The mentorship

By Jack Daniel Christie

When I was five I told my dad I wanted to be a writer. When he asked why, I told him that it was because my grandma’s best friend and sometimes boyfriend and occasional roommate Peter J* was a writer, and that he seemed to just hang out and nap whenever he wanted to. Peter himself loved that story and he used to tell it a lot, although I don’t know how true all the details of it were. He was sort of a grandfather to us kids. One day I came home to Toronto and visited my grandmother, discovering the lock to the back door was busted. Peter did that, my grandmother said casually, sipping her tea. You’ll never see him again.

In my grandmother’s last years her daughter had her claws in her pretty deep. He was an alcoholic, was the oft repeated mantra to excuse Peter’s ejection from the family. This was a cop out, as Peter’s alcoholism had never had an effect on our family, and besides, my grandmother was an alcoholic too—my aunt, for her part, had a persistent “sniffle”—so what sense was there in that? Last year, after my grandmother succumbed to a life hard-lived, I finally tracked Peter down after several unanswered phone calls to a dead end lead at a marina in rural Ontario by realizing—employing a trick that won me my first criminal case that summer—that I could find his name as a surviving relative in online obituaries and see if I could find his other surviving loved ones instead. The man on the other end mistook me for a spam caller. His family warned me that he was in the throes of alcohol-influenced dementia and told me to call later in the month when the booze money ran dry. Daniel? he asked. Is it really you?

Peter J* wrote for the movies, although his name is hard to find on IMDb. He sold a script to a short-lived Playboy-owned production company once, turned into something called The Bird Cage I think, although he had some qualms with their choice of ending and used to leave the ending he’d originally wrote sitting in his typewriter, which I recall to be some sort of monologue about snakes. Peter mentioned having a son once, but only once, who also wrote, but had many of his stories confiscated as pornography on a trip through Southeast Asia. He’d gotten addicted to heroin and received treatment in Vietnam by being locked inside a “smoke box” for two weeks and had gotten married down there. Peter had travelled too. As a young man he spent some time in Tahiti, I think it was Tahiti, making some of his money diving for pearls. Stories are like pearls, he said, trying to teach me a lesson about writing, and you have to dive into the soul to find them. Or I think that’s what he said, maybe he never did, the thing about the pearls.

*

My little cousins told me at our grandmother’s funeral, years after Peter’s disappearance from our lives, he had showed up on Christmas night, stinking of alcohol, wearing a suit and carrying flowers. John John, sixteen then, had opened the door and was in shock. The parents rushed down to eject Peter in an instant, John John staring slack-jawed through the screen of them, his last memory being Peter locking eyes with him and calling out: John. I’m sorry. Liandra made a break out the back door and ran down the street after him. He looked at her, tears in his eyes, and said look how you’ve grown. I’m sorry, I can’t— he dashed off into the night. My cousins and I made a promise to one another at my grandma’s funeral that we’d find him, and then we did. Although first I found a citation for public intoxication in Los Angeles.

I used to write for the movies, he tells me on the phone, for the movies in Hollywood. I remember! I tell him. He once received an out-of-court settlement in a plagiarism suit against the writer of The Jacket with Adrian Brody and got himself a nice Lakeshore apartment in a building with its own private movie theater, which he loved and used often, and would have the grandkids come for movie nights, popping popcorn in his microwave and taking the elevator down. Even as a child I thought this was a foolish expenditure, it obviously wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. Peter was always convinced that glamour and success would follow his next big project and it never did, he just drank up what he had and wound up back in my grandmother’s basement.

At some point in my life I realized that Peter was what they call in the industry “a hack.” The ending to The Bird Cage that he was so proud of was not, at least to my own tastes, particularly good, though details of it escape me. But he remained my mentor, and I listened intently when he told me about writing, perhaps so I, too, could join the proud tradition of the hacks.

*

When are we born and when do we die? When did I come into existence? My first memory, and all the chains of memories that link me to it? My continuity? That’s what Locke thought, at least. Who I am when I’ve forgotten, do I exist? Do I fade away the more I forget? The promise of afterlife is salvation from oblivion, but it does not negate that there is still oblivion, and that you can still experience it. Dementia is a slide into oblivion, watching your own slow disintegration—you can’t simply “call it sleep” like most deaths, maybe a waking dream, exhausted as fuck at a long day’s end. My friend Dimitri has amnesia. I should ask him if he’s dead.

Death is confounding. The Ancient Egyptians were so neurotic about it that they built a society that resembled one giant death cult. Peter loved telling the story about how excited I was to see the coffin at his mother’s funeral when he’d taken me, that I’d loudly exclaimed that it was “just like the Egyptians.” It was one of my only two points of reference, I’d tell him when he’d recite the story, it was that or dinosaurs. Be glad I didn’t call her a fossil. I heard about your grandmother, he tells me on the phone, she and I were very close. I know, I said.

Peter is Lithuanian, which, for those too well-versed in history, poses some potentially uncomfortable questions about when his family came here, questions I’d probably never field with him out of respect, questions I would now receive incoherent responses for if I did ask them anyway. The internet says there’s not a lot of J*’s, which made it easier to find Peter again, and the internet also says there’s a couple in South America, which is a particularly bad sign. There’s a Jonas J* I found who archival documents reveal lied to a refugee board in the 1940s after the war about not having become a German citizen, and claimed he was merely conscripted into the Wehrmacht, which it follows was likely also a lie. The board discovered the lie—Jonas was telling stories, but not well.

I do a lot of archival research in my spare time and a Latvian-descended friend of mine once asked me to do his family tree. I told him it was probably for the best that he forget about it.

*

Maybe we exist not because we remember but because we are remembered. My friend Fawn has forgotten most of our too-long friendship, she thinks for the best, while I keep the memories in a trust for her. Suddenly Peter tries to remember where he lost me. He seems deep in thought. I lost you… at the fair… I was at a meeting, do you remember? I smile politely even though he can’t see me and nod enthusiastically, yes, of course. He seems glad, but quickly forgets for what, and tells me he’ll get me my money soon. There’s no need, I tell him, and he says no, no, you tell me how much and I’ll pay it. For services rendered.

Here’s a hack idea: bringing the pearl diving back up again, trying to wrap this all in nice tight bow, making it seem like it all happened for a reason. Something about our searching for stories and what they mean, and maybe how they keep us alive, or any of that. Things are like other things. Memories give other memories their meaning.

What are stories for? To remember, to forget, to lie? Peter never drew an analogy between diving for pearls and telling stories, I just made it up to find a reason to tell you about it, all he did was tell me about pearl diving. Only I can tell you that I lied, because Peter’s mind is unravelling itself. Peter was my mentor and I hung on his every word when he spoke to me about writing, but much of that advice has been lost from my mind, so I have to come up with new witticisms to attribute to him. Stories save as much as they erase. We tell the stories we want to believe. We make excuses for why we let our loved ones down or cast them out, why we failed in our lives, why we joined the Wehrmacht—these are all stories, and if they really do come from our souls, then what does that say about our souls? This is this story’s abrupt ending.

*

If you liked this personal essay, perhaps you’ll like a piece of investigative reporting we conducted about writers who also tell “bad stories,” as in “flagrant lies”—here is one about a famous Chilean-American poet who is probably lying about his family’s links to Pinochet, and here’s one about Roxane Gay’s lies about her corrupt family of Haitian gangsters.