I Was There the Night He Died Read Online Free PDF Page A

most recent addition to the posters and pictures covering the inside of his garage. Eddie’s garage is equipped just like my dad’s: an old fridge for beer, a mounted television set for sports, a museum of hockey player memorabilia covering whatever wall space isn’t taken up with hanging rakes, shovels, and other yard maintenance equipment. And when the weather is nice, and with the car parked in the driveway and the garage door opened wide, several lawn chairs for watching both the Blue Jays game on TV and the much less interesting, non-televised world play its own games out on the sidewalk and in the street.
    â€œI got it at Joe Louis last month when I took Billy with me to see the Wings and Stars. Don’t even ask me how much it cost.”
    It’s what I guess you’d call a painting—sort of the sporting equivalent of an orange tiger leaping across a black velvet canvas—a sight-impaired oil painter’s impression of every Red Wings captain of the last seventy-five years holding aloft the Stanley Cup, whether they actually did so or not. Steady Eddie giggles, points out the artist’s version of Dennis Polonich, which more closely resembles Horshack from Welcome Back, Kotter than the diminutive late-’70s Red Wing dynamo. “Old Polo, eh?” Eddie says. “What a little prick he could be, couldn’t he?”
    â€œNasty with his stick, that’s for sure.”
    â€œOh, yeah, cut your heart out with that thing.”
    â€œCould play some, too, though.”
    â€œOh, don’t kid yourself, you know he could.”
    We both drink and pay silent homage to Polo, one of the few battling bright spots for a string of perpetually lousy Red Wings teams during the 1970s, when the team still played out of the ratty old Olympia. Whenever my dad would take me to a game we’d park in Windsor and take the tunnel bus over to dangerous downtown Detroit. As soon as we were off the bus and walking the few hundred feet to the arena, my dad would take my hand. I would have been too embarrassed to let him do it at home, but I always held on tight until we were safe inside the rink. Then, when everything would be all right—the sound of program hawkers, the smell of hot dogs, the view of the zamboni circling the ice—I’d drop his hand and be the big boy again that I was at home.
    Steady Eddie sits down on a riding lawnmower; I lean against the wall, between an action shot of Steve Yzerman and a gas-powered leaf blower. The lawn chairs are months away from being broken out. Eddie must have been out somewhere just before I dropped by; the car engine periodically pings above the whir of the winter wind outside.
    â€œYou still at … ?” I say, hoping Eddie will finish my sentence for me. In the ’80s, when I left for U of T and Eddie went to work at Fram, the big factories in town—International Harvester, Rockwell, Fram—were still pumping out trucks and car parts and paying out a good wage to just about anyone who was willing to work the line. Over the last twenty-five years, though, most of the larger companies having permanently emigrated south, everyone in town has been pawing over the same handful of decent-paying positions, mostly at parts operations run as small branch plants by companies outside Canada. Every time I talk to Eddie it seems as if he’s working somewhere different.
    â€œCampton’s?” he says. “In Dresden?”
    That sounds about right. “Yeah, Campton’s.”
    â€œShit, no, they shut that place down last year. I’m over where your dad used to be, at Sieman’s, in Tilbury.”
    Where my dad retired from after fourteen years. After twenty-one years at Ontario Steel, five years at Chrysler, and three years at Navistar. At least in that his timing was good: four well-paying factory jobs in forty-three years is a pretty impressive run. Not too many grade nine dropouts today can hope to