CONGRATULATIONS ON EVERYTHING
Nathan Whitlock
For Meaghan Strimas
“SAY, IS MY KINGDOM LOST?”
– Richard II, William Shakespeare
“WINNERS FOCUS ON WINNING;
LOSING TAKES CARE OF ITSELF.”
– The Risk Illusion, Theo Hendra
“TO BE GOOD AT SOMETHING, START BY BEING GOOD.
THEN FIND THE SOMETHING.”
– First Impressions Last, Theo Hendra
Jeremy wore a skirt of keys. They shimmered on his waist like small fish living in the safety of his belly’s shadow and grew wild at the back in schools of five and six. They balanced him out – with his skinny legs and dumb gut, they steadied him and helped correct his walk. On the edge of 50, he moved as if pushed hard from behind, falling forward, about to drop out of his life’s frame like a character in a self-aware cartoon. He stumbled through days, weeks, years.
There were keys for every job, every lock. He could have laid them out in reverse chronological order and gone back through every door over which he’d ever had authority, until he reached his 19-year-old self: the busboy at a resort in the Muskokas, all panting and horny and chubby, hauling cases of beer and dumping ashtrays, working his way up to a coveted spot behind the bar. One of his very first bosses, while handing him his very first key, told him the house rule was liquor in the front, poker in the rear. Jeremy said he didn’t know the place hosted card games, then quickly tried to find a way out of his mistake, which was pointless: every bar and restaurant has its own grammar, its own language, and it pleases the native speakers to laugh at struggling newcomers.
Years later, when he’d fought his way out from behind the bar and was starting his first managing position, there were more rules.
“Don’t let the staff go Christmas shopping. You know what I’m talking about?”
Christmas shopping? He thought it was another joke.
“Not really.”
It was simple: every December, a bunch of high-end whiskeys and scotches disappeared from the storeroom, along with a lot of the good wine. Everybody’s mom and dad got a nice bottle for Christmas, and the bar absorbed the losses. No big deal, right? Like the bartender who pours out a whole bottle of good bourbon for himself and the rest of the staff over the course of a night and writes it off as spillage, laughing as he underlines the word, daring management to call him a liar. Jeremy had done it himself, before he was put in charge. For his mother’s birthday he’d swiped a bottle of sparkling wine, which she thought was champagne. He didn’t tell her otherwise, since that’s what he’d thought it was when he grabbed it, and only realized the truth after she pulled off the dollar-store wrapping paper. His mother cried, “Champagne!” as she turned the bottle round and round in front of her face, reading each word on the label, delighted. She paused at Niagara-on-the-Lake. “This must’ve been expensive.”
He accepted a pat on the back from his father.
Jeremy started counting the liquor stock every morning instead of once a week, and would confront staff when the counts were off. All that shit had to stop: the Christmas shopping, the spillage, throwing some bottles in a bag on the way to an after-work party. It was theft, pure and simple. He was management now; he had crossed over. He could fire them. He occasionally did – some people couldn’t be told.
Jeremy kept every key. One day, a day filled with light and music, he would turn them all over as proof he’d worked hard, that he hadn’t been a complete asshole when he’d had every chance to be, every right to be. That he’d overseen hirings and firings, and done so as fairly as he could. That when he got his own place, when the Ice Shack was finally up and running, he had tried to make it good, a decent place to work, an oasis. He’d tried to make it the exception. In an industry filled with assholes and psychotics, he was the rare good guy. He’d done some shitty things – sure, fine, he was the last person to deny it – but that was only because he worked in an industry filled with assholes and psychotics.
He’d been better than he had to be, put it that way.
Some bars and restaurants were lawless zones. People spent months or years working up the courage to quit; others simply walked away, like kids abandoning a game they suddenly realized they were unlikely to ever win. These escapees looked back in amazement that such things could go on without someone, some higher authority, stepping in to restore order. It took a long time for their bodies to unclench, for the dread to fully drain out of their systems. The wildest things happened, the absolute craziest, like in a prison yard when the guards have been bribed to look the other way. Sex in a staff bathroom or in a kitchen storeroom on bags of rice the size of fat children. Wads of cash pocketed and “lost.” Coke snorted off wooden cutting boards stained mahogany by years of raw beef and steak. And worse, really greasy stuff: a cook who worked with the tip of his cock poking out through his fly like a little helper elf with a squashy pink hat, so only the poor young woman who did the salads could see. An owner who asked his female staff to work in short skirts and no underwear. A bartender who told Jeremy he liked to piss on his fingers just before starting his shift, then again at some point during the night, and would rub them along the lip of every glass he filled. He didn’t do it out of anger, but rather to keep clear in his own mind who, exactly, was in charge – and it sure as fuck wasn’t the idiots crowding around and yelling at him about how long they’d been waiting for a beer.
Jeremy had seen it all, and hated it all, and tried as hard as he could to keep it out of the Shack. (He made the bartenders spritz disinfectant gel on their hands mid-shift, for one thing.) He sometimes felt he ought to get more credit for that. He didn’t get sucked in by self-pity: even decades later, he retained the scorn of the run-ragged busboy for owners and managers who sat at the bar all night feeling sorry for themselves. But there were moments, when he had yet again managed to avert a disaster not of his making without receiving a single thank-you, that he wondered if he was being held to a different standard, a higher standard.
Someone, a customer, told Jeremy he was Very Zen. Which was true, he thought. He didn’t bite people’s heads off for no reason, didn’t walk around the place punching holes in walls or throwing chairs. He didn’t fire people or give them shitty shifts to prove a point or exact some kind of petty revenge, or to humble someone he thought might be getting a little too high and mighty, or to cut off at the knees a potential threat to his own authority. He didn’t freak out when things went wrong. He didn’t sit in his office snorking up clouds of coke just to give all that anger a better focus, like chalking a pool cue. (That crap made his heart bang against his ribs like a wild animal, anyway.) A long time ago, while working for a pair of owners who hated each other and behaved like battling superpowers, with the staff as hapless proxies, Jeremy watched a cook get thrown through a glass door. Another time, a waitress got slapped – actually slapped, across the face, with an open hand – after messing up the order for a table of nine. That just wasn’t him. He had never hit anyone, ever. Never even came close. How could he?
He saw so much, endured so much, and never flew into a rage. On a Friday night, right in the middle of a rush, he’d watched, helpless, as the bartender knocked to the floor a stack of pint glasses that were waiting to be slipped into the automatic washer. “Watch!” Jeremy shouted. Too late: glass went everywhere. He would have to run out the next day to buy a box of replacements. Add that chore to the list, which might as well have been on an endless scroll of paper that reached the floor and unfurled across the room like Santa’s. He nearly threw his own glass down and stomped on it.
&nbs
p; “That’s the way,” he said to the bartender, as condescending as a farmer moving cows out of a barn. “That’s what we’re paying you for. Keep it up, dude.”
Later, when the broken glass had been cleared up and things were calmer, Jeremy called the bartender over and told him not to stack them that way. “You’re just asking for trouble.” He said it quietly, like a coach not wanting to break a player’s concentration.
Another time, coming to collect the cash-out at the end of the night, he’d found the lights still on, the doors unlocked, and the bar completely empty. The zippered deposit bag with the evening’s cash and credit card receipts was sitting out in the open on a table next to the door. He stood and stared at it, amazed that it had not been stolen, and almost ready to believe it was a mirage or a trick. The bar’s stereo was blaring “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty, which no one was allowed to play while the bar was open because it made one of the waitresses cry. In the kitchen he found the last dregs of the floor staff sitting around the open door of the walk-in fridge, laughing and complaining that the heat wave and the broken air conditioning had forced them in there. They were sharing tequila and could barely stand. It was somebody’s birthday, they told him, as if to protect themselves from any curse or hex he might call down upon them. Jeremy laughed, because he could not fire them all, or at least not all at once, and would be forced to do so one by one, over the course of a few weeks as he was able to replace them. Not one of them got mad at him for doing so, and he let them go with more disappointment than anger. He wanted to ask each of them: How could you be so stupid? Instead, he said only, “Try not to do that at your next job.” There was no point in yelling – the damage had been done, the lessons were already being learned. A few cried, though not the waitress who always broke down over Tom Petty: she spent their brief meeting looking out at the street through the large front windows. When she left, he gave her the CD with “Free Fallin’” to take with her.
* * *
Jeremy told people he was like a duck swimming: all calm on the surface, but underneath going a million miles an hour. Even when he stopped to scan the pages of the Sun, it was only to glean quick facts about sports, weather, and gas prices that could be used to spark conversations with customers in the bar that night. The only break he got was first thing in the morning, when he sat in his own kitchen at home and ate toast while listening to talk radio. He listened to the old men and women who called in just to have someone to go on and on at, airing the grievances that were their entire existences, the fears and resentments that alarmed them into staying alive a little longer.
I don’t understand how the government can just keep spending money like it’s nothing.
You walk into a store and nobody offers to help anymore.
When did saying ‘Merry Christmas’ become such a crime?
Everyone is so busy with their little phones, wasting their time on nonsense.
I can’t even take the bus now, the kinds of people you see.
He recognized the type: lonely, needy. He’d worked in enough bars to know. He would sit there at his kitchen table with his mouth open, smiling slightly or shaking his head, taking everything in, every word spoken, every complaint made, accepting all of it. As if the people on the radio were in the room with him and more than willing to keep the conversation going while he ate his toast and nodded along.
Twenty minutes of that, followed by a shower and a quick shave, and he’d be moving. Keys tinkled as he stepped off the curb to get into his Jeep, fresh sunlight burning the street, bleaching it clean. The keys dug into his side as he drove and poked him as he reached for something in the clutter of invoices, parking tickets, and CDs on the passenger seat and on the floor. A heavy group of them hung from the steering column as he drove, shifting on the unpredictable tide of his thigh. Jeremy had worn the keys for so long he didn’t even notice them anymore. It took him a few seconds to clue in when people pointed them out. He’d shrug. You know me. They usually did. When he bought a new lock for the garbage shed next to the bar, the woman at the hardware store smiled at him.
“You gonna have room?”
“Oh, you know – if I don’t nail it down somebody steals it.”
Now he was the one waiting for a laugh.
“No, it’s the old one’s fucked. Someone got at it with a crowbar or something. There’s nothing in there but broken patio chairs and that kind of thing. You know. Anyways. Don’t need the bag.”
And he left, adding one more key to his belt.
The keys touched the walls of his narrow house as he walked and scratched at the back of his chair as he sat in his kitchen, that hot kitchen that collected all the heat from the back of the fridge, the stove, and even the basement furnace, which was relatively new and still eager to please. Every morning he put his coffee in the window to cool, and always forgot about it, always always always. So he would take a few sips then pour the rest out, feeling stupid. Bending over to pick up a penny only gave you a bad back – that’s what he told his staff. It was something his father said, and his father was the cheapest fucker in the world, at least when it came to spending money on himself. His father always had new shoes sitting patiently in boxes at the bottom of his closet, waiting for the pair currently in use to wear out. His father still had a VCR connected to a TV in his basement, where he’d watch episodes of variety shows that had gone off the air before Jeremy was old enough to walk. Jeremy had spent more than a few nights sitting down there with his dad, watching Sammy Davis Jr. dance and sing in black and white. And yet: worry about the dollars, not the pennies.
“That doesn’t mean I’m all into you wasting money,” he always added, just to be crystal clear.
He touched his keys while chatting with whomever was on bar that night or with a group that had come in to watch the game or celebrate a birthday. He looked at the keys, picked through them to remind himself of something he needed to do or needed to ask someone else to do, something that needed fixing or replacing. “You look like you’re about to eat it,” a server said as Jeremy stared down at one broad key, trying to remember which lock it fit. He wore them for the entire day, unlocking tool boxes and breaker panels and the vanilla-coloured safe where he kept the day’s receipts. They touched the wood of the bar as he leaned against it. They shook when he laughed – the hardest at his own jokes. At the end of the night, the keys fell with his pants when he finally got home, got undressed, and let himself drop into bed face-first like a little kid. In the morning, with his mouth full of moss and his mind inching toward surrender, he would carefully draw out the belt and attach the keys to whatever pants he planned to wear that day.
* * *
Jeremy’s neighbourhood was a relatively new one, sitting at the fat end of a wedge created by the crossing of two highways that cut Toronto off at the forehead. The thin tip of the CN Tower and the jumble of downtown were only visible from third-floor windows. The neighbourhood had bubbled up around a cookie factory in the 1970s and ’80s and then crowded over the bare ground left behind when the factory was shut down and flattened. Not long after he moved in, city workers came to chop down the trees, all up and down the block. Every tree was sick with the same thing, some little worm that got under the bark and embroidered the bare trunks with tunnels. Nothing to rake at least, he joked. Nothing to rake and nothing was going to fall on his Jeep in a storm. That had happened to people he knew who lived in areas full of old, untouchable trees: everything shakes, the rain hits the windows like silver wasps, the kids cry in their beds, the dog does a strange dance by the basement door. And then crack! – a branch goes, and they find it the next morning holding the crumpled roof of the car in the crook of its woody elbow. Still, Jeremy wouldn’t have minded having one or two still standing in his backyard to keep the house cool and maybe make the area look a little less apocalyptic. People tried planting new ones, thin saplings that didn’t make it much above shoulder-height before givin
g up the ghost. He didn’t want saplings.
“I want to order them up full-grown,” he said at the bar. “I don’t have time to watch them go through puberty.”
His house was semi-detached, and gripped its conjoined twin like the weaker partner in a three-legged race. It was in rough shape when he first moved in: full of scuffs and holes, the basement naked and unfinished and becoming animal with the grey fur of dust and mould. The backyard fence falling in on junk and thigh-high weeds, every room painted pale orange like an old motel. He had contractors in and out of the place for nearly six months to paint over everything and install new cabinets and fixtures before he decided it looked respectable enough. His yard, however, never got up to speed. Next door, the grass was green and welcoming, as soft as moss.
“I try sometimes, I honestly do. I run out and buy a whole shitload of things. I get the seed, the fertilizer, the little shovels. Nothing works.”
“I seen you out there,” his next-door neighbour said, as if confirming an alibi. His neighbour was as old as his father, somewhere in his mid-70s, and wore a baseball cap with the name of a naval ship on it – the HMCS Something-or-Other – and an arterial spray of red maple leaves. The man’s daughter was in the navy out east, where she’d once spent a week pulling bodies out of the ocean after a passenger jet went down in sight of Peggy’s Cove. His wife was dead: cancer – Jeremy had been told which kind, but could never remember, and it was too late to ask. He sometimes heard bagpipe music coming through their shared wall first thing in the morning, sounding like a Scottish regiment was on the march through the living room, about to burst through the walls in an explosion of kilts and broken plaster.
“The grass doesn’t want to grow, but I get points for trying.”
His neighbour said, “Gotta keep at it.” Like a parent explaining to a child a burden shared by all the people in the world.
Congratulations On Everything Page 1
