Keeping Things Whole (18 page)

Back then, yes, I tried
to prevent more life coming into my world: guilty as never directly charged. United I stood, divided I would fall. When a different life started shutting down, I tried to focus on Gran's high score, not her end.

The length of Gran's life changed the shape of mine. If she'd passed before my time, if her smuggling and war stories hadn't come from her directly but had only been filtered through Gloria, if she'd been a photograph, not a retired smuggler on the other side of the room, would I have strolled downtown selling joints out of my teenaged pockets? Once I'd started, sure, slinging got its green thrill into me, but part of what first took me downtown were the countless hours I'd spent beside an old woman whose legs had once carried bottles over to the other side. And when it came time for her to cross the River Styx, I had comforts to offer. Tea from the tillerman.

Over the years, plenty of moms (especially mine) and a few dads have tried to tell me how much I could learn from the dependency of infants. Sure, but what about the dependency of the very old? What, we can only learn from smooth skin, not wrinkles? Your love list has a cut-off age? Try saying that in divorce court.

Gran broke her ankle during Mom's MFA year and needed Elevator Antony for two months. We grew even closer. By the time Kate and I were waiting and weighting, Mom and I discovered that an even older Gran was spending nights on her couch rather than mounting the stairs. Even though her body was failing, at 103 her mind was still good. She had no trouble learning to use the cordless phones I'd begun sprinkling around her rooms. When I first proposed getting her a MedicAlert pendant, she'd said, “I'm no prize racehorse.” On Attempt No. 2, it was, “Big Brother's not going to have the eye on me.” When she finally relented I was half-tempted to tell her I'd be paying for her transponder by sending off electro-magnetized bags of weed. The electronic bad met the electronic good. Robin Hood with shorter, whiter arrows in his quiver. But technology can only do so much for an ailing body, and eventually I had a bigger plan than just the pendant. I was lying to both of us by putting a phone in her hands if I wouldn't be available at the other end. In the summer, Mom and I, even solo Kate, had been able to juggle regular visits. But when school resumed for Kate and Mom, we needed to change the game.

Gran had never asked anyone's permission to start smuggling, hadn't asked anyone else's advice whether or not she should have sailed to France, should have gambled on baby G. Did I ask a non-asker if she'd consent to my moving her bedroom of nearly eight decades down into her wainscoted and unused dining room so she wouldn't die on the stairs? She who lives by direct action dies by direct action. But I needed Gloria's help for the switcheroo. One evening when I was sick of bickering with Kate, I swung by Mom's. She made us tea.

As always, I thought I was being reasonable. “Look, this business with Gran and the stairs, it's dangerous, it exhausts all of us, and it's never, ever going to improve.”

“If you're proposing putting her in a home, it'll be over two dead bodies. At least one of us won't go down without a fight.”

“Jesus, Mother. A
home
? What do you take me for?” I shook my head. “I want to move her down into the dining room. Clear out the table. Make that her bedroom.”

“What's this, dying on the instalment plan?”

“The next time she's got a doctor's appointment or goes for her hair, you take her. I'll handle the furniture.”

She poured more tea. “Careful with that table of hers. It's worth more than your truck.”

“When did
you
work in the trades? I'll wrap it in blankets. I'll slide. I'll lift.”

She nodded.

“And that's not everything. I'd also like to hire a careworker. I can swing it or maybe you want to contribute.”

“Why, oh why, couldn't you have stayed in school and gone without money for a few more years like a proper young person? You've been working for half a decade, I've been working for three, and you tell me I
may
contribute? A money bully's still a bully.” She shook her head for a little pause then found something else to lob at me. “And what makes you think she'll accept strangers into her home?”

Incentives, Mother, the right incentives. Dog Management Lesson No. 3: influence doesn't consist of convincing another to do what you want. Influence involves showing another that the two of you share mutual interests, that in fact they want what you want.

The following week Mom took Gran to the hairdresser's while Reese and I flew in to move the furniture. He didn't make a single joke about old lady smells and spared me much eye contact. After our years together, he knew how to earn a tip.

Gloria plotted Gran's return, suggesting the old girl might take it harder if both of us witnessed her first seeing her bed in her dining room, that prototype of a coffin. Mom had invented an excuse so I would be the one to pick Gran back up. I knew she'd be tired, which was both good and bad. The Gran I met at the hairdresser's wasn't so much Gran as a five-foot-two-inch need for a nap.

“We'll get you home to bed.”

Beyond the closed dining-room doors, I'd left Voodoo in her back garden so she'd have something to look at other than her relocated bedroom furniture. So intent was she on a nap that she made no comment on the dining room's closed pocket doors and simply headed to the stairs.

“Actually, Gran, I've moved your bed down here.” I slid open the doors. “Your garden's beautiful from in here. Take a look.”

She remained immobile at the foot of the stairs, her eyes a little more rheumy but her jaw still as hard-edged as a tombstone.

“Look, Voodoo's out there.”

All animals have flight distances. (You've read this far but are still keeping a wide flight distance by not hitting
Send
.) Species and individual determine how far an animal will tear off from a startling noise before glancing back at the possible threat. Surprise a fox, and you'll see its face glancing back in seconds. Make a loud noise near a rabbit, and it will be a cannonball of blind fur until it reaches the next field. I stood there asking Gran to admit that her flight distance had shrunk from the Atlantic Ocean to straddling countries in the New World to just a few yards on one storey of a gorgeous house she'd no longer see two-thirds of. Her upstairs was becoming a ghost town. A cheval mirror and a sewing table forsaken unto dust. A balcony door unopened in years. The house's best river view abandoned. To her I was the nursing home ambassador, the man come to shrink her whole life down to one closet, an undertaker with a tape measure up his sleeve. But she'd already abandoned most of those upstairs things anyway.

Being right in theory did little for the reproach of her doing and saying nothing. (Pattern. Pattern.) She stood there, affront perched on one shoulder, desperation on the other. On to Plan B then. “I also brought you some organic marijuana. In the little medical research that gets done, it's the wonder drug. Arthritis, any pain, anxiety, muscle relaxation.”

Wait, sorry, are you on the Big Pharma boat to Cuba? Maybe you're not pulling the oars, just enjoying the profiteering, lobotomizing ride. Fact: minimally processed plants still provide one-quarter of Western medicine. Fact: Westerners constitute 20 percent of the world's population yet consume 80 percent of the world's pain medication. The nineteenth-century English and American opium wars didn't end, they just switched from soldiers to pharmaceutical reps. Given global demographics (i.e., the West's fucking baby boomers), the World Health Organization details a looming global “pain crisis.” Demand for pain medication will far outstrip supply, fuel costs will be exponentially higher, and, sheep to the American shepherd that we are, weed will still be illegal. When a palliative plant comes from away, we call it medicine. When we grow one in our own backyard, it's a crime.

Gran remained mute with indignation and reproach. Through the window, Vood gave me the head-tilting idiot stare. I crossed to Gran's walnut bedside table to remove a pipe and matches. “This is some very pleasant weed, like a quilt of hugs. Top drawer here whenever you want it.”

Finally she shuffled to the bed and sat. Every moment she hadn't spoken increased my fear that she'd rebuke me with something like, “That stuff's for riff-raff.” Instead she held out her hand for the pipe and nodded at me to light her up. Before leaning towards the bowl she finally spoke. “So this is your deal, is it?”

My blue-green genie slid into another contested room.

“Just try it down here,” I coaxed. “Try it down here for a week.”

By the time I was ready to leave I thought she was already asleep until she opened her eyes and stopped grinning to speak. “For God's sake, roll me some. If I'm going to smoke on my way out, I want a cigarette in my hand again. I haven't smoked in half a century.”

Turns out this one-time recipient of a French letter could French-inhale like an Old World hooker. Normally I don't sample during work hours, but the first time I handed Gran a pinner I had to follow her into the greenshine. Private, observable fact: the shit works. Her shoulders would visibly relax. Her appetite revived. For the first time in years, she'd ask me to put on records. Blossom Dearie. Sarah Vaughn. And she got chattier. “Next time, bring that girl of yours. She might as well have my cheval mirror.”

I still maintain that my care, not my wares, earned me the royal favour (and curse) she bestowed a few weeks later.

There's that line in
Raging
Bull
, the obsession mantra. “Weight, weight, weight, weight.” When he was boxing, it was all anyone ever asked about, all he thought about, the focus of his days. For me it was risk. Risk, risk, risk, risk, risk. The cops. Kate. Gloria. Other criminals. For civilians, the police offer more than protection. They also subcontract your risk, shoulder some of your worries. Sure, you generally don't fret about how many times you can tase an airplane traveller before he dies, but you know what I mean. Cops get to speed on duty and off, and civilians don't have to fight very much. On my side, we don't get these scapegoats, the fall guys in blue, the cannon fodder with nightsticks.

Most criminals are greedy bullies. Greedy bullies or, just as bad, greedy little followers who try to impress someone, maybe even themselves, by being more bullying. They rob, abuse, and exploit their families before they set to work on strangers. Once they've robbed and hit their way out of one family, they usually go looking for another.

In Canada, everyone in my trade,
everyone
, is far more worried about gangs than cops. The 'Namese in Vansterdam. Jamaicans in Toronto. Bikers anywhere outside a city and anywhere east of Toronto. And we're all bankrolling them. Weed should be the easiest drug to keep out of gang hands: it's grown not manufactured, can be grown in every province, and seeds can be obtained through the mail and/or transferred from one crop to the next. One advantage of weed being illegal is that the plant has been spared any of the suicide genes Big Agri is trying to build into every crop. Sixteen-year-olds can and do grow totally serviceable pot, but Canadian smokers are still Canadian. The majority don't grow their own food or smoke. As a grower grows, his ears are always cocked for the sound of an approaching Harley.

At the casino I swam in fast currents of worry. Working with crews, all that was necessary to send hurt my way was for someone to want a little extra money and not mind selling me out to get it. Businesses, governments, schools, parents, criminals—we're all fighting short-term accounting. If a friend of a friend of a loose-lipped employee knew a friend who knew a biker, blabbing about my operation could earn the blabber a shot of cash. When two bikers made a point of speaking to me one night at the casino, I had to take it as more than coincidence.

They might have been there looking for their own chisel on the casino, though if so they shouldn't have arrived dressed as bikers, all whiskers, gut, and leather. They could even have been another pair of money-throwing gamblers. That is, if they hadn't made such a point of talking to me. Repeatedly. And after they roared.

Given this blog and a pile I started with a trebuchet, one of my guilty pleasures is obviously gear. From trebuchets to this website, the tech snares me. Hummers and tanks, no. An ingenious tool, yes. I'd never handwrite an 80,000-word apology/hello. But really, a Harley? A Harley Davidson is
designed
to be noisy, to roar on demand. A $15,000 fart joke. Or a purchased growl.

Normally at the casino we didn't see too many bikers. Given the short lifespan of “gaming” workers mowed down by second-hand cancer, I doubt there's one alive who remembers casinos before electronic surveillance. Even bikers can recognize that they'd be spotted if they so much as walked along the casino sidewalk in full regalia. Of course they could always try disguises. Shave. Sport a tweed sheep-fucking cap, not a bandana. Prefer a Hawaiian shirt to a leather vest. But then they'd be reduced to size alone for intimidation. Cops, soldiers, bikers—they all want their uniforms and their teams. Boys with boy packs. Peters fucking Pan.

The night I saw a hulking pair of bikers roll around the garishly lit casino drive for a second time, I could suddenly feel my thighbones, knew how far my elbows were from my ribs and felt the outline of my cell in my back pocket.

The casino's circular driveway was designed as if gamblers were bees and we needed to be the brightest flower on the glowing Windsor waterfront. Crossbreed Walt Disney with Albert Speer (Hitler's “architect of light”), give the spawn truckloads of rainbow-coloured lights, get him drunk on local rye, and you might recreate our multicoloured cave entrance. Despite the bubbling and chugging of the fountains and the trickle of horrible music, the entrance was more flower for the eye than mating call for the ear. When the bikers roared up the first time, my crew and I (as well as everyone else who wasn't deaf) definitely noticed. On their second pass, when they stopped to sit and idle behind the unloading Lexuses, I could tell myself and anyone else who asked I was doing my legitimate job as I radioed security before striding over to meet them.

“Evening gentleman. None of us is licensed to park a bike, so if you just head down the street to—”

“You don't talk very loud,” said Thug One.

“Not a lot of
force
in the voice,” added his partner.

Each of them was at least 275 pounds and six-foot-something. A lot of fat, sure, but no doubt plenty of experience with pain.

“You want to talk—” I pointed at the bike's keys and mimed turning them off. “You want to game,” I nodded my head down the road, “head to one of our lots. I'm asking you to move. The cops won't be so polite.”

For the next fifteen seconds, each of them pretended their eyes were actually emitting the mechanical roar. “You won't phone the police.” No. 1 finally said before he then his partner cracked the air and roared off.

As soon as they were out of sight I was dialling Kate and rushing back inside. Their departing bikes filled one ear and her ringing phone the other. C'mon. C'mon. Shit, voicemail. “Listen carefully. Lock the doors then turn on the balcony lights. Keep a phone
in your hand
. Do this now. No debates.” I scrawled a note about my absence then tried her again as I ran to my bike.

The worried sound of her voice scraped me. I interrupted her to say, “Lock the front door. Move now.”

“Ant, what is—”

“Get it locked, NOW.”

“Slow down. For a start, I've been locking a door behind me since residence. Secondly—”

“And the lights. Get the outside lights on but then move away from the windows.”

Uncharacteristically, she paused. At least I could hear her moving around the apartment.

“You wouldn't scare me without a reason. What am I looking for?”

“Probably nothing.”

She waited.

“But maybe two bikers. Big ones. I'm on my way now.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“Don't hesitate for a second to phone the police.”

I got there ridiculously quickly, which mattered and didn't. The casino uniform I tried not to wear much in front of her looked even worse pasted to my back with sweat. Slipping across the lawn, tiptoeing up the stairs, ears pricked, eyes roaming—I'd never felt more connected to the pregnancy than when I thought she was in danger. I know, I know: asshole as charged, and all unnecessarily. There was never any sign again of those bikers, not at home or the casino. Pregnancy can rewire even coincidence. It's like a colour filter changing everything you see.

I unlocked our door as quietly as possible to the sight of Kate holding my baseball bat to her shoulder. Each of us said all we needed to say with a look. You have no right to do this to me. Agreed.

After two largely silent hours of fewer and fewer glances out the window I wound up uttering yet another cliché I shouldn't have. “I panicked over nothing, nothing but coincidence. Better safe than sorry.”

“This is hardly safe, and we're already sorry.”

Her back was a wall I slept against.