Chapter 15:  Letter to Someone’s New Home.
 

It’s that time of summer’s end, and my people are scrambling and whining.

Dear friend in the somewhere of Toronto: the roommate we shared on Ottawa’s Mcleod Street - the Swede we called Nerf, he was from Göteberg and talked of big city capital Stockholm the same way Canadians speak of the T.O. that you live in now.  Disdain.  We ribbed him about those homesick fjords and that Swedish word for cereal that we saw on his one day grocery list: flingor, or something. 

How is your endless university life, how are those proteins of study?  Are sharks truly immune to cancer?  Their cartilage, wasn’t it?  Or the filter of the female’s uterus?

I say this on lined paper and snail it away to your last known and forgo the send to unknown e-mail, speak into wrong phone number - but I am not a Luddite.  I write to you about my Now people because you are the past and it has been so very long since you were my friend to go with and hit every last call of bar without fail.

Did you ever get around to defending that thesis, and how are the new thoughts through yet another microscope?  Are macrophages still the panacea of the future?

But yes, I am a bartender now - inspired into this different All by a wonderful girl who now be my ex.  Dear friend, I hear rumours that your live-in love has returned to the Lapland of her own birth; she was is a fine lady, and what the hell she be doing with you and all that I know about you?

My friend, how is Toronto and all the arrogance that being the centre of the universe affords?  I see you searching endless for a downtown pub to sip real beer and have stool for chat: I’ve heard the horror stories from others who have tried and failed in that city.  In that vein, our Royal Oak says Hi: the skids, the waitresses, and as always, Fonzie our bartender.  That meeting of people that was our bar.

In this last of summer I give an aloud to the you I used to know and hope still do; picture us on one of those seats on the wood at the Oak - sorry, the wood the actual bar that one does lean on across from the bartender.  I am in the biz this now and you must forgive the argot.  Speak dirty to me of your nucleotides, yes no?

Dear friend, relax and answer me this: do you regret moving in with that Vanessa of Norway?  Was it the common-law or the eventual anyway rub that sent her or you away?  It’s been so long and so I apologize for the hypothetical, the intrusive guessing on my part.  But yes, fuck this - let’s get ripped, outright snockered; meet me at the Oak in thirty minutes.

My friend, I shall try this once more.  I have become a bartender; the Me that you knew now performs four to five times a week in front of a live studio audience.  I am a purveyor of a wish that I never really realized until moving to that other side of bar.  Remember the Oak, remember the poise of older Fonzie?  Dear friend, it is never that easy - and you know my personality that well.  And I believe that I still am the same person that you left over 3 years ago.

I speak of this time of year and my co-workers; I bring up this vague reference and wave to the air in front of me that is you and the empty Oak stool to my immediate left - to my right be that tone-deaf idiot who knows the words to every single song ever recorded and played on the Oak’s satellite stereo.  The characters.  But, close friend, at the restaurant of my work of my avoidance of my unconscious charm, that environment which I wish to learn you of: we are broke and tired of it all.  We are unable to join proper of union, yet wish to retain our right to call in sick some mornings.  To sum it up - we want it all.  Paid holidays, some uplifting.

And, my friend, have you heard any more of the good news about Jesus?  Do you recall the Fire of God zealots swarming the downtown of our Ottawa core?  The extended white banners of a religious Say in front of Chapters on Rideau Street, and how we tried sweet talk on the converted young holding their guitars and playing half-decent of music, even if it was Christian-based.  They were so close to real rock and roll.    

I recount the past, my friend, and I apologize.  The now is me relaying the words of my people: give us your money.  Horrible, n’est pas?  We want your tips and for some reason we don’t want to work too hard for them; I exaggerate, but this is all such new.  Still novel after all of these months and months.  You, Me - at the Oak, that was fine.  But I am now a bartender; I am an alright sort and I try.  And yet I see you and me on the stools of Centretown - the Where of our last meet and good-bye.

Me being too much the customer for this sort of work of my say; you know me - what do you think?

Sorry.  And as I bring up my restaurant as a pack of common thought, to speak for them all, I say a sorry: that be the Centretown in me, the overuse of the plural.

But my people are not happy with the end of summer.  This Prince Holmwood - our newly head chef - prides himself on the soup of the day, and as far as aspirations go I applaud him outright.  He is of standard wage and none of tip, receiver of secret white envelope every second week - a lot of under-the-table, my friend, but such is the way.  He is an overly sensitive soul - the good and the bad within one tiny person.  Caffeine keeps him running, chasing those that make comment about soup or shade of blood left in meat: he is old school for such a young man - pride and the ability to run you down with a knife he has personally whet.  It brings temporary colour to his wan; we laugh and know how to toe the line of his mania, how to avoid or stroke his depression.

He is not happy, because his friend is gone and replaced by only himself.

We complain, because business is slow and there is not enough to go around at this here High School Bar and Grill out in the burbs, semi-burbs really.  Do you remember or know it?  We complain to an owner that is never there.  I speak of staff and money but I truly feel the customers: do they not realize that we talk about them, give them nicknames to align with their quirks?

This Prince Holmwood has come to a realization at the tender age of twenty-three: the stare back.  I can see it from the bar most nights; doe eyes of his on-the-life training.  My vantage is slightly above, peering down to a semi-open kitchen concept.  My friend, everything is so different from this side, from my Now direction.  From my own look back at.  But this just a Say, about us once younger and of very different appearance - the 90’s and those days of our long hair and grunge; I feel we are about ready for a retrospective.  I feel about ready for a reunion.

My friend, something is very wrong with me writing to you after all of these many months turned to years.  I wish not to alarm you, but there is something very screwed with me paying $650 for an entire bachelor the size of our old living room on Mcleod Street: God bless this Silicon Valley of the North and all of its stock market trappings.

Wanted: roommate and or lover willing to share.

How be Toronto?  Just as bad?  But it is all so much newer here in Ottawa, in our Centretown.

My friend, something is very wrong.  I have such a very long story beyond mere catch up to tell you; I shall scrape together the will to send this letter, to find its proper address and corresponding phone number with T.O. prefix.  I wish to find the necessary time for a maybe bus ticket and ride of that sorry steel Pooch down to you.