was Giant’s way of doing business. The burgher – swine who owned Giant Mine were being put thru properly and likely recognized the gaff for the hoax that it was but had no choice than to go for the game and gimmick and accept the fact they were being duped.
Which did my fibrillating heart good. ‘A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong,’ was about as close and involved as I ever wanted to get to any big business and its corporate concerns. It was all dirt to me.
Met all the men. The Giant Y.K. mine and camp was not much more than an excuse for confusion and clutter and 2 pay cheques. One hundred and fifty miners, tight and strong, a stout and sturdy gathering of true Canadians, from every province and territory and island across this great country and every one of us drank beer and whiskey to terrible excess. It made perfect sense to me in ’76 and it met with my countenance completely.
Inside of one week Giant Mine had degenerated into my most intense fear, work or so – called honest labor. A dreaded, black – funk nemesis was on me and I began consuming more than my usual intake of alcohol and other poisons. No one cared. I never cared. I didn’t care. And as each of you reasonable and intelligent folks know, there are no more terminal words to say to your lover. Last and final words. I don’t care…
Any given shift would find me half in the bag and feeling like death. Bloopers and blunders were common and encouraged by ungrateful note worthies like myself. My machine would go down every day and hours were lost and wasted as mechanics searched frantically and desperately to find or fabricate parts for the relic contraptions. I would lose or misplace tools and other items and fritter away time looking for them but inevitably; they would be gone and lost forever.
Often, I’d simply be some foxed and wander away from my work area, find myself a shelter to cover my retreat, click off my light and sit and watch the far off flickers of shapes and shadows and listen to the distant chinks and clinks of steel on rock and wonder at the consummate sadness of the working man in this world. On such occasions, I’d sample the wisdom of being anywhere in the vicinity of Giant Mine or any place near the confines of that cursed and hell – bound mine.
There were other feints and jigs I used, to do less than my share of drudge and duty but you understand. I never cared.
Intuitively, I knew a judgment was close at hand but it was a subtle feeling and it never concerned or caused me alarm. It was an elusive and a building fear, in the dim recesses of my brain, an ominous gloom but I paid it no heed. I didn’t care.
It was easy to get crazy. It became bad enough, the menials, my co - workers, knew it wise to refuse to work with me or to keep well away when forced to do so. I had become a risky and chancy character to be associated with on the job. I never blamed my brother niggers any. Hell, they were right to avoid me.
Although I was never consciously aware of it, I was swiftly approaching a hub in my life, an ending and a beginning.
The enormity of my position had taken me to extremes and I wished it were true and I could have blamed the awesome powers of the midnight sun for my bothers and plagues, up in Y.K., N.W.T., in 1976.
There were diversions and places to hide but try and understand, if you can, I could never run far enough or fast enough, to elude and escape my troublesome demons. All my life I’ve been walking with ghosts.
Alcohol was the flight of choice. In such quantities as would send a sane person reeling and crying obscene. Crash – hot parties and sprees, which the most callused coppers allowed to run their course, and then the yellow dogs would converge and swoop down on and arrest the survivors. Binges and benders in camp and in town and on the lake. The Strange Range Hotel that on most nights served up a river of rot – gut hooch and everyone danced. Fights, sometimes just for the fun of it, no reason in particular, only the fast gun mentality at play. I was in to the nines. Both feet were off the ground and in the air and a great fear of mine was that it couldn’t last a long time and that it was all going to come crashing down around me. And on this bold deliberation, I was awfully close to the truth.
There was a barmaid, a gentle girl with exquisite tits. I believe her name was Gitte. One late night and after the Strange Range had shut down, she took me home and nothing happened and likely so because of the 30 or 40 beer I had knocked back in the bar before leaving with her. It may have been a factor, another typical accident of fortune all right.
A fearful lack of passion had been involved, to a tired and unremarkable event. It had been so boringly routine. We had only wanted to submit and subdue each other, to bruise and hurt each other, to make each other bleed and to make each other cry. I don’t wonder on her bearing and conduct, when she flitted on into her bedroom, to get pleasingly prepared, as a fine lady will and upon her return and finding me horizontal and cold and limp as a blue jellyfish, on her couch and gripping a near empty bottle of flat whiskey, that she took to mean curse and language. The girl’s faith and foundation in the male animal of our species, had to have been shockingly undermined. That dear girl wasn’t capable of understanding a perspective like mine, not on that warm and tender evening, in Y.K., back in ’76. No.
Truly though, the excitement and the challenge, the chase and the capture, the conquest and the dominion was not there for me. The game was not important and no longer mattered. Love was nowhere to be found and I never cared.
I needed a warm heart. A close heart. I needed forever in love. Instead, I found myself a master cheat. My life is crowded with such blunder and blotch.
After waffling on that event, the cold – hearted bitch refused to serve me beer in the Gold Range Hotel. Which was a fall from a great height. The Strange Range Hotel would serve anyone with a wallet, regardless of the manner of deviant behavior the bastard was up to. An Olson or a Bernardo could have gotten a drink in the Gold Range Hotel, as long as he had money in his pocket. I could only take comfort in knowing, positively, I had been asked and escorted, with greater impetus, from much finer establishments.
It was August and the midnight sun was dull and drab daylight at 1 A.M. and I can recall being in O.T. and on the shores of the Great Slave Lake and collapsing on a washed up log and being adrift in an existential void, eyes vacant, waiting and watching eyes, crossing slowly over the placid water and thinking about tomorrow and the world I would find here and knowing it would never be as confusing and as lonely as the one I lived in and needed in 1976. Where was I running to and who would I be when I arrived? Hard questions. The answers never came and I never cared. The morning after did not look good. No.
For my frustrations, all I could do was, execute and effectuate a malicious and pitiful act of spite and malice and this meant polluting the lake with puke and piss and beer cans.
The law in Y.K. was sensitive against this form of behavior. While Y.K. was a wide – open town in ’76, at times protocol had to be observed don’t you know.
One fine evening, a small group of us rabble-rousers were weaving our way towards O.T., for fun and frolic and up slid a cop car. Somebody said something. Another downed a full bottle of beer using the cops’ flashing lights for cover. ‘Could be we’re going to jail,’ thought I. After observing and considering, I turned off to the side and whizzed in the ditch. Bingo! The whole gang of us was rounded up and taken downtown and socked in the slammer. Charges were varied. Everyone was wanted somewhere else. The bag in Y.K. however, was, simple possession of open liquor, obstruction because someone had given an impossible name, mischief as someone else had yapped off and it seemed Alberta had every other form of bad business on me. Edmonton came back with, “Tough luck men. He’s not worth our trouble and expense to transport. You got him, you keep him. The son of a bitch is your problem now.”
Such eloquent and perfect usage of the English language and the sublime and beautiful
