Keeping Things Whole Page 2

  I was nineteen. I could have pleaded, showed her the paint freckles on my forearms, handed her invoices. Honest money, I swear. She could have followed me to the next day’s (legitimate) job site. But I liked the feeling of an open door in front of me. She hadn’t yelled, so I took my time packing a few things. She got the last word, so I went for the last note. I’ll come for more when you’re out and leave my key when I’m done. I’d like Voodoo when I’m settled.

  And that was it. No more little boy. Slept in my truck the first two nights. Not at Gran’s, certainly not at Nathan’s. Kinked the shit out of my neck then ate large breakfasts in restaurants. I already owned a little cooler.

  4. Safe Sisters

  1998. Life before Facebook. If Kate had run into my soul even half a decade later, on your thumb-clicking side of the millennium, I wouldn’t have been playing my games with the border, and she wouldn’t have sent me a paper invitation to Soup by Safe Sisters.

  Windsor couldn’t be Canada’s car city without a jillion garages for rent. My painting company rented one, and a mailbox, downtown (each registered to Trevor Reynolds). Before a green punt with the trebuchet, I could be at the garage three times in a single night, ears cocked for sirens and the bark of a sniffer dog. Normally I’d hit the mailbox just once a week, endure the bills and sift the flyers, see who was trying to sell business to my fake business. But after meeting Kate in the park I obsessively checked the mail and phones at work and home.

  Her invite called me out to a charity soup sale by some group called the Safe Sisters. Birth-control collective? Feminist satyagraha? No point inviting me if she’d been a nun (with that ass?). Across the back of the card she’d scrawled, I’ll be there, probably not running. —Kate.

  Wa-ha-ha-hell.

  The Sisters, soup, whether or not to wear a suit to that bar—her card presented half a dozen questions and plenty to admire. In a stroke she asked me to reiterate my interest in her, clarified we’d be meeting in public, summoned me to her turf and, if the title was any clue, ensured that she’d be surrounded by other women. Protectors and audience both. Friends, colleagues, frenemies—they all get filed under Female Audience. With all this blood under the bridge, I truly wish the most accurate dispatch I’ve ever read from the gender wars wasn’t some bitter-coffee Euro-novelist’s line that men want beautiful women whereas women want men who have had beautiful women. Sad but true.

  And soup. Good call, Kate. She too was coming up on twenty-five and like me was probably graduating from heating food to actually cooking. It’s pretty hard to fuck up soup made from fresh ingredients, and in September Windsor is just bursting with food. We sprout peaches, plums, and cherries, pop out so many tomatoes they’re harvested by dump truck. We grow most Canadian vegetables, all with a fine carcinogenic mist from the epicentre of North American manufacturing. Detroit went from being called “an Earthly paradise” to “the arsenal of democracy.” In Windsor, we paved paradise and put up a parking lot, a bar, and a strip joint. We’ve got our own modest symphony, but the Windsor Ballet has always been local code for our strippers. Strip joints in strip malls, several downtown, even one right off the bridge. Kate and her Sisters will tell you what we do and don’t pay for with the local skin tax.

  We’re within a thousand kilometres of 60 percent of Canadian and American manufacturing, yet the thickest section of our Yellow Pages sells the world’s oldest service/product. More escorts than car dealers, machinists, and boob-job surgeons combined. So many Sachas, so little time. Don’t think this pimping is all underground. Law-student Kate founded Safe Sisters because even the municipal government was stroking a young back for a buck. City Hall took an annual licensing fee off every stripper and escort. The local titty tax risked breaking federal anti-pimping laws, so municipal staff were forbidden to provide info on STIs or sexual safety. Enraged (and self-interested), Kate started up Safe Sisters.

  I was falling for a woman, not a girl. With Safe Sisters, Kate saw a winning combination for her CV: a genuine opportunity for social justice work and, by teaming up female law students with escorts and strippers, the near certainty of alcohol at all events. What newspaper editor (or law firm) could resist? In life before social networking, Kate had to tempt the local paper, not her own camera, to take photos of her, Safaa, and a few other law school friends. After one cleavagey article, a few flyers, and a simple, late-90s website, Safe Sisters was born.

  All this to say the crowded downtown bar I walked into was thick with the smell of soup and drugstore perfume. Mason jars and Brazilian waxes. What a play. I had to impress her and her friends while simultaneously avoiding the trap of ogling a stripper or escort. Even the soups on sale would show her if I went for gaudy cheap thrills (cream-of-vegetable-something smothered in chalky Parmesan) or slow-roasted goodness (ginger carrot topped with roasted cashews).

  No city can have this many Italian then Indian immigrants, a history of smuggling, and a nightlife industry that triples its downtown population without a few good tailors. I wasn’t even twenty-five, and my pungent night job had me in a made-to-measure charcoal suit. At law school, her male classmates were reluctantly counting down the days until they wore suits for the rest of their lives. Personally, I was glad whenever I wasn’t in paint-spattered day clothes or the ninja-wear from a 3 a.m. punt.

  I walked towards her thinking I’d talk soup. Any gazpacho? Is it cilantro good or cilantro crazy? When I was two feet from her, a very lacquered stretch of bangs and nails walked her tan between us.

  “Interesting friends,” I wound up saying.

  She leaned in, just a little, to clarify. “Interesting acquaintances.”

  In Windsor, we’ve always got an eye on the border.

  A few smiles and cosmos later, she finally asked, “If you’re Antony Williams and are self-employed, who’s the Victor-Conrad of Victor-Conrad Painting?”

  “Possibly my grandfather. It’s quite a story. You free for a run this weekend?”

  5. Sin City

  None of us should have been there, not even Gloria. Windsor, Ontario. Bottom of Canada in more ways than one. Huron Church Road is a roaring line, six lanes of constant traffic right up to the bridge. One truck so close to the next we’ve got an escarpment on wheels. The Ambassador Bridge, the Ass Door, groaning with freight, pollution, and money. The most commercially vital border crossing in the world, and one of the busiest, yet it’s privately owned—a billionaire’s plaything.

  Click here for a map. There’s no denying that we’re the crotch of the nation. Delta or prick, take your pick. Sin City as long as there’s been a border. Across the river, the drinking age in Michigan is twenty-one. Just nineteen here. Another Michigan law prohibits their strippers taking it all off. Let me tell you what it’s like to grow up in a place that gets American college kids drunk and their (part-time) fathers hard. And there’s always the American Dungeon Expansion Administration sniffing around, parolling murderers and rapists to lock up pot farmers. The DEA’s my reluctant patron, the unofficial sponsor of Canada’s $7-billion-a-year weed industry. The export sales of our half-secret national crop exceed wheat and cattle combined, that jagged leaf a more honest flag. Pot’s the drug of work, the ’burbs, dating, and the dinner party.

  Despite all this, Mom stayed in Windsor. Or came back. Stayed on long after each of us stopped hoping for so much as a postcard from Trevor Reynolds, my sire. An educated single mother, a drama teacher, raising a male child. I grew up thinking that plenty got said, everything was out in the open. Other parents didn’t tell their teenaged sons why they were teaching them to do their own laundry. But things were far from clear. Only after I joined the local industry and started rowing to Cuba myself, dipping my oars into the profitable waters of untruth, did I see that Mom had been out on the river for years, that every parent is at the oars. Politically, professionally, and romantically, collusion, delusion, and illusion get us through the day.

 
The Detroit River: fifty-one kilometres long and often less than one kilometre wide, a pretty but terrifying shade of azure with refineries, factories, and skyscrapers on their side; houses, parks, a distillery, and a casino on ours. It’s our side that’s lit up, CASINO and CANADIAN CLUB signs all big red and electric, our nightly sales pitch to America.

  A sales pitch on the water and a counterfeit on land. Approach the city for the first time, get off that groaning highway, and it looks like you’re coming up on a busy cosmopolitan core. Towers old and new scrape the sky. Detroit’s tubular Renaissance Center does its (subsidized) dance of steel and glass. Drive towards our downtown and you see Detroit’s, our movie-set backdrop. Actually arrive in downtown Windsor, a downtown of parking garages, strip joints, and bars, and you see that even our skyline is fake. The tall buildings are all on the other side of the narrow river that is an international border, our line in the wet sand, my family cemetery. Take the bridge or tunnel across and you’ll also see that many of those skyscrapers are now empty. Boarded up on the ground floor, any remaining windows blackened by smoke.

  In North America’s car cities you can still see a river making money. Detroit built many of its factories on the shoreline. Ship the gear by day, dump the pollution at night. Turn a corner in Windsor onto one of the many north-south streets running into Riverside Drive and suddenly the horizon, not you, appears to slide on by. The cargo ships, lakers, are two- or three hundred metres long. Boats so big you stop calling them boats. Floating islands. Rusty warehouses on the water. If you’re reading this, maybe you agree: sometimes you move, sometimes your world moves.

  The official Windsor-Detroit Tunnel was finished in 1930, the first international vehicular subway in the world. An engineering marvel for its dropped module construction and for ramming new air through every ninety seconds (not that the region has known fresh air since Henry Ford paved the family farm). Other, private tunnels were sunk as early as 1920, when the street price of one illegal bottle of whisky would buy a smuggler’s next case. That’s how Gran and ol’ Bill made their pile. And one of their graves.

  When Kate arrived in Windsor to study immigration law, she was shocked to find that community halls still existed. The Serbian Community Centre. The Teutonia German Canadian Club. The Windsor Irish Canadian Club (the building, not the drink). Multiple Ukrainian halls. The Franco-Canadians, the Scottish, and the Hungarians. The Canadian Friends of Finland, yes, all thirty-four of them. In Windsor, if they’ve made a buck and had babies, they’ve built a hall. Our Caboto Club’s bigger and older than City Hall and was founded in 1925 (an auspicious year, you’ll hear). To Torontonians like Kate, the very word hall was already an antique, never more than a short form for hallway. My inherited tunnel under the river, ol’ Bill’s tunnel, definitely proved to be more hallway than hall.

  The one community hall we should have doesn’t exist. Eighty percent of all the booze that entered the US during the thirteen years of Prohibition went through our city, yet no brick, statue, or plaque commemorates our wettest hour. With all that booze, all that money, my great-grandparents were the local norm, not the criminal fringe. Strap a single bottle to your belly or thighs, walk aboard the ferry, and you’d make enough to eat out for a week. That tempted everyone, and yet nothing around here celebrates the decade-plus of our twenty-six-ounce handshake. Mine wasn’t the only great-grandmother to cross the ferry with bottles under her skirts. We’ve got the slippery touch in our genes.

  After the official Windsor-Detroit Tunnel opened in 1930, Windsorites couldn’t read or hear the phrase without smiling. Ten years earlier—when tunnelling was done with a shovel, greed and courage, not an international agreement—police chiefs, priests, and sanctimonious politicians had nicknamed the whole area The Windsor-Detroit Funnel. Click back to that map. When we’re not the crotch of the nation or its only stiff prick, we’re a funnel. Booze from all across our country pouring into theirs at one narrow and populated spot. Glug, glug, glug. Women’s voluminous skirts, false-bottomed salesmen’s cases, cars on the winter ice, even a submarine cable car—whatever could move the hooch did move the hooch.

  Many didn’t bother to hide so far from the law, at least not on this side. During Prohibition (or, as my team call it, Prohibition I), it was legal for Canadians to export booze provided the gargle was legal in the destination country. America, no, but Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, sure. And the guv enjoyed its cut, $30 million a year by 1930 (roughly $400 million today). When a single man rowed up to Windsor’s government docks to buy a case and a permit, both customs officer and rower would agree Cuba, not America, was the destination. Right: a single man was going to row three thousand kilometres to Cuba in a small wooden boat. That he returned later the same afternoon for another delivery was never a problem so long as the feds got their coin. The officers weren’t stupid; they were paid, legitimately. And with all their trade, new officers were hired. Promotions. Overtime. Same’s now true for the completely failed marijuana prohibition.

  You sleep with an elephant, you get on top or you die. Up front we looked needy to America, always noticing them more than they noticed us. But round back we were pouring it down their throats and grabbing cash by the fistful. We got the most powerful country in the history of the planet drunk for more than a decade, and you’d never know it from walking our city today. In a country of subsidized literature and museums funded by three levels of government, nothing commemorates our bottleneck handshake. Where’s our smuggler’s symphony? Our ode to the Windsor skirt of many pockets? Detroit’s waterfront has a huge sculpture of boxer Joe Louis’s fist. Where’s our bronze bottle? We’ve got nothing unless you count the Right Honourable Prime Minister Paul Martin Junior’s childhood home, the cash drop of former whisky baron Harry Low. The floor tiles and roof slates of a future prime minister’s childhood home were originally bought with smuggling money. Kate hit the books at the Paul Martin Law Library not five hundred metres from a river carrying Paul Martin boats that dodged Canadian taxes, yet I was a criminal for moving a plant.

  The Detroit River, our umbilical cord of industry. Hanging over it all is the bridge, shuddering with its constant load of trucks. Most nights at least one letter of the glowing red Ambassador Bridge sign is extinguished. When the entrance to the nation’s hooker capital finally spells out the truth, ass dor Bridge, drinks are on me.

  When I cross I still prefer the bridge to the tunnel. Despite the trucks and the danger of the bridge, nearly a billion dollars a day in trade tempting every nutter with a bin of fertilizer and a cellphone, I like the view. Get a little perspective on the river, that trough of chopping blue. Between the lakers I can almost see down through the polluted azure to Grandpa Bill entombed there in his lonely mud, bottles smashed around his soaking bones. The fucker.

  6. Voodoo Unchained

  Windsor. Where else could you fall for a Scottish-Chinese Canadian? Kate Chan. Scottish father, Chinese mother, met in Windsor. When they split up, Father Scotsman returned to the motherland, and Mom took baby Kate to Toronto, changing her last name as quickly as she could. Bit of a pattern, that.

  I could date her with a drug smuggler’s wallet but had to hope this law student could look around the fact that, to her at least, I was just a house painter. She had rocked the LSAT; ostensibly, I rocked a roller pole. A self-employed house painter with deep pockets, but still. I wanted to pull out all the romantic stops from the get-go but couldn’t tell her the most exciting thing about me.

  A first date. The pre-date. The maybe this is a date, maybe it isn’t date. What to do for the exhibition game? A drink or three? Sure, it’s convenient and enabling, but if I’d wanted another bar girl, I’d have gone to a bar. A drink is too predictable, every dude’s reliable grease. And Windsor wasn’t big enough to have nice watering holes where we weren’t certain to see people one of us knew. Time for Voodoo to earn his keep.

  That’s right, Voodoo. Part border collie, part attitud
e. (What colour is he? See, we’re getting to know each other already.)

  On the phone with Kate, I was instantly tipsy on the cello-y sound of her voice. “You free for a dog walk in Ojibway Park?”

  The park was crucial. First and foremost, Ojibway is genuinely beautiful, especially in the fall. Every tube in nature’s paintbox opened up. And more than just trees. Think grass but not that cancer carpet you kicked a soccer ball on. Seven-, eight-, even ten-foot-tall grasses, brown by June but standing proud ’til late November, countless stalks clattering in the breeze. And the trees are forest trees, not rakes of ordered pine. Windsor sits in the most treeless non-Arctic county in Canada. What isn’t paved is ploughed. With its meandering, mulch-covered trails, the enormous park was a dog’s delight, sometimes even frolicking ground for deer. The pumpkiny smell of leaves underfoot. Half-naked branches and tall grasses swaying in the breeze. All this, plus wingman Voodoo.

  When Kate agreed to the walk, I pumped an unseen fist above my phone. “Would you like to meet me there or should I pick you up? I gotta warn you: in the car, my dog will sniff your hair.”

  All week I increased Vood’s teeth brushing to get his breath down from dragon foul, then gave him his quarterly bath the night before.

  She didn’t dress as if nature required a hundred zippered pockets on easy-to-clean fabrics. Ass-music jeans and a soft sweater she was sure to show me was a V-neck before zipping up her vest. Her black hair was pinned up in half a dozen places, a flickering little movie of two crows fighting. The sight of her worn hiking shoes flooded me with interest and relief. For some, the Ojibway Park walk risked being too un-urban, no thump-thump music, no lattes. Not Kate. “Wow,” she said when we arrived, “so this is what life outside the library looks like.” She stopped to read a plaque I’d never bothered with that claimed the grasses around us were the last preserve of species that used to blanket the entire region. “From tall grasses to tall gases,” she joked, and nodded at Detroit’s Zug Island smokestacks visible above the tree tops. “Ojibway Park—right. The park’s for the First Nations, while the local police force have scabs on their knuckles from the last time they got to write up a Driving While Indian.”