Jericho (4 page)

After he’d done his work, Mr. Steenrod asked me to go style the deceased’s hair while he ran an errand. The deceased had some bad scarring, not recent, on one side of his face, and he wore his black curly hair down past his neck. These were sort of like trademarks apparently. I knew the visitation was the next day, so I turned on the buzzer for the front door (I was alone in the building by then) and quietly went to work. First I had to wash and set the hair. It was just like drying children’s hair even though I knew pulling out the tangles wasn’t going to hurt. When I was all finished it didn’t look too bad, but I wasn’t completely satisfied. So the next morning, a few hours before the visitation, I brought in
a curling iron to do some finishing touches. It probably didn’t matter as the casket was going to be closed, but I never took that attitude and besides, the family is encouraged to spend a few minutes alone with the casket open. That way, they know they’re getting their money’s worth. Anyhow, that’s what a cynical person would say.

My next autopsied body was worse than the first but it was part of history. It was a medical examiner’s case. The deceased was a small-time drug dealer in the Downtown Eastside. Apparently his heart had stopped while he was doing business. When we got the body back to our place, we unwrapped the plastic covering, positioned the hands, closed the eyes and mouth, and then applied cream to the face and hands. Mr. Steenrod then covered the deceased with a clean sheet and pinned the medical certificate to it. Hospital ID bracelets are left on the body. The embalming process on an autopsied body can take two or three hours. I told the boss I was afraid I was going to start having nightmares about this guy

“You wouldn’t be the first,” he said.

When we had the funeral in the chapel, dozens and dozens of flower arrangements arrived. The suite was filling up and they kept coming. They were all really beautiful. Every time I took one into the room where the family was, they inspected it so carefully I almost expected them to start scoring them from one to a hundred. It bothered me a little but I can’t put my value systems on them any more than I can on the deceased. In the end the funeral home looked and smelled like a flower shop.

The funny thing about the drug dealer’s funeral was this. Since everybody has pagers now, funeral homes aren’t staffed
twenty-four hours a day any more. Sometime during the night, someone broke into the funeral home and stole the visitation book, where all the guests wrote their names. Normally this would have been given to the widow or mother when we paid a final call in a few days’ time. It was kind of embarrassing not to have it. There were rumours all over Vancouver that the media stole it. But the only rumour that got into print was that some rival of the deceased might have been behind it. Personally I thought it was the police.

Shortly after that funeral, business picked up for a while, but it was bad business. Coroner’s calls, all of them. So many packages in the morgue that even some of the top drawers, the row that’s called the penthouse suite, were filled. Not all of these people were killed in public, like Boots had been when he was leaving a nightclub; it took a while for them to be found. All you need is a matter of several days, you know, before you have what we call a hummer. The smell is awful, a gassy odour that it takes ages to get out of your system. You have to have everything you’re wearing dry cleaned, even your underwear, and you find yourself washing your hair two, three times a day.

I was determined that if I was to be in the funeral business I should at least know how to do everything a full-fledged male funeral director does, all the tasks, not just the ones I wanted. So I just pushed ahead.

In one case, the coroner told us to bring extra gloves and a pouch. The vehicles are routinely stocked with these items. I knew we were in for a rough time when Mr. Steenrod and I saw the size of the crowd outside an old house and the squad cars and the fire truck. There were old Styrofoam coffee cups and bits of stale food on the porch, I remember
that. The policemen coming out of the house were wearing respirators. One of them had almost slipped in what we call hummer juice. The police had to burn coffee on the stove to try to get rid of the smell. Me, I usually smoke several cigarettes right in a row as soon as it’s done, even though I don’t smoke at all other times and never have.

One night that summer I was down in the prep room and I saw blonde hair peeking out from under a sheet. I got curious and I pulled the sheet back to look. There was an attractive young woman with her faced fixed in horror. I know that’s a cliché but here it’s true. Usually facial features relax at death and you can’t tell if the person was smiling or in pain or frightened or whatever. I was shocked by the look I saw on her face. Turning to Mr. Steenrod, I asked him the cause of death. “Gunshot wound,” he said. I looked and it was true; you could see where the bullet went in, right below the collarbone on the right-hand side.

Then I got my second surprise. Mr. Steenrod, who usually kept his thoughts to himself, said it looked like a posthumous referral from that fellow everyone used to call Boots. I still didn’t let on like I knew anything.

I read in the newspaper that there was a war going on among the drug dealers in the Downtown Eastside and that the Asian ones were killing the anglo ones and vice versa. One side was favoured but I don’t remember which one, it’s been so long. Steenrod’s was starting to get some of its business back. But I asked myself: at what price?

They say everybody has two homes: his real one, and Snaketown. That’s what they say, because everyone needs two places to be from, one for every day and one for company,
a place to reap and a place to sow, a halfway house and a safe house. Snaketown was zoned for healing. With so many other places to be, why be there? Well, Snaketown was where people went for excitement in those days. It was one contradiction that made them feel like they was whole. It made order out of the confusion they’d bring down on ourselves. Only archetypes lived there. (You think I don’t know that word but that shows how ignorant you are about me. I am a largely self-educated man, a student of Walt Whitman and others like that.) Look in the phone book if you don’t believe me. Only archetypes need apply.

How did Snaketown get its name? Legend says that long before the Europeans, when the cries in the night were natural cries and wolves made discreet enquiries, the snakes would come down to the riverbank and mate and sign their names in the sand with a flourish. You dig?
Snaketown
is a translation of something the Indians used to call the spot. That’s the folklore anyway. Personally, I think the district was first and the name came later. In its heyday, Snaketown was a place that really slithered. Ask anyone who was around back then. Any of the elder reptiles will confirm what I’m telling you. Try looking under the Snaketown Bridge where the people without homes go to be alone. Or ask around the lobby of the Dempster Fireproof Hotel, which once boasted eighty sleeping rooms, most with running water and no questions asked.

Snaketown was really a riverside district after the prospects disappeared down the drain. On a summer day, the whole place wavered in the heat, uncertain, cagey-like. At night the neon came on. Fall meant the start of death but it was also when the streets got most alive. I wonder what it looked like
from the air. Probably either too dark or too bright to see. All the play was inside, and people pined for anyone who could question the reason for anything. There were joints you had to climb down into from street level and others you had to take some old freight elevator up to and then knock very loud on a steel fire door. Inside there was always a party-for-pay. I see a leaf suspended in a spider’s web, the ends like fingers in rigor. Do they point or do they, like, beckon? The horizon crops the image. The border is a black line across the eyes to hide the suspect’s identity.

My grandfather Lonnie Bischoff had the gift of the gab. In him it wasn’t a curse, it was still only a gift. He went to Snaketown the first time on a fact-finding mission and came out empty-handed and broke. Hearing him tell me this is one of my earliest memories. He went down to the old Rounders’ Club, owned by the unofficial Mayor of Snaketown, who hardly anybody had ever actually seen but still always bragged about knowing. Lonnie just wanted to listen to some music. At dawn, he’s sitting on the curb out front with no cab fare, no money for breakfast and his head cupped in his hands. A beat cop comes by and spots him.

“Lad, do you want me to go in and get your money back for you?”

“No, officer. That wouldn’t be right. I lost it fair and square.”

The copper laughs and looks at him awhile and then goes on his way, checking doorknobs and maybe whistling, like in mockery. That’s how I picture the scene, though I may be thinking of stuff I’ve seen in an old movie.

Lonnie—that’s about all everybody ever called him—used to tell me there was a moral to the story. The moral was
“Don’t be a jerk.” Growing up with him was like growing up in the Aesop family.

When he was young, Lonnie married a middle-class brainpan who didn’t take to Snaketown, the loud noise of decay, the steady hum, the part of the city between the white spires and the brown soil and vegetable matter, a crawl space underneath the respectable part of town. My grandmother was basically upright and brown-sighted, strictly a novelty act. They fought all the time.

“Don’t ever let yourself be tricked into defending yourself,” he would tell me after I was old enough for him to take me down to Snaketown. “It’s all that middle-class shit, it’s a drug. It puts people in a trance. Remember that.”

I’m remembering it right now. The reason why no one but me ever talked about the history of Snaketown is that there’s no phenomenology of that old-time headspace. It’s not allowed. It’s not aloud. The past’s as lifeless as a lake.

Lonnie carried a tool box with him most everyplace he went. Carpenter’s tools, a few mechanic’s tools, lots of screws and washers in little pull-out trays. Down at the bottom at least once that I remember there was a nickel-plated forty-five. “Stupidest weapon. Picks up fingerprints if you look at it from across the room. Big boom. Not very accurate.”

Now the Mayor of Snaketown was not a morning person, but then Snaketown was not a morning place. One night His Worship calls Lonnie at home. It’s like two, three in the morning. “Lonnie?” he said. You couldn’t mistake the voice. He never had to identify himself. This went with his temperament. “Lonnie? Can you meet me down here? Bring the tool box.”

The middle-class wonder was outraged at the phone ringing at that hour. “Where’d he get our number?” The two of them got into a fight as Lonnie was finding his shoes and putting his pants on in the dark. “Don’t come back,” she said.

“I’ll take the kid with me,” he said. “He needs the exercise.” I got to carry the tool box. I needed both hands.

At the Rounders’ the sign was still on out front and the main door was unlocked and there were still a few people sitting here and there, but waiters had come out of the kitchen to sweep up and put the chairs on top of the big round tables. The Mayor, also known as S or Mr. S, was sitting way back in the corner with the drawers from the cash registers in front of him, counting. There was an old cat asleep beside the money.

“Lonnie. And the boy. Nice to see the boy again.”

We sat down.

“Listen, here’s the thing. Out at the track—” The Mayor was a partner in a racetrack across the river, a beautiful half-mile. Oh, he was quite a presence in the economy and in the community. “—I want you to build me a sweatbox for the jockeys. Know what I mean? Good. About yea by yea.” He cut the big room into small squares with his hands to give an idea of the dimensions. “For the jocks to sweat off a few pounds before the race. How long do you think that’d take?”

“When would you need it by?”

“Quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.”

So a deal was made. Mr. S gave Lonnie some money from one of the drawers and told him to let him know what the balance was when he was done. I must have been sleepy-looking. The great man pulled me over to him and said,
“Boy, I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that when you grow up, you’ll never play the ponies.”

“I promise.”

He let me go. “Remember, boy, the ponies work for your Uncle S.”

At that point, the cat that was laying there woke up and shook its paws to get its circulation working.

Going home, Lonnie asked me to identify the moral in what had just taken place. I thought about it awhile. “Never write anything down?” I said.

Lonnie frowned. “Always pay people in cash. It’s a whole lot more polite. And when you are the cashee, never count your money until you’re outside in the alley. Pay attention, now. I’m teaching you etiquette.”

The first rule of social work is not to become involved with your clients’ lives. Usually this rule is an easy one to follow. I have one client, an elderly woman with a shopping cart who spends most of her time loitering in Victory Square when the weather’s good. She calls other people “riff-raffs” and in general speaks with a verbal singularity all her own. Most of those who come to the Horizons Group are riff-raffs of one description or another. There are three of us working here, Jane, Maureen (Mo) and myself. Jane is a financial counsellor, Mo is a psychotherapist and I’m an MSW. Sometimes a client will need only one of us, or two; sometimes all three—in that case it’s usually a whole blue-collar family together.