#and steph is snickering over some amazing shots she got of dicks ass as he ran n of tim n duke trying (and failing) to out-parkour cass

[kootenaygoon]

So,

It felt like driving to a battle ground.

My RAV rumbled over the exposed roots of massive trees and navigated the meandering forest road into Shambhala for the third year in a row, with Andrew Stevenson riding shotgun. I was already dressed for the part in a pair of paint splatter tights I’d borrowed from Natalya, and we were sharing a joint with dappled sunlight on our faces. A grinning skull wearing a ceremonial headdress cackled at me from the hood of a derelict truck as ghost fingers of smoke reached longingly from between the trunks. The further I immersed into the grey haze, the more I felt like I was appearing on an episode of Game of Thrones. They had just released the third episode of the seventh season, and Queen Daenerys’ continued ascent could only mean one thing: a coming conflagration of epic proportions.

It was Thursday afternoon, and we’d just put the paper to bed with the following cover story: “Shambhala dodges evacuation alert”. I’d called the Southeast Fire Centre to ask them about a 75-hectare fire that was currently raging 20 kilometres southeast of Salmo and asked them a bunch of questions: What were the chances of it coming closer? How long would it take if to reach the ranch? Was I an idiot for heading out there in person? How close does a fire have to be to trigger an evacuation? The representative reassured me that the fire was extremely unlikely to close the distance to the festival in the next four days, and promised there were plenty of obstacles in the way to keep it contained. I hung up relieved, but also skeptical. 

Guessing at the behaviour of a forest fire seemed as wrong-headed as underestimating a dragon.

Lately I’d been re-reading the Song of Ice and Fire series on my Kindle, scouring the text for new clues about the various theories I’d heard on the Internet. It amazed me how George R. R. Martin used layer after layer of world-building, doggy-piling the reader with names of secondary characters, so that each time you read it there was something new to discover. I was convinced the whole narrative was cleverly disguised science fiction, with the world’s population having regressed after an apocalyptic event. Readers who only engaged in the present tense storyline, wondering what would happen next with Jon Snow or Arya or Tyrion, were missing out on the decades and even centuries of Westeros history Martin had created to establish their current setting. There was no way the show could match this intricacy, and the quality of each episode had been diminishing dramatically since the show-runners overcame his source material.  

“Do you think I’m the villain of this story?” I asked Andrew Stevenson, as the RAV continued to splash through pot-holes. He was picking at his fingernails angrily, and didn’t look up.

“What makes you say that?”

“I started off as this blond Cupid that everyone was rooting for, now it’s like I become a shittier person the longer I stay in the Kootenays. I feel like it’s been one long plummet since Paisley left, like I’ve become this person I don’t even recognize. This pot-head asshole piece of shit.”

He snorted. “You said it, not me.”

Andrew was wearing a dirty white tank tucked into his jeans, and a pair of those cheesy wrap-around sunglasses you buy at gas stations. His hair was poorly cut, maybe by his wife, and his clusters of acne on each cheek made him look like a kid. I’d looked at Andrew Stevenson from all kinds of angles, but I never found one that truly satisfied me. I thought of him every time I came to Shambhala, because this was his town. These were the people he started out doing drugs with. It was his friends that were dropping dead of fentanyl overdoses, his people who were killing themselves with shotguns. He’d spent his entire life in the Kootenays, moving from one community to the next, and he’d fathered all his kids here. It was thoughts of them that propelled him over that bank counter, that got him swinging his shotgun around at those tellers while he shrieked like a fucking goblin.

He passed me the joint. “Once you have kids, man. It’s this whole other element. Like think what Eminem would be without his daughter, right? He’s living for her, the same way I was living for my kids every day.”

“Sometimes I worry, you know? I feel like it’s a sexual version of musical chairs and I’m going to be the one left holding my dick,” I said. “I’ve wanted to be a Dad since I understood what that meant. I feel like it’s my whole purpose, but who the fuck is going to have a baby with me?”

He snickered. “It’s going to hit you like a shovel to the face.”

As I pulled out of the forest into the yawning fields of the ranch, we were met with a security officer, who tried to send me the normal route even though I had a press pass. I argued with him, entitled, telling him that the last two years I’d come they always let me go through the back way.

“You can call Jimmy. He’ll tell you. Will Johnson from the Nelson Star.” 

The guy shrugged back a bit, cowed by the power of Jimmy’s name. At the end of the day, he was the guy. He owned the ranch, founded Shambhala and basically made this who endeavour come to life. He was like Zuckerberg, always wearing a humble T-shirt and never rocking the millionaire vibe. It looked like he still shopped at Value Village. 

“Give me a moment, I’m going to ask my manager,” he said, rounding the hood of my car and making a call through his walkie talkie. He was bouncing his chin along with a beat I couldn’t hear.

I sulked, annoyed with the delay. I wanted to get situated on the grounds with enough time to walk the ranch in daylight. It was late afternoon already, and I really didn’t want to go through with the indignity of a search. Especially because I was carrying things they could find if they did their jobs properly. While I waited for an answer, Andrew Stevenson jutted out his hip and pointed to it, grinning.

“I’m not shoving everything up my ass,” I said. “Shut up.”

Eventually the guy returned and waved me through the back way, a muddy cow-trail that led out to where all the cars were parked. It still struck me, how bizarre it was to see that many vehicles randomly parked in such an idyllic place. It was like seeing an army preparing to attack, the soldiers getting organized into rows. As I followed the smiling flaggers into the media section, I felt like Queen Daenerys as she patrolled the ranks of her invading Dothraki. When was my ascent going to be?

Once we got ourselves parked, I dug out a bottle of vodka from the dash and sat on the hood of my RAV doing shots. Some nearby campers shouted “Happy Shambs” and gave some half-hearted introductions, but mostly left us alone. I’d been feeling grateful to Andrew lately, now that the Maisonneuve story had come out, but also a little guilty. I wished I could’ve gotten an interview him him. It felt strange to tell his story without his input. Maybe he hated the article, maybe he felt I got it wrong.

All I wanted was to get it right.

Next I pulled out the provisions Niles had given me. I was meeting Steph the next day, but this evening was reserved for me. Andrew opened the Ziploc bag and handed over my share. We chased it with vodka.

“What people always forget about Daenerys is that her father’s the fucking Mad King. So who’s to say she’s not going to become the Mad Queen?”

Andrew laughed. “It wasn’t genetic. It was his reality that drove the Mad King over the edge, all his political rivals scheming and plotting to take him out. She’s in a totally different context than he was.”

“But they say all Targaryens are a little mad, right? They’ve all got that fire, that purple magic?”

He sighed. “She does seem to enjoy burning people to death.”

Taking one more shot of vodka, Andrew threw himself down on the grass and started slipping out of his boots. He pulled off his shirt to reveal a bullet-proof vest, then pulled off his scruffy jeans. He pulled on a bulky black sweater, then tight black military-style pants, followed by black boots. He threw a matching set in front of me. This was what we always wore when we were hunting rapists. It was a task I was getting increasingly ambivalent about, but Andrew pursued it with a religious glee. He wanted to find sexual wrong-doers and feed them to crocodiles. That’s what he fucking lived for.

I began to get dressed as well. “Where’re we going?” I asked.

“We’re heading to the Fractal Forest. We need to be there by 6 p.m.”

“Who’s playing at 6 p.m.?”

“It doesn’t matter who’s playing.”

“Then why do we need to be there by 6? What difference does it make?”

He turned dramatically towards me, for effect: “The difference: it’s your funeral.”

“What are you talking about, my funeral?”

“After crucifixion comes resurrection, right? Think about the Greyjoys: what is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger. You have to die so you can be reborn.”

“What’re you gonna do? Drown me in the Salmo River?”

He shook his head. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

Next he held out two black balaclavas. Ski masks. This was what he was wearing at the Nelson & District Credit Union, that day in 2014, two weeks before I moved to town. This was the event that had connected us, and I wanted to feel its truth. It wasn’t enough to know that he robbed that place, that he escaped on a bicycle, that he was so high he couldn’t even remember the events afterwards. I wanted to feel that urgency in my blood, that desperation, I wanted to evoke it on the page and make it so real it couldn’t be brushed aside. A full-grown human man was pushed to these lengths, felt he had no other choice but to take a blind run at crime. It was like Breaking Bad in real life. I wondered constantly what happened to his kids when their two parents went away.

We pulled on the balaclavas. Facing me, Andrew put his hands on both my shoulders and spoke through the black cloth. Maybe it made him feel more comfortable saying what he had to say next.

“Think of it as a car crash, okay? You know it’s coming, and you know that you won’t have any control over what happens. But you also know you’re going to survive it.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

He sighed. “Look at yourself, Will. You’re a chronic pot smoker living in your friend’s basement and doing drugs at Shambhala like you’re some rave kid, in the middle of an overdose crisis. What the fuck are you thinking?”

“I just figure, you know, when in Rome.”

“That’s the level of intellectual thought you’ve put into this: when in Rome? You’re gambling with your whole future, fucking around like this. What if you permanently alter your brain chemistry?”

“My brain was damaged to begin with. I’d rather be fucked in the head than depressed. I couldn’t deal with the sadness anymore.”

“Those are your excuses. That’s all they are.”

After a while we stopped arguing, had a couple more shots of vodka, then headed off towards the festival reunited. It was true he was like Eminem, while I was Stan, and Ryan Tapp could be our Slim Shady. We were a trifecta that way, three souls with interlinked stories. The Bank Robber, the Legend and the Holy Spirit. I wished Ryan could be there, but this was something that had to be settled between Andrew and I. And just as I was thinking that, he chose our target. I rushed up to see what would happen next.

“We’re going to make a little human sacrifice,” Andrew said, channeling Tyler Durden, as he held his black shotgun to the throat of a quivering rave kid. “Yeah, and this guy looks like he’ll please the Gods.”

“Hold on, we can’t do this here. People will hear the blast,” I said, my head whipping back and forth. There were people parading past only twenty feet away, but they weren’t looking over to where we were crouched in the shadows.

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

“Are you quoting Fight Club?”

“Raymond K. Hessel, you are going to die.”

He motioned for me to join him, then carefully transferred the gun into my hands. I looked down at the panicked Asian kid in front of me, who was stretching up his hands to unveil grotesque pit stains. He was 22, maybe 23.

“Ask him if he wants to die,” Andrew whispered.

“Do you want to die? Do you want me to kill you? Is that what you want?” I asked, really getting into my part now. I was really feeling it, like I was actually the guy with the gun. My whole life I’ve been the guy on the other side of the gun, but now it was in my hands. Mine mine mine. 

“No, please. I’ll do anything,” the guy said, his voice breaking. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?”

He blinked, confused. “I don’t know.”

After a long moment of silence, I lifted the barrel and gestured with my head. The raver kid want off into the darkness screaming with relief, and left me standing in the shadows with Andrew. He’d never killed anybody either, though he had the chance multiple times. He carried that black shotgun with him everywhere he went, but he only fired it once — into a door. He was trying to show me that he wasn’t a killer, not really, though he couldn’t admit it out loud. Much easier to embrace the guilt, to characterize yourself based on other people’s moral judgements. Much easier to be the bad guy.

By this point we were heading into the downtown of Shambhala, where all the food vendors clustered around the Pagoda Stage. I bought myself a burrito and shared it with Andrew in the dark, stumbling off towards Muscle Beach, our balaclavas pushed to our foreheads. The music was electrifying the night sky, so there was a lightning storm of purple energy reaching into the heavens. I figured sooner or later we would encounter Daenerys and her dragons, seeing as the smoke continued to billow into our faces. It smelled like campfire, like somebody was telling an increasingly grandiose story for all the gathered campers. It smelled like imagination.

“So here’s a question,” I said, as I wiped burrito off my chest. “How do you think Dany gave birth to those dragons? Was that science, or magic?”

“My money’s on science.”

“Even with all that blood sacrifice, with tying the maegi to the pyre and everything?”

“Dragons are biological creatures. They can only be birthed in a biological way. It was probably the heat from the pyre triggering some sort of genetic process or something. I don’t know, exactly.”

“Well, what about the fact that she wasn’t burned to death?”

He wagged a finger at me. “Now that’s different. That was a miracle. And that’s why people follow her: she performs miracles, just like Jesus.” 

“She’s a sexy little Jesus with a holy trinity of dragons on her side.”

“Exactly.”

I’d never really been a Daenerys fan before this conversation. It seemed too obvious, in a literary work with hundreds of characters, to go for her. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that her story resonated more strongly with my life than any of the others. I felt her familial exile, felt her frightened youth. I also knew the part of her that considered herself royalty, despite what anybody else says. She was determined to find her rightful place in this world, and that place was at the top. I grabbed ahold of two fleshy scales on Drogon’s back and soared above Shambhala with a dragon between my legs, high enough to see the forest fire on the other side of the mountain slope. It was orange, mostly, and didn’t seem especially lively. I circled around it, surveying its shape. 

“There’s no way that fire’s going to come for us,” I said, dangling from the scales as Drogon swooped. Andrew was clinging on right beside me. We were thousands of feet in the air.

“You haven’t been listening to anything I’m saying.”

The Kootenay Goon