When I stopped laughing I felt I should say something in Cam’s defence. “I think he’s having some problems with his girlfriend, or something.”
“No. Fucking. Shit. No woman’s going to like that. Women want someone to make them relax, not freak them out.”
The girl who resembled Alex reached over the table. As she sat down, she pulled up the back of her jeans and slid the strap of her tank top up on her shoulder. Both gestures reminded me of Alex’s, and the girl’s short blond hair was identical.
“Is your aunt back yet?”
“From where?”
“From that trip she was on?”
“To the States?”
Damien nodded.
“She’s back, but left again.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. Vancouver Island.”
The girl got out of her chair and was walking toward me.
“Why’s she over there?”
“I don’t know.” I said, looking back at Damien. “I guess some real estate deal, something. She—”
“Trace!”
It was Alex.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Um, not much. Just drinking.”
“Didn’t you see me sitting over there?”
“Um. Yeah.”
She turned to Damien. “Hi. I’m Alex. I’m Trace’s friend.” She held her hand out, but Damien only gave a shrug and filled his schooner with beer.
She turned back to me. “Why didn’t you come over and say ‘Hi?’”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t sure it was you.”
“Are you serious?”
“You were with that guy.”
“Leroy? He’s just a friend. He’s got this band. They’re really cool.”
I nodded, still feeling strange that she’d called me her friend. “How did you get in here?”
“With this—” She held out a laminated card. It was a driver’s license that belonged to a blonde girl named Kirsten McCloy who looked nothing like Alex. “Diane got it for me. She got it from this woman at work. She said it was better to have my own I.D. than to trust, like, older guys who would get me drunk. Take advantage of me.”
“Like me?” Damien said, and tried to laugh.
Alex gave him a sarcastic grin. “Your friend’s so negative,” she said, slapping me on the shoulder while still looking at Damien.
One of the musicians strummed a chord on his Telecaster.
“Reality’s negative,” Damien mumbled.
The drummer smacked the sticks together four times, and the band started a wobbly version of “Ramble Tamble.”
“Anyway, I should get back,” Alex shouted. “Why don’t you come and join us?”
“Maybe.”
When she left, Damien asked where I knew her from.
“I met her at the library, in Edgemont. She’s one of the pages.”
“And she just started talking to you?”
“Pretty much,” I said, not wanting to tell him that she had caught me looking at The Joy of Sex and had said that everyone looked like hippies in the book.
“She’s not bad looking,” Damien said.
I shrugged, pretending I hadn’t noticed.
Damien finished the beer, then said, “Do you think she’d give me a blow job?”
At closing time, Alex said they were headed downtown to go clubbing—she asked if we would like to join them. Damien didn’t have a car, so I said, “Sure.” Damien said he wasn’t coming, but when we got out to the parking lot, he climbed in the back seat of the Buick with me.
When we closed the doors, the guy with Alex leaned over the seat and told us his name was Leroy.
I said, “Hi.”
Damien ignored him.
We were silent for the first part of the drive. When I asked Leroy about his band, he said he didn’t have one. I wanted to ask Alex why she’d said he did, then decided I didn’t care. Leroy told Alex that Dead Corpse was playing that Saturday at Seylynn Hall. She said that she had to go shopping in the States with her mother and Leroy said he hated the States. He said that they’d killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined, and that they had actually already conquered the world, and had set up puppet states like Iraq, so that people would be afraid, and think they needed the States. The book in which he had read this was written by a guy who’d later been killed by the CIA.
Damien made faces behind his back, and I looked out the window so that I wouldn’t laugh. But when Damien started chanting “USA! USA!” I got nervous.
Neither Alex nor Leroy said anything, and Damien finally stopped.
“Do you ever listen to Alan Jacob’s show,” I asked, thinking that was where Leroy’d heard about the conspiracy plot.
“Don’t listen to the show,” Leroy said, growing very serious. He leaned over the seat. “They put subliminal messages in it. If, like, you listen to twenty hours, then the US government will control you.”
“He works for the government?” I said.
“He works for the government.”
The car again fell silent. We crossed over the Georgia viaduct and the words “Cobalt Motor Hotel,” printed in faded white letters on a brick wall, made me again feel I was in a movie—Paul Hackett in After Hours, the preppy who finds himself going “downtown.”
The nightclub to which we were headed was called The Rage and we parked beneath the SkyTrain tracks, next to the old Expo grounds.
“Make sure everything is out of sight,” Leroy said as we got out.
“Is it dangerous?” Alex asked.
“No, as long as they don’t see anything.”
Three cars ahead of us a Datsun’s passenger-side window was missing, shattered glass glittering on the sidewalk beside it.
“Do you really think my car’s okay there?” Alex asked.
“Thieves only break in if they see something they want.”
We walked along the chain-link fence. Beyond it the old Expo site was now a wasteland of cracked hardtop.
“Remember Expo 86?” I asked, looking at rusted pipe sticking up out of the ground, recalling the brightly coloured pavilions and arcades and the giant ballroom in the kid zone.
“I can’t really remember it,” Alex said.
“It was so cool!” said Leroy.
“You know what was so cool?” I said. “Those, like, UFO water parks.”
“Oh yeah!” Damien said.
“Oh, I kind of remember that,” Alex said.
On the ride home from the club, Damien was completely obnoxious. He swore at Alex and Leroy in the front and accused the doorman at the club of molesting him.
“The guy was a faggot,” Damien said.
“How do you know?”
“He touched me,” Damien said, looking for something in the pockets of his raincoat.
“He touched all of us.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Damien.
“That’s what his job is,” Leroy said.
“He was frisking us,” Alex said.
“The guy wasn’t frisking us,” Damien said derisively. “The guy was a fucking pervert. He touched my dick I tell you. ”
“He did not.”
“Yeah, he did. I swear. When he checked my leg, he brushed my fucking dick.”
Leroy and I had smoked a joint outside the club and even though I knew Damien was being a complete idiot, I couldn’t help cracking up when he said these things.
“Here,” Damien said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Do you have my smokes?”
I checked my pocket for the tenth time. “No, I don’t have them,” I said.
“Fuck! I don’t believe it. Not only did he touch my dick. He stole my fucking smokes too.”
�
�Can’t you find them?”
“No. I remember I put them in my pocket and now they’re not there.”
“I’m sure you’ll find them.”
“I pay seven bucks cover for what? For some fucking faggot to steal my smokes? I pay seven fucking bucks to have my smokes stolen.”
“Are you sure they’re not in your pocket,” Alex offered.
“No, I checked,” Damien said, checking the coat’s pockets another time. “I don’t fucking believe it. I pay seven bucks to have my smokes stolen.”
“Well, it wasn’t healthy for you, anyway,” Alex said.
“Fuck you,” Damien said. “You’re not healthy for me.”
“Do you want me to stop driving?” Alex said suddenly sounding more serious than I’d ever heard her sound before.
“No keep driving, keep driving.” Damien said.
“Where are we going, anyway?”
“Someplace we can get beer,” Damien said.
“Boston Pizza’s still open. They have beer.”
“Do you want to go to Boston Pizza?” Alex asked.
No one replied. As we drove through downtown Vancouver, Damien started going on again about how he’d paid seven dollars to have his smokes stolen by a fag. I joked that a fag had stolen his fags, but no one seemed to hear me. When we got into Stanley Park we grew silent. We noticed that something was different. It was darker than usual.
The truck was on the opposite side of the road. Its front end pointed across the lane, its back pressed against the pole that supported the lane-change signals, the pole bent in half. Beneath the engine the flame flickered on the puddle of liquid.
“Is everyone alright?” Alex yelled.
Glass crunched under our feet.
“Help me.” The man’s voice sounded very small.
“Where are you?”
“Here.”
The windshield was missing. We got up to the dark cab. A large man lay on the driver’s side. The seat had collapsed backwards and the man didn’t move.
“Okay,” Alex shouted. “Stay calm.”
Damien and I tried the driver’s door. It was jammed. I went around to the other side and tried that door, but it didn’t move either.
“Fuck! It’s going to blow,” Leroy shouted.
The wavering glow on the pavement grew brighter—I stepped back.
“Has anyone called 911?”
Stopped in the middle lane was a southbound SUV, the front passenger side window down. Someone had shouted the question from the darkness inside.
“No,” Leroy shouted back.
“Got it,” Damien yelled from the other side.
I ran around the truck’s front. Damien and Alex were standing with the driver’s door open.
The man was even bigger than he’d appeared. Damien and I pulled him out of the vehicle and put his arms over our shoulders. We walked him up the causeway. He was a big man, and he wanted to lie down right away.
“Just another few feet. Just a few more,” I said.
We got him about twenty feet from the truck and lowered him on the wet grass slope beside the sidewalk, and squatted next to him.
I became aware of approaching sirens.
The front of the truck was now completely on fire. Flames licked the windshield rising higher, and climbed up toward the roof. It’s going to blow, I thought. It’s really going to blow.
A fire engine had arrived, the undersides of the tree branches lit by the flashing lights. They shut off the siren, and it was suddenly quiet. Firemen in their baggy coats got out and placed pylons around the truck, and a single fireman extinguished the fire with a hand-held extinguisher.
“He’s down here,” Alex yelled.
One of them set some type of kit on the sidewalk and crouched down.
“Sir, can you tell us your name?”
“Cook,” the man mumbled, barely moving his lips. He mumbled something else, something about mouth and glass.
I glanced again at the truck, the hood now dark and still.
Another fireman covered the man with a blanket and slid off his right shoe and sock. He touched the sole of the foot. “Nod if you can feel that.” The man moved his head.
Damien was standing beside me. He leaned over, his hands on his knees, and I noticed a package in his shirt pocket.
“What’s this?” I said. I reached in and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.
“Oh… Yeah… Thanks—don’t say anything to the others, okay?”
The police were now there and an officer came down and asked who had seen the accident. He was young and had spiked blond hair.
“We were here first,” Alex said.
“Fuck,” Damien said under his breath. “We got to go. Boston Pizza’s going to close.”
The officer took down our names and our phone numbers and said he had some forms for us to fill out and fax back to him.
“You’re not related to Kris Patterson?” he asked as he wrote down my information.
“She’s my aunt.”
He nodded appreciatively. “She sold us our house.”
Not a house; a home.
On the way to Boston Pizza Damien and I made jokes about the accident. Damien said the man’s name was Cook, and that’s what he would have done if we hadn’t saved him. I said that we should have left him and poured barbeque sauce all over the body and watched him cook. The jokes weren’t funny, but Damien and I laughed, and Alex, groaning, said that we were sooo immature.
Boston Pizza was closed.
We argued about whether to go home or to go somewhere. When we decided on Denny’s, Damien complained that he wasn’t going to get his beer. He’d saved Cook’s life but he wasn’t going to get his beer.
Later, when Damien was dead, I would look back on that night as being somehow significant, a night when things almost happened, when our separate lives—Cam’s, Damien’s, Alex’s, and mine—almost converged.
They didn’t. But they came close enough that I often imagine what would have happened if they had.
5
Near the end of August Cam began to call again. Usually it would be late at night, and he would sound nervous, and would speak rapidly. The first time this happened I actually thought he was on something.
He said that Damien and I needed to get the band together, we needed to start practicing, we needed to record a demo.
He couldn’t say how, but soon, “very soon,” he was going to meet some very important people in New York, and he wanted to give them the demo.
And how did I respond?
Lying in bed I’d say, “yeah,” or, “sure,” not because I believed, or disbelieved what he said. He was my friend, he told me things, I wanted to believe him.
“Why didn’t you want to come here before?” I asked for the fourth time. For the fourth time, Alex didn’t seem to hear my question.
As we walked down the curved cement path to the apartment on Lonsdale, a dropping feeling started in my stomach; I saw the mildew-stained stucco, the broken boards on the railings, the blue flickering light from a television on a third-story apartment ceiling.
An angry male voice came over the intercom. “Yeah, what?”
“It’s me,” said Alex (her voice higher and cuter than I’d ever heard it.)
The lock buzzed, Alex opened the door, I stepped in behind her.
The bulbs in the lobby light fixtures seemed seventy-five watts too low. There was a brownish stain on the carpet in front of a vinyl sofa. We walked past the elevator and went through a steel door into a hallway. Cigarette burns freckled the green carpets, and a stale smell perfumed the air as if someone had tried to hide bad odors with air freshener. We passed through two more steel doors and down another hall, the muffled sound of heavy metal growing louder as we approached the door of an apartmen
t halfway down it.
Alex knocked. “That was exciting the other night,” she said and hummed a verse from Bowie’s “Heroes.”
She knocked again and looked up at me.
“These are some friends of Leroy’s,” she said as if in answer to a question that I didn’t ask.
She raised her hand to knock again, and the door flew open, the scream of Cannibal Corpse and the smell of marijuana spilling out into the hallway. A girl with dyed-black hair and a scarlet tank top glared at us.
“Yeah?”
“We’re Leroy’s friends.”
“Right,” the girl said. She was about the same age as Alex, but her face looked a lot older. Her inverted pentagram necklace glinted in the hall light.
“This is my friend, Trace,” Alex said.
“Cool,” the girl said.
I nodded, but made sure to keep my hands in my pockets.
She seemed like she wasn’t going to move, but then stepped aside.
As we went into the apartment, I started to slip off one of my loafers but noticed that there were no other shoes by the door. I slipped my foot back in.
In front of us was a closed door, and around the corner on the left, the main living room. Directly to my left was a corridor kitchen. Most of the partiers were in the living room, and it didn’t take long to notice that they were exclusively twenty-something men and teenage girls.
The kitchen seemed the less crowded of the two rooms, and as Alex went around talking to people I entered the kitchen and stood against the far wall. There was a half-empty bowl of Cheezies on the table and a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale.
Through the doorway, the left side of the living room was visible. A man in his late twenties lay on the sofa. He was dressed entirely in black and was smoking what appeared to be a cigarette, but had a stoned expression on his face.
Beyond him there were sliding glass doors, and in them my reflection. A dark figure in a skewed square of light.
When I saw Alex again she was standing near the entrance. The man she was talking to wore a wife-beater. He had a goatee that made him look like Pan. A Celtic pattern was tattooed on his bicep. Both his hands were on Alex’s bare arms, and Alex was laughing but shaking her head, and he seemed to be trying to convince her to do something.
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