by André Babyn
Red-faced Pat Hudson, standing with his legs wide apart, clumsily spaced. A black-and-yellow Batman T-shirt riding wrinkled up above Huddy’s fat belly, spilling over his jeans. I wanted him to tuck the shirt in — not for my sake, but for his. I guess it didn’t seem to matter to him. His glasses were a bit crooked, but his glare was hard and focused. Across from him was Dave Pullman. A guy I knew, but never really liked, but who Walid was sort of friends with because they shared a lot of the same classes. Dave was moving back and forth, pretending he was juking, trying to fake Huddy out and make him look stupid. He didn’t have to work too hard. You could see a complete hopelessness in Huddy, a weird determination that meant that he kept charging clumsily past Dave, like a bull tripping through a china shop. And, in the rare moments when he wasn’t moving, he stood absolutely still, as if nothing could have fazed him, as if nothing, not even kindness, could penetrate his exterior, and watched as Dave made him look really, really stupid, jabbing him in the stomach, slapping him on the face.
Huddy was a total mess. Which was basically par for the course.
I moved the camera from fighter to fighter, trying to keep it above the crowd.
“What happened?”
Arty Walls turned to look into the camera.
“Dave took something of Huddy’s. I didn’t see what. Um — should you be filming this?”
Kristina Dupont, next to him, also turned.
“Uh, hello. Dave took Pat’s hat when Pat wasn’t looking. He was wearing it around like it was his.”
Kristina started to pop her eyes and blink into the lens.
“Cut that out,” I said. “This is serious. It’s for a documentary.”
She stuck her tongue out at me.
Behind Kristina and Arty, Huddy had gone into a wild flurry, but Dave, who was breathing hard now, picked him up in a wrestling hold and slammed him onto the floor. Those idiots who were chanting before were laughing. Mostly Dave’s friends. Huddy lay on the ground, dazed.
The fight was over. Dave dropped Huddy’s hat on him, and Huddy snatched at it wildly.
The crowd began to disperse.
“Just a minute —”
The voice of Johnson, our VP.
“What’s going on here?”
My back was turned to him, but I quickly turned the camera off and put it in my bag. He came up and kneeled down to Huddy, beckoning Dave and others closer, demanding to know what had happened.
I felt bad that I had turned the camera on. And lucky that he hadn’t seen. Because of my guilt I started to walk away. “Slink” is more like it, like one of Sash’s dogs after doing something it knew was bad, like stealing a hot dog off a picnic table.
Someone must have pointed me out.
Johnson didn’t know my name. He just called down the hallway. It was only on his third or fourth “Excuse me!” when I realized who he was speaking to. Some kid tapped me on the shoulder and pointed for my benefit, but I would have turned, anyway, because his last “Excuse me!” had been so loud.
“What’s your name?” he asked, when I reached them. He was mad.
I told him.
“Were you filming this?”
I said that I was.
“What happened?”
I looked from Dave to Huddy and back to Johnson again, though I was having trouble looking Johnson in the eye.
I said that I didn’t know.
“What do you have on camera?”
I said that I had come after the fight had started.
Johnson asked me to take the camera out of the bag. “Show me,” he said.
I flicked the camera into the appropriate mode and started to rewind.
“Do you know the school policy on video cameras?”
No, I said. I told him that I needed it for a documentary I was shooting.
“On fighting?”
No. For media. Mr. Wright.
“Did you know that a fight was going to occur here?”
I said that I didn’t. The tape stopped at the appropriate location. I told him that it was ready.
“Could I look at it?”
I turned the sound up and handed it to him, pointing to the “Play” button.
“Fuck,” said Dave.
“Quiet. And stay where you are,” said Johnson, without taking his eyes off my camera.
He watched the fight through the viewfinder until his own words came out of the tinny little speakers and it cut out.
“Do you need this tape?”
I said yes, because it had Hess’s interview on it, and the prayer meeting, and the stuff I’d filmed in the hallway, and because I hadn’t brought another tape. And because tapes are expensive.
“Okay.” He looked down at the image of Huddy lying on the floor in front of all those people, Dave suspended in the air above him at a forty-five degree angle, on his way up again. He handed the camera back to me. “I want you to erase this,” he said. “I don’t care what your motives were. I don’t think Mr. Wright would like to know what you were filming here. If I catch you doing something like this in these halls again, I am going to confiscate your tape and the camera with it. If I find out that you did not erase it, you are going to be in an equal amount of trouble.”
I said okay. I said I would erase it as soon as possible.
“Start erasing it right now.”
I fumbled with the camera a bit, then I hit record. I showed him what was happening.
“Good,” he said. And he let me go.
I hate getting into trouble.
* * *
The next day I set up my camera on the edge of the table adjacent to where Huddy regularly ate lunch. I expected more of the gang to wander over and ask me what I was up to, but just Walid and Sam appeared, and I quickly shooed them away.
On the walk back home the day before I had realized that poor, pink-faced Huddy was Upper Canada Secondary’s version of Holden Caulfield. There were a few obvious differences — for example, I couldn’t imagine Huddy taking any girl out, let alone double-dating with jocks, or dancing confidently with older women at a club in New York. He wasn’t any good at school, either — teachers would ask him things in class only to have their questions bounce right off of him, like he was vibrating at another frequency that made him impervious to inquiries from our universe. It was heartbreaking watching teachers like Ms. Ambrose gradually lose their faith in him as the year progressed, their kindness calcifying into a cold mask. And, unlike Caulfield, I was pretty sure that Huddy’s family was poor — which meant no private schools or sprawling Manhattan apartments.
But those were all superficial differences. Huddy’s essence was Caulfield. I understood perfectly well, from his smouldering glare — even when he wasn’t looking at anything in particular — that there was an intense inner monologue running in his head, calling all of us out for being the phonies that we were. But unlike Caulfield, Huddy can’t be a phony because he doesn’t aspire to be anything: he’s just himself, like moss or trees or a prayerful hermit banished to the deep woods. Strip away all of the pretension from Caulfield and you get Huddy, anger blistering, silent, and righteous.
He reminded me a bit of Jeff, to be honest. Jeff when he finally decided he wanted more but didn’t know how to get it. But Huddy was even more removed than that, and, as a consequence, I think more pure. There was nothing compromising about Huddy because of his complete indifference to arbitrary social mores.
It was in making the comparison to Caulfield that I started thinking of Huddy as a subject for the documentary. I thought there was a lot that I could learn from him.
I decided to approach him in the style of Jane Goodall: spend a few days (weeks, if necessary) observing his habitat, then gradually introduce myself into his environment, then — eventually — contact. I’d proceed the same way in conversation, working around his anger, skirting it like it was an army encampment, stalking through the treeline, until I found the right entrance to make.
If I played my cards r
ight, Huddy’s words, his real words — if he saw fit to utter any, I mean, for my benefit — would give my documentary the force of a thousand Holden Caulfields, thanks to all those years of repressed wisdom he had buried deep inside.
* * *
A kink in my plan, made immediately apparent: because of the heft of the camera, and its limited zoom — 5x optical, no digital — I was about as inconspicuous as a fireworks display. Huddy had already looked at the camera directly twice. I noticed his forehead reddening, and watched the sprouting of an extra crease or two. He moved a few seats down — not enough to make himself obvious to anyone else, but enough that I had to spend a few seconds dismantling and reassembling my makeshift tripod (consisting of three textbooks: history, biology, and a rebound school copy of The Great Gatsby).
I debated with myself over whether I should attempt my planned “as it happens” behind-the-camera narrative of his actions or if I should just take notes and add all that stuff in post (although I was still unclear how I was going to do that, exactly). I thought it made more sense to put the narration in later — on the National Geographic channel they don’t whisper about hyenas in real time as a baby zebra gets torn apart. That would be tasteless, more like a boxing match than a documentary.
I had only a couple of observations scribbled down. Looking at them I briefly panicked, wondering if Huddy would yield sufficient material to justify inserting a narrative of any kind, even after long-term study. What if this was pretty much it? Huddy slowly chewing, looking annoyed. Then I would have to go with ambient noise, to count on his silence in the face of the deafening cafeteria to construct my narrative wordlessly.
Walid bent over the camera before I noticed he was there and said that the camera operator was jerking his skinny cock underneath the table. I tried to punch him in the stomach, but he was already scampering back to the other guys before I turned around.
The first note I took was about Huddy’s sandwich: what looked like soft whole wheat, tuna-fish insides without fixings, and a five-hundred-millilitre water bottle filled with what I hoped was apple juice. Point of similarity? Could that be my emphasis? Today I had a few slices of cheese on the same cardboard-y bread, no butter (we were out), my drink a few quarters that I’d yet to insert into a machine.
Actually, maybe Huds was a little bit ahead of me there.
Walid came back and said something about Huddy’s “butter tits.” I turned around and queried him re: his current obsession with the male body, making sure to speak loud enough for the camera to pick it up.
“I’m just hot for you and Huds,” he said, rubbing a nipple through his T-shirt. It wasn’t worth moving the camera for.
Second note: “huds tick when nerv.” For about two minutes before Huddy finally decided to look straight at the camera for the first time he did this interesting sort of twitchy thing where his body spasmed every thirty seconds or so, kind of like a horse’s muscles when you run a brush over its body — not that I’d ever seen this operation anywhere but on TV. I wrote: “interesting mark of his self-consciousness/interesting connection between mind and body?”
Third note: “past the tic stage — progress? / Fuck Walid.”
* * *
In media, during a free period meant to be used for storyboarding (no one was doing this; like me, maybe, not yet with any clear idea, except for Bobby Booby, sweetly bent over his paper and pencils, sketching frame after frame of himself scoring goals), I was loudly sounding off about the genius project I had embarked upon, playing it up a bit, knowing my audience — speaking to Huddy’s patheticness more than his righteousness, suggesting a case study of sloth more than purity, Walid catching on and getting even more carried away than I was — when I was interrupted by Lauren, sitting a table over, her brown eyes flashing, bangs mussed from the quick snap of her head.
“I think your video idea is really disgusting, just so you know.”
“It’s not like that,” I said.
“Oh, really?” said Lauren, clearly unconvinced.
Walid barked some retort, but I hardly noticed. I had been halted dead in my tracks. Lauren’s eyes haunted me all through leisure sports (her disapproval making a soft thwack-y sound, like the squash ball bouncing against the wall of the court at the Durham Sports Complex). I lost three games in a row, a new record. She followed me in my transit through the hallway from the athletic corridor, to lunch, so cowed and reluctant that I was still at my locker, staring into space, when the second bell rang and startled me into nearly dropping my camera, camera bag, and second measly lunch in a row (one Ziploc of half-destroyed crackers — we’d run out of bread that morning — and another containing a few slices of marble cheddar slick with sweat).
More bells were ringing, this time warnings, as I set up the camera’s makeshift tripod in its place across from Hud, who was, I’m sure, not relieved to see me (maybe he’d hoped I’d given up?), taking in a bit of a wider angle so as to account for his possibly moving again, scanning the cafeteria for Lauren — sweat running down my neck — until I realized that she didn’t even have my lunch (she was day one, second period).
Huddy’d already finished eating by the time I set up, but he was still working on his apple juice (or whatever), staring sullenly down at the table in front of him. Few notes to take: I drew a butterfly instead. I think Huddy’d resigned himself to my presence, except to occasionally lower his eyes and mutter in my general direction.
Walid popped in again, trailed by Kyle, Walid slapping me reassuringly on my back and telling me how proud he was of me for sticking it to Lauren and demonstrating real commitment to my art. I just kept nodding my head and wishing he would go away.
“Yeah,” I said.
I wondered what I was doing. I hoped she would talk to me again.
By Huddy’s sixth or seventh bout of muttering, impossible to pick up, but probably angry and directed at me, I finally realized that Lauren was right. If I hadn’t already. Morally and artistically my position was essentially bankrupt. Huddy wasn’t an animal. He was a human being who couldn’t be tricked into association. And he wasn’t doing anything and I was wasting my time and disrupting his, demeaning the both of us. Is it a rule of quantum physics or just a general scientific principle that observation alters both its object and subject?
I turned the camera off and sat there for a few moments, making sure to place it on its side so it was clear that I was done. I took a few deep breaths. Eventually I started to put the camera away, slowly and methodically, with the hope that Huddy wasn’t paying me too much attention.
I mouthed “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” on the off chance he did decide to look over.
I’m sure he didn’t.
Finally I zipped up the camera case and slid the biology and history textbooks back into my bag. I was sort of afraid of vacating my spot entirely — I don’t know why, I thought if I made it seem like it was my intention to sit there all along it might appear like I’d just been filming emptiness, the scene before me, rather than a specific person (despite all evidence to the contrary — I’m not saying it wasn’t stupid). So I picked up Gatsby and opened it for the first time.
I read a few sentences about the narrator’s adherence to his father’s good advice. I wasn’t in the mood, exactly, to follow most of what was being said, but kept returning to the father’s precept: “Remember that not everyone’s had the same advantages you have,” which rang in my head over and over.
What were Huddy’s advantages? Did he have any? I’d made his silence into one, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Maybe the difference between Huddy and me wasn’t a matter of purity. Maybe it was that no one, in his entire life, had ever left him alone.
The least I could do was ask him if he even wanted to be filmed.
And if he said no, that was it.
* * *
Huddy didn’t acknowledge me until I put my things down heavily beside him.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,�
� I said.
Huddy snorted and took another sip from his drink — I could see that it was instant iced tea, not apple juice as I had thought, based on the familiar spidery residue of powdered mix at the bottom of the bottle.
I pulled up a chair. Huddy turned his head a few degrees in my direction to look at me in his peripheral vision.
“I’m making a video for media,” I said. “A documentary. I thought …”
He turned and looked through me.
I could see there was a hole in his T-shirt, just below the left armpit. Not at the crease of the fabric, but below, extending to his back. Loose black threads bridged the gap.
“Have you ever read The Catcher in the Rye?” I asked.
He made a farting noise with his mouth.
“Uh … I just wanted to get to know you better, because I think you could offer a lot to my documentary. I bet you have a really interesting perspective.”
“Beep-beep,” he said, looking forward.
Like the Roadrunner.
Things were going really well.
“But I think I went about it the wrong way. I’m sorry for filming you without your permission … that was wrong.”
Huddy stared at the table while I sat there fingering the strap of my backpack. I looked up just in time to see Walid sneaking up behind Huddy. He draped his arms on Huddy’s shoulders and sat down next to him on the bench.
“How’s our movie star doing?” he said, looking me in the eye, like it was a private joke we shared.
I guess it was.
Huddy stiffened. Walid took his arms off Huddy’s shoulders and started massaging his back instead.
“You know you’re going to be a big star when this comes out, right?”
“Hey,” I said. Meaning stop.