The Antagonist

3


05/25/09, 6:17 p.m.


MY ADVICE TO YOU Adam is to sit back and enjoy the story. Okay? Stop whining, stop threatening (it’s pathetic and besides I don’t know how you expect to serve me “notice” whatever that means if you don’t know where I am) and for Christ’s sake stop interrupting. You’re like one of those a*sholes at the movies who can’t shut up, who keeps asking questions or complaining in a loud voice about how lame the dialogue is. There was a time when you used to let me talk and talk. For hours. Eyebrows going up, eyebrows going down. Thank god for your eyebrow movement — it used to be the only way I could tell you were still listening, that you hadn’t abandoned your physical body at some point and were occupied bouncing from one astral plane to the next. I invested a hell of a lot in those twitches and furrows. And if anyone was looking for any more than a few twitches and furrows after they’d yanked off a hank of flesh and handed it over, they were in for disappointment, right?

Of course I know now why that was, what it was that made you such a wonderfully attentive listener.

Well now I’m giving it to you — all the stuff you felt you had to wheedle out of me on the sly. Look, it’s all yours, unspooling like fishing line. So relax and just try to appreciate how magnanimous I’m being.

Where was I. We’re skipping childhood because that’s where Sylvie lives.

So, the Icy Dream. Gord blames Icy Dream Inc. for everything that’s gone wrong in his life since the day he opened shop. He likes to imbue his failures with a cosmic significance, because this makes him a kind of Jeremiah in his own mind. For example he wasn’t just some underemployed loser, back before he became my home town’s emperor of ice cream, bouncing randomly around from job to job like a pinball — he’s God’s pinball, in God’s own pinball machine, meaning the good Lord has always got a watchful, pie-plate eye on Gord.

Another example of my father’s monomania: he always tells the story of how, once he got the loans together to buy some kind of franchise, he had “the choice” between an Icy Dream and a Java Joe’s. Like it could only possibly be one or the other — the wrong choice and the right. As if some kind of celestial fast-food overseer descended from the heavens with a ID cone in one hand and a crumpled JJ’s cup in the other — obliterating all possibility of, say, a Pizza Hut, a Mickey Dee’s — displayed them both to Gord and thundered: Pick!

This would’ve been something like 1981. And the way Gord tells it, he scratched his head and said to himself: Coffee? Who wants to sit around drinking coffee all day? Who wants to go out for a coffee? ID was a magic land of ice cream confection — the kind of thing children clamoured for. The kind of all-forgiving place to which you got in the car and drove after a fight with the family, say. Everyone cools off and then you reappear bearing some kind of sweet, frosty olive branch and you’re hero of the day. This had been a favoured tactic of Gord’s long before he bought the franchise — maybe that’s part of what inspired him to go with the Dream. He couldn’t see coming home with a tray of large coffees to make up for his transgressions, no matter how many creamers and sugar packets he emptied into them. I remember Arctic Bars, Oh Henrys, two-litre bottles of root beer (A&W, the good stuff, not the no-name kind from Dominion) accompanied by a tub of vanilla ice cream to make floats. Sylvie always got a box of either Cracker Jacks or wine gums — she had strange tastes.

Point being, the way Gord saw it there was no insult, no trespass, no random act of prickery that sugar couldn’t sweeten.

But coffee? Coffee was for harried office workers, management types. Ice cream was joyous, coffee was grim. Ice cream was celebratory, coffee was no-nonsense. Ice cream was of the people, for the people and coffee was strictly for grownups — medicinal, even — a kind of businessman’s brain-lubricant.

Coffee’s not what we’re about in this here town, insisted Gord.

The town hasn’t exactly boomed since then — they always said it would and it never did. Last I heard, however, Gord’s Icy Dream is still in operation, still doling drippy soft-serve and flaccid burgers poking like tongues from out between two spongy, seed-flecked buns. Under new management since Gord retired. But of course you and I both know what did end up booming in the past twenty years. Coffee. JJ’s. My dad’s lone ID is currently surrounded by no less than six JJ’s coffee outlets — there’s the one on the highway leading north, and the one on the southbound route. There’s the one in the mall near the industrial park, and the one in the strip mall downtown. There’s the counter attached to the gas station and finally, there’s the freestanding JJ’s directly across the street from the ID. All of them thriving. No one in this town of 7,500 hardworking souls need go without JJ’s mudwater for even five minutes, and clearly no one does.

“I never claimed to be a prophet,” shrugs Gord when the topic of the Great ID Wrong Decision of 1981 comes up.

The weird thing is the pleasure he still takes in that epic failure of foresight. To him it proves his independence — his maverick spirit. Gord was never one to follow the herd, even if the herd was making truckloads of money.

“Coffee is for a*sholes,” Gord will explain. His Last Word where Java Joe’s is concerned.

It was a class thing, frankly. He associated coffee, in those days, with Management, and Dad has never done well with men of managerial timber. He planted Sylvie and himself into that particular small-town soil on the coast where he was born because of rumours of the any-day-now industrial boom. Soon, jobs would be given out hand over fist, the story went; Gord just had to get in line. So Gord got in line. And what did he do, once he was at the front of the line? Once he found himself sitting in the manager’s office awaiting the just-a-formality, five-minute labourer’s-job interview?

Gord called the manager an a*shole, is what he did. The manager of SeaFare Packers, the only industry, thus far, in town. The reason why is lost to the ages, but Gord assures us his judgement was true and just and to have held his tongue would have constituted a serious moral lapse.

Thus began his career as an independent businessman, while the town, nurtured by SeaFare, built itself up around him. Gord established himself as a parasite of sorts. “I was a barnacle on the ass of SeaFare,” he likes to say these days, always able to take pride somehow.

But he’d be damned if he was going to spend the best years of his life brewing coffee for those a*sholes.

Here’s the irony — to this day I never go to JJ’s. Not because of some kind of misguided loyalty to Gord, but the opposite. Surely you’ve been, Adam? Even a latte-sucker like yourself couldn’t have avoided the occasional last-ditch caffeination stop at Joe’s, right? So you’ll know a patron doesn’t exactly come across managerial timber stacked there in the booths.

You find parkas. Checked shirts and baggy pants — wife-bought. Fake leather shoes. Rubber boots. Work boots. Toques, ball caps. Bloated wallets in permanently deformed back pockets. Squints. Grizzle.

What you find hunched and huddled in the identical orange booths of Java Joe’s are endless variations — young, old; fat, thin — of my father Gord.



05/25/09, 8:43 p.m.

I’ll tell you what sucks about being almost forty, if you’re me. Lots of men are angry at their fathers, yes, well into their forties and beyond, but at the same time, a lot of men aren’t — or if they are, they manage to keep it in check. Lots of men go to see their fathers on the weekend, or call their fathers on the phone every once in a while, or take them to a hockey game, or out to Ponderosa for a steak. And the two of them are able to somehow be men together. They’ve arrived at that place through some mysterious process of maturation and tacit agreement.

I can’t do that. Like there was this one time I brought a girlfriend home to meet Gord. Not that I wanted her to meet Gord, but I was trying very hard with this girl and I wanted her to see the coast where I grew up. Neither of us had a lot of money at the time, however, and Gord was still living in my childhood home, a two-storey farmhouse just far enough outside of town to be inconvenient, which he’d bought to house Sylvie and their anticipated throngs of children. He’d kept it after her death and my departure and lived in it by himself, as if expecting one or both of us to return at any time.

I told myself there was no reason this visit shouldn’t work out. I remember I was still trying to be normal at that point — trying to force a sense of decency onto my life. I didn’t want to be the type of guy who was estranged from his father. I was trying not to be a lot of types of guy back then.

Kirsten was a girl from my church and the church had me convinced that if you said to yourself — I mean to God — Okay, God, I’m giving up my life to you now, it’s all yours — and then just started acting like the kind of guy you wanted to be, the rest of your life would reorganize itself around that resolution. I was a wholesome, decent young man, I’d decided, freshly washed in the blood of the lamb. Therefore I had a wholesome, decent relationship with my father, who, when next we met, would somehow detect the godly aura rippling around my cleansed being and be instantly humbled and inspired to godliness and decency himself.

I can’t blame the church for this delusion. It was my delusion, the church just lent it institutional support. On some level I knew that’s what this particular church was all about — nurturing mass and individual delusions — and that’s probably the whole reason I joined. But no doubt you’ll recall how even in the old days I would radically clean up my act every once in a while, leaving all you guys at the house gobsmacked at my sudden puritanism. I wouldn’t drink, I would go to classes, I’d make sure I was at the library on the days I knew Wade would be coming back from Goldfinger’s with his stash. Sometimes I could go two, three weeks like that. But not much more. After that I’d get angry about something and need to arrest my thought process somehow. It’s a pattern I’ve maintained my whole life.

So there I was — wholesome, decent, delusional — mentally pulling open the screen door of my childhood home for the first time in maybe ten years and thinking — I actually told myself this — It’ll be great! My girlfriend and I will drive down the coast. We will stay with my father, and Kirsten will meet my father, and the two of them will get along. Gord always had a bit of a courtly side with the ladies. He’ll take one look at her, I thought, and he’ll be all “me dear” this and “me love” that — playing up the salty old Gael stuff because if goddess Sylvie found it irresistible surely all central Canadian women must — and it won’t be grotesque or off-putting at all. Perhaps he’ll take down my baby book for the two of them to titter over, seated side by side on the couch. Looka the size a the little bastard! I said to them nuns, I said . . . Perhaps we will barbecue in the evenings, drink beer, boil a lobster, reminisce about the days of Sylvie. It won’t be painful. It will be healing, if anything (I was very interested in the idea of “healing” at this time). And perhaps, when the time is right, my girlfriend and I will even talk to my father about Christ.

Or perhaps Gord will talk endlessly about all the bastards and a*sholes who have betrayed and conspired against him, always casting an accusatory eye at yours truly, and perhaps yours truly will grit his teeth until he has to make a dentist’s appointment and be fitted with a mouth guard to wear at night, and his stomach acid will churn until he can digest nothing but mushroom soup from a can and he will want, very badly, to get drunk and give nary a thought, for a couple of days, to how our Lord and Saviour, in all his compassionate wisdom, would’ve handled a trial-in-the-desert like Gord.

And perhaps all that new-found, Christ-inspired patience came crashing at last to the ground when Gord made the mistake of referring to his son as a hockey hero, or, more specifically, a failed hockey-hero, in the girlfriend’s presence.

As in: “This fella here coulda been another Al MacInnis. Coulda gone all the way to the NHL if only he’d listened to his old man.”

To which I pleaded: “Gord, don’t be a goof.”

“But no,” continued Gord. “Listens to everyone but. Telling him he was no good. Story of his life.”

Which of course would be a nugget of information to pique any girlfriend’s interest.

“Really Rank? People said you were no good?”

“No, he’s full of crap,” I replied. With maybe a bit too much volume. “No one ever said I was no good. But nobody ever said I should go into the NHL either, except for you, Gord. Gord likes to imagine the whole world is busy judging my every move, going boo or yay.”

“You’re the one who thinks that,” Gord countered, happy now to be arguing after all the uncharacteristic nice-making in honour of the girlfriend’s visit. “Your exact problem’s always been that you believe it. You believe the judgement, when you should be looking at the facts. Even when the judgement is clearly a load of BS.”

This was about the time Kirsten started to realize that the father-son banter had shifted away from the great game of hockey into mysterious, dangerous new terrain. The big hint, she told me later, was the way I’d started moving my jaw minutely back and forth, producing a faint, unconscious twitch beneath my temples. Kirsten always called this my “warning signal.” She said it reminded her of when a cat starts swooping its tail.

Which meant it was time to change the subject. “What say we put the steaks on, Gord. Or you know what?” I reached — maybe grabbed is a better word — for Kirsten’s hand. “How about a prayer?”

This won me a sneering once-over from the old man. He wasn’t exactly buying the new me. “Where I come from, you say grace before dinner, not ten times a day before you sit down and before you light the stove and before you wipe your ass — pardon me, dear.”

“Oh that’s nice, Gord, thanks.”

“All I know is this: when the whole goddamn town — sorry, dear — turns against a boy for doing what’s right, for doing what the cops are too goddamn — pardon my French, dear — chickenshit to do themselves . . .”

The ancient lawn chair beneath me gave a rusty squeal as I got to my feet, yanking on Kirsten’s arm to make her do the same. This after months of painstaking effort trying to prove myself a gentle man — the blissed-out, easygoing kind of guy who walked in the light of Christ’s love and all that.

I knew it wasn’t going to work, is what I’m saying, and it didn’t. My shiny new halo flickered and fizzled out like past-date Christmas lights. It was no match for Gord. We’d been in his company for scarcely an hour and the whole time it had felt like sitting inside a cloud of mosquitoes — every word he spoke a needly humming in my ear. It made me want to swat.

I announced that I wanted to take Kirsten down to Jessop’s for a beer — her mouth just kind of dropped open at the word “beer,” I remember, as if her jaw had abruptly unhinged. And I did take her to Jessop’s, but first I took her to a motel on the highway and booked us a room, where we proceeded to argue into the night.

Kirsten didn’t get it. She thought I was crazy and insisted I had to at least call Gord and tell him we wouldn’t be staying the night as planned. She said she couldn’t believe how rude I was being toward my poor old father. “What?” She kept saying. “So he’s a little crotchety — so what?”

I yelled at her that he wasn’t “crotchety,” he was a f*cking prick. It was the first time anyone had done any yelling in this relationship, let alone any wielding of the F-word. I could feel all my work with this girl — all my good behaviour and act-cleaning-up — start to flake away like dandruff.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said fast. (The problem with being a man of my size is that I can’t get away with displays of aggression in mixed company. I can’t shout around women no matter how angry or frustrated I get because it scares the living shit out of them. They start cowering, and then I feel like a monster. I remember one time riding the bus I was sitting beside a baby and I sneezed — I just sneezed — and the kid nearly turned itself inside out with screaming. It’s not a nice way to feel.)

So I got my act together and said some other things about Gord, trying to explain myself. I strove to paint Gord as a kind of evil genius. Every word he uttered, every gesture, I explained, was a jab at me — a perfectly timed, precisely aimed barb.

Admittedly, I was just desperate to get my girlfriend onside. I knew how ridiculous this portrait was even as I was painting it. Gord shrimpy in his polyester workpants, floating in one of my discarded hockey jerseys as he waved us a confused goodbye. Anyone who watches him in operation can see my dad is not exactly a man of strategic foresight. Gord is a nerve ending, an involuntary muscle — he fires according to certain stimuli.

“Rank,” I remember Kirsten saying — this astonished girl who had accepted Jesus as her personal saviour when she was all of eleven years old and never looked back with even a hint of nostalgia on her pagan childhood. “He’s an old man,” she said. “He’s a frail, little old man.”

And then she held her arms out toward me, not in invitation, but as if to say Behold. She shook her head at me. As if to say Good lord, you could snuff him like a birthday candle.

And Gord is now twelve years smaller and more frail than he even was then.

And, look at this: I still can’t stop talking about him.



05/25/09, 10:56 p.m.

All right. Jesus. Here we go.

I was born, and next thing I know I’m a teenager and my father runs the Icy Dream.

But you realize if I tell this story, it’s just going to be more Gord.

I find, writing this, I keep getting caught up. Sometimes this is fun and at other times it isn’t and other times it’s not exactly one or the other. I just get caught up and forget who I’m talking to. Not who exactly, but what version of you, Adam. It keeps shifting around. I forget about the thief and liar on the back of the book, the guy who needs regular reminders of how portly he has become given that he was once so afraid of it because what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t make him aware of the gradual bloating process to which he, middle-aged fatso, has succumbed?

I forget about him and I instead remember you. And I think by you what I’m really getting at is a person who doesn’t exist. There’s the angle-y Adam with glasses in my memory who I was at first a bit put off by because he never said much and had that quiet observer thing going on of which any sane person, I think now, would be suspicious. You reminded me of a certain type of spectator from my hockey games. Guys who’d sit directly behind the net and be so immersed in the action that even when the puck came straight at them and bounced against the Plexiglas in front of their faces, they wouldn’t blink. They’d even lean forward sometimes, as if to meet it. So they were completely absorbed in the action, these guys, but at the same time completely apart. And they knew it, they never forgot for a second. They never doubted they were safe.

And instinctively, I didn’t like that about you at first. It goes to show a guy like me should always trust his instincts.

Later — and this gets to the heart of the You I’m speaking of, the You who doesn’t actually exist — I took the fact of how you sat and stared, how your eyebrows went up and then went down, how you spoke one or two sentences in response to my five hundred — and even those only after a long, agonizing, eyebrow-jimmying silence — I took all this to mean you must be some kind of oracle, a man of profound sympathy and insight. Someone, in short, who understood the way things were, who got it. Who maybe even got me.

One time, I remember, you put your hand on my forehead. You probably don’t remember this. We were very drunk, or I was anyway, and dawn was going to break at any minute, and I was talking — I’d been talking for hours and it was like labour or something, like giving birth, I was working myself up and now I could feel it coming, I could feel it coming, I was going to tell it, and I broke out in a sweat and started talking faster, willing it to come but terrified and the next thing I knew I was telling it, telling you, and the fluorescent light from the kitchen was glinting off your glasses in a way that drove me crazy, so that I actually got up and moved at one point, closer to you, mid-sentence, just to change the angle so I could see what was happening behind your eyes.

But that was when you held out your hand, as if to stop me from seeing, or as if I had moved toward you precisely to receive a kind of benediction. You leaned forward and held up your palm like a traffic cop or Diana Ross mid-routine and you placed it against my forehead and your hand felt fantastically cool, which made me realize how heated I’d become with all this talking and confessing.

And everything stopped. I don’t know how else to describe it. I wasn’t talking anymore because words seemed not to exist. And that was wonderful — it was a wonderful feeling, the sudden nonexistence of words — like a cool shower after a long gruelling hockey practice.

And morning light started fingering its way through the gaps in Kyle’s shit-green velvet curtains. Curtains he’d hung precisely to keep the morning light from doing this very thing and auguring its way into our hungover dreams, but curtains that consistently failed to hold up against the tenacious morning rays.

And long fingers of light, I remember, gradually stretched themselves across the room, illuminating the beer bottles. I’m sure you don’t remember. Probably it only lasted for a second, your hand against my head. It would be years before I hooked up with my church but I think I had a moment of precognition then. Faith-healers, charismatics, weeping, shrieking supplicants, the laying on of hands and then — all that pain followed by all that peace.

But you know what Adam? F*ck this. That’s what I have decided, just now. F*ck you, traitorous fat man, and you, skinny cryptic four-eyes, and most of all You — lying disappointment you have been, it turns out, all along.