“Damn his carnivorous soul to hell!” Kim Fischer had yelled from atop his carport towards the end, brandishing his fists like an Old Testament patriarch or modern-day mullah. It’s perhaps not fair to speak of Kim, who with his unisex name and dubious tenor no doubt had more to contend with than the rest of us. His resilience was something to marvel at, though. We like to think he’s running a raw-food retreat somewhere in the West Kootenays, or way out east, the Gatineaus maybe, remarried to a woman who appreciates his way with a paring knife, who understands that taking a pumice stone to the rough skin of your heels does not necessarily make you any less of a man.
But this isn’t about Kim. You could say this is about evolution. You could say we’ve developed a deep personal appreciation for Darwin, the man and the theorist-his dyspeptic stomach, his human frailties, his ability to cling to contradictory desires. We’ve weighed anchor aboard the Beagle, if only in our dreams, charted our own Galapagos of the soul and found it wanting.
He moved in on the Canada Day long weekend. As the children circled the cul-de-sac on their Razors and Big Wheels, like planes stacked in a holding pattern, he arrived with a U-Haul hitched to the Camaro and started unloading. No moving company, just him. He wore what’s commonly referred to as a muscle shirt but what some would call a wife beater. Stefan Brandeis noted that he hadn’t seen a grown man in cut-offs that tight since Expo ’86. (We later had a spirited debate about whether his was in fact a conventional mullet or ersatz hockey hair.) The first thing wheeled out of the U-Haul was a hulking, jerry-built barbecue. He seemed friendly enough. He flashed what Trevor Masahara called “a big, shit-eating grin” at those of us who’d gone over to welcome him with a pitcher of iced Matcha tea spiked with Kentucky Gentleman.