Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Downtown the young policeman says into his hand: “Everybody’s Code Four. Ambulances can be released.” There are times I want to be released. Instead the electrical goes on my Volvo; the tow truck arrives in beauty, the driver in big boots but a face like a fine precious fish. He remembers me from the Screaming Eagles, from the Rebels, the Mudcats: all my old teams. A memory he has. As a child I burst into tears watching my father’s car being towed away. My father laughed and said he wanted to cry too.

  The Intended and I go for a long walk to Happy Hour downtown, 2-for-i Granville Island Lager. I hit my two beer euphoria, then keep going, not wanting to wreck the mood but with the knowledge I will.

  I sold my Elvis 78 and my Satanic Majesty’s Request with 3-D cover and my autographed picture of Lefty Frizzell. I need the bucks but also I’m sick of the past, of my history of crawling black lawns, sprinklers going ssshh.

  From the past my Ex-Wife collects old mantel clocks, blue-grass 78s. The Intended collects cameras and CDS. Waitress X has about $10,000 worth of baseball cards from when she was a kid. Any number of rookie cards.

  When travelling the Ex-Wife insisted on stopping at any graveyard or ruined church; she ran to them like a kid runs to a roller coaster, bent forward a little, her arms folded but she was excited. Kathy would forget about me, trace each gravestone with her hands, look for Civil War deaths and influenza epidemics, to trade in ghosts, in wonder and in grief. My Ex-Wife still loves graveyards, while my Intended loves just driving fast, driving the scented night listening to the Blasters or Alejandro Escovedo, talking to old coots in small town taverns, plugging a bad jukebox. And Waitress X? Waitress X loves men. She told me this. Flesh is not a career. I have found this out in my profession. Though technically there is no tomorrow.

  My Intended wears glasses. I have one bad eye. And the city eye doctor asks me, “Is this better? Or is this better?” Pick a lens, pay for new sight.

  Box cameras and baseball cards are myopic graveyards of a sort, dead lenses to peer through, another camera eye of tunnel vision, another pair of glasses. To be haunted may be an O.K. fate.

  Neon phones to return my messages, but he won’t say where he’s hiding out. In the background I can hear a lot of traffic, engine retarder brakes. I imagine grey highway ramps, and Neon a recluse in a motor court at the edge of town.

  Neon says, I’m moving my career to Toronto.

  Are you planning to accompany your “career” to Toronto? Or can it move all on its lonesome?

  There’s really very little left for me here.

  I thought you moved in with my wife?

  Are you preaching to me? You’re one to talk about how to treat women. And it’s ex. As in Ex-Wife. A little slip, Drinkwater, a little Freudian slip? By the way, everyone knows all about your little waitress on the side.

  You know, I’m beginning to really despise phones.

  Actually, Neon says, all this negative business may be good for me. Stretch my limits. I’ve been thinking a lot.

  Where on earth is Shirt Is Blue? I’m thinking if Shirt Is Blue was around he’d talk sense to Neon. Why are you going, my son? he’d ask. Why are you leaving us? Oh (clearing his throat grandly) let me hazard a guess. I bet it’s the usual reasons. To be insulted by a better class of people? To levitate on Queen Street? To sneer at manicured Rosedale?

  Actually, says Neon, cutting short my trackless jackass reverie, I really want to visit Harold Ballard’s grave. I think I could do just a totally priceless installation there. Do a model of Maple Leaf Gardens in plaster, or no, in frozen ice cream. Pal Hal the diabetic would like that. And just let it dissolve in the rain, just slowly let it fall to ruin . . . Maybe time lapse video? I see it at night, weird blue and white lighting. Or I could hire some of Ballard’s cronies to take Polaroids. Pay ‘em next to nothing of course. Like Ballard. And the rain, just let the rain take it down slow. The way Ballard ran it into the ground.

  Or you could threaten to kill a rat. That’s an event, a concept. That’ll get some reaction, public outcry.

  Been done to death, Drinkwater. Sorry. Get with it, eh.

  When I travel with the Intended she hopes for a spectral dark motel with cable, dark beer, or sepia Big Rock, Jalapeño Thunder Crunch chips, perhaps a lap pool blue as her eyes, snowy jasmine peaks, a tilted smoky city nearby. I hope for the same. Soon the snow will expire.

  My Intended is somehow both fiery and shy. She is stubborn, alchemical. Her birth control pills looked like a telephone dial: You have reached a number no longer in service. She’s stopped using the pill. I can’t imagine us with kids. Would these children be hairy as us? As stubborn? Old iron trains crash past the frieze of coal sheds and switches. Where we used to place childhood pennies on the infinite track.

  CHAPTER 51

  Battle Hymn of the Apartment

  / called for my lovers, but they deceived me:

  my priests and mine elders gave up

  the ghost in the city,

  while they sought their meat

  to relieve their souls.

  —The Lamentations of Jeremiah, 1:19

  The telephone rings harmlessly. Elizabeth calls: a friend from Junior High. Now she is trying to paint in the fold and fault mountains, painting tarns and hoodoos, painting murk moraines and finger lakes. Elizabeth is having a rough time with things in the tourist-mad mountain village. It’s only a short drive, she insists on the phone. Just over an hour, really. A short drive. Can’t I come up? She sounds eager and depressed. She is another with bad luck.

  “I don’t want you to go see her,” warns my Intended.

  “You can’t just cut off the past. I like seeing old friends.”

  Elizabeth has always been my favourite person from my old school. I owe her affection. Exacdy how much? This is what concerns my Intended.

  “My old boyfriends don’t call me up. How come your tarts are always calling out of the blue?”

  My tarts. That pleases me, though I don’t tell her. Of course I think of Waitress X who doesn’t always call.

  “I keep in touch with people,” I say. “You don’t.”

  “You’re just going to sleep with her. I know you are.”

  “Look, I promise I won’t sleep with her. I promise!”

  “You’re a liar.” My Intended calls me the standard names. Her voice changes pitch a little, reflecting a nervousness and thrill with the terminology.

  Angry, I drive my gleaming car straight into sunny mountains and lime-colored glacial cirques, the bowl-shaped depressions, driving through Gog and Magog. I’m the Great Satan. My old girlfriend is having a rough time, feeling rejected and ancient, and she has asked to see me, someone from the past, but not the recent past. I know the feeling, the gradated distinctions.

  Highway designers talk of “distance decay,” towns and cities growing closer, faster roads, faster drivers. Years ago there was that bonfire speaking by the banks of a fast river but we were both there with someone else leaning on our arms. This was sufficient to keep us apart. I stared, surprised to see her again, Elizabeth’s sharp European face transfixed in the light of the fire, her laugh. We were in the woods. I knew her and didn’t know her. The S-curves of the river streaked behind us and the closest poplars seemed spotlighted, made visible as the fire lifted; farther trees became hard lines in smoky shadow. She stood with a nice guy who was selling shoes while taking a degree at the university. Social work, sociology. Something social. I stared, eyes in my head, hearing the river. My Ex-Wife Kathy gripped my arm, smiled, sensing a threat. Kathy wanted us all to be happy. Mission impossible. I knew I was with the wrong person. What do you do when you’re sure you’re with the wrong person? Elizabeth and I glanced at each other and said nothing. I wanted the immediate world to pull itself like oxygen into the fire, to leave us alone, but the world did not pull itself into the fire and I did not ask her phone number, did not tell her anything. A world of error and mosquitoes. I pretended to be at a party by the fast river. We were at a spo
t on a shrinking childhood map, breathing smoke off green wood, breathing smoke and drinking. Distance did not decay. Distance took on new life.

  From the perfect tennis court in the mountain village travels the sound of those black guns that launch neon tennis balls right at your head every few seconds. The hollow gun sounds and I think of the word recoil. Scree rattles down the resonant walls of the hanging valley. We are inside the walls of Elizabeth’s tiny room in the mountains, where she must change her clothes before our walk in the trees. Elizabeth removes her clothes, this body in nature, this person I waltzed with in junior high, our lungs moving as a clock in a vice. Ice tinkles in the courtside lounge, in the mountain condos. Not all of her is tanned. She looks at me for a reaction. The player at the net tries to adjust his grip. Walking the mountain trees: leaves display one colour on one side, a different colour on the other.

  I really should go, I say. It’s late. I’ve promised.

  I’m told our igneous continent is thrust westward and senior rocks lie on top of younger ones, a stone sandwich. Dolomite and Brachiopod shells. Rocks with old stories come up from the bottom of the sea that used to be; rocks stand on their head, trying to fool you.

  In the evening I return from those dogtooth mountains, speeding east to the speeches of my sepia city, kicking myself and smelling the clutch burning up. The city is brown and dreamlike.

  Did you sleep with her? the Intended asks. She’s sure I did: she is furious just in case. I didn’t. No.

  I promised I wouldn’t, but I should have. She had no one at all. Elizabeth’s bad news boyfriend ran off to Africa with someone much younger. They split once, reconciled, and then he dumped her again when the class of younger women enrolled at the art school: a new semester and a fast soft-shoe exit. She’s a little depressed. Now he’s going to Africa, going to climb Kilimanjaro with the new art-tart. More adiaphorous mountains. Now I actually feel guilty for not being unfaithful. I should have slept with her. The tanned woman in the mountains changed her clothes in front of me. I was the only one Elizabeth trusted and then I wouldn’t sleep with her in the tiny room. I promised the Intended I wouldn’t. That seems simple enough. Later I played it out over and over, where I did, moved fabric away, took her on the single dorm-style bed. I should have done that—the wrong thing was the right thing. I thought of the speeding river passing the bonfire, the set couples. I’ll be eighty and I’ll still regret not sleeping with her. I’ll remember. We went to the same innocent elementary school, we waltzed to “Hey Jude” at Sacred Heart Junior High, for seven minutes her ear a pink shell by my mouth, until a nun with a ruler pulled us apart. It was like waking up, as if we had been sleeping together on our feet. Elizabeth and I caught the same stupid diseases; we didn’t climb haunted mountains on the dark continent. Would it be a sin to place myself in her dorm-style bed? To obey? To disobey? That is not what I mean. I can’t explain it: It sounds condescending but she was troubled, she needed help. She called me in the city, asked me to get in my car.

  “Who do you think you are, Ann fucking Landers? How do you think I feel about this?”

  The white door has slammed so often it’s become a bore. Like so many other times, truly wanting to be a nice guy, I offend all parties: I lose either way. That role. Will the new gods of Prozac solve this? I punish the air, I punish my car. Then I think. Then I think wanly, would I be Joe Understanding if my Intended suddenly needed to sleep with her old beau? To see with two eyes; what is that like? I have one bad eye. On the slow ones the nuns at the dance prowled with a wooden ruler to make us see the distance we must keep, to keep our bodies apart.

  Clutch: mechanical device for coupling two working parts. a) Fixed member, b) Movable and splined member.

  Elizabeth’s bad-news boyfriend left and they reconciled. Waitress X’s boyfriend Will cheated on the waitress how many times? Yet she returned to him. Two working parts, movable and splined. We all return even if it kills us. Women returned to me. Now I’ve been on both sides. Both sides now. I know almost as much as Joni Mitchell, almost as much as Waitress X.

  In our city the Newfoundland man (who I thought had spurned her) phoned Waitress X: “I’m in town briefly. Lunch?” (I called for my lovers but they deceived me.) She didn’t know what to say. Frederico the male model phoned her back: “Lunch?” Will the boyfriend apologized again: “Let’s do something, honey. You know I love only you.” Are they still together? She needs more time. She was trying to tell me something. I should have seen this. I should have given up the ghost. I was adding to it, I was another mouth on her, another jangling telephone, another pair of feet chasing her in the postmodern French airport. No, she told her boyfriend, I have to see my little old lady today.

  When?

  At two.

  It was me she was seeing at two but there is some truth here in all these extinct lies, she actually does volunteer work visiting the elderly. It’s tapered off a little lately. As has the amount of sleep she gets per night. Waitress X runs on nervous energy. Perhaps some stimulants.

  I couldn’t see it then, but now I can imagine Waitress X at home with four suitors ringing, thinking to herself, This is crazy, this has got to stop.

  I know because I’ve said the exact lines, wringing my hands in someone else’s basement like a bad actress.

  A funny thing was Waitress X’s boyfriend was jealous of the wrong man. One night Will confronts her as she parks outside her apartment. It’s that Eye-talian, I know. You slut. They argue. Did he go through your purse? Did he? You’re crazy, she says, you’re really crazy.

  Driving off in huff, Will the wonky boyfriend runs over her left foot, then stops down the street, to yell again, his swearing echoing off the low apartment blocks, yet he phones later: Mongolian food? (He returned; we all return.)

  William! I thought we broke up? she says. You ran over my left foot, she says. (Years ago Elizabeth massaged my feet in my parents’ basement.)

  Well Honey, I was real mad, he says. Is your left foot all right?

  Later the boyfriend hits her. I wonder if there is a pattern, supply and demand, some piece of theatre they’ve worked out between them. He gambles thousands and loses bigtime on an NFL game. Loses her money. The rookie running back from Nigeria could not be stopped. His team beat the spread. He came from across the earth. The earth’s many hooves roll and she tries to hide in a closet the size of a phone booth. Will punches holes in the wall of her apartment, cuts his hands to ratshit. Howling Wolf sings, How many more times, treat me the way you wanna do. Stars flame above Calgary and oil men cruise new Buicks through clouds of mosquitoes on 13th Ave, on the 13th, looking for their dream chicken, their mumbling dream hustler. Will climbs out the apartment’s big windows, clambers through dewy grass, and sniffs autumn sneaking in from the mezzotint mountains where my old girlfriend Elizabeth painted tongues of ice, glacial debris, the rift of the bergschrund, etc. Early, says Will, holding his wrecked and wretched hand, fall is early this year. He wobbles right over to my car window. His teeth are chattering and his thigh is bleeding where she stabbed him. “Hey sport, I just keep giving until it hurts. How do I look? I look O.K.?” He moves off toward the bright lights of Electric Avenue. “I feel O.K.,” he says.

  Every autumn Shirt Is Blue plays the same joke on eager-beaver city hunters: just inside the trees he sets up a fake deer from bales of hay, an old hide and a pert deer head with antlers. Hunters veer off the road and leap out blasting at the ersatz deer; one Rambo hammered twenty-five rounds into the paralyzed creature, skin and bark flying, the blue gun smoking. Why won’t the deer go down?! Every year Shirt Is Blue spies with binoculars and kills himself laughing, that big HAR HAR HAR laugh, BLAM BLAM BLAM! HAR HAR HAR! Oh Jesus, look at them. Crocodile tears travelling around his eyes. But now he’s disappeared, a spirit man lost in the ozone, made to pay for his split-level jokes, his deceptions, his entertainments. I treated him badly. I didn’t appreciate him until it was too late, I didn’t tell him anything.

  Can t
he truth set you free? Can you plunge into faithfulness as from an unsteady pier into an emerald lake? Then it follows I can drown in it. It follows that I sympathize with the foolish city hunters. I’ve been over-eager, I’ve aimed at the wrong targets when I thought no was watching. I never arrived but I’ve left for pastel Africa several times, for Kilimanjaro. It’s inevitable. All the ex-boyfriends are ageing and failing in some key categories; the girlfriends as well. Each of us has a specialty. Each ends up at the country crossroads, pays for the ticket to enter the hall under the hill. Climb up the hill and you can see the Rocky Mountains, gas flares, the Northern Lights. Music travels the country and a one-eyed man guards the entrance jealously, takes what you owe, decides who dances.

  Inside the crossroads hall our dark heads lean, wilt into waltzes, into belief, but this is not the same as trust. “No lie!” a woman says, laughing, “not a word of a lie.” When I used to flatter Shirt Is Blue he’d holler gratefully, God love you for a liar!

  Now at a crossroads dance we pay attention to a traditional Cajun tune: the sad-eyed elder with a squeezebox sings, “Oh, when she was there, well what could have been more beautiful? But when she was gone, she had three or four boyfriends.”

  The sad-eyed singer waltzes with his hoodoo accordion, fingers searching the buttons. The lunged instrument opens and closes, forcing oxygen into Zydeco melody. On one wall is a mural of snowy mountains, a streamlined train, a moose waiting on the tracks. Does the animal fear for its soul? I’d like to take up painting when I get older, wiser. We dance, we breathe with each other, and we hold on tight, but not one of the men and women assembled truly trusts the other farther than one can spit.