The Slip

by Mark Sampson

  “My grad students decided to cancel class, so I’m getting a jump on lunch.”

  He nodded without comment, then pumped me a small sample of the day’s cask ale, and put it before me. The name of this craft brew was — perhaps fittingly — Pompous Ass, and I downed it, deemed it worthy, and ordered a pint. “I’ll get you a menu,” he said, but did so without making eye contact.

  Let me tell you what I know about Phillip. While barmanship is how he pays the bills, he is completely committed to his true vocation — that of a “dedicated father.” He rises at 5:30 every morning to work with his wife to get their three small children dressed, fed, and out the door. He makes it all sound like a game of roller derby. He then comes here promptly for nine to prep the pub for the day. He serves customers all afternoon, and often pulls evening shifts if needed. Unlike most barmen, he gets his weekends off, but when I ask how he’s spending his Saturday and Sunday, he inevitably says the same thing: “Oh, you know, raising children.” He says this with a touch of fatigue, but also joyful anticipation. He makes my own attempts at parenthood look like loutish indolence. Despite Phillip’s busy schedule, I am always impressed by how well-informed he is of current events, and he and I will have invigorating chats across the bar about everything from City Hall buffoonery to American imperialism in the Middle East.

  “You want to pull the trigger on anything?” he asked, nodding at the menu, and I ordered what for me was a standard Friday lunch at Stout. Today: soup of the day (chicken min­estrone), followed by a blue cheese burger and fries, followed by a brownie-and-whipped-cream sundae for dessert. All washed down, of course, with three proud pints of the cask ale. A lunch like that is going to knock your average man on his arse, but not me. No, sir. After a lunch like that I want to go out and accomplish things. I do some of my best, most inspired writing on Friday afternoons.

  As I worked my way through today’s meal, I tried to engage Phillip, as I typically do, about various things going on in the news, but he seemed reluctant to return fire in kind. This was unlike him. At first I thought it was because I had come so early and the pub wasn’t quite ready to serve customers: Phillip was still doing a lot of his prep. But then I noticed again that he was hesitating to make eye contact with me. And that’s when I clued in: Oh, right — I am the news today.

  As if to confirm this, something odd and coincidental happened during dessert. My face appeared on the muted TV above the bar, which was tuned to Toronto’s CityNews channel. I was just spooning some brownie out of the bottom of the sundae dish when Phillip and I glanced up at the screen together. There it was, a still photo of my furry and dishevelled countenance, with my name and position at U of T underneath. Phillip and I looked at each other, our eyes widening in unison.

  I swallowed. “Any chance,” I said, “that we could get some sound on that thing?”

  He scrambled over to the small laptop that was supplying the pub with music (Coffee House Alternative was the name of the feed — very tasteful) and killed it. Then he fumbled briefly with the remote as he tried to unmute the television. But by the time he did, the segment was over and CityTV had switched back to its pretty, ethnically ambiguous anchor.

  “Shit,” I said. “I really wish I’d caught that.”

  “It’ll cycle back around,” Phillip said, “eventually.” He turned to go with diffidence, once more not looking me in the eye. So I just called over to him outright: “What do you make of all this?”

  He turned and gave me one of his timid barman shrugs. Deep down, Phillip knew I was a good man, and an even better tipper, so he chose his words carefully. “I have to admit,” he said, “reading the paper on my way in this morning, I was surprised. I didn’t think that was going to be your response to the media.”

  “Look, that reporter caught me in a rage,” I blundered. “Some Internet troll had just attacked my stepdaughter online. And, you know, I … I …” I gave him a pleading look. You understand, don’t you, Phillip? One father to another? You don’t go after a man’s daughter like that, no matter how mad you are. You just don’t. I sighed. “I should have just kept my mouth shut.”

  He shrugged again. “That’s not really an option anymore, is it? But you know, Philip, it’s never too late to start doing the right thing.” He nodded at my nearly finished sundae and empty pint glass. “Did you want anything else?”

  “No, just the bill,” I replied. He printed it off and brought it over in its little leather holder, and I paid him. Tipped him well.

  “Take care, Phillip.”

  “Take care, Philip.”

  And for the first time in all the years I’d been coming to Stout Irish Pub, I left without a spring in my step.

  A half hour later, I came potting out of Donlands Station on the Danforth, turning left to head north and toward the address that Raj had provided me. As I set out, I came upon a small, hole-in-the-wall barbershop, one of those narrow east-end shacks. Through its window, just below the stencilled barber’s pole, I could see a long wooden shelf and, upon it, amidst old magazines and the day’s papers, a box of poppies for sale. I paused. Eyed it up. Went in.

  “Haircut, sir?” asked the geriatric barber as he rose from his barber’s chair, the middle one in a row of three.

  “No, sorry,” I said, going to the shelf, “I just came in to buy a poppy.” I dug my sole piece of change, a toonie, out of my hip pocket and pushed it through the box’s slot. I selected a poppy, pinching it by its pin, and headed for the door.

  “Well, come on back if you want me to do something about that hair.”

  I gave him a queer glance as I stumbled back out to the street. I looked at the poppy, the third I had bought in the last week, fucking greedy veterans, and began manoeuvring it onto my lapel as I set off again. This was my mistake: one should never attempt to pin a poppy while walking after three pints at lunch. My fingers fumbled just as a stiff squall of wind came up, and the poppy leaped from my grasp and took to the air like a tiny red kite. I watched it descend to the ground, scuttle like a crab across the sidewalk, and then — ploonk! — disappear down an open sewer grate.

  “Oh, goddamn it!”

  Needless to say, my mood was pretty sour by the time I arrived at Raj’s apartment. The place was as he had described it: the bottom half of a ramshackle house with an open porch, a rarity in Toronto’s east end. I climbed up and rang the bell. As I waited, I looked over at his gleaming SUV in the driveway, what he no doubt used to lug his videography equipment around.

  Raj threw open the door with great drama, as was his wont. “You whiskey-soaked so-and-so,” he started in, “you herring-choked cock-knocker! You made it — and early, too.”

  “Class got cancelled,” I muttered as I shuffled inside.

  Raj gave me the once-over. “Jesus, Sharpe, you look like hell.”

  He was one to talk. He was dressed in a shabby bathrobe over a tank top and a pair of board shorts, his peanut-coloured feet squeezed into a set of ancient flip-flops. The archetypal ensemble of the freshly unemployed.

  “It’s been a rough week,” I told him.

  “Tell me about it.”

  We came in to the apartment’s living room, the air of which was profuse with the loamy scent of marijuana. “The man of the hour has arrived,” Raj announced, and introduced me to the two other members of the CBC precariat: a black kid in dark-rimmed glasses and LA Lakers cap named Jerome; and a kid of perhaps Chinese descent named Walter, whose ponytailed hair and tiny moustache made him look like a two-bit villain from a seventies kung fu movie.

  “Let’s get you a drink,” Raj said with hospitality, and fetched a half-empty bottle of Grant’s blended off the heavily painted windowsill. Grant’s blended? Jeez, Raj, why don’t you just serve me toilet water? Gawd, my mood was foul. He came over and poured some of the whiskey into — yes, you guessed it, readers — a small Mason jar, and then handed it to me. I took a s
ip and tried not to make a face.

  “Would you like some merry-joo-wanna?” groaned Walter from his place on the couch, his eyes like two pissholes in the snow, and extended the roach to me.

  “Thank you, no,” I replied. “I never touch the stuff.” It was true. While the science on Mary Jane’s carcinogenic properties remained inconclusive, one thing was consistent across everything I had read: regular users experienced what clinicians referred to as “reduced life achievement.” This did not wash with a compulsively Type A like me, and so I abstained. I watched as Walter took another blow on his J, then handed it gingerly to Jerome. It’s disturbing, I thought as I raised the Mason jar once more to my lips, what some people will put in their bodies.

  The four of us chewed the fat for a while as I took in Raj’s bachelor paradise. Indeed, it was the kind of place you kept if you had no one to think about other than yourself: the unwashed dinner plates on his coffee table, the crowded ashtray, the towering stack of car magazines. But the more I gawked around Raj’s living room, the more I realized that this wasn’t a room for living at all. He had, rather, set it up like a television studio. There was a giant mixing board and editing equipment laid out on a long desk below the enormous flat-screen TV on his wall. He had no fewer than three video cameras on a shelf in one corner, their tripods collapsed and stacked neatly below. In the opposite corners stood two studio lights, each wearing a bonnet-like nylon screen atop its thin stand. And I counted at least four different types of microphones unplugged and scattered around the room. In fact, Raj had enough equipment here to film an entire TV show. I creased my brow at that. Thought about it. Felt the tickle of an idea emerge in my mind.

  But before I could voice it, he addressed me about the real reason I was here, and I zoned back in. “Okay, Dr. Economy,” he said, “give it to us straight. Are these boys fucked or what?”

  “Yeah, you’re pretty fucked,” I said. “I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want to be unemployed right now.” This didn’t exactly engender a positive response, and so I leaped in with a quick caveat. “Look, it’s not rocket science, boys. The ticket to survival — especially if you work in anything creative — is adaptability. I mean, you know this, right? Raj mentioned you both have massive student loans, so I’ll assume you’re well-educated. What do you have, can I ask?”

  I was mortified by their responses, which were nearly identical. Both had done about two years of an undergraduate degree — commerce for Jerome, marketing for Walter — before dropping out and moving back into their parents’ basements, where they spent the next couple years smoking pot and playing video games. They finally emerged and enrolled in a program for studio production at a high-priced vocational college. Their subsequent stint at the CBC was the only real job experience they had.

  Wow. It was worse than I thought. To have your undergrad background in the two areas of study designed to make you stupider, and then to limit yourself with a technical diploma so early in your career. No wonder they felt doomed. Someone like me should have intervened in their lives earlier, letting them know that if they had any aptitude for creativity at all, they should have done a broad-based liberal arts degree instead, which would have opened doors for these boys rather than closed them, via the simple fact that it would have taught them how to open a door in their minds. Gawd, commerce and marketing — what were their parents thinking? But I was too late. This sort of cri de cœur was not going to penetrate the haze of their pot smoke now.

  “Look,” I said, “the key here is the ability to switch gears on the fly, okay. I mean the idea that one institution is going to provide you with thirty-five years of employment is an anachronism from the last century.”

  “So says the guy with tenure at U of T,” Raj smirked.

  “I was lucky,” I replied, choking down the last dribble of Grant’s before Raj refilled my Mason jar. “The world was a different place in 1993. The public still believed — just barely — in funding public institutions. People still wanted to be engaged citizens and not just taxpayers looking to save a buck.” This led me into my standard rant against neo-liberalism, and how the ideology of privatization had laid ruin to all manner of public institutions — everything from universities and our alleged public broadcaster to libraries and hospitals. I went on and on about it. I could see I was starting to lose the boys, so I threw in a reference to popular culture to reel them back in. “Neo-liberalism is like the Borg on Star Trek,” I said, “assimilating and homogenizing everything in its path.” I told them if they wanted to stop being a cog in a ruthlessly efficient machine, they needed to stand up for themselves. Convince people to stop voting for pro-business scumbags and start believing in the value — the categorical value — of robust and well-funded institutions again.

  “Look, man,” Jerome cut in, “that’s all well and good, but I need money now, man. If I don’t make, like, seven hundred dollars before the end of the next week, I’ll have to move back in with my parents — again.”

  “Well, that actually brings up an idea for me,” I said. I looked at the three of them. “You all know I’m in a bit of hot water with the general public, right?”

  “Yeah, dude,” Walter replied, squeezing out his words as if through a straw, “you’re the one who’s fucked.”

  “Yes, I am,” I said, “quite. Fucked. So I have a proposition for you.” I turned to Raj. “Raj, do you need some kind of special permit to upload a video to YouTube?” Of course, I knew the answer the instant these words left my lips, and the three of them laughed at me. “Okay, okay. Here’s my thinking. I need a bit of a soapbox to explain what happened on Monday. To tell people that I realize what I said was wrong, and to say what I really believe, in my heart of hearts, about this whole issue. But I don’t just want to sit in front of a webcam to do that. As my wife and others have pointed out, I need to pull off something big to fix all this.” I took another glance around the room. “I noticed you have quite a bit of TV equipment here. So maybe I could hire the three of you to make a professional production of it.”

  Raj mulled on this, but then nodded. “Could work.”

  “How long should something like that run for?”

  “I dunno, Sharpe — attention spans on the web are pretty short.” He shrugged. “I’d say eight, maybe nine minutes, max.”

  “So what’s that?” I did a quick calculation based on delivering conference papers. “About 1,500 words, right?”

  “Yeah, give or take.”

  “Fifteen hundred,” I said. “I could definitely articulate what I want to say in fifteen hundred words. And how much would you guys charge to produce something like that?”

  He shrugged again. “We talking just you in front of a camera?”

  “Well, I may want to incorporate some graphics, to illustrate my points. Maybe a bit of music for the intro and outro.”

  So the three of them discussed it briefly, and then came up with a number.

  “That’s entirely reasonable,” I said, and grew excited. “So we can do this?”

  “Yeah, Sharpe, we can do it.” He chortled. “We’re happy to take your money, if this is what you want to do.”

  “It is,” I said. “I mean, I realize a lot of people are upset by what I said during that debate, and I just want to make amends. You know?”

  “Yeah, no, absolutely.”

  “Okay — so when can we do this?”

  Raj scratched his cheek. “Well, I’m actually heading up to Barrie tomorrow morning. I gotta help my worthless brother move out of his flophouse and into another flophouse — plus handle some assorted family bullshit with my ex and her brats while I’m there. Anyway. I’m not back until Tuesday night.”

  “So Wednesday,” I said. “Wait — that’s Remembrance Day.” I turned to Walter and Jerome. “Is that going to be a problem for you boys?”

  They both made little farting noises of sarcasm. “Dude, I got n
uthin’ on,” said Walter.

  “Me either,” said Jerome.

  “Lovely,” I told them. “So, Raj, I’ll write up the script over the weekend and email it to you. You can send me some thoughts on how we might film it when you get a chance, and then we’ll all reconvene here on, say, Wednesday afternoon?”

  “Works for me.”

  So I got up then and went to my satchel. Pulled out my chequebook and cut them each a deposit for their time. The boys’ eyes swelled at the sight of the money, and Raj refilled my Mason jar once more. They invited me to stick around: they were going to put on The Big Lebowski, which seemed to be everyone’s favourite film. I took them up on their offer, even though I had seen the movie twice and didn’t care for it. Indeed, I got up and left halfway through, wishing the three of them well. I really needed to get back to the house, and besides, the end of that movie just made no fucking sense.

  Dusk fell as I doddered up the steps of 4 Metcalfe Street and in the door. I expected, and found, the same chilly aura that had been there when I’d left, a fug of execration, a castrating chill clinging to every corner. Simone was at the dining-room table engaging with her phone, and didn’t look up when we exchanged greetings. Naomi was staging a slumber party among her dolls on the living-room floor. Grace was in the kitchen, spreading pizza dough onto two round pans, our Friday night tradition. I asked what I could do to help, and she gestured to the vegetables on the counter. So I chopped peppers and mushrooms while she grated the mozzarella and painted the dough with tomato sauce, and then we decorated the pizzas together.

  “Do you want wine with dinner?”

  “I’m breathing, aren’t I?”

  Forty-five minutes later, the four of us sat in relative silence at the dinner table over our pizza. Even Naomi, normally chatty during suppertime, seemed to know not to say too much right now. When we finished, Simone and I cleared the table and then I asked if she would take her sister upstairs for her bath. “Be very careful with the faucet,” I said. “It’s still scalding.” When they were gone, I looked at Grace as she sat there, sipping her wine like a bored queen at court.