Hour 43

Just got a call from Greg Byrne, Liberal candidate from our riding. At least I think it was him… all I heard when I picked up the phone was silence, then “this is Greg Burr…” then I hung up. Any time there’s that moment’s silence before someone speaks you’re either about to be solicited or broken up with. Maybe he was calling to say we’re over. So sad.

Since pretty much most currently interesting/peculiar things are still in process and have yet to achieve narrative fullness, I thought I’d regale you with a triptych from the vault.

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In the late 80s I had a summer job working at a youth hostel near where my parents lived on the Gaspé Coast of Quebec. It was called “Auberge du Chateaux” or The Castle Inn. This being because the owner/operator had undertaken the long term project of building a large, multi-turret castle in the woods about a half kilometer behind the main building of the hostel. I’ll talk more about this whole affair at a later date. My job was initially supposed to be two separate jobs, funded by two separate grants… but only one grant came in so I was hired to do light housekeeping, meal preparation and general administration in the morning then light carpentry and painting of the castle in the afternoon. Weird. At one point in the summer one of the guests did a little laundry and put a couple of t-shirts and some underwear on the line out back to dry… then left the next day forgetting the stuff. One of the shirts was a cool design for a Picasso retrospective at a museum in Montreal. Since it didn’t look like he was coming back for it I made that shirt mine. A perk.

That same summer my friend Kevin B. was working at a Home Hardware in Campbellton, NB where we both went to high school. Near the end of summer, aside from his usual customer relation/stock monkey duties the manager asked if he could, for some extra pay, paint the outside second floor cinder block wall and chimney. Since it was a two man job, and on a Sunday, he offered me the chance to help him in a Huck Finny sort’ve way. We tackled the wall and the job was going well. It was essentially one large white expanse that needed to be red now, for some reason, that stretched up about 25-30 feet with a 6 foot chimney at the top of the wall. The catch was that our footing was a sheet metal first floor roof that was at about at 35-40 degree angle. The extension ladder we were using was well anchored by nailed two by fours, but at the chimney part you were standing about 50 feet off the ground. I volunteered to do the chimney because I was the more experienced painter, having been doing it on and off all summer long. I had the paint can hanging off the side of the ladder, holding on with one hand and flailing away with a wide brush with the other, leaning my youthful torso back at the waist to get a better range of motion. Just then I felt the top of the ladder slightly pull away from the wall and start to tip backwards. Vertigo hit immediately and I slammed the ladder back forward, dropped the paint brush and put both hands on the ladder and started breathing heavily through every hole I had. Eventually I creeped down the ladder and then down to the parking lot and that was the end of my, till then, fairly benign relationship with heights.

At the end of the summer Kevin’s Home Hardware manager decided to have a staff party aboard a fairly nice cabin cruiser boat he rented. We were going to take an afternoon jaunt in the Restigouche from Campbellton out to where the river opened out into the Chaleur Bay in Carleton, QC, about a 100 kilometer round trip. Since I’d ostensibly been staff, though only for a day, I was invited along. The other staff was nice enough, though not overly appealing and squarish in their demeanor. Still the party offered something neither Kevin, nor I, in our seemingly endless quest for dissolution, could resist: free beer. I put on my Picasso shirt and packed up a change of slightly warmer clothes, being warned that the trip back might be significantly cooler, being late in summer and early evening by then. The voyage was great fun… though I felt a little awkward not really knowing most of the other folks, and they mostly joking around in that “work story” way that people have when they aren’t privy to any other part of each other’s lives. But by the time we’d reached Carleton both Kevin and I had helped ourselves to enough of the FREE BEER that we could’ve made (in our definition of it) pithy conversation with Death Row prisoners or dolphins if we had the chance. There was swimming (which I didn’t partake in) and a BBQ (which I did) and with my long-standing natural clumsiness around food, managed to splatter mustard all over my now-cherished Picasso shirt. I changed into my back-up garb… which was fine since we were soon enroute back to NB. The river was much choppier and windier on the way back, and Kevin and I were much drunker. But instead of the seasickness you might expect, we took to the roughness, parking ourselves at the bow of the boat and shrieking like Vikings every time a blast of spray shot up in our faces… which was often. Eventually the manager encouraged us back into the cabin citing worry for our safety. As we approach the wharf Kevin and I had decided that this was indeed one of the best Sundays EVER and that it shouldn’t end so soon… what with it only being 7 or 8 pm. While everyone else was chatting and hugging and saying “good rest of the summer,” and such things, Kevin and I loaded up our backpacks with as much of the leftover FREE BEER we could carry and stealthily (we thought) slipped off the boat and started running down the wharf. Kevin, being naturally clumsy around everything but food, tripped over his feet and a few bottles went tinkling across the gravel, sparkling in the twilight. I glanced over my shoulder back at the boat to see if anyone had spotted our less than spy-like escape, but it was hard to focus on that distance. Kevin gathered himself up and we wobbled back to his apartment. We were celebrating out masterminded coup… the liberation of the beer… for about 45 minutes until Kevin passed out on his couch. I quietly continued drinking, lying on the living room floor, listening to Rush or Marillion (all Kevin seemed to own) until I too surrendered to the night.

It was only the next day, nursing hangovers with leftover beer and strange pita/ham/cheese/mayo sandwiches Kevin had made, that I realized that my Picasso shirt hadn’t made it off the boat. Ah the casualties of war.

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Just a side note. I wrote this early morning at home (where I have no internet) so I saved it on a Zip disc. The Zip disc, which is about 5-6 years old wouldn't work in any of the external drives we have at the lab... so I had to take it down the hall to the audio lab that has a G3 with an internal drive that seemed to read the disc without trouble... except it isn't hooked up to any networks or internet... so I had to find another Zip disc to temporarily save this on... realizing that most of the discs we have are 250 MB and the G3 will only handle 100 MB discs, I had to scrounge 'til I found one of those... then save it on the new Zip, bring it back to the main lab, unload it via the external onto this computer and bang... blog entry. How much do I care about you guys?