No Safeguards (12 page)

“What's under there?”

“Nothing.”

“Let me see.”

Paul hesitated.

I removed the books and saw a switchblade. Paul instantly put a finger on his lips, and motioned in the direction of Anna's bedroom. “I'll tell you about it later.”

“Leave it with me.” He gave it to me without protesting. I waited for Paul to tell me why he carried a knife, but he never did. A week later, Paul began wetting his bed. In February Anna took him to see a psychologist. We found out then that the older boys in his class were roughing him up at lunch and recess and constantly threatening to beat him up. One noon, Alfred, a lubber of a fellow, met him coming from the bathroom and slammed him into the wall outside the door three times and told him: “If yo' complain ‘pon me, I-man will kick yo' ass every fucking day!”

That morning the class had laughed at Alfred. They'd heard him exclaim: “Gwan from ya! Yo' stink!” and everyone had turned to stare at him sitting in the back.

Alfred told Mme Loubier, their teacher: “
Nick a fait la chose qui fait boum.
” The laughter exploded for real then.

“Man, just tell her I farted,” Nick said, causing laughter to resound a third time.

Some of it Paul had brought upon himself. In the first few weeks, he'd laughed at the stupid answers his classmates gave to their teachers' questions (as he'd have done at Excelsior and as I and my classmates would have done at Kingstown Secondary), and he hadn't understood that he shouldn't raise his hand to answer every question. (The secondary II Black girls who did homework and performed diligently spent their recess and a good part of their lunch hour in the library — far from the playground and the corridors — and answered questions in class only when the teachers called upon them to do so. This Paul would aver later, when he came to understand the stratification and socialization process.)

And it wasn't just the Black students who ridiculed him. At the beginning, he'd tried to join an Asian-White group, but they made fun of his teeth. “Man, your fangs are falling out.” He had slightly crooked teeth from sucking his thumb until he was three. And they taunted him. First boy: “How many Blacks it takes to screw in a light bulb?” Second boy: “None. It's too damn complicated.” Third Boy: “Naw, Paul's the exception. He got it after the hundredth try.”

By the end of the fifth week they'd subjected him to one joke too many. “There was this White dude, see. Truck driver. Away on a trip for a couple o' days. Comes back. Goes to screw his wife, and sees she like has this slack hole. So he starts to rough her up to find out which Black dude she'd been fooling around with. She confesses it's the paper boy, and him just 13. She'd been to get the paper, and he saw her in her bathrobe and got this erection like a baseball bat. She fainted, and he fucked her, and now her thing can't close.”

“Awesome!” Pi Chang shouted. “Paul, how's
your
baseball bat?”

“Why? You'd like it up your arse?”

“Slug him, Pi! Don't let the bastard get away with it!” Willy, the runt of the group, urged, leaping up and down, his thick spectacles glinting.

Pi grinned, his mouth grey with dental braces.

“Loosen up, man,” Richard Hazan (“a two-metre bean pole”) said. “You're like so fucking uptight. Be cool, man. Chill! Learn to like take a joke like a man. After that, who knows, we might accept you.”

I listened to him and remembered how much Paul admired cougars. The killing instinct was there alright, but none of the discretion.

Thereafter Paul never strayed far from the everything-goes group of Blacks, Greeks, and Hispanics. With his journal open in front of him, he revealed all this to Anna and me in the intervals between the sessions.

After twelve sessions — the last six included Anna and me, the psychologist told Anna that Paul's esteem needs weren't being met. Beyond letting us find out the cause of Paul's distress, the sessions seemed useless. About the only remedy Anna could bring was to take him to a dentist and have him fitted with braces to straighten his teeth.

***

So began Paul's ambivalence for Canada and, indirectly, his hatred for Anna because she had brought him here. “Fathom that,” he told her on the anniversary of our arrival. “Just fathom that!” — sounding like Grama — “We left our comfortable home for this.” He made a hand-sweep, indicating the apartment. “From our back porch we used to look out over the sea, watch the sunset, the fishing boats, the fishermen pulling in their seines, the plovers diving in and out of the water.” Pointing to me. “You and I used to go through Grama's orchard raiding the fruit trees and spend long hours in the sea all year round. Now we live penned up here like prisoners, our clothes reeking of our neighbours' cooking — in a country that's frozen for half the year. Open your eyes, Ma! This is no place for us. Don't take my word for it. Look at the trees. They are grey skeletons that hiss and scream like haunted ghosts all winter long. They tell you
nothing
? Some mornings it's so cold the air is blue. And the people we live among, they're just as cold, colder than the climate. Why are we here, Ma? Can you tell me why we are here? So you can earn a living emptying bedpans? It's a dying, if you ask me.” Most likely he was quoting from memory one of his journal entries.

Anna ignored his rant (or so I'd thought). I chalked it up to his flair for melodrama, problems he was having with his classmates, and the traumatic experience the ice storm had been our first winter here, although we were among the few who didn't lose electricity: something about the hi-tension wires serving our area running along the cement walls of the Décarie Expressway, preventing them from snapping under the weight of ice. Even so, it left us in awe of winter's destructive power.

About two weeks after this outburst — Paul and I were standing alone on a Barclay street corner waiting for the 160 bus, I asked him why he'd become so silent at home. He breathed deeply, looked away, and said: “Bro, Ma doesn't have the intelligence to deal with my problems.”

“How can you say that, Paul?”

“You're blind when it comes to Ma, Jay. Blind. You know what I mean? Ma can't cope with her own problems. You don't see her lips moving all the time? She's lost, Jay, more lost than we are.”

“Paul, you don't know Ma.”

“If you say so. She's clueless about what's going down in this society. That I know. She shouldn't be here and neither should we.”

The bus came then, and it wasn't a discussion I wanted to engage in, there or at home. Was that a mistake?

***

Shortly after we arrived Anna assigned our chores. Whenever I cooked, Paul was to wash the dishes. Whenever Anna cooked, we were to take turns washing the dishes. It was Paul's duty as well to empty the garbage and to help me with the vacuuming. But Paul turned it into a power game he was determined to win, and it became too exhausting to battle with him. Once, when Anna told him if he didn't do his chores he shouldn't expect to eat, he smirked, sucked his teeth, and told her: “You're responsible for me until I am 18. I don't have to work for my food. You laid this egg, Ma, and you will hatch it. And why should I do chores? Your clay-coloured son” — he stuck his tongue out at me — “will do them anyway to impress you what a wonderful son he is. You prefer him anyway — admit it, Ma — because he's clay-coloured like you. Whose birthday you forget? Not his. Know why? Because I'm dark-skinned like my father, and you dump on me because he used to beat you. See? You can't answer because you know I'm right. The day I turn 18 I'll leave this jail. I would leave now and go back to Grama if I had the money.”

What could she say? Initially she argued with him, but eventually she'd grimace and turn her head away. Now I understand: Paul wasn't getting from her the attention he'd gotten from Grama, his Vincentian classmates, his teachers, and those Haverites who'd renamed him Ma Kirton's Genius. Would have been impossible for her, even if she'd understood his needs. Her and Paul's temperament made for an im­possible relationship. He needed Grama's authoritative presence and spontaneous warmth. Anna had neither. And because Aunt Mercy practically lived with us, someone was always on hand to give Paul the attention he craved.

The first time Paul told Anna to fuck off, I met her sitting on the sofa, her face tear-stained, singing “There is a balm in Gilead.” She recounted what had happened. Paul had ridiculed her attempt to reprimand him for using the expletive. Later Paul gave me the details with relish. “I told her: ‘Ma, everybody knows what fucking is. You've certainly fucked, or I wouldn't be here. Sorry, Ma. I'll say fuck whenever it suits how I feel. Cloacal expressions are good for soul. But you won't know what I'm talking about.'” He stared at me and laughed loud. “Know what that means? I'm not afraid of her and I'm not afraid of you. Now turn that into a cigar and use it.” He sneered and wiggled his head and shoulders before sauntering off.

I had hoped the incident would be a one-time affair, that when alone Paul would reflect on his behaviour and know it was unpleasant and unnecessary. I even expected him to apologize to Anna the next day. Back in St. Vincent, when he got out of line, Grama sent him into our bedroom alone to reflect on his behaviour and, afterwards, asked him to tell her why his behaviour was unacceptable. Sometimes he gave a reason, sometimes he didn't, but he always apologized. But here no apology came, and one week later, his surliness resurfaced. Anna had reprimanded him for something, and he told her she was a crab that should keep on crawling. She said that in that case, he should stay clear of her claws. He said she couldn't identify claws, never mind own them. I couldn't believe he'd speak to her like that — calm and composed, as if he were the parent and she his child. When I intervened, he told me to shut up, that I was just “a defanged adder heading straight into the jaws of a waiting mongoose.”

Thereafter Paul taunted her intermittently. At school he became what he first hated. Up to the end of the second year, he did his school work, but with less diligence, and still kept a playfulness about him, continuing, for instance, the alliterative play we sometimes engaged in since St. Vincent.

Paul: Just listen to my fulminating falcon of a mother.

I: No worse than you, a bellicose, bellowing bull.

Paul: That makes you my bothersome, bestial brother.

I: And you're a tiresome, tyrannical thug.

At which point all three of us broke into laughter.

And he still backslapped me — something he'd started our last year in St. Vincent — and gave me the occasional hug, palm-slap, pound, and high-five: gestures he picked up here. And he'd genuinely inquire how I had done on some paper I'd been working on or some exam I'd been studying for, and was always pleased when the result was very good or excellent. And he'd on occasion share bits of interesting information with me. Like the time he read aloud a passage from
Peoples of Africa
, dealing with the Kpelle practice in which, if the father dies, the oldest son inherits his father's wives, except, of course, the son's mother. “And, Jay, if the father wants to, he has the right to have sex with his sons' wives or the wives of his brothers. I wonder if they still do that.” But I could see he was conflicted, caught between wanting to strengthen our bond and severing it.

And the bolts of inexplicable, gratuitous cruelty! “Your mind is a cornucopia of confusion. Why do I bother talking to you?” Then leaving Anna and focusing on me: “I would educate you too if you had the capacity to absorb it.”

“I'd like to watch you say that to your classmates, to Alfred, maybe.”

“He won't understand what I'm saying.”

“How're you so sure I do?”

“I know you don't, and
your
mother — I was adopted — doesn't have a clue.”

“No point arguing with you. You're smart enough to know that cruelty won't endear you to others.”

“And you're not smart at all. You're a parrot. Your sayings come from Grama. You're like the moon. You shine with borrowed light. Parrot! I'll get you fake parrot feathers from Dollarama.”

“Buy them for yourself. You're the only one here who's flying, straight to God knows where.”

On another occasion, when he'd let fly a few expletives, and Anna begged him not to use that kind of language around her, he got his journal, grinned at her, and read:

You're thirsty, Ma:

Love parched.

Heaven's your mirage:

The oceans of water

Thirst-crazed travellers,

Already delirious,

See in parched deserts.

He closed the journal and stared at her with his mouth half-open, his extended tongue twirling. He knew it annoyed her. “Ma, I need $10,000.”

“Paul, stop your foolishness.”

“I'm serious, Ma.”

“What for?”

“To bury Jay and you. You're the dead, Ma. Your beliefs stink. Soon you'll be stinking too. I must bury you. $10, 000 will do.”

“He's just trying out his bad poetry on us. Ignore the buffoon.”

“And you're a silly loon.”

“And a good cut-arse will get in tune.”

“Try it and you'll be in heaven soon.”

Even Anna couldn't help laughing.

B
Y 13 HE
was in full-blown puberty and brought hell to our apartment. Entropy, I suppose. “Your pot never boils over on the neighbour's stove,” Aunt Mercy often said. He blasted our ears and the neighbours' with hip-hop music. At home he performed his own rap compositions. He'd read a “toast” called “Dolomite” and tried to shock us with his own takes.

I'm Dolomite

Two hundred percent spite

Always ready for a fight

My food is strife

I'll put out your lights

Put you in orbit

Don't gimme no shit

Take this lightning split

Now git, fore I ball my fists

And make you grow tits.

“If you continue like this you'll soon be inviting us to dine on your offal.”

“Offal! Listen to yourself! Shit's the word, man. You're like so fucking corked.” Laughing, he grabbed his crotch, rocked his torso from side to side, and turned the scene into a ghetto sidewalk rap session:

You've eaten my offal all your life

To make you understand

I need a drum and a fife

You think you're clever

But you're a river

Where all and sundry

Empty their sewer.

From this point on I began to worry that we'd lost the Paul that came from St. Vincent. His vulgarity made Anna wince, and when he entered his “rap space,” she covered her ears or went into her bedroom, closed the doors, and turned up the volume on her television.

The neighbours complained about the noise. Anna pleaded with him to turn it down. She even bought him a set of stereo earphones. To no avail. He'd stomp on the floors and increase the volume whenever the neighbours called. One evening during my first-year university, I found two police officers in our living room when I came home. A Jamaican woman had recently moved into the apartment on our left; she didn't return our hellos. She'd knocked on our door and told Paul to turn down his music. All six speakers of his stereo were stacked on each other right up against the wall of her bedroom. He told her: “Instead o' bitching, come let me give you some loving.” She called the police. A month or so after this, Lea Abramovitch, who lived directly under us, called to complain about the noise. He slammed the phone on her. She and Anna were friends of a sort. Just before we came to Montreal Anna had cared for her at the Jewish General and had mentioned that she needed a two-bedroom apartment because her children would be coming in a month, and Ms. Abramovitch had persuaded her brother Saul to let Anna have an apartment without the surcharges he added for people with children. She and Anna exchanged recipes and gave each other gifts of food. Whenever she saw us, she told us to be good boys, to make life easier for Anna, and to study hard so that one day we would make Anna proud. Despite Ms. Abramovitch's pleas, and Paul's apology (he wrote her a letter of apology), Saul ordered us to move. We refused initially, hoping his rage would cool. It was late November, and for two weeks he cut the heat to our apartment, and didn't restore it until Anna agreed to move on January 1.

We moved to Linton, to a bigger, more expensive and, overall, superior flat. The city had just planted trees at the front of the buildings and in the divide to replace, I assumed, those destroyed by the ice storm a year earlier. Our part of Linton is on a gentle slope. At the bottom of the hill, at Victoria, where the street ends, is Coronation School, looking like an ill-placed fortress. The metro and the Van Horne Shopping Centre are a mere two blocks away. Paul could still walk to school. Then the neighbourhood population was visibly Black; some called it Côte des Nègres.

The flat — we're still living in it — is on the first floor and has lots of light. The rooms are bigger too. But the garage is under us, and we hear the cars coming and going and the creaks, bangs, and thuds of the garage door every time it opens and closes. Our turn to live with noise above and below us. From then on we've had our own bedrooms. After we moved in Anna halved Paul's weekly allowance to $10, and Paul has learned — had his head slammed into reality, was how Anna put it — that he can't abuse the neighbours and get away with it.

By then Paul hardly did any schoolwork beyond French, English, and history, but he still read voraciously and watched documentaries. His favourite television stations were PBS, Télé-Québec, TVO and National Geographic. There was always something or other he was hounding me to watch with him.

At school that year, he had a showdown with his biology teacher. A February morning, a little more than a month after we'd been forced to change apartments, I went to buy computer paper at a stationery store in the Côte des Neiges Plaza, just a short distance from where we used to live, and saw Paul — in camo jacket, ochre overalls, the crotch almost at his knees, a blue head-wrap, silver studs in both ears — talking with a group of students in the Harvey's across the street from the shopping plaza. It was 9:27. School started at 8:30.

He ducked when he saw me. His friends — a mix of Blacks, Latin Americans, and Whites, held their breaths, their gaze alternating between Paul and me.

“You're shadowing me or what?” Paul eventually said.

I said nothing.

“I'm too old to need a minder.”

I didn't reply.

“Anyways, I have a free period. See” — one hand behind his head, the other kneading his chin. He glanced around at his schoolmates, and I could see he was vacillating between dissing and cooperating. “You don't trust me? Go ask the principal.”

“I'm on my way.” I beckoned for him to follow. He didn't move. His schoolmates looked on riveted. The joint was silent.

Paul hesitated for a few seconds and then came toward me.

His Black friends steupsed.

“All right, Jay my main man — ” he moved his head this way and that, signalling he was compromising, sparing me the showdown his buddies wanted — “lemme come clean with you.” He was now outside the door. “I'm skipping first class. You caught me, right. Let's shake hands on it and keep it from Ma. You're one cool dude. Right, my adorable bro?” He jerked his head backwards then faced me with his eyes shut. “Anyhow I'm going to class now. No need to get all hepped up. And you, you'll be late for your class” — one hand rubbing the back of his head, the other busy at his chin: a dead give-away.

“I'm working on a school assignment at home, Paul.”

“You don't trust me or what?”

***

He was standing on the sidewalk just outside the school's main entrance when I emerged from the building with a copy of the suspension letter and a photocopy of Paul's
oeuvre
that had caused the suspension. “Jay, Bro, my main man, my cool, cool brother, let's keep this from Ma, okay.” He raised his hand in anticipation of sealing the deal with a high five. “You know how she worries about me. Have a heart! You won't want to burden her any more. How can you be so heartless?”

I looked at him, squinting. It was a stinging cold, sunny, windy morning, and my eyes were tearing. “Paul, what happened to the letter the principal sent Ma?”

Paul grinned, stared at the ground, gave me a darting glance, and resumed looking at the ground. “I took it from the mailbox before you guys could get to it.”

For a while neither of us spoke.

“Tell you what,” Paul said, breaking the silence but continuing to stare at the ground, lifting his eyes occasionally to gauge my reactions. “You'll accompany me the day I'm to be re-admitted, and you'll tell Bégin you're like standing in for Ma. You'll tell him she starts work in a factory at seven and would lose her job if she shows up for work late. You're like my cool brother, right? It's just a little favour, a little favour, man. You know how hard it is for me to like beg anybody for anything.”

“Come. Let's go home,” I said. “To think how hard Ma tries. Every cent she spares she puts aside for our education. And this is how you thank her?”

“Don't be such a fink, Jay. Be cool, for once at least. Don't tell me you're a
délateur
. A snitch. A snoop. Tell Ma and I'll never forgive you. What happened to our buddy system? Spare me this one time. Jay, I won't do it again. I promise.”

He'd been suspended for a week and would be readmitted only if Anna accompanied him to school when the suspension ended. Caught, he told me what had happened, facing me from the far end of the dining table. He'd recorded the entire incident in his journal.

It all began with a verse fantasy he'd composed in which he proposed having sex with Mrs. Bensemana, his biology teacher. He'd circulated it among his classmates and they dared him to send it to her. And he did, by mail, signing it, “your secret admirer.” The class waited, even renamed him Meatman. Weeks passed. Mrs. Bensemana said nothing. The principal never came to find out who'd done it. His classmates were disappointed. They baited him. He took the bait and sent her an unsigned note: “Your secret admirer awaits your urgent response.”

Two days later, biology being his last class that day, Mrs. Bensemana kept him back when the class ended. Her classroom overlooked the school yard. He saw her looking outside. He peeped too and saw his classmates were bunched up down there, staring up at her window. “Shit! I knew she'd like know she'd hit bullseye.

“‘Have a seat, Paul,' she said to me, laughing.

“She sat down on her side of the desk. Her eyes twinkling, she said: ‘Is your nickname Dr. Feelgood?'

“‘I don't know what you mean.'

“She chuckled. ‘Never mind.'

“‘Paul Jackson!' She shook her head slowly and sighed. ‘Such a bright boy! Such a bright, misguided boy.' She shook her head again slowly and stared hard at me for a few moments before continuing. ‘Trying to destroy yourself, Paul? What's the matter with you?' She pulled out the top right drawer of her desk, took a sheet of paper from it, and put it on her desk. It was the poem I'd sent her. She picked it up and read:

Mrs. Bensemana,

In a blue mist

From sexual starvation —

Let me be your salvation.

Let me release you

From the prison of privation.

Let me unlock your fetters

Let me feed you meat

That matters.

Desire for you

Is a whorl of briars

Flaming in me.

I'll be my own funeral pyre,

Unless your love, gentle as a lyre,

A purring river, wash over me

And quench the flames

Rampaging in me
.

“She guffawed, paused, guffawed again. Then her face turned ugly, a mask. For a while she stared in front of her and said nothing. Then in almost a whisper, she asked: ‘Paul, how did you think you could get away with this?' She smoothed the back of her head. ‘I'm very happily married. I thought you had been listening to Aretha Franklin's “Dr. Feelgood.”'

“She stopped speaking and gave me another burning stare. ‘Here's a bit of advice. Take it for what it's worth: The benighted, the unfortunate, and the desperate — the people your generation calls losers — look for valorization in sex. It's all they have when they have it.
You
are not benighted;
you
are bright and, I hope, not weak.' She continued to stare at me. ‘All living things engage in sex. There's nothing elevating or debasing about it. It's a biological function. As a Black adolescent, you won't want to be branded as a stud. I'll speak to Monsieur Gaugin and tell him to let you do a project on the subject. You've heard of Phillip Rushton, haven't you?'

“I shook my head.

“‘Find out who he is and what his views are. Now back to your
opus magnum.'

“‘You can't prove I wrote it.' By now I'd stopped trembling.

“‘
I can't!
' Her eyes narrowed, a hardness came into her face; she bit her lower lip. ‘Paul, I always knew it was you. Which of my other students can write like this? Mrs. Mehta and I had a good laugh over it.' She locked eyes with me. ‘Just confess and get it over with. You'll get a lenient punishment.' She lifted her arms and spread her palms like an open book. She kept them like that for at least twenty seconds. ‘Your choice.' She shrugged.

“‘You're bluffing.'

“‘I am?' She pressed the intercom on the wall behind her desk. A couple of minutes later, Bégin entered, bleating like sheep in hot weather, a manila folder in his hand.

“‘How're we doing, Mrs. Bensemana?'

“‘Not very well, Monsieur Bégin.'

I visualized Bégin as Paul spoke: raw-red knuckles, which he opens and closes and sometimes cuffs while talking to you; aquamarine eyes with swollen pink-rimmed lids; flaking patches of skin around his lips.

“Bégin removed a sheet of paper, and read from it. ‘Dear Mr. Bégin, I found this in my son's school bag.' He held up a copy of my poem. ‘X told me that a certain Paul Jackson, a classmate of his, wrote it. His classmates have even renamed him Meatman.'

“Jay, I went cold. Man, that slimy Bégin. We think he's gay.”

“‘Young man, today Mrs. Bensemana said to me that if you were penitent and prepared to apologize to her in front of the class, the matter would end there —
l'affaire serait terminée là
.'

“I shook my head. Man, there's no
cred
in that. That's a losers' game.” Paul grinned. “Your game, Jay. If Bégin wasn't gay I'd have given him a wink.”

“‘Now, I'll throw the book at you. Have it your way.'

“I cupped my hands and pushed them towards him. ‘Go ahead. Throw it.'” Paul stopped talking briefly and stared at me. “Jay, my only regret is that I couldn't make a video of the whole thing.”