The Matt Zander Journals: Part 1 - Toronto 1-3 by Gary Denne

the matt zander journals

St. Michael’s Hospital, Downtown Toronto
Monday, February 16, about 10 AM: -

I remember waking. I spent several minutes in semi-consciousness, not knowing where I was. My eyelids were heavy. I kept them shut and just lay there, frozen. I knew I was in a bed—I could feel the fresh sheets on my body and a big squishy pillow propped up behind me. I tried to move, but struggled with the weight of my body. Compared with the weightlessness during my near-death experience, I felt so heavy and anchored down.
I knew I was back.
Being in my body again felt like … I dunno … like a prison. Something I’d never felt before.
I was stuck in the damn thing.
For the first time in my life, lying there, I realized just how restrictive a physical body really was. The weirdest feeling. It’s like … you know when you sit in a bath for ages and then get out? Your body’s heavy, right? It’s an effort to climb out, and you know you’re in your body ‘cos you’ve got that density to you. That’s what I felt lying there. Exactly that.
But being outside your body? No way. That was just friggin’ insane … in a way I could never have imagined. I mean, when you die, not only are ‘you’ still ‘you’, outside your body, but you’re introduced to feelings and senses you never knew existed or even thought possible. Does that make sense? OK … maybe not.
I’m gonna have to think about this some more before I try writing about it, ‘cos the thing is … there’s not alotta words in the English language that can describe what it’s like in the afterlife. But the idea in starting all this right now is to detail everything that happened during my near-death experience. Hopefully, when I get to all of that in a few pages, I’ll have found some words that come close to describing what really is the indescribable.

As I came to, I remember hearing footsteps getting closer and quickly felt another soul enter the room. I say ‘felt’ deliberately. My eyes were still shut, the room was dark, and forgetting the noise of footsteps, I still knew someone was close to me. I can’t explain it and I don’t know how, but … I could feel other souls around me.

Please don’t open the curtains.
Please don’t open the curtains.
Please don’t open the curtains, I thought to myself.

I opened my eyes. Daylight suddenly burst into the room. The scraping sound of curtains opening snapped me into full consciousness. I could see the back of a nurse gazing outside to the city as she fastened them. She was a large, black woman, the size of a house, dressed in white (what else).
I looked down at myself and saw two tubes coming out my chest, one on each side. A reddish/brown fluid trickled down them, draining from me (that’s one sign you’ve been in some serious shit—having tubes coming out your body like they’re a normal part of you). On my arm, an IV drip was stuck in me, and further down I’d been tagged around the wrist: -

Zander, Matt / 12.6.1973
St. Michael’s Hospital
0334578511/628
#2526

So … I knew who I was, knew where I was, and knew I was alive. Everything still appeared to be working brain-wise (my body was another story). Not that I thought I had amnesia or anything. No. Quite the opposite. Everything that happened during my NDE (near-death experience is waaaay too long to write every time) was still crystal clear in my mind at that point—the tunnel, the bright light, flashback alley, the gateway and … Keller. That’s right … that guy’s name was Keller. I almost forgot. Keller was the guy on the other side who told me I’d start to forget everything the minute I came back. That’s why I’ve gotta get this stuff down on paper … before I lose it and any clue as to what I’m meant to do now I’m back here.

The nurse turned from the window to see my eyes open. Her face revealed the hint of a smile.
“Mr. Zander,” she began, curiosity in her voice, “how are we feeling this morning?”

How was I feeling? Good question. Let me think for a second…
Well, I could barely move for starters. I was amazed at how fast my body had seized up (note to self: that’s what you get for not goin’ to the gym). My chest felt like I’d been impaled by a metal rod—straight through me to the back of the bed—and I was being pinned down. The pain wasn’t too bad—just a sledgehammer being smashed down onto my chest every second. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. The day I woke up, I’m sure I had a tonne of morphine in me.
Honestly, I was more worried about my breathing. I felt like it was safer taking shallow breaths but the nurses wanted me to breathe in and out normally, with a full breath. I had visions of accidentally taking a big breath and my chest cracking open like some earthquake fault line. The nurses assured me it wouldn’t.
“I was shot,” I said with a croaky voice, as much to myself as to the nurse.
“The bullet missed your heart by about this much,” the ‘Big Mama’ nurse said, holding her fingers up to show me about the width of a … well … a bullet. “We thought we mighta lost you there for a minute, but you proved us all wrong. Musta’ had the angels on your side, ain’t no mistakin’ that. Lost alotta blood, ya did. But the doctors … they patched y’up pretty good. You’re gonna be just fine. You must be feeling pretty lousy? We’ll get you started on some exercises today to get you up and movin’ again. We should be able to do somethin’ ‘bout those tubes, too.”
I watched her pour some water into a glass for me. She left it on the dresser. My mind was racing too fast to say anything more to her. I decided to just lay there like a vegetable.
“You get some rest for now. The doctor’ll be in to check up on you.”
That, more or less, is all I can remember from Sunday, the day I woke up. I don’t really know where the rest of the day went, but one thing I won’t forget was having those tubes pulled out my chest. The nurse—another one, slim redhead, not Big Mama—told me it was gonna feel like an umbrella being poked inside, opened out, and pulled out again. I thought she was flirting with me. She wasn’t. Thank christ for painkillers.
What a strange feeling it is to see tubing coming out your body, though, wondering where the hell it’s been and what the hell it’s been doing. Big big big sigh of relief seeing those things out, albeit with a ten-minute afterthought of discomfort (burning sensation). After that, I didn’t feel so much like … I dunno … a guy with tubes coming out his chest?

Now, a day later, I’m out of bed, sitting upright in a chair by the window. It’s no hotel room in here. There’s just a couple of basic prints on cream-coloured walls that keep it from being totally sterile. But hey, when you got a room with a view like I have, who cares what’s hanging on a wall? Anyone well enough to get out of bed and make it to the window wouldn’t care what the room looked like. The view overlooks downtown—sky-scraping office towers, condos, and the sound of the traffic below (mostly honking horns). I’ve tried to match each horn to its respective car during the rush hours, but I keep hearing the sound of the streetcars along Queen which screw me up.
Let’s see, what else … there’s a few chairs for visitors, old ‘we-have-no-funding-for-anything-new’ ones. And a TV (I’m guessing 13 inch—no widescreen) hangs down from the ceiling on one of those swivel neck thingies. Next to my bed, I have a dresser, and behind that, on the back panelling, is a metal plate with a whole bunch of plugs and buttons. That’s the nurses panel for the room ‘cos there’s no way in hell I can reach it from the bed (I have my own fully loaded remote control to mess round with).
In the room with me is another bed and another patient, lying there with problems of his own. I’ve glanced over now and then, but I don’t wanna stare and give the ‘wonder-what-he-has’ look. It’s a guy in his late teens/early twenties. He has a young, Gen-Y face, and wavy brown hair, flopped down over his forehead and eyes. I figure he’s found trouble or trouble’s found him ‘cos he’s got bandages on both arms. That’s the only thing that stands out as any kind of injury, so he’s probably not as bad off as me (tubes coming out of body beats bandaged arms). He seems to be either sleeping, drugged out or dead—the arrival of daylight doesn’t seem to worry the guy. This morning, I did get the chance to say ‘hey’ and he gave me a quick ‘hangover x 1000’ kind of ‘hey’ back, before closing his eyes again. Maybe later we’ll get to do the whole ‘what-are-you-in-for?’ routine.
The doctor who checks on me says I’m doing well, considering I was shot four days ago and spent two whole minutes clinically dead (no breathing, no pulse, no heartbeat). Giving some thought to the latter and actually counting out 120 seconds in my head, I gotta agree with the guy. Although, right now … honestly … I don’t know whether I’m lucky or unlucky to be back here.

Y’know, one thing I’ve realized being in this situation is how important the muscles in your chest are when you try to sit up in a chair or get out of bed (fucking mutherfucker—it hurts). I’ve managed to walk a little bit today, though, albeit tortoise-like. I’ve brushed my teeth, cleaned up, and gotten myself out of a shitty hospital gown and into someone’s pinstriped robe that the Big Mama nurse pulled outta lost property for me.
Sitting here, six stories up, looking down to the snow-dumped city streets, you come to realize just how busy the world went and got. Look at ‘em down there—people going about their lives, moving from A > B x infinity + 1. Just a larger version of watching tiny organisms through a microscope. Everyone rushing around, always something to do, someplace to be. But do people ever really think about life? What it is? What they’re doing?
Having a near-death experience really makes you re-evaluate your life—every single bit of it.

A journal/diary/whatever is the last thing a guy like me would’ve ever imagined starting, but I need to do this if I wanna try n’ remember what happened when I died—what it was like, what I saw, and exactly how I ended up back here in hospital. I’m no writer (duh)—I don’t know how something like this is supposed to sound, so I’m just gonna say what I wanna say, when I wanna say it. That’s what makes a journal cool, I guess? I can write what I want. It’ll be my mind on paper. Although, I get the feeling my mind’s already sprung a leak and the near-death experience has begun to slowly drain outta me—maybe through those drainage tubes … who knows?—so I guess I’d better get to it.
I’m quickly learning that an NDE is like a holiday—once you get back to your daily-routine life, you start to really wonder if you were ever on holiday at all. I feel there’s already things I’ve forgotten about this other place I went to. I’m sinking back into normal life again and I don’t want that to happen—I wanna remember that place as much as I can. Honestly … I wanna be back there right now. But I realize I was given a second chance at life for a reason.
That’s gotta be the biggest wake-up call a guy can get.
So … in order to get my mind clear on everything, I wanna go back a little, before it all happened. I’m gonna write everything about my death in the pages to come, but before I get to that, I wanna remember who I am, or, more to the point, who I was. The type of person I was before I was shot. Before I died. Before I knew life after death existed.


Cooley’s, Bloor Street
Exactly one week ago, Breakfast: -

“No. Fucking. Way,” I said softly, as I glanced around for any other diners’ eyes watching us. “No, no, no, no, no … that’s a bad idea.”
Sitting across from me in the booth at Cooley’s, Eric and James looked at me like I’d just turned down an invite to a Victoria’s Secret lingerie party.
I finished my mouthful of hash browns and discreetly continued, “There’s no way we mess with anyone at the store, let alone Belcher. We’ve always said that.”
Eric kept up the pitch. “We’d have the whole weekend wide open, he’s gonna be in Florida at some food convention. It’s a walk in the park, his wife’ll be with him—no pets, no alarm … the house’ll just be sitting there. We’d be in and out in five … ten tops.”
James turned to me and pulled a subject change. “Hey, where the hell did you get to last night, anyway?”
The previous night we’d all been downtown in the Entertainment District, squeezing out the weekend’s last drops at a club called Joker. It was one of these multi-zoned places where you had a floor of dance, a floor of r+b chill-out and a floor of techno/trance for the kiddies with glo-sticks and a liking for foam. It was Eric’s idea—he’d got a tip from a friend that John Cusack was gonna show up while he was in town shooting his latest. My ass, he was.
“I did a runner,” I said, taking a sip of coffee, “that place sucked. Everyone was from Buffalo. Get this though … I got outside, right? I flagged down a cab and told the Indian guy, ‘High Park.’ So he takes off driving, we’re on our way, but I notice he keeps doing loops around the block—he’s looking all over the place, clueless. So I say, ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ And he turns over his shoulder and says, ‘I looking for hotdog—you say you want hotdog!’”
Eric burst out laughing. James kept the straightest face (he’d always do that).
“So I told him, ‘I don’t want a damn hotdog. H-i-g-h P-a-r-k, I wanna go to High Park.’ Fucking cab drivers.”
“That is so messed up,” Eric said (he’d always say that).

Cooley’s was one of the diners Eric, James and I would stop by for breakfast before we started our shift at Runnerman’s. Cooley’s was an open kitchen—been around since the ‘60s and the place still thought it was the ‘60s. You could mistake it for a homeless shelter it was so old and banged up—swivel stools at the counter, red vinyl booths, old wooden panelling, tables so small you had to play chess with condiments to squeeze everything on—but the food was the best. They knew their grease.

Sidebar: The Cooley’s Special ($6)

Bacon—the hardwood smoked stuff … awesome.
Eggs, any style (I’m a scrambler).
Hash Browns—they put some kind of magic spice on these things? For all I know, it may well kill ya but it’s worth it.
Toast.
Choice of Fruit or Sausage—now, you’d think this one was a no-brainer, right? Polish sausage or fruit slices. Well, I always get the fruit. I try to counter-balance the bad with the good—melon, pineapple and grapefruit slices.
Coffee—unlimited refills.

OK. I think I put that in as a result of being stuck here with hospital food—I’m dying for some real-world grease. My mind’s all over the place.
So … where was I? That’s right … how this all began.
Well, I’d known Eric and James since working at Runnerman’s the past two years. Runnerman’s was a supermarket—I’ll get to that later. When I started there, I was still trying to work out what I was gonna do with my life after having worked at a tonne of places, and the job gave me a buffer while I thought things through. I’d been there ever since. Funny how you stick with what you know, ain’t it? Guess you could say underachiever, I wouldn’t argue with anyone. Thing is, I was okay with that. I was never gonna be a stockbroker or lawyer or nothin’. No way I was ever gonna climb the corporate ladder and wear a suit to the office and be one of those yuppie stiffs you see reading GQ magazine. I just didn’t know exactly what I was gonna be.
So sue me.

Me: - I was born and raised here in Toronto. A great city to grow up in, it’s just not so great as it used to be. See, in ‘97 they merged some of the neighbouring cities together and called it the Megacity. Well, no one asked me if I wanted to live in a Megacity, did they? So, from that point on, it became just another sprawling, cookie-cutter North American city. That’s when things started to suck for Toronto.
My parents divorced when I was seventeen and went their separate ways from what was a shitty marriage. One’s on the west coast, one’s in Europe. I don’t talk to either of them anymore. It’s like we all decided to divorce each other at the same time. Guess you could say I was a bit of a handful as a teenager and we never really clicked as a happy, sitcom family. I did some stupid things back then, and know I wasn’t the perfect kid. None of it that serious, just stupid stuff—shoplifting, break and enters, joyriding, doing drugs. The wrong-kinda-crowd-type deal. In my early twenties, I got tired of that scene and gave it all away, except for the break and enters. The only reason I kept those up was out of boredom, and for the rush that came with it (replacing drugs).
The only drug I craved anymore was adrenalin. See, once you get drugs into you at a young age, you know what a high is and how it feels, and you wanna keep having it. Or somehow replicate it. I’d matured a lot from my younger years, but I guess I was still willing to steal other people’s stuff so I could get that adrenalin high and some free electronics. DVDs, digital cams, cell phones, iPod, Xbox, PlayStation—I’d take any of that kinda stuff from the homes we robbed and the bedrooms of rich college kids with mommy and daddy’s $$$. I could never afford to buy those kinda things, but they’re sure nice to have for free. Well, they were, that is.
See, even if the law never catches up with you and you think you’re getting away with it, eventually, things have a way of working out. Well … they have for me, anyway. And that’s exactly why I’m sitting here in this hospital chair writing this. I think back to all that stuff I did and realize how dumb it was. Dumb isn’t even the right word. I regret stuff now. But I’m not about to write about it here in a spill-all Oprah-style sob story. I’ll just say it was stupid shit, and that I never gave one single thought to what I was really doing with my life until it was too late. Until now.
When I get to detailing my NDE, I’m gonna write about the consequences of the stuff we do in our lives and what I experienced that’s made me a different person since coming back. For now though, let me say that from the time I met Eric and James, we’d broken into homes ’cos it was the only source of excitement in our otherwise pathetic, boring, insignificant lives.

I played guitar growing up. Did the whole rock scene. I had the look down—the long, dirty-blonde hair, permanent stubble, earring, tattoos, chains and black t-shirts. These days, I’ve cleaned up and gone grunge—shorter hair (just-got-outta-bed look), goatee, ripped jeans, shirt and sneakers—that kinda thing. I never really measured up as a rocker anyways. 5’8” and 140 lbs. doesn’t really give you that whole menacing, rock bad-boy look. Only thing I had going for me was when I scrunched my eyebrows up, friends said I had a good ‘angry dude’ stare goin’ on. I even got a ‘you look like Kurt Cobain’ sometimes (okay, maybe I did look like him a little).
It was around that time that I went out and got a Nirvana tattoo. Y’know, the drunken smiley face? Didn’t stop there, either. I remember picking out a couple of other rock star ones just for the hell of it. Every other accessory’s gone now, but (funnily enough) the ink’s still on my shoulders. I don’t have a clue what the other two mean. Just some symbol shit. Makes me laugh—people these days picking out tattoos with all these deep spiritual meanings and shit, what’s that about?

Girl’s high-pitched voice: - This one means ‘serenity’ in ancient Japanese, and if you divide by pi, it also equals my birth date, sun sign and spells my boyfriend’s name backwards.

Whatever.

Anyways, I played in this band called Reception Overflow. We named it after a voicemail system that once reaching its allowed number of mailbox messages went into this mode called ‘reception overflow’. Don’t ask me what the hell that was, we just liked the name.
I taught myself how to play guitar, growing up in the ‘burbs of Toronto. It never went anywhere. I just wasn’t that good. I mean, I could play … it wasn’t that hard to turn up the amp and rock out on power chords all night. But after I got booted from the band, I pretty much gave up. Too hard, don’t try. Maybe the rock gods didn’t see me making it as a musician.
I remember one time we were at this gig playing at a friend’s party in Mississauga. We were halfway into this song. I played rhythm and this other guy, Scoots, played lead. Anyway, just before the solo started, we were rockin’ it hardcore and I looked at Scooter and shouted over all the distortion, “Yo, dude … nail it, man!”
Thing was, Scoots thought I said, “I’ll nail it, man,” and gave the guitar solo over to me. Let me say here, I couldn’t play lead guitar solos. I choked and just made shit up. Halfway through I thought maybe if I make this look so damn cool, they might think it’s meant to sound so friggin’ messed up. So I went ahead and swung my axe around, made my ‘angry dude’ face and rocked the house.
They were the longest eighteen seconds of my life.
Needless to say, the band booted me. They said I was livin’ in guitar fantasy camp and to quit thinking I was Slash from Guns N’ Roses. They thought that I thought I had killer chops on lead and wanted to take over the solos from Scooter. That was pretty much the end of guitar for me. Tough break, dude.

So, Eric and James were high school buddies. They grew up together in the prairies of Saskatchewan and drove out here for the excitement of the big (mega) city. They lived in an apartment at High Park, a suburb west of downtown, about 15 minutes by car or subway.
High Park’s this nice, leafy little shopping village to hang out in and generally get away from the downtown core of traffic, drugs, clubs and bums. I’d been living on their sofa for the past couple of months after getting kicked out of the apartment I shared with a girlfriend at Yonge & Eglington, a trendy residential strip just north of the downtown core. The thing about being dumped is … once you see your possessions laid out on the front yard in a non-uniformed kinda pile, you know it’s a bad sign. That particular ex-girlfriend wasn’t into spring cleaning, and it wasn’t spring, given that half my stuff was covered in dirty, December snow. She was a prissy bitch. So … I ended up crashing at Eric and James’ place and hadn’t left since.
Eric and James had a room each to themselves and here I was every night unfolding my salt-stained (salt from the sidewalk snow) futon in their living room. I’d moved what little stuff I had into their place and proceeded to sell it off in exchange for rent (salt-stained futon = $50). Crashing at their place made sleeping so much of a chore, though … every night, fold the futon out, put the pillows out, put the cover over it, move the coffee tables, move the lamps. Every morning … blah, blah, blah. Had their place been a three-bedroom, I would’ve been cool to stay and save myself the impending pain of apartment hunting. But having James walk over me in darkness to get to the bathroom at any time of night was kinda weird. Plus, being exposed to those two guys’ habits and freaky shit made me wanna force myself to look at rental classifieds. Let’s just say Eric loved passing out with a bag full of donuts, twenty hookers (did I say twenty, I meant two) and The Tonight Show at full volume coming from his bedroom (Jay Leno’s monologue only has the strength to drown out one hooker, by the way, not two). He always claimed he’d just bump into these girls on their way home from the Queen Street clubs, all drunk and horny. But having the back pages of Eye Weekly spread open on his bedroom floor with various escort ads circled and starred kinda made me and James wonder. (Roll eyes here).
James had his quirks too, though. They didn’t involve hookers. His fix was Law & Order. I shit not, any time of the day when he was in his room you’d hear that friggin’ Law & Order theme playing. Typical scenario of me getting home was like…

“James, you there? Eric? Anyone home?”

‘In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups—the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories. Duh-Duh.’

“Okay … James is home.”

It was like he had a damn Law & Order cable channel running episodes 24/7. And these kinds of habits were just the tip of the iceberg. There was often food left all over the place for days, mountains of hair and water in the bathroom, and the world record for days passed without laundry done was constantly being broken. They didn’t even lock the place … how’s the irony? We did break and enters and here’s their place wide open any time of the day or night—just slide the back patio doors open and walk in.
Let’s see, what else … there was the fridge that thought it was a 747-400 jet, the toilet that seemed to be set to ‘volcano flush’ mode, and Eric’s old computer, which at night had the sound of a vacuum cleaner, was big as a ‘70s mainframe, and so friggin’ old all you could download on that thing was stick porn, you know, like a naked hangman.
To top all that shit off, here’s the clincher: to get to the apartment above, the other tenants had to come into ours. So, you could be sitting there scratching your ass or whatever and have people unlock your front door, walk in, and fumble about with their keys at their door before heading up to their third-floor apartment. Wtf?! (What the fuck).

Hmmmm. Just noticed how I’m writing about Eric and James like I used to know them, past tense. That’s kinda weird. I mean, all this was last week. But it feels like it was a lifetime ago. Dying’s made my sense of time totally skewed. I feel disconnected from everything before I was shot. Maybe my mind realizes it’s now a lifetime ago. That I can’t go back to that old life anymore. Whatever.

Anyway, enough of me.
Back to Cooley’s … and this idea we had last week to break into our boss’ place while he was away at a convention in Florida.

“Don’t you see? This is our chance for payback. It can be, like, the ultimate revenge. We can wipe our asses on the furniture,” Eric whispered to the two of us, sipping coffee and sizing the room up for any potential networking opportunities…

Sidebar: Eric

Pros: Funny, great impersonations, motivator, dreamer
Cons: Short attention span, moody, completely unreliable

Eric was a wannabe actor. A networker, always conscious of meeting people, showing himself off as a player and sizing up anyone he thought might be able to do something for him. He actually did a commercial for a courier company ‘cos he stalked a casting agent at the store and helped push her groceries out to the parking lot. After about 0.6 seconds of screen time, where he walked out an elevator (w/o lines), somehow he managed to blow his big break and hadn’t done a thing since. He’d mention all these projects, but that they just weren’t right for him. He was actually well suited to showbiz, though. He had the looks—short black hair, styled in a forward brush, a clean-shaven full face, straight teeth and clean skin. At 6 ft, he had a strong presence, and his fashion sense was way above James and mine. The only blemish was his weakness for junk food. He was hypoglycaemic, and that’d get him eating donuts and shit that didn’t do any favours for his body. Eric was slick, though, with a killer sense of humour—he could joke himself out of any situation. He could have a smoking gun in his hand, dead body at his feet, and still be able to joke his way outta there with the cops.
We’d often sit around and do improv—running through lines, gags and skits we thought’d be funny for the TV show he’d always talk about writing: -

Cruise: I want answers…
Nicholson: You want answers?
Cruise: I want the truth!
Nicholson: You can’t handle the truth!

We just about knew that movie, A Few Good Men, by heart. The voices Eric could pull off were amazing. He’d do perfect impersonations and characters—where he got that stuff from I got no clue. I guess he just stayed up watchin’ alotta late-night TV. Sugar hits will do that to ya.
His talent was definitely going to waste working at Runnerman’s. See, Eric was a dreamer with big plans. He’d talk the talk, but when it came to the walking, he’d collapse on the sofa and watch Saturday Night Live with a bag of day-old donuts and coffee. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. With his looks, he could’ve got any girl he wanted if he applied himself (and maybe lost the spare tire around his waist). But he’d prefer to hang out at Starbucks and improv, or talk about script ideas and making an indie film. And even if he did go to a club, he wouldn’t pickup girls. He’d be looking to meet actors. I often thought, though, that Eric would be the one to go somewhere out of the three of us. That showbiz would find him eventually.

“No … no trashing the place,” James replied. “Wiping asses on furniture is for punks. If we do this, we need to stay professional.”
“James, this isn’t Law & Order … we’re not professionals, okay? Anyway, trashing’s not our M.O.,” I said, turning to Eric. “If—and I say if—we do Belcher’s place, we stick to the M.O.”
“Okay, no ass wiping,” Eric agreed. “But look … I know Belcher. I’m good with people, right? The guy’s gonna have some good shit. The house is worth a million—he’s not gonna have it decked out in IKEA or somethin’.”
“I dunno, it’s risky,” I said. “What if he works out it was us? Then we’re screwed.”
“Yeah, we’d lose our jobs … tragedy.”
“I was more thinking along the lines of prison,” I whispered to Eric.
“Hmmm? Prison versus Runnerman’s, huh? You know, I gotta tell ya, that’s kind of a tough call for me right now,” added James. “Mondays suck.”
Eric continued, “Yeah, well, what if we scored enough to quit and live off for a few months?”
James suddenly looked up at Eric from his hash browns.
“He’s gonna have cash and prizes in that kinda ballpark, I know it,” Eric told us. “I mean the guy wears a Rolex…”
James and I both looked at him, our b.s. meters goin’ crazy.
“Okay—so maybe it’s a fake Rolex,” Eric admitted, “but you’ve seen his wife? She’s always wearing jewellery when she’s at the store. You can sell that stuff on the ‘net.”
“On your computer? The same computer that ate all my fuckin’ emails and porn?” I complained.
“Wait a minute, though,” James interrupted, chomping on his crispy bacon, “the guy’s gonna have insurance, right? I mean, knowing him, he’ll probably claim shit he never had and we’ll end up making him money. I don’t wanna be making that prick any more money than we do now.”
Eric turned to James. “Don’t you want to get out of this life? Look at us, we’re fucking pathetic. James, you haven’t got laid in … whatever. Matt—you’re selling off furniture as rent money, for crissakes. We work in a s-u-p-e-r-m-a-r-k-e-t. We’re in our thirties. Our lives are just slipping away. We’re gonna be forty in less than ten years—still packing shit into shelves. Is that what you guys want?”
Eric looked at us with a silent scream in his eyes. He had a point.
“I say we hit a few more places, get some cash flow, then pool our money so we can quit. We move into a place downtown and start making contacts. Like, huge contacts. It’s not what you know in this town. We’ve gotta get out there, networking,” Eric said clicking his fingers. “We need to hang with guys like Douglas and get ourselves into the game. If we meet the right people and make the right moves, we’ll move up in the world. That’s how it works. High Park’s for soccer moms with SUVs.”
James and I sat there for a second, thinking. Well, I was thinking I hope I never turn into a guy like Douglas, and if I did, that someone would shoot me (hmmm, maybe a bad choice of words there. More on Douglas in a bit).
And James … well, James looked more concerned about his eggs.
“Is that a fucking hair in my eggs?”

Sidebar: James

Pros: Eccentric, easygoing, funny, conspiracy theorist
Cons: Cynic, alcoholic, liked James Taylor, hard to read

James was a tall, lanky, doofus looking guy with thick, bottle glasses and a kind of Frankenstein-like appearance … but in a good way. He was an eccentric. A man of few words. But when he did have something to say he’d usually make you laugh with lashings of sarcasm and dry humour. His voice was calm, and he spoke in a soft, constant monotone—I think I’d only heard him shout once or twice for Eric to shut up when Law & Order was on.
He gave the impression he didn’t really care about anything in life, like he was just sailing through and whatever happened was fine by him. I figured only a few things mattered to James: Beer, photography, Law & Order, crispy bacon and hockey.
He’d already had two front teeth knocked out playing street hockey last Fall. Did he freak? Nope, he just picked his teeth up off the ground and said something like, ‘Better get those fixed, I guess.’
He took them to this Chinese dentist in The Beaches, a suburb by Lake Ontario and the only strip of sand in the city resembling a beach in summer. As he sat in the dentist’s chair and had his teeth somehow glued back in by an obviously unlicensed, but affordable dentist, he explained to the guy (with slurred speech from the Novocaine) that his TV was showing this black blob on the screen and, hence, he’d been outside playing street hockey. This blob had grown from a tiny dot in one corner and was beginning to take over the picture at a steady rate. The old Chinese guy, without hesitation, as he worked in James’ mouth, said to bring it by and, ‘I fix for you.’
Teeth and TVs … makes sense. But that was classic James. Anything eccentric and he’d be there (w/ camera). In fact, I think the only reason he tagged along on the break and enters sometimes was just so he could see inside people’s homes and how the other half lived.

Eric and I were distracted for a second.
“Look at this…” James said, pulling a thick black hair from his eggs. He held it up in the light, studying it like it was gonna reveal the mystery of the universe.
“What the fuck…”
“Get over it, James. It’s a hair,” Eric said, no strength to argue.
No mistaking it’d come from the Cooley’s waitress—she worked every morning and had the silkiest black hair I think I’ve ever seen. I think she was the owner’s daughter or something. She seemed related to the guy you’d see cooking out back when heading to the bathrooms. Every time we were at Cooley’s for breakfast, I used to love her bringing our meals out. She’d reach over the table and expose the mother of all cleavage—I’m talking the most luscious tits you could dream of. They sat so perfect in her deep-plunge, v-neck t-shirt, jiggling about as she moved around the table. So, yeah … a hair … I got ‘em too, but I could personally live with the odd hair now and then in exchange for that kinda cleavage.
Hair crisis over, James back to eating, I asked Eric, “How would we get in?”
“Out back … sliding glass doors. Locks are a piece-a-cake, no noise,” he said under his breath. “So, are you in?”
I paused. I ran it through in my head. Decision-making wasn’t a strong point of mine (star sign: Gemini).
I sat there for a moment and tried to imagine all the shit Belcher had given me in two years at Runnerman’s, and couldn’t find a reason why we shouldn’t get some payback on that prick.
“He’s gonna be where?” I asked.
“Orlando, Florida. Cassandra told me,” Eric replied.
“And you’re gonna trust her? That girl’s tipped to win the Oscar this year,” James quipped.
“Everyone else knows, anyway. I heard the front desk girls talking about last year. Apparently all he brought back for ‘em was a Disneyworld keychain … to share.”
“You know what?” I said with a quick nod, “let’s do it. I hate the guy.”
“Count me in,” James said. “I wanna see the kind of place he’s got. And I haven’t forgotten about those stale chocolates, remember? My shit was black for a week eating those things.”
“That was so messed up,” Eric replied, laughing to himself through his nose.

Sidebar: The Ukrainian Chocolates

James was a pretty good worker, way more than Eric and me. He could really get busy and fix stuff when he was motivated. Last year, he cleaned out the stockroom freezer and got rid of all the shit that the Frozen Food girl had ordered by mistake. Her fingers (and ass) were so fat she’d pressed an extra ‘0’ on the computer when ordering frozen spring rolls. We got 100 cartons of ‘em … for the month. In a normal month, we’d sell maybe 7-8 cartons. So, in the back of the freezer, cartons and cartons of frozen spring rolls just sat there, slowly turning into shrivelled up little wieners that even a homeless dog in India wouldn’t touch.
When fatty took her vacation, James went in there with gloves and coat and played Tetris with the stock, moving everything round so he could reach the spring rolls and get them out to the frozen cabinet in the store. He re-priced them (without authority … an executive decision) down from $3.48 to $.50 a pack. People couldn’t get enough. Shoppers will buy shit if it’s cheap enough. Dumbasses.
So, Belcher, on seeing the clean, frozen stockroom, spoke about James’ efforts one morning at a staff meeting and awarded him a box of chocolates. When we looked at them later, they were these gross Ukrainian chocolates that never sold because they looked like little turds (customers were smart, occasionally). Oh, and these things were about 6 months past their expiration date, too. Note: James still ate the chocolates.

“We’re gonna be late,” Eric said, starting to get organized to leave.
He always did that—pissed me off. Whenever Eric was done, he’d start getting all restless, like his time was too precious to waste if he wasn’t sitting there eating.
Cooley’s special breakfast over, we vacated the booth and headed for the cashier. James went and paid the check (we’d always split it). Eric stepped out onto the sidewalk, like a celebrity waiting for his minders. He checked his cell, hoping for a message from his agent. I don’t think he’d received a call from her since the elevator walk-on. None of us knew how he managed to screw that up.
I waited for James and walked back to our booth to leave a tip for Ms Cleavage of the Year. I remember getting another quickie glance as she wiped our table down. Hoochie Mama. That there ended up as the highlight of my Monday.


Runnerman’s,
Bloor St, Toronto: -

There she was … the enemy. As the three of us stood there in the parking lot, burning up the last remaining minutes of freedom, we faced the Runnerman’s storefront in a David vs. Goliath showdown. High above the store’s entrance doors, the monstrous and all too familiar Runnerman’s sign loomed down on us, a mixture of bright red and orange letters, followed by a jazzy, corporate logo resembling a bent-out-of-shape teardrop.
Originally a family-owned, mid-size supermarket, the corporate entity known as Runnerman’s Ltd. had bought it out as a chain location a few years ago. From the outside, even from Robert St, you could see right the way in the entire store thanks to large, plate glass windows and bright, fluorescent lighting. Advertising was everywhere inside—no space was left untouched by various subsidiary companies advertising their products, all ‘new and improved!’, of course.

That was the moment we dreaded each week. Monday morning.
We began our usual slow shuffle up to the front doors. No words were spoken. We all kept to our own thoughts. Eric pulled apart the automatic doors—not yet activated for customers—and we discreetly slipped straight down the first aisle to reach the back doors, which led out to the lockers and staff area. Out back, stock was piled to the roof. Pallets and cartons of everything from coconut-oil suntan lotion to instant mashed potatoes. One after the other, we punched our timecards in a machine that looked like it was from World War II, and then followed the dimly-lit maze that led to the locker rooms. Above us, in a few decibels too many, came the words we had come to hate hearing over the P.A. system: -
“Staff to the floor … calling all staff to the floor. The store is now open. Don’t forget your smiles and have a Runnerman’s great day!”

It was a typical Monday. The start of another week. The store was trading at a quiet but steady pace, with the customer demographic mainly comprising of mothers w/ babies, doing a morning shop. The in-store bakery was already halfway through its day, close to finishing up at midday, and the produce section was still setting up for another week with a clean slate of fresh fruit and vegetables.
Throughout the day, sales representatives from the major companies running promotions would call into the store to setup their products in extravagant, eye-catching displays in the hope of good market penetration that week. See, in the supermarket business, Monday was typically known as the setup day. The day that everything would be refilled, restocked, refreshed, re-cut and re-priced, ready for the heavy trade days of Wednesday through Saturday.
Walking up to the front of the store that morning (and whenever else I’d walk by), I remember the girls on checkout had the exact same looks on their faces as the week before, as they ran shoppers’ items over laser scanners, filling the store with constant electronic beeps. It’d be fair to say you could generally sum any one of them up as suffering from: -

a) tiredness
b) boredom
c) effects of an all-night rave
d) frustration
e) depression
f) all of the above

Like most other workplaces, in a supermarket there was a certain pecking order, a food chain—even amongst the girls on front-desk/checkout—that determined who got what jobs. It operated along the lines that the newest hire would be on the very bottom, receiving the jobs that, for lack of a better word, sucked. If one was to progress and get promoted through the ranks, they could possibly end up Second-In-Charge (2IC) or even make Store Manager someday. For Eric, James and me? Well … we were no doubt bottom three. We had the ‘underachieving slacker’ label slapped all over us.
Further raining on our parade of ever moving up the shit-heap (not like we wanted to, anyway) was that all three of us refused to kiss ass to management, especially to Belcher. But there were always plenty of other staff willing to brown-nose their way into a promotion. I’d see it time and again in a lot of different variations, including: -

a) The ‘look-at-what-I-just-did’ awareness campaign aimed at management (Freezer Fatty was a master at this)
b) The store management snitch (squealed to management whenever the slightest violation was made of Runnerman’s corporate policy)
c) Volunteering to work back late (some staff just didn’t have lives)
d) Flirting and/or being eye candy (the cashier girls were particularly good at this one—white see-thru shirts, open buttons, black bras … do the math)

So last Monday, as ‘let’s-pretend-to-be-happy’ music tried to drown out beeping scanners, and shoppers poked carts around the aisles, trying to match coupons with products, the three of us were busy setting up the weekly flyer promotions at the end of each aisle. Typically, management wanted us to build up all of the product displays so friggin’ big that if a customer pulled an item from the wrong place the whole thing would avalanche and bury whatever shoppers were in its path. But Runnerman’s Rule No.1 was management always knew best.
Before we could get the new displays up, we’d have to pull the previous week’s down and take the remaining stock to its shelf location and fill it up as much as it could take.
I can still remember restocking cans of dog food from my stock trolley as I turned to see James heading down the aisle towards me. He looked pissed off and didn’t care who heard him (unusual for James).
“What the fuck is that guy’s problem?”
“Who?”
“Belcher,” he replied.
I continued placing cans on the shelf. “Why, what happened?”
“He gave me a fucking warning for talking to Cassandra.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa—you talked to Cassandra Parker?” (Cassandra would never have been James’ type. In fact, I didn’t know what James’ type was).

Sidebar: Cassandra

Cassandra Parker was the newest of the checkout girls, the girl who seemed outta place when I set eyes on her, her first day, two weeks ago. She was in a different league to the others—she was upper class (or faked it well) and came across with a preppy, snobby, sorority-queen attitude. Even at a quick glance, I could tell Cassandra was one of those girls who always got what she wanted. Now, I know I could’ve been wrong with that assumption but to back it up, my last two girlfriends also fell into that league (the club is growing), so I considered myself well tuned at the time to detect her manipulation station (i.e. her mouth). All I really knew for sure was that she was 21, attending U of T, studying Law (just what we need—more lawyers) and still lived at home.
She was no stick-thin girl—no Paris Hilton—but her body had curves in all the right places. She had long, dark brown hair with blonde highlights, and beautiful, big brown eyes to match. Her skin was clear, her lips glossed, her breasts were tennis balls, her ass was a bubble, and she had this seductive, innocent smile … you get the picture. Flaunting her sexuality was more powerful towards man than a thousand bunker-busting bombs.
In a moment of weakness, I’m sure she could’ve had us trying to kill each other for a chance to get in her pants, but personally, having been bitten one too many times already by her kind, I think (I hope) I could’ve been able to resist a man-eater like Cassandra Parker.

“So where was this?” I asked James.
“Up front, at her checkout. She didn’t have anyone in her lane so I just stopped and said … stuff,” James told me. “That’s my second warning. Third one and Belcher’ll fire my ass.”
“What’d you say to her?”
“‘Hi.’”
“‘Hi’? That’s it? You went up to Cassandra Parker, the new hot girl, and just said ‘Hi’?”
“Well, not exactly, but I didn’t get much else in before she stopped me.”
“Like…?” I said, prompting James to continue.
“She asked me, y’know, in that high pitched ‘what-ever’ voice … ‘What happened to your teeth?’” James said, giving a damn fine impression of the girl (Eric would’ve been proud).
(Since the hockey incident, James’ teeth were a little skewed. Not bad, but noticeable).
James continued, “So I said, ‘Oh, they got knocked out in a hockey accident. My dentist glued them back in. He’s Chinese. Hey, so, you’re studying Law, right? Do you watch Law & Order?’ That’s when she stopped me and started blurting out, ‘Like, I don’t, like, date anyone from the store, okay? And you’re, like, really creeping me out, okay? So can you just, like, go back to grocery and not, like, come up here again?’ That’s when Belcher showed up.”
“What a bitch,” I said.
I looked down the aisle for Belcher, checking it was clear. James cooled down and pulled a couple of pet food cartons from the bottom of his trolley, arranging other cartons to get at them.
“So what’d he say?” I continued.
“Told me to quit harassing other staff. Said everyone’d been warned about talking to the girls up front in that staff meeting we blew off last week, and blah blah blah—second warning,” James said.
From a side-glance, I saw Eric pass over our aisle, then double back and enter. He came towards us with his own trolley of stock to go back on the shelves, but didn’t look like he was setting any records—as usual.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Zip,” James answered.
“I’m waiting for the Pepsi guy to show. Said he’d be here at eleven,” Eric said.
“James just got a warning for talking to Cassandra,” I said.
“No way!” Eric blurted, amused. “You talked to Cassandra?” he said, reaching underneath his trolley. “Trust me, James, she’s so not your type.”
Eric felt between the cartons and pulled out a bag of candy. He waited for a few shoppers to pass before taking a handful and shoving them in his mouth.
“Belcher’s gonna have your balls if he sees that,” James warned him.
“For this stuff? I don’t think so … it’s outta code and I need the sugar hit. I’d say it’s a medical thing,” Eric mumbled, chewing the candy. “Anyway, how can they fire us when customers do way worse? It’s discrimination. I’d sue their ass for a hundred billion.”
“Women with kids are the worst,” I added. “They walk past the self-serve bins in aisle four and practically have meals outta that stuff.”
You’d see it everyday. Customers helping themselves to a handful of whatever they wanted, standing in full view at a self-serve bin, or, if they were a little more discreet, filling up a bag and eating as they shopped the store. Drugs were another hot item too, popular with the senior citizens. Tylenol, Excedrin, Pepcid AC, whatever. They’d browse the section looking to buy, waiting for the right time to stuff the pills down their pants, away from security, before walking out the store with nothing.
Eric reached into the bag of Gummi Cola and grabbed some more. “Here … knock yourself out,” he offered, “I always need this stuff in the mornings.”
James and I took turns, digging our hands into the bag. I mean, it was only out of code stock—if no one ate it, the only place it was going was the dumpster out back after it’d been written off.
“Shit!”
I spotted Belcher heading towards us. Eric pulled the bag into his body and, with his back to Belcher, slowly placed the candy back between his cartons. Eric and I swallowed, but James still had a mouthful of Gummi and just stood there, frozen…

Sidebar: Belcher

John Belcher (nice name) was a balding, big nosed, bung-eyed looking forty-year-old guy who thought he was king shit, all because he ran a Runnerman’s franchise. His left eye was so screwed up that whenever you talked to him it’d be focused out to the side, like he was peering over your shoulder, or had someplace else to be. Over the past two years, he’d given the three of us so much shit. He hated our guts, but no doubt enjoyed having us around over firing us, just so he could feel like a big man when he wanted and put us in our place for the losers he said we were.

“Alright, showtime … what the hell’s going on here? Huh?” Belcher barked, his bung eye darting around like a missile targeting system.
“We’re restocking,” I said.
“No one likes a smartass, Zander. It doesn’t take three of you to pack one line of dog food.”
“We’re about to take a break, actually,” Eric said, in a defiant tone.
Belcher paused for a moment, thinking of a comeback. He smirked and slowly shook his head. “Look at you three … you think you’re all so much better than this, don’t you?”
He used to always pause between lines, like a pissed off drill sergeant.
“One day you think you’re gonna be out of here, right? Gonna make it big?” he said, chuckling to himself. “You have no idea how alike we really are. One day, trust me, you’re all gonna be me. This,” he said, as his arms gestured around us, “is going to be your life. I’d get used to it if I were you.”
Belcher looked at each of us with a sense of amusement. He spoke under his breath so only the three of us could hear him. “So you go have your breaks and jerk off to the cashier girls, or do your comedy, or your screenplays, or whatever the hell it is you do on your own time … and then get the fuck back to work.”
Belcher turned to James. “And you,” he said forcefully, pushing his finger into James’ chest, “you stay away from Cassandra or next time I’ll shove a carrot up your ass and light it. Got it?”
Belcher walked off and continued down the aisle, towards the back of the store. That was actually a fairly nice encounter for a change.
Suddenly, his voice burst over the P.A. above. For a second I thought he was gonna have round two via the airwaves, but his now friendly and overly enthusiastic voice began: -

“Good morning customers and welcome to Runnerman’s, the friendliest store in the GTA! Customers, we’ve got some super savings for you today…”

Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.
“A carrot wouldn’t burn, would it?” James asked, puzzled.

Monday was always the longest day.

copyright © 2008 Gary Denne
All rights reserved.