Mates forever, forever drinking

I was at a pal's house drinking Margaritas, and we were have a great time, even though he was getting pissed with me for throwing limes off the balcony.

"The limes are green, the lawn's green, what's the problem?" I asked.

We ran out of tequila, but luckily he happened to live across the street from a liquor store. You could call me impulsive, but I like to think of myself as adventurous, always ready to try something new. So, I scored a bottle of mescal.

Back at his place we had the tunes cranked, and we were feeling good, singing and having a good time. I didn't even care that we ran out of limes - I was drinking the stuff right out of the bottle. And being the up-for-a-challenge guy that I am, I ate the worm. (They put a prize in the bottom of each bottle of mescal.)

Even a bottle of mescal, which probably tastes like turpentine if you're not hammered, won't last forever. With all the booze gone, we decided to go to the bar.

Drinking mescal makes you ask the deep, philosophical questions. Like, did the mescal make me to it, or deep-down am I an asshole? Anyway, for whatever reason, for no apparent reason really, as we were walking down the street, I swung around and punched him in the nose.

"Enough of this bullshit," he said, and stomped away.

I went to the bar and had a couple of beers. But it was a country and western bar, and really, incredibly boring, so I hopped on a bus and rode back up to his place.

I pounded on the door, but he wouldn't answer. I walked down the stairs, out onto the lawn and climbed up onto a fence and then reached up and pulled myself onto his balcony. I went inside but he wasn't around, all I found was a pizza on the coffee table. It had one piece missing. Right then, I realized how hungry I was, so I sat down and ate the rest of the pizza. Then I stretched out on the couch and fell asleep.

The next morning, he walked through the living room, and muttered something like, "What the hell are you doing here?"

I kind of took that as my cue that maybe I should take off.

But just to show you what great mates you make while drinking, despite all that crap I did, punching him in the nose, eating his pizza, and even throwing limes all over his lawn, we're still pals. Yeah, he even phoned me the next day to see if I wanted to go for a few beers.

I think we'll be mates forever, as long as we're still pounding them back. And with friends like him, why would a guy ever quit?

A witch remembers

The cabin seemed awfully empty with him gone. But he’d be back. She wondered if he realized how much she liked him. They think they’re so smart, she thought, but they never get it, even if you paint a picture for them. He looked a bit old with his grey speckled hair, but a man could get away with looking older; as soon as a woman showed a touch of grey she got left on the curb with the old newspapers. She remembered her grey-haired father, a lieutenant in the army, talking with Captain Forest at the table by the window, the sunset shining in their tumblers of whiskey. Captain Forest loved to talk when fuelled by a few whiskies. The drunken old devil would often tell stories of old battles while dad’s dinner went cold, and then dad would send her out of the room when they wanted to share a dirty joke. She liked those army days with their pretend battles and regiments passing in review. She loved the red and black of the Royal Canadians’ kilts and tartans. The military had romance in those days. She would like to have a man, now, to kiss her so long and hard it would burn down into her soul and paralyze all her feelings, and what would be the harm in that? A woman needs to be hugged twenty times a day to look young.

She sat down on her cot.

All romance had gone out of the military. The picture of the naked Vietnamese girl came to mind. Then she thought about her son, who died of pneumonia when he was just three. She wondered how old he would be if he had lived. For many years she cried through every birthday, April 11. She shouldn’t have buried him in his good, wool suit, she thought, she should have given it to another boy – so many needy little ones. And did the boy’s father come to the funeral? He didn’t even know. It served her right for having it off with a trampoline salesman. She remembered the summer when he, the first non–military man she ever talked to, came to the base to set up his trampolines. He let her jump on a trampoline in the sun and then gave her lemon gin in a paper cup. They made love in the grass. Oh, he caused her so much trouble and boy did it hurt when she found out he hadn’t told her his real name.

After her boy’s death she rode the train out to the coast, where she stayed in a rooming house until she blew up the kitchen while brewing potions from grandmother’s old recipe book. The night of the accident she slipped out quietly before the house burned down, and then acquired a house in a Vancouver suburb. She grew cold as she remembered that house. Heavy cedars sheltered it and filled the eaves with leaves. She always left the radio on in the kitchen so she would not feel alone. It was the summer of love but it rained. She collected hundreds of little blue bottles, row on row like soldiers.

All the fellas she knew then were mad, going mad, or maddening. None of them noticed her power growing. They willingly took the potions she gave them, because she told them they would get high. But she really wanted to make one of them as powerful as her, and hoped that he would stay with her, and love her. She wanted a husband, but all she did was prove that men are animals. They wolfed down her potions and their animal natures grew stronger until they turned into beasts and didn’t want to turn back into men. Each one of them ran away to the forests as a dog or wolf, bear or crow, cat or coyote.

She looked around the cabin and her gaze fell on her red backpack leaning against the wall, where she had set it down many years before.

“No where left to go,” she said.

Work Sucks

On Saturday morning, puddles lay on the steel and it shone with rain that fell during the night. Clouds packed the sky. After emerging from the shack, the crew trudged up the stairs to work, occasionally stopping to peer at the jostling, grey tiles overhead.

“Get your asses in gear!” Lou shouted at them. He turned to Joe and Garth, waiting for the headache ball. “You guys. Trucks came in last night.” He jabbed his thumb behind him, toward two flatbed trucks loaded with steel and parked on the gravel behind the shack.

Perfect, thought Joe, the easiest job on the claim and a double–time day too.

“Charlie and Andy will land the iron for you,” Lou said.

The morning’s work slipped into a relaxed pace, except Joe felt a little uneasy when he looked up at the prowling clouds and the crane’s boom, sticking up like a lightning rod.

The morning went by predictably enough and a little before coffee time, as Andy helped Charlie unhook a beam they had just landed, Joe and Garth stood with the last piece of iron to offload from the truck. Joe was gazing up at the tower, thinking about what he needed to do back up there. Flathead and the punk were working near the top of the tower, the punk feeding Flathead air hose as he walked with the impact wrench along a particularly skinny beam. A hose connector caught on cross piece. The punk tried to twist the line and whip it free as Flathead tugged. Then Flathead slung the wrench off his shoulder and let it fall to the beam with a bang. He turned to the punk. Joe couldn’t make out the words but Flathead’s body language said it all, his free arm waving wildly, his beard jutting out. Joe and Garth turned to each other and grinned.

Then as Joe looked back up at Flathead and the punk fighting over the air hose, lightning flashed and a jagged edge of current struck a column behind Flathead, showering him with sparks and causing toxic orange flame and black smoke to erupt into the air. Flathead let go of the air hose and fell to his belly on the beam. The wrench fell, jerked back up when it reached the end of the hose, and dangled. The punk managed to hang on, his gangly arms and legs wrapped around the steel. The column smouldered.

“You see that?” Joe exclaimed.

“Where’d that come from?” Garth asked.

Hollers rang out through the tower. He Man, perched halfway up, gestured frantically to the ground. Joe and Garth looked to the tower’s concrete footing where what looked like a pile of clothes lay near a column. Joe recognized the greasy welder’s jacket. Shortcut.

“Hey!” he shouted, and leapt off the truck, his heavy rigging belt nearly dragging him down.

Lou ran to Shortcut. When he reached him he fell to his knees, grabbed Shortcut’s shoulders, pulled him from the concrete to his lap. Joe saw it happen slowly as he ran, thumbing the clasp on his rigging belt and letting it fall to the gravel. He jumped onto the concrete foundation, and ran toward them.

Shortcut, lay stiff across Lou’s lap, screaming.

“Hey Shortcut,” Lou coaxed. “You’re okay, partner.”

Shortcut’s eyes rolled up and he seemed to recognize Lou, then he began to twitch, and soon his whole body was jerked around, his head wobbling on his shoulders. The men gathered around.

“Christ, he’s doing the funky chicken!”

“He ain’t going to make it!”

“Call first aid!”

“Hang on! Hang on!”

“Christ, take it easy on the guy!” Joe shouted. He smelled smoke and looked down at the smoldering welding glove on Shortcut’s hand, the glove’s fingers blown away, the skin inside crimson. Joe knelt and ripped open the remains of the glove and tossed it aside.

Shortcut’s twitching and thrashing subsided.

“Arrgh. Fuckin’ ‘ell,” he groaned, and reached over with his right hand and grabbed his forearm. “Ahhh!” He gripped his bicep and his face split in awful frown.

“What if it hits again?”

“Get him outta here!”

Charlie and He Man grabbed a leg, Garth and Joe grabbed an arm, and Lou scrambled to his feet pulling up Shortcut’s shoulders. They lifted his sagging bulk a foot or so from the concrete and ran and stumbled with him, groaning in pain, toward the edge of the building.

“Christ, he ain’t missed many hot lunches.”

“What does the fucker eat?”

They carried him to the edge of the building, slid him off the footing, and carried him across the road and lay him on the gravel in front of the shack. They crouched around the groaning, writhing man looking up from him and trying to read the sky, their faces puzzled. A wind whipped across the jobsite and the darkening clouds churned. Fat raindrops began to fall, scattering pock marks in the dust.

Flathead came running up with the punk trailing behind. “Where did that come from?”

“Fucked if I know, I never seen lightning without rain,” Lou said.

“It’s coming now.”

“I can’t feel my arm!”

They all turned to Shortcut.

“You’re going to first aid, partner,” Charlie said.

“I’ll call them,” Lou said, and scrambled up the steps into the shack.

“What happened?”

“Lightning, Shortcut,” Charlie said.

“Oh, fuck. My arm!”

“Don’t worry, you still got the thing,” Charlie said.

“Did he fall?”

“No, he was on the ground.”

“Lucky.”

Shortcut lurched up and looked down at his arm, then rubbed it furiously.

“Take it easy,” Joe said.

Shortcut looked at him. “You ain’t got hit by lightening.”

“Charlie’s bullshitting. You just turned up the heat on your welding machine.” Joe nodded.

Shortcut frowned in confusion.

“Told you he was a good welder,” Olaf said, softly.

“Good welder always welds hot,” Boris said.

Drinking Stories (1)

For some reason, I like reminiscing about dumb things I did before I knew better.

I used to live behind the Pay & Save gas station in a one bedroom apartment, a dive, but the cool thing was I owned a Chrysler 300 with a 383 and electric everything (mostly working). I paid $500 for it.

A friend of mine showed up one day. He said he had broken up with his girlfriend and needed to go up to Williams Lake to pick up his stuff. The Chrysler was the car for the trip. When we got to Willams Lake, he cleaned out his place and then said let's drive out to Bella Coola. Bella Coola's a couple hundred miles from Williams Lake, on a dirt road over the Chilcotin Plateau and through a mountain range in Tweedsmuir Provincial Park. Before starting out, we stopped by the liquor store to pick up a jug of wine and two-four of beer.

We had a blast driving across the Chilcotin, drinking and looking at turquoise rivers and grasslands out of an African safari. We played with the electric windows and bombed down the road with no cares. One time we saw an old guy with Fedora in a black Cadillac. He looked like "The Godfather" of the wilderness. We laughed a lot about that.


But by the time we got to the Tweedsmuir we were hammered. I was driving and crying and slugging him about shit that went on in high school, and he was slugging me. It was not a good time to be doing that because the road through the Tweedsmuir's a narrow, dirt track that takes you down couple or three thousand feet. Some catskinners build it on their own because the goverment said it couldn't be done. They call it "The Hill."


We sobered up by the time we reached the bottom. In Bella Coola, we dragged ourselves into the cafe for pie and coffee and when we came out I noticed all the Chrysler's tires were flat. I guess I was so drunk I didn't notice how rough the road was.

What did I learn? Nothing.

More Rejection

Another stinkin', #%&**$#@^$! rejection. Oh yeah, pile on the misery, world. What does it take to be a success, like him?

More Rejection

Another stinking rejection. C**ks**ker. What does it take to be a success, like him.

Driving in America

I lost my coat in America
walked around in the state campsite
in what’s left of their
vast wilderness

...The Golden Age

In America, men have jaws of stone
they pulled their few possesions and small children
in handcarts
to the New World
wives walking behind
praying
They sell comic books for religion down there,
have motel beds that massage you for a quarter,
T.V. shows about Hitler’s teeth,
and gossip
in the frozen food section

In a liquor store a black man called a white man
a brother
white man protested showing me the colour of
their skins
I said I thought it was a form of expression
they laughed
someone mentioned a fight
I ducked

Damn coat
always blame someone else for the things I lost
Ma said things will work out in the end
that's when
I was too young for her to know me
That coat’s gone for sure

So many miles in the desert
makes a family want to explode
look at that horizon
you can’t see anything else
makes you forget where you left your coat
looks like rain
hope it won't last long
It's getting dark
I better go find her
I saw a guy today
lives in a bathroom off the Interstate

Hey, we’re tourists
picture taking, stone arches
stepping around the U-Haul
river rafting the Colorado
Santa Fe Chicken
coffee in the pub
driving down from the mountain’s deer and poplar trees
to the red sugar bowl, by the Colorado
feet in the muddy river
off roading
slickrock, lizards, and bats
kids working tables
up to my neck in Navaho jewelry
This lady tells us her grandad’s a medicine man in a teepee
up on a mountain
eating peyote
Sure, we just need a place to sleep

The Grand Canyoon
Ick komme mit Deutschlander
The sight every American should see
Il ne parle Francais, mais il essaye
Cin-cin
tip the water jug back
Morning, dusk, walls like rust
and winnd

It’s a journey, I tell her

East Arizona’s the bottom of a tide pool
barrel cactus and yucca trees
Lake Mead - blue playing field
Have fun!
(they’re driving off to gamble)
Fat man cleans a fish
That’s a good fish!
Baseball hat on the porch says,
Sold three thousand bags of ice!

Wind carries the heat under the curry smelling tree
smell from the what’s-that-flower? rides the heat
Viking woman cradles her baby
rides a fast boat
her husband tows to the lake
We talked to a philospher
Knew he was, he smiled so…
unexpectedly
lives in a camper with his dog

Viva fucking Las Vegas!
Wayne Newton’s down with flu
Three-forty-nine breakfast in the Paradise Buffet
We sneak past the slot machines
to the res-taur-rant
birds sing caa-caa, ooee-ooee
Don Ho: moookie looukie loww
Guitar: twayiianng
An angel: no doggie bags in Paradise

On edge
I watch butterflies
cartwheel over the hood of my new truck
going down into Death Valley

Wind alway blows
In California it blows sand
from the lake drained for L.A.
driving it thirty forty miles an hour down the highway
into my new truck

I snap
get out behind a shack
read a threat in the window
rub the pits in the windshield
listen to country radio
sandblast my legs on the highway
see a hole and go
wind knocks the truck around
like those butterflies

We stop at a drive-in
I consume
coffee, Marlboros, french fries
see her back as she runs away across the parking lot
to call her mother
I go
quietly fetch her

Drive north into June snow
so
Motel 6 ecstasy

Can’t wash a truck in Mammoth
(like to keep ma truck clean)

Over the Sierra
love them snowy streams and rocks and trees
down to drive the Yosemite
500
take pictures of Park Rangers and waterfalls

In the west, grassland lies rumpled like golden fur
Lake Shasta, skirted in red dirt
needs a top-up

I-5 North to home
timberline
home
home green
Jungle!