Ghost Pine #8: Wolf (2004)
Table of Contents:
1. Sin City
2. Noah and Snow
3. Rocko
4. Untitled
5. No Time
6. Magpies
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Excerpts:
Rocko
“So how’s your little boy?,” asked the woman in the pink sweater sitting at the diner counter next to me. Her question was addressed to the enormous woman sitting on the stool behind the restaurant’s cash register.
“He’s breakin’ my heart. He called me last night to tell me that he can’t make it up this weekend. You know, he goes to that school down state.”
The woman next to me offered a few excuses in the absent son’s defence. “Maybe he’s got a girlfriend down there,” she laughed.
“Nah, it ain’t that,” said the disappointed mother. “He says he’s got to study. He’s going away to do a semester in Italy next month. This was the only weekend he could make it up before leaving.” The woman at the cash was the matriarch of this breakfast joint and was constantly engaged in tiny conversations with her patrons.
“Seems like just yesterday I was bouncin’ him on my knee,” the pink sweater lady said as she paid her bill, dropping three quarters into the tip jar.
“Uh-huh. You be safe now.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow Rosalita.”
Rosalita turned to me and smiled, as if forgetting her woes and asked, “And what can I get for you, baby boy?”
I sat at the counter of the Cozy Corner diner almost every morning that I was in Chicago. Over coffee and pancakes I read the Tribune’s headlines of the ‘inevitable war’ that was waiting somewhere, off stage.
It was still September, and from my vantage point on the Greyhound bus that I rode from Toronto to Chicago, it seemed that every billboard in this country bore the message “God Bless America.” The same slogan could be found on t-shirts and knick knacks in the dollar stores of Milwaukee Drive. Every window in the city was covered in the Stars and Stripes. Small flags were even sold on highway off-ramps by gang-bangers wearing corn rows and capped teeth. The Cozy Corner was no different. Pulled from the daily papers, the newsprint flags taped up in its windows were beginning to yellow in the strong autumn sun.
A block away from the Cozy Corner was the apartment of one of my oldest friends, Michelle. When I met her in my hometown, she was a nomadic punk who kept forks and knives on her wallet chain and told me she didn’t wear any clothes that she couldn’t wipe her hands on.
I have a whole drawer in my filing cabinet of letters Michelle has sent me over the years. They chart the end of her nomadic days, her enrollment in university, roommate woes, the plethora of shitty jobs she worked to support herself, activism, graduation, and finally the beginning of her career as a teacher at an alternative high school.
When I arrived in the city a few days earlier, she was at work. When I called, I got her roommate McKay on the line, who gave me directions from the bus station. “I’m just working on some art with a friend,” she said into the crackly phone. “Come on over.”
I walked a short block from the El train and then up the stairs of her brownstone and rang the bell. McKay came down the stairs to let me in and gave me a big hug. Her short spiky hair was bleached, and big patches of whiskers graced either side of her chin. There were paint stains on her white tank top.
“Come on in. Me and a friend of mine are working on a project on the back porch.” McKay was a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the most prestigious art school on the continent.
I followed her upstairs and through the long apartment to the back deck where, rather than a styled-up design student, I found McKay’s partner in art was a six-year-old boy.
“Alex, this is Jeff,” McKay introduced me, picking up one the tubes of paint off the floor of the deck and mixing it with water in an empty yoghurt container.
“Hi,” I said.
He said “Hi” back as he attentively painted an empty cereal box black. Next to him, tied to the railing, was a chihuahua with bulging eyes.
“This is my dog, Rocko,” said Alex proudly. Rocko made a nervous sound. I couldn’t tell if he was sneezing or barking as I pet his twitchy head.
“Jeff’s from Canada,” McKay said.
“When’s the last time you were there?” Alex asked, putting down his brush and fidgeting with his dollar sign necklace.
“I was just there this morning.”
Alex perked up. “I love it there! I went last December when I was five-and-a-half. There were palm trees and I swam in the ocean!”
“In Canada? Really?”
“Oh. No,” he said absentmindedly, “in Puerto Rico. That’s where my parents are from.” In his binary six-year-old mind there were only two places in the world: Chicago and Puerto Rico.
Alex immediately switched gears. “This,” he showed me his cereal box, “is a building in my city!”
“It’s a project for school,” McKay clarified, as she painted white windows on an already green-coated Pringles tube.
“It’s going to be so COOL!” Alex screamed, as only a child can.
“You behavin’ up there?” Alex’s mom instantly appeared on the balcony below. Her stern look turned to a smile when she spoke to McKay. “If he’s actin’ up don’t hesitate to send him down here.”
“I won’t,” McKay smiled.
“Painting my city, painting my city,” Alex sang. Rocko provided accompaniment, barking in time as his owner put grey stripes of windows across his miniature office tower.
That night, after we ate grilled cheese sandwiches, Michelle took me across town on the El train. In this Plains city, riding the train at six p.m. provided the best view of the sunset in the West. Michelle missed it though. As soon as we sat down on the train she fell promptly asleep on my shoulder. Worn out from her first year as a full-time teacher, she had a habit of falling into instant slumber on the rickety trains. She woke up a half-minute before the train pulled into our stop, as if her sleeping mind had still been counting off stations.
Getting off the train we crossed one of Chicago’s many seven street intersections, which Michelle told me were paved over old Native pathways. We went in the front door of a cafe and down a flight of stairs to the basement. At the far end of the concrete room was a stage, only foot high or so. In front were rows of seats like those found in run down cinemas.
“Would you like to read tonight?” a tall teenager dressed from head to toe in street wear asked, holding an expectant clipboard.
“Gawd, you’re like the third person to ask us,” Michelle laughed, “We’re just here to watch tonight, sweetie,” she said and the kid blushed and fled.
Sitting in our high-backed chairs, I couldn’t gauge what we were in for. Hip-hop high schoolers milled about, laughing and socializing awkwardly in clusters around the room.
“These kids are part of the Young Chicago Authors program,” Michelle whispered in my ear. “They join up in the ninth grade and if they stick with it all the way through high school, going to weekly meetings and doing these readings, they get scholarships for college.”
“Alright, it looks like I’m the MC this fine evening.” The lanky kid had abandoned his clipboard for a microphone, clearly relishing his moment in the spotlight. “As you all know, my name is Dave, but I MC under Immaculate.” He let his chosen name sound out for a second and one of his boys cheered from the audience, while others straight up laughed. “You’ll be hearin’ my skills a little later on, but first up here on stage tonight we have . . .” he consulted the clipboard, “Shelagh! Come on girl, get on up here and show us what you can do!”
Over the next two hours an equal number of boy and girl poets graced the stage. The boys tended to spit rhymes about lofty political issues and speak too fast in newfound deep voices. They were one part Dan Rather delivering the nightly news, and another part KRS ONE, taking it personally. The girls slowed it down, lyricizing about all things tender, speaking in sultry deep voices about their new bodies and the boys they let touch them.
Cutting across the gender divide was one universal subject. Every single poet had a verse about the El train in their repertoire. It made sense. As teenagers one of the cheapest tastes of freedom is riding the train clear across the city — whether going to your girlfriend’s house at midnight, to play ball in the park, or just going nowhere.
For the first thirty seconds they were on stage, the readers talked fast, stumbling on their words and apologizing. But a minute into delivering a poem they would become fully submerged in the world they’d built on the page. When their poem ended abruptly they slowly awoke from a trance, wishing they hadn’t run out of words.
The younger brother of one of the teen poets, a seven-year-old named Martin, read his first poem. “Snow,” he spoke in total monotone. “Snow/ in December: snow/ covering the world/ piles like mountains/ cold like ice/ snow.”
Finally, the Master of Ceremonies returned to the stage as promised, in the guise of microphone controller Immaculate. “I know y’all is tired, ya butt cheeks are hurting, but right about now I’m going to play a little freestyle game with ya. To prove just how dope an MC Immaculate be, when I make this signal,” he lifted his right hand and spread his fingers, “I want y’all to shout out a word, any old word, and I’ll fit it into my rhyme routine. Feel me?”
The audience immediately began screaming out words and Immaculate deftly juggled pancreas, erectile, and anthrax among others. But at the two minute mark his rhyme scheme fell apart. He was greeted, as were all his peers that night, regardless of talent, with a unanimous wall of hands clapping and mouths screaming praise.
On my last day in Chicago I wanted to see the city from the Sears Tower sky deck, but it was closed until further notice in the fear of terrorism. Instead I spent the day lost in the Chicago Loop. I was looking for the library half-heartedly. I tried to remember what corner it was on without bothering to consult a map or even ask anyone where it was. Instead I wandered in the rain, getting soaked while staring at the stumpy gothic buildings and the stark towers that crowded the skyline.
The rain eventually escalated to the point where the phrase “cats and dogs” became appropriate. The fiery trees of autumn were slowly being stripped bare and their orange and yellow leaves clogged the storm drains.
Along the streets of department stores, Halloween decorations already crowding their window displays, I found a mall carved into the husk of an old high-rise. I pushed open the heavy brass doors and was glad for the shelter. My shoes, heavy with rain, slapped against the marble floor. I followed signs that read “Food Court” with arrows pointing straight up. I rode the escalators past all the boutiques until I arrived on the eighth floor.
The food court was housed in a yawning atrium where a few fast food outlets lined either wall. The tables sat, welded to the floor, near a fountain frothing with Cook County tap water. A window two storeys tall offered awkward and unintended vantages of the adjacent skyscrapers.
The two dollar burrito that I bought to pay for my seat and the view of the city, tasted like gravel in comparison to the one I had eaten the night before. As I chewed on the stale tortilla I thought of the dinner party I had attended in the Little Village, which I was told is the heart of Chicago’s Mexican community. Our host was Michelle’s friend Alix, herself a Chicana, who told us about how the planned amnesty for illegal immigrants to apply for US citizenship had vanished without a trace in the second week of September.
“A lot of the older women in the community don’t like the fact that I’m trying to organize, to put pressure on Washington to reinstate the program,” said Alix, placing dishes on the table. “A lot of people here are really fearful of the migre. No one wants to come forward. They’d rather remain anonymous than face deportation.” On the table was homemade salsa and guacamole, fresh cut tomatoes, peppers, and lettuce. Wrapped in a fresh tortilla, it proved to be the best meal of my trip.
A janitor sweeping near my table dropped his dust pan and apologized with a coughed “Sorry.” His face was dark and creased with deep smile lines. His hair was white and he couldn’t have been a day under seventy. He looked at my table, which was clean of any scraps of food, as I diligently ate what fell from my burrito.
He leaned forward and spoke to me in an accent I couldn’t place. “These people,” he lamented, indicating the few other occupants of the food court, “they drop forty percent of their food. They eat only sixty percent. They’re pigs!”
I nodded in agreement.
Outside the giant window I watched the rain clouds as they rose and fell. The rain persisted but it was warm inside. Hidden speakers spewed elevator music that was swallowed by the cavernous ceiling and the gurgle of the foaming fountain.
As school let out for the day the rain fell upon the Young Chicago Authors, scattered in all corners of the city. Michelle ran to the shelter of the El station trying to not get soaked through. On the city’s outskirts, the rainwater collected in the reservoir that feeds the pipes hidden behind every wall. Eventually this precipitation would feed the coffee maker at Rosalita’s Cozy Corner. It would dilute the paint as Alex coloured the last walls of his miniature city. It would be lapped up nervously by Rocko from his bowl. Eventually the water would makes it way up to the eighth floor of this building, filling the bucket in which the aged janitor was now soaking his mop.
As he began to navigate his way across the marble floor, the janitor in his white shirt and black pants, looked up at one of the fake palm trees. He paused for a second, maybe to remember his homeland. Maybe somewhere warm.
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Magpies
When I was eight-years-old, I moved to Edmonton, Alberta, the gateway to Canada’s mythological Far North.
I cried. I know this is true because I was leaving behind everything I had ever known: an army of extended family and the house whose ample nooks and crannies (including a few in the backyard cedars) had raised me. I was also leaving behind my grandmother who lived five blocks from my house and whom, it’s quite possible, I love more than anyone else I’ve known in my short life.
Edmonton had ample cloudless sky, it was almost like a gem you could mount on a ring. The only house I had known until then had been cut from the bolt of cloth of uniform suburbia, and was thus exactly the same as every third house the length of our street, and many other houses built in 1971 by the Minto corporation. The house my parents found in Edmonton had been built by a maverick contractor named Don. He had a friend who worked in the carpet business, so the floor of every room was hidden by luscious shag carpeting. The kitchen had slightly shorter carpet and only one of the two bathrooms was shagged. The other was covered in wood and housed a sauna that could fit three people.
While, in my peripheral Ottawa suburb, downtown was a distant rumour it was close to this carpet house. The mid-sized banking towers of the Prairies could be seen from the park at the end of the street, glittering like the dreams of cowboy financiers. A few blocks from my bedroom, Vietnamese triads were busy shooting each other gangland-style in the alleys and split-levels. I remember hearing of one such gangland shoot up not too far from my house and thinking “Holy shit!”
But the proximity to downtown had its plus side. Dad made it home from work at 5:20 everyday and, unlike in the suburbs, long cracked alleys ran behind the yards of all the houses. All kinds of life spilled back there. Hobby mechanics pulled up the doors of their dilapidated stucco garages. More often than not, the interior would be wallpapered with full-colour pages ripped from Playboy or Hustler and I would walk by slow, trying to catch a glimpse.
There was life everywhere in the alley — tomcats clawing each other to bits, (like our pet, Minou #1) and dogs yapping at ‘em. Raccoons searched the trash for food by moon light and by day vagrants wandered the same route, looking for empty bottles. I watched them pass by as I shot hoops on the basketball net Don had installed for his kid.
Sometimes there was a little bit too much life. In winter, the magpies began cawing long before the lazy sun would start climbing into the sky.
“I shot three of them yesterday.” Every morning disgruntled Edmontonians called into a show on the talk radio station to tell how many magpies they had shot the previous day. We precious Easterners were horrified by this Wild West-style shooting in the streets. But it was my grandfather, old Lester, visiting over Christmas, who put it best.
“The birds are just doin’ what we’re all doin’: complainin’ about the goddamn weather. It’s tellin’ the truth, that ain’t no reason to kill it!”
One of the other joys of living on the fringe of the city centre was the cultural life. What’s culture to an eight-year-old, you ask? Well, it’s everything. For instance, my folks had no qualms about setting me and my twelve-year-old brother free and unsupervised at the convention centre when the comic book convention came around. As a result, my brother took a piss in the urinal next to the great comic mogul Stan Lee. Whether he said “Excelsior!” or not as he zipped up his fly, my bro doesn’t remember.
The main branch of the Edmonton Public Library was a six storey relic from the days when Alberta was flush with oil money before the big slump of the eighties. To get there we had to drive the family mini van through an aberration of urban planning known as The Rat Hole. It featured a jack rabbit zig of a turn before diving into the tunnel and an equally jarring zag to get out of it. Several years ago this atrocity completely filled with water during a tornado season blow-out. Currently, I read, The Rat Hole has been dismantled so that contractors could build “loft-style condos” over it. O Lost!
At the library, in the basement kids’ section I searched through a selection of tattered and worn four colour comic books, picking the best ones and checking them out. Upstairs my brother learned that he could take out hip-hop LPs for two weeks at a time. He unearthed Digital Underground, LL Cool J, Cold Cut (that James Brown remix), Run DMC — even the first record by the controversial, and untalented, 2 Live Crew, from the fourth floor A.V. department.
Comic books’ distortion of the world seems to be an apt metaphor for those twelve inches my brother listened to. The world in those rhymes was just a little bit bigger, brighter and a lot less nuanced in a way that an eight-year-old could really get into.
My father occasionally came downstairs, into our basement rec room to complain that the 808 thump of “My Adidas” was so loud that it was interfering with his jazz upstairs. Inevitably he would make some passing remark on the repetitive nature of the music and the poor quality of the lyrics. We would invoke Lester’s one time defence of the winter magpies. “Dad, they’re just telling the truth. That’s no reason to hate them.”
While I never immersed myself in hip hop as an adolescent, it had already saturated me as a child. The rhymes to Kurtis Blow’s “Back By Popular Demand” are lodged in the same lobe of childhood arcana that houses my knowledge of the secret identities of almost every superhero in the Marvel universe.
Maybe it’s because of this that sometimes, mostly when I’m high and sitting on one of the shiny metal benched at Lionel Groulx Metro, waiting on a train, I feel the weight of my notebook in my little black backpack and think, “Didn’t Q-Tip write rhyme about keeping his poetry in his back pack?” And I hope silently that when Rammelzee, Rakim and the Jigga are inducted into the English cannon, sympathetic critics of the day will look back on my work and call me the slowest, worst-rhyming MC in history. But an MC nonetheless. And I smile because I’m fucked up and here comes my train.
