DUKE STREET KINGS

Second Place Feels All Right

I woke up this morning only to find I was chasing Fifteen Dogs. Fortunately, I was well ahead of Even Dogs in the Wild. As for The Girl on the Train, I left her at Windsor station; sorry, baby, it was getting too heavy to laugh.

My second novel Duke Street Kings has reached the second spot on the Edmonton Journal’s list of local bestsellers. This height hit is strictly due to the success of my book’s launch at Audreys last December 2^nd. And honestly, every effort was made to paper the room with friends who would bring their wallets. The scheme worked and I thank everyone who ventured out on a school night to support my years of effort scribbling in Hilroy copybooks (coil bounds are bastards for lefties) with disposable Bic medium ballpoints (they smudge but I like their feel). As for the no-shows, well, I hold grudges and never forget: I could’ve been number one, a real contender, you too busy bastards.

Today has been particularly trying. I’ve been confined to the kitchen and the dining room since I read this morning’s paper as the entry between the rooms is the only one in the house big enough to accommodate my newly inflated Trump-sized ego. I’m thinking about caking orange paste on my face and seeing my barber about an elaborately hideous comb-over; still working out which nationalities and religions to fear and shun. Seriously, there are a few inches of snow outside that need shoveling, the fridge is beer critical and I really have to go to the bathroom but I can’t seem to fit my head through a standard doorway. And I’m not allowed to smoke in the house.

The challenges facing a small publisher touting an unknown writer are universal for anyone hustling goods: advertising, marketing and distribution. There are still a few signed copies of Duke Street Kings left at Audreys. Displayed by the door I hope. You can visit Audreys at audreys.ca although like a lot web sites it’s been neglected for the immediacy of social media. That info’s there too. You can order Duke Street Kings direct from my publisher Falcon Press at falcon-press.ca or call (in North America) 1-877-284-5181.

HUMAN WRECKAGE

The Boys Are Back in Town

Driving south on Alberta’s Highway 2, the province’s Edmonton – Calgary connector. The landscape shifts as the snow tires rumble along the bone-dry road, the white crust covering the fields crumbles and ebbs into gold and brown stubble. The low, pale sky vaults into an intense electric blue. On the right and to the west the Rockies, still young in a relative way, begin to make their jagged selves apparent, cloud-snaring pins, points and peaks.

An ancient mix tape spools from reel to reel in the cassette deck. Rocking down the blacktop to rendezvous with my three oldest and best friends; it’s been years since I can’t remember when, the four of us being in the same room together again, a complete quorum. The new normal has been a duo or a business trip trio and a smartphone ping to the missing. The Clash is playing, Mick Jones singing a rare lead vocal: And I’ll never forget the smile on my face ‘cause I knew where you would be/So if you’re in the Crown tonight have a drink on me/Go easy, step light, stay free. Sentimental? Yes. Mawkish? No.

Our reunion has been driven by one of those middle-aged speed bumps: Jim’s getting married again. Though Tim and Marty have been in long relationships, neither fellow ever married. Me, I’ve been around the block a few times. Each one of us is or has been a father figure at various times in our lives (with varying success), but only Jim is an actual biological father. This fact may be of some interest to a sociologist studying those Catholic souls who miraculously appeared at the tail end of the baby boom.

My dear friends mock me. I will be ragged to the ends of the Earth for all of my foibles, flaws, stupidities, shames and embarrassments, but I will never be judged. And, anyway, I can give as good as I get, this is the nature of our game. High school confidential: we all smoked cigarettes back then. Jim and Marty were smart enough to dabble and then quit. Jim runs marathons. Marty still plays hockey at a high level, hikes and cross-country skiis. They should, statistically, outlive me and Tim by a decade, but we’re all old enough to know that life is rife with broken plays and deflected pucks. We accept and are comfortable with each others’ life choices; no grade nine zits these days and no one’s ballooned into a waxen dough ball.

Indulge me as I flashback. Marty and I grew up together on the same odd side of the street in Montreal, Marty’s house number was 77, mine was 111. We walked to school together for years because back in kindergarten in 1965 or ’66 he decided that the two of us had no need to ride the yellow Uncle Harry’s bus, there was a shortcut through the alley. An early 80s memory: Marty meets me in Concordia University’s Sir George Williams campus pub. We have a beer and then find his parked used gold Malibu for the drive to the west end Loyola campus. We listen to Ian Hunter on the 8-track. We share a joint well above the speed limit. We go to our respective classes.

I cannot recall how Marty and I met Tim. If I had to guess a year, I’d say 1969. Probably shinny on the outdoor ice at Mohawk Park. Maybe organized atom football. Maybe at school. All of our parents knew of each other but they were not close friends. An early 80s memory: I turn up late at my studio cockroach apartment near the Montreal Forum. Jammed into the jamb is a portion of a cigarette package, a note scribbled on it. Tim is back a week early from his summer gig as the night manager of the Cascade Inn in Banff! Where was I and why wasn’t I in!? My friend has come home! I’m staggering over the moon. Jesus, you get nauseous at this height. Best to crash on the floor and avoid the bed spins.

Marty and I hooked up with Jim through Tim in high school, maybe 1974. We were so much older then. Jim’s basement walls were covered with very stark modern wallpaper. The patterns could be mutating distractions if you were high, playing Pong on the TV and trying to sing along to the Doobie Brothers. An early 80s memory: Jim and I looking out the front window of his duplex in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. We are hungover giddy. His coffee table is still sticky from the spilt Drambuie we licked off its surface the night before. Something new and weird called a floppy disk had made a poor coaster. Below us, out on the street, his orange Beetle is being harnessed to a tow truck, the wrecker’s yard looms. A lot of hazy memories tied up in that Volks. I ask him if we should play ‘Taps’ or something. For some reason he finds my question insanely witty.

Following the ceremony, the formalities and the small talk cocktail circuitry, the four of us gravitate toward one another as other guests line up for the roast beef buffet. Our chat is deep and meaningful. Someone we all know and who is not present has a batshit crazy spouse, and the Canadiens have a decent chance of going all the way this season; please, God, fix Carey Price’s mysterious lower body injury! I want to tell you that the Stones’ ‘Happy’ was playing, but that’s too perfect, too scripted. Tim senses the moment and the photo op. The iPhones come out. Jim press-gangs the official photographer. We put our arms around our each. ‘Brothers from different mothers,’ Tim said later. We’re smiling, all together again. We’re flash frozen. Another take, let’s do it again tonight, and maybe somewhere else again down the road.

EAT ME

Dining with the Lizard People

Last night Ann and I experienced a bitter end to what had been a lovely evening. Many good friends, old and new, took the time and made the effort to attend the launch of my novel Duke Street Kings at a downtown bookshop. The house wasn’t quite full but it sure was friendly. Once my Warholian 15 minutes had expired, a sizable group of us repaired to a nearby sports bar for celebratory drinks.

It was late when Ann and I drove back across the river headed for home. Ann said, ‘I feel like having a greaseburger. What about you? You must be hungry.’ I was; I hadn’t eaten all day, afraid to drop anything solid into a churning stomach. An A&W whizzed by on the driver’s side. Ann said, ‘I missed the turn for the A&W.’ I agreed she had. ‘What about Wendy’s?’ she suggested. I agreed Wendy’s would do.

The Wendy’s we frequent once a year is in the university district, separated from the teaching hospital’s emergency take-in by a twin set of LRT tracks and four lanes of traffic. We chose a booth in the corner of the restaurant as it appeared to be a clean one. I removed my overcoat. Underneath that I wore a jean jacket over a naturally distressed black tee-shirt promoting my first novel Murder Incorporated.

A lizard boy in a tracksuit slouched in a booth across the aisle, his long legs stretched out, said, ‘Nice shirt.’ I wondered if he thought it referenced the hip-hop record label or just kicks. I thanked him for the compliment although he was already reabsorbed by his smartphone’s screen. His companion was passed out: forearms on table, forehead on forearms, head in hoodie. These guys were just hanging out. There was nobody on the premises with any stature or authority to shoo them away.

Through the window I could see a gaggle of lizard people in track suits passed out at a table on the chained-off outdoor patio. Toward the rear of the restaurant, near the toilets which tonight I knew I would never use in a million years, sat an elderly man sporting a black leather jacket and a grey Mohawk. His face was a mess, perhaps disease, perhaps a beating. Likely both. No one else in the place looked much better.

Ann leaned close to me. ‘Are we in Emergency overflow?’ Or the sixth circle of Hell. We bit into our Wendy’s Hot n’ Juicy burgers. They were nitrogen cold and rubbery. Now, it’s fair to say that most fast food burger chains have inflicted a grave disservice upon the noble American hamburger. But how does a chain store with its systems in place massively, gigantically, heroically botch, nay, sodomize with impunity, its very foundation, its core fare? Ann returned our sad sack sandwiches to the counter.

While Ann was registering our complaint Lizard Boy received a visitor. This new lizard stood out as he was wearing winter camouflage fatigues. He emptied two plastic bags of swag on the table for Lizard Boy’s inspection. I spotted a doctor’s rubber reflex hammer. I spotted other personal goodies, items left lying around a busy hospital ward that only a thief and his fence might value. I suppose it’s possible to be more amoral, and perhaps there was an equally plausible and innocent explanation for what I was witnessing. Ann returned with our replacement burgers which were mildly less appalling, so we know for sure it’s possible to make a worse hamburger. If only the other patrons hadn’t killed the ambiance as we tried to wind up my big night with a modicum of intimacy.

EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Closer to Home

Our household is awash in print. We live in a sea of serifs. We subscribe to two daily newspapers and five magazines. There’d be more periodicals in the house if Edmonton still had a decent newsstand, a place with warped floorboards, wizened chiselers poring over the daily racing form, stacks of outdated European broadsheets, British football mags and an exposed, glorious wall of tobacco behind the counter. Magic. Yeah, a place like that would be a destination as desirable as our indie record shop.

Magazine racks in chain bookstores and the 7-11 don’t quite purvey the same ambience. So my favourite magazines come to me now. Rolling Stone has been a habit since 1975 and each successive issue makes me miss CREEM that much more. Alberta Views is a traditional magazine in the sense that it includes a compendium of other published articles to complement its own array of intermittently annoying left-leaning features. The New Yorker is sort of a reverse Playboy for me, yes, the writing’s wonderful but I really love the cartoons. Britain’s The Economist is hands down the best magazine in the world, full stop.

I suspect it’s a culmination of age, five miserable, lost years working nights, topped up with 25 years of advertising stress, silliness and deadlines, but I rarely sleep through the night these days. I tend to prowl the house around 3:30 in the morning. Invariably I end up seated at the kitchen counter with one or more of the recently delivered magazines. And I always begin each one on the very last page.

Rolling Stone is slip sliding into irrelevance and so it boasts reminders of past issues, glory days. We used to matter, here’s proof! I enjoy the little time machine. Alberta Views simply lifted Harper’s Index, stats and facts tied into any one issue’s theme. The New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest is almost worth the magazine’s cover price alone. The Economist publishes a single obituary. Most of us don’t qualify for an unfailingly elegant and witty send-off in The Economist, but what a crowning achievement to a life that would be – provided it was not cut short.

In recent years it has been my misfortune to write obituaries, eulogies and Globe and Mail Lives Lived columns. It is not easy work, tinged as it must be by family blood and grief. Yet there seems to be a definite third party art to concisely and succinctly taking the final human measure of a woman or a man. Lou Reed, a rock ‘n’ roll hero of mine, died in 2013. The simple, single one-page essay in The Economist revealed the artist and the man with more depth and emotion than the extensive Rolling Stone cover story tribute.

After skulking last week during the small hours, I settled in the kitchen with The Economist. The obituary told the story of one Cedric Mauduit, an obscure French provincial fonctionnaire or bureaucrat based in Caen. The picture showed a good looking, stylishly dressed man, aged just 41. M. Mauduit led a secret life after office hours and on weekends. His casual wardrobe consisted of Ramones tee-shirts; he was fanatically devoted to the music of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. M. Mauduit’s death warrant was a concert ticket. He was one of the 129 people slaughtered in the November 13^th Paris attacks.

I’ve long been numb to the rotten news of the world. Yet here before me splayed on the counter was a horrific statistic reduced to the elementary human connection, one-to-one. The Economist made a faraway event deeply personal. I imagined that if I had ever crossed paths with Cedric I would have instinctively liked him. I knew him now. I even heard dialogue in the heart of the night: ‘The Berlin trilogy? Dude, are you fucking crazy? No way, it’s got to be Ziggy, Aladdin and Diamond Dogs!’ Adieu, Cedric. Rock on. I promise to do the same.