Keeping Things Whole (8 page)

With Mom away for my
last year of high school and my regularly being handyman over at Gran's riverside house, I stared daily at America and the narrow Detroit River. A castle market with a river for a moat. How could I move beyond slinging street joints? Mom hadn't been in Chicago more than a month when Gran broke her ankle. Suddenly I was there at least twice a day to carry her up and down the oak stairs. Looking out her windows, trying to picture ol' Bill's tunnel beneath the street and the park at river's edge—how to find a bigger dealer? The drug industry is feudal: prices drop and quantities rise as you climb the fiefdom, but you can only climb if the guy above you introduces you to the guy above him. In a secretive industry with prices inflated by the scarcity of illegality, who's going to do that?

I was about to graduate high school, but I couldn't graduate beyond slinging loose joints, a kid's game. Pot dealers aren't listed in the Yellow Pages. As for any Green Pages, you crazy? We don't write anything down and we've got better things to do with paper. Generally, it's a who-knows-who industry. And the business dialogue always starts in person, not over the phone. Plenty of meetings in large parking lots or abandoned buildings, cellphone batteries left behind.
Click here
for a
Time
article about the ECHELON project, the multinational surveillance effort that snaps to attention if your emails or phone calls include
jihad, Allah, bomb, infidel,
or
weed
. (What about
truth, beauty, wisdom
?)
Look
, I couldn't make this up: the software that runs ECHELON is called SIRE.

Version 6.0 of the treb was assembled and reassembled from PVC pieces that fit into the trunk of Gran's car. At 3 a.m. on Remembrance Day I shot a kilo of birdseed onto Detroit's Belle Isle (as Cuban a name as Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac's “Earthly Paradise”). Belle Isle wasn't very close to Chicago and who knew how close to phantom Trevor, but still. My payload hit an empty field in America. Unlike later versions that could be strapped into the back of my truck, Treb No. 6 had to be braced against the ground with giant U-spikes. Inserting and removing those took time. I knocked them in quietly before the shot then pried them out in a frenzy after touchdown. When I drove over to Gran's for the morning shift, squawking seagulls mobbed that end of Belle Isle for my feed. Go, my bright cheerleaders. For three days my stomach was a parade ground of squirting fear.

Officially I was leaving one school and preparing to study engineering at another, all the while staying close to the border. For years I'd concentrated on the treb's engineering: material strength, shot reliability, set-up and take-down speeds. Then in actual business I atrophied for want of better human resources. No contacts meant no product. No product, no market. Only female plants get smoked, and as our man sings, “No woman, no cry.” Battle cry. Call to prayer. Open for business.

By now I have met every manner of smoker: career moms, physicians, software developers (why not? they can't spell
or
add), teachers before they have their babies, and calorie-counting women and athletes. But at eighteen, I knew only casual smokers and the local basement bong freak.

“An
tone
,” Simon greeted me as I stopped by his basement apartment one Saturday afternoon. He sleepily scratched at his sideburns, muttering, “In brother, come in.”

Stepping inside Simon's I tried not to look at the wall-sized Bob Marley flag and assured myself (inaccurately) that the song he was cuing up on the stereo couldn't possibly be Ben Harper's anthemic “Burn One Down.” He poured himself onto a couch blackened and hardened with grime. Several grams of weed were no doubt sprinkled across its dark cushions. The bud he began grinding up was as red and hairy as a Celtic swordsman. I hoped that the karma in which he no doubt believed meant Bob Marley's grandkids would grow up wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Simon's face. The slit-eyed grin and halved IQ he turned to me had never made a straight career look more appealing. Bring on the banking. Hello, London insurance industry.

“Sy, think we could talk a little business before we blaze? I know a ways-and-means guy looking to move something across the river. Ask your guy if he's interested in unloading.”

He nodded but went ahead lighting up.

“I'm told there's a sack in it for you, things work out. A big sack.”

Herculean lungs expanded before me. Industrial bellows drew blue smoke.

“It's all music,” Simon eventually replied.

Wonderful.

I proved to be a much better engineer than I was a fisherman. I had to make similar visits to Dave, Luke, even art-school Slyvie.

“Tell me again why I'm doing this,” I implored Slyvie as she moved a green dreadlock aside to stare through a tripod-mounted video camera. I was standing on a milk crate holding up a sheet of Mylar in one hand and a square metre of chicken wire in the other.

“The usual,” she replied. “Fight the power. Free the subconscious. Antagonize my prof. Okay, action!”

I swept the chicken wire toward the Mylar.

“Cut,” she called. “Can't you get it to curl a little, like a wave? Be the wire, Antony. Be the wire.”

Middlemen. Brokers. Agents. As the months until Mom returned from Chicago slipped through my treb-ready hands, I grew to see all of those glib little commercial parasites standing in the middle of every industry, skimming their cut. Consultants. The strip club managers who make money without having to spread their legs (or other even more intimate parts). Some musicians sign contracts to always pay the guy who introduced them to the guy who makes records. I couldn't get myself a product, so delivery didn't much matter. All I had were pointless costs, wasted time, entrepreneurial fantasies.

This is one of the last industries where “business school” remains an oxymoron. Genuine business is a mirror: it shows you what you're made of. You make money by character, ability, and chance. No digital slide show, group work assignment, buzzword, or accounting software
du jour
can change your stripes. There's no business school for drugs and, irony of ironies, America's War on Drugs is a war on capitalism at its most pure. What other product continues to sell with zero, and I mean
zero
, marketing? Some fraction of every sticker price you've ever seen in a store recovers money spent trying to convince you to buy. In most provinces, ours included, the state pays to market alcohol, printing posters and magazines for their liquor stores then cutting cheques for the hospital down the street. The Grateful Dead couldn't own stocks in the Love Potion No. 1 or Blueberry Tea seed strains. Half of the Canadian narcotics economy is in weed. Seven billion a year and
nothing
, not a dollar, has ever been spent on marketing.

With the treb, a key of birdseed, and a car I didn't own, I'd gotten around the actual border, but I was stuck at the borders in the local pot-clouded heads. No one was willing to introduce me to the guy who knew the guy who knew the guy who grew. All right, sure, there were risks, layers of extra heat (two police forces, two coast guards, two border patrols—all that competing gun dick), but this was pre-9/11. We could all see that America did not spend federal dollars on Detroit. Every low-level dealer who refused to take me upstairs was insulting local history. We'd all heard stories of great-grandparents skating across the frozen river to sell booze. At parties, we'd smoked weed someone swore had been smuggled over on a windsurfer or a kayak. Where was their civic pride?

I even tried following the tomatoes. Thirty minutes outside of Windsor is Leamington, tomato capital of Canada or maybe the world. Ketchup in Kansas or Idaho or Manitoba starts in fields just down my road. But the road suddenly lengthens if you actually want to cut up and eat a local tomato. Come Labour Day, if I walked into a big grocery store to buy “local” tomatoes, I was buying tomatoes that had been trucked from Leamington four hundred kilometres to Toronto, sold to a distributor who then sold them to grocery store chains, including my local stores, before trucking some of them four hundred kilometres back to Windsor.
Eat local
indeed.

So off to Toronto I went, cash in one pocket, three phone numbers in the other. I had to party with an old friend for a day and a half before he'd hear why I was really there. All I wanted was a meeting, a meeting to see someone who sells a product and therefore likes customers, but oh the grief.
I don't know. He's really touchy about new people
. All I'm asking is for you to ask. I drove home empty-handed and almost maudlin enough to sing that ever-available Canadian chorus: Toronto only helps Toronto.

In the end, by chance and then heavy payments, tae kwon do proved more helpful than anything else. I'm currently embarrassed to say that at eighteen I wouldn't really have noticed a thirty-two-year-old woman anywhere outside of a taek class, black belt or no.

One of the big sexual delights in life, surely in the top three, is surprise. Most of us meet the standard fare early on, and those pleasures'll last as long as the libido does. Much later, you find your hidden desires. Or are shown them. Claire d'Entremont was a thirty-two-year-old whose ass caught the eye I should have kept focused on the coil of her elbows and her lightning back foot. If you're thinking about anything other than the moving bodies, the taek instruction went, you weren't working hard enough. But oh for Claire's sculpted ass. I lingered on the sight of it while we sparred, lingered just long enough for her to brake a hammerfist two inches from my nose. As I registered my shock at that fist hanging off my face, she said, “But thanks.” At the end of class she asked me home to her place. Ah, thirty-two.

Claire's first lesson (or second, if you count the sparring emphasis on paying attention): girls get fucked; women fuck. Once after class, then again, then a long naked Saturday. Eventually, Claire would use words like
work, meetings,
and
clients
. She took a lot of brief cellphone calls but never punched a regular clock. When I asked her what she did, she replied, “A couple of fitness classes here, some promoting there. I get by.” As the sweaty weeks grew, I never saw her carry a briefcase, never heard her say
office
. And she always had a sack of the most pelvis-dissolving green. Once when she reached for her pungent little bag, I asked, “How can I get you to introduce me to your supplier?”

She shook her head before we lit up. “We fuck or we do business. Not both.”

Then pass me my gitch and your Rolodex.

Claire proved to be the smartest dealer I have ever met. Aside from sex, I learned three other crucial lessons. One, don't dress like a criminal or a pothead. Her clients were lawyers and office workers, and she dressed exactly like them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, dress codes are relaxing all the time, millionaires in jeans, but you know what I mean. Shave. No
Smoke the rich
T-shirts. Easy on the piercings and tats. Claire also unpacked the rhetoric of greed for me. You want to improve your standing with a dealer? Be on her call list when times get lean? Then don't expect her to light you up for free during the deal. For whatever reason—the cannabis camaraderie, the illegality, contact high—some people want, need, or expect to smoke while buying. Maybe potheads are looking for parity with the provincial liquor stores and their army of slim fake blondes dispensing free samples. Point is, many buyers like to smoke during the deal and those that think they should be getting a freebie won't be on speed-dial when times are tight. And my last lesson from Claire—genuine learning requires humility.

Who knows what you really want the first few times you drop your clothes. Two weeks, three, four, the phone a silly piece of plastic in my hand, I finally admitted that what I wanted in Claire was a master, no other word. You know that martial arts myth about the bridge? Two warriors step onto opposite ends of a narrow bridge. The weaker will step aside to let the stronger pass. I did my bit with Claire, dedication here, some young muscle there, but she had me outclassed, outskilled, and outgunned. We both knew that she was giving me skills for life, would be with me in every new woman I met.

And I suppose there was always this. A few months after Mom's thesis production of
Medea
, I was invited to a June barbecue at one of her friend's places. I strolled into the backyard with Claire all swishy and fit beside me. “Mom, I'd like you to meet Claire.” A summer dress on each of them.

At the end of August, just before I was to start university, just before, as Claire knew, I'd be meeting ten new girls my age every day, she made me a proposition. “This isn't about weed. It's about money. No introduction is free in this business. The two of us will meet someone in a parking lot. Normally I buy half a key. Thanks to you, I'll be driving away with a full one. I leave, you can stay behind for your chat. You cross that threshold, though, you no longer cross mine.”

Deal.

Family—we rarely say what
we
know. Every family speaks a little Cuban, some a lot. Kate had dared to ask and half-invited me to tell her if I sold weed, but then she also brought us closer again two days later. She left me another card on the breakfast table. The front was Van Gogh's
Wheat Field under Threatening Skies with Crows
. Inside she'd written:

“What is beauty but the beginning of terror?”
—Rilke
I think we're beautiful.

Within days we found ourselves in one of those unplanned, ridiculously hypothetical yet somehow inevitable discussions couples have, debating the merits of Rilke as the name for a child. I know, I know—I should have noticed the writing on the (vaginal) wall.
Wheat Field
was the last painting Van Gogh did before he shot himself.

She was my gravity. If you do anything beyond breathe in physics class you learn that gravity isn't necessarily a force that pulls things down. Gravity pulls mass together. The Earth just happens to be very massive and beneath us. In a vacuum, mass doesn't fall; it gathers. That's gravity's big deal: things want to fly together, join, coalesce. Love is gravity. Helpless. Endless.

That fall, Kate and I were crazy about each other. Our clothes dropped as steadily as the leaves in Ojibway Park. Evenings in the D. A weekend walking Chicago's dozen little bridges. And daily life. The supper chat. Nights reading at opposite ends of the couch. As a student, she had a roommate. As a self-made criminal, I didn't. She started November co-opting half of one of my dresser drawers and finished it with the whole thing, camisoles abutting panties, T-shirts squat in a corner, bras collapsing and expanding as sullenly as caged ravens. One night in early December when she stood in front of my hallway closest, she was both accurate and a little scheming when she said, “I never see you wear most of these jackets.” By Saturday my off-season jackets were stored in a bin beneath the bed and a small army of her shirts had colonized three-quarters of the closet. I was possibly too generous (or, more honestly, ostentatious) when I had a birch dresser custom-made for her for Christmas. I let her run her hands back and forth over the curved drawer faces—Go ahead, stroke the Dutch hooker—before I slid out one drawer to show her its old-fashioned dovetail joinery. “No glue. No nails. No screws. The drawer holds itself together, wood biting wood.” I ran my finger down the flared, hugging dovetails, enumerating “You, me. Me, you.” Finally I slid the drawer shut and got her into my arms. “Live with me. Live with me, you gorgeous slut.”

She wanted to hear this and she didn't. By then she almost never slept at her apartment, would complain about paying bills for her “off-site closet.” And yet my jokes about our living arrangements didn't always get laughs. “Why do
I
need a better iron? Why don't you just move yours in?” Because, as her gift iron implied, Kate was an escape-route kind of woman. (Can you get a genuine education and not be?)

Yes, I was showy with the handmade dresser. While I gave her a big, flagrant thing, the jewel in the crown of my/our bedroom, she gave me a thin, stained, and tremendously ugly used book that nearly took my knees out from under me. When she handed me the present wrapped in a new tea towel (no disposable paper for her), it had the height and width of a book, but not much thickness or weight. Oh no, I thought as I untied the ribbon, please not some local poems or a student literary magazine, not some saddle-stapled slice of earnestness. Yes and no. The thin, thirty-year-old book had a stained cover barren of images save a small red maple leaf. Except for the title it looked as sober and boring as an old government instruction booklet.
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada
.

“It's the little book that could,” she explained. “A new press run by hippies, yet sales of this book doubled every year. It was put together entirely by volunteers, Canadians and Americans in Toronto basements, then mailed all over the US. More than 65,000 copies.”

And stapled to my heart. Of course I'd told her plenty about Trevor by then—Mom's dad-vs.-father speech, my science fair work with genetics, his goodbye note—but still her gift shook me, made me feel instantly smaller to have only concentrated on the physical with the dresser.

“He'd probably have used a copy,” she added. “Most in the exodus did.”

I held her to me, and not to hide the moistening of my eyes. “This is the best present anyone's ever given me. Live with me even more.”

“
We're
the best present anyone's ever given me,” she said. “Well, most of us.” But then she did stroke the dresser again, lingered on its beautiful curves.

Ideas don't believe in borders, and once they so much as glimpse a bridge they're keen to get across. Neither the tomato nor the noodle is indigenous to Italy. The New Testament golden rule is a verbatim retelling of Confucius. Despite the Korean flag that hung at my taek dojo or the smattering of Japanese any
karateka
learns, many martial arts are as cross-pollinated as cooking, architecture, or fashion. Sweat in enough dojos and someone will eventually tell you about
tai sabaki
, the ancient art of getting the fuck out of the way. While a few black-belt masochists train to gladly take the first (but only the first) blow, a tai sabaki practitioner steps aside at the last minute to let your first slide by his chest, avoiding your blow and ready to turn your arm into a handle (or lever). For sparring, dodging the blow needs no sales pitch. Romantically, tai sabaki is impossible. If you're always stepping aside at the sight of movement, you might have some kind of relationship, but not love. To be in love is to be a target.