Class Warfare (15 page)

 

I never meant

to keep you waiting, baby,

I only meant

to stay behind,

So you could go

on celebrating, baby,

So you could rest your worried mind.

 

One of the pool players approaches Jamie's table; he's wearing a massive identification bracelet with the legend
Snake takes the Cake
engraved into a confusion of writhing serpents. “Name's Snake,” he says by way of introduction. “Did you see what happened?” He sits down, appropriates one of Jamie's beers, empties it in a gulp, reaches for another. There are people in the world who can't hang out alone in a beer parlour for more than five minutes without attracting some manner of grotesque company, and Jamie is beginning to suspect he may be one of them. “I sort of saw,” he says hesitantly. “I didn't want to see too much, if you know what I mean.” Snake looks pensive. “Yeah, it's always the same,” he says. “I coulda killed the little bugger. Killed a guy once, for less than that. Happened so fast, didn't have time to feel bad. Buddy of mine, too. Want a game?” Jamie shakes his head; he's never had much talent for pool. Snake hiccoughs, spreads his arms. “They're all out to get you,” he says. “They'll take anything you got. Beat you down, leave you for dead, never come back. It's just the usual shit. Makes no difference. You been here long?” “A while.” “Me too. Weird place, it gets into your bones, holds you. Nothing you can do. Drink beer, fuck around, play a little pool …” Gladys Gorman assembles the Gamins, fiddles with her microphone, and frowns at the audience, which largely ignores her:
Well, howdy folks and welcome once again to the License
d
Premises. Everybody havin' fun? Everybody
…
happy? For our first little number I'd like to do a song that has a real special meaning for me, and I hope for you too
…
Are you ready, group?
The group is at least as ready as it will ever be; the guitars are almost in tune; Gladys throws back her head, closes her eyes, and serenades the ceiling:

 

There ain't nothin' wrong with bein' lonely

There ain't nothin' wrong with bein' blue

You needn't think that you're the only

Guy or gal it's ever happened to
…

Yes, if you got troubles, honey

you just come and talk to me

I got troubles worse than yours and some to spare

I got troubles all around me

and as far as I can see

Trouble is the only thing we share
…

 

The applause is less than overwhelming. Snake shrugs and picks his nose. “Whaddya expect from a hick-town band anyway?” A waiter leans over: “Ya criticizin' the live entertainment, fella?” In a distant corner a middle-aged woman in a formidable hat, sitting by herself, is carrying on a monologue.
“Okay,”
she's saying.
“Okay okay okay okay okay okay okay okay … Don't bother me. Okay okay okay. The tears I shed, and what for? I said to him, I said, you'll never make it on your own, and wasn't I right? Okay okay okay okay. War, famine, pestilence, and death. I want civilian control. I want a drink, isn't anyone gonna buy me a beer? Okay okay okay. The plague is coming to get us, it's on the way right now. I want a cigarette. Okay okay okay okay okay. The tears I shed …”

“The poolroom,” Jamie says to distract himself, “the one we always hung out in, was called the Rat Hole. You can guess why. I didn't play a lot of pool, in those days, but it was a place to go. It was in a basement, down a long flight of concrete steps, and it smelled of piss. In the winter you could actually see a film of moisture on the walls, which were painted green—exactly the shade of green you've probably seen in the washrooms of reform schools and orphanages.”

“I been there,” Snake says.

“One Christmas eve, after church, the Spook and I went down to the Rat Hole as usual.” Jamie pauses; suddenly too much is coming back, it's unfair, that was all so long ago … “We'd been there maybe an hour when the air began to whine; it was that sort of soundless vibrato you get just before a fight. Then there was a noise like … like mortar fire.” He's heard mortar fire in the movies, heard it first at some Saturday matinee at the Savoy Theatre, just around the corner from the Rat Hole; come to think of it, he had his first hand-job there, too, not so many years later. Oh, well. “It was hard to catch what was happening. I thought I saw a knife flash, but I may have imagined it.”

The monologist raises her voice, in open competition with Gladys Gorman:
Okay okay okay okay okay. What's a poor girl to do? The birds are dropping out of the sky, the earth is strewn with their little bodies. Okay okay okay
… “The Spook and I wanted no part of it,” Jamie continues, “whatever was going on. The main thing was to get out of there before the cops came. We left. Outside it was beginning to snow, and the sidewalk was already white. A few cars went by, silently. The Christmas tree in front of the Post Office was covered with blue lights, winking on and off. I stamped my feet, as though to shake off a bad moment. Then for some reason, I looked down; where my boots had been, the snow was red.”

Snake fidgets, tapping a fingernail against his glass. “You're a funny cat,” he says. “I don't figure you. How did you end up
here?
”

“I honestly don't know.” Jamie signals for more beer; why is there never enough? “One thing leads to another, as they say. And then here I was. Do you blame me, really?”

“Hell, no, I was just curious. There's all types, here.”

Okay okay okay okay
… Jamie has to keep talking. “I was on the train once, going somewhere. Home, I think, though by that time it wasn't what I thought of as home, it was only a place on the map, a destination. It was winter when I went. And I took the train, because I wanted the time, the sense of distance, 3,000 miles of track, the famous emptiness of this fucked-up snowbound country. For the record, this is the obligatory Canadian Content; you'd better enjoy it. Maybe I wanted to see if it were possible, at last, to love the damn place. It's supposed to happen like that; it can happen, on trains; I don't understand it, but it does, sometimes … happen.” Jamie's getting drunk now, winding up to a pitch he's not certain he can sustain. Snake sits quietly, feeling trapped: this guy seems to be one of those compulsive blabbermouths. Gladys Gorman is singing about the last round-up.

“I've tried not to think about these things, but they keep crowding in anyway. On the train, there was no escaping them. There was a … a
connection,
between you and all that shit out there, the ordinary noise behind all the blank night you rode through. I've lost it, lost the track of it. At certain moments, there seemed to be a link.
The
link. To whatever I used to be, or could have been. Whole tundras of absurd love, to lease or purchase. One agency or another would assume the debt; love, sweet dimwitted love, would swallow it all. And it broke down even such resistance as I'd always had to it …”

Snake is concerned with more immediate things. “You gonna shut up long enough to pay for some beer?”
Well, why not?

Jamie will do anything, say anything, to keep him: anything not to be left alone. Gladys Gorman is lamenting the fate of nations, the fate of marriages entered upon in good faith, the disposal of the children.
Give
him a football, it's a present from his dad. Don't you ever let him know that his old man's been had.
“I just want to talk,” Jamie says. “I don't know what the fuck you're doing here, I don't know what you expect, but no one else is listening. I was on the train, going back. People bought me beer, borrowed money, lent me money when I was out of it, told me stories. They worked in places I never knew existed, at jobs I couldn't do; they'd dealt with heavy equipment, foremen, scabs, filthy weather, jail. The scenery went by, endlessly. It was like living in an anthology of poems by local bards …”

“Well, yeah,” Snake says, “I'm not so much into poetry, if that's all right with you.”

Jamie makes a bravado gesture in the direction of the waiter; he's willing to continue this lunacy, at whatever expense. “I had to give in to it, once,” he says. “I had to discard all the wisdom of history, as I'd learned it,
the way I'd learned it;
I had to make an asshole of my mind just once, to have something to return from. I had to discover what was mine.
Mine.
So many strangers had told me about it, so many of them had waited for me to recognize it.
IT.
Beside the train, it all went past. The cities, the overfed villages, sleeping out the patient night in their native granite and brown brick, relentless miles of rock and trees and frozen water, listless prairie, postcard mountains, all the crap in all the bad poems we ever learned in school, the …”

Snake seizes the necessary pause: “Pardon me, gotta piss.”

…
Those valleys that seem to wait, in a parody of resignation, for the avalanche to come crashing down on them. Ravening wolves around the homestead, snow piling up. We're out of ammunition, fuel, brown rice, canned goods. Dearly beloved, we are gathered together
…

“I'm back again.” Snake resumes diplomatic relations with his chair; Jamie by now is talking to the ashtray, the mirroid rim of his glass, the grey point in space, fractionally past the extremity of his vision, that invites and forgives. “This may be less irrelevant than it seems,” he says. “The train I took was late, hours behind schedule, as trains usually are. There was no lack of time to deal with the matter at hand. I ate a lot of peanut-butter sandwiches, drank whisky sours in the club car, slept crammed in a coach seat, and dreamed TV test patterns somehow involving young women, their bright uncomprehending eyes, their bounteous flesh. Woke hearing voices, gibberings in the steam pipes. Backyards heaped with automotive wreckage went by, yawning.”

“You feel like gettin' into some dope?”

“Later. Why do you keep on sitting here, listening to this?”

“If I go over there, they'll beat the living shit out of me.”

Mine, all mine, like some congenital ailment passed on unmentioned through dour generations too proud, too self-deluded, to speak of it. Mine, because I was in the neighbourhood.

Snake blows smoke rings, three of them, with dignity. “I'll say one thing for you,” he mumbles, “you sure know a lot of words.”

“I just wish I could figure out what to use them for,” Jamie says. “That's always been the problem. The words have to add up to something, you see.”

The expression on Snake's face is that of someone trying, against impossible odds, to suppress a fart. He'd like to get away from here, but there doesn't seem to be an exit. “I thought you were telling me a story.”

“I was. I am. Have I lost the drift?”

“You were talking about the train.”

“Of course. Of course I took the train, for all the proper and sentimental reasons, too. Maybe it was love, of a kind. We were all brought up to love the railroad, remember? That endless steel clothesline down which all our public wash is hung—the sooty sheeting we live behind, all manner of metaphysical towels, the underwear of inmost desire …
It was all supposed to make sense.
But the sense I could make of it was never the one they used to promise us. I guess I felt … betrayed. It was as if the whole damn country had arrived, piece by piece, by direct mail from some great Eaton's Catalogue in the Sky, marked
Launder before wearing.
Perhaps that was the revelation I'd gone looking for, when I didn't know what I was doing. Perhaps it was the function of the train actually to disclose this to me, to show me what I needed to see this one time only, before I turned my eyes away forever. Mind if we split this beer? … Thanks. The vision was there, all right, even if it was a bit out of focus: it
was
there … These oblique perspectives across our notorious geography, accidents of shadow, cacophonies of light: in all that, I could almost get hold of it. A romantic delusion, probably, the sort of thing I swore I wouldn't fall for. You know how it is.”

“You feel like another round?”

“Yeah. Things get complicated. I must have realized, by then, that the enterprise was hopeless. There was no way to get back, because there wasn't anything left to get back
to.
The stories were all fictions, no matter that some of them might really have happened to someone. The songs were … entertainment. What was going past outside the window was exactly what it looked like, nothing more. Anything I did with it, anything I made it mean, was my own fault.
It
was simply out there …”

“If you say so,” Snake interrupts, “I'll take your word for it.”

Closing time approaches stealthily. Gladys Gorman mops her forehead, clears her throat, wonders for the umpteenth time why she bothers singing for this crew of loudmouths.
And now, by special request—thanks for the beer, boys—I'll do just one more number. Just one more. Take it away, group
… The group takes it away:

 

Say farewell to the high-steppin' ladies

Say goodbye to the high-livin' men
…

 

Snake stretches, burps, hauls himself more or less upright. “Well,” he says, “see you around.” “Sure.” Jamie's head is beginning—beginning?—to grow muzzy, his vision to dissolve. Good ol' Lonesome Town, he thinks irrelevantly.
Listen, we will hang in here, until we die. I will hang in here, until I die. Fuck you, all of you, I'm hanging in here, hanging in, until I die. Play me that raunchy goodbye music, until I die. Play it loud and sweet for me, before I die. Play me your good ol' New York San Francisco Galveston Detroit City Las Vegas blues, until I die.
“I remember now,” Jamie says to the empty table, to the world at large. “When I was on the train, it was snowing outside. It was in the afternoon, I'd been sleeping, I'd just wakened up. The sky was exactly the colour of the snow, so there was no horizon, no visible distinction between land and sky; everything I could see through the window was one solid, impenetrable, featureless mass of white. I couldn't help thinking: there's nothing out there.
Nothing.
It was as though the entire world of objects, beyond the train, had finally disappeared, gone absolutely away, away, away, into nowhere …”