by Sam Wiebe
Commercial Drive
The Drive is like a neighborhood in an older, more sophisticated city, where it’s the poor people who are left wing and a certain particulate violence sort of hangs in the air.
There’s a lost name for every place in the city.
The man breaking into my apartment looked to be about seventy. He carried himself with a beat cop’s bearing, his shoulders squared, but his clothes said assisted living — Velcro shoes, drawstring pants, polo shirt with the collar unbuttoned to display a thatch of white and silver hair. He was Asian, and he looked at me as if searching my face for a recognition that would jump-start his own. The man knocked the glass out of my patio door with a long-handled police flashlight, the same as my father had carried. He called me by my father’s name.
“Matt,” he said, “the hell aren’t you in uniform? You forget we’re on nights this week?”
Despite my credentials as a security consultant, I’ve never cared much about protecting my home. I live in East Van, on Broadway near Commercial Drive. I take it as a given that people will hop the fence, smoke dope on the patio, try the handle of the apartment door. If someone were to break in they’d probably swoon in disappointment — unless their dream haul is a half-decent Rega turntable, a few shelves of boxing books, and the dregs of a bottle of Bulleit.
The only possession with sentimental worth was my father’s MagLite. After his death I’d had the bulb switched to a high-powered fluorescent. Now I pointed the beam in the trespasser’s face.
The man squinted into the light. “Tonight’s the night, Matt. Or did you forget?” I turned the beam away. His vision came back quickly. He said, “You’re not Matt.”
“He’s been dead nine years,” I said. “Hit and run. Who are you?”
“Me and Matt are s’posed to do something tonight,” he said. “If you see him, say Joe stopped by.”
“Joe Itami?”
I’d seen him at the funeral, and a few times during my very brief stint on the job. I’d gotten the sense that he and my father had once been close. Joe Itami had gone the command route, attaining the rank of inspector, while Matt Wakeland had persisted as a beat cop until the car crash that killed him.
Itami had always seemed poised, dignified. A comfortable leader. To see him now with his white hair askew, a piss stain spreading across his sweats, was disconcerting.
“I’ll take you home,” I said. “You still live on Nanaimo, right?” I put a hand on his shoulder. He shivered but didn’t shake it off.
“David,” he said.
“That’s right. I used to hang out with your son, once upon a time. How’s Katz doing? He’s, what, a sergeant now?”
Itami looked back at the broken glass but I herded him through the apartment door, out onto the street where I’d parked my Cadillac. Joe shuffled as he walked. A crowd stood beneath the neon sign for the Rio Theatre, smoking and waiting for the midnight showing. They ignored us. At the car door, Joe blinked and peered around, then looked curiously at the flashlight in his hand. He snapped the light on, off, on, and off.
“David,” he repeated. “Matt’s son.”
“That’s right.”
“You don’t look much like him.”
I unlocked the passenger’s-side door and held it open for him. “Flattery gets you nowhere.”
After a moment spent staring at me in what felt like evaluation, Joe Itami said, “There isn’t one fucking shred of good in you, is there?”
Katz Itami finished putting his father to bed and joined me on the porch. He lit a cigarette, a Rooftop, and blew smoke toward Nanaimo Street. His father’s house had a view of the distant North Shore mountains. Katz stared forlornly at the V-shaped strip of ski lights blinking atop Grouse.
“I got a woman coming in next week,” he said, “make sure he takes his meds. Aricept, memantine. It’s Alzheimer’s, Dave. Dementia. Probably from all those years living alone.”
“There been other incidents?” I asked.
“I’ve been on his couch less than a month. We have oatmeal together, then I go to work. He’s usually asleep when I get back.”
“Doesn’t answer my question,” I said.
Katz shrugged. “I mean, he gets names mixed up. When Barbara dropped my stuff off, he called her by her mom’s name. But that’s nothing new.”
“Why me?”
“He was probably out walking, noticed your name on the buzzer.”
“My name’s not on the buzzer, Katz, but he knew it. Joe was looking for my father. Acting like he was still walking a beat.”
“Christ.” Katz flicked his smoke off the porch, into the trough of dead mulch that had once been a flower bed. Joe Itami’s house had been standing for eighty years, and looked every day of it. The property alone would probably fetch three million.
Katsuyori was eleven years my senior, a sergeant with the VPD. He was taller than his father, slightly heavier, and had a genial, compassionate air that had netted him more than a few confessions. Katz also had the exhausted look of the recently divorced. I didn’t judge him when he chained another smoke.
“Always thought my dad had it... not easier, but simpler,” Katz said. “He was born the year my gramps came out of the internment camp. Nisei, second-gen. Him being a cop, and then on top of that marrying Mom, putting up with her WASP-ass family looking down on him — not a lot of guys could carry all that.”
“No.”
“But he always knew what to do. Work the job, raise a family, come home each shift in one piece. Difficult things, but straightforward, y’know? I admired that. Part of me moving back here, aside from getting my shit sorted, was to learn from him. How he kept it all together. ’Cept it’s hard to ask him if he doesn’t know me. Doesn’t know himself.”
I left him my card. “Anything comes up.”
“’Preciate it, thanks.” He put it on the guardrail and continued staring at the lights in the dark sky. I wondered if the card would end up among the crushed filters in the barren garden. Something else forgotten.
Katz must have kept the card, because at seven the next morning he phoned my cell.
“Joe’s gone,” he said. “Took my car, I don’t know where, and Dave, fuck, he’s got my uniform. He’s got my gun.”
I picked up Katz in my Cadillac and we drove across First Avenune to Commercial Drive. Traditionally the city’s Italian and Portuguese enclave, the Drive was now also home to anarchists, activists, fashion casualties, and holdovers who viewed anyone under sixty with scorn. It was a spectacular mess — trattorias and mercados, German bakeries and African hair salons. And everywhere sushi and coffee, those two staples of East Vancouver life.
I tried to see the neighborhood the way Joe Itami circa 1974 would, when it was the center of his beat. What still remained after gentrification, real estate crises, countless waves of new arrivals? What would he look for?
Katz had the passenger’s window all the way down, ignoring the light rain that soaked the sleeve of his shirt. He trailed smoke from his mouth. I’d asked him not to light up in the car, which he’d taken as an invitation to break out his vape pen. The car’s interior filled with the smell of apricot and mint.
“The Drive was your dad’s beat too,” Katz said. “He ever talk about what he did, back in the day?”
“He didn’t talk much period. Least not to me.” I added, “I don’t think he much wanted to be a parent.”
“That’s right, you were adopted or something.”
“Or something, yeah.”
We parked and knocked on the door of the Legion Hall. Built in the forties, the building had recently been painted bright blue and trimmed orange, the words LEST WE FORGET printed above the entrance. Katz put away his pen. The door was opened by a white-haired woman holding a spray bottle of bright green liquid. She looked warily between us, sizing us up.