Unfuckingbelievable
Steve Anwyll on Steve Burlton and infectious inspiration.
When I get a call from a strange number I don’t answer it. Old paranoia. But a few weeks after. As I’m trying to track him down. I find out it’s one of his. Kicking myself I send a text. No answer. Then an email. But it bounces back. Something about how this address doesn’t accept them anymore.
I don’t give up though. As I sit on the train halfway between Montréal and Toronto. I send one last effort. And tell him this is it. I spend the duration of my five hour trip telling myself I feel a vibration in my pocket. But there’s never a notification lit up when I look.
I guess you could say our relationship has gone to shit. And I’m not sure who’s to blame.
Because when we met in a tattoo parlor seventeen years or so ago. We became instant friends. We share similar tastes. The important ones. Music and booze and girls and drugs. This brings us together.
We start hanging out on the railroad track. Or under a train bridge by the river. A litre and a half of red wine. Swapping sips with stories. Our personal philosophies fusing. And before we know it. We’re inseparable.
Steve and Steve. Unfuckingbelievable!
So for the next year and a half. Whenever we’re not working. We’re together. Gulping booze. Taking drugs. Going to punk and hardcore shows. Tearing a hole through every single night. Because we’re young. And don’t mind if we die.
I feel free around Steve. In a way I don’t with my other friends. My other friends and I had known each other too long. And they were doing all the right things. Like finishing college. Getting married. Starting stable careers. Staying in on weeknights. Playing at being respectful. Our antithesis.
Because we still saw life like children. With awe. And freedom. And those things weren’t meant to be thrown away with ease.
All this causes a rift between my roommate and I. So after Steve punches a hole though our living room window. It isn’t long before my roommate tells me he’s found a place with his girlfriend.
So Steve and I find our own place. Right downtown. Big and full of light. Three of our favourite bars on the same street. The park and the river a stone’s throw from our back door. I move out from my apartment under the cover of darkness. Three months late on the rent. Window still broken. But it doesn’t matter. I’m beyond trivial things now.
I had a hard time with high school. Barely finished. No money or the chance of a loan. So any chance of a higher education was out of the question. But I always told myself that the day I moved in with Steve. Was the day my instruction began.
A few years earlier. Steve dropped out of high school. Got an apprenticeship in some street shop. Cleaning up. Making appointments. Stealing everything he could with his eyes. Practicing on his friends. Until he got enough experience to work as a tattooer. And by the time we met he’d been doing it for five years.
Shit. I’d never seen someone give themselves over to art, or a job, so completely.
Almost every evening after he got home from work. We’d walk up to Flicks. The city’s only cult movie rental store. We’d bring home classics like Street Trash or Brain Damage or Maniac and smoke a joint. Pop the tape in the VHS. And I’d settle in. But not Steve.
He was across the living room. Hunched over on a black leather couch. Paintbrush or pencil in hand. Drawing wolves and grim reapers or snakes all covered in blood. Getting ready for his appointments the next day. Creating a sheet of flash. Or painting a woman in long robes. Beckoning to the viewer. Moon and castle in the background.
And as the movie rolled on in front of me I only half watched. The rest of me paying attention to Steve. Consumed. Slowly understanding that if I wanted to write a novel. This is what I needed to learn how to do.
On the rare nights he wasn’t painting. We’d sit out front on the stoop. Smoking cigarettes in the summer evening. He couldn’t help himself. His lips moving in a blur. Talking about painting. Tattooing. The people he admired. Wanted to be like. His eyes all lit up. The setting sun behind him pale in comparison. Excitement running through his veins in place of blood.
Which gets me going. Rambling on about the books I loved. Burroughs and Céline and Henry Miller. We identified with their lust for life. Their destructive natures. Writing wreckage into something beautiful. They gave us hope. That people like us could die legends. Instead of beaten by a job. Steve was one of the people I knew who’d listen to my ramblings. And the only one who’d actually hear.
My old man did the factory thing. Came home. Dropped down in front of a newspaper. Or the TV. Same as my friends. My old roommate. Uncles. Aunts. Cousins. An assembly line of assemblers. None of them loved what they did.
So how was I supposed to know you could?
The screen printing shop I worked in at the time was getting rid of this massive old wooden desk. I said I’d take it. Got a friend with a pickup truck to help me bring it home. I started buying notebooks. Infected by Steve. I tried to fill them with stories of our nights. I fancied myself Sal Paradise. And he was my Dean Moriarty.
But I didn’t have the drive Steve did. I couldn’t hack it. Didn’t have the stamina to sit in front of a notebook. Or the confidence to not be embarrassed by what came out of me. A part of me knew I wasn’t ready to start. That I needed more time. And it’d be another ten years before I took what I saw Steve do. And put it into practice for myself.
By then I was living in Montréal. Renting a cavernous loft with my wife in a building slated to be torn down. I started getting up before the sun. Slipping out of our warm bed. Preparing a pot of coffee. Wrapped up in blankets. Still afraid to type. Scrawling out longhand page after page of vile, self directed chastisements.
But that was my training. And those books of malignant slander slowly warped into short stories. And essays. And I started submitting. And the rejections were kind. So I kept at it. Always thinking of Steve. Always following his lead.
In the years since I’ve often told him I wouldn’t have been an artist, a term we both use with sarcasm, if it hadn’t been for living with him. And I can tell it makes him uncomfortable. Like he doesn’t want to take the credit. Which is why I keep saying it. To see him squirm.
And hope that it might sink in.
All told. Steve and I lived in that place for about two years. I was the one to pull out first. The woman who would become my wife was going to school in Toronto. And I wanted to follow along. Loving her. Bored of the city. Knowing I couldn’t keep up this pace forever.
In Toronto I repeat the same mistakes over. I get a job. Another screen printing shop. I quit. Then find another. Quit that too. Find another. Because this was the culmination of every voice I ever heard. You can’t be an artist. You will fail.
But there was Steve proving them all wrong. And if he could do it. It was possible. And I could do it too.
Steve ended up going to Australia. Bouncing around Europe. Working in all the shops he’d dreamed of. And making friends with the people he admired. He’d come home long enough to keep the authorities off his back and tell some stories. Until he married a German girl. And could prolong the inevitable.
The girl and him got a divorce. And he moved back to Canada a few years ago. In some form of settling down and running away. We’ve seen each other a handful of times. And it’s always been as weird as it should’ve been. But somewhere along the line the trains diverged.
Though you can’t let go of something you keep inside yourself. And you don’t lose anything that’s meant to come back.
So pal. If you happen to read this. I promise I’ll answer the phone next time.
Steve Anwyll is the author of Welfare (Tyrant Books, 2018). He’ll always call Hobart home and runs the wildly unpopular Twitter oneloveasshole.
