AT LAST! Harold Lloyd: Introduction to The Freshman

At long last, I was able to post the clip where Harold refers to his screen alter ego as THE GLASS CHARACTER. Almost everyone else referred to "the glasses character", and no one is sure why Harold didn't, but it made a much more poetic name for my novel about his life and work (not to mention this blog and a Facebook fan page!):

The Glass Character: a celebration of Harold Lloyd

I just noticed several more very positive reviews on Amazon.com (though they didn't appear on Amazon.ca, which is why I never saw them!) So here they are, folks. . . I have to make the most of this, as the book had a very modest release and never reached the silent film devotees I had hoped for (nor was it made into a movie, which really ran me over - but I must rise again!).

The Glass Character by Margaret Gunning Amazon.com paperback edition

The Glass Character by Margaret Gunning Amazon.com Kindle edition

Reviews on Amazon.com

Michelle

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly a gem! 

Reviewed in the United States on May 29, 2017
Having become recently absorbed, nay, obsessed by all things Harold Lloyd I found myself drawn into Muriel's world---and what a world! I think one would be hard pressed to find a novel that captured the zeitgeist of the early years of motion pictures. The author did a superb job of balancing the events in Muriel's story with Harold's life. I was hooked and highly recommend it to anyone who likes the silent era of filmmaking, smart storytelling and the delicious Harold Lloyd :-)

Mathew Paust

5.0 out of 5 stars Carpet Ride to Magicland

Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2014

In case the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the guy with the straw hat and Woody Allen glasses, in the suit, dangling from a clock on the side of a building so far above a busy avenue the cars below look like ladybugs on wheels.

Harold Lloyd.

Movie comedian of the silent 1920s. Called himself the "Glass Character" because his trademark glasses were fake. No glass in them. The guy was a nut. Blew one of his hands to Kingdom Come fiddling with what he thought was a stage prop bomb. It was real. Deliberately gave himself powerful electric shocks to get his hair to stand straight up. Did his own stunts--the clock dangle, the shocked hair, pretending to trip and stagger on building ledges up in the sky, netless--a brave, some would say foolhardy, genius. Nut.

Knowing this and being acrophobic, I can't watch his movies anymore. It even scares me to look at the photos. I'll let Margaret Gunning watch the movies and look at the photos, and I'll read her reports. Well, then again, I don't have to anymore. I've read her book, "The Glass Character". It's all in there.

Margaret, poor girl, is in love with Harold Lloyd. It started out as just a fascination with soundless images. Love snuck up and struck her dumb somewhere amid the exhaustive research she was conducting for a book about what was then still just a fascination. Love. Alas. Margaret is happily married and has two lovely daughters and four darling grandchildren, yet is far too young to leap the gap into the day when her beloved Harold held sway with the girls of a baby Hollywood. Fortunately, for her and for us, she's a novelist. She has the skill to weave the magic carpet to carry her backward in time to those days of yore, those Harold heyday days, and set her gently down along the path the love of her dreams must follow should he wish a rebirth in the imaginations and hearts of admirers forevermore. She's woven that carpet. It's large enough to take us with her on that long strange trip. I rode along on a test flight. We made it back, and I'm still agog.

When we stepped off the carpet in la la land I saw that Margaret had changed. No longer the familiar author of two of my favorite novels--"Better than Life", and "Mallory"--she'd become sixteen-year-old Jane Chorney, a virgin and erstwhile soda jerk in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a terrible crush on movie idol Harold Lloyd. Soon after we landed, Margaret /Jane (and later "Muriel", as you will learn) decided to pack up her meager belongings, cash in her chips (two cents shy of fifty bucks) and head to Hollywood and into the arms of her eternal love. I might have tried to instill sense in her were I anything more than invisible eyes and ears. Unfortunately I had lost my voice and corporeal substance upon alighting in the Santa Fe dust.

So it was off to Hollywood via a wearying, bumpy bus ride, Margaret/Jane/Muriel full of glitzy dreams and innocence, and me hunkered weightless, mute and unseen on her delicate shoulder.

I won't say more. I took no notes and had to avert my gaze any number of times during moments that really were none of my personal concern. The Glass Character is Margaret/Jane/Muriel's story, not mine. What I did see and hear, and learn during our holiday in history is captured with such lucid, insightful poignancy I can't help but wonder if Margaret didn't in fact remain there, dictating her journal to a holographic image of herself in the distant future tapping on a keyboard somewhere in a place called Coquitlam, B.C.

David

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Star Shines - Great Book

Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2014

I couldn't resist turning page after page when I started reading this novel. It is as fast-paced, frenetic, frantic, as the jumpy quick movements of silent film action. To say this book captures the spirit of the silent film era, of the flashing, double-dealing, over handed and underhanded Hollywood of the 1920s and onward, is a disservice. The reader is drawn right in, involved totally with the heroine of the story. The story is about her, but it is also a thorough portrait of the great film Comedian, Harold Lloyd. He comes to life in these pages, a three dimensional fully rounded fictional character. The good, the bad, the surprising, the ugly. He is totally human and his motives and circumstances are clear.

I've read Gunning's two earlier novels, Better than Life, and Mallory. The Glass Character is far more ambitious in its depth and breadth. It is longer, more expansive than the early works. Gunning has presented her master piece, in this novel. She fully comes of age as a serious, yet entertaining writer, who displays a lovely choice of words and a often refreshing turns of phrase.
If you haven't read Gunning yet, start. If her latest novel doesn't win, or at least get nominated for the top literary prizes, there is no justice.
Don't miss an engrossing, absorbing read. By the way, you'll definitely want to hit YouTube to find full length Lloyd films, outtakes, and documentaries.
Don't leave yourself hanging from the clock hand, get the silent era spirit and enjoy the book!

One person found this helpful

K. J. Janssen

5.0 out of 5 stars THOSE WERE THE GOOD OLD DAYS

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2014

You're in for a real treat with Margaret Gunning's Novel "The Glass Character"

If you enjoy traveling back to the time when many of our parents frequented silent films as the prime source of entertainment, then you will love to bury your nose in this madcap treatise on the time and personalities of that era.

If the name Harold Lloyd doesn't ring a bell, you will know him intimately by the time you reach the last page.

We know so much about the entertainment industry today, but so little about what went on behind the scenes of the Silent Film era. You will be shocked by Gunning's expose of that wildcap period of our history.

Don't miss this treat from the pen of a very gifted author.

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

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 Eight

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


Zoltán/Szabó

The day Zoltán looked at Szabó’s face, or what was left of his face, the degenerated crater that used to be his face, he did not gasp, he did not feel sick, he did not take an inadvertent step backwards, because he was not seeing a crater, not seeing a crater at all, but the unmistakeable dotted outline of the face that was, and even, perhaps, the face that might still be.

Szabó knows this, in some way he can’t even explain. He only let the blanket fall to the floor because he knew Dr. Levy would not gasp or feel sick. He knew Dr. Levy would do something else. He wasn’t sure what, but that didn’t matter; he only knew in his core that it was time for him to reveal himself.

Behold: Szabó! Or rather, the ruins of Szabó, which Dr. Levy examines in medical fascination, looking at him from this angle and that angle like he’s studying a great sculpture, perhaps Michelangelo’s David; seeing potential in three dimensions, not in cold inanimate marble, but in flesh.

“Tamás, I have an idea.”

His head jerks up.

“There’s someone I want you to talk to. His name is Robert Kaplan, a reconstructive surgeon. He puts faces back together. I’ve seen his work.”

Szabó’s whole posture indicates shock.

“You might have enough bone here to work with, Tamás. There’s more left than you realize. It’s been years since the accident, and surgery has taken huge leaps since then.”

If Szabó had a mouth, it would be hanging open about now.

“Tamás, may I have the honour of booking you an appointment with Dr. Kaplan?”

Szabó does not move.

It’s as if he has frozen in his chair.

Seconds tick by. Dr. Levy begins to think that this will never work out, that he has wasted his time, that he -

Then the tightly-wound spring inside Szabó, the wellspring of hope that he has sat on for years, suddenly lets go, and he leaps, leaps at Dr. Levy, even though he can’t see him, leaps like he is flinging himself into what might be a bottomless canyon and what might be his resurrection.

Dr. Levy stumbles back a couple of steps, but saves himself in time, does not fall over backwards. He supports Szabó’s whole weight for a moment as the man crushes him in his arms.

“I take it that’s a yes.”

Szabó makes a sound he’s never heard before. Not a moan or a cry, or even singing. Dr. Levy realizes it can only be one thing, something neither one of them ever expected to hear from him: laughter, that defiant sound that thumbs its nose at despair.

Aggie 

Portman Hotel
November 15, 2003

So much has happened in the last couple of days, it feels like my head has been turned all the way around.

I lugged all the cylinders home with me, the great big bulging orange leaf-bag full of pink cylinders in plain brown containers, and I thought: where do I start? Which one is first? What’s on these – more of that voice I heard, that man, whoever he is, or is it music, or - ?

I fished around in the bag and grabbed. This seems like a good one. Looks just like all the other cylinders, but maybe there’s an invisible “#1” written on it somewhere.

I load it on, crank it up, and start listening.

A sound like frying bacon; ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita. . .

And then: words.

It’s so bloody frustrating, as I can only make out bits of it here and there. But it’s the same guy, I can tell that much, the same voice, speaking slowly and deliberately, but with a kind of sureness, like he knows what he needs to say. It makes me feel weird, like I already know him or something.

And after a while, it gets a little easier to tell what he is saying.

I fill in the gaps with my imagination.

So it goes sort of like this:

“When I set out to send. . . this message. . . into the future, it was with very little notion. . . of who would be able to receive it. Nevertheless, . . .I had a strong and abiding faith. . . that the message. . . would not only be heard, but comprehended. . . and acted upon.”
Okay, so maybe he didn’t say exactly that, but close enough, it’s the gist. I’m getting on to this now, it’s coming easier, like a language I always knew, but didn’t know that I knew:

“In the time. . . in which I am living, the message. . . I have to impart. . . will never be completely comprehended,. . . never be heeded or understood. It must be directed. . . into the unknown . . .with a sureness and steady (something-or-other? Faith?) that someone. . . will be prepared to receive it,. . . and more importantly, . . .to act upon it, . . .on the other side of the future.”

I wonder if I am hearing this right.

“So it is with great excitement. . . that I record. . . these thoughts, in trust. . . that the message. . . will fly to its mark. I hail thee, Listener,. . .for what I am about to impart. . . will leave you changed forever. And out of this transformation. . . will flow the beginnings. . . of a great movement. . .for human change.”

Ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita – stop.

I sit there for a while, stunned by it all, my head spinning, feeling a little bit sick.

I have forty-eight more cylinders to listen to. I’ll ration myself, only listen to one per day. I think that anything more than that would freaking overwhelm me.

I wonder about letting Porgy in on this (I mean Sly – I just can’t get used to calling him that), but – no. This is private, it’s personal. Somehow I know it’s meant for me alone.

He needs a name. He isn’t going to identify himself, somehow I can tell that. So I think hard, and then the perfect name just comes to me out of the blue.

I think I’ll call him Sebastian.


Porgy/Sly

The transformation is not yet complete; Porgy still thinks of himself as Porgy, but now he corrects himself, changing it to Sly whenever he thinks about it.

The ten good things are racking his brain. Aggie said he can fix things. That’s one. What was the other one?

Porgy/Sly goes out more now than he used to. Part of it is out of necessity, because he has to go see Dr. Levy, he made a promise to himself that he’d do it.  And he is sick of feeling this way, so burdened down with guilt. He wants Dr. Levy to remove the load, just heave it off his shoulders forever. What would you call that – a guilt-ectomy?

Now he stares at the computer monitor. On the screen is a picture of bones: an x-ray of a woman’s foot.

The foot is three inches long. The arch is buckled and folded in on itself like a train derailment, or a pile-up of solid rock pushed in on itself by the inexorable forces of a glacier. The toes are crushed under, the entire foot folded in half, impossibly distorted and deformed.

Porgy reads in horror and fascination. When this woman was only four years old, her mother took her vulnerable little naked foot in her hands and gave it a ferocious wrench, breaking the toes. It took several wrenches, in fact, to break them all. Then the small broken foot was bound up in bandages which were pulled tighter and tighter each day, until the foot finally yielded.

That little girl would never have normal feet again. All her life she would hobble, her small deformed feet encased in gorgeously-embroidered silk shoes, wooden-soled so she would not topple over: the coveted “three-inch golden lotus” that drove men wild with desire.

Her feet were bound in order to make her marriageable. A girl with normal feet was a disgrace, an embarrassment, a useless parasite, with no sexual prospects, no future, and no hope.

The destroyed feet were, to all intents and purposes, dead. Blood circulation was minimal, and gangrene often set in, with decayed toes sometimes dropping off. Many little girls died from the procedure, from blood poisoning, infection, septicemia. The smell from the crushed feet was appalling, something like a rotting corpse, but it turned men on, it made them hard as the tiny shoes the women forced their feet into every day, it was arousing to them that their women couldn’t walk, couldn’t run, couldn’t escape.

Porgy reads about Chinese footbinding, how it went on for something like a thousand years, and though it was officially banned in 1911, it went on for decades in secret. Some older women in China still hobbled about with folded, deadened feet.

Porgy/Sly wonders: can the same thing happen to your mind?

Porgy/Sly remembers foster homes where love was something you did not hope for, foster homes where alcohol hung over the family like a palpable curse, foster homes where men fondled his private parts as if they owned his body, foster homes where he wanted to die of despair.

But he did not die. Something else happened to him, or didn’t happen, some vital part of him was stunted and could not grow. He hobbled through life, “always on the outside of whatever side there was”, like the Bob Dylan song says, a stranger to everyone, even to himself.

He wonders if it’s too late. He is twenty-eight, and he feels old, his future a blank. In school he was assessed with higher than average intelligence, but he could not learn. His mind had been bound, and it buckled. Eventually it yielded, it had to under all that force, something just had to give.

He wonders if this new name will help. A fresh start in a new direction. He doesn’t want to be Porgy any more, because all Porgy brought him was pain. He has some hope now, at least a little bit of hope from seeing Dr. Levy who has been through so much himself, everybody talks about it, how he came through the war. It’s part of his legend as the rock star of the dispossessed.

Aggie thinks he’s a hero. He wonders how Dr. Levy got through, if his mind ever slid and swayed and collapsed in a heap like a house of cards.

He wonders if he can trust Dr. Levy enough to tell him what he did. When he was about fifteen, he began to experiment a little bit with fire. He would build little bonfires in the alley behind his apartment, roast marshmallows and hot dogs. One day he was in an abandoned building with his friend Shad Johnson, an older boy of about seventeen, another Halfrican, halfling, creme brulée, café au lait, mulatté. Friend may be the wrong term, since Shad Johnson tolerated Porgy more than anything else. Shad needed someone to feel superior to, someone to boss. Porgy wanted to do something to make Shad like him, admire him, or maybe even fear him a little bit, but he didn’t know what.

Then they were crawling around in the ruins of this place, creepy as hell because there was still all sorts of stuff in it, wrecked furniture, an old refrigerator with stinking rotting food in it, even a tablecloth on the table, and dishes.

Porgy was seized with a brilliant idea. He looked at Shad.

“I’ve got a lighter,” he said.

Shad looked at him in disbelief as he set fire to the tablecloth.

It caught. The line of fire quickly snaked up into the draperies, and they exploded into flame. Soon the sofa was on fire, then the chairs, and the room was filling up with thick black smoke.

“Run!” Shad said. They ran and ran. They ran like hell, seemingly for miles, until their lungs ached and felt like they’d explode. The best part of all was reading about the fire in the paper the next day. It had spread to several adjoining buildings, and done thousands of dollars worth of damage. Porgy felt like he was famous. It gave him self-esteem for the first time in his life.

But he doesn’t know how to tell Dr. Levy about this, or all the other times. The other times, when things happened, awful things, consequences. Except that he was never caught, and he never told anybody. A man died in one of Porgy’s fires. He can’t forget it. It gnaws at him all the time.

And then there was the last fire he set, or he hopes it’s the last, pray to God. Nobody died in that one, but what happened was almost worse, because a man shot his face off in despair, all because of what Porgy did.

Maybe next time, once he gets the ten things out of the way, he will make his confession.

Or not.

Mavis

And then: a breakthrough so powerful that it transports Mavis Potter to an entirely new level of euphoric devotion.

She can hardly believe her audacity in planning the break-in. She has never done anything like this in her life before. She has to be sure Dr. Levy isn’t home, of course. She has studied his movements, his comings and goings, and by now she knows his patterns. She spent one entire evening in a parked car a block or so away, watching him move in and out of view through the frame of his living-room window. Now you see him; now you don’t. She wonders if he has music on, what he’s listening to, which one of his stolen CDs he’s playing while he gets mildly drunk on dark beer. And what he had for dinner tonight. Probably heavy on the vegetables, judging by what she found in his garbage can.

She has never seen a woman in the place, and wonders if he ever has sex, casual sex, just for the sake of having it. He’s probably sixty-five years old now, but still. Men can go on forever. Charles hasn’t slowed down at fifty-eight, in fact he seems to get randier with every passing year. She tries to imagine Dr. Levy having sex, but it’s as embarrassing as imagining anyone else having it, it just seems completely impossible.

Mavis has come prepared with tools, a few things to help her get the back door open. It’s the middle of the afternoon, so she has to watch herself, make sure nobody is looking, but coming at night is out of the question, he’d be home, he’d hear her. This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where people worry too much about break-ins, however, and she just doesn’t look the type, she looks like a nice middle-aged librarian, no one would suspect her.

Every once in a while she stops to think about what she is doing, and a wave of shame rolls over her, so potent it feels like an illness. But she can’t stop now, she can’t, the research is going so well, she only needs a little bit more and she’ll be finished. This is going to be her masterpiece, her breakout book. She even has a title for it: Eastside Story, with photographs and accompanying text by Mavis Potter. She fantasizes about accepting the Governor-General award, tries to picture what she will wear, what she’ll say to the reporters.

Getting in is ridiculously easy. It turns out the lock on the back door pops open with only a little manipulation with the screwdriver. The good doctor is too trusting, it seems. Or else he feels he doesn’t have anything worth stealing. He lives on a different plane, that’s why she loves him so much.

Reading his personal notes was thrilling; she sat up late with a glass of scotch and spent hours going over the sheaf of pages, losing all track of time. Most of it was reflections on addiction, no doubt a rough draft to be worked into the book he would never finish, but some of it was more personal, almost like a diary.

“Szabó fascinates me,” he wrote, “as I suspect that his reasons for attempting suicide go far beyond losing all of his paintings in the fire. Aggie Westerman likes to talk about the ‘purple dot’: ‘People who were traumatized as children have a purple dot on their forehead, but only another person with a purple dot can see it.’ That was brilliant, and so true. I have one, Szabó has one, and I suspect the underlying trauma is very similar. And we are about the same age. He was there in Budapest in the mid-‘40s; I know he’s not a Jew, but it didn’t take much to get you in trouble back then, his family may have been persecuted for any number of other reasons. He can’t tell me any of this, of course. He can only write, and what he conveys in writing is rather limited. But I watch him, I see how he reacts. Hope has just been ignited in him, and now there is no turning back. All that remains is to return him to his reason for living, his creativity. But how? A blind painter seems like an impossibility, just too great a leap. But then I think of the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, a phenomenon. That seems impossible, too. And Beethoven composed his most original and powerful works in total deafness. I must find a way for Szabó to create again.”

Leaf, leaf, leaf. Mavis takes another sip of scotch, then drains the glass and refills it. It’s starting to go to her head, or is it the effect of these papers, his private thoughts exposed, his spiky forward-rushing handwriting giving off such vibrant energy she can practically feel his presence in the room?

Her pupils dilate: this looks like a diary entry, personal stuff, the mother lode. She reads on in rapt fascination:

“I try to forget about Annie, but how can I? She has been pushed to the back of my mind, but she won’t stay there, I think about her every day and the way I treated her. We had terrible arguments and I think there was another man, but why didn’t we try to work it out? Why did I leave Annie? And my son. Abandonment! At the time I told myself, tried to make myself believe, that he was better off without me. Such bullshit. No one is “better off”, that was just an excuse for me to leave. I walked at the worst possible time, left her alone with the baby, and since then I haven’t been able to connect with her. No, that’s wrong, I haven’t tried to connect with her. Every day people come to me, they count on me to help them deal with the struggles and frustrations and difficulties in their lives, to help them get clean and sober and get their kids back, and I do my best to help. I help them out of depression, I help them out of despair, and sometimes even keep them from committing suicide. I wonder how they would feel if they knew I was a bigger fuckup than any of them.”

Mavis has long suspected that Zoltán Levy is alone in himself as few other human beings are. Part of it is his intellect, of course (he’d probably agree with that himself), but it goes far beyond that, back to the war, almost a cliché by now, the horrors of the camps, but the thing is, the horrors of the camps really happened, and some people are still having a hard time believing it.

Now she peers into the back end of Zoltán Levy’s house, a modest bungalow, probably at least 50 years old, surely he could afford better than this, but probably doesn’t care much about his surroundings, living on such an exalted plane of existence. She is entering from the rear, the anus of the building, a dark and cluttered place full of old boots and bicycles and ski poles and an old floor lamp, an obstacle course she must stagger through to gain entry. She flips on a light, and finds herself in the kitchen. Suddenly the fine hairs on her face rise and prickle: there’s someone in the house. No: something. 

A black shadow hurtles down the hallway and surges into the kitchen, barking ferociously: the Rottweiller! Mavis backs up and backs up until she is pressed against the wall. But she thought of this in advance, she knew there was a dog, she is prepared, and she fishes around in her pocket, pulling out a handful of raw hamburger.

Soon Rosie is whining with pleasure and licking her fingers, wagging her stump of a tail in gratitude.

So the investigation continues. Living room, sparsely furnished, looks like Ikea, clever man, he can put furniture together, I always suspected he was good with his hands. CDs – God, look at all the CDs! Seems like thousands, just piled up everywhere, in no particular order. She wonders how he ever finds anything. Then she sees a shelf, already packed full. These are alphabetized by composer, all of them still pristinely wrapped in cellophane. This was how they started out, she assumes, but eventually they overflowed like anything that is contained for too long.

Then. . .the bedroom. This is where she has longed to be, where Zoltán Levy sleeps, dreams, blows his nose, masturbates, gets dressed in the morning. She pokes around in the walk-in closet, pulling down and smelling shirt after shirt; she draws one of them on to her body, and of course it doesn’t fit, it’s way too small on her top-heavy frame, but for one instant she has the thrilling sensation that she is Zoltán Levy, and it creates a pure panic of exhilaration.

Then, the bed.

It’s unmade, of course, a bachelor bed, and the sheets likely have not been changed in quite a long time. She pulls back the tumbled covers and eases herself in. The smell of him is everywhere: a dark European smell, not like North American men at all, this is like very dark chocolate, the kind you can only get overseas, intoxicating and somewhat bitter, with a silken, sensuous mouthfeel, melting slowly, gorgeously in the mouth like a great liquefying gob of butter.

She rolls from side to side, wallowing in the essence of Zoltán. Her hand creeps southward, and she begins to touch and explore, teasing herself, not yet, not yet. In a few minutes she is close to orgasm, but tries to hold it off, resisting. It is nearly impossible, but she makes herself wait, and wait. Then she thinks of his face when he saw her on the street, the look of slight confusion, a “what’s this, do I know you?” look: and suddenly she cannot hold back another second, the orgasm rips through her body with spasmodic force, leaving her drenched in sweat, gasping, and shuddering with the frightening intensity of the pleasure.

It takes several minutes for her to recover sufficiently to get up and walk.

Then she makes her escape, having taken only one shirt, the shirt she has on her body, as her trophy.

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: a novel of the Downtown Eastside - Part Six

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 Six

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


Aggie

Portman Hotel
October 31, 2003

Last night I dreamed about the Edison doll: and it was freaky, because the doll talked to me all right, but it said things it was never programmed to say, and even answered my questions in a way that made my scalp prickle.

This sort of happened once before, it was when I was eight years old and got a Chatty Cathy doll for my birthday, back in the 1960s. People don’t realize this about me, but I’m nearly 50, not 35 or 40 like they think. I don’t show my age, maybe a benefit of being schizoaffective, who knows. They say people in mental institutions and jails don’t age, they’re protected from reality, or is it just the fact they’re so far outside reality as to escape being marked in the face? Anyway, I kept telling my mother: Mum, the Chatty Cathy doll is talking to me.

Of course it is, Aggie, that’s why they call it a Chatty Cathy doll, it’s supposed to talk to you when you pull the string.

But Mum. I never even pulled it, and it talked.

Aggie, don’t make up stories.

I’m not! I never even went near it, and its eyes were following me all around the room!

Oh, Aggie. What are we going to do with you.

I told myself I had dreamed it. Did I dream it? The two worlds were muddled together sometimes. But whether I was awake or not, I heard it talk. I heard it say, don’t trust the grownups. I heard it say, keep one eye open at night. I heard it say, watch out, little girl. And: keep your head. Keep your head.

A suspicious sort of person, was Chatty Cathy, always on the lookout for danger of every kind.

Next day I found my doll hanging. It was dangling, hair all on end, from my big brother’s bedroom door-knob. He had made a little noose out of string, the kind he used at scouts for tying knots. I gasped and stepped backwards and nearly fell over the cat. 

“Watch out, little girl,” Chatty Cathy said to me in her freaky, squeaky, ripcord-strangulated voice. “Watch out for the people at home.” It was the kind of dream where I was paralyzed, unable to rise or to wake.

So this Edison doll dream was kind of traumatic for me. Brought back things I didn’t want to remember. I turned the crank sticking out of its back, and it recited this odd little poem, let’s see if I can remember how it went:

There are things in the world that we don’t want to see.

There are (people? Souls?) in the world that we don’t want to be.

The strange and the stranger are not what they seem,

And they all (something, something), lost in a dream.

It was almost like a song, a catchy little tune squeaked out by a doll that happened to be 114 years old, a little girl older and freakier-looking than your great-great-grandmother if she somehow managed to stay alive for 114 years.

The song explained a few things. It made a kind of sense to me. It is as if somebody tilted the chessboard, and all the unstable pieces, the ones with no solid foundation, slid down into a kind of crack. Anyway, that was the image that came into my head when the doll was talking to me in that horrible distorted voice. And even though this province now has a strange new ad campaign for the tourist industry with the motto, “This is the best place on earth”, there are those of us down here who might have another opinion.

It’s Halloween, which is probably what has got me so down today; I’m pretty sure of that, because I can’t help but think about Cameron and Suzanne in their costumes, I wonder what they’ll dress up as this year, they’re eight years old now, the same age I was when I got that stupid Chatty Cathy doll, and they’ll want to be something special, not just go as something off the rack from the Safeway store.

And the fact I haven’t seen them in so long makes me want to die sometimes, I’ve been judged unfit to be near them, but I swear, though I admit I don’t really remember it very clearly, that guy coming towards me on the street after dark looked exactly like my Dad. And it was self-defense, there was nobody around to bear witness, Dr. Levy believes me, but I kind of lost track of myself there, until I came to with handcuffs on, and very sore hands which apparently came from trying to throttle this guy to death.

The man’s a real asshole, verbally assaulted me and tried to touch me, but he was determined there were going to be consequences, and even though I didn’t do any time, I’m “watched”, I’m “monitored”, a social worker dogs my footsteps, and I can’t see my kids for the forseeable future, which means I have to assume Jamie is handling things, Jamie who wouldn’t know how to keep order in a home if his life depended on it. And yeah, he loves them and all, I don’t doubt that, and he has a career of sorts, playing the clubs and the street corners, but a jazz musician isn’t necessarily the best father-figure for two impressionable young kids. Jamboy, they call him – Jamboy Jarrett, with his mother-of-pearl saxophone that looks so awesome, like it’s carved out of alabaster or something, almost translucent. We did have some pretty good years, okay, some very good years before I got so sick, or at least it seems like it from where I am now, pretty much on my own. There was some bad stuff here and there, some “issues” as the social worker puts it, God how I hate that word, such a piss-ass term for stuff that’s so horrible. Being crazy is a big issue, apparently, though sometimes I think Jamie’s the crazy one, out there honking his brains out for spare change and a decent meal.

As for my cylinder project, I’m still waiting, the wait has been interminable, weeks and weeks, and Porgy is trying this and trying that, unbending paper clips, rigging up rubber bands, whatever he can think of to get the machine working again. He just got the bright idea of going on the internet to see if he can get some spare parts. Not very likely. The thing hasn’t worked since 1904 or something, no wonder he’s having trouble, being out of commission for a hundred years will do that to you. A century of silence. But think what it’s going to be like, when that baby finally begins to speak.

Szabó

What are Szabó’s thoughts?

What does he think about, a man who is unspeakable, with a crater instead of a face?

Even among the write-offs who prowl the gaudy medieval streets of Zeddyville, he is an extreme, an outcast among outcasts. But he does not sit there and think: I am an extreme. He thinks in Hungarian still, always has, always will, which is why Dr. Zee’s couple of sentences made his insides jump so hard. He’s wired for it, and also wired to create, not sit like this in a heap on the sidewalk like some Victorian curiosity transplanted 100 years into the future, wondering what his fortunes might have been in different times, when he could have charged admission for people to gawk at him.

As it is, they get to look for free, but some of them still drop toonies into his hat (a theatrical prop more than an item of apparel), perhaps moved by pity for the strange heap of humanity draped like some museum statue just waiting to be revealed for display. He sometimes feels tempted to unveil himself, but can’t quite bring himself to do it, not just yet. But one day, one day when the jeers become too much for him, one day when he has had just about enough of small token handouts and the meanness of pity, he’ll do it, he’ll pull the cover off and show the world what really happened to Szabó when he pointed the rifle at his chin and fired.

If you could watch time-lapse photography of the six hours or so Szabó spends on the street at his station, nothing much would happen. Mavis Potter recently discovered how time slows down to a crawl around these parts, how eventlessness becomes the norm.

There would be no shortage of activity, but it would all look the same. People would whir and whip by like hummingbirds in a time warp, whip, zip, whip, zip. Toonies would fall rhythmically from guilty fingers. The stream of human traffic would gradually slow down as the day wore on; some would deliberately choose to walk on the other side of the street, as the sight of Szabó sitting there faceless and stateless is just too disturbing for them to contemplate. Better they shouldn’t have to look.

This time, however, the ending is different.

This time, when the six hours or so is up, when he has enough toonies to cover his room and board for the day, plus food, and a little extra for the cheap alcohol he tips into his feeding solution as a special treat, he doesn’t go across the street to catch the Number 42 to take him back to his tiny little one-room apartment on Hemlock Street. He begins to walk towards the Portman instead. Inwardly he is quaking, his pride saying, no, no, don’t ask for help, you can do this on your own.

But something else in him, something in him that has had about enough, enough of this bad parody of living, is propelling his legs towards the clinic where Dr. Zee tries his best every day to control the runaway damage of the streets.

Come see me sometime, okay? You know where my office is.

If you don’t have a mouth, it’s a little hard for you to make an appointment. So Szabó just shows up, and as fate would have it, Dr. Zee is on the premises and not even terribly busy. Between catastrophes, he likes to say to his longsuffering staff, and almost a little bored.

Szabó suddenly appears in the doorway, startling the hell out of him. How did he get in? There’s a controlled entrance to this place, but maybe the guy at the door was too stunned to say no.

“Szabó Tamás.” He says it warmly, in the Hungarian way, last name first, first name last. It catches him behind the knees. How does he know? He knows. Szabó sways a bit, and Dr. Levy guides him towards a chair.

“I’m glad you came,” he tells him. In Hungarian: Isten hozott. Then realizes that two-way communication is going to be a little bit difficult, unless Szabó writes things down, perhaps.

As he is pondering this, and thinking of ways to overcome the obstacle, he realizes something, sees it in the bent shoulders, the head lowered almost as if in an attitude of prayer, the slight sound from a strangulated throat.

Even with no eyes, no mouth, no face, a man can still weep.

Zoltán Levy

Zoltán Levy feels that sense of privilege, of honour, that always steals over him when someone unburdens, opens themselves to him.

It is something about his face, perhaps; in spite of its battened-down quality, the hardness about the mouth, there is compassion written in the deep puckers in his forehead. The face suggests Elie Wiesel in its classic sadness, a Holocaust face, wrought by forces that crushed the life out of millions. People often feel compelled to share things with him, private things, agonizing things, secrets.

He recognizes this as a gift, but an uneasy one. Like most gifts, perhaps all of them, it has a cost. The weight of the world is on his shoulders, and he has the backaches to prove it. One can almost see the dotted-line borders of an invisible globe perched atop his not-very-powerful frame. Wiry, people call him; wiry and intense. One journalist compared him to a hummingbird, zipping around at a higher frequency than anyone else.

Zoltán Levy gazes upon the weeping figure in his office, and finds himself sinking into a powerful state, a deep state, a profound state: the therapeutic state, the place where he can help. This is his gift, the essence of it: the ability, or perhaps the willingness, to go there, to go where the trouble is, and for all his scattered attention, to make himself so fully present in the moment that he becomes a receptor for pain.

He knows that much has happened in this first session, though very few words have passed between them. There was simply no need, for something far more important has occurred. Szabó showed up. Showing up is the huge portion of life, which is what makes not showing up (also known as abandonment) so completely devastating. It is as if it’s the inverse of life, the opposite of love, if love has an opposite; not hate, for if we hate each other and are screaming and raging, there’s still energy, maybe even hope; but indifference kills, kills by not caring, by not giving a shit.

Dr. Levy sits in the warm aura of a weeping man, and feels gratitude for the moment, perhaps the closest he comes to prayer. He is not a religious man – too much has happened to him, he has seen too much to believe in a higher benevolence. But he is aware of spirit. More aware than ever now that he is older, in his sixties, the protracted ordeal of his youth far behind him.

Did such a man ever love? Could such concentrated intensity, such passion, never touch another human being? He loved once, make no mistake. The love was so intense, so profound, that it made itself manifest in the form of a child. Not a stone baby, not a papyraceous freak dry as the wings of a dead insect, but a warm flesh-and-blood little boy named Anton, the very image of his father, whom Zoltán Levy coldly abandoned as if he were some inanimate object, something to be tossed aside without a thought.

A canyon yawns between his therapeutic tenderness, the tears pricking his warm dark eyes as he watches Szabó weep in his office, and the utter disregard with which he walked out of Annie’s life forever, with not even a backward glance. For the truth is, Zoltán Levy isn’t the saviour of the mean streets so much as a first-class shit.

Annie was left alone. With a son. That bastard; that bastard. For this is the hard truth about Zoltán Levy, the truth he can’t outrun no matter how quickly he zips from blossom to blossom like a supernaturally-charged little flying machine. The damage he did when he turned his back was incalculable, and so casually done! That was the worst of it, the casualness. What happened to his conscience? Did the forces of history twist his head so violently that he lost all sense of what was right, or is that just an excuse, should we let this go by, shouldn’t he be held accountable for his actions, or his lack of actions, his lack of presence, which is in many ways worse than a death?

Annie wonders this; she wonders it all the time. She’s not living five thousand miles away, though she might be for all the connection she feels with the father of her child. No, she lives right here in Vancouver. But Zoltán Levy has found a way to compartmentalize this broken piece, this dead-ended, abortive love that caused him to coldly walk. It sleeps in a locked cellar in his mind, along with other things, including the memory of a potato, a fragment of potato he was saving to give to his mother, she kept saving food for him, he felt so guilty, so guilty, so now he would return the favour and keep this small morsel of food for her, hide it carefully in the rags of his clothing all morning even as he worked moving heavy stones from one part of the camp to another, useless, demeaning work, though it could be worse, some had to dig up Jewish corpses and move them from one part of the camp to another, so he should consider himself lucky, but at one point in a moment of weakness he reached in and fished around just to look at the potato, to make sure it was still there, and in a split-second impulse he nibbled on the fragment, and then nibbled some more, and before he knew what he was doing he had eaten it, he had eaten the potato he was going to give to his mother because the hunger was so overwhelming, and because no matter how much he loved her, his desire to live was stronger than his desire to save her.

Márta Lévai survived because she was just strong enough, and because she had a small son to live for. She survived to bring him over to freedom and a change of name, easier to spell, and not so Hungarian, a fresh start in a new country. She was one of the lucky ones, she made it through, and her son made it through, though terribly skinny, he’d never grow properly, he would always look stunted or starved all his life, but never mind, even her husband was spared, after a long and harrowing separation, and the family came back together again in 1945, it was like a miracle, a miracle of restoration. They never spoke of the war, but put it away and lived forwards, like walking with shattered bones. What were they to do? Cry for the rest of their lives? Not live, not take one step, then another – was that not letting Hitler win?

Hitler did not win, and the little reassembled family, the small sober-faced boy whom they called Tán-tán and his grateful shell-shocked parents, transplanted themselves to this strange new land, and found a way to go on living, day by difficult, irreplaceable day.


Aggie

Portman Hotel
November 11, 2003

So the day finally dawns, the great day when Porgy gets the little beast working again without breaking down after a few seconds of operation. I couldn’t believe how excited we both were – like kids on Christmas morning, like the Darling children when Peter Pan lifts them off the ground and flies them over London, all lit up at night.

We needed to have some kind of ceremony for such a momentous occasion, so we smoked a couple joints and drank some rice wine and got a little giggly beforehand. Normally I wouldn’t go near the stuff, pot I mean, because it can make me really paranoid, and I’ve even hallucinated on it before, white fountains, it was freaky. But this was quality stuff, Porgy must have a good dealer, and though it was strong, the buzz was mellow and pleasurable and calm. We grinned at each other like conspirators, and Porgy said I should choose the first cylinder to listen to.

I did it blindfolded. We thought it would be more fun that way, to pick at random. So Porgy puts the blindfold on me, giggling away, and turns me around three times like I’m going to play pin the tail on the donkey, and I grope towards the big pile of cylinders on the floor, and grab one.

It’s one of the really old ones, Edison brown wax, with no label on it, it could be anything. My head is reeling with excitement and a weird kind of fear. Porgy feels the same way, I can tell.

He loads the cylinder on, gives the machine a mighty crank, and we listen.

A hiss, a crackle, then: ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita.

“Have you ever heard about the Wibbly Wobbly Walk?

Well just in case you’ve not,

I’ll tell you on the spot,

The Wibbly Wobbly Walk is only just another way

Of saying that the boys are out upon a holiday. . . “
I freak.

I abso-fucking-lutely freak. But it’s so funny!

“And they all walk

The Wibbly Wobbly Walk,

All talk

The Wibbly Wobbly talk,

All wear

Wibbly Wobbly ties,

And wink at all the pretty girls

With Wibbly Wobbly Eyes. . .”

I freak.

I abso-fuckin’-lutely freak!

We both fall on the floor, convulsing. The recording I could not stand to listen to as a child is thumbing its nose at me over the span of an entire century.

The guy singing, who knows what his name is, he sounds sort of English, and he starts kind of raving mid-cylinder, chortling away like he’s drunk or something:

“Heh-heh-heh.

You ought to see them.

They can’t do the Grizzly Bear or the Turkey Trot.

Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

I’ve got a Wibbly Wobbly laugh, haven’t I?

Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

It’s so totally bizarre, unexpected and delightful, we just hug each other. We can’t wait to hear the next one, but unfortunately, it’s a bit of a downer:

“A Cornfield Medley. By the Hayden Quartet.” (The really early ones are announced, for a very practical reason – there was no way to label them.)

“Some folks say that a nigger won’t steal

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

But I caught a couple in my corn field

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

One had a shovel and the other had a hoe

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

If that ain’t stealin’, I don’t know

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field).”

Porgy and I listen with our mouths open:

“Now dem coons am happy,

Don’t you hear those banjos play. . .

(rang-dinga-dinga-dang

rang-dinga-dinga-dang)

I cannot work until tomorrow,

‘Cause de teardrop flow.

I’ll try to drive away my sorrow,

Plinkin’ on de old ban-jo.”

There’s an embarrassed silence.

“Oh Porgy, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. It was a hundred years ago.”

“But still. Jesus, Porg, the racism. Didn’t people realize? It’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, but it’s all part of the deal, the time-travel. If we’re gonna go back there, we have to deal with conditions as they were.”

We play through the rest of the Edison Blue Amberols, and it seems minstrel music is the most popular form: white guys trying to sound black, no doubt blackening their faces with burnt cork, à la Al Jolson, the Jewish negro: Down on the Old Plantation; Five Minutes with the Minstrels (which we clocked in at 2 minutes, 37 seconds); Darktown Strutter’s Ball; Dese Bones Shall Rise Again. A couple of them are “Hebrew monologues”, Yiddish-flavoured stories that meander along without any real punch line to them. Humour was a lot different then, too.

There’s a category we call the “modern marvel” cylinders: McGinty at the Living Pictures (and movies were a new thing then, almost as awesome and scary as recorded sound); and Aeroplane Dip, kind of a variation on Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine.

There are some really odd ones in there, too: bird imitations, of all things, a series of elaborate whistles by one C. Corst: “I will name each bird,” he announces grandly at the beginning, no doubt dressed in a top hat and tails, “and then I will faithfully reproduce its song.”

We sit through four and a half minutes of robin, bluejay, yellow-bellied sapsucker, cedar waxwing, meadowlark, thrush, nightingale, and even pileated woodpecker (does he knock on his head?, I wonder.)

For some reason male quartets predominate: the Edison Quartet (Edison had his name all over everything, he was a smart man, made the most of the new technology); the Peerless Quartet. “Oh, that’s because female voices didn’t record very well. The trebles sounded kind of sour.”

“That explains Dame Nellie Melba, then.”

“Yeah, her.”

“I don’t know, Porg, voices sure have changed a lot in a hundred years. They all had that fast quaver, and everyone seemed to sing through their nose.”

We listen to the Edison Quartet chuffing their way through a World War I song (another favorite category): How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree). Then, Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy (there’s lots of sexual stuff going on in these things, make no mistake), Baby, Baby, from Lady Slavey, The Bird on Nellie’s Hat, and my personal favorite: Tickle Me Timothy, “sung by Billy Williams, Ed-i-sohn Re-cawwds” (and apparently nobody knows how to pronounce the word “record”, the technology being so new):

“Tickle me Timothy, tickle me do,

Oh tickle me, there’s a dear.

The parson nearly makes me cough,

And I feel like pulling his nightshirt off!

I can’t help meself, I’ll do it in half a tick,

And he mightn’t have anything underneath, Timothy,

Tickle me, Timothy, quick!” 

We notice something funny, too – sometimes the music suddenly speeds up right at the end of the song. “That’s because they were running out of cylinder,” Porgy explains.

It was all pretty primitive. In the early days, before 1900, they’d get fifteen machines all cranking at once, each making an original cylinder, because they hadn’t figured out a way to copy them. The performer would have to absolutely bellow, or blow his instrument so hard his brains would start to come out of his ears.

It’s fascinating, a time trip, like a tour through a really excellent museum, only even more vivid and real. I can’t escape the feeling that we’re there, we’re actually experiencing another time. And then we come to it: the very last cylinder of the twenty-four I bought, in a plain brown unmarked canister.

“Oh. This is odd..”

I slide it out into my hand, and get a weird feeling from it. It doesn’t look anything like the other cylinders in the lot. For one thing, it’s pink. A pale, translucent pink, not the gaudy pink of the rare Thomas Lambert celluloid recordings that came out in 1902.

Somehow I know this one is way older than that.

“Wow. I wonder what’s on this one.”

“Let’s try it.”

We load it on.

There is an incredible amount of surface noise. Almost as bad as the lead cylinder with the talking clock. Then, faintly, I think I hear something.

“It’s spoken word.” My heart jumps.

“Think so?”

“It’s a man.”

“What’s he saying?”

“I can’t tell, it’s too garbled. Is it in English?”

“Hard to tell.”

“I wish I could make it out.”

We look at each other, feeling a creepy kind of chill.

There is a faint pencil-mark on the outside of the cylinder case: ’87.

“Good God, is that the date?”

“Somebody must’ve made this one privately. It’s not a commercial cylinder. It isn’t even brown, or yellow paraffin like the really rare, early ones.”

“Wow. Strange.”

“Yeah.” Porgy yawns. He’s a little tired, I can tell. He’s easily overwhelmed, in fact that’s his whole problem, he can’t deal with anything stressful, and we’ve been listening now for what seems like forever. Pot can do that to you, elongating time and stretching it into eternity.

So I give him a hug, and he goes downstairs to bed. But I sit up for another hour, listening to the strange flesh-colored cylinder over and over again. Sometimes I think I can make out bits of it, here and there:

“Would add to our understanding. . . “

Then more garble.

“Unfortunately. . . “

More noise: ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita.

“Then I came to realize that the only thing that mattered was. . .” I swear it’s making sense to me here and there, in little fragments. I try to piece them together.

My hair prickles as the cylinder concludes:

“. . .send this message into the future with (noise, noise, noise, noise) received with understanding. It is only then that (noise, noise, noise, noise, noise).”

It was hard to get to sleep that night. I was haunted by the voice. Who is this guy? What does the message mean?

I have to go back to the flea market right away. I remember seeing dozens of odd old cylinders on sale, really cheap in fact. I’ll have to scrape up the funds somehow. Hell, I’ll sell my jewellery, use the grocery money. I need to crack this more than I need to eat.

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: a novel of the Downtown Eastside - Part Four

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 Four

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

Szabó 

Make way for Szabó; make way, look out, for he’s flailing his stick.

He’s flailing his stick on the way to the bus stop, to catch the Number 42 which will take him to his particular station – his station in life, he thinks wryly. So this is what it has come to. A begging spot, reserved just for him, and it’s true, everyone else stays away, the buskers, the panhandlers, the hookers and the scam artists and the terminally confused, all give Szabó a wide berth because there is something just a little bit intimidating about a man who has no face.

“Mum, why does that man – “

“Shh, don’t – “

“Mum.”

“Please, Meggie.”

“Mum. Why does he have a blanket over his head? It looks weird.”

“Shh, Meggie. It’s not polite.”

“It’s freaky-looking. Mum!”

“I don’t know, Meggie, let’s just get on the bus now, sit down over here on the sideways seats, come on now, you like the sideways seats.” Pulling her away from the strange-looking, draped figure who finds his way up the bus steps as if by a kind of primitive radar.

Not that he never falls. He falls a lot, actually. And he has run right into objects, telephone poles and doors and walls and full-length plate-glass windows. But that is nothing compared to being chased: this has happened to him too. He is chased by clusters of young men out for sport, needing to inflict terror on someone, anyone, even a blind old man with no face.

He remembers seeing The Elephant Man years ago, watching the tortured, deformed cripple John Merrick flee the thugs who chased him into an alley and cornered him. He remembers the strangled cry, wrenched from the depths of his being: “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” Little did he know when he was watching the film that this would become his silent motto. He can’t say it; he can’t say anything, in fact. He will never say anything again. But he feels it. He feels it every day.

The bus seethes with humanity, all the people who cannot afford to own and operate a car, or are afraid or unable or unwilling to learn to drive. Cars are a social symbol, so not having one is like a reverse badge of honour, of dishonour maybe? Certainly, it speaks of a certain lack of power. The air is heavy with the rich funk of the seldom-washed. The bus has an unaffectionate, too-accurate nickname: the Loser Cruiser. Those on the Loser Cruiser know they are looked down upon, they’re even a notch below the Skytrain crowd, where it’s easier to practice fare evasion. Here, the driver watches you with an eagle eye.

The Loser Cruiser crowd is so marginalized, so glued to the very bottom of the social totem pole, that once there was a four-month-long bus strike, no transportation available at all, just nothing, and nobody even batted an eyelash.  It was allowed to go on for seventeen endless weeks, with no political will to stop it, because who cares about a bunch of elderly ladies and mental patients anyway? When the strike finally ended, at the expense of a great number of small businesses who relied on bus people to stay alive, the transit company, in an act of unparalleled generosity, gave everyone a free ride for two days. There were quite a few old people and handicapped people and mentally ill people who hadn’t been out of their apartments in literally months, but they were grateful, grateful that someone remembered them at last.

Bert Moffatt runs a pretty tight ship, doesn’t put up with any crap on his bus. He has even put off little old ladies before, well, not just any little old lady, but that infernal pain in the ass, Isobel Chaston, the terror of town council meetings all over the Lower Mainland. This woman is a professional disrupter. Calling herself a “dissident”, trying to get on the bus with a week-old transfer, then spewing random abuse at anyone she happens to dislike the looks of, groups of teenagers usually, whom she hates on sight or on principle, just abusing them willy-nilly, or fastening herself, lamprey-like, on to anyone she can victimize with her latest haranguing complaint. No thanks, Mrs. Chaston, you’re out of here, I don’t care if you did run for Mayor of Port Moody last year and got 337 votes, you’re too disruptive a presence to board this bus, period.

When Szabó gets on, which he does every morning at just about the same time, Bert keeps his mental high-beams on, watching for trouble. Trouble swirls around Szabó, even though he does nothing to cause it, he just appears, is there, unwhole, strange, scary, Halloween-ish, an affront. Usually nothing actually happens, but it threatens to. The atmosphere changes when he boards, the level of tension rises palpably, and the weird get weirder, like he carries a full moon around with him or something. The man is unsettling, he looks so strange with that blanket over his head, and besides that, he sings sometimes, and it’s a disturbing thing to hear it.

“Mum. Why is that man – “

“Shh, Meggie.”

“It’s weird. I can’t see his face.”

“I don’t know, sweetheart. Oh, look, there’s the Tilley store where Daddy got his expensive new hat.”

“Mum. I don’t want to sit here.”

“It’s OK, honey, we’re fine, just look out the window.”

Szabó absorbs all this. Like sphagnum moss, like blotting paper, he absorbs a lot every day. Sitting on a street corner begging was never in the plans for his life, it happened by default, an utter humiliation. Complete defeat. He started off with huge ambitions, he was going to set the art world ablaze, he was going to prove his father wrong once and for all, become a huge success, make piles of money, and instead a random act of destruction ended it all before it even began, some asshole casually set his life’s work on fire and destroyed it in an act of deliberate malice. It was then that everything toppled, his top-heavy ambition going down like a great tree. He can’t see, can’t speak, can function only with difficulty, and has a host of medical problems. Can’t digest anything: who could digest the ugly, slimy glop that passes through the feeding tube every day? Can you blame him for spiking it with a little wood alcohol to make it more palatable? Can’t sleep: who could sleep, with no future? What can he dream about now? You can imagine what his dreams are like, worse than anything John Merrick could have imagined. At least John Merrick was adopted by the upper class as a kind of dignified, ugly mascot. He’s lucky to have a roof over his head,  he’s better off than many people, he still has his wits, though he is not sure that’s a blessing, but it’s a struggle, a constant struggle to scrape together enough funds every day just to keep himself going. When he gets off at his usual stop on East Hastings Street right across from Pigeon Park and finds his way to his station, he almost physically bumps into someone, except that the someone darts out of the way at the last second, being quick on his feet.

The someone is Dr. Levy, on his usual hustle to get to an overdose, no, correction, to a human being who has suffered an overdose. Let it never happen, that awful terminology, the cold labels that keep feelings safely away. He is on his way to help someone, if he can, if he is in time and he doesn’t find a corpse in the cluttered upstairs room that is like every other cluttered upstairs room in this part of the city, tattered old Christmas ornaments hung amongst the junk. And he has seen Szabó before, he knows the story, or enough of it.

He jumps out of the way at the last second. Then says to him, in Hungarian: That was a close one. But I saw you in time.

Szabó’s head snaps up.

He can’t answer, of course. But he has heard his mother tongue for the first time in a long time, and can’t help but respond in some primal part of himself.

Dr. Levy touches him on the shoulder.

“Szabó. Come see me sometime, okay? You know where my office is.”

Then speeds on to his destination, hoping to salvage another life, or buy some time at least, stave off the end for another day in case the miracle happens, the miracle of walking free. He has seen it happen, it’s not impossible, he has seen people recover from a seemingly hopeless condition, and never writes anyone off. Even without the miracle, there is the inherent value of being alive for one more day, even fucked by drugs and a shattered immune system. He keeps on saying it every day, like a broken record: life has value; you have value – in hopes of undoing the effects of the blistering damage that puts people here in the asshole of Vancouver, down among the wandering strange.

Mavis

Mavis Potter doesn’t really belong down here, she’s just visiting. Most of the time she’s on her way over to the Tinseltown Theatre at Pender and Abbott, they show pretty good films there for a reasonable price, it’s comfortable seating, a great theatre in fact, too bad it has to be in such a lousy location, because to get there she has to walk through the more wounded parts of the city, trying to curb her fascination.

She’s a tourist down here, she is sure of it. Takes the bus, yes, because she’s always been phobic about driving, but she doesn’t like to talk about it, it’s just not something she is prepared to learn at her age, what with the way people drive around here, she’s not prejudiced or anything but they should learn to drive in the Canadian way, and besides, she’d rather support transit and go green, it’s one of the things she lives by.

Mavis writes poetry about this strange substratum of unhappy wanderers, and in order for the work to reflect reality, she needs to take mental notes. Her bus from the comfortable suburbs of Port Coquitlam takes her past a lot of familiar landmarks every day: the big Italian supermarket on East Hastings, window hung with cheeses and mammoth sausage, the Brave Bull’s House of Steaks (and that must be one brave bull, Mavis thinks to herself, to be rendered into steaks), the Golden Lucky Convenience Store with its “cigerattes, magezine and flower”, People’s United Church which sort of leans out into the street like a person earnestly intending to do good, the big brown dome of the library at Hastings and Main which acts as a sort of magnet for the citizens of the street, pawnshops, more pawnshops, the Regency, the Emperor, the Patterson, the Wilton, the Hemp Store, the Amsterdam Cafe, the Ovaltine, the Balmoral, the Liberty Market, a country music pub with a demented-looking cowboy painted on the outside, and the old Woodbury’s department store that everyone keeps bickering about, what shall we do with all this space, housing for the poor or an upscale boutique, which shall it be, hmmmm, let me see, which is more important, while outside the building at a certain sacred spot at the corner sits a stout elderly black lady in a straw hat handing out religious pamphlets to everyone who passes by.

She never pitches her spiel to Mavis, however, just ignores her as if she doesn’t exist, as if she isn’t even there, and Mavis has tried to figure this out. Maybe she has decided she’s beyond redemption?

This will all go into a poem one day, an epic poem that is going to transport Mavis Potter from relative obscurity (one children’s book ten years ago that sold rather poorly; a dozen or so poems in university-sponsored literary magazines read mainly by its contributors) to some kind of prominence. A GG award, maybe. Prominence is the wrong word, it’s recognition she is after, or affirmation, maybe that’s an even better word, yes, just a little acknowledgement of how hard she has worked over the past twenty years, all the effort and struggle, and all the rejection endured.

Every once in a while Mavis is lucky, and there is a Dr. Levy sighting. She has been following his career with a certain fascination since she read a long article about him in the Granville Gazette, his grim-looking mug on the cover, as if it would kill him to smile. She read with interest that he doesn’t have time for a relationship, it all goes into the work, and she wonders what the real story is there, because she knows that even detached people need people to be detached from. There’s something there that he isn’t saying, some severance. There were people in his life at one point, she’s certain of it. She likes to get a glimpse of his woeful countenance as he strides from hotel to hotel in the swarming streets, head down in a kind of determined, forward charge. She could never do it, she could never watch heroin addicts slowly die of their disease, never brook the unfathomable despair. And yet, and yet. There is a certain energy down here. She feels it as only an outsider can feel it, a wild energy that is kind of addictive, you get a little taste of it and you just want more. Mavis thinks of reasons to come down here, to visit the big Dressy fabric store with its thousands of bolts of cloth, rainbow zippers and every conceivable type of trim, or to see movies she could just as easily rent when they come out on DVD, or just to stroll. She can’t quite admit this to herself, but she likes the risk. She likes the elevated pulse, the little rush of adrenaline when she dodges another aggressive panhandler or steps over a sprawled body.

Charles doesn’t know about this, and that is part of the appeal. As far as Charles is concerned, she’s over at Terry Fox Library doing research, or the Coquitlam Centre mall having a coffee, or visiting a friend.

Charles doesn’t have a clue, because his head is so far up his own ass, he cannot see the light of day.

“Hey lady.” Mavis’s head jerks up. Here comes one now.

“Hey lady. Spare some change.” It’s a statement, not a question, but Mavis is prepared. She breaks eye contact and begins to walk rapidly towards Abbott. The panhandler shadows her, and Mavis’s heart begins to accelerate wildly. She flushes, she feels a hot flash coming on, a big one, a huge upflashing of intense heat, and bears down hard on the pavement, walking faster and faster until she finally loses the panhandler at the corner.

Sweat breaks out all over her body, and she lets out a long, deep, shuddering sigh.

Aggie

Portman Hotel
September 30, 2003

Oh man, it was cool getting my hands on the Edison Bannerfront Standard, even though I was right, it’s not working, it’s pretty much wrecked, and Porgy is taking his good old time getting it fixed. He tinkers and tinkers away with his concentration face on, kind of like a baby having a bowel movement, it’s adorable to look at. I guess I shouldn’t say bowel movement around Porgy, he’s obsessed enough already. I keep trying to get him to see Dr. Levy, he went a couple of times a few months ago and made a bit of a start, but I think Levy wanted to talk about the foster homes, and that’s something Porgy just won’t talk about or even think about. I know Dr. Levy would be able to help him, and I keep working on him, I won’t give up, he’s my best friend in the whole world and deserves better than the sad little life he has right now, barely able to go outside.

So I’m going to have to wait a while longer to hear all these cylinders I bought. They’re nearly a hundred years old, so what’s a few more weeks? Along with the Edison Blue Amberols, there are a bunch of odd-looking miscellaneous ones made of brown wax, probably really old, like 1890s or something, with no labels on them at all. I have no idea what’s on them. I also found an old brochure, all yellow and crumbling apart, and it said, “The Edison Blue Amberol Record is Mr. Edison’s latest development of the four-minute record. The term ‘four-minute’ is used because the record has a playing length of from four to four and one-half minutes when compositions are long enough to fill it.” Brilliant, eh? No wonder they called Edison a genius, he had it all figured out. My guess is that back then, people weren’t as sophisticated as they are now, and maybe they needed things spelled out. Maybe they were just a little bit intimidated by all this new technology, human voices issuing out of boxes like magic. The old silent films are kind of like that, everything really exaggerated, and the subtitles staying on the screen for a couple of minutes, long enough for a preschooler to sound them out.

“It is intended that every Blue Amberol shall be a gem,” the brochure goes on to explain, “the kind of record that its possessor will want to play three hundred and sixty-five times each year and keep forever.” Forever didn’t last very long, however, as I found out the playback process often produced shavings, and you can imagine the deterioration of the sound, which is already all buggered up by surface noise and that strange “ta-whumpita, whumpita” sound every cylinder recording seems to make.

Good old Edison, he was both ahead of his time and behind it, almost retarded in certain ways, because while he was busy improving the cylinder to make it sound better and wear longer, a guy over in Europe named Emile Berliner had already invented the playable disc. It was like Beta versus VHS for a while, quite a while in fact, all the way into the 1920s, and the two technologies existed side-by-side for such a long time because Edison was just too stubborn to relent. I mean, whoever heard of a compact cylinder? Berliner’s basic idea still has plenty of spin to it, if you know what I mean.

Then there was the Edison Talking Doll, another bright idea that never got off the ground. It had a little tiny cylinder player embedded inside its body, which was made of metal so it must have weighed something like fifteen pounds, and you played it by turning a crank sticking out of its back. But the technology was so primitive – this was, like, 1890 or something, some 70 years before the Chatty Cathy doll – the voice gave out after only a few cranks, and people brought the dolls back by the hundreds, feeling ripped off that they’d paid something like twenty dollars, a huge sum back then, for a talking doll that didn’t work. The dolls creep me out anyway, I’ve seen pictures of them, their eyes are all sunken and staring like really old dolls’ eyes always go, reminding me of people over a hundred years old whose faces just sort of cave in with extreme age. And the sound of the talking doll is freaky – you can’t make out any words, it’s like listening to Florence Nightingale on some historic old cylinder from the Crimean War or something, just a syrupy girlish-sounding garble with no meaning you can make out. Edison himself hated the dolls, and said “the voices of the little monsters were exceedingly unpleasant to hear”.

So I guess you’re wondering where I’m getting all this stuff about cylinders, all this Edisonia. It’s Porgy, naturally, and his internet fixation. He seems to have found approximately one thousand and fifty-nine cylinder recordings on the ‘net, including a site called tinfoil.com that even has a Cylinder of the Month! Who knew?

“Porg. What’s this site you’ve got here?” I’m leaning over his shoulder this morning and trying to see what he’s clicking around in.

“Oh this is a good one, Ag. It’s got real old stuff, like, the very first playable recording ever made – want to hear it?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Somehow I know this is going to freak me right out, worse than the Wibbly Wobbly Walk even, but I just have to hear it, I have to.

“It’s from 1878, ten years before the cylinder player went commercial. It was recorded on a piece of lead.”

“No shit?” (Maybe that was the wrong term.)

“Yeah, a lead cylinder. Far out, eh? A guy named Frank Lambert rigged it up as a kind of experimental talking clock.”

“A what?”

“You have to hear it to believe it.”

So he downloads the thing, which takes a couple of minutes because his computer is a piece of shit, and already I’m having an anxiety attack like you wouldn’t believe. Dr. Levy would tell me to take deep breaths, to ride it out. So I take the deep breaths, and it doesn’t help very much.

Then there’s a hiss and a crackle, and this “ta-whumpa, ta-whumpa, ta-whumpa” sound, except it’s really really loud, almost violent, and underneath that the most ungodly noise you ever heard, like a cat being strangled.

“That’s human speech,” says Porgy, his eyes shining with excitement.

“No it’s not. It’s an animal being killed, or at least systematically tortured.”

“It’s just a little distorted. This is really primitive technology, Ag. Oh, listen to this part. You can actually hear the words.”

From 126 years in the past, the wavering, impossibly distant voice of Frank Lambert begins to speak.

“Four o’clock. . . five o’clock. . . six o’clock. . .seven o’clock. . .”

“Jesus!”

“Far out, eh?”

“Awesome.”

“Eight o’clock. . . nine o’clock. . . eleven o’clock. . .twelve o’clock. . . “

“He missed ten o’clock.”

“Yeah, I know. It says on the web site that he was a recent immigrant.”

“They can’t tell time?”

“Here’s another one. This’ll blow you away. It’s the first music ever recorded, I mean ever-ever, in 1888. It’s from a Handel opera, Israel in Egypt, recorded in Crystal Palace, London, England. It says in the notes it’s ‘a chorus of 4000 voices recorded with phonograph over 100 yards away.’ “

“Four thousand?”

“That’s what it says. Four thousand people all gathered around a horn.”

“Far out. Okay, let’s hear it.”

I shut my eyes.

Again, the whumpa-whumpa-whumpa, only it’s more of a wisha-wisha-wisha this time, like stiff fabric being rustled together, going faster, then slower, then faster – obviously someone was cranking the machine by hand, and not very evenly either.

Then, just barely noticeable under all that dreadful surface noise, the most ghostly sound I’ve ever heard. Just recognizable as human, and it’s Handel, make no mistake about it, the cadences and chords are there, I remember them from listening to Messiah on my father’s old records when I was a kid. I look down at my arms and see that all the hairs are standing up.

“Porgy. We’ve found it.”

“Yeah, you’re right. It’s a time machine.”

“I’m there.”

“Yeah. . . “

“All those thousands of people crowded together around the phonograph horn, and the guy cranking and cranking. . . “
“I wonder if they knew. I mean, that it would last this long.”

“I wonder.” I feel a little strange, almost unreal.

“Hey. Speaking of making history. You want to hear Brahms play the piano?”

This was the historic Brahms Cylinder, and there’s all sorts of controversy about whether or not it’s authentic, whether it’s really Johannes Brahms playing a Hungarian dance on the piano. Somebody made a bogus Chopin recording a few years ago, such a convincing fake that even musicologists bought it. So who knows if it’s real or not. At the beginning there’s this guy with a squeaky voice shouting, “I am Doktor Brrrrrahms!” Well, it could be a fake, I am sure Brahms didn’t go around speaking English or calling himself a doctor, and the piano-playing, what I can hear of it, is pretty dreadful, surely Johannes Brahms would be able to play better than that. But it still gives me that creepy, enjoyably scared feeling, like I’m literally entering another time.

At the end of the listening session, I was just exhausted, and Porgy was too, but we smiled at each other, pleased that we were in this thing together. It’s like a kind of magic, a summoning of energy from more than a hundred years ago, a time capsule, “sound archaeology” unfolding moment by moment in what we so strangely call “real time”.

If it’s this powerful listening to these things on the internet, filtered through high technology, just think what it’s going to be like when Porgy finally gets my player going and we can listen to my Edison Blue Amberols as they were meant to be played, shavings and all.

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!