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WE ALL BEGIN

IN A LITTLE

MAGAZINE The Government of Canada may change how it funds magazines.

The arts and literary magazines you love could lose essential support.

Is our readership really too small? With culture, does size matter?

We say “No”

Help us fight!

Express your opposition by writing Hon. James Moore Minister of Canadian Heritage House of Commons Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6 moorej@parl.gc.ca And write your MP! No stamp required Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Funding for Literary and Arts Magazines For more information about what’s at stake, check out and join the Coalition’s Facebook group facebook.com/group.php?gid=53103444468&ref=mf

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issue 53 subTerrain

CONTENTS

editorial

A LITERARY MAGAZINE

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Kingdom of the Wrong BY PAT MACKENZIE

EDITOR Brian Kaufman

fiction & poetry

MANAGING EDITOR Pat MacKenzie

EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE Brian Kaufman, Hilary Green, Jim Oaten, Peter Babiak, Day Helesic, Jenn Farrell, Robert Strandquist, Nadine Boyd, Karen Green, Sharon Bradley, Kate Lancaster, Paul Pitre, Pat Mackenzie, Aimee Ouellette

L AYO U T HeimatHouse

4 9 13 39 42 44

Carcass BY CLAIRE TACON Marry Me BY GRANT BUDAY Cold Sentence BY JOSH MASSEY Get Lucky BY JILL MACDONALD Ides of March BY RACHEL KNUDSEN I Fell In Love with the Man and Then the Circus

BY SUSAN STENSON

ADVERTISING Brian Kaufman, Janel Johnson

feature folio: Self-image

COVER Derek von Essen

I L L U S T R ATO R S Dave Barnes, Amanda Crawford, Gavin DeLint, Karen Justl, Kevin McBride, Arlo Keo Valera, Derek von Essen,

B OOK REVIEW EDITOR Karen Green

ART EMISSARY Sharon Bradley

INTERN Janel Johnson subTerrain Magazine P.O. Box 3008, MPO, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 Canada Tel: (604) 876-8710 Fax: (604) 879-2667 e-mail: subter@portal.ca website: www.subterrain.ca

16 19 20 25 26 29 30 35

My Avatar, My Self-image BY PETER BABIAK Brother John BY CHARLES ANDERSON Sunday Dinner BY BRUCE MCDOUGAL Red Army Faction BY KIM GOLDBERG The Small, Narrow, Red Door BY MELANIE SCOTT A Dance of Poses BY JENNICA HARPER Pretty on the Outside BY JENN FARRELL Alvin Karpis & The Great White Zeppelin BY BRIAN KAUFMAN

commentary 52 Hunkamooga: “Make Mine Miscellaneous” BY STUART ROSS 45 Book Reviews: M. Wayne Cunningham on Richard Wagamese’s One Native Life; Bob Wakulich on Carolyn Smart’s Hooked; Carolyne Van Der Meer on A Verse Map of Vancouver, edited by George McWhirter; Lorah Delaney on Fist of the Spider Woman, edited by Amber Dawn; Jim Oaten on Grant Buday’s Dragonflies; Matthew Firth on Tony Oneill’s Down and Out on Murder Mile; Lyle Neff on Michael Petrou’s Renegades: Canadian in the Spanish Civil War; Christine Rowlands on Stuart Ross’s Buying Cigarettes for the Dog; Rod Filbrandt on Kerry Byrne’s Lillian the Legend; Stuart Ross on Martha Baillie’s The Incident Report. erratum: Our apologies to Kath MacLean whose ghazals, Talking, Talking, were inadvertently laid out incorrectly in issue #52.

issue 53

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FLASHBACK

The Editorial Collective, Then & Now

from top left, counter-clockwise: Kaufman, Brian: Founder, Hat Guy; Rowlands, Christine: Reviewer, reader, martini shaker; Hughes, Robert ( AKA “Owl Man”); Farrell, Jenn: What can we say?; Greco, Heidi: Reviewer, Member at Large; Green, Karen: Book Review Editor/Special Efx; Oaten, Jim: Reviewer, reader, rhythm guitar; Pitre, Paul: oil rig, Poetry Editor—same gig, right? Babiak, Peter: Features Editor, former Wham! member; Lancaster, Kate: Reader (I drank, but I did not inhale); Strandquist, Robert: Reader, Norseman, lead vocals; Mackenzie, Patrick: Managing Editor, fully house-trained.

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EDITORIAL

Kingdom of the Wrong subTerrain

PAT R I C K M A C K E N Z I E

FAC T U M GENERAL GUIDELINES Fiction: max. 3,000 words Creative Non-Fiction & Commentary: max. 4,000 words Poetry: no unsolicited poetry submissions Photos and illustrations welcome: please send samples or direct us to your website.

LETTERS ARE WELCOME We encourage your comments about what you find between our covers. Letters become the property of subTerrain Magazine and may be edited for brevity and clarity.

B O O K S TO R E S & R E TA I L O U T L E T S subTerrain is available in Canada from Magazines Canada (416) 504-0274 and in the U.S. from International Periodical Distributors (IPD) 1-800-999-1170.

WWW.SUBTERRAIN.CA Sniff the ether

ISSN: 0840-7533 Volume 6 no. 53 • publishing since 1988 We gratefully acknowledge the support of the B.C. Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada, through the Publications Assistance Program (PAP), and the Canada Magazine Fund for marketing and promotional initiatives. subTerrain is published 3 times a year (Spring, Summer, Fall/Winter) by the sub-TERRAIN Literary Collective Society. All material is copyright of subTerrain, the authors, 2009. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: INDIVIDUALS: Canada/U.S.: One year $15.; Two years $20.; Elsewhere: One year $25.; Two years $38.

INSTITUTIONS: One year $18; Two years $36. MANUSCRIPTS AND ARTWORK are submitted at the author’s or artist’s own risk and will not be returned or responded to unless accompanied by a selfaddressed stamped envelope bearing sufficient postage for the submission’s return. Those submitting material from outside Canada must include sufficient International Reply Coupons to cover the material’s return. Please allow 4-6 months for a response. Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the American Humanities Index (AHI). Canadian Publications Mail Products Sales Agreement No. 40065490. PAP Registration No. 09322. Postage paid at MPO, Vancouver, B.C. Date of issue: Summer 2009. All correspondence to: subTerrain Magazine, P.O. Box 3008 Main Post Office, Vancouver, B.C. V6B 3X5 CANADA TEL: (604) 8768710 FAX: (604) 879-2667 email: subter@portal.ca.

No e-mail submissions—queries only, please.

issue 53

Back in my formative reading years, that is to say the years when I was consciously or subconsciously formulating my self-image, my almost-cool parents, through their cluttered and diverse bookshelves, inadvertently introduced me to the writings of Krishnamurti.

For those unfamiliar with this Indian philosopher and teacher, Krishnamurti, among other things, stated that the self was largely a charnel house of false ideas and delusions.

At the time I didn’t really get what he was saying, but something must have stuck.

I think U2 might have been onto something when during their Zoo tv tour in the early ’90s they would flash the words, everything you know is wrong on gigantic video screens. Perhaps recalling my adolescent reading, I remember strongly identifying with those five words as they repeated themselves over and over in a dizzying cascade of white block letters. Certainly the Irish rock group was being simultaneously flippant and inflammatory, but with that statement, they were holding up not only ideas and institutions to the barbs of criticism, but individuals as well—after all, if everything you know is wrong, then you are wrong. No one escapes wrongdom.

Whatever U2 may have meant by using that statement they seem to have touched upon an issue philosophers since at least Plato have been wrestling with: namely, the difference between fiction and reality, or the difference between the ideas of ourselves and the stark reflection staring back at us in the mirror. And it is in our inability, or more accurately our refusal, to acknowledge the false nature of the images of ourselves we construct—or have constructed for us—where our troubles begin. According to Krishnamurti, “the mind creates [an] image about oneself. And that image will constantly get hurt. Is it possible to live without a single image about yourself, or about your husband, wife, children, or about the politicians, the priests, or about the ideal? It is possible, and if it is not found you will always be getting hurt, always living in a pattern in which there is no freedom.”

So if the images we have of ourselves, and others apparently, cause so much suffering, why do we need a self-image in the first place? Is it something utterly false? Something to be distrusted? Or is it something we need in order to find identity and belonging? To negotiate in a world full of strangers, to live up to others’ ideas about us? Does self-image automatically assume an authentic self, absolute and whole, separate from ideas or images?

Perhaps self-image changes with circumstances, with the people we come into contact with—acting at one moment like armour, in another a mask, our bravest face, a welcoming smile, a knife in the back. Certainly, I think relying on some personally or socially constructed idea to get through the day is a little, well, inauthentic. But neither am I taken with the idea of a “true” self, peacefully residing at the core of our chaotic lives, innocent and pure, eating grapes. I think in the end we are reflections of each other, desiring what we love, loathing what we hate, constructing walls with eau-de-Cologne and cosmetics, with mixed results, to avoid being found out—but hopefully having some fun in the process, each of us a little bit wrong about the other. »

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Carcass C L A I R E TA C O N I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY G AV I N D E L I N T

By the time we open the dumpster, the carcass is in deep decompose. It’s summer and the heat has sped up the decay. The belly is bloated—in a few more days, it would have burst, the intestines streaming out from the cavity. There’s trauma on both the hind legs—one of them has been ripped out of the shank and is only attached by a thread of tendon. The eyes are open but they’ve gone milky. The antlers are so big they scrape the sides of the container. The smell is a wall of rot so strong that you can’t lean too far into the dumpster without reeling back. Randall and I drop the lid back down and I get him to start hooking up the cables to load it onto the truck.

“Who the fuck do you think did that?” Randall asks. He slides the safety bolt into place and knocks on the side of the truck, signaling for me to turn the lever. The mechanical spool starts rotating and the dumpster slides up and back into place along the truck bed.

“Who else?” I say. It had to be George. No one except George has access to the locks or the kind of equipment you need to hoist a full-grown buck into a dumpster.

Randall wants to know if he can keep the antlers.

“You’ll never get the stink off,” I tell him, but he’s fidgeting on the top of the truck, trying to figure out a way to get down into the pile without losing his balance. The dumpster has a dual lid and Randall has the right half open, like a half casket. Only the head shows. “You have to cure it too, you know.” Knowing Randall, he’d probably let the skull get completely mouldy. Taxidermy is for professionals. I’ve seen guys try to save bits of road kill—a rabbit ear or paw—packing it in a Ziploc full of salt. Always comes out smelling off. Best thing to do is go down to Chinatown and get a rabbit paw keychain for a dollar. Randall is really starting to piss me off because he still hasn’t come down.

“I’ll buy you one at a garage sale,” I say. “Quit it.”

I don’t want to leave him alone with the truck, but I need to have a word with George. For one thing, he owes me the money it’s going to cost to dump the beast. There are rules about the disposing of dead animals, and it isn’t cheap anymore. When I was growing up, my dog got hit by a car and Dad wrapped him in some garbage bags and tossed him down at the local landfill. That was twenty years

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ago, before they started searching the waste at transfer stations.

When my daughter’s cat died, we had to pay the vet to cremate it, and it just cost a little bit less than my mother-in-law.

If he hit the deer, George should have called the cops. The only thing I can think is that he was planning on keeping the meat, so he lugged the corpse home and forgot about it. Meat doesn’t stay fresh for long in July.

“Don’t even think of going in there,” I tell Randall, grab the keys from the truck and let myself in by the back entrance.

George has been the super here for fifteen years. He inherited the twin mid-rises from his father. The buildings are rectangular, brown brick towers, with concrete balconies jutting out on each side. It’s a festival of bylaw infringements—hibachis on the balconies, abandoned clotheslines streaming from the railings, and the basement units’ windows with bars screwed on from the outside. There’s a little parkette between the two lots, with a rusted swing set, but I’ve never seen kids around.

As I walk down the hall, there’s a low hiss coming from the boiler room. I poke my head in but can’t see much, so I continue along the corridor of linoleum and patchy fluorescent lighting. It’s the kind of place I tell my wife, Leanne, never to walk down. I get on the elevator by the laundry room and head up to the eleventh floor, to George’s corner penthouse. When I get out, the hallway is humid and it smells like someone’s heating up canned ravioli.

George doesn’t have to live here. He does it because he’s cheap. I pound on unit 1108, but he doesn’t come to the door. Possibly he

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knows that it’s garbage day and is avoiding me. After a few minutes, I head back downstairs—I’ll figure out how to handle the situation later.

Back at the truck, Randall is already sitting in the cab. As I slide into the driver’s seat, I notice that he has the ac on full blast and won’t look at me. The cab reeks. “You went in didn’t you?”

“Yes.” He looks down at his hands, which are muddied with deer blood and rot.

“Did you get them off?”

“No. I just about puked.”

When we get back to the office, the boys come out to take a look.

Randall acts like he’s giving them a guided tour. “Hey, wait ‘til you see this.” Jimmy and Carl are there. The other two guys must still be out on pickup. Jimmy raises his eyebrow when he hears that it’s George’s unit. He’s still sore about last month’s poker game when he had George over to his house. After laying down a straight flush, George told Jimmy that his wife’s tits were only ten years from turning into nuts. Then he cashed in his chips and walked out.

“It wasn’t right, what he said about Wendy,” Jimmy says to no one in particular. No one responds. Randall and Carl are transfixed by the carcass and I’m rolling down the windows to air out the truck. “It wasn’t right,” he repeats.

I walk over to him and put my hand on his shoulder, nod at him.

Jimmy’s one of the thinnest men I’ve ever seen. Some days I’ll walk into the office, thinking I’m alone and I’m startled to see Jimmy standing in the gap between the filing cabinets, eating a salami sandwich for breakfast. He nods his long face at me.

Randall asks Carl if he’s got a chainsaw. I know where this conversation’s headed, so I wave them both off the top, “Let’s get to work.”

I call George and leave a message telling him he’d better give me a call.

Randall, George and I all went to St. Mary’s Catholic Elementary School. Randall and I were in the same year. George was older.

When I was in second grade, George Yanko offered me a choice: I could eat an earthworm, or I could get the shit beat out of me.

George was in grade six and already stocky. I looked at the earthworm squirming in my palm and I said, “No.” I figured it wasn’t the worm’s fault that I was a little squirt.

George grabbed the worm, crushed it under his foot and knocked the back of my head. “You’re next.”

He stared at me like a dog, nostrils curled, sniffing for fear. He punched me once in the ribs, then took off. A few weeks later, Randall was late for school. He ate the worm and had to visit the doctor to get treated for parasites he’d contracted from the soil.

Randall, and all the other kids who’d taken the bait, spent that year with George stealing their money.

When I ran into George again, at York Region Private Waste, I was taller than him by a foot, but he could probably still out-muscle me. George at thirty-five, looked like the human equivalent of a corn dog—a solid centre of meat in a thick greasy coating. I was managing the company and the owner turned out to be George’s cousin. They weren’t close, but family is family. George didn’t trust his garbage to the city. George hates the city. He had inherited the buildings and wanted us to handle waste.

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He strode into the office and did a double take when he saw me.

“Patrick Roberts, Jesus Christ!” He wiped the sweat off his forehead and pointed at my boss, Lenny. “I knew this guy back in elementary school. Knew him when he was just a runt.”

I didn’t say anything. I Just watched as George sidled over to Lenny and shook his hand. “Lenny, this guy has me to thank for knocking some sense into him.”

“Oh yeah?” Lenny said.

“Some of these guys,” George trailed off. “Some of them, this one included, was still eating earthworms.”

Lenny laughed and George clapped him on the shoulder. “Worms.”

I looked up from the invoices I was signing and stared at him. “I didn’t eat the worm, George.”

“What are you talking about? All you little twerps ate the worm.”

Lenny waved me out of the office while they talked business.

Two years ago, Lenny had a heart attack. His wife offered to sell me the operation. We closed for a few months while the paperwork went through and by that point we’d lost most of our customers to EZ Waste. George had been too lazy to switch companies and his residents were illegally dumping in the alley behind his place. He agreed to sign onto the new business under the condition that we remove his backup for free. So, just as a sign of good faith, we paid the dumping fees for three tons of George’s crap.

George calls back after four, as I’m heading out the door. Randall and Jimmy are still hanging around the office. When the name comes up on the caller id, they both start waving me over to the phone. They look unnaturally excited. There’s a lot of static on the line. “Yep, Patrick here.”

“What in the Christ was that message all about? Your wife not putting out these days? You’re poking through my garbage now?”

“Jesus.”

“She going to be there tomorrow?” I glance over at the calendar. It’s the third week of the month. My turn to host poker night. “Tell her to make more of that layer dip—don’t go easy on the sour cream.”

“George, quit talking about my wife.”

“So what the hell are you doing leaving me that kind of message?

Great customer service you boys got over there. What is it, piss on your biggest client month? Rick never gave me shit like that.”

“You know the rules, George, no live animals.”

“Coons get in or something?”

“The deer.”

Randall and Jimmy are looking over at me. Jimmy nods at me and punches his fist into the palm of his other hand and twists it. Randall just stares, like he’s waiting for me to brawl with the receiver.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ll be adding the charges to your next invoice.”

“There’s a lot of piss-ant static on your end, Pat. Quit yakking and just tell me when I see you. Seven at your place, right?”

George hangs up before I can uninvite him.

“So he going to pay up or what?” Randall asks me.

“Sure.”

Jimmy just shakes his head.

Leanne’s on the night shift at the hospital tonight, so when I get home, I play soccer with the twins. The boys aren’t identical, and

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they’re growing at different speeds. Sam’s almost two inches shorter than his brother, so I always try to set him up to score.

After the game, we heat up some leftover lasagna and they’re off to bed by nine-thirty. I like to go to bed right after the kids, because I have to get up at five-thirty. In the bedroom, it’s still hot because I’ve set the ac to powersave. The room’s decorated in beige and a kind of pinky-red. I told Leanne she could do what she liked, just no flowered sheets.

I’m not thinking of anything in particular, but pretty soon the cover is tenting up and I reach under the waistband of my shorts and stroke a bit. There’s a box of Kleenex on the bedside table and I grab one with my free hand, because I know it won’t take long. I think of what I always think of—Leanne on all fours, my arms around her waist, her round ass crushing into my hip bones. I’m almost there when I start thinking about that fucking deer. I can hear George Yanko’s voice, “So you’re poking through my garbage now?” I try to focus, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

Finally I give up, and lie there wondering if George used the forklift to drop it in or if he’d had some buddies to hoist it in. If it was in better condition, I’d just dump it in the woods out by the ravine, let the coyotes have a feast. They probably wouldn’t even touch it now. If I want to dump it, I’ll have to truck it to a dead stock place.

I don’t want to tell Leanne about it. She doesn’t have much of an opinion of George or most of my clients. Last Christmas, Leanne bought me a book about growing your own small business. It was four hundred pages and written by some guy from California. I figured I could have tripled the size of my operation in the same time it would take to read through the damned thing. Now it sits on the tank of the ensuite toilet. This way she thinks I’m still reading it. If I’m going to be honest with myself, though, the business isn’t going so well. Most of my customers are George’s friends. Most of them own warehouses in the industrial strip out by the highway.

Leanne’s worried they’re all fronts for organized crime. She watches too much tv.

Sometimes Leanne teases me about the boys at the office. She says I could tour most of them in a circus sideshow. Jimmy The Thin Man and Randall The Mentalist. “You’ve got a big heart, Patrick Roberts,” she says, “but you can only carry dead weight so far.”

Friday morning, when I pull into the lot, Randall is hosing out the dumpsters. Whatever else you can say, he’s damn hard working.

You give him something to do and he sticks to it. It’s six thirty in the morning and already hot, so he’s got his hip waders on and no shirt. Randall looks like an overgrown kid, with the red suspenders riding up over his chest.

He turns off the hose when he sees me. “Hey Pat, it’s ok if I come over tonight too, right?”

“Sure, Randall. You always come.”

“Just didn’t know if you were still pissed about the antlers.”

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“No. Beers at seven, game at eight.”

“Right.” He turns the sprayer back on and finishes up. I look over to the unit with the deer. It’s still sealed up, and we’ve put it in the shade. We should take care of it today, before it gets worse.

At lunch, Jimmy’s in a foul mood. “Someone better tell George not to mention Wendy, or I’m gonna fucking pound him.”

Randall is hanging around and asking Jimmy which hands are good for which game. “What about a full house?”

“Yes Randall, it’s a good hand.” Jimmy glares at me like this is all my fault. “But four of a kind is better?”

“You aren’t going to get a four of a kind in five card stud unless you’ve got horseshoes up your ass.”

I tell Jimmy to go home early.

When I get to the house, the boys are off at a sleepover and Leanne’s busy in the kitchen. She’s wearing a new dress, a halter with a flower print and a thick black border. I’m relieved because she tends to recycle her scrubs and the last thing I want is George commenting on her wardrobe.

She’s wearing heels and has her hair piled on top of her head, like women usually do at weddings, with bits of curls falling around. “You look like a Nashville star,” I tell her, and she smiles.

She leads me down to the basement and points out the bar she’s set up and the crockpot with barbecued meatballs. “If you want chips, the Costco bags are upstairs.”

The boys from the shop arrive right at seven, but George doesn’t make it until quarter to eight, when we’re setting up the buy-in. I figure I’ll see how the hands go, and then bring up the invoice.

For the first few hands, everyone’s conservative with the chips. The pots don’t go beyond twenty or thirty dollars. Still, it only takes half an hour before Randall’s out. George gives him a stack of his own chips, which you’d think was generous, but he just wants to get him in debt.

Randall loses these in the next hour and by then, the cross-town drivers, Carl and Dean, are out too and it’s just Jimmy, George and me left in the game as the others drink and comment on the action. We play a few hands of high Chicago and Jimmy makes a bad bet on a king of spades in the hole. George turns over the ace and takes all but ten bucks of Jimmy’s money. Leanne comes down and breaks up the tension as she pours us all a shot from an old bottle of Tequila.

Randall notices the worm and asks her if the booze is still good.

“It came this way. Gives it the kick, I guess. We got it on our honeymoon in Acapulco.”

George makes a comment about Mexicans that’s not worth repeating, but I do agree that putting worms in alcohol is weird.

Leanne tells us to finish off the bottle and goes back upstairs. Carl deals the next hand of seven-card stud. George is happy with his first three cards, because he puts ten dollars into the pot, just enough for Jimmy to have to go all in. I’ve got a pair of jacks, face down, so I’m along for the ride.

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The next two cards don’t help me out any, but I see George’s bets.

There’s over a hundred in the pot by the sixth card. It’s a jack and I see George’s fifty, even though my chance of getting a full house is still shit all. George motions to Carl to hold up before dealing. “So, Patrick, you want to explain those extra charges.”

“Live animals, George. They cost.”

“Last time I saw it, the deer wasn’t alive.”

“Plus transportation.”

“How long have I been your customer?”

“Can’t remember now, George.”

“How many clients have I recommended to you?”

All I can see when I look at George Yanko is that eleven-year-old bully crushing the worm under his boot. “Rules are rules.”

“Sure, Pat, sure. But why don’t we cut the crap and just settle this now. You win, you get the pot, plus double whatever you would have charged me. I win, you dump the damned deer, and shut the hell up about whatever I put in my own dumpster.”

It’s stupid, and I know it’s stupid, but I agree. “Just to settle an old score, George, whoever loses eats the worm.”

“Fine, Patrick, fine,” George says. Jimmy looks nervous. He can see George’s hand. Randall starts to chant “worm, worm, worm,” and soon the other boys are doing it too. Carl sighs and flips over the last card.

Queen of diamonds.

“Well, Patrick?”

“Three jacks. Ace high.”

George grins as he flips over four queens. “Oh, not much here, but I think it’ll do.” He tips the worm into my shot glass and slides it in front of me. Randall and Jimmy look horrified. I stare straight at George, grab the glass, tip it in my mouth. I grind the worm between my teeth, then swallow. There’s no taste, just the burn of the tequila. It could be mashed cardboard for all I know. I push the chips towards George, and Carl starts counting out the money.

George chuckles and reaches over to grab some meatballs. He spears a few on a toothpick. Everyone is silent, watching him pop them in his mouth, smug. He chases them with a swig of beer, but all of a sudden he starts spluttering. His face goes bright red, swells up, his neck bursting against his golf collar. He tears open the buttons and I’m surprised to see that he’s got no chest hair. I’d always figured he was carpeted, a man barely past gorilla. He must just be raw from the bbq sauce and the beer. A drop went down the wrong way or something—but the coughing is followed by wheezing and his palm pounding on the table. Randall whacks him square between the shoulder blades. The thump of his hand on George echoes off the entertainment unit. The coughing stops and George’s red face turns beetroot.

“Leanne! Christ, get down here!” I yell up to the top of the stairs.

Leanne comes thudding down and sees Randall still whacking away. She pushes Randall off and yells for George to stand up.

Jimmy and Carl are still seated at the table, their hands on the green felt. Leanne tries to wrap her arms around George’s ribcage, but his girth is too much for her. She can only grasp at her fingers, can’t make a proper fist. I move in, to help her, but he’s going limp and she tells me to help ease him down. “Randall, call nine-one-one.”

I lay George down on the shag area rug and Leanne straddles him, her narrow skirt riding up her hips. She’s wearing an old pair of cotton underwear, peach with a hole in the seam of the crotch, big enough to poke your little finger through. She said she keeps

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them because they are comfy and don’t give her lines, whatever that means. She pushes the heel of her palms together and plunges down through George’s bulk, into his diaphragm. She counts out loud, “One, two, three, four.” Then she tells me to tilt his head, check for obstructions. “Sweep with your fingers.”

I slide my index finger into George’s mouth. He’s fading in and out, eyes bulging open and blinking closed. I have to wiggle my finger past his teeth, over top of his tongue, flipping it out of the way like a fish. All I can think is that if George dies right now, I don’t want to have to pay to move him.

Randall calls down for Jimmy. “They don’t believe me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I told them we were drinking tequila…”

Leanne has started counting again. “One, two…”

Jimmy bounds up the stairs and grabs the phone from Randall. I hear him give our address and tell the attendant to move his ass.

Leanne nods at me to sweep again, then starts her third set. “One, two, three…” This time, George’s torso shoots forward and his eyes pop open. My finger’s still in his mouth and I scoop out the last of a meatball. He starts coughing again. He props himself up with his arms and looks down at Leanne and I can see that a tuft of hair has poked out of the hole in her underwear. The meatball is in the palm of my hand, puddled in George’s saliva. Leanne climbs off, pulls her skirt down, and hands me a cocktail napkin. “Twist onto your side.”

George doesn’t want to listen, he wants to stand up so he can keep on coughing. Leanne keeps her weight on him. “No way you’re asphyxiating on your own puke on my watch.”

The front door opens, the paramedics thud downstairs, followed

by Jimmy and Randall. Because he passed out, the EMS want to take George in for tests. The stairwell is too narrow for a stretcher so they load him onto one of the wooden chairs. George looks like one of those old time kings, being carried by servants. He waves at us from above, calls out in a creaky voice, “Thanks for the game, Patrick. Nice to know that your wife’s carpet matches the drapes.”

Saturday morning I pack up some of Dad’s old gas masks and Randall meets me at the garage. By the time we’re suited up, we look like biohazard workers, in hipwaders and rubber gloves up to our shoulders. It’s stinking hot in all this rubber. We open the dumpster and the smell is muted by the mask, but it’s built for a bigger man. As I move, the latex flaps away from my face and ribbons of reek seep in.

I grab a rope and shackle the front legs together, then twist the cord around the neck. The skin is starting to loose its grip on the muscle beneath. It’s too loose and I’m afraid the hide will rip right off. I spread a tarp below the dumpster, then attach the rope to the front of the truck, looping it around the joist on the front bumper. I wave to Randall to reverse. As he does, the body slides out smooth, riding the crest of the other refuse. It lands with a thump on the blue plastic and I wave at Randall to stop. One of the hind legs has torn off and I climb back into the dumpster to get it and then toss it on the pile. I grab the hatchet from the garage, and the antlers come off in a few strokes. Randall sticks them near the office door, the bases planted in soil, so they look like dead trees. We wrap the rest up in the tarp. It looks like a bulky Christmas present, crude wrapping paper and twine. It doesn’t take long to load it onto the truck with the forklift. Randall secures the hatch and joins me in the cab. We head straight for George’s boiler room. »

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Marry Me G R A N T B U DAY I L LU S T R AT I O N BY K E V I N M C B R I D E

Alison was up in the middle of the night battling the sand. While Len snored, she was wedging his towel into the gap under the door and then fitting one of his t-shirts into a crevice along the window. But the wind was relentless and by morning everything was gritty, the bed, the blankets, all their clothes. Sand clung to the cobwebs on the ceiling and even got into her ears despite her earplugs. Bent forward with her red locks dangling, Alison shook sand out of her hair, raking at it with her fingers and trying not to say how much she hated Tunisia.

“I’m going back to Rome.” She had her plane ticket and her atm card and a couple hundred U.S. dollars, so she could—and would—do what she wanted.

Len set Dead Souls down on the side table. He’d found the book in Milan, where he’d also made nine hundred and ten bucks selling fake lsd at an open-air concert. He’d blown all the money on a Gucci shoulder bag for her. That was impressive. Except she hated it. Nine hundred dollars? Wasn’t all their stuff made in China by underpaid peasants? Didn’t it make her a target for purse snatchers?

“I want to go back to Rome, too,” he assured her now, reclining on the bed and stroking his throat with his fingertips. Even at the age of thirty-five he only needed to shave twice a week.

“I mean today,” she said.

“We just get these shots of the ruins and boom, back to Roma.”

He picked up his digital Leica and turned it admiringly in both hands as though it were an artefact from ancient Carthage.

“Call the airline.”

“Let’s just go right on out to the airport,” he said, doing her one better. He had wavy blond hair and a smile that ran all the way back to where his gold-capped molars used to be. “If we hop to it we can be out there this afternoon.”

His eyes were wide-spaced and cool grey. After Milan they’d gone to Venice where they’d drunk Bellini cocktails—prosecco and peach nectar—at Harry’s Bar, twelve bucks a pop. Like everything in Italy she thought they were overpriced and over-rated. But she had to admit it was fun. The afternoon could have gone on forever.

She pretended she was Audrey Hepburn and laughed from behind

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her sunglasses. She still wasn’t sure how they did it, but they walked off without paying. At first, giddy, she’d put her hand over her mouth and laughed thinking they’d done it by accident, but Len had put his palm on her back and guided her briskly to the train station. The next morning they woke to the bells of St. Peter’s.

“Hitchhike?”

“You know how slow the buses are.”

“How about a taxi?” she said.

But he was already crossing the street, holding his right hand up like a cop to stop the trucks and mule carts. Clamping her Gucci bag under her arm, she ran to catch up. As she chased him, she dodged buckets of water flung by merchants sluicing down their shop fronts.

Len halted at a coffee kiosk and ordered them espressos and chocolate croissants. As they waited, he snapped off a couple of shots. The older generation wore djellabahs, but the younger men wore Nike t-shirts or bright blue sweat-suits. Every male had a moustache, even schoolboys, while most of the women were veiled. Given the sand and dust and wind, Alison saw why. Forget religion, it was about complexion. She picked grit from her eyes.

The wind, the harmattan, had picked up again and the high overcast muted the sun. It was December and North Africa was cold and its dominant colour grey.

They’d already been to Carthage, but Len’s goal was Dougga, because he was convinced he could sell photographs of the Phoenician and Roman ruins. Last year he’d sold photos of a Bom-

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bay toothpaste factory to a dental journal. Bombay was also where he’d sold his gold molars. He was slightly more gaunt about the cheeks now. Alison had told him there was no way she was selling her gold fillings. Len had assured her he’d never ask her to sell anything, though he did mention that her red hair would fetch a good price in Hong Kong. She still nightmared about waking up alone in a room with a terrible thirst, a backache, and one of her kidneys gone.

They crossed an open field seeking the main road out of Tunis.

Alison placed her feet carefully. She didn’t want to step on a nail and end up in a Tunisian hospital. She’d discovered she didn’t really like travel, or rather she liked the idea of it far more than the reality. The odd Bellini cocktail and Gucci bag aside, all this traipsing around on foot was tedious, and the low-rent rooms grubby.

Selling your gold molars to get a plane ticket was a little too real, though she’d gone along to the clinic in Rangoon where they each made fifty bucks for a pint of blood.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a dog. It was big, some sort of shepherd, moving fast and with purpose, directly toward her.

“Len…Lenny!”

They ran. Then Alison halted. She faced the dog and swung her bag, the Gucci. The dog veered. She whipped the purse side-toside while Len threw rocks. Then the strap broke and the bag—a deep rich oxblood with a clasp in the form of two joined hands— sailed free, spinning like a Frisbee. The dog caught it between its teeth. It shook the bag as if snapping the spine of a rabbit then bounded away with it. Alison started chasing the dog but stumbled and went over on her ankle.

They watched the dog disappear across the field. Seen from behind, Len and Alison might have been a young couple fondly watching their rambunctious purebred gambolling about a local park. Seen from the front, Alison embodied despair.

“Everything?” asked Len. Alison nodded. Money, ticket, passport, the lot.

Len put his forefinger on her chin and gently turned her head so that she was looking up at him. “Marry me.”

Alison limped along the road, the groping wind moulding her jeans to her legs. Her neck felt gritty and her cheeks were tight where the tears had dried. Off to her left, the corrugated metal roofing on a row of low cement houses rattled. The whitewash was grey—was there any other colour in this country?—and the barracks-like dwellings looked abandoned except for the dogs curled in the dirt.

“Why not?” Len called over his shoulder. “We’ve already got the rings.”

Alison dialled the mock gold band on her finger. They’d agreed to wear them to avoid scandal in the more conservative countries.

So far no one had even noticed much less cared. She’d been declining to marry him for two years. Sometimes he asked her at parties and sometimes in movie line-ups. People would gather round to hear her answer. Each time she said no he laughed as if delighted by her contrary spirit.

“This looks like a good spot.” Then he added, in a mildly admon-

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ishing tone, as if her health was always of paramount importance to him despite the foolish risks to which she was addicted, “I don’t want you walking too much on that ankle.”

She was in too much pain to be sarcastic.

Now he extended his right arm and pointed his forefinger as if indicating the exact spot where he expected the vehicle to halt.

But there were no vehicles. A half an hour they waited and not one car appeared. They stood in the wind of the grey world like survivors of some holocaust. Wind had always unsettled her. She’d heard that the harmattan, which blew through the winter, was believed to cause madness.

She looked down at the road and then she squinted off at the hazy silhouette of Tunis. The words burst from her like a sneeze: “I want to go home.”

“Home,” said Len, as if the concept was an interesting one.

Eyes narrowed against the needling wind, she watched him. He was smiling bemusedly, his hair rising and falling in the breeze.

She couldn’t remember a single moment when things weren’t just fine for him, even the day he sold his teeth. They’d met at a wake for a mutual acquaintance killed in a car accident. Everyone there had been stunned by the discovery that you could die at the age of thirty-four. Alison had gone to Len’s place, a small room in an old house, filled with thousands of dollars worth of photography books. She’d been impressed that the bathroom was so clean.

She’d checked the shelves and the medicine cabinet for signs of a female. Nothing. They’d made love then talked about death— agreeing that it was a bad thing, or maybe a good thing, for it gave life its savour, as long as it happened fast and painless and not before you were ninety-nine. In the morning he’d taken photographs of her feet. She was an X-ray technician, which, he pointed out to her, was the most profound, the most penetrating form of photography. She hated it. She didn’t trust the lead partition. She was going back to school and taking either massage therapy or psychiatric nursing.

“One difference between the Phoenicians and the Romans is that the Romans were willing to move inland,” said Len, delivering his little lecture on the side of the road. It always impressed her how well-read he was. “The Phoenicians stuck to the coast. It’s just like the Portuguese and the Spanish. The Portuguese rarely ventured away from the sea whereas the Spaniards moved inland.”

Alison continued gazing at him. Her mildly appalled expression suggested that, by a series of strange events, perhaps a misdeed in a past life, she’d fallen into the hands of a lunatic.

“Here we go!” he shouted.

She looked around and there indeed was a car slowing down to give them a ride.

They reached Dougga in the evening. The ruins overlooked a valley.

The sun was setting on the far side and the light broke through the clouds to spotlight a Roman pillar here, an arch there. There were olive trees and goats, and at that time of day the colours were radiant reds and ochres, making her imagine an ancient city of date palms and farms, carpet weavers and potters, with perhaps the occasional nomad tent pitched in the distance. The wind had let up. The only sound was the bleating of the small dark goats and the trickle of pebbles dislodged as the animals clambered about the ruins nibbling the tufts of grass.

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She sat on the warm remnants of a rock wall and looked out over the valley. It was splendid. To her shock she was happy. She probably shouldn’t be, it was dangerous and left her vulnerable, but she was too tired to ruin the mood by over-analysing. She took off her shoes to ease her feet and she stretched out on the soothingly warm stone as if lying down in a hot bath. Eyes closed, she listened to the world: goats, flies, and somewhere down in the valley a cowbell.

Sometimes she’d say to Len, You can’t be serious. He always knew what she meant. She once took him to meet her mother. The old woman had tilted her head back and observed Len through the smoke of a low tar cigarette, and in her one-lunged voice croaked to Alison, “You’re in trouble, girl.”

She woke shivering. The sun was down and the wind had returned, a hard breeze veering in off the darkening desert. She sat up and gazed around but Len was nowhere in sight. Even the goats were gone. She stood, wincing on her sprained ankle. She looked for her shoes but they were not where she’d left them. “Len? Lenny?” Panic spasmed inside her. Dizzy, she reached out for balance except there was nothing to lean on. Fighting down fear, she managed to be angry instead. She peeled off her white socks with the little red balls at the heel and, in the last of the light, started limping along the remnants of the stone-paved road that curved around the hillside. Passing a pair of Roman columns that had stood for two thousand years, she tried to be suitably impressed. Two thousand years, two millennia, twenty centuries. Where the hell was Len? She bent forward, hands on her knees, and took long slow breaths. She stood upright. A full moon, jaundiced by dust, watched her from the horizon. The moon did not care, the wind did not care, the land did not care. And apparently neither did Len. The moon cast sharp shadows of rocks and bricks. She passed the remnants of a crumbling arch and saw three men seated under an olive tree. And they saw her. One man was already up and striding toward her. She took a step back but stumbled and

the man grabbed her arm, squeezing her wrist with a hot hard hand and pulled her upright so that they stood nose-to-nose, so close that his moustache was in her face. He smelled of tobacco and olives. He wore an old suit coat and badly needed a shave. The other men encircled her.

“Please,” said one.

“Yes, yes, please.”

They were all pointing to their place beneath the tree, inviting her to sit. One hurried ahead and dusted the ground while the other two took an elbow and helped her walk.

The moon was directly overhead when Len appeared on a donkey.

With a jaunty wave he greeted the men, then tipped an imaginary Stetson toward Alison. “Ma’am.” He made a stirrup of his linked fingers and she mounted the animal. Within minutes he was leading her down the hill between the silhouetted olive trees. She thought how two thousand years ago this had been a thriving city, how in the evenings, when the light softened and the heat relented, people attended plays, gossiped, met potential lovers.

The animal smelled of hide and sweat. She held onto its bristly mane while its pelvic bones lurched and rolled under her.

“Where are my shoes?’

“Never take your shoes off near goats.”

They reached a road. A car started and its headlights flashed on, the beams boring holes in the dark. Len helped her down and then opened the rear door. The driver nodded, “Welcome, welcome,” and then put the car in gear and they set off down a road that descended into the valley. The hill eclipsed the moon so they were in blackness. Then the driver switched off the ignition as well as the headlights so as to save gas and preserve the battery, which meant they were driving blind. Alison flinched, but Len took her hand very formally in both of his. “Well?” With the question hanging in the air, they plunged on down into the dark, swiftly gaining speed as the harmattan rushed up from the desert to meet them. »

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Cold Sentence JOSH MASSEY

The lights blink on over this icy page. Everything is as vivid as a bloody nose. That little bitch, Louis Sixteen, had it coming to him, so I took the wood to him, and slapped him around like the bitch he is. And now here I am in Bordeaux, writing this story as part of a prison program sponsored by the penal board of the regional district. Eventually we will have to present our work to our families and friends who are coming to visit us. If only I could describe what it looks like in this room with these other inmates. Their heads arched over pages, dull pencils and messy ballpoint pens clenched in hairy hands. Redemption through art. The true writer has a criminal’s heart and mind.

Bob, the rapist to my left, is crying. Tears dribble under the frames of his chunky, rapist-style glasses. The Poet Laureate is telling him that what he is writing is beautiful, and he’s blubbering pathetically because suddenly on the page he can see the horror of what he done.

The Poet Laureate, she’s the one giving this workshop in the correctional wing of this infamous prison. It raises our esteem being incarcerated here. And it swells our heads to have these famous guest lecturers and filmmakers who want penal remediation work on their resumes. The Poet Laureate believes in the potential of poetry and prose to help with socialization, and she wants us inmates to look deep up our assholes for the hidden painful glass shards lodged inside, and she wants it done “grammatically.”

She’s impressed by my writing ability. I tell her I used to read all the bad-ass writers, like Jean Genet and Hakim Bey. That’s why I write dirty twisted images, and that’s part of what got me in trouble. All those bad influences. If you idealize shit for long enough then eventually you become a turd. And I ask myself, how the hell did a Windsor boy end up in this French prison, anyway? Maybe I’m writing to find out.

People I know in hockey call me Jean, in the Quebec pronouncement way. My real name is supposed to be said Jean like “Billy Jean”. When I’m not in jail, I live in a small French town called Cadillac, with my B. That’s what we call our girls in Quebec. In Windsor we always used to call them bitch, but babe to their face; but then I started calling my girl B when we moved to Quebec. She likes that better.

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But, really, fuck you if you’re reading this. I don’t want you reading my story. I don’t want to win any prize. This is for my parole officer and me, and maybe miss Poet Laureate, if she keeps wearing those thigh-high skirts and brushing against me, and filling my nose with her perfume which is something we don’t get a whiff of much in prison.

It’s day two of our criminal writing assignment and the Poet Laureate wishes me to be nicer, to respect you, the reader. She thinks it’s unjust to brutalize the people who are spending the time reading what you write. Do I agree with her? Not really. But the more I write, the more I enjoy the feeling of transport and escape it gives me, and the more willing I am to take her advice. She wants me to try writing a poem. I told her that if I were to write poetry, it would look like sentences, so she’s letting me write what she says is poetic prose. She wants to see more of my images. I write: I feel like a spiky flower screaming through its stamen, in a jagged metal vase, planted in crushed glass aggregate.

I grew up in Windsor where you can see Detroit smoldering over the water; the two cities like conjoined engines. I was playing aa hockey when I got called up to the ohl for training camp. But I never made it because I busted up my knee. I was off skates for a whole season. It put me back. I never caught up. If I wanted to pursue some kind of hockey career, I had to bypass the golden road to the nhl, and head straight for the shit-eater leagues. My coach, a tough fuck, took me aside at practice. He coasted with me from centre ice to the boards, while the rest of the team kept doing their drills.

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“Derkson,” he said, with his arm around my shoulder pads, and his head bowed pensively, “you’ve got soft hands, but it’s your fists which are going to earn you a living. Why not the Quebec Super Pro league? You’ll get fifty bucks a game, subsidized housing, and you’ll get to do what you love, which is break noses. They might even teach you French, Derk.”

The boys were all there when me and B showed up at the motel in Val d’Or, way the fuck in northern Quebec, to try out for Les Requins. Money symbols and nudes on signs framed with hundreds of little ultra-bright light bulbs. The money symbols blurry and the nudes drawn out of proportion, paint chips coming off their flabby tits and ass. Val D’Or: Las Vegas of the north. I was hung over for my first try-out. But everyone else was too. The coach breathed a boozy smell as he barked orders. B got a job in a local brewery. She would come to games and sit up in the third row, slurping beers she’d sneak in her purse, and I’d pump my arm at her from the penalty box. Those were the good days.

I soon got traded to Les Abitibi Lumberjacks. The Requins had used me to bargain for this hotshot named Louis Sixteen. He was worth more than me, I guess. He was worth me plus two other players. A scorer was becoming a hotter ticket than a scrapper. It’s around that time that I stopped seeing hockey players. They were all salaries skating around in money sign patterns, battling it out for another zero to be sticked on their ass.

The new coach wanted me to fight even more. In the new dressing room guys were punching the brick walls in anger after a bad game. Spitting at the local volunteer journalists. Smokes fired up after the game, sometimes even between periods; stained red suspenders framing greasy chest hair and sweat pimples. The collective reek of the hockey equipment on a team where nobody aired out their bags properly after the games. There wasn’t an ounce of skill on that team. It was a goon show. At the end of the season we were jockeying for last position. We wanted to come last.

We fought our way to the bottom. The refs usually let us do our thing. But the game was changing. Some of the new refs wouldn’t put up with as much. My coach was of the older school, or so I thought. He was on the verge of selling out to the new, sanitized system.

Last game of the season and we faced The Requins. My coach took me aside and told me what my duty was. Punish Louis Sixteen.

Lose with style. I was in that showoff’s face all game, shadowing him like the inevitability of death. Giving him shots after the whistle, but not enough to land me in the penalty box. Just a little gamesmanship, a few face washes, and making fun of his penis size. I wasn’t expecting to snap, I really wasn’t. Looking back, I think something hormonal happened in me. A pure fluid rage which I had rarely experienced. And it all stemmed from Louis Sixteen beaking at me. “Hey Derkson, go back to Ontario!” Later, on the same shift, he slashed me in the back of the leg as he skated by. The refs pretended not to see. The fans, those fucking biased fans, they cheered. This doubly pissed me off because for one thing I hate those cheap shots underneath the padding, and for another I

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always felt kind of vulnerable as an English minority playing in Quebec. So I ride Louis Sixteen onto the ice from behind, and ring his head off the ice until he stops moving.

(The Poet Laureate, she’s reading over my story and she says my tenses are wrong, that I switch randomly to the present. But I tell her that’s the way we speak, that’s the way stories get told in real life. She lets me have it my way, and moves on to the next inmate.

We’re going to be sharing our writing soon, and she needs to make sure everyone’s projects are coming along. I’d better finish my story.)

So I’m hollering, challenging the whole fucking team, beckoning to their bench as I coast by the slain Louis Sixteen. I want to look like the madman that nobody wants to take on and they’ll feel like fucking failures because they’re too scared. Even the refs keep to the perimeter as I skate, arms pumping, past the bench where my teammates are banging sticks on the boards. I give them the classic gap-toothed hockey grin. They love this shit. But my coach is obviously pissed, he’s looming over the team from his pedestal behind them like some freaky judge. “This is your final game in the league. Tu es fini.” I can read his lips. The motion he makes with his finger along his neck clarifies the statement even more.

That’s when I bent down and grabbed a stick off the ice and chucked it at my coach, to let him know how I felt about his twofaced manipulation. He raised his arms to shield himself, but the butt caught him on the knuckles, popped them like snapping carrots. Whoops.

The fluorescent lights make shadows hang under the noses and cheekbones of those on the other side of the glass, and there’s an electric haze about their features. They are looking at me through the tempered glass that divides the incarcerated writers from the audience. First up was the rapist, reading some poetry: “The cell darkness made me see the truth/ I write of the light I see through the bars/ I see her in that light, pure as before/ I made a mess/ of her beauty.” The rapist doesn’t have any guests in the audience as far as I can tell. But I do. My father and my grandmother. They have a weird relationship that I could never figure out. They are both forgiving Christians. B is sitting in a different area. I can’t read her expression very well. Her eyes are lowered. As I look up between sentences, I now see that her eyes are raised, and they are shiny. I may get out sooner because of this, B. Although I know the laws are changing, it’s getting harder to repent; telling a story just isn’t enough. It’s not enough to make somebody cry. But it is enough for me today, this hour, this minute, this second, this sentence. Reading my work to the audience behind the glass, those faces of the ones I care for so deeply. »

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My Avatar, My Self-image PETER BABIAK

“I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found … But even that is avoiding the real horror. The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.We are alone. There is nothing else.”

—Alan Moore, The Watchmen

Last fall, just as the world’s ersatz run at economic prosperity was cascading into recession, I had an epiphany. I was playing Amped 2, a snowboarding game, with my daughter on our Xbox. I was racing along way behind her on the hill so I tried something risky on my side of the split screen—a multiple flip and three-sixty spin combo—to gain points.

I didn’t expect it to work, and it didn’t. All I remember is crashing into a railing, and then a short conversation.

Amused at my craptastic maneuvering, she kept her eyes on the screen and hands on the controller but tilted her head in my direction and asked “Oh, pops, are you okay?”

She wanted to know if my virtual crash—through some synaesthetic transubstantiation that united avatar (the on-screen character one manipulates in video games) with flesh-and-blood player—injured the real me? With that question my kid melted everything solid—our game, the wall between fiction and reality, my self—into air and in the process dragged an elephant into that room with us. I just wasn’t sure if the elephant was me or my avatar.

“Yeah,” I said as my guy was repositioned back at the top of the hill, “I’m okay.” And then I invoked the laws of patriarchal wisdom and asked, “You know I’m not my avatar, right?”

I was trying to be clever but I was marginally concerned for my girl’s metaphysical well being. So between rail slides and grabs on our next run I rambled on about how her words had just dislodged themselves—and us—from reality, and how she should probably read more books to figure out a thing or two about the reality that she just momentarily left behind.

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People once believed, I said, that the soul leaves the body at night when it sleeps, so what happens to the “self” when we’re in a video game? What happens to you when, even in one of those entertainment situations that you’re just not supposed to think about too much, you project yourself into a pixilated construct, into Identity 2.0, that almost mythical domain of a digital selfhood? Is it like an out-of-body experience? Does your avatar change how you think and act in your physical life? Do you know that a study found that young people today can more easily identify cartoonish representations on screen than animals and plants outside?

Yes, it was only a juvenile Freudian slip uploaded from her naïve immersion in the Microsoft hyper-reality machine that I bought for her. And, yes I probably ruined our fun with my intellectualoid posturing. But I haven’t forgotten that little rupture in the spacetime continuum of our upstairs computer room. It was a noodle-scratcher, kind of like one of those high literary epiphanies you get in James Joyce, when “the soul of the most commonest object”—in this case, the family Xbox—jumped out at me faster than I could say digitally-mediated experience.

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If you spend hours staring at your Xbox—or Playstation or Wii or whatever—your mind is going to walk headlong into a cosmic mash-up of fiction and reality. And no matter how savvy you think you are at not overstepping the metaphysical fault line that separates them, you just know there’s going to be some impact on your psychic habits and practices, on how you think and see yourself. You don’t have to be an old-fashioned Marxist to understand that, because a culture’s mental habits are the products of the stuff that keeps its economy going, the suspension of disbelief we erect every time we are entertained by some fiction starts to unravel when those fictions are virtual. That’s a stock part of our technological psychosis.

Theodor Adorno, a pop culture critic who died long before Atari gave the world Pong, said that with the birth of commercial mass media “the difference between culture and practical life disappears”. He was thinking of tv. I can’t imagine how he would wrap his mind around video culture. Lobbing quotes from dead German Marxists at young gamers who have only known a world dominated by personal media and advanced social technologies like Facebook is like talking to the taxman about poetry. They might offer a vacant stare and then blithely reassure you that yes, they understand the difference between reality and the fiction they are playing on screen.

And they probably do. My kid tells me this all the time. She knows she lives in a society geared towards image, a society of the spectacle, and that she experiences simulated reality in the form of a fiction that sometimes seems more real than reality. She’s even told me, with that I can’t believe you’re so stupid twinkle in her eye, that she’s just a lot better at maneuvering between virtual and non-virtual worlds than I am. And so she is.

It’s enough to make the ground beneath me start feeling like molasses, but then for all the highfalutin abstractions that come from both technophile warnings about the dangers of gaming technology and from cheerleaders of all things digital, there always seems to be a much simpler proposition at work: consumerism. All we’re really talking about is the conflation of the two old enemies— culture and economics—and about the fetishisation of absolutist consumerism, the linchpins of the entire system.

Take the popular 3-d online virtual-world game, Second Life, for example. It’s a world, the homepage announces, “imagined and created by its residents.” You create an avatar and then you do normal life things with it, like buy land, get married, mortgage a home, have an affair, open a small business. And so on—except you can’t die.

The genius of SL, what makes it so much fun to “play”, is that it offers a frighteningly beautiful—or beautifully frightening, I’m not sure which—vacation from your self. Like a 3-d Facebook where the “walls” open up a fourth dimension and where “pokes” get more fleshy, this is technology that banks on our luscious narcissism and slightly psychotic need to have our wishes fulfilled.

Apart from the fact that they’re just so fun, the genius of simulatedworld games like SL is that they eliminate the difference between product and ideology. You role-play your character in the fictional world but that world isn’t exactly fictional. Not quite. Making real money from your avatar’s virtual endeavors is not only permitted, it’s encouraged and expected. Like the notorious Anshe Chung, the sl avatar of the corporeal Ailin Graef, who was the first “resident” to make one million dollars in her real life from profits she earned selling—of all things—“real estate” in the sl virtual world.

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Featured on the cover of Business Week and hailed by cnn as the “Rockefeller of Second Life”, the “out of character” Graef, who also goes by her “in character” name, now runs Anshe Chung Studios, a multimillion dollar metaverse development company which the World Economic Forum selected as “New Champion of the World Economy.” It’s entirely devoted to helping you, “as an individual, organization or brand, to reincarnate and reinvent yourself in the Metaverse.” So its website says.

Like a distilled galactic megamall with epic aspirations, sl is populated by six million avatars which represent, allegedly, millions of regular people around the world, but it’s also home to first-life corporations and their real goods and services, which are sold to very real avatars for very real money. Sony’s there, Nike, too, and Toyota, American Apparel and even a Reuters news bureau. And so it goes-and grows. A couple of years ago, before the sub-prime mortgage meltdown in the for-real economy, a bank approached the director of advertising at video game development giant ea and offered one million dollars to sponsor virtual mortgages and loans for real estate in that other life-simulation game The Sims. Curiouser, and curiouser, and certainly more curious than an Xbox game.

Virtual self-fashioning, whether in sporting games, dynamic first-person shooter games like Grand Theft Auto, or in sophisticated simulated worlds, may be intellectually fascinating but they are just novel ways of making the “market,” that boring and ugly old economic category, appear young and sexy. Maybe that’s why most avatar templates—on sl, The Sims, imvu—seem modeled on an animation aesthetic that teeters on the brink of masturbatory pornography.

And sexing virtual selves is exactly where that fault line between the real and fictional gets impenetrably fuzzy. In a celebrated story last year a woman in the uk filed for divorce after she found her husband in real life cheating on her in his virtual one. She had already caught him having sex with an online callgirl, with the help of an online private detective, but then she walked in and saw him committing adultery with an animated woman. On the one hand, you forget the end of your real self and the beginning of your avatar when you slide between your inworld role and out-of-world characters, but on the other hand this fictional platform is built with an atomized and highly individualized real consumer in mind. A deconstructed self operating in-world that aims solely at the fetishisation of its demand—to do as it pleases.

Which is why the avatar construction industry is not only about clothing and hair style, furnishings and commodities; avatars in role-playing games are generally without genitalia, although you can—through companies like SexGen Platinum and XCite—buy modifications that “attach” genitalia to your virtual self. At XCite Online, for example, you can buy the Cock Classic—featuring three stages of erection, orgasm and masturbation animations, and orgasm particle effect—or the X3 Clit—“Welcome to the new standard of female genitalia”—for your avatar, or you can teleport directly to the company “kiosk” in sl and buy your wares there.

I’d like to think that it’s like the Promethean myth being replayed online, and there is something voluptuously epic about the self in virtual life. Even the etymology of the word “avatar” is revealing here: Sanskrit in derivation, the original meaning of the word is “the descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form”. A deity that

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says, we might add, I am that I am. I am an avatar and the end of my self, my singular purpose, is the satisfaction of my desire.

Like most older-than-thirty people for whom virtuality means two-dimensional cerebral geekery and avatar means a thin white paddle that moved vertically across a screen with the sole purpose of hitting a “ball” back to the other side of the screen, I can’t think of these gussied up social networks as cultural objects—even though I know that’s exactly what they are. They seem little more than flirtatious marketing devices, aesthetically pleasing but rather tawdry mechanisms for pulling gobs of money and a modicum of identity from neurotic, over-heated adolescents and adolescent-minded men and women. They’re fun, no question about it, but fun in the way that shiny objects and round rubber things are “fun” for newborns and puppies.

The thing is, I know I’m wrong. I must be.

Like the return of the repressed, video and online games have moved from the geek micro-civilization that sustained them during the last two decades of the last century into the mainstream, and they are explosive in popularity, influence and sales. At the end of 2008 The Economist reported that global expenditures on video

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game hardware and software for that one year would reach almost fifty billion dollars. By my calculations domestic expenditures in my house alone—on Xbox, Playstation, DS and DS Light, Archos, Guitar Hero, the shelves of discs bought to shove inside these, and modifications to online avatars (no genitals)—amounts to about five thousand dollars of that. To say nothing of the hours of consumption.

This makes books, the oldest mass medium in the world, specifically novels— the one art form that’s always been tied to individualism and built on an acute consciousness of selfhood—look like a constantly depressed market sector in comparison.

If you’re well read or at least up-to-date with the world of “Literature” you’re sort of expected to believe that images are deceptive prison-houses. “The fundamental movement of the literary mind,” said Paul de Man, “espouses the pattern of a demystifying consciousness.” Part of what it demystifies is that stubborn mental habit of confusing literature with reality. Fiction is fiction and the world “out there” is just that: the world out there, which is where it stays. Literature is about things, of course, but it’s first and foremost about expression.

It’s about descrambling and decoding our

world in words, even though most good literature aims to make reading like falling into a fictional rabbit hole.

It’s words—harder to understand and much less fun to look at—that can deliver us from evil and make us more complete thinkers, not images, certainly not something like a sexy anime-inspired cartoon we play on screen. This old truism goes way back to Plato who, in an influential little parable about prisoners locked in a cave and forced to look at shadows on a wall, said that people are imprisoned by their inability to see beyond the surface appearance of things. We’re easily seduced by images and always mistake them for “true” content, in other words, because we like to think that an image—a painting, a photograph, a YouTube video, a super cool game graphic—can somehow restore objects they represent to some empirical state where they are just there, present and authentic, full of themselves.

Of course they can’t. That’s why they are representations: they re-present.

The best expression of this little moral that’s not really a moral at all is from the film The Matrix, in the scene where Laurence Fishburne’s ever-cool Morpheus offers Neo, played by Keanu Reaves, those two pills.

“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your own bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

I once told my daughter, months after that snowboarding episode, that her uncertainty during my accident meant that Morpheus was right. For her, my real self became what he called “residual self-image.” The mental projection of my digital self. I’ve also asked her “what would you do if you were Neo?” She tells me that she’d take the red pill, too, but she assures me that people in her generation are quite capable of jumping from online to offline without thinking. “It’s like there’s no difference for us.”

I’d like to think that, if I were given Neo’s choice, I’d pick the red pill. I still believe in demystification. The thing is, I’m almost certain my daughter, who is far more literate than I was at her age but equally savvy navigating in virtual worlds, wouldn’t take either one. She would refuse on the grounds that the offer amounted to a false dichotomy, and tell Morpheus to take a hike, or at least ask him to rephrase the question in terms she understood. »

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POETRY

Brother John CHARLES ANDERSON I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY A R LO K E O VA L E R A

I was born so, soulless half-living a motley of cloth often thought a man in the end fooling few and not myself Dawn—it was an olive-drab dawn I shambled on tiles in glass ran a blade down scalp At the abbey, they greeted me with stained hands

For consolation, call it a dream and half believe it Brothers—but they’d shrink from one among them undeceived Buttoned, God, we’re one Perhaps they dwell themselves, restless fighting sand ink a path of sleep like me and dream

Now the days are grape-picking, labour and song, raising wants and voices in song When they sing of god I sing with them uncertain I believe but listening, singing Heaven brush us, dust I think little of my old life

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Sunday Dinner BRUCE MCDOUGALL I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY D AV E B A R N E S

This is how Sundays go when you’re nine years old in the summer of 1959, living with your mother and your sister in the suburbs. You wake up early on Sunday morning, whether you want to or not.

No matter how late you tried to stay up on Saturday night, watching something on “The Late Show” like Friendly Persuasion in which a bunch of thugs invade Gary Cooper’s farm, kill his goose and molest his wife while he refuses to fight back because he’s a Quaker, or the movie with Charles Laughton in a wig that looks like a bunch of white cotton Tootsie Rolls playing an English lawyer who discovers after a long and intense courtroom drama that his acquitted client is really guilty after all; no matter how late it is when you and your mother and your sister sigh and yawn and stretch and shuffle like zombies off to bed, you always wake up early, and so do they, because today is Sunday and, on Sundays, we all go to church.

You lie in your bed wondering if you can go back to sleep again, but the harder you try, the less chance you have of succeeding. You see daylight through the window. It looks like a good day for riding your bike or playing hockey with a tennis ball in the schoolyard.

But if you make the slightest gesture, you’ll be discovered, awake.

So you close your eyes and try to go back to sleep.

Your mother has been up since the crack of dawn, rattling around in the kitchen just beyond the closed door of your bedroom making more noise than a cement mixer full of rocks.

From the noises she makes, it sounds as if she takes all the pots and pans out of the cupboards and hurls them around the kitchen, then empties all the knives and forks out of the drawer and dumps them from a great height into a pile on the arborite table. She then turns on all the small appliances at the same time, along with the vacuum cleaner, and puts ball bearings in the highspeed blender. Through all this, you soldier on, pretending you’re dead to the world. But every once in a while, you peak through squinted eyes at the door. You can’t help it.

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At the same moment as your mother bursts into your room, you open your eyes. You stare at her in the doorway. For a moment, you consider sleepwalking, though you’ve never tried it and you’re not sure how it’s done. Do you extend your arms in front of you like Frankenstein, or do you shuffle erratically into walls and furniture with your head down? Do you keep your eyes open? But your mother has your number. “You have half an hour to get dressed for church,” she says. You lie there quietly, hoping she’ll turn her attention to your sister, who preoccupies your mother in a different way and requires her full attention unless your sister is being a suck, which she usually is on Sundays when we all go to church. Like all sucks, your sister likes going to church. Some day, you hope, your mother and your sister will become engrossed in suckdom, forget about you and go to church by themselves, leaving you behind to roam around the empty house for a couple of hours, looking in closets, watching cartoons on tv or going into the basement to listen to the Everly Brothers while you take slap-shots against the wall beside the oil tank with a hockey stick and a tennis ball. But no matter how hard you hope for a miracle, they don’t forget you. Miracles never happen on the Lord’s Day. You dawdle and loaf in your room, but your mother starts to call you at intervals that get shorter and shorter until she’s calling you every five bloody seconds in a high-pitched whine that could penetrate steel or rubber or any other material that you stuff in your ears or pull over your head, until you have no choice except either to climb out your bedroom window or to get up and get dressed.

You shuffle down the hall to the bathroom, looking as exhausted as you can and hoping your mother will think you’re sick. But your sister is already in the bathroom, counting the pores in her face

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until she reaches a million or just sitting on the toilet silently staring at her bedroom slippers until you open the door, which prompts her to scream at you as if you’d threatened to beat her with a rake, so you scream back at her and laugh at her exposed chest until you realize that you’ve blown your cover. This isn’t the way people behave when they have terminal mononucleosis.

You go back to your room and start to get dressed. You discover that you’ve lost your shirt, but your mother comes into your room and finds it under the mattress and looks with disgust at the holes in your underpants. You consider the possibility of a headache, but your mother will just touch your forehead with the back of her hand, look at you sternly and declare you fit as a fiddle, at least fit enough to go to church. “If you’re really sick,” she says, “you can come home after church and go to bed.” And, in the end, after lollygagging around the kitchen chewing on a piece of toast as if it was your last meal on earth, off you go to church, dragging your ass out the front door and into the back seat of the car, hoping that the house might explode as you stare silently out the window at your neighbours, the heathens, lazing idly and carefree in their yards, and at the fields and the empty Sunday morning schoolyard down the street where already some of your friends are playing hockey. But of course they’re Catholics or Polacks or adopted, and their parents don’t make them go to church. You suspect their parents drink a lot and probably borrow money to buy six packs of beer. Your mother doesn’t drink, and she paid off her sixteenthousand-dollar mortgage in two-and-a-half years on an annual income of three thousand dollars by raising you on cheap margarine and powdered milk. When your friends aren’t staying home from church to play ball hockey, they’re in their basement recreation rooms watching The Lone Ranger on tv and eating chocolate-chip cookies and drinking 7-Up. Your mother doesn’t waste her money on cookies or soft drinks. If you get hungry before dinner, she might give you a soda biscuit. In desperation, you sometimes eat a green maraschino cherry out of a jar that has sat at the back of the refrigerator since last Christmas and tastes like costume jewellery soaked in corn syrup. Maybe if you had a recreation room, you could watch tv there, but you don’t, so you can’t. Anyway, you don’t own a tv.

Having thoroughly lamented your fate, you arrive at the church and shuffle down to the basement to sit with a bunch of pastyfaced candy-assed Presbyterian dickheads reading Bible stories and reciting prayers. Then like a herd of lunatics on an outing, you ascend in a gaggle upstairs to the big house of God to sit with the wheezing old geezers and the old ladies in hats and play with the lint in your pocket as the dour Scottish minister dressed in some get-up made of black satin looms behind a pulpit carved out of lifeless, varnished wood and drones on and on like fucking Dracula about one thing or another that has something to do with old guys in beards and sandals like the guy in the painting on the shiny page in your own Bible—a gift from your mom, with your name on it—who’s just slit the throat of a goat with his bread knife and now stands prepared to do the same thing to his own son, because God told him to. As you stare at the picture in your Bible, you envy the old man and his son because they’re outdoors in the sunshine, next to a rock.

Hope blossoms when the minister finally finishes his blathering, but the official shindig isn’t over until you stand up and try to sing a hymn that you’ve never heard before in your life but that all the

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old coots in the church seem to know by heart, the same way as you know all the words to “Pallisades Park”. Then the minister gives his best wishes to Betty McGaughey, whose sister died in Glasgow, and Herb Spit, whose mother lies ill in a hospital bed, and to all the other lucky people who couldn’t make it today. Then you stand up again and watch the robed hypocrite swan down the aisle in front of the choir like a blessed saint even though you know—and so does everyone else—that the minister’s son hangs out with a bunch of high-school drop-out hoodlums and his daughter puts out for your friend Carl Varga’s older brother. The minister positions himself beside the front door of the church, and all the old farts stop and say a few words to him, even though they all come to church every Sunday and have northing to talk about because the highlight of their entire week is going to church. You try to deke around the line and head into the sunshine but your mother grabs you by the collar and holds you until you and she and your sister reach the minister, whose name is Henry, in a smiling clump of goofy humanity. Henry touches you on the head with a hand as clammy as a codfish and calls you “a wee tyke” in his phony Scottish accent and you smile and look at his eyes that swim in his fat face like two blue marbles in vanilla ice cream and contemplate kicking him square in the scones or stepping on the shiny toes of his big black shoes poking out from under his robe while he commiserates with your mother about her difficult life alone without a husband and probably fantasizes about ripping off her Sunday dress with his yellow stained teeth and rogering her on the vestibule carpet. You wonder if Henry wears pants under his vestments.

Outside in fresh air at last, you stand around in the sunshine on the concrete sidewalk, touching the grass with the toe of your shoe while your mother shoots the breeze with Hazel, as if she hasn’t seen Hazel in a decade, even though Hazel lives next door, for God’s sake, and they see each other every day. No matter how often they see each other, they never run out of things to talk about. Another woman joins the conversation, and as they laugh and chit-chat, the men resign themselves to another long wait.

They light cigarettes and shuffle from one foot to the other, dressed in the same stupid suits as they’ve worn every Sunday for the last hundred years, rattling the keys in their trouser pockets then slowly drifting away like milkweed seeds toward the parking lot to sit in their cars smoking Black Cats and revving their engines to listen to the fan belt squeaking while their wives get in a few more words about God knows what, until even they realize that the sun has risen higher in the sky, time’s a-wastin‘, and who wants to fritter away a beautiful day on the pavement outside an empty church dressed in the same clothes as you’d wear to a funeral?

You and your sister pile into the car with your mother and drive back home, and you wonder if this is the price of admission to a Christian heaven, an hour and a half of utter throbbing boredom, once a week. And as you pass your friends, you know you’d rather stay at home and play with them in the sun-bathed schoolyard and end up in hell than sit breathing in the musty smells of God for the rest of eternity on a hard wooden pew in a murky highwalled room with opaque windows as a minister named Henry hectors a bunch of timid Christian soldiers in sensible dresses and veiled hats or unfamiliar suits and black shoes with shiny toe caps about sacrificing sheep, and you wish you were somewhere else.

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“That was a really nice service,” says your brain-damaged sister, launching into a spew about the nice minister, the nice congregation, the nice service, the nice flowers, and the nice fucking hood ornament. Listening to this drivel, you feel adrift and detached, like a distant planet orbiting through a vacant universe. If you ripped off your monkey suit and pulled on your play clothes, you might still have time to run down the street and play with your friends, Billy and Donny and Big V and Bo. But by the time you’ve explained to your mother where you’re going, how long you’ll be, what time you’ll be home, what you’ll be doing and with whom, your friends will have finished playing touch football or American baseball or ball hockey, or else someone like Eddie Drozdowski has fired the ball onto the roof of the school, and now they’re all sitting around on the grass like a bunch of old men poking holes in the dirt with sticks or else they’ve picked up their tennis ball, hoisted the hockey nets onto their shoulders and started drifting off to their homes for lunch.

So you ride your bike alone to the mall down the street, closed on Sundays, and coast through the deserted courtyard past the store windows, weaving among the concrete planters like Parnelli Jones in a racing car, listening to the goofy Muzak that drones through the speakers all day and all night, seven days a week, whether anyone listens to it or not. Sometimes you stop in front of a window and look at a matched set of leather luggage or a pair of brown brogue shoes or a gold-plated pen set or a pair of elbow pads and a hockey stick, all glistening in their promising newness, just a pane of glass and a lot of money beyond your reach, accessible only to your imagination. You take a quick spin around the neighbourhood, using the culverts as banked turns at intersections, then head for home, cruise up the driveway, lean your bike against the wall below the milk-box and go inside to wait for Uncle Charlie or Uncle Fulton or Uncle Art to arrive with Auntie Eileen or Aunt Muriel or Aunt Eleanor for Sunday dinner while your mother stalks around the kitchen growling at the oven that won’t heat and pummeling pastry dough with a wooden spoon in a China bowl with such force that she could move the house off its foundations. Your mother hands you a cellophane bag the size of a brick, stuffed with white margarine, a blister of colouring inserted on the surface, and tells you to “knead this”. You press the blister with your fingernail and the colouring squirts like a pool of blood onto the surface of the margarine, and you squeeze the bag in your hands like you’re trying to strangle a fat dog until the colouring spreads slowly through the white fat, which gradually assumes the uniform colour of the inside of a dead frog’s mouth. Then you hand the soggy blob back

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to your mother, saying, “Here’s the margarine, mom.” The tension mounts all afternoon as you go and lie on your stomach on the living-room floor, pulling threads from the bottom of the chesterfield until finally a car pulls into the driveway and in troop your uncle and aunt dressed just like the old geezers you saw this morning in church.

It takes your aunt and uncle about ten minutes to move six feet from the front door to the chairs in the living room, because they stand and talk as soon as the front door closes behind them.

When everyone finally sits down, your mother immediately stands up again and heads for the kitchen, leaving you and your sister to entertain these two old people who grew up with mastodons, for all you know.

“How’s school?” says Uncle Charlie, Uncle Fulton or Uncle Art. “Fine,” you say. Sensing that we’ve reached an impasse, Auntie Eileen or Aunt Muriel or Aunt Eleanor bellows, “Can I help, Mary?” then launches herself from the couch into the kitchen where you can hear your mother telling her to go back and sit down again. Attracted by the sound of women arguing, your sister heads for the kitchen too.

Now you’re alone with your uncle. He sits back in his chair, looks up at the ceiling and breathes deeply. He looks as if he might fall asleep. You roll over and bend your head back, trying to look out the front window upside-down.

The women file into the dining room with plates and bowls of food. Your uncle sits down at the head of the dining-room table to say a few words to God while everyone bows his or her head and folds his or her hands, then he proceeds to do the man’s job of carving the roast or dissecting the chicken or slicing the meat loaf. The vegetables—potatoes, peas and carrots all steamed to the consistency of Elmer’s glue—sit on the table in yellow China bowls in front of Auntie Eileen or Aunt Muriel or Aunt Eleanor, along with a plate of homemade tea biscuits. Your uncle passes each plate to your aunt, who drops a blob of vegetables beside the meat, plops a tea biscuit beside it, then passes it on to your sister, who ladles a spoonful of another vegetable onto the plate, which then goes from hand to hand to the top of the table and back down again, like a pail full of water conveyed by a bucket brigade. Behind this ritual lies a bedlam of preparation, fraught with anxiety and intensity out of all proportion to the simple idea of a meal. For as she has boiled and roasted and baked the evening meal, your mother has seen an entire lifetime of fear, anxiety, self-doubt and resentment in an uncooked pea.

You slather your tea biscuit with pus-coloured margarine, which your mother has set on the table on a crystal butter dish next to a

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silver butter knife, then pass the dish to your aunt, who serves real butter at her house. Your aunt politely takes the dish from you and passes it directly to your sister without taking any for herself. Your mother says she really prefers margarine to butter, because it’s so much better for you, and your aunt says, yes, and you can buy a wheel-barrow full of the shit for only two cents. You say with great disloyalty that you prefer real butter, and your mother tells you that you don’t really mean that and eat your peas. Your uncle says he ran into some guy named Smith or Jones or Brown who used to live on Dewson or Hepbourne or Sorauren, but your mother says Smith didn’t live on Sorauren, he lived on Argyle, near the underpass, to which your uncle says that wasn’t Smith, it was McLean, whose father worked on the railroad with grandpa. As this conversation meanders its way from street to street and anecdote to anecdote, you can’t for the life of you figure out why anyone gives a flying fuck about the names of the streets where people once lived forty years ago; only years later do you understand the civility and good intentions behind this innocuous bickering, that if they argued over more serious matters, they’d probably never speak to each other again, but by the time you understand this, all your relatives are dead. “The Eubanks lived at forty-five,” says Uncle Fulton. “The Clissolds lived at fifty-two.” “Oh, Fulton,” your mother says, as if your uncle has just dropped a turd onto his tea biscuit, “the Eubanks lived at fifty-two. They had the cherry tree in the backyard.” “No, Mary,” says your uncle, brooking no back-talk, “they lived at forty-five.” “Well, if you say so, Fulton,” says your mother, knowing that, by her capitulation in this skirmish she will render her opponent helpless and win the war, which has nothing to do with the Eubanks, the Clissolds or the location of their homes, and everything to do with showing your aunt that, when it comes to family, your aunt is still an outsider compared to your mother and her brother, and she can shove her real butter up her ass where it belongs, thank you very much.

It takes you decades to fathom the causes and the complexity of this friction, of course. No one discusses it outright. Everyone speaks in some sort of code. Neighbours symbolize pieces on the psychic chessboard, and their addresses represent unarticulated strategies and unwelcome feelings of loss and regret. You listen to these exchanges as you sit at the table chewing on roast beef that’s as tough as a penny loafer, masticating wads of metallic-tasting carrots and peas the size of b-bs and jellied salad full of raisins that you separate with your tongue from the bits of radish and celery greens that clutter the Jell-o like debris in a drain, then washing it all down with a mouthful of insipid powdered milk the colour and consistency of dishwater. Your underpants grow moist with sweat as you sit on the soft leather cushion of your dining-room chair and glance behind your uncle out the window at the top of your neighbour’s head as he storms around in his driveway molesting his car with a wrench in his hand and grease on his face, having the time of his life tinkering with the carburetor of his Vauxhall, while your uncle eats his peas with his knife, one pea at a time. You agonize that a world so close as your neighbour’s driveway can seem so far away and inaccessible. You stand no chance of getting there today or ever, unless you push yourself back from the table and hurl yourself head-first through the window, which, of course, you never do.

Years later, you’ll chastise yourself for lacking the courage to do it, but your reluctance has nothing to do with courage and everything to do with the fact that you’re nine years old.

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“Finish your salad,” says your mother. You glance at the world outside the window feeling like an inmate in a zoo. The moments pass and you swallow your food, one mouthful at a time, as your relatives drone on and on in their secret code, holding you a prisoner of good manners in a world of unspoken hostility where you don’t want to live, and the more you swallow, the more the world outside drifts away from you, the possibilities of pleasure and joy and wonder and curiosity disappear into the past, as inaccessible as the old man tinkering on the other side of the window with his car, and the sun drags the daylight down over the horizon.

“Have one of mine,” your mother says, when finally everyone has set aside his knife and fork and retired to the living room for a cigarette.

“Let me help you with the dishes,” says your aunt, who has installed a dishwasher in her own kitchen. Your mother digs in her heels and insists that the dishes are hers and hers alone to wash in the kitchen by herself. Another dubious victory for the downtrodden, a fight for the right to suffer.

As everyone adjusts him or herself on the couch or in an easy chair, you hover around this ritual of malarkey, trying your best to make sense of it all, feeling vaguely scornful of the fatuous behaviour of your elders and frustrated by their utter indifference to the passions that roil beneath the bland pedestrian attitudes of us all.

You sense that your mother has orchestrated her own life and, despite her pettiness and nagging refusal to engage in the messy truth of her haphazard existence, you cannot bring yourself to challenge her with the certainty of universal harmony, which you understand as only a nine-year-old can and which you’ve recognized by its absence in this house. So you turn away and, with everyone else, you stare at the legs on the couch until, finally, your uncle puts his hands on his knees, lifts himself to his feet and says, “Well, honey, time to go” “Oh, do you have to?” says your sister. But your uncle insists, and, after a long round of thank-yous and goodbyes, off they go in a trail of perfume and swirling overcoats, leaving you with your mother and your sister, waving through the glass door like passengers on a sinking ship.

“That was nice,” says your sister when you have the house to yourself again, “wasn’t it?” But even your mother isn’t buying such bullshit, and she tells your sister to go to her room and get ready for bed. Sensing an opportunity, you walk up to your mother at the kitchen sink, give her a hug and offer to help her with the dishes. “Don’t worry about me,” she says, just as you’d hoped she would. You say, “I just wish Uncle Art wouldn’t eat his peas with a knife” or “I just wish Uncle Fulton would do something about his breath.” And your mother laughs. You’ve scored some points. You leave your mother alone at the sink and go to bed, never dreaming that you’ll soon wish for more than a single lifetime to undo the lessons of this day. »

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VISUAL

ART

Red Army Faction KIM GOLDBERG

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E S S AY

The Small, Narrow, Red Door MEL ANIE SCOTT I L L U S T R AT I O N S BY A M A N D A C R A W F O R D

Mr. Happy and Little Miss Sunshine: these are two of the first literary characters I was introduced to as a child. Created by Roger Hargreaves in the seventies and eighties as part of the Mr. Men and Little Miss series, Happy and Sunshine, with spindly, undeveloped arms, still manage, after all these years, to hold open a wide and inviting portal into the sugary world of rampant do-goodery. Take a smile and a chuckle, and call them in the morning.

Hargreaves’ one-note, too-adorable allegorical creations are not easily forgettable. To this day, I believe they’re at least partly responsible for my occasional forays (more frequent in my midtwenties) into the self-help aisle of bookstores from New Brunswick to British Columbia. My theory, best proved when I’m holding a glass of something forty-proof or higher, is that much of the children’s genre is, at best, a collection of self-help manuals targeted at parents. It’s wish fulfillment, the values most parents wish they had, mixed with a lot of misguided hope for the future.

More or less, children’s books instruct the next generation on how to readily absorb unrealistic expectations of “happily ever after,” to be followed up later in life with a copy of Your Mid-life Crisis Made Easier.

This is how, I suspect, the self-help industry builds a life-long audience.

In Hargreaves’ world, the bulbous Happy (call it Mister) encourages dowdy-grey Mr. Miserable to walk through “a small, narrow, red door.” Happy leads Miserable away from the cloistered room that contributed to Miserable’s inexplicable yet dastardly funk and

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through the gloomy forest, back to Happy’s cozy cabin, for what can be interpreted broadly as, I’ll say it, a homo-erotic love fest. All we know from Miserable’s encounters with this shiny yellow personification of pure joy is that what once lay limp (his frowny gob) quickly perks right up, and they laugh and laugh.

It’s just that easy. No mention is made of a multimillion-dollar prescription drug industry, nor ties to other alternatives—underground Ecstasy labs or swingers’ clubs. Somehow, through sheer will and a positive influence, Mr. Miserable is transformed into a true bon ami, now presumably invested with the power to spread the good word to other Mr. and Little Miss Miserables.

The self-help army has been born, and they’re recruiting.

Most people, myself included, turn to self-help for the obvious reason: to help ourselves. A lingering search through either broadly defined psychology or patchouli-scented New Age book racks is far cheaper and appeals more to a meandering personality than undergoing scheduled, face-to-face turmoil with a string of

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reputable therapists who don’t know their clients at all and probably, if they weren’t accepting their money regularly, wouldn’t care to. With such a wide variety of afflictions and possible solutions at my fingertips, self prescription in book form also lends a muchneeded sense of control, especially when life veers off-kilter in small or large, real or imagined, ways.

It’s a deceptive but enticing practice, to diagnose my own issues when offered a range of titles infused with suggestion and displayed like bottomless vats of ice cream on a hot, desperate day. I can convince myself, through years of conditioning, to believe that maybe I’m not empowered enough in the Now, maybe I don’t know The Secret (the only one worth knowing), maybe I don’t live enough in the light, or enflame my creative visualizations with enough real spark to make what I want a reality. Maybe if I did, I wouldn’t be cash poor, dropping hundreds of dollars on books that won’t do much more than line my shelves, rows of individual tombstones in honour of each of my “personal difficulties”.

But realizing I’m okay, a perfectly fine, functioning human being, wouldn’t have stopped me from trying to absorb the books’ core messages. The first lessons I learned from my treasured collection do contain a nugget of value, even with a thick padding of entertainment value. They’re soft, cushiony excursions into myself, attached in some abstract way to metaphorical incisors designed to plum the depths and extract my alleged despair.

At the age of twenty, after an intense crush went haywire (that is, nowhere), I found an exercise designed to give me exactly what I wished, with a few strings: I had to fully want it. I had to know that by requesting it, it would be in the best interest of all involved.

And, most of all, I had to have patience. By treating the Universe in the way of a cash cow, I could then sit back and wait for good things to come because, hell, I was entitled. The undeserving asshole had broken my heart.

Still, I wanted him. All the exercise required me to do was lie back, close my eyes, and focus on him, the object of my desire.

Then, taking in the mild insinuation that masturbation might advance my cause, I had to imagine wrapping him in a pink bubble, coating his entire being in the full, flushed bloom of my desire, and send the bubble floating off into space, dreamily, wistfully, toward the bright dawn of mutual fulfillment. And then I had to go about my life, and wait.

When nothing happened over a period of months, when he didn’t magically return my affection or even, say, want anything to do with me, I decided I hadn’t been patient enough. The problem wasn’t with the instructions I followed—it was with me. I feared I didn’t get the details right. Soon I found a few other self-help books to try to fix what I felt were deeper problems with myself,

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with my lack of happiness and inability to grasp what I most desired. The snake was eating its tail.

I next attempted another exercise meant more as a coping mechanism. I wrote a letter addressed to him, outlining all my woes and then didn’t send it. This is actually a popular and dependable idea in and out of the world of self help—creating a letter with no other purpose than to be destroyed, with the hopeful side effect of raising inner awareness and ridding so-called negative energy from the mind and body.

I wrote sixteen drafts in the hope of narrowing down, in very precise terminology, the exact reasons why my beloved was a dickhead, and why he would never find love with anyone else as well as he could have with me.

I tore up each draft, started over, tore those up, and eventually became so frustrated with myself and angry at the process, that I mailed him a final version and was very surprised not to receive a restraining order in return. It’s a slippery slope. The road to selfrepair, when the reasons and mechanisms are not understood, is all downhill. At least there was nobody to hurt when I bottomed out but myself.

When Hollywood endings take over the imagination, the jig’s up.

The journey to some form of selfimprovement, whether seen through the tinted lens as wellness or correctness, is not as acceptable or reverent when the destination (always elusive and not really the point), packs a greater emotional punch with the audience. Very generally speaking, everyone wants him to be just that into you, or to know conclusively, as one book is titled, Why Men Marry Bitches. Going back to childhood, everyone wants to be accepted like Hargreaves’ Mr. Messy, just for being an inherently kind-hearted slob.

The lure of the destination over the journey, the carrot and the stick, is the reason I fell prey to the books many years ago and still occasionally thumb through them, even though I know better. The genre is the crack-cocaine of the publishing world, geared to saps like me who want everything to work out, who need a friend to not talk to. The books act as silent partners I turn to at my leisure, who seem so sensible in the right mood, often masquerading as my best friend and councillor, while locking me into versions of misery I already identify with. What’s life, at times, if there isn’t something wrong with it?

And if something is wrong with life, why not simply whip out some cash and try to fix it? If we crave instructions on how to find this elusive happiness, or how to construct an illusion of arriving at our cherished destination, they’re easy to buy. Even if life boils down to an imprinted code of genetic survival, something so ingrained we have no control over it, then isn’t it in our pesky

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human nature to seek ways to persevere?

It may be too easy to blame a capitalist system for perpetuating a lump-sum, self-help cause, as capitalism has always been adept at exploiting the cultural and evolutionary traits and behaviors that govern human action. Even Oprah, a selfhelp lover’s dream, equipped with her rags-to-riches status as pinch-hit spiritual leader, is personally uncertain enough to not only promote the latest self-help ventures, but to read them herself and speak of following their guidance, feeding the machine.

Anyone can aspire to improve their lives, is the message; her chosen authors rise to number one on bestseller lists—itself a dreamy, far-flung destination—and everyone involved settles into a bed of big money.

Humans invented capitalism, and humans could decide to make changes. But now we have a lot of time on our hands, more time than ever, to ponder why we’re so miserable, to find out why we’re such jerks to ourselves or to others. Our modern religion of acute introspection is nothing if not directed toward tales of self-improvement, forgiveness, and redemption, all meant to lead us to the most holy of states—pure joy. If someone’s wallet gets a little fatter, well,

that’s just more joy to despair down the road. Despair always lurks around the next corner.

It’s often detrimental, the focus on fulfillment as a destination. Life doesn’t have one, save for the cemetery. Marry the boy, get the high-paying job, travel the world—they’re all events, planned or random, leading to other events.

There’s no extended sit-down in a handcrafted, mountaintop throne overlooking the valley travelled, exultant. While I’m sometimes inspired by what I read, all I’ve ultimately learned is to get real.

I’ve ditched brands of advice on how to obtain what I want by playing (or avoiding) emotional games, or by manipulating people to receive what I think I deserve. I’ve abandoned plans to find bliss in this life (and some books claim the next) by following the right steps in the right order and then feeling absurd crazyblame when nothing happens. I’m done with books that plump up the superiority of one gender over another; they’re cheap shots that say nothing useful and deserve to have nothing more said about them in return.

I’m fortunate enough to be in relatively good mental health. I know I can always open that small, narrow, red door for myself.

The choice, by comparison, is almost effortless: push or pull. »

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FAC T & F I C T I O N MADE IN CANADA

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POETRY

A Dance of Poses JENNICA HARPER

It occurs to you they may be speaking with their eyes. Like Angel does sometimes.

Is it pet or wild beast? Is it tame to the touch?

You stare. It’s awful. You can’t pull away.

But what are they saying? Do they want you to look? Or are they defiantly daring

Does it know what you’re thinking?

It watches you watch it. Like

you not to? You will yourself to tear your eyes away.

staring at the ugly child that doesn’t know it’s ugly.

When you look into Angel’s eyes, she holds your gaze forever, until you break.

What kind of god could do this?

What kind of pragmatic god?

She’s voguing. This is a dance of poses.

Better than anyone not touring, she knows

Later, when you first feel a cock through jeans,

these moves: strike a pose and hold it still while planning the next. Don’t overthink. Wait until

you’ll understand. They’re not for looking at.

You’d jumped the gun. You’d jumped it good.

there’s a perfect break in the beat.

Be steady on your feet, but sly—decide

You’d looked, when your palm should have been the first to tell you:

the rhythm is yours, it’s within. You’re choosing when to move and the music’s following.

You are wanted, you are wanted, feel feel, let me let me let me—

Then there’s the men. You barely notice their eyes, hair, legs, hands.

At thirteen you don’t want to touch, just suck something, anything: a shark tooth,

You’re drawn right to it every time— the penis is elephantine (think: wrinkled legs),

a ball peen hammer. Oral fixation from an early age, long bus trips licking

serpentine (cobras rising out of pots).

Moles popping out of holes.

woody licorice sticks. In the future, you’ll hate anise, ouzo, Sambuca. Still, saliva pools at the smell.

Purple mushrooms, squat fire hoses.

The memory of desire. Your cells follow.

The hollows of mouth fill up with hope.

from: What It Feels Like for a Girl (Anvil, 2008)

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MEMOIR

Pretty on the Outside J E N N FA R R E L L I L LU S T R AT I O N BY D E R E K V O N E S S E N

I am the product of a rural upbringing. I remember party-line telephone rings, dairy truck deliveries, and burning our trash in an oil drum in the backyard. News from the world beyond the hay fields came in three forms: the Hamilton Spectator newspaper, from which I taught myself to read; the Sears catalogue, from which most of my wardrobe was ordered; and the Avon brochure, from which I learned all about the wonderful things a woman could put on her face.

My Great-Aunt Agnes was our family’s very own Avon representative. With her rouged visage, coiffed silver hair, and smart pastel pantsuits, she set the bar for old-lady glamour. (This in stark contrast to her sister, my grandma, who believed in the value of good works over good looks. She would often tell me, “Pretty is as pretty does.” I refused to believe it, even then.) Whenever my mother visited Aunt Agnes, she’d bring home an Avon brochure, which I’d paw until the ink started to lift.

Perhaps it was solely out of familial obligation, but my mother regularly ordered Avon items for me, especially during the holidays. My Christmas and Easter gifts always included one of the company’s seasonal fragrance pins—a plastic bunny or jolly Santa that popped open to reveal a nickel-sized disc of solid perfume, most often a revolting floral-and-woods concoction called Sweet Honesty, a scent I never liked, even as a child. The thrill of applying perfume to my tiny wrists, however, meant it could have been pigshit and I would have worn it anyway. My dresser-top was also graced by a variety of Avon dusting powders and “collectible” perfume decanters in the shapes of various fairy tale maidens.

But these childish trinkets were nothing compared to the treasures on offer in the rest of the brochure. Every page called out to me: sparkling fuchsia lip glosses, crimson nail lacquers, shimmering eye shadows in frosty blues and greens, and something called “blusher,” a magical powder that could put roses in one’s cheeks with the swish of a brush. I never got to see these items

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beyond their pages (except while possibly being worn by my beloved Aunt), because my mother never ordered them, even for herself. When Mom went out, she’d simply rub a bit of her usual lipstick onto her cheeks and finish with a couple of swipes of powder from a well-scuffed CoverGirl[1] compact.

So I’m not really sure where my love—some might say obsession—with cosmetics came from. Like the Maybelline[2] campaign suggests, “maybe she’s born with it.” I remember staring longingly at the makeup displays in the drugstore as a kid, and begging my mother to buy some for me. Up until then, I’d been allowed to have “play” makeup: the plastic lipsticks and miniature compacts that came—sadly—empty, as well as that 1970s default little-girl birthday gift, Tinkerbelle makeup, a line of products that looked and smelled real enough, but lacked the necessary pigments to actually do anything.

When my mother (who correctly believed Tinkerbelle was a foolish waste of money) finally relented, we went to the Shoppers Drug Mart on a summer day in 1981, when I was ten years old.We picked out a pale frosty pink lipstick and matching nail polish fromWet ‘nWild [3], the cheapest line in the shop. I begged for the red, but pale pink was all my mother would allow. She also bought me a small clear vinyl cosmetic bag in which to store them. A few weeks later, she gave me a baby blue CoverGirl eye shadow she had seldom used, telling me she’d take it away if I applied too much. Before school started that fall, I’d talked her into buying me a cheap purse at the Biway store, and so I

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MEMOIR

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began Grade Five carrying a handbag with my makeup in it and my pencil case and a little mirror and a hairbrush and a book or two. I have carried a purse and a makeup bag every day since. If you look at photographs of me from the time, you can often see that frosty lipstick and blue eye shadow, and the strap of that bag across my shoulder.

doves! To open the bottom drawer of my three-drawer makeup cabinet and choose from myriad lipsticks, pencils, and glosses— it is a bliss left over from childhood, as simple and delightful as a new box of Crayolas. And when I am finished, I smile at my reflection as if to say, Oh, there I am!

Every day, before I go out into the world, I have to “put my face on.” The face I see in the mirror in the morning is not a face that I share with just anyone. While there’s nothing wrong with it, I prefer to think of my bare skin as a well-cared-for canvas for makeup.

In an emergency, (the hotel’s buffet breakfast is shutting down in fifteen minutes, I’m late for a doctor’s appointment), I can put on a “basic face” in about ten minutes. But generally, that is not how I roll. I like to have a minimum of twenty minutes. I have yet to discover a maximum.

Here is what I apply or use each day, with optional additions in italics.

Cleanser Antioxidant serum (smoothing; increases sunscreen performance) SPF 40 primer (evens and smoothes skin texture; adds sun protection) Tinted moisturizer with SPF 15 (evens skin tone; adds luminosity and additional sun protection) Concealer (disguises under-eye circles and broken capillaries around nose) Eyelid primer (brightens and smoothes skin; improves tenacity of other eye makeup) Foundation (creates uniform skin tone; adds dewy or matte skin finish as required) Blush (adds colour and contouring to cheeks) Highlighter (visually lifts brow bones and cheekbones) Eyebrow pencil, in two different tones (fills in patchiness and shapes eyebrows) Brow gel (grooms brow hairs) Brow sealant (creates smudge-proof and water-resistant brows) Eyeliner (defines upper and lower lash lines) Eye shadow (contours and colours the lid, lid crease, and brow bone) Cream shadow (adds highly pigmented lid colour) False eyelashes (adds thickness and length to lashes) Lip gloss (provides shine and dimensional shimmer to lips) Lip liner (defines lip line; prevents lipcolour from “bleeding” into fine lines around lips) Lipstick (adds long-wearing, rich pigments to lips) Translucent powder (eliminates shine on nose, chin, and forehead; creates a silky, matte finish) Bronzer (adds tan-like colour and/or shimmer to skin) Mineral water spray (to set all of above and eliminate an “over-powdered” look) It looks more subtle than it sounds, honest. I am a master blender.

I won’t go so far as to say it pains me when I meet women who don’t wear any makeup at all, but it does baffle me. Really? Nothing at all?

Bare skin, bare nails, bare lips…it doesn’t read as unattractive, just opportunities missed. I can see your pretty eyes, but imagine how much prettier they’d look if you applied just a smudge of liner in a deep cocoa brown, to bring out the blue! Or those gorgeous lips of yours, just begging for a little definition and shimmer. What’s that: you hate your dark circles? I have just the thing, here in my bag …

I usually try to keep my mouth shut. One never knows if a gal eschews makeup because she doesn’t know how to apply it, doesn’t like it, or is living in the boring world of smug superiority. They’re the ones who might look at my list and see insecurity, or vanity run riot, or oppression, or some other character flaw scrawled out in liquid liner. They’re often people who fuss over other aspects of their appearance, or love hats, or collect flavoured vinegars to cook with. They put care and thought into the way they present themselves to the world, and yet see my big-ass makeup case as a testament to wasted time and money.

It’s not like I haven’t experienced life without makeup. There have been periods when I wore little or no makeup at all. It’s just that those were the times that I felt least like myself: as a new mom, exhausted and struggling with postpartum depression, or trying to be what I thought was a “good” feminist, or just afraid of the world.

In my weakest moments, I haven’t hidden behind cosmetics— because when makeup symbolizes confidence and joy and a colourful spirit, taking the time and care to put it on is the last thing I’d feel like doing. I once overheard a telephone conversation between two of my friends, one assuring the other that the worst of a recent slump was behind me: “I know she’s getting better, because she’s painting her nails again, and yesterday she bought a lipstick.”

I love watching my face change as I apply my daily arsenal. To see my skin take on a glow, my eyebrows become shapely and defined, the green of my eyes accentuated. The packages themselves give me as much pleasure as the colours and textures within. Oh, NARS[4] blush, with your rubberized black case! Oh, Benefit[5] cream shadow/liner, with your pretty cap covered in

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The only thing better than applying makeup is shopping for it. Since that first purchase at the Shoppers Drug Mart decades ago, nowhere with a cosmetics display escapes my notice. I’ve bought makeup in every conceivable location, from the Armani counter at Holt Renfrew to a vending machine in a truck-stop restroom. While I do love a bargain, my lust for prestige brands was set in motion early.

I wish I could remember why, on that Saturday afternoon back in 1986, my mother and I visited the Shiseido[6] counter in Eaton’s. It wasn’t a brand either of us was familiar with. It’s most likely that an evocative poster from the brand’s then creative designer Serge Lutens stopped me short, causing me to drag my mother over by the dimpled arm. I remember that the sales assistant (SA) was remarkably helpful and friendly, and that this must have appealed to Mom, since she often railed about the decline of good customer service. Although the makeup was the most glamorous I had ever seen, it was the skincare that my mother was willing to pony up for that day, especially since I was at that age where I was doing more harm than good by scrubbing my skin with Noxzema and hot washcloths and 10-0-6 Lotion.

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MEMOIR

The SA set me up with a daily cleanser, softening lotion, and a moisturizer, along with a facial massage kit (a thick cream and a small rubberized paddle) to be used once a week. I can’t remember what this set-up cost, but even then I knew that the solid-glass bottles, delicate tissue wrapping, and embossed cardboard packaging meant I had definitely graduated from my plastic tub of cold cream. By today’s prices, a similar regimen from the brand would cost about $120. Why on earth did she spend that kind of money on a fifteen-year-old’s face?

Perhaps it was her way of showing interest in my new hobby of obsessing over my skin. Maybe she wanted to buy my love; this was a time when I frequently told her how much I hated her. Possibly she saw the potential for me to benefit from my looks, an opportunity she herself never had. (Despite possessing a textbook hourglass figure in her youth, my mother’s eyes were badly crossed due to a fever in her early childhood. She didn’t have them surgically corrected until well into her thirties. One can only imagine the taunting she endured in the schoolyard, all those decades before anti-bullying initiatives and random acts of kindness.)

Whatever the reason, it all added up to me being the only tenth grader I knew whose skin-care regime cost more than her Walkman. I took my three-step program seriously—carting those glass bottles in their boxes to sleepovers, camping trips, and gym class. No matter how drunk or tired or fucked-up I got, I never went to bed without first staggering into the bathroom to tend to my face, even if I sometimes had to cover one eye to be able to focus on my reflection in the mirror.

The Shiseido sales assistant put us on her “preferred customer” list, and telephoned whenever there was an upcoming special offer.

This marked my introduction to the thrilling world of “Gift with Purchase” (GWP) shopping, wherein cosmetics companies give you something for free (most often a selection of popular products in trial and travel sizes, usually in a small clutch or cosmetics bag), while also encouraging you to buy more product (by setting a minimum spend for the bonus offer). In this fashion, I was able to try some of the brand’s makeup offerings, and had soon compiled a list of must-haves. Sure enough, when Christmas came, gone were the Avon perfumes, replaced by a Shiseido eye shadow palette and a lipstick and some other goodies that I can’t quite recall. What I can remember is the rich pigments, the silken textures, and the deep, satisfying click the cases made upon closure.

Like other forms of retail, shopping for makeup is different than it was twenty years ago. While the department-store cosmetics counters still exist, they now struggle to retain market share in a landscape dotted with high-end “beauty boutiques,” mall stores such as Trade Secrets, and the mega-chains such as Ulta and Sephora.

Until cosmetics superstore Sephora[7] recently opened in Vancouver, the Toronto Eaton Centre location was my Mecca. I made my at-least-annual pilgrimage to the store, often stopping by several times over the course of one weekend. (Of course, I’ve made purchases from Sephora online, but makeup shopping on the internet has all the excitement and spontaneity of an arranged marriage.)

Sephora (or any well-stocked makeup boutique or departmentstore counter for that matter) is a brain-scrambling candy store of brands and products. To the uninitiated, it must seem overwhelming. For me, it’s a giddy rush. I know where I’m going and what I’m looking for, but I’m always open to being led astray. Soon my

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hands and arms are covered in swatches of colour, and my bag is full of perfume-spritzed papiers. No tester of any product is safe, nor are the staff, with whom I engage in lengthy discussions of formulation, top notes, creative vision, and packaging. I want to take it all home with me, and no matter what I get, there’s always something I swear I’ll come back for. Every product offers the possibility of reinvention, a new look. A superior sensation, a better texture, more long-wearing, brighter, better, faster, more…in a word, prettier. Is that such a terrible thing to spend money on?

As I grow older, some of the joy has been sucked out of my morning makeup routine. There’s a lot of “spackling” to be done now, filling in creases and prepping the canvas before I can even get to the fun stuff. It’s disheartening to buy a new concealer, only to find it all gunked up in the tiny network of lines around my eyes. A bright red lipstick can no longer be swiped on directly from the tube, since an hour later it looks like something worn by Heath Ledger’s Joker. Many of the zanier looks that I tried in my youth are no longer right for me—not because I don’t have the guts, but because I don’t have the skin. The fashion-forward makeup styles featured in magazines that I then try to replicate at home, now, more often than not, just make me look like I lost a fight—or a bet.

Luckily, my teenaged daughter is there to assume the glamour crown of the household. She accepts any and all of my not-quiteright castoffs, the same way I gratefully took that blue eyeshadow from my own mother twenty-odd years ago, and is the only person I have ever met who takes longer to get ready than I do. I have never seen anyone comb out their mascara clumps with more skill. I’d like to take the credit, but I don’t think I taught her anything she didn’t come out of the womb already knowing.

When my mother died a few years ago, I sifted through her closets and drawers, deciding what to keep and what to discard. Most of it was of no interest to me, beyond the train-wreck aspect: Who could have needed seven dark green turtleneck sweaters? Why would anyone keep bags and bags of empty prescription bottles? Other than her engagement and wedding rings, and a few odds and ends, most of it was destined for the donation bin or the garbage.

But when I cleaned out the bathroom cabinets, I found several lipsticks. Anyone who’s ever read a women’s magazine knows the “What Does Your Lipstick Shape Say About You?” quiz. I’ve never been able to figure mine out, since my wear pattern is a hybrid of several shapes. But my mother’s lipsticks were the classic “sharp angle” tip—long and dagger-pointed. According to the quiz, this pattern indicates that the wearer is, among other things, opinionated, selective of friends, outgoing, and argumentative.

One of the lipsticks was L’Oreal’s Shine Delice in Sheer Mango—a line long since discontinued by the company (despite being lovely summer-sheer lipsticks with a pleasant strawberry scent). The soft, shimmery coral colour was an unusual choice for her, since she’d always favoured mauves and plum tones. Sheer Mango was nearly gone, so the usual dramatic slant tip was worn down; it was almost flat across, but with that characteristic pointed edge. I added it to my small collection of keepsakes and brought it back home with me.

I keep it at the very back of a drawer in the bathroom, separate from my other makeup, so that it won’t get lost or “borrowed” by

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my daughter. There are rare occasions when I can’t find just the right lip colour to wear, and then I remember it and fish it out of its hiding spot. The texture is getting grainy and the scent has started to fade, but the colour is still pretty. I twist it all the way up and apply it very gently, knowing that every time I do, I wear away some of the shape that Mom made applying it to her own lips. It is as close as I will ever get to her again. » Footnotes 1. CoverGirl was founded in 1958 in Baltimore, Maryland, by the Noxzema Chemical Company. Originally the line offered only six products, including their “medicated face make-up” a version of which, now called “Clean Makeup,” still exists today. The brand is notable for its girl-next-door branding and use of wholesome, fresh-faced models, including Christie Brinkley, whose twenty-year contract with the cosmetics company was the longest in modelling-industry history.

2. Maybelline cosmetics got its start when chemist T.L. Williams developed a cake mascara after watching his younger sister apply a mixture of coal dust and petroleum jelly to darken her own lashes. He called the product Maybelline, a combination of his sister’s name Maybel, and Vaseline. In 1971, the company introduced the iconic pink-and-green packaged Great Lash, the world’s best-selling mascara. The affordable brand is the leader in global sales and was acquired by L’Oreal in 1996. The brand’s slogan since 1991 has been, “Maybe She’s Born With It. Maybe It’s Maybelline.”

3. Wet ‘n Wild has targeted a young, value-conscious consumer since its inception in 1979. The brand is a stalwart of drug- and chain-store makeup counters, offering a wide variety of inexpensive products for face and nails. Known for their unusual colours and sparkly finishes in the past, the line has been steadily moving towards a more performance-based and higher-quality image in recent years.

4. NARS is the makeup and skincare line of French makeup artist François Nars. The line began in 1994 as a limited-edition release of twelve lipsticks in partnership with

department store Barney’s New York. NARS packaging was developed by designer Fabien Baron, and is known for its pleasing tactility and chic minimalism. The line has a dedicated following, despite its relatively high price point, and its powder blush in “Orgasm” frequently appears as a favourite in beauty magazines’ reader surveys.

5. Benefit was founded by American twin sisters Jean and Jane Ford, who first opened a beauty boutique in San Francisco in 1976. The brand, which has grown to include skin-care, body care, and fragrance products in addition to makeup, is well-known for its whimsical product names and colourful retro packaging. Benetint, a rosetoned lip and cheek stain that is arguably the brand’s most famous product, was originally created by the Fords in 1977 as a liquid nipple rouge for an exotic dancer.

6. From its origins as Japan’s Shiseido Pharmacy in 1872 by Arinobu Fukuhara, Shiseido is the world’s oldest cosmetics company. The corporation prides itself on its long-standing history—one of its first products, Eudermine softening lotion, is still in production today—along with technological advances in skincare, presented with the highest attention to elegance in packaging. The brand exploded in global popularity and won numerous advertising awards when, in 1980, they recruited a young Serge Lutens to develop the company’s overall image. Most recently, Shiseido has partnered with renowned makeup artist Dick Page to create a line called The Makeup. The line’s Perfect Rouge lipstick has proven popular with beauty editors and consumers since its release in spring of 2009.

7. Sephora is a chain of beauty product stores founded in France in 1969, but did not appear on North America shores until 1997. The chain includes more than 750 stores in twenty-one countries, and carries over 250 brands of makeup, skin care, fragrance, bath, hair products, hair tools, and beauty accessories, including the store’s own private label. The store concept promotes the testing and sampling of all its merchandise, a lenient return policy, and knowledgeable sales assistants who are encouraged to promote products from multiple brands. This business model stands in stark contrast to department store counters, where SAs are trained to sell for a single brand. In 1999, Sephora launched its online shop, Sephora.com, which features reader-submitted reviews of all its products.»

Fresh Fiction.

Death in Vancouver Garry Thomas Morse

Down the Road to Eternity: New & Selected Fiction $19.95 | 320 pages

M.A.C. Farrant

$19.95 | 288 pages

In the title story of this brilliant collection of avant-garde fiction, loosely based on The Picture of Dorian Gray, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and the film Death in Venice, the main character, the artist Padam, constantly interrogates the accuracy of his representations, whereas we know almost nothing about the narrator, who exists merely as the “subject” of the Padam’s portrait and an “object” of his reflection.

Satiric and philosophical in approach, indelibly marked by wit, humour, irony, playfulness, a blend of parody and science fiction, irreverent analysis and comic existentialism, these stories celebrate the literary imagination as an antidote to the stranglehold the popular media now has on the public’s imagination. Includes selected previously published works, plus a suite of eighteen new stories, The North Pole.

Death in Vancouver is nothing less than a stunning accomplishment. It is work of prodigious erudition and imaginative daring …

— David Chariandy

Farrant is better at startling us with unnerving, often misanthropic, visions of everyday life than perhaps any other Canadian writer.

— Globe & Mail

Talonbooks www.talonbooks.com

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Alvin Karpis & The Great White Zeppelin BRIAN K AUFMAN

I am thirteen years old and I’m sitting in my South Van bedroom spinning 45s on my RCA Victor mono record player—The Who, The Animals, The Stones, The Yardbirds, Them—‘Van the Man’ belting out “G-l-o-r-i-a” before anybody knew anything about the little brown-eyed girl “down in the hollow, playin’ a new game”, or who the hell Van Morrison was—and, of course, The Beatles. The b-side of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard”—Keith Moon’s “Dogs, Part 2”—makes me crazy with glee. I want to scream and bounce off walls. I have my first set of sticks and a white pearl mix-’nmatch set of skins in the basement. I thrash wildly along with the Moon Dog. Fuck—it’s 1969 and I’m rockin’ and rollin’ and ardently working on my self-image!

In the second drawer of my chocolate-brown, laminated dresser (underneath my gonch and socks) is a dog-eared copy of Scarface, (the Armitage Trail Dell original, with the fantastic cover illustration by Victor Kalin), my favourite book at this juncture in my “literary education”. Al Capone shooting Chicago to shit.

And I have recently procured a new book that I tuck in there too: Public Enemy Number One: The Alvin Karpis Story. These sensational and violence-packed paperbacks are hidden in my drawer because I fear they will be confiscated, that their presence will result in parental retribution, some sort of punishment. I dread the idea that they may be taken away, discarded as subversive trash. Already, at thirteen, I am aware of the power of the

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written word, the threat posed by certain brands of writing—writing that advocates alternative lifestyles, counter ways of seeing the world, writing that undermines the status quo—are to be monitored, kept under wraps (oh those brown wrappers that hid the erotic world!), and, in some cases, censored entirely.

There were no books like these in our house. We had the standard set of Encyclopedia Britannica, titles on wwii, and that was about it, with the exception of a coverless copy of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill that I found tucked away behind the encyclopedias.

Whose copy was that anyway? My old man’s? My brother’s? Some boyfriend of my older sister? Could it have been my sister’s?

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My most memorable book-related experience up to this point in my young life had been an ass-paddling at a Bible Study class. I had been paddled for criticizing the “good book”. I said it was boring. It was, at least the way it was taught in this class. It had more to do with the method of teaching than the actual content. Even I knew that. We were handed colourful “learners” that looked like they were written and illustrated for toddlers and instructed to read along in a Dick and Jane story fashion. I hated it.

For my outspoken critique I received three smacks on the butt-side with what looked like a cheese board with a long handle. The paddle section had holes in the wood, holes the diameter of a large piece of blackboard chalk. It looked strange, as though it had been specially designed to inflict pain on young, insubordinate brats like me. What were those holes for? So my flesh could sink in forming huge pink blisters on my skin? To allow the blood to spurt forth upon contact? I wanted to kill the minister, the father, whoever the prick was, but I couldn’t. I was too small and I didn’t own a Tommy gun.

Again, I was subject to a lesson in the peculiarities surrounding books and reading. I learned the potential consequences of a harsh critique. Several years later I would visit this church again; not to desecrate the building or the vestments, and not to bust the paddle that had humiliated me when I was so young, but rather to steal a microphone. We were forming a band.

I am surprised to discover that Scarface thrills me like nothing else my teenage mind has come across—but in an entirely different way than Fanny Hill will thrill me about a year later. It makes me want to be a gangster, a gun-toting mobster swinging from the sideboard of a speeding car, machine gun under my arm, blowing to smithereens everything that decent society has to offer, every alluring set of shackles it throws at me. It demonstrates the power of the imagined world, the emotional freight that can be conveyed by narrative; it showed me the power of the story.

I knew these guys were bad. They killed people—lots of people—indiscriminately, for money and their own perverse sense of power. At least that’s what my teenaged mind imagined.

But the most seductive thing that came across in these books was that these guys made their own rules. They were pegs without a hole and they took shit from no one.

I wanted to be a guy like that. But all these guys were from big American cities like Chicago and New York. I lived in an oversized logging town filled with drunken rednecks on the northwest coast of the Pacific. Was it even possible to live a life of anti-authoritarian rebellion in Colonial Canada? But wait, that other guy, that Karpis character—he was Canadian. Born in Montreal, his family moved south to Kansas. It was there while doing a stint in the pen that he linked up with the Ma Barker Gang, did

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atrocious deeds all across the country and ended up on Alcatraz Island for twenty-six years. Now there was a role model for an angry teen.

Then the drinking started and our apparel (and mood) shifted from the soft and colourful style of the mods to the darker gear of the angst-riddled rockers. Imagine Eric Burdon, 1965. Hair like slick cake icing drooped across my forehead and over one eye—arrrgh, I have more attitude than I can handle. Tight jean jackets, and even tighter stretch-denim jeans—why isn’t the whole world made of denim? Why don’t we have denim sheets! Denim curtains! I don’t know the answers to the questions cascading through my head but I do know I have no time to wait for the answers. The answers that never come! Instead I’m flippin’ on another disk, hiss and pop and then—Boom!—the room fills with The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”! Or “All Day and All of the Night”. Fuck!

I am sooooooo misunderstood!

We drink more and get into fights. Snoop boots, big brass belt buckles. Trouble with cops, trouble with parents, and we soon come to realize that drunken obnoxiousness does not an outlaw make. We are rebels desperately in need of a cause. Then in the summer of ’69 the bomb drops, and the bomb is in the form of a zeppelin—Led Zeppelin #1 in all its exploding phallic intensity.

That spinning, red & green Atlantic label and what it delivers blows the hinges off everything. Our world is never the same again.

Now we have a sound embodiment of a Code of Ethics, a Code of Conduct, and prior to this moment nothing has grafted this particular combination of angst and foreboding into music: a guitar that sounds like a huge beast being disemboweled at the bottom of a dark steel tank while microphones amplify the event and jettison its howls through a Leslie speaker on full bore. We are gobsmacked, dumbfounded and it is all we can do to keep our heads above the tsunami of sound that follows.

We know nothing about cultural imperialism and how we are being formed by the British invasion of music and America’s cultural monopoly of this continent. We do see, however, that we can fight the machine with music and words instead of guns and knives. The appropriately dubbed “axe” will deliver the blistering foundation blows necessary to shatter Canada’s insipid cultural bedrock. And with any luck, down will go Don Messer’s Jubilee, The Tommy Hunter Show, and Anne Murray’s entire back catalogue.

I go forth in search of our own, Canadian literary outlaws, and start this magazine so they will have a place to hide out. »

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MORE DETAILS AT OUR WEBSITE:

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FUTURE FEATURE FOLIOS INCLUDE: #54 (Fall/Winter 2009)

Vancouver’s Literary Landscape #55 (Spring 2010)

Signs #56 (Summer 2010)

Regret

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FICTION

Get Lucky JILL MACDONALD

Chris lights a joint, not his first one of the day; in fact, he smokes so many that they might as well be cigarettes, except for the continual buzz that keeps him going. Since his accident last year, he needs something besides food and a job to get himself through the day. A guy doesn’t recover easily from losing everything, not even when he’s twenty-three and lucky, as the rest of the world likes to say.

He takes a big drag, then tucks the lighter into his jeans pocket. It is still warm. He buys them from the gas station in bags of three because he is constantly losing them and he can’t be without.

Only once has he had a lighter that actually ran out of fuel. It was blue. By the time he threw it away, it was two-tone: white on the bottom, from his fingers and from rubbing against things in his pockets. It was a kind of miracle and he almost held onto it.

He tugs on his jeans, shifting them into place over his hips. He walks differently than he used to and the material creeps over to one side. At physio he does the exercises he is supposed to do at home, which is good enough. It’s not like he was an athlete or anything. All he wants is a girl, Angela, and she lives with someone else.

A battered green pick-up rolls onto the sidewalk in front of him.

The box is red and rusted out around the wheel wells. Chris leans into the passenger window. His best friend, Steve, has a cut on his lip and scratches on his shoulder.

“Want to go to the coast?” Steve taps his thumb against the steering wheel. He’s a guy who can’t keep still.

Chris’ shift at the mill starts at four. Since he doesn’t drive anymore, he catches a ride with Bud, who lives near him and points out the things Chris is doing wrong because he is older and wiser and he wants someone to benefit from the experience of his mistakes. Chris puts up with him because he doesn’t have a choice and really, Bud’s not that bad; he’s lonely.

Steve means go to the coast tonight and while Chris tries to think who could work for him, his friend adds the information he knows Chris won’t be able to resist. “Joe and Angela are playing, at the Yale.”

The Yale, in Vancouver, is a big deal for a band from Lost Creek.

It’s not often that any of them go far from what they know; they just find the same crowd they were in at home. When you come from a small town, to make it out of neighbourhood bars means new territory, a clean break. It also means that Chris’s ties to Angela are more fragile.

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“We’re going for the party.” Steve knocks open the glove box with the heel of his hand. Inside is a dirty mix of crumpled insurance papers, screw drivers, a leaking litre of oil and a large Ziploc bag.

“I’ve got weed.” He slams the door shut. “We won’t drink.” It’s Steve’s job to look after Chris, or so he believes. Chris still suffers the effects of a concussion from last year, especially when he’s drinking and he’s around Angela.

“That’s why you mentioned her. So I wouldn’t think about why I was going, I’d just go.”

“Yeah. Like the good old days.”

Chris’s share of the gas money is in his pocket. He puts a hand on the folded bills, meant for groceries and a bottle for Bud. “I don’t know.” Despite the many injuries he has to deal with, Angela is the worst hole in his heart. She is the ache that never quits. He rubs his fingers against the lighter, flipping it over and over while he thinks.

Steve turns in his seat, starts the engine. The truck rumbles beneath Chris’s elbow. “You coming or not?”

Chris gets in.

His place is twenty minutes out of town. The road winds alongside the lake, ducking under rock bluffs that regularly rain down rocks or snow slides onto the asphalt, so that everyone drives it with a tingle on the back of their neck, wondering what and when something’s going to land on their head. One lady was killed a few summers ago.

Her husband drove to the hospital in the crushed vehicle, his wife’s body beside him, the rock still embedded on her side of the car.

A tree branch catches on the passenger window. Leaves and twigs smack Chris’s arm, stinging his skin with tiny lashes. “Fuck.

Drive closer to the middle.”

Steve accelerates. They negotiate corners in a straight line, not worried about the oncoming lane because they are on the inside and if anything happens, their chances are better against a rock cliff than they are against a drop into the lake. That this is how accidents

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begin is not something they acknowledge; it’s just the way it is.

Chris shifts on the bench seat, trying not to hold his breath.

There is a block in his chest that the doctors can’t explain; it’s sporadic, but serious enough to keep him home from work on occasion. Angela thinks it’s what he refuses to remember about the accident. But the fact is, he remembers everything afterward, and that is more than enough. She should know; she was there.

When they hit the broken driveway up to his house, Chris puts one hand on the ceiling as the truck bounces over potholes and deep channels cut into the dirt by spring run-off. Twice he has to brace himself to prevent his head from hitting the panel, despite the sloppy seatbelt he has fastened over his shoulder. “Take it easy, man.”

“Fix your fucking road.” Steve grins, as he does whenever adrenalin hits his system.

They rocket toward the parking spot, almost hitting the dog, who has tangled himself on a cluster of willow trees. Steve jumps from the truck as soon it stops because in spite of the number of times they’ve met, he and the dog don’t agree on what is safe for Chris.

way he counted those minutes and hours he lay on a shelf of rock, broken and immobile, while his friends were strewn around him, dead or in the process of dying.

“The trees are gone.” Steve, after first checking to see if the dog is safely closed in a room, wanders around the house with his hands in his pockets. Despite the coolish weather of fall, he wears shorts.

Shorts and a tank top, to show his muscles and tattoos.

Like Chris, he’s never had a steady girlfriend, although it isn’t from a lack of trying. Their circle is small and new girls don’t come along often enough, ones who can see through the craziness to the connections they’re trying to make inside, with their souls.

“Let’s go?”

“Yeah.” Chris leaves a note on the table: feed the dog. When he hears the rumble of Steve’s truck, he lets Butler outside.

The drive is long and sweet. Smoke fills the cab, along with radio stations and sometimes silence, when they both stare out the windows at the changes coming their way. Chris has tried to talk to

He packs a small bag with clothes, some Ibuprofen and the necklace of beads that Angela gave him: Tibetan prayer beads, for counting the reasons it’s good to be here. He doesn’t do that. He uses the beads to get through the seconds of the long minutes and hours until she comes back into his life, the same way he counted those minutes and hours he lay on a shelf of rock, broken and immobile, while his friends were strewn around him, dead or in the process of dying.

“Keep him away from me and I’ll fix the chain.” Steve lopes into the woodshed he built for Chris a few weeks ago, to help him get ready for winter. “Where’s your saw?”

The dog’s name is Butler. He’s a huge black and tan shepherdcross that someone dumped off at the mill. He lurked around the yard for a few days, eating the bits of food he was offered, without giving the impression that he was waiting for anyone or anything.

Then came the day he jumped into the back of Bud’s truck. Chris took him home.

Before he unclips the lead, he wedges one hand inside Butler’s collar. He doesn’t think the dog would actually hurt Steve, but he pulls as though he might. Using his weight as an anchor, Chris drags the dog downhill into the house.

Inside, the place is neat. His roommate is supposed to do yard work in exchange for cheap rent, but instead spends most of his time at his girlfriend’s. Chris doesn’t mind being alone. He has Butler, who sleeps on the foot of his bed even though he is the size of a small human being. At least he doesn’t question Chris’ nightmares. It still comes as a shock sometimes to find himself alive and there isn’t anyone he can talk to about that.

He makes a phone call, then two more, covering his shifts for the next three days. Unlike most guys who’ve been there since high school, Chris likes to be careful about his job. It’s the only steady thing he has. He packs a small bag with clothes, some Ibuprofen and the necklace of beads that Angela gave him: Tibetan prayer beads, for counting the reasons it’s good to be here. He doesn’t do that. He uses the beads to get through the seconds of the long minutes and hours until she comes back into his life, the same

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Steve, to tell him about the accident, but the words aren’t there, not yet. He knows they will come; this isn’t the first thing he’s lived through. Steve nods at him, not fidgeting for once. Whatever happens, they’re in it together. That’s something Chris knows.

They arrive at the concert halfway through the first set. Steve pushes forward through the crowd until he and Chris join the table of other people from Lost Creek who are there, some they haven’t seen for years and some they hardly know, but it doesn’t matter. For this night at least, they’re tight. They order beers despite Steve’s promise not to drink. Chris doesn’t care; Angela is watching him and she knows why he’s here and somewhere, she’s pleased. He can tell by the way she’s singing.

During their break, she and Joe sit with the gang. Angela smells fresh beside him, not clouded in smoke and travel the way he is.

She holds Chris’s hand under the table, stroking his fingers while leaning into Joe’s shoulder for support, as if she might come apart in front of everyone. He takes the joint that is passed to him and chases it with a drink. Angela moves closer. “Don’t do this,” she says, pushing his glass away.

Underneath the table, her fingers are cold. Joe looks over. His brother was one of the ones who died that night. Since then, Joe doesn’t drink. And he can’t speak to Chris, who was the only survivor.

What Joe doesn’t know, what no one knows, is that his brother was driving. They were on their way home, this time from a big shaker that had been going on for two days. The boys talked Chris into stopping for a leak just before the worst section of road. Joe’s brother was juiced up. He hopped around like a nervous bird. For a moment, Chris wondered why he was there, with a bunch of guys, when he

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had just realized he was in love with Angela and she with him. Joe’s brother offered to drive and Chris let him take the wheel, who knows why. In those instances, there is no why. They caught up to and flew past Joe and Angela, who were on the side of the highway. Joe thumped the hood of his truck; as they passed in the dark, the headlights caught on his large muscles, flexed and angry, and on Angela’s long hair, shaking like those silver things that spin in the wind.

That’s the last thing he remembers. After that, is Angela’s voice.

She called from the road above; he couldn’t see her but he heard his name, screamed at first and then gradually calmer. Her voice was a filament of light, sometimes there and sometimes gone, but it kept coming back for him.

The concert is too short; nights with Angela are always too short.

They leave him with a vacant feeling, worse than if he’d never seen her because it brings her voice back into his head, urgent and full of meaning, not a whisper that he can try to ignore.

She went home with Joe. Chris sways on the sidewalk, looking at the spot where she disappeared, wishing he wasn’t drunk and hadn’t said the things he said because he made her go away and he can’t live with that.

In the shadows around the corner, Steve waits in front of their hotel lobby. He doesn’t say anything about Angela. The place is dark. “I don’t have it,” he says. He tosses his cigarette then begins pacing in front of their hotel.

“I don’t have it, either.” Chris doesn’t check his pockets because if he had a key, he would feel it close to him.

A row of bushes line the sidewalk, large leafy things, spaced like cushions below the balconies above. Their room is on the fourth storey, three balconies in. The face of the building is lined with mortar and on the corners, stone blocks jut out enough to have birds rest on them. Steve lets loose a rattle of wings and feathers and is past the bottommost windows before Chris realizes what he’s doing, hanging from ledges by his fingers, swinging his feet and showing off. “Race ya,” he yells.

Sharper than he expected, the stone rakes Chris’ fingertips, giving him a good grip. In no time he is even with Steve, being lighter and stronger because he has nothing left to lose. They scramble towards their balcony, trying not to laugh. As Chris grabs the thin metal railing from below, Steve chins up with his fingers flat on the fake grass deck, still showing off.

“Tell me the door isn’t locked.” Chris lifts one hand up higher, to where the metal spindle has a decorative twist. Steve tries the door. It opens. Chris goes for his final move.

It’s funny how freefalling, something that pretty much only happens in dreams, can be familiar when you’re awake. His legs and arms drift away from him, a lesson in gravity. Steve stomps around on the balcony; for a second, Chris thinks he’s going to jump, as if that would help. He floats past a window and wonders if the bushes will be soft.

When he opens his eyes, Steve is there.

“You okay, man?” His friend’s face is rough, grey and blotchy.

Chris thinks back. It’s like a sheet has fallen over his memory, the same as last time, only worse, because Angela’s voice isn’t there.

“You landed on your fuckin’ head.” Steve grips one of his hands, tight, hard, breathing cigarettes and stale beer onto Chris’ face.

“You lucky bastard.” »

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postcard and other stories anik see

Anik See’s smart, charged stories are a vivid education in intoxication and desire, heart and hormones, math equations and trance DJs. She is a deft seer, ferocious and tender and glorious.

—Mark Jarman

www.freehand-books.com

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FICTION

Ides of March RACHEL KNUDSEN I L L U S T R AT I O N BY D AV E B A R N E S

Beware the ides of March, Vera thought as Eric chased her: I’ll get you I’ll get you I’ll get you. He was only kidding but she ran hard anyway, shot down the street, offramped into an alley and hid behind a shed which sunk into the mud, rotten from a winter of rain. Vera crouched and let her head hang between her knees.

Beware the Ides of March. Mr. Levin had read it out loud in class that afternoon and she could still remember it. What say’st thou to me now? Speak once again. Beware the Ides of March. He is a dreamer, let us leave him. Pass. Eric had leaned his head back until it laid on the top of her desk, his face turned upside down.

Bo-ring, he mouthed, so they skipped Biology.

When she was sure that she had lost him, Vera stood up and looked out into the long row of backyards. She had lived in this neighbourhood her whole life and knew it well. The gardens were sodden with rain and the fences leaned. An orange vw bus across the alleyway slumped into the wet dirt road. I should wait for Eric.

No, you should just take them. I could just take them. Right, why not? She pulled a tiny ziplock out of her pocket. The four tabs inside were as white and clean as snow. She took two. They tasted sweet. Once they had dissolved under her tongue, she felt relieved. She had done it. It was done. Now all she had to do was find Eric, which wouldn’t be too hard.

He was at the swing set hunched over, dragging his shoes though the sand. He hooked his fingers into Vera’s jean pockets and pulled her forward. You’re fast, he muttered, where’d you go? He was only seventeen but blue veins already showed through the thin skin beneath his eyes. Vera looped his bangs around her fingers. You’re looking old today, Erico. He pulled her again and she had to rock on her feet to keep from falling into him. I took mine already.

Bitch, he smiled, gimme, and swallowed them down.

They walked through the Chinese neighbourhood to the beach.

The doors were red, incense burned in clumps on windowsills.

The yards were waterlogged, a winter’s worth of wet leaves, the trees bare and black against the white sky. An elderly Chinese couple walked across the street and Eric mimicked the loping old man, the stilted steps of the wife. Are you feeling anything yet? No, are you, but she thought maybe she was because every time she put her foot down it reached the sidewalk a second later than she thought it would.

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When they got to the beach they sat in the cold sand beneath the stooping red port cranes. They look like red dragonflies, she said.

Because you’re high, he said. She wrapped her arms around him underneath his jacket. Her fingers melted into his shirt. Is this silk?

There you go, here we are. Kissing was silk, slow and calm and a blue light the same colour as his shirt winding from the tips of her fingers up into her throat and fluttering beneath their lips. Then a rustle behind them. Three bums grinned and watched. Eric. Who cares?

Eric, stop so they sat up and the guys laughed. One of them was missing an eye, and Vera stared at the curdled mass of skin where his eye should be. Wanna kiss it girly? Their laughter followed her all the way from the beach, past the sugar refinery, inside the rumblings of the cars on the towering freeway. The sidewalk was coming up much too fast or maybe too slow now and Vera had to hook her hand into the back of Eric’s jeans. Don’t pull so hard.

They turned a corner up a street into a gauntlet of prostitutes in tight jeans and thin wind jackets. Eric turned brave and mean like he could get. How much? For both of you? one of the girls asked, looking at Vera. He burst out laughing. Asshole, another girl said, but none of them seemed to care, were eyeing the road too hard.

Their legs were so long, thin enough in their jeans to step gingerly over tall buildings. Vera held tight to Eric as they walked past them up the road. Did you see how long their legs were? but Eric wasn’t listening. We should play I’ll Get You, he said. No, not here but he wrenched away and ran down an alley. She turned to the girls who swayed on legs too long, thin enough to fit through the eye of a needle, then looked back down the alleyway. No Eric.

Which way now? »

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FLASH

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FICTION

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POETRY

I Fell in Love with the Man and then the Circus SUSAN STENSON I L LU S T R AT I O N BY K A R E N J U S T L

1.

I slept with the clown who crawled to my tent and made me laugh.

Wore his orange wig and red nose.

Flopped back and forth in the big shiny shoes.

Traced the flower’s water from mouth to mouth.

People recognized me later in the street—asked what is it like to sleep with a clown but I wouldn’t tell.

2.

The circus set up in the lot across the street.

One elephant sleeps beside a bale of straw.

Tomorrow, I will wait to ride him.

Follow the ouija board to the letters Mother never lets out of the house.

3.

Have you been thinking is this the whole story?

4.

7.

We met at a party in the woods. Teenagers and pot, tight jeans and sandals. My mother liked his teeth.

I liked the station wagon, the long black hair.

He named the car Idi. Said what is darkness if there are no scars.

The girl said she loved him but I saw her face.

He says I am too late to be a communist or volunteer fire fighter. I am pregnant, I say.

5.

I am nothing until he can find a reason to save me.

8.

I have walked the ring.

Carried the baby on the thin rope above our bed. Borrowed a black umbrella but will not fall.

6.

He has tamed the tiger, named the rage.

Trapped what animals he could.

He is not crazy, yet.

Yesterday, ate with two hands.

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I have taught the boy to hold his breath.

He is not a fast learner.

Cries out when he slips, almost falls.

Imagines a net, fat and sloppy, somewhere down there.

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Reviews One Native Life

by Richard Wagamese Douglas & McIntyre, 2008; 257 pp.; $29.95 “Life is filled with poetry,” Ojibway author Richard Wagamese says. “Our job is to find it for ourselves.” His sixty plus essays, memoirs and stories in One Native Life record his lifelong efforts to find his poetry while he searched for his identity and a sense of belonging. For his readers, it’s a trip well worth taking with him.

With a minimalist style, Wagamese describes his often lonely life while surviving “most every facet of the life we call Indian, Ojibway or First Nations.” He refers to the abuses he suffered as a child and he unabashedly mentions his struggles with alcohol and drugs as well as detailing his boot-strapping successes. He refers to a string of “firsts”—his first Ojibway word for welcome, his first awkward kiss, his first movie, and a teacher’s choice for him to be the first to raise the new Maple Leaf flag.

Throughout, he underlines his ache to belong during a succession of foster homes, losses of friends, and disruptive moves. He names those who gave him a hand up and those who tried to knock him down, and he tells of his times in a variety of jobs across Canada before finally landing in a small community outside of Kamloops where “simple truths shine in the sun every morning,” and where now in his early fifties, he lives, writes and reflects on the meaning behind land claims, treaty rights, and the strictures of the Indian Act. His advice for those who would change the world is, “One story, one voice at a time.”

His images can be striking. There is, for example, the reference to a school group photograph in which he “stuck out in the sea of white faces like a fence post in a field of snow.” In nature, where “the wind is Mother Earth brushing her hair,” there is “the basso rumble of thunder” and the “cordite snap of lightning.” For non-Natives there are Ojibway and Indian words to be learned like, among others, akhi (earth), ishskwaday (fire), nibi (water), ishpiming (universe), which are the titles of the four sections of the book. And there are myths,

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legends and lore from the stories of the Animal People, “the seven hills of life,” and lessons outlined around campfires and in native circles and sweat lodges. There is wisdom, too, from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and in chance encounters with UFOs and in “Lemon Pie with Muhammad Ali.” Then, there is pure poetry in the piece “Running after Werezak,” right from its title to its concluding lines, “Being first across the line isn’t the biggest thing. Letting them know you’re in the race is.”

With titles like “Riding with the Cartwrights,” “Driving Thunder Road,” “The Kid Who Couldn’t Dance,” ” Playing with Your Eyes Closed,” and with Wagamese’s revelations of when he “found the essence of my Ojibway self,” his book is a must read to understand, appreciate and savour the poetry in one Native’s eventful life.

— M . W AYN E C U N N I N G H A M

Hooked

by Carolyn Smart Brick Books, 2009; 120 pp; $19.00 The idea behind this collection of poems is intriguing, though potentially frustrating.

Smart explores the lives of seven noteworthy and/or notorious women in the form of concocted first person narratives. This strategy assumes a familiarity on the part of the reader with the women involved, and in cases like Zelda Fitzgerald, Carson McCullers, and Elizabeth Smart, the back story is likely a little more well-known.

Others are vaguely familiar, and a couple are near mysteries. One almost feels obligated to do internet searches in order to get a better handle on some of Smart’s text.

In the case of Myra Hindley, this relative obscurity plays into the content well. She first tells us about her partner Ian: “his nails were clean/ and he read books.” A little later on, she casually discusses the dead bodies of young children, and by the end of the section, you get the feeling you should be putting the book down and washing your hands.

Smart’s narratives are consistently blunt and brash. Unity Mitford tells us “there is a

bullet in the middle of my brain, now/ please tell me who I am.” This approach is very effective in some places, but seems a little too distant in others. When Zelda Fitzgerald tells us that “exhausted by drink and debt/ we went again to Paris where the 20th century lived,” there is less of a sense of an insightful interior monologue and more of a feeling of a clever sound bite from a cheeky documentary.

Smart, however, can be forgiven a few of these overdone conceits, partly because they manage to cover some impressive territory. Dora Carrington tells us that “like all good artists I’ll be known forever/ by only my last name,” and then “I will beg to enter your bed/ you will wrap me in your unfamiliar arms/ and follow my rules of behaviour.” The Jane Bowles section carries on in this unapologetic tone: “no one knew me on my knees/ in doorways, my mouth around a man/ to find the cash to buy my girl/ some food and proper clothes” and “Can you direct me to the nearest cocktail center?” (Shades of Djuna Barnes!)

All of these narratives share an overwhelming sense of lack of control. It isn’t that these women have experienced life as much as they’ve plodded through it. Elizabeth Smart tells us “what is left of my youth rushes up like a geyser/ as I sit in the sun combing lice from my hair.” It’s no wonder that she sat in Grand Central Station and wept.

—BOB WAKULICH

A Verse Map of Vancouver Edited by George McWhirter Anvil Press, 2009; 201 pp; $45.00 Simply put, this book was made for coffee table display. A Verse Map of Vancouver is entirely deserving of that status, inviting luxurious attention during a quiet, cozy curl-up in an oversized livingroom chair.

Edited by Vancouver’s first Poet Laureate, George McWhirter, with photographs by the widely-exhibited Vancouver photographer and artist, Derek von Essen, this volume takes the reader on a journey through some of the city’s best-known spots, described with verse from some the country’s finest poets, all of whom have some connection to Vancouver.

McWhirter’s idea, when he sent out the call for submissions for this project, was not to represent Vancouver’s poets, but rather to pay tribute to the city’s principle places and

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decision to invest in such a project. Other Canadian cities could certainly support such a poetic journey – but for now, this initiative as a whole must be recognized for its singularity of purpose and its originality. — C A R O LY N E V A N D E R M E E R

!

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The Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award* (1, 2 or 3 poems per entry, maximum 150 lines)

$

Judge: DON DOMANSKI

in cash prizes!

Short Fiction (one story per entry, maximum 10,000 words)

6,000 1st prize

$

1,250

Judge: PAUL QUARRINGTON

Creative Non-Fiction (one article per entry, maximum 5,000 words) Judge: CHARLES WILKINS * The Poetry first prize is donated in part by The Banff Centre, who will also award a jeweller-cast replica of poet Bliss Carman’s silver and turquoise ring to the first-prize winner.

2nd prize

$

500 3rd prize

$

250

FOR COMPLETE CONTEST RULES GO TO: www.pairiefire.ca

DEADLINE FOR ALL CONTEST ENTRIES: NOVEMBER 30, 2009

features in verse. And so, while many of the poets are as close to household names as you can get when it comes to poetry, the selections were chosen less for their authors than for their subject matter. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that among the many poets whose work appears here are such names as Tom Wayman, Roy Miki, Meredith Quartermain, Lionel Kearns, George Stanley and Maxine Gadd—poets largely responsible for shaping the Vancouver literary identity in the last several decades. Alongside these staples of the B.C. literary community are newer contributors, who, despite their youth, are making significant marks on the genre: Stephanie Bolster, Justin Lukyn, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Evelyn Lau, Rita Wong, and Jennica Harper. And among the long list of contemporary poets either living in or linked to Vancouver, are three deceased icons of the genre: Pat Lowther, Al Purdy, and George Woodcock.

As McWhirter points out in his introduction, Vancouver’s layout has been described as “just so damned rational�—with avenues that run east to west monotonously numbered, and streets that run north to

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south named. But in this seemingly logical pattern are traits and characteristics that follow no logic – and which beg for the rich description they deserve, if anything, in thanks for the mark they leave on residents and visitors alike. Vancouver’s streets, parks, beaches, bridges and buildings are evocative for these poets – and, in more than eighty poems, these writers set out the ways in which such features move them.

McWhirter is careful to point out that graveyards, schools, and golf courses get no mention here—but they await other verse maps to do them justice.

There is no point in singling out one or two poets in this vast collection; I will not fall into that trap. All should be mentioned for the different approaches they take to describe different elements of the Vancouver landscape. There is not room for that here and I will not be limited by favouritism based on my own biases. Instead, I will tout the merits of this volume as a whole, of McWhirter’s initiative, of von Essen’s stark artistic talent – and of Yosef Wosk’s creation of the Vancouver Poet Laureateship and the Vancouver Foundation’s innovative

Fist of the Spider Woman Edited by Amber Dawn Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009; 190 pp; $18.95 What scares you most? Perhaps you haven’t given it more than a passing thought. Do you feel a sense of degradation or perversion because being terrified actually titillates you? Perhaps it’s not something you wish to give too much attention. This collection of stories, very much unconventional in its take on the horror genre, compels the reader to ask these questions. Though the material is clearly premised on dyke relationships and sexuality, the stories are framed by universal experiences of fear, lust, and longing that will resonate with any reader.

Growing up queer brings fear to the forefront of the psyche in a way that is inextricably tied to our sexuality. We question the sanctity of our locale, the safety of our beings as we leave the bar at night—and, in the most fundamental sense, many queers simply fear being themselves, as the price of discovery is too high. In Fist of the Spider Woman, all of the writers’ deepest fears are explored in ways that are equally petrifying and erotic; gory and unsettling.

Despite my revulsion at the image of a massive, slimy, undulating slug penetrating and bringing Patty to orgasm, Megan Milk’s aptly named “Slug� elicited a strong reaction from me—and not simply because the thought of any slithery creature contiguous with my skin constitutes a horrifying encounter. Rather, what most affected me was the notion that one’s needs are often filled by the most unlikely, and unorthodox, sources. Love finds you and, as in Patty’s case, engulfs her being; she becomes one with the nameless, faceless creature: Slug kisses Patty. Slug kisses Patty until Patty can’t breathe. Slug is in her nostrils and mouth. Slug’s mucus drips down her throat and fills her lungs. Slug’s mucus fills her body. Patty is drenched in Slug, stuck in him, inextricable.

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This eroticized account of their union contrasts sharply with a real-life encounter she has with a date earlier in the story. Despite the highly visceral similarities between the passages, Patty’s experiences differ greatly: His tongue in her mouth is slithery and warm, then a lifeless slab of muscle to her weak response. Fumbling and finally dead. Retracted.

Patty’s fantasies demand escalating degrees of revulsion for her to attain the satisfaction she craves. The lines of reality and fantasy become blurred in this story, as throughout the collection. And just as Patty, “torn between horror and desire,” couldn’t look away, neither could this reader.

In some of the pieces, the characters’ fears seem paranoid or implausible at first, but ultimately materialize. “Conspiracy of Fuckers” by Nomy Lamm addresses the fears of Regina Venquist, publisher of a radical underground political zine and part-time phone-sex operator. We are left to wonder if her fears are real, or if the fantasy of fear simply serves Regina’s more base needs. (Or is it paranoia caused by a possible addiction to OxyContin?) Whatever the verity, Regina is convinced a government censorship group is targeting her for “neutralization.”

Neutralize. That’s exactly what they want to do. Make us neutral so that we can’t advocate for ourselves, can’t fight, can’t impact or change anything. My body tingles with connections being made. I feel powerful, but scared.

As many of this story’s readers will know well, it is not mere paranoia that “fuckers” have openly conspired against sexual outsiders, misfits, and activists for centuries—I found Lamm’s sharp portrayal of this political reality through the character of Regina particularly compelling. Indeed, I related to many of the themes in this collection, such as Trust, and its inherent perils: how easily it can be misplaced, and how effortlessly we offer it to perfect strangers – often just for the chance at love (or a good fuck). In “All You Can Be,” Mette Bach addresses this in a blood-run-cold scenario that brings together a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-type asylum with a seductive woman and a mysteriously paralyzed patient.

Sal Miller “was not much for getting to know people, not interested, she told herself, but sometimes a fleeting thought would tell her that she was scared, scared of

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people and the words they spoke and the things they did.” And, Bach adds, “Sal never asked anyone for help.”

When circumstances force Sal to put all her trust in one woman, as her paralysis leaves her completely reliant, her fears must be confronted. But while she comes to know herself and the carnal pleasures of lesbianism, she realizes she knows nothing about the woman that has prompted this reckoning.

In Fist of the Spider Woman, Amber Dawn compiles works that are not only narratives of horror and semi-hardcore S & M, but narratives of courage. When we face our fears they become more real, yet more manageable. Throughout these stories women confront their fears and, rather than simply succumb, choose ultimately to integrate them into their lives—often reconstituting them as agents for sexual gratification, or as catalysts for self-realization. Therein lies the heart of this anthology. Though undoubtedly they intend to horrify, these stories left me with an invigorating desire to conquer my fears … and I am not ashamed to admit, simply an invigorating desire.

—LORAH DELANEY

Dragonflies

by Grant Buday Biblioasis, 2008; 165 pp; $19.95 I suppose the big question any reader has when presented with a new account of Odysseus’ inspired trickery and Troy’s ultimate downfall is “why bother?” After all, it’s not as if that ancient wooden nag hasn’t been saddled innumerable times before. And by some pretty heavyweight talents too—there’s Chapman’s classic translation of course, and Alexander Pope’s. Samuel Butler took a swing at the epic tale, as have a couple of hundred other writers over the last few centuries.

The thing about the Illiad though, and it shares this trait with most of the going-toget-to-someday classics skulking unread on my bookshelves (Moby Dick and the Bible spring immediately to mind), is that it’s a work mostly enjoyed at a far remove.

The more Catholic the interpretation, the less engaging this Ur-story becomes as it slides into the gully of dead history, dusty poesy and dull references too obscure to warrant even a lazy search on Wikipedia.

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The genius of Dragonflies—local writer Grant Buday’s take on the Trojan Horse—is that Buday imbues Homer’s epic with an essential humanity usually lacking in the strictest adaptations. His novel Odysseus is pitch-perfect: a fully realized and rounded character who’s not only the sly and cynical survivor we’ve come to expect, but also embodies extra dimensions of uncertainty, patient love, and a sick despair bred by the cruelties of fate, gods and men. This thoroughly modern Odysseus doesn’t doubt the existence of ancient deities. He just happens to hate them too.

The exacting verisimilitude of personality that Buday conjures up for each his of characters, both major and minor, extends to the setting of his novel. Everywhere, his Achaean world sparkles with telling detail: the sun-stoked “throb” of Troy’s walls mocking the rotting army below; the gnarled scars and maiming wounds crisscrossing the bodies of his aging and not-so-mythical heroes; the camp-follower whores’ ill-bred offspring, “slimy nosed and filthy-fingered.”

There’s even the ear-hair of Oddyseus’s father, Laertes, straggly and stinking of wax.

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The considerable force of a well-informed imagination is fully evident here, and Buday’s economical style always gives just enough to keep this fast-paced story going to its inevitable—yet somehow suspenseful —conclusion.

In short, Dragonflies is a grand tale recounted by a superb storyteller. What more could you possibly want?

— J I M O AT E N

Down and Out on Murder Mile

by Tony O’Neill Harper Perennial, 2008; 256 pp; $14.95 Down and Out on Murder Mile is a superb piece of work. The novel plots the drug misadventures of its unnamed narrator from Los Angeles to London. With junkie wife Susan in tow, the narrator retreats to his native country for a new start, or, more accurately, an escape, after hitting rock bottom in L.A. when a police car runs him down on Christmas Eve while he’s out trawling for crack. But London does not save the couple. Not surprisingly, drugs are

easy to score in the British capital. The UK also offers the pair free access to methadone clinics via the National Health Service as a way to wean themselves from smack. But are they really interested in kicking? Meanwhile, Susan and her husband are chased from squalid flat to squalid flat, eventually landing in East London’s Upper Clapton Road, an area dubbed “Murder Mile” due to the high body count from a raging drug war. It’s not the sort of place to get clean. The narrator tries his hand at a few dubious jobs (magazine advertising hack; porn shop clerk) before gathering a bit of momentum back in the music biz, where, years earlier, he got his start as a fairly successful musician. But hold on—don’t those rock-n-roll types dabble in drugs now and again, you ask? Right—O’Neill’s protagonist steps from one hell into another.

Again, it suggests he is not really that interested in getting off dope. Redemption does creep into the bleak narrative when a new woman (Vanessa) comes along and gives the narrator hope. But when you’re a hardcore junkie, and a professed lover of the high drugs bring, you don’t just walk away from it all because of a pretty face. It’s here O’Neill shows his brilliance—about seventy-five per cent of the way into the novel, he could have offered his narrator a sickly saccharine out where he and Vanessa live happily ever after. But that ain’t reality, my friend, especially for a junkie, and O’Neill knows it. So instead of a tidy, happy, mainstream ending—O’Neill gives readers a minor epiphany at best, as his narrator rights himself a little but he’s still a long way from going straight. The demons that have tormented him from page one of Down and Out on Murder Mile still nip at his heels when the book concludes.

O’Neill delivers this novel with energy, pace and blistering courage, pressing the reader’s face right into the narrator’s mire of druggie darkness. The novel is also nonjudgemental. O’Neill shows readers the honest goods of a junkie’s life and makes no apologies for it. We are spared highhorse moralizing about drug use. Readers see the despair and must make up their own minds about the damaged lives O’Neill portrays. But with the damage comes some serious insider info and bias about the beauty of being high: On the train I think that maybe right here, right now, I am the most beautiful man alive, because everyone is beautiful when they are

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high: I start to realize that the war on drugs is a war on beauty—a war on perfection, because everything is perfect on heroin – it is a war against the simple human aspiration of complete contentment, and the thought makes me sad—that we are waging such a pointless and spiteful war against the noblest part of our own nature.

This passage—and there are more like it— reveals O’Neill’s respect for his readers. He shows readers what being on junk is like. He offers his views on the allure of smack and other drugs while clearly portraying the anguish of addiction and the blinding madness of the all-consuming lifestyle, but he does not preach about getting clean. In this era, when so many false prophets insist on telling others how to lead their lives, it is refreshing to come across a novelist who just lays it down cold and hard, letting the reader decide what he or she thinks.

Adding to the book’s strength is its artfulness, as the prose is very fluid. And there is humour throughout, bolstering the novel’s humanity. For example, when the protagonist is kept away from his pharmacy and his methadone because the cops have blocked off the street, he telephones the pharmacy, begging to get through and is put on hold. O’Neill describes it this way: They placed me on hold. I found myself listening to Musak momentarily. Kenny G plays the hits of Celine Dion. I wondered if that would be playing when I die. The phone box stank of stale döner kebabs and vomit.

The narrator is jonesing here, yet he still manages to think about dying while being forced to listen to the world’s worst music.

I had to laugh.

Tony O’Neill has delivered a powerful novel, more forceful even than his first landmark novel, Digging the Vein, from 2006. Murder Mile brims with vigour, violence, black humour and bleak humanity—readers will love its honesty and directness above all else.

— M AT T H E W F I R T H

Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War

by Michael Petrou UBC Press, 2008; 282 pp; $24.95 Walter Hellund and Alex Forbes, two handsome young Canucks of the desperate 1930s, look out from the cover photo of this equally handsome book, Renegades:

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Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. They wear patches over their wounded right and left eyes respectively. Neither Republican volunteer has any depth perception; yet seven decades on, with totalitarianism still rampant, their pirate glares suggest a paradoxical fullness of historical vision. In a Dominion blind to fascism’s threat, these one-eyed men were prescient.

Forbes, Hellund, and seventeen hundred or so other Canadians, most of them former Europeans of a communist bent, volunteered to fight Hitlerite fascism in Spain, years before the Nazis invaded Poland. They were unofficial men in an unofficial war, as the MacLean’s journalist Michael Petrou reminds us, in this scrupulous and sober history.

Most eventually saw combat in one permutation or another of the MackenziePapineau Battalion of the International Brigades. Roughly four hundred died on the peninsula between 1936 and 1939, battling German and Italian as well as Spanish fascist armies. Coincidentally, about four hundred Canadians died in the D-Day landings of June 1944, as London and Ottawa belatedly conceded Hellund and Forbes’s point about the dangers of fascism.

Some of the Mac-Pap soldiers, unfortunately, were dangerously authoritarian themselves, as Petrou is perhaps a little shy to admit. He documents, from a Canadian perspective, the well-known story of how Stalinists from Moscow, Moose Jaw, and Madrid kneecapped the fragile unity of the elected Spanish government. But he does so glancingly; little reference is made to the international Communist Party’s murder and imprisonment of its allies in Spain, or its military incompetence.

By contrast, Renegades makes much hay of internal government and rcmp memoranda regarding this strange breed of Euro-Canadian political zealots going off to fight an obscure war. The tone of these espionage documents is antique and hilariously bureaucratic: ... The whole question regarding the action to be taken in connection with the Foreign Enlistment Act appears to be entirely dependent upon the wishes of the Government ...

And, they show that the Canadian state’s attitude to the Mac-Paps was one of moustachioed, bum-covering indifference. (Still is, actually). But one illustration of this desultory surveillance would probably

have sufficed. Petrou feasts on these nerdy files, which suggests the primary material must have been easy to hand.

What really happened in Spain seventy years ago, and what it all meant, is hard to discern. This insightful book brings those terrible days into close focus, and helps explain why good Canadians sometimes get blinded.

— LY L E N E F F

Buying Cigarettes for the Dog: Stories

by Stuart Ross Freehand Books, 2009; 200 pp; $19.95 Buying Cigarettes for the Dog is Stuart Ross’s second collection of short stories, released into a bibliography thick with poetry, plus two collaborative novels and a book of essays. Ross is what you might call a writer’s writer. Not only a poet and essayist, he has published and sold his own chapbooks, and is also a poetry editor and co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Festival. Not to mention his Hunkamooga column for this very magazine, the fearless true tales of trying to make a living by writing in Canada.

It’s no mean feat, and Ross has done the work. This collection shows the effort of a mature writer who’s not afraid to play, plopping the reader into absurd situations and dangling disbelief above our heads, such as in the title story about a man who goes out for a pack of cigarettes and decides to “circle the globe and still be home in time dinner.” He walks and walks, acquiring a “small apartment with a dog and typewriter named Princey” in the process, before remembering he was on an errand and returning home, or where he used to live, anyway.

It’s all the sort of thing you don’t often get all at once in Canadian fiction: originality, inventiveness, and stories that hang together. It feels more like a South American writer in translation, frankly. I chewed through each one of the twenty odd pieces, delighting in the wordplay and imagery of each, as well as their diverse forms. “Language Lessons with Simon and Marie” riffs on the stilted dialogue of esl texts, while “So Sue Me, You Talentless Fucker” subverts the expected emotionless language of legalese into a scathing rant simply by beginning every long, angry, funny sentence with a “whereas.”

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Some stories are long, interconnected affairs; some are short. It’s hard to sum up the book without resorting to the word “zany.” How else to describe a story like “Cow Story,” which imagines a world where cows are invading the city, blocking spaces meant for people, such as elevators and supermarket aisles and forcing the narrator to alter his routines and plans and movements. And when the cows are gone (much like wildlife from new-ish suburbs), the people feel the emptiness. Or “Me and the Pope,” in which the Pope is a guy who comes to crash in your apartment, leaving a mess and stealing your girlfriend before going out to do his Popemobile thing.

Like most short story collections, the assortment is uneven, and Ross’s brand of poetic surrealism tends to work better in shorter bursts than sustained over the longer stories. “Guided Missiles,” the longest story in the collection, concerns a group of losers with overlapping lives, a part-time DJ named Archie, his neighbour Martita, a stalker by the name of Hank and a street preacher referred to as “the prophet”—all set in some unnamed North American city, with political strife in Nicaragua simmering in the background. A wonderful piece to read, with lines like, “He looked into the leaves above and through them he saw the grey clouds, rolling and tumbling like waves of lava, bubbling and screeching, spitting out the occasional bird and always threatening to smother the earth.” However, and maybe this is just me, in the thick of description and dialogue, I often lost the plot points and had to go back a couple of pages to find where I was in the story.

Ross’s background as a poet translates well to creating fiction. His work is experimental but accessible, and anyone with a modicum of appreciation for satire and

surrealism (Kids in the Hall fans perhaps?) ought to pick up these smokin’ Cigarettes.

—CHRISTINE ROWLANDS

Lillian the Legend

By Kerry Byrne Conundrum Press, 2008; 80 pp; $15.00 With the entire “graphic novel” versus “comic book” war of semantics showing no signs of getting any less wearying, I’m just going to go ahead and call this a picture book. I’ve never taken any courses in Understanding Comics or read any of the accompanying textbooks, admittedly quite remiss in turning a casual interest into forensic examination, so I certainly wouldn’t want to get out of my depth. I had no idea it was all so complicated and heavy. Luckily, fans and scholars of the picture books have set me straight on that last point.

This picture book tells the story of Lillian Alling, a Russian immigrant dropped into 1920s New York City who, not digging the garment factory worker scene so much, decides to return home—the hard way.

Taking a train as far as Alberta, Alling then sets out, shank’s pony style, on an epic stroll, heading west and then following the Telegraph Trail to Dawson City, eventually canoeing it down the Yukon River to the Bering Sea. Traipsing around Western and Northern Canada like she owns the joint, the intrepid Alling has adventures and meets interesting strangers. She stays in cabins and goes ice fishing. She cavorts with caribou and eats blueberry pie. It all seems like folksy fodder for some cable-knit-sweater-clad, teamug-hugging cbc Radio host who can’t stop talking about potbellied stoves and fiddle music. It’s not that it’s overly warm

and fuzzy or uninteresting, there’s just something about it that’s oozing the kind of dry, dreamy-smiled Canadiana you either shovel down with a snowshoe or you don’t.

I would have guessed that this was all some kind of Paul Bunyan-esque tall tale.

It certainly seems a stretchy saga but while accounts differ in the details and the chronology, it’s all based on fact, with only Alling’s fate a complete mystery. Maybe she made it back to Russia, maybe she was eaten by narwhals – it’s anyone’s guess.

Somehow that too seems distinctly Canadian; the story that ends with a shrug.

Executed in a presumably faux naïve style, Kerry Byrne’s drawings are impressive in their detail, but somewhat rough around the edges in terms of draftsmanship – a more rustic cousin to the sort of high-school-notebook-margin-doodle style that’s everywhere these days. The larger, narration-free panels work the best, particularly those that simply and economically convey a sense of Alling’s tiny stature against the epic backdrops of the land. Otherwise, small, possibly experimental stylistic flourishes abound, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Lillian Alling is practically a cottage industry these days. Besides Kerry Byrne’s entry into the canon there are several books in various stages of completion, a feature film in development, and an opera set to premiere in 2010 with the Vancouver Opera. I’m holding out hope for a Planetarium laser light show.

Also included here is a small collection of short stories based on the author’s odd jobs, travels, and observations. Byrne’s reflection on her brief stint as a nude art model is the best of these and the funniest thing in the whole picture book.

—ROD FILBRANDT

for a mere $20 we’ll send you, or a friend, 6 captivating issues of subTerrain. upcoming themes include: Vancouver’s Literary Landscape, #54 Signs, #55 • Regret, #56 What a long, strange trip it’s been ... why not join us? Why not bring a friend?

Cheque or money order to the address below will do it. (That covers the postage, too!) po box 3008, main post office, vancouver, bc, v6b 3x5 c anada

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REVIEWS

Not to be missed The Incident Report

by Martha Baillie Pedlar Press, 2009; 195 pp; $21.00 I worked in the public library system in Toronto from when I was 14-years-old until my late 20s.

During my 20s, I also stood out on the streets and sold my self-published chapbooks. What these two jobs had in common was that they made me a magnet for crazies, eccentrics, the creative, and the lonely. Out on Yonge Street, a man told me he was 300 years old. Back in the library, a man masturbated into a Petunia the Duck book.

Martha Baillie’s beautiful, unusual novel, The Incident Report, brings together the library and the street. Baillie, herself a library worker in the Toronto system, has created a loosely woven slate of narratives and narrative fragments in the form of 144 sometimes banal, sometimes startling, sometimes poignant, incident reports, which librarians are apparently expected to fill out when unusual things happen in their branches.

Miriam, a mid-30s library clerk, has begun to funnel her life—her work life, her love life, her family history—through this device of official library bureaucracy. Of course, it’s not the typical library patrons—the borrowers of Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele—who make the lasting impressions, but the mad and the eccentric and the pathetic: a man who nearly orgasms as the librarian reads to him the titles of all the history books in the branch collection; the man in the raincoat who carries a suitcase and talks to himself; the woman who deliberately mishears the library clerk and accuses her of incessant lying.

And then, gradually, Miriam begins reporting on her own life: she meets Janko, a Slovenian-born painter and taxi driver, who, in a series of quietly erotic, understated incident reports, becomes her lover. She also begins to find mysterious notes seemingly planted around the library for her: written by a delusionary who believes she is the hunchbacked jester’s doomed daughter in Verdi’s opera Rigoletto.

In Toronto, like in most urban cities, so many of us live through our jobs; certainly that’s where we spend most of our waking hours. Half our pay goes to rent, a quarter to food, the rest to incidentals. We work to live.

Martha Baillie’s protagonist exists only in the incident reports she fills in at work, and the moral standard on which she repeatedly leans are the Rules & Regulations of the Toronto library system.

The device is smart, and the book, by necessity fragmentary, provides a complete experience.

Back when I worked at the Yorkdale Shopping Centre branch, there were an identical mother-and-teenage-daughter who came in each Saturday and borrowed about a dozen Harlequin titles each. “Ooh, I think I got some good ones,” one or the other would chirp. “Oh, me too,” chirped the other. I had never thought of slipping some contraband into their romance heap, something to disturb them but perhaps ultimately provide a more profound fulfillment. The Incident Report would have been the perfect intervention.

—STUART ROSS

Reviews issue 53

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HUNKAMOOGA MUSINGS ON THE LITERARY LIFE by Stuart Ross Make mine miscellaneous! arlier this year, I sat on a jury for the Canada Council for the Arts.

We were giving out grants for poetry to “emerging writers.” Our little cabal of three could do this presumably because we were “emerged writers.”

Anyway, sitting on a jury is often an eyeopening experience. There were the usual aesthetic disputes, the daydreamed throttling of one juror by another, the awarding of grants to people one wants to kill, and the occasional great moment of camaraderie. The food was pretty good too.

But the thing that struck me most was the nature of the manuscripts. Sometime over the past couple of decades, something really strange has happened to poetry in this country. And I wanna know why.

See, I did some statistical forensics of the two big boxes of submissions we had to go through. I sorted the eighty-nine manuscripts into categories. I called he first category “Projects”—these were book-length poems, or collections that comprised a single project. Think Christian Bök’s Eunoia or angela rawlings’ Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists., or Herménégilde Chiasson’s beautiful Beatitudes.

The second category was “Themes”— collections of poems all exploring a single theme or character. Like Paul Vermeersch’s The Fat Kid or Gary Barwin and Derek Beaulieu’s Frogments from the Frag Pool.

Adam Sol’s Jeremiah, Ohio.

Next came what I called “Themes in Sections” — either a book divided into, say, three or four sections, each exploring one theme, or a book containing discrete projects. Alessandro Porco’s highly entertaining The Jill Kelly Poems and Sharon Harris’s Avatar. My own Dead Cars in Managua would just about fit into this file. Maybe Paul Dutton’s Aurealities.

The final category I labelled “Miscellaneous”—collections of poems whose greatest connection is that they are all written by the same author. In other words, this latter category is simply a collection of poems someone wrote. The best of what they have lying around, presumably.

Now, there are some good Project books, and some good Theme books, and some good books constructed as Themes in Sec-

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tions. Great ones, even. But my favourite poetry books are the Miscellaneous breed: an eclectic grab bag of poems by a single author. Tulsa Kid, by Ron Padgett. The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight, by Charles North. Primitive, by Gil Adamson.

I could go on.

In fact, I will go on, because you should read every goddamn one of these books.

The Bone Broker, by Lillian Necakov. Capitalism, by Campbell McGrath. A Defense of Poetry, by Gabriel Gudding (OK, most of the poems in there invoke butts, asses, and rectums, but it’s not truly a Theme book). Rhymes of a Jerk, by Larry Fagin.

Pearl, by Lynn Crosbie. The Romantic Dogs, by Roberto Bolaño. Flutter, by Alice Burdick. Shroud of the Gnome, by James Tate. Jen Currin’s The Sleep of Four Cities.

Your Name Here, by John Ashbery.

Read them, you bastards! Buy them and read them! (You’ll never find a copy of Rhymes of a Jerk, but I’ll make you a pirate edition for $75, OK?) But I ask: Why so many stinking Project and Theme books? And why are writers who describe themselves as “emerging” writing so many of ’em? Shouldn’t writers who are learning the trade be trying out everything they can, creating a tangle of eclectic experiments, writing about any stupid thing that pops into their churning skull?

Where did this all start? It’d be easy—and fun, too!—to blame it all on Christian Bök, whose book-length poem Eunoia sold 14,000 copies and made a lot of young poets think they could be superstars. Now, there’s a book that you can describe to someone and make it sound interesting: “Oh yeah, so each section only uses one vowel! It’s really cool. Yoko Ono!” But how do you make Shroud of the Gnome sound good? “There’s all these poems and they’re great and one of them’s called ‘Shut Up and Eat Your Toad’!” Just doesn’t grab in the same way.

I think, though, we can apportion the bulk of the blame three ways.

First, grant applications. Those “Project Description” requirements are evil fuckers, eating at the very fabric of our nation’s poetry. Does a focused Project or Theme make for a better book of poetry? Nope—

more often than not it means oatmeal-like homogeneity. Or some interesting idea stretched beyond its natural limit to achieve “book length.” But it sure makes it easier to describe what you’re working on when you have to fill out a grant application. Maybe it even makes the book you’re applying for sound more important. Maybe it makes the writer feel more important.

Next, let’s string up those goddamn mfa programs. Lucky for us, we don’t have the kind of sausage-factory industry that’s eating away at the U.S., but I think that’s the hideous direction we’re headed in. Again, it’s easier to spend a couple of years working on something you can define in a concrete fashion, rather than something you can’t.

Plus, again, a Project manuscript sounds important. It’s more tangible: you can talk about it with your thesis advisor and it’s like you actually have a topic for your discussion.

I don’t know that it’s the way to write exciting poetry, though. So I hereby command all universities to shut down their MFA programs in creative writing.

Finally, there are the publishers. What the hell do they know? The “sales force” for their distributor has been whining to them: “We only have eight seconds to pitch a book to the buyers for Big Fucking Box Books. It’s way better if we can say, ‘A marvellous collection of poems about gardening and suicide’ instead of ‘Oh yeah, this is the new poetry book by L. Beau Noodles.’” A Project or Theme collection also makes it so much easier for publishers to write their catalogue copy.

So there’s all this pressure on writers to come up with poetry books that can be described as if they were novels.

This new concept thing with poetry collections—it makes me sad. It limits us. It makes art convenient.

I’m heading to the mountains to start a guerrilla resistance. Join me. The food’s pretty good.

Stuart Ross is a writer and writing coach, and he’s also the Poetry Editor for Mansfield Press and the Poetry & Fiction Editor for This Magazine. His new book is Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Freehand Books), now in its second printing. It’s a collection of, um, various stories about, like, various things. Write Stuart at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

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