Mean Boy (17 page)

Schofield sees me blushing and holds up his hand to make it stop. “It’s all part of the game,” he tells me.

“Game?” I say. “Poetry?”

“Not poetry,” he says. “What you’re talking about. Being reviewed, acknowledged,
known
. Not writing poetry, but being a poet.”

“There’s no difference,” I insist. “If you’re an artist, you’re born an artist …”

“But that’s something else altogether. I’m talking about being a poet—in your terms. Known, reviewed, acknowledged.”

“But it’s indistinguishable,” I say.

“It’s very distinguishable,” contends Schofield.

“You don’t write for an audience?” I challenge. “You write just for yourself? Into the void? With no hope of acknowledgment or, or public appreciation?”

Schofield kind of sighs into his rib-eye.

“No, no,” he replies.

So I sit and wait. The poet takes a contemplative moment to smooth out a clump of mashed potatoes with the back of his fork.

“When you’re published,” he finally begins, looking up, “… it’s wonderful. The first jolt is one of validation: I’ve done it. Somebody else out there—perhaps someone who’s already published poets I admire—has published me. Suddenly I’m not the only one calling myself a poet anymore.”

Nod, nod, nod, goes my salivating head.

“It’s a wonderful feeling of
legitimacy,”
Schofield continues. “You’ve proven yourself a member of a pantheon you’ve idolized your entire life. That’s important. It’s important to
achieve that feeling of legitimacy—that external validation. I am by no means telling you not to aspire to that. I’m not telling you to write to the void, that wanting to be published makes you some kind of sellout. That’s nonsense.”

“Okay,” I say, sitting back, the wind of belligerence somewhat taken from my sails.

Schofield sips his wine, glancing away. Watching him, it strikes me that he finds this subject torturous. He continues to gaze for a good minute and a half at anything in the restaurant that isn’t me.

“Is there a ‘but’ in there somewhere?” I prompt.

“It’s just—” he begins, wriggling around in his chair as much as a three-hundred-pound man is able. “You think the
embarrassment
is going to go away at some point. But it doesn’t. It’s public, so it’s intensified. And then your peers come along and they—” (a careful glance at me, he knows we’re both thinking
Jim
at this point) “—intensify it even more.”

I stare at him.

Schofield meets my look with a small wince. “I’m not explaining it very well—”

“No, no,” I lie.

“It’s just—when you’ve idealized something for so long as this pure, true, untainted thing—when you’ve wanted to belong to that world for so long, it’s
painful
to discover—once you’re there—that it’s …,” Schofield flails. “It’s just …,” he waves his hands around. “It’s
high school
,“ he finally expels.

Schofield follows this up with a full-bodied sigh, before—torture victim in repose—going limp in his chair.

I’ve folded my arms again. Very tight. Practically giving myself fucking breasts.

IN THE PARKING LOT
of the Crowfeather, Jim’s car is buried up to the grille in snow—we don’t even bother getting in. Schofield pulls up his hood, I stick my hands in my pockets, and we trek the three blocks to campus, heads down. Sometimes a small town can be a blessing.

And sometimes a snowstorm can be a blessing. Like when you are annoyed and worn out from talking to a person and need an excuse to keep quiet for three blocks. I am angry at myself for letting him buy me dinner, drinking wine on his dollar, letting myself be lulled, sucked in. You talk to Jim about poetry, you feel electrified—he rhymes off names, cites brilliant passages, strings them all together like pearls in any random conversation, makes you feel like the world is a place that brims with beauty and genius at all times, no matter where you are—Timperly, Summerside, Malignant Cove, or anywhere. Jim reminds you that the poetry is always there, illuminating the otherwise dim-bulb world, and the poetry, once you’ve got hold of it, is all that matters—is what brings the good back to life.

You talk to Schofield about poetry and he squirms in his chair and tells you it’s
high school
. The whole point has always been that poetry was and is the opposite of high school. And elementary school. And Summerside, and the Highwayman Motor Hotel and Mini-Putt. Cousin Wayne turning his eyelids inside out, administering Indian burns. Lydia with her nose-flicks and
nonsense
. It’s an
escape
. It’s the literal
deus ex machina
. The thing that lifts you up and out.

Here’s a moment of clarity. I don’t like Schofield because I’m afraid I am him. I’m afraid I will be the kind of poet that he is, instead of the kind of poet that Jim is. Schofield reminds me of myself. He is nervous and squishy on the subject of poetry. It makes him embarrassed. On some level, he
thinks what he does is stupid, unworthy. All I’ve ever wanted to believe since I started filling Hilroy notebooks was that at some point, life would grant me the acclaim—the
validation
, as Schofield put it—to allow me to shake this omnipresent conviction that
I am an idiot for doing this
. Now I’ve just come face to big fat face with the possibility that it might never go away, the idiot-conviction.

In high school, grade 8 to be exact, a bunch of girls got hold of my orange Hilroy. Orange was for formal, old-fashioned stuff, stuff that rhymed—imitations of Donne and Byron and the like; blue was free-verse beatniky crap (I actually had a teenager’s eight-page howl against PEI scrawled in there, called “A Phony Island of the Mind”), and green was for prose. So these girls, they cornered me in the parking lot, the head cheerleader among them clutching it rolled up like a magazine in both hands. We didn’t actually have cheerleaders at my high school because the Lydia-types running the PTA pronounced such things indecent. But if we had, this group would have dominated the squad.

The girls said they had read the entire orange Hilroy and were afraid I was going to kill myself. It was agonizing, because they were nice girls, I suppose—they seemed genuinely concerned at least—even popular girls, but they were stupid girls. Therefore, stupid, popular girls had been the first on earth to read my poetry. The leader-type gazed at me with her dull, earnest eyes and said, “We’re really worried about you, Larry.” She’d never spoken to me before in my life.

“You see,” I tried to explain, “the Romantic poets were always making these overblown statements, like, Oh, I’m gonna kill myself if Lady Gwendolyn fails to return my love, and I was just … trying to …”

“Yes, but, Larry,” interrupted Stepford cheerleader #
1
, “we don’t think it’s
healthy
.”

They all nodded, marble-eyed, golden hair billowing. They were kind of like penguins in their uniformity.

“It’s not
healthy
to be dwelling on that sort of thing, writing it down in a
book
over and
over
.”

“It’s perfectly healthy,” I argued. “You know, I’m learning to be a poet, so … this is the kind of thing I have to
do
. I’m practising. It’s just like if you girls wanted to be, like, dancers or something …”

“I want to be a
nurse,”
#1 told me, drawing herself up in all her blonde authority, “and you don’t see me trying to take people’s pulses or giving them sponge baths in the hallway.” She kept gazing into my eyes, didn’t even allow herself a smile of superiority.

“Poetry is different,” I writhed.

“Well, we’re really concerned, that’s all we’re saying.” #1’s chin wobbled tinily and for a second I thought she was going to take my hand. “We thought of bringing it to Mr. McKinnon,” she added. Who was the guidance counsellor.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” I said.

“But we won’t,” #1 assured me, “if you promise never to do it again. Not to think about this kind of stuff. Ever. Again, Larry.”

I opened my mouth. It stayed open for a second. “Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” smiled the nurse-in-training, with a nurse’s comforting, patronizing, fascistic pat on the arm.

So they whirled away, a carnival of skirts and ponytails, leaving me in a state of such nut-crunching mortification that for a while I genuinely believed I hadn’t lied to #1 when I told her I’d never write again. Never. Again.
Jawohl, Fräulein
. Just don’t let me experience anything remotely akin to this feeling at any given point in the future. Burn the Hilroys—hell, I’d been planning on burning the green one all along anyway. Report to Dad as caretaker-for-life at the
Highwayman Motor Hotel. Don coveralls, maybe a straw hat. Communicate in friendly grunts that bespeak a brain injury of some sort. Be picturesque, rustic. Quaintly inscrutable for the tourists when directing them—through a series of spasmodic gestures to accompany the grunts—to Lucy Maud Montgomery’s house.

And the girls didn’t tell Mr. McKinnon—they just told the rest of the school. Hilroys were ripped from my arms everywhere I went for the next few months, gleefully opened and pored over while I stood pinned against various walls, poles, and lockers. All the scribblers revealed, to everyone’s disappointment, were history notes, long division, and the like. I’d caught on fast, you see. So maybe I owed the Stepfords a debt of gratitude.

Hide. Divert. That’s what I learned about being a poet in high school. Deny it like you would a contagion, a betrayal.

Outside the room where Dermot Schofield is supposed to give his reading, Sherrie, Todd, and everyone else from Jim’s class—plus, to my gratification, a couple of strangers—stand huddled in the hallway, coats folded over arms.

“What’s wrong?” I say as Schofield and I advance, patting snow from ourselves.

“It’s the wrong room,” says Todd, leaning thuggishly against a wall.

I look at the door. A sign—a piece of looseleaf scribbled on with pen—reads,
Dermot Schofield Reading Here Today 7 p.m
. The writing has a ghostly, half-there quality to it, as though the pen was nearly dry of ink. I have to step close and peer to read it. The sign is written in the same sprawling scrawl that prettifies my returned poetry assignments.

Beyond the sign, through the window, I can see a class taking place. It’s a big class, and looks to be right in the middle
of its business. The students have that slouched, resigned aspect of being halfway through, as opposed to the alert, anticipatory demeanour of being about to go home. The prof has a dogged, dug-in sort of look.

I glance over at Schofield, as if for an explanation. He stands slightly apart from the group of us and actually gives an apologetic shrug.

“Well, I mean the
sign
is up,” I say, looking around for help, for Jim.

“But there’s a class in there,” says Todd.

“Well … did anyone say anything to them?”

I keep looking around, hoping my eyes will hit upon someone who will step forward, roll up their sleeves, and decisively take charge. They all just stare at me.

“No,” says Todd at last, in what I must say is something of an insolent tone. His eyes drift over my shoulder to where Schofield is standing, and he takes a few steps forward. “Hi,” he says, holding out his hand. “I’m Todd Smiley.”

“Dermot,” says Schofield.

“I really liked your last book.”

“Thank you very much, Todd.”

So now I turn to Sherrie for help.

“Maybe they’re going long,” she suggests, gesturing to the closed door. “Sometimes the profs get carried away.”

I peer through the window again. Some of the students within are starting to notice me.

“Should we—should we ask?”

“Maybe,” answers Sherrie, bringing her teeth together in a gesture of delicacy.

“Maybe,” I repeat, in such a way as to let her know how distinctly useless is her response.

Everyone in the hallway kind of shuffles around, parkas and corduroys rustling, minute signals of impatience directed at me.

I knock, quietly, and then open the door.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the class. The students take me in with relief and gratitude. The prof turns to me with a glazed sort of look.

“Yes?” he says.

“We’re supposed to hold a poetry reading in this room tonight,” I tell him. “I was wondering—are you going late?”

The prof blinks a few times. “No,” he tells me. “We’re not going late, we’re here another hour. We’re here every Friday.”

“I thought classes were over,” I say, half-hoping to convince everyone in the room they’ve made some kind of a mistake.

“Today’s the last day,” blinks the prof, frowning at me.

Oh, yes. I had a class today, didn’t I. My mouth moves as I try to think of a sentence to get these people gathering up their coats and bookbags. Your cars are being towed. There’s a storm out there, you know. I could pull the fire alarm.

“If you don’t mind,” interrupts the prof, “we have a great deal to get through.”

I nod and quietly pull the door shut.

Failure, but not for long. As I turn back to the huddle with contrition, I can see Jim coming toward us, trucking down the hall with his long, loping strides. Slaughter is with him, perpetually large and bored.

“Jim,” I say.

And am ignored. A big grin is cracking his face as Jim lopes past me toward Dermot Schofield. A strange noise is coming from somewhere behind the grin, an animalistic, drawn-out kind of moan which sounds like,
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?
Like a long question. Jim doesn’t stop, doesn’t take a new breath until he is face to face with Schofield. All heads swivel as if magnetized.

“Ehaaaand
there he is,” finishes Jim. “The fat bastard himself.”

Another shrug from Schofield. Apologetic, yet again. Sorry to be a fat bastard.

“How are you, Jim?”

“Fuck that,” says Jim, grabbing hold of Schofield’s mitt. Then, with his free hand, Jim throws an arm around the fridge-like shoulders, tries to pull Schofield toward him like he did Dekker in the department that day. But Schofield neglects to float into Jim’s embrace in the same easy, half-dreaming way that Dekker did. Taken by surprise, he loses his balance and stumbles. Jim catches him in an exaggerated gesture, calling, “Whoa, there!” as if Schofield is some kind of disoriented steer, too dumb to register the damage it’s capable of.