Friends Of Duane Manwaring

And so Duane and I became friends. We spent a lot of time over coffee at the local Dairy Queen and, much more often, at the Grange Cafe (where the owner, Park Chow, was to eventually raise the price of coffee refills, exclusively for the two of us, due to the fact that we'd occupy a booth for hours at a time, drink copious amounts of coffee, smoke the air thick, and almost never order any food). A typical evening for us during the week-nights. Week-end would see more of the same, except for the fact that our base of operations would normally switch to the local bus depot, which was the only 24 hour venue available in Dauphin. Plus the bus depot had pin-ball machines, at which Duane was very adept. He could keep a quarter in play for a couple of hours. And so it went: coffee, cigarettes, pinball, books, music, discourse, and late, late nights. Until I met Duane, the concept of a night-owl was merely a theory. With time and effort he soon had me on his schedule. It was brutal at first, and I'll always remember my first 24-hour stint and dragging myself home afterward, barely conscious, hardly articulate, while Duane stayed behind at the bus depot, as dawn lightened into day, to play out his quarter on the pin-ball machine.