Mean Boy (23 page)

But, in the midst of this dejection, potential salvation appears. It’s Sherrie, of all people. Accompanied by Claude, of all people. Sherrie and Claude at the Mariner, waving at me with an ecstatic grin of relief at having lit upon a familiar face—Sherrie, that is, not Claude. Claude is not the sort to grin. Whereas Sherrie’s whole
being
is like a grin. It’s a cliché, I realize, as I watch her blonde head sailing toward me through the crowd, but she lights up a room. It’s not just her hair, it’s everything. Her stride, her pink Valentine face. And then there’s Claude—dampening, darkening her wake. Doing everything he can with his sullen presence to dull Sherrie’s vivacity. Maybe Sherrie likes to be seen with Claude for precisely that effect. She knows it is untoward to be so bright, especially if you’re a poet.

“Lawrence!” She hugs me for some reason, perhaps nervous about being here. It is the first non-mother-aunt-or-cousin female hug I think I’ve ever received. It’s fantastic. She smells like Ivory soap.

“I didn’t know you guys were coming,” I say. I hardly talked to Sherrie all night, I now recall, except to grouse about the mulled wine.

“Charles said I should come,” she says, looking around, taking in the townie bacchanals.

“Charles?” I repeat.

She wrinkles her nose at me. “Charles Slaughter. You know Charles.”

“Oh, Slaughter, yeah,” I say, maybe a little too loud.
I’m going to pound the mittens right off her
. “Charles,” I say again. “He’s a nice guy, Charles.”

Sherrie bobs her head, half in reply, half to the music.

“Yeah,” she says. “He’s funny. You wouldn’t think he liked poetry by the look of him.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” I agree.

Claude has moved around us to talk to Todd, who hasn’t flinched or looked up at their arrival.

“Lawrence!” Sherrie turns to me as if something has just occurred to her. The blue of her eyes could blind a person. “You did a super job with the reading tonight.”

I feel something happening in my chest. It’s stupid—another cliché. Swelling.

“Thanks,” I say. Except for Schofield’s, this is the only acknowledgment I’ve received all night.

“The lounge was the perfect place to hold it!” Sherrie enthuses. “They should hold all the readings there from now on.”

“I know,” I nod.

“Todd is completely messed up,” Claude calls to us.

“No, I’m not,” Todd says into the bar.

“And I was thinking,” continues Sherrie. “We should hold
student
readings sometime. Wouldn’t that be great? Maybe in the new year.”

For pretty much the first time since I got here, I stop scanning the crowd for Jim. Imagine being like Schofield was tonight. Imagine putting it all out there, on display. I turn to face Sherrie. “Do you think anyone would come?”

“Even if they didn’t, we all could read for each other,” says Sherrie. “But we could advertise in the student newspaper and stuff. Put up signs.”

“I don’t want to be the one to put up signs.” It seems wise to insist on this right off the bat.

“I’d put up the signs if you want,” says Sherrie.

“We’d have to ask Doctor Sparrow, if we wanted to hold them in the lounge,” I say, thinking out loud. Sherrie, abruptly, turns her body away and resumes gazing into the
crowd. She nods hard in time with the music. I’ve said the wrong thing, invoked the wrong name. None of us seem to have gotten around to telling each other about our independent meetings with Doctor Sparrow. With exams coming up, and the reading and everything. But now, seeing Sherrie in a posture of blatant evasion, I find myself suffused with curiosity. Of course, if she tells me hers, I’ll have to tell her mine.

And then a body extricates itself from the writhing mass, a bigger body than that of anyone in the room, and Charles Slaughter descends, plucking the awkward, tweedy spectre of Doctor Sparrow out from between us. He slings a casual arm around Sherrie, who shines up at him in gratitude. If I were to lose a leg, it occurs to me, looking at him, like if I lost it in a war or something like one of the Vietnam vets, they could very well rip one of Charles Slaughter’s arms off and replace my leg with it. It would be a perfect fit, if a little more muscular, a little more ruddy in skin tone than the rest of my body.

“What is in your bum?” Sherrie wants to know, poking at the spot in the back of Chuck’s pants where one of the “Ask For Rory” flags bulges out.

“Ah,” says Charles, nodding wisely like Confucius. “What
isn’t
in my bum?”

Sherrie laughs; Slaughter smirks, pleased with himself. I should be laughing too, and am about to, when something in the words give me pause. They sort of echo for a moment, circling around before quite catching up with my brain. The question is, I think, slowly coming to grips with it:
what isn’t
. That’s what Slaughter is saying. The question is
what isn’t
. Not the other way around.

Then all at once, the meaning rushes at me, striking me as fantastically poetic—charged with depth. Does Slaughter even comprehend what he just said? I close my mouth—which I had opened to laugh—and scrutinize his meaty face.
He stares back at me. There is an expression Slaughter wears sometimes—a contrived sort of expression of worry mixed with distaste. You’ll see it when you tell him you don’t want another beer just yet, or you’ve got too much studying to do to go out on the weekend. An expression that lets you know you’ve given the wrong answer—that there is something lacking in your character which Slaughter, for one, finds deeply disconcerting. I’m seeing that expression now, and it heightens my alarm—my sense that something is gathering in the air around us, coming to a head.

Slaughter
sees
me, I realize. His look is a reflection of everything I lack. The unsavoury puzzle of me exists in the crease between his eyebrows, the displeased pucker of his lips.

Lawrence Campbell?
he’s saying. And I can hear the words. The question. The unbearable
doubt
. I can hear it coming out of his eyes. And as I hear it, he raises his arm—the arm that could be my leg. He raises his muscled, ruddy, football player’s limb, extends it like a telescope. Unfurls his index finger to practically the tip of my nose, then circumnavigates the finger around it, slowly. He’s getting ready, is what he’s doing. He’s preparing us both with this ritual. He’s about to pronounce. He’s going to say it. He’s really going to say it.

ULTIMATELY, WHEN I PIECE TOGETHER
Friday night, I can’t help but conclude that it would have been the most fun I’ve had this year if not for the mushrooms. For the rest of the evening, every time Slaughter looked at me with his bottomless Saint Bernard’s eyes, I would shudder, thinking my soul was being penetrated. Slaughter would repeat the swirly, point-at-my-nose thing which he knew had freaked me out thoroughly the first time he did it, goggle his eyes just to
push me even closer to the edge, and then
hawg-hawg
his ass off as I sat clutching myself, trying to keep my anxious limbs from flying off my torso.

That was the thing that stuck in my mind and metastasized—the notion of Chuck’s arm replacing my leg. It caused me to obsess upon arms and legs. It was all I could see of the crowd for the rest of the night, just a jumble of flesh-coloured snakes intertwined like the mating ball my father and I discovered one summer at the bottom of a dry well on Grandma Lydia’s property. The entire floor of the well was nothing but a clenched, writhing sphere.

After that, it’s all impressions. Vignettes. Glimpses of the night I could have had if not for the turds:

Sitting across the table from Jim—no one else present—or perhaps my attention is just so focused on Jim, it’s like the others have blinked out of existence. That seems likely, because it feels as if I’ve never concentrated so hard on anything as much as I am concentrating on the fact that I cannot understand a single word Jim is saying. Or not that exactly. I understand the words themselves, just not what they mean when strung together. I hear
Rimbaud
, I hear
Blake
. I know to whom and what they refer—the fact that the words refer not just to people, but ideas—that the words are now embodiments of something huge and near-divine. It’s why Blake went crazy—why Rimbaud just stopped writing after a while. That brush with heaven, or something like it. Schofield called it the universal, but he made it sound like a good thing. Is it a good thing? Was it a good thing? With some poets, some of the best poets, you think: moth against light bulb, zapped junebug twitching on the summer porch.
The madmen like Blake, the exiles like Rimbaud, the squadron of those who drank to death. Insect Icaruses. Why? Because of that notion—that unnameable thing, concept, idea—now embodied in the names of the poets who’ve been singed by it. In some cases, burnt up.

I hear
bastard
and I hear
Sparrow
and I hear
Schofield
and I hear
ungrateful
. Nod, nod, nod. I hear the word
try
and
trying
three or four times. I hear
uphill battle
and
why
.

But only one complete sentence manages to wade its way across the moat of my addled perceptions. Mostly I’ve been divining the conversation by keeping track of the feeling-tone of what Jim is saying. I can tell from his face and the timbre of his voice that what’s required is a series of sympathetic nods accompanied by the occasional outraged scrunching of the brow. But this sentence, it smashes its way through.

I feel like I’m disappearing from the ground up, kiddo
.

The tone is all appeal. The feeling all despair.

And yet it seems to me he kind of cheered up an hour or so later. At one point there were women at our table, leaning over to converse, and whatever Jim was saying, it was clear he had them mesmerized. And then there were some men around, too. Laughing with Jim and Slaughter about something, shouting things to make everyone laugh even harder, sloshing their drinks around.

And then just two more things. Two other burps of memory from that evening, after my head started to clear a little.

One, Slaughter. A flat hand slams into the table, rattling people’s beers. A python suddenly drops from the ceiling onto my neck, its weight pulling me to one side. Into Slaughter. His face against mine. Slaughter’s arm. It could be my leg.

He hisses. He’s the snake in that cartoon. What is that Disney cartoon, with the boy who gets lost in the jungle? There’s a snake and a tiger. But there’s also a singing, dancing bear who looks out for him. That cartoon, what’s it called, where the animals all talk like jazz musicians?

“Look!” Slaughter hisses, or manages to hiss. How is he able to hiss a word like “look”?

“What?” I say, still grappling with his arm. Slaughter clenches it tighter for good measure.

“Scarsdale,” hisses Slaughter. “Right the fuck there.”

He points. I look. There is a man standing at the bar, both hands on his hips. To my discomfort, he is staring directly back at us. Scarsdale. Scarsdale takes no shit from those who would stare and point, it would seem.

“Here’s what I’m going to do,” half-whispers Slaughter, his mouth practically up against my ear. “I go up to him, right? I say, Hey, fuckwad, this belong to you? I whip out the fucking flag, man! I whip it out from my ass!” Slaughter’s muscles twitch and flex in his excitement and I feel he is on the verge of cutting off my windpipe.

“Or, no! How about this, I go up to him, like, la, la … Hm, oh I’m kinda uncomfortable here, I don’t know why … Seems to be something jammed up my asshole, hm, wonder what it could be. And then like, dum-de-dum. I start pulling the flag out of my ass!”

“Lawrence is turning red,” Sherrie’s voice speaks from somewhere.

Slaughter gives me one last, affectionate clench.

“I’m gonna do it, man!”

And then he’s gone. For the rest of the night.

Thing two:

I don’t think it’s much later. Sherrie is still around—Slaughter’s abandonment must not yet have registered. I don’t know why I remember this moment in particular, why it should stand out, because nothing actually happens. My paranoia has abated enough to let me take in my surroundings somewhat. To my relief, I am able to raise my eyes without the scenario translating immediately into a reptilian Last Judgment scene. For short periods, I can watch people dancing and be fascinated by their movements, the light dappling their bodies. But every now and then things will go a bit snaky—there’s a moment when a group of women are all waving their arms in the air in unison—and I have to look away.