Ali Hassan - Is There Bacon in Heaven?

He had me at baconAli Hassan has written perhaps the funniest and most heartfelt Canadian memoir yet. Rick Mercer

Ali Hassan

Is There Bacon in Heaven?

A Memoir

For my momYou were an angel.

For my dadI tried not to end any of my sentences with a preposition.

THERE ARE A FEW TIMES in my life when Ive felt truly cornered.

Once, when I was in high school, an older boy named Nils saw the Moosehead Beer baseball hat I was wearing and said to me, Moosehead? More like moose piss. Now, the smart move would have been to nod and say, Thank you for your input, sir, because when I say Nils was an older boy, I actually mean that he was a younger man. He had the build of a fully formed twenty-eight-year-old pugilist and the vibes of a kid who had never been hugged by his father. He was also apparently a teen who was doing beer tastings in his spare time.

I, however, wasnt notorious for making smart moves. In my defence, my hat represented a brewery from my birth province, New Brunswick, and I had spent my own money (huge deal) on it just days earlier. I was walking into school with new duds on, and this guy was already disrespecting them before first recess. And so, without thinking, I quickly retorted, Thats pretty weird that you know what moose piss tastes like, Nils. I dont know if it was the response itself or the fact that some younger kid thought he could call him by his first name, but the more important point is that Nils had his hand around my neck, and my feet raised off the ground by about half a foot, within seconds. Nils really wasnt seeing this as the Canadian Heritage Moment it could have been. His buddyalso a Brown guy (et tu, Darius?)was standing right beside Nils, smirking and revelling in the moment. I was certain my near future belonged in the nurses office or a hospital, until two angelic female friends of Nils started saying, Nils, come on, put him down and Dont be mean. He looked at the girls, he looked at me, and as quickly as it had all begun, I was deemed to not be worth his time and dropped back to the ground.

Another time, in my twenties, my friends and I left a nightclub at 3 a.m. in Montreal, only to find out that there was some kind of police operation happening outside and blocking traffic on the street. This meant that my friends car, parked right outside the cluba spot I had referred to as preordained when he reversed into it four hours priorwas now in the worst place possible. It was also then that I realized how badly I needed to pee. I circled ten feet back to the club I had just left and asked the bouncer if I could quickly use the bathroom. No. But man, I was just in herelook at the stamp that is almost still visible on my wrist. No. Buddy, I spent many dollars here tonight and now the liquid your establishment provided me with wants outwouldnt it be the decent thing for you to let a grown man back inside for one minute so that he doesnt have to publicly wet his pants? No one gets back inside. With my negotiating powers having met their match, I started contemplating my options. That is to say, I looked at the corner of a parking lot and walked toward it. In retrospect, I really underestimated the capacity of the Montreal police to multitask that night. While they were knee-deep in Operation Close the Street, a pair of officers were also able to drive up behind me and shine their bright police light on my back as I stood, cornered, peeing in a literal corner. While this incident did not end in any pants-wetting, it did end with me being handed a $120 ticket for Urination Publique.

And, more recently, as a father, I felt that same cornered feeling when my oldest son, at age four, approached me as I sat at the kitchen table quietly minding my own business.

• Him: Papa.
• Me: Yes.
• Him: Are you Muslim?
• Me: What theOf course Im Muslim, kiddo! You know that! Im just like all of you. Were all Muslim.
• Him: Do we go to the mosque?
• Me: Errr Well, no. You would have noticed if we were going to the mosque.
• Him: How come we dont go to the mosque?
• Me: Okay, do you want to go to the mosque? I can ask your grandmother to take you
• Him: How come you dont go to the mosque?
• Me: Look, its complicated. Im not a practising Muslim. Im more like a freelancer, you know? They call and say, We need you at the mosque, and I say, I was kind of hoping to work from home today. You know what I mean?
• Him: Do you drink beard?

Had this taken place in a courtroom, at this point is where a lawyer might have called me a hostile witness. I started to panic and called for my wife immediately. Its not that I had anything against my sons very normal, reasonable questions. I didnt even have anything against his mispronunciation of beer. What was stressing me out was that he sounded like an adult, and I sounded like the same confused kid I was for most of my lifeunsure of my connection to Islam.

The fact is, for a lot of my youth, I thought of myself as a white guy. I knew ten Blue Rodeo songs by heart, I played ice hockey, I used a Crock-Pot. Yknow, a white guy! I was the sum of my experiences, and for long stretches of time those experiences were stereotypically white. A day of skiing followed by some Irish coffee by the fireplace, anyone? Dont mind if I do! There were times, early in my life, at least, that I felt so unaware of my own skin colour that if someone had yelled, Paki! I might have even looked around and said, Really? Where?

Strangely, at various times in my life I was also an honorary Trinidadian, Goan, Parsi, and Sikh. I can still hear my mother yelling, Youre an honorary everything, except a Muslim Pakistani! I know, Momthings get complicated when youre desperate to belong.

Much like my spiritual life, my work life also would have been best summed up as a series of bad choices eventually leading to a series of pretty good situations. The culmination of bad professional choices came in the late nineties when I decided to make the ultimately unwise choice of becoming an IT consultant. Becoming feels like much too strong a word here. Even consultant is misleading. I mean, it was certainly my title. It was right there on my business card. But anyone who worked with me would tell you it was a title in name only. And Im not the victim of some scheme here. No one put a gun to my head and demanded that I spend $22,000 on a degree that would give me the credentials to work in the IT field. This was a CHOICE. I had been kicked out of an MBA program and had no idea what to do with my life; I looked at my groups of close friends and thought, Who among ye is dumb, and yet successful? Oh, theres a few of them. And theyre all in IT! I should get into IT! A worse rationale for a career path has yet to be devised. It ended in failure, as it should have. Although, it did give me the opportunity to live and play (and eatso much eating) in Chicago for a year and a half. Then 9/11 precipitated my move back to my parents home in Montreal, posthaste, and I finally found myself looking for work in the food world: truly, the only world I ever cared about. Yes, thats something I should have thought about before applying for that loan. I became an in-his-parents-basement-dwelling self-trained chef, a caterer, and a cooking instructor (mostly in grocery stores). And despite all these jobs, I still managed to live well below the poverty line for many years. Not knowing a damned thing about how to run a business helped. But I had never been happier. Do what you love,