Ben checks his watch: 6:12pm. This shift is over at 6:30pm and he can’t work overtime tonight. He has a date with Joly. Turner Classic Movies is running a Charlie Chaplin marathon. And he’s left a three-meat chilli simmering on the stove all day. Perfect pairing. Things have been stiff with Joly since the abortion. He hasn’t seen her in five days, hasn’t had sex in a month. But she said yes to Chaplin, yes to chilli, yes to a night at his place.
“No, absolutely not,” he says. “We’re off in eighteen minutes. That is a start-of-the-day request.”
“Don’t tell me how to manage this place, Ben. I’m juggling a lot of balls, okay? Just do your part and get it done done done. I sent Paulie down there already. The four of you should be able to finish by 6:30.”
Paulie is forever being banished to the basement or the back rooms or the kitchen, because Dickhead Debbie gets too antsy when he’s out front, worried that his “mangled English” will distract the Customer. Ben hasn’t actually seen Paulie in hours; he forgot Paulie was in today.
“Debbie. Be reasonable. That storeroom is a mess.”
“Well. Better get cracking then, huh?” And then it comes, the single gesture that Ben hates above all others, the one habit of Dickhead Debbie’s that sends a shiver of murderous rage up his spine. She brings her palms together in two sharp resounding claps: chop-chop.
Ben’s big body shudders.
“Every day she eats one of those pumpkin spice cream cheese bagels,” Lyle says as they watch her round head bobble down the hallway. “D’you know that last year, she took the leftover pumpkin spice tubs home. Full tubs. Two of them. Never pays for it. All those bagels and cream cheese. But me, I eat a pickled bean once, and she writes me up.”
“I’m sick of her always hassling me about my buttons. Do you guys have a problem with this button?” Megz asks with a fond tug at the favoured adornment.
“I got nothing against it,” says Ben.
“S’fine,” says Lyle.
“Yeah. Exactly. It’s good.”
“My brother, my sister,” says Ben, seizing on the mood of collective disgruntlement. “These are precisely the sorts of grievances we would not have to deal with if we had a union. We would be beholden to clearly outlined rules and procedures, not the whims of a maniac.”
But neither Lyle nor Megz pays him any attention. “I’d like to fuck with her schedule somehow.” Lyle gazes deep into the tub of pumpkin spice cream cheese. “Fuck with her livelihood. See how she likes it.”
“She’s, like, trampling all over my individuality.” Megz adjusts the button on her shoulder strap.
“She deserves to be fucked with,” mutters Lyle, wandering across the shop floor with his broom.
By the time they finish clean-up, it’s already 6:24pm. For form’s sake, they amble down to the basement, where they find Paulie amid heaps of old merchandise—T-shirts and ball caps and teapots and cutlery sets, all embossed with the old The Poppy Seed logo, now rendered useless by the recent revamp. Some items are crammed into boxes, but most are loose, strewn across shelves, on the floor, everywhere. And all of it has to be sorted, boxed, and labelled.
For exactly six minutes, Ben puts in a spectacularly half-assed effort and then, when the second hand on his watch ticks up to 6:30pm, he announces: “That’s it. Quittin’ time.”
“Thank god,” says Lyle, dropping a handful of T-shirts onto the floor.
But Paulie looks less relieved, his expression closer to panic. “Debbie says to finish. But it’s too much.” He waves a helpless hand at the cluttered shelves.
“I know,” says Ben. “The morning crew can finish up tomorrow.”
“Debbie says to finish tonight.”
“Quittin’ time is quittin’ time,” Ben offers with a matter-of-fact shrug.
It’s already 6:38pm when they exchange goodbyes in the staff room—they’ve already been here several minutes too long. Before Ben leaves, however, he detours to the Men’s to deal with the effects of last night’s apocalypse hot wings. He takes a profound shit, requiring epic patience and endurance, a shit that clears him right out, and on his triumphant emergence from the can almost twenty minutes later, he expects to find the shop empty. But in the staff room, beside Ben’s backpack, the same bag he used in high school—that can be identified by smell from several feet away—he notices Paulie’s ballcap. Paulie never leaves without his cap, which means Paulie has not left, which means he’s back down in that basement cleaning out that godforsaken storeroom.
“Paulie?” Ben calls out. He climbs down the stairs to the basement and tries again: “Paulie?”
Sure enough, the light in the storeroom is on, and beneath the severe fluorescents stands Paulie, sorting through the piles of outdated merchandise.
“I finish. I finish quick,” he says.
“But we clocked out already.”
“It’s okay. I finish.”
“But you’re working for free now.”
“Won’t take long.”
Paulie’s body seems to be moving at double speed, his arms darting out in one direction, then another, reaching for items and relocating them into appropriate boxes. Ben should leave. It’s worse for them all if he stays and helps and contributes to the normalization of this insane and illegal work ethic. But what is he supposed to do? Leave Paulie to sweat it out in the basement alone?
He throws his bag down in the doorway and calls Joly to tell her he’ll be late.
“How late?” she asks, her voice flat, neither annoyed nor sympathetic to this change of plans.
“I’m not sure, doll. An hour or so?”
“So we’ll miss City Lights?”
“Yeah. But we could still catch the rest of the marathon. And have dinner later? Give the chilli extra time to simmer.”
“…”
“Joly?”
After another strained pause, comes this: “Let’s just rain check it.”
“Oh. I’m really sorry, Joly.”
“It’s fine.”
“I miss you, doll,” he says, but she has already hung up.
3
DECKED OUT IN his comfort wear, Ben spills his sizeable body across two faded couch cushions and sloshes another cup of homemade mead down his throat, dribbling only a minimal amount over his beard and the front of his bright yellow Hulkamania shirt. Charlie Chaplin sashays across the TV in explosive, gut-splitting bursts.
“Pay attention to this part, young Geoffrey!” cries Ben. “Haha ha! Look at his feet. It’s the feet that makes him the funniest funnyman of the twentieth century.” He grabs the bottle of mead from the coffee table, refills his own glass first, then Geoffrey’s, his roommate, an undergraduate. The household typically balks at allowing youth to enter the fold, they being erratic, irresponsible, and generally unknowledgeable about domestic labours. But when Geoffrey came for a viewing of the basement bedroom on offer, he mentioned owning a meat smoker. The household unanimously agreed to bend its own rules. And although they broke this appliance on third use, Geoffrey’s six-month tenure has proven harmonious.
“Oh yes, watch this!” Ben cries as Charlie Chaplin gets to work on an assembly line. “This is where the indignities of modern labour send him off the deep end. Ha! Haha. Still apt.”
“Where’s Joly been at?” asks Geoffrey, on the other end of the couch.
“What?”
“Don’t you usually watch these movies with her?”
“I watch them with everyone! All are welcome. Chaplin is the people’s comedian. Now pay attention, I said.”
He throws more mead down the hatch, feeling it coat his throat with its honeyed sweetness, dispelling the sour notes brought on by the reminder of Joly’s absence. This was the household’s first attempt at brewing mead, a formidable success. Bottled ambrosia, the cure for any ailment. Tonight it has worked wonders on his mood. Following that extra hour in the storeroom, he arrived home steaming from his ears. To keep from blowing his lid, he composed a letter of grievance against D
ickhead Debbie, his fourth in the last few months. After the first missive, Frank, the head manager of all three The Poppy Seed locations, called Ben in for a tête-a-tête, and in a congenial tone discussed with Ben the ins and outs of each of his complaints, then ended the meeting with a firm promise to ameliorate the situation. But nothing happened. After the second letter, Ben earned only an emailed acknowledgement, assuring him that matters would be looked into. The third letter garnered no reply. Tonight’s comprehensive letter, however, with itemized points and detailed examples cannot possibly be ignored. The exercise of composition defused his anger. But it did nothing for his overall Joly-tinged gloominess. Not until he hit the mead did the clouds part and his spirits rise.
Ben empties the bottle, their third, into his glass. He only drinks two nights a week, recognizing in himself a hereditary bent toward intoxication, but when he does drink, he indulges. Five dry days ought to be enough to keep the demons at bay. He swirls the golden brew and raises it high up to the light to admire his own work.
“Jesus, you stink, Ben,” says Geoffrey, sitting directly in the wafting path of Ben’s tremendous summertime odour.
Ben sniffs at his own exposed armpit. The sleeves of this old T-shirt have long since been ripped off to give the garment a second life as an A-shirt. In another year or so, the shirt will realize its final reincarnation as a shoeshine rag. Awed by the power of his scent, Ben raises his elbow higher and leans his armpit toward his roommate.
“Gaze into the abyss, Geoffrey.”
As Geoffrey shuffles back over the armrest of the couch, another roommate, Runkle, explodes into the living room, brandishing a piece of paper above his head.
“You guys see this?” His gangly limbs obstruct the widescreen TV, which they found on the neighbour’s curb last fall.
“Out of the way, Runkle. We’re on a spiritual odyssey. Chaplin. We’ll be here all night.”
“We won’t be,” says Geoffrey. “Ben, seriously, where’s Joly at? Tell her we need her back. You’re killing me.”
“Guys!” cries Runkle. At forty-five, he is the eldest of the roommates, an adjunct professor, who moved into the Sanctum after a surprise divorce left him impoverished and friendless. “We’re being evicted. It’s an eviction notice.”
“Gimme that.” Ben struggles against the soft couch cushions. He swipes the paper—the words whirl around the sheet. Tricky mead. He didn’t realize he was nearly this drunk. Squinting an eye, he forces one line of text after another into focus, searching the notice for the stated grounds for eviction. Ah, there it is: renovation and repairs on a scale that requires vacating the premises.
Ben places a hand on Runkle’s shoulder and looks him square in the eye. “Gather the family. Household meeting.”
FOR EIGHT YEARS—eight!—Ben has lived in this house, since his first year in grad school, when a fellow student offered him a room in the basement, where all the roommates begin and whence they slowly work their way up. After nearly a decade, Ben has ascended to the top floor, the second best bedroom in this century-old house. Only Kata, the international student from Croatia, in the tenth year of her Ph.D., has been here longer than he has.
Standing in front of the TV, Ben casts a glance at the four roommates assembled before him. Missing at this meeting is Esther, who has rarely been seen in the evenings since she picked up a job as a bike courier for a restaurant delivery company.
“Comrades … my brothers and sisters, my spiritual brethren, my co-dwellers in this, our home and sanctum,” Ben begins, “the penny has dropped. The sword of Damocles has finally fallen on our heads. We are being renovicted. To which I say … fuck that.” And then he lets loose a belch that rattles his chest.
“Can you make this speech without forcing us to look at your nipples, Ben?” asks Kata.
Ben looks down at his ripped yellow shirt. The great might of his chest has strained the fabric, causing a six-inch horizontal tear straight out from the sleeve hole, exposing his left nipple. “Behold the image of God, Kata … in his comfort wear.”
“I’m overwhelmed by the glory. Now can you just … tug your shirt a little to the left?”
Ben adjusts his shirt slightly to conceal the offending body part and Kata nods her thanks. “We have two options,” Ben continues, pacing in front of the TV, where the Chaplin marathon plays out on mute. “We can accept this notice, walk out with our asses in hand and our nuts fully receded.” Ben pauses and bows magnanimously toward Kata. “Kata, you’re welcome to think up your own gender-appropriate analogy.”
“Thank you, Ben.”
“Or … we can refuse to vacate. Resistance! We can fight the eviction. Rain fire and fury on the Landlord and Tenant Board.” The wave of renovictions that has swept the city is turning cataclysmic. These landlords—scribes and Pharisees to the last—toss out any tenants still paying reasonable rents citing intentions to renovate. They make a few cosmetic changes, slap up new coats of paint, then jack up the rent to unholy heights.
“We won’t win that fight,” says Runkle. “Tenants never win.”
“Look at this place,” says Marko, another former student, who dropped out around the same time as Ben, also seeing the writing on the wall of academia. He has since found far more fortune and fulfillment in his new career as a bike mechanic. “You can’t argue that it’s not in need of top-to-bottom renovation. We are an inspection away from being condemned.”
“Bah! Anything can pass inspection these days,” says Ben.
“Where am I gonna find rent this cheap again?” laments Geoffrey. “And I just got here.”
“This is fucked,” says Kata, furiously passing her hands through her short dark hair. After ten years in the Ph.D. program—and still no end in sight, and certainly no job on the horizon—Kata has become a pressure cooker of frustration. “Fucked! Fuck this landlord.”
“Yes! Indeed. Excellent spirit, Kata!” says Ben. “What say you then? As our ranking tenant?”
Kata stands up and kicks her heel into the couch. “All right, Ben. My lady balls are swinging low today. Fuck him. Let’s fight it.”
“Seconded,” says Geoffrey.
“Boys?” Ben asks with a nod at Runkle and Marko. Both shrug their acquiescence.
“Good. Then it’s decided. I’ll draft our letter of refusal,” says Ben. “Now, in the meantime …” He sinks back into the couch and cranks the volume on the TV. “Geoffrey! More mead!”
4
SITTING IN THE back office of The Poppy Seed, Ben waits for Frank to make an opening move toward détente. His adversary, a hollow-chested non-entity, already bears the look of defeat—the nervous adjustment of his thick-rimmed glasses, the bent shoulders, the palpable fatigue. Frank, with two young kids, an ill parent, and a mediocre-at-best career, has plainly been ground down by life.
“So I got your email,” Frank says.
“I’m glad.”
“It’s long.”
“It’s not that long. But I was trying to be thorough.”
Ben studies the state of chaos on the desktop. Amid the disarray of papers and folders is a smattering of useless objects: a magic-eight ball, a bagel-shaped pencil sharpener, a wind-up robot, a dead aloe plant, an emoji Chia pet. All items from Dickhead Debbie’s growing collection, part of a campaign to claim this shared office as her own. But none of this can get Ben down today. Last night he found a whole chicken on clearance at the Chinese grocery, just a few days past its best-before date. With a bottle of plonk and some scrounged vegetables, he can whip up a coq-au-vin for Joly, who has readily agreed to cash in her rain check tonight. In honour of the occasion, he even swung by the Sally Ann to buy himself a sharp new outfit.
“Do you realize how long it is, Ben?” asks Frank. “Because I printed it out. And it runs onto four sheets of paper. Single-spaced.” Frank lays the four printed sheets on the desk in front of Ben, one beside the other. So Ben looks them over:
Greetings and Good Morning Frank Stark:
Pleas
e consider this a follow-up to my earlier letters, the last of which, to my enduring dismay, earned no reply or acknowledgment. (Did you not receive it, I wonder? Hard to imagine, but I suppose, in these days of technological malfunctions, such things are bound to happen. If you did not in fact receive my last letter, dated July 11, I will happily resend.) The purpose of this correspondence is to bring to your attention several ongoing grievances about management at the Ossington location of The Poppy Seed. The grievances are numerous, so I have, for your convenience, and to facilitate any subsequent discussion, fit them into five broad categories. These are itemized below.
Unpaid overtime: On several occasions I have witnessed staff clock out of a shift, then return to work to complete a task that Store Manager Debbie has pronounced “urgent and necessary.” It pains me to report that I, out of a sense of fraternal solidarity with my beleaguered coworkers, have engaged in this heinous practice myself. Compelling employees to work without pay is, as you are of course aware, a violation of the Ontario labour code, as well as a violation of common human decency. The compulsion in this case arises from the general sense of terror Debbie has instilled in many of her subordinates (see point 2 below).
Climate of hostility: Store Manager Debbie has exhibited a strong tendency toward retaliatory and vengeful behaviour. This, in fact, seems to be her managerial style. Small workplace errors made by a subordinate have been punished with public beratings on the shop floor (this in front of the holy Customer, no less!). Though I suppose this may be preferential to the many other improper workplace penalties she sees fit to impose, regardless of whether the “offence” was personal or professional. Perceived personal slights are often met with unwanted schedule changes or extended sentences at the least desirable workstations for the employee under scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, this peculiar brand of (mis?)management has resulted in a hostile work environment, rife with anxiety, resentment, and fear, all of which are antithetical to the stated principles of The Poppy Seed, as detailed in the employee guidebook.
The Towers of Babylon Page 14