Savage (3 page)

"No, not because of that, duh," I said, cutting her off. "I think he'll win the belt from Macho Man tonight."

"You think so?" Holly scratched her knee, the tiny hairs on her arms and legs standing up among sparse freckles. "Mom said she found your newt on the floor. Did it get out?"

"It always does. I had to put some records on the top of the tank."

"Oh."

"But yeah," I said to Holly, "I think Steamboat is gonna win because he's a lot quicker. I think he's got better stamina. He's wicked." I had just seen a bloody match on television between former Intercontinental Champion Tito Santana and the current champion Macho Man but missed some of it because Dad wanted me to put my bike away properly in the garage. I tried to tape it but couldn't find an empty tape in time.

The heads of two devout Savage fans in the row in front of us turned around.

"No way, man. Macho's gonna kill 'em. Steamboat's a wimp, ohhh yeeaahh!"

I could smell their Right Guard, they were older, bigger. They were chewing on candy, stuffing their braced faces with a lacquer of sugar nectars and other bright, noisy foods. Holly sniffed the air in disgust at them, disgust for the way their concession-bought candy had caked along their ugly braced teeth.

I wanted nothing to do with them. One boy continued at a lower volume. "Macho Madness all the way," the other declared before both turned to face the empty ring.

"Ohhhhhh yyyyyyeeeeaaaahhhh!" one boy said, nodding and manoeuvring his hands in manic finger gestures.

I heard one of the boys tell his friend in a low rumble, "Stupid kid likes that fag Steamboat."

I swung my legs. I liked Savage OK, but he had won the Intercontinental title in February by reaching into his yellow trunks and pulling out a piece of steel, hitting Tito Santana in the head with it when the referee wasn't looking. I didn't trust him.

"So, it's a title match though? That could happen?" Holly asked. "Who's better?"

"Well..." I said, a bit quieter, still feeling goosebumps. This was like the times on the couch on rainy days, watching videos we'd borrow from the library, when the rain and the movies and the thunder rolled over the house—a few cans of diet cola, a few handfuls of candy, watermelon—and how we'd tug on the Saturday-morning couch blanket until some boundary-smashing question would send me into a fit of shame: "Do you jerk off?...Yet?...You will. All guys do...But you're not a guy."

And now here, my birthday gift: the wrestling match.

"Do you have their dollies?" Holly asked.

"You mean
action figures
? Yes. I have both. I want Bundy though, can't find him anywhere."

"So who is going to win? Ricky or Randy?"

"I think Ricky is faster, but the Macho Man is tricky, and stronger. And smarter—maybe."

Holly pulled out a small emery board.

"Who else is fighting?"

"JYD is versing King Kong Bundy," I said. I was sniffing the program, holding the page under my nose as if it were a fence to peer over.

"You mean versus."

"Yeah."

"JYD? Oh wait—Junkyard God, right?" Holly said.

"Not ‘God'—‘Dog.'"

"That's what I meant," Holly said, a decapitated string of red licorice dangled limp in her hand.

"Who do you think will win that one?" She now had the program on her lap and was digging into a small stash of candy in her bag.

She pointed at Bundy's name. I scratched my chin. I looked into the arena's crevices; the sparse audience looked tiny and distant.

"Well? Bundy or Bow-wow?"

I thought about it: Bundy had been furious since losing the cage match to Hulk Hogan in April at Wrestlemania 2, but Junkyard Dog was friends with Hulk and wouldn't want to let the Hulkster down.

"The God! Bow-wow-wow!" I howled, stirring with excitement. "The God Dog damn it Dog!"

Holly tilted her neck back and offered me a piece of gum. "What time is it?"

She rubbed both hands over her knees.

"Eight-fifteen," I said, noticing the ring attendants fussing with a turnbuckle.

"Where's Dad?" I wondered, reluctant to turn my neck to look where I imagined Dad might emerge and burst into the ring in some ridiculous gardening costume.

"Washroom," Holly answered, nodding toward the nearest exit. "Or maybe he went to the ring."

"That would be amazing."

"I'm a bit hungry. Where's the popcorn geek?"

"Did you talk to Grammy? She called yesterday."

"No, no one told me," Holly said, pulling her gum out in a long strip and sticking it under her seat.

"Whaddyathink Mom's doing?" I asked.

"Dunno. Talking to herself? Folding your underwear?"

"Gross."

Holly was laughing.

"Mom's probably vacuuming her farts," she said, howling even louder as an announcer stepped into the ring.

Dad returned to his seat as the house lights went down.

"OK, show time, Nate!" Holly said, squeezing my forearm. Standing up partially, I ground my feet into the Gardens' unkempt skin.

*

"Goodnight Nate," Mom said, closing my basement bedroom door. "Glad you guys had a good time tonight."

The eerie and galactic light waned to a thin slit. "
Shooooooooooooo-wooooooooooooooooo-waaaaaaah-kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
," I said in a low murmur, dubbing a spaceship door closing. "Sweet dreams," I said.

"You too," Mom said. This specific two-word phrase, you too, was the hook I always waited for, that exchange, the back and forth.

As I lay there, I remembered some of my Mom's jokes from earlier in the school year when I was sick a lot. She took me for blood tests because no one knew what was wrong with me. She joked that the doctor would use a foot pump to take my blood and that I'd have to start paying rent at his office. I just got so nervous going to school and dreaded the thought of doing presentations. The work was piling up, and I faked illness for about a month straight.

Sleeping in the basement for a year now, the enamelled luxury of my own concrete washing sink and access to the workshop gave me a sense of bounty. The floor was partially covered in an oval-shaped maroon rug; the floor was tiled and cool, especially in the summer. Calculating the dimensions of the floor tiles (10" x 2¼"), often cleaned with bleach and water, the grit sopped up with a cornflower-blue dishtowel...these tiles helped ledger my world.

My paper route that summer had been filled with terrifying news of a girl my age lured out of her house to have her photograph taken at Varsity Stadium. Her body was found a couple of days later. Thirty-two times I saw her face as I carried papers up driveways and quietly tucked them into screen doors or milk boxes.

You too…

Soon I would be asleep, counting flying elbow drops instead of sheep.

*

The remaining days of summer filled themselves with sun-glazed hours, bike riding or ghosting in the basement listening to the radio. When at home, Dad skulked and trotted with Tyrannosaurus procedure. It had been a tough summer, especially when weeks earlier Dad broke my hockey stick in two over his knee right in front of me! Just for leaving it in the driveway.

I looked at the broken Sher-Wood stick. I had bought it at a garage sale for a dollar. I was being careful in how I picked it up; perhaps it could be fastened back together somehow. I had this piece of paper that I wrote all these things down on, and how I loved them.
Sher-Wood hockey stick. Orange Corvette Hot Wheels
. If I lost something, I'd write it down on this faded four-fold piece of paper. There were dozens of entries haphazardly queued on the page: everything from broken toys to dates Grammy had visited, to lost movie-ticket stubs, to items of clothing.

A few days later, I saw the hockey stick pieces stuffed like body parts into the sides of our iron garbage can resting at the curb, awaiting extinction. I imagined how I would fix it with a plastic blade shaft and some screws. This reconstructive surgery hung enormous in my psyche as I tried to calm myself with distraction and fantasy.

2 )
Temptation

Thursday, September 29th, 1988

T
he first three weeks of grade nine were like watching a grade-school photograph get aged for some missing-person article. Grade nine was all the torture and terror I'd seen in panty-raiding, locker-stuffing teen sex comedies over the decade.

I noticed many students at Leaside were people I hadn't spoken to since grade five. (I'd left Northlea in 1985 for Cosburn's Late French Immersion program for grade six through eight). Now, colliding in pseudo-recognition, in that strange divide between rudeness and reality, I felt myself wishing everyone were authentically strangers, beyond any clinging semblance of familiarity.

Save for Andrew, it seemed I would spend the next four years stone-faced, passing these equally denim-clad teens in laid-back oblivion. Not exactly what I thought would happen.

"My cousin told me Jake Cavers was at this party on Saturday and pushed all these tables over," Andrew said, unlocking his bike near the tennis court's tall fence. The sun was all over his face.

"Why?"

"He was partying," Andrew said, pulling his bike from the fence to the sidewalk.

"Where's your bike?"

"My chain is fucked up."

"Later," he shouted, turning his head from me as he peeled out of Leaside High's sprawling school property. "I'll call you later about the cottage!"

The rest of the day was gobbled by sun and daydreaming: me gliding around on my blue-and-yellow Norco 18-speed mountain bike, tucking my neck as I'd edge into Glenbrae at the last minute or swerve and circle around my block via Broadway, left on Laird to Glenvale. These Moments were the best: the rest of the day was mine—alone in the house until at least 5:30 p.m. Holly usually went over to Elizabeth's straight from school to do who knows what—smudge their lips on samples they took from the cosmetics counter or work on school assignments, practice their French, smoke weed. Holly had cornered me in the hallway just as 9th period was letting out. "Why so gloomy today? You're all head down, dead-boy sad!"

I said nothing. Fuck her, I didn't feel gloomy—just waiting to hear about the cottage on both ends, if Mom would let me and if I was in fact invited for sure.

Holly sped up behind a bomb of blonde and red manes and disappeared down the stairwell.

Now, under the late-afternoon sun, I sprint-walked for as long as I could manage, trying to distance myself from any neighbour recognition. I didn't talk to them or their children in class, and wasn't going to speak to them out in the wilderness of our common real estate. Andrew was the only person I wanted to talk to, or
could
talk to, in all honesty. He was rapidly becoming my entire universe.

*

The distribution of anxiety in our house had a four-pronged filtering system; occasionally we all suffered at the exact same time. The emotional magnetic fields twitched like a polygraph test needle—tarnishing a once-clean parchment, ledgering the erratic levels.

The cellar's stairwell cupboard swelled pregnant with two cases of beer, and sometimes four bottles were withdrawn in a night; Dad luxuriating in his post-meatloaf appetite, a little supply and demand in the works. Regardless of inventory, I grew accustomed to the chain-like clanking of empties stacked on the stairs, trophies of disgrace hugging the top step, each brown bottle an ugly tooth in wait. Why couldn't he put the empties back in the case?
Why
? I blasted each bottle with my eyes—at odds with their ugly brown presence.

Placing my school bag on the bed, I scanned my bedroom, noticing subtle changes in the décor. I powered up my stereo, the turntable instantly starting its laborious whirl.

The phone rang.

"So, you're coming to the cottage this weekend? YES or NO? I need to know now...we're leaving at 4:30 tomorrow."

I paused, aware how Andrew's voice was lowering, mine still squeaked a bit. "Um..."

I saw a scrap of paper: Mom had written, "
ANDREW COTTAGE
?" Taking this as a positive indication, I shouted, "Oh yeah!"

"Cool."

"You guys pickin' me up?"

"No, you gotta come here." Andrew said, adding with a chuckle, "Bring money this time, and pack a swimsuit..."

As Andrew continued to laugh, I thought of his house. It was just the way my mind worked, visually branding each person I know with solid shape, like the way an animal or baby becomes familiar with objects; the chocolate-stained banisters and the tiles of kitchen with the cartoon water-blue mesmerized me, the regal authenticity compared to the weak tones my house was done up in: lazy soft pink, pale scuffed mustard, boring off-white.

"I'll do a wash tonight." I said, returning to the conversation.

"Egg-wash!" Andrew blurted out with reverb into my ear. "Ha-Ha-Ha!"

"I hate that, I don't know what it means but I hate it."

"
Whatcha-gonna-do about it?
" Andrew said.

"I'm gonna take it to the max, yeah! You're goin' straight to the danger zone, dig it?!" I said in my lamest, strained, tonsil-dragged voice. I had let the phone cord twirl around my leg and was now trying to kick myself free.

"Get over it. We're
not
wrestling. Besides, you know who'd win." Andrew said.

"Well, are we going go-karting?"

"Yeah, probably. We can go out on the water too, on Saturday."

"That sounds cool," I said. I was about to ask Andrew about how much the go-karts cost when I heard a faucet running upstairs.

The alarm clock on my dresser glowered in green digital numbers. I heard three footsteps, the refrigerator opening...more noises.

It was Thursday afternoon; nothing special about Thursday afternoon registered. A lawnmower cut out.

"Hold on," I said. "I gotta go. There's a burglar in the house."

"What?" Andrew said.

"And they're hungry," I whispered, adding, "Someone's in the kitchen. I'll call you back later," and put the receiver down. The stereo was still record-spinning.