Monday Night Man (12 page)
“Lousy.” Horst had held one hundred and four jobs. Some as long as a month, others less than an hour. Once he got â then quit â two jobs in the same day. He's done everything, from gardening to working as a store detective to filling condom dispensers.
“How many jobs you had?”
Rupp knew exactly how many.
“Don't be an asshole.”
Rupp was smiling.
Horst planted his forearm on the table and leaned forward. “Hey Rupp. What the fuck you grinning at? You think I'm a character? You probably wish I'd had two hundred and four jobs.” Horst shook his head. Still, he described the interview he had the other day for a toupee company. “They wanna do Before and After shots of me.”
“But you got lotsa hair.”
“Yeah. First they do the After pictures, then they're gonna shave the top off and do the Before ones.”
“Ever sling beer?”
Horst nodded. He saw Rupp warming up for THE GAME, which consisted of guessing a job Horst hadn't done. Horst hated THE GAME.
Rupp looked around the pub for inspiration. “Window washer?”
“Yeah.”
“Painter?”
Horst nodded.
“Laying carpet?”
Horst nodded again.
They sat in the Ivanhoe, which served the cheapest beer in Vancouver, two bucks for a pint of sour, soapy draft. The walls were done in medieval swords and shields. Nearby, beer-league baseball players argued.
One of the women stood and bashed a mug against a guy's head. Then she put up her fists, still gripping the mug-handle like brass knuckles.
“Fuck you, Eddie! It was a strike!”
But Eddie was out.
The bar fell silent. No one made a move as the woman, barely five feet, marched out the door. She wore a blue nylon team jacket with EDDIE'S ELECTRIC on the back underlined by a baseball bat. Everybody at that table wore the same jackets.
When she was gone, the pub returned to life. The police and ambulance arrived, and Eddie was packed out on a stretcher. Across the bar, a table full of young guys erupted in laughter.
Rupp turned to Horst. “Ambulance driver?”
“No. I worked in a hospital, though.”
“I hate hospitals,” said Rupp.
“Me too.”
“How long you last?”
“One day.”
Y
ou'll be working with blood,” said the nurse. “Will that upset you?” Her nametag said Trapp. “You'll have four operating rooms to clean each afternoon, and sometimes there's blood.”
“A lot of blood,” said the other interviewer. His nametag said Stubbert. He was propped back on the rear legs of his chair, head against a calendar picture of cancer-fighting foods that included fruit, vegetables, and whole-grain bread spilling from a horn o'plenty. Stubbert had a cold sore the size of a barnacle on his lower lip.
“We had one orderly vomit in an operating room and it plugged the drain in the floor,” said Trapp. “Two hernias had to be cancelled.”
“I can handle it.”
Stubbert let his chair drop forward onto all four legs. He leaned his elbows on the desk, folded his hands, and looked intently at Horst. “What draws you to this position?”
Horst had expected that question. After a hundred and four jobs, he knew all the questions. “I like people. I like to feel relevant. I like a challenge.”
“We're looking for someone who'll stay permanently,” said Stubbert.
“Are you ready to make a commitment?” asked Trapp.
“Definitely.” Horst explained how he was getting to that point in life where he needed stability.
Stubbert gave Horst's résumé one last scan, then looked over at Trapp and nodded.
She turned to Horst. “Can you start tomorrow?”
“Sure.”
Stubbert pointed down the hall with his pen. “Go to Stores and get measured for whites.”
Horst shook hands with each of them. Then he went down a cement tunnel to Stores, where a queer named Lamont nudged him repeatedly in the nuts while measuring his inseam. Horst was allotted six pairs of white cotton pants, six white shirts, a locker, and a combination lock.
When Horst stepped out of the surgical rubber and meat smell of the hospital, it was noon, still November, still raining. He headed downhill toward the SeaBus to cross from North Vancouver to downtown. On the far side of the inlet, the city squatted under a low ceiling of cloud. A commitment? Horst wasn't looking forward to this job.
The next morning, Horst changed into his whites with a queer named Jaryl watching. Jaryl was about forty, and his pearly hair was swirled and scalloped like vanilla icing.
“You look great in white,” said Jaryl.
“Thanks.” Horst headed through the cement tunnel to the kitchen, where a Scotsman named Duggan, who had teeth like toenails, pushed a rubber apron at him and said: “You're mush.” He shoved Horst toward a conveyor belt that ran between two rows of hairnetted women who leaned on food trolleys. They eyed Horst and yawned. The conveyor jerked to life, and Horst slopped porridge into every bowl that passed. The bowls looked like dog dishes. Horst thought he had it under control, until the Scotsman said:
“Fook me.” The belt halted. Duggan stood by Horst, breathing hard. “Kin yae raed?”
Horst nodded.
“Then fooking well dae it man!” He snapped up the menu card from the closest tray and showed him there were three varieties of mush: oatmeal, cream of wheat, and rice gruel. “Ya daft bugger.”
When the tray line ended, Horst followed a big blonde named Dallas up three flights of cement steps to a dumbwaiter, where she slid trays onto trolleys, telling Horst: “Fuckin' move, buddy!”
Horst raced a trolley down the hall between nurses who crisscrossed from room to room on hissing white shoes. At the first bed he zinged aside the curtain and faced an old woman, gown pulled up, groaning on top of a bed pan. He backed out, still holding the tray, then reached forward to close the curtain and spilled a bowl of cream of wheat over the woman's foot.
The next floor was maternity, where women waddled the hall holding their backs, sat weeping in wheelchairs, or breastfed their raisin-eyed piglets. When he was done, he ran back down to the kitchen, where Duggan, the Scotsman, pointed a meat cleaver at him and said: “Yae're a dish pig.”
Horst hauled on the mush-sodden apron again, plus a pair of black rubber gloves that were wet inside; he went into the dish room feeling like he had used condoms on his fingers. The trays returned in a relentless line of leftovers and Horst raced to keep up, scraping meat and eggs and mush. He found a set of false teeth; an East Indian woman named Maxine found a hearing aid.
Horst spent half his coffee break washing food off himself. Then he went into the cafeteria. In one corner sat doctors, administrators, and RNs. In the opposite corner, separated by a desert of bald, grey carpet, sat the kitchen staff.
Horst sat at a separate table with Maxine, who read
The Link,
one of Vancouver's East Indian papers. She wore a poppy. It was Poppy Day. Horst had forgotten.
“My grandfather fought at Vimy Ridge,” said Maxine.
Horst said nothing. One of his grandfathers had only one leg, so hadn't served; the other ran off to Brazil and was never heard from again.
“My daughter is upstairs in maternity. Twins. Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Wife?”
“No.”
“Fiancée?”
“No.”
“No one?”
Horst mumbled: “Not really.”
Maxine looked at him. “You're not one of these, are you?” She let her wrist flop, meaning queer.
Horst shook his head. Then he glanced at the other table, hoping no one overheard.
After lunch, Duggan, the Scotsman, shook a ladle at Horst and said, “Go muck out the slaughterhouse.”
Horst rode the elevator with a mop, a bucket of near-boiling water, and a jug of antiseptic detergent called Sept-Off II that smelled like pee.
Horst had never seen an operating room. He was disappointed. It looked like a washroom. A sink and arborite-topped counter, a paper-towel dispenser, linoleum floor, and on the wall a laminated poster of two cartoon vultures on a branch, one saying to the other: Patience my ass! I'm gonna kill something! He swabbed down three operating rooms, leaving them sharp with the stink of ammonia. When he opened the door of the last one, however, the warm iron-sweet smell of blood filled his throat. The door sucked shut behind him, and Horst faced a slimy pool. He felt his stomach rise. He saw, in his mind's eye, surgical-gloved hands, red to the wrists, stirring the tripe of a slit stomach, the intestines oozing wet and slick as an orgy of slugs.
When Horst stepped outside it was late afternoon. The cold drizzle cleared his head. At the SeaBus a palsied old man sat in a wheelchair with a blanket across his legs selling poppies. Horst crossed over the inlet then caught the Hastings bus.
He got off at Glen and walked past the old row houses, narrow wooden boxes with steep roofs and sagging porches. They'd been old in the fifties, when he was a kid. Back then it had been Eastern Europeans living in them. Poles, Hungarians, Slavs. The Wops called them Hunkies. Now it was Chinatown.
Horst had his own key and walked right into the smell of ham and cabbage. His feet recognized the linoleum. The oak-cased clock ticked in the living room, and his mother slept in a chair by the iron stove in the kitchen. She had a wadded Kleenex in one fist and a rosary in the other. She wore two wedding rings, her own and that of her dead husband, Horst's father. Horst sat down quietly at the table. It was red arborite and metal tubing. The tape on the slit vinyl seat was peeling, and he felt it sticking to his pants. He was supposed to have come around weeks ago to fix it.
His mother slept solidly, a sack of potatoes in an old woollen shawl. The long hairs on her shins were pressed flat by her nylons, and she wore a pair of rubber boots because the floor was like ice. Horst hadn't been around in seven, eight weeks. He sat forward, elbows on his knees and head in his hands. Someday she'd be in the hospital.
IN
1965,
TWO DAYS BEFORE
Christmas, Horst's father, Conrad Nunn, died of a heart attack from laughing too hard. Janko Palek, drunk, had come onto graveyard shift at the door plant and tried masturbating in the toilet with a fistful of industrial-strength glue. Janko ran out onto the shop floor with his working greens hobbling his ankles and his hand sealed solid to his dink. It took a doctor two hours to separate Janko's palm from his penis. By that time, Conrad Nunn was dead, three doctors in the same hospital unable to bring his laughter-cracked heart back to life.
Laughter had always been dangerous for Horst's father. When the Lions won the Grey Cup in 1964, Conrad Nunn laughed himself into a hernia. Later that year, watching American football, he saw Jim Marshall of the Minnesota Vikings run a fumble in for a touchdown. Except he ran the wrong way and scored on his own team. Horst's father cracked two ribs laughing.
Horst's mother was philosophical over her husband's death. There were worse ways to go than too much laughter.
Horst was fourteen. Christmas that year slid past like a train departing without them. From then on, Christmas always brought back thoughts of his father laughing himself to death.
T
hey're driving down Hastings past the hookers. Six o'clock in the evening, Christmas Day.
“That tall one's too business-like,” says Bunce. “Treats you like meat. Some people don't belong in the service industry.” He points to a chubby blonde in front of the Sub Stop. “She's Four-Star. Takes a craftsman's pride in her work. Told me her father's a Presbyterian minister. Solid values. It shows.” Bunce taps the window indicating an East Indian at the corner. “Jesus! Hairiest female I've ever seen. Thought I'd gone and picked up a tranny. She could be in a sideshow.”
Bunce lurches forward slapping the dashboard of Rupp's Bug. “That one! That's her! Ripped me off for forty bucks!”
Rupp swings right at the Astoria and cuts back along the alley, passing cars and vans with women clustered at their doors. But when they get back onto Hastings she's gone.
“Shit!”
“How'd she rip you off?” asks Horst, brooding in the darkness of the back seat.
“We were in the doorway of a poultry plant,” says Bunce. “She was giving me a blow job. But I couldn't come. The stink of the dead chickens threw me off. After ten minutes she stopped and said that's it. I demanded my money back. She said no. I shook her. She kneed me in the balls then ran.” Bunce takes a swig from the bottle of Captain Morgan's. “And whores wonder why they get abused. Ripping off Johns is standard practice. But you never hear about that. Everyone thinks that's funny.” Bunce passes the bottle.
Horst drinks, lets the rum burn, then chases it with a gulp of Safeway egg nog. Rum and egg nog was his idea. Bunce and Rupp wanted rye.
“No white Christmas, again,” says Horst. He wipes grime from the window and stares at the rain.
“Use your imagination,” says Rupp.
“Hey, thanks. I'll just sit back here and concentrate real hard.”
“Saint Nicholas of Myra,” observes Bunce. “He gave dowry money to poor girls so they could get married.”
“I gotta get married again,” says Rupp.
Bunce laughs. “Whataya mean â again?”
“I been married!”
“You lived with some woman for two weeks back in the sixties.”
“Boyle Rupp â lover,” says Horst.
“Gimme a drink.”
Horst passes Rupp the egg nog.
“Not this shit! The rum!”
“You're designated driver.”