No one answers the phones. Moving vans drift up from the south.
“I repeat, this team is not for sale!” Sold.
“I stand behind my coach. He’s a pro. He’s been there. He’s as good as gold.” Fired.
“We will not make desperate trades. We’ll be patient. We’ll build through the draft.” They trade me and a first round draft choice. Don’t need a weatherman. As they tell coaches, don’t buy green bananas.
On the road I always buy a local paper, scan the headlines:
500 Missing After Storm Hits Trawlers.
A Wonderful Trip to Facial Beauty—But Only
Those with Imagination Can Take It.
About one person in ten will be appealed by this notice. Your former facial skin ... you now see your brand new skin ... you want to travel; to take dancing lessons . . . The type long used by Hollywood stars and that removes. . . your life forever.
I think of my former facial skin, my brand new skin, my carved-up chin.
The wire service kindly describes the death of a former mental patient by lethal injection. His last meal was pizza, jelly doughnuts and ice cream. He robbed and murdered a transit driver. He said Jesus was taking him home. It did not mention if Jesus had taken the bus driver home, it did not mention the bus driver’s family. It was early Sunday morning in Carson City, Nevada. I was in the desert reading the news. Light turned and the landscape burned pink. I left town from an ancient bus depot done in snakeskin deco.
As my mother would say, Home again, home again, jiggityjig!
My mother was a war bride, a nurse from Ireland. In London she washed corpses with Dettol; ablution. She was glad to get out of Ireland. She survived the Blitz with my father who was in the Royal Navy, the Luftwaffe bombing London and Portsmouth; after the war they emigrated against my grandfather’s wishes to Canada. Sometimes my Intended can watch TV for hours, waiting like a child bride, a war bride. Her dark room, TV like headlights on her transfixed face. Like highbeams, you have to stare at the source. Are you having an affair? the blue woman on television asks. There is a small sign on every café table: HAVING AN AFFAIR? It’s an ad for their banquet room. My Intended points out the scandal rag at the Piggly Wiggly: 7 Signs If Your Mate Is Having An Affair. I feel guilty—it was chance I even met the waitress—I was filling in for someone else, someone she would have disliked, someone who would see nothing in her. I saw everything eventually. It was chance I was in the same city. Her café. The pale ceilings of post-sex. One woman turning her face, three chestnut horses running back into the barn on fire. The delayed stars instruct. Chance is everything. Ripeness is all.
I drive to the lake in my mother’s car. Blow out the evil carbon. It’s probably good for her car to go 100 M.P.H., gravel racking its underside. An old tractor turns the earth while white birds pivot, gulls gathering as if to mark a whale or school of fishes. Pesticides. Shirt Is Blue is off in the desert shooting arrows at weather balloons. I drive to games.
How I loathe the Ohio Turnpike; lost among the big rigs, I’m dwarfed by trucks all around my little car, a dinghy among ocean liners, kilometers clicking, behemoths on a patina of black ice, scary storm lifting off the lake.
Uranus spins on its side; I spin my ‘59 Volvo on the icy highway from Banff, looking over my shoulder to see where the hell my car is going as we spin and spin down the narrow highway. Something miraculous keeps me up on the road and out of the big ditches, though I’m facing the wrong way after dizzying circles, engine stalled, all the idiot lights lit. I see the wimp traffic I passed earlier is catching up. I start it up and drive to Frostbite Falls contritely with the rest of the pack.
CHAPTER 12
Kingdom Fucking Come
DOLLY SHOT: Flying down Crowchild or Sarcee over the dead buffalo, ghosts under my speed-rated radials, I have a vision of killing myself or others with a car; beasts in a bullet with wheels and seatbelts. GET OUT OF THE WAY. Driving to the rink I get psyched up, want to kill, or else think Am I going to get the absolute crap beaten out of me tonight? Think positive. My face. A pickup cuts me off. I must fix my horn. I sharpen my black Kohos, one long, one shorter. The Swede, recently discharged from an alcohol treatment program, carves and shaves and nicks and blowtorches and spray paints his stick.
SPLIT SCREEN: The skinny superstar sprays his gloves and butt-ends with an aerosol can.
I put Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax on my stick. It’s actually for surf boards but keeps snow off the blade. Fans file in with the same expression on: sick of getting jerked around, waiting for kingdom fucking come, of pilfering the past and future perfect. These crowds get down on a team fast. The goalie skates from net to boards, touches the boards, leans a bit, and back to net. His ritual. He hates the fans here, hums “Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie.” They hate him off and on, demand a trade and demand he stay.
I slap his pads. He says, You got a shiner, bump on the nose. I say, I’m hip. One tires of giving to the middlemen, you get to love the sirens, the catastrophes. At some point last decade my Intended lost track of the modern dances. She says they boil down to sperm chasing egg. My Intended says hockey is a colder version of lions and Christians. My Intended makes references to bread and circuses. I like bread and I like circuses. What’s the deal? The trade deadline approaches. Neon keeps asking about money. It’s not clear yet just how much money my agent has lost or diverted for his own purposes. Why me? Nature abhors a bank account.
In a space age culture, we turn to westerns for answers, ride off into suspect sunsets. Dick and Jane graduate from a claustral college, wander Europe, Montenegro, Tangiers, eat couscous, are robbed, raped, dumped in a ditch where they know no Arabic or Spanish. Karl Malden is nowhere in sight. They hang around airports selling flowers, but what of Zeke? I recall him in my grade school readers, with Dick and Jane in an autumnal light, raking leaves, smoking a pipe on a lawn somewhere, and we loved him. Did he work for the grandparents? Where is Zeke now? No one remembers Zeke from the Dick and Jane readers. Was he made to pay a price for his peace, his smoking pipe, his lack of dialogue, his proletarian cap? Did he exist?
Waitress X’s boyfriend the gambler wins thirty-two hundred dollars betting on NBA games. He wins twice. She was against his gambling but now she wants to get in on it. “Do you know how many shifts, how many tables, how many drunks it takes me to get $3200?” No taxes either.
This is me at my absolute lowest. I phone the familiar number.
“Can you get off work early?”
“No, sorry, probably a bit of overtime.”
Immediately Waitress X and I run upstairs. The sky is full of micro-dots. Below it’s a swamp. Minor writhing and clyster pipes. These are a few of my favourite things. I’ve never been this shithead conniving before, this much a brute worm. Emotion gives me a choice and emotion doesn’t give me a choice. Sex with Waitress X is always driven, a mad pipeline, urgent, over.
“I feel selfish,” I say to her after. Coin taste in my mouth.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says. “I wouldn’t sleep with you if I thought so.” Don’t be stupid. “Don’t stare at the ceiling like that,” she says. “It gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
I work on my tennis with the Intended. At a private school she had a teacher who had played Wimbledon in the 1930s. She turns away, mad because I hold the racket wrong and still beat her. Shows me her back. I get drunk and feel tenderness toward old friends and old flames, toward life. I look them up and find I loathe them and want to kill myself. In for a penny in for a pound, whatever the hell that means.
Being away from the waitress I fall in love with her. I missed you, I say. I missed you, she says. That new moment. Both of us happy, excited, edging closer to something, avoiding proverbs. I refuse to believe her. I love her in my spare time. I can’t afford to. What a phrase. She’s in the skimpiest panties, pink as plover eggs, eating garbanzo beans from a tin can and manages to look elegant. Someone has cut my telephone line. A City truck in the alley below has what appears t
o be a headless raccoon mounted on the cab. Where is your head now? Noon and iron manholes reflect blue disks of sky. They look nice. Mountains mutate to the west, changing the view daily, the huge dome of sky flooded with seasonal light.
Another team will take you, says my Intended. I’m sure of it. I think-someone has cut the telephone fine and no one calls.
When expansion comes they’ll be burning up the lines, my Intended assures me. You always need a stay-at-home defenceman. Ripeness is all.
CHAPTER 13
Our Lady of Peace
At the glacial lake I pace a byway of dark rocks, grass between their black wet surfaces. Hillsides of flowers like melted wax, the sky the colour of the lake the colour of the sky. Neon and Shirt Is Blue stand silently watching birds and muskrats. A barrel has rusted on my raft and the platform lists to starboard. We push each other off the raft. Cool air off the water at night on my skin, washing my shoulders and groin. My father’s sailboat thumping, a gleam down the bank; a big beaver slaps the water. It is muscular and bigger than the golden Lab at the farm, about the same colour. In my binoculars lily pads leap into view, then insects, ducks, white buffalo berries. Birds go crazy near dusk, partaking to excess, then huge loops, eyeing what is rolling under them. A search for sanctuary. This process, this search, sounds familiar to me.
How I loved the Lutheran women in the Midwest. Scandinavian blondes; earnest sorority sisters hidden behind brick walls and cool shade trees. You see them move in lit windows, spotlights on mansions, drawers of panties waiting for patriot raids. What is it like to be adored? To cry over Rose Bowl results in pink Izods and pigtails and ribbons? A few moved for me, allowed me under their monogrammed sweaters, took me to Lutheran potlucks, lutefisk; laid with a foreigner by their cornfield gates and rivers. A Trojan Horse plasmid into a DNA strand, a brief reign. She said “Ufda.” She made love quietly while her parents washed the dishes upstairs and I borrowed a bicycle to pedal home. She thought of marriage; became the ex-wife.
The next condo’s philosophy: why close a door when you can slam it? The woman there wants to listen to music that’s correct, to have the right haircut, a car that will attract attention yet not have the tape deck ripped off. The pain of being hip. A Viva Vauxhall, I tell her, that’s the ticket. New Order plays from her open door, her gelled spikes nod in comprehension. I used to like New Order until she began booming them through the wall. A Viva Vauxhall runs like a piece of garbage, burns oil until the world around it is blue, but it fits all the new requirements, the unwritten rules. Also, I happen to have one at the Salvage King Ya! yard at the lake.
What’s on television? queries Neon.
Planet Of The Poison Beavers, replies Shirt Is Blue, kidding Neon.
Neon pauses, interested, wary. That a native show?
Neon played hockey with me when we were young, St. Joseph’s, Knights of Columbus. Now he has decided he is a performance artist. He drops by and buys crap from my junkyard. Has a show coming up in New York, he says. Yeah, probably Poughkeepsie, New York, says Shirt Is Blue. Neon lately is playing Nazi opera records so loudly that an occasional banshee aria drifts through the poplars between our places. He does time exposures with fast film, eleven women in animal outfits and horns. Executives with dog faces, tails.
Neon and Shirt Is Blue are bottling a batch of homemade Bavarian pilsner.
Neon says, Did you see that new liquor store?
It’s very chi-chi. I saw the good Scotch that Drinkwater had. Guess how much.
How much?
Sixty bucks a bottle.
Neon says, You mean we drank sixty bucks worth of his Scotch?
No. We drank ninety dollars of his Scotch. We killed a bottle and a half.
Neon says, Oh, we shouldn’t have done that. We were bad. We were very bad.
Shirt Is Blue says, Yes, we were bad. Did you get to Vancouver after all?
Oh yeah. Hit all the galleries. Horrible stuff. You’ll be glad to know I’ve started painting again.
Good. You should.
I’m afraid the art world needs me. Neon laughs.
Is Neon an artist? Waitress X asks me. He has the walk, she says. He’s into garbage, I tell her, it sends him messages, energy, smellovision.
Messages?
Neon’s doing a study of plaid in the late 70s and early 80s. He’s listening to the Butthole Surfers and reading Dante in paperback. A garage sale swordfish lunges over my fieldstone fireplace in rainbow colours. Its one eye turned toward us looks crazed. Reminds me of our forward—one eye to judge the world. He had a Stanley Cup ring from a stint with the New York Islanders.
A giant dinosaur of some vague model stands on two legs, guarding my drive, guarding the portals of Salvage King Ya! A gift from Neon’s coat hanger and plaster of Paris period. It is quite striking, rearing up razor teeth in the naked trees, a wrinkled neck, crumbling legs astride the ruts of my road. I drive under its legs every day, my car antenna whacking its thigh. These creatures used to hang out in this very area; eat, skulk, die a mystery, like me, their 15 minutes done.
Waitress X and I never fight. We’re always laughing at something. We never have to discuss bills.
“We’d fight if we lived together,” I say. I try to assume the worst, to be realistic. But maybe we wouldn’t fight. Maybe we’re meant for each other, meant to kill ourselves laughing.
Eventually frost breaks any wall, any road leads to the sea; what is in your rearview mirror shrinks, is gone in a curve, gone behind a mountain massif and ravens, earth curved and cut as in a fisheye lens. Maybe she’s the one.
Ice in Calgary piles up on the south bank of the Bow River; there is less sun there. The north side of each island is in ice and fast channels rush between. The flood plain is protected by the Ghost Dam, and tiny houses cling to the bank, old workers’ houses, workers from vanished stockyards and flour mills, railroads and slaughterhouses. Rotting trees breathe up brief ghosts. Young couples move back in to buy cheap houses, to paint them eggshell white and teal. We were approved for a mortgage the very day I was traded. Luckily we hadn’t put down our deposit. My poor wife cried, she wanted that little house under the cottonwoods. We moved again and again. Take your moves, multiply by ten or twenty. But something about it is exciting, addicting, to move, to just go. Buying a house guarantees you’ll get traded. A rule. As mentioned, don’t buy green bananas, don’t even send out dry cleaning. You’ll be called upstairs to the offices, you’ll be gone.
CHAPTER 14
Omaha: Gordie Howe Land
I ate apple pandowdy in an Omaha truckstop, same as Gordie Howe. He was 17 when he played here. I’m no longer 17. I’ve stood at the gates, on holy ground. Maybe I stood too long. Now police pass in iron cages, zooming after another illiterate. Blue and red lights leap from square to square on their rooftop flashers. Our hair is outlined in electric blue. 1-80 on the edge of Nebraska; a new town is a coal glowing at the rim of the universe. Where are we? Tongues of flame on a skull, Wurlitzer playing the country within, pigs roasting on Midwest spits, Strategic Air Command missile silos, riot guns. I’m behind an Omaha mall-goer in stretch pants: stretch her pants any more and you’ll hear the report. Marlon Brando was born here. Malcolm X was born in Omaha. What a place. The coach is driving a pointy puce Cadillac at Mach 7 into a town full of fists and twisters and steakhouses. “The forecast is for mostly sunny, uh, I guess until the sun goes down.” I love college radio stations. I was about to be interviewed on the drive home show. I was semiknown around there. Before me was a famous C&w band playing that night at the auditorium.
“There seems to be a blues influence in your country songs. Do you listen to much blues?” the host queried.
“Nigger music?” the singer says, obviously enjoying the Dj’s discomfort.
Where is the waitress? Have I lost your long body so soon? The team bus pulls away.
An apartment in Omaha: my ear, the white wall, yet another midnight shower next door. The unknown woman is punctual. I hear
her drop the soap, imagine her several inches from me, picking it up, lather on her, water cleansing her skin; here a thin wall and an ear, there a naked woman’s pores, her hand, the curving small of her bare back and the slightly more expansive flesh below, firm but giving. A blind voyeur, my left ear to the cold plaster wall until my neck is completely stiff. What must she cleanse herself of? Why exactly at midnight? Why am I so fascinated by an unknown life? The water running over the first minute of the new day. I must listen to her.
The ex-goon coach actually gives a stirring speech without mentioning beating them in the alley. Instead he says, “If I’m a gentleman and you’re a gentleman, then who will milk the cow?” Such candor and metaphor. I see Pulitzers in his future.
“I don’t think I get it,” says Milk Truck.
“Someone has to do the dirty work and it’s not going to be him. That leaves us,” I explain.
“Oh. Why doesn’t he say that?” Good question, I concede.
“We didn’t bring you here to dance!” shouts the coach. “We want pitbulls, not poodles, we want physical play!”
We’re all gung ho but I notice when fastening the strap on my helmet, head tilted and hand up to the side of my head, that it’s exactly like a woman putting on an earring. I try to do it a different way but somehow just don’t feel quite as brutal.
CHAPTER 15
Captain Kirk
Flaps move on the plane and we move off the map. I’m stuck in the tourist econo seats back beside the barking vowels of the engines and I can’t hear half of what is told me. I possess dull nausea and cocktail napkins for earplugs. I’m breathing beside a raven beauty who is journeying home to North Carolina. We flirt, tamper mindlessly with the movement of blood from heart to hair.
“Captain Kirk has turned out the seatbelt lights . . . .”
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