The Amazing Absorbing Boy (22 page)

The next week Sporty tried to chisel out some more money from me but I had made up my mind. He mentioned that these arts council people liked proposals about Indian history and that his project was sure to be approved. He told me that he would use his portion of the grant money to rent a small apartment by the Beaches. An old house with gables and two steps leading to a small porch. With a couple flowers in the yard which he would look over as he worked on his project on the front step. He seemed to be describing his house behind Mrs. Bango’s parlour. “The most important thing in a man life is property. A piece of the earth. A place he could leave his mark so a hun-hundred years later a passerby will say, ‘That is house where Sp-sporty used to live.’”

The next week, the bench he always occupied was empty. I waited for a while. A thin young woman with a ring on her left eyebrow unslung her knapsack and sat next to me. She left after five minutes or so. A Sri Lankan couple with their bags of fries came and began chatting in their language. I felt a little annoyed because they were talking so loudly, as
if I wasn’t right next to them but after a while, their words seemed small and neatly arranged in straight rows. I thought of a cob of corn.

That same night I realized why my father had been so distracted during the last couple weeks. As I was entering our building, I saw the Creole woman who had given me the form about refugees. She was chatting with a small group and when she spotted me she said, “Samuel, take this sheet and give it to you mother. Tell her we having a meeting this weekend.”

I read the sheet in the elevator. It seemed that Regent Park was going to be demolished and its residents placed elsewhere. All of a sudden, I felt real happy. Maybe me and my father would move to a place similar to that described by Sporty, and there we would start over and get to know each other as father and son. He might even resume his inventions. And perhaps years later a passerby would glance at our house and say, “That is where Sam and his father used to live. Father was an inventor and the son was a college student.”

When I got into our apartment, my father was not there. I switched on the television. A woman with big juicy breasts was talking about the healing power of special cubes and pyramids. She seemed too pretty for this nonsense but just before I changed channels, I wondered whether the troll-lady mumbo jumbo in our apartment was connected with this Regent Park eviction business. I checked the forms on the set and went to the kitchen. Two minutes later, I returned to look at the forms once more. I felt suddenly that I should not be
eating Kraft Dinner that night, maybe something that fancy Canadians ate. Steak or salmon fillet. Several times that night I rechecked the admission form just to make sure that I had not imagined my father’s signature at the bottom.

T
he next day at Union I looked for Sporty to give him my good news but he was nowhere in sight. I wanted to tell him that my form too had led to success and maybe mention that I forgave his scamming because all he desired was a place of his own; I wanted to say that he should add another number to his figure about the universe balancing out itself. For the next two weeks, I searched up and down for him. One evening I spotted a boy crouched over a comic. He had really spiky hair like the Sham-Wow fella on television and the way he was turning the pages carefully made me feel that he was a comic book collector or something. When I sat next to him, he held the book tightly as if I might pull it away. Still I asked him, “Is the comic interesting?”

“It’s a graphic novel,” he told me stiffly. “Comics are for kids.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Graphic novels are not.”

He wasn’t being helpful but I asked him, “Where did you get it?”

“At an antique shop on Queen Street West.” He stated the directions quickly as if he hoped I might leave him alone and go there. And that was exactly what I did. It was close to six when I got there and a stocky man who looked as if he might have been drawn by Jack Kirby was straightening some lamps on a table. The back of the store was packed with old furniture—the kind that people in Mayaro would never give away or sell but keep until they fell apart—and there were rusty tools strung on nails on the wall. At one end of the shop were crates stuffed with books and in one of these I found a pile of comics. Most were familiar, old Marvel and Charlton and even a couple
Turok Son of Stone
but there were also thick glossy comics which I guessed were graphic novels. I pulled out a
Rawhide Kid
and began reading.

“The library is at Bloor.”

It was the Jack Kirby man. He had a mean swollen forehead that made him look a little dangerous. “How much is this?”

“Two for a dollar.”

“So cheap?”

“Okay, one for a dollar?”

I had no intention of buying the comic so I told him, “It’s a first edition. Worth at least twenty-five. These old
Tarzan
and
Submariner
are just as expensive.”

He began tapping some sort of old compass against his
palm and by the tenth or so tap, he had offered me a job. Seriously. This is how it went.

First, he introduced himself as Billy Bilkim Barbarossa then he asked me, “What is your name, boy?”

Because he looked like a Mexican bandit, I told him, “Roti Ramirez.”

He scratched his beard and I saw a big mole peeping out. He noticed my gaze and hurriedly packed down and smoothened over the hair. “I have never heard of such a name.”

“I was born in Trinidad,” I told him. “The capital is Port of Spain and the main town is San Fernando. I lived close to Rio Claro.”

I tried to think of other Spanish names but he cut me off, “I am not interested in all that. What is your education?”

“I just signed up to finish my high school. The course is at the Centennial College campus.” I felt important just to be saying this.

“When do you start?”

“In two months. It’s a preparatory—”

“Then you work two months here. Only two.” He held up two stubby fingers. “I don’t want any big-head college boy here. Now, tell me if you know how to sell.”

“Comics?”

“Look, you better get out of my store.” He pointed to the door. “Is that all that you can see here?” The gesture changed into a wave at the junk lined up against the walls. “You think it’s just junk?” I shook my head. “Nearly every item you see here
is attached to a story. And not happy stories either. Death. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Sickness.” He removed a rusty hatchet from a coat hanger and I backed away a bit. “Betrayal.”

“Everyone is walking around with a broken heart,” I told him in the saddest voice I could afford.

“And never forget it,” he said, as if it was he rather than Canella who had come up with the idea. “Come back tomorrow.”

I couldn’t believe my luck. It had taken me weeks before I got the job at the gas station but in less than half an hour, I landed work in a store with comic books and mostly useless items. This was so much better than pumping gas in the cold and gazing at impatient drivers as I cleaned their windscreens and asked about oil changes. And best of all, Barbarossa’s antique shop didn’t look too different from Uncle Boysie’s Everything and Anything place. The universe was really balancing itself. However, the next day Barbarossa seemed surprised to see me in his shop and for a minute I thought he was about to ask me to leave. Worse, I tried to recall the name I had given him but came up blank.

“So, Mr. Roti Ramirez, are you ready to sell today?” Without another word, he walked to a back office and I followed him. His legs didn’t match his muscular body and because they were so short, he waddled like the Penguin. Maybe he suffered from big stones that we called
godi
in Trinidad. He hefted a portable heater from his chair and sat. “Rule number one is no haggling. Some of these people come here and believe they can get anything for a dime. Rule number two is you must never mention anything about garage
sales or the Salvation Army or pawnshops. Tell them that we bought everything at auction sales. Do you know why?”

“Death and divorce.”

“Correct. And rule number three”—he peeped through the door and lowered his voice—“is that you must never chat with Che.”

I tried to match his whisper, “Che Guevara?”

He rolled his eyes as if the question had been asked too frequently. The act was unseemly in such a brawny man and I tried not to smile. “His real name is Cherry Xalvat and he is a charlatan of the highest order. Avoid him like the plague.”

All day I kept an eye out for someone whose name was either Che or Cherry. I imagined a fat-cheek assassin wearing a beret but there were just three customers: an old woman with a blue purse, blue hair and thick blue veins on her neck; a turtleneck-sweater young man who seemed vexed to see me following him; and a tall Creole lady who just gazed around, jangled her bracelets, and said, “Hmm.” At the end of the day Barbarossa asked me what I had sold and when I said nothing he clasped his hands and rested them on his belly. It was the gesture of a man about to utter something but he kept silent. After about three minutes, I left and when I glanced through the glass door, I saw him in the same pose.

Each evening he asked the same question and most times my response was the same but soon I was able to tell him that I had sold a vase or a candleholder or some outdated cookbook. In two weeks or so, I was able to distinguish the idlers and browsers from the genuine shoppers who did not
walk around the store gazing at everything but hovered around a particular item. Sometimes they got distracted by some other bit of junk but they always returned to their cherished scrap. I learned to give them space rather than frightening or pressuring them with questions. I soon forgot about Che because there were so many interesting customers here. A few resembled the coffee shop old-timers, but there were a couple of women with sort of frozen expressions who looked as if they were searching for something valuable that their grandparents might have sold by mistake, and some pretty girls who came in packs and giggled as they fingered rings and necklaces. Once I heard a group talking about “a skank” who went around “banging” everybody and “getting laid” each Friday as a rule. These were strange words but I guessed what they were talking about and after they had left, I felt that their expressions seemed more harmless than our Mayaro swearword versions. It made the act itself seem innocent and ordinary. Maybe Barbarossa didn’t share this view because he came up and said, “No staring at nipples. The strip joint is on Yonge Street.” I was still thinking of the girls when a man wearing shorts came in with a crate of books. He explained in a throat-clearing accent that the books had been bought from Belgium and held them up one by one. The language was strange but there were pictures of castles and flowers and cyclists on the covers. The last book was a Smurfs comic. When I told him that no one would want to buy books written in a foreign language he seemed quite upset and I felt sorry he had taken the time to bring all the books here.
Maybe he had cycled too because his legs were quite muscular. He walked out dejectedly, leaving the box behind, and I saw Barbarossa smiling from the back office. A couple days later, a man with a wicked beard, just like Matapal the fisherman from Mayaro, came into the shop. He removed a banjo from its case, stroked the arm, closed his eyes and stamped his foot a couple times. Barbarossa was not so happy that time and he said I must tell these customers that some music shop was three blocks east.

One evening just before closing time I saw a thin oldish man digging into the case filled with old glasses and shades. I went to replace the jewellery in a nearby box that had been messed up by a group of schoolgirls.

“Can you tell me the cost of this?” His voice sounded fluttery as if there was a butterfly exercising in his throat. And when I turned to him I saw that he had hooked up a round glasses over an aviator shades. With his hat tipped to one side, and his perfectly straight goatee, he looked quite mad.

“The glasses is ten dollars and the shades is fifteen. Genuine aviator.”

“Oh, I meant these.” He removed the glasses and the shades and I saw a small wire rimmed spectacles barely covering his eyes.

“Ten. Just like the other.”

“Oh,” he said in his fluttery voice and I immediately put him down as interesting but useless. He blew on the spectacles, wiped it with his thumb, peered through in the direction of Barbarossa’s office, wiped it some more and gave it to me.
“It’s not suitable, in any case. What I really need is a monocle. I have a glass eye.”

“It looks real.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that. Do you think I might have it for five?”

“Sorry, sir. It’s already discounted.” Barbarossa had taught me to say this whenever someone wanted to haggle. He had also told me of
sleepers
which were valuable items sold cheaply by people who didn’t realize their rareness. At the time, I thought of terrorists, and sentinels awakening from some deep sleep.

The man took out a kerchief and wiped what may have been the glass eye. “My wife also has a glass eye. My son who I have never seen was born with one too.” He straightened his hat and walked away in an upright stride for an old man. As soon as he left, Barbarossa came out of his office. “What did he want?”