Fifty Shades of Black (19 page)

 

 

Where There's Smoke, There's Ire

H
ave you spotted any lately? They frequently travel in packs of three or four, but just as often they're solo. You see them clustered around the entrances of bars, restaurants, hospitals, office buildings and the like. They're easy to identify by their furtive gestures, hunched shoulders and darting glances over their shoulders.

CBC Radio icon Peter Gzowski once interviewed some visiting Russians who had encountered packs of these creatures bunched around the doorways of hospitals in the Far North. “It is a great pity, the number of prostitutes in your North,” one Russian lamented solemnly.

Gzowski laughed. “Those aren't prostitutes—they're smokers.”

Small wonder that Canada's nicotine addicts have been reduced to the behaviour of urban coyotes—there are fewer and fewer places they can indulge. Smoking is forbidden at the zoo in Peterborough, Ontario; at beaches in Vancouver, White Rock, Arnprior and Orillia; next to building entrances in all of Alberta, the Yukon, Nova Scotia and British Columbia.

As for smoking in restaurants, I'm not sure if there's any place in the country where you can still light up and order a meal at the same time.

I'm not complaining, you understand. As a reformed nicomaniac, I'm just as self-righteous and intolerant of public smoking as the next person. I'm just saying that anybody who still smokes has got it particularly tough in this era of cancer-conscious, clean-air-zealous, extreme tobacco hostility.

Not to mention having to fork over ten dollars for a small pack of gaspers.

It's more like fifteen bucks a pack if you buy your smokes in New York City. In an effort to reduce still further the number of New York smokers, Gotham mayor Michael Bloomberg has jacked up tobacco taxes to levels that would make a crack dealer blush.

But New Yorkers are an inventive lot. There's a place on Staten Island where you can buy your fix for only $2.95 a pack.

But this is New York, so there's a catch, natch.

You have to roll the cigarettes yourself.

The helpful folks at Island Smokes will assist you. There's a cigarette-stuffing machine on site and mounds of pipe tobacco (it's taxed at a lower rate than cigarette tobacco). You sit on a wooden stool alongside up to a dozen other hard-core smokers, insert an empty cigarette paper into a hole, press a button and out the other end comes a rolled smoke. Takes about four seconds per unit.

It's a tiny, legalistic loophole that the proprietors of Island Smokes are exploiting and it probably won't last forever. City lawyers have already slammed the owners with a cease-and-desist order; the tax gendarmes have dropped by and informed them that they are in violation of at least three city bylaws.

Another radio icon, Garrison Keillor, once wrote a short story about the Last of the Smokers, in which America's final desperate, defiant clutch of smokers were hunted down, captured and rehabili­tated by the minions of decency. It was a Swiftian satirical piece of writing, deliberately exaggerating the plight of smokers to the point of absurdity.

Or maybe not.

Yet another writer (and smoker) thought and wrote about the filthy vice. Kurt Vonnegut defined the habit of smoking cigarettes as “a socially acceptable form of suicide.”

Vonnegut had a black sense of humour. He died, still smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, at the age of eighty-four.

But with a wicked smoker's cough, I'll bet.

 

 

Shakespeare the Spin Doctor

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

—William Shakespeare

A
h yes. The enduring fame of infamy. Names of monsters like Karla Homolka and Clifford Olson are etched on our minds for life, but . . . that woman who pulled three kids from a burning house? What was her name again?

Which brings us to Richard.

A time bomb of a handle to lumber a kid with, and not just because of its unfortunate diminutive, “Dick.”

Richard conjures up the spectre of
Richard III
, one of Shakespeare's earlier plays. In the Bard's estimation, Richard III was emphatically Not a Nice Guy.

In Shakespeare's telling, King Richard has Henry VI murdered along with his son. Richard also offs his wife Anne Neville, his own brother George, sundry other royals and, most infamously, the two little princes—twelve-year-old Edward and nine-year-old Richard. What a beast,
n'est-ce pas
?

But what if it never happened? What if Richard III, instead of being England's most vilified monarch, was merely a victim of Tudor spin doctors?

Could be. The dynasty that replaced Richard III made a habit of blaming everything they could on the previous administration (sound familiar?) and when it came to political slander, a certain young playwright from Stratford-upon-Avon, who came along a century or so later, turned out to be the Karl Rove of his time. Richard suffered from a slight curvature of the spine; Shakespeare turned him into a brooding hunchback. Shakespeare has King Richard killing the Duke of Somerset at the Battle of St. Albans. No mean feat. Richard would have been two years old at the time.

Indeed, there is no evidence that Richard was guilty of any of the killings Shakespeare attributes to him. As for the murder of the princes in the tower, experts agree that no modern court would convict Richard of the crime. Any number of royal court intriguers could have benefited from the disappearance of the princes—most especially Richard's successor, Henry VII. If Richard had a better PR department he might be regarded today not as a blot on the royal escutcheon but as a champion of the people—he abolished press censorship, established the right to bail for people awaiting trial, cleaned up England's finances and even performed heroically in battle, despite his physical frailty. A historian of the time records that “to his last breath he held himself nobly in a defending manner.”

Unfortunately, Richard not only lost his life at Bosworth, he lost the battle too. And it's the victors who get to write the history books.

Reminds me of a certain US president who tried to remake America. He created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments that cost billions. He set up a national agency to regulate pollution; another to guard workers' health and safety. He even tried to bring in a guaranteed minimum wage and a national health plan for low-income families. Like Richard III, his time in office was cut short.

Odd thing: his name was Richard too—Richard Milhous Nixon.

Makes you think.

 

 

Ice Fishing in the Olympics?

W
e can all agree that the Olympics have become utterly silly, right? Synchronized swimming has always been goofy; beach volleyball is a voyeur's wet dream, aimed, it would seem, at attracting an audience of creepy guys in stained raincoats who normally hang out in peep show arcades. And equestrian dressage? Please. Are there eleven people
in the world
who have ever sat through an entire episode of equestrian dressage televised coverage?

There was a time when the Olympics were serious. I have stood on the track at Olympia in Greece where athletes of antiquity vied to see who was the fastest runner, the wiliest wrestler, the most agile gymnast. Those Olympic Games were simple and straightforward; but that was two thousand years ago. The modern Olympic Games are a travelling circus of civic hoopla, media sensationalism and under-the-table corruption and graft. The athletes today are all but an afterthought amid the wining and dining and wheeling and dealing that constitutes the modern Olympic experience.

And now the seedy backroom boys who run the Olympics are on the verge of lowering the Olympics bar to limbo depths: they are considering making ice fishing an Olympic sport.

Really. Last winter (you may have missed it) the World Ice Fishing Championship was held in Wisconsin, and when it was over, the US Anti-Doping Agency rounded up the contestants.

To test their urine for the presence of steroids and/or growth hormones.

Trust me: there are no drugs in ice fishing. Unless beer counts.

I spent my formative winters not far from the ice-fishing hotbed (okay, not hot) of Lake Simcoe in Southern Ontario. I also spent more than a dozen winters in and around Thunder Bay. I am somewhat of an expert on ice fishing.

But that's not saying much. Can you bait a hook? Can you hold a line? Can you sit for hours cultivating hemorrhoids over a hole on a frozen lake waiting for a tug to jerk you out of your frozen torpor? Hey! You're an ice-fishing expert too.

Ice fishing is what you do when you can't stand being cooped up in your log cabin anymore. It ain't, as the saying goes, rocket surgery. It also isn't an Olympic sport. A Holstein could be a successful ice fisher. Except Holsteins have more sense.

Not that there isn't a certain amount of cunning involved. I recall the time I was ice fishing on Lake Nipigon years ago and not having any luck at all. Along comes an old guy with an axe, a bucket and a grubby old haversack. He chops a hole in the ice about twenty metres away, baits a hook, drops in a line—and within minutes he's hauling in fish after fish.

I haven't had a nibble.

After half an hour I can't stand it anymore. I walk over and ask him what his secret is. He glares up at me and mumbles: “Roo affa heep ah wums wahm!”

I say, “Sorry? Come again?”

“Roo affa heep ah wums wahm!”

I tell him I still can't understand what he's saying.

He spits a slimy brown ball into his mitten and says:

“You have to keep your worms warm!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Seven

Man vs. Machine: Who's Winning?

 

 

Ruins: The New Pornography

A
couple of hundred years ago a poet by the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley scribbled down fourteen lines that would eventually become his most famous poem. It told of a traveller in desert lands coming across the ruins of what was once a colossal statue honouring a long-forgotten ruler. The inscription on what was left of the pedestal read:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair

 

Except there were no mighty works to look at. The Ozymandian empire, however vast and magnificent it might once have been, had crumbled to a few chunks of marble half-buried in desert sand. No one even remembered who Ozymandias was.

Some ruins fare better. We do our best to understand and preserve what's left of the pyramids of Egypt, the monoliths of Stonehenge, the Athenian Acropolis and the Roman Colosseum. Here in North America we're a little short on architectural antiquities, but we have some pretty impressive ruins all the same. As a matter of fact we have a stunning collection right in the centre of the continent, just a hop, skip and a tunnel ride from Windsor, Ontario.

It's called Detroit.

It used to be known as Motor City but that was in better days when gas was cheap and everybody lusted for a new car every year. Today, it's more like Mouldering City. More than half the population—about one million citizens—have left the city since its heyday back in the 1960s. Seventy thousand buildings have been abandoned and trashed—some of them heartbreakingly magnificent even in their downfall. Michigan Central Station is—was—eighteen storeys of fabulous beaux-arts design with vaulting arches and marble pillars. Today, it is home to junkies, rats and cockroaches. The Vanity Ballroom, which once rocked to the rhythms of the Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey orchestras, has been disembowelled by vandals. It now lies gutted of its brass, velvet and mahogany, carpeted in broken glass, its art deco chandelier incongruously intact.

The presence of a visibly decaying metropolis in our midst has given rise to a new and somewhat perverted form of tourism. It's called Ruin Porn. YouTube is awash with photo displays of some of Detroit's more spectacular failures. Tourist buses full of out-of-town rubberneckers crawl through the decimated neighbourhoods that are now disappearing into jungles of chickweed and scrub brush, the passengers tut-tutting while click-clicking their smart phones. An entrepreneur has arranged to cater gourmet meals served by highbrow chefs in abandoned buildings such as the formerly opulent 3.5-million-square-foot Packard plant that used to churn out automobiles.

Is there an upside to the fall of Detroit? Well, some claim the city is on the brink of reinventing itself. Citizens who haven't fled to more salubrious climes are planting crops and raising chickens in what used to be parking lots and schoolyards. One born-again Detroit pioneer says, “Look on the bright side. We don't have hurricanes like the East Coast. We don't have droughts like the West . . . Plus, I bought a Mies van der Rohe townhouse downtown for just $100,000.”

On the other hand, it is still Detroit, a.k.a. Murder City. A recent crime report told of an early-morning multiple shooting following which the perpetrator turned himself in at a Detroit fire station. The firemen called the police several times to come and arrest the guy. The police, for reasons best known to themselves, declined to respond.

So the firefighters took up a collection, put the man in a taxi and sent him to the police station.

I wonder if Percy Shelley could find a poem in that.

 

 

Cementing Relationships

A
few years back, William Kinsella, one of Canada's finer short story writers, was attending a reading by Canada's—and probably the world's—finest short story writer, Alice Munro. Kinsella noticed a curious thing. As Munro read, the audience laughed repeatedly and uproariously. Reading audiences are normally about as jovial as Stephen Harper with mumps. After the reading, Kinsella mentioned it to Munro and said that he'd never thought of her work as funny. Munro smiled and said, “Bill,
everything
is funny.”

Well, exactly. Take cement. Superficially, few things could be less funny than cement. It is bland, undifferentiated, mostly grey, the epitome of unsexy—again, like Stephen Harper.

But unsexy doesn't mean unimportant. Bland old boring cement is the elemental binder of human architecture. Without cement we wouldn't have the Taj Mahal, Chartres Cathedral or the George Massey Tunnel. Builders figured that out centuries ago. The ancient Romans even gave us our word for it. They call the mixture of crushed rock and burnt limestone they used
opus caementicium
.

So cement is a certifiable big deal—but funny?

Actually, yes.

Cement plays a critical role in one of my favourite barroom stories. A ready-mix truck driver stops by his home during a work run to discover a shiny Cadillac convertible parked in his driveway. He tiptoes to the bedroom window, peeks in, discovers his wife is entertaining a strange man within. Tiptoes back to his cement truck, backs it up to the Cadillac, places the chute in back seat of Cadillac and dumps his load.

Such a satisfying story—almost too good to be true. In fact, it IS too good to be true. It's an urban legend that's been making the rounds for the past forty years at least. Sometimes the cement-filled car is a Cadillac, other times it's a Mercedes or a Triumph TR3. Some people insist it actually happened to Don Tyson, president of Tyson Foods, Inc. That story goes that Tyson's wife spied her husband's expensive new Cadillac parked in the driveway of another woman's house, so she ordered up a load of concrete and had it delivered—through the passenger's side window.

Except it never happened. In 1992 the Public Relations department of Tyson Foods, Inc., officially declared the story to be a fake. They also said they'd been hearing it for at least twenty years.

Great story. Too bad it never happened. But here's one that did: on a highway outside San Francisco, an impatient guy in a Porsche 911 found himself at the end of a long line of cars that weren't moving. He honked, he shook his fist, he said several bad words—then he put his car in first gear and drove around the line of cars.

Right into a lane of freshly poured cement. The Porsche sank about a foot before it came to a rather final stop.

True story—and it reminds me of another barroom story. Guy is tooling along a country road in his Porsche, well over the speed limit, comes over a rise and hits a cow broadside. When the cops show up the guy is standing, bleeding, by his totalled sports car wailing, “My Porsche! My beautiful Porsche!”

The cop says, “You yuppies make me puke. You're flying down the road, way over the speed limit; you kill an innocent cow—and look, you tore your right arm off! And all you can think about is your Porsche???”

Guy looks at his empty right sleeve and wails, “My Rolex! My beautiful Rolex!”