Michael Bryant’s memoir 28 Seconds recounts tragic death of bicycle courier

Published on Saturday August 18, 2012

The Toronto Star

18 August 2012

By Jennifer Wells

Banging out one of the world’s richer reminiscences about booze, the great New York writer Pete Hamill hit upon its “delicious heady delirium,” its alchemic power. Drinking, the philosopher happily found early in his life, before its corrosive effects fully struck, “could be something more than mere fuel for a wild night out. It could be a huge f— you to Authority.”

That’s Authority with a capital “A.”

It isn’t until the waning moments of a morning interview that Michael Bryant cites Hamill, one of the writers whose works he turned to in his days in the pillory facing charges of criminal negligence causing death and dangerous driving causing death.

That may seem a curious allusion, until you learn that the twinned narrative that Bryant has just released, 28 Seconds, is both his account of the death of Darcy Allan Sheppard that August night three years ago, and the cancer of his own alcoholism, Bryant’s best buddy during his off-leash, anti-authoritarian days as the province’s attorney general and a good decade and a half before.

That August night.

Michael Bryant’s eyes flicker toward the window of a café on Bloor St. W. His hair is tightly cropped, greying at the temples. He looks fit, if weary.

“It’s the light over at Bellair,” he says, publicly recounting to a journalist for the first time the grievous events of August 31, 2009. Sheppard on his bike. Bryant in his car.

“I had been watching for him. I was looking out Susan’s side window, because the last we’d seen of him he had been on the north side of the street. And so I just assumed he would be coming along the north side of the street and then he surprised me on the left side.”

He. Him. Darcy Allan Sheppard. 33. Six-foot-one. 203 pounds. Bike courier. Inebriated. Angry.

Darcy Allan had an especially difficult time — I’m quoting here from an email Darcy’s adoptive father, Allan, sent to me two summers ago — He was medicated with Ritalin from infancy, and spent two separate one-year stays in closed-custody psychiatric treatment, once when he was around 11 and again when he was around 13. What always struck me was how little the psychiatrists and psychologists . . . seemed to know about what they were doing.

That August night.

“This particular night,” Bryant writes in 28 Seconds, “our wedding anniversary, was surely destined, just like everything else I touched, to turn out golden.”

Well, that’s not right, as we learn. The “eggshell crunches of the marriage were deafening,” Bryant writes. And then more baldly: the marriage was in trouble. Bryant had forgotten the anniversary — their 12th — until his wife, Susan Abramovitch, mentioned it. And by the time the two had consumed the shawarma platter at a little eatery on College St. and headed for a stroll on the Beach boardwalk, the talk had turned to an examination of their union. Susan held her pumps in her hand and walked barefoot.

“It was just, you know: ‘What happened?’ ” says Bryant, trying to recapture the searching conversation, one to the other.

“Who are you?”

“Who are you?”

“Who am I?”

“Who am I?”

“Why all this resentment? Why all this bitterness? Why all this contempt?”

“There was something sad about that night,” he says, quietly, sitting in a leather club chair, occasionally rubbing the brass tacks on the chair arms. Bryant is a small man, five-foot-eight, and the chair looks as though it could swallow him up.

This is not the Michael Bryant of the pink socks and acid green ties and French cuff shirts. This is not the bantam spin master who knew innately how to force feed a message track to journalists. This is not the klieg light politician who, in one of his earliest headline grabbing stunts as AG — restricting the sale of fake guns — drew a chill response from Premier Dalton McGuinty. “That was probably the beginning of our slow unraveling,” he writes of his relationship with the premier.

Bryant was just 37 when he was named attorney general. Brilliant. Harvard educated. A passionate believer in seizing public interest issues. Passionate. Period.

The day he heard the news of his appointment he celebrated by drinking a bottle of scotch.

Many mornings he would lie on the floor of the shower hoping the cool water would wash away the hangover.

New Year’s Day. 2006. “I awoke on the basement floor, face to carpet, fully dressed, with a distinct, very distinct, sense of amnesia,” he writes. “I did not know where I was, even as I looked around the basement of my own house.”

It does take a brave man to hang out all this laundry.

That August night.

Bryant steered his black Saab convertible — his old Saab, he writes repeatedly — west on Bloor. Top down. Susan in the passenger seat. He first spots Darcy Allan Sheppard tossing garbage into the street, screaming at a white SUV, at the southeast corner of Bloor and Yonge Sts., under the influence of something. Inebriated.

And he thinks: “Hello, brother. You’re one of us, aren’t you?”

As Bryant drives toward the light at Bellair St., he senses Sheppard taking a swipe at him.

“I stopped. The car stalled.” The “beater” Saab was ill-tempered and unreliable. “He’s in front of us and . . . as Susan said later, she said it felt like he [Sheppard] was growing in front of us and it felt that way. It was like a combination of snarling, sort of hysterical laughter and threat. ‘Nowwhat’re ya gonna do?’ ”

When Michael Bryant talks about his own drinking, he wraps his arms around himself and leans forward. “I was never drunk on the job,” he says. “I could see that it was eventually going to compromise my abilities to execute my public duties.”

In the early months of 2006 Bryant, on the advice of a physician, started keeping a journal of his own drinking, determined to limit his consumption to two drinks a day.

Entries:

“Sat/Sun – Drunk/hungover/Drunk.

Wednesday.

“Better, but still in that drinking rut . . .

Thursday.

“Same as yesterday.”

Friday.

“Worse than yesterday. F—.”

It sounds exhausting. “It just started to suck the life out of me,” he says, appearing tired even in the memory of it. “I was miserable all the time . . . completely narcissistic and paranoid . . . I used to have a lot of ideas. I had no ideas.”

Michael Bryant used to have a million ideas, many of which are as clearly recalled as if they happened yesterday. Point: the pit bull ban, an initiative that he acknowledges appealed as much to his ego as his instincts. His campaign was bombastic — his word — and he feels responsible for the ill treatment of pit bull owners. But he stands by the law.

In his early years in politics he drew many bright lights around him, Fulbright scholars like himself. The AG’s office was a heady, energetic place, all but independently run from the premier’s office. Communication from McGuinty’s office was commonly shipped straight to the shredder.

By 2006, Bryant was intellectually and emotionally tapped out. His journal is the evidence. “I could just see in black and white what was becoming of my life,” he says, having read and reread his entries. “And it was just a pathetic chronicle and a lot of self-hatred and self pity.”

He was hung over every morning. “The question was how hung over? A little hung over or a lot hung over?”

The sun is playing through the café window. There’s construction outside. The usual Toronto scene. “I knew from looking at the journal that there was no way I could do just two [drinks a day]. And yet, I kept trying, day after day after day, like a fly banging against a window. I had the brains of a fly banging against a window. At some point this window’s going to open up and, you know, it’s not.”

On March 7, 2006, Bryant attended a Leafs game at the Air Canada Centre, a party thrown by some friends in the legal community. It was a month before his 40th birthday. His gift was a Leafs jersey with “AG” stitched on the front in place of a captain’s “C” and “40” on the back. What should have been a happy time, golden.

“I proceeded to get New Year’s s— faced again,” he writes. “At some point in the final period, I left without saying goodbye or anything to anyone. I got lost somewhere downtown, the alcoholic Attorney General on his last night out. I don’t know how I got home.”

That August night. August 31, 2009.

Bryant picks up the narrative. “I couldn’t get the car started. Why is this car not starting? The pedals? The key not in?”

In 28 Seconds, Bryant writes that the Saab lurched three times. The first moved the car to the right, away from Sheppard. The second caused no contact with Sheppard or his bike. The third resulted in Sheppard landing on the hood.

Bryant makes a slapping sound with his hands. “He was on the hood. And his bike was under my bumper. And he went from simmering to, ah, ah, raging.”

Bryant backed the car up, then drove forward. “And as I’m driving away he starts running toward the car and . . . I’m trying to get away and he’s running at the car. He’s going to get thunked. And he runs and he jumps and he lands on the car and at the moment he jumps and he lands on the car I remember Susan screaming.”

I twice met with Allan Sheppard, Darcy’s adoptive father. The first time in the summer of 2010 and again in December of that year. I cite these meetings now to give Darcy life in a story in which he has no voice.

In our first meeting I noted how Allan Sheppard’s eyes were reddish and wet and how he would close them for long periods of time as he recalled the struggles attempting to raise Darcy and his half-brother, David. Mr. Sheppard was 72 when we met, and he wore his thin grey hair in a pony tail. He said he hoped his son’s death could serve as a springboard, advocating for better child and youth mental health care and research.

He chronicled as best as his memory would allow Darcy and David’s multiple foster placements before the boys were taken in by the Sheppards. “I had seen Darcy go through patterns of bizarre behaviour before, as a child. It would start relatively innocuously and cycle through ever higher levels of intensity where he would end up in psychiatric care because he would be putting himself at risk.”

Mr. Sheppard is thoughtful and exceptionally well-spoken. His recollections are painful and poignant. At one juncture he lived alone with Darcy in what he described as a suite attached to a little farm house. “Things were just falling apart,” he said softly. “He wouldn’t go to school so I would leave him at home while I went to work . . . And I’d come back and the place would be trashed to the point there were holes in the drywall.”

During Darcy’s first extended period of time in a psychiatric facility, at just 11 years old, Sheppard would visit every Sunday. “There was a sunroom in the building and we would have our visits there. And at the end of the visit he would always say, ‘Be sure to wave to me.’ And I’d look back, and there he’d be, waving.”

That the “system,” such as it is, failed his son is self-evident. It saddened him to see his son singularly cast as a “berserker,” a character sketch from which all of Darcy’s charm and his not infrequent generosity were erased.

Mr. Sheppard said he wished no ill on Michael Bryant. But he had questions about that August night. He was particularly puzzled that Bryant in the moment was both panicked and passive. “He said nothing to Darcy? Really?”

The release of 28 Seconds, to be published Tuesday, has been tightly controlled by the book’s publisher. We have a little more than an hour to hear Michael Bryant tell his story.

“I knew when I saw him that he was an alcohol addict. The first second I saw him,” Bryant says.

What happened that August night.

“He’s hanging on to the car . . . He’s trying to get in and I’m losing control of the car, so I stopped and he’s still there. And I tried to push him off and he pushed me and I pushed him . . . He seemed to be getting in the car better when the car was stopped.”

The car advances into the oncoming lane. “I had a hard time driving. I had this tunnel vision, literally, experience . . . There’s nobody on the sidewalk. There are no cars on the road.”

There were, of course.

“I didn’t see any of it. It was just a tunnel. And then he was gone. The tunnel was gone and he was gone.”

Bryant says he remained silent throughout the 28 seconds. “I didn’t want to provoke him in any way,” he says. “I didn’t say anything to him at all.”

The postmortem examination of Darcy Allan Sheppard cites blunt impact head trauma as the cause of death. As the Saab travelled on the south side of the eastbound lane, Sheppard was dislodged from the car after hitting the side cap of a fire hydrant. The subsequent impact to the right side of his head proved fatal.

The morning after the Leafs game, March 7, 2006, Michael Bryant awoke to a new reality. Who can say what delivered it beyond the massive hangover that was excavating his brain, more bourbon blackouts. “It’s just like I had run out of promises, run out of excuses. I’d run out of delusions that I could somehow control this.”

Bryant’s account of his relationship with alcohol is unsparing both in the book and in person. “It was, I am ashamed to say, the most important thing in my life.”

That August night, 2009, Michael Bryant had a Nestea with his shawarma. He hadn’t had a drink in three years. “I never wanted to go back to that horrible place of being a drunk,” he says.

Sitting in the bucket, as he calls the jail cell he found himself in that August night, he pondered what he calls the long fall. “I put myself extremely high upon the pedestal,” he says of his career ascent. “And the trip down to the pillory is a long one.”

On May 25, 2010, all charges against Bryant were dropped. Six months later he and Susan separated. His legal debt exceeds the $300,000 salary he was drawing down as CEO of Invest Toronto, the job he held at the time of his arrest. He expects to be paying it off for the remainder of his days. Bryant is now a principal at Ishkonigan, a consulting firm owned by Phil Fontaine, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations.

He could have let the story rest. Why write a book?

“It’s an offering, that’s what it is,” he says. An offering to other high-functioning alcoholics deluded into thinking they have nothing in common with the drunk on the street.

He sees many Darcy Allan Sheppards in the 12-step recovery rooms he attends. “There’s a lot of tattoos and hoarse voices and close-cropped hair and scars. Bones out of joint. And that look of indescribable pain on their face.”

Allan Sheppard Sr., when I met him, bore a look of indescribable pain. I don’t know where he is today. What would Bryant say to him, given the chance?

That he’s sorry for the loss of his son.

And: “Is there anything I can do to help? That’s it.”

“And what would you like to know?”