Another widower lived across the street with three kids. Two widowers on one block – must be bad luck, Jeremy thought. Something was killing the trees, the grass, the wives. Jeremy had spotted the motherless family right away when he was first looking to buy: the three boys and their father almost identical, but for their ages and sizes – all thin and healthy, with straight hair the colour of milk and blue, sinister eyes. They looked like a single member of an advanced race, caught in a time loop and thrust into simultaneous existence. He was cheerful, though, this Future Man surrounded by his past selves. The children were mute, but Nicolas, the father, always waved and shouted hello.
Nicolas admired Jeremy’s Jeep, and Jeremy was only too happy to fill him in on the car’s virtues. He still had an almost painful affection for it, and felt every new scratch and ding in his heart. “Look at you!” the salesman had said when he was first thinking of buying it. Jeremy was halfway across the lot, holding the ignition key in the air, locking and unlocking the car to measure the maximum distance. “Look how far you can go! You won’t lose it!”
“I wouldn’t anyway, you should see my memory,” Jeremy said.
He made Nicolas stick his fingers into the deep ruts of the Jeep’s tires.
“These suckers laugh at freezing rain.”
Nicolas agreed. “You’ll never get stuck.”
It was as if this Future Man had let slip a fact about Things to Come: whatever Jeremy did, whatever he attempted, he would not get stuck. He would roll right over obstacles, stopping only to rescue others who’d gotten bogged down. It was what he always tried to keep in mind whenever he was neck-deep in some staffing problem, some stupid personal issue that had become septic and burst all over the floor, tripping people up and getting its smell on everything. He would wade in and start cutting away at the infected emotions, trying to determine what could be saved, what could be dealt with on another day, and what needed to be dealt with now. Even when the dispute at the heart of the whole thing was stupid and trivial, he could usually perform this cleanup job without completely losing it, because he never got stuck, because he was Very Zen.
When Jeremy went out in the morning, he often saw Nicolas and his three boys walking in single file, tallest to smallest, out to the minivan. The boys fought for space inside the van with their elbows. Jeremy once watched as the youngest tried to push the cat’s face through the tiny squares of the living room window screen. The boy pushed hard, pulled the animal back into the darkness, then pushed again. The cat put up with this treatment for longer than Jeremy would’ve guessed, then both he and his tormentor disappeared in a flurry of fur and yelling. All of those people living in one house: it wasn’t for him. Big families meant endless hysteria and the worst sadism – he’d known a boy in elementary school who’d gone after his three sisters with a flaming branch from a campfire, giving one of them a scar on her cheek the shape of a long division sign. For years after, the kid saw a counsellor who talked to him about his anger, his favourite hockey players, and whether or not he ever played with his thing. Jeremy remembered being amazed to discover grown-ups knew about playing with your thing. He’d assumed it was a kids-only activity, like climbing trees and writing swear words on the slide in the playground.
At home, he needed emptiness, silence, space. He needed to have the bathroom all to himself and to fart loudly when he came out of his bedroom in the morning. He needed to run out of the house first thing without a goodbye. He needed to come home long after midnight or, very occasionally, not at all. He needed to sit, undisturbed, on the stairs, pressing his hungover head between his thumbs until he could think clearly enough to seek out grapefruit juice and Tylenol. He needed to keep things simple. Work was the thing, the Shack was the thing. Neighbours who’d been awoken by the sound of his Jeep returning home long after midnight would see him on the move again while they were waiting for their coffee makers to make coffee or for their kids to find everything they needed for school. Neighbours who thought it wouldn’t hurt him to pay a little more attention to the city’s garbage and recycling pickup schedule and maybe not come flying up the street at three in the morning blasting Kim Mitchell’s “Go For Soda” loud enough to wake children and disturb pets – even they acknowledged how hard he seemed to work.
So when things finally went all to hell for him, when everything fell apart with the Shack and everything else, most people saw it as something close to tragic. Jeremy was an arrow that had been bent and mangled many times but was always left pointing in what looked like the right direction. You had to be a truly awful person to want to see it snapped.
“EVERYTHING YOU DO, EVERY EXPERIENCE – IT’S ALL EDUCATION. I DROPPED OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL.”
– Burn to Learn, Theo Hendra
The Ice Shack formed the short end of an L-shaped strip mall perched on the edge of a ravine. Its patio jutted out into space – the trees seemed to hold it aloft on thin, grey arms. Jeremy liked to go out there every morning before he started any serious work. Even in the winter, he’d slip the doors open and step out onto the crust of snow for a few quick breaths of air. When the branches began to crowd the deck in the summer, Jeremy would grab the machete he kept hidden in his office, not letting anyone out there with him as he moved shirtless along the railing and hacked at the creeping fingers of the trees. Afterward, he’d come in sweating, all speckled with green gore, and drink a quick pint of draft while the staff fought back laughter. Charlene, the young woman who handled most of the lunch shifts, would hand him a bar towel and the clean shirt he’d left hanging on the back of a stool.
“It has to be done,” he’d tell her when he was halfway through his restorative pint.
She didn’t dispute this.
He told her that when he’d first opened the Shack – she wasn’t around back then – some of those trees were not nearly as intimidating as they now seemed.
“I’m the only one around here who keeps getting younger.”
Charlene said she sometimes felt as though she were 70 years old, though she was barely 30 at the time.
“That’s all up here,” he replied, touching his temple with the tip of his finger.
In the spring, the river was angry and turbulent, but by the end of the summer, it shrank down and came alive with torn garbage bags that whipped against the bars of submerged shopping carts. Kids sometimes got the idea to wade in and collect the empty bottles lurking at the bottom. A few of those bottles were from the Shack, but most came from teenagers drinking beer and vodka under the bridge. When Jeremy was still a bartender and out of town one summer, a teenager tried jumping from the bridge. A dare had been issued, so the kid climbed up onto the railing and dropped down into the water. It was nearly two in the morning, Jeremy was told – his mother kept him up to date on that kind of thing while he was gone – and the ambulance attendants and cops were forced to carry the idiot up the steep bank to the road. The kid dislocated his shoulder and almost drowned, but worst of all, he’d been speared through the thigh by part of a metal bed frame. It filled Jeremy’s legs with ice to think of that poor, stupid bastard sitting there, pinned and bleeding, probably blacking out from pain while the dark water moved past him, unimpressed.
From the Shack’s patio doors, Jeremy could see the spot on the bridge where the kid must’ve jumped. He always wondered if his friends stuck around, or if they ran off the instant they knew he was hurt, the moment the dare turned foul. Jeremy liked to think he would’ve stuck around, had he been there, though he never would’ve been the one jumping. Don’t be the first one in or the last one out, his dad used to tell him. Get in there once the going is good, and then get out before it all goes bad.
Jeremy said, “You have to know, though, don’t you? You have to be sure when it’s good. And you have to be able to predict when it’s about to go bad. It’s not simple.”
Just don’t ever be the dummy left holding the bag, his father told him.
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Fair enough.
Once a month, Jeremy would grab some garbage bags and pick his way down the hill behind the bar to clean up all the things that had been flung down from above. He felt strangely calm down there. Ankle-deep in snow or brush, surrounded by bottles and trash, he would stand and let the shadow of the patio creep down the hill toward him.
“This ravine was made by retreating glaciers,” he told the bar-back who volunteered to come down and help him clean up, and was taking the opportunity for a quick smoke. “Millions of years ago, everything around here was underwater. Millions of years from now – probably water again, who knows?”
Or a desert, the bar-back suggested.
“I doubt it,” Jeremy said. “Not with the winters we’ve been getting. Indians used to use this river, too. They’d go all the way down to the lake in canoes.”
“To do what?”
“I have no idea. Sell fur maybe? Beat the shit out of each other?”
The bar-back found a lighter in the grass and checked that it still had some life.
Jeremy looked up and said, “Look at the patio. Isn’t that impressive? Can you take a picture on your phone? Never mind, finish your smoke.”
“There’s one of our big dinner plates,” the bar-back said, pointing into the thick brush. “And a couple forks, look! Why do people chuck shit over the side?”
Jeremy didn’t know why people threw things. He didn’t know why they wrote nasty shit on the walls of the bathroom. He didn’t know why they shoved napkins and food into the folds of the seats in a booth. He didn’t know why they took off without leaving enough cash to cover the bill, never mind a tip. Inviting strangers into your place was an act of faith. He had never struggled with that faith, never had any real sense of doubt, until he got a place of his own. With the Shack, he’d been tested, but he’d also been rewarded.
“Just watch you don’t slip into the water. It’s faster than you think.”
He let the kid scramble through weeds and dead branches retrieving lost cutlery and ruined menus, while he indulged a private vision of the Ice Shack as an ark that would float away safely with everyone inside when the waters rose again in the world. This, he decided, was why some owners burned out so fast, or became jaded and cynical: they never took the time to watch their places be quietly blessed by sunlight. He had taken a few courses in hotel and restaurant management early on, but those were entirely for show. His real education, as he’d told many people at the bar, staff and customers alike, had come from watching the owners for whom he’d worked over the decades, noting every successful strategy, every fruitful ritual, but also every fatal mistake.
And he’d worked: on his way up, he grabbed every shift, took on every project, volunteered to stay late, and came in on his days off to see if extra hands were needed. He stuffed every corner and every crack with work. Many of the work friends he made dropped away – they were only there until something less stressful and less nocturnal came along. Most couldn’t understand why Jeremy stuck to it: after a certain point, didn’t he wish he could work normal hours, sit at a desk, go out at night for fun, sleep? He’d once spent half a year working a desk job, he told them, and it had felt like being stranded inside a moon colony. He remembered constantly wandering down sterile hallways lit with fluorescent bulbs, nodding and smiling at co-workers he would never get to know better than he already did, laughing at jokes that stayed within strictly professional boundaries, wishing he could walk around with his shirt off and bare feet just to feel less constrained. He went home every night feeling like a failure for being unable to find his groove amid all those cubicles, coffee machines, and magnetized picture frames displaying photos of children. It wasn’t until much later that he realized the problem lay not in him, but in the situation: he simply wasn’t built for a place like that. It was a bad match. He was a beaver locked in with the turtles. He belonged in rooms that were full of energy and chatter, that saw tides of people wash in and out throughout the day, that shook with noise and threw everyone lucky enough to work there into the weeds. In the Shack, he had found his home.
“I’m out every night,” he said. “I eat and drink for free, and I sleep like a baby.”
He chided people for using the term service industry.
“That makes me feel like a butler,” he said. “And it makes you sound like an accountant.”
What he did, what his staff did, was more fluid than that term suggested, there was more art to it. It took more than mere business savvy to make it work, and though money was a large part of the motivation, it was not the only one, or even the most important one. There were easier ways to make money.
Christ, there had to be.
* * *
One of Jeremy’s first managing jobs was at a bar called the Pour House, on a dead-end street a few blocks from a college campus. It did well – especially on weekends, when the rooms filled with enough drunken students so you could barely move.
The owner of the Pour House was an architect with hair as white as ice cream that was always pulled back in a ponytail. He smoked cigarettes with a long plastic filter like a femme fatale in an old movie. His name was Bruce, but he insisted on being called Big B. He had never owned a bar before, and never worked in one, and so immediately attributed the success of the place to his own innate abilities, his sense of things, his understanding of space. Space was everything – it was more important than the price of beer or the ratio of girls to boys. He would walk into the place during the afternoon when it was quiet and would stand with his hands on his hips in the middle of the room, his bright ponytail jutting out from the back of his head and curling around gently on his shoulder like an animal sidekick. He would stand in the spot he believed to be the exact centre of the bar, stretch out his arms straight in either direction, then slowly turn his body so that the tips of his fingers became like sensors analyzing and storing data from every corner. He would turn all the way around, and then lunge forward to rearrange a group of tables or move a plant to another part in the room.
“Movement,” he said to Jeremy. If he were in the mood, he would expand upon the idea: “Movement. Action. Air. Space. Life.”
Sometimes Big B questioned the bartender on the arrangement of the bottles behind the bar or wondered aloud if they should print the menu in reverse order, starting with desserts. That would be fun and unexpected, wouldn’t it? Instead of the same old thing? It didn’t really matter much what Big B did: the bar was perfectly located and always made money. After Jeremy had been there for a couple of years, a spot became available a few blocks away, an old coffee shop that had finally given up the ghost. Jeremy sometimes parked across the street before work and stared at the place, imagining how he could transform it, what it would look like with customers packed right to the door. He didn’t know his boss had been thinking the same thing until the day Big B walked in, ponytail straight and proud, and announced he’d signed a lease for the location and was planning to open a wine bar called Big B’s.
“It’ll be an older crowd, more exclusive. More casual, more intimate, more intense.”
At the time, Jeremy was dating one of the Pour House waitresses, a woman named Tracy who was always talking about becoming a teacher because she was so good with kids. That was what she kept saying to Jeremy when they lay together naked and sweating in his bed or hers, their hearts slowly calming down: “I’ve always been really good with kids. It’s weird – I really like them.”
Jeremy never agreed or disagreed with this. He hadn’t had any experience with kids by that point, and felt that the urge to have one was deeply perverse, a kind of self-mutilation, like wanting to have a limb cut off or to be blinded in one eye. What he did do was offer to arrange her schedule so she’d be free to work at a daycare or take childhood education courses during the week, but she never seemed all that enthusiastic about the idea.
Jeremy liked Tracy. He liked he
r hair, which smelled like green apples from her shampoo. He liked her eyes, with their heavy lids. He found that erotic. Her breasts pointed out in different directions, like chameleon eyes. They were small, but Jeremy decided he preferred small, after so many years of preferring big. He felt this was a sign of his growing sophistication, the way he’d been drinking imported beers and eating more seafood. The way even something like heavy eyelids could make him horny now. He didn’t like her laugh – loud and horsey, and on a hair trigger – or how much pot she smoked, or how she would tell other staffers intimate things about him, but he was able to overlook all that.
The wine bar finally collapsed, taking the Pour House down with it: the new place had been kept afloat by siphoning off money from the old. There was so much debt to settle, so many loans, so many unpaid invoices, that Jeremy didn’t expect to get any kind of payout, but Big B met him outside the locked bar early on a Monday morning with an envelope filled with cash, the equivalent of three weeks’ pay. His hair was completely ragged, the ponytail shredded and loose. He sighed and shrugged and said, “Money.”
Jeremy nodded to show he understood.
The money wasn’t enough to get Jeremy through the summer without work, so he took a bartending job at a golf course in Etobicoke where a manager who was younger than him told pussy jokes all day. Tracy couldn’t find another job right away and had to move out of her apartment in the middle of the night and in with her older sister, who had a house and a husband. She hated being there, and would often stay with Jeremy at his apartment. They fought a lot. One night, they were lying in his bed with all the blankets off. It has a humid night. He lay there watching grotesque faces form in the shadows on the wall, just like when he was a kid. Tracy had smoked half a joint earlier in the night over his objections, and he wondered if he was second-hand high.
Congratulations On Everything Page 2
