Mean Boy (6 page)

“Where Else in Canada …,” I begin again.

“It’s just so full of assholes,” says Todd. And then he rhymes off a list of names. Toronto poets—most of whom I’ve heard of but haven’t read, because Jim has identified them as “hucksters” for us. On the first day of our seminar he drew a line down the middle of the blackboard. On one side he wrote “Hucksters.” On the other side he wrote “The Real Thing.” There were a couple of Toronto poets on the “Real Thing” side—Greg Levine and S.M. Munroe—but mostly it was poets from the east coast, the west coast, the prairies—everywhere and anywhere but. He handed out the work of the Real Thing writers but said that to inflict the Hucksters on us would be contamination. I had been feeling cocky that day—the classroom is the only place it happens—and raised my hand. “What about ‘Know thy enemy’?” I said before Jim could even call on me. He smiled, overbite leering.
“ ‘Smite
thine enemy,’ “ he corrected. And smacked the blackboard for emphasis.

“Levine’s not bad,” I venture, interrupting Todd’s list.

“He’s not from there—he’s from Montreal originally,” says Todd. “Everyone thinks Toronto’s the place to go if you want to write. The hucksters have all the power in this country, and so they’re the ones who perpetuate it. We just buy into all that crap because we think we have no choice.”

“Yeah, but,” I say, “that’s the way it is.”

“It’s up to us to change the way it is,” Todd explains.

I enjoy how angry Todd seems about everything, how the whole world for him is like a scratchy tag on a sweater. We’re at the Stein, drinking and planning. It comes to light that Todd is like me—from the sticks. His home is somewhere nowhere on the south shore of Nova Scotia, but, he says, “I
make no apologies.” This is new to me—I’ve been making apologies ever since I got here, if only to myself. Not Todd. Todd says he’s proud of his roots, his “cultural” background (Scottish, “a Smiley of the Port Duffrin Smileys”—I get the feeling he’s about to whip out a family crest), and what he calls his “working-class background.” Then Todd rants for a while at all the people who would tell him to be ashamed of his “working-class background.” I keep quiet because I would have been one of them an hour or so ago. I mean, this is university, isn’t it? Doctor Sparrow is a graduate of Oxford. He even has a tiny English accent, the gentlest of English accents, making him sound courtly and wise but at the same time inevitably debauched, like a Roman in one of those old movies, those old Bible epics. Even Dekker has some kind of accent—not exactly English, but close. Some kind of cross between German and English. Very faint. Very not-from-here. Our benefactor Horace Lee Grayson was—it’s undeniable—Atlantic Canadian gentry. He was a landowner from a long line of landowners, first in England and then in New Brunswick. Todd and I attend classes alongside people who appear to be from other planets—I don’t know how to explain it. How they talk, how they think. How they talk about what they think. I wave my arms and say things like
Oh my God, that’s crazy!
They come out with,
I’m not sure I agree
. And you know what? They win. They win when they say things like that. What I mean is they sit back and ponder and I wave my arms and proclaim and somehow by uttering the most flaccid words imaginable—
I’m not sure I agree
—simply by uttering them in that
way
, that way they have which depends as much on haircuts and shoes as it does on words and ideas—somehow they win. It’s like they’ve won already.

It wasn’t until this year I started to understand the difference. The difference is this. It’s
breeding
, is what it is. Like show dogs.

In the middle of talking to Todd Smiley I take out my notebook.

“What are you doing?” Todd wants to know. His eyebrows don’t plunge like Jim’s.

Showdogs
, I write.

“Idea for a poem.”

I look up. Todd is nodding, pleased.

After a couple of hours, Sherrie arrives with a letter she has drafted during her Victorian Novel lecture. She reads it to Todd and me, Todd yeah-ing and twitching the whole time. We edit and drink for another hour—it goes from three pages, to one, to two, and then finally to one and a half. “To Whom it May Concern,” we begin, deciding we’ll figure out the people to direct our complaint to later. Doctor Sparrow? The dean of Arts? The university president? Waldine Grayson, Horace Lee Grayson’s oldest living descendant, who still lives in his big white house above the marsh? We have no idea what we’re doing, really, but at the moment it doesn’t matter. We’re getting it out. Words fly like sparks. We astound one another with our angry eloquence.

Second year is so much better than first. I couldn’t get into a class with Jim last year—I had to take all the intro classes first—and therefore didn’t see the point of being here. I followed him around campus a bit, even went to his office and sweatily introduced myself. He was polite. He recommended some books, and said he’d look for me in his group next year, but he didn’t ask to see any of my poetry, and I couldn’t bring myself to thrust a few pages of it at him, as I’d been dreaming of doing
(he glances down, disinterested at first; suddenly a gemlike turn of phrase catches his eye, dazzling
him; he looks back up, slowly, awareness dawning, recognizing himself to be in the presence of …
). It felt like I was still on the other side of the strait, waving and drowning. I couldn’t make him see me.

Plus I was lonely, to be honest. I thought I would never have any friends. I resigned myself to a life of poetic isolation and tried to feel okay about it because I knew lots of writers were misanthropes. Every once in a while, though, I’d think of the great literary friendships and get depressed. Beckett hanging out at Joyce’s house in Paris. Shelley tossing them back with Byron. Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Ginsberg and Burroughs. All the beats hung out together. Artists are supposed to hang out together. Often they have a clash of sensibilities or some kind of a pissy falling-out, but then they write about it and it’s immortalized for all time, whether they ever make up with each other or not. It doesn’t matter if they ever make up—the purpose of the friendship is to provide artistic fodder and rivalry and inspiration. Because writers are fiery and opinionated. You can’t expect them to put up with each other indefinitely.

Anyway, I didn’t think I’d ever have a friendship like that after a year of living in residence. To have an artistic friendship, you have to meet other artists, and the only people I met in residence were assholes or psychopaths or both. All the sports guys lived in my dorm, Hadwin House—the football and hockey players—and they were, to a man, enormous and crazy. They treated residence like their clubhouse and perpetuated horrific abuse on first-year guys who had just joined the teams. My roommate was first-year and a football player, and they broke into our room at two in the morning, wrapped him in hockey tape, and dragged him screaming down the hall. Later he told me they had shoved him in the utility closet downstairs, crowded in there with him, and solemnly showed him a broomstick. They said
they were going to have to shove the broomstick up his ass if he were to be accepted as a member of the team. They said they were sorry but explained everyone on the team had undergone this experience and it had to be done. That’s all my roommate would tell me about it the next day, except to add that they had just been fucking with him and eventually let him go back to bed, ha, ha. It was two hours later, I seem to recall—I’d been lying awake with both our desks shoved against the door. But a week or so later another guy told me the joke ended when my roommate turned to brace himself against the wall, bawling, “Just do it! Just fucking get it over with!” and the football guys had to lean against each other to keep from collapsing onto the floor in one meaty, mirthful heap.

Another time some guy from MacLaren House snuck onto our floor, took a shit in a pot, and put it on the stove in our kitchen, on “low.” The next day Chuck Slaughter—a massive football guy who used to pay me to write his English papers—went over to MacLaren wearing a pair of rubber gloves and smeared the cooked shit all over the receiver of their pay phone. Then he returned to Hadwin House and called them.

What I’m trying to get across is, it was like
Lord of the Flies
over there. I told my dad I had to get out of residence or drop out. He’d been disappointed because all summer he’d been telling me how university years were the “best of your life,” and he was more excited than I was—about residence most of all. I think it was the idea of my living with all those other guys, the masculine fellowship toughening me up. Or maybe it’s just one of those assumptions you make about worlds you know you’ll never reach yourself: the thing I’m not supposed to have must be what’s most worth having.

THERE IS A PIECE
by Jim featured in the fall issue of
Atlantica
. It’s a review of Dermot Schofield’s new collection of poetry,
Malignant Cove
. I seem to recall that Schofield failed to find a home on either the Huckster or the Real Thing list at the beginning of the year. It looks like he’s come down solidly on the side of the hucksters with this book.

Jim—I don’t know any other way to put this—he wipes his ass with Schofield.

I am in the library, poring over the new journals as I always do—feeling sick and envious and excited by them as I always do—wanting to be able to turn a page and see my own name under something so unspeakably brilliant it irradiates the page. I rip out
Atlantica
‘s subscription card and stick it in my notebook. So this is the Canadian literature of my time! No more trees and rocks and oceans and lakes and prairies and farms, but barricades. And battle lines—both
intellectual and aesthetic. Upper Canadian snottitude versus hard-nosed regionalism. City versus Town, fake versus real. It’s raw and pugilistic. Like a hockey game. Or war. It’s so
new
. I never imagined poetry could be like this.

Another sunny autumn day. I walk across the quad disrupting waist-high dunes of crisp, fallen leaves. Getting colder now, students wandering about in thicker coats, in chunky wool sweaters. But I can differentiate them—the leather coats versus the nylon parkas with polyester fill. The expensive store-bought woollen sweaters versus acrylic, or else the threadbare homemade ones. Like the one I have on—my father’s old curling sweater with the moose and hunter on the back, so stretched out it almost reaches my knees.

The point is what I’m seeing: I see the difference. I see campus like a line drawn down a blackboard now.

“It’s good,” says Dekker, scanning our letter in his tidy office. Dekker I can’t determine. What kind of sweater would he wear? He clothes himself in the camouflage of academe. “Heartfelt,” he says.

“It
is
heartfelt,” I agree. “Everyone will sign it,” I say. “We don’t know the best way to go about getting signatures, though. I was thinking maybe we should post it in the lounge.”

Dekker purses his lips, scratches his clean-shaven neck as he often does. He’s got one of those beards that just wants to grow. The bottom of his face is always black by late afternoon, and I don’t know why he won’t just let it fuzz over completely.

“Chances are,” Dekker considers, “if you posted it, it’d be gone in an hour. They’d just take it down.”

“They’d just take it down? Who?”

“The administration,” he says. The word sounds like it should have a capital A, like something in an Orwell novel.

“But it’s the
students’
lounge,” I say.

“Lawrence, they’d find a reason. They’d say the bulletin board was only for departmental business or some such thing.”

I’m aghast. “People sell their bikes on that thing!”

Dekker smiles as though I’ve told a joke. “It doesn’t matter. The department has no obligation to be consistent. What they do is, they do what they want,
then
they make up reasons for it.”

So it really is an Orwell novel. The place I go to school.

“Is that what happened with Jim?” I ask after a moment.

Dekker waits a moment too. “What happened with Jim,” he says at last, “is complicated.”

“Yeah, but you said they wanted to get rid of him from the very beginning.”

Dekker holds up his hands. “I didn’t say that exactly.”

“Yes you did, Professor Dekker.”

Dekker pauses to creak backward in his chair, stretching his arms behind his head. For a moment I’m afraid he might flip over.

“Oh boy,” he says when he finishes stretching. “If I did, if I did say that, I would ask that you forget it.”

“You said it to the whole class.”

“Oh boy,” Dekker says again. Now he looks like he wishes he would flip over. Me left talking to his mute, exclamation-point legs.

And in walks Jim.

Like a ghost invoked.

“Hi!” I scream before anyone can say anything else. The adrenalin—the Jim-adrenalin—that wild, gleeful, fork-in-an-outlet
panic—hits me like freezing water.

“Jim,” says Dekker, creaking out of his chair to his feet.

He crosses the room in an eye-blink and they shake hands like crazy. I watch them, vision pulsing. I’m standing too, I realize. After a moment Jim stops shaking but doesn’t let go of Dekker’s hand. He reaches with his other hand for Dekker’s shoulder. He folds Dekker to him—Dekker just kind of letting himself drift in, looking dreamy. They pat backs like crazy. Pufts of dust explode from Jim’s hunting jacket, twinkling around in the stream of sunlight coming through Dekker’s window.