Month: June 2011

Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.

Brampton Comes Alive
Watching bagels going through the slicer at Tim Hortons somewhere outside Brampton, Ontario. At exit 48 on the 407 east, actually. Type Books tonight on Queen Street in Toronto. A Broken Pencil magazine sponsored launch of Dave’s graphic novel The Listener. I’m really looking forward to the Hal Niedzviecki and David Q&A.

When the woman here at Tim’s asked me how I wanted my coffee, I said, “That depends on how it tastes.”

She winced slightly.

“I’ve never had one,” I explained, complicating matters. Am I saying that I’ve never had a Tim’s coffee? Or, more abstractly, that I’ve never had a coffee at all?

All around me, customers are saying, “Double-double.”

“Double-double.”

I feel like I’m at a Wiccan spell-casting.

“Double-double.”

I’ve only just learned the basics of the Starbucks language. Am I expected to speak Hortonese too?

Intensity at the Toronto airport Budget car-rental desk resulted in having to wait for a vehicle. No big deal, but when we went out to get the car parked in H6, it was a SUV-type-thing.

“It’s a people-mover,” said Dave.

I went back in, not really anticipating a great reaction to my request for something more car-like. The clerk informed me that the vehicle we’d been assigned was a Kia Soul, a double-double upgrade.

“I’d like a car with a trunk,” I said.

She was actually very helpful and friendly. Or maybe she was just normal. More normal than the Winnipeg Budget car-rental return experience. What a city. I think the woman behind the desk in Winnipeg would gladly have poked my eyes out with her wildly decorated fingernails if there wasn’t a job (her job) and a counter between us.

“I parked the car under the Hertz sign because there are no spaces in Budget,” I said, reporting in at the rental desk at the Winnipeg airport.

“Can you park it in Avis? Hertz will tow it,” she said.

“I’m just telling you where your car is,” I said. “I have to catch a plane. I’m late.”

She picked up the walkie-talkie.

“Jeff, are you on this channel?”

Her hands were shaking in anger. Winnipeggers are a one tough-cookie bunch. Man, the hard cold faces, one after another, everywhere in town and down Pembina highway, a depressing sprawlly splay of mini-malls to the book signing at MacNally-Robinson, where the staff was very friendly, but store patrons were not willing to make eye-contact with author David Lester.

“Jeff? Are you on this channel?”

The moving of the car was evidently more important than me catching my fucking plane.

“Do you really need me to run out and do Jeff’s job and move the car?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

I think I passed Jeff as I ran back to the car. He’d be the guy in the Budget costume dragging himself along the sidewalk toward the lot. Hunched, smoking.

At the Toronto Budget car-rental desk, the clerk said, “Did you touch the Soul?”

It appeared to be possible that we were going to get the car with a trunk and a very tall, skinny man in a suit looked happy to be getting the double-double upgrade. The Soul.

“We did not touch the Soul. We did not enter the Soul. The Soul remains untouched.”

The tall man in the suit turned his head slowly to see who was saying these things. He looked down at me like I was some sort of whacked-out Hare Krishna Stepford wife. I was standing motionlessly, looking straight ahead, wearing my child’s size 12, very shiny, candy-apple-red plastic bomber jacket, arms rigid at my sides.