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 . . .
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 . . .
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 . . .
