The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter 5
For such a short time into it, I’d started exhibiting copious side effects from all of my accursed journal writing — one being how, at the slightest provocation, I could break into analogies, metaphors, and similes. They flew from my head unbidden and unbridled, with different tones and timbres, like a cacophony of wino farts in a pre-dawn flophouse.
Maybe my need to bandy around these gaudy descriptions masked the fact that no matter how much I wanted to, I couldn’t capture in full what I wanted to say.
You’d think that part would be easy — saying what you want — especially with no one looking over your shoulder, or holding a stop watch, or grading the effectiveness of what you’ve just said. Good old free writing. But I’d narrowed my problem mostly down to this: I wasn’t even sure of what I was doing. Venting? Probing? Both those words had good physical rings to them, like they’d bring relief or pleasure (along with a soupçon of illicit satisfaction), but I sure hadn’t found any yet.
In fact, not a single one of my seven … labors, if that, indeed, was what they were, had brought relief or pleasure (or satisfaction) of any kind.
And as I stood outside Wendell-the-writer’s fence, I was experiencing just the opposite of pleasure. I felt as if I’d bottomed out, as if I’d come to the Augean stable section of the deal. How, exactly, was I supposed to befriend someone?
Now, a dog … a dog was different. Apricot, standing on her hind legs, with her rippled, velvety forearms draped over the front gate, proved my point. All I had to do was scratch her behind the ear and she grinned like an idiot and swish her stiff tail back and forth.
Would I want the same scenario to unfold with Wendell-the-writer when we finally met? Absolutely not.
This whole set-up seemed to magnify the artifice, the awkwardness of two people meeting for the first time: the defensive smile (if you’re lucky enough), exchanging information in thimblefuls, judging looks and tallying likes and dislikes while having it done to you in return (although, I do have to give people the nod over dogs in one category; we do not, for the most part, drop to our knees and sniff each other upon first meetings).
Basically, I couldn’t help feeling like one of those English bozos of bygone days, lugging around a suitcase and a letter of introduction, broiling in tweed and swimming in flop sweat whilst fidgeting on a welcome mat and being exposed to the glare of a monocle as blinding as a spotlight.
All right, maybe I waxed a bit melodramatic there; the situations weren’t similar. I almost knew Wendell-the-writer (we’d even given each other the nod on the odd occasion we saw each other from our separate sides of the street). I just couldn’t bring myself, once again, to ring his doorbell; not right then. What I needed to do was phone him, a far less intrusive ice-breaking maneuver, and propose a meeting. Yes. Absolutely. I’d phone him … as soon as tomorrow. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of that earlier.
I leaned over to chuck Apricot under the chin, just the way I used to say goodbye to Henry before leaving for work.
Unfortunately, I leaned as she lurched. Caught off-guard, I gasped in surprise just as our faces careened together — just as her tongue, big and wet as a beef liver, snaked out and thrust itself into my parted pie hole.
I stepped back, spitting and drawing my forearm across my lips.
“I was just saying goodbye, you big dink, not asking for a French kiss goodbye.”
She tilted her head and grinned at me wickedly. And that’s when I noticed, standing in the background on the porch, Wendell himself. Two successive thoughts seared my brain, the first being, Holy shit! Does he think I’ve purposely swapped tongues with his dog?, followed by, The nerve of that creep! He’d appeared like a specter, without warning, not even clearing his throat as he violated my assumed privacy.
But regardless of what just transpired, I now had my moment and couldn’t afford to blow it.
“Uh, hi,” I said. “My name’s Jim … Jim Kearns … from across the street.” I jacked a thumb over my shoulder, verifying my origins.
“Yes. Jim. I know where you live.”
Right off the bat I didn’t like his tone, but I kept going, determined to make something of the situation. “So, anyhow, I was wondering if you might have time for a coffee sometime today … your place or mine.”
“Sorry. I’m busy today.”
Again I didn’t like his tone, but maybe it was just my imagination; maybe he hadn’t meant to be brusque. Yet the fact that he stood dressed in a terry cloth housecoat and gripped a mug in one hand and a feather duster in the other suggested ample coffee time.
“Tomorrow, then?” I asked.
“Sorry, I’m busy tomorrow, too.”
All right. The man was an asshole, an easy enough category to fall into when applying my supposedly lax criteria, but even Maddy would have had to agree with my hasty judgment this time.
“How about next Monday?” he finally said. “I’ll have some downtime then.”
Oh, would he? I got the feeling that I was being dusted off by the clown, so I slipped a rebuff of my own back at him. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m all booked up on Monday.”
Now he raised an eyebrow. “I thought you just lost your … um, job.”
Jesus Christ, did every one on the block have access to my employment status? Rose McIntyre had dropped the same fact on me a couple of days ago. I’d worked twenty-one years straight, and suddenly my shtick was Jim Kearns, unemployed bum, with nothing but the Devil’s own idle time on his hands; Jim Kearns, the man who could always drop by later for a dose of the good stuff.
“So, just out of curiosity,” I asked, “is there some kind of underground gossip pipeline in this neighborhood? It seems to be pretty common knowledge that I’m ‘between jobs.’” And as I raised my hands to apply the physical quotation marks to “between jobs,” Apricot slapped her tongue onto my left palm.
“Well,” Wendell said (and I thought I saw the corner of his lips rise slightly as he spoke), “I can’t vouch for anyone else, but I read about your … adventure, I guess you’d call it, in the Star, the Sun, and the Globe — the virtual heavens as we know them. A great big write-up in each, with photos, and, of course, I saw that three-minute segment on City Pulse News and the blurb on Entertainment Tonight.”
Okay, now the guy was mocking me, although my indiscretions seemed to have earned me even more infamy than I’d imagined. Still, who the hell was he to bandy about any barbs? Standing there in his housecoat (with a feather duster in his mitt) at twelve-thirty on a weekday suggested more than a fictional acquaintance with the so-called housewife’s syndrome.
“Anyhow,” he said, “I really can’t afford to lose any momentum this week, but I should have a first draft of my current story ready for curing by the weekend. That’s why I suggested Monday, but if it’s no good for you…”
He paused, waiting for some sort of response. But I wasn’t about to tell him my 10:00 a.m. Bible studies with Rose McIntyre made my entire Monday busy enough for me, so I said nothing at all.
“…we can make it Tuesday. You can come on over for coffee and give me the true version of your run-in with Matt Templer.” Again he raised the corner of his lips slightly, and I felt as if nothing more than his thick skull bone separated me from some subtly humorous interior monologue.
“All right,” I said. “Tuesday it is.”
And just like that, I’d accomplished my mission. But something about the man made me nervous, and I posted a mental note. If I found myself the madcap centerpiece in some zany short story somewhere down the road, I’d sue the kimono off the bastard for defamation of character.
* * *
Another hour of sitting in front of my journal, pondering, sipping coffee, jotting and erasing, furrowing and unfurrowing my brow, and here’s what I’d written.
FEAR
PROCRASTINATION
FUTILITY
There I had it: philosophy 101. All I could produce were three words, not even in sentence form, pinched off and left to float before my confounded gaze following another sweaty bout of mental constipation. But somehow they described my mental state well enough to add up to a kind of personal gestalt — that is, a total greater than the sum of its parts when used to explain my situation.
Still, three words didn’t seem like a reasonable quantity for the effort; so, while I was still in a list producing frame of mind, I jotted down what remaining items I could think of for the upcoming third-floor renovation. After merging them with my list of questionable measurements, I hunted down the kids in separate parts of the house, first finding Eric in the basement, watching a year’s worth of Friends on DVD and avoiding the heat.
“So,” I asked, “do you want to come with me to the building center to order our reno stuff?”
“I’m not helping you with that,” he said. “I’m taking the trip, remember?”
“I’m not asking you to help. I’m asking if you want to go for a drive.”
He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Uh, no thanks.” He paused, waiting for me to leave, then: “But if you’re going to Home Depot, could you pick me up a strawberry kiwi fruizzi and one of those fudge bars from the Second Cup, please?”
I found Rachel at her computer and more than happy to tag along.
“Can I help pick out the colors?” she asked.
“I don’t know if there’ll be any colors involved yet, because this is mostly structural stuff, but how’s this — I promise you’ll be involved in any decision making.”
On our way out, I barked orders to Eric from the top of the basement stairs: Don’t unlock the door for anyone; call your mother or me if you’re going anywhere; and take your cellphone with you if you do.
And as Rachel and I got into the car and pulled out, I reflected on Maddy’s and my initial fears and how smoothly the maturation process had unfolded this year; admittedly, the kids were a bit soft and housebound (with Eric’s loafing on the sofa as he awaited his cold beverage and fudge bar being one galling example), but I pushed aside the old when I was a kid pitfall. Times were different, people were different, and I was no role model. In fact, I’d perpetrated the sole adolescent outrage of the summer when I’d engaged in my good old-fashioned name-calling punch-up.
So we drove, sequestered in our own thoughts, with me contemplating my shortcomings and Rachel listening to one of her Rachel tapes until, about five minutes into the trip, I felt an urge to fill the awkward little void in the dialogue. As we cruised a hazy stretch of industrial parkway, I offered up a reminiscence, an incident I’d thought about every so often (even more so these days) but had never found occasion to relate to the kids since they’d hit the age of reason.
“Hey, Rach,” I said. “Did I ever tell you about one of the most important lessons I ever learned in high school?”
“Noooo,” Rachel said, in that long-drawn-out way that indicated (a) can’t you see I’m listening to the Dandy Warhols, and not only are they cool, they’re cute, or (b) oh no, here we go again.
“In that case, since you’ve got nowhere to escape to, I’ll tell you now. I wasn’t much older than you at the time, and it happened in my Grade 10 urban geography class, of all places.”
“Urban what?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “Geography. City structure and planning, sort of, but I digress.”
She turned the volume down a notch on the stereo, a cue for me to continue.
“Anyhow,” I said. “We’d been watching slides for about half the class, which meant lights out, while Mr. … uh, Whatsisname stood beside the projector and prodded a lit screen with his pointer.”
“Mr. Whatsisname, Dad? How could you forget the teacher’s name if he taught you the most important lesson you learned in high school?”
“One of the most. And I didn’t say he taught me; I said I learned it in his class. He had nothing to do with it. For that matter, neither did his aerial photos of central business districts, good old CBDs, as he liked to call them, or any of the graphs mapping demographic migration based on income.”
“If you say so,” Rachel said.
“No, what was important on that screen, only I could see,” I said, with a theatrical flourish.
“Oh, great. Now you’re going to confess to drug use as a youth.”
“I’ll do no such thing. What I saw on screen was deeper than that … and it wasn’t exactly on the screen, anyway. What happened was this: the kid sitting in front of me — and no, I don’t remember his name, either — had two single hairs sticking straight out from the top of his head, like rabbit ears. And running between those two hairs was a single strand of spiderweb.”
“No way,” Rachel said. Then, an instant later, “How’d you know it was a spiderweb?”
“Because right in the middle of that single strand sat a spider, no bigger than the head of a pin, with its little legs sticking out on both sides; but from my position, with the huge, lit screen as a backdrop, it looked bigger, and it looked like it was taking in the slide show along with everyone else.”
Rachel laughed now, saying, “Okay. That’s funny … really. But it had absolutely nothing to do with urban geography, or any other class, so how could it be one of the most important thing you learned in high school?”
“Well, at first I just thought it was funny, too. But the image stayed with me, and kept staying with me as the years passed and most so-called book facts fell by the wayside, until finally, decades later, it started to mean something more than just a weird incident.”
“So, what does it mean?” Rachel asked. “Besides the fact that unless the stupid spider could survive on dandruff, it probably starved to death.”
“Exactly. It drove home the point that human beings have control of their own destinies. I mean, I can’t vouch for other primates, or dolphins and such, but for the most part other sentient creatures—”
“Huh?” Rachel said.
“Living things with awareness … unlike, say, vegetation. Most species have little or no concept of tomorrow, they migrate with the herd, they mate during mating season, they sling their web up from the two highest points regardless of where they are. They’re motivated more by the behavioral patterns of countless generations or by split-second reactions to outside stimuli than they are by free will.”
She looked at me almost straight-faced. “Okay, professor … and your point is?”
“My point is, what makes us different is our ability to apply independent thought towards a destiny we can at least partially control. Unlike that spider, we can understand the absolute futility of slinging a web between two strands of hair. We can even have a good laugh about it.”
When I’d finished the statement, I couldn’t help but feel like a moronic parent who not only didn’t know what he was talking about but had just waxed way too philosophic to a kid who’d rather have been listening to the Dandy Warhols.
The looming Home Depot sign saved me from a deeper quagmire, though, and we spent two minutes trolling for parking in a crowded parking lot. We spent the next five wending our way through a three-acre retail warehouse, following hints and clues to the contractor’s area; and for five minutes after that, we wandered canyon-like drywall and lumber aisles, our heads cranked skyward like we were rubes in Manhattan, until finally a burly and balding man with the name “Clifford” sewn onto his shirt pocket zeroed in on us.
“So,” Clifford said. “How can I help you folks today?”
“We’re looking to finish a third floor,” I said. “And we’re starting from scratch.”
We stood before an incrementally widening, blue-collar, middle-aged grunt, and I could feel the resentment radiating from him. He’d had his hopes, he’d had his dreams, and none of them had involved this. He was much like me, except he still had his job — part of which was to fire a first volley, ass-kiss, sales-related compliment.
“That’s some undertaking,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “But if you don’t mind me saying so, you look like a pretty good do-it-yourselfer.”
I gawked at my shuffling feet. “Well, yeah, I’ve built some … but my real experience is in stone and concrete.”
“No problem,” Cliff said. “You’ve created with your hands, and that’s the important thing. So tell me. Do you have any sort of game plan?”
I drew out my rumpled papers, more the product of duress than actual thought, and handed them to him; he scanned them for a moment, not quite suppressing a grimace, before saying, “Excellent overview, but it lacks some detail. If you could step over to my office for a moment?”
He was being kind. I’d have likened the plans to a novel outline scratched out on a daiquiri-soaked cocktail napkin. Rachel and I followed him until we came across a communal-looking desk holding two computers and scattered papers. He scooped up a clipboard and pen.
“Now,” he said. “If your sketch’s numbers are accurate, at least we have the dimensions. Are you going to be resurfacing the walls?”
“The studs are showing right now,” I said. “So I was going to keep it simple, drop a six-foot level across, scab out if I had to, and drywall right over them.”
“Excellent,” Clifford said. “So we calculate the amount of drywall sheets needed from your numbers and apply those same numbers to your insulation needs.”
“It’s already insulated,” I said.
“Original?” Clifford asked.
I nodded.
“And what year would that be?” he asked. “Nineteen…?”
“Forties,” I answered.
For the next two minutes, Rach and I received an enlightening lecture on R values and the new insulations. The old stuff had to go.
“And about the windows?” he prompted.
“Yeah. Well I figured I’d scrape down the woodwork on them and repaint.”
Clifford shook his head, saddened by my ignorance.
“Your doodling here,” he said, nodding to what seemed more and more like tattered papyrus in his hands with each passing moment, “shows two small windows, one at each end of the floor. Are they facing east-west or north-south?”
“North-south,” I answered.
“So,” Clifford said, recapping, “not to mention totally wasting your insulation effort if you leave these sixty-year-old wind tunnels in place, you’re keeping a couple of north-south facing peepholes. King Tut had cheerier digs. I doubt you could see your own shadow in this place.”
“Well, I—”
“When, in fact,” he said, in full sales mode, “the exposed rafters you have right now leave you with an ideal opportunity to install a Weatherlux 3000 skylight.”
“But I—”
“Look, I don’t need to tell you, because you’re a bright guy,” Clifford confided, “but the ten to fifteen thou you spend will easily translate to thirty thou-plus on the value of your house — and that’s directly upon completion of the work.”
He didn’t need to tell me. Part of this labor’s benefit was to appreciate our home’s value for sale, remortgaging, or future security on the off-chance I wallowed in unemployment for more than a year (or so I assumed). Unfortunately, I thought all I’d have to do was empty the third floor, drywall it, paint it, then sand and urethane the hardwood floors — complicated enough tasks in their own rights.
“Would installing a skylight involve any roof climbing?” I asked.
“Some,” Clifford said. “But for a man as nimble as you—”
“And the windows?”
“Ditto,” Clifford said. “You’d have to get out there a bit. But all new windows and skylights come with easy-to-understand how-to videos that minimize possible installation hazards and miscues.”
“Uh, Dad,” Rachel said, as I digested this information, “are you going to carry all this stuff to the third floor on that pull-down ladder thingy?”
All three of us looked aghast or confused now as Clifford considered this new information.
“You mean all you’ve got for third-floor access is a retractable?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “But it’s quite sturdy … and there’s not really enough room for a full-sized staircase. The wall to my son’s bedroom gets in the way.”
“But a retractable?” Clifford said, again sounding incredulous. “That’s not even up to code for a habitable living space, and if you leave it there, you’re not going to make your money back on the renovations, that’s for sure.”
“What if I nailed it in place and painted it?” I asked.
“And what if you painted your new drywall with crayon?” Clifford asked — rhetorically, I’m sure. “A ladder is a ladder. It doesn’t cut the mustard.”
Of course I’d given no thought at all to a set of stairs. After a police beating, narrowly escaping a court case of international scope that certainly would have left me with a stint in the big house, and having just lost the only job I’d ever known, I hadn’t bothered sweating the small stuff. But I sweated it now.
“So what do you suggest?” I asked.
“You can lose three or four feet of staircase length with a small landing and a few stairs coming out at a ninety-degree angle.”
“That would be perfect, Daddy,” Rachel said. “You could match it up with the first-floor staircase. It would look so cool.”
Clifford pondered for a moment, then: “So that means four eight-foot lengths of two-by-ten pine.” As he jotted down these numbers, he added, seemingly by rote, “I’m sure a guy like you already owns a good circular saw, but, before it slips my mind, you might need to purchase a reciprocating saw for enlarging your window and staircase openings and slashing that hole in your roof for the new skylight. Do you own one of those babies?”
He looked up.
“I guess,” I said, “we’ll be looking at one of those next.”
Just great. Besides being way over my head in the carpentry skills department, I could now envision myself tottering atop a ladder while I hacked at my third-floor ceiling with a reciprocating saw, one of those screaming, clattering, unsheathed blades that resembled a two-fisted electric turkey carver suffering from ’roid rage.
As Clifford droned on and I digested this raw data, once again the uncontrollable urge to compare and analogize took hold; I thought back to my Grade 10 urban geography class and that spider.
Sure enough, the similarities were there, except my particular web was a narrow, pointless band of paving stones spanning the two strands of past and present; I stood upon it now, looking out at the blinding canvas of the future and the unfathomable mysteries it held.
But the major difference between me and the spider was what I’d discussed with Rachel: I could understand the futility of my situation.
I just couldn’t quite bring myself to have a good laugh about it.
And neither could Eric when, upon our return, he found that his Strawberry Kiwi Fruizzi and fudge bar had been driven right out of my mind.
Thank you for reading. Have a great week! Jim will be back next Saturday.