04/04/2007: "I'M ALLAN, MAN! ALLAN!"

Hi All,

Been awhile since I posted anything of consequence, so I thought I’d post something that entertains me to no end but may be of slim, may I say even nonexistent, entertainment to anyone whose name is not David Hickey.

This started the other day when my buddy Dave, a poet living out in PEI now, emailed me with news that, amongst other things, he’s been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert award. This, I know, is a poetry award. The shortlist is as follows:

* a broken mirror, fallen leaf by Yvonne Blomer (Ekstasis Editions)
* In the Lights of a Midnight Plow by David Hickey (Biblioasis)
* Tacoma Narrows by Mitchell Parry (Goose Lane Editions)
* Anatomy of Keys by Steven Price (Brick Books)
* Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists by A. Rawlings (Coach House Books)
* Every Inadequate Name by Nick Thran (Insomniac Press)

I know Nick Thran, too; good guy, met him at Banff, good writer as well. I don’t know any of the other finalists so I hope they lose. Well, that’s pretty heartless to say, and ignorant seeing as I don’t know if they’re good writers and perhaps deserving of the award, but fuck off with them anyway because I’d like Dave or Nick to win. In fact, I could go as far as to pick on those writers I’ve no knowledge of ... hey, Yvonne, your keypad comes with a caps button; why don’t you use it? A. Rawlings—what, are you a spy? What’s your first name and why won’t you let us all in on it? Who or what is a Lepidopterist? I think I caught a case of it between my toes when I didn’t wear sandals in the lockerroom showers. Okay, so that’s really shitty of me. I don’t mean anything by it. Although I like Dave and Nick, I hope the best book wins. I’m sure they hope the same.

Anyway, so the point of all that is this ... well, not really the point. There is no point to this, just as there rarely is any point to any of my entries. But the thing is, Dave and I spent my last summer in Frederiction, the summer after we both graduated from the MA program, we spent it painting some of the big old houses around town for, if I recall, $6.40 an hour. Don’t let anyone tell you it doesn’t pay to get your education.

We worked for a guy whose name I misremember but he was a good enough shit, a landlord, played in a jazz band. we were painting all his properties—we spent most of our time painting a place that was soon to be moved into by a milk-white forty-something woman who, I shit you not, went by the name Eagle Spirit. It would’ve blown my mind at a younger age, the notion of this aging WASP appropriating a Native name, swanning around with feathers in her hair stinking of sweetgrass, but at that point I'd spent three years in a English program and at a university where such behavior had acquired a normative quality in my eyes. I believe they sold hair-feathers at the campus bookstore, right next to the book entitled “How to Appropriate Ways of Life Not Your Own and Become a Waltzing Cliche and Cautious Example in Ten Easy Steps.”

Anyhoo, so we painted for this guy. A good guy, though he paid us as though we’d swum up the Atlantic from Panama and he’d no qualms calling the Department of Naturalization should we take umbrage at his peasant wages. This one time he showed up at our site with a Tim Horton’s coffee cake as a birthday gift for this other guy he had bucking wood for him but he’d forgotten to bring a knife so he cut the cake with a rusty saw he dug out of his trunk. I remember thinking how tetanus never tasted so good.

But even that isn’t the point of the story. The point is Allan.

Allan. I don’t even know his last name. Let me tell you: as a writer, which I occasionally think of myself as, you’ll infrequently run across people you would dearly love to put into a book except you know that, no matter how faithful your representation, editors and readers would be left saying, “Oh, give me a break. Nobody on earth is like this.” And it can be frustrating seeing as you’ve spent time with such individuals and know, beyond any doubt, that they exist as actual human beings and not the cliched cobblings of your imagination.

Allan was just such a fellow. Me and Dave didn’t know where he came from and after painting season we’d no clue where he went off—according to Allan, it was apple picking season somewhere, and that was where we could find him had we the interest, which we really didn’t apart from some odd sociological-experimentation impulses.

Allan. How to describe Allan. See, most of the work I now do I do alone, here in my house at my computer, so my job-related experience is stale by a few years. But I assume everyone, at every place of business, has an Allan. An Allan is a generally good guy, full of stories, fun to be around for the most part, with a few odd peccadilloes ... you like him but make sport of him, too. Or, with Allans, they sort of make unintentional sport of themselves and you can’t help but point out how funny it all is. They’re the people you tend to make up impressions of, whose signature behaviors are a source of great amusement.

So, perhaps those of you reading this have an Allan at your places of work, your classes, your online chat forums if you happen to be hopeless nerds, etc. Ole Allan. The sort of person who, when their name is mentioned, you shake your head in an amused way and say, “Oh, that Allan.”

Allan. I know Dave’s laughing his ass off right now. The rest of you, probably less so.

Allan rolled into Fredericton out of nowhere ... or maybe he’d come down from St. John’s, I’m not sure; he may have actually ridden the rails—Allan was the sort of fellow you could envision jumping off a slow moving freight train, dusting himself off, grabbing his bindle, and heading off to find some under-the-counter employment. It’s not often I’ve been in the sort of work where you pick up guys like this; the last time was when I was tree planting and our crew suffered a lot of turnover, planters leaving in the middle of the night, and the crew boss got so desperate we rolled into the nearest little town in Northern Ontario and spotted this guy picking his teeth along the train trestle and my crew boss said, “Hey, wanna plant some trees?” and the guy shrugged as though to say, Gotta be better than what I got going presently and hopped in the van and planted trees the next month. And he was a damn hard worker. And so was Allan.

This is all to say that guys like Allan weren’t a whole hell of a lot different than Dave and I, in terms of work ethos: we wanted to work when we wanted to work, not be roped down to any terms, get paid on the down-low and drift out of town when it suited us. Employees of our sort generally hook up with employers like the jazz-singing, saw-cake-cutting landlord we worked for: he paid us like shit, expected us to do all manner of lunatic acts, and in return he might pay us one Thursday and never see us again come Friday morning. All in all, it was a decent deal for both sides.

So Allan. One day he shows up and grabs a brush and he was part of the crew. I don’t know if I even need to give a physical description of him—put it in your mind, readers, the sort of guy who’d show up out of nowhere with a bag of white bread and a can of beans for his lunch, a deck of Black Cat cigarettes (sold, so far as I know, only in the Maritimes, they run 3 bucks less than regular smokes due to their robust asbestos-enriched flavor. I don’t ever recall seeing any of those lurid warnings on Black Cats: SMOKING CAUSES MOUTH CANCER / CAUSES IMPOTENCE, etc. I’m thinking the Attorney General thought anyone smoking Black Cats had generally sunk to a level at which warnings might be seen as weak-chinned dares, or perhaps even incentives of a sort. I think anyone who smoked Black Cats could be seen as a physical anti-smoking advert, anyway) rolled up his sleeve...anyway, you got a picture of that person in your head? Okay, all of you have the same picture. That picture is Allan.

Allan was a jack of all trades. He was a practitioner of the hobo arts. He could paint, he could pick seasonal fruit, I’m betting he could work the Tilt-A-Whirl at the traveling fair like nobody’s business. Anything you could score a quick buck at, Allan was in there like a dirty old shoe. He was a WICKED painter. I mean, he wasn’t great quality-wise, but the man would’ve painted a rabid wolves’ balls if his boss asked him to.

BOSS: Allan, you see, I want you to climb on up this here shaky termite-eaten ladder and paint that wasp’s nest waaaaaay up there in the crotch of that there tree. Don’t ask me why, just do it. Do it in ten minutes and there’s a blintz in it for you.

ALLAN: Yessir!

Seriously, this house we were working on, Eagle Spirit’s new happy hunting ground, had a roof sloped at something like a forty-five degree angle. A slippery tin roof. A forty-foot fall. Allan got up there, tied a piece of yellow baling twine round his waist, the other end to the chimney, and painted that motherfucker bright red. Seeing him slipping and sliding up there, losing his footing and saving himself and giving us a queasy smile down where we sat painting the deck railing, I got to thinking about the value of a human life. Every hour Allan was up on that roof there were 4 or 5 times he could’ve slipped and fallen to his death. He was getting paid 7 bucks. That’s, what, $1.75 per near death? Of course, his bravado shamed me and Dave, so we ended up forty feet in the air at the top of some rickety old ladder with a paintbrush duct-taped to the end of a stick trying to whitewash the carriage-wheel protuberances coming off the roof. What a ridiculous way to pay the rent.

Allan lived in a rooming house. I think the benefits of rooming house living are the same as the benefits of under-the-counter employment: for your landlord, every day he gets the ten bucks he’s charging you for a day’s rent is a lucky one for him. The drawback is, well, you rent to a house full of Allans.

The rooming house he lived in was well-known to people of Fredericton as the semi-permanent garage sale house because the lawn, just about every month of the year, was strewn with all manner of useless weather-warped junk scavenged from wherever. The only way you could tell it was for sale, had not just coalesced there as if there were an ever-swirling refuse vortex was at work somewhere beneath the lawn, was that the people who’d scavenged it sat on the porch eyeing you as you went by, encouraging you, goading you even, to make some halfhearted bid on any of it.

ME: Soooooo ... how much for that rusted ceiling fan lying on the grass?

VENDOR: For you? I like your face. It’s a kind face, but a face in need of some of that cooling balm a fan could offer. Fifty ... say a hundred bucks.

ME: I can’t help but notice two of the four blades are snapped off.

VENDOR: It’s European.

So this is where Allan lived. One of his favorite openings for one of his many lunch- and breaktime stories was, “Rooming house madness, man! I’m telling you, rooming house madness!” This was followed by a story wherein Allan was almost always the put-upon party being maltreated at the hands of the garage sale house denizens.

I almost always had sympathy for Allan, except this one story where he spoke of being hounded by the local children whose Pennysaver flyer routes he’d stolen from them. I guess he’d gone to the local flyer kingpin and told him all those kids were lazy goldbrickers more interested in their Nintendos and, y’know, eating moon pies and whatall, and that the kingpin would be a right gormless fool if he let those kids keep their routes when he could just as easily give them to reliable ole Allan who'd he see that those flyers were nestled safely in mailboxes all over town. Well Allan really could talk the birds down from the trees because the kingpin gave him the routes. The downside was that, with their flyer routes gone, those kids had a lot of free time and, idle hands being the devil’s workbench and all, they harassed and hounded poor hardworking Allan something fierce. Allan never made it clear their exact machinations, but he frequently showed up to paint hollow-eyed and stubbly of cheek—we painters didn’t have anything in the way of a dress code, so it didn’t matter a whit—and I could only guess he’d been plagued by those misbegotten flyer-routeless kids, pelting him with eggs, stepping on his stockpiled loaves of white bread and squashing them, snapping his favorite bindle stick over their angry little knees, etc.

Well, that’s Allan. I’m thinking I’m going to hunt him down one of these days, sit him down with a tape recorder, and get all of his quotes. Call it THE BIG BOOK OF ALLAN. Some excepts:

pg. 17: “An apple picked is a nickel earned.”

Pg. 58: “Painting a roof less than fifty feet off the ground, at a slope of less than 45 degrees, is pussy work. A man does anything less than that, that man should go buy a girdle.”

Pg. 93: “Black Cat cigarettes give the lungs a real workout. Smoking two in quick succsssion is like running up the north face of K2 with a sack of rocks on your back.”

Pg. 167: “Some people might say a full-grown man punching a ten-year-old boy in the face when he asks for his flyer route back is the act of a cowardly man. Well, those aren’t any sort of people I wish to acquaint myself with.”

Pg. 188: “I’m Allan, man! I’m ALLAN!”

Go buy my buddy’s Dave book. It totally rocks. I’ve mentioned it before.

www.biblioasis.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=52

And Nick Thran’s, too:

www.insomniacpress.com/title.php?id=1-897178-27-1

Oh, yeah, and you Yanks and Brits go ahead and pre-order THE FIGHTER:

Yanks: www.amazon.com/Fighter-Craig-Davidson/dp/1569474656
Brits: www.amazon.co.uk/Fighter-Novel-Craig-Davidson/dp/0330450948

I swear, those covers, the dude looks exactly like my brother. Check out his myspace and tell me I'm wrong:

www.myspace.com/grahamdavidson

All best, Craig.