by Susan Juby
He bounded over the second I sidled into the smoking area, which I did only because I didn’t think I could survive the morning without a smoke.
“Hey!” he nearly bellowed. And I was certain he was going to go for another kiss. So I took a step back and said, somewhat less than diplomatically, “I don’t want to go out with you.”
“WHAAAA?” said Hank, stopping mid-leap like a startled water buffalo.
“Sorry,” I said, my gaze skittering from side to side, taking in the fascinated smoking area onlookers.
It took Hank a minute or two to realize what was happening, but once he did, he also grasped that he’d just been dumped in front of a crowd and that was not cool. Not cool at all.
“Why?” he said, his chin jutting into my airspace.
My hands shook as I lit my cigarette. “I just can’t go out with you,” I said, my voice trembling a little to go with the fluttery hands.
“Who do you think you are?” demanded Hank.
“Who do you think you are?” I retorted. I was tired of being scared of Hank, and my fear was starting to harden into anger.
“You get out of here,” he said, gesturing around the butt-strewn patch of concrete that constituted the smoking area. “This is my territory.”
“Why? Did you piss on it?”
I’m not sure whether Hank was familiar with the animal behaviour concept to which I was alluding. But he knew an insult when he heard one.
“Bitch,” he said. “Whore.”
“Asshole,” I muttered. “Prick.”
Then, with weak legs, I removed myself from the scene, leaving mouths hanging open all over the butt patch.
It soon became clear that I’d made a serious strategic error by crossing Hank so publicly. I hadn’t noticed before, but quite a few of the wild ones were, at heart, conservative. Many of the girls let the boys take the lead in all things but shoplifting. In a mixed group, the majority of the jokes were told by boys, even though the girls were funnier and more interesting. Some of the toughest, sassiest, and most violent girls acted like docile little waifs around their boyfriends. I might have had terrifically low self-esteem and been afraid of boys, but I didn’t think they were worthy of unquestioned respect.
And I’d apparently let that particular cat out of the bag in a flagrant display of ill temper.
It turned out the cure for uppity, a.k.a. conceited, girls who weren’t grateful for a perfectly good (if dim-witted) boy was a good beat down, to be administered by the other girls.
Around this time a couple of the wildest girls were testing the limits of their power by getting into harder drugs and hanging out with ever-dodgier people. Darcy and Tara, one of the ringleaders of the wild ones, had apparently started doing a lot of acid and mushrooms, which we called “shrooms” because we were cool like that. They were also rumoured to be hanging out with much older guys, who in turn hung around second-string bikers. Tara and Darcy hadn’t just jumped the tracks. They’d launched themselves into outer space. God only knows what was going on in their lives that they got so out of control so quickly, but by the second week of high school, they’d started terrorizing people at random. One day the smallest girl in the school, a tiny person with a hat-like head of hair, had the temerity to look at them. They followed her outside at lunch and slapped her around. Needless to say, it wasn’t much of a contest and the girl was left scratched and weeping.
When her equally petite mom came to get her, Darcy and Tara went after her, too. It was surreal to see a mother scurrying away from ninth graders, at once unsettling and exciting. All the rules of the universe had been upended. Here was proof that chaos reigned in high school.
During Darcy and Tara’s first episodes of indiscriminate violence I maintained a level of detachment, partly due to shell shock at finding myself in high school and partly because I was focused on getting rid of Hank. My detachment lasted exactly until I dumped Hank and became Darcy and Tara’s next target.
It was as though I’d never met either of them before, even though we’d been drinking and hanging out together for years.
“Tara’s looking for you. She says she’s going to kick your ass,” reported a girl named Pam, whose locker was next to mine.
I had been about to head to the smoking area.
“Why?” I blurted. “What did I do?”
“Her and Darcy say it wasn’t cool what you did to Hank,” said Pam, shaking her head sadly. Pam was the official bearer of bad news.
A few of the other girls who’d gathered around us nodded in agreement with the verdict.
“Not cool. Not cool at all,” they said.
And that was it. I’d gone from marginally acceptable to full-scale pariah in less than two hours. Damn that Hank.
The only reason Tara and Darcy hadn’t been kicked out of school yet is that they hadn’t been caught. They didn’t go to classes. They just showed up, wasted, at breaks and beat the crap out of anyone who got in their way. And now they were after me. No one was going to save me or stick up for me. I knew that instinctively. It was like I’d just been targeted by Stalin’s secret police: everyone was paranoid that if they got in the way, they’d be next. Charmagne, Brenda, and Nan and every other friend and acquaintance I had melted away.
I was already an abnormally fearful person. Being out in public while sober was hard. Being at school, surrounded by my peers, many of whom I found terrifying, was worse. I couldn’t drink at school because I couldn’t hide it like some people could, and I wasn’t ready to quit or do something to get kicked out permanently (although the odd suspension was fine). Now, all my unnamed anxiety was taking on a face and an identity. I had something to be scared of and I was up to the job.
After Pam delivered the news, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t hide in a washroom. Tara and Darcy were big on washrooms. Instead I went out a side door to smoke in relative safety. I couldn’t control my breathing. The feeling of being in a waking nightmare was as bad as any hangover I’d yet experienced.
I congratulated myself on surviving the break and was just about to slip through the side door and head to class when Tara materialized from around the corner.
“Where do you think you’re going?” she asked.
“Nowhere,” I said.
The funny thing was that I felt almost no surprise that this girl had gone from acquaintance to attacker in such a short time and without any real discussion. Since I’d started drinking, and maybe even before, I’d begun to feel that human relations teetered on the verge of violence all the time. This experience only confirmed it. Getting wasted together didn’t constitute undying loyalty.
I can’t remember what else Tara and Darcy said. What I do remember is that when Tara reached out to slap me, I tried to block her hand, but she was too fast. It was like getting stung by a bionic wasp. Sugar Ray Leonard on PCP.
Slap! My head snapped back.
Slap! My head snapped to the side.
Ring! The bell signalled the end of the break, and when I opened my eyes I saw that we were surrounded by people.
I held a hand to my stinging face in amazement.
“That’s a taste of what you’re going to get at lunch,” said Tara.
Then she and Darcy melted away before some teacher could come along and officially suspend them.
A taste. Dear god, what would a whole meal be like?
I didn’t know what to do.
If I’d been different, if I’d thought adults could help or would want to, maybe I’d have tried to talk to one. If I’d been even a little bit outraged at this sudden, terrifying turn of events, maybe I’d have tried to do something other than allow the nightmare to unfold in slow motion. But some part of me felt like I deserved it. My drinking had already chipped away at my self-esteem enough that I felt like a beating was even overdue. This is what happened to girls who drank too much. This is what happened to people who were bad news. I wandered from class to class like a shell-shocked prisoner on a forced march u
ntil lunch.
When the bell rang, I stayed in my seat until everyone else had gone, including the two or three wild ones who were also in Social Studies with me.
“Let’s go,” said the teacher. “I’ve got to close up the room.”
“I just …” I said. I just what? I’m just afraid to leave? I couldn’t tell him that.
Instead I stood and gathered my books and forced myself to walk out into the hallway. They surrounded me right away. At least five or six of them. The teacher left the classroom and locked it. He looked in our direction and then kept going.
Tara was in the middle of the pack, and as soon as the teacher left, she was in my face.
“Darcy is going to take you outside and teach you a lesson,” she said.
Her pupils were pinned and I could smell the booze on her breath. I looked over her shoulder to see Darcy, who looked considerably less certain about the situation. She seemed to be in the grip of some desire to please Tara and some need to quench her own confusion and anger. I felt a flicker of sympathy, like I was viewing all of us from above.
In a mass, the little gang of girls edged me toward the nearest door that led outside. They manoeuvred me down the stairs and into a little alcove so we were hidden from view. At the last moment, I balked and tried to stop myself from being shoved outside. I grabbed the door jamb, but Darcy pulled me by the arm and soon the door closed behind us.
I could hear the whispers: fight, fight, fight. Like a chant, or a curse.
The fight itself had an even more pronounced nightmare quality, jerky and surreal, like a poor-quality videotape spliced together with old Scotch Tape.
Darcy and I faced each other. Her face was puffy and slightly yellow. Her eyes were unfocused and there were eyeliner boogers in the corners.
Some bad dialogue was exchanged, along the lines of “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” and the ever-popular “Who do you think you are?” To which I replied, “Nothing” and “No one.”
Then Darcy slapped me across the face. Once, twice.
“Come on,” she said, gaining confidence when she realized she was battling a dedicated pacifist. “Hit me.”
And that’s when the quality of the recollection really deteriorates.
According to the people watching, I grabbed her hair, which was dark and slightly curly, kneed her in the crotch (I do have three brothers), and began methodically smashing her head into the brick wall of the schoolyard. I felt nothing. I heard nothing but the rush of blood in my head. My next memory is of sitting in the principal’s office, weeping uncontrollably, even though I was unscathed. Darcy acted more like a hardened con in a Baltimore interrogation room than a ninth grader from Smithers. That part still impresses me. Her eyes were blackened, the side of her face was scratched raw, both her lips were fat. The principal listened to my account, garbled by my persistent sobs. Darcy said only “Fuck you” to me and something similar to the principal. And when it was over, she was kicked out of school indefinitely and I was not.
My total blackout rage dominance in the fight didn’t do anything for my social standing. Instead, there was a long period during which almost no one would speak to me. The stigma of having been in a fight, as a winner or a loser, took some time to fade. I was verboten to all but a few gentle souls, who made a point of asking how I was and occasionally joining me as I ate lunch alone beside my locker.
Did this mean that I took a good hard look at my drinking, which had led to this mess? After all, if I hadn’t been drunk, I would never have ended up going out with Hank. If Darcy and Tara hadn’t been on a big bender, they probably wouldn’t have attacked me. If I didn’t drink as much as or more than they did, we would never have hung out with each other in the first place. Booze and drugs were the common denominator in all the disasters that had befallen me. But I didn’t see it that way.
I was acutely conscious of being shunned and I hated missing all the parties because it wasn’t yet safe for me to go to them. My only conversations were with girls who didn’t drink, sneak out, smoke pot, dabble in coke, or take mushrooms, which meant that I had no one to do those things with. There was only one cure that I could see, and it was one that my mom actually agreed with.
It was time to take the Susan Juby, Juvenile Delinquent, Show on the road.
8
Wherever You Go
AS A KID I’d spent every summer with much-loved aunts and uncles and grandparents in the Okanagan. My grandparents had a rickety little cabin announced by an old wooden sign as Harry’s Hideaway. The cabin had a screened-in porch and a set of steep, wobbly rock stairs that led down to a pebbled beach, and there was a silvered old wharf that extended into Shuswap Lake.
I loved the Okanagan in the summer and was completely fascinated by my uncles. They were younger than my mother. They all wore beards and were married to good-looking women who, to my inexperienced eye, were shockingly into nudity. This last quality was passed along to my cousins, who seemed rarely to wear much more than socks. In our family, we barely even got naked while alone in the shower. It was as though the entire family’s inhibitions skipped a generation and all landed on me. I’m not saying my aunts and uncles and cousins were nudists, exactly. It was more that they occasionally skinny-dipped, and when they got changed into their bathing suits they didn’t padlock the door, put a chair against the knob, and hang three blankets in the window like I did. To me, that kind of relaxed approach was pretty much the same thing as being a full-on exhibitionist.
There was a lot of drinking at the cabin, but it was Okanagan summer drinking, which seemed to be a more genteel, good-natured sort of drinking than the kind that took place during northern B.C. winters.
My grandparents were old-fashioned imbibers. Slow and steady could have been the motto for their alcohol consumption. They travelled a lot in their later years, and in every photo I’ve ever seen of them in every foreign locale, they have highball glasses clutched in their hands. So do all their friends. From my grandparents I learned that five o’clock cocktails were the best and most important part of the day. Drinking had meaning. It had purpose as well as ritual and a certain dignity.
When things went bad for me in Smithers, I decided that I needed to move to Salmon Arm, the town where all of my uncles resided when they weren’t visiting the cabin, which was farther around the lake. I figured that a change of scenery would give me a fresh start. Plus, I was attracted to the classy drinking they practised there. My aunts and uncles, all kind-hearted, generous, and deeply unprepared for what they were getting into, said they’d love to put me up. (At least that’s how I remember it. It’s possible they had their arms twisted by my mother, who was probably running out of ideas about what to do with me.)
After I spent the summer at the cabin, I moved in with my first set of relatives, my uncle and his wife, for the school year. My aunt and uncle had five kids of their own already and lived in a pair of domes onto which my uncle, a contractor, had built a rambling, marvellous house. The whole place functioned like a pinball machine named Chaos.
My aunt and uncle probably thought that one more kid wouldn’t make much difference. Turns out they were wrong because I wasn’t like their other kids. For one thing, I was optional. For another, I was about to enter my junior drinky-pants “complete meltdown” phase.
About thirty seconds after I arrived in Salmon Arm and entered my new school, I wore out my welcome with my classmates. I once again briefly dated, then for no good reason broke up with, a somewhat popular boy, thereby alienating all of his friends. I took one of my hitherto clean-living younger cousins out and got her drunk on some booze I’d stolen from her parents. I don’t remember this, but another of my cousins told me that once I forgot my makeup on the bus and refused to go to school again until it was replaced and I could get my mask on before being seen in public.
Soon my new school and living situation were as uncomfortable as or worse than the ones I’d left behind. The cousin I’d gotten drunk, who
was a year younger than me, found me so hard to live with that she started hoarding her allowance to save up enough money to take out a “hit” on me. My aunt and uncle woke to find me belly-crawling like a soldier across their bedroom floor at one o’clock in the morning, drunk and in hot pursuit of my uncle’s cigarettes. My plan was to secure some smokes and then round up a few cousins to go cross-country skiing.
Shortly afterward, I went to live with my second set of relatives. This uncle was my mother’s youngest brother. He and I had always been simpatico. He was my godfather and we had the same world view. We could talk for hours about our philosophies of life and what was wrong with almost everyone else.
My godfather had struggled with substance abuse himself, until my aunt gave him an ultimatum. He could have her or alcohol and drugs. He very wisely chose her. I didn’t really remember him as a drinker and carouser, but family legend had it that he used to travel with the equivalent of a small but well-stocked pharmacy in his luggage. When I went to live with them, he’d been clean and sober for years. Obviously, if anyone could handle me and my issues, it would be him.
Sadly, I was in such a state by the time I moved in that I’d have challenged a crack team from an elite treatment centre. Soon after I moved into town to live with my unsuspecting young aunt and uncle, I had what, in retrospect, was probably some sort of private nervous breakdown. I became profoundly irrational and depressed. I remember only a few random details from those months, but the ones I do remember are strange and vivid. I would eat only Ichiban noodles (original flavour) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and I insisted on eating them alone in my room. I had a large Billy Idol poster tacked on the wall in my bedroom and I would stare at it for hours, as though at some point Billy would stop sneering and start telling me how to get through high school. That’s what I was doing, alone in my room, hour after hour.
Like pretty much everyone else, my aunt and uncle thought I was going through a teen phase of some sort, only a bit worse than average. In a way they were right. Their own kids were young and they had no experience with teenagers. Lots of teens do lock themselves in their rooms when they aren’t at school. Some may even have a fetish for instant noodles. We have an eccentric family, so probably from the outside, I just seemed mildly temperamental. On the inside, I was in a strange sort of fugue state. Maybe it was brought on from the previous year’s fights and drinking and problems at school, or maybe I depended more on the particular structure of my family than I’d thought to keep me together. The realization that I was just as much a disaster in the Okanagan as I had been in the northern interior was a terrible blow. Probably it was a combination of all of those things that caused my little crack-up. Whatever it was, it felt like a continuation and amplification of my previous unhappy state. I was not well in my brain, but as is so often the case with head problems, I was too close to it to realize what was going on.