As colleagues fell silent, and subdued barmaids quietly served us, I began borrowing from
‘bang-bang’ folklore to create the sense of pending danger and revulsion that I had yet to realize
isolated me from their world. And when an otherwise indifferent beauty finally embraced the idea
that I was a fascinating man, the template for my posttraumatic behaviour was set.
Ironically, maybe inevitably, by my sixth sojourn into man’s dark side, I was enduring real
incidents I had previously borrowed from now familiar international crews, and had talked about at
the Cellar as if they were my experiences. Then I had a déjà vu event: I was so familiar with what
was happening around me that I had no doubt about an outcome that had no influence my
decisions. As a free spirit working in the staid business of television news, it did not cross my mind
that I had become far too familiar with irrational circumstances. To the contrary, I thought I was
becoming uncommonly wise.
My twelfth foray into the madness became my last, when the winds of change blew a tornado
across my path in the form of British immigration authorities denying my work visa renewal. This
unexpected event caused me to fly to Vancouver, Canada, to see my best friend, Ed, and to check
out the freelance market for soundmen.
During this stay, my polished tales of crappy ways to live and die enthralled his friend, Tom,
an executive at a postproduction company who subsequently offered me contact numbers in the
film and television industry. He also suggested my experiences would make an excellent
screenplay, an observation I received as schmoozing from a shameless visionary seeding new
business.
Ultimately, I stuffed my worldly possessions into three nylon sail bags, and carrying an
electronic typewriter, boarded a flight to my hometown, Toronto, only because I knew more people
in the industry there. This reasoning turned out to be problematic because events had changed me,
and sixteen months later, I was again considering moving to Vancouver.
By this time, I had stopped writing a book about what it was like to cover wars to script an
innocuous screenplay about helicopter pilots working in bush country: on the suggestion of a good
friend and mentor, I had applied for and been awarded a New Screenwriters Development Grant,
which tipped the scales for me.
I landed in Vancouver with a fifty percent advance toward expenses, six months to complete
my project, and nothing standing in my way except my penchant to follow ‘insightful’ flashes that
invariably led me away from developing established elements of my plot. As a result, I lost
valuable time trying to make these flashes relevant to my climatic surprise, which, as it turned out,
was on me. With only three weeks to go, elements of the insights I had individually coaxed into my
story over the months merged to allude to a better climax than I had been crafting.
I was not as concerned about getting the balance of the money, as I felt gutted by the
sputtering fizzle of an ending that screwed up the potential references offered by the review
committee. This meant I had to consign my first professional credit to silence, and because I had no
track record, start over.
Ed saw that I was troubled, by what he didn’t ask, and on his dime he invited me to join him,
Tom, and two others at the Avalon Gentleman’s Club to help me find a broader view of life than
my own colon was currently providing.
Fortuitously, nearing the end of this evening, Tom made a double entendre comment intended
to have me speak about my version of the bang-bang and I told him about an incident in a place I
called Goodbye. Because it involved helicopters, this tale led me to explaining the problem I had
with my screenplay, to which Tom dedicated brief seconds before saying I should upgrade one of
my helicopters. In two sentences, he explained how I could fuse my unintended implication to a
