The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
Chapter 2
To a large degree, when you’re born dictates how you’re going to live your life (genetics and locale being the two other main factors, I would think). Regardless of our present-day threats, enter the world during the fourteenth century, say, and life’s a far bigger gamble than it is now — maybe you’d hit sixty, or maybe appendicitis or a mouthful of gamy pheasant would take you out at age six. And whether a pauper or a noble, you wouldn’t stand in front of the toilet in your pull-ups, giggling with delight (as any sparkling-eyed three-year-old would these days) while you watched the porcelain portal magically whisk away your poo poo. You’d shit into a communal trench (the royal hole or the serf’s ditch), gagging at the stench bubbling up between your pudgy thighs as you added to the rancid pile.
I was born in 1957 — right here in good old North America. With Enrico Fermi’s job complete and Jonas Salk just dusting off his hands, not a bad time and place. Yeah, threats existed, but the postwar economy chugged right along, and whatever came our way we sure as hell could handle. My parents, one a paper pusher and one a homemaker (as was the style at the time) were a pair of robust, mentally able WASPS who dealt reasonable hands to all three of their children. So, regarding those variables affecting quality and quantity of life, I had no right to complain.
I did grow up in another city, though — Ottawa, a government town — which meant I saw little in the way of industry or big business as a youth. To me, politicians were the norm — and most of them, if not on the take, were guilty of collusion or nepotism (if you heard the whispers), or just plain stupidity (if you heard them speak).
Their forefathers, mustachioed gents of old, had decreed that no building erected shall be taller than those buildings housing bodies of government, and a tower with a clock in it did dominate the stubby skyline (a pointy, phallocentric thing rising some 302 feet), an obvious self-tribute to the swaggering, belligerent dicks running the show.
Nevertheless, the city had its charm: in the summer it was lush and green, with a manmade canal — an impressive physical accomplishment for early-nineteenth-century engineers — winding through its center. What the canal’s original function was meant to be, I couldn’t tell you, but it’s main twentieth-century duty appeared to be carrying armadas of sightseeing boats (with payloads of camera-toting tourists dropping their coffee cups, Wrigley’s wrappers, and Marlboro lungers into otherwise pristine waters) through some of the older, prettier residential sections of the city and into the downtown core.
In the winter (after the locks had been opened, draining vast amounts of water into the big river north of town) the canal transformed into a five-mile-long skating rink — touted as the world’s longest. With six-foot-high masonry walls exposed on either side, and the walking paths’ milky-globed lampposts casting silvery light from above, the ribbon of ice coursing through the city held a dreamlike quality on those cold, snowy evenings. And on the weekends, thousands of rosy-cheeked recreational skaters filled this rink, the adults gliding shoulder to shoulder, the children weaving in and out of traffic, engrossed in frenetic games of tag or snap the whip. Viewed from the paths above, the masses seemed to perform an intricate, choreographed dance as they propelled themselves to the next hot chocolate kiosk or chuck wagon stand.
The canal was one of the few highlights, physically or spiritually, of my birth city and childhood home. I grew up next to it (or, more correctly, to a small inlet called Patterson’s Creek that jutted from it like an afterthought in the middle of town) and it’s what I remember best.
The inlet itself lay at the bottom of a shallow hollow between my street and Baymore Terrace and gave the impression, at first glance, of a natural waterway cutting through a miniature valley. But upon closer inspection you could see the original stone wall masonry work, almost two hundred years old, rising just above the waterline. It ran for six hundred feet and, over the years, as housing and roadways and civilization in general sprang up around it, necessitated two quaint arched bridges to link the sprouting thoroughfares. Walkways and sprawling greenery lined both banks of the creek, and intricate wrought iron railings were added to it to keep the locals from falling in.
What never entered my mind as a youth (but always has when I’ve thought back on it as a shovel-wielding adult) was the amount of labor that must have gone into building such a beautiful but unnecessary elaboration. Even using draft horses and whatever hauling machinery they might have had back then, it must have taken fifty men at least two hundred days to produce something that held no real value to anyone; they’d even left a small island in the middle of it — a ten-by-thirty-foot oasis abounding with trees and wild foliage — as a kind of salute to its frivolity.
But whatever its original purpose, or lack thereof, the creek left me with a stunning hangout as a youth. Standing in that small strip of lush parkland at dusk and looking at the sprawling heritage homes of Baymore Terrace from beneath fairytale lighting almost took my breath away; well, maybe the view and the cigarette dangling from my twelve-year-old lips did that together.
I don’t know if you’d call it a parable that I can remember my first drag on a cigarette taking place in that Eden-like setting. Truthfully, I don’t remember my first cigarette at all, but the first cigarette I do remember (my first taste of the forbidden fruit), I sucked back in that very spot. I just didn’t have Eve by my side.
I partook of that particular mistake with a fellow preteen named Stanley Austen. Stanley was one of those saucer-eyed, floppy-eared, chinless marmots who looked like the subject of either a seventeenth-century English painting or a Jerry Springer episode on “Ozark Mountain love-tryst aftermaths.” You don’t seem to see as many of his type as you used to — the relatively recent advent of trains, planes, and automobiles has broadened the gene pool enormously over the decades — but he was a nice guy and my close friend back then.
That event, that premiere, I guess you could call it, took place in a what seems like a different life now — more than a hundred thousand cigarettes have passed my lips since — and even though I’ve filed much of my childhood under “things to forget,” I clearly remember that particular moment in time.
It was late fall, I know, because a carpet of red and orange leaves hugged the creek’s terrain; glazed with autumn condensation, they didn’t scatter but hopped forward in clumps when you kicked them, and they sparkled as if on fire beneath the park lights — which were already aglow although it was barely five o’clock.
Stanley and I hadn’t even made it home from school yet — we’d waited patiently for the cover of darkness before, paradoxically, wandering over and parking ourselves on a bench under a lamppost. (Today, two twelve-year-old boys sitting on a park bench after sunset would be targets for six kinds of perverts, a Reebok robbery, and a couple of good old-fashioned beatings; of course, it could have happened back then, too, but parents and children seemed far less aware of the possibilities.)
So there we sat, totally unaware of what ramifications lay on the other side of the doorway we were about to jimmy open into the future even as we discussed what we thought was the most insightful fact about the impending act.
“If you smoke it right down the filter,” Stanley said, “you get lung cancer instantly.”
“Wow, are you a fucking moron,” I said. “Cigarettes don’t cause cancer. Both my parents and three of my grandparents smoke and they’re all still alive.”
“Well I guess they never made it to the filter then,” Stanley said, indignantly. “Most people don’t. But go ahead and smoke yours right down, a-hole. I really hope you do. I won’t do any crying at your funeral.”
Stanley had previously informed me that hemorrhoids were nothing more than a painful buildup of shit. A quick check of the Preparation H package in my parents’ medicine cabinet straightened me out, so I no longer deferred to his medical knowledge — but I did tell him never to mistake any anal ointments for Brylcreem lest he lose, or at least substantially shrink, his mind. Still, he’d given me something new to think about on the smoking front — although I wasn’t going to tell him that.
“How about you produce them first, turd breath,” I said, with forced bravado. “Then I’ll smoke mine right down.”
And so he did, drawing from his jacket two cigarettes that he’d pilfered from his mother’s pack at lunchtime that day. Tobacco had shaken free of their tips, and from their long stay in his pocket they’d bent at the middle in what almost looked like polite, oriental bows; but to me, they looked every bit as straight and full and promising as the television commercials claimed them to be.
We stood and stepped right next to the lamppost. Standing beneath that cone of light, with his collar turned against the autumn wind and an unlit smoke clamped between his teeth, Stanley looked like a young and ugly Humphrey Bogart. And me? Maybe I looked a bit like a youthful Steve McQueen, although Maddy might smirk at that notion. But, hey, apparently Steve had to work at hiding a lisp, and he really wasn’t that good-looking.
It’s all about image. Stanley and I knew this even then as we sparked up his mom’s Virginia Slims. We looked tough, manly.
The taste, the smell, the park, Stanley: memories are made of this. Specks of time that litter your mind, tiny parts of a vast sum that you can never come close to totaling; if I remember correctly, neither of us smoked it right down to the filter, although I can only vouch for my actions and the sheer nausea I felt.
But with the nausea came a delightful lightheadedness that was either a lack of oxygen, instant addiction, or an intoxicating combination of both. And, of course, smoking really did make us look manly. We saw it in each other through tear-filled eyes as we sucked on those nipple-like Slims. We’d come a long way, baby.
* * *
How far have I come since then? It’s a trip I can’t measure in time or distance; well, okay, I can. I’m forty-five years old and I’ve moved a couple of hundred miles down the highway to Toronto from my hometown, but the true measurements lie in accomplishments and relationships.
And in those terms, one year rises above the rest: 1982, the year Maddy and I drifted into the same house on Dalton Avenue through some kind of degree-of-separation unfolding — months apart, both of us replacing a friend of a friend who’d flitted off to some new development in life and left news of a cheap place to live.
The complete roster in that place usually totaled six students — three men and three women, following a sex-preference screening process that Adam Wright, the fourth-year arts major holding the rental agreement, faithfully employed. His official statement was that the fifty-fifty gender split made life less complicated, but six young adults of any gender placed under the same roof made for complications galore.
The house was a big, rundown, five-bedroom monstrosity — a quasi-slum at the edge of the Annex but close to U of T’s downtown campus. The tenant turnover rate there depended on semesters, employment status, and other variables — such as who was getting together or breaking up with whom. Much of the thinking and mood in the house was testicular and ovarian in nature.
I’d lived there for five months and had recently dropped out of school (for the second time in four years; as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t grasp the importance of Democracy in America at all, and I thought the existence of Jean Paul Sartre made France’s worship of Jerry Lewis understandable). Still, life was good. Women seemed to like their men either brawny or intellectual — although I suppose they’d prefer both, with a dollop of sensitivity thrown in for good measure — and I’d landed a job as a laborer. By June of that year, I was as bronzed as I’d ever been and these strange ridges, triceps, deltoids, and the like, had sprung up all over my body. I was no Arnold, but I was more of me than I’d ever been in the past.
That entire summer, heat pressed down on the city. On weekdays I moved double-axle-loads of crushed rock with a Bobcat; and when the front-end loader went off-site, three days minimum of each six-day week, I stood in the sun and battled that eighteen-ton hill with nothing more than a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and orders to move the entire pile during the workday or move on to another, less demanding, line of work. How’d that old Tennessee Ernie Ford song use to go? “Move sixteen tons and what do you get…” The tune used to burst from my lips in an off-key whistle every once in a while as I flailed away at that crusher run.
In retrospect, how a young dirt digger could feel happy and even the slightest bit bohemian is beyond me, but somehow I managed. On weekends the house didn’t close. A group of people could drop by at any time, toting with them a few grams of hash and a huge haul of beer, with someone in the crowd holding My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, the new Eno/Byrne album, or maybe John Cale’s latest release.
One night in particular, Adam stepped into the living room waving a fistful of tickets to an all-night Lina Wertmuller fest at the New Yorker Theatre. A uniform and heartfelt groan echoed throughout the room (with the sparse Goodwill furnishings doing little to absorb the sound).
“Why in hell would you expect anybody to go with you to that?” Katie Jansen asked.
She sat beside her sister, Audrey, who, at one year older, held one more year’s worth of opinions; otherwise they were twins. They hailed from somewhere hard and flat and cold in the middle of the country. Of Nordic decent, strapping and rosy-cheeked, they wouldn’t have looked out of place in pigtails and leather shorts. The fifth tenant at that time, an engineering student by the name of Nick Burke, had pulled his usual weekend disappearing act, flitting to a better part of town and a better caliber of acquaintance — so what we had there (although, mercifully, no one ever said it) was the gang.
“It’s not where you go, it’s how you go,” Adam said, reaching into his pants pocket and removing a baggie. He pulled a length of Thai stick from the plastic and threw the grass onto the coffee table. Composed mostly of flower tops, it was tacky and ripe enough to stick to its skewer unaided; its pungent smell filled the room immediately.
“All right,” Audrey said. “Even Lina’d be funny after a few hits of that.”
“But wait … there’s more,” Adam said, in his best game show host impression. He dug into his other front pocket; another baggie hit the table. “Mushrooms — the West Coast’s finest. Something to nosh on and kill those munchies, and that dastardly edge, after we’ve smoked some of this weed from hell.”
So we smoked and noshed, and although none of us young, sensitive types would stand for drunk driving, we climbed into Adam’s ’71 Vega, a deathtrap with a hood that loved to fly open at inopportune times (with obstructions as jarring as road paint being a possible catalyst), and started for the New Yorker in a haze.
Two blocks later, Adam pulled over. “Every light’s green, yellow, and red,” he told us, although I’d been seeing different colors altogether. “I’m afraid the rest of the way’s on foot.” We spilled out, making it as far as the Saint Vincent House Hotel before common sense took over. Neither road nor sidewalk would have been a safe place by that time.
The Vince was our normal hangout, anyway — a two-hundred-seat bar within walking distance of the house that featured floor shows of every description (some appalling and some, we thought at the time, groundbreaking); on weekend nights it burst at the seams with drunken students ready to cheer for, holler at, or, when the evening grew sufficiently old, projectile vomit at, said entertainment.
We’d arrived early enough to grab a table at the front (the place didn’t get really zoo-like till at least eleven o’clock) and were immediately subjected to an opening act. The house lights faded and the stage lights snapped on as a pair of performance artists, your typical male/female team of pseudo-thespians hailing from the nearby school of art, burst onto the stage — and when I say typical, I mean they were shaved bald, stringy-muscled, and the color of dough, as if they’d spent time in the anti-gym, paying special attention to the reverse tanning bed. They spread industrial-sized lengths of clinging plastic wrap on the floor, stripped naked, and began rolling around on the sheets as the William Tell Overture blared over the PA system and they bellowed “LUNCHEON MEAT, LUNCHEON MEAT” in a monotone dirge.
And so they rolled, until the woman somehow became entangled in a non-art school way, and her buttocks, now truly bundled like a gigantic ham, hovered in front of our table. Beside her, the man finally lay still, stretched out on his back and wrapped up in an orderly fashion, like … like luncheon meat, if we were to get the drift of their artistic statement (which I’m sure Audrey did, despite her comment of “that ain’t no Schneiders he’s got there”); but the woman continued to struggle mightily, inadvertently waggling her mound of shining, packaged flesh at the crowd. Katie, now hooting loud enough to rival the sound system, pointed at it with tears running down her cheeks. In rebuttal, the woman on stage glared back over her ass at our table.
At last two enormous men, clad in leather aprons smeared with red paint, bound into view from the wings (undoubtedly early, to save the woman further humiliation), each clutching a meat cleaver in one balled fist; in unison they stooped, and, with their free hands, scooped up the artists/pimento loaves and threw them over their shoulders in dramatic fashion. As they exited stage left, chanting, “Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to market we go,” the woman looked up and, casting a scathing look at Katie, mouthed the word asshole.
Perhaps Katie found the irony of the utterance the ultimate punchline, considering what the luncheon meat lady had exposed us to for the past minute, or maybe it was just the drugs talking, but her laughing jag continued as Television’s “Venus” started pumping through the speakers. Then a waiter drifted by, and we ordered our beer as a sound crew scurried out and began setting up onstage.
We talked now, raising our voices over the occasional “testing, testing” coming through the mic and the odd guitar riff jumping out of the speakers, until the beer arrived — four pitchers, sweaty and cold — not enough to cut the mushrooms, but a start, at least. As we poured ourselves glasses, Adam let us in on some household news.
“Oh, by the way. We’re getting a new tenant tomorrow,” he said.
We’d been one person short for a while. Cindy Crawford (not the supermodel) had left on a month-long trip to Greece some time back, and we’d just recently received a postcard, cryptic in nature but to the point. It read: Having fun, guys, and making money. Won’t be coming back, so rent my room.
“Man or woman?” Katie asked.
“You know the rule,” Adam replied, telling us her name. “She’s a friend of Cindy’s.”
“Good-looking or butt-ugly?” Audrey asked.
Adam gave her a why-do-you-even-ask look in response.
“Doesn’t matter,” Katie said. “You won’t be getting into her pedal-pushers, either.”
Audrey let out a whoop and stuck her hand in the air for the big high five; Katie swiped, missing by a half a foot. The two corn-fed gals looked at each other for a beat, eyes wide with astonishment, then collapsed together in a laugh-drenched hug. The mushrooms, the Thai stick, or the combination thereof had done absolutely nothing for their coordination, but the contraband had certainly cranked up their sense of humor.
I couldn’t help but laugh, too. There I sat, high on life, as brown and hard as a nut, with an ice-cold pitcher of beer in front of me. Sure, I had to work the next morning, but I existed in that brief window of time — long enough after high school to have rinsed its foul taste from my mouth, but not so long after that reality had forced itself upon me yet. I lived where no task too difficult, no weight too heavy, no thought too profound could get the better of me. Moronic man-child that I was, whatever flaws I owned I could easily ignore.
Then the band jumped on stage, a group I’d never heard of before — REM — and they broke into an extended version of “Stumble.” As a cultural moment, this may not have been CBGB’s, 1976, with the Talking Heads on stage, or Woodstock ’69 with Hendrix setting his guitar on fire, but it felt good; I felt all right. I lit a smoke, dragged deeply, then tilted my glass to my lips. A jolt of electricity ran through me and wouldn’t stop; I eagerly awaited the arrival of the beautiful … now, what had Adam said her name was again? That’s it. The beautiful Madeleine Moffatt.
Chapter 3 arrives next Saturday. In the meantime, don’t forget to check out the short stories. Thanks again for reading!
I am always happy to hear from readers about anything and everything. Please leave a comment or you can reach me directly at dcmunroe@bell.net.