Have you ever had your life fall apart, or felt you were on the verge of oblivion and wonder if there were any glimmers of hope ahead? If you're human, it's likely that has happened to you at least once. During those times, it may seem like nothing good will ever come your way again. John Goodale felt that way. In his memoir, Johnny Gora, Goodale tells how he watched his entire life crumble. His story begins with growing up in a middle-class home and then embarking on a life of self-delusion, booze and rock n roll in a vain attempt to become a rock star. As that dream died, John found himself in a failed marriage that tore his whole life apart. But when life was at its lowest, he met a new woman-his future wife-and embarked on a humorous crash course in a culture and tradition he grew up around but never really understood. Johnny Gora shows that humor can be found even when things seem the darkest. It may be difficult to see at the time, but as Goodale shows, distance can provide insight into all life's experiences.
Johnny Gora
By John GoodaleiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2012 John Goodale
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4759-3181-5Chapter One
The Back Story
In December of 1968 I arrived in the world much like many others who arrived the same day, I couldn't tell you how many other showed up the same day as I did but I'm fairly sure it was a lot. And in arriving I popped into a seemingly ordinary middle class Anglo-Saxon life, much the same as my brother did when he later checked in.
We camped, went to school, joined Boy Scouts, took music lesson and visited family. I grew up and hung out with almost all white kids except for 1 East Indian boy I knew for a time when I was about 9. They were different than any other family I had ever known, but at the time I didn't know why. They looked different, dressed different and when they spoke to one another it was unlike any language I had ever heard in my life.
But other than that my family and I did exactly what millions of other white families did every day all across the world. However it wasn't any picture perfect made for television family, in fact as I grew up it rather sucked being in that house.
There was always some overblown drama that stemmed from some silly ideal of how we should live, or some piece of junk that was supposedly valuable with boxes and boxes of `valuables' crammed in every nook and cranny and those same boxes never being opened. Then there was always some oddball new rule that replaced whatever new rule had been brought in two weeks prior. In fact there were so many rules that it got confusing as to what was right and what was wrong.
And the endless bickering and fighting that made every one of the many endless trips to family member homes, and vacations a nightmare.
Add to this the fact that I was diagnosed as being `hyper active' and shuttled from one specialist to another and put on whatever mind numbing drug would supposedly help.
Don't get me wrong my parents did provide a lot of stuff for us. We had a decent home, vehicles in the drive way, food in the cupboard, went on trips, and received new clothes and all sorts of things along those lines. Stuff I was always told I should be grateful for because so many other kids didn't have what we had.
The one thing my parents weren't too great at was stability. We seemed to move endlessly from house to house, city to city in some never ending quest for happiness. And my brother and I always heard the same things and it was usually stuff that made no sense to us such as "We moved to keep you kids out of trouble". Not that my brother and I were bad kids we just hated sitting around being the quiet little lawn gnomes we were supposed to be. We wanted to explore and play with everything we saw, we were curious kids. But because some neighbor or family member's kids were perfectly happy to sit and not say a word this somehow made my brother and I the root of all evil.
But no matter where we moved to we always brought the baggage that made us unhappy with us. No matter how hard we ran we always wound up in the exact same spot.
And as we grew older my parent's relationship deteriorated badly. Or maybe it was always deteriorated and I just noticed it more as I grew up and saw how other families got along as opposed to the madness I saw in my own home.
My parents split up a number of times and every single time they would get back together. When I was around 10 my parents split up for a few years and my father, brother and I moved in with my grandparents. But my father's work was over an hour away and the endless travel got to him so a few years later we moved closer to his work. In the fall of 1981 we moved to Brampton Ontario. For the most part it was a large industrial town on the outskirts of Toronto. I was told that it was the divorce capital of Canada. I guess because of how close it was to Toronto and the fact that there was a lot of easy to get jobs and lower rent it made it ideal for people to start over again.
It was also an ideal place for immigrants to move to for the very same reasons.
Brampton at first was largely a lot of white and Italian families, (partial families in the case of the white folks anyway) with a growing Caribbean community.
It stayed like that for many years and then a lot of Indian and Pakistani families started moving into the area. Having grown up in a household where clothing was generally a solid colour except for t-shirt prints and our idea of spice was salt and pepper the Indian/Pakistani community was a curiosity to me indeed.
The clothing was something I had only seen in movies and comic books and the spices used were as foreign to me as a walk on the moon. I was curious about them but they kept to themselves and seemed to prefer that we did the same.
Naturally my parents got back together and as usual the whole thing spiraled downhill.
Eventually,(and thankfully) my parents divorced with my brother moving with my mother and I with my father. They say `opposites attract', but I've always felt there's two kinds of opposites: complimentary and conflicting.
My parents were type # 2, and quite honestly I felt that divorce was the best thing to happen to their marriage at that point.
Although I'm sure my parents won't be entirely happy with what I've written there,(and they may even be a little hurt) however I'm not saying anything that they haven't already said at some point or aren't aware of. And to be quite honest I've always felt that this early experience of living in a situation where nothing was as it seemed left me with the opinion to never fully believe that what you're seeing is the whole story or the entire truth.
The old `Don't judge a book by its cover' adage I suppose would be a great way to sum it up.
My father and I moved into an apartment and a year later I was sent off to a boarding school which proved to be more expensive than my father could manage at the time and I was only there for about a year and half. During this time my father was fortunate enough to meet the lady that he would wind up spending his life with, and after dating for a while they decided to take a plunge and move in together along with her three daughters. Unfortunately she was also in the process of a divorce and the financial strain was incredible on both of them.
Naturally the wise thing to do was to remove me from boarding school. Years later as I look back on that time I really have to applaud my father for sticking his neck out at such a dicey time in his life to try and get a good education for me and I can only imagine how he felt when he had to make the decision to pull me out of school.
I left school and joined my father, his new lady and her three daughters in the three bedroom apartment they lived in, it was tight and personal space was definitely at a premium but we managed to survive.
One of the things I noticed when I moved back was the significant increase in the Indian/Pakistani community, and that racial tensions seemed to be growing in the area.
Although I wasn't necessarily a bad person I was somewhat selfish and arrogant, (but what 16 year old isn't) and given all that my father and his girlfriend had been through in the past few years added to the cramped conditions it was a problem waiting to happen. Now I must say that throughout my life I've always had a talent for attracting the wrong type of person to me. If they were mouthy, trouble or bullies we'd find each other.
I did meet some really good people throughout my life but always managed to push them aside for an asshole, strange sort of talent really.
Now given my odd...
