Park West

It was 3:30 in the morning. I was sitting in an apartment on the second floor, after coming from another one on the fourth floor. This one was bigger, but had no windows. The twelve dollar rounds of double scotch with a Heineken chaser ran out long ago at the dark bar up the street. Instead, we drank water and smoked. Francois rolled cigarettes with tobacco he got from Madrid, Geisha showed us her photos of prairie sunsets and wood panelled hotel rooms, our host Michael put the final touches on a giant paper mache eyeball that was to be part of his Halloween costume, and I shared some stories about a summer I spent mixed up with a destructive fellow named Mitchell. Who used to take me on all night excursions on the outskirts of the city to vandalize abandoned vehicles. It took me back many years, to the hometown.

We would cruise the highway all night long in his dad's car, stopping at truck stops for chips and pop. Myself, Mitchell, the crazy one, and Ramone, the normal one that became crazy in Mitchell's presence, formed our own little gang of misfits one summer. We didn't drink, or do drugs, we just killed time, something much more damaging. It was just the three of us, and the empty painted pavement that beckoned acts of bravado that could never be attempted in the city. Standing on the roof of a broken down car to dramatically slam an axe through the back window, or lighting fires in the middle of the road, the perimeter highway was ours all night long. You could see a car coming from miles away, giving us several minutes to stop the mutilation of whatever we happened to be smashing at the time, and get back into the car to continue driving along the highway as if nothing had happened. My brother worked just off the highway. The night shift. His job was to sit in his car with a cheap brown suit on, watching an empty mall parking lot for any signs of suspicious activity. We would often stop by throughout the night for short visits that would find him sitting in his white sports car, his eyes transfixed on the pattern of lamp posts that lay before him. Standing in the pre-dawn light of the empty lot around his car, we would tell him about our ridiculous exploits on the outlying highway before we went home to sleep.

One morning though, after I had been dropped at home after a seemingly normal night of vending machine chocolate bars, and axe swinging destruction, I came out of the shower and saw my brothers friend Cedar standing in the hallway with a baseball bat resting on his shoulder. Cedar was wild, unpredictable, and lied a lot. With my brother beside him in my parents basement, I gripped the towel as I thought about whether or not he would swing the bat at me. He looked mad. Once I convinced them both that I had been home for over an hour he told me what had happened. Mitchell and Ramone had hit one last car on the way home. It was a red hatchback sitting at the side of the highway, not far from the mall that my brother was watching. They smashed all the windows, ripped through the car for anything interesting, and finally pulled it out of gear and sent it careening down the hill that it was parked on, and into the ditch. MItchell and Ramone were so excited that they decided to make one last stop at the mall to tell my brother all about it, who oddly enough was outside his car talking to Cedar as they pulled up. Excitedly they recounted the story to my brother, and Cedar, about the car they had just destroyed. My brother said that Cedar informed them in a quiet, calm tone, that it was his car they had just wrecked. He had run out of gas and was waiting for my brother to finish work so that they could get to a filling station. Apparently Cedar began walking towards them with fire in his eyes. All Mitchell and Ramone could do was turn around and run for the cover of the car. Standing there with wet hair at 530 in the morning, I listened to my brother describe how Cedar hung onto the hood of the car, while Mitchell drove around the lot in circles screaming bloody murder the whole time that they didn't know it was his car.

Relaying this story loud enough so that I could be heard over the new Manitoba CD Michael was playing so late at night in his second floor apartment. I started to giggle towards the end of the story. So much so that I nervously felt myself begin to lose control, and have since been intrigued with the fine line between laughter and crying. I don't think Michael, Geisha, or Francois noticed how close I was to bursting into tears. I had more stories about that highway, that summer, but I decided to cut them short, for fear of indulging in my own nostalgia too much. Instead, I had to get home, it was now past four, and the sun would soon be rising. I lifted my face of the end pillow of Michael's couch and quickly found myself in bed after a short cab ride home, far away from the open grey road, and deserted parking lots that defined that summer, so long ago.