by Alex Pugsley
~
Left alone with Johnny Red, I was not a good head. Left alone with Johnny Red, I was a bad egg. I shoplifted at Woolco. I dropped bottles off the top of Fenwick Towers. I wandered with him all over—Dutch Village Road, Mulgrave Park, Jelly Bean Square. I was in awe of Johnny Red, this gorgeous, doomed kid. He was in more than a few ways what I wanted to be. One winter day, Deb Smear and I watched him gouge a Kiss logo into the paint of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge. “People get ideas about you, man,” said Johnny, coldly finishing the last letter. “The older you get, the more they get ideas about you. And you can’t stop it. You can’t control it. So what do you do when other people say what’s normal? Fuck them up, that’s what!” His face softened into a dimply smile, to show us he was kidding. “Forget I said that. I was just peeking into someone else’s dream they was dreaming.” He shambled off toward the Halifax side of the bridge, red hair flying in the wind. He’d acquired a hobble over the winter, from crashing a Ski-Doo off a skateboard ramp, and walked with a left-leaning shuffle. He could still move with agility but it seemed something was trickling out of his life and abilities, and I wondered if he would ever be the perfect athlete he once was.
“Okay,” said Deb Smear, coming up beside me and whispering in my ear. “Johnny’s a guy who I have no idea who he is in person, right? He’s like the spaciest guy on the face of the earth. But, let’s face it, he does call Trish and he did give her a Christmas present.” She showed me a thin necklace around her throat. “It’s just a little silver jobbie he stole from Fairweather. But at least he gave his girlfriend something. Fudge is like the flip opposite of that. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t! He didn’t even call me on my birthday.” She sucked on the necklace, her face blotchy with winter paleness, and took out a flattened pack of Players Light. She pried it open to see a loose cigarette next to a skinny-looking joint. “Is that it? Hey Mickey, what happened to all the pot?”
~
Scene. Attic of the Willow Street house. Johnny and I sit with Vance Blomgren among loose flaps of fibreglass insulation, mildewed Playboy magazines, and an empty bottle of Golden Glow Cider, watching him roll joints. Fudge is still away at boarding school. He’s instructed us to deal only with Sneaky Tynes but Johnny is troubled by Sneaky and uncomfortable in his company. His instinct is to buy from Blomgren. So I sit beside a smelly, hungover Vance Blomgren—a first encounter with adult-strength body odour, which to me is a combination of cumin and rank puddle water. “Good news and bad news,” Blomgren says, blond bangs falling in his eyes. “Good news is Thai Stick only comes around once a year and I got an ounce for you. Bad news is Deacon creamed us off the top.” Johnny is reaching to examine one of the joints when Blomgren slaps his hand away. “You got suicidal tendencies, son? You’ll get your ninety joints, don’t worry. I’m trying to look out for you. That’s why I’m rolling them extra thin.” But Johnny complains the thinness of the joints will make it look as if we’re trying to rip people off. “Jesus Christ,” says Blomgren. “I try and do the younger generation a favour and you turn around and pull this shit on me? What’s that about? Here then.” He drops a hundred perfectly rolled joints on the floor. “Happy Fucking St. Patrick’s Day.”
~
The Thursday of March Break, Fudge returns to find us at a house party in Clayton Park blazed out of our minds. “Mickey, you’re fucking out of it, aren’t you? You drop acid again? Look at you. You are fucking pinned, buddy. So what are you, some drug-fiend stoner since I’m gone? Listen to me. I’m trying to tell you something. If you do drugs, you switch around. You don’t do the same drug over and over. That’s how you become a fucking addict. Where’s Johnny?”
We find Johnny in the basement, sitting on a freezer, drunkenly kissing a girl in a pink ski jacket. “Johnny, I got orders out front. You holding?” Johnny passes Fudge a baggie of joints. “These are measly little joints,” says Fudge. “Who fucking rolled these?”
“Blomgren.”
“Blomgren? Why’d he fucking roll them? How much you buy?”
“Ounce. But Deacon Vickery ripped him off. That’s why it’s not a real ounce.”
Fudge glares at us, suspicious. “But you paid for an ounce?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Blomgren ripped you off, Johnny, you fucking tool. He jacked the rest of that ounce and rolled them small so you wouldn’t feel left out. Didn’t I tell you not to trust the guy?”
“It’s only ninety bucks. Who cares?”
Fudge cared. This transgression worked away at his sense of fairness and mission. He began to talk about it as if Blomgren had cheated him personally. “Whenever somebody unnecessarily fucks with me for no reason,” he’d say, slowly shaking his head. “I can’t help but want to punch the fucker’s head in.” Fudge spoke of getting even with Blomgren, getting back at that peckerhead once and for all. Now this was a different order of business from Fudge slugging a kid in a schoolyard, which Johnny and I’d often witnessed. This was going after Vance Blomgren, a twenty-two-year-old man, cousin to Deacon Vickery, someone with biker friends, someone who knew the guy who knifed the guy in the bathroom of the Misty Moon on Gottingen Street. How was this going to work?
~
Scene. A snow-stormy afternoon on the last day of March Break and one of the last days of my random adolescence. Drifts of fresh snow, pant bottoms thickening with ice, cars skidding into curbs. Fudge sees Blomgren’s Buick Century parked at the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Quinpool Road. Inside the trunk we imagine bags of pot, cases of beer, quarts of liquor. In that stubborn teenage way, we try and jimmy open the trunk lock with our own keys. Johnny is prying off the chrome Buick emblem when I realize it’s not a convertible and not Blomgren’s car. At that point, the car owner comes running out of the KFC and we’re chased away down Quinpool Road. We buy grape shoestring licorice at the Candy Bowl. We bumper-hitch in the snow down to the Armdale Rotary and walk up to frozen Chocolate Lake, nominally looking for the house Johnny grew up in. We are the only people on the ice.
Now the day is waning grey, dimming sun behind indifferent clouds, and Fudge is cold and wants to go. We see Johnny standing over a hole he’s made in the ice. With bare fingers he takes a slab of slate from the shore and drops it in the hole, trying to make it bigger. Why? I’m not sure. It’s a Sunday on March Break and the activity seems like the appropriate way to end the afternoon. For a while we join him, carrying heavier and heavier pieces of slate and shale, watching them bubble down into the watery dark. Johnny looks above him as a bunch of sparrows scatter into the sky. “You know the Inuit?” asks Johnny, staring after the birds.
Fudge stands at the hole in the ice. “The Inuit, Johnny?”
“The Eskimos. They only got a language in 1971.”
“Like a written language?” asks Fudge. “Like a symbolic—what do you mean? Like they didn’t have symbols?”
“No, no. They had symbols but they didn’t mean the same to everybody.”
“Johnny, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Because the symbols meant different things to different people. The Russian ones are working on the same thing right now.”
“The Russian Inuit?” Fudge glances at me, more annoyed than amused, then back at Johnny. “Jesus loves you, Johnny,” he says. “But everyone else thinks you’re an asshole. What are you trying to fucking say?”
Johnny is about to reply when he notices the first drops of blood in the snow. His hand, he sees, is dripping with blood. He holds it to his chest, protectively, as if it is a baby bird. “You guys,” he says. “I think I cut my finger off.” The sharp edge of a slate chunk has caught between the knuckles of his ring finger, shearing it off clean. Fudge examines Johnny’s martyred hand, the whitened stump, the seep of blood, then goes down on one knee. He feels around the ice surface, searching for Johnny’s finger. So do I. Later, in my mind’s cinema, I see it plummeting in the water, the camera following it certain fathoms in the lake, a
smear of colour spiralling into darkness. But we never do find it.
Fudge gives up first. He starts trudging towards the shore where some kids have gathered to stare at us, wondering who we are, and what we’re doing on the ice yelling at each other. For want of anything better to do, I rear back and fling a rock in their direction. It smacks the tree above their heads, emptying a branch of snow.
Johnny remains at the hole in the ice, screaming for us to keep searching.
“We’re not going to find your fucking finger, Johnny,” shouts Fudge. “Face it.”
“Sure,” says Johnny, staring into the hole. “Be like that. Be like that, Fudge. Except one day you’re going to fucking die, man. And no one’s going to care either.”
“That’s if we grow up, Johnny,” says Fudge, stepping off the ice of Chocolate Lake. “That’s if we grow up.”
~
Howard Fudge would grow up, and marry, and become a father. Which surprised me since I imagined him a bachelor adult, bombing around backroads on a snowmobile or ATV, joining sweaty buddies at the Legion Hall in an April thaw, his hair gone white, his face steaming. After high school, I would hear of Howard Fudge but never see him again. He would do a semester at Acadia University and get an assistant manager’s job at the Radio Shack in New Minas. The map of Highway 101 is dotted with motor vehicle fatalities, especially on the curves between Windsor and Wolfville, and it was twelve miles east of Wolfville where the manager of the New Minas Radio Shack went off the road and lost his life. At the funeral, a half-drunk Howard Fudge met the widow, a petite woman with a Dorothy Hamill haircut named Etta MacKinnon. Fudge would quit drinking and drugs, marry Etta MacKinnon, and move to Antigonish to open a car dealership called Colonial Mazda. He and Etta would have three sons, one of whom was born with cerebral palsy. Googling him last summer, I saw Howard K. Fudge was the chairman of the pipe organ restoration committee for St. Andrew’s Church. And Johnny Red? I used to wonder what would happen to Johnny Red. Back from university one Christmas, I saw him in the basement of the Halifax Shopping Centre, clerking in the kitchen appliance section of Eaton’s. He pretended not to see me and I pretended not to see him. Jonathan Boutilier’s life would obscure with mishap and addiction. He would follow a future of sexual assault, forcible confinement, robbery, theft, and a three-year turn in the Dorchester Penitentiary in New Brunswick.
~
Some weeks after Johnny lost his finger on Chocolate Lake, Beasley and Bubbles were playing euchre in the ping-pong room at the Waegwoltic Club when Johnny wandered in and mentioned he’d just fucked Deb Smear on the railroad tracks below the Horsefield, news that would influence a number of local conversations. That summer was memorable for multiple reasons: Elvis died, Voyager launched, and two former friends got set to fight. The venue was the Halifax Commons, in the scrub grass between the tennis courts and baseball diamond. Sixty of us showed up. Comparing body sizes, it seemed absurd that Fudge, a hulking porker of a bully, would ever lose to Johnny Red. But Johnny was the quickest kid I’d ever seen, a champion kickboxer in his weight class, and capable of roundhouse kicks that would drop a pony. He was also crazy. Within seconds of the fight starting, some cruel spirit was released in Johnny and he rushed at Fudge, jumping above him and stunning him with a downward-flying elbow to the temple. A mess of punches was exchanged. Then Johnny landed a spinning back kick below Fudge’s ear, sending Fudge sideways, staggering him. Fudge was off balance, as if he wasn’t sure where he was, or as if he thought the ground beneath him was shifting, when Johnny’s right cross thumped him full on the mouth. Johnny rushed forward, starting a round kick aimed at Fudge’s chin. This time Fudge was able to dodge and grab Johnny’s boot. He pulled Johnny one way, bounced him to the ground, and fell on him. And once Fudge had you in the dirt, no matter how many blows you landed, no matter how fast you squirmed, no matter even if you had a six-inch spike in your fist and tried to gash his face with it, as Johnny was about to try, once Fudge got you down he used his body weight to crush you to the earth so he could straddle your chest. Johnny bucked and thrashed, scraping Fudge’s chin with the spike, but Fudge sat on Johnny’s sternum, got his knees on Johnny’s arms, and punched Johnny’s head in. Three times I saw Fudge use this move in a fight and three times the other kid was beaten to a bloody mess. I watched now with fascinated horror as blood from Johnny’s nose and mouth soaked into his Levi’s shirt, the snap buttons torn open to his bellybutton. “You’re a fucking bug,” said Fudge. “You know that, Johnny? You’re a fucking bug.” I thought it would end there, when it was clear Johnny was losing ability and focus, when spinal fluid began leaking from his nose, but Fudge dragged a still-twitching Johnny into the baseball diamond and handcuffed one of his ankles to the fence behind home plate. He was about to kick his face in when some teacher ran over, babbling about calling the police, and we all dispersed, sickened, thrilled, exhausted.
A few days later I met a subdued Johnny at the King of Donair, his face shiny with bruises, his skull fractured in two places. “It was worth it,” he said, meaning what happened with Deb Smear. Not that he pursued the attachment. In fact, I doubt Johnny ever saw her again. Deb Smear, who had bruises all over her back from fucking Johnny in the railway cut, who would have two abortions and a miscarriage by the time she was seventeen, who walked me giggling to my first bonfire—she went to live with her grandmother in Minto, New Brunswick. After that, I didn’t know anyone who saw her again. Following the fight, Johnny enrolled in the Halifax Vocational School, Fudge returned to King’s-Edgehill, and I filtered into a public high school. There I will meet sarcastic older kids who, in their knowledge and range of behaviour, will seem like citizens of an entirely different city. What of my dealings with Fudge? These years were unregulated, improvised, full of faults and wrong turns, just as my friendships were. I had no great plan but I sensed one night, while talking to some kids lined up to see a movie called Quadrophenia, that I wouldn’t be seeing Howard Fudge anymore. I was looking for a new way to be in the world.
~
Another game, not soccer or stickball, but football in the rain at the Wanderers Grounds near Citadel Hill. The field spattered with fallen leaves, the oil paints of autumn. It is Grade 11, a day before Halloween, and I am with Cyrus Mair behind the bleachers, beside the bubbled enclosure of the Junior Bengal Lancers riding stables. We are stoned and dressed as Mods in second-hand suits and desert boots, another costume. I have not seen Fudge for over a year and buy my weed from the kid who sits next to me in my Modern World Problems class. In an inside pocket of my suit I have a family-sized Smarties box crammed with sixty-seven joints and rolled-up bills. I am giving Cyrus a joint for his walk home when Sneaky Tynes and Howard Fudge appear out of the rain. Sneaky asks if I have any drugs. Fudge glances at me once and doesn’t look at me again, preferring to stare into the mud. I am fumbling with the joints in my Smarties box, asking Sneaky how many he wants, when Sneaky simply grabs the box from my hand. He picks out four joints and goes ominously still, his lower lip nudged forward in thought. Then he abruptly turns and walks away with all my joints and all my money.
“Hey, wait!” I say, in a voice that starts gruff but finishes in a squeal of girlish panic. Sneaky reconsiders, gives me the four joints as a peacekeeping gesture, but keeps the other sixty-three and my cash, dropping the empty Smarties box in the mud. In a return to childhood, and childhood’s feelings of powerlessness, I begin to cry, my tears mixing with trickles of rain, my feet soggy in my desert boots.
“Fudge,” I say, getting some control over my voice. “Come on, man. Fuck.”
Fudge stops. I have a memory of him in this moment, an indelible image of him in his blue parka, standing with his back to me, resolute, gruesome, but not without some weird fucking majesty. Then he spins around and comes back and punches me in the head. I feel my lower jaw separate from the rest of my face. Touching my cheek with two fingers, I yell his name a second time. But Howard Fudge doesn’t tur
n around. He walks off with Sneaky Tynes in the drizzling rain. In his way he is trying to tell me something.
Wheelers
My mother’s maiden name is Wheeler—in her early roles she’s credited as Mary-Margaret Wheeler—and the Wheeler family ethos, as my father would tell you, from time to time possessed everyone in our household. For my father and I lived in a house of girls and women. Imagine a back hall of scuffed figure skates, rubber boots, ballet slippers, mismatched high heels, a broken flip-flop. Picture a second floor where dance routines are rehearsed at all hours of the morning, doors are perversely slammed, sweaters are illicitly borrowed only to be returned “completely reeking of fucking cigarettes.” My four sisters competed for clothes, friends, time in the bathroom, nights with the car. They competed to be heard. There were skirmishes, schemes, hormonal swings, unburdening emotionality. Nights could be loud. When I was young, I tried to make connections between all factions—I let them give me manicures, I let them put my hair in braids—only to later explode in survivalist anger. My Sisters Talking: “Remember when you ripped off your Tarzan pajamas? What a psycho!” “Mom’s right. You need therapy.” “You know when you mooned me and Faith? We saw your balls and they looked shrimpy. In your face! And fuck off because I actually don’t talk about other people.” How to respond? The unstable spin of feminine non-logic can overwhelm a single guy and, after the age of twelve, I vowed to never again take anyone’s side or get sucked into any argument. My mother presided over these histrionics from afar and seldom intervened. When indifference was futile, she could commit to the scene with the full force of her personality and in these moments the female members of my family seemed united in a singleness of lunacy. It was rampant in the house and halls and provoked in me a confusion of sympathy so absolute I had no idea where their contradictions ended and my own instabilities began. So, with such Sturm und Tollheit looming overhead, I can tell you most of what follows occurred some thirty years ago on a slushy late December afternoon when my mother began the proceedings sound asleep in a full bathtub in the house on Dunvegan. For the second time in an hour, Katie, my youngest sister, called to my mother that she was wanted on the telephone. But this information did not really infiltrate my mother’s dreaming brain. She lay in the bathwater, her head at an awkward angle, her mouth a smidge above the water’s surface. Katie, on the other side of the door, stood listening for some kind of response or movement, but, hearing none, returned to the staircase. It was only when Katie’s footfalls faded from the doorway that my mother stirred, eyelashes fluttering, elbow twitching, finally awakening. “Who’s there?” She pushed herself into a sitting position, a pink mesh sponge slipping from her shoulder. In another second the swirl of her dreams would dissipate and her full identity return to her, bringing with it all the concerns, perplexities, and divinations that free-float on any given day. “Ditsy?” She stood up, bathwater rinsing from her, and reached for an orange beach towel draped over a nearby radiator. She sniffed the towel, feeling where it was damp from earlier use, and quickly swabbed her shoulders, arms, legs. She called a second time and stepped out of the tub, careful to avoid the debris on the fringed bathmat at her feet, debris she seemed surprised to see. Which was: a three-pack of miniature Henkel Trocken champagne, a red Lego brick, and a water-warped paperback copy of Anne’s House of Dreams. The first item had been liberated earlier that afternoon from a reunion luncheon for Dalhousie University’s School of Nursing, Class of 1955. It was a degree my mother abandoned to go into acting but she’d been convinced to crash the reunion by two of her classmates. The Lego piece belonged to my mother’s first and, at the moment, only grandson. The book had been hers since childhood. Frowning a half-moment, she picked up the Lego piece and paperback, brought them to the sink, and placed them on a built-in tiled shelf. Why this frown? The whirligig of my mother’s likes and dislikes, and where it might spin on a given day, was something few could figure or predict and what was obsessing her on this winter afternoon was anyone’s guess. It could be the reminder of being a grandmother at fifty, or the memory of a ringing telephone, or Neptune Theatre’s current season, or some theatricals still to be played. Whichever—with sudden compulsion, as if she felt the present scene needed fresh energy—she turned away from the sink and reached into the tub to pull out its rubber plug. She took a plaid bathrobe, not her own, from a two-pronged hook on the back of the bathroom door and, pushing her arms through its sleeves, walked out the door into the hallway. Fading behind her in the bathroom was a sense of fragrant vapours—the down-draining water redolent of Pear’s Transparent Soap, lavender bath oil, and the everyday assorted effluence of an adult woman’s metabolism. “Hello?” she said, tightening the bathrobe’s belt. “Where are you? Ditsy?”