Life's a Beach: Excerpt #3

June 8^th 2013

I’m at Bayside from 7pm to 6am tonight. Most of the inhabitants are socializing by the chiminea on the large swath of sandy grass in the middle of the property. Bayside is built for utilitarian partying—open your front door and there you are, right in the thick of things.

Think sleazy motel.

           

Visiting for the weekend is a prom from Mississauga. Right out of the gate I tell them about growing up in Brampton and they collectively groan their disapproval. Oh no, already behind the eight ball. Some people cringe at the mention of Brampton, their hearts bursting with pity, looking as if they’d like to pat me on the head and say, “You poor thing.”

Huh? Did I grow up in Chernobyl or something? It was the suburbs. Yes, there were a lot of visible minorities, particularly from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean, but it was the suburbs. The template is the same whether you’re from Oakville or Brampton; only the details change. Plus, our street hockey games were epic battles with imperialistic undertones—the Whites versus the Indians. Us whites generally won only because we’re genetically superior (duh!), but that’s neither here nor there.

A couple of girls with stupendous posture sidle up to me, their teenage heads full of air and vodka. One of them shoves an iPhone in my face, imploring me to say ‘turnip.’ I didn’t quite understand and asked, “You want me to say turnip? Like the vegetable?”

            They both laughed uproariously at my naiveté.

I must be getting old. I don’t even know why they’re laughing anymore. I was duly informed that it’s not turnip but rather turnt up, which roughly translates to fucked up. Got it now? Good. 

While I was having a smoke with Kelly, the manager of the motel next door, who cannot stop twitching and scratching herself, four youths ambled up to the party behind my back and made themselves at home. “These kids are always watching you!” Gary’s voice echoed in my head. We flicked our butts onto the street and went back to our respective properties. I sighed, knowing that once interlopers have succeeded in gaining access and have ingratiated themselves to the legit guests, it can be more difficult to get them to leave. If a guard is paying attention, as he should, he can stop the insurgents from even entering the property.

These four had already made themselves at home. I approach the four who are standing nonchalantly in a group of ten and ask to see their wristbands. One of them, the closest to me, in a bright orange hoodie, confidently holds up a wristband but it is not made of the same material as ours—it was cheaper and made of a papery substance. Our wristbands, on the other hand, were made of plastic, with multiple notches like a belt to secure it to a wrist. The wristband’s also a different colour. The other three don’t even bother to show theirs at this point. “You, you, you, and you,” I said, singling each intruder out with the rubber antenna of my radio, “have to leave the property now; you’re not allowed to be here. Let’s go.” I wave my antenna towards the street and add for good measure, “Hit the bricks.” 

            “Dude,” Orange Hoodie says, “relax, we’re from the same school. We’re just hanging out for a bit.”

            “Doesn’t matter. You guys aren’t staying here so you’re not allowed on the property.”

            “Can I at least finish my smoke?” Orange Hoodie asks, incredulous at this draconian display of power. He probably sees these people every day at school and finds it ridiculous now that he’s up north partying with them, he can’t even stand on the same ground and say hi. It’s a wicked world bucko, and the quicker you learn that the better, I want to tell him.   

After five songs, whose common themes were drug dealing, bitches, and weed, I again told them to skedaddle, careful to make eye contact with each of them. Two of them openly scoffed at my suggestion; I knew it was time for drastic actions--the threat level had to be ratcheted up a notch. I went over to the stereo and turned the volume all the way down. That got everyone’s attention.  “Kay guys, you gotta leave now,” I said, pointing in the general direction of the foursome, “or I have to get the boss down here and you’ve seen that fat bastard, he likes to fight, too, or maybe he’ll just throw out a random room. I’m not going to let the music play until you leave, either way, so . . .”

It’s simple: divide and conquer.

            All eyes are on me. I’m nervous and excited, unable to delineate where one feeling ends and the other begins. I’m the centre of attention and I have to out-duel these four guys, making sure they leave the party in a peaceful manner. Now that the four guys are pariahs, threatening to end the good times of the others, their backs are against the wall. Nobody ever wants to give in without a fight. They coalesce together in a huddle and discuss their future options for the night. They’re saving face, pretending to debate the matter and prolong the situation when they know full well they’ll be leaving any minute. Orange Hoodie looks back to see if I’m still watching—I am--and he mutters, “Fucking Paul Blart motherfucker.”

            “Time’s up. I’ve got to radio the boss and you can talk to him when he gets here.”

            Now, sometimes I’ll pretend to radio Gary (or even the police) and sometimes I’ll actually radio Gary. It depends. It’s amazing how easy it is to fake the use of a radio. There could be anybody on the other end. If I’m faking it, I’ll say, “Gary,” --pregnant pause-- “We have four guys here who are getting belligerent and refusing to leave the property, 10-4.”

            If I’m being for real, I’ll say, “Guy come in,” and wait for Guy to actually verbalize a response. 

            “We have four guys who are being belligerent and refusing to leave the property.”

            “I’ll be right there,” Guy would say.

            Guy is a kilometer away at the Inn or Cottage Courts. He could be here in his white Ford pickup in a couple minutes.

            The four guys are posturing to leave, but not wanting to make it easy on any of us. “I’ll fucking talk with the owner, I don’t care,” one of them chimes in with his own brand of musky braggadocio.

“That’s fine with me, he’ll be here in a minute or two,” I say.

            “Fucking Paul Blart, what a loser,” another says for me to hear as they finally walk away, and the four chuckle derisively.

I go and turn up the music, the first audible lyric being the tail end of a word ending with the two syllables: igg-er.

I consider how many words rhyme with the N WORD, because I hear that word come out in disproportionate numbers from the guests’ mouths and iPods, and I can’t help but theorize that rappers must know like every single possible word that rhymes with the N WORD. As the tunes are blasting through the Peavey amp, I scroll through my mind’s lexicon and could only come up with a marginal number of words that rhyme with the N WORD: Bigger, Trigger, Figure, Chigger. Are there any more?

Another world blossoms if you soften up the ‘er’ and turn it into an ‘ah’ sound. You can pronounce the word ‘litter’ ‘littah’ and well, the half-rhyme options become endless, as I’ve heard too many times to count. Does ‘Brita’ kind of half-rhyme?

Human language is so rich with the subtlest of nuances that it is the intent and context of the words that are being spoken by the word vessels (humans), not the words themselves.

And the N WORD is one versatile word. It can be a stinging rebuke, a racial epithet, or a greeting to a good friend. It is a happy, sad, angry, mad word, with lots of history, just like the world. It’s here to stay.

Most of the teens that come to the beach listen to rap and EDM primarily, but oddly, they also throw in the occasional country song as well. Without fail, it’s “Love my niggaz, but where’s my bitchez” this, to “I love my beer, but where’s my freedom?” that.

            There’s something comical and incongruous about these fresh faced, skinny limbed, middleclass Ontario boys and girls listening to hardcore rappers waxing poetic about the gangster lifestyle. Most of the rappers themselves are bullshitting, too.

I let a couple of harmless kids onto the property; they were clearly friends from the same school but couldn’t secure a room at Stillwater so they were staying at another motel up the road. I levied the Taylor Tax: Article One, Subsection Two, which states: “Unlawful entry onto Stillwater premises is permissible only if Taylor D. Nesbit is allotted one to two shots of vodka or similar spirit.”

The perps smartly complied.

            “We have to go into one of the rooms over here, though. There’re cameras all over the place,” I explained. A Bieberesque teen with a basketball hat planted atop his dome, carefully askew, follows me into room twelve and he declares to the occupants, “The guard’s gonna take a shot!”

A collective ‘Wahoo!’ ensues.

We can be heroes, just for one day.

            The Blackhawks/Kings game is on and it’s OT. If the Blackhawks win they go to the Stanley Cup finals. I take the bottle of Smirnoff and down a swig, big as I can handle without gagging or throwing up, a much bigger swig than if it was my bottle. I exhale, and the burn slides and sloshes its way down my esophagus like a waterslide before splashing into the pool of my belly. I repeat the process and hand the bottle back to the anonymously pleasant kid with swooping bangs.

Not all fires move upward, my friend.

           

It was refreshing to see a group of three fellas with an acoustic guitar, even if they were intensely misogynistic and aggro. Only one of them could actually play, lugging the guitar around on his back like Jesus with the cross. The guy played along with any old rock number that came on the iPod. He figured out the riff right away and learned the song on the spot, even some of the solos. I’ve been playing guitar for almost twenty years and this guy was quite impressive. They were listening to a song off of Tool’s album, Undertow, and drunkenly singing along. Shit adds up at the bottom!

Later on, I popped my head into their cabin (the door was wide open) and one guy was chopping lines on top of the fifteen year old Zenith TV. I stood there without saying anything hoping he’d notice me and offer up a snort. He never did, and I walked away, salivating and disappointed.

Attitudes regarding drug use are very laissez-faire on Stillwater property. I asked Zach about them snorting shit in their room with the door wide open, and he said it was Oxy, not coke.       

“They’re all carpenters from Brampton; they make hella money, bro” he said. “Gave me a line of Oxy, too. I don’t do that stuff though. It only made me dizzy.”

“What? You fucker! I was by their room and they didn’t offer me anything.”

One of the non-guitar playing carpenters, who looked like Stephen Baldwin in wigger gear, was shacked up with a short, buxom black girl who was herself a dead ringer for Serena Williams. You look at enough new people every night, they become incarnations of celebrities. She resembled Serena so much that I had to tell her, confident that she’d heard this dozens of times before from totally random strangers, because the resemblance is uncanny, and we’d laugh about it, but instead she was mortified by the mere suggestion. “I don’t look like that bitch!” she saucily said to me, an index finger cocked and wagging. The afternoon sun beat down upon my brow and I was sweating profusely. I didn’t want to incur the wrath of this feisty woman with the violent boyfriend, but the guy was laughing at her anger, and took to calling her Serena for the rest of the day until she simply disappeared early in the evening, never to return.

I thought she had merely gone to the corner store, so I apologized to the Stephen Baldwin wigger about offending his girlfriend. He told me it’s all good, “I only met her last night. Pump and dump, bro!” he said, laughing and taking a healthy swig from his can of Heineken.

           

You’ll never see a CD at any of these resorts. They are almost extinct, as you know. The march of progress is inevitable; it’s 2013 and I knew going in that CDs weren’t used much anymore among young people. I knew this because most of my friends don’t use CDs anymore, either (though I’m noticing more vinyl). Inherent in every smash success of a medium, encapsulated and woven into the form of it, is its death. iPods are at the peak of success right now and in ten years another goofball is going to anthropologically document his summer and he will lament the decline of the iPod, while simultaneously decrying the rise of microscopic boombox stereos implanted directly into our brains.

I yearn nostalgically for all of the extraneous uses of CDs and their covers. Just what in the hell do people snort coke off of nowadays!?

            Now that music is centralized somewhere in the digital ether, entire libraries of sound are literally at our fingertips. No more annoying stacks of CDs taking up precious space in the glove compartment. No more driving on the 410 while frantically searching for Ani Difranco’s Dilate, dying to hear Superhero only to discover the case is empty or it’s the wrong CD, and squeezing the case shut so hard in frustration that a plastic shard rips open my thumb and I have to pull over, tears dripping onto the blood soaked case. I licked up the fluids of a smooth piece of clear plastic and swallowed it. I’ll need all the blood and tears I can get. 

            Listening to music never really was a tactile experience. Would Houses of the Holy sound as good without prepubescent blonde children frolicking among ancient ruins on the cover? Probably.

While it’s true that ears and hearts do all the heavy lifting, but the artwork and presentation enhance the bond. It’s kind of like this: some potheads take great care of their bongs, replacing the screens and cleaning the pipe stem with a wet Q-tip, getting rid of all that sticky resin that builds up, knowing that the bowl of marijuana will be easier to smoke once the passages are cleared. It’s about the process.

            One outcome of the digitization of vast libraries of music is the ability to easily switch to any number of thousands of songs with the flick and click of a thumb. The end result is not letting any song play all the way through. I call these people who are forever changing the current song in search of a better one, Stereo Nazi’s. With the multitude of options it’s too irresistible. I’m guilty of it myself. There’s got to be something better going on somewhere else on this device. There’s got to be something better, something I’m not considering.

Songs are frequently cut off mid second chorus and then the next song only gets the intro and first verse, then okay, a full one (people are distracted playing beer pong), then half of Blurred Lines, then a prolonged silence while the iPod user scrolls through the alphabetized data for the perfect song, then finally finds it, after shouts from the interior of the party to “Pick a fucking song already!” and stands holding the iPod, still unsure of her selection though it had already been made, until the end of the first chorus, and then she gives up, gauging the lacklustre response from the crowd and plays another song right away as if she just gave up on the search, and walks away to join the festivities until another person takes up her place to futz around with the damn thing and the whole process begins anew.

            All hail our OveriLords!

           

One looming, uncomfortable drawback of this job is the clear and present danger of physical violence.

            Now listen: I’m a dweeby, lightweight, tranny-loving scumbag stoner who benches ninety pounds and couldn‘t tell you the first thing about a driveshaft. I don’t punch guys. I have soft feminine hands and I cry during Woody Allen movies. And if you don’t know, now you know, nigga.

            Real violence is plain scary. I’m not an embedded reporter in Afghanistan. I’m not a steroid slamming psychopath. I hit people in my dreams, not on the streets. Every now and again, though, I’m overcome with a seething rage, a will to violence--like given the slightest provocation I’ll gnaw your testes open and spit the viscous sack fluid in your face and then ground and pound your head until it’s hamburger meat--but it always passes after a moment or two.

            I am seriously unnerved by the prospect of violence from Zach in particular. I like him and get along with him well. We can joke around and shoot the shit, no problem. The guy attracts the ladies, too; very good looking--blue eyes, blonde hair, and well-built. Yummers! Next to Zach, I’m the fat guy with braces and a penis growing out of his ear. The kid’s got a nasty hair trigger temper, perfectly in tune with his primordial vestiges of caveman rage. He’s one extra lumpy protein shake away from making the first person who talks back eat a curb sandwich. My fear is that I’ll be the unwilling backup man who is forced into taking the other guy.

Zach is obsessed with fitness the way junkies are obsessed with heroin. Hours are spent sculpting obscure chest muscles. His girlfriend, too, is a bodybuilder/English teacher. He showed me a picture of her on his cell and she was a striking lass, even if I couldn’t tell where her pecks ended and her breasts began.

Because Zach places such a premium on physical beauty, it’s hard not to muse that his anger stems from his most salient physical flaw of which he has no control: he’s short. Like five foot seven six and a half short.

I sat there in the predawn hours on a ridiculously comfortable plastic adirondack chair and watched the stars slowly fade from the night sky until Gary radioed me, and apropos of nothing, asks to hear some jokes. It is immediately clear that Zach and/or Brianna have told Gary about all the dirty jokes from the other night and possibly even my ‘Possession of an Explosive Substance’ charge from when I was fifteen and for no good reason tossed a Molotov Cocktail onto a street from my backyard. The stupid thing just exploded on the asphalt like it was full of piss instead of lighter fluid. Memories!

            It’s five am and there is an audience of about six guards listening on their radios who are looking to ease their boredom via some distraction. I was tired and taken aback by the request to perform like a monkey on the spot to an unseen audience.

I bombed horribly.

Speaking on the radio is still a nasty feedback loop of self-consciousness that I’m slowly overcoming. I feel as though I am outside of myself and watching as this average looking white dude talks on the magical radio device. And then there are all the other guards listening in even though I’m not talking to them, but they’re listening by default because there are no other channels, so I have to watch what I say. Thinking clearly is not easy when caught in a feedback loop. I panic and the end result is I sound like a stuttering-muttering fool. And sounding stupid only further shakes up the nervous system and makes me more self-conscious about how I’m bombing and sounding stupid, and the whole thing makes my head hurt, never mind yours.

I am The Depressed Person, I know.   

I launched into the ‘Catholic Priest and Red Bull’ joke, willing my mouth to form the sounds that connote meaning. Like a mountain-bicyclist going downhill way too fast to maintain control, I held on as long as possible through the setup until I crashed and burned--forgetting the punch line and panicking, gnawing the loose flesh on the insides of my cheeks. I’m bombing horribly, and finally, after a couple seconds the magic of the joke evaporated anyways, and now I had to radio that I forgot the punch line.

I threw my co-workers out on the line and cut the cord. Who wants to hear the setup of a joke without the payoff of the punch line? They must think I’m a complete fucking moron. A moment later when I remembered the punch line, shamelessly diving back in for the re-tell, there was obviously no more heft left in the punch--the moment was over. There might have been a pitiful chuckle or two.

Comedy is a sensitive bitch, that’s for sure. You can say the right thing but if it’s not at the right moment, well then go fuck your mother.

Life's a Beach: A Summer Portrait Excerpt #2

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

-The Metamorphosis

PROLOGUE

In the summer of 2012 I found myself freshly unemployed and hemorrhaging my meager savings at an alarming rate.            

Up until then I had been living a good version of the Canadian Dream: a decent apartment on Bloor St. in Toronto (okay, Etobicoke) working nine to five in Mississauga at a soul emulsifying office sales job, but if that’s what it takes keep beer in the fridge, so be it. There was something building inside me for quite some time; a difficult to define life urge to switch paths, almost like I was powerless over it. I could not keep the façade going any longer and a crash was imminent, though I tried to fight it and trudge through everyday telling myself I had it so good and I would be crazy to leave. It was getting harder and harder to hide my unhappiness beneath a façade of normalcy. One day, of a will not wholly my own, I snapped. Nothing in particular happened. I wasn’t in danger of losing my job. It was a regular day, but a switch had been flicked and there was no way to unflick it.

            The five G’s in my bank looked like a fortune, taunting me to cut the cord. I left my job without a plan for the future. I figured the money would afford me enough time so that I wouldn’t have to drastically change my T.O. bachelor lifestyle for a few months, until I landed another gig somewhere.

            Of course, though, I wasn’t looking for a job. I was busy getting drunk and stoned, playing guitar, reading books, watching movies, listening to music and radio shows. Any form of entertainment/art/noise to fill my time and burn the bridge to the real world.

            Most days I spent alone in my apartment. The radio shows and podcasts kept the seedy theatre of my mind open all the time. Silence was the enemy. External silence meant internal screaming.

It wasn’t total anarchy, though. I had rules. I wouldn’t allow myself to crack the first beer before noon. I figured it seemed normal enough to begin drinking in the afternoon. If you drink in the morning you most definitely have a problem. The afternoon? Come on! That’s when everyone drinks! It’s practically the evening.

            Does it matter if you drink four or five pints every day what time you start drinking them? Whether you have eggs for breakfast or eggs for dinner, you’re still eating eggs, are you not? Some days I’d look up at my digital clock and it would read, cruelly, 11:56am. There aren’t any minutes that go by slower than the next few. But then, sure enough, the last minute number in the sequence would faithfully turn into a 9, the sun would be high up in the sky, a gentle breeze fluttering my drapes, and my internal bartender would towel off  a pint glass and pour me a cold one no questions asked. Is there anything more satisfying than watching all six numbers on a digital clock change at the same time? The four larger numbers and the two smaller number’s all go boom!

            Every day was like New Year’s Eve at noon.

            The money in the bank was magic. Number’s on a screen. I swiped my cobalt blue Bank Of Montreal card into all manner of bank and debit machines around my neighbourhood and poof! I had what I wanted. Money only became real when I couldn’t pay next month’s rent. I pushed the real world away until finally it could take no more and began to push back.

            I didn’t know what else to do except move back in with my parents. I was thankful to even have that card in my hand to play. Not to say that my parents’ love and hospitality are cards, they’re human beings, my flesh and blood. There’s nothing worse than seeing your mom and dad, both well into their sixties, do manual labour in the middle of summer--lugging out coffee tables, boxes and chairs, huffing and puffing, taking multiple breaks to stretch their aching backs, sweat pooling through their shirts. My wonderful parents are being worked like donkeys and the whole cause of this ignominy is me and my inability to swallow hard and maintain the semblance of an independent life. I’m still trying to worm my way out of the cold, wet shame blanket on that one.

            For the duration of the summer until the following spring 2013, I continued on, unemployed, living in my parent’s basement, a depressed wastrel trying to figure out how to figure out how to put it all back together. How should a person be? What did I want to do with my life? Such difficult questions to navigate while sober, never mind soused to the eyeballs!

            I had a couple interviews at full-time, career oriented jobs but didn’t get a call back. Secretly, I was afraid. These jobs seemed like so much work and I just wanted a vacation from life, to retreat into a subterranean drug and alcohol coma. I worked hard for the last seven odd years. I played the game of life and now I wanted to cash out. As a man with the faculties to appreciate the finer things in life, I only wanted to be left alone to luxuriate in aesthetic leisure. So I started applying to part time, low-hanging fruit shit jobs, the ones an ever growing number of Canadians are taking to make ends meet. Eventually I landed one as a--wait for it--  

            --Drum roll, please--

            A security guard.

            Tah-dah!

            Technically, I wasn’t even a bona fide security guard, I was a customer service representative. No qualifications necessary! The company that hired me, Stillwater, had three main properties that required multiple on-site guards to ward off teenage interlopers. I quickly found out on any given night visitors staying at the beach get so drunk, it was as if I was the only human amongst the walking dead.

            This is a snapshot, a portrait if you will, of the summer of 2013 through the lens of a man trying to keep the devil way down in the hole. 

           

June 2^nd 2013

P-A-R-T-Y is the only show in town and it sells out every night. 

Tonight the party is at full tilt. The Party Meter has been turned up a notch because it’s this batches last night in town. And in Wasaga Beach that means pouring some hammer drinks, cueing up a Two Chainz album on the old iPod stereo, and commencing obliteration.

            Dozens of passersby and friends of friends of friends were trying to get on to Stillwater property with either no wristband, or wristbands from neighbouring properties, which is strictly verboten. Alexei, a nineteen-year-old from Barrie by way of Belarus, and myself plugged the holes on our front; we did all we could to stop the heathens from crashing the party but there’s always more just around the corner. While my attention is taken up with kicking off a couple twerps, a few more sneak in behind my back. An untold number of enemy soldiers breached our positions and were now inside the wire--possibly even hiding out in rooms.

            It was a tense evening.

            This role as a sergeant in the Party Police is not something I’m even remotely familiar with. I’m used to being a fellow reveler. I’ve been that guy at innumerable parties. The guy who runs down the street naked, or pees in his own mouth and gargles with it. What can I say? Alcohol and cocaine bring out the bon vivant in me.

            It is a rite for young people all over Canada in the summer, a nihilist credo: party until you can’t remember who you are on the “Longest stretch of freshwater beach in the world.” This place is a paradise on Earth, the type of which promised to suicide bombers after they hit the switch.

            In Wasaga, you don’t need faith.

             

A prom celebration has occupied all twelve rooms at the Bayside Motel. The joint is a typical, one story motel except that the largest room is setup like a three bedroom apartment and sleeps ten. The other eleven hold five.

            The kids are from the same school, the same group of friends and acquaintances all graduating from high school and celebrating this milestone in their lives. I arrive at 7pm for my shift and the fifty or so kids are starting to get hammered. Forgive me if I’m a little nervous. I’m not used to being in wild party conditions with random teenagers whom I don‘t know, while in a position of authority, and while sober. 

            There is a little person among the hordes of revelers and someone in a green tank top and sunglasses tells me he’s the president of student council. I can believe it. This wasn’t a woe-is-me type of little person. The guy is a mover and a shaker; clearly popular with everyone. He moves in and out of the clusters of cliques with grace and aplomb. He is not marginalized or bullied as far as I can tell. Quite the opposite, actually, he appears to be one of the apex predators in his high school food chain. By ten pm he’s heavily intoxicated. A pretty blonde girl in bikini bottoms and a tight pink halter top sidles up to me and shakes a twenty-sixer of Grey Goose with only a swill or two left and says with a lilt, “He drank all of this.”

            Little people don’t run like we do. They hobble-wobble along like penguins. Christopher was no different--except that he was perhaps more akin to a baby penguin just learning to walk, for in his intoxicated state he was face planting every ten feet. It’s so stupid and cliché and LCD, but drunken midgets are funny. They just are. I’m telling you, if you were there to see four friends carrying Christopher around the motel while he splayed his stubby little arms out stiff like an airplane and made a puttering, prop engine sound, you’d laugh--simple as that. It reminds me of the W.C. Fields quote: “If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make a comedian laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.”

In Wasaga, subtlety does not exist; you go all the way or you go home.

            Once Christopher landed, he began stammering around like the town fool and it came to my attention that he lost his pair of $250 sunglasses. Sunglasses and phones are lost/stolen on an almost nightly basis. I watched as he futilely scoured the sandy patches of grass. He was in the throes of a drunken rage, the kind one gets locked inside when you lose a personal item and can’t think of anything else until you find it, accusing friends and strangers alike of possessing the lost item. Upon seeing my tucked in, buttoned up shirt, complete with crisp collar, epaulets, and radio clipped to my hip, thought I’d be more help than his hopeless friends, and he drunkenly implored me to help him. I whipped out my flashlight and turned my head upside down to check the underside of all the parked cars. No luck. I felt bad. I wish I could have been the hero who found the glasses, it would have given me instant hero status, but it was not to be.  

            Thirty minutes later and Christopher’s barely conscious, too drunk to give a fuck about anything let alone his beloved glasses. The guys are taking turns hoisting him above their heads like the Stanley Cup, pumping him up and down. He comes to long enough to give a halfhearted thumbs-up and the crowd cheers, then goes limp again.

           

An hour later the boss man, Gary, radios and yells at me to run into room four. He saw a kid on one of the cameras weasel his way in through a back window and was hiding inside. The door to room four  was ajar so I walked right in. The lights were on and the room was empty except for the bathroom door--it was closed. I knocked and said, “Dude, you gotta come out, you’re not allowed to be here.” There was a brief silence. For all I knew I was talking to no one, but the door clicked and out came a meek, pimply faced kid with Bieber bangs. “Sorry, sor--”

            “Just get the fuck outta here,” I said.

I walked outside and Gary hollers at me to check room five, too.

I knock on the door and say “Security” before letting myself in, flashlight cocked and beaming the white hot light of justice. Five guests were huddled around the kitchenette table in the semidarkness laughing at something I couldn’t see. More or less ignored, I bypassed them and proceeded into the back bedroom. I flipped over an inflatable mattress leaning suspiciously against the wall at a seventy five degree angle, half expecting to see some boozed up scallywag take off running like a frazzled deer. There was no one under the inflatable mattress. I breathed a sigh of relief and went back into the main room.

            There was Christopher, still barely conscious and now handcuffed to both a chair and a leg of the table with a belt, trying to wriggle himself free. The five kids stood around and laughed. I joined in, too, at the absurdity of the scene, of life, of everything. I got a degree from a reputable university to do this with my life?

They weren’t mock-torturing Christopher in a vicious way, or else I would have put a stop to it. They were doing what most teenagers do: fuck with the drunkest of the lot. Last night Christopher was indistinguishable from the others, just a face in the crowd. But tonight he was drunk as fuck and thus ripe to have his eyebrows shaved, or mustard squirted on his face, or cuffed to the chair and table. Even Christopher was laughing about it, his eyes lolling about in their sockets.   

           

It’s fucking Wasaga, bitch!

           

Another guard, Zach, asked me for a cigarette. Zach was a short, yoked up twenty-two year old fitness nut with spiky blonde hair. He was a good looking club going type who looked like Kurt Cobain on steroids.

Acting on some anonymous tip filtered through multiple people, Zach and myself plowed into another room, number eight, our flashlights on, little spotlights roving around the darkened cabin. I didn’t see anyone hiding; only a couple of passed out teens in an otherwise quiet room. Then Zach made the international ‘Shhhhh’ sign with his index finger in front of his mouth, and with one sweeping arc yanked the sheets off the bed, like turning over a large rock to see what disgusting insects were crawling underneath. On one side of the bed a girl slept peacefully in an oversized t-shirt, and on the other lay a fully clothed guy with baseball hat and shoes still on.

            Bah-bah-bah-busted!

I was having an out-of-body experience. Like my body had been hijacked and plopped down in the middle of an episode of Cops in some god-fearing heartland city like Amarillo, Texas. Unlike a cross-dressing, black crackhead plying her trade in the deserted, industrial warehouse part of town, our perp was a straight, white male who gave up peacefully. Zach and myself, the two hotshot guards, escorted him off the property and chucked him back into the arms of the night.

           

It was tonight, at this early juncture in my tenure, that I introduced into the House of Commons and quickly ratified into federal law, effective immediately, the Taylor Tax.  

After being repeatedly asked to unlock doors because the temporary citizen of Stillwater drunkenly left the keys inside or the key holder was not present, so I felt the need to balance out the relationship--I was doing all the damn work and not getting anything in return. I began telling the young man or woman that, “If I’m going to unlock your door, the price is one shot of vodka, okay?”

            The first thing you learn is that they always say yes; they’re thrilled to be drinking with the security guard. It’s another layer in the onion of their wet-and-wild, out-of-control, beach-living experience.

            “Hey dude,” they brag to their friends, “I gave the security guy a shot!”

            My little scheme was a win-win deal. Not only do I get a swig or two of free liquor, it’s the only way I can safely take a drink away from Sauron’s prying eye.

            “The toilet’s working just fine now,” I say to the guest, walking out the door with a wink and a smile.

            What a piece of shit I am. The moment I see where all the cameras are, I think, “How can I get away from their gaze if I want to do something against the rules?” I’m a terrible employee and will probably never be hired for anything ever again, unless there’s a company with a position for a truth-telling rebel who plays by his own rules.  

           

From 3am to 6am I found myself back at Cottage Court, the crown jewel in the Stillwater dynasty. The detached cottages and semi-detached townhouses dot the gently sloped land above the banks of the Nottawasaga River, adjacent to the locally famous bridge that leads directly to the strip. It’s a prime cut of real estate. On some nights there are hundreds of drunken teens and twentysomethings floating by. The streets turn into an absolute madhouse feasting on lawlessness. Their behaviour is typical of middle class teenagers from around the GTA, relishing a few days of new found freedom, but up close and personal it’s nothing short of astonishing. There are drunken, aggro marauders, and emotionally flabbergasted punks, all with terrible tattoos that I endlessly wince over because they’re only eighteen, man, and ‘O’Rourke’ in elegant calligraphic across the expanse of an otherwise unblemished back is skin pollution. I just want to slap half these kids--and I would, if only half of them couldn’t slap me back two times harder. 

             From 3am to 6am it was remarkably quiet. A few guests were sitting on their cottage porches, peacefully stoned and staring in silence at nothing in particular. When I’m nervous I can’t shut up, spouting out every possible thing all at once to push the relationship over the precipice of that awkward, jittery, just getting to know you phase. I force the natural progression of things into friendship overdrive. Things don’t always work out so well. Brianna may be talking and I have to tell myself listen, listen, don’t talk, listen, listen, don’t talk, shut your mouth, don’t talk, listen, listen, shut your mouth, don’t talk.

I regaled Zach, Brianna and the chirping birds with bad jokes and silly stories. Zach is twenty one and Brianna is twenty five, so I am the de facto elder statesman of the group at thirty two. These kids haven’t heard some of my generations’ most worn out clichéd phrases, and I seemed smart and funny rehashing them for fresh ears. Phrases like, “Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” when discussing extremism, though I was quick to throw in examples refuting this point. They were supremely impressed by that one. People love a good sound bite.

Then I asked, “What do Catholic Priests and Red Bull have in common?”

            “What?” they said in unison.

            “They both come in little cans.”

            I let it sink in and we all broke out laughing. A success!

            I did imitations of Mike Tyson (I’ll fuck you ‘till you love me, faggot!), a random guy from Chicago (Deep dish pizzer), a random guy from Boston (Pahk da cah in da harbah yahd), and George Bush The First (He’s a Hitler), all of which Zach and Brianna seemed to enjoy. It was a real hoot. We laughed like fools the way you do when totally exhausted during a long sleepover, giggling over every dumb comment.

            We talked of documentary movies, growing marijuana, and getting away from our families. At 5:20 Zach could not stay awake any longer and laid his forehead down upon his upturned flashlight. Brianna and I sat mostly in silence, each of us smoking a cigarette. Five am to six am is indeed the most solipsistic hour on planet earth. The streets are deserted and it’s just the two of us waiting for the world to wake up, like we are the only two people in on the secret. Was I complaining about this job earlier? I take it back. Shit, I’d be the CEO of hanging out and smoking cigarettes with Brianna.  

It’s shaping up to be a wet hot Canadian summer. 

           

Gary has one of the largest, most rotund bellies I’ve ever seen on a human being. He is so obese and portly, he, too, waddles like our friend Christopher, only on a grander scale. Gary’s got the kind of gut that hangs out underneath his shirt. The kind of gut that begs for familial intervention with personal letters read aloud detailing how Gary’s gut has impacted their lives. But no, his heft lurches on unchallenged and I stand before its wrecking-ball mercy.

            He’s the kind of guy who, in his mid-forties, likes dissecting teenage women’s asses out loud and ad nauseum, and pilfering as much free deep fried food as he can from the folks on the strip. Gary is so uncouth and rude, aggressive and confrontational, I don’t imagine he’s too well liked by many of the locals. In fact, I’m slowly learning from some business owners that they think he’s a dumb ass, too. His gut, though. I mean, wow! Did he eat a beach ball, or what?! It’s so mathematically round.

Say what you want about a direct, selfish and aggressive man like Gary, and I’ll say a lot, but you want him around when a rowdy group starts misbehaving. I’m built like Woody Allen after a hotdogs and pushups binge, not intimidating upon sight, so Gary gave me the inevitable heart-to-heart about what it takes to be a real deal security guard.

I was lectured for half an hour in the back office, standing at the altar of the motherboard—a dozen small squares on one large monitor that he can click on and enlarge to full screen, showing almost every nook and cranny of the four Stillwater properties. Gary pointed at various boxes, told me to stand here and do this; patrol over there and do that.

“Watch Al,” he said.

Al is a guy in his fifties with a weathered face and a white, handlebar mustache that always looks as though it should have been trimmed two weeks ago. He’s been working at Stillwater for an incredible thirteen years. In the midst of a chaotic party situation, Mike keeps a Zen-like attitude, never loses his cool, and seems to know what these kids are going to do before they do it. He’s been to more wild parties than you or I ever will. To him, these social expressions of collective human joy have become something else entirely, something antithetical to joy. 

            “If that commie Alexander gets attacked,” Gary continued, “you have to have his back and be willing to bust some heads!”

I tried to put forth my best busting heads face, instead I bit my lower lip, simultaneously telling myself to stop biting my lower lip. I kept saying, “Yeah, I hear you,” or “Yeah, I hear you, boss.” I babbled some more rote bullshit straight out of the first edition of Subhuman Worker Scum to appease him, and then went back to my post between cottages seven and eight at Cottage Court. I paced the curbside. I was a curbside pacer nonpareil. But I couldn’t quell the anger. Who was Gary to tell me I was inept and couldn’t handle a situation? I spent many years handling the situation How dare that fat bastard humiliate and talk down to me! Fuck him! I don’t need this! Take this job and shove it!

I wanted to go postal--

Canada Postal.

Oh, relax, relax. I wouldn’t do that. There’s no way I’m letting some rabid, out-of-control OPP-K9 monster maim my face, or more importantly, one of my digits. These digits are national treasures you slobbery fool!

Excerpt from "Life's a Beach: A Summer Portrait"

The following is an excerpt from Life's a Beach, a comedic memoir to be released later in 2014 of my time spent as a security guard for a resort in Wasaga Beach, ON during the summer of 2013. Names have been changed to protect identities because those involved have no idea of their involvement. Except mine, of course.


Aug 12th, 2013


For summer, it’s a cold and windy day. The sun ducks in and out of a series of evenly spaced clouds. I am patrolling the front of Cottage Court with purpose, though there isn’t much of one. Walking east the hands are in the pocket. Walking west they’re crossed. It’s midday and our guests are relatively sober, which is a euphemism for ‘not completely out of control drunk.’

I’m the only slice of law on the land.

My radio crackles to life and Gary yells at me to tell the people in cottage thirteen, the one down by the docks, to move their cars back up the hill to the where they should be parked.

I stride down into the guest’s inner space, where girls in bikinis are playing beer pong on a fold out table and guys are swaying to the electro dance beats with alcoholic energy drinks in their hands. They all look at me as I say in a Southern U.S. accent: “Okay. Who’s the most sober person here? Because we got to move some vee-hickles.” They laugh politely.

I have watched way too many episodes of Cops.

These kids seem friendly and they have fun pointing around at one another until the two most capable drivers are officially decided on. Some of those who come to the beach are paranoid to high hell about driving drunk and some could give a shit, flaunting it around like urban daredevils. These folks are in the prior camp.

Thirty minutes later, two of them get into a pickup truck. The same one that was moved from the dock. It‘s a nice ride. A menacing steel beast, high off the ground with large shimmering rims. This baby was well maintained with tender love and care. I stood my guard at the mouth of the street, right by the famous blue bridge, glancing at the two men, careful not to stare in their direction for too long. Hard drug users are like skittish doe’s and will flee at the first sign of danger. They were sitting there, commiserating, with seemingly no intention of driving anywhere. That’s a red flag. My throat went dry. I could sense drug activity and I continued to watch them discretely. I patiently stood there with my hands in my pockets, waiting for the move: The Lean Down. It’s a dead giveaway. If any one of the occupants bend over at the waist as if they dropped a cell phone and then pop right back up, something’s going on.

I decide to make contact. They eye me with a cup of suspicion and a teaspoonful of fear as I sidle up to the passenger side window where the black guy is sitting and tap the window ever so gently. I have a mega-wattage, ear-to-ear smile plastered on my face to show them I come in peace. The window electronically lowers itself halfway. It’s a  social scenario that I’m all too familiar with this summer: disarming strangers sniffing drugs so that they know I’m on their side, despite my position of authority. If I feel like they’re holding out, then I’ll threaten them with eviction, their safety deposit be damned.

I’m the Bad Lieutenant of Wasaga Beach, bitch!

“Don’t worry, guys. It’s all good,” I say through a toothy smile. The passenger and I were now face to face--he was a young black man with unnatural looking forest green contacts, like an extra straight out of Spring Breakers.

“Hey, guys, don’t worry,” I reiterated, “I don’t care what you’re doing, I‘m with you all the way,” I said. With you all the way. Ugh. What a dumb thing to say. The longer this summer drags on while I break the rules with impunity, the sloppier I get with the guests. Once you go too far down a hole, there ain’t no way to get out on your own. I don’t care what I say to them anymore. They’re not even real. Tomorrow they’ll be gone and it’ll be some other group of ne’er-do-wells in ironic t-shirts and barely there bikinis.  

My life is the opposite of a touring musician--I simply stay put--yet very similar in the endless revolving door of characters coming and going each night. Everyone you meet will eventually disappear, they just disappear a lot faster in Wasaga.

I was hemorrhaging what little trust these two guys had in me to begin with. The dark haired, olive skinned driver with spiky hair leans over to get a better look at me. like a Panicky Pete, the words tumble out of my mouth, a will all of their own: “Do you guys have any blow?” I was so excited,  thinking I’ll for sure get a line or a pill of MDMA. I was in the grips of the Pavlovian high before the high--crazy anticipatory neurological shit was going on in my brain that only someone like Gabor Mate could explain. My heart’s thumping and I’m about to open the back door or either jump through the passenger side window and maul these freaks. There is nothing but this moment. I don’t care that I’m thirty-one and I live in my parents’ basement, that I have no practical aspirations for a better life. That I’m hopelessly broken in some way because I only want whatever the fuck just went into old Green Eyes’ face. That everything will be better once it goes into my brain. This is for all the marbles, the key to unlock the door to enlightenment.

My heart sinks into my shoes when Green Eyes tells me they just did the last of their MDMA.

Liar whore, liar whore, and you know it!

The three of us collectively sigh. The junkie’s lament.

My premature high comes prematurely.

“Do you know where to get any coke? We ran out last night,” the white guy says, turning the tables on me.

I am asked to procure cocaine for Edgewater guests, as you might expect, and sadly I always disappoint. I honestly don’t know where to get any. Take me to Brampton and I can get it from five different guys but my coke radar is not attuned to any Wasaga Beach frequencies. I’m no fabled importer like Mickey Munday.

“There’s tons of it around, I just don’t know where it is,” I say forlornly. “It’s an elusive fish that won‘t take the bait.”

                                                                       * * *

I can’t score any blow in this two-bit town, but I do have a great marijuana connection--even if I don’t know the guy’s phone number. The only way to make contact is to knock on his door.

He never told me why I can’t call him and I never asked why.

In an illicit business that now almost exclusively relies on cell phones for logistics, it’s a throwback to drive up to your dealer’s house to score, hoping and praying someone is on the other side of the door.

Our lives are now pre-arranged. It’s getting tougher and tougher to disappear into oblivion with these honing devices in our pocket at all times.

Tommy’s his name. He’s an old craggily half native, half white guy with a long grey ponytail and a roadmap of hard living etched on his face. Tommy had the prototypical bulbous red nose. Old tattoos dotted his arms, so blue and faded that I couldn’t even make a single one out. He’s lived in the beach for the last fifteen years.

Tommy, in his twilight years, is a nice enough, laid back guy who doesn’t seem to do work of any kind. At any hour, he’s either at home or the bar. He’s the kind of guy you immediately sense has seen a few cells and eviction notices in his day.

When I am low on marijuana and need to shell out the forty bucks required for a half-quarter, I drive the two kilometres to Tommy’s place in the hopes that he’s home. He lives on the top floor of an old white house on a side street adjacent to the madness of Mosley Street. You have to climb an old rickety set of white stairs to his front door that bows and squeaks even with my 155lbs frame on it.

Tommy has a system. If the padlock is unlocked, dangling from its hasp, then knock away. If Tommy’s not home the door is padlocked, but there may be any number of succinct messages scrawled in black marker on a piece of square cardboard and placed in one of the doors’ small window frames. It may say, “Back at 11am,” or “At the bar,” in which case you know where to find him: around the corner at Studs Lonigan. The most dreaded message of all is the “X” which means there‘s no stock left. There‘s always a gut-wrenching moment of truth when I climb the stairs. Sometimes the lock is unhinged and I can hear a soccer game on TV, but my high spirits are quashed by the sinister “X”. I turn around and skulk down the stairs back to my running car with no pep in my step, back to the basement. Back to analyzing every little thing to figure out how I ended up here.

One time I was so desperate to score, I knocked on Tommy’s door anyways, even with the “X” in the window. I needed answers. A time frame. Anything. For all I knew he just got a fresh load delivered and was in his bedroom chopping the weed up and putting it in Ziploc bags, moments away from removing the “X”.

Tommy, though quite a short man, came stomping towards the door like an elephant and split apart a couple strands of his dollar-store blinds to take a look at the fool who dared knock with the “X” in the window, which communicated perfectly the simple- as-shit message to understand that he was out of marijuana. I could hear him muttering obscenities and braced for a confrontation. The door swung open and before I could explain he said, “Didn’t you see the X?!”

“Yeah, Tommy, I saw the X. I can’t even get a dime? A joint? I‘m dying here.”

“No! Didn‘t you see the X!”

“Okay, well, do you think maybe tomorrow?” I said, cupping my hand to make sure he heard me as the door closed in my face.

“I don’t know,” he said, yelling “Maybe!” through the closed door.

I walked down the stairs with the worst feeling ever. Tommy’s big, cute fluffy black cat, Betty, meowed curiously at me. I always gave her a good pet down before and after leaving.

“Piss off Betty!” I said to her, getting in my car, muttering obscenities.

                                                                     * * *

I went over to Tommy’s to buy a half-quarter and asked him if he had anything else. Pills, powder, anything. He didn’t. Doesn’t mess around with the coke or opiates anymore. Only drinks tons of Canadian and puffs the occasional joint, but as a younger man he was a devoted hard drug user.

An Arsenal game played in the background; the crowd was so big they sounded like white noise. Tommy told me about how way back when, he cooked up a speedball in a strip joint and promptly OD’d. It was the lounge in back of the club where the girls wound down before and after their shifts. For Tommy it was a regular hangout where he mainly shot dope and sold it to the seedy denizens in and around the club. When Tommy spoke of needles he always referred to them as spikes.

“Some of my friends were strippers and some of my friends were junkies,” he said, “and some of my friends were strippers and junkies. Haw haw!”

As it became clear that Tommy was OD’ing, the three strippers in the lounge who were on break ran to his aid, lugging him into the bathtub, running the bath alternately cold and hot, trying to jerry-rig his system back to life. The first three girls left to go dance and hustle and the other three girls took over, storming in, kicking off their vertiginous stiletto’s and getting down to the business of nursing Tommy back to life.

When he finally came to, whichever three strippers were in the lounge fed him bowls of chicken noodle soup and cans of ginger ale with a brand new straw for each can,  until he finally gained his strength back and subsequently made a full recovery--to pounding alcohol down his gullet. The whole ordeal in the stripper ER lasted two and a half harrowing days.

Tommy pauses to slug down the rest of his can of Canadian, it takes a good ten seconds of glugging and slurping. The clock above the window says 10:52am. How uncouth! I don’t have my first drink until at least after 12pm.

He also recounted the time was drinking and smoking a lot of heroin with some buddies in Nova Scotia twenty years ago. He had successfully kicked shooting and switched to smoking. We take our successes where we can find them.

A Hurricane roared through, one of the biggest ever to hit the province. It had an ugly, forboding alliterative name: Hurricane Hortense. Tommy explained that when he smoked heroin, he’d put it on the tinfoil, plug one nostril, and with a straw inhale the smoke through the other one like a line of coke, not through his mouth the way most people do it. “It gets to your brain faster,” he said in a gruff voice. My nose crinkled at the thought of inhaling smoke through one of my nostrils and my eyes began to water.

“So we’re in the rented house smoking dope up our noses, and I walk outside at night to get a pack of smokes from my truck and right in front of me I see this white stallion galloping into the woods. The wind was howling. I was so fucked up I thought it was a ghost! Ha-ha! We all nodded off and then once I woke up the next day and walked outside the barn next door was gone, and all the trees were broken in two like matchsticks. That’s when I realized it must have been a big storm.

For the rest of the day I couldn’t get the image out of my head of a white horse running through the woods during a hurricane, maybe even flying.

“We just loaded up our clothes and shit and took off in the truck, which had a cracked to shit windshield from the storm, back to Ontario without paying the rent cause the whole place took a lot of damage while we were fucked up. That goddamn hurricane saved us a lot of money we didn’t have, haw haw!”


Aug 18th 2013


This weekend the town hosts the annual event: Wasaga Under Siege--A War of 1812 Experience.

Schooners with large wooden masts recreate a battle during the war between Britain and America that took place right here in the Nottawasaga River.

In 1812, America and Britain were like two parents during an acrimonious divorce, fighting bitterly over custody of their young weak child, not out of concern for the child’s well being so much as for the possession of the offspring to consolidate power.

Essentially, Canada’s starring role in this historic war was mainly that of the battleground.

Lots of families and history buffs come out to watch and listen to the thunderous booms of the canons. Relax folks, they’re blanks! It’s fake violence, like fake porn. So bring the whole family!

Re-enactor’s are dressed impeccably in stuffy early 19th century war uniforms and they are all sweating profusely in the unrelenting August humidity. The soldiers balance muskets against their shoulders and pass nervously by the turnt up kids. The whole scene is full of non-stop cringe inducing moments of pity for the imitator war vets. These guys can’t pass a group of people dressed in twenty first century clothes without being made fun of and laughed at derisively. I felt sorry for the anachronistic warriors.

There’s not really much to the whole Experience--only a few old schooners and the occasional boom that echoes across the whole town. This weekend, Wasaga is a smorgasbord of 1812 war vets, drunken teens in the latest wigger wear, families, and old folks with Lego person hairdos. For the whole weekend the town is a George Saunders story come to life.

The actual battle that the Experience re-enactment is based on left me bemused. I am left scratching my head as to why it is being commemorated. I was always under the assumption that it was a glorious battle between the British and Americans, with some rogue battalion of scallywag Canadians stepping in to help the Brits win some penultimate battle. Maybe we were outmanned and outgunned, but through sheer maple syrup moxie we managed to defeat the Americans, their Yankee blood colouring (coloUring!) the southern shores of Georgian Bay a deep red, their guts sloshing around right in front of where the night club Bananas now stands.

No, it was nothing like that at all.

The re-enactment takes place in the narrow Nottawasaga River, where the sunken hull of Nancy, the centrepiece (centre!) of the battle lays after being bombarded by the American ships that were in nearby Georgian Bay. Nancy was a big fish in a little pond. Easy pickings for the Americans safely anchored a short distance away. The half sunken hull is now called Nancy Island and is a main tourist attraction in Wasaga. I’ve never been.

As the story goes, back in 1812 some American troops wandering through the woods essentially found Nancy hiding in the Nottawasaga, lying in wait to ambush or at the very least hide from the Americans docked nearby in the bay. There was only a thin strip of land separating the river from the bay--perhaps half a kilometre. The troops scurried back undetected to the U.S. ships with the good news and shortly thereafter the solitary schooner with an unimposing girl’s name was hammered with canons. Rather than let the Americans take custody of the ship, Lieutenant Worsley made preparations to burn the bitch and get the fuck out of Dodge (Dodge being the forests south of the river that are now a pleasant patch of suburbs). Before this last ditch effort came to fruition, Nancy took a direct hit on the blockhouse and started burning. Totally and utterly destroyed, her charred guts sank to the bottom of the Nottawasaga, only the prow jutting out of the shallow waters. The surviving troops scampered off into the trees. Thankfully the Americans didn’t pursue to finish off the job.

This is the battle thousands come to Wasaga Beach to celebrate? To honour with Canadian pride? I don’t really know. Nancy Island is symbolic of what? Being discovered by the enemy, being cannon-balled into oblivion, and then fleeing into the forest hoping the enemy does not follow? It’s goddamn embarrassing is what it is. And I’m a proud Canadian. Why are we re-enacting this horrendous abomination every year?

Think of Mel Gibson’s speech in Braveheart. It’s inspirational. One gets national pride goose-bumps. The Scots are defending their homeland from invasion by the more formidable English army. Sadly, nowadays, if I catch that scene on TV it’s like Mel Gibson is about to charge the HJA (Hollywood Jew Army). Hordes of writers are in the front lines with flimsy spears, like oversized pencils, while the scions of Hollywood sit back on their horses smoking cigars.

Did Lt. Worsley give a similar speech before abandoning the ship in the river? Before the troops fled into the trees, their plan sabotaged, outwitted by the Americans?

“They can sink our schooner, but they can‘t sink our LEGS! . . . Which will now run into the woods!”

Yes, Canada. We stand on guard for thee.

The Undiscovered City: Binge Ninja

Go to: www.bingeninja.bandcamp.com for all Binge Ninja music and video links.

Author’s note: an asterisk (*) functions as a footnote because footnotes are not possible with this website.

　


Naturally, being a huge metropolis with endless suburbs, a place where concrete is the national flower and creative humans are left with nothing much else to do except experiment in their basements and apartments, especially in the frigid winter months, Toronto has a dearth of unique and eccentric artists. It’s the law of averages.

One of them is Binge Ninja and the band’s most recent project: a twenty song music video collection. Yes, each of the twenty songs have an accompanying music video to go with it.

Sound familiar?

Unless Beyonce spent some recent time downing pints in Parkdale pubs, it’s doubtful she has any idea who Binge Ninja is. I mean, how could the lady? Her time is filled with private jets, arena shows, Jay-Z, performing for dictators, and raising a young child, Blue Ivy.*

A few months before she released seventeen songs with accompanying music videos in late 2013--with no warning or media hype (the cynic in me thinks that type of move is essentially a stunt for someone of her popularity because it will draw media attention, )--Toronto’s own Binge Ninja beat the multi-talented hip-shaker to the punch and released a collection of twenty video-songs--also with no warning or media hype, but that‘s because there is no other way to do it. A few downtown shows and--Pow!--a twenty sack of Southern Ontario Gothic.

The bulk of the twenty music videos are comprised of songs from the album, The Dead Artisan, The New Artist (Self-Destruction For Re-Invention) with the other eight videos coming from a collaborative album, Kissing At Summer Camp with another fine local artist, The First Seed. The BN & TFS songs are like dropping napalm bombs on sonic boundaries. It’s visceral electronic noise that eschews conventional song structure and traditional singing. There’s a lot of “Fuck You” qualities to it. Fuck a three minute song with a sing-along chorus, sweet Beach Boys type harmonies,** and a seamless fade out. Been there, done that. Bo-ring. The fractious nature of the songs, the dissonant, atonal noises*** mirror an internal chaos, and the search for something new.

These songs comes from pain, anger, they lash out at you. It’s damn near impossible to walk away from any of the videos and songs with a “Meh--it was okay, I ‘sppose,” type attitude. It’s confronting and in-your-face. Outright hostility. BN & TFS sound like Atari Teenage Riot raping a boardroom full of plutocrats. They smash what it is to even have expectations about what a musical group should sound like.

Though BN’s twenty videos are a staggering feat--as is Beyonce’s, clearly--a collaborative vision seen through to completion, the songs that comprise Binge Ninja’s TDA, TNA (S-DFR-I) is the best stuff. The songs are eclectic and well written. Binge Ninja is such an enigmatic, difficult band to pin down, and that’s alrightwith me; I like it. Why do most go down the lonely side road of a specific genre? Fear, inability, loss of money? BN expertly genre-wanders through pop, punk rock and flat out screaming noise. But who fucking cares about these tired reference points? As Billy Joel says, “It’s still rock and roll to me.” Don't bother much with the pundits' classification systems.

It’s so tiring to see the same old artists doing the same old song and dance. Evolve already! Do something truly new and innovative instead of the same old bland lyrics and formulaic song structure. Break loose! You are free, my song bird! That’s how BN makes me feel. They are free to roam and take the listener along on sonic journeys. Take a camera, some instruments, and make some magic--that is what an artisan does, after all: use their hands to create. And BN weaves an intricate, multi-coloured tapestry.

Now, there aren’t any ooey-gooey love songs to gush over on TDA, TNA (S-DFR-I). Disintegration and death are everywhere. Obliteration. The lies and emptiness of our deadweight, pointless mass consumerist lives, and failed relationships. Throw in some drug/alcohol abuse to numb the pain, too. It’s dark shit, but the world isn’t all sunshine and butterflies. It feels like an exorcism when you're done listening, a purging of the person you once were.

Actually, I’m starting a cover band called Purge Ninja.

Maybe it’s just the fourteen year old girl in me, but I am partial to the softer songs. I’m a sap for a nice falsetto voice and catchy chords like on The Bends era Radiohead and the latter half of Silverchair‘s output. I’m talking specifically about Fire Into The Dark, one of the best songs on the album.**** I find myself singing that one in the shower or while washing the dishes, as well as Why Do it Over?, another softer song.

That’s not to say that the distorted, screaming anthemic punk songs for the disturbed like One More Binge and Big Black Lies aren’t pulling their weight. Those ones are awesome, too. The videos, for the twenty songs are very DIY. They’re shaky, filmed on the streets of Toronto and the GTA with hand held cameras, but they’re gritty and edited together meticulously. Big Black Lies is all flash cut animation showing sketches and phrases whereas in Murdered, the band members are individually dressed up as Jokers-esque characters performing in the snow.

Where you won't see any of Binge Ninja's twenty music videos is MuchMusic. Fuck MuchMusic in the ass, anyways. There was some decent programming on the channel when I was sitting on the couch, stoned after school in the ‘90‘s. I can’t even imagine what kind of slop is on that sorry excuse for a channel nowadays; I fear a panic attack if I dared tune in. Perhaps I’m way off base because I don’t watch MuchMusic anymore, but I’d venture a guess that the station mirrors which current popular music makes the most money, like it always has. But because it’s harder and harder to make money creating and performing music, the only profitable choices are now, more than ever, of the lowest common denominator variety--dumbed down, highly sexualized, shameless, and douche-chillingly bad to appeal to as many ears and eyeballs as possible. That is where the double-edged sword of the internet steps in.***** Like all independent bands, Binge Ninja occupies a tiny corner of the world wide web, and like a far away star it distantly shines in the vast darkness. If you focus your telescope  just so, you can barely make it out. But it is there to see, at night, in your midnight hour.

Maybe Binge Ninja wouldn’t appreciate the comparison, but the band remind me in some ways of the late great Lou Reed (albeit with a wider vocal range). The way the music is so varied, occasionally leaking into darkly catchy pop songs, but only allowing a few on the album at most, preferring to indulge in other songs that are more intense, more difficult to penetrate. Both Binge and Lou have that genuine, this is what I’m doing and I don’t give a fuck what you think edge to their music. They don’t follow trends or buy into cheap thrills or endlessly simple chords, or smarmy, buttery lyrics.

A great writer once said, “Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted.” The same sentiment applies to Binge Ninja. Beyonce? Not so much.

　

　
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*Which, if you didn’t know, is Lucifer’s daughter’s name spelled backwards in Latin, and Ivy also quite possibly being an acronym for “Illuminati’s Very Youngest.”

**Chill out, I’m a big fan.

***Binge Ninja uses so many oddly shaped, atonal, off-kilter chords, when playing live the fingers of his left hand are often splayed, doing acrobatic splits, and dancing across the fret board like a spider freshly nailed with a spray of Raid! BN may be allergic to a simple E or C chord most of the time--but it works, and the melodies are there, clear, and nuanced.

****I’m aware that this is like being a Radiohead fan saying Creep is their favourite song, it’s the attention grabbing catchier pop tune that 'real' fans deride and only casual fans would favour, but it’s true, and say what you will, I'm not going to lie about it--Fire Into The Dark is my favourite, I don’t know what else to tell you.

*****Double-edged because the internet can both giveth and taketh away from artists. On the one hand, it provides a platform, a vehicle to expose yourself to a potentially vast audience for little to no cost, yet on the other hand, because nearly everyone has the same communistic chance to unleash their music on the masses, there is a white noise, near impossible to rise above. The irony here being that now, in our hyper-technologically advanced times where mass distribution is only a click away and high-tech recording equipment is at the tip of anyone's aspiring fingertips, it is now no easier to become successful than it was back when the only way to get an album made was a sprinkle of talent, a cigar chomping exec, and a dash of luck.

My iMistress's Sparrow Is Dead

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