Bountiful. Abundant. Excess. He lived without excess - an exemplary ascetic. Austerity was his agonistic response to what he referred to as "a ubiquitous and grotesque preoccupation with status'. "I'm as lowdown as you can go," Vance said. "But I'm no fool, in spite of what you might hear."
He scoffed at those normal lives of moderate excess and inferior luxuries - the short skirt waiting for a suit driving a BMW, the severely insecure car enthusiast, who invests in tail pipes and decals as a way of displaying taste, bored pastel suburbanite IKEA addicts, so on and so forth. While other renowned authors were doing moonlight readings at the Guggenheim prior to another blockbuster release, Vance lived in a shack, somewhere between Jasper and Radium, masturbating to a Traci Lords cooking show when his second book debuted.
"I wanted to be in Belize," he later confessed to me. "But I have no idea where it is on the map..."
Uncle Vance's most intimate desire was to chase hurricanes in Belize.
"You gotta have brass ones for that," he grabbed his balls. "Staring a hurricane right in the eye...saying to that chicken-shit old fart of a watchmaker, 'Hey here I am, you ain't got shit on me, ya old decaying decrepit crank!' - that's fucking life."
Vance did not fear hurricanes or lightning strikes or the wrath of God. What he did fear was publicity and accolades - and by extension, criticism and scorn. So when his followup work was set for release, he shored up supplies at his obscure and undisclosed hideout and planned for a very long stay. When I say undisclosed, I am dead serious. No one knew. Not my mom, not his literary agent, not even his publisher knew where he would disappear to for weeks and months on end. They chalked it up to the eccentricity of an ingenious writer and left the issue at that. I would doubt that military satellites - capable of literally finding a needle in a haystack - could find Vance's hideout. For the longest time, I thought it was a psychosomatic construction. I was wrong. When I did find him, it was a matter of utter serendipity.
Drunk and without my pants, I wandered away from my campsite while spending a weekend in Kananaskis. It had been approximately five months since Vance's second novel, It's all @%&*#@# because of the Turret's, and I was wasted. Stumbling through the trees, smiling lecherously at the owls looking on, I heard a booming shrill voice shout, "Fucking cocksucking mother...", or so it went. It was a loud virile voice. Having nary an idea where my campsite was and still monumentally hammered, I gravitated to the forceful profane sound.
"God, good God, good goddamned sodomized faggot God." As the voice became progressively louder, I knew that I was getting warmer. As my arms hacked through the brush, I notice another foreign sound: the bloodthirsty breath of a pack of hungry wolves.
Needless to say, once I was aware of their appearance, I bolted towards the humane profanities. Slashing through brush and trees - cutting up my arms mighty badly - I burst through to see my dear bedraggled Uncle Vance. He laid on the ground, semi-conscious, still cursing, as his severed hand laid on the chopping block. Before I could get to him, the wolves dragged the hand away.
"Shit, crap, fucking Hemingway in his petite ass..." his ribald grievances continued. I could understand why.
"Where the fuck is my hand?" The wolves were out of sight by then.
The sight of that bloody stub where his hand used to be sent a surge of sobriety through me. I grabbed my cantine-flask and poured its contents over a towel, wrapping it around my uncle's wrist. I told him there was no time to waste, grabbed the bloody machete, and bolted in pursuit of the wolves.
All told, I had little idea on how to subdue a pack of wolves and retrieve a severed hand - much less coming out of it unscathed and in one piece.
