The Antagonist (15 page)

“Jesus Christ!” I shout.

“Why the
fuck
,” yells Gord. “Can’t you forgive yourself for that?”

“What the hell are you doing?” I yell back. You would think after so many years of watching my father fly into rages, he wouldn’t be able to surprise me like this, but I am near-speechless.

“A
book
! Now he thinks he’s gotta write a book! It’s not enough that those bastards put a sixteen-year-old boy away for standing up against some drug-dealing
scum?
It’s not enough he lost his own
mother?
”

“Cut it out, Gord,” I say. “Calm down.”

“Oh and I know exactly what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna let that little bastard off the hook! Just like you always have. Just like everybody did.”

“It’s not about Croft, Gord.”

“And you’re gonna blame yourself. And you’re gonna blame me. Well you go ahead and blame me, Gordie. You blame your old man all you want in that book. And don’t ever call. And pretend I’m dead if that’s how you like it. But I’ll be
god-damned
[and here Gord bashes his crutch into the shattered elephant twice to emphasize the compound word] if I’ll have you in there all hours of the day writing a
god-damn
[elephant pretty much dust now] plea for forgiveness for something that was not your
god-damn
fault!”

And with the final double crutch bash embellishing Gord’s last
god-damn
, the tea tray flips over, spewing elephant ash and pinwheel sludge across the carpet.

Before I can react, he swings his crutch to the floor and wrenches himself to his feet.

“Gord,”
I say, reaching for him.

“Get away from me,” says Gord, barely managing to stay upright. I see his face contort with pain, and the merciless way the crutch has jammed itself into his armpit. “Fuck off,” he adds, pivoting on his crutch so that now I’m facing his scrawny, shuddering back. “I’m taking a piss.”

And off he stumps to the toilet.

08/03/09, 12:12 a.m.

THE STORIES WADE BRINGS
back from Goldfinger’s provide them with hours of entertainment. Now that he no longer works there, but only does business, he has enough distance from the place to comfortably laugh off its squalor. Every once in a while, the boys from the Temple will head down for a drink and be welcomed by Lorna of the bad teeth and bruised upper arms, Ivor of the sweaty face and paranoia. They will sit and listen to Ivor’s conspiracy theories for what seems like hours, sometimes. And they will notice how the occasional other adventurous clutches of university kids — slumming like themselves — will glance over at their table in admiration. It is one thing to have a beer or two at Goldfinger’s, soaking up its reprobate ambiance, but another thing altogether to actually fraternize with its habitants.

What Rank doesn’t mention to his friends is how the first time he walked into Goldfinger’s a feeling came over him like:
Ah. Home.
Not
home
in the comforting sense of the word, but in the sense of belonging. Which for Rank had nothing to do with comfort.

More than once he thought he saw Mick Croft in the crowd at Goldfinger’s. But it turned out to be simply some version of him. Turned out there were countless versions of Mick Croft in the world, countless Collie Chaissons too, countless human riffs on the various personalities Rank encountered in the Youth Centre. There were versions of Rank’s dad, even. Not as many of those maybe, but one or two. Tosspot Gords who had never met Sylvies, lacking impetus to morph into upstanding family men.

Turned out these types existed all over the place — not just on the coast where Rank grew up. You only had to know where to find them.

Where you found them in a university burg such as this was at a place like Goldfinger’s.

Ah
.

Ivor’s title was “manager,” but he mostly acted as bouncer when he wasn’t running shady errands for the proprietor of Goldfinger’s, whose name, unremarkably, was Richard, but who looked and acted so much like a gangster the guys could barely suppress their yuks whenever they noticed him slithering into and out of the back office. The boys from the Temple often accompanied Wade down to Goldfinger’s early in the evening when he went to pick up his product from Ivor. At eight or so they were practically the only customers, and the place was cavernous. But this gave them time to take in the operation, to chat with Lorna about the military ex-boyfriend who was stalking her and about whom his superiors at the base, when she complained, refused to do anything. To watch Ivor soak through his Motörhead T-shirt as he explained why AIDS was the result of a U.S. government project intended to kill off drug addicts and inner-city blacks.

“Fags was just a bonus!” Ivor would insist, eyes forever bulging. Ivor took the government’s crusade against drug addicts personally, for obvious reasons. “They said to themselves, them scientists, ‘Fags, blacks and druggies. We scored a hat trick, boys!’”

Wade only dealt with Ivor. Richard didn’t as much as look at Wade, although he sometimes eyed the group of them sitting at their table early in the evening and calling flirtatiously to Lorna.

“The term ‘greasy eye’,” muttered Kyle one such evening, after they’d all sat holding their breaths while Richard appraised them from his doorway, “has never been more appropriate.”

When the office door shut they cracked up en masse.

Wade never got invited into the back office, where the boys surmised there was a polar bear rug with the head still attached, a fireplace, a wet bar, a cache of weapons hidden behind a fake bookcase, at least two meth-addicted prostitutes, and an overflowing safe.

Richard would appear in the doorway, cast a greasy eye, then turn to the bar. “
Lorna
,” he would say. And he would, no word of lie, snap his fingers at her.

The guys would hold it in until she too disappeared into the office.

Then:
“Lorna,”
Rank would say, snapping his fingers. “I got some new product to try out and I need a pair of tits to snort it offa. Chop, chop.”

“Lorna,”
Wade would say, snapping. “Blow job. While we’re young.”

It was all fun and games at this distance. The boys were of the Temple and every once in a while they came down from the Temple to visit Goldfinger’s where they would do their best to make Lorna smile and flash her bad teeth, where they would question Ivor about the great AIDS conspiracy, intent on tripping him up with some inescapable nugget of logic (it never happened — Ivor’s fantasy was airtight, and arguing with him about it just made it more so, was like slathering it in sealant) but when they had enough they could return to the Temple, down a final beer, snap their fingers at one another for a few final inebriate chuckles before passing out in their respective chairs.

It was all fun and games until Rank lost his scholarship and Ivor, inevitably one night, observed to Rank he was a “big fuckin guy.”

“Yes, I am a big fuckin guy,” agreed Rank. It was a point in the evening where all Rank was really capable of, in terms of conversation, was agreeing with what was said to him and repeating it back in a mushy voice.

“I can talk to Rich if you want,” said Ivor. “Heard you saying you’re looking for work.”

Rank didn’t believe he had said that, exactly. What he remembered was bragging loudly to the patrons of Gold-
finger’s about how big his penis was and saying he would display it “for a small donation” to any of the ladies present. The music had been very loud and he didn’t think anyone beyond his table — and the women at the next table whose attention he’d been trying to get — had overheard.

“Oh gross,” says Adam, a few days later when Rank mentions Ivor’s invitation to the guys. “Don’t work at Goldfinger’s, man. You can work anywhere — don’t work there.”

“You totally have to do it!” enthuses Kyle. “We’ll finally find out what’s in the back office. You can free the meth-addicted hookers! You’ll be their hero! They can stay with us while they rebuild their lives.”

“Work at the campus pub,” says Adam. “If you want to work somewhere.”

“What’s wrong with Goldfinger’s?” says Rank.

“Yeah,” says Wade, offended on behalf of his associates.

“Adam is a class snob,” pronounces Kyle. This is a term he’s learned recently from a politically active girlfriend who has spent two summers volunteering in El Salvador. “He thinks you’re better than Goldfinger’s, Rank.”

“Trust me,” says Rank, remembering the
Ah
feeling when he first walked through the tavern doors. “I’m not.”

Let’s press the pause button here. An omnipotent narrator can do that sort of thing. Let’s just stop and, with the benefit of adult hindsight, compare the opposing influences of Adam and Kyle at this moment — their conflicting versions of obliviousness. Because I think we can agree: just because Adam happened to be right, he wasn’t any less oblivious about what Rank was getting into than Kyle. True, Kyle was wholly oblivious. He was enthusiastically oblivious, even. It did not occur to Kyle for a second that Goldfinger’s could exist as anything other than a joke — that Goldfinger’s was something other than a kind of vaudeville show, a pageant performed for us college kids. On some level, Kyle really believed that Lorna’s bruised upper arms were not in fact bruised upper arms — they were an ironic commentary on bruised upper arms, a parody if you will. Kyle had never experienced the idea of bruised women as anything but a satire of a certain kind of lifestyle, and he couldn’t get his head around the fact that when they stepped into Goldfinger’s, they were face to face with that world itself. He didn’t believe that world existed, really. He believed it was a representation. In Richard’s back office there wasn’t the rug, the weapons, the wet bar, the safe. Not really. There was nothing — that’s what Kyle really believed. It was backstage, and Richard simply stood behind the door, adjusting his airplane collar, combing pomade into his hair, waiting for his cue.

Kyle didn’t know he believed this, but that’s what he believed. Let’s forgive him for it. He was barely twenty.

Now how about Adam?

Adam is a thoughtful guy, we’ll admit, but he’s operating on instinct here. Of all four buddies, he has always been the least enthusiastic about visiting Goldfinger’s, even though he’s certainly shown no aversion to the product Wade acquires there. But unlike the rest of them, he doesn’t care to hang out in the bar. He’ll do it, but he isn’t keen. He has no interest whatsoever in catching a glimpse of Lorna’s teeth. He’ll only listen to Ivor’s elaborate claims about how the first instance of AIDS occurred in Manhattan as opposed to Africa, like most people have been duped into believing (“Monkeys! How you gonna catch it from a monkey?”), for so long. Is this because Adam is smarter than the rest of them? Is Adam’s radar for danger more finely attuned? No. Adam just finds the place distasteful. Simple as that.

Okay, maybe it’s not fair to call him a class snob, as Kyle was so happy to do. If we give Adam the benefit of the doubt — which is only fair — we can explain it like this. Adam, like Kyle, is oblivious to a point, but he is also perceptive. Intuitive. He is a future author, you know. Maybe it’s not appropriate to reveal this out of the blue. Maybe it’s not fair of your humble narrator to jerk you into the future in this way. But, yes. Adam will go on to write novels, or one novel at least, a novel that critics will describe as “devastatingly perceptive.” Let it be said: Adam, even now, barely into his twenties, is a perceptive son of a bitch. He perceives something about Goldfinger’s — something Kyle is missing, something Kyle just doesn’t have enough personal depth to believe in. But Adam does possess that depth. He intuits that behind the joke of Goldfinger’s is the reality of Goldfinger’s. He doesn’t quite grasp what that reality is, but he feels it. He believes in it. Unlike Kyle, on some level he respects it.

Press play.

“You wanna be a bouncer?” says Adam. “At Goldfinger’s? Come on.”

“I dunno,” says Rank, feeling that Adam is being prissy — feeling insulted, somehow. How dare Adam suppose Rank is too good to work at Goldfinger’s? Who does he think he is? “What else am I gonna be?”

“Like, anything,” says Adam. “Pack groceries. Work in the library. But you wanna get puked on, you wanna wrestle drunks and crack skulls? Be my guest.”

Their eyes connect through Adam’s glasses when he says the words:
crack skulls
. But it’s the way he said that other thing — like Rank needed his permission —
be my guest.
This is what decides it.

Yes! Rank does it, ultimately, out of spite.

08/03/09, 11:13 p.m.

Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Well, it does, a little, when you consider what took place between them only a few nights before. Something both have up until this point pretended not to remember.

It had been sort of a bad day all around. Rank had been in a bit of a state, brooding on the fleshy
smack
that rang out from Kyle’s bedroom the night before and the soft grunt of female pain he is pretty sure he heard in counterpoint. Kyle had been in there with Janine, the championship highland dancer with zero chest to speak of. And before that, Rank had discovered a poem by T.S. Eliot in the library which for some reason jacked his stress about school and his irritation with Kyle to unreasonable levels. And before
that
, earlier that afternoon, Rank had met with the registrar to discuss what exactly his status was now that he was no longer the recipient of a hockey scholarship. The registrar — a minty-smelling lady with a
Dead Poets Society
poster on the wall behind her — gave him to understand that everything would be fine, no worries whatsoever, as long as his tuition was paid in full next semester and he kept his GPA up. Easy! At which point Rank decided not to worry about tuition for the time being and sequester his ass in the library to embark on his new career as an academic achiever.

Whereupon he opened the voluminous anthology of English literature — which all by itself had cost forty fucking dollars — and found himself, once again, a trinket of the gods.

Let us go then, you and I.

Whereupon he closed the voluminous anthology of English literature — which all by itself had cost forty fucking dollars — and decided it was time to get drunk.

If Kyle had been home when Rank arrived, it might have calmed things between them. As it was, however, there was only Adam hanging out by himself, using the empty house to study in, and Rank was grateful. He didn’t want to think about Kyle, he told himself. When in fact, for some reason, all he could think about was Kyle. Kyle had swelled like a Macy’s balloon in his mind, obliterating the minty registrar, the terrifying moment in the library — everything.

Kyle, and the sounds from Kyle’s bedroom. The loud noise Rank knows he heard, followed by the soft noise he is almost sure he heard.

The twisting, seething never-the-same river of his thoughts as he yanked Adam to his feet to accompany him to the liquor store and talked a blue streak in order to distract them both, went something like this: Kyle was
such a dick
. Kyle thought he was God’s gift. Kyle paraded himself around campus like he owned it. Sometimes, if you hailed Kyle from a distance, he engaged in an elaborate ritual of greeting. He would point to you, then to his own chest, then to his crotch. Nobody knew precisely what it was supposed to mean, but everybody knew approximately. This pantomime all of a sudden struck Rank, who had once laughed at it, as an asshole thing to do.
Me, my dick. Me, my dick. You? No. Me. My dick.

Kyle was constantly getting laid. Yearning, sometimes sobbing, women were always showing up at the Temple in the middle of the night. Kyle took a kind of pride in this — you could see it. He’d laugh about it with the boys the following day.

He gave girls shitty nicknames behind their back. A girl they knew named Selina, he’d dubbed
Vaselina
. He was the one who started calling Tina
Tiny
once she put on weight. He’d done Tina long ago, way back in first year. He didn’t have to be nice to Tina anymore.