Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  occasionally struggles

  Once we’ve finished laughing, Jim gives me another little pat and wipes his eyes. “Now, I just wanted you folks to know,” he says, “you’re all invited over to my place Friday night after the second reading.”

  Sherrie turns back, and I’m not sure I can describe the expression on her face except to say that I feel for her the way you do when a good friend’s fly is open—I want to take her aside, to usher her out of view until she’s properly zipped up.

  Charles Slaughter is sitting at his desk with a pile of mushrooms and medicinal capsules in front of him, methodically bashing the mushrooms into dust with a hammer. A few guys were gathered meekly around his open door when I arrived, pleading with him to stop because they were trying to study, and Slaughter, not looking up from his work, was yelling at them to go stick their heads up their asses if they were looking for quiet, and not to be such fucking useless pussies while they were at it, because he was busy.

  It turns out Chuck is preparing for the weekend. He had the capsules from an old prescription lying around, he tells me, and had discovered that once he cracked them and dumped out the medicine, he could bash about twenty mushrooms up into a fine powder and cram all the powder into a single capsule. I sit on his bed watching him for a while, wincing every time the hammer lands. Chuck is turning the surface of his desk into a pitted moonscape.

  “See?” he says, holding up a completed capsule. “This way, you can do, like, twenty mushrooms in one pop.”

  I lean forward to squint my appreciation. “But,” I say, “should a person do twenty mushrooms in one pop?”

  “Of course, a person should,” says Charles, and swallows it.

  “Please stop the noise,” a timid freshman calls from the doorway.

  “I will come over there,” replies Slaughter, “and I will impale you on my fist.”

  Slaughter may seem like an odd sort of friend for a poet to have—I certainly thought so when I learned of his friendship with Jim. But now that I’ve gotten to know him, it seems to me that Chuck is a kind of poet himself. That is to say, there is a poetry about his weirdness, and his bigness, and his violence. His good cheer and his loyalty. I don’t really know how to explain it, but I heard someone describe poetry once as something you experience not intellectually, but with your nerves and instincts—and this is how I’ve always experienced Slaughter. Nothing is laid out or explicit with him, but evoked. You never know quite what the deal is, but you get feelings—feelings of unease, or warmth, or tension—and they circle. They never seem to land but just keep circling, blurring into one another.

  “What ever happened with the backhoe?” I ask once we’re sitting across from one another at Quackers.

  “What backhoe?” says Slaughter, gazing over my shoulder, out the window and onto the street.

  “On the weekend? You stole a backhoe.”

  Slaughter’s mouth opens. “I did, didn’t I? Fuck, that explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Why Mittens has been so pissy all week.”

  I don’t mention Claude, or Slaughter seizing him by the neck, which seems to me a more obvious, if less flamboyant, motive for Sherrie’s pissiness. Instead I ask, “What is the deal with you and Sherrie, anyway?” stretching my arms to illustrate how relaxed I am. “Are you two going out or what?”

  “Well, she’s mad at me now,” grunts Slaughter. “So, no. I don’t fucking know.”

  “She’s mad about the backhoe?”

  “Oh, who knows what she’s mad about.” Slaughter keeps staring past me out the window. He doesn’t seem much for conversation today. “I’m too big an asshole when I get drunk or something.”

  “So are you going to the Creighton reading?” I ask, since a conversation-change is clearly what’s required here.

  Slaughter frowns. “Who is this Creighton fuckwad, anyway?”

  I lean forward. “He’s awful. He’s the worst poet I’ve ever heard.”

  “Let’s kill him,” says Charles, cheering up.

  “I’d like to. I hate him. Like—the moment I saw him.”

  “I love that,” says Slaughter, nodding approval. “I love hating people like that.”

  I point across the table. “I thought of you, actually. When I was sitting there hating him. It was just like you and Rory Scarsdale.”

  Something happens then in Slaughter’s face and, it seems, throughout the bar. The lights are lowered in acknowledgment of evening, voices grow subdued, the jukebox music shrieks and grates. Night falls all at once.

  It takes me a moment to realize what’s happening. Slaughter just sits there, letting silence fill up his turn to talk. His mouth hangs open and his eyes have wandered off—he grows a crease between his eyebrows. It’s like he’s listening to a distant, unfamiliar voice.

  “What’s the thing with Scarsdale, anyway?” I say. “Is it because he threw you out the one time?”

  Slaughter grips the edge of the table, causing our beer mugs to shudder.

  And then Slaughter starts talking like this:

  “It’s because there are all these fucking men, all right? And they’re saying stuff and showing you … like … all this neat stuff. And you don’t know, you just go along, right? Because you figure they know what they’re doing. And everybody’s supposed to be fucking friends. You’re sitting around and it’s like, Okay! This is how it is, I get it, and it must be true because they say so, we’re looking out for each other, you know? And then one day the fucker hands you a shovel. And he’s like, dig. And you’re like, why? And he’s like, because I fuckin’ told you to dig. And you’re like, well that’s not a good enough reason, that’s not, it’s not reasonable, and everything you told me before, it’s all—like all of your reasons are based on … on reasonability, right?”

  “Charles,” I say, looking around.

  “And it’s like they hate you all of a sudden! And then you’re thinking that maybe they hated you all along! And maybe this was all a big fucking ploy! And maybe the whole deal was to just get you here, in the middle of a yard, with this goddamn shovel in your hand, as if everything’s been your fault all along and they’ve just been waiting to punish you and make you suffer for it!”

  “Charles,” I say, “people are …”

  “I didn’t do anything, Campbell!”

  He’s yelling at me.

  “I know, Chuck,” I tell him.

  We stare at each other. The bar has gone quiet and noisy all at once. That is, it’s so quiet, tiny noises like coughing and pouring and muttering seem amplified.

  “I gotta—” says Slaughter, looking slowly around. “Fuckin.’ ”

  “Chuck?” I say. “How you doing?”

  “I gotta call Mitts. I’ll be right back.”

  And then, instead of pushing himself away from the table, Chuck pushes the table away from himself and beer flops itself from the mugs, onto me and everywhere else.

  When I look up, Slaughter’s gone. I flag the waitress for help and she comes with a rag and tells me that I, and my university compatriots in general, are slobs and idiots to a man.

  “Little Lord Fauntleroys,” the waitress keeps repeating, never raising her head to look at me as she sops the spilled beer. “Every one of you kids. Townload of Little Lord Fauntleroys flouncing around. Doing whatever the hell you please.”

  I sit at the bar for the next half hour or so, not self-conscious about it because there is such a fuss of activity all around me that the fact of my being here alone isn’t pathetically apparent. Besides, it feels kind of cool to be sitting at the bar by my lonesome. The poet, alone with his musings, needing drink but not company. It strikes me as a pose I might find Claude in.

  After a while, though, I’m feeling bold and bored enough to let my eye wander around the bar, see if anyone is taking note of my poetic isolation. Just as I turn on my stool, Cousin Janet, whom I haven’t seen since Little Billy’s, walks in. She is with a gaggle of girls and looking thinner
since Christmas.

  “Hey, Larry!” Janet’s eyes are glassy and wobbly as puddles. I’m fogged by a dual waft of patchouli and vodka fumes.

  “Janet,” I say. “You’re half-cut.”

  “I’m fully cut,” says Janet. “I’m fully cut, mon cuz. You have to meet all my friends!” And the next twenty minutes or so are lost in a disorienting deluge of hails and sloppy, hollered introductions. The other girls are as fully cut as Janet, shine-eyed, rose-cheeked, and they all seem delighted to meet me. One of them yells that they have been having a party. Another yells that Janet is the best friend she’s ever had. Janet bellows like a cow and hugs this person before leaning into me and explaining the party was for her. A going away party. A congratulations party.

  Whooo! The girls suddenly exclaim in unison and raise their drinks. I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.

  “For Columbia?” I holler to Janet.

  “Yes,” she says. “For Columbia!”

  “Are you excited?” I yell.

  “I don’t know,” Janet yells back, staring at me through the puddles of her eyes.

  “You don’t know?” I repeat.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I’m drunk. I’m just drunk. That’s all I know for now.” Janet grins at me, face shining and slick.

  “What about your folks?” I say, not sure what I’m asking, but speaking intuitively.

  Janet shakes her head. “They don’t care what I do anymore. Nobody cares. Who cares?”

  Janet yells the “Who cares?” around at her friends and they all raise a bizarre hybrid racket of mournful celebration. One of them throws her arms around Janet.

  “We care,” she keens. “We love you!”

  “I love you guys too!” Janet yells, turning from me—just getting lost in her friends for a while.

  Another half hour later I’m back at the bar about to place an order of margaritas for Janet’s gang when in the mirror I notice Charles Slaughter lumbering up behind me wearing the same open-mouthed, distant-eyed expression he had when he shoved the table away.

  “Chuck,” I say, turning.

  “Fuckwit,” he acknowledges. On the stool beside me is a girl’s purse, and on the stool beside the purse, a girl. “Anyone sitting here?” Chuck asks the girl, lurching toward her as if the floor has suddenly shifted beneath his feet.

  The girl looks way up at Slaughter, having to lean back slightly. I can see a decision being made. “My—” she stammers, gesturing at her purse. “My bag is.”

  Slaughter looks down at the bag, swoops it up in one of his paws and places it in the girl’s lap as he sits down.

  “Well, now my bag is,” he tells her.

  The girl is hardly charmed. The girl, who is pretty but not intimidatingly so, whom I was thinking I might talk to at some point, gets up and leaves.

  “Gallant,” I say to Chuck.

  Slaughter just ahems and places his hands in front of him, staring at himself in the mirror behind the bar.

  “Did you talk to Sherrie?” I ask.

  Slaughter’s arms are such that just resting them on the bar means he can almost reach over and grasp the inside of it. He leans forward a little, and does exactly that. The position reminds me of a guy on a police show—a plainclothes cop having leapt on the hood of the getaway car, braced for a long and dangerous ride.

  “I dunno,” says Slaughter. “Yeah. Mittens is mad at me.”

  “Still?”

  “She’s mad at me,” says Slaughter.

  I watch him for a moment or two. Slaughter hasn’t taken his eyes from his reflected eyes in the mirror since he sat down.

  “Charles,” I begin.

  “Lawrence,” says Charles, stopping the words in my mouth, because Slaughter has never addressed me by name since I’ve known him. “I think you should get away from me. I think I’m going crazy.”

  32.

  SOMETHING HAPPENS. The evening goes mad. It’s not just Chuck, soon it’s me too, and everybody. I only remember drinking one margarita, but it felt like I drank it for an awfully long time. Green, sweet, and numbing.

  I find a pay phone and call Sherrie. Ring, ring. She’s there. Something Slaughter. Something crazy. He thinks you’re mad at him, he’s losing it, Sherrie. You have to come.

  Yeah, I am, I am mad at him. There’s no talking to him, Lawrence, he thinks he can get himself all fucked up and then come over and have a serious conversation with me, it’s ridiculous.

  But he’s really messed up right now, I don’t know what to say to him.

  I know he’s messed up. I almost called campus security to get rid of him. I told him I’m not going to deal with him when he’s like that.

  Come, I say, and my voice feels like it’s happening above my head. Please come. Like someone else is doing the talking.

  Sherrie’s voice goes wah-wah in my ear for a while, like the grown-ups in a Charlie Brown cartoon. One of Janet’s friends comes over carrying a blue cocktail and yells and laughs holding it up to my face until I agree to have some.

  It’s good! I say.

  It’s not good, says Sherrie, whom I can suddenly understand again. It’s not good, Lawrence.

  What’s not good?

  This thing with Charles. It’s not good.

  I can feel myself drifting again, eyes bouncing lazily, balloonlike, around the bar. They alight on Janet, on her friends as they dance and swoon together, football players, the angry waitress. I want to drop the phone but a lone remaining tadpole of coherence thrashes its way to the surface of my brain, pokes its head out, demanding to be heard.

  But why? asks the tadpole. Why are you so mad at Chuck anyway?

  Scarsdale, says Sherrie, and now I’ve lapsed back to catching Charlie Brown snippets as the crowd seems to swell then subside like the middle of the ocean. Wah-wah whores, says Sherrie in the distance. Wah-wah sores. He wasn’t kidding about that, Lawrence. He wasn’t kidding about any of that stuff.

  One of Janet’s friends tells me her name is Susan, and I seize upon this. Susan, I say. Susan, can I tell you something, Susan?

  Susan is laughing at me. Janet is nearby. Susan tells Janet I’m hilarious.

  But, Susan, I say. Listen to me will you Susan?

  He is so fucked up, says Susan.

  Not he, Susan. Not he. Me. Come on Susan I’m right here.

  Okay, I’m sorry I’m sorry but it’s funny.

  Okay.

  So, says Susan. What is it Lawrence? What would you like to say?

  Here’s what it is. Here it is Susan. Poetry.

  Susan looks at Janet, is about to say something, but then remembers—not he. So looks back at me.

  What? says Susan.

  He really likes poetry, explains Janet.

  Not he! I yell. Me!

  He’s getting upset, says Susan.

  And so I am. I get up, and they call for me not to go. I go.

  I don’t know where I go.

  It’s dark and warm and soft, the place I happen to be.

  Sherrie, I say. Oh, Brenda L.

  Her laughter is dark and warm and soft.

  The sun glares in at me through gauzy white curtains; curtains which actually seem to embrace the light instead of keeping it out. The curtains pull the sun into the room, fling it around. I’m on a couch, and not in the mood to leave it any time soon, more in the mood to turn over and lose my face in its cavernous dust-smelling crevasse, which is what I do.

  A no-thought period ensues for a while, here in the dark of the couch, which I enjoy. I shove my fingers into its depths and feel around. Crumbs, and cool metal springs. I feel blindly for a while, groping like a baby, for no purpose but sensation.

  Then the brain starts up. Suddenly, horribly. The raisin of dread leaps to attention, shockingly none the worse for wear after last night. Nourished, it would seem, on margaritas. Enlivened.

  There are only two I can think of. Lord Byron and Edgar Allan Poe.

  It seems typical of a Little Lord Fauntleroy
like Byron, totally in keeping with his entitled, nothing-off-limits approach toward the world. I don’t like that Byron is one. I’m not supposed to have anything in common with Byron.

  All I really know about Edgar Allan Poe is that, coincidentally enough, he was a huge fan of Byron. So points off Poe right there. And, since Poe got famous as a writer of horror stories, I assume I can safely dismiss his poetry. I always envisioned Poe as being like the pencil-moustachioed Vincent Price in the Hollywood Horrors—a kind of cartoon creep. The thing with his cousin confirmed that image.

  With Byron, it was his half-sister Augusta Leigh. It was a huge scandal and he had to leave London. That’s the limit, society told him. It’s been very flamboyant and Dionysian and all, but that’s about as much as we can take from you, Byron.

  Poe’s cousin’s name was Virginia. She was thirteen when he married her, and he loved her faithfully until she died.

  I turn over again, masochistically allowing the sunlight to rake my eyes, not just because I know I deserve to suffer, but because I’ve realized all at once how very important it is for me to get up and leave right now. I’m fully clothed, thank God, and suddenly hot. One of Grandma Lydia’s knitted afghans has been thrown on top of me at some point. I fling it away, and months of settled dust takes wing, riding the sunbeams. I feel suffocated. I sneeze. The sneeze is bad, it shakes things loose, wakes things up I’d rather keep dormant.

  Temporarily unable to leap to my feet and bolt out the door, therefore, I let myself lie back to gather strength and do some thinking. I think to myself that there are only a few months left of school. I avoided her most of last semester, certainly I can avoid her for most of this one. If I am very careful, I might well be able to avoid her until September, when she’ll be safely across the border, Big Apple bound, out of sight and memory.

  And now it is imperative I try and sit up again.