Two-Lane Blacktop

Sideline from movies today..... Reading the Globe & Mail this morning, the lead editorial was about the RCMP and how that can't seem to get their shit together these days. Somethings never change it seems because completely by coincidence, my old pal Brad relayed a great story last night, partly about the Mounties, from 15 or 20 years ago. Most of you are too young to remember, but in the mid '90s there were a couple of murders in Caledon, ON, followed by the abduction of two young woman in BC, all perpetrated by a creepy nut job named David Snow from around Orangeville. They captured him in BC and he was subsequently tried and locked away forever. A year earlier, Brad had rented this guy an apartment for a few months and so knew Snow in a casual sense. A friend of Brad's, a complete wild man named Darus had had business dealings with Snow and around the time he was arrested in BC, the RCMP wanted to talk to Darus about Snow's movements in the previous months.

I only met Darus a couple of times but I don't think I ever laughed as hard as I did when he was around. He was, without a doubt, the most bizarre person I'd met to that point (Remember, this is pre-Reed days). Half cowboy/half Newfie-drunk, he spoke (and as it turned out, also drove) at 300 miles an hour and lived life right on the edge. Around the time of the Snow arrest, he'd coerced Brad into driving out west with him to Vancouver in his bright red 1980 Cadillac convertible. Brad's job was to continually feed Darus beers out of a huge cooler in the back seat because they were “driving straight through” - no unnecessary stops. They pissed in empty beer bottles, cranked the Dwight Yokum cassette as high as it would go, aimed west and drove at a 100 miles an hour straight across Canada in less than 3 days, stopping only for gas, junk food and smokes. Oblivious to the fact that the RCMP had issued a Canada-wide alert to find Darus, the two of them barreled across 4333km of Canada, 3 sheets to the wind in a 35' long candy-red Cadillac with I'm a Honky-Tonk Man playing on repeat at 600dB. Brad said Darus would slow down to around 80 MPH in cities and towns, but beyond a half dozen pit stops to take on fuel and drain this piss bottles, it was straight on through to the Vanishing Point with the needle floating up around 100.

In this case, the Mounties never quite got their man. Once Darus had sobered up in Vancouver, he read in the newspaper about Snow's arrest and that he was wanted to assist the RCMP in their ongoing investigation. He and Brad wandered into the RCMP office in Vancouver to see what all the fuss was about, with Darus announcing rather loudly on his arrival, “What do ya need boys? I just blew into town and I feel like shit”. The Mounties nation-wide dragnet hadn't snagged Darus and Brad, in spite of the fact that you could hear and see them from space and there was only one road that they could have been on..... the Trans-Canada. Not the force's most shining moment.

Who knows how much of this story is true but it's just the kind of thing you'd expect from Darus. Brad lost touch with him over the years which is too bad. He's probably got some great new stories to tell.

Sporgey.