tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1567580324116906172023-11-15T10:07:20.381-08:00Fragments 1-93A series of fragments...if at all possible read them in order, starting at Fragment One!!!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-69818263963490939172014-03-16T15:23:00.000-07:002014-03-16T15:23:58.066-07:00Fragment 45: Daffodil Parking the car on Peter St. I see Frank and Alice down by the entrance to <em>The Jeremy</em>. <br />
<br />
Alice is annoyed. Why I don't know. Frank is dressed up, nice blue blazer, tasteful slacks, good shoes. Alice keeps looking away, seeming to not want to go into the bar. She sees me and smiles.<br />
<br />
There are people all over the sidewalk. Straining to get in. The two doormen are meticulously looking through the lists. A little too meticulously. They want the bottleneck. The line up. It adds to the effect. <br />
<br />
If everyone wants to be there, then the upcoming election is in the bag. <br />
<br />
It is nonsense, of course. But in politics, above all else, appearances matter. They really matter. <br />
<br />
I turn down the alley. Pulling out a pack of unfiltered Camels from a carton I picked up at a truck stop in Georgia two weeks ago, I light one and drag in the pure smoke deeply. The small spotlights of the door fixtures lead me to the kitchen access. <br />
<br />
The fellas in the white kitchen outfits seem surprised to see me, but I have found that if you are in a suit, are confident, and just act like you should be doing what you are doing, people will simply assume that it is true. <br />
<br />
They did.<br />
<br />
The main room is still only half full. I see Errol over getting food at the cold buffet. Andrew is at the bar getting drinks. <br />
<br />
I like Errol but I like Andrew more. <br />
<br />
Touching Andrew's shoulder I reach over and take the bourbon on the rocks that he ordered. He laughs.<br />
<br />
-Fucker<br />
<br />
-What have you been up to?<br />
<br />
-Nothing more than usual. Just got back from Georgia<br />
<br />
Alice slides up between us, turns her back to me and looks at Andrew<br />
<br />
-How did he get in here? You know he probably never even bought a ticket.<br />
<br />
Probably? Of course not. Why the fuck would you pay to attend an event like this?<br />
<br />
All the tables are basically already taken. Andrew finds a spot at one of the walls. No chairs. But at least you can put your drink down. We are just about to talk when Nick slimes his way over. <br />
<br />
A party favourite that one. Kisses ass for a living. Most of the people here do. He was big in the move to get the new leader installed. No scruples. I would probably like him for his total sleaziness were it not for the fact that he hated me. <br />
<br />
Your enemy who is your enemy who has always made it clear that he is your enemy is your enemy. <br />
<br />
I think Machiavelli wrote that somewhere. <br />
<br />
Anyway, Nick turns to me, looking all inside baseball or something.<br />
<br />
-Did you hear the news?<br />
<br />
-No<br />
<br />
He is about to say something when someone behind me catches his eye. His mood shifts abruptly and, without even the slightest attempt at an "excuse me" he slithers off. <br />
<br />
I look over my shoulder.<br />
<br />
David, of course. Of course, David. <br />
<br />
David was the new Chosen One. He had been hired to inner party staff after we had all those new members elected and he knew his way around. David and I used to do community work together. Back when we thought that mattered. We were good friends then.<br />
<br />
Not so much now. <br />
<br />
-How have you been?<br />
<br />
-Well... I have been.Yourself?<br />
<br />
David paused, sipping his drink slowly and almost for effect, trying to spread those peacock feathers.<br />
<br />
-You know I got a job at the Leader's office?<br />
<br />
-No shit. Really? I don't think I had heard.<br />
<br />
-I would have brought you along, but you know how it is. Only so many spots and all. <br />
<br />
-Of course.<br />
<br />
-What have you been up to?<br />
<br />
I was about to tell that after failing at my ventures south of the border I had taken up a short term position as a serial killer of asshole political types when the music started.<br />
<br />
Tracy Chapman. Talkin' Bout a Revolution. What else. Why not the song as totally detached from the party reality as possible? <br />
<br />
Parker is coming down the stairs now. Waving. Bridgette is at his side smiling. Some asshole is throwing multicolored confetti over their heads and everyone is clapping hysterically. <br />
<br />
Well I'm not, needless to say. Neither, I see, is Alice. The rest of them are. <br />
<br />
I really want a fucking cigarette, but unfortunately we are opposed to them. Cancer and the common good and whatever. <br />
<br />
In a few minutes it will be the speeches. Puke.<br />
<br />
I feel a touch on my shoulder.<br />
<br />
Sally. I haven't seen her in a several years. Married a guy she met on the campaign trail. We used to be at college together. Handed out leaflets, swore we would remake the world and all that shit. I remember she told me that even if the times changed we wouldn't. I was sure she was right.<br />
<br />
We were wrong. <br />
<br />
The times changed and so did we. <br />
<br />
-It is good to see you<br />
<br />
-You too<br />
<br />
-How is Marie?<br />
<br />
-We are divorced Sally. Couple of years. She moved to Montreal with Wayne.<br />
<br />
-Oh...shit...sorry. I had no idea. I thought you and Wayne were close.<br />
<br />
-Well, apparently we were even closer than I thought.<br />
<br />
Sally looks uncomfortable. I can hardly blame her, I feel uncomfortable as well. <br />
<br />
-How is Aamir?<br />
<br />
-Good. He is with the kids in the country. My mother's place. Remember it?<br />
<br />
Remember it? How could I forget? We spent weeks there back in our college years. Long days of doing nothing under the hot July and August sun. Yahtzee, beer and possibly unrequited sexual attraction. <br />
<br />
Putting my hand on her arm I lean forward to say something when the sound system kicks in. David is on stage, a gigantic picture of Parker right behind him. He is calling for attention.<br />
<br />
Parker is starting up to the podium.<br />
<br />
The chants start. "Parker...Parker...Parker". He turns before the podium and waves. Lovely face. Looks always a handsome thirty-eight even ten years later. Has the small party pin on the lapel. Dapper. Robert Redford kind of cool.<br />
<br />
Retreating to the now largely empty bar, I ask for, and receive a martini. A real martini. None of this vodka shit. <br />
<br />
A gin martini. Just like it says in the Bible.<br />
<br />
Two sips in.<br />
<br />
-Hello....<br />
<br />
Turn to see Alice. Hand on my back. <br />
<br />
-Hello Jonathon. <br />
<br />
I want to say something. Nothing really fits. She slips into the seat beside me. <br />
<br />
We sit looking at each other. <br />
<br />
David bellows. <br />
<br />
-Sisters and Brothers, it is my honour to present to you a tireless advocate for what matters to the people of this great nation, the next Prime Minister of Canada, Matthew Parker.<br />
<br />
The room, now ridiculously cramped, goes completely crazy. Multiple ovations.<br />
<br />
Parker steps up. Smiles. <br />
<br />
-Friends. Friends. You have no idea how happy I am to see you here tonight. To see you on the very eve of taking back our country, this great country...<br />
<br />
It all fades. I have heard the speech so many times. We all have. It is the same speech, different day. Insert issue and insert ideology. Right, left, centre, whatever....<br />
<br />
-I tried to call you.<br />
<br />
-No you didn't.<br />
<br />
-I did. Honest.<br />
<br />
She smiles.<br />
<br />
-Why?<br />
<br />
Parker has said something "important". The noise level gets too high. I take it as an opportunity to leave and start to. <br />
<br />
She grabs my shoulder from behind. Hard.<br />
<br />
Getting right up, face-to-face, she looks at me intently.<br />
<br />
-Look. Sorry OK? Fuck, don't be so sensitive. Anyway, did you hear the news?<br />
<br />
What is this all important fucking news? <br />
<br />
As Alice is about to speak, Frank appears beside her, giving me an awkward look of barely concealed malice. She stops herself and, after a pause where no one moves or says anything, slides her arm through his and guides him slowly away with her towards another cluster of people enraptured by the leader's grand speech. She does not even glance back in my direction. <br />
<br />
Good. I really need a cigarette.<br />
<br />
Back into the kitchen. Again they look up at me. <br />
<br />
-Don't worry guys. Just checking the back alley. We have to make sure, you know?<br />
<br />
They all look like they clearly do not know, and some of them may even think I am full of shit, but they are busy and no one stops me. <br />
<br />
Tap the unfiltered cigarette on the back of my hand, roll the end on my lower lip, and light up.<br />
<br />
The alley is empty, save for two guys a little farther down. I can hear they are having words. It seems things are getting more heated and I strain to see what is happening when I sense that someone is behind me. Close behind me.<br />
<br />
I can feel their presence, and it is a familiar presence. <br />
<br />
Shifting around slowly I see her. Marie. <br />
<br />
I am, for the first time in a long time, at a loss for words.<br />
<br />
-I guess you didn't expect to see me. <br />
<br />
She is dressed very formally. Different than I have almost ever seen her. Different than I remember her.<br />
<br />
-Where is Wayne?<br />
<br />
It was all I could think to say.<br />
<br />
-Not here.<br />
<br />
She shifts slightly. <br />
<br />
-Why are you then?<br />
<br />
-I work for Parker now. I am his Press Secretary. Didn't you know?<br />
<br />
No I didn't fucking know.<br />
<br />
-That's great. It is an exciting time.<br />
<br />
-You don't really think that. Do you?<br />
<br />
She turns back towards the door and pulling it open hesitates for just a moment.<br />
<br />
-You should quit you know. You will live longer.<br />
<br />
I light another cigarette. Why not?<br />
<br />
Not going to go through the kitchen again. Why bother? No one is at the main door now anyway.<br />
<br />
Heading down the stairs and the first person I see is David. <br />
<br />
-Jonathon...great event don't you...<br />
<br />
I cut him off.<br />
<br />
-Stop the shit. It was the same as every event. They are all the same.<br />
<br />
He tilts his head. Looks almost philosophical.<br />
<br />
-Cynicism suits you. But that also makes it very predictable.<br />
<br />
I laugh. He is right of course. Cynicism is easy. But then so is idealism. It is kind of a no win situation. It was an effortless transition between the two.<br />
<br />
-So, I might note, is being an ass kisser when paid to do so.<br />
<br />
David smiles broadly. He is a beautiful man when he smiles. He knows it. <br />
<br />
-True enough. So what led us both to still being here then? Do you even remember why we got involved in the first place?<br />
<br />
-Of course I remember. I remember exactly why. That was a long time ago David. I remember why. I just don't remember feeling it. At all. It must have felt great. Believing in something. Now it is an unpleasant numbness.<br />
<br />
-Bullshit. I still believe in something.<br />
<br />
-Of course you do. Narcissism. You believe in yourself.<br />
<br />
Silence. For a moment I think I have actually gotten under that granite façade. But he grins instead. <br />
<br />
-Well then why are you here?<br />
<br />
Behind David the staff are taking down the posters of Parker. I see Andrew reaching behind the bar to grab a glass. Sally is talking to Nick. The folks who don't need a job or who have nothing to gain are starting to stream out. I can't see Marie anywhere. <br />
<br />
-There is nowhere else for me to go.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-37708508826199527452013-09-01T22:26:00.001-07:002013-09-01T22:26:13.754-07:00Fragment 44: Labour DayHer call had come entirely unexpectedly. Day before last. Sometime around 10 p.m.<br />
<br />
I had been lying in bed already. I had the small TV in my bedroom on for company. Since she had left two years past, I had done this more often than not. I didn't really care what was on. The voices were comforting.<br />
<br />
Leaning across to my night stand I had picked up the phone feeling tense. No one called me. No one really had any reason to call me.<br />
<br />
-Hello?<br />
<br />
Silence. I was going to hang up.<br />
<br />
-Trevor?<br />
<br />
It had been so long, I did not recognize her voice. <br />
<br />
-Yes?<br />
<br />
-It is Alice.<br />
<br />
My mind took a moment to grasp it.<br />
<br />
-Alice. How are you Alice? Is everything OK?<br />
<br />
-Yes. Yes. Everything is fine. How are you?<br />
<br />
I really had no way to answer that.<br />
<br />
-I am good I guess. Doing fine. You know. The usual.<br />
<br />
I felt like an idiot. A total idiot. "The usual". What the fuck did that even mean? She said nothing for a minute or two.<br />
<br />
-Look, would you like to meet?<br />
<br />
-Of course. Of course I would. Are you sure everything is OK? <br />
<br />
-Look, shut up about that. Are you free on Labour Day?<br />
<br />
-Yes.<br />
<br />
I was lying. I had plans Labour Day. I was supposed to meet Bill and Jan for beers after the parade.<br />
<br />
-Good. Good. Look, meet me at Imperial. You know, where we used to always meet. Around 4 p.m. ok.?<br />
<br />
-You know I live in Hamilton now right?<br />
<br />
-Look, do you want to meet, or not?<br />
<br />
Her voice was taut. Holding anger in so tightly. Had the sense it was just waiting. Waiting.<br />
<br />
-Alice, I'll be there. You know I will be there.<br />
<br />
Staring at the screen then. Not sure what was on. A black and white movie of some kind. A man and a woman were talking. Intensely. It looked like Robert Mitchum I think. They seemed to be in Mexico. I can't remember why, but I knew that whatever was going on, they were doomed somehow.<br />
<br />
Suppose it oddly fit my mood.<br />
<br />
Back when I was much younger I had done a stint as a security guard. I was a big guy, scared of nothing, so why not? Pay was shit, but I had no real expenses then. If it wasn't spent on food or rent, it went to booze and coke.<br />
<br />
One of the gigs they sent me on was watching over a factory that had been closed. They were tearing the thing down. Five hundred poor fuckers had lost their jobs. Moving the whole operation to Alabama. I used to have to patrol the place every couple of hours all night long.<br />
<br />
I suppose it all should have bothered me. Huge factory and me the only person in it. But I liked the quiet. I liked the emptiness. The echoes of my footsteps.<br />
<br />
There was one part of my patrol I just couldn't get my mind around, though. I had to walk down the dark indoor platform that had been where the freight trains came in to drop off or to pick up. It was about 200 meters long. I would have skipped it to be honest, but the fuckers gave you this device that you had to put a key in at each stop on your patrol to prove you had been there. <br />
<br />
Walking down that platform would always fill me with a terrible sense of dread. I faithfully did it every single time. But the dread never got any better. <br />
<br />
It was not that I ever thought that anything would really happen. It was just that the place was somehow wrong and sad. As if the emotional subsoil of all the people who had worked and made lives out of the entire damn factory had settled there. In that desolate adjunct to the whole.<br />
<br />
Alice. How could it now be that I could dread to see Alice? Was it the certainty that I had been so very wrong? Was it the lingering question of why she would ever want to see me again at all? Was it the fact that I so desperately wanted to see her? <br />
<br />
For me a first bourbon is always close on followed by a second. A first Lucky Strike by a second. But it is the hollow feelings left by the scars of the past that draw us to the third and more. <br />
<br />
Labour Day Monday I woke up early. Unconscionably early for a holiday. I had not slept well. It was now rare for me to linger up drinking well after moonrise and to then see the sunrise. It was not that I have kids or anything. I thought I would but it never happened.<br />
<br />
I listened to the radio for awhile. Fed the cat. When <i>Carl's Diner</i> opened up at 8 a.m. I went and had some eggs and bacon. My doctor has told me to cut that out, but fuck him.<br />
<br />
At some point I thought I should just go. Take the bus into Toronto. Why wait? <br />
<br />
Watching the highway, the subdivisions, the urban sprawl blur by, improved only by the relatively scant traffic. <br />
<br />
The Imperial is a short walk from the bus depot. Even on a holiday Toronto is mindlessly busy as Toronto always is. People shopping because they can. They likely have nothing to really buy, but they have to buy something.<br />
<br />
Two hours early I make my way into the pub and sit at the bar. I used to love watching the fish in the huge central tank, but that was a lifetime ago. There are maybe six people here other than me. A couple of guys watching baseball. A young woman at a table with a twit who already seems passed out.<br />
<br />
The bartender, possibly twenty-one, covered in tattoos and sporting a nose ring slides over. Surprisingly personable. Tells me her name is Sara. I get a pint and a Jack on the rocks. The fish carry on, happily oblivious.<br />
<br />
The young woman from the table gets up. She sits in the stool one removed and signals for Sara. Sara approaches in a way both weary and wary. They begin to talk in hushed tones, but I can hear it all. In the end, Sara loudly says no.<br />
<br />
Sara makes her way over for my second round.<br />
<br />
-What is that all about?<br />
<br />
-It's the usual. He is a terrible drunk. She can't remember why she is with him. She stays anyway.<br />
<br />
-Does he abuse her?<br />
<br />
Sara loses the server face and stares straight at me.<br />
<br />
-Why the fuck are you here?<br />
<br />
-I am waiting for someone.<br />
<br />
-Why?<br />
<br />
-I knew her many years ago. We lived together. <br />
<br />
-That's not what I asked. Why?<br />
<br />
I glanced up at the clock. Ten minutes before four.<br />
<br />
I put forty dollars down on the sixteen dollar tab and I walked out the side exit into the street.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-20535419959491630772013-07-16T20:45:00.000-07:002013-07-16T21:23:39.243-07:00Fragment 43: Barbarossa - I remember that! That was hilarious. Martin came strutting in like some sad peacock, in that fucking yellow suit that looked like an outtake from some live action Curious George movie or something. That was too fucking funny.<br />
- I know. Martin always had a way about him. He let his freak flag fly as they say. No problem letting it all hang out. <br />
-Whatever happened to him?<br />
<i>Waitress moves the dishes to put down the beers. New drinks requested. Older guy at the bar seems drunk, head down. TV says the game starts just after the next ad, which makes no sense... it is past 1 a.m..</i><br />
- Martin? Well he died. It was kind of messed up. He was in Oklahoma. Pulled over to the side of the road to fix a tire. Some drunk guy clipped him. Going 60 miles an hour. Ripped him in half.<br />
-Fuck. I had no idea, when was this?<br />
-I don't know...years ago now. You had left the company already. I don't even remember what he was doing there. I mean...Oklahoma? What are the fucking odds? He was from Brampton. No one from Brampton ever dies in Oklahoma! <br />
-Yeah...well...everyone dies somewhere as we all know. Cliche right? We all die somewhere, we all die alone, death haunts us, the unknown country and all that shit. But true anyway, right? I mean we really all do die alone and we really all do die somewhere...so...why not Oklahoma? At least former co-workers will think it a memorable death. Almost exotic...like out of a sad western song. Maybe by Emmylou Harris. You can almost hear her..."And alone he died...down Oklahoma way...no one there to say goodbye...as the State Trooper took his life away".<br />
-Except there was no State Trooper!<br />
-That is a minor detail. It sounds more romantic that way. <br />
<i>Strange couple outside the window. Kissing and then seeming to fight. Repeat. Garbage trucks are trolling now. It is past midnight. A police cruiser is pulled up across the street. Cop seems to be watching the couple, but he is smiling. A loud crash in the kitchen. Someone at another table says they really wish they could still smoke inside.</i><br />
-Have you ever thought you were going to die?<br />
-Yes. Absolutely. Once I was certain I was going to die. It was terrifying. Have you?<br />
-Yes. Twice actually. The first was rather simple. I had had too much to drink and thought it was a good idea to go out in a canoe at 3 a.m. No life jacket. Was on a small lake. About 30 feet out, when for no good reason I tried to lean over the side and dip my hand in the water. Maybe I was going to be one with nature or some stupid shit. I went in head first. I remember sinking, and I turned and I could see the stars through the water, all blurred, but there never-the-less. And the moon. Incredibly bright. I saw my arm shoot up, raised, like in some fucking movie, and I recall thinking holy shit I am going to die. This is the last thing I will ever see. And then there was something that came to mind that I had wanted to do...and I suddenly snapped out of it. I just shot up to the surface.<br />
-What was it?<br />
-What?<br />
-That you wanted to do?<br />
-Fuck. I don't even know. It was 20 years ago. Maybe I just had to see the Phantom Menace or something.<br />
<i>Women's voices laughing. Someone is angry at a different table. The waitress is back. Last call in 30 minutes. The young fella across orders a Boilermaker</i>.<br />
-What about the second time?<br />
-Well the second time was actually the first time. It was when I was a kid. Nine years old. I was in bed, middle of the night, and I woke up with smoke all around me. I used to force my parents to keep the door open. You know...scared of the boogeyman and all that. I always saw him as some old pervert like fucker in my closet who hadn't bathed or something. Good thing, because that open door probably saved my life. Anyway, the smoke and smell woke me up, and I was, of course, terrified. I started screaming for my mom, but no one was answering. I snatched my baseball glove off the night stand beside me, which was a weird thing to do, I think I just wanted to take something with me, and I crawled under the bed. The smoke kept coming in. I know I was screaming the whole time, but it seemed like the screams were from someone else. But I am still here...so...<br />
-Come on, don't fuck around, how did you get out?<br />
-Well. I didn't. But a few moments later our neighbour came charging in and dragged me out. He carried me down the stairs over his head, right past the living room on fire, and right out the front door. My dad was already out there. Lying on the front lawn. In later years he would say it was because he had succumbed to the smoke. Fact is he was just fucking drunk. He was always drunk. <br />
<i>Two dudes arguing. About a girl it seems. Bartender tells them to keep it down. They keep going. Old guy stirs, looks over. Tells them to shut the fuck up. Thank you old guy.</i><br />
-That is the worst I think. The terror of children. Don't care what anyone says, kids have never done anything to deserve their fates. And they often cannot understand what is happening, except that absolutely everything is coming down around them. It never ceases to amaze me when people hurt children. Reading about the Nazis and stuff like that. Lining up terrified people to be killed. Not just kids, either. The terror of anyone about to be killed. Take the murders by Stalin. Having old friends dragged down to be shot in the neck in prison basements. Keeping their notes to him to read later as trophies. It is like the Son of Sam ran a country. <br />
-Well all those types are cowards. Those who make excuses for murder because of ideas. Great ideas, perfect ideas, certainty, have killed more people than anything else. Once you can convince some people that other people are an abstraction, then the path to evil is a short one. <br />
-It is odd, isn't it? Often these folks portray themselves as somehow tough, courageous. As if being willing to do the inhuman things others are not is a kind of badge of honour or is revolutionary. As if the wallowing in human death is something new that will create something new.<br />
- Or all those bombings in the various wars. Or all those drones now from Obama. "Sorry we killed that family" and all that.They all say that. Like apologizing for killing innocent people will bring them back to life.<br />
-Never worry, if the days of purges ever come again it is always the intellectual apologists, the ones who made it happen and sought to justify it, who will die first. The ideas always fall victim to their outcome in the guillotine. <br />
-Fuck, this is too philosophical and depressing for me. I didn't do that Liberal Arts shit remember?<br />
-What are you talking about? We went to college together! <br />
-No, listen, I was there for International Studies. Not the same at all.<br />
-Fuck off. Well as the intellectual here then...let me tell you...<br />
-Yes?<br />
-I think I have forgotten my point.<br />
-In the unlikely event that you had one.<br />
-... <br />
<i>Last drinks. Double Jack on the racks. Caesar and a beer. The old guy is leaving. The cop has come in, looking around. Bartender seems apprehensive. Outside couple are gone. A taxi driver is yelling over the cop's shoulder...looking for whoever called the cab.</i><br />
-Anyway, you still haven't told me?<br />
-Told you what?<br />
-About when you were certain you were going to die.<br />
-Ok. I suppose I didn't. I was in my early twenties. My family had this house out in New Brunswick. Right by the ocean. I used to go there every summer with them. This one year I decided to stay an extra week. The place was huge...it just seemed that it would be the fun thing to do. All alone in some ancestral manor.<br />
-I get it. I would have found it creepy, but I was never into that isolation shit.<br />
-I don't know. Neither am I. Maybe I thought I would write great poetry. The first two days and nights were just boring. Staring at the ocean, watching TV. I was going to leave. I should have.<br />
<i>Cop has sat down at the bar. Have never seen that. Bartender leans in towards him. They seem to be talking.</i><br />
-And?<br />
-Well, third day it was raining heavily. All day. Spent it looking out at the Atlantic and listening to Rush. Around three in the afternoon there was a knock at the door. I went there to find two guys in an Oldsmobile, a third at the stairs. He was smiling, but in an unfriendly way. He tells me that they are from Nova Scotia and they are lost. That they need to come in to use the phone. I asked him where they were trying to go, but he said that that was not important. His buddy would give him directions when he called him. He just began climbing the stairs without waiting and he started to thank me for letting him in. The other two were getting out of the car at this point. One of them was a really young guy. Turned out he was eighteen. I stepped inside and locked the door.<br />
-Shit. Did you go for the phone?<br />
-I assume that was what I was going to do, but they were already kicking at the front door. I mean it was a door. They were going to get through it in no time. The only thing I could think was to get out the side door and head for the barn across the yard. I suppose I thought it would take them a few minutes to figure out I was gone and there was an attic there. I am not sure that I even recalled at that moment that my grandfather kept a shotgun in it, but I can still distinctly feel the rain soaking through my clothes as I ran the open yard and I know I was praying to God, even though I was not religious, that I would get across. And I did.<br />
-Did they follow you?<br />
-Yes. But not all of them. I had scrambled up the ladder to the attic and went to the small oval side window. The young one was running towards the barn. He happened to glance up and he saw me, or at least I think he did as he seemed to pause for a moment and smile. I know at this second it occurred to me to get the shotgun and I pulled it out of the wall cabinet. I lay down on the floor and aimed right at the open hatch where the ladder ended. I heard him climbing. It seemed like an eternity. Then, his head just popped up and he was looking right at me, realizing I had a gun, with this mixture of confusion and fear. I almost feel bad for him.<br />
-What did you do?<br />
-I shot him. I shot him right in the face. <br />
<i> </i> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-40019423899593293412012-07-13T20:53:00.000-07:002012-07-13T21:46:47.968-07:00Fragment 42: AlexanderBright light.<br />
<br />
My mother is leaning towards me, smiling, running
her fingers down the side of my face, twirling the stray pieces of my
hair...whispering...<br />
<br />
<i>Anthony...Anthony....</i><br />
<i><br /></i>Except my name is not Anthony.<br />
<br />
Waking
up there is a pure and perfect point of pain. An intense searing
violence that seems to be right in the middle of my brain. I feel for a
moment, like I could just sit up and vomit all over the bed.<br />
<br />
But, the feeling passes.<br />
<br />
Looking
out of the twenty-second story condo window, still very dark, a January
4:30 a.m. Toronto appears sterile and empty, as it does every morning,
and reaching for the Camels I bought on the last junket I light the
cigarette in a successful attempt to stave off the desire of my stomach
to empty last night's contents. <br />
<br />
Out of bed, naked, my chest hair
itchy, my arms and legs sore and my vision dizzy, stumbling to the
shower. Ice cold water for a moment, then hot. The water feels like
shit. It is like the shower is fucking attacking me. Why the fuck am I
awake at all?<br />
<br />
Somehow, seemingly seconds later, though that can't
be right, right (?), I am in the condo gym, alone, happy it is open the
full twenty-four. I am on that machine, the running one, running. And
running. The gym windows are fogged by the cold and you could think that
the city was a Impressionist painting looking through them. Almost
beautiful instead of the dump that the daybreak will reaffirm it as.<br />
<br />
An empty financial center full of empty financial people. <br />
<br />
My watch says it is six. Six a.m. Too fucking early to go in. Too late to go back to bed.<br />
<br />
Kicking
open the main suite bar sized second fridge freezer there is a little
of the vodka left. I figure I have an hour to finish it.<br />
<br />
Office
open, 7:30 a.m. I am there a few minutes later, obligatory black coffee
in hand. Receptionist barely registers me as I pass. I have come in
before everyone almost everyday I have been in town lately.<br />
<br />
Computer
on, and I am at it. Activity slowly begins around me, volume level
gradually increasing, hellos said, people filing past.<br />
<br />
I don't
care about any of it. At all. Of course, I say hello, you have to. But I
can't wait again until they send me to Paris, Milan or fucking Topeka
for that matter. If I never saw any of these people before the day I
die, it would be too soon.<br />
<br />
Except Alice. But she hasn't been by yet.<br />
<br />
<i>Alice,
looking at me, eyes wide, "You know this can't go on..." Holding the
back of my head as the cell phone bleats out a melody...her husband
calling yet again. What was that book that you gave me Alice? That one
by Graham Greene?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>I walk out into the fierce January cold.
Negative twenty today. Just sucks the air right out of your lungs. Going
to eat shit knock off Indian food from some Yonge St. take out dump.
Won't be there in a few weeks. They all come and go with interchangeably
bland fare. People shuffling in line in front and behind me, all dreary
looking. The young man behind the counter, handsome. But defeated, I
think. He takes my order and he looks just so perfectly bored. Like he
must count the seconds of every long and pointless day of relaying these
orders to cooks who equally are doing time. <br />
<br />
So many people, so
many lives, spent doing this totally superfluous shit. When the vast
improbability that is the universe decided to grant you the gift of this
tiny instance of life, you ended up spending it doing this. Or that. Or
what I am doing, also irrelevant. <br />
<br />
Ask not if anyone will
remember us 100 years from now. No one will care to remember us fifteen
minutes after we are gone. Our pictures may be on the mantlepiece for a
few years, but nothing we did will linger on. Because, we did nothing.<br />
<br />
Up
the elevator. The negativeness of this space. I hate the fucking
elevator. Caged with people you don't know. All looking ahead. Or forced
to listen to tiny fragments of conversations that you are not a part
of. <br />
<br />
At the desk again, more painkiller.<br />
<br />
<i>In the taxi,
everything blurring by, down from Bloor to the condo. He is shaking me.
Stay awake, buddy. We've been into the whiskeys. The good ones...every
drink a bit of liquid gold. Two hundred twenty seven dollars later. Give
me one of your obscure words....ok...we have had a jeroboam of whisky
my fine asshole of a friend. How is that for obscure. He laughs.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>It is noon now. Cell phone buzzes. My lawyer in Montreal. I ignore it.<br />
<br />
Anxiety compels me to the bathroom. Lock the door and a few minutes
later it feels numb again. My pills can do that to you. Numb but alert.
The anxiety gone for now. There is no point in worrying about things
that you cannot change or undo. <br />
<br />
Jonathon comes down the hall. Ass kisser that one. But Jonathon has a
soft spot for me. He wants to see me at two. Jonathon, tell him I left
at one.<br />
<br />
He smiles.<br />
<br />
It is a Thursday. I might have had somewhere to go.<br />
<br />
The bottom of the Scotia Plaza. Small underground bar. Not underground
in some revolutionary sense, but literally. No one drinking here at two
in the afternoon is making less than $75K. But it is dark all day long.
You can pretend it is always nighttime. My kind of place.<br />
<br />
Bar is mostly empty. I get a Glenfiddich. Then another. Two tables over
are two suits. Assholes you can tell. But that is easy. They are all
assholes around here. The biliousness with which the one spouts his
puerile reactionary nonsense is nauseating. One of these business
know-it-all types. But he doesn't know a fucking thing. I contemplate
walking over to his table and punching him right in the face when
fortune intervenes on his, (or my?) behalf and I feel a slight touch to
my shoulder.<br />
<br />
I don't need to look. Its Alice.<br />
<br />
She sits down. He's looking for you you know. I know. Why did you leave? What difference? He can find me tomorrow. <br />
<br />
She smiles. I don't get you. But you don't need to get me do you? No, I
guess not. Detente then. I won't try to understand your motives, and you
won't try to understand mine.<br />
<br />
<i>A terrible feeling. Like something is bursting out of my chest</i>.<i>
I am trying to slow down, but inevitably I will get there, no matter
how slow I walk. Long institutional hallways. I am finally at the door.
Opening it and the first thing I see is the bed.<br />
<br />
</i>A few more drinks. I already have a headache. It will get worse, but then better. This is what always happens. <br />
<br />
Let's go for dinner. Where? John and Mohammed are at <i>Rodney's. </i>Why not?<br />
<br />
We walk down the stairs, <i>Rodney's </i>is packed. After work crowd now. <br />
<br />
I order two dozen oysters and a very expensive Chablis. <br />
<br />
Mohammed looks great in his blue double breasted. John is a picture of
junior executive perfection. Fancy watch, lovely shirt and tie.
Expensive cufflinks. I want to kiss them both. <br />
<br />
Mohammed is circumspect. We missed you at the meeting today. Had to see a
client. Silence. They know I am lying, of course. How did it go? It
went as it always goes. <br />
<br />
What do you think of Sandra's proposal? I laugh. Guys, do we really care right now?<br />
<br />
<i>What did you study? Was it hematology after all? Why did I see you
there...that distance I traveled to be away from you? Looking out from
the Via car window, you there on the platform awaiting another train to a
separate place, and despite wanting to get off and to run back to you,
all I could do was to look down at your overshoe. <br />
<br />
</i>Then it is just Alice and I again. Walking so slowly almost to spite the bitter 10 p.m. air.<br />
<br />
Why do you do it? What do you mean? Why don't you just quit? Everyone
knows you don't want to be here anymore. They only keep you because you
produce. But, Alice, where would I go? And why? Wouldn't anywhere else
be just the same? If you have to chose between two identical places to
wither, why not chose the one that you are already at?<br />
<br />
She kisses me and hails the taxi approaching us. I must leave you my dear. He has become something of a martinet, my husband.<br />
<br />
With Cassandra at the bar. She has seen many of my night's ends. The
usual crowd is around. A few unknown faces. Cass serves me the draft and
the double bourbon. She shouldn't really but she does anyway.<br />
<br />
<i>Trying to push through the crowd at the accident site. Coming back to
see it. The rope has cordoned off the area around the parking lot and
the curious strain to see the remains of what what once a young man. As I
turn around, knowing now that what I feared was true, rushing to the
stairs of the station, she pushes the Jesus Saves handbill into my
chest.<br />
<br />
Jesus Saves what?<br />
<br />
</i>It is near 2 a.m. Cassandra hands me my last drink. There is no one
here now, save her and I. Cassandra, I love you. Now...now...you know I
don't sleep with the customers. I know. But even if you did, I would
never try. I don't sleep with people I like. What about Alice? Well, I
tell you too much Cassandra, I suppose I do like Alice. Well, then maybe
you are not so bad after all, I like her too. You only met her once. It
was enough. She is married. We are all married to something. I'll call
you a taxi.<br />
<br />
<i>I wanted normalcy. I wanted to dream the same dream you did. I wanted
to be where you were. But we can't always help ourselves. I failed you.
I failed you the moment we met. I could never be the person I told you I
could be. You understood this long before I could.<br />
<br />
</i><span class="randomWord" id="tmpl_main_lblWord"></span>Bright light.<br />
<br />
My mother is leaning towards me, smiling, running
her fingers down the side of my face, twirling the stray pieces of my
hair...whispering...<br />
<br />
<i>Alexander...Alexander....</i><br />
<i><br /></i>Except my name is not Alexander.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-50171111242718343082011-10-21T22:45:00.000-07:002011-10-22T15:20:43.672-07:00Fragment 41: James JoyceAs the cab pulls up, taxi sign a rooftop beacon cutting as a lighthouse the sheets of sideways rain, wind hard and cold, October dismal, I flick the cigarette butt over it to be crushed by the heavy Friday night westbound traffic of Richmond St.<br /><br />Sean, also dropping his DuMaurier pre-entry, laughs, running quickly around to use the rear door, driver side.<br /><br />Soaked through, faces glistening as if long distance runners at marathon's end, horns blaring as the cabbie accelerates straight in.<br /><br />We are wet rats. Trench coats hardly useful at all. Suits freshly pressed this morning now wrinkling fast.<br /><br />But who cares?<br /><br />It is week's end.<br /><br />Sean smiles sarcastically.<br /><br />-Think she'll be there?<br /><br />I hope not. Or do I?<br /><br />A very short six dollars later, pulling up to the oddity of the doors of the Beverly wide open despite the season. Despite the thunder. A CCR cover is wafting out as I hand a ten dollar bill into the front with a dismissive "keep the change".<br /><br />Striding fast through the main room, past tables of barely legal University of Toronto boys and girls getting drunker now that it is after ten.<br /><br />But not I. No not I. Sober still six double Jacks later.<br /><br />At the table unwrapping a crisp new pack of illegal Lucky Strikes, Sean extending a hand for one as he takes a seat shotgun, a skinny, pale and humourless waitress coming up to not jot down orders she will likely get wrong.<br /><br />Swooning amorously as she departs...<br /><br />-I am in love...Sean says.<br /><br />-With what, a corpse?<br /><br />He feigns a glare.<br /><br />I let my eyes wander the backroom. Many clusters of lovely young women, but they were all that. Young. Not for me.<br /><br />I am thirty-four and they are, possibly, pushing twenty.<br /><br />Not my style. I have always sort of thought thirty-somethings who bang borderline teenagers are sexual bullies who didn't get any in high school.<br /><br />Sean, as if knowing what I am thinking...<br /><br />-Who are you to judge?<br /><br />-We all judge. I have as much right to my judgements as anyone else.<br /><br />He snorts.<br /><br />Now eleven, set drawing to a close, doors shut so the room filling with a carcinogenic fog of pack-upon-pack of whatever brands we are collectively killing ourselves with. Last song an Oasis tune.<br /><br />And there she is, goddammit, there she is.<br /><br />Lithe yet curvy, a black on white polka dot dress beneath a bright red raincoat. Dark brown eyes and dark brown short hair. Alone and just so...alluring. And so dangerously beautiful.<br /><br />Sitting suddenly across from me, lighting a menthol slim, leaning back. Almost contemplative.<br /><br />Sean gets up. <br /><br />-I'll be off then.<br /><br />Gazing up at him.<br /><br />-So soon. But I just got here.<br /><br />-Indeed. Alas, I am working tomorrow.<br /><br />She laughs flirtatiously.<br /><br />-Tomorrow is a Saturday.<br /><br />-And my boss is a right bastard.<br /><br />A short turn to me...<br /><br />-Adieu my old friend...and may God indeed help you.<br /><br />We sit, eyes locked, divided by a dirty and decrepit table.<br /><br />Some little shit beside me pronounces loudly about Y2K and his coterie of wide-eyed lasses giggle and gape in seeming awe. It is odd how rumours of impending doom worry me not at all. <br /><br />She blinks first.<br /><br />-How have you been?<br /><br />-You know, busy.<br /><br />-With what?<br /><br />-Nothing much really.<br /><br />-Don't be like that.<br /><br />-I'm not. I have been busy. Really busy. But not with anything worth being busy with.<br /><br />-So is it like that then? Drifting aimlessly from me to middle age.<br /><br />-I am not sure I would have put it quite like that.<br /><br />She leans forward. <br /><br />-That is not like you. Regret was never really your style.<br /><br />Regret. Is it regret? Or is it acceptance?<br /><br />She grinds out the cigarette into the chipped glass ashtray, slips another out from her pack and looks away as she lights it and inhales the smoke deeply.<br /><br />-So what? You were going to be someone? A contender...is that not the cliche? What was it you wanted to be all those years ago...an astronaut? A fire fighter?<br /><br />-Well what did you want to be?<br /><br />-I asked you first.<br /><br />-I never wanted to be anything. I got what I wanted.<br /><br />The band starts tuning up. Second set coming. I suddenly feel cruel.<br /><br />-I can imagine what you wanted. I bet you were one of those oh so precious in pink girls. Daddy's favourite. Dance lessons and dreams of ballet school and Prince Charming.<br /><br />-Fuck you.<br /><br />She spits it out. Blood boiling. For a moment I think she is going to leave.<br /><br />The waitress brings more drinks. I have a whisky and she has ordered what must be a truly terrible martini.<br /><br />She speaks softly...<br /><br />-A teacher. I wanted to be a teacher.<br /><br />Behind us they launch into a cover of Van Morrison. Into the Mystic.<br /><br />But it is like the musical equivalent of a child's stick figure art next to a Jackson Pollock.<br /><br />I reach over and touch her hand.<br /><br />-Why don't we go?<br /><br />Walking slowly, side-by-side up McCaul. The storm has subsided and the moon shines brightly overhead. No people, only the occasional car or two.<br /><br />A striking quiet, our footsteps seeming to echo, as on the stage set for a movie.<br /><br />Across Baldwin. Not a word.<br /><br />Up Spadina. Not a word.<br /><br />Sometimes it is better not to ask the questions that we will not like the answers to.<br /><br />On the street where she lives a very light night mist broken only by the spotlights of the street lamps. At the foot of the stairs that lead to her door she takes my arm and turns me to her, faces almost touching.<br /><br />-Do you want to come in?<br /><br />Do I want to come in? I have never wanted anything more. A painfully physical longing. A longing to feel her heartbeat on my chest, to feel her touch and to touch her. To lie as one as we once did, exhausted, spent and together. <br /><br />Letting go of her. Stepping back.<br /><br />-Best not.<br /><br />For the briefest of moments she seems shocked, but then that calm facade of composure that she is blessed with returns. <br /><br />An intent, almost intense pause, and she is gone.<br /><br />Watching her slowly ascend to her door, no last turning back, key out...<br /><br />-I lied.<br /><br />I say it loudly. She swirls about, close to smirking at me. Expectantly.<br /><br />-James Joyce.<br /><br />-What?<br /><br />-When I said I never wanted to be anything I lied. I wanted to be James Joyce.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-2136533030566777052011-10-09T22:05:00.000-07:002011-10-10T19:37:45.058-07:00Fragment 40: ParadoxFunny thing that. How many cigarettes did it take?<br /><br />Unfiltered. We used to go to the market. $20 for the filtered and $15 for the Lucky Strikes.<br /><br />I always went for the Lucky's.<br /><br />Teresa had this weird thing. Two tattoos, and an attitude. She could never stand that I was her man.<br /><br />I can hardly blame her. I had little to offer.<br /><br />I got drunk in 1990, pretended to be a poet and the rest is...<br /><br />Teresa always thought she could have done better. And she could have.<br /><br />But isn't that true of all of us? Can't we all do better and haven't we somewhere?<br /><br />Strange how it all can come into focus. Rain driving hard on the roof of the car, street lights bright as he leans into me. Grabbing the back of my head kissing me hard.<br /><br />So when do I see you again?<br /><br />The Chevy vibrating, purring beneath us, my one hand tugging at his belt, my other touching his face. <br /><br />And then that night...<br /><br />The Flat Iron. He had come in a cab. Did he really think that it could go any further? Did he really think we could move past this moment? <br /><br />Licking at my ear, sad, angry...<br /><br />I can't see you again....<br /><br />So, years later. Two kids now growing older. All of us at the pool. My wife dowdy in her one piece and Jonah and Sally being eight and ten. A young teenage Adonis of a lifeguard that I can't help but look at...<br /><br />And here you are, head lazy lying on his chest. Looking at me through second hand two hundred dollar sunglasses. Pausing slightly to recognize I am there...<br /><br />A certain smirk.<br /><br />But I had loved you. It had been my hands touching you. I ran my hands down that back and I rubbed myself across that chest. And I knew that you would not be mine.<br /><br />I never had that kind of courage, that tender fortitude.<br /><br />Leaving the daylight frivolities with Terri and the little ones.<br /><br />Glancing back to see you lift up your hands to grasp his face.<br /><br />Going down to the Canadianna. Me and the "boys". A bunch of angry and lonely middle aged men. Not the one of us honest at all. <br /><br />The usual bullshit about how great the wives and kids are...never regret. Never any regret. How you can regret these tiny perfect lives?<br /><br />Ordering the late night doubles on ice. I take it back, we all regret choices at last call.<br /><br />Don pushing me..."your shot"<br /><br />But I see her, through the front restaurant window, past the cheesy slogans, past the blur of pick up trucks and SUVs. Arthur dropping coins into a beat up jukebox, Springsteen and Mellencamp. Late night street worker looking right back at me. Haggard and angry, as if to say who the fuck are you John.<br /><br />And how to answer this accusation other than to say I am not who you may think.<br /><br />And I too thought it would all be different.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-31551238784627189832011-07-16T17:21:00.000-07:002011-07-17T12:57:29.154-07:00Fragment 39: ClemencyI get to the club about 7 p.m. A few minutes early. <br /><br />Serge and I are tight, but you never really wanted to be late.<br /><br />Walking in, front room loud, tables of Portuguese and Italian kids hollering and playing pool. Makes me laugh. As all the wall photos and menu items made clear, he had wanted this to be an East European hangout. <br /><br />I don't know...maybe Ukrainians don't shoot stick.<br /><br />Not that Serge was Ukrainian. Who knows what the fuck he was? But he did hang out with them. <br /><br />I went straight through to the back "private" room. Darker, not only because it was ill lit, but because of its colours. Whore house colours to be crass, but interior design is not my thing. Maybe they were just fanciful or Moulin Rouge.<br /><br />Drago was in the rear right corner. I made sure to mark him. We had long hated each other. He glared briefly at me over the racing forms before getting back to working out whatever it was he could garnish from today's fix.<br /><br />There were a couple other of Serge's men about. One aimlessly shooting darts, the other smiling up at the altogether too young waitress sitting on his lap.<br /><br />Serge was dapper to a fault. Perfect style as always. Tonight a double breasted dark blue Hugo Boss, striped, with an olive shirt beneath and a striking neon tie. He barely looked from his cigarette to greet me.<br /><br />I sat down to the panorama of delightful looking smoked salmon, accompanied by a Swedish plate of toasts and sides, and a bottle of Stoli in a bucket of ice. I would have killed for this dish. But it was Serge's...not mine.<br /><br />When Andre, his waiter and maybe his sole friend, came over Serge awoke for a moment.<br /><br />"Rib Eye rare. Side Waldorf salad and a glass of our second Shiraz. The Australian one."<br /><br />That was my order. He didn't ask. I didn't object. On the whole, it seemed a good meal.<br /><br />Several minutes pass. Small talk. Serge, as always, asks after the kids and Betty. I eat the steak, delicious, with Provencal butter melting atop, pools of blood forming on the plate to be soaked up by terrific fresh bread. He never serves this to his "customers". Only associates.<br /><br />Andre is back. An Aperol with sparkling wine perhaps? <br /><br />The reddish drinks arrive, over ice, and Serge smiles wryly.<br /><br />-We should do this without a reason sometime...<br /><br />Now it is time for business. Andre moves away, but still looks on from behind the bar. Serge tells the others to get out.<br /><br />-So...remember Gregor?<br /><br /><em>That was who was to die then. Of course I remembered. Gregor had stood over me, scarred face, after I had taken the shot meant for him. Laughing. Looking down as I tried to hold the blood in (funny how the brain thinks it can stave off the inevitable).<br /><br />-Fuck, I am sure you are a dead man...<br /><br />And he grunted...walking away as the sirens started to come into focus.</em><br /><br />-Clean or messy?<br /><br />-Messy.<br /><br />So he wanted them all killed.<br /><br />-I don't do kids.<br /><br />-His daughter is in Europe.<br /><br /><em>I am sitting at Gregor's years after the shooting and forced truce. Katherine, his daughter, plies through the crowd. Seventeen and beautiful. I guess the less enlightened would call her jail bait. <br /><br />She takes my cigarette. Gregor, angry, stares from across his own house as she pulls my head down.<br /><br />-Want to make my father mad...<br /><br />I don't. </em><br /><br />Serge smiles, bitterly.<br /><br />-They are expecting you.<br /><br />The Saab purrs sleekly along the highway out of Toronto. I placed the H&K silenced semi automatic on the seat beside me and the H&K silenced sub-machine gun model in the briefcase. The "plans" they were expecting.<br /><br />Radio stations playing endless pop crap until I alight upon the ball game. Toronto winning for once. Brewers down by three. Listening to the ninth soothing as I cruise along the 410.<br /><br />Pulling off as ordered, down Rural Route 6 past the farms, past the trailers, past it all to the cabin, darkness descending, sideroad harder to navigate than I recalled.<br /><br />Idling in the car, looking at the light glowing from the safehouse, pausing to get my bearings. Turning the dial. Jazz music...maybe Glen Miller. I tuck the sidearm into the back of my pants.<br /><br />We are in the middle of nowhere. Stones crunching under foot as I make my way to the front door. I hear inside music playing loudly. Good thing.<br /><br />I knock gently. Roman answers.<br /><br />Chiseled features. A huge man. Looks like an idealized Greek statue. He smiles.<br /><br />I know Roman. We worked together. A few times. He thinks I am here for a reason.<br /><br /><em>Drake, before Serge, had asked us to do a mule train once. Normally a little low end. He had wanted some muscle for some reason. We had pulled into Sudbury and checking in to the hotel had seen the bargirls on the way up. When we came back down we left our wedding rings in the room.</em><br /><br />-Good to see you!<br /><br />Turning he makes it three strides before I shoot him in the back of the head.<br /><br />Waiting. The music still playing. They know nothing.<br /><br />I approach the door slowly down nondescript hall. Leaning against doorside...opening the briefcase, weapon out, pushing...<br /><br />Funny part, so far as you can say that, is Gregor standing up, (smiling, stupid eh?) cigar in hand, mouth open...<br /><br />I shot him twice in the face.<br /><br />I saw a big guy to the left, bewildered, still with a stunned looked as the bullet drove into his brain, exploding whatever little was left there.<br /><br />Looking out, exposed, where is number three?<br /><br />-You are fucking dead you mother fuck...<br /><br />He was leaping up like some kind of avenging Ninja, screaming comic book style. I shot him through the neck.<br /><br />Holding it in futility, stumbling. Blood cascading out of his mouth. I shot him again only to shut him up. He deserved to suffer.<br /><br />Funny how much shorter the hall seems on the way out.<br /><br />The walk to the car. No rush now.<br /><br />As I stride down the driveway I see her. Out of the corner of my eye. In the front seat of her father's car. Looking with terror over the steering wheel. Katherine.<br /><br />I am still holding the H&K and I press upon the trigger. Gently. Our views connecting, tears streaming down her face.<br /><br />I should kill her. But I can't. I can't.<br /><br />Firing a bullet over her head, through the upper windshield, she ducks panicked as I get into the Saab. <br /><br />-Get the fuck out of here kid! <br /><br />I am fucked. Serge will never forgive me. Letting her live means the end for us. And he would not have let her live.<br /><br />No going back. I can see Serge. An invitation to an event is how it would likely end. But, fumbling through the bags, seizing passport, how far is Mexico?<br /><br />I can make it to Mexico I think.<br /><br />Tap...Tap...Tap...<br /><br />The hairs on my neck stand up. The slight touching right to the side of my face, the rattling of hardness upon the car window.<br /><br />I don't want to, but I look over. <br /><br />And there she is. Katherine. Sly and almost sadistic smile on her face. Eyes meeting. Shotgun barrel right up a foot away...<br /><br />Well fuck me.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-67534117282510882102011-06-29T19:06:00.000-07:002011-06-29T21:09:35.357-07:00Fragment 38: Confetti & FireworksWistful rain. Rhythmic and drumming down upon the roof of the thirty year old Datsun I bought.<br /><br />Pulling up along Madison, the lights of the house faint still in the twilight of the early evening. Blinds down, the front yard and white picket fence sacrosanct, the pretensions clear.<br /><br />Samantha is leaning at the door edge. Coquettish, a wry look and an almost aggressive curve to the lip. Only when Darryl is not around. As if asking, wondering, we had a child together didn't we?<br /><br />Darwin, gym bag hoisted over shoulder runs out, smile wide, happy to see me. It has been a few weeks. <br /><br /><em><strong>Dad...have you heard about this show where...</strong></em><br /><br />You know, honestly, when I think back to meeting her, Canada Day '96, I see not Samantha but a much younger and different man. Skinny, no grey hair, chain smoking Marlboros bought off the Kingston black market.<br /><br />Paul and I were doing shots on the patio of the 129. It was so fucking hot almost all had retreated to the air conditioned sanctuary that was the split room of the Charles St inside. <br /><br />Sam and Val pulled up in Val's VW, parking half drunk, wheel on the curb, stumbling out. She sat down, PHD student, curves to make a Victorian happy, yelling for the waiter to bring a Rum and Coke...hold the Coke.<br /><br />I was in love.<br /><br />Down on the beach that night, corporate sponsored fireworks skyside, idiotic classical music blaring from the loudspeakers for drama, Sam telling me that her Marxist analysis did not preclude the sex we were going to have, and I was so happy.<br /><br />You know what I mean? When you are just happy?<br /><br />Well not for long. Never really lasts. Pass me the cigarettes I stopped smoking ten years ago.<br /><br />The road, winding and very dark, Darwin snoring in the back, Rice Lake and the cottage only a few minutes away.<br /><br />Passing empty side houses and abandoned farmsteads. Forked lightning illuminating overgrown trees. <br /><br />I carry Darwin into the cabin. Lay him down in the room I remember from childhood. Sky so black that there are almost no lake lights to imply others. The landscape of Canada. A large and magnificent place with not that much going for it.<br /><br />The shadows you find here.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-23830880528058205552011-06-17T18:17:00.000-07:002011-06-18T17:08:35.390-07:00Fragment 37: Ottoman EmpireI am just fucking drunk. No kidding.<br /><br />I sit in one of those blurs that can only come through a bottle of Jim Beam and a boycott of water. Cindy slides over, top a little too low, running her finger down the side of my face. Its kind of a come on I guess!<br /><br />-So what the fuck?<br /><br />She laughs.<br /><br />Touching forehead to table, angry, drinks, more drinks. <br /><br />Hard for me to believe, cause I knew her once. Lovers once. Cindy was a dream I had, when sober, a few years back.<br /><br />And here we are, parkside, patio lights too dim, old men looking down on the pits with bottles of Fifty and shots of Jack, or so it would seem. Trees now impressionist by hour sixty-one of a sixty-two hour bender.<br /><br />I see Cindy as through a carnival glass. Pushing over, detached, rings touching..."I love you".<br /><br />What was it then, 1994, Cindy dancing down Walnut Ave, driven in a van by her Dad, residence bound.<br /><br />I met her because I said I would carry that table up the stairs. I met her because I came a day too early. So it goes.<br /><br />Cindy has a screwdriver. Leaning with that beautiful face over this empty battlefield of failed emotion. Jonathon, really what can you...<br /><br />Cigarettes out, smoke streams across the table.<br /><br />The bar patio blessed with the left-overs of a generation I would love to forget.<br /><br />She puts her index finger under the chin, drawing me a moth to the flame.<br /><br />And there I am again, these mornings before it all, snug against her, oblivion another brilliant sunset away.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-51523889124362147792011-03-07T15:34:00.000-08:002015-03-07T17:44:53.279-08:00Fragment 36: SocialismFragment 36: Socialism<br />
<br />
I met Denver at an antique market.<br />
<br />
He was flipping through some old prints, the kind I like, and he looked up at me. I was anxious to have a glance...aggressive as always I was probably pushing in on him.<br />
<br />
“Sweetheart, I promise. If I find anything you like I'll give you first chance...”<br />
<br />
And he smiled.<br />
<br />
He had me, apologies to Jerry Maguire, at Sweetheart.<br />
<br />
Denver was the perfect man. Handsome, but old enough to not use it anymore. Tough as nails, but never towards anyone. Generous. There was no but. He was just generous...of heart and spirit.<br />
<br />
We had Sally two years after first contact.<br />
<br />
She was so perfect. Ugly as a baby beyond all reasoning. But not to us, of course. To us she was stunning.<br />
<br />
She was our daughter.<br />
<br />
Denver was quite the fella. He bought into all that “hewers of wood” bullshit and somehow...due to his marvellous good looks, he persuaded me to move to Burke's Falls with him and our baby. My parents, for once, were so thrilled. Bad girl gone good. We had never gotten along much, but now I was their Florence Nightingale.<br />
<br />
What a time. <br />
<br />
Simple.<br />
<br />
Happy.<br />
<br />
Denver and I had this little thing we would do. We lived in the Falls, but we often would drive down to campsites across Muskoka. One of us would pilot the RV and the other would drive ahead with Sally in the SUV. We always brought both, so we didn't have to pack up shop to go buy groceries or go to the movies.<br />
<br />
That particular July trip I was in the RV.<br />
<br />
About ten minutes out of the Falls we hit a foggy patch on the highway. I remember thinking Denver should slow down, just seconds before...<br />
<br />
I don't know...have you ever had those moments where it seemed the awful, tight fist in your stomach would never go away? That it would linger with you, sometimes more, sometimes less, but forever? That it would haunt you, as a ghost, inexorable? Reminding you daily of that which you had lost. The family that you had been denied.<br />
<br />
I don't know what happened after that. <br />
<br />
I really don't.<br />
<br />
I moved back to Toronto. To an apartment on Jarvis. Nice place, save the cockroaches, mice, loud neighbours and the fact I no longer cared.<br />
<br />
I just didn't care.<br />
<br />
I would walk down to Balfour's and slide into the stool every night around six. I would start with a couple of beers, then a Jim Beam or three, then...well then I would drink whatever struck my fancy until they would, finally, ask me to leave.<br />
<br />
The days blended. I was running through the insurance policy and the money we had saved like...like...<br />
<br />
Like it no longer mattered.<br />
<br />
It no longer mattered.<br />
<br />
There is this weird moment when you know you are trying to die. Not suicide. Just suicide.<br />
<br />
There were nights I would polish off a bottle of Walker and go home to snort coke with some asshole I didn't even know. I'd meet gals at the Bradshaw and do tequila shots. I would do anything I could. <br />
<br />
Anything I could to not think about anything at all.<br />
<br />
Its odd, you know, the years, and....<br />
<br />
Angry. The rain angry. You can barely see out the windows of the bus, weaving its way down the tiny road to Malaucen. The Vaucluse.<br />
<br />
Rains exceptionally hard, but fortunately this was our stop. <br />
<br />
Filing out like the tour driven fools we were, through empty town square to the Hotel Ventoux. Squat and small town, it was what you would expect. <br />
<br />
Attentive old lady, rustic feel and decor, somehow depressing.<br />
<br />
I slid into the hurt bed in the tiny room, alone with a skylight as the only single girl on the tour.<br />
<br />
I was, at least, not in Toronto.<br />
<br />
Funny, next day in the breakfast room I was pleased to hear that the bridges to the south had been washed out. We wouldn't be going anywhere. <br />
<br />
Croissants and coffee. Couples laughing at the delay. The guide all apologetic.<br />
<br />
Coming out of the hotel, mist settling on the mountain, looking both ways down empty small town streets. <br />
<br />
Malaucen had the central plaza that all French towns do. Lined with tree shaded areas for Boules. This day the old men had all stayed at home.<br />
<br />
Seeing the Cafe de la Republique open I left hive and spread across. <br />
<br />
Bemused but tolerant locals. Me, straight up to the small bar, sitting down and ordering a glass of wine and a double of whatever they had.<br />
<br />
With a wry look, the proprietor probably guessed the rest.<br />
<br />
Toronto, New York, Malaucen...<br />
<br />
Drowning, dying...the town is not important. The landscape is always the same.<br />
<br />
I suppose a relatively young Canadian girl was a bit of an event. <br />
<br />
To their credit, the event was smiles and laughs, free espresso and Poire William.<br />
<br />
By mid-afternoon...well I was very drunk. I was not feeling particularly mademoiselle. <br />
<br />
Looking out I knew it was time to go. <br />
<br />
And I would have, but for Lloyd. <br />
<br />
Lloyd strode in, late afternoon, grizzled with a faded leather jacket that made him look like some delicious WWII fly-boy. Without hesitation, and with nary an acknowledgement, he slid onto the bar stool beside me and ordered a drink.<br />
<br />
Lighting an unfiltered cigarette, he tossed me a half-glance...<br />
<br />
“What is your issue?”<br />
<br />
I laughed and and tapped my glass on the bar...time for another.<br />
<br />
Four blurs to five and fades to six and lingers to seven and....<br />
<br />
Lloyd, it turns out, left Hastings four years ago and moved to the south. He lived in small stone farm house, with no farm of course, and painted. I supposed for a living.<br />
<br />
Now dark outside, pools of light illuminating small dots of the main drag, Lloyd turns, wry smile...<br />
<br />
“Want to see my studio?”<br />
<br />
Why not?<br />
<br />
For Provence it was bracingly cold. Up the winding and very narrow roads of the hillside. Heavy rain beginning again.<br />
<br />
His studio is this vast, vault like room above the main part of the house. Who knows what its original purpose was? Lloyd had paintings all over the walls and stacked on the floors. Mostly bizzare. Blurred, disturbing blends of colours. Disconnected images. Eyes isolated, mouths, wilted trees, flames...it sounds derivative, but it was really good.<br />
<br />
“Do you sell much?” I asked, flipping through the canvasses flirtatiously.<br />
<br />
“I sell nothing” he said with a sideways look, “I do this for me alone”.<br />
<br />
Awkward pause.<br />
<br />
“Would you like a drink?”<br />
<br />
Very much...<br />
<br />
Lloyd leaves the studio, off to find what he promises will be the best single-malt I have ever had...<br />
<br />
At the bottom of one of his most abstract piles I find them. A strikingly clear painting. A young looking, very beautiful woman, lying on a bright beach, a small boy bouncing above her. Both laughing. Seeming a memory of a perfect moment.<br />
<br />
Faces tilted, smiling, smiling at me...<br />
<br />
I feel him behind, breath gentle on my neck, saying nothing. <br />
<br />
A stillness. The child and the woman. So clearly lost to us now. So clearly...past.<br />
<br />
“Who are they?”<br />
<br />
Pause.<br />
<br />
“You know who they are.”Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-31520904702395542072010-11-10T20:40:00.000-08:002015-02-21T23:59:56.563-08:00Fragment 35: Mortal CombatPerfect moments.<br />
<br />
Air still, Trevor, two-years older is ahead.<br />
<br />
Bicycles racing down Bethune, early summer morning, heat gentle, not yet oppressive.<br />
<br />
1993.<br />
<br />
Eight and ten.<br />
<br />
Before...well before everything.<br />
<br />
Trevor was one of those kids everybody liked. Brown hair, freckled face and toothy grin.<br />
<br />
Just a nice guy.<br />
<br />
Trevor would make the old ladies at the donut shop laugh.<br />
<br />
He would make the OPP guys smoking on break out front of the station house laugh.<br />
<br />
He could make our mother laugh, and no one did that.<br />
<br />
Even when I was a kid I knew my mother was beautiful.<br />
<br />
She had, I later understood, those wistful, country-girl looks that made the very worst men weak in the knees.<br />
<br />
And she never made a personal decision that she did not regret and she never met a man who didn't, in the end, walk all over her.<br />
<br />
But I couldn't know that then.<br />
<br />
She was just mom and she'd hug Trevor and I each day home off the bus with her happy face and sad eyes. Standing, waiting at the top of the stairs of the house that her father bought when our dad left.<br />
<br />
<i>1999, just before the new millennium, and the phone call comes from Texas..."Mrs. Ridell, were you once the wife of...</i><br />
<br />
I guess summer city folks would have thought our house quaint or even idyllic, but it was just a home.<br />
<br />
God, we never had any money. Sort-of makes me laugh now, you know?<br />
<br />
Good thing we had that house because the rest was all Kraft Dinner and Hamburger Helper.<br />
<br />
Not that Trev or I cared. KD was OK by me!<br />
<br />
She tried. What can I say?<br />
<br />
When Trevor was twelve, guess it must have been '95, the <em></em><strong></strong>Second Time Around<em></em><strong></strong> got one of those Genesis systems. All our friends had one, or a Nintendo, or so it seemed. I am sure it was not really true, but you know the perceived injustices of childhood are the deepest injustices of all, right-or-wrong.<br />
<br />
Trevor wanted it so badly.<br />
<br />
He would wander up outside the store window and simply stare, slack-jawed, trying to dream the fifty dollars into existence.<br />
<br />
I do know that when Christmas came around and Grandpa made sure it was under the tree it was the happiest day of Trevor's life.<br />
<br />
<i>Grandpa mad, mama crying in the kitchen, goddamn it Jennifer, not again, why the fuck would you let him...sudden silence as I walk in unexpectedly.</i><em></em><br />
<br />
I can't even begin to count the hours we spent in front of that fucking thing.<br />
<br />
I loved the fighting games. All that martial arts shit.<br />
<br />
Not Trevor. He would play them, but for him it was Sonic or sports or even Bugs Bunny stuff.<br />
<br />
He was a gentle guy, you know?<br />
<br />
<i>Remembering Grandpa dying, mama almost stone faced in shock, Trevor's head on her lap, tears streaming down his face, long lines of neighbours anxious to pay respects and there, in the front yard, I see the cardinal, high tree-top, gazing intently into my eyes.</i><br />
<br />
Years-and-years-and-years.<br />
<br />
All a kaleidoscope.<br />
<br />
Colours blending as do memories, swirling together and then apart.<br />
<br />
Girls, then young women, then women.<br />
<br />
The kisses. The hands held. The break-ups and...<br />
<br />
All the friends moving away, taking that one-way ticket to Toronto.<br />
<br />
<i>Shannon, hugging Trevor, big eyes and honest smile, I am sure I will only be gone a few months...</i><br />
<br />
Somehow you stumble through, right? You make it through.<br />
<br />
And you know why?<br />
<br />
Because one day, getting ready to go off to college, waiting tables at the Boston Pizza, and there is Cynthia, from grade three, but now...well it is not grade three anymore.<br />
<br />
She is leaving for the same college too.<br />
<br />
Why did Trevor want to go?<br />
<br />
Who knows?<br />
<br />
All the socialist types I met at York said our soldiers were war-crazy or had no choices.<br />
<br />
But, you know what, that is bullshit.<br />
<br />
It's just bullshit.<br />
<br />
Like it or not Trevor wanted to make a difference.<br />
<br />
It's true, he didn't have a job on Bay St lined up, but it wasn't about that.<br />
<br />
When he told us our mother was furious. To him that didn't matter; he wanted to serve his country.<br />
<br />
He wanted to serve in Afghanistan.<br />
<br />
Smarter people than me, years from now, will decide if he was wrong or right. But this is where we all, it would seem, were willing to send him.<br />
<br />
<i><strong></strong>Dusty roads in Kandahar, laughter on patrol, coming around road's corner, children waving from just off-centre as the final wave of light rushed in at him. Did he have time to see his arm gone? To look over at those children now dead? To feel the pressure of the blast?</i><strong></strong><em></em><br />
<br />
Floating, floating, slowly.<br />
<br />
First in the cargo hold.<br />
<br />
Then across the highway to the ceremony.<br />
<br />
And finally to home.<br />
<br />
To mother. Older and beyond sadness.<br />
<br />
To the streets and yards and greasy spoons and treehouses and schools and hockey rinks that he briefly graced.<br />
<br />
An impression. Ephemeral.<br />
<br />
It was only a month after Cynthia and I married that my mother died.<br />
<br />
Her heart just stopped. Forty-nine years old.<br />
<br />
Clearing out the house, Cynthia now seven months along, moving slow.<br />
<br />
Trevor's room untouched.<br />
<br />
Leaf's posters.<br />
<br />
<i>You know, he had said laughing at Dylan's just five winters past, I will never live to see them win a Stanley Cup</i><br />
<br />
Girly mags under the mattress. Country CDs.<br />
<br />
I was stunned to find a dog-eared copy of The Plague by Camus in his top dresser drawer.<br />
<br />
But I was even more surprised, digging through piles of sweaters and shoes, to find the Genesis.<br />
<br />
Buried at closet back. Carefully all the games stacked beside.<br />
<br />
The Christmas card from our grandfather taped atop.<br />
<br />
We had not played it in many years. Yet Trevor had kept it hidden here pristine. Almost a subconscious shrine to fond memory.<br />
<br />
So there we are.<br />
<br />
All huddled together, flesh-on-flesh.<br />
<br />
Waves crashing astride the landing crafts.<br />
<br />
Hearts full of trepidation and fear.<br />
<br />
The sounds of death and terror about us and the violence of this meager existence near surreal.<br />
<br />
The future on unknown beaches.<br />
<br />
Waiting, as we all ultimately do, to meet a fate not foreseen on a childhood's Christmas mornings.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-42080371621803169252010-09-27T13:16:00.000-07:002010-09-28T10:55:34.480-07:00Fragment 34: ThermopylaeLaughing...together.<br /><br />It is Monday morning with flags unfurled.<br /><br />Children gone, last one out today.<br /><br />An empty house.<br /><br />Mandy the years just slipped by. It wasn't a conscious road, this road that led me away from you.<br /><br />It was never what I wanted.<br /><br />But then life is never what we want.<br /><br />The dreams of fifteen that dull to the ache of fifty-five.<br /><br />When I saw you, sunglasses on, by the boardwalk at the end of Brand St.<br /><br />Before Balfour's, before marriage, before the mortgage.<br /><br />You had that inscrutable smirk.<br /><br />Sly, quizzically flirtatious face.<br /><br />Darling green eyes.<br /><br /><em><strong>You know these summer things never last...</strong></em><br /><br />Well you were wrong before you were right.<br /><br />All great relationships, like civilizations, leave monuments to decay in their wake.<br /><br />The bungalow on Miles Ave. with its multiple extensions.<br /><br />Debbie, Jake and Joseph, too grown up now.<br /><br />The memory boxes of shared joys and pains that are a garage and basement plump with the detritus of lives joined.<br /><br />Fragments of junk sale daydreams.<br /><br />These vaulted and echoing cathedrals that we ourselves erected but can only now visit as if tourists being guided through our own past.<br /><br />It is, I guess, as was Stonehenge after the Druids left.<br /><br />But what is this then, this compulsion so many of us have?<br /><br />This desire to stand shoulder-by-shoulder as if against the tide of the world?<br /><br />Knowing as we all must that we are sure to fail.<br /><br />I suppose it is that the failure matters less than that, on those many days that littered our battlefields, you would whisper ever so softly to me. Touch my fingers with yours.<br /><br />So find me Xerxes and Leonidas,<br /><br />And to this brink and pass do draw me near,<br /><br />Loose these quivers full of expectations,<br /><br />And deliver me into this valley of tears,<br /><br />And then go tell it to the Spartans,<br /><br />Stranger passing by,<br /><br />That in faith with this fleeting fairytale,<br /><br />We tried.<br /><br />We tried.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-17453425303115708352010-04-10T18:47:00.000-07:002010-04-10T19:11:51.812-07:00Fragment 33: MantisThe morning after, I am greeted by chamomile and vanilla bean, the faint fragrances of your hair.<br /><br />Running my hand tenderly down your side, so as not to disrupt the sublime movements of your sleep, but rather just incrementally induce that involuntary twitching of your body against mine.<br /><br />In the face of this personal peril, what is it that we have done?<br /><br />Through the window, slightly open, sounds of a summer countryside as it slowly awakes, the gentle symphony of the lake springing to life.<br /><br />Thinking back on how Peter said it, Sunday night at <em><strong>Balfour's</strong></em>, the look of distressed comprehension creeping across his face.<br /><br />As the sun, newly brilliant, blazes now furiously, bathing the room in its daily ritual of renaissance, I feel you stir just so slightly.<br /><br />In these moments, these seconds, before thought translates into the catharsis of action, eternity lies.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-37715410997133745582010-03-27T21:10:00.000-07:002010-07-23T22:17:29.001-07:00Fragment 32: Concerto in FYou know what I always loved?<br /><br />It was that outward pulse, that sense of anticipation, as I would stride down those long hallways that inevitably seemed to lead to the stage, blinding lights blocking out all identity except the profiles, the cheering cacophonous and growing louder until...<br /><br />Exploding out onto the platform, they are chanting "Steven...Steven...Steven"....<br /><br />Sometimes fifty, sometimes a hundred, but when you got those twice a year crowds of thousands...there was nothing quite like that.<br /><br />What happened? I don't really know. I just remember that when I was young my Dad took me up to shake hands with Melvin Steven after the union meeting. Melvin had on an old suit, and he looked tired, but after watching over two hundred of the guys (and in those days they were all guys) go crazy about him for nearly two hours I thought he must be some kind of star.<br /><br />These guys fucking hated rock-and-roll after all, so Melvin must of had something going on.<br /><br />He just looked down at me, tie a little too low, breath a little too...<br /><br />"So your father tells me you are named Steven..."<br /><br />Fifteen years later and he is doing election number seven. This time the atmosphere is electric. <br /><br />I did the phones and organized signs. Melvin hit every house in the riding.<br /><br />"Putting People First". We loved the slogan. No socialist had ever won in South County but we knew that this was our time.<br /><br />It didn't happen.<br /><br />Cigarette smoke swirling near ceiling fans as four a.m. rolls around and the office is empty save the three.<br /><br />Melvin, Cassandra and I.<br /><br />I had been tapping Cass since campaign day five. We went to the Briar's Edge, drank a few C.C shots and next thing I woke up, no idea where I was till I saw her lying there, snoring lightly...so tiny cute.<br /><br />We just kept it going.<br /><br />Mel looked over. Sad. Drunk.<br /><br />"Its to you Steven. This is my last"<br /><br />I suppose I should have felt bad for him. He was so close, but it was over.<br /><br />In truth, I kind of thought that this was the time. It was mine, not for any legitimate reason maybe, but it sure felt right.<br /><br />Many years later, after all was said and done, I remember that I was at some stupid fucking thing held by the Youth Socialists and they were trying to honour "my life-long commitment to the cause".<br /><br />After listening to some whole list of shit I had supposedly contributed to, this one little prick got up and asked me "Mr. Lawrence, if you could teach us one thing, as young people, what brought you to this fight for social justice?"<br /><br />Well, asshole, who the fuck knows? It sure seemed a lot better than shoveling dirt at some construction site.<br /><br />Twelve days after I won my first nomination for parliament Cass and I got married.<br /><br />I remember we were on our way down to California for the honeymoon when they called the general election. <br /><br />I just turned that Mustang right-back around.<br /><br />There was always next year.<br /><br />Victory speech blending to caucus meetings to protests to watching as the janitors would fold up the chairs after the rallies in hockey rinks across wine country. <br /><br />Ivor Wynne blustery, wind brutal on an October afternoon, and there were fifteen thousand union members ecstatic over our new government. For all the good that it did them.<br /><br />The air was harsh and my voice echoed oddly but as it all wound up I looked over to Cass, eyes down...<br /><br />Hotels, motels, I made Days Inn my hometown. There was no easier way to be away from...<br /><br />Nineteen years and I was done.<br /><br />We had long lost power. <br /><br />I had hung on somehow. <br /><br />The fight was gone, but what the fuck was I supposed to do? This was it. This was my job...my career...I had nothing else.<br /><br />They held some banquet for me as I was on the way out. Tables too close and three hundred fifty of them from across the province. Terrible wine and lousy dry chicken or fish. Speaker after speaker telling them what a great fucking guy I was, all the shit I had done for the working-class, my devotion to my wife...<br /><br />(if only they knew, kinda plump, looking at me with those high-school eyes, make-up pretentious, thick, uniform issue stockings, stuttering as she said aren't you...)<br /><br />So no more limelight. What to do?<br /><br />I drank. Scotch, Vodka, Rye, Wine...you fucking name it I drank it.<br /><br />That subservient little fuck-face they got to replace me trotted up one morning, nine a.m. and asked me what advice a man of my stature might have...I told him I had yet to meet a girl who didn't look better from the right angle.<br /><br />Eventually Cass was done. She didn't even bother to talk to me.<br /><br />Empty bed and a lawyer's note.<br /><br />Years blurring....<br /><br />I saw Daniel, as I learned his name was, by the riverside even before I knew what he wanted to do.<br /><br />He looked sixteen, though he was actually nineteen, and he had on a basketball jersey and shorts, knee deep already.<br /><br />I was on one of the many walks I took to kill time and trim fat (though why, there was little left to be fit for) when I saw him wading out. We had had the rains and while clear the river was running fast.<br /><br />I yelled to him.<br /><br />Turning back he looks at me, and then I see the dog, twenty yards off, on some tiny island of accumulated wood pieces and junk, clinging for dear life. Nothing save front legs and snout above water.<br /><br />Frantic.<br /><br />"What the fuck are you doing do you want to get killed?"<br /><br />Its my dog...I can't just let him die....<br /><br />Daniel starts wading out. He has a trim, aquiline face, bristling muscles, brimming with health.<br /><br />The brush is thick on this part of the river so I push through to grab at him.<br /><br />"Look don't go out there...just call for him...what's the dog's name?"<br /><br />He ventures a little further, buffeted now by unexpected waves, treading more carefully...<br /><br />I was sixty-two, hardly sprightly, and I knew I could not possibly intervene.<br /><br />He didn't even answer, he just kept pushing towards the dog until, about eight feet out, he was suddenly lifted off his feet, cartoon like.<br /><br />His arms and legs started flailing and he kept yelling "fuck...fuck...fuck...", repeating it as a mantra, more-and-more frightened. I was running alongside but the current accelerated.<br /><br />I know what you all think. You think I was gutless, that I should have at least tried, but you weren't there. You didn't live through this. There was no fucking way...I would never have even...<br /><br />It was a moment, I guess five minutes past, that he just stopped...well, he stopped everything. I could still see him, his form at least, but nothing was happening.<br /><br />I was running the whole time through the brush and foliage, and as we got closer to the lake I started to dread that he would simply be washed out, lost, as if not so now, but I held to these slender threads.<br /><br />Eventually he drifted in. Deadwood.<br /><br />I had to try for several minutes to drag him onto the bankside, face purple bloated, eyes turned back.<br /><br />Pulling him, this perfect manhood, and I so worn away.<br /><br />As the water gushed out of his mouth, caressing his head on my lap, slowly stroking his wet hair, the ebb of the meaningful long past.<br /><br />Promise. Fortitude. Strength.<br /><br />The tragedy of circumstances unforeseen. Inevitable collisions with futures preferentially denied.<br /><br />Kissing the forehead of a dead man. Wishing.<br /><br />As the sun started to fade, night menacing, I heard the distant crackling first as his dog approached and ran up, soaked yet energetic, to happily lick the now drying leaves from his face.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-84024586042509042212010-02-22T19:21:00.000-08:002010-02-23T06:24:23.979-08:00Fragment 31: Proletarian OrderIt was three days after the plant closed its doors for the last time that I got in my Ford pick-up truck and pulled away from the bungalow, 6 a.m., with Martha and the kids left behind still sleeping.<br /><br />I had told her nothing, but had written the note. I felt she would understand.<br /><br />Boris had his little fishing shack two hours out of town in cottage country.<br /><br />I remember him telling me, God knows how many times, about his grandfather picking the place up in the 1940's for this tiny fucking sum of money, like two hundred bucks or some ridiculous shit, and now he was surrounded by rich folks and million dollar lakeside palaces.<br /><br />But that is the way it always is, we start it and they fuck it up.<br /><br />I love the way gravel sounds under the pick-up tires, and the road to Douglas Lake was all gravel once you pull off the 410. It is a beautiful noise, so I immerse myself. With twelve hundred a month going to the house, five hundred twenty to the part-time daycare, and all the other expenses of an average life in a mid-sized city, I think I can kiss the truck goodbye. Martha's four nights a week at the KFC won't cut it much with the bank when the severance runs out.<br /><br />And for me that will only be....well not all that long.<br /><br />This fucking truck was my reward to myself for six years of double shifts. It'll be the first thing to go.<br /><br />July. Thirty degrees and perfectly sunny. Slowing slightly for shirtless kids in shorts walking roadside, pulling in past the tacky old sign that he bought with Janice the year before she died in the accident down at the turnpike (<em>phone ringing at 4 am, Boris frantic, telling me he needed me to come out, telling me he just couldn't identify her alone</em>...)...Chez BOJA with two cartoonish sunbathers grasping fancy looking drinks entwined on what seemed a single deckchair.<br /><br />Down the stairs past the cabin to the dock.<br /><br />There, by perfect blue is Boris, staring blankly across the small lake to the other shore.<br /><br />As always the fishing rod lies at his side. Meaningless, he hasn't fished in years. You can't actually fish in a small lake with sixty cottages on it and a bunch of drunk stock brokers driving loud motor boats stupid fast as some kind of cock extension.<br /><br />We sit for ten fucking minutes before he says a word.<br /><br />The lake placid, the joy of kids laughing, jumping from some offshore swimming dock, a skinny teenager holding her hand up, swerving to-and-fro, waterskiing.<br /><br />Carefree.<br /><br />Boris has this huge beard, Karl Marx big he likes to say, greying round the edges, and monster tattooed arms. Only thing he wears for summer weather is the wife-beater and one of what seems to be two pairs of all together too tight shorts (not flattering, I remember he once insisted that the guy at the union sensitivity meeting was coming on to him, but given my faith in the average gay man's sense of good taste I sincerely doubt that that wrinkled ass would have gotten a second's glance from Philip).<br /><br />Boris pulls out a 100 menthol Slim and lights it, drawing smoke in deeply. Its a lady's cigarette, but when Jackson, drunk, made the mistake of pointing that out one night he found that a pool cue can, in fact, serve two functions.<br /><br />-How's Martha?<br /><br />Always the same shit. He knows full well Martha is fine. He talked to me yesterday. Chivalry. (<em>Seeing me, really loaded, leaning over, touching Cynthia's leg...I'm in the can and there comes Boris saying what the fuck are you doing man, what about Martha you prick.</em>..)<br /><br />How's Martha? How's Martha? Well frankly, last time I saw her she was crying at that stupid fucking "retro" breakfast table we bought in 2008. It didn't seem to matter how many times I told her, she just couldn't accept that I had no fucking clue what we were going to do...<br /><br />-Were you there for the last unit?<br /><br />Yeah, that's right Boris, I waited around with all those other poor fuckers, tears streaming down their faces, holding hands like it was fucking 9/11 or something, as that last fucking air conditioner rolled off the line, signing their names to the fucking thing like it was an atom bomb. You can be sure that after that management threw the little fucker straight into the garbage.<br /><br />Not me, sorry, but I was already drinking, blowing that payoff, knowing that the three dollars for the Bud was a day's pay for the poor bastard working the twelve hour shift at the new facility in Shanghai. I thought those fuckers were supposed to be Communists...well, we all know that in practice the powerful find a way to fuck us all, regardless of what they deign to call themselves.<br /><br />-what are you proud of...<br /><br />I know what he is proud of, fourth beer open, why talk...<br /><br />-I remember I walked into that plant, twenty-eight years ago and the first shift I fought so goddamn hard to keep pace. That night when I got back to the old apartment we had at the time I hurt so much that I wept like a three-year old....<br /><br />Some kind of singing, distant yet unmistakeable.<br /><br />-But nothing compares to when I got voted onto the committee.<br /><br />Vague mint odour wafting across, one cigarette lit upon another, consummate old-school chain smoker, soon to go from Miller to Rye.<br /><br />Always from Miller to Rye.<br /><br />-Remember the strike in '98?<br /><br />(How the fuck could I remember a strike three years before I started?)<br /><br />-You know what got me...it wasn't the bosses holding out or the office types, even the secretaries crossing the line, it was when that asshole down at the coffee shop came up to the picket and told me that I was a lazy mother-fucker and that I should stop complaining and be happy I have a job.<br /><br />The sound, louder than it should be, of a helicopter overhead, reminding that this all became a whole lot less rustic when they opened the airport ten minutes drive north.<br /><br />-Thing was I had been going to his shop for ten fucking years, must have spent 2 dollars plus a day, 300 fucking days out of the calendar, and here was this asshole, six fucking grand plus richer because of me, and he's calling me a lazy mother-fucker.<br /><br />(Boris, four years ago, college kids drunk, telling him that he could wash their office floors one day, dislocating my shoulder as he pushed past me, breaking that one arrogant asshole's nose)<br /><br />-Well, after the strike I went over there, ordered a latte, and when that timid little prick brought it over, with his sad fucking that'll be $2.25 sir, I took that fucking cup of shit and tossed it right over the counter at him. I think I said "shove those two dollars a day up your ass".<br /><br />He's yelling, angry loud, and the kids a little over are staring across...startled...<br /><br />-Boris, c'mon man, tone down...<br /><br />-Did you go to any of the rallies?<br /><br />Calmer, now, leaning back, opening another pack, a bit of a breeze accentuating his immense mane of hair, he staring off to his right, avoiding eye-contact...Boris, when angry, always avoids eye-contact...doesn't even matter if he's mad at you, he can't look over.<br /><br />-No, Boris, you know I didn't. I didn't see the point. We could have protested every day for the last seven months after we got the fucking news and you know that it wouldn't have made any difference at all.<br /><br />Boris keeps staring away, I should have just shut up...<br /><br />-Look, be as mad as you want, and I am not saying that going wasn't worthwhile, but I spent the time with the kids. A Sunday is a Sunday and the kids don't give a shit about protesting if it means that we don't play basketball in the driveway.<br /><br />-You could have brought them, teach them a thing or two about the union, you know all these teenies don't care at all about what we fought for and your kids will be teenagers soon enough...and then, who knows, maybe one of those endless stream of twenty somethings doing the minimum wage thing, hating unions because the asshole manager at Wal Mart that they work for tells them to...<br /><br />Why disagree with him? He's not wrong, I guess (though I am sure that like all older people his opinion of the young is about as interesting and enlightened as is the average young person's view of him), but I just hadn't cared. Deer in the headlights, fucking Stockholm Syndrome, I don't know, I just wanted to move on, I just wanted to get out of there. Maybe it hurt too much.<br /><br />-I knew you never came, of course, not like I couldn't see...You know you are part right. I remember the last of the three that NDP guy came. He got up and he sounded great, going on about how if they had been in power, if the worker's had been represented in government, it would never have happened, we would all still have our jobs because they would have a "Made in Ontario" industrial strategy or some such shit. We all know its fucking nonsense though...NDP or no NDP they can move their factory anywhere they want. Small changes seem to change nothing at all.<br /><br />Silence, gentle waves ripple past, that midday quiet that comes between lunch and late afternoon, where everyone retires for an hour or so...a Canadian summer siesta.<br /><br />-I wonder, you know, is it really so awful if working people get a decent shake...I mean, to not have an education or office job, does it really mean that we should get some shit wage or have other poor folks get mad if they don't have a union job with union pay? There is just no solidarity at all out there anymore. Its like it is somehow my fault that other people are getting even more fucked by their bosses than I am, like they just can't see that its not me...<br /><br />-I should go Boris...<br /><br />I want to leave. I feel even worse than when I came...and that is actually saying something.<br /><br />Boris doesn't even answer, gaze still off aside...<br /><br />-You know, I only ever liked you because of baseball.<br /><br />Now this is something of a shock...<br /><br />-What are you talking about..<br /><br />Laughing, first time in days...<br /><br />-Well, we were all over at the Golden Goose, Friday night, shift's end, and they had some godawful Bob Seger rip-off band singing about all that old time fucking rock-and-roll, and there you were, alone at the bar, staring up at the T.V. totally immersed in the Blue Jay's game, even though we were having a .400 season at the time. I thought, now that is dedication. This guy sticks with things.<br /><br />The sky is now absolutely clear and the sun is brutal hot, beating down, no shade. Beer, fresh from the cooler is lukewarm in moments...<br /><br />-Up till then I kind of thought you were just another young asshole. But you joined the bowling league, and you were there for all the hockey games...and you were the best goddamn outfielder we ever had on the plant team...<br /><br />I loved those nights, so hot, humid, lights way too bright, ridiculous bad quality play, always some jackass who took it way too seriously, drinks at the Kat's Kaboose after, Screwdrivers, Molsons, bad wine...happy in the knowledge that the weekend lay ahead...<br /><br />Boris and I, winning that stupid trophy, autoworkers glaring at us, but all in good fun, Sandy calls for Springsteen and the bartender obliges...<br /><br />Boris is now, five years later, very drunk already, and kicks out forward knocking the bottle of Alberta's Finest over. He seems almost dizzy and uncertain. Voice wistful...sad...<br /><br />-we'll never take that fucking title again, will we?<br /><br />I suppose not.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-57924246498458315392010-02-02T19:07:00.000-08:002011-02-25T19:36:03.495-08:00Fragment 30: ByzantiumWeird how it feels, the pulse running slowly through you, knowing that you are driving too fast.<br /><br />I guess that's why I eyed him suspiciously from the backseat, realizing that he was pushing the pedal. The city oblique through mist of gentle rain and thicker early evening fog, elevated expressway a monstrosity of modernity, looking in on condo dwellers and shift workers alike until you hit the off ramp.<br /><br />I am sure he wondered, deep down, why the fuck he abandoned a future as a doctor in some distant land to drive a drunk guy <span style="color:#000000;">across the highway</span> to Babylon in Canada.<br /><br />Who knows? Frankly, who the fuck cares? All I know is that five thousand years from now, all things being equal, our empires will be gone and those we looked down on will have had the last laugh.<br /><br />For a time.<br /><br />It all changes, see, or at least that is what my Dad taught, for all that his bullshit was worth (not much...fucker with his belt, cigarette, knowing I was into boys, looking at me with those nasty fucking eyes...), but he did teach me that, despite appearances, it is all transitory.<br /><br />Power today means fuck all <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">tomorrow</span>.<br /><br />And what applies to <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">societies</span>...<br /><br />Anyway at last at exit ramp, I don't need the contempt anymore, seeing that I am paying the bill and all, down, round-and-round, into deeper fog, dark to darker, until he drops me at the park behind the Flat Iron.<br /><br />What he wants to say is....what he says is ..."that will be$22.25".<br /><br />No please for gay folks.<br /><br />I was tempted to tell him to go fuck himself, but why bother.<br /><br />Out into October style brisk. God, I love that time in Toronto. Dark <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">getting</span> earlier ( and only children and jackasses long for daylight ), cold not yet cold, mist when not expected.<br /><br />Nothing expected.<br /><br />I knew that I was early but I wanted him so much I didn't care.<br /><br />Travelling winding stairs to the bar, band blasting from the back declaring themselves with bad Stones' covers and tributes to groups that they will never be.<br /><br />Well, what to expect, we wouldn't part with the $10 if they played a bunch of sad shit none of us had ever heard.<br /><br />Would we?<br /><br />This platinum <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">blonde</span> chick and her plump friend are staring at me soon after I sit down. Seems to always happen. Gratified to know that had I been born straight you would have been into me...or would you have...do we not always want what we cannot have?<br /><br />Dawn leans over (hey, fuck you, she said that that was her name) and asks me if I would like to see why her boyfriends have always said she gushes?<br /><br />Not really...but it is hard not to be curious...<br /><br />Glen arrives right then, red hair, fit, looking like I knew he would, like I knew he did...<br /><br />Looking like the guy I had wanted to screw every night for the last ten years, ten years to the day since we had once met.<br /><br />(Glendon College, known for its French girls, and there was Glen, Pub Night, rubbing harder-and-harder against me, dance floor crowded and dense with smoke, my cock growing larger and larger until...)<br /><br />"So, stranger, fancy meeting you here."<br /><br />Glen has this smile, disarming, gentle. I buy him a Gin and Tonic and move ever so slightly closer to him, his breath sweet and perfumed, his upper lip <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">beautiful</span>, my heart beating faster, knowing that I have waited too long.<br /><br />He looks so fucking fantastic naked, an Adonis, as I work my way down his magnificent chest to his glorious member, throbbing, responding to my every touch, so proud, tall and so thick. It was just...well I suppose it was delicious.<br /><br />He arrived in those suits that all these boys with wives wear, too perfect, too family-man, too corporate.<br /><br />Ready, as he leaned over and put his hand on me, to make that version of life just disappear.<br /><br />I have never wanted to fuck and be fucked like that.<br /><br />And when he came, exploding inside of me, I felt him throbbing, pulsating, pushing...<br /><br />Hotel room bleak, but not us, happy in each other, happy in our embrace.<br /><br />Kissing his ear, stroking him, knowing we had to part...<br /><br />So Glen, will I ever, you know, see you again...<br /><strong><em></em></strong><br />I meant it as a laugh, but no response.<br /><br />I guess I fell asleep, but when I awoke he was leaning naked against the window, his curved back delightful, his profile just...just...<br /><br />I went over to him, to the window, and put my arms around his waist. He turned and smiled at me, tilting his head down to my cheek. I kissed the crown of his head, running my fingers through his thick red hair.<br /><br />You know I won't see you again...<br /><br />Saw the plane then, lower and lower towards the island airport. I feel dizzy watching and dizzy knowing...<br /><br />...and on Monday where will we all be...will I still be there...without him again will I still be there at all....Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-59959337023827643532009-11-05T20:03:00.000-08:002009-11-06T06:19:25.070-08:00Fragment 28: ThessalonikiWe were supposed to meet at 7pm but Andrew was always late.<br /><br />I got there, punctual as usual, and slid into one of the booths at the back.<br /><br /><em>Jackson's </em>was busy, even for a Friday, and I was lucky to get a spot. Waitress, pale, skinny, unfriendly, was a composite of every girlfriend I had ever had. I should have made a pass...no one had told me to fuck off in days.<br /><br />I ordered a plate of the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Tandoori</span> style wings and a Corona and watched the start of the hockey game on the big screen TV they had across the <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">far side</span> of the bar.<br /><br />I was working on dead soldier number two and the first period was ending when he finally got there. Still in the office clothes, dark blue sports jacket, crisp white shirt with light yellow tie, pants that almost seemed freshly pressed. Remarkable how he could pull that off.<br /><br />He worked a quick ten minute walk away, and I knew there was no fucking chance he had stayed late at week's end, so I had a pretty good idea that he had had a few before coming.<br /><br />Usual small talk to start. Andrew never said anything important until at least the third drink.<br /><br />I had met him in university. Fifteen years ago now. He had joined the same drama club I had. Took me just a couple of meetings to realize that he was after the same girl as well.<br /><br />Solely at a Liberal Arts College would you read Moliere and Arthur Miller as a way to get laid.<br /><br />In the end he married Klara.<br /><br />I only...well, we never really talked about that.<br /><br /><em>Paul, look, things between Klara and I are finished....she asked me for a divorce....</em><br /><em></em><br />Quiet descending as the girl came with his scotch. A young looking <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">pseudo</span>-cowboy with an <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">acoustic</span> guitar was tuning up on stage and the business women in the dressy outfits behind him suddenly laughed loudly. He looked down, eyes averted, almost as if <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">embarrassed</span>.<br /><br />What are you going to say?<br /><br />I said what we all would say. Why? Have you tried counselling? What about the kids?<br /><br />It took me awhile to ask the single question of any interest at all... what happened?<br /><br /><em>Nothing...</em><br /><br />Long pause. He smiled tentatively, knowing I didn't believe him.<br /><br /><em>Honestly Paul, nothing happened...we just...we...well, we just grew apart. </em><br /><br />An hour or so flows past, game boring, conversation <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">awkward</span> and uncomfortable, a few too many pregnant pauses. Laughter over past exploits, stories recycled yet again.<br /><br />Andrew smiles finally, sadly, small wrinkles the tiny blemishes to an otherwise handsome face. I always thought he had a bit of a Cary Grant gee-<span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">whiz</span> quality. Infectious and effortless.<br /><br /><em>Do you remember our wedding Paul?</em><br /><em></em><br />Yes, of course, I remember. I was his best man.<br /><br />His folks had gone all out. Open bar, live band, late-night DJ. It was great. I danced with a cute little bride's maid until 2 a.m.<br /><br />Klara had looked just too beautiful.<br /><br />It was time to go.<br /><br />Andrew knew it. I knew it.<br /><br />We paid the bill and were walking out with the live show starting astride us.<br /><br />It sounded a decent Dylan knock-off but I was tired.<br /><br /><em>Paul, was your Dad at the wedding?</em><br /><br />My Dad...<br /><br />My Dad had <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">definitely</span> not been at the wedding.<br /><br /><em>He died didn't he?</em><br /><br />He had died. Two years before. The lifetime of chain smoking had finally caught up to him.<br /><br />(<em>Withered and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">wheezing</span>, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">decrepit</span> looking, so many tubes and a single tear falling from his left eye, fuck I knew I should never have visited him)</em><br /><br /><em>I don't think I ever met your Mom...</em><br /><em></em><br />No...no you couldn't have.<br /><br />We shook hands, odd for us, and then he walked off, dissolving into December dark...<br /><br />I seem to think it was a Tuesday that I was newly seven and sitting on her lap.<br /><br />My mother, stern and silent, gazing away from me, chastising for a minor transgression.<br /><br />My father pulling up in his car. Her face so very sad.<br /><br />A couple days later there was Dad, Lucky Strike in hand, holding a <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">tea towel</span> in Grandma's basement, telling me she was gone.<br /><br />Dead.<br /><br />At the house that night I knew there was something he was holding back. Everyone avoided me. All his friends whispered. I felt that there was an underlying sense of shame.<br /><br />I had never seen my father cry.<br /><br />We lived in a squat suburban bungalow and I slept in a small bedroom up at the front.<br /><br />Mickey Mouse and Guy <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-error"><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-error">Lafleure</span></span> posters, books of one kind or another, a small radio that I listened to to go to bed.<br /><br />After Mom died I had this recurrent dream where I would wake up in my bed, calling out for my father, screaming <em>Daddy...Daddy...</em><br /><br />Jumping up from beneath sheets, the house would be empty, every corner vacant, no furnishings, no people, no Mom, no Dad.<br /><br />I would run room-to-room, increasingly frantic, yelling more-and-more loudly, yet, somehow, understanding that there was nothing...<br /><br />Nothing....<br /><br />My father would always rush in, as I sat up in bed, sometimes hysterical, and he would hug me, pull me tight to his chest, almost crushing me in his ribs...<br /><br /><em>Paul... Paul...it is OK....you are OK....it is only a dream Paul...</em><br /><br />About five years later, when I was twelve, we were driving back from Grandma's late one night. We had eaten order-in Chinese food, but as we left the sky had turned morbid dark and brooding and, when near halfway home, it had opened up in a terrible downpour.<br /><br />I sat in the back of the old Cutlass Supreme as the torrents hammered harder and harder until, sideways slanting rain blurring out all <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">visibility</span>, my father pulled off of Dwight Ave. into the vacant parking <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_12" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">astride</span> the huge sidings of the soup factory.<br /><br />For a few minutes we sat there, motor <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_13" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">idling</span>, Bonnie Tyler on the radio...<br /><br /><em>Dad...</em><br /><em></em><br />There was no response for a moment...<br /><br /><em>Dad...when Mom died...you know...when she went...well some of my friends...well...what do you think happened to Mom?</em><br /><br />My father sat, smoke pooling above his head, lingering in the near vacuum of the Cutlass interior.<br /><br />When he spoke he never even looked back.<br /><br /><em>Your mother...you know no one knows what happens to people when they die. Some people think we come back again. Some think...some think that when you die...when your mother died...you go to heaven...they think she is there, safe, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_14" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">among</span> the angels.</em><br /><em></em><br />Bonnie Tyler faded to Willie Nelson and the loud horn of a fast passing truck split the cab of our car as the rain eased up enough that my father seemed ready to go.<br /><br /><em>That Mom is up there...safe...is that what you <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_15" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">believe</span>?</em><br /><br />The empty air between us as the car pulled slowly away from the siding, advancing into the now gently <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_16" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">rhythmic</span> patter....<br /><br /><em>No</em>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-65032891526701600682009-06-18T08:26:00.000-07:002009-06-18T09:08:28.754-07:00Fragment 27: SorenI ran into Regine at a church function. It was a bitterly cold February Sunday and I, against all of my keener judgement, had chosen to take refuge at the post-sermon social that I had, with true devotion, avoided for many prior months like it had been some horrible medieval plague.<br /><br />Now, praise be God, United Church gatherings bore, at least at the time, a decided <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">resemblance</span> in their intensity to the average pulse rate at the morgue.<br /><br />Cumbersome concrete stairs to a room awash with the elderly, where fifty seemed <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">sprightly</span>, a cornucopia of cucumber and tuna fish sandwiches and gigantic carafes of very bad coffee.<br /><br />Portraits of forgotten ministers and, oddly, prime ministers.<br /><br />It was, however, exceptionally warm. A bulwark against the onslaught of the seemingly secular snow.<br /><br />At twenty-seven, I felt certain that I was the youngest, by half, of the assemblage.<br /><br />Regine, you know, had this infectious, delightful little giggle. It is hard to fully appreciate should you have never had the great pleasure to hear it.<br /><br />Floating across to me, enchanting, I turned to find myself confronted by this magical girl, nineteen and beautiful, the blue dress hugging the curves of a burgeoning womanhood that was, well, magnificent.<br /><br />Why the good Lord saw fit that she should find me fetching stands as a grand testament to his relish of the absurd.<br /><br />Our first date a study in contrast with she so radiant almost despite herself, and I a cad, scruffy and undistinguished in my <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">decrepit</span>, tattered green trench coat, my hippie cords and the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">bizarre</span> fading fedora that for some unknown reason I wore at the time.<br /><br />Regine.<br /><br />Why deny? She had a certain <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">transcendence</span>.<br /><br />Anyway, within a month I had proposed to her, and, much to my shock, she had accepted.<br /><br />Almost immediately I knew I had made a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">catacylsmic</span> error and not because of her father's frantic, furious phone calls to me either.<br /><br />I had led a life blissful as it was <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">separate</span> and disengaged.<br /><br />Impervious to outside influence.<br /><br />But it is not as easy as one might think to cease to be the object of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">someone's</span> affection.<br /><br />A charmed courtship this did not turn out to be.<br /><br />Dear Ms. Olsen.<br /><br />What can I say?<br /><br />A part of me wanted you so very much. Just never on terms with which the either of us could have lived.<br /><br />Paradox.<br /><br />It all came to a head that day on the island.<br /><br />Ferry docking with the mass of humanity spewing forth as we two almost wished to hang back.<br /><br />Walking silent.<br /><br />Other lovers on rented double bikes or afloat in giant swans.<br /><br />Us, no more communication. Your eyes sad.<br /><br />Making our way through the island's farm, from seven to seventy-seven this sea of people, all apart, unknowing, yet somehow entwined, somehow connected.<br /><br />The proof of any lack of meaning in this parade of the mundane stemmed from its own <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">absence</span>.<br /><br />There was no climactic fight but as you climbed into the back of the taxi, without farewells, it was clear.<br /><br />I must say, though, that the photo you sent me of you, Joseph and the newborn sits on my refrigerator door.<br /><br />It makes me tremble a little bit inside every single day.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-72089672487078421992009-04-28T12:50:00.000-07:002009-04-28T13:57:14.684-07:00Fragment 26: SenecaFirst memories. Irrelevant.<br /><br />Grew up middle-class.<br /><br />Mom a lawyer.<br /><br />Dad a prof.<br /><br />We were the All-Canadian family!<br /><br />Cross-country <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">skiing</span> on winter weekends. Summer cottage canoe escapades.<br /><br />Teen years lost <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">necking</span> in the dark in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">boatslip</span>.<br /><br />Hidden, seeming always, beneath emotions lost and found.<br /><br />High School a blast of the usual shit.<br /><br />I suppose being from where I was from left too many options. Too many places to go.<br /><br />Well, I wanted to make a difference.<br /><br />Change the world.<br /><br />Went into social work.<br /><br />Four years of <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">pseudo</span>-Marxist bullshit followed by day-upon-day of driving around the city's projects monitoring people's kids.<br /><br />I was a prick, a fucker, a cunt, a faggot, a sack-of-shit, you name it. From revolutionary to fifth column for the police. From idealism to...<br /><br />Well, one day Celeste's father made me an offer.<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Seemed</span> the big companies were downsizing. And the one he was high up in needed a shoulder to cry on.<br /><br />Literally.<br /><br />They needed some brave soul to counsel those who were to be cut and to encourage those left behind. Keep the company cohesive and all that.<br /><br />It paid over double what the city did.<br /><br />By then I had kids to raise, and, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">after all</span>, these folks needed help.<br /><br />Right?<br /><br />If you don't work within the system, how can you change it?<br /><br />And that is the point...<br /><br />Right?<br /><br />Anyway, by my second year I had supervised the effects of twelve hundred layoffs. The counseling was always the same.<br /><br />The tears. Fears.<br /><br />What about my family?<br /><br />I don't understand, I always did what you wanted me to.<br /><br />I'll change....<br /><br />I'll do anything...<br /><br />They never got it.<br /><br />There was, no joke, absolutely fucking nothing they could have done.<br /><br />The company needed to satisfy some anonymous set of invisible shareholders. Their families were, in the final analysis, of no consequence.<br /><br />Peripheral to the broader vision.<br /><br />Eventually, come mid-December, they flew me out to <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Winnipeg</span> for another round of purges.<br /><br />One hundred and twenty seven employees.<br /><br />One third of the office.<br /><br />A <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">pre</span>-Christmas Santa Claus surprise.<br /><br />Most of the sessions were the usual shit, but towards the end of the second day this middle-aged guy, crumpled suit, dirty collar, five o'clock shadow that seemed semi-<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">permanent</span> wanders in.<br /><br />Now, remember, the counselling is voluntary. People come to let it all out.<br /><br />But this guy, he just kind of sat there. Said nothing for ten minutes.<br /><br />It was really unnerving.<br /><br />Finally he reaches down into the blue canvas bag he had brought and pulls out a .38 caliber revolver.<br /><br />Places it gently in front of him on his side of my desk.<br /><br />I thought of lunging for it, then thought that that was a rather insane idea.<br /><br />George <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Crandell</span>, it turned out that this was his name, gives me a little, I guess ironic, look.<br /><br /><strong><em>I came here today to kill them. I was going to go up to senior management, floor three, and put a bullet into everyone of their fucking heads. Fantasized about it all night. The chaos. Their screams.</em></strong><br /><strong><em></em></strong><br /><strong><em>God it would have been great. But you see the problem is that it is not them, its me. The failure lies within.</em></strong><br /><strong><em></em></strong><br />Now that, of course, was total horseshit, and without encouraging him to revert to his original plan I was about to say as much. But he snapped the gun up as I started to speak and shot himself in the side of the head.<br /><br />The only words I managed to get out were <strong><em>hold on now </em></strong>before his life dissolved into a crimson cloud of blood and brain matter.<br /><br />Saying I was in shock would be to understate matters significantly.<br /><br />Gazing emptily at his half skull. A glazed look in the eyes.<br /><br />After the police, I recall that I called Celeste's dad and told him that I was done. Forever.<br /><br />She and I <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">separated</span> shortly thereafter.<br /><br />A couple of years later I was in this antique shop in Kingston, right near Queens. Full of all manner of junk and ephemera. I have no idea what I was looking for. Just looking.<br /><br />Moving aside old <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">military</span> uniforms. Shifting through dusty prints. Thumbing pages of leather bound volumes of Dickens and the Bard.<br /><br />I saw that behind some ancient, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">tattered</span>, dangling Soviet banner was a hidden shelf. Drawing it away there he was, Seneca, looking at me.<br /><br />Knowing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-55371103167414152052009-04-18T17:53:00.000-07:002009-04-19T05:57:25.578-07:00Fragment 25: The Story of N.<br /><br />I first met N. at the Tropical House. It was the centre point of the little touristy seaside town that I called home.<br /><br />She was looking prim and proper, black skirt, dark, opaque, stockings, striped man's dress shirt.<br /><br />I can't say why but I could not stop looking at her.<br /><br />Coy, flirty but pretending not to be, she would glance back with head slightly lowered, briefly meeting my gaze.<br /><br />That first day she left after but a few minutes, brushing airily past, making sure I felt her ever so slightly.<br /><br />This became our ritual. Same time everyday. Same tables. Many weeks past. This obsessive repetition the Ptolemaic focus of all I did. I was utterly incapable of placing her out of mind.<br /><br />Then, a Tuesday, nearing the end of season, leaving as always, she dropped the key upon my table as she was drawing past.<br /><br />It was like a bolt of pure energy had rushed down my spine.<br /><br />I waited a reasonable amount of time before making my way across the pier to the Victorian beach front hotel where she had evidently spent these summer nights.<br /><br />Heart racing, mouth dry, I chose stairs over elevator and climbed my way up to 406.<br /><br />Unlocking the door, not bothering to knock, she fully dressed, same as always, leaning seductively by the open windows, clean fresh ocean breeze cutting stifling afternoon heat.<br /><br />I made to speak, but she put her thin fingers to her lips and it was clear that I was not to.<br /><br />Motioning me over to the bed she came across and lay me down.<br /><br />At bed's end she pulled her stockings off from beneath her skirt, revealing nothing.<br /><br />Crawling eternally across me she bound my hands with them as I lay, quietly acquiescent.<br /><br />Closing my eyes she put herself gently down upon my face. Warm, moist and salty, she rubbed, slowly at first, then with increasing vigour, up and down atop me. Deep breathing turning to soft moaning to the delightful squeal of release.<br /><br />Turning, she lowered my pants and took me in her hands. I was engorged, throbbing with desire. Licking her thumb and forefinger, forming a tight O, she ran it slowly, stimulating only the very top of my head. As I began twitching she went further and further down my shaft, until ultimately swallowing me into her mouth.<br /><br />Sucking me, still stroking me all the while, she forced herself atop my face, violently now, suffocating me, gushing wet, filling my mouth with her taste, moving so that now her anus was brushing me as well.<br /><br />As I was about to explode she quickly abandoned my cock and sat upright, cumming loudly, harshly, all decorum now shed.<br /><br />Several minutes stream by. She remained still there, atop her perch.<br /><br />Swinging about she took me in her suddenly, her face buried in the pillow beside mine, up against my ear, actually speaking, whispering, yes, but nasty.<br /><br /><strong><em>Cum in me you pig, get your dirty little reward... </em></strong><br /><br />I tried desperately to hold on but could not, exploding pathetically mere seconds later.<br /><br />Untangling my hands, wordless, putting her stockings back on, she opened the room door.<br /><br />I, clearly, was now to go.<br /><br />As I slunk by she stopped me briefly.<br /><br /><strong><em>I am N.</em></strong><br /><br />The next day I went to the Tropical but she, of course, was not there.<br /><br />Reaching the hotel I knew she would be gone, and she was.<br /><br />Now every summer, solitary at the table, hoping in vain she will reappear to end my lonely vigil.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-19512244232711183732009-04-03T06:54:00.000-07:002015-02-06T16:16:55.534-08:00Fragment 24: UprisingWhen Jonah was eight the doctor told us he was going to die.<br />
<br />
The cancer was <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">irreversible</span>.<br />
<br />
Fatal.<br />
<br />
Janice cried for days.<br />
<br />
All I can remember is putting Jonah in the backseat. Strapping him into the booster. Nothing at first changing, yet all different. Looking into innocent eyes not knowing.<br />
<br />
Am I sick dad?<br />
<br />
How is it that a single <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">brilliant</span> sunset can seem eternal? Is it the grasping, the determination not to let the moment pass?<br />
<br />
Six months before his...<br />
<br />
Well, six months before, Jonah begged me to put <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">him</span> into the local baseball league.<br />
<br />
Weak as he was.<br />
<br />
Saturday after Saturday wondering why we were bothering. <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Volkswagen</span> mini-vans to diamonds in parks across town.<br />
<br />
He was truly very, very bad.<br />
<br />
Couldn't catch a ball.<br />
<br />
Never made a throw.<br />
<br />
Struck out every time.<br />
<br />
Thing was, last game of the season, team already out, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">stifling</span> hot.<br />
<br />
So skinny, so frail.<br />
<br />
Refracted sunlight.<br />
<br />
He got under it. He actually got under it. The only time.<br />
<br />
Up late, final approach.<br />
<br />
Janice and I all but done. Married in name only.<br />
<br />
She angry...not at me, just angry.<br />
<br />
You know, absolutely, he will never play in the big leagues, little leagues, any leagues.<br />
<br />
I understood. But she was wrong.<br />
<br />
He would play in a league. Of his own creation, yes. But nevertheless a league. And his moment would be as <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">permanent</span> as any from Barry Bonds or Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle.<br />
<br />
Spartacus.<br />
<br />
A 4 foot tall Spartacus.<br />
<br />
<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">That's</span> how, when I do, I recall him.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-62854579158881275442009-04-03T06:46:00.000-07:002009-04-03T06:54:11.110-07:00Fragment 23: BlindlyBright lights on Houston. Up, as always, far too late.<br /><br />Counter-intuitive this, you and I, rationalist and artist.<br /><br />Who would have known?<br /><br />Dark skies over the house, waves loud out the window.<br /><br />A kind of blissful isolation.<br /><br />Perfect mornings, days even, in your arms, in your orbit.<br /><br />If it is all a blaze of glory, then this was a glory differed. A sublimation of self.<br /><br />A sense of stillness stemming from another.<br /><br />And now not knowing you.<br /><br />Not knowing you.<br /><br />Red skies in the morning.<br /><br />A sailor's warning.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-85333729622576082052009-03-17T20:03:00.000-07:002009-09-23T19:24:39.865-07:00Fragment 22: GolgothaAmanda was seventeen when I first met her. Perfect cute in a tight blue sailor's suit.<br /><br />It was a company function and she was the boss' daughter. Thirty years <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_0" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">younger</span> than me.<br /><br />But that was hardly an issue. After all, I was gay.<br /><br />Shivering outside, white fluffy film glossing over Bay St., <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_1" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">cigarettes</span> glowing in the financial tower dark, only taxis and city trucks about. Waiting for our ride.<br /><br />What a laugh she had. Whirling <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_2" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Dervish</span> intense. We hit it off instantly.<br /><br />I was rebounding and needed company.<br /><br />She was a gal who liked to be around a guy in a Hugo Boss. Take him to clubs. Wanted him nice and old. Wanted to be sure he would never try to touch her.<br /><br />Since my ideal mate was Wendel Clark at the time, no danger.<br /><br />Dizzy drunks, doing lines in the too hot condo, beginning and end of night.<br /><br />She absolutely fucked the sleaziest looking guys. Pubic beards. <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_3" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Grunge</span> band wannabes.<br /><br />At the time I guess any lad looking like Kurt Cobain made 'em all breathless.<br /><br />She would scream and moan and all that noisy shit, while I was often on the sofa praying not to puke from <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_4" class="blsp-spelling-error">tankloads</span> of tequila.<br /><br />When I met Paul I settled down, but not Amanda. She went roaring on.<br /><br />767, engines loud, coming in to land through a light summer rain, rivulets trailing off the wing. Tired, business trip gone bad, no deal, now fifty-eight and feeling every decade of it.<br /><br />Airport terminal was airport terminal white and airport terminal bright.<br /><br />Dragging luggage along, tie loosened but still on, people <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_5" class="blsp-spelling-error">criss</span>-crossing, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_6" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">journeys</span> either at beginning or end.<br /><br />Standing in the shelter, <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_7" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">limousines</span> advancing and there is Jack. <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_8" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Amanda's</span> dad.<br /><br />I had left his company eight years gone by.<br /><br /><span id="SPELLING_ERROR_9" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Philosophical</span> differences.<br /><br />Adam, so good to see you, thought about calling.<br /><br />How is Amanda?<br /><br />It seems she wasn't well.<br /><br />It turns out she had hit the needles after I had known her.<br /><br />Around '93.<br /><br />Even with the new drug treatments she was dying.<br /><br />Western Hospital, a brown, bleak <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_10" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">colossus</span>, stark and <span id="SPELLING_ERROR_11" class="blsp-spelling-corrected">Stalinist</span> against a humid, melting sky.<br /><br />Down long depressing corridors to room 401.<br /><br />I brought a potted plant.<br /><br />What the fuck was I thinking?<br /><br />She was so frail. So weak. The life all but gone.<br /><br />She still had that in imitable smirk. That special curl of the lip.<br /><br />I hear you became a social worker. Did so much good for so many.<br /><br />For all the good it did her.<br /><br />Hand held out towards me, fingers still so long, so lovely, curled with mine.<br /><br />Can't imagine why, but I made a promise.<br /><br />Two years pass, me in jeans, Paul playing at host, pouring infinite cheap wine into plastic cups.<br /><br />Community centre finally open. People filing through sliding doors. The mayor thanking me during an informal speech.<br /><br />Handshakes.<br /><br />It was all misplaced. I was never the one...<br /><br />It was her, a portrait hanging on the wall of my new, very tiny office. Right between my old brass crucifix and my framed copy of her favourite Degas.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-4536833389396266242009-03-11T21:17:00.000-07:002009-03-17T20:57:53.117-07:00Fragment 21: Niagara FallsWas I crying at her funeral?<br /><br />As I should have been. As expected.<br /><br />Car pulling into driveways. Old Volvo. Never worked.<br /><br />House, fully <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">detached</span> on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Brookside</span>. Not far from the train tracks.<br /><br />At night, in summer, still light, I would be out, watching as she came home.<br /><br />Good evening, my little boy, she would say.<br /><br />Tall, beautiful, rigid with briefcase.<br /><br />Ahead of her time.<br /><br />Did she know, even then, that she would be leaving?<br /><br />Long days. Yelling matches. Threats. What <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">happened</span> to them?<br /><br />Me, on the stairs, terrified as she said she would take us away.<br /><br />To Calgary.<br /><br />Calgary.<br /><br />I did not want to go to Calgary.<br /><br />Final episodes.<br /><br />Could I have, should I have, known that the sky would fall? That it was almost all over.<br /><br />End moments I recollect. She, in blue, <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">imposing</span>, at street corner.<br /><br />Me on my Big Wheel. Smiling.<br /><br />Looking back at me that one last time. Preserved in memory at the junction with Woodbine.<br /><br />Did she wave?<br /><br />Father with the tea towels in the am.<br /><br />What is it?<br /><br />Your mother...<br /><br />is dead...<br /><br />Years later knowing it was suicide.<br /><br />Abandoning me.<br /><br />Alone.<br /><br />On purpose.<br /><br />Why did you do it?<br /><br />I was so young. Loved you so much.<br /><br />Funny, decades <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">sliding</span> by, a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">kaleidoscope</span> of time, remembering of all things...<br /><br />You, my mother, laughing.<br /><br />Outdoor international food court at the Exhibition.<br /><br />We had Gyros from the Greek <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Pavilion</span>.<br /><br />Sister just two. Fighting for notice.<br /><br />Day perfect. Spotless. Bright.<br /><br />You leaned forward, Mama, and you touched my face.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-156758032411690617.post-49168305843113184662009-03-03T15:14:00.000-08:002009-03-03T19:34:30.345-08:00Fragment 20: SisyphusWhen I was working in transportation in the early nineties the bottom, for a time, fell out of the commercial real estate market.<br /><br />I mean it fell out...they even stopped building some projects that had started. Partially constructed. Sitting as monuments to capitalist folly for many years to come.<br /><br />In the shadow of one of these lay this odd little street named by a fucking expired do<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">gooder</span><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error"></span><br />Temperance St.<br /><br />And on it was this total dump of a bar where the guys who worked on the road would hang out.<br /><br />This was a dump. I don't know why I ever went in there without a fucking <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Hazmat</span> suit.<br /><br />Full of smoke, smelling of stale beer, piss and puke, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">bargals</span> who thought they had got off easy if it only turned out to be <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">genital</span> warts.<br /><br />All right in the heart of the financial district!<br /><br />Some of the poor fucks even ate there. Claimed the food was great. I wouldn't have given a flying fuck if Julia Child had been flipping hash behind the counter, there was no fucking way I would have eaten anything served up there. Not had it been the last joint in town.<br /><br />Now I was an office lad and normally we didn't hang there.<br /><br />They didn't want us.<br /><br />But I was an exception as I had fixed a couple of problems for the boys over the years.<br /><br />The last night I ever went was an August Monday. It was hot. The kinda hot you felt all over, especially if you had an asshole for a boss who substituted requiring us to wear suits all summer for medieval torture <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">implements</span>.<br /><br />Oh, he wasn't so bad. Just old world.<br /><br />Anyway, I was hoping Nora would be there. All skinny and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">skanky</span>.<br /><br />She was the cat's meow.<br /><br />And she had the virtue of not yet being a regular.<br /><br />No such luck, gal blew me off.<br /><br />Instead there was some gang of losers from a competitor and Darren.<br /><br />Darren.<br /><br />That guy was a genuine rat bastard.<br /><br />Nasty.<br /><br />Born mean.<br /><br />Built like a brick <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">shithouse</span>, so he could get away with it.<br /><br />The second I walked in I knew he was in one foul mood.<br /><br />Guaranteed an interesting night though, so I sat down.<br /><br />Surprise, surprise.<br /><br />Seems he and some truly ugly fucking lanky biker looking guy at the other table were having words.<br /><br />They weren't exactly Emily Post.<br /><br />Trouble was that Bob's your uncle had four friends.<br /><br />Darren was one of mine, so I had his back.<br /><br />Nonetheless, not good odds.<br /><br />Then the fella made a mistake, as dumb fuckers often do, and actually got up by himself and went to the bar.<br /><br />Darren never missed a chance.<br /><br />Jumped right up behind the guy and slammed his face on-down, full force.<br /><br />Shattered his nose.<br /><br />His buddies were fast and all, but the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">fortunes</span> had shifted and after some circling and a little church talk they scurried out of there, their fight all d<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">one</span> and their pal pretty rough.<br /><br />Night went on.<br /><br />Many, many beers.<br /><br />I kept hoping Nora would drift in.<br /><br />Instead, only a couple of old timers every now and again.<br /><br />3 am rolled around.<br /><br />Trish our less than <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">stellar</span> server had had enough.<br /><br />Darren stands to go and falls right over. Like he'd been hammered by Ali. Table down, broken glasses, you know the rest.<br /><br />Trish just furious.<br /><br />Laughing he bounced up and, no shit, out with the car keys.<br /><br />Look, I am as big an opponent of law in general as the next guy, but you must be joking.<br /><br />It took me fifteen minutes to get those keys off of him. I had to block the door. Beg. Yell. Wrestle.<br /><br />He called me every name known to man. And a few not.<br /><br />I felt pushing his sorry ass into the cab was a personal victory.<br /><br />Handed the driver twenty bucks.<br /><br />Somehow found my way home.<br /><br />Next a.m. I could barely get out of bed. My head hurt so fucking much I thought it would explode.<br /><br />Stumbled into the office. Must of reeked like a Front St. brewery.<br /><br />My mouth Sahara parched.<br /><br />When I saw Lisa crying I was sober quick enough.<br /><br />Everyone looked so fucking glum.<br /><br />Jake was a prick but he was the first I could find who would talk.<br /><br /><em>What's up?</em><br /><em></em><br />It's that driver Darren<br /><br />He's dead.<br /><br />Dead, what the fuck do you mean he's dead?<br /><br />Got out of a cab at 3:30 am last night and a blind drunk bastard ran him over as he crossed the street to his house.<br /><br />Killed instantly.<br /><br />Well, fuck a duck.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1