HENRY MEADOWS (Fiction -- part iii)

Before I go any further, I feel that I must bring to your attention a certain incident from our past, one of those dazzling childhood afternoons that one tends to forget for what seems like decades, until the moment suddenly emerges, intact and pristine. Only a few months ago did I suddenly understand how it must have impacted my life. Absurd! To think that momentous occasions can recede like the tide, but I suppose that's what life's steady accumulations tend to quietly erode, all those fragile incidents smothered by the years steady push.  Getting older simply means that some things have go. Yet they often straggle back, as this memory did.

We were playing hockey one particularly brittle February morning on the frozen pond that abutted our school. It must have been a weekend, because in my recollection we had skated all day, loopy with the kind of winter exhausition which comes from hours of stop-and-start skating, and I'm quite sure that we would have continued well into dusk had not the subsequent 'incident' occurred precisely as it did.

Probably seven or eight of us, three or four to a team, plus goalies in their nets. I can't recall all of the boys who were with us, but there was myself, Henry (of course), Thomas Malton (who occupies centre ice of this story, even though he was a goaltender in real life), the Kepowski twins, Wallace and Wendell, and a few of our other casual friends from grade school who had joined us for the day of good sport. (This is a convenient way for me to acknowledge that their names no longer ring any bells in the chapel of my head. They remain faceless, although I can remember the faded red and green knitted toques that they wore, along with certain whistles and laughs that wheedled out from their mouths. Time, you sly bastard!)

The important point, what I need you to know, is that Henry stood up for a boy. I wish I could recollect his name. I can't believe I've forgotten it, but there it is. A nameless boy, given dignity, is what I am left with, and what I'm passing on to you.

There was some kind of a skirmish -- two boys fighting over the puck, a quick fall to the ice, a knee banged-up and bloodied. (Or so I assumed) I watched it all from behind the (imaginary) blue line of my own defensive zone; my role was to stay back and protect. Leave it to Henry, the goalie, the ultimate stopper of force, to one-up my own part.

I recall hearing his akward skates glide from behind as they cut through the ice. (In those days, all our skates were little more than hardened felt fastened to dull sticks of steel, but Henry's were especially crude, little more than lengthened rocks bound together.) He might have said something to me. I can't be sure. Yet as he breezed by me, the freezing afternoon wind seemed to sway just a tad -- as if it, like me, paused in its lazy arc of motion to allow the silence its space. In that audible gap, he might have even said what he planned to say to the boy. Nothing filled, it though, and the silence kept its own swell.

The boy was bent over at centre ice (or as rougly 'centre' as one can get in the uneven breadth of a pond). His tormentor, or bully, or perhaps equal adversary was skating back to the other end, welcomed by chuckling comrades. I slowly made my way up to where Henry was kneeling beside the stomach-clutching kid. In the fastly-spreading dusk, it was hard to make out just what the fuss was about, but I figured he had been probably sucker-punched, and was clutching his gut in a vain effort to gather his wind.

I could have skated closer. I might have clearly heard what Henry was saying. I should have been a bit brave, or at least more of a snoop. I realized that my assumption was wrong, that the boy had not been brutalized, that the source of such mockery was the black stain that rapidly spread across the base of his crotch. His blue jeans, a luxury in those days, almost an anomaly in that part of Ontario, were wetly ebony at their vee.

Is there any shame so intense as that possessed by a child who has pissed his pants before others? The whole moment lastled less than a minute. In retrospect (do we have anything else in life but retrospect?) it was, to be sure, one boy helping another to feel like less of a chump. Something far down inside me, however, underwent a small shift of upheaval. The first few stars were peeking through the soot-grey blanket of sky, and the soon-to-be-night seemed to ink its way into the air, and I could smell the sickeningly sweet stink of his urine, lifted then settled, as scents often do. I looked at them both, Henry and the boy, for a short snatch of time, but I felt them become older, and myself gain a foothold on what came to be known as the ladder of 'adolescence'. The moment seemed to expand, contract. Everything before felt like 'childhood', and everything after 'adult-like'. The way a cola can will explode when shaken for too long and too hard -- that was now my own sense of what humans might be. It was as if the notion of compassion extended its grace, allowed itself to be seen.

And then it was over, and the game resumed, and the image of the boy -- his face, his build, the shade of his skaes -- faded even before the night had come to a close. Decades later, all that's left is the smell of his urine, so horrific in its purity, its exposed humiliation. Being truthful, I can't even be sure which image is real from that day, and which one is a sketch, but the stink of his piss, I can tell you that was there. I'd forgotten about this day for years ever after, but now I can remember Charlie skating back to his net, giving me one of his winks with that one good eye of his, the other blind one even then clothed in a black matted square. I don't know if the urine-smattered boy left the ice right away, or after some time. I do know that something brave had been done, miniature yet mature. The night got colder, and darker, practically inviting even more accidents and misfortune, but we kept playing hockey until we couldn't see where the hands on our sticks matched up with the wood.

HENRY MEADOWS -- (Fiction -- Part II)

I can safely assume that none of you reading this are as deathly old as myself, so my memories of those heady days after the end of the war are not likely to be challenged, but I often wonder if I can trust my own feverish sense of that time, and its heady afterglow.

For days, even weeks -- dare I say months? -- after everything had finally settled and dispersed like a fire slowly burning down to its embers, most of us in my memory walked around in a daze of delight. I would see strangers on the streets of Toronto, and the two of us would share a goofy smile as if we were old chums; other times, an acquaintance from back home in Kingston -- Morgan Thomas, say, that tall goofy tall lad whose slap-shot was so pure, or the butcher's boy, Crandall Fitzpatrick, he of the family that smelled always of pork -- might rush across the road simply to show me that he was still alive, back from the front, all limbs intact, and I would be delighted by his eagerness to show off, his humble bravado. I never felt any animosity from these friends for my own lack of engagement in the battlefields of Europe. It was enough that the whole bloody mess was done. Time to move on, and move on we did.

Even so, as the years have dragged on, often overstaying their welcome, I've accepted that the basic force of memory itself cannot be contained, and I'm often awakened before dawn by stray moments from my past that refuse to fit into the cozy narrative I've written for myself. Was I truly so ecstatic as everyone else all around me? I would say yes, I was -- but I need to qualify that assertion with an acknowledgement of a certain gap in my side.

In the few years after my good friend Henry Meadows left, and long before he returned, I admit that thoughts of his travels occupied my mind more than the war movement itself. This is a rather shameful thing to admit, even now, even since all (and I do mean all) my close friends and family have long since passed on, so any embarrassment I wield is now pretty much moot. When he was gone, I tried to shove the absence of his presence into a shoebox in my mind. Sometimes I succeeded, although the days at the factory were longer without his bad jokes, and his affected-but-amusing ways of expression. Within a few months, it wasn't his daily companionship that I missed, but rather the knowledge that we were exiles together. Other men at the factory were, quite obviously, not 'soldiers' per se, so I was certainly amongst a certain kind of civilian brethren, but I always felt as if he and I were separated from the others by way of our detachment from the whole dreary scene. We were, of course, secretly disgusted to be in some ways too feeble to physically defend our embattled northern land, but our mutual code of compliance meant that we had a means of reconciling this reality by the elevation of ourselves to a higher mode of expression. This is all rather self-aggrandizing, I know, but what I'm saying is this: I realized, when he left, and when he didn't come back, that I was, in fact, now and forever, as we all are, in this life utterly alone, despite my youthful pretensions of solidarity and a kind of communal endurance.

This feeling, vague but persistent, stayed with me, almost embedded itself, even as I married Joyce and had the twins soon after. We were busy with the children and work and watching Toronto become something quite other than what it had once represented. I could feel the Dominion itself come alive, shake off its fusty old coat, letting the dust and mothballs descend on the mouthy land just to the south. My memories of those years are filled with children being bathed in the warm splashes of a tub not big enough for their mirth, and Joyce's own laughter decorating our house with an almost ornamental reality, and my new job as a salesman at the Eaton's department store downtown providing a quiet, daily reprieve to what had been the constant, clanky noise of the factory, its unending smoky drudge.

These are good pictures, vital snapshots, ones I mentally take out and fiddle with more than you would care to know, but I do have to admit that throughout these good years of growth it was the space left by Henry Meadows that refused to be filled. He was now out there; he had left before the war, and remained absent after. As I settled into my life of grateful domesticity, I realized that there was another life that I was not living, and it was Henry himself who was exploring it for me. His was not some grand escape, but more of a time-out, one that allowed him to become almost legendary in my head, a fable taken from life, and although I knew he would one day come back -- how could he not? -- I also understood that he had entered other realms of living that would probably render him almost unrecognizable.

Only now, with the good grace of time, can I acknowledge the tiny thorn that drew blood in my head. The whole country wanted to shove the past into a big box and drop it right into the lake. So many dead, so best just to let that whole era of pain quickly sink into sludge.  Throughout those years, pre-war and after, I lived, worked, ate Sunday dinner, read THE STAR in my armchair that I felt I had earned, and that whole past life with my friend came to resemble what you could call a fond dream. I told myself that I had not changed all that much, even though he surely had, and I pretended that a certain anxiety that I felt was simply indigestion. Sometimes I would shoot up in bed after glimpsing Henry in my dream take off that black badge over his eye, and the light from his pupil was enough to blind me for good. Upon waking, I would shake it off, tell Joyce to roll over and sleep and don't make such a fuss, it was just a bad dream, get your rest and be still, but I also knew that the longer Henry Meadows stayed away, the less I could feel that the war was all done. What was he doing? Where had he gone? When could I know what his adventure had wrought for us all?  

HENRY MEADOWS (Fiction -- Part I)

In the early spring of 1942, right around the time when the last remaining snowpatches of a very grey winter had finally decided to melt and give mercy to us all, a young man who went by the name of Henry Meadows decided that it was probably time to just pack up and go. He wasn't sure where. Nor for how long. A great change was in order, even if his life was already, despite its ostensible stability, functionally adrift. That there could be a focus, even an identifiable pattern, in the decision to unravel his own comfortable means of existence puzzled him, but he had long before then realized that he could reliably trust his own unconventional approach to the notion of pursuit. I had always followed his lead, but this was one voyage he would embark on alone. (I've never been good at leaving behind maps.)

So far, such seemingly illogical, one could even say haphazard reasoning had allowed him to reasonably stay put while the world all around him continued on its mad stab. I spent many an afternoon with him drinking our blandless drafts at the various pubs which used to drearily line Yonge Street in a sad staggered row, their shapeless brown forms like the perfunctory beer-blots from our fathers that stained the kitchen table-cloths of our youth, and I would gradually understood over time that there was something beyond our mutual alienation from society that had motivated his flight. While our fellow childhood friends were off fighting for Queen and country overseas, the two of us -- he blighted by the abscence of his right eye, myself crippled and inert by a left leg that was bum right from birth -- did our pathetic best for the war effort by making munitions in a small factory at the end of John Street, We daily felt a mixture of relief and panic, thankful that were were not getting blown up in some remote Italian outpost, and disgust that something inside of us was palpably shrinking, a vital part of our youthful bravado slowly chipped away as we heard secondhand that another acquaintance had passed. While we regularly enjoyed bratwurst sandwiches from Shopsy's for lunch, extra mustard a must. So when he told me over our ritual brews one April afternoon that he had decided to leave, I wasn't surprised, merely overly cautious in how I should process my response.

"This has been some time coming," I said.

He nodded, smiling. Took a long chug of his beer, and allowed the froth of his beer to give him the kind of full moustache he could never grow on his own.

"I think the factory has gotten all it can out of my ex-per-tise," he said.

"And who's going to assemble all the jeep engine parts?" I asked. "Harold? Ronald?  You trust them with the future of Canadian military transportation?"

"My boy," he said, which was his pet phrase for me, and since he always said it so jocular, I didn't mind its banality. "I don't trust them, nor the Canadian military, nor trans-por-tation itself. I just trust myself, and you should, too."

"Implicitly," I said. "You were meant for more than the assembly line."

He wiped away his moustache with the sleeve of his shirt, suddenly looking quite serious, the same intense way that he did when we played hockey on the frozen pond behind our schoolhouse when we were mere lads, him always as goalie, in charge of stopping all the hard pucks tbat aligned against us.

"None of us are meant for anything," he said, shutting the lid of his one good eye. The other was covered by a black patch with a strap that crept up to his ear.

"Which means?"

"Which means," he went on, "that Abel Crawford is dead as of last, when was it, Thursday, I believe, while we sit here and drink, all warm and content. His head blown right off, while we burp and digest. You prove to me that there's a meaning in that equation, and the next one's one me."

I said nothing. That one of our public school chums had been killed in battle was a familiar form of news, but Henry's current reaction was not. It had something palpably sullen to its cast.

"So you are off to search for meaning in a world that you've just identified as meaningless," I finally said, after what I felt was an appropriately long pause. (Henry did tend to get irritated if you didn't let his statements breathe.)

"Precisely," he said, and this time his smile was back, that smile which always bordered on the brink of a friendly sort of menace. He rubbed his hands together, took a quick look around the bar, and looked all the while as if he had unearthed some logic to life that only he understood.

"Will you let me in on your 'plan', if I can call it that?"

"I will let you know shortly," he said. "In-ter-mittently, I should add. Until then, I need to tell you something important. Will you listen to something important?"

"Of course," I said."

He leaned in across the table towards me, and I had to consciously try not to stare at his black patch. The stink of the bar, its smoky afterglow, felt very real and primal to me at that moment. I understood that, outside, mere steps away, the sun had begun to shine, and the grass of the parks had begun to flow with the aftermelt of old snow, but in here, all was glum and tainted.

"If I don't come back, I want you to know that my ambition was real. Promise me you'll remember that. My am-bi-tion was real."

Enunciating his main points, an old childhood tic that had become almost rooted to his character with each passing year. It had always amused me, then irritated me, and now seemed almost ominous in its ridiculous portent.

"And your ambition is what, Henry?"

He smiled.

"You'll hear soon enough," he said, then slightly slapped me on the cheek, as one would after shaving. He stood up, pulled on his coat, gave a last little nod, then hurriedly walked out the door and into his life. I knew that he would be gone for quite some time, but I didn't have any clue as to his ultimate intent or motive, and I would not see him again for almost twelve years. In all that time, it seems like I did nothing but wait.

SPIT TAKES

Magazines like RUNNER'S WORLD never write about spit. How to hork it, properly. The best way to get the perfect arc so that your own saliva doesn't get whipped by the wind and end up lashing your cheek. Getting enough built up in your mouth so that you can get it rid of it all without a refill in your throat only one minute later. The first few races I ran in high school ended with people pointing a finger at me, pointing out with some scorn that something was up with my face: "That's gross, bud. Better wipe that shit." One of the the first lessons I had that most of life's necessary education consists solely of stuff that nobody ever puts down in print.

You spit all the time when you run. In winter, it's a cold, half-way frozen glob of mucus that's icy-smooth and tactile; in summer, its' consistency has a tight cozy warmth that you almost don't want to let go. I almost look it that glop as an offering of sorts -- a rich, up-from-within expression of all that I've exerted. This part of me is getting out, via my throat or my nostril (the nose-snort being another example of a technique one must refine to prevent endless stoppage), and it's a nasty part of me, to be sure, but it's also an earned part, a part of myself that feels like an exit and reward for what I put my whole  body through, a minor gift-bag whose taker is nature, the pavement or the trails whose grass over the years has formed its own winding path. Nowhere else, other than on a run, can you spit and get away with it, literally, because you're running beyond your own muck left behind. In my most ridiculous moments, I have images of my stuff mingling with rich soil and dark mud and budding plants rising up. One of the most biologically pure and dense factions of my cells has added its own biological concoction to the blend of our earth. Those same cells that allow me to spell, and divide, and watch a sunset's crimson fall, all occasionally mingle towards a future mosaic of life.

I'm sorry if you find all this a bit much. (I do, too.) Yet nobody talks about the snot and saliva we discard on our jogs. There must be gallons of this shit on the earth every day of the year. In these delicate moments of maintenace, I feel distinctly human and base. High-falutin', perhaps, considering we're talking about spit, yet also low and animal-like, a perfect blend of human contradictions. Maintaining etiquette in such matters while waxing philosophical is an uneasy alliance. Kind of inane, I know. Yet somebody's gotta say it. And as long as I remember to wipe my face now and then, I should be good to go.

PRIME TIME

There used to be this dude who worked behind the counter at Prime Pics Video in the Lakeshore Street mall on the corner of Geneva Street, the same tiny plaza that housed the big A&P supermarket and a Pete's Pizza to boot. One-stop shopping, that place. He was probably in his mid-thirties, with Robocop-glasses and a Billy Ray Cyrus mullet going on in the back. Too-tight Polo t-shirts for his slightly-pudgy frame. Always seemed a bit jittery, providing a running commentary to the, in retrospect, not-so-complicated process of checking out a video: "Okay, if I could just get your card...very good...okay...and your password...super...no tape protection for you today?...okay...that's fine...everything's great...you're looking good..."

At some point my buddy, whose friend's family owned the joint, told me that the guy was fired because he stole some money out of the till to feed his coke habit. (Or so said the rumor.)  He seemed like a nice enough fellow. Didn't appear like the type who was doing hard drugs. (Not to my twelve-year old eyes, anyways, but then again my eyes have never been good.) And maybe he was a little bit too old to be working at a video store, but I'd never thought about that little fact much either, because money and adults were both mysteries back then that didn't form a path in my head. Maybe he sticks in my brain because he was the first person I even casually knew from a distance who had had some kind of tough break. Now everybody seems broken to me.

He's probably out there now, twenty-six-or-seven years later, somehow getting through life, like we all sometimes do. Or maybe he passed away years ago, his grave right at this moment covered in snow somewhere down in St.Kitts.I haven't thought about him much over the past quarter-century, because why would I? He was just a local guy who rented me some movies. Yet I suddenly woke up this morning and hoped he was doing all right.

BROADLY SPEAKING

Twenty years on, one of the most remarkable aspects of PULP FICTION's legacy is that remains pretty much the only movie that was universally acclaimed by both the snootiest of cineastes and the most non-discerning beer-drinker. Broadly speaking, all social, racial and economic classes watched that flick, loved that flick, sometimes for the same reasons, often for others. You could appreciate its storytelling quirks on a purely cinematic level, but also investigate how it was upending recent filmic conventions. It was both high and low, crass and cultured. There was no box in its overall square that it could not in some way check solely by itself.

That's both enormously gratifying when it comes to looking at 'art', but also somehow saddening when applied to our lives. I keep thinking: Is there a single person or concept in life that could take what PULP FICTION accomplished with film and transfer it over to this plane of existence?

Meaning, there must be a method by which we can somehow attempt to satisfy every end. Not to be 'all things to all people', or a two-faced brown-noser; as Christopher Hitchens said when speaking of Clinton: "He who is charming to everyone cares about nobody in particular." I'm trying here to get to a more ethereal concept of life that we can nevertheless somehow ground in ourselves. There are political candidates who change how they speak when they talk to different groups, and marketers who try to hit every demographic, but these are practical methods enforced to favor their own craven goals, and I'm trying to hypothesize if there is some kind of way to consolidate all aspects of life into one total package that results in the end being more than sum and hum of its starts? Not religiously; not scientifically, even. Something that over time becomes self-evident.

Art looks for cohesion designed to produce an effect. PULP FICTION assembled a motley convergence of parts that produced an entertainment machine which most of the world's culture as a whole loved to watch rev and burn. Life, with its religious and political and social confusion, usually lacks any kind of unifying crescendo.

Who knows? Perhaps life as a force is building towards something. Maybe the past hundred thousand years of random evolutionary development are merely the first few funny scenes in a Tarantino-like opus. The high and the low, the funny and the grotesque, the mundane and the mythical -- all of humanity's past has been awkwardly mashed together in a prelude which has led up to now. There could be a culmination coming. Reversals of plot and expectations, just like PULP FICTION did.

Life on this earth might just be gearing up for a 'furious vengeance'-style speech like Samuel Jackson gave at the beginning and end of the film, only the real words that we say would not be tinged with the threat of violence on the way. Who would give such a speech, whether it's myself or yourself or the planet as a whole, I can't say. Probably not even verbalized. Maybe it will be in our actions. A kind of group physical cohesion that leads back to the solitary mental space in our skulls, a mutually-knit sweater we spot in the rag-tag assembly of insects and animals and peoples and countries that all seem to think they're separate and distinct. Perhaps we'll wake up one day and realize that the epic movie of our mutual co-existence can tangibly work on all different planes of reality. Everybody getting something out of it. Casualties for some, to be sure, but also redemption for a few. On the whole, as the credits roll, a deeply philosophical experience, yet with a retro surf-soundtrack kind of vibe. Life as an inflated Tarantino concoction that contains something for us all. I could see myself digging that.  

THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY (and its minor gifts)

THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY, a non-fiction book by Robert D.Kaplan, looks at the shaping of history by examining  the very contour and location of the lands in which it transpires, arguing that it's not only 'great men' or common folk that turn the tides of fate, but also the (mostly) accidental geographical placement of where they grow up. 'We are where we live', I guess you could say, and I wonder if it might be possible to take this macro-historical-endeavor and sharpen the lens of its focus onto our own lives.

For most of us, the first eighteen-or-so years doesn't give us much choice as to where we plant our feet. Family takes care of that. I got stuck with Canada. (Not a bad place to be moored.) Abroad, mention the word 'Canada' and the response is usually a variation of 'safe' or 'beautiful nature'. Can't hurt to have a reputation to life that. And probably pretty spot-on. Looking back on my own life, it is often this sense of 'nature' that informs my memories -- walking to the bus stop while fluffy snow flakes fall on a head still shower-wet; the first honey sunshine of spring cutting through the quad and into my dorm; my feet hot on the boards of a dock as I hurry to jump into the cool lake of summer; autumn cross-country trails, leaves falling over uneven ground that I quickly trod. Thinking this way, can I even begin to separate myself from the axis of that place?

Even now, when I think of where I've lived, whether it's St.Catharines or Toronto, Manotick or Yokohama, Baguio or Fujisawa, the aural-oddness of the names contrasted so closely with each other seems to represent not only their linguistic divisions, but also some crucial aspect of their physical selves. In my head is a bewildering collision of drizzling snow and typhoon-level rain, Mekong sunshine and mountain-night shadows, the dripping sweat of Japanese summer and Ontario winter's frozen snot. Did I become one with these places, or did they use and abuse me with indifferent natural glee?

Such a hostile title -- THE REVENGE OF GEOGRAPHY. Makes sense, though. At least for a book about the cruelty of historical trends,where people are just fragile pawns in the topography that traps them. Can it apply to us, though? Individuals, not nations? Are we basically fucked, depending on where we are born? I'm not talking in terms of family or jobs, friendship or love, because we can get those, earn those, but in both the broader and more linear sense.

The old saying says: "Wherever you go, there you are." Observably true. Yet wherever we land, something else holds us up. Weather and grass and concrete all amix. We usually pass through it, endure, snapshot it and post it. How the natural concoction of elements creeps into our cells and enlightens our aims is something I'd like to take more and more note of as I continue to arrive.