by Greg Rhyno
“Uh-uh. No way,” my dad said. “You’re not bringing that thing into my house.”
In our defence, my mom asked if he’d prefer us out drinking and taking drugs. “At least this way we’ll know where they are,” she told him.
“Of course we’ll know where they are. The whole goddamn neighbourhood will know where they are.”
Eventually, after a few ground rules were set (no noise after ten o’clock and no noise during Home Improvement), the Peavey Bandit was allowed inside, where we proceeded to repeatedly butcher ‘Enter Sandman,’ ‘Paranoid,’ and ‘Black Dog.’ Of course, that was all before the fateful day Soda brought over a copy of this new album he’d taped off his older cousin.
“The cover’s kind of weird,” he described as he dropped the tape into the stereo. “It’s got a baby swimming in a pool with its dong hanging out.”
“Why would you put that on the front of your album?”
“I don’t know. But listen ...”
So I listened, and everything started to make sense. Suddenly, my loud drums and Soda’s power chords didn’t sound accidental; they sounded ... I don’t know ... relevant. We invited Deacon to play bass with us a few weeks later—much to my father’s extended chagrin. Soon after, we started to play at punk shows in basements and community centres. People started paying attention, and all that underwear and toilet-related torture I anticipated never really happened. I successfully fooled people into thinking I was maybe even kind of cool.
But now, the naturally cool people—funny, confident, socially gifted people like Matty Wheeler—were starting to encroach on my territory. And I didn’t like it.
“Well,” Emily says, standing up, “I’m going to let you boys talk. Want the rest of these?” Before Soda can answer, she drops the Hickory Sticks on his stomach. “Bye, Soda,” she says musically. “See you, Pete.”
As she walks away, I try not to notice how good her ass looks in her low-riders. Soda’s always been a bit of a chick magnet, but ever since the Battle of the Bands last January, girls were acting like he was Evan Dando.
“Sorry, dude. Didn’t mean to cramp your style.”
“No worries,” he says, squinting his eyes as Emily waves at him from across the football field. “She’s not going far. And look,” he says, lighting a smoke, “don’t sweat this whole thing with Wheels. That guy’s just a tourist.”
“I don’t know. They’ve got Andy Thaler on board.”
“Thaler the Wailer?” Soda holds the smoke in his lungs, momentarily impressed, then exhales. “Whatever. So what are your classes like?”
“I’ve got Mitchell and Hildebrandt, period three spare, and Maki in the afternoon.”
“That’s not so bad. Mitchell’s okay, and Hildebrandt’s a nutjob but harmless. Maki’s a flake, but she never takes attendance, so there’s that. Did you see Deacon in any of your classes?”
I shake my head and start to unpack my lunch. Ham sandwich and a box of fruit punch that, by now, will taste like warm poison.
“Haven’t seen him at all today,” I say. “He’s taking a bunch of programming classes this semester.”
“If he spends all his lunches in the computer lab again this year, he’s going to finish out his high school career a virgin.”
“I don’t know. Gordana Novak seemed pretty into him last year.”
“Is she the one with the wonky eye or the thing on her neck?”
“Thing on her neck.”
Soda shrugs. “Guess you’ve got to start somewhere.” He pushes himself to his feet. “Well, dude, unlike you, I have a class next period. Calculus. With Gallo.”
“Ouch.”
“Practice after supper?”
I give him the thumbs up as he heads off in the general direction of Mackenzie King and Emily Gardner. I finish my sandwich and then spear the little straw on my juice box out of its cellophane and into the silver dot on top. I take a sip and squint up at the blue sky. In the distance, a flock of birds changes course with the telepathic single-mindedness of iron filings following a magnet. If it wasn’t for school, I’d be at Soldier’s Hole right now, swimming, drinking stolen beer, and listening to Twice Removed or that new Guided By Voices album. And then I realize that it’s still a beautiful day, and I’ve got precisely nothing to do for the next hour. I set my Timex so I won’t be late for period four, wedge my jacket under my head, and take the first of what I hope will be many afternoon naps.
When I wake up, the first thing I think is I’ve pissed myself. I feel a cool wetness spreading in my lap and understand even before I’m fully conscious that peeing my pants at school would be an irrecoverable horror. Then I hear the giggling. I blink my eyes open to see an arc of red fluid that somehow begins at my juice box and ends between my legs.
“Wake up, Curtsey ...” a voice croons.
“Check it out,” a second voice insists. “Curtsey’s on the rag.”
The first voice is Dave Greatorex, King of the Cafeteria. The second is Brad McLaren, Clown Prince. Greatorex is the real threat. He’s been a Junior B Hockey enforcer since he was sixteen. He’s always wearing those expensive jeans with writing on the butt, a gold chain, and too much hair gel. If there was a category in the yearbook for Most Likely to Commit Date Rape, he’d be a shoo-in. The other guy, McLaren, is a little hockey-haired third-stringer, but just like Greatorex, he walks around wearing a lame-ass varsity jacket as if he didn’t look like the villain in every John Hughes movie. He’s the one liberally squeezing Del Monte all over my button fly.
I’m wide awake now, scuttling back on the grass, trying to get away from the juice fountain.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I get to my feet.
“What are we doing?” McLaren asks innocently. “You’re the one menstruating in public, Curtis.”
“You forget your maxi-pad, Princess?” Greatorex adds.
As reasonable as my current standing in the Mackenzie King social hierarchy may be, the Pussies have always aggressively guarded their position at the top of the food chain. Don’t get me wrong—I’m no jockist. I ran track in grade nine and ten, and Soda was a pretty decent forward until he sold all his hockey equipment to buy a Telecaster (Mauri was not pleased). We just don’t have the necessary skill set to be Pussies. We don’t enjoy yelling in public places or humiliating people with half our body mass.
If Soda was still here, they wouldn’t mess with me. They’ve got a healthy respect for all six foot three of him. But he’s not here. He’s in Calculus, or having sex with Emily Gardner in her parents’ Dodge Caravan. Either way, there’s not much he can do now.
“Uh-oh, Dave. Princess looks right pissed.”
“Don’t worry, Brad. I’ll have a chat with her.” Greatorex leans down into my airspace and puts a paw on my shoulder. For a moment, everything smells like Drakkar Noir. “Cheer up, Buttercup. It’s completely natural. This is a special time in a young girl’s life.” More sniggering. “You’re just becoming a woman, that’s all.”
The worst part about this particular brand of abuse is that you’re forced to acknowledge your own weaknesses. I’d love nothing more than to punch this guy so hard that cartoon birdies circle his head, but even if I landed that first hit, I know it’d be my last. Greatorex has knuckles like steel rivets and muscles I can’t even name ballooning under his Mondetta sweatshirt. Another option is to say something—something that would put these two idiots in their place—but even if my brain wasn’t a rage-and-adrenalin factory right now, even if I could think clearly enough to find the right words, I still wouldn’t risk losing my front teeth. I don’t even bother to shake his hand off my shoulder, and I know that later I’ll hate myself for it. Guys like Greatorex rarely beat you up. They let you do it to yourself.
Eventually, the two of them get bored of discussing my dicklessness, and Greatorex adjourns our meeting by giving me a shove in the chest, hard. I trip backward over the elm root, and I can hear Brad making the sound in the back of his throat before I hi
t the ground. A second later, I feel a loogie pulling itself down my hair.
“Go home and clean yourself up,” Greatorex tells me.
“Yeah,” McLaren adds. “Get your mom to show you how to use a fuckin’ tampon.”
They walk away, congratulating each other with punches to the shoulder. I scrub my head with my sleeve, but it just pushes the disgusting wet further into my scalp. As I wait for shame to replace the fear, I hear a familiar voice.
“Hey, Pussy ...“ Greatorex and McLaren, a good thirty feet away from me now, slow down and stop. All three of us look in the same direction at once and see Soda walking toward us, shedding his jeans jacket as he does.
Here’s the thing. Originally, our sports teams were called the Kings and our mascot was this dubious, bearded character who playfully bashed the visiting teams with a foam sceptre. At some point during a basketball game in the early seventies, an overzealous King decided to use his sceptre to vigorously air-rape the visiting Sir Winston Churchill Bulldogs. It led to a bench-clearing rumble that landed half the home team in the hospital. As a result of the fiasco, the principal revoked the name Kings in favour of the more gender-neutral Lyons. Or Pussies, as they’ve been called by every visiting team since.
“The fuck you call me?”
Soda walks past McLaren and dismisses him with a roll of his eyes. He squares up in front of Greatorex. “I think you should apologize to my friend,” he tells him.
Greatorex steps up to Soda and leans in close, like he’s going to kiss him. “You want to start something, Chief?” he asks softly.
The two stare at each other for a little while. Greatorex’s nose flares an inch away from Soda’s, but Soda’s cool is unshakeable.
“No, Dave,” Soda finally says. “I don’t want to ‘start something’. I’m just asking you to apologize to my friend.”
I wonder how far this is going to go. Soda’s a big enough guy, sure, but Greatorex is a fucking kodiak, and all this testosterone has got to be testing the tensile strength of the school’s zero-tolerance rule.
And yet, surprisingly, it’s Greatorex who steps back. He cricks his neck. For a moment there’s an unsettling silence. There’s a look in Greatorex’s eyes I can’t place.
“Whatever,” he says. “Wouldn’t want to get my hands dirty anyway.”
“Yeah, fuck this,” McLaren sniffs. “I’m going home to wash the welfare stink out of my clothes.”
I can tell Soda wants to say more, but he keeps his mouth shut. As we watch the hockey players fade away across the field, I feel the beginnings of relief. Soda picks up his jacket off the grass and pushes his arms through the sleeves. He walks past me to the elm.
“Where’d you come from?” I ask, remembering to be amazed.
“Forgot my smokes,” he says, pulling a pack out from underneath an exposed root.
“Are you going back to class?” I ask.
“Think I’ll stick here for a bit.” He slides down the tree to where I was sitting before. “You should head home. Skip fourth.”
“Yeah. See you at practice?”
Soda keeps his eyes closed and nods.
I start walking, trying not to run, trying not to look as cowardly as I feel. My head hurts, my pants are wet, and there’s still loogie in my hair. I scan the football field and make accidental eye contact with a feather-haired headbanger—last of a dying breed—smoking a cigarette on the bottom seat of the bleachers. He looks away before I do. On the other side of the field, I can make out two girls sitting against the west wall of the school. I hope they didn’t see what happened. I hope they aren’t pretty.
It’s my last year of high school. I thought I was past all this. You take a little shit in grade nine, no question, but I figured that by the time you were in OAC, you’d be old enough to forget about pecking order. Apparently, this is not the case. Apparently, the shit is never-ending.
SIDE B
Come on, Teacher
“Jesus. When is this going to end?”
I check my watch again. Class starts in four minutes and the photocopier is dribbling out assignments like a nervous twelve-year-old at a public urinal.
“We should’ve got new machines last year,” Vicky Greene says, “but Trimble’s too cheap to pay for them.”
She leans against the counter beside me, and we both try to think of something to say. “So, where’ve you been hiding?” she finally asks. “I haven’t seen you in the staff room for a couple weeks.”
Against my better judgement, I tell her where I’ve been spending my prep time.
“That storage room? The one upstairs? Is there even a phone in there?”
Making small talk at the photocopier is the worst. It’s like a water cooler you can’t walk away from. I wonder if I should’ve just lied. I feel like I’ve divulged a critical element of Ruth’s escape plan.
“You should come back to the staff room,” she decides. “That’s where the action’s at. Besides, I need you around to keep Jim Lodge from looking down my shirt.”
As if to demonstrate, her eyes flit down her low-cut blouse, and against every natural instinct, I keep my own trained squarely on her forehead.
Finally, she picks up a file folder and turns to leave. I realize she hasn’t even made any copies. “Maybe I’ll stop by later and you can give me a tour of your secret hideout.”
“It wouldn’t take long,” I tell her. “It’s pretty cozy in there.”
“How cozy?” she asks. “Is there a lock on the door?” She laughs nervously and beats a hasty retreat.
The photocopier spits out the rest of my paper, and I find myself with exactly two minutes left to unleash half a pot of coffee from my bladder and get to class. After I hit the bathroom, I stop by History Storage to grab my bag. Ruth is in there flipping leisurely through a binder labelled To Kill a Mockingbird.
“I saw Madame Greene follow you into the copy room,” she tells me.
“Yeah. She does that sometimes.”
“You know she’s married to a superintendent, right?”
“Hey,“ I say, “aren’t you a member of the English department? You know this is a designated History room, right?”
“Hey,“ she replies as the bell rings, “aren’t you teaching class this period? You know you might be kind of late.”
“You’re late, Curtis.” The kid’s shaved head looks small and pasty compared to the enormous, airbrushed head of Tupac Shakur on his t-shirt.
“Guess I’ll have to give myself a detention.” I don’t exactly have the moral high ground to remind him it’s Mister Curtis.
Already there’s a cluster of bored-looking tenth-graders outside my classroom door. They watch skeptically as I try to balance my books and coffee in one hand and fish keys out my pocket with the other. I give up and drop my teacher’s copy of Civics Now! and the course binder on the polished concrete below. The jaws of the binder spring open and barf out three units’ worth of meticulously organized loose-leaf paper.
“Nice one,” says Tupac.
I open the door and watch knees and ankles surge past as I gather my notes. By the time I get to my desk, things have already gone a little Lord of the Flies. Kids are at each other’s seats, girls are sitting on each other’s laps, and in the back row, three boys crowd around a laptop and hoot from under their hoodies. Amidst it all is the mosquito chorus of a dozen or so blaring earbuds, the repetitive bleepery of handheld video games, and the intermittent buzz of phones set to vibrate.
The classroom itself is also a disaster. Hildebrandt taught me history out of this room when I was in OAC, and I always thought it was mess because he was a mess, but with the exception of a computer on the teacher’s desk and its tangled mullet of wire and ethernet cable, not much has changed. Dirty coffee mugs and a crumbling diorama of the Egyptian pyramids decorate the built-in bookshelves. An old beige file cabinet stands at the back of the room and commemorates in jagged white scratches that Rotten Rules! and Mazz wuz here. Motivational posters conti
nue to encourage DIVERSITY, TEAMWORK, and DETERMINATION, and in a series of circles, another poster reminds me of all the other things I could’ve done with a history degree—journalist, librarian, museum curator, etc. They all sound infinitely more rewarding than what I’m doing right now.
“Okay, folks!” I shout. “Grab your seats, please. Tracey Adams?”
“Here.”
“Colin Atkinson?”
“Present!”
“Thomas Bertrand?” Silence. “Thomas Bertrand?” More silence. “Okay. No Thomas Bertrand.”
I’ve been teaching these kids for just over two weeks and a lot of them still blur together. The girls with the shoulder-length brown hair. The guys with the ball caps. The bus kids with their bed-head and wildlife sweatshirts. The well-dressed kids from Cherry Ridge. I can really only put a handful of names to a handful of faces.
“All right, so,” I say, finally sorted, “today we’re going to spend some time talking about democracy. We’re going to talk about what a democracy is and what it means to live in one.”
A hand goes up. I recognize Marshall Heyen-Miller at the back. Smart kid. Reads a lot. His parents are both profs at the university. I nod to him and he asks, “If we live in a democracy, why do we have to go to school? Shouldn’t we have some kind of vote about it?”
In teacher’s college they called this a teachable moment. I can use Marshall’s question to segue right into the idea of free will and sacrificing personal rights to participate in a society. I might even get to talk about Rousseau’s Social Contract.
“Actually, Marshall, it’s interesting you should ask that—”
“I vote we watch a movie,” Tupac says suddenly. “Does that TV work? I’ve got American History X in my bag. It’s about history. Says so in the title.” A chorus of agreement bubbles from the silence.