Waiting for an Epiphany

It’s happened to me twice. Maybe it happened to you too?

Even though you know why you are sitting in a doctor’s office the actual diagnose sets upon you like a niacin rush. From the casing on your veins, from inside your head to the skin and face. You might wonder if you’ll lie down or if it’s important to use your super powers to turn back time.

The first time it happened to me was decades ago between Christmas and New Years. I was seventeen-year-old punk returned from UK not able to live with my family because I had terrible temper tantrums. I couldn’t get along.

An egg-shaped lump between my clavicle and my neck was all it took for everybody to turn their focus back on me. I’d had a biopsy and here we were mother and me to hear the results.

Wait for it, because a doctor always hesitates before the sentence: “You have cancer.

Hodgkin’s, stage three we found out after four months of further diagnosis. Then there was three months of radiation treatment and “Bam” just like that my bad moods turned into PTSD. I was a fucked up street kid complete with addictions and acting out. I was a striper and I remember standing in a medium of a roadway hooking, bad life-threatening decisions. I made it through all that, many didn’t but I did.

The second time was light years later. Because of an undiagnosed shortness of breath I was having tests again and was passed up the line to have a chat with another doctor. We talked for 30 minutes before I realized he was surgeon and planning to rebuild my radiation damages heart within the week. I have new parts. Like Blade Runner I have a serial number: 86260580. There are many things about a mechanical aorta the appeal to my punk side: I eat rat poison, I have a huge scar, I'm part mechanical and a little fake. There is a little tapping sound I can always hear. I’m a survivor, what even that means.

Quoc Te

There was a bar in the basement below where the bank machine is on Kensington Ave. The Quoc Te was William’s bar. William was Vietnamese. His stories of how he got here were harrowing: boats, jungles, separation and abuse. He was companionate and accommodating for the down and out lonely hearts who found their way there. He arrived without his family who he talked about and opened the The Quoc Te. The dark basement room was painted matt black. There was smoky mirrored tile on the wall behind the bottles and not many lights. The bar itself was so high I could rest my elbows on it when standing and had 5 or 6 high stools, usually pushed aside so the crowd could place their orders. There was a pool table.

William was always nice to me. I was a forlorn, strung out, druggie. I was habitually shitfaced. I was often bullied and pissed folk off. I didn’t have any money and optimistic guys paid for all my drinks. I was a mooch but I think most folks could sense desperation and that I didn’t fit with the usual.

William gave me food he made for himself and let me sit even though I didn’t have money to drink. He took pity and talked to me and I’d listen in on conversations with the repetitive and dull bullies who drank there.

There were rumours of him jumping over the bar with a baseball bat, or numb-chucks or a kitchen knife and quelling whatever disruption might threaten his lively hood. A five foot nothing dynamo who’d already proven he’d endure.

Now he owns of The Temp, the Red door on Spadina and The Green Door on Bloor where my underage son can get served. All the places make pad-thai, and spring rolls like what William made for himself and shared with me.

Now the place is a booze-can, despised in KM not because its illegal there’s lots of illegal stuff happening here but because they let the patrons out at 8:30 in the morning shitfaced, sometimes bloody, sometimes naked-ish. Wet from spilling drinks on themselves.

Anyone can tell if there are still folks inside the bar, queuing taxis whisk drunken partiers away.