#vanlife
in berlin, he’d been a curiosity shop
employee, a background actor, a maker of old people’s
porn,
a documenter of unexploded ww2 munitions.
he’d also written a few short
stories and started an online fiction and poetry
zine with me. it was a bust. all of it. none
satisfied, nothing paid more than minimum wage
if it paid anything at all.
so, he moved back to canada and got a job
as a flight instructor. three weeks later, he washed
his hands of that too. “shadiest place
I’ve ever worked,” he told me.
but with the money he’d earned, he was able to buy
a van,
outfit it with a bed, a dresser, and a toilet
that was a 5-gallon paint bucket
with a blue foam ring duct taped
to the rim.
his plan was to go on the road
with the van and document the experience
on his youtube channel.
his first video, called #vanlife, was an instructional
about setting up the van
and his bucket.
it was mostly about his bucket.
after that, he took to the road, tooling
through british columbia and stumbling
upon a little village called lytton.
there,
he met an old man in a diner who asked if he’d
panned for gold
in any of the local waters. he hadn’t,
but the idea appealed to his romantic
cowboy nature, so he did some research and
after deleting his #vanlife post
bought
a frying pan at wal-mart and spent the next month
squatting on his ass in a frigid river.
it was a bust. just like curiosity shops,
and background acting,
and old people’s porn,
and documentaries on unexploded munitions
and fiction writing
and editing
and #vanlife had been one. he packed up,
left lytton,
but not before smoking one last cigarette
and flicking the butt out the van window
which normally wouldn’t have mattered.
but that summer there was a heatwave,
worst there in recorded history.
well, it might not have been his cigarette.
but something – a pine needle, a leaf – something
caught fire in that part of lytton that day
and now the diner
where he met the old man longer exists.
the old man might not even exist.
lytton hardly exists.
the whole village went up in a roaring fire.
but my co-editor
made it out of there with a half-pack of smokes,
and his frying pan,
and his crap bucket,
and no plan. but he didn’t need one. he knew
something would come up.
Horror Sleaze Trash 