I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (4 page)

I'm not the only one at work worried about germs. All day long, we rub antibacterial soap into our hands. It has the effect of making us look like the evil, scheming characters in a Renaissance drama. If only people could be so obvious about their secret schemes! It would make buying a used car easier, though dating impossible.

TUESDAY.

I'm sitting in my doctor's waiting room waiting to get a flu shot. Presented with the choice of reading an issue of
Medical Economics
or doing a newspaper crossword puzzle,
I pick up the crossword. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my pen, and so I do the puzzle in my head. I'm normally terrible at crosswords, but for some reason, today I'm on fire, getting every single answer and holding it all in my mind. What's the point of solving a crossword puzzle that no one can see? I'm sure it has something to do with character or integrity, but at the moment I'd settle for being able to impress the receptionist.

FRIDAY.

Free from the worry of contagion, I meet my parents for dinner at their favourite restaurant. As I slide into the booth, I am overcome with a spirit of playfulness. It's a feeling I'm touched by only three or four times every ten years, so I decide to indulge it. I do so by encouraging my father to order a plate of the fattiest cut of smoked meat.

“I've been practising the Heimlich technique,” I tell him. “My power and precision are fierce enough to send a choking man's gristle twelve feet across the room and land it in a martini glass.”

“Choking isn't a joke,” my mother says, “and neither is eating red meat. I've already ordered fish and chicken for the table.”

Over dinner we speak of the blandness of the fish and the dryness of the chicken and, intermittently, my mother interrupts the conversation to return our water because
a) the ice looks dirty, or b) the water tastes like “bathroom sink” water.

Ten minutes into the meal, and I've lost my spirit of playfulness. I consider sinking under the table, and reemerging only after my family has left and a new family has replaced them. Maybe in time, this new family will become my family.

“This fish is too fishy-tasting,” my father says, and we all nod our heads in agreement.

“I am. I am. I am.”

(46 weeks)

SUNDAY.

On the news, I watch the outrage caused by a potential ban on poutine at a local ice-skating arena. The reporter explains to the woefully ignorant that poutine is a combination of fries, gravy, and cheese curds, but to see it as only that is to miss the magic, to forget that atoms form molecules possessing entirely new properties. I mean, if the sun is not mere hydrogen and helium but, as William Blake saw it, innumerable angels singing “holy, holy, holy,” then poutine is at the very least an obese, sticky-faced cherub having a heart attack.

I watch amazed by the power poutine has to rally a community.

“It goes against our right to be fat,” says an indignant local politician. I am not a very political man, but I am moved by his words.

MONDAY.

In the bathroom at work, I place my hands under the faucet. Water is supposed to start automatically, but nothing happens. I switch to another sink and still, nothing. After a lot of waving my arms around, I turn on the taps myself, wash my hands, and go over to the dryer. Nothing. It's like I'm a hologram. The irrational fear that I don't exist is a recurring theme in my life, and it's as if everything I do is in order to prove to myself that I am actually here. But despite my best efforts, I feel as though the automatic hand dryer in my office bathroom understands me better than anyone else.

“You're not really here,” it says to me. “You may think you are, but you aren't.”

On the way back to my desk, I hum to myself, “I am. I am. I am.”

THURSDAY.

I'm looking after Boosh for my father. We're sitting on the couch watching a video when Tony calls.

“What's up?” he asks.

I tell him I'm eating popcorn, drinking wine, and watching a movie with Boosh.

“Sorry to interrupt your date,” he says.

“What are you talking about?” I say, peeved. “We're not on a date.”

“What movie are you watching?”

“
All About Steve
,” I say. “With Sandra Bullock.”

“So you're watching a romantic comedy that I assume you paid for, and drinking wine. Dude, you're on a date with a dog.”

I hang up the phone, un-dim the lights, and put the cork back in the bottle, my date ruined.

FRIDAY.

Walking back to my office after lunch, I lose my thought. I am left with no trace whatsoever of the thought's content, but I do have the overall
feeling
that the thought has left behind: a certain
looking forward-ness
. Despite having forgotten what I am actually looking forward
to
, knowing that there's something out there that I'd previously assessed to be
worth
looking forward to is a nice enough feeling. After a few seconds, though, I realize that what I was looking forward to was the piece of uneaten Melba toast from yesterday's lunch that I'd left in my desk drawer.

Back at my office, the sadness I feel for having looked forward to the Melba toast overwhelms the happiness I feel while eating the Melba toast. Overall, I am left feeling pretty even.

Friends Who Do Not Kill You Make You Stronger

(45 weeks)

SUNDAY.

Gregor comes over for breakfast. A business breakfast. He instructs me to save the bill for the groceries so that I can expense it.

“This is warm bread,” he says. “You lack the stick-toitness to make toast. And even the way you cut it is wrong. Toast has to be cut diagonally. Not vertically. This is an abomination.”

“If manners are going out the window, then I'll say this: Quit double-fisting the strawberries. I might want to have one myself.”

“How dare you!” he yells. “You're the double-fister! Remember that time I ran into you on the street and you were eating from a bag of Cheezies with your left hand and a bag of Fritos with your right? Coming down the street it looked like you were wearing mittens.”

“I was wearing mittens.”

“Even worse! What grown man wears mittens?”

“Why can't we just enjoy breakfast,” I say. “Why do you always have to focus on what's wrong with everything?”

“It's a talent and a curse,” Gregor says sombrely. “I guess I'm just more sensitive than most.”

“Did you know that after eighteen years locked in the darkness, Kaspar Hauser's eyes were so sensitive to light he could see stars in the daytime?”

“Maybe to his friends it seemed like an ability to see blemishes in a perfectly bright sunshiny day.”

“Okay,” I say. “But to even be able to see stars you have to start by looking up and taking in the glory of the firmament once in a while.”

In a dramatic flourish, I lean my head back and stretch out my arms as though embracing the world, flaws and all. In so doing, I knock a pot of coffee off the table. It shatters, sending coffee and glass in all directions.

I rise from the table.

“Don't bother getting up to help with the mess,” I say.

“What mess?” he asks, continuing to eat his warm bread.

THURSDAY.

Tucker and I are supposed to go out for steak tonight. We frequent this place where the average customer age
is eighty-five. Going there makes us feel young and virile. But an hour before we're set to go, he calls up.

“I don't feel steaky,” he says.

I ask him why and he explains how he misplayed his whole day of eating and now he just isn't ready.

“I was working on my film treatment at the café this afternoon,” he says, “and I spilled coffee all over it. But the amazing thing was that the coffee stain perfectly highlighted the opening two paragraphs, and I realized, looking at them like that, that they needed to be completely rewritten. All of this because of the spill! I began to wonder if God had finally taken notice of me. I tested this theory by seeing if the girl sitting beside me would talk to me. She would not, and so to cheer myself, I ordered a half-pound Angus burger with fries.”

Unfortunately there's no Viagra for steak. I put the phone down and go make myself a sandwich. If God is taking notice of me, there will be Dijon left in the pantry.

FRIDAY.

Howard is going away for the weekend and I've agreed to watch his pugs, Desmond and Bruce. He shows up at my apartment with, among other things, two dog beds, three vinyl pork chops, chicken-flavoured toothpaste, and a canvas chew bone upon which are inscribed the words “Bite me.”

“Is all this necessary?” I ask. “A two-pound bag of heartshaped dog treats? How many treat-worthy deeds can two dogs accomplish over the course of a single weekend?”

“I like to lavish my boys with positive reinforcement,” he says. “Finish all the food in your bowl: that's a treat. Go to the bathroom: that's a treat.”

“Eat all your treats: that's a treat.”

“Look,” Howard says. “They can tell we're talking about them!”

I look down. A string of drool hangs from Desmond's lip while Bruce scratches an ear with his hind leg.

“The weight of their stoic hearkening fills the room like a dense fog.”

“They're enlightened,” Howard says defensively. “Pugs were bred by Tibetan monks. Do you know what for? Not sheep herding or sled pulling, but for companionship.”

Before leaving, Howard tells me that Desmond and Bruce will prove to be the best friends I've ever had. Sadly, I fear his words may actually prove correct.

Guys' Night Out

(44 weeks)

SATURDAY.

My father doesn't get out much, but when he does, he enjoys himself. The man is certainly capable of joy. It's just that his happiness makes my mother uncomfortable. Whenever he starts to come out of his shell, she likes to cram him right back in there. So disco dancing at weddings, eating dessert with too much gusto—even drumming on the kitchen table to a radio jingle—all rub my mother the wrong way. If my father even laughs too loudly, my mother tells him he's getting “punchy.” That usually quiets him down.

So the first order of business is getting him out of the house.

After all, it is his birthday.

3:45 P.M.

“Come over,” I say to him over the phone. “We'll go out and celebrate a little. Just me and you.”

Whenever I get together with my father, I can't help seeing it as a chance to nurse him back to health. Really, all we're doing is heading downtown for a bite to eat, but my father is wonderfully easy to please. One time, about ten years ago, we took a walk to the old part of the city and he still talks about it to this day.

“Remember how hot it was?” my father asks me every few months. “Remember how we had to stop in at that convenience store and each of us got a soda? You got a Coke, and so did I. We drank them straight from the can— no straw, no cup. Just like that. Like construction workers. Like street hustlers!”

4:00 P.M.

When he gets to my apartment, I offer to take over the driving. He gets into the passenger seat, and right off the bat he says, “Being chauffeured makes me feel like I'm on vacation.” When he's with my mother, my father does all the driving while my mother sits shotgun, elbows bent, pointing her house keys towards the front-door lock from forty miles away.

“What do you want to do?” I ask.

He waves a hand and tells me he doesn't need pampering.

Pampering! Since the mid-eighties, the man has been using the same ninety-nine-cent VHS tape to record and re-record the same documentaries about Nazi hunting. He keeps his cufflinks in a washed-out yogurt container on his dresser. When I was growing up, any time a roll of toilet paper accidentally fell in the toilet, my mother would set it to dry on the basin and forbid me from using it, referring to it as “your father's toilet paper.” He has a meatball-shaped wallet made of vinyl, fat with expired coupons. When he sits down he looks like a wobbling Weeble.

4:30 P.M.

The first thing I want to do is find us a fancy bar. My father enjoys a drink, and at home, he usually can't enjoy one properly. Unfortunately traffic is bad, and parking is even worse, so by the time we find a spot, my father is ready for supper.

After debating the meaning of various contradictory parking signs with the fervour of Talmud scholars, my father looks around.

“The area looks seedy,” he says.

We check and recheck the car doors and windows, and finally, we're on our way.

4:45 P.M.

As we walk along, my father comments on everything he sees, his index fingers pointing every which way as though he's on a tour bus through Paris or he's a character in a Menudo video going to a shopping mall for the first time. A panhandler! A boy with a hoop through his lip like a witch doctor! An unsavoury-looking character who might be a pickpocket!

4:50 P.M.

We find a Middle Eastern restaurant which, to be honest, is more of a cafeteria.We each order a big plate of chicken and rice, and as we eat, we drink a beer each. Beer helps my father relax. Rather than eating hunched over as though planning a prison break, he reclines and looks around. At home, he finishes a great many of his meals with the plate yanked away in mid-bite, forced to finish his corn on the cob stooped over the sink.

“What kind of rice is this?” he asks.

“White,” I say.

“I'll have to ask your mother to buy some.”

5:25 P.M.

Finished eating, we head back to the car. There are no tickets on the windshield, and the
Chicago's Greatest Hits
audio cassette still sits on the dashboard, unstolen. The afternoon has been a success.

7:10 P.M.

I call the house later to make sure my father has made it back okay, and my mother answers. She says he's downstairs eating peanuts at the kitchen table.