by Greg Rhyno
“Well, unfortunately, there wasn’t enough student enrolment for the Anthropology course, so it looks like you’ll be teaching the Civics course this semester instead.”
This semester. As in, tomorrow.
“Uh, okay. Sure.” I can hear the perkiness in my voice fading fast. “There wouldn’t happen to be any resources for that course kicking around, would there?“ My eye travels to the Grade Eleven Anthropology binder on my kitchen table, the one full of step-by-step lesson plans, assignments, handouts, and quizzes.
“Unfortunately,” she says (I’m really starting to hate that word), “Jan Maki used to chair that course, and she retired in June. You could try calling her, but I think she’s still in South Carolina. School’s open all day, though, if you want to come in. There might be something in the storage room.”
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like I have any other options. I try to say Thanks in a way that doesn’t sound completely insincere, but fail, and then hang up the phone.
When I walk out into the little kitchen, I realize the full extent to which my apartment is a mess. Partially empty glasses and beer bottles containing both questionable liquids and concerning solids crowd the counter. On the coffee table in the living room, there’re a few greasy cartons from Eddy Lee’s and a black soup of spilled beer and cigarette ash in the ashtray. A single pale noodle clings to the wall. From the sad little window near the ceiling, I can see a sunless smear of sky hovering above. It feels like the whole world has become an outward expression of my hangover.
After a little searching, I find my jacket in a wounded heap by the door and fish out a pack of smokes. I remember how there used to be a show on TV where this girl—I think she was half-alien or something—could put her fingers together and freeze time. If she forgot to do her homework, or felt like sleeping in, or I don’t know, wanted to rob the 7-Eleven, it was no problem: time freeze. It was like having a pause button for the universe. As far as superpowers go, it always struck me as pretty practical. It would definitely come in handy right about now. Instead, I’m resigned to do the next best thing. I sit down, smoke a cigarette, and pretend for about six and half minutes that I’m not completely fucked.
North West High School was rechristened William Lyon Mackenzie King High School in 1950, just after our tenth prime minister died of pneumonia. The name change happened when C.D. Howe, our local member of parliament and one of King’s closest cronies, leaned on the school board. The taxpayers weren’t so fond of the name—King didn’t have all that much to do with northern Ontario, and it was a little long-winded—but in the end they tolerated it. Fifty-four years of decreasing attention spans gave birth to a bunch of popular short forms including WLMK and Billy Mack (like the detective down in Texas), but for the most part people just call it Mackenzie King.
Personally, I think it’s kind of awesome that the school was named after the only state leader who held séances with his dead mom and took advice from a dog. Stoner legend has it that if you burn a fifty-dollar bill—the one with King’s picture on it—over the school crest then douse the flames with a bottle of Labatt’s 50, you can commune with the ghost of King. I can’t say I’ve ever had the money to burn or the beer to waste.
When I get to the school, it’s relatively quiet. Office staff, admin, and guidance counsellors are milling about, but thankfully, there are very few Dedicated Teachers to exacerbate my headache. Dedicated Teachers aren’t around today because they’ve already spent the week photocopying lessons, putting up freshly laminated posters, and organizing their desks into more effective learning configurations. Today, Dedicated Teachers are going for runs to reduce stress or looking forward to quiet evenings of watching Two and a Half Men. They are not, unlike some other people, spending the remainder of their Labour Day Weekend desperately hunting up course material.
I make my way upstairs to the history storage room and let myself in. The place is the size of a walk-in closet and smells like old coffee and paper. At one point, a few reclusive teachers must have used it as an office, but all that’s left now is a couple desks, a phone, and an unplugged computer collecting dust. The shelves are lined with scintillating reads like Confederation and Beyond, Imagine Canada, and the 1981 classic Canada Today: A Modern Perspective, but there’s nothing really specific to Civics. Some light archaeological digging in the file cabinet unearths hundreds of beige folders stuffed with mimeographs and photocopies of dot-matrix printouts. Another screeching metal drawer produces an array of peeling Trapper Keepers and a few VHS tapes labelled Fur Trade Documentary, North and South, and Star Trek—Nazi Episode. The place is a graveyard. I’m still completely fucked.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I don’t know my stuff; I know plenty. If they want me to talk about Roman aqueducts, the Reign of Terror, or the Beer Hall Putsch, I’m the man for the job. What I don’t know is what I’m going to say to thirty stone-faced grade tens when the bell rings at 9:05 tomorrow morning. My best bet at this point is to pull some icebreakers off the internet, figure out who else is teaching the course, and then get down to some serious mooching.
I leave the storage room and start heading toward the nearest exit. The web connection is faster at home and there’s the added bonus of being able to smoke while I work. It’s kind of tricky to do that around here. But then, as I walk through the English wing, I hear the sound of someone singing along to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now.’ It’s coming from Room 207. When I look inside, I see Ruth Kipling standing on a chair and stapling a poster of Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet to the back wall.
“Well, ho-lee shit,” I say, walking into the room. “They’ll let just about anyone work here, won’t they?”
“Seems like it,” she replies. “They hired you.”
She steps down off the ladder and puts the stapler on her desk.
“You plan on spending all day in here?” I ask.
“Actually, I was just about to head over to Court Street Café for a reuben,” she says looking at her watch. “Want to come with?”
The offer is tempting. Court Street does make a good reuben.
“I should probably head home,” I decide. “I’m teaching Civics tomorrow and I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“They gave you Civics? Bastards. That’s half the reason I got out of History. Have fun with that.”
I’ve known Ruth since high school. She’s been teaching for a few years, but she was just transferred to Mackenzie King last semester, which works out pretty well for me. Ruth is funny and smart and has impeccable taste in music, but I’d like to think that the real reason we’re friends is that she makes me dinner once a week. Plus, she married Deacon last spring, so we’re kind of stuck with each other now.
I leave the building through one of the side exits, but about a minute later, as I’m walking through the teachers’ parking lot, I hear the clomp of approaching sneakers behind me. I turn around just as Ruth catches up, a little out of breath.
“Hey!” she says. “I’ve still got some Civics binders I brought over from Churchill if you need them. They’re from a couple years ago, but they should be okay.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Thank you. For a minute there I actually thought I was going to have to work on Labour Day.”
“God forbid.”
Crisis averted, I offer to buy lunch. She agrees, so we walk toward her car.
“You’re really going to have to get your licence one of these days,” she tells me.
“Meh. You’d be surprised how far you can get on learned helplessness.”
She unlocks my door. “We can pick up the binders en route,” she says as we pull out of the parking lot. “I want to check in on Pepperoni anyway. He’s been barfing a lot lately. You should come in and see Michael. Maybe we can catch him in flagrante.”
“Uh oh. Has Deacon been getting into the online porn?”
“I wish,” she sighs. “Grand Theft Auto.”
&n
bsp; Deacon landed on his feet okay. Not that anyone was particularly worried. After everything went down with Soda, he took off to Laurier, and now he runs a website that manages other websites. I think. To be honest, I’m not one hundred percent sure what he does. I kind of stopped paying attention when he started talking about Boolean operators. All I know is, he gets to work from home, flies to Toronto once a month, and makes about twice as much money as I do. Fucking smart people.
The windows rattle a little as we fly down River Street. All things considered, the Sabre’s held up surprisingly well. It’s probably seen more than one transmission, but besides a little rust around the wheel well and a long crack across the back windshield, it’s in pretty decent shape.
“I can’t believe you guys still drive this thing.”
“Hey, there’s a lot of memories in this car.” She surveys the interior for a second. “Lost my virginity in here.”
“I did not need to know that.”
“Yep. Right there where you’re sitting.”
“Jesus!”
I try to change the subject by way of turning on the radio. Thunder Bay has only a handful of stations, and they’re all bad. I’ve never fully understood how there can be so many good songs in the world, but every time I turn on 94FM, they’re playing ‘One Week’ by the Barenaked Ladies.
I open the glove compartment and rummage through a mess of battered cassettes to find something better. I take out one ancient mixed tape and through the scratched-up haze of the plastic case read the tracks. Penpals—Sloan; Looking for a Place to Happen—The Tragically Hip; Helpless—Neil Young. They’re listed in a faded but familiar handwriting. I hum a little note of recognition and smile to myself.
“What’s that?” Ruth asks.
“Ah, nothing,” I say. “Just an old tape Soda made.”
She keeps one hand on the steering wheel and uses the other to crank down the driver’s-side window.
“Oh, come on,” I say. “It might be worth something.”
Ruth takes the cassette out of my hand, then lobs it outside over the roof of the travelling car. I look out the window and catch a fleeting glimpse of magnetic tape unspooling on the sidewalk.
“Not to me.”
She accelerates and keeps her eyes on the road.
SIDE A
In September
To me, it just doesn’t seem worth it. Right now the floors are all waxed and shiny, but soon they’ll be dull with foot traffic and sandwich guts. The lockers are graffiti free and the bathrooms smell like a chemical fruit, but by next week, someone will scratch a veiny cock into the paint, and someone else will take a dump on the floor. It must drive the custodians crazy to see a summer’s worth of work destroyed in a matter of days.
My first two classes of the fall semester pass by uneventfully. It’s all kind of old hat by now. Course outlines. Student profiles. Some bullshit get-to-know-you icebreakers that every teacher inevitably trots out to kill off the first day. Rotten was in my OAC History class, so I had to sit next to him. After a couple of weeks, I probably won’t even notice the smell, like how I got used to the pulp and paper mill after we moved to Thunder Bay.
I don’t see Soda or Deacon all morning. At lunch, I weave through student-clogged hallways and past manic banners that scream Pep Rally this Thursday! Go Lyons! When I finally make it out the front doors, I find myself in the middle of an afternoon that callously resembles summer. Immediately, I spot Evie sitting on the steps with a girl I don’t recognize.
“Hey, Pete!” Evie smiles. “Good summer?”
We compare adventures. By now, we’ve both had lots of practice explaining How I Spent My Summer Vacation. She helped her parents build a sauna at their camp. (Mosquitoes were insane!) I worked at the Husky on Arthur Street for a week but quit because my boss was crazy. (Wouldn’t let me take lunch breaks!)
“How come I didn’t see you at Wild Goose last week?” she asks.
“Cops busted it up by the time we got there.”
“Yeah, that was too bad. It was pretty fun while it lasted. We wound up going Cosmic Bowling after, but the shoe guy kicked us out for using our lane as a Slip ‘n’ Slide. Never go bowling when you’re that wasted.”
Evie’s pretty great. We made out once at a party in grade ten when we were both really drunk. We’d been getting along famously all night, so when we found ourselves alone in an empty bedroom, it seemed like the thing to do. But just before we made the crucial transition from vertical kissing to horizontal groping, she stopped and threw up on my shoes. Romantically speaking, it was hard to come back from.
“So,” she says, “when are we going to play a show together?”
“Uh, soon? I guess?” I hate commitment. “Lovely Rita’s the brains of the operation.”
“Well, tell Lovely Rita that you want to play with Martha Dumptruck as soon as fucking possible. Or else.” She smashes her fist adorably into her palm. “Hey—do you know Ruth? Our new bass player?”
Evie nudges the girl sitting beside her who, until now, has had her nose buried in a battered copy of The Bell Jar. The girl looks up.
“Oh,” she says, distractedly. “Hey.” Then she returns to Sylvia Plath.
“She’s actually very friendly,” Evie assures me. “But not too friendly. You tell Sodapop she’s off limits. Although, she does seem to have a thing for—” she whispers this part “—other bass players.”
From under The Bell Jar, Ruth blushes furiously.
Eventually, I make my excuses and head across the sloping front lawn. From the crest of the hill, it’s easy to survey the familiar topography. The Dominion of Goth Chicks. Drama Kingdom. The People’s Republic of Grunge. Metal Nation. Skaterland. Middle Earth. By now, I figure the Pussies have planted their flag in the cafeteria. In a way, it’s kind of reassuring that all the old tribes have found themselves and reinstated their borders, no-fly zones, and passport policies. Though, to be honest, not a lot of people visit Middle Earth.
Even frightened-looking grade nines form their own weird Island of Misfit Toys. As they make their conspicuous attempts to look inconspicuous, someone shouts, “Gummer!” and I see something hurtle through the air. Barely pubescent children scatter, and the remains of two raw eggs cling to the brick of the school wall.
Without Soda and Deacon, I’m feeling like a man without a country, and I’m seriously considering running home to watch The Monkees and microwave a Pizza Pop. That’s when I see Matty Wheeler making a beeline toward me with a fistful of handbills.
“Hey, brother,” he says.
I try to keep things to a handshake, but Matty counters with a bear hug that blocks out the sun. For a moment, there is nothing but bristly dreadlocks and the smell of patchouli. Matty, or Wheels, as his disciples call him, is the Dalai Lama of Stoner Mountain.
“Great show back in August,” he tells me. “Fucking great. That Soda, man.“ He pauses to let out a low whistle. “Terrific energy. You too. Nice drumming. Amazing.”
I want to like Matty. He’s a charmer and a true force of nature at Mackenzie King, but he’s almost always working some kind of angle. And here it comes.
“So check this out,” he says, putting a fluorescent orange flyer in my hand. “You’ll like this. It’s totally your bag.”
I look down at the paper, wondering exactly what Matty thinks my “bag” is. I expect to see something about an Environmental Awareness Conference or a drum circle—which, bagwise, are decidedly not for me—but instead read HAYDEN w/ Bunsen Honeydew, Saturday September 10th @ Whiskey Jack’s. $5 at the door.
From a fairly recent issue of Pulse, I know that Hayden is this screamy, folk-singer guy out of Toronto, but who is Bunsen Honeydew? I ask Matty.
“Bunsen Honeydew ...” he repeats, his voice full of stoned reverence. “Andy Thaler ‘n’ me started a band this summer.”
Shit.
“We’re into the Dead, Chili Peppers, Jamiroquai ... y’know, jazzy, funky improv stuff and super-extended grooves. I�
��m singing lead.”
Shitshitshit.
“So, hopefully we’ll see you Saturday. Awesome, dude.” He walks away toward a semi-circle of grade elevens sitting on the grass. They smile at him expectantly. For a second, he looks back at me, then holds up a fist with devil horns. “Support the scene!” I hear him shout.
I’ve had enough. I start to make my way home when I spot Soda sprawled out underneath the big elm on the other side of the football field. As I get closer, I recognize the incredibly hot Emily Gardner sitting cross-legged beside him, wearing enormous sunglasses and cradling a bag of Hickory Sticks in her lap. Every once in a while he reaches in and steals a few. I drop my backpack beside them and immediately become a third wheel.
“Sodapop.”
“Ponyboy. How’s your first day back in the shit?”
“Not bad. Just ran into Matty Wheeler. You hear he started a band this summer?” I try to play it cool, but he can tell it’s bothering me.
“Dude. It’s not a competition. And besides, they’re, like, a hippie jam band.” He crunches a few Sticks between his teeth.
“I heard they’re more like funk rock,” Emily offers. She takes a swig from a can of pop.
It’s hard to explain with Emily there, so I don’t. The truth is, though, if I hadn’t started a band with Soda and Deacon in grade nine, I’d probably be rolling twelve-sided dice with the Middle Earthers right now. I was a hundred and fifteen pounds of skinny, awkward thirteen-year-old. I wasn’t good at sports, or talking to girls, and I had little doubt that my high school experience would be chock full of wedgies and swirlies. Instead, I got lucky. My Uncle Ted died.
Uncle Ted was my dad’s younger brother who never really got the hang of being an adult. His massive coronary was likely due to his daily regime of cigarettes, fast food, and exercise avoidance. The only physical activity I ever saw him do was playing the drums. Why he willed them to me, I was never entirely sure. Maybe I said Ringo Starr was my favourite Beatle. Maybe I complimented the framed poster of John Bonham his girlfriend let him hang in their spare bedroom. All I know is, a week after the funeral, we drove home from Aunt Missy’s house with a set of bright-orange 1978 Ludwig Jelly Bean Vistalites crammed in the back of my dad’s Toyota. I spent the entire summer before high school learning to play them in the basement. It drove my dad crazy. What drove him even crazier is when Soda pushed his Peavey amp over on an old skateboard.