He’d found the Golden Fleece. Now he just had to get it home. He’d discovered the Holy Grail. But would it just vanish when he brought it out to show family and friends? He’d reach into the bag that held it and find only dust? Before he made it home, there were things he still had to do. Things he still had to prove to himself. Things he still had to discover – live and breathe. Taste and digest and turn into muscle.
Skiing the mountains of B.C. was the metaphor for how he would live out the rest of his life. The way he went about this sojourn was the way he would tackle his next fifty years.
Did he know this? Could he have put that into words? Probably not. But he knew it still. He knew that this trip, this effort was about more than having a good time. He was watching and listening for more than what was going on - below the surface – for the meaning of what was said, not said, done. He had opened up his soul as a canvas for lasting impressions. A new innocence was within him. New eyes, new heart came as accessories along with the new purpose. To serve the Lord. But how? On this trip he was fasting from the food of friends – the influence of what sustained his sense of self – and trying to live only on the watery company of the One who knew his true nature.
The first stop Amos had planned was at an obscure little mountain ski club a day’s drive from Vancouver. He’d found it listed in the directory of ski clubs he’d researched and photocopied at the Library. It was late afternoon by the time he drove the Dodge Dart Fleshmobile up the winding mountain road. On the way up he noticed a driveway into a clearing – like an empty building lot protected from the road’s view by a band of trees. That would be his hotel room for this resort he decided – giving thanks to the Creator for that gift.
There was nothing else up there on that road. No condos, no restaurants, just a few homes here and there along the road. The big sign for the resort looked pretty tired. Needed paint. That was okay. Amos liked the idea of hitting a club off the tourist map as his first stop.
It was off the tourist map alright. The parking lot wasn’t plowed. The chalet was dark. The chairlift was still and empty. Amos pulled the Fleshmobile up and got out. “Well” he said to his quiet companion Jesus “The line ups won’t be too bad.”
He looked around a bit. Trudging through deep snow to get a look at what he’d missed. Considered camping there beside the chalet but it felt too lonely and sad. He didn’t like the feeling that “he was too late – he’d missed his chance”. Was this an omen for the trip ahead?
Back in the Dart, he drove back down to the clearing he’d spotted on the way up. He parked the car close to the snow bank on the road side and dragged the heavy canvas tent out of the trunk. The sun dropped low over Vancouver lying hidden beyond the hills. It took his thoughts to the small life he’d planted, and now uprooted, there. Should he go back? Was he giving up on a new life of promise? Was he giving in? Was going home gonna mean he’d fall back into the rut he left behind?
The tent up, chili heated and spooned down, he was in the sack reading Neitsche when he noticed the light outside. It was like a streetlight. Had to check it out. Pulling on his boots and not bothering with his coat he climbed through the tent door and out into the windless, frigid night. Out over the valley, where the sun had set just hours before, a big full moon was smiling at him. Amos smiled back.
While the sun had a power to pull, the moon repelled and pushed and cooled off the day’s passions. It said let go and keep going. It said there’s more to find in the dark night than the day’s sun can show.
Amos turned and took a few steps to the side of the tent to pee – to mark this moment of letting go. Enjoying the release, the sound of water tunneling down thru snow, steam rising, he looked up over his shoulder to the moon again. His heart stopped as his eyes narrowed and muscles tensed. A large white wolf stood at the edge of the clearing, head high, ears erect, watching him. No sound. No sense of aggression in the air between them. Just each noticing the another.
The pee had stopped flowing. Amos let out a breath that misted the sight line just for a second. He tucked away his dick to free his hands and shifted his right leg to face the wolf but in that instant - the wolf was gone.
Had it been there at all? Amos doubted it. And he knew it had been too. He stood there til the cold made him shiver and move for shelter. Before retreating into the tent again, he grabbed the lantern and walked over to where the wolf had stood. There were no tracks in the snow. Just as he’d suspected.
If he’d seen what he’d seen – it was spirit that he’d met. Was it just a reflection of his imagination? A projection of the lone wolf persona he was playing? Whether it came from somewhere deep within or somewhere beyond - like the moon - it was telling him that he was on the right path – and to keep going.
He’d heard a lot about Red Mountain – home of Nancy Green. Skiers at Whistler had told tall chairlift tales about the powder snow. Down on the border next to Idaho, sat the railway-mining town of Trail B.C. Amos headed south for Trail.
On the way was Kelowna. Big White Mountain was a disappointment. He spent two nights in a cheap motel. It left a sour taste – wasting away his stash of funds waiting out heavy snows and high winds watching crap TV. He was betraying his mission.
Peter had given him a novel and an address of an old girlfriend living in Kelowna. He’d made Amos promise to deliver it. The novel was about sexual freedom and discovery – a semi-spiritual, semi-porn, pop literary story. Amos called Sue up right away when he arrived in town. She gave him directions to find her place in a suburban outskirt townhouse. Sue was friendly but not exactly warm. Attractive for sure, Amos noticed, but she was world weary. Life had tired her out it seemed. For a young woman she lacked any true curiosity. Her life held no mystery. As if it’d all been laid out from here to the end and she just had to keep the car on the road. Neither was she curious about this stranger who had pulled up beside her. They chatted over a beer. It was her birthday and she invited Amos to a bar that night to celebrate with her friends.
He’d found the cheapest motel he could and showered and put on his best plaid shirt but somehow couldn’t find the party spirit to get out the door. He knew that in some mystical way he’d been delivered to that place on that day as a birthday present. He knew that the stars, or Peter at least, had set him up for some free love. He told himself he was crazy to pass up such a fantasy opportunity. The voice that tried to pry him loose and out the door was hollow and distant. He’d responded to it a million times before and it had always left him empty and alone in the end. He’d rather be by himself than betray himself again.
So he spent a night and a day receiving kicks from that old demon but refusing to budge. His mind filled with fantasies of what might have been. He got a pizza from the joint next door. Chatted with the bored pizza chef. The storm was keeping business slow. Watched some old movies on the cable TV. Tried reading but he was too angry. Amos was angry for being too timid to dive into a sexual adventure and angry because it wasn’t like he was being pure anyways – eating junk food and watching junk TV and spending precious time and cash wasting away in a room like a million other motel rooms.
Refusing to kill a third day in the motel room he checked out early the next morning and drove through the blizzard – that showed no signs of letting up - to the Big White Resort and bought a lift ticket.
It was literally a white-out – Big White all right – he could barely make out the ends of his skiis and from what he could see, which wasn’t much, the hills didn’t hold the kind of challenges he was looking for. It had nothing to teach him.
He left the Resort and got on the highway at dusk. It was still snowing hard but the plows had pushed the worst of it off the roads. He found the highway south and headed for the famed Red Mountain down along the edge of Canada.
This road hadn’t seen a plow in while and the snow was getting to be - what you might call - deep. Amos pulled the Dart up behind a transport truck stopped at the road’s side. He found the driver putting chains on his eighteen wheels. “The road ahead’s deserted. There’s nothing between here and Trail. It’s a mountain pass so it’s tricky goin. If you take it – don’t make any mistakes son. Me - I’m turning back.”
For some reason, Amos figured he could make it. Turning back didn’t seem like an option. There was nowhere level enough to camp and he wasn’t going to waste another $50 on a motel. So - into the night and snow he drove with two white-knuckled fists on the wheel. He didn’t even play tunes on his stereo – afraid of any distraction. Corner after corner, up one long steep climb, and down the next, fishtailing at times but too scared to stop – going slow but not slow enough to get stuck. Just fast enough to maintain momentum and control – if that’s what you could call it. Down another long black stretch, not knowing where the next bend would come, not knowing what obstacle around it might send him into a spin. Up the next pass he plowed on.
The road went on and on for hour after hour. The fuel gage was now hovering just above empty and every time he glanced at it, his grip on the wheel tightened again. Amos found that he was singing a hymn from his childhood. When he realized that, he also realized that the snow had finally let up. Just as he was beginning to compose his thanks into words, around the next corner, that larger than life – still almost full moon greeted him. It washed the dark road in a sparkling, other-worldly light. It felt like he had crossed over into another realm. He wound the window down and let the crisp cold air fill the car - clearing out the heavy air of the fear he’d been breathing.
The car was floating Amos over clouds as he cruised along through the night - his hands now tapping that hymn out on the steering wheel. Praising his Maker and his trip’s Mate. In such good company Amos at the same time realized suddenly how lonely he was. He was wishing he had someone to share such a special moment with. A moment like this is meant to be shared he thought. His heart reached out into the future for the one he’d find to share it with. One day he’d tell his love the story of this night and how he had thought of her then.
As enchanted as the mountain drive had become, Amos was still hugely relieved to see the sign that read “Trail 10 miles”. The gas gauge was sunk below E and he knew he was cruising on fumes. Coming into the outskirts of town, he passed the sign for the Red Mountain Resort. Figuring that was why he was there, he pushed his luck further still and cut off the main road onto the sideroad and wound his way up to the Resort’s parking lot. He could coast back down the mountain to a gas station tomorrow he reasoned. Tomorrow he’d deal with such a small problem. Today angel’s wings had carried him here and he knew they’d take him all the way to a safe landing now.
He parked his trusty steed in a far corner of the Resort’s dark lot, climbed out and stretched hands to the sky, arching back to take in a skyfull of lucky stars – the Milky Way like a thick band he’d followed here full of promise and high hopes. Amos tossed the heavy canvas tent over an eight foot snow bank as if it was his sleeping bag. Crawling up over the bank and down into the woods with the stove and his pack, he set up the tent in the clearing he just knew would be there. Cooked up some soup and settled down – wondering just how laid back the management of Red Mountain Resort might be? After surviving the threats the mountain trail had posed that night, any fears about human authorities seemed somehow not worth the worry. So he hunkered in and slept the night through like a bear down for the winter.
Next morning, Amos awoke to the sound of cars crunching through deep snow pulling into the parking lot. He climbed out into a sparkling sunlit winter wonderland to pee into the thigh deep snow. Hidden from sight behind the tall snow bank, Amos cooked a quick breakfast of oatmeal and raisins and apples chunks washed down with mint tea. Over long johns and a wool layer, he pulled on his Toronto Hydro issued (donated by a friend’s sister who worked there) baggy beige coveralls – his favoured ski apparel.
With a toothbrush hanging from his mouth like a cigar, he crawled over the snowbank and into society. The look on the coiffed middle-aged guy’s face as he stopped in his tracks beside his Jaguar had a kind of “do I have to share this mountain with a street person?” shock in it that made Amos’ day.
Amos smiled and waved at him – all bright and chipper like. The Jaguar owner turned, shouldered his skiis on his ski suit – together worth more than Amos’ car - and headed for the chalet. His wife closed her mouth and followed. Amos laughed out loud. He couldn’t have been happier if he’d been a two year old making art with the pungent brown stuff he’d just produced.
He bought a lift ticket at the outdoor booth and went directly to the chairlift. His plan, developed from weeks of practice at Whistler, was to stay completely out of the chalet, or any indoor spaces, as much as possible. His body had adapted to the cold now and he didn’t want to throw off his internal thermostat by adjusting and re-adjusting to indoors/outdoors temperatures.
He shared the first chairlift of the day with a guy whose beard and hair was even longer than his own. They traded stories on the way up. This character’d been skiing Red Mountain for a decade. He told Amos he’d left Ontario in his tracks. Amos thought “here is a man truly dedicated to a lifestyle.” He’d taken Amos’ dream, and made it into a life.
When he heard Amos’ story, he said “You gotta come with me when we get to the top man. The real powder’s off the back of the mountain in the powder fields.”
“Yeah, right on man, that’s what I’m here for.” agreed Amos.
“Wahoooo!” the wildman let holler go out across the still mountainside.
“Yeeee-a-ow!” Amos responded in kind, truly excited by this connection the mountain gods had arranged.
At the top, the hairy local took right off skating into the woods like a big cat after prey. Amos could barely keep up. There was no trail – just what the Wildman’d left in his wake. He pushed himself through the deep snow and branches and was panting heavy when he caught up with the big cat standing beyond the trees grinning back at Amos.
Approaching, puffing, Amos saw they were standing on a four foot ledge just above a field of pure white powder. The sun on the snow was blinding bright. The steep slope fell down the mountain for maybe a hundred yards before a boundary of trees stretched completely across the view down. Without a word except for a “WHOOOOOHAAAAAAH” the Wildman was airborne. Expertly plunging into the powder below, he carved one, two, three wide arcs through the virgin’s bed before disappearing into the trees.
Amos was alone. He knew he’d never tackled a hill like this before. He was in way over his head – whaaaaaayyy over his head.
For some reason, Amos figured he could make it. Turning back didn’t seem like an option. He’d been skiing the Rockies for a couple of months now and had taken on some pretty wicked slopes. He’d had a bit of experience in deeper snow - not this deep - but THIS is what he’d come there for.
And so, with a “WHOOUUOOOEEEE” to drown out the whispers of fear - he jumped. To his amazement, he landed soft and immediately sat back on his skiis carving one, two, three perfect turns through the snow performing the turns just like he’d read about in the magazines. “This must be what flying is like for birds” thought Amos, “the wind offering just enough resistance to lift and turn their weight as they simply shift their wingtips.”
Then, the forest came at him like a wall of reality about to wake him from his wonder. He was moving way too fast to stop now. Straightening out his skis, he plunged in like a needle into a haystack.
If you asked Amos how he made it through that twenty yards of forest, he couldn’t tell you. The best explanation he could come up with later was that he was killed instantly - but God sent him back into the forest just to see what would happen next.
He shot out the other side like a human cannonball. Except he wasn’t in a ball. He was more like a wildly thrashing windmill careening off its post. The landing was mercifully soft. The cold, deep, goose down received his tumbling limbs and smothered his velocity with its gentle white resistance.
It took long, long minutes before his mind caught up with him and he swallowed his good fortune . When the wind returned to Amos’ lungs and the puzzled expression finally left his face, he lay there still a bit more - thanking the Maker for what seemed like an appropriately humbled time.
Then, the trusty, sombered knight began the task of hunting and slowly gathering his gear, and his courage, together again. There was no sign of the Wildman – although Amos thought he’d heard a long hysterical hyena laugh as he’d flown through the air. It took him easily an hour to find his scattered skiis and poles and goggles, and then maybe another fifteen minutes to put his nerve back in place. After all, he still had a lot of mountain to ski before he’d make the bottom. But make it he did - eventually. After several more tumbles and a long hike at the bottom back around the mountain to the chalet.
He skied the groomed trails the rest of that day. Slept like a rock. A very happy rock through the long quiet winter’s night. Somewhere in the night, in a dream that told him he’d never be this way again. That he was working with more than luck. He found the resolve to try the back of the mountain – just one more time - again.
This time, he found a trail cut by other crazy types, and followed it for a long, long time through the woods. Just when he was ready to turn back and forget the whole thing, he the woods ended and he came out to stand at the top of cliff with a single narrow chute. It wasn’t a hill. It was a chute on just enough of a slope to hold snow. Bare rock shouldered either side. It was maybe ten feet wide, really, really steep and ran straight down in a really, really long – there was no other word for it - chute. There was no other way down. Amos made an oath right then, that if he survived, he would never again tempt the gods by looking for more mountain than he could handle.
He jumped, hopping his way down that chute – from ski edge to edge to edge to edge, left, right, left, right, there was no where to stop and it was either keep hopping or tumble all the way down risking crashing into the unforgiving rocks on either side.
On sight of the bottom, Amos went into a tuck, turned his skiis straight and sped past the rocks in a blur, thighs on fire, until the deep powder at the bottom slowed him and quenched the fire with the wonder of his heart still pumping life to his eyes instead of the black oblivion he deserved.
At the bottom, Amos and broke his discipline and headed into the chalet for a whisky. He’d just done something impossible. He should have been broken in two by the attempt but instead he’d been blessed with strength and skill beyond his measure to make it through the test – whole – somehow.
Why?
The turns in the snow these past few days had carried him to a new place. Fears were simply food, like pleasure, to be tasted, digested, and dropped off along the way. Each day brings turns only to those who choose to travel on beyond the circles already known.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Heading Home
Amos skied the Whistler mountain resort as often as he could. He’d drive up Highway #99 in the late afternoon. That twisting, coast and mountain-hugging drive was almost as much fun as skiing a slope in spots. He’d drive slowly through Squamish to the outskirts of the small town outside the Whistler resort. In the twilight, he’d find the dead end parkette he’d scouted out last summer and wrestle the large canvas tent out of his trunk, over the snow bank, and into the deep snow.
Getting the two centre poles between the eight foot cross bar up was like roping a calf in the deep snow. He’d lasso both poles then, holding both ropes, yank both poles with cross bar between into the air. Then he’d scurry to quickly peg the ropes deep beneath the snow into the icy ground swinging a hatchet out from his coveralls’ deep pockets. If he pulled too hard the whole thing would fall towards him to the ground. If he was too slow, the pole that wasn’t being pegged would yearn for attention and twist this way or that and fall to the ground pulling the centre bar out. When that happened, Amos would have to drop everything and begin the process all over again.
He’d work up a sweat by the time it was up and secure. Next he carried his bulky bed roll from the car, over the snow bank and laid it out inside. Two heavy blankets beneath a half decent sleeping bag and two more blankets on top. He’d bought the blankets at an Army Surplus. They were heavy mover’s blankets quilted with well sewn edges that wouldn’t fray.
The next trip was for the Coleman Stove and food pack. Only half of the eight man tent was up. The side with the door. In Toronto before heading west, he’d searched out a tailor down off of Spadina, in a basement shop, willing to put a new zipper on that door. He’d had to try many a shop before finding someone willing to take on his old canvas tent.
His family had inherited it from another family at church whose camping days were over. They’d used it on the great Canadian family car trek west and east in summers of his childhood. Amos had invested a hundred bucks into that new zippered door. The tent must have weighed close to a hundred pounds – with the steel poles for sure. Half the tent still gave him a 6’ by 8’ apartment. He could stand up at the centre poles and even the low side stood four feet tall where three poles held the corners and centre between two good sized screen windows with canvas flaps tied down against the wind.
He’d cook up a soup with noodles, or a pot of chili with crusty bread on the Coleman. Yes, he knew that running a Coleman stove inside was dangerous. But he’d keep the flaps open while cooking to draft the fumes. He’d read by lantern, spooning down his dinner along with Friedrich Nietzsche into the night’s fall. Even though he’d met his Lord, his friend Jesus, he wasn’t drawn to the scriptures.
The experience of Christ was still fresh with him. he was still living it – tasting it – savouring it anew with signs and signals in his every day that he wasn’t walking alone. A lyric from a song would strike him with meaning – a message lifted to his attention – to encourage. He’d notice and give thanks. A snatch of conversation in his cab – an encounter with a stranger was an angel’s lift or a devil’s test. An old alc-y could speak truth with a steady gaze piercing through the booze, A young lady’s subtle lie could twist him into seduction til he saw it for a cheap trick and could laugh it off. Sunlight breaking through the clouds and shining on his path across the Vancouver bridges wasn’t just nice scenery. It was his Maker letting him know he was on his way. He was noticing. Awake. Alive to the mystery present in every subtle and simple flow of moments strung together like pearls.
He didn’t want to spoil it – turn it into an academic exercise by reading about it. His days were holy scripture. The tent that had held his childhood family of five was now a lonely cocoon that he filled with great thoughts and questions of fate and future quests. How would he best serve his Lord? It had replaced the question “How would he make a living?” Now, instead of making the world work for him, he only wanted to work for the world’s hope.
Before climbing under the covers he’d strip down naked and go out into the frigid night for a pee. Lowering his skin’s temperature after stoking his stomach’s furnace was part of the winter camping strategy he’d picked up from library books. Diving in under the cold blankets, he’d wait for his body to warm their surfaces and begin holding it close to him. He was the heater. He was the source of the night’s comfort. He was the keeper of the fire that burned within – a sacred fire that required careful tending.
The next couple of days, he’d ski – systematically trying all the different hills those mountains offered – returning to the one’s that had beat him last time until he found his “line” to follow. He’d take a run for pure pleasure. Then he’d take on a hill beyond his skill level. Laughing, swearing, crashing, tumbling, collecting himself and his gear to begin again. He was competing against only his own sense of limitations and fears. He’d try to talk himself out of taking on that hill again. But, a courage kindled a confidence that gently led him back to the top of that hill – fear and fury stirring in his guts til he plunged down into the run letting out a wild war cry whoop – crazy for the thrill of finding a way down just beyond the edge of being in control. Tasting the place where body, mind and spirit synched with snow, slope and speed.
There was no one to pat him on the back if he did it. No one to notice the accomplishment. No one to prove a thing to. Just the man in the mirror. And the man unseen just behind – with his steady hand on Amos’ shoulder. Amos could see his grin in the snow blowing off the trees. Could feel his presence in the birds he shared his lunch with in a quiet snowy sunny spot away from the slopes.
The next week, he’d be up there again. Weekdays the line ups were thinner – and so were the cab customers – so he’d ski and ski. The evenings in the tent got lonely sometimes so he’d try out the Chalet scene. But he had no heart for it and the expensive drinks would cut into his skiing budget. He sought the company of people less and less and learned to enjoy the solitude of the green canvas walls, starlit sky, and blanket’s nest.
When Amos found that he could manage any and all of the hills to his satisfaction – dancing down even the most difficult in a style all his own - he knew it was time to test himself on whatever else the Rockies had to offer. This winter was his one chance to ski the Rockies. It wasn’t likely he would ever be rich enough to spend winter vacations skiing Rocky Mountain Resorts. He knew he wasn’t cool enough, or maybe care-free enough, to become a permanent fixture among the Mountain denizens.
Amos didn’t yet know what he would do, or where he would end up, but he knew that now was his chance to ski the Rockies – and he went after it with a puritan work ethic.
He found that he was getting settled in to life in Vancouver. He was beginning to actually know his way around the streets in his cab. Taking people where they wanted to go without asking them for directions or resorting to the map book, gave him a sense of propriety over the place. Almost like he belonged there.
Amos had a circle of friends now too; a girlfriend, and a soul brother in Danny who had given him much to carry and the muscle to carry it with. He could see that it would be easy to settle in and let some roots start growing in this fertile rainforest coast.
But it would be a transplant. He was an eastern species. His quest for meaning and purpose – the meaning and purpose for his life – wasn’t going to be found in the laid-back comforts of a Vancouver lifestyle. The new identity he was fashioning here wasn’t as important as the new sense of himself in his old shoes. The demons that chased him out here had been put in their places. He’d faced them and found he could walk strong among them without losing his way to their fearful diversions and distractions.
Besides, Vancouver was just too beautiful. It still seemed surreal to Amos. He felt that his fate lay somewhere in the cold, uptight, city streets of Toronto. They seemed more real and urgent and potent with trials waiting around the next corner. Toronto called him back to its centre like an electron back from the edge of its arc.
Goodbyes were always awkward for Amos. He felt like they were a test of friendship – how sincere, or insincere, would the pledges of staying in touch be? Let’s just say “so long” and leave it at that. He hated expectations of social ties he knew he’d lug around and never untie again. He was touched by sincere efforts to convince him to stay. But, his friend’s love was proven by their unselfish best wishes for him. They listened to him try to explain what was in his guts. They couldn’t understand it because Amos couldn’t either - really. It was just time to head home.
So, with as few promises as he thought he might keep, and some sincere words of thanks, with new rubber on his wheels (a deal from his new friend at the cab company’s garage), he left – heading east. It was a Sunday morning that he left Vancouver. On his way out of town he got the idea to stop at the skid row church in the East End that he'd been curious about but never yet visited. It was mid morning and he figured he’d have time to make the service.
It stood right on the southeast corner of Hastings and Main. The main crossroads of the downtown eastside. It was where the guys he’d pick up from Detox would want to be dropped. Where hookers and pushers and all kinds of folk footloose and free from society’s claims would cross paths. Amos was curious what kind of a church service he might find in the midst of such waters. He’d written a poem about Jesus in the alleys, helping junkies with their needles. He wondered if that kind of Jesus might be hanging out in there.
The service was in progress. He’d turned around on the sidewalk about three times between the car and the front door. Thinking it was dumb and a waste of time and what was he doing this for? Inside the front door he found an old man in an dark old suit. He put a bulletin into Amos' left hand and shook the other and left him to find his way into the sanctuary.
It was a large wide space. Two aisles ran between three rows and columns of pews up to a raised platform with oak railing and an empty choir loft. Silent brass organ pipes were the backdrop within a nave the size of whale's mouth. Over the nave was enscripted a banner that read “All ye who are weary, Come and I will give you rest.” The speaker who was introducing the next hymn stood - not up on the platform hidden behind the oak pulpit – but instead down on floor level, to one side, exposed behind a simple pine podium – a bookstand really with a single post to the floor. A piano accompanied the two dozen singers spread in bunches throughout the mostly empty pews.
The speaker had on a suitjacket and no tie. He looked like an ordinary young man of the cloth. No wild eyed street preacher. Not even a beard. Just a guy you might find working in an office downtown. He had a regular kind of voice. He gave a regular kind of message to a regular kind of Sunday morning crowd. There were no streetpeople in the pews. Amos was kind of disappointed by that. But not surprised when he thought about it. Sunday morning was for the good people.
There was an offering and Amos putting five twenties on the plate feeling large about it - making a thanks offering for what that city had given him. The closing hymn was all about moving on.
“I feel the winds of God today. Today my sail I lift.” In the last verse he discovered why he was there that morning. It spoke the vow he didn’t know was in him until he sang it.
If ever I forget your love
and how that love was shown,
lift high the blood-red flag above;
it bears your name alone.
Great pilot of my onward way,
you will not let me drift.
I feel the winds of God today;
today my sail I lift.
He lingered after the service. Said good morning to a few of the other worshippers. No one seemed much interested in him. All kinds of young guys must drift through there Sunday mornings he figured. Getting too friendly with them could cost you a five or a ten to send them on their way. He thought there might be an angel among them he was supposed to meet. But on his way out he realized he’d already been given the message he was looking for. So he lifted his sail and headed east mountain by mountain.
Getting the two centre poles between the eight foot cross bar up was like roping a calf in the deep snow. He’d lasso both poles then, holding both ropes, yank both poles with cross bar between into the air. Then he’d scurry to quickly peg the ropes deep beneath the snow into the icy ground swinging a hatchet out from his coveralls’ deep pockets. If he pulled too hard the whole thing would fall towards him to the ground. If he was too slow, the pole that wasn’t being pegged would yearn for attention and twist this way or that and fall to the ground pulling the centre bar out. When that happened, Amos would have to drop everything and begin the process all over again.
He’d work up a sweat by the time it was up and secure. Next he carried his bulky bed roll from the car, over the snow bank and laid it out inside. Two heavy blankets beneath a half decent sleeping bag and two more blankets on top. He’d bought the blankets at an Army Surplus. They were heavy mover’s blankets quilted with well sewn edges that wouldn’t fray.
The next trip was for the Coleman Stove and food pack. Only half of the eight man tent was up. The side with the door. In Toronto before heading west, he’d searched out a tailor down off of Spadina, in a basement shop, willing to put a new zipper on that door. He’d had to try many a shop before finding someone willing to take on his old canvas tent.
His family had inherited it from another family at church whose camping days were over. They’d used it on the great Canadian family car trek west and east in summers of his childhood. Amos had invested a hundred bucks into that new zippered door. The tent must have weighed close to a hundred pounds – with the steel poles for sure. Half the tent still gave him a 6’ by 8’ apartment. He could stand up at the centre poles and even the low side stood four feet tall where three poles held the corners and centre between two good sized screen windows with canvas flaps tied down against the wind.
He’d cook up a soup with noodles, or a pot of chili with crusty bread on the Coleman. Yes, he knew that running a Coleman stove inside was dangerous. But he’d keep the flaps open while cooking to draft the fumes. He’d read by lantern, spooning down his dinner along with Friedrich Nietzsche into the night’s fall. Even though he’d met his Lord, his friend Jesus, he wasn’t drawn to the scriptures.
The experience of Christ was still fresh with him. he was still living it – tasting it – savouring it anew with signs and signals in his every day that he wasn’t walking alone. A lyric from a song would strike him with meaning – a message lifted to his attention – to encourage. He’d notice and give thanks. A snatch of conversation in his cab – an encounter with a stranger was an angel’s lift or a devil’s test. An old alc-y could speak truth with a steady gaze piercing through the booze, A young lady’s subtle lie could twist him into seduction til he saw it for a cheap trick and could laugh it off. Sunlight breaking through the clouds and shining on his path across the Vancouver bridges wasn’t just nice scenery. It was his Maker letting him know he was on his way. He was noticing. Awake. Alive to the mystery present in every subtle and simple flow of moments strung together like pearls.
He didn’t want to spoil it – turn it into an academic exercise by reading about it. His days were holy scripture. The tent that had held his childhood family of five was now a lonely cocoon that he filled with great thoughts and questions of fate and future quests. How would he best serve his Lord? It had replaced the question “How would he make a living?” Now, instead of making the world work for him, he only wanted to work for the world’s hope.
Before climbing under the covers he’d strip down naked and go out into the frigid night for a pee. Lowering his skin’s temperature after stoking his stomach’s furnace was part of the winter camping strategy he’d picked up from library books. Diving in under the cold blankets, he’d wait for his body to warm their surfaces and begin holding it close to him. He was the heater. He was the source of the night’s comfort. He was the keeper of the fire that burned within – a sacred fire that required careful tending.
The next couple of days, he’d ski – systematically trying all the different hills those mountains offered – returning to the one’s that had beat him last time until he found his “line” to follow. He’d take a run for pure pleasure. Then he’d take on a hill beyond his skill level. Laughing, swearing, crashing, tumbling, collecting himself and his gear to begin again. He was competing against only his own sense of limitations and fears. He’d try to talk himself out of taking on that hill again. But, a courage kindled a confidence that gently led him back to the top of that hill – fear and fury stirring in his guts til he plunged down into the run letting out a wild war cry whoop – crazy for the thrill of finding a way down just beyond the edge of being in control. Tasting the place where body, mind and spirit synched with snow, slope and speed.
There was no one to pat him on the back if he did it. No one to notice the accomplishment. No one to prove a thing to. Just the man in the mirror. And the man unseen just behind – with his steady hand on Amos’ shoulder. Amos could see his grin in the snow blowing off the trees. Could feel his presence in the birds he shared his lunch with in a quiet snowy sunny spot away from the slopes.
The next week, he’d be up there again. Weekdays the line ups were thinner – and so were the cab customers – so he’d ski and ski. The evenings in the tent got lonely sometimes so he’d try out the Chalet scene. But he had no heart for it and the expensive drinks would cut into his skiing budget. He sought the company of people less and less and learned to enjoy the solitude of the green canvas walls, starlit sky, and blanket’s nest.
When Amos found that he could manage any and all of the hills to his satisfaction – dancing down even the most difficult in a style all his own - he knew it was time to test himself on whatever else the Rockies had to offer. This winter was his one chance to ski the Rockies. It wasn’t likely he would ever be rich enough to spend winter vacations skiing Rocky Mountain Resorts. He knew he wasn’t cool enough, or maybe care-free enough, to become a permanent fixture among the Mountain denizens.
Amos didn’t yet know what he would do, or where he would end up, but he knew that now was his chance to ski the Rockies – and he went after it with a puritan work ethic.
He found that he was getting settled in to life in Vancouver. He was beginning to actually know his way around the streets in his cab. Taking people where they wanted to go without asking them for directions or resorting to the map book, gave him a sense of propriety over the place. Almost like he belonged there.
Amos had a circle of friends now too; a girlfriend, and a soul brother in Danny who had given him much to carry and the muscle to carry it with. He could see that it would be easy to settle in and let some roots start growing in this fertile rainforest coast.
But it would be a transplant. He was an eastern species. His quest for meaning and purpose – the meaning and purpose for his life – wasn’t going to be found in the laid-back comforts of a Vancouver lifestyle. The new identity he was fashioning here wasn’t as important as the new sense of himself in his old shoes. The demons that chased him out here had been put in their places. He’d faced them and found he could walk strong among them without losing his way to their fearful diversions and distractions.
Besides, Vancouver was just too beautiful. It still seemed surreal to Amos. He felt that his fate lay somewhere in the cold, uptight, city streets of Toronto. They seemed more real and urgent and potent with trials waiting around the next corner. Toronto called him back to its centre like an electron back from the edge of its arc.
Goodbyes were always awkward for Amos. He felt like they were a test of friendship – how sincere, or insincere, would the pledges of staying in touch be? Let’s just say “so long” and leave it at that. He hated expectations of social ties he knew he’d lug around and never untie again. He was touched by sincere efforts to convince him to stay. But, his friend’s love was proven by their unselfish best wishes for him. They listened to him try to explain what was in his guts. They couldn’t understand it because Amos couldn’t either - really. It was just time to head home.
So, with as few promises as he thought he might keep, and some sincere words of thanks, with new rubber on his wheels (a deal from his new friend at the cab company’s garage), he left – heading east. It was a Sunday morning that he left Vancouver. On his way out of town he got the idea to stop at the skid row church in the East End that he'd been curious about but never yet visited. It was mid morning and he figured he’d have time to make the service.
It stood right on the southeast corner of Hastings and Main. The main crossroads of the downtown eastside. It was where the guys he’d pick up from Detox would want to be dropped. Where hookers and pushers and all kinds of folk footloose and free from society’s claims would cross paths. Amos was curious what kind of a church service he might find in the midst of such waters. He’d written a poem about Jesus in the alleys, helping junkies with their needles. He wondered if that kind of Jesus might be hanging out in there.
The service was in progress. He’d turned around on the sidewalk about three times between the car and the front door. Thinking it was dumb and a waste of time and what was he doing this for? Inside the front door he found an old man in an dark old suit. He put a bulletin into Amos' left hand and shook the other and left him to find his way into the sanctuary.
It was a large wide space. Two aisles ran between three rows and columns of pews up to a raised platform with oak railing and an empty choir loft. Silent brass organ pipes were the backdrop within a nave the size of whale's mouth. Over the nave was enscripted a banner that read “All ye who are weary, Come and I will give you rest.” The speaker who was introducing the next hymn stood - not up on the platform hidden behind the oak pulpit – but instead down on floor level, to one side, exposed behind a simple pine podium – a bookstand really with a single post to the floor. A piano accompanied the two dozen singers spread in bunches throughout the mostly empty pews.
The speaker had on a suitjacket and no tie. He looked like an ordinary young man of the cloth. No wild eyed street preacher. Not even a beard. Just a guy you might find working in an office downtown. He had a regular kind of voice. He gave a regular kind of message to a regular kind of Sunday morning crowd. There were no streetpeople in the pews. Amos was kind of disappointed by that. But not surprised when he thought about it. Sunday morning was for the good people.
There was an offering and Amos putting five twenties on the plate feeling large about it - making a thanks offering for what that city had given him. The closing hymn was all about moving on.
“I feel the winds of God today. Today my sail I lift.” In the last verse he discovered why he was there that morning. It spoke the vow he didn’t know was in him until he sang it.
If ever I forget your love
and how that love was shown,
lift high the blood-red flag above;
it bears your name alone.
Great pilot of my onward way,
you will not let me drift.
I feel the winds of God today;
today my sail I lift.
He lingered after the service. Said good morning to a few of the other worshippers. No one seemed much interested in him. All kinds of young guys must drift through there Sunday mornings he figured. Getting too friendly with them could cost you a five or a ten to send them on their way. He thought there might be an angel among them he was supposed to meet. But on his way out he realized he’d already been given the message he was looking for. So he lifted his sail and headed east mountain by mountain.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Stop Making Sense
John, Zachariah’s son, out in the desert at the time, received a message from God. He went all through the country around the Jordan River preaching a baptism of life-change leading to forgiveness of sins,
“The main character in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will ignite the kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He’s going to clean house—make a clean sweep of your lives. He’ll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he’ll put out with the trash to be burned.”
Luke 3 from “The Message”
He woke up on his back but couldn’t see. Aware of ten thousand conversations all happening at once, his ears took him out to the edges of the auditorium. Then the circle became very small. Amos was aware of a circle of people standing just above him although he couldn't see them.
Slowly, it dawned on him that he was lying on the ground – waking from a dream – or was it a dream? If it was a dream, it was one of those where you try to open your eyes but can’t. He blinked his eyes but there was only blackness – only sound was reaching him. In his ear someone was asking, in a voice heightened with concern, “Are you alright man?”
He didn’t recognize the voice. “Yeah, its okay – I’m epileptic” he instinctively lied like a rug
“Get me outa here will ya?”
The Voice helped him to his feet and took his arm and they began pushing through the crowd of Talking Heads fans. It was the 1983 Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” Tour at the Vancouver Civic Auditorium. He sensed - because his eyes still weren’t working, that they were passing through a doorway and out into the halls. The dull roar of auditorium conversations dropped now into a more intense, flatter hallway babble. They kept walking. The Voice gave quick curt explanations “It’s okay – I’m just taking him back here.”
The babble stopped suddenly as they pushed through another door and into the empty echo of what Amos guessed was a washroom. The Voice put Amos’ hands on the cold porcelain of a sink.
“You okay?”
“Thanks, just give me a minute will ya?”
“I’m going to call an ambulance. I’ll be right back.”
Amos bowed his head over the sink. This was it. The edge. He was at the edge of totally losing it. They were gonna take him away; lock him up, medicate him – he could feel the spiral’s centrifugal force, sucking him down into a vortex that would take just way too much effort to escape. He’d been dancing around its edges for months and suddenly now he was in a state of vertigo on the tipping point.
“Its decision time Amos Brown” he told himself. He felt the sweat turning cold on his scalp. “Either you pull it together and get back in the groove, or they’re gonna take you away and lock you up.” His hands fumbled for the taps and he lifted water to his face. The cold splash was like waking up – like suddenly remembering from a deep dislocated dream where you are and who you are – still freaked a bit by the forgetting.
Raising his head, Amos saw a ghost in the mirror. A pale, scary, stupid expression stared back at him. “This is no time to fuck around man” he told the ghost “get your shit together – now!”
It was the first mirror he’d looked into in months. Amos Brown was so desperately trying to figure out who he was that he hadn’t wanted to get distracted by any superficial glassy impressions. He didn’t trust himself not to project some internal fantasies onto his own reflection. He’d devoted his twenty-third year on the planet to finally figuring out what was what with Amos Brown. Done with following a crowd, done with the influences of friends and families, he was doing only what he thought was worth doing. That is - without much money.
Now, his path had taken him to the edge of a dangerous madness. It would be so easy to just let it slip and let someone else take care of things. No one expects much of a crazy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He’d been surprised that his conversion – his “religious experience” out on the tidal flats after Christmas – hadn’t really changed him much. He still had the same array of silly and sincere thoughts each day. He had the same hungers and wants and fantasies and worries. He was in the same skin. So what had changed?
He had a direction. Did he? Well, no not really. He still didn’t have a clue what he was supposed to be doing with his life. He kept doing shifts, driving the cab to pay the rent. He spent his Christmas tip cash skiing at Whistler mid week to avoid the crowds. Working on his carves kept his mind occupied. But on the long chairlifts back up again he’d wonder.
It wasn’t that he had a direction. It was that he had a guide. He’d met the one who knew him better than he would ever know himself. So, he concluded, why not let go of the wheel and ride the bus instead? There was a great sense of relief in that. And there was an incredible sense of excitement. Like there was an incredible adventure ahead. More than he could cook up for himself. Serving this Master would mean a ride beyond the boundaries he’d always try to hide behind. Amos Brown could cook up some fun adventures. But Jesus the Christ could take him places he’d never think up on his own.
It wasn’t that he had suddenly become a nice guy. He was still self consumed and petty. But now he knew that it was all about giving. Whatever he had in him - it was put there to give. He'd been trying to get somewhere with it, trying to figure out what he could trade it for. Now, because he'd met a friend who was there for him unconditionally, he would do the same. He was trying to look at his choices with another set of eyes.
He was still judging the characters that jumped into the back of his cab from his Scarboro point of view. But now, when he would think to take a second look, he could see what he hadn’t seen before. It was like he could see beneath a layer or two on the surface – like he got glimpses of the heart inside. Sometimes he saw a child in the hooker’s smile. Sometimes he saw fear in the guy who was being a prick. He saw how lonely the braggart was. He saw how sad the laughing party gang was.
He still was having trouble seeing where he fit in to the picture. His ideas about being an author were still buzzing around his ears like house flies. But more and more they were losing their potency as a pull forward.
When he tried to tell his Vancouver friends about his experience the words and phrases fell flat on the ground between them. They sounded cliche. His friends would look at each other and raise their eyebrows - and he didn't blame them. Instinctively he knew that what he was trying to explain couldn't be told except with action.
His sister called him one day to say she'd be arriving the next. He picked her up at the airport. Andrea was two years younger than Amos. If Amos had been his older brother's first accomplice, Andrea was Amos' first confidante. The first female, besides his mom, who he’d loved to spend time with. They’d shared innocent hours playing – lost in imagination’s mansion where endless doors could be opened for children to explore – scenarios, dramas, adventures, pushing their tiny experiences into larger than life dramas overheard from adults or soaked up from bedtime stories, or – who knows where that idea came from?
He had fun showing her around Vancouver, telling her stories about his cabbie adventures and the strange people and places they’d go. Andrea had always looked up to him and she was full of questions about what he was doing out there?
She met Danny and he was charming and sweet. Amos told her about his experience with Christ and what he thought it was about. He didn’t know how – but he knew he just wanted to serve.
Andrea immediately assumed that meant he wanted to be a Minister. Amos told her he’d thought of that – it was the family business after all. But it didn’t seem quite right. Serving in a church seemed so limited to him. So ordinary and normal – not the adventure he thought Jesus was getting him into.
She spent four days with him. They walked the cool grey January beaches. She'd knitted him a huge grey wool sweater. Took her all fall she said. It really was huge – even on him. She explained that she’d had to guess his size from memory – hoping it would be big enough. He really was larger than life in her eyes. He liked that. The sleeves had to be rolled up and it came down halfway to his knees. It had a zipper all the way up front and a big wide collar that sat around his ears. He loved it. When she left he wore it every day. It was like wearing a hug. Better protection even than the shield of a leather jacket.
It made him realize that no one loved him like his family. While he was seeking freedom from their too large expectations and to small judgments they’d impose on him, there were also strong chords of connection there that he could never totally severe – even if he wanted to. Could he be who he was while living in the box they’d provided? Their province, their lifestyle choices, their safe and sacred church. He was afraid he might lose the ground he’d gained out here if he slipped back into the mold waiting for him.
Amos and Danny and their pals had been looking forward to the concert since before Christmas. On the big day, they gathered at his place and got tuned up smoking dope and drinking Jack Daniels. They were ready to let loose and have some fun with some heart pounding music they all loved. David Byrnes’ lyrics crossed the border from Rock’s cynical anger to a new place – hints of a spirit place to dance from in the midst of modern madness. The "Speaking in Tongues" album invoked the wild rhythm of a world beat and a world soul moving beyond, or maybe beneath, the box of religion and respectability. They’d listened to the album a thousand times and knew most of the lyrics – discussed where Byrne was coming from. Was he suggesting a new spirituality? Hard to unravel from between his strange art school poetry and quirky images of insanity and fun.
David Byrne was acting out his life on stage. He was dramatizing Amos’ internal confusion and lack of identity. He was singing about madness and losing touch with what matters in the messy world of the silly and superficial. He was cutting Amos to the bone with surgical precision and making a joke of his ego's holy quest.
There, in a crowd of thousands of people, Amos was exposed as the sniveling, weak and worthless human being he really was. All charades were over. He was being portrayed on the stage for the amusement and mockery of all.
"Watch out you might get what you're after
Cool baby strange - but not a stranger
I'm an ordinary guy
Burning down the house
People on their way to work say
baby what did you expect
Gonna burst into flame
My house S'out of the ordinary
That's right Don't want to hurt nobody
Some things sure can sweep me off my feet
Burning down the house"
Suddenly the music stopped and the house lights went up. Exposed to the glaring stares of everyone around him, he began to leave, walking from the front near the stage down an aisle past rows of seated people. Every face he looked at was a face from his past. Some one who’d tested him, teased him, scarred or stabbed him. Aisle after aisle, he’d find in each row an enemy, a foe, a friend that’d betrayed his trust and was now mocking him. He’d quickly avoid that stare only to be confronted by another and another of those who had judged him and seen only what they didn’t like. Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, schoolteachers, that nasty Sunday school teacher he was sure he’d forgotten – but there she was. The floor was on fire. He quickened his pace keeping his gaze to the floor but the fire was kindled brighter by his haste. It enveloped him. He knew what was happening. The hero of his story was being tested in the furnace. The dross and ugly parts of his soul were ignited by shame and self hate and his psyche was being steeled by a consuming fire. All impurities were being burned and, if he survived, he would be a new creation. He passed out at the end of the aisle and hit the floor like a felled tree.
Looking in the mirror now, sight returned, he straightened. He saw something he hadn't seen before. Out in the auditorium he'd seen himself through the eyes of those who'd found him wanting. Now the Lord gave him new eyes. He saw in his own eyes the light of Christ. He saw how all his imperfections were but fuel for that fire burning bright within.
In that moment he knew that the one he called friend and Master would use whatever Amos offered to acheive the redemption of the world. It was a battle worthy of the best Amos could offer. It was won already. Not because of strength and skill but because of an eternal weapon that was unquenchable. Love without measure, without bounds, beyond judgment and fear, untouchable and intimate. It was so impossible that it put a smile on Amos' face. It might have been Christ's eyes that were looking but that smile was all Amos. He turned away from the sink and headed for the door.
A young man came in and said “Hey where’re you goin? The ambulance is here.”
He recognized the Voice as his guide through the darkness. He didn’t look at him - just said "Thanks for your help man" and kept walking. The ambulance attendants almost crashed into him as swung through the washroom door and strode out into the hall.
A small group who must’ve watched him being led like an invalid into the washroom - and were waiting to see him carted off - were startled like geese to see this large smiling man striding right through them back towards the auditorium brushing helping hands aside.
As if on cue, as he entered the arena, the lights dimmed and the band started playing. He slowed his strides as the crowd closed between him and the stage. But he never stopped - he began gently bumping into concert goers as if they were flotsam in his path. They’d turn indignantly and then, looking into his face, would step aside.
“My eyes must still be on fire” Amos thought – enjoying the startled reactions. When he was close to the stage, he found his spot and began to dance. The show that had mocked his weaknesses now celebrated his strengths and fed his courage.
"Whatabout the time?
You were rollin’ over
Fall on your face
You must be having fun
Walk lightly!
Think of a time.
You’d best believe
This thing is real
What’s the matter with him? (asked Byrne)
He’s alright! (the chorus girls sang)
I see his face
The lord won’t mind (they assured)
Don’t play no games
He’s alright (no doubt)
Love from the bottom to the top
Turn like a wheel
He’s alright
See for yourself
The lord won’t mind
We’re gonna move
Right now
Turn like a wheel inside a wheel
Tina Weymouth, the hot bass player noticed him and they began dancing. The ten yards between them didn’t seem to matter. Their eyes locked and their smiles played back and forth. Amos saw David Byrne glance over at Tina between verses. Surprised that her gaze was fixed and not returning his look, Byrne traced it across the crowd to Amos. Amos grinned wide at him - still dancing. And the spell was broken.
He had nothing left to prove. Amos left the front as the next song started - hardly believing what had just happened (no one else ever believed that story either). From the very front, he now made his way to the very back of the auditorium. At the top of the stairs - where the seats met the roof, he sat and wondered about what had just happened to him. His metal had been tested – tested and purified somehow.
Of course his mind had just gotten overloaded with whiskey and weed and his body had thrown a reset switch. Sure, that was true. But in his imagination – a place as real to Amos as the concrete steps he sat on – he’d passed through hell’s doors and could no longer be scared by his own shadow. He was bigger and stronger than any box he’d grown up in. He’d pulled the sword from the stone, slaughtered the dragon, found the key, the treasure was his to take home and share.
[Letter from Thomas Merton to Czeslaw Milosz, Feb, 1959] Milosz, life is on our side. The silence and the Cross are forces that cannot be defeated. In silence and suffering, in the heartbreaking effort to be honest in the midst of dishonesty (most of all our own dishonesty), in all these is victory. It is Christ in us who drives us through darkness to a light of which we have no conception and which can only be found by passing through apparent despair. Everything has to be tested. All relationships must be tried. All loyalties have to pass through fire. Much has to be lost. Much in us has to be killed, even much that is best in us. But Victory is certain.
Thomas Merton. The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, Christine M. Bochen, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993): 57-58.
“The main character in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will ignite the kingdom life, a fire, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He’s going to clean house—make a clean sweep of your lives. He’ll place everything true in its proper place before God; everything false he’ll put out with the trash to be burned.”
Luke 3 from “The Message”
He woke up on his back but couldn’t see. Aware of ten thousand conversations all happening at once, his ears took him out to the edges of the auditorium. Then the circle became very small. Amos was aware of a circle of people standing just above him although he couldn't see them.
Slowly, it dawned on him that he was lying on the ground – waking from a dream – or was it a dream? If it was a dream, it was one of those where you try to open your eyes but can’t. He blinked his eyes but there was only blackness – only sound was reaching him. In his ear someone was asking, in a voice heightened with concern, “Are you alright man?”
He didn’t recognize the voice. “Yeah, its okay – I’m epileptic” he instinctively lied like a rug
“Get me outa here will ya?”
The Voice helped him to his feet and took his arm and they began pushing through the crowd of Talking Heads fans. It was the 1983 Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” Tour at the Vancouver Civic Auditorium. He sensed - because his eyes still weren’t working, that they were passing through a doorway and out into the halls. The dull roar of auditorium conversations dropped now into a more intense, flatter hallway babble. They kept walking. The Voice gave quick curt explanations “It’s okay – I’m just taking him back here.”
The babble stopped suddenly as they pushed through another door and into the empty echo of what Amos guessed was a washroom. The Voice put Amos’ hands on the cold porcelain of a sink.
“You okay?”
“Thanks, just give me a minute will ya?”
“I’m going to call an ambulance. I’ll be right back.”
Amos bowed his head over the sink. This was it. The edge. He was at the edge of totally losing it. They were gonna take him away; lock him up, medicate him – he could feel the spiral’s centrifugal force, sucking him down into a vortex that would take just way too much effort to escape. He’d been dancing around its edges for months and suddenly now he was in a state of vertigo on the tipping point.
“Its decision time Amos Brown” he told himself. He felt the sweat turning cold on his scalp. “Either you pull it together and get back in the groove, or they’re gonna take you away and lock you up.” His hands fumbled for the taps and he lifted water to his face. The cold splash was like waking up – like suddenly remembering from a deep dislocated dream where you are and who you are – still freaked a bit by the forgetting.
Raising his head, Amos saw a ghost in the mirror. A pale, scary, stupid expression stared back at him. “This is no time to fuck around man” he told the ghost “get your shit together – now!”
It was the first mirror he’d looked into in months. Amos Brown was so desperately trying to figure out who he was that he hadn’t wanted to get distracted by any superficial glassy impressions. He didn’t trust himself not to project some internal fantasies onto his own reflection. He’d devoted his twenty-third year on the planet to finally figuring out what was what with Amos Brown. Done with following a crowd, done with the influences of friends and families, he was doing only what he thought was worth doing. That is - without much money.
Now, his path had taken him to the edge of a dangerous madness. It would be so easy to just let it slip and let someone else take care of things. No one expects much of a crazy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He’d been surprised that his conversion – his “religious experience” out on the tidal flats after Christmas – hadn’t really changed him much. He still had the same array of silly and sincere thoughts each day. He had the same hungers and wants and fantasies and worries. He was in the same skin. So what had changed?
He had a direction. Did he? Well, no not really. He still didn’t have a clue what he was supposed to be doing with his life. He kept doing shifts, driving the cab to pay the rent. He spent his Christmas tip cash skiing at Whistler mid week to avoid the crowds. Working on his carves kept his mind occupied. But on the long chairlifts back up again he’d wonder.
It wasn’t that he had a direction. It was that he had a guide. He’d met the one who knew him better than he would ever know himself. So, he concluded, why not let go of the wheel and ride the bus instead? There was a great sense of relief in that. And there was an incredible sense of excitement. Like there was an incredible adventure ahead. More than he could cook up for himself. Serving this Master would mean a ride beyond the boundaries he’d always try to hide behind. Amos Brown could cook up some fun adventures. But Jesus the Christ could take him places he’d never think up on his own.
It wasn’t that he had suddenly become a nice guy. He was still self consumed and petty. But now he knew that it was all about giving. Whatever he had in him - it was put there to give. He'd been trying to get somewhere with it, trying to figure out what he could trade it for. Now, because he'd met a friend who was there for him unconditionally, he would do the same. He was trying to look at his choices with another set of eyes.
He was still judging the characters that jumped into the back of his cab from his Scarboro point of view. But now, when he would think to take a second look, he could see what he hadn’t seen before. It was like he could see beneath a layer or two on the surface – like he got glimpses of the heart inside. Sometimes he saw a child in the hooker’s smile. Sometimes he saw fear in the guy who was being a prick. He saw how lonely the braggart was. He saw how sad the laughing party gang was.
He still was having trouble seeing where he fit in to the picture. His ideas about being an author were still buzzing around his ears like house flies. But more and more they were losing their potency as a pull forward.
When he tried to tell his Vancouver friends about his experience the words and phrases fell flat on the ground between them. They sounded cliche. His friends would look at each other and raise their eyebrows - and he didn't blame them. Instinctively he knew that what he was trying to explain couldn't be told except with action.
His sister called him one day to say she'd be arriving the next. He picked her up at the airport. Andrea was two years younger than Amos. If Amos had been his older brother's first accomplice, Andrea was Amos' first confidante. The first female, besides his mom, who he’d loved to spend time with. They’d shared innocent hours playing – lost in imagination’s mansion where endless doors could be opened for children to explore – scenarios, dramas, adventures, pushing their tiny experiences into larger than life dramas overheard from adults or soaked up from bedtime stories, or – who knows where that idea came from?
He had fun showing her around Vancouver, telling her stories about his cabbie adventures and the strange people and places they’d go. Andrea had always looked up to him and she was full of questions about what he was doing out there?
She met Danny and he was charming and sweet. Amos told her about his experience with Christ and what he thought it was about. He didn’t know how – but he knew he just wanted to serve.
Andrea immediately assumed that meant he wanted to be a Minister. Amos told her he’d thought of that – it was the family business after all. But it didn’t seem quite right. Serving in a church seemed so limited to him. So ordinary and normal – not the adventure he thought Jesus was getting him into.
She spent four days with him. They walked the cool grey January beaches. She'd knitted him a huge grey wool sweater. Took her all fall she said. It really was huge – even on him. She explained that she’d had to guess his size from memory – hoping it would be big enough. He really was larger than life in her eyes. He liked that. The sleeves had to be rolled up and it came down halfway to his knees. It had a zipper all the way up front and a big wide collar that sat around his ears. He loved it. When she left he wore it every day. It was like wearing a hug. Better protection even than the shield of a leather jacket.
It made him realize that no one loved him like his family. While he was seeking freedom from their too large expectations and to small judgments they’d impose on him, there were also strong chords of connection there that he could never totally severe – even if he wanted to. Could he be who he was while living in the box they’d provided? Their province, their lifestyle choices, their safe and sacred church. He was afraid he might lose the ground he’d gained out here if he slipped back into the mold waiting for him.
Amos and Danny and their pals had been looking forward to the concert since before Christmas. On the big day, they gathered at his place and got tuned up smoking dope and drinking Jack Daniels. They were ready to let loose and have some fun with some heart pounding music they all loved. David Byrnes’ lyrics crossed the border from Rock’s cynical anger to a new place – hints of a spirit place to dance from in the midst of modern madness. The "Speaking in Tongues" album invoked the wild rhythm of a world beat and a world soul moving beyond, or maybe beneath, the box of religion and respectability. They’d listened to the album a thousand times and knew most of the lyrics – discussed where Byrne was coming from. Was he suggesting a new spirituality? Hard to unravel from between his strange art school poetry and quirky images of insanity and fun.
David Byrne was acting out his life on stage. He was dramatizing Amos’ internal confusion and lack of identity. He was singing about madness and losing touch with what matters in the messy world of the silly and superficial. He was cutting Amos to the bone with surgical precision and making a joke of his ego's holy quest.
There, in a crowd of thousands of people, Amos was exposed as the sniveling, weak and worthless human being he really was. All charades were over. He was being portrayed on the stage for the amusement and mockery of all.
"Watch out you might get what you're after
Cool baby strange - but not a stranger
I'm an ordinary guy
Burning down the house
People on their way to work say
baby what did you expect
Gonna burst into flame
My house S'out of the ordinary
That's right Don't want to hurt nobody
Some things sure can sweep me off my feet
Burning down the house"
Suddenly the music stopped and the house lights went up. Exposed to the glaring stares of everyone around him, he began to leave, walking from the front near the stage down an aisle past rows of seated people. Every face he looked at was a face from his past. Some one who’d tested him, teased him, scarred or stabbed him. Aisle after aisle, he’d find in each row an enemy, a foe, a friend that’d betrayed his trust and was now mocking him. He’d quickly avoid that stare only to be confronted by another and another of those who had judged him and seen only what they didn’t like. Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, schoolteachers, that nasty Sunday school teacher he was sure he’d forgotten – but there she was. The floor was on fire. He quickened his pace keeping his gaze to the floor but the fire was kindled brighter by his haste. It enveloped him. He knew what was happening. The hero of his story was being tested in the furnace. The dross and ugly parts of his soul were ignited by shame and self hate and his psyche was being steeled by a consuming fire. All impurities were being burned and, if he survived, he would be a new creation. He passed out at the end of the aisle and hit the floor like a felled tree.
Looking in the mirror now, sight returned, he straightened. He saw something he hadn't seen before. Out in the auditorium he'd seen himself through the eyes of those who'd found him wanting. Now the Lord gave him new eyes. He saw in his own eyes the light of Christ. He saw how all his imperfections were but fuel for that fire burning bright within.
In that moment he knew that the one he called friend and Master would use whatever Amos offered to acheive the redemption of the world. It was a battle worthy of the best Amos could offer. It was won already. Not because of strength and skill but because of an eternal weapon that was unquenchable. Love without measure, without bounds, beyond judgment and fear, untouchable and intimate. It was so impossible that it put a smile on Amos' face. It might have been Christ's eyes that were looking but that smile was all Amos. He turned away from the sink and headed for the door.
A young man came in and said “Hey where’re you goin? The ambulance is here.”
He recognized the Voice as his guide through the darkness. He didn’t look at him - just said "Thanks for your help man" and kept walking. The ambulance attendants almost crashed into him as swung through the washroom door and strode out into the hall.
A small group who must’ve watched him being led like an invalid into the washroom - and were waiting to see him carted off - were startled like geese to see this large smiling man striding right through them back towards the auditorium brushing helping hands aside.
As if on cue, as he entered the arena, the lights dimmed and the band started playing. He slowed his strides as the crowd closed between him and the stage. But he never stopped - he began gently bumping into concert goers as if they were flotsam in his path. They’d turn indignantly and then, looking into his face, would step aside.
“My eyes must still be on fire” Amos thought – enjoying the startled reactions. When he was close to the stage, he found his spot and began to dance. The show that had mocked his weaknesses now celebrated his strengths and fed his courage.
"Whatabout the time?
You were rollin’ over
Fall on your face
You must be having fun
Walk lightly!
Think of a time.
You’d best believe
This thing is real
What’s the matter with him? (asked Byrne)
He’s alright! (the chorus girls sang)
I see his face
The lord won’t mind (they assured)
Don’t play no games
He’s alright (no doubt)
Love from the bottom to the top
Turn like a wheel
He’s alright
See for yourself
The lord won’t mind
We’re gonna move
Right now
Turn like a wheel inside a wheel
Tina Weymouth, the hot bass player noticed him and they began dancing. The ten yards between them didn’t seem to matter. Their eyes locked and their smiles played back and forth. Amos saw David Byrne glance over at Tina between verses. Surprised that her gaze was fixed and not returning his look, Byrne traced it across the crowd to Amos. Amos grinned wide at him - still dancing. And the spell was broken.
He had nothing left to prove. Amos left the front as the next song started - hardly believing what had just happened (no one else ever believed that story either). From the very front, he now made his way to the very back of the auditorium. At the top of the stairs - where the seats met the roof, he sat and wondered about what had just happened to him. His metal had been tested – tested and purified somehow.
Of course his mind had just gotten overloaded with whiskey and weed and his body had thrown a reset switch. Sure, that was true. But in his imagination – a place as real to Amos as the concrete steps he sat on – he’d passed through hell’s doors and could no longer be scared by his own shadow. He was bigger and stronger than any box he’d grown up in. He’d pulled the sword from the stone, slaughtered the dragon, found the key, the treasure was his to take home and share.
[Letter from Thomas Merton to Czeslaw Milosz, Feb, 1959] Milosz, life is on our side. The silence and the Cross are forces that cannot be defeated. In silence and suffering, in the heartbreaking effort to be honest in the midst of dishonesty (most of all our own dishonesty), in all these is victory. It is Christ in us who drives us through darkness to a light of which we have no conception and which can only be found by passing through apparent despair. Everything has to be tested. All relationships must be tried. All loyalties have to pass through fire. Much has to be lost. Much in us has to be killed, even much that is best in us. But Victory is certain.
Thomas Merton. The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, Christine M. Bochen, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993): 57-58.
Friday, July 31, 2009
The Crisis and The Christ
It seemed like everything was coming apart at the seams again. Like a baseball losing its cover. Amos was like a tire that’s lost its tread - slippery on a wet road. He’d thought that he could see, but all he saw was how blind he was. His plans to recreate himself on the coast were tripped up by his self same old ways. He was tumbling down the mountain side and hitting every rock and hard place on the way down; every soul he’d ever hurt, every selfish turn he’d taken was painfully clear and bruising him all over again.
Trying to slow the fall was as difficult as escaping a schoolyard circle of scorn. Once the circle is formed and the target identified, the anger of the crowd is a contagious fever that infects every child. Whatever the accusation, how it started, and whether it’s true, becomes unimportant. Once a self-righteous momentum of condemnation has begun, the smell of blood pulls back the screen of adult civility and a vein where shame and anger run is opened. Friends and allies are swept up in the blood sport and as you turn, looking for support, their scorn pierces the skin and hits bone deep. The flesh of trust is rent open and self love, love of the other, love of life bleeds out.
But Amos had left all that behind. Out here on the coast he’d cast off the effects of a fearful past, claimed a fresh start – wounds healed - and vowed to reinvent himself. So why was he still haunted by this circle of demons? It was as if all his minor faults and insecurities had got together and conspired to tear him down. Every time he tried to build himself up with memories of accomplishments, they’d turn sour on him. He’d see that what he was trying to take pride in was really just another selfish grabbing for ego-glory. The good that he’d done was really only all about Amos proving once again what a good boy he was. It was all an act.
Where was the backbone? What held his skeleton together? What mattered so deeply to Amos that without it – he’d puddle like jello in his bed – his muscle and will only resulting in a jiggle.
When he’d try to go to his comfort places of imagination, He found a self-absorbed little boy whimpering and complaining in the midst of comfort and wealth. His enemy was stabbing at his newly exposed flesh and he knew that the knives were of his own design – forged in the bowels of deep mountain memories.
You might say that Amos was feeling a little depressed. The Christmas season had descended like a low cloud over Vancouver. As the year’s days were running out, so it seemed, was his sense of humour. This was not a new thing for Amos. Christmas wasn’t spoiled when he found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. (That was a relief. Knowing that it was only his parents judging whether he’d been good enough for gifts instead of some fat fairy elf made it an even game again. There were only four eyes between them and, if his siblings didn’t turn him in, he could keep his best side facing them most days.) No, his loss of Christmas innocence was more like an unrequested exchange for pubic hair.
It was early December and he’d been flipping through a Life magazine’s review of the year 1972. Along with the heroes of industry and politics and culture, there , in full colour, were the horrors of the year. The pages stopped flipping at a full page colour photo of a Viet Cong soldier holding two severed heads like dead chickens at his side. The heads - upon closer examination - were not American soldiers – that would seem like a horrible, bloodythirsty revenge – ugly but somehow rational. No, the heads were clearly Vietnamese. To Amos that was just crazed. It was an evil hatred turned in upon itself. To hate one’s enemy was a dark and ugly human trait. But to hate one’s self – one’s kin - was a black despair driven from a place even darker than the human soul.
If anyone had asked that twelve year old boy how the photo had affected him, Amos couldn’t have put it into words. But it went deep. It struck a chord in him that had never been struck before. It drummed a last vestige of childhood out of him and a shadow entered where an innocence had dwelt.
He was stung by the false hopes of a Christmas that celebrated “goodwill to all men”. Faced with the stark evil truth of war - naked without a Hollywood good guys/bad guys story – hope for the triumph of the good guys - hope for the redemption of the bad guys - slipped through his grasp like water in cupped hands. He lost a faith in human beings that he didn’t even know he had. He’d taken it for granted that good and bad were different worlds and not two sides of the same street. The bright lights of Christmas now only accentuated just how dark the human soul could be.
For the first time in his life, he wept tears that were not for himself. Those first tears of compassion were for the misery of his brothers and sisters. Sunday school had taught him well that on this small green planet we were all God’s children. The Apollo missions had captured a God’s eye view of our small round home. He’d grown up on the wave of Hippies’ songs of love and peace that were everywhere battling - and overcoming ignorance and fear and war. He’d been to the world Expo ’67 in Montreal and seen with his own eyes how happily all the world’s cultures could come together. He believed. He was a believer.
And then, a single photo had exposed the ugly truth that changed everything. He saw how human beings are their own worst enemy. The photo stayed with him as if he’d clipped it out and carried it around in his wallet.
A Christmas that claimed we were all happy, generous, people was now like eating too much cotton candy before the Wicked Whirlwind ride. Once he’d puked it up - he was off it for life. The sweet smells of Christmas now turned his stomach. Those tears of compassion he’d wept had a few sobs in there for himself too. He cried - knowing it without naming it - for what he’d lost. He was a child no longer.
For the next decade he managed to deal with this unnamed grief over the death of his childhood in a variety of ways. Christmas presents were still welcome. He began the practice of last-minute shopping –delaying the pain as long as possible. He gave presents always fearful that they weren’t good enough because no present he received was ever good enough. It could never fill, or even touch, that dark empty place inside. Nothing out of a box could convince him that he was a “good and deserving” boy.
He now knew the truth. He was a piece of shit just like everyone else. Some were just better at pretending it wasn’t so. It’s only other people’s shit that stinks isn’t it? Christmas – he noticed - really seemed to bring out the bullshit in the culture. Charlie Brown’s sad and unloved Christmas tree came close to naming it. But Amos’ loss went deeper. Cynically pulling the tinsel off of consumer’s spiritual hyprocrisy was fun - but it wasn’t enough. It helped to be “above it all”. But it never took away the shadow left where hope had once lived.
Amos became a fan of whatever could cut through the phony and expose the ugly, or laughable, truth. He was in good company of course. In many ways, Amos was only riding his generation’s wave. From Mad magazines to Monty Python, the Seventies youth culture developed a cynical, mocking sense of humour that slammed into sacred cows at every opportunity. From the Black Panthers to the Sex Pistols cultural tastes turned angry. It was cool to be angry and show it in all kinds of creative, destructive ways.
Self-destruction was Amos’ favourite method. His creativity went into living out a double-life. While maintaining a thick veneer of socially acceptable behaviours (school grades, after school jobs, even volunteer leadership work) he spent the rest of his waking hours destroying brain cells in suburban basements and risking his life in cars tearing around streetlit suburban corners.
After a decade of honing this attitude, Amos had declared himself bored by his cynical self-destruction. It was now time for a change. The power and authority of manhood hung like tools on a basement wall. It was up to him to pick them up and use them to make something of his life. Thing was, as he looked over the parts and pieces of his life, he was dismayed by the raw material he had to work with. It simply wasn’t good enough for what he wanted to do.
The Writer’s pad and pen that he’d been carrying around with him all fall were still empty. The lone artist on a mission, had become the same old party animal in a circle of misfits and funky friends that had gathered like dryer lint in the tumble of days. It was the same old Amos in a new setting.
He had hoped to re-create himself. He saw qualities that he honoured in people all around him. But those qualities seemed beyond his reach. He wanted to find a new way of being. He wanted to shed the old skin and – no not just skin – he was hoping to transform from caterpillar to butterfly. He ached to let his inner writer fly above all the suburban Scarborough mediocrity – especially his own mediocrity - that had suffocated all attempts - but not the desire - for this little worm to soar.
It snowed Christmas day in Vancouver that year. Many Vancouverites were not impressed by their White Christmas. Anyone trying to travel around the city without the aid of snow tires – not to mention skid-control skills – was in for some stress. Amos couldn’t have been more happy with the snow. He’d booked a cab for the day and there were more calls to keep a cabbie busy than cabs to meet the demand. Talk about a kid in a candy store.
The whole day was filled with ferrying merrymakers around the city. While driving was slow going, the generous tips made up for the lost time. It was a good thing that there weren’t too many cars on the road. He slid through more than one stop sign and only narrowly avoided several fender benders with a little gas on the pedal and counter-spin techniques learned in Ontario parking lots. His usually nasty Christmas mood was kept occupied by mostly happy drunks.
He did his share of skid row runs that day too. These were trips to the bootlegger for lonely turkeys trying to kill the day with a quart – lucky if they had friend to share it with. Unless, of course, their friend’s mood was as ugly as the one Amos was nursing.
He put in a shift and a half. By 3 am the calls had finally slowed down to a trickle. Sixteen hours behind the wheel was enough. With a good wad of cash in his jacket pocket, he dropped off the cab and flagged a ride from another cabbie back to his Kitsilano basement. Danny was asleep. Helen was away home for Christmas. He cracked open a beer and put a quiet album on sat on the floor back against the wall beside the stereo.
His parents had mailed out a care package that was still unopened sitting in the corner of his room. He hadn’t opened it partly because he didn’t want to expose himself to Danny’s scorn over his soft and happy family’s past, and partly because he was afraid that the comforts of that family would lull him back to sleep. Amos had gone to great lengths to get his miserable self out here all alone. He was determined to turn his angst into art. Falling back into the arms of his family would spoil his misery for sure.
How does it feelHow does it feelTo be without a homeLike a complete unknownLike a rolling stone?
You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss LonelyBut you know you only used to get juiced in itAnd nobody has ever taught you how to live on the streetAnd now you find out you're gonna have to get used to itYou said you'd never compromiseWith the mystery tramp, but now you realizeHe's not selling any alibisAs you stare into the vacuum of his eyesAnd ask him do you want to make a deal?
Bob Dylan
Still, it was Christmas – or no, it wasn’t any more – he’d made it through Christmas without family comforts and now it was Boxing Day. Okay, he thought, time to open the box. He sat on the floor of the basement beside the stereo and opened up the box. The box was filled with smaller packages wrapped up in colourful paper. There was a card with care-full notes written by his Mom and Dad telling him of their love and faith in him.
When he’d finished opening up all the gifts, he sat for a time in the midst of presents and strewn paper and felt – how did he feel? He tried to feel beneath the anger and cynicism – down there – how did he feel?
Just as empty as the boxes lying all around him. Not sad or lonely or miserable – just empty. Amos felt kind of like you feel after a good cry. After the tears - the way your mind goes through all the reasons you’re crying until you run out of reasons, and the tears slow and you blow your nose and then there’s a final big sigh. Amos didn’t know it then, but the tears that had started flowing ten years before - had finally run out.
He decided to go for a walk. This feeling was too real to waste on sleep. He put on his black Kodiak boots and leather jacket – his urban defiance gear - and walked up into the alley and out to the street. The clouds had cleared finally and there was a full moon shining on the snow covered streets. He walked down the few blocks to the little park at the ocean’s edge. The moon over the English Bay harbour drew him like a moth. Without hesitation he jumped the steel fencing that ran along the little cliff’s edge and scrambled his way down onto the beach. The tide was out and the ocean floor was black and shiny like an oil slick.
Amos stumbled along the stony shore beneath the wealthy homes that lined the million dollar view. In most places the ten to twelve foot cliff provided enough protection for these homes. But when he came across a concrete wall built all the way down to the shore, he truly felt like an intruder in this city. He looked across the bay to the city skyline and knew that there was no place for him here. He would always be an outsider to the people who lived behind such walls. The moon put his shadow against that wall and he stood tall to see his height and breadth. The wall could have his shadow - he thought - but it couldn’t have him. He turned his back to it and began to walk out towards the water.
It was a long walk out across the stony tidal flats. With each stony step it slowly began to sink into his head that he had literally reached the bottom. He was out among the very dregs of the city. These stones were like coffee grains at the bottom of the cup. All his travels, all his searching, all his hopes, all his mistakes, all his ego-driven desires had been sucked out to sea by the pull of the moon – the world’s biggest mirror.
He stopped and looked up at that moon. The light it shared was not its own. It had no fire of its own. It was a rock that became a beacon only because it was in the right place at the right time to reflect the one and only light of the world.
That was when he felt the Presence there just behind and beside him. It was like someone was standing there letting him know, without words, that he had a friend. He felt that the Presence knew him inside and out – maybe even better than he knew himself – definitely knew the real him – without the masks and the lies and the bravado. He knew, somehow, that this friend would never judge or fail him. Amos felt this as truly as a bell sounding somewhere deep in his bowels. The Presence knew him inside and out and – and – and loved him as surely as the sun shone. Amos felt as deeply loved as he knew how to love – and more.
And yet, Amos felt - somehow got the feeling - that it was a meeting of friends – that even though he was in the Presence of an amazing, timeless, source of knowing and love – that Source had chosen to be his friend. For Amos, the only adequate response to such a gift – a response from the heart and the guts and not the polite conniving head – was to choose to call the Presence “LORD”.
The moon was dropping down behind the mountains now. It told Amos that the journey wasn’t over. He still didn’t know what was to come or where he was heading but he had found what he was looking for out here.
He had thought he was looking for a new self. Instead, he discovered that he was looking for someone to serve. Only after he’d emptied out all the possibilities that he’d filled his life with, did he find his Lord and Leader there at the bottom of it all.
You find me
and offer…
grace to forgive
to begin again
spirit to guide steps through self-love’s confusion
receiving as mine the power of Your sacrifice
senseless service as the road to
no tomorrow’s
grace to forgive
to begin again…
Jesus had been patiently waiting for him. The Father’s son. God’s chosen one. The only one who really didn’t give a shit what people thought of him, or did to him, but lived for one purpose only – to reflect the light and love of the only power that mattered. The power of life that turned forever – forgetting the day gone by and always welcoming the new beginning so full of growing, changing, creative possibilities….
Amos baptized himself five days later skinning dipping from Wreck Beach on New Year’s Day. Danny was there to laugh and bless his crazy white ass with hoots from the shore. Amos had tried to explain the experience on the tidal flats to Danny in the best words he could find - but knew were failing him. For once, Dan didn’t argue. He just listened and looked at Amos with a tilted head and quiet smile and nodded. His silence acknowledging that Amos had found something worthy.
The gift he’d received was the message that it wasn’t in changing that Amos would find his purpose. What the Christ had taught him with his friendship was that it was only by becoming more of who he already was that Amos would find his path to follow. He’d been given a touchstone experience that he could return to time and again. It reminded him that his choices, his efforts, his mistakes, his life is not really about “Amos”. He was in service to a far greater power than his small sense of well-being. What Amos would do from that day on is try to reflect - in his own moon-rock way - the light of the world.
Mediocre, silly, selfish, lustful, lazy-ass that he was, God could use even a dull rock like him to shed light in a dark world. Creative, imaginative, intelligent, funny - God can mine and refine what’s good in anyone. And anyone can do their small part to add some food to the table in hungry places.
No matter where I roam
I will find my way back home
I will find a way to return
to the Lord
I was heading for a fall
and I saw the writing on the wall
Like a full force gale
I was lifted up again
I was lifted up again
by the Lord
Van Morrison
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Trying to slow the fall was as difficult as escaping a schoolyard circle of scorn. Once the circle is formed and the target identified, the anger of the crowd is a contagious fever that infects every child. Whatever the accusation, how it started, and whether it’s true, becomes unimportant. Once a self-righteous momentum of condemnation has begun, the smell of blood pulls back the screen of adult civility and a vein where shame and anger run is opened. Friends and allies are swept up in the blood sport and as you turn, looking for support, their scorn pierces the skin and hits bone deep. The flesh of trust is rent open and self love, love of the other, love of life bleeds out.
But Amos had left all that behind. Out here on the coast he’d cast off the effects of a fearful past, claimed a fresh start – wounds healed - and vowed to reinvent himself. So why was he still haunted by this circle of demons? It was as if all his minor faults and insecurities had got together and conspired to tear him down. Every time he tried to build himself up with memories of accomplishments, they’d turn sour on him. He’d see that what he was trying to take pride in was really just another selfish grabbing for ego-glory. The good that he’d done was really only all about Amos proving once again what a good boy he was. It was all an act.
Where was the backbone? What held his skeleton together? What mattered so deeply to Amos that without it – he’d puddle like jello in his bed – his muscle and will only resulting in a jiggle.
When he’d try to go to his comfort places of imagination, He found a self-absorbed little boy whimpering and complaining in the midst of comfort and wealth. His enemy was stabbing at his newly exposed flesh and he knew that the knives were of his own design – forged in the bowels of deep mountain memories.
You might say that Amos was feeling a little depressed. The Christmas season had descended like a low cloud over Vancouver. As the year’s days were running out, so it seemed, was his sense of humour. This was not a new thing for Amos. Christmas wasn’t spoiled when he found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real. (That was a relief. Knowing that it was only his parents judging whether he’d been good enough for gifts instead of some fat fairy elf made it an even game again. There were only four eyes between them and, if his siblings didn’t turn him in, he could keep his best side facing them most days.) No, his loss of Christmas innocence was more like an unrequested exchange for pubic hair.
It was early December and he’d been flipping through a Life magazine’s review of the year 1972. Along with the heroes of industry and politics and culture, there , in full colour, were the horrors of the year. The pages stopped flipping at a full page colour photo of a Viet Cong soldier holding two severed heads like dead chickens at his side. The heads - upon closer examination - were not American soldiers – that would seem like a horrible, bloodythirsty revenge – ugly but somehow rational. No, the heads were clearly Vietnamese. To Amos that was just crazed. It was an evil hatred turned in upon itself. To hate one’s enemy was a dark and ugly human trait. But to hate one’s self – one’s kin - was a black despair driven from a place even darker than the human soul.
If anyone had asked that twelve year old boy how the photo had affected him, Amos couldn’t have put it into words. But it went deep. It struck a chord in him that had never been struck before. It drummed a last vestige of childhood out of him and a shadow entered where an innocence had dwelt.
He was stung by the false hopes of a Christmas that celebrated “goodwill to all men”. Faced with the stark evil truth of war - naked without a Hollywood good guys/bad guys story – hope for the triumph of the good guys - hope for the redemption of the bad guys - slipped through his grasp like water in cupped hands. He lost a faith in human beings that he didn’t even know he had. He’d taken it for granted that good and bad were different worlds and not two sides of the same street. The bright lights of Christmas now only accentuated just how dark the human soul could be.
For the first time in his life, he wept tears that were not for himself. Those first tears of compassion were for the misery of his brothers and sisters. Sunday school had taught him well that on this small green planet we were all God’s children. The Apollo missions had captured a God’s eye view of our small round home. He’d grown up on the wave of Hippies’ songs of love and peace that were everywhere battling - and overcoming ignorance and fear and war. He’d been to the world Expo ’67 in Montreal and seen with his own eyes how happily all the world’s cultures could come together. He believed. He was a believer.
And then, a single photo had exposed the ugly truth that changed everything. He saw how human beings are their own worst enemy. The photo stayed with him as if he’d clipped it out and carried it around in his wallet.
A Christmas that claimed we were all happy, generous, people was now like eating too much cotton candy before the Wicked Whirlwind ride. Once he’d puked it up - he was off it for life. The sweet smells of Christmas now turned his stomach. Those tears of compassion he’d wept had a few sobs in there for himself too. He cried - knowing it without naming it - for what he’d lost. He was a child no longer.
For the next decade he managed to deal with this unnamed grief over the death of his childhood in a variety of ways. Christmas presents were still welcome. He began the practice of last-minute shopping –delaying the pain as long as possible. He gave presents always fearful that they weren’t good enough because no present he received was ever good enough. It could never fill, or even touch, that dark empty place inside. Nothing out of a box could convince him that he was a “good and deserving” boy.
He now knew the truth. He was a piece of shit just like everyone else. Some were just better at pretending it wasn’t so. It’s only other people’s shit that stinks isn’t it? Christmas – he noticed - really seemed to bring out the bullshit in the culture. Charlie Brown’s sad and unloved Christmas tree came close to naming it. But Amos’ loss went deeper. Cynically pulling the tinsel off of consumer’s spiritual hyprocrisy was fun - but it wasn’t enough. It helped to be “above it all”. But it never took away the shadow left where hope had once lived.
Amos became a fan of whatever could cut through the phony and expose the ugly, or laughable, truth. He was in good company of course. In many ways, Amos was only riding his generation’s wave. From Mad magazines to Monty Python, the Seventies youth culture developed a cynical, mocking sense of humour that slammed into sacred cows at every opportunity. From the Black Panthers to the Sex Pistols cultural tastes turned angry. It was cool to be angry and show it in all kinds of creative, destructive ways.
Self-destruction was Amos’ favourite method. His creativity went into living out a double-life. While maintaining a thick veneer of socially acceptable behaviours (school grades, after school jobs, even volunteer leadership work) he spent the rest of his waking hours destroying brain cells in suburban basements and risking his life in cars tearing around streetlit suburban corners.
After a decade of honing this attitude, Amos had declared himself bored by his cynical self-destruction. It was now time for a change. The power and authority of manhood hung like tools on a basement wall. It was up to him to pick them up and use them to make something of his life. Thing was, as he looked over the parts and pieces of his life, he was dismayed by the raw material he had to work with. It simply wasn’t good enough for what he wanted to do.
The Writer’s pad and pen that he’d been carrying around with him all fall were still empty. The lone artist on a mission, had become the same old party animal in a circle of misfits and funky friends that had gathered like dryer lint in the tumble of days. It was the same old Amos in a new setting.
He had hoped to re-create himself. He saw qualities that he honoured in people all around him. But those qualities seemed beyond his reach. He wanted to find a new way of being. He wanted to shed the old skin and – no not just skin – he was hoping to transform from caterpillar to butterfly. He ached to let his inner writer fly above all the suburban Scarborough mediocrity – especially his own mediocrity - that had suffocated all attempts - but not the desire - for this little worm to soar.
It snowed Christmas day in Vancouver that year. Many Vancouverites were not impressed by their White Christmas. Anyone trying to travel around the city without the aid of snow tires – not to mention skid-control skills – was in for some stress. Amos couldn’t have been more happy with the snow. He’d booked a cab for the day and there were more calls to keep a cabbie busy than cabs to meet the demand. Talk about a kid in a candy store.
The whole day was filled with ferrying merrymakers around the city. While driving was slow going, the generous tips made up for the lost time. It was a good thing that there weren’t too many cars on the road. He slid through more than one stop sign and only narrowly avoided several fender benders with a little gas on the pedal and counter-spin techniques learned in Ontario parking lots. His usually nasty Christmas mood was kept occupied by mostly happy drunks.
He did his share of skid row runs that day too. These were trips to the bootlegger for lonely turkeys trying to kill the day with a quart – lucky if they had friend to share it with. Unless, of course, their friend’s mood was as ugly as the one Amos was nursing.
He put in a shift and a half. By 3 am the calls had finally slowed down to a trickle. Sixteen hours behind the wheel was enough. With a good wad of cash in his jacket pocket, he dropped off the cab and flagged a ride from another cabbie back to his Kitsilano basement. Danny was asleep. Helen was away home for Christmas. He cracked open a beer and put a quiet album on sat on the floor back against the wall beside the stereo.
His parents had mailed out a care package that was still unopened sitting in the corner of his room. He hadn’t opened it partly because he didn’t want to expose himself to Danny’s scorn over his soft and happy family’s past, and partly because he was afraid that the comforts of that family would lull him back to sleep. Amos had gone to great lengths to get his miserable self out here all alone. He was determined to turn his angst into art. Falling back into the arms of his family would spoil his misery for sure.
How does it feelHow does it feelTo be without a homeLike a complete unknownLike a rolling stone?
You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss LonelyBut you know you only used to get juiced in itAnd nobody has ever taught you how to live on the streetAnd now you find out you're gonna have to get used to itYou said you'd never compromiseWith the mystery tramp, but now you realizeHe's not selling any alibisAs you stare into the vacuum of his eyesAnd ask him do you want to make a deal?
Bob Dylan
Still, it was Christmas – or no, it wasn’t any more – he’d made it through Christmas without family comforts and now it was Boxing Day. Okay, he thought, time to open the box. He sat on the floor of the basement beside the stereo and opened up the box. The box was filled with smaller packages wrapped up in colourful paper. There was a card with care-full notes written by his Mom and Dad telling him of their love and faith in him.
When he’d finished opening up all the gifts, he sat for a time in the midst of presents and strewn paper and felt – how did he feel? He tried to feel beneath the anger and cynicism – down there – how did he feel?
Just as empty as the boxes lying all around him. Not sad or lonely or miserable – just empty. Amos felt kind of like you feel after a good cry. After the tears - the way your mind goes through all the reasons you’re crying until you run out of reasons, and the tears slow and you blow your nose and then there’s a final big sigh. Amos didn’t know it then, but the tears that had started flowing ten years before - had finally run out.
He decided to go for a walk. This feeling was too real to waste on sleep. He put on his black Kodiak boots and leather jacket – his urban defiance gear - and walked up into the alley and out to the street. The clouds had cleared finally and there was a full moon shining on the snow covered streets. He walked down the few blocks to the little park at the ocean’s edge. The moon over the English Bay harbour drew him like a moth. Without hesitation he jumped the steel fencing that ran along the little cliff’s edge and scrambled his way down onto the beach. The tide was out and the ocean floor was black and shiny like an oil slick.
Amos stumbled along the stony shore beneath the wealthy homes that lined the million dollar view. In most places the ten to twelve foot cliff provided enough protection for these homes. But when he came across a concrete wall built all the way down to the shore, he truly felt like an intruder in this city. He looked across the bay to the city skyline and knew that there was no place for him here. He would always be an outsider to the people who lived behind such walls. The moon put his shadow against that wall and he stood tall to see his height and breadth. The wall could have his shadow - he thought - but it couldn’t have him. He turned his back to it and began to walk out towards the water.
It was a long walk out across the stony tidal flats. With each stony step it slowly began to sink into his head that he had literally reached the bottom. He was out among the very dregs of the city. These stones were like coffee grains at the bottom of the cup. All his travels, all his searching, all his hopes, all his mistakes, all his ego-driven desires had been sucked out to sea by the pull of the moon – the world’s biggest mirror.
He stopped and looked up at that moon. The light it shared was not its own. It had no fire of its own. It was a rock that became a beacon only because it was in the right place at the right time to reflect the one and only light of the world.
That was when he felt the Presence there just behind and beside him. It was like someone was standing there letting him know, without words, that he had a friend. He felt that the Presence knew him inside and out – maybe even better than he knew himself – definitely knew the real him – without the masks and the lies and the bravado. He knew, somehow, that this friend would never judge or fail him. Amos felt this as truly as a bell sounding somewhere deep in his bowels. The Presence knew him inside and out and – and – and loved him as surely as the sun shone. Amos felt as deeply loved as he knew how to love – and more.
And yet, Amos felt - somehow got the feeling - that it was a meeting of friends – that even though he was in the Presence of an amazing, timeless, source of knowing and love – that Source had chosen to be his friend. For Amos, the only adequate response to such a gift – a response from the heart and the guts and not the polite conniving head – was to choose to call the Presence “LORD”.
The moon was dropping down behind the mountains now. It told Amos that the journey wasn’t over. He still didn’t know what was to come or where he was heading but he had found what he was looking for out here.
He had thought he was looking for a new self. Instead, he discovered that he was looking for someone to serve. Only after he’d emptied out all the possibilities that he’d filled his life with, did he find his Lord and Leader there at the bottom of it all.
You find me
and offer…
grace to forgive
to begin again
spirit to guide steps through self-love’s confusion
receiving as mine the power of Your sacrifice
senseless service as the road to
no tomorrow’s
grace to forgive
to begin again…
Jesus had been patiently waiting for him. The Father’s son. God’s chosen one. The only one who really didn’t give a shit what people thought of him, or did to him, but lived for one purpose only – to reflect the light and love of the only power that mattered. The power of life that turned forever – forgetting the day gone by and always welcoming the new beginning so full of growing, changing, creative possibilities….
Amos baptized himself five days later skinning dipping from Wreck Beach on New Year’s Day. Danny was there to laugh and bless his crazy white ass with hoots from the shore. Amos had tried to explain the experience on the tidal flats to Danny in the best words he could find - but knew were failing him. For once, Dan didn’t argue. He just listened and looked at Amos with a tilted head and quiet smile and nodded. His silence acknowledging that Amos had found something worthy.
The gift he’d received was the message that it wasn’t in changing that Amos would find his purpose. What the Christ had taught him with his friendship was that it was only by becoming more of who he already was that Amos would find his path to follow. He’d been given a touchstone experience that he could return to time and again. It reminded him that his choices, his efforts, his mistakes, his life is not really about “Amos”. He was in service to a far greater power than his small sense of well-being. What Amos would do from that day on is try to reflect - in his own moon-rock way - the light of the world.
Mediocre, silly, selfish, lustful, lazy-ass that he was, God could use even a dull rock like him to shed light in a dark world. Creative, imaginative, intelligent, funny - God can mine and refine what’s good in anyone. And anyone can do their small part to add some food to the table in hungry places.
No matter where I roam
I will find my way back home
I will find a way to return
to the Lord
I was heading for a fall
and I saw the writing on the wall
Like a full force gale
I was lifted up again
I was lifted up again
by the Lord
Van Morrison
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Old friends with new faces
Amos heard his name being called out. He was walking down 4th near home. No one knew him here. Who could be calling his name? He turned to see Dave Andrews just a few steps behind him. They’d passed on the street and Dave had been the one to recognize him. They knew each other from mutual friends at Trent University back in Ontario. “Amos, how the hell are ya? What are you doin here?”
“I live here.”
“No way – where?”
“Just a few blocks from here” he laughed pointing towards the ocean.
“That’s incredible – so do I” Dave pointed in the other direction.
Dave was from Montreal and studied Philosophy like all the other guys from Montreal. They were responsible for a steady supply of black hash into Peterborough and Amos usually found them, while good for a laugh one on one, as a group too deep in thought, or smoke, to get a laugh going. They seemed to take themselves, or life, pretty seriously and that was just too heavy for Amos.
In Amos’ group, playing the fool was quite acceptable and displaying one’s smarts suspect. But in this Montreal crowd there was a stiff judgment-thing happening. He felt in the air between them almost a palpable fear of seeming stupid, or silly, or inconsequential. He’d watched a girl from smalltown Ontario go from happy, friendly, and bouncy to dark, brooding, and suicidal-looking from a year spent in their company. Not that Amos felt particularly welcome in their gatherings anyway – he could carry a sarcasm-riddled conversation spiced heavily with cynicism long enough to establish their tolerance of a Toronto fool among them. And for Amos, enough to keep the sweet black hash in supply.
Now, he was surprised and excited by this chance encounter with Dave. The distance of time and place made their somewhat arms-length, former acquaintance much closer. They quickly ran through each other’s tales – how they’d ended up on this city block of Vancouver. It turned out that Dave was living with another Trent grad – Jake Jefferson. Amos recognized the name, he told Dave, but couldn’t picture a face to go with it. Dave said “Well let’s go do that – Jake’s a t home - have you got other plans? Let’s go.”
Jake was there and he and Amos said they recognized each other from passing in pubs and parties but they’d never really met. Jake was the kind of guy who would actually enjoy dancing at Grade 8 school dances. He was smart and lean - wily even. He had an easy way about him. The way he moved across the room, smoked his cigarettes, and carried a conversation made you think he either didn’t give a damn what you thought of him or else he had his act down very tight, very well rehearsed. For all of Jake’s carefully styled manners, Amos detected also a raw rage that ran close, just beneath the surface.
As a signature story – one that would help Amos learn who he was – Jake told of the time he spit on Thomas J. Bata. Amos knew that the Bata shoe empire was a notorious exploiter of third world child-labour. The library at Trent, the architectural gem and natural meeting place at the centre of the campus, was named the Bata library for the visiting dignitary. Jake had been expelled but allowed back the next year to finish his degree. Trent reputation as the most liberal of the liberal arts school was intact.
“You lost a year for that?” Amos was amazed at the sacrafice “Was it worth it?”
Jake took a long pull on his smoke. “It’s not called the Bata Library any more is it?”
While they shared a toke and a beer, Jake put the latest Talking Heads album on. Jake knew all the words and would sing them, not to himself, but right into your eyes. There was one tune that really seemed to hit home. It had a bouncy, light melody line, that was fun and seemed to be right where they lived. It was called ‘This must be the place”.
Home - is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb, born with glowing heart
guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing’s wrong
Hi yo - I got plenty of time
Hi yo - you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up and say goodnight . . . say goodnight
Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - -she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this where I'll be . . . where I'll be
The “Speaking in Tongues” album was written just for them. They became more sure of it the more they listened. “They’re coming to Vancouver y’know.” Jake said as if prophesying.
“Who?” asked Amos.
“Talking Heads.”
“Really? Well, we gotta go. You let me know as soon as you hear about tickets on sale will you?” “Definitely” Jake nodded, smiling a knowing smile.
Peter arrived home. It was Peter’s home they were in. It was a very warm, bright, Kitsilano bungalow surrounded by trees and gardens - as they all were. This one though was filled with wondrous, bright and deep colour-filled paintings. Turns out, Peter was the painter. In his fifties now, Peter was making a good living with his art. Peter was as warm and bright as his home. Soft spoken, confident, a gentleman obviously, and attentive to his guest, Amos felt he was in the company of a strong big sister to his young Ontario friends. How the three of them ended up together didn’t come up in conversation and Amos wondered but didn’t feel it was cool to ask.
It was west-coast manners not to ask about work – the reply out here to “what do you do?” was to name your passion; as in “I sail.”. But when Amos announced that he’d have to leave soon to pick up his cab for the 4pm start of the night shift, Jake asked him if he knew “The Underground”. “It’s where I tend bar” explained Jake. Amos recognized the bar. His cab had been to them all by now. It was an electro-funk dance bar - one of the city’s main establishments for gay men. Amos swallowed that shot of information without a flinch. “Yeah, I know it – off Granville right?” He looked straight into Jake’s searching eyes as he passed him the spliff he’d just lit up. When he sat back to focus on the smoke, Amos could feel Jake and Dave and Peter’s eyes carefully watching him, checking him, with glances back and forth, for reactions.
To shift the attention Amos asked David “Are you working man?” In reply, Dave stood up “Let me show you.” The four of them followed Dave past the kitchen into a hallway leading back to the house’s bedrooms. Amos was doing his best not to have a panic attack. His imagination was running ahead of him. Were they going to seduce him into a homosexual orgy? What if he liked it? How would he tell his mother? His heart rate raced. It was very warm in this hallway.
Dave opened the door at the end of the hall and Amos followed the others in. It was a large room with a wall of windows facing east. It was the Master Bedroom but there was no bed. Instead, at its centre stood an easel with an almost life-sized portrait of Dave - hairy, naked and sensual, surrounded by leafy green sun dappled bushes and bright orange, red and blue flowers.
“Oh wow,” Amos exclaimed, letting out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Dave, you look like Adam in the garden of Eden.” Peter seemed pleased with the comment. He was watching Dave. Dave laughed to relieve his own discomfort. “Right before the fall - eh Amos?” Peter added quietly, but for all to hear “Innocent and natural.”
Amos could tell that Dave was loving the attention but at the same time unsure about sharing the intimacy of the portrait beyond the four walls of this room. The painting had a story to tell. As Amos soaked it in, it slowly dawned on him that Dave was taking a big risk here - trusting him with this revelation. And it felt like this was a trial run.
Peter and Jake were coaching – gently encouraging Dave to come out of that dark closet where his sexuality was safely locked up - and live it large in the world. Dave had just put his toe in the water – Amos was the first person from his past that he’d come out to. Jake had a huge grin on his face that said “See, the water’s fine, c’mon in.”
On the walk home, Amos’ mind was doing calisthenics. He realized that these guys were the first gay men that he’d actually known – and he liked them. Knowing Dave from an earlier life caused him to readjust his perceptions. There was more to Dave than he’d originally seen. Like Amos, Dave was out here exploring a wider, deeper, freer, wilder version of himself. That afternoon Dave had crossed a raging river of doubt on a slippery log by trusting him. Amos felt like he had crossed that same river without really thinking about it. The land of homosexuality was no longer a dark continent whose natives he could laugh at and scorn from his ignorant and fearful island of so-called normal sex.
He found that, with some mental exercise, it wasn’t a big deal withholding his judgment of these guys – these friends. His curiosity kept taking him into those bedrooms trying to get his head around what went on there. But he recognized it as the same curiosity he had about everyone’s private sex lives – and what went on in his head wasn’t where he was meeting these guys. They had offered friendship and he had welcomed it. He enjoyed their company and he wasn’t going to let his thoughts get in the way.
In the weeks to come, Dave, Jake and Peter got to meet Danny. Now it was Amos’ turn to watch his friends for their reactions and eye signals. He wondered what they thought of this coaching Amos had signed up for. He knew that the sight of he and Danny strolling down Vancouver streets was probably stranger to most eyes than seeing two men arm in arm in a lover’s embrace. It’s a lot easier to withhold judgment, Amos noted, when you know that you’re being judged and placed on the far side of normal yourself.
While his new friends definitely caused him to wonder about his own sexuality – could he, under the right circumstances be persuaded to open up to homo-erotic love? He decided he was simply a tourist passing through and there was no chance of him staying - even for a visit.
It was decided for him really. It wasn’t like there was a choice or a decision to be made. The amount of time he spent thinking about women - women from his past and women in his future - left a well-worn path in his brain when it came to sex. While he supposed he could leave the path and bush-whack - it would be all uphill work. When it came to spending emotional energy on relationships, he was just plain lazy.
He’d avoided the whole dating scene in high school just because he hated the idea of everyone else knowing and talking about his intimate affairs. He was so acutely aware of himself through other’s eyes, that to see his own awkward attempts at love being the subject of discussion was akin to putting his balls on the altar for public sacrifice. It just wasn’t worth it.
So, he kept himself pure. Or, he kept his own version of sex in a closet of a different kind. He had a Hollywood Playboy, combined with an Archie comic-book - Betty and Veronica - image of women that he’d managed to preserve right through his adolescence. Along with an idealized vision of the perfect woman – the one who would stand by him - or maybe just behind him – trusted, affectionate, understanding – like a good dog - only with a body out of a Playboy magazine.
Porn magazines – soft porn left room for his imagination to work – was much easier than a relationship any day. You could just close the cover with very little mess and put it away until the urge surged again. Minor guilt pangs were easier to live with than demands of a human being who wanted or expected a piece of his attention. The shame of being a boy in the eyes of men was better than risking embarrassment in the hands of a woman.
But it happened anyway. It was closing time and three young, more than tipsy, women climbed into his cab. They were in a good mood and teased Amos with harmless innuendo and flirting. “Hey, he’s cute, look at those shoulders – two of us could curl up in those!” Amos surprised himself by not choking up and turning red. Instead he played along “There’s room for all three of you in these arms ladies.” And they loved it. He thought that maybe he was in for a good tip.
She lived furthest away and was the last to be dropped off. The laughs turned into life stories. Heather didn’t know many people here. She’d grown up on the island – a small town girl in the big city. She and her friends were off-duty hospital nurses. When she invited him up to her apartment for a drink, Amos’ blood pumped a little faster in his veins. He liked her down to earth sense of humour. His sensitive stuck-up meter didn’t register with her at all. She put him at ease with a friendly touch as they met on the sidewalk steering him towards the apartment doorway.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” she laughed, “you’ll be getting the wrong idea about me. Why am I trusting you? You could be a serial killer.”
“Yeah, I don’t know why either. Are you crazy?” he teased “I’m going to have to ask you to give me all your butcher’s knives when we get upstairs.” They laughed and teased each other along these lines in the elevator and down the hall into her apartment. Amos found it as sensible, clean, and maybe just a little cutesy - as its owner. Heather seemed as comfortable in this place as she was in her own body. She had a natural physicality that quietened him - as if he was a skittish horse entering a stable after running wild for a season.
He called her the next week after fully debating the issue with Dan. Dan said it was good for man to have a mistress – the implication being that Amos’ passions needed to stay focused on the training. A woman on the side was okay. Amos thought Danny was maybe just a bit jealous. He liked that. And he didn’t like the way a one-night-stand looked on him. And he definitely liked the way Heather felt – natural and easy like an old pair of jeans. If only he could keep it uncomplicated.
He wouldn’t tell her where he lived – letting her know at dinner that second time that he was too messed up, too self-absorbed for a relationship and she would have to just enjoy his company when she had it and not get any ideas about anything more. Heather agreed with a silent smile – she wasn’t going to scare this stray cat away with a collar. She knew that he was hungry and had come back to her door for more.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
First day’s ski in the Rockies
He was a tourist behind the wheel of a Vancouver cab with one sole aim in life – to ski the Rocky Mountains. A North Van rich kid climbed into his cab and they got talking ski talk and this guy said “ you know that Whistler opens tomorrow eh?”
“No, I hadn’t heard man.”
“Well officially, it’s the day after tomorrow, but the tradition is that they open up the hills for the locals for one day of free skiing before the throngs arrive.”
That was the only invitation Amos needed. Next morning before dawn he had his gear packed in the Fleshmobile and was headed up Highway 99. He’d been there in the summer - stayed at his treeplanting girlfriends’ family condo - so he knew where to find the ski hill and went straight there. The Whistler village was under construction, only a couple of stores and brand new deluxe hotels were open for business. He parked the car and walked past them directly to the ski hill. He was a man on a mission.
Amos was both surprised and delighted when, sure enough, the young, obviously envious, lift operators welcomed his ticket-less butt onto the chair-lift. With a huge grin on his face the chair swung him up into the hills. He was alone on the five person chair. There was hardly anyone there that morning. It might have had something to do with the heavy cloud and mist lying low over the bottom of the mountain. Amos had been waiting months for this day and there was no way that clouds were going to daunt his hopes.
His heart was pounding from excitement and a good dose of fear as the lift took him higher and higher up and over the rock faces and tree tops. He could only see what was directly below and around him the fog was so thick. He was higher than any hill in Ontario within the first ten minutes. In the pit of his stomach a stew of worry stirred in with the excitement and adrenaline in his system and he thought he might puke.
And then, with another sweep up over a cliff face, his chariot broke free from the clouds and he entered paradise. The sun shone bright in a blue, cloudless sky, on a mountain of white, white, white snow! Breaking through into heaven out of the dim mortal reality - for this Ontario lad – truly a dream come true. He couldn’t help but begin bouncing in his seat and whooping it up along with the riders in the chairs in front of him.
This was the dream he’d been pursuing – what he’d given up law school to pursue. This was why he was alive – to live out his adolescent ambition of a Rocky Mountain ski bum – and he was doing it! His heart was soaring like a hawk high over the mountain.
Now, getting back down the mountain was a very different experience for our hero Amos. It was an experience that brought him very quickly back down to earth. He had his long stiff skis - perfect for Ontario’s icy slopes - shipped from home. He’d bought equally stiff boots on sale that fall to cement his ski-bum resolve. Now, he hit the slopes with enthusiasm only to discover that he didn’t have a clue about how to ski in two feet of snow.
Deep snow in Ontario meant you might have snow up to your ankles. Most of the time you were traversing hard packed, machine-groomed snow. Very often you had to deal with large sheets of ice to cross between the edges where hundreds of skiers had pushed the snow before you. Skiing in untouched snow up to his knees was totally different.
Amos took several tumbles before he’d made it down even part of the first slope. His ski tips kept getting pulled this way and that and the more he fought to muscle them together, the more they misbehaved. He was determined to enjoy this though. He kept pulling his legs back under him and struggling, staggering for balance, stabbing his poles deep into the snow looking for something solid to push against.
About half way down the mountain, he wiped out good enough to make him stop and sit After he’d collected his brains and equipment scattered across the hill, he sat and stewed. If breaking through those clouds had been a Rocky Mountain high, then he’d fallen flat on his face the very next thing. This was no dream. This was a nightmare. He couldn’t do this. What a disaster! What seemed at first to be a wonderful gift had turned into an incredible challenge.
As a poet, the metaphor wasn’t lost on him. Just as he’d sought out the freedom and fun of life alone on the west coast, he was finding that what seemed great from far was far from great. Complications and unseen challenges required new skill and insight untested ‘til now.
What was he gonna do? Give up and go home?
Like fuck! Amos answered his own questions. “FUCK THAT!” he said out loud. Hearing his own voice in defiance kindled a resolve in his belly. He could do it. He would do it. It just meant learning how to ski all over again. He learned to ski once, he could do it again. And if that was what it would take to ski the Rockies that winter, then, that’s what he’d do. He had all winter. He had his whole life ahead to learn one lesson at a time – one small step at a time. So, he began.
He managed to get to the bottom of the mountain feeling totally exhausted. His knees were as weak and wobbly as a new born colt’s. His shoulder’s ached as if he’d been carrying bags of cement all day. He was tired and breathing heavy, but he wasn’t totally discouraged. He got back on the lift in spite of his brain’s request for the chalet.
The rest of the day he hacked his way down the slopes – falling often, but with every fall he was learning. Skiing in deep snow was more about sitting back on his skiis and persuading, not pushing, his skiis to shift with his weight. Trying to force his feet around and set his edges hard would get him back into trouble. He had to lighten up. Get lighter on his feet – he laughed thinking of his new gay friends – more west coast swoosh and less Ontario macho man. It would take some time.
Back at the car, Amos packed his skiis and headed out for the little secluded parkette at the end of a street at the edge of the town. He’d spotted it that summer, packing it away in his memory as part of the plan he was cooking up. Out of the trunk, he dragged the canvas six-man tent he’d brought tree-planting. It must have weighed a hundred pounds and somehow in the deep snow he wrestled it up. Lassoing poles and tying the centre rail off to nearby trees took energy from stores he didn’t think he had left in him.
When he had it up though, (just the one side with the door in it) and a pot of soup cooking on the Coleman stove, there couldn’t have been a young man on the planet more satisfied with the choices he’d made. He was proud that the plans he’d crafted were working. Lifting the mug of soup to his lips and feeling the warmth go down through him he decided - living in a dream was a good place to be. His breath raised like smoke from his lips in a satisfied prayer of thanksgiving.
“I live here.”
“No way – where?”
“Just a few blocks from here” he laughed pointing towards the ocean.
“That’s incredible – so do I” Dave pointed in the other direction.
Dave was from Montreal and studied Philosophy like all the other guys from Montreal. They were responsible for a steady supply of black hash into Peterborough and Amos usually found them, while good for a laugh one on one, as a group too deep in thought, or smoke, to get a laugh going. They seemed to take themselves, or life, pretty seriously and that was just too heavy for Amos.
In Amos’ group, playing the fool was quite acceptable and displaying one’s smarts suspect. But in this Montreal crowd there was a stiff judgment-thing happening. He felt in the air between them almost a palpable fear of seeming stupid, or silly, or inconsequential. He’d watched a girl from smalltown Ontario go from happy, friendly, and bouncy to dark, brooding, and suicidal-looking from a year spent in their company. Not that Amos felt particularly welcome in their gatherings anyway – he could carry a sarcasm-riddled conversation spiced heavily with cynicism long enough to establish their tolerance of a Toronto fool among them. And for Amos, enough to keep the sweet black hash in supply.
Now, he was surprised and excited by this chance encounter with Dave. The distance of time and place made their somewhat arms-length, former acquaintance much closer. They quickly ran through each other’s tales – how they’d ended up on this city block of Vancouver. It turned out that Dave was living with another Trent grad – Jake Jefferson. Amos recognized the name, he told Dave, but couldn’t picture a face to go with it. Dave said “Well let’s go do that – Jake’s a t home - have you got other plans? Let’s go.”
Jake was there and he and Amos said they recognized each other from passing in pubs and parties but they’d never really met. Jake was the kind of guy who would actually enjoy dancing at Grade 8 school dances. He was smart and lean - wily even. He had an easy way about him. The way he moved across the room, smoked his cigarettes, and carried a conversation made you think he either didn’t give a damn what you thought of him or else he had his act down very tight, very well rehearsed. For all of Jake’s carefully styled manners, Amos detected also a raw rage that ran close, just beneath the surface.
As a signature story – one that would help Amos learn who he was – Jake told of the time he spit on Thomas J. Bata. Amos knew that the Bata shoe empire was a notorious exploiter of third world child-labour. The library at Trent, the architectural gem and natural meeting place at the centre of the campus, was named the Bata library for the visiting dignitary. Jake had been expelled but allowed back the next year to finish his degree. Trent reputation as the most liberal of the liberal arts school was intact.
“You lost a year for that?” Amos was amazed at the sacrafice “Was it worth it?”
Jake took a long pull on his smoke. “It’s not called the Bata Library any more is it?”
While they shared a toke and a beer, Jake put the latest Talking Heads album on. Jake knew all the words and would sing them, not to himself, but right into your eyes. There was one tune that really seemed to hit home. It had a bouncy, light melody line, that was fun and seemed to be right where they lived. It was called ‘This must be the place”.
Home - is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb, born with glowing heart
guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It's ok I know nothing's wrong . . nothing’s wrong
Hi yo - I got plenty of time
Hi yo - you got light in your eyes
And you're standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love
Cover up and say goodnight . . . say goodnight
Home - is where I want to be
But I guess I'm already there
I come home - -she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can't tell one from another
Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born
If someone asks, this where I'll be . . . where I'll be
The “Speaking in Tongues” album was written just for them. They became more sure of it the more they listened. “They’re coming to Vancouver y’know.” Jake said as if prophesying.
“Who?” asked Amos.
“Talking Heads.”
“Really? Well, we gotta go. You let me know as soon as you hear about tickets on sale will you?” “Definitely” Jake nodded, smiling a knowing smile.
Peter arrived home. It was Peter’s home they were in. It was a very warm, bright, Kitsilano bungalow surrounded by trees and gardens - as they all were. This one though was filled with wondrous, bright and deep colour-filled paintings. Turns out, Peter was the painter. In his fifties now, Peter was making a good living with his art. Peter was as warm and bright as his home. Soft spoken, confident, a gentleman obviously, and attentive to his guest, Amos felt he was in the company of a strong big sister to his young Ontario friends. How the three of them ended up together didn’t come up in conversation and Amos wondered but didn’t feel it was cool to ask.
It was west-coast manners not to ask about work – the reply out here to “what do you do?” was to name your passion; as in “I sail.”. But when Amos announced that he’d have to leave soon to pick up his cab for the 4pm start of the night shift, Jake asked him if he knew “The Underground”. “It’s where I tend bar” explained Jake. Amos recognized the bar. His cab had been to them all by now. It was an electro-funk dance bar - one of the city’s main establishments for gay men. Amos swallowed that shot of information without a flinch. “Yeah, I know it – off Granville right?” He looked straight into Jake’s searching eyes as he passed him the spliff he’d just lit up. When he sat back to focus on the smoke, Amos could feel Jake and Dave and Peter’s eyes carefully watching him, checking him, with glances back and forth, for reactions.
To shift the attention Amos asked David “Are you working man?” In reply, Dave stood up “Let me show you.” The four of them followed Dave past the kitchen into a hallway leading back to the house’s bedrooms. Amos was doing his best not to have a panic attack. His imagination was running ahead of him. Were they going to seduce him into a homosexual orgy? What if he liked it? How would he tell his mother? His heart rate raced. It was very warm in this hallway.
Dave opened the door at the end of the hall and Amos followed the others in. It was a large room with a wall of windows facing east. It was the Master Bedroom but there was no bed. Instead, at its centre stood an easel with an almost life-sized portrait of Dave - hairy, naked and sensual, surrounded by leafy green sun dappled bushes and bright orange, red and blue flowers.
“Oh wow,” Amos exclaimed, letting out the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Dave, you look like Adam in the garden of Eden.” Peter seemed pleased with the comment. He was watching Dave. Dave laughed to relieve his own discomfort. “Right before the fall - eh Amos?” Peter added quietly, but for all to hear “Innocent and natural.”
Amos could tell that Dave was loving the attention but at the same time unsure about sharing the intimacy of the portrait beyond the four walls of this room. The painting had a story to tell. As Amos soaked it in, it slowly dawned on him that Dave was taking a big risk here - trusting him with this revelation. And it felt like this was a trial run.
Peter and Jake were coaching – gently encouraging Dave to come out of that dark closet where his sexuality was safely locked up - and live it large in the world. Dave had just put his toe in the water – Amos was the first person from his past that he’d come out to. Jake had a huge grin on his face that said “See, the water’s fine, c’mon in.”
On the walk home, Amos’ mind was doing calisthenics. He realized that these guys were the first gay men that he’d actually known – and he liked them. Knowing Dave from an earlier life caused him to readjust his perceptions. There was more to Dave than he’d originally seen. Like Amos, Dave was out here exploring a wider, deeper, freer, wilder version of himself. That afternoon Dave had crossed a raging river of doubt on a slippery log by trusting him. Amos felt like he had crossed that same river without really thinking about it. The land of homosexuality was no longer a dark continent whose natives he could laugh at and scorn from his ignorant and fearful island of so-called normal sex.
He found that, with some mental exercise, it wasn’t a big deal withholding his judgment of these guys – these friends. His curiosity kept taking him into those bedrooms trying to get his head around what went on there. But he recognized it as the same curiosity he had about everyone’s private sex lives – and what went on in his head wasn’t where he was meeting these guys. They had offered friendship and he had welcomed it. He enjoyed their company and he wasn’t going to let his thoughts get in the way.
In the weeks to come, Dave, Jake and Peter got to meet Danny. Now it was Amos’ turn to watch his friends for their reactions and eye signals. He wondered what they thought of this coaching Amos had signed up for. He knew that the sight of he and Danny strolling down Vancouver streets was probably stranger to most eyes than seeing two men arm in arm in a lover’s embrace. It’s a lot easier to withhold judgment, Amos noted, when you know that you’re being judged and placed on the far side of normal yourself.
While his new friends definitely caused him to wonder about his own sexuality – could he, under the right circumstances be persuaded to open up to homo-erotic love? He decided he was simply a tourist passing through and there was no chance of him staying - even for a visit.
It was decided for him really. It wasn’t like there was a choice or a decision to be made. The amount of time he spent thinking about women - women from his past and women in his future - left a well-worn path in his brain when it came to sex. While he supposed he could leave the path and bush-whack - it would be all uphill work. When it came to spending emotional energy on relationships, he was just plain lazy.
He’d avoided the whole dating scene in high school just because he hated the idea of everyone else knowing and talking about his intimate affairs. He was so acutely aware of himself through other’s eyes, that to see his own awkward attempts at love being the subject of discussion was akin to putting his balls on the altar for public sacrifice. It just wasn’t worth it.
So, he kept himself pure. Or, he kept his own version of sex in a closet of a different kind. He had a Hollywood Playboy, combined with an Archie comic-book - Betty and Veronica - image of women that he’d managed to preserve right through his adolescence. Along with an idealized vision of the perfect woman – the one who would stand by him - or maybe just behind him – trusted, affectionate, understanding – like a good dog - only with a body out of a Playboy magazine.
Porn magazines – soft porn left room for his imagination to work – was much easier than a relationship any day. You could just close the cover with very little mess and put it away until the urge surged again. Minor guilt pangs were easier to live with than demands of a human being who wanted or expected a piece of his attention. The shame of being a boy in the eyes of men was better than risking embarrassment in the hands of a woman.
But it happened anyway. It was closing time and three young, more than tipsy, women climbed into his cab. They were in a good mood and teased Amos with harmless innuendo and flirting. “Hey, he’s cute, look at those shoulders – two of us could curl up in those!” Amos surprised himself by not choking up and turning red. Instead he played along “There’s room for all three of you in these arms ladies.” And they loved it. He thought that maybe he was in for a good tip.
She lived furthest away and was the last to be dropped off. The laughs turned into life stories. Heather didn’t know many people here. She’d grown up on the island – a small town girl in the big city. She and her friends were off-duty hospital nurses. When she invited him up to her apartment for a drink, Amos’ blood pumped a little faster in his veins. He liked her down to earth sense of humour. His sensitive stuck-up meter didn’t register with her at all. She put him at ease with a friendly touch as they met on the sidewalk steering him towards the apartment doorway.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” she laughed, “you’ll be getting the wrong idea about me. Why am I trusting you? You could be a serial killer.”
“Yeah, I don’t know why either. Are you crazy?” he teased “I’m going to have to ask you to give me all your butcher’s knives when we get upstairs.” They laughed and teased each other along these lines in the elevator and down the hall into her apartment. Amos found it as sensible, clean, and maybe just a little cutesy - as its owner. Heather seemed as comfortable in this place as she was in her own body. She had a natural physicality that quietened him - as if he was a skittish horse entering a stable after running wild for a season.
He called her the next week after fully debating the issue with Dan. Dan said it was good for man to have a mistress – the implication being that Amos’ passions needed to stay focused on the training. A woman on the side was okay. Amos thought Danny was maybe just a bit jealous. He liked that. And he didn’t like the way a one-night-stand looked on him. And he definitely liked the way Heather felt – natural and easy like an old pair of jeans. If only he could keep it uncomplicated.
He wouldn’t tell her where he lived – letting her know at dinner that second time that he was too messed up, too self-absorbed for a relationship and she would have to just enjoy his company when she had it and not get any ideas about anything more. Heather agreed with a silent smile – she wasn’t going to scare this stray cat away with a collar. She knew that he was hungry and had come back to her door for more.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
First day’s ski in the Rockies
He was a tourist behind the wheel of a Vancouver cab with one sole aim in life – to ski the Rocky Mountains. A North Van rich kid climbed into his cab and they got talking ski talk and this guy said “ you know that Whistler opens tomorrow eh?”
“No, I hadn’t heard man.”
“Well officially, it’s the day after tomorrow, but the tradition is that they open up the hills for the locals for one day of free skiing before the throngs arrive.”
That was the only invitation Amos needed. Next morning before dawn he had his gear packed in the Fleshmobile and was headed up Highway 99. He’d been there in the summer - stayed at his treeplanting girlfriends’ family condo - so he knew where to find the ski hill and went straight there. The Whistler village was under construction, only a couple of stores and brand new deluxe hotels were open for business. He parked the car and walked past them directly to the ski hill. He was a man on a mission.
Amos was both surprised and delighted when, sure enough, the young, obviously envious, lift operators welcomed his ticket-less butt onto the chair-lift. With a huge grin on his face the chair swung him up into the hills. He was alone on the five person chair. There was hardly anyone there that morning. It might have had something to do with the heavy cloud and mist lying low over the bottom of the mountain. Amos had been waiting months for this day and there was no way that clouds were going to daunt his hopes.
His heart was pounding from excitement and a good dose of fear as the lift took him higher and higher up and over the rock faces and tree tops. He could only see what was directly below and around him the fog was so thick. He was higher than any hill in Ontario within the first ten minutes. In the pit of his stomach a stew of worry stirred in with the excitement and adrenaline in his system and he thought he might puke.
And then, with another sweep up over a cliff face, his chariot broke free from the clouds and he entered paradise. The sun shone bright in a blue, cloudless sky, on a mountain of white, white, white snow! Breaking through into heaven out of the dim mortal reality - for this Ontario lad – truly a dream come true. He couldn’t help but begin bouncing in his seat and whooping it up along with the riders in the chairs in front of him.
This was the dream he’d been pursuing – what he’d given up law school to pursue. This was why he was alive – to live out his adolescent ambition of a Rocky Mountain ski bum – and he was doing it! His heart was soaring like a hawk high over the mountain.
Now, getting back down the mountain was a very different experience for our hero Amos. It was an experience that brought him very quickly back down to earth. He had his long stiff skis - perfect for Ontario’s icy slopes - shipped from home. He’d bought equally stiff boots on sale that fall to cement his ski-bum resolve. Now, he hit the slopes with enthusiasm only to discover that he didn’t have a clue about how to ski in two feet of snow.
Deep snow in Ontario meant you might have snow up to your ankles. Most of the time you were traversing hard packed, machine-groomed snow. Very often you had to deal with large sheets of ice to cross between the edges where hundreds of skiers had pushed the snow before you. Skiing in untouched snow up to his knees was totally different.
Amos took several tumbles before he’d made it down even part of the first slope. His ski tips kept getting pulled this way and that and the more he fought to muscle them together, the more they misbehaved. He was determined to enjoy this though. He kept pulling his legs back under him and struggling, staggering for balance, stabbing his poles deep into the snow looking for something solid to push against.
About half way down the mountain, he wiped out good enough to make him stop and sit After he’d collected his brains and equipment scattered across the hill, he sat and stewed. If breaking through those clouds had been a Rocky Mountain high, then he’d fallen flat on his face the very next thing. This was no dream. This was a nightmare. He couldn’t do this. What a disaster! What seemed at first to be a wonderful gift had turned into an incredible challenge.
As a poet, the metaphor wasn’t lost on him. Just as he’d sought out the freedom and fun of life alone on the west coast, he was finding that what seemed great from far was far from great. Complications and unseen challenges required new skill and insight untested ‘til now.
What was he gonna do? Give up and go home?
Like fuck! Amos answered his own questions. “FUCK THAT!” he said out loud. Hearing his own voice in defiance kindled a resolve in his belly. He could do it. He would do it. It just meant learning how to ski all over again. He learned to ski once, he could do it again. And if that was what it would take to ski the Rockies that winter, then, that’s what he’d do. He had all winter. He had his whole life ahead to learn one lesson at a time – one small step at a time. So, he began.
He managed to get to the bottom of the mountain feeling totally exhausted. His knees were as weak and wobbly as a new born colt’s. His shoulder’s ached as if he’d been carrying bags of cement all day. He was tired and breathing heavy, but he wasn’t totally discouraged. He got back on the lift in spite of his brain’s request for the chalet.
The rest of the day he hacked his way down the slopes – falling often, but with every fall he was learning. Skiing in deep snow was more about sitting back on his skiis and persuading, not pushing, his skiis to shift with his weight. Trying to force his feet around and set his edges hard would get him back into trouble. He had to lighten up. Get lighter on his feet – he laughed thinking of his new gay friends – more west coast swoosh and less Ontario macho man. It would take some time.
Back at the car, Amos packed his skiis and headed out for the little secluded parkette at the end of a street at the edge of the town. He’d spotted it that summer, packing it away in his memory as part of the plan he was cooking up. Out of the trunk, he dragged the canvas six-man tent he’d brought tree-planting. It must have weighed a hundred pounds and somehow in the deep snow he wrestled it up. Lassoing poles and tying the centre rail off to nearby trees took energy from stores he didn’t think he had left in him.
When he had it up though, (just the one side with the door in it) and a pot of soup cooking on the Coleman stove, there couldn’t have been a young man on the planet more satisfied with the choices he’d made. He was proud that the plans he’d crafted were working. Lifting the mug of soup to his lips and feeling the warmth go down through him he decided - living in a dream was a good place to be. His breath raised like smoke from his lips in a satisfied prayer of thanksgiving.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Mastering the Dance
The unspoken deal was sealed. In exchange for the devotion of a student, Danny would share his secrets to life lived large – free of the ties of a petty morality and the restraints of social norms that scared one back into the herd. The call of the true self would always take you beyond the bounds of what’s expected. Boundaries kept sacred by the so-called successful; Bankers, Vice-principals, cops and certain Sunday-school teachers.
Those people were good at being good - they enjoyed snitching on kindergarten mates for colouring outside the lines – and with the wrong colours too! How did they ever become so powerful? What in their threats carried such fear? How long did one have to be an outcast before you discovered that those threats of exclusion and shame could push you no further than you’d already been pushed?
There was another set of rules. Rules made and kept by those who excelled at crossing the line where the rules lie. All the forbidden fruits of violence, sex, and greed were there to be stolen and sold. The outlaw rules were as tough to keep as the others. The keepers of the outlaw codes were as mean-spirited and power-hungry as those who patrolled moral codes – both armed with petty jealousies – chunks, not chips, on their shoulders.
Those without talent for either good, or evil, ended up serving both sets of rules at the same time – caught between the impossible, half-starved, choices of staying straight and doing time in dead-end jobs or being criminal and risk doing time in all-expenses paid government hotels. But serving, always in service, to whoever controlled the payouts and punishments.
The third option was to live with beauty as your Master. These folk danced the road between the two shoulders crossing the centre lines, changing direction with the wind, and enjoying the trip seemingly uninterested in destinations. They could turn the grey pavement between morality and immorality, between the sacred and the profane, between the profound and the silly, into the yellow-brick road. This alchemy was both worthless and priceless - depending on who your patrons were. Do you dance for the Maker creating sidewalk masterpieces washed away with the rain? Or do you deal with the Devil putting trifles on canvas treasured behind locked inner-circle gallery doors?
Commerce was the fourth way. It’s rules marched single-file somewhere between the good and the bad. Commerce took anything that you could pin a price tag to - and flogged it. The value of the endeavor was in the mind of the purchaser. They were simply the a-moral dealers of human hungers. Those with talent for it kept careful track of who ruled who. They could measure it with numbers. They’d never consider that those numbers are simply symbols that stand in for the heartbeats of time.
And if they did slow enough to listen, or feel those heartbeats inside - stargazing with a lover, or alone and exposed to the great emptiness of the impossible symbol zero - they’d be called on cellphones back to the service of downtown cathedral towers whose nameless gods were paid tribute with stories and myths of the “what’s real”. Truths told in select clubs, schools, and vacation retreats. Never ask who keeps the beat. Who first hummed life into rock and water? Who loved them all – good and bad, and artists and busy-ones? They proved how real their gods were with their chequebooks – the only true test of value.
The ocean tides found their way again into English Bay, raising expectations to the moon only to release them and let them slip away again. Grouse Mountain watched over whatever this batch of humans could come up with. It was hard to surprise a mountain. Generations had come and gone from these shores. The numbers of humans and their habitations were increasing. They covered the shorelines and the hills like a thick, leafy, creeping vine that strangled its host and crowded out all competitors for the little sun that shone on Vancouver’s shores. The mountain waited and watched and wondered when this cycle would reach its full turn. The beginning of the end is hard to see even for a mountain. You need a god’s eye view. Humans only get it in retrospect.
Amos had the feeling he wasn’t Danny’s first student. Danny would make certain allusions to folks he’d tutored in the past, but would never talk about them. A direct question would evoke only a chuckle and change of subject. It seemed a subject maybe too sacred to spoil with talk? Maybe Danny was just passing along his own method of self-schooling that had gotten him through the tough times? Maybe someone had taken Dan under their wing and shown him the ropes - the moves - the way?
He would talk about certain individuals who shone in his galaxy brighter than the rest. They were people of imagination and tenacity who had been tested by life and refused to let hardships be anything but lessons. Growing up in an Ontario Housing project in an east-end Ottawa neigbhourhood, he’d become fast friends with Phil Magiman. Impressed first and foremost with physical strength and beauty, Danny would always begin the stories of Phil by reminding Amos that he was a champion wrestler. Then, he would go on, Phil was brilliant – a philosopher, scientist, and engineer – completely self-trained.
Phil had never got caught up in the gang scene like Danny but used his intelligence right away to invent and create. With a trade as a welder supporting him, he and a partner had begun creating and patenting their inventions. Parenthood inspired ingenuity. A large Pharmaceutical company picked up two of their child safety devices – one to keep cupboard doors from opening to prying little hands, and another to keep parents more attentive to their children bouncing away the hours in those doorway jumper swings.
Money had started rolling in. More inventions were spawned and Phil’s family grew to four. Just as he was on the verge of leaving behind a middle-class life, like he’d already left behind his low-income childhood, everything turned around on him. In a series of betrayals; first the Pharmaceutical company, then his partner, and finally his wife took it all away. As Danny described it, Amos pictured an ocean storm with waves stripping the cargo from the decks of a small boat. Finally, a wave swept Phil from the deck of his craft into the sea. He was stripped bare, beaten, and spit out on the beach. If Phil could wrestle himself away from gravity’s pin, then Amos could get off his butt and follow Dan to the gym.
Dan was living off Government Unemployment Insurance cheques from his last stint as a construction labourer. He had to stay in shape for his next gig. He showed Amos how to gain access to the downtown YMCA gym without paying. There was no sneaking or lurking involved. The technique involved assuming an attitude that the world belonged to one’s self and never questioning one’s right to be there - for free. It was all, as far as Amos could tell, in the greeting of the gatekeeper. Dan’s physical presence was intimidating but it was his smile and open, vulnerable, face that would disarm. Being greeted by this guy as an equal; as someone worthy of dignity, was as good as any currency.
Dan would enter singing some tune, calling out “hey Compadre, how’s it hanging?” to the guy handing out the towels at the desk. He’d greet Dan by name, like a local celebrity. Somehow, Amos observed, Dan had paid his way with this guy – met him on a level more valuable than the rules he was paid to keep. Amos was handed a towel with a nod and a grin that said - anyone on this guy’s coat-tails was in for a ride.
There was a routine, a ritual, discipled in the gym. Dan took Amos through the sets he’d designed to keep himself in shape. Most of them involved bending and lifting, bending and lifting, twisting and stretching; maintaining flexibility so that when it came time to sling concrete blocks again, they’d be light as feathers and Dan could whistle through the work day keeping the tempo of the crew dancing – and his bosses smiling. Amos had worked summer construction jobs. He could see how valuable Danny’s energy, strength, and spirit would be on a construction site. He followed the routine and learned it until he could show up in a gym alone and look like he knew what he was doing.
Danny even got him out jogging a couple of times. “C’mon young warrior” he’d coax him “just around the block.” He would prod and push and encourage Amos jogging backwards to Amos’s forwards trudge along each length of city street. But Amos knew that running wasn’t for him. Running wasn’t what saved him from that Grizzly in the mountains. No, he was better at standing his ground. He could walk for hours, shuffle up to any mountaintop, but pounding his feet into concrete for Amos was crossing the line from self-care into self-abuse.
On the days that Amos would join Dan in these rituals, Dan would let Amos treat him to a breakfast afterwards at one of their favourite haunts. The joys of eating well, was another one of the four corners of Dan’s method. Eating well, looking good, working with soul were the three essentials. Keeping it all light with music, humour, beauty, sacred ideas and conversations rounded out those hard corners into a circle that rolled morning into long afternoons, evenings into night into dream-time, mystery-time, time to begin again whistling, wondering, wandering with purpose soaking it all up with a hungry curiosity and an animal instinct that kept you grounded and earthy and hunting.
Sex was what drove Dan into the day. He was always hunting. Nothing; no lesson, no conversation, no meal, was more important than the opportunity to turn a woman’s head his way and test her eyes for hunger. Danny would leap, run, cross the street, jog backwards, whatever it took to meet a single woman. Every woman who passed his way would be greeted with an appreciative remark. “Gorgeous!” he’d say, by way of greeting “Wonderful!” he’d whistle turning to appreciate the curves she cut in passing.
Amos was completely embarrassed and scandalized by this approach to the opposite sex. Amos met woman as if across a great chasm of respect and fear. Danny met them as if across a mattress. What surprised Amos was how many women, while refusing to give Dan the time of day, seemed to soak up the attention and glow a little brighter for it. Sure, maybe most would give him scorn, but there were lots who responded. The saucy ones would swing their hips just a little more – toss their hair – enjoying the power of denial. The straight and skirted ones would reveal nothing - but Amos would often catch the smirk – the glee of being Eve - in their eyes. Sure, Danny would get his share of scorn, but that did little to dampen the fire that was burning hot, as he’d say, “in his savage loins”.
He showed Amos the best shops to pick up second hand clothes. They found a black linen jacket that Amos could pull off with jeans and sneakers. Dan had a brown wool blazer that he’d wear with his leather wingtip shoes when he wanted to be in society. When his cheque would arrive, they’d dine at classy Italian, German, or maybe a favourite Mexican place on West 4th.
When things were lean, they’d travel across the city for what Dan would call a “scoff”. At all you can eat, buffet, restaurants the growing boys would revel in meat and carb feasts washed down with gallons of coffee. A favourite was the Countryman Buffet. Ribs and chicken smothered in a sweet tangy sauce were scoffed down with thick crusts of sourdough bread. Plates of roast beef and potatoes in a brown gravy with green beans and pickles would balance the meal off. Berry pies, cheesecake, and brownies slid down with ice cream and more coffee. Amos couldn’t believe the place could stay in business with customers like them. It was one of those un-real situations that kept occurring as he accompanied Dan around the city.
To Amos, the whole city seemed more than a little unreal. The beauty of the ocean sunsets he’d catch crossing the Granville Island bridge in his cab made him feel like he was living someone else’s life. The sun sparkling on the south face of Grouse Mountain in the morning, the Lion’s Head peaks just beyond, would catch Amos by surprise. The ocean waves pounding; sending its scents into the streets, seemed to come from another time just beyond memory. Even the warm rains welcomed you into them to explore the wet greys the concrete offered. This was much different from the cold stinging rains of Lake Ontario that drove you indoors to watch from windows or turn to TV.
One rainy day Dan showed up with two umbrellas. “Let’s go man” he called to Amos throwing an umbrella at him. “Rain is from the Maker. It’s a chance to be close to God. Don’t miss it.” They’d walk down the lush green sidestreets – every yard had its own variety of tree and flower. Some Amos would recognize, others were unknown, but they all seemed larger and greener than what grew in the East. Even the leaf stems seemed thicker as if every single leaf had a better grip on life out here. They’d always end up down at the ocean. Rain and waves would play with mists and breezes to produce a mist-ical feel that was beyond anything captured in print or imagination. To feel it on your skin was the only way to know it.
On these walks, or over huge pans of lasagna or shepherd’s pie that they’d build for themselves, the talk would always begin and end with authors, artists, musicians. The one thing about his past that Amos could get some credit from Dan about, was his knowledge of literature. He raved to Dan about Dostoyevsky; about his moral authority and the rich colours, both dark and light, that he painted the world with. He couldn’t get him interested in the brainy Camus and Sarte though. Dan couldn’t believe Amos hadn’t read Tolstoy yet. He gave him a biography – as thick as “War and Peace” - and urged him to read it. Amos introduced Danny to Matt Cohen and Al Purdy, eastern Ontario boys grittier than the slick Montreal crowd. Danny opened up the awful, earthy, American trilogy of Henry Miller to Amos’ virgin eyes.
Miller’s descriptions of his journey into author-ity captivated Amos. The world he lived in; hookers and scammers and thieves, was Danny’s home turf. The way Miller found beauty, and the shine of the sacred, in those rooms and streets was entrancing to Amos. Jack Kerouac seemed an innocent romantic to Miller’s dirty-handed portrayal of the light that streaked all the way through the dark tunnel of life’s misery.
Amos secretly took heart in Miller’s story. It had taken him decades of living before he could put the way he saw into words on paper. He spent his best and brightest, youthful, years just learning how to see - before he even dared to try to write anything down. In Miller, Amos learned that the circle could turn and turn and tumble in a jewel’s sanding box before a gem was ready. Turning life over and over and over again. Turning over the lessons with the truth of experience, turning truth on its head with the lessons of time, turning hope upside down with the ugly underside of honesty, would turn, in time, turn out something worth saying.
They’d haunt second-hand book stores and assault music stores. Dan would go through the stacks rapidly pulling albums from their rows growing a pile that he’d take from aisle to aisle. Amos would watch as the store owner’s attention would be drawn to this frenzied all-you-can-eat buffet approach. Finally Dan would heft his stack of maybe twenty albums and drop it on the counter. “Fifty bucks?” he’d offer. If the answer was a “no”, he was out the door. Maybe next time the owner would be hungrier for a sale.
It’s not like he and Danny were attached at the hip. Amos worked the cabbie night shift, four til four, - as many days as he could take at a stretch. He was squirreling away a stash for his ski trips that winter. On a good night he could clear $100. Slow nights he’d cover gas and the cab rate and come home with only enough to lend Dan til the month’s end. Saving money seemed a talent beyond Dan’s reach – or desire. When he had money, he shared it with a generosity that left Amos humbled. When he was without, he lived hand to mouth and looked, without shame, for other hands to help him out.
Amos learned to give up trying to track the loans and trust that it would all come out in the wash between friends. The Union Hall would call Danny up from time to time and he’d have work for a week or two. Their paths would barely cross with Dan working days and Amos nights.
Helen would keep them informed of each other’s health. Amos noticed how Helen was still charmed by Danny’s domestic presence. Dan knew how to keep a place as carefully as his own personal grooming - leaving only a few crumbs for his pet mice in their basement cupboards. Helen was too courteous to complain to Dan about Amos’ habits. But Dan wasn’t.
Every so often, he’d blow off steam in Amos’ direction. He’d confront Amos about the laundry and dishes left where they dropped. Amos would bring up the issue of money’s lent. Dan would push back with a curled lip about Amos’ petty and caustic snide remarks. Amos had a dirty little habit of regular put-downs. He’d try to hide them in unfunny, joking, observations about his companions’ observed weaknesses. It was Amos’ way of asserting authority – letting others know that he could see their ugly sides – trying to make it okay to say such cutting things by making a joke of it.
What Amos didn’t see was how it revealed his own poverty of grace and manners. He was blind to how those little put-downs, that he thought were witty and harmless, were endured by friends who graciously let the comments pass. Danny held the mirror up. He made Amos look at the prickly barbs on his hide – how they were a poor form of protection – keeping others at a safe distance.
In spite of this nasty blind spot, Amos had qualities that would attract. When he was relaxed and natural, his laugh came out strong and easily. His smile would put strangers at ease and was a gentle stroke of fur that his friends would come close for. He was smart and attentive. When his watery eyes were on you, you felt like a thoughtful mind was watching. That is, until you realized that behind the gaze, as often as not, a whole other inner story was being followed while he tuned in and out to your company. For some, it became a challenge to see how long they could hold that mercurial attention. Others would take offence. Most were just as self-absorbed and didn’t even notice Amos’ inner wanderings.
While the smile and eyes were attractive, he had a large, quiet presence that for most was a barrier. He projected a silent shield that strangers sensed was tough to get around. When he tried to get past his own silence with attempts at small talk in social settings - his own distaste for conversations without purpose – people could smell like bad breath. The truth was that while at times Amos longed for companions, he mostly found his own company sufficient. He didn’t consider himself a loner. He was just very good at being alone and often too lazy to put himself out there, in the world, to share.
Sharing, generosity really, was the subject of Danny’s school. It was the only lesson that mattered. Dan would share his dream of gathering musicians and artists to come together for a benefit concert for Mother Earth. He was sure they would do it and that he could pull it off. He’d list off the musicians and bands he’d approach. He knew their hearts from their music. Bruce Coburn would do it he knew. And Neil Young – more gritty Eastern Ontario boys. Carlos Santana was a sure bet. Dexy’s Midnight Runners were near the top of his list. He knew Bob Gandolph had it in him. “We’re here to create; to enjoy what the Creator makes, and to make whatever we’re given even more beautiful.” They talked it over and over. They agreed and elaborated and saw evidence of it in every place and every one.
Amos’ walk with Danny was taking him deeper and deeper into his own soul. Danny was impatiently hurrying him down into Dante’s Inferno. While Amos didn’t get a lot out of that dense old text, he did get this. The sooner you hit bottom rung of hell, the sooner you could crawl up Satan’s leg, get through his asshole, and make it back into the world. Getting past the demons and getting ready to share was Dan’s program.
What mattered was your own sense of style. To be an artist was to be unique. To do what others feared, not for shock value, but to push back the night-terrors that kept people from seeing the beauty all around them; in everything. It was your job to give others courage; to get them to grasp onto the hope waiting to spring up in every broken soul, in every hurting place, where greed and hate leaves fear in its shadows. The trick was – to live it – and to let your living be your canvas.
Amos had pretty much forgotten the whole idea of Danny actually being the Devil. When he thought of it now, knowing what a sweetheart, sincere, artist lay behind that angry exterior, he’d laugh at his crazy notions. How simplistic. How could he have been caught - thinking a tough exterior meant a sinister heart too?
Amos had been yearning out loud for some weed to smoke. He hadn’t really encountered a good source at the cab company. While wishing out loud that he had some, he also kept trying to convince Dan how weed could really add to one’s creative point of view. At first, Danny had ignored the request. But when Amos kept going on about it, Mephistopheles was forced to keep his part of the bargain.
They got into Amos’ car and drove across the city to the eastern edge of the Vancouver suburbs where the city became strung out into long streets of industrial malls interspersed with blocks of houses barren empty of even the shade of a mature tree. They found Danny’s friend Derek at home and soon they were high. It was good weed.
Derek was young. Maybe even younger than Amos. But he was a street cat. Sure his house was a dump, but he had his own place and had been there for a while. Danny and Derek exchanged news in few words. They seemed to have an understanding between them that Amos wondered at. There was a lot unsaid behind the smiles and nods they exchanged as they smoked another reefer.
Feeling unsettled and more than a little uneasy about the focus these two guys were putting on him, Amos announced he wanted to find a party. Danny and Derek looked at each other and shrugged. While Derek went into the other room to get showered and dressed, Danny sat grinning at Amos. Amos became uncomfortable with this fixed attention and said “What?”.
Danny began to spill out a devil’s prophecy. It was like he had been watching all of Amos’ dreams while he mused or slept. He began describing in a flat surly monotone how Amos wanted to become a writer. He went on in a terrible mocking telling of how Amos saw himself writing in a cabin in the woods with a faithful woman at his side like a dog. It terrified Amos. He hadn’t told anyone of these private thoughts. Danny’s eyes pinned him into his chair and his smile made him small and foolish. Danny was channeling an evil, mocking spirit. The drugs had opened his heart to this demon. Danny was gone and now Amos was sitting facing the demon who lived in his own mirror.
It was a cruel and cutting attack on his most cherished self-image. He’d experienced drug-induced paranoia many times. Having a cherished self-image twisted upon itself was part of the attraction of drugs – never letting oneself get too caught up in mental illusions and delusions was almost a spiritual practice. But to go through that in your own head was one thing. To have someone else tap into those secret thoughts and portray them exactly was haunting. The dark part of himself that could twist things was now sitting across from him – laughing at his surprise like a cat with a mouse.
Amos was caught, trapped, exposed, helpless to rescue his hidden heart from the fangs of this devil.
When Derek came back into the room Danny was still going on. With relief Amos saw that Derek wanted no part of it – what would he have done if they’d teamed up on him? Derek seemed to recognize instinctively that Danny had changed personalities. Something he’d seen before.
“You still want to go?” he asked Amos. Amos said “Let’s just get out of here eh?” So they piled out the door and into the Dart, Danny laughing and singing in the back seat. They didn’t make it far before Danny called for a piss stop. Still in a residential neighbourhood, they pulled into a dark lot behind a warehouse. Out of the car, Danny was hooting and hollering. Amos told him to keep it down – he didn’t want to attract cops in this stoned condition. In answer, Dan threw his beer bottle against a wall.
Amos looked at Derek and said “I’m not taking this guy downtown.” Derek said “Why don’t you just take me home?” But Danny would have none of it. He was belligerent and threatening and getting uglier still laughing at the two of them - dancing across the asphalt. So, they left him there in the darkened lot.
Danny showed up the next day about noon. He’d spent the night in prison was all he’d tell. Whether he remembered the episode in the house, Amos was never sure. When he tried to describe it – Dan looked blankly at him – and he felt foolish all over again trying to explain what’s best left unsaid between soul warriors. What Dan remembered was that Amos had betrayed him by leaving him there for the cops. After that, Amos was a lot more careful what he asked Danny to help him with.
Those people were good at being good - they enjoyed snitching on kindergarten mates for colouring outside the lines – and with the wrong colours too! How did they ever become so powerful? What in their threats carried such fear? How long did one have to be an outcast before you discovered that those threats of exclusion and shame could push you no further than you’d already been pushed?
There was another set of rules. Rules made and kept by those who excelled at crossing the line where the rules lie. All the forbidden fruits of violence, sex, and greed were there to be stolen and sold. The outlaw rules were as tough to keep as the others. The keepers of the outlaw codes were as mean-spirited and power-hungry as those who patrolled moral codes – both armed with petty jealousies – chunks, not chips, on their shoulders.
Those without talent for either good, or evil, ended up serving both sets of rules at the same time – caught between the impossible, half-starved, choices of staying straight and doing time in dead-end jobs or being criminal and risk doing time in all-expenses paid government hotels. But serving, always in service, to whoever controlled the payouts and punishments.
The third option was to live with beauty as your Master. These folk danced the road between the two shoulders crossing the centre lines, changing direction with the wind, and enjoying the trip seemingly uninterested in destinations. They could turn the grey pavement between morality and immorality, between the sacred and the profane, between the profound and the silly, into the yellow-brick road. This alchemy was both worthless and priceless - depending on who your patrons were. Do you dance for the Maker creating sidewalk masterpieces washed away with the rain? Or do you deal with the Devil putting trifles on canvas treasured behind locked inner-circle gallery doors?
Commerce was the fourth way. It’s rules marched single-file somewhere between the good and the bad. Commerce took anything that you could pin a price tag to - and flogged it. The value of the endeavor was in the mind of the purchaser. They were simply the a-moral dealers of human hungers. Those with talent for it kept careful track of who ruled who. They could measure it with numbers. They’d never consider that those numbers are simply symbols that stand in for the heartbeats of time.
And if they did slow enough to listen, or feel those heartbeats inside - stargazing with a lover, or alone and exposed to the great emptiness of the impossible symbol zero - they’d be called on cellphones back to the service of downtown cathedral towers whose nameless gods were paid tribute with stories and myths of the “what’s real”. Truths told in select clubs, schools, and vacation retreats. Never ask who keeps the beat. Who first hummed life into rock and water? Who loved them all – good and bad, and artists and busy-ones? They proved how real their gods were with their chequebooks – the only true test of value.
The ocean tides found their way again into English Bay, raising expectations to the moon only to release them and let them slip away again. Grouse Mountain watched over whatever this batch of humans could come up with. It was hard to surprise a mountain. Generations had come and gone from these shores. The numbers of humans and their habitations were increasing. They covered the shorelines and the hills like a thick, leafy, creeping vine that strangled its host and crowded out all competitors for the little sun that shone on Vancouver’s shores. The mountain waited and watched and wondered when this cycle would reach its full turn. The beginning of the end is hard to see even for a mountain. You need a god’s eye view. Humans only get it in retrospect.
Amos had the feeling he wasn’t Danny’s first student. Danny would make certain allusions to folks he’d tutored in the past, but would never talk about them. A direct question would evoke only a chuckle and change of subject. It seemed a subject maybe too sacred to spoil with talk? Maybe Danny was just passing along his own method of self-schooling that had gotten him through the tough times? Maybe someone had taken Dan under their wing and shown him the ropes - the moves - the way?
He would talk about certain individuals who shone in his galaxy brighter than the rest. They were people of imagination and tenacity who had been tested by life and refused to let hardships be anything but lessons. Growing up in an Ontario Housing project in an east-end Ottawa neigbhourhood, he’d become fast friends with Phil Magiman. Impressed first and foremost with physical strength and beauty, Danny would always begin the stories of Phil by reminding Amos that he was a champion wrestler. Then, he would go on, Phil was brilliant – a philosopher, scientist, and engineer – completely self-trained.
Phil had never got caught up in the gang scene like Danny but used his intelligence right away to invent and create. With a trade as a welder supporting him, he and a partner had begun creating and patenting their inventions. Parenthood inspired ingenuity. A large Pharmaceutical company picked up two of their child safety devices – one to keep cupboard doors from opening to prying little hands, and another to keep parents more attentive to their children bouncing away the hours in those doorway jumper swings.
Money had started rolling in. More inventions were spawned and Phil’s family grew to four. Just as he was on the verge of leaving behind a middle-class life, like he’d already left behind his low-income childhood, everything turned around on him. In a series of betrayals; first the Pharmaceutical company, then his partner, and finally his wife took it all away. As Danny described it, Amos pictured an ocean storm with waves stripping the cargo from the decks of a small boat. Finally, a wave swept Phil from the deck of his craft into the sea. He was stripped bare, beaten, and spit out on the beach. If Phil could wrestle himself away from gravity’s pin, then Amos could get off his butt and follow Dan to the gym.
Dan was living off Government Unemployment Insurance cheques from his last stint as a construction labourer. He had to stay in shape for his next gig. He showed Amos how to gain access to the downtown YMCA gym without paying. There was no sneaking or lurking involved. The technique involved assuming an attitude that the world belonged to one’s self and never questioning one’s right to be there - for free. It was all, as far as Amos could tell, in the greeting of the gatekeeper. Dan’s physical presence was intimidating but it was his smile and open, vulnerable, face that would disarm. Being greeted by this guy as an equal; as someone worthy of dignity, was as good as any currency.
Dan would enter singing some tune, calling out “hey Compadre, how’s it hanging?” to the guy handing out the towels at the desk. He’d greet Dan by name, like a local celebrity. Somehow, Amos observed, Dan had paid his way with this guy – met him on a level more valuable than the rules he was paid to keep. Amos was handed a towel with a nod and a grin that said - anyone on this guy’s coat-tails was in for a ride.
There was a routine, a ritual, discipled in the gym. Dan took Amos through the sets he’d designed to keep himself in shape. Most of them involved bending and lifting, bending and lifting, twisting and stretching; maintaining flexibility so that when it came time to sling concrete blocks again, they’d be light as feathers and Dan could whistle through the work day keeping the tempo of the crew dancing – and his bosses smiling. Amos had worked summer construction jobs. He could see how valuable Danny’s energy, strength, and spirit would be on a construction site. He followed the routine and learned it until he could show up in a gym alone and look like he knew what he was doing.
Danny even got him out jogging a couple of times. “C’mon young warrior” he’d coax him “just around the block.” He would prod and push and encourage Amos jogging backwards to Amos’s forwards trudge along each length of city street. But Amos knew that running wasn’t for him. Running wasn’t what saved him from that Grizzly in the mountains. No, he was better at standing his ground. He could walk for hours, shuffle up to any mountaintop, but pounding his feet into concrete for Amos was crossing the line from self-care into self-abuse.
On the days that Amos would join Dan in these rituals, Dan would let Amos treat him to a breakfast afterwards at one of their favourite haunts. The joys of eating well, was another one of the four corners of Dan’s method. Eating well, looking good, working with soul were the three essentials. Keeping it all light with music, humour, beauty, sacred ideas and conversations rounded out those hard corners into a circle that rolled morning into long afternoons, evenings into night into dream-time, mystery-time, time to begin again whistling, wondering, wandering with purpose soaking it all up with a hungry curiosity and an animal instinct that kept you grounded and earthy and hunting.
Sex was what drove Dan into the day. He was always hunting. Nothing; no lesson, no conversation, no meal, was more important than the opportunity to turn a woman’s head his way and test her eyes for hunger. Danny would leap, run, cross the street, jog backwards, whatever it took to meet a single woman. Every woman who passed his way would be greeted with an appreciative remark. “Gorgeous!” he’d say, by way of greeting “Wonderful!” he’d whistle turning to appreciate the curves she cut in passing.
Amos was completely embarrassed and scandalized by this approach to the opposite sex. Amos met woman as if across a great chasm of respect and fear. Danny met them as if across a mattress. What surprised Amos was how many women, while refusing to give Dan the time of day, seemed to soak up the attention and glow a little brighter for it. Sure, maybe most would give him scorn, but there were lots who responded. The saucy ones would swing their hips just a little more – toss their hair – enjoying the power of denial. The straight and skirted ones would reveal nothing - but Amos would often catch the smirk – the glee of being Eve - in their eyes. Sure, Danny would get his share of scorn, but that did little to dampen the fire that was burning hot, as he’d say, “in his savage loins”.
He showed Amos the best shops to pick up second hand clothes. They found a black linen jacket that Amos could pull off with jeans and sneakers. Dan had a brown wool blazer that he’d wear with his leather wingtip shoes when he wanted to be in society. When his cheque would arrive, they’d dine at classy Italian, German, or maybe a favourite Mexican place on West 4th.
When things were lean, they’d travel across the city for what Dan would call a “scoff”. At all you can eat, buffet, restaurants the growing boys would revel in meat and carb feasts washed down with gallons of coffee. A favourite was the Countryman Buffet. Ribs and chicken smothered in a sweet tangy sauce were scoffed down with thick crusts of sourdough bread. Plates of roast beef and potatoes in a brown gravy with green beans and pickles would balance the meal off. Berry pies, cheesecake, and brownies slid down with ice cream and more coffee. Amos couldn’t believe the place could stay in business with customers like them. It was one of those un-real situations that kept occurring as he accompanied Dan around the city.
To Amos, the whole city seemed more than a little unreal. The beauty of the ocean sunsets he’d catch crossing the Granville Island bridge in his cab made him feel like he was living someone else’s life. The sun sparkling on the south face of Grouse Mountain in the morning, the Lion’s Head peaks just beyond, would catch Amos by surprise. The ocean waves pounding; sending its scents into the streets, seemed to come from another time just beyond memory. Even the warm rains welcomed you into them to explore the wet greys the concrete offered. This was much different from the cold stinging rains of Lake Ontario that drove you indoors to watch from windows or turn to TV.
One rainy day Dan showed up with two umbrellas. “Let’s go man” he called to Amos throwing an umbrella at him. “Rain is from the Maker. It’s a chance to be close to God. Don’t miss it.” They’d walk down the lush green sidestreets – every yard had its own variety of tree and flower. Some Amos would recognize, others were unknown, but they all seemed larger and greener than what grew in the East. Even the leaf stems seemed thicker as if every single leaf had a better grip on life out here. They’d always end up down at the ocean. Rain and waves would play with mists and breezes to produce a mist-ical feel that was beyond anything captured in print or imagination. To feel it on your skin was the only way to know it.
On these walks, or over huge pans of lasagna or shepherd’s pie that they’d build for themselves, the talk would always begin and end with authors, artists, musicians. The one thing about his past that Amos could get some credit from Dan about, was his knowledge of literature. He raved to Dan about Dostoyevsky; about his moral authority and the rich colours, both dark and light, that he painted the world with. He couldn’t get him interested in the brainy Camus and Sarte though. Dan couldn’t believe Amos hadn’t read Tolstoy yet. He gave him a biography – as thick as “War and Peace” - and urged him to read it. Amos introduced Danny to Matt Cohen and Al Purdy, eastern Ontario boys grittier than the slick Montreal crowd. Danny opened up the awful, earthy, American trilogy of Henry Miller to Amos’ virgin eyes.
Miller’s descriptions of his journey into author-ity captivated Amos. The world he lived in; hookers and scammers and thieves, was Danny’s home turf. The way Miller found beauty, and the shine of the sacred, in those rooms and streets was entrancing to Amos. Jack Kerouac seemed an innocent romantic to Miller’s dirty-handed portrayal of the light that streaked all the way through the dark tunnel of life’s misery.
Amos secretly took heart in Miller’s story. It had taken him decades of living before he could put the way he saw into words on paper. He spent his best and brightest, youthful, years just learning how to see - before he even dared to try to write anything down. In Miller, Amos learned that the circle could turn and turn and tumble in a jewel’s sanding box before a gem was ready. Turning life over and over and over again. Turning over the lessons with the truth of experience, turning truth on its head with the lessons of time, turning hope upside down with the ugly underside of honesty, would turn, in time, turn out something worth saying.
They’d haunt second-hand book stores and assault music stores. Dan would go through the stacks rapidly pulling albums from their rows growing a pile that he’d take from aisle to aisle. Amos would watch as the store owner’s attention would be drawn to this frenzied all-you-can-eat buffet approach. Finally Dan would heft his stack of maybe twenty albums and drop it on the counter. “Fifty bucks?” he’d offer. If the answer was a “no”, he was out the door. Maybe next time the owner would be hungrier for a sale.
It’s not like he and Danny were attached at the hip. Amos worked the cabbie night shift, four til four, - as many days as he could take at a stretch. He was squirreling away a stash for his ski trips that winter. On a good night he could clear $100. Slow nights he’d cover gas and the cab rate and come home with only enough to lend Dan til the month’s end. Saving money seemed a talent beyond Dan’s reach – or desire. When he had money, he shared it with a generosity that left Amos humbled. When he was without, he lived hand to mouth and looked, without shame, for other hands to help him out.
Amos learned to give up trying to track the loans and trust that it would all come out in the wash between friends. The Union Hall would call Danny up from time to time and he’d have work for a week or two. Their paths would barely cross with Dan working days and Amos nights.
Helen would keep them informed of each other’s health. Amos noticed how Helen was still charmed by Danny’s domestic presence. Dan knew how to keep a place as carefully as his own personal grooming - leaving only a few crumbs for his pet mice in their basement cupboards. Helen was too courteous to complain to Dan about Amos’ habits. But Dan wasn’t.
Every so often, he’d blow off steam in Amos’ direction. He’d confront Amos about the laundry and dishes left where they dropped. Amos would bring up the issue of money’s lent. Dan would push back with a curled lip about Amos’ petty and caustic snide remarks. Amos had a dirty little habit of regular put-downs. He’d try to hide them in unfunny, joking, observations about his companions’ observed weaknesses. It was Amos’ way of asserting authority – letting others know that he could see their ugly sides – trying to make it okay to say such cutting things by making a joke of it.
What Amos didn’t see was how it revealed his own poverty of grace and manners. He was blind to how those little put-downs, that he thought were witty and harmless, were endured by friends who graciously let the comments pass. Danny held the mirror up. He made Amos look at the prickly barbs on his hide – how they were a poor form of protection – keeping others at a safe distance.
In spite of this nasty blind spot, Amos had qualities that would attract. When he was relaxed and natural, his laugh came out strong and easily. His smile would put strangers at ease and was a gentle stroke of fur that his friends would come close for. He was smart and attentive. When his watery eyes were on you, you felt like a thoughtful mind was watching. That is, until you realized that behind the gaze, as often as not, a whole other inner story was being followed while he tuned in and out to your company. For some, it became a challenge to see how long they could hold that mercurial attention. Others would take offence. Most were just as self-absorbed and didn’t even notice Amos’ inner wanderings.
While the smile and eyes were attractive, he had a large, quiet presence that for most was a barrier. He projected a silent shield that strangers sensed was tough to get around. When he tried to get past his own silence with attempts at small talk in social settings - his own distaste for conversations without purpose – people could smell like bad breath. The truth was that while at times Amos longed for companions, he mostly found his own company sufficient. He didn’t consider himself a loner. He was just very good at being alone and often too lazy to put himself out there, in the world, to share.
Sharing, generosity really, was the subject of Danny’s school. It was the only lesson that mattered. Dan would share his dream of gathering musicians and artists to come together for a benefit concert for Mother Earth. He was sure they would do it and that he could pull it off. He’d list off the musicians and bands he’d approach. He knew their hearts from their music. Bruce Coburn would do it he knew. And Neil Young – more gritty Eastern Ontario boys. Carlos Santana was a sure bet. Dexy’s Midnight Runners were near the top of his list. He knew Bob Gandolph had it in him. “We’re here to create; to enjoy what the Creator makes, and to make whatever we’re given even more beautiful.” They talked it over and over. They agreed and elaborated and saw evidence of it in every place and every one.
Amos’ walk with Danny was taking him deeper and deeper into his own soul. Danny was impatiently hurrying him down into Dante’s Inferno. While Amos didn’t get a lot out of that dense old text, he did get this. The sooner you hit bottom rung of hell, the sooner you could crawl up Satan’s leg, get through his asshole, and make it back into the world. Getting past the demons and getting ready to share was Dan’s program.
What mattered was your own sense of style. To be an artist was to be unique. To do what others feared, not for shock value, but to push back the night-terrors that kept people from seeing the beauty all around them; in everything. It was your job to give others courage; to get them to grasp onto the hope waiting to spring up in every broken soul, in every hurting place, where greed and hate leaves fear in its shadows. The trick was – to live it – and to let your living be your canvas.
Amos had pretty much forgotten the whole idea of Danny actually being the Devil. When he thought of it now, knowing what a sweetheart, sincere, artist lay behind that angry exterior, he’d laugh at his crazy notions. How simplistic. How could he have been caught - thinking a tough exterior meant a sinister heart too?
Amos had been yearning out loud for some weed to smoke. He hadn’t really encountered a good source at the cab company. While wishing out loud that he had some, he also kept trying to convince Dan how weed could really add to one’s creative point of view. At first, Danny had ignored the request. But when Amos kept going on about it, Mephistopheles was forced to keep his part of the bargain.
They got into Amos’ car and drove across the city to the eastern edge of the Vancouver suburbs where the city became strung out into long streets of industrial malls interspersed with blocks of houses barren empty of even the shade of a mature tree. They found Danny’s friend Derek at home and soon they were high. It was good weed.
Derek was young. Maybe even younger than Amos. But he was a street cat. Sure his house was a dump, but he had his own place and had been there for a while. Danny and Derek exchanged news in few words. They seemed to have an understanding between them that Amos wondered at. There was a lot unsaid behind the smiles and nods they exchanged as they smoked another reefer.
Feeling unsettled and more than a little uneasy about the focus these two guys were putting on him, Amos announced he wanted to find a party. Danny and Derek looked at each other and shrugged. While Derek went into the other room to get showered and dressed, Danny sat grinning at Amos. Amos became uncomfortable with this fixed attention and said “What?”.
Danny began to spill out a devil’s prophecy. It was like he had been watching all of Amos’ dreams while he mused or slept. He began describing in a flat surly monotone how Amos wanted to become a writer. He went on in a terrible mocking telling of how Amos saw himself writing in a cabin in the woods with a faithful woman at his side like a dog. It terrified Amos. He hadn’t told anyone of these private thoughts. Danny’s eyes pinned him into his chair and his smile made him small and foolish. Danny was channeling an evil, mocking spirit. The drugs had opened his heart to this demon. Danny was gone and now Amos was sitting facing the demon who lived in his own mirror.
It was a cruel and cutting attack on his most cherished self-image. He’d experienced drug-induced paranoia many times. Having a cherished self-image twisted upon itself was part of the attraction of drugs – never letting oneself get too caught up in mental illusions and delusions was almost a spiritual practice. But to go through that in your own head was one thing. To have someone else tap into those secret thoughts and portray them exactly was haunting. The dark part of himself that could twist things was now sitting across from him – laughing at his surprise like a cat with a mouse.
Amos was caught, trapped, exposed, helpless to rescue his hidden heart from the fangs of this devil.
When Derek came back into the room Danny was still going on. With relief Amos saw that Derek wanted no part of it – what would he have done if they’d teamed up on him? Derek seemed to recognize instinctively that Danny had changed personalities. Something he’d seen before.
“You still want to go?” he asked Amos. Amos said “Let’s just get out of here eh?” So they piled out the door and into the Dart, Danny laughing and singing in the back seat. They didn’t make it far before Danny called for a piss stop. Still in a residential neighbourhood, they pulled into a dark lot behind a warehouse. Out of the car, Danny was hooting and hollering. Amos told him to keep it down – he didn’t want to attract cops in this stoned condition. In answer, Dan threw his beer bottle against a wall.
Amos looked at Derek and said “I’m not taking this guy downtown.” Derek said “Why don’t you just take me home?” But Danny would have none of it. He was belligerent and threatening and getting uglier still laughing at the two of them - dancing across the asphalt. So, they left him there in the darkened lot.
Danny showed up the next day about noon. He’d spent the night in prison was all he’d tell. Whether he remembered the episode in the house, Amos was never sure. When he tried to describe it – Dan looked blankly at him – and he felt foolish all over again trying to explain what’s best left unsaid between soul warriors. What Dan remembered was that Amos had betrayed him by leaving him there for the cops. After that, Amos was a lot more careful what he asked Danny to help him with.
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