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Johnny Gora
Johnny Gora
Johnny Gora
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Johnny Gora

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Have you ever had your life fall apart, or felt you were on the verge of oblivion and wonder if there were any glimmers of hope ahead? If youre human, its likely that has happened to you at least once. During those times, it may seem like nothing good will ever come your way again.

John Goodale felt that way. In his memoir, Johnny Gora, Goodale tells how he watched his entire life crumble. His story begins with growing up in a middle-class home and then embarking on a life of self-delusion, booze and rock n roll in a vain attempt to become a rock star. As that dream died, John found himself in a failed marriage that tore his whole life apart. But when life was at its lowest, he met a new womanhis future wifeand embarked on a humorous crash course in a culture and tradition he grew up around but never really understood.

Johnny Gora shows that humor can be found even when things seem the darkest. It may be difficult to see at the time, but as Goodale shows, distance can provide insight into all lifes experiences.

LanguageEnglish
PublisheriUniverse
Release dateAug 1, 2012
ISBN9781475931822
Johnny Gora
Author

John Goodale

John Goodale is a professional chef and the father of two children. He and his wife, Farhat Qureshi, reside in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, with their two lazy, codependent cats. Johnny Gora is based on his memories of his life experiences.

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    Johnny Gora - John Goodale

    Copyright © 2012 by John Goodale.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

    iUniverse

    1663 Liberty Drive

    Bloomington, IN 47403

    www.iuniverse.com

    1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

    Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

    ISBN: 978-1-4759-3181-5 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4759-3183-9 (hc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4759-3182-2 (ebk)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2012911307

    Cover design by John Goodale.

    Author photo by Farhat Qureshi.

    Contents

    Introduction

    Chapter 1 The Back Story

    Chapter 2  The Road to Freedom

    Chapter 3  Enter Farhat, stage left

    Chapter 4 Long Distance

    Chapter 5 Living Together

    Chapter 6 Getting Married

    Epilogue

    Dedication

    This book is dedicated to my lovely wife Farhat who made its completion possible.

    Other then being the inspiration she has patiently served as proof reader, rough editor, conscience and motivation every time I was ready to throw in the towel.

    I would also like to thank our friends and family for answering my endless questions about details of what has happened to make sure I was getting the story right and especially to Farhat’s mother Razzia for answering all of my questions about details of Indian/Pakistani culture and language.

    Thank-you’s

    I would like to thank, (in no specific order) my wife Farhat, Mr. David Wroe, Kate Morris, James Potts, Melanie Parker and Jeanette Hardenan for agreeing to volunteer their time to read through my earlier versions of this work and give me their insights and suggestions for improvement.

    Introduction

    Hey there, I’m John and according to Statistics Canada I am of average height, weight, education and income for my demographic. And although I could not tell you what the source was where I read that, this is my story. It is the story of how an average person in search of an ordinary life took the most incredible journey they could have imagined in the exotic culture next door that will last a lifetime.

    Having said that the first question that comes to most people’s mind is If you’re so average why would I want to take the time to read about you? The answer is very easy, I wasn’t always so average. I started life out as a standard statistic and became the sort of person that you wouldn’t want around you or in your home. And for many years I was a very unseemly person living in the darker sides of life. This story is the tale of how I went from being a child of hope and promise to a comfortable denizen in the underbelly of society and my efforts to push out of that to be a regular person that you’d pass on the street without even thinking twice about.

    As you read this book you will find that I have placed the reader in a voyeur’s seat in front of the window of my life where I present myself scars and all and neither brag nor apologize for it. You may not like me at first and I’m okay with that as my intention is to show you the mistakes I have made so I avoid presenting myself as a hapless victim.

    I found this adventure when I went in search of one goal and wound up achieving far more than I ever expected. And along the way breached culture, tradition, and standard expectations to find something I was always looking for but never expected to find, especially during my darkest days. The best part is I never had to change time zones, risk airline meals, or endure the friendly caress of customs agents wearing rubber gloves. In fact I never left my home, so to speak. Sometimes the greatest adventures are the ones that just happen without any planning or intention. And this tale happened quite by accident rather than design I assure you.

    The most ironic part was that I was one of those millions of people who spent, (or rather wasted) a big chunk of their life trying to be rich and famous, or somebody important. It was only when I tried following the rules and just blending into the background that I found myself standing out. Although I still wouldn’t mind the rich part.

    Unfortunately it took the complete collapse of my life as I knew it to realize that the pursuit of fame was a complete and total waste of time for me. Yet now in an age obsessed with fame and self importance I find myself not minding being average and ordinary.

    So again the question comes what does motivate a self professed average person to take the time to document their life and offer it up in the hopes that people will enjoy reading it? Quite simply it was the addition of an amazing person into my life. And with that person came a culture and background as culturally rich as it was foreign to me. And the contrast that it made in my life when compared to my earlier journeys through the alleys and back ways of life that happens all around us that most people choose to avoid.

    I will state right off the bat though that I won’t be attempting to change opinions or beliefs, but I will attempt to offer insights into what I witnessed. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything other than the story you’re about to read is true. And how these events opened up my eyes to an amazing world I grew up with all around me and yet never took the time to stop and observe. Until I found myself in the middle of a kaleidoscope of things that I still find eye opening. And most likely will for a very long time.

    Chapter 1

    The Back Story

    In December of 1968 I arrived in the world much like many others who arrived the same day, I couldn’t tell you how many other showed up the same day as I did but I’m fairly sure it was a lot. And in arriving I popped into a seemingly ordinary middle class Anglo-Saxon life, much the same as my brother did when he later checked in.

    We camped, went to school, joined Boy Scouts, took music lesson and visited family. I grew up and hung out with almost all white kids except for 1 East Indian boy I knew for a time when I was about 9. They were different than any other family I had ever known, but at the time I didn’t know why. They looked different, dressed different and when they spoke to one another it was unlike any language I had ever heard in my life.

    But other than that my family and I did exactly what millions of other white families did every day all across the world. However it wasn’t any picture perfect made for television family, in fact as I grew up it rather sucked being in that house.

    There was always some overblown drama that stemmed from some silly ideal of how we should live, or some piece of junk that was supposedly valuable with boxes and boxes of ‘valuables’ crammed in every nook and cranny and those same boxes never being opened. Then there was always some oddball new rule that replaced whatever new rule had been brought in two weeks prior. In fact there were so many rules that it got confusing as to what was right and what was wrong.

    And the endless bickering and fighting that made every one of the many endless trips to family member homes, and vacations a nightmare.

    Add to this the fact that I was diagnosed as being ‘hyper active’ and shuttled from one specialist to another and put on whatever mind numbing drug would supposedly help.

    Don’t get me wrong my parents did provide a lot of stuff for us. We had a decent home, vehicles in the drive way, food in the cupboard, went on trips, and received new clothes and all sorts of things along those lines. Stuff I was always told I should be grateful for because so many other kids didn’t have what we had.

    The one thing my parents weren’t too great at was stability. We seemed to move endlessly from house to house, city to city in some never ending quest for happiness. And my brother and I always heard the same things and it was usually stuff that made no sense to us such as We moved to keep you kids out of trouble. Not that my brother and I were bad kids we just hated sitting around being the quiet little lawn gnomes we were supposed to be. We wanted to explore and play with everything we saw, we were curious kids. But because some neighbor or family member’s kids were perfectly happy to sit and not say a word this somehow made my brother and I the root of all evil.

    But no matter where we moved to we always brought the baggage that made us unhappy with us. No matter how hard we ran we always wound up in the exact same spot.

    And as we grew older my parent’s relationship deteriorated badly. Or maybe it was always deteriorated and I just noticed it more as I grew up and saw how other families got along as opposed to the madness I saw in my own home.

    My parents split up a number of times and every single time they would get back together. When I was around 10 my parents split up for a few years and my father, brother and I moved in with my grandparents. But my father’s work was over an hour away and the endless travel got to him so a few years later we moved closer to his work. In the fall of 1981 we moved to Brampton Ontario. For the most part it was a large industrial town on the outskirts of Toronto. I was told that it was the divorce capital of Canada. I guess because of how close it was to Toronto and the fact that there was a lot of easy to get jobs and lower rent it made it ideal for people to start over again.

    It was also an ideal place for immigrants to move to for the very same reasons.

    Brampton at first was largely a lot of white and Italian families, (partial families in the case of the white folks anyway) with a growing Caribbean community.

    It stayed like that for many years and then a lot of Indian and Pakistani families started moving into the area. Having grown up in a household where clothing was generally a solid colour except for t-shirt prints and our idea of spice was salt and pepper the Indian/Pakistani community was a curiosity to me indeed.

    The clothing was something I had only seen in movies and comic books and the spices used were as foreign to me as a walk on the moon. I was curious about them but they kept to themselves and seemed to prefer that we did the same.

    Naturally my parents got back together and as usual the whole thing spiraled downhill.

    Eventually, (and thankfully) my parents divorced with my brother moving with my mother and I with my father. They say ‘opposites attract’, but I’ve always felt there’s two kinds of opposites: complimentary and conflicting.

    My parents were type # 2, and quite honestly I felt that divorce was the best thing to happen to their marriage at that point.

    Although I’m sure my parents won’t be entirely happy with what I’ve written there, (and they may even be a little hurt) however I’m not saying anything that they haven’t already said at some point or aren’t aware of. And to be quite honest I’ve always felt that this early experience of living in a situation where nothing was as it seemed left me with the opinion to never fully believe that what you’re seeing is the whole story or the entire truth.

    The old ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ adage I suppose would be a great way to sum it up.

    My father and I moved into an apartment and a year later I was sent off to a boarding school which proved to be more expensive than my father could manage at the time and I was only there for about a year and half. During this time my father was fortunate enough to meet the lady that he would wind up spending his life with, and after dating for a while they decided to take a plunge and move in together along with her three daughters. Unfortunately she was also in the process of a divorce and the financial strain was incredible on both of them.

    Naturally the wise thing to do was to remove me from boarding school. Years later as I look back on that time I really have to applaud my father for sticking his neck out at such a dicey time in his life to try and get a good education for me and I can only imagine how he felt when he had to make the decision to pull me out of school.

    I left school and joined my father, his new lady and her three daughters in the three bedroom apartment they lived in, it was tight and personal space was definitely at a premium but we managed to survive.

    One of the things I noticed when I moved back was the significant increase in the Indian/Pakistani community, and that racial tensions seemed to be growing in the area.

    Although I wasn’t necessarily a bad person I was somewhat selfish and arrogant, (but what 16 year old isn’t) and given all that my father and his girlfriend had been through in the past few years added to the cramped conditions it was a problem waiting to happen. Now I must say that throughout my life I’ve always had a talent for attracting the wrong type of person to me. If they were mouthy, trouble or bullies we’d find each other.

    I did meet some really good people throughout my life but always managed to push them aside for an asshole, strange sort of talent really.

    Now given my odd talent and mindset plus the circumstances we found ourselves in it was a natural recipe for disaster, and it was decided that after I graduated high school I would leave the home and go off on my own moving into a small furnished room in a boarding house with just my clothes, guitar and a small television I had been given for my birthday.

    I took a series of jobs washing dishes and working as a short order cook while playing in various bars and bands around town. Like so many other teenagers I was convinced I was going to be famous. I also dabbled with art and writing and fell in love with video games. I had wanted to be a chef while going through high school but gave up the idea a few years afterwards in the hope of becoming a famous rock star.

    Even though I barely had much money I felt like I was free to do whatever I wanted, how, and whenever I wanted. I had to survive on peanut butter sandwiches and oatmeal for a couple of weeks once because I had so little money, but I figured it was all part of paying my dues and eventually would become famous.

    Now despite the fact that I never became famous in any way I did have a lot of fun along the way. If you take irresponsible people, add a dash of wanting to have fun and a hearty serving of alcohol and mix well you’re going to have endless incidents and hilarious moments.

    Quite often the places you wind up playing in when you’re not an ‘A’ listed (or top billed) musician are rather… ‘questionable’ to say the least. Usually these dodgy places are run by equally dodgy owners and are frequented by some of the most colourful denizens a city or area has to offer. Let’s be realistic here folks you’re not going to find a pack of foul mouthed rowdy knuckle draggers sitting around a piano bar sipping cognac and discussing Tolstoy. Instead you’ll find them in whatever watering hole will tolerate their behavior.

    The bars are all the same and I imagine they’re all the same across the world. It was usually a small rectangular room with a large chest level bar being the biggest piece of furniture in there behind which was stacked a wide variety of liquor bottles. The more unusual the liquor the more dust was on the bottle. Behind the bottles was a smudged mirror illuminated by some style of yellowish light. The lighting overhead in the bar was a ceiling of cracked, sagging and stained tiles often with a series of small light pots

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