"Twenty dollars?"
"That's what they'd charge at a boutique on Queen Street."
He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke.
His face lit up like a lightbulb.
#
It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my
childhood was particularly happy.
There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My
grandfather's place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank
out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table as big as
my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the draughty barn with hay-filled
lofts bulging with farm junk and Tarzan-ropes.
There was Grampa's friend Fyodor, and we spent every evening at his
wrecking-yard, he and Grampa talking and smoking while I scampered in the
twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasures:
crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of signs, roadmaps of far-away
places. I found a guidebook from the 1964 New York World's Fair once, and a
lipstick like a chrome bullet, and a pair of white leather ladies' gloves.
Fyodor dealt in scrap, too, and once, he had half of a carny carousel, a few
horses and part of the canopy, paint flaking and sharp torn edges protruding;
next to it, a Korean-war tank minus its turret and treads, and inside the tank
were peeling old pinup girls and a rotation schedule and a crude Kilroy. The
control-room in the middle of the carousel had a stack of paperback sci-fi
novels, Ace Doubles that had two books bound back-to-back, and when you finished
the first, you turned it over and read the other. Fyodor let me keep them, and
there was a pawn-ticket in one from Macon, Georgia, for a transistor radio.
My parents started leaving me alone when I was fourteen and I couldn't keep from
sneaking into their room and snooping. Mom's jewelry box had books of matches
from their honeymoon in Acapulco, printed with bad palm-trees. My Dad kept an
old photo in his sock drawer, of himself on muscle-beach, shirtless, flexing his
biceps.
My grandmother saved every scrap of my mother's life in her basement, in dusty
Army trunks. I entertained myself by pulling it out and taking it in: her Mouse
Ears from the big family train-trip to Disneyland in '57, and her records, and
the glittery pasteboard sign from her sweet sixteen. There were well-chewed
stuffed animals, and school exercise books in which she'd practiced variations
on her signature for page after page.
It all told a story. The penciled Kilroy in the tank made me see one of those
Canadian soldiers in Korea, unshaven and crew-cut like an extra on M*A*S*H,
sitting for bored hour after hour, staring at the pinup girls, fiddling with a
crossword, finally laying it down and sketching his Kilroy quickly, before
anyone saw.
The photo of my Dad posing sent me whirling through time to Toronto's Muscle
Beach in the east end, and hearing the tinny AM radios playing weird psychedelic
rock while teenagers lounged on their Mustangs and the girls sunbathed in
bikinis that made their tits into torpedoes.
It all made poems. The old pulp novels and the pawn ticket, when I spread them
out in front of the TV, and arranged them just so, they made up a poem that took
my breath away.
#
After the cowboy trunk episode, I didn't run into Craphound again until the
annual Rotary Club charity rummage sale at the Upper Canada Brewing Company. He
was wearing the cowboy hat, sixguns and the silver star from the cowboy trunk.
It should have looked ridiculous, but the net effect was naive and somehow
charming, like he was a little boy whose hair you wanted to muss.
I found a box of nice old melamine dishes, in various shades of green -- four
square plates, bowls, salad-plates, and a serving tray. I threw them in the
duffel-bag I'd brought and kept browsing, ignoring Craphound as he charmed a
salty old Rotarian while fondling a box of leather-bound books.
I browsed a stack of old Ministry of Labour licenses -- barber, chiropodist,
bartender, watchmaker. They all had pretty seals and were framed in stark green
institutional metal. They all had different names, but all from one family, and
I made up a little story to entertain myself, about the proud mother saving her
sons' accreditations and framing hanging them in the spare room with their
diplomas. "Oh, George Junior's just opened his own barbershop, and little
Jimmy's still fixing watches. . ."