Read an Excerpt
BUCKMINSTER HOLDS COURT
By K. B. Williamson
Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2012 K. B. Williamson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4269-6267-7
Chapter One
ASCENT
A young man in his early twenties sat at the computer desk in his bedroom, in a house that he rented and shared with seven others. The house, which was in Sandy Hill, close to the University of Ottawa, was in what the locals knew as the student ghetto area. He was typing away sporadically, mumbling to himself about the wording he was using and editing his entries as he went along.
"From the desk of Buckminster Frederic Vonpell and written by said." He typed.
Okay, sounds a little pompous, but that's the point of this, so I'll go with it, he thought. It's not like anyone else is ever going to read this, heaven forbid. That would completely defeat the purpose of what I'm trying to do here.
"395 Nelson Street, Ottawa, Ontario.... June 19, 2010. 9:13 AM.
I do solemnly swear to try to ignore the shortcomings of my generational contemporaries, especially those with whom I cohabitate and those whom I come in contact with every day at the university. Even though I count many of these people as my nominal "friends", for lack of a better term, (though I do have a bit of a "soft spot" for some of them whom I've known for a long time; the sort one might feel for a family pet or young nieces and nephews), they are emphatically not my intellectual and social peers, per se, and certainly and emphatically NOT my responsibility. They are completely entitled to pursue their own paths in life and make their own mistakes. What they do, who they do it with and what the consequences may be from these associations and actions, is for them to deal with, be it immediately or at some point in the (undoubtedly) murky future that many of them seem to be setting themselves up for. Whatever political, religious, pseudo-religious, cultural, and educational choices they make and alliances they wish to pursue is absolutely none of my business. (Well, unless they become a card-carrying member of the Mukhabarat, Tonton Macoute, Khmer Rouge, the KGB (now only in Moldova!)Eco-anarchists, Free love with Children Associations and/or that fundamentalist church that the Prime Minister belongs to.)"
Hm.... Buck thought Buck as a smile leapt onto his face. I'd definitely have to horn in on that one. Ha! He continued typing.
"I will try very hard not to try to intervene or influence them in their choices, or lecture them on the idiosyncratic paths they are veering towards and staggering up in life. I will stop sounding to them like the judgmental, overly-cautious, afraid-to-take-risks person that I am.
I will stop scolding them like a parent might chose to (and perhaps their parents SHOULD have done oh those many years ago). I will try to stop sounding like the portentous, bombastic smarty pants that I am, to their ears, and is my natural inclination to be.
In short, I will attempt at every opportunity to act, outwardly anyway, my chronological age and stop estranging those around me as I seem to have being doing a lot of lately. I will appear to them to be the same careless, thoughtless, wanton, booze and drug-ridden person as the huge majority of those with whom I share my life away from my parent's home are. I will bite my tongue every time I am tempted to offer an alternative point of view to an obviously appalling choice made. I will do everything I can to appear "normal" in their eyes and bide my time while I am forced to be in association with these people until I can emerge, hopefully unscathed, into the real, safe and sainted world of adulthood. I will use the vocabulary and idiom that is expected of someone who looks like me and is of my age and will try to avoid sounding like a Rhodes Scholar who is trying to impress his tutor. I will make every effort to force myself into doing this at this stage of my life. This will not only result in making things easier on myself in the social realm, but would also would help me in being more accepted as part of the group that I, by default, am forced to associate with. Also, perhaps, this will assist in potentially attracting someone who might be deemed a girlfriend, which is an area of my life that has unlimited potential for growth and exploration as I am a total neophyte in this pursuit and realization."
There, thought Buck, while muttering softly to himself. This has to be my mantra. I swear I will attempt to recall every nuance of it in all the dire emergency social situations that I constantly find myself in that seem to rear their ugly heads every time I come in contact with anyone but my father, who is the only adult and really sane person that I can ever parlay satisfactorily with.
There I go with the wrong choice of words again. As if anyone around here would ever use or even think of using the word parlay. I've got to stop, he thought idly as he got up from his desk and wandered towards his bedroom door, which he opened slowly. He stood there regarding the kitchen in front of him and took a deep breath, his resolve to accept what his housemates seemed to find acceptable already weakening by the sight that greeted him.
The house's kitchen was really just a wide hallway outside the ground floor bedrooms. It consisted of an ancient fridge, a pock-marked galvanized stove and a hodge-podge of kitchen cabinetry. There were also a few linoleum chairs around a drop-leafed, badly scarred and stained wooden table. No one had ever bothered to finish its surface and everybody that had ever sat there and dripped some food or drink on its surface had left layers of indelible stains.
Buckminster, or "Buck" as he was known to most, was usually awakened by the arrival of early morning risers or late night revelers. He was lucky if they were alone and just clattered around a bit. There was a possibility of getting back to sleep if the visitor made quick work of whatever it was he or she was bent on doing. His bedroom door was right beside the dining area table, with the fridge on the other side of it. The chairs around the table screamed in protest across the planked floor every time they were moved and the fridge door sometimes had to be slammed a number of times, before the clasp took hold. Raisa and her boyfriend, Tariq, also had a bedroom opening off the kitchen but once they finally decided to go to sleep, nothing that went on in the common area seemed to disturb them. Rob had a bedroom at the top of the uncarpeted stairs, down the hallway, and around the back of the house but he was often away on yet another mountain climbing adventure and when he was at home, he was so exhausted by his self-imposed ordeals that he would sleep the sleep of an innocent child for what seemed to the other housemates like days at a time. The three others he shared his house with, Bobbie, Shandy and Glen, lived on the top floor also. Bobbie's room was right at the front of the house. Shandy and Glen's rooms were between Rob and Bobbie's and were across the hall from each other. The room that Raisa shared with Tariq had originally been the living room and dining room but it had a door that closed into the kitchen and the original housemates decided that to cut shared costs they would use it as another bedroom. It was the largest room in the house and was really a double room in area.
The back door, which everybody used because there were only two front door keys, which seemed to have disappeared months before, was also close to where Buck's head rested on his pillow when trying to sleep. Like the fridge door, it also had to be slammed to be properly closed. This was usually achieved only on the third or fourth attempt. They always used the back door because its lock had been snapped off months ago by a frustrated housemate who couldn't manage doing the same to the front door and therefore didn't require keys. Quite often it wasn't even closed properly, and when it was left ajar, a local homeless drug addict named Schenley made good use of the warm kitchen floor on occasion. The dishes were rarely done and the sink was always home to their collective culinary detritus. The kitchen table was almost always covered with evidence of someone's excessive debauchery including empty bottles of various types of alcohol, bongs, and homemade pipes for smoking whatever seemed to be on the go at a given time and whatever was left over from an ad hoc late night get-together with outside friends or other housemates. Buck knew that Shandy, Glen and Rob and their various gatherings of friends were responsible for these bits of evidence of Bacchanalia, but whenever he heard the clinking of bottles or smelled smoke of some kind, he hid in his room, terrified that they would ask him to join them and that he would reveal what a prig could be.
Almost every time Buck went into the kitchen area, he was immediately appalled by the habits and practices of the branch of humanity that he shared his habitation with. Whether there were others there at the time or not, he would often mutter imprecations and denunciations against whomever he thought was responsible for the latest turmoil. He would say nothing to anyone but muttered to himself when he observed what had been abandoned and left for a mythical and totally non-existent housekeeper to clean up. Only during an early morning or late night foray into their only common room, when he was most vulnerable to being temperamental, to protest the racket that was keeping him awake, might he say something in general protest to his housemates about their living habits. Otherwise, he tried very hard to just bite his tongue. He had given up even trying to make coffee there in the morning, preferring a café a couple of blocks away to having to wrestle a mug and a spoon from the murky swamp that was in the kitchen sink. He was often joined by equally disgusted housemates, particularly, it seemed, by those who had contributed most significantly to the breakdown in basic human hygiene standards themselves.
They had tried to have a couple of house meetings about these very issues a couple of times, but the kitchen only seated four at a time and its focus deteriorated significantly once someone noticed that the bongs were not being made use of or that there were still some dregs in a bottle of alcohol that needed attention. The other meeting that they attempted was at the local café but because only two or three of them actually ever ordered refreshments, the owner kicked them all out after about ten minutes. Other organizational meetings in the kitchen involving those that lived in the house and any of their friends that happened to be there at the time, seemed to be more successful in following their set agenda, particularly when those in attendance were making plans to join the G20 and G8 protests that were slated for later that June.
Rob occasionally hosted meetings with fellow climbers where they discussed their next trek towards the blue sky. Shandy sometimes hosted an ad hoc aspiring writer's meeting which usually suffered the same fate as their attempts to have house meetings in the kitchen once the drug or alcohol paraphernalia had been spotted. Raisa and Tariq often had their own meetings with uncomfortable-looking Middle Eastern friends in their bedroom, who had to run the gauntlet through the wreck of a kitchen and sometimes past a wary western housemate or two. Bobbie was too embarrassed to bring any of his soul mates into the house. They were all aspiring Pentecostal ministers like himself and any viewing of where he lived might compromise him professionally at some time in the future, or so he thought. Glen, who also lived upstairs, only seemed to have meetings with an array of single males and females who he escorted furtively up to his room. If it was late at night and he figured that he and whomever he was with would not be come upon, they sometimes tarried in the kitchen.
The only housemate who spent any significant time in the kitchen alone during the day was Bobbie, always with the hope of button-holing some passerby for a heart-to-heart, or soul-to-soul, conversation. He was always hopeful that they would, one by one, bare their innermost selves to him so he could help them rebuild themselves by incorporating his brand of theology. He seemed oblivious to his disgraceful looking, and perhaps inappropriate to his stated ethos, surroundings, but never seemed inclined to tidy up a bit while he was waiting for the next person to pounce on. Buck often found him sitting alone amongst the bongs and other possibly addiction-feeding paraphernalia and had mentioned to him that while he was just sitting there smiling softly to himself, as he always seemed to be doing, he could put on a pair of rubber gloves and have a go at the perpetually chaotic mess. Bobbie's only response to Buck's suggestions was to smile benignly and stare off into the middle distance muttering incantations of a vaguely religious sort to himself.
Tariq also muttered incantations laced with imprecations to himself while he passed through the common area, sometimes in Arabic prose and sometimes in bursts of profanity-laced English, which appeared to be attempts to offend the cultural and religious heritages of anybody who happened to be there.
Rob, when passing through on his way out the back door, just uttered a seemingly unrelated string of modern euphemisms and acronyms like "lol" and "wtf", and mild oaths, like "what the shit", "oh man", etc. When Shandy passed through she would just laugh loudly whether there was anyone else there or not or whether anyone was trying to speak to her or not. Outside of the common room she could be quite chatty and articulate, but faced with the train wreck of the kitchen she just laughed, whether out of a real sense of mirth or an attempt at conflict avoidance, Buck was never quite sure which. Raisa sometimes just sat there alone with a secret smile of her own, waiting for Tariq's return from a mysterious errand or two. The only person who ever seemed revolted enough to do anything about the mounds of accumulated garbage, moldering pots and dishes and unwashed floors and surfaces was Buck. He would start an attack on the mess and try to interest anyone passing by to give him a hand but usually to no avail. Bobbie always had a meeting at the church to go to suddenly, Rob yet another rope to buy, Glen a shady peccadillo to engage in, Shandy an attack of the giggles to deal with, Raisa a boyfriend to prepare for and Tariq a cohort to trade intelligence with or a non Middle Easterner to insult.
Buck got up that particular morning with a resolve to deal with a list of at least eight issues he had concocted in his mind while trying to sleep through five loud interruptions that had occurred the night before. He was determined to confront everyone one at a time that day and resolved to stand his ground in the middle of the kitchen until he had met that aspiration. These confrontations will only be about the state of their common area, he thought and mouthed the words to himself, nothing else. Remember!
He marched into the kitchen and promptly emptied a bucket of various items that should have been disposed of long ago into a garbage bag and then rinsed out and filled the same bucket with hot, soapy water. He was putting on a pair of rubber gloves just as the first housemate emerged for the day.
"Oh man. What the shit? This shit stinks. Lol! WTF man," announced Rob on the way towards the door. "How can you touch that shit man. What the faaa's the matter with you? Lol. Well have fun doing it. You must love shit man. I gotta sprint 'Minster man. Gotta a meeting with my peeps or some such garb. Peace out with that shit man." By the time he had had finished with his usual spate of garbled nonsense, he was well through the kitchen and out the door. "Peace out man," he repeated loudly over his shoulder as he disappeared up the driveway.
Buck had just stood there with his mouth open, choking on the first word of his prepared speech and only managed the first syllable before he was alone again. "WTF indeed," he shouted after Rob, though he had already disappeared from view. He resolved to Google WTF. He had a vague inkling about what it meant but wasn't completely sure. Who's the frog maybe? he thought. But no, that didn't make sense in the context of Rob's announcements, although Rob's own private context always seemed to be the same. He never seemed to vary from his the usual mouthful of somewhat lurid clichés and aphorisms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BUCKMINSTER HOLDS COURT by K. B. Williamson Copyright © 2012 by K. B. Williamson. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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