HUMAN WRECKAGE

Toute la gang, mon hosti

We were in the kitchen. The stereo was playing in the living room, a side of black vinyl from back in the day, gently eased from a worn sleeve with a white circle on it like a beer bottle ring on a coffee table. And if you're going to cover somebody else's song, do what Nazareth did to Joni Mitchell's This Flight Tonight: Go nuts and make it memorable.

Ann was talking to me about me and my school friends, the core of that nonexclusive leaderless gang that came with a free lifetime membership. And “school” with its primary and secondary definitions is a crucial adjective. Marty, Tim and I, all from the same Montreal neighbourhood and elementary school, met brothers Jim and John from Toronto, and Jacques, France’s smarmy exile, in the first or second year of high school. Young boys bond over sports, music, girls and getting wasted. Our particular school of adolescent philosophy and thought sought a grand unified theory, everything all at once, and a cigarette afterward.

Ann chose her words very carefully. “When was the last time you guys were all together?”

“All of us?” A full quorum? I had to think.

Perhaps that first summer after high school? The Canadiens were unbeatable, the Expos very beatable, the Stones were still relevant, Springsteen was on the rise and Bowie was immersed in his brilliant Berlin phase. Video games had just been domesticated, lassoed in the wilds of the downtown arcades; you could play Pong in your friend’s rec room. What I do know is that it was that instant before the cosmic phone rang (no local area code required): the big world calling up about real life. Somebody spilled the Drambuie and it ran in all directions.

All six of us were incredibly fortunate in that we were able to choose our colleges and universities, choose the places where we wished to live and pursue our careers in our chosen industries. This gang, this cell of camaraderie, has continued to exist through the decades in rotating fragments of pairs, trios, quartets and quintets. One of us would always have news about one or more of the others. And the internet changed us as it did everything else; it’s so easy these days to stay in touch with friends who would help me not just move house but move a body.

And I can imagine that scenario. Pizza and beer after the job was done wouldn’t be good enough for John and Jacques, they’d want pot. Tim would inform me that we need proper steel spades to dig, not my plastic snow shovels. Jim would worry about hitting a gas line or sewer pipe. Marty would remember to bring a flashlight and bag of quicklime because he’d assume, correctly, that I hadn’t thought of them. And my friends would all be annoyed I hadn’t set up an iPod and a Bose dock.

Ann continued, “Maybe you should try to organize a reunion?”

“Me? I love those guys and I miss them, but it would be like herding cats. Everybody’s all over the country and John’s in Mexico. It would take a year of planning, at least. Everybody’s busy. Everybody’s always busy. People these days need a month’s notice for a happy hour beer. And where? Montreal’s too obvious and, anyways, it’s changed a lot. Nobody would ever agree on a place: ‘I’m not going there.’ I might as well suggest Palestine. It’s pointless.”

Ann said, “You know, if you wait too long, your next reunion could be a funeral, and you’ll be one short.”

Truth. And doesn’t life sometimes get in the way of living? Life’s like a marketing pitch from one of those credit cards named for a precious metal: aspirational promises in capital letters and then paragraphs of mouse type caveats, exceptions, asterisks and daggers; nobody I’ve ever known has led a life as advertised. And here we were, me and my old friends, all of us in our sixties now and a little worse for wear and tear, but each of us somehow fortunate enough to have the means for a reunion somewhere if we wanted it.

I’m uncertain as to how to grade my life’s regrets. What’s worse, the stuff I did or the stuff I didn’t do? There was some casual Group of Six social media chatter near winter’s end: “I’d love to see all you guys again.” “Maybe we should meet in Vegas?” Let’s do lunch. I anted up my borrowed two cents: “Ann says if we don’t do this sooner than later…” Radio silence: “Broadsword calling Danny Boy, come in.” And then a message transmitted to the receivers. Jim had arbitrarily picked the dates to “meet ‘neath that giant Exxon sign.” All the hep cats formed a line and suddenly things went reel to reel like the opening scenes of a heist flick or an 8-track play of that Thin Lizzy song.

Saturday Jim, John, Jacques and I will converge on Palm Springs; I’ve never been to California. Tim and Marty to follow the next day, and the one after that; not Sunday or Monday because time’s going to become a little fluid, elastic through the holy desert days and nights. We will retell our old stories with all the inherent flaws of faulty memories. But the main thing in the here and now is that together we will write new ones.

Man, how we fell about the place.           

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of time travel since 2053. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.