Summer of the Flesh Eater

We have accepted our confluence of bad luck not as a “sign” of something, but rather for what it apparently was: bizarre coincidence. People have driven themselves insane for millennia trying to figure out, what it all means. Most often things just are.

“I know it’s only a smell,” Trevor Masahara said one particularly rank Tuesday evening, interrupting our book club’s parsing of Clarissa’s guilty rejection of the hydrangea in The Hours, “but sometimes it seems like, you know, an actual thing.”



His name? it’s easy to forget he actually had a name, a driver’s licence, most probably a SIN number. For a while, we called him the Truck Guy and, later, the Meat Guy. Karlheinz Jacobsen, who has a scientific bent, was the one who nicknamed him Lucy. You know, the so-called missing link? We thought this was terribly funny. “Lucy!” Stefan Brandeis would yell sotto voce, “You got some ‘splainin’ to do!” while the rest of us laughed. We literally yowled. It seems even then we had more in common with other animals than we could have imagined.


A couple of days after he’d moved in, as if it had been teleported there overnight, the Dodge Ram, circa early ’80s, sat on blocks in the middle of his front lawn. Off-white (“tapioca,” Marcus van der Houte insisted), one broken headlight, and on the slightly dented back bumper a peeling orange neon sticker that read: I’m Going Nuckin’ Futs! And one of those chrome Jesus fish. (We never did witness any signs of even covert religiosity, a disappointment to Karlheinz Jacobsen, who alone among us held to a notion of the divine.) The kids went giddy — instant ADHD — as if they’d never seen a truck before.

Marcus was the one who elected to go over to talk to him about it. Bear in mind that we didn’t then, nor subsequently ever, use the term “property values.” We are not the kind of men who fixate on our lawns. In fact, those of us with southern exposures have switched to drought-resistant native grasses. And if there is grass that actually needs cutting, a communal Lee Valley push mower is used.

He was underneath the truck banging around, bare knees poking out, feet in decaying Adidas. Marcus tapped out the end credit sequence to Moulin Rouge on the hood to get his attention. (“You should’ve just yelled, “Yo!” Marcus’s ten year-old son told him later.) The slathering muzzle of what looked like an Alsatian/Cayman cross shot out of the front passenger window and Marcus actually fell on his seersucker-clad ass, cartoon style, white bucks up over his head. (For the record, at least one of us failed to suppress a guffaw.) The guy slid out from under the truck with a grunt while the dog continued its concerto. He offered Marcus a greasy paw (our neighbour, not the dog) and heaved him up. After they “shot the shit for a while,” as Trevor put it, our reconnaissance man gave a wave and walked away, wiping at his grass-stained butt.

“I lost my nerve,” Marcus said later. We assured him we would have as well, while Patel Seth pried his fingers from his third black mojito and suggested it might be a good time to up his dose of citalopram.

Fear, we all know, is a useful adaptation. “Only the brave die young,” Stefan Brandeis said rather soberly, and for once it seemed he might not have been joking.