The end of the story.
My father's wife puts a load of clothes in the wash. Among these clothes is the shirt and slacks that Dale was wearing when he was admitted to St. Paul's. For whatever reason she fails to check the pockets when she loads them in.
Folding the clothes later, she comes upon an object in Dale's pocket, which turns out to be a freshly laundered $2400 cash money. We joke that she's the money launderer now. I warned him over and over not to carry around the petty cash, fucking deposit the stuff! You're going to get rolled, Dale! He never did get rolled, to my knowledge. I ferried more coarse, fragrant wads of cash around for that guy when I worked for him than I ever did in the drug business. Carrying the cash up to the TD on Burrard for the deposit, walking beside my dad at first, then later by myself. An evening walk through the city back when it was all still bewildering and new to my young self. The Games People was a truly absurd place to work.
I started to call the back storage floor the "Backstage", because every new customer got to see another iteration of my frenzied histrionic mania. It was fun, I enjoyed it, and that's why I did it. I came up with routines that I would use regularly, and modified them against the customer's reactions. I got to pretend to be so many other people there, with so many different people. People who deal with flows of customers from behind a counter get such a privileged position to intersect with the everyday crowds that came in off the street. And in the tangents that we got off on from the deals at hand I learned so much. Dale used to repeat the golden rule to us regularly, to remind us to stay on track with the sales. "ABC" "Always Be Closing", which to me and Paul meant "Sorry, we're closed! Go away!" But none of us were stupid enough to draw pride out of our day totals because we knew it all went to the old man. And if we worked for him until we turned to beef jerky, he wouldn't pay us any more than the absolute least he could get away with paying us. More than anything I think that the manic atmosphere and unique experiences kept the long-term employees around. The employees who were family occupied another lower class, below those whose resumes we'd politely accept at the front counter and peruse during a lull. Pointing out vague or unlikely details with derision. Family were a lower class because Dale had no mystique to us. We knew the characteristics of his bullshit already, but the others didn't. People didn't find ad's for The Games People in the newspaper. Only those proactive go-getter's who walked the streets with a bag full of photocopied resumes under their arms saw our little "Help Wanted" signs and strode confidently in to hand me, or Paul, or Brett, or Jimmy or someone their resume. Blissfully unaware of what they were letting themselves in for. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Many of the people that we hired got through the whole first day before quitting.
I did get a general sense of the closing down of things at one point, even though I was being pretty selfish during that late period, and unapologetic. Reasonably, I couldn't think of a scenario that would include The Games People staying open. The resources weren't real, only imagined or hypothesized to be within reach. And our neighbours who leased us the building in Gastown cast greedy eyes on the place, planning to squeeze us out and up-market it to some wealthy developer like so many other places on Water street. Mrs. Hill who owned the deed to the building, I remember, was a narrowed, seething woman. Accompanied by a tiny dog that was made of compressed disdain. A little homunculus of herself, with legs too stubby to keep up with her permanent state of rush, so it was usually carried about in her arms, and so took on an air of lazy superiority to me.
[Forcing myself to listen to a song that I believed could summon disaster in my life if I listened to it again. It's irrational, but in the way that I have witnessed magical coincidences take place out of nowhere, I connected the song "Seven" by the band Revis with the period that my life that fell into a bit of a shambles, and in that primal association feared that listening to it again would bring on some new disruption. Listening to it now, sharpens up my recollections of that time. Memories that get degraded without getting accessed. I'm disturbed by the amount of details and chronological sequencing I've lost. Junk cools your emotions down to a barely real vibration, and without the emotional content of memories the facts get overwritten. [though the ghost outline of the past remains, if an appropriate trigger is found. Such as an actual artifact from a specific memory, but I digress...]
the neighbour's alarm clock has been going off for 72 minutes. It's a special one that emits a grating buzzing under a recorded voice saying: "Attack Warning Red! Attack Warning Red!" It still freaks me out sometimes.
Dale's heartbeat and respiration stopped at 6:08am on Sunday March 8th just before dawn. Brett was there. He's had custodianship throughout the deaths of both of his parents more than anyone else. He did have a special relationship with them, I think, being the only boy out of five kids. I feel sad for him, having to lose both his parents in such quick secession. But Dale's life was at an end. I'm glad that he can now rest from his labours.
Folding the clothes later, she comes upon an object in Dale's pocket, which turns out to be a freshly laundered $2400 cash money. We joke that she's the money launderer now. I warned him over and over not to carry around the petty cash, fucking deposit the stuff! You're going to get rolled, Dale! He never did get rolled, to my knowledge. I ferried more coarse, fragrant wads of cash around for that guy when I worked for him than I ever did in the drug business. Carrying the cash up to the TD on Burrard for the deposit, walking beside my dad at first, then later by myself. An evening walk through the city back when it was all still bewildering and new to my young self. The Games People was a truly absurd place to work.
I started to call the back storage floor the "Backstage", because every new customer got to see another iteration of my frenzied histrionic mania. It was fun, I enjoyed it, and that's why I did it. I came up with routines that I would use regularly, and modified them against the customer's reactions. I got to pretend to be so many other people there, with so many different people. People who deal with flows of customers from behind a counter get such a privileged position to intersect with the everyday crowds that came in off the street. And in the tangents that we got off on from the deals at hand I learned so much. Dale used to repeat the golden rule to us regularly, to remind us to stay on track with the sales. "ABC" "Always Be Closing", which to me and Paul meant "Sorry, we're closed! Go away!" But none of us were stupid enough to draw pride out of our day totals because we knew it all went to the old man. And if we worked for him until we turned to beef jerky, he wouldn't pay us any more than the absolute least he could get away with paying us. More than anything I think that the manic atmosphere and unique experiences kept the long-term employees around. The employees who were family occupied another lower class, below those whose resumes we'd politely accept at the front counter and peruse during a lull. Pointing out vague or unlikely details with derision. Family were a lower class because Dale had no mystique to us. We knew the characteristics of his bullshit already, but the others didn't. People didn't find ad's for The Games People in the newspaper. Only those proactive go-getter's who walked the streets with a bag full of photocopied resumes under their arms saw our little "Help Wanted" signs and strode confidently in to hand me, or Paul, or Brett, or Jimmy or someone their resume. Blissfully unaware of what they were letting themselves in for. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Many of the people that we hired got through the whole first day before quitting.
I did get a general sense of the closing down of things at one point, even though I was being pretty selfish during that late period, and unapologetic. Reasonably, I couldn't think of a scenario that would include The Games People staying open. The resources weren't real, only imagined or hypothesized to be within reach. And our neighbours who leased us the building in Gastown cast greedy eyes on the place, planning to squeeze us out and up-market it to some wealthy developer like so many other places on Water street. Mrs. Hill who owned the deed to the building, I remember, was a narrowed, seething woman. Accompanied by a tiny dog that was made of compressed disdain. A little homunculus of herself, with legs too stubby to keep up with her permanent state of rush, so it was usually carried about in her arms, and so took on an air of lazy superiority to me.
[Forcing myself to listen to a song that I believed could summon disaster in my life if I listened to it again. It's irrational, but in the way that I have witnessed magical coincidences take place out of nowhere, I connected the song "Seven" by the band Revis with the period that my life that fell into a bit of a shambles, and in that primal association feared that listening to it again would bring on some new disruption. Listening to it now, sharpens up my recollections of that time. Memories that get degraded without getting accessed. I'm disturbed by the amount of details and chronological sequencing I've lost. Junk cools your emotions down to a barely real vibration, and without the emotional content of memories the facts get overwritten. [though the ghost outline of the past remains, if an appropriate trigger is found. Such as an actual artifact from a specific memory, but I digress...]
the neighbour's alarm clock has been going off for 72 minutes. It's a special one that emits a grating buzzing under a recorded voice saying: "Attack Warning Red! Attack Warning Red!" It still freaks me out sometimes.
Dale's heartbeat and respiration stopped at 6:08am on Sunday March 8th just before dawn. Brett was there. He's had custodianship throughout the deaths of both of his parents more than anyone else. He did have a special relationship with them, I think, being the only boy out of five kids. I feel sad for him, having to lose both his parents in such quick secession. But Dale's life was at an end. I'm glad that he can now rest from his labours.