Poles Apart (17 page)

“Mom, please. Give me some credit,” I complained. “I was
about to say ‘thanks to how much time he spends exercising his hand muscles.’ I was just going to leave the rest to your imagination, without getting into specifics.”

“Thank you, honey.”

We talked for another fifteen minutes or so, but the
CEO
side of her life would not sit idly by for an extended visit. She had work to do, decisions to make, employees to berate, and a company to run. I gave her a hug and headed back home.

Inspired by my mother, I sat at my kitchen table and kicked around a new blog post idea. I thought I might write about the women who climb to the top of the corporate ladder by adopting, and then turbocharging, the same despicable behaviour employed by so many men
CEOS
. After more than a century of business hegemony, men become the role model for many businesswomen on their way up. To compensate for not being men, they crank up their own man-o-meter to eleven and, go figure, immediately start raking in the promotions. Sure, they avoid the glass ceiling but at what cost? I quickly realized I was enmeshed in a very tricky subject, nestled in a minefield, surrounded by a moat of piranhas and poisonous snakes.

I certainly didn’t want to impugn the success of women who have reached the top in a man’s world. Such achievements should be celebrated, not challenged. But a small part of me wondered whether their victories might be somewhat hollow, perhaps even
pyrrhic, in some cases. Shouldn’t true equality mean that women can rise to the top as women, and not only as nastier clones of men? But really, who the hell am I to make such an argument? It was fraught. I sat there holding my head, trying to think it all through. Eventually, defeated by the complexity of the issue, I erased what I’d written. By that stage, my brain hurt. I decided there were plenty of other, more pressing, issues to tackle without questioning the tactics of the few women
CEOS
we have. Despite her performance that afternoon, I also felt some loyalty to my mother. Or perhaps I was just scared of her. That could also have explained it.

I grabbed a beer from the fridge and stepped out onto my fire escape to clear my head in the late afternoon sunshine.

“Hey, Everett, you’re blocking my rays.”

I looked down to see a young woman in sweats leaning on the loading-dock railing, reading a book. There was something familiar about her.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, and descended the fire escape stairs until she was again awash in sunlight. “Um, have we met?”

“Ahhhh, how soon they forget. It’s Shawna, Shawna Hawkins. You know, we met last night? Just a few short hours ago.”

I squinted as if that might help me remember her face. I realized the only part of the scene that was familiar was the book she was holding.

“Wow, um, you look so, well, different.”

“Gee, thanks. You know just what lines to roll out.”

Shit.

“Sorry, but I’ve just never seen Wonder Woman dressed, um, quite so casually.”

“Point taken.”

“What are you reading?”

She looked at the thin volume in her hand and then held it up so I could see the cover.”

“No kidding!
A Room of One’s Own
,” I said failing miserably to conceal my surprise. “Um, that’s a classic.”

“So what’s with the shock in your voice?”

Shit.

“Um, well, I don’t know. I guess I just didn’t expect you to be, um, reading Virginia Woolf,” I stammered, as one foot slipped into my mouth and started the journey down my throat.

“You were thinking I should be reading, what,
G-String Quarterly
, or
Strippers’ Digest
.”

“No, no, of course not. That’s not what I meant at all,” I babbled. “Is there actually a
G-String Quarterly
?”

“Not that I know of,” she conceded. “I was just messing with you.”

My cellphone rang in my hand. I looked at the number and didn’t recognize it so I just sent it to voice mail.

“So you’re working tonight?” I asked her.

“No, I just have a thing for loading docks. There’s no place I’d rather read. I come here all the time.”

“You’re messing with me again, right?”

“You’re a brainy one,” she said. “I work most nights.”

“Does he pay you well?”

“Who? The nut-bar?”

“Mason Bennington.”

“Right, the nut-bar whack-job,” she replied. “He pays us more than any other exotic dancing operation in the country. In fact, the boys at the National Association of Sleazy, Dirty, and Dangerous Strip Joints are all pissed at him for raising the bar so high.”

“I’m not surprised they’re upset,” I said. “You can always count on the NAS-double-DSJ. They’re nothing if not predictable.”

She just looked at me with brow furrowed.

“I’m just messing with you,” I said.

She smiled in a way that transformed her face.

“Yeah, well, no one is more pissed right now than the whack-job himself.” She nodded her head toward the door as she said this.

“Mason Bennington is in there right now?” I asked.

“Yep, and he’s been on the warpath since he arrived.”

“What’s his problem? Everything seems to be going very well for him,” I replied. “The luxury cars were lined up around the block, each one disgorging yet another hormonally supercharged jerk. I’m ashamed of my species.”

“Hey, those jerks are paying for my education,” she said. “The club is doing great. He’s happy about that.”

“Then what’s eating his shorts?” I asked.

“He’s mega-pissed at some blogger. There’s been talk of contract killings or at least a severe beat-down.”

Shit. Contract killing? Severe beat-down? Surely just a figure of speech. Yes, just a figure of speech. Uh-huh. I just stood there, taking in her statement, trying to process it. I always thought “knee-knocking fear” was just a clichéd exaggeration. I reassessed my opinion on the spot.

The silence reigned for a bit too long, and she looked up to see if I was still there on the fire escape.

“Hellooooo! Earth to Everett.”

“Right. So what blogger? Do you know?” I said this badly feigning a nonchalance I certainly was not feeling.

“No idea. But he was bordering on apoplectic,” she said. “Oh, and he also wants to knock off Candace Sharpe.”

And once more, shit.

“Well, I think I hear my phone ringing,” I said turning to head back up the stairs.

“You’re holding your phone,” she replied.

“Right. Well, I hear something. I’ll see you around.”

“Whatever.”

She waved at me before turning back to her book, and I bounded up the last few steps.

Most of my heart and my mind were consumed with the news that Mason Bennington would like to end my all too brief run in the human race. But a tiny part of my brain also registered that Shawna had used the word “apoplectic.”

After closing the fire escape door, I checked my voice mail and heard the unmistakable voice of Beverley Tanner. She always sounded energized, but I thought I detected an extra zip in her voice.

“Hello there, young one. I talked Billy, your dear stegosaurus of a father, into handing over your number. He gave it up, eventually. Well, Everett Kane, I gotta say, you are one interesting man. Now get your ass over here! We need to talk, now.”

I had no idea what Beverley was talking about but felt compelled to heed her rather pointed call and head back to the hospital. Unfortunately, it looked as if I’d make it in plenty of time for what they called dinner. I dumped the remaining half of my beer in the sink. Just before heading out, I decided to check my Twitter numbers and the stats on the EofE blog. That might not have been my best decision of the day. I was soon awash in swirling, conflicting feelings of pride, excitement, anxiety, and something approaching terror. The already astronomical numbers were still in steep ascent. I had thought that my fifteen minutes of fame might already be on the wane, yet the viral spike had clearly not abated. Literally, by the second, more and more people were visiting the blog and following me on Twitter.

I checked the blog and noted 279 new comments awaiting moderation. Yes, 279 new comments. Okay. Calm down. Why the fear and anxiety? I forced logic and reason into my brainpan, and
eventually, a more thoughtful pride at what I’d created eased into my mind. I reminded myself that, however unlikely this all was, this was what, in my wildest dreams, I’d hoped might happen. Right? I wanted to use my ideas, my words, my writing, to make an impression, didn’t I? That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Who really knows what impact I was actually having, but one point was indisputable. People, many, many people, tens of thousands of people, were reading my words. I shuddered, in a good way.

I sat there at my kitchen table for a few minutes with my eyes closed to try to centre myself, come to ground, as it were. I felt a little better afterwards and immediately scrolled through all 279 comments waiting to be blessed or rejected with the click of my all-powerful mouse. It didn’t take as long as you might expect. Twenty minutes later, I’d approved 198 comments, mainly supportive but not all, tagged 51 as spam, largely, no pun intended, from male potency evangelists, and rejected 30 offensive missives laced with enough profanity to offend even the most open-minded and tolerant web-surfer. Finally, I checked Technorati, a site that, through proprietary algorithmic alchemy, somehow measures the “authority” of blogs. It seemed that at that precise moment,
Eve of Equality
was the most trusted, most popular, most widely read feminist blog on the Internet. I closed my eyes again for a few minutes.

While I was at it, I logged into my EofE Gmail account. I decided I didn’t have time to scroll through all the email that had arrived since my last check-in. I was just about to close out
of Gmail when one of the most recent emails caught my eye bearing the subject line:
An invitation to appear on the show
. Uh-oh. I clicked it open.

Shit. I closed my laptop without responding, I mean, other than the anguished guttural moan that escaped from somewhere deep within me. I’d never heard that noise before and had no idea I could produce it. I grabbed the car keys and walked out the door.

I scanned the grounds. I saw my father’s familiar crustacean-like gait, as he hobbled and wobbled his way along the Red path, pushing Kenny Jenkins in his wheelchair. I watched him for a moment. He was working hard. The previous week, he had retired the walker and had graduated to the cane Kenny held in his lap. Dad was still struggling but had come a long way from our first faltering steps together weeks before. He could cover so much more distance now between breaks and was faster, too. And what had started out looking like an entirely new mode of locomotion, barely resembling walking, now looked like no more than a very pronounced rolling limp. He’d made real progress. Kudos to him. He’d done everything asked of him. He’d dragged himself around those colour-coded paths with orderlies, with me, lately with Beverley or Kenny, and sometimes on his own. But he’d stuck to it. An unexpected shot of pride swelled my chest.

They were at the far end of the property, heading away from me. I saw Beverley stationed on a bench in the sunshine a little way along the Yellow path, working on yet another letter. I had just started toward her when she looked up and saw me. Instantly, she stowed her pad and pen, stood up, and started waving maniacally at me, or to me, I’m not sure which. She had an almost crazed look on her face. She was gesticulating wildly with her arms jerking around in a kind of spasmodic semaphore. She might simply have been exhorting me to run to her, rather than walk. But she could also have been frantically signalling a Search
and Rescue chopper for all I knew. I waved back and picked up my pace in the hopes she wouldn’t dislocate a shoulder. As I came closer, I heard a high-pitched squeal that could only be coming from the nearly unrecognizable mass of geriatric energy formerly known as Beverley Tanner.