Mexican Rabbits

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Version française

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My wife and I had been separated for about two months and I was living in an unremarkable and noisy bachelor apartment in a depressing neighbourhood.

There were about 40 apartments in the building where I was. My neighbours directly above me – a young Mexican couple, the Conejos – were polite and spoke in a nasal Spanish gibberish which I could not understand at all.

One night around 11:00, I was sleeping on the couch when their relentless lovemaking woke me up.

“Ain’t love great when it’s well made,” I thought, annoyed by their indecent sighs.

I tried in vain to get back to sleep. After awhile I decided to go out to read in a café until my neighbours’ Mexican hormones calmed down.

There was a coffee shop a short 20 minutes walk away. It was one of those franchised chains lit by crude fluorescent lights where young people in ill-fitting uniforms served the dark beverage in paper cups. It was open all night and smokers were relegated to a packed glass-enclosed room while the rest of the restaurant was empty.

One would think that following the smoking ban in public places coffee shops would have lost all their clientele as coffee without cigarettes is just not the same thing. I guess people are quick to give up life’s simple pleasures. Many thanks to Zebra Jay for the photo.

I entered the cramped smoking room with a coffee and a copy of Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, hoping that the Swiss-German author’s eastern wisdom would help me forget the emptiness I felt.

Sitting at a table for four, two girls were talking.

— A funny thing happened to me at work, one of the girls said. After my shift, while I was changing in the backroom, Jason snuck in and took me from behind!

— Ah! Ah! That’s typical! scoffed the other one, Jason always does that!

I could not believe my ears. Here I was in a crowded public place and people were actually having this kind of conversation oblivious to their surroundings! I tried to focus on my book, lit another cigarette and took a sip of coffee. I was there to clear my mind after all.

I managed to follow Harry, Steppenwolf’s main character, as he was caught in his personal ontological maze. I had almost forgotten the girls’ obscene conversation when two guys joined them. I did not pay much attention until the girl who was groped by Jason got up to use the ladies’ room.

The two young men and the other girl looked lustily at her leaving.

When she came back, she said:

— So, what were you talking about?

— We were saying your ass looks great in those jeans, said one of the guys.

She immediately responded:

— You know why? It’s because I’m not wearing panties!

Flustered, I went back to my book, lit another cigarette, gulped some lukewarm coffee and really tried hard to think about anything else. Oddly, Tales of Ordinary Madness, Charles Bukowski’s famous short stories collection, came to my mind.

Maybe I needed to meet my Hermine, the Steppenwolf character who helped Harry to come to grip with his situation and learn to enjoy life again.

My predicament was not the same however. I was not depressed nor suicidal, I was only bitterly disappointed that my marriage had failed. And now, because of the Mexican rabbits who lived upstairs and those kids sitting at the coffee shop, I was entertaining lewd thoughts that were rubbing raw my feelings of loneliness.

Rabbits (conejo in Spanish) are not rodents. Rodents have incisors that are continually growing and needing to be ceaselessly worn down. Rabbits have two sets of incisors one behind the other. The female rabbit ovulates by reflex and can give birth to up to 12 kits three times a year.

I did not feel like myself anymore.

Finally the youths got up and left. Relieved, I tried to focus on my book again.

That’s when four ladies in their fifties coming back from bingo sat next to me and passionately discussed the most efficient manner to pleasure themselves with a hand-held shower head.

That was it, I had had enough. I closed my book, put out my cigarette, finished drinking my coffee and left, glad I had not brought a Henry Miller novel instead of Steppenwolf.

:Henry Valentine Miller (1891-1980) was a prolific American author whose books were banned in the United States on the grounds of obscenity until 1961. A couple of years later, western high courts rendered that kind of obscenity obsolete. The times, as the song says, they were a-changing.

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The Encyclopædia

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I was home one evening in 1986 getting ready for a writing session when the doorbell rang. Suzanne Vega was singing Marlene on the Wall on the stereo and I turned it down before opening the door to a 50-year old stranger standing awkwardly in front of me in a jacket and a tie.

He was selling the Encyclopædia Britannica.

It was not clear to me how he knew that I was a budding editor but he was quick to point out that a young man of my profession needed reliable reference material.

The 15th edition of Britannica had been published a year earlier and with 33 volumes it boasted that it held “the sum of all human knowledge.”

Those were the days before the World Wide Web and Google. Searching for information meant spending hours in a library instead of simply firing up a browser.

I did have a computer back then, an Apple Macintosh Plus, which was sneered at by my colleagues who considered it just a toy. They all used Micom 2000 word processors to write.

The Apple Macintosh Plus micro-computer made a significant contribution to bringing computing to the masses, as long as they could afford the over $2,500 purchase price. Public domain photo provided by Apple Wiki.

Listening to the salesman I could not help but be seduced by the opportunity to have a vast amount of general information at my disposal in the comfort of my home. However the steep $1,800 price frightened me. I am not the kind of man to make a major purchase on impulse.

I told the salesman I would think about it and call him to let him know of my decision. He gave me his card and left disappointed. I then went back to writing my story regarding the structure of the new National Gallery of Canada which was under construction. To me it looked like the skeleton of a dinosaur.

From a distance and with some imagination the granite pillars of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa can look like the ribcage of a dinosaur's skeleton. The glass walls demonstrate that it is easier to achieve transparency in architecture than in politics.

The next day at work I told my friend Aaron about the surprise visit from the encyclopædia salesman and that I was hesitant to disburse such a large amount of money.

“You should buy it,” said Aaron. “Knowledge is priceless. Did you know that if you read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica the University of Oxford will give you a degree?”

“Is that true?”

“Of course it is, don’t you know anything? The Encyclopædia Britannica is a British institution! Frankly, I don’t know why I waste my time discussing with a peasant like you who does not understand the value of learning!”

Aaron’s argument made an impression on me and I decided to invest in perfecting my knowledge.

Of course, I know now that nobody ever received a free university degree by reading a complete encyclopædia.

I also learned that Encyclopædia Britannica is actually a Scottish institution (established in Edinburgh in the 18th century) and that by the mid-1980s it had been owned by American interests for over 60 years.

When I called back, the encyclopædia salesman was shocked that I had kept my word. I told him that, yes, I was ready for enlightenment and that I would buy the leather-bound gilt-edged onionskin edition.

At its peak, Encylopædia Britannica employed up to 2,300 door-to-door salesmen among which Empire of the Sun author J. G. Ballard and actor Woody Harrelson's father.

For years my encyclopædia sat proudly in one of my bookcases and although I did not read it from beginning to end, it gave me hours of intellectual satisfaction.

When my wife and I divorced in 2000, we sold the house and I prepared to move to a small apartment. Looking at all my belongings, I knew I needed to get rid of many of the things I had acquired over the years.

But before I moved, a friend came to visit from out of town and stayed at the house for a few days. To thank me for my hospitality, she gave me the Encyclopædia Britannica on CD-ROM, a $50 value. I thought this electronic version would be adequate for my newly restricted living quarters.

I packed my leather-bound encyclopædia and took it to a used bookstore where I was offered $25 for the complete set of 33 volumes. I felt insulted by this contempt of knowledge.

When I calmed down, I decided to entrust my literary treasure to a small library I knew in the countryside, close to the haunted house I once owned.

I drove there only to be turned down by the librarian who claimed she did not have the shelf space. I then offered it to a literacy organization which also rejected the donation.

I regretfully realized that my initial $1,800 investment in knowledge was actually worthless.

And then it struck me: I had been totally mistaken about this prized possession of mine. An encyclopædia is not knowledge, it’s merely information. Information becomes knowledge only once it’s processed. How many people have owned encyclopædias without ever reading them?

Now that the Discovery Channel was available for all to watch, my beautifully-bound encyclopaedia, was perceived as not only cumbersome but useless.

A week later, I was visiting my old friend Asaph Mikhailovich, a well-read man cursed with a crippling affliction. I told him how I had been trying to dispose of my encyclopædia. He quietly looked at me and said:

– You know, when I want to consult Britannica, I have to ride my wheelchair ten blocks to the public library.

Not anymore.

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Working for the Russians

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Version française

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Lately Russian bots have been crawling my blogs. This reminds me of my early days as a professional writer and editor.

In the early 1980s, while Canada was in the midst of a recession, I reluctantly joined the ranks of the unemployed. With the jobless rate in the double-digits I decided it would be a good time to get an education, hoping that when I graduated there would be more work opportunities.

University was costly for me. Of course, tuition fees were expensive and the menial labour I had to do to support myself left me living in poor lodgings and eating cheap food. I was broke and indebted.

After completing my university degree I naively thought the days of despicable jobs were over. I was educated, I had paid my dues, I assumed it was time to reap the benefits.

I soon realized that employers were not easily impressed with my diploma: they wanted candidates with a degree AND experience.

With Canada slowly recovering from recession and nobody willing to hire me, I turned to freelance work.

The first job I found was writing essays for students who lacked the discipline to attend their classes but did not want to break their parents’ heart by flunking their courses.

With the name of their professor, the subject of the essay, and the bibliography and syllabus of the course, in two days I could whip out a decent 15-page paper for nearly any of the liberal arts.

First I would go to the university library to dig up the professor’s doctorate thesis to get a feel for his character, beliefs and writing style. All the while noting any of his ideas that I might be able to recycle to flatter his ego.

University libraries usually carry the doctorate thesis of all their faculty. That's where you will find what your professor sounded like when he or she was sitting on the other side of the lectern.

Then, I would read the introduction and conclusion of all the books in the bibliography connected to the subject of the essay I was to write, skimming through the content and taking notes in the process.

The speed-reading course I had taken one summer became a sound investment.

Then I would write for fifteen hours straight, peppering the document with any bit of general knowledge I had that seemed appropriate.

Without having attended any of those classes, I never got less than a “B” grade and my satisfied customers started referring me to their slacker friends.

Unfortunately, this kind of hack writing is only profitable around mid-term and at the end of a semester.

One evening as I was waiting for a customer in a university coffee shop, I met an adult student who was taking Russian-language classes and worked as a writer for the Soviet embassy press office. We became friends and after meeting a few times, she asked me if I would be interested in a position with her employer.

Starting to work in a potential Russian spy nest was somewhat frightening since the Cold War was still raging. However I had a powerful incentive for wanting that job: my landlord came straight out of a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel and cared about the working class only if they paid their rent on time.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a 19th century Russian writer known for his lengthy novels, dependence to alcohol and poor gambling skills. Hate him or love him, he is considered as one of Europe's major writers and certainly his works should be part of anybody's general knowledge.

The interview I had with the press secretary went well and he offered me a part-time job as an editor. The Soviet embassy press office was located in two contiguous apartments on the 15th floor of a large residential building. Office furniture consisted mainly of ordinary chairs and tables crumbling under piles of papers and publications. The table that was assigned to me faced a bay window which gave me a splendid view of the city.

My job was to rework stories originally written in Moscow and render them printable for Canadian publications.

I do not know if this is still valid, but since time immemorial Russian writers had been paid by the page: the longer the text, the more money they would get.

Once you know that, War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov start making sense.

The stories I was to edit were translated from Russian to either French or English. Regrettably, translators were also paid by the page and already long bland articles were getting stretched further in the process. I quickly became quite adept at turning a 4,000-word piece of logorrhea into a 300-word somewhat adequate news story.

I say “somewhat adequate” because the subject matter of the texts I received was often a hard sell. Canadian papers did not care much about the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth) nor about the use of pesticides to boost agricultural reform in Turkmenistan, one of the Soviet republics.

From time to time however interesting stories would appear. Papers about the Soviet space program, medical research, natural wonders such as Lake Baïkal and so forth could be respun and placed in Canadian media.

Months passed and one day, looking through my window, I noticed building cranes had appeared in the skyline. Construction was picking up, a sure sign that the economy was getting back on track.

The construction sector is considered as a barometer of the economy. Commercial and residential building projects create wealth through job creation, accommodation for new or expanding businesses and lodgings for new homeowners.

One morning, 18 months after I began working for the Russians, the press secretary called me for a meeting and told me how satisfied he was with my work. However decisions had been made higher up to modernize. They were going to replace the typewriters everybody was using with computers. This meant efficiencies had to be gained elsewhere. That was the first time I heard that euphemism meaning I was being laid off.

But in that year and a half, my freelance worker status had improved and I was no longer writing essays for students. The experience I had gained was valuable and some of my clients, learning I was available, started providing me with more work.

I had gotten myself a career.

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Cannibals

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Version française

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My text had to be delivered by close of business Friday. Thursday night I was still torturing my laptop’s keyboard to make the deadline on time.

The article had to be original but I could not come up with new ideas. It was my third draft and still the story was not going where it was supposed to go. What is a creator to do when his work will not follow the mind of its maker?

Finally I decided to search countless pages of notes saved on hard disks, diskettes and tapes. Using an old Macintosh SE30, I dug through the innards of diskettes for 20-year old back-ups. Every time I found something reusable I transferred it to the laptop by modem.

And the clock kept ticking...

I butchered away through unpublished stories trying to make mine again the virtues of my past creativity. I chewed ideas that were too raw, making them fit for human consumption. It was messy but it was coming along...

At 3:00 AM, the laptop was overheating. I could feel the CPU boiling under the keyboard.

Then the computer started making strange noises: “Aarrrruuuh! Aarrrruuuh! Aarrrruuuh!”

I knew what it was: the bearings of the internal cooling fan were giving up. I had to turn off the laptop until I could replace the fan assembly.

A computer’s integrated circuits generate heat that would build up quickly without dissipating devices. In this picture, the copper pipe draws heat from the CPU and motherboard for the cooling fan to expel.

I opened the back of the laptop, removed the faulty cooling fan, and went to bed wondering where I would find parts for a five-year-old laptop.

First thing in the morning, I took a cab to a computer store that sold end-of-line equipment. The owner was not selling spare parts but suggested another store that might be able to help.

The fellow in the second store’s service department told me he would order the part but it could take a few weeks for delivery. “No can do, I said, I need it this morning.”

After some thought the young man said: “There’s a shop with which we sometimes do business that locates hard to find parts. It's far but it’s accessible by bus. I have to warn you though: this is a ‘peculiar’ kind of business.” I got the address and the directions, and hopped on a bus.

When I got off the bus, I was in the middle of a field. There was a wooded area behind me. I read the directions: “Go under the bridge and walk for five minutes until you see an unpaved pathway to your right.”

I looked around; there was an overpass to my right. I figured that was the “bridge”. I went under it and soon I saw a trail leading through an overgrown area. I followed it for awhile until I found myself in the middle of an industrial park.

The address was 1245 Industrial Road. I guess the urban designer who came up with that street name felt as creative as I was the previous night, tearing off bits and pieces from old texts.

Twelve-forty-five Industrial Road was a one-story building with grey siding behind an unkempt front yard. I rang the bell and waited.

A lanky young man with a shaved head, a nose ring and gouged earlobes opened the door. His bare arms were tattooed from shoulder to wrist. For some reason I thought of Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Moby Dick was a vindictive sperm whale chased by the equally spiteful captain Ahab. Native harpooners were often used in whaling expeditions. Europeans and Americans prejudiced against natives sometimes depicted them as cannibals. However documented evidence indicates that colonialists resorted to cannibalism for survival. The British members of Sir John Franklin’s expedition set to discover the Northwest passage in 1848, or the survivors of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse off the coast of Mauritania in 1816 are good examples.

I explained what I was looking for. Without a word he let me in and left me to wait in a large damp room that reeked of mildew. The carpet was dirty and there were gutted out computers piled up all around.

Through a door I could see in another room two black men busy dismembering desktop computers on a conference table. There were electronic parts everywhere.

Then it struck me: these guys made a living cannibalizing old computers.

A soldier is cleaning a part he just cannibalized from a tank during WW II.

Cannibalizing is such a gruesome word to describe an activity that is actually environmentally-friendly: re-using components to prolong the life of dying equipment and delay the moment parts are sent to landfills.

I guess doctors do the same when they take organs from cadavers to extend or improve the life of their patients.

Anyway, since the FBI unreluctantly resorted to a cannibal to solve their problem in Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, I figured it was OK if I did the same.

When the tattooed, shaved and pierced metal faced gentleman came back, I showed him the fan assembly. He took me into another room filled with shelving stacked with old laptop computers, dug out one from the middle of a pile and removed its fan.

I was back in business...

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