East Hastings Rain

Dense rain clouds canopy Vancouver, tonight, and a perpetual rain shimmers in the East Hastings air, falling so lightly that it seems to hang in suspension like a damp gossamer curtain. Cars blast up along the street every so often, their headlights glistening across the dark pavement and their tires tearing up the stagnant water on the road and spraying it in an arc onto the sidewalk. I take a cautionary step back but my efforts are unsuccessful; wet denim clings to my shins. My dinted sneakers are soaked through, squishy water caught in the pockets between my toes. The bangs of my hair are a cold mass plastered to my cheeks. A carryout cup of coffee procured from a gas station two blocks up rests cradled between my frigid, dripping h ands, a far cry from Starbucks but warm against my palms and in my belly.

The flickering glow of a malfunctioning Bic lighter illuminates my peripheral vision, East Hastings’ very own self-extinguishing distant star for a brief moment before it disappears entirely. Buster stands to the left of me, a few steps back, those large rough hands of his I know so well tucked protectively into the pockets of his too-small faux brown leather jacket. His hair, curly on a good day, has turned into a tangle of frizz in the humidity, raindrops hanging throughout the mass like dew on a cobweb. A cigarette burns slowly between his pale, frigid lips. When he notices my eyes on him, he affords me a fleeting smile. Thick blue smoke billows from in between his lips and dives into his nose. This little trick of his reminds me of burrowing worms and I get a weird mental image of Nicotine as a fat fly nested in his brain, feeding on his grey matter and laying eggs that hatch beneath the protection of her large, iridescent bottom.

He quirks a bushy eyebrow in reaction to what must be the disgusted expression on my face and I shrug helplessly in response. He laughs, taking a step toward me and throwing an arm around my shoulder in a brief, sort of detached show of affection. It’s about as intimate as he gets. I rest my head on his chest, savouring the moment before he pulls away and removes the cigarette from his mouth so he can spit, turning his head away from my direction and firing a cloudy gob of saliva that splashes and disintegrates into a shadowy puddle at our feet. I scrunch my nose and he apologizes mechanically; spitting disgusts me, he knows that, but he’s compelled to regardless. I once asked him why he spat so much while he smoked and he responded simply, “Cigarettes taste disgusting.”

Buster’s relationship with smoking isn’t much different from his relationship with me. Habitual, bogged down in negative aspects and yet endured regardless. A lot of people smoke despite the known effects on their health and well-being, but they generally have reasons to overlook those effects: they like the taste of cigarettes, they have someone to impress, the nicotine calms them. With Buster, though, the usual benefits are moot points, inconsequential. His reasons for smoking (besides plain old addiction, I mean), are hidden somewhere in the annals of his mind, beyond my reach.

He drops the butt of the cigarette, not bothering to grind it out with his foot like he usually does, instead allowing the puddle to swallow and extinguish it. He takes a seat on the bus stop’s wooden bench, eyes scanning over the graffiti decorating the plexiglass walls of the shelter we’ve been standing beneath: accusatory statements with a vegetarian bias scrawled in black marker. At some point during their existence, some prankster decided to mess with the message of them, scrawling and replacing words so that the original statement, “if you want to live a life of love, don’t eat meat” now tells us “if you want to live a life of hatred, don’t eat pussy.” I exclaim my appreciation of the sentiment and Buster acts insulted as though the graffiti and I have touched a nerve. I sit beside him, ignoring the pools of water on the bench that soak into the seat of my jeans. I’m wet everywhere else, after all.

Time passes and we get onto the subject of our parents. Buster talks about his father with a queer mixture of love, admiration and hatred that’s not unlike my own attitude. My father is an overweight middle aged accountant who spends his days balancing the books of trucking companies despite the fact that his real passions are singing and teaching. He uses the internet to cheat on my mother with women who flicker darkly on the screen via webcam. His life is a warning to me of what happens when a person abandons their dreams for security. “My dad should have been the Marlboro man,” Buster tells me of his own father matter-of-factly. I’m a little confused as to his reasoning but then he continues: “he’s done all the traditional guy jobs. He’s been a construction worker, a miner, a farmboy, a ranch hand. . .” As he speaks, he counts the jobs off on the fingers of his thick-knuckled hand, looking nostalgic and homesick and disgusted and delighted all at once. I don’t know how to react to this bombardment of emotions on his part, so I rest a noncommittal hand upon his closest knee. My fingers fasten and unfasten the multiple safety pins that hold the expansive tears in his jeans closed, my anxiety causing me to fiddle. I examine the profile of his face, gaze lingering on his European nose and the angular line of his jaw covered in rough stubble.

A voice reaches us through the curtain of damp air, invading our secular bubble of consciousness. “That father of yours is a real man.” An old native man stands drenched in the rain beneath the busstop signpost, his hair hanging in his eyes. He has a friendly, world-weary smile upon his round features that curves his mouth, lifts his cheeks and seems to glitter in his eyes as though he were some sort of ethnic Santa Claus. He speaks with a familiar accent that, in our generation, one only hears from natives with strong ties to the reservation.

“Yeah,” Buster responds, though his voice trails off at the end of the word, making me wonder whether he agrees with the statement or not. My guess is that he isn’t sure of that himself. He surprises me by continuing unprompted. “He always worked really hard, but then, he had four kids to take care of.”

The native man relates to this. “I’ve got three of them, myself. Born and raised here in Vancouver. The oldest is about your age,” he tells us. The statement feels more like it’s directed at Buster than me, which is well enough since I’ve never been one to be able to carry on conversation with strangers anyway. I busy myself with alternating between watching for the bus and staring at my own knees while Buster and the native man talk about their lives. A car speeds past and the native man says in that deliberate accent: “Life’s what you make of it though. If you want it to be shit, it will be, but if you want it to be great, well then. . . boom!” At this, I squeeze Buster’s hand. I wonder if the advice has managed to seep into his mind past the barriers erected by pessimism and depression that my own words have been incapable of penetrating thus far. Buster’s expression yields no answer.

Later that evening, we’re alone and Buster has a referral for a construction job here in the city. Our wet hands are interwoven between our shivering bodies. “I know you don’t like it,” I start tentatively, looking at him with pleading eyes as though I’m asking him to make love to me, “but you can at least work construction until something you prefer becomes available. Get a foothold in the city.” I wonder pessimistically to myself if this approach will be more effective than my usual lecturing and demands. We fight a lot about his lack of a job. It’s driven a wedge in our relationship and I hate to bring it up. Here in these curtains of suspended rain, things between us feel at least part way mended and I don’t want to disturb that. I want to pretend our troubles don’t exist and curl up like a child in the warm security blanket of ignorance. But that sort of attitude doesn’t really solve problems, only masks them and allows them to fester, sort of like covering a wound with a bandage without cleaning it first.

To my surprise, Buster looks at me with conviction rather than exasperation. “No,” he says determinedly, brown eyes catching my own. “I need to stop whining and do what needs to be done. I’m good at construction. I can do that.”

The rain falls.