"SCARING THE GULLS"
by Steven Gajadhar

I was watching the tube last night when it struck me: individuality, uniqueness. Rarity. CBC? Can't remember. Definitely Canadian Television, it had that Canadian Camera quality. Do they shoot like that on purpose? I'm not versed on the nuances of post-production, but Americans deliver a different picture; so does the BBC.  I smell a research paper. Where did I put that grant application?

It was a show about birds. Terns. And it reminded me of an interesting fellow I met in the park. John Jacobs. Very individual. He suckered me into buying one of his paintings. Pure krap. I'm not even a big art fan. Suggestion is what did it to me--I had watched terns and he painted terns. He didn't even notice me come up. I'm not even sure he was trying to sell them.

There was a girl on the show, a summer student that spent her break on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia, looking after terns. She floored me. What a sense of identity! No friends, no family, no TV. Just terns. John looked like her through the eyes, sort of dull with a twinkle, the kind of person that fades away but still gets noticed.

When I talked to him I thought of using my serious voice, my learned voice, my I'm-better-than-you-park-painter voice. I'm not very good at it.  I ended up resorting to this one. We talked for a long time.  I gave him five hundred bucks for some shitty painting that had his fat black friend, Marcus, straddling some white fluffy thing.  I suppose it was meant to be a bird. The edges were flowers.  A fat black guy, squashing a bird, bordered in flowers. It hangs above the couch now.  I had to cut the wife a cheque from my account--she didn't buy it.

John's as crazy as a bird. Clichéd crazy. Foaming at the mouth, twitchy nervous crazy. Violently autistic--I don't care what the wife says, that painting does look like shit, but it gets you, the craziness comes across, the violence.  I had a nightmare of that fat black blob jumping out and choking the piss out of me.

John's hands shook when he painted, must have been the medication. Made his paintings horrible too.  I wouldn't trade the crooked lines for John off medication though. I'd rather pay three million bucks for three coloured stripes than see that.

That girl had to be crazy too. What the hell do you do on an island all by yourself? The noise of all those birds would drive me crazy. Her only job was to be a human scarecrow: nothing to do all day but scare the gulls away so they wouldn't eat the tern eggs. All those gulls, and those terns were so precious. The only two sets of breeding pairs left in the world.

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Steve likes napping on the couch. Especially right after work. He just bought a new house, so now, when he naps, he feels powerful. When he wakes up he feels leveraged by debt and low interest rates. He is currently working on an alternative to oil called 710. Steve's fiction has appeared in various places including Eclectica, and Ink Pot.

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