by Yasuko Thanh
* * *
—
Kyle and I made a living selling drugs in Zipolite, and, in the months since we’d partnered, we’d taken many trips together in claptrap buses to obscure parts of Mexico in search of new product, better deals. Every few weeks we bused the half day to Oaxaca, over the mountain road to Tehuacán, through Puebla to Teotitlán de Flores Magón, Tuxtepec to Huautla de Jiménez, Kyle holding my head in his hands end route, muscles straining as I slept. He never let me drop as the bus bounced over potholes. In his embrace I began to swallow down sadness like the little girl I used to be, the one who played Barbies alone in the stairwell of the apartment project, scribbling their faces the colour of blood and leaving them to their wounds. The bus skirted black sands that sounded like sea spray against its sides. I tried not to think of my parents but, looking out the window, I did. We ate bananas and bruised tomatoes from roadside sellers who boarded at each stop. In this way we passed the time without ever saying a word.
In the cabin where we stayed, I asked the owner what his pet turtle ate and whether I could take it for a walk. When he refused, Kyle bought me a pair of silver turtle earrings as small and delicate as he made me feel.
Oaxaca City’s nervous, polluted streets provided a mindless distraction from a coast filled with demons, from mountains thick with ghosts. The capital boasted more museums per capita than anywhere else in the state, and instead of the repetitive folk art the galleries featured photographic exhibitions of boys who dreamed of being television wrestlers. We went there for relief, like a vacation. One day Kyle refused to leave his hotel-room chair, insisting that the floor was covered in an invisible poison. Whenever I left the room to buy food I had to ask his permission, spell out my itinerary, my travel route, my expected time of return. Often I’d buy enough tuna and charras to last for days—I could never be sure he’d allow me to leave before we ran out of supplies.
Below us lived street musicians, and next door a young man who shared his room with his mother, who made and sold jewellery. There was a heroin dealer down the hall and vendors from out of town.
Frijol, the stray dog we’d lured home with a taco, sniffed for crumbs on our concrete floor. I sat on the tattered, knobbly bedspread with half a beer in front of me while a radio blared from down the hall where our neighbours were high. Around me I set up a circle of objects that reminded me of myself—the twenty-dollar guitar I’d bought before leaving Vancouver, my journals, the sheet music I’d photocopied at the library back home intending to learn new songs while travelling. I looked at postcards from old friends and wrote a list of all the things I’d liked to do, trying to convince myself that the person I used to be still existed.
Outside the window slats night was falling on the courtyard. I could see the colonial buildings of the town square, the mountains in the background like a crumpled piece of paper tossed from heaven. In 1763 a Franciscan priest declared that, after creating the world, God had put all the remaining mountains in Oaxaca.
“I’ll be in the bathroom,” I said.
Kyle held his breath as I crossed the room and closed the door.
The management had told us not to use the out-of-service toilet across the hall but I’d used it anyway, not wanting to run the gauntlet of other rooms on the way to the working bathroom. Now, though, I passed it by and hurried toward the end of the hall. Through the small window at the end I could see the glowing lights of the liquor store.
Out on the street I looked longingly at the bottles locked away for the night behind the store’s Closed sign. If I could have a drink, this might all seem funny: Kyle’s voices, his visions, the stories he told—like the one about his mother when they were crossing the United States by car. He was six, maybe seven. The journey excited him: amusement parks and corn dogs, the carnival-like blending of one town into the next. They slept on the side of the highway. Once he woke up in the middle of night. The doors were locked and he was alone.
“Why were you on the road?” I’d asked, as if the answer was important.
He thought for a moment. “I think we were looking for something.”
“Maybe she went to buy milk,” I said, “or smokes.”
“She was a prostitute,” he said. I’d told Kyle about my past, and since then prostitutes had come up more often in his stories. I’d given him the shorthand account, sketching in the when, why, and what, not mentioning Avery. I was still looking for answers to the deeper questions myself and hoped to defuse any potential argument over morals. I told him that “I was a teenage crack ho,” which felt not only important but true. I even said it in a way to make it sound like the punch line of a joke, to imbue the experience with humour, deflate its gravity. If I’d hoped my confession would bring us closer, I was wrong. Kyle’s symptomatic paranoia latched onto my past and spun delusions from its raw material. He saw rape where none existed, he saw my seduction of men I had no interest in.
Then, suddenly, his mother was also a prostitute. How do you know, I wanted to ask, but I knew this line of questioning would spiral into a deep pool of misunderstanding from which we’d never surface, as it always did. The two of us weren’t an emotion but a habit, a symptom, as we moved toward a now-or-never.
Out on the street, in front of the liquor store, I flagged a cab. Asked the driver for a pen and paper. Wrote Kyle a note and told the driver to give it to the desk clerk. Then I sank into the sticky vinyl backseat and told him to go.
I couldn’t stop crying. I told the driver that I’d left my lover. “I have to disappear. Take me where I can blend and vanish into a crowd.”
He nodded like a doctor. “La zona turistica. I see. You need to talk to your paisanos.” He drove to the tourist district, where I vowed I’d drink a bottle of mezcal and talk to no one.
Before I got out of the cab I asked him, “Will it always be this way?”
“We make our lives happy or sad,” the cab driver said. “But yes, it will always be this way. Así es la vida—such is life.”
Squinting in the yellow-white light particular to this city, I watched families go into the Templo de la Compañía de Jesús. They strolled holding hands, bought candles and saint cards from the vendors outside, sharing a devotion I didn’t have but craved: it wasn’t that I didn’t want to believe, it was that I’d forgotten how. I’d heard that in the chapel a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe was adorned with prayers written in Spanish, English, Nahuatl, and four dialects of Zapotec. Instead of praying, I smoked.
Children charmed their parents into buying them helium balloons shaped like cartoon characters, cotton candy, small cheap toys not meant to last more than a week. I loved to see children so well behaved, the obvious pride of their mothers and fathers. And I loved to see the men, with their big-chested embraces and a macho but attractive sense of ownership, bestowing a level of care upon the women. These women knew how to be ladies; these men knew how to protect what was theirs.
The night grew cold. Sitting in the centre of the square, I tried to forget what it felt like to have a pair of arms around me to ward off the chill.
I listened to a marimba band. Children selling chicle and toy birds saw my face and stayed away; so did the women with grilled corn, the men with crutches. Even the blind accordion player felt my confusion and did not hold out his hand.
Kyle found me in the square. He’d been looking all over town, wearing his board shorts and a heavy parka.
He said: “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anything.”
He said: “You needed something to love that much and I’m it.”
He said: “I want to be together in fifty years.”
He said: “We’ll get married in June.”
I lowered my head, raised my eyebrows. “Who says?”
“What if you got pregnant? Think about that.” He clutched my wrist till it hurt.
* * *
—
Months later, back in Canada, alone, I would recall the heat of our last day on the land. I was helping
Kyle build the roof. He’d curtained one side of the ramada with a layer of palm fronds and wanted me to hang my hammock inside. I refused. It was an unstable structure and I knew better than to trust myself to something so unbalanced.
I’d passed Kyle palm fronds knowing they’d never keep the rain off the floor. I knew one strong wind would send the fronds crashing on our heads. Knew this house would never be completed, would never be real.
* * *
—
I had returned from Mexico with no place to stay, no job, and five hundred dollars in my pocket. I’d let myself down by not volunteering at the orphanage, and I hid my shame from friends who asked, “How was the trip?”
“Yeah, good,” I’d say, a make an inane comment about tacos. The nude beach. Partying my ass off. I didn’t tell them I’d been irrelevant, insignificant—even detrimental, a loose spore hitching a ride on the wind, trying to make roots where I didn’t belong.
I’d wanted to grow, fungi-like, into respectability. I’d proven to myself I was a failure.
The few pots and pans I’d collected from a thrift store after leaving Avery awaited me in a downtown storage locker along with my clothes, but I had no place to put them. Then I met Phillip, a close friend of the Australian woman I’d almost travelled with, but who had decided to linger in Canada longer than I wished to stay. He asked if I needed a place to crash.
Phillip was an artist. He and his roommate lived in an illegal warehouse space in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, blocks from two dozen skid-row pubs. The soles of his combat boots were attached with duct tape. He cultivated the adolescent “I’m gonna shock you” affectation, trying to prove to me and everyone else that darkness streaked his psyche, his vulnerable qualities peeking through the facade. I could see him attracting the type of woman who enjoyed saving lost puppies and Mason jars to can homemade soup.
But still. As we sat drinking two-dollar pints of beer in a bar full of cockroaches, I could see the life I wanted to be inside of, the life I wanted inside of me. He had an art degree and a group of friends who used words like “contrapuntal” and “deconstructionism” in casual conversation. He offered me entry into a world where to write was a calling and not a hobby, where I too could learn to speak in -isms and -ologies at potlucks over plates of tabbouleh.
We walked to his studio, meandering through broken bottles of rice wine, windshield glass glinting on the sidewalk next to cars with no stereos, condom wrappers blowing like petals. The studio space had been a bowling alley, a stash for bootlegged whisky, an opium den. I noticed that it occupied the same block as the Golden Crown trick hotel where I used to take dates I didn’t trust, but I said nothing. The space extended under the sidewalk where purple squares of glass inlaid into the concrete glowed eerily, illuminating our faces.
We descended a flight of stairs. Canvases leaned against walls, pressed demurely or mysteriously behind furniture salvaged from the alley: a dented filing cabinet, a plastic Coppertone display table dripping with jars of turpentine and tubes of acrylic paint.
I stood with my feet shoulder-width apart in front of the breast-high oscillating fan. It was tarnished, dusty on the base, and kept sticking with a click at the end of each arc.
Phillip painted as he talked.
“I went to art school,” he said, his back to me, “not ’cause I thought it was the right thing do but because it couldn’t possibly be the wrong thing. Then I got a job as a line cook.” He moved from one canvas to the next, canvases that were lined up side by side like paper dolls, their elbows touching, painting a line or a stroke on each. “The only thing that set me apart from the rest of the guys was my art. The guys that worked there were so ordinary and sad. There were guys in their fifties who’d been there since they were fifteen. The money was good, but I swore I’d never end up like them.”
“Isn’t that a bit harsh?”
“It is if they were happy, but who could be? Anyhow, I made sure everyone knew I’d be quitting once I’d saved enough money to rent a studio and just paint. That way I wouldn’t have to socialize with them. All the guys stopped asking me to go to the pub with them after work.”
I kicked off my boots. My feet made damp prints on the concrete floor as I walked around avoiding the spots covered with oil paint.
Phillip put his palette down on the dented filing cabinet and then turned the paintings to the wall, one by one, and faced me, covered in streaks of titanium white and cadmium yellow.
We lay down on the sheetless futon on the paint-splashed floor. He smelled like a boy, unwashed, the city in his clothes. I liked that his smell didn’t come from a bottle of cologne, that what you saw was what you got. The studio had no interior walls. Phillip and I listened for the sound of his roommate’s footsteps in the stairwell, his key in the door, but the footsteps never came. We had sex. It was very casual. Afterward he ran his hand over my body with the wonder of a boy and the eye of a formally trained artist.
We dressed and bought a can of beans from the twenty-four-hour Lucky Mart with the ninety-two cents Phillip had managed to scrounge. We ate the half loaf of white bread he had in the fridge—which he locked to keep out the rats, mice, cockroaches. Beans and bread. We ate with our fingers, listening to the footsteps above us. Hookers’ stilettos tapping like a bedtime staccato. Dealers’ sneakers running from police, the odd rattle of dented shopping-cart wheels.
* * *
—
Though chiefly a painter, Phillip did installation work, too, and was represented by Third Avenue Gallery, which hosted openings once a month. To these functions Phillip always wore a bowling shirt with a pair of Dickies work pants. The pants were both trendy and functional—like him. Big ox-blood boots were his only footwear. Of course, he had flip-flops for the summer, $1.99 Chinatown specials.
I grilled him on the logistics of living without really earning a living. His ability to romanticize his poverty verged on irritating, since of course for him it was a choice. As we lay in bed, listening to water dripping from his ceiling, Phillip told me he wished he could move to a different studio in a cleaner part of the city. He hadn’t had an art show in six months, he said; hadn’t sold any paintings in eight. He thought of himself as a painter, but I knew that sometimes his parents paid the bills. He pointed to the black mould that had begun to grow from the ceiling, stalactites in an urban concrete cave, and the water that had already ruined the throw rug. He collected the drips in rusty pots and dumped them in the toilet down the hall. “How’s that for you?” he said.
“If it’s money, you could get a part-time job,” I said, the mould reaching down like wagging fingers, as if scolding Phillip for complaining about living under the Argyle Hotel where people plugged up the plumbing by flushing their needles.
“There’s some people who can do both. I can’t,” he said.
“So where do you go? If they kick you out?”
“You have to ask yourself what matters in the big picture,” he said, throwing his hands above his head. “How many people know what it’s like to be this close to homeless? Too many people call themselves artists who won’t sacrifice a thing for it. They’ve got their cushy jobs, their cushy lives. For me, this is life.”
He appalled me and impressed me. To have a university education and live like this? He exercised a brand of elegant bohemianism that gave him licence to be above it all.
* * *
—
Phillip’s roommate drove a taxi and supported a woman with two small children who weren’t his. He used to drink until his esophagus burst, almost killing him. Now he battled a weakness for soft drinks and a missionary complex.
He lit a cigarette as I leaned against the brick of the alley wall where sunlight glinted off the wings of hundreds of flies hovering above the dumpsters.
“I gave Phillip the money,” I told him.
“What money?”
“My share of the rent.” I’d landed a nude-modelling job. It paid fifty dollars an hour, even if clients
were neither regular nor steady. “I don’t want you to think I’m abusing your hospitality.”
He cleared his throat, shook his head. “Our boy.”
“You didn’t get it? I gave him cash,” I said.
He tossed his greying ponytail, turning his head toward the street and exhaling the smoke away from my face. “I’ll bet you did.”
* * *
—
To flesh out the modelling I started busking on the corner of Water and Cambie streets. From the studio I’d walk the two blocks to Gastown, where tourists with little white socks and cameras slung around their necks strolled on cobblestone streets, photographing landmarks like the steam clock and the Gassy Jack statue, and paid the equivalent of half our month’s rent to eat in restaurants with “fusion” in their name. I stationed myself in front of a shop that sold carved totem poles and leather goods and began to play the guitar I’d picked up in Mexico. The first one had broken, its strings snapping like my plans to volunteer, the high E ricocheting like a bullet to slice open my arm. I’d gotten butterfly stitches in the office of a doctor who listened to Mozart while disinfecting my wound. I couldn’t play; I’d learned ukulele in elementary school and taught myself what I knew now: six songs, on an endless loop.