a selection of dispatches written for geist

Grinkus and Pepper

These days as the war goes on, I recall Grinkus and Pepper, a short man and a tall man, or vice versa, one in a tweed jacket and the other in a tan topcoat. The taller of the two, Grinkus or Pepper, is wittier and more forthright in public: he speaks out when he speaks up. »»»

War Stories

From Issue 62 A question of some concern among my friends when we were growing up in the fifties and sixties was how old you had to be to go to war. Estimates varied from sixteen or seventeen to the unthinkably distant ages of nineteen or even twenty years of age. »»»

Road King

This story begins with a young woman named Anne Marie, who turned nineteen the day her New York uncle rolled into Kamloops on the Harley- Davidson and pulled up at the espresso joint where Anne Marie and her boyfriend were drinking iced cappuccinos on the patio. Anne Marie watched the man on the motorcycle switch off and kick out the kickstand and she didn't realize that he was her New York uncle until he took off his helmet and gloves and shook out his long white hair, and when he took off his reflector sunglasses she could see that his eyes were pink and his skin was alabaster white. »»»

Stories of a Lynching

A musket barrel and a set of old handcuffs are mute evidence of what is said to have happened and not to have happened near Sumas Lake, B.C. »»»

First Time, Last Time

The first time I stayed at the Marlborough Hotel in Winnipeg, I lost several rounds of Scrabble in the bar to an editor from Vancouver, while a trio of incompetent musicians thumped and crashed away on the bandstand, and no matter how much we drank neither of us could come up with a single exhilarating word. On the wall of my room on the ninth floor hung several decrepit illustrations of military men in the scarlet uniforms of the eighteenth century. »»»

Writing Life

He said the only car you could drive in those days no matter how drunk you were was a Volkswagen Beetle with a broken heater, and he had never seen a Volkswagen with a heater that worked. He remembered driving a Volkswagen out of the city after a night of heavy drinking and exorcism at the home of a well-known poet whose girlfriend had been troubled at the Ouija board by a phantom stalker named Jack Bicky. »»»

Evictions

When Malcolm Lowry’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, BC, burned to the ground in 1944, he and his wife Marjorie were able to save the manuscript of only one of the novels that he was working on at the time. A few months later the same manuscript had to be rescued again when the house that friends found for them in Oakville, Ontario, also burned to the ground. »»»

Stranger

Last month in Calgary a friend showed me the way to Louise Bridge by sketching a map with her fingertip on the dust jacket of The Wolf King, a book by Judd Palmer that we had been admiring at her kitchen table. A day later, with the afterimage of my friend’s map as a guide, I went straight from my hotel to 10th Street where it hits the Bow River in order to observe in twilight the understated beauty of Louise Bridge, with its arches described as flattened and softened, like the breasts of a woman reclining, by Louis de Bernieres in a soliloquy written nine years ago, and in which the river ice reminds him of marzipan chunks dusted with sugar and slabs of decaying brie strewn on a discount counter. »»»

Lowbrow Lit

One day in Vancouver in the late seventies, Pierre Berton and John Diefenbaker appeared at the same time in the book department at Eaton’s department store to sign copies of their new books, which had just been released by rival publishers. Berton was a famous tv personality as well as a journalist and best-selling author of thick books, and Diefenbaker was a famous ex-prime minister and a Grand Old Man at work on a seemingly endless series of windy memoirs. »»»

Memory of Fire

We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street. »»»

Hiatus

During the hiatus, a man in a black suit appeared in the Geist Gallery in Toronto and identified himself as a builder of ornithopters, or perhaps he said he was a promoter of ornithopters (this was during the hiatus, when nothing was clear; in any event his field was ornithoptery). I couldn’t remember what an ornithopter was but I could see one in my mind: the question was, what did an ornithopter do? »»»

Virtual City

Onstage a group of writers and critics sat in a semicircle and spoke earnestly about whether or not a national literature could exist in two languages, a harmless enough question that might be asked in either official language, but only in Ottawa would anyone try to answer it, without irony and in both languages at once; for the conversation, which was taking place in the Museum of Civilization, was relentlessly, touchingly bilingual, with no translation provided. The question of the national literature had been put on behalf of the cbc by John Ralston Saul, the husband of the Governor General; he was wearing bright yellow socks that caught the light when he sat down and then again whenever he crossed his legs. »»»

Other City, Big City

On the last day of October in Toronto a man in an art gallery said: “Showers should be coming in around 4 pm. They don’t always get it down to the hour like that. »»»

A River Gets Big

A friend in Whitehorse who was preparing to paddle down the Yukon River with seven other women in a big canoe wrote to say that she was feeling uneasy about paddling in the stern, especially, as she put it in her own words, “when the river gets big after Minto.” Their goal was Dawson City, about five hundred miles from Whitehorse, and my friend and her fellow paddlers planned to make the journey in three or four days by paddling non-stop and sleeping in shifts for an hour at a time. »»»

A Friend Moves Away

A friend who was thinking of moving back home to Calgary picked up a newspaper in the corner grocery near her place in Vancouver and there was a photograph on the front page of a man in a cowboy hat surrounded by a herd of cattle. Is that the president of the United States, the grocer asked my friend, and she explained to him that the man in the photograph who resembled the president of the United States was a rancher forced to sell off his cattle for next to nothing because there was no grain in Alberta to feed the herds. »»»

Blue Moon

We look back and so much of the past seems to portend what would come later. The man in the seat in front of me on the Greyhound bus was returning to Edmonton from his annual vacation in Las Vegas, where in the off-season you can get a cheap room with everything you need, colour TV, air conditioning, room service, no windows, but who needs windows in Las Vegas? »»»

The Coincidence Problem

I was walking down the street thinking about a friend I hadn't seen for some time, and when I looked up, there was my friend standing at the corner with his wife and he was looking at me in some surprise, for as it turned out they had been speaking of me in the same moment that I had been thinking of him, and so we congratulated ourselves on having arrived there at the corner at just the right moment for these facts to be revealed to us. We talked for a while, as there were many things that we had been meaning to discuss were we ever to run into each other precisely as we had just done, and when we parted I had the happy sense that the substance of my day had been revealed. »»»

The Lost Art of Waving

Some time ago, when she was four years old, or perhaps four and a half, which is a separate age at that time of life, my youngest protégé, whose name is Julia, observed that not many people seemed to know how to wave properly. At the time she was demonstrating an improved method of holding hands, which required that I let my fingers hang straight down with no tilting, allowing her to grasp my fingers with hers at the right angle, and I could feel in a moment that there were no awkward forces pushing or pulling against us: we could walk together easily and she could skip along as she wished. »»»

The Unremembered Man

Who today remembers the man who carried Einstein’s head in a box through the streets of Vancouver? We remember clearly the box (dark wood, varnished, the door on brass hinges: what about the latch? »»»

A Sporting Life

A man I haven't thought of for nearly thirty years became a smoker of five-cent cigars during the war, and when the war was over he became a despiser of nincompoops and began taking his whisky from a pocket flask engraved with a tiny laurel wreath. He was the gunsmith in the sporting goods department of the Hudson's Bay Company, at a time when sporting goods were sold by men of few words who favoured dark ties and white shirts with long sleeves. »»»

The Contest of Memory

Let us recall a Saturday afternoon in New York City early in the twentieth century: a young woman named Moina Michaels, having been moved by a poem she had read that morning in the Ladies' Home Journal, finds a supply of red silk poppies on sale in Wanamaker's Department Store at the corner of 8th Street and Broadway; she has been searching for them all day through the shops and department stores along the stretch of Broadway known as the Ladies Mile. This event will determine the course of her life. »»»

The Sweetness of Life

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an underground publishing house threw a party in a mansion in a wealthy neighbourhood of curving streets with no sidewalks, to celebrate a new book. The publishing house was Pulp Press, forerunner of Arsenal Pulp Press. »»»

Lion's Gate

Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene that attracted him so powerfully, pitched over the side of the bridge and plummeted sixty metres into the ocean below. What happened to the camera has not been recorded, but the falling man, during the few moments of his descent (which he would later calculate to have been about 2. »»»

Iceman

A few months ago, a military court in Italy found a former SS guard guilty of torturing and murdering civilians at Bolzana, a city in northern Italy better known today as the home of Otzi the Iceman Mummy than as the site of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. The former SS man, who had been known during the war as “Misha,” did not attend the trial, at which he was sentenced to life in prison and a fine of 8 million lire, but he was identified as a Canadian citizen living in Vancouver who had concealed his Nazi past when he immigrated to Canada from Germany in 1951. »»»

Strong Man

The Strongest Man in the World liked to set his folding lawn chair out on the asphalt next to his gold Cadillac and stretch out in the sun with dark glasses on his nose and a two-litre carton of milk in one hand. He had a basement joint in the alley behind Broadway west of Main in Vancouver: a couple of big rooms for the printing press, the protein supplement mixing operation and the weightlifting equipment, which he designed and built himself, and a tiny living space in the back. »»»

Julia's World

I went to the babysitter's to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been "a little bit sad for a while" because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for "quite a long time." There were tear stains on Julia's face and her eyes were bleary and red. »»»

The Man Who Stole Christmas

On a dark day in January in Toronto, when the sky was much too close to the ground, I went to see the grave of Timothy Eaton with my friend Tom Walmsley. We wanted to memorialize our mutual friend Brian Shein, who had first proposed Timothy Eaton as a cultural demiurge, and whose death a few years ago had cut short his ongoing study of the sober Methodist. »»»

Cat in the House

Toward the end of her life I drew close to Althea, the cat who had been with Mary and me for five or maybe six years, ever since her real owner, Mary’s daughter Karen, had to find a home for her when a landlord invoked the no-pets rule, and Mary and I were living mere blocks away, completely petless and, some might say, carefree. Karen had found Althea in the animal shelter in 1991, and she took her back to the apartment that she shared with a boyfriend who was busy furnishing an ancient blue school bus with bunkbeds, stove, sit-down shower, brake linings, windshield wipers, carburetor and other refinements. »»»