Fifty Shades of Black (5 page)

 

 

A Bellyful of Bad Guys

N
ot to be paranoid or anything, but don't be surprised if someday soon you're pulled aside by a couple of grim-looking dudes dressed in bad suits and dark glasses with curly wires coming out of their ears. As they shake you down they'll probably identify themselves as agents with the Disease Control Unit or Alien Surveillance Command or some such.

It's legit. They suspect you of harbouring and giving sustenance to alien life forms and you know what—they're right. You, my friend, are an enabler—a host. You are the front man for dangerous, possibly life-threatening creatures which are living and breeding, rent-free, at this very moment on your person.

You've heard of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang? Well, this is the Hole-in-Your-Gut Gang. These nogoodniks are presently residing and conspiring in your belly button.

Interesting piece of business, the belly button—or umbilicus, as it's properly known. It's our only souvenir of the feeding tube—the umbilical cord—that sustained us all for the nine months we spent in our mommas' bellies.

Nobody goes through or gets out of this life without one—except I suppose Adam and Eve if you subscribe to the Garden of Eden miniseries. All Gaia's chillun—the placental ones anyway—got belly buttons, one to a customer. And for microscopic creepy-crawlies, what a perfectly swell condo-cum-cafeteria the average belly button is.

“Your belly button is a great place to grow up if you're a bacterium,” says Dr. Tom Kottke of Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. “It's warm, dark and moist—a perfect home.”

And that's actually fortunate because not all bacteria are bad guys. Most of them, in fact, range from benign to positively healthy. Only a handful are what you'd call troublemakers, causing everything from leprosy, cholera and pneumonia all the way to ear and respiratory infections. Sounds ominous until you learn that researchers have identified more than twenty-three hundred types of human belly button bacteria so far—and most of them are as unthreatening as Anne of Green Gables at a strawberry social.

Are you an Innie or an Outie? If it's the latter, chances are the Men in Black will let you off with a stern warning. People with protruding belly buttons don't offer as hospitable digs for bacteria to thrive on. The odds are, however, that you're an Innie—90 percent of humans are. And 100 percent of belly button bacteria like that just fine.

Belly button infections are not unheard of, but they're relatively easily avoided. Simple soap and water usually does the trick.

For more stubborn cases though, there's always the military option. Bring out the big guns, I say. Warships, if necessary. Luckily we can do this without unduly taxing the resources of the Canadian Navy. You can build your own warship at home. Just root around in the attic or closet and find that old hula hoop you never got rid of. Next, insert a series of thumbtacks into the hoop perimeter, each one pointing inwards. Finally, put that hoop around your waist, crank up your Chubby Checker eight-track and gyrate vigorously.

Hey, presto! Your very own navel destroyer.

 

 

You Wanna Bet?

Gambling is a tax on people who can't do math.

—Anon

I
am driving through the pre-dawn murk of an early summer morning en route to Pearson International Airport, a couple of hours away. I'm on a gravel road, no traffic in sight save an obese raccoon that waddles grumpily off the shoulder and into the brush as I pass.

No other signs of life, but a glow looms up over the trees on my left. I get past the trees and . . .

What

The Hell

Is That?

A neon fortress is what it is, huge and totally alien here in the Ontario hinterland. A sign in front tells me I'm passing Casino Rama and that Dolly Parton will be performing next week. My wristwatch tells me it is 6:15 in the morning. And my eyes tell me that the Casino Rama parking lot is nearly full.

Full??? At dawn????

You betchum, Lone Ranger. Casino Rama is the largest First Nations casino in Canada. It is run by and for the Chippewa of Rama First Nation and it is a right little gold mine. The facility boasts a hotel, a five-thousand-seat entertainment centre, ten restaurants and two lounges, but mostly it boasts twenty-five hundred glittering slot machines and one hundred and ten gaming tables, all dedicated to separating gullible patrons from their money.

No shortage of either. Casino Rama perches on the geographical forehead of the Greater Toronto Area, close to flush urban centres like Barrie, Lindsay and Midland. Literally millions of potential customers live within a bus ride of Casino Rama. Not surprisingly, the owners run free shuttle buses pretty much around the clock.

It's a pattern that's repeating itself around North America. The Mdewakanton Sioux of northern Minnesota used to be an impoverished and hopeless band of American Indian survivors existing on government handouts. Now they have Mystic Lake Casino, proceeds from which have financed a community and fitness centre, a hotel and an RV park.

The tribe has done so well it's been able to hand out more than half a billion dollars in loans and outright grants to other tribes for economic development. They even made enough from the casino to donate fifteen million dollars to the University of Minnesota for scholarships and a new stadium.

The Sioux have also set aside money to return to their roots, restoring wetlands to promote waterfowl, fish and wild rice plantings. They've put in organic gardens and planted fruit trees. And they've started an apiary to harvest honey.

But their most lucrative honey-making beehive is the glitzy Mystic Lake Casino, which attracts thousands of customers (overwhelmingly white) each week to lay their money down and watch it disappear.

It's quite a turnaround. Just a few hundred years ago First Nations people of North America lived in all the abundance they could handle. Then came the white man who, by judicious application of whisky, guns, syphilis and lawyers, changed all that.

In 1626 some European sharpie showered a band of East Coast Indians with sixty Dutch guilders' worth of trinkets, beads and hatchets. The Indians had no concept of land ownership, but they accepted the gifts. Later, they learned they'd just sold Manhattan Island.

Chief Dan George put it more succinctly:
“At first we had the land and the white man had the Bible.
Now we have the Bible and the white man has the land.”

The great irony is, First Nations people through agencies like Mystic Lake Casino and Casino Rama are slowly buying their land back.

And they're using the White Man's money to do it.

 

 

Comox Women Rock!

A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

—Irina Dunn

A
lot of rock fans are positive that the group U2 invented that phrase. Others will beat you over the head with a bicycle pump insisting that Gloria Steinem deserves the credit. Actually, it was an Australian writer by the name of Irina Dunn, but attribution doesn't really matter; it's the sentiment that counts. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. A Victoria cop takes down her would-be murderer even after he all but hacks off half her hand and stabs her in the neck. “Ninety percent of my officers would have died in that attack,” says police chief Jamie Graham. Not Constable Lane Douglas-Hunt. She's back on duty as I write.

A woman named Alexandra Morton leads the campaign to get Norwegian fish farms out of our coastal waters; a woman named Elizabeth May leads the campaign to keep an oil pipeline to China out of our mountains and rivers and valleys. Six of our provincial premiers are women. Lots of Canadian women in leadership roles these days; no fish or bicycles need apply.

Still it was instructive to take a drive up Vancouver Island to the Comox Valley to deliver a keynote speech to the CVWBN. This stands for Comox Valley Womens' Business Network, a group of more than seventy local women entrepreneurs representing every profession from real estate to investment counselling, as well as bookkeeping, graphics, advertising, public relations—you name it, they do it, and they get together once a month to network, have dinner together and listen to an after-dinner speaker such as, well, that bald guy from Salt Spring.

As an observer it was fascinating for me. I couldn't get over how vibrant and sizzly the evening was, compared to a lot of guy get-­togethers I've sat through. The businesswomen of Comox Valley really meet when they meet. It happened to be International Women's Day when I was their guest, and every woman stood up and said a few words about why she was glad to be a woman. I can't imagine even suggesting such a departure at any of the male-dominated get-togethers I attend.

The question I keep getting since I came back is: “So if the Comox Valley Women's Business Network is so powerful, how come they asked a man to be their guest speaker?”

I think the answer's pretty obvious. They're beyond that petty gender crap. If somebody's got something to say, it really doesn't matter how they're wired.

When Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel, a reporter asked her how it felt to be a woman prime minister. Golda shrugged and said, “I don't know; I've never been a man prime minister.”

 

 

A Walk on the Wild Side

A
few words about traffic jams. First, understand that I come from a Gulf Island that has (I'm being generous here) four, maybe five thousand cars, trucks, bicycles, skateboards, unicycles and other wheeled means of conveyance, all told. I have just returned from Vietnam. From Ho Chi Minh City, a.k.a. Saigon, which according to my guidebook contains some four million motorbikes. Not counting cars, taxis, buses, rickshaws, trucks or tuk-tuks. Just . . . motorbikes. Four million.

A traffic jam on Salt Spring occurs whenever two good old boys travelling in pickups in opposite directions on the same road, espy one another and stop for a chat through their driver-side windows while the traffic on both sides backs up behind them. We islanders seldom honk at the good old boys. We know they'll be done soon enough and traffic will resume.

A traffic jam in Saigon? Can't tell you. Never saw one. Oh, it's curb-to-curb chrome and rubber, all right. An absolute river of motorbikes and scooters and tuk-tuks, but like a river, it keeps moving. And like a river, there are back eddies and side streams and rapids and the odd whirlpool. Can't go forward on your motorbike? No problem: go up on the sidewalk. Still can't go forward? No problem: do a U-ey and go back. One-way street? No problem.

Sounds like chaos, and on Salt Spring it surely would be. But in Saigon, as in a river, it works. In three weeks I saw more motorbikes and scooters than I could see in three lifetimes on Salt Spring, but I saw only two motorized mishaps—and even they weren't proper traffic accidents. A motor scooter fell over while the owner was parking it, and another guy had his brakes freeze as he was crossing, well, a sidewalk, but that's another story. Point is: no damage, no injuries.

Ah, you say, but what about pedestrians? What about trying to cross that river of chrome and steel? Well, that's where it actually helps to be from BC. Especially if you've ever crossed a salmon stream while the fish were running. If you have, you know that if you walk slowly and steadily, those salmon—those tens of thousands of obsessed, hormone-besotted salmon—will not run into you. Their fins will tickle you; you will feel the ripples of water as their tails lash by—but head-on and T-bone collisions will not occur.

Same with the rivers of traffic in Saigon. If a pedestrian walks slowly and steadily and most of all with intent, those tooting, revving motorbikes and scooters will magically part on your upstream side and rejoin on the downstream stretch without so much as brushing your Tilley trousers.

It should be a disaster, traffic in Saigon, indeed in much of Southeast Asia. Stop signs are ignored, traffic lights are merely a broad suggestion, vehicles travel in every direction at once. It would be total chaos if we tried it here at home, but there, somehow, it works.

Day after day, night and day, the streets of Saigon, gorged with people and vehicles, continue somehow to function. It's an Act of Faith, crossing a Saigon street. Which is another thing that can't hurt. I know I said three Hail Marys before I stepped off the curb in Saigon. And I'm not even Catholic.

 

 

Make Mine a Double-Double

T
here are many things in this world beyond my feeble ken—nuclear physics, Microsoft Word, women—but a daily and ongoing bafflement is the corner coffee shop. How does that work exactly?

By which I mean: how do those enterprises stay in business?

From an outsider's perspective, it's economic hara-kiri. You have proprietors paying a hefty rent to occupy a trendy, expensively refurbished space to sell heated beverages to, well, basically, a roomful of freeloaders.

Granted, the cafe owners get a nice return on the four or five bucks they charge for a mug of hot water and .000003 cents' worth of ground beans, but still . . .

Think of the customer turnover compared to, say, a hamburger joint. At the Burger King the customers are sliding through like Jeep chassis on a Chrysler assembly line. And at the coffee shop? Well, the lady at the first table—the one hunched over her iPad next to the chai latte that's so old it's sprouting lily pads—is working on chapter twenty of her doctoral thesis on the influence of Rumi on neo-Renaissance architecture. At table two, a homeless guy wearing Bose headphones is puzzling over the
New York Times
crossword. The rest of the clientele is reading, writing, snoozing, gazing into space or murmuring sweet nothings into adjacent earholes.

Hardly any of them are buying and nobody's moving. I'm no economist, but that does not sound like an outstanding model of mercantile viability.

And speaking of unsound business practices, who's the marketing genius who came up with the idea of offering free Internet access in coffee shops? Brilliant! Now every geek with a laptop who's still living with his parents has a free downtown office (with a heated bathroom and complimentary serviettes) where he can go and play Grand Theft Auto until his fingers bleed.

It makes no sense. And yet there is an intersection in downtown Vancouver that features a Starbucks on the northeast corner, a Starbucks on the southwest corner, and two independent coffee shops on the other two corners! They all appear to be crowded and they've been in business for years.

So what do I know?

Well, I know that some coffee shops seem to be feeling the pinch on their bottom line. They're taking down the “Free Internet” signs and taping up the electrical outlets in an effort to uproot the laptop squatters. There's a café in Chicago that's even resorted to flat-out bribery. If a squatter voluntarily gives up a seat when the place is crowded, management will buy that squatter a drink on the house.

Which, presumably, said squatter will sip while standing outside on the sidewalk, looking in.

Not every customer who goes to a coffee shop is a space hog, of course. A lot of customers line up and get their orders to take out—which again would make sound, efficient business sense if the customers were ordering a double cheeseburger with a side of fries to go.

They are not. They are ordering concoctions such as a half-skinny, half-chai, iced Frappuccino with whipped cream and a spritz of hazelnut syrup and an organically grown cinnamon stick on the side. Or possibly a demitasse of Ethiopian high-mountain dark roast pour-over with a decaf espresso shot and a lemon slice.

It's ironic. Coffee shops have been around since Shakespeare's time. They are the social equivalents of watering holes on the Serengeti—great places to meet with friends, catch up on the latest gossip.

The only problem: it's getting harder and harder to find anyone whose nose isn't buried in an iPad or—radical thought—to find a place where you can just get a cup of coffee.

Of course there's always the Canadian solution.

No upholstered chairs, no baristas at the bar, no po-mo computer graphics on the wall. Just fluorescent lights, Formica tables . . . and a queue that moves like Jeep chassis on a Chrysler assembly line.

Timmy Ho's. Make mine a double-double.

To go.