Saturday, August 27, 2016

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART TWO





This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.



Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part Two

"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night." Elie Wiesel


Aggie

Portman Hotel, Vancouver, B. C.
September 7, 2003

 

          Cylinders. The backpack was full of cylinders.  It was not full of junk.  Not not not.  And they’re not just any old cylinders, they’re Edison Blue Amberols, the best kind you can get.

     I have to find more Blue Amberols.  It’s just a habit, I can quit any time I want to, just a little quirk of mine, collecting.  I collect all sorts of stuff, birdcages made out of bamboo, salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like people, macramé handbags made back in 1973.  My room here is full of stuff,  the social worker doesn’t like it, she complains about it all the time and keeps telling me to clean it up, get rid of it all.  But it’s cool, there’s no rats or anything, it isn’t dirty, I keep order in the place.  Sometimes stuff falls down, there are loud crashes at night that disturb the neighbours, particularly Porgy who lives just under me and is a light sleeper.  But at least I know where everything is.

     I didn’t even know what a Blue Amberol was until I started going to flea markets about a year and a half ago.  I saw these ornate-looking canisters with flowery writing and ornamentation all over them – they were beautiful, and I just had to buy one of them, not even knowing what was inside.  It was only a buck and a half, what the hell, I’ll go without lunch tomorrow.  Maybe it’s snuff or something, I thought, something Victorian, or at least Edwardian, really old and maybe even valuable.

     But it wasn’t snuff at all.  It was a dusty old cylinder full of grooves.  Took me a minute to figure it out, that this was something like a record, or what came before records, the first medium for recorded sound.  I felt like I had seen one before, that I remembered it from somewhere.  I had Porgy go on the internet and do a search.  I don’t have a computer, I don’t know how Porgy can afford one, but he does and is obsessed with it.

     Anyway, he tells me that this isn’t just any sort of flea market hunk of junk  but a Blue Amberol, a particularly deluxe (back then) kind of cylinder recording popular in the early 20th century.  They weren’t the earliest recordings – those were made out of brown wax, with a few really early, rare ones made out of yellow paraffin, but even before that, they used tin foil.  No kidding – tin foil on a rotating cylinder, scratched with a needle that picked up vibrations.  The basic principles of sound recording.  Think of Thomas Edison at Menlo Park, bellowing into his new contraption:  “MA-RY HAD A LIT-TLE LAMB.  ITS FLEECE WAS WHITE AS SNOW. AND EV-ERY-WHERE THAT MA-RY WENT, THE LAMB WAS SURE TO GO.  HA, HA, HA.”  Cranking away at a variable speed, so the voice sounds freaky, all distorted like a giant’s voice, as well as tinny and really far away.





     When I was little, old records used to scare me.  I used to think. . . never mind what I used to think.  I had a hell of an imagination. It got me in trouble all the time, at school, but even worse at home.  My mother used to say that I made up stories, but to me, it was all completely real.  I thought the voices on those old 78 r. p. m. records had some sort of spooky power.  Like it was a kind of time capsule or something.  The singing ones were weird enough, they all had that muffled quality like the sound was coming out of a tiny little closet,  but the spoken word ones, they really freaked me out.  Used to make me run out of the room, but my Dad, he’d make me listen to them, listen to Caruso sounding like he was singing inside a cardboard box, or Dame Nellie Melba warbling away, or something called the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk – God, the Wibbly-Wobbly Walk scared the living shit out of me.  Couldn’t stand it, but my Dad made me stay and listen.

     It was his collection and he was convinced it was worth thousands, but now that I know something about early recordings, I can see that what he had was virtually worthless. Too many scratches, ticks and pops.

     Dr. Levy, the one they call “Zee”? He’s helping me deal with memories.  He’s good.  I mean, he’s good if you’re in pain or trouble, if you’re not, then forget about it, he can be a real hardass, it’s surprising how cold he can be.  But I’ve seen him deal with guys so far gone from AIDS, the shit was pouring out of them like lava, and he never bats an eyelash, just rolls up his sleeves and cleans up the crap like it was nothing.  I like Dr. Levy.

     But this guy on the bus today, this Szabó.  I know that’s his name, because people talk about him.  He has regular habits, I’ll say that about him.  I don’t know where he goes exactly, somewhere around the Sunshine Hotel area, the real asshole of Vancouver, Zeddyville they call it, ‘cause Dr. Zee cruises the place all the time, looking for broken people to mend.  It’s his habit.

     Mine’s Blue Amberols.  I’m glad this Szabó can’t look at me,  because I just hate it when people stare at my backpack, poke at it or ask what’s inside it.  I had fourteen Blue Amberols crammed in there today,  and never mind that I haven’t been able to afford a player yet, it’s only a matter of time.





     I guess listening to these things is going to scare the living shit out of me.  I take five hundred milligrams of Seroquel every day, Dr. Zee is trying to wean me off it, he says I might have been misdiagnosed, but I’m not so sure about that, I guess you could say I scare easily,  I was born minus a few layers of skin.  But this Szabó, he has no face, or that’s what they say about him anyway, even though he sings.  I’ve heard it, we all have.  He sings without words, of course:  “nggg, nggg, nggg” – it’s creepy, but you know something, he has a good voice, and a Hungarian accent, even with no words.  I wish he’d go see Dr. Zee, he’d be able to help him.  That guy could’ve helped Hitler get over his anger problem.  Maybe he could write things down on a piece of paper or a chalkboard, I don’t know.  Better than begging, which is what Szabó does for a living now that he can’t see to paint.  It’s sad.  I draw a disability cheque, it’s not much but it keeps me going, along with whatever stuff I can make or sell or trade, even though I’m not allowed to see my kids which sometimes makes me want to slit my fucking throat, just end this, end it now.  But Dr. Levy says don’t, Dr. Levy says don’t think that way, he says I’m valuable, he says there’s only one of me in all the world, that human beings are irreplaceable, so I guess I better trust his judgement which might be just a little bit clearer than mine.
 
     Anyway, Szabó gets on the bus this morning, it’s one of those stinky wet mornings when everything’s dripping, and he sits right down beside me like he’s done so many times before.  Like I say, regular habits.  And Szabó is clean, not like a lot of the people who take the bus every day; he doesn’t ever smell, he looks after himself. I don’t know how he does it, but he does. Pride.  He must have hair still, I mean, the back of his head must still be OK, just his face is missing,  no big deal, nothing serious, eh?  But then a guy across from us on the sideways seats says, “Hey, fucking freak, you on a pass from the sideshow? Gettin’ it on with the Schizo Lady?”  Street people have got radar, that’s how they can tell.

     “I beg your pardon, buddy, if you wanna see a freak, I think you should maybe try looking in the mirror.”  I’m usually not this bold, but poor Szabó can’t speak up.  Can’t defend himself, but he can hear everything.  It’s cruel.  This guy across from us, he looks like a bad bowel movement after too many blueberries, long and snaky and tattooed dark indigo all over every square inch of his skin.  He’s a living shit.  And he’s calling us freaks.  Jesus.  I keep trying to tell Dr. Levy what it’s like, but he just shakes his head.  Says people call him a Kike or a Yid or a Heeb sometimes, but it’s not the same, it’s not.  “Hey! Auschwitz!” one of them said to him once – and, yeah, he is pretty thin, looks kind of undernourished. How does that go?  “He hath a lean and hungry look.”





     So the driver, his name’s Bert Moffatt, I know him ‘cause I’ve seen him lots of times before on the Number 42, he says to me, “Lady, would you kindly can the comments, you’re being abusive here.”  I’m being abusive.  If a schizo lady raises her voice even a little bit, she’s being abusive, she’s out of control, while this big blue-tattoo shithead over here, he can hurl insults at anybody he likes.  Why? I don’t know, I guess he’s supposed to be sane.  Probably a pimp, probably a heroin addict or a child molester or sells his grandmother for a hit of crack, but he’s allowed to say whatever he likes.

     Fuck it, I’m going back to the flea market tomorrow and buy that cylinder player I saw, it was priced at $75.00 which for me is a bloody fortune, and it looked busted, the ones that work cost way more than that and are out of my price range, but you can usually bargain with these guys, and I have $50.00 scraped together already, it took me months and months of going without smokes, and then I found a ring in the washroom at the Tinseltown Theatre, pawned it and got nearly 30 bucks for it which goes to prove that there is such a thing as Providence.   Porgy keeps me going on smokes, enough to stave off the worst of my nicotene fits, he’s cool about things like that, even though he never goes out, he’s glued to the internet all the time, reading up on mucoid plaque and colonic irrigation.  What a nut.  But he’s still kind of sweet.





Zeddyville

     They call it Needle Park, they call it Pigeon Park, they call it Zeddyville because that’s where Dr. Zee hangs out:  and it’s not a park at all, but a vaguely triangular slab of cement crusted in pigeon shit, draped and clustered with people nobody seems to want around.

     It’s a loitering sort of place, an unplace.  A dislocation. Calling it a park is an impossible stretch, for no green thing could grow here.  Dr. Zoltán Levy barely notices it any more. He has a very fast walk, but it’s not so he can get away from the horrors of the neighborhood.  It’s so he can zip from the Portman to the Sunshine to the Waverley Hotel to get to his patients, the people who are usually on their last gasp.

     Dr. Zee doesn’t step on the bus very often, but it disgorges passengers right outside his home base, the Portman, an armoured truck of a place, fortified, barred, battened down like the good doctor’s own bleak, unsmiling face.  He makes himself available to people, people like Aggie Westerman the chronic schizophrenic, and Porgy Graham who has a strange  obsession with his bowels, and Dave the mutilator who has his lips multiply pierced and chained together, so he can’t even eat without pulling all the studs out.

     Things happened to Dr. Zee a long time ago, everybody knows that, or at least they suspect it, though no one has any specifics, and he isn’t talking.  He “doesn’t have time for a relationship”.  That’s what he says when he is interviewed, which happens quite a lot now, because slowly but surely, Dr. Zee is  starting to become famous.  At least, Vancouver famous, and maybe soon, Canadian famous,  then the world.  He is working on a book that is taking him forever to write because he really doesn’t want to finish it, it’s got too many secrets in it, and he hates to make himself so vulnerable.  Yet he loves the vulnerable, holds his hands out to them, thick-fingered veterinarian’s hands that look as if they could pull out calves and shoe horses.  He gets what it is to be this hurt, this lost, and to keep on going.

     People ask him, often, if the work is depressing.  What depresses him is the question:  the implication that he is dealing with the dregs of humanity, and not a whole lot of bruised little kids in adult bodies, people who were fucked by their fathers or whipped senseless by their mothers or told they were useless piles of shit so often they began to believe it, or told that they never should have been born at all.  It does a bit of damage when you hear it often enough; it can warp a life into a howling parody, heroin squirting up through the veins to blot out the self-loathing for just a little while, a protected, peaceful while, until it’s time to start hustling again. The abyss of the heroin state is welcome, oblivion being far more bearable than whatever is in second place.





     Tourists come to Zeddyville because the area is a little bit famous, too, kind of like Dr. Zee himself, and even the Governor-General came once, on a walkabout like the Queen Mother, her face in a carefully-composed mask of what she hoped was concern.  It doesn’t smell too good down here, it smells like rancid piss at the best of times, human vomit, pot fumes and other things you can’t identify.  It’s a  raw wound, the walls of the buildings splattered in gory-colored murals and gang graffiti impossible to decipher, the strange hieroglyphics of the street.  You have to keep your cool in Zeddyville, not show any fear.  It helps not to make eye contact, as you’ll stare into an abyss, a vacuum, an absence in the eyes of every stranger that passes by.

     “Spare change?  Spare change?  Have a nice day.  Spare change?  Spare change?  Have a nice day.”  It’s a sort of mantra for a lot of people, a way to make it through to the next day of spare change, spare change, have a nice day.  Of course some of the people here are crazy.  There used to be a place called Valleyview, but they closed it down except for the really hard-core cases, and shouldn’t these people be integrated into the community anyway and not just institutionalized and kept out of the mainstream, hidden away like they’re frightening or shameful?  Now the dirty little secret of mental illness is an open secret, like Szabó’s face when it was shot off and blown to bits all over the blackened walls of his torched studio.  The walking wounded don’t have their intestines hanging out all over the  outside of their abdomen, like in a war, but they do have spilled psyches, their pain hanging out, their loneliness hanging out, and it bothers people, the normies, the civilians. Their faces broadcast what they feel:  for God’s sake get away from me buddy before I see myself again, before I see what’s really wrong with me and why I cannot find a place in this world, before I see that this is where I really belong. 

     For no matter how good I look on the outside, I am part of this whole deal that creates a Zeddyville in the middle of a glittering, prosperous, showcase city on the coast of the best country in the world, then forces people to live in it when living is just a simple, bare act of endurance.
  
     We shove them here, we forklift, steamroll, corral, push, shove, cram, then clang the gate shut behind them and then say, what’s wrong with these people, why can’t they get it together, why can’t they make something of themselves?

     Get a job!

     Leave me alone!

    NO, I don’t have any spare change, and put that squeegee away because I am not interested in the fact that you haven’t had anything to eat for four days!  Jesus, these people.
 
     Dr. Zee sees, hears, senses it all the time, a palpable sense of dismissal and fear echoes all around him, the long antennae sticking out of his head pick it all up,  whether he wants to hear it or not, but he keeps on walking fast with his stethoscope going bounce, bounce, bounce on his chest.  He doesn’t really have one around his neck, it just appears that way, it’s his sense of purpose, so intense and focused, it’s almost a buzz.  He doesn’t carry a black bag either, but he will go where the trouble is, he will go where the pain is, and down here, there is more than enough to go around. 


Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five



Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven


Bus People Part Twelve



Friday, August 26, 2016

The path falls away behind you




This is the Gospel according to Popeye: an image I've been almost obsessed with lately. And it took some work to find it. It wasn't apparent which of the several hundred Popeye cartoons it was in, so I started googling things like "Popeye on rope bridge" and "Popeye on rope bridge falling down". 

So what is it about this teensy little cartoonlet that won't leave my head?

It always comes back to my work. I'm not saying my personal life is perfect. It never has been, and I am here to tell you, right here, right now, that my mental health hasn't always been great either. It has been variable. But that's not what gives me the existential blues over, and over, and over again.




For years I had this yearning - it was insanely intense, and it went on for years and years - to write and publish a novel. I kind of felt like that would solve everything that was wrong in my life.

I even remember sitting in a doctor's office while I was being treated for depression. I told her that if I ever published a novel, I knew would never be depressed again.

"What? . . . Why?"

"I'm depressed because I'm a loser, and if I publish a novel I won't be a loser any more."




Well, all that didn't work out so well! I DID finally get a novel in print, after one whole abortive attempt. I got better reviews for that one than I could have hoped for, and for the second one too. But I wasn't selling any copies. My sales records were worse than abysmal.

Convinced I could beat the odds, I flung myself at the barriers once again and wrote/sent out/published a third novel. Last year, I sold exactly three copies of my dream novel, The Glass Character. What is all this leading to?

I don't think I was cut out for success.

I was cut out for the work, I know it, or I wouldn't still be doing it. In fact, I still want my work out there so badly that I decided to dredge up a novel that REALLY never went anywhere, that stayed in a Word file for twelve years, and try to serialize it here, run it in chunks. 




I guess you'd have to be half out of your mind to keep going back to a poisoned well like this. But I have this novel, untouched. It's called Bus People, and it started off simply as a novel about people who ride the bus (which I took every day of my life) and evolved into a sort of fable of life on the notorious Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.  I wrote it in 2004, in a wild upgust of creativity that could have killed me. When I showed it to my then-agent and asked for her feedback, this was the sum total of it:

"I don't know if it's publishable or not." Full stop. 

I needed to get out of "the business" probably right after my first novel tanked, but I didn't. I remember the call from my first publisher after Better Than Life came out, which went something like this:

"Margaret! It's a miracle! We have never had reviews like this, not in the whole history of our press."

"Oh! That's great! I guess I - "

"Now the bad news. You had the worst sales of any author we've ever published."

Badda-boom.




Probably what bothers me more than anything is the fact that my outstanding reviews were seen as a "miracle", a supernatural act, not the result of an insane number of years of hard work and effort.

All this is a long explanation for the strange posts I'm going to be running for the next couple of weeks. Or at least, I hope only a couple of weeks. The posts will be chunks of Bus People in chronological order, so that, unless I get no readers and decide to can the whole thing, by the end of it the whole novel will be up here.




I know you're not supposed to do it this way, but since when did I know the "proper" way to do anything? If it's not going to succeed in worldly terms anyway, which with my track record I know it won't, I might as well go ahead and do it any way I want. Setting up something separate for it is like opening the trap door before I even start.

Which is why I'm making Popeye gifs tonight. They're all from the same cartoon, called Popeye the Sailor. It's a Betty Boop cartoon, actually, in which BB "introduces" Popeye. The cartoon then becomes incredibly violent. What I notice most especially is the continual bobbing up and down of the characters, as if things had to be in motion at all times.

And when you reflect on it, which is not always the best idea, the path DOES fall away behind you, because with each day you live, another day is crossed off the total days allotted to you, whatever that might be. 


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART ONE





This is a serialized version of my novel Bus People, a story of the people who live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The main character, Dr. Zoltan Levy, is loosely based on author and lecturer Dr. Gabor Mate. It's a fantasy and not a sociological treatise: meaning, I don’t try to deal with “issues” so much as people who feel like they’ve been swept to the edge of the sidewalk and are socially invisible/terminally powerless. I’m running it in parts, in chronological order so it’s all there, breaking it up with a few pictures because personally, I hate big blocks of text.


Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside 

Part One


"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night."  Elie Wiesel

PROLOGUE:  The man with no face

     The man with the Elephant Man veil over his head is a regular on the Number 42, getting on every day at  9:47 a.m.

     Same time, same place.  Broadway and Granville, heading north over the bridge towards the Downtown Eastside.

     Everyone is curious as to what he looks like under the veil.  It’s more of a burqa, actually, veil implying something translucent, something gossamer, whereas this is more of a blanket over his head, without any eye holes in it, because you see, this man doesn’t have any eyes.

     Eyes?  Hell, he has no face.

     Once he had a face, but he blew it off one day in a fit of rage.  Rage at life, that it could be so mean, so ungenerous to a man as talented as he.

     An artist. 

     Maybe even a genius.

      Living in a garret.  It was more of a studio, in fact, a big open airy loft with beautiful natural lighting, where he both lived and worked, painted and ate and slept and had sex, wept and raged when the work was not going well and the rent was overdue and his girlfriend complained that he never took her anywhere, which was true, danced heavily in his steel-toed work boots when a painting sold somewhere, even in a tacky restaurant for peanuts, because it was nevertheless proof that yes, he, Szabó, could make a living at this, that against the odds, and in spite of everything his father had said to him, he could be an Artist.

     His father used to curse at him in Hungarian, tell him he was good for nothing, that he should have a trade, or at least a job, a proper job digging a ditch, it didn’t have to be anything grand, his grandfather dug potatoes all his life, and look at him, wise man, fourteen children, he lived a great life, but to be an artist, surely that was a dream for fools, it was impractical, he would never make a mark, he would never sell a painting, he was living in a world of illusion, and sooner or later it would all catch up with him, reality would close in, and he would realize that his father had been right, that he should have gotten an education, that he should have learned a trade, that he should have prepared himself for life, instead of letting life just happen to him. 

     One flicked match, and the dream was over.  The studio went up like a torch, and with it approximately 297 paintings, his entire life’s work.  His oeuvre, gone in an instant, irretrievable.  Szabó did not believe in insurance, and at any rate, how can you insure genius?  How to replace the irreplaceable, the inspiration of the moment, mysterious and unfathomable as life itself?  So – ploomphth -  there went all his canvasses up in flames, all those carefully-wrought works stuck with eggshell and coffee grounds and sputum and semen and even his own blood, torched up to the ceiling in a cloud of greasy smoke:  “like the smoke from the crematoria at Auschwitz,” Szabó was to tell the therapist later on, back when he could still talk, when he still had a jawbone and teeth and a tongue.




     In the Old Testament, Moses keeps such close company with Yahweh that his face shines unnaturally, giving off an eerie light in a way that he fears will frighten his fellow believers.  So he veils himself, covers the radiance to tone it down.  Szabó’s veil has a more practical purpose.  It is meant to hide the evidence of despair.

     It is meant to hide the evidence of a failed attempt to die.  Propping a shotgun against your chin is a bad way to do it, Szabó; you could miss your brain, blow your face completely off instead, and, in an ultimate act of wicked self-punishment for the sin of trying to throw away the irreplaceable gift of your life, survive.

     For Szabó did not see, in that moment, in that immutable instant that would change his life forever, that he was the gift.  Szabó believed, mistakenly, that the gift was in those paintings, that the hoarded treasures rolled up and stacked up in his storage room were in fact his worth and his life.

     Such fragile belief.  Such a thread to hang a life from.  Snap, goes the thread.  It all comes down, because Szabó couldn’t see.

     It was not a good scene at the hospital.  All the nurses and attendants, from the paramedics on down, even as they shoved tubes down his throat to keep him breathing, even as they started the IV, all wished fervently that he would just expire, and quickly too.  Any other result did not bear thinking about. The nurses whispered and murmured to each other, half-ashamed of themselves for the things they were thinking, the things they were saying.




    All the while his heart kept beating, steadily, steadily.  Szabó was not ready to die.  As it turned out, he had missed his brain completely.  Though the front of his head was one big ooze, practically a crater, with only vestigial jaw left, and a bit of facial bone structure, he was literally left without eyes, nose, chin, teeth, lips, and tongue. 

     He still had his mind, he still awareness, he knew what was going on around him.       That was the horror of it; the horror.

     His hearing was completely unaffected.  In fact it seemed to have become more acute, perhaps to compensate for the loss of his eyes.  So he could hear all the remarks of the hospital staff as they worked on him that night: Have you seen this one?  No. Come on, take a look at it.. Oh God.  Sweet Jesus.  This is a sad one.  Don’t worry, he won’t make it ‘til morning.  Well, let’s hope not.  Nobody can live like this.

     There was surgery.  The doctors did the best they could, which was not much, tying off blood vessels, packing the huge wound with gauze.  They discussed possibilities, queasily:  skin grafts?  A face transplant?  But such a thing wasn’t possible. Would it ever be? Wasn’t that just the realm of science fiction?  No one in the ER had ever seen anything this extreme, not even the plastic surgeon who had put faces back together into a semblance of normalcy after hideous burn disfigurement and automotive catastrophe. Still his heart kept on beating, and beating.

     He won’t make it ‘til morning.

     Are you sure?  Look, there’s still a good strong pulse.

     My God.  What’s he going to do?

     The surgeon, ashamed of himself, prayed that he would die.  He got loaded that night, just sat there boozing in the murky dawn half-light, then stuck a needle in his arm, full of Demerol.  It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, but it wouldn’t be the last time, either. 




     In the morning, Szabó became conscious for a while, before slipping into a dark and muddy coma, swimming deep in some subterranean cave of his psyche for several days. He saw his father’s face in the coma, heard his cranky, complaining voice haranguing him for being such a failure, he saw his mother Magolna as she looked in her youth, beautiful, full-lipped and laughing, and he saw other things, things he never wanted to think about again, seared indelibly into his mind so that they replayed automatically in this deep state, as if they had been pre-recorded on an endless loop. 

     A new nurse came on shift, and began to feel sick.  She was overcome with nausea at the sight of him.  Another almost fainted and had to be relieved.  This was an experienced nurse, one who could tie off arterial gushers and sling around bloody afterbirths like they were so many McDonald’s hamburgers, but even she couldn’t stand the sight of him.

     This was as shocking as the case of the two-headed baby born in Argentina, an extreme form of conjoined twins sharing one body, the sight of which made strong men woozy.  Something that should not be.

     Szabó lived.  Strangely, after the shotgun blast that annihilated his face forever, he lost the urge to die - which is not to say that he gained the urge to live, but it was enough,  just enough to get him through.  Perhaps it would have made sense for him to swallow cyanide or throw himself in front of a train.  Instead, he joined the kingdom of night, slipped into the realm of the dusk-dwellers, which is where he had always belonged anyway.  Now he was an official card-carrying member, a member of a strange organization with no organization, full of heroin addicts and hookers and crazy people living in a twilight world.  Intractible suffering was not a place visited, but a permanent home.  His passport was his face, or the lack of one.  His white cane thwacking the sidewalk warned everyone in his path to get out of the way, here comes Szabó, or what’s left of Szabó, the man without a face, the blind painter who no longer paints because he can’t see the canvas.  Can’t talk because he doesn’t have a mouth.  Can eat, through a feeding tube; can make sounds, as his larynx is completely intact; can even sing.  The spectre of Szabó singing, waving his white cane back and forth in front of him on a fine spring morning is enough to send everyone scurrying for cover.  Can’t see; can’t talk; can sing, and seems to know every operatic aria written for the past 200 years.





     Szabó mounts the steps of the Number 42 on a wet Wednesday morning in the springtime, at 9:47 a.m. precisely.  The bus is on time, for once.  The driver sees him get on, and thinks:  oh, that guy.  He’s a regular, all the drivers know about him, they talk about him sometimes, tell stories, but you don’t know what to believe.  Bert Moffatt the bus driver feels sorry for Szabó, wonders what deformity lurks under the blanketlike covering over his head, some cauliflower growth or third eye. Would probably be sick if he saw the mass of scar tissue that used to be a face, the nose hole, the hole for the feeding tube, the hint of an eyebrow left, but no eyes.  Szabo keeps it covered, he veils himself, knowing the world is not ready for a man with no face.  He sits down on the orange plastic-covered sideways seat reserved for the elderly and the handicapped, beside a youngish-looking woman with straw-coloured hair pulled back in a ponytail and a faded green backpack stuffed full of old junk.


Bus People Part One


Bus People Part Two


Bus People Part Three


Bus People Part Four


Bus People Part Five



Bus People Part Six


Bus People Part Seven


Bus People Part Eight


Bus People Part Nine


Bus People Part Ten


Bus People Part Eleven



Bus People Part Twelve