The City Man. Howard Akler
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boxes, check check check. The days counted out so effortlessly here. Not there. There, time passed only with a nurse’s permission. A doctor’s needle. But here, whole seasons can change with one flip of the page.
RIIIII-iip goes January. He reaches out for February now. Takes hold. RIIIII-iip! The two pieces of paper flutter down. Eli begins to catch up.
Three more scores and they call it a day. Tough to ankle when the going is good but no point burning up the place, so with tempered desire they weave and flow with the rest of the suckers. Slow down near the exit.
Chesler is counting the cash.
Mona lights up. Well?
Mm-hmm.
What’s that mean?
Means mm-hmm.
Mona takes a healthy drag. Well, she says, hand mine over then.
Chesler hands hers over.
Sunlight pale and slatted comes through the colonnade of Union Station. Dwarfed by a massive column, Mona squints out at the movement on Front Street. Even off the whiz, she is observant of gait and pace, the telltale vulnerabilities in another’s motion. She takes a drag on her cigarette and looks around. Chesler is long gone, ready to breeze the moment the last poke is pinched. Mona tends to linger – daffy habit for a stall, but spending so much time in the tip often leaves her a little twitchy in the initial open spaces. So, on the peripheries of action, she smokes. Inhale and exhale easing her out of the grift.
Strolling away from the station, she passes a pencil seller on the sidewalk. Over her shoulder are a cigar shop and an oculist and competing haberdasheries. Sees familiar faces in the shop windows because she often takes the same route home, walks the relentless city while autos zip past with growling regularity. Six-cylinder hubbub. A honking Dodge hustles past her. She flips him the bird and turns onto the side streets. Beat-up rowhouses on McCaul and Sullivan, with cracked toplights and, below them, the unemployed who drowse in the doorways. She cuts across Spadina and walks one block north of Dundas to Glen Baillie Place, an alley four houses deep. She stops at the last one, tosses away her smoke and opens the door.
The next day, he leans his head back. Each new angle of the eye offers another storey, a gaze that climbs the spandrels, clambers over a dramatic setback and then a subtler one higher up the shaft. Eli at the corner of King and Bay stares up all twenty-two floors of the Star Building. Motionless on the sidewalk, but his eye wavers and wavers at the top. Tips over. A vertiginous drop all the way down to the main doors. He straightens his tie.
In he goes.
I’m talking about character. I’m talking about temperament. Christ, you know what I’m talking about: the news game is no place for nerves. You got deadline pressure, you got the goddamned Tely boys on your ass. You really take your licks in this business.
Eli shifts in his chair. Takes a deep breath. The entire news-room stuffed into a single moment of respiration: the incessant clack-clack of keys, phones that ring through the blue smoke and blue language. The eyes of all the other reporters landing on him while Bert Murneau, the city editor, sits on the edge of the copy desk and sighs.
We’ve been friends for how long, Morenz?
Five years, says Eli.
Five years. So you won’t squawk when I say this: I talked to your doctor yesterday.
Eli cocks an eyebrow.
He was a little cagey at first, but we managed to cut through a lot of the mumbo-jumbo. He says the rest did you wonders. Says you’re much better. Says it’s time to try the next step. Reintegration at a higher level, or something like that. Can’t remember the exact phrase, but it all boils down to putting you back on the payroll.
Okay.
Of course, the payroll’s just been cut. All I could wrangle for you was some voucher jobs. Nothing steady.
Okay.
Half the town’s on relief, Morenz. You’re lucky they even let you back here.
It’s okay, Bert. Really.
Really? says Bert.
Eli taps his temple. Temperament, he says.
Back in the tip. The terminal crammed today, women and men who scurry and lug their way out of town. She sees whistles and waves; all the eddies of movement end up fifteen feet from the ticket window when a lanky bates joggles the crowd. Mona hard on his heels. Deliberate and innocuous, she needs only seconds to adjust to his loose jangly gait. Her mimicry moves from the announcement boards to the baggage check before she feels Chesler fall into place. Hears him cluck, an office that asks her to come through. So she does. Moves from the front of the mark and doubles back, a subtle reversal that opens enough space for Chesler to score the pit. Another office now, a muttered ahem, hits her ears and she knows they have pinched another poke.
Between scores, she wanders the terminal. Lights up.
From the Front Street portico comes an elderly couple. They shuffle along slowly, laboured breath and halting steps. As Mona settles in for the frame, she can see the old man tap his wristwatch.
Durn thing.
I told you to get it fixed.
I know.
I told you to take care of it. I told you it’s no good but do you ever listen to me? Do you?
Mona plants her prat, then hears Chesler office that the touch has come off. With a sideways glance, she watches the couple nudge their way down the departure ramp, so eager to catch their train they won’t savvy the lost poke until they are far out of town.
In the Bowles Lunch, where empty cups and full ashtrays cover the tables and hollow-eyed men scan the want ads in a shared newspaper. Eli, waiting here three days for his first assignment, kills time with the city news. A slow reacquaintance with stickups and social programs that jangles his caffeinated nerves and gives him a full-on jag by the end of page two. He takes a sip. Chews his lip. All the bunk about three squares and regular sleep plays well out in the country, but this business is something else entirely. The news game is all about questions. Not just the ones he has to ask – the whos, whats, wheres – but the ones he’ll have to answer. How are you, Morenz? You okay, Morenz? You okay? Everyone at the paper has this scoop: the long days and late nights he needed to pound out copy, pages and pages of it that piled up until Eli couldn’t go any further and the words began to dwindle. To die. And after a while, there was nothing left to say so he said nothing. Not a word. The doctor had a bunch of names for it. Nerve strain, melancholia, depression. Back then, Eli ignored any clinical hokum. But now, when the depressed man returns to the depressed city, his smile is thinner than a vein.
So, says Chesler. What’s new?
He puts his empty glass down on the newspaper. A smidgen of moisture seeps onto the page, spreads slowly so articles dampen in increments. The police news soon blotted. Across the table is Polonsky. His big hands are dainty with the pouch of tobacco. He rolls two cigarettes with delicate languor.
Polonsky sips his drink. Was bumping gums with Cobourg Henry, he says. Remember him? Always in over his head. We used to work the hotel hustle, y’know. King Eddy, Royal York. And we angle this bates one day. A jug touch for sure, don’t even have to fan the guy to know he’s fat. So I’m fronting for Henry. And the kid’s thinking he’s a cannon and a half.
Daisy Medwick walks over with fresh drinks, bracelets clinking on both wrists. Her skin like old vanilla pudding, hair petrified by years of henna. Daisy was a choice stall in her day, hustling with a retinue of old-time cannons: Fishkin, Erlich, Applebaum. Now her arthritic fingers are barely nimble enough to open a bottle, pour a shot. Most of the mockies on the whiz punch gun in her place, a living-room speak in a two-storey house on Glen Baillie. Rooms rented upstairs.
She slides in beside Polonsky.
Give me a puff, baby, won’t you? she says and Polonsky passes her the cigarette.
Daisy