The Days Read online

  Vibe

  “We want our lives to be real. Not, ‘Oh look, the puppets are having sex!’ We want it to have a happy ending. We want to feel like we’re in a good place.

  “Furthermore, we are struggling with real issues and we don’t know the answers to them. We feel the world has cast us off and we’re in this weird, confessional bubble. We want to plant an explanation but we don’t know what’s going on.

  “It can be a very difficult and hard and cold journey.

  “Your entire reality takes place in the closed theatre of your brain. It feels like a fantasy fever dream. Now and then solid dramas intervene. And each year is like a twelve-step program. Each month is like a step. We watch out for August. August can be real hard …”

  “You know what, Wayne? Shut up.”

  Six-Day Forecast for Andrew

  1

  Today you will encounter the notion about accepting things as they are.

  Translated, this means that no matter how many times you ask Bear to build you a rocket ship, he won’t build you a rocket ship. He’s a dog. He’ll bring you the parts but that’s as far as he’ll go.

  And without a rocket ship you won’t be blasting off to the International Space Station anytime soon. You’re disappointed, but there it is. Cite personal and family reasons for this. Say your intentions have changed. That the summer’s too hot. That the last four years have constituted a marked slump for you but it’s over now. Say you’ve been acting like a neural pathway, one that’s gone awry.

  2

  Today you will get a message from God.

  God, you believe, is like one of those people who goes up to every dog in the world and kisses it on the mouth. He loves everyone that much.

  God’s message will arrive while you’re driving home and feeling great because Machine Head is playing on the car radio. There’ll be a six-pack and a bag of taco chips on the seat beside you. You’ll notice birds flying across sunset clouds and you will suddenly think, “Hey, that’s beautiful!”

  This is when God will speak to you. His voice will seem to come from inside your body, somewhere around your chest.

  God will say, “God is dead and his mother is Mary.”

  God will say, “If you want to forget the sky and the heaving earth, and human passions, and the flight of years, try at least to remember that your presence once cast a shadow here and also that, however muted, you were filled with a light that can only be described as radiant.”

  3

  Today you’re thinking you don’t want to be a recycler forever, that eventually you’ll become an entrepreneur and own your own recycling-equipment plant.

  You’re like the actor Steve Buscemi, you think, a guy who is always playing himself in a movie. You’re feeling that authentic.

  Probably, you drink too much. You admit it. But you have a willingness to never let a friend drink alone. You use booze, you say, to heighten your good times or really deepen your bad times, depending on where you’re lodged in your cycle of ups and downs.

  Your biggest dread is that your face will be one of those faces the world never sees, that you will never walk a red carpet. You dreamed about this last night. You were at the recycling plant and your pal Vincent kept burying you in empty pop cans.

  4

  Your mother will call you at work this morning and say she can no longer remain silent. You are not a lawyer, a doctor, a teacher, or an investment advisor. You have a diploma in Hospitality but you’re working at Galaxy Recycling sorting bottles and cans. What kind of a future is that?

  Tell her it’s not a future, it’s a present. That there is always a spin on the world that plays with our expectations. That you’re treating all the successes and failures in your life up to this point as boot camp.

  5

  In alchemy, you’ve heard, you add water to thoughts. This makes a mind. Today, however, you are without water, and very tired. Satiny gleams of imagination are frankly absent, and so is your mind. You’re hungover and would rather sleep.

  You’re wishing you had better skills to handle this situation because you want your life to be as good as love. It’s not that your mind is empty, it’s just that today it’s a lost outline. The pages of your internal book are not turning.

  Last night when that girl in the downstairs apartment said, “Oh Andrew, you were so good!” you didn’t believe her. But really, she was just trying to be helpful as you stumbled from her couch.

  6

  Today, you’re feeling you have a new dimension in your life. You feel good about yourself.

  On your lunch break you will call your mom and say, “Things are looking up. I might be getting a promotion driving truck.”

  “That’s wonderful, Andrew. Maybe next you’ll get a job at head office.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” you’ll say.

  In the evening, to celebrate your possible promotion, you and Vincent will gobble acid and wander the empty streets.

  Things She Wouldn’t Want

  –a tiny backpack

  –a giant to-go cup

  –the smell of the subway

  –True Religion jeans

  –tearaway Adidas pants

  –Kappa wear!

  –one of those passport protectors that “travellers” use

  –white eyeliner

  –duck boots

  –anything bejewelled, or Ed Hardy

  –bacon

  –food from the dollar store

  –a fake tan

  –has HPV been mentioned?

  –mom shorts

  –man Uggs

  –a Pontiac or Plymouth vehicle

  –a government job

  –the stench of an old nightclub

  –people talking their hype about marathons

  –a personality that ends sentences with “gratitude”

  –a life with indie rock

  –a Juicy Couture velour tracksuit

  –thick acrylic nails

  –a creaky futon

  –an itchy sweater

  –chlamydia

  –a hairy back

  –insomnia

  –rabbit stew

  –platform sneakers

  –a fake Louis Vuitton purse

  –stilts, definitely stilts

  –a man in Speedo swim trunks

  –the creepy eyes of puppets

  –dial-up internet

  –bumps on the peen

  –cancer

  –mouldy herbs

  –Chinese tattoo ink

  –one of those minivans that resembles a DustBuster

  –cargo pants

  –clip-on sunglasses

  –dry-cleaner hangers

  –a sheetless mattress

  –toe fungus

  –a whistling nostril

  –single-ply toilet paper

  –a blanket hung up as a curtain

  –a skort

  –animals with eye goobers

  –front bums and cheese butts

  –a moth infestation

  –chicken veins

  –baby tees!

  –bible verses printed on toilet paper

  –a freaking unicycle

  –ketchup water

  –a bitchy resting face

  Usually There Are a Lot of Goodies throughout the Day

  “You’re a mooch,” Gina said to me.

  I’d taken two empty bowls to her potluck dinner. Gina is passionate and tenacious and soulful and refused to compromise her position. “Mooch!”

  So I kind of rain-danced at her. You know, that’s where every bone in your body shakes. Right away Mother crawled out of my head screaming, “You dolt! You should have brought buns!”

  There are over thirty million Facebook profiles of dead people and Mother is one of them.

  In the taxi it felt good to be on the other side of commotion. Usually there are a lot of goodies throughout the day, but on this day they were in short supply.

  There’s the
dad side of it, of course. And a lot of it was Uncle Phil and his Jack Nicholson impersonations. And there’s my sister Jane, who has thicker hair. And Grandma Gibson who only had one hand but was still good at slapping. But, really, on this day, it was all me. I’d been wrestling with an agricultural crisis on earth and was not myself.

  Organized Chaos

  Joan is doing a little worship dance in her kitchen. She’s quite a story. Big as a boulder. Ordinary as a fly. Ordinary as her husband’s demented condition.

  “I believe that compromise, trust, and a little kiss now and then will get you forty-eight years of marriage,” she says across the breakfast table. A tricky idea to grasp, no question.

  Their eyes meet – click, click.

  And then she’s like, aw, thumbs-up.

  Vibe

  I couldn’t think of a better way to be vulnerable than to show up naked. As a middle-class white person, I am symbolically divesting myself of the trappings of privilege.

  Salon Day

  At Barbara’s House of Hair we sit before a row of mirrors. Black capes are fastened around our necks. Some of us sip flavoured water; others, KORA Bancha tea. The war is over. We are done with the heavy lifting.

  Even so, I can’t avoid my face in the mirror. My sagging jaw line, my limp hair. I look like my father.

  At one point the young stylists holding bottles of dye, cans of spray, packs of extensions, line up behind us to begin their work. They look like an Apache raiding party arranged on a cliff, come to take us down.

  For distraction, Grace Kelly, the salon chihuahua, clacks across the floor in her pink lace dress. Now and then she jumps on a patron’s lap, and when she does you hear a chirp of joy. Otherwise we remain quiet and well-behaved.

  The Day Comes Round with Unfailing Regularity

  He is flummoxed by his solid Elaine. She’s in the kitchen eating Salt ’n Vinegar chips, watching the bike race from the kitchen window. She’s singing the national anthem, cheering the racers on.

  Living with Elaine, he thinks, is like experiencing a shark attack and a tornado at the same time.

  After the race she becomes obsessed with the rats in the attic and orders him to do something about them. “Even the most trivial phenomenon can turn out to be important!” she calls from the stepladder.

  A while later he presents her with a dried rat in a trap.

  Now he’s her favourite conqueror in the world. “If you had died a rat advocate,” she says, “if you were a shocked, self-centred, alien, your colour faded, I couldn’t love you more!”

  On a Busy Corner of Reality

  A whisper in his ear and the wind chimes rustle.

  A little kiss and the sky grows soft.

  Love in the major leagues, you think.

  You’re like the sound you’d get if you plucked the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge.

  You’re like Dancing with the Stars gone local.

  Any time you get to break out the tux and put on heels and eat and drink, you love it. It’s like a little comedy then. A lot of pathos, some music, a tiny bit of sex off-screen.

  The Cricket Problem

  That chirping sound you’ve been hearing inside your ears of late? It’s likely a cricket infestation. House crickets will often take up residence in the area of the brain known as the frontal lobe. This could be your problem. It would explain your recent lack of motivation, a marked decrease in your dopamine levels, and your shaming by family and friends because of your recent behaviour.

  To determine where the crickets enter your body, stand outside on a night when the chirping is loudest. Most likely they are entering through your mouth. You will need to start keeping it shut.

  If this doesn’t get rid of the house crickets, remember that they only live for three months. They should be gone from your brain by November. There is no guarantee, however, that your family and friends will return in their place.

  Father’s Advice

  If you want to succeed in finance you can’t skydive every day.

  Maybe you’ve had enough trips to Thailand.

  Maybe your long vacation is over.

  Maybe you need to take a break from your self-esteem.

  You have to actually go to a job and stay there for period of time if you want to make money.

  The real magic is having a savings account that grows. In being free of the hard marching.

  In two years you will be forty years old.

  Hayden, I know you’re in there.

  Mother’s Advice

  Be emblematic of good things.

  Try to remember you’re in love with your messy life.

  Find the glint, find the funny.

  Think of sleep as an eight-hour hiatus.

  Think of dreams as gifts from your unleashed self.

  Are you getting this down?

  Remember, what works best is friendship stories.

  That the only bad food is food that tastes bad.

  So paddle your own big shoe.

  Things are actually very light and illusionary, like clouds, which are a momentary stage in the incessant cycle of rising and falling water.

  When night arrives be sure to let a thousand butterflies escape from your lips.

  Parting Advice

  She was one hundred years old and in good shape, considering. There was no slamming of car doors or tears in the shepherd’s pie. But on her next birthday she said she’d had enough, she was going to kill herself.

  “Okay,” we said, “we just want it to be a happy ending.” We were laughing, but at something awful.

  She would kill herself, she said, by not eating. But because she made the rules, she would allow herself one tablespoon of Scotch over ice each day.

  It took three weeks. Near the end she told us her memories were like clockwork mechanisms that unravelled and snapped back together again.

  We said, “Tell us something useful.”

  “About what?”

  “Love.”

  “Oh that,” she said. “Well, stay away from dolls. Dolls are creepy. There’s that stare that never changes, that same crazy face.”

  “Tell us something better.”

  “Okay. Marry someone you never tire of looking at. Picture them on a fridge magnet, on a lunch box, on something you see everyday. Picture them as a poster on the bus.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes. You’ve never noticed? I’ve got this voice where everyone thinks I’m from the South. I’ve got this drawl, and I don’t know how that happened. Maybe I got hit with a barbecue rib when I came out of the womb. Maybe I’ll find out the answer when I crawl back in.”

  Chorus of Aging Rockers

  –Melvin, shit, he’s doing the meat draw at the Legion Saturday afternoons.

  –Stoney’s delivering papers. Gets up at four in the morning.

  –Fuck.

  –Well, my socks are sick. They’re like a ten-year-olds. And look at my boots. You don’t even have to untie them. You just pull the Velcro straps.

  –You want sick? I got up one morning last week and threw up blood.

  –Ha. I done that.

  –I don’t mind throwing up beer, and I don’t mind throwing up vegetable soup. But when you throw up blood you’re like Doc Holliday. You’re dying.

  –That gets your attention real quick.

  –Yep.

  –Being a failed rock star sucks.

  –Yep.

  Ring-ring. Ring-ring.

  –Uh-oh.

  –Don’t answer. It’s the Grim Reaper. He wants to know if I’m still having a nice day.

  Vibe

  “Our hope is that down the line we might be able to do a simple blood test that tells if you will be a naltrexone person, an acamprosate person, or a ghrelin person.”

  New Year’s Day

  It was an odd party. At one point I said to Matt Grover over by the cheese tray, “You got pinkeye?” “No,” he said. “I was up all night sobbing uncontrollably.”

 
; In the living room, Morris, the chef, was sobbing with joy about his work. This was on the couch beside the retro lamp. “I get you when you’re hungry,” he said. “I reach you on a physiological level. Your pupils dilate, your mouth waters, your stomach rumbles. The only other people who can do that are in the porn industry.”

  Light from the sunset turned the room pink, causing everyone except Lee-Ann to say it was beautiful. Lee-Ann went pale and grabbed her chest. Warren, her husband, said not to worry and gave her two sublingual Ativans. In a couple of minutes Lee-Ann stopped panting.

  Warren then spoke to the few of us still standing around. He spoke like a tour guide, detached yet cheerful. “It’s spirits penetrating the visible world,” he said. “They originate from crystals, beautiful light. Lee-Ann is sensitive to their presence and gets spooked.”

  “Spirits,” we said.

  “That’s right,” Warren said.

  “How many?” Brian asked.

  “You never know,” Warren said. “Sometimes a few, sometimes thousands.”

  Then around six thirty a bunch of people with those subprime mortgages just got in their cars and left. I’d never seen anything like it.

  Chorus of Swans

  –I don’t know how people do it, how they keep their minds moving.

  –You mean those who don’t have a sleeping imagination?

  –Oh yes.

  –I feel like my psyche is about to suffer permanent slippage.

  –You will grow old in your own good time. You’re not going to like what happens.

  –You get angst. It’s like a skin-picking disorder. You can’t help going there. It’s a bad place, honey.

  –It’s like when someone says to you, “I’m sorry to hear of your diagnosis.”

  –It’s walking into the meeting room thinking: I’ll give it a shot. And leaving the meeting room thinking: I never had a chance.