Chapter One: December 31, 2008.
Part 1:
On the hunch that Luminous Macaw Breed might still be home and sleeping, I climbed up over the snowy railroad tracks and through the scattered rusted statuary creaking in the cold morning wind along the very last patch of Van Horne. There were a few white socked Hassidim, with impossibly balanced hats like surrealist fur tires, shuffling back and forth on the icy sidewalk, and beyond this Luminious’ high dark stairwell and beyond this her hair strewn blackly over her pillows and the late morning light rolling in long bright rectangles up the curves of her sheets.
And all the while the parrot downstairs squawked madly at whatever it is that matters in its world.
Part 2:
We went down, bundled in everything we owned, to the Warhol exhibit and walked with an hour or so to spare between the iconic paint-overs of photos of the famous that he did in the 1960s and the 1970s and it’s funny, we decided, because when you look at these paintings down they all seem not so exciting or good but then you get on the Metro and you see the influence of the work everywhere; a little rectangular purple highlight for no particular reason over the eye of someone on some poster or the same face repeated twice with a different coloured background is a sure sign that Andy Warhol has passed this way; and when you start looking for it you notice it a lot.
And the very best or worst of the rooms was the one done up like one of Warhol’s 1960s freak out parties, with the Velvet Underground crackling on the loudspeakers and Warhol’s films projected on two of the walls while other walls and the wide floor two were filled with changing slides painted up and moving back and forth between lines and splotches and a strobe light flickered and a disco ball turned scattering white swirling sparkles all across the room. And there in the centre, on a large circular sofa piled up with pillows, reclined an impossible number of people, pushed in with all their heads to the middle, like human slices of pie, each one with a huge shit-eating grin, watching the lightshow for a few moments before they jumped up again and some other eager patrons flopped down into the much-coveted spots.
What troubled me a little (and I got the sense that Lava-lamp MacShroomly shared my cynicism about this matter) was the institutionalization of the freak-out in this manner. This was nothing short of an anthropology of psychedelia and it rang as phoney for me as the “authentic native dances” I saw performed by resort employees in grass skirts and flower adorned hair at a beach side hotel in Panama and it struck me as just as inauthentic as the Jungle adventure at Disney world; where my own little African Queen adventure was periodically punctuated by the emergence from the murky waters of steam driven hippos and latex crocodiles, warded off by the fearless snapping of our pimple-faced tour guide’s merciless cap gun.
These re-enactments, I mean to say, provide the visual iconography of the moment that they ape but they do not provide the soul condition and they do not provide the geographical authenticity that might help a fellow to truly understand what it was like to be there. And no statue of James Clifford, no matter how meticulously stuffed up with straw, is ever going to be able to replace the real man; but in deference to Clifford the museum exhibit probably can provide a useful function if it is put together right. In this particular case (and this is the point I tried to make to Lava-lamp before I lost her to a long article about Allan Ginsberg’s left testicle and I myself got fixated on the sexy gyrations of Mick Jagger) the ridiculous re-fabrication of “my [parent’s] generation” and the furious manner in which the modern ipod sporting suburbanites took to the pillows and lights in such a manner as they would likely never do in their own homes somehow fittingly meshed with Warhol’s own maybe often sarcastic painting over of reality with colours so unnatural that the appearance of reality became nothing more than an appearance of unreality. Thus, the least realistic and least well rendered part of the show was actually the most Warhol-like aspect, not because it actually captured Warhol or his time at all, but because in its failure to capture that time it actually succeeded in highlighting both the phoniness of the original and of the copy; therefore rendering each as a thing both authentic and unique while at the same time making the patrons of the show look like fools. Andy Warhol has passed this way, and you notice it a lot.
Part 3:
Following this, we jettisoned some almonds from the second floor balcony onto the canopy of the cashiers below (and perhaps those almonds are still there to be witnessed by museum patrons with keen eyes) and we unwound a dove (Olivia) from the ornate Christmas tree, without the help of the Swiss, before dashing out into the cold like smug criminals.
Part 4:
We went up to Poolie’s rooftop cictern and floated for a while in the oddly hot water and Life-raft de Readily and I took turns suspending each other upon the very meniscus, gently rafting each other around, and you know it’s rather peaceful to drift like that. I don’t know what she thought of with her eyes closed and the waters lapping over her face, but I myself felt like a branch that had splashed down in a slow river and I could imagine myself making my way down lazily past the grassy tree lined banks and turning slightly as I bumped against the rocks, being trapped momentarily in an eddy and then drifting free again and below me in the translucent murk fat taciturn fish would hover over their beds of sunken silver-bellied leaves and then in and out of patches of cool gurgling sunlight tiny schools of arrow-headed minnows would dart back and forth frantically, each moment of their existence another opportunity for excitement and terror and, eventually I would flow down into the river’s mouth and into the salty expanses of the ocean, tossed by the waves and drifting and drifting until I became blanched white and a passing storm tossed me up on the beach and left me half buried in the sand.
Life-raft told me about the book she was reading, in which a man, in the process of biting into a granola bar, loses one of his teeth. How odd that we should have spoken of it.
Part 5:
Loqation de Rand-McNally, incredulous that I should trust so readily in her sense of direction, had clearly forgotten the rain spattered night when she, by a sheer force of will, refused to believe that the circle I thought we should take round and round again through the stinging underbrush of the completely black woods, with our cold clothes hanging off us and twigs snapping endlessly in our faces, was the right one and, pointing out the direction from which she could hear the distant rumbling of the ocean up into the long gurgling sea caves that burrowed beneath our feet, she turned us back in the other direction and back past the point I insisted was too far away from possibility and yet there at the end of it, suddenly blue and ghostly in the failing beam of our torch were the very flaps of the tent.
And so it was that we arrived at the chanting party (for other reasons) an hour behind and we were able to seat ourselves in a large circle in the darkness; for I could hear that the room was full of people and I could feel them pressing and bumping against me, but as of yet I had not seen a single face, and I could hear the voices of the confident and engaged singers rising up out of the crowd and below them the tones of the shyer ones and the ones who wanted to provide nothing more than belly timber to the sound and then, not long after we arrived it was all over and the lights came up and everyone blinked and grinned sheepishly and people began to file out and others began to drink and the music came up and so on.
It was around this point that Loqation elected to scale my back and stand upon my shoulders, towering magnificently with her fingers scraping the ceiling and the arches of her feet curling over caps of my arms. A terrible idea, possibly, because her dismount, a sudden leap over the top of my head, ended with her flubbing the landing and driving her face hard into the floorboards. “Oh,” she said, “peeling herself up from the ground with her hand covering her mouth, “I think I lost one of my teeth.”
Well, it was not a whole tooth, but half a tooth, and someone scooped it up and dropped it in a bag, which I dutifully slipped into my hoodie’s pouch, while Loqation, well attended by the sympathetic, was ushered to the medical sanctity of the bathroom, bleeding liberally over her dress and the floor, her fingers filling up with warm bright blood. Let’s have a look at this, yes, perhaps some stitches would be in order, the chorus decided, and so in no short time I and Loqation and Olivia piled into a friendly lift and went down to the Hotel Dieu.
“Goodbye”, said our ride, shaking our hands in the cold so pure it almost rang, “have a great new year”, and with this he sped off and we passed into the tubular glow of the emergency room.
Part 6:
Although we were nearly the first to arrive, there was no doubt that the waiting room was going to fill up; this being after all one of the prime nights of the year for unexpected mishaps and foolish attempts to pull wool down over the spindly eyes of the Moirae. And so we slid into a set of seats, just after the triage, with Lip-cut Machete pressing a blood-soaked cloth full of ice to her mouth and I stacking our various coats and bags full of undrunk booze and, of course, faithful Olivia into the chairs beside us. The time now, for those who were watching the new year’s clock, was around 11:30pm.
The next to arrive was a trio, three young clubbers, two boys and a girl. One boy stripped himself down to his wife-beater and his upper-left arm was wound up with gauze. I just need two stitches and I’ll be out of here he kept telling the nurses when they came out of their room. They told him to wait. And so he waited; with his friend the girl, who seemed to be someone he had been flirting with at the bar before the shit went down, bundled up in a parka beside him, and his friend the boy, with his hair done up like a cock’s crown, in that way that is so fashionable now, rumbling all the while about how he thought he ought to return to the hotel to get some sleep but he didn’t want to ditch his buddy. Eventually he did ditch, of course, but only with the assurance that the girl in the parka was going to stick around and make sure everything was ok.
Following this, another fellow came in, this time with one hand plunged into a silver champagne bucket. Very classy, I thought. I stared at him for a while and noted that every time he moved his hand about in the rattling ice and water of his bucket he winced and when he drew his hand up from the water, the back rag wrapped around it dripped blood back down into the water. After a while this fellow went to sit with the other fellow with the bandage on his arm. They became friends. They talked about their injuries. The first had been thrown through a glass window and had a shard of glass sticking in his arm. The other, a bartender, had been struck across the hand with a broken bottle. They both want on for some time about revenge and baseball bats and the girl in the parka went on about how they should chill out.
Hotel Dieu is the hospital for junkies, Lip-cut told me, as a few of them wandered in and out, looking very haggard and strung out. They went up to the triage and then left again and their actions seemed somehow separated from the normal bloody drama of the waiting room.
Chapter Two: January 1, 2009.
Part 7:
“Take that rag away from your face for a moment”, I told My Jo, John Anderson shortly after the countdown with the usual auld lang syne blaring out from the television. She pulled it back, the fabric sticking to her skin and opening the cut again, blood and saliva and melted ice water rolling down over her chin in great globs. She made sounds and expressions of great discomfort. The girl in the parka, suddenly catching sight of the condition of John Anderson’s mouth, cringed in horror. It truly was a spectacle to behold. Nevertheless, I leaned in and kissed John Anderson on the mouth.
“Happy new year,” I told her.
“That was pretty brave of you.” She said.
Part 8:
Next came a man, attended by a knot of friends, they wheeled him in, stuffed in a wheelchair, and he mumbled in slurred French, a great open gash in the side of his head running red down onto his jacket. He needs a plaster for his head, calisse, his friends kept saying. And after this came another man, crying in pain, with his father attending to him. I’m not sick, I’m fine he kept telling his father, I’m going to be fine.
And next came the worst of the bunch, a big lunk of a man with bandages all around his head, attended by another friend, also with a head wound, slightly less serious, and by a passerine blonde who implored the man with the head bandages to sit down, that the ambulance drivers had told him he had to keep still or he was going to go unconscious. He needs stitches, he needs to be seen right away! She kept imploring the nurses, her voice cracking with sincere desperation, they told him in the ambulance he had a serious head wound and a concussion.
The man with the bandages, though, would have none of it. He insisted on getting up continually from his chair and parading about the waiting room talking all about how those fucking Sikhs at the club had jumped him for no reason and hit him in the skull with brass knuckles and how bad it was going to be for them when he got his head fixed. Just sit down, you have to sit down, his girlfriend implored him.
These tales of bravado got the guy with the glass in his arm and the guy with the busted hand and the guy in the wheelchair going and soon all of them were best friends and were going on about the revenge they were going to exact on those who had wounded them and they exchanged gay stories of the manner in which they had been injured, exactly, with no gory detail left untold, and everybody surfed happily along the seas of machismo.
Look, said the guy with the head bandages to his friend, after a few hours had passed and his girlfriend’s desperate begging had gotten them nowhere with the nurses, how much money you got in your wallet? I got about three thousand bucks, said the other guy. Well I got about five thousand bucks and that’s eight thousand bucks, right, eight thousand bucks? Let’s take it and bribe them to hurry up.
Meanwhile, Lugubrious, fading after hours of non-action, built herself a nest out of coats and curled up between two rows of seats. You can’t sleep there, you can’t sleep on the floor, said an officious security guard, seconded after her head touched the scarf pillow.
I’m offering you eight thousand bucks if you take me right now, said the lunk with the head bandages to a nurse.
You’ll have to wait, she said.
I went to the security guard and said: “Look, I don’t want to be a pain in the ass but we’ve been here five hours, do you have any idea how long it will be?”
“The ambulances keep coming in,” he said, “so I don’t know”.
Part 9: (hours later)
This is so fucking insane, said the girlfriend of the lunk, he could die!
Hey, said the lunk, blood seeping through his bandages, those fucking Sikhs are going to be goddamn sorry. They’re already sorry. The evidence is right there.
How can there be only one doctor on duty on new year’s eve? Someone else complained. This is insane! Why don’t they call someone else in? The room went mad. Not one person had gotten in through the doors since we arrived.
Lugubrious, wound up in a pile of coats, a fresh medical icepack on her mouth, appeared to be asleep, or at least in a swoon. A nervous family of ten took up the seats across from us. Do you want this long discarded Celebrity Crap-Crap magazine? No.
Part 10:
At just before seven am they took her through the doors and laid her down on an examination table in a private room. While she dozed on the wax sheet I rifled through the cupboards and examined all the odd medical paraphernalia within, the various instruments arranged neatly on the counters, the odd sorts of lights and the boxes glues to the walls full of gloves and soaps and all sorts of other medical things.
“It’s so odd,” I said, “that you got this private room, while the guy with the nearly fatal head wound is still lying on a cot in the hall.” Indeed I could hear the lunk’s girlfriend begging him not to fall asleep, let he go into a coma and never recover. There were suffering people lined all the way up and down the halls, curled up on their cots, their eyes squinting helplessly with pain at each passing shadow in the darkened hall.
Moments later the doctor was in our room. As he began to address Luminous, it was clear that he had a deep stammer and that every word was a test for him. At first I thought perhaps the guy was retarded or insane and that someone as fucked up as him arriving in a lab coat at that exact moment was likely a sign of some kind of cosmic punch line to a very long joke; but as anyone with a stammer probably would have, especially in cases where one must gain the instant trust of the public, the doctor had compensated for his inability to speak with an sincere and concerned professionalism.
It occurred to me that this guy must have busted his balls in medical school to prove he was better than everyone else, just because, in one essential respect he would always be slightly worse. In the end, I think he must have been a great doctor.
All the same, the examination only lasted three minutes. One and a half to examine her broken tooth and split lip (now closed up and not looking so bad), one half a minute to hear the ridiculous tale of how it happened with a straight face, and another minute to try and repeat her very Scottish sounding last name before giving up and setting her free.
It had been eight hours in the hospital, but in Canada this is normal.
Part 11:
We went back up in the sharp cold of the morning, with the sun just rising behind us over Avenue du Parc and illuminating the mountain pink. And when we got to her street again, the sun was glistening down through the ice that had formed round the branches of the trees.
“Look,” I said, pointing to a friend’s house at the end of her block, “I wonder if their dance party is still on?”
“You can go if you want,” she said, “but I’m going to sleep.”
It’s funny to think about how much can change in a year. Last new year, as I told you, I was crashing around in the woods at that ashram, so angry at something I can’t even remember now that, when the hour of midnight struck, I think I was sitting in the snow paralyzed with despair. And then there was the year that I spent the midnight hour at an elephant’s watering hole in Southern India, the whole time terrified that elephants were going to arrive shortly to kill me, and then there was the time that the last thing I saw as the clock struck twelve was a Nazi skinhead drawing back his fist to punch me in the face, and every year is different and every year has its own charms and its own, and I spent the first morning of 2009 sleeping with my arms round Luminous and, as I told her before we passed out, delirious with exhaustion, even when she’s not at her greatest she is still the greatest kind of company.
