I wanted to tell the guy that I thought he was a pig, but I didn’t. I don’t like confrontation. I’m the kind of person who wants everyone to get along. Instead of telling him what I thought, I gave a faint smile and used a potato wedge to dredge the lake of ketchup I’d poured on my plate.

The waitress set a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice in front of the man, then walked away. While he poured cream into his coffee, the man told me a joke. It was a joke about black people and watermelons and big lips. The only thing missing from the joke was the word “nigger”. But I could hear it filling the silence after the punch line.

Janine came back from the bathroom and sat across the table from me, blocking my view of the man at the next table.

The man at the next table pushed back his chair and rose so he could see me over Janine’s afro. “Oh, this is just great,” he said. The man’s face was bright pink, like he’d been holding his breath. “This is so fucking rude, how you let me go on and on when you know full well…” He pointed to Janine and her chocolate-coloured skin. The man was like a boiler. If he didn’t let off some steam, he’d explode. He stood, clenching and unclenching his fists. If it weren’t for all the people watching, he would have let off steam by cracking me across the jaw. Instead, he grabbed a bottle of ketchup and squeezed a stream of it into my face. As I spluttered, the man tossed the empty bottle under the table and stomped from the restaurant. I turned to watch the man leave, and as I returned to face Janine, I saw my reflection in the front window. I was covered in ketchup. I was redder than an Indian. I smiled at Janine and said: “I’m not prejudiced or anything but…” and I went on to tell her a joke I’d heard when I was a kid. It was a joke about Indians, an eagle feather, and drinking antifreeze.

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1. Flash Fiction: The Dragon Slayer
2. Flash Fiction: It’s such a pain to suffer
3. Flash Fiction: Alien Landscapes

Read installment #8 of the serialized novel, Cream & Sugar: a story of advertising, race, and one man’s midlife quest to rein in his unruly testicles. In Chapter 8, Elton Pierce discovers that today is the first day of the rest of his sorry-assed life–which is another way of saying it’s the first time after quitting his job that he has felt obliged to look like he’s doing something meaningful to pass the time. He wants to tell people he’s writing a novel, but nothing comes. He watches the garbage truck. He eats potato chips. He listens to his wife do real writing. Later, the phone rings. He wonders who it is. And so on. At last his daughter calls from school, asking for a lift, and it gives Elton the perfect excuse to break from a hard day’s work of doing nothing. Read more about Cream & Sugar here. You can read chapter eight online below, or download it to your favourite e-reader. Catch a new chapter every Tuesday.

_________

I spend the morning trying to write but it isn’t working for me because the events of last night are still clattering around inside my head. I stand. I sit. I boil a pot of tea. I change a light bulb above the kitchen sink. I write a shopping list for the grocery store. I try to teach the dog to roll over, but she’s too stupid to learn. I search for a metaphorical lesson in the failure of my stupid dog tricks, but nothing comes to mind. The discovery of a metaphorical lesson would give me something of substance to write about. That way I could justify time otherwise wasted. By eleven o’clock, I’ve popped open a bag of potato chips, but as I return to the living room where my laptop waits for me, I pass my reflection in the French doors and decide instead to dump all the potato chips into the garbage can under the kitchen sink. I contemplate masturbating but Giselle is in her office at the back of the house and I may not be able to accomplish the deed without her knowing—not that her knowing has ever stopped me before. What I don’t want her to know is that I find it so difficult to write. If I’ve quit my job to write, then I should write, not masturbate. If Giselle catches me masturbating when I should be writing, then she’ll pounce on me with all the reasons why this is the most ill-conceived plan a man ever came up with.

I’ve never told Giselle this, but I admire her—maybe even envy her. From my seat in the living room I can hear her at work: sometimes an efficient tap-tap-tap on her keyboard, sometimes a muffled voice on the telephone, then back to her keyboard. She has always impressed me with the discipline she applies to everything she undertakes. I know I shouldn’t make comparisons (we are, after all, different people with different personalities), but comparisons seem inevitable now that I’ve decided to write. It doesn’t help that I have no office of my own and will have to float from room to room. Each day, as I search for a place to settle myself, I’ll have to pass the door to her office and glance in at the orderly world she has made for herself. It’s a world of boundaries like dawn and dusk, good and evil, and it’s a world of inviolable rules which govern the use of rosebuds and garlic, crosses and holy water, reflections and silver bullets. In Giselle’s world, the vampires are sympathetic. They are the outcasts. They are the hunted. Sometimes, not even the bonds of love are strong enough to overcome the revulsion and fear people hold for vampires.

I can hear the roar and grind of a garbage truck approaching. From my place on the couch, I reach up to the louvered slats of the window shades and tilt them so I can see out to the street. Here comes the truck, blue with a yellow cab, and spilling a stream of stinky liquid that glistens on the pavement and refracts the sunlight in shades of mauve and orange. If I squint until the scene blurs, the liquid looks beautiful like the abstract background for an ad. It used to be that two men worked a garbage truck: one would drive and the other would swing off the back even before the truck had pulled to a halt and would hoist cans and green garbage bags, then throw back the empty cans before moving on to the next driveway. If I was home when they drove past, I would nod and wave or say hello, and if they had to pause to compact the trash, I might chat for a minute with the man on the back. But now, they’ve automated even our waste collection. Automation came first to production when Henry Ford built his assembly line. Now the circle is complete. Automation has embraced the whole life-cycle of our products even unto death, or at least unto landfill. Now the man in the cab does everything. He pulls up to the driveway, then engages an arm which extends its claws and grabs hold of the plastic garbage container, tipping it up and dumping its contents, shaking the container up and down—bang, bang, bang—to make sure every last drop of our biweekly excrescence has fallen into the belly of the beast. Now there’s no human contact in the process. The man stays in his cab and looks out only when he needs to be sure that he’s lined up the claws with the container.

More than a loss of human contact, what I notice is that a measure of violence has seeped into the process. The machinery is noisier. Parts bang and clang and wheeze and moan. And when it’s done, the plastic container lies on its side with lid wide open, looking for all the world like a dog that’s been struck by a car and left to die on the lawn.

Note: on my future planet Earth, waste collection will be wholly automated. There won’t even be trucks and drivers. Instead, all garbage will disappear the way our sewage does now—through an infrastructure below the ground that no one sees and no one thinks about. But all of it has to go somewhere. What will happen to it? Where will it go? Landfill? The ocean? Incineration? Catapults flinging it into Québec?

The phone rings and a few seconds later Giselle’s feet come padding through the kitchen and into the living room: It’s that priest of yours.

I take the phone from her and say hello. Pastor Rick’s voice returns to me in a polished baritone and it sets me to wondering whether, once upon a time, he sang as a professional. He says he’s just gotten word. He says I’m quite a character. Really something else. Liane called him this morning and told him all about my escapade last night. At first I worry that he’s going to yell at me for interfering with something I don’t understand. I shouldn’t be helping homeless schizophrenics when the issues are so complex that they stymie even the most seasoned mental health advocates. What arrogance, then, for me to intervene. But that’s not what Pastor Rick has called to say. Instead, he’s called to gush. He thinks it’s wonderful, just wonderful, that someone from the church should stand up for George. The poor man has so few friends in the world, etc., etc., etc. Meanwhile another voice is chattering inside my head and it gets so loud I wonder if maybe I’ve caught some of George’s schizophrenia: so Liane called; she must have been impressed; I hope nobody gets the wrong idea and thinks I’m nice; I hope people realize that my motives are as banal as the plastic baggies for picking up dog shit; I bet when Martin Luther King Jr. was giving his I-have-a-dream speech he was thinking: I’m so gonna get laid after this one.

After I hang up, I try to recover my focus, but my stomach is gurgling so I go to the kitchen and make myself a BLT, but with peanut butter in place of mayonnaise and cheese slices in place of lettuce. I add two more items to the grocery list and stick it to the fridge with a fat magnet. Back in the living room with a can of Coke®, I peck away at the keyboard until I’ve laid out my first complete sentence for the day. Looking up at the mantle clock, I see that half an hour has passed since I began the sentence. That prompts some rough math: 100,000 words in a novel. What’s the average word length for a sentence? Let’s say fifteen. That makes what? I open the calculator app on my laptop and come up with 6666.6666666666667 sentences. At half an hour per sentence, that makes 3333.3333333333333 hours to finish a first draft and probably as much time again thrown away on procrastination.

The phone rings again and a few seconds later Giselle’s feet come plunking across the kitchen tiles and onto the hardwood floor of the living room. I’m not your answering service, you know. Next time, you pick up the phone. I’m trying to write.

This time it’s Feinman. Even before he placed the call, he must have gotten himself wound into a state of apoplexy. Now, when I answer the phone, the sound of my voice is like a finger pulled from a dike and it releases a torrent that I can’t stop up until the reservoir is empty. I have to hold the phone away from my ear during the screechier parts. Because of all his frothing at the mouth, there isn’t much he says that’s intelligible, although a few key words here and there give me enough to piece together a coherent message. He’s received a letter by express courier from Gentri’s lawyer cancelling their account for breach of contract and, in the alternative, for interference with economic relations. The letter is full of heretofores and aforesaids and whatsoevers that puff the whole thing up to a shrill pomposity and the words leave Feinman quaking with bowel-loosening shudders. There’s stuff about me inciting a riot, me with ostensible authority, me assaulting employees, me leading armies into battle against the poor defenseless Bruno. You don’t seriously believe that shit, do you? is what I try to say, but the screeching has thrown up an impenetrable wall of sound. Feinman goes on about how he’ll third-party me if Gentri sues him, how he’ll sue me even if Gentri doesn’t sue him, how I’m the absolute worst fucking thing that’s ever happened to him. When he pauses to take a breath, I tell him to set it all down in a letter or better yet, send it by smoke signal. I tell him I don’t really care what he does, then I hang up.

I didn’t notice that for the duration of Feinman’s call Giselle has been standing in the doorway of the living room, arms crossed, shoulder pressed into the frame. What was that all about?

Nothing.

She frowns, then throws up her hands and walks away. I try to parse her expression, her posture, her stormy whirl away from me, her retreat to her office. The most I can discern is frustration that I’m not explaining myself. I’m not communicating. Maybe she’s angry that I’m not sharing my feelings. But if she were sensitive to my feelings, she’d know that my apparent refusal to communicate is really an attempt to carve out a space for myself. These past few days, it’s felt to me like I’m fading away to a trail of mist. It’s only when I do things alone, apart from the family, that I notice the flesh on my bones.

Christ. Everything about this afternoon has put me off: the peanut butter instead of mayonnaise, the call from Feinman, and now this cloud of resentment that billows from Giselle’s office. I stare at the screen-saver that swirls around in a nerdy version of psychedelia. Maybe if I stare at it long enough I’ll get a nerdy version of inspiration. I try to type another sentence but the predicate is stubborn. As for the subject, it reads like one more shill from a twenty-year veteran of the ad industry. For two decades I’ve written about products that end their days making the journey from garbage cans to landfill, and always I’ve written about them with a you-can’t-live-without-it urgency.

Until now, my purpose in life has been to stoke desire for bits of polished packaged trash, persuading consumers any way I can that these useless baubles are the most desirable possessions they’ll ever own. Now that I’ve cut myself loose from the industry, I can’t craft a single phrase that doesn’t reek of the advertising taint. Maybe I need the verbal equivalent of a sweat lodge to work all the toxins out of my pores where I can scrub them away and down the drain.

The phone rings a third time. I want to scream at the interruptions.

Yeah, what is it? I’m gruff and curt.

Hi Daddy.

I look at the clock on the mantle. It’s 3:15 and school’s out. Katrine wants a lift home because she has a knapsack full of school books and a gym bag full of cleats and shin pads and smelly sweaty socks and her shoulder is sore where she ran into the goal post during gym class and could I please, please, please come and get her. I do my best to push down my annoyance and I yell to Giselle that I’m off to pick up Katrine. Giselle goes on typing as if I’m not there.

The school isn’t far, only a ten minute drive, one short block in from Yonge Street near the theatre where I heard David Suzuki talk about the likely demise of our species. I ease through the roundabout and pull to the curb and let the RAV4 idle while I look for Katrine among the students who cluster around the front door. There she is, off to one side, but she hasn’t seen me yet. She’s grown tall and has a pretty face. She could pass for a model in Feinman’s studio. No, that’s not true: she looks too healthy to be a model. Without exception, the talent was wan and emaciated, and when we did bikini shoots for glossy travel brochures, we could see the tawny down that had sprouted in unsightly places—one of those quirks of evolutionary biology that helps to keep starving mammals from getting cold. Unlike the talent, Katrine is robust and has high colour, and what makes her easy to spot in a crowd is her ginger hair that twists out like Gorgon. She tries to keep the frizziness in check by forcing it down with hair bands and by pulling it back and knotting it with scrunchies, but when she talks the way she loves to talk, waving her arms and swaying her torso like a dancer, then tufts spring out above her ears and over her forehead. When she’s in a self-conscious mood, she straightens her hair, but on a humid day like today, it knots up as sproingy as it ever was.

Katrine doesn’t see me because she’s engrossed in a conversation with a boy, a lean lanky white kid with a mop of dirty blond hair who stands a head taller than her. Kids are funny at this age: the girls could pass for twenty-five, but the boys look awkward, as if they haven’t yet grown used to their new bodies. I remember how it was for us in high school. Even when we were teenagers, I thought of Giselle as a woman; there was never a time when she seemed to me girlish or immature. I had always regarded myself as grown up enough to be her equal. And yet, looking now at this gangly boy, I must have been no different—just a kid struggling to pass as a man. I wonder if this kid realizes that the struggle never ends.

Katrine recognizes the car and waves to me. I hadn’t noticed before, but she and the boy have been holding hands. As she steps away from the boy, their arms extend to form a fragile bridge, maybe not a bridge, maybe an elastic band, because once their arms are fully stretched, she snaps back to the boy and plants a light kiss on his cheek, then turns away and runs to the car. The boy stands with arms dangling to his knees and with a mooning gutted look of pain on his face. I’m not sure whether to laugh at him or to mourn with him. When Katrine is settled into the passenger seat and has caught her breath, I nod to the front door of the school and ask who the boyfriend is.

Oh, that’s Richard.

I’m surprised she doesn’t protest my use of the word boyfriend. Something has changed. The signs are subtle but I know that Katrine has passed a milestone. Things will never be the same for her. And more pointedly things will never be the same for me. Now, she will have secrets and a life apart, and I will stand as an outsider looking in.

After the pleasantries, an oppressive silence seeps into the car the way water might if the car had run off a bridge and plunged into the river below. Neither of us knows what to do. Maybe there should be frantic bailing. Instead, we lean back into our seats and resign ourselves to death by drowning. I cough once or twice. Katrine sticks in her earbuds and turns on her iPod®. I run my fingers through the thinning hair on my head. Katrine stares out the window at friends on the sidewalk.

Our route home passes the middle school. As with the high school, kids are streaming from the doors and onto the front lawn and sidewalk. I slow to scan the mobs of kids. Beyond the school and crossing the street in front of us is Griff with two of his friends. There they go, the school’s three black kids, talking smack, gangsta, dawg, fuck dis, sharing earbuds, dancing, baseball caps, baggy jeans, jerseys slung to the knees, papers flying out of their knapsacks. I roll down my window and call out Griff’s name. He hears me. I know he hears me. I can tell by the pause in his gait. Then comes the low Keep on walkin’, man. The three boys strut and roll down the road, kicking at toppled garbage cans, leaving me to watch their waddling backsides through the passenger win­dow. I catch Katrine glancing at me. She wears an embarrassed, almost pained, expression.

I know, Daddy. He doesn’t talk to me either. If it wasn’t for my hair, he wouldn’t say a word.

She’s twirling her nappy frizzy ginger hair around her index finger. She pulls it straight, then let’s go so that it recoils like a spring.

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Dreaming again? she asked.

Richard said yeah, and swinging his legs off the edge of the bed, he rose to a sitting position. He shifted so his underwear didn’t slide so high up his crack.

Wanna talk about it? she asked.

Naw, nothing important. Just images from Coulson’s exhibit.

The alien landscapes?

Yeah.

But that’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, they must be … I mean, to stick themselves inside your head like that …

Richard said: I guess. But he wasn’t sure. Something about Coulson’s paintings bothered him. They were supposed to evoke alien worlds. But there was something familiar about his pink mountain ridges.

It used to be that when Richard and Ellie woke in the middle of the night, they made love, then spooned naked until first light. But lately, Richard only got up to pee and Ellie blew her nose. Then they settled again onto their separate sides of the bed and closed their eyes.

This time, before they fell asleep, Ellie asked if Richard had made his doctor’s appointment.

Richard said yes and promised himself he would do it in the morning.

After all, you have a birthday coming up. A big one. Then Ellie smacked her lips and gave a couple snorts, signaling that she had gone back to sleep.

Richard lay awake, staring into the darkness. He was back at the gallery. His mind was burbling with conversations from earlier in the evening. Mostly, the people ignored his work and crowded around Coulson’s paintings. They thought Richard was a has-been. Coulson, on the other hand, was an up-and-comer. He was at least fifteen years younger than Richard and it showed in the vitality of his technique and in the vibrancy of his palette. People didn’t say so out loud, but Richard saw it in the way they looked at him: Richard, you’re tired and uninspired; maybe it’s time to try something new.

Richard had not realized the preparation for his doctor’s appointment would be so onerous. He didn’t like taking laxatives, especially when Ellie was at home with him. She sat up in bed with a novel while he emptied his bowels in the en suite. The next morning, he went to the doctor’s office, feeling light-headed and with a rumble in his belly. When he arrived, a nurse handed him a paper-thin gown and led him to a change room. The doctor reminded him of a pig farmer, the way he carried his big gut out in front of him and massaged it with his thick sausage fingers. He made Richard lie face-down on a black, vinyl-covered table. The gown fell away to either side and exposed his ass to the ceiling. While the doctor scrubbed his hands, his assistant—a girl named Teena—spread a wad of petroleum jelly in circles around his anus. She used her dainty rubber-clad fingers to shove as much of it inside as she could squidge.

You see the game last night? the doctor asked.

Christ no.

You got something against hockey?

No. No, of course not. It’s just—the laxative—you—I—I was on the toilet all evening. Kind of hard to watch when there’s no TV in the bathroom.

Ah. Too bad for you. But here—the doctor slapped the top of a TV screen positioned near Richard’s head—here you can watch the whole show.

Really? Richard groaned.

There’s a camera sends an image.

You don’t post it on YouTube, do you?

The doctor laughed as he unfurled a length of black rubber hose. Hang on tight, he said, and he shoved the end of the hose up Richard’s ass.

Richard could feel it low in his gut, fluttering like an epileptic snake. He could feel it worm through his large intestine and on into his small intestine.

Oh, I almost forgot. And the doctor pushed the power button on the monitor.

As the image came up, the doctor gave another thrust of the hose, and on the monitor, it produced an impression of flying. Richard felt like he was soaring through his own guts, over pink ridges and purple glistening peaks. He was flying through alien landscapes.

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2. After the concert, we went to a birthday party for a friend, a mezzo-soprano named Maria, and during a lull, she and I talked about the artists I had seen. It seems to me that singing opera is also a synesthetic experience. There is the libretto (the text of the story) and the musical score and there is the drama which the singers bring to life. Maria gave my reflection another turn of the screw by suggesting operas in which parts portray artists acting within operas. There is Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter). Tosca’s lover, Mario Cavaradossi, is a painter. And Berlioz based an opera on the memoirs of the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini.

3. I drank too much wine, then went home and fell asleep. The next day, around noon, I noticed that my hand was missing. When I looked away, it was there, and when I stared at it directly, it disappeared. This could mean only one thing: I was getting a classic migraine. Soon, I saw squiggling lights in front of my eyes. Typically, this stage of the migraine lasts only five or ten minutes. The curious thing about the squiggling lines is that they respond to sound. If someone shouts or slams a door, the lights fly up in sudden peaks before they resume their squiggling patterns.

Synesthesia happens when input from one sense stimulates another sense. The classic example, often cited in the literature, is composer Olivier Messiaen, who saw colours when he heard music. I experience an associated phenomenon, known officially as ordinal linguistic personification—the perception of gender and personality in ordinal numbers and letters. I wrote about it here. Sometimes there’s more than that. Sometimes powerful images stimulate sounds—the opposite of what Messiaen reported. One of the most striking instances of this happened to me while driving through Alberta last fall. We came upon a decapitated buck. It looked like a headless buck was rising out of the asphalt. As we approached, a roar mounted in my head. By the time we reached it, the roar was a wall of white noise as loud as Niagara Falls.

I have a hypothesis. I think all people are synesthetes. At the very least, all people have synesthetic experiences. I think most people don’t notice because they desensitize themselves to this experience. This seems like a natural response. Too much sensory input would be overwhelming. Nevertheless, I believe most of our modes of expression have synesthetic roots.

Here are some illustrations, beginning close to home, then moving outward to modes of expression that are less familiar (to me).

My Blog. Even though my blog concerns itself mostly with the power of words, I adhere to a simple rule: each post must include something of visual interest. If it’s a book review, then an image of the cover. If it’s a story, then a photo of something thematically related to the story. I’m not unique in this. Most online content strives to integrate different media and appeal to more than one sense.

Poetry. Perhaps the oldest form of human expression, poetry attends not only to the content of the words, but also to their musicality, their rhythm and timbre. What’s more, we agree (perhaps by some tacit contract) that one of the measures of a poem’s merit is the extent to which its words stimulate images in our minds. Hence the word imagination. Good poetry is imaginative poetry.

Spectacle. We love spectacle. We love to assault our senses with sights and sounds. We get it in our living rooms with Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, Glee, Smash. We get it in big tents when we go to Cirque du Soleil, and on big screens when we watch Titanic in Imax 3D. Add to it the smell of popcorn and the tack of our shoes on the floor and our experience is complete. We go to Glastonbury and Burning Man and, if we’re rich, we try to get a shot into outer space.

Aldous Huxley suggested the reason we do these things is that they give us an intimation of a transcendent reality. I’m more inclined to think they awaken in us the memory of synesthetic experience which we knew in infancy but have suppressed because survival requires it.

I don’t know if my speculations are true. Sometimes it’s nice to retreat to a dark and silent place, and then, to re-enter the world as if I’m being born to light and sound.

The sun rises like a bomb and roars overhead until, come nightfall, it whispers again.

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Here is my question: why does the gumball machine on the North American edition look like its wearing a kippah? Is it a Jewish gumball machine? Does it dispense kosher gumballs? Why?

In an interview with the Guardian, Keret describes himself as more a Jewish writer than an Israeli writer. Maybe the cover artist sensed that.

Regardless of his self-assessment, I think Keret is a highly political writer. But instead of writing stories about the external world he inhabits, the world of competing forces and money and people struggling over beliefs, he writes stories about the interior world we inhabit. It’s an absurd and contradictory world, made moreso by the absurd and contradictory world we have built for ourselves out there where it’s real. Politics leaks into our dreams and twists them into goo.

By way of illustration, consider Keret’s longest story, Surprise Party. We can read it in a straight-forward (literal) way, as the story of a woman named Pnina who throws a surprise party for her successful husband, Avner Katzman. Only three people show up: a bank manager, an insurance agent, and Avner’s dentist. They talk to Pnina for a while, but it’s clear Avner isn’t going to show. Avner calls, but hangs up before Pnina gets a chance to speak to him. It seems things haven’t been going well for Avner which is why Pnina threw the party in the first place. The three guests join Pnina on a car ride to Avner’s office to make sure he’s okay. On the way, the insurance agent muses: “The truth is that he’s not worried about Avner killing himself, because his life insurance policy doesn’t cover suicide.” When they get to the office building, Avner has already left. The security guard tells them that Avner asked for help cocking his gun. Two of the men go home, leaving Pnina alone in a car with the bank manager. He makes a move on her and she slaps him in the face. The last time she slapped somebody in the face, it was Avner, and he was being as much of a dick then as the bank manager is now. The story ends on an indeterminate note with the insurance agent wondering to himself if things worked out for Avner. We have no idea.

After a first reading, the story seems unsatisfactory. But what if we read it differently? What if we read Pnina as Israel? She’s supported by shallow self-interested pricks. That could quite aptly describe Israel’s relationship with the UK, the US, and Canada. Canada could be the morbid insurance agent with the Band-Aid on his nose. I’m not suggesting that Keret would endorse such an interpretation. But it’s worth considering. I mean, why the hell not? We can think of it like this: the infected world of politics leaches into our consciousness and infects the world of our ordinary thoughts and the ordinary stories those thoughts would otherwise tell.

Below are links to Keretphernalia:

Etgar Keret’s website

The Guardian interview

Writers & Company (CBC) – Eleanor Wachtel’s interview

Open Source Radio Interview

3 Stories: Bottle, Pipe, Asthma Attack

Unzipping

Fatso

Willem Dafoe reads “Mystique”

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Read installment #7 of the serialized novel, Cream & Sugar: a story of advertising, race, and one man’s midlife quest to rein in his unruly testicles. In Chapter Seven, Elton Pierce joins the environmental group that meets in the basement of St. George’s Anglican Church. He never makes it. At the construction site of a new condo development, he catches two security guards trying to throw a homeless man onto the street. Elton uses every trick of the trade to bring bad press raining down on the developers. By the end of the evening, he’s got himself a clamouring crowd of activists, a homeless martyr, a TV news truck, curious onlookers, and the developer, all gathered at the construction site. But better than all this–he’s finally got Liane’s attention. Read more about Cream & Sugar here. You can read chapter seven online below, or download it to your favourite e-reader. Catch a new chapter every Tuesday afternoon.

I’m amazed at how I can split my brain down the middle, how I can utter two contradictory statements and believe them both. Each half of my brain can live on its own, then pause and stare in disbelief across the corpus callosum at the other half, the same way a Christmas shopper can stare at a store window and scarcely recognize the person looking back, covered in snow and tottering beneath a mound of parcels. How is it that on a Sunday evening I can make to-the-moon-and-back declarations to a sensuous full-bodied woman, yet by Wednesday can imagine myself entwined by willowy Lycra®- covered thighs while still believing in those first declarations with the absoluteness of a religious creed?

I’ve spent all day in the living room banging away on my laptop. I haven’t shaved and I’m still wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a bathrobe. Time to get myself spiffied up for another Wednesday installment of ECO. What’s that short for? Extremely Caring Organisms? Extra Creepy Oglers? I’m terrible at remembering acronyms. I shower and shave then slap on fresh clothes. Nothing fancy. Jeans and a hemp shirt I bought on Monday while I was waiting for the boys at Moe’s to service the RAV4. I snatch leftovers from the fridge, then I’m out the door with a faint good-bye.

Now that fall has arrived, it gets dark earlier. The sun has sunk below the neighbourhood rooftops, but shafts of light rise from the west and stoke the clouds a flaming orange. I catch a bus to the subway station and rumble north two stops. When I emerge again, the shafts of light have disappeared and the fire in the sky has burnt itself out. Now, everything settles into an ashen gloom. St. George’s lies a few streets north of the subway station. I can see it even from here. The building is dark except for a swath of brick beneath a solitary street light. I check my watch: 7:05. I’m late for the meeting. I had hoped to get there just as the meeting was called to order. As a newcomer, I’d rather not draw attention to myself.

A black man leans against the wall by the entrance to the subway station. He’s my height, although he appears shorter because he’s leaning. He keeps his head shaved smooth and wears a gold earring in each lobe. When he smiles, he pulls back his upper lip to reveal a gold-capped front tooth. He holds up a thin sheaf of letter-sized papers, but it’s too dark to read the title on the front page.

Hey, you wanna support Black History Month?

I stop. It’s October.

Yeah. So?

Black History Month isn’t for another—what?—four?—five months?

Yeah. Well. I … uh … I’m thinking ahead.

I laugh a cynical laugh, then point to the sheaf. What’s that?

This? Oh, this here’s a list of, you know, prominent black writers. You know. A reading list.

Let’s see. I hold out a hand.

You ever read any black authors?

You got Harriet Tubman on your list?

Of course.

Alice Walker?

Naturally.

Toni Morrison?

Goes without saying.

James Cone?

Not sure. What’d he write?

God Is Black.

Oh. Yeah. Sure.

How ‘bout Colson Whitehead?

Lemme check. Yeah. Right here.

And what about Giselle Pierce?

Never heard—wait a minute—she’s that vampire writer. Zat who you mean?

Yeah.

She black?

Yeah.

You sure?

Yeah.

Cuz if she was black, I’m pretty sure they’d’ve put her on the list. He scratches his scalp. You sure now?

Pretty damn sure.

Still, I better check.

Yeah, you should.

So how ‘bout a donation?

I smile and walk away.

Have a nice night, he calls after me.

I see that the Condo developer has put up boards around the excavation on the north side of the church. Feinman’s people have installed eight-metre high posters on each corner of the project. On the nearest corner, a mature woman in business couture smiles down at me over reading glasses. I imagine a day ten thousand years from now when an archeologist from an as-yet-undreamt-of civilization unearths these posters and marvels that once, long ago, giants roamed the earth—and they wore smart-fitting clothes and stylish hair, and they did important things with documents which they held poised above expensive faux-marble desks. I hope such a civilization has a better sense of humour than ours.

Traffic is heavy, as it always is along Yonge Street, and it fills the air with a dull roar and a sooty grimy dusty smell that you can taste when you breathe it in. Three teenagers roll past me on their skateboards, bump, bump, bumping at each crack in the sidewalk. They laugh and they swear at each other and one of them has an unlit cigarette wedged behind an ear. It seems all of a sudden the street has exploded in a mess of colour, neon above every shop and amber street lights and the blinding white of halogen headlights approaching and the blood red of taillights receding and pale bands from entire floors of office buildings, deceiving hapless birds to their deaths, light splashed everywhere so that when I tilt back my head I can’t see a single star. Hell, I can’t even be sure there’s a sky above. A cabbie blares his horn. A man looks the other way while his dog pisses on a newspaper box. A woman pulls up the collar on her jacket and shudders.

Crossing the street to the southeast corner of the church lot, I hear a kerfuffle, a brouhaha, a hullabaloo, a—you get the idea. It’s coming from further along the sidewalk adjacent to the construction site. Squabbling voices spill out from the passageway of scaffolding and boards and plywood that encloses the sidewalk. Some of it is incoherent and desperate, some of it, insistent and officious. From where I stand, it’s impossible to see what’s happening. The whole stretch of sidewalk is enclosed and cast in a deep blackness like you’d find in a cave or a womb. I stand paralyzed, caught between a voyeuristic curiosity and a religiously held belief in the suburbanite’s right to stay uninvolved. One of the voices clarifies into a distinctive Don’t. You. Touch. Me. which shakes me loose. Although I can’t place the voice, I know I’ve heard it before and should recognize it. I continue past the church and burrow into the enclosure. Halfway along, the space widens for a fire hydrant, and on either side of the hydrant stands a security guard. When they hear my footfalls, they stiffen and turn their heads to stare at me, then rise to their full heights. They were stooped over a third form, a man, tucked in behind the hydrant, and standing now, they block my view of the man.

Gentlemen, and I nod. I should be wearing a top hat and morning coat.

I can’t see much, but every so often a car whizzes past and the headlights throw a sliver across the scene. One of the security guards is a skinny beanpole of a kid with lanky arms and a goofy grin that threatens to swallow the whole of his acne-pocked face. The other one is a real bruiser, a stocky fellow with fat upper arms, the kind you’d never want to meet in a bar fight. They both wear Kevlar® vests underneath dark nylon jackets with insignia on each shoulder—a corny design with swords and a sphinx.

So what’s going on? I ask.

It’s a private matter. You just keep moving along.

Sidewalk’s public property, my friend. Then calling to the form behind the hydrant: George, izat you?

Before he can answer, the two security guys are leaning in to get a good hold of George.

Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty apes! he shouts.

I guess in a week or so this will seem funny, especially when I tell it as a story to people like Pastor Rick, but here in the midst of it, with two goons who have no sense of humour and even less sense of cultural history, it’s starting to set me on edge. I can feel the rise of adrenaline and the thud of my heartbeat. I don’t want to see them manhandle George, but I don’t want to see them manhandle me either. There’s something grossly out of balance here, two big guys in their uniforms and their armor, pointing flashlights and packing Tasers^TM and mace, while below them George cowers in his sleeping bag, dressed in stinking clothes and clutching at his shoes.

What to do?

That well-intentioned middle-class white liberal impulse to reach in to the elbows and fix things seizes me like a migratory instinct or a gag reflex. I can’t help but feel compelled to need to want to make things right. What would a good ad exec do? I stuff my hands into my jacket pockets and hunch my shoulders. An ad exec would want publicity; an ad exec would want to draw as much attention as possible to the scene of the injustice; an ad exec would use the polarizing sensationalizing catastrophizing effects of flash mobs and public confrontation, anything at all to shame the two gorillas back into their forest.

In each hand, I feel a wad of paper. From my right pocket I pull the Black History Month reading list and toss it onto the sidewalk. From my left pocket I pull the phone directory which Pastor Rick gave me on Sunday. I lean through a gap on the street side of the scaffolding and tilt the open pages one way and then another, trying to read the entries by the light of the coffee shop window across the street and the amber street light on the corner. Supplemented by the glow from my cell phone, I scan the listings for St. George’s membership. Liane, Liane. I don’t know your last name. If I were to find her listing, and if it included a mobile number, and if a signal could reach her phone way down there in the church basement, and if she were sitting within earshot of her phone, then maybe, just maybe, I could persuade her to assemble her ready-made band of activists and call them to action. Liane, Liane. The confrontation beside me is mounting. They’ve pulled some of George’s bags from behind the hydrant and have tossed them further along the sidewalk. One of the bags was full of empty beer bottles and they shattered when the bag struck the ground. Now, George is saying Oh my, oh my, oh my, and rocking on his buttocks. One of the guards grunts orders while the other rummages behind the hydrant for more belongings.

What began as an orderly search for a name has devolved into a random frantic rifling, chilled fingers fumbling with stuck pages, a dropped cell phone skittering across the ground. There. Liane Gordon. That must be her. Bus. Res. Cell. Email. I crouch and grope and, returning to my feet, punch the numbers into my cell phone keypad. As I listen to the ringing in one ear, I catch George moaning and whining in the other. You’re disturbing the order of—It’s easier to be kind to the less fortunate when they have pleasant sounding voices and smell of subtle cologne and attend to the usual daily routines like teeth-brushing and hair-combing. If homeless schizophrenics looked like Liane, charity would be easy. A good deed would leap from the heart like a song from a thrush’s throat. But it’s different when the downtrodden don’t make any sense and they smell like rotting meat and their feet are black and bleeding. “Hello, you have reached the voice mail box of … Liane … who cannot—I snap shut the phone and press redial. This time Liane answers, breathless and breathy, traces of laughter still in her voice.

Liane?

Hello?

Liane?

Who is this?

Elton.

Elton? Do I know an Elton?

I explain how we met in Fellowship Hall a few Sundays ago and again at the Suzuki lecture. I almost add that I was the disingenuous loser who gave her the business card.

Look, Liane, I’m just outside the church, and there’s a situation.

A situation?

Yes, a situation. George is out here and—

George? Do I know a George?

Sometimes I wish I could take a thought and hurl it at others the way I throw a baseball, and they’d sit crouched like back catchers and take it smack in the glove, an instantaneous apprehension, none of this fumbling back and forth between half explanations and half understandings, shadows on a cave wall, visions through a glass darkly and all that. But my own clumsy mouth is all I’ve got, stumbling and coughing its way through a description of George’s situation. On her end, Liane struggles to construct an image of what’s happening. Once she reaches that aha moment, she holds the phone away from her mouth and yells for everybody to drop everything, put on a jacket, and follow her outside. Within a minute, fifteen people are on the sidewalk and approaching at a trot. Some have raised scarves over their faces so they look vaguely Muslim. Some hold cameras or phonecams overhead. One even holds a camcorder at shoulder height and struggles to keep it steady while he runs along with the others. As the ECO people converge on the scene, I browse through my cell directory. I still have the Condo developer’s cell number entered in my phone. What the hell. Interrupt his coitus if I have to. Maybe he’s doing his executive assistant on one of those faux-marble desks he was so pleased to see in his posters.

His voice comes on the phone all gruff and tired and neanderthalensis.

Bruno is not far up the road at a French restaurant, but he has no desire to leave his table and drive the three blocks south to the construction site. Already this evening he’s probably sucked back half a liter of wine and, as a consequence, his mood vacillates from dopey to belligerent. He doesn’t see why there would be a public relations problem if his security guards were caught on camera throwing a homeless man onto the street.

When I was a kid, we did dat sorta ting alla da time, he says.

And when you were a kid, there wasn’t this invention called Youtube.

So? he says.

So … and I tell him he could leverage this as a public relations opportunity, come down to the site and smile and face the cameras and tell the world that he’s a developer with a difference, a developer with a heart. In the pause, I hear the smacking of lips and the chaw, chaw, chawing of meat, then the clatter of cutlery on a plate and the scrape of a chair.

Fuck me, he says. I’ll come down an’ tro him outta dere myself.

This is going better than I could have hoped.

When Bruno hangs up, I call a friend at CityTV® who promises he’ll do his best to get a mobile unit to my location.

I’d like to think that what I’ve done is to release forces that will collide and expend themselves according to natural laws, the algebra of vectors and the calculus of tangents. I’m helping to unleash pent up kinetic energy in the same way that I might push a rock off a cliff and watch it smash into passing cars on the road below. There is a godlike satisfaction in assuming a distant perspective. This is hubris of course and I will be punished for it. That’s how these things play out. But I can’t see yet how the punishment will arrive.

The activists are loud and aggressive. Some have squirmed around the hydrant to form a protective barrier between George and the security guards. The two young men wear expressions which range from bewilderment to anger. There’s a light on the camcorder and it shifts from one guard’s face to the other’s and back again. They squint and swat at the air as if that will make the light go away. George is as bewildered as the guards and has stuck each hand into a shoe and is pressing them against his ears. Hail Mary, full of grace. Let me vanish from this place. Here, in the shadows, Liane and I have a brief meeting of the eyes. It’s difficult to read her look, a faint upturn from the corner of her mouth, maybe the smile of a co-conspirator in the fight against oppression. Maybe nothing.

A car screeches to a stop further along the road, then backs up until it’s adjacent to us. It’s a big black Lincoln Continental® with tinted windows and a glossy metal sheen that makes it look like a spaceship. Bruno steps from the driver’s side. A passing car honks. Bruno raises both his middle fingers and yells at the driver to go fuck himself. As he moves around to the other side of his car, he hikes his trousers up underneath his stomach. He’s a squat man dressed in a charcoal suit. His shirt is open at the neck and the knot of his tie hangs loose. He steps onto the curb and, leaning through a gap in the scaffolding, grabs the skinny guard by the arm and yanks so hard the guard almost falls through and onto the road.

Whaddafuckisgoinonhere?

I dunno. They just come outta nowheres.

Bruno lets the guard go with a shove and a grunt, then he sees me standing in the shadows. You. Make dem go away. He waves his arms like a choral conductor having a seizure. Get da fuck offa my property.

Liane steps to my side while Luke yells an inane slogan about corporate power stepping on the little guy.

Well? You gonna do someting?

I cough and clear my throat and hobble from side to side. If we were doing this in the daylight, people would see how my face and scalp are glowing a bright pink. While the darkness can hide my colour, it can’t hide the quaver in my voice, and it can’t hide the uneasiness in my posture. My brain is empty except for the thought: Liane is watching; Liane is listening. Words tumble over my lips as if they have a life of their own. I stand apart from them, astounded at their coherence. Modest at first, they gain confidence. Uh … Bruno … uh … Ladies and gentleman. The words return to my ears with the intonation of a carnival barker. Allow me to introduce to you Mr. Bruno Genovesi. Mr. Genovesi is senior vice president of Gentri Incorporated, but don’t let the VP title fool you. There’s no one above Mr. Genovesi except on paper. That’s because Gentri is owned by a numbered company and that numbered company is owned by the Genovesi brothers. There’s Bruno and Giuseppe and Rocco. Bruno’s job is to handle all of Gentri’s condo projects, like this one. Oh Bruno may be a little rough around the edges, but he’s a decent guy once you get to know him. I mean, this is a guy who—his mother’s still alive, you know—and he visits her every Sunday afternoon. Brings her flowers. A guy can’t be all bad if he visits his mom and brings her flowers. And he has two border collies. He just loves those border collies.

A modest cadre of onlookers has gathered. In addition to the ECO people, there’s the black man from the subway station and the man whose dog was pissing on the newspaper box and the three teenagers with their skateboards. There’s also a middle-aged couple who look like they’ve come from the adult video store and a balding man dressed in a suit that he bought from an off-the-rack discount clothing store. They lurk in the shadows a safe distance from the stench of George’s clothes.

Bruno raises his fingers and points them at me as if he’s firing a pistol. At the same time, his face contorts through a hundred different expressions until it hardens itself into a cast of angry restraint. A Ford Explorer® stops behind the Lincoln Continental®. It’s white with a TV Station logo splashed across each door and a satellite dish on the roof. Bruno rolls his eyes. Great. Just fucking great. He points at me again. I’m calling Feinman’s in the morning and cancelling our contract.

I quit there last week, I shout.

I want to add: So I don’t give a flying fuck what you do. But I say nothing. Instead, I leave my mouth to hang open, and I pant, and I feel a minty freshness in my mouth as I draw cool night air in and out across my tongue. I’d like to think that my reluctance to swear is a sign of maturity, but it’s more likely the sign of a paralysis operating in concert with a racing heartbeat, and a trickle of sweat dribbling down my spine to soak the band of my underwear, and a dark wobbly feeling in my gut that threatens to make me evacuate my bowels. It bothers me that on Sunday I found it easy to swear at my children, but now I show such scruples with an asshole like Bruno. Maybe I’m a coward.

Bruno throws up his hands and returns to his car muttering to himself in Italian. Luke hurries to the Ford Explorer® and talks to the pair from CityTV® while they test their mike and video camera. The two security guards stand stupefied and do nothing. Some of the people from ECO gather up George’s belongings and settle them in a heap behind the hydrant. George stands in the middle of the sidewalk with a hand stuck down his pants, rearranging his genitals.

Liane touches my elbow and looks at me with her luminous eyes. Are you okay?

I feel a rush. It’s the adrenaline. It’s the biting wind on my cheek. It’s the warmth of Liane’s gaze. When I speak, my voice is too loud and everything comes out too fast. My teeth chatter. I clamp shut my mouth but can’t control the chattering. I laugh when I want to cry and I smile when I want scream. It feels as if the world is spinning too fast and my body might fly apart.

Let’s get out of here, I say. I’m high. If I had megalomaniacal tendencies, I’m sure this is what it would feel like. I’d march my armies over the countryside, trampling everything in my path and to hell with the consequences. I’m charismatic. If I had demagogical tendencies, I’d whip crowds to a frenzy and persuade them to do outrageous things like circumcise their first-born males and drink the Kool-Aid®. All at once I’m a man of action and it’s sexy. I can see it in the way Liane responds to me with her eyes. At this instant, she would follow me anywhere. Let’s get a coffee, I say. I need something to calm me down.

She trails me across the road to the Second Cup®, and as we walk through the parking lot, she suggests herbal tea instead because a coffee would only keep me hepped up. I order two chai teas and carry them to the corner table where Liane waits for me. We’ve exchanged words before, but this is the first time we’ve talked the sort of talk that involves looking into one another’s eyes. She tells me she’s amazed at what I’ve done. She tells me that last week, when I handed her my business card, she was sooooo disappointed. When she looked at the logo on my business card, then at me standing in the theatre wearing my dress pants and Italian leather shoes, she decided I was just another greenwashing corporate suit looking to take advantage of sincere (but otherwise naïve) activists for fun and profit. But there I stood, not minutes ago, confronting a corporate client, risking everything, even my job.

Why’d you quit? she asks.

Don’t look for any deep principles at play here, I say. I got pissed off at my boss is all it was. Then I tell her about Mona, how she came running to me in tears after Feinman groped her on the elevator, how I confronted Feinman, how we yelled, how I couldn’t stomach working at that place anymore, how I felt slimy and needed to wash myself clean.

And you don’t think deep principles were at play? and she smiles a mocking smile.

Not like: ‘Let’s sit down and think this through.’ It was a gut reaction kind of thing. Just like tonight. I saw how those two apes were treating George and they reminded me of Feinman back when he was younger. Christ. That was twenty years ago I started working with him.

And your wife? Liane nods at the ring on my finger. What’s she think of you quitting?

Damn. Why does she have to go and spoil the mood? I’m sitting across the table from a gorgeous girl who’s in her early thirties, single, suitably impressed with me notwithstanding the subtle layer of flab around my waist. I’m hatching a soothing fantasy that involves a sandy beach, suntan lotion, and not a stitch of clothing. Then she has to go and prick the bubble. Either she doesn’t understand the rules, or she understands them too well.

Oh, well, it was a shock, of course: me coming home and announcing we’re a one-income household now. And she frets. She always frets about money. But it’s more psychological than real. I mean, she’s got a good income. It’s not like we’re going to starve if I take a year or two to find something new. Something better.

What’s she do?

She writes.

Like magazine articles?

No, she writes books. Novels. Young adult fiction. In the real world, she doesn’t make great wads of cash. But in the world of writing, she’s wildly successful.

Liane sips at her tea, lips set delicately to the edge of the cup, taking care not to scald herself. I imagine myself sucking on those lips, biting them, feeling them pressed against mine. I want those lips. They’re not full lips like the Botox® lips I used to see on the talent walking through Feinman’s photo studio, and they’re not those thin lips that make you want to toss bird seed to librarians. Instead, her lips are perfect for her face, ruddy and substantial, glistening in the half light of the coffee shop. As I stare at her, I resolve to taste those lips. The mood from this evening’s confrontation lingers and it fills me with a triumphal certainty that I will one day fulfill my resolution. I don’t know how. I have no plan. In fact, there’s little in my life right now that’s unfolding with so much as an intention much less a plan, and yet things are unfolding in my favour. I see no reason why such an unfolding shouldn’t include Liane’s lips.

I study Liane’s face, her ears, her eyes, perfectly proportioned in relation to her nose and lips, the sort of face the art department would love because it would require so little retouching in Photoshop®. I catch myself in the act of thinking that thought and smile, half in amusement, half in self-disgust.

What is it? she asks.

Just thinking.

Obviously.

I was looking at you.

You were doing that before, when we first met. Haven’t your eyes got anything better to look at?

No. I caught myself thinking something stupid. Reminded me how much my work has infected the way I look at people. I tell her how, since the advent of digital photography, every photo of a model has been manipulated in Photoshop® to conform to a woolly standard of beauty which everybody claims to understand but nobody can explain. Although I started in advertising as a copy writer, like everybody else, I have become infected by the culture of an industry which assumes that people are as manipulable as wet mud. I was thinking your face wouldn’t need much retouching in Photoshop®.

She smiles and shrugs. I don’t get what you’re trying to say.

I feel the colour rise to my cheeks. How can she not get my point? I wonder. I guess I’m trying to tell you how beautiful you are.

Liane laughs a choked awkward laugh and avoids my eyes by concentrating on her cup of tea which she sips with those perfect lips of hers until she drives me nearly to a frenzy. She draws her lips into an O and blows onto the tea, and I observe that her cheeks are almost translucent, starkly at odds with my image of a hardened activist.

Your wife. You said books in the plural. So she’s written more than one book?

I sigh and resign myself to an existence with a wife and a house and children and debt and a car and a dog and a shared story that has taken the two of us from our days together in the summer after high school to this place we occupy now on an evening in suburbia. Yeah, I say. She’s written a whole series of them. Gothic horror. Vampires. Werewolves. Things that bite.

Like the Midnight Blood series?

You’ve read Midnight Blood?

Yeah, after high school. Oh you should’ve seen me then. Dyed my hair black. Wore black lipstick. Even got some tattoos. Someday maybe I’ll show you pictures of me from back then. I was so into Carla. She was so … I don’t know … she’s what I needed at that time of my life.

So you’ve read Midnight Blood?

Yeah.

Giselle Pierce is my wife.

Shut up. The Giselle Pierce? Liane’s voice is loud and she draws stares to herself, although it doesn’t matter what Liane does, she always draws stares to herself. She could be trudging through snow drifts wearing ski pants and a parka and heads would still turn to gawk.

For my part, I’m annoyed that, yet again and without being present, Giselle has hijacked a conversation that was supposed to belong to me. Liane sees the annoyance on my face and pulls back. She apologizes for being stupid. It’s clear there’s stuff going on. It must be complicated. Things always are. She doesn’t mean to raise something sensitive for me. She draws her face into a pout and even in that she’s beautiful. I’m supposed to tell her that everything’s okay, which is what I do, and although I know I’m being manipulated, and although I usually resist manipulation with a fury, I submit to it. There is something about Liane that tears down all my defenses and leaves me writhing helpless.

We spend an hour in the coffee shop and by the end of our chat I have recovered a sense of calm. As we leave, I wonder where Liane goes when she’s not at St. George’s, and I wonder whether she goes there with anybody. I don’t ask and she doesn’t say, but as we make our good-byes on the street corner, I have an intuition she will return across the road to Luke. Where does my sudden jealousy come from? I’m astonished. I’ve been married nearly twenty years and have a life of my own. What right have I to begrudge someone else her life? Yet there it is. I don’t want to think of Luke—the tearful pitiable Luke—tasting those lips, touching those breasts, loving that body. I want those things for myself. I know it’s greedy. Yet there it is.

I walk to the subway station and ride the two stops home. It’s not late, but Giselle has already gone to bed. I sit for a while in front of the TV, clicking through each of the five hundred channels in our satellite subscription, but nothing interests me. It’s all package and no content. Even the commercial-free channels want to sell me something: a gaudy glossy life of big cars and bigger homes and poolside vacations. I switch off and go to the fridge, but when I pull open the door, my appetite drifts away. It’s all prepared foods rolled up in shiny wrappers with photos of smiling moms feeding their perky hyper-active kids. Instead of watching TV or eating a snack, I flick off all the lights and feel my way upstairs to the bedroom. I strip to my underwear and slide in beside Giselle. What has my life become that I crawl into bed with a fat woman who snores and splays herself over all the bed so there’s no room left for me, with a giant bra slung over one of the bed posts, with a dog stretched over a stinky cushion on the floor, with a broken ceiling fan that sits motionless and leaves me to sweat on my sheets? What has my life become?

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By nature, Meriwether was a peaceful man and he had hoped that patience would break the stand-off. As long as the terrorists didn’t threaten to kill the hostages, he would keep them talking. It would dwindle their supplies. But after a hundred days, it was clear that they were well stocked. When Meriwether cut off the power, the lights flickered on again after only a minute of darkness. When he shut off the water, they put a hostage in each window with a squeegee and a bucket as if to say: “Look. Look at us. We have water enough to waste.” As for food, Meriwether had no idea how they fed themselves. All he could say for certain was that nothing came in from the outside.

The media marked a hundred days in captivity with headlines on the front page of papers all across the country and with special television reports on the Comedy Channel. Pundits questioned whether Meriwether had the balls to bring down the terrorists. But they didn’t foist all the responsibility on him. They asked the same question of the Department of Homeland Security. Even of the White House. Although Meriwether winced at the negative publicity, he took a secret pleasure at hearing his name mentioned in the same sentence with the president’s. Now, when he yelled through the bullhorn, his voice crackled with authority. And when he walked from his car to the command center, he did so with a certain swagger.

Homeland Security decided to end the nonsense. While they began talks about acceptable losses, Meriwether developed a strategy. Everything was optimized for the local news cycle. At 13:00 hours, Meriwether’s team stormed the Cheetos factory. The commandos had been trained by the same Navy Seals who brought down Osama Bin Laden. Their orders were to shoot all the terrorists. If any terrorists survived, it would be inconvenient. They would have to be questioned and there would be trials. Everybody  knows that a trial is just a forum for the guilty to get public sympathy. Meriwether’s people went in with guns blazing. Hardly any hostages died.

Initial reaction was favourable. Where, before, the media had criticized Meriwether as bumbling and indecisive, now they called him a hero. There was even talk of a ticker tape parade. But media adulation is a fickle thing. In the case of Meriwether, it lasted until all the hostages had been debriefed and were released to the care of their families. Many gave interviews and invariably they spoke out against Meriwether.

“He killed the Cheetos Ten,” they said. “They were some of the nicest people!” and the screen would show photos of the Cheetos Ten with vignette filters and poignant violin music in the background.

Meriwether lost his temper. How naïve could people be! A bunch of liberal softees with mush for brains. That’s what they were. He tried to explain the effects of Stockholm Syndrome, but he got bogged down in technical language, so the interviewer broke for a commercial before it got too boring.

Something he noticed: the hostages all looked the same. Every one of them was obese—at least three hundred and fifty pounds.

“Wasn’t it horrible?” people asked of the hostages.

“No way,” they answered. “We had a great time, you know, these last hundred days.”

“And what did you live on?”

“Cheetos, of course. Our friends, they let us eat as much as we wanted.”

“But no variety in your diet.”

“Are you kidding. There was lots of variety. Cheetos. Cheesie Puffs. Curly-Cues. Twisties. And we washed it all down with as much Pepsi as we could drink.”

“Seriously?”

“A light refreshing snack.”

After the commando raid, public backlash struck with a fury. People wanted Meriwether’s head served up on a platter. They loved the terrorists and were tired of the patronizing commentary. Reporters stood on street corners and conducted impromptu interviews. They wanted to know what the average guy on the street thought. They spoke to fat men in orange bandanas: “They’re just like us, these terrorists.” Obese women on orange reflective vests screamed into the camera: “They were only defending our right to eat Cheetos.” The terrorists became the so-called terrorists became the martyrs. What was their crime? All they’d done was give a few ordinary Americans what they wanted.

Meriwether turned off the TV and shook his head. It was like the whole fucking country had been taken hostage and was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. The way people talked, it was like Cheetos were goddamed communion wafers. Leaning way back in his easy chair, he fitzed open another can of beer and balanced it on his stomach, watching the condensation dribble onto the patch of shirt just above his belly button. Sucking the foam off the top, he wondered if he would have felt differently if the terrorists had taken over a brewery.

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Well, the doctor said, bread for one. Anything with wheat in it. No pasta. No pizza. No beer.

No beer? But I’m Canadian. I can’t live without beer. I mean, there’s Molsons and Labatts, but there’s all those craft breweries too. There’s Upper Canada Lager, Sleeman’s, Creemore, Mill Street. What the hell am I gonna do? I almost cried.

The doctor shrugged. He had no idea. His only suggestion was to stick to hard liquor. Never in a million years would I have expected a doctor to recommend that I drink Scotch. But there it was. I should have asked for it on a prescription pad. I should have billed my Laphraoig to my health plan.

I’m not an egregious drinker. Sometimes—like now for instance—I like to sit in front of my computer monitor and plunk away at my keyboard while enjoying a can of Nickel Brook Gluten Free Beer brewed just down the road in Burlington. It loosens my fingers. It relaxes my brain.

Do you think I exaggerate the effects of a good drink? Does it sound like I’m trying to rationalize a bad habit? Lately I’ve noticed a number of online snippets that seem to confirm my view: a drink helps things along.

For example, I noticed a tweet from a writer I follow on twitter. On April 22^nd, he said: “I enjoy poetry most when I’m drunk.” Admittedly, he’s talking about the appreciation of poetry rather than its creation. But that’s a fine distinction.

A week later, another person on twitter posted this twitpic. It’s an image of a P.P.S. from a letter by Ernest Hemingway which reads as follows:

P.P.S. Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky? When you are cold and wet what else can warm you? Before an attack who can say anything that gives you the momentary well being that rum does? I would as soon not eat at night as not to have red wine and water. The only time it isn’t good for you is when you write or when you fight. You have to do that cold. But it always helps my shooting. Modern life, too, is often a mechanical oppression and liquor is the only mechanical relief. Let me know if my books make any money and I will come to Moscow and we will find somebody that drinks and drink my royalties up to end the mechanical oppression.

Hemingway, of course, was an egregious drinker. To be fair, he doesn’t appear to say that you should drink while writing, but should drink all around your writing.

It’s easy to come up with a list of great writers whose writing is drenched in alcohol. Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano is an extended conversation with the inebriated brain. F. Scott Fitzgerald was, in his day, renowned as much for his alcoholism as for his writing. Closer to home, we have Morley Callaghan, who sometimes drank himself into oblivion with Hemingway when the two were working together in Toronto. Dorothy Parker is famous for saying: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” And since we’ve mentioned Hemingway, it seems only fair we mention his ex, the inimitable Martha Gellhorn. In his introduction to her Travels With Myself And Another, Bill Buford calls her a “boozy reporter of wars” and says that she tutored him “on matters of the heart, and on drinking (you could never drink enough).” She had a cottage in north Wales “where she lived alone, drank booze, read mystery novels, and wrote.” Despite her questionable habits, she lived to the ripe age of eighty-nine.

Not everyone thinks alcohol is conducive to good writing. Take, for example, Katha Pollitt’s eulogy of Christopher Hitchens in The Nation. She invites readers to remove their rose-coloured glasses and take a more honest look at the man:

His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying … Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.

But a recent study from the University of Illinois and published in the journal, Consciousness and Cognition, suggests that alcohol may improve creative problem solving. In a study, subjects who had two drinks performed better than people who had nothing to drink. As one would expect, subjects who were “sozzled” couldn’t perform at all. The conclusion: a moderate amount of alcohol may enhance certain tasks involving creative thinking.

It may be that the disinhibiting effect of alcohol encourages what Edward de Bono would describe as lateral thinking. This is precisely the kind of thinking that is the stock-in-trade of a good writer.

The problem, of course, is that alcohol is an addictive substance and a CNS depressant. There may be a strong correlation between Hemingway’s alcohol consumption, his good writing, and the fact that he put a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out.

As I stated above, I’m not an egregious drinker; I’m not even a modest drinker, so I can’t say from personal experience whether there is a connection between alcohol and creative output. But I do have an analogous experience—severe depression. Years ago, I ended up in a heated debate with my then psychiatrist. I had been in rough shape. I remember sitting in his office a few weeks after discharge from a hospital and he said something like: “Your writing is fine and all that, but trust me, your writing would be so much better if you could achieve some measure of happiness in your life.” I didn’t believe him. Even now, I think he was dead wrong.

Although severe depression (and its treatments, like meds and ECTs) can cause cognitive impairment, the experience has a disinhibiting effect that is a lot like being drunk. Your judgment is impaired. You’re overcome by feelings of dysphoria. You can hardly tell what’s real anymore. Being suicidal can liberate your writing. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you and your ego have pretty much parted company. You feel you have nothing to lose. You no longer care what other people think of you. If you’re willing to jump off a bridge, then you’re willing to take other kinds of risks too. Applied to writing, you’re willing to take the kinds of risks that make your words crackle with a detached honesty.

Although I disagreed with him, my psychiatrist was right in the ultimate sense. Your writing isn’t very good if you’re dead. Hemingway’s output was severely curtailed by his suicide, as it was for Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Jerzy Kosinski, David Foster Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Yukio Mishima, Arthur Koestler, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, and countless others.

Is there a way writers can enjoy the disinhibiting effect of alcohol or the detachment of severe depression without the adverse consequences?

One possibility is play.

Treat writing as play.

I think it’s fair to say that most of the best writing comes from people who never grow up. It’s not simply that play offers a fantasy world that generates good stories; but also that it happens in an unselfconscious state of mind. When we play, we don’t care what other people think of us. Play lets us take the kinds of risks that make our writing better.

How do we, as grown-ups, recover the world of play? I have no answer for that question. Maybe it starts by cracking open a fresh bottle …

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Yet there are hints of violence lurking within the collection. There is the 1991 massacre at Vukovar which is only a two hour drive from Daruvar where Novakovich grew up. His sister is hit by shrapnel in the same year. But Novakovich is determined to leave political divisions and resentments out of his reflections. Nowhere is this clearer than in “Two Croatias” when he confronts both extremes of Croatian lore—its flirtations with fascism and its gorgeous tourist destinations. With characteristic succinctness, he concludes: ” It is a complex country deserving of no reductionism.” His answer, it seems, is silence. Or perhaps more accurately: his answer is hidden in the details of ordinary people getting on with their lives.

Novakovich’s writing exemplifies the distinction between nationalism and patriotism. The world can get on very well without nationalism. As for patriotism, I suspect that, like trust, it must be earned. The U.S. has no more entitlement to a citizen’s patriotism than any other country. And that country’s transformation following 9/11 pretty much strips Western critics of any right to judge conditions in Croatia. So the determining question for a patriot seems to be: does a country’s conditions allow ordinary people to get on with their lives.

For Novakovich, that means returning to Croatia to visit his ailing mother and, in the end, to bury her. It means finding cello teachers for his son. It means getting a decent night’s sleep when you have sleep apnea. It means finding a job, which for Novakovich, means going abroad to teach writing courses. And in a piece reminiscent of Geoff Dyer, it means visiting a jazz club in New York City. Patriotism is emphatically not about finding a place to realize grandiose ambitions or to become a very important person.

While we’re mentioning Geoff Dyer … Novakovich compares favourably with one of his peers, Pico Iyer. I say this for two reasons. First is his meditation upon his father (or absence of a father, since his father died when he was a boy). He observes that when he gets together with others whose fathers died when they were young, it feels like children playing without supervision. While Iyer’s father did not die when he was young, Iyer most definitely played without supervision. His latest book, The Man Within My Head, is devoted entirely to his quest for a father surrogate, which he finds in Graham Greene. For Novakovich, his father’s absence is like the superego gone AWOL. He needs a substitute and muses that perhaps that is God’s job. He doesn’t resolve the question of a substitute, although he does conclude that writing is his patrimony, which isn’t quite the same thing as a substitute. Maybe the substitute is country, patria.

The second reason for the comparison to Iyer has to do with The Global Soul. Like Iyer, Novakovich feels at ease in different environments. Borders are porous. He travels a lot. When I first thought of the comparison, I looked for evidence to confirm my intuition, but it wasn’t apparent. Iyer writes about McAirports and McHotels, generic convention centres, a nowhereness that pervades contemporary global culture. Novakovich seems to write against that grain. His world is grittier, more concerned with local details and personal encounters. And yet, as I proceed through the essays, I note a recurring transaction that draws attention away from whatever concern is at hand. It starts innocuously enough with a visit to Croatia and the worry that guards at a checkpoint might be Serbs. It continues in another piece with an absurd conversation amongst self important guards who are stuck in the habits of the old Soviet regime. It culminates in an airport encounter at Moscow when his son’s cello (purchased in America) is confiscated because it might be a Russian artifact. Finally, Novakovich makes it explicit. In an essay called “Vukovar” (which is not really about the massacre but about passing checkpoints, bureaucracy, and police), he writes:

I don’t prosper around police. In a way I believe that Police is one nation, bigger than Poland. How many cops are there in the world? Well, their jobs are similar, and they are interchangeable.

Iyer’s The Global Soul was published a year before 9/11. Standing on the other side of that great divide, Novakovich has added to Iyer’s list. Like airports and hotels, policing has become a generic commodity in our global culture.

One would think that frequent encounters with police at checkpoints and border patrols might wear a man down. But Novakovich carries it off with gentle humour and a keen eye for the absurd. And now he has settled in Montreal. His sense of the absurd will not atrophy there.

Shop for Shopping For A Better Country

Read an interview in The Rumpus

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Read installment #6 of the serialized novel, Cream & Sugar: a story of advertising, race, and one man’s midlife quest to rein in his unruly testicles. In Chapter Six, Elton Pierce arrives home to an angry wife. He’s forgotten their invitation to a niece’s birthday party. The family drives to a suburban enclave near the airport where Elton’s brother-in-law has settled into a starter home. Life with Giselle’s side of the family is loud and effusive (and Pentecostal), as far as one can get from Elton’s tight-assed WASPish reserve. He doesn’t know if he can make it through an entire afternoon with them. (Midnight Blood is the name of Giselle’s series of young adult vampire novels. She had hoped that it would be understood as an allegory of race, but readers are more interested in blood and guts than in deeper meanings.) Read more about Cream & Sugar here. You can read chapter six online below, or download it to your favourite e-reader. Catch a new chapter every Tuesday afternoon.

It’s past two when I pull into the driveway. The sun is shining and the sky is blue. I should feel anxious for my future, but I don’t; I turn my face to the sky and its warmth fills me with a strange confidence that belief in a destiny is pointless and that A reaches B whether or not I’m there to help it along. A glorious fall afternoon like this would be perfect for an hour on the deck with a book. At least that’s what I’m telling myself as I leap up the front steps to the waiting figure of Giselle in the shadows beyond the screen door. Oh shit, I think. Guess I’m not sitting on the deck this aft’. Giselle has her feet planted shoulder-width apart on the tile floor and her hands balled into beefy knots that she grinds into her hips.

Where the hell’ve you been?

Having lunch with Rick.

Who the hell is Rick?

The priest.

You been eating lunch with a priest?

I nod like a primary student being interrogated by his teacher.

And what’d I tell you before you left this morning?

I look up to the sky and try to remember. Good-bye?

She frowns. I said: ‘Don’t you forget about Ashley’s birthday party.’

I shake my head, saying Christ! to myself and trying to remember when I forgot. I can’t remember if I even knew it in the first place. If I push the matter, Giselle will insist that I did, that she told me this morning, that my brain either turned to mush with dementia or got so preoccupied with its own concerns that there’s no room left in it for thoughts of anyone else. If I give Giselle an opening, I just know there’s a harangue craving to splash onto the floor at my feet. So I keep my mouth shut. But that glowering of hers is harangue enough: it’s not possible that this is a simple misunderstanding; instead, it’s evidence of a moral defect worming its way from so deep within my heart that it must have been mapped onto my DNA by Satan’s personal geneticist. I’m selfish, self-absorbed, narcissistic. There may be overlap in those descriptions, but lumped together, they provide a fair translation of Giselle’s look at times like this. I don’t give her an opening, so she yells for the kids to get their asses to the front door while I back onto the porch and try to avoid her glare.

Giselle drives. It’s twenty-five minutes to her brother Jermaine’s and no one speaks for twenty-four and a half of those minutes. There’s a dark cloud hovering just below the roof of the car. The kids sense the electric tension. Ordinarily, they’d argue about something stupid like which one of them is invading the other’s space. This afternoon, they know—just as I know—that silence is important for our survival. We listen to the oldies station: Ian and Sylvia, Sonny and Cher, Tina and Ike. Half way into the twenty-fifth minute, we turn onto Jermaine’s street, a cul-de-sac in the west end near the airport, and Katrine asks what we got Ashley for her birthday. We got her jeans, two T-shirts, and something a little dressier, all featured in a catalogue that Feinman’s shot four months ago.

If it weren’t for the numbers, I wouldn’t be able to tell one house from another: row upon row of starter homes set on thirty-three and a third foot lots, cross-eyed windows staring down at shrub-enclosed hydrants, garages stuck way out in front like lopsided tongues lolling from the mouths of lopsided clowns. I can’t believe it. There’s at least one fucking minivan in every driveway. Red. Silver. Green. Blue. And not a mature tree for miles around. All of this—the houses, the curbs, the parks, the sidewalks, the asphalt—all of this has been steamrolled across two hundred year old farmsteads. Where corn stalks once stood row on row, and cows grazed on pastureland, now basketball hoops stand idle and kids sit indoors and play video games. This is Da Hood that Griff talks about. Makes me want to rethink my view on nukes. A couple well-positioned bombs would put this place out of its misery.

Giselle points to all the cars parked along the curb and in the driveway, and: I expect everyone else’s been here at least an hour. Jermaine and Roselea’s Dodge Caravan® is parked in front of the garage because the garage is too full of bicycles and skateboards and free weights to fit a vehicle. Beside the Caravan®, half on, half off the driveway, is Jermaine’s ‘67 Mustang® convertible. Go figure: a black dude with a white redneck muscle car. It doesn’t run and half the parts come from the wrecking yard, but it’s Jermaine’s baby so he keeps it under a powder-blue tarp. Parked behind the Caravan® and blocking the sidewalk is a shiny black Cadillac®. It belongs to Charles and Doris. There must be a law that retired Pentecostal preachers have to own Cadillacs®. Maybe God owns shares in GM®. On the road to the left of the driveway is Cecelia’s red Mazda Miata®. Cecelia is Giselle’s and Jermaine’s younger sister. She’s young. She’s single. She’s beautiful. She’s spoiled. And she has a lisp. The minute Griff got his growth spurt, he discovered he could tease his aunt with impunity. With the sweetest expression, he told her she should change her name to Sissy. Thithy? Why would I change my name to Thithy? Griff and Katrine were in convulsions and it only made things worse when their aunt told them to thut up. On the road to the right of the driveway is an old Buick Regal® with tail fins, a classic blackmobile belonging to Roselea’s parents whose names I can never remember. He straightens his hair and looks like James Brown and has to step outside every fifteen minutes for a cigarette. She always wears a hat with a feather in it and finishes every other sentence with Praise be or Glory-ory. Behind the Buick® is another car I recognize—a Plymouth®—one of those stupid-looking cars modeled on the gangster sedans from the thirties. This one is a deep maroon except for the driver’s door which is blue. It belongs to Roselea’s sister, Julienne, and her husband, Julian. I think the only reason they’re still together is because of their names. I’m willing to wager my right arm that when they first met and exchanged names, they took the similarity for a cosmic sign that they should be together for all eternity. Sadly, they failed to read the hundred other signs that said otherwise. Apart from names, they share three children, and even that’s an open question. There are the three-year-old twin screamers named Mildred and Millicent, and there’s an older brother named—nobody knows his real name—we call him Gonzo because he’s ADHD and barrels headlong from one room to the next. Gonzo is the reason we refuse to host these gatherings; if we did, our house would be demolished. Jermaine and Roselea are easygoing and don’t seem to mind living in the aftermath of hurricane Gonzo, plus none of their furniture is worth anything so the holes in upholstery and the broken lamps don’t matter so much.

There. Now I remember why I forgot about this afternoon.

We draw ourselves up in front of the glass of the outer door and stare at our reflections.

How old is Ash?

Ten.

Katrine stands to the left of Giselle while Griff stands to my right. We can hear muffled laughter inside. Katrine presses the button for the doorbell. In the instant before the door swings open, I stare at Giselle’s reflection. It’s the first time I’ve noticed her all week. There’s something about the way she looks. I’m not sure what. I drink her in: the jeans, the smart-looking blouse, the sprig in her hair, the wide sunglasses with white plastic frames. The inner door swings open and Jermaine appears in place of Giselle’s reflection.

Finally, he roars.

Roselea steps to his side. Look at you. The perfect family.

On cue, a switch trips inside Giselle’s brain and she starts to life, smiling, loquacious, all bubbles and spritz. I catch the reflection of Katrine rolling her eyes and mouthing phony to her brother. There’s a phase in the life of a fifteen-year-old when every grown-up is a phony. The phase lasts a month and coincides with the appearance of J.D. Salinger on the high school English curriculum. Fuck that bastard anyways.

Ashley is at the door wondering where her present is. Grandma Doris is marveling at what a grown woman Katrine has become. Griff says Sup to T. J. and T. J. says Sup wit’ chu and the two of them do their walk with jeans almost to their ankles and they strut down the sidewalk to the park by the school. Jermaine asks me what took us so long, and that sets off a chain reaction like falling dominos. Katrine says: Dad was having lunch with a priest. That gets Charles to his feet with: You going over to them Catholics? And my answer comes out like a reflex: Anglican, sir. It was an Anglican—

Still one of them tight-assed white boy churches all the same, and he laughs a big belly laugh until he starts to wheeze and choke, then hacks some phlegm that ends up in a cotton handkerchief. Not like that Reverend Jefferson, eh Doris?

Doris shouts Amen like she’s still at the morning service.

When you stick that Reverend Jefferson with that choir of his, especially that whatsername—Amanda?

Amy.

Amy. Yessiree. Amy Jones. Why then the whole house is shaking with the power of the Spirit. Isn’t that so, Doris?

But Doris is fussing over Katrine now and doesn’t hear a word her husband says.

Charles beams up at me from the arm of the sofa where he leans forward with both hands wrapped around the onyx knob of a walking stick. He doesn’t need a walking stick, but ever since he packed away his clerical collar, he’s needed to distinguish himself. There’s his hair in oily cherry-curls pressed close to his scalp, the pencil-thin mustache, and the rheumy eyes that have yellowed with age. There’s the fine wool suit with vest that went out of style three decades ago, and the purple silk tie and silk pouf tucked in the left breast pocket, and the watch in the right vest pocket with a gold chain looping down to his waist.

Did I mention it’s good to see you, sir? and I proffer a hand.

Charles lets the walking stick slide along the edge of the sofa until it clatters against the wall. He folds my hand into both of his. All the while, a broad smile lights his face. Elton, you’re a good man. He holds my hand a second longer, then releases.

There’s a smashing sound from the kitchen. I’m the only one who starts. Everyone else laughs and makes Gonzo jokes.

Jermaine smacks me on the arm below the shoulder and points with a thumb to the driveway. Hey. Got something to show you. Every time I visit, Jermaine shows me under the hood of his ‘67 Mustang® regardless of whether he’s done any work on it since my last visit. I’m certain that, by now, Giselle has told him I don’t know a damn thing about cars. I couldn’t tell a cam from a tail pipe. Maybe Jermaine has taken that as his cue to educate me: Hey. Here’s something my lily-white-assed smart-mouthed brother-in-law don’t know—that and how to dance. Or maybe he just does it to torment me. But when we step outside, it doesn’t seem so bad to spend time with him. For one thing, it’s a lot quieter without the kids screaming at one another and Gonzo crashing from room to room. For another thing, I’d tear off my ears if I had to listen to any more Jesus lessons from Reverend Shake-the-house-down. I suspect Jermaine feels the same way, but being the son of a preacher man, he keeps a polite face.

Jermaine whips off the tarp like he’s a toreador flourishing a cape. The car is forest green with white racing stripes. The hood is fastened shut with twin padlocks. While Jermaine fishes for the key which hangs from a chain around his neck, I walk a circuit around the car, tracing a finger along the white detailing and ending my circuit back at the grill with Nice. I’ve done the same thing each of twenty times, and always, I end with Nice. Not once have I ever thought of an original thing to say. Whenever I’m in the presence of a car, it’s as if the metal sucks dry my imagination and leaves behind an empty dusty shell. Jermaine’s got the hood propped open with a cut off length from the shaft of a hockey stick and he’s rambling on about cylinders and spark plugs and timing belts and pistons and transmissions. I nod and smile like I understand what he’s talking about and care, but today my acting is off. Jermaine senses something and calls me on it. I shrug and say I’m sorry.

It’s like you’re on another planet. Things okay between you and Giselle?

Yeah, yeah. Things are fine. Great. Really. Just great. I try my best to look straight at Jermaine when I speak. I try to avoid that drift of the eyes down and left —always a giveaway when people are lying or evasive. It’s amusing to look at Jermaine. Although he thinks his father’s profession is bullshit, there are a lot of ways he’s like his father, from the superficial things like the razored part and pencil-thin mustache, to the deeper things like his sincere interest in the people around him. He’s a social worker who helps at-risk youth. The pay is dreadful but I don’t think he’d have it any other way. I don’t think he’s got a thick enough skin to make it in the world of business as, for instance, an ad executive.

It’s just … well … you see … I quit my job.

Ah geez, I’m sorry. Or maybe it’s a good thing. Is it?

I guess. Good for my soul. Not so much for my marriage.

Roselea’s father has crept around from behind the garage and is sauntering towards us. The cigarette hanging from his lower lip is down almost to the filter.

Jermaine? I say under my breath.

Jermaine looks back from his father-in-law. Just you and me, man.

Thanks.

Milton! he calls out.

Ah, that’s the man’s name. Milton walks with a stooped shoulder and looks up from an angle, like he’s peering at me from under a window shade. Flecks of ash have scattered across an old wool sweater that looks like it was last washed in the Great Depression. He wears polyester trousers that draw up too short above the incongruous sight of shiny new Nike Air® running shoes.

Hello, boys. Whoa. Now that’s some piece of machine.

The three of us stand before this 390 cubic inch engine with its 320 horsepowers and 600cfm Holley four-barrel carburetor like we’re the Magi come to honour the messiah. We shoot the shit for a while. My disclosure to Jermaine has brought me a feeling of relief, so I find it easier to pretend with Milton that I know something about cars. I’m not an imposter after all.

Jermaine lets the hood fall shut and slides the length of hockey stick underneath the car, tucking it inside the front left wheel. After he locks the hood, I help him pull the tarp over his baby and smooth out the folds. Jermaine kisses two fingers of his left hand and presses the kiss into the hood, then the three of us go back inside, though this time we go in the other way, through the door behind the garage so we can grab ourselves each a beer from the cooler as we pass. Into the living room with beers in hand, and there, Charles calls out again from the couch: Elton. I hear you’ve quit your job.

The colour spreads across my face the way blood might ooze across the floor from a puncture wound. A silence has fallen over the room and everybody gapes at me, even Ashley, even Gonzo. I glare at Giselle for what I take as her betrayal and she can feel the accusation in my eyes. I know she does—just by how she snaps her head away from me and returns with furtive glances. Don’t think I’m angry though. The moment isn’t working me that way. Instead, what I feel is shock, or maybe panic, a black hole growing in my gut and swallowing up the rest of my body. I’m worried I’ll disappear. Maybe I’ll wink out of existence like a speck of cosmic dust that gets sucked through the surface of the sun and consumed in a fusion reaction at twenty million degrees. Until this moment, it had been nothing more than a handful of words: I quit my job. I could toss them around the way I might toss around a football with Griff. Until this moment, it had been the logical outcome of a position, the sort of thing a philosopher could work out in the abstract space beneath his skull. But now, when Charles says it out loud, he makes it real, and I’m experiencing my first intimations of dread. Tomorrow morning, after the kids have left for school, what will I do? Who will I be?

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. There’s beer and chips and cake and candles and singing. Ashley has to open her presents of course. She wants to wait for Griff and T. J. to come back from the park, but after half an hour, she goes ahead without them. The boys saunter into the living room as Giselle and Katrine are stuffing wrapping paper into a green garbage bag. Roselea gives them both a lecture, but it doesn’t do any good; the boys smirk, then shut themselves in T. J.’s room and turn on the stereo. I can see that Charles is looking for an opening to say more, but I avoid him, drifting through the house like a ghost at twilight, gazing out each window in succession, studying the photos on every wall in every room, until Gonzo provides my escape by breaking one of Ashley’s new toys. While Charles consoles Ashley by bouncing her on a knee and singing songs about crickets and fireflies, I draw Gonzo into the back yard and make up contests for him that involve lots of running.

The drive home is painful. The kids cringe in the back seat while Giselle and I argue. In truth, we don’t argue so much as vent. The details don’t matter; it all reduces to a simple question: which of us has the right to be angrier. According to Giselle, I’ve got no business yelling at her for telling everybody about quitting when it’s me who quit in the first place and me who didn’t even consult her when I was making my decision. According to me, she’s got no business blabbing to her family when she and I haven’t even talked yet about what I’ll do next, and as for consulting, she knows damn well it was a spur-of-the-moment thing: when CEO gropes colleague, don’t wait around to be named co-defendant in lawsuit. Logical. No-brainer. Thought you’d be proud I don’t put up with sexual harassment shit.

How the hell can you be named co-defendant unless you’ve been groping her too?

Oh for chrissake.

And so it goes.

We drive past a Harvey’s® and Griff says he wants a burger for supper, but Katrine says Harvey’s® sucks and she wants Swiss Chalet®. Griff says Swiss Chalet® sucks and he wants Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

Harvey’s®.

Would the two of you … Just. Shut. Up. They’re subsidiaries of the same fucking company that serves up the same bland same pre-packaged same pro forma shit. Makes no difference what sign you see out front, all the meat comes from the same factory farms. Some of the most putrid fucking hell-holes on the face of the planet.

There’s a second of silence, the merest whiff of shock, then:

Yeah, but I still want Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

Harvey’s®.

Swiss Chalet®.

We end up with a take-out meal from each. When we get home, the kids tear off to their rooms with their factory farmed meat entrées while Giselle heats a bowl of soup for herself. Having nibbled on chips and cake and peanuts all afternoon, I don’t feel like a meal. What I feel like is a walk outside in the cool evening air.

I walk my brisk angry walk to a pub at the city limits where I plop myself on a stool in front of a pint from the tap. The city limits isn’t at the limits of the city. Maybe once back when I was a squirt in my father’s shorts. But now it sits on the crest of a hill overlooking another twenty sprawling kilometers of asphalt and luxury condos and box stores and drive-thru coffee shops and exclusive neighbourhoods like all the others and malls with the same shops you’d find in Vancouver or New York or London or Madrid or Hong Kong. Suburbia! Stretching twenty kilometers beyond what was once the city limits, burying what was once the most fertile land on the continent, and before the white man’s farms, what was once a lush network of forests and streams. Suburbia! I watch its thousand lights wink on as dusk descends. Strangely beautiful, but who would notice? All these big-screen-watching, benzodiazepine-popping, buttered-popcorn-munching, earbud-wearing, bubblegum-smacking denizens? Not bloody likely. I turn away from the window and back to my pint, and then to another, and sink myself into a pleasant haze that softens the stark limits of the tiny problems of my tiny life.

Fumbling through my jacket pockets, I pull out a pen and draw a fresh napkin from a stack that sits beside a bowl of extra salty peanuts. With a flair for the obvious, I scratch “Notes” at the top and underline it with sharp strokes that tear the paper. Then I scribble:

When the ship, Suzuki, finally falls into orbit around Earth and when it passes around the night side of the planet, the surface will look like it’s on fire for all the lights that blaze into every corner of the darkness. It’s a sign of fear, no different than the fear we have of silence. And when the crew goes planetside for its long-awaited furlough, they will see what I see now only moreso: pavement wrapping its way around whole continents, and gleaming buildings, and lights everywhere. I’m not sure what to think of it yet. Will my planet be beautiful? Or will it be terrible? Maybe both.

By the time I return home, I’m in an amiable mood, philosophical, prepared to view the world (and my life with it) from a proper perspective. It’s after eleven. Katrine has gone to bed and Griff is brushing his teeth. Giselle sits propped in our bed and she’s reading a novel.

None of the intervening time has made a difference. As soon as I enter the bedroom, Giselle is on her feet and at me. She says I’m a damned fool. How dare I talk the way I did in front of the children. I’m acting on impulse. No thought for the future. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. She keeps her voice low and there’s something menacing about it, moreso than if she had screamed or shouted. I come back at her with talk of how she hasn’t been the least bit supportive or empathetic, how the best she can do is blab to her family and subject me to their judgment. She pounds me on the chest. I take a wrist in one hand and a tuft of hair in the other. There, with her head pulled back and me hovering over her, I see a glimmer of something I remember, maybe in the trace of her jaw line, maybe in the smoldering of her iris, something that recalls to me the woman I fell in love with. She pisses me off but I want her sorely. I set my mouth full on her lips. At first she pushes me away, but it isn’t convincing. If she had wanted me off, there would have been an impression of my head in the ceiling. Her tongue probes my mouth and she wraps her arms around my head. I claw at her pajamas and a button pops off. Giselle is a 44 DD and the loss of a button means there’s nothing to support her significant breasts. Her left breast pushes out from her pajama top and, with a Pavlovian inevitability, I find myself drawing a beautiful brown areola into my mouth and sucking a nipple while Giselle whispers Oh Elton. She unbuckles my belt, tearing at the zipper, going down on me, sucking me. I bend her over the side of the bed and press my face into her ass with my tongue striving for her clit. She moans and topples face down onto the mattress. I climb onto her back and push my way inside her.

Our lovemaking has changed over the years. When we were young, there was an overpowering urgency to it. We would rush into each other’s arms and be done in five minutes. I might unload myself with a few quick thrusts and leave her worked up for nothing. Or she might shudder into that heated night while I was still fumbling with the buttons on my 501’s®. It was fun. There was an athleticism to it. But I’m happy to have done with it. There’s an insistence that dominates the thoughts and makes any real loving impossible until the testicles get their ransom. Now I can move forward in a leisurely way. Together, we have freedom to play, to explore, to observe. Now we roll around into other positions, or move to other rooms, or switch roles, or stop for a bite of food or a chat about some arcane thought or other. Now we can draw things out for hours. Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that we can do precisely that: draw things out for hours and resist the demand for immediate gratification. I don’t feel any less capable of the five-minute hump on the rug. I don’t feel that my libido has waned. But I do feel a heightened sense of self-control. I’ve noticed the same thing with Giselle in her writing: a willingness to draw things out, a greater subtlety with each new volume. The first of the Midnight Blood books was all action and gore, a thrill a page with a plot that followed a predictable arc to a clear resolution. But the latest in her series has a different tone, a shift from action to suspense, an elevation of the hidden over the obvious. It makes me wonder if a book is better for all the things that it doesn’t say, or that it does say but only after endless deferral. I wonder if the same principle applies to marriage. Or does it apply only to sex?

Giselle climbs astride me. She’s big and strong. I thrust up far inside her. She leans forward and presses her lips against mine. I smother myself between her breasts while she slides her hips back and forth, drawing me deeper inside until I feel the tip of my penis against her cervix. I snuffle and snort like a barnyard animal. Giselle punctures the skin of my pecs with her fingernails and she screams. I grab the flesh of her hips and come.

Do you love me?

Yes, I love you.

Do you need me?

Yes, I need you

Do you love my body?

Yes, I love your body?

Do you love the glistening curve of my spine?

Yes, I love the glistening curve of your spine.

Do you love the salty taste of the sweat on my breast?

Yes, I love the salty taste of the sweat on your breast.

Does your tongue love the smoothness of my penis?

Yes, my tongue loves the smoothness of your penis.

Do you love to suck my toes?

Yes, I love to suck your toes.

Do you love to taste the tang of my wet pudenda?

Yes, I love to taste the tang of your wet pudenda.

Do you want to fall asleep with me in your arms?

Yes, I want to fall asleep with you in my arms.

Do you want to fall asleep with your head on my chest?

Yes, I want to fall asleep with my head on your chest.

So it unwinds, like a liturgy or a catechism. Maybe Charles is right. Maybe I am turning Catholic.

Related posts:

1. Cream & Sugar – St. George
2. Cream & Sugar – Mocha Latte
3. Cream & Sugar – The Hollow World

As he backed onto the road, he heard a squawk followed by a squishing sound. At first, he thought he had run over the neighbour’s cat. But when he got the emergency flashlight out of the trunk, he saw that he had run over a baby. He had run over a baby with his right rear tire.

Panic crawled over his skin like a swarm of fire ants. He wondered if any of the neighbours noticed what he had done. He looked up and down the street, but no one else was outside. Most of them were probably sitting in front of big-screens watching reality TV shows. He wondered if the baby belonged to somebody. Of course it belonged to somebody. Somewhere. But he was more interested in specifics. Did the baby specifically belong to somebody in the neighbourhood? He couldn’t think of anybody in the neighbourhood who had a baby. There was Myrna Mapplethorpe five doors down who engaged in the sort of behaviour that produced babies. But as far as he knew, Myrna hadn’t made any extra babies to leave behind on other people’s driveways.

He found a spade and tarp in the garage and used the spade to scoop the little baby carcass onto the tarp. He carried the tarp into the back yard and there, beneath the rising moon, he dug a hole in the vegetable garden. He dumped the dead baby into the hole and covered it with loose clods. After he was done, he hosed down the tarp and washed all the blood from the driveway. When he shut off the water, it was as if nothing had happened. His wife wondered why his pant cuffs were dirty and wet. He said he had watered the garden before coming inside. She asked for her potato chips. He said he hadn’t made it in time to the grocery store. They would have to settle for microwave popcorn. Together, they watched a movie about zombie attacks from Mars while they munched on their extra buttery microwave popcorn.

On the weekend, while he was weeding the garden, he noticed a woody shoot poking up through the dirt. It looked more like a tree than a weed. Although familiar with a variety of weeds, he had never seen such a plant before. Maybe it wasn’t a weed, but a legitimate plant that had accidentally seeded itself in his garden. He decided to let it grow to see what kind of plant it was.

By the end of the growing season, the shoot was a stalk as tall as a man and as thick as an arm. The next spring, after the snow had melted and it was time to seed the garden, he found that the stalk had sprouted branches with buds. It was a sapling and as tall as the house. It put out leaves and offered a cool shade. The young tree flowered in May and by June a fruit was forming on its branches. He had never seen such a fruit. It wasn’t round, like an apple. And it was more irregular than a pear. In July, his wife remarked upon the strange new fruit tree growing in the garden. She thought the fruit looked like those funny black-and-white images you see of ultrasounds, kind of a peanut, only bigger and hanging from a branch. By August, the features of the fruit were more obviously the features of a foetus. Through autumn, the fruit ripened until the tree was laden with baby fruit. There were twenty-five baby fruits in all.

On a warm Indian summer’s morning, sleeping late with the window flung wide, they heard a great thud on the dirt and a wail that broke their morning peace. He ran to the garden and found that the first baby fruit had fallen from the tree.

It’s a baby, he shouted.

His wife stood in the bedroom window, hands on hips and frowning. Don’t be absurd, she said, everybody knows babies don’t grow on trees.

He held the wailing baby in his arms and rocked it back and forth. Well, he said, if it isn’t a baby, it sure looks like a baby.

Nature’s funny that way, said his wife, one thing pretending to be another.

As they spoke, another baby fell from the tree with a whump and the same wailing rose up from the dirt and sent the neighbour’s dog into fits.

We’re going to have two dozen at least of these things, he shouted. What’ll we do with them all?

Maybe we can cook them, said the wife. They look a bit like eggplant. Aubergine. I expect we could whip up something tasty.

But they’re babies, he shouted.

Don’t be silly, she answered. Bring one inside. Let’s look at it.

They laid the thing on the kitchen table, staring at it from either side. It was screaming now, which made a civil conversation difficult. When he turned it over onto its “stomach,” he noticed a brown paste underneath that looked and smelled like shit.

I think we should buy some diapers, he said.

It’s not a baby, she insisted. But her voice quavered, suggesting to him that she might have doubts about her earlier view of the matter.

Through the open window, they heard another four or five thuds in the dirt. He went back to the garden and, gathering up all the baby fruits, tossed them into the wheelbarrow and carted them around to the side door. They squirmed and waved their “limbs” and made a horrible noise. He went inside again and said he didn’t think he could care for a wheelbarrow full of babies.

His wife yelled: They aren’t babies, goddammit! They’re fruit that look like babies. I’ll prove it.

His wife lifted the baby fruit they had lain on the kitchen table and she slid a cutting board underneath. Taking up a cleaver, she chopped off its “head.”

The wailing stopped.

It’s bleeding, he said. He laid out paper towel to keep the crimson fluid from pouring onto the kitchen floor.

This isn’t blood, she said. This is just the juice like you’d find in any fruit—like tomato juice or grapefruit juice.

I dunno, he said. It sure looks like blood.

I’ll prove it.

Taking up a bread knife, the wife sawed through the middle of the baby fruit. When she was done, she pulled apart the two halves and displayed what looked like a severed spine and intestines and liver.

Still looks like a baby to me, he said.

Not wishing to push things with his wife, he went along with her opinion. He helped her gather up all the rest of the baby fruit and, together, they made a variety of recipes. Some, they chopped up for a stew; some, they peeled and boiled and mashed with cinnamon to make a baby fruit sauce. Some, they stuffed with rice and almonds and raisins and dried cranberries. When they were done, they filled the freezer with dozens of single serving containers that they could take to work for lunch and thaw in the microwave. But after all their work, there were eight baby fruits left in the wheelbarrow. While he washed up the kitchen, his wife worked the baby fruits into the compost in the back corner of the garden.

The following year, their baby tree yielded a crop of thirty fresh baby fruits and they found five new shoots sprouting from the compost. What they learned—and they warned all their neighbours—is that the baby fruit tree, once it takes hold, is a tenacious weed and almost impossible to get rid of. Never let baby fruits anywhere near your property unless you are prepared for a lot of work.

Related posts:

1. Short Story: The Masterpiece
2. Story: Four Billion Year Old Water
3. Story: Urine Love

My speculative brain has been sitting well back from the kerfuffle wondering if the rise of ebooks and the struggle between publishers and their online vendors might be viewed through the lens of disaster capitalism. Naomi Klein describes disaster capitalism in The Shock Doctrine. The thesis is fairly straightforward. Disasters erase existing structures and provide opportunities for capital to swoop in (often in the name of aid) and impose exploitative structures upon a helpless population.

Klein’s book is a litany of disasters exploited by Western capital. One example she offers is the tsunami of December 26 2004 which destroyed coastal regions of Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. Klein focuses on the experience of local fisherman at Arugam Bay on the east coast of Sri Lanka. The fisherman had lived and worked on the beach there, but were always in conflict with local hotels. Although plans had been drawn up to develop the beaches for five-star hotels and eco-tourist resorts, local resistance had stalled things … until a giant wave swept everything away. Here’s what Klein writes:

Regaining Sri Lanka [a "World Bank-approved shock therapy program"] was rejected first through a wave of militant strikes and street protests, then, decisively, at the polls. In April 2004, Sri Lankans defied all the foreign experts and their local partners and voted in a coalition of centre-leftists and self-identified Marxists who vowed to scrap the entire Regaining Sri Lanka plan. … For those dreaming of building a plutonomy playground, it was a major setback: 2004 was supposed to have been Year One of the new investor-friendly, privatized Sri Lanka; now all bets were off.

Eight months after those fateful elections, the tsunami hit. Among those mourning the demise of Regaining Sri Lanka, the significance of the event was understood immediately. The newly elected government would need billions from foreign creditors to reconstruct the homes, roads, schools and railways destroyed in the storm—and those creditors knew well that when faced with devastating crisis, even the most committed economic nationalists suddenly become flexible.

Can the same model be applied to publishing?

The comparison isn’t exact, but here goes:

1. The struggle between Amazon, Apple, and the Big 6 U.S. publishers is a red herring. They all represent capital. Each of the big 6 is a subsidiary of a big media giant. For them, the struggle is between retailers and wholesalers and who will get a bigger slice of the pie. This is like the Sri Lankan government negotiating with Western hotel chains.

Meanwhile, the villagers on the beach, that’s you and me, i.e. the 99.99% of people who write for peanuts, have no voice in the arrangements which shape the future of book publishing. Nor do the readers, the millions of ordinary people like you and me who depend on the intellectual and emotional food that books provide.

2. Then along comes a disaster: piracy. Arrrrgh! In the shift to digital reading, books become infinitely replicable which has the potential to reduce a book’s value to zero. All those 99.99% of writers who already make nothing should panic, because they’re about to make even less than nothing.

I’m willing to argue that piracy is an imaginary threat, but that belongs to another post. For now, all I want to do is draft the outline of a thesis—disaster capitalism in publishing—which I can develop more fully at my leisure. For now, let’s assume that the economic consequences of piracy are: 1) grossly overstated; 2) have no negative (and oftentimes positive) impact upon 99.99% of writers. Real or imagined, what matters is how the disaster gets exploited.

3. As in the case of the tsunami, here, capital enjoys the endorsement of an international organization run on neocon principles of deregulation and “free” trade –WIPO. You can visit them at their web site, but they have only favourable things to say about themselves.

4. The post-disaster plan is DRM—digital rights management—locking files so that their use is restricted to authorized devices. This, in turn, locks the consumer into an endless cycle of purchasing disposable electronics: buy reader A to read format A; vendor comes out with format B which is even better than format A but can’t fully be appreciated without reader B; buy reader B to read format B; vendor comes out with format C …

You buy Kindle which reads a proprietary format and, effectively, you’re in bed for life with Amazon. The more books (which are really licenses) you buy in .mobi format (now superseded by its KF8 format), the more you have invested in the hardware that supports that format. (Yes, I know there are apps to read Kindle books on other devices, but Amazon retains control and always has the option of pulling the plug on its apps.)

5. The luxury hotels move in, the investors make their millions, the government gets its cut, and the locals (that’s you and me) either work as bellhops and cleaners or they clear out.

Except that something strange is happening.

It looks like some of the hotel chains are willing to work with the locals.

Some of the Big 6 publishers may drop DRM. This is strategic, of course. It’s a way to fight back at Amazon’s monopoly and the Justice Department’s refusal to do anything about it. But it has the incidental effect of acknowledging the only people who matter in this conflict—the readers. They’re tired of stories about piracy as an excuse to filch money from them.

Related posts:

1. A Book-Publishing Venture from Dostoevsky
2. Smashwords, Mark Coker and the Gears of Big Publishing
3. Publishing is Religion

Using Jesus’ Son as our paradigm, we meet:

• a rain-soaked hitchhiker picked up by a man with a young family who veers into an oncoming car;

• a pill-popping hospital orderly who pulls a knife from the eye of a man who’s been stabbed by his wife

• a recovering addict, part-time worker at an old folks home, who spends his off hours spying on an Amish couple, hoping to catch them having sex;

and so on.

We get passages like this:

The man hanging out of the wrecked car was still alive as I passed, and I stopped, grown a little more used to the idea now of how really badly broken he was, and made sure there was nothing I could do. He was snoring loudly and rudely. His blood bubbled out of his mouth with every breath. He wouldn’t be taking many more. I knew that, but he didn’t, and therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth. I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.

And like this:

Everybody had a different idea about exactly how to approach the problem of removing the knife from Terrence Weber’s brain. But when Georgie came in from prepping the patient—from shaving the patient’s eyebrow and disinfecting the area around the wound, and so on—he seemed to be holding the hunting knife in his left hand.

The talk just dropped off a cliff.

“Where,” the doctor asked finally, “did you get that?”

Nobody said one thing more, not for quite a long time.

After a while, one of the I.C.U. nurses said, “Your shoelace is untied.” Georgie laid the knife on a chart and bent down to fix his shoe.

I have my doubts about dirty realism. Not about Denis Johnson’s writing, which I love. My doubts have more to do with the idea of realism. Like the hitchhiker, I can’t tell what is real. I don’t think violence (or altered states of consciousness induced by drugs and trauma) makes the world more really real. The fact that it appears as text in stories should be proof enough of its artifice. The words mediate reality. And nowadays most words betray an awareness of their mediating role, which makes the artifice even more obvious.

Even if we assume that violence makes things more really real, I’m not convinced that the violence of an overdose and a knife in the eye is the violence most of us knows. The violence most of us knows comes from glowing screens. It pecks us to death at keyboards. Do you want real violence? Do you want the dirty truth? Consider how I came to own Jesus’ Son in the first place.

A few years ago, my wife and I were driving north on Highway 400 when we pulled into the Cookstown outlet mall. Tamiko said we needed new pillows. The old ones were worn out from killing our dog had lost their fluffiness. While Tamiko went to a linen and bedding store, I slipped into one of those discount book clearance stores. A hard-covered copy of Jesus’ Son had been remaindered there. My heart was moved with pity. I chose to rescue this book (and by extension, its author) from this indignity of accountants and shipping clerks. I took it home and set it on a shelf where it could be loved and admired and taken out for a walk from time to time.

Do you want another example of real violence? Denis Johnson’s latest novel, Train Dreams, didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The violence isn’t in not winning. The violence is in the Pulitzer committee’s indecision. Nobody won. Despite a field of worthy contenders, the award selection committee refused to make a choice. Bureaucrats have inflicted an indignity against those on the short list, and on the long list too. It is the violence of the glowing screen and the hunt-and-peck typist. It is the violence of a numb mind, worse than any drug fog. It is the violence of oxygen deprivation. It is adjudication by the plastic-bag-over-the-head method.

No related posts.

Again, I park in the grocery store parking lot, only this time I’m early. I have a vaguely hatched intention of passing some quiet time before the service, reeling in my thoughts, settling my soul—or whatever you call the part of the self that has spiritual inclinations. This morning, the air is crisp and clear, and the sun strikes the east wall of the church. Last week, the bricks seemed drab, but this week, they’re warm and radiate an earnest glow. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not superstitious enough to believe that the walls have been suffused with some kind of spiritual aura. It’s just that the sunlight makes the building look more inviting.

I climb the front steps to St. George’s and with each step I imagine one of the events they must have witnessed. Wedding parties have stood here, waving as friends and family snap photos. Pall bearers have carried caskets down these steps to the waiting hearse. And here? Liane fell here once. I wince when I think about it.

The sanctuary is dark except above the chancel where the organist rehearses a piece, stopping and starting, scratching notes into the margins of the score. A woman arranges fresh cut spring flowers in a pair of crystal vases that sit on the communion table. I sidestep into a pew near the back and kneel. I don’t pray. I’m not interested in prayer. Instead, my mind hops around like a child who’s eaten too much sugar. I want to slap it on the wrist and tell it to settle down, but like any child in church, it doesn’t listen and seems bent on embarrassing me. It wonders what developing country the flowers have come from and how much fossil fuel was burned to deliver them. Shush. Such an impertinent mind. It wonders if there was ever a time in the church’s history when all the pews were filled on a Sunday morning. Or is the number of pews a reflection of the architect’s wishful thinking? It wonders, too, if Giselle will ever break her silence.

The silence started on Friday evening. To be more precise, the silence started on Saturday morning; it was the yelling that started on Friday evening. I had come home later than usual—seven o’clock—in part because I had taken the subway for the first time in more than five years and had failed to account for the extra time it would take to commute to and from the office. Before stepping inside, I had opened the garage door, dumped the contents of my brief case into the garbage can, and hurled the brief case at the far wall. I don’t recall that my movements had been energized by anger. I do recall a wry certainty as I leapt up the front steps, two at a time, and announced in a voice that made me sound like the man from Glad® that I was home. Giselle had ordered in pizza, but that was nearly an hour beforehand and now the pizza was cold and the pepperoni had turned leathery. I found her sitting with Katrine in front of the TV watching commercials, one about a car that would give you the ultimate thrill, one about a breakfast cereal that guaranteed perfect health, and one about a tooth paste with breath freshener so effective your farts would smell like peppermint. I fitzed open a can of beer and sat down with a wedge of cold pizza balanced on three fingers.

You’re late.

Sorry.

You could’ve called.

I was busy cleaning out my desk.

I chewed on the pizza crust while a man in a white lab coat presented the results of a test to determine which laundry detergent made clothes whiter.

I quit my job today.

Giselle didn’t move. At times like this, some people yell What? even though they know damn well what you’ve just said. But not Giselle. She kept her eyes on the shifting images and in a low voice: Twenty years.

Yep.

That’s a lot to give up. She rose from the couch with a magisterial air, then leaned down to Katrine: You keep watching without me, baby. There was an exaggerated calm to her movements as she swished her hips through the doorway of the TV room and buffeted me through the kitchen and into the living room. After she had shut the French doors behind us, she turned to me with her face wound in a knot and lowered her voice until she sounded like a demon child: What the fuck did you do?

Like I said—

But why, after almost twenty years?

I had to.

Did somebody hold a fucking gun to your head?

No.

Then you didn’t have to.

But I just—

And you didn’t talk to me first.

I needed to—

You just went ahead and—

I was losing myself.

She yelled. She spewed. She frothed at the mouth. When she was done, she flopped on the couch, and I, in my own halting stilted way, did my best to justify myself. I confessed: the idea of leaving had been percolating through my bones for some time. But I was afraid. I had grown tired of Feinman’s cockiness. I had grown tired of the arrogant idea that my work contributed something worthwhile to the world. Economists might look at the firm and argue that it contributed something to the GNP, but I’m no economist and I could never follow that line of reasoning. All I could say for myself was that I brokered lies. That was my sole function. I wanted to stand before my children and tell them that I had done something useful with my existence. Instead, all I could say for myself was that I had helped a disposable world sink in its own waste. I felt like a farmer watching a cow drown in a manure lagoon. How could I face Katrine and Griff and explain to them that the world I was bequeathing to them was worse for my efforts than the world my father had bequeathed to me?

I have decided that hell is real. It’s a place hot with flames, but the demons who fan the flames come from marketing agencies; the flames are the flames of desire.

You’re no fucking Dante, Giselle said, when the best you can think to do is quit.

But the decision to quit wasn’t as simple as a snap of the fingers. Instead, it unfolded like this: Mona had come sobbing to me in the afternoon. She had dragged me from my office and downstairs for a walk along a side street to a parkette where we could talk in the ironic privacy of a public space. She swung those funny squat legs of hers back and forth and she wrung her hands and she dabbed tears from her eyes which were red and swollen. It was Feinman, she said. He’d always made lewd comments, but she’d ignored him. The pay was good and he was just a pathetic little dweeb. But that morning, after a few choice suggestions, he followed her onto the elevator and cornered her there.

He touched me, she said. The asshole groped me.

Mona didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, she didn’t feel like working for Feinman anymore. How could she do a proper job when she was forever on her guard against Feinman’s fat oily sausage fingers? On the other hand, she couldn’t afford to quit when she had a substantial credit card balance, a line of credit, car payments, a dog that needed an operation, when she was forever on the verge of an assignment into personal bankruptcy? She felt trapped. She didn’t know what to do.

I did my best to assure her that everything would be okay, that a talented woman like her could find a new job with one arm tied behind her back. I did my best to staunch the tears and to keep the mascara from running down her face. Then I looked at my watch and said I had to run—a three o’clock—the Shirmer account—fighting a halitosis-inducing bacterium that no one had ever heard of until I proclaimed it to the world. Oh lucky world.

At three forty-five, I stepped into Feinman’s office. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the recollection of Mona sitting alone on the park bench as I walked away. She seemed small and frightened, and her lower lip trembled when she said good-bye. Feinman sat deep in his leather chair with legs crossed and resting on the edge of his desk. There was a Rorschach blotch on the sole of his right shoe where he had stepped on a wad of chewing gum. It looked to me like the face of a clown or maybe Mickey Mouse® with half an ear lopped off. Feinman smiled his usual smug smile. He had orange hair thinning on top and blotchy skin from too much sun.

We argued. Without mentioning Mona, I accused him of being a prick. He asked if the bitch had put me up to it. Like I said, I hadn’t mentioned Mona. So he knew he’d done something wrong. Sol, I said, you don’t corner a girl in an elevator and grab whatever you please.

What? You talkin’ about that funny-assed tramp? And he waved towards Mona’s office.

You know what, Sol?

What?

Fuck it. And I slammed the office keys onto his desk.

Sol’s face turned a pinky mauve. You’ll be sorry, he said.

No I won’t.

You’ll come to me on your knees begging for your job back.

Don’t bet the pot on it.

And you better not touch my clients.

Wouldn’t dream of it, Sol.

Cause if you do—

What? What’ll you do, Sol? Pinch my nipples?

Don’t be an ass.

You? Calling me an ass? Me? Guess you’d know seeing as you’re the prize ass grabber around here.

Go fuck yourself.

I emptied some personal stuff from my desk and I stormed out of Feinman Marketing Inc. and went down the street to the steak place where I’d had lunch with Mona the other day. I stared out the window at all the serious business suits rushing past on the sidewalk and I sucked on a bottle of Corona and I finished it off by puckering my face on a wedge of lime.

That was my explanation. Giselle listened as well as one could expect a hot-tempered mama to listen. But I could see in her eyes a gathering storm. When the storm broke, there were accusations and recriminations. There were taunts and cruelties. But when it had blown over, what remained was the fact that (in Giselle’s words) I had quit in defense of a woman’s honour, which I suppose would be commendable, except that the woman wasn’t Giselle.

My knees are sore from kneeling and my hands are sore from being clasped together in an angry knot. There’s half an hour before the service and the trickle of early risers who drift in and out of the sanctuary look at me and think I’m crazy to be kneeling so soon before the service. I hear them whispering amongst themselves in the corners and I imagine them pointing in my direction and speculating the way good church gossips do.

I realize that if I can’t get a coffee, I won’t make it through the service. There’s the coffee shop beside the grocery store where I’ve parked my car, so I exit the building and cross the street and order a large continental dark to go. As I stand by the broad counter that stretches the full length of the front window, and as I stir in my cream with a plastic twizzle stick, I gaze out across the parking lot with its scattering of cars and beyond that, Yonge Street with its Sunday morning traffic rumbling north and south, and beyond that, the excavation for a new condo project and the large boards on each corner waiting for Feinman’s lifestyle posters, and abutting the condo project, the northern edge of St. George’s. On the grass between the church building and the gaping hole in the ground is an indeterminate form that looks like a heap of rags. I snap the lid onto my coffee cup and weave my way through the parking lot, watching the heap of rags as it rolls over onto its side. It’s the same man I saw last week, with the same ragged clothes and the same bare and blackened feet and the same squinty-eyed smile as I ask if he’s all right.

Never been better, he says.

Awfully cool to be leaving your shoes off. I wonder if the black skin comes from poor circulation.

I find it bracing, don’t you?

Yeah. I guess. Can I get you a coffee?

Do I look like I need a handout?

Do I look like I give a shit?

Well thanks but I’m feeding my pigeons.

I don’t see any pigeons.

Then you’re not looking hard enough.

I’m off to church now.

Enjoy the show.

I can’t say that I do enjoy the show. The old bat with the pillbox hat glares in my direction at intervals spaced with quartz precision, and she supplements these with sanctimonious scowls every time I take a sip of coffee. I don’t think she likes the idea that a person can feel comfortable in a church with a cup of coffee and a morning paper spread across his knees. There must be an austere theology behind that sour wizened face. I refuse to heed the glare. I’m tired of bullshit. I’ve stepped in enough bullshit at the office. I refuse to tolerate bullshit in the sanctuary. The next time the woman scowls, I take a leisurely sip from my coffee, nod to the woman, and smile my sunniest smile.

I don’t pay attention to the show. There are too many other things vying for my attention. The week’s events form a veil of white noise that’s difficult to pierce. I’m vaguely aware of a man in a cassock standing behind the veil and waving his arms and offering grand pronouncements, but his words sound like the words of an aphasic. Of all the things that pass through my head during that hour and fifteen minutes, I can remember only a single thought: Where is she? We stand, we sing, we sit; children go to the front for a story; the choir squawks its way through an introit; the pastor shares with his flock all the news of the community. And through it all, I glance from pew to pew in search of Liane. In an austere moment during the prayer of confession, I cast a harsh gaze inward and acknowledge that I have no interest in the community nor in the liturgy nor in the creed. Although scarcely aware of it when I left the house this morning, I’m now prepared to confess to God—or at least to a reasonable facsimile thereof—that my sole motivation for attending the service is the hope of a chance of a wisp of a glimpse of Liane, preferably dressed in something tight like a Lycra® cycling outfit. You will understand my disappointment then when I can’t locate her anywhere in the sanctuary.

Then something odd happens to me. A feeling wells up from within, like champagne bubbles through boiling blood. Strictly speaking, it isn’t anxiety—which I know well enough from encounters with difficult clients—but it’s a close cousin. In fact, it’s a pleasant sensation, and not at all the sort of feeling I would want to blunt by popping benzodiazepines. I savour it in the back of my throat the way I might dwell upon the finish of a good wine. It tastes like high school, class of ‘84. An excellent vintage, or at least no more awkward than any other. Christ. Now I recognize the feeling. I haven’t felt this way for years. I’m having a bout of teen angst. Where is she?

Again I run my eyes systematically from pew to pew. There’s the officious, prim, anal mother scooting her four perfect children off to Sunday School, and the woolly-sweatered activist with a clipboard tucked under his arm, and the stolid elderly couple who stamp themselves upon the place with a seal of middle-class respectability. At last my eyes settle on the old lady wearing the pillbox hat. She stares back at me and I can smell the smoke where her stare has seared a hole clear through to the back of my skull. Where is she?

Liane’s absence throbs a dull ache into my head. I write the script of her life. It’s dazzling, peopled with wild characters most of whom have fucked her at one time or another, and it’s set in exotic locales or at least in gritty venues with cigarette smoke and unfinished wooden floors. She’s off leading the sort of life you read about in biographies of Dorothy Parker or Martha Gellhorn while I sit on a hard wooden bench and ruminate upon my narrow plot in suburbia. I decide I should kill myself. There’d be a cold redemption in such an end.

I linger in the sanctuary long after the final chord of the postlude, a pretentious bit of fluff, and straggle at the end of the line that snakes into the narthex where the priest is shaking everybody’s hand. He takes my hand in a firm clasp and I’m embarrassed by the sweaty feel of it. He gazes up into my face with a congenial look of recognition and greets me by name. Listen, uh … (I’m the last one out so he can take liberties) … I’ve seen you out a couple times now, and at the Suzuki thing. Clearly you’re somebody who gives a shit. He makes a conspiratorial glance to left and to right then leans in a bit. Lemme ditch the robes and what say we grab ourselves a bite to eat? Have a chat?

Sure. Why not? I have all the time in the world, which is a lie, as my actuary will tell you. According to his tables, I have approximately thirty-seven years left to enjoy conversations over roast beef on rye bread with the venerable Rev. Dr. Rick Fellowes, which seems like a lot until you start to think of time on the cosmic scale. So I stand in Fellowship Hall sipping away at a horrid cup of coffee waiting for the priest to re-emerge from his vestry. By this time, it’s definitive: Liane didn’t show up for church this morning. As I sip my way to the bitter grounds, my teen angst acquires a new flavour. I remember the sudden collapse of Liane’s expression when I handed her my business card. I remember my regret when I realized she thought I was trolling for a new account. I remember the urgent need I felt to set things right. I remember the priest’s words during the prayer of confession. Something about living in right relation.

Pastor Rick saves me from a mind-numbing conversation with an old geezer who rambles on about the good old days when the faith really meant something. I need to find someone reliable who will enter into a pact with me, promising to put a bullet between my eyes if I ever start to reminisce about the good old days. Shaking hands and incontinence and drool that seeps into the folds of skin below the mouth. I shudder to think of it. Pastor Rick appears from behind the old man. He winks at me and smiles and claps the old man on the back and calls him by name. The old man beams at the attention. After listening for precisely the correct amount of time, Pastor Rick cuts the conversation to a close and leads me by the elbow to the exit.

For a servant of God with intellectual pretensions, Pastor Rick looks fit, certainly moreso than his namesake, which suggests to me that he doesn’t spend all his time behind a desk or with his nose in a book. He looks younger in his casual clothes—no older than me—but he’s trim and he walks with a spring in his step that you see only in those who are devout runners. He carries a leather bomber jacket slung over his shoulder, and as he passes through the streaming light of the windows by the entrance, I see the hint of a star quality about him. This makes me sad. If it weren’t for God, he might have amounted to something.

Wait a sec’. He fumbles for his keys then opens the door to the vestry. When he returns, he passes me a small booklet, like a chapbook. If you spend any time at all with us, you’ll want one of these.

It’s a church phone directory. I fold it and stuff it into my jacket pocket.

North of the church, up Yonge Street, is an Indian restaurant which Pastor Rick frequents for strategic reasons: no one else in the church likes Indian food, so he can spend time with people there without the risk of being recognized by other patrons. But halfway to the restaurant we have to stop. The man in rags sits cross-legged on the sidewalk and, like a sphinx, blocks our path.

Mornin’ George. Rick is loud and gregarious.

The man squints from his place on the sidewalk. I see blackened scabs between the sparse tufts on his head. One of the scabs has split and is glinting red in the sunshine.

Judging by the light, I’d say it’s more like afternoon, Padre.

Fair enough.

He looks at me and: He put on a good show for you?

Yes, I lie.

George, we’re on our way to Taste of India for some lunch. Wanna join us?

The man shades his eyes and sways back and forth like a reed on the wind. Thanks, Padre, but you know how I feel about that stuff. They do horrible things to it. You should be careful. Vindaloo. Toilet wine. They treat your food like sewage. Be careful, Padre. You know I care about you.

Is that your final answer?

‘Fraid so.

The man lets us pass. As we move out of earshot, Pastor Rick tells a parable:

Once there was a man on the road going down to Toronto when he fell among thieves who beat him and stole his clothes and left him lying in rags by the side of the road. A Rabbi passed and his heart was moved to help the man, so he approached and offered his coat, but the man refused and called him a plotting Jew. Next, an Imam passed and his heart was moved to help the man, so he approached and offered all the contents of his wallet, but the man refused and called him a radical terrorist. Finally, an Anglican priest passed and his heart was moved to help the man, so he invited the man to join him for a meal even though the man’s smell and appearance would repulse the other patrons in the restaurant. Again the man refused, and although he didn’t abuse the priest to his face, even so, he made devilish faces behind the priest’s back as the man of God walked away. You see, the man who had been beaten and robbed on his way down to Toronto was a paranoid schizophrenic who was incapable of receiving aid. He could not help but construe offers of kindness as plots to destroy him. The seeds of charity are choked by the weeds of disease.

Pastor Rick holds open the door to Taste of India where a young woman recognizes him and seats us at his usual table by the window. I’ve never eaten Indian food before so I leave the ordering to him—babaji and pekora and vindaloo—and Kingfisher beer (which he says we’ll need with the vindaloo). While we wait for our food, we nibble on giant wafers made from chickpea flour.

We want to help, Rick says, but sometimes the need right in front of our eyes leaves us feeling powerless. Who could have imagined two thousand years ago that it might be better to leave a man to starve on a sidewalk than force him to accept the cruelty of our good intentions? And we’ve spent damn near half a millennium abusing our colonial impulses. But we go on doing it anyways.

Rick quizzes me. What he elicits from me isn’t a confession because he makes disclosures too. Life for Rick is messier than I would have expected for a priest. He has divorced and remarried, which means he doesn’t carry himself with the sanctimony I’ve come to expect from religious types. He listens and nods as I describe my two children, how I love them despite their teenage foibles. In his turn, Rick describes his teenage children who visit their mother on alternate weekends and sleep in on Sundays when they stay with him at the manse. It’s unlikely I’ll ever meet them, or at least that’s his opinion until I mention that my wife is Giselle Pierce who, even as we speak, is polishing the thirteenth installment of her Midnight Blood series of vampire novels. Rick is thrilled. His kids love those books. That would certainly get them to church—the chance to meet Giselle Pierce. I spare him the story of why that will never happen.

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