Jeremy Cooper of Toronto

By Myles Stocker

Jeremy Cooper of Toronto is a biography of a fictional character whose life loosely follows the contours of Queen Street in Toronto. It's also about relationships and morality and politics. I was younger then.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Myles Stocker
• Release date: Jul 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311149459

Myles Stocker

Myles is a young-ish man who lives in Toronto. He loves music and writing and cheap fancy cocktails. Please buy his book; maybe he'll write another one.

Book preview

Jeremy Cooper of Toronto

By

Myles Stocker

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Myles Stocker

All Rights Reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 1

Babies are loud, incontinent, and incredibly boring to anyone other than their parents and people with too much unused cooing. Cooing is an activity that should be done in private, if at all, but babies drive otherwise respectable people to do it in public. In addition, babies are selfish to the point where one could safely say that we all suffer from early-onset sociopathy. They are simply not capable of acting in any interests aside from their own immediate desires. They are not particularly intelligent; despite how many parents are greatly impressed by their child’s intent staring at an ant or a plum, the level of processing that is occurring is less advanced than what happens in the mind of a puppy or kitten, and they are certainly less playful than the latter and less caring than the former and less fuzzy than either.

Jeremy, like most babies, was to the televised, laughing image of babyhood what carrots are to Columbia: not. Like all the other babies, Jeremy had a large head compared to his body and large eyes compared to his face. He started with jealousy, facial recognition, and greed and discovered altruism years later. His larynx was high so that he could breathe and feed at once, but this meant he couldn’t talk, just hear sounds that his mind furiously worked to interpret. He waggled his arms and wiggled his toes, and just the sight of those movements set his parents and their friends to cooing.

Babies mostly appeal to us through their juvenile characteristics, which in adults is called neoteny and is responsible for cuteness. Many adults prefer their mates to look paedomorphic, probably because it reminds us to be playful, curious, and affectionate. But for babies such as Jeremy, these characteristics, physically and mentally, are exaggerated to the point where they are incapable of being anything else; they are combined with utter helplessness to make human beings who are objectively odious. Only babies can get away with combining helplessness and selfishness. Indeed, they are often praised and rewarded for it. They’re extraordinarily smug and entitled, if you think about it. No reasonable adult should think a baby drooling on its own fist while crying incoherently for no reason other than because is in any way deserving of positive attention, yet when Jeremy did this when he was eight days old both his parents momentarily set aside their hatred for each other to coo and stroke the fine hairs on his bulbous head. A week later Jeremy decided in his infantile head to scream for attention, as he did several times per hour, but his parents were distracted and didn’t come, so he stopped. He was crying as if something was wrong, exactly the same as he would have cried if he was hungry or had hurt himself, if he had meant it, but he didn’t mean it. Baby Jeremy was cute by all baby-standards, but by human standards he was a mucousy blob of demanding.

Jeremy was born with reflexes that included the urges to do all the things we take as givens. Any anthropologist convinced of all the differences in cultures does too much ignoring of how all human beings smile, cry, sniff, cough, have noses, and feel jealousy, to say nothing of what many psychologists term the four Fs (feeding, fleeing, fighting, and reproduction). Jeremy wanted to express dominance and get revenge. The primary traits were the obligate traits, physically speaking. If there were a million Jeremies, a million of them would have blonde hair that a million of them would lose by age forty, but physically most of his traits were facultative. Due to proper health he would grow to be five feet and ten inches tall (roughly), have a high forehead, and be slightly skinner than average. He was predisposed towards heterosexuality, a slightly higher than usual maternal instinct for a man, and a more violent mind than body. He would learn that any perception he experienced an equivalent in the natural world, because he wasn’t subject to excessive sensory deprivation as a child. No matter how lowly we may feel, we can take solace in the fact that we are all winners on a scale unimaginable to any known creature but ourselves. Like literally everyone else, Jeremy came from millenia of tiny changes that, while not necessarily positive, were not negative enough to cause their own extinction. You could say that he was born out of billions of years of good decisions by his ancestors. To say otherwise would be to deny a tautology. He was certainly not born a blank slate: Jeremy received an imprint of every single one of the decisions that made their way to him. He was not born good and there was no ghost in the machine. He was born with millions of imprints, the strongest of which was the imprint that told him to survive and reproduce. The next strongest imprint said that experience could govern every other imprint if given the opportunity.

Jeremy had two older sisters. There are few better things for a boy than to have older sisters. Rivalry between brothers is famous and celebrated, and goes back to Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau. Older, younger, or middle, brothers are entrenched, from birth, into a universal and depressing male power struggle. While the pseudo-Darwinian imperative of the survival of the strongest is outdated in the first world, brothers still fight bitterly for available resources like parental pride and resources. A talented first-born can easily hoover the resources from the later progeny or a talented youngest can funnel all the mother’s love away from the others. While this can happen with any children, brothers have an intrinsic urge to be on top and squash the others, a remnant from the savannah days.

Many psychiatrists and psychologists, usually the worse among them, place an inordinate amount of focus on the importance of childhood. Childhood is only as important as we allow it to be through our adulthood. That said, the amount of strength necessary to overcome childhood trauma can be beyond one’s means. We can choose (bear with the illusion of free will and all that) to change who we are through habit-forming and hard work, but childhood acts on our adulthood much as our secondary evolutionary tendencies affect our personalities.

If you are planning to have several children, try to have at least one daughter first. Otherwise your boys will teach each other to be boys and that’ll be destructive to them or at least to others. Jeremy’s sisters taught him everything good he learned in childhood, usually through typically cruel means: that he wouldn’t get all of the attention he wanted and that he needed to be cunning to get his share. If he had had only brothers he would have been encouraged to be violent to get his way, an approach not particularly viable as an adult, and definitely a bad idea for younger brothers. Critically for his development into a well-adjusted adult, he learned not be scared and angry at females in general through being around them. Most importantly, thanks to his parents’ traditional views, he was not entered into generic male competition at birth; he was able to be original, which was useful considering he wasn’t a fantastically intelligent boy. He had less free-floating angst than he would have had otherwise.

The girls were mean to him, as kids are. The supposed innocence of children is a lie wearing the same habits as the universal beauty of wailing babies. Children are, continuing from the trend set by babies, overrated and sociopathic in general. Their primary concern is to avoid trouble for themselves; until kids are taught not to steal or abuse animals or smaller children they’ll do these things freely. Kids pick on fellow kids until their peers cry and yell and hate themselves, and the crying kids go home and either get yelled at for crying until they learn not to cry or until the offenders are reprimanded and maybe learn not to. Jeremy and his sisters needed years until they legitimately cared about each other. Elly taught both her younger siblings to read before kindergarten through the same method: she had them learn what sound each letter made (sometimes wrongly, but hey), then had them pronounce each word through drawn out phonemes. Then she taught them to read silently by telling them, in the exact same words: now make the sounds, but make them in your head.

Elly was named Eloise by Janine, the mother, who got to name the first child if it was a girl. Eloise is an old-fashioned name, like Bertha or Beatrice, but unlike the latter it’s not even a very nice one. It sounds like something a pet turtle might be named, not a modern girl. Luckily, her parents started calling her Elly before she was past infancy. It started as an affectionate thing by her mother. Her father, who didn’t like the name (but certainly thought inside that she was less likely to be important because as a woman she’d have to work twice as hard to be noticed) picked it up with as much eagerness as he could muster for such a small thing. For her it would not be a small thing: in an alternate reality the same girl named Eloise would have a worse experience in kindergarten, particularly with being teased for how her named rhymed with cheese. The insults wouldn’t be clever, but they would be effective at lowering her self-esteem. Now armed with a reduced sense of superiority, Elly would become less bossy and popular than she would have otherwise. In high school she would spend less time taking care of her appearance, and would run with an altogether more benign group. Never so liked for how she carried herself, she would fail to go through the angst-ridden realization that she needed to be more than just statuesque (naturally she was just as tall in this universe), and would stay focused on superficial things. Therefore she would never develop her intense desire to be interesting. Whatever than meant, she would lack the determination to be it and this would stunt her eventual hard-edged interest in philanthropy and economics. She wouldn’t meet the same 20 year-old boy who sparked in her a lifelong love of baseball and its attached statistical analysis, an interest that (would make her more than a few hangers-on and useful idiots). Despite worrying endlessly about her looks, she would keep much the same hairstyle until her 30s, thinking it looked best and not wanting to risk embarrassment and loss of status. She would attend university in Canada instead of America, going to McMaster originally for biology but staying somewhat aimless. She would never bartend and therefore would never have an impromptu bonding conversation with him over drinks until four in the morning, sharing understandings and fording a river nobody else in her family had managed to cross. After graduation she would keep an apartment with three graduate students, feeling quite miserably about her prospects in the recession. She would temp to make ends meet, and after a few months doing reception for an insurance company (SoftServe Insurance) she would be hired as their administrative assistant. After three long years of this she would drift into a comfortable but soulless market-research job. There she would rise through the ranks quickly until running into an uncomfortably leering manager she would lack the confidence and experience to corporately manhandle. When Eloise died she would have a Christian funeral, and she would die a wavering pantheist like most of the losers of her generation.

Fortunately, then, the nickname Elly stuck.

She was a relatively well-behaved baby, though she was borderline colic like all infants. She learned to expect to get what she wanted as a toddler, but with Lisa’s arrival and the subsequent unequal parting of her mother’s already-infrequent attention Elly learned self-sufficiency. Lisa never got it. She and Elly grew up as friends, like siblings two years apart often will, but it was an unequal partnership. Elly was taller, smarter, bossier, and the only of the two with a restless urge to get the hell out as soon as was possible. Elly wasn’t explicitly an extrovert, gadflying about her temperaments, but Lisa was certainly an introvert, and her introversion didn’t lend to her any greater understanding of herself or the boyfriends and family members she wanted to understand. She had the nicest features, objectively speaking, of any of her siblings; she had large, round eyes, a pleasantly fair, average sized nose, dimples, and soft, baby-like skin. Sadly, her sadness got the worst of her, and by her mid-teens she was already unpleasantly plump. Things went downhill for her from there: introverts are inherently self-conscious, and don’t need more reasons to be insecure.

While Lisa spent most of her childhood trying to befriend Elly, love her parents and ultimately feeling pushed away, Jeremy cut his losses and accepted Elly’s waywardness. He was two years younger than Lisa, and the two of them formed a strong unit when their parents bickered. Jeremy was usually left out of the girls’ games, and developed a tendency to observe people around him sociologically, not that he knew that word until nearly a decade after he’d started. He was often talkative, but knew that trying too hard to be involved is the easiest way to be mocked and left out as a child. It wasn’t so much that no boys were allowed (though Lisa was fond of the phrase and used it to tease Jeremy) as it was that they were brought up to play inherently different games. Plus, Lisa wanted to stay as close to the protection that Elly offered as she could, which she did manage while they were all children.

Miles, the last child, was born six years after Jeremy and the difference of age resulted in his never being close to his siblings. Rightfully so, as he was an awful child who would grow into an awful, uneducated, and unsuccessful person who spent most of his adult life leeching from and living with his reluctant but tiring father, working part-time as a barista and leaving behind a trail of failed attempts to learn musical instruments and become accredited at various colleges. He was also a fat child, successfully convincing his mother that she was being mean when she packed him a healthy lunch because seeing all the candy and cupcakes the other kids got in their lunches made him feel bad.

All four of the children considered themselves black sheep at some point, either for their oddness or for their normalcy.

Victor, the father, was raised in a post-war era to be whatever his heart yearned for him to be, and he chose a life of taking over his own father’s factory and being an unconcerned member of society with undercard political power. Growing up he saw the sexual revolution and it made him uncomfortable. He didn’t like the idea that it was now fashionable and correct to allow anything other than upper class white men much screen time, ignoring his mother and family history. It didn’t help that huge events for women and blacks and gays were raging around him or right around the corner as he grew up; his young, proud self felt a little threatened. As a teen he read William Buckley and Ayn Rand (though they lost him at times) and felt inspired and eager to be a man. He was principled and meant the best for himself, his family, and the world, and that meant disseminating his views in direct, understandable terms to anyone who would hear him out. He was a salt of the earth type, meaning he confused education with snobbery, hard work with good work, and agreement with honesty.

Janine often threatened to leave Victor, but never had it in herself to betray her intelligence. She hadn’t wanted to marry for money, of course. A long time ago she wanted to become a doctor and somehow travel the world doing doctorly duties and making lots of money and saving the children, but time passed and reality acted, and she didn’t even get to enjoy her statuesque adult life due to the obligations of children. She wasn’t smart enough to have been a doctor anyway; she referred to Victor as her bo in writing while they were dating. Jeremy was the worse for it, of course, born into mutual acrimony and spite. None of it made them truly happy: not affairs or doting or revenge or snideness or tradition or temporary joy, any more than their parents’ similar dreams made their parents happy or made their grandparents happy or et cetera. Victor decided to stay in Dalewood despite his low-upper-class status. Modesty made him anxious, but would surely help his children stay grounded. Janine didn’t like this, preferring instead to pick a nicer place at least a few outskirts closer to the city, but Victor wasn’t budging, and their marriage was far past understanding and compromise on that or any issue.

For all his dedication to his fortunes, Victor not a good factory manager. He felt he could cut corners on maintenance and staff pay, resulting in underpaid (sometimes migrant) workers with little connection to their work and unsafe conditions that mostly led to ruined equipment and suffering quality and quantity of product, as well as consternation from customers. Still, he was stubborn. He knew the way things were to be done, god damn it, and that’s how he did them.

Victor loved his children but his questionable ethics led to some strange feelings. To his surprise, he easily loved Elly the most, because he saw the greatest potential for success in her. She was the brightest and feistiest, qualities that he admired even if he never considered his bitterness when he realized that she was much smarter than he was. He spent the most time, however, with Jeremy. Victor was wary of the pitfalls of assumptions but still figured he should try to make Jeremy his successor, and from an early age he took Jeremy on tours of the factory and for drives around the town, now a suburb. He resolved that even though he had money, Jeremy had to learn to make it on his own, just as he had, and so the boy would need to learn a strong work ethic and proper respect for authority as soon as possible. Jeremy kept his muddy blonde hair about an inch long. Towards dental hygiene, he accepted that he had to brush his teeth at least once a day to placate his parents, but he outright refused to floss, which Victor and Janine figured was an acceptable level of acquiescence.

Dalewood was now entirely on the outskirts of a recognized city. Once it had been a nice premodern suburb, wealthier but a class or two below Stepford. Separated single-family homes, some of them bungalows and some of them for wealthier types lined four lane streets lined with maple trees. During summer small patches of grass separated the sidewalks from the roads, except on corners and driveways, which were paved through. Small lawns separated the houses from the sidewalks. Stop signs were posted on every corner and a crosswalk halved each lengthy block. A dark red post office box was erected every point four kilometres, with a small slot at the top for letters and a larger door you could pull open for packages. The primary arterial was still lined with shops and bars, of course, most of them still rather seedy. To the west lay stretched the sparse population and farms of Mississauga. Now the city had sprawled to it and enveloped it, like the city had engulfed Parkdale and Newtonbrook and other villages. The streets were quieter than they used to be now that the idea of self-sufficiency was gone. The city was now close enough that Dalewood didn’t need to have a living room anymore. It was now bounded on all sides by highways, becoming an isolated town with no countryside to escape to except the same golf courses everyone else could go to. The largest park in town was two square blocks by two square blocks, with a small multi-coloured slide in the middle and a swing set with two swings on it, enough for a budding romance but not for kids to play on. There were no apartment buildings, just semi-detached houses that now filled up all the space except for the sparse businesses and two bars on the wider streets. You couldn’t get out, not really. Walking in any direction for too long would only take you to a twelve-lane deathtrap with cars and express buses firing past and hating the few stoplights there were. Past the highways there was just more: factory outlet malls, malls with Garden in the name and a complete absence of flora, cloverleaf interchanges, sad apartments slowly rising, eager to house immigrants who didn’t know how much better they could do for a fraction more. Dalewood was an island of nowhere in a sea of infrastructure designed for somewhere else.

Down the highway for ten minutes and the arterials narrowed to eight lanes and the factories started. It’s easy to forget that outside of every major city there’s a warren of loud, low rising, dense industrial wasteland that’s necessary for the precious high rises and restaurants and artists and lawns and hospitals and community meetings and soccer practices. These are not the suburbs. Suburbia is to the industrial lands what urbanity is to the industrial lands: the demand, and in much the same way. The industrial lands don’t draw a distinction between populated areas.

Somewhere far outside the city, but not too far, are massive drywall factories pumping out miles and miles of gypsum plaster pressed between two sheets of paper. The factories occupy acres of land in themselves. Workmen still walk on prairie-like dusty concrete floors wearing hard hats, cutting and framing walls on jigs, working seven to four or seven to five. They’re dusty and loud and forever and necessary: walls have to be made, and made in massive quantities, and this has to be the case. North America alone uses over 40 billion square feet per year of drywall. The drywall is then loaded onto flatbed trucks and trudged down long highways into the cities where it is unloaded by material handler cranes. Drywall isn’t all, of course. Roofing has to be made, vast sheets of corrugated aluminum and shingles and siding have to be produced. Pipes need to be made, vast heavy clunky metal pipes for sewage and water, and for replacing the old piping under your sink when it starts to leak. The mass production of school chairs. Doweling rods for keeping your blinds on your windows straight and steady. Massive industrial storage facilities, trucks loading and unloading massive crates. Ice cream factories, supporting hundreds if not thousands of workers, bitterly making children happy and fat for unionized wages. Anything too massive or too numerous to be produced in an urban setting. All of this sits outside our cities shamelessly churning out drywall, shrugging, saying yeah, I’m ugly, what do you expect me to do about it?

Less than that are the factories like Victor’s. They can be a little closer to the cities, but have to stay on the outskirts or somewhere somehow secluded because they sound and smell like blight. No children playing, no sounds at night, not contributing at all to the neighbourhood’s economies. Things like knives and screws and, in this case, bandsaws. Victor’s factory was one of the smallest on its lengthy block of Kipling Avenue, nestled between an ice cream wholesaler and a scrapyard. The area might have been dangerous by night if there had been any residents. As it was, the place filled with commuting workers by day and completely abandoned by night. Two dozen thermoses of coffee arrived every day, accompanied by two dozen sandwiches, one dozen apples and one dozen bananas. Not to mention, of course, anywhere from two to ten flasks of whiskey to fill up the day filled with manufacturing for the printing, engineering, and joinery industries. It was an old, old building dating back to the 20s, and while Victor had thought about expanding the purview to make circular saws and industrial knives, he was leaning towards selling and maybe buying a nicer house on Lakeshore when he neared retirement age and the kids were going. Jeremy was his son, and needed to see what honest work was like, so he got to go, usually on a weekend when the only inhabitants would be a supervisory sawdoctor holding things together and assembling a few extra orders. The overtime pay earned meant there was never a shortage of volunteers.

Like most North American children, Jeremy learned that we grow up to work and stop swinging on swings or sledding down snowy hills. None of what the factory workers told him really amounted to his life. Victor, like a lot of fathers, just wanted to be sure his son would earn a decent wage and be a decent man. Jeremy mostly remembered the sights of driving down the highway on the way to the factory: the empty sidewalks, the endless overpasses, the roar and whirr of passing cars going further in or getting farther out, the empty triangular patches of grass or snow by the sides of the highway that weren’t worth using when there was so much usable space. On the bridges he could look over at the passing concavity of roadbed and see no houses, no businesses. It was the residual land use of the highways, and to his young eyes it looked like home might be the only place in the world with jack-o-lanterns and streetlights and video stores. Then his father would tell him to do his homework.

The house on Rimolton Street had three bedrooms, but the children’s mother insisted on keeping one of them a spare room for the guests that, in truth, never stayed the night. That meant that Elly and Lisa and Jeremy shared a bedroom. They were mutually lucky that none of them snored. For Jeremy that meant a tiny bed made of blue railings in a yellow corner, trying to sleep while listening to his sisters bother each other in their bunk bed in a yellow corner. This exclusion left an enduring impression on him. When he went to sleep his dreams had nothing great to dream on, something temporal and nothing divine. Often he dreamt of horrible things happening: crossing the road and falling forward, shattering his teeth on the opposite curb, or sliding down a banister and the banister turning into a razor, slicing him in half as he somehow maintained consciousness. Most of the time it was mundane and playful: magnets and big blocks and warm rivers of sweetened milk.

Miles was born when Jeremy was six, and therefore when Lisa was eight and Elly ten. None of his siblings much cared for him; they had their social hierarchies and their relations with each other and their increasing senses of resentment toward their parents to worry about. Lisa liked him the most, most needing a new, baby-aged little brother. As she grew older and less popular she would grow more nurturing toward him, ignoring the fact that Miles really only liked himself, and inexplicably at that.

Miles lived in his parents’ room as a baby, toddler, and young child. By this time, Elly had been living in her own room for a few years, which she had demanded, and received, when she turned thirteen. Miles’ constant proximity to his parents