Mitchell


It’s Thursday night at the bar. February. It’s freezing outside. Inside, the usual crowd. Me and the boys are at our table. Like every Thursday night, Dave and I are watching Darren, the carpenter, arguing with Marc, the organic gardener. These two never shut up. At least the arguments are fun. Darren is always calling Marc "Tofuhead", and Marc swears back at him like a filthy drunk. Kind of odd for an organic guy to get mad like that. I guess he’s just one more compost commando pissed off at the world, and he likes to take it out on Darren.

Dave, a "dude" talking ski-tech, breaks up the argument. He holds his beer out like a white flag and says he heard a name from our past today - Mitchell, a guy we went to high school with. We’re surprised to hear his name, we figured he was probably dead. But Dave says his sister spoke to Mitchell’s sister and Mitchell is very much alive. Marc didn’t go to school with us, so he asks me who Mitchell is. I tell him, "Well, he’s the nicest psychopath you’ll ever meet."

We end up talking about Mitchell all night, trading old stories. Dave tells us about Mitchell’s Grade 10 essay on the merits of targeted extinction. Says he listed about twenty species of animals that should be exterminated to make the world a better place, and he wasn’t talking rats and pigeons, Mitchell was talking whales and elephants, big stuff. The teacher freaked, but he wrote is so well she had to pass him. Marc isn’t impressed with Dave’s story, he says Mitchell sounds like an idiot. "No, Mitchell’s insane," I tell him, "but not an idiot." Then I tell Marc about Mitchell’s garden.

Back in Grade 9, I’m at Mitchell’s house getting some bike parts, and he shows me his garden. "It’s experimental," he says. He’s got a table covered in plants. They’re alive but they look really strange. "They’re hung over," Mitchell says, explaining they’d been dead drunk for a week. He says he germinated the seeds with water, but then fed them a mix of vodka and water, with more vodka and less water as they grew. "Now it’s all vodka," he says, but he’s changing back to just water to see if the plants go into withdrawal. It was terrible. The poor little things looked so depressed, like they had headaches. One plant’s leaves were shaking, two of the others looked like they were going to fight.

Marc listens to the garden story, furious, says he’ll hammer Mitchell if he ever meets him. Then Dave says he can meet him because his sister found out Mitchell only lives about an hour away. Darren wants to go see him, he thinks it would be a riot. I thought so, too. Marc has no interest. Too bad for him, because the next day me, Darren, and Dave drag Marc on a road trip to meet the strangest guy we’ve ever known.

We drive about fifty miles down the highway, it’s snowing the whole way. The drive’s pretty dull. We get off the highway and onto a back road that swerves for a couple of miles through the woods. Marc asks me why my "idiot friend" lives in the forest if hates nature. I tell him that Mitchell doesn’t hate nature, he simply finds it inconvenient.

Now we’re off the back road and onto a worse one, it’s not plowed at all, but we make it to the town where Mitchell lives. There’s a welcome sign, but the town’s name is spray-painted over and it’s got "Mitchellsburg" written on it in weird serial killer lettering. We drive into the middle of town, and in the dead of winter, in an ocean of clean white snow, the whole town is black from the ground to the tops of the houses. The trees, everything, it’s all covered in filth. Then it starts snowing black snow. It’s crazy, like a bad acid trip.

We keep driving but the black snow on the road, which looks like volcanic ash, is piling up and eventually we just can’t go any farther. Dave’s getting edgy, he thinks we should go home. I said we drove too far to turn around, so we might as well walk.

Darren opens the door to get out and the stench knocks us flat. The air is unbreatheable, it reeks. But, like idiots, we walk through the black snow anyway looking for Mitchell’s house. I’ve got my jacket over my mouth so I can breath because the air’s so bad. We’re walking, and we’re looking in the store windows, but they’re all empty. There’s nobody there. The place is dead. Every house is deserted, and they’re all covered in cinders and sticky grime.

We turn a corner up ahead, and buddy, it’s unbelievable. There’s a house about a hundred feet away with a chimney that’s got to be thirty feet high, and thundering out of the chimney is the filthiest, most disgusting oily black smoke you’ve ever seen. It’s rocketing up about two hundred feet, making a mushroom cloud at the top. It looks like an A-bomb going off. The black snow coming down all over town, it’s fallout. This has got to be Mitchell’s house.

We go to the door and knock. Sure enough, Mitchell answers, he looks good and he’s really happy to see us. We shake hands and he pulls us from the wasteland outside into his house which is spotless and doesn’t smell at all. We take off our coats and go into the living room. Mitchell brings everyone a beer and sits down. There’s a silence, then I have to ask him, "Mitchell, what the hell are you doing?" He says, "Follow me."

He takes us downstairs into the basement. It’s really hot down there and you can barely walk because the place is packed with old tires. "These are my donuts," he says. He grabs a tire and walks towards another room, this one’s smaller and hot as hell, must have been a hundred and fifty in there. In the middle of the room is a huge steel oven, like a blast furnace, with a door three feet across on the front. Mitchell cranks open the furnace, it’s roaring inside, and says, "time to fry a donut, boys," and launches the tire into the fire. He slams the door shut just as the tire explodes in flames. We’re totally stunned. Mitchell just says, "Firestones give great BTUs!"

We feel like we’re witnessing a murder. That crazy furnace is pumping burning rubber death-smoke right into the stratosphere. Marc blinks once or twice and says, "Are you insane?" Mitchell laughs. He explains, in a philosophy only he understands, that his sins are the sins of many men condensed into one man, and that there’s an efficiency to his behaviour that we should appreciate. Then he says it’s legal for him to burn tires because he bought some Kyoto credits from Exxon with money he borrowed from the local bank. He says he doesn’t even have to repay the loan because once he started burning tires, everyone in town moved away, including the bank, which has no any interest in him anymore.

Marc’s losing it, he’s asks Mitchell what the tire smoke is doing to the birds and animals outside. Well, now Mitchell gets this look of pride on his face. "It’s great," he says, "they’re gone. Every single one." Darren is freaking out. He says, "You can’t burn tires, it’s nuts." Mitchell agrees, but only because his tire supply is limited. Mitchell says he’s started disassembling the neighbour’s houses for wood to burn, and most people left so quickly they didn’t take their stuff so he’s been burning that, too. But he says he still prefers tires.

Now, Mitchell’s being really nice but me and the boys are feeling like we’re stuck in a crashing airplane. Marc and Dave look like they’re going to puke. We don’t know what to do, so we do the only thing we can, we leave. We tell Mitchell we want to get back before dark, so we go back upstairs, past the stacks of tires, grab our coats, and say goodbye. But Mitchell tells me to come back next winter. He says his nuclear reactor will be finished by then, that he’s already got the radioactive parts from two thousand defective smoke detectors to use as fuel rods. He cracks this twisted smile and says, "I should get great BTUs."

We leave Mitchell’s house and run through the black snow to get away from that disgusting eruption coming out of his chimney. We get to the car, and we’re gone. Nobody says anything. It’s like we’re trying to understand what just happened. Eventually, Marc speaks up, he says Mitchell is a psychopath. "Yeah," I said, "but he’s the nicest psychopath you’ll ever meet."