“You again,” Diezl smirked. “Living dangerously.”
“I’m looking for some action,” I said, and then immediately worried that he might think I was hitting on him.
“You better come with me then.” He picked up his skateboard and we walked down an alley, past several of those slightly-fancier-than-average Vancouver Specials. Special Vancouver Specials. From the sixties to the mideighties, these boxy beauties were filling up neighborhoods, until they were considered an eyesore. This isn’t a very old neighborhood, at least from a colonial perspective. If you check Wikipedia, that’s where the history starts — when the first colonizers arrived in the 1800s. Henry Cambie was an engineer for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The land was given to the CPR by the government, which is funny, because it wasn’t theirs to give. It was xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territory. Forest and salmon streams. Some people call that untamed wilderness, and some people call it home. Diezl stopped in front of a boarded-up rancher. He put a finger to his lips and we snuck into the backyard through a space between the tall construction barriers.
“You’re not a cop, right?” he whispered.
“Uh, SkyTrain police.” My punch lines always come one second too late. He laughed anyway. That was nice. Ben only laughs at his own jokes.
This place must not have been empty too long — the backyard was clean, grass mowed. Developers are supposed to keep the acquired houses tidy, but they don’t. Diezl put his backpack on the ground and pulled out some spray cans.
“Hey, you aren’t Fukit, are you?” I asked. “Kitten, perhaps? With asterisks?”
“They’re South Cam,” he said with a sneer that suggested more of a friendly rivalry than any actual distaste. “This is Langara, baby.” He deftly outlined a juicy-looking Diezl on the back wall, between two boarded-up windows. “I’ve never done this with somebody. You want to fill it in?”
“I’ll fuck it up,” I squeaked, and Diezl shushed me as a light went on next door.
We squeezed up next to the house and crouched low beside the bushes, my heart beating like crazy.
“Nah,” he whispered, “go ahead.”
We waited for the light to go out — “Probably just the bathroom,” Diezl said — and he handed me a can. Purple, maybe — it was hard to tell in the dark. I held my breath and got to work while Diezl supervised.
“What room do you think is on the other side of this wall?” I asked.
“Bedroom, probs,” he said.
“Ever go inside?” I cringed as a little paint dripped outside the lines.
“Nah. Hold the can farther away and it won’t drip.”
I wanted to tell him that I’d been planning to break into a dead house at the end of my block. Maybe invite him along. But I concentrated on spraying in the lines instead.
Afterward, Diezl offered to walk me home, but I wasn’t sure he should know where I live. So we just walked around. Strange to see what affordable housing used to look like. Even the roads are sprawling, with big grassy boulevards. It’s kind of obscene, all that space.
Our place is quiet when I let myself in, except for the hum of the fridge. I pull a bag of blueberries out of the freezer and dump them and some protein powder into a Magic Bullet and fire it up. This wakes Ben, and he waves groggily on his way to the bathroom.
Even a smoothie is hard to get down; I can’t get the smell of that house out of my mind. Diezl’s smell. What am I going to do with that kid? Call the cops, so they can return him to his dad? The first night we broke into an abandoned house together — a little hobbit house that I’d watched the family move out of three days before — he asked about my lip. Then he told me about his dad. Then we compared cuts and bruises.
“You’ve got a lot more than me,” I said.
He shrugged. “Some of them are from skateboarding.”
The hobbit house still had some life breath; it felt like any minute someone would come down the stairs and demand to know where all the furniture went. The carpet was still clean, though it smelled a little like cat piss. Wires poked out of the walls from where the fixtures had been.
Diezl dumped his spray cans on the floor. “Ready?”
I threw some devil horns, and then realized kids probably don’t do that anymore. “Ready.”
We propped up some flashlights and tagged the whole living room; I probably inhaled enough paint to take fifteen years off my life. I tried my hand at a tag, but it was kind of stupid. #FatLip. Who the fuck hashtags a tag? Maybe people do, who knows. It was all I could think of at the time, and it’s what brought us together. We laughed a lot at that, and Diezl said it looked good. It felt nice to believe him, but he was probably full of shit. Anyway, I was glad it was inside, so nobody would see it except for us. I joked that maybe we should move into that place, and he looked around for a long time.
When we crawled out the window into the street, it was two a.m. A security guard from the building site next door walked by, holding a coffee. At the time, that high-density heaven was nothing more than a few stories of girders, but they sure do grow up fast. Streetlights threw its skeleton profile over the hobbit house, and that was the first time I really noticed how close the condos were getting. I went back by myself a few nights later to check out our work, but a demolition crew had already ripped the place apart and widened the construction site barriers around its memorial.
What am I going to do with this kid who showed me a fresh burn on his arm yesterday, when we met up to tag the back wall of Oakridge Mall? He told me that the cops had picked him up for skateboarding and insisted on driving him home, and then his dad held him down and drove a cigarette into him.
“Do you know what burning skin smells like?” he asked. Nobody wants to hear the answer to that question, so we walked in silence. I should have hugged him, or put my arm around him or something.
Well, something has to happen now, some kind of observance. I don’t have any sage. There are a couple of tea lights and a piña colada — scented candle in the bedroom — that’ll have to do. Line them up on the coffee table and light each one. Watch the candles flicker and try to think cleansing thoughts or whatever, but instead I think about a place past Diezl’s neighborhood, deep into Marpole, called c əsnaʔəm. That’s hən q əmin əm language. People who can’t be bothered to learn the original place names given to this land call it the Great Marpole Midden. Midden means garbage pile.
This spot is an ancient xʷməθkʷəýəm village and burial site that’s at least four thousand years old. The “midden” was uncovered in 1884, around the time the first settlers arrived in the area. It contained the ancestral remains and cultural artifacts of the Coast Salish peoples. The remains were removed by two white guys, who gave them to the Natural History Museum of New Westminster, which is funny, because this wasn’t theirs to give. Another white guy found seventy-five more human skeletons in the midden, and gave them to the museum too. In 1898, these remains were destroyed in a fire. There’s more to the story, but I’ll get to that later.
Diezl and I never even got around to tagging the mall yesterday, and this was kind of a relief. I wanted to show him I was badass enough to do it, but that would have been undeniable vandalism, not like the dead spaces. A mall is a living organism — pushing shoppers through arteries like leukocytes. Of course, too many of those little white cells in the blood is a sign of disease. Not enough, and the whole system breaks down. Diezl said he wasn’t into it. He said he’d rather just hang, so we went back toward South Cambie. He always seemed to want to be in my neighborhood.