Mean Boy (4 page)

A cabdriver known around campus as Friendly picks me up an hour later to take me out to Jim’s place. The cabbie greets me, characteristically, with a smile so wide his upper plate comes unstuck and clacks onto the bottom one. It’s almost like his own personal salute. He gums the denture back into place.

“Havin’ a bit of a time d’other night, wha?” he says, beaming at me in the rear-view mirror.

“Wha?” I echo.

“Out on the town, wha?”

“When?”

“Friday night, right?”

“Oh yeah. I don’t know how I got home …”

“I drove you home, buddy!”

“Oh!”

“Good time, wha?”

This last
wha
sounds like a genuine inquiry. I think about it.

“Yes,” I say after a moment. “I guess I did have a pretty good time.”

Friendly lets out a whoop on my behalf. “Givin’ ‘er!” he elaborates.

I guess I was givin’ ‘er somewhat. I realize it’s the first time since I got here I can really say I kind of had fun at Westcock. With other people, that is, doing the kind of thing university students are supposed to do.

Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t pick apart everything about the night in order to determine why. I need to know, though. I am terrible at having a good time. It’s the self-consciousness thing, it’s the pressure. Whenever I’m out with people, the stated purpose being “to have a good time,” all I can do is sit there neurotically checking myself every five minutes: “Is this fun? Am I enjoying myself now? I think I’m having fun, but what if I’m not? What if the
people I’m with don’t think it’s fun at all? Are
they
having fun?” And on and on it goes. And eventually I’ll start to even resent the people I’m with, thinking, to hell with them if they aren’t having fun, they’re no fun anyway. It’s a crazy, fun-destroying compulsion I can’t seem to resist. But I resisted it Friday night. Because I got drunk. I forgot to keep checking myself.

Therefore, when poet Jim Arsenault offers me a rum toddie at 1:18 on Monday afternoon, I accept. I accept with aplomb. I say, “You’re goddamn right I do, Jim,” and do you know what Jim does in return? Yes. On his way to the cupboard, he rests his palm on my head. Indeed, he ruffles my hair.

Oh, we speak of many things that afternoon, Jim and I. He coughs and horks into a Kleenex and tells me he loves my new poem. He calls it a breakthrough. He doesn’t mind that it’s terse, brief, scant. He doesn’t say it should have a murder in it. Jim tells me my new style is “muscular.”

I can’t quite let myself believe it. I’m afraid an alarm clock is going to ring somewhere and I’ll find myself back in Summerside, in grade 9, maybe—the purgatory of high school stretching before me wide as the Northumberland Strait—Jim and poetry on the other side, far and wee.

“You don’t think it needs to be more exciting?” I venture. It feels almost dangerous, this conversation. How precisely it seems to be lining up with my dreams.

“Ah, Larry,” Jim ducks his head, wearing an expression that is completely new to me.
Abashed
is the word. “I was having some fun with you that day. I’d been marking student poetry all afternoon.”

I tell Jim that I understand. And I do. The rum flows into my cheeks and the afternoon sunlight filters through the changing leaves and turns Jim’s dingy farmhouse kitchen a
gilded, fairy-tale pink: the searing, summertime colour of good.

I no longer am a student poet. That is what Jim means.

I don’t find out about the tenure thing until I get back to campus two hours later, having walked back from Jim’s place out near Rock Point. It was way too long a walk, and Jim told me I was crazy, but I had an evening class and had to sober up for it somehow.

“Oh, fuck your class and stay for dinner,” Jim told me. The entire afternoon he gave no hint of what was going on in the department. “I’ll make pasta,” he said. He even went so far as to open the cupboard and brandish a can at me. I was dying to. There was something so homey about sitting at a kitchen table with a man who had a cold, a blanket around his shoulders. Intimate. And I still hadn’t met Jim’s wife, whom I anticipated to be this protean mass of female sensuality, if
Blinding White
was any indicator. Moira. Jim’s muse.

But part of me wanted to leave. It’s hard to explain. It was so good I couldn’t bear it after a while—I knew it had to get wrecked at some point. I would drink too much and then get nauseous or worse—say something stupid to Jim. Nothing gold can stay, that cheesy, depressing poem dictates, and there’s a cheesy, depressing truth to it. The afternoon was nothing if not gold. Golden. The rum and the sunlight.

“He doesn’t have a cold,” says Sherrie.

“I was just there.”

We’re hissing at each other in a corner of the lecture hall. Professor Bryant Dekker is up there talking about Macbeth. Shakespeare—every English undergrad has to take it. Dekker isn’t much of a commanding presence—nothing like Jim. It’s
telling how the less interesting professors are thrown into teaching these monster classes while the higher-ups get nifty little seminars. Jim’s only been here a few years, but he’s got cachet because he is what I’ve overheard Claude identify as a “rock star.” This is the Canadian way of saying people in Toronto know who he is. He could be there right now, Jim’s given us to understand, getting drunk with the likes of Greg Levine and Dermot Schofield, were he not so appalled and disillusioned by what he saw during his time there, after
Blinding White
was published and he was the toast of the town. I’m dying to know. What he saw, what it was like. He drops tantalizing little hints in class from time to time about “rampant dilettantism” and “flagrant hucksterism.”
Ism ism ism
, like the song says.

“Yeah, but he doesn’t have a cold, it’s bullshit,” says Sherrie.

“He was coughing and sneezing, Sherrie—he has a cold.”

Everybody talks during Dekker’s lecture. You feel guilty, but you do it anyway. He doesn’t ever say much about it. Sometimes engineers or economics students here to get their despised arts credit will put their feet up in the back rows and talk at full volume about how hungover they are or how big a shit they took that morning, and Dekker will stand there going, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, until they stop out of pity more than anything else. Sherrie and I half-whisper as a courtesy, and because we’re both suck-ups, ultimately. We don’t want Dekker to look up and see us gabbing, to lump us in with the undergraduate rabble.

“Well, it’s mighty convenient,” Sherrie hisses after a long pause. She always stops to pretend she’s listening to Dekker for a few moments before leaning in to talk some more. “Did you know he had a class last Friday when we were in the Stein?”

“When?”

“Then. Three to five.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know someone who takes it. He didn’t even put up a sign or anything, so they all just sat there for an hour. That’s why I was kinda surprised to see him at the Stein.”

I sit there thinking back to Friday. My breakthrough Friday when I ceased to be a student poet. I had thought Sherrie looked surprised. I had thought she was surprised to see me there, hanging out with Jim.

“He had that fight with Doctor Sparrow,” I recall.

Sherrie nods open-mouthed like she’s encouraging a simple child to form a word.

“I thought that was about women.”

Sherrie closes her mouth. Her whole face seems to close up. “What?”

“He was going on about women for the next three hours.”

She turns away and listens for a few seconds to Dekker talk about being unsexed by the thick night. Then she speaks from the corner of her mouth.

“Well, whatever he talked about afterward, he was pissed off because they’re not going to grant his tenure.”

“That’s terrible,” I say after a moment. I can’t let Sherrie know I don’t quite understand what tenure is.

“Well, yeah,” says Sherrie, back to her retarded-child expression as she fakes paying attention to Dekker. “What did we come to Westcock for if Jim’s not going to be here?” She flicks her hand toward Dekker, being ignored and yawned at below us.

“Jim won’t be here?” I say.

“Why would he stay? God, he’ll be snapped up by U of T, if not somewhere in the States. They’re crazy.”

All at once, I smell rum. It’s me. Sweating.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN
because it’s like I’m being pulled back across the strait. It can’t happen because one minute I’m on the other side of a great man’s kitchen table with my poetry spread out between us and gold and fire painting the kitchen, and the next he’s a brilliant, distant, fading light on one shore and I’m a small, insignificant blotch on a small, insignificant island with no one to guide me across.

When I was in high school I stole all the poetry books out of the school library. It didn’t occur to me that this was such a bad thing to do because whenever I flipped to the card on the back, I only ever saw my own name written there over and over again. Eventually it seemed I might as well keep them at home, and it wasn’t much of a surprise that nobody even launched an investigation rudimentary enough to finger Lawrence Campbell as the number one suspect.

The only fuss I ever remember being raised over poetry in my school—or in my young life, for that matter—was when a book called
Even Less
by Jim Arsenault arrived, having just won a national award. More people took an interest than was usual in such matters because Arsenault was an Atlantic Canadian. The library ordered a copy, and an enterprising reporter in Charlottetown even called Jim up for an interview.

The reporter asked Jim things like, why do you live in Toronto? And, have you a wife, and if so, what does she think of all this?

Jim said he lived in Toronto out of necessity at the moment, and, no, he didn’t have a wife.

The reporter said, I’ve read your book and felt there was some unnecessary language here and there. I thought the poems were very well written in places, but some of the language was shocking. Some people down this way, I think, would be shocked by it.

And Jim said this—the reporter wrote it down:

“I am happy to hear it. Didn’t Kafka say that’s what good writing should do—should act as an axe to the frozen sea within us? I didn’t intend for my writing to waft over your readers like a friendly breeze, I’m afraid. I prefer the axe. Let your readers be shocked awake, or let them be shattered to pieces, it makes no difference to me. Only let something happen other than comfort and reassurance.”

But you want people to read your book, don’t you? persisted the reporter. A great many people, in this part of the country at least, don’t enjoy being shocked and shattered.

“Those people, in that case,” responded Jim Arsenault, “can go to hell.”

The newspaper printed it “H*ll.”

Because the library had made such a big deal about ordering the book, they now had to respond to parents, who kicked up a fuss and demanded to know what the school thought it was doing, stocking such filth in reach of children? That’s when I stepped in, slipping it off the shelf and into my schoolbag, solving the problem for everyone. The next week the school assured parents the offending material had been removed.

I read the book over and over again. And then I read the interview, which I had clipped, over and over again.

And then I knew three things.

1. I wanted to be a poet.

2. Anyone who had a problem with my being a poet could go to hell.

3. I had to get the hell out of there.

Of all three revelations, the most important was the second. Numbers 1 and 3 had always been present, but in a shapeless, jellyfish kind of way, jiggling dubiously around in the back of my mind. Because much as I loved poetry, how could I
be
a poet? Nobody was a poet, nobody read
poetry. That’s what had been holding me back, this idea of
everybody
—the everybody who couldn’t care less about poetry. But number 2 shook me awake—the insight I gleaned from Jim’s interview. This was the missing piece to the puzzle of my future. Number 2 was the axe to the frozen sea within me. Of course. It was so simple.
Everybody
could go to hell.

I will quit Westcock if I have to. I will follow wherever he goes.

Ring, ring.

Good! Maybe it’s Jim. I have been wanting to call Jim all day, but I don’t have the courage to just ring him up at home like we’re old friends or something. The fact of the matter is, much of today’s daydreaming in front of the typewriter has had to do with this question—am I allowed to just call Jim at home like we’re old friends or something? Weighing the pros and cons. On the one hand, I spent a golden afternoon at his kitchen table, watching him blow his nose by way of punctuating his remarks on my poetry. He invited me—he wouldn’t just invite me to his house if he didn’t want me around. On the other hand—

“Yeah,” I say into the phone like a guy in a movie. “Hi,” I amend.

“Is that how people answer the phone now?” says my mother. Not a trace of sarcasm in evidence—she does not know the meaning of the word.

“Hi, Mom!”

“What in hell are you doing?” says my dad, on the other phone.