Steel Animals

by SK Dyment

  “I had a studio, in Downtown Eastside….”

  “The one where you tormented the landlord?”

  “No, no, not the Water Street place, after that. Up along Railroad. It was infested. Mold, mildew, termites, no fireproof doors, rats, roaches, no lights in the halls, no panic bars on the doors, broken hinges, insulation over the windows, pigeons living in the roof, garbage all over the parking, stinkin’ all to hell, busted exit signs, no intercom, full of theft, full of piss, stinkin’ all to hell…”

  “You said that…”

  “So…”

  “So, what’s the rent?” Ben laughs.

  “No, Ben, it’s gone now.”

  “Oh, it’s gone. Where exactly did it go? Did the firm do something to it? Something a good city does not usually approve?”

  “Listen, I had a studio in the place, and was working out-of-shop for an architectural firm or ‘drawing for scraps’ as you like to call it. So, I redesigned it, redesigned the whole warehouse, all gutted and rebuilt. Then I did a redraw, and even though it was a nice-looking old place, I levelled it, but then rebuilt it with the community in mind. This time I designed an elaborate, harmonic, ergonomic masterpiece, a masterpiece, Ben—a high-class housing development with everything, enough for two hundred families. I thought I’d get a little funding from the city, make a little goodwill for the company. I showed them the chicken scratches one day, and the whole firm went … berserk!”

  “Well, you’ve never used this term ‘berserk,’ Rudy. I was always waiting for you to use that term but you never did. Why now? ‘Berserk’ is your new word. It’s a word from your company; it’s a word from your sponsor. So, you went over the heads of the other people living there?”

  “It was just an idea. I pulled it out one day at a meeting. The tenants never had it together to form their own group.” His voice rises to an adolescent pitch. “They were just going to get thrown out, Ben, and the landlord would start the whole thing all over again with some other no-brains.”

  “But they could have fought to get the place changed without tearing the building down.”

  “Those people did not have clout. Through the company, I got the zoning changed in just a few days. Of course, it was on the condition that we buy the property from the city after we had the property seized from the landlord. Then, we bought it back, since no one even knew it was on the auction block, for pennies! Connections with the municipality helped. Of course they’re scumbags, but they’re connected. In a few months, I saw something I had designed on paper rising into the sky.”

  “What about the people who had been evicted?”

  “My point Ben: A terrible, infested, dangerous fire trap was transformed into housing.”

  “Perhaps some of the original tenants even applied to move back since your masterpiece was low-level housing.” Ben watches the sound waves of his voice vibrate in the bowl of coffee.

  “Now you know that it wasn’t actually in their range. And here is where the company really ran with my idea. Without telling me, they took all of my designs, right down to the play area for children, the atrium, the underground parking, the turf and tree area on the roof—and they turned it into luxury housing—not affordable to anyone in that neighbourhood, and then snapped a wall around it and armed guards. With a beautiful view of the harbour, a beautiful view of the skyline, people bought it up, despite the neighbourhood. The place was sold out before it was built! And I am bringing in the Gs, brother. But my dream, my dream is completely gone.”

  “Why would you work with them?”

  “Why? Because I’m inside now, I’m inside, brother, and I can screw them from their high-security palace. And I will. You have no idea how deep in this thing I am. Do you know what else they did? They hired that contractor—the one that I quit a few years before, and they got the revenues they wanted, and they got the savings they wanted—and do you know how many injuries there were on that job site?”

  “Apart from the injury to your pride?”

  “Dozens of separate accidents, five fatalities. This isn’t a joke, Ben. Remember the glazier that fell off the fifteenth floor? Maybe you didn’t read about him. My building. Five guys. The company says, ‘Oh, that’s not common,’ or, they laugh and they say, ‘The construction industry—it’s full of drunks!’ My dream became a great big tombstone, Ben. And at night, I wake up from a nightmare, and it’s my tombstone with my name across it in flashing neon lights.”

  Ben is at a loss for a light-hearted comeback. He stares out the window and thinks that he hates his friend as much as his friend hates himself. The photo of the glowing ’65 CZ lies neglected by his plate.

  6.

  VESPA HAS DECIDED to visit Rudy. But she has not seen her old boyfriend for a long, long, time. She has been boycotting Rudy, because she figured he would get horns and come looking for her. Only reluctantly has she realized he was completely absorbed in his job, and was going to forget her, not to mention himself, if she did not pursue him into his Babel. Her brother had visited him, her little brother Ben who she was supposed to rescue, who seems to be throwing her a life preserver once again. On the phone he said he had not been impressed by Rudy, was too upset to talk about it. Vespa is curious. Is Rudy still the radical-talking punk he was when they were all on the street? After all the revolutionary speeches over midnight candles pressed into the tops of wine bottles, why the change? And as far as she can surmise, Rudy is not interested in any of his past friendships in any way. He seems far more interested in being a hotshot, bigwig, wing-nut bulldozing poor people’s houses, bullying bureaucrats, arranging protectionism, lobbying for privatization, and putting people in and out of business, while he covers the city landscape with high-rises of his own design. Vespa’s suspicions are close, but only some of this is true.

  Rudy has become a very confided-in, very favourite in-boy with B.F. Turner, the infamous and corrupt construction mogul who is demolishing buildings with his company of the same name. People in the Turner company grumble and are disgruntled by Rudy’s rise to power. To others, it only seems as if Rudy has found success and freedom and is living in luxury in a big sunny studio overlooking the Pacific in the upscale West end of town.

  It is here that Vespa meets her old boyfriend, his door clicking closed as they cross his rainforest-sourced hardwood. He makes her a drink at his glass and chrome bar, and they sit together on a piece of furniture that is a Brutalist interpretation of a couch. The ice rattles in their glasses and Vespa notices that he is scrubbed and cologne-scented, wearing aftershave and a body spray over top. Rudy has never smelled like this. She imagines the deodorant slapped under his pits like cement.

  “Tell me about your work,” she tells him, and he answers that he has learned a thousand ways to scare and bribe a politician into complying with a request, whatever it may be. He has learned everything the wrong way around originally, he explains to her, but now he is trying to subvert the conglomerate he works for from the inside out. Instead of saying it in a good-humoured way, he tells her this as if it is a very vital, classified secret, and Vespa feels as if she is in grade four. At the same time, she can see that her old friend is not just drinking to be social with her, but to steady a set of frayed and sparking nerves. She reaches out to touch his hand. He pulls it away. She notices it is trimmed and manicured, not by Rudy, but by a professional trained to file rich gentlemen’s nails. She pictures him in the position of getting his nails buffed and it cracks her up. It is not friendly laughter.

  “So, what are you really doing these days?” Rudy asks, in an attempt to deflect bad spirit. His voice drops, causing his defensiveness to sound suggestive instead. Vespa, who has just worked for a grubby escort agency doing straight calls to make ends meet, does not get it. She stares. This is the same man who had worked for B.F. Turner as a day labourer. She marvels. This is the same man who fed her grilled cheese and made love to her on a mattre
ss with forty-five minutes of dubbed and stolen music to fuck to before he had to flip his cassette.

  “Who’s askin’?” She reminds herself that this is even the same man who smashed her antique plates and then glued them back together in apology and sniffles. The result, a framed assemblage piece, used the decorative plate parts as a sky. Oversized plastic farm animals and architectural-model humans reading newspapers sat on benches beside a submerged doll face smiling up from a tree-shaded pond. A plug-in sun shone down on the scene; it was Rudy’s apology for his tantrum. A boyfriend struggling to become a gentleman. She still had it on her wall, had always found it quite beautiful, even if it is the last of her grandmother’s dishes that he smashed.

  He tops off her drink a second time.

  “You would love the things I have been doing,” says Vespa, lying. “I’ve been working with bicycles. All the kids bring in parts, but mostly I just work away, changing tires, fixing gears, hybridizing tour bikes with mountain bike parts and so forth. It’s funny the things people want.”

  Rudy picked picks up her hands, and Vespa’s heart skipped skips a beat. Sudden intimacy after being pushed away. Dammit. She is still attracted to him, even more curiously because of all his funny new smells. She wonders if he put them on that morning, thinking of his appointment with her and wanting to smell nice. He stared at her fingers. “No, you haven’t,” he tells her, and he continues to stare at her fingers, turning her hands over in his in a clinical way. “You’ve grown your nails out, so you’ve been doing something else. You haven’t been working with your hands in that way for months.”

  She tries to withdraw them, but Rudy holds them tightly.

  He brings them to his lips and kisses them. “You have been whoring,” he says.

  “Some people say so have you.”

  “For a good reason,” he answers.

  “For the good reason of making lots of money and turfing lots of people out of their homes?”

  “I’m not behind most of that. I’m the moderate in that lot if you can imagine. I’m the left-wing radical.”

  “I heard you were the right-hand man.”

  “I am studying the company, like a model, looking down and examining the working parts.” He puts his finger to her lips, “In order to disassemble it, but you must not tell.”

  “Do you have a lot of girlfriends?”

  “Some. I don’t really have time for anything like that. I don’t have time for emotions.”

  “Do you give them lots of money?”

  “Where is this leading?” Rudy asks. He tops off her glass, pushing past her blood-alcohol tolerance levels.

  “I stayed out of your way all those months, waiting for you to call me, but every time, it was me that picked up the phone. And you were always too busy. Too busy for emotions. Where should it be leading?”

  “You want me to loan you some money?”

  Vespa widens her eyes. Rudy’s face had not been this close to hers in so long, she has forgotten little things about him. It is hard not to stare, not to memorize all over again the arrangement of teeth and hair and to remember the good way they used to laugh.

  His pores are no longer filled with dirt; his skin has been treated by professionals, the little pits and character scars sandblasted away.

  “What do you want from me?” Vespa asks. It is a line she has rehearsed.

  He smiles at her. “Do you want me to give you some money? I know you have been whoring, why? You are so much better than that. Just like your brother, you could build a motorcycle from scrap. You’re talented, a sculptor, why are you…?”

  “For money, that’s all. Not because I am going to overthrow the escort world from the inside out, or subvert it with my new-found connections to the world of high finance and dirty pricks. It’s still me, Rudy, just the same as you.”

  “It’s true, it is still you,” he leans forward and kisses her. He draws a long breath. “I want to have you again, here, in my bed, on the bed that looks out over the city. When you wake, you will feel like a princess in a tower.”

  “Royalty? Okay, and who shall we behead in the morning, Rudy? You? For crimes against romantic poetry? Or me, for being the inconvenient one of your wives?”

  “I could tie you, I could take you, I could have you right here in this room.”

  “I could call the police for help,” says Vespa, and she makes a quick grab for Rudy’s neon-glowing phone. It falls with a clatter to the floor and Rudy’s hand takes hers and gently sets the receiver back in the cradle. She looks up.

  She looks up. “If you loved me, why didn’t you contact me? I remember you used to speak about love, but for ages you’ve shown me nothing at all.”

  “I create visual images, three-dimensional visual ideas, worlds where children will be born and people will fuck and fight and sip drinks looking over the city, and I sell them. Vespa, I sell ‘setting’ poetry. I create living spaces, animate a human cinema within my own restrictions of lighting and props, and for thousands and thousands of dollars…. That’s still poetry, poetry of space and life.”

  “Beautiful, self-occupied. I wasn’t exactly hard to get hold of.”

  “You could share a part in my future. I’m becoming famous.”

  “Your future? Your company is famous for killing people. Sure, the buildings are symmetrical, but when the workers fall from the buildings, they still break in messy pieces. Does it bother you that the poetry that lived in their heads spills out of their skulls from the right? Or that their broken hearts are on the left?”

  “I think it’s time we wrapped this all up,” Rudy says, getting to his feet.

  “Good, I don’t have time for emotions. You don’t want to rape me anymore?”

  “That was your fantasy, not mine.”

  He picks up the phone and speed-dials his own security code for the building.

  “Are you calling the police?”

  Rudy seizes her by the arms and holds her as a security guard peers cautiously into the door.

  “Is there some trouble, Sir?”

  “Please remove this young woman. Put her in a taxi outside the gates. See that she is returned to Hastings and Main Street.”

  “That’s not my address.”

  “It’s close enough.”

  “Wait, my purse. I’ll get my own taxi.” The security guard moves over to her.

  She grabs her small handbag from the table. “I don’t have time to piss on your floor, Mister, or any of that other funny stuff you asked me to do. Call some other girl, you kinky motherfucker....”

  “She’s just drunk,” Rudy tells the security guard.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” the guard says to Vespa. “You girls have a right to refuse it.”

  The door shuts behind them and Rudy is alone.

  7.

  JACKIE, HAVING COME to Toronto partly at the invitation of Wanda, has managed instead to get herself into extraordinary amounts of trouble. Following the little heist in Vancouver, the idea of leaving the region appealed to Jackie. Still, she bided her time, working at B.F. Turner long enough to reinforce her alibi and puzzle police before rolling up her small fortune in stolen ATM loot and fleeing in her gold-speckled station wagon for points East. There then followed what can only be referred to as a spree.

  Arriving in Toronto, she had found herself making only slow circles toward Wanda, wanting instead to shake her desperation and pull off something impressive before they meet. She became mired in the hope that her life could appear a swirling galaxy of possibility to the one person who might help her, instead finding it had become a cosmic drain, her self-control playing the role of the lost rubber stopper. So, she pulled the chain hard and dropped down into New York State, where the little station wagon became accomplice to a series of ATM robberies throughout the area and into Ohio. She partied as she went, met people who
pretended to love her, but her sense of a need to find home also became too great, and Jackie had returned to what she sensed was a glimmer of family and Toronto once again. There she had robbed a deli and been caught, and so, she was once again on the Canadian radar. Wanda had corresponded with her and helped her win parole, and yet ,when she was freed, she had dropped down into New York again to party, meeting people who could situate her as innocent and not involved in any crime. And indeed, Jackie was reforming when she returned from her New York fiesta, only to be picked up in Toronto for something armed robbers had done while she was away. It was poor police work, because armed robbery simply wasn’t her style. She hadn’t done it, and her New York party friends were the key. But when you are missing basic skills in judging character, strange things can happen.

  Jackie did the time, or enough of it, and inside her something hopeful, something Wanda had kindled, grew scared and angry like it never had before. Vengeful rage, buried deep. And now she has finally emerged a wet, hurt creature. She needs to be rescued in ways she scarcely even knows are obvious to others. Bothered by the feeling that someone is watching her, she is playing pool in the billiard room of her favourite downtown hotel when three armed men apprehend her. Immediately, the feeling that just being Jackie is somehow enough of a reason to cart her away sinks heavily into her bones. There is no time to tell the attractive woman she is playing snooker with if she “is someone” or not, and she herself is entirely not certain, despite the badges and the rap, whether these men are under-informed police or merely kidnappers. It is embarrassing to have it happen, and to have them publicly tell her it is “because they know who she is.”

  The snooker player trails outside to the police car, tears running down her face. She is asking the police just what poor Jackie has done.

  “Here we go again,” says Jackie. After this, the men press her head inside the cruiser and then the rest of her body. Jackie is now only able to face her own prideful hesitation in reaching out to real friends, represented by the sugar-frosting facade of the over-priced hotel where she had been hiding, and by the sight of a stranger wringing her hands on the curb.