the matt zander journals.







a novel of life after death

by gary denne





the matt zander journals

Copyright © 2007 Gary Denne


1999 by Prince, copyright © 1983 Warner Bros,
All rights reserved.

We Do What We Can by Sheryl Crow, copyright © 1993 A&M,
All rights reserved.

Ignition by John Waite, copyright © 1982 Chrysalis Records,
All rights reserved.


All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, companies and organizations
in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, 
used fictitiously without any intent to describe their actual conduct.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or places is
entirely coincidental.


First published in the United States in 2007

ISBN-10: 1-4196-8497-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-4196-8497-5

www.garydenne.com








For M & D









It was so much nicer there. I never wanted to leave. But I was told to go back. I was told I had something left to do…





part 1...





St. Michael’s Hospital, Downtown Toronto
Monday, February 16, about 10 AM: -

I remember waking. I spent several minutes in semi-consciousness, not knowing where I was. My eyelids were heavy. I kept them shut and just lay there, frozen. I knew I was in a bed—I could feel the fresh sheets on my body and a big squishy pillow propped up behind me. I tried to move, but struggled with the weight of my body. Compared with the weightlessness during my near-death experience, I felt so heavy and anchored down.
I knew I was back.
Being in my body again felt like … I dunno … like a prison. Something I’d never felt before.
I was stuck in the damn thing.
For the first time in my life, lying there, I realized just how restrictive a physical body really was. The weirdest feeling. It’s like … you know when you sit in a bath for ages and then get out? Your body’s heavy, right? It’s an effort to climb out, and you know you’re in your body ‘cos you’ve got that density to you. That’s what I felt lying there. Exactly that.
But being outside your body? No way. That was just friggin’ insane … in a way I could never have imagined. I mean, when you die, not only are ‘you’ still ‘you’, outside your body, but you’re introduced to feelings and senses you never knew existed or even thought possible. Does that make sense? OK … maybe not. 
I’m gonna have to think about this some more before I try writing about it, ‘cos the thing is … there’s not alotta words in the English language that can describe what it’s like in the afterlife. But the idea in starting all this right now is to detail everything that happened during my near-death experience. Hopefully, when I get to all of that in a few pages, I’ll have found some words that come close to describing what really is the indescribable.

As I came to, I remember hearing footsteps getting closer and quickly felt another soul enter the room. I say ‘felt’ deliberately. My eyes were still shut, the room was dark, and forgetting the noise of footsteps, I still knew someone was close to me. I can’t explain it and I don’t know how, but … I could feel other souls around me.

Please don’t open the curtains.
Please don’t open the curtains.
Please don’t open the curtains, I thought to myself.

I opened my eyes. Daylight suddenly burst into the room. The scraping sound of curtains opening snapped me into full consciousness. I could see the back of a nurse gazing outside to the city as she fastened them. She was a large, black woman, the size of a house, dressed in white (what else).
I looked down at myself and saw two tubes coming out my chest, one on each side. A reddish/brown fluid trickled down them, draining from me (that’s one sign you’ve been in some serious shit—having tubes coming out your body like they’re a normal part of you). On my arm, an IV drip was stuck in me, and further down I’d been tagged around the wrist: -

Zander, Matt / 12.6.1973
St. Michael’s Hospital
0334578511/628
#2526

So … I knew who I was, knew where I was, and knew I was alive. Everything still appeared to be working brain-wise (my body was another story). Not that I thought I had amnesia or anything. No. Quite the opposite. Everything that happened during my NDE (near-death experience is waaaay too long to write every time) was still crystal clear in my mind at that point—the tunnel, the bright light, flashback alley, the gateway and … Keller. That’s right … that guy’s name was Keller. I almost forgot. Keller was the guy on the other side who told me I’d start to forget everything the minute I came back. That’s why I’ve gotta get this stuff down on paper … before I lose it and any clue as to what I’m meant to do now I’m back here.

The nurse turned from the window to see my eyes open. Her face revealed the hint of a smile.
“Mr. Zander,” she began, curiosity in her voice, “how are we feeling this morning?”

How was I feeling? Good question. Let me think for a second…
Well, I could barely move for starters. I was amazed at how fast my body had seized up (note to self: that’s what you get for not goin’ to the gym). My chest felt like I’d been impaled by a metal rod—straight through me to the back of the bed—and I was being pinned down. The pain wasn’t too bad—just a sledgehammer being smashed down onto my chest every second. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. The day I woke up, I’m sure I had a tonne of morphine in me.
Honestly, I was more worried about my breathing. I felt like it was safer taking shallow breaths but the nurses wanted me to breathe in and out normally, with a full breath. I had visions of accidentally taking a big breath and my chest cracking open like some earthquake fault line. The nurses assured me it wouldn’t.
“I was shot,” I said with a croaky voice, as much to myself as to the nurse.
“The bullet missed your heart by about this much,” the ‘Big Mama’ nurse said, holding her fingers up to show me about the width of a … well … a bullet. “We thought we mighta lost you there for a minute, but you proved us all wrong. Musta’ had the angels on your side, ain’t no mistakin’ that. Lost alotta blood, ya did. But the doctors … they patched y’up pretty good. You’re gonna be just fine. You must be feeling pretty lousy? We’ll get you started on some exercises today to get you up and movin’ again. We should be able to do somethin’ ‘bout those tubes, too.”
I watched her pour some water into a glass for me. She left it on the dresser. My mind was racing too fast to say anything more to her. I decided to just lay there like a vegetable.
“You get some rest for now. The doctor’ll be in to check up on you.”
That, more or less, is all I can remember from Sunday, the day I woke up. I don’t really know where the rest of the day went, but one thing I won’t forget was having those tubes pulled out my chest. The nurse—another one, slim redhead, not Big Mama—told me it was gonna feel like an umbrella being poked inside, opened out, and pulled out again. I thought she was flirting with me. She wasn’t. Thank christ for painkillers.
What a strange feeling it is to see tubing coming out your body, though, wondering where the hell it’s been and what the hell it’s been doing. Big big big sigh of relief seeing those things out, albeit with a ten-minute afterthought of discomfort (burning sensation). After that, I didn’t feel so much like … I dunno … a guy with tubes coming out his chest?

Now, a day later, I’m out of bed, sitting upright in a chair by the window. It’s no hotel room in here. There’s just a couple of basic prints on cream-coloured walls that keep it from being totally sterile. But hey, when you got a room with a view like I have, who cares what’s hanging on a wall? Anyone well enough to get out of bed and make it to the window wouldn’t care what the room looked like. The view overlooks downtown—sky-scraping office towers, condos, and the sound of the traffic below (mostly honking horns). I’ve tried to match each horn to its respective car during the rush hours, but I keep hearing the sound of the streetcars along Queen which screw me up.
Let’s see, what else … there’s a few chairs for visitors, old ‘we-have-no-funding-for-anything-new’ ones. And a TV (I’m guessing 13 inch—no widescreen) hangs down from the ceiling on one of those swivel neck thingies. Next to my bed, I have a dresser, and behind that, on the back panelling, is a metal plate with a whole bunch of plugs and buttons. That’s the nurses panel for the room ‘cos there’s no way in hell I can reach it from the bed (I have my own fully loaded remote control to mess round with). 
In the room with me is another bed and another patient, lying there with problems of his own. I’ve glanced over now and then, but I don’t wanna stare and give the ‘wonder-what-he-has’ look. It’s a guy in his late teens/early twenties. He has a young, Gen-Y face, and wavy brown hair, flopped down over his forehead and eyes. I figure he’s found trouble or trouble’s found him ‘cos he’s got bandages on both arms. That’s the only thing that stands out as any kind of injury, so he’s probably not as bad off as me (tubes coming out of body beats bandaged arms). He seems to be either sleeping, drugged out or dead—the arrival of daylight doesn’t seem to worry the guy. This morning, I did get the chance to say ‘hey’ and he gave me a quick ‘hangover x 1000’ kind of ‘hey’ back, before closing his eyes again. Maybe later we’ll get to do the whole ‘what-are-you-in-for?’ routine.
The doctor who checks on me says I’m doing well, considering I was shot four days ago and spent two whole minutes clinically dead (no breathing, no pulse, no heartbeat). Giving some thought to the latter and actually counting out 120 seconds in my head, I gotta agree with the guy. Although, right now … honestly … I don’t know whether I’m lucky or unlucky to be back here.

Y’know, one thing I’ve realized being in this situation is how important the muscles in your chest are when you try to sit up in a chair or get out of bed (fucking mutherfucker—it hurts). I’ve managed to walk a little bit today, though, albeit tortoise-like. I’ve brushed my teeth, cleaned up, and gotten myself out of a shitty hospital gown and into someone’s pinstriped robe that the Big Mama nurse pulled outta lost property for me.
Sitting here, six stories up, looking down to the snow-dumped city streets, you come to realize just how busy the world went and got. Look at ‘em down there—people going about their lives, moving from A > B x infinity + 1. Just a larger version of watching tiny organisms through a microscope. Everyone rushing around, always something to do, someplace to be. But do people ever really think about life? What it is? What they’re doing?
Having a near-death experience really makes you re-evaluate your life—every single bit of it.

A journal/diary/whatever is the last thing a guy like me would’ve ever imagined starting, but I need to do this if I wanna try n’ remember what happened when I died—what it was like, what I saw, and exactly how I ended up back here in hospital. I’m no writer (duh)—I don’t know how something like this is supposed to sound, so I’m just gonna say what I wanna say, when I wanna say it. That’s what makes a journal cool, I guess? I can write what I want. It’ll be my mind on paper. Although, I get the feeling my mind’s already sprung a leak and the near-death experience has begun to slowly drain outta me—maybe through those drainage tubes … who knows?—so I guess I’d better get to it.
I’m quickly learning that an NDE is like a holiday—once you get back to your daily-routine life, you start to really wonder if you were ever on holiday at all. I feel there’s already things I’ve forgotten about this other place I went to. I’m sinking back into normal life again and I don’t want that to happen—I wanna remember that place as much as I can. Honestly … I wanna be back there right now. But I realize I was given a second chance at life for a reason.
That’s gotta be the biggest wake-up call a guy can get.
So … in order to get my mind clear on everything, I wanna go back a little, before it all happened. I’m gonna write everything about my death in the pages to come, but before I get to that, I wanna remember who I am, or, more to the point, who I was. The type of person I was before I was shot. Before I died. Before I knew life after death existed.









Cooley’s, Bloor Street
Exactly one week ago, Breakfast: -

“No. Fucking. Way,” I said softly, as I glanced around for any other diners’ eyes watching us. “No, no, no, no, no … that’s a bad idea.”
Sitting across from me in the booth at Cooley’s, Eric and James looked at me like I’d just turned down an invite to a Victoria’s Secret lingerie party.
I finished my mouthful of hash browns and discreetly continued, “There’s no way we mess with anyone at the store, let alone Belcher. We’ve always said that.”
Eric kept up the pitch. “We’d have the whole weekend wide open, he’s gonna be in Florida at some food convention. It’s a walk in the park, his wife’ll be with him—no pets, no alarm … the house’ll just be sitting there. We’d be in and out in five … ten tops.”
James turned to me and pulled a subject change. “Hey, where the hell did you get to last night, anyway?”
The previous night we’d all been downtown in the Entertainment District, squeezing out the weekend’s last drops at a club called Joker. It was one of these multi-zoned places where you had a floor of dance, a floor of r+b chill-out and a floor of techno/trance for the kiddies with glo-sticks and a liking for foam. It was Eric’s idea—he’d got a tip from a friend that John Cusack was gonna show up while he was in town shooting his latest. My ass, he was.
“I did a runner,” I said, taking a sip of coffee, “that place sucked. Everyone was from Buffalo. Get this though … I got outside, right? I flagged down a cab and told the Indian guy, ‘High Park.’ So he takes off driving, we’re on our way, but I notice he keeps doing loops around the block—he’s looking all over the place, clueless. So I say, ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ And he turns over his shoulder and says, ‘I looking for hotdog—you say you want hotdog!’”
Eric burst out laughing. James kept the straightest face (he’d always do that).
“So I told him, ‘I don’t want a damn hotdog. H-i-g-h P-a-r-k, I wanna go to High Park.’ Fucking cab drivers.”
“That is so messed up,” Eric said (he’d always say that).

Cooley’s was one of the diners Eric, James and I would stop by for breakfast before we started our shift at Runnerman’s. Cooley’s was an open kitchen—been around since the ‘60s and the place still thought it was the ‘60s. You could mistake it for a homeless shelter it was so old and banged up—swivel stools at the counter, red vinyl booths, old wooden panelling, tables so small you had to play chess with condiments to squeeze everything on—but the food was the best. They knew their grease. 

Sidebar: The Cooley’s Special ($6)

Bacon—the hardwood smoked stuff … awesome.
Eggs, any style (I’m a scrambler).
Hash Browns—they put some kind of magic spice on these things? For all I know, it may well kill ya but it’s worth it.
Toast.
Choice of Fruit or Sausage—now, you’d think this one was a no-brainer, right? Polish sausage or fruit slices. Well, I always get the fruit. I try to counter-balance the bad with the good—melon, pineapple and grapefruit slices.
Coffee—unlimited refills.

OK. I think I put that in as a result of being stuck here with hospital food—I’m dying for some real-world grease. My mind’s all over the place.
So … where was I? That’s right … how this all began. 
Well, I’d known Eric and James since working at Runnerman’s the past two years. Runnerman’s was a supermarket—I’ll get to that later. When I started there, I was still trying to work out what I was gonna do with my life after having worked at a tonne of places, and the job gave me a buffer while I thought things through. I’d been there ever since. Funny how you stick with what you know, ain’t it? Guess you could say underachiever, I wouldn’t argue with anyone. Thing is, I was okay with that. I was never gonna be a stockbroker or lawyer or nothin’. No way I was ever gonna climb the corporate ladder and wear a suit to the office and be one of those yuppie stiffs you see reading GQ magazine. I just didn’t know exactly what I was gonna be. 
So sue me.

Me: - I was born and raised here in Toronto. A great city to grow up in, it’s just not so great as it used to be. See, in ‘97 they merged some of the neighbouring cities together and called it the Megacity. Well, no one asked me if I wanted to live in a Megacity, did they? So, from that point on, it became just another sprawling, cookie-cutter North American city. That’s when things started to suck for Toronto.
My parents divorced when I was seventeen and went their separate ways from what was a shitty marriage. One’s on the west coast, one’s in Europe. I don’t talk to either of them anymore. It’s like we all decided to divorce each other at the same time. Guess you could say I was a bit of a handful as a teenager and we never really clicked as a happy, sitcom family. I did some stupid things back then, and know I wasn’t the perfect kid. None of it that serious, just stupid stuff—shoplifting, break and enters, joyriding, doing drugs. The wrong-kinda-crowd-type deal. In my early twenties, I got tired of that scene and gave it all away, except for the break and enters. The only reason I kept those up was out of boredom, and for the rush that came with it (replacing drugs).
The only drug I craved anymore was adrenalin. See, once you get drugs into you at a young age, you know what a high is and how it feels, and you wanna keep having it. Or somehow replicate it. I’d matured a lot from my younger years, but I guess I was still willing to steal other people’s stuff so I could get that adrenalin high and some free electronics. DVDs, digital cams, cell phones, iPod, Xbox, PlayStation—I’d take any of that kinda stuff from the homes we robbed and the bedrooms of rich college kids with mommy and daddy’s $$$. I could never afford to buy those kinda things, but they’re sure nice to have for free. Well, they were, that is.
See, even if the law never catches up with you and you think you’re getting away with it, eventually, things have a way of working out. Well … they have for me, anyway. And that’s exactly why I’m sitting here in this hospital chair writing this. I think back to all that stuff I did and realize how dumb it was. Dumb isn’t even the right word. I regret stuff now. But I’m not about to write about it here in a spill-all Oprah-style sob story. I’ll just say it was stupid shit, and that I never gave one single thought to what I was really doing with my life until it was too late. Until now.
When I get to detailing my NDE, I’m gonna write about the consequences of the stuff we do in our lives and what I experienced that’s made me a different person since coming back. For now though, let me say that from the time I met Eric and James, we’d broken into homes ’cos it was the only source of excitement in our otherwise pathetic, boring, insignificant lives.

I played guitar growing up. Did the whole rock scene. I had the look down—the long, dirty-blonde hair, permanent stubble, earring, tattoos, chains and black t-shirts. These days, I’ve cleaned up and gone grunge—shorter hair (just-got-outta-bed look), goatee, ripped jeans, shirt and sneakers—that kinda thing. I never really measured up as a rocker anyways. 5’8” and 140 lbs. doesn’t really give you that whole menacing, rock bad-boy look. Only thing I had going for me was when I scrunched my eyebrows up, friends said I had a good ‘angry dude’ stare goin’ on. I even got a ‘you look like Kurt Cobain’ sometimes (okay, maybe I did look like him a little).
It was around that time that I went out and got a Nirvana tattoo. Y’know, the drunken smiley face? Didn’t stop there, either. I remember picking out a couple of other rock star ones just for the hell of it. Every other accessory’s gone now, but (funnily enough) the ink’s still on my shoulders. I don’t have a clue what the other two mean. Just some symbol shit. Makes me laugh—people these days picking out tattoos with all these deep spiritual meanings and shit, what’s that about?

Girl’s high-pitched voice: - This one means ‘serenity’ in ancient Japanese, and if you divide by pi, it also equals my birth date, sun sign and spells my boyfriend’s name backwards.

Whatever.

Anyways, I played in this band called Reception Overflow. We named it after a voicemail system that once reaching its allowed number of mailbox messages went into this mode called ‘reception overflow’. Don’t ask me what the hell that was, we just liked the name.
I taught myself how to play guitar, growing up in the ‘burbs of Toronto. It never went anywhere. I just wasn’t that good. I mean, I could play … it wasn’t that hard to turn up the amp and rock out on power chords all night. But after I got booted from the band, I pretty much gave up. Too hard, don’t try. Maybe the rock gods didn’t see me making it as a musician.
I remember one time we were at this gig playing at a friend’s party in Mississauga. We were halfway into this song. I played rhythm and this other guy, Scoots, played lead. Anyway, just before the solo started, we were rockin’ it hardcore and I looked at Scooter and shouted over all the distortion, “Yo, dude … nail it, man!”
Thing was, Scoots thought I said, “I’ll nail it, man,” and gave the guitar solo over to me. Let me say here, I couldn’t play lead guitar solos. I choked and just made shit up. Halfway through I thought maybe if I make this look so damn cool, they might think it’s meant to sound so friggin’ messed up. So I went ahead and swung my axe around, made my ‘angry dude’ face and rocked the house. 
They were the longest eighteen seconds of my life.
Needless to say, the band booted me. They said I was livin’ in guitar fantasy camp and to quit thinking I was Slash from Guns N’ Roses. They thought that I thought I had killer chops on lead and wanted to take over the solos from Scooter. That was pretty much the end of guitar for me. Tough break, dude.

So, Eric and James were high school buddies. They grew up together in the prairies of Saskatchewan and drove out here for the excitement of the big (mega) city. They lived in an apartment at High Park, a suburb west of downtown, about 15 minutes by car or subway. 
High Park’s this nice, leafy little shopping village to hang out in and generally get away from the downtown core of traffic, drugs, clubs and bums. I’d been living on their sofa for the past couple of months after getting kicked out of the apartment I shared with a girlfriend at Yonge & Eglington, a trendy residential strip just north of the downtown core. The thing about being dumped is … once you see your possessions laid out on the front yard in a non-uniformed kinda pile, you know it’s a bad sign. That particular ex-girlfriend wasn’t into spring cleaning, and it wasn’t spring, given that half my stuff was covered in dirty, December snow. She was a prissy bitch. So … I ended up crashing at Eric and James’ place and hadn’t left since.
Eric and James had a room each to themselves and here I was every night unfolding my salt-stained (salt from the sidewalk snow) futon in their living room. I’d moved what little stuff I had into their place and proceeded to sell it off in exchange for rent (salt-stained futon = $50). Crashing at their place made sleeping so much of a chore, though … every night, fold the futon out, put the pillows out, put the cover over it, move the coffee tables, move the lamps. Every morning … blah, blah, blah. Had their place been a three-bedroom, I would’ve been cool to stay and save myself the impending pain of apartment hunting. But having James walk over me in darkness to get to the bathroom at any time of night was kinda weird. Plus, being exposed to those two guys’ habits and freaky shit made me wanna force myself to look at rental classifieds. Let’s just say Eric loved passing out with a bag full of donuts, twenty hookers (did I say twenty, I meant two) and The Tonight Show at full volume coming from his bedroom (Jay Leno’s monologue only has the strength to drown out one hooker, by the way, not two). He always claimed he’d just bump into these girls on their way home from the Queen Street clubs, all drunk and horny. But having the back pages of Eye Weekly spread open on his bedroom floor with various escort ads circled and starred kinda made me and James wonder. (Roll eyes here).
James had his quirks too, though. They didn’t involve hookers. His fix was Law & Order. I shit not, any time of the day when he was in his room you’d hear that friggin’ Law & Order theme playing. Typical scenario of me getting home was like…

“James, you there? Eric? Anyone home?”

‘In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups—the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories. Duh-Duh.’

“Okay … James is home.”

It was like he had a damn Law & Order cable channel running episodes 24/7. And these kinds of habits were just the tip of the iceberg. There was often food left all over the place for days, mountains of hair and water in the bathroom, and the world record for days passed without laundry done was constantly being broken. They didn’t even lock the place … how’s the irony? We did break and enters and here’s their place wide open any time of the day or night—just slide the back patio doors open and walk in.
Let’s see, what else … there was the fridge that thought it was a 747-400 jet, the toilet that seemed to be set to ‘volcano flush’ mode, and Eric’s old computer, which at night had the sound of a vacuum cleaner, was big as a ‘70s mainframe, and so friggin’ old all you could download on that thing was stick porn, you know, like a naked hangman. 
To top all that shit off, here’s the clincher: to get to the apartment above, the other tenants had to come into ours. So, you could be sitting there scratching your ass or whatever and have people unlock your front door, walk in, and fumble about with their keys at their door before heading up to their third-floor apartment. Wtf?! (What the fuck).

Hmmmm. Just noticed how I’m writing about Eric and James like I used to know them, past tense. That’s kinda weird. I mean, all this was last week. But it feels like it was a lifetime ago. Dying’s made my sense of time totally skewed. I feel disconnected from everything before I was shot. Maybe my mind realizes it’s now a lifetime ago. That I can’t go back to that old life anymore. Whatever. 

Anyway, enough of me. 
Back to Cooley’s … and this idea we had last week to break into our boss’ place while he was away at a convention in Florida.

“Don’t you see? This is our chance for payback. It can be, like, the ultimate revenge. We can wipe our asses on the furniture,” Eric whispered to the two of us, sipping coffee and sizing the room up for any potential networking opportunities…

Sidebar: Eric

Pros: Funny, great impersonations, motivator, dreamer
Cons: Short attention span, moody, completely unreliable

Eric was a wannabe actor. A networker, always conscious of meeting people, showing himself off as a player and sizing up anyone he thought might be able to do something for him. He actually did a commercial for a courier company ‘cos he stalked a casting agent at the store and helped push her groceries out to the parking lot. After about 0.6 seconds of screen time, where he walked out an elevator (w/o lines), somehow he managed to blow his big break and hadn’t done a thing since. He’d mention all these projects, but that they just weren’t right for him. He was actually well suited to showbiz, though. He had the looks—short black hair, styled in a forward brush, a clean-shaven full face, straight teeth and clean skin. At 6 ft, he had a strong presence, and his fashion sense was way above James and mine. The only blemish was his weakness for junk food. He was hypoglycaemic, and that’d get him eating donuts and shit that didn’t do any favours for his body. Eric was slick, though, with a killer sense of humour—he could joke himself out of any situation. He could have a smoking gun in his hand, dead body at his feet, and still be able to joke his way outta there with the cops. 
We’d often sit around and do improv—running through lines, gags and skits we thought’d be funny for the TV show he’d always talk about writing: -

Cruise: I want answers…
Nicholson: You want answers?
Cruise: I want the truth!
Nicholson: You can’t handle the truth!

We just about knew that movie, A Few Good Men, by heart. The voices Eric could pull off were amazing. He’d do perfect impersonations and characters—where he got that stuff from I got no clue. I guess he just stayed up watchin’ alotta late-night TV. Sugar hits will do that to ya.
His talent was definitely going to waste working at Runnerman’s. See, Eric was a dreamer with big plans. He’d talk the talk, but when it came to the walking, he’d collapse on the sofa and watch Saturday Night Live with a bag of day-old donuts and coffee. The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. With his looks, he could’ve got any girl he wanted if he applied himself (and maybe lost the spare tire around his waist). But he’d prefer to hang out at Starbucks and improv, or talk about script ideas and making an indie film. And even if he did go to a club, he wouldn’t pickup girls. He’d be looking to meet actors. I often thought, though, that Eric would be the one to go somewhere out of the three of us. That showbiz would find him eventually.

“No … no trashing the place,” James replied. “Wiping asses on furniture is for punks. If we do this, we need to stay professional.”
“James, this isn’t Law & Order … we’re not professionals, okay? Anyway, trashing’s not our M.O.,” I said, turning to Eric. “If—and I say if—we do Belcher’s place, we stick to the M.O.”
“Okay, no ass wiping,” Eric agreed. “But look … I know Belcher. I’m good with people, right? The guy’s gonna have some good shit. The house is worth a million—he’s not gonna have it decked out in IKEA or somethin’.”
“I dunno, it’s risky,” I said. “What if he works out it was us? Then we’re screwed.”
“Yeah, we’d lose our jobs … tragedy.”
“I was more thinking along the lines of prison,” I whispered to Eric. 
“Hmmm? Prison versus Runnerman’s, huh? You know, I gotta tell ya, that’s kind of a tough call for me right now,” added James. “Mondays suck.”
Eric continued, “Yeah, well, what if we scored enough to quit and live off for a few months?”
James suddenly looked up at Eric from his hash browns.
“He’s gonna have cash and prizes in that kinda ballpark, I know it,” Eric told us. “I mean the guy wears a Rolex…”
James and I both looked at him, our b.s. meters goin’ crazy.
“Okay—so maybe it’s a fake Rolex,” Eric admitted, “but you’ve seen his wife? She’s always wearing jewellery when she’s at the store. You can sell that stuff on the ‘net.”
“On your computer? The same computer that ate all my fuckin’ emails and porn?” I complained.
“Wait a minute, though,” James interrupted, chomping on his crispy bacon, “the guy’s gonna have insurance, right? I mean, knowing him, he’ll probably claim shit he never had and we’ll end up making him money. I don’t wanna be making that prick any more money than we do now.”
Eric turned to James. “Don’t you want to get out of this life? Look at us, we’re fucking pathetic. James, you haven’t got laid in … whatever. Matt—you’re selling off furniture as rent money, for crissakes. We work in a s-u-p-e-r-m-a-r-k-e-t. We’re in our thirties. Our lives are just slipping away. We’re gonna be forty in less than ten years—still packing shit into shelves. Is that what you guys want?”
Eric looked at us with a silent scream in his eyes. He had a point.
“I say we hit a few more places, get some cash flow, then pool our money so we can quit. We move into a place downtown and start making contacts. Like, huge contacts. It’s not what you know in this town. We’ve gotta get out there, networking,” Eric said clicking his fingers. “We need to hang with guys like Douglas and get ourselves into the game. If we meet the right people and make the right moves, we’ll move up in the world. That’s how it works. High Park’s for soccer moms with SUVs.”
James and I sat there for a second, thinking. Well, I was thinking I hope I never turn into a guy like Douglas, and if I did, that someone would shoot me (hmmm, maybe a bad choice of words there. More on Douglas in a bit).
And James … well, James looked more concerned about his eggs.
“Is that a fucking hair in my eggs?”

Sidebar: James

Pros: Eccentric, easygoing, funny, conspiracy theorist
Cons: Cynic, alcoholic, liked James Taylor, hard to read 

James was a tall, lanky, doofus looking guy with thick, bottle glasses and a kind of Frankenstein-like appearance … but in a good way. He was an eccentric. A man of few words. But when he did have something to say he’d usually make you laugh with lashings of sarcasm and dry humour. His voice was calm, and he spoke in a soft, constant monotone—I think I’d only heard him shout once or twice for Eric to shut up when Law & Order was on. 
He gave the impression he didn’t really care about anything in life, like he was just sailing through and whatever happened was fine by him. I figured only a few things mattered to James: Beer, photography, Law & Order, crispy bacon and hockey. 
He’d already had two front teeth knocked out playing street hockey last Fall. Did he freak? Nope, he just picked his teeth up off the ground and said something like, ‘Better get those fixed, I guess.’ 
He took them to this Chinese dentist in The Beaches, a suburb by Lake Ontario and the only strip of sand in the city resembling a beach in summer. As he sat in the dentist’s chair and had his teeth somehow glued back in by an obviously unlicensed, but affordable dentist, he explained to the guy (with slurred speech from the Novocaine) that his TV was showing this black blob on the screen and, hence, he’d been outside playing street hockey. This blob had grown from a tiny dot in one corner and was beginning to take over the picture at a steady rate. The old Chinese guy, without hesitation, as he worked in James’ mouth, said to bring it by and, ‘I fix for you.’
Teeth and TVs … makes sense. But that was classic James. Anything eccentric and he’d be there (w/ camera). In fact, I think the only reason he tagged along on the break and enters sometimes was just so he could see inside people’s homes and how the other half lived.

Eric and I were distracted for a second.
“Look at this…” James said, pulling a thick black hair from his eggs. He held it up in the light, studying it like it was gonna reveal the mystery of the universe.
“What the fuck…”
“Get over it, James. It’s a hair,” Eric said, no strength to argue.
No mistaking it’d come from the Cooley’s waitress—she worked every morning and had the silkiest black hair I think I’ve ever seen. I think she was the owner’s daughter or something. She seemed related to the guy you’d see cooking out back when heading to the bathrooms. Every time we were at Cooley’s for breakfast, I used to love her bringing our meals out. She’d reach over the table and expose the mother of all cleavage—I’m talking the most luscious tits you could dream of. They sat so perfect in her deep-plunge, v-neck t-shirt, jiggling about as she moved around the table. So, yeah … a hair … I got ‘em too, but I could personally live with the odd hair now and then in exchange for that kinda cleavage.
Hair crisis over, James back to eating, I asked Eric, “How would we get in?”
“Out back … sliding glass doors. Locks are a piece-a-cake, no noise,” he said under his breath. “So, are you in?”
I paused. I ran it through in my head. Decision-making wasn’t a strong point of mine (star sign: Gemini). 
I sat there for a moment and tried to imagine all the shit Belcher had given me in two years at Runnerman’s, and couldn’t find a reason why we shouldn’t get some payback on that prick.
“He’s gonna be where?” I asked.
“Orlando, Florida. Cassandra told me,” Eric replied.
“And you’re gonna trust her? That girl’s tipped to win the Oscar this year,” James quipped.
“Everyone else knows, anyway. I heard the front desk girls talking about last year. Apparently all he brought back for ‘em was a Disneyworld keychain … to share.”
“You know what?” I said with a quick nod, “let’s do it. I hate the guy.”
“Count me in,” James said. “I wanna see the kind of place he’s got. And I haven’t forgotten about those stale chocolates, remember? My shit was black for a week eating those things.”
“That was so messed up,” Eric replied, laughing to himself through his nose.

Sidebar: The Ukrainian Chocolates

James was a pretty good worker, way more than Eric and me. He could really get busy and fix stuff when he was motivated. Last year, he cleaned out the stockroom freezer and got rid of all the shit that the Frozen Food girl had ordered by mistake. Her fingers (and ass) were so fat she’d pressed an extra ‘0’ on the computer when ordering frozen spring rolls. We got 100 cartons of ‘em … for the month. In a normal month, we’d sell maybe 7-8 cartons. So, in the back of the freezer, cartons and cartons of frozen spring rolls just sat there, slowly turning into shrivelled up little wieners that even a homeless dog in India wouldn’t touch. 
When fatty took her vacation, James went in there with gloves and coat and played Tetris with the stock, moving everything round so he could reach the spring rolls and get them out to the frozen cabinet in the store. He re-priced them (without authority … an executive decision) down from $3.48 to $.50 a pack. People couldn’t get enough. Shoppers will buy shit if it’s cheap enough. Dumbasses. 
So, Belcher, on seeing the clean, frozen stockroom, spoke about James’ efforts one morning at a staff meeting and awarded him a box of chocolates. When we looked at them later, they were these gross Ukrainian chocolates that never sold because they looked like little turds (customers were smart, occasionally). Oh, and these things were about 6 months past their expiration date, too. Note: James still ate the chocolates. 

“We’re gonna be late,” Eric said, starting to get organized to leave.
He always did that—pissed me off. Whenever Eric was done, he’d start getting all restless, like his time was too precious to waste if he wasn’t sitting there eating. 
Cooley’s special breakfast over, we vacated the booth and headed for the cashier. James went and paid the check (we’d always split it). Eric stepped out onto the sidewalk, like a celebrity waiting for his minders. He checked his cell, hoping for a message from his agent. I don’t think he’d received a call from her since the elevator walk-on. None of us knew how he managed to screw that up.
I waited for James and walked back to our booth to leave a tip for Ms Cleavage of the Year. I remember getting another quickie glance as she wiped our table down. Hoochie Mama. That there ended up as the highlight of my Monday.









Runnerman’s,
Bloor St, Toronto: -

There she was … the enemy. As the three of us stood there in the parking lot, burning up the last remaining minutes of freedom, we faced the Runnerman’s storefront in a David vs. Goliath showdown. High above the store’s entrance doors, the monstrous and all too familiar Runnerman’s sign loomed down on us, a mixture of bright red and orange letters, followed by a jazzy, corporate logo resembling a bent-out-of-shape teardrop. 
Originally a family-owned, mid-size supermarket, the corporate entity known as Runnerman’s Ltd. had bought it out as a chain location a few years ago. From the outside, even from Robert St, you could see right the way in the entire store thanks to large, plate glass windows and bright, fluorescent lighting. Advertising was everywhere inside—no space was left untouched by various subsidiary companies advertising their products, all ‘new and improved!’, of course.

That was the moment we dreaded each week. Monday morning.
We began our usual slow shuffle up to the front doors. No words were spoken. We all kept to our own thoughts. Eric pulled apart the automatic doors—not yet activated for customers—and we discreetly slipped straight down the first aisle to reach the back doors, which led out to the lockers and staff area. Out back, stock was piled to the roof. Pallets and cartons of everything from coconut-oil suntan lotion to instant mashed potatoes. One after the other, we punched our timecards in a machine that looked like it was from World War II, and then followed the dimly-lit maze that led to the locker rooms. Above us, in a few decibels too many, came the words we had come to hate hearing over the P.A. system: -
“Staff to the floor … calling all staff to the floor. The store is now open. Don’t forget your smiles and have a Runnerman’s great day!”

It was a typical Monday. The start of another week. The store was trading at a quiet but steady pace, with the customer demographic mainly comprising of mothers w/ babies, doing a morning shop. The in-store bakery was already halfway through its day, close to finishing up at midday, and the produce section was still setting up for another week with a clean slate of fresh fruit and vegetables. 
Throughout the day, sales representatives from the major companies running promotions would call into the store to setup their products in extravagant, eye-catching displays in the hope of good market penetration that week. See, in the supermarket business, Monday was typically known as the setup day. The day that everything would be refilled, restocked, refreshed, re-cut and re-priced, ready for the heavy trade days of Wednesday through Saturday.
Walking up to the front of the store that morning (and whenever else I’d walk by), I remember the girls on checkout had the exact same looks on their faces as the week before, as they ran shoppers’ items over laser scanners, filling the store with constant electronic beeps. It’d be fair to say you could generally sum any one of them up as suffering from: -

a) tiredness
b) boredom
c) effects of an all-night rave
d) frustration
e) depression
f) all of the above

Like most other workplaces, in a supermarket there was a certain pecking order, a food chain—even amongst the girls on front-desk/checkout—that determined who got what jobs. It operated along the lines that the newest hire would be on the very bottom, receiving the jobs that, for lack of a better word, sucked. If one was to progress and get promoted through the ranks, they could possibly end up Second-In-Charge (2IC) or even make Store Manager someday. For Eric, James and me? Well … we were no doubt bottom three. We had the ‘underachieving slacker’ label slapped all over us. 
Further raining on our parade of ever moving up the shit-heap (not like we wanted to, anyway) was that all three of us refused to kiss ass to management, especially to Belcher. But there were always plenty of other staff willing to brown-nose their way into a promotion. I’d see it time and again in a lot of different variations, including: -

a) The ‘look-at-what-I-just-did’ awareness campaign aimed at management (Freezer Fatty was a master at this)
b) The store management snitch (squealed to management whenever the slightest violation was made of Runnerman’s corporate policy)
c) Volunteering to work back late (some staff just didn’t have lives)
d) Flirting and/or being eye candy (the cashier girls were particularly good at this one—white see-thru shirts, open buttons, black bras … do the math)

So last Monday, as ‘let’s-pretend-to-be-happy’ music tried to drown out beeping scanners, and shoppers poked carts around the aisles, trying to match coupons with products, the three of us were busy setting up the weekly flyer promotions at the end of each aisle. Typically, management wanted us to build up all of the product displays so friggin’ big that if a customer pulled an item from the wrong place the whole thing would avalanche and bury whatever shoppers were in its path. But Runnerman’s Rule No.1 was management always knew best.
Before we could get the new displays up, we’d have to pull the previous week’s down and take the remaining stock to its shelf location and fill it up as much as it could take. 
I can still remember restocking cans of dog food from my stock trolley as I turned to see James heading down the aisle towards me. He looked pissed off and didn’t care who heard him (unusual for James).
“What the fuck is that guy’s problem?”
“Who?” 
“Belcher,” he replied. 
I continued placing cans on the shelf. “Why, what happened?”
“He gave me a fucking warning for talking to Cassandra.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa—you talked to Cassandra Parker?” (Cassandra would never have been James’ type. In fact, I didn’t know what James’ type was).

Sidebar: Cassandra

Cassandra Parker was the newest of the checkout girls, the girl who seemed outta place when I set eyes on her, her first day, two weeks ago. She was in a different league to the others—she was upper class (or faked it well) and came across with a preppy, snobby, sorority-queen attitude. Even at a quick glance, I could tell Cassandra was one of those girls who always got what she wanted. Now, I know I could’ve been wrong with that assumption but to back it up, my last two girlfriends also fell into that league (the club is growing), so I considered myself well tuned at the time to detect her manipulation station (i.e. her mouth). All I really knew for sure was that she was 21, attending U of T, studying Law (just what we need—more lawyers) and still lived at home.
She was no stick-thin girl—no Paris Hilton—but her body had curves in all the right places. She had long, dark brown hair with blonde highlights, and beautiful, big brown eyes to match. Her skin was clear, her lips glossed, her breasts were tennis balls, her ass was a bubble, and she had this seductive, innocent smile … you get the picture. Flaunting her sexuality was more powerful towards man than a thousand bunker-busting bombs. 
In a moment of weakness, I’m sure she could’ve had us trying to kill each other for a chance to get in her pants, but personally, having been bitten one too many times already by her kind, I think (I hope) I could’ve been able to resist a man-eater like Cassandra Parker.
 
“So where was this?” I asked James.
“Up front, at her checkout. She didn’t have anyone in her lane so I just stopped and said … stuff,” James told me. “That’s my second warning. Third one and Belcher’ll fire my ass.”
“What’d you say to her?”
“‘Hi.’”
“‘Hi’? That’s it? You went up to Cassandra Parker, the new hot girl, and just said ‘Hi’?”
“Well, not exactly, but I didn’t get much else in before she stopped me.”
“Like…?” I said, prompting James to continue.
“She asked me, y’know, in that high pitched ‘what-ever’ voice … ‘What happened to your teeth?’” James said, giving a damn fine impression of the girl (Eric would’ve been proud).
(Since the hockey incident, James’ teeth were a little skewed. Not bad, but noticeable).
James continued, “So I said, ‘Oh, they got knocked out in a hockey accident. My dentist glued them back in. He’s Chinese. Hey, so, you’re studying Law, right? Do you watch Law & Order?’ That’s when she stopped me and started blurting out, ‘Like, I don’t, like, date anyone from the store, okay? And you’re, like, really creeping me out, okay? So can you just, like, go back to grocery and not, like, come up here again?’ That’s when Belcher showed up.”
“What a bitch,” I said.
I looked down the aisle for Belcher, checking it was clear. James cooled down and pulled a couple of pet food cartons from the bottom of his trolley, arranging other cartons to get at them.
“So what’d he say?” I continued.
“Told me to quit harassing other staff. Said everyone’d been warned about talking to the girls up front in that staff meeting we blew off last week, and blah blah blah—second warning,” James said. 
From a side-glance, I saw Eric pass over our aisle, then double back and enter. He came towards us with his own trolley of stock to go back on the shelves, but didn’t look like he was setting any records—as usual.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Zip,” James answered.
“I’m waiting for the Pepsi guy to show. Said he’d be here at eleven,” Eric said.
“James just got a warning for talking to Cassandra,” I said.
“No way!” Eric blurted, amused. “You talked to Cassandra?” he said, reaching underneath his trolley. “Trust me, James, she’s so not your type.” 
Eric felt between the cartons and pulled out a bag of candy. He waited for a few shoppers to pass before taking a handful and shoving them in his mouth.
“Belcher’s gonna have your balls if he sees that,” James warned him.
“For this stuff? I don’t think so … it’s outta code and I need the sugar hit. I’d say it’s a medical thing,” Eric mumbled, chewing the candy. “Anyway, how can they fire us when customers do way worse? It’s discrimination. I’d sue their ass for a hundred billion.”
“Women with kids are the worst,” I added. “They walk past the self-serve bins in aisle four and practically have meals outta that stuff.”
You’d see it everyday. Customers helping themselves to a handful of whatever they wanted, standing in full view at a self-serve bin, or, if they were a little more discreet, filling up a bag and eating as they shopped the store. Drugs were another hot item too, popular with the senior citizens. Tylenol, Excedrin, Pepcid AC, whatever. They’d browse the section looking to buy, waiting for the right time to stuff the pills down their pants, away from security, before walking out the store with nothing.
Eric reached into the bag of Gummi Cola and grabbed some more. “Here … knock yourself out,” he offered, “I always need this stuff in the mornings.”
James and I took turns, digging our hands into the bag. I mean, it was only out of code stock—if no one ate it, the only place it was going was the dumpster out back after it’d been written off. 
“Shit!”
I spotted Belcher heading towards us. Eric pulled the bag into his body and, with his back to Belcher, slowly placed the candy back between his cartons. Eric and I swallowed, but James still had a mouthful of Gummi and just stood there, frozen…

Sidebar: Belcher

John Belcher (nice name) was a balding, big nosed, bung-eyed looking forty-year-old guy who thought he was king shit, all because he ran a Runnerman’s franchise. His left eye was so screwed up that whenever you talked to him it’d be focused out to the side, like he was peering over your shoulder, or had someplace else to be. Over the past two years, he’d given the three of us so much shit. He hated our guts, but no doubt enjoyed having us around over firing us, just so he could feel like a big man when he wanted and put us in our place for the losers he said we were. 

“Alright, showtime … what the hell’s going on here? Huh?” Belcher barked, his bung eye darting around like a missile targeting system.
“We’re restocking,” I said.
“No one likes a smartass, Zander. It doesn’t take three of you to pack one line of dog food.”
“We’re about to take a break, actually,” Eric said, in a defiant tone.
Belcher paused for a moment, thinking of a comeback. He smirked and slowly shook his head. “Look at you three … you think you’re all so much better than this, don’t you?”
He used to always pause between lines, like a pissed off drill sergeant.
“One day you think you’re gonna be out of here, right? Gonna make it big?” he said, chuckling to himself. “You have no idea how alike we really are. One day, trust me, you’re all gonna be me. This,” he said, as his arms gestured around us, “is going to be your life. I’d get used to it if I were you.” 
Belcher looked at each of us with a sense of amusement. He spoke under his breath so only the three of us could hear him. “So you go have your breaks and jerk off to the cashier girls, or do your comedy, or your screenplays, or whatever the hell it is you do on your own time … and then get the fuck back to work.”
Belcher turned to James. “And you,” he said forcefully, pushing his finger into James’ chest, “you stay away from Cassandra or next time I’ll shove a carrot up your ass and light it. Got it?”
Belcher walked off and continued down the aisle, towards the back of the store. That was actually a fairly nice encounter for a change. 
Suddenly, his voice burst over the P.A. above. For a second I thought he was gonna have round two via the airwaves, but his now friendly and overly enthusiastic voice began: -

“Good morning customers and welcome to Runnerman’s, the friendliest store in the GTA! Customers, we’ve got some super savings for you today…”

Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah.
“A carrot wouldn’t burn, would it?” James asked, puzzled.

Monday was always the longest day.









7-Eleven, Bloor & Steeles
Thursday night, late: - 

The week was passing by with surprising speed. To put it not so eloquently: same shit, different days. Eric, James and I were sitting in the comfort of Douglas’ climate-controlled, fully loaded, silver Jeep Cherokee. Outside, it was -20°C plus wind chill—so cold your nuts would freeze and drop off before you even knew you had a problem. 
We were parked at the Bloor & Keele Street strip mall, right outside the 7-Eleven convenience store. We had one of the spots we’d often get, facing the front of the store, where you could sit and watch people come and go. People watching … the most underrated pastime known to man. And 7-Eleven stores were the perfect arena. They were lit up so much you needed sunglasses at night when you stepped through those sliding doors. And, from Douglas’ Cherokee, we could just about see every inch of retail floor space, thanks to the large, wall-to-wall windows and rows of fluros raining artificial light down onto customers.
At least a few times a week, or whenever Eric needed a sugar fix for his hypoglycaemia, we’d stop by the store, grab some junk and then sit there in the car, being entertained by those who came after us. If it was a quiet night, hell … we’d just sit there inventing characters and making shit up. Parked outside a 7-Eleven was like a mimed, reality stage show for us. Here were people paying good money to go to the theatre when you could get a better show at the local strip mall. 
It was amazing what you could learn watching everyday people. We’d try to workout people’s lives, their thoughts, who they were and what they were doing. Humans give so much of themselves away through non-verbal communication and the beauty is none of us are ever aware we’re doing it. And somehow, late night convenience stores seemed to elicit the best/worst of people’s body language habits. Go figure.
Earlier that night, Douglas had stopped by the apartment to chill, and it wasn’t long before Eric got a little sugar-deprived cranky and we headed out to make a 7-Eleven run for some snacks before Leno started. 
As we sat there taking turns with a jumbo bag of Lays and other unhealthy junk, we filled Douglas in on Friday night’s plan.
“You’re cool with tomorrow night?” Eric asked him.
“I’m down. I am so down. I’m gonna cane it, cane it, cane it. If you’re gonna pull something on your boss’ place, you gotta have a little ‘Satan’ on your side, right? Ooooh yeah! I am down,” Douglas said, raising his hand up and high-fiving us one by one…

Sidebar: Douglas

Pros: Ready to party, laughed at anything (flimsy pros, I know, but it’s all I got)
Cons: Yuppie, poser, ummmm … yuppie, shopped @ GAP

Douglas was a friend of Eric’s. They met at the Goodlife Sports Club, downtown, where Eric had been going since summer to try and lose the spare tire round his gut. He and Eric started hanging out ‘cos Douglas, like Eric, had the showbiz bug and wanted to get into producing. He loved the idea of being a producer, calling the shots on a project and making things happen. I think he wanted to be the next Jerry Bruckheimer.
For his day job, Douglas was a stockbroker for a large, downtown brokerage firm. He wasn’t rich-beyond-wildest-dreams rich, but I know he made well over $100K, and I’m guessing twice that when the bonuses were handed out at his office. He was in his mid-thirties, but had a baby face and gap-tooth smile, making him look ten years younger. A stocky build was the result of sitting on his ass all day watching computer screens, hence the sports club. 
The one thing that set the four of us apart was Douglas’ personal style. Sculptured, dark-blonde hair, suits, ties, designer shirts, colognes, watches—he had a thing for wanting to look like those guys from GQ magazine, so he obeyed what the mag told him to wear, told him to want, and told him to like. I assume part of his fashion consciousness could be put down to his job and the fact his firm wouldn’t take well to him turning up in grunge.
Just looking at him gave you the impression of a man in love with a life of excess. Generally speaking, though, Douglas was a good guy. He meant well. He loved to party and live it up whenever he could. The stress of the job (he told me about stockbrokers picking up computer screens and hurling them across the trading floor when deals went bad) was something he had to deal with daily, so I didn’t blame him for wanting to go out every night to escape.
Since they’d met last summer, Douglas had regularly called Eric with invites to clubs, parties and the like. And that was right up Eric’s alley ‘cos he got access to places beyond the velvet rope, places you just couldn’t go unless you had a friend in the know. Douglas’ contacts and money allowed Eric (and me & James) to tag along to some of the city’s best wrap parties, after-shows and product launches you’d never get into alone.
I think his ego definitely got a kick out of having us hang around, too. When we were out with Douglas, it always seemed like a carefully managed exhibition. He craved attention and the idea that he was a player. Like, you just knew he wouldn’t be the same guy if people weren’t around.
That was Douglas. 
Then … there was ‘Satan’. In an attempt to fit in, Douglas called himself ‘Satan’—a self-proclaimed nickname—and, using his favourite word ‘cane’, constantly claimed he was creating ‘death and destruction’ (figuratively speaking) all over Toronto’s nightlife scene. He always made the point of telling us how much ‘damage’ he was gonna inflict at a club or party. The closet thing to ‘damage’ I ever saw him commit was lose his balance dancing and fall on the edge of a table, sending another group’s drinks crashing to the floor. But sure enough, you could be at the worst party in the world, something that had totally tanked, and invariably rely on Douglas to be there smirking like a Cheshire cat, doing his little jiggy dance and shouting over the doof-doof how much the party rocked (and that he was causing d+d).
Last summer, the first time I met Douglas, the four of us were at a house party in Scarborough, one of the rougher neighbourhoods east of the city. Scarborough’s one of those suburbs you just don’t wanna be in, day or night and, I have to admit, I was a little on edge not knowing him and the kind of party he’d taken us to. Long story short—the party sucked ass. But … I’ll never forget that first impression of Douglas. 
A large group of us had been standing out on the back patio of this double-story house. The lighting around the place was almost non-existent. Maybe they’d spent all the money on beer, who knows? Anyway, as we continued to drink and talk shit around the group, I noticed a light in the distance. At first glance, I didn’t think anything of it … until I turned away and instinctively looked again. I kept my eyes on it, distracted as to its identity. As odd as it sounds, this light (not unlike the light in my NDE) was moving toward the house and, as it did, the sound got louder and louder. Identifiable. It was a train … I could hear it clicking over the kinks in the tracks, even over the raucous laughter from the other guys.
The problem … was it was headed straight for us.
I got the group’s attention.
“Why’s that train coming straight for us?” I asked in a dumb-blonde kinda moment.
Everyone turned to take a look. The laughter quickly died down and we all stared at the light as it continued to bear down on us. 
Wtf, I thought.
OK, I’d been drinking quite a bit from what I remember of that night—which obviously hadn’t helped the situation—but I was pretty sure nothing hallucinogenic had snuck into my bloodstream.
The train let out a screaming blow of its horn. Wrrrrghhh. Wrrrrghhh (train-speak for get out the fucking way). It was headed straight for us. Click-click, clack-clack. Click-click, clack-clack. Screw drugs—when I heard that, it became real enough for me.
At that moment, Douglas dropped his beer and flew off the patio—bolting away, scared shitless. I’ve never seen anyone move like he did. He may’ve been a little stocky, but he was gone in a second. And as the train’s headlight moved closer to us, it quickly began to light up tracks which passed right by the house. The house was next to a train line. It suddenly rushed by us—swoosh! Nobody moved. We felt a powerful gush of air go through us as it passed. The clickety clacks were like gunshots. The whole house shook like a Californian earthquake. Ten seconds later, it was gone as fast as it’d arrived. I watched a red light at the back of the last carriage slowly fade away. Douglas was nowhere to be found, his spilt beer soaking into the patio decking.
On the way home that night, he laid down the story that he’d rushed off to get his camera from the Jeep, and was so pissed off he missed it, ‘cos he wanted to try out his new top-of-the-line digital SLR. He said it caned every other camera on the market in a nice subject change/dodge.
I told him the next time I saw a train headed for us, I’d let him know.
So … the idea of Douglas being some crazy, hardcore party dude that he made himself out to be didn’t really fly with me. He was every bit the yuppie poser.

“Check this guy out,” James said, motioning out the window. 
Our attention turned to a fat man struggling out of his car and heading into 7-Eleven. He was wearing stained track pants and a huge down-feather coat that made him look like the Michelin man.
“This Belcher guy … is this the same guy you were tellin’ me tries to rub up against the checkout girls any chance he gets?” Douglas asked us.
“That’s the one,” Eric said, in between devouring a cream-filled jam donut like he was French kissing it.
“Trust me, he’s the biggest sleazebag,” I told Douglas.
“He gave me those stale chocolates, remember?” James said.
“Hey, I forgot to say … I heard Clooney’s gonna be in town. See … you meet someone like that, pitch an idea they like and you could be in the game, dude. It’s that simple,” Eric told Douglas. “You hear about things like that all the time. Right place, right time. Y’know?”
“Clooney sucks ass,” I chimed in.
“Ever heard of Sundance? It’s not rocket science, just make your own damn movie,” James added.
Douglas reached his hand round to the back, where James and I sat. “Hey, hand me that box back there, can ya?”
James handed a white, rectangular box to Douglas. He quickly opened it up and removed a bubble-wrap bag. “Check these out,” he said, pulling a pair of futuristic-looking, black binoculars out the bag.
“Are they…?”
“Ooooh yeah … night vision, baby! Satan can now see in the dark!” Douglas shouted. 
He brought them up to his eyes and looked out the windows.
“How much?”
“A grand. Top of the line. What the pros use.”
He clicked a switch on top of the binoculars as we all watched him.
“You gotta bring ‘em on Friday night,” Eric said.
“I’m gonna be our eyes in the night with these suckers.”
“We have a Slurpee contestant,” James interrupted. 
The fat guy had made his way to the opposite end of the store where the 7-Eleven Slurpee machine sat. Dishevelled and dazed, he slowly grabbed a Big Gulp cup and began to fill up on green Slurpee.
“You can’t use a Big Gulp for a Slurpee, dumbass,” James said to himself.
“You can do whatever you want—I’ve destroyed one of those Slurpee machines before—you think those guys from Bangalore give a shit?” Douglas said, referring to the Indian cashiers.
In any other circumstance, a Big Gulp Slurpee was an insane amount of Slurpee/sugar to be taking in, but looking at the way this fat guy was dazed and confused, I really think he needed it.
“Forget tryin’ to meet actors—what happened to that script idea you had?” I asked Eric. 
I’d listened to him talk about writing an indie script for months. I’d seen him work on it for maybe ten minutes. I used to ask him about it every few days just to piss him off. Well, ever since he said how easy screenwriting was.
“It’s all in my head. I’m gonna write it,” he said unconvincingly. “Hey, give me a go of those things.” 
Eric grabbed the binoculars off Douglas and brought them to his face.
“Holy shit,” he exclaimed, “these things are so messed up!”
Douglas’ Cherokee was like a moving, yuppie-ville mall. In the back, James and I sat next to clothes, CDs, DVDs and magazines, all scattered in a mess. Thing was, it was all brand new stuff. I mean shirts and socks and ties still in GAP bags with their tags on, never worn. CDs and DVDs still shrink-wrapped. And enough magazines in the seat pockets to open a newsstand. Some guys had way too much money.
“We’re gonna cane this guy’s house so bad … there’s gonna be death and destruction on Brunswick, baby. You’re gonna see Satan unleashed like you’ve never seen before. This is gonna be a whole new level of Satan, okay? I’m so pumped for this,” Douglas announced to all of us.
Eric passed the binoculars back to me and James, “Here, check it out.”
I looked through the binoculars and watched the fat guy place two king-size Twinkies in the store’s microwave, playing with the settings. I turned and looked out my side window. 
“That … is fucking amazing,” I gasped. 
I could see right up Bloor Street to High Park Avenue, and turning back over my shoulder could see into the park itself. Everything had a bright green tint to it, but it was just like day. I could see the trees, the bushes, even the snow blowing in the wind … everything.
I handed them over to James. He placed them beside him, uninterested, which didn’t surprise me. Instead, he was stuck on watching the fat guy. He studied him closely. 
“He’s a factory worker. He’s about to clock-on for the graveyard shift,” James speculated.
Douglas chimed in. “No way. He’s finished work and he’s getting some shit to cane on the way home. Too easy.”
“You can’t drink a Big Gulp Slurpee and then go to sleep, are you nuts?” I told Douglas.
Outside, a girl pulled up in her car and left the engine running. She was dressed up for a night out. She had a big coat on but underneath you could tell she was wearing club stuff. Her legs were exposed to the harsh February winds.
“Check it out—hot chick going in,” Eric blurted out.
The girl walked through the doors and headed straight for the freezer, pulling out a tub of ice-cream.
“She’s been dumped,” James said, as we watched the brunette hurry to the cashiers, head down, body language emotionless.
“Or stood up,” I offered.
“A girl with ice-cream has to be something bad,” Eric said. “No other purchases … she knew exactly what she wanted, left the car running. She’s headed back to her apartment. The night hasn’t gone well. She’s crushed.”
“Quick. Gimme my night vision,” Douglas said, reaching his hand back.
As the fat guy waited for his Twinkies to nuke, we watched him scratch his ass and have a good eye of the brunette. I must admit, she was cute. Yeah … I remember those kinds of details. Always. I hope she wasn’t gonna eat too much ice-cream, damn shame for a girl to lose that kinda figure. 
“She is hot,” Douglas said, hands on binoculars, zooming in on the girl. “I’d cane that all night.”
She took off from the counter and headed out the store, quickly jumping back in her car.
“I see you, baby … shakin’ that ass … shakin’ that ass!” Douglas shouted. 
“I think those things just paid for themselves,” James quipped.
The fat guy took a huge chug of his Slurpee and then re-filled it, before he grabbed his Twinkies and headed to the counter. He turned and briefly fingered through the girlie magazines before reaching into his pants for his wallet (I’m so glad it was his wallet).
Eric said, “He drives a snowplough. The only thing he has is his job, and he’s gotten so used to pushing snow off the roads that it’s become his master. The very thing he makes his living off is what he spends his money on—ice … in the form of frozen, 7-Eleven Slurpee.”
All of us looked at Eric.
“Where the hell do you get this stuff?” James said, on behalf of us all.
“You gotta stop watching late night TV,” I told Eric.
“Especially ‘Leno’ … what a funny guy,” added James, with a dose of sarcasm (James thought The Tonight Show sucked ass).
“Like you don’t have a Law & Order problem, James?”
James ignored Eric and went back to watchin’ the fat guy.
“I’d love to cane a girl like that in one of those nightclub booths at Meteor,” Douglas said, pulling the binoculars away from his face as the girl sped off up Steele. “She could play with my space rock all night.”
He looked at the three of us for a high-five or a ‘yeah, baby.’ He got nothin’.
“What the hell is that s’posed to mean? It doesn’t mean anything,” I told him.
“Yeah, you should’ve said something like, ‘I wouldn’t stop caning her even if a meteor slammed my ass’,” Eric suggested.
(dead silence…)
“So, what time are we gonna be doin’ this?” Douglas asked us.
“I’m guessing one-thirty? We do it, then get outta there around two. We’ll blend in with the crowds going home from the bars,” Eric said.
“Rock n’ roll, baby! Cane it!” (guess who)
“This is gonna be one of the big ones,” Eric announced.
“I just wish we could see the look on Belcher’s face when he gets back from Florida,” I replied.
“Yeah…” Douglas added, “that dude is gonna get so caned.”









Runnerman’s,
Friday, afternoon stretch: -

Over the P.A. System: “Matt Zander, could you please take a mop and bucket to aisle six. Mop and bucket to aisle six, Matt Zander.”

That motherfucking prick.
Belcher always took great pleasure in doing that to us. The service-desk girls would never use us—they had their own lackeys for cleaning shit up. But Belcher … he’d jump at the chance to call on the three of us. His voice would come over the P.A. gleefully requesting we clean shit, take out the stockroom trash, empty the carton crusher, fill the milk cabinets etc, etc. All the worst jobs, none our responsibility. The two front store lackeys, in between shopping-cart runs, would have more than enough time to do all of that stuff and he knew it. But you’d hear it in his voice, over the P.A., smirking the whole time he called our names. 

The twelve-‘til-two staggered lunch break was over for the day and the staff of Runnerman’s were all back to work, feeling a temporary high, seeing as though the weekend was now in sight.
I was in aisle six, mopping the floor, where a lady—whose hair hadn’t seen a bottle of shampoo in months—had clumsily pushed the front end of her shopping cart into a standing display of Papa Rossini’s pasta sauce, toppling a half-dozen bottles to the floor. I was at the crime scene—the sauce, like blood, spreading out from the victim.
Y’know, not a day went by without some customer knocking, bumping or crashing into items with their cart. How the hell did they handle a car when this was how they drove a shopping cart? No wonder there are so many road deaths. Head-on collisions, sideswipes, rear-enders—whatever was the case, after any cart collision there’d be a choice the shopper had to make. Sometimes, if you happened to stay unnoticed, you could watch them. There were two types of people when it came down to an oops-I-broke-it smash… 
Some would accidentally break a bottle of something and report it, feeling genuinely sorry. It was just an accident, these things happen—blah, blah, blah. But the type of person you’d more often see—depending on whether someone had seen them—would either cover it up, blame their cart, deny everything, or better still, just continue to shop as if nothing had happened, walking away to leave the mess as a gift for us to be consigned by Belcher to clean.
Yep, in the two years I’d been at Runnerman’s, I’d just about seen it all. Human behaviour at its best and worst. I’d often get shouted at, harassed, and abused by customers, especially in rush hour when the place would fill up and gridlock full of people trying to get some stuff and then get the hell outta there. Even the most sweet and innocent-looking old ladies would yell at you, wanting to know why there were no more coupons left in the auto-dispensers so they could get six cents off a particular brand of cat food. And looking at other items in their cart, I’m sure some of ‘em weren’t even buying it for a damn cat, either.

Fact: Glass mixed with pasta sauce stinks like shit. Sounds like a new product line, maybe?
Y’know, you quickly become an expert on using a mop and bucket working in a supermarket. It’s a definite art form, too. See, you have to mop and clean every inch of floor while keeping it safe for customers to pass on so they don’t slip and sue your ass. The key is in the water distribution to the mop. Too little water means you’ll be scrubbing the floor until you have a heart attack. Too much water in the mop and the floor’ll be flooded, allowing the potential for a customer to slip over and sue the store for millions.
As I cleaned up and placed the larger pieces of splintered glass into the bucket, I counted five bottles of sauce as casualties of war. It was pretty much a daily event. The amount of waste and damage that went on at Runnerman’s was staggering. Take, say, five bottles of stock smashed per day by customers and times it by every supermarket across the country and you start to get an idea how much shit’s thrown away. And that’s not counting leaking packets, dented tins, faulty spray cans, mouldy perishables and the out-of-code candy we’d often eat, but was perfectly fine. All of it would be recorded, written off and dumped. It wouldn’t even be passed onto the homeless kids that’d sometimes hang round the bins out back. Just dumped. And probably 50% of all the stock I’d have to dump would be totally fine for consumer use. But, I’ll refer back to Runnerman’s Rule No.1: management always knew best. Always.

I remember it being around 2:20 p.m.
I’d hoped for something 3 p.m.-ish but it wasn’t to be. It was a game that most of the staff played, especially the girls on checkout. The worst thing you could do all day was keep your eyes on the store’s wall clock, upfront. The better way to play would be to try and hang out as long as you could, until you were busting to know the time and then either get a surprise or a depressing let down when you finally just had to look.
Continuing to mop, I soaked up the remaining pasta sauce and broken glass as Eric entered the aisle.
“Oh, that’s great—real great. Hey, perfect timing. You just missed out on helping me with this shit,” I said, annoyed. 
Somehow, Eric had the uncanny ability to show up when a job was about done.
He had amusement on his face.
“That is so messed up,” he said, looking down at the floor.
“What’s with people, can’t they drive a fucking shopping cart without smashing into something round here?” I asked.
“Yeah, well get this,” Eric began, “I’ve been crawling around on my hands and knees out back, looking for canned apricots cause some old guy likes to have his regular brand. I told him, ‘Hey … this ain’t no Russia, pops. There’s only like … twenty other brands of the same thing on the damn shelf.’”
Eric bent down and picked up the last remaining pieces of broken glass, placing them in a cardboard box I had for the clean up.
“Where’s James?” he asked.
“Last I saw he was stocking dairy. And being stalked by a customer’s kid.”
“Belcher’s leaving for Florida tonight, after close,” Eric whispered close to me.
“Have you talked to Douglas?”
“Yeah, he’s still down. We’ll head to King Slice, meet him there, grab some pizza, then subway it in.”
I nodded. I was about to say something but…
“Matt Zander, could you please go to the back docks, delivery at the back docks, Matt Zander,” came Belcher’s smug voice over the P.A.
“Sonofabitch,” I moaned. “C’mon, let’s see what it is.”
“You go ahead. I’m waiting for a call from my agent. My cell has bad reception in the stockroom, remember?” Eric said. “I’ll have to catch up, dude.”
Yeah … nice one dude, I thought, as Eric headed towards the front desk, leaving me behind. Gotta hand it to Eric, like I said, he could talk his way out of anything. Thing was, I was starting to tire of that game.









Runnerman’s (customers are the worst),
Friday, closing time: -

As heavy snow fell outside and began to blanket the parking lot and sidewalks, the working day was quickly coming to a close and a collective sigh of relief the weekend had arrived could almost be heard the store over. Runnerman’s, however, was still full of shoppers—homemakers now replaced by office types and bachelors, grabbing things like frozen dinners and cases of pop for the night. It was all about convenience. No one was able to cook anymore. The world was far too busy making money to buy raw ingredients to mix up, and the market had instantly catered for the change. Now almost everything was tailored towards the quick-fix life. Microwave-friendly, pre-cooked, pre-cut, pre-whatever. As long as it was quick, it didn’t really matter what kind of toxic chemicals were used to produce it.

“Matt Zander and James McFadden, could you please attend to the doors for closing. Matt Zander and James McFadden, to the doors for closing, thank you,” came Belcher’s announcement over the P.A.

That night, it was James and my shift to watch the doors after we closed right on 7:00 p.m., down to the second (thank God we hadn’t started to trade late … yet). It’d take at least another twenty minutes for the remaining shoppers in the store to be rustled out like cattle, so every night two staff members would have to baby-sit the doors and make sure nobody would sneak in or try to invent some story that if they didn’t bring home milk, their wife was gonna kill ‘em. 
On an average weeknight, most of the staff would get away around seven-thirty, the last ones to leave being the cashiers, who had to wait patiently for the few customers who insisted on making sure every single promotional coupon came off their total. As seven-thirty rolled by, the U of T nightshift students would appear, ready to dump thousands of cartons in the aisles to complete a restock of the shelves while everyone slept, finishing up as the bakers arrived for a new day. Yep, life at Runnerman’s was a complete 24/7 cycle. It never stopped.

“Attention customers, the store is now closed. Could you please finalize your purchases and make your way to the checkouts. We would like to thank you for shopping Runnerman’s, your discount grocery store,” the front-desk manager’s voice blurted out over the P.A., making it official.

Standing at the front doors, I could see James down aisle 8, trying in vain to dodge shopper’s carts, waiting for them as they road blocked the whole aisle, many of them tired corporate moms shouting at their kids to put boxes of Count Chocula cereal and the like, back on the shelf.
Eric was at the deli counter, caught up with a customer, showing them the direction to the milk, right at the back of the store. Supermarkets put milk in the back so you had to walk the entire length of the store and be tempted by other stuff just to get to it. And bread was always at the opposite end to the milk. Clever, huh?

“Don’t you just wanna smack dumpers in the head?” James said as he reached me.

Sidebar: Dumping (say dum-p-ing) verb

a) To change one’s mind about the purchase of an item and dump it at a random store location rather than return it to its proper shelf spot.

Dumping was one of the more frustrating of customer habits when you worked in a supermarket. The most commonly known form of dumping was ‘pre-checkout dumping’. This would take place when a customer was headed to the checkouts and did a little ‘do-I-really-need-that?’ analysing with their basket of items. You’d often find impulse items such as candy bars, cookies or muffins dumped all over the shelves nearest to the front of the store. That was the normal kind of dumping. 
Taking it to the next level of how frighteningly dumb some customers were was ‘extreme dumping’. ‘Extreme dumping’ was when a customer would dump an item in a location that would then perish the item, and once found, would have to be thrown away and written off. For example, let’s say a customer bought some slices of ham from the in-store deli. Once they decided they didn’t really need the ham after all, well … it’s all cold, right? What’s the difference between the 4°C dairy case and the -20°C freezer cabinet? They’d just slip the ham quietly into the freezer cabinet and head for the checkouts. Dumb fucks.

“Who dumps a bag of muffins into the freezer cabinet? Who are these people?” James continued.
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. James just had a way about him. But he was right. Customers were the worst.
“Hey, check it out, she’s hard at work,” I said to James, as I noticed Cassandra and Belcher talking it up as she closed down her lane. 
James and I watched Belcher put his coat and scarf on, ready to leave. I couldn’t hear them with all the scanner noise and kids screaming as they went through the checkouts, but you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. Cassandra was doing her best to show off cleavage, thanks to one button too many being undone on her blouse. She moved in for a flirty touch of his arm, feeling his coat material and laughing, as she battered her eyelids and tossed her hair. You could see Belcher eating it up.
“I’m guessing she’s gonna be front-desk manager come Monday?” James quipped.
“Why do they always go for the assholes?” I pondered, the both of us watching them rather than the front doors.
Finally, Belcher checked his watch and said his goodbyes to the front-desk staff. He’d always leave closing to the girls on front-desk duty. One by one, they were all wishing him a nice weekend away. It looked like friggin’ Sesame Street—they were all doing little cutesy waves with their hands next to their faces, all smiling, brown-nosing (suck suck suck). 
Making the break from them, Belcher began to head towards the front doors and the two of us. As he reached us, we pulled the doors apart like Manhattan doormen and he walked straight outta the store, into the parking lot and the falling snow. He didn’t say a word—the guy just walked past us like we were nobody. But that was the thing with Belcher and his bung eye—half the time you didn’t have a clue where he was looking, or if he could even see outta that damn thing. I think he could, and that he was just your everyday, garden-variety asshole. He’d never acknowledge us outside of store hours, anyway, so it wasn’t anything new to get a front-door snub. All the more reason to hate him.
As the cashier girls descended into store-closing madness and the noise levels of shoppers waiting patiently in long queues grew, James and I discreetly turned around just enough to peer outside at Belcher, who was carefully dodging puddles in the parking lot as he walked to his car. 
Little did he know…
I turned to James and whispered, “Hope he enjoys Florida … ‘cos payback’s gonna be a bitch.”









When we arrived downtown,
Bathurst/Bloor Subway
1:26 AM, on schedule: -

After leaving King Slice (best pizza in T.O.), my heart rate (and cholesterol) had shot through the roof. On the subway in, the adrenalin had already begun to flow freely through my veins. It always did before a break-in—that was the idea. That was the rush that was so cool.
Climbing the steps of the Bathurst subway to street level, I’m sure Eric, James and Douglas were all equally pumped as I was, but as we reached Bloor St and the moonlit winter’s night, the bitter February wind cut through us like a knife and took away the will to speak. As revellers walked past us in large numbers, heading down the subway steps to catch the last trains home, our night of fun was just getting started.
Walking along Bloor St, towards Brunswick Ave, we all kept our heads down, our hoods on, our hands in our pockets and our mouths shut. This wasn’t for the reason you might think—to go unnoticed—but rather to survive the bone-piercing wind of Old Man Winter.
February is the coldest month in Toronto. Putting traffic, garbage and smog aside, winter is my #1 grievance of this place. I fucking hate the cold. And the problem with Toronto is there’s really only two seasons, not four. It’s either a) winter, or b) winter’s on its way. The long winter here makes summer seem like a 4-week vacation you take every year to the Caribbean. The cold’s an entity here, it has the ability to mess with your head and break you. It’s a very unpleasant existence when your skin freezes, your lips crack, your nose is like a stop sign, and your ears and fingers lose all feeling. And, let’s not forget the dirty snow, freezing rain, flurries, black ice, wind chill, naked trees, a thousand shades of grey and the occasional ice storm. Yep, whoever came up with that whole ‘winter wonderland’ bullshit must’ve been smokin’ some pretty good crack.

Anyways, thankfully, as we reached Brunswick Avenue and turned off Bloor, we became somewhat sheltered from the harsher easterly winds by the rows of houses up and down the avenue. We continued to slowly trudge through the snow towards our destination.
“Fuck!” I moaned, wiping my nose with my coat sleeve (bad habit).
“Weather Channel said it was gonna be minus forty wind chill overnight,” Eric gasped.
“You need The Weather Channel to tell you it’s fucking freezing?” James asked. “They should just flash ‘FF’ on the screen with sirens going off when it’s like this.”
“You gotta get a down coat, James,” Douglas said. “Down, baby. That’s where it’s at. Ooooh yeah … I could be naked underneath this thing and still be warm.”
“You promised you’d never do that again,” James replied, straight-faced.
“Check it out,” Douglas said, as he unzipped his navy-blue ski-coat a little and showed it to James. “This thing’s got about fifty caned ducks stuffed in it. Beeeee-eautiful.”
“How much?” Eric asked.
“$650. This is the best money can buy. The North Face.”
I’d owned a cheap, department store down coat for the past three years. It did the job, but had sprung a leak last winter, and since then I’d kinda dripped feathers everywhere I went. 
“You know, when they settled this city, no way they settled in winter,” I said, puffing for breath, “who in their right fucking mind would think this would make a good place for a city—fucking minus forty and snow up your ass?”
Eric laughed and chimed in, “How’s the surprise they woulda’ got when the first winter came round? All settled in and then … ‘Ummm, hey guys? I think we mighta fucked up.’”
Trudging through fresh snow, there was an eerie silence all across The Annex, as the light and noise from Bloor St faded away. The Annex was one of the cooler (no pun intended) downtown suburbs, and was a mix of artists, U of T students, and corporate types, giving the area a good, all-round vibe. While Bloor was a busy strip of cafes, bookstores and fashion outlets always buzzing with locals, once you stepped away from that main corridor, you found yourself in peaceful, tree-lined streets with row upon row of original Victorian-era double and triple-story homes—seemingly removed from the downtown core of which they were a part of.
Our M.O. for these types of nights was pretty simple. One of us would carry a backpack with our gear and three other backpacks inside. Once we reached a home, we’d each have our own backpack to fill with our choice of stuff. And when we got outta there, we’d look like your everyday University students on the move—especially so tonight, seeing as U of T was only blocks away. Cool, huh?
“265 … what number is it?” Eric asked us.
No one answered him.
“James,” he said again, “what’s his number?”
“How the hell do I know? You’re the one that’s been to his place,” James replied.
“It’s 3-something … I can’t remember? I need something to eat. A donut or something to make me think,” Eric said. “Matt, got anything in the bag?” he asked me.
“Nothin. No donuts, no sugar,” I answered.
“Is there a Tim Hortons round here somewhere?”
“I’ve got a cigarette,” James offered.
“277,” Douglas pointed out.
“So I met with my agent yesterday,” Eric began, getting his mind away from food, “guess who was sitting across from us?”
“Dudley Moore?” James said.
“He’s fucking dead.”
“When did that happen?” James asked.
We ignored him. You did that a lot with James.
“The dude from The Wonder Years, y’know … the guy?”
“You mean that kid? Savage…?” Douglas said.
“No, the Dad. He’s in alotta stuff. Movies and Disney shit. He’s always playing a dad or some military guy. I don’t know his name,” Eric said. “He was sitting right across from us.”
“Hey, why hasn’t your agent got you anything since you did that FedEx ad?” I asked Eric.
I counted a few steps in the snow as we waited patiently for Eric to answer.
“There was an incident…” he said, adding a pause. “I kinda threw up on her.”
“You threw up on your agent?” Douglas asked in disbelief.
“289,” James noted.
“You never said anything about this?” I said.
“I wonder why,” James replied.
“Right after I finished the FedEx shoot she invited me to this industry night to meet some talent, make contacts, network—that kind of thing,” Eric began. “It was at the Gypsy Co-op on Queen. They had everything—food, open bar, band, waiters flyin’ round everywhere. So, these waiters, they kept bringing out all these trays of little gourmet pastries. Half of them I had no clue what they were, but every time they brought them out, I took a whole bunch—I was hungry as hell. I wanted to take the entire tray of ‘em. Meanwhile, I’m drinking as you do at an open bar, and sure enough … it hit me.”
“I so wish I had’ve seen this,” Douglas said, disappointed.
“So I think … uh-oh. You know when you know you’re gonna throw up? You can feel all the food taking the elevator to the top floor, back into your mouth? I just froze. My agent pulled me over to meet this music-video director and I couldn’t run off, so I just tried to hold it down and keep still. Just as she said, ‘Raoul, come here darling, I’d love you to meet Eric, one of our new signings…’ is when I threw my guts right down her cleavage.”
Douglas burst into laughter and slowly applauded. “I knew there was a reason she hadn’t called back,” he shouted. 
I realized residents would’ve heard us, but were probably used to hearing partygoers on the way home from a night out. James and me … I think we were too damn cold to laugh.
“It was so messed up,” Eric said.
“You mean she was so messed up?” James quipped.
“I’m lucky she’s even talking to me. I spat chewed-up Hors d’Oeuvres all over her dress.”
“Hey, this is it,” I said quietly. “There’s his car.”
We reached 321 Brunswick Avenue and slowly walked past the double story home, watching closely for any sign of life. Belcher’s Lincoln was parked right out front. He’d gotten a car service to the airport. 
Now, I’m no real estate agent, but the house must’ve been worth a fortune for the neighbourhood. I figured there was a big salary gap from grocery assistant to store manager. Beneath a canopy of trees—stripped back by the season—stood a grand old Victorian two-story house with a pointy, arrow-shaped roof to keep the snow off. Built with red brick, it had four lots of tall, bay windows, painted white around their edges. Several steps led up to a covered porch, with two pillars at either side holding a second roof up over the porch and entrance. Wooden railing surrounded the porch and there was a table with chairs stacked away, probably only used for the four weeks of summer. Okay, I lie … five weeks. So sue me.
The house was dark and the curtains were drawn. We hung back for a minute, just watching.
“Turn around,” Douglas said to me.
“I’ll check what’s going on,” he said, as he unzipped my backpack and reached in, grabbing his night-vision binoculars.
The wind was still blowing through us but it’d calmed down from the strength it had back on Bloor. The moon and stars were above us. Fresh powder snow covered everything in its reach. It was eerily quiet except for the sound of snow falling from branches and hitting the ground below. The whole street was at peace. Only a masochist would be out in this weather … or anyone up to no good.
“Are we good to go?” Eric whispered to Douglas.
“Gentlemen,” he replied, looking all around the house through his binoculars, “we have ourselves an empty house to cane.”









321 Brunswick Ave,
the classic stealth manoeuvre: -

With a final glance around us, we crouched down and stepped over a small wooden fence along the front of Belcher’s house, separating the property from the sidewalk. As we moved through his front garden, we made a trail of fresh prints in the virgin snow. A birdbath carved of stone stood amongst small shrubs and bushes, all covered with the white stuff. February’s a time of the year where gardens just don’t exist in Toronto. Even the birdbath was ‘out of order’, and the only birds diving in for a dip would’ve been kamikaze ones. 
Quickly disappearing out of sight from the street, we headed left, down the narrow, side walkway of the house. I could feel the cold penetrating my socks as I crouched along, my feet deep in about 12 inches of snow. We all took care not to brush up against Belcher’s garden bushes, the snow weighing down on their leaves—any loud rustling and an alert neighbour could’ve been the end of us. 
At the end of the walkway, the path opened up to the back of the house and a yard barely big enough to hold a swimming pool. The four of us stepped off the snow-covered ground and onto a slatted wooden deck, leading to the back-entry sliding glass doors.
We were quiet. We took a moment to catch our breath from the classic stealth manoeuvre. The yard was dark. I could barely see in front of me. I turned around and peered through the sliding glass doors into the house. Everything was locked up. No one was home. Perfect.
I pulled the backpack from my shoulders and placed it down onto the deck. I gently unzipped it and started pulling our gear out: -

Scrunched up backpacks (3)
Gaffer tape
Mini Mag-Lite torches (3)
Pack of disposable gloves
Our novelty masks (4)
Canadian-Tire standard toolkit

Eric and James grabbed their backpacks, unfolding them into shape. Douglas was busy scanning around the yard and inside the house with his night-vision binoculars. 
“Fuckin’-A,” he whispered to the three of us, “these things are so awesome.”
“Can you see anything?” I asked.
“I can see everything.”
“I mean activity, dumbass.”
“The place is dead,” he said, continuing to scan.
“Then let’s get this party started,” I whispered, as I pulled my latex Michael Jackson mask over my head. 
About a year ago, I’d bought a bunch of masks for us at a party store in Etobicoke. Mine was modelled after the real (i.e. black) Michael Jackson, and looked way more realistic than Whacko Jacko did himself. It even came attached with his curly, black Thriller hair and a normal-shaped nose.
Eric became Dr. Evil—the bald-headed bad dude from the Austin Powers movies—and had the voice perfected so well that the first time he wore the mask during a break-in, I couldn’t stop laughing and we had to call it off prematurely, in case the neighbours had called the cops. Since then, every once in a while during a robbery, Eric would talk in character, just for the laughs. James, well he wore a generic gorilla mask (no frills for James) and Douglas … well, Douglas became … sorry, Douglas was Satan, and wore a bright red devil mask with a big sinister frown, wrinkly skin, Spock-like ears and two horns popping out the top.
We wore the masks just in case we ever ran into trouble, or a house had cameras, which was getting far too common, what with all the cheap, hi-tech gear out there. Black ski masks? Far too unoriginal. I always saw black ski masks as the sign of a pro or the (dead @ the end) bad guy in a Hollywood movie. Novelty masks worked for us on so many more levels ‘cos we just didn’t see ourselves as ski-masked bad guys. We weren’t pros. I know there’d be people who wouldn’t get it, but this was something we did for fun. To escape from our boring lives for a while. The kinda rush you got from breaking into someone’s home had become addictive. Kinda like being a superhero and having an alter ego. No one knew we did this kinda stuff and that was half the buzz.
The people we targeted were wealthy, middle-class—you always knew they had insurance. We’d take stuff, homeowners would claim for it, get replacements and be better off. For them, it’d be a technology upgrade. Because we mostly stole tech stuff like cell phones, iPods and laptops, when people replaced their possessions they’d get the latest models. I’m sure some of ‘em actually didn’t mind at all that their old, crappy laptop was stolen so they could get a faster one. 
That’s why we wore the novelty masks—this wasn’t some serious gig for us guys. It was like acting out a scene from a movie. I’d stopped doing it for the stuff we stole a long time ago. I was doin’ it for the rush. For the challenge. My life had no challenge. I wanted to know I was still alive, for crissake. How can you have adventure packing groceries into shelves and telling people for the millionth time where the milk’s at?
With our masks on and a pair of plastic gloves each (duh, no fingerprints), we were ready.
“James, you’ve got the door, okay?” Eric said in classic Dr. Evil, holding his pinkie finger to the corner of his mouth.
“This place is in for such a caning,” Douglas whispered, grinning through his mask. “Hey, does anyone want to go to Brass Rail after this?”
“For the last time … no,” James quipped.
Douglas had an unhealthy (unhealthy, what am I sayin?) addiction for strip clubs. The Brass Rail was his favourite. For him, a lap dance was as normal as going out to pickup a newspaper at a convenience store.
James grabbed the toolkit and crouched over to the sliding door, while we waited for him to work his magic. He paused for a moment and spent a good 30 seconds staring at the lock.
“James,” Eric whispered, “while we’re young? My ass is freezing to my pants.”
I smiled to myself. Telling James to hurry was like trying to get Eric to give up donuts. It just wasn’t gonna happen. James was always getting on Eric’s nerves, and it figured, since Eric was the highly strung, instant gratification, I-want-it-NOW type. Always had been.
James slowly began to twist and turn two small screwdrivers in the lock. He tried to be as quiet as possible, wedging them left and right. My heart rate jumped even more. 
Robbing houses was the best. And a good workout … screw the gym. The anticipation was all over us. This was the type of rush I was hooked on—better than drugs, better than booze, better than sex.
Douglas was scanning around Belcher’s yard and over the fences to the neighbouring houses. He was our eyes in the dark. He stopped for a second and pulled the binoculars away from his face, focusing towards James and his handiwork.
“How do you know he doesn’t have the place wired?” he asked.
“We don’t,” I whispered.
“But,” Eric turned to him and explained, “all last summer he made me deliver bunches of groceries for his wife. She had a fender-bender. Some girl ran into the back of her at a set of lights. Screwed her neck up. Couldn’t get off the couch. The guy was too cheap to pay for home delivery in his own damn supermarket, can you believe that? Anyway, whenever I dropped stuff off I made mental notes. There’s no alarm. Positive.”
“If we find a system inside we just get the hell outta here, okay?” I said.
“Was she nice?” Douglas asked Eric, ignoring me.
“His wife?”
“Yeah,” Douglas replied.
“Are you asking me if she was nice as in ‘nice’, or if she was hot?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“She was a total MILF,” answered Eric.
“Isn’t that some kind of Lord Of The Rings character?” James asked, listening to us as he worked the lock.
“MILF … Mom I’d Like to Fuck,” I whispered to James.
“Personality?” asked Douglas.
“Since when does that matter?” Eric quickly replied.
“Y’know, there should be some kinda law against hot women being with guys like Belcher. I remember she had these pink sweatpants on and her ass … her ass was outta this world,” Eric told us.
“Maybe they were space pants?” James quipped.
“Maybe she wanted a special kind of delivery? Ever thoughta’ that? Ooooh yeah, baby! Bangin’ the boss’ wife … that’s the dream.”
“Hey … keep it down,” I whispered to Douglas, his voice getting a little loud for my liking.
“Yeah, well, she may’ve been hot but she was a bitch like you wouldn’t believe,” Eric explained. “She gave me this … this look of disgust when I tried to make small talk, dropping off some of her groceries. A look like … ‘Why are you fucking talking to me?’ Like I was a fucking Runnerman’s robot slave or somethin’. Stuck up bitch.”
“Maybe she had a carrot up her ass? So that’s where he got the idea from,” James pondered to himself.
Douglas pulled his 9mm replica pistol from his coat pocket. He aimed it up in the air and pulled the trigger. A flame lit up at the end of the barrel and he watched it for a second, while we waited for James. The gun was a cigarette lighter he owned to smoke Cubans he’d get from a colleague of his. For our purposes, though, he’d bring it along as insurance. A safety net in case anything went down we weren’t expecting and needed to show someone we were serious … in theory, anyways.
Click.
James tilted his arm as he turned the screwdrivers around in the lock. The lock had clicked undone. Gently, he slid the door along its rollers. He turned to us in his gorilla mask and whispered, “Even a monkey could’ve opened that lock.” 
We were in.









When we got inside Belcher’s place: -

One by one, we quietly moved into the house. James waited for the three of us to enter and then carefully pushed the sliding door shut. Finally, we were out of the cold and it never felt so good to be inside a warm, comfortable house than it did at that moment. 
As the four of us stood up, I was glad to feel my toes beginning to thaw. In the darkness of Belcher’s kitchen, my heart was smashing about in my chest for those first few moments. The extra kick was knowing whose house we were in and what he’d do to us if he ever found out who screwed him over.
While Douglas adjusted his night vision, the three of us turned our Mag-Lites on in unison, as though we’d been rehearsing it for months. We began to shine the light beams around and explore the layout of the kitchen.
There were ceramic, chessboard tiles on the floor. An antique, oval dinner table and cushy chairs were just inside the glass doors. Several newspapers were pulled apart and had their sections spread out on the table. One side of the kitchen was a row of cedar cupboards and a bench-top, sink and dishwasher. There were several used coffee mugs on the counter and a breadboard with the last few slices of a continental loaf. I saw an empty bottle of wine, lying sideways in the sink. Above the kitchen counter, windows looked over to the neighbouring house. On the other side of the kitchen stood a stove and refrigerator, surrounded by another bunch of cabinets and utensil draws.
I could see a door with a large, plate-glass centre leading out into the living room. I looked all over for any sign of an alarm system or mounted camera. Nothing. So far.
“Why’s it so freaking hot in here?” Eric whispered in a Dr. Evil voice.
I could feel it, too. The central heating must’ve been on full blast. It was like a damn sauna in there, we could’ve walked round naked. 
Eric immediately began pulling off his coat, not bothering to mask any ruffling sound it made.
“Whaddaya doing?” I asked.
“I have to get this thing off. I feel like I’m at the beach in here,” he complained, as he took his shirt off and went altogether topless. A hairy chest and a handful of unwanted flab—not exactly what I wanted to see right then and there, but that was Eric.
He walked to Belcher’s refrigerator and pulled the door open.
“Now what?” I asked again.
“Seriously, I need something to drink,” he said. “It’s so hot in here I feel like I’m gonna pass out. Who leaves their heating turned up this high?”
“It’s probably some auto setting or something,” Douglas said.
Eric scanned the shelves of Belcher’s fridge, looking for something to drink, while Douglas passed by him and headed toward the living room. I ditched my coat, too, and followed Douglas, shining my flashlight all around. 
On entering Belcher’s living room you got the distinct impression that either Belcher, or his wife, had a passion for home decorating—it was a pretty nice room, I have to admit. I stepped off the kitchen tiles and onto soft, plush, beige carpet. The slushy snow from our boots had already left a trail from the kitchen (oops). A staircase was on my left, leading up to the first floor. To my right sat a dining table with a tall, clay vase in the centre, full of flowers. Bookshelves stood against the walls, crammed with books and tomes. A blue, L-shaped couch was in the centre of the room, with one side facing an open fireplace and mantelpiece, and the other, a big-screen TV and bay windows overlooking the front garden and Brunswick Ave. The mantelpiece held all sorts of knick-knacks, picture frames and an antique clock in the middle. Expensive looking artwork adorned the walls, both abstracts and landscapes. A lamp sat on each of the smaller bookcases in the room, along with a spinning globe of the world, a few Runnerman’s retailing awards, and one of those old, model sailing boats. Seemed like Belcher had more to him than I first thought. To see a man’s castle … I guess it puts some perspective on a guy. Don’t get me wrong—he was still an asshole, but all the stuff in that living room showed a side of him I hadn’t seen at Runnerman’s.
“Who owns a fucking supermarket and has no pop, no juice … nothing to drink in their fridge?” I heard Eric say in the kitchen, starting to sink towards one of his infamous mood swings. “There’s just, like, a hundred jars of condiments! What kind of shit is that?”
I turned around and could see he was annoyed. He slammed the fridge door shut and joined us in the living room. 
James was right behind him, bringing up the rear. He was keenly observing all around him. Stupid things. Little things. Receipts on the fridge. Fridge magnets. Ornaments on the walls. The kind of coffee machine on the kitchen bench. James in a nutshell.
Turning to my right, I saw a large, wall mirror and below it, a spacious mahogany desk and executive leather chair. My flashlight passed over a laptop computer sitting on the desk and instantly caught my attention. 
Hell-ooooo. What have we here? I thought to myself.
Tell him what he’s won, Dave! Why, it’s a beautiful laptop computer! (Enthusiastic crowd applause)
And this wasn’t just some punk kid’s laptop—this was Belcher’s laptop…
I walked over to the desk for a better look. I came into frame of the mirror and for a moment, I stood there, staring back at myself. I remember realizing how stupid I looked—I was Whacko Jacko, Man in the Mirror. Bad album? Get it? I kill me. Sorry.
“This is nice,” I heard James say, admiring the place. “This is real nice…”
Suddenly, there was a loud crash that just about gave me a heart attack. I spun my head round in a flash and saw a golf bag lying on the floor, next to James. Several of the clubs had spilled out. I exhaled a breath of relief and silently held my hands up in the air to James as if to say, ‘What the fuck?!’
James wore glasses, so it wasn’t his eyes that were the problem. It was just James being James. Crouching down, he slowly pushed the clubs back into the bag and placed it back up against the wall.
I turned back to the desk. Placing my flashlight in my mouth, I searched with both hands for anything worth taking apart from the laptop. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness but the Mag-Lite, as usual, was still a big help. On the desk, there were photos of Belcher and his wife (Eric was right, she was hot), a bowl of potpourri, a stack of bills underneath a glass paperweight, a daily, tear-off calendar, stationery and a phone. Not a whole lot there. All I wanted was the laptop—that definitely had my name written all over it. It was connected to an external LCD monitor, inkjet printer and cable modem, but that stuff was all too bulky and I didn’t want it anyway. I began to unplug cables as the other guys did their own treasure hunting. I turned my head briefly to see James taking a photo of an unusual-looking table just inside the front door. 
I think I already mentioned this, but James was obsessed with photography. He tagged along on these nights just to take photos of people’s homes. To capture a snapshot of real life. Offbeat stuff. The way people lived. That’s all that mattered to James. Apart from his camera, which was a freebie from a house in the Beaches, he never took anything. Well, ‘cept for photos.
One by one, Eric and Douglas were digging through the cabinet draws against the wall. I saw Eric take some cash and flick through a bunch of credit cards for anything that could be of value.
Anyways, as we were all doing our own thing, and as I was carefully reaching over the desk to the back of the monitor, I heard a distant noise. I froze. I bit down on the flashlight in my mouth. I couldn’t tell where it’d come from and I didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t that unusual … you’d often hear noises and stuff in the older houses—floorboards or an old furnace, for example. But I could’ve sworn it was a voice. I think I was starting to get a little paranoid from doing this kinda thing. 
After a few seconds of silence, I went back to what I was doing. I unplugged the last remaining cable from the laptop and placed it in my backpack. The bonus of an item like that was gonna be getting it home and going though the thing. Maybe there was something on the hard drive to use as leverage against Belcher. Best-case scenario would be private photos with a woman other than his wife, or maybe some kinda Runnerman’s company data that, if leaked, would see him lose his franchise (or at least be in alotta shit). Laptops were always good for stuff like that.
I pulled open the top desk draw and dug through it thoroughly. Nothing interesting in there. Just loose computer cables and software. The second draw was more of the same, and the third was full of files. I left the desk and headed towards the others, slowly looking for anything else that caught my eye. 
James continued to browse around, looking through the bookcases like he was in a bookstore on a lazy Sunday. Eric and Douglas were admiring the big-screen TV and home theatre setup. Next to the TV, a reclining armchair sat nestled between two glass-top coffee tables. One was covered in magazines and scrunched up newspapers, along with remote controls for the theatre. On the second, sat a DVD tower crammed full of movies. 
I carefully peered out the bay windows for any sign of life outside. Not a peep, The Annex was asleep.
Eric then got my attention.
“We gotta start thinking how we can transport something like this,” he whispered, sizing it up like a project manager. “This would be so sweet to watch Leno on.”
I ignored him. To tell you the truth, my ears were still concentrating on the noise earlier and if it was ever gonna repeat itself.
Douglas was crouched at the TV cabinet, looking at the home-theatre gear. “I am so taking this,” he said. 
Like a kid in a candy store, he quickly moved his focus to the tower of DVDs and began to scan through them.
Eric crouched down to join him. One immediately caught his eye. 
“Check this out—The Usual Suspects, Special Edition. Spacey and Singer … what a classic,” he said. He pulled the DVD from the tower and handed it across to Douglas. “Here, take it, I’ve already got a copy.”
“Nah. I don’t want it.”
“Whaddaya mean?” Eric said, puzzled.
“I didn’t like it,” Douglas told him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa—hold on—are you nuts? How could you not like this movie? It’s a masterpiece of filmmaking. Mr. Kobayashi, Keyser Söze … the ending!? You got the ending, right?”
Douglas looked directly at Eric, “I thought it sucked. I figured it out halfway through. I mean, c’mon? Who else could it’ve been? Wasn’t it obvious? And the stupidest thing was that the ending made the whole movie never really happen … what the fuck’s that about?”
“Hey … guys … c’mon. Focus,” I said. “I’m gonna head upstairs, okay?”
I left the two film critics to bash it out and walked over to James. “Did you hear something before?” I asked him.
“Hear what?”
“Wait. There it is again. There.”
James and I listened.
Both Eric’s and Douglas’ voices were rising.
“Okay … okay,” I heard Eric say, trying to keep calm. 
I could tell he was annoyed. He’d often let his moods get the better of him, especially when he hadn’t had a recent sugar hit. 
He said to Douglas, “I just don’t get how you didn’t like this? Everyone likes this. It’s a recognized classic. Of all the movies not to like … you see the irony here, don’t you? Keyser Söze’s the devil—you’re wearing a friggin’ devil mask and telling people you’re Satan!”
Douglas barked back, “Alright … I get it! I’m still not taking it! Jesus! If you like it so much, why don’t you take it so you’ve got two copies of a fuckin’ shit movie!”
I quickly turned to the both of them and waved my arms wildly in the air. It got their attention.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Eric asked aloud.
I pointed upstairs with one hand and put my finger over my lips with the other. Carefully, I walked over to them and whispered up close.
“Somebody’s up there, listen.”









A fucking problem: -

We were all silent. We waited. It was as though someone’d freeze-framed us. The clock on the mantelpiece continued to count out life.
“I can’t hear anything?”
“Oooohmpf,” came a distant, muffled voice.
“What the fuck was that?” Douglas whispered.
Eric put his finger over his lips. We all heard the noise again. A faint sign of life was coming from upstairs. We huddled close together, like a sports team in a time-out.
“Someone’s up there,” Eric whispered.
“Maybe it’s a TV, y’know, on one of those timers?” James suggested.
“It sounds like a voice. Maybe we woke someone up?” I whispered.
“Uhhhhhhhhh.”
“That’s definitely a voice, it sounds like a moan,” Douglas replied.
My heart was in my mouth. We heard the voice become clearer with each passing moment.
“It sounds like someone’s in trouble.”
“Maybe Belcher beat his wife before flying to Florida and she’s up there dying?” Douglas said.
“Uggghhhh.”
“That’s fucking,” James whispered, as he paid close attention.
“Fucking what?”
“The noise … it’s fucking—two people fucking,” he replied.
“And you’re an expert?” Eric asked him.
“Goddddddd,” came the voice again.
“This is nice … real nice. I thought he was supposed to be in Florida?” I whispered angrily to Eric.
“Wait, maybe he is. Maybe it’s his wife?”
“Maybe she’s got hookers from the Eye Weekly up there?” James deadpanned.
Eric glanced at him, unimpressed.
“His wife’s probably having an affair,” Douglas whispered. “They’re getting it on while he’s away. Sounds like she’s lovin’ it.”
“Ooooooooh,” the voice continued.
“I thought you said they were both going? As in, ummmm … both of them,” I questioned Eric, still annoyed.
“That’s what I thought! Maybe she didn’t wanna go this year? How the hell do I know!”
“So,” James whispered, “what do we do now?”
“Don’t stop—oh, god—don’t stop…”
We all stood there, staring at each other. 
I think we thought about getting the hell outta there. I know I sure did. Knowing Belcher’s wife was upstairs with some other guy freaked me out. 
But, as we stood in a huddle and I stared straight at James’ camera hanging round his neck, I said, “Wait. I got an idea. Here’s what we do—we sneak upstairs, scare the hell outta her, take a coupla’ pictures and post ‘em on the internet. Belcher’s wife … fucking … on the internet. Or better still, on the staff noticeboard in the lunchroom. She could be employee of the month. Can you imagine how cool that’d be?”
“Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod—yesssssss,” came the voice.
“This is, like, so messed up,” Eric whispered, “I don’t wanna be listening to Belcher’s wife doing some guy up there, let alone smash through the door and have that image burnt into memory. We’ll all be scarred by this shit.”
“Don’t be such a pussy,” Douglas said softly.
“You said yourself she’s a bitch. C’mon, man … we’ve got the upper hand here. Element of surprise,” I pointed out to Eric.
Eric stood there and thought it over for a second.
“You really wanna do this?” he asked me.
“Hey,” I started, “we work in a supermarket, remember? Our lives are boring as fuck—we can’t not do this. C’mon, it’ll be funny as hell. I guarantee when we’re 80 we’ll look back on stuff like this.”
“Ughhhhhhhhhh. Ohhhhhhhhhh. Fuck me…”
“What else do we wear these stupid masks for anyways?” James added.
“Okay, okay,” Eric finally agreed. “We get some pictures, then we bail.”
“What’s the etiquette here? Should we wait for them to finish? Maybe I can go have a cigarette outside?” James wondered.
“So what are we gonna say?” Eric asked sarcastically, “‘Hey, don’t mind us … can you just keep screwing while we snap a few shots for the web?’ What if the guy’s some kung-fu dude? I don’t wanna get my face damaged if I’ve got auditions coming up.”
“Douglas,” I said, “she won’t know your voice. You’re the only one who talks, okay? Point the gun if you need to—that’ll have ‘em freaked.”
“Listen to you three … nuthin’ but a bunch of pussies. You’re all crappin’ your pants,” Douglas said. “I trade millions of dollars everyday. That’s fear.”
“Take as many shots as you can,” I told James, who was configuring his camera (I’m assuming for night-mode or whatever—unless there was a porn-mode on those things?)
“We take the photos, then get the hell outta there,” Eric said. “By the time they realize what the hell happened, we’ll be at 7-Eleven getting coffee and donuts.”
“That feels so … wow,” continued the voice upstairs.
We all looked at each other and nodded in anticipation. We turned our Mag-Lites off.
“Shouldn’t we have, like, a signal or something, in case we need to abort?” James asked.
“Did you just say abort?” Eric whispered. “James, I’d lose the word ‘abort’, okay? No girl is gonna date a guy who uses ‘abort’ in a real sentence. Period.”
“I knew I should’ve brought the chloroform,” James mumbled to himself.
“We don’t need a damn signal, okay? They’re into it so much up there they’re probably not even gonna notice us,” Douglas said.
“Well, I suppose I could always roll my eyes, like this…” James said, trying out his idea for a signal. “Ummm … Douglas … it’s called a flash. Trust me, they’re gonna notice.”
“Fuck you, James,” Douglas said half-hearted, “you got the balls to do this or not?”
“Let’s just do this already!” I whispered in frustration. “They’ll be smoking a fuckin’ cigarette by the time we get up there.”
“Well?” Douglas whispered, “who’s goin’ first?”
None of us moved. Maybe it was a stupid idea.
Douglas smiled, amused, “None of you wanna put your balls on the line, do ya?”
“I’m gettin’ such a good adrenalin hit right now. You feel that?” Eric asked us.
For the record, I was too. Fuckin’ Class-A adrenalin.
“Looks like Satan’s gonna have to show you pussies how it’s done,” Douglas said.
He slowly began to walk towards the stairs, night-vision binoculars in one hand, 9mm replica in the other. You’d never have known the gun was a lighter unless you actually saw the flame at its tip. It looked real enough to make anyone shit their pants. And, together with our novelty masks, I was just hoping Belcher’s wife didn’t have a heart attack and drop dead when she saw us. Having Whacko Jacko in your bedroom doorway watching you have sex might be enough to freak you to death. No way did I wanna be trying to revive a naked Belcher’s wife.
Leaving our backpacks behind for noise reduction, I followed Douglas up the stairs, making sure my footsteps were quiet. Eric and James followed behind me. I held onto the hand railing and hoped the others did the same. We wanted the element of surprise so we could catch her in the bump-n-grind act.
Whatever you do, don’t fucking trip, I thought to myself.
As we reached the top of the stairs, we stared through the darkness, down the short, hardwood floor hallway, covered by a narrow Persian rug. At the end of the hall, we could hear the source of the noise. It was coming from what was the main bedroom. I could see the door was pushed to.
As we slowly crept toward the door, Douglas was right, there was no doubt they were going pretty hard at it in there. Belcher’s wife was gasping, sighing, oohing and ahhing. I could hear both of them softly panting. The bed was creaking like a metronome in perfect rhythm. I’d never have admitted it to the guys, but it was actually strangely erotic, knowing they didn’t know we were approaching, only feet away.
Like anti-terrorist crack commandos in the dead of night, each step we took was in slo-motion, one after the other. On either side of the hallway, we passed other rooms and a bathroom, all in darkness. I carefully stepped past a phone stand and a pot plant, not wanting to touch or knock anything. My throat went dry. My heart thumped like bongo drums. The anticipation was like you wouldn’t believe. It was a purely natural high (try and beat that, drugs).
Douglas stopped just outside the bedroom and waited for the three of us to reach him at the doorway. We all listened in for a moment. The couple’s voices were somewhat dampened by the door. It felt like we were kids sneaking into an XXX theatre, listening to a couple exchange erotic instructions…
“Oh my god.”
“Uhhhhhhh.”
“Right there. Like that.”
“Like, ohhhh, that is sooooo good.”
“Lean back.”
“Ohhhh god, don’t stop … don’t stop … DON’T. STOP.”
Listening to them, it occurred to me that there was something strangely familiar about the female voice. Like when you hear a song on the radio that you’re sure you’ve heard before but can’t quite place. 
That’s not Belcher’s wife? I thought to myself. That was more like … like a girl’s voice?
Over the course of the next, oh, ten seconds, my brain pattern, in between heartbeats, went something like this: -

Airport.
(Thump-thump).
Snow.
(Thump-thump).
Planes don’t like snow.
(Thump-thump).
Airports get snowed in.
(Thump-thump).
Flights get cancelled.
(Thump-thump).
Oh.
(Thump-thump).
Fuck.
(Thump-thump).

Before I could do anything, Douglas gently pushed at the bedroom door and it swung open with barely a sound…
In the darkness, aided by moonlight through the bedroom windows, I could see Cassandra Parker, queen bitch of the Runnerman’s checkout girls, on top of Belcher. They were on a queen bed up against the bedroom wall, above the covers. Cassandra was running her fingers through her hair as she rode Belcher, all the way to the top of the Runnerman’s food chain. We just stood there, frozen, watching the motion of her body for what seemed an eternity, but was mere seconds.
We’d hit a fucking problem…
It wasn’t a large bedroom. There were two dressers on the left-hand wall, more artwork, and a TV cabinet on wheels with TV/DVD. Two large wardrobes were up against the right wall. Clothes were scattered on the hardwood floor and a freestanding mirror was in the corner. On either side of the queen bed were nightstands, sharing between them a clock-radio, lamps, phone and cologne bottles.
Belcher and Cassandra kept at it. They were butt-naked except for a pair of white socks on Cassandra’s feet. She had one of those Celtic knot tattoos on the small of her back. Belcher’s eyes must’ve been closed, and her back was to us, as they weren’t even slightly aware of the audience they now had. 
Like a gang of school kids peeping through a window, we lost all brain function for a moment. All of a sudden, I didn’t know what it was we were meant to be doing. 
Douglas suddenly reached his hand into the room and found the light switch on the inside wall. He flicked it on. That’s when we snapped out of it and the blood rushed back to my head.
Cassandra looked over her shoulder and let out the most ear-piercing scream I think I’ve ever heard from a girl. Now, I’m assuming it was from seeing us standing there in the hallway and not an orgasm … but I’ll never really be sure. She immediately jumped off Belcher like an ejector seat had shot her off, or she was a teenage girl getting caught with a boy by her parents. She curled up on the bed, covering her breasts with her hands. She grabbed a pillow and put it over her lap in a heartbeat. 
“What the hell is this!” Belcher shouted in fear, as he rose up from the bed and did the same with the other pillow, covering his lap.
“Nobody fucking move!” Douglas screamed, pointing the gun at them both.
“You,” he snarled at Belcher, “don’t be a hero, baldie. No freaky shit and no one gets hurt. This isn’t a fucking dream, okay? I’ll blow your fucking heads off if I have to.”
Belcher pulled the bedcovers up over the both of them, slipping their legs underneath. Cassandra held one hand over her breasts, grabbing her side of the covers with the other.
I remained dead still, along with Eric and James. Seeing Belcher there shocked the shit outta me. It was supposed to be the other way round.
Douglas was improvising—hell knows what was going on in his head. And James, well, James just stood there in his gorilla mask, looking back and forth between Eric and me, as if he was wondering if we wanted him to start snapping away at a naked Belcher instead.
Belcher and Cassandra looked like they’d seen a ghost, or maybe that was just the look of getting caught together, store employee with the boss—who knows? Cassandra was whimpering up against the back of the bed, doing her best to cover her body.
“We want the cash,” Douglas yelled at Belcher.
Douglas, what the hell are you doin? I thought.
“There’s some in the drawer,” Belcher quickly responded, gesturing to the nightstand.
“Get it. Nice and slow … or I’ll put a cap in your naked ass,” Douglas instructed from the end of the bed, pointing the gun directly at Belcher’s bald head.
Belcher leaned over to the nightstand and slowly opened the top drawer. He reached in, fumbled about for a second with his hand, and then quickly lifted up a tiny, pocket-sized gun, pointing the black nozzle at Douglas. 
Douglas instinctively hit the deck.
There was no warning. Belcher squeezed off three shots in succession.
POP.
POP.
POP.
We all turned in the doorway and got the fuck outta there. Cassandra started screaming her lungs out as Eric and James ran down the hallway ahead of me. You hear some people say that at times of great panic and life threatening fear, everything seems to slow down to a crawl, right in front of your eyes. But for that moment of chaos, when Belcher started firing, everything happened so fast. I couldn’t believe how we all came out of it alive. 
The last I saw before spinning to get outta there was Belcher pointing the gun in our direction—he never waited, he just pulled the trigger. 
I remember the shots sounding like ‘pops’. Like they’d come from one of those toy cap guns you owned as a kid. I wondered if all of this was really happening or if it was one of those weird dreams where your boss creeps into your subconscious and you wake up the next morning wondering how the hell they got in there.
Maybe it was Belcher’s bung eye, or he was pumped full of adrenalin, like us, but he totally missed our asses. That, or we pulled a damn Matrix on those bullets and dodged the fuckers.
At the speed of light, Douglas picked himself up off the bedroom floor and pushed himself right past me, outside the bedroom doorway, bolting off down the hallway and down the stairs.
“Ohmygod!—ohmygod!—ohmygod!—ohmygoddddd,” I heard Cassandra squeal in quick succession, although this time I’m certain it was out of fear and not a second wave of pleasure.
I turned around and realized she was looking at me. Her eyes were as big as baseballs as they stared straight at my chest.
I looked down and saw the blood on my sweater.
Now, talking about everything happening so fast earlier, well … at that moment, everything just reversed right up and stopped to a crawl.
“I’ve been hit,” I yelled, but the guys were already halfway down the stairs. I could hear the thud of their boots come to a stop as they reached the bottom. There was no answer. They were gone. I put my hand up to my chest and held it there. I looked back into the bedroom. Belcher was holding the gun straight at me, his arm making it shake with a slight tremor.
“You fucking shot me?” I gasped at him in disbelief.
I began to feel pain. I went down on one knee and then quickly dropped backward onto the Persian rug with a thud.
“Shit. You fucking s