Today I feel beaten, like maybe I was in a fight and I lost, like maybe I was caught stealing from the middle eastern marketplace and am only just escaping with my hands, like maybe muscles are to be hung up at night and I’ve ruined mine by sleeping in them. Today I can feel my marrow.
I like how eye contact here does not waver. How it is possible to have leisurely complex conversations with strangers and never get a name or any desire of it. There is an unspoken agreement that we are both nice people, you and I talking, because, after all, don’t we live here? In Vancouver interaction is so rare that simple correspondence can gain depth all out of proportion. “Somebody talked to me on the bus today” is event enough to be mentioned.
Last night I left the house late. It was dark outside and cold, my metal pen singed my fingers when I first drew it from my bag. In retrospect, I suppose I should have taken a moment for dinner first, but at the time it was inconsequential, my day had too many leaps of tension to dream of food. I overshot my stop on the trolley, too busy being pleased by the architecture of the city to pay attention to streets, and was left in a closed neighborhood that reeked of baking sugar. For blocks the air was haunted by sweetness as if I were to turn a corner and find myself facing the largest iced cake in the world. I must have walked almost a mile in my persistence before I found a cross street that would take me south to Queen. At the bus-stop I met a young man, chinese, who had recently visited B.C. He would ask my pronunciation of all the towns he’d been to. “Then we went to Pen- Pendec-” “Penticton.” “Yes, exactly.” We talked mostly of gun laws and politics, how much safer he feels living in Canada from Bellingham, where he went to school. At Queen st I fell into step with another young man, this one interested in fashion design and live music. After him came a bicyclist, then a bouncer on his way to work.
The Drake was a movie set, a glamorous bohemian trendy set full of electronic hip-hop and young beautiful people animatedly chatting on lush velvet furniture. It was like slipping into a welcome bath scented with ornate wallpaper. I couldn’t help belonging. I was waved to five tables on my first circuit of the busy floor, and everyone looked familiar, as if I had known all of them before and would again. I left with regret, wanting to fall in with these people, this place, wanting to dance and find a young man to love me until I left. Someone to sit with who would hold my wrist and let their eyes glow with my name until the cinderella hour. An entirely new impulse, one I don’t think I could explore in Vancouver.
Lot 16 was an entirely different venue, and not the building I had previously thought at all. Instead it was a long dark bar with a small stage set up with a baby grand piano in the back. Only half full, it was obvious at first glance that every single patron knew each-other. They were all friends and they all played music. Roger was there, looking the same, but this was a sleeker man. More experience, still a working musician, but making a better living with it, touring with name bands. He did the Merrit Music Fest last year. Dull globes of light hung on silver ropes and underneath them the bartender splashed bourbon into shot glass after shot glass. It was his birthday, the big three-oh. The night before he had taken over Kensington Market, eighteen bands in a shopping market with fifteen minute sets. We sat by the door and tried to play catch-up until Roger played, getting free drinks and vaulting over the bar to mix them for others when the bartender went up to jam. The music at first was girl with guitar with a little bit of blues and country, nothing unexpected for an open mike night, but when Roger took his turn, everything changed. He takes the guitar and makes me cry with it. There were four of them playing, a light voiced man at the piano, a shaggy taller one at the drums with a bright orange shirt, with Roger and the bartender on guitars. Together they were so adept at weaving back and forth with raw melody, it was almost painful to be present. After he was down, I left, the music too strong for me, the group slightly too close knit to invade without effort. I was too tired for that and too drained. “It’s been a long day,” I said, and I buried my face in his hair goodbye. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” and I walked out again into the night.
