Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Passengers snicker, whisper: Captain Kirk, ha ha.

  Captain Kirk goes crazy. “You think I don’t hear you? God I wish that damn show had never been on.” We regret our snickering and turn to the windows for solace. At 33,000 feet the high plains are a thing of beauty, water-worked with scars and depressions, oxbows and crazy twists. We swim over them and I see a flimsy matchbox town built in an ancient riverbed; what if the big river returns, brown and swollen, hungry as the next virus?

  We fly straight through an electrical storm. From the back I watch a glowing unearthly wheel roll down the aisle toward me, a ghost’s bowling ball, a whirling of lit knives. I’m looking for a parachute, I’m looking for God.

  “Ball lightning,” says the calm North Carolina woman, “it happens to me all the time.” She feels she may attract this particular phenomenon while in the air, just as my face attracts sticks on the ice.

  Years ago on Long Island I took Billy Smith’s goalie stick to my chin: Eighteen stitches and a piece of wire that won’t go away. There wasn’t enough skin to close it. I have several sizable screws in my ankle. I now wait to trigger the more delicate airport alarms.

  Our plane stops at the mountain airport. The snowploughs are out roving the runway. Everyone recalls what happened before with a plane and snowploughs at this exact crappy airstrip. A red light flashes on our wing and reflects in a glass an older man holds at his chest, precisely where his heart would be, as if I am hallucinating his pulse. The plane jerks to the right and his red heartbeat is gone. We are a line of portholes flung back into black air, over Doukhobor colonies, our small plane lurching between sawtooth peaks. I reflect on the plane being made of the same material as beer cans and I reflect on the rows of rock teeth below and beside our alloy skin. There is too much time to think on planes, on buses, lost in the ozone. The river loves its channel but seeks another. For a while. I’m reminded of Marilyn Monroe slumming in Jasper. My polite father.

  Waitress X is leaving in August for journalism school down east. I both dread and want this. I don’t know what I want. To touch her blouse. “They’re still there,” she says. Now I know what you do, says Waitress X as we hug. First you grab my ass then you touch me here. When she tells me this I realize we’ve hit an expiry date of sorts; I’ve become predictable. I have to stop. It’s over. But what if she calls me on Tuesday? Say I’m sorry? I don’t know that I can. But I know it’s over. Waitress X can’t pay her rent, is moving back in with her mother to save for school, yet she’s always trying to buy me things. I in turn offer her an airplane ticket and can’t believe I’m doing it. My cells vibrate after I see her, I forgive all. What are we going to do, I kept saying to her at first.

  “What are we going to do?” she asks one day.

  “How come when I finally stop asking that, you start?” I say.

  She had a slow night but made a hundred in tips. Her girlfriend Judy said to her, I saw your new boyfriend with his wife. Meaning me. Her friend doesn’t approve, doesn’t like me and I don’t blame her. Her friend Judy says to her, “So it’s just sex then.” JUST sex? I wonder. Waitress X asks, Can’t she smell my perfume? Good question. Isn’t it written on my face? I wonder. Can’t everyone tell?

  Waitress X pilots an old fashioned five dollar bicycle, skirted long legs lifting, a basket of fat blackberries and speckled eggs as a gift for breakfast, my favourite meal. She smiles, we don’t really know each other. Her father drank and died in a plane. When young she found a note from her mother to her father, pinned to their pillow. She was not meant to see it. She ran away to the ravine briefly because of what she read, part of which was a sexual slight related to her father’s drinking. Will this happen to me? A note on the pillow or a fax singing through the lines? There was a cave she hid in before returning home the next night. Her mother made her see a psychiatrist; now she sees me. We’re necking. I want to run off with her to a cave in Mexico to solve things, to have a happy ending. Her black bra is visible under her loose-knit sweater. Laughing, she points this out, “See?” I see. I see that this won’t last, that she’ll tire of the problems, of sneaking around in the afternoon, and I could tire of her body I suppose, though it does not seem likely at this particular moment. It’s wilder because we can rarely see each other, can never just go to a movie, go on a nice date, eat supper at home, laze on the couch. It’s “just sex.” She picks up every lunch tab, pays for everything, says she pays for all her boyfriends, they’re always bums. She finds this somehow amusing about herself. On my birthday she brings more gifts: pepper pâté, purple grapes, barbecue chicken, Mumms. I push it; I gamble. I call her my plaything, my sex object, knowing these words are forbidden, and she just laughs, says, “You’re funny.” She has her own wit. Waitress X gives the pack of dogs a good talking to. The dogs snicker at first, then realizing their mistake, try to look more serious. The waitress’ hair streams into a city and lanterns of a metropolis swim under her bare feet. Down the hill we make out pink trembling neon of Babel, of Babylon: Girls Girls Girls, say the signs, Cold Suds, Karaoke, Ask About Our Famous Deathburger. I have no name for the colour of her eyes. There’s a sign on the Team Entrance: WINNING STARTS HERE! We lose. Coach shoves the talking heads from our locker room. Get your fat sorry asses . . . get . . . and stay away from the damn coffee machine . . . bunch of freeloaders ... wouldn’t piss on us if we were on fire .... Put that in your column, ya backstabbing dead-beats!

  I have too many women and still I’m lonesome. I know, I know; I complain no matter what. Coincidence one, two, and three: Their periods arrive at the same time. Both had a sister die when they were younger. One sister drowned off a pier and one burnt in a straw Halloween costume. A candle in a jack-o-lantern; the sister ran flaming into the evening. Both avoid talking to their surviving sister.

  Yet Another Weird Coincidence: My Intended gets a hot new job in film, in an office right beside Waitress X’s apartment building. I mean thirty feet between a metal desk and an iron bed. What exactly are the odds of this happening in a city of 700,000? I can no longer drop by during the day. Of course Waitress X finds this hilarious. What are we going to do? We’re going to do nothing.

  I didn’t ask but am told of the latest opiate of the peoples: Universal, Nautilus, speedwalking, gravity boots, fifty sit ups a day for a new order. Listen: I have spent the family retainer, the advances, the signing bonus, the salaries, the money from local carpet commercials, from Mr. Plywood ads. I bought the world a drink. I have spent money I don’t have, borrowed from family, from women I slept with who hate me now, from dipso players who wanted a drinking buddy. I ran up my VISA, hit the limit five times and they keep raising it like a poker game. Fifty sit ups is not going to do it.

  Once more our plane moves off the map and once more I’m planted in the tourist econo seats, flaps altering their stance as our celestial metal flophouse crosses Mountain Standard Time, crosses the standard dangerous mountains and doomed bears snoring in their sparkling caves. This trip there is no ball lightning, no calm woman from North Carolina. The team plays cards and wears garish ties to denote a road trip. The great plains are flooding: the brown river returns to cover its ancient bed and wipe out the matchbox town, dead cattle and broken oaks and renegade coffins spinning in its place. Under the makeup, under the No Smoking sign, the stewardess sings her weary pantomime and Captain Kirk tells us again what we can and cannot get away with in his narrow hurtling kingdom.

  In Peoria, in the I, the International League, the brawl went on for half an hour. At the end the captain and McSorley’s crazy brother met at centre ice and McSorley knocked him out with one punch. He’d done it before to the same guy. McSorley’s brother is looney-tunes. They call Junior-B “Jungle B” but this gets way worse. Salt Lake. Kalamazoo. Muskegon. I put on 10,000 miles one year with Adirondack, AHL, kept losing my per diem money playing poker on the bus. Harold Snepsts took me for a few bucks. Jack of Diamonds is a hard card to play. It’s a long drive up to Nova Scotia, to Freddy Beach or Cape
Fear. Another D-man’s young wife had his first kid while he was fuming on the bus, cursing Demers, Jimmy D., cursing his agent. He’d been in The Hockey News, a high draft out of a U.S. college, good bucks and high hopes but the coach wanted veterans on D. Down to the farm, kid. He waited and then couldn’t wait any longer to crack the lineup on the big club. The team bought out his contract and he left with a bundle. He’d played well, thought he was one of their high-octane D-men; he scored two goals in Maple Leaf Gardens in exhibition, but the coach wanted old men like me on defence, always did. Down to the farm, get thee to a nunnery. Politics, man, I’m so sick of the politics, he said, and went home to Penticton to drive a dump truck for his old man’s company, no regrets. He wanted to be home for the next kid’s birth. Some guys wait five years in the minors; Detroit never calls but they’re visionary sharks at poker.

  On my arm there is a tiny strip, perhaps a quarter inch, between my shoulder pad and my elbow pad. The puck edge hits me right in the unprotected area; there’s an ugly bruise and my arm feels like the nerves are affected. Their team has a real goalsuck, cherry picking up at centre. I’ve got my eye on him, though he doesn’t know it. I leave room. The long pass comes and as he’s looking back for the puck I step up, BOOM, send him flying. He’ll keep his head up now. I’m thrilled by the hit, want to talk about it after the game. Half the team didn’t even notice. We all see completely different games.

  The ref is trying to get the face-off done.

  “C’mon guys, sticks down. You, back up. I said sticks down. RELAX!! O.K., you guys out. Come on, get in here, you’re wasting time.”

  “Ah eat shit.”

  The ref ignores this.

  This reminds me of the time Trottier said in a loud nasal voice, Fuck you Andy, to the referee Andy Van Hellemond, and it was beamed out on national TV.

  Every time Trottier or the ref is on the tube, my Intended does a good Trottier imitation: “Feck you Andy.”

  I never got the Lady Byng but I got K-Mart Player of the Game in Omaha. Right this minute guys I know are playing for the Oilers, for the Habs, in the Big Apple, and I end up in Omaha or Mobile with yet another bunch of players I don’t know and a team no one’s heard of. What happened? It’s a riddle.

  There is a forward; I hit him hard with a crosscheck. The goalie chops his leg with a goal stick, an axe whacking a tree. We’re “physical,” we’re milking cows, right, like coach wanted? They score at that exact moment. We’re down 6-0.

  The coach went white that year, made ads for pizza.

  Kid, he said to me, you can’t make gold out of straw, you can’t make gold out of straw. He benched me. I felt real soap opera remorse. The coach told the press, Stupid penalties killed us; we’ve got to play smarter hockey. He didn’t bring up milking. I rolled snake eyes. In a mindless fury I tried to get back to some otherworld midnight.

  The Czech player was bald. On the ice, under the lights, his bare scalp looked green. It gave off steam. Vodka in his water bottle: I sipped some. What is this? He laughed. He was drunk, past caring about the team.

  “I am, how you say? A few beans short of a burrito.” Same old same old.

  Poplars, planets. Women and their walking, unlacing, snaps and pretty buttons, leaving partners, that pleasant moment when you drive and both agree it is time to stop, a quaint cabin near Glacier Park, in each other’s arms for the night. The fruitful river in the eye.

  After I was cut the press was fed. The coach stated I was a discipline problem. Sure. I missed the bus, missed the flight, missed the fucking boat. The press ate it up. It’s all politics, all politics. I was cut and I passed into the kingdom of the invisible, of the inevitable.

  When it goes well nothing is better. When your game is jinxed it plays with your mind. By the moment you realize that you loathe many of the people involved, or that you’re starting to loathe what you’ve become, it may be too late to turn around, to head back. Kids dream of some other league; this is not the one we dream of.

  CHAPTER 16

  White-skinned, Never Mind

  “You have to be very very careful in Bangkok. You can lose a lot. I know. I know.”

  The Chinese woman at the next table in Hunan Village is speaking of buying precious stones. Did she get taken? Or was it her husband? Her face, her words, the way her hair is held. These remind me of Neon’s story. I can only repeat what Neon has told me. Neon split up with somebody. Seeking distance, he hired on an Asian tour drumming for an Elvis impersonator and some dog country combo.

  “Big career move,” he mumbles. The band’s first job is a Bangkok hotel, built as an R&R destination for soldiers in Vietnam, those clear-eyed sons of the Pilgrims. Now Saudis jet there for a dirty weekend, wanting to get happy. Neon is taller than the Thais, Neon can’t hide. After the first set drumming for Elvis he tries to find a washroom.

  “It’s hot and I’m higher than a satellite,” Neon says to me, “on brandy and Tiger beer and Thai sticks. The whole band, they’re blitzed, can’t read the charts. Heroin in Bangkok is like a blue light special. Bumper crops of poppies. Five dollars for a cigarette pack of Thai sticks.” Neon walks to a white wall of tiles to take a leak, and puddles form at his feet, not draining. Crowds of midget Thai guys and attendants bunch up, staring at this whale of a white man sweating under a Calgary Stampede cowboy hat.

  “They’re jabbering in Thai or whatever language. What the hell’s their problem,” Neon wonders. Neon notices a stained glass window and peers through at women sitting in rows like a classroom, numbers on them. Dark hair pinned back, small breasts. Taxi dancers, bar girls; one you like, ask for her number. Rural daughters on an assembly line from the northern hills, the highlands, the misty mountain kingdoms, the golden triangle of Burma, Laos, Cambodia, sold to Krung Thep, city of angels, the planet’s main meat market. Country matters, jokes Hamlet to his ex, country matters, a fair thought to lie between a maiden’s legs. O God, your only jigmaker! This is not a washroom: he’s got the wrong wall, the wrong room. Farang, Neon says to the gang of men watching him, Mai pen lai. I believe this means something like whiteskinned, never mind. Farang, mai pen lai.

  Scenes in The Deer Hunter were filmed right there, Bobby DeNiro in the same bar. The Mississippi Queen is maybe two blocks away. Everything is incredibly cheap. Mekong whisky costs less than Tiger beer. Neon wanders the city’s ecru canals and crowned statues, his old Russian 35MM camera drinking in impatient tourist evil. He buys a few treats, mails me a postcard of a gold temple, of the chaos of Chao Phraya.

  Neon’s taxi takes hours to creep the fiery streets, to inch toward shops a few blocks away. It’s forty degrees. He ends up shopping from his seat, as half of Asia hovers at the windows. Teak and ivory and fish sauce. Drops of engine oil from the paralyzed traffic settle and crawl like water on Neon’s face; oil hangs in the air like a shower curtain. Ten million people’s lungs add and subtract.

  Neon sees a young woman in a navy blue skirt (is she a stewardess?) hit hard by a motorcycle, its pilot a surprised insect in a bubble helmet. He tries to flee but a stern man clotheslines him, takes him off. The motorcycle revs and reels sideways with no rider. The woman in blue flies up in an arc, her dark eyes open, seeing the city. She locks eyes with Neon. Then the woman lands, WHUMP! The woman lies still. The woman lies still, and then the woman rises, a knee bleeding, smashed fingernails, her lithe hands checking herself for damage. Her lipstick is extremely red. Men sit on the rider’s head. A conscientious pedestrian kicks him in the groin, where the motorcycle had been. Neon’s taxi moves another foot; the meter—there is no meter.

  “After one show,” Neon says, “me and the guitarist snort a little local smack. We’re chippying, we’re not serious. A bargain at ten bucks a cap, never stepped on, amazingly pure. The Elvis impersonator shoots half a cap in the bathtub, his favourite place to get stoned. Don’t ask me why the tub, I have no idea. The Asian heroin must be close to 100%, much purer than Elvis is used to in Canada. He’s used to maybe five, ten percent.
He should’ve waited but he boots up the next half.”

  “I hear gargling noises from misfit Elvis. What, is he using mouthwash? Then the noise gets weirder and I look in, see that stupid pompadour underwater, staring up; he’s all blue. His face is blue, his toes are blue, his dick is blue.” Neon pulls him out. His lungs have shut down: Elvis is paler than a mime.

  Neon says, “I listen to his heart. One beat, then nothing, then bumbumbum). A bunch fast.”

  Neon does mouth to mouth kissing naked Elvis, the antiElvis, trying to breathe for him, bring him back. “I’d never done this before.” Then the walking and walking in circles. “The guitarist is flipping out, he can’t take it. Remember Cher and the Average White Band that night in Hollywood doing this same trick? A Scottish band: imagine telling the mother in the north. Your lad’s dead. In America.”

  “Elvis come back! Elvis is dead,” moans the guitarist.

  “Shut the fuck up.” (Shut up, he explained. Who was that, Ring Lardner? Genius.) More circles, stumbling around the room. “Wake up. Jesus H. Fucking Christ. Please try to walk. Please try to walk. Fuck you. Wake up!”

  Bathwater drips over Elvis’ jewelled Vegas bell bottoms. They’re walking him through tiny rooms of somtum and sticky rice, Gun Club’s first album on Neon’s black market tapedeck, Jeffrey Lee Pierce howling, singing: “I was all dressed up . . . like an Elvis from Hell!” It’s a good tune, Neon tells me, and of course, very apropos.

  “Call an ambulance!” screams the guitarist.

  Neon rips out the phone. “No doctor, no ambulance, no police. They’ll string us up.” He’s sweating and shaking. A life sentence in Asia means life, no parole. Just think: a decade or two back, U.S. soldiers on R&R were probably acting out this same jaundiced ritual. Neon says, “It’s like the Funny Car Finals and my tires are on fire.”

  “Elvis come back!”