Trotsky

 

Enthusiasm (Dziga Vertov, 1931)

I know a guy named Curtis who drives a Ford truck and does demolition work on home renovations. I think of Curtis as a bit of a bro. And yet here we are at a prized local burger joint eating burgers, drinking pilsners, and doing our best to ogle the comely wait staff with the bare minimum of decency and decorum…all of a sudden Curtis looks right at me and says: “the preeminent and basic economics of romantic love is one of talk…not just bodies and their endless possibilities…meaningful communication in furtherance of heightened and more intense connection.” I looked at him a brief spell and saw for sure that he meant it. For some reason most definitely Curtis-related I went straight home and wrote in my notebook: beware of the sarcastic girls. It seemed funny last night but now it does not. Do people somehow manage to talk for more than fifteen or twenty minutes? Is most of the talk necessarily mean to somebody or can the branch extend?

Back when I lived in Vancouver, the days of narcotics and tree-planting, I was also in a garage rock band called the Fudds. We were all dopers and hedonistic womanizers and, ultimately, sad fucking burnouts, the lot of us. I moved back to Calgary fifteen years ago and kicked the hard stuff, with one or two nasal deviations…over fifteen years. Suddenly Feldman, who played lead guitar, messages me out of the blue and says he’ll be pulling through Calgary on the long trek from Nanaimo to Gatineau, Québec. I know that he has a wife and kid so I am able to deduce that his situation can’t be all that good. Upon arrival at my home, Feldman says he’d like to walk a bit and stretch his legs—walk and talk—so we head down in the direction of Lindsay Park and he starts to lay it out: Dagger Deacon, A.K.A Chad, former vocalist of the Fudds, is missing and a twenty-five-year-old woman was found in his apartment, dead from a fentanyl overdose. Additionally, Feldman had been sleeping with this young woman, presently deceased, and a few others in her seedy orbit; everybody he knows now knows, and that very definitely includes his wife. I’m not really drinking these days, but Feldman and I went and got good and plastered at an Irish pub in Mission and walked home yelling at the unusually ominous sky. When your rage is God-sized that’s when you really, really need God. Feldman had departed before I rose. I was in utterly pitiful shape.

I wrote a play when I was sixteen. It was about a dashing young skater boy who is universally reviled by his peers for being weird and incomprehensibly verbose and who believes himself the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky, whose name he appropriates for all sorts of nefarious purposes—his various motiveless crimes. In the first scene he goes berserk and beats another kid badly with the remnants of the skateboard the other kid has just come close to breaking over his knee, all of this to the loud applause of the other children in attendance. After this our hero embarks on a series of breakings and enterings that have no real point to them; he never steals anything, he just stalks people and walks around their houses, often while they are still in them. He recalls these events to strangers, sex workers, and three different psychiatrists. At the end he gives some random goofy-looking kid his own skateboard and says: “Tell them you got it from Leon Trotsky, kid.” I could probably still do something with some of that material. Ain’t nobody ‘round these parts gonna stage no play by the likes of heathen me, hem hem, but I bet I could make a nifty little ‘zine or something…