Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  But there’s another voice. He’s not in front of a mirror after all.

  Jim, rumble rumble. Please rumble you rumble rumble rumble. All right? Rumble?

  That voice is Doctor Robert A. Sparrow, department head.

  Jim shouts his last name again, only I realize it hasn’t been his last name at all.

  Echoes, echoes, thundering through the hallway. Footfalls—it’s very dramatic. Like a movie. I realize I’m just standing in the middle of the lounge. At some point I’ve risen from the green ottoman with velvet trim, my favourite place to read. I’m just standing here with my jaw dangling and my book dangling from my fingers when Jim appears in the doorway. The book? Of course it’s Blinding White. Poems by Jim Arsenault.

  The thing about Jim is, he’s a man. More than that—a guy. He is the new breed of poet. He doesn’t fluff himself up, doesn’t wear jewellery or turtlenecks. Not like Claude. Claude is still very much in the turtleneck phase. Jim doesn’t even wear sports jackets, let alone a tie. Work shirts and jeans. Often he comes to class “straight from the woods,” he tells us. He’s big on the woods. Or “straight from working on my roof.” Or his porch.

  So when Jim’s angry, he’s angry. His face is almost purple, which makes me think of Donne again, “purpling” his fingernail in the blood of a squished bug. Jim catches sight of me out of the corner of his eye as he’s clomping past, and spins around looking just goddamn furious. Like I’ve been standing here laughing at him or giving him the finger. His face looks like he’s about to take two fast, long strides forward, lean in, and swallow my head.

  He doesn’t move, though—he just stands there.

  He yells at me, “No wonder she killed herself!”

  Jim is addressing me in the midst of a crisis. I am the one he has turned to. True, I’m the only one here, but clearly he’s identified me as a sympathetic presence. He knows that I’m with him, I’m on his side, that there’s us and them and I am us.

  “Oh … hi,” I say, “… there, Jim.”

  “She didn’t kill herself,” Jim hollers. “This place. This place is what killed her.”

  Jim tornadoes into the room at this point, heading straight for the green ottoman. And he kicks it. He kicks the couch.

  “I think it’s antique …,” I start to say.

  “It’s not about writing, it’s about lit-ret-chaw. It’s not about teaching, it’s about dogma. It’s about this fucking Victorian bullshit.” He kicks the couch again. “Doctrine!” he says. “Sophistry!” Another kick.

  And then what I’m afraid of occurs. The ottoman collapses. One of its dainty carved feet buckles under. The balance thrown off, another carved foot gives out, this time in the opposite direction. The couch slouches over onto its frame.

  This furniture, every English undergraduate knows, was a gift from Westcock’s founding family. No other department is decked out like ours. The university started out as a humanities institution, but it was lit-ret-chaw that always held a special place in the heart of Horace Lee Grayson. So back in 1935 the Graysons gifted us with furniture from Horace Lee’s own sitting room—or one of his sitting rooms. In our founding father’s mansion—which squats overlooking the duck pond, huge and white like one of the swans that live below it—there are many rooms.

  My instinct for some reason is to kneel before the slain ottoman. I repress this instinct in front of Jim.

  “Jeez …”

  Before I can really get caught up in the power of my own eloquence, Jim Arsenault has me by the shoulders. He shakes me hard, once. It’s kind of wonderful.

  “Lawrence,” he says.

  Lawrence!

  “Let’s you and me get drunk.”

  What a pretty day. Long shadows of October filtering through the crimson leaves as Lawrence Campbell and Jim Arsenault make their way across the quad to raise a pint in poetic solidarity. I suggest going somewhere off campus, but Jim is having none of it. Jim is in a hurry.

  I check my watch, mentally girding myself. It’s four in the afternoon, and I’ve last eaten at around one. It was a big meal, because I’d skipped breakfast—one of those enormous submarine sandwiches you can get across the street from Carl’s Tearoom for under a buck. It was an all-meater. Turkey, pastrami. What else was in there? I think bologna. The point is, I have food in my stomach. I intend to drink whatever amount Jim Arsenault expects of me. I am in it for the long haul.

  Jim’s talking, and I should really be listening, but the thing is, I’m an awful drinker—I’ve got to plan this out if I’m going to keep up. There’s no way I can have a glass of water at the table, but maybe whenever I duck to the bathroom I can lean over the sink and just suck up as much as possible from the tap. Aspirin would come in handy, too, and as luck would have it there’s a convenience store right across from Franklin’s Stein, the dumb-named student pub. I can say I’m buying smokes. I don’t smoke. But Jim smokes—he lights up in class sometimes.

  I can do this. You and me, Jim.

  “Are you married?”

  “Of course,” answers Jim, flicking his cigarette as if I’ve asked, “Do you like books?” “She’s my obsession,” he adds. He says it absently, though, not really the way you would expect a man to say someone is his obsession.

  He takes a sip of beer, I take a sip of beer. My goal is to match him pint for pint.

  “Why the fuck do you ask me that?” he demands a moment later. Jim curses a lot. Never in class, but all the time in conversation. In his poetry, too—very controversial in this country. You’d think cummings or Ginsberg never even existed.

  “Because,” I start to answer, and then I stop. The reason I asked was because Jim has been complaining about women for the past twenty minutes.

  “I love women,” Jim declares, intuiting what I was thinking. “I love my fucking wife.” Jim takes another moody sip; I take one too. He has been talking non-stop ever since we sat down.

  “I have nothing against women in the classroom,” Jim tells me.

  I try to jump in. “Well, of course not, but—”

  “But that sack of shit Sparrow thinks we should coddle them. That’s what’s sexist, if I may partake of the new vernacular.”

  I’m surprised to hear Jim partaking of the new vernacular.

  “I mean, for Christ’s sake, Sparrow would have us return to the days of segregated education. By ‘segregated’ I mean, of course, some for the pampered sons of pampered sons, none for anyone else. But God save us from the English boy’s school ethos, those bastions of so-called masculinity.” Jim smirks, sips. I smirk, sip.

  Then Jim has a thought in mid-sip and sprays much of it onto the table. “There’s no turning back the clock!” he exclaims. “It’s time for them to stand up for themselves, they can’t just go running to Daddy whenever they hear something that isn’t nice.”

  It takes me a minute to figure out that Jim is talking about women again. I was still thinking about pampered sons and English boy’s schools. In all the scheming and calculating I did to make sure I could keep up with Jim, the last thing I thought about was the fact that I would, at some point, probably become drunk. All my precautions have been directed at meeting one goal only: to not throw up.

  And then—oh, and then. Something good happens. Something very, very good. I spot Claude at the bar.

  “Sparrow,” Jim is saying. “That paper-pushing cocksucker. Is about as radical and of-his-time as that couch in the lounge.”

  Normally, the reminder of the collapsed ottoman would be setting off tiny flares of anxiety, but I am too happy about where I am and with whom and with regard to who is standing at the bar about to notice us, that it scarcely causes a twinge.

  I say, “Yeah!”

  Jim smiles at me, relaxing a little. “You’re the next generation, Larry. It’s up to you. You’ve got to clear away all this deadwood.”

  I’m so flummoxed, the only thing I can think to do is to start rummaging around in my satchel.

  “What are you doing?
” Jim’s eyebrows plunge.

  “My notebook,” I mutter. I stick my entire face in the bag’s fusty opening, waiting for the blush to go away. “Good title for a poem. Deadwood. Dead wood.”

  Jim watches as I squint and write DEADWOOD in block letters beneath the swaying yellow lights of the bar, beneath the piercing jangle of music and the laughter of people who keep dropping their drinks.

  Hey Claude. Hey, cocksucker. Hey you villanelle-writing sack of shit. Look over here.

  That Sherrie has joined Claude at the bar has only somewhat taken the wind from my sails. Sherrie is odd, after all, with her extreme cuteness like a rabid, blue-eyed hamster.

  As the bar gradually floods with students, I realize it’s Friday night. This is the night when people go to bars. Ever since I moved out of residence, weekends have meant little more to me than days when I don’t go to class. That is because I am a person who eats and sleeps poetry. I live a sterile, booky existence. I thought university would change that; somehow it didn’t occur to me that my life could be even bookier than it already was. I worry that this is not how you become a poet. Jim went to Paris when he was seventeen, for Christ’s sake. Like Rimbaud. For fuck’s sake. Didn’t go to university until he was twenty-five, and then somehow blasted his way through to a master’s degree in just four years. But at my age—the most crucial time in a writer’s development, I’ve heard him say in class—he just lived. He just wrote.

  “Oh, look,” says Jim. “There’s young Sherrie.”

  Jesus, finally. I toss a casual glance over my shoulder as Jim raises his hand. There they are, working their way through the crowd, Sherrie’s curls a gold beacon. Claude’s black turtleneck makes him a bobbing, disembodied head.

  Sherrie sits on the bench beside Jim. Claude sits in a chair beside me. It’s getting so you have to yell to be heard in here. Everyone screams hello at each other.

  Jim leans in to say something only to Sherrie, so I take the opportunity to further welcome Claude.

  “Claude, you old bastard,” I greet. “Nice turtleneck.”

  “What did you call me?” says Claude.

  “You old bastard,” I enunciate.

  “I’m a bastard?” says Claude.

  “No! I was being cavalier! I was greeting you in a cavalier fashion.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m a bastard.”

  That went well. I sit back in my chair.

  Claude looks over at Jim and Sherrie and cocks a thumb at me.

  “Called me a bastard,” he remarks.

  Sherrie’s face crinkles—confused, worried maybe. She’s seen us go after each other in class. Jim bobs his eyebrows.

  “Larry!” he grins. “I’m appalled.”

  Maybe it is eleven o’clock or so, and I am deep in discussion with Claude about Jim and the way he’s been treated by Doctor Sparrow, even though I have only the vaguest of ideas what it’s all about. Censorship, I’m saying. Academic freedom. The tension between art and institutionalized education—are these things even compatible, I’m demanding to know.

  Claude says something like, if you want to do poetry in this country, you need to be at a university and that’s just how it is. I tell him that’s bullshit, and call him a bastard again. I’ve been calling him a bastard all night. It’s great.

  “Jim didn’t start off by going to university!” I argue. “The universities came after him, after he published Even Less! Milton Acorn! Anse Surette! They’re turning all that shit on its head!”

  Claude says—and I can’t believe he says this—”Let’s face it: one of the obvious limitations of Surette’s work is his lack of education. It’s rough, colloquial …”

  Claude would say that. I’ve learned many a terrifying thing about Claude this night. Claude isn’t from Moncton at all, for one thing. His father is from Moncton but went to the States when he was nineteen—my age—and travelled all over, just like Jim, eventually dragging Claude’s mother, and then young Claude, along with him. It was only five years ago, Claude tells me, that his father became all politicized about Acadia and insisted on dragging the pair of them back here to the Promised Land.

  The upshot of this, therefore, is that Claude is not the small-time poseur I’d originally dismissed him as. Claude has been to New York City. He’s been to San Francisco. He’s been to poetry readings at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore.

  “Oh my God! Oh my God!” I yell, to drown out the jitters this knowledge gives me. “That’s the power of Surette’s writing! That’s exactly what makes him great—he’s not creatively hamstrung by a bunch of educational doctrine and literary dogma.”

  Claude leans back and smiles. I look around for Jim—I’m sounding good, I want him to hear me. He was here a moment ago, entrancing us all with an impromptu recitation of Wallace Stevens aphorisms. He just came out with them all of a sudden, in the middle of a conversation about, I seem to recall, the coffee machine in the student lounge—whether or not it fits in with the old-fashioned Grayson furniture. “There is no wing like meaning,” Jim abruptly announced, followed by, “Money is a kind of poetry,” followed by, “There must be something of the peasant in every poet.” He just sat there with his eyes closed, producing one of these after another as we all glanced at each other, wondering if he was having some kind of holy poetic fit. “Ethics are no more a part of poetry than they are of painting,” Jim pronounced, finally opening his eyes and smiling at us. “I’m off to take a leak,” he added.

  So Jim’s not at the table anymore—he’s been gone a while, come to think of it. But Sherrie’s still here, resting her chin against her fist and watching me yell and wave my arms around.

  “You’ve been listening too much to Jim,” Claude tells me.

  I’ve decided I love discussing literature when I’m drunk. Not once has my voice gone up in that questioning girl-way it does in the classroom. I am at the height of my rhetorical powers. I’m not even intimidated by Claude anymore, just because he’s been to places I’ve only dreamed about and refers to William Burroughs as “Bill” and appears to have read everything by everybody who’s ever written anything in the world—how can I be intimidated by someone who wears turtlenecks and thinks Anse Surette would’ve been better off with a PhD? It’s like saying, it’s like saying … the Beatles should’ve gone to Juilliard.

  I glance at Sherrie and say the thing about the Beatles to Claude, prefacing it with a “Listen, you Acadian cocksucker …,” which no doubt would make Jim proud. Claude leans back even farther.

  “So now I’m a cocksucker?”

  “It’s just another way of saying bastard,” I explain. “You’ve been letting me call you bastard all night.”

  And then, just when I’m thinking we should get Sherrie in on the conversation, I realize that I’ve forgotten to keep going to the bathroom for covert sips of water and at any moment I am going to vomit an ocean of beer across the table into Sherrie’s lap. I jerk away, cheeks filling, and lurch my way to the exit. Not the bathroom—Jim’s in there, maybe.

  2.

  DYLAN THOMAS WAS A DRINKER. Ezra Pound. Eliot. Good old Anse Surette is, from what I hear coming out of Fredericton. Too many of them to count. Acorn. Oh, all of them are—were. All the greats, they were all drunks for some reason. That derangement of the senses thing.

  Yet it’s funny I can’t remember reading one poem about hangovers. I’ve discovered why. Hangovers are unspeakable, literally. There are no words.

  Here’s the closest I can come up with. You awake having lost your sense of good. You know there is such a concept as good in the world, but you can’t remember what it means anymore. It’s like having amnesia when it comes to the idea of good. What did I used to think was good? I used to think waking up was good. Getting out of bed, going into the kitchen for a pot of tea. Tea itself. Daylight. Squirrels and birds outside.

  And then I remember—I regain the memory all at once. Lying down on the floor is good. Lying down is good in general. Flat is good. Immobility i
s good. Hey, what do you know: my ceiling is good. So is my carpet, even smelling of endless semesters of undergrad feet as it does. I lie on my carpet and watch the birds and squirrels on the trees outside my window, feeling slightly less that birds and squirrels aren’t good anymore.

  It’s sunny, bright. A postcard autumn New Brunswick day. You’d think that would be good.

  A fat mama squirrel appears at the window and stares at me. I know this squirrel. I used to be quite fond of her, in fact, her and all her brood, but now I think the squirrel can fuck off. I decided this a couple of months after I moved in. She sat at the window my first morning here, twitching her nose just like she’s doing now, and I was enchanted when I hauled open the window and she didn’t even scuttle away. On Prince Edward Island we don’t have squirrels. Not like this, anyway—not big, friendly, Snow White squirrels who take potato-chip fragments from your hand and sit solemnly munching just a couple of inches away, like a buddy who’s come to hang out. This squirrel, I thought, was pretty much my only buddy, and then her little family started wandering down from the eave to check out the potato-chip action. We’d all hang out in the windowsill together, munching Humpty Dumpty chips, me and my woodland friends. I got to trust them. When I went home for the long weekend, I decided to leave my window open a crack and lined up a few peanuts on the sill, just so they wouldn’t miss me too much.

  Well, I got home and the little bastards had ransacked the apartment. They tore open my Humpty Dumpty stash and boxes of cereal, and shat on my kitchen counter.

  So that was it for me and nature. I never opened my window to the squirrels again. Every once in a while Fat Mama still shows up and gives me an indignant glare, just as she’s doing now, as if to say, “We’re squirrels, you know? Vermin.”

  Ring, ring.

  “Larry, I’ve got a fucking cold.”

  So it’s the proverbial morning after, the cold light of day, and we’re back to Larry. But he’s called me at home, which is something new.