The Antagonist (2 page)

Consider this the first chapter.

05/24/09, 3:12 p.m.

DO WHAT YOU WANT
. Keep as much of a “paper trail” as you want, I haven’t made any threats. What happened to freedom of the page? And I didn’t use the word “bloody” five times, I only used it two times. You are counting “bloodily” and “bleeding,” which are two completely different words. I can’t believe I have to explain the fundamentals of the English language to a celebrated wordsmith like yourself. What I sent was a literary document, just like the one you published. How many times did you use the word “blood” and “bloody” in your book? A lot more than me I bet.

I contacted you on Facebook, I asked if I could email you my story, and you said:

Sure! I’d be delighted to take a look.

I’m keeping a paper trail on this end too you know.

Maybe now you’re getting an idea how it feels to read something about yourself that you’ve had no hand in and have no control over. Like those cola commercials, when they were using footage of dead celebrities, do you remember that? Fred Astaire, smiling his slow, smirky smile at a refreshing can of cola in lieu of Ginger. And some people said it was ghoulish, it was like grave-robbing to sell pop.

So how does it feel to have your grave robbed?

To continue.

I was born, small town, prick, goddess.

I was just about to start writing about Sylvie. I thought I should commemorate her before anyone else, first and foremost, because she plays such a small role, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, having died right out of the gate. But then, all of a sudden, I remembered who I was talking to and now I’m feeling protective of her.

She was still more or less freshly dead when I met you in first year — which made me the mess that I was, the emotional disaster zone you were eventually able to take such incredible advantage of. Let’s just take a little break at this point and acknowledge a single fact: my mother had died, and you put it in your book. It wasn’t a big deal, in your book — nothing that should have been a big deal was made into a big deal. It didn’t have any consequence, my mother’s death — I mean,
your character’s
mother’s death. Didn’t kick off a police investigation or a funeral full of teeth-gnashing, clothes-rending mourners. It did nothing, it was a just a thing that had happened to this guy —
his mom died, by the way
. Background information. It’s mentioned once and never again.

Imagine what you would have done with her if I’d given you more to work with. Even now I don’t trust you. So fuck you, Sylvie stays with me. You can have the prick — who I can’t help but notice got even less play in your novel than my mother. Like zero. I find that puzzling considering how much I used to complain about him to you guys. Dead Sylvie was allowed in, but poor alive-and-kicking Gord barely made the cut. Which is hilarious compared to the reality because — you know. What I wouldn’t have given and so forth.

All you guys from the house, you and Kyle and Wade, you wondered what the hell I was doing there half the time — why I bothered to hang out with people like you. I was feared and massive and you guys were — in the parlance of guys like me, guys who played sports — kind of gay. Right? I don’t think you’ll dispute that. I mean generally speaking. You sat around getting high and listening to Van Morrison when nobody in the world was listening to Van Morrison anymore. Wade even had a poster of Van Morrison. It was so embarrassing. And anyway I show up at that party they had for homecoming week in first year and I start making out with the poster of Van Morrison, like I’ve pinned poor Van against the wall and am sexually assaulting him, and you guys are like Oh my god that’s the guy from the freshman mixer who chugged all the purple Jesus right out of the barrel and then vomited into the barrel and then started chugging that, who in Christ’s name let him in? But you’re delighted to have me, I can tell, because I am — and you sure as hell can’t deny this now, Adam — a Character.

So that’s why you hung out with me. I livened things up. I brought colour and physicality into your world. I shoved you into walls, got you in headlocks, squashed you up against unwilling women at various functions and held you there until both parties gave in.

But why did I hang out with
you
pussies? That was always the question no one on either side of the equation could capably answer. Why did I quit hockey in second year, losing my scholarship, so I could lounge stoned with you guys slouched in Kyle’s idiotic beanbag chair wasting an entire afternoon flinging Wade’s vinyl Grateful Dead across the room and into the sink?

Because Rank’s fucking crazy, people used to say.

And that was correct. That’s how I would’ve explained it too. But I’m a grown man now with the wisdom of many accumulated years and now I see that I was crazy in a very specific way. It was a layered kind of madness; it had texture. One, I was crazy with grief. So crazed I didn’t even know it. I thought I was fine. I figured this was simply how life went for a motherless young man just kicking off his twenties. I thought, as I chugged my purple vomit to the cheers of countless admirers, things were chugging along quite nicely. Mom was dead, sure. But look how popular I was! And at least I was away from Dad.

And that’s the thing — that’s where I was mistaken. There’s where all the underlying craziness, the bad kind of craziness, the kind that sneaks up on you — that snuck up on all of us — was lurking. In the knowledge I was kidding myself.

What happened happened, Adam, because I existed in a constant, desperate panic of aversion.

I hung out with you pussies because you were as unlike my father as any men I’d ever met.

05/25/09, 4:01 p.m.

I was born the illegitimate offspring of fornicators, passed like a puck to the nuns (which is what was done with us B-words in that particular time and place) and slapshot straight into the upstanding, two-parent home of Gord and Sylvie. Goal! Now I was somebody’s son.

Fast-forward through my childhood, because my childhood is mostly her. Sylvie playing peekaboo (
I seeeeee you
). Sylvie telling me never to hide on her. Crying. Telling me it wasn’t funny, it was no joke. I’d been under the porch step, directly beneath her feet as she called and called. At first it was funny, and then it wasn’t. I heard her start to cry, and then I was too scared to move, too ashamed. Making your mother cry was the worst thing you could do.

Don’t ever ever do that, she said. I want you right where I can see you.

It’s funny how it’s the memories of shame that hang on longest.

For example, I think about my life leading up to the moment you and I stopped being associated with each other — and it was an actual moment, wasn’t it? You remember. A decisive, incontrovertible moment like the moment a blade comes down. Instead of one massive obstruction, you end up with two useless halves. But at least things aren’t so complicated anymore.

Let me start that again. I think about my life leading up to the moment you and I stopped being associated with each other, and if I were to write the key incidents down on a piece of paper I’d end up with a kind of grocery list of shame. In fact I’ve done this, and in fact that is precisely what I ended up with. Bullet points. Shame-pellets.

I was ashamed that I worked at my father’s Icy Dream as a teenager — not slinging soft-serve, but the other kind of work I did for him. Then I was ashamed when I tried out for hockey in order to get out of working at Icy Dream (as long as I was busy crushing my fellow man — be it on the ice or in the ID parking lot — my father was happy).

Then I was ashamed I played so well, which is something I can’t really explain — the joy I got out of it when all I’d really been expecting, to be honest, was a means of shirking ice cream duty. And I was ashamed of my hockey scholarship, which no one — neither me nor Gord — saw coming. I was ashamed of the tweedy university it took me to. I was ashamed of going to university. I was ashamed that all of the guys on the team were like me and all of you guys from the house were nothing like me. That is, I was nothing like you. I was ashamed I quit hockey after only a year. I was ashamed to find myself hanging out with you pussies, with whom — to my continued shame — I had nothing in common. I was ashamed as my good standing with the university ticked away grade by dwindling grade, and that I no longer had any money to pay for tuition or housing. I was ashamed when I stopped going to classes and started bouncing at Goldfinger’s.

At which point, it was like I had come full circle.

And then, as I think you know, the bullets blur together in a single, spreading oil slick of shame that coated me like some flapping, flailing seabird. Or maybe I am too big to compare myself to a seabird. More like some bellowing walrus flopping around on the oil-slick rocks, splattering his fellow marine life in filth.

And I understand wanting to get away from me at that point, I really do. Wanting not to be contaminated — pulled under in my wake, or rolled on top of in my panic.

But I’ve moved on, Adam. It’s been a lot of years since then. I’ve put it behind me, as people do.

Except, not you. And you can only imagine my surprise. Adam: the first one to go, the first to get out of the way before shit could meet fan. Backing up, arms in the air. The guy who let me believe for the rest of my life I had been too much for him. That I was not worth the aggro; that he wanted no part of the bad-news contagion that constituted my life.

That it should turn out you wanted everything to do with it. That you should want it, in fact, for yourself.

05/25/09, 6:17 p.m.

MY ADVICE TO YOU
Adam is to sit back and enjoy the story. Okay? Stop whining, stop threatening (it’s pathetic and besides I don’t know how you expect to serve me “notice” whatever that means if you don’t know where I am) and for Christ’s sake stop interrupting. You’re like one of those assholes at the movies who can’t shut up, who keeps asking questions or complaining in a loud voice about how lame the dialogue is. There was a time when you used to let me talk and talk. For hours. Eyebrows going up, eyebrows going down. Thank god for your eyebrow movement — it used to be the only way I could tell you were still listening, that you hadn’t abandoned your physical body at some point and were occupied bouncing from one astral plane to the next. I invested a hell of a lot in those twitches and furrows. And if anyone was looking for any more than a few twitches and furrows after they’d yanked off a hank of flesh and handed it over, they were in for disappointment, right?

Of course I know now why that was, what it was that made you such a wonderfully attentive listener.

Well now I’m giving it to you — all the stuff you felt you had to wheedle out of me on the sly. Look, it’s all yours, unspooling like fishing line. So relax and just try to appreciate how magnanimous I’m being.

Where was I. We’re skipping childhood because that’s where Sylvie lives.

So, the Icy Dream. Gord blames Icy Dream Inc. for everything that’s gone wrong in his life since the day he opened shop. He likes to imbue his failures with a cosmic significance, because this makes him a kind of Jeremiah in his own mind. For example he wasn’t just some underemployed loser, back before he became my home town’s emperor of ice cream, bouncing randomly around from job to job like a pinball — he’s
God’s
pinball, in
God’s
own pinball machine, meaning the good Lord has always got a watchful, pie-plate eye on Gord.

Another example of my father’s monomania: he always tells the story of how, once he got the loans together to buy some kind of franchise, he had “the choice” between an Icy Dream and a Java Joe’s. Like it could only possibly be one or the other — the wrong choice and the right. As if some kind of celestial fast-food overseer descended from the heavens with a ID cone in one hand and a crumpled JJ’s cup in the other — obliterating all possibility of, say, a Pizza Hut, a Mickey Dee’s — displayed them both to Gord and thundered:
Pick!

This would’ve been something like 1981. And the way Gord tells it, he scratched his head and said to himself:
Coffee?
Who wants to sit around drinking coffee all day? Who wants to
go out
for a coffee? ID was a magic land of ice cream confection — the kind of thing children clamoured for. The kind of all-forgiving place to which you got in the car and drove after a fight with the family, say. Everyone cools off and then you reappear bearing some kind of sweet, frosty olive branch and you’re hero of the day. This had been a favoured tactic of Gord’s long before he bought the franchise — maybe that’s part of what inspired him to go with the Dream. He couldn’t see coming home with a tray of large coffees to make up for his transgressions, no matter how many creamers and sugar packets he emptied into them. I remember Arctic Bars, Oh Henrys, two-litre bottles of root beer (A&W, the good stuff, not the no-name kind from Dominion) accompanied by a tub of vanilla ice cream to make floats. Sylvie always got a box of either Cracker Jacks or wine gums — she had strange tastes.

Point being, the way Gord saw it there was no insult, no trespass, no random act of prickery that sugar couldn’t sweeten.

But coffee? Coffee was for harried office workers, management types. Ice cream was joyous, coffee was grim. Ice cream was celebratory, coffee was no-nonsense. Ice cream was of the people, for the people and coffee was strictly for grownups — medicinal, even — a kind of businessman’s brain-lubricant.

Coffee’s not what we’re
about
in this here town, insisted Gord.

The town hasn’t exactly boomed since then — they always said it would and it never did. Last I heard, however, Gord’s Icy Dream is still in operation, still doling drippy soft-serve and flaccid burgers poking like tongues from out between two spongy, seed-flecked buns. Under new management since Gord retired. But of course you and I both know what
did
end up booming in the past twenty years. Coffee. JJ’s. My dad’s lone ID is currently surrounded by no less than six JJ’s coffee outlets — there’s the one on the highway leading north, and the one on the southbound route. There’s the one in the mall near the industrial park, and the one in the strip mall downtown. There’s the counter attached to the gas station and finally, there’s the freestanding JJ’s directly across the street from the ID. All of them thriving. No one in this town of 7,500 hardworking souls need go without JJ’s mudwater for even five minutes, and clearly no one does.

“I never claimed to be a prophet,” shrugs Gord when the topic of the Great ID Wrong Decision of 1981 comes up.

The weird thing is the
pleasure
he still takes in that epic failure of foresight. To him it proves his independence — his maverick spirit. Gord was never one to follow the herd, even if the herd was making truckloads of money.

“Coffee is for assholes,” Gord will explain. His Last Word where Java Joe’s is concerned.

It was a class thing, frankly. He associated coffee, in those days, with Management, and Dad has never done well with men of managerial timber. He planted Sylvie and himself into that particular small-town soil on the coast where he was born because of rumours of the any-day-now industrial boom. Soon, jobs would be given out hand over fist, the story went; Gord just had to get in line. So Gord got in line. And what did he do, once he was at the front of the line? Once he found himself sitting in the manager’s office awaiting the just-a-formality, five-minute labourer’s-job interview?

Gord called the manager an asshole, is what he did. The manager of SeaFare Packers, the only industry, thus far, in town. The reason why is lost to the ages, but Gord assures us his judgement was true and just and to have held his tongue would have constituted a serious moral lapse.

Thus began his career as an independent businessman, while the town, nurtured by SeaFare, built itself up around him. Gord established himself as a parasite of sorts. “I was a barnacle on the ass of SeaFare,” he likes to say these days, always able to take pride somehow.

But he’d be damned if he was going to spend the best years of his life brewing coffee for those assholes.

Here’s the irony — to this day I never go to JJ’s. Not because of some kind of misguided loyalty to Gord, but the opposite. Surely you’ve been, Adam? Even a latte-sucker like yourself couldn’t have avoided the occasional last-ditch caffeination stop at Joe’s, right? So you’ll know a patron doesn’t exactly come across managerial timber stacked there in the booths.

You find parkas. Checked shirts and baggy pants — wife-bought. Fake leather shoes. Rubber boots. Work boots. Toques, ball caps. Bloated wallets in permanently deformed back pockets. Squints. Grizzle.

What you find hunched and huddled in the identical orange booths of Java Joe’s are endless variations — young, old; fat, thin — of my father Gord.

05/25/09, 8:43 p.m.

I’ll tell you what sucks about being almost forty, if you’re me. Lots of men are angry at their fathers, yes, well into their forties and beyond, but at the same time, a lot of men aren’t — or if they are, they manage to keep it in check. Lots of men go to see their fathers on the weekend, or call their fathers on the phone every once in a while, or take them to a hockey game, or out to Ponderosa for a steak. And the two of them are able to somehow be men together. They’ve arrived at that place through some mysterious process of maturation and tacit agreement.

I can’t do that. Like there was this one time I brought a girlfriend home to meet Gord. Not that I wanted her to meet Gord, but I was trying very hard with this girl and I wanted her to see the coast where I grew up. Neither of us had a lot of money at the time, however, and Gord was still living in my childhood home, a two-storey farmhouse just far enough outside of town to be inconvenient, which he’d bought to house Sylvie and their anticipated throngs of children. He’d kept it after her death and my departure and lived in it by himself, as if expecting one or both of us to return at any time.

I told myself there was no reason this visit shouldn’t work out. I remember I was still trying to be normal at that point — trying to force a sense of decency onto my life. I didn’t want to be the type of guy who was estranged from his father. I was trying not to be a lot of types of guy back then.

Kirsten was a girl from my church and the church had me convinced that if you said to yourself — I mean to God — Okay, God, I’m giving up my life to you now, it’s all yours — and then just started acting like the kind of guy you wanted to be, the rest of your life would reorganize itself around that resolution. I was a wholesome, decent young man, I’d decided, freshly washed in the blood of the lamb. Therefore I had a wholesome, decent relationship with my father, who, when next we met, would somehow detect the godly aura rippling around my cleansed being and be instantly humbled and inspired to godliness and decency himself.

I can’t blame the church for this delusion. It was my delusion, the church just lent it institutional support. On some level I knew that’s what this particular church was all about — nurturing mass and individual delusions — and that’s probably the whole reason I joined. But no doubt you’ll recall how even in the old days I would radically clean up my act every once in a while, leaving all you guys at the house gobsmacked at my sudden puritanism. I wouldn’t drink, I would go to classes, I’d make sure I was at the library on the days I knew Wade would be coming back from Goldfinger’s with his stash. Sometimes I could go two, three weeks like that. But not much more. After that I’d get angry about something and need to arrest my thought process somehow. It’s a pattern I’ve maintained my whole life.

So there I was — wholesome, decent, delusional — mentally pulling open the screen door of my childhood home for the first time in maybe ten years and thinking — I actually told myself this — It’ll be great! My girlfriend and I will drive down the coast. We will stay with my father, and Kirsten will meet my father, and the two of them will get along. Gord always had a bit of a courtly side with the ladies. He’ll take one look at her, I thought, and he’ll be all “me dear” this and “me love” that — playing up the salty old Gael stuff because if goddess Sylvie found it irresistible surely all central Canadian women must — and it won’t be grotesque or off-putting at all. Perhaps he’ll take down my baby book for the two of them to titter over, seated side by side on the couch.
Looka the size a the little bastard! I said to them nuns, I said . . . 
Perhaps we will barbecue in the evenings, drink beer, boil a lobster, reminisce about the days of Sylvie. It won’t be painful. It will be healing, if anything (I was very interested in the idea of “healing” at this time). And perhaps, when the time is right, my girlfriend and I will even talk to my father about Christ.

Or perhaps Gord will talk endlessly about all the bastards and assholes who have betrayed and conspired against him, always casting an accusatory eye at yours truly, and perhaps yours truly will grit his teeth until he has to make a dentist’s appointment and be fitted with a mouth guard to wear at night, and his stomach acid will churn until he can digest nothing but mushroom soup from a can and he will want, very badly, to get drunk and give nary a thought, for a couple of days, to how our Lord and Saviour, in all his compassionate wisdom, would’ve handled a trial-in-the-desert like Gord.

And perhaps all that new-found, Christ-inspired patience came crashing at last to the ground when Gord made the mistake of referring to his son as a hockey hero, or, more specifically, a
failed
hockey-hero, in the girlfriend’s presence.

As in: “This fella here coulda been another Al MacInnis. Coulda gone all the way to the NHL if only he’d listened to his old man.”

To which I pleaded: “Gord, don’t be a goof.”

“But no,” continued Gord. “Listens to everyone but. Telling him he was no good. Story of his life.”

Which of course would be a nugget of information to pique any girlfriend’s interest.

“Really Rank? People said you were no good?”

“No, he’s full of crap,” I replied. With maybe a bit too much volume. “No one ever said I was no good. But nobody ever said I should go into the NHL either, except for you, Gord. Gord likes to imagine the whole world is busy judging my every move, going
boo
or
yay
.”

“You’re the one who thinks that,” Gord countered, happy now to be arguing after all the uncharacteristic nice-making in honour of the girlfriend’s visit. “Your exact problem’s always been that you believe it. You believe the judgement, when you should be looking at the facts. Even when the judgement is clearly a load of BS.”

This was about the time Kirsten started to realize that the father-son banter had shifted away from the great game of hockey into mysterious, dangerous new terrain. The big hint, she told me later, was the way I’d started moving my jaw minutely back and forth, producing a faint, unconscious twitch beneath my temples. Kirsten always called this my “warning signal.” She said it reminded her of when a cat starts swooping its tail.

Which meant it was time to change the subject. “What say we put the steaks on, Gord. Or you know what?” I reached — maybe grabbed is a better word — for Kirsten’s hand. “How about a prayer?”

This won me a sneering once-over from the old man. He wasn’t exactly buying the new me. “Where I come from, you say grace before dinner, not ten times a day before you sit down and before you light the stove and before you wipe your ass — pardon me, dear.”

“Oh that’s nice, Gord, thanks.”

“All I know is this: when the whole goddamn town — sorry, dear — turns against a boy for doing what’s right, for doing what the cops are too goddamn — pardon my French, dear — chickenshit to do themselves . . .”