A lonely Saturday night on the Internet

Too easy and ethnocentric, I know. 

The school needs to call this man.

   Internet people are visual. I don't have a lot to blog about tonight; I really shot my wad with my Stephen King review last night.So instead I’m going to fill you in on what’s been going on. Just a little pause for station identification, if you will. Also, some funny pictures. 

Someone in my son’s class has been making death threats. This is the fourth grade, so the kids are between 8-10 (my son’s nine). Someone found a note in her backpack. It said If you don’t stop talking to me I will kill you. This is the second such note. 

Now, when I heard about this, I thought that teachers in my day would have brushed that under the rug and continued on with the lesson on General Frontenac. But my kid’s teachers (there are two in a job-sharing situation) are taking it very seriously. First, they worked out that only a student within the fourth/fifth grade split class could have written the note. Then they asked the class en masse for the culprit to come forward. If you come forward and confess, things will be much easier for you. You know they’re searching the faces of every single person in that class, looking for the slightest guilty tremor. But nothing; no dice. 

The next step was a visit from the cops, and a lecture from those boys and blue about how serious it is to threaten someone with death. Each child has met the teacher alone for extra-special scrutiny: How do you think this person is feeling? How would you feel if you were that person? The final step: handwriting analysis. That’s right, they’re going CSI on a class of fourth and fifth graders. Each kid will have to submit some handwriting, and then the clock will start ticking. I doubt whoever did this was prescient enough to disguise his or her own handwriting. I also think that you could whittle down the pool of suspects by looking at the neatness of the handwriting: if it’s really neat, then a girl probably did it. I’m not being necessarily sexist: many of the student assignments are posted on the wall outside class, and the girls always have neater handwriting. 

I’ll keep you posted on the elementary school death threat situation, but in the meantime, some funny pictures. Because the internet has to have its dopamine fix, its visual stimulation, and its flashy and funny things. 

Beautiful steampunk pens. Drooling? They're Montblanc limited editions.  These five pens cost more than a house.

A rude ghost spying on kitty's derrier.

Spiders can be cute. Really!

11/22/63 - Stephen King

11/22/63 is a massive, breathtaking novel that may finally affirm Stephen King as a great writer. I’ll get to that book in the moment (just finished it today), but I want to talk about something else first. 

I recently read a speech by Brian Keene, which he gave during Anthocon 2011. It was called 'Know Your Genre'.’ He runs through the history of horror literature, dividing it into waves that span from the 1900’s to the present. It’s a decent speech, and near the end he poked fun at several posters on the Shocklines message board who aren’t all that familiar with Robert Bloch. He gave the impression that without a knowledge of that very definite and linear progression of horror writers, a new horror writer is in trouble. 

I felt the speech was too precise - it posited horror writing as wizardry that must be handed down from one generation to another. Stephen King himself, along with Dean Koontz and Peter Straub, is named as part of the Fourth Wave that came to be during the seventies and eighties. Before the fourth wave came the third: Serling, Bloch, Bradbury, Matheson. After the fourth wave came writers like Keene, Joe Hill, Tim Lebbon, Wrath James White. Going by Keene’s speech, I can almost see these writers at neat, persnickety horror-genre  reunions in which the tables are grouped by age and rank. Then they get drunk and knock up the serving staff with illegitimate children. 

My own take on the ‘Know Your Genre’ theme? I’ve been a horror fan all my life. I think the progression of the genre is far more amorphous that we’d care to admit. I think that to group it into this square Danse Macabre is limiting and not particularly accurate. I also think that Stephen King wasn’t part of a wave of any kind. He was a meteor that sent waves crashing out in every direction. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read horror published within the last five years that has some element of Stephen King. Often, these efforts fall way short of the mark, but I can still tell.

Let’s discuss King’s influences. If you’ve read Bradbury, you know how much King owes to Bradbury’s collection ‘The October Country.’ But Bradbury was more a Science Fiction writer; he hung out with Heinlein and Forrest J. Ackerman. Right there is a broken link in the genre chain.

One of King’s favorite tropes is the simple, childlike character with precognitive ability: Danny Torrance in The Shining, Mother Abigail in The Stand, the blind girl in The Langoliers, Charlie in Firestarter, John Smith in The Dead Zone. In The Stand, a character wistfully remembers reading Richard Adam’s Watership Down. If someone in a King book talks or thinks of a book, it’s because King thought it was significant. Who is the central character in that novel of talking rabbits? Fiver, the dreamy and runty little rabbit with psychic powers. He foretells the arrival of the dog who attacks General Woundwort. Two of King’s great influences are fantasy authors. 

So we have the greatest horror writer in the genre, who happens to be one of the best-selling authors world-wide, who has non-horror writers as his influences, who writes best-selling novels that sometimes aren’t even horror. King is a great storyteller who happens to like writing horror; he could write anything and you’d still be reading the review at the front your newspaper’s book section. He takes whatever he needs from every genre and has melded it all into a cohesive whole, into a style that reminds me more of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. And he isn’t part of a wave of the seventies and eighties - he’s still here and right now he’s at the top of the heap.

11/22/63 is a sort-of time travel novel, but that’s a conceit that allows King to write a story that at its heart is of adventure and love. It is not a horror novel. 

Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, discovers that the owner of the local diner has been travelling back in time to buy his wholesale meat at 1950’s prices. Besides buying cheap ground beef and winning long odds sports bets, Al Templeton has been researching the Kennedy assassination - he wants to stop it. But here’s the wrinkle - the time portal he uses takes him back to the same place in 1958, five years before Lee Harvey Oswald kills Kennedy, and when he steps back into the present in 2011, only two minutes have passed. During his last visit, when he was gone for years while planning to change history, Al got lung cancer and had to return to the present to find a replacement who will save the president. Now dying and desperate for a chance to see his dream fulfilled, he wants the divorced and childless Jake Epping to go back in time to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. After Jake sees the time portal (which is in Al’s pantry) and what it can do, he agrees. 

What follows is a dizzying trip back to the year between 1958 and 1963. Ford Sunliners, hipsters, Glen Miller, gullwing fins, crewcuts, segregation, soda-shop rootbeer, taking a trip two towns over to buy condoms, poodle skirts - these are just a few of details among thousands that King and his research assistant have put into this novel. Jake comes into a world that is vastly more simple, kind, and cheap, and finds himself falling in love with it. He travels the country, starting in Maine, going to Florida, and finally to Texas to hunker down and wait for Lee to arrive in Fort Worth before he makes that fateful trip to Dallas. Jake falls in love, makes friends, trying desperately to keep his future self apart from his past self, which has become a teacher and respected member of the community. 

I became completely immersed in this book, much in the way I do when reading George RR Martin or Jonathan Franzen. Amidst the world-building, the characters that seem to step living and breathing off the page, there is the King obsession with words, and the deeper meaning below them: names, places, and actions all have similar but not identical siblings throughout the book, engendering a sense of unease and unreality that belies that fabulous, rock-solid historical detail. It is as if magic is bubbling up through cracks in asphalt. 

King, as he always has, writes in serviceable, clear prose, which you would think is the easy way out, but why don’t more authors write like this? As in Betty Smith’s writing, there is never any doubt as to what is happening. But, on rare occasions, King busts out with beauties like this:

     It’s all of a piece, I thought. It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning.

    For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

    Here, and in a few other passages like it, which I can count on the fingers of one hand, is where the true mystic emerges. This is talent, it’s magic, it’s (too make a pun with the title of one his novels)…IT. I think that here, in this one passage, lies much of what makes Stephen King tick. It’s not horror, not any particular genre, but story. Storytelling, narrative. Hope, dancing (dancing is an enormous theme in this novel) against the entirely purposeless force of decay. 

   Buy this novel. Start it on a Friday so you won’t miss work or school. But read it. 

  Stephen King still has it. After his accident, at the age of sixty-four, he’s still the equal of the young turk who wrote The Dead Zone and The Stand. He might even be better.

My old second-hand Bookstore

When you’re a young fan of horror, there’s not much choice; at least, there wasn’t much choice when I was growing up. In the 21^st century, you can order horror novels off the internet - which you’d think would be cheaper, but instead you’re paying fifty to eighty dollars for a book about giant monster crabs, because in ten years it will fetch a big price at the Las Vegas Monster Crab Book Convention. But I digress. 

There wasn’t much at the regular bookstore; horror is never a big draw. Also, new books were and are expensive, and that was before the advent of the small press. No monster crab and zombie collectibles, just an American price on the spine above a much higher Canadian price. 

Faced with exorbitant prices and and little choice, the discerning (desperate really) horror fan had to go the second-hand route. Where on Earth could you go? The United Cigar Store, on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax. Nova Scotia.

This place is so obscure that I can’t find a picture of it on google; I looked. It sold cigarettes and cigars (I think it did, anyway), and the rest of the store space was devoted to second-hand books and magazines. There was the obligatory rack of old porn mags (Hustler, Oui, Gallery, and Juggs, which should have been called Hard-Up Women with Back Problems ), and if I knew my horror history then like I do now, I would have taken a peek at them to see if I could find an old Stephen King story.

It was/is the most normal-looking store. Dirty old tile, bright trashy lights, soft drinks and bags of chips up front, a small rotating rack of bestseller hardbacks that had probably been bought at the bookstore in Scotia Square a block over. The bestsellers and candy were a beating heart with the dead and lost books a dying corpse around it. 

Some odd things about this place: It had two racks side-by-side, one full of identical copies of the killer-bee disaster novel, The Swarm(Arthur Herzog), and the other full of identical copies of the psycho killer-whale thriller Orca (also by Arthur Herzog). I have no idea why they had hundreds of copies of these two books, or why they didn’t just junk them all. Those stupid books stayed there for years and years.

The other racks had regular, non-identical second-hand books, and a wonderful horror selection. The lovely schlock I waded through when I went to that place! For one of my birthdays a friend of mine just gave me a stack of random novels he bought in bulk from that store. I loved it, because the horror rack in a second hand store is like a beach full of flotsam and old condoms, with treasure buried somewhere beneath.

What did I find there? All the old James Herbert rat-apocalypse books (The Rats, Lair, and Domain), the classic Incubus, by Ray Russel (which I’ve written about), a wonderful coming-of-age werewolf novel called The Orphan, by Robert Stallman, and an absolutely enraging piece-of-shit called Spawn of Hell (William Schoell), which was about strange slug creatures with the faces of their victims’ relatives grafted  onto their heads. I re-read Spawn of Hell whenever I wanted to get mad. 

The United Cigar Store is still there. The incongrous racks of identical Herzog novels are gone, thanks to the 21^st century business climate. But a lot of the old second-hand books (the horror in particular) are still there. I would guess that a few of them have not been touched in twenty years. They’re probably lousy with bedbugs and crumbling to acidic dust, although I like to think they’re still there, fine but just a little faded, waiting to be picked up for a buck or two. 

If you’re ever in Halifax, that store is still there, and still in the most central location in Halifax. It’s mainly second-hand, but a lot of stores in Halifax are second-hand. There is a huge second-hand bookstore in the AT&T mall at the corner of Spring Garden and Barrington, and it looks far more dusty and decrepit than The United Cigar Store, if you are so inclined. You can go to these places, or you can go to the wonderful and impossibly ancient Lawrence’s Books here in Vancouver, and see the strange and wondrous world of things that people gave up because they had to move, spring-clean, make a few bucks, get divorced, or clean out a house after a death. 

The inarguable weight and size of books, their tendency to rot and smell, make them automatically antique and obsolete before their time. There were second-hand bookstores long before ebooks, and they have always been places where the slightly oddball among us have come to search for things others might not have valued. 

The second-hand books will moulder as we buy less physical books. Second-hand stores are going to disappear, and the only thing left will be the typical box of 50-cent paperbacks at the Goodwill or the small-town antique store. 

So if you see a second-hand store, go in. Look around, remember. No one will make a second-hand store for second-hand bookstores. 

'Return to Bloodfart Lake': I'm drunk so don't judge me, godammit

   Don't even talk to me about this. It's New Year's Eve, my wife is at work, and since it's 2012 in two and a half hours, the world just might end, if the ancient Mayans have anything to say about it, not to mention the makers of a shitty apocalyptic John Cusack movie (which had its effects done by a firm based in Victoria, BC!)


   Did I mention the kids are in bed, I'm alone, and I'm full of beer and prosecco? I shouldn't mention that. One should not drink and drive, nor should one drink and blog. But here I am, and I want to shout to the world that there is a movie coming out called Return To Bloodfart Lake. Not only that, the lead actress in this wonderful movie has big hooters and looks good in a red bikini.


  Is this a scam? No idea. I've never seen the first movie, or this movie, which is its sequel. Horror movies and horror novels are full of boners, bloopers, and crapheaps that we're supposed to hail as brilliant even though most of them are an Elephant-in-the-Room awkward tour-de-force of bad writing and rape, but I've never heard of the Bloodfart Lake franchise. Is Bloodfart Lake near Camp Crystal Lake? I don't know. All I know is that it's the second installment, and the third instalment might be called Bloodfart Lake III: The Sharting. 


    But the Bloodfart Lake saga is just the tip of the iceberg. There's  'The Gay Bed and Breakfast of Terror', which I haven't seen but you are welcome to try out. Even worse than that is the cinematic opus known as 'Gayniggers from Outer Space'. These are real movies, sort of. I guess they're movies, in that they were shot with cameras and real actors were hired and maybe paid with food or perhaps oxycontin.


   It's happened. It used to be that taking pictures cost money - you had to really think about what you wanted to capture on film. That shit had to go to a developer, and he held your pics hostage until you paid him money. If you had a bad hair day, or if the boyfriend you included in your family photo turned out to be an philandering meth addict, you sucked it up and pasted those pictured in your album, because otherwise there was no picture. No memory. No nothing. Photos were made from the hooves of living creatures, and you had to think of that every time you pressed 'click' on your camera.


   Then digital cameras arrived, and photo labs dropped out of existence. That was pretty cool, actually. You could take a picture and have it printed at Futureshop or Costco, or just with your printer.


   But now you can make a movie on your phone. The next generation of smartphones will carry 8mp cameras (a lot of the droids already have 8mp but Apple had to wait for the 4s to get on the 8mp bandwagon), and these days everyone can make a movie. This is both good and bad. Good in that someone in Nigeria can make a cinematic masterpiece without whoring him/herself out; bad in that my kids might be making homemade porn while I'm reading the newspaper in the next room. Bad in that someone might make Return to Bloodfart Lake. 


Edit: It turns our that Terror at Bloodfart Lake is available on youtube. You can see it here. I skimmed through it - it looks like a few goth boys and girls made it while they were drunk and high. I doubt anyone got paid. They just ran Dad's camcorder and called it a movie. Not only that: I looked at the poster that I posted at the beginning of this article. It's clearly a picture of some girl's head shopped onto the body of an innocent bikini model.

'The Adventures of Tintin'

Well, it had to happen. We had to go see The Adventured of Tintin.

It’s in 3-D. I don’t know about you, but 3-D in the theatres is terrible. The new 3-D flatscreens are miles better. To top it off, the theatre was full of people trying to fill the emotional void left by boxing day, so the theatre was crowded and we were late to begin with. We had trouble finding seats. When we finally did get settled in, we were three rows from the front, so I’m now worried that I’ve given myself and my kids brain cancer. Then, to top everything off, about a quarter of the way through the movie, a teenage girl barfed all over her seat. She and her father left, but a moment later we were engulfed by the odour of vomit. So we had to move and find new seats. Somewhere amidst all this, I saw the movie and I will do my damn best to tell you what it’s like.

It’s live action/animated, using a technique called motion capture, but you already knew that. It’s directed by Stephen Spielberg; Jamie Bell, the kid from Billy Elliot, plays Tintin, and Andy Serkis (Gollum, Caesar from Rise of the Planet of the Apes) plays Captain Haddock; Daniel Craig plays the bad guy who was unfairly engendered from a completely harmless character from the comics. But you already knew everything I’ve just told you. Is it a good movie? Does Spielberg et al do a reasonably good job tackling the mighty mythology that is Tintin?

Yes. Mostly. There are hiccups and misteps throughout, and there are a few too many horrendously intricate and incomprehensible action scenes, but on the whole the vehicle drives. 

The racism, animal cruelty, and colonial patronizing of the original comics are largely gone, but that had to be done. The Thompsons are still there, and still inexplicable as ever (twins? Lovers? Colleagues? Members of a local make-work collective for the mentally handicapped? It’s never been explained). Captain Haddock is as gloriously dangerous and drunk as he has ever been.

The movie is a amalgam of The Secret of the Unicorn, Red Rackham’s Treasure, and The Crab with the Golden Claws, with an entirely new villain thrown in. The action has been upped, so that Tintin and the Captain have to discuss the complex plot (for the audience’s sake) while fighting bad guys and running for their lives. 

But here it is in a nutshell: Tintin discovers a model ship called The Unicorn, which hides a secret, or part of a secret, that leads to buried treasure. He teams up with Captain Haddock, whose ancestor hid the treasure under the sea, and together they traverse the globe in a race with the bad guys to find the last  piece of the puzzle. 

As I mentioned before, the actions scenes are overdone, but there is one massive and exciting exception.

In The Secret of the Unicorn, Captain Haddock recounts to Tintin his ancestor’s unsuccessful fight to repel pirates from the Unicorn, and his eventual revenge on those pirates, and their leader, Red Rackham. It’s the single most exciting story in the entire Tintin oeuvre. How exciting is it? Well, Captain Haddock has to get horrendously drunk and destroy his apartment to do the story justice. 

The best scene in the movie is when Red Rackham’s crew descends upon the Unicorn and a massive pitched battle breaks out. It’s three-dimensional in both imagery and concept as the brigands come at Sir Francis Haddock from all corners, as the pirate ship itself gets tangled in the Unicorn’s mast and swings back and forth like Calculus’s pendulum and everything, including Red Rackham’s cape, dances with flame. This battle sequence alone is worth the price of admission. 

The movie ends with the possibility of a sequel, with Peter Jackson at the helm. 

Steven Spielberg was a great admirer of Hergé, and Hergé was a great admirer of his. Both men are/were exponents of adventure storytelling and fantasy, and both men will be remembered and admired for generations. Hergé’s simple, shadowless drawings seem to become richer and more complex as time marches on, and Spielberg’s older works (ET, Duel, Jaws) shine more readily than anything done by James Cameron, because they were done with the same ephemeral and linear magic he shares with Hergé. 

Now I’m going to wait, very patiently, for Spielberg and Jackson to tackle Asterix. 

Prometheus - Oh yes. Very much oh yes.

  

Click to Embiggen. Really, you should see this bigger.

  




  Let's see. There's the original Alien (Ridley Scott), Alien 2 (James Cameron), and the very elegiac Alien 3, directed my David Fincher. Alien Resurrection followed (Jean-Pierre Jeanet), but they had to clone Ripley in order to continue the mythology.

  Then Alien vs. Predator came along, with not Ripley connection whatsoever, and then Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, again with no Ripley, who is essentially the glue that holds the mythology together. These movies don't count - why? Because Prometheus, that's why. Ridley friggen Scott has come along to make Prometheus, which is an extreme prequel to the whole mess. 

This movie looks so damn beautiful and honest I just want to curl up and revert to my childhood. Apparently it's gory and claustrophobic, but whatever. The youngsters on the internet aren't bothered by gore, trust me; they watch the real thing while they eat their noodles and keep porn on another tab. 


   I'm not the sort of guy who has contacts in the film biz (not even here in Vancouver), but I can look at the title, the hints the director is dropping, and the general feel of the trailer, to give you an inkling of what this movie might be about. 


  Prometheus was a greek Titan, and there are many myths about him. He tricked Zeus, and stole fire from Him to give to humanity. He is also credited for creating the human race out of clay (and misapplying the genitals and giving cause to homosexuality, according to one Roman comedy writer), and in some instances he gave empirical knowledge to humanity as well. In some ways, he is similar to the biblical snake in the Garden of Eden, because he gave self-awareness, in other way Zeus is a tyrant and Prometheus saved us all by giving us life and sentience. Either way, Prometheus was a brash, tricky figure who liked to mess with great powers. 


  So how does with figure into Ridley Scott's Prometheus? Well, we're probably Prometheus, and the Aliens are the deadly knowledge we attempt to steal. Or, we're the knowledge, the infection, and somehow we were set free to wreak havoc, and the Aliens are the Eagle who as punishment eats out Prometheus's liver. 


 The myth of Pandora's Box in in the Promethean myth as well. She came from Zeus in retaliation for the theft of fire, and her opened box released disease and death. But that's too simple. 


  I hope there's more. I hope it isn't the Aliens-are-the-great-secret-that-we-try-to-exploit-for-profit-and-we-will-pay-for-our-folly-by-being-eviscerated-and-turned-into-egg-incubators schtick that has been so prevalent in all the other movies. I hope there's some great origin story a la Battlestar Galactica that Ridley Scott thinks up. 

  I think there might be. In the brief glimpses in the trailer that I can see, I can see ancient and impossible structures on the planet the protagonists are exploring. I can see origin and intelligence there, and maybe something that hints at our own origins as well. But the structures in the trailer, the alien design so famously conceptualized by HR Geiger, look so very Lovecraftian. 

We call it Lovecraftian, because Lovecraft himself was the first writer to dedicate his life to the prospect of impossibly ancient things that dwell in the far cosmos and spell our doom. But if you read Jules Verne, HG Wells, or basic greek mythology, you can see the places where Lovecraft went before he began to write.

We're afraid of the unknown, that there just might be God out there, or perhaps even more than one god. We're afraid of horrors that we might discover, and our greatest fear is that we cannot help but continue to look for them. Horror is what killed the curious cat. 

Living with A Stoner

During my third year of university, I had to find a roommate. I couldn’t afford a place of my own. So I did what most people do: I looked at the walls of the Student Union Building (which, at McGill University, was called the William Shatner Centre, and no I am not making this up) where there were housing ads taped alongside the fliers for protests marches and student social clubs.

I was embryonically stupid then. I wouldn’t say I was a genius now, but I’m surprised that back then I didn’t need an artificial lung to take over when I forgot to breath. I met a fellow I’ll call Murray, and despite the filth of his apartment (where we would live), I agreed to live with him. 

I arrived to begin school in September and the horror started. 

I might have been stupid, but he was barely human. He went through terrible marijuana binges where he would shut himself into an the airtight front room (the door would be closed and the door to the balcony was sealed off with insulating plastic), smoke himself into a stupor, and watch TV all night. In the morning before I went to school, I would sometimes look through the window on the door to the front room to see what lay beyond: Murray sprawled on the floor in an insensate heap amidst his twisted sleeping bag, his rear end more often then not poking out from his partly pulled-down shorts. Grapefruit halves with dead cigarettes stubbed out inside them  and upside down pizza boxes littered the floor around him. It was almost exactly akin to the scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when a young women enters a murderer’s house and sees a living room so terribly, insanely messy that it seems to ooze evil and menace. 

I often got ready for class as quietly as possible so I didn’t wake him up. If he did wake up, he would emerge from the fetid depths of the front room, the sleeping bag wrapped around his upper body but his bare legs and sagging underwear exposed, to shuffle into the bathroom and pee, farting like an old man. Then he would shuffle back to go asleep. I never understood why he slept in the front room like he was a stoned and hibernating bear; his own bedroom was four feet away.

When I got ready for class, I often put the phone off the hook. Otherwise his mother would call, wake him up, and I would have to look at him. His mother was rightly worried about him : Murray’s little brother was in his first year of Engineering; his older sister was doing her MBA at Yale. She was worried about her disappointing middle child. So she called every morning if I let her. When Murray would answer the phone, the conversation went like this (I heard this almost every morning so it’s burned into my head. You have to imagine his Montreal urban anglophone accent, which sounds a little like a New York accent. You also have to imagine that she owned the building and he was sort of this half-assed disaster landlord who did absolutely nothing, for himself or anyone.)

“Hi mom. Yeah, I was up. No, I’m going to head out and look for a job. Yeah. I have to go. I have to go. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. I have to… Good-bye. Okay, I’m hanging up the phone. Good-bye. Good-bye.” This went on for many minutes, and sometimes happened several times in a morning. Sometimes, on snowy days, she’d arrange for him to clear the walk in front of his uncle’s Jewish tombstone store. That was all he ever did when I lived with him. He was a perversely fascinating creature, and like Gollum, he didn’t know how hideous he had become. 

But somehow, somehow, through those twists of fate that happen to stoners and the unfortunate idiots who live with them, our female roommate left (understandably - she probably would have killed him if she hadn’t left), and Murray rented a room to someone even worse that he was. 

Joey was in his early thirties and psychotic. By psychotic, I mean he talked and screamed to himself, and kept a long line of pill bottles on the mantle of his room. Thank God he was smaller than me, or else I would have been terrified of him. Murray hated him, and for a while we sort of bonded over our fear and loathing of this chaotic and doomed man.

Then the inevitable violence happened. 

Joey liked to smoke when he wasn’t coasting on his many suppressants. The deal he had struck with Murray was that he would smoke with his door closed, since I hated the smell. But Joey began to smoke with the door open, and the cigarette smoke reached me. It was the end of the year, it was getting hot in that Montreal way, and the apartment was on the third floor. 

One day I charged into the living room, hot, angry, and infuriated that the smell of cigarettes had come into my room. I yelled that he had to close his door. He came out. 

“I need the fresh air, fuck!” he yelled (the use of the word ‘fuck’ is at the end of a sentence is a Montreal thing, and it comes from Quebec french)

I charged and he met me in the middle of the living room. For a few seconds I had him in a headlock, him grunting in rage, and then I was saying: “Joey. Stop. We have to stop. Jesus Christ, we have to stop.” I let him go. 

After he rose, I held out my hand, he held out his, and we shook. He went back into his room. I looked at my arm, where there was a gash that had somehow opened during that encounter. When Joey came out to the kitchen to fix himself a snack and smiling as if nothing had happened, he had a flap of skin two inches long hanging from his arm. 

Beyond my initial and heat-driven rage at Joey, I wasn’t angry had him. He was ill and couldn’t be anything else. I was angry at Murray for renting a room to this man. 

I moved two days later, Murray screaming at me as I carried my stuff to a rented van. He said I owed him money, and I insisted that he’d made my life hell and that I owed him nothing. I probably should have payed him something, but hate is a powerful motivator when you realize you can effect revenge through money. I wanted his parents to be angry at their 26 year-old son who couldn’t run their investments and rented to psychotic welfare cases. But more than anything I just wanted to be finished, to not contribute a single cent more of my worth to sustaining what I realized was a rotating door system of college kids and crazy people who lived with this useless man-child.

This happened a long time ago, but I still think of it from time to time, and wonder if Murray (who would now be in his mid-forties) is still offering himself as a roommate to bewildered college kids, or if the great wave of money and gentrification that swept through downtown Montreal swept him up as well, along with his parents’ apartment buildings and the tombstone store up the street. I almost hope not. He added some clownish colour to that great city and I learned a lot when I lived with him.