‘Buying Cigarettes for the Dog’ by Stuart Ross

Reviewed by Victor Enns

I am buttonholed by a heavyset newspaper book critic at a glittering late-season literary reception on Ellice Avenue.

“What do you think about this Stuart Ross character and his Buying Cigarettes for the Dog? You’ve got to read it, it’s like Kafka with a sense of humour.”

Gently removing his yellowed fingers from my rabbit fur Burberry lapels, with his apologies for his uncharacteristic Winnipeg enthusiasm ringing in my Phonak hearing aids, I turn and slip into the night.

I am not surprised when a copy of the Ross short stories falls out of my coat pocket as I hang it up in my walnut closet. Let’s see what he’s got. I pour some whiskey over just the right amount of ice and settle in for a read as the holiday lights of the Wolseley street filter in through leaded windows.

I hold the book in my hand. It’s nearly pocketsize with real coffee rings on the cover designed with a cigarette burn or two and chalk drawn cigarettes stubbed into a dog’s dish. I am obviously not the first person to handle this cultural artifact, likely moved hand to hand as if in some northern gulag. Even so, the binding is stiff, my thumb isn’t up to it. Clearly this is going to be a two-handed job.

Right off there’s a war and arms blown off. Three Arms Less. I am engaged. I keep reading. I’ve heard about writing like this, but it is very rare in Canadian literature, English Canadian literature that is. The Quebecois who read Rimbaud in their cradles wearing their FLQ toques, and publish manifestos in their teens, well, they might have seen this before, but from southern Ontario? Pfft.

Suffering a momentary lack of self-confidence, which I allow myself only in Wolseley, to fit in with the neighbours, I check Surrealism in Wikipedia and yes, as I thought. It doesn’t have to make sense. Non sequiturs, startling metaphors, shifts in time and space acknowledging nothing but the alphabet. I read the manifestos. I will read the rest of the stories.

The newspaper critic is right. To a point. Not so much Kafka as Hans Arp crossed with Archie Andrews comics, the insect references excepted. But yes, jokes, and bad puns, with apocalyptic revelations modified by pop culture references.

Wherever the stories are set, they’re not set here. Just too wet. The rain outside drops gently “like Tabasco sauce” or heavily “explodes like fireworks,” clearly not Winnipeg where the snow impeded my progress home. I unlace my braces, pull the suspenders over my shoulders and get comfortable.

The flexibility of Ross’s language survives even the most severe New Critical, modernist, postmodernist, post-post-modernist, lens. I wipe my tortoise shell rimmed glass, glad to be able see truth in the pages before me. Vivid images, juxtapositions like a bicycle wheel on the base of a chair (or say, yellow chicken feet on Lana’s tanned belly at poolside standing in for a little wooden mule Greenbaum had carved in a Nazi concentration camp). Yes, I thought, yes. Bring it to me.

I make notes in the margins for each of the stories, thinking review, thinking publication.

Three Arms Less
Always, like wearing clean underwear, remember to pack a good book.

Bouncing
Tumbling to the better story in the last paragraph. Ross is good at endings.

The President’s Cold Legs
Good line: “Every year I have a birthday, but no one told me when I started, so I don’t know how old I am.” Secret Message: Don’t play on the river ice because if you fall in it makes your legs cold.

The Interview
Best line: “Pavement feels so much more molecular. Like flesh.” May be of interest to chess players, those looking for control who have been bullied, or those preparing for job interviews. Again with the ending. “Can I go now? You can probably figure out the rest of my life based on what I’ve just told you. It follows a predictable pattern with a few surprises. I will leave you hair samples and nail clippings, which might also be of some help. If you have any questions, you can telephone me. Besides, I’m late now. I have to pick up my mother’s belongings.”

The Suntan
One of my favourites, from Nazi Germany to Florida poolside in one fell swoop, the surface rippling with rain at the close. Most poignant moment: “Lana lifted her head and gazed down at her body. It was covered now in kind of a chicken-foot houndstooth pattern, and she could feel all the little toenails digging into her tough, golden skin. This man, this Albert Greenbaum, thought he was giving her a tiny mule with floppy ears. … She reached out a long slender, wrinkled hand and grasped the end of Albert’s fingers. He felt the oil transferring from her hand onto him, and he knew she had accepted his gift.”

Dusty Hats Vanish
One of the better story titles, but not at all like Oliver Sacks’ man. As if Malcolm Lowry takes up smoking in Guatemala, but it’s Corinna who spontaneously combusts when the fire at the end of a cheap Payasos reaches her fingers.

Howie Tosses and Turns
Killer fried eggs cross the chalk borders with a strong opening. “Howie couldn’t sleep too good that night. There was a guy lying downstairs, lying there on his livingroom sofa, a guy who had killed someone. I mean Howie wasn’t going to judge anyone, he hadn’t been there….”

The Ape Play
One of the weaker stories in the collection. Thankfully its only three pages long. You might want to check out Jonathan Ball’s Clockfire to compare.

Elliott Goes to School
+Not every hostage taking is interesting. Missed opportunity for wild swings.

Me and the Pope
Should make you want to check out Lenny Bruce doing “Christ & Moses” at Carnegie Hall.

Remember Teeth
How do you apologize for hitting your girlfriend in the face with a copy of Death in Venice?

Language Lessons…with Simon & Marie
Not even the ending saves this one.

Shooting the Poodle
You know you wanna. But you make your own eggs.

Letter to Heidi Fleiss
Straight up. Ignores Lolita for middle age thrill seeking. She can leave her hat on.

A City, Some Rain
Best line : “ For god’s sake,” cried Bob , “ I have fifty two teeth – no other land mammal has fifty-two teeth! I have a tooth for every card in the deck!” Yeah, and it’s raining again.

Buying Cigarettes for the Dog
Best first line in a story ever: “You say you don’t know why I’m hiding in a stinking alleyway, playing Beethoven Symphonies on the lids of garbage cans and masturbating to the memory of my dead wife.”

Best postmodern quip. “No, the sign you want, what does it say?”

Cow Story
I like milk
I like beef
I like silk
Between my teeth.

Guided Missiles
One of the best stories in the collection, a homage to Hank Williams and a story about love.

“Archie thought about lifting one of the pillows and holding it down against the prophet’s face until his miserable life was snuffed out. That would be love. Maybe then he could finally write a song.”

Mr. Joe
It could be worse. You could be an extra in a film shooting in Winnipeg, in winter.

The Closets of Time
The best paragraph and a half:

“I could smell the scree, of that cart that, shopping, caught me. For sure I could hear it. How things had changed. From my papa’s time, and the time of his papa in the shtetl, but also from thirty seconds ago.

I could feel the cold metal of the shopping cart press at my knees and shoulders. I clutched the cage of it. I clutched its cage and the squeal came from me now, my wheels my rusting castors. Didn’t matter, no matter.

I was a tin of soup.”

Aphids
Forgettable.

So Sue Me you Talentless Fucker
Best title. And the phrase “you scribbler of advertising copy disguised as a rabbi…..I do not like your play.” But why bring in the clowns?

The Engagement
Does not engage.

Out of stories. Out of whiskey. I figure, as I get out of my Danish rocker, this has been enjoyable. Stories funny ha ha and funny strange. The short stories speed by like an old Porsche on a twisting Bavarian road, with cows getting in the way. I will, given the chance, recommend it, a refreshing urban collection by a “guy in a room” that knows he is “part of this world,” finding delight in the way he sees it and letting readers see it his way too.