Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

The colourful little houses lined the cut at both ends of the Terminal Street Bridge. The design world took notice, with the San Francisco- based architectural magazine Dwell running a photo essay with text by Toronto’s latest public intellectual. “These intelligent spaces represent design that fully integrates the residents’ ideals and values with their needs. Like the yurt and the Quonset hut, the ‘signage-home’ or ‘Sigho’ will no doubt evolve well beyond its origins, co-opted by those with a discerning eye for the frugality and transportality of the design.” He supplied the requisite Walter Benjamin quote from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and ended with some McLuhanesque wordplay.

Engineered so beautifully they could only have been the work of a down-on-his-luck architect or an idiot savant, the small homes were like snowflakes-no two alike, and yet of a whole. The Vancouver Sun ran a contest to find the designer (first prize: a weekend at Sooke House B &B), which led to bewildered bottle ladies and Dumpster divers being ambushed by retired couples waving notebooks and bombarding them with questions about Walter Gropius and deconstructivism and offering a home-cooked meal in exchange for blueprints.

A candidate for mayor declared that she would live for a week in a hut made entirely of her own election signs down among “the people.” A newscast ran some unfortunate footage of her crawling out the opening on all fours, tight pigtails pulling her eyes into the coveted pan-Asian look, her breasts visible through her gaping neckline, sagging like sodden pantyhose.

The anchor and weatherman smiled at each other. Damn fine serve, though, they reminisced as the sportscaster joined them.

Alex dreamt about a green garbage bag on her front steps. “Happy Birthday, Toots,” Rufus says in the dream. And she is a Toots, all dolled up in short shorts, pointy cone-shaped black bra, hair pincurled, her lips thick with cherry-scented gloss. She’s selling cartons of cigarettes with pictures of missing children on them, big-eyed, black-velvet, paint-by-numbers kids. The bag evidently contains her gift. Rufus grabs her arm as if he can’t wait to show her.

Inside the garbage bag Corinna D. stretches languorously and yawns. There are no teeth in her cavernous mouth. Her eyes gleam. You do not wanna know, she says. Alex looks from Rufus to Corinna and then jabs her own thumbs right into her eyes. It doesn’t hurt a bit.

Onstage, a DJ dressed like a tennis player mixed Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O” with something from Trooper. It was early, and the crowd appeared sparse, spread around the barn-like space at tables that looked as if they belonged in a bingo hall. Posters of flamenco dancers, bullfighters, and beaches lined the wood-panelled walls. Beside the bar, which featured Super Bock on tap, Portuguese bean soup, and calamari, there was a framed photograph of a young man with his fist raised, inscribed, “Camarada! Trabaja y Lucha por la Revolucion!” Rufus handed Alex a foaming pint and steered her towards a small group near the stage. A wiry old man off to the side shadowboxed with what looked in the dim light like a blackened and enormous ham hanging from the ceiling.

The guys in the band were awfully sweet. They clustered around as Rufus introduced her, telling Alex how awesome it was that she had decided to come. She wondered what Rufus had told them about her-that she had terminal cancer or was agoraphobic? The band was Gideon, Attila, and Suki, who was not a guy, but neither was she a threat. She was bald and so skeletal Alex wondered where she’d left her intravenous drip, and wore a Canada Post uniform, the pant cuffs curling under the heels of her shoes, her yellowed, bulging eyes darting about like a cartoon snail’s.

They were joined by a kid with a faux-hawk and wearing an oversized hoodie that made his legs look so short he appeared dwarf-like. He slapped Rufus on the shoulder. “Cool, Roof, you brought your mom!”

Alex was beyond her hot flashes by now and their accompanying hormonal riptides or she would have leapt on him like a pit bull and clamped her jaws onto one of his goofy ears. But she appeared to be the only one who had heard. The others were animatedly debating whether to begin or encore with “Tweety’s Lament” and whether it would be too cliched for Attila to do a drum solo. Alex air-kissed in the kid’s direction and then ran the tip of her tongue around her lips. The dwarf-boy quickly fled, her past-its-best-before-date sexuality apparently as effective as a bio bomb.

A candidate for mayor shuffled and bobbed between the now crammed tables, dispensing fist bumps as if they were lollipops. “Dissin’ the safe injection site-thas wack!” he yelped, while his handlers followed sheepishly at a distance. He was wearing a do-rag, Alex noted, absent-mindedly patting at her thinning scalp. That he was third- generation Chinese Canadian and had gone to school at St. George’s on the west side and then Trinity College, U of T, before coming back to Vancouver to start a Pacific Rim polling firm didn’t seem strokes against him in this age of reinvention. A camera crew from MuchMusic was following him around, so now this had become an event. There was some giddy talk between Gideon and Rufus about getting on disBand and scouts from EMI, and finally Shuffering Shuccotash took the stage to a bunch of raucous whoot whoots and whistles.

A girl with an adorable pixie cut atop an Audrey Hepburn neck eyed Rufus as he jumped onstage at the last minute to retape a cable and adjust Gideon’s mike-his shoulder blades jutting like nascent wings through his thin T-shirt, his small butt tight in faded jeans. Alex felt a wave of vertigo and had to lean up against the wall. Dangling beside her, the large ham, which she had taken to be synthetic, glistened and gave off whiffs of smoke and fat. The odour of something not so long ago alive, now decidedly dead.

With Gideon on banjo, Attila at the drum kit, and Suki pummelling away at an accordion, they made a noise both discordant and melodic. They were off-kilter but almost great, Alex thought, and judging by the crowd’s response, this wasn’t just her opinion. And Rufus, was he an almost-great roadie? Could you be an almost-great roadie? Dozens surged onto the dance floor, moving in a way that couldn’t really be called dancing but was something nonetheless.

In the middle of the melee, there was Xmas Singh shaking it, his bulk surprisingly graceful, like the milky blobs undulating inside a lava lamp, his trademark good-natured smile elevated to something almost beatific. Alex sidled over to him. He didn’t look surprised to see her. “Thanks for the B!” He grinned, executing what could be called a pirouette. “I love these guys! They’re my gods!”

“But it’s just their first gig,” Alex yelled above the din. “Isn’t it?”

Gideon screamed into his mike: “I tawt I taw a puddy tat!”

The crowd screamed back: “You did, you did, you did taw a puddy tat!”

Isn’t it?

Rufus asked: Too something?

It was the year a candidate for mayor disappeared from her designer homeless dwelling into thin air. Or so it seemed. The double-decker tour buses with the beluga ads on their sides stopped driving by the election-sign shantytown along the Terminal Street Bridge; schools cancelled field trips. Wasn’t it only the already invisible or criminally suspect who disappeared without a trace? A massive ground search by combined metro police forces and the RCMP came up with zero. Some speculated that the pressure for the mayoralty had become too much and she was recovering on a wind-powered organic vineyard in the Similkameen Valley, pruning vines and smoking weed. Off-grid, so to speak.

When the garbage bags and their grisly contents finally made the news-front-page news, top-of-the-hour news, breaking Internet news-on the local evening TV newscast the anchor and weatherman couldn’t meet each other’s eyes.

If her students had asked, had they been the least bit curious, Alex could have offered them this fact: In 2009 she saw a machete hack a man’s arm right off. Saw this. Someone flashed his white teeth at her and without wiping the blade, strode on. Her own weapons of choice, a spiral notebook and a rollerball pen, useless in her hands.

“Hey, you live ’round here?”

Alex was walking up Commercial towards Santa Barbara Market, nerves frail as old lace from the club the night before, as if singed by an electrical fire. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the totem pole tattoos on the bulging calves of a man who was ambling along ahead of her, skateboard tucked under his arm. The double sets of Raven and Bear eyes had followed her whether she moved left or right. When he stopped to greet someone, Alex recognized the face, framed by long, grey hair, of a native elder she’d interviewed years back at that standoff in Clayoquot Sound. He should have looked ancient, he should’ve been dead by now, he’d been so old at the time (though defiant, lying in front of a John Deere Harvester, passively resisting as the RCMP carried him