Original subtitles

I received a Christmas card this morning.

It didn't come with the regular mail for some reason.

That was a bit strange.

It was also strange that it was addressed from my friend techno.

It read: "Hey rob, if you are reading this, that

means I'm dead.

I just want to say thanks.

I'll see you soon.

Go get drunk on me.

Techno."

Techno stypes.

What a guy he was.

He always said he'd never make it to forty.

A year and a half earlier, i was on a plane to China,

I was on my way to see techno.

He was at the military hospital in Guangzhou,

waiting for a new liver.

His father sent me with two clear instructions: One - gotta

get techno to stop drinking, at least long enough

to receive a liver transplant.

And two - get him back home to Vancouver.

Get techno to stop drinking...

That's not gonna be easy.

Cos that's what techno really liked to do...

Was drink.

And smoke.

And fight.

He was in no condition to fight.

He was sick.

He was really sick.

He was crippled from a car accident when he was seventeen,

but that's not how he lost his big toe.

He lost that in a motorbike accident.

Yeah, he was broken alright.

What was he fighting for anyways?

And what was he still doing in China?

I first met techno in the fall of 1978.

My first memory of techno was, we were playing soccer

on this field, and, the ball was coming right to me.

Right when I was about to jump for it, this kid jumped right in

front of me and he jumped higher than

I'd ever seen anybody jump before.

And he chested the ball, sorta trapped it, and then he

kicked it, from about halfway across the field,

and I'm pretty sure he scored....

Another time, there was this sports day at school,

and I remember he casually picked up this ball,

and he chucked it, right across the field.

And I remember going up after him, and thinking 'oh I could do

that', and I chucked the ball as hard as I could, and it only

went halfway across the field.

For the next little while, i went to that school on the

weekends and practised throwing balls, to see if I could throw

it across the field, and i never got anywhere near it.

But I'll tell you one thing.

Techno was fast.

Techno was the fastest human I'd ever seen.

When he ran, he just took off.

There's no way you could ever catch him.

And so there I was, I couldn't really Chuck a ball too far,

and I didn't really play hockey,

and I didn't really play soccer either.

All I did, all the time, was I used to draw.

And that's the one thing i could do that techno couldn't

really do, and so, we became friends after that.

One day techno said, 'hey, do you wanna go shoot some balls

around after school?' And I said 'yeah, ok.' In the middle of us

playing around, techno went berserk, he proceeded to break

about 20 windows at the school.

We were walking home, and we got picked up by a squad car, and I

remember thinking i really didn't like to be

in the back of a squad car.

I looked over, and techno thought it was great.

And that kind of explains the difference

between the two of us.

And we were only like twelve years old, and he used to tell

us these stories about fucking his girlfriend, and I remember I

didn't even have pubic hair yet like that's how young we were.

I guess that's the thing with him, it seemed like he could

always just pull it off.

Whether he was diving off a cliff,

or riding his skateboard through traffic...

It just seemed like he could always just pull it off.

I have to admit, they were getting lots of pussy.

One evening, techno phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to go

to a party at the other end of town, with his dickhead buddies.

I declined.

It was the summer of our graduation.

We were seventeen.

Techno was completely in control, and completely

out of control at the same time.

An emergency crew showed up to the scene of the accident...

And techno was nowhere to be seen.

After some time they found him in a bush...

Fifty yards away from the crash site.

He was busted up pretty good, he nearly lost a leg

One day I went out to the bay where he lived to visit him.

I pulled over.

As he bent down to lean into the window I noticed he had

a really yellow complexion.

Apparently, he was given bad blood from the hospital

and contracted hepatitis c.

He would eventually sue the hospital for

another 600 thousand dollars.

By this time techno was very rich.

He always had an odd assortment of hangers-on available

to do odd jobs for him.

There was Freddy the freeloader, dump truck, Teddy two fingers,

and dogbreath...

This guy was a piece of work.

Most of them were crackheads.

Techno could stay up for days on end,

Polish off dozens of pear cider in one sitting.

There was a little girl there named flora,

holding my name on a card.

We exchanged greetings and she went off to look for techno.

After a while techno appeared.

He shook my hand.

His expression was something like 'thanks for coming here

man', mine was 'now let's get you the fuck outta here.'

back at the military hospital, I met dr Lee.

He explained to me that it was imperative that

techno quit drinking.

The sooner he quit, the sooner he was able to receive a new

liver, it was that simple.

And also, if I could get rid of that damn cat in his room.

I turned to techno...

'Ok, where is it?'

he knew exactly what I was talking about.

He produced a bottle of baijo, he was mixing it with gatorade.

'All of it' I said.

It took a while, but eventually he gathered up all his various

He'd look at it and grimace and say something like 'ah I can't

eat that kind of lettuce' or 'i can't eat bananas without

sprinkles on it' or something retarded like that.

And so it went...

First it was Seinfeld, then friends, then we discovered

my name is Earl.

Other than that, there wasn't much to mark

the passing of time.

Techno had his good days, and his bad days.

He'd looked forward to a special meal for days.

Techno's immune system was so low, a piece of fish that was

slightly off or some other funky food would put him down

transplant surgeries.

I remember looking at a pile of rubbish in the corner of the

elevator and thinking how filthy this hospital was.

I'd never seen techno so scared.

The transplant ward had flickery lights and holes in the ceiling,

and then they wheeled him off through the double doors

and he was gone.

Kung and I walked back to the hotel.

That dumb cat darted out in front of us on the way back.

We were called back to return to the hospital.

Dr Lee wanted to show us techno's old liver

for some reason.

This infamous liver that's been the source of so much grief, I

had to take a look at it.

A couple of days later we saw techno in the isolation ward.

He was behind glass with some other patients.

He had tubes running down his mouth and he was hooked up to

all sorts of machines.

One day I was in his room, he was sleeping.

He was chewing, and putting handfuls of air

in his mouth and chewing.

He woke up and said 'ah man, i was having this great dream

about food.' I asked him on another occasion 'what does it

feel like to have a new liver?' He said 'it feels, it feels like

somebody removed a frozen lasagne out of my chest and

replaced it with another frozen lasagne.' Now it was time to

plan the exit strategy, but first we had to

pay off the hospital.

For some reason the hospital only took cash.

Techno's father had to organise a massive

western union transfer.

It was a big fuck up.

Western union didn't wanna transfer that much money.

It took all day, but in the end we had a big bag full of

one hundred renminbi notes.

It was a stack of notes over two feet long.

Me and two little Asian girls were my backup.

We returned to techno's room.

Dr Lee had to explain how all the anti-rejection drugs had to

be taken, all of which was in mandarin.

Then I had to rush back and collect techno, who was having a

smoke by the lobby.

He had a surgical mask pulled down, he was wearing his black

cowboy hat and his white suit, which was two sizes too big.

I told him about the missing note and he said 'yeah I know,

cos I took it.'

long pause...

I was steaming.

'Let me get this straight, you stole a hundred renminbi,

of your own money?' Grabbed his cigarette, snuffed

it out on the ground and then we headed to the airport.

First I had to see kung off, and then techno and I had to

get a plane to Hong Kong.

And this is where the story gets really fucked up.

I'd over-stayed my visa by a couple months,

that's a big deal in China.

This caused all sorts of alarm bells to start ringing.

Then they took us to a holding room,

we were about to miss our connecting flight

there was no way techno was not going home on that flight,

so I turned to him and I said 'you go, and I'll meet you

in Hong Kong.' And that's the second time I saw fear

in techno's eyes.

He nodded and then I had this image in my head of him limping

away from me towards the gate.

Meanwhile, back in the holding office another guy showed up.

He said he needed money, he made a space between his fingers

about an inch and a half deep.

Hell, I had a wad about 50 inches deep the day before.

He had someone escort me to a couple of atms and they

shook me down for about seven hundred us dollars.

He was actually a pretty nice guy.

I was about one hour behind techno.

This is the first time techno was unsupervised

since he arrived in China.

We were too close to home to blow it now.

I arrived in Hong Kong and immediately scanned every bar

and smoking room all the way to the gate.

I finally caught up to him at gate one hundred and something.

He didn't look so good.

In fact, he never really looked good again after that.

He walked all the way from gate five.

I don't know why he didn't get a wheelchair.

At one point he sat down on a bench that said 'wet paint.'

he had black marks going across the back of his white suit.

We boarded the flight to Vancouver.

He had a business class ticket and I was in coach,

what the fuck?

I could see the top of his cowboy hat through the curtains.

I called the flight attendant aside and I said 'my friend

cannot drink under any circumstances.

He's also very persuasive, so don't be fooled.'

I was totally acting like a cop again.

And at one point, techno came back to coach

and sat next to me on the flight.

He seemed so calm and happy to be going home.

I hadn't seen techno this happy for a long time.

With all the commotion happening that day,

I can't remember if he took his anti-rejection pills.

He was supposed to take them twice.

This next part of the story is a little hard to tell.

It seemed like we had finally got home after this huge ordeal,

and I handed techno off to his folks.

I sorta thought I needed some time away from techno

for a while.

That night, techno made a turn for the worse, and went into

pure rejection mode, and began to turn yellow again.

He was rushed to the Vancouver general hospital.

Over the course of time his situation went

from bad to worse.

I couldn't believe it when I heard the news

that techno had died.

Techno was convinced that nothing could kill him.

The truth is, is that by this time, there really wasn't much

keeping techno alive.

His ashes were gonna be distributed out at the cliff

where he used to dive off of at lighthouse park.

His father said a few words and distributed his ashes.

Just then a big gust of wind came and picked up that big

cloud of ash and blew it towards this group that was about a

hundred yards downwind from us, and they completely got dusted

with techno's ashes.

And his dad said, kinda comically,

'son, even in death you're still giving me troubles.'