I spent the holidays getting Sammy's room ready. It's goodbye to my writing study. I moved a third of my books into the bedroom and a third into the living room, and hauled two boxes of books to the second-hand bookstore. I p
ut my writing desk into our storage unit in the basement and bought a tiny, crappy, thirty-dollar computer desk from Ikea for the living room. The couch was put out on the street corner. The room got repainted light pink with white trim. A new blind and curtains for the window went up. I assembled the crib my mother bought us. Then I assembled the change table that Sarah's mother bought us. Sarah's mother and my mother are in a competition to see who can give the baby more stuff. Christmas was an onslaught of everything baby. We now have dozens of sleepers and bibs adorned with cutesy expressions: “If you think I'm adorable, you should see my Grandma,” “Please pass the bottle” and “Spit Happens.” Sarah hasn't even had her baby shower yet.
We had my father and his third wife over for New Year's Eve dinner. He brought a giant stuffed bear with a red ribbon, which now sits in the corner of Sammy's room. He got drunk, insulted Sarah, then his new wife, and then told me that he always thought I would never amount to much. It was a good time. Work, on the other hand, was particularly miserable. Since I've joined the six-person Refrigerator Committee, life has been shit. I've been organizing bake sales, trying to “cash in on the Christmas market” as one of the geniuses of the committee put it. Today I'm off to our semi-monthly meeting on how we can turn fundraising around in the post-holiday season.
I walk into the boardroom. I'm the last to arrive.
“Hi Colin, I saved you a seat,” offers Steve, patting the seat next to him even though there are only six of us in a ten-chair boardroom. Steve is flamboyantly gay.
“Thanks,” I say, sitting down next to him.
“Okay, shall we begin?” asks Debra. Debra is an uptight bean-counter and the head of the committee. “Jill, can you give us an update on where we're at?” asks Debra.
“Wait, who's taking minutes?” pipes in Laura. Laura always takes the minutes. She actually types them up after each meeting and sends them to all the committee members and carbon copies the managers. I always delete them without reading.
We all just look at each other and nobody says anything. “Okay, I guess I'll do it,” Laura says inferring that she's making a huge sacrifice. She flips open her notebook and writes the date and time.
“Thanks,” says Debra.
“Okay,” says Jill, looking at her accounting spreadsheet, “from the fifty-fifty we made $68. From the Christmas basket we made, after expenses, $58. And from all the baking, we made $59.25, for a total of $185.25.”
“Not bad for a couple of months' work,” says Debra.
“Jill,” says Steve, “remind me to get that recipe for those date squares from you, honey bun. Those were to-die-for delicious.”
“I'll email it to you after the meeting,” Jill says, winking.
“Right,” says Debra. “How are we going to make some money?”
“We could sell boxes of file folders on the street,” I suggest.
Everyone laughs.
“You're so naughty, Colin,” says Steve.
“How about pizza?” suggests Cindy, almost inaudibly. Cindy is a little mousy girl with a flat chest, thick glasses and horrific fashion sense.
“What's that? I didn't catch what you said, you have to speak up,” Debra huffs.
“Pizza, we could sell pizza at lunch,” Cindy says a little louder.
“Where could we get pizza from?” Debra asks.
“Um, well actually I was thinking we could get pizza from Gino's down the street,” says Cindy. “I already called them and asked them what their best price would be for, say, eight large pizzas, combination, and they told me that they could get me a pizza for twelve dollars. Each one has eight slices. I figure if we sell it at three dollars a slice, we could make twelve dollars a pizza. If we could sell all eight pizzas we would make close to a hundred dollars in profit.”
“I love pizza,” says Steve, flapping his arms in excitement.
“Good work Cindy,” says Laura, scribbling away in her notebook.
“Oh my God,” says Jill, bolting up straight in her chair. “I have the perfect way to sell it. Okay, get this, last Halloween I made the best costume for my husband, like ever. He was a giant slice of pizza. I made it out of foam and painted it yellow and glued on these big felt circles for pepperoni. It would be so perfect to sell the pizza.”
“Who's going to wear it?” I ask.
All eyes roam back and forth and land back on me. Oh shit. “Well,” says Jill, “it really would only fit Colin. You're about the same size as my husband.”
“No way, I'm not dressing up as a giant piece of pizza.”
“Oh, Colin, people will love you,” says Steve, touching my arm. Then he says to Jill, “Tell me there are tights too! Does Colin get to wear tights?”
“Yep, yellow tights, the colour of cheese.”
Steve closes his eyes and vibrates his legs and arms up and down with his fists clenched tight, and makes a high-pitched
eeeeeehhhhhhh
sound. I guess he's imagining what I would look like in tights. I'm a little disturbed about how excited he's becoming about the whole thing.
“No way,” I repeat.
“Please,” says Laura. “We'll sell a ton of pizza if you do it. People love you.”
“Yes, please Colin,” pleads Jill.
“You can't let us down,” says Steve.
I look to Debra for some help.
“Sounds like a good marketing gimmick to me,” Debra says.
I look to Cindy. Cindy pushes her glasses up her nose and nods her head in agreement with Debra.
“Shit,” I say. “Fine, I'll do it.”
“That-a-boy Colin,” says Steve. “You'll look great in tights, I know it.”
“Yeah, great,” I say. “Just fabulous.”
We decide to sell pizza on Thursday, the day after payday. Jill has given me the costume in a giant black garbage bag, the triangular foam tip poking out the top. There are no change rooms in my building, so I decide to use the handicapped washroom located between the men's and women's washroom just on the other side of my cubicle wall. There's a hook on the back of the door. If you were in a wheelchair, you'd have no hope in reaching this hook and I puzzle why it's there. I hang my pants and peel on the yellow tights. I pull the costume out and wiggle into it. I gaze at myself in the angled-for-a-wheelchair mirror. I look like what I am, a giant six-foot-two slice of pepperoni pizza.
BOOM! The whole wall shakes. What the hell was that? BOOM! It sounds as if somebody's hitting the wall in the men's washroom. It's not a gunshot, so I don't completely panic. They always seem to be doing maintenance in the men's washroom for some reason. But this sounds too loud. I unlock the door and step into the hallway wearing my costume.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” somebody screams, then BOOM! Is somebody being murdered in the men's washroom? Normally the coward in me would run, but curiosity, rather than good conscience, moves me forward toward the door, toward the noise. I see several people's heads are now gophering over their cubicle walls, blatantly disregarding management's policy of not standing on the office furniture. I can see the puzzled looks on their faces, trying to understand the correlation between a giant walking slice of pizza and the incredible booming sounds coming from the washroom. I shrug my shoulders and hold out my hands to let them know I don't have a clue what is going on either, but this gesture is lost on them.
“Nooooooo!” comes another scream, then another BOOM!
I'm freaked out. The costume, the foam snug around my head, is giving me claustrophobia. I kick open the washroom door and a billow of smoke wafts out at me in the hall. “Fire!” somebody screams. I hear the muted sounds of shuffling and running feet. I step back into the hallway, letting the door swing shut.
“Ahhhhhhh!” comes the scream again. BOOM! Suddenly the fire alarm goes off. Shit. I kick open the door again, shuffling sideways through the door, the only way I'll fit. I realize that it's not smoke in the air, but plaster dust. BOOM! My heart's racing, my hands perspiring, the hair on the back of my neck raising. Rounding the corner, I spot Barry cowering on the floor between two urinals. His hair and shoulders are covered in plaster dust. He's a frightened animal. There are large holes in the wall above him. I turn a little more, my peripheral vision obscured by the costume, and there's Crazy Larry, naked as the day he was born, holding a sledgehammer. He too is lightly coated in plaster dust, reminding me of Rutger Hauer in
Blade Runner
. His penis looks like a tiny snow-covered yule log.
“The device that is sucking my soul is in the wall,” he tells me, not seeming to notice that he is talking to a slice of pizza, just before he swings and BOOM! puts another hole in the wall above Barry's head. Barry whimpers, his lip quivering.
“I know it's in here,” says Crazy Larry, swinging again. BOOM! I reach my hand out and Barry grabs hold. I pull at him, but he seems frozen. Crazy Larry doesn't seem to care about us; he just seems to be concerned about the device in the wall that he has manufactured in his warped mind.
“Come on Barry,” I yell at him, pulling, “it's time to go!” Finally he moves, following me out the door. BOOM! Crazy Larry screams, “I know it's in here!”
We make our way to the fire-escape door and bolt down the stairs. As we near the bottom flight, two firefighters wearing masks and oxygen tanks on their backs greet us going up. I stop one. “There's no fire, but there's a crazy man putting holes in the wall with a sledgehammer. You need the cops!” I yell over the deafening sounds of the alarm bell.
“Say again?” says one of the firemen.
“No fire, but a crazy man. I wouldn't go up there without a gun!”
The firemen look at each other and the one thumbs back over his shoulder. We all leave the stairwell and head into the ground-floor lobby. Barry's trembling hard. A fireman comes and wraps him in a blanket. When we get outside, hundreds of employees are huddled in groups of three or four, looking up at the building for traces of smoke or flame. Maybe Crazy Larry
will
burn the place down yet, give them something to watch. I tell my story to the chief fireman, and then I tell it again when the cops show up.
“Why are you dressed as a pizza slice?”
“Marketing gimmick to raise money.”
“Nice. So, one naked guy with a sledgehammer. Any guns?”
“Not that I'm aware of, but the guy scares the shit out of me. I wouldn't put it past him.” It's freezing out, about minus-fifteen Celsius with the wind chill. A lot of my co-workers are crossing the street to Sunshine Valley. I would, too, but apparently they want me to stick around. I end up sitting in the back of a cruiser for a while to warm up. They call in the SWAT team to take down Crazy Larry. They show up within ten minutes, and two media vans pull up, too. A reporter with a camera taps on the window of the car I'm sitting in and asks if I would talk with her. I leave the warmth of the cruiser to carry out an interview about all the exciting commotion that has transpired. I repeat exactly what I'd recited to the cops moments earlier.
Fifteen minutes after the SWAT team goes in, they march back out with Crazy Larry, a bug-eyed zombie, presumably handcuffed underneath the brown blanket his naked form is wrapped in. A couple of photographers are snapping pictures as he's escorted into a police van. I see a bewildered Barry sitting in the back of an ambulance. He seems to have calmed down. I walk over to him. “Colin,” he says surprised, as if he hasn't seen me in years, “I don't know what to say. You saved my life.”
“I want off the Refrigerator Committee, Barry,” I tell him.
“Ah yeah, sure thing,” he says.
“Thanks.” I walk away and approach a cop to inquire about getting my clothes back. She tells me that the whole area is currently a crime scene, but she'll look into getting them back for me after they finish taking photos. “Shouldn't be more than an hour.”
I walk over to the mall and run into Phil outside First Choice Hair Cutters and he nearly pees his pants laughing at my costume. We kill an hour strolling the mall before I head back to get my clothes. I humour a zillion questions from customers asking whether there is a new pizza place opening in the mall, and parents encouraging their kids to have photos taken with me. I do it because I imagine I, too, would want a photo of my Sammy with a slice of pizza.
I head back over to the office building. I'm not allowed to go back into the building because the fire marshal discovered, while inspecting the damage caused by Crazy Larry's hole-punching antics, asbestos in the walls of the men's washroom. They tell me I won't be able to come in for the rest of the week until all the asbestos has been removed and the damage fixed.
I ride the bus home wearing my pizza costume.
At home with Sarah, who can't stop laughing after seeing me on the six o'clock news, the phone rings. It's Barry. He confirms that we will indeed be off for the rest of the week, but should hopefully be returning on Monday.
The next morning I awake to Sarah screaming. Or at least I think it's screaming. Something must have happened to the baby. I yank the covers off and run toward her. She's in the kitchen, laughing, crying, pointing at the newspaper on the kitchen table. I look down. It's the cover of the
Ottawa Sun
, with a picture of Crazy Larry being hauled out in his brown blanket, and me, in costume, standing behind. The headline reads, “A Crazy Slice of Life.”
“Beautiful, just fucking beautiful,” I say.
Sarah is holding her belly, still laughing.
When I return to work, there is an email informing us that a grief counsellor, Dr. Barnum, has been hired to talk to us about our feelings, about what happened with Crazy Larry. Attendance is highly encouraged. I guess because I was directly involved, I've automatically been scheduled to see Dr. Barnum first thing at 10 a.m. in Boardroom B down the hall.