China Blues Read online

  You can probably see this story, or its first main point, coming from a mile away, like a bunch of cattle hoving up in the landscape somewhere west of Winnipeg.

  We lasted for about 3 months. It was pretty close to 3 months. She slept around, I think, just about every night we weren’t together, and that was quite a few because I was working late until 8 or 9 o’clock Wednesdays, Thursdays, and sometimes Fridays as well. I don’t think she even cared that much who she slept with. They were people, I came to realize, that she met on the street, on streetcars, in cafés, sitting outside in the warm weather or sitting inside reading a book, usually a biography of somebody like Edie or some Monaco princess, or bars of course, or clubs. I was working for the Coles book company. They’re a franchise. They own dozens of soup-to-nuts bookstores across the country. I started off in the head office, went to the main warehouse for inventory training, I didn’t need any, and was then put in charge, significance, of the downtown Yonge store for what turned out to be a long time before I was promoted further.

  So our eyes would meet. Those huge yellow-flecked blue eyes, like big flowers of some kind, wild flowers, and she would say, “Oh, nothing, I just hung out for a while with Cora.” Or Pat, or Jane, or Serena.

  And then she moved in with somebody, a guitarist, by the name of Steve, I’m not sure if he has any other name. But we would still see each other. Nothing to do with borrowing money or anything like that. And not exactly what you would call emotional support. I mean we wouldn’t have conversations where she would say, “No, I’m not doing very well,” and then I would say, “How can I help.” No, it wasn’t like that.

  I would get off work around 9 o’clock and meet Marion for coffee, a snack, she has acquired strange eating habits, or maybe a drink, at this club or that restaurant, nowhere special, and we would just talk. And she would often seem stronger on me than ever. Sometimes we would go back to my place and fuck. She would get up from the bed and stroll over to the kitchen counter area with that languid walk, reach one slow lazy perfect white arm up to the cupboards and pour herself a big snifter of cognac from the bottle I kept there, 2 or 3 of them actually, mostly because I thought it was classy, like other little things I do to make myself a bit more distinct, less of a cowboy, red braided leather belts, galluses, that’s what they call them in Toronto, yellow paisley galluses, in Manitoba we call them braces but in Toronto the big moose call them galluses. She would drink it slowly but without interruption, standing with her back to me, 4, 5 ozs, rolling her lovely blonde head slowly from one side to the other, releasing a short clear gasp of pleasure after the last sip. Then she would come back to the bed, put one knee on the mattress, lean down and say, “It’s late, I guess I’ve really got to go now.” And I’d say okay.

  There’s a whole area of Toronto which I think is committed to the establishment of a world-state stock market backed up by major engineering companies, big hospitals, mining concerns, giant Mies van der Rohe office towers and so on; and there is also a whole area of Toronto which is a sort of neon Rome, committed to the destruction, the scorch and burn of puritanism in their own lives, a sort of casual and graceful surrendering to the moment of pleasure.

  I’m working at a respectable job for the moment. I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I wear a white shirt and a loose blue smock-type jacket to work every day. I read a bit, I take streetcars, I don’t have a car, I listen to 1000s of songs.

  Marion wakes up in the morning, which is usually around 2 in the afternoon; a piece of toast slathered with butter & jam, a telephone call, she’ll sometimes use a whole tube of shampoo in the course of one shower, a trash magazine, a $10.00 copy of Vogue, she just surrenders, glides through, rubs up against, sniffing, turning her head this way or that, strokes her own body, her lithe stomach, rolling her hips against the door frame as she talks to somebody.

  I go through a lot of mental reasoning at work. I do klutzy telephone-operator scenes out of Lily Tomlin, just for my amusement, for Paul’s or Harry’s amusement, I really like her, I think she is really an incredibly talented remarkably brilliant woman, slowing things down, putting in unnecessary gaffes and hooks, the whole bit, one of the secretaries comes back from the washroom and she says, “The washroom’s in a real mess.”

  Whereas Marion just pads across the bare green lino tiles of my apartment over the hardware store on dark King Street above the lake as gracefully as a punk model. She hasn’t had an assignment for about a year, except for a couple of underwear ads a few months ago. She’s 20. She has a perfect mind, no concepts, but at the same time infinite, blue like the sky, housed simply as an observation point behind a lovely face at the top of a casual body.

  I’ve been reading some of the books at work, I’m OK, You’re OK, that’s an old one, I think, I read that a couple of weeks ago, but yeah, I’d like to shake things up a bit, I don’t know what. I’m too restless to sleep all day, you have to have money, even South American wristwatches with funny umbrellas on the face cost money. I go on working, and listening to music, because that’s where it’s at, but I don’t even go to clubs very much in the evening. Marion goes out and comes home late, I’m not always sure where she goes. “O God, I’m not doing a thing with myself.” Or, “One of these days, my parents are going to kill me.” She likes to illuminate the perfection of her life, even the act of eating a piece of cold pizza out of the fridge at 4 o’clock in the morning for supper by stressing tension with her parents. They’re 2nd generation Ukrainian. Hard-working yokels who have made good money, in the restaurant business, and retired to Richmond Hill at the far north edge of Toronto. Lots of room and a well-earned backyard. Who keep waiting for Marion to become a fashion model.

  My parents are German and Italian, they have a farm, out in Manitoba, and, apart from the farm, they don’t have a great deal of money. I guess they spend it all on the cows.

  What may start wearing off, I think, is the self-destructive thing. I was thinking the other day about how much vicarious pleasure I seem to get from Marion’s different attitude games of throwing herself down and seeing how beautifully she can get back up. Of course, she gets a cheque from her parents. But I do enjoy the way she flirts with excess. Not that she’s started turning up with dark circles under her eyes. She never shoots dope. Maybe that’s what I should do, come to think of it. Maybe I should get hooked on white stuff, horse, smack, quit my job, straighten out, and then write a book about music. I’m just a neat guy who failed bass Fender guitar in high school, or something. She snorts a fair bit, not at home, but I know she does with friends when she’s out, this club, that club, hangouts.

  And she’s dependent, in various ways. Cool, but it turns out she’s dependent, first one, then the other.

  That’s what’s different about Paul and Harry at work. They don’t hang around the clubs that much. But they are cool. And funny. And they’re not dependent.

  We’re just crazy about each other, I guess. So maybe this is cool, or cool for right now. I seem to spend a lot of my time going back and forth to work on the King streetcar, reading magazines, listening to Jane’s Addiction on my Sony Walkman, and Parachute Club, and Cowboy Junkies. Cowboy Junkies are a Toronto group. They’re different, they’re very hot right now.

  What she enjoys about me is, I think, the image she has of me coming from Manitoba, clean-cut vibrant young farm stock. O that’s me, clean shaven, and I even use a touch of Brylcreem to keep the cow-lick down. She likes that.

  She likes to think of herself as beautiful and doomed. I sent out for pizza or Chicken Chalet one night, it was late, we had just made love. She was walking languidly across the green lino tiles of our main room saying something really non-sequiturial about “Tough pickers play from the hip.” That’s something about us. We both like music terms.

  And I said, I was lying on the bed, naked, a cool breeze coming in off the lake or at least off King Street, ½asleep, “You mean young pickers play the blues down low.” And she said, That’s a nice phras
e, yeah, I like that. So I kept it. They play down low and they call it punk, but it is a blues lament kind of sound, like a white dove with its throat cut released in darkness, that turns ice blue before it flies up into the light.

  I turn 27 in December. My own concept of punk and the pleasure of flirting with excess, making danger, or death, or simply going over a line and coming back, into a substitute for living by a set of rules, and after all I obviously do live by a set of rules, is more of a cowboy image, an image of somebody who can do these things but not get lost in the pleasure of their own absorption.

  But she’s beautiful, there’s no two ways about that.

  Other things are hot right now. I get hot at work sometimes when certain things don’t work out right. That isn’t a very good sentence, it’s not very clear, not clear like some of the pictures in the art gallery I was looking at over the weekend, we went to see a friend do a performance piece, he read a short essay from some almanac, about chickens, with an egg in his mouth while he read. I guess that’s trendy. I walked around and looked at the pictures. I have to read more, I’m not going to give up my interest in music, but I have to read more. This is hot.

  A certain indefinable scent, the sex is so good I find it difficult to motivate myself in certain directions. It’s easier for me if I think about certain things while I’m at work. I keep the Walkman on a large part of the time. I do take-offs on Richard Lewis for the guys in accounting when I go in to check an invoice against our computer inventory.

  Marion is probably moving anyway. Who knows? Toronto is traffic city, it’s far out. Some of our jokes. She is the only person who takes my ex-philosophy major, for 2 years, heavy comments about Hawaiian influences on the Pixies, Frank Sinatra crossing over and being reborn as David Bowie, Sinéad O’Connor as a strangled choir girl, stuff like that, as opposed to my doing impressions, mugging, things I know I’m good at, seriously. So I would miss that, I think.

  I only listen to music away from work for perhaps an hour a day. I almost never read the junk magazines. Ok, I sneak a look. I know I have to read more. It doesn’t matter what I want to do, I know I have to be more open to ideas. Sometimes when we’re making supper together, she’s got black spandex and a short skirt and one of my underwear vests on, some simple thing, putting rice and tomatoes in an oven dish, something like that, our eyes meet, and I start laughing, I’m in a good mood, my eyes are dark and a little strained, I’m always trying to come up with the right move, her eyes are like the ocean.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXT

  WHAT’S SO EASY ABOUT 17?

  This poem came to me very quickly and I can’t give you a personal reason as to Why? It’s certainly not a glorification of wild driving. I’ve always loved cars and highways. It’s not a tract against wild high school or young 20s drivers. There are no older people, truckers, or families in the poem. I like the various social details that become part of the experience. I think the poem is a metaphor for a variety of other things besides driving. Also I think it’s more exciting, in a positive way, than a lot of poems about grandfathers or landscapes and so on. I wrote it very quickly on a hot dusty July morning with my head full of Ontario streets and highways.

  THE AMAZINGLY CALM FACE OF THE YOUNG PALESTINIAN BOY

  Exoticism is a strange word that turns up and flips around, often quite subjectively, in just about everybody’s travel impressions. In a city like the greater Metropolitan Toronto spread, we are all travelling to some degree all the time. As time goes on, it may be debatable as to who becomes seen as exotic.

  PEOPLE AT NIGHT

  This is a Toronto poem, but it struck me some time after writing it that a lot of the poem has a suggestion of Rome in the late 40s. I don’t know how to explain this exactly, it’s summer, there are a lot of outdoor cafés, there’s a certain rhythm of life, the city is very multicultural, and there is a very strong Italian population that has influenced a number of dynamics including, very slightly, language.

  AVA

  I don’t know why I wrote this poem. It was a gorgeous hot day and I was thinking of Ava Gardner for some reason, and of a club I like a lot that I’d been to recently. I haven’t seen a lot of her films, but I think of her as a woman who, compared to Lana Turner, let’s say, was a remarkable woman and a really genuine icon.

  LOST BUFFALOS

  I think “Lost Buffalos” goes beyond comparing Ottawa to Washington. It’s a piece of pure continental sociology turned around and presented in emotional literary anecdotes that have their own qualities of language and story, something Chaucer might have liked, for example, as a poem in 4 parts, with a running pattern that involves gender and birthplace and attitude, and is finally, I think, about region and individual sense of place.

  ANNOUNCING BAGHDAD

  “Announcing Baghdad” is not a poem about the war in the Persian Gulf, it’s a poem about some of the media we watched during that period of about 3 months. That’s why I start with Madonna, not because I don’t like her, but because people praise her for being a rebel, and from Madonna I go on to Schwarzkopf who became something of a media hero after the war. The poem is a bit like a photograph laid over a photograph: the text is not directly about the bottom photograph, it is directly about the top photographs, so it’s about us. As for moral attitudes, Do I think the war was mismanaged? Yes, I do. Grossly. Women and children, in one of the oldest cultures in the world, were killed in some of the air strikes over Baghdad. What more can I say?

  TOBACCO HEAVEN

  I call this poem “Tobacco Heaven,” aware that the two words are a shade contradictory, because it often seems to me that a lot of southern Ontario has, at times, a sort of groundlessly optimistic view of current events which, in turn, other people, younger layers, come up against and feel confused, disaffected, rebellious.

  PHILADELPHIA

  I don’t think people who rush out to claim architects like Harold Cardenal or Raymond Moriyama as “major Canadian architects” are standing in the way of those architects in regard to larger acclaim, no, they’re more of a building block, if I can make a small double entendre. But nevertheless, this “major Canadian” label is a holding pattern. We don’t have a concept of trying to sell our major talents to other parts of North America; and if they leave, which they sometimes do, then we feel we’ve lost them. I go for walks in Toronto and I feel that Frank Lloyd Wright is with me even though he died several generations ago, and I was born in Ontario. Similarly, I would like to walk down a street in New York or Toronto, and see a Harold Cardenal building across the street from a Phillip Johnson building. Once the hype fades, I think the Harold Cardenal building is going to be the most impressive. So Cardenal and Moriyama are geniuses, and we should praise them; but we should also compare them to other people in the North American spectrum.

  WHO SAYS JEFF KOONS IS POSTMODERN?

  This poem started with a very graphic image of a brown paper bag used as a baffle or a mask, and then developed into reflections on different areas of contemporary pop. The poem is concerned with how simple music can be and still be extremely effective, although I admit tons of garbage gets reproduced by certain groups. This poem touches on personal alienation to some degree and glances at some of the subjects that come up in contemporary pop. I think it’s a good poem compared to possibly more “universal” subjects, but it is limited, it starts with the image of the brown paper bag, and it’s not intended as a total statement about contemporary pop or punk. As an added note, I don’t think that Jane’s Addiction are as musically great as Gustav Mahler. On the other hand, I think they’re extremely good, and I think they deserve to be talked about.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Sam Solecki, Ellen Seligman, and Linda Williams for helping to push this new boat into the water. I would also like to thank all the bookstores that allow me to browse at will; and several bars and restaurants where I drop in at lunch-time just for coffee, with a friend or a book.

  “Clarities” and “Cities” were
published in Poetry Canada Review some time ago; “Open House” appeared in an almost absolutely different version except for one or perhaps two lines; almost all of the other poems in China Blues are from an intensive period covering late spring and summer 1991.

  Special thanks to Wendy Furtado at the Alliston Public Library for her comments on Jane’s Addiction and the English group The Cure.

  Further thanks to The Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their continued support; and to the Ministry of Culture and Communications for their support of the Writer-In-Residence Library Program.