Keeping Things Whole Page 8

Wonderful.

  I proved to be a much better engineer than I was a fisherman. I had to make similar visits to Dave, Luke, even art-school Slyvie.

  “Tell me again why I’m doing this,” I implored Slyvie as she moved a green dreadlock aside to stare through a tripod-mounted video camera. I was standing on a milk crate holding up a sheet of Mylar in one hand and a square metre of chicken wire in the other.

  “The usual,” she replied. “Fight the power. Free the subconscious. Antagonize my prof. Okay, action!”

  I swept the chicken wire toward the Mylar.

  “Cut,” she called. “Can’t you get it to curl a little, like a wave? Be the wire, Antony. Be the wire.”

  Middlemen. Brokers. Agents. As the months until Mom returned from Chicago slipped through my treb-ready hands, I grew to see all of those glib little commercial parasites standing in the middle of every industry, skimming their cut. Consultants. The strip club managers who make money without having to spread their legs (or other even more intimate parts). Some musicians sign contracts to always pay the guy who introduced them to the guy who makes records. I couldn’t get myself a product, so delivery didn’t much matter. All I had were pointless costs, wasted time, entrepreneurial fantasies.

  This is one of the last industries where “business school” remains an oxymoron. Genuine business is a mirror: it shows you what you’re made of. You make money by character, ability, and chance. No digital slide show, group work assignment, buzzword, or accounting software du jour can change your stripes. There’s no business school for drugs and, irony of ironies, America’s War on Drugs is a war on capitalism at its most pure. What other product continues to sell with zero, and I mean zero, marketing? Some fraction of every sticker price you’ve ever seen in a store recovers money spent trying to convince you to buy. In most provinces, ours included, the state pays to market alcohol, printing posters and magazines for their liquor stores then cutting cheques for the hospital down the street. The Grateful Dead couldn’t own stocks in the Love Potion No. 1 or Blueberry Tea seed strains. Half of the Canadian narcotics economy is in weed. Seven billion a year and nothing, not a dollar, has ever been spent on marketing.

  With the treb, a key of birdseed, and a car I didn’t own, I’d gotten around the actual border, but I was stuck at the borders in the local pot-clouded heads. No one was willing to introduce me to the guy who knew the guy who knew the guy who grew. All right, sure, there were risks, layers of extra heat (two police forces, two coast guards, two border patrols—all that competing gun dick), but this was pre-9/11. We could all see that America did not spend federal dollars on Detroit. Every low-level dealer who refused to take me upstairs was insulting local history. We’d all heard stories of great-grandparents skating across the frozen river to sell booze. At parties, we’d smoked weed someone swore had been smuggled over on a windsurfer or a kayak. Where was their civic pride?

  I even tried following the tomatoes. Thirty minutes outside of Windsor is Leamington, tomato capital of Canada or maybe the world. Ketchup in Kansas or Idaho or Manitoba starts in fields just down my road. But the road suddenly lengthens if you actually want to cut up and eat a local tomato. Come Labour Day, if I walked into a big grocery store to buy “local” tomatoes, I was buying tomatoes that had been trucked from Leamington four hundred kilometres to Toronto, sold to a distributor who then sold them to grocery store chains, including my local stores, before trucking some of them four hundred kilometres back to Windsor. Eat local indeed.

  So off to Toronto I went, cash in one pocket, three phone numbers in the other. I had to party with an old friend for a day and a half before he’d hear why I was really there. All I wanted was a meeting, a meeting to see someone who sells a product and therefore likes customers, but oh the grief. I don’t know. He’s really touchy about new people. All I’m asking is for you to ask. I drove home empty-handed and almost maudlin enough to sing that ever-available Canadian chorus: Toronto only helps Toronto.

  In the end, by chance and then heavy payments, tae kwon do proved more helpful than anything else. I’m currently embarrassed to say that at eighteen I wouldn’t really have noticed a thirty-two-year-old woman anywhere outside of a taek class, black belt or no.

  One of the big sexual delights in life, surely in the top three, is surprise. Most of us meet the standard fare early on, and those pleasures’ll last as long as the libido does. Much later, you find your hidden desires. Or are shown them. Claire d’Entremont was a thirty-two-year-old whose ass caught the eye I should have kept focused on the coil of her elbows and her lightning back foot. If you’re thinking about anything other than the moving bodies, the taek instruction went, you weren’t working hard enough. But oh for Claire’s sculpted ass. I lingered on the sight of it while we sparred, lingered just long enough for her to brake a hammerfist two inches from my nose. As I registered my shock at that fist hanging off my face, she said, “But thanks.” At the end of class she asked me home to her place. Ah, thirty-two.

  Claire’s first lesson (or second, if you count the sparring emphasis on paying attention): girls get fucked; women fuck. Once after class, then again, then a long naked Saturday. Eventually, Claire would use words like work, meetings, and clients. She took a lot of brief cellphone calls but never punched a regular clock. When I asked her what she did, she replied, “A couple of fitness classes here, some promoting there. I get by.” As the sweaty weeks grew, I never saw her carry a briefcase, never heard her say office. And she always had a sack of the most pelvis-dissolving green. Once when she reached for her pungent little bag, I asked, “How can I get you to introduce me to your supplier?”

  She shook her head before we lit up. “We fuck or we do business. Not both.”

  Then pass me my gitch and your Rolodex.

  Claire proved to be the smartest dealer I have ever met. Aside from sex, I learned three other crucial lessons. One, don’t dress like a criminal or a pothead. Her clients were lawyers and office workers, and she dressed exactly like them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dress codes are relaxing all the time, millionaires in jeans, but you know what I mean. Shave. No Smoke the rich T-shirts. Easy on the piercings and tats. Claire also unpacked the rhetoric of greed for me. You want to improve your standing with a dealer? Be on her call list when times get lean? Then don’t expect her to light you up for free during the deal. For whatever reason—the cannabis camaraderie, the illegality, contact high—some people want, need, or expect to smoke while buying. Maybe potheads are looking for parity with the provincial liquor stores and their army of slim fake blondes dispensing free samples. Point is, many buyers like to smoke during the deal and those that think they should be getting a freebie won’t be on speed-dial when times are tight. And my last lesson from Claire—genuine learning requires humility.

  Who knows what you really want the first few times you drop your clothes. Two weeks, three, four, the phone a silly piece of plastic in my hand, I finally admitted that what I wanted in Claire was a master, no other word. You know that martial arts myth about the bridge? Two warriors step onto opposite ends of a narrow bridge. The weaker will step aside to let the stronger pass. I did my bit with Claire, dedication here, some young muscle there, but she had me outclassed, outskilled, and outgunned. We both knew that she was giving me skills for life, would be with me in every new woman I met.

  And I suppose there was always this. A few months after Mom’s thesis production of Medea, I was invited to a June barbecue at one of her friend’s places. I strolled into the backyard with Claire all swishy and fit beside me. “Mom, I’d like you to meet Claire.” A summer dress on each of them.

  At the end of August, just before I was to start university, just before, as Claire knew, I’d be meeting ten new girls my age every day, she made me a proposition. “This isn’t about weed. It’s about money. No introduction is free in this business. The two of us will meet someone in a parking lot. Normally I buy half a key. Thanks to you,
I’ll be driving away with a full one. I leave, you can stay behind for your chat. You cross that threshold, though, you no longer cross mine.”

  Deal.

  16. Draft Age

  Family—we rarely say what we know. Every family speaks a little Cuban, some a lot. Kate had dared to ask and half-invited me to tell her if I sold weed, but then she also brought us closer again two days later. She left me another card on the breakfast table. The front was Van Gogh’s Wheat Field under Threatening Skies with Crows. Inside she’d written:

  “What is beauty but the beginning of terror?”

  —Rilke

  I think we’re beautiful.

  Within days we found ourselves in one of those unplanned, ridiculously hypothetical yet somehow inevitable discussions couples have, debating the merits of Rilke as the name for a child. I know, I know—I should have noticed the writing on the (vaginal) wall. Wheat Field was the last painting Van Gogh did before he shot himself.

  She was my gravity. If you do anything beyond breathe in physics class you learn that gravity isn’t necessarily a force that pulls things down. Gravity pulls mass together. The Earth just happens to be very massive and beneath us. In a vacuum, mass doesn’t fall; it gathers. That’s gravity’s big deal: things want to fly together, join, coalesce. Love is gravity. Helpless. Endless.

  That fall, Kate and I were crazy about each other. Our clothes dropped as steadily as the leaves in Ojibway Park. Evenings in the D. A weekend walking Chicago’s dozen little bridges. And daily life. The supper chat. Nights reading at opposite ends of the couch. As a student, she had a roommate. As a self-made criminal, I didn’t. She started November co-opting half of one of my dresser drawers and finished it with the whole thing, camisoles abutting panties, T-shirts squat in a corner, bras collapsing and expanding as sullenly as caged ravens. One night in early December when she stood in front of my hallway closest, she was both accurate and a little scheming when she said, “I never see you wear most of these jackets.” By Saturday my off-season jackets were stored in a bin beneath the bed and a small army of her shirts had colonized three-quarters of the closet. I was possibly too generous (or, more honestly, ostentatious) when I had a birch dresser custom-made for her for Christmas. I let her run her hands back and forth over the curved drawer faces—Go ahead, stroke the Dutch hooker—before I slid out one drawer to show her its old-fashioned dovetail joinery. “No glue. No nails. No screws. The drawer holds itself together, wood biting wood.” I ran my finger down the flared, hugging dovetails, enumerating “You, me. Me, you.” Finally I slid the drawer shut and got her into my arms. “Live with me. Live with me, you gorgeous slut.”

  She wanted to hear this and she didn’t. By then she almost never slept at her apartment, would complain about paying bills for her “off-site closet.” And yet my jokes about our living arrangements didn’t always get laughs. “Why do I need a better iron? Why don’t you just move yours in?” Because, as her gift iron implied, Kate was an escape-route kind of woman. (Can you get a genuine education and not be?)

  Yes, I was showy with the handmade dresser. While I gave her a big, flagrant thing, the jewel in the crown of my/our bedroom, she gave me a thin, stained, and tremendously ugly used book that nearly took my knees out from under me. When she handed me the present wrapped in a new tea towel (no disposable paper for her), it had the height and width of a book, but not much thickness or weight. Oh no, I thought as I untied the ribbon, please not some local poems or a student literary magazine, not some saddle-stapled slice of earnestness. Yes and no. The thin, thirty-year-old book had a stained cover barren of images save a small red maple leaf. Except for the title it looked as sober and boring as an old government instruction booklet. Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada.

  “It’s the little book that could,” she explained. “A new press run by hippies, yet sales of this book doubled every year. It was put together entirely by volunteers, Canadians and Americans in Toronto basements, then mailed all over the US. More than 65,000 copies.”

  And stapled to my heart. Of course I’d told her plenty about Trevor by then—Mom’s dad-vs.-father speech, my science fair work with genetics, his goodbye note—but still her gift shook me, made me feel instantly smaller to have only concentrated on the physical with the dresser.

  “He’d probably have used a copy,” she added. “Most in the exodus did.”

  I held her to me, and not to hide the moistening of my eyes. “This is the best present anyone’s ever given me. Live with me even more.”

  “We’re the best present anyone’s ever given me,” she said. “Well, most of us.” But then she did stroke the dresser again, lingered on its beautiful curves.

  Ideas don’t believe in borders, and once they so much as glimpse a bridge they’re keen to get across. Neither the tomato nor the noodle is indigenous to Italy. The New Testament golden rule is a verbatim retelling of Confucius. Despite the Korean flag that hung at my taek dojo or the smattering of Japanese any karateka learns, many martial arts are as cross-pollinated as cooking, architecture, or fashion. Sweat in enough dojos and someone will eventually tell you about tai sabaki, the ancient art of getting the fuck out of the way. While a few black-belt masochists train to gladly take the first (but only the first) blow, a tai sabaki practitioner steps aside at the last minute to let your first slide by his chest, avoiding your blow and ready to turn your arm into a handle (or lever). For sparring, dodging the blow needs no sales pitch. Romantically, tai sabaki is impossible. If you’re always stepping aside at the sight of movement, you might have some kind of relationship, but not love. To be in love is to be a target.

  17. Courage Atlas

  In a novel, you wouldn’t believe that the skyline of Detroit, failed Motor City, was bookended by an enormous, abandoned municipal train station at one end and by a police station/courthouse at the other. Every single one of the six hundred windows of Michigan Central Station is smashed out, and none ever emits light. The marble-rich station and hotel, once the bright smile of the city, has six hundred missing teeth. With its vaulted ceilings now home only to pigeons, and its acres of marble abandoned or covered in five kinds of feces, the ghostly station is the city’s tombstone for the death of public transit (or, to many a Detroiter, public life). Only dust, birds, and the mad commute within it now. The skyline’s other end is 1300 Beaubien, a courthouse and police station filled, not emptied, by civil strife. Together, they’re the bookends of the Detroit riverside. A failed way out at one end of my horizon and a lockup at the other: I couldn’t make up my life. Can you? (Have you?)

  Borders: here vs. there. Cross from Greece into Turkey and you’ll meet every manner of bureaucratic intrusion, five pairs of hands going through your passport and half a dozen yelled insults demanding to know why you would ever want to leave beautiful country A for that dog’s asshole of a country B (that dog’s asshole of a country with, at the border crossing, an identical landscape). Snarling soldiers stand in towers and behind painted or fenced lines, hate and machine guns ready. Greece and Turkey. Haiti and the Dominican. Bosnia and Croatia. Windsor and Detroit have none of that. Our hands are too deep in each other’s pockets (pockets of various kinds) for anyone to raise a fist. But still, every border does its fictitious here and there. As Kate used to say, then finally showed, “You see a jurisdiction best at its edges.” Too true. And in the D, most of the edges you see are black.

  Everything I’d done with weed in Windsor was meaningless over in the D. The profitability of my loose jays, the connect I’d paid for through Claire, the flinging treb—small change in the wrong currency. And let’s call a non-spade a non-spade: in the D, I was cracker white. Over there, my skin said more in advance than I ever could with my mouth.

  Windsor’s as multicultural a Canadian city as you can get. With war, kleptocracy, and drought spinning a changing planet like a roulette wheel, every generation of immigrants that Canada has ever attracted has sett
led in Windsor. Meanwhile the D has been losing one colour for fifty years.

  Polite Canadians (excuse the redundancy, and the Cuban) want to say that race is irrelevant, a non-issue, a source of national pride not problems. Right: we’re all one race, all white, rich, and liberal given the right chances. Some part of you knows otherwise. What percentage of your lovers have been of a different race? Can the adventurous even claim 10 percent? How many Canadians know that Canada also had a slave history? While I’m at it, did you know that John Newton—the man who wrote “Amazing Grace” and led, against all odds, Britain and arguably the world’s fight against the slavery of blacks—was a daily opium user? Prohibition chases inhibition.

  Anyone who believes humanity is just one race should visit their nearest correctional facility. The plaque at America’s Statue of Liberty, that “Mother of Exiles,” famously reads “Give me your tired, your poor / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Those tired, poor masses have disproportionately high representation in prisons, pharmacies, and morgues. When I wanted to smuggle pot internationally, a courthouse was a job fair.

  I was a white Canadian looking for pot dealers in Detroit. With 1300 Beaubien weighting down the skyline, I could let someone else round up the applicants for me, all without a headhunting fee. Even the street name had elastic borders. Bow-been, we’d overhear locals say in Detroit’s clubs and restaurants before we drove by street signs our school French had us pronounce Bow-be-en. Goodwell Street. Not for most of the people there.

  Every defendant was black, and the only white people were judges and lawyers, a few police. The bailiffs were black, the stenographers, most of the cops and lawyers, the families of the accused, all the custodians. Walking from public courtroom to courtroom I could hear complete resumés of crime. Young Tyrell Jones minored in assault before moving on to major in armed robbery. Jephrey Johnston joined the court one day after three busy seasons with community programs. Strapping young Wardell Jones was no stranger to moving keys of green, but he liked to crack jaws and ribs along the way. I skipped lunch to hear more about Lester Davis, a promising green prospect, only to find that two of his former places of legitimate employment had gone up in flames. On my third day I got a glimpse of Carter Stewart, a man neck-deep in drug and gun charges. The weapons charges didn’t stick, so Carter stayed in my sights. By then I’d sat through so many dockets and listened to more than three centuries’ worth of incarceration get handed out. When a visibly terrified witness finally changed his testimony, Carter was found not guilty and already knew his way to the exit. I followed him out through the large courtroom doors.