Easy Avenue

by Brian Doyle

  They were in a panic as they at last got out of the smelly bus and some of them had wide eyes and others were whispering that they had to get a second car because they couldn’t stand this any longer.

  I walked Mrs. O’Driscoll up to the corner of Grove and Bank Street and waited until her streetcar came to take her to her job. Then I walked up the west side of Bank Street looking for good places to ask for a job. I tried a few drug stores that needed delivery boys but you had to have your own bicycle and that left me out.

  I went into the Avalon Theatre but they didn’t need any ushers who couldn’t afford to buy their own uniforms.

  I went into a little restaurant called the Mirror Grill but they already had a dishwasher. The man who smoked a big cigar there, joked with me and bought me a free coke.

  I was in the district they called the Glebe and there was a whole lot of Bank Street to go before I got all the way to the Parliament Buildings where it ended. If I stayed on Bank Street I thought I’d get a job for sure.

  But I didn’t stay. I turned.

  I don’t know what made me do it, but I turned left off Bank Street and started down First Avenue. The street was cool in the shade of the overhanging trees and it was quiet and cozy, everybody with their own house and their own veranda and their own lawn and their own laneway and balconies and flowers and garages and backyards. And the people seemed so happy fussing with their kids or reading on their verandas or snipping away at their flower gardens or dragging a hose up the laneway or shining their cars.

  And neighbors chatting politely with each other or waving across the street and laughing. And the breadman talking with the maid on the veranda, the breadman with his basket strapped around his neck, his hands resting in the basket. And the smell of the groceries in the back of Devine’s green delivery truck, the delivery man whistling, carrying the groceries up to the lady.

  And the freshly cut lawns that smelled like the greens at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club.

  And further down First Avenue the big square red quiet building with the high steps, Carleton College.

  And then further, the biggest building on the street. Glebe Collegiate Institute, where Mrs. O’Driscoll was inside, cleaning, and where I would soon go to school.

  I passed the school and the huge schoolyard, a block long, and crossed Bronson Avenue down Carling Avenue hill to Preston Street.

  I turned right on Preston Street and tried a store and a bakery but they didn’t need anybody—at least I think that’s what they said because it was in Italian. I tried the Pure Spring soft drink company but the man there asked me how much I weighed. I wasn’t heavy enough to work there. He was a huge man and it would be a hundred years before I weighed as much as he did.

  “Put on some pounds and come back and see us,” he said, and gave out a big laugh that just about blew me out the door.

  Further down Preston Street I saw a church with a sign that said Lutheran and some other things on it. In Lowertown it was mostly Catholic churches and synagogues. I had never heard of a Lutheran church before.

  I turned off Preston and went right on Somerset Street. Halfway up the hill I went into a pool hall that had a Help Wanted sign in the window. A French kid about my age was dusting the lampshades over a table. I thought I recognized him from Lowertown. I think his name was CoCo.

  “You’re too late, my fren’. I jus’ got de job one hour ago! Tough luck, eh?”

  Further up Somerset I saw a sign in the window of the Cinderella Book Store. “Student Wanted—part time.” A feeling of excitement came over me. My heart started to beat faster. I looked in the window for a while pretending I was looking at the books there. I was really looking at my reflection, thinking about what I was going to say. I had a feeling I was going to get this job.

  The man inside had thick glasses and hardly any face. He had a face all right, but it was so round and big and flabby that you could hardly see where his nose and his mouth started and where his cheeks ended. It seemed like a blur. And his glasses were so thick you couldn’t see his eyes at all. He seemed like a kind man and he spoke in a soft, understanding voice.

  We talked about what experience I had working in book stores, which I lied about, the books I’d read, which I didn’t lie about.

  Then he took out an application form and got my name.

  “Hubbo?” he said.

  “Actually, it’s Hulbert,” I said.

  “I bet when you were small you couldn’t say Hulbert so you said Hubbo and then everybody started calling you Hubbo,” he said.

  I wondered how he knew that.

  My address. Uplands Emergency Shelter, Building Eight, Unit B.

  He looked at me a long time after he wrote it down.

  Phone? No phone. He drew a dash in the space and looked at me a long time again. My feeling of excitement was gone. I was now feeling nervous. I couldn’t think straight. There was panic in me.

  Religion? Religion. My mind was a blank. His face was looking like a pudding. If I could only see his eyes. I was trying to think of a religion that he would like. He didn’t like the address. He didn’t like the blank phone number. He probably knew I lied about my age. I had no experience working in bookstores. I had to please him. I concentrated so hard trying to think of a good religion, one that he’d like. I could feel my face getting red. I felt like I was sitting on the toilet.

  Then it came to me. The church I had seen down on Preston Street. Maybe that was the church he went to. It was in his part of Ottawa. The sign came up in my imagination in front of me. It was a bit blurry but I thought I could see it. I would try it. I would tell him that was my religion.

  “Lithuanian!” I said. I felt like I was on a radio quiz program and I just got the grand prize question. I could hear the bells going and the applause.

  Lithuanian.

  A Lithuanian is a guy from a country somewhere in Europe called Lithuania.

  No wonder he said thank-you but that he didn’t think he needed anybody right now.

  I was all the way down to the corner of Somerset and Bank Street when I realized how stupid he must have thought I was.

  I didn’t blame him.

  I wouldn’t hire me either if I acted like that.

  The rest of that side of Bank Street took me until noon. I listened to the big clock on the Peace Tower gong twelve times and then I walked out on Nepean Point to watch the Ottawa River from away up high. The tug boats working the logs down there looked like toys and the logs looked like matchsticks. I was feeling pretty lonesome and small so I went up to the statue of Champlain Holding His Astrolab and sat down at his feet and ate the lunch Mrs. O’Driscoll had made for me. Like I told Mrs. O’Driscoll later, I lunched with Sam Champlain. He’s pretty good company for lunch, especially if you’re feeling lonesome and small.

  After lunch with Sam I worked my way all the way down the other side of Bank Street, asking in about a hundred places for a part-time job. By the time I got back down to Ottawa South and the Uplands Bus Terminal I was pretty discouraged.

  Nobody wanted to hire me.

  It was six o’clock and the bus terminal was pretty crowded. Soon I spotted Mrs. O’Driscoll pushing her way through the crowd towards me.

  There were about fifteen rich people standing near the door of the bus terminal, trying to keep as far away from us poor people as they could. They had on their nice suits and good shoes and fancy hats and even summer gloves some of them. When I first went in the bus terminal and walked by where they were standing I could smell their perfume and the newness and the richness of their clothes and the leather of some of their purses.

  They stood near the door so that when the bus came they could get on first, sit together near the front, and then get off at their rich houses first, without having to pass by or go near the rest of us. They were very quiet and they seemed to stare straight ahead. Now and then, if they said anything to each other, they said it in a kind of whisper through their teeth and without moving their lips
very much or turning to look at each other with their eyes. It looked like what they said was really important.

  And if they had parcels or bags or purses they hung onto them and hugged them to their bodies as tight as they could, and they stood with their feet tight together so that they took up as little room in the bus terminal as possible.

  Mrs. O’Driscoll was telling me more about Prime Minister King’s house.

  “...and he’s got a nice big painting of his mother up on the third floor in his study. He’s got a light lit in front of it at all times—night and day. The lady in the painting is very beautiful. They say he talks to the painting sometimes. He talks to the picture of his mother. He calls her my lovely mother... And his dog Pat. They say he talks to him too. It’s a terrier. Cute little thing. Sometimes he talks to his mother about Pat. Sometimes he’ll say, Mother, Pat and I think this or Pat and I think that... And they say he visits with dead people at night. They sit around a table in the dark and he talks to dead President Roosevelt and dead Sir Wilfrid and his dead grandaddy the Lyon. And they told me that an old lady sometimes comes over in the middle of the night with a silver trumpet and voices of the dead speak through the trumpet... O’Driscoll would say that he’s crazier than a bag of hammers but who’s to know these days...”

  On the bus some of the poor people were drunk and laughing very loud and throwing bottles out the windows onto the highway. Some of the women were screaming and fighting with other women and everybody was lighting up cigarettes.

  Then the driver said to put out those cigarettes, there is no smoking on the bus, and then everything got very quiet but the cigarettes didn’t go out and the rich people in the front of the bus sank down in their seats because they were afraid of what was coming and the driver said again to put out those cigarettes and there was some giggling from some of the women and then some man in a big deep rough voice full of gravel and phlegm said, “Come back here and make me!”

  By this time the driver had stopped the bus in the middle of the highway and the rich people were saying oh please and the driver took up a bat from under his seat and went back to the back of the bus and there was an olympic swearing contest and I heard two or three whacks and a lot of screaming and clothes ripping and the rich people at the front were saying oh my god and the driver went back to his seat, wiped the juice off of his bat, checked his mirror to straighten his tie, and started the bus moving again along the highway until he stopped a few times to let the rich people off at their stops.

  And the poor people were saying to them as they got off, “Goodnight now, and do have an awfully lovely eveningggg!” and then they added some long dirty names that even Mrs. O’Driscoll had never heard before.

  “I wish we were rich,” I said to Mrs. O’Driscoll when things quietened down a bit.

  “What on earth for?” said Mrs. O’Driscoll, out of the corner of her mouth. “This is fun!”

  Then she looked at me and got a warm soft look on her face.

  “You had a disappointing day, didn’t you, Hubbo, my boy,” she said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Well,” said Mrs. O’Driscoll, “Maybe you will be rich someday. But I’m telling you, if you care too much about it, you won’t be any happier than you are now.”

  6 Betrayed at the Glebe Collegiate Institute

  ON THE UPLANDS BUS on our way to our first day at school one of the Uplands kids who smoked pushed a lit cigarette into a rich kid’s sandwich in her lunch box when she wasn’t looking. There was some crying and complaining and some of the older kids at the back were doing volcano burps just to make the people getting on at Mooney’s Bay and Hog’s Back more disgusted.

  We got off the bus at the terminal in Ottawa South and were pretty excited as we walked up Bank Street and over the Bank Street Bridge. We stopped at the top of the bridge and leaned over to look down at the Rideau Canal and the cars on the driveway running along beside it. It was a beautiful September day, the morning sun making diamonds on the water down the canal a bit, and some early fallen leaves floating. The canal was curved away up towards Bronson Bridge one way, lined with trees hanging over and beautiful houses half showing behind them. The other way it curved down past Lansdowne Park and around towards the Parliament Buildings that you couldn’t see. The football grandstand made a long shadow across the grass in the sun and the green wooden fence around the field looked shiny because of some of the light.

  A boy named Denny, who was covered with pimples, and I and Fleurette walked together down the rest of the bridge while the other kids from Uplands came behind us in small groups.

  The rich kids were ahead of us in one big group.

  Denny and Fleurette and I walked up Bank Street past the Exhibition Grounds and the Avenues and turned left on First Avenue. We strolled down First, looking at the beautiful lawns and the trees and the fancy houses with the big verandas and the windows with the fat cats sunning themselves and the shiny cars in the laneways.

  At the school there was a big crowd of kids standing around waiting for the doors to open. Somebody told Fleurette that the High School of Commerce was at the other end, a long block away, and I said I’d see her later.

  I walked up the sloping driveway to look at the front entrance. I stood back and looked at the wide steps and the huge doors. Above the doors carved in stone was a giant shield and a hand holding a flaming torch. There were words underneath.

  Alere Flammam.

  I walked up the steps and turned around with my back to the doors. A feeling of excitement and great power filled me. I could feel the building behind me. Solid. Important.

  I wondered what Alere Flammam meant.

  I was alone. Everybody else was down the sloping driveway standing around on First Avenue. Many of them were looking up at me alone at the top of the wide steps. Some were pointing. For a minute I felt like an emperor, standing on the great entrance to my palace, surveying my subjects.

  I put my hands down on the cool concrete and kicked up into a perfect stand.

  I could hear the hooting and whistling from the crowd. I jammed my pointed toes together and secretly pressed and released my fingers on the concrete to keep my balance. I was still as a statue. Somewhere, way above me, was the shield and the flame. My eyes were on a leaf lying on the bottom step below me. I didn’t dare look anywhere else in case I’d ruin my handstand. It was perfect. I could have held it for hours.

  Suddenly something was wrong. The noise the crowd was making had changed. They weren’t hooting and whistling and clapping any more. They were saying something else.

  Then I heard a big door click shut and I felt someone behind me. Then my hair was grabbed and the back of my shirt. I was lifted right off my hands and the leaf disappeared and the trees spun around and the cement flame flew over like a great bird and I was in the air and then on my back at the bottom of the steps.

  At the top I could see shoes and pants and hands hanging and a red floppy face and lips snarling.

  “You jackass! Out of bounds! You bums will follow the rules around here! Right from the start! Out of bounds! Jackass!”

  It was the vice-principal.

  A while later, everybody went into the school.

  After a few speeches in the auditorium and some Home Room teacher business, some older students came around and told us about some of the clubs we could join. And some of the teams we could try out for. One team I was interested in was the gymnastics team. Then a very handsome senior student came in and told us he was president of the Boys’ Hi-Y. He had on beautiful clothes and his smile was happy and his teeth were white and even. He invited anyone who was interested to join his Hi-Y Club. A very special club.

  After they gave us our lockers and we signed some forms we went down to the cafeteria and got our books issued to us. While they were issuing the books the teacher in charge read out a list of names of people who hadn’t paid their class fees. Those people had to get out of line and wait until the end.


  There were two names on the list.

  Denny Dingle, the boy we walked to school with.

  And Hulbert O’Driscoll.

  We didn’t know anything about these class fees.

  While we were waiting we walked down the basement hall where our lockers were. Near my locker was a little shop that sold chocolate bars, school supplies, gym socks and stuff.

  Serving behind the little counter was the handsome Hi-Y guy who had given us the talk about the special club. The sign over the counter said, “Tuck Shop.”

  Back in the cafeteria just about everybody was gone.

  “There’s a special form you fill out if you have no money to pay your fees,” the teacher told us.

  Denny Dingle and I signed the forms and got our books. Junior Science for Secondary Schools; General Math Book I; Building the Canadian Nation; Good Health; Cours Premier de Français; Junior Guidance for Today; The Merchant of Venice; A Book of Good Stories.

  Back down around the Tuck Shop I was standing by my open locker putting my books in and I saw Mrs. O’Driscoll coming towards me down the hall with a mop and a pail. The pail was on wheels and the mop was stuck in it and she was pushing the pail along like it was a funny-looking round dog on a wooden leash. She had on a light blue charlady’s dress, with wet stains on it, rubber gloves and a rag tied around her hair. There were two boys walking behind her, imitating her.

  I was going to step out from behind my locker door and talk to her, but suddenly I didn’t.

  Instead, I slipped along the lockers to where the Tuck Shop was, and I leaned over the little counter pretending to ask the price of some pencil sets and math sets there. When I was sure she had gone by I went back and closed my locker.