The Complete Lockpick Pornography (14 page)

The scheduling guy gives me a brief description of the job site. He lets me know that I will be provided with a hard hat and a flashlight.

“A big mother-fucking flashlight,” he says. Then he makes hand motions like he's beating someone down with that Big Mother-Fucking Flashlight. For two glorious seconds his eyes bug out of his head, and his teeth gnash at the air as he tears into some make-believe crook.

He's my new favourite co-worker.

Aside from murdering trespassers, I will be required to walk around every once in a while with my justice club and then call hourly reports in to the dispatcher. I have already begun planning ways to use this call-in procedure to keep myself entertained. Some possibilities are:

a) Fake emergencies. This includes pretending that someone is breaking into the building, which would result in an exciting light show when the police arrived, and the chance to fill out long, involved reports, using made-up characters. These could also include fake murders, insisting that wet, shadowy, half-human figures beat someone to death with makeshift tools like big rocks and then dragged the bodies into the sewers.

b) Disguising my voice differently with each call. To make this more fun, I could record my male and female friends saying things like, “This is Arthur, I'm out at the site, and everything's fine,” and “I have a cold,” or “I don't think it's recording.”

c) Pushing random buttons on the phone and not talking. If I do this when I am scheduled to call in, maybe they'll panic. They'll send someone out to save me, imagining that I'm lying in a bloody mess, too weak to talk, using the last of my strength to call my employers and let them know I'm taking a break. When they show up, hopefully with the police, I will say the phone is probably busted. To be on the safe side, I may bust the phone.

I'm not really like a cop at all. I haven't got any actual authority. If someone does show up to do anything bad, I am not allowed to touch them or interfere with them in any way. I'm a scarecrow. I'm like one of those plastic owls that are supposed to scare away pigeons, but that pigeons shit all over.

I could be wearing a cheap suit with Clay right now. We could be waiting in the dark outside the office-supply store, tire irons shoved down our pants, waiting for Wallace to get off work. We could be on a plane, flying to the middle of God knows where to avenge a pimply teen.

But instead I am guarding a construction site. Every hour I am required to walk around the building looking for anything out of the ordinary. As it is pitch-black, and I carry a big flashlight, I imagine that it would be pretty easy to hide from me. The only way I could possibly catch anyone is if they managed to hurt themselves while breaking in and were subsequently too injured to move.

I am ever vigilant in my quest to defend the world from clumsy criminals.

I have a co-worker across the street who is helping me adjust to the reality of being on-site (as opposed to what those idealists down at “headquarters” expect). I'm getting an education of what life is like “in the real world.” For example, “Behind the building is spooky as fuck, so don't bother going back there. There aren't any cameras to make sure you do your rounds, and nobody's going to break in anyway,” he tells me.

After work, I stop at the mall, and there's Wallace, in line for coffee. He's not wearing his uniform, and I realize this is the first time I've ever seen him without it. He's wearing a button-up shirt and jeans. Just another guy in line for a coffee.

He looks over and sees me and doesn't smile. He doesn't not smile either. He looks at me for a second, and then his gaze moves on like he hasn't seen me at all. Suddenly I'm angry again. I don't know what I thought would happen if I ran into him. I guess I would have expected the same smile or nod I would have gotten coming into work in the morning. The Wallace I had known while working there, before everything happened. No hug or anything — we aren't ever going to be best friends — but some kind of acknowledgement. I didn't expect this.

This is someone who shoved me down the stairs when he found out I was gay. A split-second move, and a mistake he regretted. But that regret really was just about his job. Now that his job is safe, this is how things are. This is how they would have been if he'd found out that I was gay and played it cool. He looked right through me.

I turn around and walk away. There's a children's store, and then a bathroom. Inside the bathroom, I kick the stall door. I kick it again and then I lean back against the wall and look at myself in the mirror. Good call, Arthur. That empathy of yours saves the day again. You think he's gonna push another gay employee? Maybe, maybe not. But in the back of his mind he's gonna think,
Well, I could get away with it
.

The bathroom door opens and a man comes in. It takes me a second to recognize him. Adam Sambro, from high school. He nods at me the way men nod at each other and walks to the urinal. He hasn't recognized me.

I remember him in the cafeteria, telling jokes to his friends at the next table.

“What's the best part about date rape?” he said, taking a bite of cafeteria pizza. “The sex!” And everyone laughed. “Why is it depressing when a homeless woman gets pregnant?” he said. “Now she's dirty
and
fat.”

Adam Sambro, just another student-council kid. He never much stuck out to me. Except it might have been him who put a rock through the window of Mr. Payne's car. It might have been Adam Sambro here who wrote
FAGGOT
on the side in spray paint. Nobody ever got caught, and nobody came forward. I don't remember thinking it at the time, but I'm thinking it now. I'm sure I heard him laughing about it anyway. Just one more laughing voice. Everyone had thought that was funny. Fuck him. What is a person supposed to do when they come outside and find their car smashed?

Faggot.

Is this what I am?

Is this how people see me every day, when I come to work and teach physics? I'm just the faggot teacher? Is this what the repair guy at the body shop is going to think about me when I bring this in? Is this what the other teachers are going to be thinking, even while they make a show of trying to find and punish whoever did this?

When Adam Sambro finishes pissing and zips his fly, I'm ready. He turns around and I step into him. I put my hand on his shoulder, and I bring my knee up into his balls as hard as I can. He doubles over and goes down gasping for air. He's not even looking up at me; he's just fetal on the ground. I'm so angry. I don't know what to say.

“Faggot” is what I say. And then I turn and leave. I'm shaking. The doors to the outside are close. And once I'm outside, the road is close. The lights are green, and across the street there's a row of houses I can cut behind. On the next street over, I start to jog. Then I'm running a bit faster. I start running as fast as I can, and I run until I can't run anymore. Until my face feels tight and my insides are burning, and tears are streaming down my face.

I call Clay at work and tell him what happened. He's going to come and get me. He's leaving work to come. I climb up onto playground equipment, and I sit with my feet hanging down. What if Adam Sambro is someone completely different now? Everybody is an asshole in high school. Fuck, what if he's gay now? Oh fuck. What if he's gay now and I attacked him and called him a faggot?

Even if he's not gay, I attacked him. I attacked him in the bathroom, a place where people should feel safe. He was taking a piss and then out of nowhere he was on the floor in pain. Nobody should have to go through that. We should be allowed to be safe. There should be places where we can be safe. Is he going to be afraid to go into public bathrooms now? Is he going to be angry? Is he going to feel angry and helpless and frustrated and is he going to turn around now and attack someone else himself?

Why won't Clay get here? I don't like the way I feel. I need him here, putting his arms around me. Is he even going to want to put his arms around me? Is Adam Sambro still on that bathroom floor?

In
Unforgiven
, after the kid finally kills someone, he just cries and drinks. He tries to justify it to himself, and to Clint Eastwood.

“I . . . I guess he had it coming though, right?” he says.

“We all got it coming, kid,” Clint Eastwood says.

I don't know which character I am. The kid, I guess.

There's a scene in the movie
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
where Steve Martin has finally had enough of John Candy's irritating habits — his snoring, his constant chattering. He snaps. He points out every obnoxious thing that's wrong with John Candy, all the stupid things he talks about, his pointless stories. He goes on and on and on while John Candy just stands there and takes it. And when Steve Martin is done his ranting, John Candy says, “You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel better.”

He says maybe Steve Martin's right. Maybe he does talk too much, and maybe he does do the wrong thing. And you know what? Steve Martin is welcome to think whatever he wants. Because, “I like . . . I like me,” John Candy says. “And my wife likes me.”

That bit always makes me well up with tears. He doesn't need Steve Martin to like him. He likes himself. And he has someone who loves him. Later, when you find out that his wife has been dead for years now, it just destroys me. It destroys Steve Martin too. You see a series of flashbacks, where John Candy is talking about his wife, and about his life, and it's like Steve Martin is seeing him for the first time. When he figures it out, he goes running to find him, to bring him home to his own family for dinner. And this is when supposedly he realizes that John Candy is his friend after all, but I don't think so. I think this is when John Candy
becomes
his friend. When Steve Martin sees the weakness, that's the moment they become friends. That's what makes relationships strong.

I can see Clay coming across the playground toward me now, and I hope I'm right.

Joey Comeau writes the comic
A Softer World
. He is the author of the bestselling
Overqualified
(2009) and
One Bloody Thing After Another
(2010), which was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award and the ReLit Award. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Copyright © Joey Comeau, 2012

Published by ECW Press

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416-694-3348 / [email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Comeau, Joey, 1980–

Complete lockpick pornography / Joey Comeau.

Contents: Lockpick pornography — We all got it coming

I. Comeau, Joey, 1980– . Lockpick pornography.

II. Comeau, Joey, 1980– . We all got it coming. III. Title.

PS8605.O537C64 2012 C813'.6 C2011-906978-4

ISBN: 978-1-77090-192-6

also issued as: 978-1-77090-191-9 (PDF); 978-1-77041-069-5 (Print)

Lockpick Pornography was previously published by Loose Teeth Press in 2005.

Editor for the Press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book

Design and production: Rachel Ironstone

The publication of
The Complete Lockpick Pornography
has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, and by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. The marketing of this book was made possible with the support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation.