His father shrugged and kept eating. “Well, I don’t see you doing any contests or anything.”
“Contests? What do you mean? Like raffles?”
“What about that thing where the woman won that truck?”
Jeremy knew exactly what he was talking about, and nearly laughed at the absurdity of it. A car dealership in Barrie had held a contest in which they put a brand new truck in the middle of the lot and made people stand around holding on to it. The last person touching it got to drive the thing home. It took nearly three days to declare a winner.
“You’re not serious, Gord, come on.”
“Why not? Get a dealership to donate a car.”
“Do you know what state she was in at the end of that thing, the lady who won the truck?” Jeremy asked him.
“I think we should talk about something else,” his mother said, but Gord was angry enough to want to keep going. “I have no idea,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Jeremy leaned in. “People said she was cheating because she wore diapers, but diapers only last so long. After a while, it’s the same thing as not having them.”
His mother said, “Jeremy.”
“Sorry, but it’s true – she was a total mess by the time it was all over. So here’s my question: if I’m going to have people standing around pissing their pants, how does that really help me?”
His father got up from the table and put his bowl in the sink with a clatter.
His mother talked to Jeremy in their small backyard after her husband went to bed. It was a beautiful night, with a slight glaze of clouds to soften the stars that were visible just beyond the glow of downtown.
“He’s just worried about you getting into this so deep you’ll never be able to climb back out.”
“It’s a little insulting that you don’t even believe I know what I’m doing, after all this time.”
“I’m sorry, dear.”
Jeremy eventually convinced them to liquidate some of their retirement savings to put into the bar. “Does this mean we’re co-owners now?” his father asked.
“More like silent partners, or guardian angels.”
“As long as we see some of that money back before we die.”
“Oh, you two aren’t going to die. You’ll just keep moving into smaller and smaller houses until you both disappear.”
“I DON’T CALL WHAT I DO A JOB, AND I DON’T CALL IT WORK. I CALL IT LIVING.”
– Powerful Positions, Theo Hendra
Jeremy liked to get to the Shack in the morning before anyone else so he could sit at the bar with a fresh coffee and watch the morning light puddle on the floor, grow in intensity, and spread throughout the room. Then he would open up all the doors and windows to release the stale air and do his rounds. He sometimes found new things scrawled on the walls, or that another vinyl booth that had been slashed. There was the occasional illicit cigarette in the bathroom left to scorch the edge of the sink. He collected glasses and plates tucked into corners and undiscovered by staff. He tsk-tsked these as he would the carelessly discarded clothes of a child. If the staff had once again left greasy lemon wedges in the sink overnight, he’d attack the clouds of new fruit flies with a bar towel, shaking his head the whole time and wondering why – why – this kind of thing was so complicated for some people.
The next person to arrive was Tyler, the day cook. Tyler was not yet 20, and never said anything to Jeremy that didn’t sound as though it were being spoken by a prisoner to his jailer. If he hung around after his shift, Tyler would sit at the far end of the bar, looking at his phone and talking to no one, making it clear the Shack would get out of him only the hours he was being paid for. He would accept the enemy’s beer at the staff discount, plus his one free meal – as was his right – but no more than that. Everyone called Tyler The Assassin – everyone except Jeremy, who figured the guy had enough problems without having to carry around a nickname like that. When he came through the front doors in the morning, his hoodie up and his ears leaking earphone wires, Jeremy would already have a coffee ready and a copy of the Sun on the bar, open to the sports pages. Tyler would sit at the bar long enough to finish half of his coffee, then take the rest into the kitchen with him. Jeremy made a point of slipping in there throughout the day, always looking for an opportunity to draw the cook out a little.
“Working hard or hardly working?”
Tyler went about his work with about as much joy as a mortician. He stood over a pile of raw shrimp, pinching out the intestines with his fingers and turning his cutting board into a glistening black mess.
“Why don’t they just get frozen ones with the shit taken out?” Jeremy asked him.
Tyler shrugged. “These are for the dinner special. They have to be fresh.”
“Does it make a huge difference? Have you tried them?”
“I don’t eat fish or meat.”
“Oh right: no eggs, milk, cheese, steak, or pussy. Nothing that tastes good, right? Ha ha!”
“Milk’s okay. I’m not vegan.”
“So you can eat ice cream?”
“I don’t really like it.”
“God, someone put that guy out of his misery,” Jeremy said when he was back in the safety of the bar. “He’s like a dark cloud in there.”
Charlene said Tyler was shy.
“Shy. Come on. How can you be shy and work in a kitchen?”
Tyler was far from the worst, however. There were lost causes and hopeless cases that had to be let go. A few times a year he’d have to sit someone down and deliver the bad news. There was the cook who kept missing shifts because of his band. Or the busboy who would disappear for half an hour at a time, even when everyone else was in the weeds, and would return to the floor with pie eyes and a shit-eating grin. Jeremy had to fire one server less than three weeks after hiring her because she was always late and always a little short in her cash-out. Also, no one liked her – not on the floor, not behind the bar, and not in the kitchen. The trifecta of hate. One bartender said the new server was a total tampon. Jeremy look baffled, so she explained: “They’re both stuck-up cunts.”
“Okay, pretty funny. But I’m not a big fan of that kind of talk.”
He called the server in on her day off and they went out onto the deck. He had her sit at one of the tables while he stood with his foot up on the lower rung of the railing – she was a little taller than him, and he wanted to maintain the height advantage. He talked to her a little about attitude, about how there were always people who just didn’t gel with the rest of the staff, and how sometimes, if things were not working, there was nothing you could do to fix it.
“Am I fired?” she asked.
The look he gave her confirmed it.
“Are you serious? What the fuck.”
He started telling her again how the Shack only worked when everybody fit in and got along. She would find it was the same everywhere.
“So what do I do now?” she asked, cutting him off, as if only inquiring about the way to the nearest exit. She wasn’t looking for advice, she just wanted the whole thing over with. In her mind, she had already started the process of sealing this job off from the rest of her life. It would be forgotten; she’d get better ones.
On the whole, however, he felt he’d done pretty well, despite what often got thrown at him. Staffing a place was like looking for diamonds in a haystack, he liked to say, but he could spot potential in people other owners might dismiss right off the bat. Patty, who worked the busier lunches alongside Charlene, was like that. Patty was a substitute teacher who had last waited tables back when she was in teacher’s college in the mid-’70s. At first, he’d thought he was getting another sad old lady with no experience – nothing but a handwritten list of jobs with huge gaps of decades where the kids happened – but her resumé looked professional, and there wasn’t a bit of hesitancy or gloom about her. S
he’d said she needed the money because her husband had retired, his pension left them short every month, and there weren’t enough teaching jobs to fill the gap.
So why waiting tables?
“I just like meeting people,” she said, with unexpected aggression, as if the idea were somehow controversial. “I never liked working in an office. My Shawn worked forever in a room with one little window – I don’t know how he didn’t go crazy. He worked with some nice people, at least. Sometimes when you’re at one place for too long, people start to get their noses up, you know what I mean? People start to worry about the stupidest things.”
“They do, you’re right.”
“That’s the nice thing about being a substitute: you don’t have to get involved in all the nonsense, all the gossip and who said what. I made it a personal rule, very early on, that I would never eat my lunch in the staff room – my favourite thing is to sit in the music room, if they have one, and listen to students practising. Some of the girls now are just lovely.”
Jeremy felt oddly comfortable listening to her, as if he were being hypnotized. Most people couldn’t stand the motor-mouthed type, the ones who got you in the grip of a conversation like the giant squids in those paintings of embattled sperm whales. Patty’s chatter, however, had an almost narcotic quality to it. He wanted to put his head down on the table, close his eyes, and let her talk.
When he called her to say she had the job, she didn’t sound at all surprised.
“I don’t want to say this but I will: I knew I had the job as soon as I left your bar. I told my Shawn you would call, you can ask him.”
“You didn’t tell me you were psychic. That changes things.”
“Oh, I don’t go for all of that nonsense. That’s just another way to lose your money, as far as I’m concerned. I always say there’s only one part of the newspaper you can trust, and that’s the obituary pages. Everything else you have to take with a thousand grains of salt. Especially the weather.”
Jeremy told her he wasn’t really able to train her beyond showing her how to work the computer and giving her a tour of the place.
“Well, I’m sure I’ll pick it all up. I always do. I’ve learned to get right in there and do the best you can. They once had me teaching computers. I thought, Oh, you’ve really stepped in it now. But you just suck it up and get through it, one step at a time. That’s all you can do. One step at a time.”
Patty wasn’t great at the start, but she got better and more confident and was able to handle a nearly full room all by herself. Eventually, orders stopped getting mixed up, drinks and baskets of bread that had been requested were delivered in good time, and Jeremy didn’t have to stand near the bar just in case, ready to jump in and help when things got truly chaotic.
“I think I’m in the swing of it,” she said proudly at the end of a day that netted her over $50 in tips, the most she’d made so far.
“Just like riding a bicycle.”
“Oh it’s a little tougher than that, I think. It’s quite a workout.”
Patty’s husband, Shawn, always came at the end of the day to pick her up. He refused Jeremy’s offers of coffee or beer, and would not let his wife accept a staff meal. She was already getting paid for her hours, he reasoned, plus tips on top of that. That should be enough. Most people don’t get food just for doing their jobs. “Most people don’t work in restaurants,” Jeremy pointed out.
“Fair enough.” But he still wouldn’t let her eat at the Shack for free.
Shawn took Jeremy aside not long after his wife got the job. “I don’t know, you know, how much she ever talks about it, but Pat was really happy to get this. She’s grateful for it, you know. It’s just waiting tables, but you know what? She really enjoys it. It really bothered her that they never offered her something permanent with the teaching – she kept waiting and waiting, but you know how those things work. It’s who you know and all that.”
“They were stupid not to grab her when they had the chance,” Jeremy said.
“You know what? She’s too good for them. Patty cared about what she did, and they screwed her around. Anyway, she’s in a good spot now. The whole school system’s full of goddamned horse manure, pardon my French.”
“True enough. Well, I hope you don’t mind that we steal her a couple of days a week.”
Shawn winked. “Lets me catch up on my beauty sleep. And a couple extra bucks a month comes in handy.”
“More than that, I hope.”
“Not much more, but that’s okay. We’re surviving. And you know what? It’s the thought that counts, as they say.”
* * *
It was Patty who had first recommended Charlene. She’d been her teacher very briefly years earlier and knew her mother a little. The mother was not a friend, Patty made clear, just someone she’d spoken to sometimes. “I don’t even know the husband – maybe there isn’t one. That happens a lot, doesn’t it? Charlene seems like a nice girl, though. She’s a little quiet, and you can always tell she’s listening, which is a rare thing. Most people her age now can’t go two minutes without checking their phones.”
At Charlene’s interview, Jeremy asked her where she saw herself in five years. It was a question he’d picked up from a management course he’d taken before getting hired at Crane’s, and which he asked of every person who came in for a job. He couldn’t think of a single impressive answer he’d ever received, or even a particularly memorable one, but he kept asking it, feeling it must hold the key to something vital.
“Five years?” Charlene took a quick look around the room. Her mind was blank.
“Let’s say 10 years.”
“I’ve sometimes thought I might like to open my own little place. Not a bar, but maybe a little lunch place or a coffee shop. I don’t even know if that’s 10 years away. Anyway, that’s one plan.”
“I can probably help with that, when the time comes. Opening your own place can be a real boot to the balls if you don’t have help.”
“Thanks. That would be really helpful.”
She liked the sound of the lie, though she was a little irritated at having to come up with it on the spot. Her mother had told her that the job was pretty much hers as long as the owner liked her. That was the impression she’d gotten from Patty, anyway.
Her previous job had been at a tiny lunch counter downtown where the owner was a shockingly muscular hippie whose entire body weight seemed to reside in his shoulders. He had thick dreads the colour of hot mustard and a goatee that gave him the profile of something animal. Plus he had hair curling up from his chest and shoulders. He was like a centaur. He refused to carry a phone or use the internet, and talked about both as if they were evil spirits let loose upon the world.
Jeremy said he had trouble picturing Charlene in a place like that, and she admitted she had a hard time understanding how she’d lasted so long. The owner’s wife was a small, sensitive woman who cut vegetables and made sandwiches in the kitchen and rarely came up front – serving customers made her feel faint. The two of them would sit with Charlene after they closed the place for the day and smoke gherkin-sized joints rolled from pot they bought off friends who grew it on a farm out near Peterborough. The centaur told her an old singer from the sixties named Ronnie Hawkins had a big place right nearby.
“That guy’s out there. He knew Bob Dylan and John Lennon and all those guys.”
His wife’s eyes slid around like raw eggs in a bowl at the mere mention of such deities.
Charlene and the wife would listen to the husband talk about getting off the grid. The grid, and the absolute necessity of escaping it, dodging it, getting as far away as possible, was an obsession. Not just the electrical grid, he said: the emotional grid, the economic one, the psychological one. Even the sexual one.
Kyle wouldn’t step foot inside the place. The whole time she was there, he kept trying to get her a job
at the animal shelter where he worked. She told him he was being controlling. The centaur said Kyle was emotionally colour-blind. She needed someone who could see the entire spectrum – see and not fear it. She made the mistake of telling Kyle that, as a joke. He got angry and threatened to go in and confront her boss.
“Please don’t say anything,” she begged him. “I shouldn’t have told you. That’s just the way he is – he’s always saying things like that. Just forget about it. Please.”
She didn’t tell him about the blowjobs that had happened more than once while Charlene was working out front. It made her sick to her stomach the first time she heard it: the centaur kept saying reassuring things to his wife, as if teaching a child to read. One time it happened while there were customers in the café, and she had had to turn up the Peter Tosh to cover the noise. She wasn’t afraid of her bosses getting caught in the act, but of being found out herself: she didn’t want anyone to know that this was the kind of thing she was willing to put up with. She didn’t want people to see how low she’d go for rent money. She felt humiliated standing there, handing over biodegradable coffee cups and a paper bag that held two warm bagel lumps, with the reggae chopping away behind her. She worried the whole time the centaur would make a sound, some unmistakable groan.
What finally got her out was something the centaur’s wife said. They’d wanted to bring her camping with them for a weekend – just her, not Kyle. Charlene was in the middle of politely declining when the wife declared that the centaur had opened her up sexually on a camping trip, not long after they’d first met.
“He wants to open you, too. It would be so amazing – we’d be like sisters.”
Charlene couldn’t make herself work behind the counter even one more day. Strangely enough, it was the wife who would not talk to her or look at her when she went in to get her final paycheque. The centaur was gregarious and easy with her, almost shrugging off the one that got away. The wife stayed hidden in the back.
For a couple of scary months after she quit, Charlene worried about money and wondered if she’d made a huge mistake quitting her job. Even Kyle started to hint that maybe she’d exaggerated the situation at the sandwich place a little and could’ve stuck it out, at least until she had something else lined up. Just when she was starting to panic, the job at the Ice Shack came up.
Congratulations On Everything Page 7
