April 20, Friday.
Able Pace 12:00 AM: I’m in my truck outside the Wok Box at the little park across from Hawkeyes.
Send.
I lean across the seat and punch the handle to swing the door out for her as she walks up beside the vehicle.
Hello, friend, I say.
She grunts and hops inside and then laughs. It’s okay, okay, she says. You don’t have to say friend, that’s weird.
I don’t want to make any mistakes, I say. Trying to be clear and decent here.
Okay.
Okay but aside from that why are you lisping?
She pulls her eyebrows into a dark vee. It’s so stupid, I know. It’s so fucking embarrassing. My tooth is broken and I sound like an idiot.
Are you alright? What the hell? How did you break your tooth?
Saviour broke it.
What?
I’m fine, everything’s okay, it’s just this tooth, it’s so fucking annoying, and I don’t have the money to fix it right away.
What do you mean Saviour broke it? How did that piece of shit break your tooth?
She laughs. I didn’t mean he really broke it.
Okay so what happened?
We were horsing around. At this motel. It had like this pool? And he hit me with one of those water things, I don’t know what they’re called, like noodle, maybe or something, but anyways, it was like concrete, I somehow broke my tooth on it, and like, yeah, so, now I whistle when I speak. It’s so stupid.
I can’t believe he broke your tooth.
Well he didn’t actually.
So did he break it or not?
She folds her hands on her purse, unfolds them, zips open her purse, pulls out a pack of cigarettes and puts them back. She says, We were horsing around. It was my fault, too.
Right, I say.
Anyway it’s stupid.
I think you sound charming.
You would.
I can’t believe he broke your tooth, though. And why didn’t you tell me? My God, Sea, I work in a frigging dental office. And what do you mean you don’t really have the money to fix it? Do you have insurance?
No, she says. Her voice is very small.
What about money? Do you have any money to fix it?
My dad’s going to give me some money. A little bit.
Let me help you.
I couldn’t do that.
You know I can help you.
You shouldn’t though, I mean, like, that’s not why I wanted to see you. I mean, don’t feel you need to help me.
Need to? I want to. Look. You need help. I can help you. That’s all. Come into the office, I’ll set up an appointment. I can get you a huge discount, you know I can, there’s no problem there.
We shouldn’t.
Please. Don’t be stubborn. You don’t have a lot of money, this is something I can do for you.
Are you sure?
It’s a five minute drive from Hawkeyes to The Pint.
Sealike and I walk around the bar looking for her friend but can’t find the woman. Lisa or Losel or Lynnette or maybe something totally different. I’ve never met her and, if quiet is the new loud, than this bar is quiet as the abyss and full of mutes. But this bar is not quiet. And I can’t hear a thing. Sea looks up from her phone and rolls her eyes and we head back to the second room of The Pint.
Two guys playing pool at one of the diagonal tables. One of them looks up. It’s her old co worker, Gibeon, the chef from the Kingsway location of the Petroleum Club. A tall thin German, blond, in love with the gym, fluorescent clothing, and raves.
What the fuck, says Sea, I really don’t want to be here.
Gibeon nods impassively at us and looks away.
We should just leave, says Sea. I hate this bar.
But a woman screams Sealike’s name excitedly and runs up to us, blonde, a few years shy of thirty or maybe not, gives Sea a huge hug, falls back dazed, and then again screams, Sealike!
Sea is grinning and snapping and the sparkle in her eyes matches the drinks in the other woman’s face. Come back here, the woman burbles. Meet the birthday boy, she says.
The birthday boy is a smallish black man with cropped hair and a boot strap beard. He shakes my hand and claps my shoulders and hands Sea a shot. A couple on the other side of the table meet my eyes. He’s got a row of empty glasses in front of him. She’s short and rubicund and hanging onto his arm.
What is this, says Sea. She’s laughing.
Jaegermeister, he roars. Everybody! Shots shots shots. He pounds the table and a waitress appears with a pyramid of Irish car boys piled on a dripping tray. The birthday boy points at the blonde and the couple, at Sea and at me and we each get a massive glass of curdled cream and stout.
Shots shots shots, shouts birthday boy.
The blond whispers in Sea’s ear and the two of them burst out laughing. The woman stands up and reaches for the birthday boy’s hand.
Time for your present, she says, and walks him toward the men’s’ room.
Ten minutes later the birthday boy is back at our table. It’s good to be alive, brother, he yells at me above the music. He sings, This sex is on fii-iii-rre, and reaches for a glass of the stout. The blonde comes out a couple minutes later and sits beside Sea and says something. Sea nods a couple of times and looks at me.
Hey, she says, my friend here doesn’t have a ride.
You need me to drive her?
The blonde reaches over the table and shakes my hand. Hi, she says. Hello. How are you? You look cute. Who is he?
Sea puts her hand on my forearm and says, This is my friend Able.
A glass bumps my shoulder. I half think it might be Gibeon, but he’s still playing pool on the other side of the room, glancing occasionally over at Sea.
How are you doing? The bartender from a few minutes ago. He sets a couple of cans of cider down on the table. I’m drunk, he says. And I’m gonna get drunker.
Champion, I say.
Bottoms up.
He chugs down one of the ciders and I upend the car bomb.
Last call is at two and we don’t get out of there until nearly three.
Look, though, I say. The thing is, I mean you really shouldn’t even be sitting back there? This truck is meant for like three people tops. How many seatbelts are there? Okay, so, like three people then.
I really appreciate it, Able, says the blonde woman. Her eyes are as glazed as her bracelets.
Okay, I say, but the thing is, I’m gonna have to get you guys to crouch down. Until we’re in Clareview anyways? Cause if the police see two heads sticking out of the back like that they’re gonna know something’s up. I’m really sorry but I can’t have the police stopping us.
Oh, it’s cool man, it’s all good, says the bartender. Thank you so much for letting me come. That’s what I want to say.
Yeah but I really need you to crouch down. Sorry about the mess. I think’s that’s an extension cord? Can you just shove it out of the way? I know that’s uncomfortable.
No, man, no, not at all, I’m perfectly comfortable.
Looking at him curled behind the driver’s seat, his head in the blonde’s lap, he really does look satisfied.
What’s your name again, he says.
Able.
He reaches up and shakes my hand and puts his hand on the blonde’s breasts.
The thing is that Fort Road has a thousand police on it at this time of night and if I get stopped I don’t even know what I am going to do. The windshield seems a bit foggy at the edges and the road is a tunnel the entire way to Clareview.
The blonde lives in a warren of apartment buildings and takes forever to remember which building is hers.
No keys, she says. Fucking fuck, she says. I bet the fucking baby sitter has them.
Sea laughs. I love you, she says.
The bartender is staggering around us. The blonde drops into a crouch and pounds on the basement window. Hello, she yells, hello hello hello.
Maybe she dropped the keys in my truck, I say.
Fuck it, says the blonde. I’ll just break the window.
Oh my god, laughs Sea. You’re going to wake your neighbours.
The blonde punches the window. Glass drops like a small mountain sliding into the sea. A light snaps on down the alley, and another light. Somebody says hello.
Hold my purse, says the blonde. She drops her purse on the ground and turns around, tries to put a leg through the window, curses, turns back and picks up her purse, uses it to bash out the remaining glass.
But you rent this place, says Sea.
So it’s cheaper to replace the fucking window than pay a locksmith to come out, says the blonde. She says come out again and laughs. Besides. I don’t care. I’ll just pay for it. It’s my place, I rent it.
I can get in there, I say.
The only thing I end up cutting on the glass is my hand, and the blonde has a much larger slash across her palm then I do, so I don’t say anything. After I let them in the front door, I track down a bandage in a closet.
The landlord is at the door. She is pissed. It’s disrespectful, she says. It’s just disrespectful. Four o’clock in the morning. I’ve warned you before. This is your last warning, young woman. And you’re going to pay for that window, by the way.
It’s disrespectful I get hounded by an old bitch like you, yells the blonde.
Come here, says the bartender to the blonde, Where’s your bedroom?
Sealake asks me what I have for music on the way back and I tell her the only thing is Death From Above 1979 which is only the best album ever made or at least in the top thousand and it’s been in the truck for like a year now at least. You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine.
Or in the door beside you, you left it there forever ago. The Essential Daryl Hall & John Oates. Second disc.
Anything else?
Rave On is in the glove compartment. The covers album.
I know what the album is, Able, obviously. We’ve only listened to it like a thousand times. Sea turns the volume knob and the cab of the truck fills up and drowns in Romantic Rights.
You got anything to drink?
I point at the dull face of the glove compartment. Sea opens it and a nearly full two six of Plymouth falls into her lap and she laughs. Unscrews the shiny blue cap and chugs back a couple of clean swallows.
Same as it ever was. Behind the wheel of a large automobile. Sebastien Grainger’s strained voice finally subsides, but the drums keep kickijng higher and higher. Sealike drums on the dash and takes another swig of the gin.
Pass me that, I say. I love this band, I say.
I remember I thought I was going to suffocate.
DFA79 at the Starlite is the best show to which I ever bought a ticket. Saviour once told me that he had no idea who Death From Above 1979 was before I bought him a ticket to the show. Best show of my life, he said. Remember that guy in the viking horns, he said, who lowered his head and charged us? Me I remember losing my shoe and diving to the floor for it and thinking I might not be able to surface. Fought my way all night until I made the front of the stage and grabbed Jesse Keeler’s foot. A positive thing, I suppose? I have a bunch of stories from that night I won’t bother with here. Do you remember a time when this city was a nice place etc. Chords hammering through my heart and that monster sound filling up the crowd until we were so large it felt like the high black ceiling was coming down and crushing us to the floor. Sebastien Grainger stood on his drums toward the end of the show and hammered on them until the boards which dipped toward the stage nearly split and all the gods of friendly violence and desire pulled the entire floor down into a crash and sway of never ending and casual excellence. I have never seen so many good-looking women at a show. So much well-cut hair, deep bangs, low cut shirts and where-the-fuck-are-my friends stares.
DFA79 is back, of course, friends again and touring the country, and I am not going to be seeing them, and I am low in the low end of my heart about not seeing them, but, also, such things are not the worst.
I still love you, band I love. But I love other things, too, and those things and times and people are stronger in me than you are in me. And that makes me sad but also good-feeling, too. We might see each other on the street in a few years. I’ll think of you until we meet and I hope we have a few drinks when that happens. Let’s not get in each others’ way. You look good and sound better. I’ll see you then, then.
You better be there.
Is it too late to admit I don’t know what not to write? What do I not include? What do I fatten and what do I lean? How do I justify my ragged lines? Reduce the mazy rivers gapping my story? The basis of fiction being we are all connected one to another. A web we spend our lives ignorantly breaking. So to describe a single event is to consider everything in the world and all that has ever happened.
For instance.
How you and I are likely descended of royalty.
Cleopatra and Mark Antony had three children. First were the fraternal twins named after the sun and the moon, and then along came little Ptolemy the brotherly loving. The moon married a Mauritanian prince and the prince and the moon had a baby girl they called Drusilla, and Drusilla had a baby boy she named Gaius Julius Alexion, which was her shading her grandfather. Gaius Julius Caesar slept with the famous Cleopatra, after all, long before Mark Antony prowled in Caesar’s steps and made babies with the queen. Alexion burdened his own son with the name Sampsigeramus. Those plaited consonants somehow make me think of the displeasingly fibrous texture of undercooked asparagus, and Undercooked Asparagus went and had a son named Iamblichus. And now I’m thinking of lamb cutlets. And after Iamblichus, Sulpicius. And after sweet Sulps, Uranios. And a second Uranios. And the names just keep coming, a scarlet tree blooming and branching across time until the historical likenesses in the murals at Byzantium and Rome and Cologne inevitably start heavily resembling each other, and half of Europe winds up speaking a bastardy Latin. So me and you and everyone we know are related to each other through our Egyptian grandmother. From the Nile through the delta to the sea and the world, there is all Africa and her prodigies in us. Which is to say to write about myself means to necessarily write about where I come from which is to write about everyone and everything else. Which is why of making many books there is no end, etc. The blatant wonder is not that there are so many novels and histories published every year, but that there are not so many more.
If I ever wrote one of those egregious doses of spiritual mouthwash stacked in the self-help section of any bookstore, mine would probably be titled something twee and inane like Zen And The Art Of Feeling Sorry For Myself or maybe The Tao Of Self Pity.
We are all all mostly in the same boat, though. So as my story drags its slow length along, I don’t blame you for sloping off, but before you blame me in your turn, first reconcile with Cleopatra’s ghost.
Sea takes the bottle of gin from my hand and cradles it in her arm. Her eyes have the warm shine of high and drunk. Fort Road is at it’s darkest right now. It will lighten in half an hour. I head west on 112 Street. Sea chatters all the way to 97 Street, her words non stop, and drums her fingers to the music, the bottle never more than a few minutes from her lips. I pull up in the parking lot back of the aprtment building. The last of the moonlight pools around an old broken pick up truck beside us, dusty and red, the box henged with cheap wooden fencing. I have never seen the parking lot without the vehicle parked as close to Sea’s apartment building as possible.
Okay, I say or maybe mumble. The juniper is in my lips. I shake my head. I say, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.
She tugs on my sleeve. Don’t be like that, she says. Come on up.
The North Saskatchewan has fifty-five bridges. Has to be the easiest river in Western Canada to cross. I’ve been driving all night. Might as well keep going. I open the door and walk on shaky legs behind Sea up the usual stairs to her bachelor and into the bedroom and she puts her hands in my pants. Etc., and etc.
High Level Bridge, though, that’s the one. Three men fell to their deaths, you know, building it, thousands of iron beams across the North Saskatchewan, and concrete. Mostly when I cross it what I think about very forcefully is not jumping. One of the construction worker’s bodies is six feet deep in the northern pier. The police do not publish the suicides. Don’t want to give the public ideas. But most people know one or two people who have used the bridge to fall to paradise. Easiest bridge in the west to walk halfway across.
—February Break Up Album, 2013.