Lost In Space
“The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication” —Aristotle
“Mike’s in Sick Bay,” Bones, a ragged figure who resembled a skeleton with a thin film of skin from a still warm corpse stretched over it, said as he pointed a malformed finger in the direction of the single bed where my best friend was sitting. “Todd’s in the Captain’s chair,” Bones continued, his eyes cavernous pools of nothingness, his voice that of a man non compos mentis, “and only because I’m allowing it…I’m the Captain of this vessel!”
The three of us laughed in that uncomfortable way you laugh when you’re not sure if someone is making a joke or about to pull out an axe and chop you into little pieces.
Higher than the seventh summit of Everest, Bones wasn’t joking, he was bleary-eyed serious (and quite delusional). This unexpected flash of hydrophobia from Captain Bones pulled me from my drug-induced haze long enough to realize that the slightly bent greying man in front of me had assembled his closet-sized room in the old hotel into a likeness of the USS Enterprise from nineteen sixties television series, Star Trek. It was crude, but the room was definitely created in the image of the fictional Starship.
The busted down rocker I occupied, a weathered piece of furniture that looked like it had spent years living in a landfill before finding a new home in outer space, served as the Captain’s chair. The musty throne had calculators of various sizes, none working, glued to the arms. A workstation directly across from the ‘Captain’s chair’ was made up of more than a dozen plastic milk crates. It too had calculators, none working, glued to it. According to Bones, this was the “engineering department.”
In nineteen eighty-nine, Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister of Canada, gas was hovering somewhere around forty cents a liter, Guns N’ Roses was the biggest band on the planet—the group’s serpentine debut album Appetite For Destructionblared nonstop from the open roofs of T-Top Camaros driven by young punks with long hair and the open windows of chrome-wheeled Lincoln Continentals driven by middle-aged men with no hair—and a single room at the Chieftain cost a hundred and fifty dollars a month.
According to Sully, de facto manager of the Chieftain, the old hotel had once been a modest palace for out of town revelers. A malodorous combination of whiskey, soiled clothes, and cigarettes, Sully had given me the five-cent tour the day I moved in. “This place was one of the first buildings built in the city,” he announced proudly not long after we met. It definitely looked and smelled like it was one of the first buildings built in the city, perhaps one of the first structures built in all of Alberta.
In its prime the Chieftain had been a hotbed of activity. People of differing backgrounds, who’d travelled from far and wide to the then young city in search of opportunity, had made the hotel their temporary home while they built a new life in the west. Some came to work the land—Alberta was rich in fertile soil, among other things—others to escape umbrageous pasts. Much later, those who came to stake their claim in the booming oilfield lodged at the Chieftain.
Like the rooms located upstairs in the building, the main-floor taproom—which had long ago been gutted and turned into retail space—was once filled with all manner of characters: ramblers, gamblers, conmen, and ladies of the night. The air was thick with spirits from the past. If you closed your eyes you could almost picture men of all stripes imbibing and brawling, while beautiful and not so beautiful women sold love by the evening or by the hour.
If in its heyday the Chieftain was a well-turned out grandee in a tailored suit, it was now a senescent tramp bedecked in rags; its halls filled with ghosts too tired to rattle their rusted chains. Anyone who tarried too long at the geriatric auberge risked becoming ghosts themselves.
In the winter of eighty-eight/eighty-nine a friend of my father’s, in concert with my father, cooked up a scheme that would lead to my eventual residency at the Chieftain. The friend’s young daughter, who was going to school in the city, was finding it hard living on her own for the first time. My father, enjoying the sweet-spot of a new romance, wanted his bum, out of work son gone from his house. The two men came up with a solution that would solve both their problems.
Without any say in the matter, I was shipped off to stay with this voluptuous young woman. I wasn’t too put out by the idea, although I was certainly unhappy with the underhanded way in which the plan was devised and set in motion.
Roughly a month passed before a phone call from back home changed our fathers’ devious plan. Mike, a fellow longhaired dreamer, musician, music junkie, and stoner, was desperate to escape small town life and join me in the big smoke. It was, he said, time for us to continue our quest for rock and roll glory; to return to the work we’d begun back in Nowheresville.
The living arrangement with my young female acquaintance quickly unravelled by the time Mike arrived in the city, so the two of us decided to get our own place. We were brothers-in-arms, troubadours ready to conquer the world. Barely nineteen, I was a terrible singer and a mediocre songwriter. Mike, who was eighteen, was learning to play guitar after switching from bass. His talent, unlike mine, was far more apparent. Ready to take our music to the streets and to the masses, all we needed was a home base.
As it happened, another friend from Nowheresville was living in the city and had just moved into a new apartment. He tossed us the keys to his old place downtown that still had two weeks left on the lease. Neither Mike nor I spent much time looking for a place. We had two weeks. In Stoner Standard Time that was like a year. Unfortunately, Stoner Standard Time and reality are two very different timezones. The two weeks passed in a blink and we found ourselves out on the pavement. We did what anyone in urgent need of shelter would do, we stored our stuff and spent our first day homeless playing video games at an arcade downtown.
Those who say pot doesn’t steal your motivation or cause you to make boneheaded decisions simply haven’t smoked enough pot. That night we rented a room at a dumpster hotel (a palace compared to the Chieftain) located directly across the street from the arcade. The next morning, Mike took the want ads from the newspaper that came with our complimentary continental breakfast, and I took the rental listings. Off we went on our separate missions.
Affordable apartments were few and far between for two bums posing as rockstars, but I found one. Cheap Rooms, Shared Kitchen read the ad. I called the number and was given an address by a mysterious and muffled voice over the telephone that told to me come and fill out the paperwork. After hiking three miles to the location I was given, I found myself standing outside a strip mall. I double-checked the address; it was a Chinese restaurant. Once inside, a kind oriental lady greeted me and pointed to a doorway that lead up a flight of stairs. “Apartment upstairs,” she said with a smile.
Fatigued from my long walk, I climbed the stairs to a landing that lead to a hallway and two unmarked doors. I knocked on the first door. The door opened, and I was promptly ushered into a small office by a man who introduced himself as Dilby. The heavy set and balding oriental man appeared overly pleased to see me. “Come in. Come in,” he said. “Sit. Sit.”
“Where are the rooms?” I asked.
Dilby handed me a rental form and said, “I take you there.”
After filling out the form, Dilby drove me downtown to what at first glance appeared to be an abandoned building. Even though I wasn’t used to living in overly nice places at the time, the Chieftain was a tatterdemalion structure that looked more like a burned-out factory than a rental complex. To say it was a dump would be an insult to all the derelict buildings out there trying to make an honest living. The place was a shit-hole. Dilby was a slumlord.
Once inside the building, which turned out not to be an apartment complex but an old hotel, Dilby lead me down a long, dank hallway. It took about thirty seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim. Apparently the original lighting installed when the Chieftain was being constructed was still in use. Once my eyes focused, the place looked worse inside than it had on the outside. Dilby stopped at a door, unlocked it and flicked on the light. “Here you go.” He beamed as if he’d just shown me the penthouse suite at the Hilton.
The room had no windows, just a frosted skylight with a small crack in it. A Victorian-era steel-frame bed salvaged from the Titanic filled half the room, while an old refrigerator from Noah’s Ark took up a chunk of space in the corner. There was a closet-sized bathroom with two tiny sinks, one posing as a bathtub.
“What you think?” Dilby asked excitedly.
Bum central is what I thought. “I’ll take it,” I said, handing him a hundred and fifty dollars cash.
Dilby wrote out a receipt and gave me the keys. As he was leaving, he turned to me and, with sad puppy dog eyes said, “Don’t fuck me, Todd.”
I shuffled from one foot to the other feeling more than a little uncomfortable. “I…um…I…I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.
“Don’t fuck me,” Dilby repeated. “Lots of people move in and then they fuck me. They don’t pay rent.”
After I assured him I wasn’t planning on ‘fucking him’, Dilby left.
The room wasn’t much, but it was good enough for two bums standing on the brink of obscurity. Since I was footing the bill for the room, I took the bed. Mike would later claim a slab of the warped and washed-out hardwood floor.
The rock and roll dream was alive.
Sully, the short and compact ‘manager’, who had a deep love for alcohol, was the first person I met at the Chieftain. He cornered me in the hallway not long after Dilby left and, drunk out of his skull, informed me he looked after the place for the owner. After my guided tour, Sully invited me back to his room for a drink. While we sipped whiskey from plastic cups Sully gave me the book on The Chieftain and its longtime residents, including a spooky, nameless man (even Sully didn’t know his name), who came out of his room to retrieve takeout food from the (locked) front door downstairs a few times a week. I saw the man only once. His head was oval and looked like a flower-shop helium balloon. His face glowed green like he’d been in some sort of nuclear accident; he was almost transparent. It was very unsettling.
Like most of the residents who lived at the Chieftain, Sully wasn’t a bad guy, he was just a down-on-his-luck chronic alcoholic who couldn’t function without booze. He spent his days wasting away on skid row, calling everyone he didn’t like—male or female—a cunt-eyed slut. I never knew exactly what that meant, but it was his go-to phrase.
Sully’s room was stacked with old vinyl records. He loved drinking, cursing, and music, in that order. Next to the mountain of records sat a turntable, a fridge, and a bed. He appeared to wear the same clothes every day.
The entire time I lived at the Chieftain, I never once saw Sully sober. He would disappear for days on end, which is how I met Bones. Sully didn’t smoke dope, but he was the “man who could get anything.” One afternoon, out of weed and looking to score, I was banging on Sully’s door when fifty feet down a secondary hallway, Bones popped his head out of his room.
“Sully’s not around, man,” he squeaked. His voice sounded like it needed a shot of WD40. “I’m Bones.” He motioned for me to come down. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
“I’m looking for some smoke,” I said.
His eyes lit up. “You’ve come to the right place, man!”
It turned out Bones was Sully’s source. I was paying Sully a little extra to walk fifty feet to Bones’ room to get the dope. Bones took my money and told me to wait in his room. About twenty minutes later he returned with a baggie of weed. We got high and became fast friends. From that day forward, Sully was out as middle man.
After I landed us a place to stay, Mike found a job cooking in a restaurant as far from the Chieftain as you could get, about a mile outside the city. While he was at work, I would sit over in the USS Enterprise with Bones getting high. Since I was on unemployment insurance, I didn’t spend much time worrying about a job or money. I was convinced Mike and I were close to our big break and a job would only get in the way of my creativity. That, and I was a stoner who was lazy. I also suffered from crippling anxiety.
I whiled away the hours sleeping, listening to music, writing cliché lyrics, and waiting for Mike to finish work so we could bang out our future hit songs.
After walking five miles to work, cooking for a full ten hour shift, and then walking back to the hotel, Mike was often too exhausted to work on music (why he never bought a bus pass is a mystery to this day). Instead we would get stoned and plot our path to superstardom. How hard could it be? We figured we were about a year or two out from getting a record deal. Like the various unknown odors in the hallways of the old hotel, the delusion was strong at the Chieftain.
It wasn’t long before Mike rented his own room. After living in such close quarters for about a month, we had a fight. He had eaten the last orange in the fridge, my orange (or something as equally evil), I blew up and kicked him out. For about a week after our fight, Mike flirted with another guitar player/singer, while I stuck it out with the ragtag crew of dope head musicians we’d dug up a few weeks prior.
After a week of dueling fake bands—we rarely practiced, and we never played any actual gigs—we made up. We were brothers in song after all, destined for the big time. There was no room for egos, although we both had them (and mine was elephantine compared to Mike’s).
Our fake stoner band didn’t last long. It imploded when one of the guys landed a job with his mother’s boyfriend and had to start getting up early every morning for work. It was as uncool and un-rock and roll as you could get. The only thing that beat it out in the lame department was the guy back in Nowheresville we had to kick out of our first band because he had gotten himself grounded for coming home from rehearsal stoned.
It was around this time that Tong moved into the Chieftain. A scraggy Asian teen with a spiked hairdo that made his head look like it had been formed inside a giant soup can, Tong was around our age. He walked with a limp and had one wilted arm. The hand on that arm shook constantly and was so badly crippled the thumb appeared to be glued to the index finger.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in the world of the Bloods and Crips, Tong had been shot in the back, near his spine. The bullet had passed through his body, leaving him disabled. Once he’d recovered, and fearing for his safety, he had headed north to Canada with stolen money from the gang. With eyes wide and red, Mike and I listened as Tong spun tales of the California underworld: of gang wars, drugs, and murder.
Tong was a sad but lovable character. He often had us laughing our asses off. One morning I was awakened in the wee hours by a rustling sound out in the hallway. Curious, I rolled out of bed, opened my door, and stuck my head out in the hall. There was Tong shuffling by—he was like a broom when he walked—a galactic smile on his face. Mike popped his head out of his room and said, “Where were you, dude?”
“G-u-y,” Tong said. “I found twenty-cent, so I went to 7-11 and bought two pieces of licorice.”
Mike laughed, shook his head, and closed his door.
That was Tong. We fed him when we could.
Tong’s tales of Los Angeles and his former life started to become grander around the time Dillon entered the picture. Dillon didn’t live in the Chieftain at the time, he worked at Layla’s, a club located a few blocks away. Mike and I, and later Tong, would go to the club for happy hour and talk about our future world domination. One evening, while pounding back cheap drinks and talking big, Dillon came on shift. He was another escapee from our small town. It wasn’t long before he was buying us drinks and hanging out at the Chieftain on his days off.
One night, after listening to us fumble our way through a new song we were working on called “Too Young Too Die,” written about a friend who had committed suicide the previous fall, Dillon decided Mike and I were bound for the big time and he was the one who was going to get us there. Tong, also in the room that night, and not wanting to be outdone, announced he would soon be heading back to Los Angeles. He asked us to go with him.
“G-u-y,” he said with excitement, “I have connections in L.A. (he pronounced it ‘Al-Lay’) who can get your music to the right people.”
We were floored. Los Angeles? The land of milk and money? The City of Angels, where bands like the Eagles, The Doors, and Van Halen got their start? Where legendary clubs like The Whiskey, The Rainbow, and The Troubadour, places we’d only read about in rock magazines and books, were waiting for us to blow their doors off with our music? Hell yeah, we were in.
Dillon was in, too.
As excited as we were about going to L.A., there were concerns over Tong’s safety. What would happen to him once he went back and faced his gang family? Tong assured us he would be safe. “Once we get to Al-Lay, g-u-y,” he said, “I will throw myself at the mercy of my old gang.”
When you’re young and stupid, you believe what most people tell you. Tong wove a tale so impressive it would have made Hemingway proud. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to go to L.A. (or at least I’d convinced myself I wanted to go), but cracks were beginning to form in Tong’s story. San Andreas fault-line sized cracks.
Bones was one of the more eccentric characters at the Chieftain, but he certainly wasn’t the strangest. One night, while Mike and I were working on our small repertoire of songs—such teenage masterpieces as “Live Fast, Die Young” and “All The Aces”—two older men we’d never seen before walked by the open door of my room and stopped to listen. They were carrying a twenty-four pack of beer and invited us to their room for a cold one.
Free beer? Hell yeah.
After a few cold ones, I asked Harlan and Benny how long they’d been living at the Chieftain. “Not Long,” Harlan, the younger of the two said with a creepy, black-toothed grin.
“Where are you guys from?” Mike asked.
“We were just released from the Alberta Hospital,” Harlan said.
(The Alberta Hospital, which opened in 1923 in Edmonton, is a psychiatric facility that at one time housed mental health patients, including the criminally insane.)
“We killed a man,” Benny said, his words dropping like a sledge hammer on a block of cold hard steel (and without a hint of sarcasm). He laughed, not a jovial, haha laugh, but a maniacal ‘I’m going to slit your throat and drink your blood’ kind of laugh. That was our cue; we were on our feet making for the door.
Planning for the trip to L.A. continued. Dillon—who by this time was living at the Chieftain after his girlfriend had kicked him out for cheating—said he could put the money together in about a month. He promised to secure enough cash to get the four of us to L.A. and sustain us for awhile.
“Ssssoooodd,” he said—when Dillon spoke he elongated his words, stretched them out for effect, and he always changed the T in my name to an S for some reason—“I have one word for you: Porsche.” That’s all he wanted. That was his dream, to own a Porsche.
Dillon had no interest in dope or drugs of any kind, but he liked the odd drink (although I don’t ever recall him being intoxicated). He would hold a bottle of beer between his thumb, index, and middle finger, and each time he took a drink he would assume a cool blue-steel stare and scan the room. It was as if he was an actor filming a scene, one only he was a part of. I was always waiting for someone to yell, “CUT!”
Like his speech, Dillon’s mannerisms were overly exaggerated. He was constantly playing a role. In retrospect, we all were: Dillon was acting like a band manager; Mike and I were acting like rockstars; Tong was playing the part of wounded gangster on the lamb. We were lost souls trying to fake it until we made it, gamed by our own insecurities and immaturity.
Mike’s dad came to the city a few weeks before we were set to leave for L.A. It was the first time Mr. D. had been to the Chieftain. Mr. D. was a good man, if not a little heavy on the dramatics. He freaked out at the site of the building and insisted Mike come home and finish his schooling. We argued with him; we were out in the real world, living our dream on our own terms. The poor man left looking more than a little distressed. I’m sure Mike telling him we were moving to Los Angeles didn’t help.
When he returned to Nowheresville, Mr. D. tracked down my mother and insisted she do something, because, as he put it, “Our kids are living on skid row for fucksakes!” My mother relayed this to me during a phone conversation a few days later. I rolled my eyes. How could Mr. D. not see that we were on the verge of greatness?
There was one communal kitchen in the Chieftain. We used it when money was tight, but mostly we ate Big Bite hot dogs and greasy hamburgers from 7-11. The stove, an original piece from the Chieftain’s glory days, only worked with fuses, and none had been provided when we’d moved in. Whenever we wanted to cook something, we would have to unscrew fuses from the fusebox in one of our rooms. While unscrewing a fuse in my room one afternoon, we heard the tv in the room behind mine go off. The occupant, who was watching a baseball game at the time (the walls were paper thin), became unhinged. He started banging on the wall and cursing in a booming, demonic voice. I quietly screwed the fuse back in.
For days afterward we were leery and on the lookout for the monster who lived in the room behind mine. Eventually Ricky caught us in the hallway one afternoon and introduced himself. He didn’t mention the fuse incident, and we thought it best to not bring it up. He was a sickly figure with a wet brain, his encephalon damaged from decades of drinking. He was tall, with stick arms, stick legs, and a grotesquely swollen belly. He looked like a snowman with burnt flesh stretched over it. He was mostly bald, save for a few stringy patches of long hair that hung from random spots on his head. He was hunched over and disfigured. When he spoke, it was almost a whisper, a voice much different than the loud, corrosive one we’d heard while fuse hunting.
Ricky ‘worked’ at a local bar a few blocks from the Chieftain. I’m not sure if he was technically employed there, but he told us he worked the joint most nights. He was on a disability, so the bar paid him with a two-four (twenty-four beer) at the end of each shift.
We had the opportunity to watch Ricky in action late one night. He walked around the bar with an empty beer case cradled under one arm picking empties off the tables. Once full, he would take the box to the rear of the building and return a few minutes later with another one. Before he put the bottles in the case, he would drink whatever alcohol was left in them. It was a sad and sobering sight.
Ricky was harmless, as were most of the characters who lived in the Chieftain, including the Pigeon Man. After being awakened one morning by someone banging around on the roof just above my skylight, I tracked Sully down and inquired about the noise.
“Were you up on the roof earlier?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“I heard banging.”
“It was probably the Pigeon Man.”
“The Pigeon Man?”
“The Pigeon Man. He’s a reclusive little ninja who lives next to the back stairwell.”
“Why do you call him the pigeon man?”
“He likes pigeons.”
The guy likes pigeons, I thought. Nothing wrong with that. No harm in a lonely hermit treating a few wild birds as pets; whatever gets you through the day, I guess.
Later that evening, wracked with hunger, I set out for the communal kitchen armed with a box of macaroni and cheese (a staple of every struggling artist’s diet) and two fuses. What I saw when I entered the small space was forever burned in my mind—the Pigeon Man, sitting at the table, covered in blood and guts, eating what look to me like tiny chickens. There were feathers and innards everywhere: on the floor, on the walls, on the table.
It turned out the Pigeon Man really did like pigeons.
The small oriental man (who spoke no English) offered a greasy grin, a wave, and kept on eating. I lost my appetite and returned to my room. The next morning the kitchen was spotless. Besides being a bird connoisseur, the Pigeon Man was also a clean freak.
Click. Click. Click, click, click. Click. Click. Click, click, click. I tried to block out the noise by covering my head with one pillow, then two pillows, but nothing worked. I’d heard typing coming from Room 1 almost every day since we moved into the Chieftain, but it had never been this loud. The sound was coming from the Undertaker’s room.
According to Sully, ‘Undertaker’ Dan was writing a book (no shit). Outside the fact that the man was once a funeral director, Sully knew very little about him. He couldn’t have been very successful at his chosen profession, I surmised, if he was living in the Chieftain with the rest of us outcasts, bums, losers, and bottom dwellers. I figured he was likely writing the history of embalming or the decline of western civilization by the amount of time he spent banging on his typewriter.
Normally the clicking was only audible when you walked past Dan’s room, but on this day the sound was unbearable. I grabbed Mike (I wasn’t going down to that end of the building alone), and we headed off to investigate. We found Dan with his door open—his door was never open—perched behind a tv tray tapping away on what looked like a prop from the silent film era. He stopped typing and looked up from his machine. It was the evil Mister Rogers staring back at us, complete with moth eaten cardigan. He didn’t say a word, he just offered a thin, spooky smile, nodded, and returned to his work.
That was our one and only encounter with the Undertaker.
Bones may have been a little strange and mentally damaged from years of dropping LSD, but he was harmless. He was nothing more than a burned-out hippie with a kind heart and an impressive imagination. His natural ability for drawing and storytelling were enviable. He built and hung intricate WWII model airplanes from the ceiling in his room. A few of the planes had grey strips of cotton poking out the back to resemble smoke from damage caused by enemy gunfire. He wrote futuristic stories and sketched amazing pictures to illustrate them.
“Why do they call you ‘Bones?” I asked one afternoon while Mike was at work. Bones took a pull off the joint we were sharing, sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, and handed it back to me. He paused for about thirty seconds before exhaling. A look of confusion creased his age-beaten face. This was long after the “Todd’s in the Captain’s Chair” skit. I was beginning to feel a little uncomfortable and wondered if perhaps the baggie of weed in my pocket would be the last one I ever purchased from Bones.
I took a hit off the joint and waited for his response. Bones just sat there staring, more through me than at me, lost somewhere in the haze and maze of his insanity. What if he decides to kill me, I thought, who would ever know? I shook the visual of my dismembered body laying on the floor of the USS Enterprise from my mind. After what felt like an hour, but what was likely only a few seconds in Stoner Standard Time, Bones screamed, “Doctor Leonard McCoy!” He was effulgent, his eyes tiny slits that were redder than the blood I imagined flowing from my head after he’d struck it with a clawhammer.
“Oh.” I said, passing the joint back to him. “I get it.”
“Yep.” Bones took another toke. Smoke swirled from his mouth and nostrils and floated up to the ceiling where it congregated with the other wisps of pot smoke and his model airplanes. “Doctor McCoy is my favorite Star Trek character,” he said. “And don’t ever forget, I’m the Captain of this vessel!”
“Riiiiight,” I nodded, wondering if he was aware that McCoy, as far as my dope rotted mind could recall, had never captained the Enterprise at any point during Star Trek’s three season run. I figured it best not to mention it. Even though he was harmless, I wasn’t sure if Bones had a hunting knife or other defensive tool (an axe or a clawhammer?) in the event of an alien attack, and I wasn’t eager to find out.
The tale of Tong came unravelled during one of our final late night planning sessions for our trip to California. We were only a week away from boarding a Greyhound bus to La La Land when, for reasons known only to him, Tong blurted out, “When we get to Al-Lay g-u-y, I can get you anything you want.”
Mike lit up. “Anything?”
“Anything!” Tong thundered with the bluster of a televangelist.
“I want a vintage Gold Top Les Paul,” Mike said.
“You got it.” Tong was on fire and basking in the glow of his position as provider of unattainable things. “Todd? What do you want when we get to Al-Lay?”
“Where will you get the money?” I asked.
Tong was balls-out confident. “G-u-y, I tell you. When we get to Al-Lay, there’s nothing we can’t have.”
Mike looked at me skeptically. He too was beginning to see the cracks. I lost it. “Bullshit. It’s all bullshit,” I said.
Tong broke down sobbing. It had all been one big lie. He wasn’t from Los Angeles. He wasn’t hiding out from a gang, and he’d never been shot. He was born disabled in Vietnam and had come to Canada as a refugee. He’d made the whole thing up. I wanted to punch him in his soup can head, but softened once he began sharing some of the horror stories of his life before coming to Canada.
I shudder to think what would have happened to us had the lies continued until we’d landed in L.A.
With our trip to California on the rocks, it was back to square one. Dillon assured us he could still make us big stars, but at some point he found a new woman and quickly faded in the rearview mirror of the engineless vehicle that was our dream. Tong vanished not long afterward, never to be seen or heard from again. Mike wisely returned home to finish his grade twelve (much to the delight of his father). I caught a Greyhound bus for parts unknown. Like Bones I was lost, not in space, but right here on earth.
TODD STERLING MUSIC 