Between Vern and Alex by Harrison Kim

AUGUST 2021:

“My will is your authority,” says Vern, the bishop’s mitre wearing business dealer.  His blue veined cheeks turn red, then purple, as he laughs until the tears flow, rocking back and forth, holding his sides in front of red-bearded, yellow-toothed twenty-seven-year-old Alex as they sit making connections and trades in the rusted bus that is Vern’s hoarder home.   “Hold the mirror higher,” Vern commands, and Alex does.  He sees the red capillaries bulge under Vern’s eyes.  “Where did you get this holy hat?” the dealer asks.

“In the church,” says young Alex.  “It was in some kinda dressing room for the head honcho.”

He’d darted into the tiny incense simmering alcove, grabbed the mitre, then sped out of the cathedral holding the official hat across his chest and no-one stopped him because of his confidence.  As he told Vern “also my meth run made me invisible, man, like I’m a sinner and I shouldn’t be there in the house of the lord.”

“I asked for the mace from the legislature,” Vern says “Not the bishop’s mitre. Your mission was not religious in nature.”  His grin turns to what is meant to be a dark humour frown.

“I held the mace” says Alex, “but I could not take it.”

It was too heavy, all the weight of history, the jewels, the fact it rested locked in an electronically sealed glass box.

“You hallucinated,” says Vern.  “You were nowhere near that mace.”

“What can you give me for the hat?” Alex asks.

“You have moxie,” says Vern.  “You certainly have gall,” he continues to laugh.  “A bishop’s mitre, was that luck?”

“It was God, man,” says Alex.  “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have let me take it.”

“I like this hat,” Vern says. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks..”

“Where’s the tenderness?” Alex asks.  “The love between me and you.”

“I can give a hundred twenty,” Vern says. “Just for my friend Alex my man,” as he wipes his eyes and pops a pain pill.

EARLIER:

Vern and Alex practiced throwing knives outside Alex’s tent in Beacon Hill Park, where the city allowed homeless people to camp through the ongoing covid pandemic.

“I propose a big job for you,” Vern said.

He spun his knife in the air, and it arched up then fell and stuck in the ground.

“Your mission is to steal the ceremonial mace from the legislature building.”

The week before Alex stole the Queen’s portrait out of a gift shop and sold it to Vern for fifty bucks.

“Why the mace?”

Vern grinned, talked in singsong rap.  “For the buzz.  For more jib.  For me.  Whatever you can get out of there once you’re in.”  He picked his blade up, wiped it across his knee, and chuckled.  “I’m the King and I need the official rod of power.  I got no Queen so you can be my Jack.”

Alex threw his knife at an oak tree.  The handle bounced off the bark.

“I can never tell if you’re bullshitting me or not,” Alex said.

Yet he admired his dealer for honesty, and this was demonstrated as Vern said “Bullshsit is my strength.  Keep em guessing.  I need that mace, man.”

All night as he paced the park Alex mused in thought rhythms about the jewel encrusted ornament spinning through the air like Vern’s knife and falling through Alex’s arms to stick upright and golden in the soaking wet ground.

“To obtain the power rod, that symbolic instrument of order in the provincial legislature, one requires skill and stealth but most of all confidence, for what is a mission without it?” 

He thought of Vern, a man of strategy, a stocky Percocet-stoned dealer a crazy chess master who made the riskiest moves. 

“There’s no luck in chess,” Vern told everyone.

He said God blessed his dealing and that faith-based strategy made him stand out from the others, plus his “sudden turns of mood.” 

“These two opposites live in me,” Vern chortled, and showed Alex the tattoos on the backs of his calves, one a gaping, red-veined demon from the King Crimson album “21st Century Schizoid Man,” and the other a smiling cat from the inside cover of the same ancient album.

Alex revealed to Vern his own tattoo, which read in blocky blue writing “Hate” across one fist and “Love” along the other, “I did it myself,” Alex said.

“A cliché,” Vern said. “A waste of abilities.”

He talked business.  “For the mace, I will reward you well.  When I obtain that rod, I will have the power. I will pluck the jewels off the top and sell them one by one, back to the pimps, man,” as he burst out in another peal of uncontrollable mirth.

Alex himself held no craving for objects.  He thieved at his dealer’s whim:  High end clothes and bicycles, world globes, rotary phones, jade sculptures of mermaids.

 His brain craved the trumpeting boogaloo of meth’s rush and stimulation of the central nervous system. Under the covers of his tent, he smoked in the dependence of his adulthood, and came to rely on the confidence and will of Vern.

“To each according to their needs,” Alex said to himself, “and your need, Alex, is hotter than a liquid coke furnace maw.”

Alex burned all his mom’s gifted money up on alcohol and drugs.  Those funds weren’t enough, not by a long sum. Being Vern’s soldier helped him through these difficult economic times.

In preparation for his legislature mission, Alex dressed up in newish clothes from donations at the charity warming tent near the edge of the park.  He staggered around yawning, couldn’t stop his open mouth.  He stood in the park washroom, jammed donated deodorant under his armpits, brushed his teeth with donated toothpaste, shaved his neck with a donated razor.  He walked the few blocks to the legislature, then stood before the tour guide stand and registered to enter for the parliamentary excursion.

“You need to wear a mask do you have a mask? asked the smiling black-haired guide, and she handed him one anyway.

Alex and three others followed the lady’s blue suit.  Her voice related history stories that echoed between the stone walls.  The past sounded all mixed up to his blitzed-over mind.  He gazed around at the plaques and tapestries, they swirled as he turned, he dug his knuckles into his eyes and thought “it’s winging it that gets you somewhere, either crashed and burned or victorious,” and he winged it, “I’ve gotta wake up,” he said, breaking off from the group and standing back near a pillar.  He timed his act fast, because every light appeared like a camera, every gleam seemed to possess the eye of authority.

The mace lay beneath a glass case, in the rotunda, all gold with the sharp maple leaf at its tip.  Alex bent towards it.

“I felt the mace I touched it but I couldn’t pull it out of its casket,” Alex told Vern later.

“I felt its power, my hands went right through the box.”

He sensed the space between the mace and his hands, ten fingers resting on the casket of the mace, then melting to the inside and clutching that symbol of order, hands vanishing right through the glass, but he couldn’t lift..

“You didn’t have the confidence,” said Vern.  “I bet you weren’t even in the building.”

“No,” said Alex.  “When I touch a thing, I feel its vibes.  When I grabbed the mace, I knew the vibes of all the dead ones who ever carried it.  All the ghosts,” he told Vern “I couldn’t hold the force, man,” meaning all the hands powering up to the jewel encrusted sceptre for three hundred fifty years, from their stormed and ravaged castles, all the wars and intrigue,

Then he let the mace go, and winged off down the hall, through an open office door.  A pouch of tobacco caught his eye on the edge of a messy desk, and he grabbed it, “for Indigenous ceremonial purposes,” the label said.

No-one noticed Alex in the legislature, no-one chased him for the stolen tobacco pouch “and I never set the alarm off in the mace casket,” Alex mused, “it was a miracle,” and that miracle followed him as he humped his way up the street a few blocks to the serendipitously open door of the cathedral, where he darted in and grabbed the bishop’s mitre from an open closet.

LATER…..

Alex and Vern smoked the ceremonial tobacco. “It’s nice and strong,” Vern said.  “Manifest the strength of the earth any way you can,” and he grinned through his yellow teeth as he took a giant puff.

“What are you?” said Alex, “Are you Mexican?”

The tobacco scent drifted in the bus, where the bishop’s mitre sat dangling from a pair of old bicycle handlebars.

“I’m everything and everyone,” Vern rapped.   “I’m Mexican and Caucasian, Armenian and Canadian.”

“You could be my friend,” said Alex, for in that moment he smelt the smoke relationship between them, captivated by its swirl, fuelled by elation that he completed his mission and would soon be rewarded.

“I could be,” said Vern, and rolled with laughter again, pointed his finger at the mitre like an emperor and uttered “I absolve your sins, Alex my man.”

Alex bowed, though he was already on his knees.

“That mitre is god’s joke” Vern replied, “and here’s also a beautiful reward,” as he passed Alex the agreed-upon amount of cash, then set the bishop’s hat under a blue beach towel near his rotary phone collection.

“Vern always follows through,” Alex said to himself as he loped off towards the park to find some crystal.  

“Good fortune smiles on an invisible man,” he thought.

He found it supernatural, to outwit God by being no-one. 

Tonight, he planned to show the world he existed.  He would slam flame into himself.  He would light a fire in the world, kindled by the burning of his heart.                                                                                     

ALEX DANCES IN THE PARK:

The crystal melted under the heat beneath the glass, back into its molten state.   Alex leaned into the high, beneath the mighty oak and his tent.   He felt his arms and legs ignite as exploding fuel howled through his blood, a lava gusher streamed out the top of his head, carrying the power, pushing it heavenward, in a massive plume rising beyond the branches.

Alex stood, staggered outside the tent and threw about the contents of his stored can of gasoline.  He soaked his tent and stepped back, breathing in the fumes.  He threw a match, closed his eyes and perceived red, the glow of the wild flame, the heart of its power.  Hot wind blew into him, and he knew the spirit in the heat.  He took a few steps forward, advanced towards the blaze.  “I am the authority,” he called.

He lost himself in everything except that heat, the burning inside and outside him, prime moments of strength and certainty.  He stepped further, into the flames.

Strong arms grabbed, pulled him away, then held tight with force and will.  Vern’s commanding voice yelled “Get back from there!.”

Alex grabbed his dominator’s huge shoulders and danced.  The two waltzed around the burning tent together while approaching sirens sounded.  Alex tried to pull Vern into the fire, but the wide-backed bull shouldered muscle man did not yield.  With the strength of the crystal, Alex broke free, threw Vern hard against the same Oak his knife bounced off that morning.  But the immolation impulse had passed, and Alex merely danced round and round the flaming pyre of his possessions while Vern heaved himself back up.

AT THE BREAK OF DAY:

Vern sits in his rusted bus, in the driver’s seat, wearing the bishop’s mitre. 

“I did the righteous thing,” he thinks.  “I saved a man’s life last night.”

He feels high thinking about it, and the hat sits well, with some slight adjustment to the headband.

“It’s easier to do bad than good,” Vern writes in his large blue notebook of records.  “Tonight, I did good.  I could be a substance abuse counsellor.”  He lifts his head, then writes again. “Alex was strong.  That crystal makes a man strong.”

He checks the backs of his bare ankles to examine first the tortured tattooed face of the 21st Century Schizoid man, then the smiling cat on the other leg.  He thinks about listening to addicts talk about their troubles.  He remembers Alex dancing.

“Dancing brings us back to life,” he concludes.

He takes off the bishop’s hat and looks inside.  He’s satisfied but disappointed that there’s no jewels.

He reaches over to touch the piled items in his van, the high-end bicycle gears, the gortex raincoats, carved totem poles from a gift shop, the cuckoo clock, a genuine ship’s lamp made completely out of wood. The shade over the top of that lamp is a fine chocolate-coloured bark.  It would’ve taken weeks to construct.

Vern begins to chuckle. 

He hears a pounding at his van door, opens it and there’s Alex wrapped in a tattered silver survivor blanket.

“I’ve got nowhere to go,” Alex pleads.  “I’ve got some itches.”

He’s already scratching at his arms.

“Come on in,” Vern says.  “Your itching is the love between me and you.”

“Thanks, bro,” Alex tells him. 

“Tomorrow, I’ll send you out again for the mace,” Vern grins.

“Oh no, man,” says Alex.

“Something’s got to move you,” says Vern, “besides the crystal.”

“Last night I was alive inside the fire,” says Alex.

Vern shrugs.  “Too much heat for any man.  You need some goals, amigo.”

They sit in the bus and roll some marijuana cigarettes and ceremonial tobacco. After some time, they notice the light from the rising sun shimmer out of the sea that lies across the parking lot. 

“I’ve got a million-dollar view” says Vern.

“This is the best,” Alex agrees.

“It doesn’t get any better,” says Vern.

Alex nods. 

Vern grins and pops his morning pain pill.

The sun’s rays start flickering in the bus window.

“Here comes the warmth,” Vern says, “we’ve been missing since last night.”

He stands and takes the bishop’s mitre, carries it over to Alex, places it over the young man’s head.

“Time for you to wear the crown,” he says. 

“With this up top,” Alex laughs, “I’ll never need to get high again.”

“Alex shines like a crystal with the sun on his face,” Vern states.

“I am the crystal,” says Alex.

Vern’s happy with the glint.  It goes well with his own reflection in the bus mirror.

He raises his hands and lowers them onto Alex’s shoulders.

“Paying respects,” Vern says, “At the coronation of a Queen.”

Harrison Kim

Pofka, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons – A gold bejewelled mace lyingon a grey cushion.