Last of the Independents (20 page)

The Paddy's Cure

F
rom
home I phoned Yeats to broach the subject of the Ateros. Before I could, she asked if I wanted to go to a Hallowe'en party at some club downtown. Before I knew it I'd re-arranged my night so I was meeting Ben at nine at Doolin's.

“What's your costume?” she asked me.

“It's a surprise. You?”

“Same. Pick me up at 6:30.”

I helped my grandmother carve a jack-o-lantern, at least as much help as a one-armed man could give. When I'd finished dumping out the sheets of newspaper covered in seeds and pumpkin muck, I held up the felt pen she'd used to trace the facial features and asked if she wanted to be the first to sign my cast.

In contrast to the sardonic tags my friends would make, she wrote, in her elegant, slightly wobbly penmanship:

Dear Grandson, I hope you heal up quickly. Stay safe and out of trouble. Have a happy Hallowe'en. Love Gran.

Before I left I phoned Mira Das and asked her to have a patrol car check on the house. I hoped the Ateros would be busy with their own celebrations.

“
What're you 'sposed to be?” Yeats said as she slid in next to me. Her father had been tranquilized for the evening and put to bed. I waited for her in the car. She came out wearing an orange jumpsuit with numbers painted on the back and rubber manacles around her ankles. The suit was unzipped to her belly and showed a generous amount of skin.

“Couldn't think of anything,” I said.

“No costume is the saddest costume of all.” She pawed through an orange-knit handbag, her hand emerging with a pair of drugstore sunglasses. “Here,” she said, sliding them into my pocket. “If anyone asks you can tell them you're Corey Hart.”

T
here was no live music at the club, just a succession of DJs, none of whom seemed all that concerned with who they scared off the dance floor. I stuck close to Yeats, determined to ask her about Atero and not to let her out of my sight. Maybe it was insecurity, and maybe that was why I hadn't bothered with a costume, too uncomfortable in my own skin to layer something over it. Yeats's costume was both sexy and self-referential, poking fun at her mother's incarceration and maybe making that fact easier to deal with. I knew I wasn't there yet. I'd hidden behind ironic detachment, finding myself a vantage point where I could criticize others without being criticized. She was right, no costume was the complete failure of imagination and courage.

“Not really my scene,” she said over the
boosh-boosh-boosh
of the house music. “Split?”

“Split,” I said. We did, working our way down Granville, paying the cover when we had to or slipping in with a bribe to the bouncer.

I'd taken the Tylenol Threes the doctor prescribed and decided mixing them with alcohol would be a bad idea. After the first five dollar ginger ale, I changed my mind and ordered beer. Then some oily-looking executive sent over a tray of shots. By the time we'd worked from the Vogue to the Commodore to the Media Room, I'd decided that alcohol pretty much went with anything. A few painkillers and some watery club beer wasn't going to turn me into Samuel Coleridge, but it did give me a nice out-of-it feeling.

At the last club we arrived during the band's intermission. Yeats saw her friend Zoltan lurch out of the men's room looking nauseous. She asked me to stick with him for a minute while she touched base with someone backstage.

I propped Zoltan against the bar. He was dressed as usual: Nirvana tee, flannel shirt wrapped around the waist, ripped jeans. “Who are you?” he said, drooling a little on the bar.

“Mike,” I said. “What's your costume?”

“I'm Eddie Vedder,” he said, flashing a grin before stumbling and sending his drink into the lap of a seated couple behind us.

Zoltan wandered off. I circulated, trying to recognize people I'd been introduced to at other events. I tried to guess what the elaborate and occasionally wonderful costumes were meant to symbolize. The bar was tiny and packed with friends of the band, all of them artists, all of them political theorists and critics of pop culture. So-and-so's side band was total genius. The Beatles were overrated. The only real American writer is Bukowski. Like listening to a chorus of solipsists. When I couldn't take any more I pushed through the door to the side of the stage.

A skinhead with a thick orange goatee held me up at the backstage entrance. “You have a pass to be back here?”

“Security,” I said, handing him one of my cards and scowling as if preoccupied so he wouldn't notice I was drunk. He looked skeptical but let me through.

Backstage wasn't at all glamorous. I found Amelia Yeats in a dirty corner underneath some pipes on the ceiling, crouching with two women and a man. The man was cutting lines of coke on the top of a road case. The band's name, Prawn Chow, was stenciled on the side.

She looked up at me, wiping her nose. “Dad's here,” one of the other women said.

“I did warn you,” Yeats said, trying for a self-effacing smile that wasn't quite there. “So don't act surprised.”

“I'm not,” I said.
Right
. “This makes you happy?”

She didn't answer. The ferret-faced man tried to duck out. I caught him by the jacket collar, spun him into the wall and frisked him, coming up with two more baggies, each marked with an Olympic-rings logo. Not a street brand I recognized.

“The fuck is this guy's problem?” one of the other women said.

“Is he a cop?” the other said.

“No,” Yeats said. “Give those back to Max, Mike.”

I looked over at Max, who wanted nothing more than to excuse himself from a situation he didn't understand. “Do you want these back?” I asked him. He shook his head. “What's the price on these?” No answer. I dug a hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet. “C-note do the trick?” He nodded, took the money and scurried out.

“Don't,” Yeats said as I ripped open one of the bags.

I tapped out an amount on the back of my hand. Years of handling drugs and watching others use them and I still fumbled. “Up the nose?” I said.

“Mike.”

“Here goes,” I said, taking my first nostril-f of an illegal narcotic. In the shock I dropped the packets, which were scooped up by the other women on their way out. One even pinched up the coke that had spilled on the floor from the open baggie, reaching through my legs to do so.

“What did that prove?” Yeats said.

“I don't know.”

‘Intense euphoria' was a phrase from police drug literature that came to mind. I certainly didn't feel that. My nose felt sore and after a minute my nostrils went numb. After a while I felt like large shards of my brain had become unmoored and had begun to drift into orbit around my skull. Only willpower kept them from flying off completely. I spotted an orange exit sign and made for it. Yeats followed me out. Over before it began, I thought. My mouth felt dry.

“Do you know Zak Atero?” I asked her.

“Who's that?”

“Barbara Della Costa? Dawn Meeker?”

“Are these people you know who use drugs?” Standing in the doorway, arms crossed, both of us lit up by the marquee signs that cast shadows and light over the alley.

“Yes,” I said.

“So I must know them, right?” Yeats shook her head, using the opportunity to wipe her eyes. “Never heard of them. I don't understand what just happened. I told you days ago what I did. I thought you were cool with that.”

“I thought I was, too,” I said. “Evidently not.”

“You think you're going to stop me, or save me, or something like that?”

I leaned against the wet brick.

“I think, as much of an asshole and an idiot as I feel like now, I'd've felt ten times worse watching those parasites burrow into you and doing nothing. You have money and you hate yourself for reasons I can't fathom. They smell it on you same as I do, and they feed off it. I will walk back in there and apologize if you tell me any of them paid for that stuff 'sides you.”

“It's not your business, Mike.”

“Hell it isn't.”

“You don't get a say in what I do, in any of it.”

The music started up and our voices were almost lost. I watched the light reflected in the puddles ripple as the rain started up again.

“I knew you'd get like this,” she said, smiling and shaking her head to herself. “I don't need you to protect me. I don't want you to try. Can't you respect that?”

“No,” I said.

“Then fuck you.”

She zipped up her jumpsuit, wiped at her eyes. I shrugged and pulled my coat around me. I felt the sunglasses in my pocket press against my breast and thought to give them back, but instead I heard myself say, “Look me up when you feel like making a change.” I felt stupid. I started up the alley towards the bar.

A
s I lay down on the wood planks of the corner booth, I explained to Ben the reasoning behind what I'd just done. I found it made as much sense to him as it did to me upon hearing myself say it, namely, no sense at all. I attributed this to the coke and painkillers and bourbon and beer, and the half-dozen rounds of Bushmill's and Harp chasers we were in the process of putting away.

I find that when I drink there's a movement to jettison things which may, when sober, prove necessary, but under the influence seem more trouble than they're worth. No girlfriend? No girlfriend problems. Simple as that. A drunk can justify a lot of bad decisions that way. Maybe a few days out of the year that's good. When you start repeating that logic sober, though, you know you're in trouble.

Doolin's had the darkness and warmth of a traditional public house in the old country, or at least a humble Vancouverite's idea of what that might be like. I've never been to Ireland. I've never been anywhere. I was in Toronto once, for two weeks, on business. I was in no hurry to go back. I found myself repeating this out loud as Ben tried to unravel the chronology of my fight with Yeats.

“You tried to confront her drug use by snorting half her coke?”

“It wasn't nearly that much,” I said. “I spilled most of it.”

I heard Ben slam his empty shotglass on the bar. He had showed up dressed head to toe in black, head shaved completely, a copy of
From Ritual to Romance
crammed into his pocket. I'd been trying to figure out what his costume was, but after lying on my back for twenty minutes trying to will the ceiling not to spin, I was no longer sure what he was wearing. I sat up just to check.

“My heart's still racing,” I said.

“I guess that would be the cocaine.”

“You've never tried it?”

“A couple times in high school,” he said. “Problem is, I'm fat and I like to eat, and that's not likely to change. If all those
Saturday Night Live
deaths taught us anything, it's that you can be fat or you can do coke, but you can't have both.”

“Was John Candy a sniffer?”

“He was Second City,” Ben said.

I downed the whiskey, killed the last of the Harp. At the bar the crowd segued from “Fields of Athenry” to “Rocky Road to Dublin.” I banged my hand on the table in tempo.

“I should get a shillelagh and wallop the shit out of him,” I said.

“Who?”

“Theo Atero. Who else was I talking about?”

“You haven't mentioned him all night,” Ben said.

“So what was I talking about?”

“Amelia Yeats.”

“Right,” I said. “Anyway, I guess that's over.”

“From the sound of things.”

“I was looking forward to getting laid tonight.”

“Probably shouldn't've pissed her off then.”

“Not that that's the only reason I wanted to see her.”

“Of course not.”

“I'm serious.”

From the bar, a crescendo of voices.

“Katherine thinks I'm in love.”

“With her?”

“With Yeats.”

“Ever consider she might be in love with you?”

“Yeats?”

“Katherine.”

“She seems happy with her boyfriend.”

“Maybe.”

“Though I don't know why. He really is a dullard.”

“Agreed.”

“Want to go for a walk?”

“I'll settle up,” Ben said.

We walked down to West Georgia, past the bank and credit card towers, to a row of three-storey office buildings with glass storefronts and canopied staircases. I knew the block I wanted but not the suite number, only that it was on the second floor and accessible by an outside staircase, just like my own office.

“Hamlet in chemotherapy,” I guessed as I checked the office directory posted outside the main entrance.

“My costume, you mean? Guess again.”

“Yul Brynner?”

“Kurtz,” he said testily. “Brando? How could you not get that?”

“I sort of see it now,” I said.

“Did you know Orson Welles almost made
Heart of Darkness
instead of
Citizen Kane
?”

“What does that have to do with your costume?”

“Nothing,” Ben said.

On the side entrance I found the Aries Investigations logo stenciled on the door. The stairwell light inside was off. I unzipped my fly and hosed the door down.

“Real mature,” Ben said.

I shook out the last drops and zipped up. “Guy's an asshole,” I said.

“The handle's steaming.”

“Someone's going to have to touch that,” I said.

“Gross.”

“Let's do some more drinking.”

“That'll solve everything,” Ben said.

As we walked back across Burrard the Night Bus let off its passengers. Two figures in black headed down towards the waterfront. I recognized one of them.