The Movement

Part One
by Vince R. Ditrich

I’ve always fantasized about having my own Pub. I suppose a lot of people think it might be nice; but I take it several orders of magnitude higher. I want it, badly. I wish for it, I beseech the heavens for it. I use corners of ketchup slathered napkins to make sketches of what it could look like. I scout around for the perfect location. I want it to overlook the sea, and have a cozy inglenook on one wall. It will be dimly lit, just enough light to see the Queen’s face on the money. I guess I’ll need oak benches – those would be for visitors -- but it would have just fabulous taps, a selection that’d make you weep with joy, and a couple of dogs curled up by the fire…I guess it’s a no-brainer to include a ploughman’s lunch that’d blow the mind out of the side of your head. No damn TVs. A special area, near the fireplace, overflowing with excellent books and a few soft, inviting armchairs, reserved especially for me and my guests. It would certainly have a bay window. Did I mention it’d be built overlooking the sea? Of course I did.

It’s not where I’d spend my retirement. It’s where I’d spend nearly every waking hour of the rest of my bloody life. Laugh if you will, but secretly in his heart, every man reading these words wants exactly the same thing and his wife is terrified that his wish might be granted.

My friends endorse my big dream, because they know if my ship comes in and its cargo is a big fat lottery win, they are going to be VIPs at my Pub. A Pub is pointless if there’s no one to share it with. In fact, it’d be OUR Pub, with free rounds and countless raucous choruses of “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour on the Bedpost Overnight” until the Mounties have to be summoned. I imagine myself in front of a cheery fire on a rainy night reveling in the experience of sipping a pint and riffling through yellowed, dusty history books. History & beer: What a perfect combo. I once wrote that I loved them both so much that you might be tempted to conclude that I like nothing more than getting pissed up and then recounting past piss-ups.

Since most people’s lives are categorized by what they do, I guess you might file me under ‘artist’. This means I am fashionably unemployed, charmingly insolvent, and possessing of a radical chic that most folks suspect is more likely an undiagnosed medical problem. It also means I dream big.

The idea of my own Pub really took root one spring after a buddy lost his wife to cancer. She was far too young. She was suddenly and capriciously taken away from us.

For a while we stood around wringing our hands, wondering what in the hell we could do to help. What do you do in a case like this? Talk about the amount of rain in May? Pretend everything is hunky-dory? Have him and the kids over for a weenie roast and pretend it puts everything back into balance? Clearly this wasn’t going to cut the mustard.

Life, as they say, had to go on. We knew this man still needed a pint now and then so we began, occasionally, to traipse over to his house and put on little socials. We were pretty cautious about it at first but eventually one of the lads said, “For God’s sake! He’s Irish. Do you really think he minds visitors dropping by laden with Guinness?”

I had to admit he had a point.

It turned out that he didn’t mind at all. And at that moment it all took on a life of its own. This beat our regular local six ways from Sunday!

It wasn’t long before we all began departing after sunset just a little too often. We’d swagger out of the house dripping with machismo, weighed down by preposterous quantities of beer, cradling tastefully presented platters of manly appetizers, and roar off without a word, provocatively revving the Volvo a few too many times as we left, leaving suspicion in our wake. We’d had to cover our tracks.

Furtive phone calls would be exchanged. “Hello?”
“…Uhh…Yeah…Meeting Friday night…”
In the background, “Who is it honey?”
“Uhh…It’s for me, Hon.” Voice lowered again, “Yeah. Friday you say?”
“…Umm…Yeah…Just a few administrative issues to discuss…Won’t keep you long…”
“Great then, see you Friday…”
“Honey, what’s happening on Friday?” She’d invariably query.
“Oh, you know. Raising money for peace ‘n stuff…”
“Peace?” She’d ask doubtfully.
“Peace? No…No…I said, ahh…P.A.C”.
Long pause.
“The P.A.C? You joined the Parent’s Advisory Commitee?”
“Did I say, uhhh, P.A.C? Ah, heh, heh, heh…No, umm, G.A.C. Greening of Atrophied Confluencies. Yes, G.A.C…We call it GAC. Feed the trees, cut down the children, you know…Just doing my part.”

Oh yes, we were slick, savvy to the necessary double-talk. Never a peep about smoked salmon, tuna sashimi, homemade blackberry pies heisted straight out of the freezer at great personal risk, vats of the sacred golden nectar, wine marinated prawns (oh, those lucky, lucky prawns), cheeses from around the globe, chicken satay, lamb brochettes. No…We knew better than to speak en clair about our secret cabal. We were Bad Boys.

* * * * * * * *
The Movement. It wasn’t a club. It wasn’t a society. It wasn’t a lodge, though we did fancy the thought of antler bedecked leopard-spotted busbies as our ceremonial garb. I tried to find some and the best I could do were plastic fireman’s helmets, but they didn’t provide the requisite élan. What we were was the grass roots of a popular movement, a unified mass of like-minded, risk taking, iron-willed men. (Don’t tell our wives.) Oh sure, they would ask how the meetings went, make oblique references to our charitable work, trying to draw us out for details, maybe trip us up. One wife, perhaps with the hope she could sneak a peek later, suggested we take written minutes of our meetings, but she never really understood that when we left the house, we were warriors, eagles, mighty jungle cats. We don’ need no stinkin’ minutes…When I came home late, smelling of whisky and Stilton-stuffed Filo, I could just pass it off on one of the lads in the group…Say for example The Barrister. “…Terrible stories of environmental abuse…Greenhouse effect…Children starving! Biafra I think it was. The Barrister…Yes, The Barrister suggested a wee dram to deaden the pain. He is my legal council, after all…”

Organizationally we were like a sleeper cell. But politically, we were loosely knit. We decided that if push came to shove we were all president, simultaneously. There’d be no other officers. We also toyed with the thought that whoever was speaking at any given time would be president until he ran out of breath, and then the next guy got to be prez. This seemed to work too. We even tossed around the idea of giving out a live chicken as a door prize; the chicken could be president. Mostly we hovered around the snack table.

Eventually word got out. Tongues were wagging. “G.A.C. Movement, huh? Did you shave the whales last night, honey? That's not the kind of movement I've come to expect from you!” Titter-titter. I’d mumble moodily in response and turn away. Damn! Where did the leak come from? It was hard to know but these wives were resourceful, they talked to each other constantly, they could garner encyclopedic knowledge on any situation from a simple 30 second phone call; and, by God, they were putting our Movement in danger! Just a little clever application of their feminine wiles and the whole thing would blow wide open and we’d be reduced to early bedtimes, zero-tolerance snacking enforcement and a distressing booze prohibition (except perhaps for a miserable bottle or two of cheap-assed beer, by special dispensation at the wakes of former Members of the Movement who died from a broken heart.) My dream of a Pub was sinking, floundering, in danger of getting swamped. I sat there feeling like G. Gordon Liddy, sipping my morning coffee and brainstorming ways to send in The Plumbers.


As my paranoia about our need for secrecy began to crest something happened that made me pause and question the fear that my own wife was part of the conspiracy to derail the Movement. Could I have been prematurely jumping to conclusions? My doubts began after a party she took me to. One guest in particular was a wild card whose penchant for things ‘herbal’ drove him way, way out into left-field, well past the turnoff to the mystical village where elfin druids prance merrily around the Maypole. As the evening progressed he got loonier, increasingly cryptic. He was friendly enough alright, but I suspected that making friends with him would involve a lot of smoking the peace pipe; he appeared to have on hand quite an impressively stocked little kit for just such a purpose. Apparently I won the lotto and was asked to accompany him outdoors wherein I presumed we would exchange crab dip recipes and comment favourably upon the décor. Oh well, I thought, I’d just go out for a few minutes. When I got outdoors in the nippy winter air it wasn’t long before the wind hit my back and I needed to relieve myself. Having just stepped outdoors I didn’t want to go back in immediately so I looked around and found a hedge nearby. He looked at me and said, “Dude, good idea…I gotta go, too.” As I stood there, hoping that our host wouldn’t come out and see me watering his hedge, Dude approached but was unaware of a huge pile of lumber beside me. He ambled up, tripped on the pile and then like a human caricature went staggering backwards exclaiming, “Whooaaaaa!” His arms were flailing in circles, like Charlie Chaplin on roller-skates; he made a din & clatter and vanished from view. I tensed up for the fall that surely had to come realizing that I’d better zip up quickly and rush to the silly fool’s aid. No sooner had this thought flashed across my mind than he re-appeared back into my field of view, still flailing and now moaning, “Duuuuude!” He tripped once-and-for-all on the pile of lumber and fell, headlong, bulls-eye, absolutely spot-on, directly -- I swear this is true -- under my stream of pee. I stood there for a couple of heartbeats, peeing on his head, utterly dumfounded, unable to believe what my eyes were telling me. “My God, man!” I finally yelped. “Are you okay?” He got up onto his hands and knees, hair dripping with my steaming urine and said, “No worries, Dude…Just lost it for a sec”.

My wife appeared to accept this utterly bizarre incident with serenity, even amusement. I scratched my head . I fully expected her to recoil in horror and demand to leave at once. I was sure she would find some appropriately Olympian way to shrink me down to short-panted kindergarten size, affix and slather me with buckets of opprobrium (as if I should have known that peeing outdoors in the proximity of Dude would entail a clear risk of outlandish water-sport mishaps), and shake her head in that way that only wives know how to do. But she didn’t. She actually chuckled. I began to cogitate upon the matter…We’d never pee on each other at a meeting of the Movement. Not even if we drank so much beer that we stripped naked, held hands and wept while watching Terms of Endearment. Not even if Ashley MacIssac popped in for a pint. So, maybe, just maybe, this would all work, unhidden, out in the open.

I gently broached the subject with some of the other lads. One was going to bring an appetizer his wife had made especially for us; she was all for our meetings. Another said she might like to get a similar Movement afoot for the wives. I was Thunderstruck!

My dream was alive!



End of Part One