The Antagonist

4


06/01/09, 1:12 a.m.


SURPRISE! RANK HERE.

Adam, this has begun — there’s no way around it. That’s what I’ve been realizing this past week. I gave up writing to you and I felt this incredible relief — no doubt you did too. In fact that was the only thing that tainted my relief — knowing you were probably relieved as well. But f*ck it, it was over! It had been started, but now it was stopped, and so was over. Cooler heads prevailed and all that. I’d just go back to doing what I’ve been doing all along — working and coaching and going to the gym — and you would go back to whatever it is you do — vampiring the good and the real out of people’s lives — and we’d forget about each other as we’d already done and should’ve kept right on doing.

So let’s take another run at this, shall we? I’ve been reading over what I sent you so far trying to figure out why in God’s name I can’t just settle into a nice, neat, chronological version of the story of my life. I keep going off on these pointless tangents. It seemed like such a simple idea at first — all I had to do was sit down and write it out. But it’s actually a lot harder than you would think.

Now that I’ve read everything over, however, the problem has become clear. It appears I’d rather talk about pretty much anything other than working for Gord at the Icy Dream. But if I don’t the rest of the story can’t happen. Which is precisely the hurdle, come to think of it.

The interesting thing about this whole process is that I find myself realizing what I think about everything at the exact moment I’m typing it out. Then I sit back and read it over and go: Huh.

Is that how it works for you? This never really occurred to me before. I have to admit I kind of imagined you sitting around rubbing your hands together and cackling to yourself as you plotted out your miserable theft, not just typing away and suddenly looking down and going, Oh hey, check that out. I just completely screwed over a guy I used to be buddies with.

And I’ve also just realized that even though my outrage resulting from the above has led me to launch myself at you across the ether hollering Hey nice story you thieving bastard but guess what, I have the real story right here — so get comfortable, chump! That is, even though I was completely gung-ho when I initiated this little back and forth between us, there is a big part of me that keeps trying to bow out.

But I am going to do this, Adam. Neither of us is getting out of it. Every time I think f*ck this and f*ck you — and I think it with approximately every other sentence — I imagine your relief at never having to open another email from me and it propels me right back here in front of my ancient computer, constantly hitting the wrong keys and having to go back and start again in all my enthusiastic umbrage.

Gord used to go over the counter. That was the crux of the matter. I had two jobs at Icy Dream — well, three, if you counted working the till and manoeuvring the soft-serve into two perfect undulating bulges balanced in the cone — three bulges if the customer ordered a large. That was something I eventually got very good at, executing perfectly undulating soft-serve — I felt like a sculptor at times. So I did that, I even took a bit of pride in it, but I was mostly at Icy Dream, according to Gord, to “bust punks’ skulls.” So I busted punks’ skulls, but I also had a third job, a private job that I had not been assigned but ended up inevitably assigning to myself.

And that was to keep Gord from going over the counter.

The problem, which my father could not have foreseen when the Celestial Fast-Food Overseer descended from the heavens and demanded he choose between ID and JJ’s, was the existence of punks. Punks abounded in our town, as they do all towns, big and small, and were the bane of Gord’s existence as a small-business owner.

Everywhere kids went in our town they promptly got thrown out of, was the thing. Nobody wanted teenagers anywhere out in public. I knew because I was one. I was the worst kind of teenager — superficially speaking, that is — the kind that grownups like the look of least. Big and thuggy. I could take them. I could take anyone, obviously. And if you put me with another two or three guys, no matter what the size of the others might be, we were terrifying. We were punks.

I remember getting thrown out of the mall once — for doing precisely nothing. We’d been sitting on one of the benches outside the Pizza Hut waiting for it to be time to go to a dance when a cop sauntered up carrying a grease-pocked bag of garlic fingers and told us to get lost. Our very existence was offensive to the other mall patrons, he explained. They couldn’t abide the sight of us, a clutch of jean-jacketed menace huddled on the bench.

The cop didn’t call our parents or curse us out and it was, as far as this kind of thing went, a pretty innocuous incident, which is why I didn’t think it was something I should keep from Gord. But it turned out it was. When I mentioned it the next day at dinner he took a fit. I didn’t raise you to be a goddamn punk, he screamed, handing me a bowl of mashed turnips. So why are you going around hanging out in the mall like a goddamn punk?

I wasn’t doing it like a goddamn punk, I protested. We were just sitting there.

Sitting there like a goddamn punk! Give me the salt! Like you got nothing better to do!

I don’t have anything better to do.

Then you get your ass home if you don’t have anything better to do! Help your mother! Do your homework! Straighten up your goddamn room! Where the f*ck is the butter?

And so forth. There was no arguing with Gord on the punk front, not since he opened Icy Dream. Punks streamed in at all hours, hot and cold running punks, and Gord discovered his group nemesis. They scared off the kind of customers Gord wanted — moms with kids, for example, not to mention the considerable number of people who shuffled in solo just to buy a single cone or hot fudge sundae, some small confection to brighten up their lonely, ho-hum lives. These customers were depressing, yes, but at least they didn’t make trouble. There is not much sadder than a fat guy in his fifties sitting alone in the back of an Icy Dream plastic-spooning soft-serve into his mouth, but there is one thing sadder, and that’s watching the same guy flinch every time the jolly group of teenage dicks in the next booth erupt into gales of comradely yet somehow malicious laughter.

The punks would invariably order small orange pops and skulk in the corner booths spinning coins and shooting the shit under their breath until the gales of brain-dead testosterone-stupid laughter erupted, a sound that was like the pig-squeal of microphone feedback to my father’s ears. For a while he tried the “Eat something or get out” tactic, at which point the punks would invariably pool their change and place a single order of small fries to see them through the next hour of customer alienation.

Get the hell over there, Gord would hiss at me then, and tell those punks to pound salt. Or else you’ll bust their skulls, tell them.

They have drinks, I’d say.

They don’t have drinks! They got a cup full of gob after chewing on their goddamn straws the last hour. Put your hat back on.

Usually when I had to confront the punks I would remove my paper hat because it made me feel like a tit.

I look like a tit in the hat, Gord. They won’t take me seriously.

You don’t look like a tit in the hat! It’s your uniform. A uniform gives a man an air of authority.

An Icy Dream uniform does not give a man an air of authority.

You take pride in that uniform. You have nothing to be ashamed of. That uniform puts food on the —

Oh Jesus, I’m going. I’m going, Gord.

Stop calling me that! If you’re too cool to say Dad you can damn well call me Mr. Rankin.

Calling him Gord was still a new habit at that point. I’d acquired it not long after I turned fifteen. It hadn’t been intentional, the first time I’d done it — I can’t even remember what the circumstance was — but once it was out and in the air between us I could tell I had kind of broken Gord’s heart. After that I couldn’t seem to stop.

Hi guys, I would greet the punks.

And what would happen next depended entirely on the punks in question. Sometimes the punks were my friends. They would smile up at me with their greasy, fry-fed faces, make an ungenerous remark or two about my hat and I would respond with a cheerful threat to shove my hat up their asses. After some back and forth along these lines I would tell them they should come back between around five and seven next time because that’s when Gord went home for supper and then we could all hang out and I would give them free Cokes if they were nice to me.

Meanwhile, I’d say by way of wrapping things up, my dad requests you remove your dirty punk asses from his family establishment.

But Rank, Scott was thinking he might like a fudgy bar. He hasn’t quite decided yet.

We don’t want your business, boys. You bring the tone down. Bad optics, scuzz like you chowing down on our fudgies.

Why don’t you chow down on one of my fudgies sometime, Rank?

Ha ha ha. Oh my god. Nice one. Get out.

And the guys would snort and smirk just so not to lose face entirely, then shuffle their way out the door taking care to look extra dangerous and sullen for the benefit of Gord, scowling away by the fryer.

Those were the good days.

On the bad days, guys like Mick Croft showed up.

Mick Croft was one of the town punks who actually was a punk — not just a gangly, belligerent, functionally retarded teenage boy like the rest of us. He dealt drugs — of course — and brandished knives — of course — and had been expelled for kicking the gym teacher, a man with the unfortunate name of Mr. Fancy, in the ass when Fancy was bending over to gather the volleyballs into a canvas sack. Fancy had just called Croft a loser in front of the whole class. Take a good look, guys, he’d said, at what not to be if you want to achieve anything in this life other than a welfare cheque. And then Fancy made the unbelievable move of turning around to get the volleyballs and showing Croft his sinewy glutes. It was like, Croft is rumoured to have protested, the man was offering it up.

That was the effect Croft had on adults — he enraged them, moved them to say the kind of things you should never say to a sixteen-year-old kid, no matter how much he pisses you off. Men in particular he provoked to tantrums. Croft had flunked enough grades to be in a couple of classes with me and I remember the entire room sucking in its breath when a red-faced Geography teacher took hold of either side of Croft’s desk — with him in it — and yanked it with an effortlessness born of pure animal rage to the front of the classroom. When everyone was going around asking what had prompted Fancy to denounce Croft like that in the gym it turned out to be because Croft had forgotten his shorts at home. Which sounds like nothing, but we all understood how little the shorts would have had to do with it. What it had to do with was Croft’s attitude. Croft had a smirk that made you want to take hold of either side of his mouth and pull his face apart. It wasn’t a smirk like that of other punks. It was a smart smirk, and was usually accompanied by a smart remark. And when I say smart, I mean smart. Croft wasn’t your typical idiot punk like say his compadre Collie Chaisson who did time in the Youth Centre for putting his fist through a convenience store window and leaving a multitude of perfect, dried-blood fingerprints polka-dotting the cash register.

So it was no surprise that Croft would be the first to send my father lunging over the counter at Icy Dream, hands clenched to throttle and punch — simultaneously if at all possible. I will never forget that first time, grabbing Gord around the waist like a child and hoisting him backward as every muscle in his tiny body strained in the opposite direction. He actually had a boot on the counter at one point, but instead of using the leverage to launch himself at Croft, he was thwarted by me hauling him back at just the right moment and using the momentum against him. Croft was wide-eyed, having shot a good three feet back from the counter, skeezy smile quickly affixed to mask his shock. In his mind he was already sitting in some sweaty basement telling the story to Chaisson and his other dirtbag friends. Gordon Rankin man! Little f*cker comes at me right over the f*ckin counter man! Lost it. You goddamn punk! You little a*shole! Like he can’t even talk he’s so pissed. Like in-co-her-ent with rage. So I’m ready to go right? Grown man coming straight at me, f*ckit, he’s the one who’ll be charged, not me. I’m just a widdle kid. Lucky for him the gland-case comes to the rescue.

No one had ever called me a gland-case before I met Croft. I remember being a little shocked by it — the audacity. It wasn’t the kind of town where guys got mocked for being big. You got mocked for wearing colourful shirts, or using words with more than two syllables, but not for being big. Big was considered an achievement. Total strangers all but stopped me on the street and congratulated me on it. Croft was the first person to make me feel like a freak.

I remember walking by him at a dance. Croft started bouncing up and down and making earthquake noises. I glanced around and grinned to show I got the joke, but also to let him know I had heard the joke and to determine if it was the kind of joke that required me to walk over there and set a few things straight. Croft grinned back at me. Huge and chimp-like. At which point I stopped smiling, allowed myself to slow down a little, upon which Croft held his hands up in the air, all innocence and goodwill.

I kept walking. F*cking gland-case, I eventually heard, enunciated loudly and with care from somewhere behind me. When I turned around, Croft and his cronies had dissolved into the crowd.

Here’s a snippet of how the conversation went between Croft and Gord moments before my father’s attempt to take flight.

Gord: What can I get you today, son?

Croft: Coke.

Gord: I beg your pardon, now, I didn’t quite catch that.

Croft: Coke.

Gord: You’d like a Coke, would you?

I should explain that Gord is already doing a slow burn at this point. I can all but hear the rant bubbling away in the foreground of his brain: goddamn little Christer no respect doesn’t even know how to ask for something it’s the parents off doing god knows what don’t even instill common courtesy let alone basic please and thank you think the world owes them every goddamn thing they get. So it’s only at this point that Croft, who has been paying no attention whatsoever up until now, actually turns his nasty focus on my father. So I see this. I am standing at the grill supposedly waiting for it to be time to turn the patties over but at this point I have pretty much forgotten about the patties because I witness the way Croft’s bright little eyes are taking full measure of Gord and the tendrils of smoke slowly wafting from my father’s ears.

No, I think. Not the smirk.

Croft allows the smirk to just kind of ooze across his face like syrup over pancakes.

Croft (enunciating loudly, precisely the way he did when he called me a gland-case at the dance): Yeah, bud. I said a Coke. Coca. Cola. I wanna teach the world to sing.

(Chortles from the skeezer crew lined up behind him.)

Gord (with a hideous patience that tells me he is revelling in the accumulation of adrenalin that’s taking place as his ire is stirred. Now the two of them are practically dancing together): It’s not that I can’t hear you, son. I may have a few years on you, but I don’t have any trouble with my hearing.

(Oh Christ, I think, he’s called him “son” again.)

Croft: Sorry, bud. Guess it must be the Alzheimer’s setting in or something.

(More skeezer tittering. Even though it isn’t quite time, I rapidly flip all the patties on my grill to get this particular obligation out of the way.)

Gord: My problem, son, is with you. And the fact that you little a*sholes keep coming in here . . .

Croft (flipping his hands into the air at the word “a*sholes”): I just want a Coke! I’m just thirsty!

Gord: . . . and you sit in the back corner both scaring people away and reeking of maryjane . . .

Croft: I don’t even know Mary Jane! I never touched her!

(skeezers holding their sides at this point)

Gord: . . . and then you have the goddamn nerve to come up here and grunt at me in my own restaurant. “Coke” (Neanderthal grunt-speak here). “Coke, bud. Gimme Coke.”

Croft: Look, bud . . .

That’s what did it. The slavering insolence of that third and final “bud.” I dropped my flipper and hurled myself forward, reaching Gord just before his extended hands could secure themselves around Croft’s neck.

There was a lot of yelling. The word “punks” occasionally leapt like a salmon from an otherwise undifferentiated stream of obscenities where my father was concerned, whereas on Croft’s side of the counter, as he and his crew sauntered (but sauntered somewhat hurriedly, I’d like to point out) toward the door, I heard — along with their own laughing, obscene stream — the words “Crazy” and “. . . should call the f*ckin cops!”

Once Croft et al. had taken off, I yelled — still clinging to Gord — something around the restaurant about complimentary single cones for everybody, but everybody was too busy gathering up their bug-eyed children and herding them toward the exits to notice. The only people left to take advantage of the offer were a few workers from SeaFare grabbing burgers after their shift, and they seemed to regard the incident as a kind of floor show. They laughed and applauded and generally made me regret the free ice cream I ended up doling out to them.

“Nice reflexes there, Rankin.”

“You shoulda let him go off on that little tool.”

“Why you giving my food away to those a*sholes?” Gord wanted to know once I had rejoined him behind the counter. He had yelled at me for burning my patties but otherwise seemed cheerful and refreshed after his lunge at Croft, like he’d just woken up from a nap.

“Because you attacked one of the customers,” I explained. “Those a*sholes are only ones who didn’t run screaming out the door.”

“‘Customer’ my ass, goddamn little punk! Sorry, bud. Coke, bud. They oughta give me a medal.”

So about twenty-five minutes later, a pair of Mounties came strolling through the doors.

“Here they come,” I said. “They got your medal, Gord.”



06/01/09, 11:32 p.m.

And now I find myself starting to panic a little, for a couple of reasons.

Because I just told you another whole slew of stuff about Gord and reading it over I can see that I still haven’t got to the heart of the thing. I can feel you still aren’t getting it — my father is coming across to you the same way he came across to my Jesus-freak girlfriend all those years ago — as a foul-mouthed but mostly harmless “character.” The same kind of creature I must have been to you and Wade and Kyle when we all started hanging out — a shape in the distance; a figure on a screen, behind Plexiglas. You lean forward, no matter how dangerous the guy’s antics might become — no matter how much he shrieks and sweats and bares his teeth — knowing he can never touch you, ultimately. You can watch him and see him and go home and think about him, even be disturbed by him a little. But it’s not like he can ever step off the screen, or out from behind the glass, and blunder his way into your life.

That, as they say, is entertainment.

It’s weird because I’ve held this stuff in my head for so long, been so consumed and convinced by it, but when I pour it out onto the page, into you, it emerges as this completely different thing, like juice turned to cider, or cider to vinegar — I’m not sure which is the better example in this case, but my point is: it’s the same thing but it’s changed. It’s not worthless — you wouldn’t necessarily throw it away as a result — but it’s changed, and now you have to figure out what you’re going to do with it, because this is not the end result you had in mind.

The other thing is, after feeling the whole time I’ve been writing you like I’d rather shove both hands beneath a lawn mower than write about the Icy Dream, about five seconds into it I realized I was enjoying myself.

And finally, I know I vowed to keep you away from Sylvie, but I’m starting to figure out that if I keep digging into this, it’s inevitable that my shovel has to scrape against my mother’s coffin at some point.

So what do I do then?

Do I do what you did? Do I yank Fred Astaire from his mausoleum, force his cold, dead fingers around a can of cola, put on some music and waltz him round the graveyard, calling, Come one, come all?



06/02/09, 12:01 a.m.

How about you just trust me when I tell you she was perfect? Can’t we just take that on faith and move on? How would you feel if your mother died? Well, that’s how I felt, even three years after we buried her, when I was nineteen and you and I became acquainted with each other. Maybe you even know what I’m talking about — for all I know, your mother has passed on too by now. So think about how that felt and get back to me. Was it bad? Okay, well it was bad for me too. It’s never good, obviously. But it was worse for me — I don’t care what happened on your end of things — it was worse for me and we both know why.

It’s important we get this right, Adam, the story of Gord and Sylvie. It’s important because you presumed to write a book that featured you-know-who. Let’s just go with the name I came up with earlier, let’s call him Danger Man: a terrible guy who performs a terrible act. An act with a flat-out crappy outcome, an act that is shocking and horrible — but also, here’s the kicker — inevitable. Why inevitable? Well, it’s built into the character’s DNA, you see. They don’t call him Danger Man for nothing. According to his creator, the guy has an “innate criminality” swimming around in there. A born thug, born bad, born to lose. It’s fated: the guy’s a biker tattoo waiting to happen.

That was me, Adam — in your book and nineteen years ago. You’re not going to deny that it was me, right? I notice, for all your whining, you still haven’t denied it.

And here’s the gravy: Danger Man? Oh yeah. His mom died, by the way.

It’s not enough, is what I’m saying. Insult to injury is what I’m saying, Adam.

Anyway, on to Gord. Poor old Gord who didn’t even merit as brief a cameo as Sylvie-the-corpse in your magnum opus.

Picture redneck wed to goddess. Finally Dad finds himself in charge of something, in a domestically ordained managerial position all his own, and he makes his authority felt. No, Adam, he doesn’t hit. Gord is not a hitter of ladies, he is at heart a courtly little bugger, as I’ve already said. But he sneers. Croft had the smirk, Gord had the sneer, every bit as infuriating to the observer. He berates. He insults.

If I give you specific details then I have to give you Sylvie, which I am still not willing to do. But I’ll give you this much.

Picture a sort of spark. A flicker of light — there’s a flaw in the film. The glare of the projector comes blazing in. It’s startling, but after a while you get used to it, the way you can get used to a fuzzy TV channel if there’s nothing else to watch. Picture a sort of stationary glimmering — a small, steady radiance of sweetness and light. Oh, Gordie, the glimmer murmured to me one day after I’d finished kicking a hole in her bottom cupboard. Such cheap materials, in the house that Gord built.

Gord himself had just finished calling the glimmer “goddamn useless” before sashaying off in the truck to Home Hardware to buy a couple of lamps for the living room which, he’d suddenly decided, was poorly lit and which Sylvie, if she’d been any kind of worthwhile human being, would have fixed before poor, busy, put-upon small-businessman Gord had to have his consciousness affronted by the experience of an inadequately lit room.

“Useless idiot,” added Gord as he pulled on his boots. He wasn’t screaming anymore, but often with Gord, as in this instance, the post-screaming moments could be the worst. Just as Sylvie was likely starting to let herself feel relief that the screaming had finally come to an end, that she no longer had to hunker in the trenches as verbal machine-gun fire tore up the air around her, and just as she poked her head above ground hoping for the all-clear, Gord would lop it off with some quiet remark along the lines of useless idiot. And then go cheerfully on his way.

“F*cking . . . assho— . . . f*ck!” I was saying as I removed my foot from the cupboard once he was gone.

Oh Gordie, the glimmer murmured then, wanting to make me feel better. Because that was what the glimmer was put on earth to do. Even in the daily exhaustion of dodging Gord’s machine-gun fire, she never gave any indication that anyone might deserve or require comfort other than her baby boy.

It’s okay, the glimmer assured me. He really never talks to me like that . . . Dear, you made such a hole.

“He always talks to you like that!” I sputtered — talking to the hole and not the glimmer. I often couldn’t look directly at the glimmer, she shone so pure and bright.

No, no, the glimmer assured me in her voice that was like no other mother’s. Other mothers, it always seemed to me, either barked or shrieked. Their voices were either shrill and silly — a strained, desperate pitch deliberately tuned to convey: “I’m just a nice lady! Don’t concern yourself with me!” Or else sharp and harsh, a sort of debased version of the previous that announced: “I am so sick of trying to pull off this nice lady shit, now pick up your socks.”

Not the glimmer. Her voice was always low and soothing, like the coo and flutter of overhead doves.

No, no, she cooed and fluttered at me, wafting over to close the cupboard door as if that would hide the hole. He doesn’t. He really doesn’t.

“When?” I yelled. This was the worst part — now I was yelling at the glimmer. I was yelling at her for having been yelled at. “When doesn’t he talk to you like that? He always talks to you like that!”

No, no, the glimmer cooed. He’s nice to me, Gordie. It’s just sometimes he wants to show off — you have to understand that.

“Sometimes he wants to show off,” I repeated with complete incomprehension.

He’s just trying to impress you, said the glimmer. You’re his boy.

“Impress me,” I repeated.

Otherwise he’s fine, said the glimmer. Don’t worry.

Otherwise Gord was fine. He sneered and berated and called my mother “goddamn useless,” but only when I was around. Otherwise he was fine.

That’s when the dread began to settle around me like ash.

That was my first major hint from the universe.