The Antagonist

2


05/24/09, 3:12 p.m.


DO WHAT YOU WANT. Keep as much of a “paper trail” as you want, I haven’t made any threats. What happened to freedom of the page? And I didn’t use the word “bloody” five times, I only used it two times. You are counting “bloodily” and “bleeding,” which are two completely different words. I can’t believe I have to explain the fundamentals of the English language to a celebrated wordsmith like yourself. What I sent was a literary document, just like the one you published. How many times did you use the word “blood” and “bloody” in your book? A lot more than me I bet.

I contacted you on Facebook, I asked if I could email you my story, and you said:


Sure! I’d be delighted to take a look.


I’m keeping a paper trail on this end too you know.

Maybe now you’re getting an idea how it feels to read something about yourself that you’ve had no hand in and have no control over. Like those cola commercials, when they were using footage of dead celebrities, do you remember that? Fred Astaire, smiling his slow, smirky smile at a refreshing can of cola in lieu of Ginger. And some people said it was ghoulish, it was like grave-robbing to sell pop.

So how does it feel to have your grave robbed?

To continue.

I was born, small town, prick, goddess.

I was just about to start writing about Sylvie. I thought I should commemorate her before anyone else, first and foremost, because she plays such a small role, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, having died right out of the gate. But then, all of a sudden, I remembered who I was talking to and now I’m feeling protective of her.

She was still more or less freshly dead when I met you in first year — which made me the mess that I was, the emotional disaster zone you were eventually able to take such incredible advantage of. Let’s just take a little break at this point and acknowledge a single fact: my mother had died, and you put it in your book. It wasn’t a big deal, in your book — nothing that should have been a big deal was made into a big deal. It didn’t have any consequence, my mother’s death — I mean, your character’s mother’s death. Didn’t kick off a police investigation or a funeral full of teeth-gnashing, clothes-rending mourners. It did nothing, it was a just a thing that had happened to this guy — his mom died, by the way. Background information. It’s mentioned once and never again.

Imagine what you would have done with her if I’d given you more to work with. Even now I don’t trust you. So f*ck you, Sylvie stays with me. You can have the prick — who I can’t help but notice got even less play in your novel than my mother. Like zero. I find that puzzling considering how much I used to complain about him to you guys. Dead Sylvie was allowed in, but poor alive-and-kicking Gord barely made the cut. Which is hilarious compared to the reality because — you know. What I wouldn’t have given and so forth.

All you guys from the house, you and Kyle and Wade, you wondered what the hell I was doing there half the time — why I bothered to hang out with people like you. I was feared and massive and you guys were — in the parlance of guys like me, guys who played sports — kind of gay. Right? I don’t think you’ll dispute that. I mean generally speaking. You sat around getting high and listening to Van Morrison when nobody in the world was listening to Van Morrison anymore. Wade even had a poster of Van Morrison. It was so embarrassing. And anyway I show up at that party they had for homecoming week in first year and I start making out with the poster of Van Morrison, like I’ve pinned poor Van against the wall and am sexually assaulting him, and you guys are like Oh my god that’s the guy from the freshman mixer who chugged all the purple Jesus right out of the barrel and then vomited into the barrel and then started chugging that, who in Christ’s name let him in? But you’re delighted to have me, I can tell, because I am — and you sure as hell can’t deny this now, Adam — a Character.

So that’s why you hung out with me. I livened things up. I brought colour and physicality into your world. I shoved you into walls, got you in headlocks, squashed you up against unwilling women at various functions and held you there until both parties gave in.

But why did I hang out with you pussies? That was always the question no one on either side of the equation could capably answer. Why did I quit hockey in second year, losing my scholarship, so I could lounge stoned with you guys slouched in Kyle’s idiotic beanbag chair wasting an entire afternoon flinging Wade’s vinyl Grateful Dead across the room and into the sink?

Because Rank’s f*cking crazy, people used to say.

And that was correct. That’s how I would’ve explained it too. But I’m a grown man now with the wisdom of many accumulated years and now I see that I was crazy in a very specific way. It was a layered kind of madness; it had texture. One, I was crazy with grief. So crazed I didn’t even know it. I thought I was fine. I figured this was simply how life went for a motherless young man just kicking off his twenties. I thought, as I chugged my purple vomit to the cheers of countless admirers, things were chugging along quite nicely. Mom was dead, sure. But look how popular I was! And at least I was away from Dad.

And that’s the thing — that’s where I was mistaken. There’s where all the underlying craziness, the bad kind of craziness, the kind that sneaks up on you — that snuck up on all of us — was lurking. In the knowledge I was kidding myself.

What happened happened, Adam, because I existed in a constant, desperate panic of aversion.

I hung out with you pussies because you were as unlike my father as any men I’d ever met.



05/25/09, 4:01 p.m.

I was born the illegitimate offspring of fornicators, passed like a puck to the nuns (which is what was done with us B-words in that particular time and place) and slapshot straight into the upstanding, two-parent home of Gord and Sylvie. Goal! Now I was somebody’s son.

Fast-forward through my childhood, because my childhood is mostly her. Sylvie playing peekaboo (I seeeeee you). Sylvie telling me never to hide on her. Crying. Telling me it wasn’t funny, it was no joke. I’d been under the porch step, directly beneath her feet as she called and called. At first it was funny, and then it wasn’t. I heard her start to cry, and then I was too scared to move, too ashamed. Making your mother cry was the worst thing you could do.

Don’t ever ever do that, she said. I want you right where I can see you.

It’s funny how it’s the memories of shame that hang on longest.

For example, I think about my life leading up to the moment you and I stopped being associated with each other — and it was an actual moment, wasn’t it? You remember. A decisive, incontrovertible moment like the moment a blade comes down. Instead of one massive obstruction, you end up with two useless halves. But at least things aren’t so complicated anymore.

Let me start that again. I think about my life leading up to the moment you and I stopped being associated with each other, and if I were to write the key incidents down on a piece of paper I’d end up with a kind of grocery list of shame. In fact I’ve done this, and in fact that is precisely what I ended up with. Bullet points. Shame-pellets.

I was ashamed that I worked at my father’s Icy Dream as a teenager — not slinging soft-serve, but the other kind of work I did for him. Then I was ashamed when I tried out for hockey in order to get out of working at Icy Dream (as long as I was busy crushing my fellow man — be it on the ice or in the ID parking lot — my father was happy).

Then I was ashamed I played so well, which is something I can’t really explain — the joy I got out of it when all I’d really been expecting, to be honest, was a means of shirking ice cream duty. And I was ashamed of my hockey scholarship, which no one — neither me nor Gord — saw coming. I was ashamed of the tweedy university it took me to. I was ashamed of going to university. I was ashamed that all of the guys on the team were like me and all of you guys from the house were nothing like me. That is, I was nothing like you. I was ashamed I quit hockey after only a year. I was ashamed to find myself hanging out with you pussies, with whom — to my continued shame — I had nothing in common. I was ashamed as my good standing with the university ticked away grade by dwindling grade, and that I no longer had any money to pay for tuition or housing. I was ashamed when I stopped going to classes and started bouncing at Goldfinger’s.

At which point, it was like I had come full circle.

And then, as I think you know, the bullets blur together in a single, spreading oil slick of shame that coated me like some flapping, flailing seabird. Or maybe I am too big to compare myself to a seabird. More like some bellowing walrus flopping around on the oil-slick rocks, splattering his fellow marine life in filth.

And I understand wanting to get away from me at that point, I really do. Wanting not to be contaminated — pulled under in my wake, or rolled on top of in my panic.

But I’ve moved on, Adam. It’s been a lot of years since then. I’ve put it behind me, as people do.

Except, not you. And you can only imagine my surprise. Adam: the first one to go, the first to get out of the way before shit could meet fan. Backing up, arms in the air. The guy who let me believe for the rest of my life I had been too much for him. That I was not worth the aggro; that he wanted no part of the bad-news contagion that constituted my life.

That it should turn out you wanted everything to do with it. That you should want it, in fact, for yourself.