Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  Two tatty folders of typescript that once claimed to be finished products lurk in the bottom of a filing cabinet in the basement. Gerry’s ex, Patricia, had found them in the bottom of a trunk and sent them back. He wondered at the time what her motive was: prosecution exhibits to justify her going perhaps. Judged by length, they could charitably be called novellas. They were written back in Gerry’s drinking days when he thought every word was god-given. There are polite but firm rejection slips tucked into them too. Thanks, but no thanks. They made better recitations at the ends of house parties.

  “Anyway,” Gerry says, “I’m thinking about getting at it again, trying to make sense of it all, and sort of trying to explain how I got here.”

  “I’d love it if you’d do that,” Vivian says, putting the soup pot away under the counter. “But I don’t want to push you though. I think you’re afraid of failure sometimes.”

  “I am not,” Gerry retorts, making a flurry with the dishcloth. “I revel in it. I have failed consistently and creatively for thirty years now. Anybody who hasn’t failed has never tried to do anything hard.”

  “You haven’t failed,” says Vivian. Her office wall has a poster of a cat struggling to cling to a rope with “Hang in there, baby!” on it. “I mean, you’re always working. You haven’t failed.”

  “Or tried,” mutters Gerry.

  Some years ago, when Gerry thought the bottom was falling out of the freelance radio journalism market, he went out and rented himself an office to become a man of letters. He imagined Virginia Woolf and Alice Munro turning cheerleader cartwheels as he took the little room on the back of a strip mall. He furnished it with two Wal-Mart filing cabinets with a door blank across them for a desk. He took in a brand new swivel chair, a coffee maker and his computer. His office window looked out on a dumpster, a rear parking lot and a cemetery over a fence. The rent was satisfyingly low and idiosyncratic, seventy-three dollars a month. Vivian had gone to see the office the first spring he rented it. He was proud of its starkness, like the orderly room of a puritan battalion in a front-line attic in some urban guerrilla war. The computer had a tool-like, weapon-like practicality. It was like a lathe, drill press or machine gun under the pale fluorescent light of the little room. He felt he should be able to take it apart and put it together blinfolded. In the office, he hoped to make tangible, workman-like words out of his drifting life. It was a place for invention, stripped to its industrial guts, with a cheque-cashing service and a mini-mart next door.

  Unfortunately Gerry always preferred gathering the oddments of raw material to sitting down and putting them together.

  “Why do you pay rent on that darn room?” Vivian asked after a year or two. She had a point. Gerry hadn’t been near the place in a couple of months. Its equipment and purpose made it too accusatory a place to get away from home in. It was easier to sit in the coffee shops with a notebook, or just drive around.

  “It’s not costing you anything, is it?” he demanded. “You haven’t been asked to contribute to the rent. Besides it’s a tax write-off.”

  The book and the office failed to thrive. After several years more, the office was abandoned. The filing cabinets, the door blank and the computer got moved to Gerry and Vivian’s basement. So did the malaise they produced in Gerry. A laundry basket on top of a file cabinet could scare him back upstairs in an instant.

  “It’s too nice a day to lurk in the basement. Let’s go for a walk,” he’d say. He found a walk in the park or through the nighttime neighbourhood took his mind off the accusing scraps of paper and stale notebooks. Vivian found it was just as well to go with him for the walks. He was less irritable around the house.

  She took over the door-blank worktable to sew new living room drapes.

  “How the hell am I supposed to write with all that crap there?” he demanded, waving at her table and lapful of pale heavy cloth. “What the hell’s wrong with the drapes we’ve got?”

  “They don’t match the room, you poor fool,” Vivian shot back. “They haven’t matched the room since we painted and it needs doing again. I hate that goddamn room.”

  “A zoo,” he yelled. “I live in a fucking designer zoo.”

  “Oh, go on with you, boy,” Vivian said. “By the time you get around to doing anything, I’ll be out of here. I’ll take the damn drapes and go on with them if you need to write something.”

  The “new” drapes are three years old now.

  People who don’t go to church often, go at Christmas. Gerry doesn’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous often anymore, but on an evening in mid-December he finds himself driving through the dark streets to a ’60s-modern church not too far from home. He feels he needs a booster shot against the Christmas spirit. The parking lot is too full to be all AA people, and when he goes in, he can hear the organ from the sanctuary and the coughing that suggests a full house. He goes to the church library for his meeting.

  There are AA meetings and AA meetings. Gerry has been to some that have the smell of puke, piss and desperation still strong in the room. Then again, once in Ottawa he went to one so calm and existential it was rather other-worldly.

  “Hi, my name is Gerry and if I exist and alcoholism exists, I’m an alcoholic,” he described it to Vivian later.

  The people Gerry listened to at that meeting, and talked to over gritty carrot cake and coffee afterwards, seemed to imply that they’d only become drunks to further the cause of addictions research.

  This meeting isn’t like that. It’s got a good mix of people, long-timers and newcomers. Gerry sees people he used to carouse with when George Street was just starting to be a bar ghetto and before that, when the neighbourhoods of town seemed to be a network of booze capillaries and alcohol nodes he could navigate like a sodden corpuscle. There’s some grey long hair at tonight’s session and some fashionable clothes and the talk is generally pretty bright.

  There’s only one first-timer, a scared-looking woman accompanied by a pretty woman with white hair parted in the middle, but a surprisingly young face that looks like it came off a ’60s album cover, peering over a dulcimer perhaps. Gerry remembers her when she hung around the bar where a lot of reporters and actors hung out in the ’70s. He sort of remembers that she tried to cut her wrists with a broken bottle in the toilet one night, He looks at her wrists but she has long sleeves and bracelets.

  The chair asks the newcomer if she wants to speak. She’s got a narrow face collapsing into the black holes of her eyes and she’s twisting Kleenex and paper napkins into tight, white worms.

  “My name is Lori–”

  “Hi Lori,” the room booms for her.

  Hi Doctor Nick, thinks Gerry, who watches The Simpsons before the news comes on at suppertime.

  “I just want to... I don’t know, just feel better, I guess.”

  “You’re in the right place, Lori,” the chair tells her. “Just sit back and listen.”

  And hope you recognize somebody, Gerry thinks. He remembers coming to a first meeting fifteen years ago and being surprised at the number of people he thought were dead who were there, apparently alive and well and sober. He’d lost track of them when they disappeared from the pieces of the bar scene he inhabited. Any program that could raise the dead had something going for it.

  The chair knows his crowd and turns the evening into a sort of greatest hits night for Lori’s benefit. He’s a square-set man with a grey ponytail. Gerry remembers that he’s some kind of geologist and used to play rugby. He remembers singing hymns and rugby songs with him at a keg party somewhere a million years ago.

  A few people looked askance at Gerry tonight because he didn’t identify himself as a newcomer. That’s how seldom he goes to meetings anymore. There are people at this meeting who consider themselves regulars and have never seen him before. The chair must remember their singing together though, because he remembers Gerry’s name and calls on him.

  “Hi, my name is Gerry and I’m an alcoholic and I’m glad to be here tonight.” Ger
ry’s not a hundred percent sure he is glad to be here but, what the hell? Something brought him. He could have stayed home or gone shopping or whatever. Besides, he used to be glad, unbelievably, unbelievingly glad when a week of doing the impossible and not taking a drink stretched into three months and he got a copper medallion like a licence tag for a big dog. He lost the medallion somewhere, but the months have turned slowly into years.

  He decides it’s important that Lori should be glad to be here, so he talks indirectly to her.

  “The first time I came in here I’d walked around town all day to keep moving so I wouldn’t have a drink. I couldn’t make up my mind if I wanted to admit I was a drunk or go to the Waterford Hospital and say I was crazy. I decided to be a drunk because I was afraid that if I got in the Waterford, they’d never let me out or they’d zap my memory. I write and I figured I needed my memory. Once I came in here, I sort of knew I’d made the right decision. It gets easier.”

  Gerry sits down.

  “Good words there,” the chair intones.

  Gerry sits back and wonders who he is trying to convince by mentioning that he writes. He does his journalistic writing of course, but he suspects he could do that zapped or lobotomized or whatever. He doesn’t do anything very challenging.

  The meeting flows on around him and he looks at the room. This library has bemused him before. It’s richly lined with books from religious publishing houses. Gerry has sometimes wandered around looking at titles before meetings, or afterwards, during the coffee and cookies. They range from studies of the obscure miracles of obscure saints to ’50s Readers Digest-style things like Switchblade and the Cross and Doctor Tom Dooley’s medical missions in Indo-China. There are how-to books on daily devotion and “issues” books like God and Globalization. As far as Gerry has been able to discover through casual browsing, Saint Rose of Viterbo and Saint Beatrice da Silva have Thomas Merton heavily outnumbered and there’s no sampling of other philosophies.

  He remembers going to parent-teacher night, back when there was still denominational education and Tanya, Vivian’s youngest daughter, was in school. For reasons that made sense to Vivian when she took the kids and got out of her first marriage, Tanya was in the Catholic system. At one session, her homeroom teacher enthused about the new religious education text that had come out that year. In the meet-and-greet afterwards, Gerry had suggested the book didn’t give much space to anything but the home team.

  “Couldn’t it be taught like herpetology?” Gerry asked the teacher, a youngish version of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew on The Muppets, round and bland and up-to-date.

  “How’s that, Mr. Adamson?”

  Gerry could see him riffling through a mental card file of “ologies,” trying to place herpetology.

  “Snakes, right?” He looked at Gerry hopefully, expecting a joke perhaps.

  “I mean,” Gerry said, “that it’s a grand thing to know all about snakes and have a serious enthusiasm for snakes, but the goal isn’t necessarily to graduate snakes at the end of the course.”

  The faux Honeydew said that was an interesting point and went on to talk to somebody else.

  Gerry has a friend, Philip, who hangs out in the coffee shops and is a sceptic who wants a funeral. He says most religions demand that he take on faith the existence of a giant pink rabbit. Empirical evidence of the big pink bunny strikes him as being in short supply, so he’s moved away from organized religion. Still, he says, there’s no reason that a sceptic shouldn’t have some inspiring words read over him. On and off, he is cherry-picking his way through the ancients, east and west. He’s gathering snippets of text that he says should do for a humanist send-off. However, he feels classic Buddhism is bleak, and Taoism and Zen are a bit slap-dash and happy-go-lucky.

  “Lackadaisical even,” he says, looking at the Chinese notebook like Gerry’s, where he writes down his snippets. Gerry told him the shop to buy them at.

  Gerry also has a story about “lackadaisical.” At his work, he tells Philip, they have to transcribe the clips of people speaking that they put in radio pieces. Some reporter, who went to school after spelling stopped being a subject and apparently didn’t read a lot, transcribed “lackadaisical attitude” as “lack of daisy-go attitude.”

  “That’s what I suffer from,” Gerry told Philip. “A lack of daisy-go attitude. I can’t remember the last time I had even a touch of daisy-go attitude.”

  Philip continues to gather final-sounding aphorisms. At the moment though, his hypothetical funeral features a lot of Marcus Aurelius and Confucius.

  Sitting in the church library listening to people stay sober through Christmas, Gerry feels that Philip’s pink rabbit is over-represented on the bookshelves. There should be more Marcus and Confucius and a section on what to do when your daisy-go goes.

  When the meeting breaks up and Gerry goes outside, it has started to snow. He brushes off his grubby little SUV and drives home through big snowflakes like flower petals, daisy petals maybe, daisy petals going.

  On a Saturday when Vivian has gone Christmas shopping, Gerry goes to the basement, passing under the plywood duck-shape he cut out and stuck over the stairs as the international symbol for “duck.” He roots in his cabinets and desk drawers for the scribblers, notebooks stamped with glass and cup rings like old passports. He makes piles of paper, sorting by period, mood, or degree of physical damage, reconstructing how he got here.

  Call this the CFA pile, Gerry muses as he unearths a nineteenth-century looking duplicate notebook that he’d found in his mother’s house on a visit a couple of years before. It’s the kind with one-sided carbon pages that automatically left a copy of what was written. In it he’d printed a bunch of poems by hand. Today it seems impossible that there was a time when he didn’t type, when ballpoint and carbon seemed the best way to leave smudges of a human-shaped animal on the cave wall.

  Gerry pours a coffee and looks at his come-from-away self before he knew he was a CFA. His 1960s and early ’70s lurk between the blue marble-pattern covers.

  Cupid is a fascist

  With shiny black jackboots

  Smeared with small pieces

  Of hearts he’s machine-gunned;

  A thousand valentines

  Flap wildly in his camp,

  Battle flags abounding.

  “Christ, this kid!” Gerry says softly to himself. The oil furnace cuts in with a breathy, but probably sympathetic sigh. He wonders if he goes upstairs and finds the Leonard Cohen anthology Vivian gave him a few anniversaries back, will he be able to track what he was reading when he wrote some of this. Then again, maybe it wasn’t that profound.

  I was walking my serpent in the garden

  And I let him off the leash

  To frolic among the flowers and lovers,

  When up came a silver-wingèd cop

  Who said all serpents must,

  Must be kept on the leash, not

  Let frolic et cetera et cetera;

  So I sadly took my serpent and went home

  To eat apples in my room.

  “Record jackets,” Gerry says aloud, “I must have been reading frigging record jackets.”

  In another pile of paper, Gerry finds himself in St. John’s for the first time. At some point over the years he has transcribed some of the stuff he wrote when he and Patricia, his first wife, lived in the east-end.

  Why is the night?

  Because of the dog, child,

  Obscene fat doggy,

  Soul beneath his waggle:

  He licks the sun

  From the pavement

  Like ice cream;

  Dirty, mouldy dog,

  Like a hairy Dutch cheese,

  Dreams all gurgly

  And burps another morning;

  Nice fat doggy.

  Gerry had written that the first autumn he and Patricia had come to St. John’s. It occurs to him that you no longer see the packs of almost mythologically ugly crackies that used to drift up and down the hilly streets
in the older parts of town. Dogs are tied on now and belong to recognizable breeds and, for all Gerry knows, health clubs and spas and new-age churches. Their owners walk them with pockets full of shopping bags to pick up the dog shit. Gerry sometimes argues that picking up dog shit is making humanity stupider. A basic lesson in watching where you’re going has been removed. Shuffle along any old way. Never mind the dog poop. There’s no need to be watchful or learn the steps in the dance of life.

  “Don’t be silly,” Vivian tells him. “It’s not sanitary.”

  At any rate, the weird dog creatures are no longer around, but they were when he and Patricia were setting up housekeeping in 1972 or so. Maybe they huddled together for safety from the mythological crackies. They’d only just learned the word and could conjure with it. Maybe when the crackie packs disappeared they had no further need of each other and fell apart.

  The house is ghostly quiet and Gerry goes upstairs to make a cup of tea. He feels like a museum visitor, sidling past the baroque splendours of Vivian’s Christmas decorations. The few cars that pass in the street make soft noises like rotten old flags tearing. He makes the tea in the pot rather than in the cup and takes it back to the basement with him. Somewhere over the years he had come by a mini electric pad, a tiny hot plate for keeping a mug warm. He plugs it in, balances the teapot on it and returns to thirty years ago. Pawing through the snippets and false starts in his middle-class basement, he compares then and now.

  It seems to Gerry that he and Vivian dress quite a lot alike now. They both wear khaki pants in summer and blazers when they dress up. They buy sweaters and suburban sweatshirts at Work Warehouse. He and Patricia may have shopped in the same stores but their look was different.

  Patricia wore a lot of Danskin leotard tops and he remembers a short suede skirt. They’d joke and call it a wide belt. On other days she went to the opposite extreme and wore a maxi-length jumper that he called her one-legged overalls. In the winter she piled an antique raccoon coat over it all.

  Gerry wore high-top work boots and cords under old tweed or leather sports jackets or the sailorish, vinyl-shouldered donkey jacket he’d bought in the UK after university. He bought a salt-and-pepper cap and wore it. They had a gypsy air as they walked to and from the bus stops of the east-end. Gerry has an old picture of them in an album Pat sent back when everybody had divorced and remarried and settled into amiability. In the picture they look as though they might be about to break into some sort of street performance at any moment.