I Saw THREE SHIPS
WEST END STORIES
Bill Richardson
Talonbooks
For Jean McKay, writer, musician, self-acknowledged ship counter
I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons.
…
Vivas to those who have fail’d!
—WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF MYSELF,” SECTION 18 (1855)
Contents
FA, LA, LA, LA, LA
Of the thirty-two addresses where I’ve received mail in the last forty years – I’m restless, I move – twenty-four have been in Vancouver, most in the West End. That’s a downtown neighbourhood. Start walking west from any given point, and you’ll soon come to the modified forest that’s Stanley Park. Head either north – that’s towards the mountains – or south, and you’ll get to salt water, to Coal Harbour or English Bay. Go east to get to the city’s business district. Shopping galore. Whee.
West Enders are apartment dwellers. A few of the big old Edwardian piles that were usual before the war remain, but most of the housing stock is multi-family: three-storey wood-frame walk-ups or mid-rise concrete buildings or high-rise towers with spectacular views from their upper reaches. In the sixties, the West End was a swinger’s paradise, the place to be if you wanted to visit an exciting club or rock a bikini or flip your hair in a convertible. By the time I arrived, in the fall of 1978, neighbourhood demographics favoured old people, queer people, and sex-trade workers. It was heaven.
Condos were rare. We had fun in cheap rented quarters. In the spring of ’79, I secured a small apartment – my fourth in less than a year – in the Elcho, on Davie Street, a pebble toss from the fabled playground of the Garden Baths. I paid $165 a month for a funky one-bedroom above a bakery and a television repair joint and an antique store where I bought the embroidered kimono I used to wear when I went out dancing. The Gandy! The Luv-A-Fair! The Shaggy Horse! The Elcho was among the first to fall when the present long wave of demolition and construction began. The kimono suffered the fate of all such garments when carelessly laundered with beer and sweat. All known photos have been destroyed.
Sometime after the end of the Elcho and before the Garden Baths burned to the ground – sayonara, Sodom! – queer became more brandable than transgressive. The West End, especially Davie between Burrard and Jervis, roughly speaking, was transformed into Davie Village, a city-sanctioned LGBTQ+ theme park, with signage and banners and hashtags and pedestrian crossings painted like rainbows. This was social progress, no doubt, even though I sometimes hanker after the renegade days when it felt like you were violating community standards just by getting up in the morning and going out into the world and being yourself.
Cultures change and economies change; you’d need to be my age (b. 1955) or older to remember a $165 apartment. Cities and their neighbourhoods change. It’s what they do best. When Vancouver’s creative class began to migrate east and congregate in the neighbourhoods proximate to Commercial Drive, drawn by the lights of the trendsetting lesbians who went there first, the cool kids followed. While young queers remain a visible presence in the downtown precincts, they don’t require the ghetto reassurances we oldsters found and cultivated in the years right after Stonewall. The imperative to claim queer space, physical space, while vital, is maybe now less urgent, more dilute. The Village feels – this is wholly subjective and no doubt many would dispute this – less evolving than historic; less needful, perhaps, than was once so.
This shift, if that’s what it is, is morally neutral. I don’t judge it, nor do I lament it. What would be the point? I continue to live in the West End. I don’t feel like a stranger here, despite the now-and-again twinge of dislocation that comes when old, familiar streetscapes are altered when buildings one has known for decades are bulldozed and tower after tower goes up, all built on podiums of commercial space no small independent businesses or young entrepreneurs can afford. The past is far too precious to waste on something as cheap as nostalgia, but I confess I have it in me to regret – “mourn” would be overstating the case – the loss of a society that sufficiently and collectively values a little apartment over an antique store and bakery and TV repair shop enough that it makes the necessary allowances to accommodate such a possibility. I see my own ghost, young and on the make and trailing a ridiculous kimono, whenever I pass by where the Elcho was, ditto the Garden Baths. The cockroaches, it’s true, I could have done without. Ditto the crabs.
The stories in this book are, by and large, West End stories. “Sin Error Pining” is set in Brandon, Manitoba, but is informed by a West End past; “Snow on Snow on Snow on Snow” is more Gastown / Downtown Eastside, but intersects the West End. All the stories – the earliest, “With Man to Dwell,” is from 1996 and the most recent, “Since We’ve No Place to Go,” is from 2014 – were written at Christmastime for The Georgia Straight or Reader’s Digest or for CBC Radio.
The stories fit the season of their writing in that they respect mystery. They’re about secular people who undergo epiphanic moments of revelation or transcendence, experiences for which faith offers a custom-built cabinet with lots of tidy drawers, but that leave the religiously unpersuaded feeling like the fuselage has depressurized and they’re gasping for breath, praying to forces unnamed for the mask to fall. Otherwise, Christmas in these pages is mostly an environmental condition, a prop; it would be a mistake to think of this as a collection of “Christmas stories.” “Christmas stories” suggests something wholesome and family-friendly. Whatever else these stories might be, wholesome they ain’t. I hope not, anyway; if they’re wholesome, I’ve failed.
These are reworkings of shorter pieces. I wrote the originals quickly, then