The Peacock 177

 This is where I was sitting the day before yesterday, perhaps forty-one hours ago, when Melissa came to drive me up to the big house.   This diner is deceptively big and roomy, with comfy, burgundy vinyl  upholstered booths and big formica tables.  They have a menu for Western and Chinese food.  I am amazed that this kind of diner still exists.  A classic truckstop.  The owner, I think, a slim Chinese man in his sixties, approaches us with his little notepad.  We are having Chinese today.  Carl has not stopped smiling since we left the house.  This appears to be like a holiday for him, a great liberation.

"Your story is very impressive", says Jesús to Aaron.  They are sitting together, opposed by Carl and I.  We both are looking towards the window.

"Thank you", he replies.  "And now it's your turn."

"Pardon?"

"Ya llega tu turno, Don Jesús.  Cuéntanos todo. Now it's your turn, mister Jesús.  Tell us everything."

"I don't know where to begin."

"Well, how long have you been in Canada?"

"Five years."

"How did you get here?" says Carl.

"I came as a student.  To improve my English."

"How did you find out about us?" Carl asks.!

"Father Griffin."

"But who else!" shouts Carl, laughing freely and loudly.  "But who fucking else!"

The Peacock 176

 "I was of course very worried about Jeff, though why I do not know, except I had become so habituated to his emotional maelstrom that my life suddenly felt dreadfully empty without him.  So the next couple of nights, I wandered around downtown Edinburgh looking for him in various pubs and bars.  By Sunday I accepted that he was gone, and was finally ready to enjoy my liberation from him.  It was Father's Day, so I phoned my dad to wish him a happy Father's Day.  Even though it is his ancestral city, he seemed a bit perplexed and bewildered that I should call him.  Then I did a walkabout in the city, found my way to a mall on the outskirts where in a drugstore I bought a pair of haircutting scissors, of such a fine quality that now, thirty years later, after daily use, I still have them.

"Monday morning I boarded the fast train to London, where I booked a room again at the King Henry the Eighth Hotel, where I stayed another four days, until I found cheaper accommodations nearby."

We have just reached the town, which isn't really much of a place.  Just behind the gas station is the large garage where I have parked my car.  

"Is that all?" says Carl to Aaron.

"There is a lot more, but we're about to go for lunch, so maybe we could save it for later."  We all leave the car together.  The worker, to whom I entrusted my car, has given me the okay.  He is pretty typical of small town BC guys.  Around thirty years old, slim with a potbelly, sunglasses and ballcap.  Red and green plaid mac shirt covering a black T shirt with a Def Leppard logo.  He is smoking a cigarette.

"The diner's just across the street", says Carl as I return.  So the four of us, four persons most unlikely to have been thrown together even in extraordinary circumstances, make our way to a meal of burgers and beer in this Fraser Valley backwater, now a community, now a family...

175

 "I can't really describe the experience, except that the Spirit of the Living God had descended upon me, and I was caught up in a rapture and so full of peace and bliss and joy.  I had truly entered his presence, I had truly reached the high places with Jesus Christ.  And I was loath to leave this beautiful sacred place that I had just entered into.  But leave I must, in order to return to the lower places, and the everyday duties of life, and to that tiresome and sorry waste of DNA, Jeff Sutherland.  

"But I descended the mountain, knowing that I was not going to leave that place, but that I would be living there, that this would be the reality I would be carrying with me for the rest of my life.  I wanted to share with Jeff this joy I had just discovered, to share it with the entire world.

"I returned to our shared hotel room.  It must have been around two in the afternoon.  There was Jeff, watching TV, and looking very miserable and pathetic, as always.  Then he demanded from me money, I think one hundred pounds, or perhaps five hundred.  I cannot remember, but it was a lot.  I was no longer giving him money, except for what he would really need to survive on, and nothing more.  I offered him ten.  He said a hundred.  I replied no.  He threatened to leave.  I said, go ahead and leave.   I felt calm and joyful.  I left him at the hotel and walked back to the church Old St. Paul's, which was open to the public.  I spent a half hour in the chapel, alone, and in quiet prayer.

"When I returned to the hotel, Jeff and all his possessions were gone.  Given the dreadful clutter he tended to accumulate, the place did feel now clean, pure and liberated.  I knew now, that here in Edinburgh, and for the rest of my time in Europe, that I was going to be entirely alone..."

The peacock 174

 "I really don't know how long it took me to walk there. When I am in a foreign city, time tends to either stand still, or it ceases to exist.  Everything is new.  I could have been walking for ten minutes or ten hours.  But I got there.  It is a small mountain, or a high hill, covered with heath, which is to say grass and bushes.  There are very few trees outside of Edinburgh since they were all cut down over the centuries.  I remember how strong the wind, rather cold, more like April in Vancouver than June.  But this was not Vancouver, it was Scotland, the country of my ancestry.  

"There were jackdaws flying around and cawing and playing with each other.  A jackdaw is a kind of a smallish crow, with dark gray plumage and white eyes.  Rather creepy looking.  And also there were skylarks. Till then, I had only known skylarks from my readings of English and French literature, and as I heard them singing, I could tell why they had become such birds of legend.  As I took the road climbing up Arthur's Seat, a skylark would ascend into the air, singing such a piercingly sweet song, and then it would plummet down almost to the ground, before resuming its ascent to the heavens.  And so the skylarks gave me hope and strength as I climbed the hill, knowing that I was soon to meet God again.

"I cannot remember whether or not I was exhausted from the climb, only that when I reached the peak, there was a stone cradle.  There were some loose rocks lying around.  I used twelve to build a small cairn.  Then I lay in the stone cradle, and as the wild wind swept over me so I entered into my new baptism....

The Peacock 173

 "We checked into rather a nice hotel in downtown Edinburgh.  We went for dinner, then after I went for a walk alone, near midnight, in the cemetery  below Edinburgh Castle.  I understood from my father that we had some link to Scottish aristocracy, and I wanted to affirm that sense of ancestral contact through this visit. Jeff stayed in our room drinking as there was a minibar in our room.  We already appeared to be going separate ways.  Upon arriving in Edinburgh, I went straight to a high Episcopal Church nearby, Old St. Paul's.  I was seeking support, and I was hoping to talk to one of the priests there.  but I did attend mass in the chapel where I had a beautiful sense of God's presence and grace.  I did meet a friendly woman there, and we chatted a bit.

"The next day, I was becoming fixated on the mountain Arthur's Seat, that loomed just outside the city and from my hotel room window I could see that it was probably walking distance.  I somehow knew that when I ascended Arthur's Seat, I would have entered into the High Places with Christ.  In the meantime, I walked around alone in Edinburgh, taking in the sights and the sites because there is a lot of ancient architecture in that fabled city.  The wind was very strong that day, and though it was already the middle of June, it was chilly. Plus, for all the scotch distilleries in that city, there was an oppressively sweet stench of malt in the air.

"I slowly made my way to Arthur's Seat, where I was already set to climb to the High Places..."

The Peacock 172

 "I had this ongoing ideal during this trip, that there was a particular sacred purpose in my being in Europe.  It wasn't to take care of Jeff, as I was quickly discovering, nor was it to find a publisher for my novel.  The only way I could frame it was that Jesus was calling me to the High Places with him, but that I must become very small, because the way into those High Places is very small and only the very humble can pass through.  I knew that the past three years had been very challenging to me, and with the beginning of this community, the impact of having Doug with me, including Dianne and Doreen in the work, and the daily dying to self that was required in order to do well with people living in very compromised circumstances.... And now I was arriving in Edinburgh, the city of my paternal ancestry with this lost, addicted, psychopathic failed rock star with an agenda for me, a diagnosis of AIDS and an interest in nothing and no one but his own paltry little self...

"I was learning humility, and I was learning it in spades.  I also knew, upon arriving in Edinburgh, that this touching base with a city of my ancestry, would also somehow conduct me to that tiny little doorway that was going to lead me to the High Places with Jesus..."

The Peacock 171

 

"After a sumptuous breakfast in the hotel, we wandered around for a while and explored the Portobello Market, a huge outdoor Saturday market that stretched for many blocks.  We lost each other there, but I think more to the point, Jeff intentionally lost me there.  He must have found travelling with a dedicated Christian while he was determined to carry on with a totally useless and self destructive life, a little bit, shall we say, embarrassing?  I was tired, anyway, went for a wander on my own, and walked some more in Hyde Park. I did have to go back to sleep, and was woken up at night by Jeff bringing in yet another pathetic idiot he had picked up at Champions.  This time they got a room together, and even though he insisted later that they hadn't had sex, I was neither jealous, nor did I care, nor did I particularly  believe him.  He could see he was rapidly losing his power over me.

"The next day was more of the same, but he came back to the hotel alone.  Then the following day, we were befriended by a pretty young Swedish couple, both musicians, so they wanted to talk music and the whole biz with Jeff.  I rather liked them, found them refreshingly sane, and a real relief after several days with that waste of DNA.  They came back to visit us for a while in our hotel room, where Jeff played them the demo tape for his band.  They damned it with slightly less than faint praise, suggesting that it sounded like a demo.  But we were getting rather noisy, and I was concerned about Jeff getting us into real trouble, so, I went to the front desk and talked to the manager, who came to our room to toss out our new friends, after giving Jeff quite the stern scolding.

"That was the same day when in the morning, we went to Scotland Yard precinct in Highgate in North London, where Jeff was interviewed by police about the murder of his former lover, Jim.  The famous cemetery, where Karl Marx and other luminaries were buried, was nearby, so I went for a visit and wandered among the tall grass from headstone to headstone to monument.

"After two more days of coping with the imbecil, we took a fast train, a four hour trip, up to Edinburgh in Scotland.  He didn't want me to go with him, but I insisted, and I am sure now that he had gone there to buy drugs with money I had given him to survive on.  Then things got really interesting..."