NINE STORIES

GREEN SLEEVES
“Are they putting up the lights on the big tree?” Upchuck asked.
“I would assume so; they’re on cranes and they have enough Christmas lights to circle the city.”
“I’ve seen actually seen them put the lights on the tree.”
David had been home sick for a week. This was his first trip out of the house. “Have you walked the dog yet?” he said on the phone, sounding like a cartoon character. “I need some air.”
The ocean air was like a cold compress on his face. “Are you going to walk all the way to the Inukshuk?” he asked at the halfway point. Hawkeye was already pulling me towards it.
“Can you handle it?”
“Oh yeah.”

SHOCK AND AWE
The Proletariat bookstore got a bomb threat a couple of weekends ago. While the store was being evacuated, the phone rang two more times. The call was traced to Witch Hazel.
“Could you imagine what a bomb thread from Witch Hazel would sound like?” I asked Ollie. “Lime gond do blonw up than thtore.”
“You know you’re going to hell for that?”
“I thought I was there already.”

WHAT’S TRASH TO SOME …
“Did you see that Trash and Treasures is closing?” Abbey asked.
“No wonder, they charged way too much for that crap.”
“I remembered you telling me that on the way to my place. I thought it was so funny it was going out of business. They’re having a big sale. You should go down.”
“Maybe I can buy that gold rain cap to go with the dress I got from Franklin.”
A couple of days later Alice came behind the counter and said, “Did you see Trash and Treasures closed?”
“Already?”
“They asked too much anyway,” Alice said. “I can talk the ladies at The Salvation Army down, but that lady didn’t budge.”
“The Wildlife Thrift Store is starting to ask a lot too.”
“I know. They’ve got this bald guy running it now. He got rid of a lot of stuff. So much for the Golden Age of second hand shopping in Vancouver.”

WASHED UP
There has been a big, plush office chair on the beach for over two week now. It just appeared out of nowhere; I’m surprised the city hasn’t hauled it away. Sometimes it will upended or on its side, but for the most part it is stoically facing the grey horizon.

TURDS
Unlike my co-workers, I prefer to use the public bathroom to the staff bathroom. I hate having to move empty milk crates and boxes of paper cups to get to the toilet. I ran in and was about to unzip my fly when I looked down and saw a giant turd floating in the toilet bowl. At first I thought someone was just being an asshole, but like an idiot I flushed. The water started rise towards the lip of the bowl; I could see the turd coming towards me like a hand. The water stopped just short of overflowing. I shoved the plunger in, knocking the turd in the process. With every push the turd threatened to flop onto the floor like a dead fish. I gave up after five minutes.
“What’chya readin?” Drudy asked.
“The Rotto Rooter invoice for the toilet. Someone flushed paper towel. I knew it.”
“I hate that fucking bathroom. Last night, someone shit in the garbage can.”
“Get out!”
Drudy nodded in the affirmative, his smile betraying his feelings. “I went to empty and saw this great big piece of shit sitting on top of the paper towel. I just picked it up and threw the whole thing in the dumpster. You know, I try to believe there is good in everyone, but I’m always disappointed.”
“The way things are going around here, they’re going to have to start issuing HAZMAT suits.”

THE PLASTIC FLAP
“Did you see this?” Ollie asked, throwing a copy of The Province onto the bar at The Pilsner. He pointed to a colour photo of Martin, sitting at one of the tables in the bar, not far from where we were standing.
“He into the city for one day and he gets his picture in the paper.”
The story about the plastic flap crackdown. Turns out the city is going to start fining business that use clear plastic blinds to keep wind and cold off their patios in the winter. Two people that it was a fire hazard because a cigarette could ignite the blind. The fire department said, they do pose a risk, but there haven’t been any instances of it. What about the risk of a car veering off the road and into the patio? Are we going to start banning patios next?
Martin was mid-sentence in the photo. He looked as he always did, going at length to explain himself, laughing at his own mumbled asides. “It figures they would go to a gay bar and ask the most incoherent person his opinion.”

THE SECRET INGREDIENT IS LOVE
“Has Stuart been coming in your shifts when I’m not here?” Peggy asked me.
“No. I was beginning to wonder if he had another heart attack.”
“He’s boycotting.”
“Why now?”
“Because he found a lump of baking powder in his scone. Instead of returning it, he let it sit on his table and then he comes over to me while prepping the mix, dumps his scone in the garbage and says, “That scone was crap!” Normally, I would have offered him another one, but he was being such a prick about, I just shrugged my shoulders and kept measuring flour.”
I started laughing conspiratorially.
“Then when his friend orders a scone, he screams across the shop, ‘Don’t! They’re crap!’ And his friend doesn’t. Stuart hasn’t shown his face here since.”
“Did he complain to Neil?”
“I mean, we’re not making French pastry here, but I wake up at four in the fucking to make those scones!” Peggy said. “Good riddance I say.”
“Yeah but we need the Stuarts and the Witch Hazels. They keep the money going into the till. Like it or not they’re family.”
“I don’t talk to my family.”

A BARGE TOO FAR
This man-made island spent a week in English Bay. Like the chair, it caught me totally of guard – poof! There it was. The island was constructed from a barge, a tugboat acting as the engine and living quarters. Two telephone poles with satellite dishes stuck out of the middle of it like a pair of trees. There was a port-o-potty, a dump truck, and a tarp tent. The barge was moored a good hundred feet from the shore; close enough to see people but not enough to see what they were doing. I just assumed it was some sort of research vessel, but the dump truck made me wonder it didn’t have commercial purposes. As I walked by it every morning and afternoon on the beach, I wondered if they could see me, recognized me as the guy with the dog who didn’t return thee stick. By the time I remembered to bring my camera with me and take a picture of it, it was gone.

DIO-DRAMA
For her thesis, Maeve studied and experimented with the properties of Tempe – some Asian foodstuff, made of mold that lasts a really long, sort of like cheese. For months, Maeve would show up at eight in the morning like clock work, and punching numbers into her calculator at a metal table in the parking lot chain smoking – taking breaks to get refills and do the crossword. At the eleventh hour, the Tempe was held up in customs and narrowly made it by her deadline. And then lo and behold, the experiment didn’t work. She still got her degree. I guess she got an A for effort.
“How’s your Diorama panel coming along?” I asked Maeve in the smoking room at The Pilsner. The panel in question was a piece in a much larger Christmas Tree-like structure made of found materials. Maeve and Talbert had volunteered to decorate the panel at an unveiling ceremony a week from the day.
“Fine. We have lots of things painted. Things just don’t look the way you imagine them.”
“Will it fit?”
“Will what fit?”
“The pieces you’ve made so far.”
“Of course they fit. We’ll make them fit!”
“Measure twice, cut once,” I cautioned her.
“It will be fine. We have a week.”
“I don’t Maeve,” I said. “Remember the Tempe.”

GarpinBC

MANDOLINS AND HARPSICHORDS

“This is a total religious experience for me!” Franklin said, standing on his tippy-toes in his stocking feet. “This is my body, this is my blood.”
We were standing in the middle of his living room, surrounded by everything he and Manny didn’t want to take with them to Ontario: Bookshelves, dressers, TV, couch, kitchen stuff, clothes, books, movies and music. In lieu of a garage sale, Franklin and Manny invited all their friends over to help themselves and make a donation to the moving fund. It was one of those rare opportunities where you get to take things you have always coveted from a friend’s apartments.
It was early afternoon and it had been raining on and off. I had already worked a shift at The Shop and was running on fumes. My name was on a bookshelf, but I wanted to pick up things I need around the house but too cheap to buy. I gave myself strict guidelines for what I was allowed to take: only things that I can actually use.
Talbert and Maeve were already there when I arrived. Fang showed up shortly thereafter in his pajamas, sipping a Bailey’s coffee, and a cigarette in his mouth. Even in that cluttered state, people just made themselves at home, lounging, sipping Mimosas and beer, forgetting the purpose at hand.
“Oh my God,” are you getting rid of these?” I said, noticing the plaster Jesus and Mary wall hangings from the couch.
“Of course,” Manny said.
“I grew up with this shit. Do you have newspaper I can wrap them in?” So much for guidelines.
I saw the pile of pots, pans and kitchen utensils in the corner but was distracted by the two clear plastic garbage bags of clothes. I am – or was – in dire need of jeans. It was hard to be discriminating. I could have replaced my entire wardrobe with what was in those bags.
“I love this dress,” I said, holding up a purple polyester mini. “It’s so St. Etienne. Now I wish I bought that gold rain hat at Trash and Treasures.”
“You looked so cute in that dress Franklin,” Fang said, his eyes glassed over in nostalgia.
A few Mimosas later, the shelves were being emptied into paper shopping bags, organized into little piles like leaves. “I’m so glad we found good homes for all this stuff,” Franklin said, looking around. “Now let’s get it out of here.”
After a cigarette, pieces of Franklin and Manny were carried out of the apartment, into the elevator and into the adjacent building, where they were spread throughout. It took six people two trips to do it.
“I feel like we should have a cup of tea in front of us,” Kermit said to me. His head was sticking out of the other end of a dresser, decapitated, his face reflected in the veneer. Kermit never misses the opportunity for polite conversation, even if he’s walking backwards up a slippery hill, carrying a chest of drawers.
“Should that man really be using an electric lawn mower in the rain?” I asked him.
“Probably not. He must really want to mow that lawn.”
Then there was the matter of my things. I had arranged for a flatbed truck but wouldn’t have access to it for another day. “I’ll help you carry the bookcase to your house,” Kermit volunteered. Kermit’s clothes weigh more than he does.
“You realize it’s a good four blocks?”
“It’s light once you take the shelves off,” Kermit said.
“And I’ll carry those metal drawers,” Franklin offered.
“Talbert, would you be so kind as to carry that small bookshelf to my place?” I asked him as he lit my cigarette for me. “You don’t have to, but wouldn’t it be nice if we get all this out the boy’s apartment today instead of tomorrow?”
“Oh, all right.”
It was just after three in the afternoon when the four of us set out, but it felt like early evening, the autumn leaves glowing in the car headlights like tropical fish. We were bundled up, swaying down the sidewalk under our respective loads. Once again I was face to face with Kermit as he rhapsodized poetically about apartment buildings in the West End. Ahead of us I could see Franklin and Talbert resting their burdens on fire hydrants and gates. It was a timeless moment, like a scene out of a Wes Anderson film; you could practically here Simon and Garfunkel playing in the background.
The next day I re-arranged my apartment to accommodate all my new things. I came across the action figure I had grabbed at the last minute on my way out with the bookcase. “Who’s this supposed to be?” I asked Manny.
“Seth Green.”
“I love Seth Green.”
“Me too. I got a hard-on the first time I saw him Austin Powers.”
The last thing I need is another action figure and yet I felt obligated to preserve this small monument to Seth Green. I placed him on the bookshelf next to Mary and Jesus and took a step back to admire my handy-work. There is a whole shelf that looks almost exactly as it did in Franklin and Manny’s apartment, as if it had merely given notice at the other apartment and moved into mine, like any other citizen of the West End.
“This is my body, this is my blood,” I could hear Franklin saying. Damn him and his religious imagery.

GarpinBC

CHEQUES & BALANCES

I dread looking at any sort of statement. I have this sort of Karmic method of accounting; a mental ledger of how much I’m spending, a little like guessing the time. Bills are usually left un-open until I’ve made a payment on them. I go for weeks without looking at my bank balance – avoid ATM slips, procrastinate accessing my account online. I don’t need to look; I already know what they have to say. You’re broke.
This was the first month in over a year I paid my rent without going into over-draft protection. I still managed to spend some of that over-draft protection nonetheless. The eve of rent, I went online to see just how much over I had gone and was pleasantly surprised by not only my finances, but also my line of credit. The powers that be, the bank, Visa … The Man, had given me another thousand dollars on my credit card. I thought I was hallucinating, as I always do whenever good things happen. I called the bank this afternoon and sure enough, it was real – I could spend a thousand dollars if I so chose.
To a poor sap like me, a thousand bucks is a big deal. Things you want and need suddenly do the Can-Can across your eyes: DVDs, CDs, stereos, computer upgrades, Ikea, clothes, porn, books, visits to the vet, current I.D., socks and underwear. And then you remember you can barely afford a credit card payment as it is. There are things that can wait, that I can still afford to pay for with cash, if I remember to do it. And then there are those things that can’t wait.
If I’m not agonizing over my finances, I’m agonizing over going home to visit my mother. It’s been over a year since my last visit, a short one with a wedding in the middle of it. My mother has been hounding me to come back since. “Any time you want to come home, the door is always open,” she’ll say in her broken English, while I nod, unbeknownst to her.
“I’ll come home as soon as I can afford it,” I’ll tell her, knowing full well she’ll front the fare. All I would have to do is ask, but I can’t – couldn’t. She would have to offer. Not out of piety, but propriety. She paid for my last visit home, and I was sworn to secrecy by the power of attorney – my sister, Olive. My mother’s finances are carefully guarded; if I get a plane ticket, everyone will want one, or so our father led us to believe. Those extra thousand bucks is my plane ticket home. All the same, I was willing to put the trip off until the New Year.
The thing about the Karmic method of accounting is that when the balances are in your favour, you are presented with something you’ve been putting off, something that needs to be addressed. That is why not long after I confirmed the extended line of credit, I got an email from my sister telling me my mother had consented to going into a retirement home and the house I grew up in was going to be sold, as soon as December.
This is something I’ve had plenty of time to prepare for. My last visit home Olive said it was time. Olive doesn’t smoke, but she has the intensity of some who does.” There just aren’t enough hands to do the job,” she explained on the way to Pizza Hut. “Mom needs the kind of twenty-four hour care only a health-care professional can offer. As it is now she’s constantly being bussed around town to get fed, bathed, and sleep. She hates all the running around and she’s afraid to be in the house alone. But she drives out anyone who tries living with her in the house.”
“So what’s stopping you?”
“Hoss,” Olive grunted.
Hoss is my oldest brother. Since my father passed away five years ago, he’s been acting like the family patriarch. His attempts have been met with stone faces and clenched fists. The house is, and always has been a bone of contention with my brother. He feels he deserves it. Since Dad died, he’s been using the garage as storage space for all his unfinished “Projects.” Our father’s once pristine garage, with row upon row of garden tool, shovels, and lawns chairs is crammed so tight with twisted metal objects and broken engines, you can’t even get a car in it.
“He won’t let go of that house,” Olive explained. “The house is falling apart. It’s crying out for a young family to move in and fix it up. It needs a new life, like the one we started when we moved there from Portugal.”
Like my bills, I thought I had more time. Hoss and my sisters have been at a stalemate for months over my mother – it had the potential to go on for years or at least until she died, which is probably what Hoss was counting on. My sister Laura’s email threw me for a loop. “We put our foot down,” she wrote. “And he crumbled.”
I scoured my mental chequebook. When was the soonest I could possibly go? Was there time to come home for Christmas? Maybe we could have one last cathartic Christmas dinner in the house we grew up in, like the Thanksgiving dinner we had before my father died. I called Laura to bounce my ideas off her.
“Olive says she might be able to get her into a home by the twentieth of this month,” she said.
“Wow!”
“This has been in the works for a while now.”
“I know. I just wanted to see the old house – be inside the old house – one more time.”
“The estate says that as long as mom isn’t living there, the house and everything in it goes up for sale. You know Dad, a Libra until the end; he didn’t want anyone getting that house but mom.”
“That house won’t last a minute on the market.”
“There’s still escrow to consider. We’ll put in a few conditions. Don’t worry, there’s still time.”
Money and time: Between the two I don’t know which I hate more and have less of.


GarpinBC

DEMOCRACY

I knew I was not long for the United States when I saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. My faith in America had been shaken by the 2000 election. Where is the democracy in suing to become the Leader of the Free World? The war in Iraq pushed me over the edge. I watched as public opinion polls slowly grew in support for invading Iraq based on talk of smoking guns, mushroom clouds and resolve; echoes of the rhetoric that fabricated the power crisis that bankrupt California and put Schwarzenegger in the Governor’s chair.
Just two years I had been celebrating New Year’s Eve on the roof of my apartment building. All the tenants were there and friends from work. I was sitting on the ledge of the building with, Eric, a co-worker on the ledge of the roof. “Isn’t this wonderful? Fireworks exploding above the Ferry Building, people on the rooftops, helicopters … gunshots. This truly is a golden age.”
“This can’t last forever,” Eric said.
“What do you mean?”
“This. All this … the city, government … It’s all going to fall apart.”
“I don’t believe that. I have enough faith in mankind that he can always bring himself back from the brink.”
“I don’t. I see total anarchy.”
I was rather taken aback by Eric. He was one of the more happy-go-lucky people I knew. At the time I just wrote him off as young - every generation thinks theirs is the last. But as things changed, almost over-night, as they did when Bush took over, I was beginning to realize that Eric might have a point. Many hours after the second plane hit the Trade Center I was hanging out with Daria, watching CNN give a play-by-play account of the day.
“You know what this means don’t you?” Daria said. “Four more years.” Three years later, her prediction came true.
“Who do you think is going to win?” Peggy asked, holding up the cover of The Post.
“Bush.”
“Fuck off. He doesn’t have a chance.” Peggy is a card-carrying member of the Church of Michael Moore. “After that movie, those debates, P-Diddy …there’s no way he’s going to win.”
“But what about the October Surprise?”
“What Surprise?”
“Osama Bin Laden’s tape. As soon as I saw that, I knew Bush had it in the bag.”
“You’re being pessimistic.”
By the time I saw the returns at around five in the evening, I knew I was right. I left a message with Daria in San Francisco, and got a hold of Emme in Boston.
“I don’t like how this is going,” I said.
“It’s early still. Take a nap and call me in a few hours. I’m going to see ‘Team America.’ There’s no way I’m going to sit through this election bullshit.”
Daria was equally re-assuring. “This is how they predicted it to pan out. The polls still haven’t closed in the West. The Daily Show is live tonight. You should watch it, it will cheer you up.”
But The Daily Show didn’t cheer me up. Even Jon Stewart seemed poised to admit defeat. Although Steve Corel’s speech on dissent was brilliant. After the Moment of Zen, I considered going to the Pilsner for a beer, but couldn’t see the point. Why sit in a room full of like-minded people bitching about something that was beyond your control? So I went to bed.
The first thing I saw on the TV was the Republican Party declaring victory. Luckily, I had pot. I couldn’t get high fast enough. Just as my eyes were starting to feel heavy-lidded, they posted the results of the popular vote; Bush had 51%. Had I the ingredients for a Bloody Caesar, I would have mixed them there and then in my mouth.
I knew better than to engage Peggy in conversation as soon as she walked into The Shop. Instead of the usual, “Hey,” I let her drag the patio furniture onto the sidewalk and into the parking lot in silence.
“Can a mook a cigarette,” she asked.
“I’ll have one with you.”
The sun was still a couple of hours below the horizon. We sat on the cement slab in the disabled parking spot in front of The Proletariat Bookstore. I looked for my old apartment in the columns of Bay windows along the back of the Oxford Apartments, waiting for Peggy to say something.
“Well, it’s not over till it’s over,” she said.
“Peggy, he won the popular vote and there aren’t enough votes for Kerry to win the Electoral College. It’s over.”
“I just can’t believe knowing all there is to know about Bush, they would re-elect him.”
“It’s hard to vote out a president in the middle of a war.”
“Wait till he re-instates the draft.”
The past few weeks we’ve had this older guy show up on his bike as soon as The Shop opens. He has worked his way through the breakfast menu twice. He always wants a receipt, so he can expense his breakfast – something I’ve never really understood. I nicknamed him The Quiet American because he has an American flag bandana and a U.S. Postal Service cycling jersey – and he’s pretty quiet.
“Can you believe he wore that bandana?” Peggy said, as soon he left. “He’s got to be a Republican.”
“Then how do you explain the pot leaf bandana he wears sometimes?”
“I forgot about that. Still, he should not have had that thing on after what happened last night.”
A couple of days later, The Quiet American, thanked Peggy and I both for making him breakfast. “I was here on business, and I’m going home tonight. This was my favourite part of the day.”
“Where are you from?” Peggy asked.
“Oakville, Ontario.”
Peggy and I traded glances.
“We just assumed you were from the States because of the stars and stripes bandana.”
“I got that impression the morning after the election. You could cut the silence with a knife. I put it on without thinking. But I made sure to wear the marijuana leaf bandana the next day.”
“I noticed that,” Peggy said.
“I’m going to miss him,” I said to Peggy as he rode off into the morning night on his bike. “He was so pleasant to serve first thing in the morning.”
If nothing else, Bush’s re-election is good for the Loony; it’s almost eighty-five cents American. It figures that now that I can afford to go to the States, they want to start fingerprinting Canadians who enter them. And if there is one lesson to be learned from this election it is there is no such thing as “Democracy Building, ” or leading by example. Eleven States banned same-sex marriage even after it has been legal in Canada for almost two years; they banned it despite the fact the Church has fallen to its knees, the country hasn’t been swallowed by a sink hole and, that after several set-backs, the economy keeps growing with a surplus to fall back on.

GarpinBC