Mean Boy (43 page)

“Ah, kiddo,” I heard him say. I could hear him speaking through his shoulder, which my ear was pressed against. The
words seemed to vibrate their way directly from his vocal cords into my brain. “It’s all been worth it, kid. The hordes have retreated—for the time being, anyway.”

It struck me as funny that Jim thought of stodgy, traditionalist Westcock as the rampaging horde, himself as the desolate fortress under attack. You’d think it would be the other way around—Jim, the barbarian at the gate. It’s like with all the old French forts perched on their wind-blasted hills up and down the coast—signifying either victory or defeat, depending on how you look at it.

Sherrie and Todd and a few others from class are being smart and taking advantage of Creighton’s presence among us. That is to say, they are gathered more or less at his feet as he rocks in Jim’s rocker pronouncing on God knows what while Jim calls merrily to him from time to time, to consult on matters such as what records to play and what he would like next to drink.

Slaughter looms against a nearby wall, having resumed his bouncer’s posture. Or maybe it’s that of a bodyguard. Even as I’m talking to him, his eyes stay on Sherrie, flickering at the every flick of her hand.

“How you doing, Chuck?”

“I’m all right.”

“You seem kind of out of it tonight.”

“I’m a bit fucked up,” Slaughter admits. “I took something.”

“Not another one of those capsules?”

“Nah. Something. I just fuckin’ got it from a guy down at the Mariner. Put me in a bad mood.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, it’s a real fuckin’ bummer if you wanna know the truth, Campbell.”

Slaughter speaks like he’s reading off a cue card. We stand in a not particularly friendly silence.

“Mitts keeps hassling me about it,” he mutters a moment later.

“About what?”

“About taking stuff all the time. Like,” Chuck unfolds his arms suddenly and becomes animated, grimacing and gesturing, “she doesn’t get that guys are different than chicks. She’s this tiny little person and I’m this great big person. She can’t drink a couple of beer without getting shitfaced. I can handle whatever I take, she doesn’t get that. It’s drugs though, mostly. She thinks dope is dangerous.”

“Hm.” I’m trying to sound noncommittal.

“I go to her, look at Campbell. He’s half as big as me, and it didn’t hurt Campbell.”

I gaze at Creighton as he leans toward Sherrie to impart some particularly savoury morsel of insight.

“Chuck?” I say after a moment or two.
“What
didn’t hurt me? When we did the mushrooms at the Mariner that time?”

“The other night,” says Chuck, resuming his surveillance of Sherrie. He refolds his arms. “Whatever it was we had at Quackers. Might be the same thing I’m on now.”

I stare some more at Creighton and his crowd, mouth open.

My father: every single thing he warned me about the summer before I went off to Westcock—regarded by me at the time as nothing so much as an island bumpkin’s rantings against the “big city”—is being replayed in my head.

Now, don’t you go touching that wacky tabaccy, because people will tell you it’s fine but it’s not. You lose control and you can find yourself jumping out a window, or out in front of a car or some such thing—you saw those goddamn armpit sniffers on the news, they didn’t know where the hell they were rolling around in the mud up there at that show in New York
.

Dad—it’s New Brunswick. It’s a ferry ride away
.

They send the drug dealers into all the university towns—they come up from the States. Sometimes it’s the goddamn draft-dodging professors who do the deals, the way I hear it
.

Dad—Westcock professors aren’t drug dealers
.

Well, you don’t know, now, do ya? You’ve never been there now, have ya? This is my point—you don’t even know what it is you’re walking into. You go in there thinking, oh yah, this is just great, everybody’s my friend and all that, and then some bastard you think is your friend sticks a needle in your ass, or slips something in your drink at a party and then what happens?

Dad—nobody is going to

I have to go to the kitchen and drink a beer. I have to sit on the floor and pet Panda for a while. To calm myself, work through my rage. I can’t yet tell if I’m more angry about Slaughter dosing me or about the fact that my father’s been proven right about something other than lawnmowers or different kinds of paint. How dare Slaughter side with my father in this way. How dare he exemplify every boneheaded, fear-mongering stereotype about our generation. How dare he make us look so bad, so foolish. So naive—above everything else.

Although I probably look quite serene, sitting here. People keep coming in to get beer or go to the can, and they always pause at the sight of me and Panda huddled so companionably.

“Aw,” they’ll say for the most part.

In comes Jim. He sees me here, cuddled up with his dog, smiles, and takes down a bottle of rum from a high shelf in one of the cupboards. It looks to me like it is a secret bottle of rum, one that’s been kept from prying eyes. Without a word, he clinks a couple of glasses together in one hand,
picking them up, and comes to sit on the floor across from me. Panda whines and nudges him the ball.

“Shut up,” says Jim, replacing it beneath Panda’s muzzle. He reaches over and starts scratching the dog between ears. Panda resigns himself and goes back to his obsessive gnawing.

“Well, then,” Jim says, pouring me a drink. “Here’s to us, and tonight. This fine, long-awaited celebration. To friendship, eh?”

I put my beer down on the floor beside me so I can accept the glass.

“To friendship,” I say, shoving Slaughter from my thoughts and taking a sip.

Jim looks at me, smacking his lips. His rum is gone.

“You have to down it.”

“Oh,” I say. I close my eyes and down it. “I usually have it with Coke,” I explain, blinking at him.

“The only thing you should mix with rum is spit,” pronounces Jim, glass in the air as if he’s making another toast. “Now, what are you hiding in here for, anyway? If you were smart, you’d be out there shooting the shit with old Crotch. He runs a small press out of Toronto.”

“Does he?”

“Publishes a lot of first-timers, too, always on the lookout. I been chatting you up.”

A first book, a Toronto press, maybe before I even graduate. I peer at him through my rum-watered vision. “Jeez. Thanks, Jim.”

Jim smiles and meets my gratitude square in the eye. He knows exactly what he’s doing for me, exactly how much it means.

“But I can’t do all the work, so you get out there at some point, all right?”

“I will,” I promise.

Jim pours us two more shots, in silence. If it could be always like this, I think in a kind of mourning. Just two men quiet on the kitchen floor together.

“Why do you call him Crotch?” I ask, just as Moira comes in. She notices us and takes a few steps forward, hands on her nonexistent hips.

“Oh, what?” huffs Jim, looking away.

“You’re an arsehole, is what,” says Moira. “You’re a stupid cocksucker, is what.” And then she turns, as they say, on her heel, and leaves without doing whatever she came in here to do.

Jim grins at me. “I told her I wouldn’t.” He raises his glass meaningfully, and knocks it back.

“Is she mad?” I ask, hoping she isn’t. Not for Jim’s sake in particular, but because I’m starting to feel there’s a surplus of madness curdling the air tonight.

And so I just want to stay here for a moment, I just want to dwell on the ensuing half hour or so, when Jim and I sit talking and drinking by ourselves in the kitchen, muted crowd sounds coming to us from the next room. I just want to stay here because everything turns to shit so rapidly afterward.

This is the sacred moment, after all, the scenario I’ve been pursuing for the past two years—this is what I’ve dreamed of.
Dreamed
is a good word for it too, because the whole set-up has been a lot like a dream—one of those endlessly aggravating dreams where you come within a hair’s breadth of getting what you want only to have it shimmer into nothing, or turn to something like mercury and slither between your fingers at the moment of attainment. Jim, I realize, is the White Rabbit. Jim is my White Rabbit, and I’ve been like Alice, diving heedlessly into Wonderland after him.

But all I’ve wanted is this, which is not such a big deal
really—which is not so much to ask. Alice wouldn’t have been able to tell you what she wanted, but I’ve known what I wanted from the beginning. I just wanted this. To get Jim alone. To sit and talk, quietly, with Jim.

The amazing thing is, we don’t even discuss poetry. True, it’s Jim who does most of the talking. He tells me about Creighton. Not my favourite subject, but at the very least he expounds upon his fondness for the guy—which I assume explains his willingness to overlook the fact that “Crotch” is an atrocious poet. I mean, Jim has to know this, and at some point he’s going to shoot me a black-eyed wink, an impishly meaningful look, which will blast all doubt from my head in this regard.

Creighton was one of his profs at U of T, he tells me as I sit waiting for the look. Creighton published an early chapbook of Jim’s, one I’ve never heard of, to my surprise, and one Jim says I never want to read. (“Juvenilia,” he dismisses.) The important thing, says Jim, is that Creighton gave him hope, and encouragement when he needed it most. He made Jim believe poetry was important enough to give his life to.

“That was a
gift
,” emphasizes Jim. “You see that, Larry? That was the greatest gift I ever got.”

“That’s what you’ve done for me,” I say. I just let myself blurt it out. I don’t let myself think about it—how it sounds, how it might make me look in Jim’s eyes. I don’t care, I just say it.

Jim was in the process of downing another shot when I did. Now he lowers his glass and his thrown-back head slowly. He smiles, also slowly, and draws in breath to speak. I swallow in preparation for the words, am leaning toward him. His black eyes nestle themselves into mine. For the first time ever, the first time since we’ve met, I genuinely have the feeling that Jim sees me. I’m
here
for him suddenly, in a way I haven’t been before—real and breathing and alive. More
than that—I can tell he knows what I need to hear, I can see from the placid comprehension dawning in his face. At long last. Oh, long-awaited day.

“UM,” SAYS SHERRIE
, embarrassed to be interrupting us, “Charles is crying.”

Jim and I continue to sit spellbound for a second or two as our moment disintegrates around us. We glance at each other, then Jim pulls himself to his feet, weaves his way past Sherrie, and exits into the next room without a word.

“Slaughter’s
what
?” I say.

“He’s just standing there crying,” says Sherrie.

Guilt and a low-key kind of horror take me by the guts. Horror at the thought of it—giant-man Slaughter crying in the middle of a party, people standing around watching, taking note.

“God,” I say. “When did this start?” I’m positive it has to be my fault—what I said to him.

“I don’t know, I just noticed it when I went over to talk to him. He’s just
standing
there, Lawrence, with his arms folded, with tears rolling down his face.”

I stand as if full of purpose, taking my glass and the bottle of rum with me. I place them on the table, but that’s about as far as I get. Sherrie and I look at each other. Neither of us want to deal with this, it would seem. Neither of us want to go out there.

“Did he say anything to you, Lawrence?” Sherrie wants to know.

“He was being kind of an asshole when I spoke to him,” I tell her, and Sherrie seems to levitate slightly, chewing her nails.

“He’s pissed off at you, Lawrence. I should have said something, I’m sorry.”

“Slaughter’s angry at
me
?”

“It was that thing you said about him just wanting to get in my pants. I made a joke about it a few days ago. I knew—I mean, I didn’t take it seriously.”

I remember myself in Slaughter’s dorm two days ago. Sitting so companionably on his bed. Slaughter with the hammer, destroying his desktop.

“Holy shit, Sherrie.” I shake my head and have to lean against the table, legs gone to juice. It’s like I’ve been dangling on the edge of the Grand Canyon all week and have only just looked down. “You told him about the
marsh
?”

She shakes her head rapidly. “I only told him what you said. That one thing.”

“Well, why in God’s name would you tell him something like that?”

Sherrie stares up at me, her guilt-spark abruptly extinguished. Now it’s a different kind of spark.

“I don’t know, Lawrence,” she snaps. “Maybe it was the same reason you’d say what you did to me.”

And so the guilt-spark gets transferred. It was me all along. I’m the guy my dad warned me about. I’m the friend who can’t be trusted.

“His mother died last year,” Sherrie tells me.

I try to imagine it, and find that I can’t.

“Oh, man,” I say.

“He goes out, he gets as messed up as he possibly can, and then he calls and begs me to come over. And then he just cries all night, Lawrence.”

“Jesus Christ,” I say, controlling the urge to cover my ears. Why do I not want to hear this so much?

Then Jim returns with an entourage, as noisy as he was quiet when he left the kitchen a moment ago. Jim has an arm
around Slaughter, babbling about how good and okay everything is going to be, and Creighton is walking ahead lecturing them both on the salutary effects of ice water. Todd trails behind as though tethered to the bunch of them.

Jim sits Slaughter down at the table, keeping up a steady stream of patter, and not taking his hands off Chuck, as if he fears that the moment he does, Slaughter will leap to his feet and do or say something irrevocable. So as Jim speaks, he punctuates and embellishes with soothing, miniature pats and the kneading of muscles.

“Yahhh, the big guy just needs a shot of coffee or some such thing, wha? Maybe something to eat, eh, Chuck? You try any of them cocktail wieners we got out there, I bought those just for you, now …”