Author: Steven Brown

Have you ever gone to a free poetry reading and when you arrive there’s a sign on the door, “Sold Out”?  It happened to me.

Some days you just have to get motivated for poetry.  For weeks I knew the reading was coming and planned to attend, but, at the last moment, I wavered.  Should I?  Will I?  It wasn’t quite a case of, “Do I have to?”  I was bending, but I got out.  I left a little later than I should have all right, and was taking public transit.  I wasn’t even sure what bus to take north over the Cambie bridge and ended up waiting at the wrong stop, which pushed the clock further towards the 3 pm start to the reading.

I was waiting on the east side of Cambie around the corner from the entrance to the “Canada Line”.  A bus pulled in.  It was the “Downtown, Granville Island”.  I asked the driver, “Do you go downtown or to the island first?”  “The island,” he said.  “You have to cross Broadway over there to go downtown.”  Right there I thought again of bailing but pressed on.

For some reason I was feeling apprehensive or ambivalent about actually making it to the reading, the “Dead Poet’s Reading Series”, to which I’d contributed in September at the old “Project Space” venue on East Georgia Street, reading poems by Malcolm Lowry.  What was I worried about?  I didn’t know.  I was on edge.

When I finally got down there (Vancouver Public Library, Main Branch) it was about seven minutes to three.  The library guy (I recognized him from November, he was the guy who had introduced the audience to the Series’ new venue, the VPL) was just putting the sign up on the glass door to the room on level 3.  I think the sign actually said, “This room is now full.  See you next time.”  Or something close.  I turned around and left.  I didn’t try to barge my way in.  “Hey, I’m an important guy.  I’ve presented at this series!  Where’s my seat?”  All the seats were taken and I could see that.  There’s only about 40.  The readings only happen every other month.  I’ve felt myself that the organizers are on to a special thing here and that it could take off on them.  Obviously, they need more room even now.

I went down to the DVD section on the main floor and checked out “Dawn Patrol”.  I didn’t think I’d find it, but there it was.  It was some consolation.  I’d been wanting to screen the 1938 Hollywood epic again due to my research into Mick Mannock, States’ ancestor on her father’s side, the top scoring fighter pilot in the Great War.  Really?

So now what?  It’s Greytown, soon to become Darktown.  You know what I mean.  I’m back at Cambie and Broadway.  I can see that the guy is still sitting there on the sidewalk on the west side around the corner from the entrance to the “Canada Line”.  He was there earlier when I was waiting for the wrong bus.  A native/first nations guy wood carving.  There were wood shavings around his position and he even had a little dustpan and broom, presumably to sweep everything up once he decided to pack up.  I decided to go over there and see what he was doing.

He had a couple of examples of his work propped on top of his backpack which was sitting on the concrete next to him.  He had a freshly lit cigarette going in a small, round ashtray also on the concrete.  “Are you selling these?” I asked him.  I was all bold now and ready to engage whereas earlier I seemed to be unsure of things generally, trepidatious, as we used to say (incorrectly) back in grade school.  Sure we did.

“This one’s twenty-five dollars, that one’s forty-five.”  I picked up the twenty-five dollar objet.  “Eagle and frog,” he said.  It was about five inches long and an inch and a half or so wide, a pale blond piece of wood carved into some of those familiar totem motifs we’ve all seen, the eagle on top of the frog.  “I’ll take twenty.”

That was good because besides a semi-expired transit ticket what I had on me was one twenty dollar bill, one of those bright, crisp new ones.  “I’ll take it,” I said.  The other piece was nice too, and bigger.  It was the size of a coffee cup, a solid piece of red cedar with the image of a single entity.  “Do you have a card?”  I asked.  “What’s your name?”  The guy, he wasn’t young, past 60 at least, said he didn’t have a card.  He told me his name but I didn’t quite catch it.

“Seventh generation carver,” he said.

“Steven Brown,” I said, and we shook hands.

“I’ll sign it,” he said.  He took the $20 and the totem and turned it over and signed it in pencil.  ‘Eric Williams’.

“Eric.  Thank you, Eric. Where you from?”

“Nitinat.”

Nitinat.  Nitinat Lake.  Vancouver Island.  I knew that.  “It’s a talisman, Eric.  It’s good luck.  It’s great.  Thanks.”  I was walking away but then turned back.  “What is it, spruce?”

“Yellow cedar,” he said.  Ah, I was going.  Yellow cedar.

“I know about yellow cedar.  Did some logging back in the day.  Wakeman Sound.  Kingcome Inlet.”  Eric nodded.  “Should I put a little oil on this or something, to protect it?  It’s raw wood.”  Eric nodded.  I put the talisman in the breast pocket of my raincoat and walked away.  It was starting to.

Next on samoyeddogs:  The great Silly Season post that never was.

“You really despise working here, don’t you?”

I’m on the four to eleven and Marcus hits me with this barely an hour into the shift.  He’s working the cash next to me and it’s not frantic busy and he just shoots this out.  I like Marcus but more importantly he seems to like me.  I’m old enough to be his father and I’m here doing this job same as him.  I can’t believe he said this.  Of course he nailed it.  And I’m kind of embarrassed if it’s been this obvious but I don’t think it has, not really.  Marcus is an intelligent, perceptive young man.  He has the further virtue of being unpolluted by higher education, if it’s still called that.  He graduated from John Oliver high school and has been working since then, most of the time at two jobs.  He’s been here five years.  He got hired just before the economy tanked and places like this were advertising in the window for staff.  Really, he knows nothing about me but he considers me “hip”—the word he used.  That could be because I have a passing familiarity with rap and hip-hop music, which he likes.  On another occasion he observed to another employee in my presence, “Steve’s a gentleman.”  He has also acknowledged that, in spite of my advanced years, I’m a hard worker, “unlike some other people around here.”

“Well, yeah, but I need the money.  Got bills to pay.”  Is my response on the cash.  The dreary truth.  So I’ve been working in this place, part-time, for two years now.  Tonight is my 300th shift, which sounds like an incredibly huge number.  Three hundred times I’ve come in here.  It’s a shocking number.  Am I stupid?  I remember being a customer here.  I never dreamed I’d work here.  It’s been hard mentally.  It was humiliating for me to come here to work.  That’s right.  Some people messed me up at my previous employ and I decided my only option was to leave.  It seemed to be an integrity issue at bottom.  Today I wouldn’t cross the street for integrity.  Can’t afford it.  Maybe I would.

So I hack it here, or try to.  I’ve never experienced episodes of such black depression since I’ve been doing this.  Sob story-wise, it’s brilliant.  That there’s lots of pain to go around doesn’t matter.  Working here is stressful.  I’m on call.  It’s not often that I know ahead of time what days I’ll be working.  This is stressful.  My blood pressure rises in the morning and afternoon when I might get a call.  I just never know if it’s coming or not and I don’t like that.  It’s unsatisfactory.  My brain reels but it changes nothing.  I haven’t come across anything else that might be more respectable.  These are not frothy, buoyant times for white guys with grey hair but this job certainly lines up with my working class roots.  Do people still have those kind of roots?  I’m the old dockworker who should have retired years ago except for gambling debts and other bad decisions, the grey-head labourer working a crap job for peanuts because I’m stupid?  Of course.

Everybody’s stupid here.  You have to be.  It’s a stupid job.  I didn’t say it, Antonio did one night when we rode public transit out of here together at the end of a late shift.  He’s been working for this outfit a long time.  Dealing with the public all the time is stupid, but that’s the job.

Employer-employee relations are in the stone age here.  I thought it was bad at my previous employ but there are some truly Neanderthal attitudes here.  I nearly laughed out loud the first time I heard someone in the staff lunch room bitch about management.  It was like theatre.  It was like being back in my old employ, listening to someone bitching about management.  It’s universal.  It’s the long slog until out of this stupid place for good.  Very familiar.

Recently, if we’re both working the late shift and I’ve got the car, I’ve been giving a ride home to another fairly recent hire who happens to live near me.  I should complain.  I’m a some time writer who spent twenty years in books but this guy has a masters degree in forestry and can’t find a job.  We are the intellectual brain-trust of the store.  My friend, from what I’ve seen, seems to handle his affliction better than I know I handle mine.  He’s always cheerful.  It could be he’s a better actor than me.  I thought I was putting up a pretty good front until Marcus blew that up.

I don’t know how long I’ll stick it here.  I’ve found it interesting that in spite of the dreariness a sense of solidarity and camaraderie has developed with my work-mates.  Why not?  You’re still working with people.  I left an intolerable situation in a place I’d worked a long time and here I am in a new situation working with an entirely different group of people and, for better or worse, I’m now a member of this group.  Sort of a member.  It’s about getting on with the job.  You can’t be miserable all the time.  You can try, but cheerfulness keeps breaking out.  Maybe that’s not quite the right word.

They call me Steve, Steve-O, Steven, Stevie-boy, Steverino.  I’m a familiar face now, someone who comes in, gets on with it, and leaves.   Just like everyone else.

Later that night it’s Marcus and me in the staff lunchroom,  nobody else in there at the moment.  He asks me if I smoke pot.  “I’ve done everything but heroin,” I say.  But then he’s naming off some drugs I haven’t tried and, well, no actually, I haven’t done oxycontin or ecstasy.  “I’m a retired druggie, but in my prime, yeah, I tried everything, or just about everything.”

“You’ve smoked crack”?  Marcus asks.

“I have,” I say.  “I wouldn’t do it now though.  It’s hard on the body.  I’m old.”

For a minute Marcus gets talking about himself.  He’s just turned twenty-five.  “I’m not really happy with how my life is going,” he says.  “I think I could be doing much more than this and I feel like I’m kind of wasting time.  I don’t know what to do but I feel I have to do something.”

“Believe me, it’s not that unusual a feeling.  It’s more common than you might think.  I’ve felt like that for years.”

It’s about ten o’clock.  One hour to closing.  It’s not busy.  I’m standing at till 8 and look down the row of points-of-sale and see what looks like Jaccard at till 1.  He sees me.  I can tell that he isn’t quite sure it’s me, just as I’m not absolutely sure it’s him, but pretty sure.  I deal with a sale and there Jaccard is beside me.  He’s come down the store to say hi.  He’s curious to know what I’m doing here.  He has a puzzled look on his face and is slightly shocked, I can tell, to see me.

“You had enough of UBC, the bookstore?”  he says.  Bascially J. is my mechanic, or the son of my garage guy, who has now taken over the family business.  And we used to go to the same gym.  I give him the drop-kicked by trolls line.  It’s getting old, but he hasn’t heard it before.  I feel that twinge, that unpleasant surge I get when someone comes in that I know, and who knows me.  Tonight it’s Jaccard.  Haven’t seen him in here before.

“That’s the two biggest threats at UBC,” I’m telling him.  “Boredom’s number one, and the second is trolls.  I was looking for work for two years.  Finally I had to take this.  I’m here part-time.”  I’m explaining my presence and I’m thinking, wow, I’ve known Jaccard slightly now for probably in excess of fifteen years, although not quite twenty. Varsity Motors.

“Hope you get back on your feet soon,” he says, leaving out the south door with his lady companion.

It’s not true, of course.  That never happened to me.  I was not drop-kicked by trolls.  It’s not even funny anymore and some troll, no doubt, might find it offensive. I haven’t cared.  It’s just a provocative thing to say, and people aren’t sure they’re hearing you right so you usually have to say it again.  Then they smile or laugh maybe because they don’t know what else to do.  Happy 300th, Stevie-boy.