by Tim Bowling
So there I stood in the Second Cup, trying to imagine the imaginary world of a fictional character while I clutched my Dumpster-bin toys. All around me the responsible century gazed into its laptop screens and fiddled with its earbuds. I sleepwalked my way to a table, set down my horse and magician, and let the full force of the coffee-spout crash me to the metaphorical tracks. When the voice spoke, I did not think it addressed itself to me at first. And then, when I realized that it did, I thought the voice belonged to Walter Mitty’s haranguing harridan of a wife.
It didn’t. It belonged – and I swear on the box hives of my apiary Edmonton ancestry – to a three-hundred-pound man with a babyish face in a tight-fitting chocolate-coloured suit. He was young, crewcutted like all the young men today, in or out of the military, and wore a gold watch that cost more than a first edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles; it clanked like a snapped handcuff as he reached his hand out to my transparent horse.
“I had one of these when I was a kid.” His grin was genuine and joy-making. I thought perhaps a genie might emerge from the gap in his teeth. “That’s the large intestine, that’s the small.”
“Really?” What I meant was, you had a transparent horse as a kid? The man couldn’t have been more than twenty-three or -four. Were they still making transparent horses? What about transparent men? And by they, I meant the grim-faced Chinese peasantry, of course. I was certain they, meaning we, didn’t make toy horses, piggy banks or any other toys on this continent anymore.
“Oh yeah. I had the transparent man, too.” He looked at me with what appeared to be compassion. “It wasn’t the jockey. The horse and the man didn’t go together. Can I?” He reached hesitantly towards the horse.
I nodded, still gobsmacked by his face, a large blancmange in which the features of Fatty Arbuckle and Winston Churchill had been mixed. If he had announced, “This is our finest hour,” and then pushed his forefinger into a dimple and winked coquettishly, I would have saluted and chuckled. While he revolved the horse in his huge, doughy hands, I considered him more closely. His hair was Prince Valiant black and heavily gelled, and, like many young people, he sported a tattoo to express his individuality – in his case, a heron-blue-and-lizard-green Chinese dragon flew on his bull neck from the right collarbone to an ear whose lobe dangled like a flapper’s art deco earring. It made me think of that dragon guarding the treasure in The Hobbit. What was it called? Smog? Suddenly I felt overwhelmingly sad that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d read The Hobbit. Had I even read it to my kids? While the fat young man’s dragon flew, the stressed middle-aged man’s toad croaked. Yet neither of us was transparent. We wore our flesh like goblin armour. I fought off the urge to call my uninvited guest Roscoe, to tell him, “For heaven’s sake, whatever you do, don’t go to the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco for the Labour Day weekend. Stay here and talk about horses.”
As if he’d heard me, the big man loosened the dark tie at his throat and announced, “A horse can outrun a train.” Then, placing the toy gently on its four hooves, he added, “But a man can’t outrun his fate.”
No, he didn’t. What he said was, “Why do you have these things? Do you own a toy store or something?”
A toy store! To own a toy store. Was that even possible? I knew that somebody sold the toys that the Chinese peasants sweated over, but it wasn’t a single man, transparent or not, who owned Toys"R"Us and Walmart. Small business, if it exists at all, doesn’t exist the way it did when I was a boy. A pang of admiring melancholy for the adults of my childhood washed over me, those men and women who, together, owned toy stores, shoe stores, convenience stores, bakeries, dry cleaners – and, yes, tack and butcher shops – those men and women who, knowing hard times, gratefully made a living and did not dream of expanding into franchise millionaires. They took the keys out of their pockets every misty October morning and unlocked the doors and turned the Closed sign around to Open. And then, in the misty late afternoons with the foghorns and the horns of the coal trains blowing somewhere behind Time, they turned the signs back around and locked the doors. They’re locked forever now. Knock as hard as I can, I can never get in.
The past is so close, so intimate. It connects us, generation to generation, and then, abruptly, the chain breaks. The butcher shop of my fifth year in 1969 still had sawdust spread on the floors. The butcher always snapped a raw wiener out of a link and handed it to me. The giant head and antlers of a moose presided over the doorway. In would come Mrs. Hatt, the tall, skinny widow. She wore cloche hats and hose the colour of wet English sand and had teeth like a horse. One day I’d learn that Mrs. Hatt, when she was a little girl in London, watched Queen Victoria go by in a carriage. Queen Victoria! 1969. We reach out for history; we touch the fresh gravestone of Neil Armstrong who, denying death, will always take a small step. My brothers – senior citizens now – drove their Valiant and El Camino as teenagers to the beach at White Rock to see an old vaudevillian walk slowly along the tracks.
What had the big man asked me? Oh, yes.
“No. I don’t own a toy store. I just bought these things.” And then my age showed, as clearly as my underwear would have if I’d stood and dropped my pants. “For a lark.”
His eyes, I noticed then, were pigeon-breast grey, soot soft and set far back from his surprisingly small nose. I supposed he was processing what I’d said, but his computer didn’t quite go that far back. For a lark. That was Keaton and Arbuckle talk. Lord love a duck. Heavens to Murgatroyd. For Jiminy’s sake. That was my parents’ talk. Betsy and Pete probably owned the butcher shop that sold veal cutlets to the old lady who’d stared after Queen Victoria’s horse-drawn carriage. My sigh was like the cosmic silence after the Titanic slipped under the icy Atlantic.
“Hey. Can I try the bank?” The chubby boy he had been suddenly bloomed to life in his face. As if to vouch for his character, he introduced himself. “I’m Charles Sleep.” We shook hands.
“Tim Bowling,” I said. And when I did, I saw the old Ladner Lanes again. I hadn’t seen them in such a long time. The skinny Ouevray twins were pinsetters. They crouched out of sight behind the pins and, when you left a dreaded split, they magically cleared the rubble from the gap. Meanwhile, the whole town came out to bowl. Everyone kept their own scores, chewing on pencil ends, shading in the strikes and spares, working out the math. Shrouds of cigarette smoke. Laughter. Chants of “Hecky! Hecky! Hecky!” as my father readied to throw the last frame of a perfect game that did not end in perfection. One year his average was almost 300. His average! Come back and bowl me another game, Dad. With your grandson. He’s fourteen, and his average is 150 and climbing. There aren’t any pinsetters, though. Computers keep the score. You still have to take the bowling balls in your hands, and they still look like storm-battered versions of the planets. Come and bowl Jupiter one more time through the vapours.
“Are you all right?” Charles Sleep asked with genuine concern.
I brushed my eyes with the base of my palms and smiled. “Go ahead. Give it a try.”
A few people at the neighbouring tables looked up from their laptops and phones to watch.The big man named Sleep stood and plunged his hands into his pants pockets. He grinned sheepishly.
“I don’t have any coins.”
This magician didn’t take plastic. He was cast-iron through and through. By now, I longed for the past to stop knocking behind my eyelids and heart valves. Yes, yes, money itself would soon be gone, but it was only symbolic anyway. I put a dime into Fatty’s palm and he grinned without any sheep appearing this time. Fatty put the dime on the magician’s table, pressed the mechanism, lowered the top hat, vanished the dime and cried, “Cool.” I saw the blood in his neck pump the dragon’s wings.
A woman with long hair the colour of washed-out celluloid asked if she could try. I reached for another coin, but she had her own. Of course, she was probably a little older than me. The magician again performed his magic. The woman’s smile would have melted the iceberg that sank the
. . . “Can I try?” A young woman with bright red glasses this time. Then a thirtyish black man in a UPS uniform, then two older men in grey suits, then one of the gals who worked at the Second Cup. Human beings were gathering en masse, just like all those brides in Keaton’s Seven Chances who want to wed a millionaire. Coins clanked. Laughter. How about that? I sat there in stunned silence, feeling sorry for the little transparent horse whose transparency had become invisibility. The magician offered illusion, but the horse stripped illusion away and revealed the trick that gave the horse its power. We don’t really want that degree of truth, and yet we live in an age of science and reason. The paradox rose up and died away in the random delight of ordinary humanity. What brought these people to my franchise table had brought my grandfather and his siblings and thousands of other Edmontonians in 1913 to the grand opening of Alexander Pantages’s vaudeville theatre. The broken chain relinked.
As I watched a dozen strangers laugh and fumble with coins, suddenly a lovely silence enveloped them; they became actors on the screen, circa 1921. Now I was truly the boy projectionist, watching not the distant past but rather the entrancing present. Yet I could not stir my spirit self to rise and join the fun; it was too heavy with material experience, the way a field of grass in autumn can’t stand tall until the sun has burned the frost away. I sat there, so close to life, and all my apprehensions about the day and months and years ahead would not let me close enough to live. I knew it, and I fought myself, in fierce silence. According to Socrates, the unexamined life is not worth living. But what about the too-examined life? I let the merrymakers of illusion burn the frost from my eyes as the sounds of the franchise coffee shop returned – the prepackaged, programmed, market-tested music; the grinding of the espresso machine – and the workday punched its clock with a fist like a fetus. Why was the capacity to enjoy life to the fullest so fraught with the feeling that defeats enjoyment?
Buster Keaton filmed Sherlock Jr. with all of his senses on fire – no young man has ever been so fulfilled. Fatty Arbuckle, that prince of a giant man, threw the most lavish parties. Together, the two comedians pranked their way through the halcyon early days of the little town called Hollywood. Everything was fun. “In the silent days we could try anything at all, and did,” Keaton said. “We were not supervised by business executives who lacked a sense of humor. . . . In the early twenties we also had a whale of a time for ourselves after working hours playing practical jokes.” What they did on the set, they carried over off the set: impersonating city workmen to threaten a millionaire actress’s cherished lawn with picks and shovels, impersonating chauffeurs to give a visiting studio boss a terrifying madcap ride, impersonating butlers to make a dinner party hilariously unforgettable. Once, they constructed an elaborate gag involving fake Belgian royalty and a fake state dinner that was so well orchestrated and acted that the duped host of the royal visitors didn’t know he was the victim of a practical joke until he was told three months later. For Keaton and Arbuckle, there was almost no separation between work and life. It was just as if I lived the stories I wrote each day. Youth! Freedom! Humour!
Then it all came crashing down. Overnight, Arbuckle was ruined. Within a decade, so was Keaton. The frost deepened on my eyelids as Fatty’s face put on a perplexed scowl and the laughers around him darkened to a mob. Only it wasn’t the face of Fatty Arbuckle; it was the face of Charles Sleep, and his living hands were shaking my little magician.
“You jammed it,” a woman said plaintively.
“But I didn’t.” Charles Sleep looked desperately around at the scowling faces. His cheeks were tinged red, his brow looked slick. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.” Suddenly he met my eyes. “Honest. I wouldn’t.”
The older woman with the celluloid hair gently took the bank from Sleep’s hands. “Let me try.”
Clank. Clank. It was no good. The top hat would not lift. She tried to slip a finger underneath the brim. The UPS man tried next. The girl in red glasses made a suggestion. Charles Sleep’s face pulled back like the moon that had seen too much horror on the earth.
A voice said, “You put a quarter in. It was too big.” There was a palpable sense of disgust. Charles Sleep blinked feverishly, all little boy now, bewildered by a vicious, adult world he couldn’t understand. I had to give him his illusions back. I had to give my own back.
I smiled. Like any decent man in the tangible world, I yoked my material and spirit selves, and then sailed into the fray. “It’s all right. I’m sure you didn’t do it. The toy’s old. It’s probably just rusted. A little oil and . . .”
The mob wasn’t buying it. They crouched like trolls under a bridge, waiting for the clatter of goat hooves. I took the bank in my hands, pushed my forefinger under the top hat and closed my eyes to conjure up the laughter. Remember The Butcher Boy, I told myself. 1917. New York City. Keaton’s first screen appearance. He goes to a country store to buy a bucket of molasses, and he drops his coin into the molasses. Fatty tries to help him get it out. Somehow Buster’s hat gets stuck to his head. Fatty yanks at it. Mayhem! The silent comedy, which is every bit as much a part of the human condition as . . .
It was no use. The fun was over, the crowd drifted away, the wrecking ball crashed into the side of the Pantages Theatre. Charles Sleep simply didn’t know what hit him. The sweat on his brow now turned to tears of frustration in his eyes. It was just after Labour Day in 2012, the Enbridge Tower of humourless executives towered over us, and Charles Sleep, a man of his time, offered up the solution of his time. Though he wasn’t guilty, he offered to pay, not with his career, not with his whole jocular and trusting self, but with money, our age’s plastic Shroud of Turin.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “If I hadn’t asked to look at it, this wouldn’t have happened. Listen, I was going to ask to buy it anyway. How about a hundred bucks? Will that do?”
Immediately, as a man of my time, I gulped like a bullhead at the dangled profit bait. Then my humanity flooded in and I wondered if I could find the homeless balloonatic and really make his day. At last, the waterspout of humanity broke open and crashed me to the tracks. Who could make a young man named Sleep pay for the end of all illusions? Not me. Some things are not for sale.
I reached out and shook his trembling, sweaty hand, but not to close a transaction.
“I know you didn’t wreck it. It’s an old toy and it’s lasted a long time. The coin will come loose.” I suddenly realized that the magician and the transparent horse could never be separated, the way the elderly Keaton could never really be separated from the young genius. “I want to take it home for my kids.”
“Are you sure?”
Then Charles Sleep did two surprising things. He reached tremblingly into his coat’s breast pocket, the way Elisha Cook Jr. always reached for his gat in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, and extracted a small card, a business card. It read: Charles Sleep, Unit Manager, Systems and Protocols, Enbridge Corporation. It was the address that really caught my eye. No, it more than caught my eye; both my eyes were spiderwebbed and fixed in a kind of disbelieving horror that was so close to pleasure that the ghost of John Keats coughed blood mildly in the mists of Parnassus. Charles Sleep worked in the Enbridge Tower!
I didn’t know why this information shook me to the core. After all, hundreds of people must work on those twenty floors that don’t have a thirteenth floor, and most of those hundreds were probably milling around these few Jasper Avenue blocks before cracking the workday’s whip in earnest. But you must understand: I was a solitary individual, and I didn’t generally engage with strangers at all, except in the most fleeting of instances. That I should meet a fat man who looked like Roscoe Arbuckle and worked where Edmonton’s Pantages Theatre once stood didn’t just defy the odds; it put a rent in the universe. The card throbbed like Braille in my hand. I felt the long sidewalk of time tip very briefly back into the past.
Then Charles Sleep, in a few quick motions, spoiled everything. He pulled a mobi
le device from his capacious wardrobe, pushed a few pudgy fingers across the little screen, paused, his face wearing that very contemporary mix of intensity and boredom, and finally announced, “You might really have something there. Shit. I sure hope it’s not wrecked.” He held the screen out on his palm like the host of a god he believed in but didn’t pray to.
And there, in the magical, multicoloured conglomeration of pixels, appeared my cast-iron magician bank. One just like it was listed on eBay.
“There’s a few of them,” Charles Sleep mused as he laid his phone down and took up the bank. “Some are reproductions, worth only about fifty bucks. But if this is an original . . .”
Days. “Days are where we live.” So says Philip Larkin. But I didn’t generally live in days anything like this one.
“Here’s one going for seven grand.” He had somehow retrieved his phone. I hadn’t seen him or it move. Perhaps, I thought, the technologies had caught up to Star Trek’s beaming powers, at least for small objects. It was certainly possible. Being a man who didn’t own a cellphone (I couldn’t shake the association with prison, and that movie moment when the unjustly accused gets one call to a lawyer), I tended to lag behind the contemporary pace of change. Well, more than lag.
“Seven grand?” Now my tongue was as spiderwebbed as my eyes. I couldn’t articulate the impact of that sum. I made barely five thousand dollars to teach thirty teenagers the rudiments of grammar for four months. To think that some homeless guy had just handed me six months of teaching income! “Strange days have found us,” to quote Jim Morrison of The Doors, who also sang, “people are strange when you’re a stranger.” And when are we really ever anything else, even to ourselves?