On the night of my 29th birthday party, Carl and I ritualistically mutilated, tortured, burned and finally destroyed the Conservative lawn sign that Carl stole from some old lady in High Park and brought downtown to the party. We lit it on fire on the back deck and the fucking thing lit up like a god-damn Christmas tree!!! We were both hopelessly drunk on fine scotch-whiskey and cheap American beer, I was smashed out of my gourd and smoking a joint, terrified Asian families were huddled together in the window next door that looks onto our back deck. It was 3 am and I was screaming something like "BURN THAT FUCKER CARL! BURN IT! BURN THE CONSERVATIVE WITCH!" The Conservative candidate in High Park is an evil old woman that puts razor blades in the rotten apples that she gives out on Halloween. Carl had an evil sneer on his face that night, too high on Seconal and too drunk on sangria (that I spiked with two full cans of red bull earlier in the evening) to think straight. He was too drunk with power and pyromania to even hear my horrible words. He was sweating and laughing like an ugly pedophile who stumbles onto a large troop of cheer leaders practicing in a park unsupervised. It was a pure atavistic orgy of primal blood lust. The Conservative sign conflagulated precipitously, leaving a thick cloud of toxic smoke and flaming puddles of blue plastic all over the deck. It was an appropriate conclusion to a righteous evening.

Earlier that very night Carl & Mark, a couple of dudes that we know, stole a Conservative sign and put it in our front window as a joke, directly under our NDP sign. It was an unspeakable act of vandalism & irony...later on, in the heat of the night, Carl destroyed that very sign, using all available objects at his mercy, including one large black Bic lighter. But first he found the knives. I walked out of the bathroom and into the living-room and Carl is standing on a chair with the Conservative sign in one hand and our largest butcher knife in the other! My first thoughts were, "Who the hell gave him a knife!?" followed shortly by "Oh god, we're all gonna die!" followed shortly by "Jesus, he's screeching like a god damned Raped Ape...he's crazy." Carl was sweating and giggling and hacking at the sign like a violent child overdosed on Ritalin. He went berserk, his eyes glazed over, he started drooling and gnashing his teeth...it was a pure white hatred for the Conservatives and everything they stand for. It was terrible and mesmerizing to watch.

"Take it out back you crazy bastard!" I said. He was trying to stab the butcher knife, through the thin plastic sign, and into the brick wall of our apartment. "You can't stick a knife into a brick wall you stupid bastard!" I kept shouting. Mark just stood there and silently shook his head. He knew enough to stay out of the way, and he didn't try to intervene, the truth is he didn't have much sympathy. He thought of us as the stupid fuckers that invited this beast over for a quiet night of herbal tea and Trivial Pursuit and in his mind we should have known, it would end up with a god-damn bestial cannibalistic shit-storm of violence that would inevitably lead to a bomb-fire in the back yard and small Asian children crying and calling the police and trying to hide behind a thin pane of glass. Yes, that last bit was true. We could see them in the kitchen and they knew that they didn't have long to live. These sadistic white people would surely murder them all before the night was over, after all, they knew we could see them (their kitchen light was on), and we kept looking over at them with strange faces & horrible laughter. We had knives! and fire and drugs and music that to their immigrant ears would had sounded like the devil fucking a goat on a bed of cymbals. It was all too horrible for words.

Mark had little patience for any of this, he said something like, "I deal with this shit everyday, let's see what's on TV." And he sat down on the couch. He shook his head again and tried to think about something else. Maybe he thought back to a time when he was truly happy. It was a time in his childhood, before he knew Carl. Maybe he thought about his days as a young man in the Navy. He knew Carl then, but he lived thousands of miles away on a ship in the South Asian Sea. One night at sea he told his room mate about the terrible loneliness of a life at sea and his room mate, a polygamous Mormon from Lethbridge, Alberta, ended up giving him a hand-job wearing nothing but a doctor's surgical glove...these were the pleasant thoughts that occupied Mark's mind while he sat on the couch, trying to tune out the horrible noises that were coming from the back yard. Had the fire spread from the back deck to the fence? To the neighbor's house? He didn't want to turn around to look out the widow. Did he hear sirens? Had someone called the fire department? No, this was all horrible paranoia. He felt like someone had been secretly mixing whiskey and maybe even Speed into his drinks all night, and he was right.

When the fire was over Carl seemed to sober up, he started talking about his love of dolphins and other "creatures of sea," he kept saying things like, "you know, scientists believe that whales may be smarter than people" and other things along those lines. He stopped sweating and he drank a glass of water. He looked knowingly into the glass and turning to a person he had just met he pointed at the glass and said, "You know, this is the 'Life Blood,' none of us could live without it." But no one seemed to understand what he meant. He took a brief nap on the floor. He was using his Doc Martin boots as a pillow. He started talking in his sleep and at first it was unintelligible, but by and by his words became more clear and we could hear him say "would you love me if I wore the rubber glove?" he said that a couple of times and again "would you love me if I wore the glove?" and then his dream turned angry, he almost shouted "you're a pervert, I don't want to wear the glove!" and the last thing was too much for Mark, he seemed very uncomfortable and jumping off the couch he quickly jabbed Carl in the ribs with his boot a number of times muttering under his breath "god-damn you" and told him to "get the fuck up!" and he grabbed Carl's boots and threw them out the front door onto the street. Carl woke up. His first words were something about "the Conservatives criminal lack of conservation" and then something about "the Newfoundland salmon fisheries" but he still refused to leave. Carl looked around and not seeing anybody else asked in a very normal way "is everyone else gone?" and I said yes and he said "Oh, OK, hey Mark, lets get going!" And then he turned to me and said, "I just wanted to be the last one to leave!"

The End.

MDP