by Bill McNamara

So much to say and the clock is ticking; it likes you succinct, precise. So does your audience at Our Town Café, 245 East Broadway on the second Wednesday every month for Word Whips and Story Slam. Contact Johnny Frem at 604-254-0355 or visit www.boltsoffiction.org Here’s the winner of the June Story Slam.

When I was 20, I had a job delivering medical supplies around the Lower Mainland. One place I used to go about every two months was Essendale, the insane asylum. On this particular day, my good friend Nicky decided to come to work with me. Nicky. The toughest guy I ever knew.
At Essendale, the place I needed to get to was central pharmacy. This was located in the basement of the building at the top of the hill where they housed the criminally insane and the insanely insane. When we arrived, I backed down the ramp and we unloaded the goods, then we went to look for old Bob Strothers, the man in charge, but Bob wasn’t in his office, so we looked through this door, this door, this door, and this door here that just closed behind us with no doorknob on the inside.
We’d made a dreadful mistake. There we stood in a long green hallway. At the far end to the left was a sign that said: STAIRS with a little arrow pointing up, but between us and that sign was a crazy-man – a little guy, stuck to the wall, held there as if by magnetism. His head was turned away from us, and his pants were down to his ankles. Nick and I decided to head to the other end of the hallway. Not wanting to look frightened in front of each other, we opted for the casual-high-speed-walk. When we got to the other end of the hall, we were “casually walking” at about 30 miles an hour. We hung a hard right up the stairs and about halfway up we encountered someone coming down. This was a woman...a giant woman. If she was not six-foot-six, then she was seven feet tall. She weighed an eeeeasy 500 lbs! Her head was shaped like a pear, but not a good pear. This one was on its side. She had one little eye and one big eye. She had too many nostrils, and one big claw-like hand was gripping the railing as the other looooomed out above us.
Just then I heard a piercing shriek. It was Nicky! And he was scared! Now I was already scared, but seeing him scared made me really scared, because I didn’t think he could be scared. I looked at him again and realized that he was terrified, so I became horrified, then we both became petrified, because at the same time we each had the same thought: “The last man down the stairs was the one that woman was going to grab and possibly eat.” We turned to flee, but slammed face-first into each other. Without a moment’s hesitation, we began to punch and kick each other as hard as we possibly could in order to orient ourselves in the downstairs facing position.
Once at the bottom of the stairs, we tore down the hall at blistering speed. The guy who was stuck to the wall was at the end of the hall. He heard us coming and turned to look. He was on the right, so we stayed to the left as best we could, hoping to zip by without incident. But no such luck. At the last possible second the magnetism that was holding that man to the wall gave out! He sprang towards us; his little hand shot out. He wanted to shake. “Hi! How are ya! Nice t’ see ya...”
We squealed like little girls and slapped his hand down. We did not want to touch a crazy man and thereby go crazy ourselves and have to stay there. At the bottom of the second set of stairs, we looked up. All clear! Like twin rockets, we shot to the top. We made a hard right and there we were, in a hallway full of people…Oh yes...people. People I cannot and will not describe. People I don’t believe it’s right to describe.
And as I ran down that hallway, I made a second mistake. I looked in the rooms on the right and the rooms on the left and in those rooms I saw…POW! That was my mind popping like a cheap balloon. Overload! From that point on, all I could see was a thick, creamy, white fog and in that fog I heard a voice like Scarlet O’Hara saying, “I’ll think about this tomorrow.” But behind that voice was another voice and it was saying, “Oh no you won’t.” And I agreed more with that second voice and kept on running. Up stairs. Down stairs. Through hallways till we came to a huge room at the front of the building, and that room was like a lobby, and in the middle of that lobby was a desk, and that desk was like a donut, and in the middle of that donut was a nurse.
We walked up to that nurse, panting, wheezing, gasping and we said to her, “We’re truck drivers. We don’t belong here!”
She gave us a glance and said, “OK,” and pushed a button. The front door made a buzzing sound, and we hurled ourselves out onto the lush green lawns of upper Essendale. And yes, there were crazy people out there too. You could tell they were crazy just by looking at them. But compared to what we’d just seen inside that building, these guys looked pretty good. So we smiled and waved at everybody as we walked around to the back of the building, and there by my truck stood old Bob Strothers.
He said, “Where the hell were you?”
I said, “We decided to look around.”
He said, “Well, don’t do that.”
I said, “Bob, we ain’t never gonna do that again!”
He signed our papers and we left, and that was 35 years ago. And to this very day I still see my good friend Nicky every now and then, and we’ve never discussed that incident since.

Bill McNamara is a cartoonist, animator, writer, and builder of hot rod cars and trucks. Published in various motorcycle magazines since 1976, he is at present just driving a truck. He can be reached at b&dmcnamara@telus.net. Story Slam is held on the second Wednesday of every month, 9 pm, Our Town Cafe, 245 E. Broadway at Kingsway. Contact Johnny: 604-254-0355 or boltsoffiction@hotmail.com. www.boltsoffiction.org