Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

  “Better late than never,” says Johnny, walking on one of the rails.

  “What?” says Fudge, his reply more like whuh to indicate his rising frustration. “Grow the fuck up, Johnny. Be normal for once.”

  “Only human.”

  “Then be a normal human for once.” Fudge carefully lights a joint and passes it to Johnny. “See? I handed it to you like a normal person because I’m going to be a normal person when I grow up. What’re you going to be when you grow up, Johnny?”

  Johnny thinks about that. “A stunt driver. Or a cop.”

  “Oh, Johnny,” says Fudge. “You’ll probably go to car wash school. Or be a hairdresser in Toronto, won’t he, Mickey?”

  “No,” says Johnny, stubborn. “I want to be something.” He sucks on the joint. “Like a stunt driver. Or the chief of a prison.”

  “A warden, Johnny. It’s called a warden.”

  “Hey,” says Johnny. “I just seen this movie at Trish’s about torture and shit in other countries.”

  “Is that where you were?”

  Johnny presses his lips together, holding the smoke in his lungs. “But, oh man,” he says, exhaling. “The shit they were doing in these chambers.”

  “Who’s in it?”

  “It was all unknowns. Anyway, they took you downstairs to these torture chambers with this spike? Of all places, you don’t want to get tortured there.”

  “What kind of spike?”

  “Hey,” says Johnny, sucking on the joint and peering into the sunset. “You know the name of Elvis’s plane?”

  Fudge looks at him, baffled. “Elvis’s plane?”

  “Echo Poppa. You know all that Air Force language? Like your name would be, um, Hotel, Oscar—”

  “Oscar?” Fudge giggles. He is fond of Johnny but the official party line is that Fudge is only moments away from losing all patience and punching Johnny’s head in. “Johnny, that’s enough. Put down the joint. Walk away from the joint. You’re too high to talk to.”

  These are the aimless conversations of numberless nights and many of our get-togethers go absolutely nowhere. Most afternoons we smoke dope in Johnny’s basement, fanatically listening to Genesis or Supertramp or Jethro Tull. Or we loiter outside a school dance. Or get chased off the St. Mary’s University campus by the commissionaires. Then we walk home in the wetting drizzle, waiting always for some commotion to deliver us from our random teenage lives. Moods change—in the mercuriality of adolescence, relations flash from fear to boredom to laughter in a moment—but so little seems to happen. Drama, havoc, event, that’s what we crave. Which is why I recall, in hallucinogenic detail, the rest of this October night. For it marks the first time I do real drugs, a great and visionary episode in my young life.

  Under a darkening sky, we make our way along the railway cut to Point Pleasant Park, two hundred acres of wild at the city’s southern tip, where a high school is presenting a student council sponsored event, a bonfire on the beach. I’ve heard of these affairs but I’m not prepared for the madding crowd of kids, the fires and drunkenness. Bushwhacking through trees, we meet in some hiding place known only to Fudge two girls sitting cross-legged on the forest floor, smoking and trading back and forth a jar of moose piss—a liquor brewed by blending steals from parents’ cabinets. The first girl is Trish Blundell, Johnny’s default girlfriend, and the second is Deb Smear. Now Deb Smear is stingingly cute—a Grade 8 girl in jean jacket and jeans, a red rose delicately embroidered on each rear pocket—and probably the most flagrantly sexualized person I’ve seen up to that time. Certainly I have never seen anyone wear jeans as tight as she does, and I study her when she isn’t looking at me. Which is most of the time.

  Deb Smear is the queen of a phylum I am to meet later in multitudes, teenage girls in eye shadow and lip gloss, feathered hair lightened by a bottle of drugstore Sun-In, often drunk, sweet, from places like Fairview or Spryfield or East Chezzetcook. Deb Smear is from even farther, a settlement called Shad Bay, and the place-name frightens me for it evokes a No Man’s Land of beer empties, abandoned Dairy Queens, and grounded fishing boats. And yet from these rural routes springs someone like Deb Smear, a creature who radiates powers of instantaneous self-assurance and allure. I wonder about these girls—they are mysterious and complicated in ways I can’t divine. Gorgeous in dangly earrings. Sharing a bottle of Southern Comfort. Talking, drinking, flirting. Making out with someone. Crying over someone else. Wiping dribble off their chin. Pulling up their jeans. Stumbling, mumbling, plastered. Passing out, mouths open, stomachs pumped.

  “Took you long enough,” says Deb Smear, standing up. She looks at me, skeptical. “Who’s that?”

  “This is Mickey,” says Fudge, with little enthusiasm. “He’s all right. It’s his first bonfire. And Mickey, this is Titless.”

  “Don’t call me that!” Deb Smear swats Fudge with an open hand. “You don’t call your girlfriend that, you fucking asshole.”

  “I mean,” says Fudge, making a put-upon smirk. “This is Little Debbie.”

  “You don’t call me that either! Johnny never calls Trish names like that. Have some respect for once in your life.” Fudge says nothing. Deb Smear fishes in her rear pocket and brings out a pack of Players Lights. “So this is your first bonfire, hey, Mickey?” She picks out a cigarette. “Your first hoote­nanny?” Before she lights the cigarette, she looks to Trish with a sneer of curled lip, perhaps the beginning of a wicked smile or simply a blasé expression of boredom, I can’t tell. It is a masterpiece of ambiguity and I notice how Deb Smear speaks out of the side of her mouth, her lips quivering with small movements, as if she’s full of secrets, as if there are things she knows I’ll never guess.

  I ask if the hootenanny means there’ll be banjos.

  Deb Smear finds my question hysterically funny and from her mouth comes an absurdist guffaw. She bends over, laughing, and twists her head to look at Fudge. “Your friend’s pretty funny, Fudge-stone.”

  Fudge makes a this-is-what-I-have-to-put-up-with look and produces a Ziploc baggie. Inside are dark little shapes, like pieces of cereal. “Ever done shrooms before, Mickey?”

  “I want one!”

  “Calm down, Deb,” says Fudge. “I’m trying to explain something here.” He wraps a mushroom in an empty Bubble Yum wrapper and gives it to me. “You take one and chew it and wherever you’re trying to get to, fifteen minutes later, you’re there.”

  I put it in my pocket.

  “Now me,” says Deb Smear. She takes a mushroom, pops it in her mouth, and spins to me. “Maybe there’s banjos, Mickey, we don’t know. But you can bet your ass there’ll be something. Fucking right there’ll be something. You’re in for a ride now, buddy-boy. Because there’s always a party with me and Trish on the go. Never a dull moment when we’re around. We’re action. We make action happen. We’re it.”

  And so the five of us, along with hundreds of others, traipse down to the sea, swarming toward a convergence of desire and event, wanting the moment to rush in and deliver us into our futures. It is a bonfire for a city high school, the night before a football game, and I imagine the student council at one time intended a pep rally and weenie roast around one of the fire grates on the beach. At ten o’clock when we arrive there are four hundred kids and three fires, two of them blazing wild. I am selling my mushroom to a boy I know from Sunday school when I see Fudge heave a very solid-looking picnic table over the beach rocks and up-end it into the nearest bonfire. It soon belongs to the biggest fire I have so far witnessed, crackling fierce, sending billowing sparks fifty feet into the night. And where’s Johnny Red? There’s Johnny Red, falling out of a pine tree. I watch him drop fifteen feet, carom off a thick branch near the bottom, and bounce into the flames of the smallest fire before rolling into the sneakers of a Grade 11 girl. He is springing up, eager to climb another, when the first police vehicle bumps along the shore road toward the fires. “
Paddy wagon!” comes the cry. “Paddy wagon!” I look for the kid from Sunday school but he’s vanished. The whole congregation is vanishing because if the cops catch you with drugs or alcohol, you will spend the rest of the night in the Drunk Tank, a call made to your parents in the morning.

  Quickly I eat the mushroom and race after Johnny. For twenty minutes I run through the woods like a commando in a war, struggling to keep up, dry branches slashing at my cheek, my boot-bottoms slipping on pine needles. Ahead of me, Johnny takes to hiding behind trees, then jumping out to tackle me, screaming, joking, happy. We arrive back on the railway tracks to find Fudge, Deb Smear, and a kid with a wineskin named Veeper. He passes the wineskin to me and I squeeze a mix of gin and Kool-Aid into my mouth, tripping from the mushroom. I smell trees and thorns and the reek of freezing dirt. Collapsing to the ground, I pick at the frosted dew on the railway—a sensation that starts in my mouth a taste of rust and stones and sullen earth. I imagine thousands of dead Halifax people sliding wet in Halifax graves, soil mucky with earwigs, glow-worms. Full in my nose I breathe the smack of creosote, a trace of withered autumn leaves, listening to the tones of Johnny’s voice as he’s interrupted by the prehistoric clittering of a flying beetle. Opening my eyes, I watch this beetle’s flight through thistle tops and over the exposed gravel of the railway and imagine it rising to the black klim of sky where phantom crows chase higher air. All my ideas spin and spread into the sky, leaving me to wonder at this newfound religion and whether a single imagination might unite the universe. This is the last thought I register for I’ll black out and puke hopelessly later that night in the back seat of Fudge’s Ford Pinto as he drives me home. He carries me senseless to my father’s house where my oldest sister takes me in. There deposited, I awake the next morning sick and feeble, staring at my bedroom ceiling, not sure where I’ve been, what has happened, if I will ever feel normal again.

  ~

  Fudge didn’t mind me puking in his car. In fact he never referred to it. Afterwards he would only remember how entertaining I was. “You should’ve seen Mickey the night he did mushrooms the first time. Fuck, that was comical. He gets there like, ‘What’s a dog? It’s this thing that runs around for everybody.’ You remember that, Mickey? Fuck, you were tripping. You’re like, ‘I understand trees for the first time. We used to be fish!’ What a mind. Unbelievable. You wouldn’t know it was the same person.” He turned to me, smiling. “Oh, Mickey. You’re a strange little guy. I couldn’t figure you out for the longest time. Then I realized you’re just shy. But you’re all right. You’re a pretty good head.”

  Howard Fudge liked me. I was part of his crew. He took me on his rounds. Fudge had freestanding memberships in a number of Halifax dives and flats and flophouses, most frequent among them a neglected dwelling on Willow Street, back when the neighbourhood was sketchy with broken glass and front-yard scrap. The backdoor on this house was corroded, tilting, wedged open with a red plastic Pop Shoppe crate. The door led into a back porch and kitchen and main floor where there was a cosmic abundance of pot, the green fank of smoked dope everywhere in that Willow Street house. In the bathroom, joints forgotten beside toothbrushes. In the shag carpet, dozens of dropped roaches. In the kitchen sink, knife-tips blackened from hash use. Over that winter, I would encounter in this house any number of hippies and Black guys and Celtic-looking riffraff, all men in their twenties and thirties and scary and cool and dangerous.

  But that first afternoon, there is only one other person, someone called Blomgren. He has tangled blond hair and a blond beard—a General Custer look-a-like in a striped engineer’s cap and Bruins jersey. He is friendly and jokey and acts as if he has a number of attractive options on the go. “Here comes the Fudge,” he says when he sees us. In socked feet, Blomgren walks across the shag carpet and grabs a Pizza Delight box off the floor. He offers us cold pepperoni slices and beer. Fudge tries to contribute to the pizza but Blomgren holds up a hand, as if the idea is ridiculous. “Forget it, Fudgey. Save your quarters for the jukebox.” Blomgren spins to face Johnny. “But what about you, boy? Let’s see the colour of your money.” Johnny doesn’t move, unsure what to do. Blomgren smiles. “I’m just messing with you, son. What’s his name, Fudge? This good-looking kid here.”

  “That’s Johnny. And the little one’s Mickey.”

  “Hey, boys. Welcome, welcome. Let’s get to it.” Blomgren pulls out a plastic bag stuffed with loose weed. He shakes the seeds out above the opened pizza box and asks, “What’ll it be today?”

  “Is Sneaky here?” asks Fudge, sitting on the arm of a lopsided sofa.

  “Fuck knows where Sneaky’s at,” says Blomgren. “But I can take care of you gentlemen today. How much you want?” I can tell Blomgren is amused to be talking to us and it’s my feeling that to sell half a pound of pot to Howard Fudge and his sidekicks is not the biggest order of business in Blomgren’s day.

  Now Vance Blomgren is a serious criminal, a small-time crook, and full-time fuck-up. Adopted son of Milly Rees, a madam who runs girls out of the Regal Taxi line, and cousin to Deacon Vickery, one of the bigger drug wholesalers east of Montreal, Vance Blomgren drives a Buick Century convertible and operates an after-hours bootlegging service out of the Willow Street house, it’s listed in the Yellow Pages under Bottle Delivery, and I have never met anyone so carelessly charming and corrupt and insulting. The guy traffics in a number of automatic phrases—“Out of the way, Stagehand,” “First day with the new legs?” “You trying to Jew me around?”—phrases often skeezy with racist implication, although he does share the Willow Street house with a Black guy named Sneaky Tynes.

  “That Sneaky’s something else,” Blomgren tells me one day as we watch Sneaky drift out the front door and down the sidewalk. “Just look at him go. He’s like the definition of the word nigger.”

  ~

  He said it, I didn’t. I repeat it here because it leads to material I have so far avoided reclaiming—just how racist and backward and penny-dreadful many of the neighbourhoods of Halifax could be in these years. For in my childhood, grown men and women still used all-purpose phrases like Chinaman or Coloured Fella or Indian Giver. But these were mild compared to the grimy folk legends Vance Blomgren repeated. Whether anyone ever did go “brooming coons” on Creighton and Maynard I don’t know, but that fable and that fucked-up phrase haunted the minds of thousands of kids over six generations. The folklore was, at some time in the city’s past, white people drove up and down streets in the North End and, off the back of a truck, smacked Black people with a broom. Or whitewashed them with a mop. For fun. Creighton and Maynard. The streets were mentioned so often in my youth, by Vance Blomgren, Howard Fudge, Deacon Vickery, and others, that I thought it was some squalid inner city junction, but, as I would later learn, the streets run parallel and never touch. Except in my mind they did. Creighton and Maynard for me was an intersection of fear and loathing, deficiency and loss. When older kids told you this brooming coons story, and I was seven when I first heard it, I was thrilled to be included in such illicit materials, even if I sensed it was, over the long view, sort of mutually degrading. But not everyone is interested in the long view. In Halifax, the tidal repetition of received attitudes is everywhere, in all waters, and it would be a number of years before I understood the South End could prove as much a ghetto as the North.

  ~

  In my presence, Vance Blomgren tells seventeen racist jokes which I dutifully copy into the endpapers of Watership Down. It is in the midst of this somewhat covert activity that Fudge finds me one day, sitting at the kitchen table in the Willow Street house. “Cocoon?” he says, reading over my shoulder. “Wetsuits? Hockey pucks? What are these? Fucking racist jokes? What the fuck? Oh, Mickey, man. Come on.” He pulls the book from my hands and rips out the offending pages.

  I protest it’s my favourite book and the jokes aren’t mine but Blomgren’s.

  “Blomgren?” asks Fudge. “Blomgren told you these?”r />
  I nod, half-lying, and ask to have the pages back.

  Fudge tosses the torn pages at me, but keeps the book a vague moment. “Blomgren’s got a fucked-up sense of humour. He can be pretty funny, for a skinny cocksucker, but be careful. Because he can’t be trusted worth shit. And if you ever do a deal in this house, go through Sneaky. You and Johnny remember that.”

  Sneaky Tynes, to give him his due, is a stern-looking mixed race dude with freckles and a disorganized afro. He seems to occupy a strange half-life in lumber yards and massage parlours. He has a reputation as a playboy. “It’s Sneaky to the street,” he says to me, pretending to check over his shoulder. “But Quincy to the ladies.” His moods are quixotic and changeable. He messes with white kids, hassling them toward a confrontation, only to collapse into laughter, shoulders weak, a hand covering his face. Many years later, Quincy Tynes will re-enter my biography at a crucial juncture, saving my life in another city, but when I am thirteen I am mostly terrified of him. He is beyond my experience.

  “This your favourite book?” asks Fudge, starting to look through its pages.

  Feeling oddly contrite, I tell him he can keep it if he wants.

  “You want to give me your favourite book?” asks Fudge, picking idly at the fur-lining of his parka hood. But I can tell it means something to him that I’ve offered this gift. He is touched that I’ve included him in something private to me. “Mickey gave me this book,” he’ll say later. “It’s about talking rabbits. I thought, Talking rabbits? What the fuck? But it’s pretty good. They wanted to find the girl rabbits, I can relate.” Afterwards, on other days, I will notice Fudge looking at me, as if he expects me to start a story or remember a detail, as if I am someone who might take the lead when he isn’t interested in leading. I am embarrassed by this connection and by the connection Fudge wants it to be. I am young and find his favouritism troubling. I don’t understand it, think it vaguely unnatural, and his intentions for a closer friendship I resist because it means I have to recognize his attentiveness, his kindness, his loneliness. If I’d known more about the world, I might have realized Howard Fudge was a little in love with me. But I didn’t. I wanted our friendship to be only ridiculous and provisional, just as I wanted this whole period of my life to be ridiculous and provisional. I didn’t want it to matter. I didn’t want any of this to matter. In the end, I knew Howard Fudge was limited, that I was brighter, that there were and would be a number of social situations where I would be welcome and he would not. He was seen as slovenly and rough and gauche, a fatso drug-dealer in Kodiak boots. I tried to ignore these half-thoughts, hoping Fudge wouldn’t pick up on them, but he was a deep-sensing Maritimer, with many more feelings than he had ways to verbalize, and over time he probably intuited and registered the shifts in our relations. Not that, to be clear, I could possibly have articulated any of these feelings back when I was thirteen, but I did know I was obscurely relieved when Fudge was arrested for punching a bouncer at The Seahorse Tavern that New Year’s Eve. In the early hours of the new year, Fudge was brought home drunk-and-disorderly by two uniformed cops and Ralph Fudge was made to understand that his son, soon to be age of majority, was becoming known in the city as a problem. The next week, Fudge was dispatched to King’s-­Edgehill in Windsor, Nova Scotia, a boarding school in those days considered a country club for delinquent rich kids, and I was left alone with Johnny Red.