China Blues (8 page)

The trees are huge outside. Dark green. Good view of big dark green trees loaming up above houses as far west as Brunswick. Birds fly around. Nothing unusual that would interest my friend Carol. Starlings, pigeons, sparrows. The good birds, if you want to make a differentiation between colours or size, are outside in the back eating my Armenian landlord’s lingonberry tree and crapping on his red ’86 Buick Skylark. Am I writing very much? 8–10 pages a day which is probably more than I should be, but I’m in love, or impatient, or maybe just too sure of myself. I have decided that I am a man who was never meant to wear clothes. Dressed I merely exhibit the fact that I’m a largely unpublished writer, a genius, perhaps, thank you; naked, almost, I return to my usual more competent seraphic self. i.e. I am more creative. I produce more work every
day, enjoy even the simplest meal, pace myself more slowly in love-making & sleep like a child.

My old friends, I love you so much. But every day I reject more & more of the tinfoil you have tried to pass on to me; & every day I become healthier, stronger & more, I believe in my heart, what my parents originally had in mind. Listen to enormous amounts of classical music. Spend a lot of time in the sun. Royal Comfort, & Calvin Klein. One slice of Steele’s Bakery dark rye with peanut butter before morning coffee.

          All those abrasively angry honking

tenors & hoarse

                   sad altos expressing black anger

& closing me out.

                    It pulls at my heart

walking through this club in the middle of a set

& sitting down for a drink before going on

somewhere else to eat. Because it is so visceral

& makes you think about intention.

                                               It makes you

feel guilty for buying all those Joni Mitchell albums,

all those Tom Waits tapes,

                                  all those

Ry Cooder
CDS.

               It’s not just me. I can see it

on the faces of both my friends. We listen

& then drive north to a different place

before going to eat. How far down can J.D. Souther

get? How far up can Loraine Segato go?

                                                     We want

hot licks we want blue to be an ice-cube

gently laid on the eyelids we want brass to be

the colour yellow maybe Van Gogh’s yellow

or maybe Matisse in a certain mood? As it is, we

don’t even listen to Mingus that much anymore.

I haven’t listened to that album
Mingus Ah Am

for over a year or 2.

                        It’s easy to slide away

from something you love

                                & grew up

believing you understood as naturally

as putting your wristwatch on in the morning. But

things change,

                 for a while, I guess.

We don’t even seem to care if we’re missing

a certain edge.

                A certain perception is being

offered & we’re missing it. My friends are

dumb white boys with good ears,

                                            & they seem to be

saying,

      “You’re talking about the outer dark. Okay,

so where’s the moon?”

                            You see what I mean,

as if

   we don’t

understand the
idea
of falling in a moonless night?

            A New York friend of mine,

                                                     Paul,

said to me one afternoon in a bar in Jamestown,

“You’ve never had any buffalo in Canada,

have you, David?”

                       No of course not you breadhead.

No, he was a good friend. I said, No,

                                                 the buffalo

used to stop well south of the North Dakota border

in the 1720s

              & turn around,

                                    sullenly,

& head back toward Bismarck. Where once there were

many buffalo, and no oil, of course; & now there is

oil; & there are no buffalo at all.

                                           And he said,

“Why haven’t you mythologized them? & don’t give me

that ‘peaceful capitalism’ bullshit.”

                                             We were

drinking New Amsterdams with a plate of fried clams,

& I found it very difficult to answer his question.

          Similarly a friend from Montreal, Anglophone,

you know,

his last name is English but he speaks much better French

than that chinless wonder, Boor ass ah,

said to me,

          & this wasn’t in a bar so much it was in a kitchen

at a party in Scarborough & the kitchen table was a mess

of bottles & glasses & corks

                                   & one wet dishcloth

I guess that was the bar cloth, he said, I don’t know a lot

about the States,

we’d been talking Melville & Florida & Ken Kesey,

separately, 3 subjects,

we were a little pissed, a nice guy, but we weren’t drunk,

he said, “I don’t know a lot about the States, but they don’t

have any peace movement down there, do they?”

                                                                No, of

course not. The peace movement even turns up in fiction

for Christ’s sake, & in films like
FTA,

                                                
Steelyard Blues,

& indirectly in
Five Easy Pieces.

                                        They have peace movements,

sure they do, for sure.

             Sherry was like this also,

in several respects,

my friend the west coast film executive who gave up

on Paramount in 1982

& moved back to New York even though the rents

are astronomical

                    & you can’t go for coffee

after 10, 10:30 p.m., a walk down to Union Square & west,

without wondering about the possibility of being mugged.

Sherry

had a thing about logos, stamps, money, flags perhaps.

Do you, reader, think these things are male attributes?

I’m not sure – I don’t usually find that people

run to stereotype, or at least cultural stereotype,

as much as some people like to think they do.

                                                               Sherry

would say, “I don’t know what it is, it’s not just

that goddam picture of the goddamn Queen lying around;

although why is she on your stamps, David?”

                                                          And then

one night at a bar down in the Village after a play

by Arthur Kopit,

                    called
Indians,
a good title,

but compared to Tomson Highway’s
Dry Lips Oughta Move to

Kapuskasing,
the Kopit play was a kop out, a piece of junk,

& Sherry said, apropos of Norman Mailer saying something

about cards, Niagara Falls, it does, it tumbles,

postcard art, Dadaism, stuff like that,

maybe a Duchamp card from MoMa, whatever, Sherry said,

& I think this is the film producer speaking not the woman,

“You know it’s
OK
to have John Macdonald on some of your money,

but what pisses me off,” she continued, “isn’t a presence

so much it’s an absence.”

                               So we are into Sartre

or Wittgenstein or something. And then she says,

“It’s the absence of Washington
OR
Lincoln

on your stamps. How can you do that? What gives you

the right? Even southerners respect Lincoln.”

                                                           And

I said, Look darling, my great uncle almost saved

Lincoln’s life, so get off my back.

                                           Besides I don’t

think the majority of southerners do respect

Lincoln.

         Harriet was a girl from Baltimore,

she was born in Winnipeg

but her mother was from Seattle, home of the Mariners,

who lose games & most of whom don’t own

sailboats. We flew to Vancouver together

with her hand inside my shirt for most of the 4 hours

because she said the flight made her feel “queasy.”

She was bright.

She had an
MA
from Princeton & then she switched to

psychology.

             But she

couldn’t tell me if B. Franklin’s parents were born

over here. He was 3rd or 4th generation, I think,

& she said, “I think American men are sexier

than Canadian men.”

                         And I said, What? Sexier

than Donald Sutherland,

                               or Harold Town? You think,

seriously, that Dan Quayle is sexier than David

Peterson?

         And she said, “O, you’re always so precise.”

She was curled up in her seat as she said this,

but she was married; & we were in an

airplane, I think it was a DC 10,

I keep track. And it turned out she meant

sexier than this one specific hoary scotch&soda cheeks

guy in the
VP
’
S
office where she worked

at an advertising company

that did a lot of stuff for General Motors,

Canada Malting,

                  BOAC, & the Liberals, they had

the advertising budget for the Ontario Liberals. She

thought Emilio Estevez

was sexier than this vice-president at the company

where she worked; & I said, Okay, Harriet,

okay, no kidding. But life is funny

& as it turns out

she divorced her husband & married

the advertising VP, slope shoulders,

soft hands, the whole suitcase.

           Sometimes I think all these farms & highways

& major factories are about to swallow us. I don’t mean

physically, swallow, devour, like

                                          an enormous train

accident. I mean our identity. Myself & Marcus & Evan

& Carol.

       We will have to restructure some of our patterns,

produce new national symbols,

                                         it will be raw at first,

a little bit like those red&yellow daubed figures

on scraped buffalo skin.

                               It will have to be different

than the specific myths of our cousins.

We should have our own flag, don’t you think?

And our own national animal.

                                      It can’t be a buffalo,

they didn’t come this far west of Great Slave Lake,

not very often. Perhaps a horse. Does anyone else

have the horse as a national symbol? California, Ga.,

Alberta? And.

               There are other dances, where you take

off the loose black shirt & blue jeans & the Argyle socks

& walk out in the fields just because you are tired

of the brass rails & the Mies van der Rohe buildings

& you are in love or you have a bottle,

one of those 2 things, & you want to walk

naked under the moon.

             When you go into Oliveto on a sunny

afternoon there is an immediate freshness,

the plump woman who comes to the counter has flour

on her hands; there is a smell of olive oil in the air.

Which makes me think,

                             somebody compared love to bread

the other day. It was Pieter, late at night,

at the San George at 666 Manning. We were all drunk

& talking about Vermeer & his goddamn loaf of bread.

Oliveto has buttermilk bread but I worked hard today

& I’m tired, so I pass it up for something more

substantial – rich sunflower,

flour-dusted crusty Italian sourdough,

Italian
challah
in great white twists like Rachael’s

dimples,

         sunflower-nudged bagels thick with sesame seeds,

flat Roman
paddas
& the great sticks of crusty

Calabrese
baguette
which is almost a Pulcinello.

           All of these breads have that subtle touch

of almost nutty olive oil. The breads

light up the store. I can hardly make up my mind,

they’re all so good. A faint purple white glow

like the inside of certain flowers after the rain.

The air in this store is cool & sweet. I take 2 loaves

of multi-grain, 1
challah
, 1 crusty
baguette

& a number of cookies made with ground almonds.

What Aboud said in the restaurant was that

Dali’s loaf of bread is more real than Vermeer’s;

& I,

  I said, How would Marquez describe a man

sitting with his back against a wall

eating a loaf of bread with a pocket-knife

& a piece of Parma cheese?

          There is a touch of flour on one of the bills

as she gives me my change. Outside I rest the bread

loosely on one arm. Hector looks up at the sky

& sees a huge circle

of infinitely pure blue sky through the belfry aperture

of St. Paul’s rainwashed granite across the street.

The philosopher who compared love to bread probably

didn’t know very much about crops or weather. Bread is