|
Shit Happens: Matthew Firth’s Can You Take Me There, Now?
(Alley Cat Editions: Boheme Press)
by Chris J. Robinson
In hockey, we celebrate goals. We embrace Gretzky, Lemieux, and Jagr
primarily because they accumulate points. But much of the dirty work that goes into making
them heroes is done in the corners along the boards, where players crash and collide with
one another in an epic violent struggle for their holy grail: a little black piece of
rubber. When they’re not crosschecking, slashing and boarding one another, they’re
cycling the puck. Cycling involves the continuous motion of two or three players. One gets
the puck, the other shifts position, the puck handler leaves the puck, moves and allows
the second player to assume his original position. They remain in constant motion, always
in the process of becoming. The process continues until they lose possession of the puck
or find a gap in the defence. The work of the grinders is rarely acknowledged, but without
doubt it is their determination and willingness to sacrifice every ounce of the body that
often leads the heroic goal scorer to score without breaking a sweat while earning the
acclaim of the audience.
The road from hockey to life isn’t that far. We routinely
mythologize and worship those who achieve material success. We obsess over standings,
bestseller lists, top ten lists, bank rates, stockmarkets.
These lists come to us within the safe border of our television, computer or
newspaper frames; a land of beautiful snow covered fields that glisten to the early
morning sun’s gaze. We feel flush with comfort, security and warmth as we stare out
from our warm homes barely cognizant of the dark diarrheic swamp that lies waiting to
momentarily emerge in springtime before being beaten, dug, shoveled and molded into a
nourishing bouquet of flowers, grass and fields.
In his second collection of stories, Can You Take Me There, Now?,
Canadian writer, Matthew Firth, steps outside of the frames to show us the grinders, the
people who go into the shit of life day in and day out without any acknowledgement,
without any hope of acknowledgment. For these characters, life is a never-ending cycle of
desire, to connect with whatever small ounce of pleasure or joy they can grasp from a life
lived in society’s swamps. The characters in these stories include a variety of
minimum wage and unemployed drifters, mostly in their thirties, who struggle to articulate
their feelings, thoughts and frustrations through a speaker of booze, violence and
madness.
First, a beef, on the back of the book it’s suggested that
Matthew Firth is Canada’s Charles Bukowski. Now granted given Canada’s often
tepid, cozy and British influenced literary tradition ala Margaret Atwood, Robertson
Davies, and their ilk, Firth’s raw portraits of middle class Canada certainly stand
out, but there is a misguided mindset that presumes beer, swearing, street people, and
fucking were created and copyrighted by Bukowski. Aside
from serving as a useful marketing gesture (at least in Canada) labels also tend to
reflect lazy reviewers who, hard pressed to confront the meat of the subject, fall back on
familiar names, names that speak more than they. And hey, whoever said being compared to
Bukowski was a compliment?
FAKES
Now all THAT being said, it’s easy to see where the Bukowski
sticker comes in. In the opening title story we meet a young man sleeping on the street
with a copy of Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man by his side. The man, who
is waiting to catch a train back to Montreal, is a recently dumped, pissed off at the
world type who is spending his remaining money playing the part of drifter in Halifax.
From the start, the young man is clearly full of shit:
I’ve not done a hell of a lot since I’ve
been here. Skulked around the Maritime city. Drunk Coffee. Eaten cheap dinners at some
Hare Krishna vegetarian place. Hung out with other bums at the public library.
Unlike the ‘real’ bums, this man has options. His ‘drifting’
is the result of being dumped, quitting his job and “drowning his sorrows”. As he recalls his girlfriend, he bashes her “tedious,
clichéd, post-university jaunt to Europe.” Yet clearly he is on a tedious jaunt of
his own.
As he spends his remaining hours with a ‘street crazy’
named Winston, his macho words and thoughts go against his actions. He constantly worries
about his depleting bank account and catching the train home. He orders Moosehead (which
is not worthy of even Winston) and drools over a stripper as if she were the first woman
he ever encountered. The man is a tourist. This romanticized street life is clearly a
vacation of self-pity. When something very real does finally happen to the man, he is too
detached and drunk to absorb it. He merely catches his train and goes home.
The critique is subtle, as if Firth is torn between his own love for
this bizarre lure of Bukowski’s lurid macho fantasyland and an awareness of its
falseness.
Throughout the book, Firth skirts back and forth between the
legitimate outcasts like Winston and feckless youths whose biggest problems are getting
laid. In A Month of Sundays, an ex-couple continue to meet every Sunday despite
having nothing to say to one another. The man perhaps continues to go with the hope that
he can bang her. In Nostalgia, a man
is asked to attend the wedding of his ex-wife by a girl he’s always wanted to do. And
in perhaps the weakest story, Flowers, oh such beautiful flowers, we meet a man who
is sleeping with his ex-wife’s younger sister. She gives him a purely physical and
kinky relationship. No commitments. The story is little more than a middle age male
fantasy. As even its narrator notes… “A tired script to be sure.”
While Firth succinctly captures the nothingness of his characters, he
also seems weakened with a case of mild admiration for their valueless world of pizza
boxes, beer and desire. With the values and beliefs of the old world destroyed, the
characters find themselves free but free, but instead they linger and stagnate, losing
themselves in a cyclical haze of alcohol, lust and despair. You sense that if only they
found love, or even a cheap impersonation, they would emerge with newfound energy and
passion for life. Paradoxically it is their lack of real, meaningful passion that keeps
them alone. The men in these stories are less fakes then just pleasure crippled
self-loathing invalids who wait for life to come knocking.
ARTICULATION
Communication, or the lack thereof, is a common thread throughout the
collection. Unable to articulate their fears, thoughts and concerns, characters turn
inward, lash out at loved ones through yelling and violence (Some of my Neighbours,
Bliss) or simply get drunk (Orgasm) and enjoy a meaningless moment of
orgasmic pleasure that will be forgotten just as quickly.
In Exodus 10, a man (Darren), carrying their small child,
chases after his wife (Karen) as she heads to the bus stop to go to work. The man (wearing “boxers, slippers, black,
rock T” It’s minus 10 degrees.) is fed up with being stuck at home with the kid.
The man screams inarticulately at the woman in a bus shelter as others mull around them.
As the bus approaches, he physically holds his wife from the bus, but eventually she
collects herself and seeks out another bus. The frustrated man returns to his home lost
and unchanged.
Using the raw power and unfiltered haste of everyday language, Firth
captures the anger and frustration of an inarticulate and entrapped couple. Karen is not
just taking a job out of economic necessity (Darren has EI benefits), but perhaps more to
escape the tedium of her mundane existence with a man-boy whose teenage mentality dictates
a life of drinking with his buds and “forcing his fat dick into the smallness of
Karen’s back”.
After Darren has returned home angry and frustrated, he puts the baby
on the floor and flicks the TV on. Following Darren’s brief hallucination/nightmare
about being attacked by a swarm of locusts, Firth shifts our attention towards the real
victim, the baby daughter. She is the inadvertent cause of their fight, but also their
potential savior. But the stories final lines don’t provide much solace:
…her headless doll untouched. Cockroach
turds all around her naked, blackened feet. A few mouse turds too. She picks one of them
up, rolling it between thumb and forefinger as if it were a rice crispie. She toes a
littered beercap on the scratched hardwood….
Her first word might be ball. Might be
truck. Might be cunt.
In Kissing the Cabbie, Frank, unlike Darren, actively seeks
connection with other people. But like Darren his articulations are strange, violent and
uncensored. He has just lost his job and is taking a cab ride. He asks the cabbie, “You
mind this type of work?” The cabbie doesn’t answer. Frank pays, waits for an
answer, gets none and exits the cab. Our initial perception is of a typically anti-social
world. The guy asks a simple question and is rudely ignored. Then the tables turn. Frank
enters a bus shelter (a seemingly strange thing to do after getting out of a cab). He asks
a man if he is late for work, but again, no answer. Finally, Frank screams the question
out again. From here on, we begin to sense that Frank is perhaps not what he seemed. He
remains in the bus shelter all day and attempts to talk through his increasingly obscure
dialogue (“RATS I SAID. BIG NORWAY RATS STRAIGHT FROM FUCKING NORWAY. RIGHT THERE BY
YOUR FEET.”) to anyone who waits. We are
now certain that Frank is nuts, but just as abruptly Firth throws us off again by
capturing Frank’s wrenching alienation and humanity with a beautiful, empathic
passage:
Frank, alone in the shelter, cries to himself, his tears
spilling to the pavement. He tries to speak, but no words come. He reaches out with one
hand to the departed bus, touching nothing. He leans forward, brushing his fallen tears
away with his shoe, smearing them into the ground.
Minimum Wage
Firth, like most of us, has worked his share of shit paying jobs. His
keen memory helps him create strong, concise portraits of the nothingness that is mundane
labour. Minimum Wage follows the last four hours in the shift of a convenience
store clerk. His only moments of joy stem from stealing food, cruelly and rather
ironically tormenting elderly shoplifters, pulling his meat to a symphony of porn mags,
and making a $17 ‘profit’ at the end of the night.
The Job captures a few moments of an elderly garbage man’s
life from the viewpoint of a new man (called ‘Firth’) on the job. Here Firth
uses the garbage as an allegory. It is not the handling of people’s filth that
disgusts, but the recurring monotony of mindless routine.
“Firth” desperately seeks a word of wisdom and salvation from
Tommy as he retires; something to ease the pain:
I waited for him to make some kind of
remark, to give some indication about the meaning of the day. I wanted him to offer some
words of wisdom to us. Or make a joke about not seeing us on Monday morning. But he said
none of these things. Tommy just shuffled away from the truck to the bar, like he had done
most days.
But there is nothing. Tommy is no Virgil. Firth is no Dante. But this
certainly is hell.
In Bubble Room (Firth like another Canadian writer, Daniel
Jones worked in a mental hospital), we see life in a mental hospital through the eyes of a
young custodian ithin The bubble room is essentially a padded solitary cell for naughty
patients (like Trevor who inadvertently shoots his sperm on another patient):
Most of the time the patient lies there,
stultified and heavily drugged, until their incarceration passes and they are free to
wander the ward again.
But these words could just as easily be describing the existence of
the custodians and nurses who drift through their shifts avoiding each other, doing only
what their contracts require, living entirely for the moment when they are ‘free’.
In this dead world, the most mundane things become the very stuff
of life. Getting drunk, playing pool, or having your own ward to clean, sweep and mop is
one of those small moments of joy for our ‘hero’.
Once a week I mop the floors of the TV room,
the waiting room, and the poolroom, usually on Thursday. The decision is mine.”
Like descendents of Abe Spalding (look it up!), the characters live
for the moment not in the moment. They live in limbo, always, as another decent Canadian
said, “looking for a place to happen.” Firth’s minimum wage earners
sleepwalk through their shit jobs, avoiding humanity, losing themselves in the illusions
of alcohol and sex; stained shirts cloaked under a borrowed dinner jacket of
socialization.
It ain’t all darkness. In the beautiful Let Me Tell A Love
Story, a man (Kevin) in his 30s falls in love with a woman (Helen) twice his age.
Helen, an émigré from Belgium, has endured a miserable marriage, which Firth sums up
wonderfully:
Weekends he would lie on top of her in their
cold bed, pinning Helen’s arms to the mattress, forcing himself into her, all the
while muttering contemptuous phrases in her ear while he fucked her, devoid of
emotion.
After their children grew up, the husband simply packed his bags and
returned to Belgium. Her children rarely contact her and she earns money working at a
shopping mall coffee shop.
Kevin (who is perhaps an older version of the character in the title
story) has found his feet again after a divorce (by a wife also named Helen who fucked
“young professors and old professors”), quitting his job, and drinking himself
into an unshaven mumbler, all typical antics of Firth’s men.
Kevin and Helen have gotten to know each other riding on the bus
everyday. Over time, the two quietly fall in love with each other. Despite her obvious
pain, Helen brings a smile to life, takes pleasure in every morning, savours the smell of
fresh bread, and works her garden every weekend. Helen, like her Greek counterpart,
represents the pinnacle of humanity, a woman who embraces and respects every single grain
of her life. In taking life as it comes, in savouring the moment, Helen represents what
Firth’s characters perhaps wish to be. As the narrator says in the final line: “Kissing
Helen is just as Kevin has imagined a hundred mornings on the bus.”.
Throughout the book, Firth’s writing in sparse and direct. There’s
no flowery prose here. This isn’t a social cry about intolerance or injustice nor is
it a glorification of the working class. Firth
takes us beyond the window-shopping tendencies of both the faux street poet and socially
conscious writer. Possessing genuine
compassion and empathy, Firth shows us people with all their zits, belches and blemishes.
This is precisely what makes Matthew Firth more like Matthew Firth than Charles fucking
Bukowski. Firth adds no makeup. These lives are not judged. They are raw Polaroids of
lives where quite simply, shit happens.
You can order Can You Take Me There, Now from
www.bohemeonline.com or through www.chapters.ca.
|
