Twenty essays, most of them literary, several about serafin bruce Vancouver and BC’s small-town back country, once more seen through Bruce Serafin’s unique lens. “I know of no one who experienced life more intensely, or who bore witness to his world with more precision and integrity. He was a fine writer and a gifted editor who wrote and edited with that same demanding combination of intensity and precision with which he lived.” BRIAN FAWCETT Praise for Bruce Serafin’s Colin’s Big Thing: stardust “My new hero … Serafin’s inner life is rich and intelligent, and his recollections are infused with warmth and compassion.… If you choose to read one book from this season’s list, let it be Colin’s Big Thing.” GLOBE & MAIL stardust “A fast, exciting read, without a self-serving word in it.” WESTENDER “A major intellectual and literary event for the West Coast. … Serafin has created an unyielding record of [Vancouver’s] end-of-the-land brutality, and of the human and intellectual toll it takes on anyone who lives outside the narrow strip of New Age chrome and brass that rings the outer shores of Burrard Inlet.” BOOKS IN CANADA BRUCE SERAFIN (1950 – 2007) was born and raised in Hinton, Alberta, and moved to Vancouver in his late teens. He was a founding editor of the original Vancouver Review in the 1990s. bruce serafin Essays | Literature ISBN-13:978-1-55420-033-7 A New Star book ISBN-10:1-55420-033-4 Cover design: Clint Hutzulak/Mutasis.com Essays Cover photo: Mary-Anne McNeney Printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper Printed and bound in Canada 9 781 554 200337 Stardust BRUCE SERAFIN Vancouver New Star Books 2007 NEW STAR BOOKS LTD. 107 – 3477 Commercial Street | Vancouver, BC V5N 4E8 CANADA 1574 Gulf Road, #1517 | Point Roberts, WA 98281 USA www.NewStarBooks.com | [email protected] Copyright Bruce Serafin 2007.A ll rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). We acknowledge the financial support of theC anada Council, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit. Cover by Mutasis.com PDF edition created April 2009. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUblICATION Serafin, Bruce Stardust / Bruce Serafin. ISBN 978-1-55420-033-7 I. Title. PS8587.E695A16 2007 C814'.6 C2007–904649–5 For my dear Sharon For Stan Contents The Alley 3 The Secret 10 Chinatown 16 A Chest of Drawers 22 Wearing a Mask 30 Stardust 41 Stan Persky’s Enormous Reasonableness 51 Sailors 61 Snow Ghosts 69 Glavin’s Progress 78 The Crosses 94 The Third Floor 110 Dead on the Shelf 119 Avante-Garde Mentalities 126 Long Tall Sally 136 Vermeer’s Patch 146 Leetle Bateese 154 The Light on the Tracks, Part One 164 The Light on the Tracks, Part Two 190 Cowboy Stories 215 vii Acknowledgments Early versions of “Stan Persky’s Enormous Reasonableness” and “Avant-Garde Mentalities” appeared in Books in Canada. “Sailors” first appeared on www.thetyee.ca. “TheC rosses” and “Dead on the Shelf” first appeared in the original Vancouver Review. “The Secret”, “Vermeer’s Patch”, “Cowboy Stories”, “Long Tall Sally”, “A Chest of Drawers”, “Glavin’s Progress”, “Wearing a Mask”, “Stardust”, “Leetle Bateese”, and “The Crosses” were first published on www.dooneyscafe.com. The author would like to thank Stan Persky, Rolf Maurer and Carellin Brooks for their zeal, professionalism and kindness. Stardust The Alley 1 n sunny afternoons when my work as a mailhandler was O done, I wrote in the lunchroom at Vancouver Postal Sta- tion J. This was back in the 1990s. I sat near the window looking out at the alley, and when I lost my train of thought I listened to the letter carriers cheerfully insult each other. Whenever some- body came up with a really good line, all the carriers would let out a shout: “Woo, woo, woo, woo!” One noon when I arrived at J to start work the shout greeted me even before I was in the door. There were three reasons for this: Mino Fuoco’s wife had left him, he’d come back from the morning part of his walk drunk, and the other carriers were holding a party for him. In the lunchroom big tinfoil trays of Chinese food covered the tables. And in the carriers’ pleasure at being able to eat as much as they could stuff in, Mino and his grief were being ignored. Instead the carriers were gathered around Tommy Chu and young Dean Arlette. Tommy and Dean were talking about babies. Dean said, “The reason babies cry so much in the heat is they can’t cool down.” Tommy, who had three boys of his own, nodded. 3 4 ST ARDU ST Dean leaned forward earnestly. “They can’t sweat. You see what I mean?” “I do.” “They don’t have the glands for it. They haven’t developed enough.” “No glands,” Tommy said. “That’s right.” Tommy held up a finger. “Well, suppose you had a kid you nicknamed Eagle. Lively kid. And he becomes a teenager with pimples and the whole rest of it. You could say, ‘The Eagle has glanded.’” Dean looked at Tommy, bewildered. John Duguid sitting across from them shook his head. Wang Hsu kept looking at the table. Then he looked at John. Then he lifted up from his seat and leaned slightly and produced a huge blast that sounded like a trumpet being blown through a cloth sack. The sickening smell of old oil being stored behind a Chinese restaurant seeped into the lunch room. Tommy stood up. “What a fucking stink.” “It is pretty bad,” Wang said, and stood up. Ray of Sunshine stood up. “Wang, I can smell it from here, you disgusting thing.” John Duguid backed away from the table. Something of the Glasgow docks lingered in his voice. “Damn it, Wang, that smells like shit.” Rearing up like this in their dark blue jackets and peaked caps they looked like Maoists. Mino, who was standing behind them with his face red with tears, stepped up to John and Wang and put his hands on their shoulders. “You know what? You’re my home. This is my home!” I was sitting on the counter, next to the microwave. Tommy came over to warm up more food. Standing beside the machine waiting for his fried rice to finish, he whispered: “Woo, woo, woo, woo.” They read Macleans and Chinese comic books and big hard- cover science fiction novels, and every weekday they read The The Alley 5 Province from first page to last, marking up the three copies the station received until by four in the afternoon when the last let- ter carrier had finally run out of gossip the newspapers were so dogeared and annotated they might have been shipped from the penitentiary in the Fraser Valley, Oakalla. I wanted to go to graduate school. It was a mercenary move — I wanted a doctorate so I’d be in a position to quit the post office and teach in a college. I( had just finished — I was in my forties and it felt late in the day — earning an MA from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, a small city that abuts East Van- couver.) Sitting in the lunch room, listening to the carriers, I would dream about it. How great it would be! How interesting my life would be once I had my teaching job and was out of the PO forever! 2 A few months later I enrolled at the University of British Colum- bia, considered to be BC’s premier university, as a PhD student. Alas, something I hadn’t known when I entered UBC’s Eng- lish Department was that its social order depended on ass kiss- ing. I had taken the freedom I’d had at Station J for granted, mainly because it was a freedom I’d had my entire adult life. I had done many things in the post office; but never had I had to kiss ass. When you were told to kiss ass in the post office (if, for instance, a supervisor didn’t like the way you slouched as you sorted your mail) it was framed as a direct order: “Bruce, this is a direct order. I am asking you to get off that stool and sort stand- ing.” If you disobeyed the direct order you were marched out of the plant with a guard on either side of you. This suited me. What I found at UBC, though, alienated me to the core. The professors seemed unaware of what lay outside their school. Most of them had been so poisoned by years of being in a position of authority compared to their students that they’d become childish; and petulance, small-mindedness and a barely repressed anger at other men’s ideas and achievements were the order of the day. 6 ST ARDU ST But my months at UBC did have one good effect: some nights after class by the time I reached downtown on my bus, I was immersed in two ideas I’d been thinking about on and off for nearly a decade now. I looked out the bus window at the boarded- up Chinese restaurants that just a year ago had been so busy; I stared at the façades of Woodward’s and Funky Winkerbean’s; I watched the faces of the people getting on and off the bus, faces which in this part of town carried hints of Boston Bar and Spences Bridge, little towns in the BC Interior; and as I watched them hug and say hello, I thought they were people who knew each other, part of a community that stretched for hundreds of kilometres on both sides of the Coast Range, real and alive.