This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
MACK MCCOLL OWNS ALL RIGHTS
To Rest and Reincarnate
AUTHOR
A Novel (work in progress) by Mack McColl
Chapter One
Diablo Dybbuk lives in a shroud of mystery, watching behind camouflage as the world unfolds, feeling wild and free to make criminal moves and engage himself in illegal, immoral and intentionally odious behavior. Evil is everywhere in the world and Diablo is part of it. He heard something about 10 Commandments, for instance. Whatever those are, he's for breaking them. He is in pursuit of perversity and tireless about it. He doesn't get bored, dismayed, or confused. He lives a life of criminal acts (mostly trivial), and dedicates his self to one intense compulsion, a form of pulsating angst. He cannot resist talking about her. She is irresistible to his dark, hollow, empty (probably defective) heart.
To keep moving forward, an inclination of modern times, also, something sharks do, Diablo goes from drug store to drug store, picking up prescriptions and selling the addictive stuff to keep himself slip-sliding on a patch of winter ice, spring ice, or early autumn ice. He survives pill-to-pill by travelling month-to-month, city-to-city, province-to-province, picking up prescription drugs, welfare cheques, and shady women along the way. This he learned from Ronny the world traveller. He doesn't addict people to narcotics intentionally. But he would if he had to. The drugs do the talking. He's not opposed to making people happy. He's not in favour of it either.
Diablo takes shelter in Moosimin, Saskatchewan, on occasion. It's where he was born. It is a windswept town on the dry prairie,1,500 dusty heads beside the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border, a bus depot, and a room at Fake Uncle Ronnie's little shack, which is considered a permanent address by the social services department of the flat province. Munchhausen mom was long gone. He didn't know anything about her. Never knew. She managed to remain invisible to Diablo his entire life. If she was sitting in front of him, he would not know it.
One of Munchhausen mom's ex's showed a form of tolerance to Diablo. Ronnie the world traveller was a rare and demented person. Ronnie was a malignant life form in his way, prone to fitting people into his surroundings as needed. Ronnie showed Diablo how to drive a car. Ronnie showed Diablo how to get a narcotics prescription. Ronnie had the largest collection of porn mags Diablo (or possibly anybody) had ever seen. One entire wall of a shed behind the shack was stacked to the ceiling with porn mags. This is interesting. This is thousands upon thousands of porn mags, Penthouse, Playboy, you name it, all the rest, various presentations of smut going back to the beginnings of smut, Diablo surmised.
Ronnie spent hours out back in the shed behind his shack engrossed in his magazines. He would reach in and pull something out randomly. "You know how people say, 'I buy them for the articles,'" he told Diablo, one afternoon, finally, through a haze of cigarette and weed smoke, "'Not me. I don't say it. Never said it in my life." Ronnie confessed he didn't buy the magazines for the articles because Ronnie doesn't read, because Ronnie had dyslexia so severe he could not sign his name. He dropped out in grade 8 at the insistence of teachers and administrators. They told him they were tired of preventing his effort to burn down the school. "It's amazing how useful it is in the medical and financial system when you can't sign your name and you have a doctor's note to say you need to leave an X for a signature," and not a very good X. Like, That's an X? Ronnie looked at pictures and consented to a lot of fine print nobody was prepared to read out loud at prescription counters.
An obsession with pornography might be a reasonable response by a definitive half-wit to the incidence of systemic illiteracy. Another thing about Ronnie is that he doesn't function on alcohol in any way shape or form, thus a life-time ban from driving (legally and rigorously enforced, he bragged). Instead he's a middle-aged handicapped moron with a gigantic morphine monkey on his back. On the other hand, Ronnie could tell you to the penny how many rubber cheques he bounced with a doctor's permission. And how many, “rooves,” he had to fall off to hit the jackpot. Ronnie knew other things like how many informants it takes to run a rural RCMP detachment. Also, where to find those informants.
When Diablo was cut loose from foster care, he gravitated down Highway 16 from Saskatoon to Moosomin to visit the last house he occupied with Munchhausen mom. She and Ronnie had been living in the small house on a dusty corner lot when Diablo left, and Ronnie lived there still, but Munchhausen mom was gone. "Your mother? I don't know, and I thank god every day I don't. She was the most bitter, vengeful, hateful monster I ever met. . .”
Diablo put up a hand, “. . . and she hated your guts,” but Ronnie ignored him, and continued, “Said it a lot. Just like everybody else says it, a lot.”
“You're preaching to the lead singer of the choir, Fake Uncle Ronnie.”
“Don't call me that. I am not your fake uncle. They put her in a straight-jacket with a hood over her head and I never saw her snarling face again."
"Yeah well neither did I."
“You should count yourself lucky, boy” he said, “I am so very fucking sorry I ever met her,” he continued, “She is the most evil cunt to ever darken my door. Any fucking door.”
So many people, always the same story, “She makes you look like a fucking saint.” Does he have to give her credit? And, no, she did not. Diablo is Diablo, a perfectly self-made man sort of.
Diablo harboured no delusions. First of all, he knew everybody hated him. He is ready to live with it and agree, openly. It is his cross to bear. Everybody has a mother. His happened to be the same one as the Devil's. Diablo heard her say she was an 'old soul' to more than a few buckaroos on various benders over the years while he navigated a childhood smear of hospitalizations and needless, uncalled for, and often life-threatening surgeries. (Aren't all surgeries life-threatening?)
He had seen her in action up close for 14 years by and large being stuck there to witness a multitude of personality deviations (also known as a 'Legion,' he was told by one quasi-sympathetic Jesuit on a temporary stop-over at a Rectory, where Diablo was hung up momentarily for some inexplicable reason related to waiting for foster care). It's possible she had been around a few thousand years. Even so, he never learned a single thing about her. She might have been Hungarian. No evidence pointed to anything but crazy, and possibly flexible. Fake Uncle Ronnie did say they locked her into the jumpsuit real tight.
Fake Uncle Ronnie let him occupy the shack in Moosomin for a while. "I do not dislike you," Ronnie said, holding a strangely neutral position in relation to virtually everybody else. Diablo was informed about the world in which Ronnie once travelled. Ronnie bragged about being physically fit through most of his life, 5 foot 9 inches tall (one inch taller than Diablo), holding steady at 165 lbs. (20 lbs heavier than Diablo), dirty blond hair sometimes long with a permanent hairline. (Diablo's hair was a rusty frock of tightly matted curls low on his forehead to obscure his sharper features.)
Ronnie scored weed for Paul McCartney one time in Amsterdam, he said. There would be no way to disprove this. It's an odd thing to lie about. This was the single moment in his history that made Ronnie seem like a world traveller.
Ronnie was a roofer on the prairie until he fell off one of the. . . , “ -- rooves,” (perhaps archaic, and not the only thing archaic about Ronnie). He became a permanent ward of the medical system in the flat province, even though he continued, “. . .rooving,” around Southern Saskatchewan. The sum total of Ronnie's wit could be found in one sentence, “Feb-uary is Lib-ary month.”
Diablo saw Ronnie as a cartoon, and a sloth, not simply lazy, but too lazy to bother to think, which was what made him a foil for Diablo's seriously deranged, outrageously psychopathic, and eternally opportunistic Munchhausen mom.
Ronnie dropped consonants. Munchhausen mom whistled through broken teeth. She said Ronnie could take a joke because Ronnie is a joke, she said. “Ask him to say 'battery.'” Apparently he drops vowels too. A three-year relationship was the record for Munchhausen mom. Diablo reassured himself that Ronnie was not his father. Their history wasn't long enough. She didn't need men. She used drugs and alcohol and sex to conjure tornadoes of chaos. She didn't take drugs and alcohol and have sex. She needed others to take drugs and alcohol and have sex so she could treat them sadistically and murder them without suspicion.
Diablo had seen her knock off a couple of 'boyfriends,' and this had equipped him with a level of prudence regarding personal use of drugs and alcohol. The unspoken truth about Munchhausen mom's disappearance was a life sentence she now served for multiple murders never proved. Ronnie suggested they put her in a nut ward with a bit between her teeth. “It was her, or me. She lost.” Ronnie credits survival to his freakish high tolerance for drugs and especially poison.
Eventually Diablo was introduced to one of Ronnie's former partners (in crime), a businessman in Regina who owns a used car lot in the northeast corner of the city. Foster is a typical used car salesman, ready, willing, and able to fleece you to your face exactly the way you expect. The more he smiles, the more wool you're going to lose, and you stand there smiling back while he does it. “You got room for four bodies in that trunk,” is a plaque on the wall in his office.
Diablo is presently riding in one of Foster's used cars smoking dope on the way to Regina where he stays at the historic LaSalle Hotel and blind pig. The historic property downtown on Hamilton Street is a habit of reasonable comfort (sagging bed springs, no terrible odours) for a bargain basement price. Diablo often repeats the phrase 'Historic Property' around the owner because it drives Roger Dubois crazy. The provincial historic property rules involved with preserving buildings in Regina put Roger the owner on the fast track to insolvency, he complains, profusely, with no justification, since Roger bought the building under those rules, and Diablo finds this amusing.
Diablo works hard to keep the disgruntled owner of the historic property slammed on morphine. One of the owner's daughters' changes Diablo's sheets once a week. After a while he is going to ask her to do his laundry. And he would give her a tip. Don't buy historic property.
Diablo's main vocation and mode of survival is to obtain prescription drugs and sell bennies and narcotics on the street. Regina is a small city of 167,000 souls, including those possessed, sold, and under attack by intensive demonic forces at play in this particular and peculiar community. This was the way Diablo saw things. He requires a larger area of operation and Ronnie suggested going inter-provincial. "You look sick enough to have a thousand doctors chase you with prescription pads. Too bad your brain isn't as big as your nose. You need to think bigger. You need to know what they want." What they want are patients who take drugs. Diablo happens to look like somebody who needs a lot of drugs and is avidly interested in taking them. Was his nose that big? Sort of impish, upturned at the end. Yah it was kind of big. At least Diablo can read a book at the end of it.
Selling prescription drugs keeps him off the radar of street drug dealers and their issues selling cocaine and marijuana, and other drugs like heroin and LSD, and guns and collectives and insatiable addictions and those complications. Ronnie told him prescription drugs keeps you off the cops' radar, too, because cops don't regard pills as illicit generally, within reason. (Filling the backseat of a stolen 1974 AMC Gremlin with pills from a drugstore break and enter, well, Ronnie did time for that one.) Doctors don't worry about pills being addictive. Ronnie has a few cop customers for his own stash of 482 morphine sulphate pills a month with a street value of $20 per pill. Ronnie ends up downing the profits.
Ronnie is a strung-out morphine addict. Diablo shakes his head at the routine around defecation. Ronnie is free to roam the ether and atmosphere for somewhere between four days and one week, at which time he has to come down and face the toilet like a man. This is more amazing when you consider Ronnie's appetite. He's a regular at a local fish and chips shoppe's Tuesday night all-you-can-eat. Granted he doesn't eat the batter, but 10 pieces of cod slide down his gullet like a seal or a sea lion or a seagull, or all three. Presumably a day of shitting ensues after the weekly feast of fish. Diablo isn't a participant in long term morphine use.
Another piece of cop wisdom from Fake Uncle Ronnie: a driver in the right-hand lane of traffic is ignored at all times of day and night. Ronnie lost his driver's license permanently and would never see it again, and this was for a specific reason. Ronnie was as bad at driving as he is at reading, and who knows, maybe for the same reason. But he was correct about driving in the right hand lane of traffic. Cops drive by like you aren't even there. You could have a hostage in the backseat tied up and gagged, flailing at the window, cops wouldn't bother to look.
The truth of the matter was Ronnie used Diablo as a chauffeur for several months until Diablo shuffled away to greener pastures with a fresh driver's license. You cannot say greener pastures out loud in Saskatchewan without raising laughs the size of dirt clouds. As if there could be any greener pastures than Saskatchewan. Ronnie allows him to continue collecting welfare cheques at the Moosimin address. It's not like a social worker wanders out to the Manitoba border to check on the whereabouts of the much younger son of the mother of Satan.
In his daily endeavours, Diablo acquires Quaaludes, 100mg morphine, Valium, and speed, anywhere from Saskatoon to Toronto, and lately Talwin and Ritalin in Winnipeg. Endless comings and goings at odd hours in highway buses crossing the endless expanse of Canada leaves him feeling delightfully disoriented. He lives with a master plan, of course, which comes with a strategic mind developed out of an urgent need for survival, and the chase of an elusive object, and Diablo reads.
There was a reason for this. He learned early in his life that Munchhausen mom was intimidated by reading, so he devoured everything he could get his hands on. He loved doing it in front of her because she would often completely lose her shit and leave the house, and he might not see her for days. He loves reading up on how to cheat. He cheats four provincial governments and countless social workers out of cheques. He cheats countless doctors out of drugs. He is extraordinarily fit for faking disability, and switching identities.
Gifts from Munchhausen mom were a legacy of permanently disabling conditions, double-joints, knobby knees, big ears, a long nose, FASD and drug addiction, nicotine habit, (mostly heroin)-related congenital damage, and the disorders keep on giving, in cash, to spend on hookers, travel, and a carefree existence. He has several crash pads across the country. He is overdue to visit his Toronto 'address,' which is a bivouac with Tony, located a few blocks from The Brass Rail on Yonge Street, Diablo's all-time favourite peeler bar.
There are no strip clubs in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. There are strip clubs in Alberta, but Diablo isn't connected in the province of Alberta. There are strip clubs in Montreal. He watched a superbly stacked blonde on St. Catherine's Street dance it up to Funky Town. Diablo's interest in Montreal is strictly to pick up two-year-old Cadillacs and Oldsmobile 98s and deliver them to Regina. Diablo doesn't run a welfare scam in Quebec. Too much hassle about speaking French and explaining where you came from. “I came from my mother and it wasn't pretty. You don't want to hear about it. Il n'ete votre probleme, unless you conjure it.”
HELLO My Name, Is: Tiny (name-tag on his chest) is a Jamaican who lives in Toronto in a dirty yellow bathrobe and a belt with a large hunting knife stuck in it, and it was an unsightly bathrobe but at least it wasn't pink. Meeting Tony was 'Luck of the Draw' when Diablo fell off a Greyhound Bus five days (and 50, 10mg Valium pills) after leaving Regina, he thinks, with a night spent in Winnipeg and a night in Thunder Bay, (he thinks, maybe yes maybe no, on Thunder Bay). During the period in reflection, he cannot say for certain the month, and, don't forget, memories fade or completely disappear on occasions when you are involved with drugs, doing them, but there was a sign in front of a monstrous looking red brick building in St. James district, across Church Street, not far from downtown Toronto's acclaimed Yonge Street, longest street in Canada.
“Room For Rent,” was scrawled (likely, presumably, almost certainly) in blood on a cut-out piece of brown cardboard, nailed to an ancient faux column of no particular design, painted in whitewash. The tacky sign nailed to the non-weight-bearing fake porch-colon was the 'Draw.' The sign was there to attract Diablo, unmistakably.
Diablo rang the doorbell marked 'manager.' It was functional. The manager had been prompt, "Just tell 'em the manager sent you." He pointed to his name-tag. Diablo leaned in, and squinted, T - I - N - Y? "Tiny, huh? Is that ironic?" About 6 foot 5 inches of solid Jamaican muscle rippled with laughter, "That is an 'O'," he said, glassy dark brown eyes shining crazy and bloodshot. Tony enjoyed the attention of the large hunting knife planted in his waist belt. The terry cloth robe was tied, by and large, but, thankfully, Tony wore boxers to go with his stocking feet and pearly white teeth.
Diablo received a tour within seconds, entering the south hall, The hideous brick building was three storeys high, and, turns out, located on the way to the welfare office. So. Convenient. The halls were dim, the walls were thin. Small, square, box-like rooms lined both sides of the south hall, and both sides of the north hall, on three floors. The hideous building was a warehouse of people, plywood walls separating dozens of raving lunatics, in the manner of separating but containing dangerous and certifiable psychopaths, sociopaths, deviants, and degenerates in a stark, nowhere running maze. It stunk of despair and vermin. It's a place you might expect to find Munchhausen mom running a killing floor, except fake uncle Ronnie was right. She would never see the light of day again.
Tony the manager lived on the 3rd floor, in the back of the building, It was clear immediately upon stepping in the place, Tony was the manager of a human zoo on three dingy levels, and 'the Luck.' Interminable dankness was warmed by an old boiler clanging and clunking from action in the basement to ooze enough heat to keep it occupied under a permanent banishment of sentiment like welcome or contentment. Diablo took paperwork, and left by the north hall. No elevator was available except for an off-limits freight elevator at the rear, used by the owner exclusively, an old Toronto dowager, according to Tony. “To qualify for an emergency welfare supplement from the Province of Ontario, go down the block and across the street.” His instructions had been concrete. It was perfection, wouldn't you say?
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