CHAPTER SEVEN

In late February of 1961, two green cars, one a 1953 Dodge sedan and the other a 1956 Oldsmobile 98, green and white with portholes, crossed the border into the United States of America on, as they say, one another's heels. Sealed inside was the student cast of Our Town Cops Pleas, a radio play recently adapted and rehearsed for readers' theatre performance in Seattle at the University of Washington.

The author of the radio drama was a poet whose career had been marked by frequent and strange experiments. He had written in imitation of verse models in Ancient Finnish, True Norse, and Faroese, and he had some success as a painter and concrete poet and chain-saw sculptor. He often sang, or barked like a seal at public readings. He looked as much like a seal or a walrus as a skinny, gangling man can. He was, and is, an esteemed and estimable poet, and he was a great friend to young writers, though he hated teaching them creative writing. No one understood or accepted that.

Our Town Cops Pleas was a verse play, its basic line modelled on the Far Norse "stutterstolt," the notoriously difficult accentual verse form. His fifth book of poetry, it had been given a single performance by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Prester John was pleased that it would be performed again this weekend and that he would see it. John sat on the passenger side of the front seat of the second of the two green cars. His wife Pegeen, blinking earnestly, drove along the bumpy American highway, ignoring the Burma Shave signs.

Stuffed in tbe back seat between a student actress and plum-voiced Arthur Maguay, was G, trying hard not to throw up. His gorge had literally and strongly risen three times in Peggy John's blinking, jerky progress along the road. As a distraction from the nausea, his penis had also risen during the ride, hardening as it did so. This phenomenon was caused by a warm firm pressure from the hip, thigh, arm and scent (of cinnamon, gone just a little pleasantly rank) of the student actress, Dorcas. Dorcas Davenport, once referred to mysteriously but euphoniously as "Dorinda Brutska" by the satirical D in the arts page of the campus paper, The Bad Seed. G's nausea was caused by drank a lot too much Cherry Heering after a lot too much beer the night before. In the morning, just before climbing into the John's car outside his Kitsilano basement apartment, he had precipitously and without any intention or malice, vomited on his landlord's cat, Samba, hitting it with the heavy stream of creamed diced vegetables as it crouched, tragically watching in the wrong direction, on the cement walk that led to the basement door.

As G rode southward into the freedom and opportunity represented by a weekend visit to the United States, his gorge rose again and again, and he understood what the phrase meant, and he shuddered and gasped. The other passengers sat silent as shellfish, except for Maguay, who looked like a shellfish, an ancient, inedible one. Maguay recited limericks designed to amuse the presumed academic and puerile mind of Professor John. But John, a practitioner of some elaborate forms of humourous verse, including visual or concrete poetry, in fact hated limericks. So there they were, a carfull of silent sufferers, toiling in ignorance or desperation, travelling in the eye of anihilation.

G had visited Seattle just twice in the past, sleeping in cars or on a sofa? couch? Chesterfield? in a fraternity house at the University. These had been musical mystery tours featuring basement clubs in the University district. The cast of Our Town Cops Pleas was booked into two downtown hotels, about five blocks apart on First Avenue. The students were happy about this, for they observed it to be a seedy area, which meant maybe jazz, or drug dealers, or prostitutes, (or at least nymphomaniacs), or maybe just a good brisk knifing in the alley. D and G had naturally and quickly selected one another as roommates; their occasional rivalries and uncertainties were nothing in the face of the possibility of getting stuck bunking with any of the other strange types from the Player's Club.

Then it was off to the Rathskellar and the sombre glory of bock beer. Somewhere back in Vancouver was M, sadly no part of this expeditionary force, for as a freshman twice-flunked, he had been denied active student status and couldn't take part in this official exchange of culture between the universities. M had urged G not to miss the Rathskellar and the bock beer, saying "It'll gird your loins, G! Two tankards of that stuff and you'll become a stranger to decency, a foreigner to all human custom and observance." M then smiled widely. "Exactly what you want to be." G didn't know about that, but he did find the bock beer, two big dark mugs of it, marvelous.

Next came the The Italian City, a restaurant on Third Avenue where G and D joined a big table of their noisy compatriots. Ken Ellsworth, court clerk in the play, was loudest. "Broadbent will tell us about that! D is a man of literature, and he can tell us whether John is any good! Hey?" Ellsworth's eyes glistened, his muzzle was slick with foam, his hair was slicked back. His very long left arm had tendrilled around both Dorcas Davenport and Frederica Henry, the two female members of the company, who had been assigned a hotel room together and arrived at the restaurant in tandem. Ellsworth's snake arm hugged them together, made them inextricably a brace of woman.

G seized a salt-shaker and, concentrating on the little particle flow of white flecks, threw salt in four vigorous arcs at Ellsworth's front. Shuh, shuh, shuh, shuh. "Shrivel, snail-slime" he hissed, then, cackling with pleasure at his masterful enunciation, he collapsed onto the banquet to his right. There was consternation and various lungings across the table, but Arthur Maguay and Willy Jeep kept Ellsworth muffled, stuffed down in his place. Waiters appeared, bread and ravioli, more beer. Butterpats were thrown, and one landed in G's coffee, but since G didn't want the coffee anyway, he laughed with the others.

In the end the restaurant, a bar where jazz was reputed to be playing, the streets and the American night all dissolved and G found himself sitting stunned upright in the twin bed with D sitting likewise in the other bed, both fully clothed and babbling vacantly. D held forth on the colonial mentality of Canadians, the archness and preciosity of Prester John as a playwright, and something marvelous he'd seen done by Laurence Olivier in London, some scene in which "Larry was playing Eddypuss, you see," though despite the modern name the play apparently had been a classical Greek tragedy. G, lost in the whirl of D's words, kicked off his shoes, grabbed the coverlet around himself and settled for oblivion. For some time D remained sitting against the end of the bed, flourishing the stubby American beer bottles and talking to them, finding, as the Canadians did not, friendliness and reassurance in their resemblance to the little brown friends of home.

Hurled early into awakeness the next morning by a telephone call bidding them get up, get going, get out to the University of Washington by noon, D and G drifted downhill to the Pike St. market for breakfast. There in the cool shadows they had eggs and things, and also hash-brown potatoes and good coffee (appreciated by hazy G) and the cheerful service not to be found in Canada. D, tireless on three hours sleep and as always full of cheerful chatter, turned out to know a tune on the booth's jukebox list The Frozen Logger entire and by heart, and sang along with verse after verse to G:

It froze clear down to China
It froze to the stars above
At a thousand degrees below zero
It froze my logger love.

Our Town Cops Pleas was performed in a lecture hall before a small audience of drama club habitués and literary types. The actors carried texts, but most of them had, in their couple of rehearsals, memorized some lines, and G, lurking at a partly opened door of the shallow-staged lecture room, awaiting his cue to enter, alternately looked at and muttered to himself his final and most impressive lines "Eala beorht bune! Eala byrnwiga! Eala theodnes thrym! Hu seo thrag gewat, genap under nihthelm, swa heo no waere!"

On the far side of the stage G could see clearly Dorcas Davenport in the role of the prompter. This character was written for comic relief, and Dorcas had been put in a tight skirt, see-through blouse and permed hairdo to convey quickly that she was a vacuous functionary with little awarenes of the profound issues the play raised. Unsubtle, punderous with implication, John had named the prompter "Miss Take."

From his spy's vantage in the doorway, G found himself looking at Dorcas with a removed but more intense interest than he had hitherto taken in her. In some way his despair over matters, and over the unlikelihood of other matters, with A, and also his confusion and despair at the cloud of knowing and the storm of understanding emanating from D, contributed to his condition. He noted, not for the first time, Dorcas's finely curved lip. He noticed that the legs of Dorcas were good ones, and realized that she had been cast in her small part chiefly for this. He clamped his teeth together and felt an iron band holding his head and his gaze inexorably at the knees of the student, actress, and prompter, at the tanned legs and knees and the bit of slip revealed as the skirt had ridden up. He felt, just for a moment before more frantic feelings, stage fright and nausea again took over, a merciful, tremulous softness and a slight, sweet ache. Miss Take had something for him. A golden explosion.

Prester John watched the plodding little performance from eight rows up in the half-filled lecture theatre. Unlike G, he was not in any way disturbed by what he saw, only warmed. In his mind's eye he saw not David Broadbent, sassy in red suspenders and Cockney accent, as Artless Dogger, nor dog-faced Nicky Dixon as the blustering politican Grubby Checkers, nor pop-eyed Barton Martlett as the wild-eyed, white-haired (courtesy Leichner #11 Grease Stick for Stage Characters) incarnation of Seymour Tissue, debauched poet, nor high-hatted, haughty Wesley Trotsky as Twirla Trunchen, the police chief in drag.... Carried off by his own words, John saw people, the historical figures themselves, moving on the rudimentary stage before him. His world seemed the world.

While these worlds shifted and spun in their adventures south of the border, M, back in Vancouver, took advantage of the respite from dissipation enforced by the Sunday blue laws to visit his aged parents in Kerrisdale and cadge a dinner. In an after-dinner address notably brief and pungent, he informed the parents that their world was coming to an end, thank you, that there was certainly apocalypse now to be had for the asking, and that he, for one of a large squad of natural philosophers, was indeed asking. Thank you. Seat resumed, to silence.

"Oh, M!" said his mother, "Is that what they teach you at varsity?" M's mother's own university days had attached to her this never-never-land slang, still good, she supposed, a hundred years later.

M's meals were not pretty things. The evening following the Sunday roast at mama's, he cooked and forked into himself his standard rice glop, boiled rice topped with canned soup. The evening after that, he hunched in the ridged red velveteen seats of the Varsity theatre, eating two moist beef pies, one Melton Mowbray pork pie, a big kosher dill pickle, a small block of cheddar cheese, four deep-fried "drumsticks" of ground chicken, sweating and odourous, finishing the meal with a box of Glossettes raisins and a dixie of Pepsi-Cola. M was in one of his elements, lunch. This one was the registered trademark movie lunch. The chicken drumsticks were the trademark, the linch-pins of this affair, and M was known to alter his plan to see a 3 PM showing of a Grace Kelly movie (Green Fire, with Stewart Granger) because the Europa delicatessen didn't have the drumsticks out of the oven yet. He loitered in shops that sold ivy league clothing and New Directions paperback books until the perfume of the fresh-baked drumsticks seeped out to tell him that Heaven had once again come to Granville Street, then, arms loaded, strode into the movie.

The ugly spectacle of these movie lunches had achieved some notorious notice. A young woman not herself entirely a stranger to debauchery in its standard forms had fallen in with M in the Georgia pub and had consequently had a movie date with him. "It was horrible," she reported to friends. "He said we had to have a 'snack,' and he brought all this stuff. I've never seen anything like that; I was appalled."

This Tuesday night M was wolfing his celebrated mess and watching the film version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. It starred James Mason, mellow of voice and menacing, Arlene Dahl, a Titian-haired beauty of impressive cleavage but even more remarkable dullness. Not necessarily a bad actress, just someone whose roles and personality melded in an unassailable nullness. Also cast in this desecration of Verne was the pop singer Pat Boone. This was one of Boone's few non-singing movie parts, and of course he was scarcely less loathesome as a straight actor than as a singer. Though he had not yet become a declared Christer, his callow cornfed face already shone with sweetly simple bullish goodness. Those who, like M, aspired to madness and badness found that this sort of face made them puke. "Pat Boone's pukey pusillanimous pupface makes me puke," confided M, at seven hundred decibels once over coffee at the arty-farty table.

Herbert Lom was the villain, and crude animation created a suitably gnathous saurian for menace and roaring and a climactic fight after the explorers crossed "the central sea" that Verne posited in the innards of the earth, but it was all like Arlene Dahl's bosom, pretty pastel stuff. Snarling audibly and hideously, like Verne's Ape Gigans, M lunged out of the theatre and thrust himself toward the Roundtowner Motel. Near the centre of the city, this was four zs a week the workplace of D, now returned from Seattle's astonishing theatrical triumph to resume his employment as desk clerk from eight PM until dawn, unless he slid out early, in the small hours for some fun in what was left of the night. In such AWOL behaviour he was encouraged by M, who was thrilled at D's job at the night attendant at The Roundtowner, and pleased too that D could be fetched out of there at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning, when M would make his way along sleeping suburban roads, over bridges and through downtown lanes to reach his friend. For all his brassy yammer, M was an aimless, lonely lout, hungry for the company of people like D and G who had lives more directed than his.

"Look I can't lock up just yet," said D. "There's something happening in one of the rooms. I've called the police." These statements instantly vested tremendous authority in D. Some big, ugly, real thing was happening, and D was coping with it, doing the job he was paid for, putting his thin shoulder to the wheel.

The police, two of them, only blue jowls and small eyes visible, arrived, and D showed them to Room 38, unlocked the door, stepped aside. A man perhaps a few years older than D or M lay on the floor, shoulders tucked awkwardly against the bed, the salmon-pink nubbled bedspread pulled out of place, the bed otherwise undisturbed. The man's mouth was half open, his thin striped tie slung across the chest of his tan suit in a messy way. The man too had been slung or cast, looked like that, at the foot of the bed.

To M, looking covertly over the shoulders of D and a policeman, the man looked surely and exactly to be Pat Boone.