A Free Man is a satirical tall tale presented as the drug and alcohol fuelled conversation of two old friends getting reacquainted over one night. It’s also a boy-meets-girl story of the worst kind and a time travel story about a future where the world is ruled by robots and humans are vermin. When timelines cross, the world as we know it bends . . .
Skid Roe is completely self-absorbed and delusional. His struggle to exercise free will is constantly hampered by the physical manifestation of his inner demons and by the norms and rules of contemporary life. He’s both aided and hindered by Lem, a robot from the future whose good intentions leave Skid on the run from a shadowy state security agency.
A surreal, beautiful, and powerful literary mash-up, Basilières’ long-awaited sophomore effort is inventive and darkly funny.
A Free Man is a satirical tall tale presented as the drug and alcohol fuelled conversation of two old friends getting reacquainted over one night. It’s also a boy-meets-girl story of the worst kind and a time travel story about a future where the world is ruled by robots and humans are vermin. When timelines cross, the world as we know it bends . . .
Skid Roe is completely self-absorbed and delusional. His struggle to exercise free will is constantly hampered by the physical manifestation of his inner demons and by the norms and rules of contemporary life. He’s both aided and hindered by Lem, a robot from the future whose good intentions leave Skid on the run from a shadowy state security agency.
A surreal, beautiful, and powerful literary mash-up, Basilières’ long-awaited sophomore effort is inventive and darkly funny.
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Overview
A Free Man is a satirical tall tale presented as the drug and alcohol fuelled conversation of two old friends getting reacquainted over one night. It’s also a boy-meets-girl story of the worst kind and a time travel story about a future where the world is ruled by robots and humans are vermin. When timelines cross, the world as we know it bends . . .
Skid Roe is completely self-absorbed and delusional. His struggle to exercise free will is constantly hampered by the physical manifestation of his inner demons and by the norms and rules of contemporary life. He’s both aided and hindered by Lem, a robot from the future whose good intentions leave Skid on the run from a shadowy state security agency.
A surreal, beautiful, and powerful literary mash-up, Basilières’ long-awaited sophomore effort is inventive and darkly funny.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770412330 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2015 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.90(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Free Man
By Michel Basilières
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Michel BasilièresAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77041-233-0
CHAPTER 1
The Girlfriend Experience
It's about a girl, of course. I guess I'm supposed to say a woman, not a girl, because men aren't allowed to use that word anymore unless they're talking about kids, even though women can say what they like. That's the problem with language, it's not the grammar that gets you in trouble, it's the politics. Usually someone else's politics.
There you go, I'm off track already. Back to the day I met her.
I was running from the Queen streetcar to the Bay Street bus, but I made the mistake of looking at the old fat guy with the sandwich board on the corner.
He said, "You're hallucinating. I'm not really here."
His board said, "Mindless Pap For Total Morons" and had a picture of his book on it. Below that was a photograph of himself and the words "By Krad Kilodney! Only $5 Canadian, $1,500 U$."
I pointed at it. "That's not a good exchange rate. You must really hate Amerikans." Lots of Canadians hate Amerikans, mostly because the rest of the world can't tell us apart.
"Oh, no, I am Amerikan," he said. "If I didn't like them, I just wouldn't take their money at all."
"What's it all about, then?"
"I figure it like this. Here in Canada, my psychiatrist and all the pills he orders me to buy are paid for by the government. If I had to foot the bill myself, in Amerika, it would cost me untold thousands. So it just reflects the cost of living in the two places."
"So what do I get for my five bucks?"
"This book of stories. One's about a guy on welfare who gets new dentures and his social worker keeps reminding him of his state-sponsored teeth. That's what it's called, 'State-Sponsored Teeth.'"
"Uh ... okay ..."
"There's another one about this litter of kittens, a family in Etobicoke gets rid of these kittens by driving them to Parkdale and dumping them in the alley."
"Why Parkdale?" I could see it: poor guys in baggy sports outfits, layered jackets, and hoodies. The concrete sidewalk worn smooth with the dirt under people's feet, pockmarked with flattened black spots, like jet-shit, like black spots on an x-ray. Butts disintegrating in the runnels.
"Because of the Pet Serial Killer. It's been going on for years there, someone's killing neighbourhood cats and dogs, but the cops don't care, the city doesn't care, because it's not the Beaches or Yorkville or something, it's just the pets of crackheads and whores and artists. So this family from Etobicoke, the father drives a box full of kittens to Parkdale and leaves it in some alley."
"Is that it?"
"No, it turns out he leaves the kittens right where the pet killer lives, in one of those converted loft condos in an old factory, only the only way to get to the building is down this dark scummy alley. See, the killer used to live in Rosedale. But he figured he was losing too much time travelling, so he sold the house and bought this condo."
"Okay."
"Anyway, so he comes home and finds the kittens."
"Then what?"
"Then he kills them."
"Is that it?"
"Yeah."
"I don't get it."
"You have to read it, then you'd get it. Okay, how about this —"
"Wait. How many stories are there?"
"In this book? Fourteen. I got other books, though, one has eighteen in it, one only six."
"I don't have that much time. I'm on my way to work."
"Oh, man, I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I'm used to it."
"You want to buy the book?"
"I'll think about it. It's not a pay week."
"Right. Don't worry about it, it's not going to sell out or anything. I got no media interviews to do, I'll be right here whenever you want to come back and part with your measly five bucks."
"Okay. See you."
"Yeah, they all say that. Forget it. I'm not here. You just had a bad dream. Run to your safe little cage, you timid squirrel. Your wheel awaits."
I was walking away by then.
"Food pellets in, food pellets out," he shouted after me. I had no idea what he meant. "Pellets in, pellets out. You fucking squirrel!"
When I got to my safe little cage, the management squirrels were quivering because the QueenB was coming in. I call her that because once when she was having renovations done to the store, she'd picked up a hand tool one of the builders dropped and brought it to me. "I think this belongs to one of the workers," she said. "One of the worker bees." And she turned and marched off.
She'd been doing the rounds of a few branches and we'd been tipped off by a friendly chipmunk at another feeding station. So we had to go around cleaning up and talking to customers so we'd look busy. I don't really mind when she comes by, because she only yells at managers and I'm always talking to the customers anyway. And for an old chick, she's still kind of hot.
A lot of hot chicks come in. They always seem genuinely surprised to find a guy who reads. But you can tell they'd never go out with you, any book clerk is way too lowly to be a date. Besides, they're all looking for some sensitive guy who reads Michael Ondaatje. Or you get those spaced-out ones who're looking for a copy of Beautiful Losers. Or the tight-assed chicks looking for Atwood or Camilla Gibb. I kind of prefer the bubbly secretaries and their chick-lit, they're usually more feminine and made-up and dressed to give you a hard-on, even if they aren't showing any skin. What really gets me, though, are the simple plain ones, who don't know how good-looking they are. Librarians or teachers. They come in looking for Alice Munro or Carol Shields or something, and nobody's ever told them they're beautiful. So they're shy and modest, and hot as fucking hell. Some of them I remember for days, and I wish I could find pictures of them on the internet.
Sometimes, that's what I'll do, I'll surf porno sites, looking for chicks who look like someone I know. It's surprising how rarely that happens, though. It only proves how different we all are. How many individuals there really are. But usually you can find the same type of girl, if not an exact look-alike. Second best is still second best, but what the hell.
Oh, yeah, I masturbate every day. I've got to have some reason to live. I'm sure you think that's disgusting, but it's normal to me. Why not? It's free, it's fun, it calms me down, it hurts no one. Everybody masturbates but nobody wants to talk about it. It's like voting. Pornography, that's a different story. Maybe it hurts women. Maybe they're all treated badly and psychologically abused. What about gay porn?
Still, if you've ever seen some Bay Street lawyer yelling at an eighteen-year-old girl because she's the cashier, you'd understand exploitation and abuse. In some places it's seedy and disgusting, and in some places it's polite society. Take your pick.
The suit yelling at the cashier had her close to tears by the time I got over there. As usual there weren't any managers around, but because I wasn't a teenager and I'm a guy, the lawyer backed down right away. It was like I'd pulled the plug on him just by showing up.
It turned out she told him he couldn't return a damaged book for a full refund without a receipt. On top of which, it wasn't in our catalogue, so he had to have bought it someplace else. I thought it was an Amerikan edition, unavailable to us because we carry the British one. You could tell it was Amerikan because they'd taken all the u's out of words like colour and neighbour. And they'd replaced a lot of commas with periods. And they'd pulled out a thesaurus and dumbed down a lot of words. I always wonder if they do that because they think their readers are idiots. If they won't teach them to read, why do they let them vote?
So I took the suit away from the cashier, showed him with a terminal that the edition he had wasn't listed, explained the difference between Amerikan and Canadian distribution, showed him the listing for the edition we did carry, and walked him to the shelf, where I pointed out a stack of the same book in a different binding. He was starting to calm down a little, but he was clearly worried he wasn't going to get his lunch money out of us.
That's when Tertz showed up. Tertz is a great manager, everybody likes him, you always feel good talking to Tertz, like he's a real human being or something. Not like most of the managers, who mostly seem beaten into procedures that belittle them.
"Okay, I got it," he said to me. To the suit, he said, "You wanted to speak to a manager, sir?"
The guy looked at me. "You're not a manager?" I shook my head. He got all red in the face and started yelling. I left him with Tertz and went back to the cashier.
That's how I met her.
She was a cute kid with huge, striking eyes in a long oval face, an impossibly fashionable hairstyle and a nose that wasn't quite right. She knew how to make herself beautiful with clothes, jewellery, makeup. But she still had the manner of a teenager. She hadn't had enough disappointments in life yet. Her name was NaNa. Well, let's say her name was NaNa. I'm not actually going to tell you her real name. I don't know why, but I feel a sense of obligation to protect other people's privacy, as if it's a trust. Maybe it comes from my childhood, because where I grew up, a snitch was treated like a snitch: beaten, ostracized, scorned. Nothing's lower than a snitch.
But now we have Crime Stoppers and everything's different. Now we're encouraged to tell all we know, we're rewarded for it — paid informants, lauded as concerned citizens. Like Judas. I always want to know, if money's the motive, can the informant be trusted? If the snitch's anonymity is guaranteed, who's to say revenge isn't being taken?
Anyway.
When I got to the lunch room for my break, she was there, a plastic tray of sushi on the table in front of her. I sat, sipped coffee from a paper cup, smiled.
"Hi. Thanks for what you did upstairs," she said.
"Forget it. Happens all the time."
Her eyes widened. "I hope not."
"Welcome to retail. Get used to it."
She let out her breath in disgust, hunched her shoulders, and shrank just a little. "He was such a jerk."
I nodded. "People are jerks. You start out trying to chisel a few bucks out of the store, no reason to be polite about it. Get off on the wrong foot and you're trapped. Can't go right again. You end up being defensive, giving everyone a hard time."
She pushed a piece of sushi around with her chopsticks. "Doesn't it bother you?"
"What bothers me is when guys who should know better start bullying women. Makes me wish it were okay to hit people, under those circumstances. Too bad we can't fight duels anymore."
She laughed, a little forced. "Defending the maiden's honour?"
"Something like that. Sounds stupid, I know, but that's how my dad raised me. Open doors, carry bags. Treat women right."
"He was a nice guy."
"No, actually he was a prick. Cheated on my mother, yelled at us all, never spent a dime on us. He was just old-fashioned."
"So now you are, too?"
I took the lid off the cup to cool down the coffee, spilled a little on the table. "What about you? This your first retail job?"
She nodded.
"You should have tried something else," I said, but I was so, so glad she hadn't.
After that, I always noticed when she walked across the sales floor.
You can feel it, physically, when it happens to you. In your head, and in your heart, and in your package. I would look up from shuffling books on the shelves, and she'd be walking from the upper cash to the central stairway, and I could feel it. She'd bounce down the stairs, trying not to be girly about it, and just before she sank out of view, she'd turn her head, and our eyes would meet, and she'd smile. It seared right through me, I can still feel it now just remembering. Her face, that smile, is burned into me physically now, it's a part of me. It's my longing. Her face is the face of my longing.
When I woke the next afternoon, the television was broadcasting an ad featuring the mayor's only legitimate son. He was dressed in an old-fashioned prison outfit, alternating bands of black and white. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes but it didn't help. He was kissing a monkey and winking at me conspiratorially. As usual he was trying to sell cheap furniture on credit. I wasn't buying.
I got out of bed and went over to adjust the rabbit ears. The colours were cycling. On the way I stopped to pick a roach from the ashtray. When I'd moved into the apartment, I rescued the coffee table from the sidewalk, where the super had piled all the furniture the previous deadbeat had left behind. It would have saved me a lot of effort if he hadn't. Anyway, there were a few hits left, just enough to calm my nerves sufficiently so that when I got to the bathroom, I could open the childproof container my Prozac comes in.
I played with the antenna, but it was no use. I could never get rid of the ghosts. Through the patio doors you can see the power lines that go right by my apartment building. They bring nuclear juice into town from the Bruce plant and I swear you can feel your brain cells dying when the current surges. That means some channels just can't make it through the charged atmosphere.
Now I would have to watch the CBC. I turned the dial and played with the ears. Stations drifted in and out, static and scraps of audio cross-fading. I was pretty sure, for a second, the monkey was telling me to put the money in the newspaper recycling box by the escalator in the subway.
Which reminded me I had to go to work.
On the Bloor-Danforth line, some under-thirtysomething across from me in a suit and tie was reading Report on Business. The headline was "Markets Cheer Shock and Awe." We both got off at Bay, where he adroitly folded his paper and slid it into the slot of the blue recycling box as he stepped onto the escalator.
I remembered the monkey, and then a ten-dollar bill in my pocket. No one noticed me trying to be as casual about my deposit as the suit ahead of me had been. Sure it was a gamble, but I'm the kind of guy who can't pass a public phone without checking the coin slot. I've made maybe ten bucks that way in my lifetime, which is about as much as my dad's won back on his lottery tickets. And about as good as blue-chip stocks over the same period. Besides, what's ten dollars to a guy who works retail in toronto?
Two lunches.
I always have lunch at the food court on the PATH from the subway to the mall where I work. My bank machine's right there, and I've got a serious hard-on for a girl who works at the Chicken Little. Actually, I've got a serious hard-on for hundreds of women, every day. They're all over the malls, the tunnels, the subway. Completely gorgeous and completely oblivious to the gnawing lust they instill in me. I work with them, I serve them, they serve me, and I work hard to keep my mouth shut and my hands empty. It drives me crazy. It drives all men crazy. We chat them up as if there's no such thing as sex, as if we're not thinking of how they look undressed or what filthy things we want them to do to us.
Anyway. I buy Fingers or Knobs™ or Crispy Beaks & Talons™. You get a choice of sauces that are really only sugar and cornstarch with different colours, sitting in trays under heat lamps. You can watch the guys in the back taking frozen white pieces straight from the fridge into the hot oil, and the sound is like a bag of angry snakes.
The chick who serves me is a goth. Her hair's jet black, the kind that only comes from a bottle, and there are holes in her face where rings or something go when she's not at work. You can tell she hates her job because the place smells like hot fat and she has to wear a hairnet and a striped blouse and be nice to teenagers who can't even pull their pants up. Anyway, that's what I see in her face.
The food makes me sick and actually costs more than a real restaurant lunch, but I don't have to go outside. And I keep looking for a reason to talk to her, to get a date. But all I ever say is "Super-size me."
When I first got that job, I stood on the mezzanine at the Bay Street entrance, at the wide end of the oval, and let my eyes follow the lines of the architecture, first down the stairs into the well, which opened onto the subway level, then up the banks of escalators at the narrow end opposite, as they snaked back and forth from one tier to the next. My eyes climbed each gallery like steps up to the glass ceiling, taking in the sculpted geese suspended on the wing as if they were passing overhead in an empty sky.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Free Man by Michel Basilières. Copyright © 2015 Michel Basilières. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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