FIVE
POTLUCK
Pain aux courgettes
“Could you pass the zucchini loaf? Thanks. The whole thing is just a flimsy representation of Owly’s dick. The phallicness of it is overwhelming, but the whole thing is just so flaccid. You know? How’s the soup?”
“The soup? It’s, uh. It’s great.”
It wasn’t. Milton lied. It tasted like the contents of a sink trap cooked in a broth of trash-can water. It was vegan.
“And I mean, sure it’s a giant paper-mâché penis on the back of a truck, but, like, it totally ignores the whole fact the military-industrial complex is so 1982. It’s been replaced by the media-postindustrial complex, which is far more complex, not to mention narcissistic, than intercontinental ballistic missiles. It’s just a bad Cold War dick joke that nobody gets. Were you even born yet when the wall came down?”
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“The wall?”
Milton had no idea what the hell they were talking about. He was just a zucchini loaf intermediary nod-along between the two of them—a guy dressed not unlike Where’s Waldo, and a girl with the most arresting, deep brown eyes he’d ever seen.
“Yeah, you know. The Wall.”
“Oh, that Wall. Yeah, I was like seven.”
“So, like, you don’t even remember.”
“Yeah. I remember. I was seven.”
“But to make such an ordeal of it! Wren’s been filming the whole thing. He’s got Pochard and Booby down there every day, for hours, shooting the whole thing on film.”
“On film? Fuck off!”
“No, it’s true. 35mm. He says he’s going to make a doc out of it. I laughed in his face. In. His. Face. I told him no one wants to watch some asshole making paper-mâché dicks in their bathtub. But apparently he’s cutting it now and is going to try and take it to Telluride.”
Milton thought it didn’t sound so bad.
“Ha, so he can fuck the girl from Degrassi again? Good luck.”
“Could you pass the zucchini loaf?”
They were sitting on the cold cement floor of a building in the heart of St. Henri, an old working-class neighbourhood that was being invaded by freegan, anarchist, Anglophones studying Russian at Concordia, and young marketing executives in their 16-foot ceilinged, exposed-brick warehouses-turned-condos who found the whole Plateau thing so last year.
This particular squatters’ co-op used to be one of the biggest furriers in Canada. The blood of thousands of critters was spilled on the cold cement floor that Milton and a couple dozen of his new closest friends all sat on sipping hot garbage vegan soup from chipped mugs that said things like “I hate Mondays” and “World’s Best Dad” on them.
Milton was sandwiched between two Ontarians. They had a mutual friend who knew someone from Degrassi.
“The original?”
“No, the shitty remake.”
“Really? Bullshit, no way.”
“That’s what he was telling everyone when he got back.”
“Do you like the soup?”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s good.”
It still wasn’t.
“Uh, what kind is it? I am getting some, um, is that turnip?”
“It’s rutabaga and kale in a parsnip broth. Mag found a twenty-kilo sack of rutabaga in Chinatown.”
“That’s a lot of rutabaga. Must be cheap to get them in bags that size.”
They both laughed at Milton. Partly in a semi-offensive patronizing way, and partly in a fully offensive “what a stupid asshole” way.
“No, she found them…”
“…”
“…Like dumpstered them.”
Milton swallowed a mouthful of garbage soup hard.
“Dumpstered?”
He really wished he could take that question mark back.
“Could you pass the zucchini loaf? Thanks.”
“Did you see the film he took to Telluride though? It was hideous!”
“No. But I heard it was a real bag of shit. Who scored it?”
“He did. Him and the girl from Degrassi.”
Milton laughed along as hard as he could, searching his memory of anyone from any of the Degrassis.
He had nothing. He looked around for Ava or Ruddy or even Noddy, any familiar face. Ruddy and Ava were probably off smoking someone else’s pot, and Noddy was sitting in one of two chairs in the room, talking to a girl sitting on the floor next to him. He was yelling something about the “badassity of AC/DC.”
Oiseaux sales
“What did you say your name was?”
Milton’s freegan gastronomic faux pas (plural) hadn’t been enough to scare the girl with the eyes off completely. She was cute, albeit so far out of his league it wasn’t even the same sport.
“Uhm. Milton.”
“Have we met before?”
“No. I just moved here. To… Uh… to write poetry.”
Shit.
“I mean. I do write poetry. Well I do. Sometimes.”
“When did you move here?”
“Yesterday.”
“Wow, brand new!”
“Where’d you move from?”
“Saskatchewan.”
“Oh no way. Cool.”
“Where are you from?”
“The GTA.”
“Is that here?”
“No. The GTA. The Greater Toronto Area.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I’m from Newmarket.”
“Sorry, what was your name. I didn’t catch it.”
“I didn’t say it. It’s Robin.”
“Like the hood?”
“I guess.” She gave him a look. “What kind of poetry?”
“Poetry?”
“What kind of poetry do you write?”
“Oh, you know. Poetry.”
“What about?”
“Life and stuff.”
Life and stuff, what a damned fool.
“Okay. What about life?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Like life. You know?”
“Do you have any with you?”
He did. A pocket full. Always.
“No. Sadly.”
“What was the last one you wrote?”
It was about paper-mâché penises.
“Uhm, I think it was about mortality.”
“Cool. Who are your poetic heroes?”
Don’t say Leonard Cohen.
“Yeats, Keats, Frost, Whitman, you know…”
“Milton?”
“Oh yeah, he’s good. Leonard Cohen.”
Shit.
Robin smirked.
“Leonard Cohen, eh?”
“Yeah, ‘Anthem’ is probably the great Canadian poem.”
“Ah, right, with the cracks and everything. Classic.”
“And what do you do?”
That makes you so damned special.
“I make films.”
“Any with the girl from Degrassi?”
“No, not those kinds of films.”
Without even the slightest hint of a guffaw.
Milton began to sweat even more than he already was. Maybe she thought he thought she made those kinds of films. There was a lot of that in Montreal—aspiring part-time filmmakers/part-time baristas who made porn because it paid. Maybe she thought Milton was a perv.
“What kind of movies? Porn?”
“Documentary.”
Straight-faced.
Milton laughed at his own bad joke hoping to make it seem like he was doing this on purpose and maybe peer-pressure her into a tension-breaking pity laugh. She wasn’t having any of it.
“Anything I might have seen?”
He caught a glance of Noddy humping his chair across the room, and no one was laughing at him much either.
“Dirty Birds?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dirty Birds, it was a short I made that came out last year about the landfill gulls of Calcutta.”
“Oh, cool. I haven’t seen it. So, you’ve been to Calcutta then?”
“Yeah, I lived there for three years while we were working on the film.”
“Wow. Three years! How long is this movie?”
“It’s about seven minutes.”
“Oh… Did you like it?”
“The film?”
“Uh. No, Calcutta?”
“Oh, yeah. It was pretty harsh. Poverty on a level most Westerners just can’t comprehend.”
“Sort of like St. Henri, eh? Haha.”
Stone-faced.
Thankfully the chair Noddy had been humping, which wasn’t much of a chair to begin with, buckled and shattered into splinters underneath him. The entire room of floor-sitting garbage-sippers went silent. Noddy burst out laughing. Milton started to laugh and looked at Robin. Nothing. He stopped and shook his head disapprovingly.
Robin talked about Dirty Birds like Milton’s uncle talked about his bowel movements: matter-of-factly and to no one in particular. He was fascinated. This must be how artists, real actual artists, talk.
She’d won some award for it, something French that Milton never heard of, something about eggs.
“It’s all an elaborate allegory.”
“For the poor?”
“No. That’s what everyone always thinks, but I want to challenge the conventional correlation between gulls and the poor and garbage and landfillscape; I want to give these birds agency. Everyone is too hung up on the poor.”
“Too hung up?”
“Yeah, especially in Calcutta where the poverty is so blatant. So in your face.”
“In your face?”
“The West just fetishizes it. It’s perverse.”
“Perverse?”
“I wanted to challenge that. No one is talking about the birds of Calcutta—the gulls. They are so beautiful, and so miserable, yet so utterly overlooked. It’ll break your heart.”
“Overlooked?”
“Everyone is searching for some obvious connection between the filthy poor and these filthy birds, but it’s much more complex and nuanced than that. These beautiful birds are creatures of flight, free, unbound. But, like the people they share the landfillscape with, they are bound by gravity, desire, yearning, and appetites. They’re descendant from completely different prehistoric contexts, yet they have to muck about, fucking, fighting, living, dying in the same garbage pile as man.”
“You mean they’re like dinosaurs?”
She rolled her eyes hard and long, searching the room for someone interesting to talk to, stopping on Noddy—his beer t-shirt off, showing a crowd of uninterested anarchists his Newfoundland gang tattoos: WHITEFISH in Olde English letters across his chest, a knife through the letters, tattoo blood running down his beer gut and into the top of his cargo shorts.
“Where can I see it? Is it online anywhere?”
“No, not really. I’m talking to the BBC who may include it as part of a new series they’re doing.”
“Oh, wow! That’s great!”
“They are such a bunch of assholes though. They treat filmmakers like trash.”
“Like dirty birds?”
Nothing. She’d moved on to ignoring his jokes altogether.
“I spent three years living in a landfill in Calcutta, and they want my film for nothing! I told them to go to hell.”
“Well you don’t smell like it!”
“What?”
That caught her attention.
“Like you’ve been living in a dump for three years.”
“Oh.”
Still nothing.
“Anyway, I’d really like to see your Dirty Bird. Sometime maybe you could show it to me?”
“Excuse me?”
“Uh… Your film.”
Milton wanted to drown himself in his “Teacher of the Year” mug of garbage borscht.
“Hah! Yeah, maybe.”
Now she laughs.
“Could you pass the zucchini loaf? Thanks.”
. . .
Cool Ranch
Their awkward conversation eased awkwardly into awkward silence as Milton slurped the last of his trash bisque and Robin sopped up the dregs of hers with the stale zucchini loaf that someone had made with gluten-free rice flour they’d found in a dumpster in Westmount—where the good scores are. The flour had obviously turned. If flour could do that.
“What’d you bring?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, what’d you bring for the potluck?”
“Oh. Uhm…”
Milton searched the dimness of the room for a good lie. He was stuck between admitting to bringing Cool Ranch Doritos or admitting to bringing Noddy. Both were horrible mistakes. Both were the worst social missteps he could have made, save for telling some brilliant filmmaker girl with the most arresting deep-brown eyes that he wanted to see her dirty bird. He contemplated ripping off his pants and doing the helicopter across the room to distract Robin from his severe social ineptitude. He was pretty sure that wouldn’t be nearly as bad as having brought Doritos and Noddy.
“I brought some, uh, chips. I was busy. I didn’t have time to, uh, make anything, and the vegan bakery by me was closed, and I was really rushed, and I didn’t know it was a potluck until it was too late.”
“Oh, those plantain chips? Those are really good.”
“They are!”
Noddy wasn’t quite helicoptering around the room, but he was lying on his back with his legs folded as close to behind his head as he could manage, with a lit lighter inches from his ass, his face all screwed up red from extreme concentration.
POOF!
Milton buried his head in his hands. Noddy burst out in obnoxious laughter, drowning out the mini drum/didgeridoo circle that had formed in the corner. He hollered something about “sharting” and Milton wanted to die.
“Who brought that asshole?”
“Do you know him?”
“Him? No.”
“Could you pass the zucchini loaf? Thanks.”
Milton had given up any hope of ever impressing Robin. He had given up any hope of even making her laugh, even a little bit, even by accident, at one of his terrible jokes. He was so relieved when Where’s Waldo, who’d drifted off mid-Dirty Birds, returned and waved a joint over Robin like a magic wand and invited her outside. She leapt up after him, leaving two empty person-sized spaces on either side of Milton in an otherwise crowded room.
To Milton’s right, a group was engrossed in conversation about something post-colonial, and to his left, a group was chatting about farming—something he actually knew something about.
He scootched over to try and join the farm circle. His entrance, like his night, was awkward and ill-timed and resulted in his being more of a lurking eavesdropper than a participant. Which was fine, the conversation wasn’t actually about farming.
Two of the freegans had heard that land in Belize or Bolivia or Bulgaria was dirt cheap, so they’d saved up some money—about $1500 it turned out, though it wasn’t entirely clear how they may have gotten it—and were going to ride their bikes south until they found some affordable farm land, upon which they would grow pot—all for their own use, of course.
Milton gave up on the farmers and picked his asleep legs and ass up off the bloodstained cement floor and went looking for his Doritos.
In the kitchen, a girl with just one long dreadlock was standing on a bench holding Milton’s Doritos and screaming something about “Monsanto and factory farms are mass producing genetically modified corn that doesn’t even resemble food anymore, but is just a chemical cocktail designed to cause learning disabilities and lower brain function in children! What monster brought this mind-control poison into this home? Who!?”
Noddy walked in with his arm around a girl.
“Cool Ranch! Deadly, b’ys!”
He grabbed the bag of Doritos out of Dread Lock’s hand, opened it, and started stuffing handfuls of chips in his face. Rather than sticking around to witness a murder, Milton decided to do a lap around the large open kill floor.
Past the anarchist pot farmers, past the anarchist post-colonial agitators, past the anarchist digeridoo drum circle, past the pile of sleeping bags and foam mats that the 12 people who lived here all slept on, on the bloodstained floor. There was nothing much for him in any of these groups so he followed a smattering of people spilling out into a stairwell.
He made his way past Ava and Ruddy and three or four others sitting on the steps smoking— “It doesn’t matter if it’s a bagel or rye or toxic sludge Wonder Bread, it’s still not toast!”—and out into the street.
. . .
La graine fusée
Robin and Where’s Waldo were leaning against the graffitied brick façade of the vermin abattoir, them and four others shivering and smoking and drinking homebrew brandy out of the same mugs that previously held their garbage soup.
They were still arguing loudly, drunkenly, highly about art. They yelled and shook burning joints in one another’s faces, and then passed the joint to their opponent, who would take a puff and shake it right back at them.
Milton couldn’t be sure, because he wasn’t sure what a simulacrum was or what the “male appropriation of the female gaze manifest in representations of phallic maleness, you idiot” truly meant, but it sounded like a continuation of the debate about the giant paper-mâché penis that their friend Owly had made and was driving around town in the back of a military truck like an intercontinental ballistic dick missile.
“Nah, Rob, Owly’s laying bare the notion of the dick as the organizing meta-narrative of modernity. The thing, his dick truck, isn’t just about the obvious shit like the Cold War and all that. He’s also driving around through all the suburbs, playing his corny ice-cream truck music, saying to everyone, ‘Look at it, look! This is your god! Isn’t it stupid!’ It’s an idol, Rob, a monument to the inherent absurdity of our dick-centric hegemony.”
Milton understood about every fifth word of that.
“Give me a break! He’s saying ‘Look at my dick, isn’t it big, aren’t I clever?’ It’s such a tired trope, man. As if every building ever built, every car ever made, every anything ever done wasn’t some guy waving his dick at the world saying ‘Behold!’”
“I’ve never—”
Milton felt invisible, but as soon as he opened his mouth, everyone who was arguing about something else stopped to see how he was going to go about fitting both his feet in his otherwise normal-sized mouth.
“—seen this dick truck.”
He was going to say he’d never waved his dick at anyone, but saved it at the last second. Her heart swelled with pride.
“Well, it’s your lucky day.”
On cue, ice-cream truck music became audible and an ancient looking military truck carrying a giant penis rumbled into view.
“Ho-leeee Christ! Look at the size of that cock!”
Noddy had found his way outside.
“Look at ’er, Milty, b’y, look! Ain’t she a beaut!”
The truck was being driven by one of Pochard or Booby, while Wren, the filmmaker, sat in the passenger seat. In the back the other one of Booby or Pochard pointed a giant film camera at the artist, Owly, who was riding the dick missile Dr. Strangelove-style, cowboy hat and all.
The truck, a 1950s military transport truck of some kind, was deafeningly loud and spewed choking black diesel smoke over the smokers gathered on the sidewalk outside of the furrier. It jerked to a screeching, squealing halt and Owly slapped a large button on the shaft of the giant penis and it ejaculated confetti and glitter.
“Greetings, cock-watchers!”
Owly jumped down and started hugging and high-fiving everyone on the sidewalk. The film crew followed him with the camera and boom mic.
He gave Milton a big hug and told him he loved him. Milton, instinctively, said “I love you too.”
Noddy was even more effusive. He picked Owly up with a giant bear hug.
“Is that your dick, man? It’s fuckin’ deadly, b’y. Wicked! Let me buy you a beer.”
Noddy dragged Owly into the building and up the stairs to his dwindling stockpile of warm Coors Light and Cool Ranch Doritos. The film crew followed behind.
In the shadow of the massive dick missile Milton turned to Robin.
“So that’s it then?”
“That’s it.”
. . .
Chanter la pomme
For the rest of the night Milton followed Robin around like a lost puppy and lurked on the edge of all of her conversations—almost always arguments about art, almost always arguments about Owly’s dick art, almost always arguments with Where’s Waldo and, now that he was there, Owly.
Every so often the arguments would get political and she’d yell in violent agreement with the other freegan anarchists about what a dick Cheney is and what a buffoon Bush is.
In between mugs of homebrew dumpster brandy or on smoke breaks, Milton would try to make conversation.
“Where did you grow up?” “What did you study?” “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
He managed to piece together that Robin grew up in Newmarket but left home at 16 to study Romance Poetry at Oxford. It didn’t take long for her to figure out that Oxford was “the most patriarchal petri dish of penis envy you’ve ever seen.”
“If you think bozo here driving his dick around town on the back of a truck is bad, you should sit through a seminar on Byron.”
So she dropped out midway through her second year and moved to Calcutta to make Dirty Birds, because “dump gulls and Calcuttan slums are matriarchies.”
Now she was back in Montreal for a few months working on getting her next film underway. In the meantime, she cooked in a freegan food co-op soup café in the Plateau and went to parties to argue with “dicks about dicks, mostly.”
She was fascinating. Milton had never met anyone quite like her. She was loud and smart and used words in drunken arguments that were as long as his arm. He was already in love when she, well into the night, sitting next to him in the dark corner of the slaughter floor-squatter dorm, asked: “So, Milhouse the poet, what are you working on now?”
He wasn’t sure if she didn’t know his name, or had already given him a pet name, but he didn’t correct her, he just reveled in the fact that she, the first person in his entire life, believed him when he said he was a poet.
“Poems.”
“Yeah, about what?”
There was a pocket-sized notebook damp with ass sweat in Milton’s back pocket that was full of scribbled bits of an epic poem he was working on about how much he hated the band Nickelback. He usually typed free-verse love ballads on his Underwood into the wee hours, but in between these fevers, lying awake at night imagining his life as a poet, he added verse after verse to “Greaser Fire” (working title).
chad or brad
or whatever you go by cool dad
you crisco headed hipster
you scratchy voiced lipster
you couldnt make it as a deaf man
but wed all be better off if that was
the case man
case lot
case lost
lot cast
bad taste
lost cause
cause
cuz
But he didn’t dare tell Robin this. Next thing he’d know, she’d be shaking burning cigarettes inches from the end of his nose telling him to put his dick back in his pants.
“Mostly about pop culture… and the patriarchy.”
He wasn’t sure what exactly “patriarchy” meant, but he had heard it at least 40 times throughout the night.
“A(wo)men to that, man.”
Milton’s knees went weak and his head got light as a cocktail of hormones coursed through him. It was the first openly friendly thing Robin had said to him all night. At last, he had broken through her defences.
She reached out and touched his shoulder.
Images of their lives together filled his head: him writing her poems, her making films, him making her breakfast, her making films, him picking their children up from school, her making films.
Before Milton figured out a way to parlay a positive affirmation and clumsy pat-pat into smooching in the corner of the critter kill floor, several gunshots rang out, crack-crack-crack-crack-crack. Followed by screaming and people running.
Milton squealed next to Robin. She started but didn’t make a sound, so Milton tried to play it cool. Noddy, across the room, burst out laughing.
“Bahahahahaa!”
Owly had brought some firecrackers and loaned them to Noddy to incorporate into his farts-on-fire routine. He was thrilled by the outcome. Especially when a jug of something made in a bathtub out of dumpstered plums that smelled like sewer gas and tasted like asshole, and was, it turned out, highly flammable, was kicked over in the excitement.
Everyone crowded out into the street while black smoke and the stench of chemical fire and burning mink blood poured out of the windows and down the block.
Noddy crawled on Owly’s giant dick missile and the two of them and the film crew took off before the cops showed up. Dozens of others fled on their fixie bikes.
Milton followed Robin and a half-dozen hangers-on hanging off her every word down the street back towards the tunnel that crosses from dirt poor St. Henri into filthy rich Westmount.
It was late, after 2:00 a.m., but the party had ended prematurely. Elaborate plans of seduction and intrigue that had been cultivated all night were uprooted. Audibles were called. It went from a chess match to a cock fight. An arms race.
This guy had some rye left for her, this other guy had some cigarettes, this other other guy knew the way to the one 99-cent pizza-by-the-slice place in St. Henri that was still open.
Milton had nothing to contribute, but he was the last one talking to her at the party. The last one she called a poet, unironically. The last one whose shoulder she touched, maybe on purpose.
Robin, beautiful, perfect Robin. The matron saint of organic, freegan, trash-eating-dump-seagull-documentary-filmmaking neo-Marxist fifth-wave feminists. Saint Robin of Whole Grains, would revert to frat boy after an abbreviated night of too much dumpster plum liquor: 99-cent pizza-by-the-slice, after slice, after slice; laughing too loud; belching too often; swearing constantly; bumming change to dip into the Dep to buy the cheapest cigarillo.
Robin and her suit of suitors sat on a curb next to a park full of homeless people trying to stay thawed through one more miserably cold night, while she sucked on a brown tube full of all that is wrong with the world and railed against “Donald ‘motherfucking’ Rumsfeld” and “Karl ‘motherfucking’ Rove.”
And she knew all the half-dozen look-a-like hangers-on were there for her. Were watching her. Were dangling off her every. single. word. Were lapping up every last drop of rotten cigarillo. Were oblivious to the cliché-ness of her impotent rage. Because they were all rehearsing scenarios that started with a four-alarm-firecracker-fart-fire and ended in her pants.
And on this particular night, Milton thought he was the particular hanger-on who was closest to getting in because she was punching his shoulder and blowing her rotten smoke into his eyes and squeezing his cheek (!!!) when she spouted off some two-bit CNBC line about the hopelessness of The Surge.
And maybe, just maybe, just this once, it was going to happen for Milton. And maybe, just maybe, all these other hangers-on would clue in and take off and Milton and Robin could get out of here.
“Want to get out of here?”
Is what he wanted to say.
But he didn’t. He just laughed and nodded along with the rest of them.
When all the pizza was eaten, and all the cigarillos smoked, and the last of the party plum poison was drunk, and there was no reason to keep sitting on that curb, outside that park, in the frozen armpit of the city while the sun started coming up, Robin got to her feet.
“Thank you, boys, for a night.”
One after another the suitors played their last cards: offers of walks home, of invitations to “nightcaps” back at their places, of going for just one more. But she said no thanks. She said she was going home. She said good night, go away, see you later, and disappeared around the corner. Leaving six dudes who didn’t really know or like each other—sworn enemies—to walk as a pack through the tunnel and up the hill towards Vendôme metro to catch the first train of the day back to Mile End. Defeated.
In the arms race for Robin they all forgot one key thing—Robin wasn’t a country or a colony or a sparsely populated tropical island or a prize of any kind. She wouldn’t be won so easily, and she certainly couldn’t be conquered.
The half-dozen hangers-on rode the metro in silence, transferred at Snowdon in silence, got off at Outremont in silence, climbed the stairs into blazing, sobering daylight in silence, and scattered into their home turf, back to their shitty bare mattresses in their shitty rooms in their shitty shared 8-1/2s to sleep it off. In silence.