Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  Quietly, he asked the dark: “How is a pussy like a new car?”

  “What?”

  He’d thought she was fast asleep.

  “You heard me.”

  Once she was fully awake, they talked and talked until they were broken up. She lay in his bed and cried, and he went to sleep on the couch – it was her last night there, after all. His time at the Pour House was ancient wreckage, always floating just offshore in his mind. He considered himself lucky to have less of it in his past than a lot of people he knew. Some had wrecks piled up right to the beach, fouling the waters.

  * * *

  Jeremy’s conception of the Shack had been vague at first. He’d carried it with him for years, tucked somewhere in the back of his mind as he moved through more than half a dozen bars, restaurants, and hotels. The best and clearest idea he had for the kind of place he wanted was actually an anti-idea, a vision born of opposition. It showed itself to him while he was in his 30s and managing a Crane’s franchise. Crane’s was the kind of place that had big walk-in freezers full of skids of frozen steaks, each hard shingle of meat as big as a shoe print and already crisscrossed with artificial charbroil lines. In the dining room, there were saddles on the walls, as well as doors from antique Coca-Cola fridges. The name Crane’s was everywhere, printed on the cut-off bottoms of wooden barrels in bright red letters like wet licorice. Jeremy liked to say that you could stand in the middle of any Crane’s location in the world and have no idea what country you were in, or even what continent. If there was a Crane’s in China, its customers were eating under saddles and old-timey fridge doors.

  At Crane’s, they encouraged diners to time their meals, from the moment of ordering to when the plates arrived at their table. There were cards they could fill out with these times and leave on the platter with their bill or slip into a box by the front door. They were also encouraged to calculate their servers’ Smile Points – literally, the number of times the poor kid taking their order managed to smile at them, and how big and bright the smiles had been. These, too, were to be handed in or dropped into the box. Part of Jeremy’s job was to collect these cards at the end of each night, calculate wait times and Smile Points, then issue warnings or gold stars. Staffers were encouraged to rat each other out for petty theft, general laziness, and misconduct, under the guise of empowering them to help improve the business from within. This was done using cards, too, with another drop-box bolted to the wall just outside Jeremy’s office. It had been bolted to the wall in the kitchen, but kept getting torn down or filled with hot coffee and worse.

  After years of it, Jeremy felt as tight as the pristine maroon golf shirts he and every other employee had to wear whenever on Crane’s property. Standing with the rest of the floor staff, singing “Happy Birthday” to some clueless child or clueless grandparent, he wanted to scream at them all to run. Slowly, the pictures and posters disappeared from his office, as though he were preparing for a prison break and wanted nothing to weigh him down. When he finally left, it was with the certainty that his place would be nothing like a Crane’s.

  Pretty much the only good thing to have ever come out of the Crane’s job was a free trip to New York City for a big conference of owners and managers. At the airport, it was all darkness outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, and he could feel the cold through the accordioned walls of the walkway onto the plane. The jet had already noisily shed its connections to the terminal and begun a slow turn toward the runway when the whole thing went black and stopped dead. It was as if the thing had been knocked unconscious. It was soon enough after two planes had head-butted the World Trade Center towers that all the passengers froze, afraid of what would come next.

  Over the PA system the captain said, “This is a new jet.” She sounded amused, as though they were all children in her care. “It doesn’t seem to like the cold,” she said, meaning the plane. “We’re going to take her back and reboot the computer and then everything should be fine. Very sorry for the inconvenience. Won’t take too long.”

  “It’s colder where we’re going,” Jeremy said to his seatmate, an Indian woman in a pantsuit the colour of a blood orange.

  “In New York?” she asked, a little alarmed. She’d only lived in Canada for a year, and couldn’t believe there might be any place colder.

  “No, up.” He pointed at the roof of the cabin. The woman looked to where he was pointing, then got the joke and smiled.

  In New York Jeremy bought dozens of stickers, statu­ettes, and buttons to give to his staff, as well as a poster that showed the island of Manhattan as a slice of pizza, which, years later, had pride of place on the wall behind the bar at the Shack. He walked down to Ground Zero, which still smelled like someone was burning tires in the middle of the city. Everywhere he looked he saw American flags hanging from shuttered buildings, in the windshields of dump trucks and police cars, and pinned to jackets, as if the attack had come because the people there had forgotten what their flag looked like and were determined not to make the same mistake twice. Jeremy stood there at the site and tried to appear appropriately solemn, before admitting to himself that he was disappointed: it was just a big pit with some hoarding around it. The most famous city block in the world, and they weren’t doing a thing with it, at least not yet. You couldn’t even get anything to eat, other than a hot dog. He regretted not going down to see the Statue of Liberty when he had the chance. As he stood there shaking his head with disappointment, an elderly man who looked like Morgan Freeman patted him on the shoulder and told him America would stay strong, they’d get through this. On Jeremy’s way back to the hotel, he stared at a woman in a red rubber dress who was at least six-feet tall, with thick arms that looked muscular and hard. Later, he realized it had been a man dressed as a woman. This pleased him, as it confirmed that he was in the middle of something unusual, something special.

  The conference itself was mostly a waste of time: lots of presentations about ways to inspire staff. Most of them he already knew. There was a speech by a former bartender who had lost her right arm in a bus accident while travelling in Mexico. She told them how the company had helped her get through the hardest times right after the accident, how it was so amazing to know she had this huge family supporting her. She couldn’t tend bar anymore, of course, but now worked in human resources. Jeremy cried at her story like everyone else.

  The part he had looked forward to the most was a presentation by Theo Hendra, whom he’d never seen in the flesh. Hendra was the author of Power Tools, The Yes Equation, More Yes Equations, Closing the Confidence Gap, and more. (Plus a handful of semi-pornographic sword-and-sorcery novels he’d written in his 20s and mostly kept out of print ever since; Jeremy had tried to read a couple of those, but gave up a few pages in, feeling like an intruder.) Of all the books that Jeremy had ever read about building success strategies, self-actualization, and doing away with fear – and there were a lot – Hendra’s were the only ones that made any kind of sense. What he gave were the facts of life, straight up: you do this, you avoid that, you keep on top of these other things, and you might have a fighting chance. If, on the other hand, you lose your focus, let your emotional life get too messy, and take the people around you for granted, or are simply not up to the task, you are almost guaranteed to find yourself scrambling around begging for help to delay the inevitable and fight off people who try to rob your dreams right out from under you. You’d have nothing left to do but lick your wounds and settle for second-best. Jeremy appreciated being told the road ahead tilted upward. No fish ever jumped into a boat because it was beautiful, no deer ever jumped in the way of a bullet because the hunter seemed worthy. Those were the lessons that stuck.

  Jeremy constantly had to defend Hendra against the exact kind of corrosive negativity the books worked hard to neutralize.

  “Isn’t he a total scam artist?”

  He’d heard this more than once.

  “How many of his
books have you actually read? How many?” Jeremy countered.

  “None. He’s got weird teeth.”

  “Oh, well, there you go: case closed.”

  Hendra, he told people, had given him something very valuable: a direction. He was lucky; he’d seen people hit a certain age and suddenly fight their way into the religion of their parents (or grandparents) as if forcing open the doors of a departing subway car. Or they would arm themselves against boredom with hobbies and crafts. Or they had more kids than they needed. Or they started running – at some point, it seemed as though just about everyone Jeremy knew was gobbling marathons and half-marathons, and bringing their special shoes to work. Jeremy’s fragile knees would not allow him to join in, but he happily blessed their efforts and tried not to judge. He didn’t need to run, he didn’t need crafts or church. Every place he worked in, even Crane’s, glowed like an arrow, pointing him toward his ultimate goal: a place of his own.

  In the big convention hall in New York, Hendra came bounding out onto the stage in bicycle shorts and a tight T-shirt, clapping his hands over his head like a fitness instructor, with “Every 1’s a Winner” playing loud enough to be felt through the floor, and the flashing lights bringing everyone to the edge of a seizure. Jeremy chanted along when Hendra called for the crowd to shout out the Three Principles of Personal Power. He stood in line to beat on a bright yellow punching bag with the word FEAR written across it in big black letters. A team of young assistants wearing headsets ran up and down the line, handing out free copies of a new, expanded edition of Power Tools.

  Back in Toronto, in a taxi from the airport, Jeremy opened the book. On the very first page he turned to, he saw the word Canada, which seemed so unusual that he read the passage that surrounded it, right there in the taxi. And as he did, he began to sweat under his shirt. A massive jet glided down heavily above him, throwing a quick shadow over the entire road, and the relentless thunder got into his ears and his arms and almost made him drop the book with excitement. Even before the taxi joined the halting highway traffic, he decided it was time to make a move. It was time to open his own bar.

  And he knew what he was going to call it.

  “RELATIONSHIPS ARE NOT DISTRACTIONS; THEY ARE INSTRUCTIONS.”

  – The Passion Play, Theo Hendra

  For weeks at a time, Jeremy would only go home from the Shack to sleep – and even then, for barely five or six hours at a time. He’d once thought seriously about installing a shower in his office and buying a decent pullout couch. He sometimes stood in his living room at home, or in the small hallway just inside his front door, and wondered if it was worth paying for those walls, those windows, and all the invisible streams of water and power and WiFi moving through the place, when he spent so little time among them. Even on quiet nights, he loved staying at the Shack to the bitter end, helping the servers cash out and messing sweatily with the stereo behind the bar. He felt it was important to be around as much as possible, if only to ward off, by his mere presence, the sudden and total panic he was certain would descend the moment he left.

  He trusted his staff, but only to a certain extent. He knew that if things got too busy, if disaster struck, they would start to whirl and stumble. He put the palm of his hand on their backs – shifting it quickly if he accidentally touched the disapproving cross-strap of a bra – and told them to roll with it. Everything’s cool, comp a few drinks, no one’s in a hurry. With his hand he would draw out the hysteria that formed within each of them like a tiny storm. Even when he didn’t seem to be doing much of anything – just talking and drinking and walking around – he was spreading calm, maintaining order, putting out fires. One time, he’d had to put out an actual fire when a busboy dumped an ashtray into the garbage without dousing the glowing cigarette butts it contained. Within a minute, the trash was flickering. Jeremy moved fast, throwing in a whole pitcher of flat beer and getting the windows open before the alarm went off and the sprinklers drenched them all with cold rain. There were cheers. Jeremy smiled and put his hands in the air as his chest heaved under his shirt.

  “Crazy night,” he said to the bartender. “Cheers!”

  After he locked the doors for the night, the staff would slump in their chairs, and he would assure them he had no problem if they wanted to smoke a joint on the deck, as long as they were discreet about it. “After tonight, I don’t blame you,” he said. “It’s cool.” He lived for this kind of casual charity, this display of benevolent power.

  Sometimes he didn’t get home from the bar until sunlight was already showing in the sky. Once, as he walked from the Jeep to his back door, he heard a train, moving somewhere off in the distance, hoot shave-and-a-haircut as it rolled along the borders of his neighbourhood. Jeremy stood there for a moment, amazed. The train hooted again – toot toot te-toot toot – but by now it had rolled itself to another part of the city. Jeremy felt childishly privileged to have heard it, though he knew he would regret staying out so late. He waited for the train to sound again, but it didn’t. Or else it was too far away when it did, off where it could only be heard by stray cats, raccoons, and the poor bastards who delivered newspapers before dawn.

  It was the kind of thing he could never explain to people who could not understand why he did what he did: he would never have heard that train if he’d been stuffed in an office somewhere, keeping normal hours.

  * * *

  He had originally bought his house in the hopes that it would move forward his relationship with Terry, the woman he was seeing at the time. It didn’t; they split up. Which had not come as a shock: throughout the whole time they were together, there seemed always to be an incongruity at the core of their relationship, as if they could never quite settle on a compelling motive for staying together beyond mutual loneliness. He thought of the house as something solid that could anchor them, and had visions of the two of them painting the place, of sitting out back with a beer when it was warm outside, and of her filling the rooms with the smell of home-baked bread and soups and desserts that he would happily come home from work in the middle of the day for. He had no idea if she could bake, but the visions persisted.

  When he and Terry were first together, they went out on dinner dates and drank enough wine to become unselfconscious. Afterward, they would hold hands as they walked through the parking lot, and sometimes she would lean her head on his shoulder, and even though in that moment he would feel as though actual, lasting happiness were finally being dispensed, it never seemed to take, and the next time they saw each other, they’d have to start all over again. When they had sex, still in the glow of the wine, it was always at Jeremy’s place. And she hardly ever stayed the night. When she did, they’d be watched closely the next morning by one of his neighbour’s white-haired children as they walked to his Jeep or her car.

  She would whisper, “Is that one of them?”

  “The youngest.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’m guessing.”

  Terry had a child from a brief earlier marriage, a little girl who refused to accept the fact of her mother’s relationship with Jeremy, showing him less warmth than she would have an estranged uncle. She went away every other weekend to stay with her father in Guelph and would come back with a superior smirk on her face, as if she had, over the past three days, been given the chance to see the world as it really was, free of all blinders, filters, and lies. Her father let her watch movies full of swear words and naked kissing.

  “Are you an alcoholic?” the girl asked Jeremy.

  “No, sorry.”

  “All the people at your work are alcoholics.”

  The way she said it, it sounded like a religion.

  That was her father talking, Terry told him. He should just ignore it.

  “Why is he saying this shit to her?”

  Terry gave him a look he had come to recognize, which said that the acts of minor emotional vandalism c
ommitted by divorced parents were outside his jurisdiction. He was, at best, an innocent bystander, collateral damage.

  Jeremy spent more than a year trying to win the girl over. He sat through elementary school assemblies in which class after class marched onstage to berate the tight-smiled audience with Christmas carols while the young music teacher beat back their voices with the sound of an upright piano. He stared in growing incomprehension as Pokémon cards were laid out one by one before him, their individual strengths and weaknesses explained in exhaustive detail. He drove them both down to the shore of Lake Ontario, walked with them along the sand with the busy rumble of the expressway just behind them, and did his best to help when the girl cut her foot open on a piece of green glass the size and shape of a Dorito. He helped and commiserated, even though it was entirely her fault for running around on the sand with no shoes, which both he and her mother had warned against. “Homeless sleep down here,” he explained again as Terry cleaned and bandaged the girl’s foot. To make her feel better, he collected smooth, harmless beach glass for her to take home while she whimpered and bled through the bandages. The next time he came over, he brought her a big slice of cake from the bar, and even though she puked it all up in her sleep that night – forcing Terry to pick a thousand tiny slivers of coconut out of the dryer after putting the sheets through the wash – the moment when he’d unveiled the cake for the girl was the closest she ever came to expressing delight in his presence.

  Mostly she tried to ignore him. Or worse, she would do little things to annoy him that he knew were deliberate, like sitting in the back of the Jeep and humming that weird synthesizer tune from Beverly Hills Cop. He had never known what it was called. The girl told him, but it didn’t sound right. “Are you sure?” he asked her. She said yes, and rolled her eyes. Or almost but not quite rolled her eyes, since she knew rolling her eyes would get her in trouble with her mother. The tune used to be everywhere when Jeremy was younger, back when Eddie Murphy was hot shit and the funniest thing in the world. Then it was gone. Then it was back, and no one knew why. The tune had snuck back into the environment through young kids, like the flu, infecting whole schoolyards before spreading into homes. Terry thought it was cute. Her daughter was learning to play it on the piano, she told Jeremy, both resigned and proud. All the girls in her class were. It was a contest to see who could learn to play it all the way through first.