Ghost Pine #7: Blood (2003)
Table of Contents:
1. Meridian Place
2. On Truancy
3. Canadian Thanksgiving
4. Dinosaur Provincial Park
5. Bones
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Excerpt:
Canadian Thanksgiving
“You didn’t call me there, a few months back,” said Matty.
I looked at the two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle that composed my Lebanese cousin.
“Hm, how’s that?” I asked. I was already feeling the effects of the three pre-dinner beers I pilfered from my uncle Ian’s fridge.
“I need the description of two mugging motherfuckers,” he said.
“Ah,” I nodded.
It happened one night last summer as I strolled through the abandoned financial district after work, making my way to my bus stop. Near Bank street, two guys were walking towards me down the sidewalk. I paid them no mind, even from a distance I could tell they were members of that most unfortunate caste, the Ottawa Valley crack head.
When they grabbed me I thought it was an old fashioned fag bashing. To this day, Ottawa offers the full spectrum of hate crime, from continual shouts out of passing cars that assail anyone not clad head-to-toe in Nike apparel, right up to men being thrown off cliffs because of who they chose to fuck.
“What do you want?” I screamed, covering my head as they dragged me into a vacant parking lot. For the benefit of the legions of tourists who visit the Ottawa downtown core every year, this particular parking lot was surrounded waist high shrubs, part of the city’s latest beautification project.
The smaller of the two men had a long, rat-like face. He wore a Beatles t-shirt with the arms cut off. “How much money you got in your bank account?” he hissed.
“Maybe seventy bucks?” I was generous with my estimate.
The rat-face’s companion was thicker and taller. He, no doubt, was the muscle of the operation, he wore a shirt barely covering the circumference of his belly. He motioned for me to hand him my wallet, and he rifled through my riches, which comprised a five dollar bill, a loonie, and OC Transpo bus tickets for my ride home. The muscle pushed me to the ground, tripping my feet from under me. He held a sharp rock tight to my throat and barked, “What’s your fuckin’ PIN number?”
As I told them, I remembered that I created my bank card’s PIN in homage of a Shotmaker song, itself a series of numbers. I thought about this, quite possibly the nerdiest act I’d ever committed, as a strange man held me down with a rock to my throat. For a second I could almost watch myself, years ago, typing it in on the keypad for the first time. It seemed very far away and very long ago.
The rat face man made a bee line for the ATM, in the marble floored lobby of an office tower across the street. The muscle watched me anxiously, making sure I didn’t escape pending the PIN’s authenticity. I slowly stood up and looked him in the eye.
Later, I would examine mug shot after mug shot of his ilk. A slow motion slide show, the images changing with the click of the mouse. “I’m just going down the hall. You call me if you see the perps,” the plain clothes constable said, a week later, after showing me to a computer in the depths of the police headquarters. “This data base has mugs of caucasian men, aged twenty through forty five, all taken in the last five years.”
And thus unrolled hundreds of faces. The pictures changed, but the characteristics rarely did. They all had shaggy hair, and more than a few of them were bleeding from the head. Inset next to some of the faces were digital photos of blue-green tattoos of snakes, ‘Mom,’ and maple leafs. Everyone had facial hair, most of the moustache variety so unpopular in recent years.
Who are these men? These are party boys from up the valley. They grew up in Maniwaki, Pembroke, Renfrew, and came to the city in search of kicks. Their demand for higher peaks of hedonism than the banal teenage fun of shotgunning cans of Molson Ex and sniffing airplane glue had lured them down valley to free basing crack in the big smoke.
Or perhaps these men fled their home towns when someone close to them broke their heart (or threatened to actually have the baby). As refugees from everything they had ever known, they found only one solace, one light at the end of the tunnel; the light at the end of a crack pipe. The haze fogging their heads helped them forget the harsh realities that came with being a high school drop out, broke, and living in a scabies infested rooming house behind the Central Station, in a city obsessed with money and education.
Clicking from one mug to the next, I remember briefly experiencing this brand of men before. We crossed paths at the welfare office, under the Queensway that cuts the city in two. As I nervously bit my nails before my first appointment with a case worker, I noticed all the other men in the waiting room were clad in skin-tight acid wash jeans and shod in untied salt stained work boots. They were continuously making demands of the well groomed gay receptionist, who sat behind a plexiglass screen. A computer print out taped to the screen read “N.B: The receptionist CANNOT distribute petty cash or bus tickets. Thank you.”
“I need twenty bucks, or they’re gonna kick me out,” one pleaded he pointing vaguely in the direction of the colony of rooming houses nearby, whose signs boast “Rent by night, week, or month.”
“I’ll make you an urgent appointment with your case worker,” replied the receptionist. It was the same answer he gave, earnestly, upwards of sixty times a day.
“Faggot motherfucker,” the man muttered under his breath as he stormed out of the dole office.
Another took his place, saying sheepishly “I need bus tickets to get to an interview on Albion road.”
“I’ll make you an appointment…” The man interrupted him, “But the interview is in fifteen minutes!” he said, panic creeping across his brow.
Faced with this day-in and day-out, I was amazed that my case worker so readily, even happily, hooked me up with ‘assistance.’ He took only a cursory glance at my neatly prepared paper work. We chatted pleasantly for a few moments before the next client arrived, somehow stumbling upon a mutual admiration of the architect Moshe Safdie.
After our talk died down he pulled something from the blue nylon lunch bag sitting on his desk. It was a red apple, ‘Fuji-Washington’ read the sticker. He handed it to me, giving me a guilty smile. “My wife packs me one of these every day, but I never eat them. More of an orange man myself,” he explained.
As I walked from his office, I peeled the sticker from the apple. I took the elevator down to the street and set out into it, traversing a streetscape rendered barren of pedestrians by the cold February wind. The sky was frozen a bright blue, and my teeth, exposed to the cold, stung as I ate the apple.
“Can I have my glasses back?” I asked. The fear that held me taut was slowly leaving me. The air held only the simple binary code of money versus no money, as opposed to the more complicated electricity of hatred.
“Look,” the muscle began, his voice surprisingly childish. “I’m sorry about this. We’re cocaine addicts, man,” he grabbed my mangled glasses off the pavement. “Have you ever done cocaine?” I shook my head as he handed me the warped glasses. “Don’t ever touch that shit. It’s evil. It’ll fuck you up, fuck up your life.” I wondered whether or not he was being earnest, until I realised it didn’t matter.
As if sensing my disinterest in his sermon, he chose to illustrate his argument. “I mean, for example, here I am robbing you, right? Anyway, it’s nothing personal. We just need a fix, we’re addicts.”
His partner came back across the street fuming. “You only had forty fuckin’ bucks in your account!” he said in a nasal voice.”What the fuck? I thought you were in high tech and shit,” he said, no doubt referring to my faux Fred Perry shirt and twenty dollar khaki pants. ‘Fuck it.’ I thought, ‘this is the last time I dress respectable.’
“Good thing your account has overdraught,” he said, fanning a wad of twenty dollar bills, as if he learned it straight out of any of the multitude of bill-fanning hip hop videos he studied on his path to becoming a small time hood.
He grabbed my wallet from the muscle and tore through the few cards held in a clear plastic sleeve. “You don’t have a driver’s licence?” he asked.
“I don’t drive,” I said.
“I want to find your fuckin’ address,” he said. A spike of fear drove through me as he looked at my health card, which had my address printed clearly on the back, if he had cared to look.
“Listen, you little piece of shit,” said rat-face, “you now owe the bank two hundred dollars, okay? You never saw us, you never saw anyone. I don’t need your address, ok? I got friends, and if I get word that you ratted on us, me and my friends are going to hunt you down and kill you. Slit your motherfucking throat, ok? So don’t even think about ratting to the five-oh.” No longer a hostage I walked the six blocks to the cop shop in a daze. The residential streets were torn up for construction, and I sat for a moment on a pile of gravel. I knew I would have to write a report for the police, so I tried to go over what had just happened in my mind, but my head felt like it was full of cotton batting, and the world seemed far away. I watched a series of cat eyes flickering on and off in unpredictable patterns the length of the quiet night street.
“I got buddies who tend bar down at the Gluepot.” Matty said “That’s where those crack head crackers hang out. Those motherfuckers are always bragging about their criminal pasts. So what I’m going to do is give you a beeper, and I’ll page you when we finally find these two jackasses who mugged you.” he continued to speak in an even tone. “Me and my buddies will take ‘em out to the alley and you can watch us throw them around a little bit.
“Then, once they apologize to you. I will personally extract a tooth from each of their mouths with my bare hands. These teeth will be mounted on a ring, or maybe a necklace for you to wear,” his arms, which he used to demonstrate his plan, hung loose at his side.
I took another sip of beer. “Wow, thanks.”
“Alright everybody, we’re reading for Thanksgiving dinner. You can all go and find the place setting with your name in front of it.” My aunt Donna patted me on the back after her kitchen announcement.
I wandered into the dining room and found my place at one of the table’s twenty four settings. I sat down and watched my aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, and ghosts slowly stream in after me.
