Snuffy pictures Gosse’s scornful look, hears his smoke-burned voice counselling him never to write anything down. But Gosse is on the other side of walls topped with razor wire.
Snuffy feels a sudden lightness; it may even be freedom. The decision is made. In retrospect, it will seem not so much like a decision made by him as one made by the man he will become. Gushue, he decides, will be the one to help him. For Snuffy, finding the pattern in past behaviour is just the thing he needs if he’s ever going to figure out why he resides in the crowbar hotel. Enrolment in the course won’t hurt his chances when he comes up for review, either.
All Snuffy has to do to get into the class is hand in a sample of his writing. The piece—of no more than a thousand words—must be based on personal memory. “What are the memories you keep returning to?” the poster asks suggestively.
The first thing Snuffy does is go to the library—a small closet next to the chapel—and check out Ted Gushue’s book, Silver Spoon, as well as a dog-eared psychology textbook on deviant behaviour. Gushue’s paperback is a fast read and, in places, a knee-slapper. Snuffy recognizes most of the bars described and feels sure he has met at least half the characters in the story. It is the first time since junior high he has read an entire book. He didn’t learn anything in school about fiction. Fiction is a fiction. Not for the first time, he curses his teachers. It occurs to him that reading a good book is like getting high. The only difference is that the feeling doesn’t wear off. And more than that, books don’t take anything away from you; in fact, the opposite is true, they give you stuff you can use.
Borrowing Gushue’s warts-and-all style, Snuffy quickly stitches together fragments of stories Gosse had told him with ideas pinched from psychological case studies on delusional behaviour. The morning of the deadline, he hands in this 751 word paragraph:
“Grade 4. Ball-faced dog-eyed Sister Marsupial looks down on us. Smiles a smile that’s as fake as fuck but that don’t bother me none. I loves her just as sincerely for all that. I loves her the way a man might love a hooker he sees every Saturday night while he’s away from his real family for months at a time, away in Fort Mac driving a monster truck over the tar sands. Sister Marsupial is a walking closet. Mothballed for God. Her black as Toby’s hole habit is loose around her and it swishes when she walks up and down the aisles. I hold my arm out when she walks past and let the cloth rub against my hand. It’s rough and it leaves a smell like death. She’s young, probably no more than twenty-two or so, and even though I know there’s a body in there like my mom’s, I can’t believe it. She loves Jesus so I wants to be the dead Jesus lying back in her lap. I used to lie in the arms of the life-sized virgin on the Calvary hill behind the church back home. I used to cup my hands on those plaster titties. I used to knock on them. They were hollow. I used to kiss those chalky lips. Sister Marsupial wants something from us but mostly I think she wants it from me. The big boys says that all women have a pouch in their bellies like a kangaroo only Sister Marsupial had hers sewn up when she entered the convent. Little Donny, she says to me. Little Donny so sweet. The other boys snigger. The other boys are fuckers. They call me Snuffy because I can’t breathe through my nose. Fell out of my stroller when I was a toddler and landed face first on the floor. Least that’s what Mom told me. Snuffy, Snuffy the other boys used to call out. They were just waiting for me to do something they could make fun of. If it wasn’t my mouth breathing it would have been something else. If they found out my other names were Peter and Patrick they would have called me PP. And it wouldn’t have taken them long to invent a story to go with it. Cuz he smells like piss. Cuz he pissed in his pants. Cuz he still wears a diaper. I could just see them cornering me in the playground, their dirty red lips moving and their black teeth grinding and their snot-smeared fingers pointing at me. PP. PP. As they tried to shove dandelions and rocks into my mouth. Instead they shouted Snuffy. Snuffy. Like I said, it could have been worse. They could have called me Snot. It can always be worse. I shook my teeth at them and smiled. That confused them alright. Made me laugh because if they could of seen inside my head they would really of had something to talk about. Pitchfork would of been my nickname then. Because how often out of the boredom of times tables and spelling and waiting to go home to my mouldy old house had I pictured raising Sister Marsupial on a pitchfork. The long handle going up under her black robe and the three spikes sinking in making the same sound that the screwdriver made when I stuck it into a turnip. Hoist her, said the voice in my head, which was my voice and not my voice. That was a puzzle. Did I really want to hurt her? It couldn’t be true because deep down inside I knew I loved her. She only had to look at me with those wet brown eyes and I began to squirm inside my shorts. She only had to speak to me in that babyish voice of hers and my little arsehole stuck out like a volcano. I loved her. I knew she was good but something about her goody goodness left me all at sea. Rubbed me out in a way I couldn’t stand. The only way to get back from there was to hoist her. Hup now, said the voice in my head. And up she went, her habit fluttering around her like black flames sizzling away up on the top of a matchstick. Up she went with her arms outstretched like Christ on the cross and her face raised to the sky and her mouth saying words I couldn’t hear like she was calling me long distance from another country.”
The following Monday morning, just as Snuffy is about to leave his cell and take his place in the line-up for the cafeteria, Murphy, the pock-faced hall guard, hands him a note. Handwritten on prison stationary and folded once, it is a request from the writer-in-residence to meet one-on-one that afternoon.
At the appointed time, Snuffy shuffles into the reception area of the counselling centre. As Murphy unlocks his shackles, Snuffy catches sight of himself in the mirrored door next to the coat-stand. He is starting to get used to the idea of being restrained. Only four weeks into his sentence and the word prisoner no longer shocks him. He takes in the image of himself wearing ill-fitting overalls—the penitentiary look—and sees a costume. Rather than degrade him, his overalls help him play the role of the incarcerated, just as the guard’s uniform allows him to play the role of enforcer, just as lawyers wear suits and chaplains wear collars, just as Gosse wears a black leather jacket, black jeans and biker boots and he, Snuffy—when on the outside—wears trainers and sports clothes, just as the waitress in the Harbour Lounge wears skirts short enough to make him weep.
Snuffy knocks gently on the office door and enters when called. The tall man behind the desk stands up, comes around to the front and extends his left hand.
“Ted,” he says, “and you must be Donny.”
Donny—no one but Snuffy’s aunt Patricia calls him that anymore.
The writer is extremely thin, like he recently recovered from an illness. He has dark side-parted hair, cropped short, and the lower half of his face is covered in a reddish-brown beard that to Snuffy looks pubic in texture. The man’s eyes are watery blue—grey almost—and their expression is both intelligent and furtive. Maybe not furtive, Snuffy thinks, maybe exhausted, like he is not yet well enough to have returned to work. Snuffy notes his hipster ears, the lobes grooved and distended, in recovery from years of gauges.
“Snuffy, most people calls me.”
“Snuffy, then. Pull up a chair.”
Ted shuts the door before coming back around and taking his seat at the opposite side of the desk. “I want you to know that I don’t know why you were incarcerated and I don’t care—unless you think it’s important to tell me.”
Snuffy shrugs.
“We’re here to write, to do good work. What happens in this room will have a profound effect on your future.”
Snuffy shrugs again.
“And I have to say that I am excited about having you in my class. You’re writing submission was the best I’ve ever had from…an inmate…Your style…That description of the nun…The way you get right to the core…I think you’re a born writer.”
Snuffy doesn’t respond, recognizes a sales
pitch when he hears it.
“I’m serious. With your permission, I’d like to read your piece aloud to you. Sometimes people don’t really hear what they’ve written until someone else reads it to them. OK?”
“Whatever greases your gun.”
15
IN MONTH S TO come, my psychologist—who looks a lot like DH Lawrence—will guide me on a grand tour around the disaster my life has become. This tour will help me uncover the complex interaction of traits and actions, historical accidents, even, that led to Lila’s trouble and to our downfall. He will prove to me that there are limits to self-control and self-determination. We will discuss just how responsible I was for what happened. He will counsel me against rebuilding too quickly. He will guide me towards the reasonable conclusion that what happened was not my fault, that there was little I could have done to prevent it. He will ask me to walk a mile in my own shoes. He will lead me to a place where I can forgive myself.
But I have not yet signed up for therapy. At this stage, I am still tentatively reaching—just beginning to, actually—towards my friends. The matter is complicated for me because apart from Lila there is only one person in my life I call a friend (isolation being an occupational requirement for scribblers): my fellow writer Ted Gushue, a man whose work I mentored for many years. To Ted I now turn—ironically, I suppose—in the hope he will show me how to live.
Ted has just finished his second contract as Writer-in-Residence at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary. He has confided that it was no more successful than his first had been. He is feeling exhausted and depressed.
Sceptical under the best of circumstances, Ted says that time spent among inmates has only blackened his already bruised view of humanity. He was and is certain that he didn’t help anyone. He accepts that he is partly to blame. He went in the first day with a perfectly defeatist attitude, expecting the same outcome from the same slate of students: second-storey men, wife beaters, small-time dealers, pimps and perverts, men with an average fourth-grade education. He says most of them couldn’t even be called borderline literate. The main problem, he says, is not even grammar; the main problem is their lack of self-knowledge: most of them have no idea who they are.
Whether they know it or not, they have—to a man—accepted a crippling narrative about themselves. All their lives, they have been stuck with scabrous epithets—fuck or fucker or fucking asshole being the most usual—epithets which are fortified by infectious adjectives: dirty-little, lying, stunned, degenerate. It is if society wants to place all of these men into one small dark box. The inmates, in turn, work overtime to stay within the limits assigned to them. They live under a rigid code of masculinity, their imaginations accessed only through the id. Worse again, they are all—to a man—liars. The stories they bring to class inevitably involve characters who are betrayed or falsely accused. Their submissions amount to little more than whining. Put under the microscope, their machismo crumbles. Their voices shake when they read their lies aloud. They flinch when their classmates laugh, even when what they read is meant to be funny.
This is how Ted talks about them when he’s drunk, which is quite often. He says he took the gig a second time not out of social obligation but because he needed the money.
I pick up the phone. I spent all day at my desk, labouring over a paragraph I eventually discarded. I could use a pint and some company. Ted is my go-to guy when I need to blow off steam; I am his when he wants to get away from Shirley and the kids. Outside of writing and his family, Ted says he has no life.
Things are good between us again. Lila’s death washed away any personal or professional jealousy Ted may have felt towards me. There had been times when I sensed deep resentment in him, not only because of my success, but more so because I give every appearance of not giving a damn about it. It is this—my insouciance—that Ted rubs in my face whenever he is in crisis—which happens at least twice a winter—when he announces to anyone who will listen that he is going to give it all up.
Part of my job as his writer-friend is to talk him around when he feels like a failure. So what if his three short story collections and one novel brought him more recognition than money? It’s not about the money. When I say this, he reminds me about the money he did not make on the film based on his short story. None of it translated into a cent for him because the money he made when he unexpectedly sold the movie rights went toward repaying the unrecovered publisher’s advance. Ted had been too lazy to read his contract all the way through. At this point of the evening, he usually asks to borrow money.
This is the scene that runs through my mind as I hold the receiver in my left hand, the fingers of my right poised over the buttons. I feel exhausted. Ted’s life as a writer is sadly typical. The part of his life that is exemplary—the part I can’t even talk about—is his domestic bliss with Shirley. He loves her, even if he sometimes makes elaborate plans to escape from her and his two children. Anyone who has seen him with his boys knows that Ted would never—could never—do anything to hurt them.
I hang up the phone, opting to open a bottle of wine instead and spend a little me time with me. Midway through my second glass, I allow my current obsession to overwhelm me. For weeks I’ve been trying to pinpoint the last normal day Lila and I spent together, the last day before it all went south, before she got involved with Al, before her drug use, before the planned robbery and everything that came after that.
No one day stands out at first. Our daily lives followed a strict pattern for so long that specific days—at least in my memory—tend to repeat, or it feels that way, like it was all the same fucking day, man. I have to concentrate, find a detail, drill down, keep refining until the pictures start to roll.
Saturdays come to mind. Saturdays were our Sabbath, the day we set aside for each other. I am lonely for Saturdays now.
We usually went downtown in the late morning or early afternoon. If we were hungover, we stopped in for a feed of grease: the two-piece fish and chips for me; the burger platter all-dressed for her. We used to joke with Shirley (a health food nut and fanatical opponent of the deep-fat fryer) that sitting among the polyester-clad obese—those whose blood-pressure gauges were permanently fixed between purple and pop—counteracted the self-loathing of the morning after.
If we were not hungover—and we weren’t on the particular Saturday I am thinking of—we went to a coffee shop that stocked fair-trade beans. My usual was a double espresso, long shot, or a cappuccino, while for Lila it was a venti non-fat caramel macchiato with skimmed milk and extra foam.
We sipped our coffees, ate too many almond croissants, watched the rail-thin hipsters in skinny jeans, cardigans, and knit hats, talk to one another in a whiney monotone or sit in silence, reacting only to what poured through their earbuds or appeared on the screens of their sleek titanium computers.
The Internet, as far as we were concerned, was the smithy in which a whole generation sampled and plagiarised the created consciousness of their race, or something like that.
Afterwards, caffeinated to the point of prickly heat, Lila and I would speed-walk the hills towards our house, sometimes dropping by the used book shops or checking out Fred’s Records for secondhand CDs.
On that Saturday afternoon, at the recently gentrified intersection of Cochrane and Bond Streets, we came across a large pile of household garbage: a roll of double-pile wool carpet with an argyle pattern, a Dyson-ball vacuum cleaner that looked practically new, a bucket chair with frayed beagle-pattern upholstery, three overstuffed bins with green bubble-wrap blistering out from under the lids (like someone had been home-brewing plague and abandoned it), and behind them an old floor-model radio cabinet that stood about waist high, the radio it once housed nowhere to be seen.
“What do you think, Freddy?”
“It’s a nice day.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What then?”
“The cabinet.”
“What cabinet?”
“That ca
binet.”
“Where?”
“The cabinet over there.”
“I don’t see another cabinet.”
“Haha…You know what I mean.”
“Well, now that I know what you are talking about, what about it?”
“I think it would work really nicely in the corner of the living room where the stuffed armchair used to be.”
“The armchair was still there the last time I looked.”
“It hasn’t been there for over a week.”
“But I liked that chair.”
“I’m not saying we should get rid of it.”
“Where is it?”
“In the spare room. So what do you think about the cabinet?”
“Too bad the radio isn’t still in it.”
“I don’t care about the radio. Look at the warmth of that wood, and those lovely swirls in the grain. And the grill and lattice work are still intact.”
“Very Art Deco.”
“That’s what it’s like. Art Deco. Yes, very 1920s. Here, grab this end of it.”
We picked up the cabinet and jog-walked it six uphill blocks to our apartment. “It’s very light, isn’t it?” she said.
“Laminate.”
“We could store old magazines in the back.”
“We could.”
We stopped only once. I remember resting my weight on the top of this newly adopted piece of furniture while Lila scavenged a patch of waste ground for daisies, loosestrife, butter and eggs, and sprigs of yarrow.
“There,” she said, placing the flowers inside the cabinet. “They will look so pretty on top in our little blue thumb pot, the one you brought me from Quebec City.”
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