My Gabor-rant: when Dr. Mate stole my stuff

I found this letter (written in 2008) deep in the files, and I doubt that I ever sent it to Gabor, but I needed to write it  at the time, and I do think there are some good insights in it. But it's a cautionary tale about guru-ism in general, and the fundamental dishonesty of these lofty figures in particular. I don't remember the specific quote he stole from me, but it's the theft that counts. And his disrespect of those people who are trying to recover frankly revolted me in someone who is supposed to be an addictions specialist (read: guru) and is often described as "world-famous". No thanks, Gabor - I'd rather be happy. 

Though you have made a joke out of stealing my “white gloves” phrase, it has turned out to be quite pivotal (has it not?) in differentiating your addictive behaviour from that of your patients. Seeing it in an unfinished manuscript was one thing, but seeing it in print in your book (i.e., on public display) gave me the unpleasant feeling that I had been ripped off.

This wasn’t just a couple of neutral words but a metaphor, and worlds have turned on metaphor. It gave me the feeling you thought you could harvest my remarks and incorporate them, that it was all fair game. If you were going to use it, you should have asked me directly or at least quoted me anonymously, and not taken credit for it yourself.  No writer should steal from another writer, ever, nor make light of it anywhere, especially not in such a public venue as the media.

 Hearing you talk about it on CBC didn’t fix the problem, nor did it make me any less uncomfortable as you announced, “this is who I shamelessly stole it from” (then giving my real name).  It’s as if you think it’s OK, as long as you’re contrite about it on national radio. But CBC isn’t the place for this sort of  admission.

 You could have avoided all this unpleasantness if you had written or phoned me and said, “Margaret, I’m sorry I ripped off your line” (that is, if you really were sorry).  The bizarre public way you went about it (which could be interpreted as “look who I made a fool of”, or as a public demonstration of your conscience) makes me wonder if you have any sense of boundaries, or any respect for me at all. 

 In the AA chapter of your book (and it also offended me, a 12-step veteran, that you felt entitled to paraphrase and interpret the 12 steps after only one meeting), you offered a description of me. At least, I think it was me, through some sort of distorting lens: “A manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism, she’s been attending for fifteen years.”

 Nowhere in this rather depressing description do I see the words “sober” or “recovering”. In seventeen years, I have never had a relapse. I drank for twenty years, so my recovery will soon catch up: as of now, I have been sober nearly 1/3 of my life.  Yes, I do have a long history, but of what? Can you guess?

 But you wouldn’t know that from your description of me. You can “attend” meetings for decades and not experience a day of sobriety, but from the beginning I have worked extremely hard, both to maintain my sobriety and to understand and change the self-defeating thinking and behaviour that triggered my drinking. I don’t think I would have stayed sober this long if it hadn’t worked.

 But that’s not what it says in your book.

 Since the general public doesn’t have a clue about AA, they tend to think it’s attended only by practicing alcoholics (perhaps even the skid row type – believe me, I’ve heard a lot of comments) who are too weak to do it on their own.  If by some chance they do succeed, they are “former alcoholics”, as if the addiction has been “conquered” or overcome by sheer force of will.  Then they stop attending, because they are “cured”.

 Until I joined, I think I felt something like that myself.  Fifteen years of “attending” may look admirable to an AA member, but a civilian might think,  “She has attended meetings for fifteen years, and she’s still an alcoholic?”  If you look at your description carefully, it’s possible to conclude that I’ve been drinking for all that time, which is, to say the least, inaccurate.

 But there is so much more to it than that: attending meetings is just the surface level of a very deep process of revelation and profound personal change. The fourth and fifth steps take the recovering person to a new level of self-knowledge which is necessary for awareness of triggers, not just of drinking but of the behavioural “isms” that go with it. AA step meetings, usually held in a member’s home, go far deeper than open meetings in this sort of exploration, and can create profound bonds of connection and friendship that can last for years.

 And then there are the AA roundups (conferences with speakers from all over the world) and the retreats, such as the yearly Westminster Abbey retreat in Mission which I have “attended” (opened my soul to) for ten years.  These are intensive spiritual gatherings for those who are ready to do some serious work with an open heart. I cannot begin to describe the epiphanies I have experienced there.

 Did you know about all this stuff (or any of it) when you wrote about AA? At very least, I think attending more than one meeting was necessary and would have demonstrated a modicum of respect.  NO ONE, not even someone as brilliant as you seem to think you are, “gets” AA or any other soul-changing recovery group after only one meeting. I hated my first meeting, in fact I was completely closed until about my twelfth meeting. And not all meetings are created equal.  The mix is different wherever you go.  Too bad you aren’t an alcoholic, as there is a Doctors in AA group which is apparently very powerful, and no doubt better dressed.

 In other words, I think this was a pretty shallow and even disrespectful take on a profound process, but most people likely won’t realize it because they have nothing to compare it to. They will assume AA is just a bunch of lower-middle-class people getting together to slap each other on the back, smoke too much and hear someone say amusing things about the hell they went through.  You say you like these people, that you wish you were one of them, but I think you clearly differentiate yourself from them, as you quietly withdraw into your study to listen to classical CDs. Of all the addictions I’ve ever heard of, this one is pretty genteel, and about as far from the street as you can get. (White gloves, indeed.)

 The other issue (a big one) is this:  must I be identified by my psychiatric condition?  Don’t you think I am (much) more than “a manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism”? Would you say, “a Parkinsonian with a long history of playing too much bingo. . .”, or “an ADD (note, he’s no longer a person but a disease) with a long history of buying too many CDs” (or, for a more exact comparison, “a schizophrenic with a long history of heroin addiction”? How would this person be perceived by the ignorant public? Would they assume he was clean; would they assume he was well?)

 I don’t give a shit how I am perceived, as I tossed that kind of judgement in the wastebasket a long time ago. But that’s not the point. It hurts me that my fellow sufferers (who often can’t defend themselves) must be cruelly misjudged and damaged by ignorance, insensitivity and stigma.  It galls me that mental illness is still such a defining trait. Just the term is problematic for me. We don’t say “diabetic illness” or “arthritic illness,” do we? And if you’re “ill”, as in “mentally ill”, how can you be well? Defeat is built right into the terminology. 

 And don’t get me started on being identified as “a manic-depressive” (or more accurately, “a bipolar”: don’t you realize the term was changed over 15 years ago?), instead of a person with a bipolar condition. Even “a manic-depressive woman” is a shade better, as it’s at least  a descriptive term, not an identity badge.  AIDS activists broke ground on this many years ago: and even at that, AIDS was labelled a “syndrome” rather than a “disorder”, a less stigmatizing term.  

 There are people (maybe you?) who would say this is just so much hairsplitting, quibbling over terminology that means the same thing. It is not. We don’t have accurate terms to describe the raging forest fire that rips through people’s brains, leaving blackened ruins. We don’t have the language to describe the nausea at having to tolerate other people’s ignorance, pity and disgust. Or the powerlessness and sense of being marginalized, shunted to the fringes of society.  We don’t have terms for the courage it takes (yes, the courage it takes!) to get up on your feet again, and start to take a few shaky, tentative steps.

 Years ago I used to say, “if you had to live inside my head for one day, you’d run screaming.” That may be true, but we can’t get inside each other’s heads. However, we can practice some empathy, choose our words with care instead of falling back on medical jargon, and be aware that a person’s individuality and humanity always comes ahead of their disease condition. 

 Most medical practitioners don’t know this difference, but what about you?  Your book is flying off the shelves due to your insight, compassion and medical knowledge (so they say).  But a great many people, not knowing anything about addiction, will believe pretty much everything that is in it. Yet you describe your “friend” (me) as a sort of case study, a chronically disabled person who drags the long chains of alcoholism behind her, still attached to meetings like a life support system after fifteen years.

 In the past few years I have learned so much I can’t even begin to paraphrase it here, but one thing I know for sure is that people like me must insist on dignity and stand up to prejudice and misinformation wherever we find it. This isn’t just for me, but for the countless others who are too powerless to do it. How we express ideas around addiction and mental illness matters because it affects people’s (especially readers’) thinking and behaviour towards sufferers. Whether it’s a metaphor or a description of a human being, every word counts, because it directly affects the self-esteem and thus the emotional and mental health of every person who has walked through the hell of addiction.

 To sum up, I believe your little jokes about stealing my phrase (a pivotal one that has been quoted several times by journalists) miss the mark. Are you admitting that you did wrong, or placating me so I won’t call you on it? Assuming you could incorporate my original metaphor was both arrogant and dishonest. Your little drama of confessing it on the air rather than apologizing to me was extremely rude, not to mention twisted. In addition, your inaccurate description of me painted me as a sad case, a mentally ill alcoholic who still needs propping up after 15 years.  Calling this disrespectful is an understatement.

 And how is this for a rewrite:

 “A woman I know, sober seventeen years and a faithful member of the program, has been able to ride out the violent rollercoaster of a bipolar condition that could have ended her sobriety and her life.  It didn’t, due to the power and grace she still finds in her regular AA meetings. It is more than fellowship: it’s powerful medicine.”

 For the sake of accuracy, I ask you to revise your description of me in subsequent printings.

 Margaret

 (Needless to say, that didn't happen. Since then, criticism of Mate's unsavory connections with various political factions have done damage to his reputation, which wasn't so hot to begin with.)

 

BUS PEOPLE: a novel of the Downtown Eastside - Part Three

This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.

Margaret Gunning


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Three

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel

Porgy

Porgy does take the bus once in a while, if Aggie is around to keep him company, but he’s really shy and hardly ever goes out.

He spends most of his time in his tiny little room at the Portman on the computer, looking up sites on the internet. His latest fixation is colonic cleansing. Porgy has become obsessed with his colon, that long and accommodating inner passage that marks the final destination-point for our weekly groceries, taking out the garbage for the body because, after all, no matter how humble the job, somebody’s got to do it.

Or at least, it’s supposed to. Now he’s not so sure. Now he thinks he may have 40 pounds of impacted fecal matter lodged in his abdomen. Or maybe only ten, but that’s bad enough.

Porgy didn’t always have this interest, or hobby, or proclivity, or whatever you want to call it. He was on a medical site one day looking at pictures of people’s insides. It was an extreme site, meant mainly for doctors; surely the average lay person would get sick looking at these things, full-colour diagrams of cancerous tumours and ulcerations and fulminations, and something called megacolon: constipation so extreme it causes the abdomen to balloon like a fifteen-month pregnancy. He was staring at the most extreme of the diagrams, something called, incredibly, fecal aspiration: literally, choking to death on your own shit.

Actually, it was a series of four diagrams, depicting a colon slowly becoming more and more plugged and engorged, until the inevitable happened and everything began to back up like traffic on the Lion’s Gate Bridge during a bad accident at rush hour.

Porgy sat there with his mouth open in astonishment as he read the following information: “This exhibit features multiple progressive views of the female abdomen revealing severe constipation and fecal impaction in a patient. Stages of progression show how over time the fecal matter backs up throughout the digestive system until it reaches the esophagus and oropharynx where it enters the trachea causing a fatal blockage of oxygen.”

No shit.

Over to the right of this astonishing display was a small clickie, an innocuous-looking link that said, “Thick, dark and in your gut.”

Well, he just had to click on it, being intensely curious, and what he saw would have made his hair stand on end if his hair wasn’t already standing on end.

When he clicked, he immediately read this “medical fact”: “Most people have 5 – 10 pounds of matter stored in their Colon. According to autopsies, John Wayne had 40 lbs. and Elvis had 60 lbs.” This was reported in the January 11, 1997 issue of USA TODAY, so it had to be true.

Porgy seemed to recall that Elvis croaked on the toilet, and if he was trying to push out a 60-pound turd it’s no wonder he fell dead on his face with the effort of trying to get it out. And everybody knows John Wayne lived on nothing but beef and booze. The consequences of such bad living habits were illustrated in gut-lurching colour on this site: “SEE these actual photos of REAL fecal matter eliminated during a routine cleanse!”

Porgy couldn’t begin to describe it, except to say that it looked like a convoluted mucoid projectile straight out of The Exorcist. But it got worse – or better, he couldn’t tell which; there were more photos, and he just had to click. He couldn’t tell if these people were eating sacks of mucilage or buckets of bolts, but their doo-doo looked like a major train derailment.

The text was equally gut-lurching. It explained in layman’s terms that the typical North American’s colon is a putrefying mass of impacted gunk and 25-year-old sewage hardened into unpassable concrete, thick and black and hard as old truck-tire rubber: “One autopsy revealed a colon to be 9 inches in diameter with a passage through it no larger than a pencil.”

Porgy was starting to feel a bit faint. But there was an answer: Colossal Herbs! All he had to do was lay down $89.50, and in five short days all this crap would come spewing out, decades worth of impacted mucoid plaque that had been steadily accumulating on the walls of his colon since he took his first bite of solid food. All he had to do was swallow a few capsules – all right, quite a few; all right, really a lot – and out it would come, the Loch Ness Monster in fecal form, along with (just for an added thrill) a few intestinal parasites, “liver flukes” and the odd tapeworm.

Porgy was particularly taken with the testimonials, expressed with a fervour which bordered on the evangelical: “I can’t even begin to express my gratitude without extreme emotion for the blessed gift that the creators of Colossal Herbs have given fortunate people such as myself. . . I am amazed at the old rubbery mucoid waste that has been coming out. I even had to ‘pull’ some out as it was left hanging in the colon and would not come out on it’s (sic) own. . . I couldn’t just leave it there! It was like the afterbirth from a calf! Oh my gosh! I tugged gently and. . . “ But by this time Porgy was clicking away, ordering his first round of purging pills from Colossal Herbs.

When the package came in the mail a couple of weeks later, his heart began to pound. His head spun a bit at the list of ingredients: aloe leaf, cascara sagrada bark, Chinese rhubarb root, Barberry root, Dandelion root, Fringe Tree root bark. . . This was all nicely bound together with psyllium fibre and bentonite clay, the equivalent of swallowing a wire brush with a lead sinker attached.

Porgy couldn’t wait to see if it would really work, if his results would be like the internet lady’s: “compacted black-green, rubbery, gnarled and spine-like. . .It felt just amazing to know that it was OUT of my body!!!”

So Porgy dutifully fasted for a day, drank nothing but lemon water, swallowed his first handful of pills, and waited.

Nothing.

No horror-show spewings, not even a normal old clunk. He drank more water. Still nothing. He took the next dose of capsules, then the next.

Hmmm.

And then.

The ground began to shake.

Porgy jumped out of his chair.

He ran to the toilet.

He jerked his sweat pants off, sat down hard, held on the edges of the seat, and prayed.

And:

Ker-floooooosh.

Wah! It was one of the most intense experiences of his entire life. This was better than any barium milkshake, an evacuation the likes of which he had never known.

Hallelujah! His bowels were singing the chorus from Messiah as they joyfully released their load. He felt pounds lighter already, though he chickened out on looking at the results (and he wouldn’t photograph it and post it on his web site like some of these people were doing; he wasn’t that obsessed, not yet anyway) and quickly flushed it down.

And flushed. And flushed. It took several tries to get rid of all the evidence of his first purge.

Joy turned to dismay when the same procedure repeated itself a half-hour later, then again. . . and again. . .and again. He soon realized he could not afford to be more than ten steps away from the toilet for the rest of the day. When agonizing cramps set in, his elation turned to anguish, then fear. Perhaps the bentonite clay was disagreeing with him, or was it the cascara sagrada bark?

Over the next 24 hours his gastrointestinal system slowly turned itself inside-out, while he whimpered on the toilet seat, clutching his tortured abdomen as it rumbled nastily in irritation.

It was an awful, gut-rending, cold-sweat experience – absolute agony. And Porgy couldn’t wait to do it again.

For the site recommended regular “cleansings”, particularly if you committed the heinous sin of eating meat. Porgy tried not to, but every once in a while his lust for a Quarter Pounder with cheese washed down with a triple-thick strawberry shake got the better of him. Oh, terrible! Glue and goo, a disaster for the alimentary canal, soon to be converted into bituminous bricks of shit virtually impossible to evacuate.

And so, more pills.

“Aggie. I’ve found this stuff on the internet, it’s absolutely great.”

“Oh, hey, Porg, I don’t know about this. Aren’t you spending an awful lot of money here? You don’t have a lot to throw around.”

“But this stuff is saving my life. You should give it a try some time. You’ll be amazed at what comes out. You’ll get rid of 10 pounds of accumulated mucoid plaque in only five days.”

“That doesn’t sound very healthy, Porgy. How much did you pay for this stuff?”

“It’s an investment in my health, Ag. You can’t put a price on that, can you? It’s all good.”

This is one of those rare times when Aggie has been able to coax Porgy out of his hidey-hole for a little outing. The Number 42 roars and rattles along Hastings Street past the bombed-out storefronts and bizarre, hallucinogenic-looking murals. It’s pretty early in the morning, some of the night girls are still out, wearing extreme clothing, extremely short or extremely tight or extremely black or extremely full of chains and studs, standing in that particular hip-jutting, shoulder-thrusting way that says, I’m for sale, come and get it. Aggie looks at them sometimes and tries to picture them as little girls, maybe at a birthday party, blowing out candles, playing pin the tail on the donkey. Nobody plans this, nobody plans to be a night girl when they grow up, it just happens, it happens the way water swirls down the drain, it happens because it feels like there is no other place for them to go.

Aggie blinks a couple of times. She realizes that there are blank spaces where many of the night girls used to be: a sort of dotted outline, a cutout, a non-presence, and these are the ones, their count rising all the time, who ended up ground into pig feed on a Port Coquitlam farm.

But no one knows about that, and if anyone does know about that, no one cares about that, and if anyone does care about that, they’re wasting their energy on hopeless cases, so why should the cops keep on investigating it anyway? Some things are just too horrible to be true: so I guess they can’t be. So I guess they aren’t.

Porgy drones on and on about his colon and how whistle-clean it is now, and how he’s committing himself to a cleanse at least every three months, maybe more often if he can afford the $89.95, while Aggie wonders why a colon needs to be so whistle-clean to begin with, it’s a waste disposal system, for God’s sake, and you don’t need to eat dinner off it, and besides, she is worried that Porgy is going to put himself into the hospital if he keeps this up.

Nobody can quite figure out exactly what the deal is with Porgy Graham. He isn’t a drug addict exactly, though he’s been stoned more than a few times, it’s true. But he sticks mostly to pot, never touches heroin or cocaine, and has only done LSD twice. He isn’t a schizophrenic, nor even “schizo-affective”, the label Aggie has to wear to get her cheques. But there doesn’t seem to be a Porgy-shaped space anywhere in the world; he is forever on the outside of things, nose pressed against the windowpane. Maybe it is his colour; Porgy is not black, in spite of his name which is a bit of a cruel joke. He used to be called Porky, because as a teenager he was kind of fat (and his real name is Sylvester, which he would really rather not tell anyone), and somehow or other the k just slid into a g-sound, easier to pronounce maybe? But only a little less cruel. Porgy is what used to be called a mulatto, but that’s not a very good word any more, it’s just offensive in a way nobody can quite explain. Some would describe him as coffee-coloured, but with a double shot of cream. (And mulatto does sound sort of like a kind of coffee: mulatté?) His features are an interesting blend of slightly exotic Caribbean and dull ordinary Caucasian, his eyes greenish-brown, his hair coarse and upstanding as unravelled wire. The Vancouver poet Wayde Compton might describe him as Halfrican, and Porgy would get it, he’d be amused by the term, maybe even flattered.

Today he’s going to the flea market with Aggie, a long trip that requires a couple of transfers, and it freaks him out a little. He gets hassled on the bus sometimes, picked on, because he’s different, he’s coffee-coloured, and he looks a little dazed, a fallen-from-the-nest look, like mild shock. The street singles out the vulnerable and savages them. Porgy has no street smarts at all. It’s a wonder he has survived this long. Aggie falls into the role of protector with him, even though she’s supposed to be the handicapped one, “mentally ill”, on long-term disability, while Porgy lives off cheques from his Dad, a mysterious, absent figure who lives in Georgetown, Guyana with a white lady (though not Porgy’s mum).

Porgy’s Dad was not around much when he was a kid, and Porgy has never been able to decide whether that was a good thing, or a bad thing. When he was around, it was confusing. He could shower his kid with presents, lavish him with attention, then coldly turn his back and disappear for a couple of years. The fallback system was a series of foster homes that did the usual kind of damage, from which Porgy has never been able to recover.

Now all he gets from his Dad is money, but it’s something, it helps him get by. He guesses he’s lucky, compared to a lot of people who live around here.

Porgy’s so scared when the bus rounds the turn from Hastings onto Granville, he actually grabs Aggie’s hand. There’s something childlike about him, for sure, even though he’s pretty smart, he’s not backward or anything like that, far from it, he was even diagnosed gifted as a child, one of the worst handicaps a person can have if they’re the colour of coffee with a double shot of cream, or so Porgy thinks to himself on the days when he gets depressed, on the days when this grinding outworld existence begins to wear him down.

“I don’t like it, Aggie.”

“S’okay, Porg, we’re just going around the corner. Granville Street is great, we can look in all the sex shops. Ever been inside one of them? They have every kind of vibrator you can imagine. Look, there’s where the old Caprice Theatre used to be. Remember the Caprice? Too bad they turned it into a nightclub. It used to look like Elvis’s bathroom.”

“Yeah. I remember. Didn’t we go there once? It had a big silver curtain – “

“Pink floral walls – “

“Cherry-coloured seat covers – “

“And it was cheap – “

“- and good – they showed good movies there, I remember – “

“- and then they ripped it all out to make another bar. Sad, eh?”

“Yeah. I guess so. I don’t know, I don’t go to the bars.”

“Me neither. They scare me.”

He seems to settle down after that, though it’s a long, bumpety ride out to the big low-slung building advertising BARGAINS, BARGAINS, BARGAINS, the flea market which swarms with people even at this hour of the morning.

It starts almost right away, and Aggie’s heart sinks: “Oh, look-it the nigger with the fuckin’ bag lady!”

“Hey bitch, you like dark meat?”

Aggie and Porgy try hard to ignore the taunts of the scary-looking young men who run in a kind of pack, seven or eight of them, it’s hard to count because they keep milling around, they’d be no good at all in singles, never dare to utter a word to anyone, but in a cluster like this, in a pack, they’re potentially lethal, and Porgy knows it. He sees one of them lift a man’s pocket watch off one of the stalls, but doesn’t dare say anything or even reveal that he has noticed it. His heart is beating in his ears and he feels a little faint.

One of the scariest-looking guys starts poking him with his index finger. ”Hey. Nigger. Look at me, nigger.” Porgy blinks back at him, dazed with fear.

“Looks like a half-nigger to me.”

“Oh my God, it’s half a nigger!”

“Kindly get your hands off my friend,” Aggie says fiercely, and Porgy’s heart jumps into his throat. Well, what can they do to her? They can do anything they want to him, it seems, at any time of the day or night, but she’s a chick, and this is a public place in broad daylight, and –

“Fuck off, bitch.”

“We’d be happy to.” She grabs Porgy’s hand like he’s five years old and steers him firmly through the swarms to the table where she picked up her collection of Edison Blue Amberols.

“It’s okay, Porg, they’re assholes, don’t pay any attention to them.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Take a look at all this, will you? Man, they’re beauties.”

Displayed on the table is a stunning collection of old machines: ancient gramophones, Edison Triumphs, Berliner Leverwinds, a Grafonola 200, Victor Monarch Talking Machines, a Brunswick, a Hexaphone, an Amberola, a Zon-o-phone, and something called a Columbia BO. Some have horns inlaid with multicoloured mother-of-pearl in floral designs, so beautiful they make Porgy feel a little woozy. They give off the comforting antique aura of aged wicker chairs and your grandmother’s old foot-treadle sewing machine.

“Awesome.”

Aggie wants this one over here, this little beauty, an Edison Bannerfront Standard with a gorgeous, polished brass horn, but it says $75.00 on it, and, no way. She has almost $50.00 scraped together over weeks of hardship, no lunch and cutting back on smokes. Even at that price, it probably isn’t in good working order, it looks broken somehow, but Porgy can tinker, he’s good with his hands, he’ll get it working.

“I’ll give you twenty bucks for it,” Aggie says to the little round, balding man behind the table.

“You tryin’ to Jew me down?”

Aggie gets a little tired of it, the casual, everyday racism, though it’s nothing to the more formal, “dress” racism that causes certain people to be killed. “I’m just trying to come up with a fair price for a machine that probably doesn’t even work.”

“Seventy-five is giving it away. This is a valuable antique, one of a kind.” The man touches it lovingly, as if he hates to part with it for any price.

“Yes, but it should be functioning, shouldn’t it? I can see that it’s broken. I just want it for a door stop anyway.”

“You’re crazy. I’m not lettin’ it go for a penny less than $60.00.”

“Oh.” Aggie makes a show of sighing, of rolling her eyes. “Tell you what. Give it to me for thirty, and I won’t spread it around that you sell damaged merchandise.”

“Fifty-five.”

“It’s a piece of crap and you know it.”

“Fifty?”

“Twenty-five bucks in your hand, or this useless piece of shit on your shelf.”

He doesn’t say anything, just sticks his hand out for the money.

She darts a tiny, sideways glance at Porgy, who is trying to restrain himself from dancing with joy.

And oh, the ride home is fun, with the Edison Bannerfront Standard in an old cardboard box that used to have rice in it. They chatter excitedly about what they’re going to hear: sounds from 1910; from 1900; from 1890! They want to push the envelope, hear sounds from as far back as possible, right back to that primal old Edison tin-foil shout, the little lamb, the HA, HA, HA. They’re going to listen to recordings so old, you can barely hear the music for all the surface noise, the sizzle and fizzle and pop-tick, pop-tick, recordings so primitive they’re full of thunks, clunks and bumps, with orchestras crammed down into a shoebox, strangulated tenors and banjos plucked by old black musicians dead for more than a hundred years. It’s going to be so cool, it’ll hurt.

Next . . .

Bus People Part One

Bus People Part Two

Bus People Part Three

Bus People Part Four

Bus People Part Five

Bus People Part Six

Bus People Part Seven

Bus People Part Eight

Bus People Part Nine

Bus People Part Ten

Bus People Part Eleven

Bus People Part Twelve

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

BUS PEOPLE: quick links to Parts 1 - 12

Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

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Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART TWELVE (conclusion)

This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Twelve (conclusion)

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel

The bus

Bert Moffatt often thinks about taking an early retirement, he’s 57 years old now, and this driving business is a young man’s game, requiring a stamina he no longer thinks he has.

The things that happen on his shift are pretty disturbing. The other day two hookers got on along Hastings Street and got into a screaming battle about something, probably drugs, and actually started physically fighting on the bus, yanking hair and scratching faces, and had to be pulled apart. One of them was wearing only a bra, no blouse, and the other one, Bert didn’t know how anyone could be that thin and still be alive, she must be in the final stages of AIDS, it was heartbreaking to see.

He feels terrible about Aggie. It’s a shame when that happens, a woman just vanishing like that, he knew Aggie had some pretty serious problems, but he was fond of her, they had a real connection going for years, almost a friendship, and now she has just disappeared, wandered off somewhere in disorientation, or did something worse happen? Around these parts, you never knew.

The guy with the blanket over his head never comes around any more. Bert has no idea where he went. Nobody seems to know. But that young fellow, Porky or whatever his name is, he’s taking the bus nearly every day now, that’s a change, and he looks different, he has cut his hair for one thing, and it looks much neater, he’s dressing better too, but it isn’t just that, he’s standing up straighter or something, carrying himself differently, so that he almost seems like a different person.

Today on the bus, somebody tries to give him a hard time. But his reaction is so completely different, Bert is taken by surprise.

“Hey nigger.”

The old Porgy would have absorbed this, just taken it. Vester won’t take it.

His hand whips out, he grabs the young smart-ass by the collar and almost lifts him off his feet.

“Take that back.”

“Hey, don’t get excited, I was only kidding around.”

“Take. . . that. . .back.”

“Okay, okay, I take it back. Jeez!”

“Now apologize.”

“What?”

“You heard me. Apologize.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Yes! Jesus, let me go!”

“You have to promise me one thing.”

“Okay, I will.”

“That you’ll never call anybody by that name, ever again.”

“All right, I promise.” 

“Now mean it.”

“All right! Christ! Let go!” He finally releases him, and he slumps into a seat, pale and shaky-looking. Vester Graham knows he has scored a major victory.

But there is still something left for him to do.

Vester

The progress he has made with Dr. Levy has surprised both of them. The depression that weighed him down for most of his life seems to be lifting at last, and

he feels different, just different in a way that is hard for him to explain or even comprehend.

He has talked about the foster homes. Anguish at first, and the flashbacks nearly killed him, but with Dr. Levy as his guide, he has been able to slay one dragon after another.

Aggie’s disappearance has been brutal. After a few months, the search for her whereabouts becomes a search for her remains. The police have found nothing – Vester doesn’t think they looked very hard - though the psychic they consulted claimed that she had “gone home” and was in a happier place, her soul finally at peace.

“Doc.”

“What is it, Vess?”

“Some guy called me a nigger on the bus today.”

Dr. Levy looks at him, his brows drawing together.

“I made him take it back.”

“Good.”

“I made him apologize. Oh man, I thought I’d never be able to do that.”

“That’s – Vess, that’s remarkable, I’m proud of you. You are doing so well.”

“Doc. That’s the thing. I’m not.”

Dr. Levy’s puzzled expression makes his insides squirm. But there’s no turning back now.

“There’s. . . there’s all sorts of shit I haven’t told you about.”

The pause that follows is loaded.

“Are you ready to tell me now?”

“No. Doc, I’m never going to be ready. If I say this shit, I know what’s going to happen to me.”

“And if you don’t?”

“If I don’t. . .if I don’t, then all this stuff that’s happened here, all these changes I’ve made, it just won’t mean a damn thing.”

“I think it’s time you told me, Vess.”

He rubs his eyes, takes a deep breath, and in a voice shaking with dread, he begins.

“When I was fifteen years old,” he says to Dr. Levy, “I started setting fires.”

Epilogue: Szabó’s Fire

The turning of the year is like every other year, with the usual milestones and markers, another spring with its torrential rains and surges of lush supernatural B. C. green, another summer of rides and cotton candy at the PNE, another fall with the kids piling on the bus to go back to school, then everyone dressing up for trick-or-treats, then the mad frenzy of preparation for yet another Christmas and New Year’s.

But like every other year, this one is unique. Powerful changes have swept through Zeddyville, some of them heartbreaking. Aggie is now an absence, another dotted-line void, just gone. She has disappeared without a trace, almost as if she never was.

Women disappear from the Downtown Eastside all the time, a bitter, unpalatable fact. Vess Graham can’t quite swallow it, and still holds out some sort of hope that they’ll find Aggie, or even some remains of her, something.

There are moments when he can almost convince himself that she found a way to put her hand through the veil. Then he dismisses the thought as just too fantastic. It’s impossible to get out of the time you were born into, you just have to deal with what’s around you, hard as it sometimes is. Dr. Levy taught him that.

Dr. Levy taught him a lot of things. One of the greatest lessons was about taking responsibility: after confessing the fires, which was the hardest thing he ever did in his life, he wondered if the doctor would turn him in, report him. But he didn’t.

He left that up to him.

It took him a while. For several weeks he didn’t eat or sleep. His guts twisted with anxiety and dread, and even though he knew what he needed to do, actually doing it was almost impossible. Wouldn’t he lose all the progress he had made over the past few months, all the changes, his newfound power, his freedom, his life?

Then one day it became too much for him to carry. Vess Graham called the police, and told them he had to come in and talk to them.

There were consequences, harsh ones. He knew there would be. Vess would have to serve time for his offenses, there was no way around it. But when he learned that the man who died had had a heart attack, that it wasn’t the fire that killed him, the relief he felt was almost worth the four years he had to spend in prison.

Though four years was bad, it sure beat ten. Dr. Levy saw to it that his sentence was

reduced. The full confession and the determined effort he had made to reclaim himself

had not gone unnoticed.

He made good use of his time. One of the counsellors suggested he train himself for a career in computer support: “You’re a techie, Vess, a natural for this industry. Think of it. You could be completely self-supporting then, and not have to rely on your father for handouts.”
“Really?” It sounded fantastic, too good to be true.

“You can start your education right here. Once you get out, we can arrange for you to take classes at BCIT. This is something you love to do, Vess, and you’re a smart young man, you could really make a go of it.”

This was kind of like finding out he had two heads and didn’t even know it, a complete and total shock, but – the more they talked about it, the more plausible and even possible it seemed.

Step by step, starting in prison, then carrying on when they let him out in only two years, Vess Graham began to build a life.

Mavis Potter did become famous, but not in the way she had anticipated. The story of how she broke into Zoltán Levy’s house and assaulted him made her into a minor celebrity, and for a time she was hounded by reporters. Excerpts of Eastside Story appeared in the Vancouver Sun, but finding a publisher proved to be impossible. The manuscript was over 1200 pages long, a rambling stream-of-consciousness prose poem too bizarre to be marketable.

Though he was deeply shaken, Zoltán Levy did not press charges. The woman was obviously sick, not a criminal. But he did insist she get some help. Mavis entered therapy with a Gestalt psychologist in North Vancouver, separated from Charles, and began to write a memoir about her experiences posing as a bag lady on the Downtown Eastside.

Dr. Levy’s year has been complicated. He made a good connection with Sandy Alexander, the young woman who had the baby in his office last winter. She would bring little Anton in to see him, he’d crawl all over the floor, and they’d talk.

One day, Sandy is playing peek-a-boo with the little boy, and he laughs out loud in delight.

Dr. Levy feels his heart turn over.

He has heard that laugh before.

He looks at the baby, sees the resemblance for the first time. He must have been blind before.

Missing pieces fly into place, slam together in shock, and the muddled picture in his brain jumps into sharp relief.

He looks at Sandy; she’s smiling a little. She knows, of course.

And she knows that he knows.

He feels a little faint.

“Welcome to the family. Or should I say – welcome back.”

Bert Moffatt did decide to retire, but not before finding out what happened to the guy with the blanket over his head. He should not have worried, for soon the name of Tamás Szabó will be all over the newspapers, not to mention the internet.

He remains secluded during the long and difficult process of the restoration of his face. But during that time, amazing things begin to happen in his new studio on East Hastings Street. Inspiration floods through and reanimates him: “The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose,” Dr. Levy says to him, quoting Isaiah. In this great second blooming he conceives an exhibit of sculpture depicting the third-world streets of Vancouver, a collection entitled The Kingdom of Night.

When the media get wind of the facial reconstruction story, Szabó’s fortunes take a huge upswing. With a little urging from Dr. Levy, the Vancouver Art Gallery agrees to host his exhibition, a one-man display of virtuosity pulled out of complete darkness.

Zoltán Levy is excited, and eagerly anticipating opening night. Szabó hasn’t let him see the results of the facial surgery; no one has seen it but the doctors. Mystery creates interest, and Szabó knows that the time has not yet come for the great unveiling.

On the night, the gallery is unexpectedly mobbed. A crowd was anticipated, mostly from the arts community, but not this. Excitement crackles in the air, cameras flash, and media people jostle, sensing a good story. Zoltán Levy gets there an hour early, but still has to push his way through a dense and noisy crowd.

A white limousine pulls up in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery at 8:15 p.m. Tamás Szabó gets out of the back, and his new assistant, an attractive dark-haired woman named Zoë, takes his arm to guide him up the steps.

No more buses for Szabó. Now he rides in style.

The scene is beyond surreal, and would be almost comical were it not for Szabó’s palpable dignity. With his head draped in a cowl of heavy silk, he would not be out of place in a medieval monastery. The crowd parts as he enters, everyone stepping back in awe. There he is, that’s Szabó, that’s the man who had no face.

The sculptures are all thickly draped, cloaked in black. One by one, Tamás Szabó walks up to them, stands before them a moment, then pulls the covering away.

The crowd falls deathly silent.

See.

A woman of the night, flesh pared down to bone, eyes staring ahead like inanimate glass. A panhandler with tattoos sculpted in relief on his body, his hands held up in a gesture of surrender. A gaudy gang mural with graffiti expressed in three dimensions.

One sculpture is modeled after the Cenotaph, the “Is it Nothing to You” motto carved into a giant tombstone. Another is of a great rearing horse.

The crowd is quietly buzzing, some of them commenting on technical merit, but a few sculptures make them stop talking altogether. The pieces appear to be breathing, subtly expressing a kind of movement, entwining familiarity and strangeness.

When the nine huge sculptures are all unveiled, Tamás Szabó ascends to the podium.

He stands there for a full two minutes. The tension is unbearable. No one knows what will happen next.

Zoltán Levy recalls that other unveiling, that day in his office when he let the blanket fall. But this time it’s different, this time he has hundreds of witnesses. He draws the heavy dark silk covering up over his head, lets it drop to the floor.

Behold!

The audience can’t help it. They gasp.

He lets them look, lets them take it in. He knows they are having difficulty believing what they are seeing.

The face is smooth and unlined, and looks eerily young for a man of sixty-seven. There are no Frankensteinian seams to disclose the fact that this is a man-made, manufactured face, not the face he was born with.

Working from photographs, the surgeons restored the bone structure as accurately as possible, the missing half of his lower jaw, his chin, his teeth, his nose, and though they are new, these features are all Szabó, they are his. The brilliant blue glass eyes are unsettling, like the eyes of a wolf.

The word the reporters want to use is “lifelike”, though it is obviously a facsimile, a fairly convincing replica of a “real” face. The colour and texture closely resemble human skin, minus any bluish waxworks pallor, but the surgeons have not yet learned how to age and weather a manufactured face. It somewhat resembles the portrait of Dorian Grey, a reflection of a man, his traumatic past burned to ashes and blown away.

A long silence; then someone begins to applaud. Then a few more.

Then the room comes alive with applause, relieving the crowd’s apprehension that they would be looking at a freak, someone to be pitied and feared. Words are coming together in the journalists’ heads, things like “miracle of modern science,” “quantum leap in surgical sophistication,” but media clichés will never express this phenomenon, this restoration of destroyed flesh.

When the applause and cheers finally die down, something happens that dwarfs even this bizarre miracle. Tamás Szabó begins to speak.

“My friends. I welcome you all to this day of triumph. For today I share with you my vision, a vision that was taken from me by a cruel twist of fate, then miraculously returned to me.”

Once the initial shock of hearing him wears off, the audience realizes he is not speaking in the normal way. How could he? Speech would never be possible for a man so deeply damaged. Then comes the slow recognition that they are hearing a speech synthesizer, similar to the device used by the disabled physicist Stephen Hawking.

Some genius has programmed it to speak with a Hungarian accent.

“When I lost my eyes, I lost my heart also, and my will to live. I became a beggar on the street, living on the pity of others, a cruel parody of my great dreams of success. My art was gone, I lived in total darkness, and yet God would not let me die. My pride would not allow me to hold my hand out for help. And so I suffered a hell beyond your powers to imagine.”

“Then one day I could carry the burden of my life no longer. A man touched me on the street that day, a countryman, he spoke to me in my own language. Though I did not know it, it was the beginning of my second life. I came to see him one week later, and – this man, this Zoltán Levy, he healed me. He healed me inside, where the scars were worse than the mess I had made of my face. He gave me back my soul.”

Zoltán Levy stands in the crowd, swaying a little, giddy with a feeling he can’t identify. He wonders if a new emotion needs to be invented to accommodate the strangeness of this day.

“Though the surgeons restored my face, for which I am profoundly grateful, Dr. Levy restored something far more important: my reason to live, my dignity, and my art. There are no words to express my gratitude to this man. He is remarkable.”

Suddenly the crowd’s attention shifts to Zoltán Levy; cameras flash, and applause swells again, this time for him. He feels a twinge of unworthiness; Szabó did this, not him, he only showed him the way. But he accepts the recognition, knowing that worthiness is not the issue here.

If it were, he is certain he would have perished a long time ago.

The exhilaration of the evening lasts about a day. Zoltán Levy cannot bring himself to leap back into the arms of his abandoned family. It’s not that simple. God knows he has told his patients often enough that they have to stop replaying those old tapes, get on with things, live forwards. But how to live forwards when you are afraid to look over your shoulder at the lives you have damaged and destroyed?

What right does he have to ask forgiveness?

So for a long time, Zoltán Levy does nothing. Sandy still comes in once in a while with the baby, and, incredibly, Dr. Levy bounces him and talks to him and makes him smile, as if everything were normal and this was just another chubby, healthy, happy baby, not the son of his son.

His work grinds along. Some days are gratifying, some nearly intolerable. He has started listening to those sealed CDs in his living room, something he thought he would never do. He even considers returning the rest of them to the store, but is just too embarrassed.

He decides he doesn’t need six versions of Don Giovanni and donates four to the public library, then starts to distribute the rest of his ill-gotten treasures to community centres and nursing homes, hoping they like Rautavaara.

Incredibly, for the people at the Portland anyway, he goes out on a date. Some of his patients see him with this intellectual-looking brunette with glasses who spends the entire evening lecturing about forensic anthropology. When they return from seeing a documentary called Sophie Scholl – The Final Days, an experience which is about as enjoyable as having major dental work, one of his Portman patients sees them and calls out, “Hey, doc! Gettin’ any?”

He feels ridiculous when he walks her to her door, says good evening and wonders whether he is supposed to kiss her or not. Remembers how awkward he was before he met Annie, and realizes he has returned to that state and can’t seem to break out of it. He makes an excuse about a sore throat and leaves quickly.

Transformations come slowly, for some people. Not everyone can be a Szabó, but we can take small steps. Or so he tells himself.

Because of the hazardous nature of his work, Dr. Levy must be tested for HIV at regular intervals. This has become so routine that he no longer considers the danger. Rubber gloves get punctured, it happens all the time. He doesn’t give it much thought.

Then one day, the young nurse in his office receives the most recent test result. For some reason she doesn’t want to give it to him. They run the test over again, to be certain there has been no mistake.

For years now, he has been breaking this to people: the test results are back, and I’m afraid it’s not good news. But now we can deal with it. Aren’t you glad you came in?

His own reassurances bounce back in his face, useless. HIV is no longer a death sentence. But it IS a life sentence, and it has to be treated on a continuous basis. You’ll have to live with this until we find the cure. He has said it a million times, and now he must say it to himself.

Suddenly, everything he has known has been thrown up in the air.

He sits with Sandy and the baby in his office, looking telescopically distant.

“Dr. Levy.”

“Oh, sorry, Sandy. My mind was wandering.”

“You know, you’re always telling me that every bad thing that happens has a hidden gift in it.”

“I said that?” He presses his fingertips into his eyeballs. “I must be a veritable fountainhead of wisdom.”

Sandy smiles. Anton, now a robust, unmistakably Hungarian-looking baby with dark eyes and curly black hair, babbles happily.

“Yeah, you are, except that you don’t know how to take your own advice.”

“Are you telling me what I should do?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that. But it looks to me like this test result might be a blessing in disguise.”

“I don’t see how it could be.”

“Dr. Levy.”

“Zoltán.”

“Zoltán.” It feels funny to call him that, but isn’t he her son’s grandfather?

“Anton likes to quote this line out of a Bob Dylan song: ‘When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.’ What have you got to lose in seeing him? What’s the worst that can happen? So, okay, maybe he’ll be furious with you and tell you to fuck off for abandoning him. But isn’t that better than nothing? Isn’t that better than dying without having the chance to see your son again?”
Zoltán Levy has always been amazed at the capacity of ordinary people to cut through all the bullshit and obfuscation and get at the truth.

But he doesn’t go to see his son. Anton does not appear to be interested, or still hates him. Why don’t their paths cross more often, when he seems to live in the vicinity of the Portman, his beat? Mysteriously, they live in two separate universes that overlap.

Then it happens again, the weird dodge-game that brought them face-to-face in the first place. They literally run into each other. It’s disconcerting to suddenly see yourself, to see a younger version/older version, mirrors reflecting mirrors.

But this time they both stop, glued down with shock.

“Anton.”

No response.

Dr. Levy impulsively reaches out and clasps his son’s bare forearm. Just holds on to it. Two pairs of black eyes lock.

Zoltán lets go of his arm, then gestures with his head towards the clinic, his body a question mark.

Anton stares at the pavement for a few seconds. Looks up at his father, straight into his eyes.

He reaches out, grabs his father’s forearm, squeezes it once, then sprints away into the night.


Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

  

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