Lamborghini with Meatballs

            On Wednesday I vacuumed my living room for the first time in several months and filled up the canister with my dirt harvest. I don’t know where it all comes from but it’s nice that most of it accumulates along the edges of the room rather than in the middle where I live.

I spent a lot of time working on my journal entry about the life and death of Tom Phillips. That included digging through my two large drawers full of mostly my own unfinished collages and other images on paper to find some of Tom’s artwork that he’d give me. I found a print of a painting and another of a woodcut but couldn’t find any of the poetry he’d written. I know that he’d given me some over the years. I have one fat folder in my tall filing cabinet that contains the writing of others, mostly left over from the poetry slams that I ran back in the 90s, but still couldn’t find any of Tom’s writing, so I gave up on that. I’m sure it’ll pop up sometime when I’m not looking for it.

One result from rifling through the drawers was that it put new dust on my living room floor, almost rendering all my previous vacuuming a waste of time.

In the late afternoon I took a bike ride. Once I was downtown and anywhere east of Yonge there were line-ups of cyclists at every light. I got ahead of each of them once the light turned green. This time I went as far as Coxwell. On the way back a super villain in spandex whizzed past me but I couldn’t overtake him without exposing my secret identity, thereby putting my family in danger.

I went down Yonge Street and almost all the way down was riding beside an obnoxiously loud yellow Lamborghini that looked like a steamroller had run over a Corvette. The two young guys riding in the rude machine would rev the engine at every light and it sounded like a mechanical lion coughing up a hairball. I was often ahead of them but they would pass me about halfway before each corner. They finally turned left on Victoria.

When I got home I went back out to the liquor store to get a can of Creemore to have with my dinner. I ate while watching an Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplay starring Jack Cassidy as a photographer named Arthur Mannix who doubles as an assassin. All of his killing work seems to come from one mega corporation that, instead of firing its unwanted employees, kills them off. Meanwhile, Arthur is courting a gorgeous young woman named Sylvia whose father, Ernest tells him that he will only let him marry his daughter once he has $50,000 in the bank. The person that pays Arthur for his work has just been told by his boss that the company is downsizing and so only the cream of employees are to keep their jobs. Because of this he gives Arthur a new job for double his usual payment. The target turns out to be an undertaker and Arthur sets up a studio across from his mortuary. As he is staking out his victim though he notices something strange about his behaviour. The undertaker finally calls Arthur and says he wants to talk about having some photos down for his business. He enters the studio while Arthur is in the darkroom. He pulls out a switchblade stiletto to kill Arthur but Arthur is ready for him with karate and overpowers him. It turns out that just as Arthur’s photography profession is a front, the other undertaker is also really an executioner for the company. They have been pitted against one another as part of the process of sorting out which employees are the best. The two hitmen have a very civil conversation even though Arthur has made it clear that he is about to kill the other. The undertaker pulls a knife from under his collar and throws it, but it misses and Arthur kills him. Arthur’s supervisor gives him another job, which is to kill his fiancé’s father, which he easily does. The story ends with a wedding and I guess they live happily ever after.

The story was written by Alfred Hayes, who wrote the poem “Joe Hill”, which became the lyrics for the song of the same name that became a folk music standard and was most famously sung by Joan Baez at Woodstock.