by Alex Pugsley
~
Three years later and my parents have separated again. My father resides in the new Dunvegan house with my two older sisters. When she returns to Halifax, my mother moves into a place on Larch Street with my two younger sisters. I am the middle kid and shuttle between households, living mostly with my father, excepting furloughs when, sleeping bag in hand, I troop over to my mom’s new flat. It’s an improvised existence and I am unsure how to adapt to the rearranged reality of shared custody. I know I’m supposed to pretend everything will be fine, but my known world has been distorted—certainly my notions of my known world have been distorted. Though I walk the same streets I’ve always walked, past houses where inside my friends are indifferently watching Happy Days, for me it’s as if a few land mines have detonated beneath the city somewhere. The landscape seems altered and desolate. I am often alone in my new room, tracing a Kamandi comic or scanning the TV listings for comedy movies. I find the unsupervised freedom distantly oppressive and, as I wait for a new normal to emerge, I reassure myself that my life is only somewhat suspended and that moments of fulfillment and euphoria are still possible.
It is with the candle of this idea gleaming in my imagination that you find me now, in Grade 8, at work in the kitchen of my father’s house. The night is Halloween and I still imagine that Halloween can transform and transport me—which is why I have spent four hours devising my most complicated costume ever. Underneath, I wear white. Over this base, I wrap toilet paper, paper towels, adhesive tape, tensor bandages. From my sisters, I borrow a purple lip pencil and darken my eyes. From my mother, I take Stein’s stage blood and squirt it into my sockets and nostrils. I thread authentic plaster cast bandages around my eyes and head. In the hall mirror, I am pleased with the effect and stepping out the door at six o’clock, I am sure I am among the most fully-achieved Mummy costumes in the district.
At six-thirty, when a storm spills the remains of a gale on our coastal city, I am less sure. Within ninety seconds, instead of being costumed as a fearsome mummified ghoul, I am essentially walking around in long underwear, a sopping white turtleneck, and covered in decomposing toilet paper—with now lumpy, now heavy bits of plaster stuck to my head and hair. There is still good candy to be got, I know, but I am not sure whether I will be among those who collect it. Cowering at a bus shelter on Inglis Street, I watch the storm blow rain sideways, batter treetops, snap phone wires, before mysteriously lapsing to drizzle and fog. In another minute, the clouds clear, the air grows moist and mild, the sky lightly violet. The city now has a freshly diluvial quality—sidewalks wet with fallen leaves, intersections a slurp of mulch and broken branches—as if flood waters have newly receded and it wouldn’t be absurd to see a dolphin stranded in the top branches of a spruce tree there.
I leave the safety of the shelter and decide to cut through the backfields of Gorsebrook and Saint Francis junior high schools. From there it is only twenty minutes to my mother’s flat where I am due this night. In an almost buoyant mood, I crest the last and steepest hill to behold in the field below a skirmish of unknown kids. They are older, with cigarettes, and I worry immediately that these are the Halloween kids who egg houses and smash pumpkins and steal UNICEF boxes. They are North End kids—I recognize one from a remote Scout troop—free-ranging far from their normal territory. To see them on Gorsebrook Hill is like seeing a wolf pack on a golf course. I think about returning the way I came and simply getting myself home on the sidewalks but I want to see what’s going on. Two boys throw rolls of toilet paper at each other. Another tries to write his name with lighter fluid in the baseball infield. For some minutes, I watch a kid in a red down-filled jacket on a ten-speed bike. Racing down the slope of the teacher’s parking lot, he jumps the ten-speed off the lip of the pavement and tries to forward flip himself, still on the ten-speed, onto the grass of the baseball diamond. He fails each of three times I watch him—the bike splattering on the ground, a pedal coming loose, spokes popping—but with his spirits undaunted. If anything, he seems excited by disaster. The boy is fearless, reckless, and, I would later learn, drunk out of his mind on pure ethyl alcohol stolen from the children’s hospital. I am passing scared to see such kids, and I keep close to the wire-linked fence that runs down one side of the hill, my head lowered, my strategy to be a solitary fly-by-night stranger. Halfway down, in the furthest outfield of the baseball diamond, I see candy scattered in the soaked grass: a Charms Blow Pop, a two-piece pack of Chiclets, a tiny green Aero bar. I am reaching for the Aero bar when Howard Fudge stumbles out of the high bushes near the fence. He clutches a twenty-six ouncer of rum and brings it to his mouth to drink. As he chugs almost half the bottle I see he’s wearing essentially the same costume—blue parka, faded T-shirt, brown cords, Kodiak boots. The only concession to the holiday is a pirate’s eye patch, flipped up on his forehead, and what looks to be regulation handcuffs dangling from his belt buckle. In his free hand he drags a grimy and tattered black garbage bag—the source, I realize, of the scattered candy. “A little of the Captain Morgan tonight,” says Fudge, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his parka. “Whoa, fuck. That’s going through me. Probably have to puke again.” He grabs my pillowcase of candy. “What do you got for me? What do you got? I don’t like these. I like these.” Fudge ruptures a bag of Hickory Sticks and feeds his mouth with sticky fingers. “Hey, kid. You want some gum? Bubble Yum?” He turns to scream at the baseball diamond. “Johnny! Get over here!” He looks again at me. “What’s your name?”
“McKee.”
He gropes in his garbage bag and produces an unopened pint of vodka. “Okay, McKee.” He passes me the bottle. It feels heavy in my hand. “Here’s a mickey of Smirnoff I ain’t drinking tonight. Trick or treat. Smell my feet. Think you can drink that mickey?”
“McKee.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why do you have handcuffs?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to.”
“But where’d you get them?”
Fudge sniffs. “I rolled a cop.”
A kid comes over—it’s the red-haired kid who’s been trying to flip the ten-speed into the baseball diamond. A plastic Halloween mask hangs around his neck.
“Johnny, this is Mickey,” says Fudge. “And Mickey, this here’s Johnny Red.” With a swing of his chin, Fudge indicates the parking lot. “Trish still here?”
Johnny Red shrugs.
“How far’d you get?” asks Fudge.
“Farther than you,” says Johnny Red. “I fingered her.”
“The fuck you did.” Fudge drinks some rum and looks at Johnny, suspicious. “You don’t even know what fingering is! Does he, Mickey? Tell him, Mickey.”
I begin to explain that to finger someone is to touch them or caress them but Fudge doesn’t let me finish because he has started laughing, a high-pitched giggle that could just as easily come from a six-year-old.
“That’s not what fingering means, Mickey,” he says. “Fingering is when you stick your finger in the girl’s twat.” He giggles again. “Johnny, you better take care of Mickey here. Make sure he gets home all right. But keep your hands to yourself.” Fudge chugs the rest of the rum and biffs the empty bottle at the fence. It bounces off the wires and disappears in a tangle of weeds. As Fudge stumbles down the hill, Johnny takes my pillowcase of candy. He is considering a bag of ketchup chips when I offer him the vodka.
“Hey, thanks,” says Johnny Red, finding nothing unusual in my offer. And as he twists off the sealed cap, I realize I’ve seen Johnny Red a few times before. He was the pitcher in the stickball game at Westmount School. And last year I’d seen him speed down the sideline and score a left-footed goal in the Under-14 soccer championship—which was when I learned he was also a skateboarder, track star, and provincially-ranked kickboxer. With his wavy red hair, sun-lit blue eyes, and chipped front tooth, Johnny Red is a locally famous pretty boy, the kind of kid who only has
to lean against a tree and girls discover him. Teenybopper girls, my younger sisters among them, will ring his family’s doorbell simply to get him to come to the door. “You know Johnny Red?” I’ll be asked later. “You seriously know him?” His real name is Jonathan Boutilier, that last word a once-elegant Acadian surname, four-syllable music like bibliothèque—Bou-til-i-er—but over the generations the name has been bluntly Anglicized to rhyme with root beer.
Johnny has two gulps of the vodka and returns it to me. “Thanks, Mickey,” he says, his eyes going wide. “Hey, you want to get hit by a car?”
I ask what that means.
“Well, it’s fucking amazing,” says Johnny, exhilarated. “Fudge gets these old beater cars and comes after us, right? Tries to hit us when we’re running? Last night the bumper caught me right here and—” He points to his thigh. “Boom! Just a little bump but I went fucking flying! I been hit by a car must be the last three weeks in a row. You got to try it. It’s pretty jackass but it’s a fucking rush, I’ll say that.”
Someone yells for Johnny. The kid who has been trying to spell his name with lighter fluid has succeeded in setting a garbage can on fire. Seeing this, Johnny runs to join him, not a care in the world. I am left with most of my candy and a half-pint of vodka. I have smelled beer, which is marshy and foul, and tasted red wine, which is tannic and adult, but vodka’s cold colourlessness puzzles me. What do I do with a half-pint of vodka? I drop it in the grass. Take a step. Go back. Open it. And, with the flicker of a distant fire in my peripheral vision, I down five fingers of vodka on Halloween night in wet long underwear on Gorsebrook Hill. I am twelve years old. Immediately, I feel a furious medicine loose in my system. I’m hot, cold, sloppy, tight. The growing sense of contamination frightens me and the next thirty minutes are a half-colour dream sequence of fast-approaching curbs, unstable crosswalks, a chestnut in street water vanishing down a gutter grate, and finally I arrive home, stone drunk, my pillowcase of candy quite empty except for, what I will discover later, almost hidden in the mix of chip crumbs and peanut shells, a single hardened piece of chocolate.
~
My friends had names like Timmy and Tommy and Ranald. Fudge had friends with names like Johnny Red and Sneaky and Frenchy Burger. There were also Surging Herman, String Bean, Sully, Big Fish, Beasley, Bubbles, Fuzz-Head, Chug-a-Lug, and someone called Blomgren. He called me Mickey. Nicknaming was an easy invention for Fudge and these names indicated the kind of cartoon fraternity he lived in, or wanted to live in, and I list them in such detail because I copied them down as I heard them. In these pubescent years, I carried with me an extra copy of Watership Down—I’d received three copies at Christmas—and in its blank flyleaves I scribbled lists and jokes and doodles of werewolves. Fudge’s nicknames belonged to people from an alternate Halifax, a Halifax outside the scheme of the city as I knew it. This was a place of rogue adolescents who wandered university campuses for fun and profit, rink rats who scrambled around the stands of the Halifax Forum, hoodlums who hung out all day in the Scotia Square food court. These places in turn seemed linked to the mythology of an older, grey-misted Halifax—that there was, say, a secret undersea tunnel between the Old Town Clock and Georges Island. Or if you wore green on Thursdays it meant you were gay and going to Citadel Hill to be gay with other gay people. Or that there were twenty-six Volvos on the bottom of Bedford Basin. This was all some years ago now, back in a Halifax of stubby bottles of Ten Penny and foil-lined bags of Scotties potato chips, when slush on a store’s foundation might melt away to reveal a cloth election sticker for Robert Stanfield. The city seemed then a more pluralist place, home to twisting streets, hopscotch kids, clapboard houses—a folk expression of the Maritime demotic. The houses are still there, of course, painted mimosa now with teal trim, front façades appointed with brass carriage lamps and decorative flower boxes. But I liked those selfsame wooden Victorian houses precisely because of the missing shingles and peeling paint and sagging porch stairs—when a side door might lead to a draft dodger from Virginia needing a gram of hash. Or grad students wanting acid for a house party. Or a women’s macramé group refilling an order of pot. Delivering drugs was a new kind of paper route for me, it brought me into landings I could never have imagined, and Fudge was the ferryman into these underworld ports of call. He steered me into a Halifax I didn’t know was there.
As those nicknames attest, Fudge was keen on fellowship and enjoyed his role as King of the Bad Kids, but I wondered if the rumours were true, and surely they were, that he was directed by an impulsive and violent temper. In the beginning, I certainly believed he was unstable and dangerous and I behaved as if sooner or later he was going to punch me in the head—there was always a looming sense that Fudge was going to punch you in the head. I don’t know how he himself understood it. I think he liked his reputation of unpredictability. No one on the street could guess what he was going to do or how he was going to do it. Fudge had his own feral way of seeing things, his own Fudge-logic, Fudge-skepticism, Fudge-fairness. Once on Wellington Street he stared sadistically, or what I took to be sadistically, at a cat that had been run over by a motorcycle. It was crushed, belly ripped open, a squooge of intestines seeping through the lining of its stomach. Fudge scuffed it with his boot, then picked it up with a newspaper and flipped it into the trash—a gesture I’ve always remembered for its grace and harsh necessity. It was sometimes tricky to divine what Fudge noticed and what he didn’t so it was with uneasy pride that I learned he liked my mother, who was now living three doors away from Fudge’s mother on Larch Street. “You’re old lady’s a hoot, Mickey. She’s a real spark-plug.” Both women were newly-single and living in rented flats, which explains why I met Howard Fudge a third time, after Westmount School and after Halloween, when visits to our mothers coincided.
I was in the backyard trying to coax my sister’s runaway kitten out from under a patio when Howard Fudge, now a burly sixteen-year-old, slogged through the alders behind the back fence. “Hey Mick,” he said casually, as if we’d seen each other only moments before. He told me he’d been waiting an hour for Johnny Red at the Horsefield, an area of woods and baseball diamonds near the Coburg Road railway cut. “Fucking Johnny,” said Fudge. “Always late. Always.”
I asked where they were going.
Fudge jerked his head to one side. “We’re supposed to buy this ounce and Johnny’s nowhere to be found. So now what am I supposed to do? Jesus.” He leaned over the back fence, reflective. “Hey Mickey,” he said, looking up at me. “You got any money?”
~
What does a twelve-year-old know? I’m taking tennis lessons? Oh, that makes sense. Probably I will win Wimbledon. I’ve been given my sister’s guitar? Sure. Because music is my destiny. I’m going in on an ounce of Panama Red? I have no idea what that means. But I can normalize it because a kid can normalize anything. A year before, I inherited my uncle’s afternoon newspaper route and I’ve been saving to buy a rare Batman comic but these savings I choose to give to Howard Fudge. Later that day, Fudge buys the ounce from someone called Blomgren and I am given my share, a baggie filled with thirty-seven joints. That Friday, we meet at a Sadie Hawkins dance at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a private girl’s school on Spring Garden Road. When I arrive, Fudge and Johnny have sold out their stash. On the sidewalk outside the gates, I am swarmed by unknown kids. Grade 9 girls in Black Watch kilts are thrilled to see me. Everyone calls me Mickey. “Finally, Mickey gets here.” “Thought you weren’t going to show, Mick.” “Mickey comes through in the clutch!” I sell each joint for two dollars and watch my vinyl wallet swell with other people’s money. I gross seventy-two dollars on a thirty dollar investment and in that moment, counting all those wrinkled bills, I feel my identity morphing from Comic Book Nerd to Mysterious Stoner Outcast.
~
My mother was dating. My father was sunk in work. My four sisters, as always, were obsessed with their friends and feuds. But the rest of the city g
limmered curious with teenagers and it was with these possibly like-minded kin that I began to cast my fate. I saw an opportunity to lose myself in a world outside my own precincts and guessed that my association with Fudge would deliver me into new circumstances and new vocabularies of being. “You want to smoke a spliffy? Spark up a hoolie? Whoa. This shit’s strong. You sure that’s homegrown? Fuck, I am baked. Want this roach?” These years marked a time, too, when I understood it wasn’t desirable to do well in school. School-smart was a liability. It was better to smoke dope and drink Bacardi and suck the butane out of a Bic lighter so you could spew it on a lighted match—fwoosh—blowing flames like a carnie. In the space of ten months I would forget all about The Justice League and polynomials and The Tempest and fill my days with whip-its and bong hits and Sudafed, Pink Floyd and Purple Jesus and Blue Microdot, dazzled to move through such candy-coloured rainbows.
~
Scene. Friday evening in Fall. Fudge and I dawdle on the railway tracks beneath the South Street railway bridge. It is dusk and getting cold in the way a December day gets cold—bleak orange sun, wind chilling our noses, stiffening our fingers. Fudge is in his blue parka, hands in his pockets. I shiver in a Lopi sweater and Davy Crockett jacket. Johnny, in his red down-filled jacket, is just now billy-goating down the jagged slate of the railway cut.
“Finally!” says Fudge. “Here comes the little faggot.” He throws a grape Bubble Yum at Johnny. “You say you’re going to be somewhere, you be there, buddy. If not, you call the guy to tell him you’re going to be late. That’s common knowledge, Johnny. Common fucking knowledge.”