One Hit Wonders

by Patrick Warner

  “The matter is the message.” Freddy had that right for sure.

  One Good Friday I found myself outside the Basilica. I went in to soak up the atmosphere, I suppose. Maybe I was feeling nostalgic. Just as I’d remembered from childhood, the church was stripped down to its bones, like it had been robbed. I walked up a side aisle, sat in a straight chair before the thrown-open tabernacle. The crosses and statues were all covered in purple cloth. I don’t know how long I sat there. I listened to the sounds of crepe soles on parquet. The coughs and sniffs. The muted whispers. And then someone approached me. I felt hot breath in my ear. I smelled mint, and lavender—not a perfume but lavender-scented cloth. Old lady smell. “It’s beautiful to see a young woman contemplating the sacrament,” she said. Bony hands on my shoulders. I didn’t answer. I didn’t even look at her, but after she left I burst into tears.

  The trouble with the church is not the message but the messengers. Too many young gays in love with the theatre of it all, the vestments and sundry religious kitsch. The Taj Mahal of all closets. And above them, too many old homosexuals, clapped out from seminary orgies and sacristy blow jobs.

  My counsellor tells me I was depressed. Am depressed? She was empathetic (those big brown eyes) when I said that sometime between the age of twenty-five and thirty-five love changed from a feeling to an idea. Love objectified me. I became love’s thing. A thing. How her brown eyes grew moist as she struggled to understand. I mean, there’s something ghoulish in empathy, don’t you think? So I put it to her in terms she could understand, in terms of addiction. Ideas are foreign bodies. They are foreign to matter, but colonize it. Ideas make meat puppets.

  A monster.

  Pity the powerless priest abusers. Those who can neither break nor live with their vows, who are powerless and so prey on their kind. Pity their prey, the children. Pray for them.

  I said it’s not easy living with a legend. My counsellor agreed. She thought I was talking about Freddy when I was talking about myself. She said I needed to make room for me. I call that room perspective.

  As for Freddy, I long since saw through the hype surrounding him. Sure he wrote one good book—

  Oh, God. Dark outside and it’s only three o’ clock. And it’s July. It has just rained for eleven days straight. Last night I had to find my winter duvet—

  He wrote one good book that flattered the media who in turn told people that here was a book that would change the way they thought about themselves in the world. Sales soared.

  I live with a legend in a very nice apartment. I have never had to work. We live downtown. We are downtown types. We used to have many friends, but their numbers have declined in inverse proportion to the number of new babies on the scene. And Freddy’s failure to produce a sequel hasn’t helped. Even people who didn’t read the original want a sequel.

  After eleven days the sun appeared and cauterized the bleeding stump where hope had been.

  You are depressed Lila. This is me talking to me. Self-talk is my thing. You know you are depressed when the reasons you gave yourself for doing the bad things that you did start to make sense again.

  More Cawarra, Lila? Why yes, thank you, I think I will.

  Sales soared and Freddy made a lot of money. How much money he made he would never tell me exactly. He would have made a lot more money had he taken that job at the university, had he done what the publishers asked. But money was not important to him. Nor to me. We were downtown people.

  My job is to look beautiful. And to transcribe. This is the Gospel of Lila.

  Freddy is as uncomfortable with computers and typewriters as he is with the idea of an office. He finds these things to be almost as constructed as the idea of the author. He wants to stay close to the source. His finger is his stylus. He walks around town for two to three hours each morning. He walks and thinks, stopping only to record his thoughts in a notebook. He has a fetish for suede-cover notebooks.

  He once held up traffic at Rawlins Cross. He once blocked the mayor from exiting the underground parking lot at City Hall. When thought strikes, Freddy writes. Hey, that’s not bad. Actually, the Freddy pop-up just popped up to remind me that he doesn’t write, he transcribes.

  And I transcribe what he transcribes. Twice removed. And to keep it that way he insists on a certain charm. Instead of Freddy and Lila, his thoughts are the thoughts of Franz and Lula. These are our paper babies.

  Groan, I know. But the weird thing is that it works. He sees deeply into himself and by doing so sees deeply into me. He sees my sickness like no one else. And he loves me. I know this because he tells me I’m perfect.

  More Cawarra, Lila? Why yes, thank you, Lula, I think I will. A few more of these and I will really start to believe that we are perfect. I might have to fuck you.

  This brings me to the question of how much money we have in the bank.

  As of last Friday night it was $1,267,345.66.

  I know because before I began transcribing Freddy’s transcriptions for last week I went and found his secret notebook, the one he keeps in his secret place, with pictures of old girlfriends, a packet of rolling papers, and a beach rock that looks like a petrified big toe.

  I noticed there had been a steady stream of withdrawals in amounts of either 10k or 20k over the previous few months. We hadn’t made any major purchases. Might it have some connection with what I saw scrawled in the women’s toilet at the Ship: Freddy, the new Canada Council.

  Other connections were made as I faithfully typed up Freddy’s transcriptions for that week. And some were disconnections.

  Depressed or not, at thirty-five, I no longer wanted to be Freddy’s wife.

  But how do I know that’s true? Depression is like a parallel universe where everything becomes its opposite. Real life is red and depression is blue.

  Oh that this were true. Oh that thoughts came with red and blue labels.

  Truth is evergreen.

  No more wine, Lila. OK, Lula, no more wine, but only for you. And tomorrow, exercise. Yes, we’ll begin again tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll begin. Just the two of us. Me and you. Around the lake or up the hill?

  5

  TO DO WHAT I must do next, I have to shapeshift. If I am going to interpret what happened when I was not present, if I am going to know the thoughts of another, or conjure up scenes I didn’t witness first hand, I will have to become the fly on the wall. I must meditate on the carcass; piece together the whole from reported conversations, from patterns of behaviour. And I must do all this long after the fact.

  My friend Ted, also a writer, says it is impossible to enter the mind of another human being. What about books? What about reading? I ask him. He says we do not enter the mind of the writer or the minds of characters when we read; he says the best attempts at empathy are little more than good guesses. He sounds like a man in whom much is hidden, whose inner life is a Chinese box—a writer, in other words. Perhaps he is starting to suffer from the nervous disorder—hypochondria, hysteria, the vapours, call it what you like—common to those who have laboured too long in the profession. It’s an occupational hazard. Being hyper-observant of others leads the writer to turn the same unflinching gaze inward, where it becomes corrosive. Being hyper-observant of yourself eventually leads you to turn the same unflinching gaze outward, where it becomes corrosive. To tell an ugly truth about others is to reveal the same about yourself. And vice versa. It’s a two-way street, with compassion and wisdom at one end and self-consciousness and social anxiety at the other.

  I am inside your head. Where have you gone?

  The Harbour Lounge is Al’s favourite spot to rendezvous with married women, although, on this particular day, he is not here to meet a woman.

  He checks his reflection in the mirrored band that runs between the headrest and the seatback of the upholstered bench opposite and makes a mental note to trim his moustache. He thinks about Lila and wonders if pretending that he is in love with her will make it any easier to do what he is planning to do. He thi
nks again, this time wondering the opposite, if pretending that he is not in love with her will do the trick. He moves his feet and the damp carpet wrinkles and bunches under his brogues. He peers through dusty fern fronds, recalls standing in the rough at the Golden Vale Golf & Country Club, sighting the seventeenth green through a screen of pine branches. Everyone had written him off. People in the gallery sneered when he called for a 3-wood, but that was the shot that turned it around for him.

  He has come early to the Harbour Lounge, to stock up on Dutch courage, and so—it soon becomes apparent—have his potential business partners, his would-be conspirators in crime, his fellow passengers on that handcart bound for hell. He has just settled into the alcove on the other side of the room divider (the seat of his pants registers a rough patch on the vinyl which turns out to be a duct-tape repair) when the two men he is supposed to meet make their bickering entrance on the other side, shouting to the bartender for shots and pints of beer. One of the men is Gosse, musclebound handyman and groundskeeper’s assistant at the golf course. Al doesn’t recognize the other voice.

  “No sign of our friend yet.”

  “He could be here for all I know,” says the other man.

  “We said three o’ clock—three wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “Didn’t bring my watch.”

  The background music in the lounge switches to radio. The speakers pop, blurt into being a woman’s voice, smooth and educated. She is talking about her childhood, about the experience of recovered memory. She has recently visited a hypnotist.

  “Swami Pumphrey,” says Gosse’s companion, from across the divide.

  Under hypnosis the woman had uncovered memories of her father and her uncles and understands now that she has been carrying a hidden trauma her whole life without knowing it.

  “An extraordinary moment,” says the interviewer, her voice husky and quavering slightly. “Can you describe it?”

  Al listens to this interview show every week. He knows the interviewer can add that husky-quavering inflection on demand—she’s all late-night self-help talk radio, plump painted lips so close to the microphone you can hear her saliva click; it’s part of her repertoire, sex and compassion. Her voice—when it takes on this quality—embodies empathy. It’s the empathy hour. Every interview she conducts builds to such a moment, the same way every performance by a great soprano inevitably reaches for that emotive top note.

  “It felt like a fist in my throat,” the interviewee rasps.

  “Lord Jesus, turn off the fucking C-bye-C, will ya?” Gosse roars. “Put on VOCM or a tape or anything. Jesus.”

  The hi-fi system crunches: clips of smeared sound—squalling guitar solos, screeching vocals, bouncing bass lines—as the bartender turns the heavy silver knob on the receiver, scrolling through bandwidth until she lands on the requested channel. “VOCM cares, arrive alive.”

  “And don’t drive with Wally if you’re under five,” chimes Gosse, completing the rhyme about a former announcer who was charged with paedophilia. He bangs a ringed hand on the table top, calls to the waitress for another round.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I’m thirsty?”

  “No, not that. Tell her to change the channel.”

  “You weren’t listening to that crap, were you?”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You never think about things like that?”

  “Why would I?”

  “It’s natural.”

  “What’s natural about being molested?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I meant don’t you never think back to when you were a really little tyke?”

  “…Never.”

  “You hesitated.”

  Gosse laughs, begins to cough.

  “What’s the first thing you ever remember, Gosse?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “I thinks you do.”

  “You sounds like Rhonda.”

  “You’re avoiding.”

  “Now you really sounds like Rhonda.”

  “Come on—what’s the first thing you can remember, ever? Think back now. Look way back through the mists of time. There it is. You’re seeing it now…”

  “Fuck off.”

  “You’re some hard to get along with.”

  “OK. I’ll play. What’s the first thing you remember?”

  “March 4th 1967…Three months before my fourth birthday, three months before the Summer of Love, six months before my first day of school.”

  “Here you go, gentlemen,” says the waitress. “Two pints of red ale and two shots of rye.”

  “Thanks, my honey.”

  “No problem.”

  Al hears the sound of two glasses hitting the table, followed by the clink of shooter glasses.

  “Fuck. Drinking problem.”

  “No more for him,” says Gosse.

  The waitress laughs, high and sniffly. “Here’s some napkins.”

  “Thanks, my honey.... Anyway, where was I? So Mom says to me pop: ‘How can we send him to school, Pack, when he can’t speak?’ It was 1967, right? I was standing in my crib—it had pink bars, and they were all covered in teeth marks where I used to bite them. I remember the wood under the paint was right soft, and the paint chips would sometimes stick in me gums.”

  “Really, my love, no more for him,” says Gosse.

  Al hears the waitress laugh; the sound of air escaping through her nose is like someone shining shoes with a bristle brush.

  “Something about the way Mom said what she said about me not being able to speak made me right angry. I remember I grabbed a hold to the bars of the crib and began to shake the whole thing. See I was almost four years old and still hadn’t spoken a word. Mom and Pop thought there was something wrong with me, that I was a retard, which I guess would explain why they were acting the way they were acting, right in front of me.”

  “They were right about you being a retard.”

  “The old man was sitting at the table and my mom was standing beside him and he was pushing up her dress. I remember looking at her tights and then seeing this band of really white skin. He pushed her dress up higher and then grabbed her underwear and started pulling them down, his hands were making a kind of rocking motion—like he was steering a boat—while Mom shimmied her hips.”

  “It’s always the same dirty low-mindedness with you.”

  “It was at that moment I knew that Mudder was a goddess.”

  Gosse snorts into his pint glass.

  “There was Mom’s big white arse, all red lines where the elastic had cut in. And Pop was squeezing her bum cheeks really hard—I remembers when he relaxed his grip his fingertips left little white circles outlined with red. The next thing Pop was sliding down in his chair and pushing his face into her belly. And Mom lifted one leg and balanced her foot on the arm of his chair.”

  “C’mon, Snuff. That’s your mom you’re talking about.”

  “It’s the truth. You know what they say about the truth. It’s stranger than fact. I was quiet then in my crib. I was watching the way she tipped back her head and looked over her shoulder at me with dreamy eyes. She looked different back then. She kept whispering, ‘Pack, no, Pack, no, the child.’ I was just face and eyes into what Pop was doing, all that snuffling and munching. At the same time I was right confused—maybe a bit upset, now I thinks of it—because I could see that the lower half of his face was covered in a shiny black beard where a few minutes before he had been clean-shaven. So fucking weird. I couldn’t take it in. I felt everything inside me swelling up into this big bubble. There was no stopping it. I felt right swole up like I was going to burst. I expected to hear a really loud pop.

  ‘Fuck,’ I says, and began to wail, bawl me little head off from sheer relief.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Mom, ‘his first word. Did you hear, Pack? Little Rodney said his first word.’

&
nbsp; ‘He’ll do a stretch,’ says Pop. ‘Yes my son. He’ll do a stretch, alright.’”

  Gosse groans. “You’re some weird little fucker.” Al hears in Gosse’s tone a mixture of genuine disgust and genuine affection. Like Gosse is the older brother talking to his crazy younger brother.

  “Your turn, Gosse.”

  “Nah.”

  “Go on.”

  “Nah.”

  “What you afraid of?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re nervous.”

  “Not.”

  “Wuss.”

  “Wuss yourself.”

  “OK then.”

  “Fine. It’ll pass the time until our friend gets here. The first thing I can ever remember is sitting in a wooden desk at school—remember the old-fashioned kind, two to a desk, holes up at the top where inkwells used to be?”

  “I know the kind you’re talking about.”

  “Me arse was dunced: no padding on the seats in them days, just the hard board. I was staring up at the clock, watching the smooth way the second hand moved—no jerky tick-tick to it, just smooth. At the same time I was watching the minute hand. I was always trying to catch the minute hand moving, but I never could. The way I saw it, the minute hand was the enemy. The minute hand watched me from my blind spot.”

  “Cool.”

  “There was a crucifix hanging under the clock: a brass Jesus on a brass cross. Did you ever notice that on every crucifix you’ve ever seen Christ has one hip stuck out?”

  “Like Elvis.”

  “And there’s Sister Xavier. She’s up front chalking up words on the blackboard. Tick-ticky-tack goes the chalk. And every now and again a knock-knock, knock-knock when she leaned in too close and her visor thing hit off the board. Remember the white visor things they used to wear, back when they didn’t show any hair at all, and everyone thought they were bald?”

  “I remember Donny D boasting that his brother Dave pulled a nun’s veil off once and that she hardly had any hair at all, just clumps.”

  “The thing is, though, no one knew for sure what they had under there. It was a total mystery. For all anyone knew, Sister Xavier wore her hair slicked back like Elvis under that visor. Maybe she wiggled her hips at night in her bedroom in front of her mirror. Maybe she sang ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ into a crucifix.”