by Darren Greer
Goodie for Algernon.
7. Ted lied to his parents. He didn’t study harder once he had his own place. He hardly studied at all. Although he was okay at acting, he wasn’t the best in his class, not by a long shot. Ted was one of those pathetic guys who need to be the best at whatever they do before they can proceed. Which means they never proceed at anything.
Ted stopped going to classes, and even missed a couple of rehearsals. He lost one part because of this, kept on going to school in a half-assed way, and then dropped out. He didn’t tell his parents. He was having too good a time spending their money and inviting guys over for sex. He even did a bit of blow now and then, though mostly he stayed away from it.
“Too expensive, ya know,” he said. “And addictive. I’ve seen guys get really fucked up on that stuff.”
“Me too,” I said.
8. Ted kept up the charade of going to school for almost a year, till his parents called the school registrar and found out Ted had been removed from all the class lists for non-attendance. His father and his oldest brother drove to the city and got into a big argument with him in his apartment. There was a lot of screaming, and then Ted’s brother went into Ted’s room and started packing his stuff for him.
“You’re coming home,” his father told him. “If you’re not responsible enough to go to school, then you can come work as a teller in my bank. At least that will take some of the wildness out of you.”
9. Ted wanted to stay away from Three Rivers badly enough that he did what he never thought he would do. He told his father he was gay.
“You’re not,” his father said. “You’re just saying that so you don’t have to come home.”
Ted was just saying that so he wouldn’t have to go home. It was also true. To prove it he pushed his brother aside and dug out some pornographic magazines from the bottom drawer of his dresser. He threw them on the bed in front of his father, who stared at them, then looked back up at Ted.
“I always thought you were too good in that faggotty play,” his father said. His father was referring to his role as the dandy Algernon. Ted laughed. “You should have seen me as Stanley Kowalski.”
His father shouted for his brother and the two of them left. Ted’s mother called that evening and told him his father had agreed that he could come home and work at the bank.
“He says he can overlook that,” she said.
“Overlook what?” Ted replied.
“Your tendencies,” said his mother. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, Ted.”
“I do,” Ted said. “And I like my tendencies, thank you very much.”
10. Ted took a job as a waiter, quit acting, and settled down to a quiet life of booze, sex, and disco music. He still talked to his folks, and occasionally went home for a visit, but that was it. In all other ways, he was as cut loose as Darrel, June, Julie, Dean, and I.
11. I knew one other thing about Ted Williams. A thing that would have pleased Darrel Greene immensely had he known about it. Ted Williams was exactly what I go to gay bars on Christmas Day looking for.
He was a loser who didn’t know he was a loser.
CXCIX
Of course, I didn’t discover all of this right away. I had to ply him a little — buy him drinks and get him talking. But I was an old hand at getting people to spill in gay bars on Christmas Day, and after a few hours he had told me his whole life story.
Except he made no mention of Darrel Greene.
I made no mention of Darrel Greene either, though I had a feeling Ted would remember him if I did. He hadn’t seen Darrel for many, many years, but the incidents themselves would have been there.
Darrel had revealed his whole life to his counsellor. I wondered what Ted would say if he knew he was a hit after all. He figured fairly largely in someone’s life, at least — enough to be splayed all over the pages of a dead addict’s treatment file.
I didn’t know. I was too busy trying to get into Ted’s pants, because I still found him cute and I was getting drunk and horny. Hey, don’t look to me for moral guidance.
The difference between a loser who knows he’s a loser and one who doesn’t is not so much a matter of degree but perception. You can watch your house burn or you can be fast asleep and never know anything about it. Either way you die.
CC
Excerpted from
The Scar: The Three Rivers Stories
by Cameron Dodds
Ever since he had walked out of the school play, Ted Williams had hated my guts. Somehow, in his view of things it was me, not the humiliated Mr. Plant who had been most responsible for his loss of the part of the Narrator, and thus the frustration of his early acting ambitions. He eyed me with contempt whenever I passed him in the hallways, and called me Greene Snot and Faggot Boy and Fruit Fly and any other name that occurred to him on the spur of the moment. When I fell off my bike in Grade Seven and broke my arm, Williams caught me in the school hallway and wrote faggot on my cast with black marker. My father saw the written accusation, though I had done my best to hide it, and asked me who had done it.
“Ahh,” I said. “Some guys from school. They were just kidding.”
It was Saturday morning, and already my father had had a few more than was good for him. He stared across the kitchen from where he sat in front of his drink. June was still asleep. June always slept in until eleven or twelve o’clock on Saturdays. “You let ’em do it to you once,” said my father, already beginning to slur his words, “and they’ll always do it to you.”
“I know,” I said, avoiding his eye and shuttling my stocking
feet back and forth on the linoleum. “But they don’t mean anything by it.”
“Uh-uh,” said my father. “They mean plenty, writing something like that. And if you can’t stand up for yourself, maybe they’re right. Now you get in the bathroom and clean that off.” I did as I was told, though I ended up just taking another marker and marking up the word so no one could see it (something I should have thought of before my father noticed it). But when I went to school on Monday Ted held me down with a few of his friends and wrote it again, this time in red marker and in larger letters.
“Now this time, Greeney,” he said, “you leave it on there like a good boy.”
I left it on, afraid of what Ted would do to me if I didn’t. When I was home I hid the cast and the shameful brand from my father as best I could, and I wrapped my cast in a plastic shopping back when I was in school so no one could see. But whenever Ted came by, he would order me to rip the bag off and walk around with the word exposed.
“All you faggots should have casts,” he said. “Then we’d know who the cocksuckers were. Then we’d know where to go for some release.” He grabbed his cock through his jeans and rubbed himself. At the same time he reached his other hand out and pulled my head towards his groin, at the last minute pushing me roughly away. I fell down, hard, on my cast, and cried out. Ted and his friends laughed and walked away. I gathered myself, cradled my suddenly aching arm, and went off in the other direction. I do not remember feeling sorry for myself at these times. Kids who are picked on in school grow used to it very fast. I resented Ted, but not so much because he tortured me. I resented him because he was tall and handsome, because his parents had money and stature in Three Rivers where mine
had none. I resented him because deep inside where all the really gross stuff lives, I think I even loved him a little. Weird, huh?
CCI
Ted and I got shitfaced.
I mean bad.
We stayed at the disco bar for another half-an-hour and then hit the streets.
Some of the other bars had filled up by then and the music was thumping and the dance floors hopping. Ted bought some coke from a kid in a leather jacket and we did lines off the back of the toilet tank in a stall in the girls’ bathroom. Ted cut up the entire half-gram into eight thick lines and we snorted it all, four apiece.
“That’ll put the old horsepower back in the engine,�
�� Ted said and leaned across the toilet to kiss me.
I was too turned on by him, too drunk and high, to completely acknowledge who Ted reminded me of. His mannerisms, his way of speaking, kind of reminded me of my father. Darrel’s father.
Of course, the father in the Three River Stories was really my father. It was my father I was trying to get at, through Darrel’s memories.
I could hear Julie now: You liver-bellied, non-producing piece of contemptuous crap.
CCII
And that’s when everything really turned to shit.
Hallelujah!
CCIII
Excerpted from
The Scar: The Three Rivers Stories
by Cameron Dodds
I didn’t often take June downtown. It was too far for her to bike; she got pooped out less than halfway, though sometimes I did bike into town alone to go to the store or just hang out. But that morning my father had some errands to run. June had wanted to go too and my father said it was okay as long as I went with her.
“Take June for a walk,” he said. “Go out and blow the stink off.”
My father let us off on the left side of the Lahave, the furthest river to the east. June liked the Lahave. There was a path along it that she liked to walk, because the grasses were long and she could run through them and pretend she was a horsey. June loved horseys. Of course, I had to watch her. Given half the chance June would run right off into the river, which, though it wasn’t deep, was swift, even in August, and June couldn’t swim a lick.
I followed along behind her, herding her away from the water if she got too close. I kind of liked it that day. The sun was warm on my shoulders and back, dust motes and pollen danced in golden clouds around our heads. I caught a grasshopper for June and showed her how to cup it between her hands and let it make green jam, which I then had to stop her from eating.
“It’s shit, June,” I said. “It’s not really jam.”
June shouted “Yuck, Bubby!” and laughed and went screaming to the river to wash it off. I helped her, so she wouldn’t fall in. When June, inexpertly singing the theme from The Brady Brunch, raced away through the long grasses, I felt a burst of love so strong for her that it hurt and made me feel halfways like crying.
Then we saw Ted and his friends.
I don’t know what they were doing there. Smoking pot at the old mill, most likely. Everyone smoked pot at the old mill. And drank. And got laid there for the first time. It was one of those places all the kids know about and not one single parent does. It was set back along the riverbank, a match mill until the late eighteen hundreds, then a station to float logs until the big mill opened further up the river. It had all been torn down years ago. All that remained was a great flat millstone lying on its side by the riverbank — a grey, weather-beaten shack with two walls and a sagging roof and piles of rotting timber inside. A low stone wall ran parallel to the river and then into the ground; kids sat with their backs to the wall, shielded from the buildings and streets on the other side of town by the wall on one side and a hill overgrown with briars and alder bushes on the other. All of this sitting inconspicously almost directly underneath the high overarching bridge.
At the place where the three rivers meet.
Ted and his friends must have been there all along, because June and I had walked right up to the millstone and beside the wall before we saw them, or they saw us. We still probably would-n’t have noticed each other if June hadn’t been making so much goddamned noise. But June on a wild streak is hard to ignore. I saw one head pop up over the wall, then another. Pretty soon, four heads were looking over at us, worried perhaps we were somebody’s parents, or the cops. And it was then I saw, too late, that the last head belonged to Ted Williams.
He was across the wall in a flash, and his friends followed. June didn’t even see them. She was continuing on up the river, still singing, when Ted and his friends surrounded me.
“Gotcha,” said Ted.
“Where’s your cast, faggot?” another of the boys said.
“It’s off,” I said. “I gotta catch up with my sister.” It was then that June noticed I was no longer with her. I couldn’t see her, because one of Ted’s cronies was standing in front of me, looking down at me and blocking my view. But I could hear her.
“Bubby?” June called. “Bubby?” June sounded worried. Even June was smart enough to realize that four big guys standing around her brother at the old mill where you could party and fuck and scream your head off with no one to hear you wasn’t the best of situations.
“Coming, June!” I called, hoping not to sound as scared as I felt.
“Bubby?” said Ted, laughing. “Is that what the fucking retard calls you? Bubby?”
“Bubby?” June called.
“Bubby?” Ted mimicked, and the other guys joined in. Bubby. Bubby. Bubby.
“Go get her,” Ted said to one of his thugs.
“Don’t you hurt her!” I shouted suddenly. “Don’t you lay a hand on her.”
Ted grabbed me, swung me around quickly, and caught me in a head-lock, silencing me. “Oh yeah, Snot Boy? What ya going to do about it?”
One of the guys left, and returned a few minutes later herding June in front of him. Even in the situation I was amazed at how quickly June’s moods could change. Where a few minutes ago she was laughing and singing, now she was sobbing. Her hair was a mess, hanging down in front of her eyes, and a great stringer of snot was running from her nose onto her lip.
“Fucking gross,” said Ted.
“What do you want me to do with her?”
“Just make her watch,” Ted said. “She’s gonna watch her little brother do what he was born to do.”
Suddenly I knew what Ted had in mind. With the guys’ help, except for the boy who was holding June, they turned me around and forced me to my knees, so that my head was in front of Ted’s crotch. I could no longer see their faces. Ted pulled down his zipper, tried to draw my head forward. Even through his jeans I could see his cock was already half-hard. Even then I should have known.
“Suck it,” Ted demanded, pulling his cock all the way out of his pants. It was huge, and just like Ted himself: swollen and angry-looking.
“Please, Ted,” I pleaded.
I could hear my sister sobbing somewhere behind me.
“Jesus, Ted,” said one of the guys above me. “You really gonna let him do it?”
“Why not?” Ted said. “Gotta get off somehow. My girlfriend won’t do it. So why not the little faggot?”
“What if someone sees?” said another of the boys. He sounded nervous, and more than a little freaked out by what Ted was doing.
“Who’s gonna see?” said Ted. “And what does it matter?”
“Shit,” said another of the guys. “I ain’t no fucking faggot.”
“Neither am I,” said Ted. “This is the faggot. You’re not a faggot if you get your cock sucked. Only if you suck it, like little faggot boy here is about to do. Come on, faggot boy,” Ted said. “Get to work.”
But I refused. No matter how hard Ted pulled my head forward I fought him and held my neck stiff. No one said a word or made any attempt to help. Finally Ted said, “Listen, dude. You’re gonna do this. And if you don’t, we’re gonna throw your retard in the river.”
“She can’t swim,” I said, without thinking. Ted reached down, almost gingerly, put his hand under my chin, and lifted my head to meet his eyes.
His blue, blue eyes.
He was smiling, and right then I knew. I knew that Ted was exactly the same as I was. He sensed it in me. I sensed it in him. He sensed it in himself. And he hated me for it.
“Do it, little man,” he said softly, “or she goes in the fucking river and we’ll all say we saw her fall.”
So, for June, I did it. I won’t go into the gory details. June watched, still crying.
“Fuck,” Ted grunted finally, and came in my mouth.
When Ted let me go I fell on my face and vomited. Everyone
else just stood around, scared and embarrassed. Then Ted got the bright idea of carving something in my arm. It seemed intolerably cruel, even to the other guys with him.
“Come on, Ted,” they said. “He’s had enough.”
“No,” said Ted. “I want to make sure he doesn’t tell. And this will keep him from telling.” No one had a jackknife, but Ted found an old screw lying around in the mill, and the guys held me down while he did the dirty work.
“There,” he said when he was done, tossing the bloodied screw aside. “Now all you have to do to know what you are is look at your little tattoo.”
They left us.
Just like that.
There are some scars we bear the rest of our lives. There are some things you don’t forget. Not even June.
CCIV
And knowing all this I still took Ted home with me.
The two of us had sex all night.
In the morning Ted woke up first, kissed me, and I lifted my arms to reach for him.
“What’s this,” he said with a slight smile, leaning down to look at my left bicep. The way for a few weeks men had looked at the scratches Juxta had carved in my ass and asked me what happened.
“My cat doesn’t believe in a divine order,” I said.
Who the fuck does?
CCV
Ted left in a hurry. He didn’t even stay long enough to put on his clothes. He carried them with him and dressed in the hall.
“You could have told me. We could have talked about it,” he said. “You didn’t have to lie to me, Darrel.”
After he left I sat up in bed and looked at what had made Ted Williams, failed thespian and high-school jock, leave my apartment so suddenly.
Carved into the upper bicep of my left arm, faded but still visible as thin fish-belly-white scars, was a single word.
Faggot.