Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART SEVEN





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 Seven

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



Mavis

Mavis Potter likes to take a camera and stroll the streets of Zeddyville, snapping this, snapping that; a grizzled old homeless man, his pants such a miserable fit that he’s forced to hold them up with one hand; an emaciated hooker, body so wasted it looks like a rack of bones, sweating and fidgeting for an overdue fix; an offended tourist (“not my picture! I don’t belong here”). She loves to snap the murals, gory and gaudy and gang-marked, the violent graffiti, the strange signs (“Is It A Crime To Be Homeless?”), including her favourite sign of all, right there in the very asshole of Vancouver: 000 Hastings Street.

Zero, zero, zero. . . there’s those zeds again, she thinks to herself, adjusting her wool cap, a new accoutrement to her bag-lady persona. She started off badly, almost like a Downtown Eastside version of Carol Burnett, too cuddly and respectable-looking in her woollen layers to be believable at all. Then one day she hacked holes in the sweaters and ripped at them, forcing the fibres apart with her bare hands like she was tearing at flesh. The enjoyment she derived from this shocked her a little, but it did not stop her.

Mavis licks her lips, cracked and chapped, without lipstick or even Chapstick, for that would interfere with the Look. She hasn’t worn makeup in months, and her hair – her hair is beginning to smell, and looks so bad she has to keep her head covered with a scarf when she’s not “out”.

Zero, zero, zero. Almost a cliché, she thinks to herself (snap). Zee, zee, zee, or is it Ground Zero, or is it more of an “ooo”. . . the “ooo” of withdrawal, of I need a fix cause I’m goin’ down (like in that Beatles song she never understood).

Mavis wants to bag a big one today, but is not sure she’ll be able to pull it off. The trophy she’s after, the amputated animal head she wants to mount on the wall of her study at home, is the head of Dr. Zoltán Levy. Bring me the head of Zoltán Levy; bring it to me indeed, stare-eyed and blank-faced on a charger, surrounded with sprigs of parsley! But like most big game, he never appears when he is supposed to. (Snap. Fuck off, lady. Get out of my face. Oh, sorry. I thought you were someone else.)

Charles saw some of the photos, and in his mild studious way, his mild studious way that hides the heart of an absolute asshole, he asked her, “Mavie, what’s this?”

“Oh. . . just some shots I took for a project I’m working on.”

“This?” Pictures of spent syringes, a pool of vomit, a dead rat beside an overflowing garbage can, a passed-out man, another passed-out man, an aged Native face seamed by weather and wood alcohol, a hooker, another hooker, another hooker. . .

“I’m doing a book.”

“Some book.” That mild, quizzical look. Charles Potter’s students thought he resembled a big, ruffly brown owl. The owl fucks his students, unfortunately, fucks them blind, lures them with poems and promises and leaves them spinning around on their ass on icy black pavement.






“It’s a departure for me, yes. Downtown Eastside images, to illustrate a cycle of poems.”

“Really. You go there?”

“Only to do research.”

Professor Potter clears his throat and goes back to his papers, the grades in direct proportion to how much sex he gets from each of them. Cunnilingus? B+, maybe. Blow job? A-minus. All the way up the ass, with leather pants, a riding crop and spurs? A+. Or so Mavis imagines, when she thinks about it at all, for it’s easier for her to just lose herself on these streets and forget that she is married to anyone.

Mavis thinks she sees him. Quivering, she jerks the camera up to her face. But it’s not, it’s not him, it’s some other dark Ashkenazic-looking face, a poor substitute, just some schlub who happened to wander in front of her camera, and her heart plummets like a shot sparrow, dead feathers hitting the sidewalk with a sickening thunk.

She will get her photograph of Dr. Levy if it takes her a month of perseverence. She has started to do a little investigating about his habits, there are ways of finding out. She already knows where he lives. She knows he has a Rottweiller named Rosie, she’s seen him out for his little walks with her in the evening. She knows he likes a dark beer now and then, has even glimpsed him in the Jolly Taxpayer wiping foam off his upper lip. Women she’s not so sure of, but there was somebody, she is sure of it. She’ll find out. Who and when and where. Details. She hoards them, sorts them, shuffles them lovingly, and pastes them in her ever-growing scrapbook of Zoltánia, exotica, paper dolls made of cutout magazine-photos that she toys with, turning them over lovingly in her hands.




Porgy

Porgy is fascinated. For he has found out that it’s not just an internet myth: it really is true what they said about Elvis.

Maybe the 60 pounds of impacted fecal material was a bit of an exaggeration, but when he found the report, the actual Elvis autopsy report, on a site called The King is Dead: Long Live the King!, he was gratified to read that Presley’s colon was indeed choked with masses of undigested deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, burnt bacon and Moon Pies.

Elvis did not take a crap for at least ten years. That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the autopsy report, which Porgy reads with rapt fascination:

“The colon is approximately five to seven feet in length in a person Elvis’s size and should have been about two inches in diameter. . . however, Elvis’s colon was at least three and a half inches in diameter in some places and as large as four and a half to five inches in diameter in others. . . (T)he megacolon was jam-packed from the base of the descending colon all the way up and halfway across the transverse colon. It was filled with white, chalklike fecal material.”

Like a lot of drug addicts, Elvis just stopped going to the bathroom at a certain point, and everything backed up like a sewer. Peristalsis ground to a halt, his colon blew up like an enormous bratwurst, and he couldn’t pass anything but the odd rabbit pellet. Didn’t he die on the toilet? It’s enough to send Porgy back to the purging pills and potions.

“Sylvester,” Dr. Levy says to him at their last little session, “you’re in danger of doing serious harm to yourself. There’s nothing wrong with your colon, I’ve examined you, it’s completely normal. You’re not all bunged up with shit like my heroin patients. So why do you do it?”

“Ah, I dunno,” he says, bashful, ashamed. “Makes me feel better.”

“But why? You’re going to develop a dependency on those pills. Pretty soon you won’t be able to take a normal crap without them.”

Dr. Levy leans into him, gazes at him with his penetrating dark eyes.

“Why, Sylvester?”

“Ah, I just. . . “ He looks at the ceiling, then the floor. “It’s just that I feel so. . . guilty.”






Guilt Dr. Levy knows about. Guilt he absorbed with his mother’s milk. He ate it and drank it and slept with it and breathed it for more years than he cares to admit.

“Sylvester.”


“Doc, why you call me that?”

“Because it’s your name. And you just told me you hate being called Porgy.”

“I do. It’s a nigger name.” He looks up from his floorward stare to gauge Dr. Levy’s reaction to the word.

He says it again.

“Nigger.”

Dr. Levy looks at him, unflinching, unblinking.

“Nigger, nigger, nigger.”

Dr. Levy doesn’t move.

“Did anyone ever call you that, Sylvester?”

“Did anyone ever call me that.” He looks up at the ceiling. “Did anyone ever call me that.”

“You’re angry.”

“No I’m not.”

“Angry feelings can turn into guilty feelings, Sylvester, especially if we don’t express them.”

“Doc, why you call – “

“Because it’s your name, Sylvester. You have a name, a real actual name your mother and father gave you. You don’t have to go by that awful handle they gave you in high school.”

“I was fat.”

“Did you try to lose weight?”

“I took laxatives.”

“Sylvester.” Dr. Levy looks a little weary. “You don’t have to do this to yourself any more. It’s unhealthy, and an abusive way to treat your body.”

“But I feel like shit.”

“That doesn’t mean you are shit.”

“I feel like it.”

“You’re a human being, Sylvester, a unique individual. In all of human history, there has never been anyone else exactly like you.”

“Good for human history.”

Dr. Levy smiles a bit. Porgy feels a warm flush rise in his face, a good feeling.

“There’s only one of you, Sylvester, you’re absolutely unique, and you have value and worth, just like every other human being on the face of the planet.”

“Even Saddam Hussein?”

“Look, Sylvester, I don’t know why some people turn evil. It’s beyond me. I only know you’re not. There’s a sweetness about you, a goodness. It’s time you started treating yourself like you mattered.”

He doesn’t want to cry, but feels like crying anyway, big baby that he is. He wants Dr. Levy to wrap him up in a warm fuzzy blanket, kiss his forehead, take him home.

“Doc,” he says, his voice a bit choked.

“Yes, Sylvester.”

“Can I ask you a favour?”

“Name it.”

“Can you call me Sly?”

“I’ll call you whatever you want to be called.”

“It’s just that. . . you know, Sly Stallone is so cool. And Sylvester, it just sounds too much like a cat.”

“Yes, I’ll call you Sly, on one condition, that you stop taking all those capsules. You’re going to perforate your colon if you don’t watch out. Promise?”


“I promise.” He knows he’s lying, but he has to agree to it or Dr. Levy will never let him out of here.

“I want to see you in a week.”

“Sure thing.”

“Try to go a week without purging.”

“Okay.”

“Sly.”


“Yeah, doc.”

“I want you to think of ten good things about yourself.”

“Ten?”

“Work on it. See you in a week. Now get out of here.”

On the way out the door of the Portman, he notices he feels different: less guilty, and somehow lighter, his head full of the rarefied helium of hope.




The bus

The people on the bus go up and down. Up and down. Up and down.

Bert Moffatt notices a difference in them today. They’re restless; antsy. He doesn’t see Szabó. Something is definitely out of whack here, as Szabó always gets on at the same time every day. Where his he? Is he all right?

But Aggie’s here, looking preoccupied, kind of like she’s on a mission or something. She gets on with that half-black boy, what’s his name, Porky or something, nice kid but always looks a little lost, like Aggie has to lead him around by the hand. He always looks terrified on the bus.

Today it’s different, for some reason she’s calling him by a new name, but keeps breaking into giggles.

“Sly. I can’t get used to it, Porg.”

“But I hate my name. Porgy. It’s a slave name. Besides, Dr. Levy says. . .”

“You saw Levy?”

“Yeah.” Porgy/Sly looks a little uncomfortable, but pleased too. “I saw him. I’m s’posed to think of ten good things about myself.”

“Sounds like him. He’s always going on and on about how we’re all unique and irreplaceable. . .”

“He told you that?” Disappointment clouds his face. He looks like a slighted child, shut out of a circle game. He thought maybe he was the only one.

“Oh, don’t worry, he means it, Porg. I mean, Sly. Is that really your name?”

“Well, kind of.”

“So. Ten things.”

“Yeah, ten. I’m kind of getting stuck on one.”

“You’re Porgy; you’re Porgy; you’re Porgy. . .”

“But I’m not Porgy, Ag, I’m Sylvester. My father named me after a Graham cracker.”

“No shit.” Aggie sees she has hurt him. “Sorry. . . Sly. It just takes some getting used to, is all.”

“Yeah, well, I’m brown like a Graham cracker, so what can you expect.”

“So. Ten things. I can think of a few right off the top. Just to get you started, I mean. You’re good at fixing things. Hell, you even got my Edison Bannerfront Standard going again after a hundred years. That ain’t bad. You’re a whiz at doing research. Just look at all you found out about cylinder recording on the internet. I learned everything from you. You’re a walking encyclopedia. Hey, only eight more things to go!”






Porgy/Sly wonders if Dr. Levy said ten so he’d think of one, or maybe two. He hopes Aggie’s small list will be enough.

They get off the bus at the flea market, making their way through the milling crowds to the table where they bought the cylinders and the player. But everything has changed. There’s nothing on the table now but a clutter of old junk, teacups and tacky figurines. The fat bald man who sold her the player isn’t even there any more. A grandmotherly-looking Chinese woman smiles at them from behind the table.

“Uh, excuse me. . . I bought some cylinders here a couple of months ago.”

“Cyrinder?” The word is obviously unfamiliar to her, it would be to practically anyone, and Aggie’s hopes begin to sink.

“Uh. . .old recordings. You know, gramophone. . .” She mimes a cranking motion, and sound flowing out of a horn. The woman looks puzzled.

“Cylinders. I bought one that was pink.” She feels her excitement sagging into disappointment. Porgy/Sly tugs at her hand. Let’s get out of here.

“Ah. Cyrinder. Come this way, pleass.”

She takes Aggie and Porgy/Sly down a corrider into a cluttered storage room.

There, in a large coardboard crate, is a huge collection of cylinders in plain brown containers.

There must be four dozen of them, at least. Aggie looks at Porgy/Sly in wild excitement.

She opens one of the canisters, slides the cylinder out, and holds it in her hand.

It’s pink.

“How much for all these?”

“Oh, you take, you take. Man leave them here, he don’t want, you have them.”

“Really? I should pay you something for these.”

“Oh no. We get rid of, you take, make some space back here, eh? Have a nice day.” She beams at them, then hurries back to her table.

The trip home is a wild ride, as more than once somebody tries to rip off the huge orange leaf-bag crammed with pink cylinders from 1887, thinking they are pop cans gleaned from the dumpster. Nobody has any idea, nobody but her and Porgy (I mean Sly), that what they carry is a bag of magic so potent it will allow them to transcend the maddening obstacle of time.







Szabó

Szabó shows up as faithfully in Dr. Levy’s office as he used to show up in his studio every morning.

Some progress has been made. He writes his messages, sometimes in Hungarian, sometimes in English, very messy because he can’t see, but just legible.

It becomes apparent that he believes he has lost his reason to live.

Not for him the “everyone is valuable” message; Dr. Levy knows that won’t play. He won’t accept it; he’s too complicated, too subtle, too smart.

Dr. Levy always addresses him in Hungarian, which gives him a warm feeling in his centre, something he hasn’t felt in years.

“Tamás, I realize you feel like you’re lost. You may have lost your way temporarily, but you are not lost. You lost a great deal, it’s true – in fact a staggering amount, all your work, your relationship, even your face. But Tamás is still here. You still have your mind.”

Szabó scrawls: That is the hell of it, doctor, my mind lives, I remember what I was, and I see what I am now, I am beggar what lives on street, I sit on corner and wait for alms.

“Your eyes are gone, Tamás, it’s true. But not your creativity. Your creative mind is as intact as it ever was. It’s just that the energy has nowhere to go.”

Dr. Levy can tell from the inclination of his head that he has hit home.

“Tamás. I want to ask you something. And this is very important. You can say no if you want to. Tamás. . . can I look at you?”

His head turns with a start.

“Can I look at your face?”

Face? What’s left of it, the crater, the mass of deformed scar tissue? No one looks at Szabó, they would die if they looked. They would turn to stone.

Szabó sits in horror, which slowly turns to awe.

He realizes something, something powerful, something surprising.

He wants Dr. Levy to look.

It takes a few minutes before his hand will move. This is worse than a year of streetcorner-sitting boiled down into a few seconds of desperate hope.

He wants to live, doesn’t. Wants to take the chance, is sickened by it. Feels Dr. Levy standing near his chair, almost feels the heat from him, and thinks of a dog about to be euthanized, how it will suddenly relax into the veterinarian’s hands.

He drags the old blanket up over his head, holds it above himself like a fetid woolen tent for a few seconds, then lets it drop with an exhausted sigh on the floor of Dr. Levy’s office.


Mavis


It’s after midnight, and Mavis Potter is rummaging through Zoltán Levy’s garbage.

To someone else it’s garbage, a bunch of smelly discarded old food and broken junk; to her, a treasure trove: coffee grounds, probably from some expensive Sumatran roast; vegetable peelings and tops (it appears the good doctor is largely vegan, though the odd chop bone spoils the effect); dog poo, or at least she hopes it’s dog, assuming Rosie must have had an accident somewhere in the house; an old paint shirt full of stains and splotches and holes, which she lifts up to her face and lovingly, lingeringly smells; inexplicably, a classical music CD still in its original plastic wrapper (a Deutsche-Grammophon recording of Brahms’ Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2, performed by Maria Joao Pires, Augustin Dumay and Jian Wong; this she confiscates, looking forward to listening to it later); a Hungarian newspaper, damp and crumpled; and oh. Papers. Handwritten papers, masses of them, perhaps notes, a rough draft for this book he is trying to write? Or something more personal: a journal, perhaps? His private thoughts? Thank God it’s written in English. She quickly crams them into her bag, looking around, wondering if anyone has seen her, feeling the thrill of shame.

She saw him out with his dog the other morning, Rottweiller, Nazi dog, such a strange choice for a Jew. For this expedition she wore her normal clothes, civilian garb, a tweed suit, skirt and blazer and brown oxfords, sexless shoes, she’d keep the other ones for later, and walked around and around the neighborhood in North Vancouver carrying a brown leather briefcase and hoping she looked like a Jehovah’s Witness or something, or as if she were canvassing for some worthy cause, a social issue, Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, rape crisis centre, whatever. She tried to look purposeful, and she certainly was, like any predator, single-minded, alert and focused on the task, the task of capturing Zoltán Levy, of making him her own.

She even passed by him on the sidewalk that day, her heart hammering wildly, and he glanced up and for a split-second looked a bit puzzled, a “do I know you? No, I guess not” look that lasted a fleeting instant before he walked on.

Score.

Mavis cherishes these moments, recalls them when she is lying in bed at night beside her snoring hulk of a husband; her hand will steal down to the sensitive place between her legs, and she will begin to caress herself, and caress herself, until she has to bite down hard to stifle the groan when orgasm rips through her shuddering body. The dark and downtrodden Messiah of the streets, her damaged saint, has ravished her once again.

The CD rests under her pillow, still faintly garbage-scented, still unplayed. She wonders what made him pitch it out: guilt? Turning over a new leaf: I’ll never steal again, starting now? Oh, she knows how that one goes. Every trip to Zoltán Levy’s neighborhood is her last, this time she really means it, she’ll stop, she can stop any time she wants to, it’s just that she needs to find out just a little bit more about him so she can put it all in this book, this cycle of poems, or maybe she should write a novel, that’s it, she’ll publish at last and get some long-overdue recognition and respect, the Giller prize maybe, no, that’s asking too much, but all this research she’s doing right now has a purpose, it does. She’ll show Charles, show him she can write at least as well as those nubile young women he samples like so many hors d’ouevres when he feels a bit peckish. Fuck Charles, she’ll write a bestseller, she’ll win the Booker Prize, Dr. Levy will have to take notice of her then and not look askance at her like she’s some demented freak detective prowling the neighborhood for clues.

She has stopped taking the Remeron and the Seroquel, they were only dulling her thinking, and besides, she doesn’t need them any more, her depression is completely gone, she has better orgasms without the pills, and her life has a sense of mission, of purpose, a hurtling forward momentum she has never experienced, an intensity, it’s just like that poem from Yeats, a terrible beauty is born, it’s exhilarating, it’s noble, it’s furiously fine, and it speeds her forward into an accelerated state of bliss the likes of which she has never known before. Like Clara Schumann with her feverish illicit love for Brahms, her Johannespassion, Mavis has her Zoltánnespassion, an involvement, a commitment, a devotion so complete it wipes her mind absolutely clean of the shadows of the past.







The bus

The people on the bus are drunk and stoned. Drunk and stoned. Drunk. . . and. . .stoned.

Three kids about fifteen years old get on the bus at Broadway and Granville. The two boys are stocky, dressed in black leather with a lot of studs and chains, pale and a little bit puffy in the face like habitual drinkers. Alcohol fumes surround them in a nearly-visible nimbus. The girl is emaciated, sad-eyed and plaintive of voice, with multiple facial piercings and dry, three-colour hair.

“That’s because you never do any fuckin’ work around the place. You never even stack the fuckin’ dishes.”

“Ah, ya fuckin’ whiner. Make me sick. Always fuckin’ complaining.”

The two boys squeeze into a seat at the back. The girl sits next to a bewildered-looking pink-faced elderly woman in a navy coat and a white plastic rain hat.

“Yeah, talk about bein’ a fuckin’ loser, try pulling your own weight around the place.” The girl begins to sniffle and rubs her nose. “Fuck, I need some coke.”

“I need a fix, ‘cause I’m goin’ down. . . “

“Mother Superior jumped the gun.”

“My Mum does coke.”

“Fuckin’ A!”

“Loser.”
“Fuck off, bitch.”

“You’re a loser. That’s why you always talk that way. You talk like a fuckin’ loser.”

“Yeah, well at least I’m not a fuckin’ addict.”

“No. You’re a fuckin’ alcoholic.”

“My Mom’s an addict.”

“My Mom’s a slut.” Stoned laughter. The girl covers her face with her hands. The bigger of the two boys grabs her backpack and holds it up and away from her, then tosses it to to the blonde boy who wraps his arms around it. Screaming bloody murder, the girl lunges at him and slashes at his face with her black-painted fingernails.

“Hey, fuck off, bitch!”

“Driver! Driver!” The little old lady is in a panic. “Driver, do something about this. These young people are fighting back here. And their language is simply appalling.”

The driver, a beaten-down-looking East Indian man in a dark blue turban, has a wife and five kids at home. He doesn’t want to call the supervisor, it holds up the bus and makes everyone angry and makes him late, and he doesn’t want to pull the kids off the bus because he might get hurt, or worse, hurt them – but the old lady is agitating now, and the girl is clearly out of control, screaming and slapping the two boys on the side of the head with terrifying force.

“Fuckin’ Christ.”

“Bitch, you are losin’ it!”

“Order, order please,” the driver says mildly.

“Give me my FUCKING bag!” The girl yanks the backpack out of the blonde guy’s arms, falling over backwards into the aisle of the bus. The two boys in the back convulse with laughter. Blood is trickling down the burly boy’s face, and the blonde boy has an angry red hand-mark on the side of his head.

As if performing some elaborate break-dance manouevre, the girl twists and turns her wasted body around and somehow wrenches herself into an upright position. She flings the backpack over her shoulder and leans her face in so close to the two boys that they can smell her blue lipstick.

“Fucking. . .losers.”

She wheels around and strides to the back door, almost knocking down a nicely-dressed old Chinese man in the aisle, a standee.

“Ho-ly shit.”

“Hello, Valleyview? Get a bed ready.”

“That bitch is fucked.”

“Language,” says the old lady.

“Jesus Christ,” murmurs the driver.

The well-dressed old Chinese man picks himself up, leans out the open exit door and stares fiercely at the girl, who stands splay-legged at the side of the street. The passengers strain to hear what he will say.

“You die.”

“Eat shit, Chink!”

“You die, then fuck off.”

The door wheezes shut and the bus pulls away from the stop.



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

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Unliving dolls





An obsession I return to over and over again is the creepiness of dolls, rivalled only by the creepiness of clowns. Both are meant to bring joy and pleasure to small children (or rather "children of all ages!", as they say at the circus). Come to that, circuses are pretty creepy too, or at least the circuses I saw as a kid:  tawdry is a better word, with sad elephants, bad smells and clowns who had probably seen better days and likely fuelled themselves from a flask.

This is the first video I've found with a complete set of Edison Talking Doll recordings. Or, at least, I fervently pray it is a complete set and I won't find any more. God only knows where they got them, as I would've thought the wax cylinders would have melted down by now. 





The dolls had a most un-cuddly steel  body with holes in it to concentrate the "audio". I think either the crank or the cylinder broke down almost immediately. Did this freak out kids? It might have filled them with wonder. Even some of the stranger dolls from the 1960s were seen as completely charming, like the one who had different facial expressions when you wrenched her arm around (and what was her name, anyway?), or the one who said creepy things like, "I can see in the dark" and "I wish we were twins".





"Doll" has taken on a whole new meaning. When I first heard about "reborns", they were dolls with realistic-looking arms and legs and head, and a cloth body like a conventional vinyl doll. And they were vinyl. Originally, you just took a vinyl doll and mucked around with it until it looked more-or-less real.

Soon the dollmakers upped the ante, placing beating hearts in these things, heaters, voice recordings so they'd cry and coo, and even the capacity to wet and (I think) poop. Jesus, you might as well just have yourself a real kid!






But soon that wasn't enough, either. I began to see dolls molded out of silicone, one-piecers I mean, their limbs jiggling like a rubber frog's. These were so "lifelike" they scared the hell out of me. One of these might run as high as $10,000.00, though I just found this one on eBay:







5h left (Today 5:06PM)
From China
Soft Brown Hair Full Silicone Vinyl Reborn Baby Dolls Lifelike Newborn Baby Doll
$1.99
0 bids


Though it's described here as "full silicone", I have a feeling it's the kind of doll you might find at a dollar store: "Mo-o-o-o-o-m, can I have that doll?" "Oh, okay. It's only worth a couple of bucks."





I have weird feelings about these dolls. I honestly do. After watching a number of "Kaylee's Morning Routine" videos, which made me gasp, I began to wonder what it would be like to own a doll so real-looking that cops broke the glass in hot car windows to rescue them. (Doll owners are not above such pranks and love freaking people out while shopping at Walmart, sometimes casually abandoning them in the ladies' room.) I even. . . no, I didn't, but yes, I DID look at some of them, decided they weren't worth my while and that you needed to pay five grand to get a really good one.





Now I wonder what I was thinking of. Getting a cat seemed to rescue me from such thoughts.  I didn't realize I was at such a low point. At least the cat is real.

If you watch their YouTube videos, the collectors cannot understand why anyone would find their obsession creepy. "Full-body silicone" seems to be the Cadillac of these never-born, never-dead things, quickly replacing those clunky old cloth-bodies that can't even be bathed. This rarefied cult strikes me as stereotyped and largely misunderstood. Wikipedia says reborns are owned almost exclusively by elderly women who at some point suffered the loss of a child, but that's simply not true. Nearly all the videos I've seen are of women in their 20s and 30s, and quite a few of them are teenagers.

I can only assume that they just like having them around to feed, dress, bathe and take on "outings", and collect them obsessively. Elaborate, thrill-packed box-opening ceremonies abound on YouTube, each one packed with as much fun and excitement as a baby shower. These are actually entertaining to watch: though the disaster openings ("ohhhhh noooooo, his head is warped. . .") are even more fun.





I keep thinking of a chant we had in school: "Rubber baby-buggy bumpers". You had to say it ten times fast, or something, though I am not sure why.




POSTSCRIPT (there's always one of those!): I found this weird little entry in Wikipedia, which gets just about everything wrong about reborn dolls:

A reborn doll is a manufactured skin doll that has been transformed to resemble a human infant with as much realism as possible. The process of creating a reborn doll is referred to as reborning and the doll artists are referred to as reborners. Reborn dolls are also known as Bodo dolls or unliving dolls.


I've scoured the internet and found NO reference to "Bodo dolls", though I did find "Bobo dolls". These are the roly-poly clown things that bounce back up when you push them over. For some reason, all sorts of scientific experiments have been done on these that don't interest me at all. "Unliving" isn't easy to find either, except on really creepy sites that have nothing to do with these dolls.

And then there's this:




Social issues and reactions

The overwhelming majority of reborn customers are older women. Many women collect reborns as they would a non-reborn doll, whilst others purchase them to fill a void of a lost child and may treat reborns as living babies. Media features and public receptions have used such adjectives as "creepy" to describe the reborns. This can be explained by the uncanny valley hypothesis. This states that as objects become more lifelike they gain an increasing empathetic response, until a certain point at which the response changes to repulsion. Department stores have refused to stock the dolls because of this reaction, claiming they are too lifelike.

I don't know if I have seen any "older women" on the YouTube videos, if older means 60s or 70s. Many of them are less than half my age. Wikipedia makes no reference at all to the "full-body silicone" doll which is all the rage now. This information is at least ten years out of date. Wiki is mostly put together by guys in their 20s, the ones that live in Mom's basement and really don't get out much, or do much of anything except steal each other's research.




As for department stores not selling them because they are "too lifelike", it's more likely they don't sell them because of the price factor. Really good ones cost hundreds or even many thousands of dollars. Unless they bolted them to the shelves (hmmmmm. . . ), they could stand to lose a lot through shoplifting. Picture it: reborn kidnappers wearing maternity coats sneaking into the toy department and smuggling the little blighters out past the store alarms.

BTW, I'd be interested to see if there is any feuding between "old-school" cloth-bodied reborners and the newer, full-body-silicone crowd. I have never seen a video of a conventional reborn which could be bent and twisted and slung around like this. Nor do they have realistic genitals, a detail which squicks out even some of the most die-hard collectors. That hunk of quivering pink silicone looks EXACTLY like a real baby, folks, and that is exactly what makes it so creepy.

Bodo, anyone?






Damn, I thought I was finished! But I just had a horrible thought. These dolls are molded, right? HOW DO THEY MAKE THE MOLDS? The only method I can think of is to make a plaster cast of a baby. How else could they make it that realistic, down to those last minute bumps of scarlet prickly heat?





Dear God. This is worse than the squawky, distorted, Night of the Living Dead Edison doll recordings! I found some instructions for making a silicone, baby, but I find them kind of hard to believe. Nevertheless, in the interests of science, I will share them with you:

There is one way to do a full mold for a full silicone baby, and I have been researching this, but haven’t done it yet.

You start off by drawing a line through the center of the baby, around its head, fingers, toes.

Then you take some white clay and put it on the bottom of the mold, and pack it into the center lines all around the baby.

You take a flat brush and dampen it and go around the edges making sure the clay is sealed.

Cut off excess on sides to not be wasteful with product.

Take the end of a sharpie with the lid on it, and make holes around the baby, which will be the center holes that hold the mold together. You can even put the round nuts around it if you want to.

Close the mold, and mix the dragon skin, or silicone you are using for the mold, and add flocking for the color you want the mold to be.




Pour the product into the mold covering the baby half that you can see.

Let it cure.

Cut the mold open and remove the clay and any loose silicone that is dangling.

Clean all of the clay off.

Turn the baby over and roll up a clay hole maker to put into the center for the pour hole.

Cover the remainder of the baby.

Let cure.

Remove. It comes apart, but you can pour the baby into the pour hole.

Make sure to Tap tap tap to get all of the air bubbles out, because you don’t want those. It will waste your silicone product. Also turn to cover every nook and cranny.









Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Henri 2, Paw de Deux




Helas. . . meow.


"How long were you with the carnival?": Bob Dylan's dream




This snippet from one of the many (MANY) Bob Dylan biographies has always stuck in my mind. It's from Down the Highway by Howard Sounes. He's 20 years old and just getting started in the coffeehouses of Minnesota, when he says something very strange to his current girlfriend, Bonnie Beecher:


"It seemed to Bonnie that Bob's confidence was sometimes out of proportion to his ability, however. 'If the Library of Congress ever comes and asks you for these songs,' Bob told her gravely, 'I want you to sell them for two hundred dollars. I want you to promise this.' Bonnie was flabbergasted. 'I thought, what an outrageous ego! To think that the Library of Congress was going to come and ask Bonnie Beecher for Bobby Dylan's tapes!' But Bob made her promise. 'Yes, I give my word,' she agreed, when she stopped laughing." 






Bob Dylan is Rolling Stone's pick for best songwriter of all time.
Rolling Stone crowns Bob Dylan greatest songwriter of all time; here's who else made the cut

BY BRIAN ANTHONY HERNANDEZAUG 13, 2015

Bob Dylan made you feel his love — and his unforgettable lyrics.

To recognize the folk legend's brilliant contributions to music history, Rolling Stone has placed Dylan at No. 1 on its "100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time" list, a comprehensive ranking spanning many decades.

SEE ALSO: Bob Dylan's 'Like a Rolling Stone' Interactive Video Mimics TV Surfing




"A song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true," Rolling Stone quotes Dylan saying. "They're like strange countries that you have to enter."

Dylan, whose most recent release is 2015's Shadows in the Night, penned such classics as "Like a Rolling Stone," "Blowin' in the Wind," "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," "Forever Young," "Subterranean Homesick Blues," "Positively Fourth Street" and "Tangled Up Blue."

Contemporary chart-toppers also earned spots on the list — Taylor Swift (97), Eminem (91), Kanye West (84), Bjork (81), Jay Z (68) — although it's rightfully dominated by artists and writers whose music has stood the test of time over many generations.




Here are the top 25 songwriters on the list; go to Rolling Stone to see the top 100:

25. Randy Newman

24. Elvis Costello

23. Robert Johnson

22. Van Morrison

21. Lou Reed

20. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

19. Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry

18. Prince

17. Neil Young

16. Leonard Cohen

15. Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland

14. Bruce Springsteen

13. Hank Williams

12. Brian Wilson

11. Bob Marley

10. Stevie Wonder

9. Joni Mitchell

8. Paul Simon

7. Carole King and Gerry Goffin

6. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

5. Smokey Robinson

4. Chuck Berry

3. John Lennon

2. Paul McCartney

1. Bob Dylan


"EPIPHANY!" I make this blue because I had a real snazzeroo of a realization when I was digging up the Bob Dylan quote. The thing is, that quote has been kicking around in my head for quite a while now. It illustrates the absolute Zenlike poise of the Master, the nearly extraterrestrial confidence which sustains a once-in-a-lifetime artist like Dylan through all the rotten tomatoes of existential small-mindedness.

Then comes the Rolling Stone article, in which BD is finally recognized as, not unlike Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, not just of his own time, but for all time. And somehow or other those two realizations twisted together into a perfect pretzel which only required, from me, a little salt.






I never knew much about Bonnie Beecher except that: (a) she was one of many girl friends BD had in Minnesota; (b) she later married Woodstock caterer Wavy Gravy; (c) she might have been the inspiration for Girl from the North Country, though 3 or 4 others also lay claim to the fact; AND (I just found this out) she was on the Twilight Zone! Not only was she on The Twilight Zone, she was on Come Wander With Me, one of the best-known and creepiest episodes, which I remember gave me the heebie-jeebies when I was a kid. It featured a tape recorder playing back a song that had never been recorded, which freaked me right out because I was afraid my old reel-to-reel Webcor might start doing the same thing.

So of course I had to make a gif of Bonnie Beecher! Dylan always got the prettiest girls.




Bus People: a novel of the Downtown Eastside PART SIX





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 Six

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


Aggie

Portman Hotel

October 31, 2003

Last night I dreamed about the Edison doll: and it was freaky, because the doll talked to me all right, but it said things it was never programmed to say, and even answered my questions in a way that made my scalp prickle.

This sort of happened once before, it was when I was eight years old and got a Chatty Cathy doll for my birthday, back in the 1960s. People don’t realize this about me, but I’m nearly 50, not 35 or 40 like they think. I don’t show my age, maybe a benefit of being schizoaffective, who knows. They say people in mental institutions and jails don’t age, they’re protected from reality, or is it just the fact they’re so far outside reality as to escape being marked in the face? Anyway, I kept telling my mother: Mum, the Chatty Cathy doll is talking to me.

Of course it is, Aggie, that’s why they call it a Chatty Cathy doll, it’s supposed to talk to you when you pull the string.

But Mum. I never even pulled it, and it talked.

Aggie, don’t make up stories.

I’m not! I never even went near it, and its eyes were following me all around the room!

Oh, Aggie. What are we going to do with you.

I told myself I had dreamed it. Did I dream it? The two worlds were muddled together sometimes. But whether I was awake or not, I heard it talk. I heard it say, don’t trust the grownups. I heard it say, keep one eye open at night. I heard it say, watch out, little girl. And: keep your head. Keep your head.

A suspicious sort of person, was Chatty Cathy, always on the lookout for danger of every kind.

Next day I found my doll hanging. It was dangling, hair all on end, from my big brother’s bedroom door-knob. He had made a little noose out of string, the kind he used at scouts for tying knots. I gasped and stepped backwards and nearly fell over the cat. 






“Watch out, little girl,” Chatty Cathy said to me in her freaky, squeaky, ripcord-strangulated voice. “Watch out for the people at home.” It was the kind of dream where I was paralyzed, unable to rise or to wake.

So this Edison doll dream was kind of traumatic for me. Brought back things I didn’t want to remember. I turned the crank sticking out of its back, and it recited this odd little poem, let’s see if I can remember how it went:

There are things in the world that we don’t want to see.

There are (people? Souls?) in the world that we don’t want to be.

The strange and the stranger are not what they seem,

And they all (something, something), lost in a dream.

It was almost like a song, a catchy little tune squeaked out by a doll that happened to be 114 years old, a little girl older and freakier-looking than your great-great-grandmother if she somehow managed to stay alive for 114 years.

The song explained a few things. It made a kind of sense to me. It is as if somebody tilted the chessboard, and all the unstable pieces, the ones with no solid foundation, slid down into a kind of crack. Anyway, that was the image that came into my head when the doll was talking to me in that horrible distorted voice. And even though this province now has a strange new ad campaign for the tourist industry with the motto, “This is the best place on earth”, there are those of us down here who might have another opinion.

It’s Halloween, which is probably what has got me so down today; I’m pretty sure of that, because I can’t help but think about Cameron and Suzanne in their costumes, I wonder what they’ll dress up as this year, they’re eight years old now, the same age I was when I got that stupid Chatty Cathy doll, and they’ll want to be something special, not just go as something off the rack from the Safeway store.

And the fact I haven’t seen them in so long makes me want to die sometimes, I’ve been judged unfit to be near them, but I swear, though I admit I don’t really remember it very clearly, that guy coming towards me on the street after dark looked exactly like my Dad. And it was self-defense, there was nobody around to bear witness, Dr. Levy believes me, but I kind of lost track of myself there, until I came to with handcuffs on, and very sore hands which apparently came from trying to throttle this guy to death.

The man’s a real asshole, verbally assaulted me and tried to touch me, but he was determined there were going to be consequences, and even though I didn’t do any time, I’m “watched”, I’m “monitored”, a social worker dogs my footsteps, and I can’t see my kids for the forseeable future, which means I have to assume Jamie is handling things, Jamie who wouldn’t know how to keep order in a home if his life depended on it. And yeah, he loves them and all, I don’t doubt that, and he has a career of sorts, playing the clubs and the street corners, but a jazz musician isn’t necessarily the best father-figure for two impressionable young kids. Jamboy, they call him – Jamboy Jarrett, with his mother-of-pearl saxophone that looks so awesome, like it’s carved out of alabaster or something, almost translucent. We did have some pretty good years, okay, some very good years before I got so sick, or at least it seems like it from where I am now, pretty much on my own. There was some bad stuff here and there, some “issues” as the social worker puts it, God how I hate that word, such a piss-ass term for stuff that’s so horrible. Being crazy is a big issue, apparently, though sometimes I think Jamie’s the crazy one, out there honking his brains out for spare change and a decent meal.

As for my cylinder project, I’m still waiting, the wait has been interminable, weeks and weeks, and Porgy is trying this and trying that, unbending paper clips, rigging up rubber bands, whatever he can think of to get the machine working again. He just got the bright idea of going on the internet to see if he can get some spare parts. Not very likely. The thing hasn’t worked since 1904 or something, no wonder he’s having trouble, being out of commission for a hundred years will do that to you. A century of silence. But think what it’s going to be like, when that baby finally begins to speak.






Szabó

What are Szabó’s thoughts?

What does he think about, a man who is unspeakable, with a crater instead of a face?

Even among the write-offs who prowl the gaudy medieval streets of Zeddyville, he is an extreme, an outcast among outcasts. But he does not sit there and think: I am an extreme. He thinks in Hungarian still, always has, always will, which is why Dr. Zee’s couple of sentences made his insides jump so hard. He’s wired for it, and also wired to create, not sit like this in a heap on the sidewalk like some Victorian curiosity transplanted 100 years into the future, wondering what his fortunes might have been in different times, when he could have charged admission for people to gawk at him.

As it is, they get to look for free, but some of them still drop toonies into his hat (a theatrical prop more than an item of apparel), perhaps moved by pity for the strange heap of humanity draped like some museum statue just waiting to be revealed for display. He sometimes feels tempted to unveil himself, but can’t quite bring himself to do it, not just yet. But one day, one day when the jeers become too much for him, one day when he has had just about enough of small token handouts and the meanness of pity, he’ll do it, he’ll pull the cover off and show the world what really happened to Szabó when he pointed the rifle at his chin and fired.

If you could watch time-lapse photography of the six hours or so Szabó spends on the street at his station, nothing much would happen. Mavis Potter recently discovered how time slows down to a crawl around these parts, how eventlessness becomes the norm.

There would be no shortage of activity, but it would all look the same. People would whir and whip by like hummingbirds in a time warp, whip, zip, whip, zip. Toonies would fall rhythmically from guilty fingers. The stream of human traffic would gradually slow down as the day wore on; some would deliberately choose to walk on the other side of the street, as the sight of Szabó sitting there faceless and stateless is just too disturbing for them to contemplate. Better they shouldn’t have to look.

This time, however, the ending is different.

This time, when the six hours or so is up, when he has enough toonies to cover his room and board for the day, plus food, and a little extra for the cheap alcohol he tips into his feeding solution as a special treat, he doesn’t go across the street to catch the Number 42 to take him back to his tiny little one-room apartment on Hemlock Street. He begins to walk towards the Portman instead. Inwardly he is quaking, his pride saying, no, no, don’t ask for help, you can do this on your own.

But something else in him, something in him that has had about enough, enough of this bad parody of living, is propelling his legs towards the clinic where Dr. Zee tries his best every day to control the runaway damage of the streets.

Come see me sometime, okay? You know where my office is.


If you don’t have a mouth, it’s a little hard for you to make an appointment. So Szabó just shows up, and as fate would have it, Dr. Zee is on the premises and not even terribly busy. Between catastrophes, he likes to say to his longsuffering staff, and almost a little bored.

Szabó suddenly appears in the doorway, startling the hell out of him. How did he get in? There’s a controlled entrance to this place, but maybe the guy at the door was too stunned to say no.

“Szabó Tamás.” He says it warmly, in the Hungarian way, last name first, first name last. It catches him behind the knees. How does he know? He knows. Szabó sways a bit, and Dr. Levy guides him towards a chair.

“I’m glad you came,” he tells him. In Hungarian: Isten hozott. Then realizes that two-way communication is going to be a little bit difficult, unless Szabó writes things down, perhaps.

As he is pondering this, and thinking of ways to overcome the obstacle, he realizes something, sees it in the bent shoulders, the head lowered almost as if in an attitude of prayer, the slight sound from a strangulated throat.

Even with no eyes, no mouth, no face, a man can still weep.







Zoltán Levy

Zoltán Levy feels that sense of privilege, of honour, that always steals over him when someone unburdens, opens themselves to him.

It is something about his face, perhaps; in spite of its battened-down quality, the hardness about the mouth, there is compassion written in the deep puckers in his forehead. The face suggests Elie Wiesel in its classic sadness, a Holocaust face, wrought by forces that crushed the life out of millions. People often feel compelled to share things with him, private things, agonizing things, secrets.

He recognizes this as a gift, but an uneasy one. Like most gifts, perhaps all of them, it has a cost. The weight of the world is on his shoulders, and he has the backaches to prove it. One can almost see the dotted-line borders of an invisible globe perched atop his not-very-powerful frame. Wiry, people call him; wiry and intense. One journalist compared him to a hummingbird, zipping around at a higher frequency than anyone else.

Zoltán Levy gazes upon the weeping figure in his office, and finds himself sinking into a powerful state, a deep state, a profound state: the therapeutic state, the place where he can help. This is his gift, the essence of it: the ability, or perhaps the willingness, to go there, to go where the trouble is, and for all his scattered attention, to make himself so fully present in the moment that he becomes a receptor for pain.

He knows that much has happened in this first session, though very few words have passed between them. There was simply no need, for something far more important has occurred. Szabó showed up. Showing up is the huge portion of life, which is what makes not showing up (also known as abandonment) so completely devastating. It is as if it’s the inverse of life, the opposite of love, if love has an opposite; not hate, for if we hate each other and are screaming and raging, there’s still energy, maybe even hope; but indifference kills, kills by not caring, by not giving a shit.

Dr. Levy sits in the warm aura of a weeping man, and feels gratitude for the moment, perhaps the closest he comes to prayer. He is not a religious man – too much has happened to him, he has seen too much to believe in a higher benevolence. But he is aware of spirit. More aware than ever now that he is older, in his sixties, the protracted ordeal of his youth far behind him.

Did such a man ever love? Could such concentrated intensity, such passion, never touch another human being? He loved once, make no mistake. The love was so intense, so profound, that it made itself manifest in the form of a child. Not a stone baby, not a papyraceous freak dry as the wings of a dead insect, but a warm flesh-and-blood little boy named Anton, the very image of his father, whom Zoltán Levy coldly abandoned as if he were some inanimate object, something to be tossed aside without a thought.






A canyon yawns between his therapeutic tenderness, the tears pricking his warm dark eyes as he watches Szabó weep in his office, and the utter disregard with which he walked out of Annie’s life forever, with not even a backward glance. For the truth is, Zoltán Levy isn’t the saviour of the mean streets so much as a first-class shit.

Annie was left alone. With a son. That bastard; that bastard. For this is the hard truth about Zoltán Levy, the truth he can’t outrun no matter how quickly he zips from blossom to blossom like a supernaturally-charged little flying machine. The damage he did when he turned his back was incalculable, and so casually done! That was the worst of it, the casualness. What happened to his conscience? Did the forces of history twist his head so violently that he lost all sense of what was right, or is that just an excuse, should we let this go by, shouldn’t he be held accountable for his actions, or his lack of actions, his lack of presence, which is in many ways worse than a death?

Annie wonders this; she wonders it all the time. She’s not living five thousand miles away, though she might be for all the connection she feels with the father of her child. No, she lives right here in Vancouver. But Zoltán Levy has found a way to compartmentalize this broken piece, this dead-ended, abortive love that caused him to coldly walk. It sleeps in a locked cellar in his mind, along with other things, including the memory of a potato, a fragment of potato he was saving to give to his mother, she kept saving food for him, he felt so guilty, so guilty, so now he would return the favour and keep this small morsel of food for her, hide it carefully in the rags of his clothing all morning even as he worked moving heavy stones from one part of the camp to another, useless, demeaning work, though it could be worse, some had to dig up Jewish corpses and move them from one part of the camp to another, so he should consider himself lucky, but at one point in a moment of weakness he reached in and fished around just to look at the potato, to make sure it was still there, and in a split-second impulse he nibbled on the fragment, and then nibbled some more, and before he knew what he was doing he had eaten it, he had eaten the potato he was going to give to his mother because the hunger was so overwhelming, and because no matter how much he loved her, his desire to live was stronger than his desire to save her.

Márta Lévai survived because she was just strong enough, and because she had a small son to live for. She survived to bring him over to freedom and a change of name, easier to spell, and not so Hungarian, a fresh start in a new country. She was one of the lucky ones, she made it through, and her son made it through, though terribly skinny, he’d never grow properly, he would always look stunted or starved all his life, but never mind, even her husband was spared, after a long and harrowing separation, and the family came back together again in 1945, it was like a miracle, a miracle of restoration. They never spoke of the war, but put it away and lived forwards, like walking with shattered bones. What were they to do? Cry for the rest of their lives? Not live, not take one step, then another – was that not letting Hitler win?

Hitler did not win, and the little reassembled family, the small sober-faced boy whom they called Tán-tán and his grateful shell-shocked parents, transplanted themselves to this strange new land, and found a way to go on living, day by difficult, irreplaceable day.


Aggie


Portman Hotel
November 11, 2003

So the day finally dawns, the great day when Porgy gets the little beast working again without breaking down after a few seconds of operation. I couldn’t believe how excited we both were – like kids on Christmas morning, like the Darling children when Peter Pan lifts them off the ground and flies them over London, all lit up at night.

We needed to have some kind of ceremony for such a momentous occasion, so we smoked a couple joints and drank some rice wine and got a little giggly beforehand. Normally I wouldn’t go near the stuff, pot I mean, because it can make me really paranoid, and I’ve even hallucinated on it before, white fountains, it was freaky. But this was quality stuff, Porgy must have a good dealer, and though it was strong, the buzz was mellow and pleasurable and calm. We grinned at each other like conspirators, and Porgy said I should choose the first cylinder to listen to.

I did it blindfolded. We thought it would be more fun that way, to pick at random. So Porgy puts the blindfold on me, giggling away, and turns me around three times like I’m going to play pin the tail on the donkey, and I grope towards the big pile of cylinders on the floor, and grab one.






It’s one of the really old ones, Edison brown wax, with no label on it, it could be anything. My head is reeling with excitement and a weird kind of fear. Porgy feels the same way, I can tell.

He loads the cylinder on, gives the machine a mighty crank, and we listen.

A hiss, a crackle, then: ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita.

“Have you ever heard about the Wibbly Wobbly Walk?

Well just in case you’ve not,

I’ll tell you on the spot,

The Wibbly Wobbly Walk is only just another way

Of saying that the boys are out upon a holiday. . . “
I freak.

I abso-fucking-lutely freak. But it’s so funny!

“And they all walk

The Wibbly Wobbly Walk,

All talk

The Wibbly Wobbly talk,

All wear

Wibbly Wobbly ties,

And wink at all the pretty girls

With Wibbly Wobbly Eyes. . .”

I freak.

I abso-fuckin’-lutely freak!

We both fall on the floor, convulsing. The recording I could not stand to listen to as a child is thumbing its nose at me over the span of an entire century.

The guy singing, who knows what his name is, he sounds sort of English, and he starts kind of raving mid-cylinder, chortling away like he’s drunk or something:

“Heh-heh-heh.

You ought to see them.

They can’t do the Grizzly Bear or the Turkey Trot.

Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

I’ve got a Wibbly Wobbly laugh, haven’t I?

Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”

It’s so totally bizarre, unexpected and delightful, we just hug each other. We can’t wait to hear the next one, but unfortunately, it’s a bit of a downer:

“A Cornfield Medley. By the Hayden Quartet.” (The really early ones are announced, for a very practical reason – there was no way to label them.)

“Some folks say that a nigger won’t steal

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

But I caught a couple in my corn field

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

One had a shovel and the other had a hoe

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field)

If that ain’t stealin’, I don’t know

(Way down, way down, way down yonder in the corn field).”

Porgy and I listen with our mouths open:

“Now dem coons am happy,

Don’t you hear those banjos play. . .

(rang-dinga-dinga-dang

rang-dinga-dinga-dang)

I cannot work until tomorrow,

‘Cause de teardrop flow.

I’ll try to drive away my sorrow,

Plinkin’ on de old ban-jo.”

There’s an embarrassed silence.

“Oh Porgy, I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. It was a hundred years ago.”

“But still. Jesus, Porg, the racism. Didn’t people realize? It’s disgusting.”

“Yeah, but it’s all part of the deal, the time-travel. If we’re gonna go back there, we have to deal with conditions as they were.”

We play through the rest of the Edison Blue Amberols, and it seems minstrel music is the most popular form: white guys trying to sound black, no doubt blackening their faces with burnt cork, à la Al Jolson, the Jewish negro: Down on the Old Plantation; Five Minutes with the Minstrels (which we clocked in at 2 minutes, 37 seconds); Darktown Strutter’s Ball; Dese Bones Shall Rise Again. A couple of them are “Hebrew monologues”, Yiddish-flavoured stories that meander along without any real punch line to them. Humour was a lot different then, too.

There’s a category we call the “modern marvel” cylinders: McGinty at the Living Pictures (and movies were a new thing then, almost as awesome and scary as recorded sound); and Aeroplane Dip, kind of a variation on Come, Josephine, in my Flying Machine.

There are some really odd ones in there, too: bird imitations, of all things, a series of elaborate whistles by one C. Corst: “I will name each bird,” he announces grandly at the beginning, no doubt dressed in a top hat and tails, “and then I will faithfully reproduce its song.”

We sit through four and a half minutes of robin, bluejay, yellow-bellied sapsucker, cedar waxwing, meadowlark, thrush, nightingale, and even pileated woodpecker (does he knock on his head?, I wonder.)

For some reason male quartets predominate: the Edison Quartet (Edison had his name all over everything, he was a smart man, made the most of the new technology); the Peerless Quartet. “Oh, that’s because female voices didn’t record very well. The trebles sounded kind of sour.”

“That explains Dame Nellie Melba, then.”

“Yeah, her.”

“I don’t know, Porg, voices sure have changed a lot in a hundred years. They all had that fast quaver, and everyone seemed to sing through their nose.”






We listen to the Edison Quartet chuffing their way through a World War I song (another favorite category): How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree). Then, Pucker Up Your Lips, Miss Lindy (there’s lots of sexual stuff going on in these things, make no mistake), Baby, Baby, from Lady Slavey, The Bird on Nellie’s Hat, and my personal favorite: Tickle Me Timothy, “sung by Billy Williams, Ed-i-sohn Re-cawwds” (and apparently nobody knows how to pronounce the word “record”, the technology being so new):

“Tickle me Timothy, tickle me do,

Oh tickle me, there’s a dear.

The parson nearly makes me cough,

And I feel like pulling his nightshirt off!

I can’t help meself, I’ll do it in half a tick,

And he mightn’t have anything underneath, Timothy,

Tickle me, Timothy, quick!” 


We notice something funny, too – sometimes the music suddenly speeds up right at the end of the song. “That’s because they were running out of cylinder,” Porgy explains.

It was all pretty primitive. In the early days, before 1900, they’d get fifteen machines all cranking at once, each making an original cylinder, because they hadn’t figured out a way to copy them. The performer would have to absolutely bellow, or blow his instrument so hard his brains would start to come out of his ears.

It’s fascinating, a time trip, like a tour through a really excellent museum, only even more vivid and real. I can’t escape the feeling that we’re there, we’re actually experiencing another time. And then we come to it: the very last cylinder of the twenty-four I bought, in a plain brown unmarked canister.

“Oh. This is odd..”

I slide it out into my hand, and get a weird feeling from it. It doesn’t look anything like the other cylinders in the lot. For one thing, it’s pink. A pale, translucent pink, not the gaudy pink of the rare Thomas Lambert celluloid recordings that came out in 1902.

Somehow I know this one is way older than that.

“Wow. I wonder what’s on this one.”

“Let’s try it.”

We load it on.

There is an incredible amount of surface noise. Almost as bad as the lead cylinder with the talking clock. Then, faintly, I think I hear something.

“It’s spoken word.” My heart jumps.

“Think so?”

“It’s a man.”

“What’s he saying?”

“I can’t tell, it’s too garbled. Is it in English?”

“Hard to tell.”

“I wish I could make it out.”

We look at each other, feeling a creepy kind of chill.

There is a faint pencil-mark on the outside of the cylinder case: ’87.

“Good God, is that the date?”

“Somebody must’ve made this one privately. It’s not a commercial cylinder. It isn’t even brown, or yellow paraffin like the really rare, early ones.”

“Wow. Strange.”

“Yeah.” Porgy yawns. He’s a little tired, I can tell. He’s easily overwhelmed, in fact that’s his whole problem, he can’t deal with anything stressful, and we’ve been listening now for what seems like forever. Pot can do that to you, elongating time and stretching it into eternity.

So I give him a hug, and he goes downstairs to bed. But I sit up for another hour, listening to the strange flesh-colored cylinder over and over again. Sometimes I think I can make out bits of it, here and there:

“Would add to our understanding. . . “

Then more garble.

“Unfortunately. . . “


More noise: ta-whumpita, whumpita, whumpita.

“Then I came to realize that the only thing that mattered was. . .” I swear it’s making sense to me here and there, in little fragments. I try to piece them together.

My hair prickles as the cylinder concludes:

“. . .send this message into the future with (noise, noise, noise, noise) received with understanding. It is only then that (noise, noise, noise, noise, noise).”

It was hard to get to sleep that night. I was haunted by the voice. Who is this guy? What does the message mean?

I have to go back to the flea market right away. I remember seeing dozens of odd old cylinders on sale, really cheap in fact. I’ll have to scrape up the funds somehow. Hell, I’ll sell my jewellery, use the grocery money. I need to crack this more than I need to eat.



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