Tussaud's
by Paul Cameron Brown

In the wax museum with Attila and Genghis and Tamerlane all so
close in spirit with our century.
At Madame Tussaud's in London: Neill Cream. Burke and Hare. It's
hard to keep the legitimate heroes straight from the villains. I expect
Houdini to make this Niagara Falls and appear at midnight
Halloween.
With so many real and picturesque notables in abundance, I plan
the idea of creating my own arch criminal wax museum assembled
from the hallways and stairwells of my own life.
I imagine employment counsellors from across the years with sardonic
laughs and strings tripping off records to make them authentic.
Then busts of fiendish ex-teachers and hatchet fanatics that
pass as librarians giving me advanced nausea because my card
has technically expired. Think the occasional gesture at remembering
a swine or two from freeway driving might not be entirely out of
place or that mindless clerks administering my life from afar and
costing a future deserve an enshrining.
"A nickel short," droned the bureaucrat, "no transfer," secures him
passage to my waxworks.
"Sorry," and "we'll certainly keep you in mind," as a litany of woe
with its users made to memorize and make good all promises ever
made.
Wish the mind and her memories could be enlarged; I would recreate
my own historic scenes to stand alongside Nelson's Death,
the Little Princes in the Tower. Detail Israeli Nazi-hunters to
track down my Adolf Eichmanns.
Instead of samples from Jack the Ripper's handwriting in the waxworks,
rejection slips and the stylized, flowery "we'll keep your
application on file," would be served up as horror epics.
Dunces that compose form letters made to live out the threadbare
future promises. Each human roadblock making decisions out of
ignorance would have his statement dutifully recorded before entering
a world of his own design.
Ad agency types made to explain in effortless detail to packed
houses why their ketchup commercial should stand up.
Crooked garage operators made to oil and grease the chassis of
every car owner hoodwinked since the automobile began.
Football made a crime punishable by fate.
Shyster store owners too cheap to bag my newspaper made to
launder all the soiled white pants across a lifetime.
Tailors that mistakenly think they are being shortchanged
and become vocal made to attend Sartre courses where "hell is other
people," doctrines predominate.
The huckster, the con-man, those who prey on the multitude
transposed from whatever city of origin then made to tramp the
streets of Toronto where every wrong syllable or misbegotten
accent costs them a dollar of their savings.
My whole museum a living aviary, a subway at rush hour where
snotty, telephone receptionists are fed a steady diet of the Biblical
injunction "by words they shall be known."
Well meaning but ignorant people endlessly poking with the "you
should smile more," placed in a house of mirrors with durable
cassettes of Laugh-In.
Belligerent restaurant owners telling kids they can't use the
washroom then made to mop up the waste they helped create.
The world, a stand-up comic throwing away his happy face then
coming to sit in disgust at the unchronicled petty evil of our times.