Fifty Shades of Black (8 page)

 

 

To Beard or Not to Beard

T
here was a big photo of Thomas Mulcair on the cover of
Maclean's
magazine recently. STEPHEN HARPER HAS FINALLY MET HIS MATCH, the headline blared, in the magazine's trademark, understated, feces-disturbing way. The cover story mentions Mulcair's assets—a whip-sharp mind, a fast mouth and the disposition of a pit bull with ulcers. But what really separates the man from the guy who lives at 24 Sussex?

A beard.

The face fur separates Mulcair from just about every politician in Canada. It's an unspoken law, but a law nonetheless: if you're a man and you're running for office, your chops better be bare as a baby's backside. Voters, they say, won't trust a man with a beard.

Downright stupid, really. Jesus is always depicted with a beard. Abe Lincoln had a beard. Santa Claus has a beard.

Still, there have been a few bearded guys who did nothing to promote the brand. Taliban and al Qaeda lunatics wear beards. Saddam Hussein, when they hauled him out of his rat hole, sported a beard that resembled the south end of a northbound goat. Photographs of Karl Marx show a man who seems to be thrusting his face through a dehydrated hedge.

Marx looked like a choirboy compared to a seventeenth-century pirate named Edward Teach. A contemporary wrote that Teach was known by “that large Quantity of Hair, which, like a frightful Meteor, covered his whole Face, and frightened America more than any Comet that has appeared there in a long Time. This Beard was black, which he suffered to grow of an extravagant Length; as to Breadth, it came up to his Eyes; he was accustomed to twist it with Ribbons, in small Tails . . . and turn them about his Ears.”

Teach was better known by his nickname, “Blackbeard.”

Bearded bad guys are a relative rarity these days. Lots of popular figures—Brad Pitt, David Beckham, Johnny Depp—flirt with facial hair all the time. Even baby-faced Prince William grows a beard now and again—and looks much better for it.

Nevertheless beardophobia still thrives. Our armed forces take a dim view of any recruit who shows up with a beard. How to Get a Job manuals and Miss Manners columns invariably recommend a “clean-shaven” look.

Even my sainted mother went to her reward tsk-tsking and tut-tutting about her wayward eldest son and his unshorn mug. “No woman is ever going to want to kiss that,” she told me. Often.

Sorry Mom, but you were dead wrong on this one. As soon as I could, I grew myself a beard. Not for me the Vandyke, the French Fork or the Mutton Chops. Fie on the Chinstrap, the Soul Patch or the Goatee. I grew myself the Full Monty—jungle foliage from sideburns to Adam's apple.

And it paid off. I knew my beard was a turn-on the first day I showed up for my bartending job that helped pay my college bills.

Women dig beards. I still remember that beautiful blonde coming out of the washroom and undulating up to the bar where I was washing glasses. “Are you the manager?” she cooed, sitting down and pointing her cleavage at me. I stammered that I wasn't. She reached a hand across the bar and caressed my beard. “Oh, that's too bad,” she pouted, and brought her other hand up and ran it alongside my chin, twisting my whiskers gently into ringlets, “because I'd like to leave him a message.”

“I could give him a message,” I squeaked. I could hardly talk by now. She was practically giving me a full facial massage.

“Good,” she purred. “Tell him the ladies' room is out of toilet paper and hand towels.”

 

Canadian Heroes, Subspecies: Unsung

F.
Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” Well, I don't know about that, but I'll show you a hero. A family of them in fact: the Murakami family of Salt Spring Island.

There are three of them left, Richard, Rose and Violet, all siblings. They are all getting up there, in their seventies and eighties, but they've lived on Salt Spring Island all their lives. Well, that's not quite true. They spent some time inland back during the war.

The Murakamis are Canadians of Japanese descent. A 1941 census counted seventy-seven Japanese Canadians living on the island—a substantial portion of the entire population back then. Twelve months later there were exactly no Japanese Canadians living on Salt Spring. They had all—farmers, fishermen, businessmen and their families—been rounded up like Holsteins and railroaded off to work camps in Alberta and the BC Interior. Their businesses, their farms, their livestock, their fishing boats and gear had been commandeered and then sold off to the white folks.

The Murakamis came back to Salt Spring Island after the war—the only Japanese Canadians to do so—only to find that everything they'd owned was gone. But there's a word in Japanese—
ganbaru
—which means approximately “slug it out,” “do your best,” “don't give in.” The Murakamis didn't. They started again from scratch and reseeded themselves on Salt Spring. Nearly seven decades after they were shipped away in cattle cars, the Murakamis thrive on Salt Spring. They still live together, Richard, Rose and Violet, in a spacious house overlooking their gardens and Richard's shop.

He runs Salt Spring's most famous auto repair business, employs a half dozen mechanics, most of whom are receiving their old age pension. They all answer to Richard, who pads around his hangar-style repair shop all day long, joking with customers, hauling his duct-taped cellphone out of his overalls to take calls and order parts and generally overseeing the task of keeping most of Salt Spring's beaters and clunkers on the road.

And Richard? He answers to his sister Rose, who controls the finances and presides over the Murakami home. Rose is hardly your typical farm girl. She is an author and a lecturer with a master's degree in nursing and she formerly served as chief nursing officer at the University of British Columbia Health Sciences Centre.

An amazing family, the Murakamis, about as close to royalty as Salt Spring will ever get. And are they revered and honoured like royalty? By most islanders, yes. But not by all. This ain't Disneyland, chum—it's Salt Spring. I've heard one islander claim that what happened to the Murakamis during the war wasn't anybody's fault, it was just . . . the times.

So that made it okay to steal their homes and farms and fishing boats???

The Mounties still hassle Richard about cars parked across the road from his garage. And right now the Murakamis are looking at a court order to get rid of the derelict auto wrecks in his back field. Those junkers are there because Richard took them off the hands of owners who were done with them but didn't want to pay to have them hauled off the island.

Now some citizen (who naturally wishes to remain anonymous) has complained to authorities, and the Murakamis have one more legal headache to contend with.

My personal opinion? I think the Murakamis should be given a blank cheque, free room and board, a party once a month, the keys to the island and a lifetime supply of the beverage of their choice for what we've taken away from them and for what they've given back to us.

Which includes, by the way a prime chunk of land on which sit twenty-seven affordable housing units right in downtown Ganges. The Murakamis donated that prime land, gratis. They may be getting on, but they still remember what it feels like to be homeless.

 

Kilroy Wasn't There

H
e's been following me all my life.

Correction: I'VE been following HIM all my life.

He's beaten me to every significant place I've visited: national monuments, public washrooms, bulletin boards—even pages of books.

It's Kilroy I'm talking about. You know the guy? Leaves a cartoon drawing of himself—just two eyes and a big nose peeping over what looks like the top of a fence. Under that he prints his characteristic one-line calling card—KILROY WAS HERE.

The Kilroy trademark began appearing way back during World War II when American GIs took up the practice of scrawling Kilroy's inquisitive schnozz and tag line at battle sites in Germany, Italy—even on palm trees of engagement zones in the Pacific. It wasn't long before civilians got into the act. The slogan began showing up all around the world. You could find KILROY WAS HERE graffiti on the Sphinx, the Arc de Triomphe, the Statue of Liberty—even atop Mount Everest. Legend has it that an Apollo astronaut even scrawled it in dust on the moon.

It's a fascinating illustration of how even a trivial, meaningless bit of pop culture fluff can, for no discernible reason, go viral and spread around the globe.

Except for one thing: KILROY WAS HERE is not a meaningless phrase. There really was a Kilroy and he really did come up with that famous slogan.

His full name was James Kilroy and he was an inspector at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. One of his jobs was to keep track of the number of rivets shipyard workers installed every day. He would tally up the number and put a check mark beside the last rivet so that they wouldn't be counted twice. The workers—who got paid by the number of rivets they placed—quickly wised up and started erasing the check marks, fooling the next inspector into recounting the rivets and paying them extra. When James Kilroy wised up to the scam, he added his cartoon and the line KILROY WAS HERE to the check mark. End of accounting problem—and beginning of a worldwide phenomenon. The story goes that when Joseph Stalin emerged from the VIP washroom at the Big Three conference at Potsdam in 1945 the first question he had for his aide was, “Who is this Kilroy?” Reminds me of the Stan and Si.

“Stan and Si” is a sandwich. When I was younger and lived in Thunder Bay, Ontario, I frequently went into restaurants and ordered a Stan and Si—as did many others. It wasn't always printed on the menu, but the waitress inevitably knew what you meant—basically a hot roast beef sandwich with some extra trimmings.

A local newspaper editor explained to me that Stan and Si were two Thunder Bay railroad workers who liked to shoot a game of pool on their lunch hour. They didn't have time to sit down so they'd order their favourite sandwich and eat it while they played. Pretty soon their lunch became known as “the Stan and Si.” It's still available at select Thunder Bay establishments, as far as I know.

Next time I'm in the Lakehead I plan to find out for sure. I'll hit the first restaurant I see and order a Stan and Si with a side of fries.

If they know what it is and bring me one, I'll scrawl KILROY WAS HERE on the menu.

 

 

In Vietnam, Don't Order the Mutt-on

I
have just come back from Vietnam, where I have seen many amazing things, including Ho Chi Minh himself. What's left of Uncle Ho (his mummified corpse) reposes on display in a gargantuan, graceless mausoleum in the centre of Hanoi. I saw other amazing things in Vietnam—pagodas, sacred caves, water buffalo placidly plodding through rice paddies, sylphlike sampans, graceful as eyelashes, skimming the surface of canals and rivers . . .

But I think the most amazing thing I saw was motorbikes. Motorbikes are to the Vietnamese today what the automobile was to North Americans in the 1950s. Times ten.

In Saigon alone (nobody other than government flunkies call it Ho Chi Minh City) there are four million motorbikes. That is not a misprint. Four million. Virtually every Saigon family owns at least one. It functions as the family station wagon does for us. Again—times ten.

It is not uncommon to see a family of five on one motorbike, the youngest wedged between the handlebars, the rest hanging on any way they can. It is also not uncommon to see motorbikes carrying multiple bags of animal feed, freakishly high tiers of lumber, a refrigerator (I'm not making this up), twenty-foot stepladders, butchered hogs, mattresses, aluminum doors, toilet bowls . . .

And—Culture Shock 101—crates stuffed with live animals, including puppies.

Saw this myself from a bus outside Hue—a little Honda putt-putting along, one rider, with a dozen wooden crates full of what looked like Akitas or huskies, weaned, maybe three months old, lashed down and teetering behind him.

And you just know they weren't heading for the Hanoi Obedience and Agility Dog Trials.

Unpalatable fact: Southeast Asians eat dog—or some of them do. It's an old tradition bound up with beliefs about the merits of dog meat as an energy booster and an aphrodisiac.

The natives are aware that canine entrees on the menu would make tourists nervous if not hysterical, so you don't see
escalope de poodle
or barbecued border collie advertised, but if you go to an obscure Thai or Vietnamese restaurant that caters to locals you might come across a dish called, ironically enough,
pad krapaw
.

That's, um, stir-fried dog meat with basil leaves.

Eating dog meat is, I'm delighted to report, a disappearing feature of Southeast Asian life. It's a cuisine phenomenon mostly restricted to working-class clientele. Kids in school are being taught that it's not cool to eat pets—and in any case it's relatively expensive, dogs being more rare than carp or chickens.

Did I try it? Get serious. I'm a bourgeois North American geezer. I'm so reactionary I seldom even buy sushi—unless I'm fishing and I run out of bait.

Besides, I knew if I indulged I would have to avoid eye contact forever with a bearded collie and a golden retriever/border collie cross back home.

Still, I didn't raise a fuss when I saw unfamiliar, possibly pooch-­oriented entrees on the odd Southeast Asian menus. Wouldn't do for me as a Canadian to get too holier-than-thou over animal cruelty. I remember two other times when I saw cages of animals crammed together and stacked in tiers.

In one case the cages were stuffed with battery hens on a “factory farm” in Southern Ontario; the other time was a barnyard crammed with tiny, windowless plastic cubes on a farm near Vancouver. The cubes were the only home that veal calves, brusquely separated from their mamas, would ever know. Southeast Asians can't teach North Americans much about cruelty to animals.