Tuesday, February 16, 2021

“The Ultimate Fuck Trudeau Selfie” by Kim Cancer

 


“The Ultimate Fuck Trudeau Selfie”

 

Careening toward the Canadian border, we are snow-blind, forcing forward, following fat clouds.

Finally, we arrive. Join the juxtaposition and encounter a lengthy line of snowmobiles, hockey players and Bigfoot. Peering up at the checkpoint, we see motorists collared and searched, probed, and the rectal exams begin, asses hanging from car windows, border-crossers stood spreadeagle, Canuck Grim Reaper Bots extending robotic arms, latex gloves snapping back in coruscating flashes of light.

My Adam’s apple bobs up and down as I dart a glance at a Bigfoot bending over, propped against a plastic palm tree, a gloved Canuck Bot’s hand halfway up Bigfoot’s butt. Then a gust of wind splashes a sheet of snow at our windshield, coloring everything milky, blurry white…

“We should have just snuck in through the woods or taken a hot-air balloon,” Melvin affirms as he’s probing his nose with pliers and plucking nose-hairs meticulously in the rearview mirror.

But what if the Canuck Bots caught you? I ponder…

The Canuck Bots nor the Canucks are usually violent. But they could be, right? All that politeness. All those niceties. I’ll bet inside every Canadian, there’s a raging monster, an anger, a pressure cooker, a bomb waiting to explode. Any Canadian could be a merciless killer given the temptation and opportunity. 

An aggrieved Canadian, that could be the world’s most dangerous animal. Aside from playing hockey, the world doesn’t know what the Canadians are plotting, what they’re doing up there. I envisage dark, insidious actors, underground ice-bunkers, and cutting-edge weapons in the hands of polite and helpful neighbors.  

“Jeffery Dahmer was a Canadian,” mentions Melvin, who’s slapping rhythmically on the dashboard, along to the drumbeat of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.”

Shaking my head, I proclaim that “no, he was a Wisconsinite… Similar accent, though.”

Melvin curls his upper lip in disgust, mentioning that that explains everything, and there are “no worse people than the Wisconsinites.”

Oh no, the Canadians are way worse, I insist. Their Mounties are monsters. The Mounties created like Frankenstein, monsters made from assembled body parts, the evil beings born sniffing for blood. Officers of Satan, the Mounties. The Mounties, militaristic, riding on battle moose, moose themselves perfected in laboratories, moose decked out in body armor, moose fitted with jet engines and wings, moose on clandestine flying moose missions; the flying moose fitted with machine guns, missiles, and laser beams blasting from moose asses and antlers.

It’s like I tell Melvin, moose run incredibly fast, too, for an animal that size, moose reaching a peak running speed of 35 MPH…

“Even if they don’t fly the moose, just imagine those Mounties on moose back, those moose hoofs clattering and the Mounties making morbid battle cries, sounds worse than Celine Dion’s most dreadful multi-octave wails.

“Imagine Frankenstein riding a rodeo bull like a racehorse.”

“Or a war elephant,” Melvin opines, and I nod my head tacitly, and I continue, “It’s sinister… Far worse than the Wisconsinites’ black bear trampoline terror campaigns and rattlesnake catapult attacks,” I assert, plainly, and not even Melvin will argue this…

 

 

Our car inches closer. Melvin is practically licking the windshield. The snow slips wet, clearing the screen, leaving us with only the fuzzy outlines of oncoming Canadians.   

Melvin has been stirring in his seat. Says the last time he attempted to enter Canada, the immigration officer refused his entry, without explanation, aside from hinting that Melvin looked too poor to be able to fund his stay in Canada.

It’s like I tell Melvin, you can’t wear dirty basketball shorts in winter and turtleneck trench coats in summer without repercussions… At least today he’s in a pink tutu, glasses/nose/mustache disguise and a wrinkly old Wizards Jordan jersey…

 

The line speeds up, fast. We unbuckle our belts, prepare to be fingered.

“Heck, I might even enjoy it…” I mention, reaching down to unzip my fly.

The stink-hungry border guards are 30ish; they are red-faced men, troglodytes, with slow-moving eyes and potbellies. They only peer at our passports, and one of the border guards pops his head into the car, scans around, then grunts and nods. These Canadians are far gruffer than I’d pictured. They speak in a trembling tone that sounds forced, and one of them only speaks French to us.

But they let us pass, unmolested, and I feel a sense of release ease over me, a burden lifted.

Not Melvin, though. Heading through the Canadian immigration checkpoint has reanimated his PTSD.  

Melvin reiterates his negative experience, relives it, and reminds me there are indeed Canadian cunts, that they exist.

“Cunts exist everywhere,” I affirm, scratching my eyebrows; after crossing into Canada, my right eyebrow begins to itch incessantly.

Melvin cocks back his bald head. His scruffy red lumberjack beard looks itchy too. He scratches at it again but paws at his face in a way that appears contemplative.

I wonder if the border guards threw itching powder at us or something. I could see the French-speaking one being shifty like that. I didn’t like his man-bun. I don’t trust a man with a man-bun.

Melvin shares my disdain for the man-bun. Says he hopes to witness a mullet resurgence and rambles about the repercussions of hiding in some bushes, or up in a tree, then jumping out, like a ninja, and snipping off the policeman’s man-bun, with a pair of garden shears…

 

The sun starts to set, the bloody orange ball sinking into the panorama of the purplish-blue horizon. The sky here is heavier than home. The air up here is way cleaner. Everything is cleaner. The streets are so sanitary that they are aglow, gleaming like ice rinks.  

 

Melvin is apoplectic, angrily scratching his face, and still ruminating on the stubborn border guard from two years ago, saying he wanted to go find him and…

We nose into the parking lot at the mouth of the Niagara Falls. The old box Chevy had died so I’d been behind the car, pushing it like a loaded shopping cart for the last three blocks.

Melvin yanks the parking brake, hops out and hurls invective, then spits at the car, kicks the tires, and screams something in Spanish.

 

The Falls are raging. A violent hiss, a vibration, a smell of powering water wafts and swirls about in the air, and I forget my itch.

Melvin and I pop the trunk. Inside are the squirrel suits. We zip into them.

Melvin laments that America never conquered Canada. That we tried in the War of 1812 and failed miserably. He says we should have annexed Canada and Greenland, a long time ago, for the oil, wood, and maple syrup.

“And the Tim Hortons,” Melvin asserts, convincing me that he’s a true expansionist, a proud imperialist, the last of a dying breed. “Teddy Roosevelt was America’s greatest president!” cries Melvin, climbing the protective fencing.  

“I’m partial to Martin Van Buren,” I retort, and I climb up next to Melvin, flanking him. A crowd forms, encircles us. Fingers point, phones aloft. When the police race over, one riding aggressively on a Segway, shouting polite Canadian police things, it is then… it is then that we know… We know the moment has arrived.

“And we’re keeping William Shatner!” hollers Melvin, his head tossed back, his eyes toward the purpling heavens. His nostrils flaring, the veins on his neck popping like cables, he then swivels his gaze toward me, snorts and sneers.

Together, on the count of three…

One…

Two…

Three…

And we dive, face first. FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH… Our plunge propelled by the Lazar engines in our suits. Our dive is like an inverted parabola, first plummeting down, then straightening out, then arcing up and angling to a perfectly parallel, horizontal approach, flying full force forward toward the Falls.

Foooooooooooosh… And we’re zooming like fighter jets over the animosity and immensity and indifference of the pooling water below. Zooming over its frothy white bubbling, its supernatural strength and uninvited violence.

Zooming in a straight soar, we then angle and twist, slip under, bend behind the Falls, the curtain of water, the mammoth of motion, and we glide the tunnel, snap the ultimate Fuck Trudeau selfie and then shoot out the other end, ascending, and we’re over, backflipping a guardrail, touching down to a battered path, paved with blood and broken teeth.

Then we peel off our squirrel suits, disrobe, and run, naked, screaming names of recent Stanley Cup winners. Our naked, hairy man bodies, our shaven chests and backs painted in anti-Trudeau, Banksy-style artworks.

Naked at last, the itch returns, intensifies, overtaking us, as if we’d been bitten by a thousand mosquitoes, and as we run, we stop every few feet to flail, grunt, and scratch. Yet we somehow sustain our suicide sprint in the direction of the border, doing our damnedest to achieve the dash and to meet the simplicity of selection.

 

 


 

 

 

 

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