"We can make the center of a man's memory virtually as sterile as a scalpel fresh from the autoclave. But grains of new experience begin to accumulate on it at once. These grains in turn form themselves into patterns not necessarily favorable to military thinking. Unfortunately, this problem of recontamination seems insoluble."
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr, The Sirens of Titan

The night of the mustard incident started out like any other night really. Jared, John-Ryan Morrison, Rob Waite and I were having a few beers at Hemingway's Bar in Yorkville when we received a phone call from Jared's personal attorney, Casey Pickard. Her sister and some friends were visiting from the States and they had staked out a good spot at the bar at Andy Poolhall, a night club/pool hall at College & Bathurst, popular with U of T students and wealthy & stylish young hipsters like John-Ryan Morrison. So we paid our bill and caught the first cab we could find on Bloor St straight to Little Italy. There we met up with Casey and her big-breasted sister visiting from North Carolina. Her sister had driven up to Toronto with 3 Americans...a married couple and a young Puerto Rican naval officer on shore leave looking for Canadian girls and good times and BC bud if I had any. I didn't. We went outside for a smoke anyway. "This shit we're smoking is ditch weed," I said. "...from a small red-neck town about an hour from here called Hastings, Ontario." He gave me a blank Puerto Rican stare. We were back in the bar. "Good people. Bad weed." I said. He looked puzzled. "Never mind...that girl over there has been looking at us and I think she is Mexican...well, maybe Guatemalan..." He seemed to be contemplating the issue. We were standing by the bar. "Never mind her race," I shouted against the music, "she is certainly Hispanic of some kind and she just eye fucked the shit out of you." He gave me a wide grin of recognition. "Use your Spanish..." I said. He was thinking about it. "You can use your Spanish to pick up girls." I said for clarification. It doesn't work, he said. Whenever I try it in North Carolina the girls laugh at me and people tell me to "speak American." You're not in Kansas any more my friend, I said. You are in Toronto. This is an enlightened city. Here the women go crazy for a man with a foreign tongue... if you catch my drift. He did. "A Puerto Rican like you could clean up in this town." I said.

I had no money with me. Well...I had $5 in my pocket and that was the cover charge and so I was good. There were six pool tables at the back of the room. The coat check was behind the pool tables. We ran into Casey Pickard coming out of the bathroom and she seemed surprised to see us. "We came as soon as you called" I said, which was true, but somehow the comment didn't seem to fit the situation quite right. She looked confused and left quickly. Rob Waite was laughing. "Who was that?" he asked. "Jared's personal attorney." I said. He laughed again. "Nevermind." I said. "Jared is a very busy man." Jared paid for my $2 coat check. "I'm out of cash." Jared said. "Me too." I said. "Me too." John-Ryan was also out of cash...they had been drinking heavily at the Hemingway Bar and there had been lots of women and they had been looking at the women and fantasizing about sex with those women but the woman had not noticed them and that had given them very little to do except drink beer and they did that for about an hour before I arrived. I arrived and they were looking at women that were not looking at them and I wondered how long they had wasted at this place since they were clearly too young and too poor to be of any use to the women they were looking at. At Andy Poolhall the women were looking at them and they were happy. John-Ryan Morrison was on the dance floor. Our good friend Sarah Jardine was there and seeing her was good. She looked good. The bar was packed and the music was not club music which was great. Jared borrowed $20 from Rob Waite to buy a drink. Sarah asked me why I wasn't drinking. I have no money, I said. She looked confused. Why would anybody come to a bar without money? That just doesn't make any sense. She was right. Why don't I ever plan ahead? Fuck! Why am I so stupid? But that didn't last long. We needed more money. There was no time for self-pity. There was no ATM and no bank within walking distance and our coats were already checked. That is when Jared pulled out his MasterCard. He gave it to me. "Pretend that it's your card." He said. I grinned and patted him on the back. Jackpot! I thought to myself. "Don't worry," I said. "You won't regret this." And by that I meant that he would most likely regret it dearly. He looked like he wanted to take his card back but it was too late. The group had seen him hand it over in an unprecedented display of trust and generosity. He could not take it back now. The girls had seen him do it. It was too late. I waited for the hot brunette bartender to come over. She gave me her sexy "tip me" eyes. She was hot. "Hey!" I said. "My name's Jared." Hey, she said, giving me her sexy "tip me" smile. "I have a lot of friends" I explained to her, "and they are all very thirsty." I waved my arm around to signal to her that all the people standing around me, Jared, Rob Waite, John-Ryan, Casey, her sister, the Americans and Sarah Jardine were the friends to which I referred. She gave me a real smile this time, which was also sexy, but it was real. I continued, "...luckily I received this credit card in the mail today. Pre-approved. Apparently I am a preferred customer of...." I looked down to see what kind of credit card I was holding, "MasterCard." I ordered 4 double whiskey and sodas. And I ordered more after that. Jared was busy talking to Casey and I don't think he had any idea how many drinks John-Ryan Morrison and I put on his credit card until the end of the night. Later he tried to order a drink and the hot brunette bartender did not recognize him and he was drunk and he momentarily forgot about our little scheme and he told the hot brunette bartender that he had a tab going and I heard her ask him if he was with Jared. "I am Jared!" he protested. He sounded drunk. She looked up and saw me in the crowd and saw that I was listening and she looked at me for help. I laughed. "You're not Jared." I said and I put my right arm around Jared. "I'm Jared. This man is an impostor." She was still standing there not making his drink...still not sure what to do, still waiting for my approval. "Put his drink on my tab," I said in a generous fatherly way and I squeezed his shoulders like you would a confused child as she got to work making his drink and she smiled at me in a real way. I had basically just stolen his credit card, his identity and his dignity, and worst of all the hot brunette bartender seemed to like me. Jared looked mad. "You bastard." He said, "look what you've done." "Look what I've done?" I was shocked. "I've bought you a drink, you ungrateful bastard...the least you could do is thank me!" "What am I going to do at the end of the night?" He asked. "Pay your bill, of course, how else will you be able to get your credit card back?" Do you guys need more money? Rob Waite asked, watching but not hearing our debate by the bar. No! I said. I leaned over to communicate against the loud music. "I've got Jared's credit card...it's like money, but better, because it's Jared's!"

At the end of the night I was outside by myself. I was at the corner of College & Bathurst. I was ordering a hot dog. Casey Pickard and her sister and the Americans and Sarah Jardine had gone home. There were hugs and kisses and good-byes outside the bar and now it was time for a hot dog. I don't know where Jared was at that point. For some reason it was taking him a long time to leave the bar. There may have been issues with the tab. I don't know. It wasn't my credit card. I had left the bar with no hassles. I was waiting for my hot dog. It was cold but it was a nice night and the snow on the side walk was very wet. The street was busy with drunk U of T students and the various other people that populate the streets of our great city. Finally my hot dog was ready. I loaded it with ketchup and mustard. I took a bite. It was delicious. I had drank a lot of whiskey and soda at Andy Poolhall while Jared was talking to Casey and now I was drunk and all I wanted to do was eat my precious hot dog. It cost me $3 that I had borrowed from Rob Waite. I was about to take my second delicious bite of pure hot dog heaven...when it happened. I was taken down from behind. I was taken out and I didn't see it coming. The weight of Jared's body traveling at high speed hit me and my hot dog and we landed in the wet snow on my left hip. Thinking quickly, I stuffed my hot dog in the left jacket pocket of my North Face coat for safe keeping until after the fight. I grabbed Jared and flung him over like a rag doll. We wrestled and it was epic and manly. People were watching and cheering. I'm assuming that they were cheering for me. He was drunk but strong and vicious. It was revenge. There was an epic battle in the snow. John-Ryan Morrison ordered a hot dog and calmly watched although he was standing dangerously close. I think I won the wrestling match in the snow, but that may be a delusion. In any case I usually win, and so for the purposes of this story I'm assuming that I won that night as well. Although I remember thinking that Jared seemed strangely dry afterwards. Jared ordered a hot dog. The hot dog guy had missed the whole fight because his little tent had blocked out all the violence. Not knowing that Jared had just finished gang-raping a man in the snow beside his tent he naively sold Jared a $3 hot dog. (Jared borrowed the money from Rob Waite.) As I picked myself up off the ground Jared grabbed the extra-large plastic mustard bottle and began violently spraying it at me. "YOU BASTARD!" I shouted, but I was too drunk to move in any meaningful way. Spectators were laughing all around me as I was covered from head to toe in cheap yellow mustard, ejaculating from the large bottle that Jared was holding and squeezing at crotch level like an engorged yellow penis. There was low grade mustard all over the snow. The hot dog guy was screaming in Arabic. The crowd was animated, drawing Jared's attention away from me. He began squeezing his phallic mustard bottle at the crowd. Girls were screaming. John-Ryan Morrison, cool and calm, grabbed the bottle from Jared's crotch and gave it back to the hysterical hot dog vendor. From my place in the snow I looked down the street for a police car. Unfortunately there was none around to apprehend this vile criminal. His loathsome behavior would go unpunished, as usual. I had put $117 worth of whiskey on his credit card and he had exacted his terrible revenge. I took my hot dog out of the pocket of my North Face jacket and happily finished it in the snow. John-Ryan Morrison found a cab for us and we headed north, leaving the corner of College & Bathurst, leaving behind only mustard and snow and public drunkenness. I said my good-byes at the corner of Yonge & Lawrence and Rob Waite paid my portion of the fair. The taxi continued north up Yonge St to Jared's condo and quiet tranquility at York Mills.

The next morning I cleaned my coat before breakfast. My head was killing me and I couldn't think straight. Heather and I were walking down Yonge St. and the sun was in my eyes. "What's that smell?" She asked. I looked down. I had forgot to clean the mustard out of the left pocket of my North Face jacket. For the rest of the day I smelled of mud and street salt and whiskey and hair gel and mustard...always the mustard smell was strongest. And on the subway people did not want to stand close to me and all day I thought about Jared and how I would make him pay dearly for the mustard in my pocket. We met up with Jared and John-Ryan Morrison at the breakfast place at Yonge & Eglinton around noon. Jared laughed hysterically at sight of me. I handed Jared $20 across the breakfast table. He looked confused. "For last night." I said. "Are we even?"

The waitress greeted us with menus..

"What's that smell?"

MDP