Paul commutes from 20th & Main to his studio in Chinatown. He slows for certain stretches because he knows who has coffee where and when. The Gene klatchers -- Glenn, Lawrence, Neil and Krista -- meet out front at 10:15am everyday. Friday's the day I join them.
"Hello Paul."
"Well hello Misterturnerrrrr."
The closure of the Army, Navy, Air Force Veterans (ANAF Vets) Legion Unit #298 (aka the Taurus Club) at 23rd & Main in 2019 preceded the pandemic. It had nothing to do with poor sales and everything to do with the inevitable accumulation of licensing improprieties that plague businesses run by people concerned less with profit than with living life in the moment.
Opened in the early-1950s, the Legion was both a pub for vets and for those in the neighbourhood who enjoyed an inexpensive draft without having to order food to do so (Vancouver liquor laws being what they were until the 1980s). The Legion also had a gorgeous shuffle board that the Galloway-Chong-Henderson Salon was partial to, a salon that met every Thursday night until the Henderson part moved to Victoria and the Galloway part learned the hard way that nothing good ever comes from drinking with your students.
A couple months ago I noticed the legion had reopened as a private business, and then a couple week's ago the name: Hero's Walk. Okay, so that's the new name. But is it really? Surely the owners don't mean "hero" in the singular; not when so many of us are exploring/celebrating our relational links to ancestry, identity, political economy, aesthetics, etc. Unless the apostrophe is less a possessive or a contraction than a stand-in for the letter "e" in "heroes". Is that it? Like the "and" in rock 'n' roll is an "'n'"? Heroes Welcome is a better name.
Oddly enough, just south of Hero's Welcome, a sign for an upcoming show whose title plays on its subject, the musical explorer Frank Zappa, who in 1974 put out a album called Apostrophe.
The second-to-last free parking spot heading north on Main Street. I back-in, put the car in PARK, turn off the engine and here he comes, Summer Santa, motionless from the waist up, staring straight ahead as if he were a machine projecting his own image. A child stops to point and his mother yanks him way. Two teenagers bust a gut and he puffs his chest out further. When the time is right I take his picture.
I send the picture to a few friends, most of whom write back to say they see him all the time now, that he is a fixture -- a cross between Fashion Santa and his familiar bulbous self. One friend who lives off Main wrote back to say she saw him on her 6:30 a.m. jog, then again at 11:00 p.m. that night on her way home from drinks at a bubblemate's patio.
Day-in, day-out, up and down Main Street, Santa Claus is walking through town.
