Friday, August 26, 2016

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART ONE





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


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part One


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

PROLOGUE:  The man with no face

     The man with the Elephant Man veil over his head is a regular on the Number 42, getting on every day at  9:47 a.m.

     Same time, same place.  Broadway and Granville, heading north over the bridge towards the Downtown Eastside.

     Everyone is curious as to what he looks like under the veil.  It’s more of a burqa, actually, veil implying something translucent, something gossamer, whereas this is more of a blanket over his head, without any eye holes in it, because you see, this man doesn’t have any eyes.

     Eyes?  Hell, he has no face.

     Once he had a face, but he blew it off one day in a fit of rage.  Rage at life, that it could be so mean, so ungenerous to a man as talented as he.

     An artist. 

     Maybe even a genius.

      Living in a garret.  It was more of a studio, in fact, a big open airy loft with beautiful natural lighting, where he both lived and worked, painted and ate and slept and had sex, wept and raged when the work was not going well and the rent was overdue and his girlfriend complained that he never took her anywhere, which was true, danced heavily in his steel-toed work boots when a painting sold somewhere, even in a tacky restaurant for peanuts, because it was nevertheless proof that yes, he, Szabó, could make a living at this, that against the odds, and in spite of everything his father had said to him, he could be an Artist.

     His father used to curse at him in Hungarian, tell him he was good for nothing, that he should have a trade, or at least a job, a proper job digging a ditch, it didn’t have to be anything grand, his grandfather dug potatoes all his life, and look at him, wise man, fourteen children, he lived a great life, but to be an artist, surely that was a dream for fools, it was impractical, he would never make a mark, he would never sell a painting, he was living in a world of illusion, and sooner or later it would all catch up with him, reality would close in, and he would realize that his father had been right, that he should have gotten an education, that he should have learned a trade, that he should have prepared himself for life, instead of letting life just happen to him. 

     One flicked match, and the dream was over.  The studio went up like a torch, and with it approximately 297 paintings, his entire life’s work.  His oeuvre, gone in an instant, irretrievable.  Szabó did not believe in insurance, and at any rate, how can you insure genius?  How to replace the irreplaceable, the inspiration of the moment, mysterious and unfathomable as life itself?  So – ploomphth -  there went all his canvasses up in flames, all those carefully-wrought works stuck with eggshell and coffee grounds and sputum and semen and even his own blood, torched up to the ceiling in a cloud of greasy smoke:  “like the smoke from the crematoria at Auschwitz,” Szabó was to tell the therapist later on, back when he could still talk, when he still had a jawbone and teeth and a tongue.




     In the Old Testament, Moses keeps such close company with Yahweh that his face shines unnaturally, giving off an eerie light in a way that he fears will frighten his fellow believers.  So he veils himself, covers the radiance to tone it down.  Szabó’s veil has a more practical purpose.  It is meant to hide the evidence of despair.

     It is meant to hide the evidence of a failed attempt to die.  Propping a shotgun against your chin is a bad way to do it, Szabó; you could miss your brain, blow your face completely off instead, and, in an ultimate act of wicked self-punishment for the sin of trying to throw away the irreplaceable gift of your life, survive.

     For Szabó did not see, in that moment, in that immutable instant that would change his life forever, that he was the gift.  Szabó believed, mistakenly, that the gift was in those paintings, that the hoarded treasures rolled up and stacked up in his storage room were in fact his worth and his life.

     Such fragile belief.  Such a thread to hang a life from.  Snap, goes the thread.  It all comes down, because Szabó couldn’t see.

     It was not a good scene at the hospital.  All the nurses and attendants, from the paramedics on down, even as they shoved tubes down his throat to keep him breathing, even as they started the IV, all wished fervently that he would just expire, and quickly too.  Any other result did not bear thinking about. The nurses whispered and murmured to each other, half-ashamed of themselves for the things they were thinking, the things they were saying.




    All the while his heart kept beating, steadily, steadily.  Szabó was not ready to die.  As it turned out, he had missed his brain completely.  Though the front of his head was one big ooze, practically a crater, with only vestigial jaw left, and a bit of facial bone structure, he was literally left without eyes, nose, chin, teeth, lips, and tongue. 

     He still had his mind, he still awareness, he knew what was going on around him.       That was the horror of it; the horror.

     His hearing was completely unaffected.  In fact it seemed to have become more acute, perhaps to compensate for the loss of his eyes.  So he could hear all the remarks of the hospital staff as they worked on him that night: Have you seen this one?  No. Come on, take a look at it.. Oh God.  Sweet Jesus.  This is a sad one.  Don’t worry, he won’t make it ‘til morning.  Well, let’s hope not.  Nobody can live like this.

     There was surgery.  The doctors did the best they could, which was not much, tying off blood vessels, packing the huge wound with gauze.  They discussed possibilities, queasily:  skin grafts?  A face transplant?  But such a thing wasn’t possible. Would it ever be? Wasn’t that just the realm of science fiction?  No one in the ER had ever seen anything this extreme, not even the plastic surgeon who had put faces back together into a semblance of normalcy after hideous burn disfigurement and automotive catastrophe. Still his heart kept on beating, and beating.

     He won’t make it ‘til morning.

     Are you sure?  Look, there’s still a good strong pulse.

     My God.  What’s he going to do?

     The surgeon, ashamed of himself, prayed that he would die.  He got loaded that night, just sat there boozing in the murky dawn half-light, then stuck a needle in his arm, full of Demerol.  It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, but it wouldn’t be the last time, either. 




     In the morning, Szabó became conscious for a while, before slipping into a dark and muddy coma, swimming deep in some subterranean cave of his psyche for several days. He saw his father’s face in the coma, heard his cranky, complaining voice haranguing him for being such a failure, he saw his mother Magolna as she looked in her youth, beautiful, full-lipped and laughing, and he saw other things, things he never wanted to think about again, seared indelibly into his mind so that they replayed automatically in this deep state, as if they had been pre-recorded on an endless loop. 

     A new nurse came on shift, and began to feel sick.  She was overcome with nausea at the sight of him.  Another almost fainted and had to be relieved.  This was an experienced nurse, one who could tie off arterial gushers and sling around bloody afterbirths like they were so many McDonald’s hamburgers, but even she couldn’t stand the sight of him.

     This was as shocking as the case of the two-headed baby born in Argentina, an extreme form of conjoined twins sharing one body, the sight of which made strong men woozy.  Something that should not be.

     Szabó lived.  Strangely, after the shotgun blast that annihilated his face forever, he lost the urge to die - which is not to say that he gained the urge to live, but it was enough,  just enough to get him through.  Perhaps it would have made sense for him to swallow cyanide or throw himself in front of a train.  Instead, he joined the kingdom of night, slipped into the realm of the dusk-dwellers, which is where he had always belonged anyway.  Now he was an official card-carrying member, a member of a strange organization with no organization, full of heroin addicts and hookers and crazy people living in a twilight world.  Intractible suffering was not a place visited, but a permanent home.  His passport was his face, or the lack of one.  His white cane thwacking the sidewalk warned everyone in his path to get out of the way, here comes Szabó, or what’s left of Szabó, the man without a face, the blind painter who no longer paints because he can’t see the canvas.  Can’t talk because he doesn’t have a mouth.  Can eat, through a feeding tube; can make sounds, as his larynx is completely intact; can even sing.  The spectre of Szabó singing, waving his white cane back and forth in front of him on a fine spring morning is enough to send everyone scurrying for cover.  Can’t see; can’t talk; can sing, and seems to know every operatic aria written for the past 200 years.





     Szabó mounts the steps of the Number 42 on a wet Wednesday morning in the springtime, at 9:47 a.m. precisely.  The bus is on time, for once.  The driver sees him get on, and thinks:  oh, that guy.  He’s a regular, all the drivers know about him, they talk about him sometimes, tell stories, but you don’t know what to believe.  Bert Moffatt the bus driver feels sorry for Szabó, wonders what deformity lurks under the blanketlike covering over his head, some cauliflower growth or third eye. Would probably be sick if he saw the mass of scar tissue that used to be a face, the nose hole, the hole for the feeding tube, the hint of an eyebrow left, but no eyes.  Szabo keeps it covered, he veils himself, knowing the world is not ready for a man with no face.  He sits down on the orange plastic-covered sideways seat reserved for the elderly and the handicapped, beside a youngish-looking woman with straw-coloured hair pulled back in a ponytail and a faded green backpack stuffed full of old junk.


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

Thursday, August 25, 2016

Giant Head, No Brain: the Donald Trump Easter Island statue







NEWS FLASH: from The Vintage News!

Actually the giant heads of Easter Island, do have bodies, but landslides have covered them up



The reason people think they are [only] heads is there are about 150 statues buried up to the shoulders on the slope of a volcano, and these are the most famous, most beautiful and most photographed of all the Easter Island statues.


This is just one of those moments of serendipity that makes me want to do the Dippity-Doo.

I was trying to get through the usual abominable trash on The Vintage News (which for some reason keeps dragging me back, though it's about as well-researched and scholarly as Ripley's Believe it or Not) when I came across the beginning of an article on the famed Easter Island statues that was so horribly written, I burst out laughing. I just had to cut and paste the beginning of it, but then, when I went to look for an illustration. . .

It was just too perfect: a giant head that somehow completely lacked a brain.

Fair game: those old family photos on the internet




Blogging is an organic process, like all serious writing. (Serious! As 3/4 of this blog is satire, how can I say that? But satire is perhaps the most serious writing of all). This piece is beginning to evolve from some thoughts I've been having for quite a while now.

In spite of my general disdain for Facebook, there are a few pages that I "visit" regularly (in other words, I look at them, and read them if there's anything to read). One of them is called The Kitsch Bitsch. True to its name, the page posts tacky items, photos and videos and gifs, many of them from the '50s, '60s and '70s. There are certain themes or subjects that come up so often, it almost gets tedious. A few times a week there is a vintage recipe for a jello mold containing all sorts of disgusting "entombed" ingredients such as organ meats and canned fish. Old ads for men's fashions run incessantly, and include long crocheted vests that look like macrame, crimplene jumpsuits, mint-green polyester leisure suits, and bellbottoms that remind me of the fins on a '57 Chevy.




But the favorite is/are old family pictures, cheesy things depicting drunk people, people in wigs, goofy-looking people of all kinds.

You see this all over the place. There are posts at Christmas that show "really lame Christmas photos". High school yearbook photos are a favorite. The common theme is goofiness, awkwardness, ugliness, or the bizarre. Until very recently I was all in, eager to comment on how completely lame these things were.

Then I began to think (never a good idea, but I did): hmmmmm. Where do these things come from?























As with Pinterest, we usually don't know where pictures posted on the internet/social media come from. They just sort of . . . appear. When they do, they're apparently in the public domain and can be passed around freely, and ridiculed even more freely. Some of the comments are quite nasty: swipes, jeers, and groans. Everyone feels entitled to do this - it's a free-for-all, with no holds barred.

But lately, I have started to think: what if someone I knew, someone who used to be a close friend and had a big trove of my personal family photos, had a falling-out with me and decided to get a little revenge? What would it be like to see all my old pictures out there, including the crazy, bizarre ones, duplicated and shared again and again and again, with an ever-longer list of nasty comments appended?


















I've never heard anyone say anything about this. These aren't real people! Are they? Are you kidding? Who thinks about that? They're just goofy old photos on the internet, and who knows/cares where they came from. This means they can show
drunk people, out-of-control people, people weeping or hitting each other, people with disabilities - heywaitaminute.

People with disabilities?

Of course we have the thick glasses (and I have tons of those photos - mine were true Coke bottle-bottoms before the plastic variety came along). Thick glasses are ridiculous and stupid and something to be publicly jeered at. Never mind if the person is legally blind or has cataracts or is - OK, should I stop now? Have I suddenly lost my sense of humour?

Probably.

But I've seen some of those "cheesy" photos - and I think the feeling is "oh, we all have those cheesy family photos so it's OK" - in which it's pretty obvious to me that a child has Down syndrome or some other disability that may be barely visible. It makes the person look "different", thus "goofy" and fair game.



                                                       


If I suddenly found my family trove on the internet, on Pinterest or Facebook or wherever, I'd probably feel like I had been punched in the stomach. We can't control these things because once a photo is in someone else's hands, it can be "out there" in a nanosecond. WE aren't necessarily in on the joke.

I had another thought - oh God, let me PLEASE stop thinking. What if the image that popped up on Instagram or somewhere else was your deceased Grandma, or your father, or your brother who had been killed in an accident? What if the grief was very fresh - or not so fresh, but still taking up residence in your heart?

We make assumptions on the internet, and one is that goofy-looking things/people can be mocked with impunity.  If these were real people, surely they're all dead by now. Or they don't mind it, it's just as funny to them (no matter how savagely nasty the comments are, including calling a mentally challenged person a "retard").




I don't know about other people because I'm not "other people". But there was a time in my life when, if I had suddenly seen a photo of my father's face  jumping out at me from nowhere, I would have retreated in horror and spent the rest of the day weeping. It took five years of therapy for me to come to terms with the fact that he sexually abused me when I was a child. As a matter of fact, his photo IS on the internet in various places, and (to my horror) I was ambushed by it not long ago.

How did it get there? I don't know. That's another thing. If you are having difficulties with your family and there is a schism, people on the other side of it might start posting pictures -  post them "at" you, I mean, as a form of deliberate violation or revenge. Those pictures can get around like a (real) virus: just hit "share". You're automatically the target for whatever people want to publicly say about you.

At this point, the conversation takes a right turn and people begin to say, "Oh, don't be so sensitive. It's only a picture, It doesn't matter what people think. Just ignore them." So if someone finds and posts a picture of your falling-down-drunk father and the image makes your stomach drop through the floor, it's OK.  Especially the contemptuous hilarity that ensues in the comments section.




A photo means almost nothing now, we take dozens or scores of them a day, but forty or fifty years ago it was an occasion. Families usually posed for them, but the candid shots could be most revealing of what was really going on. People had to develop film then (remember?), and out of a roll of 24 shots, 3 or 4 might be "keepers". But people often kept the rest anyway, afflicted with that ridiculous post-war habit of "waste not, want not".

So how did those outtakes end up on the internet? I don't know, but it's hard for me to believe that the descendents of drunken Aunt Martha gleefully put them out there. Family albums even end up in estate sales when somebody dies. Deaths are messy, detritus abounds, and things like that just get lost in the shuffle.

Is there any way to stop this? Why should we want to stop something that's this much fun? The truth is, it's a blood sport now and part of internet culture. But I wonder if we shouldn't stop, once in a while, and think about those dead people, or perhaps the ones who are still alive and suffering through all those comments.





ADDENDUM. One of, perhaps, many. Or not. Aside from kitsch photos, I used only my own family pictures for this. Because I don't keep weird-looking ones, as a rule, most of them aren't very weird. But all of them have meaning.

Old photos are saturated with meaning. As saturated as the godawful old 1970s Kodachrome colour process in those prints. In gathering up a few images for this thing, I did seriously think of including one of my father, which ambushed me from a Chatham-Kent Facebook page a while ago. In it, he stares into the camera with a shark's dead eyes.




For reasons I can't comprehend, I kept the two photos I found. I just did. I was going to paste them up here, but when I went to open the file, it was like the Wicked Witch of the West trying to get Dorothy's slippers off. A big lightning-bolt shot out at me and I jerked back as if I had been electrocuted.

Not that those pictures mean anything. Why such a big deal?

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

See, hear, smell, taste: feel?















Pokemon: should I stay, or should I go?





I barely know anything about Pokemon, except that here I am making gifs out of the characters. I made two, in fact, to try to prove/disprove something.





I recently discovered a trove of Pokemon knitting patterns on Etsy (and I'll give you the link right now: these are just the coolest things! - as well as a link to each individual pattern. Believe me when I say, inventing these was a work of knitting genius, and I never could have done it myself.)

LittleWhitsKnits on Etsy

I have no idea at this point if I am going to make any of these. Right now, I just want to look. I like Pikachu (who could NOT like Pikachu?), and that cat is kind of cool, but I have no idea if my grandkids would go for these. They're getting a little old for any kind of knitted thing.

To me, Pokemon means beat-up old cards that you kept in a book, and traded. Kind of like Beatles bubble-gum cards. Now it means something entirely different: walking around the park, not looking at anything or enjoying anything around you, just looking down, and occasionally falling down a hole or running facelong into a utility pole. Or another person, if you can figure out what THAT is.

But we still have these characters, though I have no idea of their relevance in that game where you walk around.

I was not quite clever enough to get my two gifs to run in order at the same speed. Jesus, people, what do you want?! I was born in 1954! To have gotten this far in technology is something of a miracle. These little slide shows are no small matter to a person who had to learn everything from the ground up. I am still on manual/mono/analogue on most things, including my brain.

So why don't we (Jesus it took all day to get these photos formatted so let's use them) just compare them side-by-side, or not side by side exactly.








Now this ain't bad. This is Meowth, a kind of Unicat or Caticorn. Either that, or he has a bee on his head. But I like his friendly expression. This one I might make.







I am not sure why this character (Bulbasaur)  has a giant clove of garlic on its back, but it does. I am sure the kids would love it, and I would too if I understood it in the least.








This is Eevee, one of the harder-to-translate Pokemons. The original character has a classic anime look with big shiny eyes and huge ears. The bottom one is more like a chihuahua wearing a banana bandanna: but hey, could I do any better? I am sure I could not. Some of these things don't translate as well to the medium of wool.







In the case of Jigglypuff, the opposite is true: the knitted version is far cuter and cuddlier. The original has kind of disturbing, push-button eyes and a thing on its forehead like Dairy Queen Soft Serve. Knitted, the robin's-egg blue eyes with their shiny highlight look downright innocent, if not friendly. 







This is a duck with attitude, and - to be honest - a lot more charm and character than the original. Psyduck even bears a resemblance to a living creature, which isn't true of all of them.







Such as this one. Poliwag is some sort of made-up/cobbled-together thing made from leftover parts from the Jurassic period. The knitted stuffy looks to me like a sweet little bluebird with innocent eyes. 







This guy looks just a little TOO innocent for Pokemon, like something you'd knit for a 3-month-old baby. A nursery toy. But for all I know, Squirtle IS something babies play with, probably on Baby's First iphone.

I wonder if anyone ever designed a Gamera knitting pattern? As in: the Atomic Turtle from Space. Might be in the Godzilla section somewhere.







Oh. . . God. . . how many more?? There must be 500 of these. This is a very nicely-adapted-for-knitting blue radish called Oddish. I've knitted veggies before, but not with eyes.







And this is the last one, I hope. I saved Pikachu 'til last because he is the only one I am even remotely familiar with. This was the one they originally asked for, but it was quite a while ago. And oh God, I just realized I am NOT finished yet, because. . .







. . . there's still Charmander! I'm not sure why I'm not as keen on this one, though the stuffy is perfectly all right and even cute. But I know I'm not going to knit this one, in spite of his jigglypuff-y toes. Maybe I knitted too many dinosaurs for Ryan when he was five. Or I'm just suffering from knitting fatigue.