Loose End

by Ivan Coyote

  Turns out I’d take a house fire over an insensitive and morally bankrupt thief any day. Not that we ever get to choose, but still, at least I don’t have to spend the rest of my days perusing pawn shop windows for my treasured things, or wondering who might be wearing my favourite jacket now, and if they love it like I did. I know where most of my stuff went, and it sure wasn’t up anyone’s arm or nose, and that seems kinder to me somehow.

  As the inimitable Geoff Burner says, “Keep it light enough to travel.” So I find myself in Amsterdam, still tripping out on the fact that I can smoke cigarettes indoors here, not to mention that the café I’m writing this in carries some thirty varieties of grass and hash, and there is an Irish Wolfhound sleeping undisturbed and welcome under the table next to me.

  The transit systems in Europe make so much practical sense that it’s no wonder our government hasn’t caught on to any of this yet. You can take your bike on a bus, on a tram, and on the subway. Same with your dogs, your huge double baby stroller, and a second-hand chair. People just work around it.

  In Amsterdam, the bicycle is the preferred and most sensible means of transport, and the sidewalks are so full of them that it is sometimes difficult to find a place to lock up to. Train stations have multi-floored parking lots, but for bikes, not cars. I bought myself a cheap Dutch one-speed my second day here, and I plan to sell it to a lovely Russian gal who works at the theatre I am performing in before I return home, but I’ve fallen so in love with her silvery, simple lines (the bike’s, that is) that I might have to bring her home to Canada with me, to meet the family.

  I named my bike Janis, and she has transformed me from a meat-eating, chain-smoking guy who drives his car everywhere, into a meat-eating, chain-smoking guy who rides his bike everywhere. I average about five hours a day, and until my ass became accustomed to my new ways, I had to sit on an ice pack for three nights in a row to keep the swelling down. Lord knows I’ve had my fair share of rear-end-related injuries in the past, but this one was by far the most inconveniently located. A guy can lay off the ass play for a couple of days till things mend themselves up, but it’s hard to avoid sitting down for three days straight.

  It is for me, anyway. But back to my bike.

  My favourite time is the morning bicycle rush hour, trying to pedal just slow enough through the crowd so at the lights I don’t have to stop and climb off, doing like the Dutch do and resting one hand on a light post or street sign or a toe on a curb until the pack moves on. Beautiful women with the wind wrapping their long dresses around their calves as they pedal in high heels to work, talking on their cell phones. A mother cycles with two toddlers crammed helmet-less into one baby seat, the oldest holding a loaf of bread in one hand and a block of cheese in the other.

  Yesterday I watched a woman moving what we would call a small bar fridge, but a whole family eats from it here, strapped to her bike rack, with an old chair bungee-corded to the top of the fridge.

  I have yet to meet anyone in Holland who owns a bathtub; apartments are too small to afford to sacrifice enough space for a full kitchen or a luxury like lying down to wash. This is perfect for me, since the little house I lived in for the last twelve years only had stand-up washing facilities too. It’s been an easy transition. One thing a good house fire teaches you is how to adapt quickly to a changing environment.

  French fries in Holland come with peanut sauce and mayonnaise instead of ketchup, which tastes a lot better than I thought it would.

  It’s a brave new world.

  What If

  I was on a five-hour flight from Ottawa, and like any seasoned traveller, I was well-prepared. I had three episodes from the fifth season of The Sopranos on DVD and my laptop in my carry-on luggage.

  That’s why I didn’t exchange even a word with the elderly woman seated next to me until the wheat fields of Saskatchewan were rolling under our wings. My laptop battery died halfway through episode three, so I took off my headphones. She was well into her seventies, I reckoned, and in the two hours since we took off, she had read the June issue of Reader’s Digest from cover to cover, eaten her omelette and fruit cup but not the bun or the brownie, tucked the foil pack of sesame snacks into her purse for later, and bravely held the hand of the old lady in the aisle seat next to her whenever there was turbulence.

  I smiled a hello, and then the two of us stared out into the Plexiglassed view of all that blue sky for a long minute.

  It was dead easy to get her talking. All I did was ask her if she lived in Ottawa or Vancouver, and was she going to visit the grandkids then, and her story just fell out of her; eighty-nine years of life came tumbling out of her mouth like laundry bags out of a hatchback parked on a hill.

  It was like she had been waiting for years to meet the right stranger on the perfect plane ride, just so she could describe to someone half a century younger than her what it all felt like to lead this long and quiet life, and to suddenly find oneself somehow very old, to wake up knowing that you are right now living out what would soon become the last days of your life.

  Her name was Eleanor, and today was the third anniversary of the death of her husband. He had passed in his sleep after a long argument with Alzheimer’s, she told me, and her two daughters were forcing her to take a seniors’ cruise to Alaska. They had insisted, wouldn’t take no for an answer, and had paid for the whole trip. Eleanor had never flown alone before, and was glad the tour guide was on the plane, to help her navigate. She was meeting her sister in Vancouver, who was two years younger than her, but unlike Eleanor, needed a walker to get around. Eleanor had turned eighty-nine last March, and her knees trouble her quite a bit, especially in the cold, but as long as the neighbours didn’t let the ice build up on their stretch of sidewalk too much, then she did fine enough with just the one cane. “You just grin and bear it,” she explained. “What else is there to do?”

  Eleanor was born in 1917 and married her childhood sweetheart, Bert. He wore his Air Force uniform, and she wore the same dress her mother had been married in. Bert had worked in communications after the war and went on to do quite well for himself. They were comfortable, she told me, and she had never worked outside of the home. She confessed she had never learned to drive a car and hadn’t even taken a city bus by herself until things got really bad and Bert had to be placed into the home.

  “I had to figure out the buses, so I could visit him in the seniors’ home. It was a nice place, with good staff, not like some you hear about. I went every morning, and after mass on Sundays. Even though he didn’t know who I was anymore, those last few years, to me he was still my husband. Bert had always driven me everywhere in his car, so I just never learned to get around on my own. It’s amazing how we lean on each other for things without even realizing, then one day there you are, and he is not. You begin to see all the things you never knew you weren’t doing for yourself, how dependent you were all along. Like a child. An old, grey child with bad knees, learning how to read a map and pay the phone bill. Eighty-eight years old. How did that happen?”

  She clucked her tongue, as if she were describing someone else’s life to me, someone she didn’t quite approve of.

  We got to talking about young girls nowadays, of course, and how different they seem to her, looking even older at a young age than they did when I was growing up: louder, bolder, bigger, braver.

  “I watch them on the bus, you know, and the girls, they’re more aggressive than the boys. So much bare skin and all made up, broad daylight on a city bus, no less. And the language. No shame at all. Makes you wonder if the pendulum hasn’t swung too far the other way. The things that come out of my granddaughter’s mouth sometimes, it’s enough to curl your toes.”

  We talked about what kind of women this new breed of girls would become, and what Bert would have thought about it all. Then the Pacific Ocean appeared, the trees turned into city, and we returned our trays and seatbacks to the upright position. Eleanor held my hand with her left one, and gripped the old woman
’s shaking fist with her right as the plane touched down.

  “My friends all warned me not to come home from this cruise with some dirty old man in tow, with his wrinkly eyes on my inheritance. I’ll have to tell them that I met a handsome young fellow on the airplane, a real gentleman, but I left him behind in Vancouver. It really was a pleasure to meet you.” She left her hand on my arm until the plane stopped moving.

  Eleanor’s friend raised an eyebrow and studied me out of the corner of her eye. I could tell that as soon as I was out of earshot she was going to gleefully inform Eleanor that the nice young man she met on the plane was not as young as he looked, or as nice. In fact, he wasn’t a man at all.

  I had not lied to Eleanor or misled her in any way, but all the way home from the airport I felt lead-hearted and strangely guilty. Would she have knowingly spilled stories for three hours to a homosexual? Probably not. Should I have told her I wasn’t what she thought I was? Had I deceived a kind and sheltered woman, using her company and confidence merely to pass the time? What exactly was the truth, and would the truth have made her feel any better?

  I knew that Eleanor’s friend would never get it, but the truth is that part of me really is a nice young gentleman who loves little old ladies. That was whom Eleanor had met, and that was who had listened to the story of her life, the very same young man who will keep her story breathing long after she has stopped.

  For Rent

  So it turns out that when you live in the same place for twelve years, you completely forget what it’s like to look for an apartment. My old dog is eleven in people years, and the little guy is almost five, so last time I moved I was petless and twenty-three years old. Back then I could rely on my youthful appearance and still pass as a non-smoker. I was also working as an electrician, and had the pay-stubs to prove my gainful employment. Basically, I at least appeared to be a lot more respectable a tenant than I do now, what with the Player’s Light Regular lines bracketing my mouth, the two dogs, and the dubiously self-employed storyteller status and all.

  Not to mention that the last place I lived in burned right to the ground, all over the evening news no less, making a reference from my last address rather cumbersome. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t the top pick of the possible tenant pile, as far as your average landlord sees things.

  Circumstance and a sublet landed me in a shared house with friends right after the fire, but the owner put the place up for sale two days after I moved in. As soon as I got back from Europe, the house hunt was on. I put out the word, pounded the pavement, read the papers, surfed the cyber-ads, and made the phone calls. It quickly became apparent that not only was I going to pay a lot more rent than I was accustomed to, I was also going to be sliding several steps down the food chain in terms of the swankiness of my abode.

  Sure, my last place was a firetrap with an almost criminally negligent landlord, but at least it had funk appeal. It had a yard and a garage, and it was above ground. It had windows. I built a home there, a place nice enough that my mom would visit, a pad swank enough I could have a fine lady over for dinner and proudly tell her this is where I live.

  It turns out that in today’s housing lingo, “dog OK” is actually a synonym for subterranean, and “bright semi-basement suite” means there is a ground-level window with a security-barred view of the security-barred window belonging to the poor bastard living in the laundry room of the house next door to you. I was shocked at what some people will try and pass off as a rental unit, appalled that otherwise normal-seeming folks were walking around with consciences that would allow them to live directly above another human being, all the while knowing the man paying their mortgage below them cannot stand fully upright in his own kitchen. I felt like Martha Stewart must have felt when they first showed her around the old cellblock; it was that bad. One place had a toilet in one corner of the bedroom with a shower curtain strung up around it. One place I couldn’t even get more than two feet inside the front door before the flies and the smell of garbage spun me around into the concrete backyard for some air. “You have to look for the potential underneath, what a little paint can do,” the rental agent informed me. “Plus, there is half off the damage deposit if you clean it yourself.”

  I opened mold-lined closets and flushed wheezing toilets. I asked one fellow, who had inherited the house from his father but lived somewhere else now, exactly what he thought my dogs might do to the mismatched hunks of faded linoleum glued to the concrete floor of his basement that would warrant the extra pet deposit he was asking for? I almost blurted out to another guy, a father of three, wasn’t he worried about the kind of guy who would rent a scummy dive like this one, sharing a backyard and laundry room with his wife and children? I imagined my date having to take off her heels at the hobbit door, so she didn’t have to duck where they dry-walled around the hot air duct in the middle of my combination living/bed/dining room. I thought about the deep, dark, dank of February, when the spiders needed a handy place to get out of the rain, of how the one decent-sized window in the front would fog up from the lady upstairs doing the day’s laundry, and how the water in my tiny metal shower stall would scald me every time one of the kids remembered to flush the toilet before pogo-sticking down the stairs inches above my head and slamming the screen door.

  I couldn’t deal. It was bad enough I had to start all over at thirty-six, that all my worldly goods had burned just as I was getting old enough to own more than two towels, copper pots, and placemats. I had once had more than one set of sheets, pictures in frames, and a mattress that wasn’t pre-owned. I wasn’t about to trade that kind of luxury living for a hotplate and a flickering fluorescent view of someone else’s furnace and hot water heater, not at my age.

  I decided I’d had enough of this overpriced city living, and I moved to Squamish, north of the city. For the price of a brown-shag basement suite with a drop ceiling in Vancouver, I scored myself a three-bedroom, top-floor apartment with brand new hardwood floors and his-and-hers bathrooms. Both of my toilets flush without complaint. All five of my picture windows and my balcony gaze up at the granite profile of the mountain they named this place after, and round about eight at night, when the neighbours call the kids in from the courtyard, it gets so quiet here my ears ring for a minute when the hum of the fridge stops and the silence really sets in. During the day, I can hear the kids screeching in the outdoor swimming pool, located mere steps from my front door, right next to the building that boasts a weight room, covered bike racks, and a place to wash your truck.

  Yesterday, when I took the dogs down to the little river that runs behind my building, I crossed the bridge and walked through the playground, past the grove of giant cedars, and came upon the cherry on top of the sweetness that is my new digs: a fully-fenced, rubber-surfaced ball hockey rink, complete with blue lines painted in and two nets pushed aside to make room for homemade skateboard ramps.

  I can’t wait to unpack and settle in. All I need now is some coat hangers and a dish rack. And a mop. S’pose I’ll need a bucket to go with it too, and maybe some dishes. Eventually I’ll need more than just the one spoon, you know, for when I get visitors, old friends, up from the big city. What with the stress, and the traffic, and the cost of living, they’ll be needing a place to get away from it all.

  Afterword

  So. There it is. I moved myself into that little attic apartment on September 15, 1993, and life moved me out of it on March 31, 2005. Twelve years. When I moved in, I was twenty-four and all of my possessions could be squeezed into one small pick-up truck. After the smoke cleared, I was left with two station wagon loads of tools that the flames had spared by sidestepping the garage in our backyard.

  Funny how life goes. The qualities that made my little abode the perfect writer’s haven were the very same ones that brought about its end: it was a cheap old house with a landlord who never came around and rarely fixed anything. My minimal rent made my dreams of being a full-time writer and artist financially feasible, but it tur
ned out in the end that the place was a bit of a firetrap.

  But besides that, that little blue house across from the lake let me be a storyteller. It bought me almost twelve years of solitude and time, and all it cost me was three hundred and sixteen dollars a month – and in the end, nearly every material possession that I owned.

  A fair enough deal in the long run, if you ask me. We had a great run, the dogs and I and our little attic on Victoria Drive. For the last five years, that life was documented monthly in pieces published in the Vancouver newspaper Xtra! West, which were then collected and re-worked, eventually becoming the stories in this book.

  The first draft of this collection originally contained a foreword, written at my little walnut desk in the corner of my front room one night in February of 2005, but most of what I had to say that night was rendered no longer relevant or true a few weeks later by the demise of my home. I was no longer seated comfortably in the centre of my tiny pocket of neighbourhood. Life had picked me up and dropped me somewhere else, outside looking in. Looking back. Looking around me, and finding nothing familiar to land on or rest up against. I attempted to re-write the foreword several times, but I couldn’t talk about the last five years telling stories about my neighbourhood without mentioning that I didn’t live there anymore, and why. At the same time, I didn’t want to give away the ending right at the beginning, either.