Today’s the day I go to Westboro Beach with Connie Pan. I’m really only sort of with Connie Pan, because there’s going to be about twenty other people going too. Connie Pan has a part-time job organizing E.S.L. kids from Ottawa Tech to do stuff in the summer. E.S.L. stands for English as a second language. It’s a job but she doesn’t get paid. She dreams up things to do for the new kids from other countries and then she tries to get kids from Canada to go too. Last week she took them all bowling. The week before they went to the War Museum. Today she’s taking them to Westboro Beach.
The hard part about her job is getting the Canadian kids to go, too.
The time she took them up to Champlain’s Statue, I was the only Canadian kid there.
Dink the Thinker says that the only reason I go is to be around where Connie Pan is.
As usual, Dink the Thinker is right.
Mr. Fryday will relieve me early today because it’s Sunday, and Chinatown is really busy on Sunday, and Mr. Fryday likes to work in his wagon and say hello to everybody and give free orders of chips to his buddies, especially the people who own the shops near where he always parks our wagon.
I’m in a pretty good mood, thinking about going to Westboro Beach, meeting Connie Pan there, having a few cool swims, helping them get organized to play E.S.L. volleyball, without a net, on the sand there.
But, all of a sudden, I’m not in a pretty good mood anymore because here comes Dumper Stubbs, double parking his filthy truck with the big steel bumper beside my nice clean wagon. Dumper’s going to empty my trash can, and change my grease. He empties the trash every day. He changes the grease every Sunday.
My wagon has two fryers. One of the fryers is for blanching the chips, the other is for cooking. Mr. Fryday changes the grease once a week in all of his wagons. That’s one of the reasons his chips are so good. The other reason is that he doesn’t use new potatoes. He uses old potatoes. New potatoes won’t get brown in the cooking fryer for some reason. Then, the customers look at them as if there’s something wrong with them, they’re too white, then they make a face and probably never come back.
Dumper picks up the trash. He carries the can so that the people who are out this Sunday all dressed up have to dodge and jump out of the way. But wait! Dumper’s nostrils are opening and shutting. There’s something on the sidewalk! He drops the trash can right where everybody’s walking and bangs into a lady who is wearing a veil and carrying a lot of parcels. Dumper pounces on something and picks it up off the sidewalk. It’s a cent! One cent! Dumper found a cent! Dumper nearly knocked over a bunch of innocent people but he got the cent before they did! Nice going Dumper!
Dumper dumps the trash into the back of his truck. Now he’s going to change my grease. Mr. Fryday uses vegetable oil. The vegetable oil is healthier than lard. Mr. Fryday always leaves an empty vegetable oil can near the window so his customers can see it. On the side of the can it says “Cholesterol Free.”
Dumper comes around with a large empty grease can and pushes past some customers with it and climbs into the wagon. Some of the customers leave, because Dumper is so ugly. He squats down to hook up the hose to the spigot at the bottom of the blancher. The oil in the blancher is 225 degrees Fahrenheit. Dumper doesn’t even use gloves to touch the pipe which is very hot. Dumper doesn’t seem to have any feelings. His big rear end takes up most of the room in the wagon.
His big, low ears are filthy.
When the blancher is empty, he takes the pail of used grease and carries it out to his truck. He hoists up the can and dumps it into his big grease barrel in the back of his truck. Grease slops onto the street.
Then he comes back to empty the cooker which is full of week-old grease at 340 degrees Fahrenheit. While he’s waiting for it to drain, guess what he does? He spits on my clean floor!
“Hey, Dumper, watch it,” I say. “I spent hours this morning scrubbing this floor.” Dumper looks at me with his little, close-together eyes. There’s not much room in the chipwagon and his breath is going to knock me over.
“What do ya expect me to do? Swallow it?” says Dumper, pointing at the big gob sticking on the floor. Then he lets out a big laugh. What a sense of humor!
“And look, you’re spilling grease all over the place!” I tell him.
“So?” says Dumper, taking off the dripping hose and waving it around and hoisting the slopping grease can out to his truck.
Most of the people in Chinatown are crossing Somerset Street to the other side. They don’t even want to be on the same block as Dumper. There’s grease on his shoes, on his pants, on his shirt. There’s grease on the floor of the wagon, on the windows, across the counter, on the step, on the sidewalk, on the front of the wagon, on the road, and running down the side of the truck. The grease barrel in the back of the truck is almost full. You can tell it’s almost full because when he dumps the can, a geyser of grease reaches up out of the barrel and then flops like a wet bedsheet onto Somerset Street.
“Dumper!” I shout, “I’m going to suggest to Mr. Fryday that you’re bad for business and that you’re a filthy pig!” My mouth again.
“You watch your mouth, sonny!” says Dumper Stubbs, pulling up his pants even higher than they are, “that mouth of yours is goin’ to sink you in too deep one of these days!”
Dumper gives me my three new cans of vegetable oil, gets in his truck and pulls away. The grease barrel in the back is slopping grease all over the place. The smoke from his exhaust pipe is blue. His muffler sounds like twenty chain saws.
Dumper is an environmental disaster.
I put on my gloves and remove the hose and close the hot spigots at the bottom of my two fryers. I carefully pour one and a half cans of vegetable oil in each fryer. Then I turn both fryers back on and set the temperatures.
I figure that each fryer in my wagon holds about a kitchen sinkful of cooking grease. Dumper picks up two kitchen sinkfuls of grease from my wagon each week. Mr. Fryday runs ten chipwagons in Ottawa. Each wagon has at least two fryers. In fact, a couple of the bigger wagons have three fryers. And Mr. Fryday is thinking of buying another wagon to add to his collection. I think he said it would be called “Bach’s” chips. So, Dumper Stubbs picks up at least more than twenty kitchen sinkfuls of cooking grease a week on his rounds. It fills a huge barrel.
That’s a lot of used grease!
I get out my rags and my all-purpose cleaner squirt bottle and clean the grease off the windows and the counter that Dumper sprayed around. Then I get out my squeeze mop and some more cleaning fluid and clean up the floor and the cooker and clean off the bottoms of my shoes.
The customers are starting to come back and I put on Beethoven’s First Symphony, the Third Movement, to get Dumper out of my brain.
Soon after things are back to normal and the wagon is sparkling clean again and the music is right and the Sunday in Chinatown is just right and the customers are back to normal, along comes Mr. Fryday and, as usual, he’s in a pretty good mood. He’s been telling me lately about a song he’s been working on to be used on TV and on the radio to advertise his chipwagons. The song is all about Mr. Fryday and how everyday is “Fryday” (get it?) in the chipwagon business. Mr. Fryday is all excited about it. I can tell by the way he’s humming parts of it and trying to make it fit with Beethoven’s First Symphony, Third Movement. And I know that he wants me to ask him how the song is going, and when is it going to be on TV and on the radio and all that stuff.
“It’s going fine,” says Mr. Fryday, after I ask him how it’s going.
“Do you want to hear some verses I just wrote?” he asks. I’m just about to say, yes, I would like to hear the verse he just wrote, when he tears right into it, drumming the rhythm for it with his fat fingers on the counter:
Fryday is my day
Every day’s a fry day
When you do it my way
It’s a peachy pie day!
Not to reason why day
The limit is the sky day
A come-over-and-say-hi! day
Fryday is my day
It’s a do-or-die day
So all you gotta do is buy
Some French Fries
All you gotta do is...
What I’m tellin’ you is...
Come and have a REAL
FRENCH
FRY!
Drumming away with his fat fingers on the counter, his rings tapping and flashing in the Somerset Street sunlight in Chinatown.
Trying to make his song fit with Beethoven’s First Symphony, Third Movement.
Mr. Fryday will work the rest of today in the wagon until around five or six o’clock, it depends on the customers, and then he’ll close up the wagon, turn off the fryers, cover them, and drive the wagon very carefully home to his place and park it in his yard for the night. The other nine wagons are run by nine other men who work for Mr. Fryday. At night, each man drives his wagon home and parks it in his yard or in his laneway until the next day.
Will Mr. Fryday, while he’s driving home, tap the steering wheel with the rings on his fingers, practicing his potato chip song that he’s so proud of?
Maybe. Maybe he will.
And in a couple of years, when I get my license, maybe I’ll be driving the wagon home to my place. Maybe.
I slip out of the wagon and say goodbye to Mr. Fryday. He doesn’t answer. Beethoven’s First Symphony is on very loud and I can’t see if the noodles are jumping and shaking on the shelves of the Mekong Grocery.
And now the customers are all crowded around Mr. Fryday and now the chips are selling like hot cakes.
I run home to where I live at 179 Rochester Street, Apt. D.
My mom, Ellen O’Reilly Sweetgrass, is part Irish and part a whole lot of other things. She’s the Multicultural Counselor at the Community Resource Center. She has a whole lot of education and is very smart. She’s also funny.
Or, at least, she used to be, before my father died. She is also very determined.
Or, at least, she used to be before my father died. One time she wanted to move our fold-out couch that unfolds into a bed to the other room so instead of waiting for my father and me to get home to help her she did it herself. The couch is really a bed and is full of metal and weighs at least a ton. When we got home we couldn’t believe she moved it by herself.
“Remember how I always say I’m part Irish and part a whole lot of other things?” she explained that day. “Well, I forgot to mention it but I am, among other things, part dung beetle!”
My father and I laughed for about a half an hour. We all knew what dung beetles were. We used to watch them when we went hiking. A dung beetle can carry a lump of doo about ten times the size of itself. That’s all the dung beetle seems to do. Carry lumps of doo doo around the size of houses.
My mother is thin and very strong. She is also very beautiful. She could be a model but she says she’s a bit too short.
And she can hold you with her eyes.
Brown eyes with green flecks.
Specially when she tilts her head to one side.
Or, at least she used to, before my father died.
Right now, she’s not at home.
She’s probably across the street and down a bit, at the Village Inn. She likes it over there because people over there knew my dad, and she feels good when they say his name or even if they don’t.
They all know what a good trombone player he was. They all love how he played on the record, “Hanging Gardens.” Over at the Village Inn, they have that record in the old-fashioned juke box. My mom drinks rye and ginger ale over there.
My mom feels awful. Ever since my father died. She never laughs anymore. She sits over there in the Village Inn at the same table. There’s always that empty seat beside her. She sits over there beside the empty chair, where my father’s ghost sits. He said some mean things to her before he died. The doctor said he didn’t know what he was saying, because of the cancer in his brain.
She sits beside his ghost over there every day.
Is she waiting for the ghost to say he’s sorry?
And she never looks at me anymore the way she used to. With her eyes holding you. And her head tilted. And the little smile.
I put on my bathing suit under my pants, race down the crooked back steps and take out my bike from the old shed.
I sail down Somerset Street hill on my bike to Corso Italia (Preston Street). I swing right on Preston, ride hard to Scott Street, take a fast left on Scott to Parkdale, cut right on Parkdale through Tunney’s Pasture and all the government buildings to the Ottawa River Parkway. I take the grass instead of the ramp and head west on the Parkway to Kitchissippi Lookout.
I vault off my bike at the top of the sandy bank near the change houses. Now I can see Connie Pan getting together her group on Westboro Beach.
It’s a group of people of many sizes and colors and shapes.
And the beach is crowded with beach freaks.