Week Eight
Welcome to Three Things, fellow writers and readers. This
week's fictional leads: "Reunion Party," "The Bouncer" and
"Emergence."
Reunion Party
This week I became aware of a fascinating collaborative
project between Canadian artists Vid Ingelevics and Blake Fitzpatrick
entitled "Freedom Rocks: The
Everyday Life of the Berlin Wall." From the project website: "The
title is taken from the branding found on a bag of small Berlin Wall souvenir
pieces sold in Toronto in the early 1990s. The project began with the goal of
documenting the post-1989 movement of the Wall, both large full segments and
small fragments, from Berlin to North America. This website functions as a
nexus point for the intersection of our work with many different registers of
the continuing history of the Wall in its atomized and dispersed form. The
charting of the Wall as a mobile ruin has revealed an object with shifting
symbolic value and power."
I was particularly struck by the idea of a "mobile ruin" – a
monument which, though no longer of a piece (or even of a place), continues to
evolve as a narrative hub. With this central notion in mind, I began to imagine
a group of people who share a common attachment to a meaningful object –
ideally one that might be dismantled and dispersed among them.
Perhaps a skeleton?
What if a group of medical (or veterinary) students were
to steal a human (or canine) skeleton from the anatomy lab and share out the
bones between them as part of a pact to reunite in a decade's time?
Imagine a short story (or novel?) that interweaves the
night of the big reunion – complete with reassembly of the skeleton and the
inevitable psycho-social complications inherent to reunions – with significant developments from each character's past. What have the members of this particular group
been up to in the intervening decade? What have those bags of stolen bones
seen?
The Bouncer
This week, while watching a re-run of the excellent Canadian
crime series, Intelligence, I happened to notice the subtle yet convincing
acting of the man who plays the bouncer at the Chickadee Club (headquarters of
the show's anti-hero, Vancouver "Weed King," Jimmy Reardon). This got
me thinking about a friend of mine from junior high (let's call him with
Kevin) with whom I've long since lost touch.
The last time I saw Kevin, I didn't recognize him; if he
hadn't said my name I would’ve unwittingly snubbed him in the street. This was
partly because ten years or more had passed since we'd moved on to different
high schools, and partly because he was easily twice the size he'd been when we
were friends. Kevin had become a wall of muscle. He wasn't just standing on the
street, he was working the door at the longest-running strip club in our
coastal home town.
The whip-smart, goofy, sad-eyed kid I'd sat beside in
Chem Lab had become a bouncer. What was more, when I stopped to catch up with
him, it became clear that he was no longer "all there."
Like many writers, I tended to gravitate to misfits like
Kevin when I was in school. Our little group of friends may have been "freaks,"
but we amused ourselves in fairly typical
teenage ways. When we weren't trooping or lolling about in small, bored herds,
we were planning, executing or recovering from parties. One such gathering,
staged on a chilly, kelp-strewn beach, was the scene of Kevin's big melt-down.
He'd been drinking a vile concoction dawn from every bottle in his paren'ts'
liquor cabinet, and the results were less than pretty. Suffice it to say that
we looked after him – as well and as long as we could.
Somewhere amid the swim of memory, I began to conceive of
a fictional bouncer and his erstwhile high school friend – perhaps a shy thirty-something
guy dragged along to a bachelor party at a strip club only to find his old
buddy working the door? Consider how the story of such a night might combine
with a back-story based on a beach party gone wrong. Might it include a teenage
boy striding drunkenly into the ice-cold ocean? Perhaps a group of soaked and
frightened friends to drag him back?
Emergence
How's this for a headline: "Blade Removed from N.W.T
Man's Back – Three Years Later." Once again the CBC News site delivers
narrative gold.
One might sprint off in any number of narrative
directions from such a rich starting line; I went back in time to a
corresponding memory of my own, then spun off from there into an imagined life.
The only thing more compelling than that blade lying dormant in the man's flesh is the thought of it working its way out. Consider this tidbit from the article:
"This week, he felt something different.
'My nail caught a piece of the tip of the blade that was
underneath the skin and made a little sound, so that worried me,' he said.
His girlfriend, Stephanie Sayine, took a look.
''I told Billy, "There's a knife sticking out of your
back." I was scared. I was ready to pull it out with tweezers,' she
said."
My father, too, once came upon a foreign object in the
back of a loved one. He was brushing our massive dog (code name Barnabus) when
he came upon a lump. Fearing cancer, he drove Barnabus directly to the vet.
Surgery revealed not tissue, malignant or benign, but a bullet. Two years previous, a farmer had shot Barnabus for barking at his sheep – three bullets in the chest, only two of
which the vet had been able to retrieve. (The third lay too close to the
heart.) The first miracle occurred when Barnabus somehow dragged himself the
three miles back to our house without bleeding to death. The second involved
the slow, steady expulsion of that hostile object from his flesh.
In recalling this extraordinary series of events, I found
myself wondering for the first time ever about that farmer – or rather, about a
fictional farmer who shoots a dog that's harassing his flock.
What if, instead of the heartless rage-aholic I imagined
as a child, he's actually a gentle man driven to desperate measures? Perhaps
his wife (a dissatisfied city girl) is horrified by his violent defence of his
stock; it might even be the straw that breaks the marital camel's back.
What if she leaves him there and then? And what if, instead
of dragging itself home, the wounded dog lies on the verge of the road howling
until the heartsick farmer takes it in?
One thought on “Week Eight”
Bachelor Party Event Management, Plastic tiaras, https://eventmanagementz.com/bachelor-party-event-management/ overflowing mixed drinks, and hot strippers—that is the thing that customary single woman parties are made of. Notwithstanding, if a liquor powered night of cheerful lewdness isn’t exactly what you have as a main priority for your occasion, there are some substitute alternatives out .https://eventmanagementz.com