Symphony in A Flat Tire
(A Slightly Embellished Autobiography)
by Stefan des Lauriers
Preface
"Firecrackers and kids are out of control, it is dusk, Victoria Day 1957; and the artist as a young boy seeks refuge in a rusty Nash behind the yellow brick bungalow." So begins my life story, which I began documenting on June 15, 1975: "Ten minutes ago; struck with the sudden urge to write an epic novel, I dashed with typewriter into the sunny backyard of my youth, only to stare at this blank paper radiating with white gold."
The fireworks were in Scarborough, where I lived with a nuclear family before the breadwinner of our unit had a near fatal accident at Goodyear, when a tow motor load of tires toppled upon him. I had just been written up for my own near death endeavor in the Toronto Star as the "Toddling Astronaut." The headlines: "Boy, Two, Survives Brush With Death As Goldfish Bowl Gets Stuck On Head," did little to propel Canada into the space race.
With a wolf at every window, our beloved nuclear family was forced to move to Acorn; and we abandoned that bungalow that radiated in my eyes with yellow bricks. So we tied the chairs, the television, the beds and what have you, to the top of our lemon, an amber and green 1957 Dodge and forged our way West. Just forty miles, mind you, in a westerly direction, towards that old escarpment affectionately referred to as "the mountain," in my formative years. Indeed, it was in the shadow of an Imaginary Mountain that I endured the perplexities of my youth.
The first page entertained mundane atrocities. Mundane if you consider white washing the dilapidated frame house, naming our dappled cat Sputnik, and tearing down the outhouse. Mundane until we discovered too late that a full fledged hive of bees congregated in that proverbial house out back.
Standing beside the verandah I watched Fern, my French Canadian father in a fedora ascend the ladder, sporadically muttering "Sacre blue." My dad was known for painting with furious speed just as Picasso was known for painting bulls with flaming light before cameras in the dark. If you are not aware of Picasso painting with light, at least try to fathom my predilection to make light of painting.
For the past two years I have lived a Bohemian subsistence in Toronto; thrusting myself, as it were, upon the music scene. I lived in putrid rooming houses, communes with theater people, and allegedly toiled as an itinerant petunia planter at the Royal Canadian Yacht Club. As you may have heard it sung in Tour de Farce, "that summer job was a breeze."
At the time of my premature but eloquent musings I'd been reading a lot, and often played Frisbee with Lester the dawg and Danny. Sometimes Danny — born in the summer of '57 — jammed with me on the dulcimer, a vastly misunderstood instrument. As a matter of fact, just the other day we went to the city, to busk on the street. A passerby dropped a twenty in the case, and in snatching it up I said: "Let's quit while we're ahead." The man probably intended to give us a dollar, and may have come back for his nineteen dollars change.
I've been longing to get back to "Smashville, home of the world's largest freestanding imitation Unicorn Horn." I miss my friends, Paul, Michael and Mary – and the fabled others who frequent Fatal Berts. We are the Handful of Stars; the passionate splashes of paint that never quite make it to the canvas. (Incidentally, I've been hitchhiking to Toronto on the weekends to crash at Paul Nash's Bloor Street pad, to play a few places and keep in touch.) From this moment on I'm a living character in a literary experiment. This is a story about telling everyone a story that never gets written.
INTRODUCTION
On June 15, 1975, at my childhood home in Milton Ontario I commenced writing: The Sunset Metaphors and The Yodeling Frog, my two autobiographies. Being 22 at the time, I had just relapsed to my parents' place from a musical career that was fizzling. I got laid off from my alleged day job. The first passage was written in the backyard amid the dandelions with the sun's blinding light on a blank page. It began with my first recollection, which hit me like a barrage of cherry bombs.
There have been several attempts on my life story, starting
with: Wind-up Monkey Dance, an "obscure
fusion of yodeling frog and sunset metaphors."
Paul Nash, my unofficial literary imprimatur, was heard
to lament: "It may be entertaining, but you're no Thomas Mann."
The second attempt, The Dragonfly Metaphors, began with the line: "The
swimming limbs of shadows which leaped around the Yodeling Frog were...."
This particular embarkment, this maligned masterpiece, was unearthed, in my
mind by unemployed archaeologists in a closet at 49 Mary Street and was rescued
by my sister, just before she declared she would get married "At the Pieces
of the Just." The third attempt was penned, by hand, oddly enough, into
a blank book while I lived in a somewhat furtive manner, after a radical chain
of events somewhat changed my life.
If I had been a fugitive, an escaped convict, if I had just for the fun of it say, done something totally un-Canadian, something like cause the death of a hockey star by surreptitiously tying his skates together while he was in the penalty box — then I may have been forgiven by my følksingin' friends. But I did something that was far more unforgivable and was consequently ostracized in their literary eyes. I'm not talking of doing covers of Gordon Lightfoot songs, which I admit, after the now infamous frying pan incident, are actually quite good songs, worthy of being covered. To understand fully, though I speak figuratively of those fugitive years, you have to read on...
The "furtive works" disappeared in a suitcase with twenty handwritten journals under mysterious circumstances. I was told that the suitcase, which was kept in unguarded condition at a storage facility outside of Irving, Texas, may have been stolen by "thieves thinking there were power tools inside." The suitcase had no latch, and I dare say that thieves would not be so inept as to steal 21 volumes of latent literature thinking they were "power tools".
The handwritten version may have been relegated to a designated dustbin had not a photocopy of it survive with my friend, Ellen, who was by chance with missionaries in Honduras. She returned the manuscript, which was stuck together after having being dropped overtly into the river during a photo op with Contras in canoes. Ellen presented me with the muddied manuscript, after an accident left my T11 and T12 vertebrae mildly crushed, and we pried it apart. As I recall she handed it to me under cover of darkness at a screening of The Beverly Hills Cop.
Junkyard in the Sky, my fifth incursion into literary airspace was attempted towards the end of 1987 after I went to Toronto with my own nuclear entourage. My sister, who had second thoughts and didn't get married at the "Pieces of the Just," gave me the original rough work, which had festered in a trunk at that dilapidated shack the old man so elegantly whitewashed. Subsequently I typed the meandering memoirs into an IBM clone; it being a time when cloning was in its infancy; restricted to mechanical devices and Woody Allen movies. This "short lived version" begins with me in a sublime position on an operating table telling "the story" to the Doctor as he removes a birthmark from an important part of my anatomy. Removal of said birthmark from my neck with a tunable dye laser was like a face lift, and thus enabled me to chance being seen once again in the public eye.
The theme of my fading escapades was now to reconcile my past from a secular point of view, being that major episodes were like stages of a rocket that had propelled me to higher planes in sudden bursts of glory. "The stages served their purpose, but what of these propagated boosters, the mere relics of rusty rockets that mire the ocean floor." I do not under any circumstances picture myself a satellite orbiting the earth with only the occasional thrust here and there to keep me on course. The so called "penultimate and lesser lofty version" begins: "It was dawn when Michael Greenbaumn tossed a banana peel and boards a southbound Bathurst Street car." Sadly the epic ends with the realization that the banana peel had been left up in the air for a long time, beyond the willing suspension of disbelief.
The story was in the hard drive of the IBM clone which was stolen from a basement during a moving dispute. Fortunately I had made a home movie of the manuscript as it spurted out of the printer like an endless roll of paper, and was able to scan it into readable form. Finally, the last attempt, Symphony in A Flat Tire, began just after my forty-fourth birthday. "On Saint Valentine's Day 1994 I had a near death experience when my kidneys failed due to Cellulitis. I was allegedly working as a wedding photographer at the time, under the umbrella of a larger nuclear entourage, destined to die in intensive care."
A miraculous recovery dispelled rumors of my eminent death, as a hundred or so people prayed for me in earnest. On that drafty death bed I could almost reach out and touch Elvis's gold lamé jacket. But a voice reached out and admonished me to go back and "let the worm out of the apple." I came to and began reciting Soliloquy of A Worm Inside A Candy Apple, to the nurse.
TODDLING ASTRONAUT
My radio flyer—it is bright red
It's orbiting my bungalow
The big dogs can't lick my face
Cause I wear a goldfish bowl
I'm a toddling astronaut
In outer space
And I sure miss
The human race
Through asteroid rocks again
Take this helmet off my head
Think I need some Oxygen
Hope the fish aren't getting dead
Somebody call my flight engineer
This goldfish bowl is really stuck
Oh good my mommy's here
With the sirens and a fire truck
I've learned my lesson well
Don't put plastic on your face
And concerning
Those homemade spacesuits
Well just don't trust them
In outer space
© 1996 Stefan des Lauriers
