I told Honey that more than once. Sometimes she didn’t seem to believe me. I mean, there have even been times when I cancelled my trip just to prove it to her. I do wish I had not cancelled that trip to Sicily. Everyone who was there said it was luxurious and scenic at the same time. I should have cancelled Weyburn instead.
I am not saying that they always feature sex. We are not rock musicians, after all. Not all of us. I can remember quite a few that did not involve sex, not for me anyway. Some involved violence instead.
One time I pushed an academic poet with an English accent off a porch because he insulted some friends of mine. Did I mention that these meetings usually involve beer? I once saw a middle-aged poet and a middle-aged novelist wrestling on the snow, trying to get their fists free to bang each other, trying to kick, and maybe biting a little. Later I saw them sitting beside each other on a bench in the bar, their arms around each other’s shoulders, their shirts torn.
At a conference in Calgary I once accidentally witnessed some violence followed by some sex. I wonder, I asked myself after skedaddling, whether that had anything to do with painting. There were some people, I remembered, who said you could not paint anything at all true if you did not explore your desires and fancies. I generally thought of that sort of thing as horseshit, like the psychological studies of art tolerated in some of the class seminars I attended at university.
In the movies they like brawling poets, especially if they are Irish or Brits. I have had a few fist fights in pubs or outside pubs, but these didn’t happen because I was a poet any more than any casual poontang did. And once in Vancouver, in a quaint apartment made out of a former bicycle shop overlooking some train tracks, I got involved in what might have passed for a contretemps with a famous poet who was in town being celebrated.
He was apparently notorious for provoking fights in bars and at parties, anywhere connected with the consumption of liquor, an activity he devoted much of his non-writing time to. He had decked or tried to deck a dozen of the poets who shared a famous anthology with him. A good college friend in a way-downtown New York City saloon, a book reviewer for the Village Voice, the head of the hiring committee in a Southwest university where he had been employed to unlock the mysteries of poetry for the sons and daughters of the rural middle class.
He was, by all accounts, a willing but ineffectual scrapper. Some people suggested that he did not get whacked good because he always chose fights with people who knew him and had high regard for his abilities as a composer of verse. Other poets and editors held off punching him out because they did not want to take advantage of his inebriation, and maybe because he had only one eye.
Some people no doubt figured that with just one eye he would be at a disadvantage, his punches coming up short, what with the lack of depth perception. There were others who might have said that his poetry did not suffer despite that quality. I was a lad who used to follow prizefighting in the papers and magazines and on television. I had seen fighters inflict a lot of damage despite having one eye swollen over.
I am not a boxer. I am not saying that. In fact, I usually do everything I can to avoid a bout. I have, in my time, let some bozo lay one on me without retaliating. I may have felt a little superior doing so.
Anyway, I know this poet, Bowering. He and I were often to be spotted in the same pub or auditorium, sometimes even reading our works, as we like to call them, from the same microphone. Here’s a difference between us: he adored this one-eyed poet, imitated him, quoted him. He was ten years younger but more an acolyte than a fellow. As for me, I could not see what all the fuss was about. I guess I admired the guy for making a career out of quick takes, but I like poetry with oceans in it.
Well, I had heard several people tell me, with several kinds of detail, about a party in which Bowering had been mauled by his hero, or if not mauled, at least embarrassed. According to the stories, Bowering just backed up and didn’t even raise his hands. Maybe he wasn’t as drunk as the other guy, who was ten years older, one will admit, and somewhat shorter. In any case, the stories went, Bowering was puzzled as to why the barroom bopper went after him. Other people claimed they weren’t puzzled at all, or at least less so.
But I am not Bowering.
When the guy came after me at a later party, I had a head full of lager, and I was wearing a pair of eyeglasses with bandage tape holding them together. When the famous poet came after me from across the room, younger men fecklessly discouraging him, he did it with claws instead of fists, as if he didn’t know whether to punch or grab hold to keep from falling. There was a little guck coming out of the inside corner of his eye hole.
I stepped back one step, hoping he might mistime his advance and fall at my feet. It works sometimes.
But he kept coming, low voices saying, “Tom, forget about it.”
“The fuck you think you are?” he enquired of me.
“No one you know,” I said.
His little claws came for my face. I did not feel that I was in danger. But I was pestered all the same. I had come to this party to stay away from sex and/or violence.
I belted him, staying away from his nose and eyes. Young hands caught him as he was going down.
All this trying-to-get-home business. For some reason, all the way through my long age, I have been thinking of my home town as home, as if sometime I will reach its heart, that I will be at home there, responding to my townspeople’s loving greetings, retaining my anonymity when I want it. I go back there often because of all the relatives I have in town — my mother, my sister, my two brothers, a lot of nieces and great nieces and nephews whose names I don’t remember.
Corporation of the Town of Lawrence it says across the front of the big old veranda building at the south end of the main street, or it was the south end at the time that I left for my adventures. Now there are a few blocks of this and that, fire hall, liquor store, Italian restaurant south of that. In fact, there are a lot of buildings trailing off down there now, before we get to the first fruit trees, and now there are lines of grape plants reaching up into the hills, wineries with pretentious names. My favourite is Neriton because it shows that not everyone in this sun-drenched valley is unread. I say this bitterly because in this burg it is impossible to buy a copy of our national magazine or anything I have written.
That’s the town hall I am looking at, a large craftsman-style house, I learned to call it a few years ago. I am across the street, which you could also call Highway 97, and if you were thorough, Highway 3, which when I was a kid I thought really neat, seeing as they added up to one hundred, which was often the temperature on a summer’s day while the tree fruit was ripening. I am in the little triangular park called Triangle Park, thinking why couldn’t they have called it Triangle Square. The hexagonal log bandstand of my childhood is no longer there, and I miss it, even though I never once in my life saw or heard a band playing in it. It sat even then, 1947, as a reminder of something that used to be here, when this was an English immigrant village, before the Germans and Hungarians and Yugoslavians and Ukrainians started pouring in after the war.
They walk by me now, on their way to the new new post office, around the corner and down the hill from the old new post office, where my family had for a while a box number that was identical to my unlucky number, and I did, yes sir, yes little fella, think about luck a lot.
“It’s not luck. It’s hard work,” my mother would always say.
But do you know what she had in her purse? A piece of deer bone given to her by a “Gypsy woman” back when my mother was a little girl in a wash-faded frock.
They walk by me now, the daughters with Hungarian names, in tight American skirts in the May wind, the last lilacs drying on high bushes, birds all over the green triangle, orchard trucks and Volkswagens going by, bird chirpings through their engine noises. The first hobbling man of the evening with straw hat straight on his head sits here in the after
noon sun, long shadows on both sides, Indians coming in dirty cars down from the hills east of us, to fill the two pool halls and two beer parlours, in baseball caps, this is 1964, the women with dark cardigan sweaters over long cotton dresses of too much material. Green of trees in every direction from this park where five roads meet, wind bringing odour from the river two blocks away the other side of the tracks, where in winter the freights come three times a week for logs and lumber, and in the summer every day for boxcars full of boxed fruit — tender peaches, pears, plums.
A small man with an apron strides out of the grocery store, helping a woman carry potatoes and flour to her car nosed in to the edge of Triangle Park. Old man beside me holds a tailor-made cigarette pinched by the side between thumb and forefinger, shows his history, and in the wind he spits on his old black round-toe shoes, mutters over-iterated goddamn mumble mumble in tired voice, ignores me writing beside him — he has seen me years ago, maybe even knows my name.
Five streets of car and truck noises surround us, old farm couple gets into small-town diesel Five Star ***** Taxi, she in dress and fur stole in front with the driver, he with sixty-nine-cent cap square on his head in back with brown wrapping paper goods, to go three miles out to their blighted back-bending apple ranch.
Everybody goes home somehow.
There’s a sign on Main Street, hand-painted:
NOEL SECOND STORE,
in dusty window, stacks of magazines, True Story, Motion Picture, Screen Gems, deer-antler cribbage board, 1940 sunglasses, Chinese plastic backscratcher, old buffed leather box camera, rusty hacksaw, tobacco can full of plastic earrings, water pistols, razor strop, yellow-and-red wooden shoe with “Belgium” hand-lettered on it.
I am, like they say, home, walking the actual sidewalk of downtown highway bottleneck, sad coloured lights and faded flags blowing on strings on every second lamp pole. Horse show over three days ago, 24th of May coming in six days, rock and roll music seeping out of garage, greasy old radio. Kids collect around the Greyhound bus, picking up their Vancouver newspapers to deliver, 1964 news.
Off the main street I walked toward my brother’s house. Before I got there I saw an old one-legged man with a cane, trying to push a lawn mower around his front yard. He was flesh and blood and something else, tired from the moment he stood up. An example to us all. A hero you would not want to look at twice.
I don’t know what I was doing in the air force. A homesick guy like me? I should have been in the navy. Trouble is, I get a little seasick sometimes, I mean if the ship is moving more than one way at a time. I have had that trouble in airplanes too. Aeroplanes, we wrote back then. But when I was in aeroplanes, we called them kites. But I saw to it that that didn’t happen many more times than necessary, I was usually working, figuring out mathematics in my head and adjusting gizmos all over big cameras, or leaning out the half door of the DC-3 with a hand-held camera, or if it was an Expeditor, the whole door hole, but with my body secured to belts and snaps that were designed not to give way. And talking to the pilot on my headset. If I am working with a camera the size of a washing machine, I have to know what the airspeed is, what the compass setting is, what kind of drift and yaw we are experiencing.
Can you believe it? I knew how to do all that when I was nineteen. Now I have a little trouble trying to figure out what setting I want on my little pocket-sized snapshooter camera.
I don’t know. What kind of photographers did they have in the navy? Let’s say I had joined my school friend John Lundy on the destroyer Cayuga. We were cutting through medium waves on our way to visit Saipan, an island whose name I remember whispering over and over as I knelt on the linoleum floor and read the wide-opened Vancouver Province when I was eight years old, day after day, until the daily map at last showed a U.S. flag raised over another dot in the Pacific. Now the U.S. claims to own Saipan, and uses Asian slaves to make blue jeans they can then mark as “Made in the USA.”
As a photographer for an allied navy, I am instructed not to take pictures of the barred sweatshops or the unemployed zombies shuffling Saipan’s dust looking for jobs they will never get. My task is to permanentize officers saluting each other’s flag and sailors lined up white in the blaze of August. I point my Speed Graphic and I hang my wet negatives and keep my mug shut. I am nineteen years old. What do I know?
But I am indeed homesick. Or if not homesick, a little lonely for the order I grew up in, my dad off at school, free peaches in a bowl on the kitchen table.
On deck everything is dazzling white, or at least a battleship grey tending toward white. In my workspace it’s cool and dark, sometimes a darkness touched with yellow, sometimes a deeper darkness muddled with red.
As a photographer I have it pretty good, compared with the other young men who actually have to work, carrying heavy things, pulling heavy stuff, sitting in oriole nests hung over the side, painting grey on the grey. I find a shady spot early on this Pacific cruise, a corner grey as grey, with a useful-looking coil of rope plunked down with a card covered in English letters clamped onto it.
Spic as we can, span as we might, we are on a seagoing vessel, and seagoing vessels have always had rats aboard. The day after we leave the Marianas, a rat joins me in my shaded retreat. The day after that, the rat begins to gnaw the rope.
Okay, I can remember another skinny one. If the music had been different, she might have kept me away from home for some time. Do you know that kind of Russian beauty? You can’t say it was her neck or her back or her shoulder. There is this kind of Russian beauty wherein every part just becomes another part, or you could say she is smooth, she flows even when still. No, I am not describing what I mean. Look at the bone structure around her eyes — it’s all so smooth as it becomes something else.
But when I think of Tanya I think of her hip bones. She was what people mean when they say angular. It was almost as if her arms and legs were on backward or on the wrong side. Knobby knees and shoulders, all right, and those hip bones. I will never see her right in my memory. She was skinny in a long-thighed way, with a skin that was tan and white at the same time. Now that I think about it, Tanya was contradictory in every way.
Sometimes I thought she was disdainful of me. Her chin would rise and she would be looking across the room, even while my hand moved with its own admiration over her taut belly. At other times she looked as deep into my eyes as one could go, and her smile had a little fearfulness in it, as if she wanted her vulnerability to draw love from me. I ran my fingers over the smoothness of her rib cage. I licked her slight firm breasts.
All right, she was skinny. Maybe she was knobby because she was supposed to be twenty kilograms heavier than she was. I had seen Doukhobor women naked before, or at least I had seen newspaper photographs of naked Doukhobor women. They were just about always big and doughy, with huge lumpy bums, often standing in front of a house their husbands had set afire. Sometimes they were standing in a Kootenay town park protesting capitalism, some of them with stockings rolled partway down, nothing else, maybe a plastic hair clamp.
Hard to disagree with them. Possessions are not as good as getting rid of possessions. Nakedness is God’s design. Violence is out of the question. You don’t have to read Tolstoy to believe what he said. The Sons of Freedom, they were called in English, these women and their husbands. They were not angular or knobby. Nor were they in bed with me.
In bed, posing for a humble watercolourist, or out, she hardly uttered a word, this sweet smooth Russian girl I call Tanya. “Mmm,” she might offer, knowingly, as I placed the soft palm of my hand on her chest above her slight mounds. How on earth could I maintain that I was her captive kept from his quest for the family hearth?
I was always sad when I was with her, sad because for some reason I did not ken, I knew there would never be a chance to hold her as my full-time sweetheart. There was a kind of interior mountain range canyon secret condition I could not even guess about. There was a wind
with sad snow in it I could only imagine hearing. I would never know her. If I managed to kidnap her and take her to the Antilles and bring fish every day, I could never get her to tell me a tiny atom of her lorn family’s history, the tintype unpainted walls her grandparents might have posed before, the landlords who did not even speak their language.
“Mmm,” she would say, when she raised her fingers to the sweaty hair above my ears and smoothed what I was too quick to call my soul.
I think she may have written a story about this, and I think it may have been read by her blonde friend Maggie, but I know that I will never see it.
I don’t know whether you could call that town my home now. I don’t even know whether I could call it that. My school was burned down by some brainless youth recently. Most of my friends from Lawrence are dead, or living in Kamloops, or melting into the last stages of some disease that acts like nature getting you ready to compost. The orchards are disappearing yearly, and everyone’s backyard has turned into a vineyard.
Most of the homemade signs stuck up on bulletin boards and fences feature bad spelling and stupid grammar. Along the highway there are hundreds of fruit stands, with homemade signs on which farmers or their children have proven that they do not know how to spell the names of the fruit they are offering to sell. The weekly newspaper prints a lot of stories that are “contributed” by people who do not know that a plural noun likes to appear with a plural verb.
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