Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  Conversation stopped as Slaughter stood panting, dominating the centre of Jim’s sitting room. It was no wonder he’d scarcely stood up all night, I realized, looking up at him from the floor with a bun hanging out of my mouth—the place was too small for him. He listened for a moment, waiting for someone to pick up on the other end of the line. I was wondering what time it was again when I heard Slaughter furiously suck in a breath—Hup!—in order to scream into the phone, “Fuck you Scarsdale you flabby piece of shit I wouldn’t set foot in your goddamn rat-infested shithouse if somebody set it on fire and stuck my own mother in there I’d just let her burn up ‘n be caught dead in that fucking little pisshole you with your goddamn flag don’t even know how to use fucking quotation marks you illiterate ignorant inbred why don’t you go screw your sister some more, asshole? Then who you gonna throw outta your fag-hole fuckin’ bar?”

  Charles slammed down the receiver and threw his fists into the air, shuffling his feet back and forth like Muhammad Ali. We applauded out of fear and wonder. Somehow from this emerged the consensus that we had to go and get the flag outside Scarsdale Holdings. It was an obscenity, we determined—a flapping and dangling insult to literate men everywhere. Moira said she was going to bed.

  Jim is in the front seat. I am all cuddled up in the back between Dekker and Todd, my legs bunched because of the hump in the centre. Todd should really be sitting here, because he is the shortest, but he told me he gets sick sitting in the middle, which I assumed to be a load of shit. But before I could argue, Slaughter told us to get the fuck in the car.

  “Time to stand up against irresponsible punctuation!” Jim is shouting in the front seat.

  “Time to stand up against assholes in general!” yells Slaughter, bashing his fist against the horn four times in a row. The road is completely deserted and I think this is a good thing. “We’ll grab that flag and we’ll head down to the Mariner and we’ll fucking make him eat it,” Slaughter jabbers. I’m staring at the back of Chuck’s head, but I can see drops of spittle landing on the windshield in front of him. I look at Dekker, who has his head in his hands, but he’s laughing.

  “Not the best idea,” Jim advises Chuck. It’s like they’ve forgotten about the three of us back here. “You ever been to that place?”

  “I told you, man, I got dragged out of it by a bunch of his fat fuckin’ cronies.”

  “This is what I’m saying,” says Jim. “Guy’s got cronies. Actual goons. He’s like the Godfather.”

  “Slow down,” whispers Todd beside me.

  “The Godfather of Timperly?” titters Dekker.

  “Don’t laugh,” advises Jim, raising his voice so we all can hear. “You’d be lucky to get out of the Mariner with your nuts on straight, Bryant.”

  “I’ll puke,” says Todd.

  We’re roaring through downtown and there is not a soul to be seen anywhere—there’s scarcely even any cars parked nearby. All of Timperly must be tucked in its collective beddy-bye. We own the town, it feels like—we are the town at night. And it’s snowing, whirly white flakes, the first I’ve seen all year. The streetlights turn the black sky a dim orange and the white flakes yellow, like bright, airborne flames. Scarsdale’s flag waves at our approach, quoting some cheery, unknown personage who exhorts us to “Ask For Rory!” We hear it snap in the strengthening wind once we’ve all piled out of the car. Slaughter whoops a whoop of ownership, a kind of Viking whoop of claim-laying which bounces off the stone buildings and the streets. Smiley whoops a whoop of vomiting by the car’s back tire. Jim skips like a schoolgirl across the street and leaps like a dancer to try and reach the flag, gorilla arms extended to their full simian length. He snags it, dangles for a moment above the sidewalk, then lets go, shoes slamming against concrete. I walk toward him, raising my face to the glowing sky, leaving fresh-snow footsteps like I did in the flour on Jim’s kitchen floor. It’s so quiet and empty and the snow is so new it’s like everything’s just sitting here waiting for us to take over. Big flakes brush against my face, melting as they go.

  2

  it’s not healthy to be dwelling on that sort of thing

  8.

  A POT OF TEA can usually sustain me through an entire poem—two or three if they’re short. It has to be a big pot, though, enough for four or five cups. My parents furnished me with a small Brown Betty to see me through my first year at school, but the thing infuriated me. I wouldn’t even be through the first draft and I’d have to get up and boil more hot water, having run out after only one mugful. It shattered my concentration, so I gave the Brown Betty away to Luc, who used it to steep magic mushrooms, and headed to the Co-op seeking something with a little more heft.

  I overdid it. I came home with this enormous blue thing that could hold about a gallon and a half. I’d been overwhelmed by the size and the sky-blueness of it, its clean utilitarian lines. It was not like any pot I’d ever seen. Every teapot my mother and grandmother own—and between them they could go into business—is filigreed with foliage and flowers and women in bonnets and the like. The kind of thing I never would have gotten away with in residence—Chuck Slaughter would probably have taken a shit in it. So at first I considered swiping one of the tiny tin pots from Carl’s Tearoom, since they were the only remotely masculine versions I’d yet encountered, like something you could bring with you camping. The problem again was with size. Those held about the same amount of liquid as the Brown Betty I’d started out with.

  This might sound like a lot of fuss and consternation over a pot, but poets have their sacraments, and a bottomless pot of tea is mine. Last year I went on a bit of a Gary Snyder kick, which got me interested in Japanese culture, and I remember reading something about Japanese tea rituals. That makes sense to me—tea as a kind of sacrament, like the Catholics with their bread and wine. You boil the water, you inhale the warm steam, letting it open your pores, you pour it from kettle to pot, pot to cup. Milk, sugar. And then you sip the hours away, letting them come, letting time unfurl. That’s where I need the reassurance, that’s the reason I have to fortify myself with a ritual of warmth. You are sitting at your desk facing possibility—the possibility of failure—in the shape of an empty white page. A window into nothing, the universe of blank. The question: Am I here or not?

  But then the tea’s ready, and you get down to work.

  So here I am, sitting in Carl’s, carefully emptying out some of the water into my saucer so I can add the milk and sugar to the pot in advance—that’s my particular ritual. It keeps me from having to interrupt my thoughts by adding milk and sugar with every cup. A lady sitting in the booth beside me in the opposite seat watches with polite interest, almost as if she assumes I’m performing for her benefit. The thing about Carl’s is, the booths are attached to one another, but there’s no wall or anything separating them. When strangers sit down at the next booth, it almost feels like you’re on a blind date.

  She’s what you would call a little old lady. Blue hair, hat pinned into it. Gloves, even—not because it’s cold out, although it is, but because she’s the kind of old lady who wears gloves when she goes out on the town. Blinking and smiling at me, until I have no choice but to look up and smile back, nice Maritime boy that I am.

  “I’ve never seen that before,” she remarks, nodding at my teapot. “Is that a new way?”

  It reminds me of something that would happen at home, in PEI. What I want to know is this: is there anywhere in North America I could go right now where I’d be out in public and people would fail to give a shit how I take my tea? Is there anywhere old ladies neglect to look you up and down before taking it upon themselves to pronounce on your behaviour? Where it doesn’t behoove cab drivers to stick their heads out their windows as they drive by to tell you that your shirt’s untucked? (Friendly did this, passing me in his cab as I was shuffling my hungover way to Carl’s. Honk! Clack! Forgot yer shirttail, there, buddy!) Admittedly, this lady probably thinks herself very indulgent and forward-thinking, tolerating su
ch heresy as she is. Such anarchistic tea-handling.

  “It’s just the way I like it,” I explain. “It’s what I always do.”

  “Well, good for you,” encourages the lady. “You should have it however you like.”

  Carl’s is a hotbed of radicalism today. They’ll send troops like in Québec if we’re not careful.

  “Are you a student at the university?” she inquires. I look around me, weary. Any part of my table that is not supporting tea-related paraphernalia is covered with books and looseleaf. Final papers were due last week, and soon exams, and then Christmas. But before Christmas, just before the break, Dermot Schofield is coming to town to give a reading. It strikes me as a strange time of year to be doing such a thing. Jim assures me he’s doing it now “just to make our lives difficult.” I find that it’s working. Jim has appointed me to help with Schofield when he’s here.

  Todd arrives and takes over where the old lady is concerned. Todd is happy to speak with her, because of his working-class background. Old ladies are “authentic” as far as Todd is concerned, representing “living history.” They begin chatting, for some reason, about the harvest excursion in the twenties. Todd hasn’t been here for five minutes and this is what he’s talking about—in his element discussing illiterate Maritimers riding the rails westward-ho in the twenties to find work. To me the prairies sound like PEI dropped in the middle of a field and steamrolled flat. Todd tells the lady both his grandparents went west on the train, and many of their relatives. Excitement! Perhaps the old lady knew them! What were their names? Smiley this, MacDougall that. She is sorry to say she can’t remember coming across any Smileys, but she did meet several lovely Nova Scotians from the Annapolis Valley. Todd swallows a pucker of distaste. I’ve heard him disdain the Valley as a breeding ground for Baptists.

  Unfortunately, the lady is now in a Valley reverie, remembering her rosy, apple-blossom youth and the trips she made to visit her friends in King’s Landing—once they all came to their senses and returned east, that is, dust-covered and traumatized by the endless miles of flat. I imagine it would be the farmhand’s equivalent of staring into a blank page. Empty sky. Non-stop horizon. Am I here or not? There wouldn’t be enough tea in the world.

  I doodle these ideas into my notebook, waiting for Todd to dispense with his friend now that she’s betrayed her affinity for the Baptists. Empty sky. Non-stop horizon. Would it ever occur to Todd to write a poem about the harvest excursion? What would he say if I brought one to class? Tough tit if he doesn’t like it. Jim requires a manuscript of no fewer than ten new poems before the break. I’ve written very little since “Deadwood,” and even though I usually have at least that many in reserve, my reserves are drying up. Besides, my sensibilities have transformed themselves these past few months. My usual five-page opuses strike me as rambling, self-involved wankfests. I need to be meaner, more sparse. Muscular. Two-word stanzas. Fuck it—no stanzas whatsoever. Stanzas are for the likes of Claude, with his villanelles. Smiley, with his hymns to industrial mishap.

  At last, the lady pulls on her gloves and bids us good day. Todd nods, baronial. I wave.

  “Thought she’d never leave,” Todd confides.

  I raise my eyebrows at him.

  “How’s your head today?” he inquires, all business.

  “Sore,” I say.

  “Me too,” says Todd. “Tea.”

  “And french fries,” I recommend. “Grease helps for some reason.” We’re here to study, but I can already see it will take us forever to get down to it. Todd is bouncing around in his seat, his small blue eyes flashing this way and that. I am thinking he must have gotten laid last night.

  “Where did you disappear to, anyway?”

  “What?” he squints, focusing on me with reluctance.

  “You left the party early.”

  “Oh fuck, man, I was sick.” Todd says this fast, eager to dispense with the topic. So that’s not it, he must have really been sick. It was a Christmas party at one of the girls’ residences—they somehow wangled special permission to hold an open house. Sherrie invited us. We got to weave in and out of fragrant female bedchambers all night long, being handed a different shot of booze in each room, lounging on their quilted beds and fondling their stuffed animals on our laps. It was sort of maddening. The smells reminded me of Janet’s bedroom, when we were kids. Many things have been reminding me of Janet lately. Paramount among them, the occasion when I saw Janet a couple of days ago, walking down the other side of the street with a friend. She waved to me, I waved to her—just as we always do. I haven’t called yet to ask her how she is and what she needs. Safe on the opposite side of the street, however, I at least took an interest. I peered at her gut. It was bigger, but so was all of Janet from what I could see.

  “Well, you’re looking pretty lively today,” I say to Todd.

  “I checked my mailbox this morning,” Todd tells me.

  “Exciting.”

  “I forgot to check it Friday, so I went down to check it today.”

  Todd has thick lips. You notice these details with a hangover. They are thick, and they glisten slightly. As I watch, he licks them as if to add polish. Don’t have those french fries after all, please, Todd. But I wonder how to deter him, as mine will be coming soon.

  “So?” I prod. I want him to finish talking so I can look away from his lips.

  He places a letter in front of me. Westcock University stationery. I get an envelope like that every once in a while, informing me of grades or the status of my scholarship.

  “Doctor Robert A. Sparrow, department head,” says Todd.

  “Crap!” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Todd.

  We heard nothing after collecting the signatures. It took us a week of setting up tables, arguing with engineering and economics students who refused to believe the university administration was capable of doing wrong, and reassuring hockey players who accused us of being communists and threatened to kick our heads in. The football players fell into line thanks to the efforts of Charles Slaughter. Every once in a while he would drop by our table between classes to make sure no one was “taking liberties with you fuckwits,” because at one point he arrived just in time to stop a guy who had ripped the bottom half of the petition from the clipboard and wiped his ass with it before crumpling it up and making for the door. Chuck practically picked the guy up with one hand, turned him around to face me, and recommended an apology. Then the guy had to smooth out the crumpled half of the petition and go find some Scotch tape to put it back together again. I watched Slaughter closely the whole time, taking in the cliché of him. The ludicrous coincidence of the guy’s last name. How second-nature it was for him to grab a total stranger by the scruff of the neck and tell him precisely what to do next. He did it with a bored and absent-minded smile, like a cashier making change.

  And yet, after all that work, we heard nothing. Even Jim had sort of lost interest. He was back in class, standing around with his arms twisted behind his head—as brilliant and animated as ever—but now that the official complaint was underway, he stopped asking about it and returned his attention to merciless critiques of our poetry. One day in class he used the word “banal” in reference to one of Todd’s ballads. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Todd for the remainder of class.

  But that, of course, is Jim. He doesn’t play favourites when it comes to poetry, and I shouldn’t have expected him to. Clearly, he was saying with that “banal,” there would be no coddling or kid gloves in the classroom and it didn’t matter what anyone might have done on his behalf. I would have it no other way, and would expect nothing less from a great poet and teacher.

  Once the signatures were all collected—and I swear to God we got practically everyone except for the occasional weirdo who claimed to “never sign anything”—we sent them, along with our endlessly revised and impeccably typed letter, off to the dean of Arts, the president of Westcock, and Doctor Sparrow. Then the three of us, intoxicated by ou
r own bravado—drunk on fear—went out to get even drunker downtown. We took ourselves out for pizza at the Italian restaurant and talked and screamed laughter at each other’s wisecracks and found that none of us could eat.

  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” whispered Sherrie into her plate.

  I knew what she was saying—I knew exactly what she was saying. I’ve always been so good. And this is what I’m thinking as I look down at the letter teetering on top of my pile of English books.

  “What does it say?” I ask Todd.

  “He wants me to come see him.”

  “Just you?” I demand.

  “That’s what it says,” says Todd.

  “Why doesn’t he want to see me? Or Sherrie?”

  “I don’t know,” says Todd. “When was the last time you checked your mail?”

  “Oh,” I say.

  December 2, 1975

  Dear Mr. Campbell,

  I am in receipt of your letter and the petition you have circulated regarding Professor Jim Arsenault and the Department of English. The concern of yourself and your fellow students has been noted, and your efforts are appreciated. Please make an appointment to speak with me at your earliest convenience.

  Sincerely,

  Robert A. Sparrow, PhD

  Chair, Department of English Literature

  Oh, but I have exams. I have a literary reading to organize—doesn’t anyone understand this? And I have to talk to Janet before Christmas, because when I go home everyone will expect us to have fostered a close and nurturing affinity. What’s more, they’ll be wanting their “report.” And what about Christmas presents? I don’t have any money, I never know what to buy. Should I get a present for Jim? Can’t I put the meeting with Doctor Sparrow off until the new year?