Jericho

by George Fetherling

  Sometimes we’d go to his place. He had what I would call a very seventies one-bedroom suite. The little kitchen was painted with industrial enamel, bright yellow. He had a few pieces of second-hand furniture and a broken Vancouver Sun street box that he kept his baked goods in. There were books and dirt everywhere, artifacts, objects, a rat living under the old-fashioned bathtub, a picture of Jimi Hendrix on the wall in the bedroom. The Hendrix picture bothered me because I didn’t think Bishop was all that very much older than me, but then it was hard to tell. His body didn’t give that much of a clue; whatever age it was, it looked worn out, that’s all. Later he often did or said things to make me think the difference in our ages was even bigger than I was supposed to think it was—that’s how it seemed, anyway. “You’re Generation Z,” he would say. “The last one.” Another time I was “OG—Omega Generation.” Sometimes he would chant—like a cheerleader at a football game—“Postmod, posthuman, postconsciousness, post everything.” I never knew if he meant himself or me or both of us or everybody.

  He talked a lot about the mythical land called Snaketown that he said was where he was from. “Snaketown was one of those places where everybody is left-handed,” he would say. (I’m relying here on my bathroom notes as well as my memory.) “Snaketown was one of those places where sometimes everybody seemed to be named Smith. Like a Mexican clinic. It was a ten-cents-on-the-dollar kind of place. One of my earliest memories is the night someone was lightly murdered outside the Steamfitters’ Hall. We didn’t see the body, but the cops were still there, collecting evidence, taking down statements—probably exclamations too. I wasn’t much more than a toddler.” He used words like toddler. His face went dark. “I am in possession of certain documents which, if made public, would prove incomprehensible.” Then he cackled, the way he did. “In evolutionary terms, I am an embarrassing afterthought.”

  One day we were on the Granville Mall where a Charlie Manson look-alike was doing a rap that both foretold the coming of the end of the world and protested against the GST. Bishop went up and for no reason hit him in the face, and then we ran away. When we finally stopped, in some lane, he broke out in an incredibly big smile, like a dog with its head stuck out the window of a moving car. I was angry with him, and terrified of his violence, but I have to admit I was excited too. Later, that evening, Bishop said, “I once made the mistake of going up and speaking to someone who looked lost. He turned out to be an evangelist.” More hooting at how clever he was.

  I could go on, but I think I’ll stop now.

  Almost everyone in Vancouver who isn’t lesbian or gay is bi but won’t necessarily admit it. This helps feed the polarization scenario, with gays in the West End close to the best beaches and lesbians on the East Side surrounded by ancient industrial working-class despair. As usual, the women are the losers. However, both sides have budgeted token lip service to the idea that they are part of a great alliance, as though it were all of us against the heteros, undecideds and abstainers. What a façade of lies. Gays hate lesbians because they believe we are not well enough dressed, lesbians hate gays back but we’re too polite to do so openly. This is only one of the reasons other lesbians make me ashamed to be one.

  I cannot disengage from their smugness or belief in their own perfection. Of all the groups in the world today that actually do have sex (I say this to eliminate the Mormons), Vancouver lesbians are the straightest people on earth. Here I do not reference the Lotus Hotel paraphrase of sexiness. Bike-dykes with tattooed biceps and pierced parts attached to other parts that make them look like an old man in a bus terminal with a chain running from his wallet to the belt that holds up his pants—they do nothing for me but make me weary. In any case, I try very hard to keep my professional life separate. I’m referencing the ones who, for all the kick they get in life, might as well be married to men. Off Commercial you see them walking everywhere together like the old-fashioned nuns my mother had such nostalgia for. But they’re spread out in all parts of the city. They wear expensive fleece jackets from Mountain Equipment Co-op and one of them always has some type of British accent. You see them renting videos and walking along the Seawall (never touching though). You can’t turn into the next aisle at Capers, the one in Kits, without running into them personally inspecting each individual eggplant for the right degree of purpleness. They go on holidays together to places where they fit right in, and they are thinking about finally taking that trip up the Inside Passage to look at the whales approvingly (and at the other lesbians looking at the whales). They read the news with earnestness and go to films, also with earnestness. Season tickets to something not too strenuous are undoubtedly possessed by them. They study swatches and colour charts. You can tell by a glance they don’t pound and suck but cuddle insatiably. They grow old together one glass of Merlot, one book club meeting, one magazine subscription at a time. All that Boston marriage stuff, they idealize it as a tradition that they believe has viability. I can’t take it seriously; how could anyone? They despise me and I have given up on wanting to know them. There is simply no one more Protestant than a Vancouver lesbian in her thirties, living in some tasteful condo with her lover and her houseplants, close to the amenities. (They don’t call it the Georgia Straight for nothing.)

  It is wrong therefore to assume that animals prowling for their prey do not discriminate and judge. Animals aren’t men, after all. We, people who have come to my level of understanding, are resigned to outsourcing pleasure. Resigned but invigorated by it too. My idea of a package is a straight girl, bigger than me but not big as in BBW, who may or may not be white but if white is of some other ethnicity, not looking to experiment exactly but able to get that buzz in the femoral arteries when the thought first enters her mind, is put there by me in fact. I was working on Beth but I don’t think she knew it. I would not categorize her as naive, but you wouldn’t classify her as sublunary and carnal either. She was not a flake you’d run into at Banyen Books. She was not a nutter personality in any way whatsoever—I want to emphasize that, because I was doing my best to keep my personal life separate, and if she simply happened to wander into my professional world, then the blame cannot be put upon me.

  People always tell me I’m so sensitive; I could intuit that she had been feeling wounded for a long time beneath her good nature, the kind of even disposition that makes people like that prisoners of the way others always like them. I have studied this in the field; I know. The official Vancouver lesbians wouldn’t like her. She was far too much of a butter tart for the razor crowd with the steel-toed boots and not mid enough for the whale-watchers who’d bled themselves, sitting by the fire, into a kind of premature and perpetual death. Like me, she was outside of the known systems of taxonomy, and to be at my frankest, I was intending to get inside her. This was not an end result that could be achieved at a fast rate of speed.

  When I was a kid I’d stand on the riverbank and try to puzzle out where it was exactly the rum-runners used to tie up. I’d stare across at the Deetroit skyline, so much taller than ours, wondering why I wasn’t looking at Babylon. Deetroit comes from the word detritus, meaning the garbage thrown out the window into the vacant lot or the bit of money that gets lost during the getaway. Even the foremost authorities cannot agree with each other on that. Babylon, now that was something else entirely. Babylon, Ur, all those places, they were a trip. In those days I was heavily into drugs and Mesopotamia. I could practically visualize some of the earliest hustlers, working their magical powers at the corner of Tigris and Euphrates, being cool. Eventually my studies led me elsewhere, all the way to the true birthplace of Civ. I was drawn west, to Judea, Palestine, the West Bank, whatever you want to call it. I’ve always been drawn west. That’s what I’m doing here, how I got into a mess like this. The sun going down in the west puts some kind of force into play and certain people can’t get free of it any more than a piece of scrap metal can get out of the way of a magnet. It’s like the alleyways were paved with gold. Also, nobody was looking fo
r me out here on the Coast.

  My colleague Mo had just started maternity leave and we had no budget to secure a third person even temporarily and so Jane and I were keeping the office open on our own. In practice, this meant we had each taken over some of Mo’s responsibilities in addition to our normal positions. The jobs tended to blend together rather than stay distinct. Jane was doing both financial counselling and classic social work, and I had taken on lay therapy (which is my main interest anyway). For example, Jane returned from seeing a woman who worked at Cult Video, the local rental place on Main. “It was very weird,” she said. “She lives with a large male transsexual. There were all these women walking in and out of the apartment, and the one with the biggest breasts turned out to have once been a man.” Conversely, one day I had to go to St. Paul’s Hospital to talk with a member of the psychiatric staff, and there was a guy in the elevator who definitely was not part of the team. I pushed one of the buttons, he pushed a higher one. Then he said, “There’s a lot of floors here I’ve been on: two, three, six, nine, eleven, twelve …” (There aren’t that many floors.) I told him he should try some of the others. I informed him: “I understand some of them are quite exotic.” But of course he was closed to my ironic rejoinder.

  Still, I wasn’t prepared for Bishop when, once Beth and I had become friends, she first introduced me to him. One constituent factor was his appearance. He had shoulder-length hair, but it was from transplants, and I can imagine how he got the money for that: haggling in the washroom with people in need. He looked like an abuser himself. It was immediately apparent that he was what I call a histrio, an emotionally overcharged person. I don’t know what the situational expectation was when she told me about him—I don’t think I’m a jealous person—but when I met him I quickly realized he was borderline.

  What do we mean by this? The borderline personality is one who, because of echoes of past traumas, expends most of his or her energy merely trying to remain within the boundaries set by functional society. (Of course, some rogue authorities in the field have argued that functional society is tyrannical and that these people are heroes of a kind, but I put no faith in that position, which seems to me faddish old seventies nonsense.) The classic borderline personality is a jejune American or is of that type. Over thirty years or so, these profiles were developed by American clinical figures such as Otto Kernberg, James Masterson, Gunderson (the first name is unable to be recollected by me) and, here in Canada, Daniel Silvers. In Britain and Europe, borderline personalities are called sociopaths. But then, if the nosology differs, so does the reality it names.

  Bishop is also borderline in a lay sense. I mean he is borderline mediocre. Beth, who has much to learn in these matters, thinks he is an intellectual. I think he is someone who has picked up a lot of interesting-sounding babble somewhere (interesting-sounding to him) and continues to replay it out loud, in no particular or logical order, to impress people or anger them or maybe (he no doubt feels) amuse them. Personally, I am neither angry nor amused and certainly not impressed by him. He is the kind of male I might have been interested in when I was about sixteen, and that was when I was in the full throes of heteroism. Some may accuse me of not being neutral in the matter, but Bishop (I detest the way he won’t use his first name) is the one with the conflict of interest. That is how disreputable he is. He is one of the people who has tried to create a fad for his own existence. And Beth, with her abnormally bright eyes, was such a trusting person, you know. Perhaps this is what they saw in each other: a trusting person is simply an inverted paranoiac.

  From the moment I met him I was of the opinion that Bishop was moving towards crime as towards a goal of some sort. At least that was the conclusion I instantly found myself approaching. He appeared to me to be experiencing the sensation that violent crime was some variety of right and that it was the light awaiting him in the darkness; he was progressing towards crime as though is was a destination to be sought. Such a case deserves watching for it is study-worthy, I thought. I could get a book out of him. If not that, then a conference paper. Certainly an article for a juried journal.

  It is important to be able to leave, to check out, like our life was the old Dempster Fireproof Hotel back in Snaketown. Knowledge of the art of disappearance is a kind of insurance. “Always X-ray the dice before the game begins,” as Lonnie used to say. That’s why I live in this dump with the rat squeaking under the bathtub at night. It’s not an apartment, it’s a camp. Fixed fortifications are always susceptible to infiltration and you can grow attached to em, to the investment and the permanence. This can sometimes keep you from abandoning em when they should be abandoned.

  I have these dreams. Hell, I’m a catalogue of bad dreams. Someone in the room. A man, close by. Armed, I’m pretty sure. I wake up with a defensive start. The doctor’s nurse phones to tell me that the tests are in and there’s a problem. I’ve contracted the notice of the cops. She suggests counselling, as is standard in these cases.

  Or this one: My mother is dying but she looks younger than when I knew her, with high colour. I see Lonnie in myself when I assume a position behind his own eyes. Growing up in Snaketown or Babylon with others of a type whose names don’t come to mind, one of whom is now a dealer in those Lost Articles that restaurants always have signs saying they’re not responsible for. We’re all in the Devil’s Rolodex now. Which of us is going to be the first to break the law in an entirely new way? After a certain point it becomes a tactical trophy. Life as a death game, to see how long you last. Easy does it. Overdose. Over does it.

  In my dreams, there is that famous dead local celebrity Boots. He speaks with an RCMP accent. He tells me there’s too much shredded paper mixed with the fuel, it won’t light.We’re at some sort of initiation ceremony. Beth’s there too but at first she refuses to participate, but then she finally comes around. Typical. This is possibly in Snaketown down by the tracks where the old glass factory was. The Mayor’s bald head, I realize later, is part of the crowd. Everything’s unhurried, no tension. Beth’s face all friendly and mellow. First night back at my place. Read-to-death books everywhere. A big red poster of a rat, somewhat deco. Boots calls. He’s cutting throats at the other end of the line, then suddenly he’s there in the room with me, as if he’s travelled through the phone wire. At that point I wake up.

  Or even this one time, it’s truly weird. The wizened old barber where Lonnie used to take me to get my hair cut down in Snaketown—one of Snaketown’s few legitimate businesses, though I think the barber made a little book on the side. “Hey Lonnie,” he says, mistaking me for my grandfather. But it’s no mistake. I am Lonnie. The place still has its battered old tongue-and-groove floor, but the space is now transformed into a kind of Snaketown boutique, selling sin collectibles and dispensing old-fashioned aromas from around the world. The barber’s wife has predeceased him and I realize that my mother has predeceased me as well, that is, if I’m not dead. I see the middle-aged man I knew hiding deep inside the old fellow standing before me. I feel like the last survivor of an age, which, when I wake up, it turns out that’s what I am. And later Lonnie and I go into Mother’s room (I’ve never been there before) to collect her effects. The bed where she died, one of two built-in cots, still unmade. A little metal shelf of her things screwed into the wall. I go through her wallet—my wallet, in fact—checking ID. A small drab cubicle, and outside the window, far down below,a city that’s all pewter grey. It’s that fifties city again, at its peak or close to it, with the old-fashioned newsstand and the busy Dempster Fireproof Hotel. But now everyone is deaf. Applause. The day after dreaming this I realize that the room was in fact a cell.

  Last dream: I am visiting this social-worker type, Theresa, in the lobby of where she works. She is her usual condescending self. I don’t have to wait long for that first elongated nooooo in that corrective tone that always drives me crazy. But she is decent this time all the same. She talks about the past and tells me to wait by the tree in her back garden, where s
he brings me some food. It’s like I am some sort of laboratory animal in a controlled experiment. Without any warning, we are in Montreal for a type of overheated sex show, but Boots is there with his goons and he translates—though as far I know he didn’t know French unless it was maybe Hell’s Angels French. Pimps and heavies.

  Sometimes I invited Beth to come over to the women’s health club where I enjoy a membership, signing her in as my guest. She had to sign in too, which is how I came to know that Beth in her case isn’t a whole name or short for Elizabeth but instead is short for Bethany, a name I don’t believe I’d ever seen before. We would have a good workout, side by side on the stationary bikes, or take an aerobics class together or sit in the sauna and go out for a quick lunch afterwards. I am on the board. On the membership and finance committees as well.

  I enjoyed watching her shower. She was just a bit thicker everywhere than I thought she would be but very firm, like a piece of fruit at the absolute optimal moment. I loved to see the rivulets of soapy water run over her shoulders and then down her back or drip between her breasts and belly. Of course, to get a good long casual look, I needed my back to the wall and the rest of me exposed, which I hated. I’m not really sure but I believe this is the heritage of my separate-school education. Gym class with the nuns. The sisters also told us that we must never go to the washroom at Woodward’s department store, as white slavers lurked there and we could be kidnapped and forced into lives of shame.

  Beth told me how she was getting nowhere selling jewellery and was bored all the time and so had gone to see about going back to her other employment. She had an unwarranted obsession with finding her father, and when she had made her day’s quota of sales, if she did, she would resume her wanderings in the world of lost souls, looking for male derelicts of the right age to whom she could show the photograph she had. This didn’t strike me as a very practical approach. The area is just too big and too populous and her whole methodology too random, too dependent on sheer good luck, which she never seemed to have. I did not want to tell her that I thought she was wasting her time. I wish there had been something positive I could have done. I made an honest attempt at some research, because she was expecting me to. But there were no social service records in the City of Vancouver archives for any male with that name or nobody with even approximately that name who’s remotely the right age. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting to find any. It’s not as though there’s an Alkies’ Who’s Who. I was naturally surprised, then, when one day she came into the office to tell me her good news.