The Antagonist (5 page)

I’m exaggerating to make my point, but you get it, right? And the problem with being a boy in a man’s body is that, basically, in this world, it isn’t a problem. It’s commonplace. There are lots of boys in men’s bodies walking around — I work with a few of them. Some of them are my age, trembling on the precipice of the big four-oh, and some are even older. What I’m saying is, a lot of boys don’t bother growing into men, because they don’t have to — their bodies have already done it and it turns out that’s all anybody requires.

Which is to say, Adam, that when you are fourteen and you walk around looking like you are twenty-two, you rapidly figure out a few things about the human condition. First, being a grown man gives you this instant, irrational power. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t graduated from junior high yet, it doesn’t matter if you spend most your evenings picking your nose in front of
Family Ties
, and it doesn’t matter if you have done precisely nothing in your life worthy of your fellow man’s respect. Doesn’t matter — you have it. Everyone figures you can fix their cars, that you know what kind of aluminum siding they should buy, that you can file a tax return. And they turn to you, this is what’s astounding — they turn to you, these ladies with the bashed-up furnaces — in all your assumed expertise and aptitude.

Meanwhile you just want to eat hot dogs and pick your nose. And you
do
. You
do
eat hot dogs and pick your nose. And nobody
notices
. It doesn’t seem to sully your newfound respectability one bit.

So imagine you’re not just a grown man at fourteen but (and sorry for how this sounds) imagine you’re a
spectacularly
grown man. That you tower above other men. That your voice is deep and authoritative — your pronouncements, therefore, not to be denied. That your forearms and chest and genitals are practically carpeted. If being a grown man endows you with instantaneous authority, what do you suppose a body like mine was telling people?

It told people, I think:
Make way.

It told people:
Trust me.

Some people it told:
I am your hero!

It told women:
I’ll take care of it.

Men it asked:
How could I have anything but contempt for you?

It said:
Prove it. Prove to me how big you are.

06/07/09, 1:27 p.m.

So I was fifteen and Croft was eighteen, and I was the obvious choice among all my friends to head to Croft’s upstairs apartment on Howe every few months or so and purchase a few fragrant rabbit-turds of hash and multiple baggies of what my father so quaintly called “the maryjane.” There was never any discussion of this among me or my friends; it was simply understood that Croft was a dangerous skeeze, known to deal with bikers and carry knives, and therefore it fell to Gordon Rankin Jr., fifteen-year-old colossus, to do business with him. Everyone assumed I was invulnerable and would have no problem with this, and in fact I didn’t. I wasn’t scared of Croft. I wasn’t scared of anybody. Because when people make the kind of assumptions about you that I describe above, Adam — that you are basically a 214-pound superman — it is kind of hard not to assume it right along with them.

I went to see Croft not long after Gord took that run at him. I don’t think it occurred to me that the incident at Icy Dream would interfere with our business interactions, so when I climbed the steps to Croft’s apartment, the woozy stench of cheap meat and sesame oil from the Chinese restaurant filling the stairwell, I’d pretty much forgotten the whole affair. Like I said, I was fifteen years old. Not all my higher brain functions had gelled at that point. I was fantastically oblivious to danger at that age — or even the idea of consequence itself. It never occurred to me, for example, that there was any reason I should bring a buddy with me to Croft’s — none of my friends had any interest in attending these transactions, and they all had complete confidence in my ability to handle myself. Therefore, needless to say, so did I.

Imagine how any given small-town petty-criminal teenage headbanger circa 1985 would decorate an apartment and — bang — there’s your mental image of Croft’s drug shack. A lot of red light bulbs, a lot of smoke, a lot of heavy metal odds and sods (skull candles, flying-V ashtrays — you get the picture). The guitar in the corner, the amps, the preposterous stereo system, so tweaked and extravagant it might as well have been sculpted from solid testosterone. The grimiest of couches placed behind a wooden slab of a coffee table that in its squat massiveness had a kind of sacrificial-altar thing going on. Croft probably chose it for that very quality, now that I think of it (and by “chose,” of course, I mean hauled it out of the dump or his grandmother’s basement or somewhere). Because the coffee table definitely performed a ceremonial function during these meetings. This was where Croft cut, measured, tested and finally bequeathed his product.

Croft’s bright little eyes lit up when he opened the door. “Dude!” he greeted. This I should mention was long before people in my part of the world started saying “dude” all the time, but ever since that California stoner movie with Sean Penn, Croft had adopted the expression as his own as if in tribute. That, and “bud.” He also went around exclaiming “You
dick!
” more than was strictly necessary.

And if you’re expecting an atmosphere of criminal intrigue to take over at this point, Adam — sorry. I was one kid buying dope from another, just as millions of kids do every day. I sat down on the couch across from Croft (and the cow-flop of hash that was splayed on the table between us), placed my order, and waited for Croft to saw me off a few chunks like I was waiting for a slice of ham at Easter dinner. We’d been through this a bunch of times. He didn’t give me a sinister look when he pulled his knife out of his back pocket, his eyes didn’t glint as he extracted the blade, he was barely paying attention to what he was doing, and so was I. I just sat there feeling vaguely depressed by my surroundings. Croft’s skeezer entourage lounged around sucking beers and bobbing their heads to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Collie Chaisson had his eyes closed and was playing air guitar. My own eyes were tearing up from the smoke. I remember thinking to myself, as Croft invited me to help myself to a beer from a cooler sitting near my feet, that I should feel jealous of him living this outlaw, parent-free life, and I wondered why I didn’t. I downed the beer and didn’t pursue the question, but the answer is pretty obvious to me now: I was only fifteen. I had no desire, conscious or unconscious, to live like Croft. I craved, like any kid secretly does, rules, decency, wholesome surroundings. I didn’t want this, or anything like it, not yet. I still wanted my mother.

“So dude,” said Croft, rolling a chunk of hash into a ball between his fingers. “Your dad, man. Fuck.”

I placed the emptied beer bottle between my legs. So we were going to have the conversation after all. “I know,” I said. “Sorry, man.”

“Lost it, bro.”

“I know,” I said again. For lack of anything else to do, any other kind of this-conversation-is-over gesture to make, I picked up the empty beer again and made a point of pretending to drain it.

At this point Collie Chaisson’s freckled eyelids flew open and he stopped playing air-guitar mid-riff. “Holy fuck man fucking
guy
!” he exclaimed. “Like,
flying
across the counter man!”

I slouched deeper into the chair and let my arms dangle over the armrests, deciding to just go limp and permit the stupid inevitability of Chaisson’s play-by-play wash over me.

Croft was smiling down at his drugs, shaking his head in a seen-it-all kind of way. “Angry little man,” he remarked.

I sighed. “Yeah. Short fuse.”

But Chaisson wasn’t finished. “So he, like, he
comes
at the Mickster, right?”

Chaisson was actually preparing to tell the story from start to finish. Not only that, he was acting it out, leaning forward in the chair with his arms extended straight out in front of him, fingers spasmodically clenching, exactly the way Gord’s had been. Even Chaisson’s face was twisted into a unpleasantly accurate imitation of Gord’s furious little knot of blood lust.

“And he’s like ‘You
blankety
little
blank-blank
!’”

Blankety? I stared at Chaisson.

“Dude,” interrupted Croft, and I was glad he did because we both knew if Chaisson kept going I would eventually be obliged to respond. Much as I wanted to distance myself from Gord, I couldn’t let this skid sit there guffawing all night about how ridiculous my tiny, angry father had made himself.

“We were all there, Col,” continued Croft, still not looking up from his work. “No need for the floor show.”

Chaisson immediately sunk back into his chair, glancing over at me and frowning just a little when he realized how hard I had been staring at him this whole time.

Then, a massive piece of furniture at far end of the room began to tremble and grunt — it was actually a guy, a guy in sunglasses who I’d originally assumed to be passed out when I first arrived. Now he was hefting himself out of a chair that had previously seemed a natural extension of his body, so snugly did it fit his lower half. I sat up and watched as he trundled over, still grunting, to join Croft on the couch. He was almost equally tall as wide, with a balding pate and grotesque little ponytail nestled in the folds of flesh insulating the back of his neck.

“Jesus, Croft,” he grunted as he approached. “I can’t watch this anymore.”

Croft smiled up at him. “What?”

“What,” repeated neck-fat. “What. It’s like you’re sitting there crocheting fuckin doilies is what.” He took the knife from Croft’s impassive hand and briskly finished the job like an executive chef chopping onions. A second later, he’d wrapped the chunks of hash and shoved them, along with the requisite baggies of pot, across the table at me.

“Good?” he said to me.

“Um,” I said.

“Hey man,” said Croft. “I’m just trying to do a good job by this guy. This guy’s a good guy.”

“How nice,” remarked neck-fat, peering at me through his sunglasses. I didn’t know how he could see a thing in Croft’s red-lit living room. “So is the customer happy?”

“I think so,” I said, rapidly counting the baggies. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, this is good.” Thank you neck-fat, I thought to myself. This is exactly what was needed — someone to step forward, punch through Croft’s leisurely, lord-of-the-manor pace and move this business along. I stood up from my chair in order to yank my wallet from my back pocket.

“Forty,” rumbled neck-fat.

“Wait a sec, Jeeves,” said Croft. “I thought we’d give my buddy Rankin a little discount.”

“Why that’s adorable,” said Jeeves, gazing up at me — and could his name really be Jeeves? “And why would we want to do that?”

“Little dust-up at his dad’s restaurant the other day. Just wanted to say no hard feelings.”

I was still standing there with my wallet in my hand, practically hopping up and down with the need to get this over with and go meet my buddies behind the mall. The parking lot behind the mall seemed the most wholesome place in the world all of a sudden.

Abruptly, the mountain man heaved himself to his feet and extended his hand to me.

“Call me Jeeves,” he said.

“OK,” I said. The top of Jeeves’ red-shining head came level with my nose, which meant he was a pretty big guy. And, as I contemplated his stringy skull, I realized that he had about twenty years on the rest of us.

And he still hadn’t let go of my hand.

“Oh,” I said. “Rank. Gordon Rankin. Call me Rank.”

“Rank,” repeated Jeeves. “Like pee-yew, right?” He smiled and wafted his other hand in front of his nose.

“I never thought of that,” I said, thrown, because I really never had. I realized for the first time that I had basically been insisting people call me Stinky since I was twelve years old.

“You’re a big fucking guy, Rank,” remarked Jeeves. He pumped my hand and finally let it drop.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I am a big fucking guy.” I had trained myself at this point not to automatically respond “Thanks,” when someone made this remark.

“Well why don’t we say thirty-five, big guy?”

“Thirty-five, sure,” I said, digging through my wallet and glancing over at Croft. Because why was I doing business with this Jeeves guy all of a sudden? Croft gave me one of his sweet smiles, the same kind, I recalled, that had sent the Geography teacher into such paroxysms. The thing about Croft was, he had something of an angelic face. When he smiled his bright blue eyes tended to dance — he could light up a room. That face, I think, was what really sent people like Fancy and the Geography teacher over the top. Being a badass little shit is one thing. But being a badass little shit who follows up his snotty remark with a smile that melts your heart is too much to ask of anyone’s patience.

06/07/09, 7:05 p.m.

Adam, I notice you still haven’t emailed me back. I know I told you to sit back and enjoy the story, so maybe you are just being obedient and, if so, I appreciate that. And sorry again, really, for my drunken e-nagging earlier. I just want to let you know it’s okay if you feel the need to remark upon any of this. It kind of helps me to keep going if I know someone is digesting the story and responding to it. I guess it’s nice to have an audience, to know I’m not just whistling into the void. When I asked you that question before, about whether or not I felt real to you, if it felt like you were getting email from a figment of your imagination, it wasn’t rhetorical. I was genuinely wanting an answer. It kind of bugged me when you didn’t answer.

I know I came off a little psycho previously but I was just pissed off because you were being so defensive with that “serving notice” shit. Why is it you can’t seem to get around the whole “innate criminality” thing when it comes to me? You turned me into a criminal in your book and you are treating me like a criminal even now. Just because of a few emails. But they’re
my
emails, right, therefore they must have an innate criminality nestled somewhere in their genetic soup.