The Antagonist

29


08/17/09, 12:44 a.m.


GORD CRIED AND CRIED and cried and cried and cried. I can honestly say I’ve never seen a man cry like that, before or since. It’s not something a lot of men do, and when you see it happen, you understand why. When men cry, particularly men who are your father, there is something huge and elemental about it — something that feels entirely wrong and yet entirely natural all at the same time, like volcanoes; like the planet regurgitating. And it continued for days, the crying, intermittently. In between, he would knot his face up and scowl at the hospital administrators and the funeral directors — anybody who had a whiff of “the man” about them, anyone who could potentially be considered managerial timber by the powers that be at SeaFare packers. He’d bark insults at them, urge them to kiss his scrawny Celtic ass, then the moment we were alone in the rental car or the house or the funeral home or cemetery the crying would start up all over again.

And he would cling to me at these times. I think his intention, through his grief, was to be fatherly and sort of take me in his arms and offer comfort, but it didn’t work because I was so big and he was so small. He’d end up just sort of wrapping his arms around my waist and burying his face in my sweater like a child. It’s okay Gordie, it’s okay Gordie he’d say into my chest as if trying to speak through it and converse directly with my heart, and as I stood there feeling, even through my own grief, how ridiculous we were.

When I was in the hospital, being treated for absolutely nothing except the shock of seeing my mother caved in (and that shock more or less manifested itself in sleepiness — I was in the hospital for being sleepy as they pieced Sylvie together), I’d open my eyes every once in a while and a small, dark-haired man with John Lennon glasses and a sort of science-teacher look about him would be standing there. And he’d smile and glance over at me as my eyes were opening as if he just happened to be standing in my room this whole time enjoying the play of sunlight across my bed sheets or something, and wasn’t it fortuitous that I was now awake so we could chat. And because my town is small, he was familiar to me, so I politely said hello.

“Your lawyer Trisha introduced us a while back,” said Owen Findlay. “Do you remember?”

I didn’t. Didn’t matter. Owen was from that point on a daily fixture in the lives of Gord and me. He had apparently been appointed to welcome my mother and me to the Youth Centre that day, had been waiting for us, all set to guide us through some paperwork, offer a bit of a tour and — his particular area of expertise — be reassuring. The more I got to know Owen, later, the more I wished Sylvie could have lived just long enough to meet him, to see what a sweet guy he was, to hear his reassurances about the way my life would unfold in the following months. I think she’d had no idea what was in store for me — how could she? Juvenile detention was a phenomenon beyond her realm of being. I think she must have been imagining prison tattoos, forced gay sex, eventual heroin addiction — that’s the only thing that can account for the way she lost it in the car. If only she could have been greeted at the door by Owen’s open, well-shaved face, sniffed the humble waft of Ivory soap that hung about him, seen the calming way he had of rocking on his heels, hands-in-pockets, in his science-teacher loafers and cords.

But in the car it had been a frenzy. She managed to hold on to the wheel but her demeanour was that of a bee that had flown in through the car window just as it was being rolled up and now was trapped and slamming its body against the glass in ever-increasing alarm. The conversation became pure adrenalin — neither of us quite knew what we were saying, or what the other one was talking about. My mother and I, we had never spoken like this before. It was always Gord I shouted and railed at, and he who did the shouting and railing in return. Sylvie and I usually turned to each other for relief — for a little peace and quiet once Hurricane Gord had finished raging.

She had pretty much liquefied the moment we pulled out of the driveway, when only moments before she’d been entirely in control. She had explained to Gord he would not be coming along on the drive to deliver me to my punishment for having brained Mick Croft, and Gord, surprisingly, hadn’t kicked up too much of a fuss. Sylvie made her case in theological terms. Like any good Catholic, Gord could only bow before the inviolable bond of the Madonna and child, so when Sylvie explained things on that level — we need to talk mother to son — he had little choice but to nod and flick on the TV. Gord had exhausted himself in the courtroom anyway, and now that the verdict had come down and Trish had refused to hand over the judge’s home phone number and/or address, he didn’t quite know what to do next. My father’s wrath, and the immense, inexhaustible supply of energy he always drew from it, was, for the first time I’d ever witnessed, spent.

She even kissed him on the top of his prickly head before we left, which troubled me because my parents usually took such care to not go near each other, at least when I was around.

She was being, I think now, very careful.

But at the first stop sign we came to, she let go, braking the car and collapsing across the steering wheel as if gone boneless.

I remember her telling me, “You don’t have to be this. You could be anything.”

“Be what, be what?” I was saying, freaked out because of the way she was crying — great whooping sobs that convulsed her entire body. And I had done that to her. It was because of me.

“Don’t have to be what? I don’t know what I am, let alone what I’m supposed to be.”

“What they’re going to try to make you be now. What your father tries to make you be.”

“I never wanted to be that anyway,” I shouted.

“I know what you are,” Sylvie shouted back.

“No you don’t,” I continued to shout (and, warning: it gets very teenage here). “Everybody thinks they know all about me but they don’t! Nobody knows anything about me!”

I was thinking about Constable Hamm — I see exactly where you’re headed, son. I was thinking of Gord thwacking me in the sternum. This son of a bitch right here.

We went back and forth like this in our mutual incoherence. That is, I was incoherent and panicky, whereas Sylvie, I think, was in the process of elucidating something, however heartsick she may have been while attempting to do it. We were on the highway now. I just wanted her to stop crying that way. It would be okay if she were trickling a little, but the sobs wracked her body like she was being flogged. I even thought she might pull over and ralph out the driver’s-side door at some point, like one of my high school buddies on the way to a dance.

“We can’t continue like this,” she gasped after a few heaving moments of speechlessness. “We don’t have to.”

“I have to go to jail, Mom,” I said, watching her because there was a weird momentousness to the way she was speaking all of a sudden. “We can’t, like, go on the lam.”

“After this, Gordie,” she said, shaking her head and reaching up to swipe an entire forearm across her eyes. “After this, everything changes.”

Needless to say she was right. Of course, that wasn’t what she meant. She didn’t mean that in about eight minutes she would take a blind turn while driving slightly on the wrong side of the yellow line as she finished blouse-sleeving another gush of tears from her eyes and a car would be coming just a titch over the speed limit in the opposite direction and the vehicles would brush against each other like two illicit lovers at a party, spin in opposite directions, they into a ditch, we into yet another oncoming vehicle before discovering a ditch of our own. That’s not what Sylvie meant by everything changes. At the time, however, I didn’t understand exactly she what she meant.

She meant, it took me years to understand, that she was leaving Gord. She and I, that is. The thing I always wanted; my ultimate, never-spoken wish.

Which of course is what ended up happening anyway.



08/17/09, 3:25 a.m.

I just realized I’ve got one more story to tell you.

I started playing hockey again a few years ago, can you believe it? Twelve years after stumping out of the locker room back in university and making my buddy Adam so proud of my principled stand against the cracking of human skulls. It happened not long after I bought my house. One of the first things I noticed about the neighbourhood, standing with the realtor at the upstairs window, was an outdoor community rink a couple of backyards beyond mine.

I watched it fill up with kids from the first snowfall in November and not empty out again until March. On especially cold days, rink sounds — the pock of pucks hitting the boards and the slash of skates gouging ice — flew across the frozen air into my yard. It sounded like all the games were taking place directly beneath my bedroom, and if I jumped out my window I’d land smack at centre ice like a dropped puck.

I’d stand there some evenings watching the kids going around and around, making their touching Hail Mary passes from one end of the ice to the other, and eventually I noticed that during a certain block of time on Thursday evenings, the kids got bigger. I took in the occasional pot belly here, a faceful of beard there. I saw how different guys seemed to come and go from week to week, some of them even showing up in the middle of a game, brandishing their sticks and being immediately accepted onto the ice. Next thing I know I’m at Canadian Tire buying extension cords but standing, for some reason, in the sporting goods section, feeling annoyed at the crappy selection of skates.

Flash forward two years later and at the age of thirty-four I’m finally doing my father proud — heading downtown to the arena every week to play in a league. And let me tell you, old-timer’s hockey is the best hockey going. There are no psychotic parents in the stands, no purple-faced coaches, none of that sweaty, draft-pick desperation. Guys can be old, guys can be pudgy; guys are slow. Guys are sometimes even — as in the case of our goalie for a couple of years until pregnancy interrupted our winning streak — women.

There’s only one downside, which is this: when guys go into cardiac arrest.

The first time it happened, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. On the opposite side of the ice from us, Hamish Powell from the Stoney Creek Choppers bounced off the bench where he’d been sitting, mouth agape, exactly like someone from my former church might have done in a moment of holy ecstasy. The spirit could hit you like that if you happened to have the right preacher — say, a preacher like Beth — in front of you, egging it on. One minute you’re letting the words wash over you, weaving back and forth in relative peace, hands in the air, and the next it’s like a holy bolt has entered through your anus.

But that wasn’t what had happened to Hamish, even if that’s what it looked like to me. Wow, I thought. Here of all places. Hamish has seen the light. Hamish has been saved.

I remarked to a guy on the bench beside me: “Hamish —” but didn’t have time to say anything else, because my teammate, an internist at Saint Joseph’s named Wally who had helpfully identified my broken tibia the year before as I lay writhing and gasping on the ice, was now flying across the rink.

As I watched Wally arrive at the other side I still didn’t grasp what was going on. Meanwhile another guy had positioned himself on top of Hamish. They’re fighting, I thought. Hamish has gone nuts! But that was when I realized the other guy was a colleague of Wally’s — an EMT, to be precise. And that’s when I heard Wally yell for a defibrillator.

Did you know sports arenas are legally obliged to keep heart defibrillators on the premises, precisely for occasions such as this? It happens, I was soon to discover, all the time. Old guys like us who spend our weekdays in desk chairs and our weekends on couches and our mealtimes dumping gravy all over everything decide we can just lace up a pair of skates one fine winter’s day and hit the ice like we were seventeen again. It’s a bit sobering, Adam. It’s sobering to be sitting in what you realize is a kind of temple devoted to the worship of youthful, masculine vigour and watch a guy get taken down so decisively, as if in reproach. Like a too-big kid getting his hand slapped reaching for cookies. You’ve had enough, decrees the f*cker-in-the-sky.

Hamish was okay, but I would never meet him on the ice again. I found this out from Wally a few weeks later after a game. Usually I liked talking to Wally, because he often shared gross details from his medical career. He once told me he’d learned to do stitches in med school by practising on the flesh of dead pigs. I couldn’t get the image out of my head — a bunch of guys sitting in a room sewing pigs.

Still. I wasn’t all that keen to learn the details of what happened to Hamish. Wally was keen to give them, however. Wally loved talking about his work, and he was, he said now, perpetually fascinated by the workings of the human heart. We men, he told me, we walk around with no idea how fragile our hearts might be.

We were standing in my kitchen, Wally watching me slather sauce onto spare ribs in preparation for a post-game barbecue, one of my all-time favourite rituals of defiance against the winter months. I have been known to barbecue while wearing ski-goggles, to protect my eyes against ice pellets ripping at my face in gale-force winds.

I replied something like Yeah yeah yeah as I slathered, just letting Wally ramble about ventricles for a while. I was happy Hamish was still with us, but the image of him popping up from the bench like a jack-in-the-box with his mouth in an agonized gape hadn’t left me.

Then, from out of nowhere (or at least that’s how it seemed to me, considering I’d been working so hard at not paying attention), Wally started talking about the tasering deaths in the news. Do you remember that scandal, Adam? The cops got a bit zap-happy with their new, supposedly non-lethal toy and a handful of people getting zapped promptly disproved the whole non-lethal thing. Whoa, remarked the cops as multiple zap-ees dropped like stones. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Cue public outrage.

So Wally got very exercised on this subject. Wally appeared to be among the outraged, and because I’d been following the details on the news pretty carefully — you can imagine how stories of accidental deaths tend to claim my sympathy — I shoved the platter of ribs aside and gave him my full attention.

“I mean, Christ,” Wally was saying as he struggled to open a non-screwtop beer with his hands. “You send up to fifty thousand volts of electricity through a guy’s body — and maybe the guy is freaked out as it is, maybe the guy has a heart condition; he’s angry, he’s terrified. You are pretty much begging for the worst possible outcome.”

“That’s not a screwtop, Wally.”

“I’ve almost got it,” said Wally. He didn’t, but it was a matter of face-saving now.

“Dude,” I said, holding out a bottle opener. “You’re a doctor. Save your hands.”

“So anyway,” continued Wally, accepting it quickly. “They say it’s perfectly safe, right, all this electricity coursing through your body, but for who? An eighteen-year-old maybe. A guy who runs ten K every day and watches his cholesterol. But they have no idea who they might be jazzing, what a guy’s heart might be doing, what kind of shape it might be in. They’re dealing with crackheads? Drug addicts? The guy’s in a state of excited delirium — just holding him down could stop his heart.”

At Wally’s last remark, I responded, as you can imagine, “What?”

“It’s a controversial term, but generally it just means if a guy’s all cranked up his heart could blow. The last thing you want to do is zap him.”

“But what about holding him down?” I said. “You said you can’t even hold him down.”

“It’s not a good idea,” allowed Wally, “with someone in that state.”

I had picked up my own beer once I shoved the ribs aside, but now I placed it on the counter again without taking a swig. “But how do you know? How are you supposed to know if someone’s in that state or not?”

“Well I suppose the dilemma for the cops,” said Wally, “is probably every other guy they wanna taser is in that state.”

“Excited what-did-you-call-it?”

“Excited delirium.”

“And what happens?”

“When?”

“When a guy’s in excited delirium.”

Wally rolled his sleep-deprived eyes to an upper corner of my kitchen and seemed to recite from a memorized textbook. “He’s agitated, violent. Sweats profusely, seems unusually strong — doesn’t really feel pain. I mean, definitely the kind of guy the cops are going to want to tase. But definitely the last guy that you should.”

This painted something of a familiar portrait, would you agree?

“But you said you don’t even need to taser him.”

Wally’s eyes rolled back to me and he leaned on the counter, smiling, making himself comfortable. He seemed to almost wallow now that he had my full attention.

“Just by restraining him, yeah. Because he’s in a heightened state, right? The heart is just flailing, it’s going flat-out, it can’t go any harder, and then you grab him from behind, throw him to the ground. What’s it gonna do next?”

I was in a bit of a heightened state myself at this point. My beer, I noticed, had overflowed after I placed it — gently, I’d thought — on the counter, so I moved on autopilot to get a rag and wipe it up, still firing questions at Wally so he wouldn’t get the idea the conversation was winding down. I kept him there in the kitchen for a while, making him go over a few details of particular interest to me. Pretty soon he stopped wallowing and took on the demeanour of what he actually was, i.e., a guy under interrogation. He’d finished his beer and just stood there and fidgeted, wondering why I wasn’t offering him another, why I wasn’t putting on the ribs and letting him get back to the party. A few of our teammates wandered in from the living room, wanting to know the same thing. I dumped a bunch of chips into a bowl and shoved it at them and told them to go sit down.

“Not you,” I said to Wally, who’d made a move to sort of unobtrusively attach himself to the other two and wander unnoticed from the kitchen.

I didn’t offer him another beer until I was sure I had all the facts straight. Not that the facts of the initial revelation really changed much under my questioning. I just needed them affirmed, and then re-affirmed.

So here’s what I learned.

You can stop a guy’s heart, Adam — an over-excited guy, say, a guy who has abused drugs his entire life, a guy who means well, who is only looking out for you, a guy who has to live with the fact that the most powerful forces in the universe have marshalled themselves against the scummy likes of him — and what difference does it make if that fact is a fantasy, and how can it be a fantasy anyway, when the loneliness gouges his face like scars? So a hunted, haunted guy. A guy who just happens to be coked out of his head at that very ill-starred moment. The very moment the powers eternally gunning for him finally muster themselves to gather overhead and funnel their way into a convenient, waiting vessel. A vessel who happens to be a bit of a hard-luck Charlie himself, let’s face it. Therefore, what better vessel? The point is: such a vessel can stop a guy’s heart simply by, it would seem, restraining him. As the obliging vessel does. Just by holding the guy down; applying force. Just by kneeling on the dude.

“Does he die?” I said to Wally. “Does he die? Every time? Does the guy die?”

Wally was looking at me vaguely — he was leaning against the refrigerator now and his big eyes had glazed over and were watering as if I’d been shining a flashlight into them this whole time.

“Well . . .” he began. “Hamish didn’t die.”

“But all the tasering guys. All the excited delirium guys. They croaked from it, right? That’s why it’s such a huge scandal, they die every time.”

“Rank,” said Wally, raising his hands and scratching either side of his head with them. “You only hear about the ones who die.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean the guys who live — it doesn’t get reported. Why would it?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“There’s no story there.”

This was when Wally actually yawned. Like the absence of a good story was getting to him.