Read Better Living Through Plastic Explosives Online
Authors: Zsuzsi Gartner
“I know it's only a smell,” Trevor Masahara said one particularly rank Tuesday evening, interrupting our book club's parsing of Clarissa's guilty rejection of the hydrangea in
The Hours
, “but sometimes it seems like, you know, an actual
thing
.”
His name? It's easy to forget he actually had a name, a driver's licence, most probably a SIN. For a while we called him The Truck Guy and later The Meat Guy. Karlheinz Jacobsen, who has a scientific bent, was the one who nicknamed him Lucy. You know, the so-called missing link? We thought this was terribly funny. “Lucy,” Stefan Brandeis would yell mock
sotto voce
, “you got some 'splainin' to do!” while the rest of us laughed. We literally yowled. It seems even then we had more in common with other animals than we could have imagined.
A couple of days after he'd moved in, as if it had been teleported there overnight, the Dodge Ram, circa early '80s, sat on blocks in the middle of his front lawn. Off-white (
tapioca
, Marcus van der Houte insisted), one broken headlight, and on the slightly dented back bumper a peeling orange neon sticker that read i'm going nuckin' futs! And one of those chrome Jesus fish. (We never did witness any signs of even covert religiosity, a disappointment to Karlheinz Jacobsen, who alone among us held to a notion of the divine.) The kids went giddyâinstant ADHDâ as if they'd never seen a truck before.
Marcus was the one who elected to go over to talk to him about it. Bear in mind that we didn't then, nor subsequently, ever use the term “property values.” We are not the kind of men who fixate on our lawns. In fact, those of us with southern exposures have switched to drought-resistant native grasses. And if there is grass that needs cutting, a communal Lee Valley push mower is used.
He was underneath the truck banging around, bare knees poking out, feet in decaying Adidas. Marcus tapped out the end-credit sequence to
Moulin Rouge
on the hood to get his attention. (Marcus's ten-year-old son told him later, “You should've just yelled âYo!'”) The slathering muzzle of what looked like an Alsatian/Cayman cross shot out of the front passenger window, and Marcus fell on his seersucker-clad ass, cartoon-style, white bucks up over his head. (For the record, at least one of us failed to suppress a guffaw.) The guy slid out from under the truck with a grunt while the dog continued its concerto.
He offered Marcus a greasy paw (our neighbour, not the dog) and heaved him up. After they “shot the shit for a while,” as Trevor put it, our reconnaissance man gave a wave and walked away wiping at his grass-stained butt.
“I lost my nerve,” Marcus said later. We assured him we would have as well, while Patel Seth pried his fingers from his third black mojito and suggested it might be a good time to up his dose of citalopram.
Fear, we all know, is a useful adaptation. “Only the brave die young,” Stefan Brandeis said rather soberly, and for once it seemed he might not have been joking.
The dog's name was Gido. He wasn't a bad dog really, despite being seriously misbred, his gene pool a murky concoction that no doubt involved at least one AWOL chromosome. Contrary to what his owner might have desired, he did seem all bark and no bite. His oversized head, with its long snout housing teeth in double rows like a shark's, balanced on a dachshund's body. He looked alarmingly like a life-sized bobble-head dashboard dog. How he ever managed to hold up that head for any length of time we'll never know.
We can now admit an isolationist stance would have been best for all concerned. But we did what any civilized tribe would have done under the circumstances and invited our new neighbour to a dinner party. The soiree was held at the Brandeis-Lahr place, as they have the most accommodating deck. It was one of those sultry, edge-of-the-rainforest evenings, but the lingering smell from the last shift at the rendering plant soon drove us inside. We were discussing what Trevor Masahara's wife maintained was an apocryphal story about the worth of a certain crowd-pleasing Egyptian Bastet cat statue at New York's Metropolitan Museum when our guest of honour arrived with a two-four under one arm, dressed in sweatpants of some ambiguous vintage and, to everyone's relief, a T-shirt with sleeves. He clamped a beer between his molars before anyone could offer him a bottle opener and said something like, “How is everyone?” (Patel Seth recollects it as the more colloquial “Howz it hangin'?”)
The cat statue, Kim Fischer continued, after a series of ill-executed high-fives and faux gut punches initiated by our new neighbour, turned out to be much too valuable an antiquity to be put on open display, so what museum-goers were gaping at was in fact a meticulously wrought replica. When this got out, no one was interested in viewing it anymore. Karlheinz Jacobsen recalled the story differentlyâthat the actual statue
was
put on display, but after being authenticated by a third-party expert on the Ptolemaic period was found to be a fake.
“It's all the same in the end, isn't it?” said Patel. “People place great stock in authenticity.” He turned to our guest, who stood squinting his eyes and chewing his upper lip as if deeply considering the issue, and asked his opinion. “What I've been wondering,” he said, thrusting his beer in the direction of Trevor's chest, “is how much mileage you get with that rice grinder out there.”
Kim's wife, ever diplomatic, extended a skewer of honey-glazed late-season fiddleheads, cultivated in the dankly shaded side of their house. “Kim's a committed locavore,” Trevor said, recovering himself admirably. “He's been trying to convert us all.” The Truck Guy smirked and twirled a finger alongside his right ear: “Loco what?” We had no choice but to laugh along good-naturedly, even Kim. He was our guest, after all, the new guy on the block.
The evening proceeded towards what could in hindsight be clearly seen as a preordained train wreck. (“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed jack is king,” a hungover Stefan remarked the next morning. To which Trevor replied, “Come again?”) Our neighbour actually giggled at Marcus's lamb popsicles in fenugreek sauce, and when Karlheinz unveiled a test-tube tray of plastic ampoules filled with wild-morel cream that we were meant to squirt into our mouths (the women loved it, that clever Karl!), he pretended to inject his
amuse bouche
into the raised veins traversing the waxy underside of his left arm, flexing in a manner that accentuated his already over-delineated bicep. Again we laughed. (Although Marcus stage-whispered to Patel, “It's obvious that he's never actually shot up.”)
Karlheinz was explaining his failed attempts at crossbreeding golden agoutis with voles in order to create sleeker guinea pigs when someone passed our new neighbour a plate of Trevor's dulse salad. He demurred, muttering something about erectile dysfunction.
What felt like light years later, during which “Hot Rod” (as Stefan dubbed him that night) frequently interrupted the conversation with detailed descriptions of the modifications he'd made to his carâNoki adjustable shocks, Bruce Herb 1.31-inch anti-sway bar, two-inch lowered Simpson Michigan leaf springs[?], EJR carpet, Dyno-Mite insulation, restored dash pad, Ultra-Lite Automorphic gauges, Painfree Wire 16 circuit, '68â'74 muscle-car kit, TPS polygraphite bushings [?] used throughout,
including body mounts
, WRT Z28 coil springs, Calvert Johnson “Cal-Rac” traction bars [a pause for lubrication here], Black '73 interior,
added years ago!
, Sony Frost Mark stereo head unit, 5 Ã 160 watt amp.
And believe you me
a twelve-disc multi-play CD changer, two 6 Ã 9 Altitude rear speakers, and PH Quartz components in frontâhe returned bleary-eyed from yet another trip to the bathroom and shot dual pistol fingers at each of our wives. “Next weekend I'll make you ladies some real food.”
With that he disappeared into the night, and in the elongated silence that followed we could hear the waters of Lynn Creek churning through the gorge below the water-pipe bridge as the snowpack far above melted in the July heat. Already it had claimed a young man, the season of playing chicken with the creek only just begun. We could almost
hear
the melt.
Sure, we knew men like him existed. But we'd never had a chance to observe one in such close proximity. Karlheinz confessed to thinking of him as a
specimen
, and we nodded in agreement.
We have often wondered what Darwin would have made of the summer-long struggle for existence on our cul-de-sac. If he'd lived here, would he have taken the role of observer or participant? By all accounts he was a bona fide gentleman, didn't partake of arguments, even kept his own counsel when the
Beagle
's mad Capt. FitzRoy expounded at length during dinnerâas if daring the naturalist to differâon the Book of Genesis. (Once, only once, did he weigh in, when the captain was explaining the trickle-down benefits of slavery, proving our hero did have a backbone.) Did he float above the chickpeas and rice in the captain's mess, a benign smile shielding his face, lost in barnacle dreams? Did he clutch his stomach and plead seasickness and flee to his cramped quarters?
Something we can be certain C.D. didn't consider: reaching across the table and throttling FitzRoy until the man's eyes bulged from their sockets.
We found his backyard well-kept, albeit oddly quaint. (“Holly Hobbie chic,” Stefan called it.) Garden gnomes stood here and there (“Gnomically,” Patel later said, as if reciting a Zen koan rather than a bad pun) amongst towering delphiniums and various mulleins. Lobelia and other generic annuals spilled from a small weathered wheelbarrow, and a blown-glass hummingbird feeder hung from the coral bark maple.
Surely the W-Cs couldn't have left these things? But it was even more inconceivable that they belonged to him. (It now seems laughable that we wasted so much time over the following week debating the question of whether he had bought all this in earnest or whether he had an understanding of its kitsch value. Karlheinz had posited the most plausible theory: “It could be they were his mother's and he maintains them through a sentimental streak.” That we could understand, although Marcus couldn't help reminding us that sentiment is anathema to design.)
The “Q” stood in the centre of the yard like a Mayan shrine in the cloud forest of Cobán, feathered in smoke and snapping and spitting as fat hit the fire. Mosquito torches on bamboo poles flanked the barbecue. (Trevor's wife deemed this “thoughtful.”) The patio table was laden with platters of raw meat, the variety defying categorization, but our host was all too willing to lead a tutorial. There were slabs of porterhouse steaks, rib-eyes, short ribs, spareribs, pork loin chops, lamb shoulder chops, and lamb leg steaks. He eschewed terms like “well-marbled” in favour of “nice and fatty” and smacked his palm down soundly on cuts he deemed particularly “bodacious.” We hardly need point out that there wasn't a rub or a marinade in sight.
REO Speedwagon blasted from what looked like car speakers attached to the balustrade of his deck. He later came strolling through the sliding doors with a guitar, yodelling “Ring of Fire” as a prelude to dishing up his Voodoo Chili, a recipe he had evidently learned in a squat on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. He promised us his chili would fire up visions of Erzulie Dantor, the Haitian goddess of sex. She would make love to us in our dreams. His way of putting it of course involved more colourful terminology, in a dialect Patel, our own Henry Higgins, recalls as “Thunder Bay, 1977.”
We will admit to the record that he was an attentive host that evening, exuding a kind of ruffian charm in his own milieu. He even kept his talk of body mounts and adjustable shocks to a minimum. It also bears mentioning that this was the closest we ever came to being chummy. At one point he and Trevor engaged in a tête-à -tête about the ultimate burger. (Trevor swears by a knob of frozen blue cheese encased in the centre of 275 grams of hand-chopped Kobe sirloin.) “No shit,” he kept saying, sounding genuinely impressed as Trevor pulled out his BlackBerry to do some quick temperature conversions (our host not having mastered the move from imperial to metric back in grade school). “No shit.”
It turned out that among his many adventures he'd spent some time in the Australian outback. “Kangaroo,” he told us, “is a beautiful protein.” Patel's wife, who is an ear, nose, and throat specialist, said she found that poetic. (A less generous person might have said, “She wouldn't know poetry if it bit her on the ass,” but Patel wasn't that kind of guy.)
Other things we learned that night: Chicken isn't meat. Medium-rare is for chumps. Boys who can burp the Lord's Prayer at age eight retain the ability, like a vestigial limb flaring to life, well into their thirties.
The night was alive with smoke and fire. Insects were held at bay. Blood pooled on his plate. Stefan's wife leaned forward and dragged a finger through it and then exaggeratedly sucked. At the time, we erroneously believed she was mocking
him
.
For a while after that, things were good. Almost too good. Kim's wife turned to him in bed the night of the barbecue and said, “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.” He told us her overbite had glinted in the bedside light like the teeth of something feral. We all knew what he meant. Even Marcus's wife, who has a no-nonsense air about her and is an avid golfer, started running her fingers through her cropped hair in a manner some of us found disconcertingly attractive. (During those brief, heady days, more than one child walked in on a mid-afternoon scene in a rec room or kitchen that elicited hysterical giggles or cries of “Gross!”)
We found it impossible not to notice that by the third week of July the hair on our neighbour's chest and shoulders looked thicker, more pelt-like than the springy bed of curls that had so freely dripped sweat the afternoon he moved in. Throughout the first half of the summer it seemed he was out there every day tinkering with the truck and later with the Ford Ranchero pickup that joined it on its own blocks on his front lawn. From time to time he'd wave to us with a monkey wrench or soldering iron. “Now that he's discovered fire,” Stefan quipped one morning while squeezing into Patel's Mini Cooper with those of us who didn't telecommute or weren't on paternity leave, “maybe he's trying to reinvent the wheel.”