LOND HO ADVENTURES Part Two - Special Edition
With more "Thor The Hutt" scenes!!!
OCTOBER 1992
Day shift at the BVS Towers… ung! Day shifts are the worst for me, even more so than the dumb-ass 18:00 to 02:00 “split shift” nonsense which I despise only slightly less. I leave home at about quarter after six and shuffle through the skywalks from the flat all the way to work. I quickly get dressed in the locker room located deep in the bowels of the parkade below the quad-tower complex and sit reading until about a quarter to seven before I take the lift upstairs to the “+30” level and the tiny closet that is the security office. I bang on the door and say “It’s Idi Amin,” when the muffled interrogative comes through the door. The door is jerked open from the inside by one of the night shift guys who doesn’t even bother to get up from his chair. The scent of fresh coffee only sometimes wafting to my nostrils. I say “only sometimes” because there is only coffee if the night shift makes it. The rotund day shift supervisor never makes coffee for his guards, only for himself, and only after he kicks the day shifters out into the massive foyers to wander about aimlessly amongst the thick pedestrian traffic. By the time coffee break rolls around there is never any coffee left and Thor is always sitting there, fat ass firmly planted in his creaking supervisor’s chair, chuckling to himself and chanting his mantra:
“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, so izzat!”
This morning, as I squeeze into the tiny room, I see that the thieving, porcine, Dutchman Thor “The Hutt” Jugg - Security Supervisor extraordinary, is already squirming his corpulent ass away in the supervisor’s chair at the supervisor’s desk. He dismisses the night shift and starts wringing his hands. His fat fingers find a gooey blueberry-filled doughnut from a box of a dozen he has brought in for his own personal breakfast consumption, prick that he is. He knows that the rest of us hardly make enough at this job to pay rent, and often have to go without food for days, yet he still has to rub our noses in it by bringing in food he has no intention of sharing. Purplish goo squirts out onto the back of his pudgy hand and down his chin as he bites into the doughy treat. Thor licks the jelly from his hand and wipes the excess from his face with a paper towel before reaching over to the radio battery charger and pulling out the walkie-talkie that will be mine for the day. If any of us ever reaches for a radio ourselves, Thor will sit there, smugly, arrogantly, staring with his piggy little eyes before ripping the radio from our hands and going on a five minute diatribe about how he “eess di soopervizor, unt I em di one who weel ‘and oot di radeeoz.” Which translates roughly to: “I’m a big, fat, megalomaniac of a Dutchman and you are just a lowly little shit working under me, so whatever I say goes, so don’t think you can come in here and get your own radio.” Well, I said it was a rough translation.
“So izzat Meester Oonter.” He says, mangling my name on purpose like he always does.
I take the radio and he pulls out a second one for Robert, who is to be my partner in “crime fighting” today. We turn to leave when Thor demands that we take out our earrings before descending to the zocalo. I pull out my four studs and Robert removes his two hoops, the two of us shaking our heads in annoyance.
Once out of the office we are free to roam about the complex to, as the book says, “maintain a security presence in the mall and parkade.” I wander around trying not to look too bored or too alert, walking that tight-rope between non-chalance and bitter intensity like a master trapeze artist.
I glace around me and wonder how the hell people can be happy working a “day job” for a living. A job should be a means to an end, not something you get stuck doing for the rest of your life.
From an early age I realized that I was not cut out for the work-a-day world. Indeed, the father of my ex-fiancée Karyn, proper Englishman that he was, once told me he pictured me in the future being a “gentleman of leisure.” Probably just his way of telling me I was a lazy no-goodnick that had no business trying to marry his daughter.
I look around at the hundreds of wandering zombies as they walk past me, sometimes right into me, (I’m just a lowly security guard, hardly noticeable at all!) going about their fatuous lives in their dull, grey suits, tightly gripping shiny briefcases, strolling the carpeted foyers and sound-proofed skywalks. They stop for less than nutritious lunches in the food courts, incessantly glancing at their watches, or fidgeting nervously on tall wooden benches while people of lesser stature shines their shoes. Thousands of these people stagger through the two mammoth levels of the BVS Towers zocalo, never so much as a smile on their faces, always their mouths a hard slash, worried lips pursed with pseudo pensivity, brows knitted, or for the most part sagging in a deep, black frown turning the face into a mask of pain.
Pain. The first time I put pen to paper was the one time in my life when I had no need to. As a child in the fourth grade I had no knowledge of real pain, of real suffering so the first stories are nothing more than the naive, Technicolor™ scrawling of the truly innocent. If I remember correctly, the very first story was of young boy who comes upon a haunted house. After escaping the place, the haunted house rips itself from it’s foundations and chases the young protagonist around the city. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to frighten the child when he was trapped within its gothic walls! Of course it was a lot of nonsense, and as the teacher would tell me, overly long which would be something that would plague me throughout my remaining school years.
In Junior and Senior High when a teacher asked for two pages, I gave four. If asked for four, I gave eight or nine. One instance in particular that sticks in my craw was in the ninth grade when we were asked to do a four page “Love” story for Valentines Day. A week before the story was due, Fred (who was in a different class, yet had the same assignment), and I decided to push the envelope a little and collaborated on overlapping stories utilizing some of the same characters, from the same “universe.” After receiving the go-ahead from our respective instructors, we went to work on them. The stories went in different directions, and had differing scopes, Fred’s was an epic adventure in which the protagonist “finds love” in the end, where my story was one of a single man’s dark and sometimes demented journey out of a pit of self loathing and towards love for oneself. Together, both stories clocked in at a “hefty” twenty-two pages. Of course nothing ever goes as planned, and after handing in our work we were called in to have a sit down with our two English teachers who needed to know just what the hell we thought we were doing overlapping stories, and characters, and my God, the stories were just too darn long! My teacher even went so far as to say to me that mine wasn’t even a “Love Story!” We explained that we had talked to them both about this before beginning, to which they looked uncomfortably at each other and explained they didn’t think the stories would be “this long.” Fred then asked what exactly they thought he had meant when he used the word “epic” to describe our literary plan. At this point we were sent on our way.
As a child I had no life experience, so I wrote of fantastical things. By Junior High, I was older and continued writing but by this time using my own experiences, fears, neurosis as fodder for my work. By the time the “Love Story” assignment came around however, I had yet to have ever fallen in love, and so having no real frame of reference, I crafted the story about a man and his stuffed animal. A stuffed animal that “talked” to his human friend, and was capable of deep feelings for his human friend, feelings that the man did not have for himself. The themes of the story; loneliness, sadness, self loathing, and ennui in a cruel and uncaring world were lost on my English teacher who graded me a 68% on the assignment. As far as I was concerned the so-called “creative writing” assignment should have been just that. It should have set us dreaming, it should have been an exercise to get a person thinking, and by spewing out such ignorant remarks as “This is too long” and “It’s not really about love per-se is it?” these teachers are not nurturing the creative process, they are attempting to hinder it, to pigeon-hole it, chop it up, and serve it as unpalatable mush, as meatloaf for the masses.
The long day of security drudgery ends and I head back to the flat via the +15 skywalks. Bill isn’t back from work yet so the place is quiet. I sit back and revel in the relative silence until he busts through the door an hour or so later. Afterwards, Bill and I listen to the Hockey game on the radio. The Flames beat the Sharks 6-2 making them 4-2-0 so far this season. Is that another Stanley Cup I see on the horizon?
SPECIAL BONUS!
LOND HO ADVENTURES Part Seven
NOVEMBER 1992
Winter has us completely socked in by the middle of the month. With the exception of work neither of us has had the courage to leave the flat and brave the freezing weather. We look out the balcony window and see nothing but the grey fog and blowing snow, which completely obscures the buildings across from us and the traffic on Fourth Street down below. I look around the place; every poster, every toy, every stick of furniture, from the black IKEA TV stand, to the giant leather chair is getting on my nerves. Bill is pacing around the TV room like a caged animal. He turns on his stereo and throws the Singles soundtrack into the portable CD player that I hooked up to the AV receiver the other day. I slide open the patio door and let the frigid air blow over me, chilling my bare arms, and my legs below the cuffs on my black cargo shorts.
“Are you trying to make it like Greenland in here?”
I close the patio door and sneer: “Maybe, what’s it got to do with you?”
Bill wanderers into the kitchen and looks in the refrigerator. He searches nearly every crevice and hiding space in the nearly empty fridge, hoping beyond hope that one of us hid a beer in there and forgot about it.
“Nothing.” He grumbles, slamming the door shut, “You got any cash?”
“No,” I say instinctively, “Maybe… a little, why?”
“I’ve got some, so if you have some more, we can get the hell out of here for a few hours.”
I nod, and head to my bedroom and he does the same. I dig through my sock drawer and find an old wallet that I had been periodically stuffing fivers into for the last few weeks. I pull out a mitt-full of bills and find just over twenty bucks in fives, as well as a couple of twos I must have thrown in for good measure. When our resources are combined we have about forty-eight dollars.
“I think an evening at the ‘corn.” Says Bill.
The Unicorn is our favourite pub in the city. It sits on the corner of Stephen Avenue and Second Street right next to the currency exchange. A single, weather beaten sign above the door and a battered sandwich board, both of which are covered in a fine layer of gritty snow, are the only things beaconing visitors. I pull open the door and the warmth greets us, defrosting our nearly frozen faces. First Bill then I enter, stopping in the entry hall to shake our clothes of snow. I yank down the hood from my WestBeach™ “hoodie” and pull off the frosty Calgary Flames cap from my head and give it a quick shake, a thousand droplets of icy snow, sweat, and various beads of precipitation scatter in a million directions. Bill yanks off his longshoreman’s toque and shakes his huge frame causing snow, and ice to drop from his great, olive drab parka like an avalanche. A quick nod and we shuffle down the brick steps to the smoky basement below where the pub lay, waiting.
We grab a couple of pints and get stuck in at the bar. The bartender is a new girl named Mandy. She’s tall, about five-nine, with flowing locks of chestnut brown hair, a tight black tank top, tighter black jeans and immaculate dental work. We introduce ourselves and pay for our drinks, the both of us quite smitten with her. In fifteen minutes the first pint is finished, and another is in our greedy mitts so we head over to a booth in the corner nearest the washrooms.
“You gonna take that longshoreman’s toque off or what? You are aware we’re inside right?” I say, noticing he’s put it back on.
“Bite me.” He says
I reach over the table to try to jerk it from his head and he freaks out a little. I tell him to fucking relax.
“You wanna know why I’m wearing this thing?” he says finally after an eternity of seconds, “It’s magical.”
“Magical.” I take a sip of ale.
“Absolutely.” He lights up a smoke.
“Care to explain what the hell you’re talking about?”
“Come on, Hunter, you believe in magic.” He says.
I nod, “A Kind Of Magic anyway...”
“Chicks love this toque, okay. I don’t know why, but they love it. Ever since I picked it up at the Bi-Way for $1.99 and started wearing it, I’ve noticed chicks, I don’t know, looking at me more.” He says.
“You’re as big as a damn tree, girls look at you all the time, they like that sort of thing. Nudge, nudge.” I say, giving him a little Python elbow in the side.
“It’s not that, I swear to Dog, this toque does something to women, I don’t know what, but it seems to make me more attractive to them somehow.”
I roll my eyes, “Whatever.”
We finish our drinks and Bill goes up to the bar to grab us a couple more, and when he comes back he’s brought a little hootchie with him. She’s about five-six and dressed in black, black Ramones t-shirt, black skirt, black winter stockings, and black hair, cut in a short bob just below her ears.
Bill introduces her as “Persephonie” but I doubt that’s her real name, I mean what kind of cruel parent would name their kid that in this day and age?
“Well, then I’m Aloysious, and this is Guildenstern,” I say, reaching out my mitt.
She laughs and gives it a delicate shake.
“Billy here told me your name was Hunter.” She says, cocking her head towards him.
Billy? “Yeah,” I nod, “that’ll work too.”
“So, what do you guys do?” She seems to need to know.
“Nothin’” says Bill, and I nod my head in agreement, with the crappy-assed jobs we have, anything, even nothing sounds better.
But she is determined: “No, really, what do you guys do?”
I regret it the moment it comes clear of my yap: “Security at the BVS Towers.”
She gets a look on her face, a kind of disgusted sneer, filled with repugnance and revulsion like I just shat in the middle of her living room rug. I have to remember to lie about what I do!
Bill tells her about his job stocking shelves and she is instantly more interested in that, “It sounds fascinating/wonderful/magical/etc,” she’s swooning. I finish my pint and go up for another, bringing one more for Bill. He reaches into his pocket and hands me a fiver and axes if I will go up and get whatshername a Kokanee. I snatch it from his hands and take care of it and when I come back I find the hootchie wearing Bill’s toque. I put the pint on a coaster (always on a coaster) in front of her and sit down, contemplating my ale as it sits, perspiring before me.
A few more cutesy moments between them pass and she excuses herself to go to the Ladies. I axe Bill what the deal is and all he can say is it’s the “power of the toque, man, the power of the toque.” I begin to wish I had me one of those. I have a look about the pub and there is like, three other people in the place, one of them is the bartender girl, the other two are a couple of old guys playing billiards. I pick up my pint and tell Bill I’m going for a wander. A few sips later I’m around the other side of the bar staring at the tele, there is a Hockey game on, the Flames and the Nordiques in Quebec and it’s tied five all in the third. I watch a bit of the game, by a bit I mean until my pint is dry, and return to the booth only to find Per-whatsherface sitting on Bill’s lap and chewing on his lip.
That’s enough for me and I tell Bill and his hootchie that I’m off and head for home. The weather has relaxed a bit since we walked to the pub, the wind has died and the snow has crystallized on everything it clings to creating a sparkly, silver shimmer, the streets and sidewalks coated with a veneer of ice...
...I’m awakened to a banging at the door at 4:13am and for a moment am totally confused as to where I am or what is happening. More knocking, more than someone gently tapping, it’s POUNDING at the chamber door, only this and nothing more. I step out of bed and pull on the big, black, hooded “Jedi” robe, cinch it up and grab my KOHO SR 6000 before stumbling through the near darkness to the door. I look through the peephole and who do I see but Bill, shifting from foot to foot. I wonder why he didn’t just use his key before noticing the locks are undone, I pull the door open but it stops short as the chain is on.
“What the fu-?” I mumble in my sleepy daze, taking the chain off and letting the man in.
“Why did you put the chain on man?” He frantically needs to know before running to the bathroom to piss.
I don’t even remember putting the chain on so I have no idea what I may have been thinking at the time. I lean the stick against the wall and flop down into the big leather chair. Bill comes out of the bathroom and slumps his ass down on the chesterfield.
“So,” I say, “out with it, what happened?”
“Well, after you took off we had a couple more drinks that she paid for, ‘cause by that time I was out of money. Then she says ‘how about we go back to my place?’ and I’m like: ‘Uh, okay!’ So we get back to her apartment, it’s this cool place a couple of blocks up on eighth there,” at this point he notices the empty XXX can on the black aluminium mesh coffee table, “hey, beer? We got beer? Why didn’t I get any beer?” I tell him that was the last one and he sighs, “Damn it all to hell! Anyway we get there and she’s just gagging for it, she’s got her cloths off and is in the bed before I’ve got my shoes off, so I dive right in. And this girl, she’s crazy! She’s screaming and biting, I mean look at this-“ he pulls aside his shirt collar revealing a dark red welt on his neck. I tell him it’s impressive, and he goes on: “but I had to get out. . . she was a little, uh, well a lot FUCKED UP.”
“What do you mean?”
He looks down at his feet, then begins to take off his shoes, “Fucked up as in after it was over and we are both lying there on the bed having a smoke, she grabs me and says, ‘now punch me!’ and I’m all ‘Uh, do what?’ and she says it again, ‘punch me in the eye, give me a shiner!’ and she’s almost giddy about it, so I say, ‘No, I can’t do that,’ and she says, ‘No, it’s okay,’ and I’m like, ‘Well no, it’s not okay.’”
I’m dumbfounded, “Why the hell does she want you to punch her in the eye?”
He rubs his feet, “I dunno, something about getting out of working, or school tomorrow or something, I decided not to stick around much longer after that.”
“Did you hit her?” I smirk.
“Jeezus, of course not!”
And with that, I stand up, give him a jaunty, two fingered salute and head back to bed.
* * *
Its maybe a week later and MacGreggor, Bill and myself are at the Underground drinking and having a good time. We run into a half dozed buds including Mac’s old friend Dave the Martial Artist, and Gerry and Mark from the old days when we worked at a place in the north east called “Marv’s Washworld.”
Mark tells Bill that he ran into an old High School friend of ours upstairs so Bill goes up to try and find her.
Stigmata by Ministry starts blasting through the speakers so MacGreggor and I decide its time to hit the mosh pit for a little exercise.
We’re bumping and crashing and stomping when I‘m suddenly distracted by a girl I’ve never before set eyes on. She emerges from the silvery mists of the fog machine like a slam dancing angel. I stomp towards her and we bounce off each other, our eyes meet for a moment, her long, straight blonde hair, whipping me about the face, beads of sweat, the beat of the industrial punk rock pounding in my eardrums, a girl with a pyramid of red, curly hair goes down and is quickly scooped up by two other moshers, lights flash against my glasses and reflect, more fog machine fog, that strange smell of patchouli and sweat. I grab MacGreggor around the neck and swing him around, of a sudden there are two skinhead guys and a girl with fire engine red hair attached to our spinning mass of flesh, bone, hair, sweat, fabric, and leather. Flash. Stomp. Crash. Bass. Vibration. Pogo. Fist. Sweat. Denouement.
MacGreggor and I stumble back to the booth, both of us out of breath and drenched with the sweat of ages. I take a draught of beer-like drink, finishing off the small glass. MacGreggor re-fills it. The girl with the long straight blonde hair walks by, all legs with an extra short “school uniform” skirt to accentuate all the more, tight white “Molson Canadian” T-shirt showing off small, firm teats, short cut CAF parade boots clunking along the grates. She’s walking with the red head with the pyramid of curly hair, so I guess they must be friends. I kick Mac in the ankle and point her out.
“She was out in the pit with us. . . not bad.” He says. I tell him to check out the legs on the blonde. He nods in agreement, then says: “Sailor Moon called, she wants her skirt back,” and I cannot help but laugh.
Bill returns to the booth from the upstairs bar with some chickie at his side that I don’t recognise. He introduces her as “Mish” and suddenly it comes to me. She’s Amber’s old friend from the “Mr. Citrus” days. We all chit, and chat, and have a few drinks when it slowly becomes clear that Big Bill is trying to chat her up in an attempt to get his monkey dipped. Inevitably the discussion degrades to the point where we are now discussing Politics. A few minutes of this and its obvious that Mish is way to the left of we three boys so I cast a little nugget into the conversational pool to see if she bites.
“What is the deal with bums who accept no responsibility for their actions?”
She instantly adopts a frosty tone and axes me what I mean by that.
“Well,” I begin, “I was walking around the other day and I saw a graffiti on the 9th avenue underpass that said ‘go home white Columbus trash,’ now clearly this was written by some Native person who’s had everything paid for and handed to him by the fucking Liberal government his whole life, but still finds reason to bitch and complain,” I pause, then before she can jump in, I start again, “what the fuck is this guy’s problem anyway? I wish I could have my home, and car, and fucking university paid for by the government and then have the sack to bitch about it as well.”
She jumps in, “Well you know Natives are an oppressed peoples. When our ancestors came here, intentionally spreading disease and stealing their land and resources-“
“Look,” I say, “I don’t need a history lesson, even if it’s revisionist, I know what happened hundreds of years ago, but what I want to know now is where does it end?”
“End? What do you mean?” She says.
“Don’t give me that Mish, you know exactly what I mean, when do I when does Mac, when does Bill, when do you, when do 90% of the people in this bar get to stop paying for the mistakes of people who lived hundreds of years ago?”
MacGreggor jumped in, perhaps to try and calm things down. “I think we can all agree that they’re oppressed to a point, at least I think so, but they are also given great opportunities that we don't get, but a lot of the time, they squander them.”
“The Natives don’t get any opportunities!” She snaps, “They’ve been stepped on for years by the white man and they deserve compensation!”
“Ah, that’s a bunch of horseshit! Maybe the people who had the wrongs done to them and their immediate families deserve some sort of apology and compensation for what happened to them but two hundred years later? What is that, like four generations or something? Look, at this point, so many bloody years after the fact, the only thing holding some of these people back is themselves. My family didn’t even come to this country until 1900 or so, my great grandfather came her with nothing and homesteaded, and worked his ass to the bone to build a life for his family-“
She jumps in, “ ‘These people’ huh? What are you? A member of the Aryan Nations or something?”
“Ah,” say I, “the racist card. The last resort of the person who knows the argument is lost.”
“Fuck you Hunter, what do you know about the suffering of the poor?” She spits.
“A hell of a lot more than you do Sally! I’ve fucking lived it.”
“Whatever,” she says, “The rich have an obligation to all poor people to make sure that they have at least as good a standard of living as the rich themselves do.”
MacGreggor and Bill get up to grab another couple jugs of beery substance.
“Why?” I say, “Why should someone who works his ass off, (To this she snorts, “The rich don’t work!”) and spends thousands of his own bucks, and takes huge risks, and who finally makes a success of himself have to give half of that away so that some socialist on welfare can buy his beer and cigarettes for the month?”
“Because the rich-“
This time I cut her off, “The rich? Who are ‘the rich’ exactly? What is your definition of ‘the rich’?”
She seems all a-fluster, “White people who-“
“Oh, ‘white people’ huh?”
“Okay then, people who make about fifty thousand a year.” She says.
Mac and Bill are back at the table and pouring everyone drinks.
“50k a year is ‘rich’ eh? Tell me Mish, how did you get here tonight?”
“What? What does that have to do with anything?” She wants to know.
“Just curious,” I say, “MacGreggor, Bill, and I walked, but I was just wondering how you got here.”
MacGreggor smiles and shakes his head, he knows where this is going.
“I drove,” she says, “I came in my car.”
“Your car?” I say.
“Well, a car my parents gave to me when they bought their new one.” She takes a sip of her drink.
I down another small glass of beer, “What kind of car is it?”
She’s pissed off, “Why should that matter?”
“Just curious.” I say.
“Fine. It’s a 1988 E 320.” She’s looking down at her drink.
“E 320?” I axe, knowingly, “What kind of car is that?”
“A Mercedes.” She says under her breath.
“Sorry?” I say, pretending I didn’t hear.
“A MERCEDES!” She screeches so that half the bar can hear, even over the music.
“Wow,” I say, “It’s pretty easy to be a socialist when your rich huh?”
“Fuck you!” She says, staring venomously at me.
I stare right back at her and there goes by a few moments when the only sounds heard are the music, the chatter, and the scraping of chairs. At a nearby table, a glass is knocked to the floor, shattering it into a million crystal shards, and inciting ironic applause for the clumsy patron. Our eyes never part.
“Well,” MacGreggor finally says, “This is getting a little too psychotic, how about you come upstairs with me and cool off.” He puts a hand on my shoulder.
“Whatever.” I say and we stand up.
As we walk up the stairs, I shake my head having heard it all before, pinkos are all the same. They yak endlessly about what they like to call “the redistribution of other people’s wealth” which equates to nothing more than a bunch of lazy socialists sitting around on their collective asses waiting for someone else to take all the risks, make the big investment, and eventually make a little money. Then they get up on their “moral” high horse, obviously having decided that no one should have that much money (however much “that much” is seems to be a sliding scale of course), march around in their grubby ball caps with placards in their hands whining “gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, I need some more.”
We meander around the upstairs for a while watching the Go-Go Dancers, then back down to the Underground from one end to the other, and by the time we get back to the table Bill and Mish are standing up to leave. I give Bill a quick salute and hold out my hand to Mish.
“Nice to see you again kid, no hard feelings.”
She just scowls at me and they take off.
I grab Bill’s barely touched pitcher of beery goodness, claiming it for my own.
“Well,” I say to MacGreggor, “lets get stuck in. It’s looking to be a pretty good night!”
posted by The Jaeger @ 7:53 a.m.
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