June
27th 2013
Some guests in cottage one had
a barbeque problem and they were a little annoyed at the whole snafu. Maybe a
lot annoyed. They really wanted to fire up some chicken wings that were marinating
nearby, a sea of guts in a large bowl. I hopped on the radio, explaining the
issue to Gary. How two out of the three cylinders inside the barbeque were not
catching, so there wasn’t enough heat to cook anything except a grasshopper. “We
probably need to replace it right away,” I told him.
These pachucos were having none of it. Disgusted with
the subpar service, they made insulting comments underneath their breath,
engineered to be just loud enough for me to hear: “Fucking stupid idiot,” said
one generic fool.
“We probably need to replace it right away,” one
of them said, mocking me in a nerdy white guy voice. *Sigh* If people only knew what it’s like to be white in the 21st
century.
There was no denying it—I was infuriated and humiliated.
It was the maddest I’ve been at any guests since I started at Stillwater. I
wanted to smash the butt of my radio into the first piece of scum that made a
move towards me. I was burning with white-hot rage at these fucking Latino
jerk-off punks, each one of whom I could totally kick the shit out of in a
one-on-one battle (probably not). My anger bolstered my confidence. You learn
to size a man up pretty quick at Stillwater if you want to keep those teeth in
your gums. If it’s in your nature to be allergic to aggressive posturing, that
will either change pretty quick or you’ll find another job. I’ve slithered out
of all the potentially violent confrontations by either feigning superpower
strength or feigning to call the police. Either way it’s all bullshit.
The bulging muscles of a beefed up dude will affect the
level of respect you accord him. I tone down the sarcasm and become respectful
really fucking quick if the guy is 6’2” 220lbs. Luckily, most of these high
school kids here tonight have a pea brain stuck between two spaghetti arms.
Talk to them in the correct way and they bow at your feet; you can put them
back in line with a stern voice. Not these particular teens. I started to fear
that I was dealing with a drug cartel and not recent secondary school
graduates. Why are they not respecting my
authority? They just arrived and they’ll be kicked out from their beautiful
riverside cottage if they fuck with me. Are they cray-cray?
I walked away from the group to hear Gary more clearly
over the heckling. I’m going to be here well into the night with these dopes as
they get progressively more fucked up, and the slightest provocation could ignite the
latent primal male rage that surely resides within me and I’ll probably get
hurt real bad even though I upped my bench pressing from once a week to every
five days. My soft feminine hands are filled with middle-class rage! So
lookout!
When I get off the radio with Gary, one of them, with an
aquiline pencil-thin beard asks, “So, yo, you gonna fix it or what?” There was
a smattering of snickers from both the boys and girls. I got the sense that
they were from Toronto.
I took a deep breath and sighed. A loner amongst hostile
forces all leering derisively at me, I replied with a mendacious, Walter
White-esque quip: “Do I look like a barbeque repair man to you?”
They didn’t like that comment too much, and there was a
collective, “Ohhhh” and as I quietly walked away, not wanting to incur any
physical wrath, they were muttering insults under their breath and I was simmering
for the next hour. I avoided them for the rest of the evening, only having to
endure their stink eyes and smirks as they walked by towards the convenience
store for some zig-zags and smokes. By the time the gang was coming back from
the store I made sure to be somewhere else.
I have seen so many good
looking eighteen year old Ontario girls in the last couple months it is nothing
short of stupefying. It is positively life affirming! I have a renewed sense of
faith in humanity! The milky skin and pert breasts, the taught haunches and
shining blonde hair. Canada is full of healthy and vibrant women! As Yakov
would say, “What a country!”
June
29th 2013
At Cottage Court tonight,
Friday night on the Canada Day weekend, I laughed truly and heartily for the
first time in a while. It’s 7pm, and the hour-long thunderstorm is over. The
stifling humidity has been sucked out of the air and it’s a cool night. Most of
the guests are a racially mixed lot from Brampton. White, brown, and black kids
are running wild all over the property hootin’ and hollerin’, not a care in the
world. Oh, to be young and dewy-eyed again!
An immaculately toned black kid, clearly the class
clown type and clearly drunk, whips out his cock and balls and jiggles them
around for the whole world to see. I didn’t really want to see this kid’s
penis, but like the sun I stole a glance at it before my eyes burned. You’d
think an atom bomb of funny exploded. A few kids had the presence of mind to
whip out their iThingamajigger’s and immortalize the lurid display. A lot of
these teens reach for their hip instinctively whenever something remotely out
of the ordinary happens. Reaching for an electronic device is like an outlaw
reaching for his six shooter; you got to watch out for Billy the iKid. Now, I
didn’t actually see the young black man’s genitals; by the time I glanced over
he was zipping up. That’s not what made me laugh. What made me laugh was the
reactions of his buddies, who I’ve come to know in the past couple days and am
fond of. For one comes to know, understand, and bond with people in a deeper
way during a dramatic life event, (ie., passing through the requisite, liminal
lost weekend at the beach that proceeds the graduating of high-school and
precedes entering post-secondary education and/or work. In other words, not a
boy, not yet a man). Everyone was falling all over themselves, wailing and
laughing so hard--it was
infectious, and I too joined in from a distance. There is no feeling quite like
laughing as hard as possible with a large group of friends. If only we could
bottle that up and sell it for twenty bucks a shot.
Gary relocates me to Bayside,
supervising a much smaller group on my own. Bayside is the best chunk of
property to guard because most of the time I’m the fox in charge of the
henhouse. At Cottage Court, there’s usually three or four guards on duty. Here,
I can order a shot or accept a twenty and grant permission for a kid or two
come aboard the party train without much fear of getting caught.
A drunk Indian kid in a tank top was running around,
accosting guests and being generally annoying and unruly. He didn’t have the
right wristband. I approached the young gent to kick him off the property but
he was “bro, bro, bro-ing” me. I was in no mood for his nonsense and I clenched
my fists and the words just spilled out: “Get off the property or I’ll break
both your arms and then your Daddy will have to jerk you off!” I don’t know
where it came from. It was meant to be serious--and I was--yet the line came
out kind of funny and some of the guests laughed. He was too drunk to realize
the full import of my warning so his two buddies grabbed his shoulders and
ushered him towards Mosley Street, towards the next beachfront motel party.
As they were walking away, he suddenly turns sober and
serious and says “Yo, why you have to get all aggressive with a sixteen year
old?” I cocked my head and shrugged my shoulders as if to say “You gotta do
what you gotta do” and I never saw him again.
I know what it’s like to be in
the Walking Dead. I live it most nights at Stillwater. In the early hours of
the morning, they walk along the street, stupefied and stumbling, moaning
incoherently. I’m the only one not infected (well, most of the time).
July
2nd 2013
As previously mentioned, the
best part about the 6am cleanup shift are the pristine goodies laying amidst
the rubble of another mega beach party. Today I found four quarters, three
bottles of Canadian, one can of Coors Light, a flash-bang firecracker and a
pair of sunglasses with Canadian flags in the lenses.
A good chunk of my time on the
clock is spent standing at the entrance to the various Stillwater properties
and many folks will walk by me all day either say “Hi” or will sometimes stop
and chat with me. I get asked all the common greeting tropes: “How ya doin?”
“How are you?” “Doin alright?” “Yo, what’s up?” And of course, the least labor
intensive verbal greeting, a mere reflexive guttural emission: “’Sup?”
Then there are various nods and waves of recognition
in lieu of actual sounds coming out of your face to convey acknowledgement:
Winks, smiles (showing teeth, not showing teeth), barely perceptible head nods,
the casual two-fingered salute. I’m standing around, greeting dozens and dozens
of people every damn shift—I find myself bored with answering with “Not bad”
and “Doin alright, sir” and “Hey there” dozens of times a day, and organically
I began to incorporate new phrases. This weekend, my go-to response to the
eternal, “Greeting another human being for the first time question,” is the old
clever talk-show line, maybe Rickles or Newhart said it.
TALK-SHOW HOST: “How ya doin’ _____?”
GUEST: “If I was doing any better, it would be illegal.”
More than half a century
later, the sunbathers who will never be on TV still seem to like it. Kind of
clever if you’ve never heard it before; it comes off as witty—a verbal wink. The
phrase itself is quite absurd when you think about it. What does it even mean?
“If I was doing any better it would be illegal.” Like my life is in a
zenith state, perfectly matched up with my dreams and if one more roll of the
dice went my way it would be too much fulfillment and I could actually be ticketed
and/or arrested because things are so darned good? I’m that high on life?
Also, currently, I’m punctuating greetings directed at
males with “Boss.”
“Doin’ alright, boss?”
“Having fun, boss?”
“Gonna fucking party tonight or what, boss?”
“Can I get a beer from you, boss?”
“Just chillin’, boss?”
“Hey, you got any blow, boss?”
“Hey, you got anymore blow, boss?”
July
4th 2013
A group of one hundred twenty
five young adults from Mississauga came up to wonderful Wasaga Beach, Ontario,
Canada to celebrate their high school graduation with a three night stay at
Cottage Court. I began cracking jokes and most of them were pleased, putting me
on a first name basis right off the bat. This one girl, rather plain, but
definitely DTF, kept talking about how she was going to, “Smoke my cock. Room
number nine.”
“You’ll need a lighter with a lot fluid to smoke this
cock,” I said. Her friends laughed, and it was all a half-serious charade with
the security guard.
I busted into cabin six, and
later cabin seventeen, to collect on the Taylor Tax. The ghetto party
inhabitants were more than accommodating. Giving the security guard a shot is
like feeding a monkey at the zoo: you’re not supposed to do it, but it’s
irresistible.
I was feeling oh-so-fine and went to chat with a group
of fifteen kid’s barbequing and smoking all sorts of things on the back porch
area. This massive porch is about one hundred feet long and ten feet wide. It’s
where the BBQ’s and graffitied picnic tables are. It’s where the kids hang out
most of the time; where beers, faces, joints, and hookahs are sucked. Across the river, the lights of the main strip
waver in the humidity. Throbbing beats from the nearby clubs echo back at the
Stillwater guests, delayed and out of time.
Below, at the fire pit by the banks, another drunken
multitude is roasting dollar store weenie’s. They all laugh at one girl who’s
weenie has fallen into the fire just as it was ready to eat.
In front of her whole clan, this girl again asks for me
to see her in room number nine and makes the international blowjob motion,
jerking her hand by her mouth, pounding her tongue against the inside of her
cheek. “I’ll smoke your cock. You can finger my ass,” she says to the
delightful laughter of the group.
“How many fingers? One or Two?” I ask, and the group
roars their approval at my willingness to participate in the game. I smile and
walk away. Big brother is watching me and I’m supposed to be at the front of
the property, not cavorting with the guests in back.
Speaking of smoking things--all the kids nowadays sit
around massive octo-hookahs and huff flavoured tobacco. They don’t ever smoke
pot out of these hookahs. Their tall glass bongs are kept right beside the
hookahs. Or they smoke joints. Usually both. I’m still dumbfounded that
practically every teenager smokes pot up here. I understand it’s a party
resort, but these kids all smoke pot back in Mississauga or Ancaster or Toronto
during their regular day-to-day life, too—they all tell me so. Christ, they
haul the humidors and the bongs and the grinders all the way up to Wasaga like it’s
their toiletry bag.
I’ve witnessed countless glass bongs topple over and
shatter. Perhaps there’s a market for fixing these vessels of the magic herb; a
golden opportunity for a shrewd entrepreneur to open up a seasonal bong repair
shop. Let’s call it Bong Voyage. Guys with their names stitched onto
coveralls in sweeping cursive--Bob, Gary, Don--with resin blotches
smearing their faces, wiping their brows after a hard day’s work cleaning and
repairing glass bongs.
Marijuana is so integral to modern Canadian teendom, you
wouldn’t believe it unless you saw it with your own two eyes. It’s outta
control! I’ve seen some studies that say only a tiny percentage, like 3% of
teenagers smoke pot daily but that has not been my experience this summer. At
any moment the sweet, burnt pine smell of potent bud wafts into my nostrils
while I’m pacing back and forth on the grounds. Joints, blunts, bongs, you name
it, they smoke it. Seems to me that people smoke blunts as more of a display of
wealth than any other form of smoking marijuana. These guys are the show-off
types who like mega bling.
Blunts are the five star hotel of marijuana smoking. If you smoke blunts, it
says, “Yeah, I have enough fuck you money to burn this big ol’ thing full a
weed rolled with the most expensive, thickest type of cigar paper.” Or, they’re
simply connoisseurs of the herb and spend thirty minutes with their scissors
and their wraps and their pile, carefully plucking out the stems and dropping
them into the ashtray with a little rattling ping, like a doctor removing body lodged bullets out of another
drive-by victim. And they put in a filter, usually a small rectangle cut out
from a pack of zig-zag’s, and lick the blunt twenty times, pulling it out of
their mouths and holding a flame under it to harden the fuselage and ensure it
stays uniform while burning down. If these potheads put that much effort into
world peace, we’d be shitting flowers.
On any still night in town, there is a haze of marijuana
and camp fire smoke that hovers in the air creating a thick, flagrant, muggy
fog. Kids keep their appurtenances on the picnic tables in full view of the
cops that drive by every few minutes. Wasaga is nice that way. You can freely
sit outside your room or cabin and smoke away and the staff or the law won’t do
a goddamn thing about it. The kids get a
kick out of it when I inform them upon their arrival that they can smoke weed
right in front of the cops. “It’s all good,” I say. “This is private property.
Smoke away!” If they’ve never been to the beach before, their reaction is
incredulous delight at the freedom. God bless Canada! Young men and women come
here to dance in their thongs and smoke weed in their bongs, shaking it to
cheesy beats that loop and loop, a robotic voice spraying nonsense in between
drops, fists pumping furiously into the air. This is freedom in the great white
north. This is what kids do. They get fucked up and get fucked and eat sloppy
hamburgers, and get half of it on their face, and then they hit REPEAT.
When a group of fifty plus
teenagers sit around, drunk and stoned, inevitably one of the jocks whips out a
football and three or more guys fan out and start tossing it around. One guy
goes long. Too long. The ball ends up on Mosley St, where it’s like ‘60’s
California: guys showing off their tricked out anachronistic rides. In Wasaga
you don‘t simply go for a ride to get from point A to point B, the raison
d‘etre for the ride in the first place is to go cruising by the strip
and along Mosley where the resorts are. To show off the whip and gawk at the
girls. ‘Tis a pity I don’t care much for steel horses. Doesn’t matter if
there’s a good engine under that hood or if it runs on unicorn tears—all I know
is I would look good in a new model, two door, black BMW. Men visiting Wasaga
will sidle up to me and get all technical about an engine or valve like we grew
up on the same block and had discussed the finer points of automotive
maintenance many times. “The viscosity rate on the V5 block is atrocious,” he
says.
“Oh yeah, totally,” I say knowingly.
If only I could talk Wimbledon with some of these
nitwits! Don’t they know that it’s the men’s semis tomorrow!? Don’t they know
Jerzy Janowicz is playing Andy Murray and that a Brit hasn’t won Wimbledon in
like three hundred and fifty eight years and Jerzy is a great young Pole who
has never made it this far in a major tournament? Jerzy is an emotional wreck,
getting progressively more pissy-eyed after each win, but it’s true sports
glory, the greatest kind of reality TV, and if that doesn’t hit you right here,
than you, sir, have no soul.
But no. They want to talk about rims, upholstery, and matte
black paint jobs.
We’re all on our own, and here’s to each and all of
you.
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