As if two jobs and as much photography as I can possibly squeeze in wasn't enough, I thoroughly enjoy writing short stories. Creative writing. Though my style may not be to the liking of some people, as it's blunt and often from the dark side of humanity. But I don't write for other people. I write for my own pleasure and to maintain good mental health. Here is a sample for you.
They were raving about it. All over town. The newest hip restaurant in Yaletown had been open for a mere two months and already they were famous in all of Southern BC and well into the interior.
Today’s “Repas surprise”, as it
happened every Sunday, was a packed house and sold out long in advance. The
prep had consisted of a trip to Stanley Park after dark, where they had
harvested a dozen raccoons. Free meat is good for the profit and a little
creativity of the culinary kind had cooked up quite a delicious meal, according
to the snobby patrons who’s only concern was to be seen at all the hippest
events, at all the trendiest places.
As far as the chef was concerned, there were no bylaws prohibiting the harvesting of animals mostly considered to a nuisance. But you had to be careful, though. Raccoons can be vicious little beasts and they got long, fucking claws that can slash you open in an instant. Best way to get them is to clubber them like a baby seal. Shooting them, in a public park, is too risky and too noisy. Not a good PR stunt. Basically, you would have to smash their fucking brains out in one, hard blow, without hitting the body, which would “pre-tenderize” the meat and render it useless. One of the guys who went harvesting with the chef was playing semi-pro baseball with the local AAA league team and he swore his allegiance to the aluminum bats because they were easier to clean the blood off, afterwards, than the wooden sluggers.
Often the chef and a few friends would go fishing. For seagulls, off Ambleside Park. His Sous Chef had a 16 foot Bayliner, so they would spend a great day at sea, accompanied by plenty of beer, booze, hooks and fishing line. And weed, of course. No fishing trip without weed.
Hook on the line, bait the hook and then throw the baited hook up towards the gull. See him dive-bomb for the bait and the split second his beak closed around the hook, you yanked the line. Preferably before he swallowed it, or it could get quite messy to retrieve your hook. Once the gull was in the boat you quickly grabbed it and cut the head off the still live gull and voila, Jonathan Livingston was ready. On a good day, he’d go home with a hockey bag full of little Jonathans.
He’d serve
the gulls grilled, in a “jus verte”made from the grass he got last time he
mowed his lawn. Fuck! People are suckers just dying to get ripped off and they
don’t care as long as they think they are hip. It would all come with a Waldorf
with crispy, friend cockroaches for that extra crunch and enhanced flavours and
don’t forget the protein boost you would get from those little mudda’s. We all
know that insects and beetles are the wave of the future.
Once he got
his two black garbage bags of raccoons peddled back to the restaurant without
anyone seeing him, there was the little matter of skinning them, gutting them
and cutting them up, all which would have to be done while the restaurant was
still closed, for obvious reasons.
All guts and useful parts like eyeballs, testicles, kidneys, heart, liver – and even the asshole, from any animal, were collected for his quite popular homemade sausage, which he made with just a dash of ghost peppers, just to hide any unfortunate flavour profiles. Anything the park provided was a good meal, as far as he was concerned. Crows became “Infantino Cremeux”. Hedgehogs became “Spikes’ Brulee” and rats became “Ratatare’, which he eventually changed to “Cru Phuong” because Ratatare sounded a little too close to what it really was: Rat Tatar. Cru Phuong sounded more exotic. More…colonial, French Vietnames ala Indochine.
At 13:00 the
place was cleaned up and anybody who looked in would have no clue what had just
transpired. They downed a few more beers, smoked a joint and snorted some
cocaine before they went home to get some sleep before coming back for dinner
service.
When the chef came back, he noticed a reservation for eight, by a group that just identified themselves at PETA. “Oh, that’s right fucking up my alley” he said to himself. “May you all choke to death on your own vomit”.
Staff starts
trickling in as he’s doing his office duties. A typical zest pool of infidels:
Robbie-Man, the rasta. The outlaw biker with his tats. The bimbo, playing
outright on her sexuality to get the big tips…and it’s tips with a “P”. The Jap
student on a work visa. The academic jock who is clearly out of his element.
They come from everywhere, just like a friggin’ U.N: Congo, the Caribbean and
California. Hokkaido, Andalucia and Winnipeg. Tijuana, Terrace and Tumbler Ridge.
All in Vancouver for the illusive fame and glory.
Halfway
through dinner service, the “save the cockroached” and “release the rats”
fanatic extremists want to see the chef.
“What are we
eating, chef? It’s just…totally awesome. Like nothing we’ve ever had before”.
That’s for a
fucking good reason, he thinks to himself
“Croc
Adelaide in jus episee” he informs them.
“Croc
Adelaide?”
“Ya,
Australian crocodile. Not a North-American animal and I don’t know how the
fucker was killed or even treated before he had his head cut off”, he replied.
They looked at him in horror. Jaws dropped, eyes opened up big like blinds being pulled up in a window. Then eyes narrowed again, into a tiny little slit that spewed hatred and revenge. Two of the girls even drew the sign of the cross in front of their chest, while looking towards the heavens above, lips moving like they were mumbling something. It was probably not a “thank you, chef”, that came over their lips, one would assume. Or maybe a prayer to the lord.
“Well, being the inherently destructive species that we apparently are, the Homo Sapiens, I don’t give a shit about these nut cases who want to protect every animal including those rats who killed millions of people through the spread of the black and bubonic plague. We are just another animal, the human being, and for millions of years, since evolution first began, animals have been eating each other in order to survive. Every scientist, every person with a brain, knows that. We either kill and eat other animals, or other animals kill and eat us. I just offer a little extended diversity in your choice of animals from which you harvest your nutrition and everything else that keeps you alive and no pathetic protect-the-rats freak is going to change that”, he thought to himself as he was back home, sitting in his arm chair with a cold beer in hand.
But what about next Sundays’ dinner? I mean Canada geese are easy and you got plenty of free meat. Not to mention the fact that a lot of people hate those monster shitters. Everywhere they’ve been you are walking knee deep in a pile of goose shit. They’re like fucking flying rats who leave a mountain of shit – literally – everywhere they go. It’s just a little…too plain for me, the goose thing. But it’s easy, which counts for a lot with me. You find them everywhere and they are easy to approach. It’s one quick surprise move and you got your right hand around their neck. Then you just hold tight and with your left hand you grab the beak and give it a quick 360 degree turn, like the big arm on a clock, until you hear the neck snap and the body goes limp. Then you shove him in the bag. You can probably fit six or eight in a hockey bag and nobody would suspect anything. You are just on your way home from practice, right? Ya, right. Killing practice. That’s what I told you, man. You can’t trust those fucking hockey players. Especially not those on the World Juniors team. Geese are easy and plentiful. But a little too plain and ordinary for me. The asshole snobs are paying for something “out of the ordinary”, so how about…Hmm? Seal? Sea lions? Harbour seals or stellar sea lions? According to those in the know, those are plentiful, too. Especially the harbor seals whose numbers are rising to the point where the industry brains are saying that we are heading for a future problem. Well, I can alleviate that problem, to some extent. I’ll take half a dozen of those. Or if we go for the stellar sea lion, I only need one or two. Now that’s a fat motherfucker, the stellar. It’s basically half an elephant who can’t walk well.
I know there
are plenty of them down at Tsawwassen. I’ve seen them just flopping around
there on the pier, when I was taking the ferry to the Gulf Islands. Fat and
lazy fuckers out on the rock, pretty much just begging me to come and take
them. “Take me, take me”, he begged, with big wet eyes, the harbor seal. But
you would have to harpoon them, tough. Like you did to the whales in the good
old days. Otherwise they’d just slip off the rock and disappear on you. If you
harpooned a Stellar sea lion, you’d need a monster truck to tow him up on land,
though. I mean, if you get a big and adult male, you are looking at a full ton
of meat and fat and he can be as tall as two Mexicans on top of each other. Ok,
maybe Guatemalans. You’d have to butcher him and cut him up right there on the
beach and it wouldn’t look good if three ferries full of people are standing
there watching you working on their dinner at 9 o’clock in the morning. But if
you harpooned him and dragged him to an isolated beach, somewhere, it would be
very doable. You just bring a guy with a shotgun who can shoot any potential
drones that might be approaching. Nobody will know a thing.
We all know how those snotnosed, soft hearted people feel about slaughtering a seal. But if it doesn’t happen in public view, nobody would give a shit. Just look at the cattle industry and the chicken industry. Nobody gives a fuck simple because it’s out of the public view. And the inuit has been killing seals and whales and all kind of other weird shit for eons. So you just harpoon them and drag them to your isolated beach. Actually, the harbor seals, as we all know, are small enough that you can drag them away, yourself. That won’t happen with a male stellar sea lion, though.
Then there
are otters and beavers, of course. I mean the real beavers. Not the kind
of “beavers” you like to pelt in your 20’s and 30’s. The animal. The official
little fucking rodent of Canada.
Plenty of weird shit out there to eat, that the rich asshole snobs will be mega mula for, as long as they don’t know what the fuck it is they are stuffing themselves with.
The following day when he came into work, there was a lot of raucous going on before he even got the key in the door. Swinging it open he walked right into the biker who was busy fucking the bimbo right there on the crudité table, her eyes glassy like she was fresh off the bong, his cock buried deep inside her clean-shaven cunt which he kept pounding even as his boss walked in.
“Sorry,
boss, but she wanted it and deserved it” he later told him in the office as
they went over that evenings’ menu.
“I hope you
at least cleaned and disinfected the table”?
“Of course, boss.
All sanitized. Menu?”
“Duck au
glacage Algerien”
“And what’s
in the Algerian glace”?
“Earth
worms. The bucket in the back, just run them through the blender and add some
anise and nutmeg. You can piss a squirt of Bulleit in it if you like, but don’t
empty the fucking bottle yourself, on my account.
“Anthony
Bourdain would’a been proud of you, boss”.
“Rest his blessed soul”.
That winter, driving home drunk from Whistler, he ran down a bicyclist without light, in the middle of the night, just north of Lions Bay. Not a living soul on the road at that time of night, so the bicycle went over the cliff near the viewpoint and the body in the back of his van, like nothing had ever happened. Six hours later the freezer was full of all the best cuts and all evidence ground and rototilled. It wasn’t until next spring somebody, sitting at the outdoor patio, bit into a piece of a toenail, things started escalating.
They were
all there. All the various agencies, special interest groups, even the CBC and
his old friends from PETA. It got a little hot in the kitchen, metaphorically
speaking and maybe not quite the kind of attention you really wanted. So he
emptied his bank accounts and maxed out his credit cards and line of credit and
36 hours later he was sitting on the beach in Salvador do Bahia, safe from any
extradition agreements. One of the girls he frequented on the beach, mostly for
her “filo dente” bikini, introduced him to a friend of hers.
“Ya, we
could really use a nice restaurant, here in the favela”, he was told.
“Something a
little out of the ordinary. People are getting tired of bacalhau. They want
something…different”. And so a new chapter of his life began. Or maybe not so
new, after all?
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