A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden

by Stephen Reid

  You’ve never been hooked until you’ve been hooked on Camels. Another year passed: first thing each morning I tapped out one of those non-filter Turkish blend little suckers and fired it up. The smoke hit bottom like an overhead right to the lungs. I was wired to the hilt by the time they sent me home to a Canadian prison, where it was nothing but Export A and Drum tobacco. I threw cigarettes to the ground again.

  Not a few years later the clock ran out on my sentence and I was released. I went to work pounding nails for a skinny carpenter who smoked the longest, strongest cigarettes you can buy and still be called a Canadian. This guy went all day, a cigarette dangling out the corner of his mouth, driving six-inch spikes in three clean swings. I figured it must be in the cigarettes; by the time I got the hang of pounding spikes and learned it had nothing to do with cigarettes, I was hooked again. I finally got lucky with a film script, and was able to quit the heavy labour, but by then I was pounding back a pack a day of Players Light.

  Meanwhile my youngest daughter developed a habit of her own: breaking my cigarettes, lecturing me on second-hand smoke, leaving pictures of black and tarry lungs on my pillow, and telling me how my clothes smelled bad. How I stank. I caved in and quit again.

  A couple of years after that my daughter and I took a five-star holiday to Cuba. While my eight-year-old danced the Macarena with the hotel dance instructor, I started up a conversation with an elderly Cuban gentleman who rolled Cohiba Robustos in the lobby. What could be the harm in an occasional fine cigar? Even my daughter agreed: cigars are cool. I returned home with five boxes in my suitcase.

  By the second box I was inhaling, and I’d stopped handing them out. When my stock ran out I went to the local tobacconist to replenish it. A box of the cigars I bought in Cuba, I discovered, cost, in Canada, about the same as a used BMW. Before long I was smoking smaller and smaller cigars until I was right back down to cigarettes.

  Now both my daughters were on my case. The older one had turned fifteen and was far too mature to smoke. She’d quit, and she was riding me the way only a reformed fifteen-year-old smoker can. Time to get quit again.

  The patch. Great dreams but it made my skin itchy, and I got so-so results. I asked my doctor to prescribe Zyban: Zyban appealed to me because you got to keep smoking for the first part of the regime. But I wasn’t only taking the Zyban, I was eating Percodans all day. One Zyban, ten Percodans. It didn’t seem to be having the desired effect. The way cigars led me back to cigarettes, the Percodans took me back to heroin, which in turn put me back on the wrong side of a prison wall.

  As I awaited trial, and the announcement of Sheldon Green’s (BC Attorney General’s office) and the WCB-ordained smoking ban in BC jails, I continued to light up. A few days before New Year’s, no smoking ban in sight yet, they tossed me in the hole — for possession of a contraband X-Acto knife blade. I was going to use it to slit my throat if I couldn’t quit. Prohibited from smoking, I managed to quit for two days, then a few minutes before midnight the youngster in the adjacent cell fished me over a contraband cigarette. It was the eve of the new millennium: that was my last cigarette. Of the 20th century, that is.

  Now that I’ve been transferred to the federal system maybe there is something I can do to spite both judges. Quit, just because one said I didn’t have to, and by doing that maybe win back the years the other one sentenced me to.

  A WCB spokesperson characterized Justice Sunni Stromberg-Stein’s ban on the smoking ban as “a bump in the road.” For most cigarette addicts it’s been a long road, a road as straight and flat as a run of bad luck.

  THE CARVING SHED

  A CURTAIN OF RAIN FALLS SOFTLY across the tin roof, mixing like a snare drum with the rhythm of Frog Lake on the tape player. There is the smell of red cedar and the shadows of two men carving in silent concentration. The shed is Native Brotherhood territory but I’m welcomed here not just because my great-grandmother was Ojibway, but because in the eyes of the Brotherhood, anyone who has done as many years in a white man’s prison as I have must be all right.

  Under the yellow light tacked to the crossbeam, our little carving shed becomes a world unto itself. Space and time seem to pause together and suspend the three of us in a gift of place. The razor wire, the gun towers, the years behind us, and the years ahead don’t hold much weight in the curve of this moment.

  Bobby kicks the cedar shavings from a moon mask he’s been working on into a small pile. Narcisse, an elder, who has been whittling a talking stick, unfolds his tobacco pouch and rolls a cigarette. No hurry, we’re on Indian time as he’s fond of saying. I mark my page in a new hardcover I’m reading, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, the story of young Haisla “Flower”, a girl coming of age in the coastal village of Kitamat.

  I turn Bobby’s moon mask in my hands, checking the depths of the cuts, running my thumbs along the swirling grain. I pass the mask to Narcisse. Bobby is encouraged enough by Narcisse’s silent inspection to suggest mother of pearl for the eyes. Narcisse says “abalone shell.”

  Young Shawn comes running in out of the rain. He squeezes the water from his ponytail, his long blue-black hair as shiny as a crow’s tail, hangs his soaked benny on a nail. Underneath he’s wearing a sweat top illustrated with a pair of manacled hands and the words “Free Leonard Peltier”. Shawn made the sweater’s logo when he first drove up on this bit but in the ensuing months his consciousness has shifted from the political towards the spiritual and his red fist has become unclenched. He says now of the sweater, “It’s more like wearing a poppy, to remember, plus it keeps me warm.”

  Shawn reaches under the workbench and makes me a present of one of his drums, a caribou hide stretched over a pine frame. Last week, I helped him bang out a gradual release plan and filled in the corresponding applications. Afterwards we sat together to write a different letter, this one to his Tsinii Al up in Haida Gwaii. I had to dig it out of him to find words, his words, to make it his voice and his letter. Shawn had come down from Masset and landed in the East End of Vancouver. When the pavement came between him and the earth, he fell into confusion, addiction, and when welfare was no longer enough, he became involved in senseless crime. Many of his friends ended up in small boxes in cheap funeral homes but Shawn ended up here in a bigger box. Prison, is, simply put, the bottom rung of the welfare ladder.

  The Correctional Service of Canada tries. They recognize the gulf between native and white rehabilitation. They encourage the Native Brotherhood to function, they hire native contract workers to act as counsellors, teachers and Elders. They allow the carving shed, the sweat lodge, and a private space for healing circles. In spite of the tension and mistrust from both sides, the red path is attainable — if a native prisoner recovers his culture, he recovers himself.

  Tonight, Shawn’s face is etched in troubled lines as deep as Bobby’s mask. He tells me he wanted to take the money from selling his drums and make restitution to his ex-landlady, the woman who returned home to broken locks, smashed lamps, and missing valuables. Case management had turned him down, stating there is no process within Corrections to make restitution without a court order.

  A hundred years ago, Shawn would have faced his victim and his village in a longhouse. Restitution would have been part of the determination. Shawn would have been punished and the circle would have been damaged but it would not have been broken.

  In Eden Robinson’s story, her uncle Mickey has just landed on the doorstep after a long absence. He’s been “away.” Uncle Mickey is wearing a “Free Leonard Peltier” T-shirt. But as Uncle Mickey begins an overnight boat trip, taking young Lisa Marie up to the traditional oolichan fishing grounds, I suspect that out there amongst the seals and Kermode bears, where the dark water laps at the stone beaches and bleached logs stick out like old bones, that Uncle Mickey will not be denied his process, the one that existed there ten thousand years before the first iron bar was ever poured.

  IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN

  USUALLY A BOBBY PIN LYING IN a puddle
on concrete wouldn’t make me stop and stare in wonder, but there I was, dead in my tracks. Maybe it was because the puddle was on the caged-in roof yard of a maximum security segregation unit in Matsqui, a men’s prison.

  Maybe it was because last week I went to bed with seven women. Of the seven, I had met five previously at various social functions. One of them I married. Each of them lies between the covers of a tantalizing little book titled, Desire, In Seven Voices, a collection of essays edited by Lorna Crozier.

  Although the introduction alludes to all sorts of mystical connections to the number seven, I have put my own spin on it. I have been using the book the way a convict puts an X on the wall, an essay to mark each passing day. A week of women.

  Monday, I was in a cool blue room with Evelyn Lau; Tuesday I blushed with Bonnie Burnard as she wrote about the hard evidence of desire. On Wednesday, I fell in love with Shani Mootoo’s tender admissions. Thursday, I had dinner and went to Paris with Carol Shields. On Friday, I wanted to eat the snow off of Lorna Crozier’s mittens. It’s Saturday and I’m driving with my wife, Susan Musgrave. She’s got the top down and she’s over the speed limit. I wanted to smoke a cigarette afterwards. A Number 7 of course.

  As I bent to pick up the bobby pin, I remembered I was being closely observed by three young women in uniform on the other side of the smoked-glass office windows. The bobby pin was my red wheelbarrow/glazed with rainwater/beside the white chickens moment.

  Most of my free life has been spent in the company of women and their objects. I grew up with five sisters and the quintessential mother. I’m married with two daughters, and our house is usually filled with their girlfriends, most whom treat me as their confidante or other dad. Even four of our five cats are females. But I’m still trying to get used to being guarded by women.

  One of them comes to open the grill with a key the size of a garden trowel. My yard time is up. She is polite, so am I. We have formed the relationship. I’m an old con, in every sense of the word; a deferential drop of the eyes gets me through all the gates in any prison, except the front one.

  I have a relationship with all three of these guards. They are the day shift, in charge of the fifteen or so segregation prisoners. I am not in seg per se, I work up here. I serve the meals, I wash, fold, and issue the laundry, and I mop the floors the women walk on. I’ve come a long way, baby.

  Female guards are the most professional within the Corrections community. They must not only be guards, they have to be guarded. When one of them summons me for a chore or a lockdown, she addresses me by last name only. I know their names by the tag pinned to their blouses but I avoid using them.

  When they give me a pat-down search, I blush. There is nothing sexual, nothing intimate, about their hands on my body. I blush because this touching makes us all less human.

  These three young women in another setting, would be friends of my daughter, or neighbours I would wave to as they passed by on their bicycles, or even students in my writing workshops. Sometimes a bobby pin in a puddle on concrete is the saddest object.

  I like solitary, but I like this better, working up here. I have the relative quietude, but also a bit of freedom. And I’ve got a cleaner’s closet to which I can retreat. I keep a chair in the narrow space between the washers and the dryers on one side, and the shelves filled with puffed wheat, tins of brown sugar, and boxes of styrofoam cups on the other. It’s there, in my little cubbyhole, between the smell of warm towels and toasted cereals, where I read and try not to think.

  A critic once described me as someone who thinks things. It became a household joke. Whenever I would be staring off into space as if the grief of the world were on my shoulders, and a visitor would ask “What’s the matter with him?” my wife would answer, “Oh, that’s just Stephen, he thinks things.” But my best thinking got me into this cubbyhole: I pick up my book and turn to the page I left off at.

  I love writers for what they do. These women’s essays touch me in the most intimate ways of all, yet the words jump over gender and make me, for the reading, a little more human.

  The buzzer on the dryer sounds. Another cycle done, time to fold towels. Tomorrow will bring Sunday but who can predict where Dionne Brand will take desire.

  I tuck the little book in amongst the pile of towels just as a key raps loudly on the door, followed by a female voice. Reid! Food carts up. It was her way of letting me know it is time to serve meals.

  Come Monday, with Desire depleted, I’ll have to find a new book. Maybe there’s one out there titled Amnesia, in 6,570 Voices, one to forget each passing day.

  BUSHWHACKING SOUTH OF THE BORDER

  THE LAST TIME I READ A PLAYBOY MAGAZINE, Jimmy Carter (who, by the way, would have known how to properly treat Saddam — he would have built him a new house) was the President of the United States. But hey, fuck the war and fuck the decline of the American presidency; what is of real significance here is the demise of pubic hair on American women. I had my first gape score at a centrefold in a lot of years and whoa and behold! Miss April got no hair down there!

  I flipped to the other pictorials only to discover they all wore the same prepubescent vertical smile. I know these models have to be at least twenty-one to win a staple through their nipple from Hef, so how come most sport none, or very little, pubic hair? Even those who retain a thin wispy line have a mons veneris that looks more like a “Got Milk” commercial than the garden patch of a grown woman.

  I have been in prison for too long, haven’t viewed erotica for even longer. I sense that something of great social and cultural import has passed me by. Where did all those dark and curly Bermuda triangles disappear to? And when? It’s like I fell asleep one night, and, in a reverse Rip Van Winkle, the whole continent got busy with the shaving cream. But an even more meaty question stared out at me from between the legs of this new fashion mode. Why?

  Why, since I last looked, have pubic hairs, at least the public pubes, been clipped, cut, tonsured, trimmed, shaved, depilatoried, mowed, and mohawked? Perhaps G-string thongs and ittier-bittier bikini bottoms have moved women to narrow even further that thin middle line of modesty. But bikinis of all sizes have been around since Frankie danced with Annette and only a slight cropping was all that’s ever been needed to make a wedge suitable for the viewing audience. And when it comes down to the G-string, modesty is no longer even in the movie. So why have all the nether goatees been so ruthlessly and utterly hacked into nothingness?

  It is only the nothingness that is new to me. Women I’ve known have always had a penchant for pruning. I once had a girlfriend who shaped hers into a heart for Valentine’s. I knew another who clipped her fiancée’s into a diamond on their engagement night, and then there was an all-girls band in the ’70s who contoured theirs into little guitars. But this modern vogue, this movement toward clear cutting, is a whole other slice of the honey pie.

  Young women who like a clean line must, at least in part, inherit their crisp aesthetics from computer era imagery. Sort of a Laura Croft imitation. Or maybe it’s global warming. There are evolutionary raisons d’etre for body hair and one of them is warmth. Perhaps with the earth temperature rising there is just too much heat down there in the pearly kitchen. How then do we explain the bare labes of those northern girls, especially the ones living above the 49th parallel? Do their lips stick to the crossbar in sub-zero weather? Surely in a country where the national symbol is the beaver, the pelt is not going to become extinct?

  In another evolutionary trick, hair south of the navel is there to trap pheromones in its tangled locks. Pheromones are those little dancing musk devils produced to attract the opposite sex — in the case of the female body, to lure the unsuspecting male of the species towards her cave. Perhaps women who shave are making a statement. They choose not to trap men with a beguiling scent, opting for a more open, more conscious and less subliminal means of attraction. If true, some would have to ask themselves hard questions about perfume.

  Pubic hair also a
cts as the local police force: it’s there to serve and protect, to prevent friction and act as a buffer. But with the advent of the female jock strap, hair does present a feeble sort of protection. Some women may see it as simply obsolete.

  Whatever all the different reasons women are trimming, there is one I know to be true. It is because their sexual partners prefer them that way. This is some cultural/generational preference I am not getting. Maybe my generation just didn’t convey our wishes.

  Something else changed with the young and the restless. I didn’t grow up with Sex Ed classes being about AIDS and hepatitis and all the STDs. I didn’t learn in grade six that condoms were as necessary as looking both ways before you cross the street. What is there to say to a generation of young lovers that has been taught sex is death, that there is a deadly virus lurking behind every bush? Small wonder they are not looking for a mystery lair. They don’t want to peer through the undergrowth, nor their garden to be secret. They want a visible and clear shot at whatever they are getting into. Maybe it is the search for prepubescence itself because, at an even more subtle level, theirs is a generation that loses its innocence at a way too tender age.

  After my initial shock and bewilderment at seeing Miss April with the southern isosceles of a ten-year-old, things have gone from bad to worse. I have since learned, while out in the compound talking about this phenomenon to a new generation of cons, that it is now common for young men to shave — and I’m not talking five o’clock shadows here. It’s some sort of buff image trip. I been in the weight pit off and on for over a century, and I believe if you aren’t bulked like Arnie or at least be flexing muscles in the professional ring then you got to be like fireman calendar gay to be waxing the hair off your body.