Crooked River

By GP Landry

Like the other patients in the "Institution," Boots must write how he came to be there. He recounts all the sordid details, starting with losing his job at the toilet paper factory. His ex-girlfriend, Celine, was engaged to be married, and his best friend, Cornmeyer, had become civilized by a woman. For a long day and night, Boots travelled Greater Moncton in his battered old Chevette, trapped in painful memories, trying and failing to find connection and purpose. He narrates the story of his unravelling and his optimistic, if not naive, recovery. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: GP Landry
• Release date: Jan 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215174166

GP Landry

Once upon a time, GP Landry won the Canadian Authors' Association's CanWrite! Contest. It landed him a whopping $500. He continued to wallow in alcoholism for the next decade, only once making the longlist in the CBC Short Story Prize. When he got sober, he learned guitar arpeggios and how to bleed at the typewriter. He continues to write every day. Contact: [e-mail]

Book preview

chapter 1

Well here I am. I never thought I'd be in a place like this but here I am all the same. I only write in pencil here because that's all they give us, and believe you me, some of the guys in here would snort the lead if they could find two seconds when no one was looking. They told me I wasn't allowed to bring my guitar and they forbid us from bringing books, too, which kind of pissed me off even if I was at the end of my rope when they brought me in. I was going to start War and Peace, believe it or not, and I was looking forward to it. But they have us doing shit all the time here. They have you so tired that by the time you're in bed you just conk out. Anyway, all that is a long way of saying my parents raised a son who needs to be institutionalized.

The reason they even gave us pencils and paper is because we need to write our stories. We're supposed to tell you pretty much how we got here and stick to the relevant facts. If something has nothing to do with our journey to becoming social failures and pariahs, crooked, malformed monstrosities who should be ringing bells in the Notre Dame, then we got to leave it out. My buddy Cornmyer would probably think it's hilarious. There you go, he'd say. You always wanted to be a writer, so careful what you wish for.

But he would just be kidding around because he knows the pain all too well. He used to be out there with me, hand in hand, arm in arm, bosom buddies or whatever you want to call it. We were drinking like alcoholics pretty much out of high school. I started when I was fourteen and was tame for a while, but after graduation me and Cornmyer really kicked it into high gear. He went dry a year before me and then met this girl not long after that, and she civilized him and made him into a relevant, functioning member of society. I wasn't even pissed off about it. I actually admired it. We never really had a falling out, I mean, I was happy for him even if I had no idea how he had managed to pull it off. It's like when you hear a good song and you wonder how the hell the artist came up with the idea. Anyway, Cornmyer's doing pretty well for himself, obviously better than me since they never had to throw him into a loony bin. That's something. They should give diplomas for it.

But back to my story. I was working night shift at a toilet paper factory. I know it sounds really glamorous and everything, but don't jump out of your underwear just yet. It was a place at the very back of the industrial park. It was a Sterling-owned place, of course, because who the hell else were you going to work for in New Brunswick? No one, that's who. It's a company province, after all, and the Sterlings mined labour like they mined coal. They scraped us out of the ground and burned us into smoke. 

If you ever get the honour of working for the Sterlings, you'll know all about the punch-clock. They'll dock you two minutes if you punch in two minutes late. They nickel and dime the workers to death, and have nice big signs warning that punching in before tying your boots constitutes wage theft, and all that kind of capitalist bullshit. Meanwhile, they pay most of us minimum wage—-some of us, like me, even less because we got hired through a personnel agency that took a cut, and lo and behold, the Sterlings owned the agency too. So that's where I was: in line at the punch-clock just outside the lunchroom. The factory wasn't so loud there. It just sounded like a distant machine.

The toilet paper factory was man's work. In fact, most of the steel-toe jobs were. Of all the shitty blue-collar stints I've had, whatever the hell it was, I only once saw a girl working with us, and she was more masculine than most of the men there. I remember it was in the other industrial park, the one by Salisbury Road, in a factory that baked rubber transport tires. This girl, her name was Jane or Janet or something like that, she was short and squat and had broad shoulders like Gimli the dwarf, and probably some of the beard, too.  But she was nice. She had her own car and her own apartment and I never figured out how she could do it all on our salary, but there it was. I didn't know how anyone got by, really. She didn't smoke or drink coffee either and never came to the tavern after work, so I guess some of it could be down to discipline and a boring life, but I wasn't about to test the theory.

But back to the punch-clock. I was sort of away from everybody, in the back of the line. I was trying to hide in plain sight, really, as if that ever worked. Technically, I was probably fired. You see, my last shift had been Friday night and I had just left in the middle of it without telling anyone, without even faking that I was sick and had to go home. That was for amateurs. For an experienced guy like me who had lost a million jobs, it transcended beyond excuses. I was on a higher plane of existence sometimes. That's what happened last Friday. I was carrying on as usual, throwing packages of toilet paper onto palettes, and the packages just kept coming on that conveyor belt like some Laverne and Shirley sitcom, and that's when it hit me: a wave of sadness like you wouldn't believe. I was so depressed I thought the air was going to crush me into the cement floor. So I just up and left. But why come back to the scene of the crime, you ask? Well, I was remorseful afterward, like always. I felt like two cents, like I was the biggest failure and disappointment in the world, plus I didn't want to tell my parents I had lost another job. So I came back hoping they might not have noticed my disappearance and that maybe they hadn't collected the time cards. They only did that once a week.

In reality I was looking around for Dale. Dale was the manager and he was sick, I mean, really sick. He had some kind of cancer that he probably got working in the Sterling factories all his life, and he was probably going to die sooner than later. You could see it in his face. A guy gets a look, and you just know. But through all of it, Dale never even missed a shift, at least not that I had noticed. My plan was to try to get ahead of the scandal and mention to him that something had gone wrong with my punch-card, or that I had forgotten to punch out last Friday. Something along those lines; I hadn't quite worked it out.

But deep down, I knew better. Guys like Dale were pretty organized and could smell lies a mile away since they'd heard them all before. Blue-collar managers were probably better than teachers at smelling bullshit. Christ, they had to defend the Sterlings all the time in workers comp cases if they wanted to keep their jobs. Manager types like Dale, guys who made a few dollars over minimum wage, probably would notice if a mountain of toilet paper suddenly appeared at the end of a conveyor belt because one of the grunts had gone missing.

So there I was, dressed in overalls and steel-toe boots, looking out at the highway through the lunchroom windows. I looked exactly like all the other minions there, with that dull look in our eyes when we realize we've reached the end of the line already, that there was nothing more to life than what we saw, punching in and punching out and going home hoping our backs didn't give out lest we starve to death.

And even when there was hope, there wasn't really. A couple of guys, the machine operators who made more than even a guy like Dale, had taken a liking to me. René and George, I think were their names. I knew René was Paul's brother, and Paul was a guy I went to school with. Anyway, it's not important. In a place like Dieppe, everyone knew each other from birth or association, but I digress. So these two operators told me on a coffee break that I showed potential. They liked the way I had organized my work and all that kind of stuff. I told them it was just geometry, but they said if I stuck around maybe one day I could become an operator like them. They said the Sterlings sent you to trade school for a few months and then you came back qualified. I'll be honest, a little part of me relished the thought of having a steady salary, but the prospect of becoming a permanent fixture in these factories, if I'm being totally honest, made me want to lay down and die right there on the pavement next to the Sterling-owned canteen truck and its overpriced donuts.

And so finally I came up to the punch-clock and looked for my card. My hands were trembling but not because I was nervous. Cards on the table, I was a little hungover, maybe even still a little drunk, but that wasn't out of the ordinary. I still had a few years left before that kind of stuff would really start to affect my body, or so I told myself. I might as well have taken advantage of being young and healthy while I could.

By some miracle my card was still there. I punched it and walked away like everything was normal. I even whistled like I was happy to be on the job. I walked with my hands in my pockets and leaned back on my heels like a Robert Crumb cartoon. I had outwitted the system, which, of course, was impossible. But I tend to have this weird exceptionalism complex where I think things that are true for some people might not be true for me. For example, I know the house always wins, but sometimes, just for a moment, I think I have the upper hand. But those are just delusions. 

Then this guy, Jerry, came out of the lunchroom. He was a true-blue company man, the type of guy who buys in right away, who thinks the Sterlings really do have opportunities to give guys like us. He's the kind of guy who had a hard time reading aloud in class without using his finger and never got a grade above C, at least in middle school. In high school he moved to the English side of town, but I'm willing to guess he didn't do much better there.

Jerry looked at me and his eyes were serious. Well, I'm surprised to see you here, he said.

Why? I was on the schedule, wasn't I? I said it all innocent as if I was in a play at the community theatre. I didn't bother giving him any excuses, either. Guys like Jerry would never understand existential pain. It was beyond his horsepower so why waste my breath?

I took the beak of my hat and pulled it down and re-curved it to make sure it was still an arc. I always did that with my hats—-straight beaks looked dumb. I got to get to the floor, I said. I'm already punched in.

Dale wants to see you, Jerry said. He's in the lunchroom.

chapter 2

Dale was always kind of a happy guy, and I never could figure that out seeing as he was dying in plain sight. He was pretty much just a bag of bones at that point, and his skin was grey and rubbery and barely held him together. His eyes looked like two wet marbles. But there he was sitting at a table in the lunchroom, sipping coffee, happy to be at work and have some reason to get up in the morning, even if it was to be exploited by the Sterlings. I guess it all depended on your point of view. It gave me chills of terror, really, to see a man as happy as that in this kind of pig sty. If I ever got to that point where working in a factory became both the reason I was dying and my reason to keep on living, well, then I'm sorry to say that would be the end. At least that's how I was thinking back then. I'm not supposed to think like that anymore.

So I came in, and Dale waved his coffin hands to indicate I should take a seat across from him, and I complied like a good little soldier. I was still putting on the act, pretending to be just a normal guy who wanted to work hard so the Sterlings could keep making enormous profits at the expense of my life, and probably there had just been a misunderstanding last Friday. It had probably been a glitch in the punch-clock. Maybe it misfired or something along those lines.

You wanted to see me? I said.

Yes, Boots. I'd like us to have a little chat, he said.

I immediately regretted coming in. I hated being that close to a coffin body, to Dale, so close that I could see all the little lines in his rubbery skin. It was like sitting at a funeral home, but the corpse had just gotten up for a coffee break and stopped to say a few words before going back on display. It made me wonder what his wife and kids would say when he finally died. They would probably run a slideshow with some cheesy music playing in the background, Bette Midler or something like that, and have affirmative slogans in between old pictures of Dale back when he didn't look like death. They wouldn't even realize that our economic system killed the fucker, broke his back, and ate him alive from the inside out. But the worst part was that guys like Dale didn't even see it. They felt proud that they did their part and got themselves a mortgage and paid the bank a lot of interest while they were alive.

How are you feeling, Dale? I said.

Oh, you know, there are good days and bad days, he said. Did you already punch in?

Yes, sir. I'm on the clock.

Dale pulled in his white lips to try to moisten them, but he didn't have enough saliva to do it. He was a living, walking piece of dried fruit now. His eyes seemed loose in their sockets. It gave me the shivers.

"Say, you've