Drive-by Saviours

Author:Chris Benjamin [Benjamin, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2011-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

TWO MEN IN THE WORLD OF CHAPTER 17

The harder Sarah tried, the more I withdrew, from her, from everything. I left work earlier each day. Each day I bought a paper in front of Pape Station and read half a story. Then my fingers got itchy and I covertly sketched the people on the TTC—the Torontonians I wanted to know but was too shy to meet. I filled a sketchbook a week, but every sketch remained unfinished. I couldn’t commit to any one person’s face. I had to know them all, or at least know their silhouettes.

I preferred dark faces. Maybe I fetishized the noble brown man, his pain and strength. But also, they were easier to draw. White faces came out so lifeless, outlines of black around where flesh should be. But even dark faces were hard to concentrate on for long. My excitement always faded before I brought them to life. Maybe I just didn’t have it in me to make them breathe, like Michelle could with her model cities. Better an incomplete possibility than a completed failure.

The face that most excited me became the most troublesome. He was a handsome brown man in grease-stained brown polyester slacks, scuffed black dress shoes and a green army surplus coat open over a white t-shirt, also grease-stained. He wore no jewellery and had no tattoos. He stared at a closed book.

He looked familiar but I hadn’t met him. I had seen him somewhere before. Maybe he had been a client, but probably not. Everybody needs help sometime, but not this guy. This guy was dignity, even though his worn good looks were periodically scrunched up by little facial twitches, during which he rubbed his chin on his right and then his left shoulder. Even those twitches looked familiar. He was the dignity I’d always wished I could personify.

My charcoal pencil blew over the page like a gentle breeze, of its own volition. I could have put it in my weak hand and had the same results. But I was interrupted. He caught me in the act.

He stared at my pencil, as if he knew it was beyond my control. He put his book into his knapsack but he never took his eyes off the pencil. I put it and the sketchbook back into my briefcase and took a last good look at his features. Maybe I could recapture the magic and finish the sketch later.

He stood and approached me.

“Sorry to bother you, Sir,” he said. “Why are you drawing me?” He spoke in an accent, but not a strong one, and not one I recognized.

His question was straightforward enough, but the answer was complicated. I had been drawing since I was a child. The more life pissed me off the more I drew. To draw was to release. My sketch pad was like those little stress balls the other social workers liked to squeeze after tough appointments. I never put much thought into how my own release worked, or why drawing made me happy even though I wasn’t all that good at it.

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