Chris and Randy

I live here now and the small changes that a yearly visit used to make clear are hidden in plain sight. I sit and watch as they deal with their human incarnation. I wonder what they think of this person, their only son, perched on a stool, eating their food, without a plan. At any point in your life may be midway through and not know.

30 years ago I was walking, talking, drinking lots of milk and don't remember anything. I’ve been walking and talking and drinking milk ever since, I still don't remember much. In this way I feel closer to wild animals, I’m sure they wake each day to a new life.

I remember walking home from school with my older sister. We talked about the way clothes I liked and felt comfortable in would equal a good day, and clothes I didn't like would make it just another day, not feeling myself. So, when I found something I liked, I’d wear it every day. I still do that. I remember Mrs. Shooter in grade two, she called me Sport. That was the year Doug stabbed Joseph through the hand with a pencil.

I liked Sarah Erskine from the very beginning. She was small and cute, had short hair, tanned skin and a French accent. When it came to being around Sarah, I would do anything. If she was sharpening her pencil at the pencil sharpener at the back of the room, I would break my lead and get in line to talk to her. It’s odd how human nature works. It's not like I read it in a book or second guessed myself, I just followed my compulsion, my instincts. Like an animal, I did what little boys do.

It was perpetually spring in that little bilingual town. The roads were always dirty and there was always melting ice making little streams down the side. I can’t remember what the smell was, but I can remember the feeling of it in my nose, like a liquerish perfume mixed with moth balls. The carpet was red, I think. There were lots of people in someone’s house, kids had gathered there for a birthday party maybe. And under what felt like a spotlight, Sarah turned to me and said, “do you dare me to kiss you?” As I said yes, she stood on my feet to get closer to my lips and we kissed, our first kiss, first love, first time I felt invincible.

I fall in and out of love every day. On a list of all the women I’ve known there is a note about each one. It started with Sarah and her note reads: “If you’d stopped here you would be happy.” I’ve been around the world and now I’m living at home with my parents. I don’t really need a job but this is an opportunity to earn some money and get out of the house.

The first day of work I meet Randy. He shook my hand, the other one (with the bulldog tattoo) hiding in his pocket, his t-shirt tucked into his blue jeans. He and Bill were a team. Bill is the Luigi to Randy’s Mario. They both have thick South Shore accents and I feel immediately at home.

We paint and scrape and sweat under the summer sun. No one complains because we’re just here to work and earn our $12 an hour. The first hour of that job was all it took for me to know I needed to go back to school. The sound and feeling of scraping paint off the side of a house sends shivers up my arm and I can still taste the lead paint as it chips and splinters and sticks to the sweat on my face.

I liked them both but on the day Randy brought up what life was like in prison, I started paying more attention to him. He told me how his cellmate was beaten to a pulp and never seen again. He explained what some of his tattoos meant and how ashamed he was of them. Randy, sitting across from me, not quite making eye contact, his blue jeans and gray t-shirt, glasses, and the classic prison tattoos up his forearm. The tattered mermaid swimming up from his wristwatch and someone’s name fading away.

It was Bill who told me about Marjorie one day when Randy was working on the other side of the house. They were together 27 years, not married. And she had died in the Manor. It didn’t seem like Randy was too upset about any of this, even though it was just last month when she finally passed.

I was always early for work, and Randy was always there before me. Parking his maroon car with its Fuck Cancer and 420 stickers on the bumper. He carried a gallon of water and a plastic bag of whatever he was going to eat that day. Sometimes his lunch was just a couple juicy tomatoes with table salt that he would eat like an apple. Mine were never much better. We would get our assignment for the day (always the same, scraping and painting) and we’d work to the sound of peeling paint until around 10 a.m. or whenever Bill called for a break.

As we settle in for a break, under a bush hiding from the summer sun, Randy breaks the silence with a hunting story. I eat slowly and keep one eye on the clock and one on his short, graying hair, greased and parted down the middle. The gap perfectly matching his missing front tooth and moustache. He said he shot a buck and ran after it. He soon realized he was lost in miles of forest between a river and a road. But he knows how to find his way in this world, keep the sun on one shoulder. He knows why we circle when we’re lost. Telling me that everyone has one foot bigger than the other, so we naturally will end up going either left or right in a circle. One of his strategies was to put a fluorescent glove high in a tree and walk until he couldn't see it anymore then do it again with the other glove. I’m relieved to hear he eventually made it to the road a few miles from where he went in.

Everyone said Marjorie was mean to him, would even steal from him. Still he loved her. She got sick and stayed that way for the last 10 years of her life. She had a double bypass surgery, “broken ass,” (I can explain) skin grafts, hysterectomies, and finally, cancer. “She had her stomach out on the table while she was under and when she was put back together, she was never the same.” “Big old scar from her sternum down to her privates. Looks like a railroad track,” says Randy. He said almost every night he would have to drive her to the hospital. After work he would come home and have a few beers and try and get some sleep before she would be in too much pain and he’d have to drive her to town from Crusher Road. So, he was drunk driving a lot, but “didn’t never get caught.”

One day while we were painting an excessively large house an excessively ugly blue, Bill tells me that Randy would have stayed with Marjorie forever if she hadn’t died. He worries about Randy; he’s only ever been with Marjorie and he’s already met a new woman. This house is a monster, and I’ve overextended my ladder to reach as far as I can go. It’s still not high enough and I’ve had about enough of this blue. Bill combines two ladders to finish the job and curses the whole way up.

He’s already met a new woman? How can Randy find a woman in this town and I can’t? Lunch break comes and leave it to Bill, he broaches the subject. They met at the laundromat; she was there putting up a flyer with all her belongings for sale. (To move back to the Philippines) He called her that night about a flat screen TV and they talked and then hung out and talked more. At work he said her hair is “so black, black as tar. And right down to her ass.” As we’re packing up the paint for the day, he says something significant but in passing. He doesn't know what the point of meeting her now is if she’s just going to leave. I don’t know where to begin.

By now I really need an escape plan from this job. Working with Bill constantly yelling at Randy has been great and all but I’m really just staying on to hear about Cindy. Randy tells me the only thing that will come between him and Cindy is her dogs. It’s the female that is causing the problems. They are both Shiatzus and the male is fixed but she isn’t. Randy won’t even let his dogs in his room. That is not where they belong, he says. Two weekends ago Randy told me his 16-year-old dog died. It had trouble walking, his hind legs would give out. He would fall in his own shit when he tried to squat. The dog couldn't see or hear. Randy dug a hole in his neighbour’s yard, they took the dog over to the hole, shot it behind the ear and they buried him together.

He sees the thought of him having to kill his own dog crushes me. He quickly changes the subject. Cindy wasn't allowed to have a computer or cell phone in her last marriage. She was only allowed to watch certain TV channels, speak to certain people and only go out if he drove. Now that Randy is in the picture, he’s been “wining and dining her,” he has set her up with a cell phone and put a laptop on layaway from the pawn shop. This reminds me of something.

We sit under a bush to take our break. He eats a cucumber after he peals it with his knife and leaves the skin on the ground by his feet. He offers me some, but I say no thank you I have cucumber on my sandwich today. He tells me how much he doesn't want to be here today. And I agree. He wants a job where he just has one thing to do. Like when he worked at the fish plant before it closed. He said he used to raise pigs and chickens, but Marjorie didn’t like it, so he gave them away. He became my hero when he told me of his plan for having 12 turkeys, one for each month, no 24 turkeys. One to sell one to eat. And a steer to kill at the end of the year, some pigs, chickens, living by a river to generate power with a mill. He said vegetables are cheap enough you could just buy them from the store, grow what you can of course.

I’ll be moving out of my parent’s house at the end of the summer. Randy gives me his phone number on a scrap of paper with sadness in his eyes. I’ve since visited and have seen him with Cindy and their dogs. He might not know why he’s met the girl of his dreams right before she is to leave the country. But she seems to have arrived just in time. After what he went through, I think he deserves this new opportunity, love does not come around very often. (Even if he thinks she was originally a mail-order-bride.) I know I’ve never met anyone who compares to Sarah. There seems to be no end to painting. And the more we paint the more I wonder if we both have one foot bigger than the other, circling, lost in the woods.