ONE
MILTON OF NOWHERE
Milton Ontario
Milton Ontario—not to be confused with Milton, Ontario1—sits on a bus as it grumbles across the frozen Prairie.
It’s cold like winter, but technically still fall, late 2007. In just over a year, the world’s economy will collapse, a Junior Senator from Illinois will be elected America’s first Black president, Beverly Hills Chihuahua will be the highest grossing film in theatres, and Milton will be back on this same bus going in the opposite direction.
But for now, Milton has left his parent’s basement in the middle of nowhere with all his earthly possessions, hopes, and dreams packed into an old hockey bag with a bum zipper, wrapped in half a roll of duct tape, headed for the most romantic city in North America: Montreal.
He’s left his nowhere behind for somewhere. For something. To become someone. To become, at long last, what he’s going to be when he grows up.
Or that’s his half-assed plan.
The trouble is, Milton has decided the thing he’ll be is a poet.
A poet.
Not a doctor or lawyer like his mother encouraged. Not a welder or pipefitter like his father insisted. A poet.
A poet and a ladies’ man. Like his hero, Leonard Cohen.
Never mind that he doesn’t know anyone in Montreal, has no money, no job, no prospects, and—as he sets off from the Montreal bus station on foot, dragging his 80-pound duct-tape bag, towards the Mile End apartment he’s renting sight-unseen from Craigslist with three strangers—he isn’t even sure if Leonard Cohen is still alive.
Never mind that he is not particularly talented, nor motivated, nor clever.
Never mind that Milton has never kissed a girl.
And never mind that Milton Ontario is incredibly, spectacularly, remarkably average. Plain. Boring. Humdrum. Bland. Dull. Beige down to his very soul.
Never mind that if all of humanity was charted on a single chart for averageness, Milton would be a pimple on the nipple of the distribution curve of averageness.
No, never mind that every force in the universe is pulling Milton, with all of its might, towards the mean. Towards an absolutely average life, with an exceedingly average wife, and 1.8 devastatingly average kids. Towards an over-crowded half-furnished split-level bungalow with an attached one-and-one-half car garage and seven socks lost forever under the second-hand couch. Towards fifteen years of showing up fifteen minutes late to teacher-parent meetings. Towards soccer practice and hockey practice and piano practice. Towards cable subscriptions and cell contracts and car payments and crippling credit-card debt. Towards a surprise 25th wedding anniversary at the Legion Hall with a catered ham lunch served on paper plates. Towards accepting an early retirement package from the Wheat Pool when the grain elevator he’s spent 30 years at is sold to the Chinese and closed down then blown up. Towards chronic pain. Towards chronic numbness. Towards chronic disappointment. Towards his heart giving up several years after he had.
Never mind all of that, because Milton Ontario, somehow, against all sense, doesn’t.
Never mind every force in the universe. Milton has decided to become a poet when he grows up. Whenever that might be.
. . .
Janne Alatalo
How such an outrageous idea—becoming a poet when he grows up—comes to nest in the mind of an altogether incredibly average man-child living in the middle of absolute nowhere was entirely an accident. Just like Milton.
He was just the latest accidental kid in a long line of accidental Saskatchewan dirt-farming Ontarios made in pick-up trucks and tractors and farm houses and grain bins and sod huts and wood sheds and, at least twice, in the only bathroom in the old Legion Hall during the Chaff Days Cabaret.
A long chain of extraordinarily average dirt farmers who, one after another, worked and drank themselves to unremarkable deaths, but not always in that order, beginning with Janne Alatalo.
Janne was the illiterate seventh son of a Finnish cobbler from the tiny village of Meskusvaara near the tiny town of Kuusammo not far from the Russian border.
In the 18-somethings he fled a Finnish famine to take Canada up on 160 acres of free land in the middle of the bald-headed Prairie.
Bald-headed Prairie that for some 12,000 years or so had fed the , Niitsítapi (Blackfoot), Néhinaw (Cree), and later the Métis just fine, until the king of England stole it and gave it to his cousin’s start-up—a company that traded trinkets for beaver pelts to keep the old country plutocracy in fancy hats.2
Hats!
The history of Canada—the fancy hats, the department store running half a continent, the free land—would be a hilarious Monty Python sketch were it not underwritten by 400-and-some years’ (and counting) of passive-aggressive genocide.
But, when it comes down to it, Canada isn’t really a country. Not in the communally-governed-chunk-of-earth inhabited-by-people-belonging-to-the-same-tribe sense. It is just a really big company town built around stockpiles of foreign-owned riches.
Riches, it was decided through centuries of squabbles amongst various versions of rich white Christian Europeans, that were most effectively exploited by poor white Christian refugees fleeing the endless squabbles and turnip famines in Europe rather than the millions of locals who had the galling tendency to not be white, Christian, European, nor easily bought.
The Crown, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Church, the Royal Navy, the Queen’s Own Rifles, and the North-West Mounted Police built the world’s biggest company town and gave vast chunks of it freely to illiterate cobbler’s sons with no farming/fishing/mining/logging experience because they were more than happy to break their backs digging up, chopping down, and scooping up the riches of the land and sea for Big Hats, Big Coal, Big Oil, Big Ag, Big Timber, and Big Fish.
This particular cobbler’s son didn’t speak a word of the Queen’s English, which didn’t much matter on the Prairie where it was just a stew of Slavic-Nordic Germanic dialects and whatever Finnish is, but it mattered when he landed in Montreal and the customs officer asked him his name.
After an elaborate game of yelly charades: “Janne!” “Johnny?” “Janne!” “Johnny?” “Janne!” “Johnny?” “Janne!” Janne Alatalo became Johnny Ontario and was sent by train to collect his 160 acres near what would become Bellybutton, Saskatchewan.
. . .
Bellybutton3
Saskatchewan is the distillation of geography into the purest mathematical form of utilitarian colonial averageness.
It’s what happens when history and landscape are erased, and a kind of bland Victorian modernist utopia is designed from scratch by bureaucrats who had never seen a prairie sky in its full spring fury, who had never had a whiff of native prairie grasses in late summer, who had never had their nostrils freeze shut in a cold prairie winter.
The Queen’s Own Rulers and Her Majesty’s Protractors drew a perfect rectangle in the middle of an imperfect continent. Nothing to define it but four lines drawn arbitrarily through the southern dust and northern bogs and then cut into a million perfect six-mile, then mile, then half-mile squares. Just squares within squares within one massive square. Everything in two dimensions. Everything straight, everything flat. Infinite flatness. Infinite.
Bellybutton is mostly nothing to mostly no one in the absolute middle of this absolutely infinitely flat nowhere.
It sits, most notably, near the banks of Lake Diefenbaker—a man-made lake made in the year of Canada’s glorious centenary by the damming of the South Saskatchewan and Qu’Appelle Rivers4 and named for Saskatchewan’s favourite son: the ineffectual Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker.5
Once upon a time, Bellybutton had a post office and a grain elevator and a school and a hockey rink and a gas station with a Chinese restaurant.
It used to be a proper Prairie town.
But all of that has gone away. All the young people have left. Convinced there was nothing for them at home. That something was somewhere else. In a city. In a college. In an office. In anywhere other than the cab of a tractor or at the end of a shovel.
So, they’ve gone and taken most everything with them. The post offices, the grain elevators and the schools and the hockey rinks and the gas stations with Chinese restaurants. Not much is left. Just like all the other Prairie towns.
By the time Milton was on a bus retracing the footsteps of his great-great-great-great grand Janne/Johnny back to Montreal, less than 100 people lived in Bellybutton.
It’s just a dusty two-combine-wide main street, a mostly empty grocery store with always-wilted lettuce, a motel with a tavern but no rooms, and a café with 42 items on the menu but only ever enough ingredients to make about seven.
. . .
Birth of a Ladies’ Man
Like Milton’s coming to be in Bellybutton being an accident of the most average kind, so was his coming to wanting to be a poet.
His childhood was average. He spent it fruitlessly trying to kiss girls, and endlessly horsing around with his friends—playing hockey, riding bikes, making fart noises with their armpits, calling each other gay, shooting each other in the ass with Joey Flipchuk’s BB gun, stealing beer from their dads’ fridges and puking in the woods after shot-gunning a single can of Old Style Pilsner, stealing cigarettes from their moms’ purses and puking in the woods after chain-smoking half a pack of Player’s Light Menthols, stealing porn magazines from underneath older brothers’ beds and awkwardly hiding erections in the woods while making lewd comments about the “jugs” and “cans” on Ms. September, lying at sleepovers about making out with one of the seven Ashleys from their class in those same woods.
He was a little shit, just like all the other little shits. And well on his way to being an average, everyday, normal shit.
Milton was well on his way to the same sameness as everyone else. Or he would have been, were it not for a conspiracy of ninth-grade hormones, the Saskatchewan Board of Education pension policy, the inventory turnover of the seven rental videos at Roy’s Gas & Grocery, his father’s refusal to throw anything away, his inability to skate backwards, and the incessant questions about what he was going to be when he grew up he’d been getting since before he could even talk, that gave him the foolish notion he had a say in the matter.
Had any of those things been different, even slightly, everything would have been different.
Had he started puberty a few months earlier like most of his friends; had Mrs. Jankowski not been eligible for her full pension for one more year; had something with more explosions than Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet been available at Roy’s for Ashley B.’s 14th birthday party; had he made the Central Butte Bantam “A” Rep team and been at a tournament in Biggar the night of the party…
Had anything been even a little different, everything would have been a lot different.
But it wasn’t.
Milton sat next to Ashley D. at Ashley B.’s 14th birthday party as Claire Danes drank the poison.
As Juliet took her last breath, Milton drank in the smell of Ashley D.’s intoxicating cherry lip gloss, falling hopelessly in love with her.
The next morning, Todd Strubey, a 22-year-old from Vancouver who went to university in Montreal, was hired to replace Mrs. Jankowski as the English, Social Studies, and Shop teacher at Bellybutton Regional.
Mr. Strubey, who insisted his students called him Todd, was the first man Milton had ever seen wear a full beard; he owned the only Volvo in all of Saskatchewan, which he’d smoke weed in after school every day in the parking lot; and in the poetry unit of grade nine English, instead of the government-mandated curriculum of boring dead old white guys, he surreptitiously taught the poems and semi-lewd love songs of Leonard Cohen.
“The man is a god,” he’d say as he drilled the lascivious themes of “Death of a Ladies Man” into impressionable, hormone-addled minds.
Milton didn’t really understand any of it, but between the coolness of Todd and that Leonard Cohen seemed to be speaking only to Milton, coaching him through the heartache of his unrequited, burning love for Ashley D., Milton was hooked.
Todd, being cool like that, lent Milton a bunch of old Leonard Cohen records.
Milton ran home and dug through the shed for his dad’s old record player. He found it buried under rat-eaten boxes of his ancient baby clothes and his grandmother’s 44-pound, 98-year-old Underwood No. 3 typewriter.
He hauled both giant machines under his bed and began clackity-clacking his innermost feelings just like Leonard Cohen, while listening to I’m Your Man for hours, trying to decipher what “I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat,” meant, until his dad would smash on the wall and tell him, in not so many words, to “stop feeling things.”
Death of a Ladies’ Man
Milton played out his pubescence through awful,terrible, sappy lovesick poems with barely visible ks, and fs, and os that hit too hard and left tiny holes in the paper.
He would nurture one look from Ashley D. at lunch into pages and pages of lovesick agony. Horrid poems about how impossible love was. Things that started with lines like:
love is impossible!
And ran several pages long full of poorly rhyming similes emphasizing this point:
like a fun time at the hospital
like a double backflip off a combine
like going back in time
like a saxophone improving a rock song
like mr calvin not droning on
And ending, pages later, with lines like:
alas send my heart to the hospital
love is impossible
These first poems Milton wrote, despite his later insistence that he might become a professional poet—so much as there are “professional” poets—were probably his best, or at least his most honest.
He never did work up the courage to ask Ashley D. out. The closest he came was writing her a letter. A love letter. The greatest love letter ever written. The love letter to end all love letters:
my dearest ashley
your cheeks are like a fawns on a spring morn sparkling like mildew youre heart my love is delicate like a flower but thunders like a thousand galloping lionesses returning from the hunt filled with the blood of your pray and its my heart my love that is your prey for i am at your mercy i prey daily for your look your laugh my heavens your touch i pray to be your prey forevermore would you allow it pray tell to be so twould you i twould be yours and yours alone you feasting on my heart me in revelry alas pray tell shallt be so so shallt be that i be yours and you i prey come to me
will you go out with me
circle yes or no
yes
your pray
milton ontario
He carried the letter around in his backpack for a year and a half before Ashley D. showed up for homeroom wearing Joey Flipchuk’s Sk8 or Di6 sweatshirt.
Milton vowed revenge.
. . .
Revenge of a Ladies’ Man
Each year, the twelfth-grade class would take an overnight trip to the John G. Diefenbaker Museum and Gas Station in Prince Albert (a good four hours into the northern Saskatchewan wilderness).
The timing of Milton’s twelth-grade trip coincided with a particularly vicious bedbug outbreak in his older brother’s room. So, as any truly great revenge plot begins, Milton, with tweezers and a magnifying glass, snuck into his brother’s room and collected dozens of barely seeable, particularly vicious bedbugs.
He carried them in a jar with him all the way to Prince Albert where, in the middle of the night, he emptied the jar into Joey’s bunk.
These particularly vicious bedbugs, though, weren’t actually bedbugs at all.
Between Milton’s brother’s general sloth, filth, and promiscuity, and their dog being the same, these were some kind of super bugs created by the extensive cross- and inter-breeding of bedbugs, fleas, crabs, and fruit flies, all infected with a particularly vicious strain of the herpes simplex virus.
However, rather than causing immediate death like one would suspect, or even minor irritation as Milton had hoped, this super insect caused sudden-onset penile hypertrophy, or gigantism of the penis—a condition that enlarged Joey’s penis to 10 times the average size.
It was a big deal at the time, the sudden-onset penile hypertrophy. Joey was hospitalized and no one knew why. Milton was worried his revenge plot had worked a little too well and he’d killed Joey. But word soon spread around school that Joey got “bitten by a radioactive spider on the dick” and that the swelling was immense, “like a third leg.”
The front page of The Herald ran a picture of Joey from his hospital bed, giving the thumbs up, the shape of his new third leg clearly visible under the blankets, Ashley D. in his Sk8 or Di sweatshirt, out of focus at his bedside. The headline read: “Local Boy’s Bits Bitten by Radioactive Arachnid.”
Joey got a hero’s welcome when he returned to school. Everyone assembled in the gym, with their “Welcome Back Joey” banners, and cheered wildly when he came in wearing his team jacket and a special giant penis brace, making a humping motion as he walked.
Principal Flipchuk, Joey’s uncle, gave a teary speech about bad things happening to good people and finding a silver lining in even the darkest clouds.
“Bad things sometimes happen to good people. It’s important, though, to always look for silver linings in even the darkest clouds. Take young Joey here. He’s been stricken by a tragic insect bite on his…ahem…tallywhacker, and he could have chosen to shrivel and die, but no. He is here. He is back. Bigger and better than ever!”
Mrs. Marichinko’s third-grade class sang “How Great Thou Art” at the tops of their lungs. Everyone but Milton was moved to tears.
“He’s been through so much!” they said.
“That poor boy!” they said.
“Look at the size of that thing,” they said.
“Like one of Berta Federko’s overgrown zucchinis,” they said.
Nine beers deep into an unsanctioned bush party that Friday, Joey debuted his new party trick: “The Big Reveal.” Someone would dare him to “whip that thing out” and he’d unspool “that thing” from his pants like a garden hose and chase people around with it, cracking it like Indiana Jones’s whip.
. . .
Who by Fire
Milton was humiliated and heartbroken. As an attempt to heal he decided to burn the love letter and all the poems, the endless pages of poems.
He made a thing of it.
About to leave for college in Moose Jaw, he went to the edge of a cliff overlooking the lake and set a small fire, feeding it pages of:
my heart is a dessert
you walk through like a lizard
but you dont drink
and that stinks
But the trouble with rituals in the time of Friends, Furbies, and Y2K was that everything felt phony.
Hoping to be cleansed, or to be shown the great secrets of the universe—or to feel whatever Abraham must have felt as he tried lighting the match under his only son—Milton, a late-onset pubescent 17-year-old feeding unsent love letters and poorly-written poems into a fire that took him and his mis-remembered Boy Scout training far too long to start, felt nothing. Then he felt angry because he felt nothing. Then he felt silly for feeling anything at all. Then he felt panicked as the fire spread to the nearby prairie grasses, dry with drought. Then he felt embarrassed when his courtroom picture was later splashed across the front page of The Herald with the headline “Local Boy’s Broken Heart Starts Bellybutton Blaze.”
He was still a minor, so he avoided getting a criminal record. But, for starting and stoking with heartbreak a fire that burned 12,000 acres of John Angelstad’s nearly ready soy beans and snap peas, Judge Marshall Johnson sentenced Milton to 100 hours of community service (i.e., hand cleaning each of John Angelstad’s 37 giant grain bins), and ordered Milton to pay John Angelstad’s crop-insurance deductible and legal fees. Judge Johnson, a renowned hard-ass, also gave Milton a stern dressing down in the courtroom.
“You’re soft, son. Soft like baby shit.”