Tussaud's

    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.