that first summer

I was out of university first year and on my own. A Toronto summer. How could I forget those April mornings after exams were all done the skies still pulsed blue in the cool morning? It was then I took the liberty of engaging myself in useful work with a publishing company. I liked books. They wanted to publish. It seemed like a good fit until I realized that I would be selling the books they published. Well, it was a bit of a disappointment to know that I wouldn't be with the books, but still, selling, what a deal! But then on the first day of training - my first job that had me sitting in a swivel chair - realizing that selling was simply a mask for what could be termed attempting to sell, telemarketing.

There I was, suckered, I suppose of my own accord and fancy after having dreamt up that I would be there with the smell and splash of ink on my hands and forearms. A summer of, perhaps, accidents with the press, paper being jammed, a print with a libellous error, or perhaps even an accidental death. My penchant for the slightly morbid has abated some since then.

I held on to those dreams until the first day of work, hoping that somewhere in the basement of the building, or perhaps even another floor, that machines would be printing copies of masterpieces, Austen, Eliot, Homer. I must have dreamed my way through the training where they, as I later found out, told us about selling email and fax directories. The idea sounded good the first time you said it, as if someone would use something of that nature to look up an address, but once you explained your job a second time and what exactly you were selling you realized the futility of it all. Couldn't someone just filter your emails and if all else failed simply change their address?

Still, I called Coca-Cola, Ford, peanut butter factories, a monastery. I pulled lead sheets of phone numbers and talked to people who got to the office at seven in the morning, or in the case of the monastery, who were there all the time.

We were a motley bunch on the eighth floor of that building on Peter Street and there wasn't much holding us together except for the view. From our swivel chairs and particleboard cubicles we'd gaze out the floor ceiling windows looking out over the downtown. The old bank towers hidden among the new skyscrapers, the shadows of the buildings moving like the slow folds of a bed sheet on a Saturday morning. The shadows growing longer, deeper shades of grey-black, casting complete darkness on the street below, a midday eclipse.

It was that beauty that kept us there, but even that beauty was not enough. I sold nothing and was bored. I quit and at home sat out on the roof watching the pigeons make circles in the evening sky remembering the labyrinth of downtown, there to my right, there growing dark with each moment, marching slowly into the night.