“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.
