After I got the phone call informing me that I had advanced cancer, I went to the New Edinburgh Pub. I sat at the end of the bar, so thin and pale and hunched as to be little more than a shadow on the periphery, and ordered a half liter of red wine and a large soda water, and then quietly flipped through a newspaper for the rest of the night. That was over 20 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
The New Edinburgh Pub, located on Beechwood in Ottawa, wasn’t too far from where my parents lived.
It’s a generic place, a standard Ottawa pub that looks like it was made from a Build-Your-Own-Bar kit. It wasn’t ugly, but there was just no mind paid to the character or aesthetics of the place, and it reflected nothing back to you. It was nobody’s first choice, just a space in which you could drink.
The reason that I went to this particular pub on that night is that I didn’t think that I would know anybody there. I wanted to be invisible and uncalled to. I wanted to separate from the herd, step outside of my life and dissolve into the space around me. I didn’t want to see anybody who might call me back to my life or the one that had been expected of me. I could not bear my own sadness, let alone theirs.
My recovery from the treatments and surgeries for Hodgkin’s Disease took a long time, years, actually, and each night, I went to this pub. It became the bell I had to ring each day, the one that confirmed my survival. And in spite of my desire to be anonymous, to have nobody care about me and vice versa, I became friends with all the staff and regulars.
I went there late, in the drinking hours, and all of us there carried our weights. But the pub served as a place where these weights were lifted, and suspended from our lives we could just sit amongst other people, unjudged and unmeasured.
We all need rest stops like this. And when I think of this place I think of it as being as essential to my recovery as the hospital. I sought to abandon the world, but it was here that I found the world, and that world restored me.
Just the other day, about half and hour before I turned the astonishing and impossible age of 50, I was told that after decades, the New Edinburgh Pub will be closing. This is what the world does. It reinvents itself. And that the landscape of my past is vanishing is nothing new–it happens to everybody, on every single block of this world, but still, it’s a blow, a real loss. And I just want to thank the New Edinburgh Pub– Paul, the truly decent owner, and everyone who worked and spent time there, I want to thank them for being present and sharing that space with me.
]]>
And then, two new mothers, each one wearing sweat pants and with a baby strapped to her chest, walked serenely down the street. They were almost glowing, almost hovering, and they walked in geisha silence, as if having moved passed language to an inalienable home that would be forever present.
]]>August 15, 2014
Dear J-Law:
It’s me, Michael Murray again, just writing you a quick note to wish you a most excellent and happy birthday! It must feel incredible to be just turning 24, having already won an Academy Award and been nominated for a few others, all the while being utterly adored by absolutely everybody on the planet, including the Chinese, who are known to be cautious with their affection.
Chinese people never seem to like me. I don’t know why but I’m starting to think it might be because I’m really good at ping-pong and that they’re just a really insecure people. Any thoughts?
I would like to play ping-pong with you- we’d be a great match! ( I am gifted at puns)
At any rate, I have to say, I’d really like to feel incredible like you must feel all the time. It must be pretty cool, that feeling. Sometimes I feel depressed. Like right now, as I think about the insecure Chinese and how they hate me, I’m also realizing that I’m old enough to be your father! Funny, that, because it really feels like there’s great chemistry between us. If we starred in a movie together I think we’d become the next great couple.
Jennichael.
Do you know what helps depression? Touching. If you were to touch me I would feel less depressed. It’s a medical fact. It’s called Touch Therapy.
There’s also Sensual Touch Therapy for the people who really care.
It was a real shame about Robin Williams, don’t you think?
Anyway, I don’t want to be a drag on your big day, my depression isn’t that bad! I only get down because I’m sensitive and feel life more than most people! I just wanted to give you a big shout-out and wish you an incredible birthday full of much happiness, health, joy and success, and to let you know that Touch Therapy really works. It does, it saves lives. You are beautiful, staggeringly beautiful, and I bet you have cool, soft hands that smell like poems.
I would love to hang with you if you’re in Toronto for the Film Festival next month!
Michael Murray
PS: Bradley Cooper (pretentious name) is much older than you. Did you sleep with him when you made Silver Lining Playbook? I have seen that movie 24 times, once for every year you’ve been alive.
]]>
My hatred of him was immediate, visceral and enduring, and over the years I have taken time out of my busy, important life to write him a note each year on his birthday. This is a small sample of some of the letters I have written him:
July 3, 1986
Dear Maverick:
Your call sign in Top Gun should have been Muffin.
You’re a loser and flash in the pan and it’s obvious you don’t have a clue how to play beach volleyball.
Your smile makes me want to punch you with a rake.
Happy 24th, moron.
Michael Murray
PS: Please send an autographed photograph.
July 3, 1992
Dear Tom:
I want to congratulate you on your Irish accent in Far and Away.
You’ve really been acting the shit out of things lately, especially when you made us all understand what it must feel like to be Tom Cruise in a wheelchair in Born on the Fourth of July. That was some heavy shit, really brave, and you deserve a milk carton full of Oscars for that role.
Happy 30th, loser, it’s all downhill from here.
Michael Murray
PS: I have named my band Cole Trickle after your character in Days of Thunder. Inspired by your acting, we formed as a group even though none of us can play any instruments.
July 3, 2000
Tom:
What the fuck was up with your package in Magnolia???
I mean, please! Are you really that vain that you have to make it look like you have a giant cock? Really?? And did you even know what Eyes Wide Shut was about? Truly, you are the worst actor ever.
Happy birthday.
Michael Murray
July 3, 2005
Dear crazy Scientology person:
Joey will never love you.
You will never have her.
You may jump on sofas all you want, but you will never win her heart. You are a robot, a robot made of money and teeth, and although she has likely signed a contract, that contract will end and she will leave you. Mark my words, Cruise, mark my words.
You’re 43 now, and although you don’t know it, things are beginning to slip away.
Happy birthday.
Michael Murray
PS: I am taking the bus to America to buy a crossbow on the weekend.
July 3, 2014
Tom:
I’m on medication now and am doing well. I understand boundaries. I am sorry about the genetic material I sent to you on your 50th birthday. It was inappropriate of me, to say the least, and trying to get you to introduce me to your ex-wife, the Katie Holmes version of your ex-wife, was insensitive. I just want to thank you for our friendship over the years, wish you the best as you move through your 50’s and let you know that I am really just fantastically excited for Top Gun II.
Happy birthday, old friend!
Michael Murray
]]>
Dear Queen Elizabeth II:
Happy birthday!!!
I just want to say that you look absolutely fantastic for 88! Really, I could see in the photograph that your skin was just glowing so I really want to congratulate you on that. I had my passport photograph taken yesterday, after only a five year interval, and I’m very sorry to say that I looked asymmetrical, angry and jaundiced, like a hard drinking 68 year-old. Really, I looked like I live in Russia or something, and I don’t!
I’m actually from Canada, so I’m one of your subjects, and when I was a boy I used to collect stamps with you on them. There must have been hundreds of them, and they all looked pretty much alike—you, looking regal in front of some aspect of Canadian industry.
None of them were valuable for collectors as so many were printed and used to mail letters. (You remember mailing letters, don’t you? Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you always had a fancy butler to mail them for you and put the stamp on the envelope, otherwise I guess it would have been pretty weird to put a stamp of yourself on the envelope. That’s the sort of thing that could go to a person’s head, I think.) At any rate, they were everyday stamps, the sort that filled the pages between the cool ones of Grizzly Bears or hockey players, but every once in awhile for a special occasion they’d put out a stamp of you that was practically the size of a hockey card. It would be either silver or gold and it was like finding a jewel. Suddenly, we got to see you in all your majesty, if that makes any sense.
Everybody has regrets, but I imagine a queen might have more than most. You were locked into a very particular life from the time you were born and you must always wonder about that boy you thought cute way back when, or what it would have been like to have been a hippy and get high with a Beatle. What would you say your biggest regret is?
I regret never learning how to fire a gun.
And if you could sleep with either Colin Firth or Russell Brand, which one would you choose?
Don’t be shy, it’s your birthday.
Michael Murray
PS: Is Gwyneth Paltrow really British?
]]>