“Har Har. That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.”
She married money, Kathy says some minutes later. I have no idea who she is talking about. I lost the thread listening to the Rheostatics sing about Wendel. I’m dwelling on things.
Married fat, is more like it, says Shirt Is Blue. He plugs “These Boots Are Made For Walking” one too many times and the alcoholic fry-cook, sick of Nancy Sinatra, comes running at us with a spatula.
I went to this place long before it was so trendy, Shirt Is Blue says as we all flee. Kathy and Neon: a surprise. I can never predict who will end up with who. Or is it whom?
On Hank Williams Boulevard I see a woman making a fast lane change and something catches me, the exact same way her wrist bends to grip the top of the steering wheel with one hand, the quick nervous turn of her head, her profile, or perhaps the angle of her neck, her chin; I don’t know what but it’s just like Waitress X doing a shoulder check. Something in the sight gets to me and I’m melancholy the rest of the afternoon missing her. It’s crazy but I let it eat away at me, even take some small pleasure in that.
At the condo complex the bozo neighbours are finally evicted. They exit on Italian scooters, taking their gel and primal screams. The glass in their oven door is broken. A wall kicked in. Female ghosts telephone me from the coast and hang up. Hello? Hello?
Who was that? the Intended asks.
An ex-girlfriend who hates me.
Is anything the matter, the Intended asks.
What could possibly be the matter? That bourne where nothing is the matter. I am talking in my sleep.
What was that name you said? she asks.
Did I say a name? How odd.
I row the sandy bay southwest of the cabin and then cross the lake. Tiny fish jump like smelt, put on a show. A creature in glacial water. I row until it is dark as broccoli, no running lights, no stars, no shore. I walk into the trees behind the cabin, bump into the startling skin of someone’s bare feet hanging at face level and recoil swearing. Worried, I get a good light, moths, the police. I recognize him from the city. Neon may know him. We are a convenient dumping ground. He has no shirt on. I can’t help thinking it’s a message to me or Neon. I’m paranoid. The sky is like blackberry yogurt, like pink stone, unknown birds killing each other. We all recognize the signs. I go in and have a beer and when the RCMP arrive the body with no shirt on has vanished. Was it real or a prank? He got away somehow, climbed down off the cross I guess. The RCMP give me that look. Soon they’ll start ignoring my calls.
Once the waitress and I were at an outdoor table, which was foolish I suppose—anyone can see you, and she saw “little Frederico,” as she called him. She’s mad at him for his snub but gives him a kiss anyway. I disapprove.
Too Hollywood, I say later.
French do it, she says.
Different culture, I say. When we hate each other, I say, don’t give me a polite kiss. I’d rather be spit on. I knew this was not helping our situation.
O.K., O.K., she says, I’ll spit on you instead. She gives me the same look the RCMP give me.
I saw her rarely after that. We both settled for what we knew. That was less hassle. Now I miss her.
Shirt Is Blue and Neon are sitting on a hammerhead pinto’s neck to prove some point to it. Neon flies off the horse and all present laugh. Ha ha ha. Shirt Is Blue asks him, “Why you down there?” Their idea of a rocking good time. Some Charolais cattle looking on seem embarrassed for them.
Rainbow trout slip right through Cowtown past Electric Avenue’s vulgar shrines; I could fish from a downtown high rise, or beyond the weir, past Calf Robe Bridge. In my sleep I can’t find the deer, can’t find my way home.
GMS horse-trade and I awake one summer day an indentured servant of the L.A. Kings, the league’s famous burial grounds festooned with palms. I am going to California. I am a Salvage King and an L.A. King. This is pre-Gretzky, pre-Cambrian. It’s the bigs but it’s not the bigs. They’re always last place. Outsiders can never know what it feels like. Better money though than Seattle. Moving again—drag out the motherfucking Samsonite. Just like Gary “Suitcase” Smith. I just hope my car makes it to Los Angeles.
At another farewell party in Calgary a friend’s witty blonde sister gave me the same free lesson: How hard to be faithful. She has her hair in a braid. She’s teaching natives by the lake. We get along, we talk for hours but still she has no idea how I wish to be on her back like a dedicated co-pilot, ready to alter a life, to throw everything away for a Slavic face, for her eyes, her braided hair, for an invisible unknown body and mind. I’m sure she sees me as ancient, a dinosaur. Light does not age. I read that in a book one time on the team bus rolling to play Hershey. The air in Hershey actually smells of chocolate. The hotel gives you free chocolate with your room. Hershey restaurants give you free chocolate. You get sick of chocolate because it’s failure, it’s the minors. How many lives have I spent inside juke-joints and restaurants, waiting on waitresses? Hustling the help and waiting on waitresses. The bus moved on its fixed route and the book talked of the duality of waves and of seething particles, blue-shifting, repulsion, the creation of particles out of nothing, the eternal golden braid.
CHAPTER 37
In America the Carpet King
Else, if thou refuse to let my people go,
behold, tomorrow will I bring the locusts
into thy coast: And they shall eat every tree
which groweth for you out of the field:
And they shall fill thy houses. . .
— Proverbs, Chapter 10
I am cruising America again on 1-5’s curving ramps and diamond lanes, past my moldy Seattle haunts: The Comet Tavern beside the boxing gym, the Central Tavern in Pioneer Square, Ballard’s Owl Café, the Squid Row Tavern; my Intended and I pass through the iron bridges of aubergine Portland, where I buy old Volvo parts and catch Paul DeLay’s blues band. Paul Delay is a wizard on chromatic harmonica. Travel is a pleasant limbo, dazed with distance and wind whistling the vents, inside a particle accelerator with sun and halogen headlights. It’s a long drive down the whole west coast, considering I won’t make the L.A. team; they just want me at the camp as a body, to knock heads, scare a few of their lazy D-men. With any luck someone will get injured and they’ll have to keep me around.
The Intended and I swim in a blue motel pool below a blue motel sky, a daylight moon held in dreamy arms of dead trees. Elderly women in Carmen Miranda bathing caps drag sun cots noisily, fruit shaking on their leather skulls.
My ear is to the Pacific now; I am happy. I like the black of a brand new road, smart yellow stripes leaping, leading me to good diners in Oregon, to a café over a horseshoe beach, mist and morning sun lighting up over the surf. Sometimes it’s hard to return to say Moose Jaw and the worst winter in twenty years. Down in the States they don’t know we live, nothing north of Disneyland really exists. In a deco motel, my Intended rises while I sleep. While I sleep she gets water and aspirin, decodes the dawn.
We hit hail in San Francisco, follow 1-5 across the spastic L.A. basin’s nightmarish beauty of toxins and ice plant and weeping pear, and onto the San Diego freeway, America grinding to a halt in a greasy nitrous mix, a sulphurous fuming, suddenly older than terracotta, than boxcars. All down 1-5, in every city, America grinds its teeth behind the wheel of a bone-weary Hupmobile, becomes little more than a stalled European, pretending it’s the new world.
Everywhere in California we see that identical red Spanish tile, stiff dagger plants and indolent palms in the Santa Ana wind. Boy Howdy, she says, someone made a bundle on all this Spanish tile. 1-5 gets insane; we have to pull off in a beach town and have a breather, a drink, a BLT. Cars slur past full of Guatemalan and Samoan faces, everyone’s smashing into each other, not bothering to look at the damage, stay in your car, stop and go, watch out for guns. That California is mellow is a myth: it’s nuts, it’s cardiac city. But I like its mountain tribes, its Third World baroque Babel.
A man
is up the palm tree with a chain saw; I didn’t know you had to prune those mothers. The California sun we see is eight minutes old. In Los Angeles the gas station nozzles are like huge space guns, I couldn’t figure out how to use them and felt like an idiot from out of town. I hate being a hick.
Hick or not, I’ve arrived, and I’m soon pissed as a newt in the local VFW, in the fused Vertebrae of Foreign Wars, in the Stircrazed Lounge & BarBQ, in the Swamp Train, whatever it’s called today, where a lone dobro plays sweetly with country & western death, Cajun death, Mississippi death, the mystery train. A bartender called Ohio opens and closes the refrigerator in this favoured, favoured nightspot.
“I’m your biggest fan.”
Who said that? I think I imagined it.
On the jukebox, on the stage, country & western death relocates to the suburbs, opens and closes. America conquers and is conquered in the same spin cycle. After the drive-by shooting Channel 7 asks everyone How does it feel? On the jukebox Bob Dylan asks, How does it feel? A waitress moves languidly in the long aisle to your distant table. In L.A., when a King is dead there is another King. As the newest player, I’m interviewed on the cable channel no one watches. The interviewer brings up thirteen-year-old hookers. Perhaps this is his interest. It seems off-topic. I went to the radio interview, ended up alone at the microphone.
With three days to kill, we cross the border at San Ysidro, cross green streaks of traffic into the Baja Peninsula. A man breathes fire on the street of a small market town, asks me for change. Pesos, sure, de nada. The dollar is killing the peso. REM’s guitarist is at the same campground as us. He sings and plays an acoustic at the campfire on the beach.
Down by the fishing docks dozens of grey sharks hang in grey sky’s rain, rain a grey noise, sharks slick, their skin harsh but also a little like the feel of a cold puck. My Intended’s camera clicks, blood on wood, some tails still hanging on rope after the shark is cut down and taken away. Those strange shark eyes, the size of a camera lens, still seeming to see us and say, Just give me a minute alone with one of you motherfuckers that nailed me. I want to freeze one and take it home over those bloodless lines on the map. Pretend to pull the shark out of my lake in Canada.
Mexican Inflation To Top 100%
The bordellos got shut down while we were in one city and hundreds of hookers started peeling in front of the Government Palace to protest. All these dark-haired women pulling their dresses up and sideways; it was out of Fellini.
Business Council Report Says
Mexico Will Suffer
At the border a billboard on a hill. The Intended provides me with a rough translation: “That which you earn in Mexico spend in Mexico.”
The road climbs to the double fences, the five miles of lights, the holes cut in the wire. The illegals stream into El Norte, waiting all day, back and forth, get busted and start over, kids running like zig-zag ghosts through the cars at the crossing; the guards give up and the river grinds its teeth at night.
The American Customs has glass doors like a supermarket. There are stainless steel tables. No one stops me: I have a green card, a Canadian passport. They would kill for what I take for granted. How many souls are here waiting in this limbo? Millions: No one can supply exact numbers. Gavilondo and a hundred other chaotic neighbourhoods tilt on the plateau; here are our lost jobs, the maquiladoras, the assembly plants, a big toxic fingerprint pressed under the border, a web of river canyons and sewage, a bruise spreading below the skin. Here are the night sensors, the infrared scopes, encrypted radios, the ten thousand agents.
“When I was younger,” my Intended says, “I used to come down here with my dad. That big dump over there. And others. My dad checked people’s eyes and gave them free medicine and eyeglasses and stuff. It was through our church. Like missionary work. There weren’t as many people then. It’s crazy now. Much more dangerous. You wouldn’t believe how many are robbed or beaten or murdered trying to cross over. Women raped. Part of the border now, part of the bargain.”
Established families live permanently at the dump, like seagulls picking through trash mountains. At least seagulls can fly to the sea at nightfall. The latest newcomers, perhaps Guatemalans, set up shacks or crates right down in the riverbed, gambling it won’t rain. It’s been years. Eventually it will rain.
CHAPTER 38
The Anthems
I go to training camp and I agree to go primitive. The Powers That Be like to see us peons duke it out, a feeding frenzy, a big ‘roid rage.
There are two camps: the first camp is for rookies, repaired riffraff, minor league migrants, free agents, black aces, walk-on dark horses, damaged goods, goons with hearts of gold, etc. The second camp is for the big club. They say I’m overweight, which I always am, and put me in the early camp. This means they don’t want me. The sleek shall inherit the earth.
I start one scrap with comedy: “Feel lucky, punk?” My hand gets cut to ratshit on his helmet. You hit your thirties and bopping someone in the dentures doesn’t have the same cachet as when you’re a sparkplug teen scrambling to make a team for the first time. Now I feel sheepish, a carnival geek of sorts. This profession lacks dignity, punching plastic headgear when all I want is a piece of the peace that passeth all understanding. Feel stupid punk? You will.
The young players dress so well now, like GQ models: loafers with no socks, sharp hair, stockbroker trenchcoats, and muscle tone a-go-go. They drive polished 4 × 4’s and Firebirds.
After the game I go for a beer. You guys going?
No thanks they say, got to go work out, pump iron, ride the bike. Maybe later . . . maybe later they’ll start resembling us: scarred and driving pickups or beaters, smashing glasses in some crappy lounge, daring the bouncers to toss us out. I was always on the wrong end of a three-way contract: X amount with Regina Pats (later shipped to Kamloops), XX amount with Flint, Michigan in the “I”, the International League, XXX amount if I cracked the Minnesota lineup. Someone doesn’t like you, sends you down, and you can lose half a million. I had chances at scholarships but school didn’t seem there back then. Who went to school? For what?
One player borrows money off absolutely everyone, including the Zamboni driver and the Down Syndrome kid hanging around the team, then the player leaves town. He knew he was cut.
After the brawl the ref calls the game; we walk to our dressing room yelling what a bunch of fucking pricks they are for starting the fight, while they walk to the visitors’ room (where we keep the heat on high to drain them) yelling what a bunch of fucking pricks we are for starting the fight, all of us sincerely believing we’re the good guys, the wronged party. Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.
How many times have I heard the anthems?
Speed up. Stop. Skate forward, circle back. Hurry up and stop. Go! Seal off their blue line, pinch in, stand up to them at our blue line.
Choppers buzz the beach, flapping the palms. There is blue light in insect wings, my skin actually becoming more humid, soft versus Alberta.
Come on, up the boards, up the boards. No, not that way. I SAID UP THE GODDAMN BOARDS !
PAY THE PRICE! yells the coach and as a joke we imitate him. Any stupid play and we jump up. Pay the Price! Pay the Price! The coach doesn’t get it.
We do a fast road trip and all immediately catch the Hong Kong flu.
I’m in the penalty box and our team scores twice shorthanded; what lesson do we take from this? Also, why do I play better when I’m sick as a dog? The whole team coughing but we win. Don Cherry was pissed off at my suspension in Detroit. This’ll make the peaceniks happy, he says on TV. A good fight never hurt anyone, he says.
Yeah sure, as long as he’s not in it. Gary Green in a hotel lobby doesn’t count. Actually I like Don Cherry; I like that he exists.
I keep breaking my fingers over and over on helmets. My hands are wrecked. I soak them in warm wax after a fight, have to keep punching plastic hoping one hand will connect, maybe break a nose, a cheekbone. I u
se wax, ice-packs, tape, butterfly stitches, Vitamin E, whirlpools, massage, you name it. Outside, spring rain falls under the traffic lights and coloured wires, the crowd wet and smiling after the game, faces like open leaves, and me inside the huge arena with my hands smashed to shit because I had to fight again with bad hands and make them worse and worse. I’ll be sixty-five and my hands will kill me. I know it. I’m not big, maybe 190. I earn my money. I get in my tiny car, hunched and small in a big country, and I put my hands on the wheel feeling meanness and a new kind of crappy. I’m being used but I continue in that knowledge, at times buying into it. I put my hands on the wheel.
The gold and grey sky sits on our heads: a million birds trapped under a streaked golden bowl. A low swift chopper falls from the gyrating palms, falls into La Jolla’s sweet erosion of surf, bounces like a Christmas bauble, flailing and whooshing and cutting the heads off the waves. In sunglasses, we line the shore. They clamber from the bubble dazed and we cheer like a puzzling Pepsi ad.
I feel like Chicken Little; everywhere I go things fall from the sky. I favour drab clothes, shades, the solemn nod of the good bartender. “I thank you,” he says politely.
Bozos in the stand yell for Baumgartner: “DROP THE BAUM! DROP THE BAUM!!” It’s me they want the bomb dropped on, huge hands clapping as if in slow motion.
The handsome player from Atlanta wanted to take us out for dinner. His fiancée, my fiancée. He asked the waiter to give him the tab.
Later I took the waiter aside. “He pays for too many, give it to me.” The waiter gave me the bill.
The handsome player from Atlanta lifted the waiter by his lapels. The waiter’s feet dangling in the air.
“If I say give me the bill, I MEAN GIVE ME THE FUCKING BILL! UNDERSTAND JACK?” A pleasant interlude.
We drive under electric palm trees etched in yellow and green; striking, hallucinatory. A woman’s gauzy skirt holds to her legs, shows her as if there is no material. Perfect coiffures crash into pools, waiting for Prince or Princess Charming, waiting for the oysters to kick in. We pull in Mexican radio.
Salvage King, Ya! Page 17
