Cigarette Sandwich

           

            Wednesday was another day to get the place ready for the exterminator. The best I can say is that the last two or three months has shown an ebb in the bedbug infestation. It’s hard to be satisfied with that though. There is another spraying already booked in exactly two weeks, so I remain hopeful.

            The Orkin guy usually comes around 11:00, which is the same time on Wednesdays that I go to the foodbank. I went a little earlier than usual in hopes that I would be home when the technician arrived. The line-up was already fifteen people long when I got there. My place in line was a cigarette sandwich. The red faced lady was sitting and amicably saying things to people she recognized, though most people didn’t respond. She suggested that maybe there would be treats for us here for Halloween, then she gleefully repeated the word “Treats!” two or three times. She said that she told someone that the bus drivers need to control their emotions, especially around Christmastime, with the RIDE program, then she added, “I was only joking, but it might be true!”

            I rushed back home with number 16 and found the exterminator still in the building, but he’d already dome my place. The smell of poison is usually confined to the bedroom and living room, but this time it was barely breathable even in the hallway outside my apartment.

            I took a large load of empties, discarded by my two neighbours, to the Beer Store and scored a little over six dollars. Then I needed to take my bedding to the Laundromat, but I wanted to stay there, so I wanted to take some reading along. My copy of Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian” is an e-book, so I needed to copy it to my flash drive so I could read it on my laptop, but I didn’t want to breathe the fumes in my living room. So I held my breath, came in and stuck my usb stick into my computer and then went back outside to take a breath. Then I took another breath and came in to open up the file, then went back out to take another breath. After several trips like that I had what I needed and carried two bags of laundry on my bike to the Laundromat. It was being managed by a Tibetan couple. The woman was sewing a quilt and listening to a Tibetan video of someone talking on her smartphone. I got through half of the Sherman Alexie book before my laundry was done.

            So the teenage indigenous American, Arnold Spirit Jr. has done what no other Indian on the reservation has ever done: he’s transferred to a white school. He gets psychologically bullied almost from the start. He tells us that fistfighting is part of the culture on the reservation and even if one loses almost every time, one has to fight. So when the toughest kid in the white school tells him a very rude joke about Indians, Arnold shrugs and throws the first punch, expecting to be beaten to death afterwards, but nothing happens. The kid is shocked and treats him with respect afterwards. It turned out that white kids didn’t get into fistfights.

            I took my laundry home and headed back to the foodbank. I had brought along E. B. White’s “Charlotte’s Web” to read while I was waiting. It was kind of embarrassing though because the first few pages brought tears to my eyes when the little girl saved the baby pig and started bonding with it. When they called my number, I was glad that they had packages of sliced ham. It was either that or flavoured yogourt with artificial sweetener. There was a new bread person. I reached for a package of multigrain buns but she told me that was for families. Then she gave me a loaf of bread, which was pretty much the same amount of bread as the buns.

            When I got home I sat out on the deck for a while because of the poison in the air. After an hour or so I moved into the hallway. Even five hours after the spraying, the smell was too strong. I went inside quickly to open the windows and then went back to the hall. After a while I was able to sit and read by the window in the kitchen but couldn’t go into the living room. I finished reading Charlotte’s Web. It was interesting how the little girl could understand what the animals were saying and the animals understood what humans were saying but the girl didn’t communicate with the animals.

            It was early evening by the time I could go into the living room.

            I watched Buster Keaton’s “The Love Nest”. Keaton writes a letter to his ex-fiancée that reads, “Since you’ve broken off our engagement, I’ve decided not to marry you.” Then he used his tears to wet the glue on the envelope and sailed away to a bunch of seafaring slapstick.