Showing posts with label a novel of the Downtown Eastside. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a novel of the Downtown Eastside. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2020

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





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 Seven

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



Mavis 

Mavis Potter likes to take a camera and stroll the streets of Zeddyville, snapping this, snapping that; a grizzled old homeless man, his pants such a miserable fit that he’s forced to hold them up with one hand; an emaciated hooker, body so wasted it looks like a rack of bones, sweating and fidgeting for an overdue fix; an offended tourist (“not my picture! I don’t belong here”). She loves to snap the murals, gory and gaudy and gang-marked, the violent graffiti, the strange signs (“Is It A Crime To Be Homeless?”), including her favourite sign of all, right there in the very asshole of Vancouver: 000 Hastings Street.

Zero, zero, zero. . . there’s those zeds again, she thinks to herself, adjusting her wool cap, a new accoutrement to her bag-lady persona. She started off badly, almost like a Downtown Eastside version of Carol Burnett, too cuddly and respectable-looking in her woollen layers to be believable at all. Then one day she hacked holes in the sweaters and ripped at them, forcing the fibres apart with her bare hands like she was tearing at flesh. The enjoyment she derived from this shocked her a little, but it did not stop her.

Mavis licks her lips, cracked and chapped, without lipstick or even Chapstick, for that would interfere with the Look. She hasn’t worn makeup in months, and her hair – her hair is beginning to smell, and looks so bad she has to keep her head covered with a scarf when she’s not “out”.

Zero, zero, zero. Almost a cliché, she thinks to herself (snap). Zee, zee, zee, or is it Ground Zero, or is it more of an “ooo”. . . the “ooo” of withdrawal, of I need a fix cause I’m goin’ down (like in that Beatles song she never understood).

Mavis wants to bag a big one today, but is not sure she’ll be able to pull it off. The trophy she’s after, the amputated animal head she wants to mount on the wall of her study at home, is the head of Dr. Zoltán Levy. Bring me the head of Zoltán Levy; bring it to me indeed, stare-eyed and blank-faced on a charger, surrounded with sprigs of parsley! But like most big game, he never appears when he is supposed to. (Snap. Fuck off, lady. Get out of my face. Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else.)

Charles saw some of the photos, and in his mild studious way, his mild studious way that hides the heart of an absolute asshole, he asked her, “Mavie, what’s this?”

“Oh. . . just some shots I took for a project I’m working on.”

“This?” Pictures of spent syringes, a pool of vomit, a dead rat beside an overflowing garbage can, a passed-out man, another passed-out man, an aged Native face seamed by weather and wood alcohol, a hooker, another hooker, another hooker. . .

“I’m doing a book.”

“Some book.” That mild, quizzical look. Charles Potter’s students thought he resembled a big, ruffly brown owl. The owl fucks his students, unfortunately, fucks them blind, lures them with poems and promises and leaves them spinning around on their ass on icy black pavement.






“It’s a departure for me, yes. Downtown Eastside images, to illustrate a cycle of poems.”

“Really. You go there?”

“Only to do research.”

Professor Potter clears his throat and goes back to his papers, the grades in direct proportion to how much sex he gets from each of them. Cunnilingus? B+, maybe. Blow job? A-minus. All the way up the ass, with leather pants, a riding crop and spurs? A+. Or so Mavis imagines, when she thinks about it at all, for it’s easier for her to just lose herself on these streets and forget that she is married to anyone.

Mavis thinks she sees him. Quivering, she jerks the camera up to her face. But it’s not, it’s not him, it’s some other dark Ashkenazic-looking face, a poor substitute, just some schlub who happened to wander in front of her camera, and her heart plummets like a shot sparrow, dead feathers hitting the sidewalk with a sickening thunk.

She will get her photograph of Dr. Levy if it takes her a month of perseverence. She has started to do a little investigating about his habits, there are ways of finding out. She already knows where he lives. She knows he has a Rottweiller named Rosie, she’s seen him out for his little walks with her in the evening. She knows he likes a dark beer now and then, has even glimpsed him in the Jolly Taxpayer wiping foam off his upper lip. Women she’s not so sure of, but there was somebody, she is sure of it. She’ll find out. Who and when and where. Details. She hoards them, sorts them, shuffles them lovingly, and pastes them in her ever-growing scrapbook of Zoltánia, exotica, paper dolls made of cutout magazine-photos that she toys with, turning them over lovingly in her hands.




Porgy

Porgy is fascinated. For he has found out that it’s not just an internet myth: it really is true what they said about Elvis.

Maybe the 60 pounds of impacted fecal material was a bit of an exaggeration, but when he found the report, the actual Elvis autopsy report, on a site called The King is Dead: Long Live the King!, he was gratified to read that Presley’s colon was indeed choked with masses of undigested deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, burnt bacon and Moon Pies.

Elvis did not take a crap for at least ten years. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the autopsy report, which Porgy reads with rapt fascination:

“The colon is approximately five to seven feet in length in a person Elvis’s size and should have been about two inches in diameter. . . however, Elvis’s colon was at least three and a half inches in diameter in some places and as large as four and a half to five inches in diameter in others. . . (T)he megacolon was jam-packed from the base of the descending colon all the way up and halfway across the transverse colon. It was filled with white, chalklike fecal material.”

Like a lot of drug addicts, Elvis just stopped going to the bathroom at a certain point, and everything backed up like a sewer. Peristalsis ground to a halt, his colon blew up like an enormous bratwurst, and he couldn’t pass anything but the odd rabbit pellet. Didn’t he die on the toilet? It’s enough to send Porgy back to the purging pills and potions.

“Sylvester,” Dr. Levy says to him at their last little session, “you’re in danger of doing serious harm to yourself. There’s nothing wrong with your colon, I’ve examined you, it’s completely normal. You’re not all bunged up with shit like my heroin patients. So why do you do it?”

“Ah, I dunno,” he says, bashful, ashamed. “Makes me feel better.”

“But why? You’re going to develop a dependency on those pills. Pretty soon you won’t be able to take a normal crap without them.”

Dr. Levy leans into him, gazes at him with his penetrating dark eyes.

“Why, Sylvester?”

“Ah, I just. . . “ He looks at the ceiling, then the floor. “It’s just that I feel so. . . guilty.”






Guilt Dr. Levy knows about. Guilt he absorbed with his mother’s milk. He ate it and drank it and slept with it and breathed it for more years than he cares to admit.

“Sylvester.”


“Doc, why you call me that?”

“Because it’s your name. And you just told me you hate being called Porgy.”

“I do. It’s a nigger name.” He looks up from his floorward stare to gauge Dr. Levy’s reaction to the word.

He says it again.

“Nigger.”

Dr. Levy looks at him, unflinching, unblinking.

“Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

Dr. Levy doesn’t move.

“Did anyone ever call you that, Sylvester?”

“Did anyone ever call me that.” He looks up at the ceiling. “Did anyone ever call me that.”

“You’re angry.”

“No I’m not.”

“Angry feelings can turn into guilty feelings, Sylvester, especially if we don’t express them.”

“Doc, why you call – “

“Because it’s your name, Sylvester. You have a name, a real actual name your mother and father gave you. You don’t have to go by that awful handle they gave you in high school.”

“I was fat.”

“Did you try to lose weight?”

“I took laxatives.”

“Sylvester.” Dr. Levy looks a little weary. “You don’t have to do this to yourself any more. It’s unhealthy, and an abusive way to treat your body.”

“But I feel like shit.”

“That doesn’t mean you are shit.”

“I feel like it.”

“You’re a human being, Sylvester, a unique individual. In all of human history, there has never been anyone else exactly like you.”

“Good for human history.”

Dr. Levy smiles a bit. Porgy feels a warm flush rise in his face, a good feeling.

“There’s only one of you, Sylvester, you’re absolutely unique, and you have value and worth, just like every other human being on the face of the planet.”

“Even Saddam Hussein?”

“Look, Sylvester, I don’t know why some people turn evil. It’s beyond me. I only know you’re not. There’s a sweetness about you, a goodness. It’s time you started treating yourself like you mattered.”

He doesn’t want to cry, but feels like crying anyway, big baby that he is. He wants Dr. Levy to wrap him up in a warm fuzzy blanket, kiss his forehead, take him home.

“Doc,” he says, his voice a bit choked.

“Yes, Sylvester.”

“Can I ask you a favour?”

“Name it.”

“Can you call me Sly?”

“I’ll call you whatever you want to be called.”

“It’s just that. . . you know, Sly Stallone is so cool. And Sylvester, it just sounds too much like a cat.”

“Yes, I’ll call you Sly, on one condition, that you stop taking all those capsules. You’re going to perforate your colon if you don’t watch out. Promise?”


“I promise.” He knows he’s lying, but he has to agree to it or Dr. Levy will never let him out of here.

“I want to see you in a week.”

“Sure thing.”

“Try to go a week without purging.”

“Okay.”

“Sly.”


“Yeah, doc.”

“I want you to think of ten good things about yourself.”

“Ten?”

“Work on it. See you in a week. Now get out of here.”

On the way out the door of the Portman, he notices he feels different: less guilty, and somehow lighter, his head full of the rarefied helium of hope.




The bus

The people on the bus go up and down. Up and down. Up and down.

Bert Moffatt notices a difference in them today. They’re restless; antsy. He doesn’t see Szabó. Something is definitely out of whack here, as Szabó always gets on at the same time every day. Where his he? Is he all right?

But Aggie’s here, looking preoccupied, kind of like she’s on a mission or something. She gets on with that half-black boy, what’s his name, Porky or something, nice kid but always looks a little lost, like Aggie has to lead him around by the hand. He always looks terrified on the bus.

Today it’s different, for some reason she’s calling him by a new name, but keeps breaking into giggles.

“Sly. I can’t get used to it, Porg.”

“But I hate my name. Porgy. It’s a slave name. Besides, Dr. Levy says. . .”

“You saw Levy?”

“Yeah.” Porgy/Sly looks a little uncomfortable, but pleased too. “I saw him. I’m s’posed to think of ten good things about myself.”

“Sounds like him. He’s always going on and on about how we’re all unique and irreplaceable. . .”

“He told you that?” Disappointment clouds his face. He looks like a slighted child, shut out of a circle game. He thought maybe he was the only one.

“Oh, don’t worry, he means it, Porg. I mean, Sly. Is that really your name?”

“Well, kind of.”

“So. Ten things.”

“Yeah, ten. I’m kind of getting stuck on one.”

“You’re Porgy; you’re Porgy; you’re Porgy. . .”

“But I’m not Porgy, Ag, I’m Sylvester. My father named me after a Graham cracker.”

“No shit.” Aggie sees she has hurt him. “Sorry. . . Sly. It just takes some getting used to, is all.”

“Yeah, well, I’m brown like a Graham cracker, so what can you expect.”

“So. Ten things. I can think of a few right off the top. Just to get you started, I mean. You’re good at fixing things. Hell, you even got my Edison Bannerfront Standard going again after a hundred years. That ain’t bad. You’re a whiz at doing research. Just look at all you found out about cylinder recording on the internet. I learned everything from you. You’re a walking encyclopedia. Hey, only eight more things to go!”






Porgy/Sly wonders if Dr. Levy said ten so he’d think of one, or maybe two. He hopes Aggie’s small list will be enough.

They get off the bus at the flea market, making their way through the milling crowds to the table where they bought the cylinders and the player. But everything has changed. There’s nothing on the table now but a clutter of old junk, teacups and tacky figurines. The fat bald man who sold her the player isn’t even there any more. A grandmotherly-looking Chinese woman smiles at them from behind the table.

“Uh, excuse me. . . I bought some cylinders here a couple of months ago.”

“Cyrinder?” The word is obviously unfamiliar to her, it would be to practically anyone, and Aggie’s hopes begin to sink.

“Uh. . .old recordings. You know, gramophone. . .” She mimes a cranking motion, and sound flowing out of a horn. The woman looks puzzled.

“Cylinders. I bought one that was pink.” She feels her excitement sagging into disappointment. Porgy/Sly tugs at her hand. Let’s get out of here.

“Ah. Cyrinder. Come this way, pleass.”

She takes Aggie and Porgy/Sly down a corrider into a cluttered storage room.

There, in a large coardboard crate, is a huge collection of cylinders in plain brown containers.

There must be four dozen of them, at least. Aggie looks at Porgy/Sly in wild excitement.

She opens one of the canisters, slides the cylinder out, and holds it in her hand.

It’s pink.

“How much for all these?”

“Oh, you take, you take. Man leave them here, he don’t want, you have them.”

“Really? I should pay you something for these.”

“Oh no. We get rid of, you take, make some space back here, eh? Have a nice day.” She beams at them, then hurries back to her table.

The trip home is a wild ride, as more than once somebody tries to rip off the huge orange leaf-bag crammed with pink cylinders from 1887, thinking they are pop cans gleaned from the dumpster. Nobody has any idea, nobody but her and Porgy (I mean Sly), that what they carry is a bag of magic so potent it will allow them to transcend the maddening obstacle of time.







Szabó

Szabó shows up as faithfully in Dr. Levy’s office as he used to show up in his studio every morning.

Some progress has been made. He writes his messages, sometimes in Hungarian, sometimes in English, very messy because he can’t see, but just legible.

It becomes apparent that he believes he has lost his reason to live.

Not for him the “everyone is valuable” message; Dr. Levy knows that won’t play.  He won’t accept it; he’s too complicated, too subtle, too smart.

Dr. Levy always addresses him in Hungarian, which gives him a warm feeling in his centre, something he hasn’t felt in years.

“Tamás, I realize you feel like you’re lost. You may have lost your way temporarily, but you are not lost. You lost a great deal, it’s true – in fact a staggering amount, all your work, your relationship, even your face. But Tamás is still here. You still have your mind.”

Szabó scrawls: That is the hell of it, doctor, my mind lives, I remember what I was, and I see what I am now, I am beggar what lives on street, I sit on corner and wait for alms.

“Your eyes are gone, Tamás, it’s true. But not your creativity. Your creative mind is as intact as it ever was. It’s just that the energy has nowhere to go.”

Dr. Levy can tell from the inclination of his head that he has hit home.

“Tamás. I want to ask you something. And this is very important. You can say no if you want to. Tamás. . . can I look at you?”

His head turns with a start.

“Can I look at your face?”

Face? What’s left of it, the crater, the mass of deformed scar tissue? No one looks at Szabó, they would die if they looked. They would turn to stone.

Szabó sits in horror, which slowly turns to awe.

He realizes something, something powerful, something surprising.

He wants Dr. Levy to look.

It takes a few minutes before his hand will move. This is worse than a year of streetcorner-sitting boiled down into a few seconds of desperate hope.

He wants to live, doesn’t. Wants to take the chance, is sickened by it. Feels Dr. Levy standing near his chair, almost feels the heat from him, and thinks of a dog about to be euthanized, how it will suddenly relax into the veterinarian’s hands.

He drags the old blanket up over his head, holds it above himself like a fetid woolen tent for a few seconds, then lets it drop with an exhausted sigh on the floor of Dr. Levy’s office.


Mavis


It’s after midnight, and Mavis Potter is rummaging through Zoltán Levy’s garbage.

To someone else it’s garbage, a bunch of smelly discarded old food and broken junk; to her, a treasure trove: coffee grounds, probably from some expensive Sumatran roast; vegetable peelings and tops (it appears the good doctor is largely vegan, though the odd chop bone spoils the effect); dog poo, or at least she hopes it’s dog, assuming Rosie must have had an accident somewhere in the house; an old paint shirt full of stains and splotches and holes, which she lifts up to her face and lovingly, lingeringly smells; inexplicably, a classical music CD still in its original plastic wrapper (a Deutsche-Grammophon recording of Brahms’ Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2, performed by Maria Joao Pires, Augustin Dumay and Jian Wong; this she confiscates, looking forward to listening to it later); a Hungarian newspaper, damp and crumpled; and oh. Papers. Handwritten papers, masses of them, perhaps notes, a rough draft for this book he is trying to write? Or something more personal: a journal, perhaps? His private thoughts? Thank God it’s written in English. She quickly crams them into her bag, looking around, wondering if anyone has seen her, feeling the thrill of shame.

She saw him out with his dog the other morning, Rottweiller, Nazi dog, such a strange choice for a Jew. For this expedition she wore her normal clothes, civilian garb, a tweed suit, skirt and blazer and brown oxfords, sexless shoes, she’d keep the other ones for later, and walked around and around the neighborhood in North Vancouver carrying a brown leather briefcase and hoping she looked like a Jehovah’s Witness or something, or as if she were canvassing for some worthy cause, a social issue, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, rape crisis centre, whatever. She tried to look purposeful, and she certainly was, like any predator, single-minded, alert and focused on the task, the task of capturing Zoltán Levy, of making him her own.

She even passed by him on the sidewalk that day, her heart hammering wildly, and he glanced up and for a split-second looked a bit puzzled, a “do I know you?  No, I guess not” look that lasted a fleeting instant before he walked on.

Score.

Mavis cherishes these moments, recalls them when she is lying in bed at night beside her snoring hulk of a husband; her hand will steal down to the sensitive place between her legs, and she will begin to caress herself, and caress herself, until she has to bite down hard to stifle the groan when orgasm rips through her shuddering body. The dark and downtrodden Messiah of the streets, her damaged saint, has ravished her once again.

The CD rests under her pillow, still faintly garbage-scented, still unplayed. She wonders what made him pitch it out: guilt? Turning over a new leaf: I’ll never steal again, starting now? Oh, she knows how that one goes. Every trip to Zoltán Levy’s neighborhood is her last, this time she really means it, she’ll stop, she can stop any time she wants to, it’s just that she needs to find out just a little bit more about him so she can put it all in this book, this cycle of poems, or maybe she should write a novel, that’s it, she’ll publish at last and get some long-overdue recognition and respect, the Giller prize maybe, no, that’s asking too much, but all this research she’s doing right now has a purpose, it does. She’ll show Charles, show him she can write at least as well as those nubile young women he samples like so many hors d’ouevres when he feels a bit peckish. Fuck Charles, she’ll write a bestseller, she’ll win the Booker Prize, Dr. Levy will have to take notice of her then and not look askance at her like she’s some demented freak detective prowling the neighborhood for clues.

She has stopped taking the Remeron and the Seroquel, they were only dulling her thinking, and besides, she doesn’t need them any more, her depression is completely gone, she has better orgasms without the pills, and her life has a sense of mission, of purpose, a hurtling forward momentum she has never experienced, an intensity, it’s just like that poem from Yeats, a terrible beauty is born, it’s exhilarating, it’s noble, it’s furiously fine, and it speeds her forward into an accelerated state of bliss the likes of which she has never known before. Like Clara Schumann with her feverish illicit love for Brahms, her Johannespassion, Mavis has her Zoltánnespassion, an involvement, a commitment, a devotion so complete it wipes her mind absolutely clean of the shadows of the past.







The bus

The people on the bus are drunk and stoned. Drunk and stoned. Drunk. . . and. . .stoned.

Three kids about fifteen years old get on the bus at Broadway and Granville. The two boys are stocky, dressed in black leather with a lot of studs and chains, pale and a little bit puffy in the face like habitual drinkers. Alcohol fumes surround them in a nearly-visible nimbus. The girl is emaciated, sad-eyed and plaintive of voice, with multiple facial piercings and dry, three-colour hair.

“That’s because you never do any fuckin’ work around the place. You never even stack the fuckin’ dishes.”

“Ah, ya fuckin’ whiner. Make me sick. Always fuckin’ complaining.”

The two boys squeeze into a seat at the back. The girl sits next to a bewildered-looking pink-faced elderly woman in a navy coat and a white plastic rain hat.

“Yeah, talk about bein’ a fuckin’ loser, try pulling your own weight around the place.” The girl begins to sniffle and rubs her nose. “Fuck, I need some coke.”

“I need a fix, ‘cause I’m goin’ down. . . “

“Mother Superior jumped the gun.”

“My Mum does coke.”

“Fuckin’ A!”

“Loser.”
“Fuck off, bitch.”

“You’re a loser. That’s why you always talk that way. You talk like a fuckin’ loser.”

“Yeah, well at least I’m not a fuckin’ addict.”

“No. You’re a fuckin’ alcoholic.”

“My Mom’s an addict.”

“My Mom’s a slut.” Stoned laughter. The girl covers her face with her hands. The bigger of the two boys grabs her backpack and holds it up and away from her, then tosses it to to the blonde boy who wraps his arms around it. Screaming bloody murder, the girl lunges at him and slashes at his face with her black-painted fingernails.

“Hey, fuck off, bitch!”

“Driver! Driver!” The little old lady is in a panic. “Driver, do something about this. These young people are fighting back here. And their language is simply appalling.”

The driver, a beaten-down-looking East Indian man in a dark blue turban, has a wife and five kids at home. He doesn’t want to call the supervisor, it holds up the bus and makes everyone angry and makes him late, and he doesn’t want to pull the kids off the bus because he might get hurt, or worse, hurt them – but the old lady is agitating now, and the girl is clearly out of control, screaming and slapping the two boys on the side of the head with terrifying force.

“Fuckin’ Christ.”

“Bitch, you are losin’ it!”

“Order, order please,” the driver says mildly.

“Give me my FUCKING bag!” The girl yanks the backpack out of the blonde guy’s arms, falling over backwards into the aisle of the bus. The two boys in the back convulse with laughter. Blood is trickling down the burly boy’s face, and the blonde boy has an angry red hand-mark on the side of his head.

As if performing some elaborate break-dance manouevre, the girl twists and turns her wasted body around and somehow wrenches herself into an upright position. She flings the backpack over her shoulder and leans her face in so close to the two boys that they can smell her blue lipstick.

“Fucking. . .losers.”

She wheels around and strides to the back door, almost knocking down a nicely-dressed old Chinese man in the aisle, a standee.

“Ho-ly shit.”

“Hello, Valleyview? Get a bed ready.”

“That bitch is fucked.”

“Language,” says the old lady.

“Jesus Christ,” murmurs the driver.

The well-dressed old Chinese man picks himself up, leans out the open exit door and stares fiercely at the girl, who stands splay-legged at the side of the street. The passengers strain to hear what he will say.

“You die.”

“Eat shit, Chink!”

“You die, then fuck off.”

The door wheezes shut and the bus pulls away from the stop.


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

Monday, June 22, 2020

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