JPod (10 page)

Lovely pod

You can be happy, also, in the jPod space. Be happy. Be jPod.

jPodding work style is a way to make friends and enjoy the happy life.

. . .

Kaitlin's dissection of Cowboy's personality made me begin to have doubts about my own personality. Prior to Kaitlin's rant, I thought Cowboy was the quirkiest person I knew. And now he was suddenly just a Lego mini-fig. (Okay, maybe John Doe is the quirkiest person I know.)

But honestly—
do
I have a personality? Do any of us? I scoured my life and saw no overriding purpose, just my love affair with computer games—my old SOL and the 8808s in particular. If nothing else, I was pleased to be able to earn a living within an industry that's increasingly more corporate and bland and soul-killing, but
. . . but
then I got to wondering if I even possessed the ability to fall in love with another human being and . . . I began to feel like such a
module,
especially compared to Kaitlin, who was such a firebrand tonight. I couldn't help but wonder what she's like when she removes all of her brakes.

I was having this crisis of faith while parked outside my Chinatown shack. Then, while attaching The Club, I looked up and saw that the bathroom window upstairs was open, the nylon Union Jack curtain billowing from within. I always keep that window shut (pigeons) and was curious as to what was going on. I put my key in the lock, opened the door, and realized that all of my old furniture was gone. In its place was strange, ornate, gilded, swan-crested, diamond-tufted black and red leather junk—the sort of stuff I'd expect to see in the living room of, say, North Korean president Kim II Sung. It was disturbing and garish and way too big for my place, like adult furniture in a tree fort. In a corner I saw some boxes that held my flight simulation software, but everything else was new. I wasn't hallucinating—it really
was
my place.

There was a sofa made of curlicued gold wood, upholstered with baloney-coloured fabrics patterned with Chinese mountains capes. At one end were a matching club chair and a glass coffee table—a lens of blue tinted glass held aloft by worshipful egrets. My framed Offspring poster had been replaced by an oil-painted fantasia of kittens frolicking amidst Louis XIV mirrors and vases filled with blue Himalayan poppies. In what was now the dining room (but what had been the gaming room) sat a glistening black lacquered table with matching chairs for eight. My bedroom and the spare room were similarly decked out.

This was Greg's doing.

Fortunately, his cell number was pencil led onto the kitchen wall, just above a brand new plum-coloured breakfast nook table inlaid with a mother-of-pearl scene depicting Marie Antoinette in her garden throwing lawn darts at poor people.

"Greg."

"Tell me how much you love it!"

"Yeah?"

" . . . I don't know where to begin."

"Isn't it great? Kam Fong is rewarding your hospitality for helping him with his, um,
shipment''

"Greg, I told you I've got no interest in dealing with people-smugglers, and I don't want their free furniture."

"Grow up. For the people being smuggled, it's all just one big adventure, and they'll be telling their grandkids about all of your old shitty furniture and your dorky slacker something clothes."

"Greg.. ."

"And by the way, what's with the Union Jack flag curtain? Only junkies use flags as curtains."

"Junkies with
lice,
Ethan."

In the background I heard my father shouting, "Who's that?"

"It's Ethan."

"Greg, are you over at Mom and Dad's?"

"I came for dinner here and thought I'd spend the night, too. I'm bagged. By the way, why is there lipstick on my old pillow?"

"It's a long story. What's everybody doing up so late?"

"Dad was on a shoot and came home too stoked to sleep. There's a live feed from the Perth-Fremande ballroom dancing semifinals coming in, so Dad and I are watching it. You know how he gets during semifinal season."

Dad is a ballroom dancing fanatic. I spent my preteen years being abandoned on the sidelines of dance club floors while dad studied and practised. Mom won't go near a dance floor. I heard a wash of flamenco music. "Where's Mom?"

As if on cue, Mom said, "Greg, is that Ethan?"

"Yup."

She took the phone. "What do you think of your new furniture?"

"It's . . . overwhelming"

"I think your brother is just a dreamboat. And aren't you lucky his friend, Kam Fong, has such a generous heart and gave you such an amazing array of luxury furniture? You must have done a terrific job helping him redo his accounts and balances spreadsheets."

Words failed me and then re-entered my life. 'Yes, I certainly am lucky."

Mom was on to a new topic. "Ethan, I need your help tomorrow. I have to make a collection."

"Mom, I have a job."

"Nonsense. I'll phone young Steven and tell him it's important to me that you take the afternoon off."

'You're still talking with Steve?"

"Of course. I made him a pie today, too. He works so hard, and hard workers need treats every so often."

Mom handed the phone back to Greg. I looked around me and noticed something else. "Greg?"

"What,bro?"

"Everything here is on . . . an angle."

"Oh,
that.
Yeah. Kam brought in his feng shui guy."

"Thanks."

"Ethan, you sound pissed off. This is the last time I ever try to help you out.
Ooh, look at me, Tm an information worker. My job is clean
and environmentally friendly and futuristic
—"

"Greg—" Experience has taught me to simply ride out Greg's diatribes until they stop.

"Hey, Ethan, you know the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square? He's the guy who hot-glued the faceplate over the keypad in the phone you're using."

"Greg, I have to go."

He changed his tone. "Hey, speaking of sweatshops and toxins, I'm flying back to Hong Kong tomorrow. Want anything?"

I thought about this. "Can you pick up an assortment of bootlegged games for me? I've got a bet going with Cowboy that he can't properly detect boodegs. Just buy a bunch at random. Nothing over two bucks."

"Done."

. . .

Mom's pie worked. The next day I left jPod at noon and passed Steve's Touareg by the main security booth down the hill. He gave me a rehearsed-looking thumbs-up, and that was that.

At Mom's we switched to her K-car wagon and drove out into the Fraser Valley amid a chilly monsoon. I was wearing another outfit cobbled together from smugglees' remnants. Mom took one look at it and said, "Oh, Ethan. You're dressed like a new sie in a Broadway show."

"I told you, it's my new style."

"How am I going to make a collection with you dressed up like a ragamuffin?"

There was a twenty-mile patch of fashion-induced tension before Mom stopped editorializing about my personal style. We were headed to Maple Ridge, a suburb on the city's easternmost extreme—largely built overnight, with overtaxed roads that burped along at a speed best described as digestive. The clouds were so dark it felt like we were night driving. Mom gunned the engine and cut off an impatient Prelude driven by a baby boy with a new driver tag in his rear window.

"Tell me more about this Jeff Probst celebrity. What do you think he's like in real life?"

"Jeff Probst?"

"Yes, Steven has got me intrigued."

"Well, he hosts this show where he's always having to deliver bad news to people. He's like a professional firer they bring in to do mass layoffs. In the first few years of the show, he tried to display empathy, but I've noticed that as he ages and sees more of the world, he's realizing that bad news is a part of life, and that when you have to give it, just say it and get it over with. He's a regular kind of guy, but at the same time, he's not."

"Does he skateboard?"

"Not that I know of."

"Does he wear silly baggy pants and oversized nonsense jewellery?"

"No. Style-wise he's always dressed as if he's about to get into a stolen Cessna on a private tarmac somewhere in central Colombia."

"Who does he look Uke?"

"Generically handsome—game show-y, but definitely of the twenty-first century. He's a bit too tanned. He'd better watch it, or his skin'll look like caramel popcorn when he's sixty."

"So how does this Jeff Probst fellow's personality convert into a skateboard character who's a friendly turtle?"

"He could maybe be wise and all-knowing like Yoda."

"Who?"

I let it drop, since Mom's curiosity was clearly ebbing. We were entering an older area with uninflated property values and roads last resurfaced in the 1960s. Invisible waves of manure entered the station wagon. I asked, "Is it far?"

"Another few minutes."

"I'm hungry."

"If you can't find something lying around the car, then you can't be very hungry."

I looked in the glove compartment. Mom had stashed some gold-foiled chocolate coins, probably from one of the egg hunts we used to have at Greg's ex-wife's place. I tasted one of them and nearly gagged.

"Mom, how long has this chocolate been in there?"

"A few years, maybe."

"A
fewyears}"

"Ethan, everybody knows Easter chocolate lasts forever. If they don't sell it one year, they put it in the warehouse and bring it out again the next year, over and over until it finally sells. By that standard, those coins there are practically new."

I got to thinking about the business at hand. "Mom, one more time, why are we out here in this hillbilly's armpit?"

"Tim's buddy, Lyle, owes me fifty thousand dollars, and won't pay up."

"Okay, that's more than I knew a few minutes ago. Does he know about Tim's,
um, fate}"

"No. But he found out about Tim and me a few months ago. It caused a rift between them and . . ."

"Wait a second—what do you mean,
found out about Tim and me}"

"Remove your mind from the gutter. Tim was nice. I felt a closeness with him."

"Don't tell me any more."

"Why not?"

'You're my mother. You're weirding me out."

"Eat another coin."

"So, then, are these guys bikers, too?"

"Connect the dots, Ethan: we're in the middle of nowhere and drugs are involved. Who else is going to live out here?"

The rain wouldn't let up as we turned onto successively dinkier roads, finally coming to a gravel lane.

"We're here," Mom said.

At the turn of the century this had been a farmhouse. It was remote back then, and continued to be remote now. "Imagine living in Vancouver and managing to miss all the real estate booms," I said.

We knocked at the front door. Inside, a TV was blaring, and a mentally ill dog barked.

"That's Gumdrop," Mom said.

The door opened with a creak.

Mom said, "Hi, Lyle."

"Oh,you."

"Yes, me."

"What do you want, Carol?"

"My money, please."

"Who's the guy with you—cradle-robbing again?"

I said, "I'm Ethan. This is my mom."

Lyle shut the door.

I said, "Rude prick."

"Bikers. What do you expect?"

I knocked this time. Mom said, "Lyle. Please come out. Let's discuss this like sensible adults."

Through the door, Lyle told us to fuck off. I heard another biker laughing above the TV, along with Gumdrop's crazed howling.

Mom knocked. "Lyle, just pay me what's mine, and I'll be out of your hair."

Lyle's friend shouted, "Lyle doesn't have any hair." From behind the door, this witty retort garnered convulsions of laughter.

"They're stoned," I said.

"You know, dear, this reminds me of back when you had your paper route, and on collecting day people would pretend not to be home to avoid you."

"That always drove me nuts. Why didn't people just pay up?"

"I think it's because when you walk up to the door, in the customers' minds, you're like their conscience come to haunt them. Perhaps that's how our biker friends here feel about me."

Just then, a foaming pinkish-white pit bull swooped around a corner of the house and up the front steps and jabbed a justifiably named canine into Mom's shin.

"Mom!"

She pulled a gun from her purse, and one shot later, Gumdrop met his maker. Mom then keeled over and began verbally spazzing, using language about as brutal as is possible for her to use: "Oh shoot! Sugar! Ouch! Oh, Ethan, it hurts! Is that nasty little thing dead? Good."

I kicked Gumdrop's carcass. "You evil litde shit. Come to life so we can shoot you again." I turned to Mom. "Let me see your shin."

There was one deep bite that barely missed a varicose vein. Oddly, my thought was,
Mom has varicose veins?