by Mark Critch
“ComeOnNow,” my mother said, grabbing my hand and making a break for it. “Let’sGetTheHellOutOfHereNow.” Across the street I could see the little girl from before, still being pulled along by her mother. She was almost parallel to the sidewalk, like a flag flapping in the breeze. I studied her as I, too, fluttered behind my mother. The little girl didn’t look any different. Would she be cured now from whatever ailed her, too? Would she be forever safe, the way we were in our car as long as we had a plastic Virgin Mary stuck to the dashboard?
Mom opened the car door and I inhaled another lungful of smoke as the output from twenty minutes’ worth of Rothman’s escaped the vehicle. Mom started the engine and backed out of her improvised parking spot, inciting many a drenched passerby to bang on the sides of the Chev. The old man couldn’t believe our luck. There wasn’t another car on the road. We’d beat the traffic.
I noticed that people were waving at us in the same way they’d been waving at the Pope. Did they think this was the Popemobile? No. They weren’t waving, they were waving us off: we were going the wrong way. I could see the outline of a barricade and an army truck ahead. The road had been closed. Once the Pope had arrived they’d locked down the perimeter and the area around the Basilica had become a secure site. Our car was the only thing moving.
“Mom!” I shouted. “Stop the car! The road is closed!”
“Good God, Mary,” the old man exclaimed. “You’re going to get us shot.” He punctuated his statement by pressing a butt into the triangular mound of its fallen comrades atop the overflowing ashtray. Then he lit another. Mom did not stop. She accelerated. The interior of the car flicked from red to blue as we heard the distinctive wail of a police siren. Mounties were chasing us as we sped toward a military checkpoint on a closed road. This was not how I’d thought my night of Pope watching would end.
“QuickMark! LieDownOnTheSeatAndStartWheezing,” Mom commanded as she ran out of asphalt and brought the car to a screeching halt.
“Why would I—”
“JustLieDownAndActSick!” she shouted as a soldier shone his flashlight into our car and motioned for her to roll down the window. Mom did as she was instructed and the soldier disappeared in a cloud of my father’s secondhand smoke.
“This road is closed, ma’am. Licence and registration,” he said in an accent that used all the letters in each word. This man was not from around here.
“NeverYouMindThat,” my mother squawked in a tone he’d last heard from his drill sergeant. “MySonIsSickAndHe’sAfterHavingAnAsthmaAttackBecauseThatFoolishOldPopeIsAfterDraggingAllHandsDownHereInTheFreezingColdRain! It’sShockingIsWhatItIsAndYou’llBeLuckyIfIDon’tSueHimAndAllOfYouCrowdAlongWithHim!”
I was beginning to see my mother’s ruse, and so I dropped to the seat and began to wheeze like a set of broken bagpipes just as the soldier’s flashlight hit me. The spotlight was on and I gave an Oscar-worthy performance. The old man even stubbed out his smoke. “He’s got asthma,” Dad added, not lying.
“Oh,” the soldier blurted. I realized then that he hadn’t understood a single word my mother had said.
“He’sGotSeizuresToo,” Mom threw in for good measure. I wasn’t sure whether I should start to convulse.
“Scissors…?” the soldier asked. “Do you want me to take them from him or—”
“NotScissors! Seizures,B’y! MyGodAlmighty! MoveThatBloodyThingOrI’llRunItOver! HeNeedsToGetHomeToGetHisInhaler,YouBloodyIdiot!”
A cop had now joined the soldier, adding a second flashlight beam to my huffing and puffing, quivering form.
“You better lift that barricade,” the cop exclaimed. “That boy looks like he’s dying.”
“Let them through!” the soldier shouted. Two other members of the Canadian Army lifted the wooden barrier, clearing our path to freedom.
The soldier spoke into his walkie-talkie. “I’ve got a family in a silver Chevrolet coming through with a medical emergency. Let them through all the checkpoints. I repeat: a very sick child needs medical attention. Wave them through.”
“He’s going to need to go to a hospital. I’ll go on ahead,” the cop added, and soon the red and blue flashing lights moved from behind our car to in front of it. His siren wailed as we sped through the downtown streets, and at each checkpoint the roadblocks lifted as soon as we came into sight. I even saw one soldier bless himself as we zoomed past.
As soon as we were outside the perimeter my mother turned off onto a side street, leaving our police escort to speed onward through the city, alone.
I’d been fake wheezing so hard that I started to feel a real asthma attack coming on. I had to spend the rest of the night leaning over a bowl of boiling water with a towel over my head. The steam loosened my lungs as my face boiled from the heat.
I hadn’t been cured, but I’d seen His Holiness. And although I’d gone hoping to be wowed by the Bishop of Rome, I’d come home more impressed by my mother. She could not be tamed. She would not be stopped. She had taken on the Canadian Army and stolen the Pope’s police escort. God helps those who help themselves. I did not need to be cured. My weakness had been our strength, and my mother had shown me that laughter wasn’t the best medicine. Adventure was.
9
SLACK
SOMETIME AROUND GRADE six, I developed an addiction. It wasn’t to cigarettes or alcohol. Those were common vices. I was more discerning. Nor was it to something illicit: the island’s opium dens had long been shuttered, and unlike Sherlock Holmes, I couldn’t take a seven percent cocaine solution; my math wasn’t good enough. I was jonesing for something stronger. I needed my daily fix.
I was hooked on the smell of ink from the mimeograph machine, and I’d do anything to keep that monkey off my back. For those of you who missed the 80s, there was a time before laser jet printers and Xerox photocopiers when the mimeograph was used in schools as a cheap printing press. It worked by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper. A carbon paper copy was reproduced in a smudgy purple ink with a smell that, when properly inhaled, would give you a slight buzz. I’d sit at the back of class sniffing a freshly copied sheet of paper as if I were Tony Montana snorting a mountain of coke at his desk.
It didn’t matter how I got my fix. I wasn’t proud. It could be a pop quiz, an exam, a multiple-choice review sheet. Other kids groaned whenever the teacher announced a test; I lived for them. I’d sniff the sheet before I ever read a word on it. I couldn’t get it up my nose fast enough. You had to get the paper as soon as humanly possible because once the ink had dried the scent faded, and what could have been an exhilarating high would provide barely enough of a bouquet to give you a headache.
The more I sniffed, the deeper I slipped into the abyss. Like a lot of guys, I started off with mimeographed test paper. Soon I was sniffing whatever I could get my hands on. Scented pencils, scented erasers, Play-Doh: it didn’t matter. I could go through a whole roll of smelly stickers in a single recess. “Berry Good!” “Grape Stuff!” A banana sticker that said “You’re Appealing!” I didn’t care what the scent was or where the sticker was stuck. I’d scratch it until I’d worn my nails down to the cuticles.
Scratch-and-sniff stickers were doled out in class for a job well done, so I signed on as the teacher’s narc to get closer to her roll of my perfectly perfumed obsession. I was a stoolie, an informant for Mrs. Brenton, my new homeroom teacher. She wasn’t a nun, but she could be just as intimidating. Sure, she could be motherly and kind, but she took no prisoners and could see right through you. I tried to stay so close to her that she never got a good look at me. Besides, she always smelled good, as if she were the sole survivor of an explosion at the Sears perfume counter. Come to think of it, maybe I was hooked on her Chanel No. 4 1/2, too. “Sweet Mark?” she
would think. “He couldn’t possibly be an addict.” I wasn’t proud of it, but I had an itch that needed scratching—and sniffing. I knew the other kids were quietly judging me for judging them, and I resented them for it. I got moody and bitter and I took it out on the class.
Mrs. Brenton would leave the room for a moment, saying, “I expect grade six boys and girls to act like grade sixes. If anyone talks while I’m out of the classroom, Mark will write down their name on the blackboard.” I’d sit and wait, eyeing the room like a warden. Usually someone would make a face at someone else to make them laugh. That’s when I would strike. I’d go to the board and write down a name.
Gary Perry.
“Hey! What did you do that for?”
“For talking.”
“But I never talked. I only laughed,” the ticketed citizen would argue. While that may have been true on some level, I viewed laughter as a validation of external stimuli offered by another person. Laughter is the physiological response to humour. What is call-and-response if not a conversation? A laugh is no less a sign of communication than saying “I agree.” And is inciting laughter in another person any less a way to start a conversation than saying “How do you do”? Therefore, the person who made the face, though silent, is communicating as well. It’s wasn’t just the laugher who’d broken the law, it was the face maker, too. Another name down!
Harold Burke.
And so it would go. Soon, someone else might say, “That’s not fair. They didn’t do anything wrong!”
Tammy Burke.
Or someone might say, “You’re crazy. You’re not the teacher. You need a smack in the head.”
Fox.
By the time Mrs. Brenton came back, not five minutes later, the class would be in full revolt and thirty names would be written on the blackboard. Clearly I was in the right. She could hear them all the way down the hallway, and they weren’t just talking, they were shouting. Now, if Mrs. Brenton had been able to tune out the roar and into one voice at a time, she’d have known that all they were doing was calling for my head. If it weren’t for my totalitarianism, there’d be nothing to talk about. As it was, the writing was on the wall—or rather the blackboard. They’d be punished and I’d get my smelly stickers.
This did not do me any favours in the popularity department. As an informant, I was labelled a teacher’s pet. I’d get to wash down the chalkboard and clean the erasers by banging them together to create a giant chalk-dust cloud. To some, this was a punishment. To me, a prize worth dying for. It placed me where I deserved to be: in front of the class, right under the crucifix like a chalk-dusted God. I could do no wrong. I was untouchable. But when lunchtime came I was all alone in the world. No one to chat with, no lunch item to swap. For the first time in my academic career, I was forced to eat my entire lunch as my mother had made it. No tradesies.
Surprisingly, one day Fox came over to sit with me in the cafeteria. Although I was suspicious, I welcomed the company. I’d ratted him out for talking in class, but if anyone would forgive and forget, it was Fox. He was always in trouble anyway, so being caught talking was nothing. Telling on Fox was like telling a prisoner on death row not to run in the halls on his way to the chair.
Mr. Abbott was on duty. He was a nice guy who wore his hair slicked over to one side in such a perfect way that several of the lads figured he wore a toupée. As a result no student had ever looked him in the eye. Our gaze crept forever upward to the shellacked follicles that crowned his forehead like the lid of a Tupperware container. My own eyes were locked in careful study of the back of Mr. Abbott’s head, looking for a label, when Fox spoke up, breaking the spell.
“What kind of sandwich you got?” The question hung in the air for a moment as I did the math. Was there some snotty answer he’d give when I said ham? Would he announce it to the rest of the cafeteria and make me look like a fool for eating that particular type of sandwich? He, too, had a sandwich, so sandwiches themselves hadn’t fallen out of favour; still though, it smelled like a trap. I decided to roll the dice.
“Ham.”
Fox just looked at me, smiling and nodding. Not having anything to add to the conversation, I bit into my sandwich. The sliced ham seemed tougher than usual, so tough that I couldn’t quite bite through it. He stared at me wide-eyed as I tried again and again. Finally I pulled with my teeth like a dog trying to wrestle away a bone. Out came a long piece of rubber.
The entire cafeteria erupted. Fox could barely hold himself together. “That’s not a ham sandwich,” he shouted to the room, finger pointed at his victim. “That’s a condom sandwich!”
I had no idea what a condom was. Not only had I never seen one, I’d never even heard of one. I tasted a condom before I ever knew what it was for. I sat there puzzled, a long translucent snake hanging from my teeth. I felt like I was having a dream where I’d come to school naked and only realized it when I was standing in front of the class and everyone began to laugh. Table after table of kids, from kindergarten to grade nine, howled and pointed. Even those younger than me seemed to know what a condom was.
Mr. Abbott made a beeline for the cause of the uproar. He pulled the prophylactic from my mouth, which I can only imagine wasn’t something he’d expected to do when he left the house that morning. He held it up to the light to confirm his fears. The length of the shaft was covered in mayonnaise, giving it a “used” appearance that was lost on me. He tossed it back down on the table and said, “Eat it, b’y. It’s good for you.” It’s one thing to be bullied by your classmates, but it takes a special kind of nerd to get laughed at by your teacher.
The second half of lunch was spent in our classroom (weather dependent). I watched the other kids chatting and playing and wondered if I’d chosen the right path. These kids had been my playmates. Now they were my classmates. In another few years they’d become my colleagues. Yes, I was getting attention and an easy ride as a teacher’s pet. But next year I’d have a different teacher, and all the groundwork I’d laid would be for naught. I’d have to begin anew. Would another teacher find me as charming? What if it was a nun? They’d taken a vow of poverty; surely they didn’t get many rolls of smelly stickers. What if we had Mr. Abbott? He’d just told me to eat a condom. Bad start.
Two of the boys I’d written up earlier opened a window at the far side of the room. Regulations were that the opening and closing of windows was the domain of teachers, so this was an actionable offence. My natural instinct was to write down the names of the offenders, but I figured it best to let it slide. Then they did something that seemed to dare me to tell on them. Gary climbed up on the radiator and then out through the window and onto the ledge. We were on the fourth floor of the school, and now this grade six boy was standing on the other side of the glass. The ledge was part of the roof of the school’s lower section; if our classroom were a French restaurant, you might have even put a table out there to make a terrace with a view. But it wasn’t a French restaurant, and this was no place to enjoy views or life. This was a Catholic school. The other students applauded his bravado and his cousin Kevin demanded a turn.
Gary climbed back into the safety of the classroom and boosted up his cousin, who repeated the stunt. Then Kevin climbed back in. “You want to go next, Mark?” Gary asked. Every face in the room looked to me. If there were ever a chance to redeem myself for eating a condom in front of the entire school, this was it. And two of the other boys had done it; it couldn’t be that bad. They’d been outside for only seconds at most. I stood up and walked toward the open window, feeling my knees buckle slightly.
The room that had moments ago echoed with celebratory shouts for Gary and Kevin had grown eerily quiet. Would this condom-chewing tattletale have the guts to climb out? He would. I put one foot up onto the radiator and slipped the other out onto the red-brick ledge. One hand gripped the window jamb as my head passed into the great wide open. I could feel the wind on my face as I reminded myself not to look down. My right foot followed, as did my right hand
. I was outside, looking in at the familiar sights of my classroom as I’d never seen them before. I looked down at Gary as he howled with delight. I’d never seen him smile so widely. I was back! I was one of the boys! I had shed the skin of the tattletale and written my own tale to be tattled.
Gary was still smiling when he shut the window, trapping me outside. The boys high-fived and embraced. Their plan had been a success. I tried to laugh, too. “Good one, b’ys,” I chuckled. “Ya got me that time. Open the window now.” They ignored me as they continued to celebrate with a toast, thunking their juice boxes together. “Guys?” I knocked on the glass.
Gary and Kevin shared a look that seemed to say I’d been tortured enough. They’d started to make their way back to me when the girl in the desk closest to the door shouted, “Teacher!” The on-duty teacher was approaching to check in on our class. Calling out “Teacher” had the same effect as shouting “Incoming!” during a war. The kids scattered, including Gary and Kevin, who dove for their desks. I was four storeys in the air, behind a pane of glass, with a teacher headed right for me. I rapped on the windowpane with panicked fury. Gary shook his head and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “What can I do?”
What he could do was the obvious. “Open the window!” I shouted. But Gary had done the math and he figured there just wasn’t enough time to save me and make it back to his seat before the teacher came.
“Hide,” he mouthed. This was terrible advice. The only thing between the classroom and me was a wall with six identical windows.
“He’s coming!” the lookout shouted, and everyone settled into their spots, lifting books and pencils to emulate regular kids and not Lord of the Flies characters who’d just sent Piggy to his death. I’d have to save myself. I began to inch to the left. Getting in off the ledge was paramount to my survival, but being discovered playing Spider-Man by a teacher at a Catholic school was equivalent to a death sentence. I shimmied from window to window, shuffling toward the salvation of the bricked break between the next classroom and ours.