JPod (43 page)

. . .

Steve refused to believe the game was dead, but there was something more going on than just denial. Around midnight he came to my place and told me to accompany him to my parents' house.

"Steve, Mom's not there. She's at her commune."

"I don't want to see your mother. I want to see your father."

"Why?"

"You'll see."

Dad was moaning drunk when we got there. Steve asked me to help drag Dad into Steve's Touareg.

I said, "Not until you tell me where we're taking him."

"A recording studio. We need to get Ronald's voice tracks laid down. Your booze-soaked heartsick dad is the dream voice for Ronald we've been searching for. I'm paying my own money for the sound session."

"What if he pukes in the back seat?" I said.

"He won't. Members of the Greatest Generation never puke. They just internalize their nausea, then squeeze it out in the form of freeway infrastructure and tighdy indexed pension plans."

"Dad is a boomer, not a member of the Greatest Generation."

Dad's body was about as stiff as a garden hose, which made it hard to carry him. Just before we plunked him in the back seat, Steve gen-dy nudged Dad's liver, and Dad parped out a hoarse, mucousy
goddammit.

"Need I say any more? If he isn't Ronald, then who is?"

Steve was right. A drunken, utterly fucked up Dad was Ronald to a T.

Once Dad was inside with his door closed, Steve and I stood there in the moonlit darkness. The only sound was the faint roar of the Trans-Canada Highway to the south.

"Ethan, over the past year you've made crap, you've made shittier crap and you've made three-layered crap sandwiches—but don't forget for a moment that with the creation of Ronald and his Lair,
you
and the jPod crew have been making the finest form of art—a blood-soaked communion that allows weak souls and lost lambs across the globe to give vent to their inner rage as surely as Jackson Pollock threw household enamel onto raw canvas, or Jack Kerouac scrawled his druggie maunderings onto Woolworth's foolscap."

"I'd never thought of it that way, Steve."

"You, Ethan, dammit, are an
artist."

"I am!"

"Okay, let's drive off with boozie here."

The drive downtown was uneventful. Steve needed a fix big time, but the recording studio adjoined his favourite dealer's alley—convenient. After lugging Dad into a small room covered with grey carpeting, Steve popped outside for his vein treat, and returned with a bit of zing in his step. "Let the voices begin."

I sat in the recording room with two techies while Steve circled Dad, who was slumped over on a teal-coloured Naugahyde sofa. He bent down and screamed in Dad's face: "Ronald, who the fuck are
you?"

"Wha—?" Dad's body hopped like a cricket

"I said, WHO . . . THE . . . FUCK . . . ARE . . .
YOU?"

I cut in over the intercom. "Dad, just say you're Ronald, okay?"

"I'm Ronald."

Steve said, "No, you're not, because the Ronald I know is
angry.
The Ronald I know is pissed off.
You,
you disgusting maggot, are a flaccid, docile fetal pig splayed out and waiting for the first incision." He whacked Dad on the back of his head.

"Steve, Jesus Christ, go easy on him."

Steve kept talking to Dad. "Ronald gets the first speaking role of his life, and what does he say? Nothing."

The words "speaking role" seemed to rouse something deep in Dad. He grabbed Steve by the neck and pulled Steve's head down to his own.

"This particular Ronald does
not
blow his chance for a speaking role. I will ace this goddam role, or I will snap your legs into slivers like the stems of cheap wine glasses."

Steve looked at me. "Did you get that on tape?"

"Got it."

From there, Ronald's/Dad's words flowed smoothly.

I am Ronald,

of Mordor,

the Mage,

the

Destroyer.

Taste the scorched fruit

inside my pies.

Chew the bitter towelette

of truth.

Die, you seedy little elves

who refuse to accept any

new menu items added

after 1975.

I scorch your loins with

coffee that sears like a

molten steel patty

flipper.

I till your soil, steal your

potatoes, circumcise

their skins, cook

them in tallow

and tell you

they're vegan.

I shall castrate your

bulls, rendering them more

juicy and docile,

and I shall salt them with

hormones, making them

girly-cows.

Youshall wander the

wastelands in search of

fishwiches fallen from

the sky, frozen and plump

with weevils and sauce

of fiercest tartar.

My face is stripped of

pancake makeup,

staring at the sun,

burning, awaiting

balloons and a helium

canister that will never

arrive.

Your ears shall hear only

the sound of a french-fry

computer that beeps

eternally.

Youshall remain forever

parched with a

bottomless Styrofoam

drinking cup.

You, my imprisoned

sprite servants, I shall

deprive of both minimum

wage and nutrients.

My cooker writhes

with yellow frybabies

your lips shall

never taste.

I shall pierce your being

with shakes made of

ground bones, nay,

chalk.

In my costume of yellow

bib and coarse

enormous red feet, I will

smite you with burgers

laced with thorns.

Inside your bird nuggets

you will find razor

blades, rats and tumours.

. . .

"Hey, Ethan, there's some really great stuff here—"

It was three a.m. Cowboy and I were listening to Dad's work.

"Thanks. Dad is such a star. Steve really coaxed it out of him."

"I had no idea Steve had all this pent-up bile. It's wild."

Cowboy was dressed in weird belt less rugby pants. "What's with the pants, Cowboy? You look like a 1982 liquor store clerk with herpes."

"Since I've laid off the sex, I've had to come up with all sorts of ideas to help me out. Allison downstairs told me about these special undergarments worn by Mormons. They're specifically designed to unflattering the body, so that if you end up with someone, they'll snuff out any urges."

"Right. How's the no-sex thing going?"

"I hate it."

"Are you at least allowed to, er, fly solo?"

"Nope."

"So what happens?"

"Meaning?"

"Meaning—can you sleep or think or anything else?"

"Nope. The thing about abstinence is that
all
you think about is sex, whereas when you actually have sex, you don't think about it nearly as much. Which do you think is the more religious option?"

"Sex."

"Thank you, Ethan. That was the permission I needed!"

Cowboy leapt up and was gone. I made a mental note to turn off my cellphone for the next twenty-four hours.

Mark came in. "Where'd Cowboy go?"

"At the very least he's gone out to stock up on Kleenex."

Mark and I worked until dawn, generating new moves for Ronald. Now that he had sound effects, it was impossible not to work on the project. Ronald had become real to us.

Kwantlen College Learning Annex

Course 3072-A

Assignment:
Describe Your Life Quickly

"Ma Vie
"

by Kaitlin Anna Boyd Joyce

Life is dull, but it could be worse and it could be better. We accept that a corporation determines our life's routines. It's the trade-off so that we don't have to be chronically unemployed creative types, and we know it. When we were younger, we'd at least make a show of not being fooled and leave copies of Adbusters on our desktops. After a few years it just doesn't matter. You trawl for jokes or amusingly diversionary .wav files. You download music. A new project comes along, then endures a slow-motion smothering at the hands of meetings. All ideas feel stillborn. The air smells like five hundred sheets of paper.

And then it's another day.

. . .

The phone rang at 6:12 a.m., and I knew it wasn't going to be an ordinary phone call.

"Mom?"

"Ethan, honey, I need your help."

Oh God.
"What's up?"

"I'd rather not discuss it on the phone."

"Where are you?"

"I've left the commune and I'm back at the house."

"Where's Dad?"

"Greg took him to a 'Swing-Step and Pivot' seminar in Seattle to try to cheer him up."

"Mom, it's 6:12 in the morning."

"Ethan, I need your help right away."

"Doing what?"

"Something only you can help me with. I don't want to discuss it on the phone."

"I don't want to get up."

"Don't be such a lazybones."

"I've got to eat breakfast."

"Breakfast is for losers."

"No, it's not, Mom. I know for a fact that every family on earth eats breakfast."

"Who told you that?"

"You never served breakfast because you didn't want to get up."

"That's not fair, Ethan. I've got low thyroid."

This is still a sore spot in our family history. Greg and I got all the way to high school without ever eating or being served breakfast. However, having stayed over at friends' houses, we finally realized that our family was aberrant in its rejection of a.m. dining. When we confronted Mom with the fact that everybody else eats breakfast, she was like a bird trapped in the house, trying to escape. Then one afternoon she came home with a bag of chocolate-flavoured Carnation Instant Breakfasts, plonked them on the kitchen table and said, "There, I never want to discuss this again." Greg and I figure we could have had master's degrees at MIT or Harvard if only we'd gone to school properly fed. But the past is the past.

"The last time I helped you like this, it was a pretty shitty experience."

"Ethan, don't swear. I wouldn't have called if it wasn't urgent."

"How urgent?"

Mom started to sniffle.

Oh God.
"Okay, I'll come over."

"Thank you. Dress warmly and wear sturdy boots."

Boots?
Dear God.

. . .

When I pulled into the driveway, Mom was loading shovels and turf-hedging tools into the K-car. Before I could say anything, she said, "Ethan, we have to go dig up Tim."

"What?"

"You heard me. He's got a safety deposit box key in his jacket."

"What's in the box?"

"Don't be nosy."

"Why don't you just call Kam and explain it to him? I doubt he'd care."

"I did phone him." Mom was loading a tarp. "His acupuncturist said he's down in Oregon, foreclosing on some small town that got wiped out by cheaper manufacturing costs in China. At least he won't catch us digging up his prized New Zealand tree fern."

"Do you have any idea what Tim is going to look like by now, Mom?"

"Don't be a sissy. Hasn't the Internet toughened you up at all? Kaitlin says you practically live in all those gore sites. And in any event, I packed a few bottles of Febreze to help mask the odour. So just get in the car."

"Okay, okay, already."

"I knew you'd help me. You've always been the responsible son."

We got in the wagon. "Mom, how come Greg gets to swear as much as he wants, but I can't?"

"Ethan, that sort of thing was decided long before you were born. Use your nervous energy for better purposes, like trying to figure out ways to make the world a better place. Wait a second—did I pack both plastic tarps?"

I looked in the back. "Yup."

"Good."

Off we drove to Kam's fabulously bizarre Canterbury neighbourhood, past an endless succession of homes even larger, more garish and more bizarre than Kam's. "I find it highly suspect that, of all the houses in the city, Kam ends up buying Tim's burial plot," I said.

"It's not a coincidence at all. I showed it to him when he was house hunting. I told him it had good kung fu."

"Feng shui."

"That, too. Wait a second—Ethan,
stop! Stop the carl"
Mom was screaming.

I jammed on the brakes. "What!
What!"

"I saw a sign for a garage sale just up the hill. We can sneak in as early birds."

So we did, and Mom haggled like a Microsoft accountant over a stack of 1980s-era
National Geographic
magazines.

"Mom, why are you buying
National Geographies?
We got rid of ours ten years ago."

"I know, and I've been sick about it ever since."

I helped her load them in the back. When she slammed the door, she said, "I got them to throw in a set of used Cuisinart blades for free."

As we resumed driving up the mountain, she said, 'Your father
would
have to go AWOL the one day we really need him."

Finally, a natural point for me to ask a question or two.

"So, Mom, how is, um, freedom doing?"

"Ethan, I am not a lesbian."

"I'm not saying that, Mom, I was just asking how she is."

"She's fine. She's in Seattle today, delivering a speech."

"On what?"

There was a note of challenge in her voice. "It's called 'Revoking Yesterday's Vagina: Towards a New Theory of Birth, Post-Industrial Economics and Clitoral Praxis.'"

I remained mute.

"I am not a lesbian."

"I'm not saying you are."

"freedom is an enlightened woman and has given me range to expand both my autoandrogyny and my hormonal slope."

More silence on my part.

"It's very scientific, you know."

I played silent.

Mom said, "If you must know, the food at that house was awful. A bird feeder has better food than there, and every bite came with a lecture. After a while I began dreaming of having potato chips and Tang for lunch in silence."

"Kam's house is over there."

We parked the car. "What if people question us?" I asked.

"Ethan, I'm a well-nourished rich-looking white woman. I could burn polka dots onto Kam's front door with a creme brulee torch and nobody would question me."

"Good point."

And so we began to dig.

. . .

Four hours later:

"Ethan, this digging is boring, and it's going nowhere."

"I'll never make cruel jokes at the expense of gravediggers again."

We were only maybe a foot down in the blend of premium-grade topsoil, rock bits and construction debris that was Kam's front garden area. All that digging, and Kam's New Zealand tree fern hadn't even begun to list.

"Mom, we need help."

"But who?"

"I'll call Kaitlin."

Mom gave me a look. "Are you sure?"

"She's got the bone structure of a Ukrainian peasant. Her family's in the business, too. She'll understand."

"Leave out the main details." Mom dropped her shovel. "Curse it. TV makes gravedigging look so easy."

The phone rang. "Hi, Kaitlin."

"Hi, Ethan. Where are you?"

"I'm over at Kam's with Mom. I'm helping her out with something."

"With what?"

"It's probably best not to discuss this on the phone. Can you come over?"

"Actually, I've got this, uh, thing I have to go to at noon."

"What thing?"

"It's a, well—"

"It's a Coupland meeting, right?"

"Well, yeah. Ethan, we've been through this a thousand times. Stop taking your resentment out on me."

"Sorry. Who else is going to be there?"

"All the podsters."

"Okay. See you later." I hung up.

Mom asked what was happening, and I told her about the meeting. "The meeting! I forgot about it.
Phooey."
She brushed herself off frantically, as though the dirt stains were leeches. "Ethan, you carry on. I'll be back around two-ish."

"What!"

"Oh, calm down."

"Can I come?"

"No. You have to dig."

At least if I was digging in a videogame, I might find a piece of a puzzle or treasure. A fermented dead biker? Some prize.

. . .

I carried on digging, and by two o'clock the hole was finally up to my waist, but there was no way I was going to be able to finish the job. I got out my PDA and was trying to locate a place where I could rent a Bobcat or some other kind of tractor when I heard jPod voices coming towards me from up the driveway.

"Ethan?"

"Guys?"

"Ethan," Mom said, "your friends are going to help you dig for a while."

This alarmed me, for obvious reasons.
"What?"

"Not the entire hole. Don't worry. I stopped by the house and got some more digging tools for everybody."

"Uh, great."

Kaitlin said, "It's so sweet of you to swap Kam's tree fern for a Himalayan windmill palm. You're such a good friend."

"And digging the hole
yourself"
Cowboy added. "Now
that's
friendship, and
that's
commitment to being Green."

Tim's corpse weighed heavily on my mind. "You know, I thought I might get a tractor and dig it that way. I don't think I'll need any help."

"Nonsense, Ethan," said Mom. "We're all adults, and we all care about Kam. Digging will be fun, and you young people all need some fresh air and exercise. Poor John Doe here looks like a telethon child."

"Thank you, Mrs. Jarlewski."

"Well, it's true, John."

I asked Mom if I could speak to her in private. We went to her car.

"Mom, what are you doing getting everyone to help us? Are you insane?"

"Don't be such a worrywart. Once we begin to smell Tim, I'll have everybody leave."

"I'm going to rent a Bobcat."

"Over my dead body you will. What if it accidentally cuts through Tim's body? Have some respect for the dead."

And so the gang jumped in and digging began, but it was slow going. There were only two real shovels. Bree had a spade, Kaitlin had an edging tool and John Doe was using this pole-shaped thingy Dad had bought off the Shopping Channel during a three a.m. rum jag. Bree looked at the pole and said, "I think it also French braids your hair if you hold it upside down."

An hour later we decided to trash the fern. The six of us (with Mom as overseer) managed to lug it out of its pit and roll it across the adjoining rockery. I wondered what Kam was going to make of this. It wasn't going to be pretty.

Everyone was being friendly and co-operative, and despite our sad little tools, the hole came along nicely. Cowboy, for once, wasn't off in a corner, contemplating death (or brokering a quickie skankwich); John Doe was full of vim and revealed to us a heretofore unknown talent for mimicking dial tones; Bree was describing her doomed second date from the previous evening ("You think you know somebody, and then all of a sudden they start talking about crop circles. . ."). Mark, bless him, was happy simply to be doing a disproportionate share of the work.