The Journey Prize Stories 24 (26 page)

Finally I pull away. Grab the chilly receiver. Wrap a scratchy blanket around my naked shoulders.

Hey, Mom
.

Exhausted, feeling trapped already, I collapse into the dumpy armchair. It’s green and fancy in a retro way, something I rescued from an alley last summer. Around me are pages of an essay I’m supposed to be working on for a course in Canadian history.
The Influence of the Trade Union Movement on
Canada’s Migrant Workers
. Underneath these papers in a well-worn baggie, the flaky remains of some B.C. bud I traded for a blow job from a jacked-up skinhead at the bus terminal.

Oh El
.

Instinctively my fingers begin to roll. I think I can hear something new in her voice. She’s crying, of course. Which isn’t so unusual. She cries like the women on TV, like the love-worn and the heartbroken, like her life is some never-ending drama etched into bright 3-D. But her sobs now sound as if someone is beating her chest with a boxing glove, so hard that the tears are being pounded, literally being pounded right out of her.

For a beat, a whisper and a half, I’m afraid.

Then I clear my throat.

Around the time of this phone call, many years ago, my mom lived a quiet life in a rundown farmhouse outside a village called Warsaw. She lived there all alone until she died. Warsaw is about half an hour or so outside the armpit of a faded industrial city I moved away to for university, about a million and a half years ago. Her house was the house I grew up in, a place we only rented, and though the land had been hacked off and sold back in the days when Sonny and Cher were still a couple, I used to pretend sometimes that it was ours. I had childish Dungeons and Dragons–type fantasies where we were the feudal landowners and the piss-faced farmers our lowly serfs. Wandering around in camouflage shorts through the sad Christ-like cornstalks, beheading stray sunflowers with a sword carved of wood, I used to imagine too that in a different kind of life we had a whole other family history, descending not from the stone-hearted Vikings, with their raping and pagan
pillaging, but blending in instead with everyone else around us in that fucked-up little corner of the world, heirs to a solid line of God-fearing Irish-Catholic drunks.

Other times, horny and so bored out of my mind it seemed fun to think about killing myself, if only in the theoretical, the way you imagine winning the lottery or living forever, I’d get on my BMX and bike past the rows of corn up our long gravel road to spy on our fun-loving neighbours. Cycling past the lake and the fake European châteaus with their gingerbread-laced verandas and fancy designer solar panels, I’d wonder what it was like to be part of this ass-kissing leisure class, who seemed not necessarily rich, but full of a kind of bullshit I could never get away with. Men in ironed golf shirts practising their drive, tanned kids playing pick-up games of laser tag, women in tight sundresses drinking iced tea and peach schnapps under long covered porches, keeping one eye on the kids and joking in a sexual way about the men.

I didn’t want this world. It made me feel guilty and ashamed. But maybe something like it. Maybe just a slice of it. A made-for-CBC documentary, where intimacy was a Cracker Jack prize, some hard, sweet surprise, not just a nail-spiked Molotov cocktail hidden inside a slot machine waiting to blow up in your face, on what you thought was your lucky day.

After her phone call, I must have fallen asleep. I wake up a few hours later, soaked and sweaty in my briefs. The heat in the apartment is cranked. It’s dark outside and I feel disoriented, bloated by the sensation that I have fallen out of time.

Around me the walls vibrate. Hello, you little fucker, you cocktease Friday night.

When I get up I notice I have just a few cigarettes left. So I put on jeans. Outside the street is freezing. The stars are at their finest: twinkling, sleazy little ghost eyes. Ropes of Christmas lights flicker, gaudy silver garlands rustle from ornate street-lamps, the storefronts themselves are haunted with cotton snowmen and gaunt-looking plastic Santas staring out like orphans at the world. As I slip along the sidewalks, the cold nudges its fingers under the edge of my coat. I think I might walk toward the river later, past the factory where they roast the oats and where even in the middle of winter ducks huddle like nuns along the banks. I like that kind of silence beside the river, the maple smell of the oats, the shadows under the bridge where you can sit on the concrete pilings and no one will ever find you.

I tell people, in the world I live in now, that I grew up in the sticks. I say I was born in
God’s Country, Ontario
; I make it into a joke, something dark and unimaginable, like we were so poor we had to shoot mutated squirrels and scrape half-flattened roadkill from the side of a secondary highway for our special Viking soup. I tell them my mother made me clothes from old curtains stained with turpentine; that I was so lonely as a kid I created imaginary friends in the faces of rotting pine trees in the forest at the edge of our property and learned to kiss by pressing my lips against the itchy bark, whispering their terrible names like a mantra. And that later, much later, I’d dream that there were lost hunters and rugged backwoods bachelors who would find me wandering around like this in the eerie back fields and want to do cruel, unimaginable things to my unloved body.

Only some of this is true.

Other stuff?

I did have a TV, though we only got two channels. My mom and I fought over the
Jeopardy
questions. I knew the names of every GI Joe and believed I was in love with Hawk Eye. I had a Commodore 64 (a gift from my long-dead grandmother) and later on a second-hand Nintendo. I could wrap the first Zelda game in a single sitting. I could kick Super Mario Bros.’ ass and give the sequel an equal spanking. Offer me a new game and I’d master it in a week. I was a genius that way.

I also enjoyed masturbating. I was a genius in that way too. The first time I had an orgasm I was twelve, humping an abandoned Victorian couch in the dark comforting cave of our unfinished basement.

I wrote fan letters to Ricky Martin, when he was still a part of Menudo. I imagined the two of us on tour together, how he’d hold my hand in the bus and teach me Spanish.

For a year I collected Scratch ’n Sniff stickers in a flower-covered photo album from the bargain bin at Zellers. I traded them at recess with the girls.

All of this is true.

Inside the tavern later it’s pretty dark. Amid the hollering and the smoke I can feel myself start to unwind. The place is maybe half full. It’s a rough sort of place set in the refurbished bunker of an old radical union hall. I take off my scarf and let my eyes adjust to the light, finding a spot at the long bar beside an older guy I’ve seen before. Rick, I think his name is. Rick Mc-something. He’s maybe forty, and going grey. A big dude. Tall.

“Hey,” Rick says, nodding and clearing a spot. His eyes are
watery, wired and alert, then softening a bit, as if he has turned down the volume. The bartender that night – a woman named Louise, hair dyed red, a rough patch of acne fucking with her chin – hauls out a bottle of Molson. I raise my beer to Rick and we clink ceremoniously, as if we are toasting a buddy’s wedding. There are other people at the bar, guys like Rick who work the factories, women in leather pants, puffing cigarettes and teasing their bleached bangs. A whole sad crowd of nutcases and half-assed pretenders.

“Who’s playing,” I say, although looking up at the screen I can see right away it’s the Blackhawks and the Bruins.

“Bruins.”

I can feel him watching me sideways.

“Nice,” I say, gulping.

You can’t hear much of the game. In the bar all you hear are glasses clinking and the spitfire of a dozen conversations. I look at myself in the mirror across the counter, bony cheeks, what passes for indifference in the eyes. I finish what I’m drinking. After a couple of minutes the screen switches to a commercial. Rick starts staring again. I have this kind of paranoia, from all the weed I’ve toked, that he can see inside my brain.

“What?” I say, swivelling around on my stool.

“Nothing.”

I don’t know him. Not much. We’ve talked about hockey, spouted some bullshit politics. He smiles, licking his lips like a drunk. I like this liquid need about him, the eager hangdog show, how he stays close to me and presses his shoulder up against me and laughs and tries to listen to what I say. He’s a good listener. But I don’t feel much like talking.

“How’s school?” he says, eyes drilling down.

I shrug.

“At least you’re getting an education.”

“I better be, for how much I’m fucking in debt.”

Louise comes over. Rick makes the turn of the finger to show he’ll buy the round.

When Louise brings the beer we toast again.

“Here’s to Mr. Smartypants!” He squeezes my shoulder, lets his hand linger for a beat. It’s warm. I can see the trail of tiny veins swelling beneath his eyes, broken red rivers carved into saggy cheeks. On the screen the Bruins score.

I put down the bottle. “How about you?”

“Me? Work blows. I haven’t gotten laid in awhile. What the fuck else is new?”

He laughs. His eyes fish, dig into the ponds of mine, and he smiles like we’re sharing a joke, like he wants me to smile, too. So I do. And I start to feel better. A couple of girls in the corner are laughing over pinball, rocking the machine back and forth, until Louise shouts over for them to knock it the hell off. Seeing these girls, hearing their laughter, their recklessness – I think about my mother. Her voice, so desperate, only a few hours earlier. It makes me feel shitty all over again. But I stuff that shitty feeling into my pocket.

The reality of my story was like nothing I saw on TV. There were no slow-moving love scenes, no laughter in the parental bedding unit late on a weekend morning. If anything, it was a low-budget, family-values, after-school special produced for PBS in the Reagan era and sponsored by Big Tobacco. I never knew my dad. My mom raised me solo. She turned twenty-five the day they met, a line cook working the oil patch in Alberta.
She swore to her dying days that the only thing she could remember was that he was a funny guy and very blond. A mythical Swede, a jack-in-the-box Leif the Lucky. They dated for a few months. They even pretended they were in love. Then one month she missed her period.

For years I would dream of my dad pretty much all the time. I thought about what he looked like, what kind of food and cars he enjoyed, if he was married or lived alone. I wondered who he was as a kid. If we would have been friends. I wondered if he resembled me. If his body was tall and wiry, if his penis curved to one side, if he had a chest like a hairy linebacker.

I wondered if he was religious. How old he was too, the first time he had sex.

I wondered if he ever thought about me.

I went through a period early in elementary school where I’d draw pictures for him in art class, stick drawings of the forests, blotchy watery paintings of all the rocky lakes, etchings of spaceships and aliens in cheap waxy paper that would disintegrate in the rain.

I’d sign them all. Each and every one. And add a column of Xs and Os. Save them up in a special pizza box hidden under my bed, wrapped in second-hand Christmas paper, to give to him when I was big enough and could finally get out there to find him.

To Dad
.

For My Best Bud in the World
.

Happy Father’s Day!

When I get up to say goodbye, Rick grabs me. His place is around the corner, he says. Do I want to head back? The bar
is bright, people staggering around like little kids, everyone hovering expectantly over their seats, searching for their coats. It seems early.

I look up. Around us, under fluorescent, Louise is wiping the bar, getting ready to count her tips. Rick’s eyes are damp. Bits of his grey hair stick up here and there in tiny spikes.

“Sure,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

When my mom told my father the news about her unplanned pregnancy, over lukewarm sloppy screwdrivers in his tiny foreman’s trailer, he looked down at her very strangely, as if he was about to smile, then he changed his mind, and punched her hard a few times in the gut. She had expected celebrations. At first she was so shocked she forgot to lift her arms to protect the invisible fetus growing and developing inside her. But when he raised his fist the third time, she finally learned to duck, to turn her stomach away from him down toward the floor, and the blow instead caught her in the side of the face.

It’s cold. But I don’t really feel it. Just a bite of it at the neck. There’s a moon rising slowly over the James Street Baptist Church. Rick lives near this church. He lives in a big brick building with a wooden porch and a tricycle in the snowy yard and some black bags of garbage frozen to the curb. A metal sign flapping and squeaking in the wind says
Dearborn House. Apartments for Rent. 742-5656
.

“We’re here,” he says, pulling out keys. We stumble up some steps and a woman with a feather boa shoves past. She calls Rick a perv. Her heels click like nails on the splintered wood.

“That’s Rosie,” he whispers. “Our whore.”

We go down a narrow hall with several doors. There’s the sound of staccato gunfire, something from a DVD, and a baby mewling from somewhere, which may or may not be real. Also some weird low moaning, human or animal, leaking out from one of the apartments.

“Welcome to my kingdom,” Rick says, pulling open his door.

His room, like mine, is nothing much to look at. There’s a bed against the wall with a green blanket twisted over some sheets. There’s an armchair and a small TV sitting on a box near what used to be a fireplace, boarded up now and painted black. At the far end there’s a table, two chairs piled with dirty clothes, a kitchenette with a sink, and one of those mini fridges crowded up on top with scummy dishes. There’s a calendar over the bed, stuck on the month of July 1992, with two naked Thai girls curled up like sleeping sisters in the middle of a zebra-skin rug.

He closes the door, rubs one of my shoulders in a halfmassage, squeezes my elbow in a comradely way before heading to the kitchenette. “Drink?” he asks from the counter. My face is warm. There’s no empty chair, so I sit like it’s a first date on the edge of the dumpy bed.