Call it research. I went down to the riot because I wanted to know what tear gas smelled like. A writer should know such things, I thought. Be familiar with humanity in extremes. They say write what you know, but who knows anything, really?
In 2011, I was still at community college, part of a cohort of wannabe writers. I was failing screenwriting, despite the many Richard Price scripts I read and plagiarized. Universities train writers to be process-oriented, to give ruthless feedback in the form of praise, to submit themselves to the authority of the priesthood. All good skills to have. College writing courses are more like detention for credit. You’re expected to attend, not succeed.
We wanted to succeed, though. Our cohort was a mix of single moms, working parents, retirees, and teens straight from high school. A few of us had gone into the real world for a year or two. Jeri and I fell into this category. Not quite mature students but lacking what you’d call academic promise. For us, a creative writing minor seemed a lot easier than working a till or a sausage press.
Jeri was a few years older than me. Before college she’d worked at The Old Spaghetti Factory and End of the Roll. Back-of-house jobs in both cases. She wasn’t a customer service type. At the college, we worked together in the Writing Centre, an alcove in the library where first years could get help with grammar and citation style. The extent of our assistance usually involved pointing out websites that would do the work for them. The job paid minimum wage, and it gave us plenty of time to write or talk about television.
Jeri wrote short stories, nothing longer than a few handwritten pages. Her characters were always TV actors on hit shows, and they were always falling in love with their co-stars. What if the hot teen leads from the Superman series actually kissed? Or the Enterprise captain and his stolid first mate? Not quite slash-fic, not roman à clef, Jeri’s stories were secret histories of what she was watching. A declaration of love could go on for three or four paragraphs of neat green single-spaced cursive.
She wasn’t a gifted writer, but I admired the way Jeri wrote constantly, composing during lectures, blogging at lunch. Her green pen would be moving even while receiving feedback on another story. She refused to take a knee to any artistic authority. If the entire class suggested the motivation of her teen heartthrob was unclear, she’d nod to show she understood the note, that it didn’t need repeating, but that it wouldn’t be acted upon, either.
I don’t think Jeri was motivated by praise. Or grades, or a publishing deal. What she wanted, I think, was the camaraderie of fellow mediocrities. When you’re not good at something you love, there’s a comfort in being around others who are equally bad. Our cohort offered her that.
Our instructors had either checked out or didn’t care enough to criticize. “Add 10 sounds and resubmit” or “Terrific feeling, keep on doing what you’re doing.” Teaching writing is hard, practical labour if done well. If done badly, it only takes a few minutes and makes a lot more people happy.
I knew my own work was lacking. Since reading The Road, I’d been leaving offerings at the temple of Cormac McCarthy. My stories were full of blasted landscapes and characters spouting vatic truths—sans quote marks, of course. Like the rest of my cohort, I was trying to be both apocalyptically numinous and quietly devastating. My scripts were even worse, a brew of TV procedurals, arthouse, grindhouse, and cowboy films. A lot of reticent men unable to share their feelings, walking away from civilization only to be struck by cars or lightning or runaway horses. Cosmic irony was big in 2011.
All I had done with my life at that point was smoke dope, play Madden, move out and back in to my parents’ house, and start stories I couldn’t finish without relying on the old deus ex vehicular homicide. My dialogue was the dialogue of films I’d seen. My thoughts were courtesy of NBC/Universal.
So when I heard Vancouver had lost the big game, and there were rumblings of civil discontent, I took the SkyTrain down to watch. If nothing else, a sweep of unselfconscious emotions would be on display. Always good fodder for writing. I texted Jeri, did she want to come, but didn’t hear back before I lost cell service in the tunnel.
Stadium-Chinatown was closed. In fact, the train didn’t even stop near the arena. I got off at Granville, hiked up the long escalator made famous by Jason Takes Manhattan. Dusk hadn’t set in. The sky was a motley of blue and orange, separated by plumes of grey and black. Air horns in the distance. On the ground, a breadcrumb trail of litter and broken glass.
There’s no uniformity to a mob, even when most of them are wearing the same jersey. Violence seemed to well up in a person. They’d boot the fender of a car, then fall back into the crowd, suddenly timid. Then two others would rock the car, egged on by cheers, filmed by dozens of phones. A window would break, and anticipation would thrum through the mob. What would happen next? The riot was a story they were telling themselves in real time.
I passed the Art Gallery, saw police gathered near Robson and Burrard. I saw one mounted cop and a few supervisors in a huddle. Officers were steering the mob rather than trying to break it up.
I walked around Howe and Robson, keeping my distance from the violence, more curious about pillaging. The display windows of the bookstore near Pacific Centre had been smashed. For the most part, the looters went about their business unbothered by security or police. They ignored the books—no one ever looted a Heather’s Pick—but were scooping up e-readers, scented candles, and phone accessories. At the drugstore nearby, the booty was perfume, Chromebooks, and PlayStation 3s.
Her photo was never released to the press, but I saw her through the ventilated storefront with an e-reader in hand. Jeri. Like a mannequin come to life, she walked through the display, up to the edge of the window. The toe of her runner kicked away glass.
As she began to step down into the street, an arm caught her elbow and took hold of the box. A teardrop-shaped security guard with swept-back hair, nearly a foot shorter than Jeri, was wrestling with her for the device.
A tug of war, at least at first. They blurred together, Jeri’s ironically ugly sweater and the blue and neon yellow of the guard’s uniform. The e-reader rose and twisted as they spun, each trying to gain leverage. Other looters poured in and out through other windows, ignoring their struggle. With a grunt, the guard wrested the e-reader away. His triumph lasted barely a second. Jeri slugged him in the face. An ugly punch, the slap of impact accompanied by mutual noises of distress. She’d skinned a knuckle on his mouth. The e-reader fell, and the guard staggered back. Jeri’s heel kicked the device into the street. She dropped down, scooping up the box, bolting up Howe Street as the guard called for backup. The police had their hands full and paid no attention. Jeri passed me and kept walking. I might have said “Hey.” Half a block farther, she glanced back. Saw me. I’m sure of it. A patrol car chose that moment to hurtle through the intersection. An abrupt change of course would draw its attention. Jeri nodded at me and kept walking.
The term “ghosting” wasn’t in the culture yet, but I received no more texts or emails from Jeri. She shuttered her blog, dropped class, and never graduated. Her hours at the Writing Centre were taken over by someone else. I don’t believe she avoided me out of shame or fear I’d squeal on her. What I think is, we both realized our writing lacked depth. We were two people who had never seen the ocean before. I went down to the shore, beachcombed a little, and called it a day. Jeri dove right in. Her goal might have been to live awhile, then resume writing. Either she lost her way back or chose worthier goals. In all the footage I’ve seen of the riots, all the documentaries, Jeri is nowhere to be found.
Friends don’t seem to last for me from one stage of life to the next. After graduation, my only connection to the cohort was through Facebook posts, which I dutifully liked and occasionally read. Jobs, kids, cancer, the odd publication credit. One of us became a prepper, another an antivax loon. A third became a writing guru who runs workshops promising “a proven path to publishing success.” His ads pop up on my feed from time to time.
Every couple of years, I check to see if Jeri’s blogging again or has published anything. If she has, it’s under a pen name. It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t stick with it. If it’s not fun, why bother? I wouldn’t wish writing success on anyone not constituted for an equivalent amount of humiliation. And what is success, anyway? Are you truly desperate to see your name in print? Find some wet cement.
I was at Banff one year and ran into a mutual friend. I asked if she knew what had happened to Jeri. They’d been roommates, briefly. Jeri had left midmonth, owing rent. This friend seemed amused when I waxed nostalgic about our cohort.
“I never heard Jeri say a kind word about any of you,” the friend told me. “I mean your writing, of course. As a person, I’m sure she liked you fine.” Puzzled and a little hurt, I asked for details. A mistake.
“Oh, just that you’d sold out and never really had a voice, and your genre stuff was weak, and that if Jeri had applied for that script mentorship, she’d’ve got it instead of you. Words to that effect.” Last the friend heard, Jeri was working in the oilsands up north.
About a year after the pandemic, I was working on this Netflix show, Blue Fault Lines, about cyber-detectives in a world after the big earthquake hits. I’d been a script supervisor on an Old West vampire thing, wrote a spec script for Motive that an agent liked and a short film that got shelved when the lead actor’s Reddit posts were made public.
Most of what’s shot in Vancouver is written in L.A. or Toronto. A sad fact of the business. I was the exception in the room, mostly because I worked cheap, and the co-star had a tendency to demand last-minute rewrites. I was on set for that reason. Taking out her character’s motivation and vulnerability, adding in a soliloquy about how every life matters, even the digital kind. The character gives the speech on the steps of the precinct to a vigilante mob intent on meting out frontier justice to a wrongfully accused AI. A riff on Rio Bravo, except she disarms them with the power of her words.
The character says: I know we’re all a bit shaken up (“‘Shaken up’? Is that an earthquake joke? I don’t think Celeste would be joking at a time like this”) but listen to me, really listen. Q-97 may not look like you, but that doesn’t mean their life is any less valuable (“Can I say ‘precious’ instead? Valuable sounds too, I dunno, late capitalist”). Which of us decides what a life is? If you really want to destroy Q-97, then go ahead. I won’t stand in your way (“But that’s what she’s doing, isn’t she? Literally standing in their way?”). Just remember that you’re destroying a part of yourselves as well. We’re only as human as our actions (“I don’t care if it’s not in the budget, I feel like Celeste should shoot at least one of them”).
As I waited to see if my revisions would meet the star’s approval, I watched the prop department at work. They were handing out weapons to the extras, foam pipes and baseball bats. The mob was being assembled on the Art Gallery lawn, which would double for the precinct with a little green screening. Mostly I was trying not to get in anybody’s way. As I do from time to time, I thought of Jeri. How she’d probably rip on me for bending my words to the whim of someone with power. How she would have written the star into a secret tryst with another actor. Maybe toiling up north had given Jeri one of those hardscrabble faces that casting directors love.
Wouldn’t it be neat if she was somewhere in that crowd?
Wouldn’t that be something?
Read more from our Autumn 2024 issue.
