CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

So here he was, in the hoosegow. The linoleum, a deep colour of old dry McIntosh toffee, shrieked and whined under hectic traffic. Screeches and banging doors as Vancouver's worst of the evening were bundled away. Walls and cages behind walls reared before M as he was ushered from the van, up the stairs, through the grey corridors.

Being booked at the police station was just like the great comic book bust at Kerrisdale School, many years earlier. The frog-marching on that occasion (and it's only fair to report that M's mother swore to the end of her long, busy, and honorable life that M had never, ever, in his life actually been frog-marched. Might have done him some good, she chuckled, a bit of frog-marching. Dumb boy) the frog-marching was to the office of Mr. Amarillo, the principal, the white haired terrifying ramrod who lived with his strap under the stairs. M feared the strap, and he thought he was gonna get it for having a desk full of comic books, forbidden, forbidden. It had started with cranky old Miss Dreckshin finding mess, mess, mess, in M's exercise book, and on M's desk top. What kind of mess? Ink, snot, unfocused thought? Likely just grime and evasion, the staples of M's career as a student at every age. Sent for his inability or refusal to see where the apostrophe must go to Principal Amarillo's's office, he looked down the length of the hall and saw a file of classmates that went back to the stairs, and didn't seem to end even there. Each of his classmates carried an armful of comic books. This was contraband, forbidden stuff. M wept from fear. Mr. Amarillo had beaten many pupils; the screams were heard, the red hands and wet red faces were seen. It was all known. He would beat several more. He was a scoutmaster. And he beat M. Five on each hand.

Now M stood in fear and consternation in front of the authority charged with keeping order in the city. A slight commotion behind him, the clank of a heavy glass door and a scuffle of hush-puppied feet produced the long, squirming figure of G. Astonishing. Where had G come from, how, why?

G was hustled to the desk where rude hands took his nice watch and his belt. He produced, on command, what was in his pocket - some coins and a small black notebook. The officer behind the desk reached across and removed from G's nose the dark brown hornrimmed glasses.

"Hey, I need my glasses." said G, reaching slowly across the desk toward the items taken from him. "Gimme my glasses." He said this not loudly. Immediately one cop grabbed him and held his arms behind him, while the cop on the other side heaved a punch into the middle of his stomach. G went right down like something empty and was pulled down the hall backwards, one cop at each arm, pushed into an elevator, disappeared.

M stood goggling. God, they were so fast, just waiting for him to be just a bit out of line...they shouldn't get away with that...true, G had a big mouth, a big fat mouth, a mouth as big as all outdoors, an ego the size and shape of a barrage balloon. But whomped like that, the mealsack, heelwhack hall departure...it couldn't be allowed. It couldn't be stopped. It was history, and M just stood gaping until nudged and turned toward an open door. "In there, sonny."

"Officer Aliel, he's a honey of a guy," said the constable, pushing M up to the desk. Aliel looked as if rats had borrowed his juices for the evening. And replaced them with rat juice. With his consent.

"Who are your friends, Mister?" was all he said. And he looked at something happening over M's left shoulder.

Something small and metal whacked M just under the bone of the cheek and in an instant filled his mouth with blood. M's body jumped. M swooned.

The world went far and near, went wild and wacky. Sounds of thunder and sirens. Wooga wooga alarms as in The Man From Uncle. "They hit M," friends were shrieking as they ran down vast hallways like frenzied mechanical mice. "Tell Mr. Amarillo! Tell Reverend Harry Lumm! Call the police!"

M, aswoon, found himself lost in the ice caves with Mandrake and Lothar. No sign of Narda. Or standing with Rip Kirby, spreadlegged, arms in a warding-off gesture, as a black panther springs from the limb of a tree. Great Scott! Four-footed company! No sign of Honey Dorian. The Mangler going heh heh heh behind the heavy drapes of the study.

God! The wolf! The clarinet - poor little Sasha! Where are the woodcutters?

M spent the night in a blue funk on a metal bunk thinking of anagrams of the towns of Ontario. G, a puzzle freak and whiz kid, brainy though thick, had always in his room a forty-inch stack of magazines: The Romanian Review, Baseball Illustrated, Sport, Ladies of Lapland, New Arts and Baseball of Japan, Women Comrades of Cuba, the Tamarack Review, Boink, a magazine of uncapitalized poetry, etc. He also subscribed to the journal, Etc. M collected the overflow of these mags and read them for the personal advertisements in the back pages. The Ontario puzzle was scrambled names of towns in Ontario. Chimnord was Richmond. Sandud was Dundas, and Agraina was Niagara, but M was stumped by Stiltslevit. Test your own wits.

G spent his night in the hoosegow in a salle privée, a broom closet. Woken at six in the morning, he was told he could make a telephone call, and given one of the dimes taken from his pocket the night before. G's phone call was to D, and it found that young worthy in the middle of personal negotiations with Byrna Brytellson, student poet and raven-haired meaty. "Brytelly-haired Byrna Raven," D had described her in a Bad Seed review of her book Kitsilano Felonies. Published by Fiddlesticks Press and Subtitled The Peckered Shade, it was a sonnet sequence detailing the ins and outs of her two years' love affair with the head of the UBC English Department. The ins and outs were not literally described but rather rendered as a narrative of an incubus and its maiden victim, with Bryna and her Professor in the main roles. A key sonnet was a hymn to her innocence, stolen by the ghostly, ghastly lothario:

And when to love our bodies down we laid
I found full well you were a peckered shade.

D had a high and penile regard for Byrna, but roused by the call from G, he left her promptly, darting out the bathroom window as was his frequent custom. Dawn found him at the White Lunch on Broadway. Thence, after a quick fuelling, he spread the alarm throughout West Point Grey, rallying for help a small army of odds and sods. M and G are drowning under a hail of billyclubs in the hoosegow, he informed the Players' Club and The Bad Seed. Kerry Feltham, Dave Robertson and Rupert Brooke-Buchanan, pen- names all, responded for the newspaper, Walter Shynkaryk, Fee McMannic and Arthur Maguay for the actors. Also Liam Chutney, Fred Clivus, Doris Chilcott, iron-jawed Trevor Howard imitator Roy Gooper, Pat Manzer, Di Filer, and a mobile unit from CBC-TV. We're back in the days when the regional mandate meant something.

Flying down Blanca, Fourth and Cornwall streets that evening were McPhrenzy's Hillman convertible, and antique Bentleys piloted by Liam Chutney or T. Gammelfelt. Les belles dames de Shaughnessy participated in their MG's. Tenny Rughead appeared in a three-wheeled Messerschmitt, so clapped out that he'd converted it to pedal propulsion. Ebbe Coutts came on a unicycle. They joined a growing crowd of curiosity-seekers and poets manqués converging on the Public Safety Building.

It was a wave of protest, fueled by popular rage and celebrity visits. Debbie Reynolds and Carleton Carpenter in summer dress, striped blazer, ice-cream pants, white shoes, ukulele, straw hats and picnic basket sang "and then he'd row row row," and suited the action to the word, grinning like hyenas. In the next boat, Gordon MacRae and Doris Day, likewise warbling their false little red cellophane hearts out. Stokely Carmichael spoke from the steps of the Vancouver Courthouse. Tom Hayden appeared. Linus Pauling waved a bottle of Vitamin C. Benjamin Spock hoarsely exhorted a group of mothers standing in a circle around him, and Leonard Nimoy spoke on behalf of those with longer ears. The Beatles donated the proceeds of their concert at Empire Stadium, though the Rolling Stones refused to do so. Jean Chrétien said Grace in one of the official languages.

A short-wave radio hummed and whistled, and submarines were dispatched from a secret dock in a remote fjord in Norway. They slid in single file down the inlet toward the North Sea. Swimming with consummate ease and power just ahead of them was Submariner. Meanwhile half a world away, Stukas dove on a Jap warship. Stuka Stuka Stuka Stuka Stuka, they shrieked. Henry Fonda, James Cagney and Alec Guinness watched from the bridge of an Allied battlewagon. It was an international joint task force and one of the three was a Canadian. One hopes it was Henry Fonda.

A squad of Australian bathtubbers, delirious from thirsty weeks in the mid-Pacific, missed Nanaimo by miles, crossed the strait at full throttle and roared through the third floor of the jailhouse, shredding doorjambs with the custom propellers on their six-horse engines, doctored to the legal limit (and beyond it) for the Big Race. The Harvard University swim team, the "Crimson Tide," led by its captain, the doomed breast-stroker Teddy Kennedy, surged through in the wake of the Australians. Crimson rubber caps, prominent ears. Attack helicopters from Cold Lake and Comox thrashed overhead.

Across the inlet Malcolm Lowry roared with joy and held up an empty glass. "I'll have another gimlet," he smiled at Marjorie. "Assuming you were able to buy gin in this God-choked presbytery of a city."

The atom-powered sub Poseidon, with the speed of fiction, passed Ferguson Point and slid into Coal Harbour near HMCS Discovery. The craven, complicitous Royal Canadian Navy yawned at its radarscopes. "At your service, Submariner," they muttered. ThePoseidon surfaced beside the Rowing Club, and its first salvo hurled an 80mm. artillery shell from one deck gun, and, from the other, Prince Namor himself, sizzling through the aether, a human cannonball. "Circus must be in town," observed Wystan Bucket from a vantage point on Pender Street, as he watched Namor hurtle through the roof of the Public Safety Building.

More shelling from offshore - poum, poum, poum. Smell of cordite drifting over Point Grey. The marines hit the beach at Spanish Banks. Richard Widmark with his helmet strap undone waved ashore his platoon. John Agar was there and, yes! a glimpse of Montgomery Clift, which meant that old blue eyes, playing Maggio in From Here to Eternity, was likely to be on hand. With Burt Lancaster, and you know he did that movie just for the fun of wearing the brushcut, lying on the beach somewhere, pseudocoupled to Deborah Kerr. In that black bathing suit, a décolletage twenty-five years ahead of its time...but no time for that now. Eddie Albert and Jack Palance led the attack and there was wiggly eyebrows, John Saxon, as the Strange One. Which meant that Robert Redford might be there, years before Barefoot in the Park with Henry Fonda's poopsy daughter. Redford then a stage actor, and Demi Moore just a piddly little gleam in someone's eye. John Wayne stood on a concrete picnic table, his eyes wide and bugged in that insane look, and yelled "Get your men up th' beach, Mr. Dunphy," sounding (as always) as if he had terrible sinus trouble. Just offshore, Humphrey Bogart, on the deck of his yacht the Santana, gazed ashore from under a baseball cap. He wore khaki. James Dean, wearing black, sent regrets.

Most marvelous of all was Ernest Hemingway, done up like Bogart in khakis and navy-blue baseball cap, debarking from the Pilar at Kitsilano beach, wearing a hundred pounds of expensive sidearms but taking no heed of the screech of artillery or the bang and rattle of small arms fire. Why should he? He still had two years to live. From an old-fashioned leather briefcase he pulled a battered, well-used, and much-oiled prose style. Our earnest aspirant G, said Arthur Maguey, speeding along Cornwall in the back seat of McMannic's Hillman convertible, thinks he's entitled to have that when the old man dies. M wanted that snazzy old briefcase, never mind the prose style.

Led by the Justice League of America, the Silver Surfer, or the Fantastic Four, (M and G later, comparing notes, couldn't agree which, and D remembered only the rabble he'd himself collected), the marines stormed across town to the jail and burst it apart, routing the police and grilling Officer Aliel and Hanging Judge Les Pewley on pointed sticks over a bonfire. As M and G scurried out of the building, a lunatic strode purposefully into it, a man with a cap pulled down over his eyes and a balloon floating over his shoulder, attached to his arm. "Here's the cop shop," he cried over and over. "Here's the cop shop."

"Hey!" cried G, looking back at the odd fellow. "That has to be a helium balloon, which would be an anachronism."

"Shut up and just keep walking; don't look back," advised his comrade.

D found his jailbird friends in the middle of Main Street. Dazed and giggling, they briefly hugged. A, watching from a little distance away on the sidewalk with her friend Feather, snorted and muttered something that gave Feather the giggles. Outside the Jade Garden restaurant, Peaches Dobell smoked from a long cigarette holder and smilingly, sneeringly observed to companions Mike Valpy and Murray Farr, "My heart leaps down when I behold these guys, a bunch of pansies that can only get out of a tight spot by calling in the Americans."

But there was one serious casualty in the affair. A man just a few years older than D or M lay on the sidewalk, shoulders tucked awkwardly against a hydrant. His mouth was half open, as if he might have been in the midst of singing "Friendly Persuasion," his thin gold-and-black-striped tie slung across the chest of his tan suit in a messy way. The young man too had been slung or cast, looked like that, against a fire hydrant. The face was peaceful, smooth and shining, as if he had Taken Christ. Far too seriously.

To A, now quietly and covertly peering over the shoulders of G and D, the man looked surely and exactly to be Pat Boone.