The Antagonist

19


08/05/09, 11:21 a.m.


I HAVE NOT THOUGHT about that moment in a very long time. I’ve thought about that night a lot, yes — what happened later. Because that’s the night I told you what I told you as the morning light began to finger its way inside the room, and you put your hand against my head, and after yanking the story from myself like it was a barbed, endless tapeworm I leaned into your palm and, finally, rested. Yes, I’ve been remembering that night off and on ever since I read your book. And I remembered the fight with Kyle the second I locked eyes with him at Winners. But I’d forgotten all about that in-between time, the calming-down period, your enormous Adam’s apple glowing in the shadows, how you told me I had the opposite of a whore/whore complex and next thing I knew I just wanted to open up my throat and down all the alcohol in the world. If I’d thought I could absorb it through my pores, I would have filled up Wade and Kyle’s bathtub and climbed in for a soak.

I didn’t remember it until I started writing about it.

But what’s weird is that I’m sitting here not sure it really happened.

It seems to me it must have. I remember how Kyle’s ears glowed red. I remember the shove, and how he teetered, his face completely blank with disbelief. I’m sure I remember that. But I don’t remember remembering it as I wrote it, if that makes sense. I just wrote it — it spilled out of my head like it had been lodged somewhere in there, way in the back. It didn’t feel like a memory. It just felt like something that was happening in my head as I was typing.

I want to confess that the longer I do this, the stranger it gets. Half the time, I’m not sure I’m even getting the story right anymore — yet the whole idea of this little project, you’ll recall, was to ferret out the truth. To take your bullshit version of me, flush it like the steaming turd of half-truths and oversights it was, and replace it with the glorious, terrible, complex, astonishing truth of Reality. I still feel like that’s what I’m doing sometimes. I still find it all pretty complex and terrible. But recently I’ve been getting lost in it. I forget what I’m about. For example, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I spent about a half-hour trying to figure out the best way to describe your Adam’s apple, how it seemed to glow, enormous in the shadows.

I’m worried that this is how the lying starts. You, for example. Maybe you started off writing your book with the noblest of intentions, wanting to get across something real and significant. Maybe you were holding something in your mind — some sacred value or belief — and thinking to yourself: This, this is what I want most to articulate. This is the most important thing. This is what the world must know. Maybe you actually meant to do good.

And what if this same thing happened to you? All of a sudden, you get sidelined. All of a sudden, you need to get the Adam’s apple exactly right — something totally stupid and insignificant and beside the point. You let it distract you from your noble purpose. Suddenly people in the story are doing and saying things you never meant for them to do or say — and you’re letting it happen, because it’s fun. It’s interesting. And maybe it’s simpler, too. Maybe it’s just simpler to say, “This bad guy, this innate criminal? His mom died, by the way. Yeah, so, poor old Danger Man, he’s had it pretty rough. Anyway, next chapter . . .” Rather than to sit down with the actual person whose actual life events you’re cherry-picking and take the time to peel back his flesh and deal with all the ugly underneath. I get it, Adam. You couldn’t bring yourself to break the skin. Who wants to face the mess below the surface, right?

And so you make stuff up. You get sucked into your own bullshit. You want to see where it’s all going. You let the story take you instead of you taking it in the direction you originally mapped out. The direction that your noble purpose dictates.

The noble purpose gets lost. And maybe, before you know it, you’re screwing over everyone who has ever meant anything to you, without even realizing it. You are changing them, interpreting them, riffing on them, without even asking their permission. Your family, your girlfriends. A bunch of guys you used to be tight with. From any objective standpoint, you’re producing what amounts to a kind of slander. But you can’t even see that anymore. You’re too busy trying to get the Adam’s apple right.

The question is, are you, therefore, an a*shole?

Or, let’s put it in metaphysical terms. Is this a sin?

I put it this way because that’s the feeling it gives me — a feeling like I’ve sinned. Not the kind of sin I would have reproached myself for in my evangelical days — when, let’s face it, anything that didn’t serve the greater glory of God was suspect. I’m talking about a deeper, guiltier, Catholic kind of sin. A sort of trespassing.

The truth is, I was as every bit as surprised today, writing about you telling me I had a virgin/virgin complex, as I was when you said it, if you said it, twenty years ago.

In fact I think I’m maybe more surprised today.

And now I’m going to do something I never thought I’d do: cite my father’s parish priest, Father Augustine Waugh, as an authority.

“God love you,” remarked Father Waugh one Monday as I tore the cling-wrap from the Chinet plate of peanut-butter squares he’d set down, “you can’t leave the church, son.”

It was my first week back in town, and the Father had asked if I would be helping my poor disabled dad get to mass next Sunday. Rather than point out that even at his most sprightly Gord rarely made a point of rushing out to Sunday service, I took a bit of pleasure in painting myself as an apostate.

“Haven’t been to mass since high school,” I told him. Since my mother’s death, to be precise. “I’m afraid I left the church behind me long ago, Father.”

And that’s when he hit me with his Hotel California-ism.

“God love you,” he tittered. “You can’t leave the church, son.”

Son. I almost laughed down into his four-years-younger-than-me face.

“Yeah, well,” I said around a square. They were pure sugar, festooned with multicoloured marshmallows, and the sight of them, accompanied by my immediate desire to inhale the plateful, made me feel about seven years old. I turned to put the kettle on before Gord could yell at me to get the Father his tea. “It would seem you can.”

“Nope!” countered Waugh, settling down at the kitchen table. I glanced over at his placid face. Here, too, was faith. Not the raucous, shudder-and-squeal faith of Jimmy Swaggart, but the complacent, immovable dogma of the Catholic Church. Even via Waugh’s mild, dumpling-esque visage, two thousand years of papist absolutism projected itself.

“Yep!” I said, getting irritated only five minutes after Waugh’s arrival — a new record.

“No sir, you can’t. You were baptized, I assume. Took first communion. Confirmed. You’re with us for life.”

Something occurred to me then. “Hey Gord,” I yelled into the next room. “Was I baptized?”

“Of course you were baptized, what in Christ is wrong with you?”

“I’m just wondering because of being adopted.”

“You came into the world surrounded by nuns, sonny boy.”

I frowned. No getting around it; no escape clause. Father Waugh just sat there turning the Chinet plate of squares, smiling liplessly.

And the lousy thing is, he was right. You don’t just decide not to be a Catholic anymore — it doesn’t work that way. Catholicism is something that soaks into your skin like vitamin D. You can’t just stand there as the sun pours down upon you, saying, None for me, thanks. It seeps into your world view; it dictates how you act and everything you think you know. I see this now — thanks to writing down what you told me twenty years ago.

So you were right too, Adam — you’re up there in the Paunchy Sages Club with Father Augustine Waugh. I see it. I admit it. I had then, and have now, a virgin/virgin complex when it comes to women. I had, and have it, because I am, and will always be, a Catholic boy at heart.

There is only one person I can really blame for this.

I can’t believe I tried to depict her to you as a glimmer of light. I’m embarrassed about that now. It’s so obvious. I am very nearly forty years old, have not been inside a Catholic church since 1986, and I’m still as conditioned as a Pavlovian dog. Holy Mary Mother of God. Why didn’t I just put her in virginal robes, describe her ascending into heaven, hands over heart, eyes in the clouds?

All my girlfriends too, every last one. I see it now. You don’t know about them, because I figured I was being a hero. Protecting them from you, and making myself sound like some kind of holy celibate along the lines of Father Waugh in the process, when needless to say — you knew me in school — I’m not. But also, needless to say, Gord wasn’t the only one who considered Kirsten — a girl so inflated by the holy spirit her feet barely ever touched the ground — marriage material. And it’s no accident, I realize now, that she was the only one I ever felt that way about with total certainty.

I can’t remember much about the girls we knew in university. I remember the night we both had sex with whatsherface, and I remember being angry, and I remember you brushing it off with Kyle’s “Paris in the twenties” line although I could tell you were a bit freaked out yourself. But I can’t remember which one of you, exactly, I was pissed at. I can’t remember what I might have done or said or how I might have acted with women to lead you to the conclusion that I had a virgin/virgin complex.

Truth be told, and I never would have admitted this that night, I considered myself at least as much of a player as Kyle. But that’s not how you saw me, clearly. Somehow, before I’d even spoken one word to you about Sylvie, you called it. You had me pegged.

Even now, speaking to me from twenty years ago, you have me pegged.

Which makes no sense when I think about your book. How is it you could have me so nailed down, and still get everything so wrong?



08/05/09, 2:31 p.m.

Okay so, f*ck it. Here’s Kirsten.

Kirsten had her own curse word, tailor-made to be inoffensive to the Lord, which nonetheless she used only in moments of supreme agitation. It always made me howl, reminding me of my mother’s little-used cache of Franco-Ontarian curse words, which in English translation sounded ridiculous, not to mention utterly inoffensive: chalice of the tabernacle! Kirsten’s preference was to take four innocuous “curses” and smash them together as if to enhance their execratory power.

Darnfriggerbumheck!

She had dark hair, enormous blue eyes, and long bangs that stopped precisely at her eyelashes. She cut them herself about once a month, and I don’t know how she got them so straight and perfect every time. They were fantastic bangs, childish and sophisticated all at once. They were also a little naughty, a little Bettie Page. No other girl in the church wore bangs like that, except for some of the younger ones, who wore them with braids. When Kirsten wore them with braids, I’d go a bit nuts.

Kirsten grew up in the prairies and had been saved since the age of eleven. Her parents divorced due to her mother’s whirlwind, torrid infidelity with Jesus Christ. Kirsten’s father was a town engineer who worked practically all the time, and her mother had been lonely, and initiates of my former church, in the small prairie town of Lacombe, Alberta, happened to be practising their guileless, welcoming faith nearby. They held a revival meeting one weekend, featuring a charismatic preacher from the States, and because it was a small town, even the irreligious were interested in coming out to see the fundies roll around. It seemed so deep-south, so voodoo. It was rumoured there might be laying on of hands and speaking in tongues.

People like Kirsten’s mother didn’t show up just to gawk, I am convinced. They might have told themselves that — I know, because I told myself that too, when I got around to sticking my own head in the proverbial tent: Should be good for a laugh. The truth is, you go because you want to be persuaded. After all, who can deny the power of God? Who really wants to? The truly religious are never entirely dismissive of other religions, no matter how whacked out — a believer’s a believer. Just look at Gord and me, camped out in front of Swaggart every Sunday. Even Sylvie sometimes used to speculate about her “past lives,” an idea that was in no way Catholic. But she had heard it on TV or read about it somewhere and she just liked the thought of it, of karma: returning to earth for a do-over. It sounded fair to her.

I think now that anyone who believes in God, even a little, can’t help but yearn toward the evangelicals. Let’s face it, theirs is the church we really want. We want to be swept up. We want to sob and roll around on the ground. We want to feel the Holy Spirit as a real living force and we want it to swoop down and kick us in the ass. We want it to heal our souls. We want it to remove every last doubt we ever entertained about our randomness as creatures of the earth. We want certainty. We want to see the face of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich. We want to throw away our crutches. We want Satan, and we want him to want us too, so we can always be at war, because war makes our daily bullshit righteous and significant. We want to hear the voices — the ones that tell us what to do, and tell us how we’re loved. We want to be as little children and believe.

And Kirsten was a little child, so it was easy. She took one look at her mother’s rapturous face, and she believed. She was on board.

The town engineer sued for custody on the basis that his wife was actively engaged in sculpting religious fanatics of Kirsten and her brother. The family court of small-town Alberta, however, didn’t see excessive piety as a problem worth separating mother and child over. So Kirsten’s mother won custody and promptly headed east, away from the unholy “contaminating influence” of this godforsaken engineer, a man about whom Kirsten hardly ever spoke, of whom she had no pictures, and who I thought about a lot for some reason. I imagined him abandoned on the prairie, squatting like Job, befuddled in the dust.