One in Every Crowd (17 page)

CORNER OF PENDER AND ABBOTT, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT. Whose bright idea was it to build a multiplex theatre and high-end mall here? Remember when it was a parking lot? I think I liked it better as a pit filled with water. I knew a guy who was arrested once for canoeing in the flooded hole that gaped where this mall now is.

I light a smoke into cupped palms. Orange glows bright, then dimmer.

Streetlights leak shifting spilled paint reflections off shining sidewalks and pavement. It is chilly tonight, like this evening belongs in a whole different month than the rest of this week.

I smoke with one hand and run fingertips over the ridged edges of quarters in my pocket with the other.

There’s a woman, she’s just rounded the corner off Carrall onto Pender Street, she’s walking towards me. Her dress has two straps; one has fallen to her elbow and remains there, the other clings to a prominent collarbone. I watch her only because there is nobody else on the street to look at. She shuffles along the sidewalk, fists blossoming into five narrow fingers and then closing again. Repeat. Eyes down, back and forth, she searches the sidewalk and gutter. She scoops up a flat cigarette butt and places it into the shapeless front pocket of her dress. A small baggie is picked up, opened, sniffed, licked, and dropped again. She runs a yellow tongue over peeling lips, passes a sleeveless wrist under her nose. Repeat.

I look down as she starts to get close to me. I can hear the sound of her flip-flops sucking and slapping against the wet pavement. The sound stops in front of me. I don’t look up. Both hands are in my pockets. My half-smoked cigarette is crushed and soggy, an inch away from the toe of my boot.
What a waste
, I think. Too late to fix it.

“Spare some change, young fella?” Her voice is deeper than her small frame seems capable of.

I shake my head.

She lifts one lip a little, in my direction. “I know you’ve got change in your pockets. I can hear it. Heard it all the way up the street.”

“You asked me if I could spare some change, not if I had any.”

She raises her eyebrows. They have been plucked and then painted back on, but she raises them nonetheless. “We got a wise guy, huh?” She flips then flops back two steps and surveys me closer. “You go to college? Because that, my friend, is lawyer talk.”

I shake my head. “I’m a writer. I tell stories.”

She snorts. “Same diff. Makin’ shit up. Twisting the facts so they end up on your side. I’ll ask you again, counsellor. Can I have some of the change I can hear in your pocket?”

“It’s not change. It’s my car keys.” I jingle them for evidence.
Exhibit A.

“Other pocket. Nice try. What, are you afraid I’ll go spend your hard-earned money on drugs?”

I half-shrug, half-nod. “What if I get you something to eat?” I motion over my shoulder to the McDonald’s behind me, which is getting ready to close up.

She snorts again. “That garbage? Now, that stuff will kill you.”

We both laugh. I pull my other hand out of my pocket. Two loonies, a twoonie, three quarters. I hand it over. A nicotine-stained hand shoots out and collects. The change disappears before I can squeeze out a second thought. She doesn’t thank me.

“You’re welcome,” I say.

“What? You want me to thank you now? I took your money to make you feel better about having more of it than me. I just did you a favour, if you think about it. Don’t you feel like a better person now, helping out an old woman? I’m the mother of four children. I have three grandchildren. I’m almost sixty-five years old.”

“You don’t look a day over eighty,” I quip.

“Why, thank you.”

We laugh again, she coughs.

“Where are your kids, then?”

“My kids? Where are my kids? You mean why don’t my kids swoop down and rescue their poor old mother from the mean streets of the Downtown Eastside?”

“Well, yeah I guess that’s pretty much what I mean.”

“And argue over whose turn it is to keep me in their basement suite? All the free cable I can watch? I tried that. There’s one catch. There’s always the one catch.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m never allowed to bring my heroin.”

I nod, because there seems to be nothing to say.

“Shit happens, kiddo. Sometimes life gets in the way of all your plans. I’m too old to live under someone else’s roof, someone else’s laws. Had enough of that when I was married to the bastard, may he rest in peace.” She makes the sign of the cross in the air with her right hand and falls silent for a bit.

I nod again and reach into my pocket for my smokes. I offer her one, light both.

She inhales deeply, stares at the red end of her cigarette. “It’s the simple things. Tell you what—how ’bout you spare me a couple more of these for later?”

I look down into my pack. There are two left.

“I’d offer to buy them from you, but you’d probably just go spend the money on more cigarettes.” She smiles, raises one eyebrow, and then winks at me.

I hand her the rest of the package. Up close, she smells like rose water.

“There now.” The pack disappears. She pats my forearm. “Doesn’t that feel better?”

I AM GOOD AT FINDING MY KIND OF place for breakfast. Especially in small towns. This place had all the right elements: it was embedded in the middle of a mini mall, in between a second-hand furniture store and a laundromat. Lots of new pick-ups parked outside. All you can eat Chinese food buffet on Sunday nights. All-day breakfast for five bucks. Neon open sign flashing in the window. Vinyl booths and chrome-edged tables that have been there since the fifties. I pulled up a stool at the counter, and the owner passed me a newspaper and slopped coffee into my cup without asking.

The old guy sat down right next to me a minute or so later, I had seen him and his hand-carved cane coming up the sidewalk when I was parking. GWG jeans, a white Stanfield V-neck t-shirt under a faded red and blue plaid jacket, work boots with stainless steel starting to show at the toes where the leather was worn through. Clean-shaven. Export ‘A’ cigarette pack peeking out of his breast pocket. I know this kind of man. He has worked hard every day of his life. Paid his bills. Buried his wife. He keeps his garage spotless, draws outlines of hammers in black felt pen on the pegboard above his workbench, repairs the lawnmower of the single lady next door, even though he doesn’t like her noisy kids. My father will be this kind of man one day, sooner than I would like to admit.

The owner smiled hello at the old guy. “Soup of the day and pie with ice cream after?”

The old-timer nodded, and then spun his stool around to address the two older ladies tucked into the first booth by the door. “Bea. Helen. Enjoying the sunshine?”

They smiled, exchanged niceties, and then he turned back to me, squinting at the headlines in the open newspaper in front of me. “No good news in there, I read it this morning.”

We get to talking. He asks me what I am doing in town, as it is painfully obvious to all of us that I am not from there. I tell him I am a writer, in town to teach some creative writing classes at the high school.

“Ah, an educated man then?” He narrows his eyes at me, and then smiles, as if to let me know he will not hold this against me, even though he should.

I shrug. We move on and talk about other things. As far as I can tell, he continues to think I am a young man. I can tell by his comfortable body language, how he slaps me in the upper arm with the back of a gnarled hand when I crack a joke, the kinds of questions he asks me. The details about his own life he reveals.

Some people would say that I am being dishonest, that I am lying, to not stop him mid-sentence and inform him, even though he has not asked me, that according to what he has been taught to believe about these things, I am female. The people who believe that I am being deceitful have never lived in a skin like mine. I answer his questions with the truth. I mind my pronouns, sure, but I do not lie. Ever. Why? Because I like this old man, and so far, he likes me. Even if I am an educated man.

He tells me that his wife has been dead for ten years. That he is about to turn eighty-one years old. That he hates golf, and doesn’t watch hockey. I ask him how many grandchildren he has. He has to think for a minute, moving his fingers in front of his face to count them. Ten he says. All of them turned out pretty okay, except for the one grandson, the druggie, who is sponging off his only daughter, can’t keep a job.

I ask him what kind of drugs his grandson is on, and talk a little about my friend, the one I haven’t seen in years, and her battles with the meth.

“Does she look hard now?” he asks me, and I think about this for a minute. “You know, older than her years? The drugs, they hit the ladies in the face harder than they do the fellas.” He shakes his head, sadly. “Can make it hard to come back from.” He holds up one finger, to make a point. “The hard stuff, I’m talking about here. Not the pot. I’ll even take a bit of pot myself, now and then, for the arthritis, you know,” he winks at me, “but I don’t seem to get the same kick off the stuff I used to get. Maybe I’m toking it all wrong, who knows? Anyway, point is, I always stayed off the hard stuff, and now here I am, outliving everyone.”

His pie and ice cream comes, and his coffee cup is refilled. We are both quiet for a minute while he eats.

“Don’t get me wrong.” He clears his throat, pushes his plate away. “I’m no angel. I like my beer, for one thing. But if I was to give you any kind of decent advice, here is what I would say: stay off the hard stuff. By that I mean the hard liquor, the hard drugs, and especially the hard women.” He laughs at his own joke then, slaps me on the back with a leathery paw.

I tell him it was great meeting him, and we shake hands. I am thankful for the weightlifting, and the calluses it gives me. As I push the glass door open to leave, he picks up his coffee cup and slides into the booth with his two lady friends. “Just having a little chat with a young fella from the city,” he explains. “A writer, he tells me. Just telling him about my secret to sticking around long enough to get to be an old bastard like me.”

WE PICK UP THE RINGS NEXT WEEK. We drop off the cheque for the florist tomorrow. My custom suit is hanging in my closet, and her dress is nearly finished. It is really happening. We are getting married.

I have learned a lot about what other people think about marriage over the last few months. Next to birth and death, I think it is one of the most ritualized things we do as humans, and people have strong feelings about it. They have ideas. I quickly learned that whenever one of my friends confessed that they were surprised I was getting married, it was because they thought my marriage would mirror what their idea of marriage looked like. Which it often does not. My sweetheart and I have worked really hard to build the kind of relationship that we could live happily in, and this rarely involved tracing the blueprints of others.

This does not mean I am not open to hearing advice about the topic. In fact, last week I called around the family, as I do, and asked them for any words of marital wisdom. My grandmother is ninety-two, and she had a miserable marriage, followed by a passionate love affair, so I was interested in what she had to say, having lived through the extremes. She told me to “foster the ability to really talk to each other. You don’t want to know all of his secrets, but honour the ones that he does tell you. And respect each other. Respect is almost a bigger word for love.”

Respect turned out to factor big in my family. My Uncle Rob told me to “make sure to marry your best friend. Respect her. You can love all kinds of stuff, you can love ice cream, you can love your new shoes, love is the most misused word in the world. When you respect something, you take care of it. Respect her, and take care of her. Be her best friend. And remember, everybody fucks up. Especially you. You come from a bloodline that is prone to selfishness and narcissism, so keep that in mind. Everybody screws up, but it is probably mostly going to be you.”

My Aunt Cathy took the phone away from him to add: “Learn to nod your head when they talk about the boat or the motorhome or whatever. Be kind to each other, don’t fight over stupid things. When Rob and I first got married he told me he would make all the big decisions and I would make all the little ones. So far we haven’t had any big decisions.”

Then she passed him back the phone. I asked Rob how long they had been married for. “Near forty years if you count the time we were living in sin, and the time we’ve been married.”

That would make them both experts, in my book.

My parents were married for twenty-six years, and my mom has been with her beau now for eight. She told me to “be honest with your feelings but always kind delivering the message. And you have to have fun. Laugh together a lot. And let him win once in a while.”

Her partner Chuck chimed in from the living room, in the background: “Always make sure to have the last word. They should be ‘Yes dear.’”

They were both still laughing about this when they hung up the phone.

My cousin Dan and his wife Sarah have been married for thirteen years. I was interested in their opinions, being from the same generation, and similar radical lefty feministy artistic bent that we come from. Their words echoed those of the previous generations, almost exactly. Communication, always talking about problems before they really become an issue.

“Actively pursuing interests together,” Dan says. “Show an interest in her interests. If I hadn’t started learning about roller derby, who knows where we’d be by now. I get her to chase me on my bike on her skates. It’s a good time for everyone. Even bystanders.”

I called my Dad’s wife Pat on the phone. She was my Dad’s childhood sweetheart, and then her family moved away and they lost touch for thirty years. She stayed in love with him that whole time, and they reconnected on his fiftieth birthday, when she tracked him down and called him. They have been married now for fourteen years.

Pat had a one-word answer for me. “Trust,” she said, without hesitation. I asked her how she stayed in love with my Dad for three decades, without even talking to him or seeing him. “I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I do know that the first time I saw him after all those years, it all just came rushing back into me. Where I kept it all that time, I cannot say.”

My father’s advice was very practical. He told me to “stay busy. She will get tired of vacuuming around you eventually.”

When pressed, not a single member of my family thought that a queer marriage would need a different set of values than their straight ones. “A relationship is a relationship is a relationship,” my grandmother informed me. “Whether you’ve got a piece of paper from the government or not. It is your marriage. You get to make the rules.”

I found it interesting that none of my family even brought up things like co-habitation, or enforced monogamy, or rigid gender roles, or “settling down,” which were all assumptions made by the predominately queer friends who expressed their shock over our upcoming wedding.

I do lament that I don’t have three generations of queer married couples on hand to look to for marriage advice, as it hasn’t been legal for long enough to afford us that. Maybe thirty years from now, we’ll have a lot more to say to each other about queer marriage than “I never thought it would happen to you.”