Al’s Book of the
Dead
I. Writer
Al sold stereos. Lots of stereos. He was Regional Senior Sales Manager, Western Canada. Al was married, had a son, a daughter, a Labrador retriever, a Mercury Sable station wagon. Al sniffed cocaine, drank whisky, watched strippers in taverns. But that’s not important.
Al was alive. That was the important thing. Because Al was writing a book. What separated Al from the people he wrote about was this: They were dead. He was alive.
Al’s book was a kind of a list. It contained the names of all the people he ever knew who had died. The first entry went:
Diane Adams
I first heard Diane used a razorblade to scrape the empty baggie from an ounce of coke and shot that, and the plastic from the bag got into her brain, then Stan W. told me no, she OD’ed on bad speed or MDA.
I liked Diane ever since I came on to her when we were about fifteen and she just laughed and laid a hit of acid on me. She went to New York to be an actress or a model or something for a while. She came back though.
II. Style
Al didn’t know much about writing books. He didn’t read, except for trade magazines and business reports, the occasional in-flight magazine, Golf Digest. He didn’t know about plotting or character development or theme or conflict resolution or foreshadowing. He didn’t know that even non-fiction books about dead people used narrative structures.
Al didn’t know the kind of book he started to write had a tradition. He had never heard of William S. Burroughs or James Carroll or Howl! or Charles Bukowski or Crad Kilodney. He didn’t know that someone born white and middle class in Jasper Place wasn’t supposed to write a book about dope addicts and criminals and alcoholics and just plain ordinary people who happen to die.
So he wrote:
Kelly Shopstuk
Shopsy shot himself twice in the face. He was using a cheap 22 and the first one didn’t even go through his cheekbone so he went through his eye socket and blew his brains out.
He was up in Peace River living in a motel room with two of his cousins. He was up there trying to stay out of trouble but I heard from Val he was drinking bad after he got laid off.
P.S. Shopsy’s brother I forget his name I didn’t really know him died in that accident on Groat Road where that car fell off the overpass.
III. Manuscript
Since he was on the road at least ten days a month, Al found plenty of time to work on his book. He wrote in longhand, using a PILOT pen with either green or blue ink. He never wrote at home.
His handwriting was poor, but not illegible. He scrunched the pen between his index and middle fingers and overlapped it tightly with his thumb. The lowercase letters were cramped together on uneven lines. His capital letters were always printed, neat and square. Solid blotches of ink marked the spots where he crossed out a word or phrase. He sometimes tore through the paper.
He wrote the book on stationery from the hotels and motels of his sales trips. He collected the pages of his book in a large three-ring binder with a pale yellow plastic cover. The logo of an out-of-business stereo manufacturer decorated the spine. He kept it among similar binders of parts catalogues and product brochures on a bookshelf in his Vancouver office.
When he returned from a sales trip, he inserted any new writing into the proper place in the book. With a single exception, he wrote one obituary per page and filed them alphabetically by last name.
The exception read:
The Agostini Family
This is the only family I knew where everyone died.
Marc Agostini: Marco was found one morning in his car. They never knew whether it was on purpose or whether he just came home drunk and passed out with the motor running.
Marco was my age and we went to school and stuff starting about grade three. His house was a hangout when we were teenagers because Mrs. Agostini was never home and we could do anything in the basement. Also, Marco’s oldest brother Rick had a Marantz stereo and a bunch of records. Slade, Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, Status Quo. We were really into that English shit. I always knew Marco had a tough time with his family but I never figured him for suicide. He bought a real expensive lamp made out of stained glass with his first paycheque after high school.
Mrs. Agostini: Mrs. Agostini burned herself up. It was Christmastime and I was visiting the folks. The couch she set on fire with her cigarette was left out in the front yard for a couple of days.
I never knew Mr. Agostini. He never came around. When Mrs. A died she was living alone in the house. Somebody tore it down and built a house like a big cottage on the lot.
Ricardo Agostini: I heard from Sheila R. that Rick died in a mining accident in Ontario. Rick was older by four or five years. We all figured Rick would turn out to be some big success.
Roberto Agostini (“Pee Wee”): Bobby died last year. He had arthritis or diabetes or something.
Bobby was a grade ahead, but was always really scrawny. He was a pretty good soccer player though. We used to get him to go tapping at the liquor store he was so pathetic looking. One time there was a bunch of us tripping on acid and Bobby couldn’t remember how to tie his shoelaces and he freaked out and ran home in the snow without shoes. We went to call on him, ten or twelve of us wired out of our minds, and Mrs. A came to the door and told us Bobby didn’t feel good and to go away. That kind of worried us so later Stan W. and Stevie Q. snuck back and talked him down through his bedroom window. He hated it when we called him Pee Wee, which was his nickname.
IV. Theme
This is how Al’s book got started. He was in a Victoria nightclub called The Anvil, drinking with some clients. Low ceiling, loud music. Twenty-five years ago, he lived for nights in bars like this, pounding back double paralyzers, scarfing drugs by the handful, chasing after high school girls with fake ID.
The band in the club was doing a tribute set to Deep Purple, and halfway through the prolonged solo in “Highway Star,” Al recognized the guitarist. It was Larry Murphy. Murph and Al had gone to Sunday school together, played on the same soccer team, had even shared a paper route for a while. Murph had been playing in bands since about grade eight. Al hadn’t seen him in years.
During a break, Al bought Murph a drink. Sitting at a tiny table they made a peculiar pair. Murph was tall, skinny, all hair and pale skin and tattoos and bony shoulders sticking out of his black sleeveless shirt. Al was short, stocky, intense, with a golf-course tan; he was still in his suit and white shirt, his tie loosened. They talked for twenty minutes, telling tales about the old neighbourhood, catching each other up on their lives.
“Hey, you ever bump into Diane?” Murph asked at one point.
“Died,” Al said.
“Wow. She’s good people. She get sick or something?”
“OD.”
“Bummer. That’s just fucked. She was a cool chick.” Murph lit a smoke and had a swallow of beer. Al noticed he still held his bottle in that weird way of his, gripping the long neck around his fingers like it was a cigar and tipping it up with his knuckles. “You hear about Shopsy?” Murph asked.
“No.”
Murph made his finger into a gun and pointed it at his head.
“Fuck. When was this.”
“I dunno. Last year. The year before. After Eddie. You knew about Eddie, right?”
“I was at his funeral.”
“Hey, I was there. I don’t remember connecting with you there, man.”
“I didn’t stay long,” Al said.
That night, before he slept, Al wrote a list of names on the Strand Hotel stationery. It was his outline.
Many months later, in Winnipeg, Al had lunch with a client who specialized in heavy-duty sound equipment for concerts. He was a mutual friend of Murph and Al.
Larry Murphy
Murph caught double pneumonia. Phil T. from Winnipeg thinks it was AIDS. I only saw Larry once in the last ten or twelve years, just a little while ago. I remember he didn’t look so good. S
kinnier than ever. He was probably sick then, knew he was a goner. Maybe that’s why he kept talking about all those dead people. The original rock’n’roll headbanger. I guess I owe this whole damn thing to him.
V. Reader
Al kept his book a secret for a long time. He had no reason for doing so, other than a vague sense of embarrassment at the thought of being a writer. And then too, he had no good reason to show it to anyone.
Sandra, he was sure, would not like it. She would think it morbid. She would worry, tell him that the past was not important when he had so much future to look forward to. She would sulk. She would argue. She would convince him to drop it. She would probably be right.
His family would find it disturbing. His wild youth, his drugs and drinking, his unsavoury friends. His mother and father were retired, they lived a quiet life. They wouldn’t want to remember. His sister was a holy-roller now, she’d want to save him.
None of his current friends or business acquaintances would get it. The sharks at head office would see it as a sign of weakness.
Al finally showed it to his friend Stan Walker. Stan was a filmmaker, teaching at an art school in Toronto. He and Al still managed to hook up a few times every year. In the middle of the night during one of Stan’s trips to Vancouver, Al took Stan to his office. On the drive there, he couldn’t talk about his book. Al sat in the shadows as Stan read the book by the light of a desk lamp. At first, Al was nervous. He had never watched anyone read his work. As the minutes passed, his nervousness faded. He dozed off.
It was getting light when Stan finished reading all of the eighty-three pages. He embraced Al in a big bear hug and wouldn’t let go. His voice a hoarse whisper, Stan said, “Most of us don’t know shit about.”
It was a line from the book:
Eddie van Dyk
Eddie went on a bender and never came back. Alcohol poisoning complicated by downers. He was dry for almost a year before that.
Everybody loved Eddie. I saw him the Thursday before he died when I was in Edmonton on a trip. Just dropped by his mom’s place as I was driving by, and there was Eddie on the couch, watching the soaps and playing with his dog. I could write a whole book about Eddie. Once we had the same dream on the same night, about shooting stars and rocket ships in a 7-Eleven parking lot. One afternoon, I got Eddie out of bed to deal me a chunk of hash, and he said, “Some day I’m gonna die of a hangover.” He was on and off the wagon a lot. He wasn’t real good in school, but he was deep and took a lot of stuff seriously. He fought with demons most of us don’t know shit about.
VI. Character
Unlike many of the people in his book, Al had never been busted by the cops. He had never been rushed to hospital with an overdose. He had never been suicidal. He had spent the better part of ten years in a lifestyle that killed and injured the weak and the strong alike, but Al survived. He liked to think it was because he was neither weak nor strong, just average.
His first impulse had been to document the most sensational deaths: all those suicides, overdoses and car wrecks. Even a guy he knew who was murdered. But as the book grew, he added entries that were ordinary by comparison. The cancers, heart attacks and strokes were no less deadly, just as random. That line between the here-and-now and the there-and-then was arbitrary.
The earliest death experience he could remember was this:
Sally Boychuk
Sally died the summer between grade seven and eight. She had a virus in her heart or something like that.
Sally was the most popular girl in our class. I had a crush on her most of grade seven. I even got to kiss her once in the shacks behind the hockey rink. She played the violin and went away to summer school all the time, except that last one. If it happened today they’d give her a heart transplant.
VII. Climax
A year and one hundred and thirty-one obituaries later, Al ran out of dead people.
After two months without an addition, Al was happy and sad. Happy that everyone else was still alive. But he had come to look forward to the book during his sales trips. He even toyed with the idea of making up the deaths of imagined characters.
He began to carry the whole book with him on the road. He would sit in hotel rooms, flipping through the pages. Occasionally, he would edit an entry, re-word a description, perhaps add a postscript. He started using a purple pen for the corrections, so he could keep track of the changes. He tabulated the various causes of deaths. He sorted the entries by name, by gender, by age. He compared the numbers.
One night at home, after four days on the prairies, he lay in bed with his hands clasped behind his head. “I never knew anyone who drowned,” he announced. Sandra extinguished the light and crawled in beside him. “That’s good,” she said.
Two weeks later, Al started a new entry:
Stan Walker
Fell off a boat into Lake Ontario.
VIII. End
Al hunched over a table in The Anvil. For last call he ordered a beer, a Bushmills, a coffee, a Coke, and a water. He made notes on a napkin. He had an idea to write something, a movie or a novel maybe, featuring his dead people. It might help justify the existence of his book of the dead.
Since Stan’s drowning, the liver failure of his father, and then the sudden brain cancer of his health-nut boss, Al had begun to chafe under the burden of maintaining the book. It scared him. As he grew older, the book would grow thicker. He felt like he was in a room where the walls moved closer when he wasn’t looking, and his chest tightened whenever his mind thought of someone still alive who might one day be dead. As if just thinking about it could make it happen. Sandra. His kids. He needed that whisky. If he lived long enough, his would be the only name missing.
When the waitress brought his round of drinks, he gulped the Bushmills then drained the water. As she cleared the table, she reached to pick up the napkins he was using for notepaper. Al gripped her wrist hard.
She twisted out of his grasp and gave him a look. “What’s with you anyways, mister?”
“I’m writing,” he said.
Misdirection
Ice tumbles out of the pitcher and into her glass as the waitress tops up her water. “Are you ready to order, or do you want to wait a few more minutes?” Viola checks her watch: almost an hour. She wonders if her daughter is at another restaurant. It’s not that hard to do, really, she thinks. Like the time Vi got on the wrong bus for the cross-country ski outing. It could have happened to anybody. She saw the bus parked in the shopping centre across from the Jewish Community Centre. A gentleman stood next to it holding a pair of skis. She pulled up and rolled her window down a crack—it was bitterly cold—and asked him, “Is this the bus for the Kananaskis trip?” And the man said, “You bet.” She parked her car, loaded her skis, and got on.
She wants water with no ice, but the waitress keeps crowding the glass with cubes. The lunch rush is slowing. Men in suits scribble signatures on credit card slips. A trio of bank tellers gathers purses and jackets from the backs of their chairs. The garrulous line-up of those waiting at the door has disappeared. Her daughter Joy is never late, certainly not an hour. “Didn’t you notice that there wasn’t anyone on the bus you knew?” Joy had asked about the ski trip.
“Well, when I got on there were only two or three others. I didn’t pay much attention, I guess.” Vi had put on her headphones, loaded the tape of her talking book—they were doing a Maeve Binchy for her club that month—and took out her knitting. It was only when the bus stopped an hour and a quarter later—not at the William Watson Lodge but at the Delta Hotel—that she really noticed the absence of “my Jewish ladies,” as she calls them. Most of the day-trippers were men. She discovered they were from the Shell Oil Retirement Club. “They treated me marvellously. They insisted I join them for the lunch they put on at the hotel after.” She saved the sandwiches she had packed in waxed paper for supper that night.
She asks the waitress: “Can you please tell me what the specials are again?” It’s a fis
hy something, Vi can’t remember, she never cooks fish, it smells up the home so. Maybe tuna or salmon from a can occasionally, fish sticks when the children were still home. But the waitress has turned her head and banters goodbyes with a group of regulars. Vi looks at her water glass. Even her membership in the Jewish Centre was an accident. Her neighbour had told her about the daily drop-in aquasize classes at the Southland Leisure Centre, where seniors qualified for a fifty percent discount on a ten-visit pass. “Where was that?” she had asked; “Oh just down the road, you know the one.”
The next time she was heading down 90th Avenue she stopped in. The customer service rep informed her, no, they didn’t have a drop-in aquasize, they had a program for members only, no extra fee but pre-registration required, three times a week, not every day. Seniors did qualify for a thirty percent membership discount, but there were no ten-ticket passes. “I was told you do. I’m sure you’ve made a mistake,” Vi said. By the time she left, the manager had agreed to sell her a full membership at a half-price discount. Two weeks later she realized the Southland Leisure Centre was the facility on Southland Drive, the other way from the house.
“You do this all the time,” Joy said.
“Nonsense,” Vi said. “Besides, how else would I have got to know my Jewish ladies?”
The waitress turns back to Vi, settling onto one hip, holding the water jug loosely at her side. “Did you want to order?” she says.
“The special,” Vi repeats. “Could you tell me again what it was, please?” She half-listens to the list of radicchio salad in a vodka-berry dressing, Chilean sea bass with fennel and some sort of herb reduction, pilaf. Out of habit she lifts the flap on her handbag on the table to make sure her keys are there. One time she couldn’t find them after a shopping trip to the Hudson’s Bay store in Chinook Centre (she still calls it that, never The Bay, just as she calls the store at the other end of the mall Simpson’s Sears). That was the trip where she bought the loveseat for the family room, the one she returned on the 89th day of the 90-day trial period. She was certain she had locked the keys in the trunk, phoned the Alberta Motor Association for the locksmith. She led him to a red Accord in the lot, watched while he slipped a thin piece of metal into the window frame and jimmied the latch. It was only when he popped the lock that she said, “But this isn’t my car. Look, there’s a baby seat in the back.”
Knucklehead & Other Stories Page 6