Five Minutes - Part Two

Part One can be found here.

When I got back home, I ran upstairs and screamed into my pillow until my throat was raw.   When I came to my senses I looked up to see the cat staring at me, inquisitively.  Of course, cats don't have expressions on their faces, but I would've sworn he looked worried... it only served to make me feel worse, and I spent the better part of the morning in bed in despair. 

Later, I drove over to my folk's house to download my frustrations on sympathetic ears.  They'd called to invite me over for cups of tea and plates of cheese and crackers, in an attempt to assuage my shock and depression.  I soon excused myself as I realized my mood was taking a dive.  My entire lifestyle, including work, had evaporated with a few strokes of a pen.

I spent most of the next week in bed with a continuous migraine which I nursed by a home-made concoction of single-malt whiskey from my liquor cabinet with various types of pain medication.  Unable to sleep, I drank, watching sad bastard romantic comedies, hoping that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan would finally sort things out.  Sometimes my sister would come over to take me out, but I felt disconnected and distant.  

It was like I had fallen off the face of the earth. The store, where people would usually find me, was, in essence, boarded up, and in my haste I had not left a note on the door thanking people for their years of patronage.  Grace stopped in for a visit.  I think she may have been concerned after not hearing from me in some time.  During our conversation over coffee on the back porch, she mentioned that she would soon be on her way to make soup at her aunt's house, and promised to bring some for me on her way back home, if I liked. Having had romantic notions about her, I simply wanted to spend time with her, but as I looked into her eyes I felt  I had nothing to offer her, or to anyone else for that matter.  The very idea filled me with grief and self loathing.  I don't know what she was thinking, I've never been able to ask.  She came back about 3 hours later.  I had set the table for the two of us, but she wasn't staying; instead she invited me out to her "Soup-Kitchen in a Chevy", where she carefully ladled soup into my bowl; and left.  I went back in.  The soup, chicken noodle vegetable by the way, was very good.  

   

Sometime later in the week I overheard my housemate Ross discussing my circumstances with our mutual friend Malcolm on the telephone one evening.  Ross told him I was "doing fine", which surprised me, because I was far from it.  On the other hand, it also pleased me in a way; I was able to fool him with the brave face I put on.  In reality, I had crumbled inside.  I felt like an actor playing my former role in everyone's life… including my own.  

Another ally in this, my friend Dylan, who had worked at the store, was able to fix me up with a position I knew absolutely nothing about nor one that would ever have occurred to me.  I hand-delivered my updated resume to Sol Mechanical, a shop he had started working at to make money so he could go back to school.  After a brief interview with the owner, and against my better judgment, I was hired as an apprentice plumber.

I was thrown into work almost immediately despite still reeling from a sense of loss.  I ended up under the tutelage of Dylan's friend Trey and worked with fellow apprentice Klayton, whose main claims to fame, aside from having arms like tree-trunks and thinking he was some kind of super-hero, were his sexual exploits with women.  He explained to Trey and I one day how he'd managed to get a black eye; about how, in the middle of a threesome with his competitive twin brother and a woman they'd picked up at the bar where Klayton moonlighted as a bouncer, they started arguing over who would get to do what to her and when.  Frustrated with the bickering, she left while they remained, punching and kicking at each other.  

I once asked him baitingly, "What does the giant stylized letter S sticker on the back window of your car stand for?"  With no sense of irony, and with his very pronounced lisp, his response was what I'd been fishing for, "Superman, you fockin' idiot."

One Friday afternoon, after hooking up waterlines to fixtures in a nearly finished home, the three of us got together with another trio of plumbers over beer and pizza at a nearby restaurant. Trey regaled us with a story about the new home and acreage he and his girlfriend had purchased outside the city, about how in the early morning hours they could look out their bedroom window to witness deer licking salt off their driveway, and how the animals would come right up into the garage to do this.  One of the other plumbers, an apprentice in his early twenties asked Trey if he could come on to the property to hunt.  Trey, astonished, replied in a shocked tone a very firm "NO", followed by a reasonable explanation that he believed firearms were not allowed in the county.  "It's okay", the apprentice said, "I've got a bow".

I didn't last very long in that environment, though I appreciated Dylan immensely for getting me the job.  One of my final days happened in the middle of December, while I was alone in the attic of an unfinished, unheated house in sub-zero weather struggling with a bit of 4 inch ABS pipe I was running as a vent from a 4-piece bathroom suite.  There are just some things that you have to do in life with your bare hands, and while muttering to myself about everything that was going wrong in my life - I found I could not feel my fingers.  

I eventually wrestled the pipe into its final resting place, and came to the rather hasty decision to leave that line of work for someone better suited to it. 

Some time later I was thumbing through the classifieds of the local paper in my kitchen, and spied an advertisement for a national delivery company needing owner/operators.  Not knowing what that was about, but believing it to mean something having to do with owning a car (which I did), I ventured down to the head office to hand them my CV.

The next day, quite surprisingly, I received a call back, inviting me to come in for an interview.  Turned out the manager's wife was a reader, and in fact had been a loyal patron of the bookstore.  That was that, and he asked, "How soon can you start?"  

I asked for a few days, thinking I would need some time to tune up the car and get other affairs in order regarding my bankruptcy - including the first of three rather ominously titled "counselling sessions".  In the negotiations with the delivery company, they offered me an hourly wage, a one-tonne panel van, and what would eventually prove to be the most lucrative route they had in the city for delivering office supplies: the downtown core.  Of course, all this was contingent on my agreeing to work towards buying the 4-year old van for $30,000, after my 3 month probationary period. 

I enjoyed the work almost immediately, except for the hours.  Work started at 4:45 a.m. and finished 12 or 13 hours later.  The first 2 or 3 hours were spent putting my stack of delivery forms, sometimes upwards of 120, into a drivable order, then loading the cargo into the van.  Sometimes I had what they called a "swamper", a person who would help me deliver especially large loads.  On more than one occasion, this turned out to be a 16 year-old girl who had dropped out of high school who actually started work at 3 a.m.

When the company found out I was reliable, they offered me the additional task of delivering beer at the end of my shift.  Their regular fellow was about to be let go as he all too often intimidated clients, mainly restaurant managers.  This increased the length of my workday by 4 hours, so now I was getting home between 9 and 9:30 at night, catatonic.  Often Ross would have leftovers from his supper ready for me when I arrived.  At that time of day, I couldn't imagine making a complete meal for myself; I did the dishes in return for the favour.  After days of lifting 3000 lbs of paper and pens followed by a dozen or so 160 lb kegs of beer and flats, running up and down the stairs, I was in the best shape of my life.  I was crossfit, before there was CrossFit!

Then one day, I made an office supplies delivery to one of the biggest breweries in the city.  It was an old turn-of-the-century red brick building I had never been to before, on the edge of downtown.  I backed into the loading dock and hopped out of the van.  Ringing the bell on the double door summoned the cheerful Receiver who was all too happy to show me and my dolly-load of three boxes of photocopy paper and a box of other goodies to the elevator. 

This was an enormous classic Otis traction freight elevator I was unfamiliar with.  It looked to be about 100 years old, and you could've fit a grand piano in it.  The light was bad, with only one swinging bare bulb far from being up to the task it was given.  The Receiver had vanished into an unlit passageway, and once I got myself inside, I looked around for the controls.  I pushed the number 2 and waited... nothing happened.  Quick to realize that I had to close the door manually, I let go of the dolly, looked around and reached up to grab a thick loop of nylon cable.  It was as about as high as I could reach, so I was on my toes when I began pulling it down.  It took all my weight to get it moving, which gave me an idea of just how heavy the door was.  What I did not account for in that moment was the bottom half of the door coming up to meet the top half.  Normally I'm quite aware of where my body is in space - but not that day.  The top half of the door was now coming down with the necessary momentum to close it, as my left hand was picked up by the bottom half, and before I realized what was happening, the doors met with my hand sandwiched between.

I don't remember making a sound, but after working my hand out, I closed the security gate and finally got to the second floor. There I was greeted by a very concerned secretary brandishing a first-aid kit.  Obviously this was a regular occurrence for her.  Thanking her for her concern, I refused her assistance, even as blood percolated through the fabric of my work glove, insisting that if I took it off my fingers may come off with it.  She unloaded the dolly for me.

I never bought the van.  I got into house renovations instead, for a spell.