Crow Jazz
Page 15
“Hutch’kwa” in unison.
How does it feel, Critic Person, to be circling the drain surrounded by unsympathetic Indians? New Guy beats his drum harder.
“I’m done,” Dumb Woman steps out of line to read her letter.
Dear aggrieved lineup,
I think I have been unfairly targeted. This is a free country and I expressed an opinion. I said Slender Person’s show was a waste of an hour. An hour is precious to me. This lineup is my only chance to be heard. I am old and no one cares what I think. I am deaf and no one tries to communicate.
I’m not sexist, please understand. Life is a bitch and so am I. I need to know who is a girl and who is a boy.
“What the fuck does that have to do with it?” Ladyboy and Racism Girl shout in unison. Suddenly we’re all on the same page. All except Dumb Woman.
“I found it confusing.”
“Life is confusing,” New Guy asserts.
And it dawns on me. The line isn’t moving, and it isn’t going to. I step ahead and try the door. Locked.
“We’ve been had, guys.”
“How so?” New Guy asks.
“Why did you come here?”
“Someone gave me a comp.”
“Me too,” the line says in unison.
“Well the show is over unless you want to stand here until you freeze your asses off.”
“We’re it,” says Ultimo who finishes my sentences and makes the coffee.
“Yes, how about a hand,” I say, and we clap in unison.
“That’s a good start,” I say, “clapping together.”
SHOCK THERAPY
My finger’s in the socket,” I yelped. It was 4 AM. He gave his pillow an extra squeeze and rolled over, but even though I’d sprained my neck bouncing off the ceiling, I was charged up, ready to jump into nautical twilight.
Splash!
This event came out of the blue. Ever since the election of the Bratman who spooned alternative truths to baskets of deplorables and evicted the black man from the White House, I have been waking up to the death of civilisation, mass Exodus, one refugee at a time: an intelligence operative, an artist, a singer, a comedian, a poet, a beautiful child, all of them rising, letting out air, the shhhhhit sound of Armageddon, deflating helium balloons, the laugh diaspora.
“Where the hell are they going?” I ask in the time between midnight and dawn.
“To the power source,” my husband mumbles.
Is that it? I know the science. We’re mostly water. Good conductors.
Weren’t we all told not to fondle sockets and, “Don’t cross your eyes, they will stay that way.” “Cross your legs, or boys will see,” what? Pussy? Cunt? The unspeakable, until now, a different now, where Omega is Alpha, and cautionary stories have been taken over by spin.
While my mother’s friends dispensed alternative parables to keep their kids in line, they took pills, Mother’s little helpers, to stay thin and calm while their pinhole pupils raced around virtual clocks. While they jiggled their cellulite to death on Stauffer couches, their curious daughters hunted sockets, sometimes licking their fingers first.
Many of my mother’s friends were hustled off to shock therapy when the inevitable happened: when their husbands fucked their secretaries despite their desperate efforts to stay young and viable, when they ran out of Kraft cheese and marshmallow recipes, when they ran out of children to poison with red dye number 4, when their daughters discovered the pleasant sexual nature of power surges.
It’s all about electricity.
Despite my re-charge, I’m still in bed, scrolling through the news feed while He delivers many cups of coffee, so many my hands are shaking, or is it the stories about the child who was shot in the head and the child refugee in handcuffs; but then, hallelujah, a photo of snowdrops and one of a quetzal with tail feathers three times longer than the rooster’s middle finger.
OK. That’s breaking even. I can start my day.
Today there’s a vigil for Muslims murdered at prayer: fathers, a pharmacist, a beloved professor. I’m charged, tooling up for protest: one pink pussyhat, one shawl, instant hajib, one I AM MUSLIM sign and my safety pin that promises sanctuary.
Time to get up, wondering, is my dream a death wish? When children write stories that are intolerable but truthful, the last line always reads, “Then I woke up from my dream,” as if death didn’t happen. This is the real alternative truth. We don’t want to know, but death happens. At four AM. It does.
Mothers say, “Use your words” to frustrated children, the ones who use sticks and stones to make a point, but not mine. Mine gave me a pencil and lined paper. Silence was golden. Then. Please, try not to win every argument. NO ONE WILL WANT TO MARRY YOU.
But not any more. I’ve been married several times, well, twice, but hyperbole is a poet’s prerogative.
By the time my mother hit menopause, many of her friends had disappeared. Some of them joined cults, and some died of amphetamine overdose. Mothers’ little helpers turned out to be their pallbearers. Some who remain are considering assisted death. The rest have dementia.
My mother says straight women are the problem, and up to a point, I agree, having watched too many of us morph into Barbies and rooster surrogates as the misogyny of the right and left drowned a relatively ethical woman in fake news.
We are self-cannibalising, a hen characteristic, and it is ugly to watch, especially the rooster surrogates, injecting themselves with Botox and fake tan, blonde variations on beef jerky wrapped in tinfoil, under orders to “dress like ladies.”
So I join the sisters of the resistance who have crossed the bridge from dormancy during the years of affirmative action to real action. Again. I keep putting my finger in the socket. Welcome to the zombie jamboree. Soon you will be reading that I lit a fuse somewhere along the Mexican border.
But today is the day for prayer and meditation on the persecution of innocents, the horrible stutter of social repetition.
I am still crossing the bridge, pumping my charged fist in the air when I realise I have forgotten to do up my seatbelt. Not exactly forgotten. I couldn’t turn and shoulder check with a stiff neck in restraint when I backed out of the driveway. That was deliberate. Then I did forget, because I got caught up in the pussy mantra (We will overcome!) and thoughts of the newly dead: my intelligence source, who recently corroborated the report about the Rooster’s Russian connection, an artist of great energy whose power was short-circuited by deliberate indifference, the poet who wrote about a woman who decapitated her husband and poured his brain into a bowl of cereal.
So many stories about roosters and hens!
There’s a little known fact about roosters. Most of them are terminated at birth. Shredded. Animal rights people are working on sexing eggs so their crowing is silenced before viability. Having witnessed the socio-pathic behaviour of roosters, I like the shredding option, would like to see the Demented Rooster shredded in public, before the United Nations, which he is out to destroy with shock and awe tactics, diversion and simultaneous lightning strikes.
No one said roosters lack barnyard smarts. They put on quite a display with their feathers and spurs, their cock-a-doodle-dos.
But we are smarter. We are the daughters of Lysistrata, Salome and Queen Esther, “Off with his head,” resonating in our genes. I should probably put my money on the Slovenian, who could be a true seraph, the agent of ultimate justice, her slutty photos and nudges and winks all code, “I’m with you.” My hope is she’s busy booby-trapping the golden tower, threading fuses through the elevators and tacky restaurants, sharpening her golden chopsticks from Mott 22 in anticipation of the moment she sticks one in his ear.
Poor King Swear, his Kingdom for a good otolaryngologist.
I am crossing the bridge, thinking these thoughts and neglecting to do up my seatbelt until lightning strikes, Eureka! Buckle up! Get your finger out of the socket.
He sees me do it. Probably thinks I saw him first, but no. I coul
d run him over. He jumps in front of the car with his flat hand out. I think he’s a distraught motorist.
“You could get yourself killed,” I say, rolling the window halfway because he might be the angel of death I missed this morning, or a highwayman.
“That’s my line,” he says, indicating my unengaged buckle.
This is when I see the discrete badge.
“I’m on my way to the vigil,” I say. I am not trying to get out of a ticket. I just want him to understand. “I have a stiff neck. In the middle of the night, I put my fingers in an electrical socket.” I trust him with this information, because I can’t see him putting me into a padded cell, wearing the straightjacket you can bet I’d embroider with feminist slogans, bad optics for the cops.
There is something familiar, ah yes, my informant, the Balkan specialist. If I tell the cop that just before my friend passed he told me the dead man walking in Britain was a credible source. Would that information take him to the Cop Oscars, a promotion?
I am not thinking of this as a chess move, simply as reality television. This is the cop show finale, where I might get the rose.
I have hated cops for over a decade, ever since five giant babies in blue beat up a street person, then tasered him, while I, the only witness apart from a pot grower who was afraid to speak up, objected. Picture me, a middle-aged woman driving a Volkswagen pussy-car in glasses and granny shoes. Picture them, five armed toddlers with adrenalin grins, coming at me with threats, “Off with her head.”
Picture me giving them the middle finger.
That was life changing. Trust me, I have been vicious: refusing to buy cop raffle tickets, boycotting Cops for Cancer benefits, giving the resting bitch face to every schoolyard cop in the crosswalk, screaming at the black-child murdering cops on the news. Hating is hard work. I am tired of it.
This cop looks like my dead friend from MI6. He has kind eyes. He hands me a ticket, “Stop putting your finger in sockets.” I feel a slight shock when his fingers touch mine, the Michelangelo effect.
“I’ll be late for the vigil.” I say, stunned. Is this my annunciation, my re-creation?
“Drive safe,” he says. “I like your hat.”
The vigil is over when I get there.
Am I supposed to go back to the bridge and give him my pussyhat? Would that be reparations/reconciliation? It’s worth a shot.
But he’s not there. Was he ever? Thinking I might be living inside a sitcom, I check my box: three walls, check; screen, check; sound, on.
I’m still plugged in. He’s checked out, and I know I didn’t imagine him because the ticket is written on real paper. I have a feeling we’re going to meet again, maybe not at the The Supreme Court but possibly on some other golden path. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to believe?
DARLING BOY
I didn’t feel a thing. Hair doesn’t have feelings. Not even red hair. Not even when I’m stoned. Especially when I’m stoned; and that’s an important detail because the cop who went to the Cop Oscars for arresting that famous bank robber dragged me all the way up the cliff from Mile Zero by my ponytail the night me and my buddies got busted for hanging at the beach.
I’m a ginger, and that means hard to stone, hard to put out for surgery, but easy to piss off.
But I’m not. Pissed at Daisy. Fair is fair. I have all the advantages. I can remember the magic numbers to get in and out. I get to choose the books we read and the food that I eat. Daisy just got it in her head she wanted some kind of keepsake, snuggled up close as if to see the pictures in the book about Wounded Knee, and gotcha, I was missing some ginger and she was dancing inside a circle of Dementia Girls whooping like Sitting Bull’s warriors. Lucky I was wearing my magic shirt full of roach holes that never burned me. Who knows, she might’ve thought of hacking off some skin.
“Where’d you get these?” I put down our book, got up, disarmed her gently, and brought her back to her chair. Daisy doesn’t need scissors. People come in to fix her hair and her nails. The nurses chop up her food. She put her handful of my crowning glory in her pocket with a smirk I would never call a smile. It was pure naughty.
“No more ghost stories,” I warned her. “They give you bad ideas.”
“You mad at me?” She grabbed my hand and kissed the fish webbing between my fingers. Ginger on speed, they said before I quit swimming. How many husbands did she waste? Daisy can charm the seeds out of a nickel bag.
“I’m mad about you,” she said, half-singing, so I knew it was an old tune. Daisy is a human jukebox. I wish I had half that number of songs in my head.
Matt the physio says we’re an item. That’s a relief to him because all the other ladies stalk him. It started when he asked the Dees to make like they’re windshield wipers and she couldn’t get her arms going in opposite directions.
“Unison’s good,” I said, and we did it together. That got her laughing.
“She never laughs,” Matt said, and that was how I got off janitor duty and became her special reader, even after my hundred hours were up. We have a connection. She calls me Darling Boy because she can’t remember my name. That’s OK by me. When you’re a ginger with your name on the cop blotter, anonymity is a true endorphin hit.
Daisy does remember some things. Unison got her going. Her brain is wired for opera. A nurse gave her earphones so she could listen in private; but she sings along, and we all try to get through it without wetting ourselves, especially when she dances. She’s dem bones dancing.
I like reggae myself. Daisy made a face when I downloaded a bunch of tunes, but she did get up and shake her moneymaker, or the handful of skin that’s left of it. Matt laughed his face off.
“You got her number all right.”
“She’s got mine too.” I make like I’m dialling up the lonely muscle on the left side of my ribcage. Daisy is cool with me, and she never tells me to do my homework, go to school, cut my hair or quit smoking ganja. That would be my business. I’ve taken charge of my life, and I have a new family, all friends, and no blood relations.
In a way, it was her idea to get me working with the dementia team. One morning when I was still chipping off my hours with a broom, I found her redecorating the dayroom, moving the chairs around. You’ve got to know, some of those chairs, especially the La-Z-Boys, are heavy, and she’s a small lady. Just to give you a picture, I’ll tell you she’s about a handspan over five feet tall, and she eats as much as an ant can carry in one load. Daisy wears yellow, and she smells like dandelions. Even when she’s just had her hair done, she wears a sunhat with fake flowers stuck in the band.
“Awesome, you’re a monster,” I said, watching her motorize chairs, wondering what she was on. “What’s up?”
“We need a meeting.” Daisy wasn’t even puffed out. This is the lady who calls her visits to the washroom 8220;hikes.”
“What about?”
“You know,” she said, one of her two standard answers. One is “You know,” and the other is “Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.” Either way she avoids making mistakes. I think she is way more with it than she gets credit for. I should have answered like that at school. They might’ve thought I was Einstein throwing the questions back at them.
“No, I don’t.”
She let go of the chair she was scraping across the linoleum (“It’s got to be linoleum because some of the girls pee themselves,” she’d confided) and whispers, “We’re all prisoners here. They won’t let us back into Canada. It isn’t fair. We’re Canadians.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It isn’t.”
“So we’re going to have a revolution,” she announced, Daisy proud of Daisy for dialling the right word that time.
“Oh.” That’s what I got for reading her stories about Che, Louis Riel and Sitting Bull. Back in Canada, I’m willing to bet she voted Conservative but in Deeland, Daisy’s gone rogue. I wondered if I should sneak in a joint. It might help with her constipation.
“You have to help.”
“You’re going to make a speech.”
“A speech? Me? What about?”
“You’re going to tell them.”
“Tell them what?”
“To let us out and in.”
“Where?”
“Canada. We want in. It’s our right.”
“You’ve got to give me some time.”
I noticed the Dees had put away their blank expressions, which only happens when little kids and dogs come into the ward. They were smiling and winking at me. Daisy really had them worked up, which was neat, but it totally maxed my stress level. This could land me in jail, which I barely avoided last time I stuck my red head up. Jail scares the crap out of me. I’ve heard ginger boys get the eggbeater where the sun doesn’t shine if they step out of line; and who decides where the line is anyway?
“OK. I’ll make a speech tomorrow.” And maybe I’ll never come back, I thought.
Soon as I got out of there, I lit up a doobie and walked around the hospital ’hood. It was spring and colour saturated, like being in a Johnny Depp movie. (They don’t call Victoria the Garden City for nothing.) Daisy loves her garden walks. Isn’t that Canada enough for one old lady?
The trippy gardens handed me a plan. The deck off the dayroom is big enough to have a name, and there was nothing growing in the planters, somebody’s great idea gone to waste. I knew what to do.
Daisy hadn’t forgotten. Soon as I walked in with my big garbage bag, she and her ladies crowded around me like hens at feeding time (I used to look after the chickens at our farm). I have to admit the dementia ladies smell like a henhouse.
“Well?” she asked, white knuckles gripping her hipbones.
“OK,” I said. “Back off, ladies. Follow me. We’re going to Canada.” I led them to the door.
“Canada?” she said when they were all outside on the deck.
“Yes. Inside is purgatory.” (I know that word from my brief incarceration at Sunday School). “Outside is Canada.” I let them peek in my bag. “I have some plant donations.”