CHAPTER TWO

In those days G was always looking for the writing on the wall, and he usually connected it with death. He was in his twenties somehow and expected to die when he was twenty nine, dramatically and without pain. Like a movie or the Old Testament, at a distance, completely alone, his friends or the people who went to classes with him telling each other later that they should have been at his bedside, but now here he was at the side of the bed, trying to get up, a hangover without romance holding him down. But he does get up, finds a Black Cat cigarette on the backless wooden chair beside the bed, sits, white bare feet on the cakey jeans on the dirty brown carpet on the basement concrete floor. It is the late 1950s, Jack Kerouac is as glamorous as his name, ACK ACK ACK the reverberation through G's head. Oh to be in Vancouver, so much more romantic than to be in the air force on the prairie, end of the runway, aluminum jets taking off in groups of four all night and he not hearing a thing till his Newfy roommate wakes him to get to the mess in the last minute before it is closed, get coffee, tastes like the metal it is kept in, eat some bananas, good for the ulcer, 19 years old has an ulcer. More romantic than working in the "plant" in Lawrence in the Okanagan no one has ever heard of, deep winter, counting bolts with frozen fingers. Always wants to be on the road, and Greyhounds it from time to time, smoking in the back seats, holding the newspaper upside down because that is funny, sucking on the rye whiskey or if you are really unlucky some underage Okanagan Indian guy, has some lemon gin, doesn't matter. And he never did find out whether you are supposed to mix something with lemon gin, or is the lemon something mixed already. Lemon Hart is so pretty, and the lemon gin is sweet, but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

G was trying to get D to eat last night. Eat, eat, he said, you might wish you had later on. What? Like midnight, says D, no like say 1985, says G. We won't live that long says D, and they both agree. What are you going to do, get shot, die in a fiery crash, puke blood and die at a hundred and eight pounds? I am going to be shot by a jealous common law husband, says M. Then he doesn't say anything in any language other than Horse for the next hour. D goes to the can and doesn't come back, we suspect him of having slipped into the Ladies and Escorts side, give him another fifteen minutes. Maybe some guy in a plaid shirt banged his head against the porcelain in the can. I will go and see, volunteers M, and off he goes. This is eleven p.m., you are in your twenties but you have to have a leak every half hour. But you are drinking a glass every fifteen minutes. Building tissue. Building a past to look back at fondly, not a narcotic in sight. Beer was still pretty romantic.

Right after the air force he had taken Trombone into the Devonshire and bought him a Zombie, something he had learned from the nurses in Quebec. Now that too was effete. As far as G was concerned these college types were effete, especially the ones who had ridden in any car driven by someone in a fraternity, especially all the Christophers and Anthonys from England. He was in love with a Wendy from England, but he had no idea where she was. She had never been in the Georgia, upstairs or down.

He was sitting on the side of the bed, a narrow iron thing, really a kind of cot, with a thin mattress on it, with a dirty sheet on the mattress. Last year he had lived in a place where the landlady changed the sheets every week, whether there were stains on them or not. Now he was living two blocks from a laundromat, good place for love, and fifty blocks from his landlady, in a basement under a lot of other people living in wallpapered rooms that contained the smell of leaking stove gas. What was that flash in the sky last night? Did the military, their military or ours, who, have some secret installation behind the north shore mountains? The prime minister, a three piece suit lawyer with a bad haircut, from the prairies, was ready to start an election campaign, his platform to keep U.S. nuclear weapons out of Canada. In the air force a few years ago G knew casually that there were nuclear weapons already sitting under a tin roof on Vancouver Island. What was that flash in the sky? G had seen northern lights, he had heard northern lights. He had been north of the northern lights. He was not even a patriotic Canadian yet, but he knew from northern lights. M was born in the North West Territories - he was probably born in a flash and coil of northern lights. Those weren't the northern lights last night. They were not a mass hallucination, they hadn't had a Zombie all night. Twenty-five trolley buses came loose from their connections all at once within five blocks of Stanley Park?

The worst kind of explosion is a silent explosion. He started to stand up. He pitched forward, landed on the elbow that was flexed as he reached toward his mouth for his Black Cat. Fell on his elbow and his other wrist on the painted concrete floor. The floor was a kind of dark purplish red dirt colour, it looked like plasticene gorged with very old blood. He got up and found his piss jar. This was an old marmalade jar he pissed into, then carried to the laundry drain in the floor, where he poured it down. Either the smell went away in an hour or one got used to living there with the smell of piss in the laundry drain. He imagined D in his mansion up the hill, sipping French coffee, D draped in a silk dressing gown, gazing out the window through a well-managed headache at the black squirrels. In G's seventeen years in the Okanagan he had never seen a squirrel. They scampered in England and in boys' books, and in leaf-strewn yards in weary old colonialist Vancouver.

We have been, unwillingly perhaps, looking at this skinny nearsighted person for fifteen minutes or so, and we have strewn a number of pages, depending on the impecuniosity of the publisher, and have not heard much about what these people are studying. They, each of them in his own way, think of what they are supposed to study as impedimenta, or as necessary weight, something to encumber oneself with as the price of pursuing fame at a west coast Canadian university, the best there is in the immediate area, totally unknown in, say, Rottinghurst. G could not shake the impression that his friends were getting a lot more sex than he was, and that they knew a lot more than he did. M could, for instance, speak pages of Antony & Cleopatra. He would often do such a thing, loudly, in the basement of the Georgia.

"Shut up and sit down," Cece would suggest.

We would concur, mainly to indicate to Cece that we could control this person, M, the bearded humanization of all our worst impulses. Our Canadian libido. Years later we would have waxed comic about our rights, about the terrible cost of puritanism, about M's stifled talent. As it was we did not want to be cast out of the bar. We wanted to be romantic, till about eight p.m. After that we just wanted our friends to save our seat in case some thin logger might want to drag it over to his table.

"What the hell was that?" asked some thin logger.

"Dwight D. Eisenhower, you dolt," said M.

We indicated to the logger and his eleven friends that this was a local matter, an academic matter. G felt as if he had a special seat and a special problem. He thought that he had not yet been assimilated into the society represented by these effete college kids. He was never a logger, but he knew how to feel like them, that these phonies with their dramatic scarves and foreign beards needed a Leckie in the upper jaw from time to time.

A reader might be excused for thinking that this narrator, one among a number, was planning to asseverate about university syllabus, about courses, about Psychology 101. I imagine the grown up D looking at this chapter and considering it too linear already, the author not dead but still filled with the apprehension that the reader might be alive in the middle of the 21st century, wiping his eyes over the beauty of these fifties youth, sleeping in their overcoats, eating spaghetti with warmed Campbell's tomato soup poured over top, piss poured down the drain. There's a sandwich in every glass, some would-be literatus had said last night, before being banished to the stairwell, the worst place to drink in the Georgia.

Peripheral vision: D would never have heard of Lou Boudreau, but even though Lou Boudreau had been a young playing manager of the Cleveland Indians, and beaten his boyhood Red Sox in the playoff, G liked Lou Boudreau. They said that he wouldn't have been such a good ballplayer if he hadn't had amazing peripheral vision. G can hear M scoffing in Horse right now, that idiot G and his baseball, harrumph. He would actually say "harrumph" in those days, like the equally American Major Hoople, equally American as Lou Boudreau was American; M would say harrumph rather than harrumphing harrumph, in the way that people who had read more strangers than they had heard them say, say things such as "Oh Pshaw!" Baseball and the comics, when G listened to lonely Okanagan radio stations from D's California back in the forties (we do get to go back to the forties when we were not three people on a too-narrow bridge ready to fall with the heat and blast into False Creek, we get to go back to the forties when G for instance would listen to the sixty four dollar question and hope that the category would be the comics). In case you are bored enough to be interested, G can still remember Denny Dimwit's going-to-school, ambling-through-the-wildflowers-to-school song:

Ah, 'tis spring,
De boid is on de wing.
Dat's absoid,
Everybody's hoid,
De wing is on de boid.

In fact, G was probably singing it quite loudly outside the pub that night. He was frankly too scared to sing inside the pub, too scared to rise with a glass of beer in his hand, too timid to stand plaintively at the door of the Ladies & Escorts side, because not only did he think himself too inconsequential in their lives for the coeds inside to welcome, but he included them in the legion of the effete. Instead, he would intone in an almost-singing voice: "Scram gravy ain't wavy." Boid boid, kid from the Okanagan with what he presumes is a Brooklyn accent, don't even know the layout of Gotham, don't know Brooklyn's on the end of Long Island, don't even know that KerouACK lives farther up Long Island with his fat mother, writing books fast with a hangover, romance gone long ago.

Vancouver is not an overgrown small town to this kid, G, going to get famous. He was in Montreal in the air force, his ears sticking out, a virgin in a pink teeshirt because he is colourblind, catching shit for that from the Phys Ed corporal, scared again, abashed is the best word. This guy is abashed as his friends from England and the big Vancouver city are suave. They know what English movies mean, they have been to a fraternity party, they have read Schopenhauer, they know what is meant by non-U, and he had a sneaking horror that he was non-U as U can get. He was in the big city, and he expected to see big flashes in the sky and not know what they meant. He did not know how to use a transfer on the bus for the first six months he was in town. D had snuck free onto the subway in London. M knew how to get into the knickers of rich girls. G didn't even know what knickers were. Is this an exaggeration? Was the Georgia really a little bit of an Olde English Pub?

G lit another cigarette and remembered the flash he had seen behind him and then beside him and then in front of him when he turned. Then he took a deep drag on the cigarette and as he went to pull it from his mouth it stuck to his lips, and his fingers slid down to the business end, to be burned and initiated into a day long pain that alternated for attention with the pain behind the bone of his forehead. He remembered the strange writing on the walls, walls that have still these decades later not fallen, hieroglyphs, fifties space ship writing, fingers long passed on, fingers free forever of pain. Flash and glyph. He looked for the crinkled envelope. It was not in or under any of his clothes. It was not on any of the lamentable furniture, it was not in the mud outside. He came back inside and put on his pants and shirt and white silk scarf. D must have the envelope. If not D, M would have it. It might be in the gutter, marked by tire tracks, at the curve of street next to the brewery. He put on his shoes.

Retracing their precipitate steps of the night before, he kept his eyes to the ground. His glasses were smeared badly but he was afraid he would drop them on the sidewalk if he tried to wipe them. He saw five crinkled envelopes between his grotto and the home of Sick's Lager or was it Molson's already. People were dropping envelopes all the time, apparently, addresses gone with the wind and rain, gone in a flash. One of the envelopes looked just like his and his heart leaped and so did his stomach as he bent over to pick it up. It did have handscrawling on it. The words, though, were in simple French, and this is what they were:

Les gestes et les mouvements sont rendus
pénibles par la pluie (porter un carton à
gâteaux, traîner un cabas à roulettes, marcher
en tenant un enfant par la main).

Pretty tentative. So he walked until he arrived at the near end of the bridge to the beer belt. There was a scaffold where the night before there had been only the wash of reflected light. There were three men on the scaffold, and they were not drunken students, not avatars. They were serious people in Bapco outfits, white coveralls and hats. They were painting the wall of the brewery, vandals with brushes. They were nearly finished their thoughtless task, wiping creamy yellow paint where last night's interstellar graffiti was now almost totally unreadable.

Oh yeah, like last night it was readable.

Last night he could not have read a flashcard held by a grinning grade one teacher.

Last night none of the three of them could have read the card called TO-DAY.