A House in the Sky: A Memoir Read online

  When I said no, Rob laughed. “If you’re looking for a job, you’re looking to make money, right?” he said. “Just give it one week—one shift, even. If you hate it, you quit.”

  I walked back into the cold, having agreed to show up the following evening. He had never even asked for my résumé.

  *

  The Drink took up the corner of a city block, with a restaurant and five separate bar areas, offering forty different kinds of martinis. Chandeliers hung, lit like constellations, from the high ceilings. A hardwood dance floor occupied the center of the space, with a short stairway leading to a velvet-roped VIP area. About twenty waitresses worked at a time, all of them pretty. They wore high heels and designer dresses and carried little round drink trays coated with rubber to avoid spills. A few introduced themselves, but most hardly looked in my direction. I’d soon learn that new girls came and went all the time, some too flaky to keep drink orders straight and others not managing to pull off the right image for the club, which—as Rob reminded everyone at weekly staff meetings—was “classy-sexy.” If you looked cheap, you got sent home.

  Under Rob’s management, the Drink had become the hottest club in town—hosting an after-work happy hour for corporate Calgary, which morphed into a more glamorous and freewheeling late-night pickup scene. This was where NHL players gathered after their games, touring rock stars came after their concerts, and oil barons showed off their money. On weekends, the line to get in was five people wide and stretched around the block.

  Working from ten P.M. to two A.M. on my first night, wearing high heels, dangly gold earrings, and the nicest dress I owned, I was given a tray and some instructions on taking drink orders and printing up bills. I was then assigned a quiet section at the back of the club. For the next few hours, I shuttled chilled martinis and tumblers of rye between the bar and four or five tables, where the customers—most of them businessmen—thanked me politely and handed me their credit cards. At the end of the evening, a waitress named Kate showed me how to use the computer to cash out my tips. I had made fifty dollars in four hours, in addition to my wages, and was overjoyed. Though Jamie, who had no interest in bars, had been angry when I told him I’d taken a job as a cocktail waitress, I thought now he might at least recognize that money was money, and this money was good.

  “How’d you do?” said Kate, looking over my shoulder. Catching sight of my total, she winced. “Oh,” she said, “that’s brutal.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  *

  By my standards, I got rich working at the Drink. Showing up for my second shift, I was again handed a dead section at the back of the club, but before long, a group of garrulous stockbrokers showed up and started ordering three-hundred-dollar bottles of Cristal. I went home a few hours later with five hundred dollars in tips. Over the course of several months, I worked my way up to handling bigger sections and busier nights. I bought nice shoes and elegant cocktail dresses. On a good night I could make seven hundred dollars. On an exceptional night, I made a thousand. I kept rolls of cash stuffed in a jar in our kitchen cupboard, until there was so much of it that I started stashing the bills in the freezer. When another waitress told me that freezers were the first place burglars looked for cash, I got better about making deposits in the bank.

  I became friends with the other girls, learning how to deftly dodge drunken propositions, how to milk a good tip with some attentiveness and a smile. I was drawn to Priscilla, a legendary high earner at the Drink, who used her tip money to take long, exotic vacations. When I first met her, she’d just returned from Thailand, which seemed to me unimaginably far away. Priscilla showed me how to maintain a pack of regulars—good customers who would be sure to buy their drinks from you—by giving them VIP treatment, plopping “reserved” signs on their tables, and serving their drinks not in the usual plastic cups but in heavy glasses fetched from the bar upstairs.

  For a while, I just enjoyed the freedom that came with having money. I quit my retail job. Jamie had been picking up day labor on the city’s many construction sites, though more and more, he stayed home to be with me during my off hours. Sometimes he played a short set at an open-mike night in a café near our apartment, always to enthusiastic applause.

  He’d stopped minding that I worked at the Drink, but he never came to see me there. I’d cook us an early dinner and spend almost an hour in front of the mirror while Jamie sat in the other room reading a book or playing music. For me, getting ready for work was like getting ready to go onstage. I had a closet full of black dresses, a bucket’s worth of makeup. The whole act was easy by now: You put on your highest heels, trussed up your hair, painted your eyes and lips. Your job was not to be pretty but to be stunning, and in a way that made men want you and other women jealous, even if was just flirty playacting. Some of the girls at the Drink had cashed in a few months’ worth of tips and gotten boob jobs as a professional investment. I opted for an old waitress trick I’d learned in the changing room at the Drink, layering a push-up bra over a padded bra, which made me feel a little like I had an iron bar strapped to my chest but nonetheless served its purpose.

  After work, while some of my friends from the Drink were going to after-hours clubs, I was heading home to curl myself around Jamie as he slept. He and I had settled into a quiet routine. In the mornings we went for meandering walks along the Bow River. When he wasn’t working, we went out for expensive lunches. I found a used bookstore called the Wee Book Inn near our apartment and bought piles of paperbacks to read. For the first time in my life, I had real money in the bank, enough to fund a year at university. I’d just turned nineteen. I knew I was supposed to want a stack of textbooks and some sort of high-minded career plan, but that didn’t interest me. I figured going to university would only put me in lockstep with all the twentysomethings in suits who coursed down our street in the mornings headed to their skyscraper jobs, resurfacing at the Drink ten hours later, acting as if they were fifty years old, flopping into the leather barrel chairs, saying, “Jesus, what a shitty day. I’ll have a gimlet, straight up.”

  *

  Back at home, my mother’s latest boyfriend—a cruel man named Eddie with whom she’d been living in Red Deer—had been sent to jail for racketeering. My brothers and I agreed this was a relief. She had dumped Russell back when I was twelve, but still she gravitated toward unstable men. As a result, I’d spent most of my high school years living with my dad and Perry in a house they’d bought in Sylvan Lake. Mark had moved in with friends, while Nathaniel had stayed on with our mother. We all loved her, but we worried anytime a man got close.

  My mother was in her early forties, her dark hair not yet showing any gray. After Eddie left, I took the bus from Calgary every few weeks to have dinner with her. She’d moved into a sweet little house in Red Deer and found a good job with a Catholic social services agency as an aide in a group home for troubled teens. She’d been reading self-help books, trying to teach herself to meditate. She spoke about saving her money to travel. Her talk was filled with the language of fresh starts.

  I used to joke with Jamie that my childhood seemed tailor-made for The Jerry Springer Show—not just an episode, more like a whole season. My mom had a thing for bad men. My dad was one of the few openly gay people in town. My grandparents prayed fervently to Jesus, speaking in tongues when the occasion called for it. My brothers struggled with drugs. I, too, had issues. I often starved myself to stay thin, obsessively counting calories. I cut my food into halves and quarters and then ate half of that. After going days without a real meal, I’d snap and binge, eating everything in sight before forcing myself to vomit. This, too, was right out of the dysfunctional-family handbook.

  Still, we tried. The year Eddie was sent to jail, my father called my mother and tentatively invited her to come to Christmas. They’d softened toward each other, my parents, over years of forced communication about school schedules and which child needed new shoes. Also, Perry and my father were as s
ettled and married-like as the next couple, more so than my mother had ever been with any of her men. Slowly, she’d come to appreciate this.

  Christmas morning, Mom walked through Dad and Perry’s door, with its tinseled wreath and velvety red bow, smiling at me and my brothers, apologizing all over the place that she hadn’t been able to afford gifts. What she’d brought was a painstakingly written batch of letters, printed on pages of computer stationery with colorful Christmas lights around the borders. One for each of us in the room, including Dad and Perry. I opened my letter and read it slowly. In it, she described a few of her best memories, clear and happy moments like the two of us horsing around in front of the mirror in that basement apartment in Sylvan Lake, fluffing up our hair. She spelled out her love for me, and her hopes that I would always have good luck and great adventures. I don’t know what she put in the other letters. All I know is that every one of us was silent and a little teary.

  After that, we spent every Christmas together. We would never be a close family, exactly, but we loved one another in a certain fierce way.

  3

  Going Somewhere

  Jamie,” I said, “let’s go somewhere.” We’d brought a blanket down to the river one late-summer evening about nine months after moving to Calgary. I was tired and antsy. I had been studying the travel ads in the Sunday paper—the eight-hundred-dollar round-the-world flights, the grainy pictures of palm trees in faraway places, the package deals and flights to cities whose names I’d never heard.

  Jamie was on his back, watching the summer clouds slide through the sky. I admired the simple arc of his nose, the smoothness of his skin, the honey brown of his eyes. He was imperturbable, a puzzle to me. His ability to loiter in record stores and thrift shops, to pass time without purpose or go weeks without working, sometimes made me impatient.

  “Where do you want to go?” he said.

  “Anywhere,” I told him. “I mean it, anywhere. Let’s just plan something, go somewhere.”

  Here was what I loved about Jamie: the slow-breaking smile, the long-fingered hand that clamped affectionately onto my shoulder. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Anywhere’s good.”

  *

  The next day, I was at the Wee Book Inn, digging through old issues of National Geographic. Where I wanted to go, really, was Africa, but that hardly felt like a beginner trip. The only place I’d ever been outside of Canada was Disneyland as a kid, once with my dad and once with my mom, after her divorce settlement came through. Jamie had never left Canada. I tugged out a thick plank of magazines, slid to the floor, and started shopping for a destination.

  Jerusalem? Tibet? Berlin? The funny thing about National Geographic was that it told the same sort of elemental story every time—featuring whatever was lost or unexplored, mystical or wild. You’re here, the magazine seemed to say, and we’re there. It was not meant to be a taunt, more like a small flag planted on behalf of the stay-at-homers. Having the magazine was a gesture of respect for the world’s outer limits, its predators and prey. I see that it’s all there, it enabled you to say, and now, thank you, I’ll stay put.

  For me, it was also a provocation. There was a cover article on Bolivia and the Madidi, a small national park in the upper basin of the Amazon, where parrots flashed through mahogany trees. In another story, I found photos of white-mist waterfalls slicing into the forests of Paraguay. I unearthed an old issue I’d had as a kid, with a story about a slablike magical plateau somewhere in Venezuela called Roraima, covered in quartz crystals and drifting above the clouds. The names alone seemed delicious and made up. They ran through my mind like poetry as I walked home, erasing the blunt syllables of the place I lived, the places I came from. Madidi. Venezuela. Paraguay. The decision about where to go seemed straightforward. No city, no country, no coast in particular. Just a continent: South America.

  *

  There was a place called the Adventure Travel Company a few blocks from the Drink, where two women sat behind computers, encircled by a mini-coliseum of glossy resort brochures in racks. The cheapest plane tickets we could get from Calgary were to Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. It was now early September 2001. I reserved two seats for a trip in January, with return flights six months later, paid in cash.

  It was done, happening. The trip became our organizing principle. This was how Jamie and I started our sentences: “When we go on our trip,” or “When the trip gets closer . . .” At the secondhand bookstore, I bought a Lonely Planet guide to South America, thick as a Bible, five years old, and already thumbed-over. Jamie and I went through it page by page. We imagined ourselves pushing through tangled jungles, communing with the Quechua on our way to summiting snowy peaks beneath a blinding sun.

  We read the guidebook’s section on insects and snakes and flesh-eating flies that tunnel into your legs and pythons that dangle from trees, and we let that unsettle us. We read the section called “Dangers and Annoyances” that said we could be pickpocketed or mugged or conned into handing over all our money to an orphanage that wasn’t really an orphanage. We read the warnings about malaria and flimflam artists and highway bandits. We allowed our parents to heap on their concerns about car accidents and fatal fevers. We imagined the worst—or what, in our innocence, we thought of as the worst—because that seemed to be some necessary part of our preparation, owning up to the inherent gamble.

  *

  By the time Jamie and I left for South America on a frigid morning in January 2002, the world’s dangers were more overtly on display. Thousands of people had died on September 11. There had been anthrax scares and false alarms and people talking on television about a jihadist underworld and an axis of evil. Just before Christmas, a terrorist had boarded a plane in Paris and tried unsuccessfully to ignite his shoe. In Pakistan a few weeks later, a Wall Street Journal reporter named Daniel Pearl set off to do an interview connected to the shoe bomber’s financing. He was kidnapped and later beheaded. When it came to danger, the totally unreal had, in the span of a few months, become entirely feasible.

  Despite it all, we were going. Our plan was to drift from Venezuela into Brazil and then to Paraguay. Sitting on the tarmac in Calgary as our plane was de-iced, I tried to push away any thoughts of death and disaster. South America was not the Middle East, I told myself. It was not America, even. We’d compressed and rolled and shoved our belongings until they were dense as bricks, making room for what we saw as necessities—extra bottles of mosquito spray and sunblock, laundry soap, antifungal spray for our shoes, plus a giant squeeze bottle of ketchup and the salt and pepper packages we’d been collecting from fast-food restaurants for months.

  When I visited my grandmother before leaving, she donated a hefty jug of antibacterial gel and some Tupperware, all of which I improbably managed to fit into my pack. By way of goodbye, she offered a cheery and quick double disapproval of my travel plans and my everyday fondness for short skirts and high heels. “I hope you know you won’t be able to go down there and wear those, you know, model clothes you like to wear,” she said as I planted a kiss on her cheek.

  From his recliner in their living room, with its old piano and Grandma Jean’s collection of ceramic purple roses, my grandfather added, “I hope you know if you get yourself into trouble, we won’t have any money to get you out.”

  I let this comment float right past.

  4

  A Small Truth Affirmed

  Caracas late at night looked only a little like the jungle city I’d been imagining. Our cabdriver spoke English and pointed out landmarks. Most of the buildings were shuttered for the night. I could see big palm trees, their fronds pinwheeling heavily over the broad boulevards. The city looked sedate, leafy, exotic.

  This might have been a moment to tuck myself under the crook of Jamie’s arm or kiss his palm and say something about how alive I felt, having traversed this impossible-seeming curve of the earth with him in one day, beginning in the numbing cold of Canada and ending in the drippy heat of another hemisphere. Bu
t I didn’t do any of that. It wasn’t that sort of moment. Some part of me was scared by what we’d done.

  The next morning, we woke in a three-star hotel room, which our travel agent had booked in advance and was more expensive than any other place we’d stay. I drew back the curtains and got my first glimpse of the waking city. A massive Pepsi billboard sat outside our window. There were skyscrapers in the distance and jets flying overhead. On the street several floors below, people sat in their cars, staring blankly ahead as they waited for the stoplight to turn. It was oddly, depressingly familiar. There were no donkey carts, no parrots, no panpipers or charming old women wearing ruffled blouses and lace on their heads. Only the air felt foreign—thick and a little mossy.

  I pushed open the window and peered down. On the sidewalk, several brown-faced men in baseball caps were selling fruit out of wooden crates: piles of oranges, peaches, papayas, and several things I didn’t recognize. “Jamie, come see this,” I said.

  Looking over my shoulder, he said, “Should we go buy some?” Jamie was always hungry.

  I was remembering what the guidebook said about fruit and vegetables, how everything had to be scrubbed and peeled. I was afraid of bacteria at that point, the same way I was afraid of terrorists and bandits and being alone. I was planning to eat nothing but thoroughly cooked rice and beans all the way through South America, and to do a lot of hand-washing. Beyond that, we had our ketchup.

  “Let’s not,” I said.

  *

  Here’s a lesson we learned quickly: Your guidebook—especially when it is five years old—is at some point going to fail you. While the world’s Hiltons and Sheratons, with their breakfast buffets and Friday-night poolside mariachi bands, will probably be there for eternity, places like the Hostel Hermano and the Posada Guamanchi, in the strata where rooms rent for eight dollars a night, come and go. The doña who once fixed morning churros with sliced mango and hot coffee for guests leaves for an indefinite visit with her grandchildren. The elderly man who runs an “immaculate and friendly” guesthouse near the bus station hands it off to his son, who worries less about the spiders and roaches and the creeping shower mold and focuses on making late-night passes at all the tanned lady backpackers who, without an update in the guidebook, have yet to be directed elsewhere.