Mean Boy (5 page)

“Hi, Dad!”

“It’s not too polite, I don’t think.”

“I was working, I was distracted.”

“Oh, good for you,” says my mother. “What were you working on?”

“Poetry.”

“Oh, good for you,” says my mother again.

“Something for class?” demands my father.

“Yes,” I say loudly.

“Oh, good,” says my mother.

“So, how’s it going?” Dad wants to know.

“What, the poetry?”

“The whole damn thing.”

“I went to Jim’s house and we talked about my poetry yesterday for something like four hours.”

“Jim, Jim, Jim,” says my dad.

“Is that normal?” asks my mother. “Is that what they do?”

“Who?”

“In university?”

“No!” I tell her. “It’s not normal at all, not in the least!”

“Oh,” says Mom.

“It means he’s singled me out, he thinks I’m special.”

“Oh!” says Mom.

“So, he’s tutoring you, like?” says Dad.

“No! Jim’s my prof, Dad, he doesn’t tutor. He’s mentoring me—he’s mentoring me on the side, in
addition
to being my prof, because he likes my poetry so much.”

“Do you get an extra credit for it?” Mom wants to know. Mom has studied all my university calendars, trying to grasp things like credit, first-year and second-year courses, how sometimes you can get credit just for doing directed reading or writing a paper or something. When I was registering last summer it took her forever to understand that I could be in my second year at Westcock and take first- and third-year courses. She says it still doesn’t sound right to her. University culture, university rules—it is all a Byzantine mystery to the PEI Campbells. It’s not like potato farming, or politicking,
or running a motor hotel and mini-putt. It’s like nothing else they know.

“Well, now, it’s lonely around here without you, Larry,” Dad tells me—just like he tells me every time he calls. “No one around to sweep off the greens.”

“Nobody calls me Larry here, Dad,” I say.

“Well, everybody calls you Larry here,” says Dad.

We talk for another hour and I tell them every single thing that happened during my week, which they are always content to hear for some reason. Dad tells me how a bunch of drunk teenagers showed up at the motel at one in the morning wanting to play a game of minigolf and he told them he kept a rifle behind the counter and made as if to reach for it and they ran like hell. (You better run! he hollered after them. This thing took the arse off a bear who was moving a damn sight quicker than you punks!) That was the highlight of his week, Dad says.

We hang up, and I’m in a good mood. I feel like going out in the sunshine and buying groceries or something—being productive, responsible. Then I make a mistake. I glance over at my typewriter, the empty page like bared teeth.

I hug the phone. I weave the cord back and forth between my fingers. The receiver clicks and clacks in its cradle.

Ring, ring.

“What.”

“Jim?”

“Who’s this.”

“It’s Lawrence.”

“Lawrence who?”

“… Larry.”

Rustling sounds. Blankets, cushions, chesterfields.

“Oh, Larry.” he sniffs. Snorts, really. “How’s it going?”

“… Good, Jim, good.” There’s a wailing in my brain like a disaster siren; it sounded the moment he answered the phone.
Bad idea. Bad idea
.

“What can I do for you, Larry?”

What are you bothering me for, Larry?

“Um, Jim. I’m just calling to see how you’re doing. See if everything’s okay.”

Cushions, blankets. “Oh, you are, are you?”

There’s something dead in his voice and it’s like I’m fighting to keep my Adam’s apple from plugging up my throat.

“Yes.”

“Now, why wouldn’t everything be just ducky, I wonder now?”

“How’s your cold?” I say very fast.

“What have you heard,” demands Jim.

“What have I heard?”

“What have you heard,” demands Jim.

“I—I heard there was some kind of problem with the department.”

“Some kind of problem,” Jim repeats slowly.

“Yes,” I say.

“Yes,” says Jim.

Jesus Christ, this is a waking nightmare.

“And so I was just calling,” I continue.

“Yes?” says Jim.

“… to see …”

“Yes, Larry?”

“… if there was anything I can do.” I hurl this last part out like I’m vomiting—with the same sense of helpless revulsion I had on Friday night outside the Stein. Wanting to get it out. Hating to get it out.

More chesterfield noises. Something being poured. A woman’s voice then, angry, faint, and urgent.

Who is it, for Christ’s sake?

Shh. It’s just a student
.

Oh.

“Jim?” I say.

“Still here, Larry.”

“Listen, I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“No, no, I appreciate it, Larry, I really do. Is there anything you can do—well, let me see. I don’t know, Larry, is there? What do you have in mind?”

“Jim … I don’t even understand what’s going on, I just wanted …”

“No, you don’t understand, do you. Well, I guess we can’t be much help to each other, because I’m afraid I don’t understand either. I don’t understand a fucking thing anymore.”

No one has spoken to me like this ever, in my life. I can feel my stomach contracting, pickling itself in acid. And then something even more terrifying happens. The chesterfield noises again, phone against fabric. A sound, a male sound like I’ve never heard before, a Jim sound, but not a word. A sob.

“Jim?” My eyes strain against their sockets. “Jim?”

“Fuck off, why don’t you!” The barky voice, not Jim anymore. It’s his wife.

“I’m sorry …”

“Why don’t you cocksuckers all just smarten up!”

And she hangs up.

I need to get away from the telephone. Also, I need to stop talking stream of consciousness to my parents every time they call. I need to keep stuff inside like a normal person. It has to fester inside me, that stuff, and get warped and stewish until it blurps out onto the page like tomato sauce
splattering onto the white of a stovetop. That’s what poets do, real ones. Real poets are careful. They are circumspect. They don’t just call each other up in the middle of the afternoon to see if everything’s okay.

But he was crying
.

I decide to lie on the floor again, catching my typewriter’s eye as I do. Finally something has wiped that smirk off its face.

NOW IT’S WEDNESDAY
and we sit in Jim’s seminar class staring into the void of the blackboard.

“He’s not coming,” says Claude.

“Bullshit,” I grunt. I am trying to be meaner these days, more brutal.

“I mean,” says Sherrie as if she has said something prior to this, “if he’s only on probation he could still be reinstated, couldn’t he?”

Claude leans forward in a rare display of energy. “If he’s been denied tenure, that’s it. He won’t be coming back after this year, he’ll go elsewhere. But it won’t look good for him to have been denied. Other universities will take it into consideration. They’ll wonder why.”

“I’m
wondering why,” I say.

The door to the classroom shrieks open and Bryant Dekker shuffles in, hugging his briefcase across his torso as if it could protect him from bullets or wild dogs.

“Hi, everybody,” he coughs.

We stare at him.

“Professor Arsenault asked me to take over for him today—he’s not feeling well.”

In a wonderful, somehow pointed gesture of indifference, Claude raises his arm and looks down at his watch. He
doesn’t need to do it, because a huge industrial clock hovers on the wall above Dekker’s head like a displaced halo. But thanks to Claude’s lead, we all think to gaze up and note that it’s forty-five minutes into class. Dekker turns to see as well, and then adopts a look like the raccoons my father used to corner in our shed.

“So,” he says. “So, uh. Whose stuff are we looking at today?” He puts his briefcase onto the table in front of him. He doesn’t bother to open it. “And would anyone have an extra copy?”

Nobody says anything. My hand goes up. Dekker looks at it.

“Lawrence?”

“We want to know what’s going on,” I say.

Silence as I fold my hands and Dekker takes a careful breath, deliberately prolonged.

“Yeah!” goes someone else. To my surprise, someone has sounded, “Yeah!” from behind me. And suddenly I feel a powerful boy.

Jim Arsenault has not been a departmental favourite since he was granted the usual four-year probationary appointment at this small but prestigious undergraduate institute. Nobody knows why Jim decided to come here. It is assumed he was being clamoured for after
Blinding White
started getting attention overseas. It is assumed that a Canadian poet with an unheard-of international reputation—who also happens to have picked up a master’s degree somewhere along the way—would be the dream of every English department in the country. It is assumed he deigned to settle here because he is a native New Brunswicker himself, and his poetry testifies to his reverence toward the land and its people.

But holy God, if it were me I would’ve killed to get out of these sticks.

Anyway, settle here he did, to the insane good fortune of us all. I knew where I was going to university by the time I finished grade 11—the year Jim arrived at Westcock. Otherwise I would never have given this place a second thought. It was founded by Methodists—precisely the breed of people Jim had said could go to H*ll. It’s in Timperly, a town with a population of scarcely three thousand, surrounded by nothing but tractors and marsh. The nearest metropolis is a twenty-five-minute drive across the border—Wethering, Nova Scotia. “Friendly as can be!” announces the highway sign. Population a teeming 4,052.

Right up until I heard about Jim coming to Westcock, my plan was to hie me off to Toronto, figuring that if someone like Jim Arsenault was living there “out of necessity,” this necessitated that Lawrence Campbell should live there too. I terrorized my parents by articulating this intention pretty much every day from the moment I discovered
Even Less
. It was Toronto or nowhere, I said to my parents, who have been off Prince Edward Island overnight maybe six times in their combined lives. There was nowhere else to go, I told them, nowhere else to be, nowhere else to write in this hinterland.

But Jim. So Jim came. He bought the house near Rock Point. He settled in with Moira. He gathered acolytes from all across Canada. He initiated the joint creative-writing honours for English students—the first such degree in the country. The department had no choice but to do it because there were so many students like me arriving, more interested in studying poetry with Jim than anything else. Enrolment skyrocketed. Dekker says it “went up,” but that has to be an understatement. It skyrocketed—how could it not? And the most amazing thing—or not so amazing, it turns out, if you
know anything about what Dekker calls “departmental politics”—is that from the moment Jim showed up on the department’s doorstep, Doctor Sparrow has wanted nothing so dearly as an excuse to throw him off it.

I am extrapolating. Dekker didn’t come out and say it like that, but he did say that Jim has been “rubbing the administration the wrong way” since his arrival.

“Why?” we all want to know.

“Well,” says Dekker. He leans against the table now, seeming to have shed his armour. Dekker is far more at ease simply having a conversation than I’ve ever seen him teaching a class. He scratches his five-o’clock shadow, searching for the right words. “Jim,” he begins. “Well, Jim is a little eccentric.”

“Oh my God,” I shout over Claude, who is snickering. “That’s because he’s a genius!”

“Yeah!” goes the yeah-guy behind me.

Dekker looks us over for a moment. A second later, all his armour has been shrugged on again. He picks up his briefcase.

“People,” he says, seeming to apologize with the word, “I can’t go into it with you. Jim’s been told his tenure won’t be granted next year—that’s all I can say. I’ve seen the letter, and personally, I think it’s a travesty. I’ve written to Doctor Sparrow and the dean of Arts, and that’s all I’m in a position to do. It’s—” Dekker sighs into the crease of his briefcase. “It’s a genuine shame.”

“What if
we
wrote letters?” asks Sherrie.

Dekker places his briefcase down on the table again. “Um,” he says carefully. “It’s not like I’m instructing you to do that or anything, but if you feel strongly about this, I’d encourage you to follow your conscience.”

Claude speaks. He says one word. That word is this: “Please.”

We all look at him. The cheerful futility sloshing around in that one syllable infuriates me. We’re silenced by it, and Claude gazes at us, finishing his sentiment with apparent effort.

“A bunch of students write letters,” he drawls.
“That
will make a difference.”

I’ll show him, I decide.

The yeah-guy, it turns out, is Todd. I haven’t spoken to him before, but I’ve read and commented on his poetry, most of which is pretty bad. A lot of it rhymes. He can’t seem to wean himself from the idea that poetry has to rhyme, and as a result everything he brings to class—often about sex or industrial accidents—has a grotesque sing-songy quality.
And as the coal fell on his head / he thought of what his mother said / work well: no matter what you do / the mine shall make a man of you
.

But now I find that I like him. Todd is all flailing limbs and pissed-off energy, and it’s infectious. We huddle outside the classroom.

“This is a pile of crap,” says Todd.

“Fucking bullshit,” I say.

“A complete pile of shit,” says Todd. “Jim’s my only reason for being here, for fuck’s sake. I could have gone to Dalhousie.”

“Me too,” I say.

Todd ceases to flail for a moment. “You got accepted to Dalhousie?”

“No, I mean Jim’s my only reason for being here,” I clarify. “I would have gone to U of T.”

“Toronto, man? Really?” Todd looks dubious.

“Well, yeah,” I say, “You know, Where Else in Canada …”

“Yeah, but Upper Canada,” says Todd, and I blink. The only other person I know who refers to it as Upper Canada
is my grandmother Lydia, the head of the Summerside Daughters of Temperance Society.