by Greg Rhyno
On the floor beside his bed, I notice the dog-eared copy of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders. I pick it up and thumb open the cover. A blue stamp reads Property of McIntyre Public School and underneath, a list of names ends in a blockily printed Jesse Koskinen. It’s still the only book I’ve ever seen him read.
As Soda pulls opens the door to his mini-fridge and clinks out a couple cold beers, a small animal darts out from under the futon, runs past me, then stares at me defiantly from the other side of the room.
“What the fuck is that?”
Soda turns around, looks in the direction I’m pointing, and swears under his breath. The grey-and-white kitten walks across the floor, rubs its whiskers on Soda’s pant leg, and lets out a screeching meow twice its size.
“My dad found this guy eating out of our garbage a week ago and let him in the house. Said he missed having a cat around, but now he never remembers to feed the fuckin’ thing.”
The kitten does a circle of my legs and then looks up at Soda accusingly with big green eyes. I bend down to pet him, but he runs to the other side of the room. “What’s his name?”
The cat strolls over to a stack of empty pizza boxes near the stairs and sniffs at a grease stain.
“Pepperoni,” he decides. “We better go topside. See if we can find him some food.”
We climb back up the basement stairs, then a few more past the landing into the kitchen. Pepperoni follows at a distance. A prayer on the wall reads Bless This Mess. The sink is full of dishes, and the stove top is a Jackson Pollock of dried spaghetti sauce. A half-empty case of Crystal beer sits open next to the fridge.
While Soda goes spelunking in the pantry, I can hear a river of white noise rushing out of the living room. When I poke my head in, the television is a snowy beacon in an otherwise dark room. By its light, I find the remote control on the coffee table and turn it off.
“Hey ...” a groggy voice surges to life. “I was watching that.”
A shadow pushes itself off an easy chair in the corner of the room. It lurches forward, suddenly illuminated by the light from the kitchen. I haven’t really seen Mauri for a couple years, and he looks like he’s aged a decade. His blond hair is now white and his moustache is murky against a few days of silvery beard growth. He steadies himself with both hands against the arm of a couch. Shoulders gargoyled, he stares at me without recognition.
“The fuck you doin’ in my house?” His voice is a hoarse whisper of restrained rage, like Clint Eastwood behind a .44 Magnum.
“Uh, it’s Pete, Mr. Koskinen. Pete Curtis.” My face throbs, twice shy.
“I don’t know a ... ?” He confers with himself, then directs another question at me. “You think you can just come into my house and turn off my television when I’m watching it?”
He takes another shambling step toward me, taller now than he seemed a moment ago. I’m relieved when Soda jogs in between us.
“Hey! Dad! It’s just me and Pete. We didn’t know you were watching that.” He holds the remote out to him. “Here you go.”
It’s in his hand for a second before Mauri flings it against the wall. The batteries eject on impact and clatter against unseen furniture.
“Don’t you suppose to tell me what I can do in my own goddamn house. This is my house.”
Soda lets Mauri rattle off a few more incoherent accusations before talking him down. “No one’s telling you what to do, Dad. We’re just going downstairs.”
We retreat through the kitchen and I watch Pepperoni attacking his food, pushing the little cereal bowl around the linoleum floor as he eats. We head down the stairs and Soda stops on the landing. There’s a sudden heaviness.
“I don’t think tonight’s a good night to hang out, Pete. Sorry.”
I realize he’s showing me the door.
“That’s cool. I get it.”
“Yeah.” His eyes won’t meet mine.
In a short, awkward silence, punctuated only by Mauri cursing the blank screen of the television, I swing my arms back into my coat and tie up my shoes.
“Look,” I say. “Tell Matty we’ll do the show. I’ll talk to Deacon. He can be very forgiving when it comes to Sloan.”
Soda nods. I open the door and leave.
Against hope, I’ve constructed a dim fantasy that involves me walking up the sidewalk to my house only to find Kim sitting on the front steps—cold, repentant, head leaning on her hand. She’ll look up at me with her big blue, shimmering eyes, see my ruined face, and burst into tears. She’ll provide some perfectly understandable explanation for her departure, which doesn’t involve servicing any members of any rock bands, and then we’ll have really intense make-up sex.
Instead, I fall asleep on the couch, surrounded by unlit candles, just after Gregory Peck gets his hand cut off in the Mouth of Truth. A gift-wrapped negligee sits on the coffee table with a card that reads Happy Valentine’s Day.
SIDE B
Romantic Rights
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Mr. Curtis!”
Bethany Atkinson pulls a pencil from my 94FM coffee mug and taps it playfully on my desk. With her strawberry-blonde curls and her straight teeth a year or two out of braces, she’s exactly the kind of girl who didn’t look twice at me in high school.
“Any big plans tonight? With your ... girlfriend?” she fishes.
“Nope. Not really.”
In my head, I can hear Sting advising against this kind of student proximity. Bethany’s a nice kid, but these little chats before my new Ancient Civilizations class have started to make me feel uncomfortable. I guess it’s bound to happen if you’re a young(ish) teacher and you don’t look like Gabe Kaplan in Welcome Back Kotter. Still, you can’t be too careful.
After delivering a fairly painless lesson on Ancient Rome, I find Ruth in the staff cafeteria chewing on a bleak-looking salad. I order a tuna melt and sit down beside her.
“Okay, question: I’ve got a couple of no-shows in Ancient Civ. Who do I talk to about that?”
“Well,” Ruth talks through the iceberg lettuce bouncing under her nose before she chews and swallows. “If you talk to the office, they’ll tell you to call home. But if you call home—” she punctuates this second option with a raised fork “—they’ll probably just tell you their kid isn’t taking your course and that you should talk to the office.”
“So ... ?”
“So, I’d let it sort itself out. This salad sucks.” She pushes the plate away from her in disgust. “What are their names?”
“Uh, Alexandra Carter and Sasha ... something.”
Ruth shrugs and takes her plate over to the wash bin.
“Sasha Mersault?” A couple seats down, Len Salwowski is negotiating a chicken burger with one arm in a sling. “I taught Sasha music, oh, about three semesters ago. She didn’t show up for the first two weeks.”
“Any idea why not?”
“She told me why not. She said the first couple weeks of class are ‘bullshit,’ so she doesn’t come. Her words. Her parents seemed to be in agreement.”
“Yikes. What happened to the good old days when Ed Rooney chased you all over Chicago for missing nine classes?”
Ruth reappears with a carton of fries and chimes in. “With our board, Ferris would have to miss sixty consecutive classes before he got expelled. And even then they’d just move him to another school.”
“Sixty classes?”
“Who’s Ed Rooney?” Len asks.
“Sometimes,” Ruth says, sipping her Diet Coke, “the office will keep a student on the roster even after that. As long as the kid’s enrolled, the school gets funding.”
I have to laugh. It’s a pretty good scam.
“So,” Len says, changing the subject, “I’m getting a finder’s fee for your big debut tonight, right? Ten percent?”
He’s joking, I think, but it’s not a completely unreasonable request. About two weeks ago, Salwowski knocked on the door of History Storage with his one good arm. Apparently, he had taken a head
er on a patch of ice a few days before, and the resultant broken bone constituted the third strike against Silverwolf, a weddings-parties-anything band, that had also lost its lead singer to vocal cord polyps and its keyboard player to a Floridian retirement earlier in the month. Salwowski had tried filling in on singing duties, but when he couldn’t play guitar anymore he knew that Silverwolf was finished. They still had one show booked, though, a standing Valentine’s Day gig at a bar called Shenanigans, and he told the owner, an old friend, that he’d try to hunt up a replacement act. Unfortunately, most of his contacts in the “biz,” as he called it, had dried up. That’s when he remembered that Ruth Kipling, the new English teacher, got an A+ in his choral music class back in the nineties, and that she once played in a band.
“It’s decent money,” he promised. “My wife and I were going to use it to fly to Mexico this year, but that’s off. Now, we’ll have to spend the Break with her brother’s family in Beardmore. Ice fishing.”
Ruth was flattered, but claimed she was too out of practice. And besides, she hadn’t played in a band for years.
“Too bad,” he said. “If you can think of anybody who can fake their way through ‘Love Me Tender’ and wants to make three grand, let me know.”
When he shut the door, I stared saucers at Ruth. Three grand was more money than I had ever made with Giant Killer or Filthy Witness. Clearly those old guys knew what they were doing. Later that night, Deacon came over to watch a movie, and I mentioned Salwowski’s proposal. That’s when he told me that his wife still played guitar “like, every goddamn night.” Within the hour we had cornered Ruth with the guitar tab and lyrics for a bunch of Valentine’s Day-appropriate schmaltz.
Ruth protested, but eventually Deacon convinced her by promising that they could use their share to go anywhere she wanted on the March Break. She called Salwowski the next day, and he put us in touch with the bar manager.
“I was pushing for one of those all-expenses-paid tropical resort trips, with palm trees and a swim-up bar,” Deacon told me. “Of course, just to spite me she’s decided we’re going to New York City which is probably just as fucking cold as Thunder Bay in March. Maybe colder.”
I set up my drums in their basement and the three of us rehearsed every day after work for a week and a half straight. We learned ‘Forever Young,’ ‘Nothing Compares 2 U,’ and ‘Never Tear Us Apart.’ We learned ‘Stairway to Fucking Heaven.’ It was like endlessly reliving the last twenty minutes of a high school dance. We learned some more up-tempo numbers too, but the theme remained the same. ‘Hello, I Love You.’ ‘Baby Love.’ ‘Tainted Love.’ ‘Love Cats.’ ‘All You Need Is Love.’ ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love.’ I never realized how much I hated love.
It had been almost a year since I’d even played the drums, but luckily, fifteen years of muscle memory takes a while to atrophy, and I got my chops back after a few practices. Deacon and I fell back into step pretty quickly, too. He was still a solid player, but his back-up singing had gotten a little rusty.
“Hey,” I told him, “you should use your diaphragm.”
“Your mom should’ve used her diaphragm.”
It was just like old times.
Still, there was no doubt—as far as Deacon and I were concerned—that Ruth was the real talent. I remembered seeing her play with Martha Dumptruck years ago and thinking she was a good singer, but the last ten years had given her voice this cracked, whiskey-and-cigarettes quality that made me wonder if she’d been secretly moonlighting in honkytonks.
We tossed around a few band names but had trouble deciding on one.
“What about Hit Remedy?” I suggested. I’d been saving that one up for a while, but no one seemed all that impressed.
“Like Zit Remedy from Degrassi?” Ruth said.
“Why do fake band names always sound so phony?” Deacon asked.
“All band names sound phony until they’re real,” Ruth said. “Would you believe that Red Hot Chili Peppers was a legitimate name if you didn’t know they existed? Or Death From Above 1979?”
We ran through a string of other possibilities. Nearly every musician worth his or her salt has a couple band names under glass for just such an occasion.
“How about the William Lyon Mackenzie Kings”?
“Too long.”
“What about T-Rex Murphy?”
“Too punny.”
“Phasers On Stun?”
“Too nerdy.”
“Kid Charlemagne!”
Finally, Ruth put things in perspective. “Look, we’re going about this all wrong. We’re not some ambitious art-punk band. We’re a cornball cover band playing a Valentine’s Dance for a bunch of forty-somethings. We need a cornball name.”
“Yeah, like Marvin Berry and the Starlighters,” I said.
“Who?”
“Marvin Berry and the Starlighters. From Back to the Future. You know, the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance?”
“Now that’s a great fake band name.”
Deacon thought about it for a second and then made a final suggestion. “Ruth Kipling and her Gentlemen Callers.”
“Holy shit. That’s perfect.”
“Wait. Why does my name have to be in the title?”
“You’re the star, babe. Can’t help that.”
On my way to class, Vicky Greene stops me in the hall and says she’s got something for me. Students stream around us like we’re two sticks standing in a river, and her hand is warm as it presses something into my palm.
“See you tonight, Drummer Boy. Don’t forget—you still owe me a drink.”
“You’re coming to Shenanigans?”
“Of course! It’s a Valentine’s Day tradition.”
She smiles and disappears back into the current. I open my hand and look at what she put there. In slightly smeared block letters, a pink Sweetheart reads Wink Wink.
I get to my room before the bell and let the kids in. The gods of timetabling have cursed me with Civics yet again, but I have to admit, teaching it the second time around is definitely a little easier. It’s not quite the nightmare of weekend planning and marking it was last semester. Some days, I actually feel like I’m kind of good at my job. Like today, I’m teaching this lesson on democracy versus authoritarianism. I’ve got Clash lyrics projected up on the overhead, I’ve got music blaring out of the English Department’s thirty-dollar portable stereo, and I’m bobbing my head along to Topper’s drumming, which is probably why I don’t hear the knock on my classroom door, or notice Murdock until he’s looking over my shoulder. A couple kids giggle. I turn around and wrench a stupid, welcoming grin to my face.
“Hey!” he shouts to the students over the music. “You guys won’t mind if I borrow your teacher for a minute, will you?”
Thirty-two heads shake no.
“You can keep him,” someone shouts out of the darkness.
“Brilliant.”
His sudden presence in my room is grating, but as I follow him out into the hall, it occurs to me that I might be in trouble for something. I’m not sure what.
“The Clash, huh? ‘Know Your Rights’? Love that tune.”
“What’s up?” I’m not interested in rock talk.
“Well, what’s ‘up,’ Ringo, is I’ve just been touching base with the other Civics teachers—y’know, Gail, Mary, Doug, the whole lot—and it seems like they’re all on schedule with the standardized agenda. Second week—examine political parties of Canada. Liberals, NDP, Progressive Conservatives—seems pretty straightforward. But here you are, kind of doing your own thing now, aren’t you?”
Inspired by the spirit of Joe Strummer, I want to say something tough and smart. Something Murdock might have said himself when he was still a classroom teacher. Instead, I just stand there and pretend that his advice is well intended.
“Look, mate, I know what it’s like, but sometimes you’ve got to toe the line for a paycheque. Trimble and the school board are really into these new ‘standard practices,’ and
you need to be too. At least—” he looks at me meaningfully “—while you’re still on ninety-day probation.” Joe Strummer rolls over in his grave as Murdock squeezes my balls just a little tighter. “I mean, if Trimble thought you weren’t on board, you’d be buggered.”
Having little other option, I nod stupidly.
“Okay. Glad we’re agreed.” He turns away and starts walking down the hall. As he does, I hear him sing another Clash song to himself: ‘Clampdown.’
After the bell, I make my way down a flight of stairs to a little bathroom on the bottom floor that has only one sink, one stall, and two urinals. It’s a little out of the way, but it’s my shitter of choice when I’ve got the time. It’s closer than the staff john, and kids usually steer clear of it. Granted, it is a little sketchy looking. Exposed pipes hang out of the ceiling like internal organs, and after someone ripped the mirror down off the wall, the school never bothered replacing it. Still, I like the fact that I can usually take a dump in private, and because it hasn’t had a new coat of paint in almost twenty years, the stall provides an interesting historical record. There’s politics (Clinton inhaled), romance (Tina Lessinger takes it up the ass), and culture (SLAYER RULES). Weirdly enough, it’s also a veritable Louvre of cock drawings: cocks going into vaginas, cocks going into bums, sad cocks, smiling cocks, cocks fountaining semen willynilly. But the best graffiti is what’s scratched into the back of the stall door. There’s a thoughtfulness to this vandalism, as though the young men responsible for it appreciated that they were providing material for the ages. From my U-shaped throne, I review some old favourites. In black marker, someone reminds me to Question everything! In blue pen, someone else asks Why? The proclamation to END TYRYNY has been amended to END the TYRYNY of spelling. Finally, my eyes wander to the bottom of the door where, less cleverly, four-inch block letters spell out a simple message: FUCK MURDOCK. I feel a little better after reading it, until I start to wonder how long it’ll be before someone scratches my name into the paint.