Brent LaPorte - Unatoned - A Memoir

I was maybe five years old and living with my mom, brother and three sisters in a basement apartment in Sudbury, Ontario.

The winters were brutal. Cold beyond belief. The snowfall was unrelenting.

It was the mid 70s.

We were on welfare, had little money and fewer options.

Wed settled in the Flour Mill District amid other families who could not afford to be anywhere else. Our basement apartment was the Canadian version of a cold water flat in the Bronx.

The apartment had three rooms. A kitchen and two bedrooms. Our mother slept in one bedroom and the five of us slept in the other. The windows to our rooms faced the road. If you stood on one of the beds, you could look out and see King Street.

I was in bed and was awakened by a pounding at our door. It was not a long run for me to see what was going on. I saw and heard my mother from across the small kitchen tell this man she would not let him in. I could also hear the madman on the other side of the door, demanding entry. The man on the other side of the door was my father.

My mother was terrified.

We all were.

We knew what he was capable ofwe had seen it.

Five young children and one young mother trapped in a basement apartment, with no telephone and no means of escape. We were under attack.

He was loud. Probably drunk. Yet somehow he convinced my mother to open the door a crack so he could talk to her.

She did.

The chain lock was on so he could not get in.

Or so we thought.

Once my mother had opened the door a sliver, he shoved his right arm through, reaching, trying to get a hold of her. She jumped back, yet he continued to grab at thin air. His arm just flailing around through this tiny opening, grasping for anything he could get his powerful hand on, all the while yelling what he was going to do to my mother when he got through.

The flimsy chain was no match for his drunken brute strength as evidenced by splinters of wood on the floor and the feeble lock hanging on what was left of the broken door frame. The image of him grabbing my mother by her hair and spinning her around that small apartment will never leave me. I do not remember what he said, but I know what he did. He beat this woman brutally in front of his five children. This was not the first time, but for me, it remains the most violent and vivid. He had not come home from work, as he had done in the past, angry about supper; no, hed broken into what was supposed to be our home and tore down our last line of defence, right before our eyes.

She did nothing to deserve this. Other than being born, we did nothing to deserve this.

All my mother had done was remove her children from an abusive situation, and the result was the beating of a lifetime.

During my time as a police officer, I saw many disturbing things. Nothing I witnessed or experienced affected me the way this did.

Thankfully, another single mother in the building had the means to pay for a telephone, and she called the police. It took six cops to take my dad off of my mother and out of that cramped apartment to the street where their cars were parked. I know this because I watched them take my dad out in handcuffs. I stood on my bed and pleaded along with my brother and sisters through the window for the officers to leave my father alone as they did their job and dragged him to a waiting police car.

It was awful. Watching my mother get beaten by my father and watching my father struggle with the police.

Ive never been the same.

Ill never be the same.

Innocence lost? Im not sure I ever had it. Life wasnt good before that night, and it didnt get any better for a long, long time.

The premise for this book came to me one night while I was walking up the stairs to the loft above my garage to do some writing. Ascending, I had the strange feeling that my father was going to be sitting at my desk waiting for me. That image raised the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck. I knew it wasnt possible, but still, I hesitated.

The rational part of my brain urged me on and told me that because he killed himself when I was nine he couldnt possibly be sitting at my desk smoking a cigarette waiting to talk to me. The irrational part of my brain compelled me to keep climbing those stairs because if he was sitting there smoking a cigarette, then he had a lot of questions to answer...

I never saw him dead, you know. Never.

I was not allowed to go to his wake and, honestly, cannot even remember if there was a funeral. I only remember aunts and uncles from my moms side in our small kitchen, eyes red and puffy, crying and saying, It didnt even look like him.

A bullet to the head will do that. I will add that in speaking with one of my aunts years later about this very scene, she had been just as relieved as my mom that he was dead. Quite a tribute. Apparently he was not just a monster to his immediate family.

Mom thought I was too young to go to his wake. Maybe she thought it might be too much for a nine-year-old to handle. Maybe she was right; but for years I did not believe he was dead. I thought the entire thing was an elaborate hoax being played to keep me away from him. It would have been quite the hoax. I dont know for sure, but I guess this is evidence of the narcissism of a nine-year-old, thinking the entire world revolves around him.

Oddly, I had a special bond with himsure he was a monster, but he was my monster.

So, when I mentioned this eerie feeling from that night to Michael, my editor and, more importantly, my friend, he said, Thats your next book.

I replied, No one wants to read a book about a conversation between Brent LaPorte and his dead father. Im not a famous athlete, musician or author. Sure I published a novel in 2010, but Im hardly a household name. No one is looking to read about me or my life.

His reply was simply, Brent, Id like to have that conversation with my fatherand hes still alive.

I began to write. It was mostly fiction, with a lot of real events mixed in.

People began asking when my next book was coming out, and I had to answer that it was in fact written but I didnt know when... And then it went on for four years.