The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
After the Incident: Chapter 7 - Jim and Wendell
I’m not sure what I expected when I rang Wendell Berkshire’s bell the following morning. Of course, I didn’t expect to see him sporting a frock and an apron, and I tried not to assume that he’d still be in his robe, a cup of java in hand, but when he answered the door, his appearance surprised me. No comfortable coffee-klatch ensemble here; instead, he wore jeans, a crisp golf shirt, and a slightly sheepish look.
“Hey, sorry, Jim,” he said, before either of us had uttered any sort of greeting. His screen door remained between us. “I had a change in plans at breakfast this morning and have to head up to the Superstore on Don Mills for groceries.”
He’d had a change in plans? Weak verbiage for anyone, let alone a writer. What he’d meant was, he’d been given a change of plans — passive voice highlighted. I might have answered with a kerrchaaaw (one of those whip-snapping sounds), but before I could respond at all, he said, “You can drop by again this afternoon, though . . . or, if you want, you’re welcome to come along with me. We can shoot the breeze a bit in the car on the way up and back.”
How big of him. I could accompany him to the grocery store or I could wait by the window for him. If I weren’t under orders to grow as a human being I would have considered his offers a slight; luckily, though, a short, dog-eared list of necessities (coffee, mayonnaise, a pack of Always Maxi Overnights with Flexi-Wings, and things of that nature) garnered crease lint in my front pocket at that very moment — nothing more than a hand-basket trip, but I recognized the occasion as one where I could, realistically this time, cross off two chores with a single stroke.
“Sure. Sounds good to me,” I said.
“All right, then. Just let me get my keys.”
He stepped away and Apricot ambled into his wake, her tail beating like a windshield wiper set on high. I said hello but avoided pressing my hand against the door in greeting, knowing that a mere screen wouldn’t stop me from getting my knuckles soaked. Instead, I stepped back and looked around at the toddler paraphernalia littering the porch: the fold-up stroller, the accordion-style baby gate, the red and yellow Playskool car, the scattered plastic pails and scoops. With the big, goofy mutt panting in the background, I could have been standing on my porch of twelve years ago.
I was still trying to tell myself I felt no envy when he stepped from the house. He paused, ruffled the top of Apricot’s outthrust head, then nudged her back inside and locked the front door.
Their Honda sat curbside — a scenario that should have been my first clue to a scheduling change when I sleepwalked around it to call on him minutes earlier. Usually, their car was gone for the day. He must have dropped off his wife and child at their destinations already, a speculation the open driver-side window and still-ticking engine strengthened.
We got in, he started the car, and a CD blared to life — Tom Petty playing “Don’t Come Around Here No More.” Not my taste exactly, but he lost no points if I were tallying. He turned it down a notch and we pulled out onto the road.
Yesterday’s downpour had departed, the oppressive humidity had returned, and now the street had resumed its late-summer, post–9:00 a.m. ghost-town feel — with the omnipresent Rose doing little to alter the vibe. In acknowledgment of our newfound friendship, she raised an eyebrow at me from her spot on her porch as we rolled by. I returned the gesture.
“Yeah, so like I said. Sorry,” Wendell stated as we turned at the end of the street. “We had one of those hectic, non-stop weekends and never made it to the grocery store.”
I declined comment on the foot-long Blockbuster video receipt flowing from his car’s front-dash cup holder, the amount of beer I’d seen him cart into his house Friday evening, and the fact that it was already Tuesday. Everyone’s definition of hectic came in a different wattage, and however this morning unfolded would be better than some Nescafé-fuelled small talk at his kitchen table.
But small talk did follow, conversation so boring that when condensed it might fit into a Sominex gel cap: Wendell’s wife, Ashley, was a thirty-year-old law clerk (which, as a superficial job description, meant nothing to me) and the cat’s pajamas; Wendell himself toiled on his second book, another short-story collection for a mid-sized publisher; and their son, Casey, apparently had few equals in the looks and smarts departments. Whether Berkshire meant at Holt Renfrew or Zellers only time would tell.
I tried to punctuate his boasts with baseball card–style stats of my own for Maddy, Rachel, and Eric, knowing I had every reason to be as proud of my family as Wendell was of his; but I found myself falling into one of those bizarre alienation modes even as I spoke, where I felt as if I knew almost nothing about them. These moments of semi-isolation had seemed to crop up more often since I’d lost my job. It was as if my recent and constant probing into memories of twenty-plus years with Maddy with more than half of those built around the kids had actually exposed a criminal lack of knowledge and understanding of those dearest to me. Why didn’t I have ten thousand memories at my command? Had I not cared enough for them? Had I not worked hard enough at my relationships?
Maybe. Or maybe I just didn’t have the social skills to prattle on about me and my own the way Berkshire was able to about him and his. But whatever the reason, it made for an uneasy trip, sitting in an unfamiliar car, beside a strange man, digging for buried kernels of information to cast his way in those rare moments of silence.
Finally, though, we crested the rise at Eglinton Avenue and the Superstore came into view; relief seemed at hand. At the same time, David Bowie’s cover of “Pablo Picasso” issued from the car speakers, momentarily elevating Wendell’s status another notch. But that’s when he reached out, lowered the volume even more, turned to me, and said, “So, Jim. You’ve got to tell me the real story.”
I sat, feigning a blank stare for a moment. “Huh? What real story?”
“Y’know,” he said. “About your fight with Matt Templer.”
“Oh, right.”
Of course, I hadn’t forgotten about it, and I knew he hadn’t. He’d told me all about it last Friday. And not to belabor the point, it was the only reason I sat where I sat. But the truth was, now that my righteous indignation over the event had cooled with time, I was starting to feel like . . . well, just what was Bowie calling me at that very moment . . . ? like a bit of an asshole. Maybe I could have handled the situation differently.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said quickly, and a touch defensively (perhaps sensing something in my tone or expression) as he wheeled into the parking lot. “It’s not like I’ve followed your situation closely or I’m passing judgment, but I do a lot of reading and Internet research during the day, and well . . ..”
His eyes shifted now as he talked and cruised and looked for a parking spot. “Time Magazine Online, for example, made it sound like you attacked the guy, he overpowered you and had his way with you, then he wiped himself off on your untucked shirttail.”
“Time Magazine? They wrote it out just like that?”
He didn’t answer for a beat, instead braking, slipping his car into reverse, and peering over his shoulder as he glided into a tight space. Then: “Well, I’m paraphrasing, but yeah, Time Magazine of Time/Warner, Inc., the ultimate backer of Guts ’n’ Glory, if you catch my drift.”
We got out of the car, and as we walked towards the store, he said, “Don’t worry, though. You’re not in the headlines anymore. Everyone’s pretty well forgotten all about you.”
Good . . . good; despite the personal anguish of a tattered life and what looked to be long-term unemployment, I was, at least, last week’s public humiliation. Andy Warhol’s well-worn maxim had never seemed truer.
“Anyway,” he continued, “since you happened to ring my doorbell after all this time on the street together, I find myself in the unexpected position of being able to hear your side of it.”
Even as he said the words, I realized that nobody other than Maddy had heard my side. Sure, I’d written about it in my little journal, and I’d dwelled on it — Lord how I’d dwelled, wording and rewording my defense in my mind until doubt had started to creep in — but I’d never told anyone how I saw it unfold.
“And the fact is,” Wendell said, still blathering, sounding almost confessional now as he pulled a cart from a long train of them parked just inside the store’s entrance, “I suppose I’m a lot like most people in that I take my mainstream news at face value.”
So now that I did have an audience (even if only of one), I found myself tongue-tied and more than a little piqued. I mean, Berkshire had lived across the street from me for close to two years now; he had a passing acquaintance with Maddy and the kids and knew that we were a decent, functional family. But basically, what he’d just confessed was this: to the best of his media-fueled knowledge (which, by the way, seemed more than ample), and until I could prove otherwise, he actually believed that I’d gone berserk and taunted Matt Templer until he’d left me spent and twisted, with my arse in the air and my tear-stained upper cheeks buried in my own screenings. For an instant, I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and yell, Hey, show some common sense! Why did I have to prove anything to him? Guts ’n’ Glory was now shooting around a disabled Hollywood star famous for his infantile personality and quick temper, a man with a history of dust-ups, petty demands, and outrageous behavior, and the press had done its inexplicable duty, lionizing him for it.
As always, it seems, the most maddening aspect of my situation had come back to roost: inequality. The man with his jaw wired shut wasn’t the man with the lesser voice. And I now found myself preparing to plead my case through clenched teeth.
As it turns out, though, I had little chance to sort my thoughts and fashion any response while we ran the gamut of Girl Guides and Boy Scouts peddling their wares throughout the mezzanine; by the time we’d slipped past the college-aged girl hawking MasterCard applications at the foot of the movator and escalated up into the store proper, I had no urge to try to deliver the facts as I saw them, humming and hawing every time Berkshire tuned me out to stretch for an item or consult his page-long shopping list.
“I’ve just got a few things to pick up, myself — coffee and stuff,” I said, plucking a hand basket from a stack.
“You’re in luck,” Wendell said. “The house brand’s always on sale here if you’re okay with no-name.”
“Sure. Great. I’ll catch up to you later then.”
I turned and headed in a direction he wasn’t facing, not sure if he’d been expecting me to tag along with him and not looking back for any indication; I just kept moving my legs until I was away, drifting from the groceries section into the household-items aisles, where I ogled Japanese room dividers, exercise machines, and color televisions, impulse items for the new consumer.
The breathing room was pleasant and the shiny baubles fascinating, but before I knew it, twenty minutes had passed, so I drifted back to the heart of the store with my mini-list in hand, lost in the strange atmosphere of weekday shopping, noticing details I might not have noticed on a Saturday when caught in the crowded, hectic swirl of strangers and family.
In fact, that’s why I noticed the song. I’d stopped in front of the feminine hygiene section to pick up Maddy’s brand of pads, those maxi-wingy things she’d put on the list, when I realized that “Avalon” wafted through the air. I struggled there for a moment, trying to decide just how I felt as I started moving to the music that once moved me so.
Was ’82 the year that song made me feel so cool and sophisticated, like I was another Bryan Ferry sliding through Parkdale in my new black leather jacket? That was Maddy’s and my first year out on our own together, when we’d rented that two-floor duplex apartment on Elm Grove Avenue, well out of our price range but with an unobstructed view of the skyline from the third-floor back balcony.
Yes, indeed: ’82. A year in the distant past, from that brief era in time I’d managed to compartmentalize and carry around in my mind like a precious, wallet-sized photo of my youth.
“Avalon,” my past, now background Muzak in a semi-suburban, big box grocery store.
And that’s where I was when I heard a voice calling me. I shook my head, focused, and saw a youth (well, a twenty-something, anyway), wiry-muscled, his skull showing a steel-blue widow’s peak of stubble; he stared at me hard from the personal grooming section a few feet to my left. A homemade tattoo, a cross of sorts, stood out on his veiny forearm as he clutched a pack of Bic shavers.
“Yo, pal,” he said. “Your … partner … wants you.”
He spit out the word partner like it had turned bad in his mouth. Behind him, about forty feet down and at the end of the aisle, Wendell held up two coffee tins.
“Hey, Jim,” he called. “The coffee’s two-for-one. Should I pick them up?”
I looked down now and realized that I clutched a package of Maddy’s pads in my right hand. And, of course, I still grooved to “Avalon,” doing that anti-rhythm, chicken-pecking-for-grain thing with my head that I called cutting loose. Then I looked back at the punk, who now examined me closely for signs of … the plague, a scarlet letter … what?
Then it all coalesced, and after an instant of doing a little thinking, I heard my mind allow this one particular thought past my vocal chords without my consent: “Hey. Let’s get something straight, Ernst. He’s more than just my partner, he’s my shy little guy.” I held up the maxis for him to see. “I’ve even got to pick up his pads for him.”
I peered around the weasel for an instant, called out, “Okey-doke, Wendell, you just do that,” then reapplied my stare-down as I pondered two almost simultaneous questions, the first being What, exactly, did I mean by that pad remark? (For protecting those previously mentioned and much-maligned Dockers from messy post-coital drip? I just don’t know.) The second, far more pertinent question, came quick on its heels: Why do I do things like this? (Although the jerk had caught me smack dab in the middle of a vulnerable moment, mourning the loss of irretrievable youth.)
Meanwhile, the kid still held his stare-down on me, disliking me for many reasons, first and foremost, I assumed, because he thought I was not just gay but a fuckin’ fag. I didn’t do things the way he did them. I did them all wrong.
How in hell would I explain the situation to Maddy if I got into another raging punch-up, this one in the feminine hygiene section of a grocery store with a youth-league supremacist while in the midst of performing one of my “growing” labors?
I braced for one, though, shifting my feet to stabilize myself, loosening my grip on my hand basket, preparing to throw a right . . . and what? Maxi-mize the bastard? Buffet him about the head with a barrage of overnight protection? But because I outweighed him by forty pounds and a good beating wasn’t guaranteed to show up on his side of the scorecard, the kid merely shook his head, as if I were a pathetic wretch in the presence of royalty, and walked away in a measured gait.
I let out my breath, and those familiar jitters ran up through my legs and along my back and arms. For someone so physiologically and psychologically traumatized by violence, so absolutely terrified of it, I toyed with it far too often. Maddy was right, there was no way around it. I had problems.
I tossed the pads in my basket and spent the next ten minutes shopping cautiously. I think the kid did, too. Behaving like two different species with sharp teeth sharing a watering hole on the savannah, we orchestrated a palpable space between us as we worked our way to the same end of the store. And as I walked down the last aisle with my refrigerated goods fresh in my basket, I found Wendell parked at the last cash register with half of his cart unloaded.
I pulled up behind him. “How’d it go?” I asked.
Wendell kept unloading. “Uh, okay, I guess. The damnedest thing happened, though.” He nodded towards the exit. “You see that guy over there?”
In the vast, almost empty store, the punk, six aisles down, eyed us warily as he ran his hand basket full of goods past a cashier.
“Yeah.”
“Well, for whatever reason, he bumped my cart. Over by the eggs. And there was tons of room in the aisle.”
“Oh,” I said. “I can explain that. He’s a bit of a neo-Nazi sociopath and he thinks you’re a homosexual.”
“What!” Wendell barked. Then he paused; you could almost see the liberal side of him, the progressive man-of-letters side, working its way to the surface. Like in the old Seinfeld episode, I could sense he wanted his next line to be, Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He didn’t quite make it, but he came close enough, calming himself and asking, “Why in the world would he think that?”
“Well,” I said, “back when you called up to me about the two-for-one coffee, I exchanged words with him and” — I paused here, trying to think of how to word it properly before finally just spitting it out — “I think that he thinks that you’re my wife.”
“What!” Wendell barked again, this time not even looking for his liberal side. “Why did he think I was the wife?” He tapped himself on the chest as he said the word I.
How was I supposed to reply to that? I don’t know, but better you than me? Or, Would you have felt better about being cast as the husband? Or, more fittingly, People believe what might or might not be the truth, regardless of its likelihood, when it’s laid out for easy consumption right in front of their beady little close-set eyes. He could have related to the last line of thinking with ease.
But I didn’t respond with any of those answers; and I certainly didn’t point out that I’d implied Wendell’s alleged spousal status when the young Nazi confronted me and misidentified our sexual orientations.
Instead, I just shrugged and said, “Beats me.”
Wendell didn’t hear me; he was too busy casting his own tough looks at the young man, who, on his way out now and glaring back over his shoulder, returned the favor. They locked eyes until the punk’s head disappeared beyond the descending movator like a tiny, not-too-bright sun dipping beneath the horizon at the end of the day.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, when he looked back to me. “Shit like this happens.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t think you were the wife.”
“That will be $228.72,” the cashier said, interrupting our conversation and inspecting us in tandem as she plucked Wendell’s debit card from his fingers.
The woman was older and portly, with permed grey hair, and definitely had sprung from a time when Rock did Doris and then slipped quietly back into the closet; oddly enough, I got the sense she felt that’s where Wendell and I belonged right now as she peered up at me through the tops of her bifocals and started ringing up my tab.
“The better half’s,” I said, nodding at the Always pads as she passed them over the scanner. “She’s some feminine gal.”
“I can imagine,” the cashier said, deadpan, her eyes flickering in Wendell’s direction for an instant. I kept my mouth shut after that, paying without comment and waiting for my receipt. Wendell, meanwhile, stood at the end of his conveyor belt, stuffing groceries helter-skelter into shopping bags (he’d bought Vaseline alrighty, a brand with little bunnies on the label, but for whatever reason, he’d hadn’t picked up any Pampers). He fired his full-to-bursting bags into his cart as fast as he could.
I walked to the end of my belt and looked across to him as I bagged my few items. “If I can offer you a word of advice,” I said, “slow down and put him out of your mind. It’s not worth it. It’s never worth it.”
I’d heard those words recently, and I knew they were much easier to repeat than to live by: men become morons over issues like territory and sexuality, even when the encroachments or threats upon them are merely implied or trifling. But I offered the advice out of guilt as much as any onrush of decency. Basically, I’d put him in his mental dither with my own big mouth and ornery nature.
He studied me for a second and nodded in agreement; for the next while, though, he appeared totally lost in thought.
He continued to brood as we found his car and he loaded his groceries. And now, as we pulled from the parking lot, a Kate Bush tune warbled gently through the car, doing little to inflate his punctured macho psyche; finally, just to break the melancholia, I said, “Anyhow. About the Matt Templer thing? You want to hear what really happened?”
“Sure,” Wendell said, perking up a bit.
So I told him.
When I’d completed my story (dispelling all of his surface skepticism about events, anyway), and submitted a brief synopsis of the aftermath, we’d been sitting in Wendell’s parked car in front of his house for about ten minutes.
“After all this time,” I said, “I still don’t know if I did the right thing.”
“As far as I can see, you had no choice,” Wendell said. “I mean, that line you gave me back at the grocery store, about it not being worth it, is true — when you’re dealing with something as small potatoes as a bumped cart. But that Templer guy made you take a stand.”
“Do you think?” I said. “Because that line was a direct quote from Maddy — after I’d been fired and had left our life in shambles. It seems damned accurate in hindsight.”
Wendell shrugged. “From what I know of your wife, she’s a smart woman, but to me it sounds like she contradicted herself there.”
“Really? How?”
“Well, first of all,” he said, “she imposed an obviously feminine point of view on how a guy like you should have responded to virtually getting sand kicked in his face. The way I see it, you’re not wired to respond any other way. You couldn’t. Evolution, your genetic makeup, wouldn’t let you. And that list she drew up for you? It’s a terrific idea, but the fact that she told you to wait and keep your mind open before looking for work again implies that she thought you weren’t where you should have been anyway, and that in the long run, standing up for yourself before a pompous moron was the right thing to do.”
“I don’t think so,” I replied. “I can’t recall a single high-five for career planning during our little breakfast tête-à-tête.”
“Maybe not, but Maddy does expect more from you now, doesn’t she? And it’s not like you threw away any sort of ca—”
Berkshire stopped himself before he could finish his sentence. It’s wasn’t like I threw away any sort of what? Candy bar, cantaloupe, career?
“What I mean is,” Wendell said, trying to apply damage control now, “over the years you must have discovered other things that you’re good at, things more befitting a man of your…”
Ouch, there he went again. Sweat varnished his upper lip.
“Station,” he finally spit out, thereby avoiding “advanced age” or “declining physical capabilities.” At least he hadn’t said “intelligence” and insulted thousands of lock-stone installers in one thoughtless sentence.
“Seriously,” he said, still in smooth-over mode. “You must have a number of options.”
But the truth was, I had no options and no ideas. “It’s all I’ve done,” I told him, “for the past twenty-one years. Nothing else.”
And then it popped into my mind, as it did every so often, as much as I tried to suppress it: “Except for the screenplay, of course. But that doesn’t count.”
“What screenplay?” Berkshire asked.
“Never mind,” I said. “It’s not important anymore.”
“What do you mean, ‘not important anymore’? And why wouldn’t a screenplay count as something?” Wendell asked.
“The world’s littered with yahoos who’ve penned half a novel or banged out a screenplay only to have it be a waste of time. I was one of them; in terms of work history on a résumé, I’d be pretty safe in limiting my experience to Paving Stone Installer.”
The bitterness of my little soliloquy surprised me — possibly because I’d only heard those words spoken of me in the past; I’d never admitted to them to myself, never verbalized them, and the only reason I did so now was because of Berkshire’s interest, obviously feigned to atone for his previous thoughtlessness.
“When did you write it?” Wendell asked.
“Maddy and I worked on it over a winter, about seven years ago.”
“So, what came of it?”
“Nothing. We got some decent interest from a couple of notable producers for a while but things fell through. After that, we had a New York agent at one point but nothing came of that either. Then . . . then nothing but a waste of years. It’s a long, boring story that goes nowhere — as you might imagine since I’m sitting here right now.”
“Producers and agents, huh.” He paused for a moment then said, “Look. I’ve got to get the refrigerator and freezer stuff put away or Ashley’s going to kick my ass. But if you’ve still got a copy of it kicking around, drop it off when you get the chance.”
“Sure.”
He reached down to pop his trunk, I groped for the grocery bags between my feet, and we opened our respective doors.
“Seriously,” Wendell said, looking over the top of the car now. “I’d love to read it.”
Okay, so maybe he was doing more than mollifying me. He sounded genuinely interested; my immediate reaction, of course, was to regret my thoughtlessness at not having given his short story collection a chance by now. He’d shown me up.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll see if I can find one.”
Have a great week. Another chapter arrives in your mailbox next Saturday. If you’re new here or haven’t had a chance to read my short stories, don’t forget you can access all by going to the Dashboard!