About my Friend Buck…

No plumbing, no water, no electricity: t'was the slums of Jamieson Avenue. Dark and cold nights. Buck could tell you all about them with two blue trees, an old run down red barn for a house, and five feet of white white snow in his eyes. And the night wagon: the poop truck. It tottered by late every night to pick up every household's glittering toilet treasures. But the kids in the neighborhoods made proper nuisances of themselves. Before the truck arrived, they tied the poop buckets together; when the poop guy picked one of them up, it tipped over every other pot of gold on the street.

Buck likes talking about the past, the forties and fifties mainly: Saltwater Willy unloading freights of oranges. And the Eskimo; he lived behind the hotel in a nook heated by a pipe. He threw rocks through windows on Water Street once a year so he'd have a place to stay for the winter: jail. His friends called him Tonto; everyone else just called him a bum. He was Buck's friend. Buck gave him a plaid jacket to help him get through some of those colder nights on the street before Her Majesty's Penitentiary intervened.

And the regatta: the rowers, the CLB Band, the Greasy Pig. Players greased a pig and tried to catch it. Yeah I know; it's cruel. Thankfully they don't play this game anymore.

"I was a real nuisance," Buck said. Unlike Tonto, he smashed out windows on Prescott Street just for something to do. But he's an intelligent man. He knows that a lot of us as adolescents behaved in a manner that would embarrass us later. But with the reason and wisdom obtained with moving ahead, looking back you can acknowledge how young you were. And …

The past sits as nakedly and as blackly in his mind as the black crow in the naked tree outside the front window. Buck, he dreams. He remembers the dreams he lived. Nostalgia: all that was once real seems like sheer fantasy now. He rides his memories like all of the tiny gold fairies that ride the autumn wind on falling leaves. The seasons change so quickly. But the past stays the same. He gets to the future by staying in the past. He stays with the happy things, the sad things; the nuisance things like pickin' fights with American servicemen from Fort Pepperell next to Quidi Vidi lake way back in the nineteen fifties. He still remembers to this day. And he has many such stories. But he still remembers his mother's stories as well as his own. His mother's two sisters locked their baby sister in the shed to stop her from following them. They forgot about her and left her there for hours. Her mother started asking questions: Where is she? You can only imagine the panic. Baby sister had psychiatric problems for the rest of her life. She died of pneumonia in the asylum some years later. They left the windows open all night, even in the middle of winter, to let out those foul hospital smells. When did human dignity become a basic human right?

Buck's brother died of pneumonia too. - Only two years old, in the middle of a freezing cold winter in St. John's. No heat, no electricity, very little plumbing: Pneumonia. Yeah. Buck remembers the poverty. Never expect much for Christmas, you might get one gift. He sighed with the smirk of unchanging history backing him; "They never had no money back then." Buck had four brothers besides the one who died. Benny, Matthew, Dean and Robbie. Robbie had a paralyzed arm. His mother took him out of school because all of the kids treated him badly. They made fun of him. And Buck, he just never wanted to go; but he could still read like the proper shut-in scholar. School just made him sneak out through the bathroom window, and then he'd go gather bottles. They fetched a penny each. Five bottles: five pennies. Five pennies got him into a movie. The nickel theatre crowned the top of Garrison Hill, and looked down on the Majestic on Duckworth. But no one called it The Majestic back then; they just called it the bug in honour of the icky armies of earwigs seen marching about the premises. And those stripe-backed carpenters that probably aren't even carpenters. Forty years of being too sick and too self-conscious to go anywhere left Buck reading books and watching TV. But this didn't harm him too much. He had a sharp mind. He taught himself things that many of us on the outside could never begin to understand: Independence and courage and how to put your pants on with a stick.

He can't move his neck. Arthritis has left his head permanently propped forward. It's useless for him to try to get comfortable because he can't get comfortable, and the cushioning of a pillow is hardly helpful. He can pile them under his head, but he's still so stiff he can't relax. With that, and all that stuff he's got on his mind, how can he possibly rest? He drinks a glass of wine to help him sleep. He can't bend his body to kneel or keel or crouch. So in all of his painful innocent clumsiness, whenever he knocked down supper, he swept all of the food into a dustpan and pulled it straight up and ate it. How independent he is even with the severity of his condition. His secret: take your time. "When I rush I get slower, see." He says.

Given Buck's bad sleeping habits and strange diet, and all of his pain, it's obvious he needs regular check-ups. But he hates it when the community health nurse comes over, not because she pokes him full of holes although he's not fussy on that, either; he's ashamed of the way he looks and fears others will be ashamed of him, too. The fewer people he encounters, the better. But then he disguises the insecurity of this truth joking, "I'll be anemic when she's done." She was disappointed she couldn't get any blood out of him. That only meant that yet another more experienced intruder would have to come over and poke him full of more holes.

He tells me I'm the nicest person he's ever met; but I'm the only person he's ever met. He tells me I'm the best friend he ever had. It crushes me that he has to pay for his friends. I'm his homecare worker. How thrown away these people are. He throws himself away. He doesn't want to make friends. He doesn't want to see people. He didn't go anywhere for forty years. He's defective and nobody would ever want to be his friend. He says, "It turns their stomach to look at me." Simply because his fingers and toes are cramped and crooked. I glanced at him with my weird face looking as weird as ever. And he thinks he's stomach turning. "Sure everybody is different and nobody's perfect," I said. Suddenly I felt like Queen cliché. But free the spirit of elephants wading through swamp grass, and let princess truth ride upon their backs. And read the storybook of little ballerinas in tutus dancing Juliet, and let Queen self-esteem dance with them. Everybody really is different. Nobody really is perfect. Everybody has different health problems and personal problems. He shouldn't look down on himself. If low self-esteem is religion, then even God is stomach turning.

Elaine 06