Sunday, June 21, 2020

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





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

Margaret Gunning


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 


Part Three


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

Porgy


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

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

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

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

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

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

No shit.








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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

Hmmm.

And then.

The ground began to shake.

Porgy jumped out of his chair.





He ran to the toilet.

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

And:

Ker-floooooosh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, more pills.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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







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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t like it, Aggie.”

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

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

“Pink floral walls – “

“Cherry-coloured seat covers – “

“And it was cheap – “

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

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

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

“Me neither. They scare me.”






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

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

“Hey bitch, you like dark meat?”

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

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

“Looks like a half-nigger to me.”

“Oh my God, it’s half a nigger!”

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

“Fuck off, bitch.”

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

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

“Yeah. Yeah.”

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

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

“Awesome.”

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

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

“You tryin’ to Jew me down?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Fifty-five.”

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

“Fifty?”

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

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

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

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


Next . . .







Bus People Part One

Bus People Part Two

Bus People Part Three

Bus People Part Four

Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six

Bus People Part Seven

Bus People Part Eight

Bus People Part Nine

Bus People Part Ten

Bus People Part Eleven

Bus People Part Twelve


Saturday, June 20, 2020

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




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 Two

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


Aggie

Portman Hotel, Vancouver, B. C.
September 7, 2003

 

          Cylinders. The backpack was full of cylinders.  It was not full of junk.  Not not not.  And they’re not just any old cylinders, they’re Edison Blue Amberols, the best kind you can get.

     I have to find more Blue Amberols.  It’s just a habit, I can quit any time I want to, just a little quirk of mine, collecting.  I collect all sorts of stuff, birdcages made out of bamboo, salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like people, macramé handbags made back in 1973.  My room here is full of stuff,  the social worker doesn’t like it, she complains about it all the time and keeps telling me to clean it up, get rid of it all.  But it’s cool, there’s no rats or anything, it isn’t dirty, I keep order in the place.  Sometimes stuff falls down, there are loud crashes at night that disturb the neighbours, particularly Porgy who lives just under me and is a light sleeper.  But at least I know where everything is.

     I didn’t even know what a Blue Amberol was until I started going to flea markets about a year and a half ago.  I saw these ornate-looking canisters with flowery writing and ornamentation all over them – they were beautiful, and I just had to buy one of them, not even knowing what was inside.  It was only a buck and a half, what the hell, I’ll go without lunch tomorrow.  Maybe it’s snuff or something, I thought, something Victorian, or at least Edwardian, really old and maybe even valuable.

     But it wasn’t snuff at all.  It was a dusty old cylinder full of grooves.  Took me a minute to figure it out, that this was something like a record, or what came before records, the first medium for recorded sound.  I felt like I had seen one before, that I remembered it from somewhere.  I had Porgy go on the internet and do a search.  I don’t have a computer, I don’t know how Porgy can afford one, but he does and is obsessed with it.

     Anyway, he tells me that this isn’t just any sort of flea market hunk of junk  but a Blue Amberol, a particularly deluxe (back then) kind of cylinder recording popular in the early 20th century.  They weren’t the earliest recordings – those were made out of brown wax, with a few really early, rare ones made out of yellow paraffin, but even before that, they used tin foil.  No kidding – tin foil on a rotating cylinder, scratched with a needle that picked up vibrations.  The basic principles of sound recording.  Think of Thomas Edison at Menlo Park, bellowing into his new contraption:  “MA-RY HAD A LIT-TLE LAMB.  ITS FLEECE WAS WHITE AS SNOW. AND EV-ERY-WHERE THAT MA-RY WENT, THE LAMB WAS SURE TO GO.  HA, HA, HA.”  Cranking away at a variable speed, so the voice sounds freaky, all distorted like a giant’s voice, as well as tinny and really far away.





     When I was little, old records used to scare me.  I used to think. . . never mind what I used to think.  I had a hell of an imagination. It got me in trouble all the time, at school, but even worse at home.  My mother used to say that I made up stories, but to me, it was all completely real.  I thought the voices on those old 78 r. p. m. records had some sort of spooky power.  Like it was a kind of time capsule or something.  The singing ones were weird enough, they all had that muffled quality like the sound was coming out of a tiny little closet,  but the spoken word ones, they really freaked me out.  Used to make me run out of the room, but my Dad, he’d make me listen to them, listen to Caruso sounding like he was singing inside a cardboard box, or Dame Nellie Melba warbling away, or something called the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk – God, the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk scared the living shit out of me.  Couldn’t stand it, but my Dad made me stay and listen.

     It was his collection and he was convinced it was worth thousands, but now that I know something about early recordings, I can see that what he had was virtually worthless. Too many scratches, ticks and pops.

     Dr. Levy, the one they call “Zee”? He’s helping me deal with memories.  He’s good.  I mean, he’s good if you’re in pain or trouble, if you’re not, then forget about it, he can be a real hardass, it’s surprising how cold he can be.  But I’ve seen him deal with guys so far gone from AIDS, the shit was pouring out of them like lava, and he never bats an eyelash, just rolls up his sleeves and cleans up the crap like it was nothing.  I like Dr. Levy.

     But this guy on the bus today, this Szabó.  I know that’s his name, because people talk about him.  He has regular habits, I’ll say that about him.  I don’t know where he goes exactly, somewhere around the Sunshine Hotel area, the real asshole of Vancouver, Zeddyville they call it, ‘cause Dr. Zee cruises the place all the time, looking for broken people to mend.  It’s his habit.

     Mine’s Blue Amberols.  I’m glad this Szabó can’t look at me,  because I just hate it when people stare at my backpack, poke at it or ask what’s inside it.  I had fourteen Blue Amberols crammed in there today,  and never mind that I haven’t been able to afford a player yet, it’s only a matter of time.





     I guess listening to these things is going to scare the living shit out of me.  I take five hundred milligrams of Seroquel every day, Dr. Zee is trying to wean me off it, he says I might have been misdiagnosed, but I’m not so sure about that, I guess you could say I scare easily,  I was born minus a few layers of skin.  But this Szabó, he has no face, or that’s what they say about him anyway, even though he sings.  I’ve heard it, we all have.  He sings without words, of course:  “nggg, nggg, nggg” – it’s creepy, but you know something, he has a good voice, and a Hungarian accent, even with no words.  I wish he’d go see Dr. Zee, he’d be able to help him.  That guy could’ve helped Hitler get over his anger problem.  Maybe he could write things down on a piece of paper or a chalkboard, I don’t know.  Better than begging, which is what Szabó does for a living now that he can’t see to paint.  It’s sad.  I draw a disability cheque, it’s not much but it keeps me going, along with whatever stuff I can make or sell or trade, even though I’m not allowed to see my kids which sometimes makes me want to slit my fucking throat, just end this, end it now.  But Dr. Levy says don’t, Dr. Levy says don’t think that way, he says I’m valuable, he says there’s only one of me in all the world, that human beings are irreplaceable, so I guess I better trust his judgement which might be just a little bit clearer than mine.
     Anyway, Szabó gets on the bus this morning, it’s one of those stinky wet mornings when everything’s dripping, and he sits right down beside me like he’s done so many times before.  Like I say, regular habits.  And Szabó is clean, not like a lot of the people who take the bus every day; he doesn’t ever smell, he looks after himself. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. Pride.  He must have hair still, I mean, the back of his head must still be OK, just his face is missing,  no big deal, nothing serious, eh?  But then a guy across from us on the sideways seats says, “Hey, fucking freak, you on a pass from the sideshow? Gettin’ it on with the Schizo Lady?”  Street people have got radar, that’s how they can tell.

     “I beg your pardon, buddy, if you wanna see a freak, I think you should maybe try looking in the mirror.”  I’m usually not this bold, but poor Szabó can’t speak up.  Can’t defend himself, but he can hear everything.  It’s cruel.  This guy across from us, he looks like a bad bowel movement after too many blueberries, long and snaky and tattooed dark indigo all over every square inch of his skin.  He’s a living shit.  And he’s calling us freaks.  Jesus.  I keep trying to tell Dr. Levy what it’s like, but he just shakes his head.  Says people call him a Kike or a Yid or a Heeb sometimes, but it’s not the same, it’s not.  “Hey! Auschwitz!” one of them said to him once – and, yeah, he is pretty thin, looks kind of undernourished. How does that go?  “He hath a lean and hungry look.”





     So the driver, his name’s Bert Moffatt, I know him ‘cause I’ve seen him lots of times before on the Number 42, he says to me, “Lady, would you kindly can the comments, you’re being abusive here.”  I’m being abusive.  If a schizo lady raises her voice even a little bit, she’s being abusive, she’s out of control, while this big blue-tattoo shithead over here, he can hurl insults at anybody he likes.  Why? I don’t know, I guess he’s supposed to be sane.  Probably a pimp, probably a heroin addict or a child molester or sells his grandmother for a hit of crack, but he’s allowed to say whatever he likes.

     Fuck it, I’m going back to the flea market tomorrow and buy that cylinder player I saw, it was priced at $75.00 which for me is a bloody fortune, and it looked busted, the ones that work cost way more than that and are out of my price range, but you can usually bargain with these guys, and I have $50.00 scraped together already, it took me months and months of going without smokes, and then I found a ring in the washroom at the Tinseltown Theatre, pawned it and got nearly 30 bucks for it which goes to prove that there is such a thing as Providence.   Porgy keeps me going on smokes, enough to stave off the worst of my nicotene fits, he’s cool about things like that, even though he never goes out, he’s glued to the internet all the time, reading up on mucoid plaque and colonic irrigation.  What a nut.  But he’s still kind of sweet.





Zeddyville

     They call it Needle Park, they call it Pigeon Park, they call it Zeddyville because that’s where Dr. Zee hangs out:  and it’s not a park at all, but a vaguely triangular slab of cement crusted in pigeon shit, draped and clustered with people nobody seems to want around.

     It’s a loitering sort of place, an unplace.  A dislocation. Calling it a park is an impossible stretch, for no green thing could grow here.  Dr. Zoltán Levy barely notices it any more. He has a very fast walk, but it’s not so he can get away from the horrors of the neighborhood.  It’s so he can zip from the Portman to the Sunshine to the Waverley Hotel to get to his patients, the people who are usually on their last gasp.

     Dr. Zee doesn’t step on the bus very often, but it disgorges passengers right outside his home base, the Portman, an armoured truck of a place, fortified, barred, battened down like the good doctor’s own bleak, unsmiling face.  He makes himself available to people, people like Aggie Westerman the chronic schizophrenic, and Porgy Graham who has a strange  obsession with his bowels, and Dave the mutilator who has his lips multiply pierced and chained together, so he can’t even eat without pulling all the studs out.

     Things happened to Dr. Zee a long time ago, everybody knows that, or at least they suspect it, though no one has any specifics, and he isn’t talking.  He “doesn’t have time for a relationship”.  That’s what he says when he is interviewed, which happens quite a lot now, because slowly but surely, Dr. Zee is  starting to become famous.  At least, Vancouver famous, and maybe soon, Canadian famous,  then the world.  He is working on a book that is taking him forever to write because he really doesn’t want to finish it, it’s got too many secrets in it, and he hates to make himself so vulnerable.  Yet he loves the vulnerable, holds his hands out to them, thick-fingered veterinarian’s hands that look as if they could pull out calves and shoe horses.  He gets what it is to be this hurt, this lost, and to keep on going.

     People ask him, often, if the work is depressing.  What depresses him is the question:  the implication that he is dealing with the dregs of humanity, and not a whole lot of bruised little kids in adult bodies, people who were fucked by their fathers or whipped senseless by their mothers or told they were useless piles of shit so often they began to believe it, or told that they never should have been born at all.  It does a bit of damage when you hear it often enough; it can warp a life into a howling parody, heroin squirting up through the veins to blot out the self-loathing for just a little while, a protected, peaceful while, until it’s time to start hustling again. The abyss of the heroin state is welcome, oblivion being far more bearable than whatever is in second place.





     Tourists come to Zeddyville because the area is a little bit famous, too, kind of like Dr. Zee himself, and even the Governor-General came once, on a walkabout like the Queen Mother, her face in a carefully-composed mask of what she hoped was concern.  It doesn’t smell too good down here, it smells like rancid piss at the best of times, human vomit, pot fumes and other things you can’t identify.  It’s a  raw wound, the walls of the buildings splattered in gory-colored murals and gang graffiti impossible to decipher, the strange hieroglyphics of the street.  You have to keep your cool in Zeddyville, not show any fear.  It helps not to make eye contact, as you’ll stare into an abyss, a vacuum, an absence in the eyes of every stranger that passes by.

     “Spare change?  Spare change?  Have a nice day.  Spare change?  Spare change?  Have a nice day.”  It’s a sort of mantra for a lot of people, a way to make it through to the next day of spare change, spare change, have a nice day.  Of course some of the people here are crazy.  There used to be a place called Valleyview, but they closed it down except for the really hard-core cases, and shouldn’t these people be integrated into the community anyway and not just institutionalized and kept out of the mainstream, hidden away like they’re frightening or shameful?  Now the dirty little secret of mental illness is an open secret, like Szabó’s face when it was shot off and blown to bits all over the blackened walls of his torched studio.  The walking wounded don’t have their intestines hanging out all over the  outside of their abdomen, like in a war, but they do have spilled psyches, their pain hanging out, their loneliness hanging out, and it bothers people, the normies, the civilians. Their faces broadcast what they feel:  for God’s sake get away from me buddy before I see myself again, before I see what’s really wrong with me and why I cannot find a place in this world, before I see that this is where I really belong. 

     For no matter how good I look on the outside, I am part of this whole deal that creates a Zeddyville in the middle of a glittering, prosperous, showcase city on the coast of the best country in the world, then forces people to live in it when living is just a simple, bare act of endurance.
  
     We shove them here, we forklift, steamroll, corral, push, shove, cram, then clang the gate shut behind them and then say, what’s wrong with these people, why can’t they get it together, why can’t they make something of themselves?

     Get a job!

     Leave me alone!

    NO, I don’t have any spare change, and put that squeegee away because I am not interested in the fact that you haven’t had anything to eat for four days!  Jesus, these people.
     Dr. Zee sees, hears, senses it all the time, a palpable sense of dismissal and fear echoes all around him, the long antennae sticking out of his head pick it all up,  whether he wants to hear it or not, but he keeps on walking fast with his stethoscope going bounce, bounce, bounce on his chest.  He doesn’t really have one around his neck, it just appears that way, it’s his sense of purpose, so intense and focused, it’s almost a buzz.  He doesn’t carry a black bag either, but he will go where the trouble is, he will go where the pain is, and down here, there is more than enough to go around. 

Next. . . 




Bus People Part One

Bus People Part Two

Bus People Part Three

Bus People Part Four

Bus People Part Five


Bus People Part Six

Bus People Part Seven

Bus People Part Eight

Bus People Part Nine

Bus People Part Ten

Bus People Part Eleven

Bus People Part Twelve


Friday, June 19, 2020

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. 

Margaret Gunning


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.

Next. . .