samoyeddogs

That’s right.  Check your bank account.  You have a bank account, don’t you?  The kids’ll be taking a break and you’re broke.  You’ve been broke for some time now, haven’t you?  Like, if you’ve got two hundred dollars in the bank you’re feeling flush, right?  Feeling chipper?  Ready for Vegas?  Your account balance is $46.21.  You have no investments, no RSPs, no TFSAs.  You had to sell off all that to survive.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s bridge under the water.  Now it’s about the $46.21.  Poverty teaches many things.  The main lesson is it’s a lesson you didn’t need.

Being broke actually gives you a lot of power.  It’s not really great power, but still.  You have the power to say “no” to so much.  It’s the triumph of being broke.  You’ve made it.  You’re indifferent.  Let’s take a short break here to have a look at nature’s riches.

Being broke means you’ve bought one pair of pants in the last five years.  You did well, really saved up.  You went without so that others could shine then finally you went out and bought those pants.  They cost you a dollar.  As for shoes, well, there’s been no shoes.  It’s a good thing you stocked up on shoes when you had the chance because even now, at this advanced date, some of those shoes are still wearable.  It’s close, but you can kind of fake along, right?  You go from strength to strength and it’s the power of the impoverished.  You’ve sacrificed everything for capital A Art and it isn’t until recently that you’ve realized the guy’s name’s not Art at all.  It’s Phil.  There’s been a error somewhere and you made it.  And Phil is not locatable.  Is that a word?  Everything’s a word here.  Locate?  Lo-cat?  Able?  Locate-a-cat?  ‘I should think that something must be terribly wrong somewhere.’

It’s five years now that you’ve been this broke.  Everything’s five years.  You used to buy anything you wanted.  Lots of pants and shoes, and shirts too as well as coats and jackets.  These days you’re still holding the line on shirts.  You haven’t bought one shirt in the last five years.  You’ve “borrowed” one jacket, meaning you wore it on a guestworker gig and neglected to return it. You liked it because it was black like you and carried no insignia of any kind and you knew, anyway, it was from Costco and cost about thirty-eight cents.  And anyway later the proprietor said it’s okay, keep it, you earned it, and she was right.  So you did.  You haven’t bought a coat, sweater or even a pair of shorts.  Okay you’ve bought underwear.  Let’s keep it real.  And you haven’t succeeded in stifling your ambition for books and beer.  You haven’t stopped reading and keep those famous words of Oscar Wilde close to you:  “I’m for beer and plenty of it.”  And you remember another one over at Ernest Hemingway:  “Beer is a food.”  He said it in “Green Hills of Africa”.  I wonder who the last person is that read “Green Hills of Africa”?  So you feel it’s all right.  And you support the economy of your back lane by leaving your empties out there.  Being broke doesn’t mean you’ve lost your passion for philanthropy.  It’s obvious you’re a generous soul.  Let’s take a short break here to have a look at nature’s riches.  There’s that echo again.

Obviously it’s wheels within wheels.  It’s poverty explained.  You can get a little burned around the edges and maybe the exposure hasn’t been all that great and there’s nothing but tofu in the house, but in the midst of death we’re in life.  There’s that too.  You can be cancelled financially, but you know what?  You open an account across the street.  Get over there.  You bring in your pennies and you’re helping your country too.  Get those pennies out of circulation.  Your patriotism is unquestioned.

You can tell when people have decent jobs.  They wear decent clothes.  But you’re still a lucky human being if you can see that you are.  And, who knows?  A dump truck full of cash could be right around the corner.  Alexander Pope was right.

This stuff’s pretty good.  Or can be.  You take a hit once every two months and it kind of sets you up, you know?  Hopefully?  You go to the library.  It’s virtuous.  It’s educational.  You can do your research.  It only takes a couple of hours.  It’s also a bit like church.  Lot of grey-heads when you get down there.  You get to the venue and start the count and you see that there’s about 6 guys here including 2 that are members of the team that puts this thing together.  And about 50 women.  Come on guys, you got a problem with poetry?  It’s always the ladies that come out.  The guys sit at home drooling or staring at some bull sporting contest or practicing what they do best which is being some sort of tard, but poetry on a Sunday afternoon?  Come off it.

One guy came in late, stayed about ten minutes, and decamped.  He had a point.  The reading was turning out to be a bit of a snooze-fest.  You can have good poetry kind of neutered by ineffective presentation.  I’ve seen this kind of thing before.  Earnestness doesn’t equal effectiveness.  Write that down.  I mean, how do you massacre Shakespeare?  He doesn’t deserve it.  He put in his time.  It should have been good.  It wasn’t.  What might one expect from a masters in creative writing?  From the great uni no less.  Enough said.  The guy reading Lew Welch.  What was he doing up there?  He brought all these books and laid them out on the table to his left but no one could see what they were.  He did a lot of talking but only ever read about one and a half poems by the guy he was here to represent, who couldn’t represent himself because he’s dead.  He’s dead, man.  Finished.  And he’s got a lot of company.  More is more, you know?  Give him a chance.

Milder days ahead, I was thinking, regaining the concourse.  We deserve it.  Enough said.

We weren’t supposed to talk about this. I told Rodriquez I wasn’t writing about this place anymore.  But there’s so much great material!  And I’m thinking, if you can do 300 you can do 400. And the world is starved for material.  I mean good material.  It’s not that great a number.  400.  400 shifts.  It’s still embarrassing but you made it, right?  You’re still here.  You’re hitting 400.  And that’s too bad.

Right now I’m in the “Break Room”.  It’s that tiny room the size of a shower stall, or maybe a little bigger, but not much, where all the excess product, the broken cases and pierced cans and half-filled returns and stale dated stuff is dumped down the drain, and it’s amazing not only how much product gets written off, but how all of it is just dumped.  Bye bye.  It’s a messy, sloppy job and you wonder, you really wonder about all this stuff going down the drain.  There are worse things going down the drain, but is there something worse than going down the drain?  It’s dark down there, but if you’re anywhere around this drain you’d be drunk as a sewer rat, hombre.  Swimming in it and sinking.  Blub blub.

I had a strange experience.  Somebody kept putting the “Closed” sign in front of my till.  It happened twice and I put it away twice and then there it is again.  I saw Sebastian and realized he was doing it.

“Why do you keep putting the closed sign up?”
“Because I want to see you in the office.”

So that’s it.  Wants to see me in the office.  Could mean anything.  I have a good working relationship with Sebastian.  He’s a lifer manager.  He bears a striking resemblance to the “Milhouse” character from the Simpsons cartoon TV show.  You remember the Simpsons?  Striking, uncanny resemblance.  It’s all right.  Being called to the office could mean anything and usually does.  I follow Sebastian in at a distance.  The “office” is also a small, cramped space, but bigger than the break room.

“What’s the latest outrage?”  I ask, as I step into the office where Sebastian is standing waiting.

“You’re not selling enough chocolates.”  This is a booze store, not a chocolate shop, I think of saying, but think, correctly, that this might sound a bit flippant, and I don’t really want to irritate any of these lifer managers unless I’m really, really provoked, in which case I just wouldn’t care.  “We’re tracking it and you only sold six yesterday.”

For every dollar a customer donates they receive a chocolate treat in a little pink package.

Of course they’re “tracking” it.  They track everything around this place.  Everybody but the non-com part-time sweats like me track everything.  They’re all narcs.  There must be 60 surveillance cameras watching everyone’s every move.

“I won the gold star last year.  I’m just getting started,” I say.  And it’s true.  They laid a $25 Starbucks gift card on me last year at the conclusion of the “Adopt a School” program for selling the most donations.  And now, after one shift, when I haven’t been here for a week, the order has come down to hassle me because I only sold six yesterday.  Which right there is a snapshot of the organization.

I don’t blame Sebastian.  He’s not a bad oaf.  I know the directive came from none other than the senior manager, an insanely ambitious individual in his little world, who also takes his directives from the area manager, himself a piece of work.  It’s all about money, you see, as in any other organization, despite all the bumpf.  And image.  You can lead a customer to donate but you can’t make them donate, but that doesn’t matter.  Employees are held in such low regard it’s just good corporate management to hassle them every chance there is.  Maybe that’s not quite it.

I might have known something was afoot when I saw the senior manager just earlier in the office at the “shift starter” meeting and he was just leaving for the day and didn’t look at me, just kind of stared past me as he was going out.  I detected something in his non-acknowledgement, but at the time didn’t know what it was.  The senior manager knows I’m a writer and has seen some of my stuff.  His comment on one of my pieces as reported to me by the security guard was, “How does he stand working here with all these stupid people?”

So I knew who and what had put Sebastian up to it.  And later, when transferred to the break room, where you can’t importune customers to donate to “Adopt a School” because you’re not dealing with customers, I was wondering if anyone had marked it down that I was in here or if the stage was set for another chat in the office about how I’m not selling enough donations.

It’s a nothing.  It’s bagels and cheese.  I’ve hit 400.  That’s a rare distinction.  I can’t help but feel the season is winding down for me here.  No one hits 500.  Have a flower.