Chapter 6: Right Sock

On the night before leaving, they counted their loot, a laughable sum, and Canadian to boot.

"Is that all there is?" Belle gasped.

"So it appears," said Meg, staring at the little bundle on the table. The Queen and a few notables from yesteryear stared back. "Five thousand and twenty three dollars. Only." Her tone of accusation was directed at no one in particular, though, by some stretch of the imagination, the intended recipient may have been Olney Garkle.

She looked at him. "Is that really all there is?"

"Of course not. Just let me empty my pockets. Ah, here we are." He threw down a crumpled note impressed with the face of a key figure in Canadian history no one had ever heard of. "I was being selfish, I'll admit." His contribution was greeted with boos and hisses, a seemingly commonplace response to his notion of munificence. "Aw, come on now," he whined, "we've been living on Brute's pogey, don't forget. Where's your sense of humour, you guys."

Meg looked at him through the eyes of her moon in Aquarius. He shuddered.

"Maybe it's enough," offered Crusty, hoping to reverse the trend of depression setting in. They all stared at the impoverished display of colourful Canadian tender, the sum total of a velleitous drive for funds.

Neither Bebette nor Garkle were blessed with a talent for financial gain, though Meg had at least made an attempt. It was she who, for a week, had got them up at the crack of dawn to root in nearby fields for magic mushrooms. "We can sell them in Quebec for $6000 a kilo," she'd heard. "Sell shmell," chirped Olney, "we'll eat 'em." She stomped her frequently stomping foot. "Money, Olney. We need money!" For a moment he looked stricken. "Yeah, but, we can eat some too, can't we?"

But when, after a few mornings, he realised it would take several weeks of 36 hour days to come up with enough dried mushrooms to make up the kilo, he stopped bagging and started eating in earnest. Meg called the whole thing off when she found him two fields over, giggling quietly at the quizzical expression of a dung beetle upon whose cow pat Olney was trying to arrange himself for a comfy snooze.

That was the beginning and end of his participation in fund raising. Meg's other ideas for advancing their financial security were met by sneering admonishment. "Too much thinking about money will turn you into an entrepreneurial huckster," he said. "Well, how do you propose we find it, then!" she asked furiously. His response was to widen his eyes. Indeed, they resembled two little pies in two little skies.

Crusty and Belle would look at each other and wince. Sooner or later they were going to have the privilege of bailing Olney out. Meg would make it back on her own, the resourceful girl; she always landed on her feet. But friend Olio had the natural resources of a windblown desert. They knew in their home-loving bones that a collect call was only a few months away. "Help!" would be the message. "I'm down to my last croissant in funds. Send more dough, I'll pay you back in heaven." Meanwhile, poor Meg was under his spell.

She and Olney saw themselves as giddy heroes, but Crusty and Belle were reminded of the joke about the two morons on top of the Empire State building. Neither could remember the punch line, but they agreed both morons looked like their friends.

Olney's plan for the city of Muses: write the book he was forever outlining. It had followed him around for years. Write me! it called, sometimes with a hesitant nudge, like a memo from sanity as he entered yet another brothel along the tropic of cancer; sometimes relentlessly, like a hound at his heels, threatening to bite off his feet if he didn't cure his obsession for experience. So that he finally had to stop somewhere and get it started. He would spend a month in blissful preparation, organizing his notes and making more, enjoying his new walls and wishing he could get to know them well. Then, funniest thing, just as he was ready to begin the Great Task (sometimes on Great Task's eve, even), reality, in the form of an empty fridge, would strike at the heart of his near-creative bliss and turn him to the want ads again. And then it would all slip away, just beyond the grip of his draining concentration. The new job usually led to evenings wasted and weekends spent in furious pursuit of relaxation. Three months was about it for Olney's dispiriting stint in the concrete world of workaday. Not long after, he would pack up and leave town and the chase would begin all over again.

His friends knew he was capable of writing the book. They were equally sure he would never write it in Paris. No one said anything, but he felt it too. His lily-livered chickenheart was calling instead for a pilgrimage to the Bo tree of Ferdinand the Bull.

Meg was just as scared. Her plan for Paris: engage in battle and soundly defeat her fear of inadequacy. She knew where the feeling came from, yet she was still powerless to get rid of it. Under LSD, she had traced it to humiliation at the hands of her Grade One teacher. A kindly soul by trade, the old woman sometimes lapsed into moments of frustrated anger. Who knows, Meg had often thought (with a generosity issued through clenched teeth), but that the teacher's real calling had lain elsewhere, and for some reason--a drunkard husband, perhaps--she was forced to settle with what had once been a temporary job: teaching larval seven year olds. At any rate, one day the woman accused Meg's mildly dyslexic condition of stupidity in front of the entire class. The moment burned its way into every cell of Meg's being. Since her recollection during the acid trip, she had often likened the experience to the way Ethel Rosenburg must have felt when they turned on the voltage. Meg was still alive though, and she sometimes felt ashamed for the analogy, yet electrocution was exactly what it had felt like. She wondered if the other kids remembered the incident as they were growing up. Was her public shaming an example of what might happen if one was different? Had the teacher afterwards wrung her hands in remorse, perhaps thinking of suicide from time to time over the years, while looking after her alcoholic husband? Meg would never know, but the sense of worthlessness remained.

§§§

Yes, they had great plans, yet neither was willing to give more than a side-eyed attention to any of them. There was something about their adventure that hinted of Tether's End. They even had a motto to that effect: "Better to starve in Paris than stay schnockered in Right Sock."

Indeed, Margaret P. Bebette and (especially) Olney Garkle were getting hammered at the kitchen table every night in Right Sock, British Columbia. Originally named "Semiyahoo," after an Indian word meaning "dimwit," the town had been a modest seaside resort in the 1930's. Until the war, carefree vacationers had come to dip their toes in the only warm water north of California: owing to the town's queerly cupped bay, which coddled and warmed the sea flowing past, the temperature remained at an almost Mexican tepidity.

Perhaps the whoopeemakers never left, their cars breaking down forever, for contemporary Right Sock is distinguished by an odour of shut-in skin and motor oil. Postwar boom years left the town behind, resort-mongers driving their bigger and better automobiles further south for gambols in the land of the puer.

Coastal Right Sock received its present name in the mid-Fifties, at the peak of its inverse boom. The lingering scent of spark plug scint and grease gun spunk had long since made it the mecca for honeymooning auto mechanics and their brides.

The story, as it is told today at bus stops and in public washrooms, is that one such couple, Slug and Slatternella Scumchuk, honeymooning for the weekend from their home in One Million, BC, had gotten particularly shitfaced in the pub their first night in town. They caused the help no end of trouble as they bought round after round of draft for the locals. Incorporated bylaws were put to rout when several carousers carried Slug and Slatternella to their room in the pub's hotel. The RCMP, called immediately by the hair-tearing tapsters, traylofters and a maid, arrived within the hour from their barracks two blocks away. With grim perseverance they found the pub crawlers, snoring in their chuck in various crannies of the hotel, and filled the local jail with them. The honeymooners, innocent of the uproar, slept like babes.

Next morning, Slug--who had never suffered a hangover in his life--woke up and looked at his sleeping new wife. He listened to her closely with a mechanic's trained ear as she backfired through her mouth with every exhale. "Girl needs a minor adjustment to the old clituretor there, hyuck, hyuck," said Slug, copping a fond feel. He yawned and stretched heartily, let a sudsy beer fart, slapped his rolling belly good morning, swung out of bed and reached for his socks.

"Hey, hell! There's only one sock here. Where's the other one! Shit, now where's the other damn sock, anyway! Hey, honey?"

"Mmflgit, mmflg-git," responded his bride.

"Shit, honey, what the hell does that mean?"

"Flgunk, unk," she said.

"Well, I gotta find it," he puled. "Might help if I knew which one I was lookin' for. Now, would you say this one here was the right sock or the left sock?"

"Tsthlifit."

"Whadja say?"

"Tsthl'fit."

"Say it again, babe."

"Tsthlft...ich...uch."

"Y-yeah? It's the left sock? Honey, ain't you somethin' else. I sure lucked out when I married you."

"Aw...swry," she said, rolling over.

"An' now I know which sock to look for, the right sock!" And Slug Scumchuk looked hard for that sock and when he found it under the bed right next to his nose he put it on, and then he put on the other sock, and then he put on his shoes, and then he put on his...and then he took off his shoes, and then he put on his pants, and then he put on his shoes again, and his shirt and his coat, and while his wife dreamed of past-life tune ups went unto the town and into the nearest cafe where he ordered sausage and eggs and told his story to the waitress who herself went unto the town a little later on lunch break and told his story to the gathered people of what a few years later was to become Right Sock, BC.

Right Sock in the Eighties still boasts of its small, rockstrewn beach and warm, gentle waves. The pier is still standing, though a recent flotilla of dead whales (hapless chemical poisoning victims of a for-profit government) nearly battered the poor thing to its creosote knees. A museum, lodged in the old railway station, is dedicated to the town's history. Portraits of Slug and Slatternella adorn the west wall, while a life size bust of Myfanway Twitty, the waitress who played so important a part in recording the legend, faces them from the east. A memorial plaque represents Town curator, Tyler Flange, who committed suicide upon learning that the relic Scumchuk socks were lost to the whims of an irascible top loader in the local laundromat.

A variety of commerce serves the town well. In addition to the Scumchuk Hotel and its adjacent pub, the Choke and Throttle, the town offers a shopping mall, several fish 'n' chipperies, three auto repair shops, and a drop-in centre where the ping-pong tables are always all busted to hell. The railroad is still in operation, curving along the coast and passing through town some twenty yards behind the beach. Every day at 12:20 precisely the Amtrak toots by without stopping, en route from Vancouver to Seattle.

§§§

During his few months in Right Sock, Olney spent most days pacing up and down the tracks, avoiding the occasional hustle and bustle of tourism by sticking to the wilder littoral that stretches for miles between Right Sock and the nearest town, Balsamic Beach. Walking the rails allowed his thoughts to wander aimlessly whilst avoiding the unpleasant distraction of having to watch where he was stepping. Because of the coastal curves, his reveries were often interrupted by the approach of a local freight train coming around the bend in front or behind and sometimes right on top of him. He never knew when the train was near. The breakers dashing against the shore covered all other sounds and the train never signalled its approach. At least once a day, Olney found himself leaping to the safety of nearby boulders as the train and the hurtling ho-ho's of the wild-eyed engineer zoomed past.

The Pootie joined him in his land's-end jaunts a few weeks before they left. Together they walked and talked with the lowered heads of the doomed. They knew each other well enough by now to have the gravest of doubts. Living in Paris on next to nothing should have been a great challenge, but it needed a unity of heroic proportions. Olney wasn't sure he would write. Meg frankly admitted that Paris was the last place for her to overcome her fear. And their savings were a joke. Together they felt unimportantly fated, as if meeting each other had been an arbitrary moment in a Time yawning with ennui. The tracks stretched before them as they walked in silence, a silence broken only occasionally by sudden curses as they leapt for their lives from the careening locomotive and bloodcurdling laughter of the mad engineer.

§§§

Chapter 7: Pan Am to Paname

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