The Antagonist

15


08/01/09, 9:59 p.m.


SYLVIE USED TO HATE IT when Gord and I would sit around Sunday afternoons watching the televangelists on the American stations, but now that she is dead and I am stuck here and we have no other means of entertainment in common, we can do this as much as we want. Unfortunately, the heyday of the televangelist is long over. No more does Jimmy Swaggart perform his loony goose step across the stage to the ecstatic howls of his arena-sized congregation. No more Jim and Tammy Bakker swapping earnest platitudes, directing bald-faced cries for money into the camera.

Sylvie refused to watch with us. She had a superstition of evangelicals. But she’d listen from the kitchen.

“Such crooks!” she’d cry after Jim and Tammy’s hundredth extortionate demand of their viewers. “How do they get away with it?”

“Americans will believe anything,” Gord explained.

But we watched Jim and Tammy only to feel superior. To see what lengths they’d go to — to what money-grubbing depths they would descend in His name. To laugh as Tammy Faye’s mascara turned liquid on her cheeks.

We watched Jimmy Swaggart, however, to feel awe — even though neither of us would ever admit it. We laughed at him the whole time — the shameless way he bellowed and bawled — but secretly, he amazed us. He believed, was the thing — you could smell the faith pouring out of his sweat glands. It seethed beneath his skin. Every once in a while Gord and I would forget to laugh and just get caught up. Jimmy would be howling his holy ecstasy into the microphone, his audience would have devolved into a shrieking, blubbering human tide, and Gord and I would be silently riveted. God. God? God! The way Jimmy spoke the name made you realize that this was the way it was meant to be spoken — in awe and fear and dumb, sub-literate rapture. You should be shitting yourself, Jimmy conveyed, at the idea of the Lord. You should be rolling around on the floor in convulsions — it’s only right. It is appropriate. You should be swallowing your tongue in a seizure. The Lord was awesome and terrible. He was pure power. This was the Dude who smashed the planet between his hands and pushed up mountains, exploding them like zits between His fingertips. This was the Guy who turned the earth into one boiling ocean when He was finally fed up with all our crap. Who begat dinosaurs and the bubonic plague. This Guy. Him. And what’s worse, what’s most terrifying of all? Dude loves you. He loves you like a psycho girlfriend. Endlessly, obsessively, for no good reason. Dude will stalk you to the ends of the earth.

Sylvie had an instinct — a kind of papist radar that alerted her whenever Gord and I were getting sucked in. “Stop watching!” she’d call from the kitchen if we’d been silent before Jimmy a little too long. “It’s a cult! They just want your money.”

“Oh, Mother, it’s not a cult,” Gord would say as he came to. “It’s bullshit, sure.”

“It’s witchcraft,” said Sylvie, frowning in the kitchen doorway. It seemed to me Sylvie was seeing witchcraft everywhere in those days. She had recently returned from a Catholic women’s retreat where she had been taught to identify as witchcraft pretty much everything that was a) potentially more influential than Catholicism, and/or b) something people enjoyed doing. She’d arrived home vowing to never check her horoscope again, for example, or put her feet up in front of the soaps.

“Don’t let him watch that,” Sylvie would say to Gord, referring to me, her one and only son.

“Witchcraft. You’re just as bad as the Jesus freaks with that kinda talk.”

“Look at those people, crying and rolling around. Faith-healing. It’s witchcraft.”

“There’s people who’d say the same about Catholics with their body of Christ and whathaveyou,” said Gord, putting his feet up and scratching the side of his face theosophically. “Going to some shrine and throwing away their crutches.”

A euphoric roar rose up from the television. “Don’t let him watch that,” repeated Sylvie.

This may well have been the only time I sided with Gord against Sylvie in our entire parent-child relationship. I didn’t understand why Sylvie couldn’t just ignore what the priests told her, like every other Catholic outside Vatican City, and live her life. Why wasn’t she able to just roll her eyes at the priests like she did with Gord? Hadn’t anyone ever explained to her about the implicit contract between church and flock — John Paul II hands down completely untenable directives along the lines of thou shalt not enjoy harmless kicks and the rest of us ignore them and go to confession every other week in semi-sincere repentance?

“It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “It’s just fun to watch him — he’s crazy.”

“That’s how they get you,” insisted Sylvie. “They make it fun.”

And it turned out she was sort of right.

And now, as my father and I sit in front of today’s pale Swaggart imitators — the televised Christian-industrial complex never did fully recover from Jimmy’s fall from grace — Gord cannot help but be reminded of my own brief period of salvation. I knew it was coming.

“Whatever happened to that girl?” he wants to know.

“What girl?” I say, knowing precisely who he means.

“That young one you brought home a few years back.”

I know precisely who he means because I’ve never brought any girl home but her, that single time, twelve years ago.

Of course Gord also knows the answer to the question he’s posed. The two of us are camped out in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon, a tray of tea and ROC Centre cinnamon pinwheels on the table in front of us, watching a Pentecostal preacher rant and weep. In short, Gord is attempting to direct the conversation down a fairly obvious path.

“We broke up when I left the church,” I say.

Gord keeps his eyes on the TV in an attempt to be casual.

“How long you stick with that stuff anyway?”

“Couple of years I guess.”

“She have sex?”

I frown, parsing the question. “What?”

“They have the virginity balls, I guess, the born-agains. True Love Waits they call it — there was a story on NBC. They wear these bracelets . . . ”

“Yeah, yeah, no. No. She wasn’t like that.”

I can feel my muscles reluctantly tense up. Today I have been mostly too tired to keep my guard up with Gord. Two weeks in his presence — not just in his presence but actually catering to the man — will do that. After about the first week my body just sort of collapsed with the fatigue of maintaining a 24/7 fight-or-flight response. It’s too bad — I was actually on the verge of enjoying myself, filling up on cinnamon pinwheels in front of the TV. I was up writing to you pretty much the entire night before and up until this point had been sitting here feeling nicely emptied-out — as close to relaxed as I’ve been since I arrived.

But now Gord is about to say something crass about my former girlfriend. I just know he is — it’s an unfortunate habit he acquired around the time I started Grade 9. Except for Sylvie, and perhaps his own mother, Gord has never quite been able to imagine women in anything other than a pornographic milieu. I would get home from a night out at a dance and Gord would be sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me with his tongue practically hanging out, wanting the details of the wild sexual romps he imagined Kids Today indulged in. Because, he informed me, girls my age were now “loose.” Every last one of them — it was a well-known fact, he insisted. “Not like in my day,” he said with regret. “Not the girls from Our Lady of the Crossed Legs, like I grew up with. These days, they’re all on the pill. Anything goes! Tell me I’m wrong!” And he’d lean forward, ready to drink in all the tawdry details of my teenage exploits.

“It’s not true, Gord,” I’d say, even though in fact I did okay on those weekends. It wasn’t exactly porn star time, but it was sometimes, at the very least, furtive hand-job time. That said, I couldn’t imagine a bigger hormonal buzzkill than having to detail my activities to the old man. So I’d just shake my head and tell him I got nowhere. Which he never believed.

“Horseshit! Big, good-looking fella like yourself. The young ones must be shoving their panties at ya in the halls.”

And I’d grimace and have to go to bed before my dad cured me of heterosexuality altogether.

So here I am, flopped on the couch in front of the TV on a Sunday afternoon, feeling one muscle group after another bunch up in anticipation of Gord saying something gross about a girl I once liked very much.

But all he says is this. “She was nice, that one.”

“Yes, she was nice,” I say.

“What was her name again?”

“Kirsten,” I reply after a moment.

“Kristen.”

“Kirsten.”

“What kinda name is that?”

“I think it’s Dutch.”

“I liked her,” says Gord. “Wasn’t always going on about the blood of the lamb and all that shit, like you were for a while there.”

“No,” I agree. “She didn’t actually like proselytizing very much. You’re supposed to try to save everyone you come into contact with, but she didn’t like bothering people. She couldn’t bring herself to do it half the time.”

It’s funny to remember this period of my life — how I was secretly still me under all that piety but refused to admit it. I called the secret me Satan and shut it down whenever I could. But you can only shut the real you down for so long. The real you is not having that bullshit, will only abide being referred to as Satan for a short time before it revolts and shows you what true havoc it can wreak. So the secret me, a.k.a. Satan, would watch my girlfriend weep and pray and inside he would be smiling to himself thinking, she’s never going to pull it off. At the bottom of it, she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t have it in her. She’s not a social person — she doesn’t even like people all that much. But you can’t be born-again and not be full of love for your fellow man, not be trying to bring people into the fold. It’s all about community and fellowship. If you’re a natural introvert — if that’s the secret you — you call it Satan, and you kneel and try to pray it away. And you fail.

“You ever in touch with her?” Gord asks after a while.

“No — of course not, Gord. I left the church.”

“What, the born-agains can’t intermarry?”

And now I get it. Now I understand why Gord has neglected this whole time to remark fondly on Kirsten’s cup size or recall the tightness of her jeans. Gord saw Kirsten as a potential Sylvie. Kirsten was pious. She may have been the wrong religion, but she was still the kind of girl you marry.

“No, Gord. You don’t marry someone who’s going to hell. I leave the church, I’m going to hell. I’m hellbound. The whole idea is you’ll be together forever in heaven after Judgement Day. You don’t want to look down and see your beloved waving at you from a pit of fire.”

“Jesus,” remarks Gord, impressed at such zealotry. Both of us have barely taken our eyes off the TV during the entire conversation. A woman in a hot pink power suit is swaying and singing into a microphone with her eyes closed as tears pour down her cheeks. I don’t know how she can sing and cry at the same time. Kirsten, I remember, could not even verbalize when she cried. She’d just gasp and flop around like a fish on a pier.

Meanwhile, I lean forward to grab another pinwheel off the tray. Gord grunts, so I chuck one into his lap as well. There are only a couple left, but we’re not worried about running out because Father Waugh shows up with his baked goods like clockwork every Monday afternoon.

“Maybe you should look her up,” suggests Gord at length. “Maybe she’s fallen from grace since then.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that, Gord.”

“I’m serious.”

“I wouldn’t know where to find her.”

But then I remember you, and Kyle at Winners, and realize I know exactly where to find her. At least, I have an idea where to start. But I’m not telling Gord that, obviously.

“What’s stopping you?” Gord persists. “What else you got going on these days? You’re up on that computer surfing the porn or whathaveyou all hours of the day.”

Gord’s limited experience has informed him that the internet is basically a Disneyland of porn, and computers are manufactured for no reason but to offer up a sleazy gateway to this magic kingdom. He therefore thinks the worst of anyone who sits all day at a computer unless they work in a bank or office. And even then, he regards them with a suspicion tinged with envy.

“Hey Gord,” I say, pushing myself into a sitting-up position. “I have a life, you know? Outside these four walls. I have a job, which I’m going to have to get back to at the end of this summer. And I told you, I’m working on a project right now, and I’ve got to get it done before September.”

“What project,” grunts Gord, sullen. “Whacking off to the naked pictures. And you won’t even show your old man.”

“Dad! I’m not surfing porn. I’m writing a — book.”

I let this word dangle in the air for a moment. It never occurred to me to call it that before.

“What kind of book?” Gord asks finally, scowling at the still crying, but no longer singing, woman in pink. She sputters praise into the microphone.

“I guess it’s a biography or something. My life story, kinda,” I say, learning this as I say it.

Gord continues to scowl silently for quite a few moments. I’ve picked up the remote to channel surf when he grunts, “Is it about that Croft bastard? That’s why you were asking me about him back in June, right?”

“It’s about that,” I say, putting the remote back down again. “And some other stuff. It kind of starts with that.”

Gord picks up his crutch. I think he’s about to try to hobble off to the bathroom, and I swing around to stop him because he’s always trying to get up without my help and practically re-breaks his ankle every time. But instead of struggling out of his chair, Gord smashes the crutch down on the tray of tea and pinwheels. Sylvie’s ceramic teapot — a cheerful lavender elephant whose trunk, for as long as I can remember, has provided the spout — implodes, flooding the tray with tea, which is instantly absorbed by the remaining pinwheels.

“Jesus Christ!” I shout.

“Why the f*ck,” yells Gord. “Can’t you forgive yourself for that?”

“What the hell are you doing?” I yell back. You would think after so many years of watching my father fly into rages, he wouldn’t be able to surprise me like this, but I am near-speechless.

“A book! Now he thinks he’s gotta write a book! It’s not enough that those bastards put a sixteen-year-old boy away for standing up against some drug-dealing scum? It’s not enough he lost his own mother?”

“Cut it out, Gord,” I say. “Calm down.”

“Oh and I know exactly what you’re gonna say. You’re gonna let that little bastard off the hook! Just like you always have. Just like everybody did.”

“It’s not about Croft, Gord.”

“And you’re gonna blame yourself. And you’re gonna blame me. Well you go ahead and blame me, Gordie. You blame your old man all you want in that book. And don’t ever call. And pretend I’m dead if that’s how you like it. But I’ll be god-damned [and here Gord bashes his crutch into the shattered elephant twice to emphasize the compound word] if I’ll have you in there all hours of the day writing a god-damn [elephant pretty much dust now] plea for forgiveness for something that was not your god-damn fault!”

And with the final double crutch bash embellishing Gord’s last god-damn, the tea tray flips over, spewing elephant ash and pinwheel sludge across the carpet.

Before I can react, he swings his crutch to the floor and wrenches himself to his feet.

“Gord,” I say, reaching for him.

“Get away from me,” says Gord, barely managing to stay upright. I see his face contort with pain, and the merciless way the crutch has jammed itself into his armpit. “F*ck off,” he adds, pivoting on his crutch so that now I’m facing his scrawny, shuddering back. “I’m taking a piss.”

And off he stumps to the toilet.