by Tim Bowling
“Why? What’s insane about saving a life?”
I wasn’t quite sure who spoke. Was it Delmore, suggesting that each child never born was, in fact, saved? Or Whitman again: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?”
Delmore was just emerging from another long, oceanic sigh. “I never had children, it’s true. But I was a child myself. I was a son. That counts for something. The truth is, Tim, I’ve thought more about fatherhood than most men who simply perform the biological function. Experience without reflection is, in some ways, not experience at all.”
“He was going to die, you know. If we had left him there. And I don’t have fifteen hundred dollars to spend on a monkey.”
“What?”
Chelsea’s voice – calm, a little defensive – hardly registered. I was too stunned by hearing my name spoken so tenderly in Delmore’s usually oracular and sardonic tone to take anything else in.
“I’d have to work a ton of shifts to make fifteen hundred bucks.”
“Being a father,” I said over my shoulder, “means becoming a child again, only more so. Imagine being five, and knowing what lies ahead.” My own idea, which I’d never really articulated before, somehow struck me as so haunting and terrible that the Pinto’s wild gallop towards downtown suddenly became a pony ride at the Midwest Chautauqua. But only briefly. The exigencies of the practical almost always trump the profound insight.
“Maybe he’d have given you a layaway plan,” I suggested to Chelsea, half my attention cocked for Delmore’s next response.
“A what?”
Oh God, where the hell did I think I was, 1972? I hastened on. “You could have used a credit card. Everybody buys things that they can’t afford sometimes. And then they pay them off. Most people don’t steal.”
“Then what’s this little dude doing in Edmonton? He didn’t get on a plane all by himself.”
The girl’s logic, once again, chastened me. The moral foundation of her rash act hit hard against my tired, middle-class assumptions, which were, to use the language of her age group, lame. I floundered for a response. I knew my face looked just like Keaton’s at the end of Sherlock Jr.: perplexed, bemused, full of the wondering question, “Is this what life boils down to?” For the boy-projectionist, and for the comedian playing the part, that wonder focused on marriage and family. How does the carefree existence of youth so suddenly become the responsibility of adulthood? Keaton holds the newborn twins, and blinks. I held the inside handle of the passenger door and shut my eyes as Chelsea minnowed across the lanes.
“Not for all fathers,” Delmore said with a groan. “To say that is to say that all men are the same. Which obviously isn’t true. My father . . .” His words died on a choked sob.
I couldn’t deal with such a massive subject now. It required far too much emotion, and I sensed a calmer opportunity would present itself. For now, I had the violence and moral confusion of the present to contend with. I mean, you could ignore a reckless driver and a shrieking, stolen monkey for only so long.
As we careened back onto Jasper Avenue, the monkey’s shrieking became a continuous high howl that sounded horribly like a police siren. Then I realized that it wasn’t the monkey at all. Greg Arious had fallen completely silent, as quickly as the silent movies had collapsed into sound. Even worse, he appeared to be studying me. His baseball-sized head cocked slightly to the side, his lips moving as if nervously mumbling, he perched on Chelsea’s right shoulder and stared. It would have been disturbing, and I might have read a great deal of psychoanalysis into it, if I wasn’t so stricken by the police siren, descending on us from behind like an avenging maniac. Metalhead hadn’t wasted any time, and the local constabulary was obviously keen to set a new station record for response.
“Pull over,” I gasped. Already I was scrambling for a reasonable explanation.
Delmore, back to his usual self, didn’t help. “Tell the cops you’re the monkey’s uncle. That you’re just taking him out on a day pass.”
I ignored the remark, but I could hardly ignore the evidence. We had the goods, there was no hiding the fact. Everybody’s got something to hide, I thought hysterically, especially me and my monkey. A nervous laugh slipped out.I saw Keaton’s ghost blinking at me from where he stood on the sidewalk, leaning jauntily against a blood-red Canada Post box. I remembered the reason he’d once given for never visiting the elderly, moaning, forgotten silent film actors and actresses at a Woodland Hills rest home: “Some of them had never heard a Beatles record. They haven't kept up with the times.” Now the Beatles themselves were old news. But, at least, unlike those silent film stars, the Beatles never had to endure the obsolescence of their art form.
“Try poetry,” Delmore said. “Obsolete before you even start. Obsolete at your height, and obsolete ever after.”
This was patently false. After all, I was reading his poems, I was talking to his spirit. But I couldn’t engage in a debate now.
Chelsea, who remained remarkably composed, cracking her gum as she veered towards the curb, suddenly turned a gentle smile on me. I felt grandfathered by it.
“You’ve never had much to do with the cops, have you, Professor?”
I shook my head.
“You’re lucky.” There was so much painful history in her voice that, for a few seconds, I didn’t even realize that the police car – lights flashing – had sped past. Once I had noticed, once I had recovered my breath, I determined to be the sensible and responsible middle-aged man that I was.
“Chelsea, you know you have to take him back. You can’t keep him.”
The gentleness disappeared, her jawbone tightened and I immediately regretted my common sense. After all, what good had it ever done me, except to keep me clear of the law? Yet I knew enough about power and authority to understand whom most of the laws serviced. Oil companies had all the protection in the world, whereas you’d be hard pressed to find an elephant with tusks anywhere on the planet. The process of change in a human life isn’t a matter of technology; it isn’t one kind of film over another. If I was going to shed my birth skin, it would have to come off painfully, with a ripping of flesh and a spray of blood.
“I’m not taking him back. I’m giving him to my mom.”
“Good idea,” Delmore said. “He’ll treat her better than most men would.”
“Your mom?” I asked. “Chelsea, a cat’s one thing, or a dog, but most people don’t think of a monkey as good company.”
“Most people don’t think of monkeys at all. That’s hardly the monkeys’ fault.”
“She’s got you there, chum.” Delmore slapped the back of my seat.
“Oh go soak your shaggy head.”
“What?”
My God, had I spoken that last bit aloud? I glanced at Chelsea, but she was pulling the car out onto the avenue, Greg Arious gargoyling her shoulder as always. I must have simply mumbled. To cover up, I made my plea.
“Listen. There has to be a better way to go about this. Can’t we stop somewhere and talk it over? Somewhere out of sight.” Driving around the downtown core in a lemon-yellow Pinto was akin to rumbling through the streets on one of the aforementioned elephants. Naked. Like Lady Godiva, except she was on a horse. Completely transparent.
“You’re not without a certain capacity for wit,” Delmore conceded. “But then, poets are often funny. Did you know that Eliot corresponded with Groucho Marx and S. J. Perelman? Most people figure that Eliot was stuffy and sombre.” He chuckled. “Nope. Eliot was funny. One of those funny anti-Semites. By the way, you spelled sombre wrong. It’s somber.”
“You’re in Canada,” I said.
He chuckled. “I’m in death. We get to keep our own way of spelling.” There followed the kind of pause that follows the first turning of the wheels of a hearse as it leaves the gravesite. “Among other things.”
“Like where?” Chelsea asked.
Delmore’s voice dropped so low that I could barely hear it. “We even get to keep our deaths.”<
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But I had to give my full attention to Chelsea. I peered through the windshield and saw that we were approaching the general area of Churchill Square. Was this to be my finest hour? It didn’t feel that way. But I did have an inspired idea.
“The library parkade. It’s underground.”
Chelsea nodded, and dropped her foot on the gas. Soon we were plunging down, out of the people-thronged streets – it must have been lunch hour – into that close-ceilinged world of oil-soaked cement and cement pillars and mostly black SUVs cattled in their stalls. Chelsea reached for the ticket, the arm of the machine lifted and the Pinto cantered into the gloom. Once we had parked, and Chelsea had shut off the engine, I almost felt that we should have immediately watered the car and wiped her flanks down. But, in truth, I was too relieved to move. My whole body released. An inaudible sigh released from every pore. For the moment, we were safe.
Safe, but confused. Or at least I was. I had no previous experience to fall back on. I fell back on my good citizenship, which, in this case, was perhaps also kindness and caring and not merely self-protection. I had heard the painful history in Chelsea’s voice; I didn’t want her to have any further trouble with the law. The right and wrong of the crime was immaterial for the moment, but trouble was trouble. I had grown up in British Columbia at a period of rising environmentalism; when a grandmother chained herself to a Douglas fir to save it from the loggers, the law always settled Grandma’s hash eventually.
“Chelsea.” I turned to face her. She was chattering to Greg, making clucking noises with her tongue, smiling for all the world as if there was no such thing as the future or the past. Her face shone with sweat, her mascara had formed little Rorschach blots on her cheeks and her red hair had come free in a few places; some strands stuck out like straw from a scarecrow’s shirt. I forged on, even more convinced of the rightness of my plan. “Let’s make a deal.”
She stopped chattering. And the monkey – I swear – turned to gaze at me as if he were her advocate. I admired him for his pugnacious willingness to protect his protector, and the admiration completely decided me.
“I won’t make you take him back, but we can’t just leave things the way they are, either. It isn’t practical. They’ll track you down. It isn’t just your car. The owner had plenty of time to study you, and he’ll be able to give the police a full description.” I raised my hand to ward off her protests. “And I understand that you can’t, or don’t want to, use a credit card to buy the monkey. So” – Delmore’s hot grizzly breath burned the back of my neck; he was as interested as if I’d been T. S. Eliot pronouncing on the quality of his poems – “let me buy him for you. Let me call the owner, explain the situation calmly and then give him my credit card information. If you like, we can work out some easy terms that will give you lots of time to pay me back.” I was already calculating just how I was going to budget for the purchase of a South American capuchin monkey. No doubt the credit card company would wonder if they were dealing with another case of identity theft. Books, the occasional flight to Vancouver, groceries on rare desperate occasions, some fees for children’s swimming lessons and various sports and arts programs: that had been the purchasing pattern for many years. Now, all of a sudden, an exotic pet. But then, surely, the credit card company would recognize exactly what had been my consolation about identity theft ever since it first emerged as a maddening modern crime: who in their right mind would want to steal my identity? What self-respecting hacker would waste his time and energy on an impecunious poet who mostly couldn’t even get blood from his own stones because he had long ago sold his stones to buy organic baby food or to pay the heating bill?
Chelsea broke gently into my thoughts. Were those tears sliding with Fred Astaire grace onto the mascara’s black dance floor? Delmore didn’t even groan at this stretch of an image; I knew that he was stunned by my offer to pay, because no one other than a serious poet who had to teach to survive could understand what fifteen hundred dollars on my credit card meant. He also understood that I had no serious intention of making the girl pay even one penny back. I had made that point for appearances only. In any case, it eventually occurred to me that fifteen hundred dollars seemed a reasonable share of the twenty thousand dollars I might just take from Ollivander for the magician bank.
“Really? You’d do that?” Chelsea asked, so softly that I barely caught the words. “That’s . . . that’s so cool of you.”
Ah, if only my children had heard her. Was that worth fifteen hundred dollars and a monkey’s freedom – to be, at fifty, called cool by a teenager? Frankly, no. Coolness had never been a part of my repertoire, not even when I was a teenager myself and briefly concerned about such things. 1980. Feathered bangs! But to help someone, to reach out, with no expectation of anything in return, as Keaton had reached out to Fatty Arbuckle after the rape trials, giving him the directing job for Sherlock Jr., at least until it became painfully obvious to everyone that Fatty, his confidence shaken, no longer had the goods. Even then, Keaton had manufactured a reasonable explanation for Arbuckle’s removal from the project; he told his old friend that he was wanted elsewhere, on a more important project overseen by William Randolph Hearst and all his millions, a situation that Keaton himself, with the utmost discretion, had orchestrated. What did Keaton ever gain by this friendship and loyalty? Self-respect? Peace of mind? I hoped these dividends paid off a decade later when he sat weeping on the set of all those tired MGM sound comedies in which he was miscast, or several decades later when he played unfunny bit parts to all those teenagers in the beach blanket pyjama movies. Who knows – perhaps that loyalty to Roscoe Arbuckle, more than the comic genius and the work ethic, perhaps that natural affection that led to a five-hour walk through the streets of Paris upon hearing of his mother’s death, perhaps those acts saved him as much as his art did. It is certainly not true to say that impressive personal qualities are inextricably linked to artistic talent. The list of real bastards who ever put pen to paper . . .
“Why do you even write prose,” Delmore grumbled, “if you can’t stop digressing? There’s such a thing as dramatic structure, you know.” Yet I could hear him moving the solid blocks of tears from his dark eyes to his massive paws; they scraped like pyramid stones. I was almost crying myself by now.
“Well, I’m happy to do it,” I said, keeping the emotion from my voice. “Think of it as a gift to your mom. She’s probably about my age. I know how tough things can get.”
Chelsea nodded. Greg Arious nodded. Delmore shifted some more of his Egyptian sand and, far across the slick, grey sea of cement, through the silty underwater gloom, the ghost of Keaton inspected the moving arm of the parkade’s ticket machine. It seemed that death did not alter one’s interests, but I wasn’t sure if I was comforted by that. I made a mental note to ask Delmore about it later. For now, I had work to do.
“Could you look up the pet shop number on your – whatchamacallit – phone?” Truth be told, and as God as my witness, I didn’t know whether you could call a phone with Internet access a phone. I didn’t even know if all phones had Internet access. People talked about their various plans with their mobile devices, but it was all Greek to someone who still thought in terms of layaway plans, and who still used phrases such as it was all Greek. Understand: I make no apologies. Despite the cultural and social pressure, we don’t owe our degree of currency to anyone. It’s a free country. Isn’t it interesting how that particular slogan never goes out of currency? Some language just always supports the troops.
Chelsea performed the petit point on the tiny digits and announced the phone number of the pet store. Then she held the phone out to me. Noticing my hesitation, she offered to dial the number. Except she didn’t say dial. So what did she say? Type? But still I hesitated. The darned thing was so tiny. If I put it up to my ear, I feared that it would drop into the canal and vanish. Then I’d be hearing teenaged conversations continually, which, come to think of it, might well teach me something about life.
I’d been arrogant long enough. If I couldn’t quite swallow my pride, I could at least taste it. I asked Chelsea to dial the number (of course I said dial – I’d been raised a rotarian and a rotarian I remained), which she accomplished in about the amount of time it takes a hummingbird to complete one beat of its wings. Then I took the little phone and held it up like an explosive device to my eardrum. A few seconds later, Angus Metalhead’s softly sinister voice reached out with a “Yeah?”
I took a deep breath, dragged the little phone down my jawline, and plunged in. “I was just in your store. The middle-aged man with the young red-headed woman. We –”
“You stole my fucking monkey.”
Not a good start, Metalhead, I thought. Aggression doesn’t encourage generosity.
“Yes, well, it would be stealing if we had no intention of paying for it. That’s why I’m calling.”
“I’ve already got the cops looking for you. That piece of shit you’re driving won’t be hard to find.”
I’d always suspected that lovers of heavy metal music were idolaters of the bleeding obvious, and here was the proof.
“Well,” I said, as calmly as possible, “you can tell them to stop looking. I’m calling to pay. I’ll use my Visa. It was fifteen hundred, you said?”
During the pause that followed, Greg Arious, as if sensing the physical presence of his former captor, began to shriek like a banshee. I raised my eyes to Chelsea, suggesting that she find some way to distract her friend. And the quick-thinking girl – who might indeed prove to be a good student, if I ever found my way back to the classroom, which seemed more and more like the way Kansas seemed to Dorothy, except in reverse (and God help me, both Keaton and Arbuckle had been born in Kansas, and what exactly did that mean?) – dangled her go-light purse in front of Greg Arious, and he had enough sense of irony to take it as a sign to stop. Meanwhile, in the interim of shrieks, I couldn’t tell whether Metalhead had spoken. So I repeated my query about the price. The response was unexpected, to say the least.