By Marie-Hélène Westgate
Photo by Matt Mims
I didn’t come into the Mardi Gras I set out for. Just a lukewarm line-up at Money Mart, and depravity and its usual trimmings. I wanted the spectacle of clever Canadian alliterations in the good old East Side. Instead, I rode the Powell far east, too far east, into industrial wasteland. What year were those Powell buses built, anyways? They’re like something out of a 1940s prison movie, the kind of vehicle that shuttles new inmates through the gates to lockdown.
I eventually got off the bus and waited for the one heading back downtown. I boarded with my student pass, feet poised to hold my weight without having to hold on anywhere. I was that girl who wouldn’t sit down or touch anything, and tried to do so pleasantly because I am the girl in men’s dress shoes who forgets that nobody is watching her. Especially not the elderly gentleman who holds on to every seat, every bar, every pole, every possible available surface with both hands; hands covered in open sores, reaching across his neck and over his face to scratch at scabs on his forehead, around his eyes, on his scalp deep down below oily folds of hair.
I probably left too late this morning, or they changed the day. I don’t know who they is, but I should have asked someone instead of relying on the Internet to reveal the details of welfare Wednesday. So I guess now it’s the next best thing, the grope for some similar feeling. Breakfast at Denny’s with Bukowski over tales of ordinary madness. Let’s talk, Hank, let’s really talk.
Kill the crazies, you said so yourself: Even a madman eats too much and needs a place to sleep. You escaped because you didn’t ask anything of the system. You’re a madman, that’s exactly how you put yourself through a lifetime of such formidable alcoholism. It paid your way.
What do you think of it, that your pockmarked legend lives on, in this moment, in the soft little hands of a French Canadian girl come all the Canadian way west? It would be too writerly of me to say I’d come all the way west seeking Mardi Gras. Too obvious a reiteration to use so soon. But there was a time, another time, when my notebooks overflowed with abandon; with song titles and the canons of idealism.
So where is the music that makes my wandering mean something? Is it the black man’s relentless wail — we never caught up to his rhythm — while that lady, that twisted waste of a woman’s body, contorts to his every note, champions in one jagged move from bend to dip all of our failures? Risks everything, throws it all down right across from our street view window, Charlie? Can I call you Charlie? Can I lean in close so we watch her elbows and knees release in every which way except/but proper together?
Wicked rotten-toothed smile, callused feet sauntering out of ragged white tennis shoes my mom had in the ‘80s. You can whisper to me, I’ll tell you girlie, she’s my kind of lady.
I might laugh or cheer you on, but there’s something too feminine about those shoes that made me sad even twenty years ago. Something like the martyred novelty of treading so lightly that you’re not even there. Ballerinas dismembered from the dance. A mother without her child. Woman is the nigger of the world,* I hope we can all agree, but the woman here only cooks substances. She cleans her baby’s dress at the launderette and pays for the load with change left over from the welfare cheque. She washes her baby out of town, in grandma’s sink. In the city she offers up a broken womb. If she forgets her baby in the sink, for a sick moment of magic, she can flail her limbs about along Main Street; aim her wide open pores, her festering sores, at the sky’s grey drizzle. And I can see the way you watch her, Charlie. Oh, that’s meth baby.
Bring me to my bowl of shit, Bukowski. Bring me: I never wanted to end up here anyway. I pay the bill but I know you’re a classy guy, you’ll get me back, somehow, next time. When we meet here again in four weeks if I still can’t find the right place to be.
