Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short stories. Show all posts

June 3, 2022

THE TV REPAIRMAN, another short one by Jai.




 I was in 1958 an engineering student at Ottawa U., renting a room where I heated my spaghetti sauce in a plate sitting on a boiling pot of noodles cooking on a defective hot plate that probably threatened the curtains, my room …and my life. Happily, my mother was 200 miles away. This was twenty years before cheap microwaves took care of student hunger with fast popcorn. My TV had all her guts exposed, showing off her ancient round picture tube. That thing had been soldered together as a kit ten years earlier. Yeah! My dad made for us a TV set four years before Canada had TV stations. Living not far from the US border, I had all the kids in my street watching Space Command and Howdy Doody on WPTZ Plattsburgh NY…weather and rabbit ears permitting.  Word got around as I remember my dad and I installing home-made TV antennas on rich doctor’s roof. And so at age 7, I thought of myself as “tech savvy”

So it was only fair that I would inherit the original TV set that gave me so much pride fun. By connecting the sound output of my record player to pins of its vertical and horizontal oscillator lamps, I could thrill to black and white light shows in visual sync with the beat of early rock and roll playing on my radio speakers so connected.

One week before the Grey Cup, the TV died and I took it to a pipe-smoking repairman on Rideau Street. The day before the big game, I entered the place with excitement, holding in my hand a ten-dollar bill, the estimation money for a yoke replacement. That’s the big donut-shaped magnet around the neck of a picture tube. While I waited inside, I got to survey a mess of wiring, electronic circuits and transformers clogging counters, work benches ..and the floor. Then on a high shelf that went around three walls, crammed helter-skelter with all brands of TV sets, I happily spotted my own naked baby, the only one of the few not covered with dust and spider webs. Said he didn't have time, but a week later still no TV to take home with me, this time not even bothering to give me an excuse.

I was very upset, looking puzzled as I walked out. The lady next door, a hairdresser I think, stepped out to tell me that she hadn't seen a thing come out of that place in months "He can't seem to repair anything anymore. Yet TV sets to fix keep getting brought to him. I warn people when I get a chance".

As a brash sixteen years old, I was pouring scorn on that old man not fit to be in that business . I thought he was obviously in over his head with the new tech. "But he's only forty and used to be good" the lady said, interrupting "His wife used to do the books, clean the place up and all.

She paused and looked down at the sidewalk. Her doctor wasn't sure if she died of lead poisoning or an asthma attack .She did an awful lot of soldering. I can still see her at the workbench in a corner. She didn't smoke but you often could see a plume of blue smoke rising over her head ".

The Ottawa Roughriders had won the Grey Cup in 1951. I was hoping to watch a repeat win in 1954 on my repaired TV, a game I watched somewhere else with no pleasure as they lost it badly. They got to win the cup in 1960 and I heard that the quiet Ottawa population exploded and managed to destroy a lot of Ottawa's downtown in their celebration, Go figure! I went back to that town years later. The repair shop and hairdresser’s, demolished for a high-rise.

A year ago, as a wasted 78 year-old, I needed to dispose of mountains of wires, computer circuit boards and so many defective electronics, junk and computers, stuff I hoarded for years... to be fixed one day... or recycled later. Looking at that amount of unfinished business, I remembered that "old" repairman's shop and a sadness wrapped over me. A month earlier my own cigarette-loving wife passed away from lung cancer. Today, I don’t watch TV,  all in on YouTube...and...TikTok.

It's never easy to drop out of anything that used to arouse passions, even after they turn into poison, problems or pain. That goes equally for people and things , I guess.

JAI

November 7, 2007

Another True but Strange War Short Story with Snow in it.

The snow fell all week in Chambly. A triple team of seminarians was commandeered to clear both ice hockey rinks for the day’s important game. Woken up at one AM by the priest in charge of sports, the first team would push the snow against the sideboards using wide concave shovels. Those made a distinct scraping noise reverberating all the way to the fourth floor dormitory. Then a second team of older and stronger seminarians hits the ice at 4 AM using regular square shovels. Their mission is to throw the cleared snow on high mounds surrounding both rinks. Awaken by the return of the exhausted first team, Jacques feels fortunate to be with the third team, the ice makers. They will go down to the rinks at around 6AM and keep watering the ice surface until it is crystal hard, at around 9 AM, just in time for the first semi-final match. The Bears would meet the Jaguars on the junior rink while the Eagles would meet the Owls on the senior rink. The final game will occur Sunday, in the presence of the parents, invited through the afternoon visiting hours. Jacques knows he will miss morning mass and prayers, the 7.30 breakfast and the one hour study period at 8 o’clock. Barely twelve years old, he is still too puny to shovel a lot of snow, so they gave him the job of stenciling the red and blue lines with powder, a task he takes very seriously not to disappoint his classmates, all older than himself. To be accepted by these boys, some of whom already have hair on their legs and chest is an honor for the nerdy kid who was earlier dispensed from playing in the hockey league. Too short and too fragile, having had a double pneumonia a year earlier. Those players use a lot of body-checking and nasty stick handling, bloody noses and broken collar bones to show for it. Jacques had to find another way to participate, like the large cardboard stencil he cut earlier to mark center ice. Just three black two-foot high letters O.M.I, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, with over the « M » the blue torso of the Virgin . The priests were delighted and gave Jacques the title of assistant propagandist, dispensing him of the harder communal tasks like stair cleaning and latrine washing.
He wants to conform and feels slightly excited at the idea of missing a Saturday mass. Falling back to sleep, he was entertaining much more exciting thoughts, the progress of a secret network!

Several other kids were not allowed to play hockey. Sevigny, because he had a heart murmur, Pagé because he too was too small, Malenfant because he smelled bad and had severe acne. Communal hockey gear and jersey notwithstanding, no team wanted him at the onset. The four of them would sit out the games on the snow mounds, looking dejected while the seat of their pants would get progressively wetter from the snow melting on those cardboard scraps they used as seats. At around mid-season, the snow around the rinks is so high that it is customary for the spectators to dig out seats and bleachers, a fine wind protection and another way to pass the time when the game is dull. Jacques was first to dig horizontally at the base of his cylindrical dugout, a short tunnel leading to Sevigny’s own « house », as they now call these spectator holes in the snow. Before falling asleep, Jacques remembers when Sevigny’s fuzzy mustache grew a foot wide when he saw Jacques’s face that day, peering in through a tiny hole at the bottom of his own dugout. Five hockey games later, there was a network of tunnels all around the junior rink, and the promising stem of a similar civil engineering feat around the senior rink. The diggers now included Malenfant, Sevigny, Pagé and Leclerc, the latter, a high-ranking choir boy, having spread dozens of stolen candles throughout. Malenfant was by far the best digger, having created a private alcove right behind the coach’s bench. With a pine knot removed, he could hear the conversations. The network was born there in a ceremony, with all the tunnelers swearing secrecy while filling the tunnel with latin words and the fog of their breath. Under no circumstances, not even torture, could they reveal the existence of these tunnels or any enlargement thereof. A pocket knife, a short bleeding scar on the calf with mutual leg rubbing clumsily sealed the deal, while hard packed snow slabs concealed the entrances. A map was drawn and circulated concealed in a religious song book. There was talk of war from Sevigny. They had to be ready.

Jacques is now sleeping, dreaming of war and weapons, secret missions and the Holy Virgin holding a broken hockey stick. When father Beliveau grabs his shoulder for the ice watering session, he has a plan to execute. The reader must be enlightened to the fact that before 1956 hockey sticks were entirely made of wood and were easily broken, littering the rink environment. Jacques will send a coded message to all the comrades inviting them to pick these broken shafts and surreptitiously push them down into the snow so that they would protrude into one of the tunnels. Malenfant who spent entire afternoon in the tunnels will pull down on these and stash them carefully for a future war. The sun is bad for his acne anyway. Leclerc has the better pocket knife and will sharpen each with a point hardened on the flame of those candles.
At nine o’clock, the first game starts, and by five that day, 8 games later, a few dozen sticks are collected and stored in a new snow room called the armory. The feverish activity below has created heat and the walls are shiny with a crust of ice, hardening the tunnel against collapse. Wet and happy, the youngsters attend vespers and pass the song book to share new messages. There will be no war until the tunnels are extended completely around the senior rink, a precious source of longer stronger spears.
The Bears won the championship thanks to insidious spying by Guy Malenfant. Their chief scorer Hallé was always on the ice at a different time than the attributed checker from the opposite team. The coaches could never get it right. The rest of the winter provides hundreds of new spears stored in four separate caches in case of discovery. Those locations were know to the commanders only, namely Malenfant and Sevigny. Jacques was given a sealed envelope with a location map to be opened only in case of accidental death. Stored inside the bellow of the accordion he played, that letter gave Jacques a chest-expanding pride that cured him of any sequel from the pneumonia.
It is now April and finally the tunnels have collapsed without any outsiders noticing a thing. By then the spears have been stored at the end of the recreation field where a dump sits in a depression by a brook. Sevigny, Malenfant and Pagé are doing badly in their studies, so they fear no discipline. All would rather work on the family farm like their brothers anyway. In those days the mothers would sacrifice one son each to priesthood so that they could guarantee their access to Heaven. In Quebec, they typically had several sons, more so on the farms where families of 10 or more were the norm. All three of them are now standing by the study door waiting for the right party when Jacques walks by. looking at Sevigny’s lips whispering for him the « W » word. He repeats his exaggerated articulations with fire in his green eyes : « WE-ARE-GOING-TO-PLAY-WAR-IN-THE-DUMP---ARE-YOU CO-MING? » Jacques’s heart is pounding. All winter there had been talk of war. Now, on this very sunny Sunday morning, WAR has finally come. Jacques puts on all the drab clothes he can muster to look like the other three when he sees Leclerc trotting down the stairs with a military jacket from some surplus store. Leclerc points loftily to the end of the field. There is no need to say more. The two then walk close to the trees by the river to not be noticed until the ground slowly drops out of view of the seminary building into a large gully full of broken refrigerators and rotting furniture. Two soldiers are already here choosing their weapons for straightness and point.
« Where are they? » asks Pagé.
« Everywhere » says Sevigny with a comical grin. Just raise any rock or crate and you will see them squirming.
Jacques still has no idea of who exactly IS the enemy. He never had to nerve to ask for fear of being called a « baby » as had happened a few times before. Just then the answer comes in full sunlight in the person of Malenfant climbing from the back of a large rock. His acne is in full bloom and his face red with pleasure :
« I got seven already ».
On his stick are skewered seven enemy combatants, pinkish baby rats bleeding profusely and most very dead, although Jacques detects some tiny movements. He is thoroughly disgusted to learn suddenly that this rat nursery is the enemy for which he had dreamed all winter. Pagé lifts a rotten milk crate, exposing a terrified mother milking several little rats. Before he could raise his stick, Jacques has grabbed the biggest senior stick from the pile and hit him over the head with what was later called a devastating blow.
Father superior wanted a full explanation but the oath still held. Jacques would not talk and Pagé’s head wound would not heal well. Sevigny and Malenfant were thrown out before the final exams and Leclerc was disrobed from the choir boy association. Someone had spilled the beans. Jacques would never know who. His last job as propagandist was to make a sign for the dump, ACCES INTERDIT, French for DO NOT TRESPASS. Jacques never made priesthood. Those people are just too weird, he thought.

November 2, 2007

The Power Of 'Tennessee Waltz'


After the war, the prolific Belgian author
Simenon, father of famed Commissaire Maigret, was not happy with his wife nor with his editor or even with Europe. So he moved to Quebec and started writing again with Denyse Ouimet as his new secretary. As was his custom with all of them, he soon fathered a child with Denyse, keeping all his people in tow when he moved, which he did every year. So a caravan of large cars successively traveled to Connecticut, Tennessee, Arizona etc...buying a huge house at every stop until he had 33. In Reno, he got a quick divorce from his first wife and sent her packing, then started to dip into a Spanish maid. Later Denyse slowly went insane and had to be placed into a mental institution.
Then the beautiful but disturbed daughter Marie-Jo got jealous. When she was 8 years old she already knew that she was madly in love with her father. He had bought her a wedding ring then. In her letters published posthumously she admitted that the happiest moment of her short life was on a transatlantic cruise when daddy asked her for a dance as the band started to play 'Tennessee Waltz'. "He held me tight against his tweed jacket and smelled of wonderful pipe tobacco" .
Later, after having written his biography where he bragged of having had sex with 10,000 women, Mari-Jo asked him "Why not me?" He refused to make love to her even when she threatened him at gunpoint to do so, instead giving her a bottomless bank account. Simenon sent her to an insane asylum several times. She was diagnosed at that time as manic-depressive, but she was mostly depressed for long periods, having few manic attacks like the one just described. A twenty five, after writing 100 wonderful unmailed letters from her all-devouring passion for daddy, she shot herself. "Save me Daddy – I’m dying – I’m lost in the space, the silence of death" In her last message, she asked to be cremated wearing the ring he had given her.
You can read all about it here. Her ashes were spread on a Lausanne lawn where Simenon died several years later, a darkness having enveloped his later years.
I composed this audio track last night thinking about her not a little because I was also obsessed with that same song, albeit not sharing the same degree of affection for her father. The steel guitar continuum is actually a piano play modified by the software. Same for the flute and everything else actually. Hope you like it for a mood to suggest the mind of the disturbed child of an autocratic father. Bi-polar disorder is a problem solving mechanism gone awry, mostly because the problem to be solved just cannot be solved. The dear girl wanted the love of her father. He had told her, "if you love me, please please do not disturb me needlessly". She sometimes spent over a year with no contact from her father, not wanting to displease him.
On a lighter note, I just hope Amélie doesn't develop the same passion for me...but then we had her neutered. That should help.

October 15, 2007

Help Camille Decide On A Book Cover For Her Latest Novel


This is the opening chapter to help in judging cover suitability. More covers to come soon. Leave comment below please.
......
The Yellow Cab drew up in front of the Foxworth Apartment complex in Annandale, Virginia. The driver shut down the meter and turned to the man in the back seat for payment. Dr. Mahmoud Jassim pulled the fare out of his wallet and placed it in the outstretched hand. Now the driver pressed the automatic trunk opener and motioned his passenger out. The doctor stepped down to the sidewalk and removed his three pieces of luggage from the trunk. The cab drove away.
The British-born Pakistani was bedraggled, exhausted by airport hopping from country to country, beginning in Karachi, to Riyahd’s King Khalid International Airport, to London’s Heathrow where he’d spent several days in meetings, ending at Dulles International. Those moments, as he presented his visa to immigration officials, had been tense and emotionally draining. His passport was in order; still, suspicion was imprinted on the faces of the men at the immigration booth and behind the baggage search counter, leaving his tongue thick and unresponsive.

Now, baggage at his feet, he looked up at the six-story apartment complex, all brick with jutting balconies, surrounded by green lawns. On the third level, Apartment 3-606, his adopted brothers awaited.
At Mahmoud’s knock, the door opened.
"As sala'amu alaikum. Peace be upon you,” Richard Yost greeted him. Just behind him, Dr. Khalid Amin echoed the greeting. “Walaikum as sala'am. And unto you also, peace.
Richard Yost, a recent British immigrant to the United States, ushered him into the two-bedroom apartment. The three men embraced.
“Allah’s blessing and salutations be upon you,” Richard said. “I have prepared for you.”
It was sparse, with just the minimal rented furniture – a wrap-around couch long past its factory issue, single folding chair; long, badly scratched coffee table; two desks, each outfitted with computer and telephone. The doctors’ assigned bedroom held a bunk-bed and single.
“This is temporary,” Richard explained.
In the small kitchen, his Pakistani wife, Shamshad, was preparing their meal – a meatless curry dish combined with eggplant, okra and potatoes. Slim and willowy, she wore a long tunic and baggy pants with a colorful scarf draped around her neck. She nodded a timid greeting to her husband’s new guest. Khalid Amin had arrived ten days earlier.
“Brothers,” Richard said to the two men. “Finally, we are gathered as one. Rest, recompose yourselves. Tonight we will eat and pray. Tomorrow we will talk.
.....

September 30, 2007

'BROWN' , a short story by J. (X-Rated, but no squid)

The man had a brown double-breasted suit and a large brim hat, equally brown, matching wingtip shoes and a white handkerchief he kept pulling out of his vest pocket to wipe his tears. He was walking very fast to a brownish region of the forties. The Andrew Sisters were singing a sweet song from a shack by the tracks. The sun was cooking the oats in a field nearby and the man appproached a brown railroad car lettered in red with The Fabulous Forties”. A German envoy walked out and went to a small building nearby where a telegraph operator was clicking away, blending with the sound of a thousand crickets from the field across the tracks. The man with the brown suit hesitated as he heard distant jazz remixed into the aforementioned crickets in the aforementioned oat field. He saw the German boots shining darkly in the dark rectangle described by the open door of the station. When he turned towards the car door the train had started to move with angry hisses. He was then reading on the side of the next car “Welcome to the fifties”. As soon as that door materialized he eagerly jumped in. To a brunette with a brown hat and skirt powdering herself by the front exit of the "Fabulous Forties":

“Thank God the war is over!”.

She answered without missing a beat, all the while tapping on her compact:

“Go tell that to the folks in Korea!”

The man was already moving to the front of the car where through the door he could see the end of another car wiggling noisily.

“I’m going forward in that train. Fuck the Fifties”

He jerked open the stainless steel door, letting in the track noises, some smoke and a good whiff of English countryside. Before he grabbed the next car's door, he heard “And they called the wind Ma-ra-ia”, a distant song that was the saddest thing he had ever heard. At that point the man was ready to jump off the train but his pain had grown larger than the door. That’s actually what saved his life. So he just sat on the top step, sobbing and getting softly powdered with soot, his feet dangling by the side of the fast moving train. His pain was caught in the doorway, jammed tight between two moving cars. It was unbearable to watch, yet a strange light was radiating from the brim of his hat, perched farther and farther to the back of his head until it properly rode on the hump of his back. The locomotive became visible slowing down in a long curve to the east, a plaintive low whistle heard. Out of “The Sixties” burst a young clean-cut Vietnamese girl, naked from the waist up and bearing a shoulder tattoo that said “Make war, not love”. His pain instantly shrank, freeing him to move around. The man grabbed a small pistol from his vest pocket, one shaped like cigarette lighter made to look like a pistol.

“Got any free love for me baby”

The now excited man had pushed the short barrel of the gun into the girl’s navel, a feature of hers that was highly visible above the giant towel silk-screened with a $100 bill that she was wearing in lieu of a skirt. Almost instantly she pushed him off the train with a swift kick to his groin, picking up the smallish gun that had just dropped to the floor. The man described an arc as he fell off the bridge, hitting the Thames seconds before his hat that was describing a similar arc, the wing tip shoes flying escort like a pair of Sabre Jets. No one saw the man disappear under water, hunched over and holding his balls, a fact that renders this entire descriptive unverifiable.

Meanwhile back on the train the girl had unfolded the towel and reattached it upside down, showing a bill that said 001$. The reversal was hard to conceal to the other passenger of the smoking car where she was heading to. With a Miss Clairol #13 kit, she had taken the time to die her hair Strawberry Blond and learn a few key English words by swallowing a miniature book suitably called “English for Blonds” She had walked there so very slowly, her head down in pain, one she caught between the railroad cars where she had performed her ciminal deed, like a large tick moving from one host to the next. In the smoking car British sixties music was blaring as people lit their Gaylords, Pall Malls and Players cigarettes. The girl had mouthed a Matinée from a pack stolen at a Montreal Expo concession stand. That made them better tasting, she thought as she flicked the gun at her own face. “Click”.

“The thing is out of fluid. I should have thrown it after him, the macho bastard!” she thought to herself in now perfect English.

Someone came to her from behind and flicked a Zippo with the typical mesmerizing hollow sound, prompting her to suck in a long slow draft to her first Matinée of the day. “Thank you”, she purred “You light my fire!”

The man was positioned behind her in such a way as she could not see him no matter on which side she glanced. But she had noticed earlier the brown sleeve on a very wet brown suit. Not able to identify the style, single or double-breasted, she calmly said to herself “When in doubt, abstain” . Then she delicately positioned her round little derrière dead center on the stainless steel bar stool, giving her bare torso a quick twist to view the stranger face to face.

To her horror it was indeed the “free love” guy she had earlier kicked off the train, his soaking wet hat pushed back to offer a large wet forehead , a drying algae crossing it diagonally.

“How could you make it back here so fast, she said incredulously!”

The man had a curious smile as he pushed his hat back some more:

“I have connections at the railroad company. Railroad connections”

Lowering her head and noticing his soggy shoes, the girl said softly:

“Sorry about what happened. I was raped in the Fifties and twice more in the Sixties. You can’t talk to me like you’re the next moron to try that one me. I don’t want to enter the Seventies with a large lump in my belly”

“I have protection with me” said the man as he put away the Zippo, pulling out two Trojans from a very wet brown wallet.

“God, you never quit, do you!”

Then nonchalantly, trying to conceal a pain that was now larger than the sum of her two large breasts:

“Before I forget, here’s your other funny little lighter. Fill it up and its ready to go”

They both excused themselves to the other passengers visible through the cloud of smoke as they walked to the early Seventies. The bathroom door said “vacant”. Upon entering, the man immediately slapped the light switch off and pushed the girl to sit on the toilet seat, her knees tightly clamped to his own and her hands fumbling for the fly on his brown pants. It was a buttoned fly and her fingers poked through effortlessly.

“I’ll give him a good blow job and get to the Eighties smoothly. If you can’t fight them, join them”. These two thoughts were colliding in her head, making a distinct wooden sound. Her pain had left in the sixties along with a vintage bottle of Valium.

In the total darkness she looked up and saw nothing…nothing but the rim of that brown hat glowing mysteriously with a greenish tint.

“What a freak!”, she thought as she was about to mouth the man’s brown organ. This is when she heard the song that was to change her life, a soft gurgle from the transistor radio that always hung around her neck.

“Ooh my Lord…My Sweet Lord”

What a sweet song, she mused as she was about to suck the man’s dick in the dark. To her surprise he tasted so sweet that she needed no further prompting to give it her best shot, moving her head back and forth on him until he came with a soft rumble in his breath, his hat falling quietly to the floor. Anointed on her chest and breasts, she had an epiphany, connected the dots like had done Saint Paul on the road to Ephesus, stuttering out with tremors in her voice .

“Are you the second coming of Jesus-Christ?”

There was a large noise like cars uncoupling, a silence and then…blitzkrieg!

The lights came on and all that blinding stainless steel was not enough to prevent the girl from seeing that the man with a brown suit was now wearing a purple pajama, a terrible goatee and eyes that were like glowing coals. His laughter crackled as the red arcs of miniature fireworks shot from his shaved skull. He was holding a surgical saw with his mouth while his hands went to her throat, enunciating through clenched teeth:

“Try the FIRST coming of the Antichrist?”

The blond Vietnamese girl never made it to the eighties. After a short fantasy of being the second coming of Mary Magdalena, looking forward to Sweet Lord’s second coming, she was processed into 8-inch segments that were fed to the tracks through the stainless steel water closet. There was no pain to clog the sanitary. The head was stuffed into the sanitary napkin disposal bin where they found it along with a blood-soaked pajama bottom. The top of that garment was found three cars down towards the back of the train. The man had to have walked past the eighties and nineties half naked but no one saw him as they were all gazing at their respective newspapers. They were an odd lot, creepy Croatians and sultry Serbs, drunken Russians and loud Americans, all busy masturbating while holding their own version of the daily news over their respective work site. Once he got into the “New Millennium” he tried to quickly go past that car too but something had grown inside him, a pain darker, harder and larger than any of his past pains. The door would not let him through. A devout young Muslim volunteered to help by flashing open his Aquascutum. The man barely glanced at the dynamite belt, choosing instead to remove his goatee that by that time had grown to a full size beard. Then the blood-soaked pajama top was dropped to the floor as he knelt as if about to pray Allah. As his forehead touched the floor glowing orange arcs acted like powerful acetylene cutting torches cutting a hole in the metal floor, a hole large enough to easily let him and his pain through. The circle of steel fell out as a lot of air and track noises came in. The man rolled into the hole and seventeen devout Muslims jumped after him, seeding the tracks with their prayer beads. The Iraqis left in the car sighed with relief as they clutched the adorned frames they were holding, some bearing the photograph of an attractive bearded man, others with a cheap replica of Santa Claus. One could decipher the track noise as either singing “I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… I’ll be back… or instead, depending on where you were sitting in the car, “Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back… Watch your back…”

“Same meaning, really”, thought an oriental girl with large breasts sitting near the hole, a large folded towel on her lap.

The train slowed down as it entered a small community. It was coming to a full stop at a station whose black and white sign said: “Late-Thirties-on-the-Thames”. A German Envoy with shiny booths climbed aboard carrying a fat portfolio. In it was a fake goatee and a folded purple pajama. Steam billowed as the brakes screeched for a long minute. The telegraph operator had finished his shift, stood up and put on a brown suit jacket, a brown hat and left towards the next town in a brown Bentley. The car radio played “Little Brown Jug” , a song quickly interrupted by the news of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by German brown shirts. The man appeared to smile as his hat brim started to glow. He knew he could beat that locomotive to the next town. “Life is good”, he said as a million stars were alit high in the sky above.

September 18, 2007

'Blue', a short short story by J.

…She had a blue dress that described a large parrot, it’s head under the left breast and it’s tail swinging to her right side where it met the tail of another parrot whose head rested by her left omoplate!

The sentenced died there, on a French word that he could not translate, a tragedy for someone dedicated to spending the rest of his life writing English novels. The island had not a single Anglophone, no books, dictionaries, anatomical charts. Nada. People here spoke occasional Spanish and a curious dialect called Intoto. Of course there was no Internet. This is 1935, a time of wooden boats and sisal rope, like the kind that broke off from the anchor, precipitating his 30-foot ketch to a splintering death on the coral shoals. That was a year ago, the beginning of what Raymond had thought to be a brilliant literary career, analogous to Gauguin’s own artistic flowering on a Tahitian beach. He would give a manuscript to his editor every six months, when the noisy blue Fokker would land on the beach to provide the essential mail service. After six months, he had four or five chapters still missing and a list of 312 words that needed translation, each written down in French with a blank space next to it where an obliging bilingual proofreader would write it in. After twelve months, his typewriter ribbon had expired and the first chapter had been eaten by an agouti, a local rat-like creature for which he did not have an English word. After eighteen months on the island, Raymond had managed to get two girls pregnant, for which he had to pay their respective fathers a pig each. That took care of his meager cash reserve after the shipwreck. After two years, he was the proud father of a set of boys that cried loudly, discouraging any attempt at literature. The two women laughed together when Raymond scribbled through the night with a worn pencil under an oil lamp. Their warm bodies were starting to look elsewhere, especially towards Alomi, a tall Polynesian with a pony tail and long shiny muscles. Raymond’s share of food was acquired through hard work at the pineapple field, handling the machete with a skill that surprised even him, the ex-New York stockbroker who had never so much as planted one seed in his entire life, the two boys not being counted as agriculture. The foreman was a lady, the widow of the estate that provided jobs for a good third of the islanders. She was in a grumpy mood most of the time except after the boat came to be loaded with her crop twice a year, paying her in good solid Aussie dollars. That night was exceptionally happy since the crop fetched a record $25,000. quite a sum in those depression years. She had invited Raymond to be the bartender at a party thrown for the employees. Alomi was not one of them, a fisherman with the best boat in the island. He was having his own party with two young mothers anxious for long overdue sex. The giggling in the hut would have made Raymond sick with jealousy if the blue lady had not suddenly turned on to Raymond as he was raking ice cubes from the bottom of a wooden box. A hand on someone’s rump is no signal of interest, but that fragrant hand was kneading a subtle message that said, translated roughly from the Intoto dialect: ‘I have been a widow for too long. Come in my bed as soon as the last guest leaves. Raymond had noticed the sky blue dress with the large breast resting on the surprised head of a parrot. The following night made him realize that he madly in love with ‘la patra’, Intoto for “the woman boss”. When he walked into his own hut, the girls were sleeping soundly with their respective son, each groping for a breast that was not delivering milk at the normal rate. Something was wrong and Raymond had no idea what it was. Instead of waking the young mothers, he chose to sit under the acacia and write a new novel, the blue lady, underlining the word blue with a worn H4 pencil that required two strokes or more to create a visible line. When he reached the word “omoplate”, he stood up and had one look at the sea. The old Fokker was to land on the beach in five days. He could persuade the pilot to take him and ‘la patra’ to the mainland for well-deserved R&R. His passion had shifted from writing to making love for hours at a time. The girls sold fish at the market, being paid in substance. They would lack nothing during his absence since the rice bag was still nearly full, with plenty of okra in the cellar bin. La Patra was thrilled with the idea, a week in Brisbane with her new lover. He only fear is that having never cultivated a good lieutenant, she feared that her employees would not perform during her absence. Raymond had an idea. Why not invite an outsider with authority to take over for a week? He had just the right candidate, a tall fisherman with machismo and the capacity to quell any mutiny. Alomi was hired when the plane left the beach and circled overhead.

The hotel was clean, pale blue with a radio in every room. The plane had rattled them both and they needed a nap. La Patra was already snoring when Raymond turned on his side, resting on one elbow to better observe the soft belly rising and falling under the blue silk dress. A few centimeters lower, a powerful bush created a dark shadow that moved with her respiration while the radio played “A night in Tunisia” by Artie Shaw. Raymond had to pull up that dress and look at that area, his mouth watering with desire. A quick glance at the locked door and he was in full facial contact, sucking in the delicately smelling tasteful morsels of that powerful woman. She moaned a tiny moan and soon was withering with pleasure, accidentally tearing off her dress so that each parrot was now independent from one another, lying helplessly by the bed. Her breasts were now jiggling all over her chest as she was massaging Raymond’s scalp with nails that had been carefully lacquered the night before. Out of breath and thirsty, Raymond took a swig from the wine bottle by the bed, offering the lady a sip that she refused, busy as she was coordinating the sexual orchestra at her disposal. Grabbing Raymond’s trombone, she pulled it hard in the direction of her inner sanctum, begging in Intoto: “ley marinn, ley marinn’’. Raymond had heard that expression before from her mouth as she often exhorted her workers to plant their machete deeper into the top part of the fruit, better to sever the top leaves. “Ley marinn”, he had concluded, meant “dig in deeper”. Proud of his linguistic skills, he proceeded to dig into ‘la patra’ with a barely contained gusto that was rewarded with cries of satisfaction and ample heaving from her perfect pelvis.

Alomi had put in a nine hour day, counted all the machetes and walked home from the plantation carrying four juicy fruits. He stopped at the girls hut to drop two of these when they said. “Alomi, tang dey lama yi”, Intoto for ‘’You are invited to eat with us and in no way you are going to say no”. He obliged but first showered in the back of the house with a rubber hose connected to a rooftop tank that became quite hot in the daytime. The girls were giggling and the kids laughing, a happy moment made happier when after the meal as they all piled up over Alomi, saying that the Ray would be gone all week. That meant many good quality orgasms for all without the risk of having an unpleasant moment. “Tari tari” “All is well”

Raymond boarded the plane with La Patra on a Sunday morning, having loved and shopped all week with a part of the proceeds from the sale of the last crop. La Patra was wearing a new dress, blue with a streak of lime green across both breasts. Very smart. Only according to the pilot they were overweight by 20 pounds, almost exactly the weight of the new cast iron Royal typewriter . It was decided to leave it at the Aero Club until the next trip. The boys were happy with their rubber molded kangoroos and the girls just loved their new phonograph with its shiny bell. They actually fought to decide who was to crank the contraption when the record slowed down. Alomi went back fishing with a new reel, American made with self-lubricating bearings. “Tari tari”.

Raymond was soon made superintendent at the pineapple ranch and Alomi was now fishing for big stuff, yellowtails and swordfish. Soon he rigged his boat with imported sails and could extend his forays to the next island where they had electricity and night clubs. Of course the girl knew the details of all that and were just dying to go there. That occasion materialized months later when La Patra decided to go to Sidney with Raymond to buy a new crusher for her plantation. Their return by boat with the one-ton machine was to take two weeks. Saturday morning, after Alomi had been tending the plantation expertly all week, it was decided that he too needed some R&R . So did the girls who always giggling were introduced to winches and spinnakers and halyards, all of that in Intoto, of course. The blue sailboat drifted off at noon and a full wind soon pushed off towards Akina, the mysterious and sexy island next door.

Meanwhile in his cabin on the boat Raymond was writing a poem about the deep blue sea. He had the blues allright, mostly because he did not get a chance to retrieve the typewriter from Brisbane several hundred miles to the south of Sidney. His writing career was getting nowhere, a childhood dream squandered by family and duty. But he did have dictionaries now and quite a bit of money thanks to a profit-sharing arrangement with LaPatra that attached a reward to productivity. The last crop was exceptional again and in a perverted way, that gave Raymond some hope. Indeed he could buy a new sailboat one day and just…sail away to a bright literary future. He tore the poem and went on deck, staring towards the northeast. He would just leave for San Fancisco, sell the boat and write a complete best-seller in one year max. This way he would make enough money to one day retrieve the boys and their mothers, sending all four to college in the USA.

Wearing identical blue sarongs, the girls entered their first nightclub, their little hearts beating over one hundred per second when they saw a real stage with dancers and musicians. Alomi was triumphant to produce such emotions in his uneducated girlfriends. He wasn’t much better since he could barely write. But he could read the sea like no one, pull the big ones in patiently and even wrestle with a small blue shark as he was rumored to have done. The return trip had more stars in their eyes than into the entire austral night sky. They made love at the foot of the mast with a full spinnaker pulling them forward at clipper speed. Under a bright moon, the exhausted Alomi steered to boat into the cove sight unseen a 2 in the morning. “Tari Tari”

The kids were now well over 2 years old when the girls were in labor again, simultaneously. The nurse brought the good news to the pale father none too soon. He had been waiting for hours, attempting another novel on a series of paper towels. His hands were grimy as he had earlier spent several hours trying to fix the pineapple crusher that had broken down. He felt miserable to have to need the childbirth excuse for a chance to write. Now with two more mouths to feed, when will he get the leisure to restart his real life passion.

”Mister Raymond, you have two girls, already fully sun-tanned and ready for the beach” Raymond was overjoyed at the curly headed little critters than sang a full octave above the remembered sound of the boys when they were born. For a while life was sweet at the plantation as well as at the house. The little darlings slept full nights and grew with incredible speed and agility. Raymond’s tiller was also filling after two more highly successful crops brought about by a new irrigation technique learned in a book he had purchased in Brisbane the same day his typewriter was repatriated. That left him no time to write but the typewriter was used as a percussive instrument by all four babies when the mothers played that new thing on the phonograph, American jazz. When vacation time came about, Raymond had bought a ream of paper and sat at the instrument with the unrealistic desire to write a novel in two weeks. He cooked a pot of coffee, lit a cigar and proceeded to write when he realized that three keys still lifted when pushed down hard enough. Salt air from the sea had completed the damage brought about by American music. He was determined to succeed to such a degree that he used the typewriter as a door stop to keep dogs and kids away, proceeding to complete the damn thing by hand. The four typewritten letters on one sheet spelled B…..L.U……E. He would call the novel “BLUE”. By hand, laboriously at first, he spelled:

She had a blue dress that described a large parrot, it’s head under the left breast and it’s tail swinging to her right side where it met the tail of another parrot whose head rested by her left shoulder blade.

There, he said patting the dictionary, I am now an American writer.

The girls did not appreciate the isolation that papa Ray was subjecting himself with the illusory purpose of becoming famous. They resented his writing so much that they spent entire evenings playing Mah Jong with Alomi, the daughter playing house and the boys playing pirate on Alomi’s boat. Raymond needed to fix machines all the time at the plantation. La Patra was cruel he told the girls as he was trying to conceal scratches on his chest and legs. His two wives were not duped that easily since Alomi had punched a hole in the cannery wall, one that gave a full view into LaPatra’s bedroom, concealed by a collection of sea shells. There he had seen Raymond’s short naked silhouette striding from bed to latrine with an excited step. He did not need to see more to convince the girls that hubby was not above all cheating. The household slowly turned silent as the kids played outside and away most of the time. The girls were now taller than the boys and were constantly kidded about it at school. The rumor had it that their mothers had had tiki tiki with a tall man, one with dark skin and long lean muscles. Raymond was by now certain of that fact although he had earlier blamed far reaching genetic laws for the difference in skin tones. He did not care any more. His LeJeannot 35 was soon to arrive on the island, his chance for a slow sail to San Francisco and a new beginning in the world of American literature. La Patra had had an hysterectomy that turned south, souring her mood permanently it seemed. A hurricane had wiped out the last crop and the mothers were now completely hostile to Raymond, insensitive to his gifts or his chatter. Alomi was caught stealing and was never re-hired on the plantation. Many had left after the hurricane and the blue mail plane was now only once a year for lack of enough mail to fill its cargo bay.

Raymond was never bored as the novel BLUE had grown to one hundred glorious pages, safely stashed away in the map box of his gleaming new sail boat. He had spent his leisure hours beefing up the rigging for a Pacific crossing, keeping to himself and spreading distrust all around him if that was still possible. His Sailor’s Almanach was now a book he read everynight after the women were asleep. There was a window of opportunity for that crossing, the first week of May. San Francisco in July must be awesome he throught, with all these quaint coffee houses where poets read their lines holding up a glass of wine. How quaint and positively exciting, he thought as he was trying to figure out his auto-pilot rigged to his rudder. He would need to understand that device if he expected to get any sleep. Only when he bought that second hand boat, no instruction came with it. His poetic brain could make no sense of it so he decided on one more trip to the mainland where the boat broker would certainly oblige with a detailed set of instructions. With no plane scheduled in for awhile, he decided to take Alomi as a mate and sail all the way to Sydney. Alomi was a wonderful sailor who managed to figure out the auto-pilot before they were out just a few nautical miles away from their island. They played with the wind like schoolboys and returned to the cove on time for a pig roast where all were happy.

Pigs were hard to come by as the island degenerated into the unemployment capital of the entire Micronesian archipelago. It was time to leave, thought Raymond, just a week ahead of the Almanach’s best sailing schedule. His bag was ready, hidden under an abandoned pirogue. He could barely sleep. He left one thousand Australian dollars in a tin pot for the girls to discover after he left at dawn. Sleep finally came, a heavy kind with nightmarish qualities. Must be that bad meat he had for dinner, he thought as he awoke for his transatlantic journey. The girl’s room was empty. Girls will be girls he thought with some sympathy, noticing that the school girls were also missing…and the boys too. They cannot all be with Alomi he throught as he approached the neighboring hut like a hunter. It was empty, missing also the fishing gear, the bags of rice and several other manifestations of life on the island. An ominous thought entered his mind. What if…what if…He soon realized upon climbing to the ledge that the cove contained nothing but several islander fishing boats and Alomi’s sailboat. LeJeannot 35 was gone, maybe for good, as well as his entire family.

A true poet is not afflicted by material loss when the passion feeds him night and day, thought Raymond. He would furiously finish the novel and mail it to his friend at Random House. No one was here anymore to distract him, no more pestering kids and sulking wives, barking dogs and paper-eating rats. But he could not find it after looking everywhere, even in the pantry where he had a habit of hiding things in pots and pans not used often. The money was gone. Good grief, had they read my mind? He said to himself walking to LaPatra’s house for a stiff drink.

The boat was sailing sumptuously towards Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef, the boys manning the mainsail while the now much taller girls handled the jib and the spinnaker. All were sun-tanned like Coppertone kids, albeit with different degree following their respective DNA, a still unknown notion in 1942. The mothers wore beautiful pareos bought with their allowance money in a tourist island visited earlier. They were cleaning the galley. “Para wha!” (What’s this?) said one to the other holding a bunch of handwritten sheets. “Fita filawo nai’ said the other pulling the entire manuscript away from her and throwing it overboard as they giggled hysterically. She had said “Food for the blue shark’ Sure enough, the first page with the word B..L..U…E floated by Alomi who was fishing at the back of the boat, quizzically looking at it as a blue shark was showing no interest, biting his line hard instead.

August 24, 2007

The Job

by Jacques Poirier
for Vintage Snowmobile
The Cessna was running out of fuel after almost two hours in the air. We still hadn’t located Saint Évariste de la Guadeloupe, the only village with both an airstrip and a swimming pool, "It's my own pool!" Fournier had told me over the phone, "...piece of cake to find it from the air…"
Only the cake was covered in snow, a surprise October flurry not unusual in these boonies we affectionately called “La Beauce”. The young pilot was systematically swooping down over each village main street to spot a hotel or store with the word “Evariste” spelled out on a sign, one eye on the fuel gauge and the other on the high church steeples of the Quebec countryside.
Heck I thought to myself, he could land in any one of these villages and I could locate a snowmobile manufacturer there and get hired on the spot. In 1970, there were 60 of these in Quebec alone, with at least half of them precisely in the area we were criss-crossing in the air. Anyone who had worked at the Bombardier R&D facility in Valcourt during these golden years could expect to double his salary by defecting to the competition. It didn’t seem to matter if the person had pushed a pencil, a broom or a wrench. I had worked on the Elan prototype, a mini-sub, the Olympic, a pedal-boat with a sail, the Nordic, the mini-bike, the dragster, and the first Sea-Doo, mostly deciding where to put the reflectors and other details for the decal companies. But it was happiness… until I had a really bad break: my boss Sam Lapointe, ever anxious to please the Bombardier Family, found out accidentally that I had a degree in architecture. So he switched me to designing a stable for 30 horses, a guest house, an employee recreation center, president Laurent Beaudoin’s kitchen, the new 100,000 ft2 research center, the trade show kiosks and a rear deck for his own house. All that work for $5000 a year. There was no time left to ride the hills on my snowmobile, much less a chance to design one, a fond dream of mine. So I handed in a 24-page resignation letter that Beaudoin kept under the glass of his desk for a long time, they say, just for laughs. I was twenty-five and my main reason for quitting was that I thought that his research center had no research and no center, his company heading for the trash heap of history.
Common wisdom is that an architect is someone that is not ‘macho’ enough to be an engineer, yet not ‘gay’ enough to be an interior decorator. This time around I had hidden that unfortunate diploma carefully to the hiring people, choosing instead to hype my experience at Bombardier’s, especially my hard work on the very successful Elan. That year, Coleman had bought SkiRoule, Bombardier bought Moto-Ski, Conroy had just acquired Sno*Jet while AllSport was buying BoaSki. The latter was located in faraway Saint Evariste de la Guadeloupe, a mouthful for those naïve American corporate types. It needs to be said that by Christmas, like clockwork, Bombardier would have sold out hundreds of thousands of its SkiDoos, its entire production. The pressure to double that number every year was so intense that one of the brothers,  Jacques Bombardier brought a shotgun to work and unloaded it into his mouth, stopping the assembly line for nearly an hour. That pressure-cooker tempo  was spawning companies much like dense galactic gases spawn young stars. Every one of these was at work filling the gaps in the rest of the snowmobiling season.
Only three or four persons were needed to create a new brand, a new company selling JetSki, MotoJet, SnoSki, SnoCuiser MotoSki , SnoJet or what not: you needed a lawnmower guy, a sheet metal person with a 6-foot break, a fiberglass fella with canoe and/or auto body experience. Engine, body, cowling were then their respective areas of expertise. The more sophisticated startups might have had an upholsterer for seats and a financial officer for show, the latter deemed unnecessary because of demand, the giant sucking sound heard from the 4000 mile long North American Snow Belt. It is true that every boat dealer from Alaska to Newfoundland wanted to have something to sell in winter. Anyone without a blue, red, black or yellow snowmobile sign hanging was habitually depressed and out of business for six months every year. It did not seem to matter that most of these manufacturers bought their skis and tracks from the reject piles near Bombardier’s subs and affiliates. Or that some of these machines were shipped without an engine and others with the track installed in reverse. Money and American corporations flowed into the province so fast that Quebec-style colleges started to cancel Latin and Greek to make room for more English and Economics. Engineering followed, but too late, according to some bad gossip from Minnesota. But that’s another story
I liked the salary AllSport had offered me. That morning I was flying to visit the plant and meet local management to show some sketches, 200 miles away. Then suddenly the snow was melting on a gorgeous turquoise rectangle at 2 o’clock. That’s it, this is Saint Evariste, let’s land that bird the pilot had said . The landing strip was equally well camouflaged with snow but the wind sock caught our eyes. At the end of the wiggling strip stood a dark blue Lincoln Mark V, Fournier’s massive limo. After a much needed shot of Scotch from the back seat bar, we headed to the local restaurant for lunch, the car filled with tropical music from an eight-track tape player. Moods of Caribbean Guadeloupe under fresh snow. Prosperity must be fun, I thought with envy.
Waiting for our meal with five rowdy semi-drunk execs, the thrill of the conversation was a bet they had taken with Evariste. Not the saint who gave his name to the village, but Evariste Boulanger, a maple syrup farmer who had invented a new aggressive track and a new slide suspension to match. He was the talk of the restaurant. Rumor had it that he had driven his prototype to nearby Thetford Mines and managed to climb all the way to the top of an asbestos tailing mound. That cone stood 200 feet high with a 40 degree slope, and just after the year’s first snow, Evariste won his bet. Clever ‘Varist’ had made another bet, one that he would fly his plane between the church steeples across the street at precisely 12 noon. The waitress had raised the venetians and the clients were anxiously waiting to see if the farmer could slip his 32-foot wingspan into a 24-foot gap with enough of a bank to clear the ancient steeples. In a loud burst of plane exhaust noise he did just that to the crowd’s delight, later showing up for congrats and schnapps.
These events didn’t detract Fournier from advising me on what was coming. I was to meet Lincoln Custeau that afternoon, the head of research at Boa Ski. With the breath of a Scottish distiller, Fournier’s voice went into a low growl: Be very careful with Lincoln...
I understood pressure. Nothing’s wrong with a drink when you just sold your company for millions of dollars to a faceless US corporation, with final payment due when you deliver a precise number of units to their Ohio distributor by Christmas. Add to that the dilemna that you still have you have no idea on how to get the missing sprockets, chains, headlamps and engines. To get enough, Bombardier had to buy a little-know stationary engine maker deep in Austria, the now-famed Rotax. Chains came from Korea by plane at huge costs, the entire market swarming with orders that no one could fill on time. To compound the problem you also have to know know that Lincoln’s new baby looks like an overcooked marshmallow with a bad paint job. The new owners insisted on hiring a stylist but Lincoln just adored his freaky looking Boa. With his ego the size of a mountain, all the execs sensed that me, the guy sent by the Montreal hiring agency, I had no chance to work it out with their hairy-chested research head with hands the size of shovels. I was too much of a city slicker with my transparent smoked acrylic briefcase full of pretty sketches. I already knew that from the oblique stares and shifty attitude.
Darkness falls quickly in late October. The assembly line that I was being shown was badly lit, sitting inside a 1000-foot long instant steel building, the rusty cylindrical kind. I was dreading the encounter with Lincoln when a sudden power failure stopped the assembly line in full darkness. Freezing rain had downed some power lines. Immediately people went to their cars to get flashlights and gas lanterns. Most employees there were hunters, poachers and woodsmen that took occasional jobs to buy potatoes, gin and tobacco. The assembly line was cranked by hand with a four-by-four and work quickly resumed. Trucks with oily 55 gal drums filled with parts were searched by flashlights, someone having yelled Vite, on manque des 2 pouces 7/16 fil fin pour les moteurs . Hard to attach engines without these fine thread bolts. Soon I could hear the air compressor's tank whimping out. Fournier was now standing on a crate waiving a wad of hundred dollar bills. I will put one of these for your Christmas party for each machine you load in the semi-trailer before the next shift.
The current came back on and Lincoln showed up with a resignation letter written on a tiny square of paper, held up front between an enormous thumb and equally large forefinger. He had learned of my potential mandate to civilize his 640cc BoaSki SS and threatened to quit. All knew that if his resignation was accepted, he would take half the employees with him and start SnoSomething Inc. at the other end of the village. My goose was cooked. I didn’t care for the name either, as BoaSki was coined in a local school contest where the winner was promised a summer job. Some smart-ass kid said Boa was the best name since a boa is strong and goes into the wood, just like a snowmobile. The parents cried with pride and the color chosen was blood red by unanimous consent. Choosing a color that was already used by other sleds was considered blasphemy, unlike today. At Bombardier, I was instrumental in changing the original yellow paint that for years Armand Bombardier had bought second hand from the Highway authorities. They were tired of being called “mustard pots” so we opted to standardize with Sico paint a brighter cadmium yellow that still stands today. Yellow looks good on snow in the bleak winter months. Blue did not fare so well, I thought, not knowing what was awaiting me.
Although Lincoln became a friend much later when we built a racer together, that day I chose to leave that job opportunity to the local talent. Because the pilot had to fly back to Montreal before the onset of the freezing rain, I took a very slippery taxi ride to Thetford Mines and booked into a hotel, hoping to meet the new president of SnoJet. I spent the next two hours making little sketches to show him what I could do for his brand, a high cg racer in the tradition of the "mustard pots" Olympics. Little did I know then that we would become famous for the exact opposite, the low-slong Thunder Jet racing machines that would soon dominate the snow belt. Jose Suys was a steely-eyed Belgian hired by Conroy when they acquired the company from three Quebec businessmen, a former lawnmower repair man, a sheet-metal guy and a canoe maker. I went to sleep, toying with figures : Bombardier was aiming for 600,000 machines a year when I left, earning $6000 a year. BoaSki was aiming for a production of 6,000 machines and was offering me $24,000 a year. Sno*Jet, I had read, was aiming for a production of 60,000 units. Simple maths, tomorrow I would ask for $16,000 , a fine number more in line with my lack of real experience but justified by a great desire to achieve.
Money isn’t everything when you’re young and you like your work. Sno*Jet had a real challenge to offer a designer, something awful and unheard in the entire industry: 5,000 crates containing unsold machines from their last year of operations. Their Sno*Jet Super-Sport had bombed, too ugly, too expensive and delivered too late in the season. It was endowed with cranky Hirth engines, bad carbs and other unmentionables. My first job would be to recycle these into something decent and desirable. Suys gave me the $16,000 I wanted, asking to keep it a secret since the chief engineer with a family of four was earning less. But thank goodness for all those Popular Mechanic magazines I had read, I could speak English to the new owners…and he could not! What a plus that was in our future fights. I was in heaven and the sky was blue, like the snowmobile color I detested but had to live with for four years. And there were no hairy brutes here, just tall slick gentle Mormons who manufactured Glaston Boats in Austin TX, Carlsen cigarette boats in CA and coffee tables in GA. They mostly came and went, leaving the unionized Frenchies to themselves as long as they delivered the goods to all their famished boat dealers in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas and Idaho.
Since manufacturing and engineering jobs were hard to fill in the then priest-ridden Quebec, most engineering staff had been brought in by Jose Suys from a recent bankruptcy in the refrigerator industry. He was a “fridge guy” himself for the four years since his immigration to Canada. That culture would seem natural for a company called Sno*Jet, don't you think? You have guessed by now that the asterisk placed in the word Sno*Jet is meant to be a snowflake. We at Sno*Jet were very proud of that bit of creativity by the secretary of our Production Chief. until it melted five years later under the heat of a Kawasaki engine. But a lot of glory would come to Sno*jet untill then. In a next issue our story will go to Austin TX, Minneapolis MN, Burlington VT, Japan, Peterborough ON, Thetford Mines QC, Eagle River WI, Tring Junction QC, Kerrville TX and a host of other great places.


So kick your boots into those stirrups as we are ready to roll into the hills. Of course, this is after I’ve had a chance to see if certain characters are really dead. I don’t want to get sued out of my retirement money. I will write next chapters with a genuine zeal, the golden years of Sno*jet and the amazing things that happened within the industry in general. Then later I will revisit Bombardier for more pre-1971 highlights and dark secrets along with post-1971 juicy gossip. You will get to know Henri, Gaston, Tony, Duane, Jim and a host of other colorful and now deceased individuals that I will proudly re-awaken for you.
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You see, I later taught an Industrial Design class at the U. of Montreal., a new department brought about by the explosion of new manufacturing activity in our province. Some of my students went on to work with my former employers, diligently reporting to me every crispy secrets of design, production and marketing flavor. I can’t wait to share these with Vintage Snowmobile readers.

August 21, 2007

Short short story


One day, once upon a time in a faraway land, a woman was neither nagging nor whining nor even complaining a little bit. But that was a long time ago, and only for ONE day.
J.

May 5, 2007

Wolfie's exit

A sad bus with jammed windows and diesel fumes, the BushBus had been rolling on for almost seven years, entering strange cities like D.C., Crawford and Bagdad, turning dangerous corners like TaxCutsForTheRich and BanStemCellResearch, blowing tires here and there, running over pedestrians and generally fouling the air in several countries. With yet another year of tumultuous travel ahead, its occupants were getting restless and not a little upset with the overflowing toilet in the rear and the stench of urine permeating all the way to the front. There sat a group of advisers around the driver, Dubya, forehead streaked with several furrows but grin intact, the legendary smirk that already had made him a legend at the bus company. Those neocon advisors as they are now called had made it to the front of the bus by their ruthless self-assurance, grabbing seats by tricking passengers to the back of the bus. "Neo-Conservatives" were actually known as "NeoCons" to the passengers, people who had conned them with new techniques and old-fashion lies. None of this worked anymore as the back of the bus was a horror story of sick or dead passengers piled up ceiling high, some frantically writing tell-all books and others blurting out declarations to the press on their cell phones.

A motorcade of press cars followed the bus, most predicting the imminent end of the road or its tragic fall into some canyon. But no such pessimism was to be heard in the metallic blue van right behind, FoxNews . Its occupants were always very much in awe of the entire expedition, amazingly supportive of the driver and his advisers. Theirs was the biggest van, covered with ads from sponsors saying strange things like ,
THE SCIENCE OF THE GLYCEMIC INDEX, and DO YOU KNOW YOUR CREDIT SCORE. It was driven by a clever fellow named Rupert who was making a lot of money with the entire bus episode. He knew that controversy breeds viewership, viewership breeds sponsors, sponsors breed profits and profits breed power. Seventy six years old and power hungry, excellent eyesight and a strong engine, he was forever increasing his presence in the motorcade. He owned the NewYork Sun van and several other news cars further back. He was on that day eyeing the van just behind him as a potential acquisition. Its white sides had black Gothic fonts spelling:. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL . Here was a more than valid takeover target. He would grab it and plunk one of his boys in the driver seat.

Although Dubya had never read anything but parts of a few pages of the Bible, he felt great joy when he heard the news; it is always nice to know you are escorted by a favorable press. Rupert had been approving each and everyone of his detours, interviewing some of his advisers and co-pilots, blasting opposition through bullies like O'Reily . Dubya was about to lose his old sidekick Gonzales, sick at the back of the bus with massive constipation. Gonzales had just lost his own sidekick to a bout of embarrassing diarrhea. Then Dubya heard about Wolfowitz. He had been chief co-pilot for the Bagdad caper but had since been promoted up to drive the WorldBank, a wobbly and slow armored car at the back of the convoy. Rumor had it that he was being pushed out of WorldBank bogged down with radiator problems. On his mike Dubya said:
"Paul Wolfowitz is a nice man and he loves poor people". This classic one-liner brought good humor to the bus as all knew that he had said something similar about Rummy before the latter was ejected six months ago from the front door of the bus.

Wolfie used to sit right behind the driver's seat before the bus made that unfortunate detour. So did Tenet and Dick and Perle and Rummy, all cohorts that favored Bagdad in spite of some passenger's howling protest. Those were immediately reported to FoxNews who properly destroyed their credential with instant slander, a trade trick mastered by the occupants of the van. The neocons are a smiling bunch with sharp elbows, all fueled by their peculiar truth, rock-hard convictions that they are right all the time, all of them, on all matters of travel and leisure. It was learned by some passengers that neo-cons were practically all ex-students of professor Leo Strauss of the Political Science School of the University of Chicago . The German expatriate prefered
"lies that heal" to "truth that kills" The entire detour through Bagdad had been a lie that was going to heal the Middle East. Instead it killed many passengers and even more unfortunate Iraqi pedestrians. "They will greet the bus with flowers " had said Rummy while cracking his knuckles. "Slam dunk...we can present a great case to the passengers". .. .had volunteered Tenet munching on a baklava. "It won't cost a cent, they have oil" had said Wolfie sucking on a plastic comb.

The trip through Bagdad actually started well as smiling neocons faced the rest of the bus with funny quips and happy clever slaps into each others back. Pretty soon eggs started to be thrown, tires were slashed and oil nowhere to be found. It had to be brought in from outside the country under police escort. Wolfie through all this was a normal reaction to people not used to bus traffic and central plumbing, something transitory that would soon evaporate when everyone has SkyTV and MyPlace, two other businesses owned by Rupert. Four years later, the bus had not recovered from the episode and remaining passengers were looking towards the exits. Which brings the story back to Wolfie.

Of course no one was happy with Wolfowitz as it was now known that the Bagdad detour for the motorcade had in large part been influenced by him, referred to by the press as its chief architect. As the driver, the decider as he liked to be called, Dubya liked to surround himself with shorter men so as not to obstruct the rear view mirror. Short Fat Karl invented pranks to deride him, short funny Rummy created puns and short sinister Wolfy talked about the bus legacy, how future travel writers would laud that historic trip and its driver(s). The folks in WordBank hated him from the start when he brought into the armored truck his own cronies, all veteran of BushBus, none of which knew how to operate the 12-speed truck transmission or ask for advice from the existing crew to find out. They chatted at the front of the armored truck and threw their empty bags of Doritos through open windows, a no-no when you transport the donated cash from several bus companies. Worse still, Wolfie had a preexisting girlfriend in that truck, one that he had displaced into an expensive trailer towed behind WorldBank. This was done without true consultation and in violation of the driver's contract that forbid conflicts of interest. Because Bagdad had been and is still so painful to the entire motorcade, WorldBank occupants declared showtime, stopped the lumbering truck and tried Wolfie by a steep embankment. Dubya heard about the sordid details and wavered. The guy is slowing us down , he thought. Of course, this is May 2007 and the BushBus has but 18 months to go before his shift expires. He can't wait to drive to Crawford and get rid of his angst on the shredder at his ranch.

The bus now stinks of vomit, urine and something else as Gonzales finally had a bowel movement. The air is thick with expectation of worst kind. Dick's pacemaker is misfiring in tune with the out of sync engine on the badly bruised bus. Dubya has more furrows on his brow but his smirk is gone. Tenet is in the CBSNews car blabbing away, essentially saying that he never said "Slam Dunk" and everyone is blaming everyone for the Bagdad event. Fortunately Jesus is still smiling at Dubya on the dashboard and there is hope. Real Christian hope. Gerry Falwell died yesterday and his influence in Heaven could be felt throughout the motorcade, even as far back as the stalled armored truck by the roadside, even between the wide ears of a bewildered Wolfowitz, standing on the edge of a three hundred feet straight down cliff. Something is shining in his eyes. Could it be Jesus?. Something is shining even more in his raised right arm, the keys to the truck. From his soft-spoken trembling lips we can hear, but just barely:
You assholes push me and I go down with the keys to WorldBank. No one called his bluff as none of the truck occupants had the right kind of walking shoes. Besides, there was money to haul, lots of it, and a trailer. A trailer? All had forgotten about the woman in the trailer. She was nowhere to be found. Oh well! a temperamental Muslim, that Shaha, someone muttered she had probably decided to walk, angry at everyone including her lover Wolfie for having been so dismissive of her. All she wanted back then was her seat in the middle of the truck, her Arabic expertise and her worldwide women's rights interest.

At that time, the whole motorcade had stopped and gone into reverse gear to catch up with the action. Gonzales had been ejected when the bus stopped at the head of the convoy, a fine time to clean the latrine as passenger Pelosi had snickered. All the press camera were aimed at Wolfie's bravado by the edge of the cliff. FOXNews was wildly creating NEWS ALERT, interrupting BREAKING NEWS, interrupting the regular show, AROUND THE WORLD IN FIFTEEN SECONDS, itself interrupted by bearded Bill Mays screaming out a soap commercial.
This just in, Wolfowitz might die with the WorldBank.

Rupert Murdock was using the distraction to buy the white van. Bush was now standing in front of BushBus while Karl was looking at the timing belt. It's all about timing blurted the rotund little man . While they are all there in the back of the convoy, we sacked Gonzales and buried him in the ditch along with a bag of uneaten tortillas. Dubya smiled and looked ahead at the empty road. He thought it looked like TX34, the road to his Crawford ranch where he would find peace and contentment in just a few short months. He was secretly hoping that the next driver of the bus would be one of its most irritating passengers, Pelosi, Hillary, faithless critiques of him and Jesus.
That'll teach'em. Historians will figure it out later.

Historians are still at odds as to what really happened next since for awhile no trace of the driver could be identified. All that we know from one of the few survivors is this BBC interview posted the same day. None of the press cars survived the apocalypse except the BBCNews. They were covering events in Darfur, miles behind the motorcade, when they saw the huge dust and smoke plume in the sky ahead. After making it to the head of the convoy through a back road, they noticed this lone man hiding behind a boulder on the high side of the road. The road itself was but a long crater that had collapsed the retaining cliff. Hundreds of cars lay 300 feet below, pell-mell, with no sign of life emanating from the rocky debris. The man drank from a bottle of green tea a bloke handed to him, took an enormous breath and slowly began:

I was riding the BushBus and needed to relieve myself really bad. The toilet was clogged. When the bus stopped, I quickly ran behind that rock and was relieving myself when I saw our driver in front of the bus looking ahead, his hand cupped over his eyes as if he was trying to identify something in the distance. So I looked at the road ahead and saw the fast moving car coming at us, first just a dot but soon a yellow truck, like a rental, y'know, Hertz or Penske. It never slowed down but just plowed right on.

It was terrible. The truck exploded when it hit the bus, a horribly bright flash. I must have fainted. When I regained consciousness, the earth was still rumbling. A good part of the mountain fell on the cars and trucks and together the whole thing fell into the canyon below. It's a miracle I'm alive.(nervous laughter) I think I'll take that rock home with me.

FBI , the Federated Bus Investigators , spent 2 years analysing the wreckage.All frames and sheet metal from all cars and trucks were re-assembled in several hangars. All body parts were frozen, DNA-sampled and properly identified. All except the driver of the yellow truck who was probably not a US citizen. Skeletal analysis determined that she was a middle-aged woman. DNA showed middle-eastern markings and teeth forensic were tentatively traced to a NY dentist. Of course there were national funerals in countless churches and synagogues. The mood was ugly. The angry Muslim woman was in all conversations, spreading anger and vengeance everywhere except Bagdad and a few retarded villages in Pakistan. This is when this BREAKING NEWS bulletin hit in full force at Fox, an organization recently acquired by MSNBC after the death of Rupert Murdock:

This just in from the FBI. The suicide bomber responsible for the motorcade carnage has now been identified as being Shaha Riza, Paul Wolfowitz girlfriend and source of the now resolved conflict at WorldBank. Positive identification came about as Dr Smileshein, a NY dentist, recognized his signature drill markings on the woman's molars. This puts an end to a long national interrogation while defusing the tensions with middle-eastern countries still suspected of having been behind the horrible tragedy. Our driver and decider Bill Clinton has now closed the book on that investigation, saying that his wife Hillary, Nancy Pelosi and Shaha had not died in vain during the Bush bus tour, since the cause of Muslim women and all women was now in good hands with him behind the wheel. Hugo Chavez, the new President of WorldBank named by Clinton was seen shedding a tear when he addressed a developing nations World Bank summit in the now reconstructing Bagdad. "Better truth that hurts than lies that heal" he was heard saying as the crowd guffawed. He was at that time referring to the $10 a gallon price of gasoline and his incapacity to help lower it. And now a message from our sponsor:
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