Solstice in the City
by Harrison Kim
I’ll never own a house. Mornings I laze, slide back the apartment window and step out for air in a parking lot where rain and cars collect, witness natives of the city poking in the garbage with long sticks. I’ll never be like them. It’s all in your attitude. You’ve got to plan things out. Dress well, eat well, charm with reckless abandon. Then maybe you’ll obtain a minimum wage position as host at Pearl’s. Don’t sweat it. It saves you from the bread line.
Suitable props for my peer group include multi-coloured eyebrow rings, Celtic band tattoos linked round the biceps, and knee ripped jeans and leotards that smile when you walk. I’m dressed to the nines. Attitude includes righteous anger against the rich and successful, combined with the philosophy “If it feels good, go for it,” and a quirky haircut. When I arrived in Vancouver, I sported the attitude, but I also wanted a job. So I trashed the haircut.
There are a lot of houses in the city that people actually own. I don’t know how they do it: inheritance or drug sales; maybe luck. Dez, my supervisor, said it’s a life of pain, mortgage, and visits to Home Depot. He gave me temporary employment: “So you’ll have some time to plan the rest of your life.” He laughed, and I observed his strong white teeth and dapper brown suit, his sideburns standing out behind them, everything so clean and nicely brushed.
I work in a mall. I’m a Santa Claus. Apply one hot beard and moustache, stir rouge onto cheeks and a George Washington wig around the head until it sticks. A cushion under the stomach. One heavy red suit, revealing one paunchy swayback, age 24, with cotton all over his face.
My girlfriend Ariel is an elf, also temporarily. She bends towards children who smile in front of a mountain of tinsel, and snaps their photographs. She’s blonde, with a long face ending in a sharp pale chin. One angry blush will turn her chalky cheeks red as stop lights. Like me, she’ll never own a house, but she doesn’t believe it.
“I don’t know why you’re so resigned to everything,” she says to me. “Your slack and sorry attitude defeats you.”
“It’s a waste of time to buy a lot of stuff, because we’re all going to die eventually,” I reply. “And if we don’t die, there will still be cigarettes.”
“You’re morphing into a poseur,” she says. “You seem all over the place at once.”
I laugh. It’s the festive season. The time to be jolly.
When we arrived in Vancouver, Ariel and I met many youthful people exactly like us. Our tribal getups made it easy for believers in similar fashions and philosophies to notice and associate. They admired Ariel’s retro appeal, polyester pants, her blonde hair shaved sideways, her lounge wear and lack of an umbrella. They approved of my eyebrow rings, my ponytail braided with flower stems and copper wire, my hat of rice paper, my black boots with many lace holes.
So, inevitably, we met lots of majors in English and Criminology, musicians on heroin, fans of the Fleet Foxes, snowboarders and poets. A guy named Max crashed with us. Said he walked eighteen miles a day. That put him a little further out on society’s fringes than ourselves. He tried to sell everyone jewelry he said was made by local artists for really, really cheap. Then he crashed at our apartment like a lot of people you meet and trust first and ask questions about later. He cooked up mountains of Sunny Boy breakfast cereal, very tasty.
“Jackson, you are serving the establishment big time,” he said when I mentioned my Santa job.
He thought there was a conspiracy of child molesters, a very well organized cadre and that he knew who they were but the police just wouldn’t listen. “Keep your eyes and ears open, Santa,” he said. “Remember, you’re on the front lines.”
Max and I had the same blue eye colour, but he had long, pushy arms he stuck in people’s way when he tried to explain something. His gap-toothed smile became wider as he talked them into submission on random subjects, like whether oysters smell like sex or sewage. He shaved his head every morning. “The six a. m. massage,” he said. But he often worked too fast. New cuts always snicked and redlined across his bald cranium.
Dez, my supervisor at the mall, did not match my eye or skin colour, but we jogged together around the mall and the park in synchronized style. His arms and legs moved in time with mine like the girl swimmers’ underwater. “What physical activities do you enjoy?” he asked at the job interview.
“Marathons,” I replied, because this would establish my image as a go-getter.
Dez leaned back, nodding. “I’m pleased you keep in shape,”
“If you don’t keep in shape,” I said, “the next guy will knock you down.”
Dez rubbed his hands slowly through his hair. “Yes,” he said, half-smiling, his big black eyebrows pulled up towards his scalp.
He hired me right after fingerprinting, police checks, and a lie detector test.
“We can’t take any chances nowadays,” he said. “But I like you, Jackson.”
So I acted like a big gangly guy with sudden opinions, just to continue that first impression.
I gave Ariel a good reference, and Dez hired her to take photos of kids at five bucks a pop, for fifteen dollars an hour.
“This is what sustains the momentum of a great city,” I stated.
But Ariel said, “I am being a prostitute here. It’s not right to sell myself for any price,” and “How can people eat so much sugar?” as I, as Santa, doled out candy canes to multitudes of baby-toothed kidlets.
“I am no longer an impulsive teenager,” she told Max. “I must become mistress of my own destiny.” And she told me: “You are full of anomie, trailing it like a slug since back east.”
And I told her, “It doesn’t matter. One day usually follows the next for both slugs and humans.”
She sighed, then laughed, and we reminisced about arriving in Vancouver on blue seats bolted to a great stinking passenger jet. The pristine mountains and bank cathedrals of the city glowed, and the waves of the ocean heaved. We strolled, hands in pockets, along the sea-wall and talked of things to come. I smoked a cigarette and coughed. She tossed hers in a recycling bin. Right then, I knew there would be problems. Strangely, I felt better immediately.
“You are so dark. You are like a parody of darkness,” said Max, swishing something in the sink. “Can’t you not understand the anguish of Ariel?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I like her so much.”
He emerged from the bathroom with several blue-and-red necklaces wrapped in toilet paper. “Only twenty bucks each.”
“Won’t this drive up the price of consumer goods?” I ventured.
“There’s a small circle at the top controlling all,” said Max. “We think we’re independent, but we’re not. Stealing from them is defiance.”
I shrugged. For a second, I imagined Max as a secret agent, working for those very powers he claimed to rebel against. He certainly seemed to have everything figured out.
Ariel and Max slipped out a lot together for “espresso” and “meetings.” Their group “Friends of the Homeless” seemed to meet every day or two.
“It’s not just a cause,’ said Ariel. She blushed, glancing at Max. “It’s a calling.”
When “The Friends of the Homeless” stormed the local Food Bank to liberate the groceries, Ariel explained: “Poor people are degraded and forced to accept rations.”
The ration was two bags per person per week.
“The Friends empower self-serve systems,” Ariel told me, while a TV clip showed a bulging-eyed fellow hauling away a shopping-cart load of food and pop cans while a skinny, sore-faced woman squatted on a pile of cardboard next to a rusty van with no wheels.
“They must have juxtaposed some third-world pictures,” Ariel said. “To make us look bad.”
Her life was divided between fantasy and practicality, Activist and Elf, somewhat like the city itself. And the city wasn’t just split into the loopy and the Machiavellian: it was hipsters who rode bicycles versus boomers who drove Teslas, anarchists who drank cappuccino versus anarchists who spat cappuccino, people who believed in chopping down trees, but only to make guitars, versus people who thought a tree should never be cut up in the city unless if first fell on a Tesla.
So I reclined on my Santa throne, aware that some folks in the city loved me, others wanted a stake-burning for the Patron Saint of Commercialism. Hopefully, my breath didn’t stink of sugar from all the snarfed candy canes, while I held kidlets who always wanted to straddle my legs. Whey the hell didn’t they sit with both their legs over mine?
“I want ‘Dig a Dinosaur,’ ‘Acrylic Paints,’ and ‘A New Phone,’” said yet another hopeful child. Then a commotion sounded down the wide and tinsel-lined hall.
Ariel jerked up from her photography. A young man with a Justin Trudeau haircut whizzed by. In fact, “He’s wearing a Canadian Prime Minister mask,” I commented as he leaped up onto the podium and shoved a handful of makeup tubes into my hands.
“Stick these up your cushion,” said Justin Trudeau, leaping off the platform, right into a security guard who grabbed his neck in a two-fisted choke.
“It’s okay,” I said to the little girl on my knee.
She smiled, showing braces held together with numerous brown elastics. “Thank you, Santa,” she said and took a tube of lipstick.
I shoved the rest of it under my cushion, with my white Santa gloves now almost black from handling the day’s sticky customers. Security wrenched Justin Trudeau away, left arm twisted up against his back.
“You know who that was?” Ariel whispered as we jogged off for the change room. “That was Max, acting out part of his big plan!”
“He looked like Justin Trudeau.”
“He was making a point,” Ariel said. “He’s got convictions and the courage to show who’s boss. You see, nothing, not even police brutality, can stop him from doing anything he wants.”
I took the makeup home. Part of me wanted to return it to whatever beauty shop they were lifted from. Ariel said Max would pay me something.
“I can use these!” Max said as I forked over the eye shadow and mascara. “I wonder if I’ll be on the airwaves again.” He’d already made the six o clock news during the “Friends of the Homeless” food bank raid.
“That security asshole cut my air off. I had a receipt for that mask. Nothing else to declare.” He raised his eyebrows and grinned. “I’ll educate the public with irresistible images.”
Sure enough, at six came the story of Max and his Christmas rush down the waxy mall floors. Dez, my supervisor, came on. His dapper suit dominated, made his face appear small and dark, his teeth filmy and wet. He talked about his property taxes.
“They’re gouging me and shovelling money off a truck for every Tom, Dick, and Harry!”
“What’s that got to do with the alleged choking incident?” asked the reporter.
“I just want to make people happy,” said Dez. “I’m not a wealthy man. Does he hate me because I own a house?”
The clip moved to Max, folding his Justin Trudeau mask and stating “It was a clear-cut case of assault on the underprivileged by the powers that be.”
He wore a flashy orange beret that covered his scratched up noggin. Face: wide and earnest. Hands: slowly, deliberately placing the mask in a plastic sack marked “Evidence.” Voice sounding the right mix of concern and outrage that makes people shake their heads at the unfairness of it all.
“Right on, Max!” cheered Ariel, as I sucked up some more Sonny Boy.
“Enjoy your five minutes of fame, buddy,” I mumbled.
“It’s not fame,” Ariel nibbled at the end of a spoon. “It’s independence.”
Next day at work, Dez called me into his office. He looked tired, rocking slightly in his fancy chair, his words slow, deliberate. He turned his head. I noticed newly trimmed sideburns, cut off just below the temples.
“See this?” he said.
There was a video clip. A Methuselah-bearded Claus with a 24-year old face removed a little girl from his lap and stuck several makeup tubes under his pants.
“This incident caused me a lot of embarrassment,” said Dez. “But most of all, I’m really disappointed in you. I thought we had some kind of partnership.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I like the jogging together thing.”
Dez sighed. “Our cameras clearly showed that crazy shoplifter dropping the merchandise to you.”
“I think it fell from his hands when they choked him,” I said. “Talk about overreaction.”
“I should fire you,” Dez continued. “But every day some parent calls to praise your Santa work.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a hundred thumbs-up on the shopping mall Claus site.”
Dez stood up. “They think you are a superb actor.” He sighed again. “Go put on your suit. I looked like such a fool on TV.”
* * *
In these times, you’ve got to be thankful for something. I still had my job, a roof over my head, a girlfriend, cool clothes and shoes that fit. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to wear eyebrow rings, be a rebel, and try to change the way things are. Maybe I am a slug, a slacker, a poseur.
Ariel is connected to her new political identity; she says this elf job will be her last compromise. Max has the vision and the ability to stand up for his ideas, even if he has to wear a mask. I’ve disappointed Dez. But hopefully he’ll still give me a good reference. I’m sure there’ll be a few Easter Bunny positions coming up in April. “Hehe,” as they say on Facebook.
Yes, I’m in a philosophical crisis here, trying to make ends meet in this fragmented city. To survive, you need to be a chameleon. I must keep the same shape but choose a different colour for each situation, blend in without altering the eye that views things right. I stare out at the parking lot from the apartment’s sliding windows and wonder if there’s anyone I know who thinks like this. It would be fun to chat or Zoom with a co-chameleon.
I watch light climb over the concrete pillars of the transit rail. A train whooshes by, blocks the sun for a second. Soon, I’ll suit up, distribute candy canes and promise kids that their wishes will be granted. I watch Ariel sleep on the couch. Max snores lightly from the bedroom.
“You’re not going to pull me in,” I whisper.
Copyright © 2020 by Harrison Kim
