Soft zipper, p.7
Soft Zipper, page 7
Stateroom
When I was a young snob I drew up an informed list of things I would never have anything to do with, largely because that’s what the fraternity boys and then the Rotarians would do. Go to Las Vegas and take in the shows, for example. Get a time share in a cottage on a lake, with a big barbecue on the deck. Go for a cruise on a big ship with a Scandinavian name. Well, I haven’t seen Paul Anka or Celine Dion, or those other desert Canadians, and I don’t know how to cook a trout outdoors, but I have been to Ketchikan and Singapore on big white vessels. We’ve cruised the Caribbean and Tierra del Fuego and both canals, and managed to do it all without white slacks or a twinge of guilt. Jean and I have shared a lot of travel rooms, from one-time palaces in Spain to steel grill motels at bleak intersections in U.S. corn country. But there is nothing you can quite compare to a stateroom with a balcony upon which you can read E.M. Forster and occasionally wave at a tanned guy on the edge of the Egyptian desert. The best room with a view is a moving room with a view. It’s also a nice place to sleep. Sure, our bedroom on the beach at La Manzanilla in Jalisco, where I wrote the early parts of this book, features a light surf that’s divine to go to sleep hearing, but to hear the faraway drone of your ship’s engines through your pillow while a clear moon shows itself between your open curtains where no one in the world can look in should cost a pretty penny. And it does. And in the morning you wake atop the Indian Ocean, you have a shower while standing quite straight, and you head for the elevator that takes you to the breakfast room, where another day of choosing begins.
The Cecil Pub
An important room in the history of Vancouver poetry was the taproom of the Cecil Hotel. We didn’t use the term “taproom,” though. That’s the kind of word businessmen or advertisers like to use. They think it sounds sophisticated or, heaven forbid, hip. We called it the Cecil pub, which was enough of an advance over “beer parlour,” and we met there once a week, on pub night. Pub night did not start until about 10:15 p.m., after the university youngsters had left for home or further fun. We were mostly poets, or writers and painters and other friends who did some kind of art. In those days the word “artist” had not been changed to mean a singer of popular music. When poets or painters were visiting from Toronto, say, they knew enough to come by the Cecil on pub night. I don’t know whether esthetic discussions often transpired –– we were there to gossip or catch up on each other’s lives. Sometimes new chapbooks got disbursed at the Cecil. It wasn’t the kind of “eatery” you get nowadays. You could get pickled eggs out of the big jar on the counter. The height of Cecil cuisine was an item called a “cubanette.” It was so awful I can’t remember what it was, but it came in a plastic bag that had been overheated in some electric gizmo, so you hurt your fingers opening the bag before you burnt your tongue on whatever was inside. Once in a while there was a barroom brawl, a chief form of entertainment in Vancouver at the time, but always with outsiders. If you were a poet and also an outfielder on a Kosmic League ball team, you did a lot of insincere bragging with teammates and foes. No one ever stood up and recited a poem. You might go home with a few typed pages, but you were not Cendrars and Apollinaire. You were never a “circle” in that large room, and nobody was allowed to take photographs in a beer parlour. Whatever brew the Cecil was serving was more important than posterity.
Hotel Rooms
Our hotel room in Toledo had been looking out at the Cathedral door for six hundred years. Our room in the Giulietta e Romeo hotel in Verona was fifty meters from the Roman Arena, where a big Europop show filled the streets with sound and light, lucky again, we said. On Christmas Eve in Singapore our hotel room was the site of a big holiday noise, Asiapop and cascading balloons and young people in costly raiment pretending to be drunker than they were, and we had to catch a 6 a.m. flight to Beijing. Our hotel room in Chicago could be reached via an elevator with a golden door, not exactly my kind of town, but we love the effrontery. Our hotel room in Valparaiso had a window from which we could see nothing because we were on the edge of a high cliff, and outside at the bar, young people were seated while downing pisco sours and tossing their cigarette butts a hundred metres straight down. I felt like a grubby sophisticate descending the wide staircase of the Grand Hotel in Lund, dressed like a streetcar conductor, glimpsing a royal dining court. Maybe we got the same room they had given to the U.S. president at the St. Regis Hotel in Beijing, a television set in the bathroom mirror, one Christmas carol over and over in the hallways, the best Italian restaurant you ever ate at just past the bowling alley. At the famous beat Swiss American Hotel in North Beach, back in those days, I felt very hip but someone had broken the lock to my room, and I had to do with a hook and eye. The other famous poet hotel was the Chelsea in Manhattan. My door was broken in that room, too.
The TV Room
I remember the first time I heard the phrase “TV room.” I had never lived in a place that had a television set in it. As far as I knew, people had the television set in their front room. Back home in Oliver, that’s what my parents did, put the TV where the big console radio used to be. In my experience the TV was something you saw in the diner or in a store window. So when I got comfy enough with my new girlfriend Joan to spend some of my mature student and tyro poet time at her father’s house, I saw that this house, which was apparently built by a famous architect, had a little room that was meant especially for watching TV. I figured this is what well off and sophisticated people did. I liked saying those words “TV room.” I was so pleased that I was living in an age during which television was added to the ways in which to receive culture. I was young and in love and enamoured of novels and plays. In the TV room I saw For Whom the Bell Tolls for a second time, with Jason Robards Jr. instead of Gary Cooper, and Maria Schell instead of Ingrid Bergman, in serious arty black and white instead of Hollywood colour in which John Donne doesn’t get a mention. Got to see William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett and Fyodor Dostoyevski in that little TV room. I blessed my lucky stars that television had come along, and that I had a girlfriend with a well-off father who had a television set that I could watch great literature on.
Locker Rooms
When an unmannerly candidate for U.S. president was upbraided for telling someone (on tape) that he liked exercising his power to grab women’s genitals, his spokesperson said it was all right because he was only a man employing “locker room talk.” Of course he was not using it in a locker room. In fact, given that he appears tall and fat and soft, he is difficult to picture in a locker room. Of course, he used to be difficult to picture in the oval office. Remember when the Kennedy clan used to play touch football on their big Massachusetts lawn despite JFK’s bad back? Now try to picture Donald Trump going deep. Anyway, locker room is an ordinary but interesting designation. Football players stomp around in locker rooms before and after bashing each other. Hockey players suit up in their bisexual outfits in dressing rooms. Baseball players will be in their clubhouse. You see why I prefer baseball to those other sports? Sure, they talk about a baseball player sitting in front of a locker. But have you seen a picture of him? There’s no lock on that thing. No door, even. Now look at what is hanging in the unlocker: a shirt that buttons down the front. You want to know why basketball players like to pimp their street outfits? It’s because they are not allowed to wear nice shirts at work, whether in their locker rooms or on the floor. Basketball players wear undershirts called jerseys. Football players wear jerseys. Soccer players wear jerseys. Hockey players wear sweaters, and now U.S. American sportswriters call them jerseys. If you want to dress for the game in a shirt, button up in a clubhouse. Remember the doubleknit era, when baseball players wore pullover tops? Those things and the sideburns that went with them made the game look silly, especially in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.
Bixby’s Room
My buddy Willy’s father was born to British parents in China early in the twentieth century. So Willy spent his early years, before Alec ran off, with a dad who played rugby and wore old army clothes and spoke with an odd British accent. But here’s why I’m thinking of Alec Lyttle here. For some reason I’ve never discovered he referred to their guest room in Oliver as “Bixby’s room.” Don’t bother trying to find out anything from Google. And as these things go, Willy has always referred to his spare room as “Bixby’s” room. His kid brother Sandy also used the term at his house in Winnipeg. Well, why not? Jean and I always call our guest accommodation “Bixby’s room,” and because it has an ensuite, we also boast “Bixby’s bathroom.” I’ll bet that Sandy’s off-spring and Willy and Sandy’s sisters refer to their Bixby rooms. I hope my daughter does likewise. If the name has gone, as they say, “viral,” who knows how many rooms in this world, from here back to China, Bixby could call his own, if only on a temporary basis. I have never known anyone named Bixby. I have never been to Bisbee, though I have an old sort of friend who has or had a ranch nearby. For some reason, when I heard the name Bixby, I think of William Bendix, who was in half the movies I saw when I was around twenty, but if I mentioned a Bendix room, people would likely think I was referring to the laundry room. It is peculiar, isn’t it, that Bixby should have a room of his own in my house or in yours? I would like to look up something about that, but I have today had a coffee accident on Warren’s table in my computer room.
Roommates
If you room with someone, that is a verb, and it can happen in, say, a small number of rooms in a building. You do not need to room in a room. I did once room with a young man who made the Eiffel Tower sundae out of creme biscuits at night and lay down for electroshock therapy treatments sometimes in the day. Our landlord removed the roof from our rooms so I went to room with my friend Willy at his aunt’s house up the hill. As a college student I once roomed with my aunt and uncle in Victoria, and he got hot under the collar because a young woman I was in love with came to sit in my basement room. There was a lot of room for improvement in my father’s brother, and I understood why my father tended to keep a lot of room between them. Years later, when my daughter was herself at college, it did not matter whether your roommates were young men or young women, even in Victoria. I roomed with two young men and a German shepherd pup in a bunkhouse and sometimes a tent when I was a tree-marker for the B.C. Forest Service. We cooked and cleaned and once we had a fistfight. The dog ate saskatoon berries off the branch. Once in the barracks at Namao I roomed with a USAF sergeant from New Jersey, who was seldom in the room because he was in the room of a woman somewhere in Edmonton, and a skinny USAF private or whatever from Tennessee, who got really angry when I got my copy of Sports Illustrated with a photograph of Willie Mays and his manager Leo Durocher’s wife Larraine Day on the cover. I couldn’t understand him. He talked like a young man from the Ozarks, and I talked like a young man whose grandfather had come from the Ozarks. Roomies.
– La Manzanilla, January 2017 – Vancouver, June 2018
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Copyright George Bowering 2021. All rights reserved. Introduction copyright Lisa Robertson 2021. 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 Access Copyright.
The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.
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ISBN 978-1-55420-173-0 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-55420-174-7 (mobi)
ISBN 978-1-55420-172-3 (print)
Cover design by Oliver McPartlin
E-production by New Star Books
First print edition, March 2021
First ebook edition, March 2021
George Bowering, Soft Zipper
