HAVE SINCE I CAN REMEMBER

HAVE SINCE I CAN REMEMBER by JOHN STILES
(Another, earlier unpublished short story. It was written in 1994 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was the fourth short story I ever wrote. It was inspired by Catcher in The Rye. I can imagine you might roll your eyes at that one. I used to show these stories to fellow wait staff at The Keg Halifax where I worked as a waiter. I was experimenting with the 'first person' voice. I remember this story, I found it in some old files. I liked the flow of it but I didn't have a place for it to go. I remember some of those waiters liked the story enough to quote the "Have since I can remember part." This was before I moved up to Toronto.

HAVE SINCE I CAN REMEMBER by JOHN STILES

My younger brother’s a tall guy with glasses, big ears, a funny way a walkin that makes it look like he got no ass. I guess you could say he slouches. I hang out with my brother as much as I can. I always hope some of what he got’ll rub off on me. Some of his brains. I always have wanted some a that. Have since I can remember.

Most times, if you ask me a question I can come up with a snappy answer. If you give me enough time, that is. That’s not to say I’m some kind of smartass, cause I’m not. It is just that most times I say what I want. And I hate tellin lies. I’ve always been that way I guess. Have since I can remember.

Me and my father, we don’t get along too good. But that’s no big deal. He don’t drink or nothin like that. He just likes his food on the table at twenty past five and likes tellin my mother what his buddies been up to at the lumber yard. He thinks he’s smarter than them boys at work the way he goes on about their antics. Sometimes I think if I walked in there, to visit him, I’d see him sittin by himself eatin his nice sandwiches that my mother made for him special and then I’d see the rest of the boys carrying on playin cards, jokin with each other laughing at him and the way he thinks he’s better than all them. Of course, I can’t really say for sure what goes on at the lumberyard. I ain’t ever visited my father. And he’s worked there a long time.


I see my brother a coupla times a week. He got some kinda new stereo system that he taught me how to use. I like to play the music he hates. It gets him real mad. He listens most times to Classical Jazz , shit like that. I’ll always love my Whitney Houston records. O, yeah I guess I should mention my brother sniffs a lot and his nose is always running like its winter outside. I always bring over a box a tissue when I come. My mother sends it with me. She thinks he got a cold. Still I don’t tell her otherwise. My brother’d kill me if I said anything. And I always have loved my brother. Have since I can remember.

The dog my brother lives with shits too much indoors. Usually when I come over I gotta clean it up before I can do too much else. The stink is just too much. Shit is shit no matter how old it gets. Stinks till it goes all mouldy. The dog’s name is Dyon – short for Dyon-is-i-us. Smart name for a stupid dog that always hides when I come inside. Still I don’t hit it or nothin like that. But I don’t pet it either. I tried that once and it was a mistake. The goddamn dog wagged its tail and leaked piss all over the place. And piss stinks just as bad as shit except piss don’t stink till it gets old. And then it stinks worse.

My brother got a scholarship at McGill to study classics. He never went though. My father said my mother would do something crazy if he left.

“Yah.” I said onetime to my father, “Like go an visit him on Saturdays.”

My father just gave me the look. I laughed at him and stared back at him. It made him get even more mad. My brother says you got to understand my father.

“He’s just angry” my brother says.

Lots of people are angry I’d say. Even them people my brother is with are angry. Of course, they’re smiling when they’re with him. But afterwards they just seem angry.

One girl named Sally my brother likes more than the rest. She got some kinda skinny ass body. Sometimes she writes a little poetry on paper she finds laying around the house. Sometimes she waits with me for my brother to come in if he’s out. Sometimes she helps me clean up the house. She told me I was cute a couple of times. I didn’t take it too serious though. Specially when she passed out right afterwards with a magazine open. One time she drooled onto the carpet and the dog came by and licked it up. She got all pasty white on me. And she didn’t wake up for awhile. Still I like Sally more than the rest a’ those girls that come around. Yep. Have since I can remember.

We got high class cousins up in Toronto. I met them once when my uncle Maury died back in the late eighties. They held a funeral for him in a place called Rosedale. There were a lot of people at that funeral and lotsa nice cars parked outside. I almost didn’t make it into the service cause I was checking out all the cars with them bright, shiny Mercedes logos on them. Musta been eight or nine of ‘em in the parcade. Red ones. Blue ones. Pretty well every colour except black. There was a Cadillac that was black, though. I started to check it out too. My father told me he was embarrassed of what I was doing. Said people might think I was a car thief. So my father pulled me back into the Church. I was kinda yelling at him. Best part was everyone stared at him and made him right embarrassed. He told my mother later it was me made him embarrassed. But I know different. He didn’t look nice like them rick folk, dressed in his dark grey suit.

My cousin Molly was the best. She told me about a school she goes to where everyone understands. She said she didn’t know why but it was better going there than staying at home. I always hated school I told her. She just kinda smiled at me. I did tell her after that I felt kinda hot for her. She just laughed and reminded me we were cousins. She did kiss me though before we came home. Afterwards my brother told me that Molly kisses everyone. Still sometimes I can’t stop thinking about her.

I learned a lot of big words from my brother. Sometimes I read his poems he got lying around. He sure is smart I guess. Sometimes I get sad when I read some of his poems. One time I read a poem and started crying. It started like this:

Please, the man
beams from
shrouded curtains?


Anyways, I stopped reading it half way through. I was cryin real hard. Thing is - everyone keeps tellin’ me I got a low IQ. My father especially. One time he told me they shoulda stole some a’ my brothers brains and gave em to me. Them maybe both me and my brother wouldn’t have such a hard time.

Tonight I gotta go back home. I don’t really want to go cause I lose some a my freedom. I got to eat at exactly the same time everyday. Not watch too much T.V. and wait for when my father comes home. Worst part is he’s gonna ask me how my brother is doin. And I’m gonna have to lie. I’m gonna have to say my brother got his shit together, except I gotta say that without swearin’. My father says he hates swearing though he does it himself sometimes. Y’see I’ve always hated lyin. Have since I can remember.

OUR MAN JIM SWAN
(from a story set in TO that didn't make the final cut of Taking the Stairs)
By John Stiles circa 1998
3700 wds

Each morning Jim Swan woke at six, lay back and stared at the ceiling of his room and recited a scene from a favourite play, Romeo and Juliet. Jim recited the part four times, end to beginning the first two times, beginning to end, the second, annunciating each syllable carefully. When Jim finished the recitation – delivered exactly as he had intended – he switched on his bedside light, stepped into the legs of his trousers which he folded neatly the night before and in the one or two minutes grace he gave himself each morning, he lit a smoke. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with the cigarette dangling from his lip, he pulled on his socks right foot then left, stretched his arms through a white vest and then selected from his fridge a carton of orange juice which he poured into a small rocks glass an equal measure of orange juice and an equal measure of vodka.


When Jim arrived at his place of employment, an Insurance building, a fifteen story Toronto landmark near Queen Street, he walked straight through the scattered groups of secretaries and insurance men eating breakfast in the cafeteria and proceeded directly to the dish pit, where he put on his apron, tied the strings tight, pulled on his gloves and began scrubbing the soaking pots and pans. He never smoked in the cafeteria because he didn’t like the defeated stare that smokers wore so he rationed his cigarettes carefully so that when he went to the John he could steal a smoke and savour the smell of the smoke.


When break time came, Jim folded his apron neatly and placed it between two cardboard napkin boxes and walked out into the quiet part of the cafeteria where he ate sparingly his usual lunch of antipasto, mains and a bagel. Sitting alone he stared hard at the dining room clock until it was exactly half past twelve and then he put his dirty tray on the conveyor belt and walked back through the kitchen and deposited the newspaper into the box in a curtsying fashion as if he was laying a wreath at a funeral. When the end of his shift arrived, Jim folded his apron neatly and tucked it away under the counter and strode through the large polished corridors and into the a crowd of noisy Insurance men from the offices upstairs who pulled their arms around his shoulders and stated: “Here he is, the company man himself: Our man Jim Swan.”

In a different time Jim had been a different man. In a different time, Jim had worked the account books for Welland Transport up in Northern Ontario. But after ten years of staring at prefabricated walls and the same parking lot filled up with eighteen wheelers and pick-up trucks, Welland Trucking Caps and jean jackets and dusty clothing, Jim returned home, one day, to his bachelor apartment with a feeling of complete and utter helplessness. He wasn’t married, he never gambled, he didn’t chase women, had no friends to speak of and had never taken a risk in his life to save his soul. He was bored, boring, living an uninspired empty life in a world of people who lived the same. A week or so later Jim walked past the Baptist Church in his hometown and past a sign that read: DO YOU FEEL EMPTY? CASTING CALL FOR BORED YOUNG MAN.


Answering the advertisement and sitting in a small church basement amongst a crowd of high school kids and divorced men, Jim so impressed the young director with the focus that he brought to his part that he secured a minor role in the much talked about new local production: Lives of Working Men. Jim spent an hour every day talking in a loud voice and then a soft voice, mimicking some of the raspy-voiced blue collar men with whom he had worked, telling himself that he had what it takes to make it in show business.


So, buoyed by the success of LOWM he made a rash move: he quit his job at Wellands and moved in with a spinster aunt, in town, to pursue his new career. Despite the doubt and uncertainty that this move presented, the constant querying from his aunt at mealtime, the dour tones, and long looks, Jim surprised everybody with his limited but immediate success. One year became two, more parts, a lead, a few newspaper reviews, and a murmur, a distant murmur, of potential fame. Then in his third season Jim was offered his biggest break: he was selected to understudy Steven Brice, a Stratford trained actor who was being paid a great sum to perform the role of Mercutio in the Welland Summer Festival production of Romeo and Juliet.

However, despite the burst of pride that welled in Jim at securing an understudy position, Jim had disappointed in his lone Mercutio performance and the newspaper reviews the next day were unkind. ‘Wooden, Forced and Uncomfortable…’ read the Daily Globe. ‘Hitting one note too many times…’ ran another of the local dailies. Add to this the outrage he felt when, he was replaced by a younger and more ambitious man, a terrible loneliness at not really fitting in with any of the other actors in his troupe and an unsettling paranoia that friends from the trucking company were laughing behind his back, Jim, crashed emotionally and realized suddenly: the likelihood of him ever making it big was small.


"You don’t want to be old and broke, Jim," a friend had said to him in a grave tone after seeing one of his last performances. However, instead of going back to Wellands and a life staring at figures in accounts, Jim reservedly packed his belongings into two old hockey bags and took the Greyhound to Toronto where, after a month of flopping in a Sherbourne Street rooming house, he settled into a small one bedroom apartment and secured a cafeteria job for a respectable food services company which paid handsome health benefits, gave him three weeks paid vacation and paid the substantial wage of thirteen dollars an hour.

When the weekend came, Jim followed his usual early morning routine. He stepped into the clothes he had laid out the night before, he poured himself a small glass of orange juice, topped it up with the Vodka, then patted his hair against his scalp, and pulled on his `weekender’ white shirt. Then he descended the old wooden staircase, stared into the hallway mirror for several minutes and because it was the weekend, made the face of a sad clown, a happy child, a angry man, an old scared pensioner and proceeded down the stairs and out the door and walked along the street towards his favourite peeler bar.

Walking through the neighbourhood park as he usually did on Saturday afternoons, Jim was relieved to see that spring had finally come and that the leaves had begun to flare out from the tips of the Maple trees in the park. The crocuses had broken through the soil along the pathway and under the trees, and on the main quarter as far out as the tennis courts, the grass had begun to green. There were people walking their dogs, and there were couples cuddling in the park benches, faces turned towards the sun and Jim was faintly pleased seeing these things until he came upon a homeless man sitting at the exit of the park near Queen Street. The man, a gaunt fellow, with dark yellowish brownish circles under his eyes, wore a baseball cap and sat nodding and nodding like he was counting something. Jim walked past him not looking back, but he couldn’t get the image out of his mind, the man just sitting there nodding and nodding, arguing and arguing, counting and recounting something.

Jim liked the way that the women at the strip bar came up to him and flirted with him. He liked the idle banter and that fact that whatever he said they laughed, and he was having such a good time laughing and joking with everyone, that a couple of drinks were gone before he remembered that he had come there to see a young girl who had once worked in a neighbouring coffee shop, a girl who had once confessed to him her dream of being a ballerina.

"Is there a new dancer working here," he asked, "a dancer by the name of Manuela?"


A young sultry woman with her hair tied up in a bun, stared at him with a kind of disappointed expression and looked towards the stage. She pointed with her long thin fingers,


"You just listen for Dog and Butterfly because Dog and Butterfly is Manuela’s song."


So Jim took a seat at the front of the stage and sipped his vodka and orange juice through a straw. He sat there for some time and tried not to stare at the naked women but he did anyway because he noticed after a while that the women didn’t seem to be embarrassed at what they were doing. Eventually Manuela came on stage, twirled on her blanket, and shimmied up and swung on the pole, and then crawled over on all fours towards him. Jim had a sense that she hadn’t expected to see him there and because he wasn’t sure exactly what to say, he announced in a theatrical voice:


“Dido a dowdy,
Cleopatra a gypsy,
hildings and harlots,
Thisby a grey eye or so...”


“The name is Manuela,” she said in a cold voice, her eyes flashing. And when the song was over she took her blanket and covered herself with it and walked off stage.


Traipsing back through the park, drunk, Jim found himself collapsing into a park bench halfway through, trying not to think too much about what had passed. But two images tormented him. The high booted shuffle step that Manuela had done, a one-step forward, two-steps backwards shuffle strut that seemed to him vulgar and the way that Manuela had covered up afterwards, with her blanket draped down over her naked front and had walked down off the stage looking past everyone. There was nothing refined or remotely graceful or beautiful about her actions, they seemed careless in a way, slovenly in a way, and there was something of permanence in them.


When the next Saturday came Jim looked in the mirror. He ruffled his white linen shirt and shaved his neck hair that he noticed was getting long. Then he took out a small pencil and traced, ever so carefully across the tops and bottoms of his eyelashes, four dark lines, an outline. He blinked a couple of times in the mirror and thought that this new appearance, this sexy dark-eyed Egyptian appearance was an improvement. Then he puckered his lips and drew just over the tips of his lips a thin red line, and then pressed at it with his fingers smudging it and smoothing it in. He hadn’t intended for the lips to be so smudged, but he left the marks there anyway and he put the pencil and the crayon the back in his case and walked out.


So Jim was at the strip bar, sipping vodka and orange, and waiting, in his patient way, for Manuela to come on stage. But after exhausting most of the money that he had brought with him, he realized that she wasn’t coming on because he had waited near an hour and a half.

“Is Manuela working today?” He had asked the bouncer at the door.

“Moved up north,” the bouncer replied looking past him, “Works at Ralph’s place now. Yonge and Finch.”


Walking back into the entrance of the park, Jim saw to his dismay, the man with the baseball cap rocking back and forth on the wooden park bench. The sight irritated Jim and he was drunk and so he stopped there beside the skinny man, shouted at him.


“Did you ever think for once someone else might like to sit there?” And the skinny man with the dark circles around his eyes glanced back up at him, a sad, sorrowful expression. And Jim grabbed his shoulders and started shaking him and then slapping him with the backs of his hands until he realized that the man’s mouth was gashed and swelling and there was his blood on his hand, slashed across Jim’s knuckles, dripping down the corners of the skinny man’s mouth. Jim looked around sheepishly.


“Well, look what you’ve made me do,” he said wiping his hands on his pants.

Ralph’s was worse than Vinny`s place; it was larger and more cavernous, most of the women were from the Eastern block, Rumania, the Ukraine, and they had harsher, more direct ways about them. Manuela was there though, and she seemed to Jim, happier than he had ever seen her before.

“Jim,” she collapsed with her arms draped around his shoulders,” and whispered into his ear, “thirty dollars and we can go into the room, the private room if you want, upstairs.”


“I just came to see you Manuela. I felt like I needed to see you, Manuela.”


“Do you have thirty dollars, Jim,” she was pulling at the lapels of his jacket, “It’s just a few dollars, Jim. I promise you I’ll pay you back.”

Suddenly Jim seized upon the idea that there was some trouble about her, that she needed the money rather than wanted the money and so he gave her the thirty dollars and began walking out; but Manuela pulled him towards the stairs and he didn’t resist her because he couldn’t. So he walked up the stairs with her, wanting, suddenly, to ask her what sort of trouble she might be in. But each time he looked at her he saw in her eyes, a tension, and a fear concealed behind a forced smile.


“Just stay with me for ten minutes, Jim,” she said, “just lay back here and we’ll just wait and see what happens,” She went towards the door and peeked out. Then she came back sat on the bed. Jim found his hands stretching out towards her nipples and circling them.


“Don’t Jim,” she caught them between her hands and squeezed them, “please don’t.” Jim looked at her hands, suddenly speaking as if he couldn’t get the sentences out of his mouth fast enough. What he said was:


“Don’t you ever feel like you’re a different character, Manuela? I mean don’t you ever feel like you’re someone completely else?”

Manuela played with the lapels of his jacket and stared at Jim blankly.


“You know I used to be an actor Manuela, out in Welland. I used to act in the local theatre community and people used to tell me I had the talent.” Manuela pushed his hair away from his face saying in a calming voice, “But that’s just the thing Jim, if you had the talent you would have known, that’s the whole thing. If you’d had the talent you’d be actin now wouldn’t you Jim, wouldn’t you Jim?”

“But I do have the talent.” Jim was just saying it all so hopelessly, pitifully, emptily, over and over again. And Manuela stood in the background, in her negligee and lifted her leg up over her head, and then pointed her toes towards him.

“Just because I can dance doesn’t mean that I’m a ballerina you know.”

When Jim arrived at his job on Monday morning he was sure he detected in his co-workers a pall of ill humour and gloom. When he went into the office and took out a hair net and put it on, one of the women said, “you don’t have to wear that, you know,” and Jim turned right around and stared at them.

When break time came at the cafeteria Jim sat where he usually sat, near the clock so that he could watch the time ticking past and, snapping the hair net against his head, he listened to the conversations of the insurance people around him. And he noticed for the first time that mostly they just talked of themselves and the things that interested them. And there was hysteria in their voices, rather a lack of certainty in their voices as if they had no confidence in what they were saying.