Cole Nowicki | Sad Mag

It was a move of passion––nearly instinctual. You were straddling me as we kissed on the couch and I stood up as you held on like a koala and slowly navigated us towards the bed; doing my best to avoid the coffee table, the chair and my clunky oversized bicycle on the way. I almost lost balance when I noticed a pair of my dirty underpants on the floor and casually tried to kick them out of sight.

Then came the sound. I squatted to lower you onto the bed and it was like a gunshot. A cannonball fired from a pirate ship oddly moored in my apartment. My pants had exploded from my scrotum to the soft patch of skin above my ass that acts as a foyer to the fleshy mound before it splits like an embryo into two hairy cheeks. I felt the breeze from the open patio door on my bottom. You held your composure as long as you could before crumbling into laughter. I didn’t think it was that funny. I really liked those pants.

The boardroom at the parks department was hot, humid, and full of media and piles of us skateboarders who were filling the seats and every available space on the floor. We were waiting to speak in opposition of an asinine motion concerning the removal of a well-loved and utilized skatepark. But first there was another item on the docket—the proposed zipline at Queen Elizabeth park.

Yes, a zipline. Because it’s always best to have a quick exit readily available at popular tourists spots for when your relatives come to visit and your grandpa starts talking about “all of the damn Filipinos that are moving to town” again. The commission asked you general questions about your company’s proposal like “What does the zipline’s revenue model look like?” and “What will be the environmental impact?” before lobbing you a softball. An easy homer. “Is it true that 1/10 people who ride the zipline are squealers?” Admittedly it was a strangely worded question but not as strange as your answer.

“I’m not sure about that statistic, I mean, this isn’t an episode of Deliverance.”

There were two fucked up things about your response. First, Deliverance was a movie starring a sans-mustache Burt Reynolds, not an episodic. Second, you just made a wildly tangential reference to one of the most infamous rape scenes in cinematic history at a public and televised Parks Board meeting. A few of us gasped. The board voted almost unanimously in favour of the zipline.

“Oh, the skateboard man, the skateboard man, skateboarding down the road as fast as he can!” You sang to me while I walked down the alleyway. Before you broke out in song you had been raking gravel back and forth across the road, not collecting leaves or trying to get pieces of a broken bottle into a manageable pile; you were just raking rocks and dust while wearing a very comfortable looking ivory white sweat suit.

And I’m not sure why you began singing about my skateboard and me. Maybe you saw how upset I was and you wanted to cheer me up, or you were just looking for an excuse to play your rake like a guitar. Either way, I instinctively started to sing along and banged on my air drum-set like an Albertan Neil Peart, using my skateboard as an exaggerated drumstick. When we’d finished I thanked you and kept on down the road, face wet with tears, even more confused than before.