A D A N A C

BY

A L W K E K A C A S WA

DOlan

JOHn

DOLAN
We were so grateful when we finally made it to Canada as official Permanent Residents that we wouldnt even cross the street until the walk sign came on, even if crowds of natives were shoving past us. We used to wait at the corner of Cook Street in Victoria, repeating our mantra: We must respect the laws of the B.A.L. B.A.L. was our code for Beloved Adoptive Land. Nine months later, we walked down the same street in a blizzard, looking for Victorias Salvation Army Shelter, hoping to find a warm place to spend the night. And when we finally found it, we were turned away for being a mixed couple. It was a men-only shelter. In Victoria, the most twee, cutesy-greeny city in Canada, we fell through floor after floor of poverty, right down to actual Dickensian privation, where youre cold all the time and dont have anything to eat. We thought wed be good immigrants because we had experience. Wed lived in Moscow for two years, between 2002 and 2004. After Russia, how could we help but think that British Columbia, where people were nice and spoke English, would be anything but a cakewalk? As it turned out it was a cakewalk, in the Baghdad sense. What we realize now is that speaking the local language isnt nearly as important as having contacts you can trust. And its got nothing, zero, to do with whether the locals are nice or not. Muscovites arent nice; their normal expression is a snarl. But no Muscovite ever cheated us the way Canadians cheated us, because we had friends watching out for us in Moscow. The people we met on Vancouver Island were nice as pie. And they nearly killed us. Drowning among nice, smiley people is a very strange experience. It takes a long time, and no one raises their voice not even you, as you go under. Our slow disaster in Canada always reminded me of a great scene in an old Paul Newman movie, Sometimes a Great Notion, where Newman and his brother are shifting logs on a river and the brother gets his leg caught between two logs. They laugh about it, what a klutz he is, and start prying the logs apart. But they wont move. And the river is tidal, and the tide is coming in, nice and slow its a nice river, not a raging torrent. But soon its up to the guys neck. He says to Newman, Hey, youre not gonna let this ol river up an drown me, are ya? But it does, in the same slow, polite, steady way. We took a long time to drown because we came with money, almost $50,000. Besides, Canada had invited us. The Canadian government had a campaign at the time to draw highly educated immigrants and, according to the point
2

BY JOHN

system they used to rate applicants, we were a prize catch. With a Ph.D. from Berkeley and 20 years experience running huge writing programs in the US and New Zealand, I thought it wouldnt be too hard to get a job in Canada. After all, they were recruiting educated foreigners like us. And Id been telling Katherine about the wondrous forests of Vancouver Island for years. So I quit a tenured university job in New Zealand and we flew to Vancouver, then took the ferry out to the Island, to Victoria. We had money, we had experience, and we had modest hopes: I didnt expect to walk into the kind of posh job I had in NZ. No academic careerism for me! Id be happy to teach at the smallest, most remote school in Canada. All we wanted was a house in the forest where we could feed the birds and maybe get a dog. We got the dog, and nearly fed the crows, but we know now well never own a house. We lost everything quietly, slowly. You dont fall all at once; thats for the movies. There arent many sheer vertical cliffs in the world. You reach the bottom by a lot of hard slides, not one huge Wile E. Coyote splat. Along the way, there are little victories, just often enough to help you ignore the clear downward line of the graph. We started out well. I found a job at the University of Victoria teaching remedial composition. Nothing fancy, nothing like the job Id left in NZ. In fact, it was the sort of job ladder faculty love to farm out to hungry newcomers but that was fine with us; all we wanted was a car and a dog. We got the car and we got the dog, a harlequin Dane who turned out to be a Dalmatian cross. The breeder we got her from was a creepy Dr. Moreau type who bred tiny little horses. She kept a few puppies in a little cage in the corner of her mutant-breeding hangar, and it seemed to me the puppy looked kind of hound-like for a Dane, but this lady with her J. Edgar Hoover face told us it was purebred Dane and we believed her. She got $1,200 out of us for a mixed breed with a long list of expensive canine diseases and a deep hatred of all humans. There were plenty of signs that the dog was not as advertised, and not a good pick. When the breeder lifted her out of the cage where she was being gnawed by a baby Rottweiler, the puppy walked right past Katherines outstretched hand and trotted over to some scrap in the corner that shed been coveting from her cage. Thats a bad sign; the puppys supposed to come to you. But we believed shed warm up to us, so we paid the breeder. Actually, thats a pretty good synopsis: We believed and we paid. The day after bringing her home, we learned that the apartment building where we lived did not allow dogs and was full of ancient, angry, sleepless 80-year olds from Ontario who lived for The Rules. One thing you soon learn about Canada: The Rules are sacred. Unless youre part of the local network. But for newcomers, immigrants, its The Rules and nothing but The Rules.

We were screamed at and followed up the stairs by a crazed retired cop from Sudbury who always demanded our names and the name of our dog, as if he suspected she too might have a criminal record in another province. His partner was an ancient skull-faced crone who monitored the laundry room in the basement, making sure no one left private socks on the public surfaces. She left vicious little notes, in perfect cursive, asking us newcomer wog filth to please clean the drier filters after EACH use. Those undead creeps hated us and our dog so much that we had to sneak her into the apartment in a backpack, which was not so easy with a Great Dane, even when shes a puppy. As for the car, an ancient Hyundai, it looked like shit and the drivers window didnt completely close, but it ran perfectly. As much as we loved it, we suspected that it wasnt popular with the Canadians, because the cops had roughed me up over

done with the demoralized kids whod been shunted into my remedial writing class. At first theyd looked shocked when I'd encouraged them to argue, with each other and the essays in the anthology, but by the end of the semester some of these mute jocks and ESL immigrants could analyze and respond to any of the bland persuasive essays in the book. Im an idiot in all kinds of ways, but I can get students excited about writing. Now was my chance to show off a little in front of my seldomseen colleagues. The meeting seemed like all the other marking meetings Id attended until it was time to review my students grades. The elderly hippie assigned to review my courses seemed offended by something hed seen in the essays. Not that he was going to say so; he wouldnt even look at me, and kept leaning toward the professor who was running the program, tilting his head toward her as he talked. It hit me, finally,

it. It didnt look right; it was a 1985 Excel, it was an insult. They hated it. They pulled me over because our insurance was two weeks late and fined us $700, plus $140 for having the wrong address on my license and $120 for the tow. A thousand dollars, gone because we had belatedly learned a lesson in what cops are for: keeping poor people off the road. But these were minor difficulties compared to what happened after the university eased me out very quickly and quietly at the end of my first semester. My first crime was teaching my students to write arguments, which deeply offended the Canadian woman who was running the program. She wanted me to teach the students to paraphrase the well-meaning essays in the anthology not that she or anyone else informed me that this was their policy; there were no guidelines of any kind. The first time I met most of the other composition teachers was at the end-of-semester marking meeting, where our students final essays were passed around to other teachers. I was looking forward to that meeting, because I was very proud of what Id

that this guy wanted to fail one of my best students. It made no sense. This student, a huge, inarticulate jock, had come into my course totally phobic about writing, and by the end of the semester hed turned into a decent writer with a real knack for coming up with surprising but convincing theses. And his last essay, the one this hippie wanted to fail him for, was his best. The essay students had to write about was a dismal, sanctimonious scold by George Monbiot, a Guardian progressive, called The Case for Banning TV. In Monbiots snotty Oxbridge view of the world, the case for banning this pleb entertainment ran through the Columbine massacre, via Doritos. Yes, Monbiot fearlessly laid the blame for a dozen dead teens right where it belonged: on junk food, and the TV shows that force adolescents to eat them. My student had actually gone out and done research into the lives of the two Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. He discovered that they were both health freaks who worked out every day. He used his findings to suggest that Monbiots thesis was incorrect. And he did it well.
3

And the hippie wanted to flunk this student? It took me a while to get what the students crime had been. Finally I realized that simply talking back to a canonical (i.e. well-meaning, censorious, progressive) text was a flunkable offense. Apparently everyone but me knew that, because when the old hippie read the last paragraph of my students essay aloud to the marking group an excellent paragraph, exactly the sort of conclusion Id taught them to write there was a group shudder, a group flinch, and a noise I would later come to recognize as Canadian disapproval, a sort of minorkey, fading hum. They were actually going to flunk this guy if I didnt do something. Now Im a coward from way back, and God knows I didnt want to stick my neck out, but even buzzards sometimes gag, and there was no way I could let this guy get an F for doing exactly what I taught him to do. So I objected, or rather started yelping loudly, fighting for my student. I knew even while my mouth was making words that this was a very bad mistake. Theres a feeling of congealed doom you get when you know youre going to do the right thing and pay for it. I made many perfectly valid points, not that it mattered. I told them that no one had ever told me that students werent allowed to challenge the assigned texts, and pointed out, just to seal my doom once and for all, that making students parrot canonical texts was a sure way to make them despise writing. I waited, ready to argue. But that was the point; these people didnt like argument, were terrified of it. So no one argued with me. The professor in charge, a linguist doing temporary duty minding the comp. ghetto, was in no position to reply, since she knew nothing about teaching writing; the hippie was content to sniff and avert his eyes like Queen Victoria smelling something unpleasant. The others well, two of them told me later they agreed with me, but only after looking both ways down the corridor.
4

So there was a long silence. Finally the hippie mumbled, dipping his head toward the boss, I suppose we could give him a B-minus. But that wasnt good enough for me. I held out for a B, and got it, and repeated the performance twice more, with other stroppy student essays they wanted to flunk. Its only now, trying to describe all this, that I see how ridiculous it was, getting my students acquitted of misdemeanor insubordination by implicating myself in a capital case of it.

The linguistics professor in charge made my crime and its consequences clear to me at the end of the meeting. Not explicitly, of course. Academics in general, and Canadian academics in particular, are specialists in oblique malice. Their martial arts are the nod, the shrug, the anonymous rejection. So instead of yelling, Youll never work in this town again!, she simply shut her folder, ending the business of the day, warmed up her voice a few degrees, and went around the table asking the instructors, by name, what theyd like to teach next semester. She started with the woman to my left and ended with the guy on my right, then stood up, said, I think were done for today, and left the room. A week later I

got an official letter informing me that my employment had ended because I had missed a reapplication deadline. That was the time to fight back, of course. Make noise. They hate noise up here. Probably wouldve worked. But remember, we were infatuated immigrants, and all too meek. So it couldnt be their fault. I sure didnt remember getting any notice of this deadline they were invoking, and there was no record of it on my email, but this was the Beloved Adoptive Land; they must be right. Besides, there are lots of universities in Canada, right? Wed go someplace smaller, somewhere in the forest like we planned. In the meantime, we got by on our savings and Katherines small income. She couldnt get a teaching job either, but she did find work, first nannying for a hairdresser, then doing a minimumwage night shift at Cobs bakery. It hurt to see her get up at one in the morning to sweat over the ovens. Our money was draining away and I applied without success for dozens of jobs in places that sound like the punch line to a hick joke. Lying there looking at the ceiling, you start mumbling about how you used to be a contender. Then you feel ashamed of talking like that. But it comes back: I was somebody, and now Im nobody. Like the conquered Mayan scribe says on the mural: My fingernails have been pulled out and now I am no one. That was a private, nocturnal opinion. In the daytime we made jokes about the various disasters and told each other these were normal immigrant bumps. We did our best to laugh off the little nightmares, like my near-death experience with anaphylactic shock courtesy of a Victoria naturopath. You see, I paid this nice naturopath $700 to give me a blood test that would show my allergies may as well get that cough taken care of, now that were in the B.A.L.! It didnt even occur to me that she was a con artist or that the test would be a fake. Wed come from two years in

Moscow, where everyone warned us to be careful; that was the bad place, the scary place. Now we were in the good place. There was no way this nice blonde lady in Victoria could be a fake. So I gave her a vial of blood and seven hundred dollars and she sent the blood off to Alberta for tests, according to which I was not, after all, allergic to nuts as Id feared. No, according to those tests, nuts were fine. In fact, said my nice blonde naturopath, nuts were good, I should eat more nuts. So after paying her $100 to talk to me for 45 minutes, I stopped off at an organic grocery and bought a pound of hazelnuts -- unprocessed, uncontaminated by anything un-clean and un-green. I took them back to the apartment and started chomping. They take some chomping, let me tell you, a whole pound of raw hazelnuts, but I swallowed them like I swallowed the rest of the maple-leaf lies. Twenty minutes on, I started itching. Coincidence. Nothing but coincidence. The itching got so bad I started tearing the skin off my wrists, waist, anywhere skin touched clothing. Then my throat closed up. It was like trying to breathe through a wet toilet-paper roll wrapped tightly in steel wool. The dog looked at me in a dubious way as I wheezed around the apartment scratching my bloody skin and gasping for breath. I finally granted the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the naturopath didnt know what she was doing. But if I had to leave the apartment the puppy would howl, and if she howled I thought of Dawn of the Dead, those snarling hordes of old toothy zombies. Better to suppress the whole thought and pretend that it would get better soon. Maybe if I took a shower... The shower did get results, in the sense that huge itchy welts sprouted all over my body. I was scared then, and dug in the still-packed suitcase for some Benadryl capsules wed brought. The emergency room staff said, a few hours later, that those three

capsules were the only reason I survived. But while swallowing them no easy thing at the time my only thought was that I was betraying the nice naturopath and showing a disgusting lack of faith in the B.A.L. The next ten minutes were like watching a horror movie from the inside, morphing into an oxygen-free itching monster. Zombies can drive, it turns out; zombies can even carry a half-grown Great Dane downstairs and into a used Hyundai and drive to the bakery where Katherine works. Well, in my state it wasnt so much driving as steering. I steered wheezing to her bakery, crash-parked the car and staggered in to tell her, I ink I avin awwegic weac-shun. She didnt seem to

recognize me somehow, but understood what was happening when she saw the car, with the dog poking her head out the window. She dragged me next door to the walk-in medical clinic, where everybody got out of my way with alacrity. A few minutes later I was in an ambulance, sirens blaring, heading for the hospital. Even in that ambulance the slapstick continued, thanks to the butchy paramedic who rode with me. She misunderstood my explanation of what had happened my tongue

was swollen to the size of a cows, and I wasnt speaking clearly. She thought Id said I ate nuts after being warned I was allergic to them. She looked at me contemptuously as I wheezed on the gurney and said, Wow, you should get a Darwin Award. I attempted to explain the circumstances: Nnnuh, Deyy tole mnnee I wathunth ah-ergic to nutth!!! She didnt seem to get it, so I tried another tack: Eeeey, In nna thupid! I guh a P-A-Dee fum Buh-khlee! Ith itten thith boothth! She was properly impressed: Six books? And youve got a Ph.D. from Berkeley? Yaaaaah! I nodded. Granted, my logic was lousy; anyone whos read many books or met a few Ph.D.s realizes that neither authorship nor an advanced degree is proof of intelligence. But I was dying, ladies and gentleman; give me the proverbial break here. Besides, it worked. She was properly impressed, and asked, Whatd you get your Ph.D. in? Wed-a-wic, I blubbered proudly. What? Wed-a-wic! Rhetoric? You got a Ph.D. in rhetoric? She guffawed and ignored me for the rest of the trip, my Darwin Award status confirmed. And she told the ER personnel the same story: Guy ate a bunch of nuts even though hes allergic to them. A real Darwin Award winner. By that time my tongue had swollen to the size of a baleen whales, and I couldnt have argued even if Id wanted to. Youd think that would have slapped me awake. But still I never blamed the naturopath. When my face finally deflated and I could talk again, I called her and told her what had happened. Suddenly all the nice was gone. She got very cautious, told me shed call back after checking her copy of my test results. She called an hour later, triumphantly telling me, Ive looked at my copy of the test results and it says you should eat filbert nuts! It doesnt
5

say anything about hazelnuts! I was embarrassed for her and said almost apologetically, Filbert is another term for hazelnuts. I looked it up before trying them. She hung up again, without a word. When I called her again she wasnt the friendly hippie lady I remembered; shed reverted to the tone of a corporate lawyer. When I told her that all I wanted was the huge fee Id paid for the blood test, she said shed talk to the company that administered the tests. Thats the last we heard from her. Soon after that, we bought a boat.

dissuade you from your fatal enthusiasms and they grow without check. We purchased a big (42-foot) extrawler from a stoner who called himself Odin. Heres a good rule: dont buy a boat from guys named Odin. And if you do, make sure you get the boats papers. Odin didnt have them at the time, and asked if that was fine with me. Hed bring them later. It was fine with me. A year later we still didnt have the papers, so we couldnt resell the useless old tub. Again, its the kind of stupidity that makes you think youd never, ever be as

another thousand, and hire somebody to put them in for a few hundred. Also, since the toilet on the boat didnt really work, we decided to do the green thing by shelling out $1,800 for a composting toilet that turned human waste into healthy, odorless mulch. Later we found that the city of Victoria, packed with 100,000 wealthy retirees, still pumped raw sewage into the ocean and had voted for decades against spending any money on sewage treatment. Thats the thing about rules in Canada: there are lots of rules for

Of all our disastrous moves, the very worst was buying that boat. I wish I could say we squandered our savings on drugs or tropical vacations, but it was nothing as frivolous as that. What pauperized us was my idea to escape Victorias outrageously high rent: Hey, we can buy a boat and live on it! It might have worked if Id bought the right boat, if Id taken time to choose one that had a few options like a toilet, a heating system, insulation, a roof that kept out the rain... Not me, baby. I zoomed down those ads looking for maximum size and minimum price. I saw that big ol trawler for sale and fell in love. When a fit like this takes hold of most people, their friends talk them out of it. When youve immigrated without a single contact in the new country, there are no friends to
6

stupid as I was. Maybe you wouldnt. But Im telling you, when you immigrate to a place where you think everybodys nice, you do stupid things. You think I would have bought a boat without proof of ownership in Moscow? I wouldnt have bought a loaf of bread except in a store my friends told me I could trust. Thats why we survived Moscow and died in Canada. On its maiden voyage the boat started making a funny noise. That noise cost us $5,000. Then we trustingly let Odin borrow the boat back for a weekend. We got a call next Monday telling us our dinghy was floating upside down. The outboard motor was a write off, and we had to buy another dinghy. That was another thousand. And because we were trying so hard to be green, we had to get solar panels,

newcomers, and none at all for the locals. Then there was the problem of bringing a Great Dane puppy to live on a house-boat. Naturally, she hated the dinghy, which we had to row to where the boat was moored a half-mile from shore. And she hated the water. Most of all, she hated the boat. That meant we couldnt leave her alone for even a minute or shed howl, and more nice people would zoom up in their expensive Zodiacs to ask us pointedly if anything was wrong, then suggest that we might want to do something about that dog. So as the summer passed, we fell into our wretched marine routine. I spent most of my time dog-sitting on that miserable boat, and on my brief trips ashore applied for every teaching job in Canada, without result. Katherine kept

working nights for minimum wage at a bakery in town. It didnt pay anywhere near enough to live on, and it demanded that we wake at two a.m. so I could drive her to work in our beloved, trustworthy Hyundai. We had to take the dog with us, of course and oh, what fun we had each time, getting a tall, uncoordinated puppy into a small, tippy plastic dinghy in choppy water. Its amazing we didnt drown several times over. Id drop Katherine at her job and wait in the car with the dog until Katherine got off work in the morning. Then shed take her shift staying in the car or walking with the dog and Id go up to VIRCS, Victoria Immigrant and Refugee Centre Society. They were nice people who tried to help new immigrants walk through the porridge-y quicksand of Canadian life. They meant well, thats about the most I can say. I applied for every teaching job I could, in remote Cree villages in Quebec, in Inuit villages that were icebound ten months of the year. If there was a snow-choked hamlet in Canada that wanted a teacher, I applied. And never got a nibble. I still dont know if Canadian educational institutions have some hyper-efficient blacklist, or if that job I lucked into in Victoria was the only one in the whole country. All I know is that for three months I applied for jobs in Nunavut, the Yukon and Newfoundland. I begged to be allowed to teach at schools on the Porcupine River and Pelican Narrows. Pelican Narrows, Saskatchewan, that is. Reachable only by floatplane. Im not making those names up. I have the letters on file if you want to see them. They didnt turn me down; they didnt answer at all. I was starting, belatedly, to panic, and actually wrote to Yukon Community College to ask why I wasnt shortlisted for the parttime writing job theyd advertised. I got a very careful email informing me that those jobs were for members of the Yukon community, and that since I was not a member of the Yukon

community, I wasnt eligible. Lying in the bunk that night telling Katherine about it, I yowled, How am I supposed to become a member of the Yukon community if I cant get a job in the fucking Yukon? But though that sort of tautological refusal is easy to mock, there was something frightening about it, something horribly Zen, teasing, a closed loop: You cant be one of us because youre not one of us. I kept applying, as the days got shorter and the nights got colder, just to be doing something. I branched out, applied for call-center jobs, fast food jobs, anything. Nothing. Now the terror was already beginning to bubble in our guts. No one wanted us at all. That was clear. Our money was gone. We were chained to the boat and to the dog. As autumn came on, the other discomforts of shipboard life no working toilet (we never got that composting thing going, and just used a bucket), no light started to seem minor compared to the cold. The only heating was the propane range, which meant buying 25-pound tanks of propane, driving them to the docks, humping them to the dinghy and rowing them out to the boat. A 25-pound tank lasted two nights, though as the nights got longer and colder it was more like one night. Then the plot turned ridiculous: in the middle of the night, on a quiet residential street near the docks, somebody torched our car, our beloved Hyundai that had never failed to start. One morning we walked up the hill to where wed parked it and found a smoldering hole. The trees were singed, the ground was blackened; it looked like somebody had hit the car with a Hellfire missile. But even a missile would have left wreckage. Here there was nothing, just a burnt license plate and a scrap of melted tire. And that was that. We were carless in the vast North American suburbs, where everything is miles away on narrow semi-country roads with no

sidewalks. Instead of driving, we walked to the store and lugged back drinking water, propane tanks, groceries and laundry on our backs. We were pedestrians. I read somewhere that thats what Gwyneth Paltrow calls non-famous people. What they are to her, we now were to the ordinary people zooming by in their huge pickups. Without the car or a reliable bus service, Katherine had to quit her bakery job. Instead she got a part-time job caring for a woman with spina bifida. It paid less, but at least the house was within walking distance. Then came winter, and real poverty. Days are long when youre sitting on a boat in the middle of a bay. I watched the seasons change, as the poets say, but there was nothing pretty about it. Id already spent too long staring down into the algae blooms and jellyfish swarms of summer. Now it was my turn to see the storms and die-offs of late autumn and early winter. I was in the middle of Nature, and it was nothing but cold and fear. One day an otter came and lay on the bench at the stern, grooming itself, waiting out yet another storm. In the old Disney days Id have been ecstatic to be within a couple of yards of an otter, but it didnt seem so great now. The otter didnt look like a jolly, playful mammal up close either. It had a flattened head, an unhappy expression, and didnt seem any more excited about its life than some loser who works at a car wash. After a few hours it left without saying anything. It seemed wed been on that boat for about a decade, but it had actually only been five months. That was enough to make some changes, though. The one good change was physical: wed both gotten very lean, very mean. I didnt realize the extent of this change until the day, just before our car was torched, when I got into a stupid parking dispute in downtown Victoria with a tourist whose car had Oklahoma plates. He screamed at me in his twang,
7

and, to my and Katherines surprise, I screamed back convincingly; rather frighteningly convincingly. And when we both got out of our cars for the inevitable bullshit confrontation, he actually backed away and said, You better watch it or theyre gonna revoke your parole! before getting into his car and leaving. I didnt know whether to be insulted or flattered at being taken for an ex-con, but settled for being flattered. After all, it was the only compensation wed gotten for all the nightmares. Then I met Jimmy Wall and realized we were never going to be hardcore, and didnt want to be. Jimmy introduced himself to us at the dock. He was a thick, hard looking guy who seemed very eager to make friends. He told us his life story within seconds: hed just gotten out of Collins Bay, a mediumsecurity prison in Ontario, after doing 17 years for murder. He told us the murder story quickly, reciting it by rote: These goofballs tried to extort my business and I shot one of them in the leg and his stupid buddy drove him around till he exsanguinated. The word exsanguinated echoed like a trumpet in that story; it didnt fit in at all, and you had the feeling it had played a large role in Jimmys trial. He didnt exactly seem proud of his background, but he traded on it as he could. We understood that attitude much better than we would have, preboat. It was like the real, lifelong version of using our misery to grab the parking spot from that Okie. We werent prejudiced; after all, he was a murderer, not a mere thief. So we invited him aboard to share the flounder Id caught part of a hopeless attempt to live off the land, or rather the water, and save money. As we discovered, the flounders of Brentwood Bay consisted of thick skin tougher than a sharks, inside which is a little fish filet, thinner and even more tasteless than the one you get at Mickey Ds. But Jimmy grimaced and swallowed his bit courteously, and
8

gravely gave us the chocolate-covered coffee beans which formed, with methadone, marijuana and morphine, his diet. Im dying, he explained. I dont like to talk about it. Bowel cancer. He had a boy on his boat. The boy was never introduced when we met, a pale, skinny, scared-looking kid. We never knew if he was Jimmys punk in the prison sense; it didnt seem like a good idea to ask Jimmy that, especially because, as we got to know him better, he opened up a little on his real criminal background. This was our only friend, the only one who ever helped us as winter closed in. December 10, 2007 was the day of the big blizzard, the day we ended up being turned away from the Salvation Army shelter in town. Weather-sensitive as we were, we felt the blizzard coming and used our last cash to book the dog into the cheapest dog-care place around. We walked her there, fifteen miles each way, and came back to the boat to huddle together in a single sleeping bag, waiting for the big snow to arrive. The blizzard came right on schedule, and the wind made it colder than youd think the 21st century could be, Dark-Ages cold. Cold and scared was all we were. The next morning we ran out of propane and food. Although the blizzard was still blowing, we rowed to shore and into the little village of Brentwood Bay, scared enough to beg. Neither of us had ever begged, or ever even dreamed wed have to someday. Id spent half my life in Berkeley; Id had enough beggars for several lifetimes. And, like the T-shirt says, Now I Are One. First we tried the thrift store run by some local charity, forcing ourselves inside. God, it was so warm in that store! I made myself go up to the old lady in charge and say as quietly as I could, in one breathless, shamed blurt: Um, we dont have a place to stay for the night is there a shelter or something here around here? Naturally she was deaf, so I had to

repeat it, to the general fascination of her smug, well-heeled customers. When she finally got it, she led us to the phone, where I repeated the blurt to her equally stupid superior, who spent minutes dithering out what amounted to No. We figured our chances might be better in Victoria after all. Bigger place, more bums like us. So we counted our change, and were momentarily happy to find we had enough for bus fare. All bus stops are cold, but this one was unearthly, like waiting for a bus on Pluto. Katherines cheeks were gray-blue, her hands were just gray. I wanted to kill every smug driver in the cars that went by, spraying slush at us. I brought Katherine here, to this, and I dont even have the guts to commit a crime for her. A little blonde woman popped out of a door by the bus stop, almost ran into Katherine, and said, Oh, you look cold! What you need is some gloves! You could get some over there, pointing at the thrift store wed just come from. Katherine said, with admirable detachment, Yes, but were poor. Whoo-eee, you shouldve seen that womans bland smile crimp up into a snarl. And off she skittered on her expensive little shoes, afraid poverty might be contagious and outraged that wed used that obscenity, poor. That was good for a laugh, for a few seconds, but then we were just cold again. An hour it was a full cold hour before the bus came. The driver said hed been stuck in the snow. OK, fair enough, but what I couldnt forgive was that he didnt turn on the heat. I whined to Katherine like a sulky child, Why doesnt he turn up the heat? But after the long, cold bus ride to Victoria, we were quickly turned away from a shelter for being a mixed couple. The guy manning the booth barely looked up from his book to give us the bad news. Defeated, we wandered in a snowy haze past the naturo-greeno-swinoyuppo grocery store where Id bought those hazelnuts. We went in to soak

up a little heat and to gaze at the meats (you want meat in that state, as Jack London always warned me). Even now, I vividly remember one thing from that pauper-window shop: A headline over their extensive chocolate section that read, How to Be an Ethical Chocoholic. The slogan was written in clean green cursive over imported coffee-flavored chocolate bars that cost more than a weeks bus fare. The moment I read that slogan was not the first time I imagined Victoria sucked into a glowing mushroom cloud, but it

money; it was the principle. Luckily, they only struck on their lunch hour. Seriously. They struck for one hour a day, their lunch hour. They didnt want to lose their salaries, so they were on duty the rest of the time, but refusing to check out books. That was the workers struggle in our time in Victoria, and as we sank to utter destitution it began to seem more and more grotesque and infuriating. After the principled lunch strike ended, the librarians came back. They took their precious time about it, but

saying that to a Canadian library lady. If there were a merciful god, Id have been killed before uttering that line. But there isnt, so I said it and she flinched again and fobbed us off with a phone book and a cell phone, advised us to call a local charity, and added, At least its warm in here, and you can stay till we close. Under the circumstances, I guess that was nice, that was as nice as it got. The only one who helped us, actually helped, wasnt appalled that we needed help, was Jimmy Wall. When the library closed, we trudged

may have been the most intense. After being turned away from the shelter, there was nothing to do but spend our last dimes and nickels on bus fare back to Brentwood Bay. When we got off and started to walk down to the boat, I had a last desperate inspiration and thought of the Brentwood Bay library. Wed spent many afternoons there, one of us walking the dog on the lawn outside while the other went in to email and use the nice clean sink and toilet. They knew us there! Theyd help us, the nice ladies! Ah, but wed forgotten: the librarians were on strike, outraged that they only made $25/hr for their arduous work chatting and replacing books, outraged in principle because other workers for the municipality of Greater Victoria made more. It wasnt the

eventually they reopened the library doors and turned on the lights. It was time to do my begging routine again. I waited until a kind-looking American Indian woman appeared behind the counter and blurted that we had no place to stay, did they know of any, did she, was there somewhere... When her face flinched at me, I tried another tack, one Id sworn Id never sink low enough to try. I shrilled, Look, Im a writer, my names John Dolan, you can look me up; Ive got a Wikipedia entry! Somehow thats the hardest part of this whole shameful story for me to write down, even now. Ive written that line, cut it, and re-written it a dozen times because it makes me far more ashamed than anything else Ive said here. Ive got a Wikipedia entry! Ill take that to the grave, the shame of

down the dock and started rowing out to the boat. But I saw a light on in his boat and rowed there instead, calling his name as we got close. He came out from under the snow-covered tarp that draped his old sailboat and I told him we had no money and were afraid wed freeze tonight. He didnt hesitate: You go back to your boat and Ill bring the heater over! Ive got a propane heater thatll melt your socks! That was the kindest thing wed heard in a long time, the part about the heater. And he kept his word; he and his bloodless boy Benny rowed over, their dinghy crunching against the ice. When they pulled alongside, Jimmy handed up a propane tank and a heater with a dinner-plate-size, multi-jet nozzle. All that night it blazed like a sunflower of little flaming petals, while
9

Jimmy and Benny slept, respectively and respectfully, on the floor and the bunk, with Katherine and I on the floor by the bow. There was a ridiculous, touching tact about the arrangement, a dont-ask-dont-tell etiquette that, along with the blessed, wonderful heat, made us feel very close to each other. Jimmy wasnt any kind of antihero. He was kind to us, unlike anyone else in BC, but he was also a liar and a thief, a childish braggart and a beggar. The begging came into play whenever I sold an article and had a little money; Jimmy would ask for a twenty in a casual way, as if Id been holding it for him. Then, in a different context, hed brag about his skill in the art of the con, though the only cons I saw him do were sad, pitiful things like stealing scrap wood from a construction site and pretending to be retarded to get a free bus ride. In the beginning he played down the violent crimes, assuming that as a sane human being I wouldnt like hearing that he enjoyed hurting people. But I wasnt a sane person, I was a middle-class nerd, and like all middleclass nerds Im easily awed by tales of mayhem. And I was going a little insane with rejection and terror, so I was more eager than ever to hear stories with blood. So he started confiding, or
10

making up, a bloodier bio. It turned out that he hadnt just committed one justifiable homicide. It had been his business to hurt and kill people on behalf of the Angels. He grew up in the backwoods with a Scottish drunk thug Dad and a nice, tiny Indian mom, and went into the martial arts after years of training as dads punching bag. He made it on to the Canadian Olympic taekwondo team, called his little brother to give him the good news, and little brother took the car and a bottle to celebrate, killing himself. After that it was downhill for Jimmy. He became a traveling enforcer for the Angels: Id come to your town, and when I left either you werent happy or you werent breathing. Now he made money not much of it dealing pot downtown. His boy Benny had lived on the streets there. Literally. Benny bragged once about how he could sleep on pavement even on the coldest nights. Johnny sulked when he saw how impressed we acted. As soon as he was alone with me and Katherine, he hissed, Fuckin Benny, fuckin asshole, all that about sleeping on the ground any 20-year old can do that! He was jealous, and that started to scare us, because you got the very strong feeling that bad things

happened to anybody Jimmy liked. In early December, he rowed over all excited to tell me that hed gotten a phone call from his wife. I blinked a little at wife, but managed not to ask, What about Benny? He and Benny were a prison arrangement, in which Benny did as he was told and kept his mouth shut unless instructed otherwise. This long-lost wife was something else; Jimmy repeated every word shed said proudly to me. She said shes comin out here! To see me! She said, I dont know, though, Jimmy am I gonna be taking a swim? See, she knows me, knows the rep. He was proud of that line above all, about the swim. The reappearance of this wife meant getting rid of Benny. Jimmy cut him out of his life completely. For a while, Benny used to stand on the dock forlornly looking toward Jimmys boat. Jimmy only mentioned him once, on the night he borrowed and wrecked our electric outboard. By way of making small talk before taking the outboard, he repeated the phone call to his wife, then bragged about how hed seen that kid, that goof, Benny in town. Benny said something about feeling rejected Jimmy put on a petulant mumble and said with a little laugh, I just gave him a forearm to the chest, just, you know, Get the fuck outta here. Stupid punk. That was mean in a way even a dumb middle-class nerd like me couldnt find impressive. Just plain mean, to poor Benny, whod been booted from his Christian moms house at twelve and had done his best to be a good punk for Jimmy. And our stuff kept disappearing. We knew he was stealing it, but I didnt have the guts to confront him. He seemed to see us in the past tense already, and when he didnt think we were looking hed look over the boat to see if there was anything he could pawn. It occurred to me that one of these days, Katherine and I would take that big swim Jimmys wife had

predicted for herself. And the cold. Cold and poor are the same thing; being out of the running. They say cold and wet are the same sensation, and you can add poor. Cold and wet and poor. With our car burned out, it was a three-mile hike each way to the propane nozzle at the gas station, and a tank only held off the cold for one of the long nights. The whole sky and angle of the planet had turned against us. And not just us. All the unlucky who arent allowed indoors, the unhuman majority. I found that out in midDecember, the day of the big wind. I rowed Katherine to the dock in the morning, when the wind was just hitting its stride. It was already choppy enough to capsize that ridiculous plastic dinghy. We dropped her off, the giant depressed dog and I, then rowed back to the boat to spend another day doing nothing. The wind got bigger and meaner every hour. It wasnt neutral or impersonal; it was mean. I became an animist and a Manichean around the time the wind hit 70 mph. There was nothing to do but lie on the bunk and stare up at the sky. The crows and gulls were screaming as they banked and ducked the wind. It was terror. They were terrified. I was one with Nature, and it was nothing but terror. Next morning, when I rowed Katherine to the dock, we saw hundreds of beautiful sea birds were floating near the docks, their dark wings still outspread, their white heads under water. Theyd just run out of heat, calories, propane. Heroes, immortals, far more beautiful than any human and just dead in the water. It was nothing but terror. I thought so then, and Im not at all sure I was wrong. Im indoors now so I dont have to know about it, feel it but that doesnt mean I was wrong. I tried to sleep away the afternoon, but surprised myself, and disgusted the dog, by waking up screaming. It was a new experience to me, waking up screaming. What surprised me most is that it wouldnt stop when I was fully

awake. I woke up screaming and kept on screaming, annoying the dog intensely, and even when I ran out of breath the scream just subsided to a babyish whine and sobbing. I had to get off the boat, go see Katherine, and I got the dog into the dinghy still screaming quietly and whispering Help, help, help. We reached the dock, I threw the dog up and climbed after her, and walked the two miles to Katherines job. The bossy hippie mom was there, a nasty combination of farm wife and new-age preacher. She looked like a van Gogh potato eater, and their house was situated like a farmhouse in a painting, at the end of a half-mile driveway. Katherine said the woman was capable of talking about angels at the least provocation, but I didnt care; I was indoors and had left all dignity somewhere far away. I begged her to let us stay in their house, indoors, for the night. She went into farmwife mode, none of her inspirational crap about rainbows and angels now, and finally said we could stay in the basement, just the night. Then she told me to get in the truck to help her clean her oyster floats. That was fine, anything was fine, even that unheated basement. At least it stayed still. She came down the next morning to remind us, Time to go. The dog growled at her that dog was not an

asset in delicate social situations and we were packed and marching with hardly any delay. By the time wed walked the two miles back to Brentwood Bay, we agreed that it was time for me to call my brother in Seattle and ask for help. He sent us enough money for the ferry to Seattle, where we spent the rest of the winter huddled in blankets by the wonderful gas stove in their guest room. The two fires Jimmys propane sunflower and my brothers gas fireplace those are the good gods in this story. Little gods, admittedly. We didnt even want food, just heat. Food is the caloric middleman; we wanted to cut out the middleman and hug the stove directly. At first we couldnt talk, and later, when wed thawed a little, we tried to tell people online what had happened. But we found that our story was implausible. We were informed that Victoria was a wonderful place, and that what had happened to us certainly had not happened. Or if it had, our online interlocutors suggested with varying degrees of courtesy, it was our own fault. Which it was. But theres plenty left over. And I still think very bad thoughts when I remember the blank indoor faces of those ethical chocaholics.

11