That summer we moved to Canada for the same reason Tony moved anywhere — we had an in. I had happened on a tweet from a man I barely knew, advertising with blatant desperation a potential sublet of his East Vancouver home. The man ran a small record label that trafficked in the lo-fi house sounds popular at the time; later on, after our two-month lease had stretched out into four, I would learn that he’d got word of his impending cancellation and gotten the hell out of Dodge. The studio was neatly cluttered with cassette tapes by the hundreds, interesting little vials of homeopathic tinctures, a dozen tropical plants we did our best to keep alive. The neighborhood itself was not quite beautiful, but quiet. Nearby was a Dollarama, a place for beer and smokes, and a grocery store whose cheap, generic products in their garish yellow packaging had a certain Communist appeal.
He was dropping off the cat at his cousin’s in Seattle, riding the bus from there. I’d arrived the day before, and from the severity with which Border Patrol had grilled me, I was sick with worry that he’d never make it through. I waited at the station in the early August heat, watching the bus empty until the last rider disembarked, keyboard jutting from his backpack, scowling at the sun. I was happier to see him than he was at seeing me, and though I’d bought a 12-pack whose name (Kokanee) I thought would make him laugh, within five minutes of unpacking he was asleep, or pretending to be. Watching the sunset from the balcony in silence, I welcomed in the loneliness that made itself at home.
I’d never lived with anyone who had PTSD. He had mentioned it in glances, but that was as far as it went. I’d even thought it sexy, the reclusive tendencies he’d spoken of before we met. Perhaps the novelty of life back in New York had made him social — the long nights out with musicians or writer friends, at some point in which his mood would usually plummet without warning; then I’d follow him home crying, at a loss for what I’d done. (Yes, all very “Shades of Cool.”) But here in Canada, he barely left the room. It was hard to accept “fear” as the reason I was left to fetch our food, our loose tobacco (cigarettes were too expensive), eighths from the dealer I’d found with a tweet: “Who in Vancouver sells tree?” I couldn’t understand it. I took it personally.
What did I do those five months in Vancouver? Mostly, I walked — all through East Van, past the hippie shops with their health food and hula hoops and up along the harbor, where cargo ships as long as trains made for primo iPhone photography, draped in ribbons of fog and framed Joy of Painting-style by Douglas firs. Or west along the street where the unlucky met to suffer, past the Chinese garden, sidewalk markets dank with ginseng and writhing fish on trays. The canceled man returned from exile so I found another sublet, a smaller studio in a fancy part of town which offered, as far as furniture, a two-inch mattress, massage table and large exercise ball. The owner was off to India for a mindfulness retreat, though not before inviting me to a “cuddle party” that evening. “It’s really all about consent,” she panted in a baby voice. I took the keys and hit the bricks before the tea had cooled. The neighborhood was gorgeous, bordered by rocky beaches that were dead this time of year; across the bay, the downtown skyline and the North Shore mountains behind it. It was December and I’d never been so lonesome, stalking the beach at sundown to Burial’s Rival Dealer or the gloomy Swedish rapper who I’d just discovered, Bladee.
Meanwhile Tony made an album he was sure no one would like; for one, it had some hope. (He’d registered the way the press had fetishized his story: “Toothless Former Junkie Makes Sad Music on Skid Row.”) In the year since his first record he’d already lived his dreams, an unknown 35-year old who’d never left the country, now touring London, Shanghai, Tokyo, Montreal. I hear something beyond hope when I listen to it now, maybe an understanding of what achievement doesn’t fix. I hear it most of all in the song he wrote for me: it’s there in the lack of climax, the sorrow at the margins. Burning through spliffs, he’d agonize over the details, and when asked for my opinion I would tell it to him straight, with a brutal honesty that no man really wants to hear.
Does it seem as if we lived those months in abject misery? I suppose maybe we did. Then why did we laugh all day? He understood my humor in a way no one has since (and later on, meeting my sisters, instantly got our inside jokes). It was bliss to listen to his running commentary on the latest Drake record or episode of The Bachelorette, one of my many brain-dead programs he would come around to love: “So is there like a rack of heathered henleys for these assholes to choose from, or does each guy bring his own?” Even better was to hear him tell the stories of his childhood — not the terribly sad ones everyone already knew, but of the poems his mom had read him or his grandparents’ backyard on the bay in Bellingham, WA. “It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen,” he’d told a magazine the year before, “and I always wondered if I would find a way back, if my family would still be there, if there was some way to get back to that place that seemed so out of reach.” On a gray day in early fall, we rode the ferry to Vancouver Island. Just across the bay was the last place he’d felt at home nearly 30 years before.
PART TWO OF ?????
PART ONE BELOW.