Authors: Nino Ricci
Weekend dances often drew groups of Italians into Centennial from the surrounding suburbs, usually slick-haired boys in platform shoes and tight shirts whom I felt nothing in common with, strutting and tough, seeming to wear their Italianness like a challenge. But there were few Italians who actually attended the university, those of us who did seeming like quiet interlopers within the university’s tidy enclave of privilege. There was an Italian in a satire class I took in second year who began to grow friendly with me at some point, Michael Iacobelli, a few years older than I was, the two of us seeming to come together with the same unspoken bond of forced difference and sameness that had joined me to Vince in high school, gradually gravitating toward one another in the after-class gatherings a group of us held in one of the residence pubs. Michael talked little at these gatherings, visibly set apart, balding and wiry and small like a wizening construction worker; though he remained true whenever he did speak to a peculiar iconoclasm, swerving always from the expected as if to subvert at once any thought people had that they were better than he was.
“It’s not the oil crisis that’s going to bring the world down, it’s the humour crisis. People don’t laugh any more. Make a joke, for Christ’s sake.”
But then when the group thinned down to just the two of us, as it usually did, there’d seem a silent, almost bored complicity between us as if a disguise had just fallen away.
He lived with his parents still, in a subdivision not far from the campus, his street dwindling from the malls and highrises of Jane Street into a small-town decorum, spruce-treed and brick-bungalowed. The first time I visited him there I registered only an indifferent blur of familiarity, the vine bower out back, the pictures of Christ, the baroque excesses of furnishings and flowered ceramic and swirled plaster. People came and went: siblings, shadowy in the background, so that afterwards I couldn’t remember how many I’d met, what their names were; his mother, in apron and hairnet in the kitchen, greeting me with a curt, silent nod and a look of suspicion. Before going down to the rec room we sat a few minutes in the living room with his father, burly and gruff, enshrined in his armchair there like a monolith.
“We live down St. Clair before, is better. Too many different people here now,
drogha
, black people, everything.”
“Come on, Dad,” Michael said, good-humoured. “What did black people ever do to you?”
But his father didn’t respond, walling himself up against the edge of condescension in Michael’s voice.
“He gets into his moods,” Michael said afterwards. “He’s like those slugs, you poke them and they roll up into little balls.”
Michael had been briefly addicted to heroin a few years before. He and two childhood friends, Perry and Gus, still did what they called chipping, no longer addicted but tripping out every month or so when the urge suddenly took them. The three of them would show up sometimes at my residence subtly altered, looking for distractions the way a cat sought movement, for some object outside themselves that could give a shape to the strange floating energy of their high. Gus took on a keen, malevolent irony when he was stoned, treacherous, mind-twisting; at
the residence he’d hit on women in the pub with a manic onslaught of banter and innuendo.
“Say, don’t I know you? I’m sure we met at that sexology conference down in Fresno, you were with Xaviera Hollander.”
But it surprised me how often women were taken in by him, attracted to his outlandishness or perhaps simply too mystified by him to ward him off.
The three of them formed an odd group, Michael the still centre around which the other two revolved like polar opposites, Gus an A-student, overbearing and articulate, Perry shambling and easygoing, a high-school dropout, grown eccentric with his unschooled intelligence. Yet they seemed to have evolved over the years into a single organism, even their differences, their marked individuality, their constant disputatious assertions of it, seeming the shift and flow of a common energy. For a time I fell under their spell, drawn into their sphere like a satellite by the collective gravity of them, part of them and not, wanting the community they seemed to offer yet feeling something in them that was meant as much to exclude as to attract, to hold the people they drew to them in abeyance like disciples. I mentioned to them once a socialist group I’d joined and felt suddenly like I’d been caught out in some betrayal of them, put on the defensive by their quick dismissal of the group though I myself had never taken it very seriously.
“So what do you guys do?” Perry said. “Sit around and plan the revolution?”
Of the group Gus was the most politicized, forever haranguing us over whatever issue had most recently caught his attention. But now he was all condescension and concern.
“Victor, I thought you were smarter than that. Can’t you see, they’re brainwashing you. They’re as bad as the Moonies.”
“You’re just talking off the top of your head. You’ve probably never had anything to do with this kind of thing.”
“I don’t have to, Vic, believe me, I know what they’re like – you meet in some basement room, there’s the little group of them that runs things, there’s the people like you that sit at the back and don’t say anything and then never come back. It’s like a religion for them, Victor, they’re just looking for converts so they’ll feel they’re important. It doesn’t have anything to do with politics.”
“It’s not that,” Michael said. “It’s the scope of these things. You can’t change the world like that. Those are the same people that go home after and beat their wives, they don’t see the contradiction.”
And my meetings after that seemed to lose the one satisfaction they’d still given me, that of allowing my own scepticism to take solid shape in me.
Toward the end of third year I shot up with them once, in Michael’s rec room, the rest of his family away though there seemed something purposely cavalier in doing it there, in the defiance of it, in the tawdriness, the strange disjunction between the delinquency of what we were doing and the banality of where we were. Michael helped me raise a vein and put the needle in for me, the experience intimate like sharing a bodily function, the sight of the needle’s tip pricking the skin, of the blood swirling up into the syringe. Afterwards we went up to a floor party in my residence; I had the impression the drug hadn’t affected me though the world had taken on an odd liquid resistance.
“Look at Vic, he’s already nodding,” Perry said. He made a face, a clown’s exaggerated grin.
Gus began to work the room, disappearing into the crowd, while Michael and Perry went off in search of beer. Then a few minutes later Gus resurfaced beside me.
“Vic, I’m having a bad trip. I’m freaking out.”
He seemed visibly shaken, his body like a single nerve.
“I’ve gotta stop doing this shit, Vic, I’m wrecking myself. I get it into my head and it’s all I can think of.”
The intensity of him alarmed me. He seemed one instant merely desperate and then the next oddly lucid, inside the experience of his own brutal honesty as if it energized him.
“Talk to me, Vic, talk me down.” But he continued to talk himself, increasingly paranoid and strange.
“I get this hatred going through me sometimes, this pure hate, I think I could be one of those guys you hear about, those normal guys who start picking people off on the street from a roof one day. I’ve never told anyone about this before.”
I felt truly disturbed now, less by what he was saying than by the responsibility for him he was urging on me.
“Maybe we should go,” I said finally. “Just let me get Perry and Michael.”
“Go? Why?” He looked at me suddenly in mock incomprehension. “Oh, all that stuff I was saying, is that it? I was just joking, Vic. Relax.”
And he walked off into the crowd.
I went down to my room. Half an hour or so later the three of them were at my door.
“Hey, Vic, no hard feelings,” Gus said. “It was just a joke.”
“What, did Gus pull one of his mind trips on you?” Perry said. “You’ve gotta make allowances for Gus, he gets a little cockeyed when he’s stoned.”
But I was determined to feel betrayed, not just by Gus but by all of them, the thing they formed together.
“Are you all right?” Michael said.
“I’ll be fine.”
“He’s okay,” Michael said, as if interpreting me for the others. “He just wants to be alone for a while, it’s his first time, you know what it’s like.”
Michael came by to see me the next day.
“Gus is a bit of an asshole sometimes,” he said.
But what Gus had done seemed somehow beside the point.
“It’s not just Gus, it’s all of you. You close people out. You make it seem as if the world should revolve around you.”
But I’d put it more harshly than I’d intended. Michael seemed genuinely taken aback.
“We’re individuals, Victor. Half the time we don’t even get along ourselves. You make it sound like a conspiracy or something.”
“I’m not saying you do it consciously, it’s more subtle than that.”
But I’d lost the offensive, had wanted to seem coldly perceptive but came across as merely resentful.
“Victor, it’s normal you’d feel left out sometimes. We’ve known each other for years, you can’t just walk into something like that and understand it. I know what you’re like, you like to sit on the edge of things, check them out. I respect that. But you can’t hold back like that and then blame us for closing you out.”
It was this reasonableness in him that was most frustrating, his ready, level-headed responses. I’d expected him to see at once the truth of what I was saying and capitulate; but finally he was the one in the right, seemed at bottom sincerely to want some connection between us while I’d simply been awaiting some clear excuse for a rupture.
In the summer, back at my endless routine of work, I had a call one night from Michael: Gus’s parents had discovered he’d been using again and had thrown him out of the house.
“He just needs a place to crash for a couple of days while they calm down.”
“What about your place or Perry’s?”
“It’s no good, our parents won’t have him. You know how it is with Italians, these things get around.”
But they had other friends, more indebted, seemed to turn to me now as the path of least resistance.
“We don’t even get along very well.”
“He’s just uncomfortable around you, that’s all. He thinks you don’t like him. I thought this might give you a chance to get to know each other.”
Gus stayed for nearly two weeks. Almost at once he made himself at home with an irritating imperiousness, his things everywhere, the kitchen littered with his mess.
“I really appreciate this, Vic, I can’t tell you how much.”
Yet the whole time we hardly spoke to each other, Gus only just rising from his cat’s bed of cushions when I left for work in the morning and out when I came in or forever on the phone.
“Ma, it was the first time in three years, I swear it. I’m your own son, for God’s sake. You send me out like this to beg off
stranieri
, it’s humiliating.”
But he didn’t sound humiliated at all, sounded his old self, lying, conniving, manipulating, though afterwards it was more Michael I felt used by than Gus, who after all was merely being himself, couldn’t help being himself.
Oddly, Michael dropped out of Centennial that fall, only a few courses short of a degree, to enrol in a college course in computer repair.
“Basically it’s easy money,” he said. “The younger guys there, it’s a kind of mission for them. But I get into the mindlessness of it, you know, Zen and computer repair, that sort of thing.”
But he seemed to have capitulated to some lesser self in him, talked about being left free to pursue other things but with a backwash of unspoken defeat. Then part way into the year Gus dropped out as well, going to work full time for his father’s construction firm. I suspected some cosmetic compromise, some means he’d worked out of being able to support his habit while seeming to be drawn back into the fold; but the next time I saw him he seemed truly chastened.
“Believe me, this is what I need right now.” There was the smug desperate assuredness in him of someone aping borrowed wisdom, strange for him. “They don’t give me the cash, eh, they’re not that stupid, it all goes right into a trust. But in a few years I’ll have enough to do whatever I want.”
But I sensed the same resignation in him as in Michael, the same falling back into the world they’d come out of as if they’d been held there by some limit it had set on them.
I had entered my last year at Centennial. I’d envisioned simply going on in school, but the weeks passed and still I’d made no enquiries, sent for no applications. Each time I opened a book or entered a class now I felt a resistance in me, a disjunction, the sense I’d been taking on faith some way of looking at things that finally had little to do with how the world was.
There was an information session one evening for a development organization that sent students overseas to teach. I expected political rhetoric, the unreliable earnestness of the converted, felt my suspicions confirmed at the sight of the speaker, long haired and bandana-ed and bearded. But his talk unfolded anecdotal and small like a returned vacationer’s, following a series of slides like the ones Father Mackinnon had sometimes shown us at St. Mike’s after one of his trips, the shanty towns,
the blasted landscape, the people gravely posed before the camera as in a wedding portrait. It was exactly this unassumingness in the talk that seemed to draw me in, this sense of making a tiny, other life in some unknown place as if starting from scratch. The next week I began the lengthy process of application, and by early March I had been accepted to teach English the following fall in Nigeria, a country that a few months before I could not even have located on a map.
The next weeks I passed in a kind of dream, set now on this future that had somehow been conjured out of nothing. The world took on an impermanence, everything already compared to the future’s imagined foreignness, the buildings and shops, the traffic lights, the strange organization of things, so arbitrary, roads and highways and malls, the endless civilized neatness of suburbs. Then my last day at Centennial had come: I felt no nostalgia, no remorse, only the unthinking relief at having got through again.