Keeping Things Whole (5 page)

She'd been living in Windsor for more than a year and could have been to the DIA any number of times, alone or with another stubbled schemer. Apparently not. She put a hand to my arm. “No one, including me, has brought me here.” Her eyes roamed the walls constantly.

We circled and circled, stared and shared. In the middle of the room we sank to a bench to sit beside each other but facing opposite directions. I told her about my family, what I'd been told in that very spot. After she emptied her lips of mine, she looked me in the eyes. “Get me home.”

Paternity is always a story.
Ask the Bible or every other Victorian novel. Subtract dad, add story (the ol' shell and Mendellian-pea game). Paternity is something you get told, not something you feel. Not in the beginning, anyway. (And, for some, not ever.) All those monthly cheques written because of paternity: contracts, petitions, detention lines. A woman feels maternity, lives it. If science doesn't tell her first—little chemical strips changing colour, a positive sign coming up whether it's positive or not—nature eventually will. The sore breasts. Darkening areolae. Dizziness. Morning sickness isn't a cliché to the person running down a hallway.

When you're the child of a single mother, you don't ask immediately. Babies are animals long before they're linguistic, mewling birdies in the nest, membranous little things, the hair like a stain dripping off their cantaloupe skulls. A baby fresh from the oven will open its mouth reflexively, regardless of who's holding it, the will to survive written in the rooting little lips. Every baby needs a tit. It might,
might
benefit from a father, Mr. Errand, Mr. Stockboy, possibly Mr. Provider, but it needs a tit to survive.

I have a few memories of life from before I started seeking (inventing?) my own paternity story. Kate, not me, put two and two together and realized that Gloria had enrolled me in taek just before I'd start to get teased at school for not having a dad. We were both single kids of single moms and traded stories about those early years when we hadn't even thought to ask about Dad Vader. You don't really care until around the age of five, when you're at school, when other people want you to care. Between three and five there was no trauma in the questions, and I have zero complaints about how Glore told me about Trevor Reynolds.

“Where's my daddy?”

“You don't have a dad, just me.”

“But who was my dad before?”

Really, she was great about all this, would set her book down or pause scrubbing something in the sink to look at me. She didn't even cast blame (that bit isn't so saintly: she just waited until blame could cast itself).

“Your father and I separated before you were born. This family is just the two of us.”

“And Gran.”

“Right, and Gran.”

For a while, that worked. But by six it all snagged on a single word. This story wouldn't exist if one adjective was very much not like the others.

“I want to go see my dad.”

“Antony, you don't have a dad the way some kids do.”

“Well, where is he?”

“Nowhere around here. I haven't seen him since before you were born. He left without telling me where he was going. I'm sure eventually he went back to the States. He was American.”

America, the land across the water, a very thin strip of water. Eventually I'd put that narrow river to use, connect my history to the continent's. If you've ever had a toke, you've held the country's secret immigration in your lungs. Canadian pot, which is now recognized globally as truly killer shit, originated in imported strains of hairy American
sinsemilla
. That's
Spanish for “without seeds,” and for the years I knew her Kate loved the stuff. She taught me the verb
cornerstone
. “You know, when you want to turn a corner sexually but need to get high to do it.
Cornerstone
your way into the bonus tunnel.”

Green-keen Kate loved all the matriarchal weed lore. Once as we prepared to smoke she said, “Such a human plant. When it gets ready to bloom the males grow balls and become useless, or a threat, while the females get hairy in the crotch.” Later she contrasted the female marijuana plant to her Safe Sisters: “That rare single mother that doesn't need subsidies.” Another time she asked, “If the valuable seeds were
masculinized,
not
feminized
, would it be so illegal?” At online seed catalogues, somewhere between the spelling and grammatical mistakes (ah, my peeple), you'll find two lists of prices. Feminized seeds are guaranteed to produce smokeable female plants, so they're at least double the price. This is a story of how I got feminized (at least for a while).

When it comes to weed, Canada's only marginally smarter than the US. Canadians spend as much on weed as we do on tobacco, though none of it gets taxed and most sales go into gang coffers. But here at least drug crime is just another crime. In the US, drug criminals, including pot farmers, are handled with all sorts of unique legal pressures. Minimum sentencing, no parole, sentencing by the prosecutor's office instead of a judge, and convictions for nothing, and I mean
nothing
, beyond someone's word against yours. Rape a woman in front of multiple witnesses, leave DNA smeared everywhere, and you'll serve much less time than if you're rumoured to have carried a bushel of green.

Cannabis has been tripping the light fantastic for as long as humans have been farming. The plant is ancient; its prohibition is very recent and as American as atom bomb pie. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had hemp farms. Some say the US Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper. Mind you, others say Rudolf Diesel designed his engine to run on hemp oil but was assassinated by the petro-chemical industry so they could co-opt the tech. These theories are usually launched around 4:26 p.m.

The US federal government has subsidized the growing of hemp or has even sewn it directly to make blankets or ropes during the war
du jour
. Once your start seeing the overlapping borders of prohibition and inhibition you'll notice that
Virginia
passed America's first marijuana law. In the 1600s, the virgin state required every household to grow marijuana. Government-sewn ditch weed still grows wild in Indiana and Illinois, though industrial hemp and mind-bending smoke are about as much the same plant as a Pomeranian and a Doberman are the same animal. The mind-smoke has been illegal since the 1930s, and its prohibition is about as unflattering a portrait of government as you can find, ours and theirs.

In the 60s, Canadian hippies smoked American or even Mexican weed. Three decades later, BC Bud was trading pound for pound with cocaine, the grown on par with the cooked, raw lumber as valuable as finished cabinets. Contrary to the image of bountiful BC, our market parity of bud with marching powder is all a consequence of how lightly the gavel comes down out West, not soil or climate. North Americans chase BC Bud as if it's the product of the sweetest growing spot in the world, as if every stone has a
goût de terroir
. Fact is, most of the export crop is grown indoors.
Goût de
basement.
Goût de
closet.
Goût de
the one place in Canada where judge after judge doesn't hammer the gavel over green. A pot bust in Canada is an endurable cost of doing business. In the US, it's the end of your sorry life. Yet they, not we, have the highest per capita consumption in the world.

During the Vietnam War, Canada became home to a different kind of American Green Beret. Draft dodgers brought pot seeds, grow-how, and a crucial dose of chutzpah to a Canada that had been importing, not yet growing or exporting, its marijuana. When the war was over and amnesty finally declared for its resisters, some of those hippie farmers went back to the US; their strains, me included, didn't.

Confession No. Something: I like my drink, a bit of the Windsor lifeblood. If I absolutely had to choose forever between my vices/birthrights, it would be drink over pot. A bottle of wine is the fuel cell of dating. With smoke, you're high in four minutes. What do you do for the rest of the date (other than listen to the best CDs you have and find something else to put in your mouth)? But still, I like to talk
while
stitching together my buzz, not just after. If nothing else, and this is reason enough, I'd go with the sauce not the green, even though weed's better for me, because I can read with a glass beside me. Judging from the length of this memwire, apparently I can type with a tipple as well. High, I just want to feel the rusty texture of a guitar line, do spontaneous yoga or make dubious combinations in the kitchen. I absolutely promise never to make you my guacamole fettuccini.

Another picture we need to reframe. I say
Johnny Appleseed
and what do you see? Classrooms all across America—and Canada when teachers are lazy and/or bending a knee south—hand out colouring sheets or pictures of Johnny Appleseed sowing apples all across the New World. Striding around barefoot with a bag of seeds (bit of a pattern, that), he brought sweetness to the land. True, but the apples were for hard cider, not eating. Johnny Appleseed was the first liquor baron of the New World, not a wandering farmer. Ah, lies in school. Any more questions on why I sling?

No matter what they spend on their war on drugs, another of their false wars, their rich-get-richer wars, we will win. They win battles; we've already won the war. Every dollar spent on prisons and workplace drug testing is waste, vicious waste. Never, ever forget that we could be beautiful. What we spend on guns and prisons and big-dick missiles could be spent on the mind, on health, on the future.

“Exactly,” Kate eventually replied. “Spend your money on the future.”

I'm trying, girl. I'm trying.

No single event led me
to the green. Just growing up really, growing up where and how I did. This punctured, hybrid, half-dead, and half-rich land. My family of rowers and bounders. The end of faith in government (by everyone). As a teenager, getting then quitting a job in the fast food industry nudged me along—pocket money for treb parts plus a long, greasy look at the McIdiocy we all bankroll. Reading helped. My genes on both sides. Plus the education at Mom's knee, not that she'll admit it. She claims to condemn what I do, but our holiday meals were at Gran's, a riverside house built with smuggling money. Italian marble floors and walnut wainscoting, all with the sound of the river nibbling our ears. (Plus Zug Island up the nose when the winds weren't kind.)

Windsor's downtown is a mouth, an open mouth. Bar, parking garage, bar, strip club, bar, falafel joint, parking garage, bar, casino, bar, bar, strip club, bar. All take, all sell. Indignity at night but a pocketful of cash come morning. A wet mouth, our oracle at Delphi. Downtown tempted me away from the treb at thirteen then sent me back to it at sixteen. On a weekend night, our population increases by up to three thousand people, everyone there for a vice, drinking, gambling, or whoring. There were a few non-licensed oases for the underaged, cafés where my teenaged friends and I could watch, endure, or deride the American herd. In January, you'd see visiting American girls in open-backed shirts smaller than handkerchiefs shivering in line outside a bar. C'mon. Jess, the first girl I liked more than just sexually, was a bright girl with great hips who really got me by snorting, very audibly, as a pair of these frozen bar girls clicked by in their heels, backs cut open by the cold night, skirts the size of belts. Jess was wearing boots and a toque, cool boots and a darling little toque, but still, boots and a toque for January. Later that night she slid my hand under her sweater and she was warm, warm, warm.

Sixteen, seventeen, unable to drink in the bars ourselves but equally unable to not watch, not be there. Eighty percent of Canadians live in the 20 percent of land closest to the US border. Sure, that's also the warmest part of the country, longest growing season, cheapest heating costs, and closest to the big market, but still. Noses to the candy store window. Maybe our loyalist blood keeps us close to the border, all the former Americans who came up glancing back ASAP. When we glance back, my team turns into pillars of green, not salt. Was Trevor Reynolds still glancing back? Or maybe, once in a while, glancing north again?

Downtown Windsor on a teenaged Saturday night. The official border stretched out behind us and other, unofficial borders were drawn all around us. We stood a little closer to the candy store, had one foot in it. And we were overrun with candy shoppers, sticky fingerprints on our glasses and Sachas. Too young to drink, too bored or incomplete to avoid downtown, we were there most weekend nights as teenagers. Compiling censuses of derision, sure, but there all the same.

For decades now, every weekend night I've been downtown I've seen some drunk dude, usually a blond, corn-fed Midwesterner, pausing in his stumble across the street to bellow at the top of his lungs. Invariably this feat of genius
cracks up his dude posse, leather jackets, dental work, and misogyny yucking in the night. Four seasons a year in Windsor's weekend inferno you can cock an ear and wait, certain that soon enough someone will bellow out this half-local mating call.

We heard the idiocy and saw the industry. Every downtown block had its mega-bar. SWAT-team bouncers, a coughing smoke machine, rapier lights. When you're on the outside of that looking in, watching cash get pulled from the small pockets of tight jeans, all that can make a thinking teen question alcohol. If you have to huddle behind a back-alley power transformer to chase your buzz or hide in the shadows around the abandoned armoury, why bother with bottles, glasses, and all that gear? Why spend twenty-five minutes to do a job with cumbersome liquid you can get done in five with some herb? I'm certain more Windsor teens choose this same route in the molecular garden of forking paths, THC not -OH, precisely because of the weekend carnival. Go figure if a few of us turn pro.

What words do I use to describe the first joint I sold, the first September night Nate and I cruised the bar lineups muttering, “Joints rolled and ready. BC Bud. BC Bud”?
Eventually
isn't adequate. I didn't just
eventually
start selling. Jess and other friends had grown up with the same sham borders. They didn't
eventually
start slinging. And
change, change
is also too small. My first pre-rolled stroll felt like I was chopping off a finger, not just changing. Chopping off a finger then gaining a whole other hand.

I lost my literal virginity two months after I popped my criminal cherry. There was no condom involved in my selling, and I could do it for more than ninety seconds. Well, no rubber condom. There isn't a day goes by I don't thank Mom, at least mentally, for enrolling me in tae kwon do at an early age. If you think of the taek as a tool, or, let's stay the oars, a weapon, then I've used it all of once in my life. But every day I've used the feeling that the tool is there if I need it. And I'm not overstating my protection. One of the big lessons in any martial art is that there is always, ALWAYS, someone else who can kick your ass. Someone faster, more fearless, or more gifted in the hurt. You feel that in every tournament, a smell stronger than B.O., soul knowledge. But of course those high priests of the hurt generally weren't out drinking on a Saturday night. The crowds were fine. My problem was Jess.

I conceived the Handshake of Nations plan and was arguably my own best defence, but still. I wanted a partner, someone with my back. Nathan was large (which matters visually but not practically), less clever, and, in the beginning, not a chronic pothead. But in Jessica's eyes, he lacked one crucial qualification: he wasn't her.

Happy Weed versus Fight Juice. I knew (then) not to go anywhere near the casino. Aficionados of the Windsor Ballet also had zero interest in an introspective drug, so we ignored the strip joints and concentrated on the Monopoly board of bar lineups with its cash-fat Americans impatient to chase a buzz. Our product also had another advantage: what white boy can dance without weed?

Back in the early 90s, a gram cost $15 Canadian and would yield three decent joints, no blunts or cones, but not all pinners. We'd sell each joint for $10 US. This was before the oil patch wars had bankrupted America, so $10 US was $14 Canadian. One joint to cover costs. One to bankroll the next g, and one for profit. That should have meant that getting ripped off over a single joint didn't matter, though of course by the end of the first night money was only part of the glow from my green lantern. “Pot rolled and ready. BC Bud. BC Bud,” we'd mutter, prepared to say
Kelowna Hydro
or
Okanagan Valley
about our Brampton Closet green. Good product, good service, but a little Cuban in the pitch.

More shameful than the marketing was the wigging. I knew the TV word
wigger
long before I ever read my Québecois quarter-countryman Vallière's phrase “white niggers of America.” Sell drugs in the age of TV and you sell counterfeit blackness. Our bars were full of white kids up from as far away as Ohio. Whitey was on a tear, and oh the fake blackness this created. Nathan'd say, “Handshake of nations here, brother. Cash to me and product from my man.” Every handshake was choreographed for the Hollywood ghetto. Oullette and University became our Compton, our El Barrio. Just saying hello, Officer, being sociable and all. A vertical bumping of fists with the Ohioans, one potato, two potato, or some slides and pulls of the flesh, a bill or a pin tucked beside the thumb.

You might do something (or someone) once out of curiosity. Twice is an investigation. By the third time you're at a crossroads: is this who you want to be? The first stroll Nathan and I did with loaded pockets was a lark. Six joints on a warm September night. Could it be done? We sold out in ninety minutes, and other friends were nearby as soon as we walked off work. Steven, Emil, and Adria lingered at a café table with a fuming Jess. Being night muscle generally isn't the best way to impress your vegetarian, ad-busting, Blackspot boot-wearing, sometimes maybe hook-up girlfriend, but I had secret money in my pocket and a new high under my wings.

One of the fundamental facts of the bud business—excuse the obvious—we were outside the law. There was no police or Better Business Bureau for us. That was oh so clear as we tinkled a different kind of ice cream bell up and down the bar lineups. “High sticks. BC Bud. Loose jays.” Cash first, no exceptions. Many a frat boy wanted the deal otherwise, all liquored up on Jaeger and stronger beer. “No, no, no,” Huey, Dewey, or Louie would say, “we get the product first.”

“Look around, Magellan. We've got more customers than you do suppliers. Buy or bounce.”

But Jess was right. All of that was unnecessarily risky, each transaction too close to a cop-summoning brawl. Genuine accounting concerns what to measure, not how or when. Out there in the No Assholes Land between the cops and the bouncers, we were risking everything, including a stomping from three different directions, all to make $7 each. The bouncers were the biggest, the customers almost always drunk and in groups, and no one fights as viciously as a cop, all that sanctimony and self-mythology coming at your ribs. (Two things about bouncers: one, empirically, scientifically, muscle size does not necessarily indicate muscle strength. And two, no matter how big a guy is, he has a nose, and it's a blood faucet if you can open it.)

Jess almost got me. “Why do you only ever seem to proposition assholes? Make money or pick your little fights. Don't do both.”

“A customer's a customer,” Nathan claimed, half-satisfying me.

“No, every customer is a risk,” Jess shot back. “Choose your customers. For a start, you should look for couples, not packs of guys. As for looking for smokers, just find the people with the best shoes.”

If we'd been selling in Vansterdam (aka Bongcouver), we would've had to worry about getting stomped for selling on someone else's corner or having to protect our own. In fact, our first and only competitors were the very friends we'd left behind. Next weekend Emil and Steven strutted around saying, “Unbleached paper. Get high and don't die.” Not to worry, theirs was a passing thing. Nervousness was written all over Emil's face. If he kept it up, someone was going to read it back to him.

My hands did little more than float in front of my chest for two years selling weekend street weed. The only nasty thing I ever had to do was pose a question. Eventually one frat fuck thought he'd try to give me a shove, a posturing move which happens to be the dumbest way possible to start a fight. Hey, shove, I might hurt you. I answered by sweeping both his arms aside and tugging his own shove forward so that he half-fell across my raised knee. I tapped him, literally tapped him, on the back side of his exposed ribs. “How hurt do you want to get?” I let him hear me breathe, fuelled the sweep and set with a very trained exhale.

Whatever we were becoming, it sure beat working at the mall. Nathan and I quickly graduated from smoking for free to making a little side scratch to increasing our profit margin. Buy in bulk and save. The first time we bought an ounce, we were half-terrified and half-elated at the sheer volume of the icky. None of our friends had ever bought more than a quarter of an ounce. Too few Canadians are completely bilingual with English and French, but most are fluently bimetric, switching between the imperial and metric systems without even noticing. An ounce, an oh-zee = 28 grams. (FYI, acting and painting majors, a “half-quarter” is an eighth.)

Niche marketing. Customer satisfaction. Risk analysis. Accounting. Turns out the biggest surprises were in human resources. Sure, I wanted Nathan there in the beginning, but my original 50-50 split on my own idea quickly became rebukingly childish. Big Lesson No. 2: management is vigilance, though I needed more watching than Nate. As a criminal, you've got to keep an eye on what adrenaline does to you. Our revenue and our profits kept growing, so I had to be careful not to race home and immediately dust the cobwebs off the trebuchets in Mom's basement. My self-inflicted resentment over the 50-50 split with Nate spared me any temptation to tell him about the treb, but it also meant I was even itchier to use it. And I was young. I didn't want to show him the treb, but I seriously considered showing Jess what I could do with PVC plumbing, physics, and smuggler's genes. And there, finally, I saw my own drug problem. Adrenaline either exhausts and terrifies you, or it makes you higher than your customers. Per hour, I'd have made more money working as a busboy at one of the busy Windsor restaurants affluent Detroiters feel safe enough to dine in. But jingling my green bell—that money was all mine, my paper valentine from the visiting Americans. No boss or official had any piece of it.

Who knows? Landscape alone, not politics, family, or history, may have taken me down to the shores of the river with a pocketful of green. Rivers aren't borders by accident. How did Julius Caesar announce he was promoting himself from general to emperor? By crossing a river, the Rubicon. His senate decreed that taking their/his army over the Rubicon was passing into treason. Caesar crossed that river then many others, most of them bloody. We know his name, not those of his senators. The Detroit River was my Rubicon, my family cemetery and half an altar. The lying, Cuban press natters on about
gateway drugs
. The Detroit River is a fifty-kilometre gateway. And grave.