Chris Eaton, a Biography Read online

  Haven’t we all been driven, at some point, to Google ourselves? And what did you find? That there are people out there who seem to have something in common with you? Dates, places, interests? How coincidental are these connections? And what are the factors that define a human life?

  Chris Eaton, a Biography combines the lives of dozens of real people who share nothing more than a name, identities that blur into each other with the idea that, in the end, we all live the same life, deal with the same hopes and fears, experience the same joys and tragedies. Only the specifics are different. From birth to death and everything in between, the narratives we share bring us closer to a truth about what it means to be alive. To be you.

  A remarkable collection of randomness. I can’t tell what’s true and what’s not but I don’t really care because ultimately it’s an ingenious look at our obsessions with identity framed by a grotesque overload of fascinating information. Chris Eaton has managed to invent a kind of super-ego by distilling and compounding all the Chris Eatons that ever lived into an avalanche of hilarious humanness.

  – Charles Spearin of Broken Social Scene and Do Make Say Think

  Combines world history, North American folklore, personal memories and postmodern storytelling to create an intricate novel that can stand alongside the work of both Mark Twain and Roberto Bolaño.

  – Jason Boog, LA Review of Books

  A wondrous Oulipian experiment of a book, Chris Eaton, a Biography is like Tristram Shandy turned inside out and anagrammatized.

  – Gabriel Blackwell, author of Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer

  Not since Ray Davies’ X-RAY has a musician/author crafted such an engaging, artful ‘biography’ about his life. Equal parts moving, funny, irreverent, full of shit, sincere as hell, and nothing short of brilliant.

  – Mitch Cullin, author of A Slight Trick of the Mind and Tideland

  Just as often hilarious as it is tragic, it offers truth and absurdity hand in hand.

  – Todd Olmstead, Mashable

  Reaches for the impossible, creating characters and situations that could never be – and yet you find yourself believing.

  – Emily Schultz, author of bestselling The Blondes

  Awesome. Chris Eaton shows how environment and experience shape our individuality and that, no matter how different we seem on the surface, stripped to the core we are all the same. A harsh reality for this self-obsessed society to accept, Eaton makes us comfortable with it, and does so with humor and intensity, skill and style.

  – Nat Baldwin of Dirty Projectors

  Rich with history and memory, myth and legend. While your parents probably called you something different, don’t assume you’ll find this novel any less captivating, as it’s impossible to miss or mistake the other common bonds that unite us with all these real and imaginary and fantastic Chris Eatons, many of whom you will not soon forget.

  – Matt Bell, author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

  Zany, exuberant, encyclopedic, possessed of remarkable wit, knowing and complex and hilarious, Chris Eaton, a Biography is a book which, if it didn’t exist, only the mind of Chris Eaton could invent.

  – Steve Hayward, author of bestselling Don’t Be Afraid

  In Chris Eaton, a Biography, the multi-talented Chris Eaton twists together the frayed threads of possible lives and laces them into a remarkable, hilarious, and stirringly original novel.

  – John K Samson of The Weakerthans

  Like Trout Fishing In America meets Cloud Atlas.

  – Jim Guthrie of Royal City, Human Highway and Sword & Sworcery

  CHRIS EATON, A BIOGRAPHY

  Chris Eaton, a Biography

  A Novel by Chris Eaton

  BookThug · 2013

  FIRST EDITION

  Copyright ©2013 Chris Eaton

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  Cover illustration (front) “you were born ... you died,” (back) “Casey McGlynn, moments before his death,” by Casey McGlynn, copyright ©2002, 34 piece wooden box diorama – house paint, pastel, crayon and ink on wood – 120 × 120 inches – used with permission.

  The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

  The author would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for providing funds toward the writing of this book.

  Copy Editor: Ruth Zuchter

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Eaton, Chris, 1971-

  Chris Eaton, a biography [electronic resource]: a novel / Chris Eaton.

  Electronic monograph in EPUB format.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-927040-67-6

  I. Title.

  PS8559.A8457C57 2013 C813'.6 C2013-901268-0

  CONTENTS

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  PART 4

  PART 5

  PART 6

  PART 7

  PART 8

  PART 9

  PART 1

  It’s not hard finding ways to die.

  In Sheffield back in the forties, there were tons of them. At least that’s what Chris Eaton’s grandmother thought to herself as she herded her tyrants into the neighbour’s shelter, the nearby ground ripped wholly from the Earth, where the pockets of violently vertical soil coalesced into a flock of birds, an octopus, a steam engine, counting each child as they skipped excitedly through the door like it was Christmas. She had one in her arms, one grappling her leg, and the third running off in all directions after the dog the boys called Betty, the one they found in the rubble of the last German attack. The mutt humped everything it saw, including the baby, and still the boys thought Betty was the perfect name. One, two, three, Betty. One, two, three, Betty. She did it over and over to reassure herself, until she began to think the numbers were their names: One, two, three, Betty; one, two, three, Betty. Chris Eaton’s grandfather had left with his brothers (One, two, three, Betty) to make sure this explosive import-export business, this trade of bullets and bombs (One, two, three, Betty), was not unilateral. And oh, how they died! The eldest never even saw battle, drowned during training procedures at Ford Ord when he convinced one of the tank operators to let him take one for a spin, and he steeped the Crusader in the river, trapped inside as the water seeped slowly through the slots of the gunman’s visor. One, two, three, Betty. The next, Great Uncle William, who was schooled as a mining engineer, was selected by a Special Missions unit to tunnel under German lines and set off charges beneath the enemy trenches, just like they did at Messines Ridge in WWI; but with nothing but a pick-axe, a canary and a compass; he had already succeeded in undermining the fronts at classified and classified, and was making his way towards classified, when his compass was attracted to the iron deposits of the mines in classified, and he mistakenly created another underground effluent for the nearby river. One, two, three, Betty. Exhausted during the rainy march to the front, Great Uncle Nelson pitched face first into a mud puddle and never looked up again, already dying from the venereal disease he picked up from a prostitute in London before even shipping out. One, two, three, Betty. And Great Uncle Timothy, the youngest, who liked to collect exotic fish and sail paper boats down the canal behind the steelworks, constantly devising special folds in order to create more and more elaborate rowboats, lifeboats, and double-ended sail
boats; dinghies; Turkish caïques; Irish currachs; cobles and coracles; kayaks and umiaks; punts and junks; luggers and nuggars; galleons, battleships and aircraft carriers; and gradually perfecting his kraftmanship to create everything from a catamaran and trimaran through septamaran to dodecamaran, halted only by his inability to find a sheet of paper large enough to fold into a vessel with thirteen hulls side-by-side; Great Uncle Timothy, the sensitive artist, who managed before he was even twelve to harness the feebleness of the nearby creek to power his sister’s tiny oven for making small cakes; Great Uncle Timothy, the innovator, who tumbled into a pool when he was three, and subsequently wept at any attempt to teach him to swim until his parents simply gave up; that Great Uncle Timothy, the crybaby, was captured in France in 1941, and deported to Germany a year later, where he spent fifteen months in captivity before being shot because the camp was running low on rations. When news of their deaths reached their mother, Chris Eaton’s great grandmother, the poor woman refused to take another bath, or even go out in the rain.

  Chris Eaton’s grandfather survived mostly because of his position as a drum major, a responsibility that was still used in World War II when radio signals were uncertain and unsecure. The only other brother who managed to return without serious physical injury was Great Uncle Chippie, who had already completed most of his medical degree, and so they sent him over with a First Aid Regiment. He suffered a stroke soon after his return, on the train into London to catch another early show of Oh, What a Lovely War at the Theatre Royal, and when they went to visit him at the veterans’ hospital they always had to approach him from the right, just so he could see and hear them coming.

  When his grandfather returned from the war, planting his drumsticks in the front yard like they were flags, there was a hole he could not fill. A hole he could not explain. Something was missing. Like the schoolchildren when they were told there would be no more bombs, he didn’t understand. Someone might as well have told them there would be no more air. Or water. Or beans with toast. There had been nothing but fighting. Nothing except the sirens. And for six months following Nazi surrender, the kids would continue to play games in the schoolyard where one girl would scream at the top of her lungs like a thousand wailing children while the rest of them ducked under whatever they could find, until they were told repeatedly by any passing adult to stop, just stop. So, Chris Eaton’s grandfather started with the roof, where the dud had passed through. Then he filled the holes made by the missiles in the fields behind their house. Against the recommendations of friends and neighbours, he packed the entire bomb shelter with soil and covered the entrance.

  This made him happier.

  Still, it was not enough.

  Luckily, there were even more holes in London, which were then being filled with American greenbacks, provided to the UK through the Marshall Plan – created as much as an American PR stunt for repelling Communism as it was a European rebuilding fund. Boarding the train to London each morning, Chris Eaton’s grandfather shovelled dollars into ditches and sat back to watch the American seed money grow in the only way it knew how: straight up, blossoming into residential towers and high-rise flats, great plumes of brick and reinforced concrete that weighed heavily and choked out the skyline. Chris Eaton’s grandfather was elated. Then someone wrote a study that said high-rises made people depressed. On the outskirts of the city, complete new towns went into bloom, with rigid grid systems, which he admired, and spacious backyards, which he did not. The birth of the suburbs. Discouraged, he stopped boarding the train.

  Around that same time, the government had started up a programme for war veterans, facilitating the transition to civilian life by training them as security guards, cross-walk guards, valets, mailroom management, mailroom operations, couriers and dispatchers, weigh-scale operators, managing complaint desks and wildlife control. He chose the parking lot because, once again, although it wasn’t the most exciting job in the world, it involved more space to fill. Then, towards the end of the seventies, the average car length dropped from twenty feet to somewhere closer to seventeen. He repainted his lines and found he could fit another dozen cars; fifteen if he parked them himself. Throughout the eighties, another two feet fell to history, and this time he discovered that pivoting the entire layout, running parallel to the street instead of perpendicular to it, brought him another four vehicles. (By this time, he parked everything himself.) Whereas he used to spend half of his days reading the newspaper or playing solitaire, he now used all of his time arranging and re-arranging the cars in the lot. Parallel, perpendicular, diagonally. In star patterns and spirals. In 1611, Johannes Kepler challenged himself to discover the most space-efficient way to pack oranges leaving as few gaps as possible. Mimicking the stacks of cannon balls he witnessed on ships, he found he could make the exotic fruits occupy 74.04% of the total space. So Chris Eaton’s grandfather tried that, staggering the cars, alternating rows between cars that faced north-south and east-west, producing even more space in some cases depending on the particular makes and models. He also tried parking them in self-contained squares: two cars parallel followed by two perpendicular. And by the end of it all, he’d found space for another five cars. On a good day, six.

  It just made it harder to get them back out.

  He spent more and more time at the lot, requesting overnight shifts at the locations where he knew people parked until morning, for maximum time with the same vehicles. Sometimes he’d fall asleep at his calculations and Mr. Chisolm, who came around at midnight to collect the cash from the register, would have to poke him with his cane through the bars where he accepted the money, or shake the entire booth. There were normally only a few people who would pay to park after that time, and it was the unspoken rule that whoever worked the late shift could keep that extra money as a tip.

  In the February 8 edition of The Sheffield Star (1992), the front page features a story about the Maastricht Treaty, the controversial agreement between European nations to create a political and monetary union with one common currency. Maastricht was the first city in the Netherlands to be liberated by Allied forces in World War II. Great Uncle Chippie was there to greet many of the Dutch resistance with Vitamin D tablets and classified, treating them for classified and classified as they emerged from the caves at St. Pietersberg. The caves were originally created in the 1700s, when the limestone marl was excavated to build homes like squat, fossilizing toads, and Maastricht became part of the dinosaur boom at the turn of that century. The most popular was the masosaur, which turned out to not be a dinosaur after all, but contributed to a 6-million-year epoch being named after the city. In fact, the photo of the European leaders was taken as the delegates emerged from a tour of the caves, with the caption: Major Takes Britain Back to Maastrichtian Era.

  On one of the last pages of the first section is the story of a murder. There is no picture. The name of the war veteran who was knifed for twenty-seven pounds as he was getting ready to head home from his job at the car park is not even mentioned.

  Chris Eaton’s grandmother, Cordelia Eaton (née Barratt), hated Sheffield until the day she died, popping and snapping down the stairs like a bag of doorknobs, arms and legs forgetting their place and going every which way at once. She’d been legally blind for two years but had refused to tell anyone, preferring instead to sit still when people came to visit, and when she was alone, accompanied by nothing but the high-pitch squeal of her malfunctioning hearing aids, crawling across the countertops to press her face directly to every box of cornstarch and dried soup mix. The only one she confided in was Arthur, the mysterious stranger who showed up at her funeral and shook quietly in the back, his creased satchel rattling at his side like the dark, brown seeds of the chronic infection at the back of his sinuses, in the new modern Lutheran church of all places, which was best described – and was described by several of Corrie’s more distant and Anglican relations – as looking like a child had made it with a gigantic shoebox and scissors. Corrie never liked Sheff
ield, and saw the Nazi razing of it as its true nature finally revealed. The place was rotten, she often said, like a disease that had felled nearly the entire population, with its lack of cultural arts and its goonish football thuggery, and she was constantly reminding her grandchildren of her idyllic youth near Newcastle-under-Lyme, dressed in her favorite cream-colored frock with a wide and heavy straw hat, quietly kicking her foal-like legs against the wall. In Newcastle, people would greet her as they passed. Her family was known. In Sheffield, they had eyes so heavy they rolled down into breast pockets when she passed. In Sheffield, their noses were like weathervanes, twisting their faces whichever way the wind blew.

  To Chris Eaton, who would help her with the crosswords on Sundays, she left her entire collection of books, including:

  Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett (1902) – This was Bennett’s first novel about the Potteries, a name given to the six communities that spread to the east of Newcastle like a child’s fantastic, shimmering soap bubble: Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton and Longton. The town of Fenton was dropped by Bennett mostly because he found the word five much more euphonious than six. The volume is signed.

  Inspired by the evolutionary work of Charles Darwin, Bennett was part of the naturalist movement in literature, whereby the lives of characters were greatly influenced by heredity and one’s social environment. Bennett believed, like Thomas Hardy and Emile Zola before him, and John Steinbeck shortly after, that the lives of ordinary people had the potential to be the subject of interesting books. He also took on the less popular stance that the same could be achieved with the other, inanimate minutiae of life, and his books also contain prosaic and wearisome lists of pottery and ceramics tools and processes, from the blunger to the sagger or the muffle, sculpting scalloped lambrequins with a half-inch Acacia thumb tool and then applying the most delicate glost with bundled Japanese hemp palm stems. At parties, he was known to entertain people by reciting a quite comprehensive list of the most famous makes of china and porcelain: Adams, Belleek, Bow, Bristol, Chelsea, Coalport, Copeland, Crown Staffordshire, Davenport, Dresden, Goss, Kofmehl, Limoges, Longton Hall, Matteo, Meissen, Minto, Pietra, Rockingham, Rosenthal, Royal Copenhagen, Royal Doulton, Royal Worcester (thank goodness for five Rs in a row), Schildknecht, Sèvres, Spode, St. Michael’s, Sunderland, Swansea (and six Ss), Wedgwood and Withem.