Dancing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page B

public school on Dovercourt Road. He is fluent in English, speaking it from childhood although he was not born in Canada, he came here, at 6 months, not in his mother’s but in his father’s, Giuseppe’s, arms; Tom even speaks a little Latin, tall for his age, which seems oddly indeterminate, freckles, dark, sort of handsome for an awkward boy, with a very determined chin, a
polpaccio
, a calf, pale. But the calf loves Toronto more than Orillia, which was Stephen Leacock’s summer home; Toronto is larger, bustling, sprawling, full of new sights, smells, people, streetcars, things to look at.
    (He doesn’t know the city very well yet, but is hotly, moistly interested in everything about Toronto. They, the Garrones, including Tom’s sister, Fran, and his younger brother Paolo, have moved from Orillia, where Tom’s father was employed as a day labourer in the Caterpillar factory. Tom hasn’t really settled in yet. It takes time to settle into a new school, and time is an infinite, and infinitely fine, white elastic band that stretches somehow in the upper strata of blue air between southern Calabria, wherea man will take a loaf of bread in one hand and a knife in the other and sit down to have lunch. Tom has 2 or 3 friends at school, a mixed school, some Italian, no one from his region, several Romans as a matter of fact, a beautiful angelic girl from Turin, a lot of Anglos, all indiscriminately dismissed as Anglos, some Polish kids, one Jewish boy who wears a yarmulka to school on Fridays, which is their Sabbath, apparently. There are 2 Chinese boys, brothers, the older one is George, the younger is also called Tom.)
    So anyway, the encounter, which will eventually be reflected in Tom’s life after college, and in various songs he will write during that intense concentrated period at age 27 when he does pretty well almost nothing except write songs.
    Tom is on his way to Saturday morning basketball practice, as per usual. It is October, Indian summer month in southern Ontario, when everything is crisp and pleasant and sunny; and it is still 1972, it will be for at least another 6 weeks. Not the year of the first dizzying dizzy dean erections, that was last year, before March, sometime before spring, when the sap began bursting in the Orillia maple and elm and evergreen trees; Nixon and America are still in Vietnam. American television and the CBC are still observing the landscape, usually showing rice paddies, not napalm.
    Tom is on his way to Saturday morning basketball practice at a local church, big for his age but fairly innocent,
innocente
, and he runs into 2 new school acquaintances, Spud Arnetson and Billy Flaherty. They talk bicycles and fart around and jam a bit at the corner of Ossington and Bloor; and Tom winds up being talked into a quick subway visit to the much-publicized CN Tower south of downtown on the Lakeshore.
    Spud Arnetson and Billy Flaherty, an Irish kid, take Tom up to the top level of the newly built CN Tower south of King Street and, as a joke, a yoick, a kibitz, harmless, nothing serious, 465’ above street level, despite the fact that he is tall for his age but also skinny and ambivalently bold and shy, they hang him out by his heels over the 5 ½’ glass-bricked – from Pilkington & Co., world famous for the best glass bricks in the world – guard rail, holding him there above the city, his huge dark grey eyes full of traffic, streets, and a confused image of the infinite blue lake, for a full5 minutes until a redhaired young 25-year-old security kid originally from St. John’s, Nfld., where, listen you miserable fuckers in Mississippi, the most experienced serious drinkers and eschatologically good-hearted barroom brawlers in North America drift around a famous street – it is called Duck Street and has 350 licensed bars and emporia plus a fantastic view of St. John’s Harbour where nobody makes any money, except for the Lundrigans – intervened and stopped them. They would have