Cockeyed (6 page)

My parents, always supportive, didn't really need my excuse to help me do whatever I saw fit. I'd completed enough college courses to obliterate my high school grades, a chronicle of my early loafing, and was ready to transfer to a local university. Before those first classes began, I moved out, with a truckload of donated rattan furniture and a mound of aging appliances and kitchenware, all of which my folks had scrounged from coworkers and friends. Dad strapped the
works down on a one-ton flat deck and used my pillows to keep the ropes from cutting into the edges of IKEA book-cases and my mother's ancient brown easy chair, my favourite, the velour one. Finally we backed out of the drive-way, and I left home. My moving truck looked like an inheritance from the Beverly Hillbillies. I have yet to meet someone whose first kitchen had two cake decorating sets, as mine did. Such are my parents and their unbridled generosity.

My new roommate, Jane, was a deaf student also attending Simon Fraser University. Yes, deaf. This, our poetry courses would teach us, was poetic. She was slender and sweet, spoke with a slight lisp, and wore hearing aids, unless she didn't want to hear anything or anybody, which was most of the time. Jane's most notable feature, however, was her hair. She cared for a long mane of the bushiest, curliest tendrils I've ever seen, hair so big and poofed that Jane could only paint it down with tubs of salon goo. Nothing really worked, though. In short, she was a terrific character who misread my lips daily. Jane also happened to be the daughter of some church buddies my grandparents favoured. She was looking for a roommate at the same time as me. We'd never met before. We weren't friends, not yet, but we shared a need to transplant ourselves out of our homes and closer to school. Everything seemed to be mutually beneficial. Even perfect.

We were the true Odd Couple, and it helped. Being in the company of the other's disability was a comfort of sorts. Our denial, or struggle, or whatever attitude we took to our fucked-up bodies on any given day, gave us each some private reassurance, when we didn't see an apartment full of the
other person's fear. Mostly the absurdity of our match amused us.

“Hi, you've reached the answering machine for Ryan and Jane. We're probably home right now, but Jane didn't hear the phone again, and I can't find it. Please leave a message. Or just come over and help.”

Our bodies weren't as poorly designed as our new apartment. The ugly digs Jane and I chose were irredeemably close to our new school. You may be familiar with Simon Fraser University. It's the depressing concrete monolith that often doubles for the Pentagon in movies and
The X-Files
. The university's architecture is that oppressive, and because it sits on top of a mountain, in the clouds that rain on Vancouver, the architecture is forever wet. We lived as close as we could.

It seemed wise at the time, in the practical and dull sense of wise. The goal was to minimize bus trips after evening classes and to diminish my potential for getting lost among the darkened shrubberies of low-cost apartment blocks. Proximity validated my excuse for moving out, not that I really needed one. I didn't believe a word of my rationale, really. Like any respectable nineteen-year-old, I just didn't want to listen to my parents' music anymore. Where I lived didn't matter to me at all, as long as I had the keys to let the people and parties come and go. What I hadn't considered, though, was the holy trinity of fun: location, location, location.

Not to exaggerate, but the neighbourhood and apartment we chose sucked, and sucked beyond any definition of sucked I'd known. My life was deeply suburban all over
again, deeply boring, deeply in service of long television nights and delivered pizzas. That I had chosen this place made it all the worse, as if I'd doomed myself to some version of Langley forever. I was becoming the Sisyphus of the culde-sacs. Today I think of that time near SFU as the year of brown carpets, soupy smelling hallways, rented movies, and a suppressed fear of going out in the dark. Nothing chained me to my second-hand sofa, but I'd imprisoned myself in order to avoid a life that would reveal my blindness to me in all its force and difficulty. As long as I stayed home, I was okay, and okay meant living in a state of self-loathing with
M*A*S*H
reruns lighting the room. But I still didn't think of myself as a blind guy. Not at all, not yet.

I found it hard to understand or even believe I was night blind. Bullshit, I thought, I can't be night blind yet. I can still stand on my deck at midnight, count the streetlights, and see the tip of my burning cigarette. Even a star or two was visible if I bothered to look up and indulge my neglected awe for the cosmos. I found night blindness difficult to identify or accept because I could see light, be it candlelight, flashlight, or, soon to become my favourite, strobe light. But I failed to spot anything those lights intended to brighten, unless the lights were very intense. A lava lamp in my room, I could see that, but it floated like the sun itself, supported by nothing, suspended from nothing, just a ball of oozy luminescence surrounded by a great deal of space. Isn't that what everybody saw? Isn't that why we invented fluorescent tubes? Night blindness can be, in fact, a lot like a night sky. Visible points of light are here and there, the ones we might wish upon, and a whole lot of
vaporous mystery stretches between them. Often I tripped over the vaporous mysteries in my room as I fumbled my way to the light switch or headed for the door in search of bigger city lights and brighter city kicks. I needed to look beyond the black hole of the suburbs and find a suitable place for my pathology. And I did, kind of.

It took some courage and willpower to tackle the evening streets of downtown Vancouver, but eventually I found its nightclubs, as well as my desire for them. Four, sometimes five nights a week, as many as I could withstand, I began to brave my way into the downtown core. There I looked for the scenes and people I had always wanted to become a part of, the ones that never visited me on Beaverbrook Crescent while Jane sewed and I stared blankly out our living-room window.

You might think an appetite for something called a night-club would be a bad idea for someone called night blind. You would be right. Equally wise would be me joining a gun club. Nevertheless, to this day I owe a debt to punk rock. Its culture helped me become as blind as I was but couldn't admit to being.

My apprenticeship into the club scene had numerous dangers and disadvantages, although most were silly. In my time I have argued with empty bar stools, talked to pillars, knocked down waitresses, bounced off bouncers, pissed between urinals, drunk other people's beers, and hit on shadows. Even though I routinely tumbled down stairs and plummeted off stages, never, not once, did it convince me to perhaps take up a white cane. Bullshit, I thought. I'm not that night blind. I'm just drunk.

When the coloured strobes and spotlights did their job, pulsing and spinning with the music, then I was more or less able to see enough. Stepping off the dance floor into the murky bar, that was a bit of a problem. Slow songs, too. They always dropped the lights down for slow songs, which left me paralysed wherever I happened to be. For a moment, anyway. Then like a jerky Sex Pistol I'd careen off the dance floor, knocking people over instead of politely scooting around them. I was a poser, not nearly close to hardcore, but blindness lent an authenticity to my recklessness. I ignored every social propriety our eyes manage.

That was the best thing about the scene. The culture camouflaged my inability to cooperate with other bodies. In growing blindness I became, oddly enough, safer and more like the postpunk scenesters around me than I was like my peers at school. Booze helped. Everybody was bent, legless, gassed, rat-arsed, and every other word for blind drunk. Bumping into people was acceptable, even expected, and I was practised at bashing into folks on a regular basis, whether I was in my cups or just spilling them. Confusion and disorientation ruled the clubs, too, and that pretty much described my sober state. Above all, though, I blended with ease and advantage on the dance floor. I loved to slam. What blind person doesn't?

When the opening bars of a thrashy song burst from the sound system, I felt in my muscles my own rhythm of relief. Here I could be a blind man and feel it, or test it, for a while. Somebody's elbow would clock me in the face, and we were off. Up and down we jumped and flung ourselves aimlessly in
any direction, a random application of weight, speed, shoulders, fists, heads, and boots, all hoping to meet another body, sandwich a few, or sometimes miss altogether and drop ourselves. A ragged enthusiasm. Family fun. But in all that I was relaxed and abandoned, a pro at the art of whacking and rebounding, while some could never give themselves completely over. Many tried too hard to control themselves, tried to brace and aim, as if they could do that. Dumb. In the middle of a slam, or a mosh pit, or whatever it's called now, abandon is the key to survival and pleasure. You can't predict what's coming. You can't aim at a moving crowd. You should shut your eyes and go. In my case, I left them open. I loved to slam. It was where my blindness worked. It was the antidote to where I lived, be it behind my failing eyes or behind my nervous, suburban door.

Then I began to lose things other than my eyesight.

It started at a gig at the Commodore Ballroom, one of Vancouver's oldest venues and one of its finest. Rubber tires supported the old wooden dance floor. A crowd could easily get a good trampoline effect going. One night somebody stepped on my heel and off my shoe popped. It was gone, kicked about like a soccer ball, boinking across the floor. I chased after it but didn't get very far. Mostly I stared down in disbelief at my sock, which I couldn't quite make out, either. My friend Peter spotted my shoe. It was briefly in the air and travelling in the general direction of the stage. Looked like trouble for the bass player. According to Peter, my shoe connected with her head. Without losing a beat, she booted my Doc Marten off stage, into the wings. I had to wait until the
show was over and the club was clearing out until a roadie agreed to go shoe hunting backstage. Twenty bucks to get it back. I was proud. The bass player for Lush had touched my shoe with her face.

I should have taken this as a sign that slamming in nightclubs was not the best of hobbies, but my evening schedule was too busy for reflection. Not one week passed before Peter and I found ourselves in a different club. This time somebody knocked the glasses off my face. They dropped to the floor like a hockey puck, and the chase was on, once again. Peter went after my specs, his body hunched over and scurrying about the floor like a man chasing a renegade pet. Somehow he snagged my glasses from the trampling herd, and somehow the frames had survived. Not even the slightest bend or lightest scratch. I put my glasses back on, and, presto, I still couldn't see very much. All was right. I was touched by the Slam Gods, clearly.

So it seemed, until I lost my pants.

I adored those pants as much as pants can be reasonably adored. They were polyester and vertically striped, black, green, and grey, and they flared at the ankles. One of my younger brothers, Mykol, who was at the club with me that night, called them my Jack Tripper trousers. He said
Three's Company
was about as retro as one could go without dressing Amish. The only trouble was my pants fit a bit too snuggly in the waist. A complex zipper system inside the belt line kept them tight, a system which I'd let out to its fullest, but still my pants remained a little more constricting than when I'd bought them. The likely cause was all the beer and burgers
I'd begun to live on, as well as the bags of leftover chocolate cream cheese muffins Jane brought home after her shifts at Muffin Inn. Like my attitude toward night blindness, I denied my growing belly and figured I'd dance my way around it.

Then, one night somebody thumped me good in the belly during a Ramones tune, forcing me to double over. The force split the zipper system from its outer limits. My size 33 pants ballooned to a size 45 or so. When I stood up straight, they dropped to my ankles. Immediately I pulled them up and jammed my hands in my pockets. That's how I remained as I shuffled my way to the can to find out what the hell was going on.

It's not the proudest moment in a young man's life when he is standing in a public washroom in his underwear and combat boots, holding his pants up to the light as if inspecting holiday slides. It didn't take me long to admit defeat. I couldn't see much with the little light available, and I obviously knew more about nineteenth-century verse than the engineering and repair of zippers. Back I climbed into my pants, and back my hands went into my pockets. I left the can in search of my brother.

I found him after a couple of revealing circuits around the club. In that short time, shuffling about with my hands in my pockets, my night blindness became more apparent to me than ever before. My fingers weren't available to touch the edges of tables, or to find the railings of staircases. Moving about like a blind amputee, the darkness in me bloomed, even deepened, and suddenly, without hands to help me, I felt how
much compensation I'd grown accustomed to. I felt it missing in my fingers like a phantom itch.

When I spotted Mykol, he was near the bar, under an ultraviolet light that illuminated his white cowboy shirt. I could barely make out the shadow of embroidered guns on his shoulders. Mykol has no shortage of fashion irony. Lucky for me, it made him easy to spy. And where would an underage kid be other than at the bar?

“I need to borrow your eyes,” I said.

“Sure. What do you need?”

“I need you to come to the bathroom with me.”

“No, thanks,” Mykol said. “Feel free to watch yourself in there.”

“No, no, it's my pants,” I explained. “My pants are broken.”

Mykol paused and sipped his drink. I heard myself and what I was saying.