Mean Boy (24 page)

When I turn to see who’s left at the table, it’s Sherrie, looking down into her Coke. And Jim, looking at Sherrie, with folded arms.

I get the feeling I have stumbled into something. Like when you’re switching around the channels on TV and come across a scene which is clearly a significant part of some narrative, a moment that’s heavy with meaning. The two characters face off in silence, but you can feel something weighty in the air—something that’s gone on well before you arrived, something with a lot of no-doubt-fascinating twists and turns.
This looks like it might be good
, you think to yourself, settling down to watch.

But then the credits roll. You realize the show is over. You’ve come in too late.

MY FIRST DRUG-INSPIRED EFFORT
. It may not be “Kubla Khan,” but into my midterm portfolio—due on Jim’s desk Monday morning—it goes. I woke up from dreams of snakes and limbs and wrote it at once, Big Blue steaming at my side.

It started with a nagging feeling. Something is nagging at me, I thought. It felt like the mental equivalent of having to piss. So I dug out my notebook—not ready to unleash the merciless clackity-clack of my typewriter keys this early—and out came “The Ass of the Head.” Smooth and easy. It reminded me of the time I was six and saw a cow give birth at a neighbour’s farm. It’s not a memory I cherish, in particular, but I do recall with a sort of poetic relish the
glide
of the experience—the smooth and perfect glide of the final moments. Once the difficult stuff was out of the way, the rest of the creature’s wet body just slid right on out, easy as pie. After an infinity of struggle and suffering, and only a little bit
of throwing up on my part, the thing abruptly pooped itself into the world like it was no big deal. To me this will always be the best and only metaphor for writing poetry, although I will probably never say so out loud.

Then I just kind of fawned over it for a while, “The Ass of the Head.” I imagined Jim extricating it from my portfolio, his sudden, surprised smile at the title (the smile fading as he becomes engrossed). It was a bit sing-songy, and I didn’t quite understand exactly what I meant by “this angel,” which was worrying, because the whole poem seemed to kind of hinge on the image. But maybe that was okay. Maybe it was supposed to be enigmatic, the angel. This was poetry, after all. And why “this” angel, I wondered, why didn’t I go with “an” angel or “the” angel? Who is the angel? I wasn’t sure it mattered. I decided to leave it. Leave it to the portfolio. Leave it to Jim.

So now the poem is neatly typed and snugly ensconced in my midterm portfolio alongside “Deadwood” and a few other new ones (“Showdogs,” “Stormfront,” and “Thanksgive”—a tribute to poor knocked-up Cousin Janet). The rest of the portfolio I’ve padded with old stuff. But it’s finished, and so you’d think my conscience would be clear. Still, something is nagging at me. Something from the night before. Another unwritten poem, perhaps? I flip the pawed, soiled pages of my notebook for clues. And there it is.

Ring, ring.

“Hello, this is the Crowfeather Inn, Peter speaking.”

“Yes, may I speak to Dermot Schofield, please?”

“Mmmmm. Just a sec.”

The flipping of pages. The tapping of a pen. It sounds like it could be one of the hippie proprietors, with his casual
mmmm
and soft way of talking. My parents told me this was the thing they most noticed about hippies, once they started showing up to hitchhike around the island and mustering the toked-up audacity to ask my father, not for a room, but for permission to camp out behind the motel. “For free!” Dad always marvelled. “Lousy armpit sniffers think they’ll set up a squat on my land for
free!
Well, I showed
them
where the gun was.” Dad is always saying he showed people where the gun was. But he’s never showed anyone where the gun is. Dad is a softie. I remember quite clearly the canvas lean-tos pitched out back. He even let the hippies light fires.

Regardless, the tents and the fires—that wasn’t what really got up my father’s nose. It was their voices, the way they talked. That deliberately gentle, deliberately inoffensive mode of speech. “Made you want to punch ‘em in the face,” Dad always said.

“I’mmm sorry,” says Peter the hippie. “Mr. Schofield checked out bright and early this morning.”

“Bright and early?” I repeat.

“That’s right,” Peter practically whispers in my ear. “Um,” I say. “Did he go to the bus station?”

“I believe he did,” affirms Peter. “How were the roads this morning?”

“Oh, fine,” Peter tells me, happily. “They had the plows out all night.”

“That’s good,” I say, twiddling the phone cord, twiddling away my guilt. “Did he get a cab or something?”

“Mmmm, no,” slurs Peter. “I believe he got a lift out to Spanky’s with one of the other guests.”

“A lift?” I repeat.

“Mmm-hmm,” murmurs Peter, as if in seduction. It really does make you want to punch them in the face.

“Did he,” I say, “did he, like … Did he have any trouble with the bill, or anything?”

There is a pause. “I beg your pardon?” says Peter.

“I just want to make sure he got away okay,” I apologize. “I was … I was his host.”

“You were his host,” repeats Peter in a slow, soft, and measured cadence. Dulcet tones, as they say. What is a dulcet? At the moment, I’m assuming it is a big machete-shaped thing one uses to hack a person into strips. Or else something like Moira’s dragon blade. Who would have thought such tones could be so cutting?

I will fix it later.

I’M TOO SICK
to do anything. Every time I look down at a page—be it my notebook or the library copy of
Poets of Contemporary Canada
I brought along—my guts heave. Janet’s not sick. I’m so sick, I begrudge her this fact. I thought pregnant women were supposed to be puking constantly, but she actually looks pretty content for a girl with no future—all curled up in her seat across from me, wool coat draped over her knees, immersed in George Eliot. Janet is never to be seen without some hefty old novel under her arm. As long as it’s not of this century and is over six hundred pages, she’ll read it. Must be the Lydia in her. Janet says she doesn’t like “modern” literature. She once told me she finds Hemingway “bland,” and because everyone is so influenced by Hemingway, it’s all bland now. I think she just likes reading about corsets and
pince-nez
and the like.

Every once in a while she’ll look up at me, not so much out of concern but, I imagine, because it’s unsettling to have me sitting across from her just staring into space. And I’ll admit—I’m not just staring into space. Sometimes I’ll forget myself in all my nausea and sit staring at her. To get my mind off the nausea, I’ll wonder about Janet. The girl with no future. She’s got four months worth of baby in her now.

“Oh, Larry,” says Janet when she looks up at me. Her face pinches. “You’re so green!”

I force a verdant smile before turning my face to the window. The sky is grey and the sea is greyer, choppy. “The chop,” I’ve heard seagoing types call it. Gotta look out for that chop, they’ll say. Chop’s bad today. Would make a good title for a poem come to think of it, “The Chop.” But I don’t write it down.

The rainbow of awfulness I’m experiencing this morning comes in a varied spectrum. Green is for my hangover—because there’s no way I’ll accept that, after all these years, I’ve lost my sea legs and have turned into one of those mainland types who need to take a Gravol before even setting foot on the pier. So the green is a hangover green, not, I emphasize, a seasickness green. Any seasickness I may be experiencing is a direct result of the hangover, is what’s causing the slightly yellowish tinge to the green.

Then there’s the red. Red is for fear, and Christmas. Yellow doesn’t work for fear as far as I’m concerned, it’s too sunny a colour—daffodils, Van Gogh sunflowers. Yellow is not of my spectrum today, except in the sickly tinge it brings to the green. Red is what’s fear. It’s alarming, gory. Red is the colour that warns you to stop. Blood, Santa Claus. He opens his jolly old bag and out comes—nothing. Because I still have no money for Christmas presents. Especially now.