This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
MACK MCCOLL OWNS ALL RIGHTS
To Rest and Reincarnate
Chapter One
Diablo Dybbuk lives in a shroud of mystery,watching behind camouflage as the world unfolds. He is wild and free to make criminal moves and engage in illegal, immoral and odious behavior. Evil is everywhere and Diablo is part of it. He heard something about 10 Commandments, for instance. Whatever those are, he's for breaking them. He is in tireless pursuit of perversity. He doesn't get bored, dismayed, or confused. He conducts trivial criminal acts mostly and lives for one intense compulsion. He cannot stop thinking about her. She is irresistible to his dark, hollow, empty (probably defective) heart.
To keep moving forward, an inclination of human beings in modern times, also, something sharks do (move forward), Diablo goes drug store to drug store to pick up prescriptions and sell the addictive stuff. This keeps him slip-sliding on a patch of winter ice, spring ice, also, early autumn ice. He survives by travelling the country to pick up prescription drugs, welfare cheques, and shady women.
Diablo doesn't addict people to narcotics intentionally. But he would if he had to. The drugs sell themselves. He's not opposed to making people happy. He's not in favor of it either. This he learned from Ronnie the world traveler. Diablo once took shelter in Moosimin, Saskatchewan, where he was born. It is a windswept town on the bone dry prairie,1,500 dusty heads 20 kilometres this side of the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border. There was a bus depot, and a room at Fake Uncle Ronnie's little shack, considered a permanent address by the social services department of the flat province. Munchhausen mom was long gone. He didn't know anything about her. Never knew. She managed to remain invisible to Diablo his entire life. If she was sitting in front of him, he would not know it.
One of Munchhausen mom's ex's showed Diablo a rare form of tolerance. Ronnie the world traveller was demented. Ronnie lived a thoroughly malignant life, prone to fitting people into his surroundings as needed. Ronnie showed Diablo how to drive a car. Ronnie showed Diablo how to get a narcotics prescription. Ronnie had the largest collection of porn mags Diablo (or possibly anybody) had ever seen. One entire wall of a shed behind the shack was stacked floor to ceiling with porn mags. This is interesting. This is thousands upon thousands of porn mags, Penthouse, Playboy, you name it, all the rest, various presentations of smut going back to the beginnings of smut, Diablo surmised.
Ronnie spent hours engrossed in his magazines smoking dope in the shed out back behind his shack. He had a gas heater. He would reach in and pull a magazine out randomly. "You know how people lie, and say, 'I buy them for the articles,'" he told Diablo, one afternoon, finally, flipping pages through a haze of cigarette and weed smoke, "Not me. I never say it. Never said it in my life." Ronnie confessed he didn't buy the magazines for the articles because he doesn't read, because Ronnie has a form dyslexia so severe he cannot sign his name. He dropped out of grade eight at the insistence of teachers and administrators who complained they were tired of preventing his effort to burn down the school. "It's amazing how useful it is in the medical and financial system when you can't sign your name and you have a doctor's note to say you need to leave an X for a signature," and not a very good X. Like, “That's an X?” Ronnie looked at pictures and consented to fine print nobody was prepared to read out loud at prescription counters.
An obsession with pornography might be explicable for a definitive half-wit in the face of illiteracy. Another thing with Ronnie is he doesn't function on alcohol, thus a life-time ban from legal driving (rigorously enforced, he bragged). Instead he's middle-aged with a mental handicap, tobacco-stained teeth, and a gigantic morphine monkey on his back. On the other hand, Ronnie could tell you to the penny how many rubber cheques he had bounced with a doctor's permission. And how many, “rooves,” he had to fall off to hit the worker's compensation jackpot. Ronnie knew other things, such as how many informants it takes to run a rural RCMP detachment. Also, where to find those informants.
When Diablo was cut loose from foster care, he gravitated down Highway 16 from Saskatoon to Moosomin to visit the last house he occupied with Munchhausen mom. She had been living with Ronnie in the small house on a dusty corner of outer Moosimin when Diablo was taken by social workers, and Ronnie lived there still, but Munchhausen mom was gone.
“Your mother? I don't know, and I thank god every day. She was the most bitter, most vengeful, most hateful monster I ever met.”
Diablo put up a hand, but Ronnie ignored it, and continued, “And she hated your guts. Said so every day. She called you the Albatross.”
“You're preaching to the lead singer of the choir, Fake Uncle Ronnie.”
“Don't call me that. We are not related. They put her in a straight-jacket with a hood on her head and I never saw her again."
"Yeah well neither did I."
“Count yourself lucky, I am so sorry I met her,” he continued, “She is the most evil cunt to ever darken my door.”
So many people, always the same story, “She makes you look like a fucking saint. The social worker who took your sister out of here whacked on 5 ounces of Benylin Cough Syrup calls her the kind of person who breaks the system.” Does he have to give her credit? And, no, she did not make Diablo look saintly, since he is a form of self-made perfection.
Diablo harboured no delusions. First of all, he knew everybody hated him. He is ready to live with this and agree, openly. This freedom from guardianship is his cross to bear. Everybody has a mother. His happened to be the same one as the Devil's. Diablo heard her say she was an 'old soul' to more than a few buckaroos on various benders over the years while he navigated a childhood of hospitalizations and needless, uncalled for, and often life-threatening surgeries. (Aren't all surgeries life-threatening?)
He had seen her in action up close for 14 years by and large being stuck there to witness a multitude of personality quirks (also known as a 'Legion,' he was told by one quasi-sympathetic Jesuit Priest while on a temporary stop-over at a Rectory, where Diablo was hung up momentarily for an inexplicable reason related to foster care). It's possible she had been around a few thousand years. Even so, he never learned a single thing about her. She might have been Hungarian. No evidence pointed to anything but crazy, and possibly flexible. Fake Uncle Ronnie did say they locked her into the jumpsuit real tight. Sis has a name for Munchhausen mom. She calls her, 'The Executioner,' because Munchhausen mom uses potassium chloride to kill her boyfriends. “If it's good enough for the government,” she says. “Mom, they don't do executions in Canada anymore.”
“'They' don't. The Government of Pandora does.”
Fake Uncle Ronnie let him occupy the shack in Moosomin for a while. "I do not dislike you," Ronnie said, holding a strangely neutral position in relation to virtually everybody else. Diablo was informed about the world in which Ronnie once travelled. Ronnie bragged about being physically fit through most of his life, 5 foot 9 inches tall (one inch taller than Diablo), holding steady at 165 lbs. (20 lbs heavier than Diablo), dirty blond hair sometimes long with a permanent hairline. (Diablo's hair was a rusty frock of tightly matted curls low on his forehead to obscure his sharper features.)
Ronnie scored weed for Paul McCartney one time in Amsterdam, he said. There would be no way to disprove this. It's an odd thing to lie about. This was the single moment in his history that made Ronnie seem like a world traveller.
Ronnie was a roofer on the prairie until he fell off one of the. . . , “ -- rooves,” (perhaps archaic, and not the only thing archaic about Ronnie). He became a permanent ward of the medical system in the flat province, even though he continued, “. . .rooving,” around Southern Saskatchewan. The sum total of Ronnie's wit could be found in one sentence, “Feb-uary is Lib-ary month.”
Diablo saw Ronnie as a cartoon, and a sloth, not simply lazy, but too lazy to bother to think, which was what made him a foil for Diablo's seriously deranged, outrageously psychopathic, and eternally opportunistic Munchhausen mom.
Ronnie dropped consonants. Munchhausen mom whistled through broken teeth. She said Ronnie could take a joke because Ronnie is a joke, “Ask him to say 'battery,'” she cackled. Apparently he drops vowels too. A three-year relationship was the record for Munchhausen mom. Diablo reassured himself Ronnie was not his father. Their history wasn't long enough. She didn't need men anyway. She used drugs and alcohol and sex to conjure tornadoes of chaos. She didn't take drugs and alcohol and have sex. She needed others to take drugs and alcohol and have sex so she could treat them sadistically and murder them without suspicion.
Diablo had seen her knock off a couple of 'boyfriends,' and this equipped him with a level of prudence regarding personal use of drugs and alcohol. The unspoken truth about Munchhausen mom's disappearance was a life sentence she is serving for multiple murders never proved. Ronnie suggested they put her in a nut ward with a bit between her teeth. “It was her, or me. She lost.” Ronnie credits his survival to his freakishly high tolerance for drugs and especially poison, in particular, Potassium Chloride, “Indetectable upon autopsy," she would say, and cackle, and whistle.
Eventually Diablo was introduced to one of Ronnie's former partners (in crime), a businessman in Regina who owns a used car lot in the northeast corner of the city. Foster is a typical used car salesman, ready, willing, and able to fleece you to your face exactly the way you expect. The more he smiles, the more wool you're going to lose, and you stand there smiling back while he does it. “You got room for four bodies in that trunk,” is a plaque on the wall of his office, which truly endeared Diablo to the place.
Diablo is presently riding in one of Foster's used cars smoking dope on the way to Regina where he stays at the historic LaSalle Hotel and blind pig. The historic property downtown on Hamilton Street is a habit of reasonable comfort (sagging bed springs, no terrible odours) for a bargain basement price. Diablo often repeats the phrase 'Historic Property' around the owner because it drives Roger Dubois crazy. The provincial historic property rules involving the preserving buildings in Regina put Roger the hotel owner on the fast track to insolvency, he complains, profusely, with no justification, since Roger bought the building under those rules, and Diablo finds this amusing.
Diablo works hard to keep the disgruntled owner of the historic property slammed on morphine. One of the owner's daughters' changes Diablo's sheets once a week. After a while he is going to ask her to do his laundry. And he would give her a tip. Don't buy historic property.
Diablo's main vocation and mode of survival is to obtain prescription drugs and sell bennies and narcotics on the street. Regina is a small city of 167,000 souls, including those possessed, sold, and under attack by intensive demonic forces at play in this particular and peculiar community. This was the way Diablo saw things. He requires a larger area of operation and Ronnie suggested going inter-provincial. "You look sick enough to have a thousand doctors chase you with prescription pads. Too bad your brain isn't as big as your nose. You need to think bigger. You need to know what they want." What they want are patients who take drugs. Diablo happens to look like somebody who needs a lot of drugs and is avidly interested in taking them. Was his nose that big? Sort of impish, upturned at the end. Yah it was kind of big. At least Diablo can read a book at the end of it.
Selling prescription drugs keeps him off the radar of street drug dealers and their issues selling cocaine and marijuana, and other drugs like heroin and LSD, and guns and collectives and insatiable addictions and those complications. Ronnie told him prescription drugs keeps you off the cops' radar, too, because cops don't regard pills as illicit generally, within reason. (Filling the backseat of a stolen 1974 AMC Gremlin with pills from a drugstore break and enter, well, Ronnie did time for that one.) Doctors don't worry about pills being addictive. Ronnie has a few cop customers for his own stash of 482 morphine sulphate pills per month with a street value of $20 per pill. Ronnie ends up downing the profits.
Ronnie is a strung-out morphine addict. Diablo shakes his head at the routine around defecation. Ronnie is free to roam the ether and atmosphere for somewhere between four days and one week, at which time he has to come down and face the toilet like a man. This is more amazing when you consider Ronnie's appetite. He's a regular at a local fish and chips shoppe on Tuesday night all-you-can-eat. Granted he doesn't eat the batter, but 10 pieces of cod slide down his gullet like a seal or a sea lion or a seagull, or all three. Presumably a day of shitting ensues after the weekly feast of oily fish. Diablo isn't a participant in long term morphine use.
Another piece of cop wisdom from Fake Uncle Ronnie: a driver in the right-hand lane of traffic is ignored at all times of day and night. Ronnie lost his driver's license permanently and would never see it again, and this was for a specific reason. Ronnie was as bad at driving as he is at reading, and who knows, maybe for the same reason. But he was correct about driving in the right hand lane of traffic. Cops drive by like you aren't even there. You could have a hostage in the backseat tied up and gagged, flailing at the window, cops wouldn't bother to look.
The truth of the matter was Ronnie used Diablo as a chauffeur for several months until Diablo shuffled away to greener pastures with a fresh driver's license. You cannot say greener pastures out loud in Saskatchewan without raising laughs the size of dirt clouds. As if there could be any greener pastures than Saskatchewan. Ronnie allows him to continue collecting welfare cheques at the Moosimin address. It's not like a social worker wanders out to the Manitoba border to check on the whereabouts of the much younger son of the mother of Satan.
In his daily endeavours, Diablo acquires Quaaludes, 100mg morphine, Valium, and speed, anywhere from Saskatoon to Toronto, and lately Talwin and Ritalin in Winnipeg. Endless comings and goings at odd hours in highway buses crossing the endless expanse of Canada leaves him feeling delightfully disoriented. He lives with a master plan, of course, which comes with a strategic mind developed out of an urgent need for survival, and the chase of an elusive object.
Diablo reads. There was a reason for this. He learned early in his life that Munchhausen mom was intimidated by reading, so he devoured everything he could get his hands on. He loved doing it in front of her because she would often completely lose her shit and leave the house, and he might not see her for days. He loves reading up on how to cheat. He cheats four provincial governments and countless social workers out of cheques. He cheats countless doctors out of drugs. He is extraordinarily fit for faking disability, and switching identities.
A legacy of gifts from Munchhausen mom was permanently disabling conditions, pigeon-chest, double-joints, knobby knees, big ears, a long nose, FASD, drug habits, nicotine habit, (mostly heroin)-related congenital damage, and disorders of all sorts that keep on giving in cash to spend on hookers and travel and a carefree existence. He has several crash pads across the country. He is overdue to visit his Toronto 'address,' which is a bivouac with Tony and large colony of cockroaches, located a few blocks from The Brass Rail on Yonge Street, Diablo's all-time favourite peeler bar.
There are no strip clubs in Saskatchewan or Manitoba. There are strip clubs in Alberta, but Diablo isn't connected in the province of Alberta. There are strip clubs in Montreal. He watched a superbly stacked blonde on St. Catherine's Street dance it up to Funky Town. Diablo's interest in Montreal is strictly to pick up two-year-old Cadillacs and Oldsmobile 98s and deliver them to Regina. Diablo doesn't run a welfare scam in Quebec. Too much hassle about speaking French and explaining where you came from. “I came from my mother and it wasn't pretty. You don't want to hear any details. And you don't want to get me started. Il n'ete votre probleme, unless you conjure it.”
HELLO My Name, Is: Tiny (name-tag on his chest) is a Jamaican who lives in Toronto in a dirty yellow bathrobe and a belt with a large hunting knife stuck in it, and it was an unsightly bathrobe but at least it wasn't pink. Meeting Tony was 'Luck of the Draw' when Diablo fell off a Greyhound Bus five days (and 50, 10mg Valium pills) after leaving Regina, he thinks, with a night spent in Winnipeg and a night in Thunder Bay, (he thinks, maybe yes maybe no, on Thunder Bay). During the period in reflection, he cannot say for certain the month, and, don't forget, memories fade or completely disappear on occasions when you are involved with drugs, doing them, but there was a sign in front of a monstrous looking red brick building in St. James district, across Church Street, not far from downtown Toronto's acclaimed Yonge Street, longest street in Canada.
“Room For Rent,” was scrawled (likely, presumably, almost certainly) in blood on a cut-out piece of brown cardboard, nailed to an ancient faux column of no particular design, painted in whitewash. The tacky sign nailed to the non-weight-bearing fake porch-colon was the 'Draw.' The sign was there to attract Diablo, unmistakably.
He rang the doorbell marked 'manager.' It was functional. The manager had been prompt, "Just tell 'em the manager sent you." He pointed to his name-tag. Diablo leaned in, and squinted, T - I - N - Y? "Tiny, huh? Is that ironic?" About 6 foot 5 inches of solid Jamaican muscle rippled with laughter, "That is an 'O'," he said, glassy dark eyes shining crazy and bloodshot. Tony enjoyed the attention of the large hunting knife planted in his waist belt. The terry cloth robe was tied, by and large, but, thankfully, Tony wore boxers to go with his stocking feet and pearly white teeth.
Diablo received a tour within seconds, entering the south hall, The hideous brick building was three storeys high, on the inside, and, turns out, located on the way to the welfare office. So. Convenient. The halls were dim, the walls were thin. Small, square, box-like rooms lined both sides of the south hall, and both sides of the north hall, on three floors. The hideous building was a warehouse of people, plywood walls separating dozens of raving lunatics, in the manner of separating but containing dangerous and certifiable psychopaths, sociopaths, deviants, and degenerates in a stark, nowhere running maze. It stunk of despair and vermin. It's a place you might expect to find Munchhausen mom running a killing floor, except fake uncle Ronnie was right. She would never see the light of day again.
Tony the manager lived on the 3rd floor, in the back of the building, It was clear immediately upon stepping in the place, Tony was the manager of a human zoo on three dingy levels, and 'the Luck.' Interminable dankness was warmed by an old boiler clanging and clunking from action in the basement to ooze enough heat to keep it occupied under a permanent banishment of sentiment like welcome or contentment. Diablo took paperwork, and left by the north hall. No elevator was available except for an off-limits freight elevator at the rear, used by the owner exclusively, an old Toronto dowager, according to Tony. “To qualify for an emergency welfare supplement from the Province of Ontario, go down the block and across the street.” His instructions had been concrete. It was perfection, wouldn't you say?
Even sleeping 48 consecutive hours on a Greyhound Bus, Diablo managed to keep things straight in his head. Diablo had not been back to Toronto for a few weeks now. The arrangement with Tony allowed a backlog of three months. After that, Tony had explained, he would keep what he got and tell welfare to stop the cheques. Sure ya would, big fella. It isn't hard to imagine a long history of 'managers' like Tony in St. James neighborhood. This is the kind of manager that can dispose of bodies, either with attention of authorities, or without.
It is a short distance to Yonge Street and literally a stone's throw from the welfare office, which Diablo never needs to visit again. His arrangement with Tony came to this: Diablo needs an address to get a welfare cheque. The address is the ticket to the free drugs. Tony read the scam like a book he wrote hisself. Diablo explained to his Toronto landlord, “I will not be back, except to collect my half of the cheque. You can rent the room to somebody less crazy than me.” He had seen enough of the screaming meamies in the building on a single walk-through. Tony agreed to the arrangement.
The welfare office had cemented the multi-thousand dollar deal. “We have to conduct a home visit.” Diablo handed the social worker the address scrawled in pencil on a piece of white cardboard, which was the back of a cigarette package. "Tiny Tony sent me. He recycles a lot of cardboard into literature. Here's some for you."
The welfare office person didn't smile. “Yah, we know. We don't do home visits to this address."
Diablo recalls twisting on the inside wearing a blank expression, acting fast on his feet, searching for the will to live. This was an unacceptable punch in the gut which he was determined to convey to the office clerk.
"It's the only address in St. James we don't visit," she added, casually, feeling safe behind bulletproof glass.
"Well it's the only place," he stammered, "I could find. . , ," or wanted to look.
"Come back in an hour with this form filled in. A cheque will be waiting."
A flabbergasted Diablo smiled, his mood spiking, giddy at striking the gold here on Ontario. Like, finding a pirate ship loaded with it. Sure you have to fight some of the pirates but this was the day he felt the warm embrace of a concrete jungle called Toronto. No doubt Tony cruised the hallways half-dressed and menacing everything but vermin. He probably did a lot of screaming and yelling, but must be laughing sometimes. Tony sold shitty weed. And he seemed to be an even-tempered psychopath, generally speaking. That is to say, he might be miserable or he might be happy. He managed a building with few if any even-tempered psychopaths. One tour had proven the rules with unbridled screaming and dress optional in the facility, doors open, doors closed, doors slamming. Diablo makes rare visits. No overnights, goes slightly further than by the book of the 'emergency' social workers in St. James.
Diablo makes an effort to live up to his name, but it wasn't work. Being diabolical can be arduous and taxing and challenging, but it is a choice. It is what he wants to do and he has given this vocation to himself. It was what he needed. It was the only thing he was gonna get. Everybody knows it. It was written in the strange contours of his face.
"Can I see your ID? Uh huh. Well, Darren, we make the cheques out to your building manager." "Tiny." "Tony, fills out in this form. You bring it back, and we give you the cheque, which you take back to Tony." "Tiny."
She reminded him they do not do 'home' visits to Tony's warehouse. “Yes, ma'am, I had a tour. The place is as scary as it looks.” She smiled finally, “I cannot imagine,” she said, and waved goodbye.
Diablo has no reason to be so defeatist all the time, does he? When does the devil ever lose? He worked things out with social workers, and, ultimately, Tony, doing business at a small table in a kitchen/office, in uniquely (for the building) livable quarters on the third floor, at the back of the building. After he filled out the welfare forms diligently, and took the cheque, and returned Diablo's share with cash in 30 minutes, the test run was complete. Best of all, Tony writes letters to a medical clinic around the corner for 'tenants.' This moment rose as negotiations were finishing. It came up because Tony likes valium and never says no to a mickey of Bacardi rum. Diablo learns Tony goes nutty around rent day, and people who turn their backs on Tony are betraying him (or themselves). Diablo doesn't turn his back on Tony. Diablo backs away slowly.
Getting half of a welfare cheque for rent is a dividend. Prescriptions are the core of the business model. He acquires diet pills in Toronto, and a large volume of mild sedatives, mild sleeping pills called Trazzadone, some Mandrax usually prescribed to anxious housewives. Diablo makes runs to Winnipeg for Talwin and Ritalin.
Besides Tony in Toronto, Ronnie in Moosimin, and the stupefied hotel owner in Regina, Diablo fostered a few other connections. One was a former partner of Ronnie, a guy named Foster who sends guys to pick up cars from Winnipeg or Montreal occasionally, but more often from small towns near the U.S. border in south west Saskatchewan. Foster is a bad ass, but he plays himself off as Mr. Goody Two Shoes by sponsoring victims in Alcoholics Anonymous.
Another connection was an Indian Diablo met on the streets of Regina with the hookers. Virgil wasn't a pimp, per se, but Diablo was known to sell one or two pills on Rose Street, now and again, and Virgil knows this in explicit detail, down to the stamp on the pill. You might even say forensic detail. Which begs the question, what else does Virgil know?
Virgil comes to Diablo's room at the LaSalle Hotel in downtown Regina, on occasion, and, while he doesn't come alone very often, Virgil does the talking. He says he doesn't visit the hotel's slum level tavern nor the demon-rich blood red Rococo Lounge. Too many over-served Indians in one, too many under-served white people in the other. As it turns out, Virgil took to distributing pills to girls for Diablo, a lot of pills, way more pills than he had been selling earlier, so Virgil and his sidekicks were in and out of the rickety elevator like ghosts. They had a new hankering for T's and R's, which came in limited supply. Speed was plentiful (diet pills). Morphine was plentiful. Valium, tons of it. Sleeping pills. Always.
Diablo's main prop was to present himself bedraggled and sickly to attract a specific sort of person into his orbit, fellow losers. From this life, a lack of magnetism. On this earth, a short run at kicking up the dust. Diablo didn't know where his personal life-force came from (or went to). Speculating is pointless, to contemplate in polite company, impossible. It's off-putting how offended people get when you gab a little about Satan. Others were too drunk or incapacitated to give a fuck. Diablo's heedless diabolism grew from a power he was granted by Munchhausen mom. The power of dismissal. This came directly from his primary guardian, and since he had no guardian, Diablo was acting strictly from his own diabolical volition, a disposition which had been developing throughout his entire life. He noticed the condition of being guardian-free created a sort of night-vision.
Diablo emerged from childhood with a profound sense of abandonment. He longed for it. This was an incubator for remarkably bad feelings. He made peace with the vacuum but it caused Diablo to act in manipulative ways. One night, growing up, one of Munchausen mom's peculiar ex-boyfriends (in a parade before Ronnie) opened the door of the bedroom shared illicitly with Diablo's budding sister and threw in a paperback which landed on the grim-looking linoleum floor of the stark lit room. He remembered how mind numbing cold it was in the room, as well as the rest of the house, until the arrival of that book. "What am I supposed to do with that? Burn it?"
"You should memorize it first, " fake uncle number 10,000 said, "People should know where the fuck somebody like you is coming from. How you survive this bitch mother of yours is something diabolical," he had added, and disappeared for all time shortly thereafter. Diablo's younger sister on the mattress behind him was swaddled in blankets and sniggering at the alarming exchange. All in all she had a good sense of humour. The most dreadful or silly thing could make her laugh. This time it was The Satanic Bible. Sister gave him the name Diablo thereafter when he began to read it out loud.
He and his sister separated during those formative years, by the time he was 14 and she was 11 (and she was a remarkably and perhaps exceedingly developed 11 year old). Once he became an adult, Diablo travelled far and wide mostly by Greyhound and Saskatchewan Transportation Corp, (STC). He was known to ride the rear seat of a Greyhound Bus. He rides STC but those trips are dull. On STC he hooked up with an occasional farmer's daughter once he figured out the stereotype was true. Rides in Saskatchewan are of short duration, for example, leaving no time to get bent or do any drugging of fellow passengers who ride obliviously through several changes in driver. It was Greyhound taking him to exotic locales like Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, and Toronto, and Montreal. He switched to l'autobus for Sherbrooke, and something else for Halifax. Diablo went east for his big adventures.
Occasionally he was shuttling cars for good old boy Foster, sometimes from Montreal, but he was in Regina presently, which is the base of his operations. He had taken the literary pimp's advice, modified the beliefs with a true believer's zeal for exploring one's "own nature and instincts." Zeal entitles Diablo to interpret beliefs whatever way suits him, and this book is open to interpretation. He gives copies to people who appear to have unrealized potential to walk sideways, speak extemporaneously, act out a character toward an end suitable to themselves and possibly Diablo, who is ready to take them to the darkest corner of the darkest side in their darkest moment.