(Their officers had hoped to ship the trio to Afghanistan, to be shot down or blown up by the irregulars of the opium warlords. Unfortunately, as shipbound sailors, they would have faced little danger from either narco-terrorists or Islamist drug smugglers. Indeed, plenty of other Canucks were being dynamited and decimated, all without even an apologetic letter from The Queen, but it was quite impossible to ensure the same fate for the water-borne warriors.)
Following their jettisoning from Her Majesty’s service, just last September, the three men drifted into the hard-driving, high-pay trade of trucking. Wanting to “get the hell out of the lousy Maritimes,” where they were infamous for brawls and extra-toxic intoxication and for getting punched out in every grotty pub or murky tavern in which they exposed their mugs, they eagerly enlisted with Great Lakes — Atlantic Ocean. They began transporting goods among the spaced-out (distant) cities of Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Windsor, and Thunder Bay.
The three boys loved the job, but could not steer clear of the sauce. They had the awful habit of spiking their coffee thermoses with Pusser’s Navy Rum. To drive, just a little drunk, was okay, for it kept them pepped up, making their rigs smoke nonstop from payload to payload.
Off the road, the guys bunked in Toronto. It was terrific: not very French, not very English either. It was a fine place to unwind.
They found a three-bedroom apartment in the only affordable, near-downtown place left in Toronto: East York. The location nudged them, by a mile or so, a bit closer to the real East Coast, and they were only a few blocks away from a semblance of Atlantic Canada: the Beaches. (Yes, the burg was hoity-toity, but the sand was sand and the water was sky-blue.) Their corner was Coxwell and Danforth: a critical mass of taverns, cafés, diners, and medical facilities, everything from hospitals to funeral homes.
(In fact, to pass the north-south artery of Donlands Avenue and bear east along the Danforth is to encounter a horde of cripples wielding canes, gripping walkers, or speeding motorized wheelchairs along sidewalks or across streets. Between Donlands Avenue and Coxwell Avenue, the Danforth is a parade of invalids, interspersed with exotic immigrants, including strays from Atlantic coastal Canada.)
One truly funky hangout for the boys was the Terminal Diner, so-called because it was, three decades ago, a veritable bus terminal. Its decor was walls of black-and-white photos of undying Hollywood idols: Marilyn, Jack & Jackie, Lola Falana. The ceiling boasted vintage record album covers. Marilyn could wink at the boys as they slurped an extra-creamy milk shake; if they looked up, they could see Doris Day, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Harry Belafonte beaming down at their french fries and chicken burgers, as if they were actual deities who could (and did) provide blessings for such greasy, sugary fare. No matter, the Terminal Diner was a cozy site for ostentation, semi-private smoking, and low-toned, public fuming.
Bruno, Peter, and Scalpel also loved checking out the Racetrack Tavern. But the best entertainment in the whole world was to sit on a park bench across from the Toronto East General Hospital and watch obscenely beautiful nurses pass in and out in white stockings, coats, skirts, dresses, and shoes, to eye the most interestingly limping, wobbling, or staggering patients, ideally women, also make their way outside to smoke, inside to die; their spastic motions; their disturbed, yet ballet-like movements; their flounces and jerks rendered them haunting to the point of arousing obsession.
Then again, none of the East Coast truckers were consummately paired with ladies. No, their unions were weekend flings or weeklong traumas. Their primary commitment was to the road, the rig, the rigmarole of work and drink and chat and card games, not to dames, who were great to eyeball but could only bring bad luck and babies.
The guys liked their low-rise apartment building on Monarch Park. Its rent was manageable on their three paychecks, and it was, for Toronto, unusually clean of cockroaches. The super — a Sicilian workaholic — was almost a stereotypical housewife, the way he fussed over every nook and cranny of the building, purging it of bugs, getting rid of “low-life scum” of all sorts, clearing out the garbage, and mopping and sweeping as if this were the exterminating duty of a soldier.
The boys didn’t even have to trouble themselves about who used the “can” first, last, always: Their road schedule ensured they were seldom “home” together. However, when they were all about, they’d recall their Navy days, and go out and get shit-faced smashed.
They could don dark sunglasses anytime and cruise the Beaches scoping out the pointed erections of breasts — or even, if very lucky, actual topless nudity (legal in Ontario for a decade or more). Or they could jaunt up to the Plaza, at Victoria Park and Danforth, and try the fries at Burger King, pick up porn from the Adult Store, or, when weepingly sentimental, buy Newfie ballads from World of Song. Or they could hit the swanky section of the Danforth — Greek Town — and oil their throats with ouzo while salting them with lemony calamari.
Although the three lads could still drink to the acme of absurdity, they did not scuffle much now. In Toronto, unfriendly waitresses and waiters would simply summon the police, who were neither as forgiving nor as helpfully fanatical about fisticuffs as were the Halifax bobbies. Hogtown’s finest would simply wade into an orchestra section of fists, swing their batons like mad conductors, or taser discordant miscreants, and then hogtie offenders’ wrists as if they were closing up a garbage bag. Prison was a likely outcome of a Toronto to-do. After all, the Tories had thrown up a lot of jails during the ’90s and the first years of the ’00s. So it was better to sucker punch a foe in an alley and scram. Bruno, Pete, and Scalpel were awfully quick with the slick, dirty knuckle throw.
But the biggest difference between Good Toronto and all the smaller cities, including Allô Police Montreal, was the presence of many more “people of color” (as the newspapers said) and the extra-delicate women, a plush rainbow of dreams. The boys had gone to school with a black woman here, a yellow one there, but they had concentrated their adolescent, juvenile lusts on the Britannic brunettes, the Germanic blondes, the undecided Acadians. Yet Toronto expanded “poontang” possibilities exponentially, from the trim copper goddess in a sari to the golden divinity in a T-shirt and shorts. The truest benefit of the city’s multiculturalism was its cosmopolitan smorgasbord of potential sex partners. Even the local cable TV monopoly sang the praises of this cornucopia of copulation possibilities, serving up such titles as Chocolate Sticks and Vanilla Licks, Bollywood Busts and Hollywood Lusts, Asian Gals and Caucasian Pals... When the guys weren’t drunkenly veering their rigs between Gog and Magog, they were only stopping to view their hotel room TV screens, always tuned to a Cubist dazzle of body parts, an orgy of conjunctions and subtractions, plusses and minuses, as clear as the frank numerals of a tax return.
During his days and nights at home on Monarch Park, Scalpel would supplement his TV movie purchases by peering discreetly from behind the living room Venetian blind at the across-the-street neighbors, a piquant blend of Greek pater and Sri Lankan mater, issuing in a daughter, a teen delicacy of cocoa-butter tastefulness, a seeming satin smoothness of skin, black hair as jet and as long as licorice, two eyes as soft as sable, almond-shaped, and dark brown, and lips of a raspberry pink and strawberry plushness. She usually wore a Catholic uniform of uncomfortable (for Scalpel) brevity of skirt. Her couture was peculiar, if visually exciting, for her papa was Greek Orthodox, at least in terms of how his mother dressed (in comprehensive black, save for a strand of white pearls about her neck). In contrast, the neighbor girl’s mother was not a devotee of modesty, for she, like her daughter, kept her hemlines and heels high. She was also transfiguringly beautiful, vaunting skin that was pure, sensuous sable in color and imagined feel, contrasting nicely with the honey-gold appeal of her daughter.