Excerpt from Patient: A Memoir
Chapter 5
Raymond Rules
It’s the smell of gasoline that takes me back. Grease on my hands that never really comes off. Playing with my brother Ryan pouring gas on our hands from the pump on hot days because it cooled them off. Using gas to wash the grease off our hands. Laughing. We were always laughing. He’s thousands of kilometres away, and every time I pump gas in my frozen capital city, I laugh thinking about it.
Smells always take me back. Ryan and I grew up on our parent’s auto wreckers, and the smells were everywhere.
I always laugh when someone tells me the countryside is so pure and clean. I grew up in the country, living in a cesspool of auto effluent. We drank well water. Amazing we don’t glow in the dark.
Our closest neighbours owned a chicken farm and when they burned the chickens on Sundays you couldn’t go outside because the smell would slap you back indoors. Up the road were the sewage ponds. The sewage trucks would arrive regularly and offload into deep, oil covered ponds. On warm days, and when the wind came from that direction, you could taste the air.