One in Every Crowd

by Ivan E. Coyote

  I DON’T WANT TO SOUND LIKE SOMEONE’S GRANDMOTHER or anything here, but really, would it be so hard to pick up a phone and call? You don’t even have to call me, just call anyone, your brother, your dad, any of us, just to let us know that you are alive. We all talk, you see, hoping that one of us has seen you, or heard word, or even heard a rumour.

  I’m not even the worrying kind, you know me, I get really busy too and forget to keep in touch and miss my cousin’s birthday or whatever, just like everyone else, and I’m definitely not usually the type to get on anyone’s case for stuff like this. It’s just that the last time I saw you, you had lost about thirty-five pounds and the crystal meth was starting to turn your back teeth black, and the newspapers and the streets are full of stories about irreversible brain damage and psych wards brimming with lost souls stricken by this addiction, and, well, I worry. It’s not like you’re backpacking in Europe and just forgot to send a postcard. I don’t care about broken promises or the money you owe anyone. I do care that your brother and your dad spent another Christmas wondering where you were, and that they are running out of reasons you haven’t seen your niece and nephew. I can’t help but care about that, but even that I would let slide.

  Some guy asked me for change outside of the bank today. He looked skinny and drawn and nervous, just like you did the last time I ran into you on the Drive, and for some unexplainable reason I felt like punching him. Instead I took a deep breath and asked him when was the last time he called his mother?

  The self-help books and the twelve-step doctrines would probably feed me some line right now about how no one can really help you until you are ready to help yourself and to not to allow myself to feel hurt that I haven’t heard from you in almost a year, that it is your addiction governing your behaviour right now and not you. But I call bullshit on that. We have known each other since we were kids, I would and have done anything to help you, and I deserve better than this.

  This not knowing. Remember when I dragged you off the street and let you sleep it off for days and fed you and helped you track down the bits and pieces of your life so you could start putting them back together? Back then you said you were done with it all, you were ready, you wanted to change your life, and you needed my help.

  I told you that night on the back porch I would do whatever it took, anything in my power to see you through this time, but that I had one condition. My one condition wasn’t even that you stay clean, because I know what a demon the meth is, and I didn’t want you tossing me out with the clean and sober bathwater if you backslid. My one condition was that you didn’t lie to me anymore, that if you used I wanted to hear about it from you. No more bullshit.

  Maybe that is why you haven’t called, maybe the truth was something you thought I wouldn’t want to hear, or something you weren’t prepared to say out loud.

  I asked after you at your favourite old coffee shop the other day. The owner’s grandson, the cute one, he surprised me by saying yes, he had seen you, and that you were looking great, that you had cleaned up and were living in the suburbs somewhere, and working construction.

  I let out the long breath with your name on it that I had been holding for almost a year, and went straight home to call your brother. I was so glad to have word that you were alive and well that it took me a couple of days to get around to wondering why you hadn’t gotten in touch with anyone.

  The guy who first said ‘No news is good news’ obviously never had a best friend fighting the ice.

  And the guy who coined the phrase “fair-weather friend” never met either of us. I once told you I knew that if ever I found myself in your shoes, I had every faith you would be there for me, and you hugged me in place of a yes.

  I think of you whenever I swim in a lake, whenever I pass a rusty pick-up truck on the highway, whenever I see the northern lights or a blue-eyed dog. I miss you whenever I hit my thumb with a hammer, ride my bike, or walk past a lawn that needs mowing.

  I’m not writing this to judge you, or to make you feel guilty. I’m writing this to let you know that whenever you are ready, I will be here. I refuse to give up on you. The fire that burned my house down spared the garage, so I still have most of the tools you stored at my place. A couple of times I had to laugh out loud at the same time as I was cursing your name, as I’ve moved around a lot since my house burned down, and I must really love you, because I can’t think of anyone else I would move an entire set of free weights five times for, myself included.

  I will pick up that phone whether you are still using or not, and I will listen to you whether your news is rosy or rainy. I want you to know that I meant what I said on the back porch that night, no matter what. No bullshit. A lot of things have changed for both of us since then, but not my home phone number.

  Oh yeah, and my grandmother says to say hello.

  Single Malt

  MY DAD USED TO BE EASY TO SHOP FOR. Every Christmas and birthday, for as long as I can remember, I have got him a bottle of single malt scotch. What brand I chose changed yearly; it depended largely on my economic status come shopping time, but that was all okay by him. I knew in my leaner years that he could just pawn the cheaper stuff off on his visitors. I’ve caught him guiltlessly pouring an Oban for himself, back turned, while simultaneously serving his houseguests Johnnie Walker Red. I once caught him trying to pull this stunt on me, red-faced with a bottle of Canadian Club in his hand, as if he thought I wouldn’t know the difference.

  I reminded him I had been trained by a professional.

  A couple of Christmases ago, my Uncle Rob trapped me coming out of the washroom to have words with me about this. “Why buy booze for a guy who drinks too much?” he asked me with rum and eggnog on his breath. “Why not get him socks or something, like everybody else does now?”

  Rob had a point, to be sure, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it all. But my dad already owns every tool known to mankind, never wears ties, hates sports of any stripe, and only wears work shirts. The contents of his closet reveal a repeating pattern: GWG boot cut jeans, thirty three-inch waist, thirty three-inch leg. White Stanfield T-shirts, size medium. Blue BVDs, also medium. Tan work boots, size nine men’s. Grey and white work socks, the kind with the red stripe. He reckons if you own all the same socks, you don’t have to throw both away when you get a hole in one. Easier to sort that way, too. A couple of summers ago he got himself a pair of sandals, and the whole family almost fell over in collective shock. Buying him clothes as a gift would be like going out for supplies.

  My dad throws stuff away when he knows he won’t use it, even gifts. After a couple of Boxing Day heartbreaks when taking out his garbage, I settled myself into buying him something I was sure he would love, something I knew would never go to waste. Scotch it was.

  Last spring my dad called me out of the blue, which should have been my first clue that something big was up. The second alarm bell went off when he asked me how my girlfriend was. Sure, he didn’t know her name, but that was as much my fault as it was his: I had stopped telling him years ago. But still, he asked.

  Then the bottom fell out of all things predictable. My father interrupted me, stopped himself, and went on to say the following: “I’m sorry, I interrupted you. What was that you were saying?”

  I immediately called my grandmother to find out if he was okay. “Is my father dying of cancer or something? He’s acting very weird. First of all, he called me up just to talk. Then, he apologized for interrupting me. Is everything alright?”

  “Of course,” she said, laughing her little laugh, letting air out through her nose like she does. “The new Don takes a little getting used to. Yesterday, he called to let me know he was going to be late for lunch. Very unusual, indeed. Usually he just wouldn’t show up and then avoid me until he thought I’d forgotten. But everything is different since he quit drinking.”

  My mind reeled through the rest of our conversation. The details rolled around my head and only stuck later, because I had
yet to fathom the first line. I heard her say he just got up and poured it all down the sink, that it had been over a month now, but I was still stuck on imagining my father without a drink in his hand and wondering what his voice might sound like, thin-tongued and without a tinkling soundscape of ice cubes behind it?

  When I visited in July, he was clear-eyed and full of wisdom; simple, yet sublime. “I realized,” he said to me, swirling black tea with one sugar and tinned milk, “that it looks like I’m probably going to have the same wife, the same job, the same house, and work on this same little piece of ground for the rest of my life.” He paused to light a smoke with steady hands. “And that the only thing I could change was my attitude.”

  We drove around town, going to pick up sheets of aluminium, welding rods, one-inch square tubing, and two-inch fine thread bolts, talking the whole time. It was just like when I was a kid, the only difference being that my dad now would allow the proud-biceped kid who worked in the warehouse load the really heavy stuff into the back of his pick-up. “Better his spine than mine,” he whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth by way of explanation. His hair was a streak of silver, so startling, I could never lose him in the aisles. He seemed shorter, somehow, than I remembered him.

  He lit a smoke when we got back into the truck, letting it dangle from one corner of his bottom lip as he backed the truck up with one hand, his right arm draped over the back of the seat between us. He has always been able to do almost anything with a cigarette in his mouth like this. Somehow, the smoke never gets in his eyes. “You know what?” he asks, eyes on the road. “I used to drive downtown, just like this … before.”

  “Before” is the term my dad uses. He will not say “when I was drinking.” He does not use the word alcoholic. Everything is just before, or after. You have to just let him talk. He won’t answer direct questions. I don’t push him, I’m just so glad it’s after now.

  He continued, because I said nothing. “I used to drive around, and everything seemed like it was broken, or abandoned, or it needed a paint job. Nobody smiled. I really felt like it was hell right here on earth, some days.” He cleared his throat. “But now, I come down here, like today with you, and all I see is new construction, heavy equipment, girls in tight shirts … and a lot of chrome.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye, to register my comprehension. “You know, all the things I like.”

  After I got back, I was afraid to phone him all summer, afraid to hear that his voice had slowed and dropped, afraid he would let the phone ring and ring and I would know. Scared that things had changed, or worse, that they had gone back to being how I thought they always would be.

  I called him last week; I had to finally, to see what he wanted for Christmas. He sounded fine, but the stone in my stomach didn’t dissolve until I heard him laugh. He didn’t laugh that much, before.

  “Don’t get me anything. I’m good. Don’t you worry about me. Or, how ’bout you get me something we both know I’ll like. How ’bout you get me a carton of smokes?”

  Thicker than Water

  EVERYBODY ALWAYS SAYS I LOOK JUST LIKE HIM. Every once in a while, my grandmother hauls out the second oldest photo album from her closet and opens it on the kitchen table, next to the cut crystal bowl of sugar cubes and the matching cup that holds the little silver teaspoons. She slides the teapot aside to make room and squints over her bifocals. If I have brought a friend with me, this is the part where she makes them try to pick out which face in the faded black-and-white photos belongs to my father. My dad has three brothers. They are wearing matching plaid shirts, or bathing suits, or cub scout uniforms, or hand-me-down pajamas and holsters for their cap guns. In the background there is a Christmas tree, or a lopsided front porch, or a wall tent, or a brass statue of a war hero from the summer the old man took them to Winnipeg to see the army base and learn some respect for the soldiers who fought and died so the rest of us could sit around in our underwear and read comic books and not eat the peas or the broccoli he worked all day to pay good money for. It is always easy to find my dad’s face in the photographs. I look just like him, but without the ears. My grandmother named him Don, after his father, she tells my friend. This is the part where if it is raining or her knees are bad she will confess that she never really loved the old bastard, that he was never half the man his sons turned out to be.

  More and more, I find little bits of my father in me. Not just around the eyes or in the shape of my jaw, but how I can’t stand to have less than half a tank of gas in my car, because you never know. How I hate cheap tools and dull knives and loose screws. How I own twenty pairs of the exact same underwear. How I can’t stop looking for something until I find it, even when I’m late, even if I don’t need it until the day after tomorrow. I have to know where it is. My smokes are always in my left pocket, lighter in the right. I can’t sleep if the dishes aren’t done, can’t read only half of a book, and I never turn off the radio until the song is over. I like a little bit of egg, potato, and bacon in every bite of my breakfast. It is a finely tuned ratio, constantly being weighed and adjusted throughout the meal. Nothing worse than winding up with only hashbrowns in the end. Always let your engine warm up before you drive anywhere and cool down a bit before you turn it off. You can double the life of a motor if you treat it right. Driving fast burns more gas and is hard on your brake pads. Besides, you just spend more time waiting for the light to turn green. Don’t go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. All of these things I learned from my father. Most of the time I do them without thinking of him, but every once in a while I remember; these are inherited habits. Other fathers might have saved their bacon until last, or ran out of gas, or hired someone else to build their house. Other fathers might have worn dress shoes to work instead of steel-toed boots. A different kind of dad might not have taught me how to weld. A man with sons might not have let his daughter drive the forklift.

  Who would I be if he had been someone else?

  A couple of months ago, I had a gig in Calgary. An all-queer spoken word show at a sports bar downtown, right in the middle of the hockey playoffs. Strange, but true. I was wearing a dark blue shirt with thin stripes, and a sky blue tie that subtly highlighted the secondary tones of my shirt. The waitress liked my stories and kept slipping me free scotch on the rocks after the show, and I had about four stiff drinks in me when this huge guy in a Flames jersey grabbed me by the necktie and pulled my nose right into his chest hair.

  “Your tie is all messed up. Where’d you learn that? Nobody ever taught you how to do a proper double Windsor? You’re a disgrace. Come here, lemme show you.”

  I tried to explain that I had been drinking, and was thus unable to engage in activities that required concentration or hand-eye co-ordination, plus it was dark and my tie was fine anyway, but he pulled my substandard knot loose and laid a drunken death grip on my right shoulder.

  “I’m in the Mafia. The Mafia knows how to tie a tie. You going to argue how to tie a tie with the Mafia, or you going to shut up and watch me do this right?”

  I mentioned that I had read somewhere that the real Mafia never admits that there is a real Mafia, and that Calgary wasn’t known for being a hotbed of organized crime, and that the odds were neither of us would remember any of this in the morning anyway, but he insisted.

  I ended up getting a nonconsensual thirty-minute lesson in proper manly attire from a guy with one leg of his track pants accidentally tucked into his white sweat sock. He started with the double Windsor knot demonstration and went on to sum up the billfold versus money clip conundrum for me. He was pontificating on the merits of French cuffs when his buddy interrupted to announce they were all leaving to go catch the peelers.

  I woke early the next morning, dry-mouthed and blurry. I pulled a clean shirt and a different tie out of my suitcase and was amazed when my fingers remembered what tying a perfect double Windsor knot felt like. I don’t remember who taught me the wrong way to tie a tie, but I know for sure it wasn’t my d
ad. He never wears neckties. He taught me how to tie a boat to a dock, and a fishhook to a line. How to tie double bows in your bootlaces so they never come undone halfway down a ladder or get caught up in a conveyor belt or a lawnmower blade and end up costing you a toe. My father is a wise man. He taught me all the important knots. The double Windsor I learned from a wise guy.

  Maiden Heart

  I PUT THIS STORY TOGETHER OVER THE last ten or twelve years, and it is still full of holes. It is a true story in the same way that an old vase that is broken into pieces in the sink and glued back together holds water. Maybe, maybe not. But it is no less beautiful to look at. This is what I think I know.

  On October 31, 1997, my father turned fifty years old. He and my mother had split up about two years earlier, and as far as any of us could tell, he was attempting to drink himself into an early grave.

  As always, he never let all that booze get in the way of a solid day’s work, so he was half in the bag and all the way inside a tanker he was welding on when the phone rang in the little office at the back of his shop. He hung his torch up on the ladder and climbed out to get the phone. It had been ringing all day. Big family and a big birthday. Big pain in the ass.

  “Happy Birthday, Don.” The woman’s voice was husky, with a bit of a smoker’s rattle.

  “Um, thanks.” He didn’t know who she was, but he felt as though he should. Something in her voice told him he should recognize her. Not the sound of her voice, more like the way she weighted down her words, like they meant something.

  They chatted a short while; how was he doing, did he feel old, that kind of thing. She cleared her throat, paused for a second.

  “You don’t even know who this is, do you?”

  “Keep talking,” he insisted, sitting up a little in his greasy rolling chair. “I’ll figure it out any minute.”

  “I should hang up on you right now.”