I didn’t know, however, that Dusty wasn’t through. He pulled my hand back from my face. Part of me thought it was a gesture of regret, that he was trying to apologize for his impulse, for the rage that had come over him, that he wanted to examine my face to see if I was all right. Then, while I was still puzzling through his motives and as passive as a patient with a doctor, I felt him straighten my arm, hold it still, and stomp down.
He stomped on it?
Like he was breaking a stick. Like it was kindling.
I heard it snap.
I almost puked.
And then Mr. Henderson showed up and we all ran like hell.
Except for me, on my knees, with my arm cradled, gulping air. I don’t know if it was shock, fear, misery, or an act of defiance in the face of immense cosmic injustice, but when Mr. Henderson, one of the teachers, asked if I was all right, I said yes. I stood up, managed to wipe my flushed and tear-streaked face, and carried my broken arm in my good arm all the way home.
Dusty’s psycho.
No kidding.
He can fight though. Remember that time he caved the guy’s face in?
Fucking brutal. They had to pull the guy’s nose back out with surgery.
That’s because Dusty boxes. He knows how to punch.
Yeah, it’s the boxing and the insane killer part that makes him scary.
Is he going to Westphal next year?
Fucking hope not.
Should be going to jail.
He’ll get there.
He’s already been in juvie.
You can’t go to juvie when you’re barely twelve.
Sure you can. Where the fuck do you think you go—to your room?
I didn’t verify or dispute the story or interject with any information of my own. I just listened to their analysis and took some solace from the indirect way they were commiserating with me. For some reason, perhaps because I lived in their neighbourhood and school was over for the year and local ties were stronger in the summer than during the winter, I was now suddenly one of them. And it made me feel a little better that in their shared awe over Dusty’s cruelty, I got the message that there was little any of them would have done differently in my position. Dusty was the car wreck you didn’t see coming. If you were lucky, he hit the guy next to you and spared your pitiful life. If you weren’t lucky, you stood around and listened while
others talked about your broken arm or your surgically reconstructed nose.
Then one of the boys said: Someone ought to break that fucker’s arm back.
And that was the first time I knew Chris.
He was a year older, already attending middle school, and one of the tallest and certainly the strongest in the group. A fringe of curly blond hair framed his high forehead and he had a hooked and slightly crooked nose, so that he looked a bit like a youthful Roman centurion who’d just taken off his helmet. He had wide shoulders and noticeable biceps. He was rumoured to be a tae kwon do brown belt, and his knuckles were raw and chapped as though he spent his off-hours breaking bricks in half. He was quick to laugh but rarely the first to speak. He held himself back a little and was unusually watchful. What impressed me about him at that moment was his tone. The quiet, offhand way he spoke about breaking Dusty’s arm was a signal that he wasn’t bullshitting or throwing out some wildly implausible suggestion. And that made him seem capable of doing it. Moreover, this unexpected reaction reawakened in me, in delayed post-traumatic stress fashion, a sense of moral outrage. I’d been wronged. I’d been dealt a serious injustice. The surge of gratitude I felt got mixed together with instant hero-worship and marked the beginnings of a true and lasting love.
The conversation moved on to other subjects, but with the strength that Chris’s sympathy had given me, I was able to slough off my self-pity and join these new friends in a game of street hockey. Although the cast limited my ability to shoot or pass, it served as an excellent blocker and I gamely offered
myself up as goalie. Once, when a wicked wrist shot hit the plaster, a hollow
thud
sounded. Everyone thought that was so cool, we spent a half hour trying to make it happen again.
A few weeks later, I saw something else from Chris—his unusual determination and follow-through. Many of us made bold statements but few were capable of heroic deeds. All alone one Saturday morning, as if setting off to take care of a neglected errand, he made the journey over Somerset Hill and down into the neighbourhood near the elementary school. Fate put Dusty out front of his duplex, chucking rocks at parked cars. Words were exchanged, and the fight started with a detached and almost professional manner in the empty driveway. The melee lasted several minutes before Chris’s strength and reach overcame Dusty’s speed and viciousness, and Dusty lay on the ground wincing through a bad eye and puffed lip. Chris’s nose was bleeding and his shirt was stretched, but he was the one still standing. Then, casually and deliberately, because this had been the point all along, he grasped Dusty’s arm, stretched it out, and stomped down.
I never asked him why. It seemed self-evidently about doing what was right.
There’s
an alchemy to close friendships. The ingredients are compiled haphazardly, with desperate abandon. A mixture of laughter, anger, fun, resentment, safety, betrayal, redemption, outrage, and time go into them. Unique external forces create unpredictable dynamics. Pressure or weight counts. Lightness often results. The effects cannot be reliably reproduced.
Like a magician’s illusion, a close friendship creates its own reality. There’s a cloistered quality. You disconnect from the outside world. You lose perspective, meaning you fail to be able to understand or justify your own behaviour from any angle but the one supplied by internal logic.
I’m trying to explain how we became capable of walking into the pastel-tiled lobbies of neighbourhood banks, wearing masks and carrying high-powered weapons.
Halifax
was the far edge of the world. After Halifax there was nothing but ocean. The heavy flotsam of memories, the cold whitecaps of futility. Even the sunshine and the seagulls seemed to know this. There were enough good weather days, plenty of blue air and warmth to fool you that it was a reasonable place to live, but the sky was often dark, filled with roiling, embittered clouds cut by sharp shards of light. You got a migraine just being outside, blinded by the brilliant wet blink all around.
What we called Halifax was really three distinct cities surrounding a lagoon-like harbour. There was Halifax on one side, Dartmouth on the other, and cupping the far end a nondescript municipality called Bedford. When my family moved there, in 1981, we lived on the Dartmouth side. For years, I thought Dartmouth was south of Halifax, because south felt subservient or lesser. But when I looked at a map, much later as an adult, I saw to my astonishment that Dartmouth was actually north of Halifax, sitting on top, the ceiling to the open cave. I still have to think that through just to reorient myself mentally.
I did not know then that Halifax would become not a home for me but a place of exile. I’ve lived in a lot of cities since, and I occasionally feel as though the geography of my brain has collapsed. Streets in one neighbourhood remind me of streets in another. I turn a corner, glance at an old clapboard house, a vine-covered wall, a cobbled lane, or a shaded sidewalk and think I remember it well, only to realize my memories wormhole back to Halifax. It’s as if that’s the original Jungian forest, where heroes and dragons still live.
Dartmouth was insignificant compared to Halifax. A trivial abutment. We all felt so back then. Unless you had to admit it, you never said you were from Dartmouth. There was no excitement there, and nothing to do. Dartmouth was residential, filled with neighbourhoods and low-rise buildings, lakes and forests. When you looked across the harbour, you saw Halifax, the downtown clustered with skyscrapers, a string of lights on each of the two bridges spanning the water, and you knew that’s where stuff happened.
After I moved to New York City, I often got the same feeling whenever I saw Manhattan across the East River. Naturally, I was living in Brooklyn, the Dartmouth of the five boroughs.
Though
I never told anyone, there was a specific reason Dusty hated me so much he felt compelled to boot me in the face and break my arm.
Being new to a place is not easy, and when you are a boy, there are extra difficulties. I was seated in the classroom alone that first Monday morning when the other students arrived. In
their shorts and T-shirts, they looked feral, and so impatient for summer that they resented everything between them and it, even the walls and desks. My presence was an affront. Was I a spy? Had I been forced on them as some kind of a challenge? Everything about me seemed to spark up their hatred.
What are you doing here? I was asked at recess by a crowd.
I had my standard response. I just moved here. But it was an insufficient explanation.
A routine of cruelty began. I was ignored at recess when I was lucky, surrounded by tormentors when I was not. I got shoulder knocks during gym activities, took a basketball off the side of my head unexpectedly. I was the brunt of hard laughter whenever I got tripped in the hallway. Smirks appeared whether I hesitated over an obvious answer or answered an unexpectedly difficult question correctly.
Dusty was the cruellest boy of all. I knew—the way you know a dog isn’t right or that the crazy person on the bus will direct their attention toward you—that he would mark me. He was shorter than me, but he came from a broken home and lived in a shitty duplex and had taken boxing lessons and could do forty-seven push-ups at a go and beat up anyone. He walked with a purposeful swagger wherever he went, a hair-bouncing, knee-flexing pimp roll I realized later had been copped from John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever.
Being marked by Dusty meant that I was given regular promises of my imminent doom. Sometimes the promise came from Dusty himself, hissed into my face; sometimes, gloatingly, from the girls in my class or one of Dusty’s several minions, like Lewis Garner, or even from the few kids who were sympathetic toward me but accepted Dusty’s
reign of terror as a fact of life and were just helplessly relaying the message.
What was the reason for Dusty’s persistent and calculated fury? He’d found, on my desk at school, a page of writing. It was a short story, something I began when I had some free time because the others were finishing an assignment I had never started and wasn’t required to do. I’d always wanted to be a writer. I figured Halifax, if it did nothing else, would give me a fresh start to get that writing life going. I vowed after I moved there to write every day—even as a twelve-year-old I felt that kind of weight. But I forgot to hide my page of writing before lunch, and Dusty found it on my desk when class resumed in the afternoon. I was writing a mystery about a college student who gets a letter from a professor who disappeared while exploring a cave in Mexico. I had in mind that the college student would form an expedition to follow the professor’s trail, explore the cave, and discover a lost city inhabited by a humanoid species that were actually aliens, stranded on the planet for a thousand years. I thought the story had great potential but Dusty didn’t share my enthusiasm. It wasn’t the content or even the quality that seemed to piss Dusty off; it was the simple act of writing.
I didn’t tell my parents how I broke my arm. I pretended nothing at all had happened until I banged it accidentally at the dinner table that evening and began to retch with the pain. When they asked me what was wrong, I said I’d fallen. I added that the fall had happened in the playground and that the other kids had been concerned, but I hadn’t mentioned it to any teachers and never realized the injury was serious until that moment. I lied for complicated reasons. Mostly I was afraid of disappointing
my father, the businessman who sat at the end of the table in judgment of everything I did. Given how it had happened, Dad wasn’t sure a trip to the hospital was necessary, but Mom took me anyway. After many hours in the waiting room, the X-ray, we were told, showed a long fracture in the radius with a spiderweb of microfractures at the radius head. A strange split and twist, seen occasionally in episodes of child abuse. How had I done it? I just fell, I said, and elaborated to explain the odd manner of the fall. The doctor lost interest until I stopped talking, and then he brightened. I was lucky. The injury was about as close to needing surgery as a break could be, but he’d set it expertly. We went home, my arm encased in plaster and throbbing from being moved this way and that. For doubting me, and perhaps in apology for moving to Halifax at all, my father bought me those comic books.
I later told Chris that I wanted to write books, meaning stories, novels, and so on. Anyone else would have mocked me outright or used the confidential information against me later in front of others. But Chris thought it was cool and made nothing more of it, which was exactly the response I needed.
Actually,
some of that isn’t true. I did get picked on mercilessly by Dusty, and I did get pushed into a fight with Lewis, and I did get kicked in the face by Dusty during the middle of that fight, and Chris did suggest someone ought to break Dusty’s arm for his blatant transgression of schoolyard code, but no one, including Chris, made the walk over Somerset Hill to take care of the deed and right the wrong. Still, when I think about everything
that happened, I can come up with no better story to explain how my friendship with Chris began.
The
neighbourhood was called Manor Park, a name that was strictly aspirational. It was a new subdivision and there were still houses going up when I first moved there. We played guns or hide-and-seek in the half-built structures, hanging from rafters, huddling in dank, gravel-floored basements, shuffling along the narrow ledges outside second-storey windows high above the ground, or crawling across tar-papered roofs and leaping into the piles of pink fibreglass insulation stacked below. Most of the neighbourhood kids were twelve to fourteen, with a few brutish fifteen-or sixteen-year-olds thrown in. When school was out, we all played together. There was Derek, who was a little manic and clumsy, but who knew how to throw a knife so that it stuck in a tree, and could tie impressive knots. There was Geoff, who had a slapshot you could barely see and who could spit between his teeth a squirt of saliva that was marvelled at for distance and accuracy. There was Hughey, who was so tall and big-haired that we called him Franky, for Frankenstein. There was Jay, Robin, Paul, Sheldon, and Tom.