Monday, November 3, 2008

CHRONICA 1

I’m L now. I wonder if I’ll think L is so bad when I’m C. One time I asked my friend Brooke , “ who the hell would want to be 100 ?” and he said, “ someone who’s 99.” We were tooling around in a beat up Pontiac , just driving around drinking and having fun. We hit a big pothole and he said, “ they should fix the road in that hole.” I thought that was pretty funny, obviously, given that I still remember that xxx years later. Brooke lost a leg in an accident and he had to live in the Rehab centre in Richmond while the money issue was sorted out between his lawyers and Workers Compensation. That was a crazy place that Rehab centre, sort of a cross between a recreation complex and an after hours booze can. Brooke didn’t appreciate all the rules and regulations. After all , he was a young man who had just spent a year of his life in the hospital and now he only had one leg, and gone were a lot of dreams, and here was some asshole with coke glasses and pimples telling him to be in by X1. It didn’t go over so well. We’d be out tooling around in that old Pontiac and he’d wheel in to some dive and make a phone call; “this is Mr Brooke Peters, have a cheque ready for me by three o’clock, I need five thousand for today.” And it would be ready. And away we’d go on one of our champion drunks , and almost always he’d have to have a new used car. The transaction would take about XV minutes. It was exciting to look out on to that car lot and wonder which one he would pick; sometimes it would be a beauty , a gold coloured 1966 Lincoln Continental Land Yacht, sometimes it would be the worst looking piece of shit you’ve ever seen , depending on his mood. We did a lot of touring during that time, taking up residence in some very charming places, the details of which mercifully escape me now. Brooke tells me he’s the only guy I know who doesn’t lie when he says his dink is longer than his leg.