“What?” I said leaning back, the gust of wind and the sunlight in my eyes.
“…tell you about last night?”
“You had to take the friend to the hospital?”
“Yeah—but it’s even crazier than that,” he shouted and interrupted the conversation with an eight-second rendition of G N’ R’s “You’re Crazy.”
“This girl, the Brazilian, she’s crazy. Last night we went to the Cambie for drinks. Halfway through the evening this other girl—this friend of hers, the one I had to take to the hospital—gets all hot and shaky. So we take her to emergency. We’re thinking someone’s put something in her drink. But the girl, she’s O.D.—ing on coke.”
He looked searchingly at me.
“But you know what’s incredible about this Brazilian girl. I wanted to stay with her friend, to make sure she was alright. But the Brazilian girl, she wanted to go back partying. Can you believe that? Your friend almost dies and you want to go out again and party!”
“I guess she’s Livin’ La Vida Loca,” I said.
Cam laughed. “Yeah, livin’ la vida loca.”
I looked over and saw that he was enjoying the thought.
“How about the friend, the one in the hospital?”
“I took her flowers at the hospital and she seemed okay.”
“A real Don Quixote,” I said.
“But this cop—you should’ve seen this fuckin’ chink. He was waiting for me when I came out of the hospital, when I got in the car. He was like, ‘Excuse me sir. Have you had anything to drink?’ and I said ‘No, I just took my friend to the hospital,’ and he said ‘Come on. You must have had something to drink,’ and I said, ‘No. I’ve not had anything to drink,’ and he said, ‘You must have had a drink of your friend’s beer,’ and I said, ‘No’ and he said, ‘Come on, buddy, just a sip. You must have had a sip—’ Fuck. I swear. I wanted to smack that guy.”
“What happened?”
“The fucker, he took away my license.”
“So you don’t have it now.”
He looked at me and grinned.
In a souvenir store on Denman Street Cam searched for a sun hat. A Filipino store clerk watched from the front. I was afraid he’d be suspicious of me if I didn’t do anything, so I studied a revolving rack of postcards. All showed Vancouver as glass towers between violet mountains and white-capped waves.
“So, are you going to meet this girl?”
“The Mexican?” Cam said standing in front of a mirror and trying a sun hat. “Is she hot? A good body? Que pedazo de tetas?”
“So you want to meet her?”
He tossed the hat in the bin. “Why are you trying to get me to date these women?” he said trying another sun hat. “Delve in there yourself. Try heterosexuality for a change.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said shaking his head and laughing. “Nothing.” He adjusted the brim of the tennis hat and grinned at his reflection in the mirror. “I think I like this one.”
The clerk at the counter rang in the hat. “Five forty-five,” he said.
Cam handed the clerk a ten-dollar bill and said to me, “You should have seen this cop that stopped me. Fuck man, he was such a prick. I wanted to smack him right there.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Yeah, why didn’t I?” he said taking the change from the clerk. “Thanks—do you think if I found out where he goes and start a fight with him when he’s off-duty, I’d get into trouble because he’s a police officer?”
The conversation continued as we walked through the tree-shaded streets of the West End, toward the beach. First Cam spoke of exacting revenge on the police officer, then about what he should do with the Brazilian girl. As I listened I couldn’t tell if Cam liked the girl or disliked her. One minute he said she was out of control and that he had to stop seeing her. The next, that she was very beautiful and came from a strict Catholic family.
“You know one thing that’s fucked up? That homestay father. He’s a total fucking pervert, I was talking to the Columbian guy—he’s also staying at the house—and he said that this homestay father, he buys this girl wine. That when his wife was away, he had the girl upstairs and he made dinner for her and they drank wine together, and then danced.”
“What does the girl say?”
“The girl—she’s very innocent. She just thinks he’s being nice.”
Before we reached English Bay, Cam wanted to stop. We sat at the top of a grass slope that overlooked the water. The weather that afternoon was clear. The harbour dotted with sailboats. Freighters in the distance.
Cyclists and rollerbladers glided by on the paved walk below us.
“So…is Damien out yet?”
The question came out of nowhere, and surprised me—it was the first time he’d mentioned Damien.
“I think they’re still adjusting his medication,” I said.
There was long pause before he said, “He’d probably never be on drugs in the first place if he hadn’t broken that window.
“And we know who told him to do that,” he added, insinuatingly, “and then ran around outside to get a better look.”
I didn’t reply.
“Can I ask you something?” His tone was different.
“Yeah?” I said.
He was looking at the ocean. “Have you ever thought you might just lose it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
I swallowed. Tape was stuck to my shoe, and I pulled it off. I gazed back at the distance. I didn’t know what he meant—or I didn’t want to.
“What? Like Damien?”
He let out a half-laugh. He shook his head and smiled wanly. “No. Farther than that.”
I studied the sole of my right shoe. A small stone was caught in my tread. I searched the grass, found a twig and dug at the stone, feeling all the while like I was in one of those scenes in a movie where the guy turns to his friend for help and the friend gives his buddy advice, and the advice turns out to be wrong. When I got the stone loose, I dug at another one.
“Sorry, am I scaring you?”
“No. It’s fine,” I said and threw the twig aside. “I think you should see someone.” As I said this I felt like a ham actor reading lines from a TV drama script.
He shook his head.
“Why?’
“Pride, Mr. P., Pride.”
I stared back at English Bay and realized, almost with horror, what a beautiful day it was. Clear. Bright.
“Just forget about it,” he said.
“How about now? Are you okay now?”
“Now’s okay.”
I nodded. “So you’re not going to blow that cop away?”
I knew that’s not what he was talking about, and that I shouldn’t be changing the topic—but Cam laughed.
I laughed too, and the mood lightened.
“I would love to waste that chink,” he said, and mimicked the sound of a gun firing.
Thinking of the maniac and the parked car and Brad’s (or Chad’s or whatever his name’s) head exploding, I laughed again.
Cam sighed. “I think I’m in love. I think I’m in love,” he said.
“With who? The Brazilian?”
He giggled.
The fact that he said this just after his previous announcement frightened me. But I tried not to think about it.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We both stood up. I dusted off the back of my jeans.
Things will be okay, I told myself. Things will be okay.
The beach was crowded and it took at least five minutes to find a spot. Cigarette butts and wood chips speckled the sand. I cleared away a discarded French fry container and spread out my towel. Cam sat on a log next to me, pulling off h
is white Nike shirt and exposing his dark, rippled chest.
“Are you going in the water?”
“No,” he said glancing up and down the beach. “You go. I’m going to wait here.”
Still disturbed by what he had said—or feeling that I should be—I headed into the water. The water was cold. It was cold, and I gasped when a wave hit my groin and my muscles tightened as I dove into those cold waves, the intense sensations pushing all thoughts from my head. I swam metres through the salt water under the surface, and opening my eyes, stared into the dark mud-filled nothingness.
When I surfaced, the skin on my back burned. I wiped hair from my eyes and crouched low in the cold water, the breeze off the ocean suddenly freezing. Two boys, splashing near me, shouted something about a shark.
A metal barge was moored about fifty-feet from shore. It would be used later in the summer for The Symphony of Fire. Closer, there was a small diving platform. A slide was on top, and bathers were sliding down it.
I pushed off and swam out and climbed up the ladder. The dry wooden planks were scorching. As I lay down on them, my back actually felt like it might get burnt. High up in the blue sky a thin streak of cloud lay frozen. I closed my eyes. The ocean breeze was cold on my wet skin. When it paused, the sundry sounds came to my ears, the shrill cries of children and the clanking sound of people rocketing down the slide. I enjoyed the blank feeling of these sensations. I enjoyed the clean, empty feeling they gave me and I lay there another minute. When I sat up and opened my eyes, blotches appeared on my vision. At the raft’s edge there was a girl of about fifteen. She sat with her legs in the water. Her face reminded me of my cousin Emily’s, but this girl’s breasts were larger. But then Emily’s breast might be larger too—I hadn’t seen her in a year. I guessed I would get to see at Harrison, at the end of summer, if they’d changed. This girl arched her back, adjusting the strap of her turquoise bikini, and I closed my eyes again and tried to recall Maria’s face. I saw Cam’s face instead. I imagined him standing behind her. Her head fallen against his broad shoulder. His hand sliding down her front. Her breasts in his large hands. Her brown nipples between his fingers. Her mouth half open.
I sat up quickly, and covered my crotch with my left arm.
Cam had left my jeans and T-shirt lying on my towel unattended. I checked to see if my wallet was still in my jeans, and scanned the beach for Cam. When I found him he was standing near the footpath, talking to two guys, and I picked up my things and headed to join them.
One of the guys I suppose was good-looking, with a kind of James-Dean haircut, but he was very short. Cam introduced him as Stephan and said he was from Switzerland. The other guy, Lance, was tall and lanky and from some country I’d never heard of before.
The conversation they were having was about how to pick up women, how to bang women, how to get rid of women after you bang them.
Bored, I said that I was going to go take a piss.
The washroom was cool, and I blinked a number of times as my eyes adjusted to the dimness. The urinal, an old-style one, was a raised step before a tiled wall with a trough at its base. The standing area was gritty with sand I imagined to be soaked with urine, so I stood on the sides of my feet—afraid that I would contract AIDS through some microscopic cuts on my soles.
When I went to the sink to wash my hands, I noticed that the doors to the toilet stalls only went halfway up, and wondered if this was to prevent people from having sex or from doing drugs.
You delve in there yourself. Try heterosexuality for a change.
I washed my hands.
When I came out, Cam had disappeared again, my clothes and towel lying on the grass beside where he and the two men had stood. Thinking perhaps he’d gone to the washroom or to the concession stand, I sat on the log beside the path to wait. A rollerblader passed me with his dog and then a woman with very long hair. The hair moved suddenly and I saw that she wasn’t wearing a top.
It took another twenty minutes to figure it out, but Cam had left without me.
Maria looked slightly sunburned. She leaned forward and kissed my left cheek.
“’ola,” she said.
“Hola.”
We were standing at the corner of Denman and Robson. Maria’s white jeans and T-shirt looked purple in the twilight.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Crowds swarmed past us. One of the drunken teens walking in front of Maria shouted, “She’s a skank.” He wasn’t talking about her, but I wondered if she understood the term.
The light was fading. An uneasiness was in the air. Again I felt that feeling I’d felt that day on Robson Street, the feeling that people were watching us, that someone would come out of nowhere and punch me in the face.
At the bottom of Denman, something was happening. I knew it was a fight from the loud boos and gasps, and saw over the shoulders and between the backs of heads, a blood-covered face; I pushed closer.
But Maria tugged my sleeve. We untangled ourselves from the group and headed toward the beach. Whiffs of marijuana came on the breeze. The dusk sky was rippled with grey and scarlet, the water of English Bay luminous.
I glanced back at Maria and breathed in deeply, making a face. She laughed.
As soon as the fireworks were over, people surged back toward the city. It was too crowded for me to think and I reached for Maria’s hand and made my way through them. I’d grabbed the hand so that she wouldn’t lose me, but wondered if she thought it meant something, and if it did mean something.
Downtown, we headed north on Granville, jostling through beggars and street protestors, past lines of night-clubbers, street kids with their pet dogs and “Hungry” signs, past sidewalk merchants’ velvet-covered tables, turquoise and silver jewellery, past the entrances to sex shops, mannequins in bondage gear in a window, past a busker who coughed and began “Sweet Leaf” on his acoustic, past an arcade, past this man in a brown business suit with padded shoulders who yelled in front of a movie theatre “Just as in the days of Noah… just as in the days of Noah!”
And all the while the smell of marijuana came steadily on the breeze and my hand in Maria’s glanced her hip, and for a second I felt connected to the city.
Two goths with a German shepherd sat beside the door of the McDonald’s on Smithe. On the way in, I tossed the change I had in my pocket in their turned-up fedora.
A Japanese woman was waiting in the line-up, her arms crossed. She had high black boots and a mask-like face.
Maria was hungry. I got two apple pies.
As we sat and ate, we talked. I asked her how to say a few things in Spanish, and I said them, and she giggled. She looked at me and asked if I had a girlfriend. I said no. I asked her if she had a boyfriend. She said no.
The house’s porch light, shining through the passenger-side window, silhouetted Maria’s head. She turned to face me. I didn’t say anything. She leaned over and kissed my lips. We kissed again. Then one more time. I enjoyed the feeling of the kisses. We kissed gently three or four more times and we opened our mouths and I put my tongue in her mouth and felt her tongue reaching for mine. I didn’t know what to do, so I moved my tongue around and around. After doing this for a while, I got bored and wondered if I could touch her breasts. With the Spanish women, you’ve got to take them. This repeated itself in my head and I imagined recounting the scene to Cam, and felt the need to make it more interesting. But still I was nervous. If she stopped me, I would feel cheap and dirty. I placed my left hand gently against her stomach and moved it gradually toward her breasts, expecting to be stopped. I reached inside the bottom of her T-shirt and again lay my hand against her stomach. The skin was soft, it was hot and smooth. I left my hand there a minute, while I kissed and hugged her. I slid my hand toward her breast—I felt certain that she would stop me. She didn’t. I grabbed her breast through the rough lace of her bra and squeezed it three times and pulled
back the cup and pinched the nipple. The nipple was large and firm and I flicked it back and forth with my finger and squeezed the breast. I thought this is what she wanted me to do and I felt excited, but not as much as I thought I would. Doing this, I realized that I was forgetting to move my tongue in her mouth. All this was exciting for a few minutes, but then I was again bored. Almost without me even noticing that they were doing it, my fingers began to play with her nipple much as they would a small coin in my pocket or a spring. After another minute, I pulled her bra cup back in place. I got out and went around to the other side and let her out. As she stepped out of the car I felt weird, like it was the first time I was seeing her that evening. The person whom I’d been kissing and whose breast I’d fondled seemed like someone entirely different.
During the midsummer long weekend at the beginning of August, I seemed to be the only person left in Vancouver. Kris was at a real estate convention in Whistler, Alex was at her family’s cabin in The Shuswaps, Damien was at home but only wanted to stay indoors and play Nintendo, Sadie was on the Island, and whenever I called Maria the male roommate said she was out.
As for Cam, I’d called his house over the past two weeks and left at least ten messages on his machine. He hadn’t returned one of them.
The Police’s “Message in a Bottle” was on the poolside radio. I swam six laps, then crouched in the shallow end and held my breath. Everything was silent except for the muffled sound of the music and the gurgling of the pool’s filtration system. Still under, I remembered Paul Ramsey, my friend’s older brother, doing this. He had seen some documentary about Polynesian skin divers—the ones who go six or seven minutes without air—and began to practice himself. His parents figured that was what he had been doing when it happened—at least, that’s what they told people. No one really knows though, because no one else was at home. They returned from Hawaii and the body was floating in the pool.
My throat and lungs now burned. I held my breath longer and thought of what it would be like if I lost consciousness—passed out, died. I could imagine Damien and Cam and Alex standing around and looking at my casket. But what I couldn’t imagine was where it would be. When my parents died they were cremated, I remember being told that, and told that we were going to do something with the ashes—but I can’t remember if we ever did. And my grandparents, they both had small graveside services, but that was because they’d requested them.
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