by Amy Spurway
I remember the tea in my travel mug, take a gulp, and nearly spit it back out all over the dash of Gimp’s truck. My chattering mind and my pasty mouth expected my usual gently steeped loose leaf green tea with bits of toasted walnuts and praline sprinkles, candied pineapple, flower petals, and other bits of artisan tea goodness. Fruit tea, Mama calls it. Whether that’s because she thinks it is actually made of fruit or because she figures only “fruits” drink it, I’m not certain. Instead, I get a scalding mouthful of Effie Fortune’s Stovetop Sludge, which I could probably bottle and market as a potent detoxifying tincture, if I wasn’t so busy getting ready to die.
“God, Crow. That’s terrible. I don’t even know what to say.” Gimp leans across my lap to rummage through the console for his shot glass and scissors.
“Me neither.” I take another sip of tea, this time managing to swallow it without making a scene. “Allie’s on her way home, too. Her mother finally died.”
“Well, Little Mary Sunshine, so much for polite stoner small talk. You’re only slightly less depressing than neo-con newspapers and government-run education.” He drops a fat green bud into the shot glass, and starts chopping it with a methodical tenderness, watching the scissor blades pinch and pierce the whole sticky mass into crumbs and slivers. Talking to it, practically. “Death, eh? Shitty reason to come home.”
“Death’s the only reason to come back to this shithole,” I say, staring out the window. The sun has hoisted itself higher into the sky, putting the run on the remnants of early morning mist. There’s not a breath of wind. The water is dead calm, an acquiescent mirror for the sky’s vanity. All that showy light and colour and vastness.
“Shithole?” Willy’s voice cracks with feigned offence. “Nah, b’ye, this here’s a good place to live.”
“I need a good place to die,” I mumble, returning my attention to the enclosed comfort of the truck. “Remember my cat Whipper?”
“That the one the coyotes ate, or the one that played the piano?” he asks.
“No, he was orange.” I give his bad arm a flirty shove at the precise moment he begins to shake the carefully chopped pot into the rolling paper he has cupped in the other hand. But Gimp doesn’t drop so much as a crumb. And his eyes never leave the narrow sphere of the task at hand. He hasn’t looked at me since I said the word tumours.
“Whipper had a tumour in his gut,” I say. “The day after we found out, he ran away. A week later, I found him right there on the wharf, sprawled out on the edge overlooking the water. Dead as a doorknob. That cat did the same thing I’m doing. Haulin’ ass home. Looking for a good place to curl up and die.”
“Flawed analogy.” He shakes his head but keeps his eyes fixed on the delicate mechanics of his one-handed joint rolling. “You’re doing the opposite. Whipper left home. Went somewhere different. Somewhere lonely. Where the people who loved him wouldn’t see him go all twitchy. You’re the reverse Whipper.”
“Dammit,” I say. “I am. Well, better chop that story out of the blockbuster memoir I’m writing. Wanna party like it’s 1995 with me in the meantime? I’ll make you a chapter.” I glance at him, toss my hair, grin, and start leaning in toward him.
“Ah, Christ!” Gimp jumps in his seat. “I gotta go! I hired that Edwards kid to work mornings at the garage, but don’t trust him enough to give him keys. Betcha he’s been standing outside with his thumb up his arse and his brain in neutral for the last fifteen minutes. Wouldn’t just break in like anybody with half a brain would do. Kids today. Want a ride back to your ma’s?”
“Oh. No. I’m fine. Thanks,” I say, doing a shit job of concealing my sulkiness at being cock blocked like that.
He tucks the fresh joint behind his ear. “Nice seein’ ya, Crow. Don’t be a stranger, eh.”
“Hey, maybe we can, you know . . . go for coffee.” My shoulders lift in a fake-casual shrug, doing my non-verbal damnedest to remind him that “going for coffee” was our secret code for getting high and having sex in random parking lots, bushes, and occasionally beds.
“Yeah b’ye, that’d be r’oit awn,” he says. No flirty wink, no devilish eyebrow arch, no goodbye pat on the arse as I get out of the truck. He peels away in a dusty grey haze, which my squirrelly vision tinges with swishes of murky blue.
Under the grandiose influence of unobstructed land, sea, and sky, with a goodly dose of pent-up sexual frustration and primo medicinal weed, I meander up onto the wharf and get the urge to do something crazy. Jump in the water with all my clothes on, maybe. No. Even crazier. A quick skinny dip. I shimmy out of my boxers and tank top. Do I do a flying leap off the wharf, dropping six feet straight into the deep, dark water, just like I did when I was a kid? Or do I go down to the shoreline and tiptoe in until there is enough cold and courage to force me to get ducked, the way the lame old grown-ups used to do when I was a kid? Leap or be lame? Leap or be lame? C’mon Crow, what’s it gonna be?
While I’m psyching myself up, a long bank of blackish cloud comes out of nowhere and swoops in front of the sun, thwarting its warmth and light. The wind picks up. The water gets choppy. The rush of feeling cocky and crazy and cool was fleeting. Suddenly I am cold. And naked. Stoned, sick, and stupid.
I yank my clothes back on in a hurry. Then I walk back to Mama’s, dragging my feet in the roadside dirt the entire way.
2 THE DUST
The Wharf is the second-most sacred place in the world to me. Back at Mama’s I retreat to the first: my bedroom closet. I crawl in, just as I used to do when I was a drama queen of a kid. That closet was, and still is, a comfortable disaster that always made me feel held, contained. The late-August morning light that streams through my bedroom window is filtered and softened by the rainbow tie-dyed sheet that hangs over the place where a closet door should be. It’s cozy and dim enough to curl up and fall asleep, but too dark to do what I’ve crawled in here to do. Especially since I’m old, stoned, and my vision is all screwy. I flip on the little night light that Mama installed when I was five to keep the monsters out, and begin to dig through the pile of long-neglected throwbacks. The only monsters here now are memories, and I need to touch every goddamn one of them at least one more time.
My fingers land on the shimmery cover of my junior high diary. A literary masterpiece if I do say so myself. Each entry a poignant coming-of-age vignette imbued with deep emotion. Which means I wrote down my moody teenage takes on whatever drama had unfolded that day, and dotted my i’s with hearts. I even worked in a little poetry here and there. Who knew that love/ was a gift from above/ like a hand in a glove/ with no push or no shove? I did, at age thirteen, when I had a crush on a guy named Weasel.
Beneath the diary, there’s a substantial pile of early nineties fashion relics. Skin-tight acid-washed jeans with zippers on the ankles. A pink crimping iron and scads of neon friendship bracelets. The electric purple suede jacket with ridiculously gigantic leather shoulders. I pick up the jacket, and my stomach turns.
The summer before grade nine, I saw it in the window of Rutherfords, the tony ladies’ wear shop in Town. After fifty-nine kilometres’ worth of garbage picking in roadside ditches on a government grant job, I finally had enough money to buy it. For twenty minutes, I preened and twirled and made sassy duck faces in front of the mirror in the store, pretending I’d just stepped out of a music video. When I asked Mama what she thought, she smiled a big broad smile, then started singing “Purple People Eater.” Complete with a little dance. That was the first and nearly the last time I ever swore at my mother. I called her a bitch, threw the jacket on the floor with an angsty flourish, and stormed out.
Mama found me a few minutes later, sitting in the car, where I’d already resolved to blow all the money I’d saved on streel clothes, Doritos, cream soda, and smokes. Which I did. Mama’s underbite pinched her top lip in a vice grip as she got in the car. She didn’t say much. Just this: “Listen here, missy. I brought you into this world. You ever talk to me like that again, and I’ll take you out of it.�
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A few months later, I opened my fifteenth birthday gift from Mama. The flying purple people eater suede and leather jacket. I never wore it. Not even once. I try the jacket on for size now. It borders on being too big but is still soft and supple and purple as fuck. Maybe Mama will have me buried in it. She might have to, since I sold all my good clothes on Kijiji before I left Toronto because I needed the cash. And because I’d look stupid wearing that kind of wardrobe around here. And because I probably won’t be around much longer anyway.
Over in another closet corner, there’s the pile of my high school era treasures. By grade ten, my muddy waters ran too deep for original poetry and bubble gum teen magazine fashion. My binders weren’t identified by subject, but rather by the song lyrics scrawled on the covers. The Tragically Hip, for English. Sixties drug tunes, for chemistry. The most cryptic and depressing things Tori Amos ever wrote, for math. There’s baggy jeans with ripped knees. Plaid shirts. A pair of busted-up red suede Converse One Stars, like the ones Kurt Cobain died in. Bought them with the tips I made waiting tables one summer. Mama gave me the gears for wasting money on something as foolish as a pair of brand name sneakers, when they sold ones “just like them” for ten bucks at the Bargain Store. I made a point of wearing them right to death. Maybe I’ll be buried in them, too. They’ll go great with the purple people eater jacket.
I emerge from the closet with an outfit to wear to my doctor’s appointment and some reading material to kill the time. I’m wrapped in the nostalgia of worn denim and plaid, and a little black T-shirt with the word skater on it — an ancient artifact from the time before it was spelled with an 8. I flip through my grade twelve yearbook.
There we are, Loch Bhreagh Rural Consolidated School’s Class of ’95. Fifty young faces preserved in shades of grey. Glossy, air brushed, and earnest with our First Loves, Final Destinies, and Favourite Quotes. Allie’s long, pin-straight blonde hair spills over her shoulders onto her symmetrical, enviable rack. Her wide, steady eyes and her beauty of a smile. Allie’s First Love was “Mom’s chocolate chip cookies.” Her destiny was to “buy a Shaggin’ Wagon De-Luxe and change her name to Dr. Feelgood.” Her quote, some trite shit about crying over spilled milk only making it salty for the cat, was stolen from a poster in the guidance counsellor’s office. Allie spent a lot of time in there with me, handing me Kleenex as I sobbed to Mr. Patterson about another pet cat’s tragic demise. He never caught on that such trauma only ever seemed to surface when Allie and I had double gym class after lunch.
A few pages later, there’s my other best friend, kooky, cocky Char MacIsaac. She threatened the yearbook editor, Becky Chickenshit, with a puck in the tits if she printed her real name, which was Charlotte. Char’s grad portrait looks more like a mug shot. Her snaggle-toothed smirk and angular, freckled face are framed by an electric mess of tight orange curls. Her slightly off-centre left eye is framed by a big black shiner that was too big and too dark to be airbrushed out without making the entire eye disappear. Which was fine by Char. She earned that shiner in a fight against Scary Sylvia out behind the rink after a dance. Char’s First Love was “adrenaline rushes,” her destiny was “to set the world record for full body orgasms while nude skydiving.” And she quoted herself: “Shut up, before I puck you in the tits.” Which Becky snuck past the yearbook staff advisor, because she was scared of getting pucked in the tits.
Every few months, I get a quasi-coherent Facebook message from Char. Scattered stories about how she hitchhiked across Europe with a three-legged pit bull that she rescued from an underground dog fighting club. Detailed descriptions of her days spent teaching English at a posh private school in Thailand, and nights spent performing exotic, drug-enhanced sex rituals in the forest with men dressed as Buddhas. Tales of her tumultuous love affair with a twenty-year-old Congolese diamond smuggler. Somehow, that self-destructive danger junkie is still alive and kicking. Much to everyone’s surprise.
I flip back to the page with me on it. My hair is poufed like a mouse-brown Christmas tree. My cheeks avoid looking chubby, more by good luck than good management. A tight pseudo-smile. My quote is from the chorus of “Me and Bobby McGee.” The part about freedom. About having nothing left to lose. Attributed to Janis Joplin. Mama was miffed at me because I “knew damn well it was Kris Kristofferson.” I also knew damn well that it was better to be cool than correct. First Love: “the sound of my own voice.” Final Destiny: “to die a living legend.”
“Oh, g’wan,” Mama had said when I brought that yearbook home. “Legend in your own mind, that’s what you are.”
Little did we know I’d be back here, trying to live as a dying legend. I’m clutching at these silly, trivial remnants of my past, trying to patch over the frays, the rips, the tears in who I am, who I thought I was, and who I won’t get the chance to be. Meanwhile, Allie stands on the brink of getting her life back, and Char is still off gallivanting around the globe like the reckless wreck she’s always been. For a while I thought I had a shot at being a redemption story. The gritty Cape Breton girl who comes from multi-generational dysfunction but manages to pull herself up by the dirty old pit boot straps, go down the road, make a name for herself, and never look back.
First, I bolted to Halifax, where my nickname followed me, as did Char and Allie and half the people we knew. Because we all wanted to be anywhere but home. When I finished university there, the only logical step was to go bigger. Farther. To Toronto, where I could really morph myself into whatever I imagined I could be. Alone. Walking down Yonge Street that first time felt like floating, like I was this empty vessel being carried along by a cool current of anonymity. No one spoke to me, no one made eye contact, no one gave a rat’s ass about my father’s name or my mother’s past or the fact that my skirt was too short and tight. I could be whoever I wanted. In Toronto, I was Stacey Fortune. Stacey Fortune was so urbane. Edgy but classy. Ate dim sum and drank Shiraz. Didn’t cut and dye her own hair, or reek of pot smoke and cheap perfume. Stacey Fortune got into a course at a Toronto university and got a certificate. In marketing. She was going to make it on her own in the big city, come hell or high water. She hustled, she networked, and she landed a half-decent job. Eventually, she even landed a boyfriend named Dave, who played piano, downhill skied, and delivered pick-up lines in multiple sexy-sounding languages. Stacey Fortune was a success story. Crow Fortune was but an amusing anecdote that would linger in the gossipy minds of a backwoods island on the edge of nowhere special.
This time last year, I was prancing around Toronto with an antique diamond engagement ring on my finger, nibbling organic wedding cake samples, oohing and aahing at exotic flowers being beautifully humiliated into things called tussie-mussies and nosegays, and even entertaining the idea of growing another human being inside my aging uterus. It took me seven years of chameleoning myself into Dave Salyszyn’s idea of wife material — worthy of his grandmother’s jewellery and his unpronounceable last name. Then, when that particular version of Stacey Fortune’s Dream Life went to hell in a philandering handbasket last New Year’s Eve, I managed to ignore Mama’s litany of “I told ya so’s” and yank myself into yet another iteration of victory.
Stacey Fortune would go all Sex and the City Shopaholic Girl Power on this whole shitty deal. Because Kris Kristofferson was right, freedom was just another word for nothing left to lose. And once again I was free to be whatever I wanted, including — but not limited to — a nightclubbing cougar with no standards and several credit cards. Not Scruffy Effie’s daughter, one of the poor cursed Fortunes from the Halfway Road. Not Crow, the high school scandal turned university Beer Pong champ, nor Stacey the smiling Viva Rica shill. Not even the future Mrs. Dave Salyszyn, uptown Rosedale yummy mummy to be. I was gearing up to be a friggin’ phoenix, emerging in a flash of golden mid-life glory, rising from the ashes of an ego burned by other people’s assholery. But I didn’t get a chance to be a full-fledged phoenix because brain tumours have a way of fucking with such plans, and the phoeni
x life burns up a godawful pile of resources in a hurry. So here I am. Plain old Crow. Again.
Which means that my mother will still bust in through my bedroom door without knocking and scare the shit out of me. I used to roll my eyes and yam at her about it. She’d fold her arms across her chest, listen to me rant a bit, then snap, “What’s this, the Greeting Gale Inn? Knock knock, housekeeping? Listen, this is my house missy, and I’ll walk into a room as I see fit.” Then, for the hundredth time, she’d regale me with tales about how the shack she grew up in didn’t even have doors, and the bathroom was a three-walled outhouse in the front yard. “If you want privacy, go in to the bathroom and be glad the whole of the Halfway Road isn’t watching ya piss.”
Now, I don’t protest, even as she thumps into the middle of my room and grunts, “You’re not going to the doctor dressed like that? Like a friggin’ lumberjack.”
“It’s retro fashion, Ma. And you’re one to talk.” I nod toward her ridiculous Greeting Gale Inn housekeeper’s uniform. What kind of an arsehole makes his aging female motel staff wear pouf-sleeved, full-skirted dresses with white aprons while they make beds and scrub toilets all day? An arsehole by the name of Jason Gale. He was in my grad class, too. First Love was “money,” Final Destiny was “to inherit his grandfather’s motel,” and his Favourite Quote was “Clothes make the man.” So he makes my mother go to work dressed like a drab version of Alice in Wonderland. If she and the other women say a word about it, their shifts might get shorter and shittier. They might find themselves cleaning the rooms of every bedwetter, hair shedder, prom nighter, and honeymooner that comes through the front desk. And I know this. So I immediately feel like a heel for teasing Mama about the dress.
She picks up a teddy bear and whiffs it at my head, but misses by a mile. Then she pulls a small silver flask out of her Greeting Gale dress pocket and takes a swig.