It took some courage and willpower to tackle the evening streets of downtown Vancouver, but eventually I found its nightclubs, as well as my desire for them. Four, sometimes five nights a week, as many as I could withstand, I began to brave my way into the downtown core. There I looked for the scenes and people I had always wanted to become a part of, the ones that never visited me on Beaverbrook Crescent while Jane sewed and I stared blankly out our living-room window.
You might think an appetite for something called a night-club would be a bad idea for someone called night blind. You would be right. Equally wise would be me joining a gun club. Nevertheless, to this day I owe a debt to punk rock. Its culture helped me become as blind as I was but couldn’t admit to being.
My apprenticeship into the club scene had numerous dangers and disadvantages, although most were silly. In my time I have argued with empty bar stools, talked to pillars, knocked down waitresses, bounced off bouncers, pissed between urinals, drunk other people’s beers, and hit on shadows. Even though I routinely tumbled down stairs and plummeted off stages, never, not once, did it convince me to perhaps take up a white cane. Bullshit, I thought. I’m not that night blind. I’m just drunk.
When the coloured strobes and spotlights did their job, pulsing and spinning with the music, then I was more or less able to see enough. Stepping off the dance floor into the murky bar, that was a bit of a problem. Slow songs, too. They always dropped the lights down for slow songs, which left me paralysed wherever I happened to be. For a moment, anyway. Then like a jerky Sex Pistol I’d careen off the dance floor, knocking people over instead of politely scooting around them. I was a poser, not nearly close to hardcore, but blindness lent an authenticity to my recklessness. I ignored every social propriety our eyes manage.
That was the best thing about the scene. The culture camouflaged my inability to cooperate with other bodies. In growing blindness I became, oddly enough, safer and more like the postpunk scenesters around me than I was like my peers at school. Booze helped. Everybody was bent, legless, gassed, rat-arsed, and every other word for blind drunk. Bumping into people was acceptable, even expected, and I was practised at bashing into folks on a regular basis, whether I was in my cups or just spilling them. Confusion and disorientation ruled the clubs, too, and that pretty much described my sober state. Above all, though, I blended with ease and advantage on the dance floor. I loved to slam. What blind person doesn’t?
When the opening bars of a thrashy song burst from the sound system, I felt in my muscles my own rhythm of relief. Here I could be a blind man and feel it, or test it, for a while. Somebody’s elbow would clock me in the face, and we were off. Up and down we jumped and flung ourselves aimlessly in any direction, a random application of weight, speed, shoulders, fists, heads, and boots, all hoping to meet another body, sandwich a few, or sometimes miss altogether and drop ourselves. A ragged enthusiasm. Family fun. But in all that I was relaxed and abandoned, a pro at the art of whacking and rebounding, while some could never give themselves completely over. Many tried too hard to control themselves, tried to brace and aim, as if they could do that. Dumb. In the middle of a slam, or a mosh pit, or whatever it’s called now, abandon is the key to survival and pleasure. You can’t predict what’s coming. You can’t aim at a moving crowd. You should shut your eyes and go. In my case, I left them open. I loved to slam. It was where my blindness worked. It was the antidote to where I lived, be it behind my failing eyes or behind my nervous, suburban door.
Then I began to lose things other than my eyesight.
It started at a gig at the Commodore Ballroom, one of Vancouver’s oldest venues and one of its finest. Rubber tires supported the old wooden dance floor. A crowd could easily get a good trampoline effect going. One night somebody stepped on my heel and off my shoe popped. It was gone, kicked about like a soccer ball, boinking across the floor. I chased after it but didn’t get very far. Mostly I stared down in disbelief at my sock, which I couldn’t quite make out, either. My friend Peter spotted my shoe. It was briefly in the air and travelling in the general direction of the stage. Looked like trouble for the bass player. According to Peter, my shoe connected with her head. Without losing a beat, she booted my Doc Marten off stage, into the wings. I had to wait until the show was over and the club was clearing out until a roadie agreed to go shoe hunting backstage. Twenty bucks to get it back. I was proud. The bass player for Lush had touched my shoe with her face.
I should have taken this as a sign that slamming in nightclubs was not the best of hobbies, but my evening schedule was too busy for reflection. Not one week passed before Peter and I found ourselves in a different club. This time somebody knocked the glasses off my face. They dropped to the floor like a hockey puck, and the chase was on, once again. Peter went after my specs, his body hunched over and scurrying about the floor like a man chasing a renegade pet. Somehow he snagged my glasses from the trampling herd, and somehow the frames had survived. Not even the slightest bend or lightest scratch. I put my glasses back on, and, presto, I still couldn’t see very much. All was right. I was touched by the Slam Gods, clearly.
So it seemed, until I lost my pants.
I adored those pants as much as pants can be reasonably adored. They were polyester and vertically striped, black, green, and grey, and they flared at the ankles. One of my younger brothers, Mykol, who was at the club with me that night, called them my Jack Tripper trousers. He said Three’s Company was about as retro as one could go without dressing Amish. The only trouble was my pants fit a bit too snuggly in the waist. A complex zipper system inside the belt line kept them tight, a system which I’d let out to its fullest, but still my pants remained a little more constricting than when I’d bought them. The likely cause was all the beer and burgers I’d begun to live on, as well as the bags of leftover chocolate cream cheese muffins Jane brought home after her shifts at Muffin Inn. Like my attitude toward night blindness, I denied my growing belly and figured I’d dance my way around it.
Then, one night somebody thumped me good in the belly during a Ramones tune, forcing me to double over. The force split the zipper system from its outer limits. My size 33 pants ballooned to a size 45 or so. When I stood up straight, they dropped to my ankles. Immediately I pulled them up and jammed my hands in my pockets. That’s how I remained as I shuffled my way to the can to find out what the hell was going on.
It’s not the proudest moment in a young man’s life when he is standing in a public washroom in his underwear and combat boots, holding his pants up to the light as if inspecting holiday slides. It didn’t take me long to admit defeat. I couldn’t see much with the little light available, and I obviously knew more about nineteenth-century verse than the engineering and repair of zippers. Back I climbed into my pants, and back my hands went into my pockets. I left the can in search of my brother.
I found him after a couple of revealing circuits around the club. In that short time, shuffling about with my hands in my pockets, my night blindness became more apparent to me than ever before. My fingers weren’t available to touch the edges of tables, or to find the railings of staircases. Moving about like a blind amputee, the darkness in me bloomed, even deepened, and suddenly, without hands to help me, I felt how much compensation I’d grown accustomed to. I felt it missing in my fingers like a phantom itch.
When I spotted Mykol, he was near the bar, under an ultraviolet light that illuminated his white cowboy shirt. I could barely make out the shadow of embroidered guns on his shoulders. Mykol has no shortage of fashion irony. Lucky for me, it made him easy to spy. And where would an underage kid be other than at the bar?
“I need to borrow your eyes,” I said.
“Sure. What do you need?”
“I need you to come to the bathroom with me.”
“No, thanks,” Mykol said. “Feel free to watch yourself in there.”
“No, no, it’s my pants,” I explained. “My pants are broken.”
Mykol paused and sipped his d
rink. I heard myself and what I was saying.
“Broken pants?” he asked. “You have broken pants? Who breaks their pants? I don’t have a sewing kit, if that’s what you need.”
“Just come with me and you’ll see,” I said. “Please. Like, now.”
Mykol could hear the urgency in my voice, so he dropped the banter and walked ahead, towards the bathroom. We hadn’t walked far before he sensed my trouble with following him. He stopped and extended his elbow to me for guidance. Mykol was always good at knowing when I could see and when I couldn’t. I wanted the elbow, but I didn’t have a hand available.
“I can’t,” I yelled above the music. “If I take my hands out of my pockets, my pants will drop.”
Without a word or a snicker, he moved behind me and pressed his palm to my back. He steered me to the bathroom this way without drawing attention.
When we were kids, I used to wrestle with Mykol for fun, rubbing our elbows and knees raw on my parents’ orange shag carpet. Because I was older than him, I tended to win, and because I was older, I celebrated my win with the nastiness only brothers practice. Sometimes when I had his shoulders pinned to the ground, I would loom over his face and threaten to drool, sometimes letting a bit start at the corner of my mouth. Our other brother, Rory, would shout, “Do it! Do it! Drool him! Give him a drooling!” I don’t think I ever did, but I can’t be sure. Now, as Mykol guided me and my pants to the can, I felt rotten for everything I’d ever done to him.
Nobody else was in the washroom. Mykol asked what the problem was, so I extended the waist of my pants to demonstrate.
“And what’s wrong with that?” he said. “Looks comfortable.”
“Seriously, Mykol, the zipper-waist-control-thing is broken, and I can’t tighten them enough to keep them on. Please, can you have a look?”
On my face I mustered a look of innocent encouragement.
“Aw, jeez,” he whined as he knelt down, brought his head to my stomach, flipped my waistband over, and began to tug and wrench.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” I began. Two guys walked into the washroom, spotted us, apologized, and quickly retreated. With the pants to match, I became Jack Tripper in some lost episode.
It didn’t take Mykol long to fix my busted zipper. When we left the washroom, I left convinced that I needed to reconsider my eyesight and act a little more carefully with it. I was ashamed, but in a specific sense: mine was the sting that comes with delayed transformation. I felt like a man whose mid-life crisis had caught up, enlightening him to what a bad idea his new earring was, and how silly he looked wearing the same clothes as his son. In that bathroom I left behind something like my youth and, for sure, my few punk rock days. At that specific moment I became worried, cautious, and practical beyond my years, and I was miserable. That was my first feeling for what it meant to be disabled. I felt very old. I had to wear my blindness from now on, whether I found it ill-fitting or not, and I knew it in my bones.
As Mykol and I walked upstairs into the main area of the club, a man descended the steps towards us. By his size and his stride, I knew he was a bouncer. Mykol knew it by the word “Security” on the guy’s chest.
When he reached us, he blocked the stairs and asked us to leave the club. Mykol asked why. The bouncer said something to the effect that we knew damn well why and that this wasn’t no bathhouse here, man. I didn’t want to explain what had happened. Who cares, I thought. It’s closing time, anyway.
My brother took a different position. As the bouncer escorted us to the street, Mykol grinned and argued, saying, “It’s just some brotherly love, man! What have you got against brotherly love?”
When I arrived home, the apartment was dark. I didn’t bother with the lights. I walked down the hall, feeling my way, and knocked on Jane’s door with the heel of my palm. Only lower tones could reach her ears. I heard her wake up, turn in her bed, and tell me to come in. Something became clear in the black of her room, but I can’t remember what. I climbed into bed beside her and began to cry. I told Jane everything, how threatened I felt, how scared I was of my eyes, of my future, and of who I was becoming. She stroked my hair and said everything would be okay, everything would look better tomorrow. Her hands undressed me and pulled the blankets over us. We were two tangled and frightened kids, both wounded and hidden away. Our hope was that nothing would find us or take anything more from us. At some point, just before morning, I fell into a deep and colourless sleep. For three years we stayed together that way.
Bodysnatchers from the Planet NASDAQ
Lougheed Highway is ugly and unremarkable. It also feels cold and rough against the back of your head.
I remember waking up, spread-eagled on my back, and staring at a street lamp. Movement felt available to my body, but I didn’t feel capable, as they say, of going towards the light. I palmed for my hat and wondered if I’d crushed it in the fall. My time out and away hadn’t been long, maybe a few seconds, but that was time enough on the wet asphalt to soak my pants and jacket. My palms, face down on the road, had numbed somewhat, too. That was a sort of booby prize. Shredded skin is best chilled.
Jane and I had taken the bus home from the university that night. We’d gotten off at our usual stop, and stepped into the usual Vancouver rain, ready to hoof the two remaining blocks home. Although the whereabouts of our apartment minimized my noodling around in the dark, our bus stop proved to be an inconvenience. It was on a busy highway, and on return trips from class, we had to cross it. Not one of my great talents.
The highway also challenged my penchant for laziness. The crosswalks in either direction seemed too far, especially in the rain, and especially at night. My eyes detected so little in the dark that walking itself had become a dangerous mode of transportation. Better to shorten the journey by sprinting across the highway, and home. You know you’ve still got some running left in you, my mind would taunt, although the rest of me would doubt it.
Test run the feeling for yourself some time. In an empty parking lot or an empty ball diamond, close your eyes and sprint a good distance. You’ll experience just how unhappy the act makes your body feel. Even when your mind knows it’s safe, the rest of you will drag and resist like a mighty skep-tic. That inner argument produces a strange, herky-jerky motion, too. Running blind is never pretty, let me tell you, nor smart.
This time, however, my mind didn’t prod me to bolt. Jane did. We got off the bus, and she glanced at the pause in traffic and said, “Quick, quick.” She was off, so I ran after her with particular abandon. The four lanes were clear for now, but Jane failed to mention the median that interrupted the otherwise level street. I suppose, in all fairness, she didn’t know she’d failed to mention anything. Neither of us was too clear about what needed mentioning to me and when. Because my blindness could worsen daily, its effects always seemed somewhat new and unpredictable.
As I ran, I discovered the cement median for myself, with my foot. I tripped, skidded on my hands, rolled, then landed on my back in a lane of oncoming traffic. Jane raced back to fetch me and to stop the approaching cars.
When I came to, she helped me up, dusted me off, and put my hat back on top of my head, as a mother might do for a toddler after a failed first crack at walking. The rest of the way home I limped and kept my hand fixed to Jane’s elbow for guidance. My frustration followed us. I’d just tripped over another of my incompatibilities with life’s basic skills. As we walked, and the pain announced itself in my palms and head, Jane asked, carefully, circuitously, if I thought maybe—just maybe—it was time to look into a white cane. For two years I’d avoided the thought, despite twenty-four months of bumping and bruising myself. The tumble, although not the worst I’d taken, amplified my sense of endangerment. I felt stumped for an argument against the inevitable. Pride wasn’t enough to refuse a cane. A promise to walk slowly or to even stay home wasn’t enough, either. Not anymore. I’d exhausted my own ridiculous solutions. Although I had only been knocked down and out f
or a few seconds, sometimes that’s all it takes. A new world order can emerge when nobody’s looking, and fast.
Taking up a white cane is perhaps the most dispiriting thing a newly blinded person goes through. Our mobility aid is a form of confession and defeat. Its battered white segments and red stripe declare the very identity we’ve always feared, avoided, or hoped to disown. A cane is a permanent commitment to blindness, more final than a diagnosis, even. In my case, I committed to it because, while languishing on Lougheed Highway, I understood, at a molecular level, that I had to adapt to the pressures of an unseen world. If I didn’t, I would soon be feeling a lot of other pressures, such as a Honda against my face. I could survive, as long as I could adapt. A white cane substitutes for slow evolution. A cane, albeit primitive and clumsy, also relieves us of one dangerous paradox: the blind are most vulnerable when we are not seen. The entire human species has been through this problem, not that long ago.
About 543 million years back, our gooey, shapeless forebears sprouted the first complex eyes. Seeing had to start somewhere, sometime. According to the biologist Andrew Parker, in his book In the Blink of an Eye, the first complex eye to appear on the planet may have evolved in less than a five-hundred-thousand-year period. In terms of evolutionary time, that’s no time at all. Imagine if I’d grown, while cuddling the pavement on Lougheed Highway, an eyeball on each earlobe. Profound adaptations can happen in haste. In the blink of an eye, even a white cane can fuse itself to your hand.
Seeing, not to understate the point, transformed the world. For one thing, when the first “eyes” appeared, the oceans of protein blobs and cells and whatnot had to adapt to a new survival pressure. For the first time in history, they were the objects of sight. They were seen but not necessarily able to stare back. Most of the seeing was done by predators who, with this new sense, enjoyed a super-Darwinian advantage. Prey had some major evolving of their own to do, pronto. Developing meaningful and defensive shapes and colours was a start. Another way to put it is this: when sight began in the world, so did the visual meaning of form. To that end, prey might quickly evolve spiky skeletons so predators wouldn’t want to take a bite, or prey might suggest toxicity with bright colours. According to Parker’s theory, even those that didn’t evolve an eye had to adapt to being seen. Sight was inescapable, whether you had it or not. Parker calls this the “Light Switch Theory.” The degrees, varieties, and speed of evolutionary change in that period remain unparalleled.
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