I took a shower, came back out to the living room, and fell asleep in front of the hockey game.
Chapter 19
Every time Marie-Lou brought up Jess I ended up feeling guilty. So she was on my mind when I got up the day after my visit to Chez Maurice. Usually my thoughts about Jess were a muddle, but the one certainty was my sense of relief that we weren’t together anymore. This time I felt something else as well, a strange nostalgia. It might be that my relationship with Marie-Lou had been stagnating for weeks, and though she appeared happy to see me she was clearly still struggling to trust me. She seemed to harbour a serious fear of gambling, or more precisely of what gambling was doing to me. Today I see she understood my addiction better than I did. Hanging out with me demanded a constant effort not to dwell on it, not to be constantly suspicious, not to challenge me or try to teach me a lesson. When she brought up Jess that afternoon, out of nowhere, it made me think about the first time I met Marie-Lou, three years earlier. Yeah, I met Marie-Lou through Jess. It was winter. Jess and I were in a rough patch, fighting all the time. Her mum was going through a relapse. It was a Friday. Jess and I had arranged to meet up at Longueuil Metro station, to do something with her friends. Basically she was doing whatever it took to avoid spending time at home.
I was at the station, leaning on the railing, slightly hidden by a bank of payphones. The crowd was coming off the platform, rushing toward the concrete stairs. People were on their way home from school or work, everyone rushing to catch their buses. Groups of rap kids were waiting for their friends, gathered around the dépanneur right in the centre of the Metro station. Metallica’s “One” played in my headphones. The station smelled like cement, cigarette butts, and fried chicken. With my Walkman turned up to nine, I was discreetly watching the group of sketchy kids in front of the glass doors of the McDonald’s. I knew who they were. Jess knew them all. Maureen wasn’t there yet. Maybe she was still sleeping. I hoped so: that chick scared the shit out of me. Even the baddest of the bad kids got nervous when she showed up. Maureen rolled with the real shit disturbers, the ones who lived on King-George, the ones you didn’t want to look in the eye. When Jess introduced me to her—the one and only time she spoke to me—I’d barely managed to spit out a few meaningless sentences. I’d never experienced a more suspicious, truculent glare.
I’d been waiting around fifteen minutes. I checked out the gang one last time, to see if Jess was finally there. She’d figured out that she could keep me waiting. Luc was there, the dealer from Gérard-Filion high school, with a few of his jaded little sidekicks. Luc pretty much lived at the Metro station. His apartment was next door, in the Port-de-Mer tower. I recognized Théberge, who ran things in Fatima on the other side of Longueuil. He and the Hubert brothers always had some kind of beef. Frantz was there too, clowning around, talking shit and gesticulating with his fake Rolex spinning around on his wrist, twitching far too much for someone with such glassy eyes; they called him “Frantz the Queb” because he was the only Haitian around who didn’t have an accent. Of course Goupil was there as well: he was a tall guy with an elephant’s forehead who always wore his Tommy Hilfiger jacket unzipped and the collar of his polo shirt upturned. I knew who he was because he’d come to our school in the fall to beat up our kingpin. People said he was mixed up in a shooting behind a teen club in Brossard. The older Hubert brother had confirmed the rumour. Goupil had his eye on Jess, you could see it a mile away. As far as he was concerned, I was beneath consideration. I checked the time on one of the phones. Jess was twenty minutes late now. Heaven forfend that I should ever show up even two minutes late, though; she’d tear a strip off me. The chorus of “Accident of Birth” was ringing in my ears. I chanted it under my breath, to boost my confidence.
I had another look over my shoulder, toward the McDonald’s. People stood in line waiting to order. I saw a guy my age, maybe sixteen, no older. He wore a long wool coat and his hair in a ponytail, with Coke-bottle glasses and blond peach fuzz. Engrossed in his Dungeons and Dragons Campaign Book. The big backpack at his feet was surely full of DM rulebooks, twenty-sided dice, binders, and mechanical pencils. I knew exactly what he would get up to that night. No self-centred, temperamental girlfriend would be dragging his ass to some crowded party where a bunch of way older people were doing coco puffs. He wouldn’t have to buy beer with a fake ID, wouldn’t be the laughing stock of a gang of dropouts stoned out of their skulls, wouldn’t have to look after his girlfriend, who’d be all over Goupil after one beer, and ready to fight all comers after two, nor would he have to carry her home at the end of the night to her drunken-ass mum and a step-dad who was equally happy slapping or punching, depending on his mood; no, this guy wouldn’t be stuck listening to her claiming for the twentieth time that she wanted to kill herself, wanted to be done with it all, or that he was too uptight, too young, too boring. For this guy there’d be no three a.m. emotional blackmail after his night went south. This guy was going to order his combo, gobble it down, and catch his bus. This guy would unhurriedly read over his DM notes, and then spend all night playing with his friends. And he’d have fun, more fun than I’d had in the last six months. On that day I would have given anything to trade places with this guy and live my life without a girlfriend who hung out with a bunch of skids, without the small recurring humiliations, without a thing to prove to anyone.
Jess finally showed up. She saw me from a distance, but acted like I wasn’t there. My heart leaped up in my chest. It did that every time I saw her. She said hi to everyone, jumping into the guys’ arms, standing there resplendent in front of Goupil, who hugged her and grinned like a degenerate. Every time she did that I wished I could disappear. It was like I didn’t know this person, who was nothing like the Jess I knew. I wondered what she saw in them. As far as I could tell they didn’t give a shit about her. They didn’t care about the girl who was there to look after her mom every single time she clambered back on the wagon for a while. The girl who wouldn’t let anyone tell her what she could and couldn’t do, who was determined to make something of her life at any price—they had no idea who that girl was. The Jess who could draw a thousand times better than me, who’d plan our horror movie nights, who’d read more Stephen King than I had, who was hustling to finish high school so she could go to Cegep to study animation—that Jess pretty much vanished the moment she hooked up with this crew.
“Accident of Birth” was almost done and I still didn’t feel up to facing them. Jess was wearing the coat I’d bought her for her birthday at Le Chatêau with the money I’d saved from the summer before, and jeans that hugged her ass so tight they may as well have been tights. She kept right on doing her royal rounds in the court of the skids, pretending she hadn’t seen me. She wouldn’t come to me. It was up to me to go to them. When I didn’t, she’d eventually relent and come over to me, but she’d be mad, as if I’d insulted her, and then we’d fight in front of everyone, and Théberge, Goupil, and the rest of the crew would have a hearty laugh at our expense. At my expense.
The first chords of “Dead Skin Mask” made my headphones shake, and a shiver ran all the way down my spine. I felt prickly goosebumps popping up all over, as if my skin was turning into an armoured carapace. I turned the music up to ten. I sat there for a minute, listening to Tom Araya’s dry, commanding vocals, holding myself back from headbanging, just letting the guitars and thumping drums work their way over the surface of my body. Then I raised my head. That’s when I noticed that Jess had brought another girl along. She had short purple hair, cut around her ears except for two locks that hung down over her cheeks, and a pierced lower lip. She wore her jeans tucked into her Docs. Her boyfriend, a big guy in a white cap, with holes in his jeans who must have been around Goupil and Théberge’s age, held her tight against him, tucked under his arms. They didn’t really fit together. The final chord of “Dead Skin Mask” stretched out like the sound of an electrocardiogram failing to register a pulse, and the opening drum bi
t of “Rust in Peace. . . Polaris” came on. The guitars kicked in and a new wave of shivers came over me. I walked over to them, riding the swell of Megadeth riffs.
“Oh, you’re here?” said Jess in an unfriendly tone, as if she were already tired of seeing me.
The skids barely looked at me. But her friend introduced herself.
“So you’re Jess’s boyfriend. I’m Marie-Lou. Jess talks about you all the time.”
I shook her hand. My palm was moist, hers smooth and dry. Her grip was vigorous. I could feel the bones in her hand pressing against my own hand. Her boyfriend looked me up and down. He was wearing a three-quarter-length leather coat, stank of cigarettes, and looked even older than I’d first thought: probably twenty or so, based on his five o’clock shadow. Jess gave Marie-Lou a dirty look and pulled me toward her, to French kiss me in front of everyone. She stank of cigarettes too. I released myself from her grip, tangled up in the wires of my headphones, which had fallen when she put her hands around my neck.
Everyone was ready to get out of there. Marie-Lou’s boyfriend kissed her and said he’d meet up with them later. He left us and ambled toward the parking lot. We went into the Port-de-Mer high-rise with Luc, who had to get some stuff at his place. Then we left the Terminus to buy Colt 45s at the dépanneur, and started walking. We went to Frantz’s place. He lived in a tiny one-bedroom on Sainte-Hélène. We set up shop in the living room, on the busted-up sofa and kitchen chairs. The walls were yellow from nicotine and Frantz had sheets as curtains. The girls who were in Adult Ed with Jess showed up almost right after us. I didn’t know any of them. One of them sat down in the living room, the others stayed in the kitchen, leaning against the cupboards. Frantz had already turned on the element and pulled out the knives. Luc was handing out hash and bragging about it as if it could cure cancer. People were talking loud over the music. Théberge put on Wu-Tang Forever. You could hear the speakers’ skins vibrating with the bass.
I spent the evening in the background, sitting on the couch nursing my 40 while everyone else laughed and yelled and did coco puffs. Jess was dancing and rubbing up against Goupil. I did my best to pretend it didn’t bother me. Théberge was reefing joint after joint, and hocking massive loogies out the open kitchen window. In between puffs he sipped on a mickey of Bacardi. The girl he was talking to was doing lines of PCP. They were arguing over how Biggie Smalls had died. She talked about it as if someone had ripped out her own kidney. Fifteen minutes after Frantz’s neighbour came by to complain about the noise, Marie-Lou’s boyfriend showed up with a two-four of beer.
Just when I thought everyone had forgotten I existed, Marie-Lou came to sit next to me with a Smirnoff Ice. I had my Iron Maiden shirt on, the one I wore over my school uniform, the one that made the Haitian guys laugh because they thought it had something to do with the Ghostface Killah album. Marie-Lou pointed her finger at it and said that her brothers listened to it too, and she did too sometimes.
“Really, you listen to metal?”
She quietly said yes as she took a sip. I cracked a big smile. It almost didn’t seem possible. Then I noticed her t-shirt, which she wore under a black and red flannel shirt. I could see a band name written in the spiky, illegible script that signified Black Metal.
“What bands?”
She started naming them off. She listened to a much wider range than I did. I knew about half the bands she listed, and had at least heard of the others: Opeth, Dark Tranquility, Death, Dimmu Borgir, and some other stuff Malik wasn’t into, Martyr and Quo Vadis. Apparently one of her brothers was a founding member.
Being a metalhead between 1993 and 1999 was a bit like living alone on a deserted island. 1993 was the year Metallica changed its sound, Guns N’ Roses broke up, and Bruce Dickinson quit Maiden. Grunge was at its apex, punk and indie were taking off, and hip-hop was beginning its long ascent to the top of the charts as classic album after classic album dropped. It wasn’t until the 2000s, when the progressive European bands came onto the North American scene, that metal would finally find its legs again. But in early 1999 I was out there on my own, making my little discoveries. No one around me listened to metal. I would find one group, one album at a time. When I’d listened to everything I could find from a band and I knew all the songs on my mixtapes by heart, I’d call up Malik for some new suggestions. After Live After Death I’d bought all the other Maiden albums, starting with Powerslave and Piece of Mind. Then I’d gotten into their early stuff, with Paul Di’Anno screaming like a punk at the top of his lungs. I’d burned through every Megadeth disc, starting with Countdown to Extinction, then I got totally obsessed with Rust in Peace, with its cover showing a secret conclave in a hangar in Area 51. That prepped me for Slayer, which felt like Clive Barker stories translated into guitar riffs. The problem was that at that point all these bands had pretty much stopped putting out new music. All I could do was pray that Metallica would return to their Master of Puppets sound, or Bruce Dickinson might release a new solo disc. It was like crawling through a cave with nothing but a flashlight. With no one to advise me, I’d often buy albums blind, and when I found a treasure there was no one to share it with. From my first discovery of Maiden until that night at Frantz’s apartment, I hadn’t found a single person besides Alex and Malik who truly loved metal and knew a thing or two about it. The apartment receded. The Puff Daddy blasting on the stereo had become a barely audible crackling under Marie-Lou’s voice. We talked for a long time—I don’t know exactly how long, but I remember she got up a few times to get a fresh Smirnoff while my 40 grew warm between my knees. Every time she left I worried she’d head off somewhere else, to sit with her boyfriend or Jess’s friends, and that would be the end of that, but each time she came back and sat next to me on the couch, clinking her light-blue bottle against my brown one, and we were back in the same place, outside of time and the world. Even when her boyfriend came by to let her know he had to make a delivery she stayed put and barely paused in the story she was telling me. As she talked she repeatedly tucked her hair behind her ears. Her incisors were set back a touch behind her canines, it gave her a mischievous look. From time to time she fidgeted with her lip piercing. As we talked she looked me in the eye, always with a smile in the corner of hers, and sat on her bent leg, angled toward me, with hands that never stopped moving.
Eventually she switched to Colt 45 too, there must have been no more Smirnoff Ices left. With her brothers she’d seen plenty of bands play live, and as she told me the stories I hung on her every word. I wasn’t thinking about Jess anymore. She must have gone out on the balcony, or the dep. Two of her friends were dancing on the coffee table like they were in an LL Cool J video. I couldn’t fathom what Marie-Lou was doing hanging out with these people. I didn’t get where she’d come from. Since Alex had been kicked out, I was the only kid at my school who listened to metal. Close to 800 students and just one metalhead. At my school, I was the skid. Half the time I felt like Hellboy, taken prisoner on earth. I was living in a world where metal had suddenly disappeared and ceded its ground to Tupac, Snoop Dogg, and DMX on one side, Millencolin, NOFX, and Lagwagon on the other. But the unthinkable had occurred: I’d found a kindred spirit.
Our discussion broke off when peals of laughter erupted in the hallway that ran through the kitchen. I heard Jess’s voice, yelling something inaudible over the music. Frantz was hollering and laughing. I heard a door slamming and a muffled banging on the wall. I heard Jess’s voice again but couldn’t understand what she was saying. I got up and made my way between the girls in the living room to see what was going on. Marie-Lou followed me. Jess was in the bathroom. She had her head in the toilet. Théberge was leaning against the doorframe.
“I told her not to do any,” he said, in a weary tone. “I told her it was stronger than PCP. But she’s stubborn as fuck.”
Jess lifted her hand up to give him the finger. She was livid. Théberge turned toward Luc in the kitchen, who was heatin
g knives on the stove.
“You the idiot who gave her K?”
“No way,” he said, placing a chunk of hash down on a red-hot knife.
His expression reminded me of the guy on the Krispy Kernels package.
I heard Goupil’s stupid laugh from the living room. He yelled.
“She wouldn’t stop begging me for it.”
“So you’re the genius who gave it to her, then,” Frantz said. He was mad too.
He shook his head with an exasperated look and bloodshot eyes. One of Jess’s friend, a redhead in bell bottoms, came to look over Théberge’s shoulders. Jess was throwing up now, catching her breath just long enough to tell everyone to fuck off, including me, in that furious voice I knew all too well. I put my half-drunk beer down and tried to help her up, help her walk, but she just pushed me away and insulted me and finally fell into me. She got up again and grabbed hold of my t-shirt, almost tearing it. Frantz came out of the bathroom, looking like none of this had anything to do with him. Marie-Lou had backed up to make room for us. No one was looking after Jess anymore. I held her up as we walked to the living room. Heads rose up over the clouds of pot smoke. Big Goupil and Théberge exchanged a knowing look. I put Jess on a chair in the kitchen and started gathering her stuff, which was spread all over the apartment. Marie-Lou helped Jess get dressed. She was fighting us, refusing to put on her coat, telling Marie-Lou to leave her alone, she was suffocating. The three of us left and Marie-Lou decided to come wait for the bus with us. Jess was out, sitting on a bench with her head rolled back. Marie-Lou was trying to hold her head up, rubbing one hand and whispering. We kept talking while Jess slowly regained consciousness. When the bus got there Marie-Lou gave me her phone number and told me that when I called her she’d give me the names of other metal bands to check out. She helped me coax Jess onto the bus, as she gasped out that we should leave her alone, she could do it on her own. I watched Marie-Lou walk away through the dirty bus window. We sat on the front seats, where it was darker, and Jess started dozing against the window. She took my hand. Her face seemed at peace, her features relaxed, and you could hear her slow, deep breathing, as if her whole body were enjoying a welcome respite from the ecstasy and the rage, the jealousy and desires and loathing that increasingly gnawed at her from morning to night. At one point, without opening her eyes, she told me in a whisper to put my music on and give her a headphone, so she could listen too. I smiled. Maybe for the first time of the night, of the week, I recognized my Jess. The other one had slipped away. Just like every time, I told myself we were going to be okay, that we would be okay in the end, we were just going through a rough patch, we’d rent an apartment in Montreal and her toxic family would leave her alone. But things didn’t play out that way. I was telling myself stories. I’d just met Marie-Lou. I was moving forward, with my hands over my eyes. It would become my signature move.
The Dishwasher Page 21