No One

by George Bowering

  The high school basketball team is now mainly made up of tall young Sikhs with headgear, but the Indian restaurant closed down because no one was interested in anything but mashed potatoes and gravy — you know, food you can trust. In the library you can get a lot of large-print books by authors with made-up names.

  Once or twice a year I go “home” to say hello to close relatives, but when I walk on the main street, which is still Highway 97, no one says hello. They don’t have a clue who I am or what I do. They don’t know that I once killed someone not far outside the town limits.

  Talk about your sex and violence. I brought quite a few nice-looking girlfriends to my folks’ house, but I never had my ashes completely hauled in Lawrence. The hilltops resembled in their shapes the breasts I got my hands on. But I never got a complete oil change in my home town. That was something for the tougher boys in Grade 11 to boast about, usually in the lavatory. I fell in love, and tried to figure out how to write about it. But I never got my wick trimmed until I left town.

  So if I was an adventurer hoping to see the hills of home before dying, they wouldn’t be the scantily treed hills on the west side and the east side of Lawrence.

  I never fooled around with Maggie. Or to put it another way: blonde Maggie never stood or took any other physical position in my path while I was attempting to get home, drunk or sober.

  What a pretty young woman she was. She was kind of what the movie magazines and the margarine package labels had been looking for in the 1950s. Always a smile with those white teeth and light brown eyes. Innocence with a hint of the sly. You wondered: did I supply that hint of the sly because I could not believe in total mountain country purity? She spoke with a voice that might have been accompanied by a piccolo. I am pretty sure I remember her skipping, if not through a meadow, at least along a sidewalk.

  Her mother and her father should have been thanking their blessed stars that they were sent this pretty girl, but they were probably doing nothing of the kind. They probably thought that daughters came along faithfully the way cows gave milk every morning and bean sprouts popped out of the moistened soil under mountain suns.

  You know that sometimes depraved men such as I think hourly of burgling the innocence of rural angelettes such as Areth. Tear off white blouses and lift tartan skirts. Bruise thighs and expose bare blonde asses.

  But there was something in Maggie’s unguarded loquaciousness that made me happy to stay on the level of semi-serious conversation. Even when in the West Coast summer she wore a white T-shirt with an obvious absence of brassiere, I had a look and thought that’s quite pretty and initiated a conversation, sometimes about poetry, sometimes about the Russian.

  “I have decided to quit writing poetry,” she would say. “It is not necessary to my happiness.”

  “Like beer,” I suggested.

  “Get serious,” she admonished. “I come to the Cecil to hear the poets talk. They are so full of it.”

  “Of beer, yes. It is the beer talking.”

  “I have a rare sip and listen.”

  “Normally, poets are quiet types. They tread the forest floor, alert to hear a naiad drop a phrase that might ring true.”

  “Naiads are in the forest?” She opened her wide innocent eyes. “I thought they frequented the watery part of the world.”

  If there had been some soil to scuff with my shoe’s toe, I would have performed a photogenic scuff.

  “Okay, if not a naiad, maybe an oread.”

  “Mountains,” she said.

  “A dryad,” I tried.

  “Bingo!”

  “Poets are often found in the company of dryads,” I maintained. “They find a reed and dip it into a stream and indite the supernal words whispered to them by a semi-naked woods wench.”

  Remember. I was a kind of part-time university professor, and this cherubic blonde person was recently a student. Not my student, but, like Tanya, a creature from the mysterious far interior of our province. It was my duty to appear knowledgeable and fully prepared to impart knowledge.

  “What about us female-designed youngsters? If I had not decided to shuck my poetic ambition, where would I go for the kind of ethereal inspiration you are describing?”

  I rolled my little hazel eyes. “Why, you must snuggle up to a reasonably older male poet,” I said.

  She snuggled. It was the least erotic snuggle I have ever experienced. It was sweet, and she was cute as a button. But zipped like a zipper. I liked her. In the way that one likes Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Violin no. 3 in D Minor, Opus 108.

  I figure the rat is making a home for himself and maybe his family among the coils. Or is it herself? Or was it stretching the meaning of home to imagine such repose while being carried across the top of the biggest ocean aboard a vessel made of metal torn from the earth who knows where? Or is it straining the meaning of relativity?

  This creature who nibbles so near my inactivity knows no panic whatsoever. That wee beastie is nae tim’rous at all. Of course its wee bit housie is nae in ruin, but just begun the construction. The Canadian destroyer is, as the worn phrase has it, plowing the waves, disturbing in no way the denizens that make that deep water their home.

  But fishies are always astir, their eyes always open, their tails never ceasing to move.

  For mammals, on the other extremity, a home is a place to lie down. Partridge says that the word came to us via “perh Gr keitai, he is recumbent, Skt kayati, he is lying down.”

  After hanging his hat, that is.

  On June 5, 1965, that young guy named Delsing, like the old-time weak-hitting outfielder, was hanging around Kitsilano Beach, which in those years was the tame waterfront for young people who lived around there because they could not afford the more expensive parts of town. He thought he was seeing things pretty straight, a young married guy with more future than bank account, more hope than talent.

  He was pretty sure he was looking at some mountains west of Vancouver, what the rest of us probably don’t mind calling islands. He was from way upcountry still, and the only way he could imagine himself at the coast was with a particular undercoating of romance.

  The mountains west of Vancouver, he told himself, rise out of the ocean, constantly surprising, and as summer comes the sun sets behind one or the other, casting changing shadows on small boats and Island ferries. At the end of daylight at Kitsilano Beach the sun hangs over a mountain in the water, the waves come in quickly, lifted by the evening tide, sandbars disappearing, growing darkness obscuring the posts in the water and the logs that lie parallel to the water’s edge on the light-coloured sand. Some people in swim clothes lean or sit on the logs. Old men and women sit on the benches above the breakwater, backs to the lawns and traffic of Point Grey Road, and some men arrive with a light boat, straightening out nets with ball-shaped wooden floats — smelt fishers — for family’s late supper with beer.

  A woman dressed all in black comes by with her big hairy black dog in front of her at the end of a leash, the usual thing around here, they are picking their way among logs, sticks, swimmers, along the dry beach, old black canvas shoes on her feet.

  Behind the closed fish-and-chips shack there is a dry tennis court, and a few tennis players are still there, in white shorts of Vancouver, lobbing the ball to each other in the faint light. Young lovers drift back toward Point Grey Road from their various blankets on the long lawns and the sand that stretches for miles around all the bends and promontories in the Pacific coastline.

  Mike Rice the wild painter is seen with his homemade hand wagon, collecting wood from the sand for the oil-barrel stove in his long studio, piling up a whole wall with sticks of wood for the coming winter. At six thirty in the morning he gets out of his single bed, sets the kettle on a low oil flame on his square little cookstove, puts on his dirty white tennis shoes and a sweater around his neck, goes for his morning run, two blocks down to Kits
Beach, a half hour running on the tide-smooth sand, then back to the studio, where the water is boiling, makes instant coffee and jam sandwich, and turns on the record player, Stravinsky, loud, then sits and looks at the present canvas for another half hour, good morning.

  There is an ocean out there, how Mike and I take it for granted, especially now, nearly half a century later. So many dogs born and died over that stretch, so many sailors fallen into the brine, the large orb turning without a whisper of sound in the black universe. There is a street we both occupied while getting through our itchy or painful artist youth, there is a woman we loved by turn, a valley we left to be men, a gleam of ambition just the other side of the horizon. A voyage beset by insanity, a song coming from that shore we hope to sail past.

  Here’s a thing I liked to do with Bob Small. I have to tell you that Bob Small is my longest lifetime friend, but he doesn’t know anything about the main streams in my life — baseball, painting, jazz, Guatemalan history. But he’s my best friend, which is, isn’t it, the same thing as my oldest friend.

  Here’s what I liked to do. We’d be in a bar, lots of noise, people looking either glum or gladsome, a bunch at our table to entertain, or maybe just the two of us with full glasses of amber in front of us, back when it cost a dime or later when they wanted six bucks. I’d look around the crowded beverage room and shout, really loudly, “My buddy Bob Small can beat the shit out of anyone in this bar!”

  “Shhh shhh, shut up, Delsing.” He’s either cringing down in his seat or shifting his eyes from side to side.

  “Hey, I’m sticking up for you.”

  “Shut the fuck up, please.”

  “You’re my hero.”

  Etcetera. I remember the time that Bob Small and Ron Barber and I were walking along the sidewalk on the main drag in Penticton late one afternoon during the Peach Festival.

  “My pal Ron Barber can beat the hell out of anyone in this burg,” I shouted.

  Before a second had gone by, Ron turned to Bob Small and asked really loudly, “Is that right, Barber?”

  He wasn’t my oldest friend, but I was proud of him. If the Club charter had not prevented it, I might have asked him to join the Club.

  But I am supposed to be telling you about my travails during all these years during which I have been trying to get home to stay. Maybe this last little anecdote will help. It does, after all, take place in my home town.

  I was, as I usually was twice a year, up in Lawrence visiting the oddly disconnected members of my natal family. During this occasion I was staying with my kid brother Reggie, and of an evening we could be found in the taproom of the Lawrence Hotel, an old building with unrented rooms in the middle of the more southern block downtown. Reggie looked a lot like me, only taller, thinner, darker of hair, and sporting a nose that had not been broken. All I knew about his life in Lawrence was that he worked in the irrigation system most days and sweated on the golf course on the others. He had been married once, to an okay woman who had developed a taste for haywire religion. While I was visiting we ate out or at other houses in the family.

  It is Saturday night and we are sitting in the pub and saying the odd word to each other loudly enough to be heard despite the rock and roll music being played by a band from some other small town in the province. People would say hello to Reggie or give him a fashionable handshake as they walked by our table.

  We were all caught up on his valley news and my West Coast news, and we had covered the National League pennant race. For a while we drank in silence and listened to the Quebec French being spoken pretty loudly at the nearby tables, by young fruit pickers who worked mindlessly in paradise by day. Then I went into my routine.

  As soon as the band had finished a song, I held a twenty-dollar bill aloft and shouted, “I’ve got twenty dollars for anyone who wants to fight my brother!”

  A lithesome young woman I had not noticed until then was walking toward our table. When she got there she took the twenty dollars in one hand, pulled Reggie out of his chair with the other, and said, “I’ll fuck him for twenty dollars.”

  And took off with my kid brother. I had another beer, sitting all alone, wondering whether I should hold up another bill. Then I had to up and walk home all alone. Well, home, eh? Used to be a home. Not mine. I didn’t see my brother till Sunday afternoon.

  Honey didn’t like to have me hanging around her shop, or even to drop in. It was her domain, her hive, whatever. It was not a home so much as it was another life. Not that I was crazy about visiting the place. I have never been that much interested in fabrics and furnishings. I have never seen a cover of Home & Furnishings magazine that I liked. If they were to have the nerve to show us a small room with nothing in it but a room-sized mattress, I might riffle the mag. But brocades and tassels and bolts of organza I find about as exciting as cocktail jazz.

  If I was ever to get home, really home, or if I was to visit from time to time — I mean the house I almost shared with Honey and the kid — I’d make myself a cup of coffee and head straight to my so-called studio. In the olden days it held a homemade easel and some books and paper and incoming letters and a typewriter. Later it held more books, less paper, more incoming letters and a series of computers. There was a homemade easel under something somewhere. I didn’t know much about these computers — they were typewriters with screens.

  The main thing about my studio. It was messy. It was cramped even though it was originally intended to be a garage. The chair I sat in had forgotten how to swivel, and sometimes it even fell over, though you would swear that it couldn’t. There was an area rug that had once been on the floor of my bedroom in the basement of my childhood house in Lawrence. It had known its share of spiders and jism over the years. Once in a while I would get out the hand-held vacuum cleaner and spiff it up. That’s when I would often find half-written poems or little bits of wisdom that were supposed to find their ways into essays about the artist’s life. Most of the wall space was taken up with buckshee bookshelves and the odd photo in a dime-store frame. One charcoal drawing of my sister, made when I was in high school.

  I wasn’t in this space to get it ready for a spread in Exquisite Homes. Honey was going for that in the rest of the house. In fact, she did make it once, sort of, a page in a year-end feature of a city magazine whose name eludes me — or maybe I elude it.

  Anyway, sometimes I felt like an intruder rather than the hero of the story as I walked past well-thought-out floral arrangements and damask whatevers on the way to my room.

  I had two kinds of clothing, as you might imagine. There were the expensive and ill-fitting overcoats and dress shirts that Honey bought me to make up for her much more exciting spending on renovations. And there were the clothes I usually wore — my black denim trousers and the sweaters I’d got somehow, I don’t remember how, twenty-five years earlier in a snowy city across the continent.

  What I really tried to do, much of the time, was to feel at home in my skin.

  One night back in August of 1965 we squeezed five people into Federico’s fender-beaten Renault and drove down the blue-lit streets of Mexcity to a rock and roll place on a corner I’d never seen before, Club Harlem — no dancing, the young Yankee-looking Indios with Beatles hair and upsweeps, doing the frug and the jerk on their stools before tables of checker-cloth and ten-peso fancy coffee.

  Electric guitars and loud drums coming from a tiny stage in one corner — loudspeakers high on the walls, the Rockin’ Devils is the band, very loud Yankee rock and roll classics and crazy new English sounds — the singer wails in English, loud Spanish sad accent, they don’t have a band uniform, but they all seem zooty rockers, pounding it out.

  Later we squeeze back into the Renault, down long Insurgentes of bare streetcar tracks, around crowded Saturday-night tourist section, what, the Zona Rosa, maybe, to the kosher café filled with hip books for sale in English and Spanish, great paintings and murals and
sculptured bronze bust of the owner, who is a middle-aged Jewish beatnik with pipe and frizz goatee and balding frizz on his head, his face in all the paintings we see now, he is there, and rushes to Federico — he has checked the proofs of his new book of poems, lots of excitement, amid kosher Mexican foodstuffs, and a drunk is led quietly out the back glass doors — President Kennedy ate in this café, Felipe Ehrenberg the cool painter is here with his friend the Polish choreographer from Nuevo York, used to dance in Tashkent, my favourite dream city. You can tell who it is I’ve been reading.

  After the immense meal we drop Clayton E. at his hotel by the railroad station, and continue now, two little beat Mexico cars into the mysterious north-side Mexcity of broken factories and dark streets, no street lamps for you, looking for a darkly famous bordello. Down a long narrow unlit street between blackened brick warehouses with smashed windows, ruins of adobe-like bombed-out cities in a war no one remembers, screams and really loud laughter of women from doors with bare light bulbs and radios, taxis parked in the alley, dark Mexicanos wearing midnight sunglasses sitting in them, a boy with white shirt gets into Felipe’s car, and away we go again, Honey saying she is nervous, will we actually go into the whorehouse?

  We pass a tire shop at 1:00 a.m., seven Mexican men with oil rags are putting a pretty well-used tire onto a car jacked up at the curb — around corners we go, two little dented cars, to a wide street with autos all around a long low brick building, taxis arriving and leaving with smoky diesel bursts. We pull into a dark dirt parking lot, usual youths there banging flat hand signals on back of the car, back into this narrow space between jalopies, we get out, and Federico and Felipe confer with Indio under cowboy tassel hat — he says if the women are coming to work here they have to leave, the police are nervous, but we explain that they’re not working and in we go through a curtain made of two blankets over the doorway, inside, where the first part is empty, music coming from three directions somewhere. We’re in a long row of mud huts with connecting walls broken open. We are now moving or being moved in a thick crowd of people, a lot of men, short people mostly, smoke in the air; there are tables now, and benches, where men smoke everything and drink who knows what, maybe pulque, a guitar here and there, then voices deliver plaintive quietened corazón song, there are hundreds of men, old, who knows how old, young, and a few women with them, Tristessas all, in underwear and sweaters, all fading red. Near the smelly wooden bar made of planks and boxes, the crowd gets thicker yet, people continually pushing by, two ugly shapeless little women with scowling faces jam past us. Federico turns, and all in single file we are pushing our thin way out again, my protective possessor arm around Honey’s shoulders in front of me. A man smiles at me and says, “¿Hermana, no? Muy hermosa, ah . . .”