Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART EIGHT





This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Eight

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel


Zoltán
/Szabó

The day Zoltán looked at Szabó’s face, or what was left of his face, the degenerated crater that used to be his face, he did not gasp, he did not feel sick, he did not take an inadvertent step backwards, because he was not seeing a crater, not seeing a crater at all, but the unmistakeable dotted outline of the face that was, and even, perhaps, the face that might still be.

Szabó knows this, in some way he can’t even explain. He only let the blanket fall to the floor because he knew Dr. Levy would not gasp or feel sick. He knew Dr. Levy would do something else. He wasn’t sure what, but that didn’t matter; he only knew in his core that it was time for him to reveal himself.

Behold: Szabó! Or rather, the ruins of Szabó, which Dr. Levy examines in medical fascination, looking at him from this angle and that angle like he’s studying a great sculpture, perhaps Michelangelo’s David; seeing potential in three dimensions, not in cold inanimate marble, but in flesh.

“Tamás, I have an idea.”

His head jerks up.

“There’s someone I want you to talk to. His name is Robert Kaplan, a reconstructive surgeon. He puts faces back together. I’ve seen his work.”

Szabó’s whole posture indicates shock.

“You might have enough bone here to work with, Tamás. There’s more left than you realize. It’s been years since the accident, and surgery has taken huge leaps since then.”

If Szabó had a mouth, it would be hanging open about now.

“Tamás, may I have the honour of booking you an appointment with Dr. Kaplan?”

Szabó does not move.

It’s as if he has frozen in his chair.

Seconds tick by. Dr. Levy begins to think that this will never work out, that he has wasted his time, that he -

Then the tightly-wound spring inside Szabó, the wellspring of hope that he has sat on for years, suddenly lets go, and he leaps, leaps at Dr. Levy, even though he can’t see him, leaps like he is flinging himself into what might be a bottomless canyon and what might be his resurrection.

Dr. Levy stumbles back a couple of steps, but saves himself in time, does not fall over backwards. He supports Szabó’s whole weight for a moment as the man crushes him in his arms.

“I take it that’s a yes.”

Szabó makes a sound he’s never heard before. Not a moan or a cry, or even singing. Dr. Levy realizes it can only be one thing, something neither one of them ever expected to hear from him: laughter, that defiant sound that thumbs its nose at despair.







Aggie 

Portman Hotel
November 15, 2003

So much has happened in the last couple of days, it feels like my head has been turned all the way around.

I lugged all the cylinders home with me, the great big bulging orange leaf-bag full of pink cylinders in plain brown containers, and I thought: where do I start? Which one is first? What’s on these – more of that voice I heard, that man, whoever he is, or is it music, or - ?

I fished around in the bag and grabbed. This seems like a good one. Looks just like all the other cylinders, but maybe there’s an invisible “#1” written on it somewhere.

I load it on, crank it up, and start listening.

A sound like frying bacon; ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita. . .

And then: words.

It’s so bloody frustrating, as I can only make out bits of it here and there. But it’s the same guy, I can tell that much, the same voice, speaking slowly and deliberately, but with a kind of sureness, like he knows what he needs to say. It makes me feel weird, like I already know him or something.

And after a while, it gets a little easier to tell what he is saying.

I fill in the gaps with my imagination.

So it goes sort of like this:

“When I set out to send. . . this message. . . into the future, it was with very little notion. . . of who would be able to receive it. Nevertheless, . . .I had a strong and abiding faith. . . that the message. . . would not only be heard, but comprehended. . . and acted upon.”
Okay, so maybe he didn’t say exactly that, but close enough, it’s the gist. I’m getting on to this now, it’s coming easier, like a language I always knew, but didn’t know that I knew:

“In the time. . . in which I am living, the message. . . I have to impart. . . will never be completely comprehended,. . . never be heeded or understood. It must be directed. . . into the unknown . . .with a sureness and steady (something-or-other? Faith?) that someone. . . will be prepared to receive it,. . . and more importantly, . . .to act upon it, . . .on the other side of the future.”

I wonder if I am hearing this right.

“So it is with great excitement. . . that I record. . . these thoughts, in trust. . . that the message. . . will fly to its mark. I hail thee, Listener,. . .for what I am about to impart. . . will leave you changed forever. And out of this transformation. . . will flow the beginnings. . . of a great movement. . .for human change.”


Ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita – stop.






I sit there for a while, stunned by it all, my head spinning, feeling a little bit sick.

I have forty-eight more cylinders to listen to. I’ll ration myself, only listen to one per day. I think that anything more than that would freaking overwhelm me.

I wonder about letting Porgy in on this (I mean Sly – I just can’t get used to calling him that), but – no. This is private, it’s personal. Somehow I know it’s meant for me alone.

He needs a name. He isn’t going to identify himself, somehow I can tell that. So I think hard, and then the perfect name just comes to me out of the blue.

I think I’ll call him Sebastian.


Porgy/Sly

The transformation is not yet complete; Porgy still thinks of himself as Porgy, but now he corrects himself, changing it to Sly whenever he thinks about it.

The ten good things are racking his brain. Aggie said he can fix things. That’s one. What was the other one?

Porgy/Sly goes out more now than he used to. Part of it is out of necessity, because he has to go see Dr. Levy, he made a promise to himself that he’d do it. And he is sick of feeling this way, so burdened down with guilt. He wants Dr. Levy to remove the load, just heave it off his shoulders forever. What would you call that – a guilt-ectomy?

Now he stares at the computer monitor. On the screen is a picture of bones: an x-ray of a woman’s foot.

The foot is three inches long. The arch is buckled and folded in on itself like a train derailment, or a pile-up of solid rock pushed in on itself by the inexorable forces of a glacier. The toes are crushed under, the entire foot folded in half, impossibly distorted and deformed.

Porgy reads in horror and fascination. When this woman was only four years old, her mother took her vulnerable little naked foot in her hands and gave it a ferocious wrench, breaking the toes. It took several wrenches, in fact, to break them all. Then the small broken foot was bound up in bandages which were pulled tighter and tighter each day, until the foot finally yielded.

That little girl would never have normal feet again. All her life she would hobble, her small deformed feet encased in gorgeously-embroidered silk shoes, wooden-soled so she would not topple over: the coveted “three-inch golden lotus” that drove men wild with desire.

Her feet were bound in order to make her marriageable. A girl with normal feet was a disgrace, an embarrassment, a useless parasite, with no sexual prospects, no future, and no hope.

The destroyed feet were, to all intents and purposes, dead. Blood circulation was minimal, and gangrene often set in, with decayed toes sometimes dropping off. Many little girls died from the procedure, from blood poisoning, infection, septicemia. The smell from the crushed feet was appalling, something like a rotting corpse, but it turned men on, it made them hard as the tiny shoes the women forced their feet into every day, it was arousing to them that their women couldn’t walk, couldn’t run, couldn’t escape.

Porgy reads about Chinese footbinding, how it went on for something like a thousand years, and though it was officially banned in 1911, it went on for decades in secret. Some older women in China still hobbled about with folded, deadened feet.

Porgy/Sly wonders: can the same thing happen to your mind?

Porgy/Sly remembers foster homes where love was something you did not hope for, foster homes where alcohol hung over the family like a palpable curse, foster homes where men fondled his private parts as if they owned his body, foster homes where he wanted to die of despair.

But he did not die. Something else happened to him, or didn’t happen, some vital part of him was stunted and could not grow. He hobbled through life, “always on the outside of whatever side there was”, like the Bob Dylan song says, a stranger to everyone, even to himself.

He wonders if it’s too late. He is twenty-eight, and he feels old, his future a blank. In school he was assessed with higher than average intelligence, but he could not learn. His mind had been bound, and it buckled. Eventually it yielded, it had to under all that force, something just had to give.






He wonders if this new name will help. A fresh start in a new direction. He doesn’t want to be Porgy any more, because all Porgy brought him was pain. He has some hope now, at least a little bit of hope from seeing Dr. Levy who has been through so much himself, everybody talks about it, how he came through the war. It’s part of his legend as the rock star of the dispossessed.

Aggie thinks he’s a hero. He wonders how Dr. Levy got through, if his mind ever slid and swayed and collapsed in a heap like a house of cards.

He wonders if he can trust Dr. Levy enough to tell him what he did. When he was about fifteen, he began to experiment a little bit with fire. He would build little bonfires in the alley behind his apartment, roast marshmallows and hot dogs. One day he was in an abandoned building with his friend Shad Johnson, an older boy of about seventeen, another Halfrican, halfling, creme brulée, café au lait, mulatté. Friend may be the wrong term, since Shad Johnson tolerated Porgy more than anything else. Shad needed someone to feel superior to, someone to boss. Porgy wanted to do something to make Shad like him, admire him, or maybe even fear him a little bit, but he didn’t know what.

Then they were crawling around in the ruins of this place, creepy as hell because there was still all sorts of stuff in it, wrecked furniture, an old refrigerator with stinking rotting food in it, even a tablecloth on the table, and dishes.

Porgy was seized with a brilliant idea. He looked at Shad.

“I’ve got a lighter,” he said.

Shad looked at him in disbelief as he set fire to the tablecloth.

It caught. The line of fire quickly snaked up into the draperies, and they exploded into flame. Soon the sofa was on fire, then the chairs, and the room was filling up with thick black smoke.

“Run!” Shad said. They ran and ran. They ran like hell, seemingly for miles, until their lungs ached and felt like they’d explode. The best part of all was reading about the fire in the paper the next day. It had spread to several adjoining buildings, and done thousands of dollars worth of damage. Porgy felt like he was famous. It gave him self-esteem for the first time in his life.

But he doesn’t know how to tell Dr. Levy about this, or all the other times. The other times, when things happened, awful things, consequences. Except that he was never caught, and he never told anybody. A man died in one of Porgy’s fires. He can’t forget it. It gnaws at him all the time.

And then there was the last fire he set, or he hopes it’s the last, pray to God. Nobody died in that one, but what happened was almost worse, because a man shot his face off in despair, all because of what Porgy did.

Maybe next time, once he gets the ten things out of the way, he will make his confession.

Or not.




Mavis

And then: a breakthrough so powerful that it transports Mavis Potter to an entirely new level of euphoric devotion.

She can hardly believe her audacity in planning the break-in. She has never done anything like this in her life before. She has to be sure Dr. Levy isn’t home, of course. She has studied his movements, his comings and goings, and by now she knows his patterns. She spent one entire evening in a parked car a block or so away, watching him move in and out of view through the frame of his living-room window. Now you see him; now you don’t. She wonders if he has music on, what he’s listening to, which one of his stolen CDs he’s playing while he gets mildly drunk on dark beer. And what he had for dinner tonight. Probably heavy on the vegetables, judging by what she found in his garbage can.

She has never seen a woman in the place, and wonders if he ever has sex, casual sex, just for the sake of having it. He’s probably sixty-five years old now, but still. Men can go on forever. Charles hasn’t slowed down at fifty-eight, in fact he seems to get randier with every passing year. She tries to imagine Dr. Levy having sex, but it’s as embarrassing as imagining anyone else having it, it just seems completely impossible.

Mavis has come prepared with tools, a few things to help her get the back door open. It’s the middle of the afternoon, so she has to watch herself, make sure nobody is looking, but coming at night is out of the question, he’d be home, he’d hear her. This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where people worry too much about break-ins, however, and she just doesn’t look the type, she looks like a nice middle-aged librarian, no one would suspect her.

Every once in a while she stops to think about what she is doing, and a wave of shame rolls over her, so potent it feels like an illness. But she can’t stop now, she can’t, the research is going so well, she only needs a little bit more and she’ll be finished. This is going to be her masterpiece, her breakout book. She even has a title for it: Eastside Story, with photographs and accompanying text by Mavis Potter. She fantasizes about accepting the Governor-General award, tries to picture what she will wear, what she’ll say to the reporters.

Getting in is ridiculously easy. It turns out the lock on the back door pops open with only a little manipulation with the screwdriver. The good doctor is too trusting, it seems. Or else he feels he doesn’t have anything worth stealing. He lives on a different plane, that’s why she loves him so much.

Reading his personal notes was thrilling; she sat up late with a glass of scotch and spent hours going over the sheaf of pages, losing all track of time. Most of it was reflections on addiction, no doubt a rough draft to be worked into the book he would never finish, but some of it was more personal, almost like a diary.

“Szabó fascinates me,” he wrote, “as I suspect that his reasons for attempting suicide go far beyond losing all of his paintings in the fire. Aggie Westerman likes to talk about the ‘purple dot’: ‘People who were traumatized as children have a purple dot on their forehead, but only another person with a purple dot can see it.’ That was brilliant, and so true. I have one, Szabó has one, and I suspect the underlying trauma is very similar. And we are about the same age. He was there in Budapest in the mid-‘40s; I know he’s not a Jew, but it didn’t take much to get you in trouble back then, his family may have been persecuted for any number of other reasons. He can’t tell me any of this, of course. He can only write, and what he conveys in writing is rather limited. But I watch him, I see how he reacts. Hope has just been ignited in him, and now there is no turning back. All that remains is to return him to his reason for living, his creativity. But how? A blind painter seems like an impossibility, just too great a leap. But then I think of the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, a phenomenon. That seems impossible, too. And Beethoven composed his most original and powerful works in total deafness. I must find a way for Szabó to create again.”

Leaf, leaf, leaf. Mavis takes another sip of scotch, then drains the glass and refills it. It’s starting to go to her head, or is it the effect of these papers, his private thoughts exposed, his spiky forward-rushing handwriting giving off such vibrant energy she can practically feel his presence in the room?

Her pupils dilate: this looks like a diary entry, personal stuff, the mother lode. She reads on in rapt fascination:

“I try to forget about Annie, but how can I? She has been pushed to the back of my mind, but she won’t stay there, I think about her every day and the way I treated her. We had terrible arguments and I think there was another man, but why didn’t we try to work it out? Why did I leave Annie? And my son. Abandonment! At the time I told myself, tried to make myself believe, that he was better off without me. Such bullshit. No one is “better off”, that was just an excuse for me to leave. I walked at the worst possible time, left her alone with the baby, and since then I haven’t been able to connect with her. No, that’s wrong, I haven’t tried to connect with her. Every day people come to me, they count on me to help them deal with the struggles and frustrations and difficulties in their lives, to help them get clean and sober and get their kids back, and I do my best to help. I help them out of depression, I help them out of despair, and sometimes even keep them from committing suicide. I wonder how they would feel if they knew I was a bigger fuckup than any of them.”

Mavis has long suspected that Zoltán Levy is alone in himself as few other human beings are. Part of it is his intellect, of course (he’d probably agree with that himself), but it goes far beyond that, back to the war, almost a cliché by now, the horrors of the camps, but the thing is, the horrors of the camps really happened, and some people are still having a hard time believing it.

Now she peers into the back end of Zoltán Levy’s house, a modest bungalow, probably at least 50 years old, surely he could afford better than this, but probably doesn’t care much about his surroundings, living on such an exalted plane of existence. She is entering from the rear, the anus of the building, a dark and cluttered place full of old boots and bicycles and ski poles and an old floor lamp, an obstacle course she must stagger through to gain entry. She flips on a light, and finds herself in the kitchen. Suddenly the fine hairs on her face rise and prickle: there’s someone in the house. No: something. 







A black shadow hurtles down the hallway and surges into the kitchen, barking ferociously: the Rottweiller! Mavis backs up and backs up until she is pressed against the wall. But she thought of this in advance, she knew there was a dog, she is prepared, and she fishes around in her pocket, pulling out a handful of raw hamburger.

Soon Rosie is whining with pleasure and licking her fingers, wagging her stump of a tail in gratitude.

So the investigation continues. Living room, sparsely furnished, looks like Ikea, clever man, he can put furniture together, I always suspected he was good with his hands. CDs – God, look at all the CDs! Seems like thousands, just piled up everywhere, in no particular order. She wonders how he ever finds anything. Then she sees a shelf, already packed full. These are alphabetized by composer, all of them still pristinely wrapped in cellophane. This was how they started out, she assumes, but eventually they overflowed like anything that is contained for too long.

Then. . .the bedroom. This is where she has longed to be, where Zoltán Levy sleeps, dreams, blows his nose, masturbates, gets dressed in the morning. She pokes around in the walk-in closet, pulling down and smelling shirt after shirt; she draws one of them on to her body, and of course it doesn’t fit, it’s way too small on her top-heavy frame, but for one instant she has the thrilling sensation that she is Zoltán Levy, and it creates a pure panic of exhilaration.

Then, the bed.

It’s unmade, of course, a bachelor bed, and the sheets likely have not been changed in quite a long time. She pulls back the tumbled covers and eases herself in. The smell of him is everywhere: a dark European smell, not like North American men at all, this is like very dark chocolate, the kind you can only get overseas, intoxicating and somewhat bitter, with a silken, sensuous mouthfeel, melting slowly, gorgeously in the mouth like a great liquefying gob of butter.

She rolls from side to side, wallowing in the essence of Zoltán. Her hand creeps southward, and she begins to touch and explore, teasing herself, not yet, not yet. In a few minutes she is close to orgasm, but tries to hold it off, resisting. It is nearly impossible, but she makes herself wait, and wait. Then she thinks of his face when he saw her on the street, the look of slight confusion, a “what’s this, do I know you?” look: and suddenly she cannot hold back another second, the orgasm rips through her body with spasmodic force, leaving her drenched in sweat, gasping, and shuddering with the frightening intensity of the pleasure.

It takes several minutes for her to recover sufficiently to get up and walk.

Then she makes her escape, having taken only one shirt, the shirt she has on her body, as her trophy.



Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five



Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART SEVEN





This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside


Part Seven

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel



Mavis

Mavis Potter likes to take a camera and stroll the streets of Zeddyville, snapping this, snapping that; a grizzled old homeless man, his pants such a miserable fit that he’s forced to hold them up with one hand; an emaciated hooker, body so wasted it looks like a rack of bones, sweating and fidgeting for an overdue fix; an offended tourist (“not my picture! I don’t belong here”). She loves to snap the murals, gory and gaudy and gang-marked, the violent graffiti, the strange signs (“Is It A Crime To Be Homeless?”), including her favourite sign of all, right there in the very asshole of Vancouver: 000 Hastings Street.

Zero, zero, zero. . . there’s those zeds again, she thinks to herself, adjusting her wool cap, a new accoutrement to her bag-lady persona. She started off badly, almost like a Downtown Eastside version of Carol Burnett, too cuddly and respectable-looking in her woollen layers to be believable at all. Then one day she hacked holes in the sweaters and ripped at them, forcing the fibres apart with her bare hands like she was tearing at flesh. The enjoyment she derived from this shocked her a little, but it did not stop her.

Mavis licks her lips, cracked and chapped, without lipstick or even Chapstick, for that would interfere with the Look. She hasn’t worn makeup in months, and her hair – her hair is beginning to smell, and looks so bad she has to keep her head covered with a scarf when she’s not “out”.

Zero, zero, zero. Almost a cliché, she thinks to herself (snap). Zee, zee, zee, or is it Ground Zero, or is it more of an “ooo”. . . the “ooo” of withdrawal, of I need a fix cause I’m goin’ down (like in that Beatles song she never understood).

Mavis wants to bag a big one today, but is not sure she’ll be able to pull it off. The trophy she’s after, the amputated animal head she wants to mount on the wall of her study at home, is the head of Dr. Zoltán Levy. Bring me the head of Zoltán Levy; bring it to me indeed, stare-eyed and blank-faced on a charger, surrounded with sprigs of parsley! But like most big game, he never appears when he is supposed to. (Snap. Fuck off, lady. Get out of my face. Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else.)

Charles saw some of the photos, and in his mild studious way, his mild studious way that hides the heart of an absolute asshole, he asked her, “Mavie, what’s this?”

“Oh. . . just some shots I took for a project I’m working on.”

“This?” Pictures of spent syringes, a pool of vomit, a dead rat beside an overflowing garbage can, a passed-out man, another passed-out man, an aged Native face seamed by weather and wood alcohol, a hooker, another hooker, another hooker. . .

“I’m doing a book.”

“Some book.” That mild, quizzical look. Charles Potter’s students thought he resembled a big, ruffly brown owl. The owl fucks his students, unfortunately, fucks them blind, lures them with poems and promises and leaves them spinning around on their ass on icy black pavement.






“It’s a departure for me, yes. Downtown Eastside images, to illustrate a cycle of poems.”

“Really. You go there?”

“Only to do research.”

Professor Potter clears his throat and goes back to his papers, the grades in direct proportion to how much sex he gets from each of them. Cunnilingus? B+, maybe. Blow job? A-minus. All the way up the ass, with leather pants, a riding crop and spurs? A+. Or so Mavis imagines, when she thinks about it at all, for it’s easier for her to just lose herself on these streets and forget that she is married to anyone.

Mavis thinks she sees him. Quivering, she jerks the camera up to her face. But it’s not, it’s not him, it’s some other dark Ashkenazic-looking face, a poor substitute, just some schlub who happened to wander in front of her camera, and her heart plummets like a shot sparrow, dead feathers hitting the sidewalk with a sickening thunk.

She will get her photograph of Dr. Levy if it takes her a month of perseverence. She has started to do a little investigating about his habits, there are ways of finding out. She already knows where he lives. She knows he has a Rottweiller named Rosie, she’s seen him out for his little walks with her in the evening. She knows he likes a dark beer now and then, has even glimpsed him in the Jolly Taxpayer wiping foam off his upper lip. Women she’s not so sure of, but there was somebody, she is sure of it. She’ll find out. Who and when and where. Details. She hoards them, sorts them, shuffles them lovingly, and pastes them in her ever-growing scrapbook of Zoltánia, exotica, paper dolls made of cutout magazine-photos that she toys with, turning them over lovingly in her hands.




Porgy

Porgy is fascinated. For he has found out that it’s not just an internet myth: it really is true what they said about Elvis.

Maybe the 60 pounds of impacted fecal material was a bit of an exaggeration, but when he found the report, the actual Elvis autopsy report, on a site called The King is Dead: Long Live the King!, he was gratified to read that Presley’s colon was indeed choked with masses of undigested deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, burnt bacon and Moon Pies.

Elvis did not take a crap for at least ten years. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the autopsy report, which Porgy reads with rapt fascination:

“The colon is approximately five to seven feet in length in a person Elvis’s size and should have been about two inches in diameter. . . however, Elvis’s colon was at least three and a half inches in diameter in some places and as large as four and a half to five inches in diameter in others. . . (T)he megacolon was jam-packed from the base of the descending colon all the way up and halfway across the transverse colon. It was filled with white, chalklike fecal material.”

Like a lot of drug addicts, Elvis just stopped going to the bathroom at a certain point, and everything backed up like a sewer. Peristalsis ground to a halt, his colon blew up like an enormous bratwurst, and he couldn’t pass anything but the odd rabbit pellet. Didn’t he die on the toilet? It’s enough to send Porgy back to the purging pills and potions.

“Sylvester,” Dr. Levy says to him at their last little session, “you’re in danger of doing serious harm to yourself. There’s nothing wrong with your colon, I’ve examined you, it’s completely normal. You’re not all bunged up with shit like my heroin patients. So why do you do it?”

“Ah, I dunno,” he says, bashful, ashamed. “Makes me feel better.”

“But why? You’re going to develop a dependency on those pills. Pretty soon you won’t be able to take a normal crap without them.”

Dr. Levy leans into him, gazes at him with his penetrating dark eyes.

“Why, Sylvester?”

“Ah, I just. . . “ He looks at the ceiling, then the floor. “It’s just that I feel so. . . guilty.”






Guilt Dr. Levy knows about. Guilt he absorbed with his mother’s milk. He ate it and drank it and slept with it and breathed it for more years than he cares to admit.

“Sylvester.”


“Doc, why you call me that?”

“Because it’s your name. And you just told me you hate being called Porgy.”

“I do. It’s a nigger name.” He looks up from his floorward stare to gauge Dr. Levy’s reaction to the word.

He says it again.

“Nigger.”

Dr. Levy looks at him, unflinching, unblinking.

“Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

Dr. Levy doesn’t move.

“Did anyone ever call you that, Sylvester?”

“Did anyone ever call me that.” He looks up at the ceiling. “Did anyone ever call me that.”

“You’re angry.”

“No I’m not.”

“Angry feelings can turn into guilty feelings, Sylvester, especially if we don’t express them.”

“Doc, why you call – “

“Because it’s your name, Sylvester. You have a name, a real actual name your mother and father gave you. You don’t have to go by that awful handle they gave you in high school.”

“I was fat.”

“Did you try to lose weight?”

“I took laxatives.”

“Sylvester.” Dr. Levy looks a little weary. “You don’t have to do this to yourself any more. It’s unhealthy, and an abusive way to treat your body.”

“But I feel like shit.”

“That doesn’t mean you are shit.”

“I feel like it.”

“You’re a human being, Sylvester, a unique individual. In all of human history, there has never been anyone else exactly like you.”

“Good for human history.”

Dr. Levy smiles a bit. Porgy feels a warm flush rise in his face, a good feeling.

“There’s only one of you, Sylvester, you’re absolutely unique, and you have value and worth, just like every other human being on the face of the planet.”

“Even Saddam Hussein?”

“Look, Sylvester, I don’t know why some people turn evil. It’s beyond me. I only know you’re not. There’s a sweetness about you, a goodness. It’s time you started treating yourself like you mattered.”

He doesn’t want to cry, but feels like crying anyway, big baby that he is. He wants Dr. Levy to wrap him up in a warm fuzzy blanket, kiss his forehead, take him home.

“Doc,” he says, his voice a bit choked.

“Yes, Sylvester.”

“Can I ask you a favour?”

“Name it.”

“Can you call me Sly?”

“I’ll call you whatever you want to be called.”

“It’s just that. . . you know, Sly Stallone is so cool. And Sylvester, it just sounds too much like a cat.”

“Yes, I’ll call you Sly, on one condition, that you stop taking all those capsules. You’re going to perforate your colon if you don’t watch out. Promise?”


“I promise.” He knows he’s lying, but he has to agree to it or Dr. Levy will never let him out of here.

“I want to see you in a week.”

“Sure thing.”

“Try to go a week without purging.”

“Okay.”

“Sly.”


“Yeah, doc.”

“I want you to think of ten good things about yourself.”

“Ten?”

“Work on it. See you in a week. Now get out of here.”

On the way out the door of the Portman, he notices he feels different: less guilty, and somehow lighter, his head full of the rarefied helium of hope.




The bus

The people on the bus go up and down. Up and down. Up and down.

Bert Moffatt notices a difference in them today. They’re restless; antsy. He doesn’t see Szabó. Something is definitely out of whack here, as Szabó always gets on at the same time every day. Where his he? Is he all right?

But Aggie’s here, looking preoccupied, kind of like she’s on a mission or something. She gets on with that half-black boy, what’s his name, Porky or something, nice kid but always looks a little lost, like Aggie has to lead him around by the hand. He always looks terrified on the bus.

Today it’s different, for some reason she’s calling him by a new name, but keeps breaking into giggles.

“Sly. I can’t get used to it, Porg.”

“But I hate my name. Porgy. It’s a slave name. Besides, Dr. Levy says. . .”

“You saw Levy?”

“Yeah.” Porgy/Sly looks a little uncomfortable, but pleased too. “I saw him. I’m s’posed to think of ten good things about myself.”

“Sounds like him. He’s always going on and on about how we’re all unique and irreplaceable. . .”

“He told you that?” Disappointment clouds his face. He looks like a slighted child, shut out of a circle game. He thought maybe he was the only one.

“Oh, don’t worry, he means it, Porg. I mean, Sly. Is that really your name?”

“Well, kind of.”

“So. Ten things.”

“Yeah, ten. I’m kind of getting stuck on one.”

“You’re Porgy; you’re Porgy; you’re Porgy. . .”

“But I’m not Porgy, Ag, I’m Sylvester. My father named me after a Graham cracker.”

“No shit.” Aggie sees she has hurt him. “Sorry. . . Sly. It just takes some getting used to, is all.”

“Yeah, well, I’m brown like a Graham cracker, so what can you expect.”

“So. Ten things. I can think of a few right off the top. Just to get you started, I mean. You’re good at fixing things. Hell, you even got my Edison Bannerfront Standard going again after a hundred years. That ain’t bad. You’re a whiz at doing research. Just look at all you found out about cylinder recording on the internet. I learned everything from you. You’re a walking encyclopedia. Hey, only eight more things to go!”






Porgy/Sly wonders if Dr. Levy said ten so he’d think of one, or maybe two. He hopes Aggie’s small list will be enough.

They get off the bus at the flea market, making their way through the milling crowds to the table where they bought the cylinders and the player. But everything has changed. There’s nothing on the table now but a clutter of old junk, teacups and tacky figurines. The fat bald man who sold her the player isn’t even there any more. A grandmotherly-looking Chinese woman smiles at them from behind the table.

“Uh, excuse me. . . I bought some cylinders here a couple of months ago.”

“Cyrinder?” The word is obviously unfamiliar to her, it would be to practically anyone, and Aggie’s hopes begin to sink.

“Uh. . .old recordings. You know, gramophone. . .” She mimes a cranking motion, and sound flowing out of a horn. The woman looks puzzled.

“Cylinders. I bought one that was pink.” She feels her excitement sagging into disappointment. Porgy/Sly tugs at her hand. Let’s get out of here.

“Ah. Cyrinder. Come this way, pleass.”

She takes Aggie and Porgy/Sly down a corrider into a cluttered storage room.

There, in a large coardboard crate, is a huge collection of cylinders in plain brown containers.

There must be four dozen of them, at least. Aggie looks at Porgy/Sly in wild excitement.

She opens one of the canisters, slides the cylinder out, and holds it in her hand.

It’s pink.

“How much for all these?”

“Oh, you take, you take. Man leave them here, he don’t want, you have them.”

“Really? I should pay you something for these.”

“Oh no. We get rid of, you take, make some space back here, eh? Have a nice day.” She beams at them, then hurries back to her table.

The trip home is a wild ride, as more than once somebody tries to rip off the huge orange leaf-bag crammed with pink cylinders from 1887, thinking they are pop cans gleaned from the dumpster. Nobody has any idea, nobody but her and Porgy (I mean Sly), that what they carry is a bag of magic so potent it will allow them to transcend the maddening obstacle of time.







Szabó

Szabó shows up as faithfully in Dr. Levy’s office as he used to show up in his studio every morning.

Some progress has been made. He writes his messages, sometimes in Hungarian, sometimes in English, very messy because he can’t see, but just legible.

It becomes apparent that he believes he has lost his reason to live.

Not for him the “everyone is valuable” message; Dr. Levy knows that won’t play. He won’t accept it; he’s too complicated, too subtle, too smart.

Dr. Levy always addresses him in Hungarian, which gives him a warm feeling in his centre, something he hasn’t felt in years.

“Tamás, I realize you feel like you’re lost. You may have lost your way temporarily, but you are not lost. You lost a great deal, it’s true – in fact a staggering amount, all your work, your relationship, even your face. But Tamás is still here. You still have your mind.”

Szabó scrawls: That is the hell of it, doctor, my mind lives, I remember what I was, and I see what I am now, I am beggar what lives on street, I sit on corner and wait for alms.

“Your eyes are gone, Tamás, it’s true. But not your creativity. Your creative mind is as intact as it ever was. It’s just that the energy has nowhere to go.”

Dr. Levy can tell from the inclination of his head that he has hit home.

“Tamás. I want to ask you something. And this is very important. You can say no if you want to. Tamás. . . can I look at you?”

His head turns with a start.

“Can I look at your face?”

Face? What’s left of it, the crater, the mass of deformed scar tissue? No one looks at Szabó, they would die if they looked. They would turn to stone.

Szabó sits in horror, which slowly turns to awe.

He realizes something, something powerful, something surprising.

He wants Dr. Levy to look.

It takes a few minutes before his hand will move. This is worse than a year of streetcorner-sitting boiled down into a few seconds of desperate hope.

He wants to live, doesn’t. Wants to take the chance, is sickened by it. Feels Dr. Levy standing near his chair, almost feels the heat from him, and thinks of a dog about to be euthanized, how it will suddenly relax into the veterinarian’s hands.

He drags the old blanket up over his head, holds it above himself like a fetid woolen tent for a few seconds, then lets it drop with an exhausted sigh on the floor of Dr. Levy’s office.


Mavis


It’s after midnight, and Mavis Potter is rummaging through Zoltán Levy’s garbage.

To someone else it’s garbage, a bunch of smelly discarded old food and broken junk; to her, a treasure trove: coffee grounds, probably from some expensive Sumatran roast; vegetable peelings and tops (it appears the good doctor is largely vegan, though the odd chop bone spoils the effect); dog poo, or at least she hopes it’s dog, assuming Rosie must have had an accident somewhere in the house; an old paint shirt full of stains and splotches and holes, which she lifts up to her face and lovingly, lingeringly smells; inexplicably, a classical music CD still in its original plastic wrapper (a Deutsche-Grammophon recording of Brahms’ Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2, performed by Maria Joao Pires, Augustin Dumay and Jian Wong; this she confiscates, looking forward to listening to it later); a Hungarian newspaper, damp and crumpled; and oh. Papers. Handwritten papers, masses of them, perhaps notes, a rough draft for this book he is trying to write? Or something more personal: a journal, perhaps? His private thoughts? Thank God it’s written in English. She quickly crams them into her bag, looking around, wondering if anyone has seen her, feeling the thrill of shame.

She saw him out with his dog the other morning, Rottweiller, Nazi dog, such a strange choice for a Jew. For this expedition she wore her normal clothes, civilian garb, a tweed suit, skirt and blazer and brown oxfords, sexless shoes, she’d keep the other ones for later, and walked around and around the neighborhood in North Vancouver carrying a brown leather briefcase and hoping she looked like a Jehovah’s Witness or something, or as if she were canvassing for some worthy cause, a social issue, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, rape crisis centre, whatever. She tried to look purposeful, and she certainly was, like any predator, single-minded, alert and focused on the task, the task of capturing Zoltán Levy, of making him her own.

She even passed by him on the sidewalk that day, her heart hammering wildly, and he glanced up and for a split-second looked a bit puzzled, a “do I know you? No, I guess not” look that lasted a fleeting instant before he walked on.

Score.

Mavis cherishes these moments, recalls them when she is lying in bed at night beside her snoring hulk of a husband; her hand will steal down to the sensitive place between her legs, and she will begin to caress herself, and caress herself, until she has to bite down hard to stifle the groan when orgasm rips through her shuddering body. The dark and downtrodden Messiah of the streets, her damaged saint, has ravished her once again.

The CD rests under her pillow, still faintly garbage-scented, still unplayed. She wonders what made him pitch it out: guilt? Turning over a new leaf: I’ll never steal again, starting now? Oh, she knows how that one goes. Every trip to Zoltán Levy’s neighborhood is her last, this time she really means it, she’ll stop, she can stop any time she wants to, it’s just that she needs to find out just a little bit more about him so she can put it all in this book, this cycle of poems, or maybe she should write a novel, that’s it, she’ll publish at last and get some long-overdue recognition and respect, the Giller prize maybe, no, that’s asking too much, but all this research she’s doing right now has a purpose, it does. She’ll show Charles, show him she can write at least as well as those nubile young women he samples like so many hors d’ouevres when he feels a bit peckish. Fuck Charles, she’ll write a bestseller, she’ll win the Booker Prize, Dr. Levy will have to take notice of her then and not look askance at her like she’s some demented freak detective prowling the neighborhood for clues.

She has stopped taking the Remeron and the Seroquel, they were only dulling her thinking, and besides, she doesn’t need them any more, her depression is completely gone, she has better orgasms without the pills, and her life has a sense of mission, of purpose, a hurtling forward momentum she has never experienced, an intensity, it’s just like that poem from Yeats, a terrible beauty is born, it’s exhilarating, it’s noble, it’s furiously fine, and it speeds her forward into an accelerated state of bliss the likes of which she has never known before. Like Clara Schumann with her feverish illicit love for Brahms, her Johannespassion, Mavis has her Zoltánnespassion, an involvement, a commitment, a devotion so complete it wipes her mind absolutely clean of the shadows of the past.







The bus

The people on the bus are drunk and stoned. Drunk and stoned. Drunk. . . and. . .stoned.

Three kids about fifteen years old get on the bus at Broadway and Granville. The two boys are stocky, dressed in black leather with a lot of studs and chains, pale and a little bit puffy in the face like habitual drinkers. Alcohol fumes surround them in a nearly-visible nimbus. The girl is emaciated, sad-eyed and plaintive of voice, with multiple facial piercings and dry, three-colour hair.

“That’s because you never do any fuckin’ work around the place. You never even stack the fuckin’ dishes.”

“Ah, ya fuckin’ whiner. Make me sick. Always fuckin’ complaining.”

The two boys squeeze into a seat at the back. The girl sits next to a bewildered-looking pink-faced elderly woman in a navy coat and a white plastic rain hat.

“Yeah, talk about bein’ a fuckin’ loser, try pulling your own weight around the place.” The girl begins to sniffle and rubs her nose. “Fuck, I need some coke.”

“I need a fix, ‘cause I’m goin’ down. . . “

“Mother Superior jumped the gun.”

“My Mum does coke.”

“Fuckin’ A!”

“Loser.”
“Fuck off, bitch.”

“You’re a loser. That’s why you always talk that way. You talk like a fuckin’ loser.”

“Yeah, well at least I’m not a fuckin’ addict.”

“No. You’re a fuckin’ alcoholic.”

“My Mom’s an addict.”

“My Mom’s a slut.” Stoned laughter. The girl covers her face with her hands. The bigger of the two boys grabs her backpack and holds it up and away from her, then tosses it to to the blonde boy who wraps his arms around it. Screaming bloody murder, the girl lunges at him and slashes at his face with her black-painted fingernails.

“Hey, fuck off, bitch!”

“Driver! Driver!” The little old lady is in a panic. “Driver, do something about this. These young people are fighting back here. And their language is simply appalling.”

The driver, a beaten-down-looking East Indian man in a dark blue turban, has a wife and five kids at home. He doesn’t want to call the supervisor, it holds up the bus and makes everyone angry and makes him late, and he doesn’t want to pull the kids off the bus because he might get hurt, or worse, hurt them – but the old lady is agitating now, and the girl is clearly out of control, screaming and slapping the two boys on the side of the head with terrifying force.

“Fuckin’ Christ.”

“Bitch, you are losin’ it!”

“Order, order please,” the driver says mildly.

“Give me my FUCKING bag!” The girl yanks the backpack out of the blonde guy’s arms, falling over backwards into the aisle of the bus. The two boys in the back convulse with laughter. Blood is trickling down the burly boy’s face, and the blonde boy has an angry red hand-mark on the side of his head.

As if performing some elaborate break-dance manouevre, the girl twists and turns her wasted body around and somehow wrenches herself into an upright position. She flings the backpack over her shoulder and leans her face in so close to the two boys that they can smell her blue lipstick.

“Fucking. . .losers.”

She wheels around and strides to the back door, almost knocking down a nicely-dressed old Chinese man in the aisle, a standee.

“Ho-ly shit.”

“Hello, Valleyview? Get a bed ready.”

“That bitch is fucked.”

“Language,” says the old lady.

“Jesus Christ,” murmurs the driver.

The well-dressed old Chinese man picks himself up, leans out the open exit door and stares fiercely at the girl, who stands splay-legged at the side of the street. The passengers strain to hear what he will say.

“You die.”

“Eat shit, Chink!”

“You die, then fuck off.”

The door wheezes shut and the bus pulls away from the stop.



Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five



Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Unliving dolls





An obsession I return to over and over again is the creepiness of dolls, rivalled only by the creepiness of clowns. Both are meant to bring joy and pleasure to small children (or rather "children of all ages!", as they say at the circus). Come to that, circuses are pretty creepy too, or at least the circuses I saw as a kid:  tawdry is a better word, with sad elephants, bad smells and clowns who had probably seen better days and likely fuelled themselves from a flask.

This is the first video I've found with a complete set of Edison Talking Doll recordings. Or, at least, I fervently pray it is a complete set and I won't find any more. God only knows where they got them, as I would've thought the wax cylinders would have melted down by now. 





The dolls had a most un-cuddly steel  body with holes in it to concentrate the "audio". I think either the crank or the cylinder broke down almost immediately. Did this freak out kids? It might have filled them with wonder. Even some of the stranger dolls from the 1960s were seen as completely charming, like the one who had different facial expressions when you wrenched her arm around (and what was her name, anyway?), or the one who said creepy things like, "I can see in the dark" and "I wish we were twins".





"Doll" has taken on a whole new meaning. When I first heard about "reborns", they were dolls with realistic-looking arms and legs and head, and a cloth body like a conventional vinyl doll. And they were vinyl. Originally, you just took a vinyl doll and mucked around with it until it looked more-or-less real.

Soon the dollmakers upped the ante, placing beating hearts in these things, heaters, voice recordings so they'd cry and coo, and even the capacity to wet and (I think) poop. Jesus, you might as well just have yourself a real kid!






But soon that wasn't enough, either. I began to see dolls molded out of silicone, one-piecers I mean, their limbs jiggling like a rubber frog's. These were so "lifelike" they scared the hell out of me. One of these might run as high as $10,000.00, though I just found this one on eBay:







5h left (Today 5:06PM)
From China
Soft Brown Hair Full Silicone Vinyl Reborn Baby Dolls Lifelike Newborn Baby Doll
$1.99
0 bids


Though it's described here as "full silicone", I have a feeling it's the kind of doll you might find at a dollar store: "Mo-o-o-o-o-m, can I have that doll?" "Oh, okay. It's only worth a couple of bucks."





I have weird feelings about these dolls. I honestly do. After watching a number of "Kaylee's Morning Routine" videos, which made me gasp, I began to wonder what it would be like to own a doll so real-looking that cops broke the glass in hot car windows to rescue them. (Doll owners are not above such pranks and love freaking people out while shopping at Walmart, sometimes casually abandoning them in the ladies' room.) I even. . . no, I didn't, but yes, I DID look at some of them, decided they weren't worth my while and that you needed to pay five grand to get a really good one.





Now I wonder what I was thinking of. Getting a cat seemed to rescue me from such thoughts.  I didn't realize I was at such a low point. At least the cat is real.

If you watch their YouTube videos, the collectors cannot understand why anyone would find their obsession creepy. "Full-body silicone" seems to be the Cadillac of these never-born, never-dead things, quickly replacing those clunky old cloth-bodies that can't even be bathed. This rarefied cult strikes me as stereotyped and largely misunderstood. Wikipedia says reborns are owned almost exclusively by elderly women who at some point suffered the loss of a child, but that's simply not true. Nearly all the videos I've seen are of women in their 20s and 30s, and quite a few of them are teenagers.

I can only assume that they just like having them around to feed, dress, bathe and take on "outings", and collect them obsessively. Elaborate, thrill-packed box-opening ceremonies abound on YouTube, each one packed with as much fun and excitement as a baby shower. These are actually entertaining to watch: though the disaster openings ("ohhhhh noooooo, his head is warped. . .") are even more fun.





I keep thinking of a chant we had in school: "Rubber baby-buggy bumpers". You had to say it ten times fast, or something, though I am not sure why.




POSTSCRIPT (there's always one of those!): I found this weird little entry in Wikipedia, which gets just about everything wrong about reborn dolls:

A reborn doll is a manufactured skin doll that has been transformed to resemble a human infant with as much realism as possible. The process of creating a reborn doll is referred to as reborning and the doll artists are referred to as reborners. Reborn dolls are also known as Bodo dolls or unliving dolls.


I've scoured the internet and found NO reference to "Bodo dolls", though I did find "Bobo dolls". These are the roly-poly clown things that bounce back up when you push them over. For some reason, all sorts of scientific experiments have been done on these that don't interest me at all. "Unliving" isn't easy to find either, except on really creepy sites that have nothing to do with these dolls.

And then there's this:




Social issues and reactions

The overwhelming majority of reborn customers are older women. Many women collect reborns as they would a non-reborn doll, whilst others purchase them to fill a void of a lost child and may treat reborns as living babies. Media features and public receptions have used such adjectives as "creepy" to describe the reborns. This can be explained by the uncanny valley hypothesis. This states that as objects become more lifelike they gain an increasing empathetic response, until a certain point at which the response changes to repulsion. Department stores have refused to stock the dolls because of this reaction, claiming they are too lifelike.

I don't know if I have seen any "older women" on the YouTube videos, if older means 60s or 70s. Many of them are less than half my age. Wikipedia makes no reference at all to the "full-body silicone" doll which is all the rage now. This information is at least ten years out of date. Wiki is mostly put together by guys in their 20s, the ones that live in Mom's basement and really don't get out much, or do much of anything except steal each other's research.




As for department stores not selling them because they are "too lifelike", it's more likely they don't sell them because of the price factor. Really good ones cost hundreds or even many thousands of dollars. Unless they bolted them to the shelves (hmmmmm. . . ), they could stand to lose a lot through shoplifting. Picture it: reborn kidnappers wearing maternity coats sneaking into the toy department and smuggling the little blighters out past the store alarms.

BTW, I'd be interested to see if there is any feuding between "old-school" cloth-bodied reborners and the newer, full-body-silicone crowd. I have never seen a video of a conventional reborn which could be bent and twisted and slung around like this. Nor do they have realistic genitals, a detail which squicks out even some of the most die-hard collectors. That hunk of quivering pink silicone looks EXACTLY like a real baby, folks, and that is exactly what makes it so creepy.

Bodo, anyone?






Damn, I thought I was finished! But I just had a horrible thought. These dolls are molded, right? HOW DO THEY MAKE THE MOLDS? The only method I can think of is to make a plaster cast of a baby. How else could they make it that realistic, down to those last minute bumps of scarlet prickly heat?





Dear God. This is worse than the squawky, distorted, Night of the Living Dead Edison doll recordings! I found some instructions for making a silicone, baby, but I find them kind of hard to believe. Nevertheless, in the interests of science, I will share them with you:

There is one way to do a full mold for a full silicone baby, and I have been researching this, but haven’t done it yet.

You start off by drawing a line through the center of the baby, around its head, fingers, toes.

Then you take some white clay and put it on the bottom of the mold, and pack it into the center lines all around the baby.

You take a flat brush and dampen it and go around the edges making sure the clay is sealed.

Cut off excess on sides to not be wasteful with product.

Take the end of a sharpie with the lid on it, and make holes around the baby, which will be the center holes that hold the mold together. You can even put the round nuts around it if you want to.

Close the mold, and mix the dragon skin, or silicone you are using for the mold, and add flocking for the color you want the mold to be.




Pour the product into the mold covering the baby half that you can see.

Let it cure.

Cut the mold open and remove the clay and any loose silicone that is dangling.

Clean all of the clay off.

Turn the baby over and roll up a clay hole maker to put into the center for the pour hole.

Cover the remainder of the baby.

Let cure.

Remove. It comes apart, but you can pour the baby into the pour hole.

Make sure to Tap tap tap to get all of the air bubbles out, because you don’t want those. It will waste your silicone product. Also turn to cover every nook and cranny.