The Liquor Vicar

by Vince R. Ditrich

Vicar ambled along the side window that looked out on the roundabout, where some newspaper boxes stood unevenly in the gravel. “Dozens Dead in Mumbai Terrorist Blast,” a headline blared. The photo provided grisly details that made him wince.

  He absently licked the drips from his ice cream and saw a competing headline on the local rag alerting everyone: “Winds Damage Kiosk.” There was an accompanying low-res snapshot of a dishevelled roadside produce hut. It featured the hangdog owner in a hellish checked shirt pointing at a highlighted circle of missing roofing shingles. Vicar hacked out a guffaw of sheer disbelief and felt a sudden, profound cognitive dissonance.

  His vision blurred, and his hearing shut down.

  ---

  He is suddenly in a cavern, watching flickering images projected onto its walls. They show brief flashes of misery — plagues, bloodshed, cruelty, roving gangs of unhinged skinheads, auto-tuned vocalists, venal politicians, miracle diets, Kool-Aid-swilling cults, and Real Housewives of various and sundry places: things life has meted out with smiling malevolence to man and beast alike. Nobody really takes any notice; it’s all just curling wallpaper randomly plastered to the insides of their heads. He absently wipes his sticky fingers on the seam of his pants.

  Too many fixate on fictional junk. They go around and around and around. Their philosophy — if they have one — is based on price, but seldom on value. They get up at 6:00 a.m., to save twelve cents a pound on tomatoes, driving for two hours in their Bimmers to greedily snatch up a few. They aspire to extremely tidy driveways. They spend far too many Saturdays setting their belongings at right angles to show their dominion over chaos, as if that is a thing. They spend days edging their lawns to make perfectly straight lines when they could instead be talking to their kids about the history of the world and how it reveals the future. They speculate endlessly about royal engagements and celebrity divorces at their neighbours’ weekend mixers, spending far more time gathering intelligence than imparting knowledge. They are convinced that boldly stating an opinion is more important than understanding its ramifications. They distrust imagination because it is not graphable.

  They are the tactical rich — skinflint millionaires ravaging the Sally Ann, reselling their bargain booty on eBay for maximum profit, poring over flyers in order to be the early bird amongst a horde of lemmings. Life can be depicted on a balance sheet, after all. This is war, economic Darwinism, and they are at the apex. They wouldn’t leave a good tip for a waiter who had donated them an organ.

  Vicar realizes how rewarding unoriginality can be and feels encircled by blank, desolate mediocrities bereft of talent or vision — high-status garbage pickers.

  He slowly pirouettes, trancelike, in the alcove near the paint rollers. Shoppers muscle past. One truculent lady bumps him with her buggy and pretends it was an accident. He doesn’t even acknowledge her as she rolls by, despite the biting honk of her perfume hanging around her like a cloud of DEET. Somehow her rank passage seems perfectly timed.

  His mind is gyrating now, spitting out examples to buttress his case. The images now flood the cavern. A roiling cataract is unleashed.

  He stares at a thirty-dollar packet of spot remover; Lady Macbeth’s favourite, no doubt. How immaculate do they require things to be? These people buy crap and then spend nearly all their time cleaning it. My God! They are janitors who think they can buff and polish their way to providence. They call it “protecting their investment,” as if there were some mojo in a highly burnished gas barbecue that will inoculate them against their own banality.

  His head is down now, shaking slowly back and forth. One of the apron-clad employees leans into the aisle and peers at him suspiciously. Vicar puts a hand to his forehead and feels a familiar headachy gloom creep up his neck toward his temples.

  All the catastrophic hazards the human race has fought: smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, black plague, typhus, leprosy, and polio. Then, suddenly, lacking a challenge, we lose our minds over things like gluten. He imagines her, that evil demoness, Gluten, taking on multi-limbed form: the Bringer of Bloating. Before her, a field of kneeling trophy wives in perfectly fitting two-hundred-dollar jeans and superb shoes avert their flawlessly threaded brows from her blinding power. The Great Gluten holds a mobile phone in each hand, sending texts at a ferocious speed. The throng struggles to reply with novel emojis that will please her sufficiently to save themselves from doom and water retention. In the cheap seats far away from all the hubbub, the genuine celiacs sit despondent, hidden from sight by the faddish throng who study them with aspirations of someday feigning perfectly the disease that true sufferers so hate.

  Vicar replays the vicious knockout he delivered to Randy the Vile Poodle and tries to make sense of it. He knows the feckless fop deserves it and, oh, so much more, but he can’t understand why no one else ever acted, or why he was incapable of not acting, no matter the personal cost. The passivity of people stumps him. The need to act is as obvious as picking up a piece of trash on the floor in front of you or holding the door for the person behind you. Clear, normal, correct, appropriate — no-brainer stuff. Something within him stirs. No, damn it. He is not wrong. He can’t be wrong, can he?

  ---

  Vicar rocketed up from the depths of his cavern and was again in the hardware store. His ice cream had dripped all over the floor, a gooey illustration of why the sign was on the door in the first place. He banged down the mucky cone and spun on his heel. As he glided past the huffing, arrhythmic clerk at the counter fruitlessly swatting her hands together, he clapped sharply exactly once, and lo, the light bulb turned on.

  ---

  Under his own initiative, Vicar attempted to tackle creating a website for Liquor, but came to a halt early on. Staring at the screen, utterly confused, he suddenly sympathized with Poutine’s dim view of technology. “Goddamn gadgets” was Poutine’s only response besides angry scowling, which wasn’t any help. Vicar was beginning to suspect his modernization efforts would get him fired, and he was desperate for the income.

  Off the top of his head, the only person he knew who might understand all this claptrap was Jacquie O, and at any rate, it gave him a legit reason to call her. He reached for the lone phone on the premises: an ancient, chipped artifact from the late twentieth century, orange in colour and liberally spattered with expectorated food chunks and black grime. He gingerly picked it up with his fingertips and held it an inch from his ear as he looked at the number Jacquie had written on the back of an old recycling schedule.

  Vicar dialed Jacquie’s number and looked at Poutine. “I’m going to get some help with this website, then I’m going to force you to upgrade this Stone Age junk!”

  From across the shop, Poutine looked over his glasses and scowled in displeasure, but said nothing.

  Vicar got her voice mail. He nervously left a message at the beep. “Uhhh, hi, Jacquie, it’s, ahhh, Tony Vicar calling. I’m just down here at Liquor, trying to set up a website, and I’m a bit, ahh, stumped. I wonder if you know anything about this stuff. Ahhh, you mentioned that you’ve done some website work. Ahh, gimme a call, please.” He left his number twice, reciting it with extravagant clarity.

  His nose sensed Poutine’s odoriferous approach.

  “Aha,” Poutine uttered with warming interest, “sounds like you’re hot for that one.”

  Vicar was taken aback. “What? It’s just someone I met recently.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Poutine laughed. “Mr. Bossy Boots with the goddamn computer, dere. Gotta bring in yer girlfriend fer help. Better buy some quiche. I’ll come in here and she’ll be kickin’ yer ass and you’ll be in the feeble position.”

  Vicar burst out laughing.

  Nine / Halo

  Jacquie was curled up on the couch, the phone to her ear. “Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh … Mom, you’ve told me at least fifty times. I know.”

  Her mother, alone and far away, was perennially concerned that her beautiful daughter was going off the rails. First, she’d started dancing naked for m
oney like some common hussy, and then she’d kept company with a string of men, most of them old farts.

  “The last one, that Prentiss … I told you he was bad news.”

  “He was a lovely guy. He died. He really couldn’t help it.”

  “Couldn’t he have bought a car like everyone else? Who dies on a bicycle, for God’s sake? Didn’t he care about leaving you behind with a broken heart? Is that all we O’Neil women can ever look forward to?”

  Jacquie felt herself getting aggravated, then thought better of it and started laughing. “I swear I still don’t know when you’re kidding …”

  “Oh, never mind. Sometimes I don’t know myself. Now this new one, what’s he like?”

  “Uhh, not too sure. I’m just getting to know him.”

  “You call me to tell me you’re seeing someone? But you don’t know him? He’s probably another one of your grandpa types. Did you already bonk him?”

  “Mom!”

  “He must have quite the unit.”

  “Mom!”

  “Does he need blue pills?”

  “MOM!”

  ---

  Vicar stacked a display of Malbec in the corner. The shop door opened, and two people walked in. He was deep in thought about the dark, angry edge that had invaded his existence, and so it took a moment for him to recognize them as Becky and her mother. He looked at them warily but welcomed them into the store all the same.

  The girl fidgeted with something in her hands. After some awkward pleasantries, her mother said, “We just want to thank you.”

  “Thank me?” He was confused.

  “Yes, he’s been awful to Becky. Well, to both of us … This isn’t the first time …” She looked down.

  Vicar appraised them solemnly for a heartbeat and said, “Well, I’m the one who’s sorry, actually. I just snapped when I saw what he was doing to you.” He knew it was only partially true. He’d snapped all right, but his frustration had been mounting for years.

  “Mom kicked him out,” Becky began confidently, then grew soft and frightened. “I’m really scared of him.” Her voice sank down to a near whisper. “He hit Mom that day, too.”

  Unable to censor himself, Vicar blurted, “Aw, fuck.” He began to apologize for his language, but the mother stopped him.

  “We’ve wanted out for a long time,” she said. “You forced me to finally do what I should have done a long time ago.”

  Vicar stood there, hands instinctively covering his genitals, feeling as if he were naked in a courtroom.

  Becky stepped forward and extended her hand, which held a glittering object. “This is for you. It’s a halo because you were our guardian angel.”

  He took the garland and tinfoil halo from her and grasped her hand tenderly, deeply moved. A tear sprang to his eyes, and he mumbled, “Thank you, thank you.”

  ---

  “Okay, now when you scan the bottle, it finds the price for you and puts it up here on the screen,” Jacquie said. “Also, it changes the stock quantity, so you’ll know you need to replace it next time you order. For stock, you press here.” The screen flashed to all the stock in a quick blink.

  Poutine hunched over the new monitor, utterly entranced, muttering in sheer wonder, as if he were watching the very birth of life in the galaxy. Vicar stood behind the two of them, feeling the gravitational pull of Jacquie’s marvellous ass, but still managing to pay attention. She passed a little book to Vicar that contained notations written in her hand of all the usernames, passwords, and special codes they’d need to learn.

  “Put this in a safe place, gentlemen.”

  Poutine straightened up. “Safety deposit box?”

  She laughed. “No, no! Just a drawer or someplace you can’t lose it. If you have to log in or change passwords, this will be your bible.”

  Poutine snatched it out of Vicar’s hand and reverently put it in a locking drawer next to what appeared to be an old-fashioned belt-mounted mechanical change dispenser.

  Poutine stood back from all the new equipment and glanced at the glamorous website displayed on one of the monitors. He paced out to the middle of the store, gazed upon the new equipment with pride, then walked to the side and looked at it from yet another angle. He was as delighted as Vicar had ever seen him. He made a showy jog back to the staff room and returned quickly.

  “Now you take that filly out for some fancy grub,” he said, gesturing at a smiling Jacquie as he put a fistful of cash in Vicar’s hand. He was jarringly out of step with the times, but a gentleman all the same, and he was clearly grateful for all the help. It looked like he was misting up a little. He dabbed his eye with a tattered cuff and sniffed.

  Vicar, surprised at Poutine’s show of emotion, looked down at his hand and was about suggest his boss come along, too, when he realized that the pong surrounding Poutine would make eating dinner impossible. The man was incredibly kind, yet also incredibly stinky. And, so, Vicar simply accepted.

  Ten / Night of the Living Dead

  Caoilfhoinn Jacqueline O’Neil, known generally as Jacquie O, never used her first given name. No one could spell it, and few could extract Key-Linn from Caoilfhoinn. Even she herself had misspelled it on occasion, embarrassingly. It had been a tip of the hat to her Irish grandfather, but she felt very little connection to the name or the culture, other than the deep tingling she felt when Celtic music began to drone, making her desperate for a pint. But she was Canadian. There was nothing unique about liking those things here.

  She entered Tony Vicar’s tiny house and gawked openly at the sea of bric-a-brac that crowded it. His balled-up Elvis costume, hiding amongst the dust bunnies, where laundry lay in several piles, gave the room a discouraging air. The small house overflowed with random pieces of ill-matched furniture clearly collected over a lifetime of bachelorhood. What a hodgepodge, she thought.

  A gorgeous, elegant sideboard and four kitchen chairs — one nice, three cracked and wobbly. A beige La-Z-Boy clearly retrieved from a pile in a lane was positioned in the dead centre of the room. A table presumably heisted from the set of The Golden Girls was rammed in a corner. And all was set against an audio system straight out of mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  Speakers surrounded the little room, powered by towers of things she couldn’t identify that blinked and were covered with knobs. It all looked like a slob’s spaceship. How was it that men could obsess over the tiniest detail of a woman’s anatomy, yet happily live in the contents of an overturned dump truck? If ever there were a house that needed a woman’s touch, it was this one.

  Vicar waved an aerosol can around just ahead of her in the vain hope of disguising the stale male odour. Ugh. Now it smells like somebody shat Banff.

  Everything was covered in magazines, seashells, old chunks of rock, unopened mail, antique tourist souvenirs, and dirty dishes. There was a small diploma so faded that she couldn’t make out the writing on it in the oblique light, guitars and their cases leaning against every vertical surface, books stacked up the far wall to eye level, a large mounted print of some man holding a saxophone, a giant statue of a dinosaur that came from Drumheller, an accordion, a colour picture of Earth, and two or three vintage pinups. The pinups interested her, so she strolled over to inspect them.

  The pine-fresh scent settled upon her like a sylvan glade of nausea. Breathing into her sleeve for momentary relief, she began her research. “Have you ever been married?” The answer was starkly apparent, yet strangely, she felt nervous asking.

  “No. No. Close, but no cigar,” Vicar said glibly. “I’m told I am too hard to live with, but I disagree. I just like my space.”

  Jacquie turned to meet his gaze, then swiftly surveyed the jumbled scene before her and suppressed a chuckle.

  “So, when did you start DJing?” she asked, gently guiding the conversation away from matrimony.

  “When I lost my job.”

  “Doing what?” she asked.

  “Most recently I sold stereos.” He waved
his arm at the equipment taking up his living room. “But I play in bands on the weekends, too.”

  “Oh, yah,” she replied with a Canuck glottal stop, “any bands I might know?” She suddenly sounded so young.

  He looked up and put his hand to his chin. “Uhh, Fibreglass Tigress? Prog Rock. Pete had a gong. Pretty cool. No? What about Lady in Her Eighties? Loverboy Tribute. I had red leather pants.” He started singing. “She’s turning on the heating pad, she’s got phlebitis a touch … Oooh and she’s a million above … Hot flashin’ love!”

  Jacquie’s eyes widened as she leaned imperceptibly away from him.

  “Not that one either? Hmmm. The Wizards of Awz-Some? Lots of Elton John. The old stuff, before he started singing about the Circle of fucking Life,” Vicar said sagaciously. “What about the Artificial Hip? That’s our tribute to the Perennially Hip, who are a tribute to the Tragically Hip. We had a great show at Memorial Hall two years ago — we rented this huge light show and the same PA that Trooper used the night before.”

  He went on at some length about wattage, something called a “sage plot” or maybe “stage pot,” the band members’ nicknames (Tin Ear was one that stuck in her memory) and monitor problems — it sounded like he’d said “feet-back” (but that was anatomically impossible, wasn’t it?). She could barely understand him. He was babbling at top speed, assuming she understood all his lingo. He added an unrelated sidebar about an amplifier borrowed from someone named Zonk.

  He then climaxed with a well-rehearsed set piece about the song they’d dedicated to a buddy who had just lost a hundred pounds after a two-year-long diet. It was a send-up called “Lou Ortiz Is Shrinking But I Don’t Want to Slim.” Hi-lar-ious, of course.

  She nodded her head, gamely trying to follow along, but losing the thread as he trilled in a tangential flareup of exuberance.

  “You still play, don’t you?” she asked, hoping to redirect the flow of his outburst. His boyish enthusiasm was not what attracted her, so she focused on his grey temples.