Day 20: Excuses Pub

Recently, a dear friend told me I am emotionally immature. This was very hard for me to hear. I’ve always imagined myself as wise, or, at the very least, more aware than the majority of my generational counterparts. I’ve taken care to surround myself with similarly advanced young adults - I realize now I equate ‘advanced’ with ‘artist’ - whom I relished in giving advice to on matters of life and love. Maintaining a steady relationship with Marco since I was twenty helped prove that I had something - some elusive and complicated concept - completely figured out. I’m twenty-five now, newly single, and I realize: keeping a kid in kindergarten for five years doesn’t make her any smarter; it just makes her really good at colouring, and nap time. Fresh out of the vacuum of a familiar routine, all my dormant interpersonal handicaps are activating, sweeping in like unpredictable weather systems. Like snow in June.
        It hailed, rained, and snowed our entire weekend in Calgary. On Monday, the first day of sun, Toby and I decided to go east. We took McKnight Boulevard, which is a lot busier than its width on our road map had led us to assume. Six lanes carry transport trucks, SUVs and motorcycles in and out of this sprawling city. Marco once said he loved cycling with me because it was the only time I wasn’t afraid of anything. I wasn’t afraid on McKnight Boulevard, but I did have my eyes glued to my review mirror as I juggled the narrow space between my loaded bike and the vehicles whizzing past on my left. So I didn’t notice the motorcycle pass us, weave in front of us, and then hop up onto the curb. The voice, however, I recognized in an instant. Before I swung my head back to glimpse its source, I knew it was Eric.
        Five days earlier, Eric’s rusty scour-pad voice made me swing my head his way the first time. Outside a café in the Rockies, I was at my bicycle retrieving some butter packets I’d swiped from Radium Hot Springs - they’d enhance the apple-crumb muffin I had just purchased to dream-like status. I heard Toby shouting and clapping his hands. I looked up, and the fattest crow I’ve ever seen was flapping clumsily away. His stupid wings were weighed down by the weight of my muffin, which was clamped firmly in his stupid little beak. “No!” I shouted. “He has my muffin!” I looked at Toby.
        “These birds are so intelligent, you know,” he said. “The most intelligent.” Toby has a Swiss accent and speaks with slow, thoughtful concentration. We met in Switzerland last summer when Marco’s band toured the area. We shouted at each other over loud punk music and, after an hour of halted conversation, he agreed to cycle across the country with me. Having spent the past month and a half together, I wonder if he regrets his impulse. We are extremely different. He is logical, attentive, and interested in the brain span of birds. I am hungry and temperamental. From behind Toby and me, I heard laughter bubbling up, rough and black and deep as crude oil.
        “Smart little fuckers, ain’t they?” shouted Eric from across the parking lot. He was as big as his Harley Davidson, with shoulder-length silver hair to match the chrome, sparkling blue eyes to match the paint, and a handlebar mustache to match the handlebars. He stuck his cigarette in his mouth and shrugged. Exhaled. “You gotta watch the wildlife here in the Rockies!” He hooted again. I scowled and stormed back inside the café. My new muffin stayed safe against my chest, hidden by both my hands, and then, quickly, my mouth. The fat crow sat on the roof, watching.
        Belly full, I started a conversation with Eric and his wife Carol. I sense sometimes Toby looks down on the rougher Canadians we meet - he becomes quieter, observant. Though he’s probably just trying to pick coherent words from their barks and twangs, I still feel the need to flaunt their charisma in front of him. Eric and Carol were nothing if not charismatic. Whenever he gets some time off of operating forklifts, he and his wife, clad in matching leather suits, hit the open road. She didn’t always like motorcycles. When their first child was born twenty-one years ago, she made Eric trade his bike in for a mini-van.
        “And I told her,” Eric grunted, “as soon as that kid has its own kid, I’m getting my bike back.” Sure enough, shortly after Eric’s grandson Lucas arrived, so did his beautiful Harley Davidson. And Carol, who’s experiencing what she calls her “second childhood”, bought her own helmet and hopped on the back. She is a petite, cheerful Metis woman who was genuinely captivated by mine and Toby’s travels. She oohed and ahhed and giggled, delighted by our anecdotes. Eric lit another smoke and - mostly for the reaction I knew this animated roughian would give me - I asked to bum one.
        “Well holy shit, little girl!” he rasped, emptying out his pack - three cigarettes - into my hands. “You’re pedaling your ass across the country and smoking? You and me are gonna die the same way, kid!” They rode west and we rode east, and I thought of them exactly three times since our lunch together.

And there he was, five days later, sitting on the side of McKnight Boulevard. Toby and I swung our bikes up onto the curb and Eric rolled over.
        “Holy fuck!” he yelled over the traffic. “I can’t believe it’s you two crazy fuckers! I saw your goddamn yellow bags and I thought: holy fuck! It’s those two crazy fuckers!” He stamped out his cigarette, pulled out his cell phone, and called Carol. “Carol!” he shouted. “You won’t believe who I just fuckin’ ran into on the side of the road. Those two crazy fuckin’ foot pedlars we met in BC. Yeah! They’re spending the night at our place! Put some spaghetti on!” He hung and looked at us, blue eyes starry. “She can’t fuckin’ believe it.” We were to meet him at a pub around the corner from his house. We figured a coincidence as incredible as this one deserved some ritualistic beer drinking at the local bar, aptly titled Excuses.
        On the way to Excuses, Toby and I had our first fight. Eric’s directions included turning left onto 52nd street. But 52nd street came up with only a right lane exit. The left exit would put us on a street whose name I didn’t recognize. “We’re supposed to turn left on to 52nd,” I reminded Toby. “What should we do?” An innocent question, I thought.
        “Yeah, you have the directions!” he snapped angrily. “Not I!” I looked back at him. He had the same look on his face I used to give Marco when he farted at the dinner table.
        “I was just asking a question!” I yelled over my shoulder.
        “And how am I supposed to know this answer?”
        I swerved left onto the unknown street. “You know, you can be a real asshole, sometimes,” I called back to Toby. A truck roared by us, and I missed the first half of his response. The last half was “Thank you for this.” In silence, we navigated our way through Calgary’s suburban streets and somehow wound up at Excuses where Eric had two cold Kokanees waiting for us. There, we were distracted from our tiff by Taz, an ancient Vietnam veteran one table over. He had black, watery eyes and mottled skin, and made various physical advances toward me which I deterred only by shrinking a bit into my chair. I infuriate myself in these situations - all my common sense and feminist theory disappear, overwhelmed by a pathological need to not upset this asshole copping cheap feels. In the past, Marco dealt with out-of-line men. Though I wanted to slap Taz’s disgusting hands away, all I did was look at Eric.
        “Why don’t you kick the fucker in the balls?” Eric asked.
        “Isn’t he your friend?”
        “Hell no, honey. In fact, let’s go.”
        We all hopped on out bikes and rode the short distance to Eric’s house. Toby and I still didn’t speak, and my passivity with Taz embarrassed me - I can call Toby an asshole, but I can’t tell an old pervert to fuck off? We parked in Eric’s backyard, which was a playground of discarded but well-loved toys. A broken hot tub, a defunct fish pond, a portable laundry machine, three rusted bicycles, torn window screens, kitchen chairs with ripped upholstery. Carol leaned out the back door.
        “Don’t mind the mess,” she said. “We’re packrats.” The inside of their home confirmed the same - they are packrats, and their main collection item is people. They have a habit of adopting strangers. Since Eric moved to Calgary twenty-seven years ago, he has taken in seven ‘brothers’ - young men he found struggling whom he let live in his house until they found jobs. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, they go downtown and invite a dozen homeless people over for a meal, a shower, and a change of clothes. Toby and I were just two additions to a long list of recipients of their unadulterated kindness.
        Over wine, spaghetti and garlic bread, Carol chatted away. She works as a personal care attendant, and told a story about a favourite client of hers, Jane. Jane lived with her son, who was supposed to care for her in the evenings. When Carol would arrive in the morning, she often found Jane soiled and hungry, victim to her son’s cocaine habit. Carol worked hard to get Jane into a nursing home. Her main obstacle was the son’s protest.
        “He loved her so much,” she told me. “When he finally admitted he couldn’t care for her anymore, he cried and cried. I hugged him. I cried. It was very sad.” Carol teared up at the memory. I found myself scowling. A drug addict who lets his own mother shit her pants? This is love? But Carol’s earnestness pushed me to find the curve in the road that could lead to her conclusion. I encountered obstacles: suspicion. Not only of the son, but of Carol. And even Eric. Their selflessness and generosity. Can these traits, so pure in intention, be real? Another obstacle was my pride. I could never do something so horrible to a loved one. Or could I? Have I?
        Sure I have. I’ve abandoned friends and family without notice, simply because the relationship wasn’t easy or convenient for me anymore. The dear friend who discovered my emotional immaturity before I did, did so the hard way. I hurt her, but she was kind enough, and determined enough, to stick around and make me see how my self-absorption affects the people I love, the people who love me. Of course Carol could feel compassion for a man in turmoil; she leaves herself - her hang-ups, her judgments - out of the equation, and cares only for the person in need.
        The next day, on the way out of Calgary, Toby pulled his bike off the road and said we needed to talk before continuing our travels. As usual, I was relieved he had taken the reigns. “I think you are a young soul,” he said. Aw, shit. It wasn’t any easier to hear the second time around. I started to protest, but my reasoning rang false. The main problem Toby was having - why he had snapped at me a few times in the past week - is that I often won’t make my own decisions. When it’s a tough call, I shift the onus to him. “This is your dream,” he said, “to cycle across your country. It’s not mine. I’m here as a sort of mental exercise, and because I told you I would come. But you have to take charge.”
        Later, on the telephone with my dear friend, she asked me why I was undertaking this bike tour. “This is something crazy people do, Chelsea!” she laughed. “You need to think about what you want to get out of this, what this means in terms of who you are.” And she’s right. Though I don’t know the answer yet, for the first time I can hear the question.