Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Friday, June 10, 2005 The Queen Anne's Revenge!

Last night I manually pulled a centimeter long piece of my jawbone out of the empty socket in the back of my mouth, spat blood for about 10 minutes and went outside for a cigarette.

Sunday night in Chinatown. Nothing more wholesome than that long trek up Spadina dodging thousands of garbage bags filled with rotting vegetables that are just as mysterious when they aren't half decomposed. Tripping over those pentagon shaped coconut things that people drink and the rancid husks of durian fruit. When the garbage strike was on in Toronto, Chinatown was a nasal tour of the most rancid acrid smells on earth. To this day, when the shops close and the bags of garbage move on their own with burrowing rats in the rotting contents, you can still breath-in and remember.

I'll go back a week though, to a dentist chair half way through having my wisdom teeth removed. See, this wasn't a hospital, it was a dentist chair, and all I got was oral freezing. When you can't feel it, the image of blood and bone shooting from your mouth like a fireworks display in a butcher shop is sort of neat, the trouble is when you have a slight immunity to freezing and the dentist decides to dig at a raw, exposed nerve in your face. It gave me new respect for surgery before the invention of ether.

I've used the word fuck innumerable times in my life. As punctuation for a sentence, in causal conversation, as a subtle pause in speech, and ofcourse while fucking. I dont think I meant the word fuck so much as when I yelled it at the top of my lungs while shooting out of the chair blinded with a white light of pain and sharp metal instruments lodged in my face, as when the dentist hit that nerve. After being held down and having three more injections of freezing, I was casually informed of the fact that the freezing wasn't working. Something made abundantly clear with the blinding pain. Im sweating from my brow and trying as hard as I can not to think about my jawbone being chiseled with scalpels and drills. After another half hour, it was over. I stumbled out of the chair with blood dripping down my face as the dentist stared at me as if I was about to phone a lawyer. So last night when I found a piece of broken bone that had not been removed during the surgery, I wasn't all that suprised. My mouth is a fieldtrip into the ghetto of dentistry.

After the surgery I moved to Toronto. Driving on the 401, the greasy fat guy driving the van dressed in sweatpants and sandals lets me know that the cloud of white smoke coming from the back of the mini bus I hired was nothing to worry about. Remember gym class when you were a kid? Remember that dirty son-of-a-bitch that used to casually sniff his dirty underwear right in front of everyone? Well guess what? Now he drives a broken down mini-bus. 30 minutes later the van was pulled over. His solution to the problem was to pack a gym bag, abandon the bus and walk away. Nice, looks like I just inherited a broken bus. I was still taking a lot of codeine from the surgery so it looked like a perfect time to lie down on the roof, smoke cigarettes and listen to music while traffic passed at 100km/hr. If anyone wants a mini bus with a destroyed engine, get up to the entry ramp where the Veterans Highway meets the 401, just be warned, I pissed on the seat out of spite.

Christ, the details of my first week back in Toronto are a blur of drunken idiocy. To start, there's Bob. Bob is a very smart guy. He also happens to be evil and as a side note, he also happens to be 7 foot 4, 350 lbs. Bob is a God-Damned Viking. When I met up with him, He cracked open a beer and drank it before even leaving the beer store. At a show he decided he wanted to go into the pit. The logistics of that were impossible, and as a result, Bob BECAME the fucking pit. The singer on stage was eye level with Bobs chest, So when Bob decided to re-posses the microphone and destroy the singer with insults, there really wasn't much that the singer could do but stand there and stare into the sweaty mass that encompassed his field of vision. But I'll start at day one. Imagine this, you are out for a jog in downtown Toronto when you hear a roar, you turn around and you see a giant fucking Viking chasing after you and screaming "I EAT YOUR FACE!". Bob chased this guy for a city block, I've never seen anyone run faster than that jogger. When Bob came back all of us were falling over laughing. His reasoning for this? He was motivating the guy to run, pushing himself farther than he would have otherwise. Its a good idea if you think about it. How much more would get done if a God Damned Fucking Viking was standing behind you while you worked.

On another night my entire group of friends came out. 20 or 30 of us. See, in my absence my friends took over a diner. The previous owners sold the place because too many fights were happening when the bars let out. When we arrived there were only about five of us. But because its known that during the night hours its almost guaranteed to find everyone there, people just drop by. Its almost like Cheers, only I don't think there was a heroin addict that painted the lower half of her face in red lipstick and assaulted the cast when asking for spare change. If there was, I'd guess it would be Dianne. But in the real world, that would be Simoan. and as the saying goes; "Nobody like a lady named Simoan". She's the local latex covered skeleton who walks up and down the same block asking you for change over and over again. At 3am when you're tired, she is the last person you want to see. The only practical way I've ever gotten her to leave me alone is to wave my arms and scream "White bats! White bats!" it freaks her right out and she usually walks away muttering under her breath. Around 12 o'clock the bar went from being occupied by a group of South American truckers to a massive 20 foot banquet table filled with the pirates and circus acts that are my friends and I. Random people arrived as the entire party broke out onto the tiny patio following volleys of pirate cheers and glasses crashing together. Weird drunken cameos give me single frame memories of that night. Some weird coked up hippy chick doing some windmill scarf dance. A Peruvian guitarist jacked into a belt amp and played classical Spanish guitar. Dave and Conrad highjacked some frat kids video camera after filming some of the girls making out with each other. The tape was later liberated, set on fire and bootstomped to ensure total non-disclosure of that nights events. Why? THE FUCKING SHOW IS NOT FOR SALE. Some guy who looked exactly like Charles Manson was shooting the shit with Kurt. Kurt, who hates the nickname, looks exactly like Kurt Cobaine, so the concept of Charles Manson and Kurt Cobaine drinking beer in the midst of this scene will stick in my mind forever. Doug the bike builder sitting with his apprentice hasselling the passers-by. Beardo from The Delinquents playing the theme to the Legend of Zelda in the background. One of the best times of my life, even if I don't remember all of it. But thats part of what we do as pirates on a ship of fools.

Before I left the city a collection of oddities happened. Jack, Kurt and Dave. They've only known each other for a few months. But in an interesting turn of events they got jumped at a late night restaurant. A difference of opinion can lead to all sorts of results; misunderstandings, fueds, or (as in this case) a fibreglass chopstick stabbed lengthwise to the temple. Nothing really lets people get to know each other like a drunken brawl with total strangers, sort of like a "get to know you game". The City at night is fun like that. Pass 3am and be prepaired to deal with the most random and occasionally terrifying shit. It happens in a city of 3 Million, I'd rather run the risk of meeting the psycho with a weapon, than stay at home watching television. Its a risk of life. Its not really avoidable in some cases. I had a six inch nail pulled on me for trying to stop a fight. Really though, A NAIL?? Do you laugh or run? You could do what I did; calm your friends down only to fire yourself into a fit of teeth nashing rage. But I wouldn't suggest it. See, the really gruff looking bartender who is always just on the brink of kicking you out just for being there doesn't need to be provoked. Why? because even if that bartender is a dragqueen (and in this case it was) the guy is still 4 times bigger than you. On the list of most soul destroying circumstances that you will never be able to live down, being beaten up by a dragqueen would be near the top of that list.

That was all a month ago now and Toronto is far away. I'm somewhere in the middle of Canada where the sun doesn't set until 11:30pm and rises at 3am. You can see for miles in any direction, which excludes anything surprising happening considering you could literally see it coming a mile away. Which makes me ask why am I out here? It's actually an interesting story....

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