Now, don't quote me on this or anything, but having spoken to Ana on the phone last night, the payphone down the bottom of the street ("bottom," yes, in the sexual fashion), I can firmly say that the water's been turned back on again and that means showers. For everyone, actually, golliping showers that are not in the least bit brown, grey, or opaque. Utter transparency! It's like rinsing with glass, actually, only there are no bits to get caught in your cheeks when you press them with your hands, there's no chance of blood being drawn.
Ana knows these things, she's in the know, she hangs around with the Mad Typewriter Gang that scoots along Gladys Row, you know, the street with all the hedges. Why are they called "mad?" Well, wouldn't you call someone stupid enough to strap a typewriter to the handlebars of a half-broken red scooter - well - possibly - mad? They can't balance for shit and they're usually piloting one-handed while they type madly with t'other, yes, and then they go full-bore hands-on-home-row when the light's red. Yes! They respect traffic lights! They must be mad. Sure, they can't be bothered with most of the laws of the road, but traffic lights. Well. They like traffic lights (but only, like the song says, when they're green).
Dottie Perpetual's the one that actually, as they say, told Ana about the status of the hot water tank's availability. Trailblazer, honey, Dottie Perpetual took the first shower in the altogether with one hand to the wall, still wearing her riding gloves because she's never been a proper girl and there's nothing more improper than wearing gloves in the shower! They say Dottie subsists on a diet of bugs caught between her teeth while on the road, they say she'll join the Algonquin Road Table when they make it a drive-thru. She favours her strict sestinas, and Ana calls her "Auntie."
The Deplorably Dogged Dapper is the one with three or four cigarettes betwixt his lips, yes, all the time, ongoing, neverending - they never run out! He's been accused of not inhaling but possibly he switches them out whenever his scooter crashes on account of the paper roll from his typewriter getting caught under the tire because he's convinced that somewhere in his non-euclidean typings lies the lost epilogue to "Kaddish," mostly because nobody can be bothered to remind him that Allen Ginsberg's been dead since the Nineties, that he's not Jewish, and that he's not even Allen Ginsberg. He's the one with the bare feet, of course, he likes to feel the concrete against his callouses. The Dapper has an irresistable impulse to mouth the words as he types, which has been known to distract other drivers, especially because he's never quite conceived of the words VOLUME. CONTROL. in relation to himself.
Saintly Sara Seagull, she's the one who habitually ties a bird to her head and SCREECHES AT YOU when you're having an argument, has decided that Ana is her secretly her soul sister, on account of the missing letters thing. She's what happens when you give an accountant a gun and a condom, whatever that means, and she sold her virginity to the Devil for a preternatural capacity for lists. Saintly Sara has always wanted to perform an entire opera using semaphore, but makes do with postcard stories typed directly onto the back of photographs of war criminals and then tosses them out in her wake, hoping to cause car accidents and street theatre and Nuremberg Trials. She wants to drag an antique bathtub along behind her scooter for the occasional mid-afternoon siesta in the harbour...
The journalist, Boddy Esss Bigg, they say he doesn't have eyes, no, just empty voids and a desperate hunger for News. Reporter for a Great Metropolitan Newspaper, he files reports from the road, dumping pages into mailboxes as he skims on by - to Bigg, the streets are sentences to be edited. He asks the big questions, the fiction versus non fiction or non versus fiction or fiction question mark non question mark. He has perfected the Styrofoam Riding Suits and has made himself hundreds of falsified passports and identity files; he's run for mayor, for president, for prime minister and pope. They say a woman in Ireland once witnessed a photograph of Bigg weep openly for hours when in the presence of horseradish; to pronounce his name properly the Esss must sound as air expended by a deflating tire in heat, a mating call for tires to come, to come and burn in an everlasting sexualized tire fire!
And Ana? How do I know Ana? We went to school together, maybe, and I knew her on weekends at garage sales and certainly there were parties, and everybody heard about her and the Russian count, the unpleasantness, and why she doesn't play cards anymore. Tarot cards make her violently ill. She favours poems with anaphora, the incantatory repetition, the calling of spirits, and the purr of a scooter engine. She found hers leaned up beside a little red garage with the seat falling off and negligible ignition and it claimed her, right there, she touched that magic gas cap and then they found her, oh, the Mad Typewriter Gang you can't quite say no to the gang when the Dapper kisses the back of your hand in that way that he does and Dottie Perpetual thrusts a mixer towards you and demands that you make her a dirty, dirty martini with an onion rather than an olive because she can't abide the dirty, pigeony things.
(c) 2006, Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved.