CHAPTER ONE

The first thing you need to keep in mind if you're going to write a novel about the 1950s, which began in 1951 and ended in 1963, is the multitude of stuff that hasn't happened yet. I mean no Sixties (1963-73), no Seventies (1974-79), no Eighties (1980-1992). We're sitting in the Georgia, and as far as the mini goes we're tabulae rasae. John, Paul, George are in Hamburg but we're in the cellar in Vancouver - and what is Vancouver? An overgrown small town, more wood than brick, more brick than concrete, the laws are so blue we can't be sitting there on a Sunday, and unless we've found a female over twenty-one to get us into the Ladies & Escorts side of the beer parlour, to meet other females, why, we're sitting in a space that's strictly men only. The expectation is frontier town, words like rugged and twofisted float, definitely not MCP or MADD. Mind you we're college eggheads, and other such are present, but some of the patrons are loggers or off the boats or psychos from Saskatchewan seeking a new love or an old grudge to be settled by punching some egghead and they're getting drunk fast.Though, being Canadian, even this rough trade has training in a certain mild-mannered benevolence, but only up to a point. You have to remember that they're not packing guns, and, seeing it's the Georgia, probably not carrying knives, either. But they're not without prejudices and they're paying taxes to keep us in school doing fuck all while they're bustin' their butts - and tonight they're getting drunk. We want to joke intelligently and sing our silly songs of sophomore humour so we have to negotiate the terrain, it isn't goddammit ours alone. Sooner or later some chump will ask to join our table and he won't be taking no for an answer. Sooner or later he'll want to argue in a language game we're not playing. The table is crowded with glasses full of beer because one can only order up to two glasses at a time so naturally everyone does order two at a time. Then there are splashes of colour: the glasses of tomato juice. Sooner or later, but for sure, someone is going to knock one of these glasses over. It's 1961, two more years to go till the sixties begin, no-one has stopped smoking so the air is blue with fumes. We're smoking Chesterfields, Black Cats, Buckinghams, Cameos, Craven As, Players, Export As, Marlboros, you name it if you're fifty or over: never without a lit one. And what are we saying?

Before we say what we think we were saying we have to remember that it sounded utterly different then than those same words and phrases do today because today they willy nilly refer to major public or minor personal events of the past thirty-five years. Listening to us talk, talking back then, is like listening to a foreign tongue. It's akin to Pound's difficulty writing in American slang from the 1890s and the 1900s, in the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s - moving further and further away from its currency. After all, we're persons, and that's strictly an architectural affair. You live there a while and then the big iron ball comes through the wall and you move to someplace else. There I sit, never having smoked a joint. Haven't dropped acid. Jerussi hasn't invented the pill yet. I haven't met Jack Spicer. I haven't raised a kid. I eat without forethought. In fact I only eat when the person or persons I'm with eat; in that way I'm completely undifferentiated, a member of the herd. They shut down the beer parlour for an hour at 6:30, the other people at the table either go home for dinner or to Hudson's Bay Company where there's a snack bar or somesuch, eat, return for the evening's stint. If someone takes me home for dinner, I go, I maybe eat. Or I go to HBC and do eat. I have no notion what I'm eating. Eat, someone says. You'll be able to drink longer and not get so drunk. So I eat.

I never noticed stuff like that. There's a whole lot of stuff I simply don't notice, back then. I don't monitor my own behavior very closely. Well, I haven't had psychotherapy yet, I know I have problems of that order but I believe they make me who I am, and although it's evident even to me at times that that's a pretty desperate configuration of drives and impulses, I'm witlessly attached to my momentum and its baffles, wouldn't trade 'em whatever the offer or the cost. And ghoddamit I'm right, McGee.

So what is it I do notice? What you say, how you say it, how your face looks as you say it, things you do with your body because of what gets said. The power of the spoken word. And how our speech rings the bells of reference.... Movies, books, people we know, want to know more of. And wordplay, slips, puns, or a word I can only guess the meaning of from its context. Sex - still a bigger mystery than the irreducible-minimum mystery it must ever be.

Peeking into the Ladies and Escorts side at the beauty and allure gathered there, boozing and smoking just like us guys. The people I know like movies where the hero triumphs over unbearable obstacles then fucks up and is killed. I don't know about you but I expect to die shortly. And don't let's forget we all expect to die shortly, atomized by The Bomb. The Cuban Crisis hasn't occurred to demonstrate that maybe It won't get detonated. No, the hourglass cloud has already been inverted, the sand is trickling quickly down. Drink, get drunk, have fun, get laid. Yet that's oddly only a partial imperative. Meanwhile, also, read books, wrangle over ideas, obey many of the laws we could probably get away with breaking, beads on a cultural string drawn pointlessly on. We worry about grades, finals, though I don't recall much worry about careers. I'm already an elementary school teacher anyway; somehow I had it together enough (definitely an anachronism there) to cause that to happen. At the same time I expect to be famous. I 'm marking time till that happens. Actually I'm driven, writing through my hangovers, bad stuff about characters with fashionable hangups, weird poems about people turned to stone on the beach.

I would really like to do a lot of fucking. Being young can't have changed in some respects. So in that way, too, no longer young, it's impossible to inhabit that person sitting across the table with you. That I gets hardons two, three times a day, without apparent provocation. No wonder the gals look so glamorous. You college fellas are attractive too, though I hasten to add, etc. Some of you are thoroughly middleclass in training and I like your assurance, you expect, expect to be bright, intellectual, well-read. We give the middleclass a lot of flak, squares, dullsville, all that, no doubt this general dismissal can find many points of application, but the middleclass, being such, made you the way you are and I think it's wonderful. From time to time, as a college intellectual who's loads of fun, I get to see inside your houses (your parents' houses) and I like it there. It's tedium to you but exotic to me. And you're all exotic, just about everyone in this pub is exotic, simply by my being here with you - and simply by my being drunk.

But too, simply by your being Canadian. Because I'm British. And that's one more fact to remember, the aura of being British in Vancouver back then. Power. British voices on CBC. Brits permeating the theatre. You're either for 'em or agin 'em. The guy who has joined us at our table either wants to tell me about how great the Limeys were to him in the war, or he wants to smash my face in for being one of the oppressor race. Or he wants to get my goat until I smash him. Pick up a bottle and crack it over his thick skull. Then the shit will hit. Cece the beerslinger won't be standin' for any of that. Shit, Cece won't be puttin' up with anyone standing for anything: you have to drink sitting down. No singing, either - though we do.

So - Brits, the English in particular - voices modulated but loud, speaking out - saying how it should be done. Showing the rest the reasonable way. And then the Ozzies. Escaping my fellowcunts, I seek out the Ozzies. There's a hotel, the Gifford, in the West End, where a couple of lads from Melbin take me to dinner one day when the pub shuts. Everyone in the below-street-level restaurant must be Ozzie. Everyone knows everyone. They've met in a score of cities strung round the world. Here, they meet again. A bread fight commences - they know how to have fun. The women are just like guys. Easy come, easy go. Now that I've seen southern California, Ozzies don't strike me as so distinctive. But they were the first people I met who lived in their bodies that way.

But there's a plot to be planted here, if a novel's to be written. Three of us are walking a long way to our various basement suites, having no car, and a good thing too! The only people I know with cars are my sister, who lives almost in Burnaby, Eduardo Viejo Pink-Meadow Pink, the Anglo-Portuguese-Canadian strawberry farmer from Saanich, who might have been along tonight in his classic 1934 Oldsmobile, but isn't, was probably singing something dainty, even ecclesiastical, in some well-connected mansion on the Endowment Lands, Fee McMannic, who drives a Morris Minor or a VW Bug, some vehicle, anyway, that causes his knees to touch his chin when he's behind the wheel, and who we understand on this particular evening was porking Iowa's finest, the sexually perspicacious Mary-Beth "Thanks for the Mammaries" Hansen, and last but not least, driving a sobriquet bestowed upon him by Sally Hillcoot, Tommy Pavlow, aka Barfly, aka Tommy P, so that one might, in referring to the exploits of the drunkest drunk at the latest Hillcoot party, not get him confused with Tommy Deadwood, the Shakespearean, who, once Pavlow had been taken into the circle, became known as Tommy D. Tommy P had been known to D (second in the alphabet that constitutes our four protagonists) years back in Gopher Hole, Alberta, and D was the only one of our trio who was likely to wonder where Tommy was at this moment, or to come up with guesses as accurate as (a) boosting booze from (1) a neighbor (2) the LCB, (b) reading Voyage au bout de nuit while sucking on a sixpack and mistaking a streetlight for the moon, (c) driving said car with an impressive deliberation into a concrete lamp standard.

We three - this three, G, D and M - are more than halfway across the Burrard Street Bridge. D was looking out to sea, and to see the few lights still burning behind the drawn drapes of the West End's tallest building, the Hotel Sylvia, just now heaving into view. Heaving, and having so heaved, had hoved. And D was turning back to speak to his companions, G (Delsing, the poet) and M. When there was the most almighty white flash.

Yes, that's what they behold, that's it, it is the most Gigantic White Flash. G sees it first, because of his exceptional peripheral vision. Then D and M together see it too. It lights up the whole sky north behind the mountains. It lights up the West End - not a collection of high-rises at this time, remember. Three, four-story wooden houses. But they don't burst into flame, although that glare looks hot. White hot.

"¡Shock wave next!" G says. (G has spent time in Mexico).

"It's pleasant to recall that there's nothing one can do about it," M puts in. "It's neither seemly nor comfortable to curl up into a tight ball on a city sidewalk at midnight."

D says nothing. He's having deja vu. Trying to recall what comes next.But nothing more occurs. So they walk on. They pass by Sick's Brewery. And on its blank walls they see some letters-as though burned into the stone. Hieroglyphs. D has a pen, G has a wrinkled envelope. And says so.

"¡Hey you guys, I have a wrinkled antelope we can use!" he tells them. They copy down the symbols. M clicks his tongue impatiently.

"It probably says something like 'You only have 24 hours to live'."

They put away the envelope, stumble ahead. They discuss this strange

event, strange twin events, no doubt. They say pretty much what anyone would say, within the constraints of what we know of these three-precious little, from a reader's point of view. They allow as how it might have been a group hallucination - but M takes out the envelope and there's the hieroglyphs.

"¡Careful with that wrinkled antelope, M!" G chortles. He always clowns when terrified.

They point out to each other that there is no necessary connection between flash and wall-writing.

By now they have reached the region where the likes of them get to live. They're wired but tired, so say g'night in front of the basement suite of G. His gangly form, much like Buddy Holly's, vanishes between the camellia bushes.

"Astounding," comments M, "How calmly he took that."

"I expect we're in shock," D offers cheerfully.

"Did it occur to you that we might all be dead?"

A pause. Then, "If so, it's distressingly like being alive... I've got to piss," and D whips it out and pisses on the wall of G's landlord.

"This could just be the illusion of pissing," M says, joining him.