Salvage King, Ya!

by Mark Anthony Jarman

  Gone.

  Who stole my Love Me Tender Elvis shampoo? That janitor said he hadn’t seen it but I bet he grabbed it. He coveted my Elvis shampoo. This I have on good authority. Anyone have any shampoo? O.K., see you at the bar. You owe me a beer.

  OUT! they said at the bar. The Gold’s Gym bouncers knocked our full glasses to the floor, drawing audible gasps from a number of thirsty souls, thirsty throats. Drums going, fighting with static and videos.

  “You’re so intense,” I said to the bouncer’s eyes.

  I slipped from them and began joyful hissing, hissing loudly while doing an impromptu karate dance under the lit dartboard. I was all bent over and herky-jerky and hissing through my expensive teeth. I distinctly heard someone remark to someone else at their table, “Yeah, but doesn’t the curry all rise to the bottom?”

  Rise to the bottom? I felt wounded. I picked up a chair and thrust it through the ceiling’s acoustic tile. I was still hissing, taking the time to make the role convincing. They try to catch me over by the big windows but I am a cloud, I am full of cold rain. How I love the brewing open ocean, the blue nesting of beautiful evenings. When my parents left their green homes to emigrate to Canada, is this the kind of evil bughouse scrambling they hoped for their son in the New World?

  My car radio won’t work deep in the mountain passes. Deprived of signals, it must feel orphaned. Scary Monsters threads the tape deck. You smell the pulp mill from a distance, see sparks from the cone burner, the identical company houses across from the huge saws and the night shift working the green-chain, snow held on a heap of tailings, moonlight on the coal like milk, moonlight on a hotel mattress. The old wooden hotel: the country guitarist says, “Well, it was in tune when I bought it.” The red-haired woman requests Sixteen Tons, Muleskinner Blues, moves from side to side with the backbeat when it’s there.

  The redhead goalie moves from side to side in his crease, makes a great kick save but breaks his ankle doing it. I help him off the ice. I see him puking in the toilet from the pain. When I was young I had an iron bed and a bedspread with tiny hockey players on it, all of them skating upright, smiling pleasantly. Now, when the shinpads come off, your eye sees the zippers on the knees around the room: let us compare scars.

  CHAPTER 20

  Drugs: Part 2

  Outside a solid church in Philadelphia, a brother and a sister in their sky blue car, shot overnight in the back of the head by whoever was their passenger, perhaps a friend. A $10 vial of crack on the floor of the car. Lungs, blood, heart, brain: a train connected and steaming, then stopped. It was their birthday. He was a security guard, she a nurse. The romance and glamour of the service sector. Like me. Now his big foot in a sneaker sticks out the car window. Nice kids, the routine chorus says, no enemies. Went to see a friend, nothing unusual; now strangers peer at their long bodies in the church parking lot. Police place plastic bags over their hands in case of hair or skin under the nails.

  I ask a wide-eyed kid, What happened?

  Bad man shot him in head, he dead.

  I wonder, did the ancient Chinese envision this scene when they started messing around with gunpowder? What would the brother and sister’s stance be on the NRA about now?

  I’m sick of this Billy Ocean tape, a young woman says.

  Well, stop playing it then, the kid says. The crack players come and go, speaking of Michelangelo. Leaves like bronze coins, wires between us and the sky. Stones leap to windows with miraculous coordination, finding the sweet spot, the pane that will surrender early.

  CHAPTER 21

  King of Prussia

  My relatives are as sweet as can be, I love them dearly, but their city makes me nervous. Do they actually want to live here or is it serious denial? Everything that can be kicked in, is. To my innocent western eye, Philly looks crashed and East European and hopeless; I’m not used to the trash and truly faithful vandalism and abandoned rows of brick colonial houses, cobblestones torn up or stolen, creepy feral plants growing over closed minor factories, bricked ex-Quaker windows for weird-ass wild miles along the commuter track, the land of no tax base. Downtown I wander Locust, Walnut, Market, watching the ugly descendants of the Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Hussars, Hungarians, Slavs, slaves, Dutch, Puritans, four continents’ roving bone mass, all with faces like the famous bagels and pretzels and chestnuts. A pretty woman is even more striking than usual amidst so much lip and nose, so many inflated faces. A different gene pool.

  A uniformed conductor is swearing up and down on the Chestnut Hill train: Kill that motherfuckuh. Kill that mother-fiickuh.

  My aged Irish aunt glares up at him with cat’s eye glasses while my American cousins stare at the floor. Most passengers opt to not hear, to not see.

  Burn ha ay ass. Be ‘bout billion contracts out on his ass.

  He got me, got me good. Three minutes late, I was three minutes late!

  He wrote me up and sent me home for three days. Kill that motherfuckuh ....

  Our train shrieks, its high metallic sounds somehow connected to our conductor’s soliloquy, to my nerve endings, and the same old tune of worker and boss, hand and glove grievances.

  I am the new world, we are all claiming. I and I. Me! Me, myself and I; we’re all going to kill that motherfucker.

  The humidity is 90%. I’m on my third shirt. My favourite uncle, now eighty, is yelling: “They’re all bloody nuts! The only damn mayor of a city in America, in the world, to bomb his own city! Pizza!? You don’t eat that slop do you? I wish I’d had the guts to move from here twenty years ago. I should have moved to Canada. This place is going to the dogs I tell you, I’m glad I’m not going to be around much longer.” My uncle has been saying this since WWII. He came here from Ireland in 1923 and still has the Dublin accent, pronouncing guts as goots, nuts as noots.“They’re all bloody noots!”

  Jersey City; Albany; Philadelphia; Gary, Indiana; these are cities more ancient than Persia, than Carthage. They’ve been through the wars, these are the oldest places I’ve seen. They make me think of the breezy lake, of home, of lighting out. But if everyone keeps lighting out for the territories there’ll be none left. Everywhere will be kicked in, everyone will be bombing their own city.

  I call Waitress X and ask what’s up, she’s different, not leaving notes under my windshield wiper or returning messages. Our necking seems forced, solemn, religious (we must).

  She says, I feel guilty now about my boyfriend, I want time away from it all to think things over. Two weeks ago she brought bottles and books and deli treats, said she didn’t want to be alone all the time with her cat. Now she says she wants to be alone with her cat. Here’s metal more attractive.

  Waitress X says, “This seems kind of unstable.”

  “Unstable. Is that bad? Next we’ll be sensible.”

  “Sensible,” she says wistfully.

  “Is it over?”

  She pauses before answering. Does she know before me? Obviously she does.

  “Well . . . no. No, not necessarily over per se. Not at all.” Her expression is abstract.

  “Per se. That helps.” She still knows how to smile.

  Not even one summer. A simple fling, nerveless, sunny. What is simple now?

  I want to phone her but resist, desist, whatever the word is. She is becoming invisible. She has made a judgement.

  I thought I was different but I’ve joined the yahoos, they’re laughing in the cafés.

  My Intended has an expensive plant with spider mites. She’s tried everything but can’t get rid of the mites. Finally she chucks the whole beautiful thing in the dumpster. My Intended says, Some things you can’t salvage, sometimes, she says, sometimes it’s really stupid to keep trying.

  After the waitress stopped calling, the worst part was not that she thought badly of me, but that perhaps she didn’t think of me, period. Once I was on her mind, inside her. I remember her phone call once with a shadowy rich man to the east. She asked why he hadn’t written.

  He s
aid, “Actually, I hadn’t thought that much about you.”

  Well I’ve seen that movie now. What has happened to her she visits on me. That must be it. I’m her punching bag. When Frederico the male model stood her up to jog with the woman model instead, she told me, I wasn’t crazy about him, but still it hurt, it hurt my ego you know? Yes. She felt orphaned, older, sensed the new broom coming at her for the first time. Ditto. I got old in a day, in a week, and I couldn’t tell anyone. Am I supposed to tell my Intended, Gee, someone dumped me and I feel really bad? I don’t expect sympathy. You’re born thinking you’re the centre of things, and they chip away at that until you expire muttering If I knew then, or some nonsense in an empty rooming house.

  I refuse to call her. Once she drank Blowjobs in a lounge with Wayne Gretzky. Who cares? Once they sliced open Fuhr for nothing; they put him on the block and sold him, sold an orphan. Who cares? The rich man gave her a vintage red Mustang. Who cares? But I see the red car parked and want to fall down prone on the sidewalk.

  I am a plain man. I’ve inhabited Nebraska, taken speeding tickets along the Platte River roads, been traded, put on the block. Knowing the corners is not enough. I drive and I drive and never get there. Rain does not follow the plough and the crops failed. The doctor could not seem to save himself from drowning. My dentist killed his wife. At 3:00 A.M. trees look like smoke and the small bedroom smells of cedar, of the 1950s. Every tress must be confessed. Give us a prescription, doctor: take two of these and call Waitress X in the morning. Enough already: enough rain, enough privileged glimpses into jerkwaters of the heart.

  CHAPTER 22

  Losing the Talwin Wars

  The Sense of that degree of love:

  Permitted every stealth I made.

  —Aphra Behn

  Hockey is a tribe with its own cruelties and allegiances.

  —Alan Eagleson

  Dropping lower and lower into sleep’s borders, where fructose and fractious foreign cities motor and movie in my head . . . SLAM! My neighbours are home and I jump awake. Thanks loads. I can hear a bass somewhere in the condos. Someone else’s bass keeps me company for several hours. In the early morning: Ring-ring!

  “This is Ed from Combat Carpets ...”

  “Fuck off Ed.”

  I rip the phone from the plaster, put it on the balcony with the Hibachi and the peeling K-Mart chairs. I should have explained to Ed: we’re the new cargo cultists, we’re hoarding adrenalin.

  Under the Holy Ghost, white trash drink and eat white bread and gravy with Lost Highway snuff queens. The chief of police barks to the local press, They are behaving as animals, then we will hunt them down like animals. Christmas: daydreaming lazily of Waitress X while raising the Intended to orgasm with my thumb barely inside and two fingers at one of the magic spots. If I give her an orgasm at midnight, a Chinese courtyard echoing, she craves another in the misty morning. Fifteen minutes of fame and gasping for air as if saved from the lake. I do some of my best thinking then, waiting. As predicted, the next day she wakes wanting the beast with two backs. “I had another dream. In my dream you were a big Indian.” One night I touched her with just my tongue, nothing else, until she pulled her knees up and turned away from me. Just like the old days. “I could get used to that,” she said later. Once I was a foreigner, a blank slate, faithful as nicotine.

  My Ex-Wife’s giant horses swim behind a spruce fence, big nostrils open behind the sullen sunflowers and I’m going to sleep content in my cabin. Huge klieg lights bob at night in the walls and hollows of the narrow valley; jacklighters killing motionless deer.

  We’re out hunting and Shirt Is Blue gets up at 6:00 A.M., climbs out of the van naked. I keep sleeping. Thirty seconds later: BOOM! BOOM! He opens the van, throws two dead ducks on the metal floor and crawls back into his goosedown army bag, starts snoring like a gas mower. I wonder if he was sleepwalking.

  He cuts the legs off silent moose with a bucksaw, hauls the quarters out while I think of Rocky and Bullwinkle, of the clumsy moose I saw years ago in Newfoundland. Blood on the dead leaves and my knees get cold; we’re on our stiff knees around a dismembered cartoon character. The dead caribou dangles from the helicopter, the animal’s antlers hacked off. It starts to spin, gets up some serious R.P.M., making me dizzy just watching.

  The bell and whir of great birds overhead in weather. There is smoke from forest fires hundreds of miles distant. Montana and Wyoming’s state forests are burning. B.C. is burning. London is burning. The airborne ash makes sundown gorgeous. A cabin on a hill. We translate the Crayola sunset without speech. From USA Today: NEW ORLEANS— Horrified restaurant patrons watched helplessly as a two-metre long shark attacked a lawyer during dinner. This has to be a gag, I think. How I wish I was a witness.

  All my Intended’s plants are entering some private autumn. For crying in the sink, she says, studying the yellow leaves, what am I doing wrong? What?

  You damn drinker, she says to me. You sold my Centennial dollar. How much did you get for it?

  Get? Why, a dollar.

  And you sold some of my books! And my Sandinista flag!

  I was at the studio parties, the loft parties, the talk of left and right hemispheres; I confess ignorance of geography. I do know of Talwin though. Ts & Blues. A lesbian in a beret burns a goldfish with a cigarette. I spot a man who looks like Sonny Bono and am paralyzed with depression, thinking That’s me in a few years, a swinger in a white turtleneck, bad hair. Everyone watches fat women dancing together.

  Match the following with any available mouth. Add caustic coke, irritating funk bass, and guitar feedback like bus brakes.

  Well, how come you get to see me and your husband, and I’m not allowed to see anyone else?

  Because!

  The missionary position gets such bad press, says Shirt Is Blue, I mean I quite like it.

  Don’t call me doll. Call me by my right name.

  Are Lee Press-On Nails as hot in Seattle as they are here?!

  Is that the name of a new band?

  Team-wise he’s a big asset. Person-wise he’s a big asshole.

  Check it out, I’m going to a blues bar and she’s dressed like a Filipino debutante. Tell me it isn’t true, you know, about Renée and her wrists.

  I am what keeps her alive, says Neon.

  Kathy! Turn that stereo up!

  Can you get me a team jacket? Tickets? A stick? The stick you crosschecked Gretzky with?

  Dave, how’s the room above the gunshop there? Testing guns in the back, all that racket in the A.M.?

  I like it, boom, boom, nice, turns my crank, cacophony, ya know.

  Kathy! Turn that stereo down!

  When’s Lanny going to retire? The legs are gone.

  Kathy! Turn that stereo up!

  I bet she wore out her knees praying for that.

  Yeats Yeats Yeats; why wouldn’t the man play hockey?

  Are you artistic?

  A little bit. I had this déjà vu dream where my soul left my body and Woody Allen was there telling jokes in a black wheelchair . . . May I?

  You . . . Certainly . . . Hey, not all of it! Jesus . . . Thanks so much.

  Just talk to the machine all right?

  You can’t listen to Blonde on Blonde all your life, says Neon.

  Why the hell not? says Shirt Is Blue.

  You’ve got Ivan’s fifteen dollars, let him have it.

  Tell him to come down here and I’ll let him have it.

  You hit me on the back of the head with a bottle and you’re . . . dead . . . meat.

  Neon’ll be spanking his carrot tonight. Hangs around those Christian girls.

  I can’t help it: they’re attracted to me.

  I can’t touch lima beans since the war.

  What war?

  Dr. Kissinger has blood on his hands, says Kathy. And in New York they love him.

  Drinkwater, here come the killer bees.

  Punctual.

  When is Lanny going to quit? When are you going
to quit?

  So I go, Jimmy, Jimmy we’re dry, in need. He goes, Name’s not Jimmy. All of a sudden he’s not Jimmy.

  Mind games see, things have changed. I got bent but not broke.

  Hey. Borrowed the money off her to come here and drink, all right? She knows who’s good to her.

  You make me ill, says Kathy. You’re a pig.

  You’re just saying that, honey. Now what a gal like you needs is—owl

  Jesus! Drinkwater busted the guy’s nose.

  Will you change? Will you retire? Never?

  Turn off that machine. I was sick, cast kittens, they threw me off the plane in Iceland. I made the bigs. Are you a reporter? Do you know? Can you?

  No, I’m Jimmy see.

  Call my fucking agent. Turn off that machine. I said . . .

  Put that knife away. Take it outside.

  Bad news pass; GM calls me to the office. Yes, your oilyness, says I. Traded again! You could’ve knocked me over with a fender.

  Put. The. Knife. Away.

  The player asks, Can I take beer with? He motions with the botde toward the waiting cab. Polaroids flash, freeze us in their red-eyed world. Like deer with the jacklighters.

  The cab driver has a weary Mediterranean accent. Come with it, he says, it’s your troubles man.

  Way downtown the city dealers are cleaning house, leaving a rival’s dead body, a man from the same 96th Street hotel as them, splayed in the witchgrass alongside the road to the lake. An old Ukrainian couple found the latest casuality. The countryside is a convenient dumping ground in the Talwin wars.

  Alberta Wheat Pool Profits Down 23 Million.

  Break-ins Up. Suicides Up.

  The rancher down the north road is looking thin as a weasel. The number of oil drilling rigs fell by a hundred thirty-four last week. There is a new class of bankrupts, of divorcées, of suicides. The downturn was expected, company spokespeople said, because incentives ceased for wells begun after Halloween. The world oil “spot” price is plunging, feed prices up, interest rates way up when you’re locked in. Now you see magpies and dead horses in the winter fields. Guys can’t afford to feed their stock, can’t afford dick. You stare at the frozen lake: pines and the end of the dock, the end of luck, snow filling the burn barrels. Be careful skating on the lake when they’ve been ice fishing. The holes freeze over a little and then open like mouths just as you glide over them. As a joke, someone on the team puts Vaseline inside my helmet. They put tape on my skate blades and I fall when I first step on the ice.