The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  I went to see Croft not long after Gord took that run at him. I don’t think it occurred to me that the incident at Icy Dream would interfere with our business interactions, so when I climbed the steps to Croft’s apartment, the woozy stench of cheap meat and sesame oil from the Chinese restaurant filling the stairwell, I’d pretty much forgotten the whole affair. Like I said, I was fifteen years old. Not all my higher brain functions had gelled at that point. I was fantastically oblivious to danger at that age — or even the idea of consequence itself. It never occurred to me, for example, that there was any reason I should bring a buddy with me to Croft’s — none of my friends had any interest in attending these transactions, and they all had complete confidence in my ability to handle myself. Therefore, needless to say, so did I.

  Imagine how any given small-town petty-criminal teenage headbanger circa 1985 would decorate an apartment and — bang — there’s your mental image of Croft’s drug shack. A lot of red light bulbs, a lot of smoke, a lot of heavy metal odds and sods (skull candles, flying-V ashtrays — you get the picture). The guitar in the corner, the amps, the preposterous stereo system, so tweaked and extravagant it might as well have been sculpted from solid testosterone. The grimiest of couches placed behind a wooden slab of a coffee table that in its squat massiveness had a kind of sacrificial-altar thing going on. Croft probably chose it for that very quality, now that I think of it (and by “chose,” of course, I mean hauled it out of the dump or his grandmother’s basement or somewhere). Because the coffee table definitely performed a ceremonial function during these meetings. This was where Croft cut, measured, tested and finally bequeathed his product.

  Croft’s bright little eyes lit up when he opened the door. “Dude!” he greeted. This I should mention was long before people in my part of the world started saying “dude” all the time, but ever since that California stoner movie with Sean Penn, Croft had adopted the expression as his own as if in tribute. That, and “bud.” He also went around exclaiming “You dick!” more than was strictly necessary.

  And if you’re expecting an atmosphere of criminal intrigue to take over at this point, Adam — sorry. I was one kid buying dope from another, just as millions of kids do every day. I sat down on the couch across from Croft (and the cow-flop of hash that was splayed on the table between us), placed my order, and waited for Croft to saw me off a few chunks like I was waiting for a slice of ham at Easter dinner. We’d been through this a bunch of times. He didn’t give me a sinister look when he pulled his knife out of his back pocket, his eyes didn’t glint as he extracted the blade, he was barely paying attention to what he was doing, and so was I. I just sat there feeling vaguely depressed by my surroundings. Croft’s skeezer entourage lounged around sucking beers and bobbing their heads to Lynyrd Skynyrd. Collie Chaisson had his eyes closed and was playing air guitar. My own eyes were tearing up from the smoke. I remember thinking to myself, as Croft invited me to help myself to a beer from a cooler sitting near my feet, that I should feel jealous of him living this outlaw, parent-free life, and I wondered why I didn’t. I downed the beer and didn’t pursue the question, but the answer is pretty obvious to me now: I was only fifteen. I had no desire, conscious or unconscious, to live like Croft. I craved, like any kid secretly does, rules, decency, wholesome surroundings. I didn’t want this, or anything like it, not yet. I still wanted my mother.

  “So dude,” said Croft, rolling a chunk of hash into a ball between his fingers. “Your dad, man. Fuck.”

  I placed the emptied beer bottle between my legs. So we were going to have the conversation after all. “I know,” I said. “Sorry, man.”

  “Lost it, bro.”

  “I know,” I said again. For lack of anything else to do, any other kind of this-conversation-is-over gesture to make, I picked up the empty beer again and made a point of pretending to drain it.

  At this point Collie Chaisson’s freckled eyelids flew open and he stopped playing air-guitar mid-riff. “Holy fuck man fucking guy!” he exclaimed. “Like, flying across the counter man!”

  I slouched deeper into the chair and let my arms dangle over the armrests, deciding to just go limp and permit the stupid inevitability of Chaisson’s play-by-play wash over me.

  Croft was smiling down at his drugs, shaking his head in a seen-it-all kind of way. “Angry little man,” he remarked.

  I sighed. “Yeah. Short fuse.”

  But Chaisson wasn’t finished. “So he, like, he comes at the Mickster, right?”

  Chaisson was actually preparing to tell the story from start to finish. Not only that, he was acting it out, leaning forward in the chair with his arms extended straight out in front of him, fingers spasmodically clenching, exactly the way Gord’s had been. Even Chaisson’s face was twisted into a unpleasantly accurate imitation of Gord’s furious little knot of blood lust.

  “And he’s like ‘You blankety little blank-blank!’”

  Blankety? I stared at Chaisson.

  “Dude,” interrupted Croft, and I was glad he did because we both knew if Chaisson kept going I would eventually be obliged to respond. Much as I wanted to distance myself from Gord, I couldn’t let this skid sit there guffawing all night about how ridiculous my tiny, angry father had made himself.

  “We were all there, Col,” continued Croft, still not looking up from his work. “No need for the floor show.”

  Chaisson immediately sunk back into his chair, glancing over at me and frowning just a little when he realized how hard I had been staring at him this whole time.

  Then, a massive piece of furniture at far end of the room began to tremble and grunt — it was actually a guy, a guy in sunglasses who I’d originally assumed to be passed out when I first arrived. Now he was hefting himself out of a chair that had previously seemed a natural extension of his body, so snugly did it fit his lower half. I sat up and watched as he trundled over, still grunting, to join Croft on the couch. He was almost equally tall as wide, with a balding pate and grotesque little ponytail nestled in the folds of flesh insulating the back of his neck.

  “Jesus, Croft,” he grunted as he approached. “I can’t watch this anymore.”

  Croft smiled up at him. “What?”

  “What,” repeated neck-fat. “What. It’s like you’re sitting there crocheting fuckin doilies is what.” He took the knife from Croft’s impassive hand and briskly finished the job like an executive chef chopping onions. A second later, he’d wrapped the chunks of hash and shoved them, along with the requisite baggies of pot, across the table at me.

  “Good?” he said to me.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Hey man,” said Croft. “I’m just trying to do a good job by this guy. This guy’s a good guy.”

  “How nice,” remarked neck-fat, peering at me through his sunglasses. I didn’t know how he could see a thing in Croft’s red-lit living room. “So is the customer happy?”

  “I think so,” I said, rapidly counting the baggies. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, this is good.” Thank you neck-fat, I thought to myself. This is exactly what was needed — someone to step forward, punch through Croft’s leisurely, lord-of-the-manor pace and move this business along. I stood up from my chair in order to yank my wallet from my back pocket.

  “Forty,” rumbled neck-fat.

  “Wait a sec, Jeeves,” said Croft. “I thought we’d give my buddy Rankin a little discount.”

  “Why that’s adorable,” said Jeeves, gazing up at me — and could his name really be Jeeves? “And why would we want to do that?”

  “Little dust-up at his dad’s restaurant the other day. Just wanted to say no hard feelings.”

  I was still standing there with my wallet in my hand, practically hopping up and down with the need to get this over with and go meet my buddies behind the mall. The parking lot behind the mall seemed the most wholesome place in the world all of a sudden.

  Abruptly, the mountain man heaved himself to his feet and extended his hand to me.

  “Call me Jeeves
,” he said.

  “OK,” I said. The top of Jeeves’ red-shining head came level with my nose, which meant he was a pretty big guy. And, as I contemplated his stringy skull, I realized that he had about twenty years on the rest of us.

  And he still hadn’t let go of my hand.

  “Oh,” I said. “Rank. Gordon Rankin. Call me Rank.”

  “Rank,” repeated Jeeves. “Like pee-yew, right?” He smiled and wafted his other hand in front of his nose.

  “I never thought of that,” I said, thrown, because I really never had. I realized for the first time that I had basically been insisting people call me Stinky since I was twelve years old.

  “You’re a big fucking guy, Rank,” remarked Jeeves. He pumped my hand and finally let it drop.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I am a big fucking guy.” I had trained myself at this point not to automatically respond “Thanks,” when someone made this remark.

  “Well why don’t we say thirty-five, big guy?”

  “Thirty-five, sure,” I said, digging through my wallet and glancing over at Croft. Because why was I doing business with this Jeeves guy all of a sudden? Croft gave me one of his sweet smiles, the same kind, I recalled, that had sent the Geography teacher into such paroxysms. The thing about Croft was, he had something of an angelic face. When he smiled his bright blue eyes tended to dance — he could light up a room. That face, I think, was what really sent people like Fancy and the Geography teacher over the top. Being a badass little shit is one thing. But being a badass little shit who follows up his snotty remark with a smile that melts your heart is too much to ask of anyone’s patience.

  06/07/09, 7:05 p.m.

  Adam, I notice you still haven’t emailed me back. I know I told you to sit back and enjoy the story, so maybe you are just being obedient and, if so, I appreciate that. And sorry again, really, for my drunken e-nagging earlier. I just want to let you know it’s okay if you feel the need to remark upon any of this. It kind of helps me to keep going if I know someone is digesting the story and responding to it. I guess it’s nice to have an audience, to know I’m not just whistling into the void. When I asked you that question before, about whether or not I felt real to you, if it felt like you were getting email from a figment of your imagination, it wasn’t rhetorical. I was genuinely wanting an answer. It kind of bugged me when you didn’t answer.

  I know I came off a little psycho previously but I was just pissed off because you were being so defensive with that “serving notice” shit. Why is it you can’t seem to get around the whole “innate criminality” thing when it comes to me? You turned me into a criminal in your book and you are treating me like a criminal even now. Just because of a few emails. But they’re my emails, right, therefore they must have an innate criminality nestled somewhere in their genetic soup.

  I told that story about Jeeves because I knew it would ring a bell with you. Aha, you’d think, that’s why none of it was new to him. That’s why he settled into that world so comfortably, treated those people like he’d known them all along. Wrong, Adam. That was the first and last time I ever met Jeeves. Pretty innocuous, right? Just a bunch of dirtbags sitting in a crappy apartment drinking beer, dealing hash and pot. Sound familiar at all? Replace the dirtbags with a clutch of fine young college men and what do you have? No guns, no prostitutes, no intravenous drugs. I bet you had all these big expectations — Rank running with bikers, some kind of enforcer, beating the crap out of rival gang members, all at the tender age of fifteen. Innate criminality and all that. You’d lap it up. Ahm, num, num. You’d be on to your next book in a flash.

  But Jeeves didn’t have anything to do with what happened next — or very little anyway. Like I said, I never saw him again. Jeeves wasn’t the problem. The problem, as always, was Gord.

  6

  06/08/09, 7:06 p.m.

  I JUST REMEMBERED I didn’t tell you what the Mounties actually said when they showed up at ID a few hours after Gord flew at Croft. And I should, because it kind of began there.

  They arrived just as Gord and I were closing up, so Gord invited them in and we all sat across from one another in a booth like four kids on a double date.

  There was this one cop called Hamm. The best way I can describe him is rectangular — the guy was all corners. Even his moustache was a rectangle. If it had been any smaller, he’d have looked like Hitler.

  Hamm’s partner was one of those cops whose job it was to be unobtrusive. To just sit there recording everything, saving it for later, and fade into the background meanwhile. Therefore, I can’t tell you much about him, but the way I just described him reminds me of a certain someone. So let’s call him Constable Adams, in homage.

  Gord had learned somewhere, at some point, that Constable Hamm’s first name was Bill and kept referring to him by it. By his full name, that is — Bill Hamm. I had no idea why. Gord was the kind of guy who did this sort of thing sometimes — resorted to random rhetorical flourishes.

  “I’ll tellya something right now, Bill Hamm,” he began before we had even quite settled into the booth. “If I’d managed to get my hands around that little Christer’s neck you’d be drawing a chalk outline over by the counter, there, rather than having this nice little talk with me.”

  I threw my head back and stared at the ceiling. We were going to jail.

  But Hamm chuckled. “Now, Gordon,” he said. “You can’t —”

  “You explain to me what I done wrong, Bill Hamm. Explain it to me right now.”

  “You can’t attack —”

  “Why is it a load of drug-dealing little shits are permitted to come into my place, sit back there using bad language and stinking of dope, and I’m not allowed to do a goddamn thing about it?”

  “Gordon, you have every right to —”

  “Then! The minute I try to defend myself. The minute I assert my rights, you assholes — pardon my French, Bill Hamm — you fellas, you show up here —”

  “Gordon,” said Hamm. “Let’s step back. Let’s not get angry. We’re just here to find out what happened. We got a report of a disturbance. We just want your side of the story.”

  “When you should be out there arresting every last one of those little bastards! Not here harassing me and my boy.”

  Hamm and I sighed simultaneously.

  “You should be thanking this boy,” added Gord, taking the opportunity to thwack me in the sternum with the back of his hand. “This son of a bitch right here, Bill Hamm.”

  “And why is that?” said Hamm, eyeing me, abruptly deciding to let Gord take the conversational lead.

  “He’s the only thing kept me from ripping the little bastard’s head off. He’s the law and order around here.”

  I met Hamm’s gaze and tried to get some ESP going between us. Don’t worry, I transmitted. Sanity exists here at Icy Dream. No teenage heads will be torn asunder.

  But Hamm didn’t look reassured. In fact the amused indulgence that had been dancing in his eyes while dealing with Gord dropped out of them completely when they met up with mine.

  “You know, Gordon,” he said, sitting back. “That’s not actually what I hear.”

  Gord was as surprised by this as I was. That anyone could hear anything but good about his boy.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? What do you mean that’s not what you hear?”

  “What I hear is that the boy starts fights in the parking lot is what I hear.”

  Gord and I looked at each other, both astounded and both of us realizing simultaneously, I think, that, strictly speaking — keeping within the letter of the law — it was true.

  Gord’s reply, therefore, was entirely predictable.

  “Horseshit! That’s goddamn horseshit is what that is, Bill Hamm!”

  After all, I was there to bust punks’ skulls. Gord had made that clear from the moment I started working with him. And it’s not that I literally busted anyone’s skull exactly, it’s just that I threatened to do this to some random punk pretty much every
weekend and — yes — I even got into a tussle or two. The thing is, there were a lot of little shits of the Mick Croft mould who knew Gord couldn’t stand the sight of them and who would therefore get liquored up and wander in around closing time precisely for the sport of it.

  They had been banned from the restaurant, which of course my father had every right to do. So Gord could have easily called the cops to get them kicked out of there. But Gord didn’t want to do that. He liked to handle these things, he said, “himself.” Meaning getting me to handle them.

  So my job was to take off my hat (my own stipulation), stalk over to wherever the punks happened to be seated, and growl at them to vacate the premises immediately. If they didn’t, I was within my rights (according to Gord) to wrestle them out the door — but I rarely had to do this. What happened more often than not was that the punks would tell me: Fine. We’ll just be in the parking lot then.

  The parking lot, I’d say, is our property, and we want you off it.

  You got it, man, they’d say. And go wait for me in the parking lot. They’d smile and wave at me through the window if I didn’t go out right away. Or sometimes they would be in the Legion parking lot, immediately next door. The two parking lots were separated only by a sign and a concrete rail — it was easy to get them confused.

  That, apparently, was what constituted me “starting fights.”

  But Gord was all over the situation before I could even draw a breath in my own defence. He leaned forward as far as he could in the booth so that the table between us and the cops cut into his scrawny chest.