Write me a Letter

that looked as phoney as hell to me but didn’t seem to bother the stewardess any. I wondered if all Canadians were as friendly as Chuck, laughed as much, and drank as much beer. To spare the suspense, it turned out they were, they did, and did they ever. Good beer too, Labatt’s and Molson and Carling; not as good as Corona and Dos Equis and Tecate, to my highly developed taste, but a lot better’n Coors and Miller and Bud, eh.
    Chuck had a veritable host of amusing anecdotes about the cement business. He’d just finished up one about the time a guy dumped a whole truckload into and over a rival suitor’s parked convertible, when we landed. And at Dorval , luckily for my bankroll, because, as know-it-all Chuck piped up to say, Dorval was used for all U.S.-Canada flights as well as most charters. I don’t know why, but Canadian customs and immigration authorities seem more worried about lettuce entering their country illegally than Yankee wetbacks like me, but that’s their business. Anyway we had no problem; my guy even spoke English to me. So did the mademoiselle at Avis who rented me a bright red Ford. Even the free map she gave me of Montreal and its surrounds was in English. I gave Sara a dirty look in the rearview mirror after we’d climbed in and were about to take off, with Willing Boy beside me to navigate.
    ”Everything in French, eh?” I said. ”I haven’t heard a word of French since I got here.”
    ”What’s that, Swahili?” she said, pointing to an overhead road sign of which only one word, ”exit,” was understandable.
    ”Point taken, cherie,” I said. ”Boy, some country, where your copilot not only has to navigate but translate, too.”
    ”Want me to drive?” Willing Boy offered. ”I think I could manage it if you showed me where the gear stick is. Maybe it’s this little doodad here.” He flicked; the windscreen wipers started working.
    ”No, it ain’t that,” the twerp put in from the backseat. ”Try something else.”
    ”Try shutting up and stopping fooling and start navigating and translating,” I said.
    ”Oui, my masterful leader,” Willing Boy said. Sara giggled.
    I drove. At least the road was fairly decent, it actually had more than one lane and was paved. We got to Montreal somehow, finally, after passing through a lot of terrain once featured in Chaplin’s Gold Rush. On the way I discovered Montreal was an island, which I did not know. Well, did you? We even managed to find the hotel. From what I could see of it, at night, the gay Paree of North America seemed large, clean, slumless, old, new, and lively, with many a park and many a square, which cannot be said of many cities in the New World . It reminded me somewhat of a colder and more sedate version of San Francisco , with lots of water and lots of hills in close proximity. It seemed to have an awful lot of McDuck’s restaurants, but when I pointed out this interesting observation to Willing Boy, he grinned and said the big Ms were all stops for the city’s underground system, or le métro.
    ”Just joking,” I said. I noticed Curly had been right about the store signs, too, they said things like boulangerie and charcuterie and brasserie instead of plain-old bread, deli, and bar, which should be good enough for anyone, if you ask me.
    I checked us in under our phoney traveling names, Holmes and Browning, leaving off the initials ”E. B.” in case the desk clerk, who spoke English to me, by the way, was moderately literate. I left him two hundred U.S. as a deposit for the rooms as I only had (with me) credit cards in my real name. I’ll tell you sometime how to get a wad of legitimate cards in someone else’s name when I’m in the mood. I might however mention briefly how you can get all the major credit cards for yourself without having any credit, any employment, and/or any money to speak of. True, I should really check over the details with my financial adviser, Benny the Boy, who first told me about it, as it is complicated and I’d hate to steer you wrong, mes amis, but what the hell:
    Roughly, you have to form a corporation somewhere it’s easy and cheap to do so, reputedly, say, Nevada , and where no proof of assets is required. Then you need a simple contract drawn up that says the corporation agrees to pay you, say, ten grand a month, in cash or stock, so now you have, on paper, one of the requirements for obtaining credit, a well-paying job. Next you have to set up a bank balance at