The clarion, p.9
The Clarion, page 9
“Oh, cool,” she said, surprised.
“I’m going to disappear in the crowd now.”
“Oh, okay, man. Good to meet you too.”
I left them. I drained the drink Alex had bought me, then faced the crowd, moving to the music. I went to the bathroom and came out again. Suddenly I got really comfortable. I was going fast but keeping up. I moved into the crowd, arms in the air, loose-limbed but shuffling like an old man, and found a dark space in the middle surrounded by people, none of them looking at me, and I rotated there, slow as a planet, feeling large and calm. The floor heaved up and down in a heartbeat, primal; colours and lights spun. I had my face up, then down.
I’d been doing this for long enough, I made rules for it—what the drinking and drugs would be for me. One day a week and no more. You can’t be sad when you go. You’ll end up always wanting it when you’re sad. You can’t have trauma; it was dangerous. You had to face that first, sober. You can’t go when you’re poor. You’ll start cutting back on food, then bills, then everything slips. You can’t be rich either. Rich people had a different sadness; they would slip too, and they could easily afford it. You can’t fall in love with the drugs themselves: powders, pills, alcohol. You had to see them as doors and windows. Nobody loves the door or the window, you love what you see on the other side. And, above all, you couldn’t wait for it all week, you had to love the other days first. The boring Tuesdays, the short and sad Sunday nights. All of life is Tuesdays and Sundays. You had to be bored and alone, and not do it, and go to bed with a quiet mind. You could never forget it’s a little bit cheap, a little bit fake. Even though it’s not cheap to you. But it is. You got better highs of terror and relief from performing for a stranger. From losing a trumpet and finding it again. From a stranger’s random ask for kindness that broke open a world you thought you inhabited alone. I made rules for the drugs and kept them an arm’s length away. I kept a cool relationship with pleasure, never fully trusting it; I would enjoy but not love, visit but not stay. But I loved the people, the weird-mouthed, strange-limbed dancers in the shimmering lights around me. I wanted to ask everyone, Hey do you love this? I wanted to hear, Yes I love this.
The DJ broke the floor. She held a sudden, devastating silence in the room—all of us paused. And held. And then she dropped it.
Small, broken variants of hooooooo leapt up from the crowd. How she pulled us apart, how she brought us all together—how a break and a drop made us into one. And the music, I loved the music. Songs that never ended, only turned into other songs. A woman near me was spinning, steady in her circle. She slowed and saw me, smiled. A vocal was drawn out around us —and my brain’s bruised from all of the bad news—and my brain’s bruised.
She stopped spinning and laughed suddenly. I didn’t see her friends or who she was with. “Who are you?” she shouted.
“I make puffs! Pastry puffs!”
“Wow!”
“Only on Tuesdays.” She should know the truth.
“Yeah!” she said.
We were messed up in a basement with loud music. The world was so big now, crowded.
“Who are you?” I shouted back.
“I write emails!” she shouted. “A lot of fucking emails!”
Crowded, and online so much worse. Too many people, everywhere, always. It pushed you smaller.
“I love emails!” I said.
“Not if you write them all day!”
A circle that went around. Brutally alone. Predictable and heartbreaking and as sudden as a snapped limb.
“Depends on the email, right?”
“Yeah.” She nodded hard, fully into this point. “It depends on the email!” She laughed.
But here it was dark, and small.
I turned to give her space back and shuffled out of the crowd, toward the bar. Halfway there, I changed my mind and turned for the smoking patio out back; generous joints circled indiscriminately, and I wanted something deeper.
I stepped out onto the patio. The November night was brittle cold and the stars hung delicately in the blue-black sky. We knew the best drugs already. Wanted children, lives of humility and connection—we longed for other people, but only if they were kind to us. To each other. I stood next to some guys in light shirts, shivering. We nodded at each other as I stood close. Misanthropes were not born but cruelly made. Shy ones the same. The guy to my left leaned over with a reed-slim joint and I nodded, taking it and drawing a small, neat line of smoke between my lips. I handed it back quickly and looked the man full in the eyes. His face was almond-shaped and his black eyes seemed like the oldest thing I’d seen in my life. But he was young. “Thank you,” I said.
Like something kicking through my chest, he smiled at me, ancient eyes unchanged. He brought the joint to his mouth again, his lips forming a tight circle for half a moment, and then passed it behind him to his friend. “No problem,” he said.
I went back inside. Now this party was starting. Really fucking starting. I was in the Holy Trinity now; I would be chasing it, close to losing it all night. I would fall into the crowd and disappear. Surface occasionally, floating on my back, understanding.
“Peter!”
I snapped back into place.
“Peter!”
I turned around, saw a man beckoning—Billy. Of course, old Billy. He was in line at the bar, waving eagerly, childlike, with both hands. Billy was in his late fifties, thick-bodied, with a shaggy face and happy-dog eyes. He partied a lot. He came to Fifteen a lot, mostly on off-nights—I don’t think he went much on weekends, a more serious crowd then. Billy was a well-dressed hippie who had started on uppers later in life, learning to dance through the night after he had dealt with all the obligations of marriage and family and career. I didn’t know if he worked anywhere now, what his current situation was. I loved Billy because he said the strangest things, he made them feel normal.
I put my hands up in surrender. I approached him at the bar. He put his arms up in greeting, like hugs high above our heads. Stoned—either everything happened very slowly or it was over already and I don’t remember how I got there. We were facing each other.
“Peter! When’s the last time I saw you? Last Wednesday? Was it last Wednesday?” He was shouting. “Or the week before.”
“Yeah, I was here last week, Billy.”
“Did I buy you a drink?”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Let’s do that again.”
Billy faced the bar and tried to lean past another person ahead. His shouts were lost in the music. Billy wore all black too; he liked to disappear and not be seen, like me. I know he felt we were the same, in this and other ways. On the outside he was a hippie in hair only—longish, wavy, silver; it moved softly around his face and when nightclub lights caught it, it flamed out, neon, wild. The rest of him was crisp.
He handed me the rye. “How was that audition?”
“I told you about that?”
“Yeah, you told me about that. Pretty shit drunk last time I saw you. Nervous and all that. I bet you were fine.”
“I was pretty good, Billy.”
“So when do you know?”
“When do I know what?”
“When do you know if you got it or not?”
“Oh, Thursday, she said,” I said. “Tomorrow I guess.”
“Thursday tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
Billy took a drink and passed his eyes across the room. “I know you are the right one, but they are allowed to be wrong,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I mean, if you don’t get it, it’s okay.”
I saw it. He was trying to let me down gently.
“I know that, Billy. It’s just a temporary gig anyway. Not a life-changer.”
“Hey, we don’t always know what life-changers are until they change our lives. You can’t predict that.” Billy was becoming wise. Hippie wisdoms came out of him like Pez. We were still half shouting, standing beside each other.
“Billy, I can’t tell which way you’re going.”
“What?”
“Are you trying to comfort me in advance by saying I might not get it?” I paused because the music had built up before crashing again. “I might not get it, but then you’re saying it might have been a life-changer?”
Billy pressed his lips together and nodded, taking a drink. “Yeah, OK, mixed messaging there, Peter. But I meant what I said.”
“Which part?”
“All of it.”
I drank. “Billy, I had a buzz going and now I’m thinking about that audition.”
He dodged it. “Anything beautiful lately?”
I knew what he meant. It was an ongoing conversation with us. “Yeah. Coming home from the audition.”
“Well.” He gestured with his open hand.
He meant the few tiny moments that were exquisite and immaculate, natural and fleeting—and rushes of that feeling, almost blushing. So earnest, I felt many times Billy was a child himself, innocent and excited, eager to share.
“Coming home, I felt like everything was right. Like I was on fire.”
“High,” Billy said, nodding.
“Yeah. It was kind of perfect.”
We didn’t say anything for a moment.
“My neighbourhood felt different. I felt different walking home, people around me were more real. There was so much leftover adrenaline in me, felt like I could run for hours. Sprints. Over tops of cars.”
“Flying.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s perfect,” he said. “Being alive like that.” He grinned. “I take pills for that.”
I saw Alex and Candace laughing and heading to the bar. They looked happy. Seeing that made me happy, mirror that I always was. I thought about Lucia and Al. I thought about Marc sitting at a messy desk and Stu pausing a video game to take a swig from a green bottle of pop. I thought of Ange sitting on a balcony listening to music. I didn’t know much about these people. Some of them I saw almost every day. I’m not sure why it struck me then, drunk and stoned in a basement club with Billy, that I didn’t really know them. Billy and I were facing the crowd of dancers.
“I tell you about the yellow chair yet?” He smiled at me from the side.
“No.” But it felt familiar—it felt forgotten already, as if I had been too high to remember. But I didn’t want to tell him that.
“Oh, good. I was waiting, I guess.” He considered that, then continued. “The yellow chair. Well, I drive up this same road all the time—I go in the mornings, it’s an errand I like to get out of the way. And I go up this road and there are these big fields on either side where the electrical lines are. You know—those towers that have the wires—I forget now.”
“Hydro lines.”
“Hydro lines—transmission lines. Yeah. It’s a big empty industrial field with tall grasses, weeds, no sidewalks or paths in there. Rough land. And I see a yellow chair in there. Sitting in there, by itself. Like a metal chair painted yellow.” Billy took a drink. “At first I think it’s just a chair somebody forgot in the field but I’m driving through often enough that I start to notice—I see the chair in different places each time.” He started gesturing with his free hand, the other still holding a drink. “Every couple of weeks, couple feet this way. Another time, turned a little bit, facing a different way. Just slightly. So I’m thinking, somebody’s sitting in that chair.”
The yellow chair. I remembered now. Somebody’s sitting in that chair. I remembered him describing it.
“Then last Friday, I couldn’t get to the store in the morning. I have to go later. And now I’m driving on that road and it’s four or five in the afternoon and the sun’s going down. November sunset. Like somebody tore the sky open and on the other side was fire. More than that—green around the gold, blue around the green. Devastating. You know that chair is facing west. So I’m understanding it now.
“There’s some housing around there—row houses. Standing alone next to some empty lots, before the empty fields. And there’s a long-term storage company—rows of metal garages, a driveway, a small office at the gate. Nothing else.”
He had been loosely gesturing how the pieces were placed together but he stopped talking. The club was crowded and waves of people moved with the music, rippling around the room, and the whispery high from the joint made everything seem slow. I wondered how long we had been standing there. A couple of dancers had their hands in the air as if skimming the sound with the tips of their fingers. Lights winked on and off, illuminating one person, casting another in shadow, before rotating again; Billy was facing them but he was miles away, inside his own little world, letting me in—he was so happy and so lonely, both.
“It’s not really about the yellow chair, of course—but what an elegant image, anyway—now I just think about that person. That person in the chair.” Billy put one finger up, let his hand drop again. “I think about the front-desk person at the storage facility. Or a security guard. Someone in those row houses. I think it has to be someone nearby. And I like that they go there. I like that they sit in that metal chair even in November and watch the sun go down. I like that they move it sometimes. Maybe they have a cigarette, or a joint. But I like that nobody ever takes that chair away, though all of us on the road see it.
“And I remembered when I first started seeing the chair, it was in the summer, in a field filled with little white flowers.”
Yes. All of it now coming back to me. A field of little white flowers.
Billy was done. He had been shouting the whole thing to me. He looked out over the club; for a brief moment, it had dropped into shadow.
He turned and smiled at me, a little weary from the shouting. “It’s such a pretty-hearted thing to do.”
“Pretty-hearted,” I said back to him. I liked that. I took a drink.
“And then—I don’t even need to know who it is. It makes you less lonely, all the pretty-hearted things that strangers do.”
Billy was a good old hippie. He found me and liked me and was very loyal. He wanted to share his moments and remind himself that we were more than just jobs and cars and families and drugs. It seemed he had given up on most of those things anyway, as I threaded together from random comments he had made since I met him. Billy wanted to share these moments and hear some in return, echoing each other, like a single thought across two minds. Once in a while he had a miss—he spent one long, drunk night describing his conversation with the moon—okay Billy, go home—but I liked his urgency.
But Billy was hard on his family, though; he didn’t give details, but he said they were small-minded people. I worried that he betrayed them because I think he had kids. I thought he had mentioned it once, but I never asked about it. I knew he had had a wife, in the past tense. It was a struggle to understand how such a soft-hearted hippie would harbour those feelings toward his own. But we didn’t talk about that stuff—instead, yellow chairs, the moon.
My phone vibrated. What? I pulled it out of my pocket.
Hey forgot to text earlier, we doing lunch tomorrow? It was Stasi.
I looked at the time. Yeah of course.
Then: You still up?
There was a pause.
Yeah up late sometimes.
Then: See you tomorrow.
I put the phone away.
“Who was that?” Billy asked.
“Sister,” I said. “I’m seeing her tomorrow.”
“Tell her to come out now.” He grinned.
I had told Billy my stories too. I had described Convertible Corner and I think he got it—our awkward little grasps at happiness. I told him about relearning to breathe with the trumpet and he had loved that; he loved hearing how manipulating the clutch of my chest and push of my mouth could produce liquid amber emotion, a gold-plated sigh, a honeyed whine. He loved music of course, the trumpet in particular because he knew me; sometimes I thought he loved that I had no ambition with it. He was that type of guy.
“We just going to watch or what?” I gestured at the dancing crowd.
“Old man at the party,” Billy said. Then, putting his arms up in the air, louder: “Old man at the party!”
We dumped our glasses and got lost in the crowd. I didn’t see where Billy went, only the hands raised in the air as they disappeared among other hands, flapping palms and dancing fingers. Billy danced weird, but nobody bothered him about it: arms swinging, steps out of step, bouncy jumps with his head up. I faced the DJ with my hands in the air, calling down something exquisite. She laid out something smooth. A low tide pulled us out.
I felt cheap and happy. Cheap because none of this was real, happy anyway. It wasn’t real without the drinking and the drugs; it was an elaborate, constructed kaleidoscope, a fantasy with occasional vomiting. Happy because the music was so loud I was lost in it, and the crowd so chaotic I disappeared. I didn’t have to be ethical in my pursuit of a moment like this. Everyone else was ridiculous too—some people went to amusement parks, strapping into a machine that pulled them hundreds of feet into the air and shook them left and right. A shakedown of stress hormones, bored humans trying to come to life. Cheap and happy.
Alex circled through my vision and out again; she didn’t see me. I didn’t wave to her. Billy was gone. In front of me a man with long hair tilted his head back and started running his hands through it. His arms were thick out of his sleeveless shirt. His gestures were private, lost in himself.
I went back for another drink. The crowd was thinner at the bar now, all the tables were full, phone screens flickered. Waiting, I looked around. I wondered whether to go to the bathroom again or step outside for another joint to pass by. I pulled out my phone, but Stasi hadn’t sent anything else. It was almost two in the morning, why would she be awake and texting me about lunch? I knew she got up early every day, running, whittling herself down. Lean as an arrow, piercing the skin of this world and finding herself in the wound. Something like that. That was her thing. I was drunk, but when my drink arrived I drained it, neat, clean, quick.
