1. |
Hyena Subpoena
09:45
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HYENa subpoena
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hyena
If I could be a hybrid species, here's what I would be:
a creature who's one-half hyena, and one-half me
And should I be called to testify upon my own behalf,
I'd take the stand and be sworn in, then laugh and
laugh and laugh
In the Kanuri language of the Bornu region
of Western Africa, the word for hyena –
bultu – connotes one who is unsettled,
does not remain in one state, an individual
who vacillates between strength and weakness.
Hyena are even able to shift between sexes,
as well as from human to hyena form –
the verb bultungin signifying,
I transform myself into a hyena.
There's said to be an entire town or two who can do it.
A formidable ability, considering hyena notoriety
both proverbially as well as in popular mythology.
The public image of hyena is generally not very
pretty, because neither according to many is the hyena
–
with its tragic mouth and down-slope eyes,
ursine lumbering and slobbering like a zombie
Saint Bernard, mournful-looking as the mug
of Goya's Kronos.
But according to a proverb of the Hausa tribe,
Every fault is laid at the door of the hyena,
though it does not steal a bale of cloth.
The tongue of a hyena is barbed, like the tongue
of a cat. Some humans being are surprised by that
because, they suppose, hyena more resemble dogs
than cats, when in fact they're neither of those.
Most closely related to meerkats and mongoose,
hyena constitute their very own Family: Hyaenidae,
Order: Carnivora, Genus and Species: Crocuta crocuta,
named after a mythical wolf-dog with supernaturally
powerful teeth and instantaneous digestion,
which lured dogs and men to their doom,
assuming a human voice and calling them by name,
feigning the identity of a loved one in distress
just beyond that clump of shrubbery.
Not such a trustworthy namesake to be saddled with, a little like naming someone Low down snake in the grass, or something like that, rather stacking the odds against social success.
And so yes, nobody loves a hyena –
they're carrion-eaters. Grave-robbers,
shape-shifters, liars and cheaters with
a bad reputation for repugnant gustation.
This, in addition to being cowards and scavengers.
Demons and enemies of the church, overturning
sepulchers and devouring the corpses of innocent
converts.
Furthermore, hyena are sexual perverts.
Known whores and hermaphrodites.
Chicks with dicks who can switch at will
which sexy bits they wish to copulate with.
They operate within the mythical dimension,
with intentions that are shifty and shady.
Always changing from one thing to another,
not entirely stable. You might almost feel sorry
for the poor guys, but bear in mind the Mandi
proverb which reminds –
It's never wise to show a hyena how well you can bite.
Hyena, hyena, cattle of night,
courser of witches with lanterns alight
burning hyena butter – anal glandular putty
rubbed up against branches, in two tones like
Tiger Balm, red & white, gathered by witches
in gourds to light their course, then mounting hyena
take flight onto the astral plane to do nuisance there.
Hyena, hyena, cattle of night, courser of witches
with lanterns alight burning hyena butter,
gathered in gourds to light their course –
here the hyena is Bringer of Light.
With eyes open wide and a fine set of canines,
hyena cubs come into the world via the so-called
pseudo-penis of their mother – in fact, an elongated
clitoris of identical dimensions to the male apparatus,
making labour a particularly arduous process,
but still downright impressive, and not well under-
stood, why the females are packing in the hyena
sisterhood.
Then there's that laugh of hers, that maniacal
cackle which screws with Eustachian tubes,
haunting the hearer ad nauseum like some kind
of voodoo tinnitus. Now a crying baby,
then suddenly a crazy lady. Really makes you
wonder what hyena find so funny.
Unless that laugh is a call to bear witness,
to some shift in emphasis – from general culpability
to a clearer analysis, of how maybe you've been lied to
by the same set of standards that has tried to
define you.
From symbol of depravity to source of light
and clarity, what hyena best exemplify is that
which can't be quantified – like Natural Science
before Wallace and Darwin, a curiosity cabinet,
resisting easy definition.
If I could be a hybrid species, here's what I’d be:
a creature who's half hyena and half me.
And should I be called to testify upon my own behalf,
I'd take the stand and be sworn in, then laugh and laugh
and laugh –
Meanwhile, the profile emerges of hyena as scavenger,
despite that they're equally talented hunters.
Indeed, it may be lions do the lion's share of
scavenging, if we tally who steals who's kill
most frequently – but lions have a better public image,
shall we say, and so, as explained in a proverb
of Swahili, The leavings of the lion are welcome to the hyena.
So the truth is, hyena are just betters eaters.
Seriously. They're marvels of digestive efficiency.
Hyena feces are as white as chalk and dry as Ryvita,
I've seen it, you could probably draw a hop-scotch
on the sidewalk with that shit.
Enzymes in their digestive tracts can extract blood
from a stone, with tooth and jaw designed to grind
bone, not a narrow lick of marrow left unscoured.
Nothing going to waste.
It kind of brings back happy memories of your
anarchist squatter days in East Vancouver in the
late eighties. Scavenger was never a bad word, it was
what you aspired to be. Diving into dumpsters in the
parking lot behind Safeway – you could pretty well
feed all thirty-eight squatters on what the
supermarket chucked out every day. And can it really
be stealing
if the lion’s already abandoned it and walked away?
And when the supermarket started putting padlocks
on the dumpsters, wasn’t that pretty sour grapes?
So you went similarly out of your way to subsist
on the waste of society, because you didn't want to pay
for what it pandered. And in six abandoned houses,
squatters took up residence. Hooked up phone and
power, just like regular citizens. Then petitioned the
city to save those perfectly livable bungalows from
demolition – instead of throwing up still more fancy
condos for which not a soul in the whole neighbor-
hood had the dough.
The point wasn't solely to draw attention to the
plight of the homeless, it was to avoid joining them.
But when your Great Aunt Enid saw squatters on the
evening news, she refused to accept that any relation
of hers could fall in with people like those –
long-hairs, political radicals, unwed mothers –
Couldn't they settle into proper jobs instead
of cluttering up the steps of City Hall?
Great Aunt Enid had worked as an office clerk
her entire life and it never hurt her any.
But you do have a job, you tell Great Aunt Enid,
and this is aside from rescuing perfectly edible fruits
& vegetables from landfills. You also work in the
stainless steel steamy industrial kitchen of some
fancy hotel downtown, where they chuck out enough
food every night to feed a crowd. Food no employee
is even allowed to salvage, at least not officially,
which is why some rules are not meant to be paid
attention to.
So you arrange to be the one who takes out the trash
at the end of the night, dash to a phone-booth, and call
up a certain United Church on the downtown East
Side – a neighbourhood where homeless persons often
line the curb like that ridge of dust at the edge of the
pan which never gets swept up, quite.
And you wait in the back alley for the minister's black
Mariah with headlights dimmed, and you deliver the
food bins to him, carefully stacked in garbage bags,
a flat of mashed potatoes and carrots, a tray of Boston
Creams or whatever it happens to be, which breach of
legality the good folks at the downtown church are
only too happy to recycle into meals for local people –
the broke, addicted and mentally ill – helping keep
body and soul together another night.
Because we might as well admit it
Most folks don't love the homeless any more
than they'd love to see a family of hyena move in
next door. They likely have lice, or worse, homeless-
ness may be contagious like some economic virus –
best to not even look at a homeless person, or suddenly
find yourself flat on your ass and addicted to crack
at the corner of Poverty & Despair and then you
die there.
But Hope springs eternal from darkened doorways
and shrubberies – the more dire the fight for survival,
the greater the necessity for levity, which must be why
they call it making light –
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2. |
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Is hope lost Lady? Pride abandon ye by the side of the road,
lioness dying alone. On your face still traces of predator grace,
never losing your feline refine even as flies encircle your crown like vultures.
They pluck out even the eyes of the blind. But I too am a scavenger here,
gathering scraps of this ravishing culture ‘til my eyes are filled, spill over
and still can’t believe what I’m seeing –
a dying lion – no surprise I’ve never seen one,
but neither do I wish to be the very last thing she sees.
We slow the rented Go, windows rolled down letting russet dust
settle equally on all of us – two Canadian aliens, one South African lioness.
We don’t choke the engine though, now it’s growling at the tattered cat
and it doesn’t feel right, listening to the life rattle out of her like a gate chain
locking out the night. Not long ago she was top of her game, top of the food chain
now slowly consumed by consumption. Lying low to the ground like a pup tent,
skin stretched thin over bony ribs, black lips mutter back to her heart ‘til the very last beat,
when the fire in her lion eyes freezes in the heat, and her sight sinks like shiny sunstones deep
in river-beds beneath her lids. The arid air throws dust over my vision and I swear
I see her leaping at the sun, where long ago she must’ve come from.
Yet none so young deserve this, to wither of illness, invisible nemesis crippling dignity.
She may be a mother with youngsters to feed, like any other hunter gathering food for
her brood of hungry cubs. But who’d bother to let the local pride of lions know
that the flesh of those Cape buffalo contains a fatal dose of bovine tuberculosis?
And that this tenacious germ had recently learned how to leap to her species easily?
So it seems our Lion Queen is being eaten by something she ate.
There may be no greater tragedy, but in the state of nature it’s consumer beware:
even on the savannah, it’s a jungle out there. Did she feed poison kill to her children as well?
Was she guilty of involuntary regicide, when the King of her pride laid claim to the lion’s share
of the prey, leaving behind just the nasty bits only hyenas would eat anyway?
But therein lies the irony of infectious disease –
Viruses couldn’t care less about social hierarchy,
given equal opportunity, diseases will eat every body equally.
But look, how the eyes of the lioness suddenly widen awake!
She’s taking us in, never taking her glittering focus from us.
In better days we’d have been breakfast.
I’ve heard certain prides have acquired a taste for us homo sapiens –
maybe fancy apes make a tasty break from antelopes such as
those skinny impalas, shy-eyed and nubile like a herd of schoolgirls,
knobbly knees even wider than their thighs. How inviting they look
to those guys higher on the food chain, who’ve got nothing to lose
and nothing but a little time to kill.
See, how their prey stand stalk still like fear were the devil it is –
a bush fire taking no prisoners, finding no sacrifice too great to feed its fever
if even at the price of a few insignificant lives.
But I heard of this pride who’ve acquired a taste for human meat;
specifically the flesh of young refugees from Mozambique,
who get caught trying to sneak over the border through Kruger
in hope of seeking South African salaries. We met two of these guys on the road.
Like young lions, they were walking not driving, with nothing but a bottle of water between them.
What kind of poverty must they be fleeing, to risk being torn limb from limb by wild animals
for the slim chance of advancing their financial situation? What else but desperation
would make a man lay his life on the line that way, settling the wager at all or nothing?
I saw those shadows of human misery all around me,
it likely surrounded on all sides, I didn’t have to look for it
but what I generally found was the opposite –
generosity of spirit, easy humour even where you’d expect
to find bitterness. Maybe I was blessed in this. Yet the question I kept asking is,
Can it be true the most important thing to do is to somehow die while alive
then keep living right through the new day, just to sit by the river
laughing away like a baby hippopotamus?
There’s a certain laughter seems to surface when you believe completely
what you’re seeing, as though it were being shown: youthful, buoyant, joyous
as school children in kaNyamazane, who can’t stop cracking up at the
two Canadians who came to visit them. Yet, concrete walls of bubble-gum pink
surround their elementary school compound, laced on top with razor wire
and emblazoned with hand-painted slogans celebrating freedom and warning
against the spread of HIV. The deputy principal asks me to perform a poem
in the centre of the courtyard, where stands a spreading tree, now youngsters
gather beneath it in clusters like fruit.I choose a poem about meerkats,
how they babysit each other’s kits while a watcher keeps a watchful eye
for sneaking snakes and swooping eagles. The watcher stays awake
to keep the young from harm – when a dangerous stranger comes near,
it’s the watcher who sounds the alarm – but the rest of the time when the coast is clear,
she sings a little peeping song, so they’ll know she’s still near and they’ve got nothing to fear
as long as they can still hear another peep out of her, and then another.
Kids in blue uniform clap at the end of the poem, then the deputy principal
takes a turn of her own at story telling. It’s clearly her calling, her hands spread
wide as branches over the circle of children, sweeping them up in her tale
of two Canadians who came from far away to visit them, friendly and sweating
and smiling all teeth like two white mice with sunburns. Then the buzzer sounds
like a fire alarm, and young boys race to shake my hands like they’d take home
some alien germ, while little girls lace fingers through my hair as though it were
falling water. I falter in my place then, to see in their faces the fire of their powerful
heredity look up at me through laughing eyes, and I shy before their growing shadows
reaching past me toward the sun where young lion kings and queens of long ago first came from.
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3. |
The Lottery
08:53
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You heard it from an antelope and tried to tell your analyst
the rational explanation for your n-n-n-n-nervousness
Listen, no impala is stupid. We may look that way
'cause of the staring and chewing, staring and
chewing, but listening intently is what we're really
doing. We have no choice, we know stats –
we're the primary diet of various big cats, painted
dogs and spotted hyenas. Essential ingredients in
Nature's great Opus – but unfortunately for us,
It's a cookbook.
Look, it's no coincidence there's over a hundred
thousand of us impalas here in Kruger Park but only,
like, sixteen hundred lions, all too delighted to invite us
to dine. Hey, here's some ruminant humour for you,
How d’you get a hundred impala to leave your house
party? Just drop everything and listen –
When I was young I used to wait
for everyone to suddenly start running all at once
in same direction at a frantic pace –
Except for that one dude. Too old, too young,
too sick or too stunned stupid to move, even when
pheromonally warned to by the whole group,
but the poor dupe, his last words were,
“Where's everyone running to? Oh dang,
I'm screwed...” then those dreadful guttural noises
of predator crushing esophagus. When the rest of us
finally reach safety, maybe we try to comfort each
other –
Well, you know, Joe, that whole branch of the family shrub
is so slow, it's a wonder they didn't all die out aeons ago...
For an antelope, the age of innocence is short,
but what can you do? You gotta know, if you're not
trying to eat anybody, most likely somebody's trying
to eat you. They say we all drink from the same pool,
but no antelope takes lingering cat-naps in mid-
afternoon unless he's a damn fool. We're at the
bottom of the pyramid, so our numbers need be
myriad. We lack the luxury to lounge around belly-
aching over how they misspelled our names on the
Menu – we've got more important things to do than
ruminate over the meaning-less-ness of existence with
you. Leave the philosophizing to the predators,
who do love to have something amusing to muse upon
while they loll about digesting.
After an antelope reaches maturity, it serves no
earthly purpose to assert her personality against
the rest of the herd – that kind of behaviour is
never in the interest of self-preservation.
When you're a prey animal you need to blend in
with the herd – not be seen, not be heard.
Because it could be any of us, at any time, it's pretty
random, really. The young bucks are lucky for their
antlers and their speed, but all of us are fast –
you have to be or you're lunch meat. Scapegoat tartare.
It's a little like living in a science fiction movie,
or in Shirley Jackson's short-story The Lottery –
the very collectivity we rely upon for security
also makes us complicit in this ritual culling of
antelope society. It's roughly the same every time –
as soon as the day seems to be going maybe a little
too peacefully, we all get to feeling jumpy, like we're
being spied on by leonine eyes or leered at by sneering
hyena. The chief does his best to warn us about
whatever-it-is but very often another mother's child
goes missing again. There’s no justice in it,
it just is like this.
An antelope needs to hit the ground running even
before the word Go – quadrupedalism ain't as easy as it
looks, you know – any new born oryx or gnu needs to
sort it out soon so he can hoof it with the rest when he
hears the alarm, then we all just try to hang together.
Whoever becomes separate from the group is pretty
well doomed and everyone knows it – yet some of us
seem to be brought into the world for little more
reason than this. So folks think we antelope don't care
about our kids as much as certain other animals do,
because we don't spend like a whole year teaching
them how to hunt and fish. They say we expose our
kids to too many treacherous situations too young –
as though we have any say in the matter, other than
smothering every single one. If it's not my child who's
taken to feed the lions, it'll be another mother's child,
so it's no less my loss than hers if she's bereaved first,
it could really be any of us. Do you think antelope
have time to mope about at funerals, like elephants do
for their dead? There's not usually much left of us,
to be blunt about it. So we don't take each other's
company too much for granted, keep ears and eyes
open, and try to blend in with the foliage.
Early life can be a minefield for any kid who's a little
bit different. It seems inevitable even junior society
will pick out and crucify certain personalities as a sign
to the rest to stay in line – some are cast out in the
wilderness, where they stumble into the clutches of
predators, brambles of crime running rampant all
around them. Because there very often is no warning
sign, and there is no Catcher in the Rye. You can't
ultimately protect a child from barreling blindly head
first into her own fate, now can you? Couldn't it be
she's just in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Couldn't it be she's just walking home from Seven-
Eleven a few blocks from her house, even feeling
a wee bit saucy in her new maroon ski-jacket and
stretch denim jeans, grade eight being the first year
she doesn't have to wear those polyester flood pants
with the elastic waistband, no, but actual clingy-ass
stretch denim jeans?
Then lo and behold, a full pack of grown men
with ice cold Extra Old Stock beer in stubby bottles,
sunglasses, sideburns and moustaches, whistle at her
as she passes the front porch, where they're standing
around like the spitting image of a Bob Seger tribute
band. This gang of jackasses is out there partying
every week in that yellow house right across the street
from the high school. They like to tell a girl one of her
friends is already there at the party, then maybe they
give her her very first beer, so she has no way of
telling if it tastes a bit queer, then Hey, wait a minute,
there're no other girls in here –
But now who's this guy with the worried eyes,
claps his buddy on the shoulder, says, “Thirteen gets
you thirty, Kevvie,” some kind of brotherly warning
you don't fully grasp. The same worry-eyed guy
who'd asked your age and you'd lied and said
thirteen when actually it was still three weeks 'til
your birthday. But it's too late, you already hate your
stretch denim jeans, if they just make you look like
some dumb slut flattered by drunks whistling at her
butt, but resistance is chemically dissipating,
as though your brain were melting in a pool of wax
beside the bare mattress, as though you'd solidify
there by the bare zebra-striped mattress, unaware and
completely unconscious of how you got upstairs in the
first place.
And no, it wouldn't get Kevvie thirty years or even
thirty grey hairs if he didn't get caught, which he was
not apt to do if you didn't press charges, which you,
in perverse defiance of your parents, are not on your
life about to do. Not after having to deal with being
dragged to Emergency, and having your mother,
who hasn't even said two words to you, hovering
over you in the examination room. She doesn't speak,
doesn't seem to want to touch you, just keeps her arms
wrapped tightly round herself as though afraid her
ribs might fall open, while her adolescent daughter
lies askew on the white sheets like a peeled carcass.
It seemed the only way to reclaim your own dignity
was to say No.
No, you didn't want to press charges. No, no, a
thousand times no – you'd really rather forget the whole
fucking thing, thanks all the same. You didn't want to
have to see that gang of creeps again, you kidding?
Hell no. You have no intention of even mentioning the
subject to anyone. Ever. Again.
But then, two days later find yourself wandering back
to that same yellow house, as one returns to the scene
of a crime, to find it gutted. No blaring Silver Bullet
Band, no puffy vinyl furniture seen through the
picture window. They probably left that stinky bare
mattress right there on the upstairs floor, though,
no one would bother saving something like that.
Suddenly a man speaks and scares you half out
of your wits, but when you turn round it's only the
elderly owner of the building asking if you knew the
guys who lived there. No. You don't know them at all,
why does he want to know?
“Because they just packed up and left overnight
without telling a soul where they were going”, he says,
“Every last one of those young men, took off out of
here like they thought someone was chasing them.”
Like they thought someone was chasing them, you
heard the man say – as though you were the predator
and they were the prey.
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4. |
Seeing the Elephant
06:56
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When you turn fourteen they send you to see a certain
Dr. Schwartz, of whom there turn out to be two.
As your luck would have it, rather than the city's
alleged expert in adolescent psychology, you get the
sixty-year-old cynic who admits to your mother he
has no previous experience with adolescent girls –
jokes he'll likely live the longer for it – then twice
alludes to the fact he's heading out on sabbatical as of
that after-noon, just as soon as he's finished with you.
He's got a furrowed brow and a slate grey beard with
two white stripes like tusks growing down from either
side of his mouth. Behind him stand cavalcades of
leather-bound books with wrinkly knees embossed in
golden filigree, on such topics as abnormal psychology
and hypnotherapy, plus a few university degrees and
a pair of bifocals all in golden frames.
From across the expanse of his dark wooden desk
he raises a bushy brow at you and asks, Why you
aren't wearing any socks. You didn't feel like wearing
socks, was the truth. You're wearing your usual black
canvas shoes from Chinatown, they're soft inside and
you didn't feel required socks, actually.
“But don't you care if your feet get cold?” sounds like
a trick question to you, so you sit staring silently at
that eyebrow to see if he'll raise it again, but he
swivels his grey leather armchair around to a whole
new strategy.
“What about the little elephant?” he asks,
waving his index finger over your left closed fist,
“What's significance of the little elephant?”
Your hand seems to open automatically, traitorously,
revealing a tiny grey elephant of molded plastic,
the size of a cat's ear or a toy soldier. A child of some
other era has bitten its face, leaving it pock-marked
and askew.
The truth is that Molly, your best friend in the whole
world, who's just been moved to another school because
the grown-ups all thought the two of you were
spending too much time together, had given you the
elephant. So yes, it has all kinds of significance.
You're not sure which bits he wants to know,
and whether it's any of his bee's wax, actually.
“D'you mean what does it represent symbolically?”
you ask.
Symbolism, as you well knew, was a literary device
whereby an object or motif took on a deeper
significance than what it appeared to have on the
surface of things, coming to represent a character's
secret fears and desires. This was one of the most
interesting parts of English class, when the teacher
would suddenly reveal all these hidden meanings in
the poem or story, and you'd wonder whether the
writer was putting all that in there on purpose,
or whether it was just made up by English teachers
so they have something fascinating to teach which
might otherwise never occur to most people.
“Sure,” says Dr. Schwartz, “what does the elephant symbolize to you?”
“D'you ever see that movie The Elephant Man?
Me and my best friend Molly saw it once.
I can't remember the exact words because it was
a long time ago, but there was a part where John
Merrick, whose name was actually Joseph like my
grandfather? says sometimes he thinks his head is
so big because it's so full of thoughts. Then he says,
What happens if thoughts can't get out? Maybe his
head is lumpy like that because his biggest thoughts
are trying to push their way out.
So, then he builds this little paper church,
but the whole time most people still think he's
a circus freak whether they dress him in a tuxedo
or lock him in a cage. He just doesn't fit in anywhere.
So then at the end of the movie, he looks at these
pictures on the wall of his hospital room?
There's someone sleeping peacefully, not all propped
up on pillows like he has to do, because otherwise he'll
either suffocate or break his own neck from the
weight of his head. But he moves the pillows away
anyhow, just to be like a normal person, even
though he knows it might kill him and it does.
He's only twenty-seven when he dies,
just like Jimi Hendrix.”
Any mention of death or suicide is, of course,
one of the things Dr. Schwartz is listening for.
It doesn't bode well that you identify so strongly
with a deformed adult male who died over a hundred
years ago, but he doesn't have time to probe the issue.
He only has the therapeutic hour, which is drawing to
a close. He really doesn't know enough about your
situation to say whether you're in Serious danger of
harming yourself or anybody else, but he does know
which forms require only his signature to make the
whole damn thing not his problem. To him, what you
represent is the last piece of paper he has to sign
before jumping in a cab to the airport. He's got a
bright new Hawaiian print shirt and sunglasses
waiting in his desk drawer.
Your mother had not expected to be just leaving you
there at St. Paul's that afternoon. You don't even have
a toothbrush or a change of clothes, she explains,
but is told to worry about those things later.
They preferred to keep an eye on you, was how
they put it. After your mother leaves they make you
change into a flimsy blue gown with no back, then sit
you in a wheelchair just to take you down the hall,
which at first you think is totally ridiculous but soon
the red syrup they gave you in a cup starts to feel
like space travel. They put you in a starchy blue bed
sectioned off by curtains, with a window opening
onto the streets of downtown Vancouver.
It wouldn't be too difficult to just climb out of here,
you think, but then suddenly you fall fast asleep.
Your mother didn't know and neither did you,
that this appointment would be the first and only
time you ever meet this Dr. Schwartz or any other
Dr. Schwartz. His only role in the whole downward-
spiralling snowball was to be the admitting
psychiatrist, after which he disappeared –
never to be held accountable for anything that
happened to you from that point onward –
as though he'd simply backed into a lever releasing
a trap door, and you'd fallen down through a hole
in the floor to the world on the other side of the two-
way mirror, where everyone knows what you're doing
all the time but somehow they read it all backwards.
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5. |
The Trial
09:35
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THE TRIAL
It's not quite like you were raised in a refrigerator crate,
fed on fossil cubes of crusty bread, cheddar cheese and grapes
left over from your best friend Molly's father's trade conventions,
with not a stitch to wear but that hideous pair of blue & yellow
striped institution pyjamas. You weren't brought up in a box
like Caspar Hauser or B.F. Skinner's daughter, set loose on
the world like the sole surviving member of your own species,
though these scenarios come pretty close to describing the time
you went AWOL from Cedar Grove, that damn psych unit which
took huge bites out of your so-called formative years.
It's a wonder you even got as far as Molly's bedroom closet
without getting caught and brought back to Cedar Grove,
but back in the early eighties there was nothing so strange
about pale-faced fifteen-year-olds with hacked-up hair,
wearing hideous pyjamas and stolen bowling shoes, hanging
around Kootenay Loop in the wee hours, trying to conceal
what resembles a series of festival passes, or hospital bracelets.
But just five days later, Molly's father detects your presence
in his daughter's closet, but only because it's very difficult to
piss silently in his missing roast pan. You're found crouching
over it when he goes to investigate the source of the sound,
like rain on a hot tin roof – and is lead to Molly's bedroom closet,
where he opens the door and looks down.
Too soon you're picked up in that crummy white van
and carried back to Cedar Grove, where it's noted in your
Treatment Plan that you're a “runner” which really sucks
because you'd much rather have been a “sneaker”.
**
The name “Cedar Grove” makes it sound like the most charming
place on earth, while the names of the individual units are similarly
misleading. “Cottage Three” at Cedar Grove is also known as the
“Locked Unit”, intended for the violently disturbed, kids who pull
knives on other kids or teachers. They don't put you in there.
Cottage Two is for the behaviourally impaired,
maybe they refuse to eat, bathe, or get out of bed.
You're not put there, either. You're assigned to Cottage One,
instead, which appears to be the unit for the true blue loonies.
You soon feel fairly at home, if one's sense of home includes
severe perpetual embarrassment and a paranoid sense of being
watched at every moment.
The characters who people your life in Cedar Grove
are characters indeed. Running down the hall just now
is Pamela, who's plump and pink and dashes about barking
like a dog. Once, when men come to fix the vents, Pamela
spreads a rumour they're planning to gas us all to death,
claims it's some new provincial policy regarding the mentally ill.
She whispers this to each of us by turn – about half, believing it,
begin to wail endlessly.
Another Cottage Oner, call him Ned, has an alleged
group of little men living in his closet. According to Ned,
the men resemble jawas in brown burlap robes, about two
feet tall with red eyes. Ned tries to provide the little men
with a reasonable quality of life. He brings them half his
dinner every night, sausages and potatoes in the pockets
of his robe, and he sings to them. Their favourite song
seems to be Friends of Mr. Cairo by Jon and Vangelis,
a 30's-gangster-fantasy about the chase to find the
Maltese Falcon, which Ned knows by rote, word for word
and note for note, with sound effects, machine gun fire and
reasonably fair impressions of Peter Lorre and James Cagney.
Ned also involves himself in clandestine sexual
experimentation with another patient named Kyle,
who styles himself after Freddy Mercury and claims
to have been sent Cedar Grove because he's able to
fellate himself and just won't stop doing it. Kyle is kept
on community confinement, meaning he's not allowed
to leave the common areas. Not that it makes any much
difference, he isn't particularly modest and always finds
his opportunity. Once, they caught him doing it behind
the Christmas tree.
Then there's the new guy, whose name is Steven King.
Steven King is the most depressing person you've ever met
in your life. He's in Cedar Grove because he jumped off the
Lion's Gate Bridge and survived. Someone saw him do it
and called 911, then a rescue craft dragged him out of
the water, sobbing and trying to bite the rescue workers.
So they brought him here, where he says he's even more
depressed, which he seems to hold against all of us.
Then there's Vanessa, who's curvy and pretty,
thrown in here for being a rock'n'roll groupie
to whom Tom Petty is sending naughty messages
through the airwaves. And Parvati, who's madly
in love with her boyfriend Aamir, but her parents
have chosen someone else for her, so on her wedding
day she collapses in a heap in her red & gold sari
and starts banging her head against the sidewalk.
Parvati writes a poem entitled My Life is a Ruined City
and tapes it to the plastic bathroom mirror.
Then there's Donovan, who's tall and thin,
the spittin' image of Tim Curry's Frank-N-Furter,
which resemblance he enhances whenever he
can get the face paint. Whenever Donovan's
forbidden to wear make-up to Group, he sits there
holding a newspaper in front of his face and refuses
to participate. And those are just the staff. Ha ha.
**
Seriously though, it's no joke that certain staff members
are just as bizarre as the patients, which is a source of
frustration because any one of them can write whatever
they want in that big book in the nurses' station known as
your Treatment Plan. One staff member writes you have
the habit of hiding behind your hair, after which the entire
staff harass you about it so much, you have one of them
hack it all off. It looks awful. Your mother doesn't even
want to look at you when she comes to visit and that's
how you know.
Then your case worker, whose name is Andre,
catches you coming out of your room one day,
and stops you with the comment, Oh, come now.
As in, Let's be reasonable, here. It's apparent he
has some new problem with your appearance,
but as usual you've got no clue what it is.
“Oh, come now. Why don't you go take a look at yourself?”
says Andre, pointing toward the plastic mirror in the hallway.
You already know you're a lot bigger than when you
first got here, with pale spotty skin and hacked up hair.
You're wearing a floppy green t-shirt of Molly's, with
your blue & yellow striped institution pyjama bottoms.
You've got one pierced ear from which dangles a clear
plastic earring resembling a fishing lure or an Astropop.
You reckon it must be the earring Andre has a problem
with, because nothing else is your fault.
“Is it the earring? I can take it out,” you say.
Andre makes an incredulous sound like deflating
a cushion. This is when he tells you maybe you're being
deliberately obtuse. That he's obviously referring to the
strip of cloth missing from the bottom hem of your floppy
green t-shirt. And he's right, a strip is gone from there,
not so as most would ever notice.
It was Molly who'd cut off a strip of the hem,
to make ears for this bunny-rabbit sock-puppet
she'd made for your birthday. Andre, however,
thinks you should start taking better care of your
appearance, and should not pretend not to know
what he's talking about –
so he writes down in your Treatment Plan
that you've got a tendency to be “deliberately obtuse” –
after which, you can no longer get away with not knowing
anything. Any time you even try to say, “I don't know”,
the staff eye you suspiciously and state that maybe
you do know perfectly well. And so you do know,
that you are in hell.
It becomes as alienating as deep space
to be stuck away in a place where you're
put on drugs which make you sluggish
and slow your gait to a pitiful shuffle
as though you're suddenly ninety-seven
instead of only fifteen.
You're just lucky to have been deathly allergic to Haldol
or who knows how you might've ended up. Initially this is
the drug they prescribe, until one day when you're sitting
with Pamela the barking girl, eating popcorn and staring up
at news on television, which is suspended from the ceiling
like Arrivals and Departures. You have fairly departed,
are largely concentrating on closing your fist around the
popcorn in such a way as would enable you to actually
pick it up and lift it to your mouth. The tricky parts are
picking up the popcorn and chewing with your mouth closed.
On the tv is something about soup. It’s increasingly difficult
to pick up any popcorn, you notice, because your fingers
are curling up like fiddleheads, and you can no longer open
them. Soon your neck and head take on the same motion,
a compulsive curling up as though a fractal equation were
curdling your bloodstream.
Pamela stops watching the soup and is now watching
you, because your head’s bobbing back and forth like
you're sneezing repeatedly. It's not until your eyes and
tongue roll back as well, that Pamela realizes something's
wrong, because now you look quite frightening, eyes and
tongue rolling back, crooked limbs and thrashing.
She starts flapping her arms and pointing at you, making
noises of general distress. With difficulty, she gets up from
the couch and starts barking, running and barking toward
the Nurses' station. Now two nurses run over to you,
one kneels on your arm and sticks her fingers in your
mouth to move your tongue, while the other flips you
on your side and pulls down your pyjama bottoms.
Sharp jab in the butt and your body quickly goes limp.
After that, they don't give you Haldol anymore.
You wonder what good came of it in the end.
At times there seemed ample evidence maybe you
were better off to have spent some time in captivity,
rather than out in the wilds of East Van in 1983
where so many school-mates and acquaintances
were experiencing violent nose-dives in their young
lives. Maybe being put away saved you from worse
fates such as those preying on some your peers,
like that childhood friend whose brain got fried from
solvents, now sits glassy-eyed in a vegetative state
with who knows what kind of inner life.
But on the other hand, it was a year after
you were released, you ran into Donovan,
downtown on Robson, doing a lot worse than
he was before, working the street and so thin
you could scarcely see him anymore.
Even your best friend Molly, for the longest time
things didn't turn out that great for her. Ironic it was
you who got put in a mental institution way back then,
while Molly just got transferred to another school in
a so-called better neighbourhood, when it would be
Molly who'd wind up developing schizophrenia plus
a crack addiction, who'd spend lost years in Lock-Up
before being turfed out on the street again, by order
of the provincial government.
Proximity to these stories used to be a source of
something like survivor’s guilt but now just makes
you grateful it was not the fate you met with, when
you could quote chapter and verse at least a half-dozen
stories that turned out so much worse for the person.
|
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6. |
||||
John Cleese and John Lennon have a few things
in common, both being British, born around 1940,
and well-beloved by you and your best friend Molly
when you were in the eighth grade.
Each is additionally the indirect cause of your nearly
getting beaten up by the Junior Girls' Lacrosse team
on one occasion, and quite thoroughly beaten up on
another.
The Junior Girls' Lacrosse team hate you, and your
best friend Molly, too, ever since they caught the two
of you practicing John Cleese' Silly Walks in the
parking lot after school. Cameron Dowd,
Kelly Boudreau and them corner you and want
to know What kind of freekin' rejects are you,
anyhow? No, they've never heard of Monty Python's
Flying Freak Show, one of them said, the other wants
to know if you've ever heard of a punch in the head.
But this first altercation turns out rather well.
You and Molly simply wrestle free and run like hell,
it’d been such a saving grace in so many ways to have
met each other. Molly'd just walked right up to you
on the first day of school, heard you were a bit of
a weirdo, she said, which was cool because people said
that about her, too. Molly wore a purple sweater vest,
had shoulder-length hair the colour of prairie wheat,
bright blue eyes and very straight teeth with shiny
silver braces on them. Her grandparents came from
Ukraine and she was going to be a famous painter
some day. She could draw better than anybody.
Horses, dogs, ladies, you name it. You loved to draw,
too, but certain things like perspective and proportion
just didn't come naturally to you. It was Molly who'd
even introduced you to the Beatles in the first place,
and now Beatle-music was the best thing in your life
besides Molly.
So the year is 1980 and Molly turns thirteen years
old today. She makes chocolate cake in a bag, like in
the Ballad of John & Yoko, for the two of you to eat
seated cross-legged, backs against lockers at lunch
time. But before you even reach recess, this gaggle of
grinning eighth-graders is singling you out, to tell you
some info they hope will upset you.
They want to know if you've heard the news yet,
that Jack Lemmon has just been shot.
At the age of twelve, you're not even sure who
that person is – you reckon some Hollywood actor
of your parents' generation, but the gentleman you're
picturing in your head is not Jack Lemmon, but
Walter Matthau instead. You think it's depressing
that someone would shoot some old actor, but why are
they telling this to you in particular?
The disappointed boys submerge into the migration
of students streaming down the halls, and it isn’t until
later that afternoon you and Molly learn the truth.
It's all over the news, radio and television, swarming
like a virus. It crackles into every ear leaving
emptiness in its wake, into which empty space flows
music like a healing balm. You stay on the phone
with Molly all night, sniffling to radio station vigils
by candlelight.
A few weeks later there's a series of noon-hour
symposiums in the school auditorium. Any student
who wishes to could stand up at a podium in front of a
microphone and rattle on about whatever topic stokes
them. One girl spends the whole hour extolling Mike
Reno of Loverboy, while another boy wears a bed
sheet and models his symposium after those of ancient
Greece. Then another kid talks really quietly about
why divorce should be illegal.
You convince yourself this is your opportunity to do
some good in the name of global peace and harmony,
so you put together a little speech about ahimsa,
Mahatma Gandhi, and the history of non-violent
resistance – closing with a coda about John Lennon
and the irony of that deluded gunman citing Catcher
in the Rye as writing inciting his misguided mind to
violence. But just as you're about to close, someone
calls out from the very back row, Wait!
There's something they're just dying to know.
The voice steps out into the light and –
Oh cripes, it's Cameron Dowd and Kelly Boudreau.
And Cameron says, “So – Are you saying that if some-
body punched you right in the face, you wouldn't even
punch back?”
And you think, Dang, I'm screwed. You can't just drop
John Lennon and now Mahatma Gandhi, too, like
a pair of pacifist hot potatoes, so all you can really do
is say No.
“No, Cameron, I would not punch that person,” you
say and try to mean it, but all you can feel is personal
doom descending like a heavy velvet curtain.
If you gain a bit of wisdom, then fail to act in accordance with
it, does the wisdom go away again or are you just a hypocrite?
If you're not even good as your word then you're not
worth spit, so you reckon you better get on with it and
finish the speech by making a peace-sign to the three
people still listening, then beating a hasty retreat
out the backstage door and onto the soccer green.
But it's too late – the Junior Girls’ Lacrosse team
is already heading you off at the pass –
a sort of fox-and-hound scenario at the double-doors
behind the drama class – with Amazonian Kelly
Boudreau leading the pack with the battle cry,
“We are so going to kick your ass!” But it's saddening,
half a dozen jocks versus one vegetarian pacifist,
so after they've all had a chance to rough you up a bit,
most fall back – leaving just Cameron Dowd, standing
over you blocking out the clouds, asking again if
you're sure you don't want to change anything you said?
Again you say No, so Cameron winds back
and clouts you right in the head.
And it came to pass that whacks in the head
became closely associated with a number of significant
life events, as though your skull were so thick you
needed to be literally clouted into the next level of
sense.
You found sense of humour to be a saving grace –
you take the original long sad story, and replace it
with something short and pithy as a flounder to the
face. You come to see that that which nearly kills
you can become hilarious, eventually, and to view life
as like an old old movie, in shaky black & white with
rickety piano, from those bygone days of silent film
when it was just plain funny when somebody takes a
tumble down three flights of stairs, or his pants catch
on fire, or he's beaten repeatedly about the head and
shoulders by the parasol of an irate dowager.
Such primitive methods of advancing plot have been
known more commonly than not as slapstick comedy –
named after the battacchio, a slapping stick with a flap
which inflicted more sound than fury on thespians of
Commedia Dell'Arte, who struck one another with it.
Since as long ago as the 16th Century, the battacchio
has enabled actors to beat each other silly while
causing very little actual physical damage, and so
for the theatre, reduced liability.
There'd been similar instruments back in the
institution, made of the same squidgy styrofoam as
swimming noodles. You were supposed to whack your
case worker with it when he was really getting under
your skin – but in too controlled an environment to
accomplish much of anything. Whereas, your own
whacks to the head had been genuine article –
as though you'd been one of those jukeboxes which
just doesn't play, until some karmic guru comes and
whacks it in just the right way.
|
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7. |
Cat Kidd Montreal, Québec
Catherine Kidd is a Montreal-based writer/performer. Hyena Subpoena is her first audio collaboration with Jacky Murda (aka Jack Beetz) since the critically-acclaimed Sea Peach, which toured internationally. Cat has performed her work in festivals all over the world, from Whitehorse to Oslo, Singapore to Cape Town. She’s author of the poetry collection Bipolar bear and novel Missing the Ark. ... more
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