The Video Watcher (11 page)

One of the musicians strummed a chord on his Telecaster.

“Reality's negative,” Damien mumbled.

The drummer smacked the sticks together four times, and the band started a wobbly version of “Ramble Tamble.”

“Anyway, I should get back,” Alex shouted. “Why don't you come and join us?”

“Maybe.”

When she left, Damien asked where I knew her from.

“I met her at the library, in Edgemont. She's one of the pages.”

“And she just started talking to you?”

“Pretty much,” I said, not wanting to tell him that she had caught me looking at
The Joy of Sex
and had said that everyone looked like hippies in the book.

“She's not bad looking,” Damien said.

I shrugged, pretending I hadn't noticed.

Damien finished the beer, then said, “Do you think she'd give me a blow job?”

 

At closing time, Alex said they were headed downtown to go clubbing—she asked if we would like to join them. Damien didn't have a car, so I said, “Sure.” Damien said he wasn't coming, but when we got out to the parking lot, he climbed in the back seat of the Buick with me.

When we closed the doors, the guy with Alex leaned over the seat and told us his name was Leroy.

I said, “Hi.”

Damien ignored him.

 

We were silent for the first part of the drive. When I asked Leroy about his band, he said he didn't have one. I wanted to ask Alex why she'd said he did, then decided I didn't care. Leroy told Alex that Dead Corpse was playing that Saturday at Seylynn Hall. She said that she had to go shopping in the States with her mother and Leroy said he hated the States. He said that they'd killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined, and that they had actually already conquered the world, and had set up puppet states like Iraq, so that people would be afraid, and think they needed the States. The book in which he had read this was written by a guy who'd later been killed by the CIA.

Damien made faces behind his back, and I looked out the window so that I wouldn't laugh. But when Damien started chanting “USA! USA!” I got nervous.

Neither Alex nor Leroy said anything, and Damien finally stopped.

“Do you ever listen to Alan Jacob's show,” I asked, thinking that was where Leroy'd heard about the conspiracy plot.

“Don't listen to the show,” Leroy said, growing very serious. He leaned over the seat. “They put subliminal messages in it. If, like, you listen to twenty hours, then the US government will control you.”

“He works for the government?” I said.

“He works for the government.”

The car again fell silent. We crossed over the Georgia viaduct and the words “Cobalt Motor Hotel,” printed in faded white letters on a brick wall, made me again feel I was in a movie—Paul Hackett in
After Hours,
the preppy who finds himself going “downtown.”

 

The nightclub to which we were headed was called The Rage and we parked beneath the SkyTrain tracks, next to the old Expo grounds.

“Make sure everything is out of sight,” Leroy said as we got out.

“Is it dangerous?” Alex asked.

“No, as long as they don't see anything.”

Three cars ahead of us a Datsun's passenger-side window was missing, shattered glass glittering on the sidewalk beside it.

“Do you really think my car's okay there?” Alex asked.

“Thieves only break in if they see something they want.”

We walked along the chain-link fence. Beyond it the old Expo site was now a wasteland of cracked hardtop.

“Remember Expo 86?” I asked, looking at rusted pipe sticking up out of the ground, recalling the brightly coloured pavilions and arcades and the giant ballroom in the kid zone.

“I can't really remember it,” Alex said.

“It was so cool!” said Leroy.

“You know what was so cool?” I said. “Those, like, UFO water parks.”

“Oh yeah!” Damien said.

“Oh, I kind of remember that,” Alex said.

 

On the ride home from the club, Damien was completely obnoxious. He swore at Alex and Leroy in the front and accused the doorman at the club of molesting him.

“The guy was a faggot,” Damien said.

“How do you know?”

“He touched me,” Damien said, looking for something in the pockets of his raincoat.

“He touched all of us.”

“That's what I mean,” said Damien.

“That's what his job is,” Leroy said.

“He was frisking us,” Alex said.

“The guy wasn't
frisking
us,” Damien said derisively. “The guy was a fucking pervert. He touched my dick I tell you. ”

“He did not.”

“Yeah, he did. I swear. When he checked my leg, he brushed my fucking dick.”

Leroy and I had smoked a joint outside the club and even though I knew Damien was being a complete idiot, I couldn't help cracking up when he said these things.

“Here,” Damien said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Do you have my smokes?”

I checked my pocket for the tenth time. “No, I don't have them,” I said.

“Fuck! I don't believe it. Not only did he touch my dick. He stole my fucking smokes too.”

“Can't you find them?”

“No. I remember I put them in my pocket and now they're not there.”

“I'm sure you'll find them.”

“I pay seven bucks cover for what? For some fucking faggot to steal my smokes? I pay seven fucking bucks to have my smokes stolen.”

“Are you sure they're not in your pocket,” Alex offered.

“No, I checked,” Damien said, checking the coat's pockets another time. “I don't fucking believe it. I pay seven bucks to have my smokes stolen.”

“Well, it wasn't healthy for you, anyway,” Alex said.

“Fuck you,” Damien said. “You're not healthy for me.”

“Do you want me to stop driving?” Alex said suddenly sounding more serious than I'd ever heard her sound before.

“No keep driving, keep driving.” Damien said.

“Where are we going, anyway?”

“Someplace we can get beer,” Damien said.

“Boston Pizza's still open. They have beer.”

“Do you want to go to Boston Pizza?” Alex asked.

No one replied. As we drove through downtown Vancouver, Damien started going on again about how he'd paid seven dollars to have his smokes stolen by a fag. I joked that a fag had stolen his fags, but no one seemed to hear me. When we got into Stanley Park we grew silent. We noticed that something was different. It was darker than usual.

 

The truck was on the opposite side of the road. Its front end pointed across the lane, its back pressed against the pole that supported the lane-change signals, the pole bent in half. Beneath the engine the flame flickered on the puddle of liquid.

“Is everyone alright?” Alex yelled.

Glass crunched under our feet.

“Help me.” The man's voice sounded very small.

“Where are you?”

“Here.”

The windshield was missing. We got up to the dark cab. A large man lay on the driver's side. The seat had collapsed backwards and the man didn't move.

“Okay,” Alex shouted. “Stay calm.”

Damien and I tried the driver's door. It was jammed. I went around to the other side and tried that door, but it didn't move either.

“Fuck! It's going to blow,” Leroy shouted.

The wavering glow on the pavement grew brighter—I stepped back.

“Has anyone called 911?”

Stopped in the middle lane was a southbound SUV, the front passenger side window down. Someone had shouted the question from the darkness inside.

“No,” Leroy shouted back.

“Got it,” Damien yelled from the other side.

I ran around the truck's front. Damien and Alex were standing with the driver's door open.

The man was even bigger than he'd appeared. Damien and I pulled him out of the vehicle and put his arms over our shoulders. We walked him up the causeway. He was a big man, and he wanted to lie down right away.

“Just another few feet. Just a few more,” I said.

We got him about twenty feet from the truck and lowered him on the wet grass slope beside the sidewalk, and squatted next to him.

I became aware of approaching sirens.

The front of the truck was now completely on fire. Flames licked the windshield rising higher, and climbed up toward the roof.
It's going to blow,
I thought.
It's really going to blow.

 

A fire engine had arrived, the undersides of the tree branches lit by the flashing lights. They shut off the siren, and it was suddenly quiet. Firemen in their baggy coats got out and placed pylons around the truck, and a single fireman extinguished the fire with a hand-held extinguisher.

“He's down here,” Alex yelled.

One of them set some type of kit on the sidewalk and crouched down.

“Sir, can you tell us your name?”

“Cook,” the man mumbled, barely moving his lips. He mumbled something else, something about mouth and glass.

I glanced again at the truck, the hood now dark and still.

Another fireman covered the man with a blanket and slid off his right shoe and sock. He touched the sole of the foot. “Nod if you can feel that.” The man moved his head.

Damien was standing beside me. He leaned over, his hands on his knees, and I noticed a package in his shirt pocket.

“What's this?” I said. I reached in and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.

“Oh… Yeah… Thanks—don't say anything to the others, okay?”

The police were now there and an officer came down and asked who had seen the accident. He was young and had spiked blond hair.

“We were here first,” Alex said.

“
Fuck
,” Damien said under his breath. “We got to go. Boston Pizza's going to close.”

The officer took down our names and our phone numbers and said he had some forms for us to fill out and fax back to him.

“You're not related to Kris Patterson?” he asked as he wrote down my information.

“She's my aunt.”

He nodded appreciatively. “She sold us our house.”

Not a house; a home.

 

On the way to Boston Pizza Damien and I made jokes about the accident. Damien said the man's name was Cook, and that's what he would have done if we hadn't saved him. I said that we should have left him and poured barbeque sauce all over the body and watched him cook. The jokes weren't funny, but Damien and I laughed, and Alex, groaning, said that we were
sooo
immature.

Boston Pizza was closed.

We argued about whether to go home or to go somewhere. When we decided on Denny's, Damien complained that he wasn't going to get his beer. He'd saved Cook's life but he wasn't going to get his beer.

 

Later, when Damien was dead, I would look back on that night as being somehow significant, a night when things almost happened, when our separate lives—Cam's, Damien's, Alex's, and mine—almost converged.

They didn't. But they came close enough that I often imagine what would have happened if they had.

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

 

Near the end of August
Cam began to call again. Usually it would be late at night, and he would sound nervous, and would speak rapidly. The first time this happened I actually thought he was on something.

He said that Damien and I needed to get the band together, we needed to start practicing, we
needed
to record a demo.

He couldn't say how, but soon, “very soon,” he was going to meet some
very
important people in
New York,
and he wanted to give them the demo.

And how did I respond?

Lying in bed I'd say, “yeah,” or, “sure,” not because I believed, or disbelieved what he said. He was my friend, he told me things, I
wanted
to believe him.

 

“Why didn't you want to come here before?” I asked for the fourth time. For the fourth time, Alex didn't seem to hear my question.

As we walked down the curved cement path to the apartment on Lonsdale, a dropping feeling started in my stomach; I saw the mildew-stained stucco, the broken boards on the railings, the blue flickering light from a television on a third-story apartment ceiling.

An angry male voice came over the intercom. “Yeah, what?”

“It's me,” said Alex (her voice higher and cuter than I'd ever heard it.)

The lock buzzed, Alex opened the door, I stepped in behind her.

The bulbs in the lobby light fixtures seemed seventy-five watts too low. There was a brownish stain on the carpet in front of a vinyl sofa. We walked past the elevator and went through a steel door into a hallway. Cigarette burns freckled the green carpets, and a stale smell perfumed the air as if someone had tried to hide bad odors with air freshener. We passed through two more steel doors and down another hall, the muffled sound of heavy metal growing louder as we approached the door of an apartment halfway down it.

Alex knocked. “That was exciting the other night,” she said and hummed a verse from Bowie's “Heroes.”

She knocked again and looked up at me.

“These are some friends of Leroy's,” she said as if in answer to a question that I didn't ask.

She raised her hand to knock again, and the door flew open, the scream of Cannibal Corpse and the smell of marijuana spilling out into the hallway. A girl with dyed-black hair and a scarlet tank top glared at us.

“Yeah?”

“We're Leroy's friends.”

“Right,” the girl said. She was about the same age as Alex, but her face looked a lot older. Her inverted pentagram necklace glinted in the hall light.

“This is my friend, Trace,” Alex said.

“Cool,” the girl said.

I nodded, but made sure to keep my hands in my pockets.

She seemed like she wasn't going to move, but then stepped aside.

As we went into the apartment, I started to slip off one of my loafers but noticed that there were no other shoes by the door. I slipped my foot back in.

In front of us was a closed door, and around the corner on the left, the main living room. Directly to my left was a corridor kitchen. Most of the partiers were in the living room, and it didn't take long to notice that they were exclusively twenty-something men and teenage girls.

The kitchen seemed the less crowded of the two rooms, and as Alex went around talking to people I entered the kitchen and stood against the far wall. There was a half-empty bowl of Cheezies on the table and a bottle of Canada Dry ginger ale.

Through the doorway, the left side of the living room was visible. A man in his late twenties lay on the sofa. He was dressed entirely in black and was smoking what appeared to be a cigarette, but had a stoned expression on his face.

Beyond him there were sliding glass doors, and in them my reflection. A dark figure in a skewed square of light.

When I saw Alex again she was standing near the entrance. The man she was talking to wore a wife-beater. He had a goatee that made him look like Pan. A Celtic pattern was tattooed on his bicep. Both his hands were on Alex's bare arms, and Alex was laughing but shaking her head, and he seemed to be trying to convince her to do something.

I was about to approach them when something hit my arm. The man on the sofa through the doorway tried to say something. There was a garbage can beside me. A live cigarette butt lay at my feet. The guy must have been trying to throw it in the garbage. I picked up the butt and put it in the garbage. I imagined it catching fire, the apartment building burning. When I glanced back at the entrance, Alex was gone.

My head was aching. I sat on one of the kitchen chairs and took a couple of deep breaths.

A girl with spiky hair and her left eyebrow pierced came and asked me if I was Redgy. She was quite thin and her midriff was showing, and her belly button was pierced too.

“I don't think so,” I said, trying to be witty.

She reached for the bowl of Cheezies in the centre of the table.

“You know someone spat in there,” I said.

“I know. That was my friend. So—are you Redgy?”

“No.”

The girl tossed the Cheezie into her mouth and folded her arms. “Like, then, who are you?”

It sounded like a simple question, but I couldn't think of the answer. I glanced at the garbage.

“So you're not Redgy?”

“No. I'm not Redgy.”

“You have an accent.”

I shrugged.

The girl continued to peer at me as she ate the Cheezies.

“Some people think I have an accent,” I said.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Some people think I have an accent.'”

The girl nodded and tossed another Cheezie in her mouth. With her mouth full, she said, “So where are you from—originally?”

When I said, “Here. North Van,” the girl gave me a sarcastic grin. “Seriously, don't bullshit me.”

“Nowhere. Here.”

She rolled her eyes, and for a moment, was cute.

“Okay, where were you born?”

“Here.”

“How about your parents?”

“I don't know. Back east. Somewhere.”

“Not England?”

“No.”

The girl shook her head. “It's weird. You have like this total British accent.”

When I didn't say anything, she said, “You're not bullshitting me?”

I shook my head.

Another girl entered the kitchen. She wore a grey hooded sweat top, with the image of a fish-bone skeleton on the back. She took a Labatt Wildcat from the fridge.

“Here, Kristin, come here,” said the girl I'd been talking to. She grabbed the other girl by the sleeve and pulled her over. “Listen to this guy.”

The second girl cracked open the can.

“Okay, say something,” the first girl said.

“What? What do you want me—”

“Just
anything
. Just say something.”

“I don't know. Do you—”

“Make up a story. Tell me why you're here.”

“Okay. I. Came with this girl. Alex. And she's this girl I met at the library and—”

“You
se
e
!” the first girl said to the second girl. “Doesn't he
to
tally
sound like he has an accent.”

“He's faking it,” the second girl said. She took a sip of the beer.

“You are faking, aren't you?” said the first one.

I didn't answer. Alex had emerged from the room with the closed door. She was adjusting the strap of her tank top. The man came out, patted her on the shoulder, said something, then went back into the room.

“Alex,” I said and waved. Her expression changed.

“Where were you?”

“Nowhere,” she said. “Just in there.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. Just some pictures.”

“Pictures—”

“Hey, how's it going?” The girl in the fish-bone sweat top hugged Alex, holding the Wildcat off to one side.

When Alex looked back at me, I said, “I think I'm going to go.”

“You're not feeling good again?”

“I guess not. I can come and get you later if you want?”

“No. It's okay. I can go too.”

Out on the street, I asked Alex again what went on in the bedroom.

“Fuck! Would you give it a rest!
You
wanted to come here.”

“I—”

“I'm hungry. I want to go to Burger King.”

Neither one of us spoke as we drove there. When we arrived, she was calm again. As I stood in the line-up I found the lit menu board somehow reassuring.

We ordered Whoppers and milkshakes and sat in a booth by the window. It was dark outside and wet.

 

4:01 A.M.

“Good evening. You're on Alan Jacobs.

“I am SO.TIRED. of YOU.”

“Okay—” said Alan, unfazed. “Can you be more specific? Is there something in particular that bothers you about my show?”

“YOU are ssPREADING the devil's lies. People are becoming POssessed by listening to your show.”

“Well, YOUR'RE listening to my show.”

“I'm what?”

“You're listening to my show,” Alan continued, deadpan. “Have you become possessed?”

“I need to know the lies that Satan is spreading.”

“I find it interesting that you think my show is causing possessions. We rarely talk about religion on this show. In the last month I can think of only ONE show in which Satanism was discussed.”

“All of your shows have to do with the Devil and His works. UFOs, aliens, extra-terrestrials—these are all Satan flexing his muscles in the end times.”

“So you believe we are in the end times?”

“Yes I do.”

“Do you care to put a date on it?”

“The day and the hour are unknown. But the Antichrist has come—”

“Okay, this IS something I want to talk about. This Antichrist, is he around now?”

“He may not be active—but He's here.”

“Do you think he's listening to this show?”

“He may very well be.”

“Okay—if you're out there, Antichrist, please call in.”

 

My thoughts were racing as I lay in bed that night. I breathed deeply and started to touch myself, tried to focus my thoughts on Alex or Alex's mother or any woman I could think of. But couldn't. I pictured the fat boy at the party astride Luke and the expression on Luke's face as the fat kid drove the tube into his ass. I pictured myself in the room with the closed door. Alex on all fours. The man with the Celtic tattoo telling me what to do.

Just as in the day's of Noah.

Give it time

Just as in the day's of Noah

My little cock can go where big cocks can't

We know who told him to do that

You know, THOSE pesky thoughts

The feeling wasn't going away; the feeling was only intensifying.

I got out of bed. I paced the room. I went down the hall to the kitchen—I wished someone was home, someone to talk to. I thought about calling Kris, but I didn't know where she was, only that she was somewhere in the Okanagan—she'd left no contact information. The air in the kitchen was stupefying. I walked in circles, tried to find a cold patch of tile to stand on, then went outside by the pool. The air was cooler there. It was quiet too. I looked up at the black shape of the mountain under the blue sky, the dim glimmer of the Skyride going down its face, the lights of the chalet at the top illuminating the low-flying clouds like the glow from the mouth of a volcano to which people were sacrificed; then out over the treetops at the shimmer of the city and the harbour. There was a breeze. For a moment I thought I was going to be okay. But the feeling returned. It wasn't as strong as before though, and I went back inside, leaving the door ajar, and turned on the TV. It was tuned to MuchMusic, a Rusty video playing. The remote sat on the coffee table and I reached to switch the channel, but the song came to the chorus. Unlike the verse, the chorus was poppy and catchy, and as I continued to watch, the feeling gradually subsided.

The video was a parody of
The Midnight Cowboy,
and I thought of Joe Buck.

When the video ended, I realized that it was going to be okay, that I was going to be okay.

 

Damien was at the pool table in the centre of the room when I stepped out of the elevator. He was leaning across the table, throwing the one ball against the bumper and catching it when it bounced back. The room had a high ceiling and there was a skylight: there were bars on the skylight. This—Damien had once told me—was the ward reserved for the seriously disturbed.