The Countess Bubna – Litic was without any doubt one of the most compelling characters Kelowna BC has ever known. She was born Irene May Blair but by the time she landed in Kelowna BC she was a countess, having married an Austrian blue blood. Her legacy began with the opening of a destination resort hotel in 1926. This is an excerpt from her story.
“How can you defend those dirtbags!?”
It was my friend Clayton, a retired prison guard who had worked at the Kamloops Regional Corrections Centre. We were sitting together at the ’10am Small Dog Dog Park’ in West Kelowna and Clayton knew I had been a guard at Oakalla prison in Burnaby and a defence lawyer. For him it was more a statement than a question and it was perhaps the two hundredth time I’d been challenged about my work as a criminal defence lawyer.
The doors of the Club Zanzibar, one of Vancouver’s most notorious nightclubs, swung open. And in we went an Inspector, a dog handler and his police dog Argus, two other police officers and me, Cst. Tony Peyton, a green untested young cop seconded to the Vancouver Police Department through the UBC law student police officer program.
I’m 71 now and have just published a book, “I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can’. It begins on August 4, 1958 the day I disembarked with my family at the port of Montreal, fresh immigrants to our new country. I was eight. I wanted to tell my story for my children and theirs, and have spent many months exploring my memories of the decades since. As I spelunked down some deep corridors I came across this story about my time as a guard in one of BC’s most infamous prisons. It was a notorious hell-hole called Oakalla.
The courtroom doors opened and a man strode in shackled and dressed in prison fatigues, surrounded on all sides by a phalanx of RCMP officers dressed in civilian clothes. Underscoring the tension, each of the police officers had one hand on the prisoner, the other on their weapons, safety off. A man sitting at the back of the court in the gallery was the hitman.
The prosecutor leaned over to me as the witness left the courtroom, surrounded by a phalanx of police detectives, each of them with their hands on weapons under their jackets, “Dead man walking.” he whispered as the witness passed. I was a defence lawyer in one of the most dangerous and intense trials of my entire career. My client, Roch ‘Rock’ Pelletier, a French Canadian was charged with first degree murder and attempted murder.
BANG! I fired the gun and a phosphorus bullet put on an incredible display, the bright purple ricocheting off tree trunks like some sort of pinball light show. I caught a glimpse of the bear on his haunches, no doubt wondering, ‘What the hell is this manner of naked nonsense’ or some such thing. Whatever the beast actually thought, he decided this was all a little weird for his liking and took off into the deep forest.
With a humble nod to Stuart McLean, one of Canada’s greatest story tellers and humourists.
Let me pick up where I left off hurtling face down, mimicking some form of a lumpy human torpedo, headed directly toward a gnarly thicket of old bramble bushes, which upon seeing me approach opened a tunnel and consumed me. I literally disappeared into a giant prickly maw, something like the insatiable blood drinking plants in the Little Shop of Horrors.
Writing for profit is a fool’s game. I don’t, I write for myself. Some of my writing is profound, some is important, but most of it is neither of those two things. I am at my best as an observational humourist, filtering the mundane through the ‘amusing’ lens and writing.
David Sedaris is a great American observational humourist and he has unknowingly guided me as I spelunked my way through many a dark, confusing writing tunnel. He taught me to stop worrying about inspiration. He says that human beings are very funny, hilarious at times. The knack he says is to get better at seeing it. He is right, if I have grown as a writer it is because I am better now at ‘seeing’ us as we are, simple and complex, shallow and profound, tragic and hilarious. We are endlessly fascinating, a never ending source of writing inspiration.
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