I see Boogie as a stoic mountie, out to do right, but not so naive that he believes there aren't grey areas that he will have to encounter and disarm, possibly by inching across ethical lines. He meets his walking, talking ethical dilemma in the form of a teenager living somewhere outside of town on his own, in a shack. He's an orphan, and Boogie has almost caught him a few times lifting things from a camping supply store on the edge of the vast Canadian frontier, but he hasn't moved to arrest the boy due to sympathy for his situation. But when Boogie finds out that the kid has apparently been lifting just the right supplies to cook up crystal methamphetamine, he decides that the grey area has gone decidedly into the black.
Still somewhat sympathetic to the teen's sitation, Boogie decides that an arrest would do nothing but ruin the life of a boy in a difficult situation in his formative years. He briefly considers turning him over to the state foster program without notifying them of the boy's legal transgressions, and he even investigates this angle. He decides not to follow through after an encounter with local authorities, whom he believes so shines of pedophilia, hidden well by years of practice.
So Boogie is up a creek. This teen is breaking the law. This teen is on his own. This teen appears to be a pretty nice guy. Arresting him would ruin his life. Turning him over to the authorities would have him exploited. What's Boogie to do?
Boogie drinks. He's only been working for a scant year, and he's dealt with some heavy situations, but this is different. He's well-educated, and studied enough grey areas that he believed he would never be at a loss for a thing to do in a jam. Not him. never. But it did happen, and now there was a 15 year old boy that was occupying his thoughts at just about every waking hour. There's no peace for poor Boogie. He wants to help society, the store, and even the kid himself, but none of the options available are "clean." Someone is always left hurt, and by shuffling his feet and not addressing the situation, Boogie is the one getting hurt. Within two months, Boogie has fallen deep into alcoholism. He has put on a lot of weight, and he looks lost, and unshaven, and his job is toddling away from him. He could easily pick up the pieces and make everything, everything right if he could just make this dilemma go away.
Things go from bad to worse. After a particularly dark night, first at the pub, then at his apartment after he got kicked from the pub after a tab disagreement, Boogie sees things go the opposite direction of him, all angels lost. After a supper of Banker's Club vodka, Boogie realizes that he has to make things right tonight. The next day, his supervisor has called a meeting, and it appears to be his job on the line. Boogie figures that if he can't remember "the line," he cannot cross it. As he leaves his place, he grabs a shotgun and a bottle of bourbon. He hops in his pickup truck and says, "this is it."
He drives to the teen's shack. He's ended up looking at it from a distance several times over the course of the past few weeks, wondering whether to arrest, kill, turn in, help, whatever. He just doesn't know any more. He puts some shells into his gun and kicks in the door to the kid's shed.
The kid is in there, jacked up on cold medicine, the good kind that they still sell in Canada, where gold is gold and freedom is freedom. The boy, half out of his head, is reading a poorly translated copy of Nichomachean Ethics, and this puts Boogie over the edge. He came here to murder a meth cooker, and instead found a sad, parentless cough syrup addict trying to read philosophy. Boogie collapses, crying, dropping the gun on the floor. The kid, startled and freaked out, drops his book onto the ground, into a puddle of cough syrup vomit that just happens to be there. He scrambles across the floor to Boogie's dropped shotgun. Boogie is puking up bourbon and cheap vodka, grabbing his head between vomitus heaves.
Then, the kid points the shotgun at Boogie, and makes him get down on his knees. The boy then makes Boogie suck his cock, and a bizarre sort of Stockholm syndrome kicks in. All the problems are solved, and Boogie's long-nascent electra complex has been satisfied. The boy will not get molested, or arrested, or killed.
Several hours later (I am giving them their privacy), Boogie exits the shack. it is approaching dawn, and a wave of remembrance washes over Boogie. He remembers in explicit detail what just happened. He remembers that he has a meeting with his supervisor in a few hours, and that he is still likely to get fired, even if he tells him that he got rid of his problem situation; heck, especially if he tells him that. He has little choice of what to do. His indecisiveness in addressing the grey situation leaves him in a cold situation where he has to fix his flaw, and do the right thing.
He walks up a nearby highway exit ramp, onto an overpass. Taking a cassock that he retrieved from the teen's cough medicine sex cottage, he strips naked, and hangs himself from the overpass. Right before he dies, well, when you die from hanging, the last thing you do is simultaneously orgasm and shit. Since he was "empty" from his liquor- and Robitussin-fueled sexcapades, Boogie blows dust as he hangs. But he still shits. Right on the car of the one woman that possibly could have loved his alcohol-imbibing, cough medicine-chugging, pederast ass.
the end
