The Rhode Island Diet

I am a self-betraying stooge for a weight loss clinic. I have to note and disclose everything I eat during twelve weeks, and I have to report the daily variations in my weight. Every Sunday evening I make these disclosures on the website of the Oberkommando running the show. This morning, standing in my altogether at the daily weigh-in in my bathroom, I was neither at the same weight as yesterday nor at a lower level. In fact, I was one pound heavier than I had been a week ago. Panic. I had to make those weight disclosures tonight. I knew the culprit. Last night, there was an unfortunate three-way between me, a novel and a bottle of screwtop rosé. The contents of the bottle had somehow insinuated themselves between my lips as I read the novel at my kitchen table, in the vicinity of where I would wake up at about two in the morning. Life is full of such coincidences. As I stepped off the scales I pondered my options. I could lie to the Oberkommando and risk a court-martial. No, too daunting. Or I could count on the workings of intestinal transit to lessen my weight. Yes, good! So, Adam and Eve-like, I took a couple bites of an apple, bounced about a bit to encourage peristalsis and waited for Ma Nature to come calling. She did, and I did – though I will not inflict the details of the operation on posterity, even if posterity is what it was all about. Anyway, I then stepped back on the scales and somehow, impossibly, I was a half-pound heavier. Desperate now, I reached for my helmet. I would delay breakfast, bike like a madman, then weigh myself. The rules stated that you had to weigh yourself before breakfast – they did not specifically say just after you woke up. So I wouldn’t be deceiving anyone, would I? I would take my beloved bike trail. This would be my first time on it this year. Somehow I had developed a vague fear of tire inflation, which had kept me off my bike for months. Conquering this fear, I grabbed the pump and set to work, and soon I was hurtling lancearmstronglike down the familiar stages of the trail: The Ramp That Hugs, The Ramp That Doesn’t, The Hill of Death, Riverside Drive, Redemption Slope, The Fallopian Straightaway, Voldimort’s Cottage, The Lesser Fallopian, Tankerville, Dari Bee, Extramarital Parking State Park, The Bridge of Hungover Fishermen and then at last, to Bristol, Rhode Island, and its seaside Gull Guano Boulevard. Pausing only an instant to take a slug of water, I turned the bike around to head back the fourteen miles to the Center of the Universe (i.e., Providence). I was elated, the sun felt good. As this was the first time I’d been on the trail as a non-smoker, it no longer felt as if I was pedaling uphill all the time. The sensation was novel. And the sights! All the familiar sights came back to me in all their human glory: the tramp stamps and tanktop gullies of the girls, the tattooed biceps and dirty looks of their boyfriends. The archetypes were out in force, too. At Mile 15: The Tottering Grandfather. Later on: The Teeth-Bearing Sprinter. Then, in quick succession: The Immodest Behemoth, The Sullen Virgin, The Unicycle Mime, The Aspirational Jogger, The Aerodynamic Lawyer, the hotties, the fatties, the homeys… trail nuts, all. And I love them. At last I pedaled up The Ramp That Hugs, then went the two blocks home. I was exhausted, but in a good way, as if I had just attended a successful reunion. I stabled my metal steed and headed upstairs to my apartment. The scale lay in wait on the tile floor. I stripped off then stood on it. I had lost three pounds. There would be no court martial.

Border Incident

8 a.m., at a St. Lawrence River crossing into the U.S. from Canada. I pull up at the booth and recognize the border guard: young guy, with a mullet and a straggly beard.
Him: Where you live?
Me: Providence.
Him: Why were you in Canada?
Me: To visit my father, in Ottawa. I was there three days.
(He surveys my passport)
Him: How come you’re an American?
Me: Had a green card…
Him: Hmmm… What do you do?
Me: For a living?
Him: Yeah.
Me: I’m a writer. I write books.
Him: What kind of books?
Me: History books. My last one was about medieval history.
(Pause)
Him: I’ve had you before…
Me: Yes.
Him: Why don’t you write about Northern aggression?
(Pause)
Me: You mean… like in the Civil War?
Him: You can’t have a civil war between two separate countries. The South was independent.
Me: Oh.
Him: Yeah, it was the War of Northern Aggression. Why don’t you write about that?
Me: I… I’ve never thought about it that way.
(Pause)
Him: You can go. Welcome home.
And the agent of the United States government waved me through.

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.

Portrait of a Lady 2

I was driving from Moira to Bombay, way way upstate. The sun shone, one of the first warm days of the spring. I passed a herd of bison munching on a dirty bale of hay that had been left for them in a sloping field.

Around the bend, and there over to the left stood a man at a horse-drawn plow. Two boys, his young sons, presumably, scrabbled away at the clods of muck obstructing the forward movement of the plow. The muddy hay of winter lay strewn across their expanse of land, which was unplowed and unplanted. They worked hard in the sunshine. The man wore a straw hat, an immaculate white shirt obscured by a black vest and jacket, and suspenders that held up his stovepipe black trousers. On his feet, leather boots. His boys wore exactly the same thing.

At last a T-junction and I turned west, on the road to the bridge to Canada. This was the Akewsasne Reservation, the heart of Mohawk country. Their Iroquois meeting house, always reliable for militancy, stood by the roadside festooned with a large billboard that read: “Yes, terrorists pass through Akwesasne! They’re called NY State Police, the FBI, US Border Control, ATF agents.”

I drove past a large casino, an IGA complex, a warehouse under construction. On the shoulder of the road in front of the last sat a buggy, with a trestle table set out. The frail black buggy looked like a toy that had somehow been multiplied in size by some 3-d printer. Between it and the table, petticoats flapped in the breeze on a clothesline. A sign read: “Baked Goods For Sale.” A horse was hitched to a post nearby. No more than twenty feet away, at the half-completed warehouse, a couple of young Mohawk men squatted on their haunches, cigarette smoke curling around the yellow hard hats. They appeared to be watching the horse, the buggy, the clothesline and the sale table.

Fifty feet further on, I turned into the parking lot of the Bear’s Den Trading Post, my last stop in the USA, where I habitually get a tankful of cheap gas and a big bag of discount Swedish fish. The post was its usual human kaleidoscope: impossibly huge upstate New Yorkers eating piles of fried things in the diner, ZZ-Top truck drivers with hair stringy and wet from using the showers in the back, French-Canadian families gripping their cartons of tax-free cigarettes while exclaiming loudly about jewelry in the Iroquois fashion store, and the usual bustle of bathroom-bound children.

Before the cooler, there she was. A tall, graceful young woman. On her head was a stiff brown bonnet hiding all of her hair and sloping bell-like down to her chin, where it was fastened by a shiny brown strip of fabric. Wrapped around her shoulders was a black woollen cape that fell down to just above her ankles. Beneath that a full-length navy-blue dress devoid of any grace notes, buttoned firmly up across her bosom and up to her neck, but still cinched at the waist, nonetheless. On her feet, handmade leather shoes, with rough coils of black-dyed cord running through a dozen or so eyelets.

Her arms hung down at her sides. At their end, holding her hands on either side, were two little girls dressed exactly the same way, down to the smallest detail. They must have been three years old, at the most.

The remarkable threesome looked at the sodas, designer water bottles and vitamin drinks, clearly nonplussed. The little girls had obviously never seen the likes of it before. Neither, perhaps, had the mother. The girls’ free hands timidly pointed out things, questioningly. The young woman spoke to them quietly, without reproach, in medieval German.

They moved on to the candy bar, tortilla chip and breath mint display. They stood before it, indecisive. The subdued German continued. From their vantage point in the Iroquois fashion store, the French-Canadian families could now see the woman and her daughters. The twang of their conversation dulled, quieted, fell to a whisper.

At last a decision was made. I got behind the Amish trio in the line to the cash register, my Swedish fish in hand. When it was their turn, the young woman pulled out from the fastnesses of her cape an enormous wad of dollar bills. She stripped a couple of singles off and wordlessly placed them on the counter. A gum-snapping Mohawk girl took them up and gave her back the change.

After paying, I went out to the parking lot. I could see the three walking back along the shoulder of the roadway. The girls still held their mother’s hands, but in their free hands were clutched yellow plastic wrappers, long and lurid. They both held a beef-jerky.

They reached the buggy. The two braves stood up and went back inside the warehouse to work.

Dilemma

I was thinking of taking a road trip across the U.S. this summer, but I’m afraid of melted cheese.

Will I starve?

Portrait of a Lady 1

Yesterday I was waiting for an elevator in the lobby of a retirement home. Beside me, leaning on a walker, stood a little old lady of my acquaintance.

Bonjour, Hélène.

She looked over at me. The penny dropped.

Ah bonjour, monsieur!

We waited together, patiently. I looked at her walker. The last time I saw her she got around with a cane.

Pourquoi?

I motioned to the walker.

She sighed and answered in a French-Canadian accent as thick as goalie’s pad.

Je suis fatiguée. Ben ben fatiguée…

We looked up at the elevator display. It seemed to be stuck on the third floor.

I felt a nudge at my elbow. Hélène held out a newspaper clipping, protected in transparent plastic. She urged it on me.

Regarde-moi ça!

I took it from her. It was from Ottawa’s French-language daily. Yesterday’s edition.

A picture of Hélène, wearing a deranged, gleeful smile. On her head a conical, comical party hat.

The headline read: La Doyenne d’Ottawa!

The caption stated that Hélène Chatelain, the city’s oldest resident, is seen here celebrating her 108th birthday.

We got on the elevator. I placed the clipping face up on the tray of her walker. The door closed.

We looked at each other.

Cent huit?

Her smile was positively demonic.

Zahn witt!... Ben ouais…

I recognized the smile from the newpaper. I looked down at the clipping.

She misunderstood. She thought I was looking at the walker. Reproachfully.

The doors opened at her floor.

Vous savez, monsieur, she apologized. On a beaucoup beaucoup dansé.

Bond. Justin Bond.

When one has spent three years thinking, reading and writing about medieval torture techniques, is there a way to reinsert oneself back into society? Can the thought of the rack and stake ever be entirely banished? Can one join the company of free men and women, enjoy their fresh faces, airkiss their scrubbed cheeks and smile beneath their warm and welcoming gaze, unencumbered by unspoken speculation about their eventual dismemberment? Is there a way, oh lord, is there a way?

Yes, there is a way. Espionage. Secrecy. A mission. Only by feigning involvement in the real world to accomplish an ulterior goal is one able to simulate normalcy and thereby return to civilian life. Call it a stepping-stone, a half-way house, a stairway to sanity.

I got the call last night. Headquarters in Toronto instructed me to procure some valuable matériel unavailable in the socialist hell north of Lake Ontario. I was to get in my car and drive, purchase the items with an unmarked credit card, then, at some later date to be specified, head far, far to the north and somehow sneak the precious cargo of contraband past the vigilance of the Canadian border huskies and their mukluk-shod Mountie masters.

The morning dawned brilliantly sunny, a cold hard day in late winter. Ha, I thought, enjoying the ironies of the cloak-and-dagger. A couple jogged innocently by in the brightness of my rear window, oblivious to the darkness within. I smiled to myself as I turned the key in the ignition, if they only knew…

Business with pleasure, I thought suavely, as I avoided the highway to take a slower, harder-to-tail route. I drove south out of Providence onto Allens Avenue, a.k.a. the Narragansett Bay Corniche, its mixture of tank farms, rusting tugs and mountainous heaps of toxic crud a clever counterpoint to the predictable vista of sea and sky. Then onto bucolic Cranston, a limitless expanse of drugstores and hot dog vendors punctuated by foreclosed clapboard houses and palm-reading shops. When I reached the boarded-up storefront of the place that used to sell week-old grinder rolls and Wonder bread, I knew I had gone too far.

I deftly executed a U-turn and headed to the next stage of my journey: I-95, a ribbon of asphalt stretching from Maine to Florida that is the quasi-mobile home to five million UPS trucks delivering fall-apart goods made in Shenzhen. I merged and soon found myself in familiar company, Massholes passing on the right, Rhode Islanders unfamiliar with the concept of the turn signal, even a few New Jersey plates straining to break the sound barrier, all of the drivers shouting into cellphones and eating something.

I exited at Warwick, Rhode Island, my dread destination Bald Hill Road. Almost immediately it was upon me. Beyond a shivering spinney of leafless trees loomed a sign: Toys R Us.

Yes! There it was… No, wait, it says: Toys R Us Babies R Us. There must be some mistake. I pressed on the accelerator and climbed the bald hill. It had all been too easy, I wasn’t going to be fooled.

Target, Wal-Mart, Chuck E. Cheese, Panera, Best Buy, Barnes & Noble, Ocean State Job Lots, Dollar Tree, Payless, T.J. Maxx, Christmas Tree Shops, Petsmart, Dick’s, Rick’s, Applebee’s, Wendy’s, Republic Tax Returns, Sears, Marshall’s, Yankee Candle… I squinted in the sunlight as I passed the succession of parking lots, around which were artfully arranged the depositories of the I-95 deliveries, dancing up and down the hillside like a winsomely choreographed dog’s breakfast.

But no Toys R Us.

I pulled into Trader Joe’s to get my bearings. I knew the place, it was reassuring, the place where people who don’t like to touch food go to buy food. Lettuce, avocadoes, tomatoes, all hermetically bagged, a cheese section kept close to absolute zero, meat ditto, two aisles of starch wrapped in Trader Joe’s post-apocalyptic unirradiable pouches, then, of course, seven aisles of chips and salsa, ground zero for the organic couch potato.

I felt at home. But still a bit dizzy. I made my way hesitantly to the feeding station. A woman there offered me a viscous dollop of guacamole atop a chipotle-mole-mesquite-low-sodium-jalapeno-infused-free-range tortilla chip. It slid down my gullet and restored me to the lethal acuity necessary to carry out my mission.

“Excuse me,” I said quietly, after looking over my shoulder. “There’s a Toys R Us Babies R Us up the road, but isn’t there just a Toys R Us around here?”

“Nope,” she said. “That’s it.”

Within minutes I was in the store, Toys R Us Babies R Us, expectant, hair-triggered.

“Ma’am?” I whispered to the bent lumbar behind Customer Service. “Ma’am?”

She straightened up. Her red shirt could have said Greatgrandmothers R Us.

But it didn’t.

The time had come for disclosure. At least partial.

“I’m looking for…” she stared at me expectantly… “for four pairs of Justin Bieber 3-D glasses.”

Her face folded into a smile.

“I’ll see, hon.”

The wait seemed interminable. I checked out the cases of Duracell on sale, tried not to think about the consequences.

She returned, emptyhanded.

“We’re all out.”

A bead of sweat pearled on my ashen brow. This could not be.

“Can you call your other stores?”

She looked at me, greatgrandmotherly annoyed.

“We have other 3-D glasses, you know.”

I paused, trembling. How much should I give away?

Then I thought of that colleague bludgeoned to death with a hockey puck in the middle of the night, that other bright young thing brought down with arsenic poutine…

“It’s… it’s for these Canadian… Canadian… people I know,” I began falteringly, then raced on. They can’t get the Bieber glasses up there, they’re not on sale at Toys R Can, though they should be able to get them, shouldn’t they? It’s insulting, pathetic, horrible. “Justin’s Canadian,” I blurted out, desperately.

“No kiddin’?”

I sized up my demographic.

“And so was Monty Hall.”

“Really!”

She seized the phone.

After forty rings, Swansea, Mass. picked up. They had one pair.

“I need four,” I croaked.

Attleboro, Mass. had a few of them left.

I thanked my World War One widow and raced out to the lot. Seconds later I was on I-95 racing north, weaving between UPS, Fedex and Da Pasquale Removals, passing on the right, eating quahog tacos and causing a sonic boom. Warwick, Cranston, Providen –

The traffic slowed, crawled, stopped. It was the storied curve near Thurbers Avenue, where accidents should happen and do. I looked helplessly off to the right, then to the left. We had just passed the classy brown and white sign reading “Historic Providence.” But here, like the Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio, stood the shed of New England Pest Control, on its roof a gargantuan blue bug, a sort of winged cockroach of mercy, rocking in the wind and blessing the immobilized motorists. I bowed reverently then looked ahead. No movement.

The Jeep Cherokee with Mass plates in front of me had two bumper stickers. One had written on it in large capital letters: YOU JUST GOT PASSED BY A GIRL. The other was black, with a figure in white, a naked, pot-bellied middle-aged man with tousled, thinning hair, pissing against the wind. Below him, a small legend: “Ex-husband.”

I turned on the radio. First, NPR, talking about irrelevant things, like world events. I switched to another AM band. Much better. Obama is a socialist, he verbally said out loud that he doesn’t agree with, y’know, the democracy in this country, he’s against us, he’s a dictator, least that’s what everybody else can’t see…

I let the window slide down. The redeemer bug rocked in a slight breeze. Ex-husband advanced a few yards. The sun shone. Home.

We crept through Providence. Then on to Pawtucket. The first police presence of the day made itself felt, on the entrances to the bridge spanning the Blackstone River. The bridge, like the Interstate, was built in the 1950s, but successive governments had pocketed the money destined to recovering it every other year in anti-oxydizing paint, and now the bridge stood rusting, close to collapse, able only to support car traffic. Any truck that takes it is subject to a $3000 fine; hence the avaricious cops, the poorly marked detours and the promise to rebuild the bridge with toothpicks.

I swept by these inconveniences, readjusted my silk scarf. I switched to FM. A plangent voice spoke of Skinsational Day Spa and laser vaginal rejuvenation.

Onto Massachusetts. The first exit was marked South Attleboro. My car crested a ramp and was deposited in front of a mall. Petsmart, T.J. Maxx, Best Buy…

I returned to Via America, I-95, and cruised another few miles under the pitiless sunshine. If there was a South Attleboro, there had to be a northern sibling, I thought to myself with cosmopolitan panache. Skinsational also offered acne-scar obliteration.

The next exit was disconcerting. Instead of the welcoming embrace of fall-apart warehouses, here there was New England in all its postcard glory, a snow-specked hillock of pilgrim forest framing a nestled Dunkin’ Donuts. I pulled into the lot, admiring the Ye Olde Mobil Mini-Marte across the street.

A woman came out of the shop, cradling a super-Dunk mocha, ready to mount her mini-van, a reassuring, sensible corner-kick mom. I called to her before she speed-dialed.

“Excuse me. Is there a Toys R Us near here?”

“Why yes!” she said, eager to help. “Take 95 south to Boston and get off on the second or third exit. You can’t miss it.”

Her phone rang. I went into the store. You took 95 north to Boston.

“Right out of the lot, then right at the fourth set of lights. Go about a mile and it’s on your right.”

Buzz-cut with the RedSox cap seemed entirely believable. I asked him for an Old Fashioned, and dunked it. I then drove through neighborhoods with signs marked “Thickly Settled.”

The Toys R Us stood apart, on a hill, in a small two-business mall. Dwarfing it in size was a jug-wine superstore, but, as I was on a mission, I did not tarry.

“I’m here for four sets of 3-D glasses. We called from Warwick.”

The Customer Service lady eyed me. “You Steve?”

I glanced around, Bourne-like, then nodded. Gawd, greatgrandmother had been indiscreet.

She reached under the desk and shoved them at me. Four pairs of 3-D Glasses. I looked at them.

“Justin Bieber?” I said fiercely.

“Wha…?”

“You said you had… four… pairs… of Justin Bieber…?”

She looked at me, perhaps glimpsing the collapsing continent before her, the mountain ranges falling foaming into the sea.

“I’ll check.”

I stuttered into my lapel, knowing that no Blackhawk was picking up the signal. A child wailed. I don’t remember the rest…

She returned. Sweet, middle-aged, fresh-faced, New England, flinty.

“We don’t got none.”

My inner scream was soundless.

Just like in the torture chamber.

Football for Foodies

Tonight the heavily favored New England Patriots lost their playoff game to the New York Jets. Aside from the feeling some empathy for football fans here in Providence, I am especially upset that my free January feasts have come to an end.

Let me explain.

When the Patriots remain in the playoffs, two of my local bars become the answer to cooking at home.

This afternoon I started at a social club – a drinking club, really – run by the Portuguese of the neighborhood. You have to be Portuguese or Cape Verdean to be a member, but you can be anyone to go and drink there. The members, as far as I can tell, are all men – cops, firemen, contractors, electricians, carpenters and a reliably deranged contingent of house painters. The lighting is naked fluorescent, the décor non-existent. These guys have grown up together, so it’s not unusual to hear shouted conversations like this:

“Hey, remember where Joey’s wife is buried?”

“Yeah.”

“Well yesterday Billy was buried just two graves over.”

“No fuckin’ kiddin’!”

Where there is a women present, which is very rare, there is a sort of unspoken chivalrous agreement to tone it down. Tonight there was a sweet redhead there, maybe thirty, which is a rarity of a rarity, so when Tom Brady threw an interception, the tall vociferous, Viking-gone-to-seed house painter who seems to live at the bar stood up and shouted, “Asshole! Douchebag!” Everyone was impressed that he had the presence of mind to leave out the normal adjective such occasions call for and remain polite.

But I digress… As this is a fraternal Portuguese place, and as this is a Patriots playoff game, there is always good food prepared by one or two of the members. Tonight there was a Mediterranean chile, lots of olives and some squid, and a light, not overcreamy seafood chowder.

I took two small bowls then watched the first half. The chowder was sublime. I considered going back for seconds, indeed was encouraged to, but I had other plans.

At half-time I left and went for a walk through the silent, snowy streets. Everyone was inside watching the game. I had to work off my first course.

Just a few blocks away is another communal bar. About twenty years ago, it had to be closed down because the building it occupied was condemned. About 40 guys from the neighborhood – called Fox Point – chipped in and bought the building around the corner. The bar was christened Around the Corner.

Fox Point is a working-class neighborhood of African-Americans, Cape Verdeans, Italians and Portuguese. In front of the bar is a parking lot that can accommodate perhaps six cars. On game days, there are usually eight black Cadillac Escalades jammed into the space.

That is because much of the clientele are big, and I mean big, black guys. They all seem to have PhD’s in football. The always shouted conversations run something like this:

“Look, the man is limpin’! That’s from that hit he took in third year at Tulane!”

“That was fourth year, brother.”

Pause.

“Yeah, right.”

There are black women present, lots of them, dressed to kill. And a lot of slobby white people. Everybody knows everybody. The bartender is a sixty-something bottle blonde shaped like a chest of drawers. She’s very friendly.

And during Patriots playoff games, there is serious cooking going on. Tonight was a choice of Philly cheese steaks or seared pork tenderloin, with baked beans, okra and a crispy salad.

I dug in at the start of the fourth quarter. Delicious.

I am so annoyed that the Patriots are out of the playoffs.

Douchebags.

La noche de los santos mexicanos

The New York Thruway on Boxing Day, or as it is properly called elsewhere, St. Stephen’s Day.

The snow hit at about 4 in the afternoon. The traffic slowed. 60, 50, 30, then 15 miles an hour. By five it was dark, so at least the whiteout could no longer be seen. The cars crept along, following each other’s tread marks in the mounting piles of snow. 5 miles an hour. Next Exit: 8 miles.

Then we stopped.

After a while people got out of their cars to see what the hold-up was. The ghostly blinking of red brake lights far ahead, the howling wind, the driving snow. Aside from the garishly lit three lanes of our southbound expressway, with its hundreds of headlights forming a ribbon of intermittent brilliance, all around was blackness. There was no way of knowing what had happened.

An hour passed.

Every ten minutes or so you had to get out of your car and wipe away the snow and ice from the windshield and bang the wipers free of frozen slush. Then back in the car, with the heat turned up to full blast on the window, in the futile hope of keeping a clear field of vision.

Another hour.

The radio did and did not help. The AM news stations were too terrifying. Already stories of abandoned cars and stranded travelers were being breathlessly reported. Repeated warnings: stay at home, do not drive. The FM proved a little better. A good reggae show calmed the nerves as the car rocked in the bitter blasts of wind. Then it was over, too soon, followed by some inane talk show. A flip of the dial. Country. No. Oldies. No. Hate radio. No. Christian. Definitely not. A search of the glove compartment yielded a few cds left there by my teenage daughter. What the hell. I slipped one in.

It was now eight o’clock. Off to my right, in the middle lane, a pick-up truck danced crazily, trying to gain some traction. It rocked, fishtailed, but could not advance.

Uh-oh.

I put my car into first. Gently played the clutch and gas pedal. Then went into reverse. Then back to first. Reverse. First. Reverse. First… Nothing.

I was stuck. We had been immobile too long, the snow was too deep.

Outside again to clear the windshield, I could hear over the roar of the wind the high-pitched, mocking whine of wheels spinning uselessly. Dim figures were digging, shoveling, pushing, a long line of ants busy in their desperation.

Back to the warmth and the music. Yes, Avril Lavigne, you have lots of problem, but so do I.

A third hour passed. I closed my eyes. Forget about the damn windshield. I directed the heat to my soaking feet. I dozed. I had a full tank of gas. What, me worry?

A sharp rap to my left. I hit a button. Miraculously, the power window still worked. It slid down all the way, snow cascaded into my lap.

A man was standing there. Fortyish. Short, stocky, with kind eyes.

“Señor. I help. Later.”

Then he was gone.

The torpor vanished. Outside again, to tend to the windshield too long neglected. The scraper struck thick ice. Scrabbling at it bare-handed, pounding the wipers. At last it was clean.

Ahead, at a distance of about ten car lengths, a riot of flashing lights. I trudged up the road to see what it was.

A garbage truck turned tow truck. Turned snow plow.

Yes!

It had grabbed a few tractor trailers from the middle and outside lanes and hauled them to the inside lane, which it had just plowed. They rumbled away, the first forward movement any of us had seen for three hours.

A half-hour later the traffic in the inside lane inched ahead. The middle lane turned into a scramble of determined bedlam, as passengers pushed, dug, pushed, to move the few precious feet onto the cleared lane.

We, in the outside lane, dug and clawed at the snow that had drifted in front of our tires. Escape was twenty very long feet away.

“Señor.”

It was him again. He held out a shovel, looking with amusement at my soaking red Vancouver Olympics mittens.

I dug a notional path for my tires toward the middle lane. Straight, no fancy turns.

The two hundred or so cars in the inside lane had all passed. The middle lane was emptying, slowly.

Another hour. But no one paid any attention to the blizzard now.

At last came our turn. I saw my man two cars up. Must not lose him.

I joined him and another man pushing a grey sedan. Two women finally got out of the back seat to help. Laughter.

“Dominicanas,” my friend explained.

They were off.

The three of us returned to the car ahead of mine, a black BMW. More rapid-fire conversation.

“¿Dominicanos?” I ventured.

“Mexicanos,” came the reply.

My guy and I pushed and pushed. Instructions were shouted. “¡Ahora!” “¡Otro lado!” “¡Atrás!”

The BMW swerved, slid, screamed, then finally found purchase and rolled forward. Across the middle lane and then, at last, onto the inside. It moved off, its red lights disappeared into the night.

There were very few of us left on the road. I turned to my friend.

“¿Tu coche?”

He nodded in the direction behind my car. At a distance of about thirty feet, his white SUV stood athwart the middle lane, ready to roll. He could leave right now.

We looked at each other. He smiled reassuringly.

The man was a saint.

We dug some more. He took the wheel, I pushed. No movement.

The shovels again.

“You guys getting out?”

A state trooper was slowly cruising along the inside lane.

“We need help,” I shouted. “One more man to push!”

“Right,” he said in a friendly manner. Then he drove off.

We turned back to my forlorn Passat. More pushing, grunting, spinning.

Then another person was beside me. The BMW guy!

“I park,” he explained.

Another saint.

The car inched forward ever so slightly.

The first saint got out. The two Mexicans discussed matters for a moment. Apparently, it was decided that the BMW man would drive.

From that moment on, things happened very quickly. The driver was an expert. He rocked the car expertly back and forth, gaining enough momentum to move forward a few feet. We two shoveled in front of him, like sweepers at a curling rink. Then one last push and the car made the cleared lane.

And then kept on going…

It disappeared.

I looked at my friend in alarm. He laughed, waved me forward.

“Go,” he said.

I stumbled through the snow up the road. Whenever there was a break in the line of cars going forward, I jumped into the inside lane and broke into a run.

The wind was still howling, the snow still blinding. Yet running up the New York Thruway in a blizzard at eleven o’clock on a Sunday night seemed a perfectly normal thing to do.

In less than a quarter of a mile, I saw the BMW and the Passat. He had found a clear part of the shoulder and pulled over.

It was my turn to tap at a door. The window of his car slid down to reveal a broad smile.

“Bye,” he said.

Then his car rolled forward and disappeared.

I got back in my car. First gear. I was moving. Second. Then third.

It was over.

All right, Ms. Lavigne, I can listen to your problems now.

Highway Clobbery

From the Edinburgh Evening News, 1978:

“While they were waiting at a bus stop in Clermiston, Mr and Mrs Daniel Thirsty were threatened by Mr Robert Clear. ‘He demanded that I give him my wife’s purse,’ said Mr Thirsty. ‘Telling him that the purse was in her basket, I bent down, put my hands up her skirt, detached her artificial leg and hit him over the head with it. It was not my intention to do anything more than frighten him off, but unhappily for us all, he died.’”

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

[With apologies to Stephen Leacock.]

The current issue of The East Side Monthly, a freebie magazine about what’s happening in the wealthiest neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, features a profile of one Reverend Jonathan Huyck. Following five years as a pastor at the American Cathedral in Paris, the Episcopal globetrotter has returned to the center of the universe, where he spent his undergrad days at Brown University. An excerpt:

“Father Huyck is no longer a student, however. He and his family are settling in as true residents. They have explored the Farmer’s Market at Lippitt Park, joined the Athenæum and RISD’s Museum of Art, and participated in Fox Point’s National Neighborhood Day event. Jonathan rides his bike to work. He hopes to get on the East Bay and Blackstone River Bike Paths soon. ‘Oh, and there is Taste of India on Wickenden Street – my all-time favorite restaurant,’ says Jonathan. ‘It is better than anything in Paris.’”

The Fright Stuff

On moving here about a decade ago, I immediately noticed that Providence, Rhode Island, is best suited not for Thanksgiving, Christmas, the Fourth of July or St. Patrick’s Day, but for Halloween. The city looks the part. Creepy neighborhoods of eighteenth-century houses give way to large murky swaths of nineteenth-century mansion mania. Ill-lit streets, dead leaves swirling through the air, memories of native son H.P. Lovecraft and frequent visitor, Edgar Allan Poe, a large population of former art students with a love of the elaborately macabre and just a general crow-in-the-graveyard feel to its black autumn nights… the place is ideal for good, dark fun.

Take last night. After the kiddie stuff – though even that was punctuated with cemeteries on lawns and “statues” coming to life and screaming through their gore at the terrified trick-or-treaters – I decided to take a stroll with my younger daughter down a commercial street near our place (The elder, Pippi Longstocking, was at a friend’s watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

We passed someone with an axe buried in her head.

At a tea-shop we saw a sign: “Alice in Wonderland.” Fortunately, we had not changed out of our costumes. My daughter was still an orange and I remained Amelia Earhardt. As she loves Alice, we decided to go in.

At the counter, on barstools, no fewer than five shapely rumps clad in clinging vintage. A head turned… full scarlet lips. The women of Mad Men.

“What’s this got to do with Alice?” the orange asked.

“Look,” I said quickly, “There are playing cards on the wall.”

A Playboy bunny appeared before us.

“I’m the rabbit,” she said.

The orange looked at her dubiously.

“Want a cupcake?”

As the bunny jiggled off, a black guy came in wearing a suit of armor. His sword looked bloodstained.

“Here you are.” The bunny handed us two cupcakes, dark, dark haemoglobin-red.

“Maybe we should go?”

The orange nodded.

We walked back home, eating the cupcakes. From the doorway of a sushi restaurant, we heard a woman’s voice.

“Mmmm, those look soooo good!”

It was Morticia Addams.

Local Color

Yesterday was one of those days that God gives us to make all the other crap in life bearable. Crisp autumn air, a blameless blue sky with a mischievous cloud or two to relieve the monotony of beauty, and nature itself turning biblical and putting on its coat of many colors.

I leave Ottawa early for the 400-mile drive back down to Providence. Behind me, to the north, on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, rise the Gatineau Hills. They are aflame, their sumac forests a startling scarlet beneath the vault of the blue.

After a half-hour on the Ottawa-Montreal expressway, I turn right, south, onto a secondary road that leads straight to the St. Lawrence River and the border. It runs through the rich dairy farms of the Ottawa Valley, crests a scruffy ridge of yellow foliage, then descends into the St. Lawrence Lowlands. Red silos and silver church steeples pointing at the sky, the stubble of harvested cornfields, spinneys of poplars the color of clementines – I stop at a honor-system roadside farmstand, slip a couple of loonies into the box and grab a small plastic bag. It contains white cheddar cheese curds, the chewy snack food of the region and, in nearby Quebec, one of the three ingredients, along with french fries and brown gravy, of poutine, French Canada’s stupendously weird contribution to sloppy cuisine.

The border at Cornwall, Ontario, is peculiar, too. Two bridges span the St. Lawrence here, one from the town of Cornwall on the Canadian mainland to Cornwall Island; the other from that island to the American side. Canada used to have its multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art border station on the island, but when it decided recently to arm its border guards, the proprietors of Cornwall Island protested. And they are not just any landlords – they are Mohawks, jealous of their independence (there’s more Mohawk land on the New York side). They tolerated the border post, but they would not stand for government men carrying guns on their land. Neither side blinked. The result? The Canada border station was moved: It is now on the mainland and is little more than a couple of makeshift shacks with their rear ends sticking into a riverside traffic circle at the foot of the bridge, an embarrassment unsuccessfully embellished by a flowing clothesline of red maple leaf flags.

As if in retaliation, the first of the two grand bridges – the Canadian one – has been left in ridiculous disrepair by the authorities. It doesn’t seem to have been resurfaced since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in the 1950s. The cars crawl up and over it, juddering and jolting – and, no doubt, spilling the steaming contents of countless Tim Horton’s coffee cups every day.

As I wipe the hot coffee from my jeans, the traffic picks up and we pass the deserted, grandiose Canadian border station on the island. Then up and up the American span, an aquamarine suspension bridge, rising gracefully over the dark waters of the southern arm of the St. Lawrence. There is construction at the midway point of the bridge; a traffic light controls our impatience. The wait is long, but we are high, so very high above the earth and water. My fellow drivers start to look around. To the north, forty or fifty miles’ distant, the red slash of the Gatineau. To the south, at about the same distance, the looming orange outline of the Adirondacks. Beneath us, far below, two mammoth container ships, one red, the other grey, plow smartly eastward, pursued by playful seagulls, white against the deep blue water. The ships are the heralds of many others to come, in the annual race to get out of the Seaway – past the locks near Montreal then beyond Quebec City to the open sea – before winter closes in and shuts the waterway down.

And then, at eye level about two hundred yards to our left, comes a great, noisy chevron of Canada geese, racing south, to escape the winter, too. Power windows slide down to hear their honking.

The wait at the American border crossing stretches on. The Americans’ spanking new techno-up-the-wazoo facility, cleverly not built on Mohawk land, has seven lanes open, all of them crammed with cars, SUVs, pick-up trucks and motorcycles. It is the start of the Canadian Thanksgiving/Columbus Day weekend.

The minutes, then the quarter-hours, pass… we are barely moving. Three lanes away, a woman gets out of her purple sportscar. Her companion does the same. They are in their thirties, Hollywood blondes in tight jeans, clinging sweaters and pricey sunglasses. The first yells, to the border-guard booth some twenty car-lengths away, something to the effect, “Why is this taking so damn long?!” Her Paris Hilton friend, from outside the convertible, reaches over and leans on the horn with one hand and then gestures with her free arm for all the rest of us to follow suit. There are no takers. The music from the car radios continues to mix in a low, incomprehensible symphony. The women shake their straw manes, laughing, and get back in their car.

Once past the border, I turn left, eastward, and am immediately in the Akwesasne Reserve. I make my usual stop at the Bear’s Den, a trading post that just happens to have cheap gasoline and tax-free ciggies. The lot is filled with Mohawk teenagers, jumping up and down, waving signs, offering to wash cars to benefit their high school. Some are in full Iroquois regalia. Three braves set to work on my car, and when I leave the Bear’s Den, my green Passat gleams in the yellowing light of mid-day.

The moment is so lovely that I decide to take the most scenic of all the scenic routes leading home. At an Indian mega-lodge complex surrounded by a sea of parked cars – Akwesasne’s casino – I turn left and head south, through the narrow strip of the fertile Lowlands on the New York side. The reservation is left behind, giving way to tiny towns, a few ramshackle farms and lonely stands of trees tawny and gold in the sunlight. At a crossroads in a small town, there are two horsedrawn buggies parked on the shoulder, a trestle table set up between them. Bearded Amish men are selling their produce.

Their customers are south Asians, two women in brilliant, multicolored saris. Their laughing husbands click their digital cameras as the young women pose with the bemused Amish elders. I glance at the plates of their expensive sedans: Ontario. My guess, given the affluence, irony and ease: Toronto. But how could these big-city types have found their way here, my secret way south, far off the beaten track? Then I remember the name of the small town: Bombay. Clearly, these Torontonians possess a GPS and a sense of humor.

The land grows poorer as the mountains approach. Boulders crop up in the green grassy fields, which in turn cede to a tough barenness resembling the moors of England. Then comes my favorite stretch of this familiar detour – the road describes an elongated S-shaped curve down into a gentle valley, past a well-kept red farmhouse at the bottom and then up to a rocky pasture where a herd of bison grazes, magnificent and iconic. Today I slow to take in the sight – just as two minivans with Connecticut plates come to a halt on the opposite shoulder and slide open their side doors. I brake and let two Muslim families, the women in headscarves shepherding a brace of children, cross the road to snap pictures. They wave enthusiastically to thank me.

The farmland gives out. Small towns, St. Regis Falls being the most beautiful, huddle in the forests of the foothills, built around rushing streams. Then, through a long, uninhabited straightaway, perhaps twenty miles in length, up and up, bordered on both sides by impenetrable pines. I slip an incongruous Scottish novel into the tapedeck.

A few unkempt clusters of houses now appear in the trees every once in a while, their front yards covered in used car tires and rusting trailers. Human geography does not always match its surroundings.

Then a few miles north of Saranac Lake comes another cherished stretch of the journey. I break out of the forest and enter a long and broad alpine meadow, a Sound of Music expanse perhaps a couple of square miles in size. On all sides, in the middle distance, standing in rumpled grandeur, rise several different ranges of the Adirondacks, now all a brilliant bouquet of every color in the autumnal palette. In the center of the meadow, a tiny graveyard, old, unfenced and well-tended.

I hit the eject button on the tapedeck then slow to look around me. To my left I hear a roar. Passing me leisurely are a middle-aged couple on a Harley, all black leather and fringes and badges. The husband, a Jack Sprat of a fellow wearing a Old Glory bandanna and an expression of pure delight, turns and says something to his voluminous partner. She laughs, hugs him closer… they’re livin’ the dream.

He guns it, and as the mountains and the sky watch, the woman on the back gives me a thumbs-up and a smile.

The Secret Ride of Walter Meaty

The heretic had gone back to his errors, the inquisitor shouted to the villagers over the roar of the flames and the wails of the dying, “like a dog returning to his vomit!”

Pleased with that chapter-closing sentence, I decided to return to my beloved bike path. It had been a long day of torture and burning.

Within minutes my two-wheeled destrier was groaning under my weight and we were creaking over the bridge. As it was late afternoon and the days were shortening, I would not go all the way to the path’s end at Bristol, Rhode Island, fifteen miles’ distant. Instead I would turn around at the six-mile mark, at the Extramarital Parking State Park. That’s not its real name, but past experience of pedaling through the parking lot of the pretty seaside spot had usually included seeing a couple of rocking pick-up trucks and hearing the joyful squeak of shock absorbers.

On my way there I whizzed past a tanned twenty-year-old Adonis clad only in what seemed to be a handkerchief. He was sprinting, but I effortlessly distanced him, allowing myself a brief thrill of intergenerational supremacy. Then I realized I was on a bicycle, and had I been on a roadway, a World War Two veteran in a beat-up Buick could have done the same to me.

The cars in the parking lot were not dancing. Just truly stationary. Oh well.

There was a reason for this: a farmer’s market was being held alongside the lot, so this was a day for vegetable voyeurs. Before investing in an organic tomato, I called a friend in Bristol, who has a plantation of tomato vines. As I waited for her to pick up, I felt a zephyr of wind tickle the back of my neck. “You’re on the bike path?” she said, in alarm. “There’s a huge storm down here.”

I looked to the south. Black, black, black.

Almost immediately on returning to the path, the wind kicked in. If the storm’s coming from the south, I muttered, why is a north wind blowing in my face?

Pedaling became harder, much harder, as the wind strengthened. I made it to the four-mile mark, past the Dari Bee ice cream joint. Its roadside sign – Kids! Scream Until They Stop! – was buffeted by the gusts.

Then alongside the bay as it narrows toward Providence. The water was choppy, angry. Even a gargantuan oil tanker tied up at the dock could be seen rocking as if extramarital.

Adonis came barreling toward me, propelled by the wind at his back, Buick-like. His hanky fluttered.

At Voldemort’s Cottage – a country club on a big rock in the sea – the wind became a howl. I moved into lower and lower gear, it seemed as if I were pedaling in place.

Then on to the wide-open space of the Fallopian Straightaway. Here the bike path sits on an old railway bed, arrow-straight. To the east, a large pond; to the west, the open expanse of the bay. Water everywhere, just a foot or two beneath the straining spokes.

The wind became a wall. No, I was in Boulder, Colorado, going straight up a mountain. I looked out at the bay to get my bearings. The water churned white – and it was on fire.

OGM! (Oh Goodness Me!), I thought, my mind unhinged by panic, it’s the apocalypse!! A cloud of brown smoke skittered demonically over the heaving sea. Where’s the Antichrist? And what will he be wearing?

I heard the flap of a plastic bag and a sudden whoosh. Even my tomato had deserted me.

The smoke was coming closer, coming toward the Fallopian Straightaway. Brown, choking, brimstone… No, wait… it wasn’t smoke, it was sand. On the far shore stood the industrial port of the city, home to great pyramids of crud. I glimpsed a geyser of brown stuff whip into the air from one of them, and head out to sea.

The cloud got closer and closer, and then was on me. Sahara, Gobi, Star Wars. Although the sun was still out, I could barely see. The whipping wind and the tiny particles… I wouldn’t need a facial for months.

Through the swirling brownish murk I could see a figure approaching. A cyclist. Young woman. She came nearer. A very low-cut top barely suspended by spaghetti straps. Of a blinding, otherworldly white, to match her teeth. She bent low, very low over her handlebars. I stared. Was she the Antichrist? No! OGM! I can’t believe it! It’s Selena Gomez!

She flashed past me. Then came her companion. A billboard for bad tattoos disguised as her boyfriend. For some reason, he glared at me.

By now the cloud had lifted, but not the wind. I struggled past another jogger, a stocky, lego-like woman, blonde to the point of albino. She seemed not even to notice the impending global cataclysm. A wicked gust of wind struck me in the chest, almost toppling me over. If I fall off, I thought, at least I’m wearing my…

Oh no! In my haste to escape the dog vomit, I had forgotten my helmet. What if I get blown off the bike, fall on my head, crushing the centers of reasoning and intellect? What would happen? Would I join the Tea Party? What about my family? My block? My neighborhood? My city? Hell, what about the whole country…

Humbly, I thought back to the episode when Captain Kirk has to let his pacifist girlfriend get run over by a car, or else the whole course of history would change and Hitler would win the Second World War. How could I have forgotten that helmet? Had I no sense of responsibility?

I was almost at the end of the the Straightaway. A Vietnamese couple with a baby carriage and a long fishing pole stood laughing in the wind, looking out to sea.

The fools!

I heaved myself into the home stretch. The sun still shone, the birds still sang, people still fell in love.

Unbelievable.

At last, in front of my fridge, I tried to make sense of it all, to recollect in tranquility. I reached in for a tall boy of Narragansett beer. Yes, it was possible to live the heroic life, to face down certain death, to emerge triumphant. There was nobility to every action.

I looked at the can I was holding. Below the brand logo, a message read: “The Official Beer of the Clam.”

Judge, Jury and Jameson

Visitors here may recall that last month, when recounting how a Quebec City emergency-room nurse recommended Pepsi-Cola as a cure for incipient strangulation (see “Je me souviens”), I was moved to make what could be thought an unkind and indefensible comparison to similar medicinal beliefs in Ireland.

Unkind, perhaps. Indefensible? You be the judge of that.

A crucial piece of exculpatory evidence emerged – in a story I had never heard before – during a conversation with my father here in Ottawa last night. He is about ten days shy of his eighty-ninth birthday, so our interaction can be somewhat stop-and-start, when not wandering into fields of weirdness. Or it can be lyrical. Depends on the day.

Yet one sturdy artifact that has survived wholly intact from our past is his active, mischievous interest in my hair. Ever since my teen years, it has been too long. Now it’s white. When did that happen? Looks greasy. Looks unkempt. Is it thinning? When you going to get it cut? Etc.

Last night the stars aligned differently and the hair hectoring ceased. Not only that, the subject turned to his hair – specifically. his very first haircut, in his hometown of Tralee, County Kerry. He must have been about four or five, and his mother decided it was time for her curly-headed eldest to get a proper shearing.

His father, my grandfather, was instructed to bring the little boy to the barber. It was the mid-1920s, in what was then a remote corner of Ireland.

Before they left, however, his mother handed his father a small bottle of whiskey. A brief discussion ensued, but, as usual, the woman won.

So the haircut took place. My father cried. His father squirmed.

When it was over my grandfather held out the bottle of whiskey to the barber.

“Now what might that be for?” the barber inquired.

“It’s the lad’s mother,” my father’s father replied, scientifically. “You’re to massage his scalp with it, so he doesn’t catch cold on the way home.”

The defense rests.

Film Notes

In the early 1980s I spent an afternoon hanging out with nuns.

Explanation? On a visit to London, I was told by an English first cousin that her aunt (not related to me) worked as an Irish nun in a French prison. Perhaps I could visit her?

So arrangements were eventually made and I went to see Sister Mary at the women’s prison at Fleury-Mérogis south of Paris. An elaborate luncheon had been laid out, and I spent a pleasant few hours chatting with the sisters about their life in the prison and my life on the Left Bank. Much wine was consumed.

The nuns hailed from Portugal, the Philippines, and Ireland, but, given their work among the convicts, everyone was fluent in French.

When we finally rose from the table Sister Mary, or rather Sœur Marie, suggested that we take a tour of the place. We were accompanied by a pretty young novice, who had recently arrived from Lisbon.

We walked through corridors, past cell blocks and infirmaries before at last arriving at a large window that looked out over an exercise yard. There were about a dozen or so women walking about in a desultory manner, smoking, talking, killing time.

Suddenly Sister Mary grabbed the novice’s sleeve, pointed at one of the inmates and quickly said something that I did not catch. The novice nodded, obviously impressed

As we were away from the others, I ventured, in English, “What did you just say, Sister?”

She turned to me, her Dublin face alive with excitement. “That woman out there,” she said in a whisper, “was Mesrine’s girlfriend!”

Birth of a Woman

On a recent road trip that culminated in a Quebec City emergency room (see: “Je me souviens” below), our first stop was in a town about an hour or so west of Albany, in upstate New York. I was with my daughters: the younger, eleven; the elder, a couple of months shy of fifteen. On the long car ride from Providence, they had been reading aloud for me the first book in the Harry Potter series.

Nice family moment, a touching example of daughterly solicitude for their father’s inner life.

Just off the Thruway, there was a strip of motels. The Best Western. No vacancies. Days Inn. No rooms.

We were told there was some sort of gambling convention in town. We might not find anything.

Desperate, we pulled into a ramshackle place called Happy Journey, half-hidden by a highway overpass and a sign announcing “Only $50 a Night!”

Sitting in the lobby’s sole folding chair was an unhappy, stringbean of a fellow, in a filthy t-shirt and soiled jeans. He was barefoot, and his feet were not pretty. Some sort of infection. In his hands, he held a cob of corn, which he toyed with as he watched us wordlessly.

The clerk emerged from a back room and came to us at the desk. He was south Asian – Pakistani or Indian – and the whites of his eyes were the color of cherry tomatoes. And around his left eye was a dark and angry bruise, as if someone had landed a good punch there not so long ago.

As he fumbled to find us a key, a large middle-aged black man came into the lobby. He was way too happy, he was flying. “I’m looking for my daughter!” he explained with a laugh. “Anyone here seen my daughter?”

By this time stringbean had left and we had our key. We walked across the lot and saw stringbean go into a room. At the window a disheveled woman looked out from the darkness. He did not turn on the light.

Our room, a few doors down, was lit by a naked lightbulb. There was a lumpy double bed, draped with a greenish-yellowish coverlet, a couch of a similar color, and a tv on a stand. The walls were slightly stained. Obviously, the place had not had a deep cleaning since about 1964. And in the bathroom, a pipe protruded from the wall above the bath. There was no shower head, just a pipe.

I sighed and tried to make the best of it. Look, I started saying, it’s only for one night. We won’t bring in all our stuff. We’ll just go to sleep and get up early. It’s already late and we don’t want to drive around all night trying to find a room. You heard them say at the other places that everything’s booked up around here…

I looked searchingly at my younger daughter’s face. Sure, Daddy, she said. We can do that. It’s fine.

Then I turned to the older one.

She looked into my eyes. The look she gave me was not the one of a daughter to a father. I recognized that instantly. No, this was something entirely different, something as timeless as the Garden of Eden.

At last she spoke: “I am not staying here.”

Une femme est née.

Je me souviens

Last week I found myself in the hospital emergency room of the Université Laval, in Quebec City. There was a certain irony to the proceedings as I had attended that university more than three decades previously, and this was the first time since then that I had been back to the lovely citadel city of the St. Lawrence.

My eleven-year-old daughter was choking. Not exactly choking, but in extreme discomfort. A piece of steak had lodged itself in her esophagus – thankfully not her windpipe – and she couldn’t swallow anything. Worse, she had to spit up saliva about once or twice a minute.

Her sister and I had tried everything. Sticking fingers down her throat. The Heimlich. Giving her a hot bath… Nothing doing, so here it was, one in the morning, and we were in Laval’s emergency room, a clean, spacious, efficient place, a monument, in fact, to socialized medicine.

The nurse who received us was a standard-issue French-Canadian sexpot. She sized up the situation, and before checking us in, told me to go to a vending machine and buy a Pepsi. Sometimes Pepsi works on these kind of things, she explained.

Now, for those of you not up on the arcana of intra-Canadian hostility, “Pepsi” is a very derogatory term used by Anglo-Quebecers to demean French Canadians, since the latter are supposed to have a love of the stuff. (The French, it should be said, give as good as they get: tête carrée, literally “square-head” or blockhead, is a term of non-endearment used for Anglos, in part due to their uptight, play-by-the-rules, straight, boy-scout, boring demeanor as viewed by the Latin, loose, sensual, fun-loving Québécois.) There are a lot of other epithets hurled back and forth between the two sides, but let’s not get Belgian here.

So the nurse told me to get a Pepsi for medicinal purposes. As cultural stereotypes run, this was akin to going to a Dublin hospital for psoriasis and being told to go buy a bottle of whiskey.

I spent a loonie and bought the Pepsi, chuckling. It didn’t work. Eventually a doctor came by and with breezy ease managed to induce my brave little daughter to upchuck. All was then well with the world.

Immediately, we then left the world of medicine and returned to the world of Quebec, which is to say, language: how is it, the doctor asked, clearly curious, that you three Rhode Islanders all speak French? Two nurses, obviously having bitten their tongues over the same question, came over to hear the answer. All three of us looked like week-old ratatouille – it was two-thirty now – so I skipped most of the biographical details and explained our connection to France, where both my children had been born and spent time in school.

It was the third time we had heard that question in two days. Ah, Quebec. And now, thanks to the doctor at the Université Laval, an unbidden memory came back to me.

When I was student at Laval, Quebec was living interesting times. A separatist government had just been elected, causing panic elsewhere in Canada and sparking the corporate stampede from Montreal to Toronto, which subsequently replaced Montreal as the country’s most populous and most important city. At the time, politics were dominated by two brilliant French Canadians: the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who shoved bilingualism down the throats of a recalcitrant English Canada, wrote a new constitution and repatriated it from Westminster and, in a nifty cosmopolitan move deplored by many traditionalists, switched the entire country to the metric system.

The other great figure was the dimunitive, chain-smoking, plainspoken, charismatic René Lévesque, the leader of the separatists and the premier of the province of Quebec. With these two dynamic Québécois in charge, la merde was invariably going to hit the fan.

So there was a referendum on Quebec independence in 1980. Then a federal referendum in 1992. Then another Quebec referendum in 1995. These campaigns and the French-language-only laws enacted in Quebec sucked all the air out of Canadian political debate; weary Anglos called the whole business: the neverendum. In both Quebec votes, the indépendantistes were defeated, but only very very narrowly. The hinterland, and Quebec City, voted yes in massive majorities, but the city of Montreal, with its Anglos and other ethnic communities, and, most important, the majority French-speakers worried about jobs and the cosmopolitan nature of their home town, voted no.

But all that still lay in the future when I was at Laval. At my time there, the entire country was walking on egg-shells, waiting for Lévesque to make his move. Hope and yearning could be seen elsewhere, on the larger stage: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin were meeting at Camp David (speaking English, the Quebec press sourly noted), so perhaps, it was thought naively, this was an era of sea change. Perhaps Quebec would, indeed, become its own country.

As a tête carrée, I kept a low, timid profile. My French was good enough to understand lectures and do the required reading, but my Anglo trap remained firmly shut in classes where all the other students were voluble Québécois. Only once, I should say here in fairness, was a beer poured over me for being from Ontario.

In January, I had a meeting with my professor of a Nouvelle France history class, a very prominent French-Canadian historian who, for reasons that shall soon become clear, I will not name. He was a youthful forty-something who rather bewilderingly led our conversation toward the founding charters of the Université Laval. He reminded me in florid French that Laval was the second-oldest university in North America (after Harvard), but, he added, its charter had been amended many times.

What the hell is he talking about, I thought.

Eventually, it became clear. Laval was officially a bilingual university, he said meaningfully. I want you to hand your essay into me… in English.

What the…?

It took some hemming and hawing, but eventually he issued a version of the professorial complaint that has echoed through the halls of academia since professors were first invented. His variant: I want to see if you, an English-Canadian, write as wretchedly in your mother tongue as my French-Canadian students do in theirs.

And, he warned conspiratorially in this Trudeau-Lévesque egg-shell time, you mustn’t let the other students know you’re writing your essay in English.

In the emergency room, as my saved-from-strangulation daughter finished off the warm Pepsi, I even remembered what the subject of the essay was: mariages à la gaumine. These were a ploy that frustrated the Catholic Church in New France. All that was needed to make a marriage legitimate was the blessing of a priest. So, canny, penniless peasants working the farmland of seventeenth-century Quebec, who were unwilling to shell out money to the church (and were anticlerical, in any event), would stand up at the end of Sunday mass, just as the priest turned toward the congregation and blessed it, and then hurriedly recite their marriage vows and – voilà! – they were wed.

What’s not to like?

So as we got into the taxi outside the hospital, I thought about how I had researched that paper. I loved the subject. To hoots of disbelief, I told my friends about it. They were all Senegalese exchange students, as foreign to the Québécois of that time as I was. I spent a lot of time with my African pals, hanging out, drinking O’Keefe beer (we called ourselves les philosophes O’Keefe), eating couscous, and talking, when women weren’t present, about women. There were lots of cultural hilarities: “Stephen, is it true that at the sports center locker room, the men walk around completely naked (tout nu)?” Yes. “C’est pas possible!”

Another arose from the weather. Some time in mid-January, I realized that my Senegalese friends had, since early December, not gone outdoors. An explanation is required here: although I hailed from Ottawa, the second-coldest capital city in the world (after Ulan Bator, Mongolia), even I was shocked by how absolutely polar a Quebec City winter coud be. The Senegalese, like most of the student body, kept to the asbestos-lined tunnels linking all the buildings of Laval’s windswept suburban campus. They didn’t dare go out.

But one evening, at their dormitory, we knocked on doors and moved up and down floors, in a scavenger hunt for hats, gloves, scarves and coats. The Québécois who lent us their clothes laughed and, none too discreetly, admired the stunning Dakar beauty who had been wisely delegated as our spokeswoman.

So a dozen of us stood in the lobby at midnight, all bundled up, a kaleidoscope of wool and color. It was a starry, moonless night, perfectly still. The temperature was about thirty below zero. I warned my companions to take shallow breaths only. And to feel the hairs in their nostrils freeze. That’s when you know it’s really cold.

I took them outside. A white plain stretched before us. Eyes opened wide, incredulous. Brilliant white smiles. Peals of laughter. “C’est pas possible! C’est pas possible!” The beautiful girl took off a glove and ran her hand over a snowdrift. And then shouted in triumphant disbelief. Her friends gathered around her and did the same.

They might as well have been on the moon.

And we were all of us so utterly foreign, in this strange and wonderful place.

The taxi flashed by the main campus of the university. My daughters were slumped together in the back seat, already asleep. We arrived at our hotel.

A few days after the moonwalk, the professor came over to me after class in the hallway. There were a few shaggy students hanging about, smoking listlessly (this was back in the day, remember), casually appraising us.

“Remember, Monsieur O’Shea,” he said in French. “In the language of Sadat and Begin.”

I nodded and he smiled. The others looked on, uncomprehending.

Vive le Québec.