Truth or Claire

When asked why he won’t, at thirty years of age, find a job that pays at least on par with minimum wage, Norman explains that patience is a virtue.  He says he’s most likely next in line for the managerial position, and that it’s only a few years before his double shifts pay off. “I also stay for you girls,” he adds. “You make it all worth it.”  I once convinced him to go to an interview at a chain book store, and he returned claiming they just couldn’t match the benefits the sports centre offered. When I asked him what those were, he said, “Beautiful women and The Space Channel. What else?” Couldn’t argue with that.  However, I sensed there was something else keeping him there. Someone else, rather. And it was anything but beautiful.

Charlie was another contender for the position of recreation manager, should the seas part, exposing the pale buttocks of that opportunity.  He too worked in the bowling alley, but unlike Norm, Charlie’s schedule varied to accommodate his drinking habit. He missed shifts regularly, showed up hours late, and left early.  This affected Norm on a weekly basis, and I often watched the consequences of Charlie’s hangovers from the bowling alley windows. The clock struck four and Norm was ready to go home, waiting for Charlie to replace him, the appendages of his red hat tied around his chin in preparation for the December wind.  At four fifteen, he would start to sweat, and would take a seat among the anxious birthday bowlers waiting to receive their bowling shoes.  By half past four, the red hat became the birthday bowlers’ pet as Norm assumed his duties once again, mumbling threats to kick Charlie’s ass.

“You should make him your number one enemy,” Adam once suggested to Norman.  “That way when he goes ‘ga ga ga ga ga ga ga ga!’ with a Type 81 you’ll know why he did it. Well maybe not a Type 81, but as long as it’s powerful but slick.” The best part about that conversation was that Norm and I often sketched evacuation plans for the day Adam would come through the doors shooting at us.  When I heard this suggestion, I felt a chill running down my back. He was a step ahead of us.

The only thing worse than seeing Norman’s skin turn into a lava lamp of anger and composure was knowing that the recreation managers couldn’t care less.
To be completely honest, I found it funny. Maybe it was because I’ve had personal conversations with Charlie and knew that he meant absolutely no harm by his laziness, or maybe it was because his ridiculous idea of punctuality was a signature part of his erratic personality, which I always found entertaining.  There was also the fact that Charlie enjoyed telling the occasional lie, which certainly kept our conversations exciting. What made him particularly special was that his lies didn’t benefit anyone at all. Ever.

“The smell coming from that box is amazing, Chuck!”

“It’s poutine!”

“..it’s a pizza box, Chuck.”

“Oh, yeah. This box. I thought you meant another one.”

For a fifty year old man, his lies were seriously undeveloped. The first two years I worked there, I thought he was retarded. But as I got to know him, I realized he was quite astute, but was hiding his intelligence under fluorescent cloaks of madness, and I loved to see them spinning. The fun part wasn’t the topic of our weekly conversation but my success in identifying the lies from the truth.  Sometimes he made it very easy.

Monday, 11:03 pm, MSN

BeerMan69 says: “hey, how r u?”

Cakelover says: “Not bad. I’m actually only online to transfer some photos over.  I’ll see you tomorrow at work, okay?”

BeerMan69 says: “oh, this isn’t charlie. its his buddy. i am on his comp!!!!”

Cakelover says: “Haha…nice to meet you! Bye for now.”

BeerMan69 says: “do u like him?”

Cakelover says: “Who?”

BeerMan69 says: “charlie”

Cakelover says: “Uhh….”

BeerMan69 says: “u can tell me. i wont tell him. he is sleeping now anyway. i am on his comp!”

Cakelover says: “See you tomorrow, Charlie.”

(User Cakelover is offline)

This routine was something we engaged in at least once a month. No matter how many chances I gave him to come clean, Charlie stuck to his guns and assured me that it was indeed a fellow middle aged friend of his that was at his computer that night, and not Charlie, alone and drunk again.

“Sorry about last night,” Charlie said one afternoon following such conversation. “My friend was over and he was on my computer.” “Hmm,” I answered, without looking up.  “I was asleep though, so I couldn’t stop him. Did he say anything weird to you?”

“Yeah, he told me you like watching children at Dairy Queen,” I smiled. He blew a bubble with the nicotine gum he was chewing and walked off, leaving his newspaper behind.

A few hours later, my shift was over and so was Charlie’s.  He walked by my desk and jingled his car keys. “Want a ride?” he asked. We lived on the same street, and he had driven me home before.  I grabbed my things and got into what he identified as his mother’s Cadillac.  For all I knew it could’ve been stolen.

The ride home was comfortable. I flipped through a pile of his CDs and he talked about his new tenants.  He owned several apartments and was always renovating something that left his fingers stained in white paint. He bought the apartments several years ago, and always asked when I was going to move in, despite the fact that all of the apartments were occupied. The only thing that kept me from being creeped out was the smirk on his face when he asked.

“When are you gonna move in?” He asked that night as well. I looked at his face as he drove, but the smirk wasn’t there. I laughed. He didn’t. The car stopped. We were in front of his building.

“Come look at my apartment. I just finished renovating,” he invited me, getting out of his car without waiting for my answer.  I followed him out noticing how neatly the grass was cut.  “There’s no one living in this one,” he opened the door to a basement bachelor.  He slowly walked across the empty room into an equally empty kitchen, and opened the fridge. In it stood four beers.  He pulled two out, and I noticed a cluster of burnt light bulbs laying in the corner, like caviar. On the counter was a banana hook with two bananas hung over it, completely still.  The room smelled of wet wood and wallpaper glue. “What do you think of these knobs?” he asked, pointing to the cupboards. “My mother gave me these. They’re marble.”

I began to panic.  What made me so sure he wasn’t bringing me there to murder me?  I had known him five years, but how did I know he wasn’t waiting all these years for this exact moment?  What if he had renovated that apartment just for me? I pictured myself sitting in the pile of light bulbs, shivering, naked and peppering my own thigh in preparation for dinner.

He handed me a beer and sat at the empty kitchen table.  “So, my friend didn’t say anything embarrassing last night, did he?” he asked again.   My stomach turned. I thought of making a scene and yelling that I needed to be driven home, but that never seemed to work in movies, so I decided to ride it out and befriend my way out of this mess.  “Not that I can remember. So, how long have you been living here?”

“Oh, years. Or months. I want to show you something.”  He stood up and walked past me, into what looked like his bedroom, from which I heard his voice again: “Come and see something.”  I dug my hand in my pocket, where I felt my cell phone.  The back of my neck began to sweat.  I quickly glanced around searching for a knife or fork, but everything was neatly stored away, most likely inside the ribcage of his latest victim.  I tore a banana from the hook and shamefully shoved it down my shirt. What was I going to do with it? Peel it and throw it behind me to throw his Mario Kart off balance? I followed the sound of his voice into the bedroom where he was sitting on a mattress, his beer on the bedside table.

“I’ve kept it here because it’s a secret for now.”  He looked at me and I felt the shape of the banana swelling through my shirt. I wasn’t good at keeping secrets anyway. He reached into a drawer in his table and a drop of sweat slithered down my spine. What would he produce? A gun? Was Adam right? A knife? I was hoping for a banana. I watched his hand fumble around. Finally, he pulled out an envelope.

“I have a daughter,” he said.  “I just found out last week. She sent me a letter. You look shocked already, but wait until you hear it!”  He must’ve noticed me pressing my head against the wall to stop it from spinning, eyes bulging out like a child’s googly eyed craft.

“Go ahead,” I mouthed.

He took a quick swig of beer and cleared his throat.

“Chuck, you are my dad. I didn’t want to tell you this before, but I am really your daughter, and now you know. I don’t want to see you yet. I am not ready. But I want you to know that I exist, and that- ” he paused and looked at me, “that I love you.”  He put the paper back in the envelope and took another drink. “What do you think?” he asked.  Having calmed down a little more, I exclaimed, with genuine amazement, “That’s so crazy! How did you not know about her? I mean, how old is she?”

“Well, how old are you?” he asked.

“I’m in my twenties..”

“Well, so is she,” he said.

“So, how did you…I mean, did you ever, you know, not use what you were supposed to use when, you know..” Charlie had never been married, and said he was too busy making money to ever consider a woman in his life.  He laughed.

“I can see that banana in your shirt.  Let’s go get a bite. My treat.”

Putting the banana on the table, I followed him out, smiling at the burnt light bulbs in the corner, and running my hand against the cupboard knobs. What a nice apartment it was, after all. It’s material occupants smiled back at me, no longer torture weapons, but well-wishing tourist attractions I promised myself I would never visit again.
We drove to a diner where we caused a stir among our patrons. Apparently a fifty year old man and a twenty something year old girl weren’t a common pairing, but still high off being given the option to live, I didn’t care how we looked.

“So I dated a lady many years ago. I think she’s the mother,” Charlie said, biting into his roast beef sandwich.  I took a sip of my cherry Coke and asked, “Well, where is this lady now? Can’t you contact her?”  Charlie looked out the window and thought, for a minute.

“No, because she’s crazy.”

“You dated a crazy woman? Details please!”

“Well, no..” *pause* “She wasn’t crazy when I met her, but she became crazy after.”

“How do you know? Did you stay in touch?”

“I found out.”

“How?”

*pause*

Either it was a painful subject, or I was visiting Charlie and the lie factory again. He finished chewing his sandwich and finally replied:

“It was on the news.”

“That she went crazy?” I asked again, beginning the detective game.

“She was committed, you see. I sent her money because of Claire.”

“Who?”

“My daughter.”

I wondered how he made such a sloppy slip up when the rest of the evening was so well executed.

“So you already knew her name?”

*pause*

“No, I just found out! Didn’t you see that letter? She sent it!”

He was losing the game quickly, but I wanted to keep playing. He deserved a little punishment for forcing me into his apartment.

“So you sent your crazy ex-girlfriend money for no reason?”

“Because she was crazy and a single mom! Jeez, you’re unsympathetic!”

I started laughing. “But how did you know she was a single mom if you just found out-“

He ignored my attempts to straighten the story out.

“Anyway, I told you she was crazy. Maybe she was a single mom, and maybe she wasn’t.”

I nodded and he continued.

“So years went by, and now I get this letter from Claire, who says she is my daughter.” He waited to catch my eye before he finished. “And that she loves me.”

I watched Charlie sink his teeth into his sandwich. A piece of roast beef fell out and onto the table by his elbow, where I noticed a patch of psoriasis. I put my sandwich down and looked away, feeling slightly queasy.  Was I vigilant or heartless? Ten o’clock and there I was, sitting across from a man I had thought was going to murder me, who had just wanted me to know that he was loved as well. I had almost fallen for another one of his lies, but could I, should I have caught him on this one? The desire to be loved seems to know no boundaries. Some marry, some buy a pet. Some conceive unconditional love: a child. To Charlie, that conception was bound to his mind.

I let it go, and ordered another Coke.

That’s the Spirit

“Good afternoon, how can I help you?”

“Yes, I’m calling to report something that I have noticed in the past few weeks.”

“Oh, please go on.”

“The traffic light on Bank street isn’t long enough for me to cross the street.”

“…I’m sorry?”

“Well, I always find myself rushing to cross the street, and I just don’t want to fall!”

“….that would be awful, but I think you may have the wrong number. This is-“

“I know where I’m calling and I’m telling you this is a nightmare!”

“I understand.”

“What if I have grocery bags?”

“I really think you have the wrong number. We’re a sports centre.”

“Frozen corn falling to the ground!  I’m on my knees, trying to put my cans and what nots back in the bag!  And then what if a car comes?”

“….that would be even worse I suppose…”

“That light needs to be longer!”

Such was the fate of my afternoon at the reception desk.  It was almost time for me to leave, when I received a call on the emergency radio about an elderly lady fainting upstairs.  The First Aid team were already on their way, and as they ran by I noticed the glimmer in their eyes. The one expressing a profound hope that their patient was wearing a diaper. They brought her down to the lobby in a conscious state. They wheeled her in on a pink wheelchair as she shook her head at me.  “She says she has something to ask you,” one of her helpers said.  I stood up from the seat and leaned in. She put her hand on the desk, and it looked like a learning tool for human anatomy students.  Though the skin wasn’t transparent, the brightness of her blue veins seemed to stain the flesh around her little hand like pen ink stains wet paper.  Yellow knuckle bones protruded effortlessly, and what remained of the inner flesh was so peppered in brown age spots that it looked like she was wearing lace gloves.

“Excuse me, but I am just afraid,” she said.  I smiled and answered, “You don’t need to be. You’re okay.”  “No, no. I’ve lost my cheese.”  There’s a new one.  While I was well aware of the effects of aging, I’ve never heard someone degrading their own mentality to the state of a limp dairy product.  “You’re fine! You haven’t lost your cheese!” I laughed.  “No, my cheese. I left it at Zellers. It was mozzarella I think.”  I nodded slowly, wondering what the hell I was going to do now.  “Could you call them and ask please?”  I took out a big yellow phone book and for a moment wondered where my rotary phone and abacus might be. Ever since Adam was caught looking at pictures of Babes in Bugattis, we had the internet removed from our computer, and I was forced to dust off the yellow beast whenever someone needed a number.  I ran my finger down the page in the Department Stores section like a wizard, and, upon finding my spell, proceeded to dial the number for customer service. “Could you tell me where you were at Zellers?” I quickly asked the old lady.  “Well, I looked at brassieres, then I stopped to sit at the diner. Yes, that must be it! I thought to myself ‘maybe I’ll have some cheese’ but then I thought ‘how ever will I open this package?’ you know how tightly sealed they are.”   I nodded. Someone answered and I explained the situation.  Surprisingly, she didn’t seem amused, and didn’t consider it a prank call, as I assumed she would. “I’m sorry ma’am, we just had someone check our intimates section as well as the diner. The cheese isn’t there.”  I looked at the lady and whispered, “No luck.” Her eyes widened. “Tell them it may have been cheddar! I was convinced it was mozzarella but now I’m not so sure.”  I suggested the idea to the lady at the other end of the line, and she responded, “I think we would’ve noticed cheddar. It’s a lot brighter.”  I thanked her and hung up, disclosing the bad news.  She looked down but didn’t look upset, which was a reaction you don’t often see from a senior citizen.  I instantly wanted to hug her for not yelling at me and for not expecting me to have milked a cow and curded a cheese to replace her loss.

“We need to get you in an ambulance, ma’am” one of the guys said.  The ambulance had already arrived at that point.  She resisted. “But I’m fine, I’ll just take a taxi!”    They weren’t having it. If you’re over sixty, you can’t get away with fainting.  One slip up and you’re strapped in for good.  I watched her shaking her head, but even that she seemed to do with an understanding of the inevitable. I walked beside her as they wheeled her closer to the doors.  The ambulance crew pulled out a stretcher and she laughed, “Well, I’m not crazy you know!  I don’t need to be tied up!” I laughed as well.  Then she turned to me and said, quietly, “I don’t have any family. If I die, nobody will know.”  Maybe it was the fact that I had that exact same fear on a weekly basis, but right then and there I stooped down and hugged her.  I was hugging bones and not much else, the skin around them serving solely as a name tag.  “You aren’t going to die. You’re fine! Trust me!” I had no idea what I was saying.  I’ve never comforted my own fears of dying before, so I was no expert at helping others.  Luckily, it worked, because she smiled and nodded, as they rolled her away.

“I hope she didn’t crap herself!” I heard a woman say.  I looked behind me and there stood one of our newest Bridge players.  Her green crocodile skin purse sat on my desk and she was rooting through it. I returned to help her but she didn’t notice me.  Under her curly crow black hair, I could see the beginning of her natural white roots growing defiantly. She wore a black mink coat, and had she been carrying a cane, I would’ve mistaken her for a pimp.  She dug around, pursing her neon red lips with concentration.  “Where the hell is that little red book? Come on baby, where are ya? Of course, I keep so much crap in here I deserve to never find it!”  I pretended not to hear her. My mind was still on death.  As if reading my thoughts, Adam arrived to replace me.

“Hey, what’s she doing here?” he asked both of us.  The lady didn’t look up.  “Uh, I’m not sure. Can I help you?” I asked her.

She sighed. “I keep calling my housekeeper but she’s out playing in the snow instead of picking up the phone! Fifty three and she can’t stay indoors! Summer, she’s out in the mud. Fall, and she’s playing in the leaves. Every season there’s something keeping her from doing her job!”  “Spring,” said Adam.  She looked up. “What?” “I said spring. You forgot spring. Don’t say every season if you didn’t say spring.”  I felt my face burning.  She didn’t reply but kept picking up random items from her purse, looking them over, and putting them back in, a tube of lipstick, a metal comb, a mirror, as though she needed to make sure the book wasn’t metamorphosing into those objects to trick her.

“He’s a cute young man,” she said to her purse. “Keep him around.” She looked at Adam’s animé perversion of a hairstyle. It stood up and burst out of his head like roots of insanity.  “How old are you, if I may? 19?” “No,” he answered.

“20?”

“NO.”

“21?”

“Older.”

“You’re almost as old as me!”

“Go.”

“Hmm?”

“Keep guessing.”

“Oh, well uhh, why don’t you just…keep it a secret then!”

“It was my birthday Friday. That’s no secret.”

She looked at me and feigned curiosity by curving her lips into an o.  “Is that so? Who did you invite?”  She asked, the way an adult might ask a toddler about what they had for lunch.

“No one. My family. Birthdays are for family. Friends can come later.” With that, Adam threw his backpack under the desk, motioning for me to get out of his way.  It was evident, through his robotic delivery of ideas he could never grow in his own brain, and through the agility of the backpack throw signifying mild defensiveness to his own statement, that those words were said by his father.  Apart from taking Adam shopping for a ‘sturdy leather jacket’ his father didn’t allow much frivolous activity, and my assumption was that Adam’s desire to have a birthday party at the bowling alley was met with an equally sturdy rejection.

If we are born alone, maybe birthdays should be spent accordingly, and if the cheese-less lady lived to her next birthday, maybe she’d rather bowl.

“That’s the spirit!” crocodile skin lady said to Adam, and turned away.  She walked towards a man standing by the doors. “Oh I thought you were someone else! I was gonna tell you a joke!” she laughed. “And what the hell is that ambulance still doing there?”

The Fight

I watched Eugene from across the lobby.  With his elbows pressed against the wall, and with a quarter, he had been scratching a lottery ticket for half an hour, his little body leaning towards it intimately. He looked as though he was coercing the neon-colored card to put out, the way a drunken sailor might press his prostitute against an alley wall.   Eugene needed that card to put out because it was the twentieth he had bought that month.

“I been buyin’ these for years. I know it’s gonna happen soon,” he said later, brushing lint off his tuxedo vest and pants.  “But just think of how much you’ve spent on these tickets through the years! Probably a million,” I said. Eugene shut his eyes and opened his mouth, which meant he was annoyed, but then diverted his attention to Norman, who was walking by us angrily. Eugene squinted his eyes from behind his Monopoly Man glasses, fixating them on Norman, then shot me a mischievous smile. “Hey you!” Eugene yelled to Norman. “Your mother know you go out with that on?” he pointed to Norman’s hat. It was a bright red wool hat with three braids growing out of it. One on each side, covering his ears, and one coming out the top, slightly resembling the relaxed genitalia of a large mammal. Had a girl been wearing it, she would’ve merely looked stupid, but as its owner was a thirty year old man with stubble covering his face from the nose down, I couldn’t help but be confused by his reasoning. “What’s wrong with my hat?” Norman asked, “It’s the Anne of Green Gables hat!”  “You look like a retard,” Eugene replied, straightening his bow-tie. He then picked up his serving tray and walked back into the room where coffee was waiting to be distributed. Norman also turned away and walked into his bowling alley.  I was even more confused now. He hadn’t acknowledged my presence.

A few hours later, I found a note by my phone. It was from Lisa who worked the earlier shift. It had my name on it, and I pulled the staples open to expose the meaning of his coldness. Norm is mad at you. I think it has to do with the poster.

A few weeks ago, Norman returned from his yearly trip to Vegas. Every year, he goes to the Star Wars convention alone, takes pictures of celebrities and brings back useless novelty items by the bag.  The celebrities in Norman’s pictures are always unidentifiable, because in addition to staying in his seat to take photographs (after purchasing a VIP ticket entitling him not be a stalker and to actually have the chance to be down on the stage with all the other fans mingling with the actors),  Norm insists on using a single-use camera. I always wonder how R2-D2 feels seeing the one fan sitting in his seat, watching him from a distance, sweating, rubbing the arm rests. Does Jar Jar Binks get uncomfortable noticing, out of the corner of bulbous his eye, a single flash going off amidst the rows of empty seats?

-“Pi pi pa po poo……uh oh..”

-“Hmmm…yousa point is well seen. How wude!…call security.”

No one really knows what else Norman does while in Vegas.  He doesn’t gamble, is still a virgin, doesn’t drink, and doesn’t like being outside with people.  Still, when he comes back he tells us he had the best time ever, and we flip through fifty grainy gray pictures, pausing to ask who or what is featured in each one.  If he comes back on a Monday, by Tuesday he will have bought his ticket for the next year.  He says he worries about tickets being sold out, and I worry about the event being canceled one year, because then he will quite literally have nothing to look forward to.

Norman returned from his most recent trip with a cardboard cylindrical box poking out of his backpack.  As his best friend, I was entitled to the best gift in his souvenir bag, and as his best friend, I was forced to accept this gift every year, no matter how much it pained me to find a new hiding place for it in my apartment. He pulled the roll out and handed it to me.  I tore the tape that kept it together, and unraveled his surprise.  It was a scene from outer space, with star ships flying in all directions.  In the center was a superimposed picture of Norman standing in mid air, slouching, with his backpack on, single-use camera in hand.  He looked blasé, despite the ship exploding just below his left foot. His expression said “Get it over with” and I instantly felt sorry for him. If they couldn’t make him look like he was floating rather than obeying the rules of gravity of a planet that wasn’t even featured in the scene, they could’ve at least drawn a star ship under his feet. I gasped and screamed, “I love it!” the way I usually do when I don’t love it.  I thought of where I could hide it. A pair of fuzzy dice was stuffed behind my books, a deflated Darth Vader lay under the garbage bags under my sink, a ‘someone who loves me very much…’ t-shirt insulated the cracks in my window, and the space between my oven and fridge was occupied by five other posters, three of Vegas and two of movies I had once mentioned liking.  I couldn’t decide where to put the poster, so I kept it behind the desk for a week or so, and later put it on top of the lost and found cabinet, as I still couldn’t come up with a suitable burial plot for it in my apartment. Weeks went by and I had entirely forgotten about it, and somehow it managed to roll inside the cabinet. Knowing no one would claim it, I let it sit there until one day it was gone.

I called Lisa to ask her about the note.  Through laughter, she told me that Norman found the poster in the cabinet, ‘got pissed’, and took it back.

“He said he was going to teach you a lesson. He wanted to scare you.”

“Scare me? How?”

“He said you would flip out when you realized it was gone.”

I looked behind me, through the doors of the bowling alley where Norm was polishing a bowling ball.  After saying bye to Lisa, I called him.

“Bowling, Norm speaking.”

“It’s me.”

“Yes?”

“Can I have my poster back?”

“What poster?”

“The one you gave me.”

“I gave you a poster?”

“Yes, it’s lying on the table beside you.”

“That’s not it.”

“Yes it is. I can see it from here.”

“You threw it away! You’re not getting it back.”

“Someone else threw it away!”

“Well you didn’t take it home!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay I’ll bring it back now.”

I smiled and hung up. Forgiveness was effortless to Norman, and for a minute I thought maybe he could be my best friend as well. I don’t know many people that cherish friendships the way he does.  And what could be more important?  Perhaps it was time I was a better friend to him.  Maybe one day I would go to Vegas with him, drag him onstage with his idols, and be the one taking pictures from far away.  I’d get a good one of Norm high-fiving Chewbacca, with Jabba the Hut giving them the thumbs up. Norman came up to me and smiled, extending the now tattered poster to me.  I took it and thanked him, and he walked off.  I paused and thought about those charming scenarios, then walked over to the lost and found cabinet and shoved the poster back in.  I hate Star Wars.