Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  Anyway, I didn’t think I’d ever have a friendship like that after a year of living in residence. To have an artistic friendship, you have to meet other artists, and the only people I met in residence were assholes or psychopaths or both. All the sports guys lived in my dorm, Hadwin House—the football and hockey players—and they were, to a man, enormous and crazy. They treated residence like their clubhouse and perpetuated horrific abuse on first-year guys who had just joined the teams. My roommate was first-year and a football player, and they broke into our room at two in the morning, wrapped him in hockey tape, and dragged him screaming down the hall. Later he told me they had shoved him in the utility closet downstairs, crowded in there with him, and solemnly showed him a broomstick. They said they were going to have to shove the broomstick up his ass if he were to be accepted as a member of the team. They said they were sorry but explained everyone on the team had undergone this experience and it had to be done. That’s all my roommate would tell me about it the next day, except to add that they had just been fucking with him and eventually let him go back to bed, ha, ha. It was two hours later, I seem to recall—I’d been lying awake with both our desks shoved against the door. But a week or so later another guy told me the joke ended when my roommate turned to brace himself against the wall, bawling, “Just do it! Just fucking get it over with!” and the football guys had to lean against each other to keep from collapsing onto the floor in one meaty, mirthful heap.

  Another time some guy from MacLaren House snuck onto our floor, took a shit in a pot, and put it on the stove in our kitchen, on “low.” The next day Chuck Slaughter—a massive football guy who used to pay me to write his English papers—went over to MacLaren wearing a pair of rubber gloves and smeared the cooked shit all over the receiver of their pay phone. Then he returned to Hadwin House and called them.

  What I’m trying to get across is, it was like Lord of the Flies over there. I told my dad I had to get out of residence or drop out. He’d been disappointed because all summer he’d been telling me how university years were the “best of your life,” and he was more excited than I was—about residence most of all. I think it was the idea of my living with all those other guys, the masculine fellowship toughening me up. Or maybe it’s just one of those assumptions you make about worlds you know you’ll never reach yourself: the thing I’m not supposed to have must be what’s most worth having.

  5.

  THERE IS A PIECE by Jim featured in the fall issue of Atlantica. It’s a review of Dermot Schofield’s new collection of poetry, Malignant Cove. I seem to recall that Schofield failed to find a home on either the Huckster or the Real Thing list at the beginning of the year. It looks like he’s come down solidly on the side of the hucksters with this book.

  Jim—I don’t know any other way to put this—he wipes his ass with Schofield.

  Perhaps this is what passes for talent in the perfumed salons of the Toronto literary elite, where running low on cognac is the closest anyone gets to hardship and the professor-poets dally in the faculty-club cloak room with colleagues’ wives in the attempt to graft some semblance of passion and genuine human feeling onto their airless, obtuse existence. This is no “garden” of “stay” as Schofield professes, although it is indisputably stagnant and fecund—much like a swamp, or a diseased animal—the perfect breeding ground for pestilence and infestation. God grant Canadian poetry be inoculated against the wasting illness that is Dermot Schofield.

  I am in the library, poring over the new journals as I always do—feeling sick and envious and excited by them as I always do—wanting to be able to turn a page and see my own name under something so unspeakably brilliant it irradiates the page. I rip out Atlantica‘s subscription card and stick it in my notebook. So this is the Canadian literature of my time! No more trees and rocks and oceans and lakes and prairies and farms, but barricades. And battle lines—both intellectual and aesthetic. Upper Canadian snottitude versus hard-nosed regionalism. City versus Town, fake versus real. It’s raw and pugilistic. Like a hockey game. Or war. It’s so new. I never imagined poetry could be like this.

  Another sunny autumn day. I walk across the quad disrupting waist-high dunes of crisp, fallen leaves. Getting colder now, students wandering about in thicker coats, in chunky wool sweaters. But I can differentiate them—the leather coats versus the nylon parkas with polyester fill. The expensive store-bought woollen sweaters versus acrylic, or else the threadbare homemade ones. Like the one I have on—my father’s old curling sweater with the moose and hunter on the back, so stretched out it almost reaches my knees.

  The point is what I’m seeing: I see the difference. I see campus like a line drawn down a blackboard now.

  “It’s good,” says Dekker, scanning our letter in his tidy office. Dekker I can’t determine. What kind of sweater would he wear? He clothes himself in the camouflage of academe. “Heartfelt,” he says.

  “It is heartfelt,” I agree. “Everyone will sign it,” I say. “We don’t know the best way to go about getting signatures, though. I was thinking maybe we should post it in the lounge.”

  Dekker purses his lips, scratches his clean-shaven neck as he often does. He’s got one of those beards that just wants to grow. The bottom of his face is always black by late afternoon, and I don’t know why he won’t just let it fuzz over completely.

  “Chances are,” Dekker considers, “if you posted it, it’d be gone in an hour. They’d just take it down.”

  “They’d just take it down? Who?”

  “The administration,” he says. The word sounds like it should have a capital A, like something in an Orwell novel.

  “But it’s the students’ lounge,” I say.

  “Lawrence, they’d find a reason. They’d say the bulletin board was only for departmental business or some such thing.”

  I’m aghast. “People sell their bikes on that thing!”

  Dekker smiles as though I’ve told a joke. “It doesn’t matter. The department has no obligation to be consistent. What they do is, they do what they want, then they make up reasons for it.”

  So it really is an Orwell novel. The place I go to school.

  “Is that what happened with Jim?” I ask after a moment.

  Dekker waits a moment too. “What happened with Jim,” he says at last, “is complicated.”

  “Yeah, but you said they wanted to get rid of him from the very beginning.”

  Dekker holds up his hands. “I didn’t say that exactly.”

  “Yes you did, Professor Dekker.”

  Dekker pauses to creak backward in his chair, stretching his arms behind his head. For a moment I’m afraid he might flip over.

  “Oh boy,” he says when he finishes stretching. “If I did, if I did say that, I would ask that you forget it.”

  “You said it to the whole class.”

  “Oh boy,” Dekker says again. Now he looks like he wishes he would flip over. Me left talking to his mute, exclamation-point legs.

  And in walks Jim.

  Like a ghost invoked.

  “Hi!” I scream before anyone can say anything else. The adrenalin—the Jimadrenalin—that wild, gleeful, fork-in-an-outlet panic—hits me like freezing water.

  “Jim,” says Dekker, creaking out of his chair to his feet.

  He crosses the room in an eye-blink and they shake hands like crazy. I watch them, vision pulsing. I’m standing too, I realize. After a moment Jim stops shaking but doesn’t let go of Dekker’s hand. He reaches with his other hand for Dekker’s shoulder. He folds Dekker to him—Dekker just kind of letting himself drift in, looking dreamy. They pat backs like crazy. Pufts of dust explode from Jim’s hunting jacket, twinkling around in the stream of sunlight coming through Dekker’s window.

  “How are you?” says Dekker, drawing back, coughing slightly.

  “Illegitimi non carborundum,” answers Jim. His voice is heavy, full of phlegm and gravel.

  Dekker grins but doesn’t seem to know how to respond. “It’s goo
d to have you back,” Dekker says. “It’s good to have you back,” he repeats when Jim doesn’t answer.

  Jim allows the dusty silence to hang a moment longer. “I want to thank you,” he says finally, deflating as he sighs the words out.

  “Oh, Jim,” balks Dekker, “for what?”

  “I heard about your letter.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “No,” says Jim. “You stuck your neck out, Bryant.”

  Dekker looks around, shaking his head, trying to form words.

  “You stuck your neck out. For me.”

  Dekker raises his hands, still speechless.

  “I want you to know that I know that. And that I appreciate it.”

  Dekker, it would seem, is as tongue-tied around Jim as everyone else is. He flails around a bit more before his eyes light on me.

  “Lawrence,” he says, and Jim turns, nods funereally.

  “Hi, Larry.”

  “Hi, Jim!”

  “It’s Lawrence you should be thanking,” says Dekker.

  My jaw drops in preparation to deny it. Jim’s forested eyebrows plunge—his most intimidating gesture, because you know it could mean anything. He looks that way when he talks of poems he loves. He looks that way when he talks of poems he hates.

  “Is that right?” interrogates Jim.

  Dekker beams his relief from the weight of Jim’s gratitude, explaining, “He and some other students have initiated a—a sort of campaign.”

  Jim’s eyebrows descend practically to the tip of his nose.

  “We’re just writing a letter,” I say. “Like Professor Dekker.”

  “He’s going to get all the students to sign it.”

  “All the students?” says Jim. His brows ease up. His mouth opens.

  “All the students in the department, at least,” Dekker amends.

  “No!” I say, and Dekker’s lips twitch in surprise. “All the students. We’ll get the whole student body involved.”

  Jim takes a step toward me, eyebrows and overbite looming.

  “We’ll take it to the president’s office,” I babble. “We’ll take it to Waldine Grayson if we have to. We’re behind you, Jim. All of us—”

  And then I can’t talk, I’ve got a mouthful of woodsmoked jacket.

  There’s music in my head instead of poetry now. I’m jiving down Bridge Street toward Carl’s Tearoom. “Rock & Roll,” by the Velvet Underground. A guy named Luc from Montreal blasted it day and night in Hadwin House last year until inevitably some football player would yell at him to turn off his fucking faggot music before he shoved his entire record collection up his ass, and not sideways either, you French faggot, I’m not gonna just slip it in like a letter in a mailbox. I remember that particular threat so well because it was Chuck Slaughter who made it and I spent around twenty minutes trying to figure out what it was supposed to mean. Chuck’s rage was often of the incoherent variety.

  But Luc never stopped. He played whatever he wanted because he knew the football and hockey players wouldn’t touch him or his turntable. He played the Doors and the New York Dolls and David Bowie. He was the only guy on the floor with a decent stereo, which meant girls always came to Hadwin House parties. And on those nights, out would come the Elton John and the Stevie Wonder and they all bowed down to Luc’s power and genius.

  I am so into the song I’m practically singing out loud, lips moving, spreading my hands wide on FINE FINE music, getting threatening looks from passersby. Hello everybody. Hello town of Timperly. Jim Arsenault loves me. Despite all the amputations, just like Lou Reed says. Amputated personality. Amputated literary ability. Amputated power of coherent speech in his presence. I’m grooving down the sidewalk in my curling sweater with the moose and hunter on the back. Past the Sub Stop, where I get my all-meaters. Past Razors Sharp, where I get my hair trimmed about once a year. Past Rory Scarsdale Holdings with its stupid, meaningless flag—“Ask For Rory!” 362–9130—made all the more infuriating by the arbitrary quotation marks.

  It doesn’t bother me so much today, of course, but the flag was like an insult when I first arrived. It’s a university town! Whom are they quoting? If it’s Scarsdale himself, then why quote? It’s his flag. On and on, I ground my teeth over it countless times on my way to the tearoom. I could have stayed in Summerside for pointless quotation marks. The sign outside the Legion: “Ham Dinner” Friday! Is it a ham dinner in theory? A euphemistic ham dinner of some kind? Notes left on the table from my mother: Larry give Aunt Maudie a “ring.” Give lawn a “trim.” Don’t forget to “pick up” new putters. Her letters are the same—quotation marks jumping around all over the page like ticks.

  Anyway, I don’t care. I love Timperly. I love quotation marks. I love my mother.

  Ring-a-ding goes the bell above the door at Carl’s Tearoom. Sherrie’s not here yet. I boogie my way into a booth. I’d like to go and play the jukebox but know from experience it’s all country and western, with a little bit of Don Messer and Stompin’ Tom thrown in to remind us where we come from, and I’m not in a twangin’ mood today. I order tea and french fries with Beef Gravy with a jaunty sort of flourish, looking the waitress straight in her remarkable amber eyes, taking the time to ask how she is today. She has a tag over one breast reading Brenda L. I say, How are you today, Brenda L.? and it goes over well. She tells me she is just dandy. She looks like she’d like to lean over and ruffle my hair, maybe kiss the top of my head. I watch her shuffle away, energyless, like a lady in a housecoat. I think Brenda is maybe around thirty. Quite old. A body that Jim would call overripe in one of his poems. But I find Brenda nice, comforting to look at. I bet the underneaths of her arms would wobble whenever she reached for things. To me that seems nice. Soft. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand—that’s from Joyce, I think, the only novelist so good he’s practically a poet. Soft and white. Smelling heavy and soft, like grandmother’s soap. Maybe she has children. Maybe I could have an affair with Brenda L., instead of bothering with girls from school. It would be iconoclastic. An older woman, maybe with a neglectful husband. It would be theatrical. No one else has wanted to kiss me since I got here. On the head or anywhere else.

  Overripe. How does Jim mean it? Like a banana? An overripe banana isn’t bad. I look over and see Brenda L. balancing an entire tray of food on her hip.

  I take out my notebook and am writing overripe can mean sweet when Sherrie sits down.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Heyyy,” I say.

  “What are you so happy about?”

  I smile. Sherrie flaps her enormous eyelashes. Tweety Bird, that’s who she reminds me of.

  “Maybe I’m just a happy kind of guy.”

  Sherrie smirks elaborately at this. Do I not seem a happy kind of guy? Then Brenda L.’s heavy, overripe presence is hanging above us. She stands with her order pad poised as Sherrie looks down at the placemat where the tearoom menu is writ.

  “Tea,” says Sherrie. I am concerned that Brenda will think Sherrie is my girlfriend.

  “That it?” says Brenda. “No fries?”

  “No, thanks,” says Sherrie.

  Look at me, Brenda L., I am thinking. And she does.

  “Yours is coming,” she tells me. I nod.

  Sherrie starts laughing once Brenda goes away. She puts a pompous look on her face and bobs her head a few times.

  “What?” I say.

  “You!” she says. “You’re Mr. Cool today.”

  My neck begins to burn when I realize all Sherrie’s bobbing was supposed to represent my nod at Brenda. I rub at it and hunch my shoulders. What’s your deal anyway, Tweety? I want to say to Sherrie. Girl poets don’t look like you. They’re gaunt and sucked-in and wear hippie clothes. They’re ethereal, sexless. The only thing you’ve got down is the frizzy hair.

  “I’m just kidding,” says Sherrie, ducking her head to catch my eye. “You just seem like you’re in a good mood.”

  I remember my good mood and sit up. “I saw Jim.”

 
“Oh! How is he?”

  I can’t remember the Latin thing Jim said in Dekker’s office, so I try to come up with something equally sombre and elegant. “He is bowed … but unbroken.”

  “What?” says Sherrie.

  “He’s good,” I say fast.

  “Really?”

  “Well,” I say, “he says he’s coming back to work. And I think he was really, really touched to hear about what we’re doing.”

  “Oh, you told him what we’re doing?”

  “Yeah. Dekker did.”

  Sherrie smiles, nestling back into her seat. A pink smudge appears on each cheek. Pink and white—her face is like a valentine. “Oh, good,” she says. “Oh, good.”

  Brenda sets two aluminum pots of tea down in front of us, and then two identical cups and saucers. “Fries’re on their way,” she says.

  “Thank you, Brenda L.!” I call. And she bestows her nurturing, head-kissing look before going away. It fortifies me.

  “What did he say?” says Sherrie.

  “About what?”

  “About us.”

  All I really remember is a wall of eyebrow coming at me, a faceful of wool and sawdust.

  “He just said thank you,” I answer, floating on the memory.

  “Thank you?”

  “Yeah—‘thank you, thank you so much.’ He was a little choked up.”

  “Was Todd there?”

  “What? No—Todd dropped the letter off, remember?”