Business

by J. P. Meyboom

  BUSINESS

  BUSINESS

  J.P. MEYBOOM

  a novel

  Copyright © J.P. Meyboom, 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Publisher and acquiring editor: Scott Fraser | Editor: Russell Smith

  Cover designer and illustrator: Sophie Paas-Lang

  Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Business : a novel / J.P. Meyboom.

  Names: Meyboom, Jan Peter, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200297244 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200297252 | ISBN 9781459747050 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459747067 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459747074 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8626.E923 B87 2021 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

  Dundurn Press

  1382 Queen Street East

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4L 1C9

  dundurn.com, @dundurnpress

  When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.

  — Mark Twain

  CONTENTS

  ONE: Gotta Go

  TWO: Marla

  THREE: This New Life

  FOUR: The Ellington

  FIVE: Hornsmith Was Holding Out

  SIX: All in the Family

  SEVEN: Marla’s Show

  EIGHT: The Real Dope

  NINE: The Hustle

  TEN: The Heart of the Matter

  ELEVEN: Escape

  TWELVE: Bobby Fischer Said

  THIRTEEN: Trouble in the Night

  FOURTEEN: Fire!

  FIFTEEN: Everyone’s Out

  SIXTEEN: The Rubber Hits the Road

  SEVENTEEN: America

  EIGHTEEN: Shirley Rose and the Dipshit Kid

  NINETEEN: The Crossing

  TWENTY: Vegas

  TWENTY-ONE: A Bad Turn

  TWENTY-TWO: Rescue Me

  TWENTY-THREE: Home on the Range

  TWENTY-FOUR: Town

  TWENTY-FIVE: Bad Things

  TWENTY-SIX: Visitors

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Nowadays …

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ONE

  Gotta Go

  THOSE DAYS MY JOB was at a business that made greeting cards. Social expression products, that’s what the marketing hacks called them. I scribbled the intimate messages printed with fake handwriting inside cards of pale watercolour landscapes. “A Very Special Birthday to a Very Special Girl.” “Darling, since we have been together, every moment has been so precious.” “My heartfelt condolences on this day of sorrow.” Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera. My writing career.

  Our boss, O’Malley, liked us to call him “the Editor.” He sported a perpetual five o’clock shadow, his black hair blown back into a helmet. His workday passed in an office with the lights off, the blinds pulled down, face pressed to the surface of a polished empty desk. Fast asleep. Drunk.

  A little weasel named Isam owned the business. Given the substandard crap Harmony Greeting Cards produced, he seemed uninterested in profits. It might’ve been innocent. He could’ve been bad at business. Equally, he could’ve been up to something else altogether. Chained to my station, my thoughts were free to cast him in whatever sinister light I chose. So, I had him money laundering for Hezbollah. Trafficking sex slaves to Bahrain. Importing Lebanese hash for the Hells Angels. Something sleazy and sinful. The others didn’t think of him like that, but I’d seen him shout on the phone when he was alone in his red DeVille, his free hand smashing on the dashboard. Mad spittle sprayed the inside of the windshield.

  He’d slink through the shop every morning on a cloud of jasmine-scented soap, wring his hands, and grimace more than smile at the staff, his crooked teeth bared like someone had shoved a live electrical wire up his ass. Then, into O’Malley’s office for a chat before that idiot was unable to speak. The rest of the day, Isam disappeared into the depths of the Beef Baron, a grotty strip club up near Markham and Castlemore, where he and his other business buddies plotted their next crime wave between lap dances and hot roast beef sandwiches. At least, that’s how I figured it.

  I was adrift, uninterested in this business or any other. “Business” was an arena of combat, more beak and claw than fair exchange. A slippery shit pile I’d only experienced the bottom of. Exploited and underpaid with no clear way up or out, at Harmony Greeting Cards Co. the deal was hand in your copy and scan the horizon for signs of a channel deep enough to escape these shoals for somewhere better. Beyond the confines of these mouldy walls. Beyond the reach of morons like O’Malley. Head for someplace where your blood pulsed, and your eyes widened. Someplace you could feel free.

  Ed Ray caught me with a joint at work one afternoon on the loading docks. A surprise. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He didn’t work for Harmony Greeting Cards. Ed Ray dated Heather Mann from marketing, which meant a couple of times a week he dropped by in the middle of the day to visit. Half the time Heather was out on sales calls. Ed didn’t care. He’d hang around anyway, talk about the Blue Jays and how hot the summer was this year. He’d use the phone on her desk, drink some of the bitter office coffee, and steal off for a smoke out back. That’s how he busted me.

  “Need some inspiration?”

  The rat crept up in the dark, chuckled, and stepped out from behind the rusty yellow forklift they used to move boxes around the warehouse. He paused to light a cigarette between his chapped lips. The flame illuminated his moth-eaten beard before his face fell back into shadow.

  “Inspiration?” Dope smoke burned my lungs. “Fuck, no. I need a change of scene.”

  “What’re your prospects?” His eyes watered and didn’t blink. “What’s your plan?”

  Hard to say if he really cared. It didn’t matter. High enough to reconfigure the world according to my own compass, I tried to sound like someone with a plan.

  “I might go to Dawson. Make some cash. People can do that there. There’s still a gold rush going on.”

  For fifty bucks I couldn’t have pinned Dawson on a map. Just read about it somewhere. I only wanted Ed Ray to shut up, leave me alone.

  Instead, he said, “Really? Interesting. Don’t you need some basic knowledge of geology for that? I’d think so. And you need money, too. For mining equipment and such. You have money?”

  We both knew the answer to that.

  “You went to art school, right? You might want to consider something you’re more familiar with.”

  A box of mouse poison guarded the door to keep the vermin from the offices. A futile gesture. They were everywhere.

  Ed Ray’s career advice didn’t resonate. The expanse between his ambition and his ability was a harsh swim across an icy lake. Last year he’d written and self-published The Power of Intuition: A Woman’s Secret Path under the ps
eudonym Margaret Underhill. He had to have real books, with real pages. Hardcover. No electronic publishing for Ed. Spent all his money on paper and ink. Bad luck for Ed that no one would distribute it because his Power of Intuition was terrible. Instead, he’d dumped a thousand copies in the back of the warehouse. Isam and O’Malley never ventured there. The books went unnoticed. Ed sold them piecemeal off his website. His publishing career.

  “Something I’m more familiar with? Like what?”

  “Like a receptionist,” he said, “or doing research. Freelance writing. Organizing things. There’re lots of gigs out there.”

  Ed had no idea how little I cared about anything he’d call a job. From his jacket pocket, he fished a business card.

  “There’s a guy,” Ed said.

  With a flick of my finger, the roach trailed into the weedy parking lot. A wrecked car sat on its rims by some dead bushes at the edge of the pavement. I returned to the cool gloom of the warehouse. The card read: The International Business Consultancy. Finance, Business, Arts, and Sciences since 1998. A.S. Hornsmith, President & CEO. Modern Solutions for Modern Problems.

  “What’s he do?” I said, to be polite.

  “These guys here would kill me if they thought I was talking to you about him, because they need you here,” said Ed, “and they’re afraid of him. Albert Hornsmith is a rainmaker. He sells people ideas. He helps them out of situations. And sometimes those situations become other kinds of situations. Which is what happened here. Which is why they’re afraid of him. He always wins.”

  “What are you talking about? Situations?”

  “Complicated situations.” Ed pushed my hand away when I started to hand the card back. “Keep it. A gift from me. I like you, and maybe you shouldn’t be here. Call him if you want. He might use a kid like you. Just don’t tell these guys you got it from me. Which you didn’t.”

  Like most decent people, Ed Ray only wanted to be helpful.

  Those days, there was no Plan. The world was a senseless operation hurtling toward inevitable wreckage. A place in this inconsequential cosmic disaster didn’t matter. Sometimes there was no reason to get out of bed at all.

  At twenty-six, after an expensive, mostly useless education in art history, my brief resume of hopeless temp jobs at slave wages offered a dull read. An aimless year bartending from Amsterdam to Bangkok to Kathmandu had also failed to achieve anything other than a penchant for hash and Scotch. I lived alone. Drank a lot. Smoked a lot. And did nothing slick to move my life along while time leaked away.

  Those days, I didn’t embrace my story; I endured it like a virus that, at best, might go into remission. I was the only child of people who’d left me on the side of the road like a dog they no longer wanted. Not that they were bad. Just stupid. Too weak to resist the business of the world.

  Father: an elected voice of the people who moved to the nation’s capital to change the system from within. He ended up a bagman for the Party, betrayed and disappointed, co-opted like every dreamer before him foolish enough to bed down with the ways of man.

  Mother: a hippie who moved out to a commune after my seventh birthday. Left a note on the kitchen table: “Love yourself without judgement. Goodbye.” The seed of all my future hackneyed emissions.

  And so, the grandparents. My mother’s folks. Saskatchewan shopkeepers who stepped in when idealism crashed through the door and lured my parents away. The grandparents were serious people who had faith in the world. They worked hard. They believed in the government. They voted as if it mattered. Paid their taxes on time. Answered their phone. Balanced their savings accounts. Idiots. I wouldn’t do it. I was out of true. Lived without reason. Worked without purpose. Smiled while it made me sick.

  Those days, my goal was to expend little to no energy until a better opportunity presented itself. What shape that took remained to be seen. Sadly, chances were slim. There were no business contacts or prospects to reach out to. The only people I knew were unemployed dope fiends, drunks, hippies, and otherwise marginalized losers. So, I dialed Hornsmith’s number. I thought I had nothing to lose.

  Hornsmith agreed to meet early one Tuesday morning in August before the heat of the day became unbearable. He waited on an iron bench near Dundas and the Grange. The city already throbbed with streetcars and garbage trucks going about their business. My hopes, unfounded as they were, remained high that he’d have some insight into how someone gets traction in the world.

  Despite the summer weather, he came in a brown-tweed outfit. Creased trousers. Jacket. Yellow bow tie. Vest over starched white shirt. Yellow socks peeked out from his pants legs and disappeared into a pair of brown Oxford walking shoes. In his manicured left hand was an unlit calabash pipe made of polished wood, accented by a white porcelain bowl. He stroked his free hand over his cropped beard, seemingly preoccupied. A streetcar rattled by, so loud that at first I only picked up his last snippets.

  “… survived death for now. When I got out of the hospital, I didn’t have a plan. As unappealing as the idea of going back to work was, I had mouths to feed and bills to pay.”

  He sucked his unlit pipe.

  “Your shoes,” he said. “They suit you. Fashionable and modest. Your only pair, I’ll wager. Are they comfortable?”

  My crepe-soled desert boots had been on sale at The Bay. It was hard to say what they had to do with anything. Hornsmith didn’t wait for an answer. His soliloquy proceeded. He stabbed the pipe stem at points he wished to emphasize.

  “My brother, Norton Hornsmith, was an evil fucker who got me to quit school to sell bibles when I was fourteen. He was twenty. Already had his first Eldorado convertible. We drove from town to town, selling bibles from the trunk of the car. When he got tired, he’d have me drive. He didn’t care I had no licence. In every new place, he’d make me do the first sale. He said it brought us luck.”

  My ass already felt sore from the iron bench. This was a dead end. Some nut dressed like Sherlock Holmes reminiscing about his teenage bible sales days. Should’ve stayed in bed. The traffic flowed by, steady. What was it like to have somewhere to go with such purpose?

  Hornsmith continued to channel the past.

  “We sold bibles for a couple of years,” he said. “Lived in the car to save money until eventually we had enough to buy a little printing business. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any experience with printing, and so after a year we were back in the car, selling musical instruments. Mostly to high-school bands. That’s how I learned the trombone. Self-taught. For years, he had me tied up in his money-making schemes, which were always better for him than for me.”

  He swivelled his head toward me, startled, like he’d noticed me for the first time. “What person exploits his own flesh and blood like that?”

  I shrugged. No idea.

  “It’s Latour, right?” he said.

  “No, it’s Wint. Paul Wint.”

  He blinked in the morning sun, a surprised owl out of its element. “That will never do. You should be Latour. Something like David Latour.”

  “That’s not me.”

  “Exactly. A new name liberates a man.”

  A pigeon hopped along the sidewalk beside us. Its head bobbed at some squashed French fries amongst the street trash. Freedom. Bullshit.

  Another streetcar clanged by so that only the tail end of his next installment made sense:

  “… now that I’ve had the surgery, I don’t have the energy for that. So, Norton stepped in to help. The last thing he did before the aneurysm killed him was buy me a photocopy franchise. Dr. Sure Print. He said it’s a money-maker. After all these years, I’m back in the printing business. Good thing I’ve got other irons in the proverbial fire, Latour.”

  He stared at the traffic. He seemed despondent. This was a mistake. The way he told it, Hornsmith didn’t have much going on.

  “I should get to work,” he said after some time.

  I said, “I should, too.”

  Hornsmith slipped the pipe into his pocket and
smiled, a hairy quivering twitch. “Can I give you a ride?”

  In time, Hornsmith revealed that he gave greedily. Turned out, he kept a mental ledger complete with compounded interest for everything he bestowed, with full expectation of a return that exceeded his initial gesture. A return I’d pay until long after he was gone. Nothing would’ve happened if only I’d declined Hornsmith’s offer. But I didn’t know much those days.

  We drove through the city in his old air-conditioned Buick Regal. Perfect canary yellow. White walls. Blue-tinted windows. Wood grain interior with red velour seats. The Mikado blared on the stereo.

  “You know who was the most brilliant Koko ever?” he said over the music. “Groucho Marx. I know you were going to say Eric Idle, but for me it’s always going to be Groucho. The 1960 Bell Telephone Hour. He’s the perfect blend of crazy, evil, and humble. An inspired performance.”

  “Before my time,” I said.

  He ignored me and pointed to the ashtray.

  “Go on, open it,” he said, excited, like some treasure awaited. Inside, there was a lighter built into the ashtray, lit up by a small lamp.

  “There,” he said, “the lamp. That’s what makes this a real salesman’s car. Only the best salesmen get that.”

  “What do you sell?”

  “Aspiration by inspiration. I sell people their own dreams. Help them picture possibilities. Enhance their chances. And business is good.”

  I had no idea what he meant.

  “We need to make a stop before I drop you off,” he said.

  I agreed. Why not? Anything beat public transit.

  We drove to one of those downtown glass towers on Bay Street and parked underground. He said to come along, so together we rode a wood-panelled elevator to the twenty-fifth floor. A muted TV monitor displayed the morning’s market decline. Up top, we stepped into a vast lobby of quarried limestone, leather couches, and huge red Rorschach-style inkblots framed in chrome.

  Hornsmith spoke without moving his mouth. “No matter what happens, don’t say a word. Look sharp and stay quiet.”