Friday, August 1 2003 Vancouver (MORE)

(cont) We drop by a .99cent pizza joint on Granville and I watch with amazement as The Monkeyman (The man who claims to hate food, and eating) shovels back three slices to my zero! We move in to a place called the “Loose Moose” and have a quick Kokanee Gold™. This place serves full sized (English Imperial 20oz) pints*, but charge almost seven bucks each for them. I want to go to the “SOHO CAFÉ & BILLIARDS” in Yaletown (1144 HOMER STREET. 604-688-1180, that’s the SOHO CAFÉ & BILLIARDS in Vancouver’s trendy Yaletown where it’s lunch to late night, seven days a week!) so we do. The place has changed since I was last there. The wall separating the pub and the billiard hall is gone, and they are now Fully Licensed. There are paintings on the walls of a variety of girls done by a local artist chick. I tell The Monkeyman the paintings are fine, realistic depictions of the idiosyncratic facial qualities of the models used. The Monkeyman says the paintings give him a rash. Five minutes into our pints he is whining about how he is bored and falling asleep. I suggest we shoot some pool, but he will have none of that and I soon concede to his whinging and we leave after but one pint. I knew that he never had a thing for the “SOHO” like I do, but I thought he could at least try for me this one time, but I guess not. I make sure I give a special goodbye to the HOT Asian bartender girl whom I was flirting with when I grabbed out pints earlier, and she smiles sweetly and tells me that I better come back sometime. We walk out the door and straight into a TV interview with the bloke that owns the restaurant next door. We wait three seconds for them to put the camera down then push our way through the crowd. The Monkeyman wants to head back to the boat for a minute to see if his brother is there. He isn’t. Apparently he made it to his bus! Good for him! The Monkeyman goes below deck to call his woman, which he does like eight times a day (she is in Calgary on business), and I sit in the salon listening to the sounds of the sea. In a few minutes Joe Blogs, a buddy of the Monkeyman’s, who makes his living going from marina to marina doing boat maintenance, and polishing the teak, etc. We axe him to come with us for a drink and he agrees but first he has to talk to the guy that owns the huge river barge The Watercolour I about some work he is to do for him. The Monkeyman takes this opportunity to call his sister in Whistler with whom he keeps in daily contact with. Joe Blogs says he’ll take us to a place not far from the marina that serves $2.50 pints. This intrigues us. We head out and we’re nearly there when Joe Blogs remembers he needs to get smokes. He tells us where the place is and says he’ll meet us there. We come around the corner and face to face with the pub Joe Blogs has in mind. A grubby little hole in the world called “The West” (although there are no exterior signs to announce this, I guess it’s one of those places you just have to “know” about). The entrance is patrolled by a group of about seven dealers, junkys, hookers, transvestites, and junky-hookers. We elbow our way through the front door and enter. “The West” is certainly a place with character. The inside looks almost painted gold with the years of yellow nicotine that has built up on the walls. Of course no one has smoke in the main pub area for about two years since the smoking laws changed in B.C., but the overall effect is somewhat stunning. The Monkeyman and I sit down at a table near the bar and order a couple of draft beers. You only have to say “draft beer” in this place since they have only one on tap: Molson Canadian, as the huge white and red banner above the bar proudly proclaims. Joe Blogs comes in and after grabbing a beer for himself suggests that we move into the so-called smoking room. I suggest we stay out here for a while, but am outvoted. The smoking room is more of a smoking closet: a twelve by eight foot enclosure in a corner by the front of the pub. It’s made of cheap ply-wood and ultra-thin nicotine stained glass, and entry is gained by a squeaky aluminum screen door. A motorized fan is mounted high up on the outside wall and is supposed to suck the smoke outside, but it doesn’t. The windows to the outside are spray painted black so the only light that gets into the room is what filters through the interior windows from the non-smoking area of the pub. The place reminds me of the Mos Eisley cantina, there is every manner of person here, short, tall, fat, thin, hunchbacked, one-eyed, junky, drunky, and sober. Every face with a superhighway of deep creases, every face with a thousand stories. After being in the smoking room for what surely must be forever, (only about three hours) I start to feel absolutely sick from breathing in all the smoke. It’s like a fucking airless hot-box in there an I’ve had enough. “Lets get outta here.” I say to The Monkeyman as he’s being chatted up by a six-foot one transvestite hooker who promises the best blow job ever for the price of a pint. I wonder to myself as we exit the smoke room how good a $2.50 blow job could possibly be. Of course it also happens to be Karaoke night at the West, hosted by an aged, flaming Queen wearing a black and sequin covered “Elvis” style jumpsuit. He starts things off with a stunning rendition of Cher’s “Turn Back Time.” A waify woman in her early forties who looks to be about seventy sits at our table and starts talking to us at a million miles an hour then leaves, darting away like the humming bird she is. The Monkeyman and I decide to shoot some pool. The bar demands a tenner deposit before they’ll give us the pool cues. I win the first game, then am crushed three times in a row to teach me a lesson: mess with bull, you get the horns, or something. An old guy who must be at least one hundred, decides to challenge The Monkeyman for the table. The two then get into an argument because the old fart thinks the challenger shouldn’t have to pay! The Monkeyman sends the old guy packing then returns the cues to the bar after I tell him I have no desire to be trounced a fourth time tonight. The eve comes to its inevitable conclusion around two in the morning with The Monkeyman in a right state. We stumble back to the boat through the Indy car pits, past the grand-stand, within the darkness and the light, hammered, soused, drunk. Good People.

Saturday, August 2, 2003 Vancouver

Dénouement
Euggg. . . groggy. . . woke up @ 13:15 and lay there in the V-berth of the Blue Iguana, the sun streaming through the hatch, illuminating the whole thing in a sparkly, golden-blue light. A though occurs to me: It’s Saturday! My initial idea was to leave by Friday, yet here I still am, on the boat, my bladder feeling the heavy oppression of complete fluid saturation. I sit up and throw the blanket from my naked body, my hazy eyes beginning to focus. I grab my travel bag and dig out some clothes, all around me are the remnants of five nights of fun and debauchery. Empty beer cans lay a-strewn all over the ledges and the second bunk. Shards of Doritos and stray peanuts lay discarded, tossed aside, all the products of drunken, late-night snacking that never quite made it into our pie holes. I quickly grab the remaining items that lay strewn about my room and cram them into my bag, then throw the garbage into a plastic bag before bursting forth, out the door and toward the stateroom head in the aft section. Long, anticipated relief is had. I brush my teeth and give the underarms a quick going over with the deodorant before zipping up the soft, leather shaving case given as a gift from my parents what seems like a century ago. I stumble back to the V-berth to grab my stuff and get ready to get out on the road once again. The Monkeyman says he wants to come with me, then calls his woman. She discourages him from going and I’m ready to take off without him when the phone rings. It’s her, just as The Monkeyman prophesized it would be. She tells him to come back to Calgary with me (make up your mind woman!) and so he gets his shit together and we go to leave. He locks up the boat and as he steps down onto the stairs, a pair of CDRs leap from his ruck-sack and splash into the inky depths of False Creek. “Fuck!” He is cursing like the sailor he is as I drop my bag to the dock and plunge my left arm into the warm, murky waters of the marina. I save one of the CDRs but the second one floats just out of my reach towards the Blue Iguana’s keel. Too far to reach, but at the same time tantalizingly close, drifting far enough to cause another explosion of cursing from The Monkeyman. “I think I can get it,” I say, as it drifts momentarily closer. “Forget it,” he says, “it’s gone.” Then soon, so are we, gone and on the road, The Spoon’s “Romantic Traffic” is playing on the radio as I steer the Little Red Mazda onto the freeway. A strange feeling of melancholy coming over us both as the #1 takes us away from the sprawling GVA and back towards Calgary from whence we came, a silent, poignant, melancholy waltz that although we try, we can’t quite put into words.


*A note about “pints” in British Columbia. For the last couple of years the Provincial Government in B.C. has been slowly changing liquor laws so that they are more in line with the 20th Century. Of course we all know this is a little late considering that it is now the 21st Century, but that’s government for ya! With these changes, which for the most part take power and cash out of the hands of the government, something had to give and this was standardization of the “pint.” The B.C. government didn’t want to lose money on the booze they sold to the pubs, restaurants and clubs so they decided not only to raise taxes on booze, but to also force retailers to standardize to the American Imperial Pint which is 16oz as opposed to the British Imperial Pint which is 20oz. What this means is the Government sells for more, but forces retailers to keep prices the same and feel the consumer backlash over the smaller drinks, or lower their prices slightly and try to sell more volume-wise to the consumer who still ends up getting a little less beer for his money! ;p