The Crash Palace

by Andrew Wedderburn

  She must be throwing a party, Audrey thought. Some kind of dinner party that you put out different olives in tiny bowls.

  Glen was sitting on his folding chair looking up at two big men standing on either side of him. Paramedics: big men made bigger by their blue-and-yellow jackets. Coils of radio wire twisting out of bulky panels in the jackets. Shelly led Audrey up the sidewalk, then stopped a couple of yards from Glen and the paramedics. She pulled her hand out of Audrey’s and stood waiting while the men talked, her hands clasped in front of her chest.

  ‘Glen, if you see Shorty LeClaire, it’s really important that you don’t touch him,’ said one of the paramedics.

  ‘You can’t touch him, not at all. His bare skin,’ said the other.

  ‘We’re trying to get to everybody in the neighbourhood, but not everybody’s around, so when you see people, tell them.’

  Glen Aarpy looked back and forth between the big men.

  ‘Tell people that they aren’t to touch Shorty LeClaire’s bare skin,’ said Glen.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It’s a fungal infection. It’s in those big calluses on his hands. You know how big his hands are.’

  ‘Don’t shake his hand.’

  ‘Don’t shake his hand,’ said Glen. ‘And tell people this. Not to shake Shorty LeClaire’s hand.’

  ‘What about you, Glen? You keeping well?’

  Glen Aarpy sighed and shrugged. ‘I don’t know about fungal infections. My own health issues are more microbial. Ill-intentioned spores in my gut biome. There’s a malevolent microscopic kingdom down there squeezing out the more benevolent fermenters, which might otherwise bubble and burp the proper vapours out into my bloodstream. All of which leaves me ill-equipped to handle the various vagaries on any given day’s agenda.’

  One of the paramedics coughed into his fist.

  ‘You want a cup of coffee?’ asked the other. They pushed open the door and went into the fluorescent white grocery store.

  Shelly stood patiently with her dinner-plate-wide eyes and hands clasped in front of her chest. Glen shifted on his plastic folding chair. Leaned down to root in the canvas bag he kept underneath, shuffling the papers inside. Shelly stood waiting while he puttered and rooted, and then he looked up.

  ‘Oh, hello, Miss Cole. When did you get there?’

  He had too few teeth and they were in the wrong places, all under a broom-bristle moustache, the whiskers of which looked to hurt the face they were so thickly rooted into.

  ‘Shelly,’ Audrey said, ‘go ahead.’

  On weekday mornings after rush hour, Glen Aarpy would get off the number 2 bus outside the St. Anne Apartments. He came into Mirko’s grocery with his heavy backpack hitched up on two shoulders, and if Morris or Mirko had a customer, he waited, not talking to people inside the store by long-standing agreement. Once the shop was empty, he’d let himself into the back storage room where he kept his chair and his padded seat cushion. Outside he unfolded the chair, opened up his backpack, and pulled out a stack of bond-paper booklets with black-and-white Xeroxed covers: THE LUNAR PURVIEW: Calgary’s Authentic Newspaper of Vigilance and True Voice.

  ‘Every lie is a porthole into which the black waters of cold time lap and look and wait,’ Glen Aarpy would declaim at passersby, while cars slowed and stopped for the red light a block ahead. ‘And we can rivet that steel seal tightly as we might against the rime and bluster, but drip drop, drip drop, we can only float above our falsehoods for so long before the bottom goes out. Whereas the truth printed on a page will keep on your shelf high and dry, and your humble vendor’s personal cost to produce is only sixty-five cents an issue.’

  As long as Audrey had been coming to Mirko’s – for a box of tea bags, for toothpaste or dental floss, a carton of milk, baby wipes, or after work or on a Saturday morning for a cup of the thick black coffee he kept slowly reducing on a burner behind the counter – Glen had always been sitting outside, yelling at people, shaking his handmade newsletters at them.

  ‘Glen Glen Glarpy, I wanna magic,’ Shelly said in a small, cautious voice.

  He grinned to show her the black veins in his gums. Then he sighed dramatically. ‘Baby Shelly Cole, I am delighted by your enthusiasm. If more people wanted magic, it would be a good deal easier to perform and produce. Unfortunately, magic is not only difficult for the practitioner but demanding on the audience, and the sort that I’ve made my practice requires of both participants the sort of keen, unclouded attention that is rigorously squeezed out of all of us like so much toothpaste by the circumstances of life.’ He waved his hand around to encompass the building, the street, street lights, traffic. ‘Their institutions do not absently grasp and pinch the tube willy-nilly. No, they roll from the bottom up from the first day of kindergarten so that years later every smear of cognitive gumption has been pressed out and left to stick to the bottom of the sink. Shelly Cole, because you are as of yet completely untouched by this grist pincher, you are the ideal magician’s audience. An increasing rarity, however, and this difficulty in securing an appreciative audience has more or less drummed not only the desire but the ability itself from me of late.’

  Shelly’s eyes were big and her mouth open in anticipation.

  ‘In this atmosphere of pervasive, smothering skepticism, I find it more or less impossible to practise any sort of interesting magic. For instance,’ he said, stretching and wiggling his fingers to show off the cracked nicotine-yellow nails and thick white knuckle hairs, ‘I’m unable to produce the most basic misdirections and conjurations.’ Then he snapped his fingers loudly and pointed at Shelly.

  The little girl followed the line from the finger to the plastic zipper of her puffy jacket, which she unzipped a few inches and then gasped. A rolled-up tube of white printer paper protruded from inside her coat. She looked up at her mother and then at Aarpy, who motioned for her to give him the paper.

  ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘I’m sure it would be altogether impossible these days for me to conjure up a little girl’s favourite animal. I’d be unable to produce a …’

  Shelly waited a moment, making sense of this, then said, ‘Kitty.’

  ‘Right,’ said Glen, ‘a kitten. It would be out of the question for me to make a kitten with magic.’ He patted the pockets of his pants and jacket. Then squinted at her coat again and pointed to her pocket. She reached in, then made a happy little squeal and produced a black Sharpie marker, which she gave to him.

  ‘A kitten,’ he said. ‘Right. Just not possible.’ He uncapped the marker and drew on the paper, flat against his thigh. A few quick lines and marks, then held it up: a crude cartoon of a dog with floppy ears and a bushy tail.

  Shelly shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘kitty.’

  ‘Right, a kitten. This is what I mean,’ he said, drawing again. ‘Proficiency in magic has more or less deserted me at this point.’ He held up a drawing of a pig with two little slots in its snout nose and a single squiggle curly tail.

  ‘Not piggy, kitty.’

  There was one sheet of paper left and he scribbled furiously, then held up a duck with wide feet and an open bill, and a speech balloon, which said, ‘Quack Quack.’

  ‘No. No no, kitty,’ said Shelly.

  Glen Aarpy coughed and shrugged, then squinted his bushy eyebrows and pointed at Shelly’s zipper again. She pulled it down further to produce another rolled-up tube of paper. She unfolded it and then squealed with delight. Turned to her mother and showed her: a black marker drawing of a kitten with little whiskers, licking an upraised paw, its long tail curling happily behind it.

  ‘No, magic is altogether too thankless an occupation these days,’ said Glen Aarpy.

  Shelly giggled and clapped. ‘Mommy, Mommy, itta a magic kitty.’

  ‘It’s a magic kitty,’ said Audrey.

  ‘Canna keep magic kitty, Mommy?’

  ‘We’ll put it on the fridge. What do you say?’

  Shelly concentrated so that she could say as clearly
as possible: ‘Thank you, Glarpy, for magic kitty.’

  ‘You’re very, very welcome,’ said Glen.

  ‘Go in and show Mirko,’ said Audrey. Shelly pushed into the hot bright store, and once she was inside, Audrey fished in her purse and found a $10 bill.

  Glen inclined his head seriously and stuffed it in the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Here,’ he said, handing her a copy of the Lunar Purview, ‘take a paper.’

  §

  At the funeral home, a young man in a black suit led her into the chapel. A little pewter urn sat on a cherrywood podium at the front, beside white lilies in a white vase and a picture in a frame. Audrey thought about walking up to the front to have a closer look at the picture. See what they’d chosen. What they’d been able to find. Instead she sat down near the back.

  A woman in an expensive jacket that she hadn’t taken off sat in the back row, holding a designer handbag and staring straight ahead. Another woman sat a few rows ahead of her, holding a notepad and a pen.

  There was a grey-haired man in a shabby leather jacket with his arm propped over the back of the pew. Wrists McLung was sitting next to him.

  Wrists turned in the pew to look over his shoulder. He saw Audrey and didn’t look as surprised as she would have liked. Puffed out his cheeks and looked up at the ceiling.

  There was no one else. Audrey looked over her shoulder, watching the back door, but no one else came.

  After a while the young man in the suit walked into the chapel, down the aisle to where Wrists was sitting. He whispered something to Wrists, who looked around the room, then nodded and coughed. Stood up and walked to the front of the room.

  There was a little microphone on the podium, and Wrists spent a while adjusting this. He leaned onto the podium with his big hands on either sides. Coughed again and then he started talking.

  ‘I guess I first met Alex Main after he bought the Alka Skelter from Sid Stein. Sid had hired me a while prior to that to be his doorman. “Wrists,” Sid said to me, “we have a drug problem, a skinhead problem, and a people-having-sex-in-the-bar problem.” He said my job was to do whatever I had to to fix these problems.’

  The woman with the handbag in the back row exhaled loudly, stood up, and walked out of the chapel. Wrists waited for the door to shut.

  ‘It was this real derelict bar, the Alka Skelter,’ said Wrists. ‘Right in the heart of old Victoria Park, on Olympic Way and 13th Avenue. This was before they bulldozed Vic Park to expand the Stampede grounds. Before the casino and all the condo towers. Proper sketchy, mostly vacant Vic Park. You went up a long, narrow flight of stairs. The building was old and there were places where the floor was thin and you could see down between the slats. You’d feel the floor bow when there was a room full of people. I mean, later, after Alex bought the place and people started coming, years later when the room was full, you’d still feel the floor bow.’

  Wrists coughed into his fist.

  ‘The drug problem was that everybody who came to the bar did drugs. It was a pretty quiet place before Sid sold it to Alex, and since it wasn’t really busy, the only customers were friends of Sid’s and they would come in and do drugs, and so it seemed like the kind of bar you could go and do drugs in. “Wrists, people think it’s okay to do drugs in the bar and you’ve got to stop them,” Sid told me. Sid did a lot of drugs and liked to do them with his friends in his bar. Most of Sid’s friends liked downers and heroin and a few of them who considered themselves more exciting liked to snort cocaine. If they couldn’t get their hands on powder cocaine, they’d go out onto the fire escape and smoke crack in the alley. Which was bad because it was a really sketchy alley that had a lot of its own crackheads occupying it already. Sid would send the bikers that sold him and his friends their drugs out into the alley to chase away these crack-heads. The bikers would then come back later and sell the crackheads more drugs. All of which was just a really bad scene.

  ‘Now, the bikers that sold Sid his drugs generally liked me. They liked me ’cause I’m a more or less together guy with my head on straight. I told them they couldn’t sell drugs in the bar and they said, Hey, no problem. I found this surprising at first until Sid explained to me about his lawyer. Sid and the bikers shared a lawyer, the Skinny Cowboy. The Skinny Cowboy obviously isn’t his name but it’s what everyone called him. He was an old cowboy who lived outside of Turner Valley. He had long silver hair and weighed 120 pounds, maybe. Wore a silver cow-skull bolo tie and this proper old battered cowboy hat. He was some kind of crazy good lawyer, the kind that can keep bikers out of prison and city inspectors from shutting down empty, drug-infested, morally bankrupt bars. He’d come down and sit at the end of the bar and drink neat whisky. “Wrists,” he’d say to me, “Wrists, you ever find yourself in any trouble and I’ll make it go away. Poof.” And he spread his fingers out like a magician. Poof.’

  He coughed and looked around the room, doing his best not to look at Audrey.

  ‘So mostly it was Sid and his friends, and Sid did his best to be involved in the running of the place. Sid really loved reggae music. He hired Bruce News, who owned more old roots-reggae forty-fives than any other DJ in town, to bring them in and play them in the bar.’

  The man in the front raised both of his hands, fingers spread for victory Vs. Wrists coughed again.

  ‘Hi, Bruce,’ said Wrists.

  ‘Hi, Wrists,’ said the man in the front.

  ‘Am I getting this more or less right? It’s been a long time.’

  ‘More or less,’ said Bruce News. Wrists coughed again.

  ‘Anyway, Sid loved reggae music, so he hired Bruce News, but he scheduled him on Tuesday nights because he was scared that if too many people came, Bruce would feel compelled to play different records to make people happy. “I don’t want any kind of hippie dance party, Bruce,” he’d say. So Bruce News played old reggae records to an empty bar on Tuesday nights. Which was why we had the skinhead problem.

  ‘As you know, skinheads really love reggae music. Especially the real old crusty roots records that Bruce News played. Sid’s bar was empty except for some strung-out junkies and punk rockers who went there to score drugs from bikers. So skinheads loved it because they had it to themselves.

  ‘The Alka Skelter had everything that skinheads like except fighting. Fighting with junkies is a what-do-you-call-it, a non-starter. I think they thought at first that the bikers who sold Sid drugs would be good for fighting but these bikers didn’t want any of it. They were on strict orders from the Skinny Cowboy. “No fighting anybody who doesn’t owe you money, he told them. So they were stuck fighting with each other.

  ‘You got about one good hour with them. They’d show up early, nine o’clock, right when Bruce started playing records. They drank a lot of beer, which was good for the bar. God knows junkies don’t drink a lot of beer. They’d take turns walking up to Bruce and requesting songs. They were very polite to Bruce because he had all the records they liked and they were worried that if they antagonized him he’d start playing the kind of hippie dance music reggae that other people liked and the bar would get popular and they’d have to go someplace else on Tuesdays.

  ‘About an hour in, though, they’d had enough beer and they needed to fight, and not having other options, that meant fighting with each other. One of them would sock the other in the face and they’d get a good brawl up. I’d get in the middle and then they’d run their mouths off to get a rise out of me, because as good as fighting with each other was, they all wanted a run at me and just needed the excuse. I was just barely smart enough to recognize this and not give them any. I’d just get in between, hold them apart, and tell the bartender to cut them off. They’d cuss me out with all kinds of skinhead bullshit to bait me into a proper fight, which I did not take. Eventually they’d leave.’

  ‘Well, you took the bait once,’ said Bruce.

  Wrists sighed. ‘Well, I took the bait once. I threw Curly Edwards down the stairs. It was a long staircase. I don’t remember w
hat Curly Edwards said except that it made me mad enough to throw him down the stairs. They said, “Next week we will come back and we will kill you.”

  ‘The next week I came to work on Tuesday. None of the skinheads came. I made it through the whole shift, waiting. I stood at the bar staring at the door. Bruce News played really great records and the whole place was empty all night.

  ‘I shut the door at the end of the night. Nowadays there are a lot of condos and apartments around that block. There’s the casino now. Back then they’d pretty much emptied out the neighbourhood to make room for the Stampede expansion, which hadn’t happened yet. There was an empty lot across the street and boarded-up doors on either side of Sid’s bar. I came out of the bar and there were six skinheads waiting for me. It was the middle of winter. They were all in their bomber jackets and those tight jeans they wear and a couple of them had those flat English-bloke kind of caps on. What’s that pattern called?’

  ‘Pattern?’ asked Bruce.

  ‘The pattern on that fabric they make those hats out of. It’s not really a checkerboard, it’s kind of …’

  ‘Houndstooth,’ said the woman with the notepad.

  ‘Houndstooth.’ Wrists snapped his fingers. ‘Anyway, I remember thinking, these guys really don’t dress for the weather.

  ‘They beat the shit out of me. Beat me unconscious. I remember thinking before I blacked out, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill beating, these guys aim to kill me. Apparently they dragged me back into the alley. It was minus thirty outside and they left me unconscious at 3:00 a.m. in this alley to die in the cold.