Montreal’s left-winger is about to take a slap shot…
No, wait.
I feel a gentle breeze on my face.
Strange.
I open my eyes. Yes, there is a breeze.
Not again! I look out the window from my bed, expecting to see trees bending in the gale.
The darkness of 4 a.m. Nothing but silence, the glow of streetlights.
Streetlights?!
Then I hear it. A gentle whir.
I look up. In the dimness, the blades of an overhead fan turning and turning.
Electricity! For the first time since Sunday.
Thanks for nothing, Irene.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Portrait of a Lady 5
So, Lance Armstronglike, I mount my trusty metallic steed and wheel through the lazy summer heat.
I come to an intersection, a 4-way stop. I am the first vehicle there, the only other candidate is a small red car, with Mass plates, approaching from my right, still twenty feet away from its stop sign.
So I proceed, thinking idly about Eleanor of Aquitaine, for some reason.
Thank god for peripheral vision. And animal reflexes.
The red car guns it, sails through the stop. I slide to a violent halt, fall onto the pavement.
The woman in the car whizzes past, two feet away from me. The window is down. She yells.
“Fuckhead!”
Then drives on.
I come to an intersection, a 4-way stop. I am the first vehicle there, the only other candidate is a small red car, with Mass plates, approaching from my right, still twenty feet away from its stop sign.
So I proceed, thinking idly about Eleanor of Aquitaine, for some reason.
Thank god for peripheral vision. And animal reflexes.
The red car guns it, sails through the stop. I slide to a violent halt, fall onto the pavement.
The woman in the car whizzes past, two feet away from me. The window is down. She yells.
“Fuckhead!”
Then drives on.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Oh Karmada!
So Canada is a safe, sorta William-n-Kate kind of place, right? Maybe not.
May:
I’m at a writers’ conference in Toronto. A friend and I decide to go visit a Very Famous Writer in Stratford, Ontario. We take the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated lakeside highway built too long ago to be safe. I tell my friend that I almost died there, when, in my mid-twenties, I was a courier and had a blow-out. Since there are no shoulders to speak of on the roadway, I had to go out for three-second periods to wield the tire iron and then rush back to safety in front of my car as the traffic whizzed past.
It took an hour to change the tire. I drove to my boss’s place (a print shop) and quit, right then and there. I had been terrified.
It’s curious, I say to my friend as we get off the Gardiner and onto the QEW expressway, I almost died here, in the same stretch of road where I was born.
The brown hulk of St. Joseph’s Hospital looms up on our right as we barrel onward.
Your story reminds me of Andre Dubus, my friend says. Dubus was an American writer of renown who was seriously injured when he pulled over to help someone and then was hit by a car. He was a mess, and died a few months afterwards.
We drive along talking about Dubus. We turn north, onto the mega-expressway that separates the city of Toronto from the mega-suburb of Mississauga. For those of you reading this who do not know Toronto, that city has a Brobdingnagian ring road, at one point encompassing up to 24 lanes of high-speed traffic. I’m not kidding. Heading north, we are on one of these beasts.
Blam!
A blow-out. We look at each other.
I slow miserably, and come to a halt in a tiny V-shaped piece of pavement, where two six-lane expressways come together. It is twenty yards long, at most.
We sit in silence. The car is rocked, literally rocked, by blasts of air from the transport-trailers hurtling beside us, less than than three feet away on either side.
I have to get out and see which tire had blown. The way I stopped makes the driver’s side almost flush with the inside lane of one of the expressways. I check the mirror. Not enough time, not enough time… now! I jump out of my seat, slam the door shut and race to the back of the car. A huge truck honks loudly, insistently, foghorn-like, as it whizzes past at 70 mph.
The flat is the right front tire. On the right-hand side, there is a bit more breathing room, perhaps two feet from the roadway, so I get in the back seat on that side and call CAA, telling them I am a member of AAA.
Sure, they say, we’ll have someone over in a sec.
Fifteen minutes pass. We are rocking in the wash of trucks.
Suddenly, a flashing of lights. A towtruck has maneuvered behind us.
A south Asian man approaches. We have a conversation near the trunk of my car.
CAA will take hours to come. For one hundred dollars I will tow you to a garage.
I demur. Say that CAA promised to come.
Okay, he says, you’ll see.
Forty-five more minutes. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Another truck, another south Asian.
For forty dollars I change your tire.
Deal.
The man squats down, takes out the VW key I’ve given him. Then the tire iron. The bolts have been machine tightened. He strains at them, strains.
He loses his balance, staggers back two paces, into the roadway. I grab his sleeve and pull him toward me.
A transport-trailer opens its foghorn and barrels past an instant later.
The man smiles. Then changes the tire.
I give him eighty bucks, then after waiting ten minutes for an opening, gun the car back onto the roadway.
June:
Celsius or Fahrenheit, it is unbelievably hot. I crawl out of Montreal at rush hour. At last the traffic thins, and progress is made toward the international frontier between Quebec and Ontario.
At the town of Rigaud, on the Quebec side, I stop for gas. The wind whips up suddenly, operatically. I look to the west, the direction in which I will be driving.
The sky is gun-metal green, riven with jagged bolts of lightning.
Scary.
I get back on the road, but the wind builds, with gusts buffeting the car. At times I feel as if I’m driving on two wheels.
Ten feet above the roadway, a tree branch flies past. Not a twig, not a few leaves, an entire, mature branch. I see a sign for an exit one kilometer distant.
But then the rain comes. It is so heavy that you cannot distinguish drops. It’s as if someone is dumping out a bucket from the sky. The volume of water is so great that the curtain of white lightning ahead is extinguished.
Ten miles an hour, five… I inch the car toward the promised exit. Cars have pulled over onto the shoulder, but I want to get into a building, where the wind can’t pick me up and toss me away like a rag doll.
The rain relents, then stops. Good news, yes, but the surrounding sky is now black, green… and yellow and white with constant discharges of thunderbolts. The wind screams.
At last I make the exit. Down the ramp and into a parking lot full of rocking vehicles. A Tim Horton’s donut shop.
I put my shoulder into the car door to open it. I step outside. The wind slams the door shut.
I can hear nothing as I bend into the fury and cross the lot. I stagger, almost lose my balance.
At last I am inside… Where is everybody?
At the back of the shop, employees and customers. White-faced. They are as far away as possible from the big picture windows. Someone beckons me to join them.
Later I read that the funnel touched down about three miles away from us. And headed the other way.
July:
It’s late and I have the munchies. On my walk back to my hotel in Ottawa I decide to spring for a slice at Pizza Pizza. It’s about midnight.
As I am pointing to the slice I want, a scream. Yelling.
Something has happened outside.
The clerk and I go out the door.
A junkie chick is wailing, a man with a backpack is squatting. Before the pair, prone on the pavement, a man.
He is bald, in his late twenties. His shirt begins to swell slightly, then it wells out. Blood. Lots of it.
“Stabbed,” the clerk says.
The crouching figures gently presses his hand on the reddening shirt, as if to staunch the flow. Hopeless.
I take a step forward. There is an open wound in his neck, too. The man is soundless.
A cop car, then another. Sirens. More cops, paramedics, ambulance.
One cop tells us not to leave the scene. He herds us, strangely, even closer to the body as the medics whale away at the victim’s chest in an effort to revive him. We all stand together in a blizzard of police misery lights… blue, red, white, yellow, red, blue…
The man dies.
He is strapped on a gurney and wheeled away.
The police question us. The clerk, who is known to the police (there are drunken late-night brawls at Pizza Pizza every now and then), at last convinces Ottawa’s finest that neither of us could be the assailant nor could have seen the assailant. I was ordering a slice at the time of the incident, inside the shop.
Back in my hotel room, sitting on the bed. I look down.
I get up and go into the bathroom to wash the blood off my sneakers.
May:
I’m at a writers’ conference in Toronto. A friend and I decide to go visit a Very Famous Writer in Stratford, Ontario. We take the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated lakeside highway built too long ago to be safe. I tell my friend that I almost died there, when, in my mid-twenties, I was a courier and had a blow-out. Since there are no shoulders to speak of on the roadway, I had to go out for three-second periods to wield the tire iron and then rush back to safety in front of my car as the traffic whizzed past.
It took an hour to change the tire. I drove to my boss’s place (a print shop) and quit, right then and there. I had been terrified.
It’s curious, I say to my friend as we get off the Gardiner and onto the QEW expressway, I almost died here, in the same stretch of road where I was born.
The brown hulk of St. Joseph’s Hospital looms up on our right as we barrel onward.
Your story reminds me of Andre Dubus, my friend says. Dubus was an American writer of renown who was seriously injured when he pulled over to help someone and then was hit by a car. He was a mess, and died a few months afterwards.
We drive along talking about Dubus. We turn north, onto the mega-expressway that separates the city of Toronto from the mega-suburb of Mississauga. For those of you reading this who do not know Toronto, that city has a Brobdingnagian ring road, at one point encompassing up to 24 lanes of high-speed traffic. I’m not kidding. Heading north, we are on one of these beasts.
Blam!
A blow-out. We look at each other.
I slow miserably, and come to a halt in a tiny V-shaped piece of pavement, where two six-lane expressways come together. It is twenty yards long, at most.
We sit in silence. The car is rocked, literally rocked, by blasts of air from the transport-trailers hurtling beside us, less than than three feet away on either side.
I have to get out and see which tire had blown. The way I stopped makes the driver’s side almost flush with the inside lane of one of the expressways. I check the mirror. Not enough time, not enough time… now! I jump out of my seat, slam the door shut and race to the back of the car. A huge truck honks loudly, insistently, foghorn-like, as it whizzes past at 70 mph.
The flat is the right front tire. On the right-hand side, there is a bit more breathing room, perhaps two feet from the roadway, so I get in the back seat on that side and call CAA, telling them I am a member of AAA.
Sure, they say, we’ll have someone over in a sec.
Fifteen minutes pass. We are rocking in the wash of trucks.
Suddenly, a flashing of lights. A towtruck has maneuvered behind us.
A south Asian man approaches. We have a conversation near the trunk of my car.
CAA will take hours to come. For one hundred dollars I will tow you to a garage.
I demur. Say that CAA promised to come.
Okay, he says, you’ll see.
Forty-five more minutes. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Another truck, another south Asian.
For forty dollars I change your tire.
Deal.
The man squats down, takes out the VW key I’ve given him. Then the tire iron. The bolts have been machine tightened. He strains at them, strains.
He loses his balance, staggers back two paces, into the roadway. I grab his sleeve and pull him toward me.
A transport-trailer opens its foghorn and barrels past an instant later.
The man smiles. Then changes the tire.
I give him eighty bucks, then after waiting ten minutes for an opening, gun the car back onto the roadway.
June:
Celsius or Fahrenheit, it is unbelievably hot. I crawl out of Montreal at rush hour. At last the traffic thins, and progress is made toward the international frontier between Quebec and Ontario.
At the town of Rigaud, on the Quebec side, I stop for gas. The wind whips up suddenly, operatically. I look to the west, the direction in which I will be driving.
The sky is gun-metal green, riven with jagged bolts of lightning.
Scary.
I get back on the road, but the wind builds, with gusts buffeting the car. At times I feel as if I’m driving on two wheels.
Ten feet above the roadway, a tree branch flies past. Not a twig, not a few leaves, an entire, mature branch. I see a sign for an exit one kilometer distant.
But then the rain comes. It is so heavy that you cannot distinguish drops. It’s as if someone is dumping out a bucket from the sky. The volume of water is so great that the curtain of white lightning ahead is extinguished.
Ten miles an hour, five… I inch the car toward the promised exit. Cars have pulled over onto the shoulder, but I want to get into a building, where the wind can’t pick me up and toss me away like a rag doll.
The rain relents, then stops. Good news, yes, but the surrounding sky is now black, green… and yellow and white with constant discharges of thunderbolts. The wind screams.
At last I make the exit. Down the ramp and into a parking lot full of rocking vehicles. A Tim Horton’s donut shop.
I put my shoulder into the car door to open it. I step outside. The wind slams the door shut.
I can hear nothing as I bend into the fury and cross the lot. I stagger, almost lose my balance.
At last I am inside… Where is everybody?
At the back of the shop, employees and customers. White-faced. They are as far away as possible from the big picture windows. Someone beckons me to join them.
Later I read that the funnel touched down about three miles away from us. And headed the other way.
July:
It’s late and I have the munchies. On my walk back to my hotel in Ottawa I decide to spring for a slice at Pizza Pizza. It’s about midnight.
As I am pointing to the slice I want, a scream. Yelling.
Something has happened outside.
The clerk and I go out the door.
A junkie chick is wailing, a man with a backpack is squatting. Before the pair, prone on the pavement, a man.
He is bald, in his late twenties. His shirt begins to swell slightly, then it wells out. Blood. Lots of it.
“Stabbed,” the clerk says.
The crouching figures gently presses his hand on the reddening shirt, as if to staunch the flow. Hopeless.
I take a step forward. There is an open wound in his neck, too. The man is soundless.
A cop car, then another. Sirens. More cops, paramedics, ambulance.
One cop tells us not to leave the scene. He herds us, strangely, even closer to the body as the medics whale away at the victim’s chest in an effort to revive him. We all stand together in a blizzard of police misery lights… blue, red, white, yellow, red, blue…
The man dies.
He is strapped on a gurney and wheeled away.
The police question us. The clerk, who is known to the police (there are drunken late-night brawls at Pizza Pizza every now and then), at last convinces Ottawa’s finest that neither of us could be the assailant nor could have seen the assailant. I was ordering a slice at the time of the incident, inside the shop.
Back in my hotel room, sitting on the bed. I look down.
I get up and go into the bathroom to wash the blood off my sneakers.
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