Mail bomb
Confessions of a student journalist part 5
“No young man believes he shall ever die.”
—William Hazlitt
On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth
When you’re a newspaper editor, you sometimes find yourself dealing with difficult stories. For me, none was as difficult as the story of a fellow Peak editor dying of cancer.
Tom Brasseur was a coroner and aspiring journalist, working towards a degree in communications at SFU. He was also the designated office bad boy, a frequently obscene clown whose crass stories and pranks were the stuff of legend.
As a shy newcomer to The Peak’s hyper-sensitive, hyper-politicized environment, I was boggled by Tom’s ability to say things like, “Lick my hemorrhoids, you stuck-up dyke!” and get away with it by sheer force of charisma. Even the paper’s most knee-jerk, sanctimonious denizens couldn’t resist the charm of this lovable cad, a proudly conservative redneck whose politically-incorrect sensibilities were tempered with an open mind and a genuine good nature.
When Tom started having mysterious blackouts, none of us expected the roller coaster ride that was in store. First, Tom had some tests and learned he had a brain tumour, which scared the shit out of us all. Then, a few weeks later, Tom announced that the tumour had stopped growing and would be shrunk with medication, which relieved us all. Then, a few weeks after that, Tom was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and told he had only a few months left.
When Tom learned he was terminal, he came straight from the hospital to The Peak—we were the first people he told. I walked into the offices a few minutes after Tom broke the news, and found everyone in tearful shock.
The energy in there was indescribable, and Tom’s behaviour was downright surreal. He was running around, glassy-eyed, a huge smile on his face, shouting “YEE-HA!” every few minutes to keep his spirits up, clinging to his redneck goofball shtick in the face of a fear the rest of us could only try to comprehend.
In the weeks that followed, the strain of this terrible news brought out the best and the worst in The Peak. On one hand, we showed our true nature as petty student journalists by venting our anxieties on each other in a spectacular geyser of malicious bullshit.
But on the other, we rallied behind Tom, and our affection for him resulted in the purest display of Peak-love I ever saw.
One night the paper’s staff and volunteers clandestinely got together at the offices and shot an album of idiotic fetish photos for Tom’s amusement. Armed with a large collection of costumes and sex toys, we stripped down to our collective underwear and simulated a wide variety of perverted carnal acts.
Before the depraved photo shoot-cum-quasi-orgy was over, I’d been sodomized by The Peak’s resident bull-dyke, female editors had been reduced to sex slaves, power drills, dildos and fresh fruit had been utilized in ways not recommended by their manufacturers, and countless more crimes against nature had been committed.
Of course, Tom loved seeing some of his most cherished fantasies about his co-workers come to life, and flipped through the album often during the course of his illness.
As time passed and Tom grew more accepting of his condition, he embraced his oncoming demise with his typically tasteless sense of humour. Ever the provocateur, he cracked disgusting jokes about what would happen to him after he died (and he would know, seeing that he performed autopsies for a living), and detailed the scandalous things he was planning to do up in Heaven. In his final entry in the Peak Collective register, he wrote that he was looking forward to his upcoming interviews with Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.
But there were other aspects of his situation that were harder for him to face, and that’s why, one afternoon, he asked me for a favour.
I’d only been a Peak editor a short time when Tom made one of his increasingly rare visits to our offices. He looked like shit. He was pale and puffy, and wore a bandana to cover his bald head.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said as he sat with me at my desk. He handed me an article titled “Facing Mortality,” a farewell piece about his coming to grips with his own death. “And I’d like you to do something for me, if that’s okay.”
“Sure, Tom. What?”
“Listen,” he said, becoming uncharacteristically serious. “My mother still doesn’t know that I’m dying.”
Tom’s mom was a legendary figure he’d spoken of in many stories, a famously high-strung ex-nun who was not known for her equanimity in the face of crisis. She knew he was ill, but she still believed the earlier prognosis that he was getting better. And Tom couldn’t bear to tell her the truth.
Tom had found it much easier to tell his friends than his family—he’d told us he was dying within an hour of his diagnosis, but it took him several days to work up the nerve to tell his wife.
“I can’t tell her to her face, so when this piece comes out next week, I’d like you to, uh, mail my parents a couple of copies.”
“Jesus, Tom. Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Trust me, it’ll be the best way.” He did an amusing impression of the histrionics that would ensue if he told his mother face-to-face.
“If she finds out through the article, she’ll have time to settle down a bit before she sees me.”
Tom had timed the mailing to coincide with his final visit to his parents in Montreal. The article would arrive at their home while he was out for the day, and he would return that evening to face them.
To be sure, it was a cockamamie scheme, but if that was how he wanted it, that was how it would be.
“All right,” I said. “It’ll be in the mail on Monday.”
Over the next few days, as I put together the section that contained Tom’s story, I had difficulty getting my upcoming task off my mind. It was a curiously remote-control method of inflicting pain, like pressing a nondescript button that administered an electric shock to a person in another room.
On one level, Tom had asked me to perform a totally routine and mundane task—just drop an envelope in the mail—but on another, he’d asked me to perform the decisive act that would shatter a family. By dropping that Peak in the post, I would set off an unstoppable chain of events that would, days later and thousands of miles distant, culminate in a mother opening an envelope and learning that her son was dying.
Finally, the paper hit the stands. I took two copies of the article, slipped them into an envelope, and dropped it in the outgoing mail bin. A few minutes later, I watched as it was loaded onto the university mail trolley and wheeled away. The deed was done. The bomb was in the mail.
* * *
After his return from Montreal a few weeks later, Tom visited the Peak offices for the last time. He praised my editing and layout of the piece, and thanked me for mailing it to his parents. He did an amusing imitation of how his mother welcomed him home the day she read the piece, and said it was indeed the best way she could have been told.
That was the last time I saw Tom. After that he was too weak and sick to make his way to campus.
Of course, I could have visited him at his home a few miles away, and I wanted to, but I didn’t. Because I was, frankly, chicken. Although I was very fond of him, we weren’t close and aside from the time we all dropped in to deliver the album of fetish photos, I’d never hung out with Tom off campus.
I felt that showing up alone at his place would be like shouting “I’M ONLY VISITING BECAUSE YOU’RE DYING”—I was still pretty shy back then, and the threat of such morbid embarrassment was enough to keep me away.
Several other Peakies did visit him, and they invariably came back saying, “You should visit Tom, I’m sure he’d love it.”
And I was smart enough to know that if I were dying, I’d probably appreciate visits from anyone who cared about me, even co-workers I didn’t normally hang out with. But still, I didn’t go, because of stupid shyness and stupid, stupid fear.
To this day, I remain ashamed that I didn’t have the balls to visit a dying man.
Ten weeks after “Facing Mortality” hit the stands, Tom died. He was 30 years old. •
Completed in 2004 for inclusion in the Wasting My Youth book. Read Tom’s article “Facing Mortality” at the Peak website. Hit your ‘back’ button to come back when you’re done.
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Tom’s handsome face later appeared on my ass in the below picture, which was taken to amuse Tom during his illness. And yes, I really can do this.
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