How Happy to Be Read Free Page B

honourable: I pretend there’s a neo-Nazi combat boot kicking me in the gut.
    The convulsions die down. I lean against the bathroom door and wipe my mouth with toilet paper, wait for the heart to stop boxing in my chest. Am I dying? I think, pulling a Southern belle, back of the hand on forehead.
    No, this is bad, but this is not what dying is like – put the hand down – because I remember my mother dying, yes I do, I can still go back that far (a smell, a date on a calendar, oh, it’s easy to go) and see her there, truly buckled and drained. That was illness of a different order. Serious. It occurs to me that seriousness must still be out there, free-floating around the universe, even sometimes touching down.

 
    T HE CAB IS CHARGING ONTO THE HIGHWAY TOWARD the city and the driver can’t get the heat to work so the inside windows are frost-streaked and the radio is blaring a dispatcher who thinks he’s a comedian: “So then the fare goes, ‘Not
Bloor
Street,
Blur
Street!’ ”
    The cab driver grips the wheel. “All day, every day, I must listen to these jokes on the radio. Not funny jokes,” shouts Mohsen, smacking the radio with a fist. No matter what time of day, if I call 1-800-TAXI, I get Mohsen and his airless cab and his fury.
    “Did you hear?” he asks, smoking and driving without his hands on the wheel. “Now you have to dial the area code. I live here eight years, just one area code for the city, one for the suburbs. Now when you’re already in the city, you dial the city code. Is stupid. Why is this happening? I will tell you why.”
    “Yes, you will.”
    “World-class city,” he says with scorn. “Mayor tell us we’re world class. I tell you what makes a city world class. Not area codes.”
    The Toronto feeling is like living in a photocopy of a real city, or a photocopy of a photocopy, since Chicago is a version of New York and we’re blurred Chicago. I’d like to know how to live in three dimensions as much as the next guy so I ask, “What’s the secret?”
    “Olympics. We must get Olympics. Good for business.”
    “Don’t you think it could be bad for the uh” – I try to conjure up a contrarian compound momlike stance – “homeless people?” Also, I love the cabbie freak-out, and expressing sympathy for the poor usually gets one. Sure enough, Mohsen is off: He works hard, eighteen-hour shifts, supports a family, came from nothing, escaped in the dead of night eight years ago. Do I know what it’s like to have my country invaded by Russians? Do I know what it’s like to have to smuggle videotapes of American movies from house to house because some totalitarian regime says
Rambo
is bad for the comrades? Do I know what a bomb sounds like metres from a baby’s nursery? Don’t talk to Mohsen about homeless people who cash abundant welfare cheques and sleep in the comfort of palatial bank-machine foyers.
    “Now, your paper. That’s a paper. Truth! Not soft on communists!”
    Grey skyline taking shape against a grey sky.
    I’m a bit drunk because Baby Baron materialized, as promised. Post-purge, I had been feeling rested and was enjoying some hard-hitting research Googling Ethan Hawke (“Ethan is a vegetarian who enjoys skiing …”). A bit bleary, maybe, but goddamn it I was okay, running over the sober mantra as I wandered aimlessly around the corridors of my computer, opening window after window of the World Wide Web, its knowledge spanning the globe so we can all share cat pictures and Ethan Hawke: dear God, grant me the serenity to get it together, the ability to know that things aren’t so bad (“Ethan is married to the talented and gorgeous Buddhist actress Uma Thurman …”), the wisdom to think that anything is possible, the ability to get up in the morning. That’s not exactly right, but when you can name the designers of Julia Roberts’s last three Oscar gowns, when you know the exact date of Frances Bean Cobain’s birth (August 18, 1992), when the trivia