“No, you keep it,” I said, but he insisted I take the two bills.
It hadn't occurred to me that we'd become partners. If I didn't take the money, there'd be no punch line. If I took the money back, we'd conned the stingy guy together. He'd always think the poor blind man paid his way when the poor blind man hadn't shelled out anything. I thanked the kid for a good time and pocketed our winnings.
My vacation wasn't all about that kind of con, though. It goes without saying I wouldn't have gone through the fresh hell of travelling a different country and a new city with my white cane, not just for bad jokes. Leaving my routine and my
neighbourhood kicks out the crutch of memory. In that respect, my home is perhaps the only spot on the planet where I can truly feel secured within a rich sense of place. Always will be.
When I say home, I mean two things. More than the apartment I live in today, I'm thinking of the places I walk to in my neighbourhood and everything I've memorized within that distance.
My mental map is not to be underestimated. I've memorized this neighbourhood in excruciating and ridiculous detail, a degree the sighted would pay no mind. Rarely will you find me venturing beyond that knowledge and the places it circumscribes. Where I live is a state of mind, quite literally. It's a matter of defence, even delusion. Memory keeps me from being as thoroughly blind as I am. When you can't see, nothing seems to exist in a city or landscape if it isn't in mind already.
Think about buildings. Each one I passed in Louisiana appeared to be, and remained, a vague sketch of an idea, no more and no less. I saw bits of its shape, and that's all. An unknown like that repels me because it's too overwhelming, with all its capacity to hurt, embarrass, disorient, and elude. Sighted people walking past new places ask, “What's in there?” The blind ask, “What's that?” We are far, far away, even when we are near.
When I do muster the courage and wherewithal to venture inside the shape of an unknown building, I can, with a lot of effort, error, and discomfort, touch my way into some limited knowledge of the contents and purposes served there. Only
then, in a sense, have I seen what most people glean as they walk by, or derive from reading the store sign. If I can't touch something, if it isn't narrated to me, it isn't there. So I pay no mind to what I don't know. I only go where I remember.
As you might imagine, disorientation takes on a whole new meaning. When I travel, the scale of being lost is different than when I was sighted. It's not about directions, not at the street level anymore, although that's always a problem. More immediate is the sense that, say, sitting in a new bar in a new city, when I let go of my beer, along with it I let go of the surety it imparts about where I am and what's around me. I can easily feel I'm nowhere. The sensation compounds and follows me, too. The world away from home doesn't make my world bigger. It introduces me to a terrifying smallness. It's like moving from living in a complex city map to a skeletal line drawing.
Back home, the bus stop is twenty paces from the corner of Fifth Avenue. No bench. The stop is beside a tree, and I know where to wait because of the branches that graze my porkpie hat. The bank machine nearest my house is around the corner and inside the first set of doors. Only the right one opens. I don't read the screens on the ATM. I don't have to. I've memorized the pattern of buttons to press and in what order to press them. At Slickity Jim's Chat and Chew, Tyler always puts the cream for my coffee beside the mug's handle and puts the sugar beside my napkin. The others who work there tell me at what time they've placed my sandwich, quick and habitual. The washroom is to the left of the open kitchen door. These memories make the basics of my lunch hour map
at home. I haven't even mentioned how I know which key is which on my ring, how I've memorized the menus of several restaurants, according to my tastes, how I've memorized grocery store aisles, how I've learned which intersections could trick me into crossing when cars are turning left in front of me, and so on and so on.
But here, in New Orleans, or anywhere else in the world, where do they keep the cream? Which of these buildings could be a bank? Which door is for the bank machine and which buttons do I press in what order? How do I know from out here on the sidewalk that this bank isn't a mattress store? Every gesture, step, reach for the cream, when I'm away from home, is a grope and test to see if anything is in front of me, let alone the particular thing I'm looking for. I'm always on the edge, then, of a flat and shrunken earth, trying my best to give it more dimension. That's closer to exploring than holidaying or travelling, and we all know how rested explorers feel.
So, why go to New Orleans, then, or anywhere? My only answer is this: self-delusion. I always think travelling this time will be different. I always hope it will get better. Every time. Maybe I could be conned into having a different experienceâthat's my hope. That was my hope in New Orleans and my hope for my relationship with Jane, too.
The first morning of our trip, we left the hostel and cut our way across the small patch of lawn beside the entrance. We debated breakfast as we left. Jane wanted beignets at Café du Monde, and I wanted catfish as fast as humanly possible, especially if we could get it at Igor's Bar, Grill, and
Laundromat. I mostly wanted to see who the hell would be in a bar, grill, and laundromat at seven o'clock in the morning.
Not two or three steps across the lawn, Jane let out a screech and bolted for the sidewalk, her knees lifting as she ran. In her blurry shape I remembered images I'd seen in high school biology class, some bit of film footage of a Jesus lizard getting up the speed to run on water. I, on the other hand, froze in my tracks and awaited further instruction.
It's a funny difference in blindness. If I'm alarmed, my flight-or-fight instinct short-circuits. I can't run, of course, not without jacking up the amount of danger I'd be in. But I can't fight, either, because, well, fight what, where, and how? So, when alarmed, I paralyse in position, then wait, like the passenger I am, for instructions. My method doesn't work very well. Sometimes I have to remind people that I'm still in a holding pattern. This time, Jane, too busy screaming, had forgotten me.
“What! What what what?” I said. I was glued to my spot and unsuccessfully scanning about for clues. “You gotta tell me what's going on!” Snakes, I worried, if it's my luck, it'll be a snake. Jane's sprint had taken her to the sidewalk, where she seemed to feel safe. Safe from whatever I was hanging out with.
“What, what, what?” I reminded her.
“Bugs! Around you on the ground. Really big!”
I looked down at my feet but don't know why. I couldn't see anything, not even in the clean tunnel of my good eye. All I could make out was a blended spectrum of green and brown and yellow. Grass? Grass laced with brown bugs? Brown
grass with yellow bugs? Which is worse? Nothing seemed to be moving.
“Hey, guess what?” I said, bringing my face closer to the dirt. “I don't see them.”
A man exited the hostel and walked past me along the walkway, the proper path to the sidewalk.
“They're cicada shells,” he said. “They look just like live ones, but they're molted shells.”
“Could have fooled me,” I said.
I gave into beignets for breakfast to help calm Jane's startled heart. In return, we ate dinner that night around the corner at Igor's and closed the day there, courting deception one last time.
I wanted to stay out late and long into the night. We were in New Orleans, after all, and the people we'd met at Igor's were travelling to Vancouver, of all places. Conversation is something I can have and enjoy. Blindness doesn't matter. But Jane's body and character didn't share my sociability or pleasure in a long sit and a long yabber with strangers. Although we helped each other with our disabilities, we didn't always lead one another to a mutual sense of belonging. Jane wanted to go back to the hostel, but I protested we should stay at Igor's. She was bored and wanted to go. Soon, I said, but what she meant was go, as in go now.
Conversations in loud places like Igor's didn't filter well in Jane's hearing aids. The background and the foreground blended, sometimes one taking over from the other. Jane inevitably felt outside the group, not part of the exchange or able to track what was said. I remember how, that night, she
would say something, make an observation, and be met by people's confusion. Why does she repeat things we talked about a minute ago? Why does she suddenly talk about chess when we're talking about jazz? Unlike my cane, Jane could hide her hearing aids under her hair, and, often to her detriment, she preferred to keep it that way. Our new bar-buddies didn't know what to make of her. A couple more times her elbow ribbed me, indicating it was time to go, but I pretended not to notice.
True, it was insensitive, but I'd been bored earlier for hours while she looked at knick-knacks. You can only touch so many saxophone lamps or paddleboat snow domes without beating them against your head. I figured, selfishly, it was my turn to do my thing. I wanted to talk with people and sit, two things I can do well. This way we'd be, you knowâ
square
. The fight was on. A silent one.
I got up to plug some money into the jukebox. No better way to suggest staying. Jane didn't offer to help me, which wasn't our usual routine. Stubborn, I followed the last few bars of the Monkees until I felt the jukebox in front of me, fingered the coin slot, put in my money, and pressed three random selections. I couldn't read the play list, which Jane would normally have helped me with, but anything was better than the Monkees. My first song kicked in. “Daydream Believer.”
I found my way back to our table, irritable and ready to stand my ground. Jane got the last word, though, and won the argument. She'd up and left while I was picking songs.
If I was sighted, that would have been fine with me. Our hostel wasn't far from Igor's, just down the street several
blocks and a couple of turns, in fact. Then it occurred to me I had no more detail than that in my mental map. I couldn't find the hostel on my own. I knew how Scrooge McTourist must have felt. Jane had hijacked the argument and forced me to go along with her.
I excused myself, left what I guessed to be enough to cover our bill, and chased out the door. Jane waited just outside, certain I'd follow, but I didn't know that. I made it to the corner before she let me know she was right behind. The street was as black as our mood, and I resented the dark as much as I resented my reliance on Jane.
We walked in a silent fury, her stride taking her slightly ahead. Her distance refused me her guiding elbow, but I was happy not to take it. Then a voice from behind me yelled something. Footsteps hustled after me. I stopped and turned to face two large shadows as one of them crowded me and spoke.
“Yo, man. Whatcha got?”
I shrugged. “Huh?”
The other shadow elaborated, very loudly. “He asked you whatcha got, man? Fuckin', whatcha got?”
The two shadows crowded closer. They either had a poor sense of personal space, or they were deliberately jostling me. I couldn't say for sure, but I had a hunch. Then again, people often think I'm deaf because I'm blind. Strangers will press close to my face and holler phrases such as, “You are doing very well at walking!”
“Are you asking what I've got?” I said. “You mean this?” I held up my cane. “It's for the blind.”
I'm not entirely stupid. Something felt wrong, even threatening. But asking me “Whatcha got?” was ambiguous at best. I hoped I could answer the question with my cane. The crowding worried me, but I couldn't determine what the intentions of my two shadows were. Facial expressions often complete these pictures.
I'd been mugged once before, but never as a blind man. More accurately, I'd received an amateur thumping from some yahoo when I was fifteen. He, too, started with a cryptic question I couldn't follow.
My friend Chris and I were walking home one night when a gold Camaro zoomed past us, then locked its brakes, and backed up in a hurry. We knew that wasn't good. We hoped it would keep going, but the car parked beside us, in the middle of the street, the engine still running. In a suburb like Langley a gold Camaro is never a good sign, nor is any car that bothers to back up to you and your goth-loving, pointy-toed shoes. You can't run in those things, which was often a problem when I was fifteen.
A long-haired guy in a leather vest and a beer shirt burst from the Camaro and slammed the door. I could hear Iron Maiden on his stereo. Leather vests were another one of Langley's more popular bad signs.
“Where's the fight!?” he shouted, both declaring and asking at the same time. Chris and I couldn't tell what this guy was getting at. “Where's the fight? The fighting-fight?!” he shouted.
I made the mistake of floating an answer. “I dunno?” I said.
Then he showed me where the fight was. Duh, it was here and now. I could smell sour booze breath as he got in my face. He closed in enough to grab me by the head, as if about to pull me in for a nice kiss. But instead of coaxing my lips towards his, like they do in the movies, he slammed my chin into his raised right knee. Several times. Bobbing for kneecaps. A Friday night in Langley.
In New Orleans, when those two shadows asked me what I got, that Camaro memory tore through my body. The crowding reminded me of Mr. Camaro, as did the weird use of a question before a possible drubbing. My answer, I supposed, would begin whatever violence or theft was about to happen.
And why does it have to be so manipulative, anyway? It's like someone asking you, “Hey, do you think the garbage needs to be taken out?” when they really mean to say, “Hey, take the goddamn garbage out.” Or, it's like when somebody asks, “What are you going to do about it?” but it really means, in certain circumstances, “Go on and hit me first, please.” If my two shadows just outright said, “Give me your money,” I would have. But, no, instead we danced with semantics, and I offered them my white cane. In the end, their “Whatcha got?” probably saved me. And the fact Jane was there.