untitled, unfinished manuscript excerpt

(Parking Lot Protocols Pertaining to Pot, Pussy, Police and Paranoia ...)

Friday, May 23, 1986

            Post-Einsteinian reality – the world is not in fact what you see, it is actually a shiver of energy waves from somewhere that through mysterious means arrange themselves like beads on a string, like threads in a brilliantly patterned Indian rug. Patterns form patterns (throwing pebbles in a still pond tells you everything) ... shimmering curtains of stardust and fire produce this: A red plastic Sanyo ghetto blaster humming to the beat of Nina Hagen. 'UFO'.

UFOs are picking us up

UFOs are picking us up ...

            Dad had all these paperbacks in the 60s: UFOs Are Real! I'd pull them out of the family book case and pore over the photo sections in the middle ... grainy pictures of silver cones and blurry discs hovering above a bit of forest or field, and cryptic marks on the ground with white arrows pointing to them. I could really do a whole set of UFO songs ... Jonathan Richman, Hüsker Dü, The Stranglers ... yeah. That'd be amazing! Nina Hagen ... what an artist ...

I give you the highest of all the spirits,

The holy spirit, the holy spirit

The UFO did it

The UFO did it!

            I am in a booth that is no more than six feet by six. I can span the walls with my hands simply by extending my arms and rotating my old black swivel chair. As I rotate I see first, the aforementioned music system (an invaluable resource) and a grotty tiled counter. It is grey with dirt and cigarette ash, cracked and pitted. Bennie has attempted to repair the crumbling plastic edge of the counter with infinite layers of scotch tape. I prefer to let the place decay naturally. The booth is old and wooden, the inner walls are completed with cheap fake wood panelling; someone named Diane, who worked her before me, wallpapered the upper half of the walls with a dull brown flowered pattern.

            Facing the counter I have a view of the fully occupied, silent parking lot through a scratched plexiglass window. Rows of cars diagonally parked on either side of the long, narrow lot. In front of the window, a series of little boxes all in a row, constructed of thin plywood slats, receptacles for bright yellow parking lot tickets. They are arranged according to how much time was spent in the lot by the holder and the consequent rising order of payment. Point a on the clock to point b on the clock costs you x amount of dollars. This clock stares at me and clunks at the quarter-hour. To the right, Cornwallis Park; to the left, the great brick hulk of the Hotel Nova Scotian. The trees in the park are full and pulsing darkly in the night breeze, and there's a scattering of street walkers eyeing the cars that cruise around the curve at the end of Hollis Street.

            I could get a better look at the hookers on the corner through the window to my right, but it's usually covered by a blind. I close it because I smoke a lot of dope in here and want to avoid undue attention. Next to this window is a small framed painting my Mom did. In the foreground is a field of white paint depicting snow, with thin, naked trees standing up here and there. Beyond them I see a cluster of farm buildings, including a house with far too many narrow windows. Then a dark band of pine trees, and beyond them, low, naked mountains fading into the wintry sky.

            To my left is a dutch door that can be opened on top and closed on bottom, or both halves can be closed or opened together. Unfortunately the door is huge and swings inward, which is a pain in the ass. Every time I open the door at the start of my shift, Bennie and the black swivel chair have to squeeze into the back third of the booth to make room. Through the sliding plexiglass window of this door I see Terminal Road descending, and beyond it, now that the old Trolley Building has been torn down, a swatch of the glittering blue water of the harbour.           

            There’s a shelf to my left by the door, and a bunch of electrical devices, switches and outlets to my lower right. The floor is a collage of grubby random bits of linoleum and bare plywood. Everything is grimy from the millions of packs of cigarettes consumed in here by generations of parking lot attendants. You may think this is awful, but I like it in a way. I say, if you are indeed a parking lot attendant, you should live the legend of the parking lot attendant. You should smoke, look strangely bohemian or simply strange, and you should be a writer. I keep my Dad's ancient Smith-Corona Skyriter in here for those elusive moments of inspiration, and sometimes I bang out a tune on a pawn shop Stella guitar that hangs on the back wall.

            I work in a parking lot and I write; I am reduced to this in order to be happy. In order to be happy I must be poor, I must be in love, I must have friends and things to do. And I must write.

            Hold the shimmering curtain, and light me a smoke.

            It was already dark and I was high as a kite when a shadowy figure appeared in the stage-like space of the open dutch door. I jumped – could it be Mort on a snap inspection? – then relaxed when I saw the smiling face of my love.

            "What're you doing here?" I said, delighted, as I opened the door and pushed the swivel chair back into the corner to let her in.

            "What, can't I come and visit my boyfriend whenever I want?" she said in a gurgling cartoon voice.

            "Oh, of course!"

            Samantha was carrying a white plastic bag with something in it. Setting it on the counter, she produced a styrofoam container.

            "What's this?"

            "Lasagna from Soho Kitchen," she said.

            "Wow! What a treat."

            "I was there just now with Melanie and I sudden felt bad that you and I weren't eating together, so ..."

            There was an old pink plastic milk crate that had to serve as the 'guest chair' in the booth, and Sam elected to sit there with her back to the bottom of the big dutch door. "Go ahead, I'll watch," she said. "I've already eaten, of course ..."

            I sat in the swivel chair and ate the lasagna while we talked.

            "Think you'll be very late tonight?"

            "Well," I said, consulting the Nova Scotian Hotel Weekly Function List, "there's a dinner for the Dalhousie Faculty of Medicine, and a meeting of Nikon Canada. Dinners and meetings don't usually go very late, so I'll probably get out of here by eleven." Generally I was on the hook until the number of cars in the lot dropped below a certain critical mass. It was one of the more draining aspects of my job, never knowing when exactly I would get out of that booth.

            "Of course I'm working tonight." She meant her job on the hot dog stand outside the Misty Moon. "I'd rather just go home and draw. D'you think we could ..." she pointed at my cigarette case with her chin. "Yo-o-ou know! ..."

            "Oh, smoke a joint?" I produced one of the pre-rolled joints and handed it to her. I was getting so habituated to the homegrown I was getting, I'd taken to cranking joints out on my black plastic cigarette maker. I'd figured out how to pull the filter out of the paper tubes I usually used for making cigarettes. I'd just pack the dope in and crank them out, clack-clack. I carefully closed the upper half of the dutch door while she lit the joint, took a good lungful and handed it to me.

            "I'm more concerned about tomorrow night," I said. "Because tomorrow night the parking lot plays host to 400 cops, cop friends and cop families."

            Her green eyes widened. "Really? What's the occasion?"

            "Well, it's the RCMP Regimental Ball," I said. "So I'm going to be in here forever."

            "Oooh, a 'ball'," Sam said.

            "I'm worried I won't be able to smoke any dope, what with the place swarming with cops and all."

            "Swarmin' ..." she said, and we both giggled. It was one of 'our' words. She accepted the joint and pulled on it.

            I sighed. "That will be a total drag, stuck here for hours and hours and not being able to get high. I'm really tired of working Saturdays. I really wanted to see that Fellini film they're showing at the NFB this weekend, I've never seen a Fellini film."

            When I'd been hired the previous fall, I'd been grateful for the extra hours, because while I was jobless I'd run up about a thousand dollars in personal debts. Now that I'd cleared them, I was free to grow weary of the grind. On Mondays I'd reluctantly flip through the Weekly Function List, and this week like most weeks I'd winced when I saw that Mort, the Maple Parking Services supervisor, has scribbled in the margin: "Open Evening Shift Only Sat. May 24," and he'd initialled it too, just to make it official.

            "Well, at least you'll be making a little extra money for your trip to Montreal," Sam said optimistically.

            "Yeah ..." I brightened a little. "I'm so glad you told me about the seat sale, I would've totally missed it."

            "Well, they happen every spring around this time," she said. "I'm always on the look-out for cheap flights back home."

             "I can't wait ... a whole week off!"

            "I have an idea," Sam said. "You could make a pot pattie."

            "What's that?"

            "I'll show you how to make one tomorrow," she said. "It's real easy." Sam was fussily butting out the roach, which she duly deposited in my cigarette case. "You have another one?"

            "What, you're not stoned?"

            "Not exactly ... I mean, I gotta get in good shape for the dog stand, right? Y'know, y'know ..."

            I chuckled. "Okay, but you know this stuff's creeper ..." I pulled out another fat joint, lit it, inhaled and passed it to her. Every once in a while either she or I would take a glance out the window to see if there was any activity in the lot.

            "A parking lot full of cops," Sam said, chuckling as she toked.

            "That's not all," I said. "There's a fucking NATO conference at the hotel this week."

            "Really?" she said. "NATO?"

            "Yeah, George Schultz is coming."

            "No way!"

            "Yes way!" I laughed. "There's gonna be secret service guys everywhere."

            "That's insane."

            "When're you on tonight?" I asked.

            "Ten. Ten to whenever ..."

            "Yeah, so I'll probably be asleep by the time you're back."

            Sam could live on the income from her part-time job as a print technician, with occasional stints of nude modelling. She'd started working the hot dog stand to raise extra cash; she wanted to fly home to her parents and she needed to frame a number of prints and watercolours for an upcoming show. It was her first major show, and she's been working toward it nonstop. When she wasn't at one of her part-time gigs, she was painting or framing or printing. Her bedroom tableaux had broken out into fragrant gardens of lush tropical plants and lusher bodies.

            "Or maybe I'll come visit you ..." I said. It had been a while. In April, she'd come home with a story about a couple of out-of-control drunks who'd managed to knock her cart right over in the middle of a fight. After that, I'd dropped by her post outside the Misty Moon on a regular basis for a while, but things had settled down into a routine since then, with no further 'incidents'.

            "Well, don't worry about it if you're too tired," she said.

            By the time Sam left the booth, her eyes were mere red slots, and I was completely fried – that is, too stoned to write, or play guitar, or even think. Still, I was happy ... it had been quite a week, but things seemed to be getting back to normal. I cranked up the Nina Hagen tape and dreamed of the UFO set. I was startled out of my trance when an engine roared on the dark lot, and a pair of headlights suddenly stabbed the darkness. The meeting, or the dinner was coming to an end. I shook myself out of my reverie and prepared to harvest small change from the hands of the parking lot's captive clients as they exited.

Saturday, May 24, 1986

            Bennie didn't generally work the early shift on Saturdays, so the routine was a little different. I had to pick up the float from the front desk of the hotel, then unlock the ticket spitter at the far end of the lot in order to activate it. It also issued a special stamped ticket to indicate precisely when I had started my shift. Then I walked the length of the lot, 'policing' it for any obvious trash or other disruptions of normal parking lot protocol – just in case Mort happened by on one of his surprise inspections. I unlocked the dutch door, and made a note of the number of cars on the lot. If they came to the booth without a ticket, I charged them from the time I'd opened, making out a special ticket for just such a purpose. I carefully counted out the float. I did it twice, since I was already stoned. Everything seemed to add up.

            I set about unpacking my knapsack. First came two detachable speakers, then the body of my red plastic Sanyo blaster. I attached the speakers to either end of the unit, plugged in the leads, then stuck the AC cord into a wall plug and pressed 'play'. It was Double Nickels on the Dime, one of the Minutemen albums I'd taped in the PCR at the campus station. That was one thing I was going to miss, I realized, now that I'd given up the all-night radio show. I'd been able to copy any number of records during those long nights. But my co-host got a job, and couldn't do it any more, and I didn't have the stamina to pull an all-nighter on my own every week.

            I reached into the front pouch of the knapsack, and pulled out a stubby bottle of Pepsi, a Xero bar, an egg sandwich in a paper bag, a white plastic cigarette case, a fake Japanese Zippo lighter, and the pot pattie, wrapped in a plastic bread bag. I distributed these on the counter, then sat back, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and stuck it in the black plastic ashtray on top of the punch clock. I was in business.

            "So how do you make these 'pot patties'?" I'd asked.

            Sam was at the kitchen table with her best friend Kevin, poring over her latest print. We'd lit up a joint and it was going around.

            "Oh, it's real easy." She bustled around the kitchen, found a package of Robin Hood white flour, poured some into a small plastic bowl, added some water and a dash of salt. "You just ... keep adding flour until it's kind of like a dough. See?"

            "Yeah. How much pot?" I asked.

            "Around ... I dunno, five joints worth? Seven ...?"

            "Seven!"

            "Here –" She took the plastic bag from my hands, took a goodly amount in one fist and crushed it up over the bowl, then started mixing it in with a fork. "Here." She thrust the bowl at me. "You can do the rest."

            I industriously mixed the pot and dough together until it seemed more or less evenly blended. "What now?" I asked.

            "Just put a little oil in the frying pan, and put it on a low heat. Let it cook."

            "It's not gonna taste like much," I said glumly. She chuckled, turned back to her print at the kitchen table. Following her instructions, I stood uncertainly over the pan. She looked at me with combined affection and mockery.

            "Well, you don't need to hang around while it cooks, it's gonna take a while."

            "Right." I noticed a store-bought cigarette butt in the ashtray. "Is that one of yours?"

            "Yeah. Horrible, horrible thing. Last night I smoked on the dog stand, eh? I gotta go through serious quitting again now."

            When we'd moved in together, we'd agreed to have a non-smoking household. She was quitting, but I was back to it after yet another failed attempt to stop.

            Kevin said, "I bought you a cigarette pack."

            Sam said, "Yeah, you did! I owe you four bucks." She took a toke from the joint and said, "You want save this ‘til laters, or smoke more now ...?"

            "No, you can get rid of it," Kevin said. "Don’t get flaked out too fast."

            "Oh, we were gonna save it for the park," Sam said, suddenly remembering.

            "Oh, the park," I said.

            "Actually, maybe we should go," Sam said fuzzily. "Wait, what time is it?"

            Looking at the digital clock in the living room, I said, "Four-oh-nine. Yeah, you should go."

            Sam said, "It’s four?" She looked at Kevin. "Oh, maybe –"

            Kevin said, "We don’t really have time to go to the park, it’s too far away." They laughed.

            "I thought it was only about two o’clock," Sam said.

            I had to head off to work and I didn't think the pattie was cooking fast enough, so I turned the heat up. I got distracted collecting my things, so the pattie ended up scorched, with the consistency of a Nabisco saltine cracker. "Oh darn. Darn."

            Sam came over and took a look. "What'd you have it on?"

            "Three."

            "Well, there you go. You'll know better next time."

            I'd brought along a few joints too, in case the pattie didn't have any effect. I thought about Sam, seeing her friend Kevin off for the summer. It was that time of year, people were going off to their summer jobs, scattered across the country and beyond. My daytime radio show co-host had already left to work in the woods in Michigan.

            A gray-haired woman came to the window of the dutch door and asked for change for the pay phone on the corner by the Bank of Nova Scotia. I took a rumpled dollar bill and gave her three quarters, two dimes and a nickel. "Thank you, dear," she said, and as she walked away I wondered what sort of life-long labour had made her hands so gnarled and leathery. As my eye followed her, I noticed movement where I wasn't used to seeing it, and startled, saw a vast, sliding metal cliff, like a high-rise set on its side – 'Maersk' – it was one of the giant container vessels making its way toward Bedford Basin. I still wasn't used to having a view, now that the trolley building was gone. Above me, clouds scudded over the top of the hotel, making it seem as if it was heeling giddily over, on the verge of crashing down on top of me.

            I was starting to come down, so I decided it was time to eat my pattie. There was only a smattering of cars left, but soon enough the street parking would fill up, and then the many invited guests of the glittering RCMP soirée would have little choice but to park in my lot. I crunched and munched on the tasteless pattie, chasing each swallow with a hit of Pepsi. Eventually I got it all down, and I lit another cigarette. I began my parking lot ritual of reading all three newspapers – The Daily News, The Chronicle-Herald and The Globe & Mail. Maybe I'd do a little writing tonight. Probably not ... the last poems I'd written were when Sam and I had an argument, a week or so ago. The one about the argument was no good, but the other one, about impending environmental collapse, was something I could work with. I needed to type up some mailing copies on the good typewriter at home, and send them out.

            A half an hour later I was feeling nothing from the pattie I'd consumed, so I decided to risk smoking a joint. There was still no action out on the lot anyway. I closed the top of the dutch door, slid the plastic window shut, lit a cigarette, then lit a joint and puffed away at it nervously, keeping a keen eye out the window for any sudden Mort or customer incursions. By the time I finished the joint I was tremblingly high. I finished the cigarette, then lit another one, and finished it before I opened the top of the dutch door again. It was getting dark out, the street lights were coming on, and the curbside parking spaces all along Hollis were filled up. I watched couples and singles in silhouette making their way across the lot to the front entrance of the Hotel Nova Scotian. Now cars were coming into the lot. I heard doors slam faintly, more people headed into the hotel. I spread the pages of the paper I was reading, lost myself for a while in the intricacies of the news, the gush over the impending arrival of the NATO foreign ministers. By the time I noticed the lot again, there were many more cars parked. I might even have to rouse myself to walk the length of the lot to put up the 'full' sign.

            It occurred to me then that I was spectacularly stoned. I roused myself enough to ensure I'd put away all incriminating evidence, lit another cigarette, and wondered who would come to give me my half-hour lunch break? I didn't usually leave the booth for the length of my break, I didn't really see the point, unless it was Mort, or Fred the Beard. Mort because it was Mort. Fred, simply because Fred lacked knowledge of basic hygiene and he always stank of body odour and unwashed clothes, which I found quite unbearable in the close quarters of the booth.

            It was Fred, in fact. I nodded, evacuated my chair, and went into the hotel bathroom off the lobby for a leak. I went back to the booth, got my sandwich and headed across Hollis Street. I bought another Pepsi at the corner store across the park, then walked back to the middle near the monument and found a comfortable bench. The air was cooling fast and the trees whispered as the night breeze blew in off the harbour. I ate my sandwich, but it did little to alleviate my state of advanced stonedness. After I'd sat digesting for a little while, smoking and sipping my Pepsi, I ambled back to the booth.

            Normally, Fred was as taciturn as they come, but tonight he hesitated at the door, turned slightly toward me and said, "Gonna be working here this week."

            "What do you mean?" I said. "Is Bennie sick?"

            "Nope." He gestured with his chin toward the ticket spitter at the far end of the lot. "Gotta hand out this letter to everyone who comes in."

            "What letter?"

            "Telling them they can't park in here Thursday or they'll get towed."

            "Really? That's weird ... I wonder why?"

            "There's gonna be a parade on the parking lot."

            "Oh really? A parade?"

            Fred made a sort of grunting noise that I guessed was a chuckle.

            "Well, at least you'll be making some extra cash," I said.

            "Yup." Then his tall, gaunt figure slipped out into the darkness. I had a brief glimpse of him as he walked up the lot, and then he was gone.

            I was so high, I started to get worried I wouldn't be able to deal with it when all those cops started rolling out of the lot at the end of the night. I hadn't even noticed the Minutemen tape was finished. Suddenly the silence was gaping at me like an idiot. I found another cassette I'd made at the radio station, Wiser Dread. Reggae was always soothing, I'd play some reggae. I needed to do something to keep my mind occupied, something more challenging than reading newspapers, so I put the Smith-Corona on the counter top, detached the protective cover and set it to one side, and muzzily found some scrap paper in the knapsack to type on.

Ina dis ya time, ina dis ya time ... reggae burbles through my life points out some facts, I listen. I listen, I watch, I monitor all possible sources as I go about my rather mundane life. Mine is a life like anyone’s, with a job, with lovers, travel, fear, anxiety and pain. Like anyone, I have gone through desperate times. A man trying to plug an increasingly serious rupture in a dike, a man pounding his head on the pavement. Gibber. Sounds pretty melodramatic, doesn’t it. I’ll start again.

     What I am trying to get around to doing is starting a book. Now at first I thought I could just sit down and produce a fine fiction novella. But by the Jesus if I am totally annoyed with my attempts. As I write, as I block the stupid story out and write it and think about it, these new sources of information magically appear, my mind undergoes eruptions like a new-formed planet, tectonic plates rock and roll in psycheland, man, and suddenly the whole story is a mess, a blind ignorant piece of nonsense that sounds like the boggling blasphemies of a frustrated hack. Drool slipping from his gaping mouth as he makes crooning chimp noises over the typewriter keys, eyes glazed he is seized by manic visions of destruction.

     Writing a story at this stage of the game is like taking a single rare flower from an entire section of the planet which is teeming with exotic life, coating the bloom with plastic and selling it at a flea market for fifty cents. My mind is a vast oceanic slurry of thoughts waiting for free expression and the pressure to produce is beginning to hack madly at me. I mean I cannot stop writing incredibly long letters to people I can barely think about usually. I have written the equivalent of three hefty books in the last few months, I think. Why waste this energy by putting it into letters? Because I’m going INSANE that’s why. Because I have to write but the swarming snakes of thought in my medusa skull won’t submit to the usual attempts at discipline used in fiction. So I simply sit here at work and get high and free-associate my way into mental exhaustion. This has served as a kind of stop-gap measure at best; I think I can only keep up these letters so long, they get repetitive.

            It was late, past one in the morning when the parking lot finally began to empty out. Men and women in what passes for 'fancy dress', drunkenly rummaging around for change. The men sported a lot of gold braid and epaulettes. I felt smug in my cocoon-like pattie-induced stone – "That's three-fifty sir." "Thank you sir!" They didn't tip me very well, perhaps put off by my usual parking lot attendant uniform of worn-out old t-shirt, a home-made haircut courtesy of Sam and glazed pot-smoker eyes.

            That was when my real 'work' commenced: accepting tickets from one car after another, cars lined up like a convoy, lights glaring; quickly inserting one end into the punch clock, thunk, making a quick calculation, telling the driver the charge, accepting the money and making the change; and when the lot was once again nearly empty, tallying the lot's 'take'. Maple Parking was a stickler for correctness – no sloppy accounting was permitted. I'd learned the hard way, getting errors in calculation taken out of my pay cheque. So I went over the subtotals again and again until everything balanced perfectly. All the tickets arranged by time and length of stay, bundled together with a rubber band. The float in one packet, the night's deposit in another. Tucked into a worn canvas bank deposit bag and signed over to the night clerk at the hotel. All done in a swirl of stoned exhaustion.

            Once out in the world and walking homeward, I regained enough of my spark to take a swing by the Misty Moon, to see if Sam was still working. Saturday nights were the longest nights – and there she was, glassy-eyed with exhaustion, in a spring jacket against the cool night air, scat-singing to herself. "Dah-doo-dah dooo-dah-doo-doo-daaah, dah doo dah ..."

            I'd come up along Barrington, dodging the clusters of drunks, and swung around the corner where the Misty Moon's marquee sign announced the current crap cover band doing a week-long residency. There were no customers around, a rarity. Generally, Sam attracted drunk hangers-on like flies. "Hey ..."

            Sam's eyes lit up. "Hey you!"

            We slipped together easily and I kissed her deeply. I wanted to make her feel it deep in her sex – she leaned into me, feeling my hardness. When we parted again, she sighed happily.

            "How goes it?"

            "Oh, yew kno-o-o-w ..." I lit a cigarette, and she took it from my lips and took a drag, handed it back. "Pretty good tonight, really. Lots of business."

            "Lots of dog-selling."

            "Yeah ... what about you?"

            "I'm still completely fucking blitzed by that pattie," I said.

            "Oh, really?"

            "Yeah. I had a lot of trouble getting the tallies to add up at the end of the night!"

            "Oh no!"

            "I'll have to put a bit less dope in the next one, eh?"

            "Hah!"

            "You getting off pretty soon, then?"

            "Yeah, I hope so ..." she looked around with eyebrows raised. "Pretty fucking dead right now."

            "I'll try to stay up for you," I said.

            Another lingering kiss. As I started walking down the hill, I heard her say, "Ooooh ... I'm gonna get ya!"

            I barely woke up when I felt her climbing into bed. She burrowed against my warm back like an animal, and we slept together in peace.