Savoury Friends

Savory Friends

       by Dee Are

         douglas reimer was a fraud

         douglas reimer caught a cod

         some thought douglas reimer odd

         others likened him to god

         I can tell you he's a clod

         still, if you're one who gets awed

         know he's worthy, though he's flawed

If you are ever in the River Heights neck of the woods you will notice that people here have unusual physiognomies. In most respects they are normal. Their bungalows are ordinary, their lawns neat, their cars shiny and their children smartly behaved. They eat three meals a day, go to the office for their day jobs, and have carpenters in to do repairs on their buildings. Yet, oddly, they look unlike the residents of Transcona, St. Norbert, Fort Rouge, Charleswood, Tuxedo, or Wolseley.

         They have bigger heads of hair, their torsos have a squat fullness about them, and their feet splay curiously as if each and every one of them studied ballet as a child. Most distinctive, however, are there butts, or "asses" as some of my less savory friends would say. I have these, ones with whom I am obliged to continue relations. I encounter them at billiards, in the curling rink, at the Montcalm beer establishment, at the Assiniboia Downs, in the liquor stores, and in a few other places. I got to know Wayne Teflon as a high school teacher. He taught science. He became my friend when I was still too shyly new to the community. Since then I have had reason to wish to forget about him, but he phones me when he's in town and we go for beers. Jackson Simplot, a greens keeper for the Fort Garry Country Club, never passes up a holiday without contacting me to see if I wish to go for a few and watch the strippers. 

         I dislike the Montcalm now, being fifty and not all that active in imagining the female body anymore. I have, furthermore, an aversion to drink and when I've had two I resist the others that men like Jackson press on me. Beckenridge, first name Simms, is in the used iron business on Panet Road. His acreage is contained by an electrified wire fence and inside it at night are three dogs of large size and fierce attitude. He phoned me a few days ago with the offer to purchase a two year old Honda Accord, fully loaded. He said that he'd let me have that "low mileage number" for twelve thousand plus. I thanked him but declined politely. William Kelp Jr. is in clothing retail, Borden Grishman sells automobiles for Car Canada, Spinmann Sweatman is unemployed, but always on the verge of something, Guy Banderbout drives transport along Highway 6. There are a few more but they do not call me as often. 

        Riverheights butts tell a tale of white-collar employment and few kids. The men work in offices and the women stay home for the most part doing this or that but not too much of it. They tend to stick out further than the average. If you take a perspective against a house that one of them is walking past you will notice that the butt temporarily is visible alone without any other part of the body in sight on this side of the house edge. Other butts in the other parts of the city that I mentioned have a shoulder or an elbow or some piece of the anatomy still in the frame. The butt is never alone. 

       Big butts do not fascinate me. Some Africans, I am told, or Africans generally, like a big butt. They like the swing and dip of it as it undulates to the beat. I don't see why they would, but then I am a caucasian. I like (or liked before my operation) a neat and small butt of the sort sported by the Alison Krausses and Gillian Welches of the world. Long legs, slim waist and a round, compact posterior, these did turn me on. A skirt on the same region, a bit short, maybe, or swaying and kneelength, did nothing to detract from the picture. I wished always to be able to lift one of these little numbers a bit and touch the warmth of the thigh and the back of the knee, but I never did, for we are trained, are we not, to leave the beautiful alone and not stick our hands and fingers where they are not wanted? Keep your hand out of plackets, selah. 

         You can have all the butts I have ever seen in River Heights. As far as I am concerned, they none of them interest me. Take them. They are yours. Enjoy. All too soon our lives are over. I concede them to you, every one, and wish you the best with them that can be. God speed. Uncover them as you will, taste them as fully and as often as you wish, make a pig of yourself in their presence, I will not be offended. Spank them in play as well, if you are so inclined. They offer themselves to you that way by their very station. Have them sit, stand, walk, slide, boogey for you and giv 'er hell. Bon voyage, my fellow pilgrim.

The Purchase of Scotch

Purchasing Scotch

      by Doodoo Right Dougie Lanyards

Poe ushered in a new era in literature. No one had done the horror thing before with any persistence. Frankenstein may have been a model for him. A woman wrote that. Not too likely that a woman would make a life of writing horror. It must have been Byron who wrote it. Or, as I am about to asseverate, a male acquaintance of his.

          A decade ago, round about, in England for a visit to my wife's people, I ordered a bottle of scotch and sat down in a library to read. I got tired of Poe, and then tired of Dickens, Crabbe, and Boroughs successively. What might I do that would be of more interest. I went up to the sixth floor by lift and walked about in the stacks. I came, eventually, to a dark corner where light drained in from a distant bulb. I sat down on the floor itself, dusty, unattended, hardly ever visited by the feet of visitors. With the help of my electric torch, a small pencil type that I keep with me at all times, I scanned the titles before me. The library in this remote corner of nowhere bore a silence not unlike that of a dungeon or crypt. I pulled my bottle from my pocket, set it down on the floor beside me, and thought how cozy this moment was. A Christmas carol filtered through the dust and distance. "Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining." I drank, and shone my light over the titles of books not seen or held for many, many a decade. I pulled out one or two and thumbed through them. Belleville, the Marquee. Torture in the Dungeon of the Castille. "Vous a vous la Trois frer te ma votre," I read, uncomprehending. And next, Samuel Taylor. Come For to See, 1893. And after a while, the scotch warming my insides, this: Frankenstein, by Percy B Shelley. 

           "What?" I thought to myself. This cannot be! The authorage is incorrect. I opened the book, read the text, noticed how immediately variations appeared from the Mary Shelley text so well known to me, and became absolutely riveted. This was not the book that I had heretofore known as Frankenstein. Surely, this must be an imposter. Someone had deliberately attached the poet's name to the text that, for all the world knew, Mary had written, though, often thought, with the help of her husband. I felt suddenly a tingling sensation along my arm. This is an affect I experience when something is not as it should be, when something big and very strange is in the making. I put my bottle away, I picked up the book, and I gave it to the attendant to ask from the databanks when the last date of its withdrawal had been. He checked. A frown crossed his brow. He finally spoke and said that it had never been borrowed by anyone before. He looked surprised as he handed the slim volume back to me, shaking his head as if to clear it, and then went back to his work.

        I did not sign out the book, but went back in the direction from which I had come. My intention was already clear to me. If, in fact, this was an unknown version of the text, signed by the poet, then it would turn an entire literary history on its side. Courses would never again place great emphasis on the superb fact that in the mid-1800s a woman wrote the first great novel and as a result today women have a fine place in the annals of literature. I did not mind at all having women in the center of literary tradition, but not if they did not deserve to be there. Nevertheless, all this was only a niggle in my mind. I knew that a good reason existed for my spiriting this text out of here so that I could gain the reputation accruing to it and its discovery. I took the lift up to the sixth floor, returned to my remote corner of the building, looked about me for a window that I might pry open and, sure enough, found one casement that lifted after some effort. Below me a meadow, and a parking lot to the right. I could see my small red truck where I had parked it. I knew the general location and would be able to find it again. I searched about me until I found a paper bag and loaded it with pages from some old volumes that I thought no one would ever wish to see again. I threw the bag out and watched it fall. The book landed rather roughly in a bush. I closed the window and left the library. I found the text and recovered it. It was not damaged, to my great relief. I drove away. I now am a tenured professor at the University of Wallingsford, near the home of Shakespeare. I teach the odd course at Oxford. My reputation has been built on the fact that not Mary Shelley but her husband Percy wrote the famous novel with which we are all so familiar. This life suits me. I meet with students once or twice a month and they usually work at subjects related to this business of literary tradition.

Bidding on Ukeleles

Bidding on Ukuleles

      by Barry Pitch

Cukes and ukes. And dulcimers. Yep. Goddamned dulcimers. Anyways, as I was saying, Jill jumped on Jack and did for him what his name always inspired her to do and he resisted not in the least, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming of the little rise in crescendo that he achieved on his dulcimer when he picked it up after a grueling day at the car wash.

       They were in a berry patch picking cukes when she, Jill, took it upon herself to approach Jack with a proposition of an altogether diverting sort and he, Jack, not loath to try new things, gave in at once, and at once she undid him till he was in a state of readiness for a ministration of the best kind, in a berry patch, in township such and such, in Canada, in North America, in the Western Hemisphere, in the wide, wide world, in the solar system, in the universe.        

        So, Jill pulled out Jack's dulcimer for him and played on it a lively tune, as tunes go when played on a lowly dulce, correctly and expertly fingering all the stops. Lively, yes indeed, for Jill was still young and able, fifteen and quick, unlike her mother who was already in her middle forties and showing signs of the perversions the old are privy to: languishing before a television set sometimes until one or two in the morning; eating barbarous quantities of either halva or tortilla chips, depending on which she held in her hand, Coke or Sprite; ironing and folding her husband's clothes and laying them out as neatly as for a military inspection of her house, though not a guest expected, and all this with great regularity as if grand something depended on it; and never, under any circumstances, stepping out of doors unless it was to chuck a bag of old cat litter on the front step for Jill to escort to the garbage container behind the garage.

       This was their crisis: when Jill had played two or three simple ditties on that dulcimer of Jack's, a traveling musician, happening to wake up from a night spent under the influence of a jug of red biddy under an Alamour tree with such wide branches spreading that he had felt none of the rain that the night had brought, awoke from his deep dreams, and saw, near to him, peeking over the tall grasses as he was, wary of intruders, having himself watched Easy Rider in the days of yore, within the compass of his natural room, a movement of limbs and grass nearby that he neither mistook for danger, animal, nor angel but for what it was, two young people in the act of making music of great sweetness and lightness. 

         Jill was not nearly finished; she felt as if until this point she had only been fiddling with a few crescendos and decrescendoing distaffs. Her real forte, the strength she brought to any musical composition, remained so far untested in the present circumstances. When up jumped this gumbuck and helloed to the billy brook and down came the Wambaughs one two three. Partially clad, and susceptible of observation, Jill felt conspicuous as the hobo traveled quickly to their sides, and without so much as a howdy doody grabbed Jack's dulcimer from Jill, and making energetic forays on its person elicited wonderful notes of the highest sort from first the instrument and then Jack himself. Jill stood dumbfounded, staring at the dulcimer in the musician's hand. Never had she been able to bend it's bow so cleanly, nor produce arpeggios of such exquisite order and command. She sate her down and wept for her lost past. She appreciated her mother more now, in this moment of loss and confusion, than she had ever done before. Jack altogether forgot about Jill then and turned his attention from that moment onward to music and the travellers who played it best. 

        That is what he thought in those times. Later, after the death of Jill at a tender age and like Emily Dickinson, never attached, a rose without a thorn, Jack lost his youthful interest in music. One day he looked back and realized that he had not played his dulcimer in quite some time and as far as he was concerned he would sell it for a song to the highest bidder.