Stockboy

By Doug Downie

A collection of short stories that is novelistic in that there is a timeline, a main character, interconnections among stories. It follows Jack Dugan through a series of mostly demeaning jobs over a 25 year period. The stories are mostly quite short, and eschew the climax and resolution of standard story-telling - they play out the way real life plays out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781794713567

Book preview

Stockboy

STOCKBOY by Doug Downie, Jazzman Publications, Sacramento, CA Copyright © 2019 by Doug Downie, all rights reserved. Except for short excerpts no part of this book may be reprinted without permission from the author or publisher. ISBN 978-1-79471-356-7 Some of these stories have previously appeared in Chiron Review and Down in the Dirt.

We all know that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end

and hopefully rise to a crescendo before the conflict is resolved,

but they really are just stories, aren’t they,

and have nothing to do with the lives that people

are forced to live

lives with no climaxes and no resolution of conflict

just moments that pass by

and move on to the next moment

like ghosts in the night

whose beginnings are obscure and whose end

is assured

lives lost in the years of endless trying.

The Journalists

The first job I ever had resulted from an entrepreneurial spirit that never surfaced again as the years went on. My friend Allen and I had cooked up the idea of a neighborhood newspaper and I had my parents buy a play printing press that was going to be the hot bed of eight year old investigative journalism and would have the tongues wagging from Leigh Drive to Kensington St. and all the way over to the end of Faulkner Ave. The summer lawns simmered in the heat and humidity of a stale New Jersey afternoon while the spires and thrills of New York City sat just 20 miles away – a distance too far for us to traverse anytime soon.

Clearly, something had to be done.

We gotta do something. Allen said.

Yeah? Like what?

Something.

Sounds pretty good…something.

Don’t make fun of me, I’m serious.

I lay on the grass and absorbed that thought for a moment. I slapped at an ant that had just disappeared beneath my shorts. I could see that he was serious, though he had no idea what to do with such a mature and firm stance.

You could smell the macadam melting in the sun and occasionally cars would pass along Rahway Ave. heading down to Clark, or maybe up toward town. Just a few weeks before a driver had had an epileptic fit and lost control of his car. He had careened across the Dingle’s yard, sideswiping an old oak, before he came to crash and rest right on the stoop just above where we sat at that moment wondering about something to do. A ’57 Plymouth sat in my driveway, red as a tomato, with fins that swept to the sky like the appendages of some sort of spaceship. A convertible sped by, and we could hear its screeching tires as it turned into Cottage Place one block over, then again as it turned either to the right or to the left fork. It made no difference, really; it was all just four blocks of brick bungalows, and few college degrees hung on those walls.

I’d like to get me one of those. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a convertible? asked Allen.

Yeah. Yeah, it’d be pretty cool.

So what are we going to do?

Well, it’s pretty boring around here, right?

It sure is.

You know how we could make something happen?

How, genius?

Start a newspaper!

Allen’s eyes grew like the ripples from a rock thrown into Tamaques Pond. His jaw slackened just a bit.

How are we gonna do that? We’re eight years old!

We’ll get a printing press. I’ve seen ‘em down at the Playfair. My parents might buy one for me. We’re doing something positive, ya know, not getting into trouble. We’ll get it all set up, then we’ll do some investigating.

And so it was. We quickly learned how to use the printing press, it was quite simple. It had little rubber letters and symbols and you swiped the ink across them after you’d laid out your type then rolled a single piece of paper under the roller, like an old-fashioned laundry machine, and it popped out the other side covered in print, just a bit smeared. We got better as we learned about patience. We were in business, but we had no stories. We looked very hard for stories, prowling the neighborhood hoping to overhear some juicy bit of bile or tragic revelation about what transpired behind closed doors of the three models of houses that lined the streets of our suburban neighborhood, sitting underneath the grandeur of New York City. Sometimes in the evenings we huddled under stranger’s windows hoping to witness some sort of dirt that would titillate the bored and jaded readers that lived where we lived.

Then one day our Big Scoop finally arrived. My mother was cooking mini-pizzas, cup sized bits of dough and tomato sauce and cheese, barely anyone’s conception of a pizza, but we loved them, and were excited every time that these were slotted to be on our lunch menu. As Allen and I lounged in the living room, exchanging the casual insults that were so common and almost obligatory among young boys, an acrid odor began to pervade the air.

You smell something? Allen asked.

Yeah. What is that?

It was then that we both saw the smoke lofting out from the kitchen, in little filigrees and curls. We hightailed it into the kitchen to see the smoke billowing from the stove.

The pizzas were on fire!

Mom! Mom! I called. The pizzas are on fire!

My mom came running down the stairs, her hair in curlers, and pulled down the stove door. Flames billowed out like an angry lash and scorched her eyebrows, melting one pink curler.

Call the fire department mom! I called, cool of head.

Allen was running around from kitchen to living room, trying to solve some problem only he knew about. Finally he tripped on the coffee table and fell headlong into the sofa, where he remained until the firemen arrived. They were big and sloppy in their orange and black suits and boots. There wasn’t really much damage, just a lot of black stuff in the stove and a bit of soot trailing like a puff up the wall by the kitchen door.

After all the excitement was over we realized we had our Big Scoop. The headline said it all:

FIRE ALMOST DESTROYS HOME AS MRS. DUGAN’S MINI-PIZZAS GET TOO HOT

There were other little stories too, about the Quimby’s dog and how it died of distemper, and an update on the epileptic driver who killed the Dingle’s old oak tree by stripping its bark, but the fire was the big story. We delivered the paper by hand to our customers, a nickel a copy.

We sold seven copies; one each to my parents, one to my brother, and one to Allen’s parents, two to the Dingle’s, who wanted to promote this fine example of juvenile capitalism, and one to the Quimby’s, who hated my parents and were more than glad to gloat over any embarrassment that might be visited upon them.

Three days after our first issue the printing press broke when we fell on it as we wrestled over a comic book and the world thereafter was deprived of all the news it needed to know.

Newsboy

Slinging rolled up newspapers onto dusty stoops as we sped on by on our bikes was a job lots of us had in the leafy suburbs. We were good at it. We had baskets that held the pack of papers, stacked like sardines on their tails, and we’d ride the streets, tearing through the neighborhoods, doing our little loop-de-loops and wheelies, and knowing exactly which house was which, and who got a paper and who didn’t, and imagining ourselves as some Sandy Koufax of the newsboys, flipping the paper out from our fingers in a side-armed delivery, to come twirling and slap to a stop on some stoop. Occasionally we missed and hit a front door, or a bay window.

Allen, down the street, had a route, and I had a route. I had over toward Faulkner and Summit Ave., and through the little brick homes of Cottage Place, and finally all around the neighborhood that circled Jefferson Elementary School. He had down in the newer developments, those that had been built on bits of Tamaques Park and old man Bladoe’s spent corn fields. The trees were just spats not long since seeds and in the summer the sun was merciless. Then again, when it rained those streets would flood with the runoff, spiked with fertilizer and pyrethrins. On both of our routes each neighborhood consisted of three or four slightly different variants of the same model home, different models for different neighbourhoods.

We would sit on his stoop or my stoop with the two neat piles of papers stacked before us and we’d pull each folded sandwich of newsprint off our pile and roll it into a burrito, reach into a plastic bag for a rubber band and with a quick expansion of hand slide the band over the burrito, then throw the thing onto a growing and more unruly pile, a little mountain. They’d all end up in our baskets as we headed out to tackle our routes.

I think I’ll write a story about this. I’d already written a story, about Baron von Munchausen, that was critically acclaimed by one teacher and one parent.

About what?

This. Rolling up papers and riding all over town in the middle of the summer, the wind in our hair.

Who’d want to read about that?

I feel free when I’m on my route. And I love to throw the papers. I pretend I’m Koufax. That’s worth writing a story about.

You’re goofy.

You’re boring.

Yeah, well, nobody will ever want to read a stupid story about newspaper boys. Nothing ever happens.

That’s why it would be good. It’d be like real life.

You’re goofy. Nobody wants to read about real life. It’s time to get going.

Allen had gone along with the trend toward the little bikes, with 20 inch wheels and long handlebars that seemed to reach to the sky. I was sticking with my 26 inch Schwinn. I was still proud that I could reach the pedals and wasn’t about to give that up.

Why do you like that runty little thing so much?

It’s cool. I can out manoeuvre you any time, buddy.

Maybe yes, but take me on a straightaway and you’re eating my dust. Ya little piece of shit.

He had no reply to that. He did hit me on the shoulder though, and it hurt.

Wanna do something after we’re done with our routes?

Ah, I got homework to do.

Me too, but what the hell. I was trying to sound grown-up, using words like hell, shit, damn. When I finally got around to using the word fuck it just happened to be where Mrs. Hines could hear it. I think we were rolling the papers on Allen’s stoop one day and I’d said something like; Fuck! Wouldn’t it be cool if you were rich? Shit!

Through the open door we heard a pan drop in the kitchen. We looked at each other with wide eyes. I grinned but Allen didn’t. I was beginning to see myself as a tough guy.

I wasn’t allowed to hang around with Allen for awhile after that. Mrs. Hines thought my mouth should have been washed out with soap. That’s another story.

We finally got off on our respective routes, standing up as we cycled the pedals with the rubber rolling on the gravel sprinkled pavement with little crunching sounds.

See ya later asshole! Allen shouted, then turned to execute a 45 degree wheelie and disappeared from view around the corner onto Summit Ave.

I headed up along Faulkner hoping that girl over on Myrtle would be out on her stoop or lawn. I was also hoping I could peer into the windows of Mrs. Francis’ house and see something more than what I’d already seen, what all us guys had seen in French class as she strutted back and forth across the classroom in her white blouse, the buttons spread just far enough apart to allow ample vistas into the topography inside. She was a lovely young woman and we knew it and each and every one of us wished he was older, a man in fact.

But we weren’t, and I was reduced to hoping for furtive glimpses of what her husband, and maybe other men, had seen and felt first hand. It felt pathetic. Why wouldn’t it? It was the first in a long line of frustrations about something so natural and right, like breathing or drinking water.

It was always interesting when I got over to Jefferson Elementary because there were usually some high school kids out on the fields, playing baseball or football or basketball, and I always stopped to watch awhile. I was a baseball nut and during that season I’d watch these pickup games and have visions of grandeur. It was all Koufax and Drysdale and Maury Wills for me, looking to LA and away from NY, and as I straddled my bike with the dumb schoolboys down on the field shouting and running around, the world was transformed into the world of sweet swings, smooth as a knife through a skinned piece of avocado, every motion without a hitch, the follow through sure and true.

Back on Rahway Ave. I had to deliver to the old Vernon house. It had been where it was for so much longer than all the other newly planted houses had been that it stuck out, an anomaly. I traversed the gravel drive that formed an arc in front of the white pillars and flicked the paper onto the wooden porch. My friend Steve’s place was right next door - a clone of all the other houses that sat on his street - and there was this old colonial near-mansion, with weedy growths gripping at the windowsills and old farm machines rusting near a rotted old barn. The very idea of a barn was quite intriguing to boys like me, growing up in the shadow of New York City in the mid-twentieth century.

I’d finally end my route at Nicholson’s Deli down in Clark where I’d buy a pack of Juicy Fruit gum with the tip money that old lady Gladson had given me as I handed her paper to her, personally. Then it was home, to my books and radio.

There was a time as I sailed on down past Tamaques Elementary, where I’d been