The Antagonist (4 page)

Gord: You’d like a Coke, would you?

I should explain that Gord is already doing a slow burn at this point. I can all but hear the rant bubbling away in the foreground of his brain:
goddamn little Christer no respect doesn’t even know how to ask for something it’s the parents off doing god knows what don’t even instill common courtesy let alone basic please and thank you think the world owes them every goddamn thing they get.
So it’s only at this point that Croft, who has been paying no attention whatsoever up until now, actually turns his nasty focus on my father. So I see this. I am standing at the grill supposedly waiting for it to be time to turn the patties over but at this point I have pretty much forgotten about the patties because I witness the way Croft’s bright little eyes are taking full measure of Gord and the tendrils of smoke slowly wafting from my father’s ears.

No, I think. Not the smirk.

Croft allows the smirk to just kind of ooze across his face like syrup over pancakes.

Croft (enunciating loudly, precisely the way he did when he called me a gland-case at the dance): Yeah, bud. I said a Coke.
Coca. Cola
. I wanna teach the world to sing.

(Chortles from the skeezer crew lined up behind him.)

Gord (with a hideous patience that tells me he is revelling in the accumulation of adrenalin that’s taking place as his ire is stirred. Now the two of them are practically dancing together): It’s not that I can’t hear you, son. I may have a few years on you, but I don’t have any trouble with my hearing.

(Oh Christ, I think, he’s called him “son” again.)

Croft: Sorry, bud. Guess it must be the Alzheimer’s setting in or something.

(More skeezer tittering. Even though it isn’t quite time, I rapidly flip all the patties on my grill to get this particular obligation out of the way.)

Gord: My problem,
son
, is with you. And the fact that you little assholes keep coming in here . . . 

Croft (flipping his hands into the air at the word “assholes”): I just want a Coke! I’m just thirsty!

Gord: . . . and you sit in the back corner both scaring people away and reeking of maryjane . . . 

Croft: I don’t even know Mary Jane! I never touched her!

(skeezers holding their sides at this point)

Gord: . . . and then you have the goddamn nerve to come up here and grunt at me in my own restaurant. “Coke” (Neanderthal grunt-speak here). “Coke,
bud
. Gimme Coke.”

Croft: Look,
bud
 . . . 

That’s what did it. The slavering insolence of that third and final “bud.” I dropped my flipper and hurled myself forward, reaching Gord just before his extended hands could secure themselves around Croft’s neck.

There was a lot of yelling. The word “punks” occasionally leapt like a salmon from an otherwise undifferentiated stream of obscenities where my father was concerned, whereas on Croft’s side of the counter, as he and his crew sauntered (but sauntered somewhat hurriedly, I’d like to point out) toward the door, I heard — along with their own laughing, obscene stream — the words “Crazy” and “. . . should call the fuckin cops!”

Once Croft et al. had taken off, I yelled — still clinging to Gord — something around the restaurant about complimentary single cones for everybody, but everybody was too busy gathering up their bug-eyed children and herding them toward the exits to notice. The only people left to take advantage of the offer were a few workers from SeaFare grabbing burgers after their shift, and they seemed to regard the incident as a kind of floor show. They laughed and applauded and generally made me regret the free ice cream I ended up doling out to them.

“Nice reflexes there, Rankin.”

“You shoulda let him go off on that little tool.”

“Why you giving my food away to those assholes?” Gord wanted to know once I had rejoined him behind the counter. He had yelled at me for burning my patties but otherwise seemed cheerful and refreshed after his lunge at Croft, like he’d just woken up from a nap.

“Because you attacked one of the customers,” I explained. “Those assholes are only ones who didn’t run screaming out the door.”

“‘Customer’ my ass, goddamn little punk!
Sorry, bud. Coke, bud
. They oughta give me a medal.”

So about twenty-five minutes later, a pair of Mounties came strolling through the doors.

“Here they come,” I said. “They got your medal, Gord.”

06/01/09, 11:32 p.m.

And now I find myself starting to panic a little, for a couple of reasons.

Because I just told you another whole slew of stuff about Gord and reading it over I can see that I still haven’t got to the heart of the thing. I can feel you still aren’t getting it — my father is coming across to you the same way he came across to my Jesus-freak girlfriend all those years ago — as a foul-mouthed but mostly harmless “character.” The same kind of creature I must have been to you and Wade and Kyle when we all started hanging out — a shape in the distance; a figure on a screen, behind Plexiglas. You lean forward, no matter how dangerous the guy’s antics might become — no matter how much he shrieks and sweats and bares his teeth — knowing he can never touch you, ultimately. You can watch him and see him and go home and think about him, even be disturbed by him a little. But it’s not like he can ever step off the screen, or out from behind the glass, and blunder his way into your life.

That, as they say, is entertainment.

It’s weird because I’ve held this stuff in my head for so long, been so consumed and convinced by it, but when I pour it out onto the page, into you, it emerges as this completely different thing, like juice turned to cider, or cider to vinegar — I’m not sure which is the better example in this case, but my point is: it’s the same thing but it’s
changed
. It’s not worthless — you wouldn’t necessarily throw it away as a result — but it’s
changed
, and now you have to figure out what you’re going to do with it, because this is not the end result you had in mind.

The other thing is, after feeling the whole time I’ve been writing you like I’d rather shove both hands beneath a lawn mower than write about the Icy Dream, about five seconds into it I realized I was enjoying myself.

And finally, I know I vowed to keep you away from Sylvie, but I’m starting to figure out that if I keep digging into this, it’s inevitable that my shovel has to scrape against my mother’s coffin at some point.

So what do I do then?

Do I do what you did? Do I yank Fred Astaire from his mausoleum, force his cold, dead fingers around a can of cola, put on some music and waltz him round the graveyard, calling,
Come one, come all
?

06/02/09, 12:01 a.m.

How about you just trust me when I tell you she was perfect? Can’t we just take that on faith and move on? How would you feel if your mother died? Well, that’s how I felt, even three years after we buried her, when I was nineteen and you and I became acquainted with each other. Maybe you even know what I’m talking about — for all I know, your mother has passed on too by now. So think about how that felt and get back to me. Was it bad? Okay, well it was bad for me too. It’s never good, obviously. But it was worse for me — I don’t care what happened on your end of things — it was worse for me and we both know why.

It’s important we get this right, Adam, the story of Gord and Sylvie. It’s important because you presumed to write a book that featured you-know-who. Let’s just go with the name I came up with earlier, let’s call him Danger Man: a terrible guy who performs a terrible act. An act with a flat-out crappy outcome, an act that is shocking and horrible — but also, here’s the kicker — inevitable. Why inevitable? Well, it’s built into the character’s DNA, you see. They don’t call him Danger Man for nothing. According to his creator, the guy has an “innate criminality” swimming around in there. A born thug, born bad, born to lose. It’s fated: the guy’s a biker tattoo waiting to happen.

That was me, Adam — in your book and nineteen years ago. You’re not going to deny that it was me, right? I notice, for all your whining, you still haven’t denied it.

And here’s the gravy: Danger Man?
Oh yeah.
His mom died, by the way
.

It’s not enough, is what I’m saying.
Insult to injury
is what I’m saying, Adam.

Anyway, on to Gord. Poor old Gord who didn’t even merit as brief a cameo as Sylvie-the-corpse in your magnum opus.

Picture redneck wed to goddess. Finally Dad finds himself in charge of something, in a domestically ordained managerial position all his own, and he makes his authority felt. No, Adam, he doesn’t hit. Gord is not a hitter of ladies, he is at heart a courtly little bugger, as I’ve already said. But he sneers. Croft had the smirk, Gord had the sneer, every bit as infuriating to the observer. He berates. He insults.

If I give you specific details then I have to give you Sylvie, which I am still not willing to do. But I’ll give you this much.

Picture a sort of spark. A flicker of light — there’s a flaw in the film. The glare of the projector comes blazing in. It’s startling, but after a while you get used to it, the way you can get used to a fuzzy TV channel if there’s nothing else to watch. Picture a sort of stationary glimmering — a small, steady radiance of sweetness and light. Oh, Gordie, the glimmer murmured to me one day after I’d finished kicking a hole in her bottom cupboard. Such cheap materials, in the house that Gord built.

Gord himself had just finished calling the glimmer “goddamn useless” before sashaying off in the truck to Home Hardware to buy a couple of lamps for the living room which, he’d suddenly decided, was poorly lit and which Sylvie, if she’d been any kind of worthwhile human being, would have fixed before poor, busy, put-upon small-businessman Gord had to have his consciousness affronted by the experience of an inadequately lit room.

“Useless idiot,” added Gord as he pulled on his boots. He wasn’t screaming anymore, but often with Gord, as in this instance, the post-screaming moments could be the worst. Just as Sylvie was likely starting to let herself feel relief that the screaming had finally come to an end, that she no longer had to hunker in the trenches as verbal machine-gun fire tore up the air around her, and just as she poked her head above ground hoping for the all-clear, Gord would lop it off with some quiet remark along the lines of
useless idiot.
And then go cheerfully on his way.

“Fucking . . . assho— . . . fuck!” I was saying as I removed my foot from the cupboard once he was gone.

Oh Gordie, the glimmer murmured then, wanting to make me feel better. Because that was what the glimmer was put on earth to do. Even in the daily exhaustion of dodging Gord’s machine-gun fire, she never gave any indication that anyone might deserve or require comfort other than her baby boy.

It’s okay, the glimmer assured me. He really never talks to me like that . . . Dear, you made such a
hole
.

“He
always
talks to you like that!” I sputtered — talking to the hole and not the glimmer. I often couldn’t look directly at the glimmer, she shone so pure and bright.

No, no, the glimmer assured me in her voice that was like no other mother’s. Other mothers, it always seemed to me, either barked or shrieked. Their voices were either shrill and silly — a strained, desperate pitch deliberately tuned to convey: “I’m just a nice lady! Don’t concern yourself with me!” Or else sharp and harsh, a sort of debased version of the previous that announced: “I am so sick of trying to pull off this nice lady shit, now pick up your socks.”

Not the glimmer. Her voice was always low and soothing, like the coo and flutter of overhead doves.

No, no, she cooed and fluttered at me, wafting over to close the cupboard door as if that would hide the hole. He doesn’t. He really doesn’t.

“When?” I yelled. This was the worst part — now I was yelling at the glimmer. I was yelling at her for having been yelled at. “
When
doesn’t he talk to you like that? He
always
talks to you like that!”

No, no, the glimmer cooed. He’s nice to me, Gordie. It’s just sometimes he wants to show off — you have to understand that.

“Sometimes he wants to show off,” I repeated with complete incomprehension.

He’s just trying to impress you, said the glimmer. You’re his boy.

“Impress me,” I repeated.

Otherwise he’s fine, said the glimmer. Don’t worry.

Otherwise Gord was fine. He sneered and berated and called my mother “goddamn useless,” but only when I was around. Otherwise he was fine.

That’s when the dread began to settle around me like ash.

That was my first major hint from the universe.

06/06/09, 9:16 a.m.

HERE'S ADAM. LOOK, EVERYBODY!

Lope-de-dope, gangly through the quad, awkward artsy four-eyes. His body doesn’t fit him somehow. He stoops, but in the strangest way. In a backwards kind of way. His hips jut a little forward, his hands dangle a little behind. A type of guy that other types of guys, hockey-team kinds of guys for example, want badly to scrape across the pavement. It is an instinctive, gorilla sort of thing, a phenomenon Dian Fossey might have witnessed. Culling the herd. Stamping out the genetic weaklings.

Once, in first year, Adam said, in the middle of a party, the word “methinks.” He was talking to girls, clearly a pretty new experience for a guy like him, one of the girls had opined something about something else, and Adam was actually going to quote Shakespeare at her — the line from Hamlet about the lady protesting too much — but his new friend quickly wrapped a forearm about Adam’s windpipe to spirit him away before too much social carnage could be inflicted. So the quote came out kind of: “Oh
ho
(the oh
ho
being what put the friend on alert). Methinks the
gwaaaa.
”

“What the hell is wrong with you?”

Adam singularly unappreciative as he rubbed his overlong neck: “What?”

“Don’t say ‘methinks.’ Don’t ever say ‘methinks.’”

“It was a quote from . . .”

“For fuck’s sake I know it’s a quote. Don’t quote!”

Adam just hadn’t found his niche. There were girls you quoted at, and girls you didn’t. And once he learned to distinguish the girls ripe for the quoting, he knew enough not to quote Shakespeare, and not to stand there with a look of anticipation on his face as if to say: Oh boy! Time to quote! No, he figured out his routine pretty quick. You lounge, you smoke. Perhaps you twirl the ice cubes in your glass of mid-range scotch that by second year you’ve decided makes a more distinctive impression than a beer bottle dangling from an index finger. You never look at them directly, the girls who like to be quoted at, because that makes it seem as if you’re deliberately quoting as opposed to just thinking out loud, following the profound and languorous train of your own thoughts. Rattling off a little Beckett here, a little Kafka there. What’s that? Neruda! Adam did extremely well with Neruda, it was all you heard out of him for a while. The thing about the blood of the children in the streets. Betraying something of a social conscience. He doesn’t just live in his head, this guy, not Adam. He’d be at the barricades soon as the first shot rang out.

None of which made the guys who wanted to scrape him against the pavement any less eager to scrape him against the pavement, you understand. If anything it stoked the evolutionary-determinist fires: Cull herd! Squash faggot! Fortunately, Adam, as previously mentioned, had a friend. The same friend who was considerate enough to crush his windpipe at such a key moment in his social development. A big, strong, popular friend, genetically blessed if cursed with a tragic past and a disastrous readiness to trust his fellow man.

Adam was afraid of fat people. He was afraid of a lot of things. Rare meat, for example, made him gag and run away, wrists a-flapping, like a high-strung little girl. His friends found this out during an outdoor barbecue one early spring day in first year. It was too soon to be barbecuing, there was still snow on the ground, but everyone at Kyle and Wade’s house decided it was time for winter to be over so they put on shorts and flip-flops, spun a few of Wade’s Beach Boy records and bought some steaks for grilling.

They grabbed either side of the horrific couch — a Sally Ann special, natch, as this is a period in a young man’s life, although the young man never knows it at the time, that is riddled with clichés. You drink to excess. You carry the horrific couch out into the yard, sit it in the snow. You are so crazy! Little do you know you are caught up in some kind of Star Trek time warp, where in a million universes exactly like this one, throughout every possible history of every such universe, a billion college dorks exactly like you are doing exactly the same thing and declaring to their exact same selves: We are so crazy! Who’d have thought to bring a couch outside in early spring?

(I think sometimes I felt it, Adam, and that’s why I behaved the way I did. I felt the weight of those million universes, those billion clichés. Wade: pothead music freak. Kyle: pothead Future Leader, offhand alpha male, even with me around. You: geek; me: jock. All we wanna do is drink and get high and listen to guitar rock and talk about some interesting shit we might have read or heard, god forbid, in class, and have sex with girls, all the time, in all sorts of horrifying ways. And we talk about those ways. And we listen to Van Morrison. And suddenly I can’t stand it, I am suffocating under the weight of the billion college dorks who came before me — who exist on every side, in all the invisible universes — and I eat the by-now grievously abused poster of Van Morrison off the wall. I don’t even take it down first, decently ripping it into bite-sized morsels with my hands. I just lean into the wall and tear off chunks with my teeth and tongue and lips; chew and swallow — ahm, num, num like the Cookie Monster. Ahm, num, num as Wade gazes from behind his peevish cloud and mutters:
Hey
, man.)

Adam was afraid of rare meat. His big, popular, handsome friend unearthed this bit of information during the springtime barbecue. The big popular handsome friend had guzzled a jug of alcool like it was Mountain Dew and he was feeling the massive weight of the innumerable universes of college dorks who had guzzled innumerable jugs of alcool before him, so he blundered over to the barbecue, grabbing the still-semi-frozen steak off the rack (none of them knew how to cook in those days, no one thought to defrost it) and started tearing into the semi-frozen, mostly raw cowflesh with his teeth. He just stood there growling with the steak in his hands as his good friends — his band of brothers — gaped. He looked like some kind of upright animal, a monster, the Wolfman maybe, tearing off chunks of flesh like they were chunks of a Van Morrison poster and going
ahm, num, num
, blood trickling down his charismatic chin.

And that’s when Adam lurched to his feet about to run, but threw up instead.

Ha, ha, ha! declared the friend before throwing up himself.

06/06/09, 1:14 p.m.

Good times, Adam. Like Paris in the twenties. Do you remember Kyle saying that — that was his line:
It’s
like Paris in the twenties in this place!
Whenever our interactions with one another grew particularly squalid. Like the time in second year we both ended up having sex with that one girl because she was so drunk she came back from the bathroom and forgot which one of us she’d been with previously, so went to you after having been with me, and then when I showed up wondering what the hell was going on everybody just kind of shrugged it off like —
Oh . . . Sorry.
And then I passed out on the floor beside you guys and I can only assume you just kept at it, because neither of you seemed particularly happy to be interrupted. Or the time Kyle slapped a girl he had in his bedroom (I still believe he did this, Adam) and we all heard it and stared at one another for a minute and then went back to our beers and conversation. Or the time Wade came back from Goldfinger’s clutching his stash and terrified for his life.

Or that time I made someone die. Again. Remember that?

Well let me remind you. It was like Paris in the twenties.

06/06/09, 2:59 p.m.

Do I feel real to you? Do you feel that I actually exist, pounding keys two-fingered here at my kitchen table, or is it more like receiving email from a figment of your imagination? Is it like I’m a ghost coming back to haunt you? It sounds stupid, but that’s what it was like for me, reading your book. We get freaked out by ghosts because they aren’t supposed to exist, right? They’re not real, in the same way the past isn’t real, not really — and what are ghosts except the past floating around, occasionally taking shape and going booga-booga in your face? Strictly speaking, what’s past doesn’t exist anymore. And it shouldn’t. And you don’t want it to. And there it is, swirling up around the light fixture, trembling your tabletop, banging on the other side of the wall. Notice me — take me into account. I’m not supposed to be here; here I am. That is, here we are. Together again.

That was an experiment, when I was writing about you earlier, the way you came across back in school. How’d it feel reading that? I was trying to do what I felt you did to me and Sylvie — take you over. You’ll notice I didn’t make stuff up exactly, but at the same time I wasn’t really being fair, was I? I was brutally honest, as they say, which is never quite indicative of truth per se. I was making a smarmy story out of the person you innocuously were, out of the hackneyed college-guy life you were innocuously living. You couldn’t help it — you were nineteen, twenty. You were an idiot. We were all idiots. But not all of us end up being immortalized at our personal peak of idiocy do we? Or, say, at very nearly the worst moments of our lives. Not many of us are lucky enough to encounter a hungry young wannabe in the midst of our suffering, a would-be storyteller nearly lobotomized by the dullness of his own existence, famished for some kind of genuine emotional content.

And then I come along. And I am nothing
but
emotional content.

Anyway, the experiment failed. I got caught up again and lost sight of who I was writing about exactly. I started having a kind of weird, dreamy fun and next thing I knew I was writing not about you, exactly, but about us. All of us, back then.

Or, fun is not the right word. Let’s just say I get caught up and leave it at that.

06/06/09, 11:48 p.m.

Hey shitheels. What’s the deal? I thought we had a back and forth going on and now you leave me hanging in the breeze. WTF, as the kids say. I’m baring my soul for you here, yanking off one strip of flesh after another and feeding it into cyberspace. This is supposed to be a dialogue, not To Be or Not To Be, if you know what I mean, not a one-man show. A meeting of minds so to speak. Methinks the a-hole needs to drop a line, is what I’m saying. I mean I know I told you to shut up but I didn’t actually mean shut up. I meant it would be kind of nice if you could not talk to me like I am some kind of psycho stalker freak for a minute or so. You certainly had a great deal to say earlier, about the serving notice and the paper trails and whathaveyou. How can you create a paper trail if you don’t ever write me back?

In conclusion, get with the program.

Your pal,

GR

06/07/09, 8:38 a.m.

OK so I had some beers last night and got bored and was checking my email for word back from you, which I have started doing a tad too compulsively lately, and I guess I was feeling sort of fed up with the radio silence. Sorry about that. I hereby vow not to waste your time with random drunken harangues anymore. We’re not pen pals; I get that. I didn’t exactly kick this whole thing off in the spirit of friendship and, let’s face it, you didn’t pause to solicit my opinion at any point when you were busy chronicling The Life and Times of Danger Man. So just ignore that last email and we’ll continue.

Back to Gord. Needless to say, the Mounties didn’t give him a medal the night he flew at Croft. But they didn’t exactly give him a dressing-down either. Who could fault Gord, after all, an upstanding member of the small-business community, for wanting to kill Mick Croft?
Everybody
wanted to kill Croft — kids, teachers, small-businessmen and Mounties alike. This was nothing new.

At the same time, though, Croft was a kind of subliminal hero in our town. He was such a little bastard, and somehow he got away with it. On the surface, of course, everyone predicted dire things for Croft — he was the kind of guy a decent, God-fearing little town like ours was desperate to dismiss. Croft was insolent, criminal and rebellious. Surely he would come to no good. But in our secret outlaw dreams, I think, we rooted for him.

Croft was eighteen when he was expelled for kicking Mr. Fancy in the ass but only in Grade 10 because he’d been held back a couple years. So instead of sliding into some menial production-line gig at SeaFare like any self-respecting dropout, he moved into a two-bedroom apartment above the woeful Chinese restaurant on Howe Street and set up his drug-dispensary in earnest.

How do I know? Because I went there every couple of months. Croft was the man to see, like it or not. He was to my hometown what Wade was to the student body back in our beloved college days.

I was fifteen but about twice the size of Croft, and for all intents and purposes a man. It’s weird to think back to it now. I was always big, as I think I might’ve mentioned, but at fourteen I kind of exploded into manhood. I shot up an extra foot, putting me at 6 ' 4 ", I sprouted hair overnight like a werewolf — except the hair didn’t disappear after the full moon, but sallied forth from the ground zero of my crotch to obliterate my entire torso. My voice — already deep — plummeted into Darth Vader Luke-I-am-your-father territory and I had to shave practically twice a day to keep from looking like a prospector. You’d think that would be weird, and it was weird, but I’ll tell you what was weirder: other people — the way
they
changed, behaviourally, in response to what had happened to me physically. Almost overnight I went from being alternately marvelled at and teased for being the big lumpy kid I was, to being deferred to and even respected as a grown man.

Imagine one day the neighbourhood mothers are gleefully feeding you hot dogs to see how many you can down in one sitting, tousling your hair, exclaiming over your “big, hungry boy!” status as they pour you another glass of milk, and the next day those same ladies, who thought nothing of shouting at you to take your shoes off at the back door and wipe your pee off the seat next time, are blinking up at you respectfully and asking if you think they should replace their furnace now or give it another winter. Lady, I’m fourteen! Gimme another hot dog. But no more hot dog marathons for this strapping young man, suddenly they’re setting the table and frying me steaks and having to stop themselves from pouring us both a couple of fingers of scotch and plunking their mom-arses down onto my lap, practically.