When he caught Chaz and Mason and other underage boys drinking beers in the back alley, he drove to the liquor store in his ’59 Galaxy and came back with a gallon jug each of Ruby Red, Slinger’s Grape and Bounty—“The Taste of Exhilarating Adventure.”
“If you mugs can siphon this and keep on breathing, than you deserve to be boozers,” he said. Mason took this cryptic challenge to heart. He outdrank them all and was the last one found, in the bushes by the yacht club, just as the sun was coming up.
“A soft spot for this one,” said Tenner, as he lifted him up. Somehow, through all the red wine and vomit, Mason heard him, and he loved him like a hero.
After school, Tenner taught Mason how to play poker with the big boys. Chaz sat there grinning as Mason lost his allowance, then his textbooks and gym clothes. He learned how to laugh when he lost, how to walk home without his shirt, a fire in his guts.
When Mason was seventeen, Tenner threw a poker party. All Chaz’s gang from high school was there, as was Tenner’s crew—roughnecks from the old days. Mason showed up drunk and high on mushrooms. Chaz was busy with some girl in the living room. Tenner said Mason could play, and he took a seat between Sam the Chinaman and Straight Ron, smoke circling up through yellow light, chips clicking together like coins.
He lost, lost again, and kept on losing. The mushrooms amplified everything—the sting of the loss, the smirk. He wanted more than anything to impress Tenner and instead he was almost out of money.
When it came to his deal, Mason gathered up the cards. Tenner was holding court—telling a trademark story. Mason, meanwhile, had found the aces, slipping one in every sixth card as he shuffled. And now he was dealing them, snapping them down on the felt. As he dealt the second round, Tenner reached his arm across the table. He laid his hand on the deck.
“Let me deal it out,” he said, interrupting his own story.
It was supposed to be down, but Tenner turned the next one up.
“That’s a deuce for me.” Flip. “A cowboy for Sammy.” Flip. “Crabs for Lou …
He lifted the next card slowly then slammed it down in front of Mason.
“BOOM!”
The ace was face up. Tenner reached over and grabbed Mason’s down card.
“BOOM!” he said, turning another ace.
Sam the Chinaman pushed back his seat. Mason’s mushroom high was now a sweating, heartbeating hell. The faces around him were morphing from good ol’ boys to demons who’d finally got a hold of him. He was only seventeen, but that’s how it felt: final. And done for.
Tenner stood up and put his large hand on Sam’s chest. With his other hand he pointed his finger like a pistol at Mason. “And boom,” he said.
The air went out of the room.
“If you’re going to cheat, you should at least learn how to do it.”
Mason tried to talk, made no sense. Then he was up, pushing through the party, out the door, escaping into the night air.
He never cheated again. It wasn’t the humiliation, the fear of being gutted or a sudden injection of ethics that did it. It was Tenner’s disappointment.
Tenner deserved a kick-ass, blaze-of-glory kind of death. Instead, the doctors kept cutting off pieces of his liver until finally he died. Chaz was too broken up to talk, so Mason delivered the eulogy, and he told that story. In a church full of goons, poker players, fishermen, Vietnam vets, hunters and good ol’ boys, he confessed that Tenner’s sharp eye had turned his son’s stupid friend into an honest man.
When Chaz left town after the wake he ended up here, with the Toronto Berlins. He’d heard plenty about them over the years, but didn’t know how much to believe. There’d been a split in the family before he was born. It turned out that the Toronto contingent didn’t have Tenner’s dilettante spirit. They were gangsters through and through.
Still, Chaz figured it would have made his dad happy—the reunification of the Berlins. So he set to work. And now he was pretty much running things.
Mason tried to carry Tenner’s legacy in a different way. The plum incident was a good example. Just last week, Chaz had invited him to a house party an actor friend was throwing. There was plenty of booze and pretty people, and on a counter in the kitchen an arrangement of very small plums. Mason began to hold court in the kitchen, Tenner-style, eventually turning his attention to the bowl of fruit. “I’ll bet I could put eight of those in my mouth,” he announced.
The first six went in okay, the seventh a bit trickier. While attempting to push the eighth and final plum past his gums, plum number one slipped into his windpipe. And there he was: eyes suddenly bulging, a horrible, panicked wheeze coming from his throat. He grabbed at people, hands flailing, gesturing towards his fruit-filled face, but they just laughed. He tore at his mouth, jaw jammed tight, then began to pound on his cheeks to crush the plums, to make some room. It seemed to work and finally he was pulling them out, desperately—like babies from a fire. But plum number one would not dislodge. The actors laughed as he ran out of air.
This, he thought, is how you go? Death by fucking plum! That gave him enough of a jab to send him lunging across the kitchen, gut first into the edge of the counter. The plum shot out, hitting the window above the sink with a squishy thud—a champagne cork flashing through Mason’s mind.
Just then, Chaz had entered the room. “I almost died,” gasped Mason.
“What else is new,” said Chaz.
The others were cheering and laughing. He felt like a complete idiot, and Chaz was right: it was not a new sensation.
And now neither was this one: the feeling of losing at cards. The smoke rising, chips skimming across the table, Chaz’s eyes flashing, his taunts, clubs and spades, a heartbeat, music, silence—the bet and raise then call. It was easy to get under his skin, into his head—open it up, let stupid things through: mushrooms and Tenner, funerals and plums, then Warren and birds and birds and birds …
And money.
By 4 a.m. he’d lost most of it. Chaz was gone and Mason was left with that soul-destroying combination of panic and emptiness that often came with a big-money loss. Then something ran right over it. The rush of playing was dead, the drugs would only do so much, and now here he was, point-blank thinking of Warren.
Did he need the letter to do it?
Or did he do it because of the letter?
Either way, you sort of killed him.
Fuck that! It was him. He played you from the start.
Just go to the cops. Tell them about the five grand.
Five fucking grand! He could have paid a helluva lot more than that. It’s not like he was saving up for anything….
That’s a terrible thought! I need a drink.
You should sleep.
How the hell am I going to sleep?
You should write.
I need another line.
17
When the sun came up Mason was in his underwear standing in front of the desk, shaking, drugs dripping down his throat. He heard a voice: “It’s all yours. It’s all yours. It’s all yours, sweetie-pie….” Outside the window at the apartment’s far end, he saw a man on the roof with a cat on a leash. And he was talking to it: “It’s all yours. It’s all yours …” The sun was rising behind them. Mason wanted to talk to someone. He thought maybe the roof-cat man had been sent for this purpose, so he rapped on the window. The cat looked up but the man didn’t. Mason banged the window harder. Still nothing, and the sky was filling with rose-coloured light. He left his apartment, pushed open the fire escape door to the roof, and stepped out into the morning. The door clicked behind him. Locked.
The roof man and the leash cat were nowhere to be seen. Standing on the dirty tarmac he looked out on the city, burning time before he’d have to face facts: he was fucked up, locked out and stuck on a roof in nothing but his underwear.
At least they were boxers. Unfortunately they were red, with monkeys on them. Monkeys. He felt like he was falling over. He steadied himself, then walked carefully to
the edge of the roof and sat down. Everything felt undone—not just unravelling, but like he’d left things hanging, forgotten them all over the world: a kettle boiling in Honduras, a van double-parked in Chicago, his mother’s birthday, a soldier hanging off a bridge by his fingers, hotdogs burning on the grill … and more profound, buried, unnameable things. But trying to locate these abstractions seemed silly. There was enough to figure out right here, in the present, nearly naked on a third-storey roof.
He looked around. The roof itself didn’t offer much—not even a loose brick he could use to break the window. There was the fire escape, of course, down three floors to the back alley. But then what? People were on their way to work now. What would he do? Stand there in his monkey underwear, begging for a quarter to call a locksmith?
Atop the Mental Health, Alcohol and Drug Centre rose a large moving billboard. Mason knew it well, as he could also see it from inside his apartment. Oh, the inside—those were the days. On the billboard was an apparently dissolute, frowning woman. Above her, black letters read: Grey skies are going to clear up … The sign revolved, and as it did, the woman turned from sad to joyous. So put on a happy face! Then, beneath it: To book an assessment, call 1 800 TOO-MHAD or visit our central location.
He thought of monkeys again, and the pamphlet with the drunken, stoned chimpanzee. He looked down at his boxers, then at the giant manic woman on top of the building across the street. And then Mason saw the path ahead of him: down off the roof, through the alley, across the street and into the MHAD building.
It was a good plan for a lot of reasons. Shimmying down the fire escape, he commended himself. Time out in the open would be limited—just the few seconds it took to cross the street. And once on the other side he was practically there—he just had to make it through the gates, across the yard and in through the sliding doors. If you couldn’t be strung out and mostly naked in the centre for madness and drugs, where could you? They probably wouldn’t blink an eye.
People out on Spadina, though, they sure were blinking, and it was taking him longer than he’d foreseen to cross—it was a very wide street, after all: parked cars, two lanes heading north, a turning lane, two sets of streetcar tracks, two lanes heading south, then another row of parked cars. That’s nine lanes, for God’s sake! Plus, he’d stepped on some glass in the alley, so now he found himself hopping as he tried to cross the street. It was like Frogger (if, instead of a frog, the video game had featured a full-grown man in red monkey underwear). Tires screeched. A bell clanged. Mason looked up to see a streetcar full of people staring down at him. It seemed everyone—not only on the stalled streetcar, but driving, and on the sidewalks, too—was talking into a cellphone. He thought maybe they were talking about him, even reporting him to someone, then decided he was just paranoid. Being too high with too little clothing on will do that to you.
There was a woman on the grass in front of the MHAD building. She was humming, a Ms. Pac-Man towel tied around her neck like a cape. As he passed she frowned, then smiled, like the lady on the billboard. There was a large ashtray on either side of the entrance, and a man was checking them both, the automatic doors opening and closing as he paced back and forth. Mason prepared himself then timed it right and made it past the ashtray man, through the open doors.
It was a big foyer with a semicircular desk in the middle. There were other people in the background, in and out of doorways, but Mason focused on the large desk, striding straight towards it. Since he called an eight-hundred-dollar bet against three kings, six hours earlier, it was the first thing he’d done with real conviction. His appearance, no doubt, would trick them into thinking he was mentally unbalanced, or a drug addict. They’d be compelled to help him out.
Then he saw the woman behind the semicircular desk and realized he’d misjudged the situation. It wasn’t exactly panic on her face—more like emergency resolve. Like the people on the street, she was muttering into a handset, but hers was a walkie-talkie, and she was looking right at him. So this was the answer: apparently there was nowhere you could be strung out and mostly naked. He’d have to play it cool—take it down a notch.
“Good morning,” said Mason. “I would like to book an assessment.”
There was something humming next to him. It was the woman who’d been sitting in the grass. She was holding the Ms. Pac-Man towel in her arms now. She stood on her toes to speak into his ear.
“She eats ghosts,” said the woman, then tied the beach towel around his shoulders, like a cape.
“Thank you,” said Mason. She stepped aside, still humming, and a man in uniform took hold of his elbow.
18
Chaz was waiting for him in front of the building, dangling his keys like a sadistic jailer. “Nice outfit.”
Mason was in sweatpants, running shoes and a yellow hoodie, the Ms. Pac-Man towel tucked beneath his arm. “They didn’t have a lot of selection,” he said, and took the keys from Chaz.
“Why didn’t you just call me?”
“Things got complicated,” said Mason. “I’m okay, Chaz. Really.”
“All right. You let me know if you’re not.”
Chaz left, and Mason let himself in.
All things considered, it could have gone worse. A doctor had “formed” him, which meant they were allowed to keep him in hospital, against his will, for up to seventy-two hours. Fortunately, though, it hadn’t taken long to persuade them he was neither a threat to himself nor to others. He explained about the sunrise, the cat on the leash, and the difficulty crossing Spadina. They’d given him some clothes, then put him in a room with nothing but his thoughts—not even a doorknob.
It had only been one night but a lot had happened in that empty room. By morning the thought of Warren meant something different. All his thoughts, in fact, had shifted.
After a small breakfast, a nurse named Danny had sat down and talked to him. They would let him leave, he said, as long as he booked an assessment and follow-up. “Usually you have to wait a few weeks, but we can get you in sooner.”
“Great,” said Mason.
They’d written down some information, given him some more pamphlets, then let him use the phone to call Chaz. It all seemed like a lot of trouble just to get back into his own apartment—but now, finally, he was home again.
His new outfit smelled like someone else. He took off the clothes, folded them—along with the Ms. Pac-Man beach towel—and put on some of his own. He walked to the centre of the room and sat down on the floor, trying to cross his legs lotusstyle, closing his eyes. After a few minutes he got up, poured a glass of whisky and drank it down. Then he yelled, for no reason at all. It shocked the hell out of him. In the front window’s reflection he saw the surprise on his own face, and he started to laugh.
Notes on the Novel in Progress
To keep in mind:
Transformation. How does the main character change over time?
Possible insert:
A typical day for our (anti-?) hero.
To research:
Funerals. Antipsychotic meds. Card tricks. Different types of squirrels.
The amount of cocaine you can do before your heart explodes.
Possible title:
Life after Birth
19
Mason was quietly stunned by his inability to run a business even as simple as this one. It had got to the point where he was dragging his fibreglass fedora to the Matt Cohen Parkette barely in time for lunch, then packing it up when he got itchy or hit the sweats—usually between 3 and 4 p.m. He was making barely enough to cover his costs. Fortunately, Fishy didn’t come around much since the fuzz had been there.
Some days he didn’t work at all. He slept and slept. Waited until the weight of his body ached against the mattress so much that he had to stand up. He drank several glasses of water, pulled back the curtains. Let the light shine in. He looked at the day and felt like he might throw up. He got dressed and went for a walk. There was a small park in the middle of Kensing
ton Market that reminded him of Richard Scarry’s Busytown—every kind of folk doing every kind of thing—mohawked punks playing guitar, old Chinese women doing tai chi, a man on a unicycle being chased by small children, a circle of fishmongers smoking from a hookah, painters with their easels and watercolours, young Wiccans with their sticks and stones, people writing in notebooks, readers reading, singers singing, dealers dealing, drummers drumming, drinkers drinking—all together in the same small frame.
There was a statue of Al Waxman there, and Mason sat beside it on a bench, staring at the birds as they pecked in the grass. He found a newspaper box that suited him, and then a diner or restaurant, ordered a coffee, then another, something to eat. He lingered over the most disturbing newspaper articles, reading some of them twice. He finished his meal, left the newspaper and a ten-dollar tip, and walked back towards his apartment.
He stopped at the liquor store, then the Lucky Save to get some poppers—amyl nitrite disguised as an ancient Chinese remedy. Most of the convenience stores in Chinatown had them—little brown vials beside the cash register: impulse purchases. Mason, impulsively, bought a half-dozen. Then he dialled Chaz’s number.
While he waited, Mason tried to think.
He knew how to win. It was all about the Warrior Monk. The Warrior Monk won because he didn’t care. He was careful, carefree and ruthless. His head was always in the zone. Sometimes Mason felt like that before he played—that perfect mix of clarity and confidence and then the cards were like quick love notes passed into your hands. You could fight demons or bullets with hands like those. That was how you won.
But poker is a cruel game, most of it played before the cards are even dealt. The more you care, the more you lose. The more you lose, the more you need to win, the more you care, the more you lose. That is called being on tilt and it is a vicious cycle—the opposite of Zen. Mason had been on tilt for a while now.
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