(22) Trying It
And try it he did. Living a normal life. Without dares, without adventure. One foot in front of the other. On the sidewalk, not on the wild side. Walking into town, a citizen minus any mysterious agenda. A guy out for a walk. The stinging March rain had folded into itself and become a moist wind from the south. Over the river, past the library and into town. The street had filled out with noontime escapees, all fresh faced and up for something. He passed the new high end burger joint, pausing to observe and listen. They seemed to have a music policy of playing forty year old music. Classic rock he guessed you call it. But not predictably classic. On one previous pass he’d recognised the original ‘66 version of I’m So Glad by Cream, the pure Clapton, untainted by adulation. On another The Who’s epochal Young Man Blues from Live At Leeds, complete with Daltrey’s final plaint, He ain’t got sweet fuck all!, at which he turned to observe the full room of family diners, none of whom seemed to notice, never mind lunge to protect the ears of their little ones. Today it was a piece he didn’t recognize, some kind of generic something he couldn’t place, but definitely not the MC5 or The Stooges.
Didn’t amateur detectives flirt with opera arias and suchlike gems of culture? Well, Andrew was breaking the mould. In his own small way he would blaze a new trail, and more than likely make a new mould along the way. No-one would ever think of writing about the kind of crazy stuff he got up to. He could always pen a memoir, now there’s an idea. What would he call it? Rich And Then Some? Scot Among The Pigeons? Or, in a nod to you know who, Mair Money Than Sense? All three had their advantages, although Scot Among The Pigeons did seem like an odds-on favourite already. He passed a young woman, maybe 19, but who could really tell, settled on one of the benches provided by the town, leaning into her cell with smiling enthusiasm. There was something of the eager puppy in her, but also, and this came a second later, a reminder of the old days when you’d see people here and there really enjoying their cigarettes. Not just smoking but totally enveloped in the experience. As if this was their five minutes and no-one but no-one could snatch it from them. Cell phones as inviolable privacy. He carried the thought to his next port of call, the caffeine dispensary of distinction. Debra served him with her usual disarmingly sincere smile. The store was unusually quiet, perhaps only for a moment or two, so they took advantage and chatted. After hearing of her recent activities, including a city visit for an Anime festival, Andrew mentioned Asha’s flight to Vancouver. Debra smiled knowingly, she had seen the two of them bent forward over drinks and had wondered. Not that two Indians, or were they Pakistanis, had to be together, nothing like that, just, you know, they seemed a fit. And they wouldn’t have any trouble filling the vacancy, there’d been ten or more applicants.
He found that day’s Globe and Mail and settled to peruse the world, or at least those aspects of it the editors saw fit for print. Andrew was well aware, by this point in his adulthood, that the gaps and omissions would be highlighted elsewhere, usually the internet, by those who thought other aspects were the significant ones. That governments and corporations maintained agendas in the deep shadows behind the cheery lights of their public relations was no longer any kind of a surprise, yet their challengers and critics often seemed to be clutching at the thin straws of suspicion starved of corroborating evidence. Of course, they would argue that the well-financed cover-up crews stashed, destroyed or assassinated that evidence so regularly and efficiently that there was generally little to build on other than the persistent clouds of suspicion. Or, as was often said, holes in the official story you could drive a truck through.
Andrew usually resorted to his modification of Joyce’s metaphor: He had awakened from the nightmare of history and was in the process of wondering just what to replace it with. The aestheticism of art and music seemed one option, the Oscar Wilde angle. The devotion to beauty is all its manifestations was not really that much different from the devotion to God and all those manifestations. The practitioner came to ignore all that did not fit. The ugly, the deprived, the suffering. As Paul Simon sang, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
