February 2022 – The Gunsmoke Diaries

Dressed for Success

First Published: 22 March, 2005

You might recall, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece entitled “Wardrobe Malfunction” in which I catalogued examples of food leaping off my fork and onto any clean clothes I happen to be wearing. In the first paragraph I talked about a new-from-a-thrift-store linen shirt of which I happen to be particularly fond. Somewhat predictably, I spilled food on it when wearing it for the first time and as it turned out it had to be dry cleaned instead of laundered, this little incident ended up costing more than the shirt itself. As a result, I was particularly careful the next few times I wore it and can cheerfully report that I haven’t spilled food on it since.

Instead I lost it.

While riding the train to work one morning I managed to leave this and several other perfectly serviceable shirts in a plastic bag under the seat. My plan had been to drop them at the dry cleaners near my office but as they never showed up at the Lost and Found, I can only imagine some thieving b*****d is strutting around wearing my shirts! I hope he gets as big a shock as I did the first time he gets the linen one dry cleaned. Harrumph!

In addition to the pain of losing a very nice, almost new to me shirt, this simple act of carelessness more or less cleared out my stock of work shirts. I didn’t have too many to begin with and most of the ones remaining are dressy to the point where they only look good when I’m wearing a jacket and tie. Which is virtually never. So, to my horror, I realized I was going to have to devote a precious day off to descend into the seventh circle of hell. I was going to have to go….clothes shopping. Dah dah daaahhhh!!!!! (If you’d had your sound turned up, you would have heard dramatic music there.)

I’ve never been a fan of shopping in any form. Not from the days when me dear ol’ Ma used to drag me round the town of a Saturday morning. Even in the first few years after starting work when I had almost as much money as I knew what to do with, I was always more interested in using the stuff I bought than actually buying it. Now I’m married and broke, the act of shopping is just simply one more miserable task ranking up there with cleaning the gutters and drilling holes in my feet. It has to be done, but I’d much rather somebody else did it. Maybe not the drilling holes but you know what I mean. Part of the problem is that the stuff I want to buy; kayaks and motorbikes and 12-year old malt whisky and stuff, is way out of my price range. As a general rule, if I can afford it, I don’t want it.

And clothes shopping has to be the worst of all. I don’t have the disposable income to drape myself in custom made garments and as my physique is not one commonly seen within the pages of GQ I have challenges finding things off the peg which come close to fitting me. Not only that, but I’ve always been somewhat uncomfortable in clothes stores of any type. When I was a lad, no matter how down market these places might be, they were always staffed by frighteningly intimidating super-models and as talking to pretty girls caused my face to turn beet red and my tongue to wood, the whole thing was a traumatising experience.

My usual procedure was to shuffle in, trying to look invisible and furtively rummage through the selection. As soon as I found a garment looking vaguely similar to what everyone else was wearing, I would head straight for the check out. Fit? What’s that? I was well into my twenties before I had the faintest idea of my waist or leg size. I do remember one particularly cruel salesmonster telling me “Nobody makes jeans in your size, these are the closest you’re going to get”. Of course I believed her and walked around wearing jeans half way up my calves for years before learning that several manufacturers make jeans in my size, it’s just many stores don’t carry them.

But anyway, teenage trauma notwithstanding, new shirts were needed so new shirts have to be bought. Although The Light of my Life™ has done a sterling job over the years in keeping me equipped with skivvies and socks, and was responsible for the purchase of the aforementioned linen shirt, when it comes to outerwear, I generally like to at least see them before buying. So, with a heavy heart I headed down the hill to the big city, credit card at the ready.

And I have to admit; it wasn’t all that bad. Even though The Light of my Life™ had her own list of things to buy, many only vaguely benefiting me. Even though we left the house at 9:30am and didn’t get home until after 6. And even though my bank account is in urgent need of a massage with some liniment, it was about as trauma free as a visit to over a dozen shops could be. I didn’t hyperventilate. I didn’t start swinging punches. And I even used the fitting rooms a couple of times.

Oh, I’ll confess there was a spell where we made the mistake of taking a scenic detour to look at an upscale neighbourhood and found ourselves trapped in an endless series of red lights which would have taxed the patience of someone far more patient than me. And the temperature in some of the stores could have been a good 20 degrees lower and still been sub-tropical. And a number of screaming kids were in urgent need of the duct tape treatment. I also got a shade cranky on one of the freeways towards the end when nobody would let me merge. But other than that, it was a comparatively pain free day.

As a result, I came home with several new shirts. And a pair of trousers. And a pair of shoes. Oh, and a snazzy looking pair of shorts too. Which I think is more new clothes than I’ve had in one day since I was last kitted out to return to school. So now if I can just refrain from dripping food on them, or leaving them on the train, I should be looking pretty sharp for a while.

We’ll see.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

First Published: 12 April, 2005

They said there was a storm coming. Over and over they said it. On the television, the radio, online, everywhere. Big storm’s a-coming; you better get ready.

Except they’ve said that before, hundreds of times. And they’ve always been wrong. Well, not always – there was the blizzard of ’03 which buried parts of the foothills under 12-15 feet of snow; they did predict that correctly. But all the other chicken-little warnings either haven’t come to pass at all or have been a fraction of what we were told to expect. As a veteran of 3 ½ Colorado winters I’ve come to learn that when the weather service says “Expect a foot of snow”, we can anticipate an inch or so.

To be fair, our house is located in an area which seems to be remarkably well protected from the brunt of Colorado’s winter storms. Known locally as “The Banana Belt” we’re sheltered by the mass of Mt Evans which means the nasty stuff tends to blow right around us. Quite often the worst driving conditions of my commute don’t happen until I’ve dropped a good thousand feet or so towards the plains. Many of Colorado’s world-famous ski resorts are approximately the same height as our house yet they receive five or ten times the amount of snow. But even so, the weather predictions have a tendency to be almost comically unrealistic.

The “big storm” was supposed to hit us on Saturday night, so it was with a weary cynicism I headed for bed after noting an almost immeasurable amount of snow on the deck. Up at 5am to accommodate The World’s Most Irritating Dog who’d refused the opportunity to pee at bedtime and still there was virtually no snow.

“Useless b******s,” I grumbled. (I grumble a lot in the mornings) “I wish I had a job where I could be wrong about absolutely everything and not get fired.”

Pre-coffee crankiness aside, I was really quite pleased. You see I was leaving for a conference later that morning and as the airport is a good 70 miles away, I didn’t fancy having to battle the elements all the way there. Back to bed with a clear conscience and another couple of hours between the warm sheets. 7 a.m., the alarm went off and I hopped semi-cheerfully out of bed only to discover the long-awaited storm had finally got started. Oh boy; had it started.

There was still only 3 or 4 inches on the ground but it was coming down thick and fast so I decided that although my flight would almost certainly be delayed, it still made sense to set out for the airport sooner rather than later. Of course, it never entered my head the flight would be cancelled altogether so I learned about that from the radio when I was only a couple of miles from the house. I’d to drive another mile before finding a place safe enough to turn around and giving thanks once again for 4-wheel drive, pointed Angus homewards.

Like a kazillion other people due to fly from Denver, I had to call the airline to find out what they had in mind for the rest of my day. I expected to be on hold for an hour or more so when a pleasant voice came on the line after about five minutes, it caught me completely off guard and with a mouthful of toast. Yes, the flight was cancelled but not to worry, there was room on a later flight scheduled for the evening, presumably by which time, somebody would have shovelled the runways clear and jump-started the planes.

Which left me with almost a full day to kill. Me, who never has enough time to do the things I have to do, much less the things I want to do. Me, who has a dozen projects to start “whenever I get some free time, even just a few hours would do”. A whole Sunday with nothing planned, nowhere to go, no chores to be done.

And I couldn’t get motivated to do anything.

I’m not sure what the psychology of all this was but it seemed my head was already in travel mode and my brain wasn’t ready to do anything else. My exercise gear stayed in the bag. The pile of photographs didn’t make it into the new album. My drumsticks stayed in the daypack along with my practice pad. And the bills stayed unpaid. Oh, I did allow nutso-dog to drag me around the neighbourhood for an hour or so, but most of the day was spent mooning around the house or standing at the window, listlessly watching the snow come down.

When the airline left a message to say my new flight had been cancelled too, it came as no big surprise. Nor was it any great shock that it took a whole lot longer to get through to the reservation centre this time. I took this in my stride and calmly accepted my fate. I didn’t get bad tempered until I accidentally pressed the phone too close to my face while holding it wedged in my shoulder and disconnected the call after being on hold for 26 minutes.

Then I got really bad tempered some 35 minutes later when I finally got through and found myself conversing with an infuriatingly chirpy automated robot. I’m not sure if the deficiency was on my side or Deep Blue’s but the conversation broke down when it asked me for my confirmation number and was then unable to understand my response. So, it asked again. And again. And again.

I learned a couple of things during this exchange. One is that regardless of how many obscenities you scream at United Airline’s telephone robot, and no matter the volume, it will still respond with “I’m sorry, I’m unable to find that confirmation number. Could you please give it to me again?” The second is that The Light of my Life™ is probably right when she says I should have my blood pressure re-checked.

The conference was at a ski resort high above Lake Tahoe with a breath-taking setting in one of the world’s most beautiful valleys. But I’m afraid I barely saw the view as it was the middle of the night when I finally arrived. I spent the following day blearily taking part in what was left of the conference, and before I knew it, it was time to go home. I’m told it was very nice though. And they had more snow that we got.

Would it have been too much to ask for my flight to have been cancelled in this direction?

The Hustler

First Published: 15 February, 2005

We had a leaving do for a colleague at work last week. The shindig wasn’t actually at work of course, but in a bar just down the street. At 4:30 all pretence of toil stopped and en-masse we headed out for a couple of hours of beer, munchies and pool. These are all pleasant diversions in themselves, but even better when paid for by the company. Eating and drinking are two skills I have long since mastered, mainly due to long hours of dedicated practice. Pool on the other hand remains something of a mystery.

Not in the sense that I can’t play or even that I can’t play well, sometimes I play superbly. The crucial word here however is sometimes. And therein lies the mystery. Most of the time, I’m every bit as hopeless at pool as I am at everything else. But sometimes, on extremely rare occasions, when the stars are in alignment and the dice are rolling, I play as though gifted by the doGs themselves.

This was such a night. While my first three or four trips to the table were the usual humiliating display of mile-wide misses, appalling blunders and balls bigger than the pockets, all of a sudden it came together. I was Paul Newman, Tom Cruise and Jackie Gleason all rolled into one. Cuts, banks, combinations, the full length of the table and back. Everything I attempted went in. As I knew they would even before I leant over the table and took aim. I was in the zone. This wasn’t just pool, this was poetry.

People lined up to challenge me and I slapped them down one after another. Conversations stopped. People from other groups came over to watch. I was on fire. I didn’t bother to explain that I hadn’t picked up a pool cue in months; what was the point? Nobody would believe me. In fact, they probably all assumed I had a pool table in a hypothetical basement at home and practiced for hours every night. But I knew when it was time to stop. After sinking my umpteenth black of the night. I calmly handed the cue to someone else, walked back to my beer and took a seat.

“I’m done” I announced. “Someone else can have a turn”.

Beer has never tasted so sweet and in my rare moment of triumph, I reflected how I haven’t always been this wise.

Lakes Entrance is a tiny fishing village on Australia’s Victoria Coast. The curious name stems from its location on a small river which leads from the sea to a network of natural lakes. The ocean beaches are wide, long and largely empty while the lakes are a veritable playground for water sports of all kinds. As such Lakes Entrance is popular with holidaymakers and day trippers. However, once the sun goes down it has to be said, there’s not a whole lot to do. I discovered this in the company of two Australian girls, Lee and Cheri whom I’d met in the local backpackers’ hostel. We were trawling the streets looking for somewhere, anywhere we might sit and enjoy a quiet beer or six. It wasn’t that Lakes Entrance was lacking in hostelries, quite the reverse, but they were all what might be termed…shitholes. After searching fruitlessly for some time, we finally settled on in which the absence of broken glass on the floor suggested it might be less threatening than others.

Australians as a whole are a wonderfully friendly and sociable people but even though I’d only been in the country for a couple of months, I was well aware that in certain circles, my English accent could be a hindrance to social advancement. The fishermens’ bars of Lakes Entrance were just such circles, and I was anxious to avoid drawing attention to myself. This was something of a challenge in the company of Lee and Cherie, who were extroverts to the max and wanted to talk to everyone. Cherie’s sprayed on Levi’s, and Lee’s pink fur hat were drawing just the notice I hoped to prevent, contrasting as they did with the rubber boots and rain slickers worn by most of the other patrons. That and the fact that the three of us had more teeth than the rest of the bar put together.

“Let’s play pool” chirruped Cherie, at a point when the stares were becoming most uncomfortable. If I had wanted to divert attention from myself, playing pool wasn’t the method I would have chosen but she was already setting up the table. With a sigh I made my way over, lined up the break, closed my eyes and muttered a silent prayer. Three stripes went in.

And that was just the beginning.

Shot after shot, ball after ball, game after game. Everything I attempted went home. Lee and Cherie were quickly replaced as my opponents while one after another, the local hotshots stepped up to take their turn. Everyone retired defeated. Nobody could touch me, and they were lucky if they visited the table more than once or twice before I cleaned up the balls. Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London” wasn’t playing in the background, but it might as well have been. Far from being bothered by my Englishness, those people worshipped me. At the end of the night, I left that bar a legend.

Weeks later, I met up with Lee and Cherie in their hometown of Melbourne. I stayed with them for a few days and on the weekend, tagged along to a birthday party in a local hostelry. A number of people were there, all friendly souls and before long, someone suggested a game of pool.

“Oh Andrew will play with you” chorused Lee and Cherie, “He’s great at pool!”

While it might be good for the ego to have two cheerleaders boasting of your skills to all and sundry, it makes the inevitable fall all the harder to take when reality sets in. The shark from Lakes Entrance was long gone. Today we were back to the normal Andrew, the real Andrew. I couldn’t hit a barn door at 5 paces with those pool balls. People had come from all areas of the bar to watch this famous pool wizard from Britain and were now standing in puzzled silence as ball after ball refused to go anywhere near where I wanted them to. How embarrassing. The sense of let-down was tangible.

One the way home, Cherie asked me in puzzlement. “So why did you play so well in Lakes Entrance, yet so badly today?”

What could I tell her? “Pool” I said, “is something of a mystery.”

In the Headlights

First Published: 8 March, 2005

I saw you up ahead, you and your mate, but only for a moment. I braked but didn’t swerve; stayed in a straight line just like we’re told to do. And if you’d only kept running, I would have passed safely behind you. Your mate had already stopped and was safe. It would have been alright. Instead, you panicked and turned back the way you came. You almost made it, I thought you’d made it, but there wasn’t enough time. And you were no match for me. You didn’t even make much of a noise. But I knew how hard I’d hit you. I knew.

The driver behind me stopped as well and the pair of us walked back together.

“What was it?” he asked. I told him and his face mirrored mine.

I’m not a praying man, but as I made my way along the road, I was wishing with all my heart. “Please let it be dead, please let it be dead”.

We found you by the side of the road, much further back than I’d thought. You were lying prone and still, curled up as if you were asleep. As if you could be sleeping, here with all those vehicles roaring by only inches from you. I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank goodness, you were dead.

Then you lifted your head and those enormous liquid eyes looked right into my soul. You told me of your pain, your suffering, your fear.

“Why?” you asked, “Why did you do this?”

I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you, I really didn’t. I was paying attention, honestly, I was. I wasn’t even going fast. It’s just one moment you weren’t there, the next moment you were. And I braked. I was slowing down. But you turned and ran back. And there wasn’t enough time.

Cell phone reception is unreliable up here, but after a few moments hesitation the signal came through loud and clear. The dispatcher was very kind though it was hard for us to talk over the roar of the traffic, so she suggested I get back in my car. And I had to leave you, frightened and in pain. I didn’t want to leave you.

“No, I’m not hurt. No, there are no other vehicles involved. Yes, my car is safely off the road.” Then we started talking about you, the reason for my call. You were off the main highway, I told her, but in a turning lane. Another vehicle could easily hit you in the dark. I was worried about the additional suffering this would cause you. She of course was concerned for the other vehicle.

“I know this won’t be pleasant” she told me, “but could you drag it to the side of the road?”

“No ma’am” I told her, “I can’t do that.”

She hadn’t heard me say you were still alive.

So instead she had me back my car up to you. My car, which had caused you so much misery, was now shielding you, protecting you. In a tragically pitiful way, helping to ensure you suffered no more than you had to for your final minutes in the world.

The local sheriff arrived first. A badge, a uniform, authority. Someone who could take charge. I explained what had happened. I took him to you, and I could tell from his face that he was sorry too. I expected him to unclip his gun but instead he pulled out a baton. A dead weight on a telescopic arm. Could I stand here and watch as he hit you? Break your neck, break your skull? Yes, I would have to watch it. I owed that to you. Squeamish cowardice at this time would be a further insult to the end of your beautiful life. But instead, he merely reached forward and gently touched your eyeball. No reaction. Mercifully, you had finally moved on.

Donning protective gloves he carried you off the blacktop and onto the grass verge. I noticed there was litter by your head and absent mindedly, picked it up and took it away. Just a token effort but I wanted your surroundings to be as close to natural as was possible. We had to wait on the State Patrol; apparently you were their jurisdiction. So, the two of us checked my car; the first time I’d really looked. A light cover was gone, part of the bumper was missing, the spoiler bent back. Nothing much really. Nothing to show how much the damage had cost you. I pulled the spoiler back into place. I can replace the light cover tomorrow. It would be more than the car’s worth to fix the rest, so I’ll need to leave it as is. Which means I’ll see it every day. Which means I’ll see you every day.

State Patrol arrived a few minutes later. He looked half my age, but he carried an air of calm authority I suspect I’ll never have. He’s seen it all before of course, but really at this point, there was nothing more for him to do. I filled out an accident report, which gave me fifteen lines to say what I was able to say in 2. I saw you. I braked. You turned. I hit you. What else was there to add? That you were beautiful? That you were only in your second or third year? That your eyes were black pools of pain that communicated your feelings to me as clearly as if you spoke my language? That I’ll carry you with me for the rest of my days? I couldn’t write that. So instead, I said what happened. “I saw you. I braked. You turned. I hit you.”

“Try not to feel bad.” said the sheriff “It happens. It’s part of living in the mountains.”

“It’s my first” I told him.

“I’ve hit three. It doesn’t get any easier.” He replied.

Business done; it was time to go. To leave you like any other piece of highway debris. In the next few days, the county workers will come with a winch and take you away, who knows where. Hopefully you’ll provide food for some other animals, or nourishment for the soil. I took solace from the fact that you of course, were gone. This was just your body; a means for getting around during your short time on earth. You’re running free somewhere now, beginning the cycle yet again.

You almost made it, I thought you’d made it, but there wasn’t enough time.

This article appeared in Issue # 114 of Mountain Gazette in June, 2005.