Odd Jobs is a comic-caper love-story about Mountie women and layabout men, house and family, script-writers and cat-burglars. A modern tale of movie magic in the wrong hands: the Big Lebowski meets Elmore Leonard's niece.
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ACT II
ACT III
At first appearance I never looked much like a family man. My long straggly hair and sideburns, acne-scarred face, the sloping layabout shoulders. But appearances, as they say, can be deceiving. I always believed in family, probably more than most. Family was simply what I always dreamed of....
I’d met my share of Mounties in my time, but none like this one. I was driving my white limo over the Center Street bridge, coming up through that valley that was once a sandstone quarry but now a speed trap, when she stepped out from a shrub and waved me onto 7th Avenue. My heart leapt. Partly because I had an ounce of homegrown in the back, waiting for my clients in a champagne bucket, arranged with flowers and greens in a pleasing camouflage display....
Someone came into the kitchen. I feigned interest in sink fixtures. Then a bright voice said hi and I turned to see a young girl drag a chair across the floor and open the freezer and struggle with a vat of ice cream roughly the size of her head. I helped her maneuver the vat onto the counter while she insisted, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’ She shooed me away and climbed onto the counter to retrieve a large plastic salad bowl, which she proceeded to fill with ice cream. I had never seen so much ice cream in a bowl. I felt a pang for
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That’s when Fate dealt me her wild card.
Beside me at the Westin, a throng of reporters surrounded a large man in black pants and jacket, white shirt and two-tone shoes and slicked back hair. It was his signature apparel: John Fitzgerald, the Al Capone of entrepreneurs. I'd seen him on television. He had a big head and a big voice. Reporters loved him. He was walking news and he spoke right at that grade-eight level of all the great communicators. The newspapers called him FitZZ, and TV reporters pronounced it that way. Because, they said, he had fizz-azzz.
Donald climbed off his Hog on the concrete apron to my garage. He did not look at me. I didn’t warrant his attention, which was fine: his was not the kind of attention one longed for. He was six-foot-four and over two-hundred-and-fifty pounds. His head was the size and texture of a medicine ball, with striations of scars and a low ring of hair just above the ears. A kind of Friar Tuck with menace....
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Calgary: Pages on Kensington
Duncan: Volume One
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Author Video: Karl Meade on YouTube
"Cinematic and well plotted, Odd Jobs is a fast, funny, and visual read, easy to imagine as a comedic script in the style of the Big Lebowski or Nothing to Lose."
"hilarious and touching... impossible to keep a straight face... a terrific writer..."