The Antagonist

14


07/30/09, 10:16 p.m.


HERACLITUS IS SAYING THAT no man can step twice into the same river and Rank is thugging it up for the boys saying, Yes you can. Of course you can. Duh. Out there is the Saint John River and we could go out and walk to it right now and I would step in it, and then step out of it again, and then step in it again and then I would have stepped into it twice. There. So take that ’*us. How do you like that, Captain *?

Wade is rolling around on the floor laughing. He’s been doing this, at various volumes, for the last hour or so. It is 4:17 on a Thursday afternoon and they are all, of course, stoned brainless. They are doing what they always attempt to do when stoned brainless: talk philosophy. As second-year humanities students, Adam, Kyle and Rank all had to take the pre-Socratics course. Wade is doing a year of sciences in the hope of gaining entrance into the Engineering program at some point, and therefore he gets to refer to the other three as art fags. Rank finds this hilarious — for Wade is the biggest such fag of the bunch of them. Kyle is simply doing whatever he needs to make law school happen. Adam is an all-around grade-maker — a kind of robot who seems to hoover up knowledge and file it away as a matter of protocol, as opposed to deriving any kind of enjoyment or pleasure out of it. And Rank is your average directionless undergrad, hoping one day he’ll arrive at a class and the professor will open his mouth and all of a sudden Rank will know exactly where he is supposed to go and what he is supposed to do. Which is to say, none of them come across as particularly passionate about Arts and Humanities — they are all too busy enacting a private duty.

Which makes Wade the only real zealot in the group. If you mention Led Zeppelin one too many times in his presence, he will veer into ecstasy. He’ll not only deliver a lecture about the timeless, groundbreaking brilliance of Jimmy Page’s guitar — if you let him continue in this vein, he’ll actually start in on their album cover art. He’ll give you a breakdown of the Arthur C. Clarke novel that inspired the cover for Houses of the Holy, and even tell you how the guy who took the photo was a member of some British design group who did album covers for all the big art-rock outfits like Genesis and Pink Floyd back in the day. At which point, he’ll be staggering over to his record collection to show you a few pertinent examples, and that’s when you’ll realize you should have changed the subject long ago.

Captain *, wheezes Wade now.

The only time any of them get passionate about what they are learning at school are times like these, stoned brainless and trying to outdo one another.

No, no, no! shouts Kyle over Wade’s rug-muffled hee-haws. Kyle sinks from his armchair onto his knees in order to be closer to Adam and Rank — who are sprawled on the Sally-Ann-tastic couch — when he makes his point. As always, he gestures with the spout of his beer bottle for emphasis.

No, Rank. He’s not talking about the river, like a river with a name — the Nile or the Saint John or the Thames or whatever. You’re thinking about a river as a single, solid object — but he’s talking about, like, a moving body of water. It’s all a gazillion water molecules right? All different.

Rank knows what Kyle is on about but he’s enjoying playing the thick-headed moose to Kyle’s impassioned orator.

Bullshit, man, grunts Rank. We go out there, I stick my foot in the water, it’s f*cking wet. It’s wet from the river. I stick my other foot in, it’s not a different river that got my other foot wet. It’s still the Saint John River, and I’m still wet.

You’re getting too caught up in names, man.

What’s in a name, really? asks Wade from the floor. Of all things, this is what starts Adam giggling.

Let’s say we go out there right now, and I push you in the river . . . says Rank, leaning back against the couch, the more comfortably to spin his scenario.

Rank, huffs Kyle, it’s not about getting wet.

Yeah it is. That’s what he’s on about. That’s what happens when you step, or for our purposes let’s say get pushed, into a river. You’re wet and it sucks. So let’s say I push you into the river and you flail around and glug for a while but eventually you crawl back out. You’re shivering and you’re soaking wet. I push you in again. Does it feel any different the second time around? How about when you get out? Still freezing and soaking wet. So, for good measure, I push you in a third time . . .

Rank, you’re just . . . this is just turning into a sick fantasy about pushing me into the river. You’re not taking the argument seriously.

He’s also talking about the man, says Adam, smiling but no longer giggling. Rank and Kyle turn to look at him. You never know when Adam is going to interject. Sometimes he’ll just sit there for hours, listening to the rest of them toss bullshit back and forth, and they almost could forget he’s there.

Who, says Rank. Me?

No. Hera*us. Captain *. It’s not just the river he’s talking about; it’s the man.

What man?

The man with the wet foot, says Adam. It’s never the same man, either.

This stops even Kyle for a moment. The spout of his beer bottle hovers, directionless. Rank can feel his eyebrows begin to pinch together as a half-assed comprehension descends, but before he can call bullshit, a question wanders up from Wade, still flat on his back on the floor.

Is it the same foot?

Ever since Wade became a dealer, they have had far too much access to hash and pot and acid and mushrooms than is strictly advisable for college-aged men. Particularly if one of those men has a juvenile criminal past, some all-seeing narrator might observe at this point. But it’s hard to turn away from such largesse — they are students, after all. These are supposedly the best years of their lives. They are built to party, just like Wade’s T-shirt says, they are kids in a candy store, which means they are helpless not to indulge. This is what happens when your best friend is a drug dealer, Rank thinks in his more lucid moments. This is what happened to Collie Chaisson, I bet. At some point, your brain just falls out your ass.

But they are the popular boys this year as a result — the campus-god charisma of Rank and Kyle in combination with their stewardship of the Temple’s weekend excesses, added to Wade’s superlative music collection and stereo system, with Adam providing just enough bookish gravitas to keep them from looking like your typical fratboy gang-rape-in-waiting — this, plus an on-site drug connection? They may as well be dipped in gold.

Wade made the connection back in first year. He’d been the only one of them without any kind of scholarship, meaning he had to get a job to see him through. He brooded on this problem as he partied his way through frosh week, when in the middle of a pub crawl it came to him: he could bartend. It so happened that when this occurred to him he was sitting in one of the sketchiest bars in town, a former disco, presently a dive, that nonetheless had retained its Studio-54-era moniker: Goldfinger’s. Wade stood up and staggered over to the bar, tended by a woman wearing a kind of corset-tank top who he’d been looking for an excuse to talk to anyway and asked her, “Where can I apply?”

“Apply for what?” she hollered over the music.

Wade could see from her already-wincing expression that she was expecting a sleazy come-on. He tried for a moment to come up with one: To be your man, beautiful lady.

“To tend bar. You guys need any help?”

“Right now?” she asked.

“No, not right now, I’m hammered right now.”

“That aint stopping me,” she told him, and winked before downing a shot she’d been keeping under the counter.

Wade shivered with pleasure. Not at the shot, or even the wink. It was his first year away from home and he’d never met a woman who said aint without any kind of ironic inflection before.

So Wade tended bar at Goldfinger’s his entire first semester at university and quickly discovered that a) it was disgusting work and he hated it and the woman who said aint looked so serious all the time because she was trying not to smile — she had brown teeth — and b) he didn’t have it in him to spend three nights a week dodging both punches and vomit ’til one in the morning (followed by another grisly hour of clean-up) while maintaining any kind of GPA to speak of.

The upside? There were drugs at Goldfinger’s. But that led to yet another downside of the job — the fact that most of his hard-won tips were going into the baggies he took home with him at the end of every shift.

It took a while for the obvious solution to sink in. In typical Wade fashion, there was no real eureka moment — he simply noticed one day that a great many of his friends — and mere acquaintances even — had come to rely on him for hash and other illicit sundries. His connection at Goldfinger’s, a middle-aged paranoiac coke-addict named Ivor who acted as bouncer in addition to his other, more underground activities, mentioned one evening that if Wade “had any kind of brain on ya,” he might think about charging his friends a percentage.

And the moment he did was the moment he realized he was crazy to keep tending bar three nights a week.

By second year, Wade was in business.



07/31/09, 10:23 p.m.

And so they party that year, our boys. God love the little fellas, how they party. They bond intensely during those pothead philosophy rap sessions — Cheech & Chong meets Plato’s Symposium — and consider one another geniuses. They admire and look up to each other, but at the same time harbour their own secret senses of superiority, which keeps them from being too resentful of the others’ particular gifts. And they intuit this — that they have one another’s respect, but not too much, not enough of it to lead to jealousy or outright emulation. They are each their own man — and, in some kind of shared psychic acknowledgement, each has been deemed worthy of the other’s friendship.

They are often seen together as a group, but they pair off just as often too. Because Wade and Kyle have their shared hometown history, they make up one side of the coin, so Rank and Adam come to be the other. Rank and Adam are one of those superficially unlikely-seeming friend-pairings that eventually make a paradoxical kind of sense — in accordance with the eternal principle of “opposites attract,” one can only suppose. Rank’s big-mouthed bruiser alongside Adam’s introverted aesthete are sort of complementary — they click. They tone down what’s most provocatively stereotypical about each other. Just as Rank’s fellow gland-cases no longer compete to hurl the weedy Adam out of windows, classmates and profs are no longer as quick to dismiss Rank, for all his overgrowth, as a special-needs, Andre-the-Giant goon.

It’s a fact that his association with Adam causes Rank to consider that he, Rank, is perhaps a smarter person than he has given himself credit for all these years. People consider Adam deep, if only because he never wastes words — he’s not a bullshitter like Kyle, a smart guy who nonetheless believes the only path to profundity is to run off at the mouth until something intelligent inadvertently emerges. Adam just doesn’t talk if he doesn’t have anything real to say. There are people in their circle who find this annoying, and unnerving, and Rank was for a while one of them, but now he can’t help but think that there’s an enviable confidence in Adam’s zipped lip. He’s not trying to impress anyone. Which is a singular thing in a community of twentysomethings.

So when Adam opens his mouth to pronounce, a part of you trembles, thinking: Oh hell, he’s going to start quoting Kierkegaard or something and I’m going to have to nod a lot and then maybe pretend I have to go to the bathroom. But Rank found he never had to do that. Rank found he could keep up.

Like the talk they had on the way to the liquor store after Rank had walked out on one of his playoff games, thereby pretty much annihilating his academic future. Rank had gone directly to find Adam because he knew Adam would be the only guy on campus who would not realize that he should be utterly appalled and horrified by what Rank had done. You don’t, of course, leave the arena in the middle of a playoff game. Nobody does that. It’s not conceivable. But Adam could be relied upon not to grasp this principle quite as keenly as the other guys in Rank’s acquaintance. Which meant that they could just talk about what Rank had done as if it had been a rational, measured decision as opposed to the cataclysmic middle finger to his future — and his current, quasi-respectable college boy existence — that it was.

“Coach was a dick,” explains Rank.

“Right,” says Adam. “But you’ve been saying he’s a dick all year. Aren’t they all dicks?”

“No,” says Rank. “My high school coach wasn’t a dick.”

“So why is this guy a dick?”

“My high school coach would practically stop the game if a guy even got checked. Whereas Francis figured I should be an enforcer. He put me out there to bash the shit out of guys and I wasn’t gonna do it.”

“Isn’t that part of the game?”

“Yeah, it is,” says Rank after a moment. “It’s everybody’s favourite part of the game. So I quit.”

“I still don’t get why you quit now, though. If you knew it was part of the game.”

“It’s like I said, my high school coach coddled us. He was a social worker. I thought I could just keep my head down here and play defence like I did in school. And, you know, I’m good, so the coach gets pissed off but I figure he’s not going to kick me off the team for neglecting to maim people as I was clearly born to do.”

Adam just keeps quiet now — listening.

“Anyway, we’re losing, is the problem. We’re sucking hard. And Francis is practically bashing his head against the wall at half time. And he’s got his eyes closed like he’s praying to Jesus and he’s saying: I’m so sick of having pussies on my team. I’m so sick of trying to coach a bunch of goddamn pussies who don’t even have the balls to get out there and punish those bastards. And then his eyes pop open and he bulges them at us like he’s going to pick up a sledgehammer or something any minute and he barks: I want you to put up your hands. Who hasn’t fought all season? I’m f*cking serious. Who hasn’t got out there and really slammed someone? And of course he’s glaring right at me, because I’m conspicuous, right, like he saw me at the beginning of the season and he’s been thinking I’m going to crush everything in my wake. But I haven’t, no matter how much p-ssy talk I get from Francis — and I’ve been getting a lot of it, Adam, and I don’t give a shit. And so he’s looking at me and we’re both aware of this.”

“Wait,” says Adam now. “Why not?”

“What?”

“You said it was part of the game. So I don’t understand. Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why don’t you want to be an enforcer?”

They are trudging down the hill on their way to the liquor store and Rank stops walking at that moment and he pulls down his scarf so Adam can look him full in the face. Adam finds a patch of ice and deliberately slides a couple steps like a little kid would, until he notices Rank is just standing there on the sidewalk waiting to tell him something.

“Because I could kill a guy, Adam.”

Adam’s jaw actually drops. Rank can’t help but feel affection for him — he’s not like anybody else on the planet. He doesn’t possess the same frames of reference.

“Seriously?” says Adam.

“Yeah, seriously. Or give him brain damage. It’s a very easy thing to do.”

“But that’s unconscionable — that he would want you to do that.”

“Yes — thank you!” exclaims Rank. “But it’s like people don’t really believe in it. They think death is . . . like a dream. Like it’s something out of stories. They don’t realize it’s . . . always . . . right f*cking there. Just hovering over everything we do. It’s always waiting for an opening, and this coach, Francis, he’s there dying to let it loose.”

Adam opens his mouth but instead of saying something, starts walking again, crunching snow. Rank follows him.

“OK — go on,” says Adam.

“Well, since he’s looking at me, I have to put up my hand, right? I can’t just whistle a tune and pretend I didn’t hear him or whatever. So it’s just me and a couple of other guys, the captain and the goaltender, but it’s pretty much all about me at that moment because I’m the meathead, right?”

“Right,” says Adam.

“So that’s when he says it: Tonight’s the night, boys. You either fight tonight or you leave right now.”

“Was he looking at you when he said it?”

“Well he actually followed up with: You got that, Rankin? So, you know, not a lot of ambiguity.”

“So what did you say?”

“I said: Bill Masterton. Ted Green. Ed Kea.”

“Who are they?”

“Those are the names of guys who got their heads bashed in playing for the NHL.”

“Did Francis know that?”

“Yeah, I assume, because at this point he goes completely apeshit. Face turns purple. It’s like he can’t breathe for a second, like he’s having a heart attack. And then all of a sudden he starts yelling in this high, really gross voice, like he’s trying to sound like an old lady talking to a little kid: Oh! Are we afraid we’re going to hurt ourselves out there? Are we worried we might get an owie? Big boy like you, Rankin?”

“So he thought you were worried about yourself.”

“No he f*cking didn’t, Adam, everyone in the room knew I wasn’t worried about getting hurt myself, he was just trying to shame me into cracking skulls.”

“So what then?”

“So then intermission’s over and he drops the old-lady voice, and the purple goes out of his face a little — you know it’s all an act, really,” says Rank — interrupting himself when this revelation hits him. “On one level, yes it’s real, yes he’s really and truly pissed, but on another he’s just doing what he thinks he’s supposed to do.”

“I know what you mean,” says Adam, to Rank’s surprise.

“So he stands aside to let us back out onto the ice and he’s just like, All right boys, you have your marching orders. And he points at the other guys, the captain and the goalie and he’s like — you guys gonna kick some ass out there or what? And they’re like, yeah, sure, even though it’s idiotic. Just a stupid way of trying to save face. He’s telling the goalie to just grab the first guy that comes anywhere near him, no matter what he’s doing. We’re gonna go out there and create mayhem boys, he’s saying. We’re gonna show them well and truly who they are f*cking with tonight. Is everyone clear on that? And all the guys are like, Uh-huh, yeah.”

“And what about you?” asks Adam.

“No, I’m just staring back at him because he’s been staring at me pretty much this whole time. So finally it’s: And what about yourself Mr. Rankin? Still worried you might get a boo-boo or are you ready to kick some ass? And I don’t say anything. And all the guys have stood up at this point, and they should be heading out onto the ice but they’re waiting to see what I’ll do. But I don’t say anything, because I’m waiting for that ultimatum again. Because we both know, if he restates the ultimatum, what’ll happen. I’m positive he knows. And he doesn’t have to do it — he could just say something like, Okay, get out there Rank, and I probably would’ve gone back out and played. So I’m leaving it in his court, right? I’m just not saying anything — I’m waiting. And I can see him thinking about it for just a split second — realizing that if he decides not to be an a*shole, I’ll go back out there and play and not crack skulls, and he’ll be pissed off and we’ll lose, but we’re going to lose anyway, so big deal in the grand scheme of things right? But no — his pride gets the better of him and he decides to play the a*shole card.

“And there it is: there’s the ultimatum. Because, he says, drawing it out, Anyone who’s afraid to get their knuckles bloody this evening can leave right now. And I have never been more serious in my life, gentlemen. There’s the door.”

“And what’d you do?”

“Stood up. Opened my locker. Grabbed my shit. Out the door,” says Rank. “Didn’t even take off my skates. Of course I had to skulk in the hallway for a while until everybody was back on the ice, because I couldn’t go anywhere in my gear. Kinda anticlimactic. Then I went back in and showered and came home.”

“That’s fantastic,” says Adam, holding open the door of the liquor store.

And Rank smiles as he crosses the threshold, contrasting Adam’s reaction to the sick groans of his disbelieving teammates. To them it had been an experience like watching that space shuttle explosion on TV a couple years back — seeing it combust before it even left the atmosphere, fall to earth in blazing chunks.

“What did the coach say then?” Adam wants to know.

“He was sort of beyond speech at that point.”

“You left him speechless,” says Adam. “That’s great.”

Of course, none of it is great — it is catastrophic, which is why Rank is now in the process of gathering a potpourri of liquors into his arms, upon which he will spend an allotment of money that was meant to last him well into the next month. But Rank is throwing caution to the wind on this day, in celebration and acknowledgement of his newfound status of Completely Screwed.

But — it’s hilarious. He doesn’t feel so bad. It’s clear now why his first instinct was to dig up Adam and tell the whole story to him before anybody else. He must’ve known that only Adam would react this way — only Adam would applaud. As Rank rings up his bottles, it occurs to him that this is the first time in their acquaintance Adam has given any indication of being impressed with Rank. Everyone else is impressed with Rank more or less immediately. But this is what it took to get Adam’s approval. Upending the contents of his life into a toilet and flushing two or three times for good measure.

“You know, I’m proud of you,” says Adam, once they are back outside and making their way toward the Temple. They both live in residence, but Kyle and Wade’s has by this time become their default destination after visiting the liquor store.

Rank is pleased to notice they are passing an enormous snowbank when Adam says this, ploughed to towering proportions along the edges of the drugstore parking lot. He takes the opportunity to shove his friend directly into it.

“You monster — you could’ve killed me!” complains Adam, emerging from the nerd-shaped hole created in the bank. “I could have cracked my skull and died!” he jokes, shaking snow off his glasses.