samoyeddogs

“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.

October the last, 2013.  So I decide I’m going.  I must go, must present, must be my own unpublished brand.  Writing stinks when you can’t make a go of it.  You feel lousy, like a loser.  It’s sad.  Success is for other people.  But go to the party.  Free food.  Stand around with published Penguin Random House writers.  People will wonder who you are and they’ll be right, all right.  You’re no one they know because you’re not one of them.  You’re a spy.  A spy from nowhere bringing nothing.  It’s tiresome, but go anyway.

I go.  I walk down.  I can’t sit here like a wet bar stool with my 20+ rejections.  It’s ‘The Sandbar’ on Granville Island.  I go upstairs and see Trish, who sent me the invitation.  The Penguin Random House party in conjunction with the ‘Vancouver Writers Fest’ is in the same space in the restaurant as last year’s Random House party, also hosted by Trish.  That was before Random, for whom Trish has worked for a long time, merged with Penguin to form a really, really big publishing company.  Trish has a new job title: Publicity Manager.

I remember last year.  It was so hot in that upstairs space I nearly melted.  It was all the bodies.  And there was a raging gas-fired fireplace fire making it even hotter.  I was standing next to Aleister Simpson or whatever the crap his name is and we both had our backs to that raging, unnecessary roaring gas-powered fire and I remember saying, “It’s hot in here.”  I think Aleister gmumphed or something.  Something came out of his mouth.  I had nothing else to say to him having read none of his work and with no plan to. Aleister. Aleister something.  Some writer, published a few books, damn him.  I then shook Timothy Taylor’s hand.  I hadn’t much to say to him either.  I read a story of his once I thought rather good.  I read a novel of his I loathed and not just because it enjoyed some publishing success.  I thought the novel was bull.  I hated it, cover to cover.  I remember thinking my unpublished novel of the day being much better than “Stanley Park”.  Alas, Taylor gets published, Brown not so much.  Taylor’s a player, Brown not so much.  I hate writing and all writers.  My non-career is an embarrassment.  Nevertheless I was slightly sycophantic to Taylor, as I recall.  “You’re a big strap,” I said to him.  “You write big too.”  The dude was taller than I remember from some reading I saw him at.  Plus he looked as if he’d been working out.  Bench presses, or something.  But he can’t be that cool, I remember thinking.  Drives an Autobus.  Saw him getting into it up 10^th one afternoon in the supermarket parking lot.  Well, crap all these published writers.  Crap crap crap ’em.  Then later I saw Taylor talking to another real writer, what was his name?  Crap.  Can’t remember the names of these titans of Canned-adian literature.  They shake hands.  Heighton.  Steven farking Heighton.  That was it.  Two tall white guys in their dark blue tailored jackets having a jaw as I was in process of deciding to get the hay out of here that night.  These wunderkinds of Canned-adian literature.  So good.  So fine.  The word “greatness” has been attached to Taylor by some doped-up book reviewer.  Heighton is merely a “genius”.  To tell you the truth I’ve no doubt they’re good guys and were probably embarrassed by such asinine encomiums.

This year there’s fewer people and vastly fewer dark blue, tailored power jackets on male backs.  For instance, I’m not wearing one myself.  I come pretty much as I feel, which is every day-type clothing including the black, rayon pants made in Bangladesh that I’m wearing tonight, the same ones I wear to my part-time job.  I’m in disguise.  I’m an outsider.  States said this later when I told her about this.  L’Étranger.  An outsider not completely out of it, apparently, as I’m first talking to Trish, then I’m saying hello to Hal Wake, then I go over and I’m talking to Lesley Hurtig and from there, moving on to Michael Winter.

“Michael Winter.  Great to see you.  Steven Brown.  Haven’t read your latest, I’ve got a copy of ‘The Big Why’ but haven’t read it yet, but I really thought ‘This All Happened’ was terrific.  Yeah.  I was doing a thing with Martha Sharpe at the time.”

“Oh yeah, she’s great.”

We shake hands.  He’s taller than I would have imagined and speaks with a definite Newfoundlander twang.  He looks tired too, and older than images I’ve seen of him.  He’s a long way from home and doing all this book promotion stuff and Writers Festival-ing.  He introduces his companion, a lady who speaks with a European accent, possibly Czech.  I decide to pop the question.

“Michael, how do you get a novel published in this country?”

“Just keep trying.”

I’m on my way out because I have to get up early and this party didn’t start until ten p.m., but there’s John Vaillant whom I’ve met before, whether he remembers or not.

“John.  Steven Brown.  Met you a couple of times.  Once at UBC and at the Tiger event for the film festival down at Cinematheque.”  We shake hands.  I ask him about the novel I’d heard from Trish over a year ago that he was writing.

“It’s coming out next year,” he says.

“That’s great.  Looking forward to reading it and possibly writing about it.”

“Oh.”

“Do you live in town?’  I ask, kind of off the cuff.

“Yeah, not far from here.  I walked down.”

“Me too.  I’m close.”

I see Trish again.  “Thanks a lot, Trish.  Heading out.  Got an early start tomorrow.  See ya.”

Home by 11:30 p.m., and beddie-byes, just as planned.  In my mind’s eye I see Michael Winter walking over to John Vaillant after I disappeared.

“Who was that?”

“I don’t know.  What did he say his name was?”

September Something or Other, 2013.  Saturna Island.  Perfect morning.  Make coffee.  End chapter one.  Chapter two, part one.  Change light fixture.  Change broken outdoor plug cover.  Done.  End part one.  Part two.  More coffee.  Watch States sanding deck right outside my windows.  She’s doing great.  Doesn’t need my help.  We’re finishing the re-staining of the deck begun last September.  You have to do things in stages because you’re not here all the time.  Months go by.  Magnificent job, States.  Magnificent job.  She’ll have it done and I won’t have moved a muscle.  Thas grand.

All calm this morning.  Sunlight through the pines and firs.  The trees.  Through all that forest green.  Fell down drunk last night.  Didn’t take much.  Sometimes even one shot of bourbon is enough.  Don’t mention  a shot and a half.  Was up since 4:00 a.m. so feel the whole experience worth it although in my downfall I scratched my right ankle on a broom stump.  You know.  Broom.  That invasive species from Scotland some twit planted in these isles a century ago.  We’re hacking it back.

Beans are ready, States’ time-honoured baked beans.  Need to seriously think about eggs here.  What we do is we dig a hole in the beans in the shallow pan, like a frying pan?  Crack the egg and it goes in the hole and cooks and then you eat the beans and eggs.  Usually, in fact always, it’s two eggs apiece.  Those and of course the beans and a glass of juice or milk and maybe a slice of toast and you can certainly say you’ve had breakfast here today.

The deck.  Stuff is easy enough to slop on but you’re either on your knees or bent over double plus under the burning rays of the sun and this is work.  I’m sweating and groaning but we get it done..  I put a little Willie Dixon on and take a break.  It’s 1:57 in the afternoon.  Not sure what happens now.  Maybe a bit of a look at the distilled spirits course material.  Can’t seem to get over as a novelist, moving on to distilled spirits.  Simply put it’s wait things out until “Frailty” comes together, my next benighted novel, and try to make a little extra dough as a spirits consultant.  Or I could start reading Douglas Coupland, whoever he is, as I’m apparently reviewing his new novel for some newspaper.

September 13, 2013.  Friday morning fog.  10 a.m.  We’ve even got the fire going.  The wood is well seasoned now and burns well.  Fire burning.  Out of nowhere the Juncos came.  Looking for seed but we have it not.  We have coffee, but they’re all coffeed out.  Bouncing around with a Kinglet or two it seems, as if that were possible.  The flight flies off.

Breakfast of bangers and hash browns and old cassettes from the 80s and 90s.  The un-recapturable past.  Or is it unrecapturable?  In the woods you decide.  It’s your program out here.  Things will not always be as they have been.  But the old honeysuckle vines will be everywhere, as they have been.  States:  “Sure is a lot of wood around here.  You wouldn’t want anybody playing with matches.  Dad liked the honeysuckle because his mother used to have it in the garden.”

Noon and it’s still foggy.

4 p.m. and the sun is out.  We drive to the store for a few provisions.  Going down the hill from the store homeward bound we pick up a hitchhiker.  His name is Cameron, he’s a fairly elderly islander, and we give him a ride to his place on Sunset Boulevard.  He has two Siamese cats.  “Nootka” is in the driveway and is a friendly feline.  “Neptune” is about somewhere but doesn’t come hither as States pets Nootka in the driveway a few moments.  Cameron had a slightly gamey odour coming off him from his position in the back seat for the short ride.  Gamey and perhaps an undercurrent of alcohol.  Well, what else is there to do on this pokey island?  But the guy’s got two Schmeezers.  He’s gotta be all right.  It was foggy around Sunset Boulevard too, he said, but it burned off hours earlier.

September 17, 2013.  Don’t know what happened to September 16.  Heard something drop away and when I turned to look—gone.  Rose at ten.  Did dishes, which seems to be the ritual around here.  Do the dinner dishes in the morning because why bother with them after dinner?  Works well.  Plenty of water in the tanks and we heat it in the big and bigger kettle on the stove.  The stove is old and in need of replacement and we hope to do that by the end of this year.  New stove.  New fridge.  Just a general round of new appliances all around.  Would you like a couple for yourself?

We left Corgi in the driveway and drove to the store.  He was obviously used to going for car rides because he very definitely wanted to come with us.  He was eager.  I stayed with him as States drove to the road.  We didn’t want any squashed, arthritic Corgis besplattering our leafy parking area and driveway.  I got in the car at the road and Corgi was making his way towards us.  We drove off and could see him in the rearview mirror standing in the middle of the road watching us disappear.

Reggie update.  September 19, 2013.  Reggie the corgi indeed made it home.  We’ve sent a picture to the Janzens. Pam Janzen said seeing old Reggie always makes her smile.