Commodore Redacted, the fatherless Samoan formerly known as [redacted] (and before then called just "The Commodore"), sits across from me in the warm gloom of the Parliament House tavern and passes his hand over his head wearily. "It's just like -- fuck," he says. "Fuck, you know?"

"I know," I say, nodding and pouring more beer. "I have a wife, too."

"Fuck!" he repeats. "It's been total shit between us for the last week, again." He sips his fresh beer and shakes his head. Then he looks up suddenly and says, "You're not going to write about this, are you?"

"Uh...no."


Six Points & Big Mitts

It's hours earlier. Littlestar swings the Volvo down into the mire of the city freeways while I eat a muffin and look out the window at the snow streaking by. We come up against a doddering East Indian couple driving half the speed limit in the passing lane, and Littlestar suggests that they clear the lane by honking her horn. When they remain oblivious she pulls around them, passes on the right, and then merges swiftly back into traffic a few inches off the East Indian car's nose.

"It's called the passing lane!" she cries. "It's for passing!" Her eyes flick to the rearview mirror. "Why are people so stupid? Look at this idiot rushing up my ass in this snow without even having his lights on. Does he want to die?"

I finish my muffin and look in the side mirror. Twilight is approaching and blowing snow slides and billows across the freeway. It takes me a moment to pick the speeding car out of the gloom. "Retard," I opine.

Littlestar manoeuvres the Volvo toward our exit and the speeding lightless car changes lanes with us, driving alongside. It's a crappy looking little silver import. Littlestar glances over. "He's a cop," she says.

"A cop?" I echo. "Does he want us to pull over?"

She shrugs. "Not that I can tell. He just keeps swerving toward us, like he's trying to look in the car or something." We cruise around the exit ramp and are released onto the city streets.

"He's still with us," I say as he pulls up beside my window, keeping pace. He seems to be gesturing in a vague way, so I put the glass down and stick my head out. "What's that, then?"

"Pull over!" he shouts. "I want to have a little chat with you!"

So Littlestar pulls over in the circular drive of a business park. The cop squeezes out of his little silver car and ambles over, squatting down and hanging his large, loosely-knitted fingers inside Littlestar's window. He is big and black, and his hands look like brown baseball gloves.

"Listen," he says in a friendly bass with faint Caribbean overtones, "I want to talk to you about the driving behaviour I saw back there. In conditions like we have today, riding somebody's bumper and then cutting them off, speeding the whole time --"

"I wasn't speeding," Littlestar interjects. "I was --"

"Listen!" he says forcefully, taking his hands off the car. "If you want to argue with me I'll call this in right now as a careless driving charge. That's a three hundred dollar ticket and six points off your licence. And I promise you that I will show up in court to testify to what I saw here today."

Littlestar says nothing.

He puts his big sausage fingers back on the window edge, hanging loosely and flexing slightly in time with his words. It is apparently a gesture of friendliness. His meandering lecture concludes with, "I just want you to understand. We have enough accidents out there on a day like this without the ones that can be avoided, you understand?"

"Yes," says Littlestar crisply.

"Okay then," says the cop, withdrawing and ambling back to his car. Littlestar grumbles and swears while executing a quick three point turn and sliding effortlessly out of the driveway while the cop saws his car back and forth ineffectually. "Moron," she assesses.

"We're still making good time," I note brightly, pointing to the glowing numbers on the dashboard.

"That's the fuel efficiency readout, honey," she says.

"Oh."


King of Cabbagetown

I stand before a cluster of six unlabelled doorbells, and opt to use a telephone. "Which ringers is yours?" I ask.

"The middle one," says the Commodore.

He comes downstairs to let me in, making small-talk noises while I follow him up the narrow staircase into the flat he shares with Earthy Parker and L'il Commodore. We pass through the livingroom and tromp up to the kitchen and he offers me green tea. "I've wanted a cigarette since Christmas," I tell him. "Lord grant me some tobacco."

"You got it, buddy," he says, chucking a pack of Belmonts across the table. He offers me a lighter, but I've brought my own: Slozo stuffed my Christmas stockings with a lighter shaped like a small pink pig who gushes twin flames from his nostrils. "That's awesome. How do you refill it?" asks the Commodore.

"Rectally," I say, turning it over for him.

He starts to laugh but hears a noise and cocks his head. "Hello?" he calls. I hear nothing. "It's Earthy Parker," he says. "I'll be right back."

When he returns he says that we should probably get scarce for a while. "Let's go get a pint," I suggest. The Commodore nods. We bundle up and squeeze down the stairs and come out into the windy, snowy world. We walk a few paces and run into an acquaintance of the Commodore's, and then walk a few more paces and run into another. "This neighbourhood is sweet, CheeseburgerBrown. Not many places left in the city where people know each other."

"You're the King of Cabbagetown," I dub him.

"Yeah," he says sheepishly. Just then somebody hails him from across the street and the Commodore waves back. "That's my friend Dave," he explains.

"Everybody's got a friend Dave," I agree.

Dave crosses the street and we chat with him for a few minutes before he heads off to find a submarine sandwich and we duck into the Parliament House tavern. Like most bars since the smoking ban took effect, it smells like vomit and cleaning products. The owner and the barmaids greet the Commodore by name as we pass by the regulars and take two seats in a shadowy corner. He orders us a pitcher of pale ale.

For a long hour we discuss things I promise not to repeat. We talk about our women, and our children. We talk about figuring out what kind of a man to be in an age where sex roles are ill-defined. He has a lot to get off his chest. "This is awesome," he says. "Really, this makes me feel a lot better," he says. "Seriously, CheeseburgerBrown. It's good to know I'm not the only one going through this shit."

"You have a good woman. It's worth some grief, to keep her."

"Yeah," he agrees. He orders another pitcher. "So, how you doin'?" he asks me seriously.

"Aw, pretty shit," I admit. "My last two jobs fell through. With the most recent cancellation we've officially moved from concerned to fucked. I have to come up with three thousand bucks in the next couple of weeks, somehow."

"Shit!" sympathizes the Commodore.

"Well, I prefer to look on the bright side. If I had a job right now we couldn't be sitting here having beers, could we? With paralyzing dread comes a certain freedom."

We knock glasses and drink to that.

He shifts in his seat. "When I didn't hear back from you for a while I was afraid I pissed you off, you know, about the whole [redacted] thing and everything," he tells me.

"You did piss me off," I confirm. He looks stricken so I'm quick to continue, "But there's nothing wrong with that, really. People piss each other off. I've pissed you off before. It's okay to piss people off sometimes."

To a non-confronter like the Commodore, this is strange news. He's so tragically afraid of pissing people off. He's used to denials. He smiles like a sleepy puppy. "I'm so glad we did this," he says, drinking up.

He tells me about the animated segments he's currently producing for children's television, and I tell him about how work on Fish's Wishes has been progressing (barely). As we near the end of our second pitcher my pocket starts beeping: it's Littlestar, and she wants to meet me at a crosstown bar called Ein Stein.

Fine, fine, fine.

So I walk the Commodore back to his front stoop and we shake hands and hug and then he buys me a stick of pepperoni from a street vendor and then I jump in a taxi and issue my directives. My pocket beeps a couple more times -- Littlestar demanding updates on the pursuit. "Fifteen minutes," I tell her.

"Ten," says the cabbie.

"Ten minutes," I amend and fold the telephone wand away.

"My friend, I tell you," the cabbie tells me, "sometimes having a cellphone is like having your dick stuck in a car door, do you know what I'm saying?"

"Um."

"My wife is calling me every day many times a day until I change phones, and keep my real number a secret from her. Do you know what I'm saying? Sometimes that's what you have to do to buy some peace."

We bump along in silence for a moment. "Some weather we're having," I observe.

"My friend, it is a shit-storm," agrees the cabbie.


"Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Banana?"

I'm pushing through the slush on College Street toward Ein Stein when a bass voice calls out, "CheeseburgerBrown, mon!" I look around and spot Jolly Le, a rotund Jamaican of my wife's acquinatance, sitting in the Volvo with clouds of blue vapour escaping into the night around him. I trot over and slip in the backseat.

"Close the doors, Jolly Le! Cheeseburger!" calls Littlestar. "You're letting all the smoke out."

I shut the door. "Jesus Murphy Brown!" I exclaim as the dank gloom pushes up against my eyeballs, making them water. "This car smells really high."

"Cha, mon," agrees Jolly Le with a baritone chuckle. "Here, have somma this."

When we get out of the car the world is buzzing and more sparkly than it once was. We duck our heads against the flying snow and shuffle down the short steps into the bar. On duty at the taps is Littlestar's ex-bestfriend -- a troubled lass now called Barmaid. Barmaid sets me up with a pint and then mixes something exotic and pineappley for Jolly Le and Littlestar. "I like it when you come out!" Littlestar whispers in my ear. "I like seeing you drunk, and sociable," she adds. So I put my hand down her pants and squeeze her bare bottom.

It's Open Mic Night and a crew of long-haired sensitive-looking boys with acoustic guitars is accumulating by the small stage. "Aw, fuck," I lament.

The MC arrives, late. He spots Littlestar and comes over to chat with her before going on, recalling old times. Then he jumps up on the stage, taps on the microphone and then declares that each act tonight will be obliged to tell just the punchline of a joke, without telling the body of the joke itself. The first strumming crooner is forgettable, but his punchline is: "How the hell did you ever fit your dick in there?"

Next up is a truly horrid duo: a hippie on bongos and a Kurt Cobain wannabe with a mis-tuned guitar, hoarsely moaning out tragic mumbles and tossing his hair around. Their sense of rhythm is unorthodox. "Tell us a punchline!" I shout.

"Rectum -- damn near killed 'im," mutters Wannabe Cobain.

"You suck!" I reply.

Ah, beer!

I go outside to have a cigarette in the swirling snow, and tell two drunk girls my joke about the lisping midget who wants to buy a mare. "May I thee the horthe'th twot?" I recite. I light their cigarettes with the twin flames from the pig's nostrils.

"That's hilarious -- I'm going to put that on my blog," says one girl.

"What's a blog?" asks the other.

When I come back inside a competent musician has taken the stage so I feel no urge to demand punchlines from him. Slozo (who finally moved out of my house!) has turned up, but is heading off for a date. Once he's gone Littlestar presses the bar-staff for details about the girl he's seeing. "She's tall," says Barmaid.

"That's good," says Littlestar.

"She's smart," says Jolly Le.

"Oh," says Littlestar. "Well, hopefully she doesn't see through his bullshit. It would be so nice for him to have a girlfriend."

A couple of pints later I announce that I have a tummy ache and Littlestar announces that she's getting tired and sober so we bid adieu to the collected crowd and worm our way back outside to the sleet. I put up the hood of my Han Solo on Hoth jacket, and notice that I've lost my green scarf. "Crap."

I had already lost my hat. Now I've lost my scarf. Soon I will be naked.

We settle into the car and she lets it warm up. "We don't go out often enough," says Littlestar, and I burp behind my hand. "It's so fun!" she sighs, putting the Volvo into gear and letting it drift backward onto College...

The night swallows us, and soon it's nothing but rushing snow and blackness and our own reflections outside. We stop for windshield-wiper fluid from Petro Canada and opium bagels from Tim Horton's. We hold hands and yawn. We feel like we've been up all night.

It's eleven PM.

"Tomorrow is Popsicle's birthday," sings Littlestar happily as we pull up at the old schoolhouse. "I can't believe she's going to be two."

"Time fries when you're having some," I say sagely. I push open the unlocked door, and we cast off our slushy outerwear and climb upstairs to bed.

Now, I know there are some of you out there who are scandalized, offended or otherwise discomfited whenever I talk about enjoying sexual relations with my lovely wife. So, with the sensitivities of these readers in mind, let me concluded by simply saying [redacted].

Sticky, tired and loved I fell to sleep.