Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

When Dodge was born he had more hair than he does now. What a thing to remember. But I do remember. I can recall each of their births with a startling clarity; the exquisitely searing pain infused with jaw-clenching joy. Now Pudding is keening. The first sound she has ever made.

Pushing Sam and Dodge aside, I reach for my daughter.

I wake to the shrill cry of a bald eagle. How could I have slept so soundly, like a dead woman? The last thing I remember is holding Pudding’s bandaged hand to my breast and closing my eyes while the others either wept or whispered around me. And beneath us the eternal come-hither thrum of the cyclotron.

But even the cyclotron is silent this morning. The campfire doused. Camp broken. Is that how they put it? Or struck? The camp has been struck, that is a fact, as if by a smart bomb. There is no Pudding, no Cinders, no Felix, no Kevster, no Sam.

Dodge has taken them all away. Is this weakness or responsibility?

There are things I could do. I could stride through the forest in a shambolic rage, uprooting hemlocks and sharpening my teeth on towering cedars, bearing down on small animals. I could stalk that cougar, mount it and ride it back into the city, gather my followers and march on the towers of the faithless, with burning coals in the pouches of my cheeks, spitting fire.

But who am I without my platoon, without my flesh and blood?

The punchline of a joke?

A woman walking across burning coals to get to the other side.

1I hesitate to indict pharmaceutical concerns, as prescriptions for citalopram, my birth control pill, Alesse, as well as my Ventolin inhaler have kept me afloat for more years than I care to tally. I have always held that the existence (and acceptance) of “grey areas” makes us more human, although this is a point of view that is best kept to yourself if you are going to succeed as a motivational speaker in Amerika.

2To paraphrase the great Amerikan songwriter Hal David.

3Dodge adopted this Briticism after reading the Harry Potter series several years back (the characters he identified most closely with were Fred and George Weasley). Whether this is an affectation versus a general affection for the term is impossible to say. This is Dodge, after all.

4There is also an application called positron emission tomography. (I prefer the more anthropomorphic PET, as, apparently, do the researchers themselves.) PET allows for a true scan of a living human brain at work. A scientific euphemism for “mind reading”?

5I am not averse to a little borrowing here and there from the classics of literature. Browning is a particular favourite. As for Aesop, what is there not to love?

6It is an ugly world out there for the truth-seekers and soothsayers among us. For those with the instinct for conciliation, punishment comes swift and hard, as we have so sadly witnessed.

7Including his third wife.

8Wednesdays and Fridays at 1 p.m. Prior booking recommended.

9I plan to include this line in my next book, with permission, of course.

10You may ask, whatever happened to Bernie Taupin? In 2006 he won a Golden Globe for his song “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” for the film Brokeback Mountain. In early 2012 he collaborated once again with Elton John to write the song commemorating HRH Prince Charles’s long overdue ascension to the British throne, “Midnight in the Kingdom.” Bernie Taupin has been married four times and is the proud owner of a bucking bull used in professional competition in Amerika. If pressed, I will admit to still carrying a small flame for him.

11My arduous journey from pessimist to optimist is described in detail in My Emotional Fatwa.

12I greatly admire the great Amerikan singer-songwriter Neil Young but have often wondered whether it would hurt him to try doing something with his hair.

13According to Viva, whimsy itself is neutral. The user is the determinant of whether it has a “creative” or “destructive” charge.

14It is not that I seek to liken myself to Christ on the cross but at times the looks I get from Dodge are as piercing as the point of St. Longinus’s lance.

15Other scientific detractors cite the Leidenfrost effect (as musical as it sounds, it’s a dispiriting explanation of the phenomenon of fire-walking). In effect, just as drops of water dance about on a hot skillet because of the protective layer of vapour formed by evaporation, a fire-walker’s inevitably sweaty feet help create a similar protective layer.

16In 2002, twenty Australian Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet managers had to be treated for burns caused by fire-walking. I ask you, is the Leidenfrost effect substantially different Down Under, or is it that they were insufficiently motivated in mind and spirit?

17My colleague Tolly Burkan has called fire-walking a metaphor and contends that if you can master it, you can also muster the courage to demand a raise. With all due respect, this diminishes all of us, does it not?

18Some useful advice from Tony Robbins: Visualize walking the coals while chanting, “Cool moss, cool moss, cool moss.”

The man who is in charge of ruining Patrick Kakami’s life prowls the halls of Vancouver’s Telefilm office in search of personnel.

Across the street in Victory Square, rats the size of Whiskas-fed house cats patrol the base of the war memorial for abandoned pizza crusts and dropped panini fillings. In the garbage-strewn alley below the funding agency’s boardroom window, a seventeen-year-old heroin addict is in the final throes of an overdose, telescoping pupils in bruised eyes like some wide-eyed child in a velvet painting by a direct descendant of Bosch.

Inside, the workstations are alive with screen savers and nothing else-undulating seaweed, someone’s diaper-clad toddler, Bart Simpson on a skateboard flipping the bird. Syd Gross leafs through a bulging manila file folder labelled FUBAR, thinking, I’ll say .

Syd hates these trips to the West Coast. You can’t get a decent veal sandwich and just yesterday he met a woman who lived on a houseboat in False Creek who gave her two Abyssinian kittens bimonthly fish-oil enemas. Guys walked around downtown carrying waterproof briefcases and wearing flip-flops. How could you do business with these people when their hair-tufted toes were showing? It was like negotiating with hobbits. One of the teamsters on the Vancouver segment of the Rain Dog shoot, a soft, fiftyish man in an April Wine 4-Ever! T-shirt and Teva sandals whose job it was to drive in the honey wagon each day and then sit there for twelve hours doing absolutely sweet fuck all (for $37.46 an hour), kept telling anyone within earshot, “I came back from Hollyhock feelin g spiritually replenished.” Get a real job , Syd thought. Get a pair of real shoes .

From a cubicle in the far corner of the large open-air office, Syd hears the kind of gulping for breath children engage in when words fail them. He finds a man around his own age, mid-forties, sporting shocking sideburns and Tweety Bird suspenders, sitting on the ground crying, hunched over a mound of photocopied scripts, a clutch of forms strewn around him. The man looks up at Syd. “I spent the whole night at Kinko’s”-he pauses, striving to get his voice under control- “and I still missed the phase-three script-development funding deadline.” Syd makes a clucking sound with his tongue.

Because the thing about Sydney Gross is this. His name, his manner, his voice, his deep regard for the bottom line and affinity for darkened rooms redolent of the smell of Golden Topping® may have predestined him to become a producer of moving pictures, but somewhere along his ribbon of DNA there’s a den-mother gene programmed to respond to sorrow. This is the reason he continues to champion Patrick Kakami, not because the guy is on top of his game, but because Syd can sense he’s unravelling. And this is the reason Syd lowers himself onto the faux-distressed concrete floor, in his $475 (plus GST) “sport” slacks from Harry Rosen, and allows this weeping man, this complete stranger, to lay his head on his shoulder as he gives the man a one-armed hug.