by John Lawton
‘I leave meaning to the critics, but if you figure it out, let me know. Meantime, I’ll fix supper.’
One reason I do not eat Chinese food is that after college and countless improvised meals by Tsu-Lin, when Mel and I were too drunk or too stoned to do anything smarter than phone out for pizza, I could never face the monosodium-glutamate rich goo of commercial Chinese food again.
Over dinner I watched her hands move over half a dozen dishes like fluttering hummingbirds—a little of this, a dash of that—ate my fill, nostalgic to the last noodle, and answered her questions about the lives Mel and I had led since we last met the best part of seven years ago. She was deeply curious about Mel. Everybody always was. He seemed to fix himself in people’s minds. I had gotten used to it. I was well over six feet tall, and if I say so myself, a looker and a bigger hit by far with women. Mel was short, pudgy and nothing to write home about. But the combination of wit and aggression, energy and commitment made him a force. I was always Tonto to his Lone Ranger. I called him Kemosabe in college. He didn’t even think it was funny. Just accepted it at face value.
‘Mel’s been at the Voice since 1963. He’s turned out to be a first rate investigative reporter. Tried to make me into one. Got me up from Washington, stuck me behind a desk and tried to teach me. Couldn’t be done. He goes his own way, takes as long as it takes to come up with a story, and every so often they scream, “Where the fuck is Mel Kissing?” and every so often lets himself get as far as the talking stage when bigger papers want to headhunt him. Lets the Voice know they can’t take him for granted. He’s turned down a lot of money to stay with them. It was Mel exposed that illegal garbage dumping racket about six months back.’
Another roll of the eyes and flat utterance of ‘Fascinating.’
It was—but only to New Yorkers.
‘And is the Tom Wolfe of the East Village married?’
‘Nope.’
‘Girlfriend?’
‘Not as many as he’d like.’
‘But more than you?’
‘No comment.’
Nothing I said seemed to surprise her. Perhaps we had all gone similar ways for all our differences. We were none of us part of the Amerika for which our education had been designed to prepare us.
I asked her why she had got involved in war resistance.
‘Why do I do it? Simple enough if you think about it. My family has moved on each generation for almost a hundred years. China, Hong Kong, Macao, Saigon. I was born in Macao, but the first country I can remember is Vietnam. We left when I was three and the Japanese invaded. We went back and the French invaded—we left again. Finally washed up in America. Turner, I know what it’s like to leave home, to turn your back on everything that mattered and everything that made you. I was sixteen when I got to America—almost grown. These kids who run to Canada may well be making the biggest decision of their lives. Sure anyone can get to Canada in a day—makes it too easy. I give them time to pause. I don’t put up any argument. I just let it be known that if they want to lay low for a couple of days or a couple of weeks they can do it here. Whether they go on or go back is no matter to me—I’m not out to make or un-make the army that’s raging across my country. I gave up my country—I’d just like them to have a chance to think about it before they do the same thing. My father died with China on his lips like Orson Welles with Rosebud. It shouldn’t have to be that way.’
‘What do the locals make of all this?’
‘God, Johnnie, they don’t know. They think they know everything that goes on, but that’s just village life. No different here from Vietnam or Gascony or Yorkshire. They think they know—they hardly ever do. No, there’s six ways in and out of here. Nobody sees a thing. If they did I might well have had a visit from the Feds by now, but I haven’t and I don’t think I ever will.’
That had been three years ago. The Feds never had come—the waifs, as she always called them, seemed endless. It seemed sensible to ask about Joey DiMarco—he was far from being the usual runaway. Thief or not he seemed from all I’d heard to be more mainstream than anyone I’d chased after so far. But there was nothing to lose by asking.
I arrived at Tsu-Lin’s late morning, after a couple of hours’ drive in my beat-up VW. She wasn’t at the door to meet me. I found her up a ladder, at work with brush and palette on another of her vast canvasses. She slipped down quickly, offered me one cheek instead of the usual Gallic kiss on both. I caught her chin in one hand and said, ‘What are you hiding?’
‘Just another purple heart,’ she said and squirmed from my grip. I could see now, a fading bruise on her left cheek, fading but big. Big as a man’s fist.
‘Who did this?’
‘One of the waifs. Who else would it be?’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘Joey. He didn’t have a surname. Most of them don’t,’ she said.
I said, ‘It’s DiMarco.’
She wiped the paint off her hands on a rag, looked me up and down and said, ‘He the one you’re after? If he is, be careful. He’s a mean son of a bitch.’
‘When was he here?’
‘Just over a week ago. Spent a night here, casing the place, then he grabbed me, socked me when I said I’d no money and took $229. Cleaned out the stash I keep in the kitchen drawer.’
‘You were alone.’
‘Yes. I guess it was always a risk so I won’t be needing any lecture you might be thinking of giving me.’
‘You gonna stop now?’
‘Of course not. Are you?’
‘No.’
I stayed two or three hours, more to reassure myself than her. At last she said, ‘You staying the night?’
‘No.’
As I got back in the car she said, ‘Turner. I want the money back. I can afford to lose it. But I can’t think of a single reason why I should.’
Nor could I. Then I thought and said, ‘Did you take your usual mugshot of the guy?’
‘No. Wouldn’t let me. If I’d been smart I should have smelled a rat at that point. Like I said, Turner, be careful.’
§
I hit Toronto just after midnight. No matter—the guy I stayed with usually studied late. I could count on him being up till two or three. He opened the door with an economics text book in his hand.
‘Hi, Mikey.’
‘Hi, Raines.’
Mikey Kosciuscko had become a good friend. He had found a freedom in Canada, a direction, less from escaping America and the draft than from escaping his family. There is an old adage—you never know what you can do until you don’t have to explain it to your dad. Well, if there isn’t there should be. Mikey’d finished high school in two years of evening study and was now a college freshman, University of Toronto. He worked mornings and evenings, went to college in the afternoons and studied halfway into the night. Had to admire the kid. I’d had it easy. Everything paid for. I’d never waited table or pumped gas in my life. Oh—and he dropped the ‘y’ from his name. Part of growing up I guess.
He yawned a lot, made coffee and asked me his usual, ‘So, who you after this time?’
I told him.
‘I was over at the Rochdale two nights back,’ Mike said. ‘The Frisbee brothers were there . . . ’
I’d met the Frisbee brothers. Doug and Bob Frisbee. Two kids from Minneapolis, so named because they did little else but play frisbee. They were Canadian National Champions. And they were earnest advocates of Nixon, or whoever came after Nixon, granting amnesty, but only so they could go home, become All-America champions and take on the world.
‘. . . they have a new place now. They said this really weird guy had turned up on them. Could be the kid you’re looking for.’
‘How so weird?’
‘You know Doug and Bob—not great with words. They just said
he was straight, but straight in a weird kind of way. Like they pass him a joint to take a toke and he doesn’t pass it on, like he doesn’t know what to do with it. Sucks it down to the roach. Then he rolls over and barfs. It’s like he doesn’t know the rules. Like he’s . . . straight. Straight and heavy at the same time. That was their phrase—straight and heavy.’
Straight and heavy? That could be Joey DiMarco.
I said I’d look first thing in the morning. Check out the Frisbees’ new commune.
In those days it was possible to drift from commune to commune—always a place to untie your bedroll, always a vegetarian pot on the hob, and few—if any—questions asked. Rochdale—which Mike had mentioned—was a high-rise warren that had become a mecca for dropout kids across Ontario—I’d bump into kids who’d driven all the way from Sault Ste Marie on Lake Superior just to hang out at the Rochdale and score some dope—and for dodgers from across the border. I had daydreams of dodgers and deserters going in there and emerging thirty years later like Jap soldiers from the jungle. I say dodgers and deserters. Not a good idea to roll the two together. Same motive maybe, but the deserters had nothing left to imagine. They’d seen it. They were hard, took what they wanted from anyone and shit from no one. The kind of kids who gave ready shelter to draft-dodgers soon found deserters too much to handle.
I found the Frisbee brothers’ commune. Down one of those endless leafy avenues off Bloor in the Annex district—a two-block walk from Honest Ed Mirvish’s store. You know the place. No two houses quite the same. No two houses quite different enough. Doug and Bob’s house stood out—zap colors on the picket fence, a mess of reds and yellows, peeling door and window frames, sheets tacked up for curtains and a front lawn surrendered to the predations of squirrels, not a blade of grass or a flower to be seen.
No one answered at the front. I went around back. Hammered on the door. Heard nothing. A chain-link fence, playing host to a few dried out trailing plants, separated this garden from the one next door. A small, bald, wispy old man was moving down the fence to the end of the garden away from me.
‘Excuse me, sir. You wouldn’t happen to have . . .’
He scurried on, glaring back at me a couple of times. I caught up with him by a gap in the fence. He was clutching a dustpan and brush and he was looking up at me still glaring.
‘Excuse me, sir. Have you by any chance seen . . .’
He drew a line in the dust to complete the sense of the missing chain-link fence, like a kid in some baked dirt schoolyard daring me to step over it.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is what you people do to Canada.’
He threw the contents of the dustpan at me, quite possibly aiming at my face—the crud bounced off my chest instead.
‘This is what you do to Canada. Filth, scum, crap.’
I looked down at my feet—I was standing among the shards of a couple of dozen used hypodermics.
‘Send us your bums, send us your junkies, send us your scum!’
In the years in which I’d been coming up to Canada I had not encountered this kind of resentment at the tide of disaffected youth we had unleashed upon our nearest neighbor—but I’d not doubted for one second that it existed.
‘You can’t control these kids. So you send ’em here. You can’t win your goddam war so you export it to us. Scum! Nothin’ but scum and bums and junkies.’
I’d said nothing. The old guy seemed to run out of steam and glide gently to the side, the dustpan in one hand, the brush in the other, hanging at arm’s length, pulling him into a round-shouldered stoop. Maybe he thought I’d hit him? Who knows? He ran for his back door, yelled ‘God bless America’ over his shoulder with as much irony as he could muster, and locked himself in.
Was I going to search every commune in Toronto or was I going to get tactical? I looked down at the needles again—drugs did not seem like Joey D’s scene at all. The tactical move would be to track him down to the Toronto equivalent of his New York scene—that is, wait until dark and hit the clubs in Yorkville. I was never sure whether Yorkville was a Lower East Side or a Greenwich Village, maybe it was the former aiming to become the latter. Half the clubs weren’t even licensed—run by potheads for potheads. That whittled down the task some. Beer ’n’ rock ’n’ roll ’n’ girls. That was Joey D . . . and if he had to put up with a few hippies along the way, so be it. Suddenly I could see a place for Joey in all this—for a small time New York thief always in search of a ‘mark’. I could imagine Joey in a few years’ time—dealing dope to the hairy tribe he despised and occasionally asking, ‘What does this stuff do for you guys? I tried it once and barfed.’
§
He seemed to know me at once. That kind of second sense some crooks have in the presence of the man. I was scouring The Technicolor Orange about ten the same evening, propping up the bar and trying, as unobtrusively as I could, to look at every face at every table. Looking for someone who might be Joey D with a new haircut, or Joey D in a hat or Joey D growing a beard. He’d changed nothing. The photograph I had of him could have been pulled from the back of a Polaroid minutes ago. The out-of-date greasy quiff. The sharp, imported suit. The narrow, shiny tie. The fistful of rings. The unrufflable arrogance of a punk looking to be a made man.
I was wrong about the beer. He was nursing a large scotch on the rocks. When I got to him he said, ‘Don’t tell me—the old man sent you?’
‘Right,’ I said.
He was sitting in a booth—he waved me into the seat opposite with a kind of ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ bonhomie that he probably learnt from his father—the little man’s assumption of the role of big spender. Every guinea a godfather.
‘I’ll buy you a drink, tell you I’m doing OK, and then you can head off back to Pops.’
Circumstances there were under which I would have accepted this. An address, a letter, some sense—and here I was not so insistent on the truth—of how they meant to support themselves, and I could and had gone back to New York and calmed the heaving breast of parenthood. But—fuckit—there was Tsu-Lin and the $229 the little bastard had ripped off.
‘Ain’t gonna be that easy, Joey.’
‘Uh?’
He was looking around for a waitress—trying hard for the effect of me being of no particular importance to him.
‘Two hundred and twenty-nine dollars, Joey.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what you took from Tsu-Lin Shin in Palenville. I’d like it back.’
‘She a friend o’ yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘No problem.’
He pulled a fat roll from his inside pocket, peeled off three big ones and said, ‘Keep the change.’
The cocky little shit. I was fit to kill him now. Where had he gotten hold of a stash like that? Throws me $300 and thinks nothing of it because he’s got two or three thousand riding on his hip? I never did get to know.
At last a waitress passed us, topless, young, shy and carrying a round of drinks to another table. Joey grabbed her by the arm.
‘Hey, a beer for the man here. And another Chivas for me.’
She said, ‘Just a moment, sir,’ and Joey slapped her across the tits—slapped her hard. The drinks tray toppled and tears welled in her eyes. The next thing I knew Joey and I were on our feet—face to face but for the fact that his face was not much higher than my chest. I was getting ready to adopt the placatory ‘now just a cotton-pickin’ minute, son’ tone of voice I had surely learnt from my father, but he poked me in the chest with a stubby middle finger.
‘Butt out—butt out—go home and get out of my face.’
That made four times he’d prodded me—enough to let me know that, little or not, the kid was built like a log-cabin. Didn’t stop me. I prodded him back and out of nowhere a switchblade sliced through my shirtfront and sank into my belly. He’d stabbe
d me. The little bastard had stabbed me.
§
I spent the best part of the next month in hospital. The wound took infection. I narrowly escaped peritonitis, and lay there pumped full of antibiotics with a drain in my side to let unspeakable goo run off.
The cops talked to me. I would not press charges. I gave up on Joey D. If I ever got back to New York in one piece, I’d invent something palatable for his parents. I owed it to the client to lie.
Mike said, ‘You’re an idiot. I known guys like that all my life. Typical Wop hellraisers. Always wanting to be bigger than they are. He’ll never amount to anything.’
‘That’s what your old man used to say about you.’
‘Sooner or later someone will send him to jail.’
‘Then let it be later and let it be someone else. I have a reputation to think of. How many kids in this town will talk to me if it’s known I call the cops on them? Mike, forget it.’
Mike shrugged it off. He was angrier than I was, partly I suspected because he could see a little ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ when I described Joey D to him.
‘Is there like anything you want?’
‘A newspaper would be good. I feel like the world has stopped turning while I’m in here.’
‘It’s only been three days, Raines. You could be here a while.’
‘Fine. Get me an American paper. New York Times would be good. Boston Globe maybe. And a packet of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.’
I watched a lot of TV. More Rowan and Martin than could be good for a man. Failing to find the Times on a regular basis, Mike brought me the Daily News every so often as a kind of consolation prize. Eight cents in New York, a half dollar in Canada. It was kind of him. Kept me in touch with the burgeoning madness of home without the effort of having to read long sentences. Hardly a day passed without some pronouncement from Tricky Dicky, some new lie about his peace program. That’s the neatness of having a ‘secret’ program, you can say what the hell you like. Troops in, troops out—and a lottery for the draft. That last was no lie. Bastard meant every word of that. John F. Kennedy’s final dream orbited the moon as Apollo 10—‘Moon Summer’ was under way. The papers hashed over the abandonment of Hamburger Hill—the Pentagon had deemed it an indefensible site, because of ‘the difficulty of supply’—so what if we mangled the lives of five hundred and fifty Americans kids taking the damn thing? I missed Charlie Mingus at the Village Vanguard and . . . and . . . Leo Gorcey died and a piece of my childhood died with him.