3,000 Miles

Jason Schneider

Description

Nirvana s Kurt Cobain could not have envisioned what his death would mean to Generation X or that he would influence one young man from small-town Quebec to take his own life . . . 3,000 Miles is the story of Andre, a man entering his twenties with very little going for him. The only stabilizing influence in his life is music, but the news of Kurt Cobain s suicide finally pushes him over the edge. He leaves town and joins his friends Richard and Stephane in Quebec City to sell drugs. Eventually, the reserves of his self-centred nihilism run dry, and

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 09 mai 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554902576
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

3, 00 Miles
3, 00 Miles
Jason Schneider
Copyright Jason Schneider, 2005
Published by ECW PRESS 2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M 4 E 1 E 2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process-electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise-without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW PRESS .
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Schneider, Jason, 1971-3,000 miles / Jason Schneider.
ISBN 1 -55022-686- X
I . Title. II . Title: Three thousand miles.
PS 8637. C 44 T 47 2005 C 813 .6 C 2004-907033-9
Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book Cover and Text Design: Darren Holmes Author Image: Shannon Lyon Typesetting: Mary Bowness Printing: AGMV
This book is set in Goudy
The publication of 3,000 Miles has been generously supported by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.
DISTRIBUTION
CANADA: Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Ave., Georgetown, ON L 7 G 5 S 4
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
For Candy
I will not forget that this kid killed himself for something torn T-shirts represented in the battle fires of his ripped emotions, and that does not make your T-shirts profound, on the contrary, it makes you a bunch of assholes if you espouse what he latched onto in support of his long death agony . . .
-Lester Bangs, Peter Laughner, 1977
1 Marcel La Forest: September 6, 1994.
Like everyone else, I m leaving town after another Labour Day weekend. It used to be that I couldn t wait for all the idiot tourists to get out of here and stop pretending that they re communing with fucking Nature. Whatever. I don t even know why I m wasting my energy thinking about that shit now. I don t have to say I m from here anymore. Pretty soon, I ll be bitching about big city people. Even though I ll probably become one of them.
Don t get me wrong, there are many things to love about La Forest. One thing I ll definitely miss is the woods. City kids get the street, we get a bunch of trees. It s all still survival of the fittest. That must be why I hate the summer crowd so much. This is our turf, we earned the right to live here. Not like you shitheads who get in your parents cars, bribe someone to buy a couple cases of beer and then floor it for three hours without caring about anyone else on the road. Your only reason for being here is to see who can drink the most and shoot the most stuff.
I ve seen it every year and still can t figure out why it s such a big deal. But fuck it, like I said, I shouldn t be wasting my time thinking about it. Today I m leaving my parents house on Ste. Marie Street. They re not taking it very well, but they know, after all that s happened, I have to go. It won t be long before they re back to their routine-drinking and playing bridge with the Delormes. Anyway, they ve got my little brother to worry about. He ll be following in my footsteps soon, I m sure.
I don t go for most of that Indian spiritual shit, but I believe I m at the point in my life where I have to take a journey. Otherwise, there s not much point in going on. I sound like such a fucking jerk saying that, after what they did. I never approved of it, but in the last few weeks, at least I ve come to accept it. Everyone s looking for some kind of way out, but most of the time when we find it, we re too scared to open the door. Now, when I think of those guys, I remember the nights in the woods when we d take our girlfriends there and lay on the banks of the creek, just listening to it trickle by. I never appreciated that creek until I heard a song with a line about the sound of rushing water in the dark that really got to me. I think the best I ve ever felt was when Monique and I were there one year at the beginning of May, before the mosquitoes got too bad, feeling her warmth in the middle of the night while the water drowned out our nervous laughter.
There were never enough of those nights, though. Labour Day would always come way too soon, which meant just one more bush party, and maybe a bigger bonfire to mark the occasion. Our parents even wanted to get in on it. Then, almost overnight, the trees would be a different colour and we d begin numbing ourselves for the long winter ahead. The process would take hold when we went back to school, reverting to our natural roles: the headbangers, the stoners, the slackers, the bullies, the nerds, those-most-likely-to-succeed. There weren t many in the last group, and there was a little bit of the rest in all of us.
No one from our town ever really accomplished much, because everyone always had to work so fucking hard for next-to-nothing. The town started as little more than a logging camp, back in the days when guys worked in the bush eight months of the year and the rivers carried logs downstream to the big mills that made furniture, roof beams and hockey sticks. Someone finally decided to build a mill right here so families didn t have to be separated and, voila , La Forest was born.
Everybody worked at the mill when my father was my age. He hasn t worked in five years but he still goes down there to chat with the guys during their lunch break. All the older folks talk about the mill constantly, but I don t think it s ever seriously come up in a conversation I ve ever had with someone my age. That s because when we were born, the mill didn t need people anymore. It s not that I m bitter, I couldn t imagine myself working there anyway, but after the mill stopped hiring I think everyone knew things were going to be very different.
The mill still can t be ignored, though. First, there s the constant noise. And it mostly makes paper now, so there s a lot of chemicals, something that made people uneasy when I was a kid. Some old-timers started getting cancer, and there was a lot of talk about organizing a lawsuit, but nothing came of it. They were all too spineless to bite the hand that fed them, and that broke everyone s spirit.
The worst part is still the smell. We re all used to it, except in the summer when the plant shuts down for two weeks. We wake up one morning and realize what fresh air is. That s the best time of the year, when we can finally get away from our families and enjoy life a little. But the smell always comes back. It creeps up on us while we sleep, waiting to ambush us when we open our windows in the morning. The night shift starts to pump it out all over again, twenty-four hours a day, until the mill shuts down again at Christmas. When my relatives come up from Montreal, their first reaction is always, Oh God, that smell! I don t know how you can live here.
We just do. My father came home with chemicals all over his coveralls, while cousins and neighbours died of cancer.
None of it mattered. This was our home.
I guess another thing I ll miss is Sergio s, makers of the best pizza I ve ever had. There isn t much fast food here, so Sergio s is the most popular hangout, and he deserves it. One time, I was eating there with some friends when a half-dozen motorcycles pulled up. The place was packed, and everyone got really nervous because we d all heard of the gang wars that go on in the city. But the riders turned out to be three men and three women, and they immediately searched out Sergio. He treated them like long-lost family. I understood one of them say, in English, We came all the way from Ontario for one of your pizzas.
Andre was with me, but he didn t know much English so he didn t laugh. He seemed genuinely uninterested in the scene as it played out.
What the fuck s with you? he asked.
I translated, but he still didn t laugh. As we each took another bite, I heard him mutter Fuckin animals under his breath. I stared at him until he noticed, then quickly turned my attention back to the bikers. I realized I d never had an opinion about outsiders until that moment. The summer mostly brought families on camping trips, while the other seasons brought hordes of hunters and fishermen. We were always told not to stray too far into the woods after that fall when Robbie Delorme was accidentally shot by these guys from New Brunswick. They thought he was a quail or something. His family did all right in the end, the hunters paid them off in exchange for not pressing charges. Actually, I think a lot of people got jealous about it. Every now and then I d hear my friends parents say, You behave or I ll send you out in the bush with antlers on your head. The first thing Frank Delorme did was quit his job at the mill and cash in his pension. Then he bought a new car, a new stereo, a satellite dish and every other cool thing you can imagine. He got Robbie some stuff, too, after he recovered.
It was normal for Andre to not be impressed by unusual things, like having bikers invade our favourite hangout. We d been friends forever, and not once did I remember him ever being surprised. He wasn t an overly negative guy, he just never seemed interested in anything outside our little world. Even when it came to girls, I never saw him go out of his way to make a play. Then one morning, I came to school and Sylvie was on his arm like she d been born there.
Andre never talked about his family either. His father worked at the mill but wasn t really part of the regular crowd that hung out at the Lion Rouge on weekends or went fishing in the summer. The family lived in one of the small, wooden houses a few blocks from the main street on Cartier Ave. and kept to themselves. From the few times I d gone over there, I remembered only a rusty Chevy Malibu on blocks in the front yard and a collection of old snow-mobiles littering the back. I assumed Andre s dad was a mechanic, but when nothing ever seemed to move at their house, my perception changed. I couldn t imagine how they survived.
Andre did have an older