The Antagonist (23 page)

08/12/09, 10:52 p.m.

I DIDN'T THINK I WOULD
ever do this after I took up correspondence with you, but I’ve started reading your book again. It has to be my fourth or so time through it. I know I told you when we started this up months ago — decades ago, it seems like — that’d I’d read it quite a few times, but here’s a confession: this was and wasn’t true. I read it the first time the way I would any book, taking my time to get into it, wondering when in God’s name the action would pick up. And then the slow, cold recognition started to take over and I couldn’t really concentrate after that. I started reading specifically for the recognition — I remember sitting rigid at the kitchen table holding the book up in front of my face, the most unrelaxed book-reading posture you can imagine. I started blasting through paragraphs and pages until I got to something I recognized and I would feel my heart thumping in my face as my outrage reignited. It was addictive, in a way. There he was, the character I knew to be myself, lumbering in and out of scenes, and I’d be outraged when he was like me — because that was stealing — and outraged when he wasn’t — because that was lying. I started folding down pages so I could go back and read these parts again. If there was a scenario I recognized, I’d go apeshit, marvelling at your gall, at how wrong you got it, or else how mercilessly dead-on the whole thing was. Either way, it was a violation. Lies and theft; theft and lies.

So when I said I read it three more times after that, what I meant is I read it in that same state, in that same way — blasting through the pages I’d folded down in a state of high piss-off, ignoring everything that didn’t feel relevant to me personally.

Which maybe wasn’t fair.

I want to say again that I am sorry if I scared you when I first got in touch. I was aggressive and creepy about it, and I apologize. All I really wanted to tell you was what I have just said — that I took your book personally. It felt as if you had reached across the decades just to poke me hard in the gut a few times, and I didn’t understand why. What had I done to deserve this double assault? First: the angry guy, the football thug, the “innate criminal” with the eyebrow rash. Then, just as I’m recovering from him: the incident. The awful Incident. The awful, unspeakable,
inevitable
(as you paint it — and you have no idea how sick that made me feel) incident. Right alongside those occasional, sadistic, close-ups of yours: my rash, Wade’s zit. Even worse: those throw-away lines — the most annihilating moments of my life dispensed with in just a handful of words:
His mother had died
. Jesus, Adam! Why this attack after twenty years? That’s what it felt like — an attack, vicious, out of the blue, out of nowhere. I wanted to make sure you understood that. And the only way to do that was hit back.

Mostly I wanted to confirm whether or not you had done it on purpose, deliberately, hoping I’d see. Because you were trying to tell me something — or else tell the world something about me.

You have to admit, I’ve been trying very hard to see things from your point of view, Adam. The least you could do is acknowledge mine. I have been learning about you — and how and why you’ve done what you done — through every part of this experience. I figured out the thing about the noble purpose, and I figured out about getting caught up, and how the Noble Purpose is gradually shunted aside by something else, something deeper and more selfish, and I figured out about the lying, and how easy and natural and seductive it can be — to the extent that it starts to feel like a separate truth unto itself.

So what I’m saying is, I’ve come pretty far without any help or participation from you whatsoever.

I have been generous, if anything. I’ve been trying to understand you.

And you have given me precisely nothing back.

Anyway, I’ll tell you why I started reading your book again.

Lately, I can’t keep Gord out of my room, whether I’m in it or not. When I’m in here, typing, he tries to come in and dictate what I should say to “them” in my grand, cosmic appeal. That I can bench four hundred pounds, or used to be able to anyway, that I am a beloved soccer coach, that I graduated with honours from Teaching College, that I was a scholarship student (fact of it being a hockey scholarship, to a school I dropped out of, tactfully omitted), that I served for two years as an altar boy, that I was chosen to narrate the Christmas pageant in Grade 3 because I was the best and clearest speaker in the class, that my father started his own business from nothing, that my great-grand-uncle had a hand in starting the Co-operative movement.

And, it turns out, when I’m not here Gord’s obsession with what I’m doing doesn’t wane.

“Gord,” I called to him yesterday afternoon after getting home from a run and ducking into my room for some clean clothes. “If you are going to go through my drawers, can you at least not leave all my stuff in a pile on the floor?”

“I’m sorry,” Gord called back. “But I heard you coming in and thought you’d probably wanna get right back atcher book, so figured I better clear out. Did you tell them about that birdhouse you made for your mother in Grade 9?”

I ambled down the hall as he was speaking and found my father in the kitchen holding down the tab on the toaster. He’d broken it the day before — as I’d shouted at him he was about to do — by slamming it down repeatedly. (He said it never kept the toast down long enough to properly blacken it the way he liked.) We immediately started fighting about whether to buy a new one (me) or take a screwdriver to the old which was still “perfectly good” and had cost “an arseload of money” when purchased in 1982.

“Were you looking for something in particular?” I inquired as threads of smoke drifted up from the toaster and formed a stratus above our heads. “Needed to borrow some underwear?”

Gord released the tab and leaned over to check if the bread had been charred to his satisfaction. A second later, he pushed it down again.

He wasn’t meeting my eye. This was about as abashed as I’d ever seen my father.

“Well I’m pretty anxious to read that book a yours,” he confessed.

“Gord, the toast is done, okay?”

He leaned over to check, waving smoke from his view.

“Not quite yet,” he said.

“I’m going downtown and buying another toaster tomorrow.”

“Go right ahead and I’ll just chuck er right on out the window because we do not waste money in this house, Gordie.”

“There’s no book, Dad. Just so you know.”

Gord looked up, scowling, from his bread-blackening vigil.

“Well I’d like to know what you’re in there tapping away on all day if there’s no goddamn book.”

“I mean I’m not printing out pages. There’s no manuscript. So you can stop digging around in my shit.”

He released the toaster and crossed his arms at me. “What do you mean no pages? What’s the good a that? You just tap-tapping away into the air?”

“No, I mean it’s on the computer.”

“Well nobody’s gonna read it on a goddamn computer!”

“Okay, one, lots of people read on computers —”

“Bullshit!” barked Gord.

I took a breath. “Two, someone is reading it. Right now. Friend of mine. I’ve been emailing it to him in chunks, okay?”

“Well why the hell does he get to read it and I don’t?”

“Because it’s not
for
you, Gord.”

“Who the hell is it for if not your own goddamn family?”

I rubbed my face. There were no answers to these questions.

“I’m taking a shower,” I said.

“It’s all about me,” Gord said as I turned to go down the hall.

I stopped. “It’s not, Gord. You think everything’s about you.”

“That whole goddamn book is about me and what an asshole I am and I defy you — I
defy
you Gordie — to tell me any different.”

I came back into the kitchen, feeling my major muscle groups bunch.

“Wow,” I said. “I’ve been
defied
. Jesus. I think I just pissed my pants.”

“You try and tell me different!”

“Gord it’s
not
about you, don’t be so narcissistic.”

Gord picked up his crutch from where it was leaning against the counter and I thought, Oh great. He’s going to do to the entire kitchen what he did to Sylvie’s elephant. I’ve got to get that crutch away from him. But he just pointed at me with it.

“
You’re
the one who’s narcissistic,” he shouted. “About
me!
All you do is sit around tap-tapping all day trying to come up with ways to blame your old man for every goddamn thing that’s ever gone wrong in your life.”

I was about to blow up, as per usual in these circumstances. I was about to yell at him to get over himself, and to buy a dictionary, and to mind his own fucking business, and to stay out of my room, and, oh, by the way a lot of the shit that went wrong in my life
was
his fault, measured against any objective standard. I was about to spew all this at him in one volcanic cascade when Gord added in a minor shriek:

“You’re writing it all down for
posterity
! And sending it off over the internet where it could end up God knows
where
! Well maybe I’ll just sit on down and write my own book, how do you like that Gordie? Maybe I’ve got one or two opinions of my own to contribute!”

I was about to laugh at the idea. Gord sitting down at the kitchen table with a big pot of tea, gearing up to write his own goddamn story of my life — answering my version chapter for chapter, page for page, with his own. I was about to laugh at the idea, except I could see that Gord was kind of terrified.

Long story short, I’ve started reading your book again. With a little more attention this time and maybe a little less adrenalin.

Kirsten said, Cyber-stalking? Sounds very high-tech.

And I said, It’s not really, it’s basically what I’m doing now, with you, the only difference being you write me back.

And Kirsten said, So if I stop writing you back will you officially be stalking me?

And I said, No, if you stop writing me back I’ll stop too.

And after a while Kirsten wrote, I don’t think I could be a cyber-stalker. I don’t have the self-confidence for it.

And I said, You would be amazed how little self-confidence it takes.

And she said, So what does it take to be a really superlative cyber-stalker?

To start, I said, you need anger. Like a really good jolt, high-dosage adrenalin like someone’s just kicked you in the ass for no good reason. And then you just need a bit of contact, a bit of back and forth to grease the wheels, to feel like you’ve really established yourselves in each other’s vision. And then abrupt withdrawal — the contact has to be taken away just as you’re getting comfortable; the moment you feel your fingers taking hold of something vulnerable — yank, it’s gone. And you are in the dark. And you’re alone, but it feels like something has been done to you and is continuing to be done, as if you have been tricked. As if you are a big stupid animal who’s been led into a trap. So the only way you can think to get out of the trap is to chase down the guy who led you there in the first place.

And Kirsten wrote, Rank in all seriousness wtf?

And I said OMG you just wrote WTF. What are you, fourteen?

And she said IMHO, OMG is worse than WTF.

And I said, Do you mean because G is worse than F?

And she said G, as you know, is great.

And I said, F is pretty great too.

Ha ha, said Kirsten. I mean LOL.

RAOTFL, I said.

E2&ITCYP9, she wrote back. I just made that one up. My kids say you can’t do that. It’s a very lockstep sort of place, the internet.

Like religion
, is what I wanted to reply. But stopped myself. We hadn’t broached this yet — where exactly Kirsten stood on the whole Lord Jesus thing lately. There was that offhand
G is great
remark, but I had no idea how to take it. It could be anything from a fervent avowal to a smirking reference to our holy-roller past. This led me to remember that the problem with Kirsten and I back in the day is that we were basically incapable of having a serious conversation. We could talk about God, because that was sort of required — and, looking back on it, just another way of avoiding what was really going on — but the minute we tried to talk about each other, or our lives, or how we felt, we’d start joking around and never could quite get down to it. We entertained each other too much — it was always more fun to exchange quips than to dig into what was going on. She asked me once how I met Beth, for example, and I gave her the sitcom version. There I am in the bar when this fat, excessively bangled lady twice my age, who I can only assume is looking for some hot young meat, heaves herself into my booth and I decide in all my drunken beneficence to go for it and even try to buy her a drink. (
Beth!
Kirsten had screamed, dying
. You tried to buy BETH a DRINK?
) But I told her nothing about how the booth shook, how I gulped and sweated, how Beth’s eyes were like a scalpel down my chest. Kirsten knew this was my conversion experience, and therefore the most important thing to ever happen to me, but she never insisted on hearing any version other than the joke. Anything else made us both uncomfortable.

And I’m noticing that pattern emerging again already, and it’s great, don’t get me wrong, it’s as fun as it ever was but I also don’t want to lose sight of the way it eventually sunk us. So before I replied to her
lockstep
note I sat and thought for quite a while.

And I wrote, So. I have told you about my irrational obsession. What about you? What kind of pointless bullshit is needlessly consuming all your time and emotional energy these days?

And she wrote back five seconds later, practically: I have kids, Rank. I’m not permitted pointless bullshit anymore.

Which was when I thought: For Christ’s sake next year I’ll be a forty-year-old man.

And I wrote, I would like to call you, Kirsten.

08/13/09, 11:22 p.m.

HEREWITH BEGINS OUR HERO'S
life of crime, which is not really much of a crime-life at all since it consists basically of driving around with Ivor in a mud-coloured Dodge Aries making “drop-offs” and “pick-ups.” Ivor, on Richard’s instructions, doesn’t even let Rank drive. Richard is perhaps the most cautious son of a bitch Rank has ever encountered. Rank is asked to do nothing but accompany Ivor — to climb into Ivor’s barn-smelling K-car on departure, and out of it on arrival, at which point Rank follows Ivor into the abysmal apartment block or dilapidated household where business is being done. Glamour! Intrigue! Once inside, Rank stands there so that everyone present can get a good look at him before Ivor suggests to the host or hostess that they adjourn to another room to do business. Rank is not invited to come along at this point. Rank is instructed to stand by the door and wait. As he stands there — smelling stale cigarette smoke, or stale toast, or stale sweat, or stale macaroni and cheese — he wonders if this is yet another stage in the process of being brought up through the ranks of Goldfinger’s — another tier on the hierarchical ladder.

During their time together on the highway, Ivor regales Rank with stories of his life (mostly to do with avoiding the rabidly obsessive efforts of the U.S. government to infect him with HIV) and attempts to impart to his younger cohort the occasional snippet of wisdom courtesy of Hard-Knocks High.

And, yes, more often than not the wisdom amounts to: Don’t trust the U.S. government because it wants to give everyone AIDS. But every once in a while, when they’ve been driving a bit longer than usual and the road has become a hypnotically undulating grey ribbon, Ivor’s one-track mind slows down a little and even wanders far enough afield to allow him to talk about his life. A time before the Nixon administration’s diabolical plan to eradicate the black, gay and scummy had begun to take hold; a more innocent time.

Ivor grew up only a few miles down the river and even though his entire family are alive and live nearby, the only one he sometimes talks to on the phone is his sister Dini. He isn’t able to go visit Dini because Dini’s husband is an asshole who has never forgiven Ivor for breaking into their basement eight years ago to sleep off a binge and not paying to replace the window. Ivor argued that he had no memory of doing it, so the husband couldn’t even prove he had. And the husband said he’d walked into the basement and Ivor had been sprawled beside the furnace in his long-johns and what more evidence did anybody need?

“But my point, Rank,” explains Ivor, “the point I tried to make at the time was this. I am a man with a substance abuse problem. I will always have that hanging over me. There’s nothing I can do about it — it’s my cross to bear is what I’m saying. What I need is the compassion and understanding of my family. And I have never had that, Rank.”

“That sucks, man,” commiserates Rank.

“I never got that from anyone in my family except Dini.”

“She sounds nice,” says Rank. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters myself.”

“Well they can be a blessing,” says Ivor. “My family isn’t scummy like me, you know. I’m what you call the black sheep. My dad did a pretty good business selling Kawasaki bikes and ATVs and whathaveyou and he had this idea all his kids would go to college — first crop a scholars in his family history. But I kept fucking up at school. I had my own bike, so, you know, I was the king. I was Captain Motorcycle. Just wanted to fuck off and get high. Figured I was untouchable. Didn’t graduate.”

Rank tries to glance over and take account of Ivor without being too obvious about it. He has no idea how old the guy is. Ivor is balding, and greying, with a ponytail, but his face is as smooth as a baby’s.

“You could always go back,” suggests Rank.

“No, I can’t go back to school Rank. I’m not a school guy.”

“Hey, I never thought I was a school guy,” says Rank. “And look at me.”

“Yeah, but you are, Rank, whether you think it or not. Whereas I got a few years on you and I know. I know what I’m not. I know what you are. You keep doing what you’re doing — I’ve known a lotta good kids like you who have done the same. Make your money offa Rich. Rich won’t screw you over and he won’t get all pissy when you tell him it’s time for you to go find a real job. He’s used to it. Meanwhile, you and he got a mutually beneficial relationship going. Pay for school and then get the fuck out of here.”

Rank bounces along the highway beside Ivor feeling surprised.
Let me talk to Rich.
It never occurred to Rank before that Ivor might be concerned with anybody’s well-being other than Richard’s.

It is almost sweet.

“Hey,” says Rank after a couple of minutes. “I just wanna say thanks for setting this up for me and everything, man.”

“Pay for school,” repeats Ivor, “and get out of here.”

Before dropping Rank off back at the dorm, Ivor hands him a ten and two twenties.

“For the pleasure of your company,” he says.

Fifty dollars was about what Rank got paid after a five-hour shift bouncing at Goldfinger’s. Sometimes the rides in the Dodge with Ivor take no longer than fifteen minutes.

It is a good deal, no matter how you slice it. In the first week of his new position, he has already worked three such shifts with Ivor on top of the Thursday and Friday evening shifts he’ll put in at the bar. All of a sudden, he’s not making bad money.

All of a sudden, Rank begins to wonder if he shouldn’t study for exams after all. What he should do is, he should call Adam, with whom he takes two courses, and set up an all-night grilling session. Do what he can to yank at least those two grades up by the bootstraps and then spend next semester doing his best Adam-imitation, pulling down A’s across the board to make up for the shitshow that is sure to be his mid-term results.

All of a sudden, he’s thinking about next semester.

The problem is he doesn’t really call Adam anymore. They just sort of bump into each other, and not even very often. But Kyle has booked their boys’ night out for the coming Saturday, the Saturday Rank has off, so he and Adam will see each other then. He plans to apologize for being such an asshole all semester. Maybe not outright apologize, as that would be kind of gay and over-earnest, but do or say something to sort of imply contrition. Mutter about how stressed out he’s been lately. Buy his buddy an entire tray of shooters, tell him he likes his cardigan, slap him — ever-so-lightly — on the back.

And just before they get too shitfaced, ask his friend for help.

Wade has a girlfriend and it is ridiculous and sad. He won’t shut up about her, goes around shamelessly burbling,
I am so freaking in love, man!
and is busy writing a series of guitar ballads to elucidate this point. It pains and embarrasses them. Wade and his girlfriend spend entire moony afternoons nuzzling each other on the grimy couch, so when Rank arrives to hang, he finds he can only sit so long watching them gaze and fondle before needing to be elsewhere. Worse, Wade insists that everyone must get to know and love his girl as he does. Kyle had to place him in an arm-lock to keep him from inviting her along on their Saturday blowout.

“I don’t go anywhere without Emily now,” Wade insisted. “It just can’t happen, man. She’s a part of me.” So Kyle pinned him to the couch and wrenched his arm behind his back.

“Yoko Ono!” said Kyle, astride Wade who was busy suffocating among the cushions. “Say it. Say Yoko Ono.”

“I will never say that about her,” Wade protested from the depths of the couch. “She isn’t even Asian.”

Emily was one of those awful neo-hippie girls who never wore anything tight. It was all enormous, cable-knit sweaters pulled down over ankle-length skirts, chunky boots and hair going everywhere.
Little House on the Prairie
meets Janis Joplin. And she smiled at you whether she liked you or not, no matter what you said — one of those secretive I-exist-on-a-higher-plane kind of smiles — just to prove how laid-back she was.

“Just kill him,” pleaded Rank. “Suffocate him now and get it over with.”

“Yoko. Ono.”

Wade’s reply was lost inside the couch, but his tone was all defiance. Kyle rolled off him onto the floor and Wade sat up, red-faced, victorious.

“Okay but she’s not coming Saturday,” panted Kyle.

“We’ll see,” said Wade.

The plan was to lock up the Temple for the night, because if they hung out there for any length of time on a Saturday, people inevitably would start dropping in, looking for a party. Kyle, needless to say, had dictated the agenda for the night. First stop was the Italian restaurant to treat themselves to dinner. Rank, who was just getting used to having cash in his pocket, thought this was a lame and needless expense — they could easily pad their stomachs at a sub shop for a quarter of the price then hit the bars — but since none of the other guys balked, neither did he. Gordon Sr. sounded in his head throughout the meal however, saying things meant to accompany a flitting hand gesture like:
My, my!
And,
La di da!
Also the occasional slur against Italians, whose traditions apparently involved pouring a greenish puddle of olive oil onto your side plate, meant to be soaked up by bread.

Rank watched as Kyle dumped some kind of brown syrup onto the plate to mingle with his olive oil. The two formed a greasy yin-yang.

“That’s disgusting,” said Rank.

Kyle glanced up, smiling at him indulgently like a kindergarten teacher. “It’s balsamic, man. Try some.”

I’d rather try my own toe jam,
Gordon Sr. opined in Rank’s head. So Rank made himself lean over and wipe his bread on Kyle’s plate.

“It’s good, right?” said Kyle.

“You know what else is good on bread?” grunted Rank. “Like, butter.”

Kyle was about to crack a joke at Rank’s ill-bred expense, when Adam, who had been silently hoovering his minestrone this whole time, remarked, “Why don’t you just fucking order some?”

Kyle and Rank both turned to stare at him, but Adam hadn’t bothered looking up from his soup. A couple of moments of silence went by, not at all in keeping with a celebratory evening among four raucous pals. Kyle dabbed a chunk of bread into his yin-yang, frowning, as Wade sat gazing obliviously out the window as if hoping for a glimpse of his neo-hippie beloved. Adam finished off his soup, not bringing it up to his face and slurping the dregs as Rank would have done, but tilting the bowl this way and that and fiddling with the spoon forever to catch every drop and morsel. Rank watched Adam until finally Adam noticed he was being watched.

“What?” said Adam.

“What,” repeated Rank. “You know what.”

Adam stared at him through his glasses. “What?” he said again, scarcely moving his lips.

“You’ve got a bug up your ass is what,” said Kyle.

There was something about Kyle’s rejoinder that broke the spell of hostility bouncing between Adam and Rank. It had taken shape abruptly, for no fathomable reason, and Rank was relieved to feel it dissipate. It was the opposite of what he wanted to happen that night, but he’d felt helpless against its weird surge.

Adam turned to Kyle. “I do not.”

“Yeah, you do,” said Rank, settling comfortably into the familiar ganging-up-on-Adam group dynamic. “It’s up there so high you probably can’t even feel it anymore.”

“It’s way up there,” agreed Kyle. “Impacted-colon up there. Way, way up.”

“Like the Friendly Giant,” exclaimed Wade, as if waking out of sleep. This was so left field, they all cracked up.

“I have been locked in my room studying for the last three days,” admitted Adam. “I’m ready to kill someone.”

“You wanna punch me?” said Rank. “I’ll let you punch me in the face.”

“Maybe later,” said Adam, smiling at his empty bowl.

Press pause. Zoom out. Look at the four of them giggling, pouring wine for one another, sitting around the table in their jeans-and-sweater nice guy uniforms, the occasional, innocuous swipe of hair gel and heavy whiff of Drakkar cologne. Fresh-shaved faces and napkins in their laps.

They’re just kids — let’s remember this, okay? That’s the thing to keep in mind as this particular evening spreads itself against the sky.

Two bottles of wine at the Italian restaurant and Rank’s lasagne ended up being basically a trough of mozzarella and therefore one of the most wonderful things he’d ever consumed — so the mood has improved by the time they hit the student pub. It’s early and there are not a lot of people there but that’s okay because the boys don’t want to be tempted to stay for more than a couple of hours anyway. They have promised one another to conduct a pub crawl this night, as half-decent a crawl as is achievable in a town of only three pubs. They will start at the U, then hit the Leeside across from the strip mall to try out the karaoke machine, and finally polish the evening off at Goldfinger’s nice and late when the action tends to be at its plastered, orgiastic apex. This, of course, another Kyle directive. Rank, personally, has experienced the aforementioned apex night after night — could frankly do without the apex. The apex often involves middle-aged women in various stages of undress laid out completely insensible on the dance floor, if not perilously animated, trying to climb up onto the bar and lead the crowd in a confused singalong/striptease. Or else some guy trying to break into one of the VLTs using the cranium of anyone he happens not to like the look of. Or vomiting. The apex often entails a great deal of human throwup.

But that’s not how Kyle sees it, because Kyle hasn’t seen it enough. But whatever; it’s Kyle’s show, Kyle’s pre-holiday hurrah. And what’s a night on the town, in this town, without Goldfinger’s? Rank can only hope he won’t be dragooned into service as a bouncer upon the brothers’ arrival at the bar — at the same time, though, he can’t see how he won’t be. The Goldfinger’s clientele can keep a bouncer pretty busy come one in the morning; Ivor is sure to need help at some point, and Rank won’t have much choice but to pitch in if he wants to keep his lucrative new gig riding shotgun in the Dodge.

So, shit. Only thing for it is to get as drunk as he can before then.