Mean Boy (34 page)

“I don’t understand football.”

“You don’t have to understand it, Campbell,” says Slaughter, looking pained. “You think the only reason to do something is so you can understand it. You gotta stop reading all the time, and get out more. Take an interest in the world around you.”

It strikes me as an apt idea, particularly at this point in
time. Forget about understanding. Forget about poetry. That’s what Sparrow seems to think I should do. Jim too. Not to mention my good buddy Joanne Not Up My Alley, whoever the crap she is. The universe conspiring against poetry—against poetry combined with the likes of Larry Campbell, that is. Who am I kidding? Who gets to be a poet in this world? The rich and the crazy. Byron and Blake. Because if you aren’t rich, it drives you crazy. That’s the path on which I’ve plunked myself.

We decide to stop at the sub shop for a couple of all-meaters to fortify ourselves for the evening. This is where I confess to Slaughter my conviction that Jim is mad at me.

“Who gives a shit?” demands Chuck. “Arsenault is a big fuckin’ baby anyway. He’s always mad at somebody about something.”

The truth of this hits me between the eyes. “You’re right. He is, isn’t he?” Schofield. Dekker.

“He’ll get over it, man.”

“The problem is,” I add, “he’s my prof. You know, he grades my papers.” And then I bury my face in my sandwich because this actually isn’t the problem at all. It’s part of the problem, but it’s not the big-picture problem. The big-picture problem is what makes me want to hide my face from Slaughter, my suddenly swimming eyes.

“Just go see him,” says Slaughter around a mouthful of pastrami. “Bring him a bottle of booze or something, he’ll forget all about it. Jim’s always gotta be pissed off at someone—it’s just your turn in the rotation. He got pissed off at me this one time I told his wife to fuck off.”

“You told his wife to fuck off?”

Slaughter puts his sandwich down on the table between us.

“You ever meet his wife? Oh yeah, you met her out at
their place that time with the dumplings. She’s a complete bitch, right?”

“Well,” I balk. I want to explain to Slaughter that Moria is not actually a complete bitch. Slaughter is from suburban Ontario and so he wouldn’t understand. Moira is a New Brunswick woman, I want to explain—but that doesn’t work because I’ve met women like Moira in PEI as well. Moira is a rural person, is the best way I can think to describe it. She doesn’t put on airs. Moira would never have been exposed to airs in her life, is the thing—and if she ever was, she would dismiss them immediately. As airs.

“She’s just—she’s
harsh,”
is what I end up saying. “She’s blunt.”

“She’s a douchebag,” Slaughter contends. “So one night last year I’m over there, right, and I’m playing with the dog and the dog’s going apeshit the way it does the moment you give it any attention, and she’s going, Stop teasing that dog, stop teasing that dog, and I’m like, I’m not teasing the dog, we’re playing. And the dog barks some more and she goes, I’m telling you for the last time to stop teasing that dog before I kick your goddamn head in.”

This makes me laugh, because I can hear it. I can hear Moira’s voice forming the words. Also because Chuck is demonstrating for me the face he wore when Moira threatened to kick his head in.

“So I’m like, Yeah, all right, whatever, fuck it. I mean, that’s what I meant to say, but I think it came out sounding more like,
Aw fuck you
. So Arsenault—who was drinking so much I thought he must be asleep this whole time—he fucking leaps out of his chair. Just … 
leaps
, right? And his eyes are coming out of his head. Whad you say? Whad you say? And I’m like, Nothing, man. And Jim, you wouldn’t believe it, I’ve never seen anything like it, the guy is right up in my face going, No! I heard you say something to my wife and I want
you to repeat it to me right goddamn now, Charles. So he’s calling me Charles. So it’s
that
way, right? And, you know, I could have killed him. Jim’s tall, but he weighs something like a hundred sixty, I could have put him through the wall.”

Slaughter looks relaxed and happy telling this part of the story. The absolute assurance that Jim could never have hurt him but Slaughter could easily have crushed Jim. Watching him I think, This is what carries Chuck through life. This is what makes him so scarily likeable. This is where all that confidence comes from. The simplest of formulas.

“So what did you do?”

“I stayed calm. You gotta stay calm. I had a coach in high school who taught me that. He taught me that when you find yourself getting pissed off, you gotta look at the person in front of you and ask yourself if you genuinely want to hurt this person. Like, you have to be able to take a step back, because, at that particular moment, you may really think you do. Fuck, I’ve had that feeling more than once, you know? Like with my dad for starters. But this coach, he taught me to count to ten and really think about it. He used to say that was my main responsibility in life, ‘cause I’m so big. He was the guy who drilled it into me I could really kill someone, you know? ‘Cause it’s not something you really believe when you’re a kid, that you have that kind of power.”

Slaughter nods his head in an attempt to appear solemn, but actually he still looks pretty cheerful. Imagine having such a confrontation with Jim. Eyes bulging. Red face pulsating down into mine.

“So I just left,” concludes Slaughter, thrusting his hands into the air by way of demonstration. “I just backed up. Whatever you say, Jim—I’m gonna split. And Jim—fuck, he really is lucky I didn’t drive him, come to think of it—he’s like, Yeah, that’s right, you better get the hell out of here you goddamn Neanderthal, this isn’t a zoo, we don’t have enough
bananas to feed a full-grown gorilla, all this sort of bullshit.
Personal
stuff, you know? All the crap you think about a person but never say. The kind of crap you can’t take back, and you’re really goddamn lucky if the guy decides to forgive you afterward, you know? That kind of shit can end a friendship pretty effectively.”

Slaughter furrows his brow, belching meditatively. He shoves himself to his feet to find a pay phone and call Sherrie.

All the crap you think about a person but never say
. I remember. I remember coming very close.

I WAKE UP THE NEXT DAY
feeling slow, but not sick. Vague, as opposed to queasy. Remote. Detached. The tea is extra invigorating, and I seem to be lacking my usual frantic impulse to do something intellectually improving—like bash out a half-assed poem just so I can tell myself I produced something, or go poring though back issues of
Atlantica
to try and figure out what it is all these published poets seem to be doing right in the face of my multiple unpublished wrongs.

I try to find a word for the edge I’m lacking. It’s important to figure out, because this is the first time I can ever remember waking up without it—and it’s good to wake up without it. If I can name the quality, perhaps I can continue to keep it at bay. So what is it? What is that desperate, metallic flavour of energy that drives me through my days? In its unhurried, detached state, my mind circles, taking its time while I slurp tea from Big Blue, watching snowflakes pile up on my window ledge outside. After a lazy while, it alights, my mind does.

The word is
dread
.

I take another long, noisy slurp.

So. I wake up every morning feeling dread. I sit down at my typewriter feeling dread. I shrug into my jacket and wind my scarf around my neck, I shoulder my satchel and trudge my way to school, I sit down in a lecture hall, I get up to go to the next class, I do it all, every day, in a state of dread.

Yet today, a reprieve. From the dread—the dread I didn’t even know was there until now. All thanks to drinking gallons of rum with Charles Slaughter. I am no scientist. Who knows why saturating my bloodstream with alcohol would have such a salutary effect? People always tell you drinking kills your brain cells. Whole slews of brain cells, the educational reels warbled at us back in high school, completely annihilated—the spark sucked out of them. The film would show us plump cartoon brain cells, their rosy cranial environment gradually deteriorating into a sodden alcoholic swamp. Wading through the muck, the cells would soon degenerate into grey, sad-faced raisin creatures before keeling over with a murky splash. One raisin would be labelled, Memory of First Kiss. Another would be Hand-to-Eye Coordination.

Wouldn’t it be nice to think that’s what happened. That I killed off my dread-raisin with booze.

Of course, I don’t believe it. Now that I’ve identified the bastard, I can pick it out, I can see it lurking in the shadows. It may be down. But it’s not out.

Meanwhile, it would seem today’s the day to get a few things done.

First stop, the library. When I don’t find what I’m looking for in a back issue of
Re:Strain
(idiotic name for a journal, by the way, Joanne, did you come up with that name? Did you find
it was
up your alley?)
, I head to the university catalogues, yank out the 1973–74 edition from Ralston. The page is still marked at
Department of English
from when I pulled out this same book to find an address to send Schofield his cheque.

Hoisting the catalogue under my arm, I head to the stairwell where the pay phones are and chat with the operator a while. I give her the number in Ontario and make sure any long-distance charges go to my number at home.

In the electronic interim between the click of being transferred, the distant whirr of wires, I reflect upon how unreflective I was during my chat with the operator. That is to say, I didn’t feel awkward or stupid, or worried about the way I was phrasing my request; I didn’t wonder what she was thinking of me. It is a glorious thing, this lack of dread. How do I kill it off for good? How do I shrivel it into a staggering raisin, cause it to keel over once and for all? There have to be means besides rum.

Ring, ring, Department of English, Professor Schofield please, just one moment, ring, ring some more, and by God he picks up.

The raisin trembles. Plumpening?

“Why hello, Larry!” He sounds more pleased than surprised, even.

“Hello!” I shout back. My voice booms monstrously throughout the stairwell.

“Holy God, Larry, where are you calling from? It sounds like … an indoor swimming pool or something.”

“Sorry,” I say, lowering my voice. “I’m in a stairwell in the library.”

“Ah.” Weird pause. It’s my turn to talk, and so I don’t. “And how are things at Westcock?” queries Schofield at last.

“Great!” I say.

“Glad to hear it. And you got my letter with the cheque, yes? Everything’s okay?”

“Yes,” I say, and, after another weird pause, decide I might as well get right down to it. “I was just wondering if you got those poems I sent you.”

“Oh, that’s right—you sent in some poems, didn’t you?”

“I did!”

“I’m sorry, Larry, I should have let you know when I wrote back. I suppose I must have just passed them along and forgot about them.”

In the distance, wires whirr. I can picture them stretched taut along the highway to Wethering, vibrating in the wind.

“Sorry?” I say. “You … passed them along?”

“To the editors.”

“Ah,” I say. “Um, oh. I guess I thought you were the editor.”

“Officially,” says Schofield, “I’m the ‘editorial advisor.’ The review itself is actually student-run.”

Student-run? So Joanne? Is a student? I can’t yet tell if this makes things better or worse.

“Anyway!” sings Schofield, as if cleansing the conversation of detritus. “What can I do for you, Larry?”

“Oh,” I say again. “Well, that’s basically what I was calling about. My poems.”

“To see if we got them? I’m sorry about that, Larry, but it’s still pretty early in the process. I should have warned you it usually takes forever for the editors to respond. It has to go through first readers, then the board itself has to have their kick at the can—a lot of duelling egos involved there, I can tell you—then …”

“Sorry?” I interrupt. “First readers?”

“Mm. Undergrads in the department.”

The wires hum like descending locusts.

“Larry?” says Schofield.

“Actually,” I say at about the same time, “I did get a response.”

“Oh,” says Schofield. “Already?”

“Yeah. That’s what I was calling about.”

“Hm,” says Schofield.

“Yeah,” I say. “The thing is, I thought that you—”

“You know, Larry,” Schofield speaks over me, “these are the perils of student journals. Young writers often have very particular ideas of what poetry should be. Hell, it’s not an attitude restricted to undergrads. And so this sometimes means good work can get overlooked.”

“It’s just that,” I push on, “I thought you would be the one looking at my poems. That’s what I had hoped.”

“O-oh!” says Schofield, for what feels like a long time. “I’m so sorry, Larry. I guess you would have no way of knowing otherwise.”

“I don’t—I just didn’t understand.”

I am not used to people like Schofield—people so readily apologetic, so willing to take the blame.

“Send them to me,” Schofield decrees without warning.

“No, no, no,” I start yelling—the word echoing in the stairwell around me—even though this was precisely what I had been hoping Schofield would say. “You’re busy, I just should have known—”

“Send them to me, Larry. Really. I’d love to see them.”

But I know that I won’t. I can barely stand to think about those poems anymore. B-poems. Not Up My Alley.
A confection, ultimately
.

“Maybe I could send you … something else?”

“Send me anything you want. But Larry, honestly—you can’t let this discourage you. If you let one rejection throw you off, it’s going to be all the harder to park yourself down in front of the typewriter again, do you know what I mean?”

I know exactly what he means. But how do you stop it? How do you kill that particular raisin?

Dermot Schofield is the only person I’ve ever met who seems more comfortable talking on the telephone than in person. As we continue to converse—easily, amiably—I keep trying to reconcile my memory of him writhing in his chair at the Crowfeather, blushing and stammering through the preamble of his reading. The guy on the phone I can picture with feet up on his desk, arm dangling over the back of his chair, jacket removed, tie loosened—perhaps even set aside. Schofield sounds like he’d be happy to talk to me all day.