Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Alex muttered. “It’s starting to feel like incest.”

  But she closed her eyes and rose to try to meet him halfway.

  It was the year the enterprising homeless constructed ad hoc villages of tidy huts from purloined election signs. The colourful little houses lined the cut at both ends of the Terminal Street Bridge. The design world took notice, with the San Francisco– based architectural magazine Dwell running a photo essay with text by Toronto’s latest public intellectual. “These intelligent spaces represent design that fully integrates the residents’ ideals and values with their needs. Like the yurt and the Quonset hut, the ‘signage-home’ or ‘Sigho’ will no doubt evolve well beyond its origins, co-opted by those with a discerning eye for the frugality and transportality of the design.” He supplied the requisite Walter Benjamin quote from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and ended with some McLuhanesque wordplay.

  Engineered so beautifully they could only have been the work of a down-on-his-luck architect or an idiot savant, the small homes were like snowflakes—no two alike, and yet of a whole. The Vancouver Sun ran a contest to find the designer (first prize: a weekend at Sooke House B&B), which led to bewildered bottle ladies and Dumpster divers being ambushed by retired couples waving notebooks and bombarding them with questions about Walter Gropius and deconstructivism and offering a home-cooked meal in exchange for blueprints.

  A candidate for mayor declared that she would live for a week in a hut made entirely of her own election signs down among “the people.” A newscast ran some unfortunate footage of her crawling out the opening on all fours, tight pigtails pulling her eyes into the coveted pan-Asian look, her breasts visible through her gaping neckline, sagging like sodden pantyhose.

  The anchor and weatherman smiled at each other. Damn fine serve, though, they reminisced as the sportscaster joined them.

  Alex dreamt about a green garbage bag on her front steps. “Happy Birthday, Toots,” Rufus says in the dream. And she is a Toots, all dolled up in short shorts, pointy cone-shaped black bra, hair pincurled, her lips thick with cherry-scented gloss. She’s selling cartons of cigarettes with pictures of missing children on them, big-eyed, black-velvet, paint-by-numbers kids. The bag evidently contains her gift. Rufus grabs her arm as if he can’t wait to show her.

  Inside the garbage bag Corinna D. stretches languorously and yawns. There are no teeth in her cavernous mouth. Her eyes gleam. You do not wanna know, she says. Alex looks from Rufus to Corinna and then jabs her own thumbs right into her eyes. It doesn’t hurt a bit.

  Onstage, a DJ dressed like a tennis player mixed Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” with something from Trooper. It was early, and the crowd appeared sparse, spread around the barn-like space at tables that looked as if they belonged in a bingo hall. Posters of flamenco dancers, bullfighters, and beaches lined the wood-panelled walls. Beside the bar, which featured Super Bock on tap, Portuguese bean soup, and calamari, there was a framed photograph of a young man with his fist raised, inscribed, “Camarada! Trabaja y Lucha por la Revolución!” Rufus handed Alex a foaming pint and steered her towards a small group near the stage. A wiry old man off to the side shadowboxed with what looked in the dim light like a blackened and enormous ham hanging from the ceiling.

  The guys in the band were awfully sweet. They clustered around as Rufus introduced her, telling Alex how awesome it was that she had decided to come. She wondered what Rufus had told them about her—that she had terminal cancer or was agoraphobic? The band was Gideon, Attila, and Suki, who was not a guy, but neither was she a threat. She was bald and so skeletal Alex wondered where she’d left her intravenous drip, and wore a Canada Post uniform, the pant cuffs curling under the heels of her shoes, her yellowed, bulging eyes darting about like a cartoon snail’s.

  They were joined by a kid with a faux-hawk and wearing an oversized hoodie that made his legs look so short he appeared dwarf-like. He slapped Rufus on the shoulder. “Cool, Roof, you brought your mom!”

  Alex was beyond her hot flashes by now and their accompanying hormonal riptides or she would have leapt on him like a pit bull and clamped her jaws onto one of his goofy ears. But she appeared to be the only one who had heard. The others were animatedly debating whether to begin or encore with “Tweety’s Lament” and whether it would be too clichéd for Attila to do a drum solo. Alex air-kissed in the kid’s direction and then ran the tip of her tongue around her lips. The dwarf-boy quickly fled, her past-its-best-before-date sexuality apparently as effective as a bio bomb.

  A candidate for mayor shuffled and bobbed between the now crammed tables, dispensing fist bumps as if they were lollipops. “Dissin’ the safe injection site—thas wack!” he yelped, while his handlers followed sheepishly at a distance. He was wearing a do-rag, Alex noted, absent-mindedly patting at her thinning scalp. That he was third-generation Chinese Canadian and had gone to school at St. George’s on the west side and then Trinity College, U of T, before coming back to Vancouver to start a Pacific Rim polling firm didn’t seem strokes against him in this age of reinvention. A camera crew from MuchMusic was following him around, so now this had become an event. There was some giddy talk between Gideon and Rufus about getting on disBand and scouts from EMI, and finally Shuffering Shuccotash took the stage to a bunch of raucous whoot whoots and whistles.

  A girl with an adorable pixie cut atop an Audrey Hepburn neck eyed Rufus as he jumped onstage at the last minute to retape a cable and adjust Gideon’s mike—his shoulder blades jutting like nascent wings through his thin T-shirt, his small butt tight in faded jeans. Alex felt a wave of vertigo and had to lean up against the wall. Dangling beside her, the large ham, which she had taken to be synthetic, glistened and gave off whiffs of smoke and fat. The odour of something not so long ago alive, now decidedly dead.

  With Gideon on banjo, Attila at the drum kit, and Suki pummelling away at an accordion, they made a noise both discordant and melodic. They were off-kilter but almost great, Alex thought, and judging by the crowd’s response, this wasn’t just her opinion. And Rufus, was he an almost-great roadie? Could you be an almost-great roadie? Dozens surged onto the dance floor, moving in a way that couldn’t really be called dancing but was something nonetheless.

  In the middle of the melee, there was Xmas Singh shaking it, his bulk surprisingly graceful, like the milky blobs undulating inside a lava lamp, his trademark good-natured smile elevated to something almost beatific. Alex sidled over to him. He didn’t look surprised to see her. “Thanks for the B!” He grinned, executing what could be called a pirouette. “I love these guys! They’re my gods!”

  “But it’s just their first gig,” Alex yelled above the din. “Isn’t it?”

  Gideon screamed into his mike: “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!”

  The crowd screamed back: “You did, you did, you did taw a puddy tat!”

  Isn’t it?

  Rufus asked: Too something?

  It was the year a candidate for mayor disappeared from her designer homeless dwelling into thin air. Or so it seemed. The double-decker tour buses with the beluga ads on their sides stopped driving by the election-sign shantytown along the Terminal Street Bridge; schools cancelled field trips. Wasn’t it only the already invisible or criminally suspect who disappeared without a trace? A massive ground search by combined metro police forces and the RCMP came up with zero. Some speculated that the pressure for the mayoralty had become too much and she was recovering on a wind-powered organic vineyard in the Similkameen Valley, pruning vines and smoking weed. Off-grid, so to speak.

  When the garbage bags and their grisly contents finally made the news—front-page news, top-of-the-hour news, breaking Internet news—on the local evening TV newscast the anchor and weatherman couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

  If her students had asked, had they been the least bit curious, Alex could have offered them this fact: In 2009 she saw a machete hack a man’s arm right off. Saw this. Someone flashed h
is white teeth at her and without wiping the blade, strode on. Her own weapons of choice, a spiral notebook and a rollerball pen, useless in her hands.

  “Hey, you live ’round here?”

  Alex was walking up Commercial towards Santa Barbara Market, nerves frail as old lace from the club the night before, as if singed by an electrical fire. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the totem pole tattoos on the bulging calves of a man who was ambling along ahead of her, skateboard tucked under his arm. The double sets of Raven and Bear eyes had followed her whether she moved left or right. When he stopped to greet someone, Alex recognized the face, framed by long, grey hair, of a native elder she’d interviewed years back at that standoff in Clayoquot Sound. He should have looked ancient, he should’ve been dead by now, he’d been so old at the time (though defiant, lying in front of a John Deere Harvester, passively resisting as the RCMP carried him off), but his face was now smooth and burnished like new copper against his steel locks.

  “This your ’hood?” came the voice again. It was Corinna D. But not the Corinna of a month ago. This Corinna, leading two small boys by the hand, was a stout, middle-aged woman, though still regal in bearing. The word matriarch sprang to mind, embroidered in cross-stitching, giving off a comforting vibe. The boys were fighting loudly over a Nintendo DS. Corinna wrenched it from them and dangled it above her head while the boys paddled at the air ineffectually.

  “This is Cousin Kevin and this is Cousin Tristan,” she said, plopping the gaming console into an enormous handbag, and then holding each boy up by a wrist as if offering them for sale. “Boys, say hello to my teacher Ms. Alex Dinesen.” Alex was surprised Corinna actually knew her name. Her eyes looked warmer, even welcoming, the lids no longer on sentry duty. Or was that just the difference between seeing someone in daylight versus under fluorescent lights?

  “You stopped coming to class,” Alex said, not sure what she expected from Corinna at this point. An apology? Absolution? The class, like so much of her life, was now mere historical fact, receding into a mist of could-haves and should-haves. She stroked her crepe-paper neck, a new habit, as she waited for Corinna to reply.

  “I can give you some lotion for that,” Corinna said, digging around in her bag. She pulled out a small amber-coloured bottle. “You have to shake it real good and then massage it in before bed. It works so well you’d swear it was voodoo.” She laughed with her mouth open, teeth all there, shiny and white.

  A candidate for mayor strode past, swinging a gold-tipped cane, his white spats gleaming, and tipped his bowler to Corinna. “The Widow D., looking mighty fine. Don’t forget to exercise your franchise.” Corinna waved him off with a “Shush now.” The cousins simultaneously whined, “We’re missing Prank Patrol/I have to pee!”

  A group of Kamper Kids drifted by wearing nubbly oatmeal-shaded robes, like the deeply hooded monks in A Canticle for Leibowitz. You could no longer tell the girls from the boys. They stopped a few feet away and began to perform a pantomime. One of them bent low and put a hand to his (or her?) back, while another stood tall and raised arms above her (or his?) head as if wielding a mighty axe. Several knelt in prayer and a couple of others held out hands, palm over palm, beseechingly towards passersby. They froze in tableaux as a siren sliced across East 1st and someone yelled out of an overhead window, “Armand, do not, I said— Armand!!”

  “I have been young, and now am old,” Corinna said quietly, “yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. Psalms, 37:25.”

  From the Kamper Kids came a low murmuring that cohered into a chant: “Nun puer fui siquidem senui et non vidi iustum derelictum neque semen eius quaerens panem.”

  Or vice versa, thought Alex. But that was just her opinion.

  For your final exam

  Write an editorial piece on the following: Why did the reporter ask for the African assignment? Are witnessed atrocities more real than unwitnessed? (See: “If a tree falls in the forest …” Bishop George Berkeley, philosopher of immaterialism—or the metaphysics of “subjective idealism.”) How near the flames can you stand and not get burnt? Take your time before handing in your final draft. Take a lifetime.

  N.B. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

  There’s a grinding sound, like the approach of a Howitzer tank, and that’s how Alex hears her husband before she sees him. As she teeters down the front steps, hauling herself painfully along by the railing, she sees Rufus, pants hanging below the rubberized waistband of his SpongeBob underwear, small bony hips like the horns of a kid goat, rocketing down the street on a skateboard, his feet huge, with their two sideways baby toes that had always made them seem so vulnerable despite their size, inside ratty sneakers, laces flapping.

  “I knew a girl in Africa,” Rufus once said, back when they still lolled about in Sultan Blunda, “and she was the bravest girl in the world.”

  Well, that was a fact.

  I used to love you, she could shout. We used to be happy! Once, we were Swedes!

  But even without the green plastic buds in his ears all he would hear was the clacking of her new dentures, large and loose in her mouth.

  She could be saying, Kaxig! Minnen Fackla!

  She could be saying, Tie your shoes, Besta!

  GLOSSARY

  (in order of appearance)—IKEA product in parenthesis:

  Drömma

  to dream (Lycocel flat sheets)

  Blinka

  to blink (pillow)

  Sultan Blunda

  noble man & to shut your eyes (mattress)

  Smila Blomma

  smiling flower

  (children’s wall lamp – light pink or white)

  Fira

  celebrate

  (storage system – mini chest for CDs)

  Slabang

  funny (alarm clock)

  Skarpt

  sharp or sharply, suddenly (kitchen knife series and ceramic sharpener)

  Duktig

  good, well-behaved (toy cookware)

  Mammut

  mammoth, huge

  (children’s furniture series)

  Kaxig

  cocky, overconfident (children’s pendant lamp – blue or white/green)

  Minnen Fackla

  memories, reminiscences & a torch

  (children’s wall lamp with flickering “torch light” option)

  Besta

  asshole, blockhead, doofus

  (TV storage unit)

  FLOATING LIKE A GOAT

  Or, What we talk about when we talk about art

  Don’t let that horse

  eat that violin

  cried Chagall’s mother

  But he

  kept right on

  painting

  And became famous

  —LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI,

  A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

  Dear Miss Subramanium,

  It may strike you as ridiculous (as it did my husband) that I could lose several nights’ sleep over the fact that Georgia is “not yet meeting expectations” in art. It’s only art, my husband told me. She’s only in grade one. But lose sleep I did, and in fact I am now in such a deeply caffeinated fugue state that I fear my letter to you will come across as intemperate. That is not my intent.

  Please note that I am not suggesting Georgia is some kind of artistic genius or that she even has any particular talent. This is a defence of artistic expression, not of my daughter’s abilities. Or rather, a defence of art itself.

  Your penchant for feathered dreamcatcher earrings and tight, sequined T-shirts bearing the names of various headbanger acts has not gone unnoticed among the parents (my husband in particular seems more inclined to pick up our daughter this year than when she was in Mrs. Tam’s kindergarten class—where, FYI, Georgia did manage to “fully meet expectations” in art). I take it you may think this gives you a somewhat “free-spirited” or “bohemian” air. But bohemian resides not merely in the costume, Miss Subramanium.

  Th
ere was a time when I would gladly have sold my soul to curry favour with a particular curatorial demagogue, but I can tell you with certain authority that even back then I would never have stooped to impose strictures on others. A free-spirited woman does not make girls and boys form separate lines before they can enter the classroom, she does not restrict conversation during snack time, and she most certainly does not insist that when six-year-old children draw people or animals their feet MUST be touching the ground.

  When my daughter informed me of this “rule,” despite the tears of frustration puckering her drawing of our late cat, O’Keeffe, I couldn’t suppress a snort. (Not an attractive habit, I admit, and one I’m attempting to rein in after a particularly ill-timed one at the head table of my husband’s annual Conservative Party fundraiser—I blamed the dill sprig on the poached salmon.) “I guess she’s never heard of Chagall,” I said to Georgia, trying to sound offhand, as I’m well aware that it’s considered verboten to undermine a teacher’s authority. Georgia, ever curious, wanted to know more, so I hauled out my dusty Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, only to find that the small black-and-white photograph of The Crucifixion did little to convey the intensity of vision and colour and the infectious joie de vivre of Chagall’s work. The Internet proved a more satisfying resource, as it frequently does these days.

  Georgia was most taken with the goats—floating, soaring, violin-playing goats. “I wish I could fly,” she said, more pensively than her tender age warrants. Well, who doesn’t? (Do you suppose we could purchase posters of La baie des Anges for only $56.01 plus shipping or a boxed set of eight Chagall greeting cards online today if daydreamy little Marc Chagall had been in your grade one class, Miss Subramanium? Just a thought.)