Addictions

Devil May Care - Dependency - Cellphone Triptych - Pauper Lear - Fire Down the Hole - Alcoholics - My Three Uncles

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Devil May Care

I have to admit he looked pretty cool smoking that cigarette, as if telling the world that he didn't care, that he wasn't afraid of anything, he was beyond all that: the whining and the sniffling, the cardiogram and the radiation; he had super-powers that would protect him from vomiting and drowning in his own blood. The devil may care, but he didn't.

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Dependency

The weak, weary numbness, as if the body were only a receptacle, far from the tabernacle of soul. Thoughts stray this way and that, nothing makes sense but the desire for a deep sleep or to be awake again. Nothing makes sense but the desire for the drug, the only thing that might connect neuron to neuron, thought to thought, in a line of being, in a way of seeing.

So I walk down the meaningless street, fingers slipping through nickels and dimes like water, and tell the man what I need, knowing that I have enough to buy my freedom, to purchase flight, to follow the rainbow, and dance the jig of my Irish luck, maybe even get my life together, write up a game plan, line up all of my ducks.

I will get all this once the drug hits my system. And I will sit in deep bliss, double latte throbbing in my veins.

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Cellphone Triptych

1. Baubles

Back in the old days the baubles bounced on high and a line of plastic letters was strung across the crib. And there were so many choices: pink bunnies danced across the ceiling and mommy's face beamed down from above. Kisses and mommy's round body was a playground of milky breasts and padded fun. And you were the only one.

Now as you lie back you see a flashing in mommy's hand and a dark thin slab. The light springs onto her fingers and up into her sparkling eyes. She's the one who's mesmerized. But you can't see from where, from what playland of colours, green and blue messages, the tiny yellow smiles beam upward into her smiling eyes.

2. Raskolnikov Latte

Please don’t call me on my cellphone because I swapped it for a creamy latte and am now drifting from thought to thought, anonymously, as if I were my own person.

I’m no longer tied by an invisible string to anyone and everyone. I’m just just being here, phenomenologically, by my self, here at Blenz Cafe, looking across the street to Indigo Books.

I look across Granville Street to the chapters of other people’s lives, to the books unwritten, all the mystery and the subtlety locked into those complex brains until the cellphone rings beside me— what was I saying? But, to be fair, you do get the odd intriguing tidbit — You let him do that? — but for the most part there seems to be little of interest in the average citizen, now that we’re disabused by their vocalized thoughts unleashed into the airwaves. It seems that everyday man is a depressing animal. The women aren’t any better, they just talk more, and the more they talk, the less they say. All in all, it’s depressing and repetitive, day after day, it’s depressing and repetitive …

until she walks in, in her green sparkling eye-shadow, and those white legs, goose-pimpled in the late afternoon, raw white cylinders shifting nervously in the harsh February sun.

She buys a caramel macchiato and sits next to me and opens her book, as the sun threatens to fall, turning amber rays to grey shadow.

I decide to find out if she’s an indifferent monster reading Crime and Punishment or my celestial muse. She answers, Yes, I found the book fascinating, and disturbing. Did you like it? Although hardly fit to absolve Raskolnikov, I confess, Yes, I embraced him years ago. 

I know. I love the way Dostoevsky — excuse me. Yes. Hi. No. I don’t see why not. But I left it on the kitchen table. Forget it. I wouldn’t say that. Yesterday? Fine, we —

On the pavement the purple sun sets and the heavy buses roll by, each with several dozen passengers, each talking in their separate circuit skulls.

3. The Ancient Fleets

The old secrets can no longer be kept. All the mysteries we once wondered at are revealed for everyone to hear. 

The gargoyle curse is lifted, and the marble statues of Rome now speak about groceries and about Jerry who had way too many tequilas fuck was he wasted. What? No, I haven’t seen that episode.

Ancient Horus now opens his beak, long closed and hallowed in casks of teak.

Unbound mummies in their charnel vaults hold forth about the way she looked in that pink halter what a slut.

Once upon a time tribes of Nubian mystics descended onto the Nile in wooden fleets.

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Pauper Lear

Can you spare a loonie? his thoughts said, as he gave me that haunted heroin look

so I told him with my thoughts that we don’t serve empty caverns here, or sightless trolls

and he looked back at me, trained his lightless sockets at my brain

and beamed the following words: through tattered clothes small vices do appear*

and down the back alley did disappear

——

* Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear; / Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks: / Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it (King Lear 4:6).

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Fire Down the Hole

on the corner of Pender and Main he spat and shouted to the lost tourist that he couldn’t stand the smell of cigarettes, they burned his fingers and he felt like he was walking through Calcutta and everyone was burning hay and dung and the scraps from cardboard signs with brightly coloured polyethylene letters singing his nostrils as the toxic smoke scoured his larynx and made him cough up jagged bits of clotted blood

his fingers were yellow and brown and cracks were appearing in his teeth, some sort of strange cancerous bulge appeared on his nose yet all this didn’t stop him from fingering his pack of twenty tight sticks and eyeing the girl in the tight skirt as she plucked a pink Zippo from her faux Gucci purse, with fingers that were long and delicate

it’s worth every leprous convulsion, he said to himself, as he stepped up to her and asked for a light

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The Alcoholics

With half their minds on alcohol, they only half minded the idiocy of their companions: one was reworking Nietzsche in a nightmare version of a philosophy class he never went to on account of the proximity of the campus pub

another was regurgitating Chomsky with no rigour or direction, his mind a mishmash of Michael Moore documentaries, and anger at the Liquor Control Board for taxing the poor working stiffs although he hadn’t had a job since he threw an empty bottle of Johnny Walker at his boss

the third was mumbling something about people, stars, and the likelihood that the other two were spies trying to control the conversation so that he wouldn’t notice they were eyeing his bottle of rum

none listened to the others, and all wondered why their wives had left them and their children threw away their answering machines and the world was such a brutal, mean, and selfish place

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My Three Uncles

All the guys who bragged about all the guys who could drink you under the table are now six feet under the table. The Legion table that seemed so sturdy then is rickety now.

It once held up the elbows of my uncle Marlin, who was a tough guy in the Navy (a whiskey-bottle-a-day kind of tough) and now seems a skeleton. When he returned to civilian life, he was still floating in the endless waters off Jack Daniel’s Point. His convoy finally got struck from beneath by German schnapps and Löwenbräu, six fathoms deep.

And then there was my uncle Garth from the same small prairie town, stock of tough guys: Do it yourself, Keep it all in till your wife leaves you and your arms become like rakes that can’t gather anything from the untilled ground. He was a farmer who grew up in the Dirty Thirties, when the soil was Dry-Gulch dry, where the silos once held like rich garners the full ripen’d grain, but now hold only dust. The wheat fields that once shone like gold in the august sun were inundated by the red river of cabernet sauvignon that pumped cirhhosis through his veins and made his chickens run.

And finally there was uncle John, a sturdier fellow you’ve never seen, no rake at all, at least until his liver called it quits and called him on all the party shots of tequila, sambuca, and rum; that fiery uncle with so much life; an industrious Falstaff he seemed to me, who was a skinny city kid who wouldn’t eat red meat and said I’m a vegetarian, at which point he slapped onto the plate a sixteen ounce steak. He was having none of that vegetarian nonsense, not at his picnic table, but after so many whiffs of the bar-b-qued meat I was inclined to agree anyway, anyway, what could you do with a man who shook hands like he was gripping a calf that strayed from his vice-like hand, from where beer flowed, and who laughed into the wide prairie fields, where in the end death flowed from the manly manners, from the no-holds-barred I-can-drink-you-under-the-picnic-table world of my deceased uncles.

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