King's Court Apartments Recollections
For some reason, as I was trying to sleep, I was powerfully reminded of one of my first jobs. I got it from the Youth Employment Centre beside Lonsdale Quay in the summer of 1999. I was 15 years old, I suppose. I had gone there with my friend Chevar and signed up for their casual labour program. This was my first placement: moving the lawn around the King's Court Apartments, near Queens and Lonsdale in North Vancouver.

The lawn didn't really have much irrigation and, despite North Vancouver's ample rain, it tended to get pretty dried out in the summer. The manager of the apartments - Peter - was an older fellow of the 'Old World' sort, as he frequently described himself. It was clear why he no longer wanted to be spending his afternoons pushing the heavy, loud, smelly, and unreliable gasoline powered mower across the sharply slanted lawns that surrounded the complex. On the basis of that first job - four hours at six dollars an hour - he invited me back to clean the inside of the place.

For three years, I went there once a week. It was a three story collection of apartments. The place smelled strongly of smoke, which seemed to have saturated the faded carpets that I vacuumed each week - much more easily when, after the first year, the incredibly heavy and ineffective vacuum I started out with was replaced. I was never very mechanically inclined and the mower and vacuum would frequently fail for some reason or another, leaving me no choice but to go home, call Peter, and come back after he had fixed it.

The place had two staircases: the westernmost extending down through an airlock-style double door room into the unlit, bare concrete parking garage. Down there was the wooden sectioned-off area where the mower was kept, along with a large red plastic jerry can of gasoline, rags, paint, and a kind of well with a pump that was meant to keep the place from flooding. From down there, you could also get into the concrete shaft that at one point was meant to house an elevator that had never actually been installed. On the first and second floor, the shaft was separated from the corridor by only a couple of millimeters of flexible board, with a thin plastic coating on it meant to make it look like wood. On the third floor, there was a wooden-framed door that opened through a slightly thicker partition directly into the shaft. I used to open that door and stare down into the darkness. I had resolved that if I ever needed to hide out for some reason, the concrete room at the base of that shaft, with its plug-in industrial lamp, would be the place for it.

On the ground floor, past the lobby where I had to clean the glass every week, there was a small utility room. Inside were the vacuum, a ladder, and three rows of electrical meters. One or two would generally be racing around quickly, suggesting that the apartments in question had temporarily become marijuana growing operations. I never interacted much with the tenants. The only time I can remember doing so was once when I was exuberantly practicing Judo break-falls in the lobby when nobody was around. I had just started the sport and was keen to improve. I was embarrassed to realize that a young male tenant had observed some unspecified portion of this exercise, and I fled quickly to one of the areas you could only get to with a managerial key.

I was meant to work for two hours every week, at a time essentially of my choosing. I got paid $11 an hour for this, by the end. Actually, I eventually got quick enough at vacuuming, cleaning windows, cleaning the laundry room, emptying garbage cans, and the rest that I could finish the whole job in a touch more than one. I can remember hot days spent furtively drinking a Slurpee in that crammed little utility room and dank winter days poking at a copy of The Economist or Asimov's.

I always listened to music while I was working: CDs on my old Panasonic portable player with the big silver full-ear Sony headphones. The best music for the job was Rage Against the Machine - perhaps because they're the only band I can think of that improves through the application of vacuum noise over top.

The detail with which I can remember the place is surprising. I remember the colour of the carpets, the arrangement of machines in the laundry room, and the places where the plastic moulding around windows had separated. I remember the way the second and third floor hallways looked, illuminated by cheap incandescent bulbs. I remember the places where the slope of the lawn changed suddenly, making it easy to hack right down to the dry earth with the blades of the lawnmower.

Each week, Peter would stop by my parents' house and drop off my pay in cash, along with a receipt of the kind we sold carbon-paper books full of at Staples. He gave me a whole series of raises, none of which I asked for, though he never offered to extend my duties beyond two hours of inside work a week and four hours of outside work every two, during the summer. My favourite part of that was pulling the Morning Glory vines out from the various hedges where they grew. One of them extended well off the property of the apartment building, but I would sometimes strip it of the vines as well, just because it was more enjoyable than the lawn mowing.

The fact that the above is one of the four paying jobs actually listed on my resume says a lot about my commercial experience. I remember my father once insisting on photographing me in the lobby and the little utility room. For both of us, I think, the job was a kind of touchstone of meritocracy. Despite the pay being laughable in contrast with our family income, it was something done reasonably diligently for a good length of time. The class overtones of the whole thing, as well as the proximity to Lonsdale, may also have something to do with why I associate the job with Viki K.

Above all, it's the smells that linger in my mind. The smoky smell of the place overall, the dankness of the parking garage, the gasoline smell of the supply room downstairs, and the smoky gasoline smell of the mower. I remember the way the burlap grass-catching attachment detached from the mower, and what it felt like to carry over to the dumpster and empty. How the bits of dried grass fell into your clothes and itched, turning up again during the rest of the day like barbershop hairs. Now, it seems like a stupidly detailed story recalled for no good reason: something that happened to someone else and has no present importance. There's a kind of nostalgic twinge to it - these were the days when we used to rent a bunch of anime and watch it in Nick's basement; when we were borrowing from the cabinet of school snacks and candy rather than the well stocked liquor cabinet upstairs - but it feels as unreal, now, as the possibility of sleep.
- posted by Milan @ 3:49 AM