Barbed Wire 01
BARBED WIRE
Vancouver's only FREE webzine with a COMPLETE money-back guarantee
(contact paull@istar.ca)
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C O N T E N T S
- Message From the Editor
The Bottom Line: Evolution of a Webzine
- Honey, I Fucked the Dog!
People who really love their animals want to come out of the kennel, reports Paul Levine.
- The Mouse that Huffed: In defense of Elton John
Sartorially challenged, friend of the marginalized honky, tea-bag glam piano queen Elton John isn't the idiot you think he is. He's a pile-of-shit genius, claims Adrian Mack
- Caesarean Section
Ghrant watches his wife get drugged up and cut open and gets his own labour pains
- Soliloquy of the Vancouver Cloistered
British Columbians excel at the three R's, says Jeff MacDonald. We're just as redneck, reactionary and racist as anywhere else.
- Fetish In Love
Ridge Rockfield takes fetishism over his knee and gives it a good spanking.
- Genki desu ka?
Chuck Blade has a lot of explaining to do as he undergoes interrogation at Tokyo customs
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Message From the Editor
The Bottom Line - the evolution of a webzine
While the Internet has affected the way the world communicates, the way business is conducted, and the way many choose to spend their leisure time, it has also dramatically altered the degree of whim with which one can choose to create a magazine with a potential international readership. I wish I could say that Barbed Wire is all about a dream I've had for years of publishing a magazine and that the Internet has now made it all possible. I wish I could say that Barbed Wire is all about tapping into a carefully researched market segment that other magazines have neglected, ignored or simply not noticed. I wish I could say that Barbed Wire is all about a revolution in print communications, about being a key player on the cutting edge of new technologies, about defining the shifting zeitgeist for the next millennium. Actually, Barbed Wire is all about my ass.
Let me explain. I'm originally from England and on a recent visit there I drank copious amounts of hot tea and warm beer, took long walks in idyllic settings, and endured endless admonitions from relatives to get a long, flexible, rod inserted into my rectum. The entire membership of one side of my family, as a safeguard against a recently discovered increased genetic risk of developing bowel cancer, has recently endured the procedure medically referred to as "colonoscopy". As a consequence they've all become alarmingly enthusiastic about the process, which gave family dinners there a disturbingly evangelistic flavour. "You really should get yourself scoped," someone would inevitably say as they spooned some peas onto my plate. "We've all had it," someone would pipe in, making me feel like a vegetarian at a pig roast.
So I checked into the situation and discovered that if I am to avoid the possibility of my sudden, premature demise, I have to endure a roster of colonoscopies through my lifetime until either medical science develops a less intrusive safeguard or I drop dead from something else. To avoid avoiding this procedure indefinitely I resolved to create a situation that would force me to go through with it. I rounded up a motley crew of sometime writers, secured commitments from each of them to write to a late April deadline - and Barbed Wire was born. My first article was to be tentatively titled "The Unbearable Lightness of Colonoscopy", a first-person detailing of the ins and outs of the dreaded procedure that's given me more than it's fair share of pause for thought. My doctor, somewhat puzzled by my enthusiasm, foiled my plans when he told me he couldn't book me into a specialist for a couple of months, well past the first issue deadline. While I still plan to write the piece for an upcoming issue, I decided that my replacement article for the launch issue would be on an activity that's quite unlikely to be introduced into my daily routine - sex with animals.
The crew of writers I managed to gather together for this launch issue have their own reasons for participating in this intercontinental literary wank. We're a fairly insular group at present, all in our early 30's, with varying degrees of experience with writing, with meandering and inconclusive career trajectories, perfumed with the faint odour of protracted adolescence. Here in conciliatory Canada we've found little to read in the popular/unpopular presses that doesn't seem more like a duty than a pleasure. Here in Vancouver, a barbie doll of a city if there ever was one, there's a kind of complicity in our print media with the local chamber of commerce and the tourist board to promote our illusory "world class" status. We're particularly enthusiastic at congratulating ourselves for mediocrity here - which only encourages the bastards to continue churning out the cultural crapola. So, if only to provide some solace from the bland smorgasbord of local writing we consider it our civic duty to portion out our own brand of crap. It is our hope that, whether you're appalled or indifferent, amused or offended, the result will be pungently poignant, like a fart after an exotic meal.
This first issue of Barbed Wire is an experiment, the result of a single meeting between a small group of acquaintances who came away with a simple mandate: to write something interesting for a deadline. Whether we've been successful is for you, dear reader, to judge. What cannot be denied is the variety of forms and styles that have resulted from our efforts - something for the whole family. If you're into post-structuralist, pre-menstual, tit-lit porn, then look no further than Ridge Rockfield's Fetish In love. If you read to escape the hullaballo of your busy life, if you want your reading to take you to relaxing, far away, exotic places, you might want to avoid Chuck Blade's account of his recent experiences at Tokyo immigration Genki Desa Ka? Perhaps you're recently knocked up, nuzzled in your cocoon, and dreaming about the pitter patter of little feet. Ghrant's Caesarean Section may be up your alley. Or if you've got a pet and you can't figure out a way to thank him for his lifetime of allegiance you might want to check out my own Honey, I Fucked the Dog. And if it's opinion you want we come through on two fronts. Adrian Mack's The Mouse that Huffed: In Defense of Elton John is as strangely compelling as it is seemingly preposterous. And Jeff MacDonald's Soliloquy of the Vancouver Cloistered puts it to both the hosers and the poseurs of the sleepy little backwater we call home.
Whether anyone actually voluntarily reads anything outside of the phonebook or TV Guide these days is a matter of some debate. And whether anyone actually reads anything on the Internet that's longer than the average crap is certainly up for grabs. We haven't chosen the Internet as the exclusive delivery medium for Barbed Wire because it's particularly well-suited for the written word. Browsing text on a computer screen is about as rewarding as reading a book through an aquarium. So I suggest you print the articles you're interested in from your browser and luxuriate over them later - on the couch, in the bath, on the toilet - or in any other place where reading is meant to be done.
We welcome contributions for future issues to paull@istar.ca as long as you keep in mind that we have low standards and if you don't meet them your submission will not be published. Feel free to throw your story ideas in our direction if you're uncertain about their suitability. If you're a talentless, egocentric, unjustifiably opinionated, intellectually challenged cretin and you want to write an article about that then feel free. Otherwise, you may want to launch a career as a Canadian journalist.
We also welcome your feedback, if only for some kind of confirmation that this site isn't playing host to a continuing roster of click-happy, attention deficit, post-literate dilettantes. Please address all correspondence to paull@istar.ca
Paul Levine
Vancouver, Canada
May 1997
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Honey, I Fucked the Dog!
By Paul Levine
Forget women's rights, gay rights, victim's rights or any other plain vanilla lobby group seeking equality and acceptance from our inflexible society. There's a new movement afoot whose members want to be empowered and validated, who want to rid themselves of the shame they've been programmed to feel, who want to be accepted for who they are and what they believe in. There's only one small stumbling block which may limit their public support: they like to have sex with animals.
They are the bestialists, the zoophiles and the zoosexuals , and until quite recently they've kept a fairly low profile, seeking out discreet liaisons with various pets and farm animals and sharing very little with friends, relatives, or researchers.
The Internet has changed all that, providing a means for otherwise anonymous animal sex aficionados to connect with each other, share experiences, trade tips, and provide mutual support. Now people who have sex with animals (shall we call them PSA's?) have their own newsgroups, their own chat rooms, and their own web sites. While their choice of sexual partners may be perplexing, the depth of their devotion to their animal lovers - with their tributes to their dead pets, their own porn (furotica), and their meticulous tracking of all film and video with animals appearing - can be suspected by only the most cynical among us.
The result is a burgeoning online community (and a associated off-line community) which displays all the aspects of more familiar identity groups. They argue over definitions, they wrangle over justifications, and they negotiate the boundaries of proper behavior. Animal fucking has gone bureaucratic and the love that dare not bark its name is howling well into the night.
Much online discussion is devoted to definition. If you have an "emotional relationship" with an animal that makes you a "zoophile", which gives you high moral ground in the PSA community. If you're purely in it for the sex you're a "bestialist", which is tantamount to being an animal molester. In other words, a bestialist's idea of a good night out is to hump a stray Great Dane in the woods. Whereas, a zoophile would cook his dog a gourmet dinner, showers it with doggie treats, read poetry into the small hours and make love in the kennel.
Not that there isn't hope that the right animal might win the heart of a bestialist and that he might find himself transformed into a zoophile. It can happen to the most confirmed PSA should Cupid's arrow be aimed just so.
It happened to "Stasya", a middle-aged PSA with outspoken ideas on interspecies relations and a web site to display them on. "Well, I'm a 42 year old white male who started life as a pure bestialist," he writes, "and gradually, with the love of one hell of a bitch, became a zoophile."
Stasya's lifetime history outlined in his home page mirrors the formative experiences widely reported on the Internet by PSAs: a family dog, an empty house, and a bored adolescent with a helping hand all contribute to saving poor Fido from the boring routine of humping legs and pillows. With dogs lacking the necessary opposable digits to repeat the experience alone they apparently will beg for repeat performances. Before you know it, man's best friend becomes man's best fuck.
"When I was about 15, I somehow got the idea of having sex with this male dog," writes Stasya.
"I can't remember right now if I ever let him fuck me, but I did have anal sex with him."
This youthful dalliance with a male dog, this flirting with homo-bestiality was, after much soul searching, not what Stasya was really after. What he really wanted was a female dog. A few years later and a quick trip to the pound, he brought his first love home.
The relationship was purely physical at first, Stasya tells us, but when he really got to know her he had to admit that there was something special going on.
"Finally, after several years, it hit me. We weren't fucking. We were making love to each other. We'd kiss deeply whenever the mood hit us. We'd cuddle and share quiet moments. In short, we shared everything that I'd always been taught was what I could expect if I fell in love with a woman. The only difference was that my lover was a bitch."
The political approach taken by online PSA's borrows quite purposely from the language of the gay rights movement. Internet zoophiles claim they don't choose to be attracted to animals for sex; they were just born that way. Furthermore, they claim society is "zoophobic" which has a devastating effect on PSA self-esteem and drives them into the closet (perhaps the kennel is a more accurate metaphor). "Coming Out" to friends and family is the goal of any self-respecting PSA, and a number of websites provide testimonials from those who have taken this step. Judging by the incidents outlined, one could easily come away with the impression that the world is more than ready to accept people who have sex with animals as part of our rich cultural fabric.
Acteon, a late-twentysomething male zoophile from Oregon, decided that he couldn't go a day longer without telling his parents of his extracurricular activities.
"I came out because I was getting very stressed out from making up stories about where I spent my weekends. I still live at home, and have never been evasive about things, so when I went to a Zoo party of some sort, I had to tell them something," he reports.
Acteon goes on to say how his parents took the news rather well and "admired my guts for telling them".
"They didn't even forbid me to see the neighbors German Shepherd," he says "which was actually my greatest fear, even more so than being kicked out of the house."
While parents may be reluctantly accepting, you can always count on your friends for support, according to Akita, a male "bi-zoosexual" for the past 24 years. He says he was quite reluctant to spill the beans to his long-standing buddy Shyfox (Internet alias).
"Would it damage a super friendship or, maybe better yet, build a stronger one," he wonders.
Eventually, he finds the right moment and tells Shyfox that he's "only interested in having sex with dogs and horses, that they have a loving, caring relationship that makes him feel whole". What follows smells suspiciously like an informercial for bestiality.
"That's all you were going to tell me!" says Shyfox. "Gosh, Akita, I couldn't imagine what on Earth you were going to tell me that you thought would upset me so. I thought you where going tell me that you didn't like Dragon and I anymore or that you were moving away! I don't care what you're (sic) sexual preference is. Gee, Akita, I'm your bestest friend!"
A common misconception about PSA's is that they share their affections exclusively with animals. According to Internet sources, many are either looking for a human partner or are already coupled up. To be the spouse of a PSA obviously takes an especially tolerant attitude, and one could do much worse than getting hitched with Isis, a middle aged woman who only recently became aware of her husband's extracurricular activities and who has immortalized her diary entries of the time on the web.
What tipped off Isis was that her husband was spending an inordinate amount of time on the Internet downloading pictures of animals. When she questioned him he tried to downplay it, but eventually he admitted more than a casual interest in interspecies sex.
"I can't remember exactly what lead up to it," writes Isis, "but as we were leaving to go shopping he said he'd had oral sex with horses. I couldn't ask him about it any more because we were shopping and then to friends for supper."
In retrospect, Isis admits there were warning signs.
"He loved watching nature shows, particularly the ones that showed real matings between almost any sort of animal," she writes. "I never found it odd that he would spend hours just visiting friends who owned horses, or going to the racetrack just to look at them, or going to the races but never betting. When he said he couldn't sleep at night, and would go for walks until two in the morning, I worried about him, but never once thought he was going to fence-hop at the track and suck off a stallion."
While this revelation may have been disconcerting news for the most devoted of wives, Isis' reaction proves her to be the ideal mate for a PSA: curious, accepting ...and sexually aroused.
"Finding out that my husband could do something so, well, bestial, was a real turn on. I had never seen him as a particularly passionate person, and this revelation did quite a bit to show me how he truly is. Our love life had always been nice, and comfortable, but not terribly passionate. As the days went by and he told me more of what he'd done though, things heated up considerably. It felt like a honeymoon for almost two months."
While these best case scenarios may provide some comfort to those who struggle with the complexities of being attracted to animals for sex, history illustrates that such activities have never really been socially acceptable. Court records over the past 600 years are littered with cases involved human sexual contact with goats, cows, sheep, dogs and birds, many resulting in the hanging of both the perpetrator and the animal. Laws have been relaxed somewhat since then. Many countries now have no law governing bestiality. A number of US states have decriminalized sex with animals or offer small fines or short prison sentences.
The trend towards decriminalization is largely due to what is referred to as "lack of use" of the existing laws. Since animals don't kiss and tell, the only way to secure a bestiality conviction is to catch someone in the act. If we are to believe Internet PSA's, most inter-species sex is perpetrated by pet owners in the comfort of their own homes. Even those more adventurous types who venture further afield to the barnyard can, with some careful planning, commit the perfect crime. Those who actually get their asses dragged into court are either exceedingly unlucky or, whipped up by the excitement, overly careless. Perhaps the perfect example of guilty on both counts is the recent case of a Canadian man who was found, well after dark, inside a barn copulating with a cow he had secured with ropes. A passing police cruiser noticed his car parked in a empty field with its headlights on.
While Internet zoophile propaganda would have us believe that carloads of sexually unsatisfied urbanites are descending on small farming communities in the small hours, web pages like the one entitled "A true account of my (unsuccessful) attempt to get a BJ from a calf" puts the matter in perspective. The author gives us a vivid picture of the lure of the farmyard - from the lonely walk in the freezing cold down a pitch black lane, though the mud and the shit in the open field, to the sewer of the cow shed.
"I found myself hugging the side of the shed," the author reports, "where the ground was still hard, and I worked my way to the edge of the door frame. I also heard the traditional "plop" of manure against manure, but since I was already stepping in tons of the stuff, that sound was less of a turn-on."
"I found a section that had firmer footing, and inched my way a little deeper into the shed. I held out my hands to feel my way around, and within a few minutes I felt something soft and moist on the fingers of one hand. I looked down and saw that one of the calves was suckling my fingers. I got my penis within an inch or two of his mouth, but at that moment he released my hand and started wandering away. Damn!"
From all the discussions, testimonials and publicity information available on the Internet, it seems clear that the stereotype of the lonely sheep-shagging shepherd is in dire need of revision. As they tell it, the new breed of PSA is an ubiquitous, clandestine presence in society, the proverbial aliens among us - "in every tax bracket, in every location - from the farmer in Montana to the businessman in New York", as one PSA web page claims. Whether the numbers are exaggerated or not is something that will be made clearer as more PSA's meet online, organize themselves offline and become more public about their activities, as they have in (surprise, surprise) Northern California. There they've formed a support group called "Calzoo" which boasts several dozen members who meet regularly for social gatherings, to celebrate holidays, and "build community" with zoophile groups in other states and countries.
Whatever their numbers, PSA's may be doing themselves a disservice by drawing attention to themselves. Their claim that PSA's are at every level of society, if taken seriously, is more likely to induce mass paranoia rather than general acceptance as we all take a second look at all the pet owners who touch our lives. And despite the current fashion in "I gotta be me" identity politics, PSA's may be barking up the wrong tree in attempting to draw tenuous comparisons with groups like gays and lesbians when they're much more likely to be likened to child molesters or rapists. The FBI has found the Internet to be a goldmine in upping their arrest records for suspected pedophiles, who formerly kept to themselves and evaded apprehension. People who have sex with animals, by making their cause public, are risking being at the receiving end of a new wave of moral panic.
We have a long way to go before politicians court the bestial vote by admitting a bit of youthful experimentation with the family cat. Meanwhile, you may want to carefully scrutinize whoever volunteers to look after your treasured pet next time you go away on vacation.
Paul Levine never goes to the racetrack if he's not betting
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The Mouse that Huffed: in defense of Elton John
By Adrian Mack
Idiot
You are between the ages of 26 and 44.
You do not have a single Elton John record in your rotten collection.
You have "Parallel Lines" by Blondie...you might even have "Rio" by Duran Duran out of some misguided sense of nostalgic mischief and you probably ran around in your youth believing that the Cure were the dog's bollocks. You still do. And Bauhaus...WELL!!! You listened to Bauhaus therefore you were interesting.
These days you're still interesting but you're also a little wiser and certainly not given to the kind of religious pop militancy that landed you in a fist fight with your best mate over the ultimate significance of "London Calling" over "Sound Affects". (If you're a girl, then it was the B-52's vs. the Go-Go's. Winner: the B-52's). Anyway, your tastes are a little more catholic now and you have chosen to represent yourself in the '90s with an Oasis CD and the Beastie Boys - thereby proving to your future biographers that you had a grasp on both melody and beats. You were a smart, uptown Honky with a little jack-funk coursing through your veins. Sampling is cool and De La Soul were fucking wicked!
And look! There's "Rumours" by Fleetwood Mac! On vinyl! You're not so big that you can't take the piss out of yourself! Of course, you guiltily wish that you really understood the difference between analogue and digital but fuck it - nobody has to know about your dark secret.
And you are an idiot. Because you don't have an Elton John record in your rotten collection.
Made in England
It was 1947 and England was flush with post-war esprit-de-corps. The Conservative government was dominated by elected politicians and peers alike, most of them called Harold, who were given to saying "you've never had it so good" to the cowering and grateful underclass who toiled in squalor and chewed on pork fat just to get through the day. Then some Tory shill in a pair of overalls invented pebble-dash in a drunken fugue and all the terraced streets of Britain started looking like enormous strips of sandpaper, albeit strips of sandpaper relieved by the bent figures of alcoholic miners and fishermen spitting tuberculoid gobbets of blood, falling over and wondering what a vagina looks like.
England, in short, was not good. It was terrible. As terrible as it was before the war and as terrible as it is now. Except with pebble-dashing.
Into this appalling milieu was born Agga Cartwright whose life would unfold as a catalogue of failures and miscarriages. In another town, where life was only marginally better, Reginald Dwight arrived in a flurry of financial anxiety.
Just like every other British male, Reginald spent the first twenty years of his life looking exactly like Albert Finney. Gradually, however, hair-loss and weight-gain rendered the bi-polar youth into an alarming, apparently laboratory constructed Anti-Rock Star prototype and consequently, Reginald took a new name and launched his career as tea-bag glam piano queen Elton Fuck Off John!!!!
Bald Fairy
Elton was inching towards the brand of high faggotry that would distinguish him in his golden era and this brought him into legendary conflict with his old man, Mr. Dwight, who was disconcerted to find that he was more and more frequently being addressed as Mr. John - a name rich with unspeakable innuendo.
Elton hooked up with Long John Baldry in the mid-sixties for some third-rate Pub boogie, earning his chops and, presumably, venturing as far from his mother's magnificent teet as he could without becoming suicidally neurotic. (Long John Baldry later achieved fame as the man whose malevolent sexuality so frightened Marc Bolan that the latter chose to die in an appalling car crash rather than accept a ride in Baldry's pink Rolls.)
Here, then, were the circumstances that created Elton - all the unchallenged social complexities of an Empire in recession; in a time famous for its burgeoning liberalism and infamous for its hypocrisy and barely concealed Puritanism. Quite unexpectedly, young Elton stood at the threshold of a new paradigm of psychodramatics on a Grand Scale.
In the late sixties, Elton was composing flops for other artists when he came across a pile of lyrics by a Lincolnshire-born thumb-sucker called Bernie Taupin. The rest of the story you already know: "Border Song", "The Bitch is Back", "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", "Philadelphia Freedom", international superstardom, fantastic decadance, terrible prescription spectacles and worse shoes. By 1975 and the release of "Rock of the Westies", Elton had invented the Bald-Long; miraculously made "Tommy" seem interesting and was about to give disco a kick up the arse with "Don't Go Breaking my Heart". As if this wasn't enough, he was also running around claiming that he could make it with girls and boys while the rest of the world wondered how he managed to make it with either. At this point I'd like to propose that Elton also invented Punk but I suppose this is already enough of a hard-sell without jacking up the price even more. And anyway, he didn't invent Punk. Neil Diamond did.
While the Rolling Stones were mining American musical history and coming up with a cheeky and beguiling synthesis of cross Atlantic, cross-racial sensibilities, Elton was identifying himself squarely with the oppressed white man. The hidden theme in all of his major albums is the plight of the marginalized honky and here credit must be given to Taupin for intuiting Elton's victim-crush and supplying the lyrics to match. Mars, indeed, is NOT the kind of place to raise a kid and it was this kind of hard-hitting insight that moved lower middle-class Whitey to a condition of devotion. The apotheosis of Elton Snowflake came with "Crocodile Rock": a song so piss-awful in both conception and execution that I mention it only to illustrate my major point - that Elton is a fucking genius. But a very special kind of genius.
Elton Savant
James Joyce: genius. Orson Welles: genius. R. Buckminster Fuller: genius.
Billy Joel: pile of shit.
Elton John: PILE OF SHIT GENIUS.
This is not a bad thing, being a Pile of Shit Genius. In fact, it's my favourite thing in the world. It is the thing that gives dignity to our late twentieth century culture. Think of the John Woo movie "The Killer". Overripe garbage or an accelerated critique of the modern condition? Can't decide, can you? It walks the line between ridiculous and epiphanic. So does "Someone Saved my Life Tonight", arguably Elton's greatest moment and certainly his most overwrought. And it appeared on an album called "Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy" for Christ's sake.
All of this was revealed to me very recently while watching the wonderful Lars Von Trier movie, "Breaking the Waves". Both "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and "Love Lies Sleeping" from the same album are used to underscore moments of emotional devastation. This is an implicit and confident apprehension of the power, the grace and the beauty of debased art. Mention "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" to one of your smart-arse friends and they will either smirk or snort. Play it to them after their dog gets run over, however, and watch the decades of backed-up, style-nazi snot and too-hip-to-cry-tears come spilling out.
Elton did not seem to master his genius. James Joyce, who would have adored Elton, wasted not a single word. Elton, conversely, leaked crap like a man on arsehole relaxants. Between them, "Greatest Hits" Volumes 1 & 2 contain about seventeen downright amazing songs. These are culled from a back catalogue of compositions, however, numbering...let me calculate...erm...One Billion. And they're mostly terrible. This would seem to lend weight to the Pile of Shit aspect of my theory, but when you consider that Elton, legendarily, never spends more than an hour on a song then the ball bounces resolutely back into the Genius court.
And James Joyce never played to 250,000 people in Melbourne.
In High Dudgeon
I don't care if you're G.G. fucking Allin, if you can't admit that the production on Elton's seventies output was standard bearing then you might as well decorate the inside of your arse with a few nice posters because you'll never get your head out of that thing.
Gus Dudgeon was responsible for the best drum and bass sound in Soft Rock History, not to mention all the other things you have to do in order to create the perfect aural environment. Happily, Gus is still working today. He recently produced an album for tousled, brit-pop blockheads Menswear.
Asked how he achieved the Elton sound (his work commands reverence, to this day) Dudgeon replied, "I don't know, really. I'd hear something and then say to one of my engineers, put a bit more bollocks on that." Remarkable.
The Elton John band were shit-hot players and Elton always gave them the credit they deserved. As a child, however, I puzzled over the presence of Bernie Taupin in all those band photos on the inside cover. Why was he there?
Bernie bloody Taupin
I have a friend who grew up next door to Elton and who maintains a friendship with him. I've seen a picture of him backstage with Elton and Bernie in 1975. I recently asked him, "Why is Taupin so present in all that old PR stuff?"
"Elton always felt that Bernie deserved half the credit."
"Is he odious and egotistical and awful?"
"Please, Adrian, don't ask me this."
"Come on. He's horrible, isn't he?"
"Be quiet, Adrian."
Bernie Taupin released a solo album sometime in the '80s. It stank.
In his defence, he did some excellent work with very thin hair.
Elton - the movie
I would dearly love to produce a movie about Elton but the perfect director for the project, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, is dead. So is the perfect lead, Peter Sellers.
I'm never coming to the South of France again!
My passion for Elton's music doesn't extend beyond 1977 when he began to drop many of the key personnel in his glorious past. "Blue Moves" was a brave album but the ineffable qualities that I dig in "Caribou", for instance, are clearly waning - the shabby melancholy, the damp smell of the pantry, the half-baked glam, the sense of bad taste gone inexplicably good and the clear mental image of two fat, little legs bestriding the globe.
Elton stormed through the '80s with confessional knock-offs, self-reflexive and disgustingly insidious jingles, Watford F.C. and a completely fucking bonkers marriage. His output in the '90s, frankly, commands as much interest as the salad bar at a Fat Boys reunion but he's riding high on legend and his continued flair for the distasteful mingled with the revelatory. Now, however, it is in the field of his personal life that this is expressed most acutely.
In the documentary "Tantrums and Tiaras", assembled by his boyfriend David in 1995, Elton comes on like a permanently injured, exiled King gone mad. Every sad little crisis is met with a puffed-out chest and camp defiance. In one mind-boggling episode, Elton huffs out of France like a man who's been threatened with Global War. Why? Because some woman waved at him and said "Yoo-hoo."
Elton John: the only man in the world who hates the French for being too nice.
"Tantrums and Tiaras" is a text-book study of the human drive to create one's very own Hell. It reveals Elton as a living, barking, sulking, piano-playing metaphor for the beautiful incomprehensibility of human behaviour. In a climactic scene, Elton is subjected to a video-taped conversation between his lover, David, and his repugnant American therapist (who's name, oddly, I keep thinking is Bunty - although I know it's not).
Quite naturally, Elton sinks into a very deep slough of despond as he watches his two closest confidantes deconstruct every aberrant component of his personality. If my boyfriend and my therapist did that to me, I wouldn't hesitate to fire them both. If my boyfriend then went to the trouble of documenting my reaction and selling it to the world media, I'd probably murder him about twenty-seven times in a row.
He's an odd little fella, Elton.
Agga Cartwright - sad bastard
So, as I mentioned earlier, Agga Cartwright was born around the same time as Reginald Dwight, in a town called Grimsby in the North of England. If this article has moved you at all then you might shortly discover that Grimsby is the subject of a song on Elton's "Caribou" album. I lived in Grimsby until I was eighteen and I got to know Agga when he was living with his mother, across the road from my family. He was thirty-seven, unemployed, alcoholic and a bit thick, to be honest. His next door neighbour was a bloke called Dilly Graham who was just retarded enough to be a walking menace. Dilly Graham weighed about three-hundred pounds, suffered from hyper-tricosis and had an uncontained libido. He used to go up to women on the street and say, "how about a kiss, darling?" When the moon was full, he'd beg a fuck off of them, too. He would make little girls cry at a rate of about two-hundred an hour. Once, during a football game in the park, I saw him go into a wierd, spitting, screaming, retard-fit and he knocked this little kid to the ground and then stomped on his groin with all of his three-hundred pounds and the kid didn't move until the ambulance men peeled him off the floor. It was the worst thing I've seen in my life, aside from Sarah Mclachlan at the Arts Club (by accident).
Incidentally, there was another bloke in Grimsby who's eye was in a bag. That is, it dangled at the end of a sac that came off his forehead. Lovely place, England.
Agga Cartwright had a bit of a crush on my dad, so he would come over and make my old man buy drinks for him. One day, he showed up with twelve cans of Kestrel lager that I suppose he stole and since my dad was out, I went over to his house and met his mother, who was a maniac. We really had nothing to say to one another so I just sat there, supping lager and drinking of the Cartwright's melancholy essence. Then Elton John's "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" came on the radio and Mrs. Cartwright said, "He's good. Elton."
"Aye," agreed Agga.
I put aside my punk ethics for a moment, in the spirit of friendship.
"Yep," I offered, "he's good."
And there we sat, making cross-generational peace and quietly acknowledging our class kinship. Then I said, "Elton John is a tiny pianist who proves once and for all that size doesn't matter," and the Cartwright's looked at me like I was a complete fucking cunt.
Adrian Mack always plays "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" when his dog gets run over
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Caesarean Section
By Ghrant
To give birth to our first child the doctors had to lay my wife out on an operating table, pump her body full of drugs and cut her open with a scalpel. So much for those natural childbirth classes.
Caesarean section is performed by cutting in the lower part of the abdomen down to the uterus. The child is removed and the uterus/abdominal wall are stitched back together
If we had lived only a couple of generations back she or the baby or both would have probably died. Thank God for C-Sections. What wasn't wonderful about the birth of our son, however, was the bullshit the doctors put my wife through to get into that operating room.
In the Talmud, a book written some time in the first Century A.D. containing Jewish law and stories, there are references to babies delivered by "yoze dofan' or "a cut in the side'. There is some indication these women may have survived, as unlikely as it may be
It all started when my wife's obs-gyn told her in the final month of the pregnancy that the kid's head had grown too big. "50-50 chance," he said. Immediately my wife's spirits were raised: no need to suffer the torture and agony of squeezing a watermelon through her crotch. My sentiments echoed hers.
References to caesarean section can be found as far back as the first Century A.D. These early references by Pliny the Elder evoke the unlikely legend of Julius Ceasar being "cut" from the womb of his mother
Finally, the big day arrived. Her water broke. We zipped to the hospital...
Another unlikely origin of the term caesarean section is a Roman law in 750 B.C. ordering babies be cut and saved from any dead mothers. The law was known as ' lex caesarea'.
Good news! We quickly learned that the "50-50" bet was about to pay off in our direction: the baby's head was too big and lying at an unusual angle. On a more serious not, my wife's water was discolored, so the baby had to come out quick to avoid infection. But instead of getting my wife prepped for a C-section, our situation stirred up the Great Debate of Childbirth: Natural vs Intervention. It seems that all alternatives had to be exhausted before considering a trip to the O.R. This fact was eerily summed up by one masochistic Head Nurse speaking to my wife: "you can't have a baby without pain". Sweet Jesus.
There is a story that a Swiss man in the 1500 cut his wife open with a butcher knife and delivered in front of 13 midwives. It is unlikely there was any sedation The wife is said to have survived to have more children
After spending six confusing hours in the admitting room my wife was transferred to a normal hospital bed. But the battle had only just begun. Nurses quickly carted out the meds required to bring my wife the joys of full blown contractions. My wife became severely agitated. The situation was getting out of her control. She refused to suffer countless hours of hellish contractions only to be C-sectioned in the end. Her demands irritated the staff, but in the end they begrudgingly complied.
In 1794 in the U.S. a husband stood in for an unwilling doctor and cut open his wife and removed a living child. The husband then went on to remove the poor woman's ovaries stating "this shall be the last one". The child lived to be 73
After two hours staff was disappointed with her progress so they cranked the dosage of hormones up by a factor of 4. Contractions came fast and furious. My wife was in agony. Still, the baby's head had not budged. My wife's tolerance snapped. She ordered the hormones to be immediately stopped and replaced by pain killers. Again they reluctantly agreed.
In Britain there were 38 caesarean sections performed on living women from 1739 to 1845, only 4 women recovered
It was clear even to a lay person that the baby was not coming out. Yet even after they had given her the pain killers they discreetly began to crank the hormone dosage back up. They just had to keep their agenda going.
In 1876 Professor Edoardo Porro of Pavia discovered that removing the whole uterus after caesarean section greatly increased the chance of survival for the mother. It also made the woman completely sterile.
In the dozen of hours that had passed absolutely nothing had been accomplished by the the hospital's antics. Worse still, we got caught in overlapping hospital shifts. The surgeon on the way out didn't want to do a last minute operation and the surgeon on the way in had to reassess my wife.
In 1882 Max Sanger's "Der Kaiserschnitt' (The caesarean Section) declared the necessity of sewing the uterus up before dropping it back into the abdomen. Previously the uterus was left sliced open allowing massive bleeding or infection; the main cause of death following a caesarean.
The changing of the guard brought a semblance of sanity. In the time it took to grab a coffee my wife was on her was to the O.R. The hospital had finally broke down and let the inevitable occur.
When I look at my son and how beautiful he is, its easy to forget what happened in the hospital. We have gained so much. But at the same time I will never forget the dehumanizing experience my wife was put through.
Ghrant is going to think very carefully before he gets pregnant
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Soliloquy of the Vancouver Cloistered
By Jeff McDonald
So we're sitting there, me and a friend, having a greaser in a breakfast joint on Broadway, slaking our thirst with cupsa joe and our hunger with overcooked, leathery eggs and hashbrowns doing the backstroke in a poly-saturated pool. Our chat turns to Canadian federal and provincial politics, and we jaw on about this and that. Eventually we hit upon Alberta, and the strange political devolution that seems to be happening there. My friend levels her gaze at me and volleys: "So what IS it with you people anyway?"
And once again, I'm flabbergasted, because she's only one-quarter kidding. I've lived in Vancouver for almost a decade, I'm involved with lots of development and international human rights work, I've been a good solid (if somewhat middle-class and white) left liberal, I've never voted for the Tories, indeed never voted for any party other than Canada's wacky socialists (a lie: Mel Hurtig in 1993, which only strengthens my point).
Yet there it is: I was born, raised, and educated east of the Rockies and west of Lloydminster, and in the eyes of your average Vancouverite, that's enough, by association, to make me some sort of Brownshirt or Khan henchman or worse: a Ralph Klein acolyte.
Now it just so happens that, my lefty credentials aside, I think Klein's methods of ripping away at government are fairly brutal if you're anyone who needs any kind of social service for any reason. He's also vivisecting health and education to eliminate the province's debt, while using an odious method of belittling anyone who suffers from these cuts as whiners and loafers and probably takin' pot too, those ne-er do wells. It appears that the province's debt has been reduced on the backs of the people who legitimately need government services. And I'm a bit stunned by Albertans' propensity to lap up the guy's folksy I'm-one-of-the-people bullshit without divining that little has changed in the power corridors in that province.
But this is not my point. My point is, how the hell is it that I'm identified with what's going on there? Cowboy libertarianism isn't my friggin' fault, although I suppose you could argue that, in an ostensible democracy like ours, the people get what they vote for. Which, if true, means that B.C. deserved Bill Vander Zalm, who in some ways was scarier than Ralph Klein; he was crypto-conservative and whacked out (Remember? He seemed to honestly believe that if no one had found out about the $20,000 cash payment he took from Faye Leung in a Bayshore Inn room a few years back, it wouldn't have been wrong for a politician to do that.) But I don't hear my left-liberal friends, or anyone else, taking any responsibility for the scandal-a-month Socred scourge. You too, B.C. people, have gotten what you voted for.
I digress, but only slightly. There's something amazing self-delusory about many Vancouverites I know. Perhaps it's the circles I move in, but generally they seem to think that B.C. is a centre for left-liberal hipness, political and pop-culture awareness, and a sort of worldliness that one gets simply by living here, and doesn't exist elsewhere in the country because it can't because it's not Vancouver. Yeah, and another thing that I find hilarious; Vancouverites think that they are environmentalists simply by identification with the admittedly astonishing physical beauty of this land; yet they don't drive any less or walk any more or consume any less than anyone in cities where I've lived or visited.
Here's another laugher; denizens of Vancouver exude an annoying sort of by-dint-of-being-from-here worldliness, but most have never been to Alberta or any of the places that they defile, including in B.C. They've sure as hell never been to Smithers or Clearwater or Williams Lake. The last time I and a life-long- Vancouverite friend drove to Williams Lake to visit another pal, she kept trying to direct me onto 99 south to Seattle, the only road out of town she'd ever taken; I'm not sure she knew the Trans-Canada existed. For that matter, how well do they/we know our own city? I have friends in Kitsilano who have heard about East Vancouver and would really like to go there sometime. And certain of my Commercial Drive cronies would rather eat boiled all-beef weiners than go for coffee on West Fourth Avenue.
I suppose that what surprises me the most about my hip left-liberal friends is that they LABEL me. Unspeakable horror of horrors; LABELLING people based on where they're from or what they look like is and has been completely verboten in my crowd. Yet I've got culturally sensitive, well-travelled, and anti-racist types making assumptions about me because of where I'm from, and verbalizing them, in ways that they would never in a kajillion years do with people from Kenya or Vietnam or Poland.
Here's my bottom line in this admittedly slightly bitchy piece: except for certain tiny zones, Vancouver, the Lower Mainland, and all of BC are as blown-out redneck and reactionary and racist as any other province in Canada, and you don't have to look very hard to see it. The history of the province is steeped in racism, with a nasty little history in the treatment of Asians only a few decades ago. First Nations people have been and continue to be oppressed, and certain towns in the B.C. interior that I've visited are disconcertingly racially divided. Conservative values and religious fundamentalism, with all the concomitant intolerance and bullshit, flourish here. And if guilt can be attached to people by virtue of their birthplaces, everyone born here should be hanging their heads about what they've collectively done to B.C.'s environment, especially coastal and interior forests and watersheds.
We're all going to make judgments all the time; that's how we survive in the world. But I think, perhaps naively, that we would all do better to make judgments about people on what they've done and why, not where they're from.
Of course, I've got a problem there; I think Vancouverites are insular, blithely unaware, unworldly, and smug - they must be, because they're from Vancouver.
Jeff McDonald rarely makes harsh judgements about people who make harsh judgements.
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Fetish In Love
By Ridge Rockfield
The priest and the general look longingly at each other. "I love a man in uniform," says the bishop to the warrior. "And I love a man in a dress," the other replies. Before you can snap off a smart salute, each has a secret handshaking hand on the other's purple cock. The staff, the stars, the crossed swords, the music down the road: it's shiny material stretched over their empty ambitions. "Jesus, I love the cross," crows the general. "Those Roman legionnaires were really quite handsome!" replies the out-of-breath father. "They crowded round to watch because they knew it hurts to serve." Let's take the body down, and nail the cross to the wall!
Professor Von Wilheim stood at the front of the lecture hall. He was tied to the podium with thick rope. All the students were chained to their desks, and ruthlessly gagged. Despite the leather hood on his head, Von Wilheim managed to make himself heard in his shrill Goebbels falsetto. "Ze fetish is empty! Ze fetish lover zees only mystery und power, ze inverse image of his own shrinking in proportion to ze growing power of ze fetish." The class squirmed in their seats. Someone began to cry quietly. "For you zee he worships ze inaminate object and believes his desire is animated there. How sad to zee such unrequited love, longing zat is never returned. Leather, latex, und nylon: they are cold lovers, no? I zink ze fetishism is like ze shopping mall: there's no end to it or the stimulated expanded hunger of ze consumer seeking solace in ze merchandise. Vee are all Fetishists, my friends!"
I pressed my nose into the vinyl. I breathed deeply, inhaling the familiar scent of virgin material. It smelt and felt new, even squeaked as my fingers slowly played across its surface. My stomach was aflutter, and my left hand shook as it reached out to pull at the zipper. The teeth parted with a low purr and the material fell away to reveal her leather skin and metal bones. She was more beautiful than I had hoped. Silent and perfect and still.
The professor continued. He had changed into a red-sequinned dress and stiletto heels, and was walking unsteadily before the class. "The consumer consumes but never gets what he wants, the coup de grÉce that will satisfy him beyond satisfaction and put an end to his endless appetite." On a screen behind him, a projector was flashing images at stroboscopic speed. Foot, car, hand, gun. Several students had fainted, and one had emptied his bladder on the floor. "He religiously pursues his fetish and binds himself to its worship, and becomes a priest of its exacting rites. His fascination leads to sexual monasticism. He locks himself away from worldly things and with all rigor pursues ze fatal charm, and bends himself to ze unbending calendar and its secret clock ticking away his desire and tocking down his power." He stopped and faced the class: "Zo enjoy yourselves while you can!"
I huddled under the table. The meal had been cleared from the table, and coffee was being served. I stared at her crossed legs, and could not stop looking. When she adjusted her weight in the chair and recrossed her legs, I could see pale skin above the darker band of her stocking. Her skin glowed in the dim light of the undertable world: it looked soft and creamy. The white garter was wide, and hugged her thigh. I had never seen such conjunctions of skin and machine, such soft bondage. Questions and longings made my eyes swim. Why was the stocking attached to the clasp, and following the clasp, why did it terminate the garter, and then, finally, why did the garter come out of the darkness? I knew then I was to follow, and began the journey home.
"The sway-hipped goddess tramples all into ze ground," droned the professor. "She is hermetic in leather or latex for her second skin erases her first loose, blemished one. You zee, vee do not vant the reality, but only ze image of zat reality. Vee do not like ourselves as ourselves but need ze Stimulacrum to excite our nerves." The professor paused to take a pinch of snuff. "Ze Stimulacrum has a second skin and zis skin is perpetual and anonymous: and ze goddess commands ze simulated flesh with a mask of imperial unfeeling. Her heels grow stilettos. Her mouth has a zipper. And her cunt has a bar code reader.
I weep tears of joy and pain. My balls are throttled with a stocking that she holds tightly like a rein as she sucks on my cock. I drift to Ever-Ever Land on a bobbing current: my secretary bares her bottom and I insert one wet digit after another. It all adds up. I'm the teacher's pet, and I am wedged between her nyloned legs licking her cherry. Trapdoor opens and I swing out into blue space shooting cum across an empty ocean. A comet flares out my ass and dies. I am lying in bed, shrinking, with my knees drawn up to my wasting cheeks and eyeball one last time the nurse's round white form at the end of the darkening hallway. I can still form a smile before my face freezes into its skull.
Ridge Rockfield is a man's man who wants his mommy.
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Genki desu ka?
By Chuck Blade
Clearing Customs and Immigration are a couple of standard procedures that nevertheless make air travel both tedious and a little nerve-racking for me. So it was with some trepidation that I stepped up to the red line in Narita International Airport and waited for the next available Immigrations Official. "I see you have already been in Japan for three months.Why is it you wish to return?" the Officer asked. I had rehearsed this scene in my mind a hundred times so, despite the convulsions in my chest, I cooly replied, "I have spent most of the previous three months in and around Tokyo and I didn't get to see much of the rest of the country. I would like to see more of Japan particularly Hokkaido and do some skiing or perhaps travel to Nagano and see the Olympic Village."
I had come to Japan three months prior following the thousands who came before me in search of the fabled treasures to be had teaching English there and like many of them I had met with little success on my initial three month stay. Now I was giving it a second shot having left for Bangkok a week before my visa was due to expire. I was re-entering with the excuse to do more sight seeing .
I could tell by the rather long pause that the Immigration Officer wasn't buying my story. Then the three words I didn't want to hear, three simple words, innocent in themselves and their general usage, but that day they carried a hammer strike against the thin veneer of my coolheadedness and shattered it into a million tiny specks of dust. "One moment please." That's all it took and I knew that it was not going to be my day. What had I done wrong? Cursing myself. Where had I blown it? Looking down the counter I saw him returning with his supervisor. My mind snapped back to the premonitory sensation I had awoken with in Bangkok, which I wrote off as nerves on account of having spent a sleepless night at the airport waiting for my early morning flight, that later took on the proportion of ominous foreshadow as I read a harrowing letter written to The Bangkok Times about an Americans'abduction and detention by Thai Immigration Police.
The foreboding brought on by his story; the smelly, overcrowded cell with nothing but a hole in the ground for thirty men to shit and piss in,did not ease off after my smug thoughts about the poor sucker. Not only did he have the shit end of the stick he had it rammed down his throat by getting nabbed in Bangkok where, during the week I was there, police had conducted a summary execution of six alleged drug dealers during a brutal crackdown by Thai police on drug gangs.
I was taken out of the line up and walked to one of the main walled off central rooms. I would regain my advantage by resorting to the letter my girlfriend had written for me and mention that I would be a guest at her aunt's home for my stay in Hokkaido. "Sooooooo Japan is a very small island. Why do you want to come back?" the supervisor asked me while shaking his head back and forth. I replied as before and showed him the letter. This gave him some pause and he looked at it without saying anything for about a minute. Then he asked in a very casual way whether I knew any other Japanese people, as if not impressed with the letter, and could I write down their names and phone numbers? After handing me pen and paper I searched for my journal and, resting the paper on one knee and my journal on the other, I complied. Again in a casual tone as if to feign disinterest he asked me, while I was writing, what had I done in my three months in Tokyo? Where did I go? What did I see?
This cheap tactic didn't phase me much and I easily answered him spinning a yarn about nights out with friends in Shibuya and Shinjuku,watching Kabuki Theatre, a weekend trip to Kobe, being a guest at a number of Japanese homes etc when with the same casual manner he reached over and picked up my journal. As he leafed through it I saw his frown deepen while he read the pages that had my interviews listed with salary quotes, particulars of the school, terms of the contract and watched his eyes narrow into a mean, icy stare as he scanned the various schedules of my three part-time English teaching jobs.
"You have a lot of explaining to do," he said coldly and with that left me sitting there panic-stricken while I watched him photocopy the contents of it. A wave of fear-nausea surged through me , leaving a cold sweat on my forehead and back, that slowly congealed into a hard tumour in the pit of my stomach. Now I had good reason to believe that the days presentiment might in fact manifest into reality and I would not get back into Japan thus stranding my students, my employers,and my sweet and tender girlfriend who was nervously waiting for me to come back to our apartment. I rationalized, "They can't prove anything. It isn't illegal to LOOK for work as a tourist." It was cold comfort. I futilely tried to remember the complete contents of my journal.
I looked at the Immigration Officer hunched over the photocopier methodically Xeroxing every page. I looked at the clock and agonizingly watched the minutes slowly pass while the seconds kept time with the noise of the machine and the green flash of light reflecting off the bare, white concrete walls. I knew the only way to go was to play this bluff right to the very end because now I was caught and under very strong suspicion of working illegally. I desperately believed I still had a faint hope of clearing immigration and a level head was called for if I was going to talk my way out of this.
My thoughts drifted back to Bangkok hoping to snatch a brief respite from the grim prospects the day was offering me. If Tokyo can be seen as a model city convincingly fusing its history with its stunning modernity boasting low crime and unemployment rates, a highly efficient and impressive transit system and a level of affluence reflected in the buildings, public works and thriving commerce, then Bangkok is the complete and utter antithesis to it. Everywhere during the hour long trip from the airport Bangkok's future lay forsaken in its streets. The machinery of abandoned public works projects rusting in the boulevards, the concrete skeletons of apartment buildings housing rat trap shacks of scrapwood, tin and cardboard and at regular intervals along all the streets huge, gaudy, Barnum & Bailey paintings of the peoples proud king lit with flood lights beaming arrogantly into the surrounding polluted darkness.
I had missed the hot summer in Tokyo when the temperature soars into the high 30 Celsius range taking the pollution count up with it but in Bangkok the heat,the exhaust and the sewage produced an unrivalled olfactory assault that left me screwing up my face in disgust. Standing on that rickety bus its wooden floorboards rattling dangerously beneath me , as the driver squealed, bounced and jostled us at high speeds in and out of traffic, I watched block after block of the terrible urban decay the extent of which I had never witnessed before. I recalled a boasting Italian recounting to me how Rome was "one great open air museum." Perhaps this is so then Bangkok must be one great open air sewage depot. As the bus sped on into the night toward my destination, one of the "foreigner districts" on Kaosarn road, I thought about the bizarre scene that greeted me as I stepped out of the airport terminal to wait on the highway for the bus.
Waiting at the stop adjacent to eight lanes of two-way traffic, congested with fast moving vehicles that paid no mind to road etiquette since there existed no visible lines of paint to divide up the lanes, broken down doorless trucks and smashed up juryrigged cars drove frantically on as a group of teenagers sat in a circle on the concrete traffic island drinking, singing songs and throwing rocks at passing drivers. If this wasn't surreal enough of a sight at 1am then a sound in the weeds directly behind the stop startled me. A moan then a movement in the bushes and an old mangy dog ambled out slowly with its head down labouring through the stifling heat and exhaust. It came to within three feet of where I was standing but paid no attention to me or the cars as it slumped its tired old body down on the curb. Staring at it breathing with increasing difficulty, as more and more time gradually elapsed between each breath, I watch its body convulse and then it died. When the bus arrived the Official who took the fares stepped down and before I could get on kicked the carcass back into the bushes while passengers leaned out the window laughing.
"Come with me sir," the supervisor commanded breaking me out of my reverie: in his right hand the photocopied contents of my Tokyo journal fitted neatly in a stiff transparent plastic baggy with a yellow zip-lock seal. Like the absurd level to which merchants in Tokyo applied shrink-wrap to their merchandise here was my fate sealed for freshness. I walked with him back out and past the crowds gathering continually at the Immigration counter and down a corridor into a waiting room where three other foreign nationals milled about looking very worried and nervous. A black guy was pacing the room when some Japanese officials came and led him off. The rest of us sat silently waiting our turn grimly eyeing each other. In a few moments he came back gesturing wildly and shouting the first words spoken in over ten minutes. "I can't believe it they're sending me back! Even though I got my papers and passport and everything..." He trailed off and began pacing again only this time right beside me, all the time cursing and shaking his head in disbelief. I had collected my nerve and courage only to have it undermined by this whining bastard. I was next and followed another Japanese official into the office of the Senior Immigration Officer. A short balding man obsequiously suggested I sit down, all the time smirking to himself.
END OF PART ONE
continued next issue...
Chuck Blade has a chip on his shoulder and a pain in his neck.
Email Barbed Wire at paull@istar.ca
