hook raze greg had a metal hook where his right hand used to be. i never asked him what happened, but he didn't look like someone who would have worked in a factory. he looked like he stepped out of a 1980s police procedural, with his perfect hair and his magnificent moustache. more "magnum p.i." than "miami vice". i trained him. i was eighteen. he was probably thirty years older than me. he was the third person i trained. the turnover rate at that place was ridiculous. i only had a month or two of seniority, but that made me a grizzled veteran. i felt like one. spending your days talking to people who hate you without knowing a thing about you will grind you down. i used to sit on voicemail messages for as long as i could to kill time between calls. let lonely old women talk about their lives forever. one time i got one of those "this customer's voicemail box is full" messages, and after it cut me off there was this nice delay effect. it only ever happened once. i sang "new year's prayer" by jeff_buckley into the void and listened to my voice get all tangled up in itself. ooh, fall in light, fall in light, fall in light. when chantelle told everyone at work what aimee confided in her before she got fired, how she was having an affair with me in her mind, she couldn't understand why i wouldn't talk to her anymore. she thought it was funny. all those assholes thought it was funny. they would joke about how fat aimee was. how i would have disappeared underneath her body if we ever did anything. when she came in to get her last cheque, she had her daughter with her. tom looked at the little girl, looked at me, and said, "that yours?" when greg found out about it, all he said was, "pretty face." it was true. she had the most beautiful pale blue eyes. we passed notes back_and_forth. she called me johnny baby. it made me melt. and she sang. when we were all singing happy birthday to someone who was probably going to be gone in a week and everyone else was aiming for the same sad note that didn't exist, she was singing harmony, finding something pretty in a pile of shit. greg bought me a whopper for lunch once. he was an excellent driver. he was a single father. he didn't say why his ex-wife wasn't in the picture. his son was about six. when it was getting close to the end of the year, he told me he was sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast with his son. he told him he wasn't going to be able to afford to buy him all the presents he wanted to get him for christmas. we were making eight dollars an hour. that was the minimum wage in ontario then. more than six dollars less than what it is now. greg said he was sorry. he wanted his son to have a great christmas. he felt like a failure. a middle-aged telemarketer with a missing hand and a voice that belonged on the radio, not transmitted through a cheap headset microphone, shaming itself, trying to sell a thousand strangers on the idea of some fancy bed they didn't want. his son looked at him and said, "that doesn't matter, dad. the important thing is we're together." "smart kid you got there," i said. and he smiled. 210805 what's it to you? who go blather from