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DIATRIBES GALORE! LISTEN TO JUST PIERRE SPEAK! ALL PIERRE, ALL SEXY


Every day Pierre and Wild Bill will come at you with fresh INVECTIVE! Sometimes witty, sometimes sobering, and sometimes just down right livid, The Book of Jesse will feed your ire! You read Wild Bill's rants via the Wild Bill Archive. Click here to go back to the Daily Invective.




August 18, 2007

The Transmission.

One of the American cell phones went off.

He took the call. I could feel Bertie Ernesto tighten beside me.

Another ring; this one amongst security. The suited man turned and took it bent to the wall. Tumulty quietly observed.

I could see Betsy grow restless as she kept watch on the door.

The Canadian was still wan and restless, dabbing his forehead with a wet handkerchief.

I reached out to touch Bernie Ernesto’s elbow, just to have it, ready to leap into escape.

Pierre



August 16, 2007

Back in the Parlour.

Betsy kept guard now in the parlour, I assumed to keep close eye, and we all re-gathered. The Canadian was resuscitated, the Japanese returned to their seats. The Americans took fifteen minutes to change and arrived, all and none left out, in black suits, white shirts, black ties. Bertie twisted his hands together pensively.

Sheriff Tumulty came into the room, clearing his throat like a bear howl. 'It appears that your killer here, now two bodies into the count, is, first, a woman. Two, she is left handed. I also note the smell, the scent of perfume; if I'm not incorrect, it's German. Joop. A floral warmth with a distinctive oriental signature.'

My mind was blown! I recognized immediately where the scent was from; troubled myself desperately to orient the facts to the impossible facts.

'You might think that narrows my list of suspects,' growled Tumulty. 'It may, it may not.'

I turned my head down, my mind washed in impossible thought.

Pierre



August 14, 2007

The Body of Sully.

I squirmed me way past the others to follow the sheriff. Why not? I knew what was happening, perhaps more than anyone! I followed directly into the tunnel the tight-jeaned deputy until we came to a carved out room beneath the Chateau. There, on the floor, the cold limestone floor, was the body of Sully Berkovitz. His throat was slit, blood congealed in horror movie fan around his head like a halo of wrong. Inside the smell of sanguine dank, I detected something floral, like a presence. I could see the eyes of Sheriff Tumulty and knew he was of the same mind, his keen detective sense well on the trail, utilizing nose and eyes, touch and experience.

I shook my head in dismay. Poor Sully. He'd only wanted justice: we'd promised him too much. That smell. Tumulty lurched of a sudden, finished with his inspection of the scene, and turned back to the head of the tunnel. We had no choice but to follow. Betsy touched my shoulder as I passed through back into the maid's quarters. I looked Bertie in the eye. His wouldn't meet mine.

Pierre



August 11, 2007

Subchateauan Homesick Blues

The Americans, clad in grey woolen pajama tops and bottoms with the red white and blue letters U S A printed on the front and backs of the tops, and down the sides of the legs, mingled and spoke, their tones growing from whispers to argumentative banter. The two Japanese went to the aid of the fallen Canadian minister, one propping his perspiring head on his folded knees while the other produced a white handkerchief to dab the stricken man's cold, wet pate.

Sheriff Tumulty looked down on his countryman with disgust as series of quick-footed clicks met the hallway outside. In walks a gorgeous brunette wearing skintight blue denim and a high collared white shirt tucked in and belted with fat brown leather and a buckle the size of Winnepeg. I can see there's a Colt tucked into her belt at her coccyx and I'm instantly turned on. Come on! Comment est-ce que je ne pourrais pas être? Un canon de main de douze pouces remplié dans son âne? Did I mention she was wearing high heels and a beaver felt cowboy hat? She clicked across the floor to Sheriff Tumulty who bowed his considerable frame so that she could whisper in his ear. Nodding grimly, he stood erect.

'Seems there's been another body found,' he scowled and made to follow the ginger footed detective. The Americans were quick to follow and I nudged Bertie Ernesto. La parcelle de terrain s'epaissit!

In this, the dead of night, we made down the low lit hallway, the sexy detective's heels a fugue with Tumulty's clodding boots, the Americans shushing night slippers as we descended the stairs, crossed the marble foyer, through the kitchen, into a small maid's quarters where a dresser had been pulled back to reveal a secret tunnel. Betsy Ross stood by the entrance to the tunnel as we wended our way into the small room, us so close I could smell the Bounce on the American's pajamas. I caught Betsy's eye and knew right away that the worst had happened. But why?

The Sheriff ducked his long frame into the tunnel.

Pierre



August 9, 2007

Ain't nuthin but facts...

'On my way up here,' growled Provincial Sheriff Henry Tumulty, 'I've gone over your profiles. Having a hard time finding a motive amongst you. Seems like this here little party was supposed to be a mutual circle jerk of interests; your interests being the slaughter of my country's most precious resource. Even your godforsaken film crew looks like it was plucked from the most unfair and unbalanced pool you could find, but it ain't my business to get my hands dirty in your's, so I'll just keep to the facts here. My people are determining, at this moment I' bet, that there are no prints on the Elk Horn knife and before too long they&#ll be able to tell me if there was any breaking, entering, or escaping. Anybody here wants to share a little something with me, in private, well, you probably best go on and do that before my people find anything else.'

The Canadian emissary swooned, his sherry glass dropping to the floor with a thud just before he did.

The tall cowboy sheriff jangled menacingly over to his collapsed and twitching frame.

'Aye God, this is what's become of my country?'

Pierre



August 7, 2007

Spurs jangled up the hall, approaching as we sat in wait...

Le Stump was dead; murdered! We had gathered in the parlour; the pajama'd Americans whispering conspiratorially in a corner by the wet bar where I had actually to shove by them to get a proper whisky. Lechez mon cul, Whitethorne cronies! The Japanese, both of them, were seated politely in identical Louis IV chairs, dressed in identical black Armani suits, speaking not a word. The Canadian emissary, a nervous nelly, a real douillette, was nervously taking in sherry in frenetic, hand shaking sips over near the Replogle floor globe. I took my whisky back to sit with Bertie Ernesto in the corner. Our eyes bouncing off each other told the story; this could be big trouble, if there was an extended investigation. How long could Cheetah Murakami hold off the real network crew?

The sound of spurs came jangling up the dark oaken hallway; a lone man walking. Into the parlour came this tall wraith of a man, hatted in a silverbelly Stetson, his long grey-black hair like dirty icicles falling down between two glacier blue, beady eyes that stalked the room like laser pointers. His face, stony and weathered, was like carved rock; mean, time-tested, hard. He wore a black cowboy shirt with white piping and tan, tassled jacket pinned with a shiny, silver star. Black denim fell down his fence post legs into fine ostrich, spurred, black cherry Nacona boots. Why was I expecting Gary Cooper in Mountie wear?

'Any y'all good with surgery?' he drew the words out like the whip snarl of pulling a chainsaw cord, afterward rolling his tongue along his front bottom teeth, as though to remove the last bits of chaw. 'Ahm only asking on account of the wound, the deathblow. Your man, name of Helmut Brandt, the owner of this here castle and your host; he was stabbed in the back with the kind of precision I've only come to see in real clean operating rooms.

'My name is Provincial Sheriff Henry Tumulty,' he said, I, slugging my whisky for the fear the man's beastly voice gave me, 'And we're here to solve a crime.'

Pierre



August 4, 2007

In the Parlour...

The police were called; in fact the cellular fury that took place had probably strained the local networks. The Japanese were rabid to inform their masters of the demise of Le Stump, as were the Americans. The Canadian, voice raspy, made a quick and quiet call. And then we gathered in the parlour.

Murder! Most foul, indeed. Bertie came into the room last, rubbing sleep from his eye in a way that seemed feigned. The Americans were dressed in identical pajamas. The Japanese, apparently, slept in their suits. Here we waited, murmuring conspiracies, until the local authorities arrived.

Pierre



August 2, 2007

Murder at the Chateau Le Stump!

It was a horrible, high pitched howl; gurgling and girlish, and it came from the floor where Betsy Ross and I were making out! We raced toward it, careening down low lit hallways until we found the Canadian ambassador standing, arms beetling upwards around his face, still heaving sharp, tinny bleats, and staring into a room with its door open. When he noticed us coming, he began to point, unable to utter a word; only whimpering the dead gasps of his fey scream.

We looked into the room, the office of Le Stump where his body was slumped over the desk, the hilt of an elk antler handled blade abreast of the fabric of his Tom Ford suit jacket. His face on the desk blotter was turned toward us, eyes closed, and, it seemed to me, reposed in a quiet kind of calm; a countenance in resolution.

We could hear the sounds of the other guests, opening and closing of doors, the shuffling of feet approaching.

Pierre



July 31, 2007

A stolen moment...

In a stained oak hallway, festooned with paintings of Pope Benedict as a child in the Nazi Youth, he was Ratzinger then, have you ever thought about that name, I meet with Betsy Ross for a stolen embrace; her giant shoulders folding crane-like arms around me in passionate, furtive grasp. Yeah! We had done it! We were in, the camera's were ready and I had a text from Cheetah Murakami saying that the EIB truck with the real Limbaugh reporters had been successfully nipped! In the morning the conference would begin in earnest and, luck holding, we would have the dope on the bad guys!

'My sweet papoose,' I whispered as Betsy kissed the shiny reflections of herself in my Ray Ban Aviators, 'We really did it!'

And that's when we heard the scream.

Pierre



July 28th, 2007

The Man.

I was only to glimpse but once the architect of this eco-terrorism, Le Stump, standing at the door of the library and looking down the sweeping double staircases at the marbled and massive foyer. He was pacing, on the telephone, speaking German in tones which, in turn, were affectionate and demanding, punctuated by a strange wheeze as he inhaled. He looked to be about my age, and perfectly Aryan; short cropped blonde hair, and chiseled features. The phone call lasted little more than a minute, Le Stump pacing nervously, a countenance betraying the casual cool of his Tom Ford suit. Where does evil reside in the body, I found myself thinking, is it in the heart? Some black valve pumping bile and hate from some mysterious, alternative plain of existence; is evil itself some neuro-synapse cross-wired that one day science will correct? Why did this man want to destroy our trees?

Pierre



July 26th, 2007

From the window of the Chateau...

Dull, grey rain pattered over the burned sugar, glassy fusion that surrounded the Chateau, and ran in streaming rivulets downward as I watched from the third story window in the library. I turned toward the room; its polished dark hardwood flooring clear but for four French chairs on a Killim Sumac floor rug, circa 1880, and the light stands the Bertie was preparing, the wall shelving lined with volumes; I counted among them the works of Albert Speer, Ayn Rand, Max Hegel, and Franz Beckenbauer. Back to the window I went as the roll of tire against wet ground signaled the arrival of the first motorcade. It was the Japanese; two motorcycles in the lead, a long stretch limo followed by a black cruiser. From the front seat of the limo came an Asian woman in a black raincoat who promptly opened the rear door. The first man was spindly and tall, dressed all in black with a black bowler hat. The second, remarkably short and stout, was dressed in tan. They entered the Chateau as the second motorcade appeared on the horizon of the compound; six white Chevy Suburbans, head and tail lights blinking in red and blue. The Americans, the vassals of the Whitethorne Administration; the men in black emerged from the vehicles, looking like a casting call for another Matrix movie; coiled wires behind the ears, Ray Bans, and marched, mouths grim, into the Chateau.

'Look, Bertie, here comes the motorcade of our glorious Canadian government. It is truly a sight to behold.'

Bertie came to the window as a single, purple colored Prius pulled up to the Chateau, stopped and a bookish man emerged, wearing spectacles and a tweed coat and hat. He looked around nervously, waiting, it seemed for someone to park the car, but the guards merely stood at arms, one of them indicating the direction the other cars had gone. The man pointed in that direction, as though to confirm and then, resignedly, got back in the car and drove off toward the garage.

Pierre



July 24th, 2007

The Plan

The I.D. passed muster, the coup of the operation! Bertie and I were able to drive the truck into the staging area and were welcome as we pulled out our equipment. We were allowed to set up a closed circuit television stage, where the approved phases of the conference would, ostensibly, be broadcast, pay-per-view; like boxing for the red states. Our plot was to get the access, get the recording and free the broadcast; expose the tyranny! Yeah! Betsy's contacts had gotten us this far; Sully was our covert security, the unseen communicant between us. I imagined, as briefly and as realistically as my French Canadian, existential, worldly mind was able, what could be done when the Whitethorne Administration was caught pants down, in the middle of another fragrant, flagrant deal. Alay!It was high time!

Pierre



July 19, 2007

The Patriots.

While the guards check our IDs I let my gaze drift upwards to the crenellations of the Chateau, and there I spotted the mighty, square shoulders of Betsy Ross.

The last two weeks of preparation and planning had sprung, ineluctably, irresistibly into passion's embrace. Yeah! Betsy and I were compelled to each other like thin sliced ham to Croque Monsieur, ending our marathon training and planning sessions with tri-athletic fich-fich-machen and declarations of patriotic fervor. I called her my Ugly American, she called me her Canadian Rose and we'd spend sweet hours into the night debating the state of democracy.

'The democracy that I believe in,' she'd whisper slyly as we snuggled in the bearskin run before the fire, 'would see election reforms of the kind which would never allow a Whitethorne into office in the first place.'

'And it would have instant run-offs,' I cooed, 'and motions of no confidence so as to be able for a parliament to remove an embarrassing government.'

'You mean Congress, don't you, my creme Francois?'

'Yes, of course, my buttermilk pancake, Congress. A Congress without an Electoral College.'

'Yummy.'

Pierre



July 17, 2007

You are curious.

Yeah! Rush Limbaugh has nascent television network! Coagulating the forces of American talk radio into one bloated mass, like that fat woman wearing your one-size at the beach; Laura Ingraham, Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck all had come together under the aegis of the 'great one' excellence in broadcasting, indeed. Thankfully, Betsy's recon had allowed us to stop the real Fox Truck, hosting John Ziegler, via the interception by Cheetah Murakami's combat geishas out of Chicago, and we were allowed the time and access codes to pretend that I, and my intrepid comrade Bertie Ernesto, were the French counterpart to the U.S. Bill O'Reilly, and we waited with great anxiety as our codes were passed by the security team.

Pierre



July 14, 2007

Approaching the Chateau of Le Stump.

The day bore the feeling, you know, of, say, the Wannsee Conference as our truck slowly bore along the two lane, unimproved roadway heading toward the dreadful castle. Imagine, the ogres of the Ruling Party in the U.S. coming, in their fetid gases, to oversee the negotiations between Japan's most depraved capitalists and Canada's most pliable molasses cookie, her government, descending on the Mordor atmosphere of this repugnant landscape and its hideous mid-eighteenth century Tudor style, with the treasure of my homeland's survival at stake. Our trees faced complete degradation!

The van was marked 'Fox News' and Bertie was at the wheel. Sully was properly secured under the news van, and I was to use to play the Agency's top French reporter on the scene at the behest of Rush Limbaugh's new television network.

Pierre



July 10, 2007

From the offices of Pierre Bertrand Lafitte...

Oh, dear Pierre! I do not know how or that I should do this thing. I am so sorry. But Gerta must be going, she must. There are things in time that do not adhere to our ordinary conception of its passing. I am experiencing one of those 'occurences' now, and I have to follow it. It has brought me great joy to give myself to your efforts, and I will never forget the happiness that has come to fill a girl's smitten heart. But, there are things you will never know about dear Gerta, about what she has to do, and, as or if you read this, those things may be less or more clear, but it is nothing that I can control. I only leave you with an old expression from my small hometown in the Schleswig Holstein: Auf die kann man Häuser bauen, Aber er hütete sich wohl, davon zu sprechen.

Pierre



The Crew.

July 7, 2007

This short one, the thickset Sully Berkowitz, he was like a miniature rugby player, his blue pale face crumpled like he smelled bad diaper, his clothing cheap and unimaginative, was born in Manchester but raised in Vancouver, the son of stunt coordinators for film and television. In what I can only relate as queer theater, as I interviewed him in my hotel suite, he proved himself far more nimble than his squat meat slab frame suggested, performing backwards somersaults like a Chinese acrobat. He was trying to prove something, being up here in Alberta, railing against the system, looking for a way to change the world. I suspected there was a woman, the poor bastard; some bird he was bander over, who couldn't pick him out of a line-up that sent him on this goose chase. I told him what I could about the plan, of which, I got to honest with you, was only the vaguest of developments. What I knew was that it would be the construction of the crew that would define the course of action, and, naturallement, I was right.

Pierre



July 5, 2007

The Body of an American.

She stood nearly two meters tall and called herself Betsy Ross. Raised in the rural Oregon countryside, her broad shoulders sported arms like machine cranes. Her action figure legs went on and on and bore the sturdy muscle form that comes from season upon season of bucking hay bales. She got an N.R.O.T.C scholarship to Oregon State where she attended the School of Forestry, summering at Quantico, Virginia and learning to kill for the United States Marine Corps. After college she attended a series of schools in intelligence gathering and combat operations to become a Ground Intelligence Officer, serving in Afghanistan in the months after 9/11. I can look in her eyes, the color of a shark's razor gray skin, and see there are things she knows I will never have the clearance for. After Afghanistan, in particular, after an aborted mission in the Hindu Kush mountains, Ross came back to the United States, a civilian, deeply disenchanted not with her beloved Corps, but with the Administration wielding it like a Tonka truck in the hands of a spoiled child.

All of this she related to me over American whiskey the day before the protests were to begin. Her days since leaving the Marine Corps ones of deepest contemplation as she joined the Forest Service, spending weeks at a time in the Cascade Mountains, tending to the rebirth of the ecology at Lassen Volcanic National Park. 'It moved me, Pierre,' she says to me, handling her 13th Blantons with the élan of Marion Ravenwood from the first Raiders movie, 'to see how the earth can heal itself, renew its own life force. They say that nature, herself, has done more to clean up the oil spill of the Exxon-Valdez than any human effort. What scares me now is our human ability to increasingly destroy. And that's why I am here tonight. That's why we have to act.'

She came because she knew the evil we were up against. She knew who the man on the hill was. So did the last member of our crew.

Pierre



The Boy.

July 3, 2007

His name was Bertie Ernesto Wolseley and wore patchy 'Che' bearding, ubiquitous black leather pants and vintage 80's concert tees. On the night we all gathered in my hotel room, it was a Van Halen Tour of the Word 1984, as the young Bertie explained to us all what exactly we were up against.

'I have been studying Le Stump for the last year now, though what I can gather of him, in terms of past and history, is thin, only to say that he is of Western European origin and that he comes from great personal wealth. Seeing what he has become here in Alberta, specifically as his influence permeates from this chateau, we can discern that he is singular in purpose and driven from a deep well in his soul to destroy that which is natural among us, namely, our precious Canadian arboreal forests.'

'Can you be more specific?' inquired Betsy Ross, dressed in red and white checked flannel and new denim jeans. 'Well, yes,' said Bertie, striking me more and more as I met with him, as someone, somehow familiar, though I could not say quite how. 'Take the Chateau itself; the grounds surrounding it, they are not just devoid of the trees, the very land has been scorched, scorched at such high temperatures to not simply blacken the land, but to fuse the very rocks and minerals within the ground until it has become an obsidian, glass-like surface. Entrance to the castle can be accessed only very specifically and, of course, now with the conference to be held there, the security can be very tight.' 'Which is why I took the liberty of contacting some of my old Marine comrades,' said Betsy. 'I'll be on the payroll of Le Stump as of tomorrow. Mister Berkowitz, how long do think you can suspend yourself under a ground transport truck?'

Sully shrugged it off as no problem. Alay! I love it when a plan comes together, no?

Pierre





June 22, 2007

'I'm in Alberta...no, the Province, Gerta.'

'Listen,' I telephoned to my English-addled German secretary, 'I need you to contact Cheetah Murakami in Chicago. The number is in my filofax. Tell him that I have made contact in Grimshaw. Are you taking this down, you Teutonic menhir? Tell him I've assembled a team to go after the Euro-tree-killer. He'll know what I mean. We are planning to strike the night before the conference. Tell him to make for the emergency contingencies. L'avez-vous? '

Pierre



June 20th, 2007

The Gang.

The leader of this gang of true believers took to the podium, an attractive, dark skinned woman named Masada and I was intrigued. Think Arundati Roy meets Jennifer Garner, my filthy readers! Her sexy, sing song voice was laced with a Kathleen Turner husk as she took to the makeshift podium and began to denounce the Whitethorne Administration, the Japanese Loggers, the Milquetoast Canadian government; the usual long winded diatribe about sustainable resources and the need to organize. Alay, I sighed, no matter how sexy you dress it leftist political posturing always leaves me dry.

Across the room I caught sight of my first mark, possibly because of the resemblance he bore to yours truly, perhaps it was simply his taste in clothing. Eschewing the hempy, recycled cotton, tie-dye look this boy, perhaps twenty, wore black leather pants and an Echo and the Bunnymen concert Tee from the Eighties. Moreover, as I inspected him, his very bearing was girded with defiance; a post-adolescent verve to lash out at the world and a premature cynicism that informed him there was nothing good to come of it. Nom d'Fred, I had one down!

The next one had found me. She stared hard at me from across the room like a mining drill raping gold from the Peruvian Amazon, but it was not sexual, no... well, maybe just a little, but you know I am sensitive to the little things. No, this woman, tall and broad shouldered, though not unattractive, pretty in that manly Muriel Hemingway kind of bigger boned lady, you know; her stare bored into the mysterious opaqueness of my sunglasses, sizing me up for the kind of duty you don't get assigned at an environmental rally; something meaningful and effective.

The next and last member of the team I was thinking of putting together, it would stand to reason, was right under my nez, so to speak. I had to look away from the warrior woman's piercing glare and there next to me, a few feet down was a tiny juggernaut of a man, a bulked up Tasmanian Devil who probably stumbled in here by accident anyway; a lost soul in search something simple and terrifying to do. You don't think I know these things? I was raised by vampire zombies, Nom d'dieu! Just pay attention!

Pierre



June 18, 2007

I know what you're thinking...

Cause I had thought it, too! A wine bar in Northern Alberta? SacrePoutine! What kind of business-addled, drooling simpleton would open a vin bar in this desolate forest? It's like growing cacti in the Arctic Circle, no? Nonetheless, the place was full this day; people of the sorts you'd see congregate in drum circles, D.C. marches, or booing the opening band at Dylan shows. The proprietor, behind the bar and panicking up and down its thick, oaken line with a kind of perverse, fervent delight, was just the sort I had figured: thin, nervous, wispy spikes of thinning brown hair, his eyes bulgy. Probably tramped north from Vancouver with a dream and a nest egg.

I stood out like a putain at a tea party; Ducati Giubbino Borgo Panigale leather jacket in black and cream, my hair askew like Sylvester the cat after a blast of dynamite, my Ray Ban Aviators reflective of the political sensitivity that faced me, a Dunhill dangling from my lip. I went to the bar and commanded the attention of the barman.

'Sancerre, seavous plait,', I told him, producing a Zippo from my pocket and striking the flame with elan.

'Would the gentleman prefer a California Sauvignon Blanc? Or something from New Zealand, perhaps?'

'Fantome d'un dieu, I do not,' I spat. 'Something white, then. From a land where they craft wine, not hobbies.'

Hurt, the man shuffled away and brought me a Verdicchio dei Castello di Jesi. 'No smoking, sir, I'm afraid.' 'Pauvre con,' I whispered under my breath, dropping the Dunhill and grinding it into the floor with the heel of my boot and turned to lean on the bar and study the crowd, looking for my marks.

Pierre





June 15, 2007

North.

I hopped a plane to Edmonton, then a train to Peace River. I was due to meet the usual conglomeration of tear-stained hippies, militant tree-huggers, and birkenstocked do-gooders from Pax Universalis to organize the protests against the Green Forest Services Conference (as it was being hypocritically dubbed) in a small town called Grimshaw. I was, naturellement, skeptical about what good a pack of sign-waving, puppet-wielding, mono-syllabic chanters could get done to oppose the trans-global tsunami of the Japanese logging industry, the python-bicep-flex of the United States government, the spindly twig-snap weakness of the Canadian, and the dark and mysterious shadow of some Blofeld from Europe. Perhaps, I could find in them a few, quality true-believers, people I could work with. With that in mind I debarked my rented motorcycle ޻ Triumph Tiger 750, metallic green tank) outside the wine bar that was to host our first gathering.

Pierre



June 13, 2007

In the Parlor

The parlor was disguised as a Bears fan den, replete with flat screen tv and a fat Polish-American with a balding crew cut drinking beer and watching montage of his team defeating the New Orleans Saints and the Super Bowl Shuffle. Murakami took a bottle of Cordon Bleu (I still shudder at the memory of Colleen!) and poured thick fingers of the golden honey liquor into snifters.

'Turn down the volume,' he barked at the jersey-ed man on the couch, handed my a drink, 'Lafitto-san, there is one man who is singularly responsible for this atrocity being committed against Canada. A lone man, a European, who is behind this dastardly reallocation of resources. He lives in his own castle in the wilds of Northern Alberta. I am told it is a terrifying place and that he never leaves it. Lafitto-san, you must go there. He must be stopped. In two weeks he will meet with members of the Japanese logging industry, the Canadian Prime Minister, and representatives of the Whitethorne Administration. What happens there could spell the end for the pristine Canadian Wilderness.'



June 11, 2007

Uproars of a Geisha

Her name was Baseball Wife and her face wore a patina of make-up caked ennui. She took the die in her delicate fingers and turned it slowly like a rusty, discarded key. A breath rose in her and sighed out, her wrist and arm suddenly pulling back like a pinball plunger and the die went flying across the table where it hit Cheetah Murakami in the ear.

'You stop the bullshit now, Cheetah! No one want to hear stupid drinking game mysteries! No one care! You get to point now. Me sick and tired. Cheap sake make me spill truth, Cheetah. What kind of name is that? Cheetah. Your name Ralph anyway. Canadian drunk, sing bad song, what is point? You tell me now! Idiot wind is all I hear!'

Cheetah, a big Jap, already blush from rice wine, went crimson from neck to hairline, squaring his shoulders and sitting more erect than an eighteen-year old quarterback in an all-girls Catholic school, his eyes lowered on the table as though to create a kinetic lever that might flip the table in order to crush the mouthy escort, cleared his throat.

'Lafitto-san,' he said softly and gravely, like the nocturnal rotations of my childhood rock tumbler, 'Perhaps we shall retire to the parlor for cognac and a talk between men.'

My eyebrows raised, lips pursed slightly in classic 'awkward moment' poise rolled my fingertips over the table in front of me, nodded my head, then, suddenly, slid back on my ass and performed a reverse somersault, landing upright on my feet, flush with sake racing through my blood.

'Faisons cette chose! Dewa mata atode, geishas!

Pierre

I gravely slugged my Martell, winced at quarterback Drew Breeze's wild eyed downfield stair as he launched another interception, and shook my head.

Pierre



May 23, 2007

Pierre's Song.

Set to Radiohead's Iron Lung



Geishas, you're blowing me away

in almost every way

you don't mean it

but I'm confused



My brain says I'm receiving clues

and not for lack of booze

I'm missing the point

of this game



The country's losing trees

to the Japanese

And Whitethorne is behind it?

I can't tell



What I've got to know

is where am I to go

and what's the next step

in this case?

The geisha's nodded gravely and Cheetah Murakami slugged back his saki and flipped the die to the girl next to me.

Pierre



May 21, 2007

Pierre's Turn.

The cold, unfiltered sake was like truth, seeping into my bones like some kind of osseo-balm. I had not yet ascertained the details, but there was an odd clarity in the room as Stuttering Caterpillar handed me the die and the geishas refilled the cups.

I rolled the musical note. It was to me to compose and sing a song.

I stood and cleared my throat. Alay!

Pierre

May 18, 2007

The Game.

Shaking Fern stood at the table, kimono curving down her hips like a garden waterfall. She cleared her throat with the slightest of chirps and then began.

'Two Japanese multinational corporations are involved in the degradation of the Northwestern Canadian forest. The two corporations are the Mitsubishi and Daishowa Keiretsu, that are involved in the harvest of the old growth, boreal forest in both Alberta and B.C. The harvesting is mainly done through clearcutting methods that are environmentally damaging because they speed up erosion, pollute fisheries and streams, destroy travel corridors for the animals which inhabit the forest, and damage the indigenous populations' culture and lifestyle. The harvest of the boreal forest by the corporations is mainly for the prized Aspen tree, utilized for building materials in Japan, disposable paper products and disposable chopsticks, which are also known as waribashi.

The gathering, quite satisfied, each took a flask from the table and drank. I followed suit. The glasses were quickly refilled and the second geisha rolled the die. This time it instructed that a JOKE be told.

The geisha called Stuttering Catepillar stood promptly and recited:

'Canada's strict environmental biodiversity regulations are free from interference from the U.S. Whitethorne Administration and the Japanese multi-nationals and the forest's will remain protected with out further vigilance.'

An uproar of cynical laughter rang round the room. Cynical geisha laughter is not to be taken lightely, mon amis, it is like the shards of your favorite childhood lamp scattering across a chalkboard. I drank my sake with solemnity and waited for the next round.

Pierre



May 16, 2007

Konichiwa, Bitches!

The girls wore tight kimonos with plunging decolletage revealing soft, milk white, porcelain chests and Cheetah Murakami and I wore yakutas with Marvin the Martian printed on them as we sat round the low table in the rice-papered backroom of the club playing an ancient Japanese drinking game called Hebereke Teawase. It was in the act of massive quantities of the unfiltered sake imbibed that I was to glean the clues to the case in front of me. The rules of the game were such: six black lacquered vessels of varying size were filled with the rice liquor and a single die was employed, printed with six different symbols. Play began with the player to the right of the host (Murakami) and each face of the die corresponds to a task which was required of the roller.

The Tasks

Pose a RIDDLE to the guests (and stump them)

Tell a JOKE that makes all the guests laugh

Offer an interesting FACT to the guests

PANTOMIME a famous saying (so one of the quests guesses what it is)

Make up a POEM (traditionally a Haiku) or LIMERICK on the spot

Musical Note. Sing a SONG

The geisha, Shaking Fern, was to Murakami's right and she rolled the die. She rolled a 'FACT'...

Pierre



May 14, 2007

An call for help, signed Planet Earth.

I'd received an urgent missive from an old friend. Masada Roy, who used to direct Pax Universalis, the old true believer, had a new case for me to look into. Pax Universalis is, or at least was (Since the Convention Riots of 2004 they've been underground and Masada has not been seen in public) the band of, you know, le bon gars; the people surfing the old mer de merde and pointing out the turds. She was a hell of lot of help in uncovering the Whitethorne Liver Case and I knew there were favors to be repaid. And this is how I found myself drinking unfiltered sake into the wee hours and playing dangerous card games with Cheetah Murakami and his six geisha bodyguards at some underground club on North Clark Street. Who says environmental radicalism is just for hairy-legged Hildas and flannel-clad Floyds? Alay! Kampai!

Pierre



May 11, 2007

The Case.

Damn the filthy details! You know most of the story. Wild Bill and I traveled to the Whitethorne Ranch in Texas, we uncovered the mystery. The President of the United States brokered a deal to procure an illegal liver from the body of a Chinese political dissident in order to save the life of his daughter. We broke the case, we told the story, but no one will listen! Sacre Poutine! The media giants ignore us as though we were Comedy Central! We've covered the Convention Riots, traced the ignominy behind the fake elections held, revealed the truth behind the Whitethorne Relocation Camps, where dissidents are removed from the general population to quell dissent! I can tell you now, too, that there are worse things brewing. Terrible events to be set in motion! Right now, on my desk, I see an insidious suggestion that the Administration is plotting with corporations in my own dear homeland to filch from our most precious Canadian resource! Our beautiful trees! Nom Dieu! When will it end? I've got to book a flight to Chicago.

Pierre



May 9, 2007

The Mistake.

I have been making this mistake since the last seconds of my virginity. Alas! The man could smell my interest even through the shield of funk he wore like a cloak of landfill. I'd rushed it. He became coy, animated again, like a lunatic under a full moon.

'I can help you, my friend, I can,' he snarled, dragging himself behind one foot in my direction. I shivered and recoiled my hand pressing the air in front of me. 'But you must help me.'

'Of course, I have procured a buyer already for the girl's liver, but my circumstances, you see,' he tilted his head at the bars of the cell, 'have made things just a little bit difficult. I will be here for sometime, I will not say why. But you, you could arrange this sale for me.'

'Ouais, pal, but what about me? No? I am to go on trial for smuggling bootleg CDs.'

'Yeah, right, a kid can download The Tragically Hip till his computer crashes and you can't get off a little bootlegging charge?' he said scornfully, as I detected an AI dipthong which revealed this foul beast from somewhere near Buffalo. 'Tell you what, I'll put you in touch with my lawyer. He'll make mincemeat of the case. Yours too,' he threw a thumb in the Chassid's direction, who said nothing and remained still, sitting in the lotus position at the other end of the cell.

'And then you can do me this little favor which I will repay in kind.'

Pierre



May 7, 2007

The Moose.

The man prattled on. The Whitethorne daughter, drunk again, this time rending her liver into total cirrhosis; a putrid-meat-gray lumped mass of useless tissue. The security detail he was able to bypass. The ravings of a crazed man. Eventually he broke down again, slumping in the corner of the cell we shared, mumbling about all the disappointments and failures that life had brought. Nom Dieu! Did I tell you how he smelled? A fetid mixture of wine, dirt, and sweat. He would pick his nose and then scratch his crotch, an old habit it seemed, from the crusty deposits on his pants. Vile! He began to lament on the sorry state of his progeny, a son, whose station in life had never risen above third string goalkeeper for some AHL team in Manitoba. Just as the thought occurred to me that there could hardly be a better expectation for the passed DNA of this miscreant, something came burbling from the dark recesses of memory, climbing into my consciousness like a hot air balloon from a deep cloud. The Manitoba Moose! I took the man in a new aspect, his age was perfect to have given life to a man who might have been of the age of a young hockey player when I was a young boy of six! The man who spirited away my dear mama, leaving me to rot in the prison of papa's cabin on the Gaspe Peninsula. I began, though from the distance of the other side of the cell, to pepper the man with questions about him, his son, I wanted his name.

Pierre



May 4, 2007

The Liver.

The desiccated old man revealed to us that he'd been in Tokyo that night to receive the Emperor's niece's kidney stone, normally a prize catch on a given day, but... suddenly a cavalcade of ambulance and police cars arrived, swarmed by dark suited authorities, the man said he knew to wait. And sure enough he recognized the gurneyed figure of the daughter of the president of the United States! He held, for this would be a take more valuable than any he had ever seen! Sacre Pigeon!

Bill and I, obviously, were dubious. It would take a contrivance equally as twisted to engage us in the journalistic battle we are now embroiled in to bring us together on this remarkable journey.

Pierre



May 2, 2007

The Interview

'An interview, avec moi? Dearest Angela, it is too soon for you to be back to work, no?'

'Well, my little peanut of brittle, I am your humble servant. Yes, my association with Bill Herschovitz, my career in the journalism of investigation in general? Well, we met, actually, in Holding at Bordeaux Jail. These were low times for me, since the death of my MC Nervoux Stephane, I had stooped to smuggling bootleg CDs, in particular, I had been nabbed right here in New York City with a beautiful batch of Abdel Al Slimani sampling St. Lawrence fiddle music with Algerian Rai. Very cool stuff. Anyway, the FBI thought I was involved in terrorism and the Fiddle Society in Montreal, that bunch of leg-breakers, have their fingers deep into the pockets of law in Quebec and I faced three to five.

'Quelle est? Angela, you cut right to the chase! Sacre cerise! It was there in the cell that Bill and I both met with that wreck of life, the organ salesman. You never met a more foul beast than this man. He claimed to us that he would sell us the ruined liver of the daughter of a very famous American. Cagey at first, said he dealt in paraphenalia exotique, and then, as we were increasingly disinterested, as is the nature with the mad, he began to gesticulate madly, confessing to have been in Tokyo, on a very fateful night...

Pierre



April 30, 2007

It's good to be back. Alay!

It took a while, but Colleen's Sci-Fi Channel original series went back into production (I just love imdb!), so I knew she'd be in B.C. on a six week schedule, providing her character isn't killed off in one of the episodes, so with luck I can venture out without the fear of the zombie-type retribution. I'll fill you in later.

It is time to get back to work. My job these days, you ask? Since the demise of my days as the father of Quebec Hip Hop? It's the journalism of investigation, mon freres! The revelation of the sinister underbelly that is the current administration! The illegal wars, the insidious dispersal of fat contracts to cronies, the traffic in illegal organs harvested from Chinese political dissidents!

I came back to the City, to where I kept offices with my partner, my Bernstein, the unwashed Wild Bill Herschovitz, the last Chassidic cowboy. My secretary told me it had been sometime since she'd seen him around and the bastard never carries a cell phone so I went to my desk and began to play through my messages. I was stunned to find one from long missing reporter from the SPN network, Angela Brentwood, long presumed lost in the Colombian jungle!

Pierre



April 27, 2007

The ride to the hospital...

Helmut would recover admirably, even still to play the fußball, though never professionally, as was his dream. But what I remember most about that day, now some twenty years past, is the conversation that we had, Helmut strapped to my back and I pedaling my bicycle down the winding roads of the Schleswig-Holstein.

'Gerta,' he called to me. 'Do you believe that the universe has a moral order which encourages the determination of right and wrong and that human beings are capable of mimicking the larger, divine order and properly mete out justice as they see fit?'

'I like to think so, Schätzlein.'

'And the forces which drive the moral order of this universe, being divine and all powerful, they are capable of acting without the use of human direction?'

'Please, Helmut, why don't you please just rest until we get to the hospital?'

'It just seems, Gerta, Shatzi, that if there is reason in the universe, divine order, fate, that god has spoken today. God has said to me, through the insidious use of his forsaken, sharply branched baum, that I am NOT to be what I have dreamed I would be. Is this not true?' Though it was a summer day, and the high German sun burned noon, I felt a sudden the cold depths as though Helmut, through his words, had unzipped the very fabric of reality and the chill of the abyss swept through my body. Mired in dank thought I lost control of the bicycle and trying to right it, trying to maintain balance and above all, keep poor, brave, despaired Helmut in place, I broke my thumb on the gear-shift of the bicycle, but I did not cry out. I would be strong for Helmut. My dream, too, became stillborn that moment. I would never perform the surgeries I longed so to do. Das mußte nun einmal so sein.

Pierre



April 25, 2007

Gerta performs field surgery on young Helmut...

In falling from the tree, poor Helmut's lung was pierced by opposing branch. I could tell by the bubbling whisper-whine his chest made when he tried to breathe after thumping to the ground. Immediately I tore off his Die Artze shirt, revealing his German, pre-pubescent brawn and brushed away the bark from around the slit just below his right pectoral. I rushed back to our bicycles and grabbed the tire repair kit and returned to poor Helmut, who was brave and as strong as any youth of our nation, and took out the black rubber sheet and affixed it as a seal over the sucking chest wound. Keeping young Helmut stable was paramount to the success of the recovery and I scurried around, bringing materials together to form the exoskeleton of a large backpack, something every German girl is trained to do from the very first days she learns to hike the majestic forests of the vaterland. To this I strapped Helmut, whose stoic silence still resounds in me like the quiet hum of the universe in brave motion, and then the human backpack to myself and began the twelve-mile ride down into the village and to the hospital.

Pierre



April 23, 2007

From the office of Pierre Bertrand Lafitte...

Guten Morgen! Gerta here. It was not always that this Deutsches Mädchen dreamed of becoming the personal secretary of great Hip-Hop stylist and muckraker, Mssr. Lafitte. Back in the Schleswig-Holstein, I once aspired to hopes of my own and no, shame on you, they did not involve those videos that are so horribly spoken of, when the name of my hometown is evoked. No, indeed, it was my wish to become involved in medicine, surgery, to be precise. I studied at the age of eight, having passed the Numerus clauses with flying colors. When my oldest friend, Helmut, fell from the Dwarf Balsam in the fields behind his parent's barn, I had my first opportunity to perform the tasks of repairing a sucking chest wound...

Pierre



April 20, 2007

Private Secretary, Gerta, brings us up to speed with Pierre's doings:

Mr. Lafitte was captured by his vater and the humpbacked Marie Brisebois, but then saved by Sarah, a beaver and lifelong confidant. In the melee that followed, Marie was swarmed and overcome by Sarah's colony of combat beavers. Sarah, herself, was skewered by the pere, whom was then summarily decapitated. After the destruction of the head, it was to be the end of the matter, but some years later, on his annual pilgrimage to the hill where the head of his vater was buried, he was attacked again. Confused and believing it was his vater returned, Mr. Lafitte slew the man, the man turning out to be an immortal/zombie-like creature as well, a fact which was only recently revealed by his daughter, Colleen, who wooed Mr. Lafitte into a vulnerable moment and then attempted to shoot him. Mr. Lafitte, as those who have read these pages already know, was narrowly able to escape and is now in hiding, planning his next maneuver. Alles hat ein Ende, nur die Wurst hat zwei. It reminds me of my girlhood days back in the Schleswig-Holstein.

Pierre





April 18, 2007

Gerta recaps the events of Pierre's life...

In Montreal, the young Mr. Lafitte found the life of the Hip-Hop. The dancing and the pretty lights of the club scene were to his liking immensely. He practiced the 'art of spins' and was soon verbunden with a young 'MC' named Nervous Stephen in an outfit called Buerre Phat which was to become quite popular, firmly establishing the phenomenon called Quebec Hip Hop in the pantheon with the likes of Kanye West, MC Solaar, and even Canada's most esteemed rapper Maestro Fresh Wes. It would have seemed the stratospheric rise would have no end but it was in the studio, recording the follow up album to their smash success Grand Trepidation d'un Canada Francais, that my dear employer meet with his schwarzes tier, Marie Brisebois, would later engineer the murder of Nervous Stephen and reunite father and son back in the 'beaver infested' cabin out on the Gaspe.

Pierre





April 16, 2007

From the desk of Pierre Bertrand Lafitte...

Guten Morgen! This is Gerta here, the personal secretary for Mr. Lafitte, whom has expressly contacted me, through quite a frantic telephone conversation, in order to best bring you, his dearest, most supple reader up to speed with the events of his life that led, in his words 'to my fleeing down the hallway of the swank hotel dressed only in my silk boxers, the ones with Marvin the Martian printed on them. Oh, and my wallet...'. So, for you to better understand the recent events which have led to Mr. Lafitte's recent and necessary reclusion, I will detail as follows:

His mother, purchased for pelts, ran away when he was young, with a goalkeeper from the Moose squad of hockey players from the Manitoba town. His father, a tireless taskmaster and apparent immortal crime lord (with, it is noted, a 'bug infested beard'), raised him brutally in a small cabin on the Gaspe Peninsula in Eastern Quebec. The young Mr. Lafitte swore a revenge that he never quite had the deutsche kugeln to carry out and so ran away to Montreal...

Pierre



April 14, 2007

Touchdown!

Alay! There I was, half naked, drowsy from cognac and the sound of my own voice, and there was Colleen, robed in a Japanese happy coat pointing a .44 Magnum at my hapless chest! Do you ever have these days? Nom Dieu! I tire of them!

'That was my dad you killed up there, you dirty French bastard,' she said to me, pulling back the hammer. ' I told you that he was one of them. But you've got it wrong. They are not the living dead. Your father, mine, they were immortals, members of an eternal sect that live among men. But you killed them and now I'm going to make you pay.'

Randolph Scott, the Mountie, got little Savannah safe back to his home, where she squealed with delight when she meets his fetching fiancee, played by Margaret Lockwood. I watched Colleen's eyes flicker involuntarily to the screen. Oh, the forgotten charms of Shirley!

I reached behind my on the couch and flung the statue of Johnny Unitas that had been on the sidetable, at Colleen and lurched my body from the couch, grabbed only my wallet and fled the hotel room. On the run again! 'Je te pisse en zig-zags au raie de cul,' I yelled as I raced down the hall.

Pierre



April 12, 2007

The last of the tale?

At the hotel we were half watching a movie on AMC while I told Colleen the last of my story, but my attention was half fixed on this Shirley Temple film from the thirties that begins with the slaughter of pioneers wagoning into Western Canada. Their entrail-spilled remains are come upon by Mounties wearing pillbox caps with perfect quaffs of oiled hair.

'The dirt was freshly dug out around where I had buried papa's head ashes,' I said absently, watching the movie as the Mounties discovered an oaken barrel rattling near one of the wagons. 'The clay urn was not there any longer.'

The Mounties lift the barrel to discover the adorable Temple girl, her face be-smudged with toil and soot, her thick curls in primal distress. She is clearly in a dire state of post traumatic stress disorder, resistant to the Mounties reassuring efforts.

'So, what was I saying?' I said, transfixed by the movie in the way only men watching post-coital television at dawn can be, 'Any way there was another zombie, I thought it was papa come back, but now I don't even know for sure. I killed it though. Least I think I did, mon cheri.'

Shirley, named Susannah in the film, is manically describing the murder of her grandfather some meters away as she is hugged by the lead Mountie, a smitten Randolph Scott, whom you just have to guess is going to adopt her. I hadn't noticed that Colleen had gotten up from the couch. I certainly didn't notice until I heard the cold spring click as she drew back the hammer of the high caliber pistol. I looked away from the television, reluctantly, to find her standing, backlit by the orange light of the bathroom, in a bathrobe, and aiming the affaires end of a hand canon, ala Dirty Harry. Sacre'Bleu!

Pierre



April 10, 2007

Pierre finishes telling Colleen his story...

The sun slowly rose over Broadway as we reclined in the plush sectional of the suite on 32nd street.

'Sarah's beaver colony were of immense help,' I told her, cupping an amino acid and banana smoothie in my right hand. 'We buried the body on the property behind the cabin, but took the head to a special, ancient place high up on a hill in the forest. There we burned it, took the ashes and filled a clay urn, which the beavers provided, and I buried it, about four feet deep, right there on the hill.'

'Somehow,' Colleen said, looking at me coyly. 'I don't feel like that's really the end of the story.'

'Well, mon cheri, it was for a long time. I would come to visit that hill once a year, on the anniversary of papa's decapitation. I would reflect on the deaths of Nervoux Stephane, faithless Marie Brisebois, and that poor security guard, the state of my hip hop career. My work investigating the Whitethorne administration began and with it the slow, long avoidance of my mother. But this year, upon this return, something terrible and inexplicable happened. It's strange now, to think of it, I was so sure a week ago about what had happened, but now...

Pierre



April 7, 2007

Elegy for a beaver.

Both papa's knives, their curved blades, were shot through poor Sarah's torso like a viper's fangs. My brow curled like Brando's over Caan in heart rendered despair for my old, old friend. I reached to pet her quivering pelt.

'Do not waste time mourning for an old mammal like me, mon cheri, there is more work to be done,' she told me, bubbles of red opaque-ness forming at her beaver lips. 'The head must be destroyed, the body put in the ground. My colony will aid you, trust them as you have trusted me these many years.'

'Sarah, my heart, I would this had turned out any other way. Sacre'Poutine!' I wailed.

'Mind your language, pauvre con, just do as I say. When you leave her, when this business is done, you must find your mother. You must reconcile in this life with her.' She coughed and spat, the life trickling out of her like the last waters of the deep well. 'Promise me, promise me you will do this!'

The other beavers begin to gather round us, my kneeling despondent frame, the severed body of my papa, and the dying queen of the beavers of the Gaspe Peninsula. Their tails slid over the wood like the finest grain of sandpaper in the world as they circled us.

I promised her, and even as I say it yet, my heart is a stone somewhere in my bowels for now, after all this time past, I have not yet fulfilled it. Désespoir totale!

Pierre





April 5, 2007

The head must be removed!

'I will help you,' whispered Sarah, the aged beaver, 'Wait for my signal!' Papa took two sinisterly curled blades from my collection and turned to me, upright and facing him from the other side of the broken wooden table. ' Ta mere suce des ours dans la foret!,' papa spat. 'You were never worth a damn and now you never will be.' 'You won't ever speak of mama that way again,' I said, my sweat cooling icily on my cheeks, my breath returning. 'Bon. Me faut retourner à la pute qui m'a accouchée. But you must come through me, my boy!' I heard a sudden scurry behind me and before I knew it, Sarah had ascended my backside and launched herself over by head, a roping arch of beaver. I knew this was my only chance and, as papa's knives readied to stop her, I, myself, took to the air, finding my dragon's tooth dagger square into his ruddy, bony pate and secure... I slashed my way into his throat as I might a chicken. All falling down I remained true, cutting through the sinew and the bone of his neck and as his hulking shoulder touched the stone floor of the hearth, the head tore off with a fat ripping sound. A nauseating, gaseous smell came from the neck as I rose to find the fate of Sarah, my heroine.

Pierre





April 3, 2007

Battle in the Gaspe! Papa wouldn't relent. I waited for the wound in his leg to drain his strength but, Mon Dieu, he would not slacken. Using a melange of techniques from the Krav Maga of the Israeli army to the Russian Specnaz he pierced at my defenses like a tiger cat a quarter his age! Like the sullen child I was, I scowled and hissed, sneaking in a flying circle kick that broke his nose, yet did not dull his attack. He hunkered down like a rhino and tanked toward me, striking my head with the butt of his knife, following with a vicious knee that sent me flying to the kitchen.

Woozy, face down in beaver tail and what could only have been the deceitful blood of that tramp Marie Brisebois, I looked up to see Sarah, her benevolent muzzle clucking instructions to me.

'Pauvre con! Your papa is undead, have you heard nothing? You must take the head from its holder! It is the only way!'

Beside my face the knife papa wielded struck the oaken floor with a hideous thunk, piercing the tail of one of Sarah's minions. It howled in pain! I clutched my blades and rolled over as I heard papa make back to the mantelpiece for more knives.

Pierre





March 31, 2007

Beaver Nation!

In the early 1600s when the French were looking to populate the Americas they came to Canada, Catholic and Huguenot alike. In order to turn some profit from the new land they sought silver, or gold, some precious natural resource. They found neither. There was nothing in the land but beaver, from which, they discovered, excellent waterproof hats could be made from their pelts. They traded with the Hurons for blankets, kettles, and hatchets and soon the French colony was shipping 15,000 beaver pelts a year out of Montreal. Eastern beaver grew scarce. The decimated population, the drying wetlands struck me, right then, right there, as I battle papa blade to blade as Sarah and her swarm of beavers overcame the most quintessential French Canadian I had ever known, the recreant Marie Brisebois, the destroyer of my heart. It was a strange and beautiful revenge and forever the sound of her wailing as the life was expelled from her will always remind me of the power of nature to reclaim itself. Yeah!

Pierre



March 29, 2007

Beaver Swarm!

I took a dragon's tooth dagger in my left and an elk hunting Bowie knife in my right and lunged at papa, still struggling to get his breath on the floor. Marie was screaming in the kitchen as the beavers crawled up her leg, clattering with the most malevolent churrs and whines, their claws tearing at her flowered dress.

Papa was keen to my attack and kicked me square in the chest, though I was able to swipe at his calf with the elk knife. He howled and the sound of it was like sweet honey drizzling into my mouth. My eyes became alive with vengeance and as papa rose I squared off, ready for action. 'Perfidious beavers!' he spat as he warily set himself against me. 'After all I have done for them. Sarah! I will see you in hell!'

With that papa performed a beautiful leg sweep, scuttling me to the floor, while he zipped across the room to the mantelpiece and grabbed my 9 inch hunting blade. I regained my stance and prepared to fight!

Pierre



March 27, 2007

Sarah the beaver saves Pierre!

'I think we will start you at one of Uncle Richie's clubs in Matane. You can sweep the floors and balance the books. I think two years will be a good start.'

Sarah clapped her big padded tail on the creaky floorboards and I sprang into action! My hands came whipping round to the front and shoved the table hard into my papa's chest! He went flying pied over tete. Marie dropped her percolator in shock as suddenly the cabin around me came alive with bucktoothed mammal. The beavers were revolting!

This was a long time coming for papa. My knives were on the mantelpiece behind my chair. As he wheezed on the floor for breath and the beavers swarmed the treacherous Marie Brisebois, I selected my blades for the job ahead...

Pierre



March 21, 2007

Pierre belongs to Canadian Undead Orgainized Crime Family!

Before I knew it something had raised itself to the level of my bound hands behind me on the chair. I could feel wet muzzle sniffing at my fingers. What was this? There came a furtive gnawing at the hard leather. No! Could it be? Nom de Dieu! Was she still alive? It had to be! It was Sarah, the aged beaver, mama to countless Castor Canadensis that littered the landscape of my childhood and its filthy cabin and my friend and confidant through the hard years after mama ran away with the wayward goalie from Winnipeg. I stifled a joyous grin as papa outlined what was to become of me in his pernicious crime group. Sarah chewed away at my bounds. There was hope again as I slyly eyed the room to see what had become of my knives...

Pierre



March 21, 2007

Papa Lafitte lectures the tied and bound Pierre!

'You were a worthless pup, you peu de fart; always cuddling up to your soft-headed mama and wasting your hours up in your oversized head, or making your little drawings. Did you never notice, boy? The empire that your papa ran, that he has run from the birth of this pine needle compost heap of a nation? The Lafitte Family, you know nothing of us, do you?'

Papa glowered at me, his yellow eyes causing my own to sting by virtue of his glare. I began to remember the trail of guests running late into the night. The aboriginals, the Caribbeans, the Italians, the fat, bearded men on motorcycles. I was in my loft on my hard wooden palate, covering my ears with my pillow and trying, inside my mind, to float away. I knew nothing of their activities, only the glass and tobacco strewn messes I would clean up in the morning.

'Theft, robbery, hijacking, and home invasion,' he bellowed, 'Arms trafficking, counterfeiting, extortion, fraud, gambling, and loan sharking, you dirty simp! You are hardly worthy of the family name, you runny piece of cheese, but I will mold you, boy, I will turn you into a proper Lafitte!

Just then there was soft, almost imperceptible padding just behind me, a slither of fur on wood floor...

Pierre



March 19, 2007

Pierre tells of his adventures!

'So there I was, yeah, tied up in the chair, Colleen, in my father's rickety cabin, you know? Marie Brisbois paced in the kitchen, her head only occasionally turning to peer over its humped back to savor in the glory of her treachery as papa sat before me explaining what was to be my destiny. I had managed to free one of the turntable needles I have kept in my belt since the old days spinning records in Montreal and was fruitlessly pricking away at my hard leather bonds (yours are very nice, though, my dearie). You see, I had run away from papa those many years ago, when I was going to be apprenticed at my uncle's Canadian Ballet theatre in Chibougamau. What I hadn't realized is the depth of my family's involvement and even less, the role that papa had been playing for years, operating out of our rancid little cabin...'

Pierre



March 16, 2007

Pierre's nightcap recap!

'He's not, I guess, really a zombie, nor a vampire,' I told Colleen while she tied my hands above my head to a heavy leaden statue of Johnny Unitas that stood on the coffee table. 'Just kind of, undead, you know? At least I was unable to kill him.'

Colleen listened intently, fastening my bounds with such gentle firmness. I told her about how he'd told my mother, on the day he bought her, that he was born in Ville Marie (Which would become Montreal) just days after it was fortified as a fur post in the early 18th Century. I told her how she loathed him and eventually ran off with a third string goalie from the Manitoba Moose; the years of subjugation, feeding the beavers, and chopping wood. She was kind, Colleen, stroking my armpits and biting my toes. Outside the sun fell, darkness filling the lightless hotel room like ink.

I told how I intended to kill him, how it had gone so terribly wrong and how that, somehow inexplicably, it launched my famed hip-hop career with Buerre Phat and yet brought the demise of my MC, Nervoux Stephane. And then there was that fateful late summer eve, when I was captured by papa and the perfidious Marie Brisbois, where I found myself bound to a chair in papa's cabin as I was brought to atone for my sins...

Pierre



March 14, 2007

Pierre reveals himself!

We retired after a long, weird convention to Colleen's sumptuous appointments at the Radisson Martinique on Broadway. I opened a bottle of Puligny Montrachet by Jean-Marc Boillot and poured her a glass, opting myself for a fishbowl size snifter of good cognac, Cordon Bleu, and swirled its maple colored contents as I stood before the window facing downtown and Madison Park, the heady vapors of the brandy arresting my olfactory glands.

'My father is one of the living dead,' I said to her, Colleen, as she sprawled, kitten-like on the plush sectional of the suite.

'Yeah, so is mine,' she said. 'What are you going to do about it?'

I smiled. In the reflection of the window against the cobalt winter sky, the brandy sparkled aflame over my chest. I turned to Colleen.

'I was raised in a beaver infested cabin in the Gaspe Peninsula...'

Pierre



March 12, 2007

Will Hayden be saved?

And that's when Gary Coleman, like a child star bolo, came flying through the air, arm hooking round the nerd's neck and legs wrapping round, the result of a Wolverine/Colossus-esque Fastball Special delivered by Phantom Menace one light saber wonder, Ray Park. The box dropped from in front of the gargantuan geek and Hayden and Colleen shot up from their tables in horror!. The lines of adoring fans shuddered and averted their eyes. I couldn't look away, it was the sort of twisted, sordid sight (like Bush being sworn in or Ashcroft singing) that draws the eyes to monstrosity. There stood the beast, his Oliver Sacks hair and beard wrapped in an Arnold shawl, his well-worn Docker khakis split at the crotch, his dingus retreating like Napoleon from Egypt, the box down before him, its homemade hole cut from pre-sharpied dimensions and its gaming and fanboy contents spilled out. I felt humbled for the man as Gary Coleman writhed and struggled to bring him down, Ray Park leaping over the tables and dropping into a leg-tackling roll. He was humiliatingly subdued. Colleen made her way to me and she held me and I could feel in her trembling embrace that she had come to trust me, come to look to me for security. I sighed. I would have to tell her my story, it could not wait another day.

Pierre



March 8, 2007

The nerd strikes!

The portly mooncalf held his box of collectibles slung before his jelly belly like a truncated menhir and lurched yet again now away from the line and back around it. I followed. The security guard's kertwang appeared a surfeit of sufficiency as the schmo gamboled now in an out of orbit spiral into the back recesses of the Javit's center. Warily, I turned back to the galleria and spied my best gal, Colleen, signing glossy photos of hers truly from some Sci-Fi channel program I had never seen. She winked. I wagged my Canadian tongue salaciously. Hayden Panettieria took notice, I could tell out of the corner of my eye, my tongue unleashed never fails to draw eye gawking support and appreciation and in fact was a hallmark of the live shows at the DTC back in Montreal when the spins poured like milk and honey and my poor, dead partner, Nervoux Stephane, mc'd with the beautiful xylophonic stutter, but alas... Those were the days. Hayden was signing a photo for a particularly fleshy Qui-Gon Jinn. Behind her the curtains began to rustle with a terrible immediacy. The rube was shuffling with his box out before him from behind the divider and, dear merciful god, it was too clear to me what was happening! I cried 'Dick in a box!' but I feared I may have been too late...

Pierre



March 2, 2007

Pierre is on the trail of a suspicious nerd at the New York Comic Con!

His hands were loaded with paraphernalia that to the naked eye looked like no more than the boxed effluvium of a hard-core collector, here in the Javit's Center, one of thousands. He careened around the corner like he'd been hit in the head and broke past the line for Peter Mayhew and demanded of Chewbacca to know where his 'guest' was. Chewy blew him off. He tried Gary Coleman, a few tables down, and got a wave in the general direction of the massive line that had formed to see that regenerative blonde. He swung his box of crap in that direction and made off with a hearty tramp. I began to speed up. Sure enough, he attempted to skewer his way through the line, but was held back by security. I stopped for just a moment, to see if the nerd would abate...

Pierre



March 1, 2007

Pierre attacked by NERDS!

Imagine you are in a pastry bag, only instead of sweet, sweet cream, the bag is filled with plus-size, socially and spatially challenged geeks by the thousands who smell of cheap costumes and sweat and then, lo, someone begins to squeeze the super pliable nylon fabric! It was a weekend like living under a mosh pit without the music! I was attacked by an ungainly behemoth wearing suspenders over his massive t-shirted girth and sporting a wild, unkempt beard who thought I was a costumed Berkeley Breathed character and want to know where his 'Special Guest' was. I sneered and shoved a thumb toward the Galleria, hoping to put his annoying, nasally stutter behind me, but something about the man suddenly arrested my mind and I realized that, around the corner, that Collen (My new ride and best gal) was doing a signing with actress, Hayden Panettierri from Heroes. I watched his dork-waddle journey past the Artist's Alley suspiciously. Something was wrong with this portly Orc. I began to follow him to see just what it was...

Pierre



February 23, 2007

Pierre to attend the NY Comic Con at the Javits Center!

It would be good to get lost for a little while at the Nerd Prom East. It'd been awhile since I talked shop with Arvid, goosed an octogenarian in a tight dress selling autographed photos of her three episodes on the original Star Trek, told Rodney Ramos to smile and then run away. Colleen said she could get me a pass and I was, for the first time in weeks, able to breathe easy, if just for a little bit, as the Manhattan skyline began to loom before the 87...

Pierre



February 21, 2007

Pierre is cruising down the New York Highway...

Her name was Colleen and my luck was ripe. She was driving to New York, an actress known for her roles on the SCI-FI Channel, to attend the Comic-Con and sign glossy photos of her half naked self. There were people I would know there. Brian Vaughn, that guy who does the Rex Mundi, possibly Gary Coleman. I made small talk, constantly checking the rearview mirror, tilting my head to watch the heavens, no idea what form papa might take, if he were still after me.

Pierre



February 19, 2007

Pierre seeks shelter in the car of a woman!

Normally women who drive Volkswagons give me the fantods, to say nothing of things in the color yellow. But I was in danger and the woman was somehow familiar, I can't say how, I guess in the way any man might hope some voluptuous 33D with a copy of Finnegan's Wake laying on the brown, sunburned dashboard ought to be, I suspect. A way a lone, I made my play and she responded. "I've something for scabs and sunglasses," she said. "Get in the car and let's go."

Pierre




February 16, 2007

Previously... On Pierre:

Former Quebec Hip Hop star, Pierre Bertrand Lafitte is on the run, pursued, he suggests, by the zombie corpse of his papa, whom he also claims to have murdered six years ago. As he races down the New York Highways, he recounts the tragic tale to William Herschovitchz via tape recorder. The details are sinister and include abuse as a child, a rocket arc career in the world of French Canadian DJing, unrequited humpback love, the murder of Nervoux Stephane, his MC, and the exacting revenge he had to take. In our last episode Pierre runs out of gas in his stolen Woody and has to rely on the kindness of one voluptuous stranger outside a Bob's Big Boy at a rest station. Will she attend his emergency? Stay tuned next week and find out the thrilling truth! Yeah!

Pierre




February 14, 2007

Pierre is lifted from his tale!

"Bill! The goddamned petrol in the Woody is gone!"

I pulled over the car somewhere just outside B********* and tucked the tape recorder in my jacket pocket. Sacre Bleu! I could not spare a moment's time. My papa's corpse could be pursuing me in a hundred different ways! I could waste no time. I was fortunate to find a rest station nearby. Ignoring the tempting neon of the Bob's Big Boy I flagged down a young woman heading for her yellow Jetta. She had breasts like slung melons and a rear cupped by cut off jeans like burlap round a couple of Walla Walla Sweets, you know what I am saying? Yeah! Would she know my spins? But no, only the Tragically Hip are known this far South. But there was a chance that she could help me in my escape...

Pierre




February 12, 2007

Pierre has been captured by his papa and the perfidious Marie Brisebois!

Marie poured papa coffee from the speckled percolator, lurking behind him like some humpbacked Pussy Galore as his yellow eyes bore down on me like the quiet menace of police tape. "The ineluctable modality of fate, eh, little Pierre?" he said to me finally, his voice like hissing gas. "That which has brought you back to me. She's a good girl, my Marie, no? Eh? She treat you real nice?" Was I nauseated? Yeah! Sacre-Poutine, the very thought of my beloved Brisebois cradled in the evil grasp of papa turned my bowels to curd! But the fear inside me of what papa would do now was greater than anything except my will to end his life! As a DJ, I always keep spare turntable needles in my belt for the nights when the spins are flowing. I slowly began to twist my hands from their leather bindings to try and get to one of the diamond tips. "Ten years ago, little Pierre, I made an appointment with your future. I arranged your apprenticeship in Chibougamau with my uncle. It was an appointment you did not keep." I nudged a needle out from my belt loop, turning it in my fingers carefully. "It was a low class strip club,"I told him coldly, "It was called The Squirrel Cage. I would have none of it." Papa's hands clenched on the wood table. "Canadian Ballet, you peu de fart, the Canadian Ballet! Now listen to what I tell you!" I began to prick away at the leather strapping. This would take awhile.

Pierre




February 9, 2007

Snuck up from behind by an unknown assailant, Pierre has been captured in front of his papa's cabin!

I came to slowly, my head a pounding cauchemar, the first things to come to me not sight but, of course, that wicked foul odor of papa and his bacon and tobacco and bad whisky. But that was not all! Nom de Dieu! My mind could not allow for what my senses were telling me! I was strapped tightly by leather cord to one of papa's chairs, I knew as much, though my eyes had yet to open. That smell of sandalwood and nag champa, the practical fragrance of none other than my old producer and part-time lover, that barb in my heart, the dear and perfidious Marie! My eyes popped open like an owl's shocked glare and I struggled against my bindings furiously, but there was no escaping the truth, there she was. In her plain, flowered dress, holding papa's blue, speckled percolator in papa's kitchen. Across from me he sat, his thick arms on the table before him, his yellow eyes staring at me from above his bug-infested whiskers. He smiled and called my name softly...

Pierre




February 7, 2007

Pierre is approaching his papa's cabin in the Gaspe Peninsula, composing Mi'kmaq poetry...

The cod looks up from the cold and glassy water

To say that patricide is a grave and onerous sin

Moose grunts and reflects on the sins visited

Upon the mother and the boy, years of misery and toil

Beaver slaps water with tail, an almost pornographic spank

He says that dirty old bastard has it coming. Yeah!

I am close now, at the end of the forest, before the meadow in front of Papa's cabin. The sun's light is tipping over the dewy green of the grass where Mama and I once held picnics. I can see papa inside the cabin. He does not suspect that I am but meters away from bringing him his just deserts! I can taste sweet revenge as the blunt instrument (I will later learn it was the handle from the axe with which I had endeavored to 86 papa with ten years ago) strikes me with a nausea-inducing thud and I fall to the ground and loll out of consciousness...

Pierre



February 5, 2007

Pierre makes his way through the forest of the Gaspe Peninsula to his papa's cabin, where he intends to kill him...

As I tread over the loamy ground of the woods, I reflected on the poetry of the Mi'kmaq Indians who inhabited these grounds when the original French missionaries came to these shores in the 16th Century. The poetry is a beautiful dialogue taking place between a Cod, a Beaver, and a Moose, the animas of these unique people whose culture now seems teetering on the brink of extinction. There is no shortness of irony that these dialogues often explore the subjective and objective moralisms of human existence. These poems take form, generally, with a statement of absolutism (almost always uttered by the Cod, a stodgy and plain character if there ever was one), followed by ruminative reflections by the Moose and Beaver, which reflect the sage wisdom that comes from the witness of Life's Wheel, age after season turning age, and holds the soft glow of truth (as though gone over with a fine chamois). Dawn turned over the Mountain Ash as I stole through the forest, the air just chill with the first sign of autumn and I attempted to compose a poem for myself...

Pierre



February 2, 2007

Pierre makes his way into the forests of the Gaspe Peninsula to meet his destiny...

There were indigo stains still on the rock inside the cave, this womb of my self. For the first time in weeks, perhaps in years, I felt alive, fecund with the creative juices of youth! The air was clean and sweet in the late summer way, but I was not to be distracted. My days were spent in martial meditation, summoning the courage to kill papa, exercising my body (my vim crumpled like a handful of aluminum foil after my binge drug cocktail over the lost Marie) until I was again the picture of Canadian fitness. My diet was algae mixed with yogurt, rare red meat, and muesli. I sharpened my knives and learned to throw them with a sinister accuracy; I read the poetry of the Mi'kmaq Indian tribe, a particularly beautiful prose form traditionally clad as conversations between a moose, a beaver, and a cod. Weeks passed until I knew I was ready. Alay! My weapons strapped to my body I descended from the cave on the hill to find papa and bury the knife into his wretched heart, as mama had so often wished she could...

Pierre



January 31, 2007

After the grisly murder of Nervoux Stephane, Pierre travels back to the Gaspe Peninsula to find his murderous papa...

The security guard, as I suspected, was dead, too, and here with this dastardly double murder ended my illustrious career in the world of Quebec Hip Hop! Thoughts of my love, Marie, faded into the recesses of my heart as the consequences of my inaction tormented me, propelling me forward along Highway 132 in a rented Renault, cogitating over my next move in this sanguinary chess match that was afoot. He would be in the cabin, that beaver-ridden pile of logs, and would be expecting me. I needed to conjure the element of surprise, but how? Sacre'Poutine! Then I remembered the sanctuary I had created, so many years before, when I was in the woods for weeks creating my first comic book, that dreaded gush of life force spilled into the world that now demanded of me the reconciling of destiny! Alay! It was a small cave up a craggy hill in the boreal forests distant from Riviere la Madaliene by a day and a half on foot. I stopped in Matane to purchase supplies for a long stay. It was the late summer again, now ten years removed since that fateful night in the cabin. This time I could not fail...

Pierre



January 29, 2007

Pierre is seeking to reconcile with Nervoux Stephane and keep Buerre Phat alive...

There was a sticky sweet smell in the air of maple and cough syrup as I pressed the intercom of Nervoux Stephane's opulent apartment in Le Plateau. I waited, my body exuding the chemical fumes of my weeks of excess, my spirit flagging like a dying car on the highway. There was no answer. I pressed the little button again, my teeth grinding so hard I could feel the muscles in my back constricting. I could not wait through this! I crawled awkwardly over the iron gates, surely monitored by some tea-sipping goon with a black jack, and landed in a crumpled mass on the pathway inside the apartment complex. I came to my feet and stumbled forward, back and to the left to number 31. I passed the security office, relieved to see the guard slumped in his chair, napping on the job! The door to apartment 31 was left ajar, I noted with ominous suspicion. My back hairs leapt erect! That smell! Nom Dieu! I slowly pushed open the door and even before the first sight of blood on Stephane's lush polar bear rug, I knew that papa had been here! That smell of Yukon Jack and bacon soaked sweat! And there was Stephane, murdered, most grisly! Désespoir! His body was filleted by sharpened axe and hanging over the mantelpiece beside his JUNOs. I broke down to cry but tears would not come, my body so desiccated by the Jellies, scaffle, and unkie that I could not weep for my dead friend. On my knees I swayed like Munch in motion, dry heaving in great sobs. This was my fault! Had I not lost courage and cut papa down when I had intended, Nervoux Stephane would be here today!! Doom! This was also a message, from papa, and I knew that when the convulsions and the paperwork subsided, I would move North to meet my fate...

Pierre



January 26, 2007

Pierre reflects on the break up of Buerre Phat...

It got bad. The foo foo, mollies, Kleenex, the estufa, all of it. I was deranged by the dizzying cocktail of pharmacopoeia I ingested to rid myself of the memory of that humpbacked woman named Marie. I found myself hanging by my own belt strap from the emergency sprinkler pipes at The Devastated Tongue Club (which may or may not have involved some bizarre and lurid act initially engaged in with and then abandoned by a DOTPOTUS*) one dark early morning and soberly realized that I had squandered the greatest act that Quebec Hip Hop had ever known! Nom Dieu! I untangled myself and lurched blearily into the cold, Montreal air, the sky so grey my heart ached. I had to find Nervoux Stephane, I had to try to find if we could rekindle the infectious stylings of his rat-a-tat stutter delivery and my own inspired scratches and make Buerre Phat come alive again! Alay! The taxi carried me to his opulent apartment in Le Plateau and my hand trembled as I reached to press the intercom...

*Daughter of the President of the United States

Pierre



January 24, 2007

Pierre is reminiscing over love during his days with Buerre Phat and the world of Quebec Hip Hop

My love for Marie (my Beatrice, my Layla), I knew, was beginning to affect my art. Nervoux Stephane and I were at work at our follow up album, The Last Gaspe, and it became clear the creative relationship was deteriorating. I began to bring 'Vitamin Water' bottles filled with Ciroc vodka and cranberry into the studio every morning and by noon would have broken down completely, setting R.E.M. "Everbody Hurts" on a loop and screaming at Stephane until his famous stutter delivery had exaggerated itself so that he began to sound like sheet metal flapping in a typhoon. There was resentment everywhere. I began to find copies of Alpha Flight, the comic I had created only to have my papa steal it and sell it to Marvel, strewn around the production area. Waterloo Rhythms Records began to issue press statements trying to explain release delays, privately retaining lawyers to severe our agreements...

Pierre



January 22, 2007

Pierre is reminiscing over love during his days with Buerre Phat and the world of Quebec Hip Hop

Which is not to say that I didn't sleep with her. It was Montreal, after all, and Marie was French Canadian. Yeah! But her indifference to me romantically was as like the United States to their overdue U.N. bill. I begged with her to eat with me, to share a single meal in a public restaurant, but she would have none of it! It was only furtive, uncomfortable love making on my turntable at the studio, or the lucky moments after hard rain when her fire escape was not slicked with oil and I could ascend to her kitchen window with gifts of Cipaille (Marie, cold as she was, could never resist the charms of my layered meat pie) and we'd share a stolen hour or two on her creaky Murphy bed. Afterward, she would disappear into the shower, so long and hot the paint above her bathroom door would start to peel before I got the message that it was time for me to go...

Pierre



January 19, 2007

Marie Brisebois was not a pretty woman. Her coat rack shoulders ran dangerously close to the ground and her plain, thin black hair was always tousled in an unkempt way that reminded my of a laundress. Her eyes were mousy and dark, the skin around them fielded with white downy hairs and a single, pronounced black mole. But, alas, she was demanding. A musical, mental contortionist, barking orders in her tinny voice that came like the blows of the Swedish masseuse to the blocked tight passageways of my infant's mind. I began to flow as I never had before, confronting with my art the vile shame of my relationship with papa. My tears were the spins on cuts like "Kid Named Pierre" and "Qui mange l'oie recolte le couteau". I was made whole again! Seen through my wet eyes and the glare of the glass window of the sound room Marie was like a vision to me. Her dress no longer a cheap floral print but a sweet, halcyon meadow where the sun hit the grass like great dabs of butter on a luscious mound of spring pea. But my love was never requited.

Pierre



January 17, 2007

They were the heady days, when Buerre Phat was toiling to create its seminal disc, Grand Trepidation d'un Canada Francais; when Nerveux Stephane laid down the rhymes and I, DJ Lafitte, spun out the percussion breaks, the scratching, and the ineluctably beguiling samples of Belioz, Kraftwerk, and Jungle Jitters. This was no Fresh Wes! No! Sacre' Poutine ! Alay! This was the politics of Public Enemy fugued with the sensual groove and philosophical inquiry of MC Solaar! Stephane and I were the toast of Old Montreal, the up and coming with the tumescent explosiveness of Kanye, the gunshot velocity of Tupac. We were signed by Waterloo Rhythms, the gravy train's rails well oiled and shiny, when the studio assigned us our new producer (our former, Polish expatriate, Tomasz, who claimed to work with Katowice's Pokahontaz, turned out a liar and a cheat). Would we'd stuck with the perfidious Pollack, I might still have the remnants of a heart. But this was how Marie, that tortuous siren, that undeniable force of nature, came into my life.

Pierre



January 15, 2007

I had to ditch the stolen Woody somewhere near Saratoga Springs when a fan blade shot through the hood, killing a young heron. As I hitched along the woodsy upstate blacktop I came across a man named Tom who was shooting a 'potato gun', a bizarre contraption of pvc piping, an igniter from an old barbeque grill, and an aerosol can of leather cleaner. He gave me cheap light beer and showed me a collection of frozen dead animals he had in his freezer, waiting for the spring to thaw them out and sell their pelts. There was an otter, several minks, and a muskrat. He then drove me to the train station in Saratoga. As I sped south on the Adirondack line, something about that muskrat, its seized and frosty contorted face, I was reminded of my first love after joining the world of Quebec Hip Hop...

Pierre



January 12, 2007

I hitchhiked to Montreal, a sixteen year old boy, but with the soul of an octogenarian widower. In the city I was a denizen of the night. In the day I stole fruits and meat from the Marche Atwater. I roamed the shadowy, but assiduously clean alleyways begging change from the lines of club goers in the Plateau Mont Royal and Old Montreal. One night a benevolent transvestite bought my way in to The Devastated Tongue Club. My life changed forever. The music, the beats, the bars of gun-blue light swinging like long hammers into the night of my despair! Yeah! I spent the entire night beside the DJ as he spun intoxicating mixes of Yaz, Radiohead, and the Linda Tripp tapes! Alay! I was ready to begin my apprenticeship immediately! I was ready to join the world! This is how you came to know me, this is how you came to know the spins of Buerre Phat. ..

Pierre



January 10, 2007

I knew every creak in the cabin, every loose floorboard. As I'd practiced for weeks I danced through the main living space like Kelly in the rain, my confidence slowly returning to meet fate and the deed I was about to commit. In the dark, the glint of the moon shone on the high polish of my sharpened axe; I could see my own maddened eyes as I poised myself before papa's bedroom. I breathed silently, deeply. I waited. The tick tocking of the Black Forest cuckoo clock by the fireplace inspired me; I began to gently swing the handle of the axe in time. An ember in the fire bed hissed and softly popped. Then, I could hear papa's snoring; its hateful sound like a grizzly in pain. In my mind I saw mama by the creek as I opened the door. It slowly swung, as quietly as though I'd greased it that very morning... I gripped the handle of the axe and...near dropped it in horror! Papa's eyes were open wide like haunted moons! Staring at me! What was happening? A ringing in my ears came over me as blood raced behind them! I cringed, the axe falling limp to my shoulder, my arm covering my terrified eyes! Even as I began to hear his snoring again, as I realized this man was some slobbering, drunken beast who passed out eyes wide open, I knew that I had lost my will. I ran, the axe falling away behind me with a double thud, and didn't stop, not at the service road, not for years, in fact...

Pierre



January 8, 2007

I seethed the whole evening long, as papa prepared roast goose to celebrate his ill-plucked gains. It was early summer and the sky was clear, that bright transparent blue wherein you can almost see the stars behind it. I sharpened my axe, my cheeks felt like the surface of a molten planet, sitting on the stump behind our cabin. The air was sweet in a way that sickened my heartbroken stomach, the navel of my being. From time to time there came a chortle of laughter, the smashing of another bottle, as papa listened to old broadcasts of Your Truly, Johnny Dollar...America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator and downing Yukon Jack with peach schnapps. The evening's light faded into darkness as I sat, leaned against the cabin wall cutting micro thin shavings from my toenails, waiting as each bone wrested from the goose, cleaned dry by his greedy maw, was tossed into the fire with a fat-crackling pop! Eventually, papa's chair farted backwards as he rose in a stupor and clambered for the bedroom. My heart began to pound, my breath coming in desperate pulls as I stood up and began to tip toe to the front door...

Pierre



January 5, 2007.

You've heard this story. On the occasion of my sixteenth birthday, papa made the drunken, sunrise announcement that I would be going to the north to apprentice at The Squirrel Cage, a "Canadian Ballet" club that his uncle ran in Chibougamau. I stood my ground and announced to pere my intentions that I should become a writer of comic books. He snorted wildly. I remember that even his snot contained the foul odor of Yukon Jack and cheap tobacco. He took me into the forest with an axe, some brushes, indigo and told me, "Make your comic, you little fart!" I spent six weeks in those woods, eating hallucinogenic mushrooms for inspiration, sustaining my self with raw fish from the creek. Finally, emerging proud from the dark forest, comic in hand, I came to father, certain that I had proved myself as a man. Papa snatched my work from me and sold it to Marvel as Alpha Flight. That night the angry beast inside me wanted to kill him more than ever before...

Pierre



January 3, 2007.

Papa was as tireless as I susceptible to the fatigues of his daily regimen of chores; the chopping of wood, preparing snacks and lures for the beavers, preparing maintenance on his illegally wired cable from Cablovision Warwick. My studies took me late into the evenings where my only reverie was found in comic books and dreams of papa's demise at my hands. The comics I obtained in stolen moments while delivering papa's disgusting letters to OUI on my mountain bike. The dreams came from the bottomless well of hatred in my black heart...

Pierre



January 1, 2007.

My first memories of mama include doing laundry in the creek, the frothy lather slipping way downstream, her careworn face betrayed by the way the sun danced off her eyes mirrored in the dappling, burbling waters. I would sit by her, mesmerized the whole morning long. I remember her telling me that pere had purchased her for a handful of skins and that if she only had the courage she would drive his eight-inch Bowie knife through his ribcage and watch his evil face expel its last breath. She ran off with a second string goalie for the Manitoba Moose when I was seven. I did the laundry from then on; the smell of my father's collar, drenched in tobacco spit and bacon soaked perspiration forever stain the olfactory catalogue of my life's horrors. Mama was a terrible, terrible coward.

Pierre



December 30, 2006.

Bill, I am on Highway 73 between Charlesbourg and Stoneham in a stolen Woody...there is the smell of high-grade pot and the car is strewn with surfer paraphernalia but I've searched it and it is clean. Disgustingly clean of any substance... I am coming home but it is with fear in my heart. Great trepidation, indeed, I know my father is trying to kill me ! But I will start at the beginning, Wild Bill, so that you can understand. I was born and raised in a small, beaver infested log cabin in the Gaspe Peninsula...

Pierre

 
 





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