Savage

by Nathaniel G. Moore

  The beer store had set him free.

  One weekend in February 1997, Holly took the bus and visited me during a blizzard. I made a short film of us making tea and shovelling snow. Holly did her best to cover her face from my tabloid ascents. We didn’t really do anything but eat microwavable food and watch movies, and I do remember a yelling match one morning about the state of our family and Holly shouting at me about getting my shit together.

  "Well it must be nice to live at home all your life with mother margarine container as your personal chef and laundry slave!"

  "You sound so mad; why are you so angry? It’s like you go to this whole other plateau of—"

  "BECAUSE, HOL, JESUS! I feel trapped, cornered, a scalded dog, a dead slow-snake, a real monster, I dunno," I shouted in a booming action-film voice-over voice, "BECAUSE YOU only get three hundred opportunities to ruin your life forever!"

  "Please."

  "I don’t hate any of you. We just seem to want nothing to do with each other at a gut level, you know, the deal is done."

  Despite this glitch, things were OK, and we’d talk every few weeks after that on the phone. When Holly didn’t return my calls for a month in late spring, I called Dad, who just said something disposable like Holly was working a lot and taking a night-school class.

  In the summer, Holly finally visited again for the weekend. My friends wanted to go out for lunch, but Holly didn’t want to spend the money, nor did I, so we wandered in the hot parking lots while my friends ate lunch.

  Again, as had been the case in February, Holly moved her hands over her face whenever I tried to take a photograph or videotape her doing something like making food or reading the newspaper on the couch.

  On a glossy postcard depicting Waterloo’s bustling downtown core in winter on King Street between Weber and Jameson, I had scrawled the following:

  Q: Nate, what was it like retiring from being a teenager?

  A: YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT WALKING AWAY FROM SOMETHING YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT, AT A VERY YOUNG AGE.

  Thanks for throwing hot coffee on me as a teen pin-up boy waiting for his suicide shipments on the front porch. You scalded my self-esteem like a prince turning into a rodent covered in expired groceries...it would have made a great Miracle Whip commercial, you Nazi.

  Have a great boxing day

  Nancy

  After inserting the tape into the fragile video-camera jaw and sliding my hand underneath the grip to hit the red REC button, I heard the gears inside the belly and moved in front of its tiny red eye. I waited patiently for the auto-focus to come to its senses. (The cassette was labeled "WATERLOO 1997.") The red light went on; the tape began chewing up real time.

  The machine wheezed and gestated. I was at my kitchen table, head full of thumping pharmaceuticals as my early morning confessional began, sermon-like, an autopsy of my own living life. I turned the camera off and tidied up the evidence.

  Dad, hello father, here, I am at Camp Granada! Hello Dad listen, listen up! I’m not accusing you of anything anymore. I know I did, but your appearance in my powder-keg nightmares is just syndication, nothing more, a nifty balm of worry, 100-proof vodka, a dreg of anxious breath afterbirth still raw as war, as in war in the air of my own premastered edition of myself. You are a worno, you have worn down your financial memory, down to a thin hobo shoe cud and I can revisit you pure, in un-Glenvaled Technicolor. In old library MICROFICHE, counting the years from the headlines, the grainy headlines with their chewed rat corners, rat-chewed corners before you met Mom...so here I am now, Nate in the time of Holly, post-stigmata, the Menendez home work-out videotape exploding and snapping in its own juicy gears and all we have is the segregated grocery bills and the solo consumption as if nothing EMOTIONAL ever happened. I will be your father figure put your tiny hands in mine I will be the one that loves you Davey until the end of time. Your sister Rebecca gives me a homeless man’s shaving set last Christmas, so brief and cruel and glistening in a plastic cocoon of disposables—just like me, and your sister Becks saying "YOU’RE ALWAYS MOVING AROUND NATE, SO I THOUGHT IT’D BE PERFECT FOR YOU, YOU BUM!" and I’m not supposed to do anything but put down my ginger ale and ice and calmly start shaving while repeating THANK YOU AUNT BECS THANKS THANKS BECKY BABY all the while knowing she got it free with her REAL pharma purchases? Oh BECKY I’M YOUR LONG LOST DAUGHTER NANCY PROM QUEEN so be proud of me, I’m a doctor I’m a lawyer I’m doing my masters at HOOKER SCHOOL!

  Every day congealed. Each morning when I woke from my pharmacy sleep, I awoke with a sliver of hope, as though this could be the day I made sense and everyone would understand what I said at the grocery store or over the phone and that somehow the abstract white noise filling my brain night and day would subside, like a bad techno song played on repeat, the cassette finally giving up, spooling out into a complex warranty suicide.

  When the ’90s finally folded, Holly took more classes to hone her business skills and become more desirable in the workforce. She travelled, snow boarded, started seeing a graphic designer and lived at "home" with Mom while I waffled in and out of contact with them both and became increasingly obscured through medication, missives and bouts of energy deprivation and acceleration. My weight yo-yoed, as did my appetite and overall economy.

  Sometimes I would spend weekends in hospital. The pills would be reassigned, the prescription stapled to my sleeve and I’d be sent back through the electronic door into the hollering city. The side effects would always turn me into a mute zombie or twitchy wretch. Once or twice, I woke up with the billowing screen door crashing back and forth, having fallen asleep unaware I’d temporarily expired for the night.

  "They make me so nuts," I’d tell Mom live or over the phone. "I can’t take them anymore, I feel these undulations, a pulsing wave in my arms and legs."

  "Well, why don’t you talk to your doctor about it?"

  "He’s an idiot."

  Or to Holly from a payphone, "I hate those doctors...they just hand me prescriptions, expect me to remember every pill I’ve ever taken over the past six years, and to know my every mood for every single fucking minute of my life. Like I’m an expert on me. Fuck them. Darkness is cheaper."

  I became elusive as the new millennium began, my bitterness rose to the surface in the form of callous Christmas cards: sardonic, as if penned by a bottom-hitting child star, unable to come to terms with reality, abject mail art that charmed no one, stylized in the form of psychotic family newsletters, which Holly, Mom and Dad all received separately, dismissed and recycled.

  ...You’ll all have to kill me to be finished with me! I’m so sick of this I live in squalor, and no one does a goddamn thing about it, just take your fucked-up pills and live in garbage, live beside a funeral home and wait for an opening to come up and crawl inside a coffin and just die, die, die, that’s what you want isn’t it? There’s just so much God damned injustice in this family and no one does a Goddamn thing about it! It just didn’t start here you know, this goes back six or seven years when you all started to gang up on me, and put a price on my life. Which was zero dollars! I do apologize though to all my fans, those who watched me deliver my paper route, those who watched me chew gum and ride my bike, and tried my best to defend the honour of this family, those who witnessed me try to be the hero, try to do what is right, to take a coward like David and show him what he did, when I held the mirror up to him and knocked him down in the ground after he ran his mouth about how you Diane would NEVER get the house, what happens when we get back in town, after our little Kingston street fight? You all sympathize with him, and suddenly I’m a bad guy. It didn’t just start right here. It didn’t just start right now, this very second, me on medication all insane and angry, this goes back years! So to you, Diane, Holly and David, I apologize for nothing. So I thought I’d see what happened. I played it cool. Then, a few months later, David out of nowhere, attacks me for no reason. After I tried to clean up this family, he took it upon himself to strangle me and shove me all over the
living room just hours before my first real girlfriend was on her way to spend the weekend. Then I have to make a decision about school, there is paperwork, loans and other things that I have to worry about all summer, I don’t know if I can afford to return to university, and if I do, where I’ll be living. But my insanity colours could not be tamed or washed out of the rinse cycle. Everything is so Goddam uncertain and suddenly old David is talking about how he has to go back to school to get his dead man diploma. And that I need to back off, to get a job. To concentrate on school. To keep busy. So I get a job, but it turns out to be a scam. Then I get another job at Jumbo Video, part-time. Fine, I’m working. I come home one night after work and you guys are sitting around the table planning a vacation without me. Some sort of family time share. Fine, I say, count me out, that’s great. I try to figure out what is going on, I’m staring at the OSAP forms, the line where you put your address, all that information about what your parents make, their income, where you’ll be living, and the situation. I have no idea what is happening because no one is talking to me, you’re all too busy conspiring behind my back for better deals with other organizations. A better man would have quit, but I stayed I stayed through the summer. I tried to understand what was happening to me, I saw my friend’s therapist. You even gave me one of your antidepressants, my friends were like, "Those take weeks to work, Nate, one pill isn’t going to do anything." I don’t understand what is happening to me...you see me as just a fucked up person...anyway I am in no position to speak, I have no votes. It’s just me on this phone in these insane emails and whatever, all day 365 days a year...

  Persecuted manifesto sprung out in hostile blue-ink tributaries, garnering no acclaim from their readers, just exacerbating my toxic sense of betrayal. "Hey, Hol. I keep having the same dream. It’s always the same exact time: a few weeks before we sold the house, and I’m in my room, looking at all my stuff and wondering what the fuck I’m going to do with it all, and like, where am I going to go, in a constant looping panic. All I know is that I have to move, then I wake up."

  Holly replied: "Here’s my last message, since you don’t want a barrage, I understand, OK, Nate? I know that you have emotional pain and that you’ve tried lots of ways of dealing with it. I’ll support the small steps that you take towards letting go of wounds, loving yourself, and relying upon yourself to not allow yourself or other people to victimize you. I’ll support you because you’re my brother."

  I had mortgaged my youth, gnawed on pills and on depression and pushed everyone to the horrifying edge. I got drunk and photocopied a nightmare doctor’s note, remixing the end with self-cruel parody.

  You were initially seen in the mood disorder clinic by DR. R. GUSKOV in November 1994. Your initial diagnosis was bipolar disorder, depressed phase. Since that time you have been treated with lithium carbo I, approximately 1200 mg per day, augmented by either a low dose of antipsychotic agents or antidepressants. Mood swings, accompanied by occasional paranoid ideation, has impaired your social functioning and school performance. Your most recent medications are lithium, 1200 mg at bedtime, and desipramine, 100 mg at bedtime. You will hopefully die soon.

  Sincerely, Dr. Shane McMahon-Hemsley

  *

  You need sleep, Nate? How about you whip out your founding father of Emo Han Solo drag Polaroids? Or your savoury middle-class and white box-bedroom rebel-teen-cutter forearm scars, or your cool imitations of dead goaltender Jacques Plante, complete with a makeshift antique goalie mask and spackles of dirty Madison Square Garden blood? Do you think some girl, well, you know, that she’d like, go for that? You wonder all this now while you bask away in a manger, thinking of you and Andrew and his cousin playing the three wise man circa December 198_?, Northlea United Church for the Christmas pageant. You were Doctor Frankincense.

  18 )

  Vanishing Point

  March 2002–June 2003

  My Tuesday night had been uneven, tossing and turning after a long close-shift at work—a Montreal phone centre entombed with hundreds of computerized phones similar to those used in any number of 1980s paranoia war movies. "The people we call can’t see us," I explained to my supervisor, as I quizzed strangers nation-wide about their consumer habits on things like candles and the number of times they went on vacation, rented movies or played charades.

  Wind kept coming through the window, mainly because I had to leave it open for Jimmy, the three-month-old kitten with (mostly) white and grey fur we adopted and who now lived and breathed with me, causing my roommates, who shared in his cost of living, to be jealous and suspicious I was bribing the animal with various procured meats. I couldn’t imagine another year stockpiling morbid VHS footage of me and my life dregs. As I fell asleep that night, I dug and I plotted my ending: walking from a highway road, fifty feet deep in the forest, rocks and soil would be placed on a large plastic drop sheet. Then I’d dig a big hole large enough for me to lie in and then I’d just pull the sheet and be buried alive. This weekend was Wrestlemania X8 in Toronto at SkyDome and I had my ticket. I was staying with Tabitha our first sleepover and our first real date.

  I was now living in Montreal, having saved up enough money for a single semester of university in an attempt to see if I could do something from start to finish, even if it was only for four months.

  "You are a brute," the soft voice said into the phone. "I’m wearing a pink dress my friend Jen made me." This was how it began with Tabitha, a voluptuous, dusty, vegan-muffin-baking stoner barista from England.

  I mumbled a sound. "Jesus Christ! You’re not about to make yourself vulnerable!"

  I had no idea what Tabitha was talking about, but assumed it had something to do with who she thought I was. We had been talking on a daily basis for nearly two months now, ever since I moved to Montreal for school in January. We had an attraction to one another that we never discussed, dating back to a party she had taken me to in Toronto on New Year’s Eve where I left after seeing people doing cocaine.

  I was re-reading something she wrote me last month. The stoned speech is highlighted here:

  You can think of homo porn, but girlies are mommies to be sugarcoated and fattened and baby-pictured up for your future home but boys are the Eros in your heart cruciform. You can’t even dream of throwing me around the office unless I have a cock...Nate, did you know I was thinking about you and Roger Rabbit and Walt Whitman. I want to be your fag fairy, let me help you, like you help me. Maybe one day we’ll live together and you’ll be dating hot boys and so will I and we’ll be sucking cock for art and baking vegan brownies at home. Anything is possible; it’s all about differentiating your desire. Face it, Nate, you’re not into girls. Go out and explore your sexuality now, don’t trade passion for security because you don’t want to be rejected by your mother. I think you’re being lazy. I’ll still be your friend; I’ll be your bestest friend, but I want to be with someone who’s into femmes. A gay boy can’t objectify women even if he can have sex with them. Don’t pretend that wanting a wife makes you straight; having a wife is, weirdly, a Christmas wish list numero uno for homos. Home alone, homos, it’s all so Freudian.

  Tabitha and I hadn’t had sex yet, or kissed, though she did take my hand and place it on her lacy blouse one night in December and squeezed it next to her breasts. This back-and-forth filled our days apart, screaming at one another on the phone about desire and fantasy, only to end with laughter or confessions about degrading fantasies, mostly involving her. "I love it when you said you had that dream of me trying to get out of the pool on a ladder and you kept pushing me back under water," Tabitha gushed into the receiver. She called me that night at eight-thirty. "Nate, it’s so cold tonight! I am wearing two sweaters."

  I heard the faint beat of techno playing in the background. Tabitha had a stack of cassettes she’d play on an old crusty boom box in her bedroom that made warbled, hissing sounds.

  "I know. I keep reheating this soup. It’s so cold here too!"

  "I was thinking about y
ou today; if you accepted being more curvy, feminine and emotional, you’d feel less like it made you weak and you’d feel more like your real self."

  "Yeah, that’s true. I think a lot of it is in my head."

  "Lots of people are blind or have heart troubles or asthma; that doesn’t make them idiots. You do have to do some work on your self-realization and health, but in essence, I do not think you are a wimp."

  "Thanks."

  "It could be also that you are lonely and you aren’t giving yourself the chance to feel good about being alone. But do you have any friends in Montreal? I can’t believe you’re coming here this weekend!"

  "Sort of, from class, I guess. But it’s hard. Yeah, I know, I’m so excited to see you."

  "I’d love to be a woman you have over," Tabitha said. "And make out in your room."

  I was silent. Tabitha continued, "You can be the dude-jock archetype, and I’ll be your adoring Barbie; we’ll do performance art in the living room, where you talk bullshit for hours and I gaze up at you like a melting chocolate lab puppy."

  She kept going, her voice making me see tinsel and soft pink sweaters and—

  "We’ll have really loud sex, and the next morning you can look busy and preoccupied while I sit on the couch all teary and dejected. That’s what our relationship might turn into anyway."

  "Maybe, if you’re good," I said. "Maybe you’re a psychic witch," I said.

  "Oh yes. Do you know that you have a dark, sexy look that also goes a bit decadent, Rasputin, at times? As though you’ve been drinking absinthe in a brothel since you were four; except, when you really were four, you looked like, I don’t know, a 1960s game-show host—you had this all-American-entertainment boy’s club thing going on, like you could have been born with a cigar in your mouth and left the hospital to go fishing. Then you turned into this mercurial magician. You became very animated and you still knew show business, but you’d taken acid and you were now on a psychedelic, shaman journey, which is where you got your mask. It’s cool, because I have two swords, and all the boys in Japanimation have masks and split identities. That’s why I thought you’d like that Japanese novel Confessions of a Mask, though it was at a time I did truly think you were gay. But you don’t have to cut your head off like he did. It must be some boy mythology mysticism, because just think of cowboys and the Lone Ranger and highwaymen and Batman. You said about Batman, ‘He’s the only superhero who is self-conscious.’"