CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I thought he was dead already, A mused, delighted by M's prose, though not surprised by it. He was like that, always had been. Ready to erupt out of his own dark and understanding recesses into a gabble of enthusiastic anarchy. No wonder he gets arrested. In some ways he was worse than G, who at least proclaimed his challenges to authority in pointed aphorisms which baffled his audiences long enough for him to get away. M was always caught mid-sentence, still raving. G made himself feared, hated and adored by others, depending on how one read his histrionics. Anyone with any intelligence at all doubted all postures, every persona, A thought, as she certainly did, having been forewarned early by G's friend Carrots, who, grinning but serious, said, "Never trust a man who says he loves you for your mind; he only wants to fuck you in the ear." Long after Carrots was dead, A thought of him nearly every time she looked at the Simone Martini Annunciation that hung at the foot of the stairs in the house she shared with G.

Carrots was A's favorite of G's friends back then. He'd been a cook in the air force when G was serving out his self-imposed penance there for failing first year university and losing his girlfriend and his job within the space of a few months. Carrots, white-faced and skinny, had arrived in Vancouver after his stint in the air force was over, caught up in a fascination with G that looked like love to A. He was a coiled spring whose white intensity shone through his pale red hair and made his freckles luminous. He moved with precision so that every gesture was a ritual act, a thing of beauty, whether he was flipping pancakes or fried eggs, snapping a cap off a bottle of beer or unfurling, in one swift gesture, as if he were performing a magical trick, a bottle of West Coast Berry Cup, the cheap red wine he drank and offered to others. He was always engaged in a ballet he had choreographed himself. A was grateful to him for his reminder that not all persuasion was friendly. He seemed to be perpetually astonished by people and endlessly interested in them. He invented real people and told their stories for them and to them. That was another thing A loved about Carrots. All the persons in his life were mythic - Jack the Bear and Harry the Hummer and G and Ebbe, whose place Carrots lived in down at the waterfront. Like Troilus, he looked at the peopled earth from the seventh sphere and laughed, but without bitterness - with affection and wonder. A was never sure whether it was Carrots or G who had taught the other most about the fictional character of our lives.

Carrots lived on the edge of the water, on the edge of the Hits cabal, and drew wonderful cartoons about them, reinventing them as characters from a wild west show. A remembers one that lined up Ebbe and Furd and G on one side as the bad guys and Frunk on the other as a sheriff with a star on his shirt. Frunk was the straightest of the lot of them in those days, and the most unrelentingly intellectual. Somehow he had managed to grow up without the need or ability to temper his intelligence by brutalizing it. The North American practice of intellectual self-mutilation-blunting, disavowing, deprecating - was not part of Frunk's psychological armory. He paid for it in other ways - as in the cartoon by Carrots. "F -f-f-fuck off, you guys," he is saying, pistols in hand, pointed at the three lackadaisical unshaven rowdies he confronts. Ebbe is a mean twisted little critter - another version of Jesse James; Furd is big and wide with a squint and a sticking plaster; G stands tall and lanky, a cigarette dangling from his scornful grin. A laughed and laughed when she first saw it. Carrots had them down cold.

M was right, though. G's mouth would always get him into trouble. He could not forego a witty quip when one offered itself to him. Like the time at one of Ebbe's parties when he was yakking it up in competition with Ed Dorn and Robert Creeley, for whom he had so much respect he'd never visited him. Trying to impress them, he'd merely angered Creeley. A felt the threat in the air, but didn't know where it came from. Mostly, A was bored at Ebbe's parties. There was hardly any furniture, so everyone sat around at the edge of the big room overlooking the water and smoked dope in the candlelight. Ebbe never paid his electrical bills, so it was almost always candlelight at night. A remembered only one occasion when it wasn't, but in the middle of the party the lights had gone out suddenly, and no one knew whether it was the result of a thunderstorm or of Ebbe's failure to pay the electrical bill. A, in love, had thought of the possibility of a romantic interlude in the dark, but G had seized the opportunity to begin wisecracking like a yahoo. A was a student of literature, so she knew about foreshadowing, and, accurately sensing that this was a promise of things to come, decided that it might not, after all, be a smart idea to marry G, and suggested as much to him. She had not been prepared for G's reaction, which was to attempt to put his fist through a burlap-covered wall. He had been unaware that the burlap covered concrete. So had A. She relented when she wakened the next morning to see his broken hand lying on the pillow beside her head, swollen to the size of a football.

At this party of Ebbe's, spring, 1963, the candlelight looked romantic, but, as usual, everyone was sitting there stoned, waiting for something to happen. Usually, it didn't. They hadn't grasped the fact, A thought, that if you wanted something to happen, one alternative was to make it happen. They were a television audience without a television set. Or maybe something was happening for them. A didn't know since she didn't like marijuana. She turned away when Ham Berry asked her to smell a big bony chunk of stuff lying on the floor in front of the fireplace and giggled sillily when she wrinkled her nose in recognition and bewilderment. "It's Sperm Whale bone," he said-just a boy from St. George's Academy playing a prank on a girl, two years before he shot himself in the head. They were so young.

But then Creeley roared with booze and amphetamine-fed rage and threw himself on G, hammering and pounding - a literary lion gone berserk, his wrath far in excess of anything G could have deserved, though, remembering her own earlier disenchantment, A understood Creeley's refusal of G's imitation comic-strip character. She saw G straighten with shock and deliberate for a brief moment about whether or not to deck his clay-footed would-be killer. After Ed Dorn and some others had peeled Creeley away from G, A took him outside and wrapped him in cooing condolence. This was no time for judgment.

The next day, the story was all over town that Creeley had tried to kill G. They'd found out when they went down to visit Carrots at Ebbe's place. A sat on the mattress staring idly at the evidence of a recent Pete Oxhead visit - a row of cigarette ends turned upside down and left to burn out - and wondered why there hadn't yet been a fire at the Pender Street house. Carrots popped up, grinning, from behind the kitchen counter, whipping a bottle of Berry Cup from its brown paper wrapping, and told G of the rumour. A heard G, feigning nonchalance, tell Carrots that Creeley was just drunk - he'd even tried to punch Dorn out earlier. The light fell away as G and Carrots talked, two shadows against the window. Behind them, the lights came out across the water from the downtown. The Shell sign floated above the barge anchored in the harbour just as it had for Malcolm Lowry. Five years later, G and A would go to a poetry reading in Detroit and Creeley would smirk with his eyes dropped in shame for the memory. Pawing at the floor with an apologetic foot, he would look up at A who would feel her face refuse the absolution he was asking for.

But here now, in the story, back on Main Street A has turned to Feather and said, "Sparrow Matbooze will have a field day with this one." Feather burst into tears, which A thought was a strange response until some time later when Feather told her she didn't even know who Sparrow Matbooze was. Feather felt insecure, and like they say now, marginalized around all these literary folk, despite the fact that all the men wanted either to fuck her or protect her - probably both - though in the condition Feather was in, A couldn't see how they could do both. Feather McFiddle-Dee-Dee, A called her, and so did the rest of them. She would let some of them lie with her, but the abortion was still too recent and traumatic an event for her to take on anything serious. She was funny; she drank until she vomited her teeth down the toilet and, swaddled in heavy scarves, had to make her way down back alleys to the dentist to have them replaced, the plumber having failed in his efforts to retrieve them. Wrapped like an Arab in her bedspread burnoose, she drank with Carrots and Ebbe, who were frequent callers.

"Trust M to bring in the marines, " A said, "and a host of Hollywood actors and comic strip characters besides."

But A had a sense of M's serious side, his solidity and his elegance, which she didn't want violated by his affiliation with G's hyperbolic presentation of multiple personae. M was Comforter, source of solace in a wacky world. She liked him just to be there, a big gentle person. If he went crazy, things would come undone. Once, she'd heard him crooning into his wife's black despair in the middle of a summer night on the edge of the water at Yellow Point and had felt justified in her sense of him as protector against the darkness, although she knew that was an estimation of him, a burden he'd probably just as soon not bear. You could tell that by the way he erupted when he unplugged the restraint and let all that exuberance run. You could tell that by the way he drove a car.

But it was certainly true that restraint went out the window that summer the American poets came to town. It was as if all that waiting around the edges of Ebbe's room had finally paid off. M, of course, had turned it into metaphor, but A doesn't believe metaphor is worth a damn unless it is grounded in the actual. "Unremittingly referential," G calls her when she attempts to sort out the names behind the names in the story they are writing now about the stories they were making up then.

"But I have to have it come out of my bottom nature," A wails, "and I can't unless it has some ground in theirs, in it ."

So she reads M's writing as metaphor grounded in the events of that summer. "How are we going to get out of this jam we're in?" she hears them ask, but she has to know what the jam is, first. Her friend Rob always said that A began her stories "Shortly before I was born...", but it's probably worse than that. All around the edges, there are other stories going on, and like their friend, Greg, she wants to paint every leaf on the tree and knows she never can. They are both dead, these beloveds, but their words are part of A' s world forever. They become their words and sound in A's heart and mind, resonating there, making rings in the tree of time, tree of the world, torn out when time ends, according to the Norsemen who are A's ancestors, so how can she believe in anything uprooted? Anchored in words, she is anchored in the world, but it's a speaking world for her, first, not a writing world first, as it is for G. "We have come to bring you metaphors for your poetry." Old Georgie Yeats knew what to do to hang onto her man, but A can't do it. It's cheating, A thinks; uprooting is cheating. It's ungrateful. Perhaps because she's been uprooted so many times. By her mother, by G, moving from place to place. No refuge for him save in words written, a place on the page. For A, there's a place on the page when it's anchored to speech, to the real words that real people speak when they make up the world. Writing is the effluvia that remakes the world when it's read and anchored by its readers to the world again. No ideas but in things. Writing is deepest solace.

It was a summer of writing, that summer, or of waiting for there to be writing. Vancouver was invaded by the American poets, but it was a summer of other things as well. It was the summer A's life began again, moved in a new and bewildering direction. Cultural holocaust, another uprooting. Soft springtime rain, people tumbling about in the warm rainy nights. Two years later, Jack Spicer drunkenly stumbling through a bed of daffodils carefully laid out by Japanese gardeners-no tiptoer through the tulips, that one. Abominably dressed in a white sports jacket flecked in black, leftover stylelessness of the fifties, worn in honour of a dinner at the university faculty club whose flower beds he was destroying. Strange ugly Persephone, going to hell in his own way. This was only a prelude of things to come later that summer. Alien Ginseng in white robes, rushing about the Chalkfists' garden, looking for his hungry fix, a boy, any boy, a jar of KY jelly in his hand. "I have seen the best 'hinds of my generation."

But they were having fun, these poets, being lionized and listened to by hundreds of us, all sitting at their very clay-ey feet, eyes open, ears cocked. Gaston Helios turning a UBC auditorium into an open field in which he was dancing, dancing, dancing to the sound of his own song. My mother was a falconress. Naomi with a long black shoe. The first time A heard "Kaddish" on tape, it shattered her. And Chelsea Octopod, giant man in workman's boots, Colossus of America, striding across three countries and up the aisle of a Vancouver classroom, towering above everything, fell in love with a teenager. All the young men were in love with Bobbie Creeley - beautiful, fierce, disdainful, Helen, high on her tower, impossible love of the prince of these islands. All the young poets fell in love with Robert Creeley, quoted him all over town. Oh it was high romance. We had never seen anything like them before. Mythical bestiary come to life in Vancouver, shining on their pedestals - words, words, words, all over everything-patches, illuminations, branded into consciousness.

Furd and Polly had a party. Their little three room apartment was jammed with the poets, thronged with adoring fans. Furd's home-made brew supplied most of the refreshment at that Dionysian frenzy - that summer equivalent of a rock concert in a very small space. The anonymity of astonishment enacted itself there. A, starting down the hall, saw Octopod lift a long, gangly boy-girl Polly in his arms and carry her horizontally over the heads of the feeding frenzy - we all consume our gods - and launch her onto the pile of figures heaped on Furd and Polly's marriage bed. Confronted by this display of droit de seigneur, Furd said to the room at large, "My wife, my wife," a small protesting voice drowned in a sea of noise. Polly smiled her benign indulgent smile. She never lost her head, never would - looked on tempests and was not shaken. Built houses, raised her children, taught her classes, provided lasagna for the visiting poets, wrote her articles, swam in the lakes, travelled with Furd all over the world, kept a purse full of medications for whatever ailment she confronted. Polly and M were both like that - still points in a churning world. A could not sustain herself in the midst of it. What is this animal, she thought, all arms and legs , entangled limbs and steamy, laughing bug-eyed faces? The animal forced her down the hall, ejected her into the room where Hannah Chalkfist, from the bed said, "Poor girl, are we frightening you?" A disappeared. Outside in, inside out. G found her some time later, wandering on the street, feeling the air in front of her face, speaking in tongues. She had no idea of who she was or what had happened in that chasm of consciousness. The light foot hears you and the darkness comes. What did you do to us that summer? What did we let ourselves in for? It was an enchantment. The lovely enchantment of words. Did you save or damn us? You American poets, bent on your own salvation, damnation. Explosion of light - bodies and words.

Eventually, the police came and broke the party up. The neighbours were complaining, they said. "What neighbours?" asked Furd, who was worrying about his illegal home brew. They lived above a print shop, empty at this time of night. "Us," said the police, whose shop was around the corner. The hangover lasted for decades. Did we ever recover? No, thank God. Yes, thank God. That was the real writing on the wall. They marked us as their own. We had to write our way out of that rapture we'd been caught up in, not to be overcome by it. D moved to California and became friends with Helios, became a writer. Furd and Polly moved to Albuquerque to study with Creeley. M failed Russian 200 nine times, lost in another language until he finally found his own by becoming an actor, finds it now in crazy rhapsody, this writing. G, caught in the rapture, wrote himself into being. A lost her language, lost it again, years later in a Jack Spicer poem, opened her mouth in a seminar, lapsed into Babel-gabble and silence, wrote herself out of silence in G's office, listening in the middle of the night to the language whispering in the room all around her, talking amongst itself, was healed by another one who had been wounded by it - Robin, playing tape of man singing in ancient Greek: "Of arms and the man, I sing," he sang, playing tape of Dada babble gabble that, with extraordinary effort, resolves itself into a single word: "Ich." Isn't that where we all begin? That separation? The creaky sound of one's own voice, as Bobbie Creeley Louise Hawkins has it? Furd breathing his name with a sigh: "Wah, wah," trumpet wailing, baby bleating, crying in the dark following the blossoming of the light we are born into. Later, when Sheila Watson sang her inside out, A would begin to write for the first time. But this isn't A's story. It is their story - story of the little joy-boys still dancing, dancing, over the hills and far away into their battle, their rapture, with words.