by Derek Hayes
“That’s great,” says Joseph. “Your dad’s a nice guy too.”
“Yeah, he is,” I say, feeling foolish. I’m in a genuine fucking conversation, which is not something I’m used to.
Joseph’s eyes look past me at someone approaching from the elevator.
From behind me Rudy says, “Let me see that, Joseph.”
Joseph ignores him, but when Rudy asks again Joseph says, “I haven’t even listened to it myself, yet. I haven’t downloaded any music.”
Rudy motions with his hand and says, “Come on. Give it over.”
Joseph reluctantly hands Rudy his iPod.
Rudy puts the headphones on and nods his head to imagined music. “Can I borrow this for a while?” he says.
I drum my dustpan against the railing. “Want to come into the apartment, Rudy? I need to talk to you about something.” Rudy turns and when he does, I snatch the iPod and pull the headphones from his ears. I hand them to Joseph and crack the dustpan against the railing.
Joseph runs down the stairs.
“Is there something wrong with you?” Rudy says.
Something is wrong. I can’t gut the fucker with a dustpan. I need a knife. Tell you what, God — let’s sentence this fucker to purgatory and the boy gets to keep his iPod. Are you with me, Lord? “Yeah, something’s wrong, Rudy. I want you to leave Joseph alone. Don’t bug him anymore,” I say.
“Why do you care about that kid?” Rudy says.
“If you mess with him, I’m going to come back here and have a word with you.”
“Come back here?” He laughs. “Come back from where?”
I haven’t really thought this through. “I’m going to live with my dad,” I say.
“Is that right?” He laughs again. “Just how are you going to toke up at your dad’s place?”
“That’s not my biggest concern at this point.”
“Then get the fuck out before it’s dark.”
“Tell, you what, Rudy. It won’t even take me that long.” And it won’t. I’ve got maybe three garbage bags worth of stuff. I’m mindful that I’ll have to come back and check on Joseph from time to time. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll even renounce weed. Is that really so difficult?
MY HOROSCOPE
I DROP MY SUITCASE AND REEBOK DUFFEL bag on the single unruffled bed and massage my creased neck, a result of the twenty-minute walk up Union Avenue, duffel bag banging my hip, shoulder strap gripping the flesh under my ears. A print of Jupiter with its many moons covers one wall. Astrological maps and ancient Greek transcripts are tacked up on the left side of the room. Thick, hardcover books line shelves. The posters and books are immaculately organized. My half of the room is barren.
My new roommate, Cam, is sprawled on the floor. He’s tall and soft looking with brown eyes. We met briefly at a get-to-know-you social at Wellington Hall last Thursday. He’s studying a weathered zodiac chart. A manual of astrology, Life According to the Stars, leans against his leg. He smiles, and asks me when I was born, then consults his chart, and says, “So you’re Sagittarius. You don’t like to spend too much time in one place, right? Your planets are all in their sixth sector. Oh, but wait a sec — you have a moon in Aquarius, which means that you’ll soon be obsessed with something that’ll disturb your work, in this case your studies. But don’t let me scare you. This chart is usually off. You don’t mind if I use your information in a study I’m doing of every kid at Aberdeen Hall, do you?”
“Not at all,” I say. “Where are you from?”
“I’m from Cambridge,” he says. “Do you happen to know Julia? I don’t know her last name. She’s got black, shoulder-length hair. She’s from here as well.”
“You’re going to have to give me more than that,” I say.
Cam closes his astrology book, and sits cross-legged, his limbs like spaghetti noodles the way they hang. “She’s probably in Aberdeen residence. I met her yesterday in the laundry room.”
“I don’t know anyone named Julia,” I say, laughing, thinking that Cam is obsessed with this girl. It’s understandable, but it’ll never happen to me.
“I can clean up that stain for you,” he says. He’s staring at where I’ve spilled salad dressing on my shirt.
“It’s all right. I’ll clean it myself later. I need a shower,” I say. “Long walk here, right?” I get a bar of Ivory soap from the shaving kit that my father has given me, grab a wrinkled towel stuffed next to my Psych 101 text and walk down the hall to the showers. Cam is following me, lugging a book, which is a concern — I don’t want him crowding me. I’d just as soon make a few other friends first.
There is hollering from kids in neighbouring rooms. I’m missing out on something but don’t know what. I want to get cleaned up, retrieve the half-full bottle of Bailey’s stolen from my parents, and walk down the hallways in the hope that someone will invite me in. Cam is still behind me. A mohawked seven-footer with gentle features dribbles a warped basketball down the hall through wafting incense. In the bathroom, there are about twenty stalls and fifteen sinks. Cam follows me into the shower area in his street clothes. At least he removes his socks and shoes. He corners a red-haired boy, who is lathering himself with soap.
“What are you doing?” the redhead says. “Can’t I have my shower in peace?” I give the kid a look and then avert my eyes. I’ve never actually showered in front of anyone before. Cam lowers himself to the floor by the sinks, the antiseptic tiles scrubbed spotless, though I imagine toothpaste, toilet paper and grime will be everywhere by the second week of school.
The redhead has a dumbstruck expression on his face. “Are you waiting for me?”
“Sorry ‘bout that,” Cam says. “I’d like to ask you some questions for this study I’m doing. I can ask you later, though.”
I’m now in the room of our neighbour, Jim, the redhead. We’re listening to Cold Play, sharing my Bailey’s. I don’t feel like talking because he’s got the music turned up and is yelling about how much he hates gays, and how he’s going to punch Cam if he approaches him in the shower again. I’m nervous myself, first day on campus and all, but Jim’s from Thornhill and I suppose they don’t have a lot of gay people there. His room is orderly like Cam’s. A kettle spouts steam in the corner, and he offers tea. “Right,” I say. “Yeah, know what you mean.” Jim and his roommate, a taciturn, gangly guy from Toronto, have turned the two singles into bunk beds. A dark Spiderman duvet cordons off their sleeping area. I lie on the futon sofa, and decide not to challenge his homophobia. The raspberry Pop tart he gives me is three-quarters eaten. I pick three moist crumbs from my lap, toss them in my mouth and stare unabashedly at a picture of a hot high school junior, instantly and righteously envious of this asshole for having such a pretty girlfriend, who in two weeks will probably be down for a visit and will be even cuter than her pic, and I know, for this reason alone, Jim and I will never be close friends.
Cam pokes his head in the room. “I want to clean up that shirt of yours,” he says, and I get a queasy feeling.
I tell him not to worry about it, but he insists we go back to our room so he can clean it. I get up, thank Jim for his hospitality, and say for his benefit, “I’m sure as heck not taking off my shirt.”
Jim sniggers, a provincial, inconsiderate sound, but Cam just laughs along with us.
Back in our room Cam takes stain remover from his suitcase. I hand over the soiled garment, and lie, half-naked, on my unmade bed. His rigorous scrubbing comforts me. This is a nice experience — someone applying elbow grease in an effort to save one of my collared shirts from the garbage heap. My mother’s going to love him.
On our first night the phone rings and wakes me up. Cam gets it and then covers the mouthpiece to explain that it’s Laura from Cambridge, and that they’ve been best friends since grade three. She’s married and has moved to Surrey with her husband. He turns the speakerphone on so that I can say hi.
Laura’s tone is maturely chipper, older than her twenty-two years. Cam’s puffer,
is it accessible? Are the other kids nice? Is the art history program going to stimulate him? Is he going to make some nice friends? Tucked under my covers only six feet away, I am in anticipation of her next question. Her voice (to be honest, I haven’t paid attention to Cam’s responses) activates my lower organ, and I have zero restraint. I gently rub the main artery — need to christen the room, right? — but it takes much longer than normal because violent shaking is out of the question. All done, and one hundred percent feeling shame and panic, because Cam might get a whiff of my coagulating mess. The thought that Cam may have heard me keeps me awake until the fervent rumblings from other rooms cease. Sleep.
Next afternoon we’re watching The Young and the Restless with some co-eds. Cam is talking to Julia, a brunette with long dark lashes. I signal to him that I don’t know her. He asks for her sign and birth date, and then says, “Mars usually stays in whatever zodiac sign it’s in for six or seven weeks but in 2009 it will stay in your sign for seven months, which means that you’re not going to meet anybody during this period. I mean . . . you’re going to have low energy for a while, but I really wouldn’t worry about it. I mean, you don’t have to believe me, now do you? There are other people who know a lot more about this stuff than I do.” Julia rolls her eyes, and moves to where her friends are slumped on the sofa.
She has a pretty, unblemished face but lacks a nice figure. She isn’t remarkable at all. She doesn’t talk to anyone, except the one really loud girl in the bunch, a tall blonde-haired girl with a ponytail, and even then her comments are nothing more than bland rejoinders to what the loud blonde says. She looks so strait-laced she’d seem out of place in a washroom. Maybe her odourless squeaky-cleanness attracts Cam.
I do my Victor Newman impression — “I think I’ll join you in the dining room, darling” — that always makes my little sister laugh, but Julia isn’t listening. She’s staring at two other freshmen — tree-planters apparently — tucked snugly beside the jabbering ponytail-flopping blonde. These guys are like twins from a rich part of Toronto. They wear their bangs in their eyes, their goatees trimmed, and laugh at each other’s jokes. I suddenly feel I’m in danger. I cognitively rule out any evidence that might suggest peril, but the sensation of being in danger is still puzzling and discomfiting. And my Victor Newman impression has failed because the womanizing Victor of the 2003 season has given way to the angry, pill-popping cad at the tail end of 2004.
Cam takes out a moon chart and plots trajectories on a piece of paper on the coffee table. “Gemini. This is a good time for you. You’ve just come off being sick. Am I right?” he asks the blonde girl with the ponytail.
“I have had a cough,” she says.
The taller, thinner tree-planter says, “You should take this act to New York.”
“I’m wondering if this gets you laid, Cammer,” his chubbier counterpart says.
Cam smiles and says, “This isn’t a science. It’s only a hobby of mine.”
He asks me if I want to go back to wash up. We scrub our hands and then join a mass exodus of nervous freshmen heading off to feed. We’re soon surrounded by heat lamps and abundant trays of Mugzee’s chicken wings and Domino’s pizza slices. The grease on the pepperoni trickles, mixing with the bubbling fat from the processed cheese. Cam reads aloud each menu choice, posing pertinent questions to the hair-netted service ladies. I follow him, pretending interest in Caesar salad ingredients, but all the while wondering what we’re going to do. The caf is filling up fast on this second day on campus, the first regular day, and I’ve got to secure a spot at a table, perhaps the biggest move of the year, bigger than deciding my electives, bigger than deciding which university to attend. Cam inadvertently assists me by studying the bean burrito ingredients for toxic additives, buying me time to scope out the cafeteria. I’d love to stand at the foot of the room, in front of the checkout line, and scan the area for a few minutes so I can make the prudent choice, but I’m already too self-conscious. I am self conscious of my self-consciousness. I barely survive, french-fries in hand, by sticking to Cam. He wants to sit with Julia, and I agree, not remembering at first who she is, but lo and behold, she turns out to be the long-lashed, smooth-faced brunette from this afternoon.
Cam sits primly beside her, which leaves me standing behind him, french-fries falling to my feet. She is smiling, which puts me at ease. Cam, God bless him, says, “There’s a seat, Stewart,” which is doubly beneficial. He has named me; I have a seat, and am now ensconcing myself between our redheaded neighbour, Jim, who doesn’t say hi, and one of the goateed tree-planters from the afternoon. I fit my knees under the table, but my torso can’t squeeze in. Neither boy nudges over, but I notice they don’t have much room either. The thin half of the tree-planting tandem is histrionically collapsed at the end of the table (one of the girls has just asked if he was taking engineering courses). His forehead is on the table, his goatee collecting flecks of salt. Two gorgeous co-eds are trying to revive him by licking their fingers and sticking them in his ears, which causes movement in my jeans, and which makes me think, so passionately that others must hear, that if only this cretin would right himself and tuck in his elbows, and if everyone shifted slightly, I could thrust my hips forward and be physically at the table. My fries, five bites for each salty wedge, distract me. This way I’m not obliged to talk. I’m aching for Cam to make some type of breakthrough with this gang before it’s too late, before we descend into the caste of the unnoticed. Each passing hour in this venerable institution is less crucial than the one before it. Cam tells Julia about Laura. “We’ve been best friends since grade three.”
This clearly won’t do. I bob my head into the flux, eyes wide with anxiety and say to the long-lashed brunette, “Where are you from, Julia?”
She looks at me for the first time, and I can tell she isn’t sure that I’ve spoken to her, so I repeat the question. She opens her mouth, a pert orifice, and I’m trembling. The slighter of the two goateed guys is telling a story about tree planting, and he wants Julia to listen, so he grabs her arm. “Imagine getting bitten by a dozen skeets on the ass,” he says. “Not on the fleshy part of the ass, but right on the, like, sensitive, pink part of the ass, while you’re taking care of business, and you’ve gotta itch and you don’t want to get up cause it’s gonna get all over you, and you’ve gotta itch. Did I say that already?” And Julia is now laughing, though I don’t know why, because this guy is a moron, a filthy-mouthed moron, but she and the others find him funny, which makes me want to be his friend.
“Where on the ass?” I ask. But he’s already said where and I’m speaking much too loudly for the intimate space, and he doesn’t say anything, which adds to my irrelevance. I feel totally shut out from the group. They all get up and set off to see a documentary on Trudeau at Crosbie Hall, which leaves Cam and me at the table by ourselves. This is okay with me. I go back to the line and get two cheeseburgers and a chocolate mousse.
At bedtime, Cam speaks in a hushed tone. “I wish you’d been there, Laura. I was in the laundry room at my regular time and guess who walked in? That’s right. The machine across from me. I’m not saying it means anything, but she must have known I’d be there. Put it this way — she didn’t go out of her way to do her laundry at a different time, right?”
While he’s talking, I roll about, both hands rather obviously on my head in a bid to convince him that any past restlessness on my part was just that, restlessness.
“So anyway, Stewart and I ate lunch late because our English class ends at one o’clock on Thursdays,” he is saying to Laura. “She ate her lunch and left with some friends and then, I couldn’t believe it — she came back ten minutes later to pick up her bag. She stared right at me. Do you think . . . ?”
The Bio 101 text has large, vivid graphs, a large font, and is a more than adequate substitute for class, which is why I’m at the Highbury Market with Cam instead. After buying bananas and strawberries, Cam says he has personal business to attend to. He tries to pe
rsuade me to go back to the residence without him but I stick to him. In a pleasant neighbourhood just south of the downtown core, we stop in front of a two-story residence and take in the scenery. I know where he’s taken me because I too have looked up the information in the university directory. “This must have been a healthy place to grow up,” Cam says. We walk up the driveway, past the detached garage, to a lane. On the other side is a small park.
“A kid would have a great time on that playground equipment,” he says.
There are beige curtains in a second-floor window. Is that her bedroom? Did she prance over these two large boulders in the garden? Her mom’s garden, perhaps. Did she sit under this willow tree on hot summer days? Did she roll in leaves as a small child? Did she tussle with other girls during games of Red-Rover? Scrape her knees? I can enjoy this voyeuristic indulgence because Cam is here. And he’s normal. His presence makes me feel less creepy.
Thank you, Cam.
We stand there for a few more minutes and then leave the neighbourhood and walk back to our dorm.
Nine o’clock. Cam enters our room with a box of brownie mix. I’m lying on my bed, reading Maxim.
“Oh — hey Stewart,” he says. He bends over, and pulls out a camping stove from under his bed. He cracks an egg, adds water and mix and then stirs the dark sludge. Brownie mix slops on his prized chart and he neglects to wipe it up. I rest the Maxim on my chest and say, “Are you going to the library, Cam?”
“No,” he says. “I’m going to a friend’s.”
He leaves the room with the pan resting on his forearm. I know exactly where he’s going and feel sick to my stomach, but am relieved when he comes back with a full plate of brownies. He dips his hand into the batch and eats half. He flips the pan on the ground. It’s so unlike him to not offer me a piece, but I understand. I slide off the bed and join him on the floor. He has brownie crumbs all over his black turtleneck. Today I’m more civilized than he is. I cut a piece with a knife, and eat it without making a mess. I wish I could assuage his pain, but I can’t let him drag me down. In dormitory life, the hurt do not endure. It’s the fun loving who get the attention, and so, like any other nineteen-year-old, I leave the room when I hear the first sad crack in his voice. As I close the door I hear him lift the phone.