A Poem About Mike Grace, On The Occasion Of His Actual Death

Last week Peter Grace called to tell me that Mike Grace died. Can this be true? I am at the airport thinking. He who has stepped out in front of the beast so many times before, waving a red scrap? His famous garage collapse and coma that made us all quit smoking? Then next time I see him is at a hoopla and a celebration in his honour in Vancouver and it is a Holy Cross Grade Twelve basement party, crowded and loud and all the same people are there, I had not thought life had done so many, and it’s like Mike Grace has spun some kind of Spanish alchemy to halt and reverse the relentless, snorting charge of time itself. I had styled him so adept at dodging the bull it seemed impossible now to believe him gone. To accept his departure as I walk onto a plane to Paris.

A rival poet, some better poet than I, says that we never mourn the dead; they have no use for our tears and agitation. Rather, we mourn the living in whose lives the dead have left what Vallejo calls ‘a bottomless emptiness.’ I mourn for Joan; for Lindsay and Matthew; mourn for his siblings and friends … and of course chiefly mourn for myself, because that is the kind of self-centred poem-writer I aspire to be. I want my friend to live. At my convenience. I want to come to town and call him up and go out for lunch with him and Joan, and have a couple drinks and a lot of laughs. I want to drive him over to the 8th Street Dub for a teen-burger combo and listen to his florentine stories of corporate intrigue and avarice. I’m selfish like that.

Because Mike Grace was a good friend and we shared many adventures in our youth. As Antony says of Caesar: “He was my friend, faithful and just to me.”

One year, after exams, I talked him into going with me to Shawinigan, Quebec to look up these girls I had met one night in Calgary. I had an address. We left Saskatoon very much alive, hitch-hiked across the prairies, jumped freight trains through Northern Ontario, got into a lot of scrapes, had a lot of near misses, close shaves. There may or may not have been warrants. I should have made notes, kept a record, sorted it out, it’s all a cloudy brew and a brouillard, of occluded nebulae and telescoped anecdotes and the one guy I could consult for clarification has passed beyond the sting of meteorology. In the end those girls took us to a bar, in Hull, Quebec, called the Chez Henri, where we got jumped by five or six guys swinging bottles and chairs and we had to fight our way to the door back to back, like some old-time movie. I had been fooled and fooled again, like a serious case of love’s labour lost. And then we picked up a Montreal Drive-Away Cadillac bound for Cowtown which Janice Dowling drove into the ditch in North Ontario, which she will of course deny, and we all would have died in the snow in the dark at three a.m. if not for the mercy of a passing trucker with a tow chain. But then, when we got back to The Hub, Mike Grace met Joan, he met his match and it was a perfect one, I always thought and never doubted it. Their temperaments fit together like pieces of a crafted and ancient puzzle. I never worried about Mike Grace.

As a bohemian wannabee with artistic pretensions and zero-cross double-blind test-case for the social dictum “Artists are the shock-troops of gentrification,” I never tried to understand what he exactly did in the world of corporate finance, but I do remember once Mike Grace told me he had decided on his next career. I asked what, and he said, “I’m going to follow you around and buy real estate wherever you decide to live.” I know you can hear it … the ironic flow, the dead-pan delivery of which he was undisputed master. “Well, you see, in Saskatchewan, we had to get rid of daylight savings time. Farmers complained all that sun was burning the crops.” He killed me with that stuff. It’s the timing. And the tone.

Here in Paris I see how the locals of the quarter all gather in their cafes after their day to talk, and have a few drinks and some laughs. And I am reminded of our student days and the many nights after study or work when we could drop down to a hotel beer-parlour, the Cavalier, the Senator, the Parktown or the Ritz and know pretty much which group of people to expect to find there and what kind of hilarious conversations, libations, competitions, ministrations, imitations, defenestrations might ensue. We car-pooled to the bar before they called it that, alternately begging our mothers’ cars before we could afford our own.

Mike Grace liked to tell the story of when the Grace family lived in Burnaby, BC, of a little neighbour kid, maybe four or five years old, who spent a lot of time at their house, would just come in uninvited to supper at Joe and Mary’s table (not unlike your humble scrivener.) Anyway that summer, they returned home from a two-week family vacation visiting relatives in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Joe pulls the old wagon into the driveway; he and Mary and all the kids look up at their house and see this little guy standing inside the big picture window, looking back at them, as if to say, “Where the heck have you been? I’ve been waiting here for you.”

None of us, as they say, are getting any younger. I am pretty sure that some dark and bitterly cold snowy winter night Mike Grace will swing by to pick me up; will be over soon in Mary’s old, black Mercedes, tires crunching the dry snow at minus 35, distinctive diesel rattle heard from the end of the road, come to give me a ride to a downtown hotel for a few drinks and a laugh or two, maybe see some good friends of ours.

And I can only end with that rival poet’s words to you:

“Thy heart is big; get thee apart and weep.
Passion, I see, is catching; for mine eyes,
Seeing those beads of sorrow stand in thine,
Began to water.”