TWELVE
NINE TO FIVE
Entry-Level Data-Entry Clerk
In several months of bouncing between terrible jobs and destitution, Milton had done some pretty desperate things for Craigslist strangers.
Everything from rubbing the bunions of a 72-year-old widow in Little Italy for $15 to handing out explicit strip club pamphlets to tourists on rue Sainte-Catherine promoting the “Spectacle des œufs” while in full leather BDSM regalia, complete with whips and gimp mask, for, he found out after, free admission to the show.
He figured he’d stolen $50 in change from Noddy’s ashtray, probably that much again in Georgette’s teabags and groceries.
He’d eaten dumpstered pineapples that were in no shape to be eaten. He’d held his nose while he selectively nibbled at the least mouldy parts of very mouldy bagels.
He’d pawned everything of value, save for his typewriter.
With the $100 from Wayne running out and rent coming up soon, he had run out of options.
Milton resigned himself to having to beg Noddy for his old job back.
To help him build up the courage, to overcome his pride, or eat himself to death before Noddy got home, he ordered a large pizza with the last few dollars from his “Duck, Duck, Goose and Other Traumas” windfall and ate until his stomach ached. About 9 slices into an extra-large 28-inch from Pizza Maurice, Georgette knocked on his door.
“Milton, someone call my phone for you.”
For the last several months, Milton, when not helping move a couch that a hermit had died on and rotted into for $10 or delivering Parapluie de Nouilles for tips, sent hundreds of resumes to hundreds of seemingly legitimate companies for hundreds of seemingly legitimate jobs. Hundreds. Everything from shelf stocker—of which he had vast experience—to Junior Vice President.
He didn’t have a phone, so he put down Georgette’s number.
There hadn’t been a single call for months.
Apparently, he forgot to tell her.
“I’m not your secretary, Milton! Putain!”
The woman on the other end of the phone spoke quickly and Milton missed her name, the company name, and what the job was, just that they wanted to interview him tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. He couldn’t find a pen or pencil, so he wrote the address in the film of dust on his bedroom wall.
The address Milton etched in the dust was somewhere on rue Sherbrooke in Westmount between two Metro stations. He figured it would be no problem to catch a metro then a bus and make it there in plenty of time. Which meant, of course, that he mistimed his trip and landed between buses, which ran less frequently in the wealthy Anglophone Westmount. His options were to wait for the next bus and be really late or walk and be pretty late.
He walked for the first two blocks before he saw a clock in the window of a dep and then started running. He ran about 20 blocks at a full sprint to the offices of Medi-Drug Inc., arriving at 9:07. He was soaked with sweat and steam poured off him as he panted his way into the reception area, completely out of breath.
“I’m… I’m… I’m here for a job interview.”
“Is everything alright, sir?”
“Yes… Just… My… My… Car broke down…”
“Oh dear! Please have a seat. I’ll let Cathy know you are here. Would you like a glass of water?”
“Yes… Yes… Please.”
“Hi, uh, Milfron, is it?”
Cathy Dixon was the beaming HR Manager. Fresh out of business school, she was all chemically whitened teeth and sensitivity training.
“Milton, yes.”
“Oh, sorry, Milden. Yes. Right this way.”
Cathy led Milden to a large boardroom filled with a giant table. He sat on one side, and Cathy took a seat directly across from him next to a short nerdy-looking guy hiding behind thick glasses and one giant eyebrow.
“This is Tom Turacos, the Deputy Assistant Manager of Data here at Medi-Drug. He’s our ‘numbers guy’.”
‘Numbers guy’ was in air quotes, which confused Milden more than usual.
“Tom, this is… uh… Milden Ontrayo.”
Milden held out his hand to shake Tom’s, but Tom just stretched a pained smile across his face and shrugged.
“Germs.”
The job was for an entry-level data-entry clerk. Days and days, weeks and weeks, months and months, of typing numbers into spreadsheets. Everything was coded, Cathy explained, so it would just be a seemingly random bunch of numbers. Months and months of never-ending random numbers.
“Do you have a high tolerance for monotony, Milden?”
“Yes, I’m from Saskatchewan.”
Cathy and Tom took turns asking Milden various questions he didn’t really understand. He knew vaguely what a database was but didn’t have the faintest what a SQL Table was or how it was ingested.
He was determined not to go back to S&M, he’d do whatever he could to get the job, so he lied through his teeth.
“I’m a little rusty with SOQ tables, it’s been a few years since I studied them in school, but I believe I got an A in that class. I’m really a secret data head under this rugged exterior, like you, Tom.”
Milden was the only one who laughed.
As the questions got increasingly particular and difficult, Milden’s bullshittery got increasingly forced to the point that his dad became a physician who studied pediatric diabetes and was about to co-author a ground-breaking article on insulin receptors in children under five in Kids Diabetes Quarterly.
“So medical research is in my blood, you could say… Like insulin…”
“I’m not familiar with that periodical,” was all he got.
The final question was a softball.
“Milden, this final question is a softball. What are your hobbies and interests?”
Finally, one he could half answer truthfully.
“Oh, I’m a writer when I’m not pursuing my passion in medical research.”
“Oh, interesting. What kind of writing?”
“I’m a poet.”
“Poetry is a dead medium that has long been surpassed by newer forms like television—”
“Oh Tom, stop it! Poetry! That is so interesting! Lorraine, one of our VPs, is a poet! Wait here, she’d love to meet you.”
Lorraine Donnatella was the Vice-President of Regulatory Affairs. Her thick Italian lilt carried through walls and down long halls and often from her fourth-floor office to the reception desk on the first floor. She was all exclamations, hair spray, and hot red lipstick.
“Hello dear! So, you’re the poet! That’s so wonderful! I’ve never met another poet before! What kind of po-ems do you write?!”
“Uh, well, uh… free verse, I suppose. Experimental modern sorts of po-ems.”
“Get outta here! Modern po-ems are beyond me! My god! That’s so impressive!”
“Lorraine is a poet too, Milden.”
“Aw hush, Cathy, you’re being kind! I took a limerick class at the United Irish Societies Centre with a fella I was seeing a few years ago! That’s a whole other story! Haha! Let’s just say my love of poetry lasted longer than my love for that no-good cheating scumbag! If you know what I mean! But limericks sort of became my thing! In birthday cards and such! Y’know! There once was a girl from HR, whose MBA would take her far, she worked all she could, and the money was good, so now she can afford a new car! Nothing fancy!”
“That’s good.”
“You’re too kind!”
“So, are your po-ems like published or anything?!”
“Yeah, a few. I was in The New York Times a few weeks ago, actually. And I’ve done public readings and things like that.”
“Get outta here! No way! Look at you! The New York Times! A real poet, Cathy! How exciting! I can’t wait to read it! Are you single?!”
“Uh… yeah.”
“Get outta here! A handsome fella like you! I want you to meet my daughter! You’d love her! She’s a stunner like her mother! Haha! What are you interviewing for!?”
“Uh…”
“He’s interviewing for the data-entry clerk.”
“My gawd! That will bore you half to death! It’s no work for a poet!”
“I don’t mind, honestly.”
“I won’t hear it! No! Cathy, what’s D.E.C. one pay?”
“13.75.”
“No, no, no! Milden the poet—my gosh, that’s even a poet’s name!—how would you like to be my executive assistant for, say, $15 an hour?! Us poets have gotta stick together, hon!”
Milton was terrified of Lorraine, but the alternative was S&M until it put him in an early grave.
“Uhm… sure. That’d be great.”
“Then it’s settled! How wonderful! A real poet! My god!”
Lorraine clapped her hands together, grabbed the sides of Milden’s head and planted a big, wet, lipsticky kiss on his sweaty forehead, turned on one of her super high heels, clicked down the hall and sprinted up the stairs.
“Oh, that Lorraine! Congratulations, Milden! Welcome to Medi-Drug!”
Cathy stuck out her hand to shake Milden’s. Tom muttered “unbelievable” under his breath as he and his eyebrow pushed their way past Milden and out the door.
. . .
Medi-Drug Inc.
Medi-Drug Inc. was the pharmaceutical arm of a large multinational corporation. One of them great big companies that make drugs for keeping old dicks hard on one coast, casserole dishes on the other, and nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles somewhere in the middle.
Medi-Drug was a pretty small corner of this global mega-conglomerate super empire. And while this particular corner did jack up prices of life-saving medicines to the highest the market would bear, it was, on balance, probably better for the fate of humanity than the nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles part, slightly.
Not that Milton was in any position to be particularly choosy or moralistic about what he was doing. His choices were between helping to shake down the poor and the sick, ducking out of the way of hammer-tossed power tools and plumbing fixtures, or dying of starvation in his windowless room.
Plus, it was more money than Milton had ever made in his life, came with full benefits—not that he would dare set foot in a doctor’s, dentist’s, or optometrist’s office for having to try and explain anything to them in his très mal français—and a company cellphone.
The job itself was something that Lorraine made up on the spot in the interview, so Milton’s actual job description was fairly non-existent.
She was the VP of Regulatory Affairs, which meant she was responsible for ensuring Medi-Drug met the 37 bajillion government regulations dealing with drug research and the mountains of paper it produced.
Regulatory Affairs was the most powerful department in the company.
Black pens were forbidden. All original paperwork had to be filled out in distinguishable blue. Every scrap of paper had to be scanned and copied three times and stored in three different secure physical locations for a minimum of forty years. Every digital file had to be printed and backed up hourly and likewise stored on three separate encrypted media in three different secure physical locations.
Any documents with potentially identifying data had to be stored in triple-secure safes, of which there could only be two keys (as opposed to four keys for the regular filing cabinets), as well as double biometric security (retinal and fingerprint scans). And those were just the documents.
The drugs themselves were stored in tamper-proof containers in a climate-controlled vault in the basement with three layers of security as well. They were delivered by armoured transport, no matter if they were diet pills, the cure for cancer, or the latest highly addictive designer opioid.
Employees needed special clearances and background checks in order to access data or medications. There were dozens of licences and permits required for different things, and scores of reports and inspections and site visits and spot checks to be completed throughout the year.
All of this, and anything else anyone did or even thought of doing, had to be written down in formal standard operating procedures, against which employees were closely monitored and audited quarterly. Those who kept to procedure got bonuses, those who wavered got fired.
It was a massive amount of work, but Milton did none of it.
There was a Department of Document Management whose job it was to photocopy and scan and file and schlep boxes to the basement or into courier vans to be sent to off-site warehouses. There was a Department of Compliance, whose job it was to write reports and prepare for inspections and site visits and spot checks and keep the various licences and permits in order. And there was a Department of Standards, whose job it was to write, train, and monitor employee compliance with 179 standard operating procedures—a number that was growing by the week.
Across these three departments there were at least 30 employees, plus 11 other people whose jobs Milton could never quite figure out. The entire Regulatory Affairs Division, or Reg. Div., took up most of the fourth floor of the four-storey building that housed Medi-Drug on the corner of rue Sherbrooke and avenue Metcalfe.
Milton’s job was pretty much to sit at a small desk outside of Lorraine’s office, get her a coffee “with a droppa! Justa little droppa!” when she needed it, answer and dial the phone for her, greet the steady stream of Data Entry Clerks, Research Directors, Trial Administrators, and Medical Consultants summoned to her office, and then listen through the never-thick-enough walls to her scream obscenities at them for deleting an email or writing a note in black ink or losing a patient record or dropping a bottle of experimental drugs and having them skitter across the lunchroom floor and under the fridge.
“Madonna! What in the name of our blessed virgin were you doing with them in the lunchroom anyhow?! Coglione!”
In all it was between 30 to 45 minutes of actual work per day. The rest of the time Milton had nothing to do but discretely write poems and letters to Robin in spreadsheets and by hand on toner test sheets and printer-jam misprints and fax machine spam (in blue ink, of course).
The Hyperreal
The Medi-Drug miracle saved Milton from having to stoop to ask for Noddy’s help.
Noddy was, after all, the one who’d slept with the love of Milton’s life. That very same love of his life who’d gone to Florida and could be gone for years, if she came back at all. That very same love of his life who he spent most of his days writing letters to. Letters he would never send because they were too personal, too embarrassing, too mundane. Mostly, though, letters he would never send because he didn’t have her email address or mailing address or any way to reach her. He’d google her often for clues of her whereabouts, but nothing would ever turn up. So, eff Noddy, was Milton’s general sentiment. Eff Noddy.
Noddy, though, didn’t feel the same way.
He continued to knock on Milton’s door and declare apologies into its 40 layers of lead paint every so often.
“Dude? What did I do? I knows I fucked your bird the once there, but that’s it, b’y. I messed up. But I haven’t seen her since.”
Milton just pretended Noddy wasn’t there. The odd time they bumped into each other in the hall or going opposite directions in the stairwell, Noddy would give a hearty “whaddayat, b’y?” and Milton would just stretch his lips in not-quite-a-smile and duck past.
Noddy grew sadder and sadder and Milton could hear him through the thin walls asking Georgette, or Larry, or Chris, or Ava, or Ruddy.
“What’s his deal? He okay? You talked to him lately?”
He was worried. Milton was his protégé, his “little buddy,” and now he wasn’t.
For weeks after the Robin ‘incident,’ Milton had laid in his misery and dreamed of elaborate revenge plots. Mostly to do with reporting Noddy to the city building inspector, or poisoning his horse meat, or switching his Coors Lights with Heinekens. But he didn’t have the heart for any of it. And after what happened with Joey Flipchuk and the super bedbugs, he didn’t know if there was much of a point anyway.
It turned out, the best revenge Milton had ever venged was just going on with his life and being a bit of a dick about it.
To avoid running into Noddy, and with more money than he knew what to do with, Milton spent almost every night out.
Either on his own or with Ruddy and Ava going to rock shows or art shows or house shows, or with Georgette and Chris to heckle a rival troupe’s puppet rock opera, or one night with the few people from work to a Meat Loaf concert.
Yet for all the going out and being around people who were having a good time and looking to meet people and hook up and fall drunkenly head over heels in love and get pregnant in the accessible bathroom, Milton met no one, made no new friends, didn’t fall in love, never hooked up, got no one pregnant. He stood alone, even when with a group, his arms crossed in front of him, watching.
Watching music.
Never dancing. Never really listening or feeling or ingesting the music in ways that people do that makes them tap their toes or fall in love. That makes them see clearer or further or differently. That makes them stand taller and walk lighter and laugh deeper. That makes a single tear climb down their cheek as they sway in unison with a few hundred other sweaty bodies, holding their flip-phones up over their heads while the encore drags into its fifteenth minute. That makes them bundle up the memory and place it in a box marked “Precious” and put it away in the backs of their minds where it will stay safely until their father is found blue on the kitchen floor, or while they’re sitting in the chemo lounge with an IV in their arm, or when they’re dropping their youngest off at their first day of university, or any other moment when the only thing that helps someone keep putting one foot in front of the other is climbing up into that mind attic and pulling out that old dusty box marked “Precious” and unwrapping the fifteenth minute of “Paradise By the Dashboard Light.” The warmth of that moment. The glow it gives off. The glow of all those cell phones. The glow you carry around with you at just the thought of it.
There was none of that for Milton.
He just watched.
His mind was somewhere else. His heart was somewhere else. Somewhere in Florida making a movie about vultures.
Yet he kept going, despite never seeming to have a good time, because it’s where he thought he should be. Because it’s where people he thought he’d theoretically like or be like were. But it wasn’t and he didn’t. Not really.
They were all Ruddys and Avas. All dancing very seriously, feeling very seriously, dressing very seriously, looking out through their horn-rims from under their asymmetrical androgynous bowl cuts very seriously.
All grabbing a beer and going for a smoke outside and debating the incomplete bits of Baudrillard they’d half read for class that week and whether or not if they went and got all-day breakfast after midnight it would be real real or hyperreal.
“I mean, of course the eggs are really real, like real real, but the entire experience, the faux-1950s diner, the gang of chums, the witty banter and in-jokes, all of it is just Tarantino, which is just Hughes, which is just Hawks, which is all just this re-creation of a re-creation of a re-creation, so of course we’re living in the simulacra, and eating eggs in the simulacra, but they’re still eggs—and let’s go to Palais instead of Dinette, because their coffee is better.”
All everything very seriously all the time. But not at the same time.
No one really gave a shit about any of it. Not really. Even for the most serious of them. Even for the ones in the actual bands making the actual music everyone was actually dancing to. It was all just fantasy football and half-hearted attempts to get laid.
Everything and everyone had honed this highly refined sense of irony to the point that irony became the core principle of their very being. It became their existential state.
The kind of empty and agonizing limbo that living in irony creates became manifest as all these grown-assed teenagers walking around the Plateau in their norm-core Garfield sweatshirts, in all their hardcore-noise-mope bands, in all their dick-missile art projects, and garbage-soup potlucks. Nothing was really real, just hyperreal.
Everyone was playacting like this was real life. Like they were adults. Like any of this mattered. Like anyone could possibly give a shit about their shitty art, or even their feelings, or even if they existed at all.
They were all children on an island in a sea of working-class Francophones who were clinging to some shred of meaning, dignity, and identity their grand-père du grand-père du grand-père brought with them from the old county and drove the Indigenous out to impose and fired muskets into a sea of Red Coats to defend and kept their heads down and their mouths shut to keep safe and spoke up and tore down and took hostages and dumped bodies in car trunks in municipal airports to send the message to back the fuck down.
Stuff that in a cosmic sense didn’t really matter either. But in the stuff of everyday life, the love and the hate and the drudgery and the misery and the chapped lips and the sore backs and the cracked heels and the root canals and the cataracts and the growing stench of death sense—it matters most of all.
And in that sense, all that matters is getting through, is surviving, is passing your vendettas and indignities and prejudices on to your children so they might cling to that same tenuous, fraying thread and that one lump of blood-soaked stolen mud that ties them and their rheumatism and their pigeon toes to you and you to their grand-père and their grand-père to the Franks and the Gauls and the Romans and to Jesus Christ himself.
And that is salvation.
That is eternal.
And salvation and eternity might be myths, but they’re the myths that get you out of bed in the morning.
Play-acting adulthood at Anglophone summer camp wasn’t any of that. Not salvation. Not eternity. Likely not even into next year or beyond graduation, when everyone would move back to Toronto for a while and then back to the suburb they came from and settle for a bad job and a mediocre spouse and the 1.8 average kids.
But that year or two or seven in Montreal, that one summer, will play on a loop in the back of their minds, in the shower, through the dog-day afternoons in accounting, in the evening as they close their eyes.
That time they pretended to be something becomes the thing they depend upon to get them through their eternity of being nothing.
But the make-believe is the very thing that dislocated them from everything that came before in the first place. From everything permanent and eternal. It isn’t survival and salvation that gets them out of bed in the morning. It’s nostalgia. It’s the opposite of eternal salvation. It’s terminal damnation. Tying your very soul to fading recollections of time wasted. Of time spent being ironic and thinking it clever. Of being clever and thinking it smart. Of being a poet and thinking it mattered.
And where does that leave us? It leaves us slip-sliding from something into nothing. Into atheism, into cynicism, into nihilism, into suicide or the suburbs.
And what do we leave behind?
At the very most, 1.8 asshole children.
You might get the sense, if you were an anthropologist sent from a fancy British university to study this tribe of transient, rootless, listless lit majors and poet secretaries and barista musicians play-acting at living, that no one was having a good time. That they were just taking the piss, pulling your leg, all in on some elaborate practical joke—just not a very good one. And you’d get the definite sense that the one straight-faced kid off to the side with his arms folded in front of him staring straight ahead while an orgy of prog-rock foolishness spilled off the stage and pooled around his feet, that that one kid wasn’t in on the joke.
Yet Milton kept going. Milton kept thinking, kept hoping, kept praying—as he walked home alone in the cold and the dark replaying every mumbled drink order, every brush against every sweaty elbow, every accidental eye contact—that maybe one of these times he’d get it.
If only Robin would come back from Florida and take him by the hand and whisper that Noddy was all a horrible mistake and teach him how to dance in a way that looked aloof but not silly.
If only.
. . .
Corporate Ladder
While all the going out and getting not nearly enough sleep and showing up to work most days at least a little hung-over and at least 20 minutes late wasn’t so great for making friends or advancing his poetry career or getting him laid, it was great for Milton’s Medi-Drug career.
Lorraine was fascinated by him.
Medi-Drug was a company made up almost exclusively of moms and dads. Every conversation revolved around daycare pickups and school trips and soccer practice. Every day in the lunchroom there’d be a cake for so-and-so’s birthday or because so-and-so is having another baby.
Everyone who worked there, in their tan slacks and floral blouses living really real and really boring lives, looked the same and sounded the same and lived the exact same. The parking lot was filled with Hyundai Santa Fes with two car seats in the back and handfuls of Cheerios ground into the upholstery.
It was a living Dilbert theme park.
It was a special kind of hell.
To have someone living any kind of life other than that was so refreshing to Lorraine—the queen of the t-crossers and i-dotters, the enforcer of regimented sameness.
Each morning she’d coax out of Milton details of his night before. Where’d he go? Who with? Who’d he see? Who was there? Did he meet anyone? Does he have his eyes on anyone?
“Here’s my daughter’s number! You should take her out! You’d get along great! Just wear a condom! I’m not ready for grandkids just yet! Could you imagine?! Me a grandmother?! I’d die!”
Milton quickly began stretching the truth to tell better stories. He began inventing recurring characters and plot arcs and nightly subplots with lovers and villains and intrigue and polyamorous relationships and good-old-fashioned cheating and betrayal. It was Lorraine’s favourite soap opera. She couldn’t get enough.
And after Milton agreed to go to a Meat Loaf concert with Lorraine and her daughter—who turned out to be 17 and not the least bit interested in even looking at Milton—he was promoted to Assistant Director of Regulatory Affairs. Much to the cockeyed dismay and angry hushed chagrin of all the moms and dads.
“Between you me and this rubber tree, hon! There’s barely a brain cell in this entire department! And don’t get me started on those fools downstairs! My god! They’re like the boys my daughter brings home! Dumb enough to shame even an Italian mother! Madonna!”
The promotion didn’t bring with it much more work. Milton still spent the majority of the day scratching poems and mundane love letters on scrap paper, but Lorraine gave him more and more responsibility.
Milton, of course, had not one clue what the hell he was doing or how anything worked. He was some kind of office boy-toy, not any kind of real actual employee. Yet the moms and dads, with their actual need for their actual jobs, and their healthy fear of Lorraine, did all the actual work Milton might actually be expected to actually do, had he been an actual employee at all.