My Way Home

By David Luchuk

My Way Home is a true story. Greg thinks he has the world on a string. He is a teenager, with his whole life ahead of him, when a devastating illness snatches it all away. Once the crisis ends, his real struggle begins. Greg is trapped in a body that doesn't work. He fights to cope with everyday life, facing obstacles that make him question how to carry on. My Way Home is an honest and unflinching look at a catastrophe that hits without warning, told by Greg himself as it happens. This is a disaster no one sees coming and a journey he does not choose to take. Few expect him to survive but, fighting against death, Greg finds a new way to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Luchuk
• Release date: May 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9780968979020

Book preview

My Way Home

Greg Shulkin

Written by David Luchuk

-

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Greg Shulkin and David Luchuk

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Library and Archives Canada legal deposit:

My Way Home

Helegron Press, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Cover design by Laurent Kgvan.

Dedication

For Dick. For Jim. For Danny. For Grandma. For my family.

Foreword

In 2009, I carried the Olympic torch as part of a cross-country relay to Vancouver. Not long after, the idea of releasing this book came to mind.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Olympian. Believe me; you don't want to see me on skates.

What the torch relay did, however, was expose me to a group of people with neat stories, all lined up from one side of the country to the other. That was awesome.

People and their stories are important to me. In the past fifteen years, I have spoken at schools, fund raisers and businesses to share my experiences. The best thing to come out of those events was the stories: mine and others.

What happened? What choices did people face? How did they cope? No piece of advice or lesson learned is as powerful as the simple truth of a person's story.

That's what this book is; the simple truth of my story as I lived it.

I'm older now. I don't think it takes away from what you're about to read for me to say that life is good. I'm happy.

In some ways, the things that happen in this story defined my life and what it means. In other ways, they were just the start of what my life became.

I’ve learned a lot. That’s for sure. I would not be the same person if these things hadn’t happened.

I think that's normal. I was a teenager.

You don't hold onto those years. They mark you. They test you. Then you get on with it.

Everyone faces crises when they're young. Not everyone dies then comes back to talk about it.

So this is what happened. This is my story.

Chapter 1

The alarm goes off first thing in the morning and I jump out of bed. Well, not quite. First thing in the morning came and went hours ago. It must be third thing by now. Plus, jumping out of bed isn’t an option. I feel like crap. I’m not jumping anywhere.

I’m eighteen years old. There’s usually more piss and vinegar in my tank. I'm king of my hill. Most of the time, nothing can touch me except for my curse.

Everybody's born into this world with a curse. For some, it's acne. For others, it's body odour. For me, it's making plans on the weekend. As far as curses go, mine is pretty lightweight but it can still be a pain in the ass.

When the weekend rolls around, my friends want to hit the town hard. We have a ritual. It starts with a bunch of phone calls. I ask the guys what they want to do. They give me one of three answers: I don't know, I don't care or Whatever.

One by one, they pass the buck. They're like rugby players. All forward progress is made by moving backward. In this case, back to me. Like I said, it's a curse.

Luckily, we’re from the suburbs. Priorities are straightforward. What do they want? They want to drink. They want to smoke. They want to ogle women.

The first two elements are crucial. It can't be the weekend without them. The third is important but, if you can find somewhere to do the first two for free, then the last one can wait.

This is especially true for me. I can ogle my girlfriend whenever I want.

Ours is a simple system. Settings might change. There are bars until three in the morning or basements until the sun comes up. The bottom line remains. We are on a weekly quest for decadence. I coordinate the coming and going.

Decadence comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes you swallow it. Sometimes you inhale it. The only constant is excess.

Excess is just a willingness to bite off more than you can chew. I try to mix a little excess into every weekend. My job gets easier when someone's parents go away on vacation. That's the cash cow of suburban parties: the open house.

When parents go away it’s like the carnival comes to town. A house can be free for a night or a weekend, sometimes weeks on end. It doesn’t matter. We take all comers. An open house is a palace of riches and, needless to say, of excess.

One memorable night, we sat on the front stoop of a house we’d invaded. Our host took his eyes off the party for long enough to smoke a butt. That was a mistake. Pals rushed up from the basement and burst out the front door. All they’d say is we had to come back downstairs. We each took a last haul before going inside.

The party was business as usual. It was hazy and loud with people flopped all over. In that scene, the pin-drop silence of the basement was sort of ominous. I followed the others down. At the foot of the stairs, I stopped and backpedalled to keep my socks out of the mess. One of our buddies was sleeping on the carpeted floor.

The mass of steaming puke underneath him was too huge to have been wretched in one volley. It must have taken several rounds. The puddle was like an Exxon oil slick. He had been rolling in it, too. You could see by his clothes.

At first, we were all denial and disbelief. Half-digested food on the carpet was like a biology lesson. This guy didn't chew his pasta before he swallowed.

Our host pondered the clean-up in silence. In the end, he accepted a solution that must have irked him to the core. I bet he still cringes to this day.

They fetched snow shovels from the garage and ploughed the vomit in heavy scoops. Leaning to push, pure liquid bile squeezed out of the saturated carpet. It was carried away in garbage bags. Not one, but many. When it was over, after the carpet was scooped and vacuumed, the victim of that night's excess was still asleep where he fell. Someone changed him into a new set of clothes.

I've always suspected there are worse curses than mine. That night, I was sure. All I do is coordinate the decadence. It's someone else's job to clean it up.

Like any proper curse, mine has me on call 24 hours a day. I've got no cell phone, no pager or anything. I'm just open all night like a border crossing. The suburbs are on one side. All things decadent are on the other.

There are no tariffs other than cover at the bar. There are no customs agents other than parents expected home. The only illegal aliens are people who forget which side they live on and which side they're visiting.

Dave is that way. Last summer, Dave came to the border late one night. It was a Sunday. I had to work the next morning. Dave didn't.

For some reason, he decided to spend the summer backpacking. Not through Europe, mind you. Through our neighbourhood. He was a refugee seeking asylum on the couches of his hometown. Dave renounced his citizenship on one side of the border and defected to the other.

It was pretty late when he brought his freedom to my house that Sunday. A warehouse full of tools would demand my full attention bright and early in the morning. There were boxes waiting to be packed, stacks piled to the ceiling in categories I didn’t understand. The prospect of eight hours in the warehouse was daunting.

I was asleep when Dave arrived. I was approaching sleep, at least. That’s close enough for me to be annoyed with the clatter outside my window.

My bedroom at the time looked onto a balcony that was really just the roof of a garage. A large window opened to it from inside. Dave climbed up from the driveway below. There he stood, naked as the day he was born, wearing jockey shorts on his head like a toque. His clothes were strewn between my place and my pal Lee's house a few streets over.

I let him in. We smoked butts to pass the time. Dave, incidentally, is one of the strongest people I have ever known. I once saw him beat another guy racing up an escalator. Dave ran up the down-flowing stairs. Imagine what a man like that can do to a pack of butts.

Before long, we were bored. I was tired. We were both squirming in our chairs. To this day, I still know exactly which chair Dave's bare ass was in. I haven’t sat in it since.

I walked him back to the door. Maybe it was the window. I don't remember. He went hiking off. In the end, he hadn't come for any reason. He dropped in for a smoke because there was nothing else to do. I was on top of things back then.

I'm still on top of things now, except I feel seasick just sitting here on my mattress. I feel like garbage this morning.

I climb out from under the covers. My brother, Lonn, comes down to my room. The lights are off. There are shutters over the windows. Lonn kicks around in the clutter then gives up and asks if I’m awake. I answer that I am.

You sound like crap. he says.

Thanks.

I’m relaxed talking to him. It isn’t a confrontation.

Lonn is my younger brother. It would be different if it were my older brother. If he came downstairs to wake me up and tell me I sounded like crap, things would get ugly.

My older brother’s name is Lee, not to be confused with my friend Lee who lives up the street. Big brother and I always seem to be at odds. Maybe it’s a natural antagonism between siblings. I don’t know. He goes to school out of town. Lee is a university guy. I feel bad saying it, but I’m less edgy with Lonn because Lee isn’t around.

I run a palm through the sweat on my face. Maybe I’ll feel better after a shower. I wonder if I can make it to the shower. Being on top of things is a challenge this morning. Not so, normally. Being on top is usually no stretch.

I've got this world figured out. It’s a straightforward place so long as you don’t let it get too complicated. It can be brutal and ugly but it is also pretty simple.

Take a far way place like Africa, for example. It’s exotic but, to me, not so complex. There’s no rain, no water and no food. That’s pretty easy to understand. Problems are going to arise. Closer to home things get trickier.

We're too sophisticated for an old fashioned famine. We need to mix things up. We live in one of the best countries in the world but have a province that’s always threatening to separate. If one of our sports teams wins a championship, we hold a riot and tear down the city. If some kid in a farming village catches a scary virus and dies, everyone gets inoculated in the suburbs. For us, it’s all over-reaction all the time.

We're so sophisticated that it’s hard to tell big news from little news. Everything is just news. Take the story with that kid and the virus. That’s just news. It blends in with the rest.

I paid attention while the story was hot. First, the kid started feeling sick as a dog. His head felt two sizes too small. Second, his neck stiffened like Michael Keaton in a Batman costume. His stomach churned like he was making butter.

It was gross but no one suspected there was a problem with membranes running the length of his spine, over his brain. Under normal circumstances those membranes act like a long condom, protecting delicate nerves from the medieval functions of the rest of the body.

In his case, the membranes split and leaked. All hell broke loose, just like when any condom fails. Flu symptoms got worse. Before anyone could do anything but write a newspaper article, he was dead. It was in the news.

Lonn is crashing around the house now. He's on the phone, talking with my friend Lee. They're having an argument. Lee says I have an important essay due in one of my classes. If I don't pick up my tempo, I'll blow the assignment. These things are true. Lonn insists that I'm passed out in bed. Regardless of what’s due, I'm not going anywhere. These things are also true.

The argument doesn't last. There's only so long two people can argue true statements against each other.

It's a shame, really. My essay isn't half bad. I wrote it on the book American Psycho, which was once banned in Canada like pot. In the paper, I argue in favour of certain unexpected merits of the book. For example, as its depraved main character got crazier, I found myself making clearer judgments about people who deserved to live and die as well. People who merely annoyed me before soon appeared in visions as twitching corpses. If nothing else, the book could change a person’s perspective.

As it stands, the essay is probably good enough for a passing grade. That’s funny because I wrote it off the top of my head. Sometimes I wonder about our schools.

Don’t get me wrong. We learn plenty.

We don't spend a lot of time worrying about dates and names and details like that. Most of our exams are multiple choice but, make no mistake, we learn to solve problems. Our biggest problem, of course, is having to be at school.

Being good students, we're always on the lookout for solutions. One of the best was the Great PCB Strike.

To this day I still don't know anything about PCBs. Are they radioactive? Do they cause cancer? Does it really matter? It didn't matter to us a few years ago when news broke that PCBs were being stored under our high school.

The only thing that mattered was that no one told the students or parents. Not that there was any reason to tell anyone. The container was buried in ten feet of concrete. It would have taken a bomb to release chemicals into the air. That wasn't the point.

The point was that it was a conspiracy. We were at risk.

That was the spin, anyway. It was a solid performance. Student council stirred up a mob-rule atmosphere. They were tactful in explaining our outrage to school administrators. It gave precious credibility to the entire exercise. Everyone walked out of class.

Teachers resisted, at first. Before long, they got tired of the rhetoric and grew accustomed to having us out of their hair. It was a full-blown demonstration. A demonstration of what? I'm still not sure.

Students poured into the streets or lounged in the lobby, depending on their mood and their friends. Crowds chanted slogans like Hell no, we won't go! which mostly had to do with afternoon classes. Rambunctious vandals tossed science experiments out of windows, though these were just popular kids terrorising honour roll peers.

Traditional high school priorities were intact. We simply applied them to a new context. It was inspiring. School was shut down for two days. Some of us even got to be on TV.

I learned more about accomplishing my goals on that day than I did the whole rest of the year. We pushed the envelope. The envelope was empty but we pushed it anyway. It was a success for the entire educational process.

Schools around here teach kids how to play a particular kind of game. If handled correctly, a teacher will not only turn the other cheek when you skip class but will work the system so that harmless delinquency doesn't turn into a trouble-making phone call home. This is our curriculum so I'm not missing much by being out of school today.

To my dismay, Mom succeeds in coercing me out of the house by mid afternoon. She takes me to a doctor's appointment that makes me really want to become a doctor.

Looks like the flu. Feels like the flu. You've got the flu. Go get some rest.

Wow. Is it that easy? I've got to break into this business. Maybe Dad knows someone.

Speaking of Dad, I guess he landed in Germany by now. He’s away on a business trip. I talked to him on the phone right after my appointment. He called to make sure everything was okay. My flu seems to be a bigger worry for him than for my doctor.

I got checked out. I’m fine. I told him.

Dad asked whether I took a blood test. I said that the doctor didn’t think it was necessary. There was silence on the line. Eventually, Dad asked to speak to Mom.

In the end, the plan is for me to