The Indifference League (3 page)
Read The Indifference League Online
Authors: Richard Scarsbrook
Mr. Nice Guy glances at his watch, his most prized possession:
The Super G Digital Athletic Chronometer.
It has a built-in calculator and everything; it's as if he's got the instrument cluster from a fighter jet strapped to his wrist.
The Super G reads 12:11 a.m. Eleven minutes past midnight. It's tomorrow already.
The day that has just passed also happened to be his eighteenth birthday. None of them remembered, not even Hippie Avenger.
It doesn't matter,
he tells himself.
It's okay. It was a good day anyway.
When Psycho Superstar turned eighteen last month, they all chipped in for a bottle of rye whiskey for him, and he got to grope both Miss Demeanor's and Hippie Avenger's bodies when they complied with his request for “a birthday babe sandwich.”
For Mr. Nice Guy's birthday, nobody even passed a card around for everyone to sign.
But it's okay. Mr. Nice Guy doesn't mind.
He is happy. All is well.
*
There is a pensive smile on Mr. Nice Guy's face as he floats up from this old memory and resurfaces in the present, where his fingers are still hovering over the keyboard of his outdated computer.
It never happened again. Despite Mr. Nice Guy's consistent efforts, that weekend twelve years ago was the last time that they were all together in the same place at the same time â well, except for the funeral, of course. Sure, a few of the other Not-So-Super Friends would show up at The Hall of Indifference from year to year, but never everyone, and sometimes no one at all.
This year will be different
, Mr. Nice Guy thinks. He can feel it. This year, everyonce will come. He blinks, blinks again, and then continues typing.
Of course, the invitation is also extended to everyone's significant others.
The Statistician's moody, passive-aggressive wife was inducted into The Indifference League a few years ago, but Mr. Nice Guy doesn't dare mention in the email the
nom de plume
that he and Hippie Avenger invented for her: Time Bomb.
Miss Demeanor and The Drifter have taken to calling her that, too, but never in front of The Statistician, and especially not to Time Bomb herself, who could go off at any moment, without warning.
Mr. Nice Guy stabs at the keyboard again.
The Drifter, Hippie Avenger and Miss Demeanor, invite your current main squeezes along if you've got âem, and we'll initiate them into the League.
Mr. Nice Guy leans against the backrest of his faux-leather desk chair, hoping that either Miss Demeanor or Hippie Avenger shows up solo; lately he has found himself wondering if, under the right circumstances, some of the old magic might return with one of his former girlfriends. It's been a lonely year.
He shakes his head, and types some more.
Mr. Nice Guy will provide all the booze and food (especially the bratwurst!). I've bought new sheets and pillows for The Hall of Indifferenceâ¢, so no need for sleeping bags anymore!
Long Live the Not-So-Super Friendsâ¢!!!!!!!
Your Fearless Leader,
Mr. Nice Guy
Of course he will provide everything, the food, the booze, the lodging. He will pay for it all, without expecting anything in return, even though most of the other Not-So-Super Friends have higher incomes than he does. Of course he will! He is Mr. Nice Guy!
Mr. Nice Guy deletes “Your Fearless Leader.” SuperKen will surely make fun of him if he includes that line. He is about to hit the “Send” button when he notices something else, in the second paragraph of the email:
To commemorate this milestone year, all surviving members of the Indifference League⢠are hereby summoned to The Hall of Indifference⢠for the upcoming holiday long weekend!
He also deletes the word “surviving.” No need to reopen that old wound.
PSYCHO
SUPERSTAR
“Madness, as you know, is like gravity.
All it takes is a little push.”
â The Joker, from the movie
The Dark Knight
, 2008
P
sycho Superstar was the only member of The Indifference League who ever claimed to posses any superpowers:
“Rockin', Drinkin', and Kickin' Ass.”
He got his name from a song by Ron Hawkins â not the old country music star “Rompin'” Ronnie Hawkins, but the Toronto indie scene legend who was the frontman for the Lowest of the Low. Psycho Superstar loved all of those indie rock bands; he'd seen them all at least a dozen times each at The Horseshoe and Lee's Palace and Sneaky Dee's. But he loved Ron Hawkins the best.
During the four years that followed their graduation from Tom Thomson High School, Psycho Superstar was the wealthiest of the Not-So-Super Friends. While The Drifter laboured on for two more years in high school, then left to go backpacking through Europe and Asia, and the other members of The Indifference League lived the starving-student lifestyle in various university residences, Psycho Superstar landed a high-paying job on the jar-
capping line at the King o' the Bun condiment factory.
While the rest of them subsisted on peanut-butter sandwiches, Kraft Dinner, and whatever discount-brand beer happened to be on sale that week, Psycho Superstar ate at sit-down restaurants and developed an appreciation for Scotch whiskey. He rented a Babe Lair bachelor apartment near the Entertainment District, and he splurged on a blood-red crotch-rocket motorcycle. He'd almost bought the Suzuki GSX-R1000, because the slogan for the bike was Own the Racetrack,
and baby, he was ready to own the racetrack, the highway, and anything else he wanted. But then he saw an ad for the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-14, which proclaimed it
“The Most Powerful Production Motorcycle of All Time.”
Ninja. Zed Ex Fourteen.
The words tasted like chocolate-
coated hallucinogens in his mouth. Now
that
was the name of a Superhero's ride. He paid cash for the bike, and rode it away from the dealership that same day.
There was no doubt about it: Psycho Superstar was
The Man
. As if there was ever any doubt.
*
Four years later, things changed.
SuperKen graduated from the Royal Military College with a degree in military and strategic studies, and joined the Canadian Armed Forces as an officer cadet. While SuperKen's athletic career dwindled somewhat at RMC, since practically everyone else there was
also
the winner of their respective high school's Athlete of the Year Award, SuperBarbie became captain of the Queen's University volleyball team (she had turned down scholarship offers from other universities so she could be close to SuperKen in Kingston). She was being scouted for the Canadian Olympic team, but she passed on that opportunity to begin decorating the Perfect Little Starter Home she and SuperKen purchased near the base where he was stationed, where they would eventually start their Perfect Little Family.
Mr. Nice Guy graduated from the University of Western Ontario with a degree in English and history, and got a job working as an archivist for the Toronto Public Library. Hippie Avenger earned a B.A. in visual arts and women's studies from the University of Guelph, and became the assistant curator of a small but prosperous gallery that sold the works of a semi-famous group of painters from the late sixties.
Miss Demeanor finished her psychology degree at the University of Toronto, where she was hired as a student crisis counsellor. At U of T, she occasionally bumped into The Statistician, who earned a B.Sc. in advanced mathematics, graduated with
Summa Cum Laude
distinction, and won a graduate scholarship in statistics, which allowed him to earn a master's degree and then a Ph.D.
During the summer that the rest of The Indifference League assumed their new Spelled-with-Capital-Letters, University-Degree-Required positions, The Drifter returned from his travels through Europe and Asia, brimming over with stories and knowledge, and a new maturity and self-confidence. The Drifter also brought back with him the motorcycle upon which he'd wandered two continents; not an expensive, overpowered racing bike like Psycho Superstar's, but a battered, ancient Norton Commando, which rumbled and sputtered and barfed blue smoke.
At first Psycho Superstar made fun of The Drifter for the constant repairs and adjustments the Norton required, but the mockery ceased when he noticed that the warhorse bike attracted women to The Drifter like ants to spilled honey. Not even live-for-today Miss Demeanor would climb onto the back of Psycho Superstar's Ninja; the danger outweighed the potential thrill.
*
When the filling lines at the condiment factory shuddered to a halt at the end of another Friday afternoon shift, the last relish jar on Psycho Superstar's conveyor belt was empty, except for the pink slip tucked inside. This was the method favored by the King o' the Bun human resources department for communicating to a line worker that his or her employment had been officially terminated.
That little fucker musta ratted on me to the foreman
, Psycho Superstar figured.
It's not like I hurt
him. I just shook him up a bit, put him in his place a little.
He smashed the relish jar against the cinderblock wall, unzipped his pants, and pissed the words
FUCK OFF
on the concrete warehouse floor, and then he strode out of the factory with his head held high, giving the finger to each of the security cameras along the way.
Fuck 'em all.
Tonight, Psycho Superstar decided, he would put his superpowers to their ultimate test. So he Rocked. And he Drank. And he Rocked and he Drank some more. And then it was time to go Kick Some Ass.
He climbed onto his Ninja ZX-14 and revved it until it screamed like a hellhound. He pushed that blood-red crotch-rocket to Superhero Velocity; of that there is no doubt. The forensic experts figured he was traveling at over 180 kilometres an hour when he hit the pedestal of that concrete overpass.
They had a difficult time separating the bits of Psycho Superstar from the pieces of the shattered bike. For one thing, everything was the same colour.
*
At the funeral, none of the members of The Indifference League referred to him as Psycho Superstar; they called him “Jake,” the name chosen for him by his parents when he was born.
The Statistician puzzled at how the words “dead,” “died,” and “killed” were carefully avoided. Jake's leather-faced, whiskey-scented father repeated over and over again that he'd “never expected the boy to cash in his chips so soon.” SuperBarbie referred to Jake's condition as “asleep in Jesus” and “in God's loving arms,” while SuperKen saw him as having “passed over.” To Hippie Avenger, Jake had “left us,” and to Miss Demeanor, he was merely “gone.”
The minister gave a sermon explaining that Jake had “winged his flight from this world, launching himself into eternity.” While SuperBarbie called out an emphatic “Amen!” after every line, The Statistician strained against the impulse to roll his eyes, knowing that Jake himself would have said that he'd “bit the dust,” “kicked the oxygen habit,” “bought the pine condo,” or “made a nice road pizza.”
Miss Demeanor, the closest thing Jake ever had to a girlfriend, gave the eulogy. She got some sniffling laughs when she recounted the time that Jake got tangled in a barbed-wire fence fleeing from a farmer who had caught him trying to ride the cows. People nodded and chuckled and swatted away tears when Miss Demeanor described that time in high school when the Not-So-Super Friends paid to go bungee jumping from an abandoned railroad bridge over this deep gorge near Guelph. Of course Jake went first. The bungee cord snapped, and he crashed into the water. So, he swam to the shore, climbed the cliff wall back up to the bridge, and demanded a second go for free. It was such a Jake thing to do.
