SEVEN
S&M
S&M Construction
Milton never turned himself in. The police never showed up to arrest him. The cash reward went unclaimed. The fires were put out. The furor died down. The eggs were hosed off the walls and floor of the bank. The Cultivez Votre Pécule/Grow Your Nest Egg promotion was shelved. Life returned to normal and Milton returned to the trail of Robin.
He continued searching for her at every music show and art exhibit and poetry slam he could find. He didn’t know if she survived the riot. He hadn’t even seen that she was on the receiving end of the full force of all 10,468 eggs. He didn’t know if she had been arrested, or clubbed, or hurt in anyway. He wanted to ask Ava if she knew anything but didn’t want to seem too eager or too weird or too stalky about it, so he just continued looking everywhere for her.
Gradually, though, despite his best efforts to find ways to get into things without having to pay, his savings dwindled. He had been in Montreal for two months and had burned through all the $5 bills from Uncle Randy’s, and maxed out his Visa.
He was living off two-for-one half-rotten pineapples from Fruiterie du Parc and day-old bagels from St. Viateur’s.
It wasn’t complete destitution. Of whatever he had, some went to rent, some went to food, and most still went to cover for shows and poetry readings, whatever English books Guillaume et Gweltaz stole from the library, and cheap typewriter paper he got from the stationery store down past the Library. But the quality of the shows and poetry readings and the quantity of books and paper was dwindling to the point he was only able to afford Pay-What-You-Can events put on by students, paying with metro transfers and change he’d steal from Noddy’s bedside table.
It wasn’t complete destitution, but it wasn’t far from it.
He was having the time of his life, but with only 73 cents left to his name, things were starting to look bleak. He’d soon have to start looking for work.
But on the eve of Milton’s birthday, Noddy saved him.
Sort of.
Noddy had had a tough time finding work when he first moved, or fled, to Montreal. His one skill, Newfoundland Strip Club DJ, was the one he wanted to avoid using most. So he bought a Y membership and a got a library card, and swam and read for weeks on end until he met Ava at a bus stop. She was a student with a streak of pink in her bleached-blonde black hair, and she found Noddy’s accent worldly. Best of all, she had a line on a summer job as the head of a house painting crew for College Painters, a company renowned for hiring half-assed college kids to do half-assed paint jobs for full price.
She gave Noddy the job, though he claims, “She gave me more, if you know what I mean… sex… I nailed her… on that couch… and that chair… nutted right where you’re sitting, b’y.”
The work suited Noddy fine. The pay was shit, but it was all students on Ava’s crew, except for him and Sam Wrybill—an illegal immigrant from New Zealand who says he defected because of that country’s fascist government and would claim refugee status if it weren’t also for this country’s fascist government and as soon as he got enough money saved up from the array of under-the-table, cash-only, below-minimum-wage jobs he was eligible for, and capable of, he was going to hitch to Mexico and get into the coke game and “fuck all y’all, mate”—so the summer was spent drunk and hooking up with college kids or hungover and slopping cheap paint on expensive houses.
When the summer ended and the students went back to school, Noddy and Sam, now out of work and drinking mates, decided to start S&M Painters.
S&M Painters went gangbusters. Without any talent, tools, expertise, or more than three months’ experience between them, Noddy and Sam got contract after contract.
It may have had something to do with the fact they charged a quarter of what the work was worth if done by someone who had half a clue. And when a client, over afternoon beers, bemoaned the lack of available carpenters in town, Noddy offered S&M’s services.
“I thought you just painted?”
“Nah, b’y. We paints, renovates, does kitchens, bathrooms, decks, landscaping, whatever ya got. We got a good crew, real cheap.”
“I’ve got a place…”
And like that S&M Construction began restoring 200-year-old two-million-dollar homes in Westmount for the lazy son of a millionaire.
The first morning Noddy, on his bus-metro-bus ride to the jobsite, stopped and bought a hammer, a saw, a tape measure, and a tool belt to hold them all—just like he’d seen on TV. The next day he bought a bigger hammer, a crowbar, and a radio.
All day, every day, except Sunday, Noddy and Sam could be found tearing the guts out of one of Montreal’s oldest mansions.
When asked by the client about permits, Sam screamed through the dust: “That’s how the fucking fascists control you mate, don’t fall for it.”
When asked about the piles of rubble being coated in a thick layer of dust that certainly contained asbestos, lead, and formaldehyde, Noddy shrugged and coughed something about: “I come from a long line of coal miners around Buchans, b’y, I’se got lungs on me like a crab trap,” and that Sam was “one of them Aussies, they’s all from criminals down there, they don’t mind a bit of dust.”
When asked about when the work of putting it all back together again would start, Noddy put a reassuring hand on their shoulder and said: “Now, just leave that to the experts, b’y, got to crack a few eggs when you’re after making an omlette.”
It was two months before Noddy bought a broom on one of his commutes.
On the eve of Milton’s birthday, as he toasted a day-old bagel on the stove for his supper, Noddy poured himself a juice glass of gin and asked: “What are ya at tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”
“Want some work?”
“Uh… okay.”
The pay was 50 bucks per day, cash. They were leaving at 5:15 to be there by 6:00—someone was meeting them there.
“Wear something warm.”
. . .
S&M Destruction
If you are up before the sun it means you are either unemployed or employed in some of the worst shit work. The unemployed watch the sunrise from the back. Stumbling back to their apartments after long nights out. Labourers, bakers, candlestick makers, and ex-strip club DJs playing at contractor are up before dawn, staggering through their houses in work boots with a couple of soggy tomato sandwiches in an old grocery bag.
Noddy beat on Milton’s door at 5:25.
“Time to go!”
Milton was cold and itched all over. He’d fallen asleep under his winter coat and gnatty towel he had stolen from the dryer and been using as his blanket, while reading The Sun Also Rises, between two and three. He’d gotten, at the very most, three hours of sleep. His eyes burned like a smoldering fire that no amount of rubbing would put out.
Noddy handed him a radio and stomped out the door towards the bus stop.
Noddy was one of them morning assholes. He wanted to talk on the bus ride, but instead of the usual banter about how cold it was, or about the hockey game he half-watched the night before, or about “legs” or “bush” or “jugs,” he wanted to talk about the Newfoundland cod moratorium and Russian trawlers and whothehellknows. Milton just wanted sweet, sweet death.
A bus, a metro, and three-quarters of the way through the history of the North Atlantic codfish, they got to where they were going—a giant three-storey stone house—fifteen minutes late.
Noddy didn’t have keys. Sam was bringing them, so they sat in the dark, in the freezing cold, on the front step for the conclusion of Noddy’s treatise on overfishing. Milton had tuned him out long ago and sat freezing, staring covetously across a park at a Java Jean’s, slowly filling with morning commuters.
With these work arrangements having been negotiated after everything was closed the night before, and his lack of money to get anything anyway, Milton hadn’t brought along any soggy tomato sandwiches. He would have killed a man for a sandwich right then. A hot chocolate maybe. A few doughnuts. Hell, even a plain scone.
He offered to run over and grab some coffees and snacks, “for the crew,” but Noddy assured him that work was set to start at any second and assured him he could procure a lunch at a nearby burger joint when the time was right.
In the meantime, all he had to do was clear the basement of rubble from the previous months of S&M’s handiwork.
There were a “few” bags and boxes and piles of lumber and concrete and “shit” that needed to be hauled up out the basement and taken to the dump. A “guy with a truck” would arrive any minute now to take it away. Blah, blah, blah… Any minute now.
“Here, wear these here gloves.”
There was a hole in the right index finger.
Milton’s toes burned with cold inside of his old, ironically vintage-running shoes, and the end of his nose was solid and purple, and clear snot dripped off the tip and froze in a pile on the ground. It was so cold he couldn’t feign interest in Noddy as he transitioned to a dissertation on Victorian-Anglophone Architecture in Westmount.
The ‘any minute now’ of Sam’s arrival was about forty-five minutes later. He’d stopped to get coffee, and there was a line-up, and, and, and…. He didn’t know Milton was coming, “Good to meet you, mate,” so he only got two coffees. One for him and one for Noddy.
While they sipped their steaming coffees and made small talk, Milton dreamed of bludgeoning them to death there on Greene Avenue, in front of all the bourgeoisie out taking their dogs for a shit.
Sam said the truck guy, whose name he couldn’t remember, would be there any minute now.
Any minute.
He’d found this guy on Craigslist: “Truck for hire. Fare rates,” and a phone number. There were a “few” loads, so he was going to come early to get a good start, maybe bring a helper. 100 bucks cash for the half day. The guy with the truck was worth four times what Milton was.
It better be a big damned truck, he thought.
Sam dug a mess of keys out of his pocket and started trying different keys in different locks at random in a I’ve-had-coffee-and-am-warm-so-I-am-in-no-rush-to-getthis-door-open-let-me-stumble-fuck-around-with-these-500keys-for-a-while-while-the-frostbite-climbs-up-your-legs- and-you-lose-feeling-in-your-balls way. Half-a-million keys later, they got into the giant mansion that had been ransacked by a couple of amateur demolition technicians.
Not that being inside made much of a difference for Milton’s frostbite. An overzealous swing of a sledgehammer severed a gas line last month, so the heat had been shut off in the giant old house for weeks. Any hope Milton had of warming up would have to wait until lunch when he would be found floating face down in a vat of coffee.
Of course, the truck and its high-priced driver weren’t there for 6:30 a.m. as promised, nor 7:30 a.m. by the time Sam remembered that the key for the inexplicably locked inner porch door was in his other pocket and they got out of the biting, kicking, screaming, clawing at your eyes wind for a few minutes.
The truck wasn’t there by 7:45 a.m. when Noddy had Milton sweeping bedrooms on the third floor that they hadn’t demoed yet.
“It’s good to keep a jobsite clean, it shows professionalism.”
So clean that there wasn’t a sign of any tools even, other than the two tools currently screwing an Ikea kitchen cabinet upside down over a toilet hole in a downstairs bathroom.
Professionalism.
By 9:00 a.m., and still no truck, Milton had added another couple giant contractor-sized garbage bags worth of dust and demolitia to the contractor-sized garbage bag mountain in the basement awaiting the still-unseen Manwith Truck.
Noddy and Sam had just torn everything they could tear out of the house and thrown it down the stairs into the basement. The stairs were buried by shards of drywall and old trim with three-inch-long finishing nails sticking out of them. To get into the basement you had to slide down the rubble stairs, careful not to have one of those three-inch-long finishing nails tear you a new one.
By 9:45 a.m. Milton was hefting one end of a cheap-looking tub surround into place while Sam hefted the other end and Noddy blazed drywall screws through the no-longer-watertight plastic sheeting, screwing it to the wall surrounding a filthy tub with a leg-length, pinky-wide scratch—a casualty of “some serious demo” that would “probably buff out.”
Milton’s suggestions of levels and caulking and taking half a damned minute to get the thing in straight and not filling it full of screws that rust easily, let alone screws at all, were rebuffed with Noddy brandishing his Philips-head screwdriver—also known as the screwdriver—crotch height and saying something about “I got your caulk right here, b’y.”
By 10:30 a.m., with the tub thoroughly surrounded, it was coffee-break time. Noddy lit a cigarette and dumped a bottle of stale water into a busted kettle on a busted stove while Sam pulled a box of rubble up next to the radio and shook a day’s worth of dust out of a filthy mug.
“Tea?”
“I… uh… yeah… Please.”
Thank God!
“Got a cup?”
Noddy shook the dirt out of his dirty mug and dug a bag of Red Rose out of a bag of Red Rose and dropped it in.
“No…”
No one told Milton about BYO-mugs, or food, or any of this.
“Sorry, brah, have a look around, but I don’t think there are any others.”
They weren’t brahs. There were no others.
“You can use mine when I’m done.”
By 10:35 a.m. Milton was sitting on a pile of rotten, asbestosy lumber watching Sam and Noddy warm themselves with tea while Sam went on about what a “fascist bitch” his girlfriend, a student from the summer crew, was, “always on the computer, always giving me shit,” always, always, always.
By 10:40 a.m. Milton was wiping Noddy’s mouth off the grimiest mug you’ve ever seen and digging a Red Rose bag out of the Red Rose bag and pouring the last few precious mouthfuls of hot water left in the busted kettle into the filthy mug.
That half cup of tea. That tea. That tea! Was the sweetest thing Milton had ever tasted. He drank it, scalding hot, all in one gulp. Scorching the roof of his mouth, and his tongue, and all the way down his gullet. A burn that itched and screeched for the rest of the day, and a few after. A burn that made everything he’d eat for the next two weeks taste tinny and bloody and sandpapery. A burn that kept him from going hypothermic or postal or both at that precise moment. Sweet heavenly boiling hot tea. Manna from heaven. Sweet, sweet manna from…
“Back at it, b’ys.”
. . .
Dans les chiottes
Still no Man with Truck by 11:30 a.m., as Sam and Milton watched Noddy overtightening the bowl nut on the brand-new dual-flush low-flow Jet Flush JF250 toilet, which was worth about $500.
Not by 11:31 a.m. as Sam and Milton watched the tank shatter and fall in two heavy halves on either of Noddy’s feet, adding insult to stupidity.
Not by 11:32 a.m. as Sam and Milton dove for cover as Noddy picked up what was left of the $500 toilet and threw it, Olympic Hammer Throw-style, through the freshly dry-walled partition wall between the bathroom and the hall linen closet leaving, as you might suspect, a $500-toilet-sized hole.
Not by 11:33 a.m. as Sam and Milton, laughing to themselves, hid behind a lineup of brand-new still-in-the-box kitchen appliances like it was some kind of foxhole while Noddy hurled obscenities and the entire contents of the toolbox, one tool at a time, through the $500-toilet-sized hole in the freshly dry-walled partition wall between the bathroom and the hall linen closet. Laughter that got a bit too loud as evidenced by the 6-inch C-clamp that smashed into the side of the stainless-steel fridge, right next to Sam’s head, leaving a noticeable gash in the side of the fridge. Just another thing to “buff out” later.
Out of tools to throw, but with plenty of obscenity left, Noddy left the house, leaving a trail of slammed doors behind him.
“Holy cow!”
“He’ll cool off. Happens all the time. Yesterday it was a closet shelf.”
“All the time?”
“He’s got a bit of a temper. Y’know. It’s why he’s here, in Monty-Hall? Temper got himself in some hot water back in Newfoundl’nd. Right, mate?”
“Uh… Right…”
Noddy resurfaced a few minutes later with a cooler head, and a tall cup of piping hot coffee.
“I can’t believe that toilet was faulty like that. Shit’s not supposed to happen. Have to take it back and shove it up their fucking asses.”
“Even the shitters these days, even the shitters, are just disposable pieces of plastic corporate shit meant to keep us subservient to our corporate overlord masters, mate. Fuck all that shit. Let’s go install the bar in the rec room.”
By noon Noddy was smoking cigarettes on an upside-down pail watching Sam watch Milton trying to assemble an Ikea bar. There was only one Allen key, so Noddy barked orders, Sam handed odd-looking screws, Milton screwed.
The noon-hour newscast over the radio was the lunchtime bell.
“Enough of this shit, let’s have lunch.”
Milton had never been so happy to hear about a Guatemalan mudslide, low-pressure cold fronts, or backups on the Décarie southbound. Never in his life.
His stomach, unamused by the splash of lava tea, had been eating itself for hours. Gnawing its way up his esophagus towards his head to look him in the eye and ask him what his problem was.
Milton thought about how he might navigate the situation at home with Noddy if he just walked out and never came back. If he said eff all of this Two Stooges Construction Company, eff the imaginary Man with Truck, eff all this and went home for a day-old bagel and a half-rotten pineapple and a nap and a shower and then down to Java Jean for as much of a bucket of something hot he could get with his 73-cents and whatever change Noddy had left in the ashtray on the table beside his bed. Maybe he would even find Robin, it was his birthday after all.
The only catch was Noddy would be home stinking of asbestos and ass sweat, frying horse meat, by 6:00 p.m. and would wonder where he’d run off to and would probably want to put him through the partition wall between the bathroom and the hallway linen closet, so it was probably best to just go find that burger place and pray his credit card would work and drag his bleary-eyed ass back here for the rest of the afternoon.
Hamburger.
The Red Rose blisters on the roof of his mouth, and his tongue, and all the way down his gullet were watering at the thought of it.
Hamburger.
It’d be enough to save him. Enough to save this shitty birthday. For the sake of everything good and redeeming on this earth, on this bitterly cold day, for all those buried in mud in Guatemala, for all of that, there was that hamburger across an empty park, buried in winter, and half a block down.
Hamburger.
Just half a block…
BANG.
Outside, a 1980-before-Milton-was-born two-tone rust and blue Ford F250 quad-cab pickup truck with a snow plow on the front had just climbed the sidewalk, and punted a metal garbage can end-over-end into a BMW parked in the driveway of the house next door, setting off its alarm.
MWRAMP-MWARMP-MWARMP.
“Truck’s ’ere.”
Lunch was going to have to wait. Milton wanted to cry/ die/murder everything.
Les éboueurs
Two ancient men got out of the truck. The tall one with the toque perched on top of his wrinkled raisin of a head, whose clothes just sort of hung off him, was the driver. He unfolded himself out of the truck, stomped over to presumably survey the damage to the BMW and leave a note under the windshield wiper with his insurance information. Instead he kicked the garbage can into the side of the BMW again and turned to shake his fist and scream something at his sidekick: a short prune of a man who couldn’t zip up his coat.
The screaming raisin, Milton would eventually decipher, was called Johnny (for Giannis). He was the leader, the driver, the brains, the toque, the mouth, the bottomless pit of spectacularly humourless in-your-face rage of the tandem.
The prune, Peter (for Panagiotis), said nothing, did nothing, contributed nothing. Everything you could want in a loyal sidekick.
They were both Greek, Milton assumed. Not that that means anything other than they spoke no English nor French other than, “you guy…” point, point, nod, shake head, shake fist, Greek slur, Greek slur, Greek slur.
Noddy met them on the sidewalk and played curse-charades, “GO AROUND BACK! BACK! BACK! FOR FUCK-SAKES!” and convinced them to pull the truck around back, where Milton would help them wrestle load after load of junk and toxic dust out a narrow window, across a snow-buried yard, and into the antique truck that was really just chunks of rust and dents stuck together with peeling duct tape and wire.
Johnny pulled into the alley that was built for a vehicle about a third the size of the massive truck, and pulled off an impressive 37-point turn that included his crushing several more garbage cans, scraping a gash in the side and busting out a tail light of a Mercedes parked two doors down, and culminated in his snow plow ramming through the fence across the alley.
Once parked, Johnny and Peter both got out. Johnny jimmied some wires holding the tail gate closed and swung it down to make loading easier. Then scowled at Milton, screamed “you guy!” and some Greek curses, and pointed to the junk and then the truck.
The two of them watched, in the bitter cold, for half an hour while Milton pushed junk out the basement window, wiggled his way out behind it, dragged it through the snow, and heaved it onto the back of the truck.
With a full load, Johnny started slamming the tailgate shut repeatedly, hoping it would catch enough to allow the wire he’d rigged up to hold it shut. In the slamming, the tailgate was forced out of alignment, and, in the most active thing Milton saw him do the entire day, the mute Peter grabbed the edge of the tailgate to shove it back into alignment mid-slam.
Naturally, Johnny slammed Peter’s hand in the tailgate with all of his might. His hand could have been broken, but Peter didn’t make a noise. He just grimaced and rubbed it and looked at Johnny like he’d just killed his puppy. Johnny didn’t skip a beat, but added some angry Greek cursing directed at Peter to the mix.
Eventually the tailgate got wedged sort of shut and the two of them piled into the truck. Milton was supposed to go with them to unload, as obviously they weren’t going to do it themselves, but they both slammed their doors before he could crawl into the back of the extended cab.
Johnny had it in gear and was ready to go when Milton tapped on Peter’s window. Peter’s face, upon realizing his mistake, looked more distraught than when Johnny almost ripped his hand off. He opened the door and a stream of Greek slurs poured out from Johnny at them both. Milton pulled up on a little lever at the base of Peter’s seat and had to fight to get it to tip forward so he could climb in and sit on the tiny bench seat that held about half his ass and had no seatbelts.
Before Peter was all the way back in, Johnny floored it and they took off down the alley, scratching a long, deep gouge in the brick wall of the million-dollar mansion across the alley.
. . .
Poubelles
Johnny wasn’t built for reliability or kindness or hard work or any of that. Johnny was built for one thing and one thing only: speed.
Red lights: he didn’t give a shit.
Speed limits: ditto.
Punk kid in a Civic looking to race gramps in the rust bucket of a truck: eat dust.
Garbage cans in alleys: bugs on the windshield.
Milton dug his nails into the dirty back seat of that old F250 while Johnny careened, ricocheted, sped, bounced, slammed, scraped, skidded, and swerved his way around town. Milton had never been so afraid for his life.
For the next several hours the three of them fell into a routine. Johnny would scratch and dent and wedge the truck into the back alley. He and Peter would watch Milton break his back crawling in and out of the basement window with armloads of asbestos. They’d go through the dance of the tailgate—slam, slam, slam, slam, hand, crunch, curse, slam, slam, slam. And then they’d speed around town breaking every traffic law imaginable looking for dumpsters.
When they found a dumpster Johnny would back the truck into it at high speed. All three would pile out of the truck, and Johnny and Peter would watch Milton unload the contents of the truck into the dumpster. All the while a constant stream of angry Greek instructions, demands, and curses streaming from Johnny, while Peter kept mute.
After the third or fourth trip, Milton had blocked the endless Greek epithets out. So he was a little surprised when the cursing stopped, and the doors slammed, and the truck fired up and took off with him still in the back on a pile of shifting nail-riddled, asbestos-y garbage.
They tore out of the loading dock of a downtown Federal government office building just as a pair of armed security guards and their attack dogs arrived. Milton grabbed the sideboard of the truck box and hung on for dear life as Johnny slammed through a closing chain-link gate, sending the gate cartwheeling into a busy street, and squealed around the corner.
The dogs followed the truck, which the guards were sure was full of stolen government property. Milton laid down flat on the garbage, nails digging into his skin, as gnashing killer-dog teeth nipped at his heels as they dangled off the end of the truck.
Johnny sped up and weaved in and out of traffic for several blocks until he was satisfied they’d lost the dogs. He spotted a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant, slammed on the brakes, sending Milton crashing into the back window, wheeled around, and backed into the dumpster with a loud crunch.
Johnny and Peter both got out of the truck and came back to survey the damage.
Or something.
Milton was laying on the pile of garbage, bleeding out of several nail holes, face bruised from bouncing off the window, breathing heavily. Johnny began, or continued, shouting.
“You guy!” Curse. Curse. Curse. Pointing to the dumpster.
“Are you crazy! You almost killed me!”
Curse. Curse. Curse. Point. Point. Point.
“Forget this!”
Milton crawled out of the back of the truck and dusted the asbestos and debris off his torn clothes.
Johnny increased in volume and frothiness. He was clearly extra pissed that Milton had somehow been responsible for getting busted by the Feds. He was pointing with extra violence at the dumpster. Demanding Milton empty the truck. Milton refused, as he doubled over to catch his breath.
“Empty it yourself, you old fart. They sicced dogs on me! Jeez!”
Johnny didn’t take no backtalk. This was why he and Peter got along so well. He grabbed Milton by the back of his collar, stood him up, and kicked him in the ass with his heavy winter boot.
Curse. Curse. Curse.
“Get off me! Don’t!”
Johnny reached in the back of the truck and grabbed a piece of 2x4.
“Yeah, you empty it!”
Johnny wasn’t about to empty anything. He swung the 2x4 at Milton’s head. Milton ducked but couldn’t duck the follow-up blow that came down on top of his shoulders and dropped him to the ground. He rolled onto his back and Johnny stepped all his weight onto Milton’s chest with a big dirty white winter boot and pressed the 2x4 into his throat.
“Αδειάστε το γαμημένο φορτηγό ή θα σας σκοτώσω και θα σας βάλω στον κάδο! Εσείς λίγο σκουλήκι!”
Milton wasn’t sure what the angry words Johnny spat on him meant, but he guessed, by the look in Johnny’s eye and the weight he was leaning onto the 2x4, that he best empty the truck before it was him going into the dumpster.
He tapped Johnny’s boot in surrender and Johnny let him up.
Johnny didn’t prove entirely unreasonable, though. Or at least he was willing to let bygones be bygones enough to not leave Milton behind that Chinese restaurant. No more than they tried to leave him anywhere. Peter slammed the door on Milton before he could get in. Milton tapped on Peter’s window. Peter got out, Milton climbed in, Johnny took off before Peter could get all the way back in.
Back at the mansion, after Johnny got the truck wedged back into the alley for the next load, Milton found Noddy and Sam upstairs taking turns electrocuting themselves trying to install a light fixture.
“I’m not riding with them anymore!”
“OUCH! Fuck! What’s the problem?”
“Those two idiots tried to kill me!”
“Oh, g’wan b’y, they’re harmless old fucks.”
“Yeah right! We got chased by dogs! And then the tall guy hit me with a 2x4! I’m done. You don’t pay me enough for this!”
They could hear Johnny yelling from outside.
“He what?”
“Some security guards sent dogs after us, and he takes off going 100 miles an hour while I was still in the back of the truck, and when we got away I told him off and he hit me with a 2x4 and tried to choke me.”
“I always figured you liked the wood, b’y. Bahahaha!”
Sam thought Noddy was hilarious.
“I’m not kidding!”
“Just calm down, I’ll go talk to him. Here, hold this.”
Noddy stepped off the new dishwasher they had turned on its back and were using for a step stool and handed the light fixture to Sam. It sparked.
“OUCH! MOTHERFUCKER!”
Milton watched Noddy confront Johnny and Peter through the basement window he’d been crawling in and out of all day. They didn’t speak English, so far as Milton could tell, and Noddy didn’t speak Greek, so far as Milton could tell. Noddy mimed something that looked like jerking off and dogs barking, Johnny screamed, spat, and cursed, and Peter looked at something up a tree down the street.
They reached some conclusion when Noddy started patting Johnny on the back and saying loud enough for Milton to hear, “Best kind, b’y, best kind.” He fished $20 out of his pocket and gave it to Johnny.
Noddy came over to Milton’s window and stuck his head in.
“All right, b’y. All settled. He agreed not to try and kill you again. It cost me an extra $20, which I’m gonna have to take out of your wages, but you should be all good.”
“Wait, what?”
“The b’ys can only stick around for another hour, so you’ve got time for a few more loads. They’ll drop you at our other jobsite for the rest of the day.”
“This sucks!”
“That’s why they call it work, b’y, and not fucking your mother.”
. . .
Love Cams Inc.
Milton and the Shitty Truck Mafia managed to move two more truckloads of rubble without anyone getting eaten by dogs or choked out over the next hour. After emptying the last load, they drove 20 minutes into the depths of some kind of sprawling industrial park. Johnny pulled up in front of one of the anonymous looking buildings, one with a generic-looking sign, “Love Cams Inc.”, over the door.
He shouted something and pointed to the door. “You guy!” Curse. Curse. Point. Point. Peter wouldn’t get out, he was probably worried Johnny would leave him there too, so he just leaned forward and Milton had to contort himself into all sorts of compromising positions to squeeze out of the truck. He still had one foot caught in between the seat and the door frame when Johnny gunned it and sped off. Milton toppled out onto the icy pavement.
“And screw you too,” he whispered laying on the ground.
He was on the ground a while when Sam poked his head out the door.
“Kia Ora, mate?”
The guy who owned the two-million-dollar mansion S&M were destroying, some guy called Tony, also owned Love Cams Inc.—a quasi-legal internet porn company. Milton wasn’t sure of the whole story. But Tony had hired S&M to renovate the offices of Love Cams Inc., too.
Offices isn’t the right word for it, though. They were turning what used to be a metal fabrication shop into a bunch of cubicles. Each cubicle was decorated sort of like a bedroom—there was a bed at least, usually with cheap satin sheets, and a webcam. Lonely internet pervs would drain their bank accounts paying girls to roll around on these beds in their underwear.
“He makes a fortune,” Noddy told Milton when he explained it to him later.
For now, though, Milton was picking himself up off the frozen pavement and joining Sam inside.
“Noddy went to a client meeting, so it’s just us.”
Of course he did.
“We’ve got to finish painting everything in here. I’m half done this wall.”
Sam gestured to a wall that looked the same as all the other walls.
“Did you get lunch?”
Mercy! There is a god after all.
“No.”
“There’s nothing around here for miles, but you can have this.”
Sam held out a grimy, dusty plastic container. Milton pried the lid open and found a half-eaten piece of cold left-over lasagna.
“My girlfriend made me this. She can’t cook worth a damn.”
On any other day, in any other circumstances, Milton would have gagged in disgust. But he was starving.
“Do you have a fork?”
“Yeah, here.”
Sam handed him a clearly used plastic fork. Bits of sauce and smooth lumps of cold cheese stuck to the tines.
“Thanks.”
Milton had never tasted anything so good.
Back in the land of the living and the fed, Milton joined Sam in painting for the rest of the afternoon. It was the first time they’d ever actually spent any time together, and while Sam’s political views were on the rather extreme end of things—he wouldn’t stop going on about the deep state and the dark web and the mind control agenda of “neo-liberal fascists and their so-called ‘vaccines’”—he wasn’t altogether terrible.
At 5:00 p.m., as it was getting dark, Sam said they were done for the day, except for the 45-minute walk to the nearest bus stop, and the 95-minute bus-metro-bus-metro-metro-bus ride home.
Milton got off the 80 at the Library to check his email. He had a handful of birthday messages from friends and family. Including a message from his best friend in Bellybutton, Cory:
“HBD Bro” with a link to a news article explaining how researchers in the UK had scientifically determined that this exact day was the most depressing day of the year.
“The days are short and cold. You’re leaving work in the dark and getting home in the dark. You may not have seen the sun for weeks,” said Dr. Morley Brennan of the University of Sussex. “The only way it could be any worse was if it was your birthday today.”
Back at the apartment, stuck to Milton’s bedroom door, was $30 and a note:
All that for $30. The misery, the hunger, the cold, the multiple brushes with death, the getting clobbered by a 6’3” antique Greek raisin, the verbal abuse, the back-breaking labour, the asbestos, the lead, the formaldehyde, the leftover leftover lasagna with another man’s fork, the painting sex cubicles. All that for $30.
With travel time it amounted to just over $2.00 per hour. But it was $30 that Milton didn’t have, so he stuck it in his pocket and went back down the street to Parapluie de Nouilles to treat himself to $30 worth of MSG to celebrate his birthday.
. . .
Col bleu
Each day with S&M followed a script similar to the first: cut corners, cut fingers, lunch breaks cut short by three-hours-late Craigslist rent-a-trucks, hissy fits, shouting matches, heavy breakable things broken and thrown through freshly hung drywall, never-ending near-misses, lungs full of toxins, sloppily painted webcam sex cubicles, and slowly-destroyed million-dollar homes.
Despite Milton probably being the handiest of the three—he once built a deck and a backyard fence with his dad that was by no means the Sistine Chapel, but turned out better than anything S&M had ever done—his name wasn’t on the nine business cards Noddy printed at Kinko’s as part of a free sample promotion, so he remained the one and only lowly employee. Which was fine with him. He got the shittiest jobs, but at least he got paid each day.
Besides, Noddy didn’t take so kindly to advice or pointers or constructive feedback. Especially while holding the other end of a 300-pound, $1,500-bathroom vanity with double sinks that bounced three times as it toppled down the stairs. So, Milton kept his mouth shut.
He kept his mouth shut when Noddy started cutting the $150 Italian marble threshold six inches too short. Kept his mouth shut when Noddy dragged a washing machine across the freshly laid engineered hardwoods floors—leaving a deep gash the entire length of the hallway. Kept his mouth shut as Noddy stabbed the screwdriver through a newly painted wall looking for a stud and only finding the electrical junction box he’d illegally covered up the day before—Milton could have sworn he saw sparks shoot out of Noddy’s ears as he flew off the stepladder, landing hard on the radio, crushing it.
He learned to keep his mouth shut and just smile to himself, making mental notes to include in his semi-autobiographical best-selling novel years later.
With that understanding, things settled into a sort of normalcy, and Milton and Noddy became sort of friends. Only sort of. Noddy was still the boss, but felt he was Milton’s mentor, his big brother, his spiritual guide.
Every day, from the rap on Milton’s door at 5:15 a.m.-ish each morning, until they dragged themselves back in the door after 6:00 p.m., Noddy would talk Milton’s ear off.
He would expound on all the life lessons he’d learned from growing up “poorer than dirt in the Circle” in St. John’s (or “Town” as Milton came to know it).22
Lessons from having to fight kids twice his age: “One of my mom’s kitchen knives or that bat I stole from the gym closed the age gap pretty fuckin’ fast, let me tell ya!”
Lessons from the summer spent at a camp for wayward boys because he stabbed a kid six years older than himself in a fight after school one day: “Harder to find a knife or a bat in one of them camps, but they can’t lock up every fuckin’ rock in Newfoundland, b’y.”
Lessons from doing a year in “juvie” for assaulting a counsellor at the camp for wayward boys with a rock because: “He was one of them rich Townie fucks, thinking he was some grand, coming at me trying to grab my ass n’ shit, it was self-defence, b’y. But, of course, the judge didn’t think so, he was one of them rich Townie fucks too.”
Lessons from dropping out of school at 14 to go to work on the docks: “Me uncle got me into the longshoreman’s union, making $20 an hour to unload cargo, if ya know what I mean,” Milton had no idea what he meant, other than that he didn’t mean unloading cargo.
Lessons from befriending the prostitutes who’d hang around the docks when there were boats in: “You should try it, get right friendly with ’em. On a slow night, they might give ya a deal on a handy. They knows their ways around the gear, b’y.”
Lessons from having to fight Russian sailors on the docks who were too rough with the girls: “Those fuckers fight dirty, b’y. They’ve all got knives and clubs and shit in their boots, and they’ll gouge your fuckin’ eyes out if you’re not watching. The trick is to let ’em beat the shit out of ya pretty good the first time, they won’t kill ya the first time. Just take your licks, don’t really fight back, and then they thinks you’re beat. Then you comes back the next night with half the fuckin’ Circle fastpitch team—and take the fuckin’ bats to ’em.”
Lessons from a few years in prison and how “the Pen” compared to “juvie” and how it’s prudent to “Slam some b’y’s head in the workroom door on the first day and send ’em to the infirmary and they’ll all back down.”
Lessons from turning his passion for friendly prostitutes into a career: “I gets out and they wouldn’t give me my job back at the Port, fuckers said they can’t have convicts working for ’em even though half the fuckers down there done time. So’s I went on the pogey and pretty much moved into the peelers and got right friendly with the girls there—for the deals on lappies when things were slow, right—until the DJ didn’t show up for work—’cause he was floating face down in the Gut23 for not knowing the right way to scrap with the Russians—and they gave me the job. Good one too. Free drinks, free lappies, just hanging out pushin’ play on the fuckin’ CD player. Did that for ten years.”
The only story he didn’t tell was why he left St. John’s.
In all, it was quite the master class in hard living. But Milton wasn’t sure how much of it was true. He googled Noddy and nothing came up. No court reports or news stories about a bunch of Russians being beaten by a fastpitch team down on the docks for looking sideways at prostitutes.
Nothing.
One day at Love Cams, while they used razor blades to scrape up paint they’d previously splashed on the floor, Sam told Milton that most of what Noddy told him was bullshit.
“I dunno, mate. I’ve ’eard all them stories before, and they’re mostly bullshit. I’m sure of it. His dad was a politician or something, no way he’d let that hard shit happen.”
Milton googled that too, and sure enough, someone with Noddy’s intense forehead was the Minister of Fisheries and Labour in Newfoundland and Labrador for three months in the ’70s before being thrown out of office for sleeping with his unnamed son’s babysitter and into jail for corruption.
When he asked Noddy if he was any relation, Noddy said something about his mom being “some Townie politician’s side piece for a while.” And though he claims he never met the man, bringing it up set off several weeks of more lessons.
Lessons on Newfoundland history: “Confederation was a fraud, b’y. Everyone thinks the place was bankrupt, but that was bullshit lies that Quebec spy Smallwood told everyone ’cause he was on the take. And even then they didn’t have the votes to get ’er through! ‘Til Joey and his buddies got every corpse laying in every grave in Town to vote for it.”
Lessons on politics: “If you think them Russians fight dirty, you should see fuckin’ politicians. My dad grabbed some fella by the throat on the floor of the House there one day, and told him if he didn’t go along with whateverinthefuck, his family would pay, then he got a buddy with the phone company to change all his family’s numbers so he couldn’t get a hold of any of them, even his daughter away at school on the mainland. Buddy thought my old man murdered them all, he was right rotted, b’y.”
Lessons about economics: “She’s rigged, b’y. The works of ’er. The banks own it all. And they own the politicians. And they make the rules. And the rules say they get it all. And they get it all because we give it to them. We walk right through the front door and give them all our cash. We give to them like damned fools. Fuck that, b’y. I’ve got all my cash in my boot right now. They ain’t getting nothing from me.”
Lessons on labour relations: “Unions are a racket, b’y, so you gots to get in ’em, if you can. I was in the stevedore union, it was prime dog fuckin’. Never stole so much shit and made so much money in my life. But the big bosses, who steal way more shit than any union ever did, don’t like that none so they’ll fuck with the unions as much as they can. It’s war. I’ve seen some shit that’d make your skin crawl. A whole shipping container full of union brass sealed up tight and dumped over the side in the middle of the Indian ocean. No one knows anything about it, no newspaper or police would dare say a word about any of it, they’re all in on it.”
All the while, Sam, Noddy’s hype man, would chime in with “fuckin’ right,” and “the man, man, fuck the man.”
It was like Milton was working with the Marx & Engels Construction Company—if Marx was a disgraced ex-con strip club DJ and Engels was a Kiwi anarchist stowaway.