Requiem for Will by Dusty Blowhard

Aimless, drinking too much coffee, stoned again, waiting for Dougie to finish work, it was the day before the Oregon Country Fair, where all the hippies love to go. We would drive down that night and get drunker than drunk and higher than high (as was my fashion in those days) and I’d see for myself if my hippy friends were right about it being a really fucking cool gig.

I wasn’t planting that year. I’d ignored the tendonitis for months, working through the winter, and had fucked myself up to the point that even WCB, those prickliest of pricks, agreed; I was too mangled to work. The repetitious impact syndrome, as my doctor called it, was as sure a sign as I’d ever get that hitting things with shovels and axes and chainsaws was not a career that I should be doing. I ignored him, being me, but happily took the Worker’s Comp stipend, agreeing to rest up for as long as it took.

I wasted it getting wasted, like I had the rest of my youth, not educating myself out of the rut I’d dug. Having fun, playing video games with career criminals and reprobate hippy scions of great wealth, moonlighting as a dope-grower’s labourer, I did nothing of value for months and months. I got really good at some video games and listened to a lot of jungle music, as drum and bass was called then. That was all. I wrote, but all I wrote was garbage.

So there I was, sitting at the café on Yates and View, reading a paper, when Kent walked up. He was looking even more bugged out than usual—not just half-mad this time, but fully crazy, and as always with that dangerously energetic spring in his heels. He looked that way generally, but much less so. I could tell immediately something was wrong, and wondered what new bad news he had.

He and Will had got popped for a sizeable grow-show some months before, and still reeling from the heavy fines and the loss of their crop, both had gone out planting to try and make up some of the loss. Will hadn’t planted in a couple years. I’d been stoked when he told me that he had gone back to straight bush work; he didn’t have the head for details that successful criminals need. And, he had become super-fat. I’d entertained the notion of going out with him on his gig, briefly, but the WCB checks were too delicious, and my arms still hurt a little.

“Pete!” said Kent.

“Kent!” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Will fucking died."

“His fucking heart exploded. He was planting for Honeycutt and he never showed up at the end of the day so they went out looking for him and they found him dead at the back of his piece. Massive fucking heart attack. He’d been born with a defective one and it fucking exploded. The fat fuck. Hey, I gotta go. Later.”

“Uh…okay…hey, you okay? Kent?”

“Nope!”

Neither was I.

And so, he left me there at the café, both of us out a friend. It wasn’t the first time I’d lost a buddy to random death, but Will, the mad bastard, was one of my favourite people in the world. I was a rookie again, and Kent was too I guess, to the very new, very ancient truth, that everybody dies and you don’t get a say about the who and the how and the why and the when. Everybody I’ve buried since then proves that for me at least, it doesn’t get easier, no matter how many times it happens. I’ll always be a rookie at death.

The Oregon Country Fair sucked that year. I’m told it was one of the best ever. But for me it was miserable. I, with characteristic foolishness, ate too many mushrooms, and moped alone, making no friends, alternately feeling pissed off and utterly gutted. I ran my mind over the fact of his death like a tongue over a broken tooth not yet numb. It’s half a lifetime later, now, and it still ain’t numb yet .

I wondered, then, and still do today:
The day you died, William old boy, did you feel any different, when you went to work that morning?

Did you have your walkman on when your ticker popped? Of course you did: you always did.

Were you singing, as you climbed that hill, annoying your fellow planters with your semi-melodic howling?

Of course you were; you always were.

What was the song, Will? If I go to the block you died on, can I catch the echo? Is your voice still in the wind?

Of course I can’t, of course it isn’t. It doesn’t work like that. And even if it did, even if you went ghost, you’d’ve picked a better spot to haunt than some fucking clearcut.

And; what did they do with the trees in your bag? Did they stash the bundles right then and there, to wash their hands of your curse, like I probably would have done, or did they plant them out in the shape of a big “W”? Not likely. I’m told nobody even liked you on that contract, that you kept so totally to yourself, everybody figured you were just an asshole. Hell, maybe they weren’t wrong to think so. You never did much care what people thought of you.

So, Will--who finished your piece? Was it spooky as hell? No doubt it was, no doubt it was.

And--who got your money?

You were a stupid genius, Will, or a very clever moron—I could never figure out which. You were a far cry from the athlete you were, and you seemed as old as the hills you planted, but you died at 25. I’m a lot older now than you ever got, but you still seem older.

I met some of the guys who’d been on that crew, who’d dragged your massive ass off the slope and notified your mom and dad that their son was dead. I asked about you, but they didn’t want to talk about It.

Of course.

You will never be forgotten, Will—not by your friends, and not by the poor bastards who had to haul your carcass back to the truck.

Rest In Peace,
William Plaatjes of Squamish.
1970—1995, or thereabouts.