CHAPTER NINETEEN

Ten days before we meet Brian Stewart, Dave Powell and Danny Charles [the painters from Chapter 15] for the first - and probably the last - time, and exactly two weeks before the party at Gerry Lecovin's, A, G, D, and M gathered in the TV studios of CBC for a program CBC called "Youth," which our heroes, despite their willing participation, called "Youthless." It was very popular with all manner of persons in the Lower Mainland and Northwestern Washington, not for any intrinsic merit but because there was nothing else to watch on CBC on Saturday mornings, and because you never knew what the one called G would do next. The week before, he had unzipped, rezipped, reunzipped,rerezipped his fly quicker than a lizard snags a waterbug, and (no tape) people were still disputing among themselves whether it had happened or not. Word of mouth saw to it that the sets were tuned to this show in the Stewart and Powell households. What would those college cutups do this time!?

The producer had wanted to ban G from future shows but had caved in when A,D, and M objected and threatened to walk off: yes, thought Melchior Mobb-Barnsley bitterly, he could find another quartet of UBC twerps, just like that!, but one or more of them would likely prove even less ductile than the shitpiles he was currently using. And these four were undeniably photogenic, Melchior said to his fiancee, Fiona Futt-Tweenie. "For horror-films, darling," Fiona had replied, unkindly . She was jealous of A. "Well, at least, they can talk," he had growled, like the silly young middle-aged bear that he was, and so teddibly kewt, thought Miss Futt-Tweenie to her adorable self.

Her man Melchior was unjustifiably proud of his program, an earnest public-service CanContent feature in which university undergraduates held forth on various topics of current interest while the rest of the Provincials learnt how to chatter by studying their behavior. It was for this that D,A,G,M (Dam with the Silent Gee, as they were known, with deliberate irony) practised practically incessantly their party-going; at these events, one talked against rigorous obstacles - ukelele-playing, increasing intoxication (especially of oneself), intellectual brilliance (Angus Cary) or its simulation (Liam Chutney), but above all else, one's own ignorance. One learned adaptation. At first reluctant, D had eventually caught on, and began to say that he had read books that he hadn't. Even without Cliffnotes, after a number of these parties he knew what to say about them, these great masterpieces that he would one day get around to (if only these parties would stop!). From this, he in fact learned almost as much as he did when he did come, years later, under duress of graduate school, to actually read these repulsive tomes - The Faerie Queene, All For Love, Moby Dick, The Collected Poems of Bliss Carman, or the book Wystan Bucket (pron. Boostit) referred to as Lord Weary's Asshole.

Wystan Bucket was an exchange teacher from Brighton & Hove Redbrick College, whose parties some held superior even to Tarragon Chalkfist's. While weed was introduced to one at the latter's, fine wine flowed like rye whiskey elsewhere in Vancouver at the highly permissive entertainments of Wystan and Desiree Bucket. D preferred the Buckets's because one was less likely to be lectured and hectored there, and because he didn't smoke dope. At Tarragon and Hannah Chalkfist's, the only place where one could get stoned on a regular basis, one might then smile at this paradox: Life was Real, Life Was Earnest there, whereas it was so only through the negation of such an attitude or policy, chez Bucket.

This worked better for D Broadbent. As it probably did, he mused, for Malcolm Mandrake, otherwise "M". He was distressed to know that George Delsing ("G") and Angelica Helsingfors ("A") were being drawn more and more into the Chalkfist ambience. They were going to get so American, hanging out with those two yanks, one of whom had actually gone to college with Gaston Helios, the Neo-Romantic poet and preacher, doyen of San Francisco in these late 50s and early 60s that supply the materials for this account of a couple of weeks in 1961. Bucket, of course, being British, could fake being serious as readily as he could fake being frivolous and trivial: "We're the West-Sussex Bucketts," he had said to the people sitting on his rug, and giving his name the West-Canada sound that synonymized with "pail." "The Worcestershire Bucketts pronounce it 'Boosh-it'." ("Marvelous," said Eduardo Viejo Pink-Meadow-Pink in a loud aside to D, "What I always say. Boosh it first and find out its name later, if any." ) "Then again, the Northumberland Bucketts pronounce it 'Botch-it'."

"Wyst, what? 'Bat shit'?" D inserted.

"Ha ha, haven't heard THAT one before," replied Bucket, imperturbably beaming. "I've even heard there's a London branch - not too well-connected, y'know, come dahn a bit in the old standard of living, like, holed up somewhere like Stepney, and they pronounce it 'Bouquet'. As in (and he sang: it was horrible) 'A bouquet of roses/ for you and for me'. Ha ha 'bat shit' how about that. So " - and he put into words what D had already thought - "you louts and lubbers can call me anything you feel like from bat shit to bouquet to botch it to bucket as long as you don't kick it and as long as you don't call me before ten in the morning, and as long as you remember that high expectations breed misanthropy. Now who would like another glass of this splendid Kelowna Red? You, Eduardo?"

And Eduardo did have another glass, one in a long but not infinite series, for the sequence came to an end sordidly some twenty years later when his radio fell, or was dropped by himself (or another), into the bathtub of his California home where he had gone to sponge off the evidence of a three-week bender. Never again would D have to enter Eduardo's filthy house at three in the afternoon to find his friend sitting, surrounded by his circle of fifths, on a grungy green couch watching a tv screen gone equally green and grungy from overuse and neglect while a long-dead seagull simmered unwatched in a pot atop a stove inch-deep in grease. Never again would he have to kidnap and deliver him to Bel Azur Retreat (while Eduardo had some money left) or to the county treatment center (after the money had been pissed away: half a downtown block of Regina). And never again would he sit with his old friend and bathe in the glow of his permissive yet waspish personality. To this end came all Eduardo's charm, gifts and gaiety! (Was D today writing of it to deny that churchyardy Aufgehoben ?) And at what ends would D and his bright young chums arrive, long years or short down the so-thought road? D-on-the-rug certainly didn't want to know: didn't even want to think about it, and so he dwelt in dread, and in denial of dread, and so there was that special reason for him, too, to have another hit from the wine jug. But this was before the White Flash, and the hieroglyphs, and the murder of a pop idol look-alike, and the being-kidnapped and forced into a contract with powers possibly diabolical. Before, that is, life got more interesting.

So that for now, seated on the rug at the Buckets, getting drunk, negotiating with it so as not to show how drunk he was actually getting, listening to the insights and banalities of this dear chap from West Sussex, and being beside the rakish and consoling big-brother figure of Eduardo Pink-Meadow, D knew himself happy just as surely as A, had she been at this party, would have known he was not. And after all, D might have died that night - dropped dead on the spot or been killed by Eduardo's driving. It would falsify the record to show D at this time being aware of the falseness of his persona and the thinness of his means. At this time D was like a phrase on the board at the start of (which came along a few years later) a famous American TV show. It was all there, but only a couple of the letters had been named so far. And in this, he was not alone.

Meanwhile back at the Buckets...what one got was the faking, which was first-rate and, as all such, an excellent challenge to oneself. Sincerity was found from within, not pounded into one from without. It was not determined in the town square. And it was seen to be an act - perhaps the finest of all acts.

Something of these musings came to D as he sat, a panelist, at the fake-wood desk (the plastic swirled to look like tree-grain) in the TV studio. The topic for today was Love: Different Things to Different Genders? It was striking in that it even referred to gender. Dictionaries had been widely thumbed.

D was going to talk about certain differences in terms of the Great Love-Pairs of the past. That is, he had been going to address this topic in this way. Until Angelica Helsingfors had said what she had just finished saying. Angelica had let loose broadside upon broadside at the good ship Male Bonhomie [v. Chapter 13], which was blocking entrance to the Harbour, she maintained, of Authenticity. Of course, she added, she realized that authenticity didn't matter to them. Show them a tale, even a little piece of one, and those escape artistes would disappear down it like Alice down the rabbit hole. They were always turning into something or somebody else, were males, A informed the folk in TV land, as if death wouldn't find them anyway, anywhere, anytime: if not in Samara, then Vancouver would do. And at the end, then, what would any of them - these inauthentic males - have to show for it? Rags and patches, wandering minstrels. Always singing about their peckers. These last A referred to, D thought, as "Hooligans". (D hadn't heard of the slippery little fish that offered themselves to the hand in the luminescent surf of summer nights). "Hooligans" was about right, thought D, with a shock of surprise at the unusual application of the word.

There had been more. D sat there appalled, not so much at A's hostility as at her accuracy. Spot on, he thought, ruefully, grieving.

But not for long.

For this was deja vu all over again. D had confronted this during the Blitz. Authentically, he was about to be blown apart by high explosive. There was nothing he could do about it. So he began telling himself stories, stories he might hide in. He was only five, but he figured that out. He would be dead before he knew it. There was no afterlife, save for what people made up about you. Therefore, as far he was concerned, he would never die. The threat of death led to this conclusion.

Of course, says the grimly comic chap who looks a lot like you, or you, there's missing people. She left the room. She would be back.

And there are long nights....who could ever have imagined how very long some nights would be. Nights bereft of invention.

So he would defend the male illusionist, saying there are a hundred ways to feel up an elephant.

He would iterate that the basic difference between men and women concerned, indeed, the sex organ of the male, in its unpredictability. D was decades later to read a story by Winnifred Golden, about growing up in San Diego County, about these two girls, one of them the narrator, disguising themselves as boys and picking up a girl and both of them making out with her in between them in the front seat. "It was pretty squishy inside the stranger," Winnifred wrote, a sentence D would ever treasure.

But even if it isn't squishy, it can be greased to accomodate. Men, on the other hand, find their penises let them down. So no wonder all their braggadocio, their touching incredulity when they penetrate - the velvet dark. It's not like orgasms are everything. But they hadn't all heard that yet. Blame them? Blame the women for not telling them! Blame no-one. It's history. And it's specific, as in species. No wonder their bigger and bigger erections: The Empire State, the breast-phalloi of the Pyramids; or Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Albert Memorial (Some guys hated their dicks), the Taj Mahal.

All of this D thought to say, none of it he said. Because, as he developed conclusions from his premises, a leap took place between his brain and his mouth, just as his turn came up. If there was no death, there was only truth. If there was death, there was only the story.

"Some nights ago a giant white flash lit up the northern sky. There was no blast nor sound. Coincidentally, hieroglyphs appeared on the wall of the Sick Brewery. Subsequently, attempts have been made to stifle any news of this. I myself was offered a choice between premature death and a cosy career in California. I accepted, but I shouldn't have. I reject these bribes, these threats. Stand forth and testify!"

But G was already speaking. "Hey, these fellas kidnapped me, eh? (We Canadians say 'Eh'). They said I could win the Governor-General's Medal for Poetry if I'd only keep quiet about what I saw. They told me I would be rolling in literary lolly, rewarded like no poet ever was before. But fuck them - Oh, that's 'But, fuck, them,' not 'Buttfuck them' - If I can't make it on my own, who wants it? Eh? I too saw the great white shock wave of which Broadbent has spoken to you recently. I - "

" - Aye, and I too!" put in M.

Abruptly the cameras pulled away . The producer came out of his booth.

By yon bonnie banks and by yon bonnie braes
Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond,
Where me and my true love were ever wont to gae,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.

Donald the Editor wept - wept into a scrunched-up copy of The Bad Seed. Ugh, felt D, imagining the rough touch of the crinkly newspaper against human skin. Donald raised his head. His face was all smudgy with newsprint. It was hard not to laugh, and D opted for the easy way.

Donald regarded D with some dislike, wondering perhaps whether he ought to rebuke this tyro for his insolence. But he needed his support, not his enmity. He swallowed his pride (what a big gulp that must have been!) and smiled his charming smile.

Donald's ancestors had a proud history, including support of Robert the Bruce in his independence battles with the Sassenach. Their ownership of Halvinch, an island on Loch Lomond was confirmed by charter of King Alexander II in the 13th century, and King David II officially recognized the family in the 14th century. Later, a clan member reached historical fame as a tutor both to the beautiful and tragic Mary Queen of Scots and to her son James (later to become James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England).

"If there's one person I know who's astute enough to get us out of this mess, it's Marianne McLuster. You can't call her - she doesn't have a phone - didn't pay the bill - she's always broke so she won't expect payment. Which is good because we can't pay anything. Take this hastily scribbled note to 1212 Haro in the West End. You have a car?"

"No."

"Is Eduardo Viejo Pink-Meadow-Pink on campus?"

"I believe he is."

"V. good. Commandeer his vehicle. I'll meet you later - say at eleven tonight. Good luck."

O ye'll tak the high road and I'll tak the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland afore ye,
But me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.

But when D reached Eduardo Viejo Pink-Meadow-Pink's office, it was locked. The note on the door read "D-D-D-D-og down with the doggie flu. Must take him to the vet. Ta ta." D went to the Green Room intending to use the phone to call Montgomery Incline, CBC propsman, the only person he knew, apart from Meadow-Pink and Tommy P (currently on a bender) who had a car.

In the Green Room, however, he found Dorcas Davenport and Smetyana Gnarowski, huddled together under a mangy blanket on a leaky couch. They spoke to him and he went into a dream.

They asked him where he had been and with whom. He replied, the $25 reply, mentioning Robert the Bruce and adding, "But Loch Lomond is loved not just for its history. As you drive from Glasgow ("frae glasgie," put in Smetyana) and the Lowlands ("Lalands"), in less than thirty miles the landscape is transformed by the grandeur of this loch and its dominating mountain, Ben Lomond.

"Real Highland splendour continues unbroken as you go up the loch and beyond into the wild and mountainous northwest. It is of this lovely loch that Scotsmen the world over sing this nostalgic song:

Twas there that we parted in yon shady glen,
On the steep, steep side of Ben Lomond,
Where in deep purple hue the Hieland hills we view,
And the moon comin out in the gloamin."

The twin ingenues of the UBC Players Club joined in with D on the next verse:

The wee birdies sing and the wild flowers spring,
And in sun shine the waters are sleepin,
but the broken heart it kens nae second spring again,
Tho the waefu' may cease frae the greetin."

At this point a heap of what D had taken to be old coats left over from a production of "Her Scienceman Lover" stirred, took form, spoke:

Will you can all that crap
Will you stow all the scots
Will you drop dead and leave me in pea-eace

For if ye will nae
Like asses cease to bray
You will all verra soon be de-cea-eased.

It was Arthur Maguey. If Oscar Wilde had been a British Columbian actor bearing a passing resemblance to Alistair Sim and taking forever to fulfill his Arts degree requirements at the West Point Grey campus in the late 50s and early 60s of the 20th Century, he would have been Arthur Maguey. D was always pleased, in his puppydog way, to see Arthur, whose drolleries were quite to his taste. But this time, Arthur was preoccupied. The coats parted further and revealed the comely thighs of Philomena Ghastle, a stage-struck person of more than usual size and lack of talent. "G!" She cried, for it was beyond her abilities to tell D and G apart. She had always had trouble with the alphabet.

"G! How's Hits ?" Wrong man, wrong mag.

"You mean, my dear," cooed Arthur, "'D! How's Jackdaw?'"

"Gee, Jack, how's Dits?" Was the best P.G. could manage. D's mind was working. Her parents, he recalled, had given her a convertible for getting straight Cs in her sophomore year.

"Philomena, how would you like to take me to the West End? We haven't finished reading the manuscripts yet." Philomena had submitted a suite of love-&-insomnia haiku dedictated to "One A.M."

They did not improve on the ancient form.

"You can let me off at the G," A.M. put in. "Together with these young beauties. I know you can't join us. Since your speech therapist sees you tonight."

He next indicated the frowsy duo blending in with the stuffing of the other couch. "If they have the price of a beer between them."

As these five crossed campus, they spotted the lean, Piers-Plowman form of Prester John sloping towards the library, with Amanda Tunefork in close attendance.

D went into another dream.

It was in one of Prester John's poetry writing workshops that D resolved never to present one of his own poems to the students for comment when he should have a poetry writing workshop of his own.

D was sitting there, one of the dozen around the long, seminar table, but, unlike them, playing footsies - legsies, actually, that had started out as footsies, but had quickly advanced - with Amanda, the most conventionally gorgeous of the females present. Unlike most of them, but not all of them, for G was also playing legsies with Amanda - D had sneaked a peek, after counting one too many limbs down there; sure enough, one of Delsing's desert boots was rubbing up the inside of Amanda's toreador-panted legs. (This must have been a little while before G met A.) Playing legsies with Amanda Tunefork made D nervous. It was a delicious distraction amid the boredom of listening to other people's stupid poems, but D was pretty sure that Prester John himself was getting into Amanda's torreadors and he didn't want to fall foul of this father figure upon whom his grade depended. It hadn't been D's idea. Amanda had initiated the action. But it felt good, and D was bored. He was also programmed to be chivalrous, to accede to a lady's request, however dumbly delivered. He didn't really know what to do with Amanda if she did want him to go further, as he was already involved with Beth, had a full course of studies, his nightclerk job at the Roundtowner, and an obligation to spend Hockey Night in Canada with Bobby P once a week. He had also promised himself, in his spare time, to complete the seduction of Tamara Nevers, the scandalous wife of Dean Rind, who had allowed him, the previous year when they had found themselves alone in Notting Hill together, to insert her tampax for her. It had been by hand that time, but she had declared to D that, should the situation ever arise again, she would permit him to push it in with the tip of his prick.

Last night, ah yesternight, betwixt left thigh and right



Began a poem of D's, the middle of which the reader shall be spared; it ended, of course,

I have been faithful to thee, Tamara, in my absence.



(At this time, all of D's poems ended with the "in-my-absence" phrase. When asked where he was, then, at such times, he would respond "Trapped in the poem and trying to get back to my desk.")

Those who knew of this attraction supposed D wanted Tamara for the usual reasons men wanted her - her full red mouth, top lip flattened back as though she had spent her formative years staring up at a waterfall exploding upon her face; her big breasts, made, she maintained, only for grown men, never for a baby, to suck on; her long legs (of which more shortly), her risque - if not actually foul-mouthed - small talk, her heavy head of hair, carrot-top from a bottle that had never been cheap. But to D, these were all incidentals; he wanted her because her maiden name, Nevers, was the same as the surname of the girl he had fondled in Gladstone Park one teenage night, the first girl he had ever fondled, Vera Nevers. Mick, Jim, and D had met Vera in the park: they went to different high schools, but had all been in elementary school together. Mick, it was soon obvious, had seen Vera since those days. He and she strolled ahead, hand in hand, lovers in an idyll of innocence, whispering sweet nothings. Then Mick rejoined his chums, with this proposal: they should each spend ten minutes in turn with Vera; Jim first, D next and Mick last.

It was dark by the time D's turn came around, darker under the chestnut tree that draped itself like a canopy above the bench where Vera Nevers sat. D had no idea what was expected of him. He kissed her and she kissed back. He put his hand on her breast outside her clothing and she began to talk of her plans after graduation. He put his hand on her breast inside her clothing and she told him she wanted to be an actress. Telling her he was going to be a journalist, he ran his other hand up her leg under her skirt. He had nearly reached her crotch when she slapped his hand away, meanwhile discussing the relative merits of RADA or LAMDA. She was already an accomplished thespian, D noted, for she hid her sexual excitement very well behind a calm and matter-of-fact exterior. But now it was Mick's turn, as Mick came to say, looming out of the September Cricklewood night. Vera greeted him a trifle too warmly, D felt. He had grown accustomed to her unruffled manner.

After they had walked her home, Mick said to D and Jim, "What did you get?" Titty, they both told him. "Is that all?" Turned out Mick had gotten, whatever that might have meant, "Everything." He had been much longer than ten minutes, certainly. Poor, benighted girl! Felt up by three different pairs of male hands, warm young unaccustomed hands feeling all over her young body, her delicate and rewarding nervous system! Had she bought into the patriarchal system, or hadn't she? Unhappy wretch!

D had taken Vera out on his own a couple of times after that, but, whether in the bushes by the tennis courts near the pool in Gladstone Park, or in the bushes behind the Bull-&-Bush on Hampstead Heath, his progress had been arrested at the breast. That he had found thrill enough at fifteen. He never was to hear Van Morrison singing "Brown Eyed Girl" without remembering Vera, although he couldn't recall what colour her eyes were. What had become of her? He had not ever seen her name when watching British TV. Maybe she had changed it, although Vera Nevers sounded poetic enough to D's poetic ear.

Yes, Tamara Nevers-Rind was fun to be with, a challenge to try to fuck, an attraction-repulsion pain to be infatuated with, and perhaps her being a Nevers wasn't all that crucial. She was theatrical, and D was a sucker for dramatic people. She was one more claim, however, on D's time, and so he worried that Amanda Tunefork would prove, even if laid, an embarrasment. But legsies with A.T. sure made Garlin Scott Crankshaft's poetastings more palatable. Soon, it would be D's turn to read, and he could hardly wait. He had knocked off two new Audenesques only the night before. But he worried that he wouldn't be able to give an adequate reading while intwining his nether limbs with Amanda's. He would have to relinquish to G the sole rights for as long as he himself was reading. He resolved to read the sonnet, not the sestina.

But before D could read, Prester John interposed with a new poem of his own that he had decided to read to them, he said, because it shared something with Garlin's last poem.

What had Garlin's last poem concerned? Or his first, for that matter? Anyway, John was reading by now, a sad twinkle in his bright birdlike brown eye. Some fish had swum up his private creek and his cat had stalked them. Then the fish had swum off and the cat had licked its paw. The poet had seen all this from the crotch of a hemlock. So what? Jejune D was embarrassed for the great man, so obviously pleased by this piece of crap. He understood that it meant something in Existentialism - "The cutthroat trout flick off to other banks" - but again, So what? D then and there resolved never to repeat this move himself. He often forgot this resolve, but he always regretted it.

If you wanted poetry, D thought, hazily, not making the connection yet to his own practice, you had to listen to Tamara when on a roll. He remembered her staggering back home from the Spanish restaurant near the Ladbroke Grove tube where they had dined on calamari and some powerful Roja, and Tamara talking about women's legs. She went into peals of laughter - our young D was a sucker for women whose laughter pealed. "Legs like Indian clubs - legs like milkbottles - legs like pipe cleaners - legs like carrots - legs like Waring blenders - legs like Stephen Spender's - legs like Claudette Colbert's - legs like concrete culverts. . . ." There was the true genius of language, inspired invention tumbling out of Tamara Nevers's bright-red mouth, and D was the luckiest fellow in the world, to be strolling the Portobello Road with her arm-in-arm, headed for her flat and her tampax box.

After they had wrestled cosily, and with Tamara flat on her back on the floor, D placed his hand on her breast.

Next morning, over breakfast, D had, at her bidding, told Tamara about the play he was writing, which was based on his experiences in the Provincial Mental Hospital in Jackfish City, Sask.

"What was your scariest moment there?"

"It would have to be the time I was working nights on the violent ward. I was taking a leak and two maniacs grabbed me from behind."

"Then what?"

"I shouted and my ward-mate Phil Avecroi came running. When he saw what was happening, he blew his whistle. They let go of me. Then four guys from the day shift appeared and dragged them off and beat the shit out of them."

"That must have been a scary moment, alright," Tamara said, musing. "It must have been - it must have been like last night, when you put your hand on my breast." And she went into peal upon peal of laughter. D felt lost in her teeth, mouth and throat.

Years later, when she had returned to Vancouver (leaving D still languishing among the Young Angries in West Hampstead with his wife Georgia Littlewood), D penned her a card: I miss your laugh, your teeth, your hair,/ Your cruelty, your underwear./ Come back quick, for you I'm sick/ To push your napkin with my dick.

She replied, on a p-c of the Grand Canyon: There is a young fella called D/ Who fancies his chances with me/ If he tries one more time/ He could find it sublime/ Or told to fuck off, wait and see.

Through D's life, as through the lives of many of us, twisted this dark, glittering thread of unaccomplished deeds and vanished persons which even he would at some point cease to mourn. Ah, but how keenly real, how suddenly to memory substantial, the living flesh of undone business, washed clean of habitual, remembered replays of what didn't happen, washed with the vinegary rainlight of the dawn of that particular kind of loss - the loss of what (no doubt fortunately) one has never possessed!

It put D in mind of a late night in an after-hours jazz club at Main and Broadway where his party had drawn to it a couple of Yanks up from Seattle for the weekend. One of this pair, D had taken a shine to. He liked the way this man, Danny Schwartz, had weathered the usual Canadian flak about being a Yank, and he liked the sense of humor Danny had employed so adroitly to win these drunken bums over.

The talk had wandered into zen buddhism, currently a popular topic, and thence to a more general discussion of enlightenment. Danny Schwartz said:

"A man in a gray-flannel suit found life meaningless on Madison Avenue. He quit his job, kissed his wife and kids goodbye, and set off on a quest for the true meaning of life.

"For years he ranged across the face of the globe, swimming rivers, paddling across whole oceans, trekking through deserts in the blistering heat of the tropical sun."

"Cut to the chase," suggested Tommy P.

"He climbed a mighty mountain range because he had been told that a guru at the top knew the secret. He climbed and climbed, and he got to the top, and there sat the guru, cross-legged, his arms out sideways, index finger touching thumb in the approved manner. 'O Holy One,' our seeker exclaimed, 'I have swum rivers, crossed deserts, paddled - '"

" - the chase?" Tommy P nudged.

"'And now I come to you to ask you, 'What is the Secret of the Universe?' And the guru immediately says, 'It's the fountain.' And the seeker starts to scream, 'The fountain? I leave my job, my wife and my kids, I suffer all kinds of hardships - swim rivers, cross blistering deserts - '"

" - the chase, man, the chase," urged Tommy P.

"First eight times I heard this one, it wasn't the fountain, it was whole grain bread," said G.

"' - Climb this goddam mountain and all you can tell me when I ask you for the Secret of the Universe is "the fountain"?' So the guru looks at him for a moment and then he says, 'Oh, it isn't?'"

Danny and his buddy lived in a big house in Seattle and Danny insisted that D and Beth and their companions (Tommy P and Caroline Anthrax and Montgomery Incline; Ida Ride was supposed to have joined them, but had to stay home and wash her hair), should come and spend a weekend on the shores of Puget Sound.

"It's one long 32-hour party," Danny had told them. "We were all at college together. Like you guys," he added, to Tommy P's amusement. But D had lost the piece of paper that Danny had scrawled the address and phone number on. From time to time he recalled Danny and mourned this loss. He felt they were meant to be friends.

In 1971, D went to welcome the new hire of the department of English at Hydrangea State College. It turned out that Dr. Danrather Black was none other than Danny Schwartz.

"I got so sick of my family, and so into R and B," Danny, who now sported a Zapata mustache, shoulder-length hair and a hippie headband, told him, "That I changed my name. Hey, great to meet again, man! I hear the Secret of the Universe is somewhere around Hydrangea. Say, do I smell doobie?"

But that's a later tale, and Tamara Nevers, a faulty parallel. For in 1971, she had fallen from a rope bridge crossing some Andean gorge while working as a Carmelite nun with the poor and sick peasants of Peru. When he heard this news, D's first thought was "Now it's never." He was immediately flooded with a mingling of grief and abashment. Yes, D was abashed.

But that was ten years down the line.

"And to what do we owe the luminous pleasure of your dubious presence, D?" Maguey was purring, as Philomena Ghastle dragged the Buick from Dunbar onto Point Grey Road. "Why the West End, and not the G? Will you never weary of going too far? Mind you," he went on, warming to his sentences, "it becomes you, this way of toppling over without ever quite doing so. You're always adding one more brick to the stack. Why not insert having ten or fifteen beers with us in between one of your pressing concerns, and the next? Wouldn't that just complicate things," he smiled happily.

D, wanting to wipe that grin off Maguey's face, agreed to this suggestion. He figured Maguey wanted both girls for himself. So, D decided to drink with them simply to spike Maguey's plans. It was a petty gesture, one not worthy of a hero, and one - to mitigate the case against our D somewhat - of which D stayed unaware. Or does that make it worse?

The evening passed. It was all great good fun. The dark wood of the small Romanesque arches - three of them, whence beer and tomato juice were dispensed to the surly slingers, beneath the ornate clock (always ten minutes ahead), did not trouble D's vision that evening, for they were out of view from the Ladies and Escorts section.

Only when closing time was announced did D remember with a guilty start that he was on a mission. Saying goodnight to the others, he headed for Haro St. Late as it was, it was noisy in this part of town - a giggling trio of revellers brushed past.

"Aha!"

One of them was Montgomery Incline.

"Ink!" D yelled. "The very man I just remembered I'm - uh, I'm NOT - looking for. Good to see you."

The couple Ink was with were Ham and Leona Bremser.

"Hey, man," said Ham, "You bin a stranger too long. Come see us and we'll boogie on down some more."

"Don't make yourself a stranger," added Leona, who liked D's looks - legs, pants, a torso and a head. D knew how she felt. Sort of furry. Um, fuzzy, he corrected himself. Funny.

"Saw you two the other day," D blurted. "Fixing the roof."

"We were balling the jack," said Ham. "Fine day for a roof party." For an architect, he gave passable jazzman.

Leona, who resembled the Japanese version of Olive Oyl, was not exactly trapped in a preview of "The Shining." Ham was intense but laid back.

"We're going home to ball - want to watch?"

"Awfly decent of you - but cawn't, frightfly soddy," was D's offbalance reply. He reverted to this kind of English when taken aback. The last time he had watched them, it had been by accident, opening the wrong door on a drunken Sunday afternoon. What a lot of muscles and tissue had to be deployed to bring two small zones into concordance! They were certainly wrapped up in what they were about. D found himself less interested than he would have imagined. D wasn't ready to face his curiosity head-on. Besides, he recalled, "Besides, I'm on a quest. I've got to find Marianne McLuster, and I've lost her address."

"I can take you there," said Incline, the man who knows his way around and gets things done.

The Bremsers bent and screwed their ways into their own personal Hitler's Revenge and puttered off to West Van. Incline led D to a two-storey apartment building , the kind that has four or six apartments in it, and is sprayed with gray-pink stucco containing bits of colored glass.

"It's a bit late to be visiting isn't it D?" Incline wanted to know. "Unless, of course, that is, ah, well,"

"I've never laid eyes on her before," D cut in. "How late is it?"

"Oh not very, not from MY point of view. But she's an A student. Probably studying in bed."

"We'll bring her some flowers," D told him, and began tearing up plants by their roots from the neat front yard of the wood frame house next door.

After Incline had brought him right to her door, D knelt as his partner knocked. Almost at once the door swung open and a woman more interesting than Tamara Nevers was standing there. Had D been a Sensation Type and not an Intuitive Type, he might have registered that Marianne McLuster (for it was she) was younger, more buxom, and with more and redder hair than Tamara, and with a laugh every bit as scintillating and infectious; but as it was, he would need months and years to articulate such information as he had already taken in at a glance.

"Well don't just kneel there without anyone under you," she said, "Come into my boudoir. Ink, who is this chap? He's lean but intense. Can I try him out and keep him if he passes muster?"

"Aha! This is the fellow I told you about, Marianne, the one who aided me in the art hoax - "

"I'm D," D interrupted, "and I'm in love with you. Have some flowers."

By now they were inside the apartment. For the abode of a person allegedly penniless, it was surprisingly well-appointed.

"Roots and all," said Marianne. "You don't mess around. I like that. I hope my neighbors appreciate it. I have a feeling I've seen these flowers before." She began to chop off the roots. Then she rinsed them and put them in a vase.

"I have a message for you. A problem to solve, actually." D threw himself onto the sofa. Ink hovered around Marianne.

"Uh, I warned my young friend it might be a tad too late to be knocking you up - " Ink enjoyed supplying the straight lines to such known quantitites as D and Marianne.

"Never too late for that," she said pleasantly, meeting D's gaze and smiling the Smile of the Wicked Glint. "Let's drink some scotch. I studied enough tonight. I was about to go to bed and masturbate, but I can do that later. It'll be even more fun after flirting with you two charming chappies. Or maybe you could stay. Now, tell me, what's this mysterious message? You sure it was a message and not a massage? I think I'd rather have the massage, if it's all the same to you, which it probably is not. In fact I can tell you're dying to get your hands all over me. But let's settle the lesser matter first."

She plumped herself down next to D, letting her body rest pleasantly against his. Ink continued to pace, his face going through the exaggerated contortions of a melodrama villain, as his eyes rolled to heaven at the scandal of Marianne's speech and demeanour, and his mouth pursed into a tight anus of disapproval: and this was funny, because as they both knew, Ink was unshockable, and at least as bent as themselves. But he was ten years their senior, and this masquerade of the censuring elder was one way he had of entertaining the college kids of today.

"The message is from Donald McDonald."

"Oh that dear man. I deflowered him recently, and he was so very grateful."

"?"

"A friend of mine told me that Donald had been complaining that he was still a virgin at twenty-two, so I told him to send him on over. He took me out to dinner, and then I brought him back here for dessert. He too arrived bearing flowers. A little less earthy, though. And the message? Surely he doesn't want to be deflowered again! No, no, he wouldn't send you to tell me that. What's up?"

"The Bad Seed has already gone to press bearing the news of a giant white flash and some resultant or concommitant hieroglyphs on the wall of Sick's Brewery. Now various agencies are saying that no such events occurred, that it is alarmist and unCanadian to give credence to any such reports, and UBC Admin has sent us a red-alert memo that the paper's to say nothing about all of this. When tomorrow's issue appears, we'll all be canned."

"Who put this story in there?"

"I did," D allowed modestly.

"Aha! Once the hoaxster, always the hoaxster," cried Ink. "I've trained you well, my boy!"

"No hoax," D said. "I saw the flash, I saw the hieroglyphs. There's something big being covered-up here."

"It's just a female torso, sweetie," said Marianne. "44-28-38."

"And you mean to expose it!" added Ink.

"I don't want to get expelled from college. I worked for a living far too long," D answered, although it might be fun to suppose that line was Marianne's.

"And it's too late to stop the presses? What if you simply don't distribute it?"

"The advertisers will sue. And that'll be the least of our worries. Anyway, it's being distributed at this very moment. You see, I was supposed to get here about four o'clock this afternoon. But the only ride I could get off campus took me straight to the Georgia."

"He's not ALWAYS irresponsible," Ink interjected. "He's almost a Family Man."

"Almost?"

"Ah well uh, there is a wife or two at home. But I know you'll be charitable," said Incline, going to bat for his buddy D.

"Yes I feel quite charitable where this young man is concerned, and boy does he ever look concerned! - I look forward to meeting your wife," she added, looking directly into D's slightly evasive gaze. "What's she like?"

"Well she's a lot like you," D found he had said, tactlessly.

"An honest answer. Then no doubt I shall like her. Love her, even," smiled Marianne McLuster. "Red hair? A lawyer into bohemians? Smarter than you? Big boobs? Born and raised in Moose Jaw?"

"All of the above," replied D, awed by this psychic divination of geography and topography.

"Don't be awed by my psychic powers," she told him. "Do you know Tamara Nevers?"

D saw that Tamara Nevers, too, was a redhead built along the lines sketched in so recently. He saw also that Vancouver, if you had gone to high school there, was a small town.

"Don't you KNOW?"

"I do now," she said pleasantly. "Thought she might be your type."

D was still baffled by the discovery that he had a type. He had thought he was omnivorous.

"Oh, a lot of us are redheads this year," Marianne told him. "These hair colors come and go - as I'm sure you've observed. Next year, who knows? I rather fancy a blonde Joan-of-Arc hairdo myself."

"It would look ravishing," Incline said. When the propsman and hoaxster indulged in flattery of the female, his strange posture became even more pronounced. The torso bent one way, the neck and head another, while one arm was semi-extended, the hand with one finger up saying "Whisst!" The other arm, bent double, was up behind its shoulder-blade, a balancing act. His blue-black hair, slicked straight back, allowed several strands to fall across his forehead; his eyes glittered like pieces of anthracite. His nose was straight and his face halfway between humourous and handsome, the skin white like that of one long in city pent.

"I'll play Warwick to your Joan of Arc any night of the week," he added, with the usual over-emphasis that rendered all of his words camp, thus empty of primary meaning, so that signification ping-ponged behind the spoken lines. Incline's was a parodist's nature. One of his allusions here was to a recent production of The Lark, which had included both D and Incline in its star-studded cast of amateur thespians, although Incline had not played Warwick. That vital but woodenly-written role had fallen to the lot of M.

The play had been adjudicated by Someone from Back East, someone therefore Important, D realized, beyond any importance any mere Vancouverite could ever - in Vancouver eyes - attain to. After the play ended, this worthy gave his public summing up. D was pleased and surprised to learn that he, D, had given this savant "a moment in the theater." The best critique of his acting D had received up until then had been of his role as Colonel Sir Francis Chesney in Charley's Aunt, from Fee McMannic: "You looked like you were standing next to your character saying 'if I were going to act this role, here is how I'd do it'." Spot on! D's subconscious yelled, as D tried to come up with something equally hurtful to say to Fee.

The difference this time, D reflected, as the adjudicator rambled on, was the leek. As La Hire, the rough soldier friend of Joan, D had to eat a leek on stage each night. It had grounded him.

The nightly leeks were supplied by Incline, who doubled as propsman. Ink liked to tell everyone that D took a leak on stage every evening. It was a pun that linked up with Ink's sponsorship of Tobacco Road, that play where a character does fake a leak on stage every evening. It was the outrage of two little old ladies over this act which Ink, the production's publicist, overhearing in the lobby, encouraged, advising them to carry their complaint to the police.

The police came to watch the play, and shortly thereafter closed the show. This led to a court case (at which Erskine Caldwell, the playwright, testified) and the subsequent re-opening of the play, whose "redeeming social features" outweighed the indecencies of public urination or simulation thereof. The lines stretched round the block. It was Ink's first successful ruse, and he never missed an opportunity to recur to it, directly or otherwise.

Returned to the present, D listened with alarm as the adjudicator panned the production. One "moment in the theater" wasn't enough for him, it transpired.

The show stank. The hiss of air escaping a dozen punctured balloons was metaphysical. But someone would invigorate even this cast party. . . .

In The Lark, after Joan has been martyred, Warwick declares, "We made The Lark into a giant bird, who will soar the skies long after our names are lost and forgotten." At the party, Ink went around announcing, in his stagiest manner, "We made The Lark into a giant turkey thanks to which our names in this town will never, damnit, be forgotten!"

Marianne and Montgomery were trying to solve D's little problem.

"Say it's a hoax. You put out one hoax issue a term, right? Say that this one is it."

"That's right," said Ink, "Have a rubber stamp made and stamp every copy."

"There you go," said Marianne. "Well, the rubber-stamp shops don't open for another six hours. What shall we do till then?"

"But there are other stories in this issue," D wailed. "The story about the rapes in Nightingale Hall, for instance. The story about Otto Hunzinger's huge donation to the Art Gallery. The story about President McGonnigal getting a big award. The story about Prester John winning a Canada Council grant. The review I wrote praising the issue of Jackdaw I've just put out."

"Aha, it's a lesser-of-two-evils choice, Broadbent."

"You have only these alternatives," said Marianne.

"How am I going to stamp every issue before the students hit campus?"

"We'll help. Won't we, Ink? And Donald must help, too. I'm sure I can get him up."

"And I know a little old rubber-stamp maker who is in his shop by six every morning," added Ink.

"Four hours to party," calculated Marianne. So party they did.

They partied, teeny-boppers, by getting Uncle Ink to take more medicine and then tell them (for maybe the tenth time) about some of his principal japes, the ones before their time and the ones they had played bit parts in. Ink embellished. Each time, something new and untrue would have been added; the stories grew. It was a lot like Homer.

D liked particularly the one where Ink, forbidden by city officials to paste a poster announcing a play on the walls of a new civic building, had let it be known - widely - that he would go ahead anyway. On the night he had named, Vancouver's Finest gathered in force to preserve law'n'order. Punctual to his schedule, Ink had made the poster appear.

He was projecting it via magic lantern from a storefront opposite the public building. Police wanted to arrest, but several of Ink's old lawschool associates were on hand to opine that Ink was doing nothing illegal.

It took considerably longer in the telling as Ink told it. Many personalities had been involved at one or another stage of this scheme, and Ink had to evoke each and every one of them. But it wasn't exactly boring. No, mused D, thinking how to convey the experience to a future generation, it was rather like having Eugene O'Neill's father do the Count of Monte Cristo with the intermissions handled by Clarence Darrow doing Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

Nearing dawn, with Ink on bathroom break, Marianne asked D about the flash and the wall-writings. He told her all (Ink, returning, hushed up for a spell), and she accepted the truth of it - phenomenologically, anyway. D thought Ink wasn't so sure. He smelled hoax.

"It reminds me," he began, "Of the time when - "

Daylight arrived.

"The rubber-stamp, Ink!" his audience carolled.

D and M were in Nanaimo. D had been suspended from campus for two weeks for his part in the hoax-hoax issue; a light enough punishment. Donald McDonald had been threatened with expulsion. In order, he said, to save the hallowed name of Clan McDonald from further shame, Donald had gone on his knees from Brock Hall to the chapel, where he had repeated "Mea culpa" one hundred times. The entire route had been lined with Sciencemen in their red sweaters, granted special dispensation by Dean Brute to pelt the ex-editor of the hated Bad Seed ("tells the truth about Engineers") with the veggies left over from an agricultural experiment that went wrong some weeks before.

M, ever eager for excuses to goof off, had generously offered to accompany D. Besides, there was less likelihood, they hoped, of being kidnapped here. Foreigners seldom arrived at Nanaimo: they couldn't pronounce it, so how could they ask for directions to it?

D was sick and tired of campus and of the plot of the novel he was now trapped in and created by. His arm still ached from his part in stamping one thousand copies of a newspaper. (He and Ink had tired of this solution and had dumped the remaining nine thousand copies in the ocean off Wreck Beach; two days later, several soggy masses - happily unidentifiable - washed up on Gambier Island; the locals dried them out then built fires with them to heat their primitive huts. Ham Bremser, in on the caper (not the kind of secret Incline could keep), called to say a wad had ended up on the beach in front of his house. Leona was using some of it to clean her paintbrushes.

Beth had more-or-less tossed D out for being gone all night and not phoning her; she needed time to get over it, D figured. And Marianne had taken off with Donald once the deed had been done. She, too, would think differently soon. He relaxed, there by that still, northern sea, lapped in the syllables from the mighty mouth and mind of M.

"To a man of my intelligence, the proliferation of literary magazines is scandalous. If this seems a reactionary attitude, let me remind that nine times out of ten, to be reactionary is to be right. There is a horrible phenomenon whereby our bright, mindless progressing is making new problems for us faster than we can solve the old ones. This is so in literature as in politics, economics and science. And in literature it tends particularly to a geometrical rather than an arithmetical rate of increase, as each creative work automatically spawns a squadroon of critical material.

"Everyone is so busy vomiting creativity that we have more art than life. To combat this noisome imbalance I propose the banishment of any would-be writer to the frog mines for a term of not less than a dozen years. And if this experience only inflames him with an austere passion to transcribe into little tracts his found bonds with the workaday earth and his workaday fellows, why then chuck him back for as many more terms at hard labor as may be necessary to break and humble him." M barely paused, sure of D's attention, or indifferent to it.

"Writers, by and large, have the emotional tonus of a squid - all mushy and grasping, gutless and tenacious. The plain fact is that the army no longer absorbs enough of our youth. So they go to the universities, learn about sides to take on moral and political issues, and write. When they are too lazy and poor to go to the universities they compensate by becoming socialists, and writing.

"Despite the generic imbecility of fiction as a literary craft, I think the poets are the more personally disgusting group of artists. Present company possibly excepted - but only if you let me keep your Sigma Tau Xi badge and the pen from San Francisco with the woman who undresses every time it is turned upside-down.

"They are inevitably clever, in the unassuming rote way which is the product of tacking to the dogmatic sensibility of the trained and uneducated mind the most subtle and ghastly quirks and personal nuances of Neo-neurosis."

"Neo-neurosis?" Queried D mildly. He had scarcely heard a distinct word M said. The mellifluous, trenchant harangue appeared to excuse thought and put one on the shortcut to mindless pleasure. But D felt he ought to do something in return.

"Neo-neurosis, D: ivy-league haircuts‹heavy blue-black hornrims - "

"Oh, like Jack - "

"Exactly - the man with all the pens in his breast pocket - your powers of observation are improving Broadbent - on with excoriation - homebrew (beer or saki) - "

"B-b-but Beth and I brew both - you came by two Sundays ago because your bootie is doing time - "

"Yes and when Serena spilled some on her velvet dress, it left a big bare patch as if some cricket eleven had played a five-day test on her midriff! On with excoriation - U. of Cal., U. of Iowa - ceramics - Horizon - PMLA - Evergreen Review - sociologists studying Judaism - mobiles in the living room - old kitchens - Danish modern - wedding rings made by artist friends - "

"You mean like Angus Cary and Harry Bale - "

" - three children - taking an interest in architecture - VWs - obviously loving one's spouse - marinas - belles with extravagant overbites majoring in Slavonics seduced by European exchange students - "

"She wasn't worthy of you, M, you have Serena now - "

" - Poetry about jazz musicians - poems about Dylan Thomas and Rilke - quotations from Dante - John Cage - Karlheinz Stockhausen - Ingmar Bergman - "

"Oh no, not Ingmar Bergman! He wanted to give me a part in Summer with Monika!"

"He did? What happened?"

"I got in a fist-fight with the head of the studios. Over his waif. "

"Waif or wife. It's the story of your life. On with excoriation - Ingrid Bergman - Audrey Hepburn - Marilyn Monroe as 'sensitive actress' - Club Nine - College Board exams - Adlai Stevenson - driftwood sculpture - guitar-playing folksingers - Charlie Parker - in a word, Barney Rosset. Note that I did not mention beards."

D had been wondering when M's list would reach Beards.

It's difficult to recall in 1998 what fury beards aroused in the usual onlooker in 1961. The usual cleanshaven or naturally beardless persons who came and went about their civic business in Vancouver then. Passing motorists would wind down their windows and shout "Hey, Fidel!" at D or M walking down the street. It was not meant to be a friendly greeting. Old ladies (old, and thus presumably beyond the sexually predatory orbit of these barbarians) at bus stops who would take the trouble to cluck deprecatingly and say, "What a pity you cover up your face that way. We can't see how good-looking you might be." Random thugs who wanted to smash in your face who didn't know why and didn't care to. "Hey, beatnik!" What could the subtext be, D wondered, years ahead of that term. Were they reminded, with an unpleasant shock, of "hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these"?

Mind you, there were beards and beards. M's - couldn't G see this? - had fled his scalp to flourish on his cheeks and chin. It was luxuriant. D 's was sparser. During his brief courtship of Frederica Henry, D was sitting one evening having a brew with Mr. Henry, a superintending sort of chap and man of few words. Eventually he spoke. "It's like a forest where the underbrush has been cleared," he told D. "Do away with it. My daughter comes with a substantial dowry, but not to a beard like that."

G had once said to D, "If I couldn't grow a better beard than that, I wouldn't grow one." And he never did.

But DHL had worn a beard, and EP, and WW, and RC, and AG. By stopping shaving, D had announced himself of their lineage. But it was a growth in part of a Bohemian gesture and therefore meriting the mindless hostility of those it was meant to shock. Decades later, pins in the tongue would constitute the same contradiction - or a gorgeous teenage head of heavy honeyblonde hair streaked frightful red, if somebody's teenage daughter's reading this.

Loggers, however, though of the square world, were allowed to go bearded and untaunted. Sea captains, Sikhs - though not untaunted for their headgear. Rum, that. . .

"Treatise on Beards. (Are you listening, Broadbent?) Beards are physically beautiful. Beards are spiritually beautiful. Beards are practical. These arguments will, I think, be found overwhelming, against any counter whatsoever."

The penny dropped. D realized that M was trying out on him the essay he had promised D for the next issue of Jackdaw.

"On with excoriation: poets inevitably have the whitest underbellies, and the yellowest teeth. And it is tacit in the ranks of the seedy intelligentsia to ignore the sinister significance of this, and pretend that great gaping souls have a veracity apart from the bodies housing them. I can never understand why the sight of the gorgeous blonde with the glassy-eyed stare is necessarily more depressing than the totally scruffy mien of the little sparrow of Cader Idris. It's past time to drop the cult of the soul and react in favor of the glistening exterior."

"You are so prescient, M," D interpolated. "I too predict the era of poets as shiny, glittering creatures, upon whose bright surfaces one will obtain no purchase. And I see them glassy-eyed too. 'Come down to earth, you shiny things!' That will be the call. But their overflowing polysemy shall be all their answer. "

"Now some few," M continued, clearing his throat menacingly, as to say, 'interrupt me again at your peril, you yellow-toothed loon,' "Now some few have had sufficiently cool vision to be antipoetry, but they have let this manifest itself in the insane form of further literary mags - "

"Hits," D breathed.

" - thus by Dogman's Law (to discuss, even for the purpose of rejecting, the shoddy is to commit a shoddy act) adding to - "

"Where does Dogman's Law leave us?"

" - adding to the miasmal abundance. We must stop producing literature until everyone has a chance to read all the books existing now and discuss them with everyone else. As things stand one can't in a normal lifetime - "

"M, you will never, never have a normal lifetime! You - "

" - in a normal lifetime read even the bibliography to a given subject. Try it. Take any subject of your choice: --'fish' 'the English novel in the 14th century' 'trepanning' 'Wilhelm Gorgy' 'struttin' pomposity as measured in a representative sampling of Deans of Applied Science at the Canadian Universities' - you'll see that I do not exaggerate.

"One solid little journal devoted to both new fiction and poetry and to critical material, of one hundred pages, published quarterly in French, German and Latin, would do very nicely. We have instead a great belching, sneering glut of verbiage, soggy with concept, devoid of saving sensuality. This phlegm, this loathsome smear, this gutwrenching, fatuous dribble, this maleficent ooze, this pululating whey, this reeking and screeching flux of gelid neurotica surges across a landscape littered with the half-eaten corpses of the monolithic scriveners of antiquity - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Donald Culross Peattie. Why cannot we let the bones of these great men rest easy beneath the tennis courts of Goucher college? Surely it's clear now that cognition will never survive verbiage, that whereas 430 words might convey some crude message 4,3000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001,700,000,020 words can only mean confusion and heartache.

"The writer is the most dispensable man in any civilization worthy of the name. As his craft offers continual opportunity for the use of his inmost bestialities, he is not ever likely to be a very considerable human being.

"Let's have an end to his writhing and clacking."

"I'll take it," D said excitedly. "It'll fill a full three pages in Jackdaw. There's a satirical poem titled 'after a literary reception for a contemporary poet' that can precede your essay, and I can put an essay by G after it."

"Why would you put ANYTHING after it?" M wanted to know. "Don't you think it must be the Last Word?"

"G already paid me, uh, that is, um, persuaded me, that he should have the last place. Anyway, let him have a hard act to follow. His essay is about being dead so it'll fit in like post-mortem effects following your destruction of literature for our time."

"How does his go?" M wanted to know, well aware of D's photographic memory.

"'There was one thing that bothered me that year when I was thirteen going on fourteen, and that was what it meant to be - '"

"So you really like my essay?" said M, who had stopped listening as soon as D had begun his recitation.

D was about to reassure M, but they were interrupted. Two village lasses of more than usual pulchritude and with that mix of shyness and boldness D found charming, who were walking the seawall in the other direction, spoke to our lads.

"Aren't you Wendell Corey behind that beard?" The bolder said to M.

"Aren't you Michael Wilding behind that, uh, beard?" The second blorted in D's direction.

They were chewing on Nanaimo Bars. Nanaimo Bars are made with half a cup of butter, quarter cup of white sugar, and three tablespoons of cocoa. These ingredients are stirred together in a double boiler until smooth. Then a second layer is added, consisting of a quarter cup of butter and two cups of icing sugar, mixed into a kind of cream, to which are added (until smooth) two tablespoons of custard powder, three tablespoons of boiling water. Or sometimes only two. This is then spread over the first layer.

There is a third layer, made of two squares of unsweetened chocolate and two tablespoons of butter. This layer, melted, is spread to be a top to the bar. The whole bar is then chilled.

"Well nice talking to you," said one.

"Ta-ta," said the other.

"?" said D to M, as the girls sloped off.

"That was their big thrill, D," M assured him. "Let me explain something to you about Nanaimo. You will become well-known as a writer. You will read in the World Poetry Festival at Harbourfront in Toronto, accomodated in a hotel that is made for corporate chiefs, wined and dined in a different restaurant every night for a week. Phyllis Webb will be your table-mate. You will be flown to Paris to read at the Museum of the City of Paris on Woodrow Wilson Avenue. Your writings will be translated into Italian and published in a journal so avant-garde its cover will resemble a packing box while its pages will feel like silk. The Canadian government, on behalf of its taxpayers, will give you chunks of money, and will fly you back and forth and up and down this mighty continent to carry your version of culture to the masses. Not to be outdone, the United States government will also squeeze a little largesse upon you and your poetic productions."

He broke off here to spot-kick a dead gull into the briny. The two chums had hopped down from the seawall to walk the beach proper, crunching evidence of their seashell existence as they went.

"A consortium of the thirteen western United States, " M resumed, his handsome teeth flashing within his luxuriant beard, "will choose your selected poems for their prestigious award, and as a consequence, you will be flown to New York City, to the Hawaiian islands, to Anaheim even, where you will be put up in a hotel with a view of Disneyland. You will be feted at a billionaire's mansion in Newport Beach, in a room with two grand pianos with dead animals on each, while the three-piece Creole band plays 'Banana Boat Song' following and followed by 'Yellow Bird'.'

Here D interrupted. "When is this particular musical event going to happen?"

"Twenty, thirty years from today," M said, indifferently. "Depends on the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis."

"Well my dear M," D laughed, flashing him his most winsome look, clear sign he was enjoying this glimpse into his future and hoped to avoid abrupting it by such small correction as he now felt impelled to offer, " I expect there will be other songs by then. We cannot expect this calypso craze to continue. Why, some friends recently returned from England speak of 'a Liverpool Beat.' Who can say what songs new tunesmiths will have provided by that time?"

"No," M responded, firmly, "It will be as I say: 'Banana Boat Song' following and followed by 'Yellow Bird'. " To emphasize the finality of this judgement, he stooped to take up a piece of driftwood, which he then began to smash on a nearby rock, meanwhile screaming, "Thus perish all fetishes! Japanese fishnet ceiling draperies! Conversation-pits! Pipestem pants!"

"But M," D protested, "You're wearing pipestem pants yourself!"

"However," M resumed, as though his little fit had never been, "You will not win all the prizes. You will unaccountably be left out of several important anthologies. But those in the know will quickly figure out what petty jealousies and disgraceful self-serving resentments were the cause of these anomalous exclusions. They will remember whom you reviewed with brilliant malice, and how they or their friends decided to pay you back. No, D," M concluded, becoming stentorian so as to indicate the end was nigh, "Your fate shall be even as I say. The rewards, while puny compared to what you might make in a dedicated lifetime of real estate dealings, will be immense compared to the common lot in these matters. When publishing becomes extortion - sometime in the late 80s, I imagine - you will be required to pay less than most authors, to get your work into print and - ha! - distributed. Someone will actually try to get admitted to UWO by announcing he intends to do a PhD dissertation on your oeuvre. He will be denied admission, naturally. Someone else - "

"Huh?" said D, who had almost ceased to listen; over-indulgence was catching up with him again; he had begun pretending to be the Consul in his garden at Cuernavaca: "Huh? I'll get admitted to a UFO shaped like an egg in French? How's that?"

"Even though you will become more famous at writing than any of our generation at UBC save for G - "

"Save for G?" D interceded, dismayed.

"G will be published by Penguin Books," M said, smiling fatly. "G will win three Governor General's Awards. His works will be made into movies. He will be flown to the Antipodes. He will live in Cleveland."

"What's any of this, M, have to do with Nanai-im-i-o?" D spoke from his position in the sand of Vancouver Island.

"Just this," replied M, magisterially: "After this long and distinguished career, you will suggest to a college teacher in Nanaimo that you be given a fee to read at his college. And he will report back to you, D, that you are tiny tubers in Nanaimo. That is all I know, and all ye need to know, about Nanaimo: tiny tubers." A crazed grin blazed across his hirsute countenance as he spread his arms wide like a Roman consul approving a crucifixion or a German goalie anticipating a penalty kick. "And," he ended, "I shall make this paradise my home!"