“Magic ingredient kryptonite is.”
“Kryptonite!”
Superman was about to induce vomiting with his middle finger when Yoda said, “Frightened be not! It is only at a strength useful for flavour, not enough that you lose your superpowers.”
The martinis were tasty. “You’re not shitting me? No lost powers? Seasoning only?”
“I shit you not. Mix you another I will.”
“Done.”
Soon Superman was hanging out at the bar every day, from its noon opening time until 2 a.m., with a few time outs at the Wendy’s next door, plus one isolated incident when he chased down a teenager who’d jimmied the Hyundai logo off the front grille of his car. Being drunk, he miscalculated his speed, and the offending delinquent was flattened like a taco shell between Superman’s body and the wall of the local rental storage facility. But nobody had witnessed the event, so Superman squished the teenager into a diamond and, once back in the bar, tossed the diamond toward the barflies.
“Nasty little prick.”
Yoda said, “Hear you I did not. Mr. Superman, I am sorry to inform you, but you owe several thousands of dollars for the martinis you so much like.”
“Bar tab, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Forget cash. I know, how about I pay you in…diamonds?”
“Diamonds I like.”
“Good.”
Superman picked up the new diamond from the floor and gave it to a smiling Yoda, who promptly made him another kryptonite martini. All was well for several days, until his next bar tab came due. Superman excused himself, went outside, jumped up and flew around the skies for a bit, trying to find someone committing a crime who might deserve the fate of crystallization. Finally, he saw some guy holding up a rice warehouse. With just a small amount of vigilance, Superman was able to snag him and crush him, and soon he had Yoda’s diamond.
But as the months passed, Superman’s superpowers waned. And there came the fateful evening when, upon capturing a burglar in the act of entering somebody’s rear window, instead of being able to squish the perp into a diamond, all he created was a blob of stinking bloody mess that got all over his crime-fighting suit.
Shit.
Superman’s crimes grew uglier as his superpowers dwindled to mortal levels. Yoda, addicted to Superman’s diamonds, refused to accept any other form of payment. Superman tried offering a Patek Philippe watch he’d ripped from the wrist of some guy who was selling weed behind an Office Warehouse. No go.
And so he robbed a Zales in the strip mall off the interstate. Bad decision. He fell down on the third bullet; by the sixth bullet, he was dead.
Back at the bar, Yoda trawled the news sites for exposés on Superman’s private life: the whores, the spare bedroom filled with emptied and unrecycled cans of Boost and Ensure, the back taxes that went all the way back to the Reagan administration. Yoda sighed, fondled his sack of diamonds, and then smiled as he looked up and saw Batman enter the bar.
“Ah, Batman. The drink just for you I think I am having.”
McWage
One observation I’ve often heard from European friends and visitors to North America is “It’s as if every single person in your culture has worked at one or more restaurants in their life.” I’d never thought of it before, but they’re right. I can’t think of anyone in my orbits who hasn’t waited tables or bussed or dish-washed or cooked for some stretch. Europeans visiting Canada or the States: remember that restaurant memories are a great conversation starter; almost everyone you encounter will have tales of psychotic bosses, Christmas morning shifts and après-work partying excesses.
Working in a restaurant when you’re young doesn’t necessarily mean minimum wage (though it usually does). For many people, minimum wage is a stage-of-life thing that we all work through and gaze back on with rose-tinted glasses. When I put the word McJob in my 1991 novel Generation X, I wanted a word to describe a “low-paying, low-prestige dead-end job that requires few skills and offers very little chance of intracompany advancement.” It made sense then and it makes sense now. Back in the early 1990s, I began to see the start of a process that’s currently in full swing: the defunding or elimination of the mechanisms by which we once created and maintained a healthy middle class. What was once a stage of life is now turning into, well, all of life.
In the early 1990s I wanted to set a book in a fast-food restaurant, and in order to make field notes, I tried extremely hard to get a job in various Vancouver-area McDonald’s restaurants, but as a reasonably well-nourished male in his mid-thirties with no references on his application, I rang too many alarm bells. I never got a job, and good on fast food for having HR mechanisms that can filter out infiltrators like me. A decade later I ended up setting a blackly comic novel (The Gum Thief) in a Staples, which is basically fast food but with reams of photocopier paper instead of pink goo–burgers. The point in doing so was to foreground the fact that a minimum-wage job is simply not a way to live life fully, and to be earning such a wage past a certain age casts a spell of doom upon your days, sort of like those middle-class Argentineans who lost their jobs in the crash fifteen years ago and never went back to being middle-class again.
McDonald’s campaigned for years and ultimately failed to get the word McJob struck from the Oxford English Dictionary, even renting a big screen in Piccadilly Circus in 2006 to put forth their viewpoint. The saga of this campaign is a fun read on Wikipedia, but given the accelerating shrinkage of the middle class, the McLawsuit seems like a frivolous corporate bonbon from a nearly vanished era. Discussions of a minimum wage still seem to have a nasty bite. As I’ve said before, we’re all going to be working at McDonald’s into our eighties, and the relentless parade of numbers that are making this clear to us is starting to really frighten people. It’s really happening.
I guess the thing that bugs me about current minimum-wage dialogue is that the minimum wage has gone from being a drop-dead minimum salary that, if nothing else, protected the young, the weak and the less able from being exploited (and the moment people can exploit others, they will, and we all know it) into an idea implying that if you can’t get by on a minimum wage—rent, food, transport, life—then tough luck, sucker; you don’t deserve anything at all…and it’s all your fault…and by the way, you’ve forfeited your voice and participation in your culture.
The minimum wage is a shield behind which politicians can deflect any social criticism that might be central to people who need a minimum wage—student life and education, most social and medical services, artistic and creative life and whatever else you can think of—and basically say, “Well, look, we gave you a minimum wage, didn’t we? So what’s your problem now? If you can’t stretch your minimum wage into food, shelter, lodging, medical, dental and education, then I guess it just sucks to be you.”
Minimum wage has gone from being a device created to protect the worst of power and labour imbalances to a fiscal panacea that allows its wielders to gut valuable social infrastructure while smiling beneath the cheesiest of haloes. I was twenty-eight when I wrote Generation X, but the last time I was officially an employee anywhere was in August of 1989—so technically I’ve been unemployed for the past twenty-five years. But about once a month I have this recurring dream in which I suddenly realize that I’m unemployed, broke and living in a basement suite, and I desperately need a job—and so my mind automatically goes to having to work in a fast-food restaurant. The sensation is terrifying, because how on earth is anyone going to be able to live on what you make there? And then I wake up and say, “Phew. I’ve still got a few decades left before manning the french-fry computer. Dang, life is good.”
Lotto
Thirty years ago I was staying over at my parents’ on my birthday, December 30. Around nine in the morning, I heard my dad cursing from down the hallway. My mother’s aunt Constance had phoned from Victoria, on Vancouver Island, and had not only woken my father from a deep sleep but also told him that the lottery tick
et he’d put in her Christmas stocking was a big winner.
$%#^&!!!
Well, that’s life.
But apparently there was a complication: Aunt Con had lost the actual ticket. My father was not thrilled. “You what?!?!?!”
As my family’s “finder” (every family has one), I was called to duty and instructed to get dressed and take the ferry over to help Aunt Con find her ticket.
No problem.
When I arrived, maybe six hours later, Aunt Con’s face was beet red and her facial muscles were wrung like a dishcloth. Her furniture was upended, the contents of drawers and cupboards emptied. I asked my great-aunt to sit down and take a quick breather. You can imagine the sort of day she’d had in her head.
So we inhaled and exhaled, and then I looked down at the coffee table and saw a runner on top of it. I lifted it up and there was the ticket: ta-da!
Except the thing was, Aunt Con had made a mistake. A few days earlier she’d seen the winning numbers in the newspaper and written them down on a sheet of paper that she’d stuck to her fridge door; later she looked at the numbers, forgetting where they’d come from, thinking they were the numbers on a ticket she’d bought…
If you ever wonder what it looks like to witness someone lose several million dollars, let me tell you, it is a dreadful sight. I hightailed it out of Victoria very quickly, and the Day of the Ticket entered family lore.
Fifteen years later I wrote a small indie movie, Everything’s Gone Green, which used the story of Aunt Con’s ticket almost verbatim. Along with it, I created a minor mathematical theory called “birthday people.” A birthday person is someone who uses calendar dates as a means of generating lucky numbers—a very common tendency. People who win the big lottery jackpots are people who pity birthday people.
Big winners use the numbers from thirty-two to forty-nine (most lotteries use forty-nine as their numerical end point), thus lowering the chance of having to share a big win with people who chose the same numbers—birthday people. And it turns out there’s a small but genuine mathematical basis for this. My birthday theory may not be the Fibonacci series, but I’ll happily take credit for it.
I think there’s something inherently cruel about lotteries. They’re like a surtax on desperation. A friend of a friend used to work a ticket booth at a local mall. I asked him when they sold the most tickets and he said, “That’s easy: immediately after last week’s winning number is drawn. That way they can hold on to their ticket all week and get the maximum amount of hope out of it.”
I don’t buy lottery tickets because they spook me. If you buy a one-in-fifty-million chance to win a cash jackpot, you’re simultaneously tempting fate and adding all sorts of other bonus probabilities to your plane of existence: car crashes, random shootings, being struck by a meteorite. Why open a door that didn’t need opening?
Gambling is apparently the hardest of all addictions to shake. When you quit smoking or oxycodone, you know you’ve stopped, but former gamblers are still always gambling in their minds, even if they’re not at the racetrack, or buying lotto tickets, or playing the stock market online in the family den.
I like Las Vegas but I don’t get the gambling part of it. Let me see: I have two hundred dollars, which I then incrementally set fire to over the course of an hour or so. At the end the money I once had is gone. Who thought this was a good idea? I’ve noticed over the years that people who go to Vegas always lie about how much they won there. It’s always one hundred to two hundred dollars, and they always say something along the lines of, “I never gamble much, but I thought I’d give it a shot and I came out $150 ahead.” It’s uncanny how common this highly specific lie is. Watch for it in future.
I read something last week and it made sense to me: people want other people to do well in life but not too well. I’ve never won a raffle or prize or lottery draw, and I can’t help but wonder how it must feel. One moment you’re just plain old you, and then whaam, you’re a winner and now everyone hates you and wants your money. It must be bittersweet. You hear all those stories about how big lottery winners’ lives are ruined by winning, but that’s not an urban legend. It’s pretty much the norm. Be careful what you wish for and, while you’re doing so, be sure to use the numbers between thirty-two and forty-nine.
Frugal
In art school my friends called me Dougal, which rhymes with frugal. Because of this, I thought that being frugal, or cheap, might be a funny, loveable or endearing personality characteristic—so, why not? For a few years I thought I was being amusing with cheapness until my friend Angela took me aside one day and said, “Dougal, you have to stop being cheap. It is incredibly unattractive and it makes it almost impossible to like you.” I thought it over and realized she was correct. I stopped being cheap immediately and have never been wilfully cheap again. It was good advice.
Follow-up: Angela ended up marrying a Dutch guy, and this became my introduction to Dutch culture. She told me a joke about the Dutch: How did copper wire get invented? Two Dutchmen found a penny at the same time. LOL! Not really. But watching people be cheap in real life—to be specific, watching people taking pride in cheapness—is depressing. There has never in the history of the Earth been a woman or man who has been sexually turned on by an act of cheapness. There has never been a single person who saw someone be cheap—someone who wilfully undertipped, someone who chose an inferior brand of ingredient and subverted the quality of a meal, or someone who purchased unflattering garments in the wrong size and colour because they were on sale—and said, “Hey, that penny-pincher there, that’s the one I want to have kids with.”
I’ve written before that worrying about money is a bit like having locked-in syndrome—except you’re still able to move around and be a part of the world. But imagine marrying someone only to find out too late they’re a spendaholic—would that have been a deal-breaker, had you known? Or imagine marrying someone who turned into a creaky, prematurely aged miser—would that be a deal-breaker for you?
Supposedly, the three things you can control in this world are time, dirt and money. This comes from Freud, I believe—except when I Google it, it comes up blank. Still, it makes sense. As people age they fixate on these three things. We all know perpetually late people: they twigged on to this control mechanism ages ago, and it’s annoying and uncute. We all know super-clean freaks and don’t like visiting their places because we know that we trail germs, and in their heads they’re seeing wavy stink lines of pathogens wafting off our bodies.
Then there are cheap people. I mean, how is cheapness going to make anybody think better of you? Really think this through: the best that can come from adopting a cheapskate persona is a low-level clerical job with no prospect of advancement because people want to elevate people who think big. Saving five bucks by ordering an inferior snack tray for the office Christmas party is something everybody notices—it’s a bad impression that, once made, is almost impossible to rectify.
Would Richard Branson or Elon Musk order the cheaper snack tray? No. They’d hire Cirque du Soleil and dress them up in snack costumes and have them do trampoline acrobatics. People would probably die in the process, but everyone would treasure the memory, and they’d expect even crazier batshit the next time.
When you meet self-made rich people who are cheap, possibly it’s cheapness that got them there—but maybe they could relax a bit and make it look like a blast, like Richard Branson does. It’s way weirder when you meet cheap rich people who inherited their money. Then it gets messy and psychological and taps into low self-worth and family drama.
Andy Warhol said that the difference between rich people and everyone else is that rich people have more interesting problems.
I think he was right.
So who are you trying to impress when you’re being cheap? The only answer that comes to mind is “a younger version of yourself,” or perhaps your parents if they didn’t have much money to throw around, which is most of us. But the thing is, you’re old now
. You’re pretty much being cheap to an audience of ghosts. So if you’re not cheap, then what are you supposed to be—thrifty? Really? Actually, yes. Boring but true. Thrift is often called for. Thrift is simply not broadcasting and not taking pride in having a common-sense approach to money. It’s not a turn-on, but it’s not a turnoff either. It’s neutral, like being right-handed or having wavy hair. Oh, you’re thrifty. Good. Now let’s discuss other people’s problems.
Zoë Hears the Truth
Once upon a time there was a princess, Zoë, who had no brothers or sisters. Since she was fated to become queen, she spent much of her early life wondering exactly what it is a queen does, aside from displaying excellent table manners and cutting ribbons at the openings of horticultural festivals. Her parents had always told her that when her day came, she’d receive special instruction. In the meantime she was told to enjoy life.
So Princess Zoë went to the gym. She read ancient scrolls. She played tennis. In order to promote her kingdom’s industrial base, she once had lunch with a Japanese-made robot that simulated Elton John. It was an interesting life, but then one day during a month of heavy rains and floods, her father became sick and a hush fell over the castle. He called Zoë to his bedside and said, “It’s time we had a talk.”
Zoë’s stomach fluttered because she knew this was when she was to receive her special instructions on how to be queen. “What is it, Father?”
Rain drummed on the ancient leaded glass windows.
“It’s simple, really. You need to know that your mother and I don’t believe in anything.”
Zoë was shocked. “What did you say, Father?”
“Your mother and I don’t believe in anything.”
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