Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  “I didn’t know you guys were coming,” I say. I hardly talked to Sherrie all night, I now recall, except to grouse about the mulled wine.

  “Charles said I should come,” she says, looking around, taking in the townie bacchanals.

  “Charles?” I repeat.

  She wrinkles her nose at me. “Charles Slaughter. You know Charles.”

  “Oh, Slaughter, yeah,” I say, maybe a little too loud. I’m going to pound the mittens right off her. “Charles,” I say again. “He’s a nice guy, Charles.”

  Sherrie bobs her head, half in reply, half to the music.

  “Yeah,” she says. “He’s funny. You wouldn’t think he liked poetry by the look of him.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I agree.

  Claude has moved around us to talk to Todd, who hasn’t flinched or looked up at their arrival.

  “Lawrence!” Sherrie turns to me as if something has just occurred to her. The blue of her eyes could blind a person. “You did a super job with the reading tonight.”

  I feel something happening in my chest. It’s stupid—another cliché. Swelling.

  “Thanks,” I say. Except for Schofield’s, this is the only acknowledgment I’ve received all night.

  “The lounge was the perfect place to hold it!” Sherrie enthuses. “They should hold all the readings there from now on.”

  “I know,” I nod.

  “Todd is completely messed up,” Claude calls to us.

  “No, I’m not,” Todd says into the bar.

  “And I was thinking,” continues Sherrie. “We should hold student readings sometime. Wouldn’t that be great? Maybe in the new year.”

  For pretty much the first time since I got here, I stop scanning the crowd for Jim. Imagine being like Schofield was tonight. Imagine putting it all out there, on display. I turn to face Sherrie. “Do you think anyone would come?”

  “Even if they didn’t, we all could read for each other,” says Sherrie. “But we could advertise in the student newspaper and stuff. Put up signs.”

  “I don’t want to be the one to put up signs.” It seems wise to insist on this right off the bat.

  “I’d put up the signs if you want,” says Sherrie.

  “We’d have to ask Doctor Sparrow, if we wanted to hold them in the lounge,” I say, thinking out loud. Sherrie, abruptly, turns her body away and resumes gazing into the crowd. She nods hard in time with the music. I’ve said the wrong thing, invoked the wrong name. None of us seem to have gotten around to telling each other about our independent meetings with Doctor Sparrow. With exams coming up, and the reading and everything. But now, seeing Sherrie in a posture of blatant evasion, I find myself suffused with curiosity. Of course, if she tells me hers, I’ll have to tell her mine.

  And then a body extricates itself from the writhing mass, a bigger body than that of anyone in the room, and Charles Slaughter descends, plucking the awkward, tweedy spectre of Doctor Sparrow out from between us. He slings a casual arm around Sherrie, who shines up at him in gratitude. If I were to lose a leg, it occurs to me, looking at him, like if I lost it in a war or something like one of the Vietnam vets, they could very well rip one of Charles Slaughter’s arms off and replace my leg with it. It would be a perfect fit, if a little more muscular, a little more ruddy in skin tone than the rest of my body.

  “What is in your bum?” Sherrie wants to know, poking at the spot in the back of Chuck’s pants where one of the “Ask For Rory” flags bulges out.

  “Ah,” says Charles, nodding wisely like Confucius. “What isn’t in my bum?”

  Sherrie laughs; Slaughter smirks, pleased with himself. I should be laughing too, and am about to, when something in the words give me pause. They sort of echo for a moment, circling around before quite catching up with my brain. The question is, I think, slowly coming to grips with it: what isn’t. That’s what Slaughter is saying. The question is what isn’t. Not the other way around.

  Then all at once, the meaning rushes at me, striking me as fantastically poetic—charged with depth. Does Slaughter even comprehend what he just said? I close my mouth—which I had opened to laugh—and scrutinize his meaty face. He stares back at me. There is an expression Slaughter wears sometimes—a contrived sort of expression of worry mixed with distaste. You’ll see it when you tell him you don’t want another beer just yet, or you’ve got too much studying to do to go out on the weekend. An expression that lets you know you’ve given the wrong answer—that there is something lacking in your character which Slaughter, for one, finds deeply disconcerting. I’m seeing that expression now, and it heightens my alarm—my sense that something is gathering in the air around us, coming to a head.

  Slaughter sees me, I realize. His look is a reflection of everything I lack. The unsavoury puzzle of me exists in the crease between his eyebrows, the displeased pucker of his lips.

  Lawrence Campbell? he’s saying. And I can hear the words. The question. The unbearable doubt. I can hear it coming out of his eyes. And as I hear it, he raises his arm—the arm that could be my leg. He raises his muscled, ruddy, football player’s limb, extends it like a telescope. Unfurls his index finger to practically the tip of my nose, then circumnavigates the finger around it, slowly. He’s getting ready, is what he’s doing. He’s preparing us both with this ritual. He’s about to pronounce. He’s going to say it. He’s really going to say it.

  15.

  ULTIMATELY, WHEN I PIECE TOGETHER Friday night, I can’t help but conclude that it would have been the most fun I’ve had this year if not for the mushrooms. For the rest of the evening, every time Slaughter looked at me with his bottomless Saint Bernard’s eyes, I would shudder, thinking my soul was being penetrated. Slaughter would repeat the swirly, point-at-my-nose thing which he knew had freaked me out thoroughly the first time he did it, goggle his eyes just to push me even closer to the edge, and then hawg-hawg his ass off as I sat clutching myself, trying to keep my anxious limbs from flying off my torso.

  That was the thing that stuck in my mind and metastasized—the notion of Chuck’s arm replacing my leg. It caused me to obsess upon arms and legs. It was all I could see of the crowd for the rest of the night, just a jumble of flesh-coloured snakes intertwined like the mating ball my father and I discovered one summer at the bottom of a dry well on Grandma Lydia’s property. The entire floor of the well was nothing but a clenched, writhing sphere.

  After that, it’s all impressions. Vignettes. Glimpses of the night I could have had if not for the turds:

  Sitting across the table from Jim—no one else present—or perhaps my attention is just so focused on Jim, it’s like the others have blinked out of existence. That seems likely, because it feels as if I’ve never concentrated so hard on anything as much as I am concentrating on the fact that I cannot understand a single word Jim is saying. Or not that exactly. I understand the words themselves, just not what they mean when strung together. I hear Rimbaud, I hear Blake. I know to whom and what they refer—the fact that the words refer not just to people, but ideas—that the words are now embodiments of something huge and near-divine. It’s why Blake went crazy—why Rimbaud just stopped writing after a while. That brush with heaven, or something like it. Schofield called it the universal, but he made it sound like a good thing. Is it a good thing? Was it a good thing? With some poets, some of the best poets, you think: moth against light bulb, zapped junebug twitching on the summer porch. The madmen like Blake, the exiles like Rimbaud, the squadron of those who drank to death. Insect Icaruses. Why? Because of that notion—that unnameable thing, concept, idea—now embodied in the names of the poets who’ve been singed by it. In some cases, burnt up.

  I hear bastard and I hear Sparrow and I hear Schofield and I hear ungrateful. Nod, nod, nod. I hear the word try and trying three or four times. I hear uphill battle and why.

  But only one complete sentence manages to wade its way across the moat of my addled perceptions. Mostly I’ve been divining the conversation by keeping track of t
he feeling-tone of what Jim is saying. I can tell from his face and the timbre of his voice that what’s required is a series of sympathetic nods accompanied by the occasional outraged scrunching of the brow. But this sentence, it smashes its way through.

  I feel like I’m disappearing from the ground up, kiddo.

  The tone is all appeal. The feeling all despair.

  And yet it seems to me he kind of cheered up an hour or so later. At one point there were women at our table, leaning over to converse, and whatever Jim was saying, it was clear he had them mesmerized. And then there were some men around, too. Laughing with Jim and Slaughter about something, shouting things to make everyone laugh even harder, sloshing their drinks around.

  And then just two more things. Two other burps of memory from that evening, after my head started to clear a little.

  One, Slaughter. A flat hand slams into the table, rattling people’s beers. A python suddenly drops from the ceiling onto my neck, its weight pulling me to one side. Into Slaughter. His face against mine. Slaughter’s arm. It could be my leg.

  He hisses. He’s the snake in that cartoon. What is that Disney cartoon, with the boy who gets lost in the jungle? There’s a snake and a tiger. But there’s also a singing, dancing bear who looks out for him. That cartoon, what’s it called, where the animals all talk like jazz musicians?

  “Look!” Slaughter hisses, or manages to hiss. How is he able to hiss a word like “look”?

  “What?” I say, still grappling with his arm. Slaughter clenches it tighter for good measure.

  “Scarsdale,” hisses Slaughter. “Right the fuck there.”

  He points. I look. There is a man standing at the bar, both hands on his hips. To my discomfort, he is staring directly back at us. Scarsdale. Scarsdale takes no shit from those who would stare and point, it would seem.

  “Here’s what I’m going to do,” half-whispers Slaughter, his mouth practically up against my ear. “I go up to him, right? I say, Hey, fuckwad, this belong to you? I whip out the fucking flag, man! I whip it out from my ass!” Slaughter’s muscles twitch and flex in his excitement and I feel he is on the verge of cutting off my windpipe.

  “Or, no! How about this, I go up to him, like, la, la … Hm, oh I’m kinda uncomfortable here, I don’t know why … Seems to be something jammed up my asshole, hm, wonder what it could be. And then like, dum-de-dum. I start pulling the flag out of my ass!”

  “Lawrence is turning red,” Sherrie’s voice speaks from somewhere.

  Slaughter gives me one last, affectionate clench.

  “I’m gonna do it, man!”

  And then he’s gone. For the rest of the night.

  Thing two:

  I don’t think it’s much later. Sherrie is still around—Slaughter’s abandonment must not yet have registered. I don’t know why I remember this moment in particular, why it should stand out, because nothing actually happens. My paranoia has abated enough to let me take in my surroundings somewhat. To my relief, I am able to raise my eyes without the scenario translating immediately into a reptilian Last Judgment scene. For short periods, I can watch people dancing and be fascinated by their movements, the light dappling their bodies. But every now and then things will go a bit snaky—there’s a moment when a group of women are all waving their arms in the air in unison—and I have to look away.

  When I turn to see who’s left at the table, it’s Sherrie, looking down into her Coke. And Jim, looking at Sherrie, with folded arms.

  I get the feeling I have stumbled into something. Like when you’re switching around the channels on TV and come across a scene which is clearly a significant part of some narrative, a moment that’s heavy with meaning. The two characters face off in silence, but you can feel something weighty in the air—something that’s gone on well before you arrived, something with a lot of no-doubt-fascinating twists and turns. This looks like it might be good, you think to yourself, settling down to watch.

  But then the credits roll. You realize the show is over. You’ve come in too late.

  16.

  the ass of the head

  and what is in it,

  or is not—

  The question

  of which should take

  its rightful place up top—

  Is the axis

  the ass-kiss

  the pinhead

  on which this angel

  squats

  December 7, 1975

  MY FIRST DRUG-INSPIRED EFFORT. It may not be “Kubla Khan,” but into my midterm portfolio—due on Jim’s desk Monday morning—it goes. I woke up from dreams of snakes and limbs and wrote it at once, Big Blue steaming at my side.

  It started with a nagging feeling. Something is nagging at me, I thought. It felt like the mental equivalent of having to piss. So I dug out my notebook—not ready to unleash the merciless clackity-clack of my typewriter keys this early—and out came “The Ass of the Head.” Smooth and easy. It reminded me of the time I was six and saw a cow give birth at a neighbour’s farm. It’s not a memory I cherish, in particular, but I do recall with a sort of poetic relish the glide of the experience—the smooth and perfect glide of the final moments. Once the difficult stuff was out of the way, the rest of the creature’s wet body just slid right on out, easy as pie. After an infinity of struggle and suffering, and only a little bit of throwing up on my part, the thing abruptly pooped itself into the world like it was no big deal. To me this will always be the best and only metaphor for writing poetry, although I will probably never say so out loud.

  Then I just kind of fawned over it for a while, “The Ass of the Head.” I imagined Jim extricating it from my portfolio, his sudden, surprised smile at the title (the smile fading as he becomes engrossed). It was a bit sing-songy, and I didn’t quite understand exactly what I meant by “this angel,” which was worrying, because the whole poem seemed to kind of hinge on the image. But maybe that was okay. Maybe it was supposed to be enigmatic, the angel. This was poetry, after all. And why “this” angel, I wondered, why didn’t I go with “an” angel or “the” angel? Who is the angel? I wasn’t sure it mattered. I decided to leave it. Leave it to the portfolio. Leave it to Jim.

  So now the poem is neatly typed and snugly ensconced in my midterm portfolio alongside “Deadwood” and a few other new ones (“Showdogs,” “Stormfront,” and “Thanksgive”—a tribute to poor knocked-up Cousin Janet). The rest of the portfolio I’ve padded with old stuff. But it’s finished, and so you’d think my conscience would be clear. Still, something is nagging at me. Something from the night before. Another unwritten poem, perhaps? I flip the pawed, soiled pages of my notebook for clues. And there it is.

  Ring, ring.

  “Hello, this is the Crowfeather Inn, Peter speaking.”

  “Yes, may I speak to Dermot Schofield, please?”

  “Mmmmm. Just a sec.”

  The flipping of pages. The tapping of a pen. It sounds like it could be one of the hippie proprietors, with his casual mmmm and soft way of talking. My parents told me this was the thing they most noticed about hippies, once they started showing up to hitchhike around the island and mustering the toked-up audacity to ask my father, not for a room, but for permission to camp out behind the motel. “For free!” Dad always marvelled. “Lousy armpit sniffers think they’ll set up a squat on my land for free! Well, I showed them where the gun was.” Dad is always saying he showed people where the gun was. But he’s never showed anyone where the gun is. Dad is a softie. I remember quite clearly the canvas lean-tos pitched out back. He even let the hippies light fires.

  Regardless, the tents and the fires—that wasn’t what really got up my father’s nose. It was their voices, the way they talked. That deliberately gentle, deliberately inoffensive mode of speech. “Made you want to punch ‘em in the face,” Dad always said.

  “I’mmm sorry,” says Peter the hippie. “Mr. Schofield checked out bright and early this morning.”

  “Bright and early?” I repeat.

 
“That’s right,” Peter practically whispers in my ear. “Um,” I say. “Did he go to the bus station?”

  “I believe he did,” affirms Peter. “How were the roads this morning?”

  “Oh, fine,” Peter tells me, happily. “They had the plows out all night.”

  “That’s good,” I say, twiddling the phone cord, twiddling away my guilt. “Did he get a cab or something?”

  “Mmmm, no,” slurs Peter. “I believe he got a lift out to Spanky’s with one of the other guests.”

  “A lift?” I repeat.

  “Mmm-hmm,” murmurs Peter, as if in seduction. It really does make you want to punch them in the face.

  “Did he,” I say, “did he, like … Did he have any trouble with the bill, or anything?”

  There is a pause. “I beg your pardon?” says Peter.

  “I just want to make sure he got away okay,” I apologize. “I was … I was his host.”

  “You were his host,” repeats Peter in a slow, soft, and measured cadence. Dulcet tones, as they say. What is a dulcet? At the moment, I’m assuming it is a big machete-shaped thing one uses to hack a person into strips. Or else something like Moira’s dragon blade. Who would have thought such tones could be so cutting?

  Dear Mr. Schofield,

  It is the day after your reading, and I am feeling guilty. I should have thought to drive you to the bus station this morning, but Jim

  Dear Dermot,

  Dear Dermot Schofield,

  Hi there, Dermot!

  Dermot, hello.

  Dermot:

  Dermot;

  Attention: Dermot Schofield

  ATTN: De

  Dear Mr. Schofield,

  It is the day after your reading, and I just wanted to let you know once again how much I enjoyed it. I also really enjoyed meeting you and would like to apologize if I made you uncomfortable at all with all my nervousness and rudimentary winter driving skills. Too bad about the storm, I’m sure we would have had lots more people out to the reading had the weather been more accommodating accommodating element cooperative