1972. THE YEAR Canada beat Russia in hockey. The year Idi Amin expelled 60,000 Gujarati Ismaelis, and the year Budden was sitting on a Liquor Board carton in the dead centre of the one-room shack he’d built in the cedar forest leading down to Wreck Beach on the UBC endowment lands peninsula. The place he called his “off-grid hunting shack.” The box contained sixteen bottles of dollar-a-bottle Baby Duck, a cheapo, oversweet Canuck bubbly made by a winery called Andrés. He’d taken over a squatter’s hut, the only one granted a non-conforming use status on that prime piece of Musqueam land confiscated by the university.
Budden came from Fernie in the Kootenay mountain country in eastern British Columbia. He was broad-shouldered, blond-haired, his eyes were like gun turrets. I’d met him six months earlier while shooting eight-ball in the Cobalt, one of a string of dead-end bars on Main Street near Hastings. Since neither of us was really out to make friends or influence people, six months had gone by in a flash, but we were still spending all our time shooting pool and drinking together.
One of Budden’s Kootenay friends turned up for a few days. Larry Arishenkoff was a Doukhobor, born into an offshoot rebel sect called the Sons of Freedom who were into pyromania and public nudity. That made him sort of a son of a son of freedom, since he’d left the sect and made his money as a faller for Crown Zellerbach. He had a Fu Manchu moustache, and was pleasant to have around, because he just drank and didn’t say much, while Budden and I did all the talking.
Budden uncoiled the wire wrapped around the neck of the Baby Duck and popped the plastic stopper.
“Still down in the mines.”
“Pretty well.”
“I made a lot of money down in that Crowsnest Coal Field. How you doin’?”
“I’m doing okay,” Larry said.
“Up against the cave wall, baby.”
“You said it.”
“I’m done with that, just moved down here. That money doesn’t come in easy, so I ain’t giving it to a landlord. I’m just sitting here doing the Wreck Beach squat for a while, maybe drift down to the Eastside, pick some fights with the city boys?” Arishenkoff smiled, and Budden continued. “I love fist-fighting, man, it’s in my blood. Fucking, boom-boom, baby. You see old peaceful looking Larry here in a brawl? You don’t want to be on the receiving end.”
While working our way through the wine, Budden explained to us some of the strange customs of the Kootenays.
“There was this guy — they called him the monk. He was this short, curly-haired motherfucker. There was something wrong about him. He laughed too loud at the wrong times and took showers three times a day. Sometimes, at parties, he would disappear for two, three hours at a time. So, one night, he stumbles through the door, and I can smell something rancid. So, I followed him next time right through Gizzard Linch’s cherry orchards, past Longacre Ravine, and into Barry Wilcox’s stables down by Lizard Creek. I creaked the door open, and ...”
He shrugged.
“There’s not a lot going on up in Fernie. We live under the curse. Bill Fernie convinced the daughter of an old Indian chief, Chief Red Eagle, to tell him where all the coal was in the Kootenays. But her mother put a hex on all the white people of Kootenay. Said we’d all finally die from fire and water. Nothing changes in Fernie; we all live under the curse.”
At some point in the middle of the black peninsular night, Budden reached down, and not one of those sixteen bottles had a drop in it and he said again: “It’s the curse.”
“Let’s go down to the water, welcome in the new day.”
We stepped outside his shack and walked the trail down to Wreck Beach. It’s a good twenty-minute hike down cedar trails, right in the middle of the rainforest. If you’re born in paradise, you tend to more or less presume that’s just the way it is, and you don’t believe people who tell you you’re lucky to be there. But, after sixteen bottles of Baby Duck and a couple of hits of white blotter, the mental walls cave in, the trees breathe, and the sky talks to you.
We continued our walk down to the ocean. A Cunard ocean liner was crossing the inlet from the city harbour in a southerly direction towards the Juan de Fuca Strait and the Pacific Ocean. The first B.C. ferry of the day was coming in from Active Pass, steaming towards Horseshoe Bay. Just as the two vessels crossed each others’ wake, the first rays of the Pacific dawn struck the water like a rose-tinted laser, lighting them up against the morning sky. Arishenkoff was quiet. He claimed he’d shaken off the fanaticism of his family, but there was something religious about him. You wouldn’t be surprised if one day, he just disappeared and moved into the forest somewhere.
Wreck Beach was all kelp, driftwood, and sand thick as clay. Everything lay ahead. We had no ambition, and our minds were bending with the curves of Burrard Inlet. After a while, Budden broke the silence.
“We used to go to these football games — my girlfriend and me. Back in Fernie. Or we’d take a bus down to Creston to watch the Creston Cougars Junior Varsity team play. I was only twelve, but she was thirteen and the whole football team hated me they were so jealous. We’d bring this thick, woollen blanket with us. I’m telling you, it gets cold already in October up there. We’d nestle down in the bleachers, pull that old blanket over the two of us, and you don’t want to hear the rest ...”
Budden never talked about love, except in the past tense.
“I loved her, and she betrayed me. So, that’s it for love. Over.”
He meant it too. Arishenkoff traced out a pattern in the sandbar with a loose piece of driftwood, creating a gutter, which immediately filled with water. We walked along the beach towards Spanish Banks, a stretch of beach where you could see the whole West End of Vancouver, curving into English Bay and Stanley Park. Arishenkoff shivered.
“This is Icepick Willie zone, folks. When the screech is wearing off and your teeth grind and your eyes frazzle like scorched eggs sunny side down.”
We turned upwards and hiked up to Fourth Avenue and stopped in at Mildred and Gloria’s Sizzlin’ Hot Mexicali-Tamale Diner for some breakfast. When you do things like this, a high, invisible wall divides you from the so-called “normal,” so the three of us decided to more or less stick it out together for the time being. Without actually putting it into words.
Later that day, we moved back to the Cobalt on the Main, and started drinking and playing pool. The game was eight-ball, and not everyone plays call pool the same way, and usually the disagreements would lead to some kind of a fight. This time, it involved a Vietnam veteran with a head like an ice cube. He and Budden were about to square off, and he pulled out a handgun, and levelled it at Budden. Budden smiled.
“Oh that. Go ahead. Pull the trigger.”
The Vietnam vet smiled.
“I just might do it, motherfucker. Send you down with the gooks.”
“Do the deed, man. Get it ON!”
Cube-head stuffed his gun into his suede Aussie jacket, spun around and walked out the rear doors into the parking lot. Like he was still thinking, do I use it or not?
A couple of weeks later, Arishenkoff contacted me by telephone.
“Budden’s dead.”
“What happened?”
“Electrocuted.”
It took me a while to get over Budden dying. But, then it dawned on me that, if he’d survived, he would’ve ended up in a bad place. And he must have known that too. So instead, right up to the day he died, he remained whole, unified, sexual, violent, natural, animalistic. And I’d chosen to stick around. I wasn’t sure why. Probably just that the other part could wait, I’d get there sooner or later.