That Vito walked away with only first-degree burns over his left arm, shoulder, and leg from where the hot asphalt had flowed through the smashed driver’s side window would later form his father’s prime selling point for the entire McLaren line. The families of the three workmen he’d bowled over on his way to earning himself six months’ worth of skin grafts wouldn’t be able to count themselves so lucky. All were killed on contact and so it was left to their wives to provide victims’ impact statements on the occasion of Vito’s sentencing. And while the Right Honourable Mathias Crawley himself was seen to dab at his eye with the cuff of his gown more than once at the sight of these widows weeping brazenly upon the stand, he then went on to say that he had no choice but to agree with the defence since it was eminently clear to him that Vito’s parents—“owing to their wealth and the corresponding lack of regard for anyone else that it had instilled in them”—had failed to provide any sort of moral guidance to their teenage son and thus he could hardly be held culpable for his actions.
Two weeks after Judge Crawley had suspended Vito’s sentence, Nick, for old times’ sake, had provided Trevor with ten minutes’ worth of footage from The Toybox’s security cam. It had opened with Vito standing on the hood of a Porsche 911 GTS Cabriolet and using its front seat as a urinal. He had a sledgehammer propped on his shoulder and he put it to good use during the next eight and a half minutes. His rampage through the showroom was replayed several times during Vito’s trial, first by the prosecution to prove their point and then by the defence to prove an entirely different one. Trevor too, saw great potential in Vito’s burst of filial acrimony and within a month of becoming affluenza.com’s inaugural post, it would rack up a shade over 350,000 hits, along with amassing 12,000 followers, thus providing a suitably attentive audience for Taylor’s video, shot several weeks later.
In the first week alone, it had accumulated over 250,000 views, and Trevor had had high hopes that it would be his first post to breach a million. When it had bottomed out at just under 800,000 he’d asked Taylor if he wouldn’t mind providing some commentary in hopes of pushing it over the edge. Taylor had originally dismissed the idea, the video having been made for an audience of one and not millions anyway. Faced with the prospect of a two-hour drive into exile, he’d conceded that it would at least give him something to do besides stewing in the back seat. But every time he started it again, he’d become swept up in the drama of the thing and thus far hadn’t managed more than a few words of introduction.
So it is that, clicking play now, his voice rings out over the establishing shot Trevor had taken of the Diplomat Hotel.
“I’d found the Diplomat Hotel by way of a Google search I made two weeks previous,” it says. “I put in Toronto plus bar plus fight and didn’t have to look any further than the first hit before I knew that I’d found the place I was looking for.”
It was all he’d managed and as the scene cuts from a shot of his Google search results to the Persian-looking reporter doing her spiel in front of the row of motorcycles, he tried to think of what he might say when the footage caught up with him walking down the cement steps leading into the bar.
He’d broached the subject with Trevor, last Thursday, when he’d gone down to the pool to do his laps. He’d found him and Darren lounging in deck chairs and drinking mint juleps though it wasn’t yet ten. Trevor had suggested something that explained why he was there.
“I think it’s pretty obvious,” Taylor countered. “I’m there to get in a fight.”
“But why do you want to get in a fight?”
Answering that question would mean compressing ten years of his life into a few short lines, a task that seemed well beyond his own meagre proclivity with words. Mentioning as much to Trevor, Trevor sparked up a joint of what he called his “Inspiration Kush” (not to be confused with his “First Draft Bud” or his “Polish Blend”). Trevor had barely taken a toke before his eyes had suddenly widened, the spark of an idea flaring to life.
“We could film a flashback sequence,” he said.
“A flashback sequence?”
“Yeah. You know, to when you were a kid and you beat the shit out of your cousin.”
“How do you know about that?”
“Sandy.”
“She told you?”
“How your cousin—what was his name?”
“Justin.”
“How Justin made you eat dog shit that one time and your dad hired a ninja to teach you how to kick his ass? Shit, it’s her favourite ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Fucked-Up’ story. I must’ve heard her tell it a dozen times.”
“Master Lo wasn’t a ninja.” It was all Taylor could think to say.
“But he played one in that movie—”
“Two Minutes to Midnight,” Darren piped in.
“A true classic of the genre.”
And though it most surely wasn’t, they both nodded in deference to Taylor’s mother, Two Minutes to Midnight being, as it was, her last role upon the silver screen.
Trevor then took another hit of inspiration and it seemed to do the trick.
“We’d need a couple of kids,” he said, passing the joint to Darren.
“For the flashback?”
“Yeah.”
“I got a nephew. Calvin. He’s only nine but he’s big. We could use him to play Justin.”
“Calvin have any friends?”
“I’d expect.”
“We could get one of them to play Taylor.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
Turning back to Taylor, Trevor held his hands boxed in front of him to simulate a viewfinder.
“Picture this,” he said. “We open on a close-up of a young Taylor’s face. Eyes wide, nostrils flaring, mouth parted in a bestial roar. Fists flying in slow motion. Cut to Justin’s face. Fear in his eyes as the blows rain down upon him. Freeze-frame as a spatter of blood sprays from his nose. Then cue narration: ‘I was ten years old the first time I went looking for a fight.’”
“Hell ya.” This from Darren. Then after another toke: “But we’d need to explain why he was beating the shit out of him though, wouldn’t we?”
“We could film another a flashback.”
“A flashback within a flashback?”
“Tarantino does it all the time.”
“Fuckin’ right he does.”
Trevor had pulled out his pad and they’d set to storyboarding the schematics of the thing. By the time Taylor had finished his laps, Trevor had dispensed with the notebook and Darren was hunched over a MacBook, typing as they bantered dialogue back and forth.
“Such a fucking pussy,” Trevor said apparently playing Justin. “Just like your dad.”
“My dad’s not a fucking pussy,” Darren countered as Taylor. “No, scratch ‘fucking.’ Taylor was a prissy little kid, right. He wouldn’t have said fucking.”
“So: ‘He’s not a pussy.’”
“Yeah.”
“Hell he ain’t! When he was a kid my dad said even the girls used to beat on him.”
“That’s good.”
“He’s a fucking pussy alright.”
“Well, at least he isn’t a bum.”
“You calling my dad a bum?”
“And a drunk too. Everyone knows.”
“Then Justin sucker-punches Taylor in the gut?”
“Yeah.”
“Do we cut to a shot of Justin picking up a piece of dog shit from the yard?”
“No, I think we stay with Taylor, curled up on the lawn. Justin sits on top of him and squeezes his nose shut between his thumb and forefinger. Taylor’s mouth opens wide, gasping for air, and that’s when we see Justin holding a dried-up turd in his other hand.”
And while it didn’t exactly happen that way, it was close enough that seeing Trevor and Darren taking such obvious delight in his torment
had Taylor snatching up the laptop on his way past, flinging it on a high arc into the deep end of the pool.
He heard a splash that he figured must have been Trevor diving in after it because it was Darren’s voice that followed him into the house.
“So I guess that means no flashback then?”
While Taylor hadn’t responded, he was thinking the same thing making his way up the stairs towards the kitchen as he did now watching himself descend to the Diplomat’s basement door.
It’s fine just the way it is.
As the dinge of the cement stairway opened into the smoky haze of the bar, he could feel the Lexus slanting steeply downwards. Glancing up, he saw through the window the shadowed outline of what he knew were thirty-foot walls of pink granite rising on either side of the vehicle.
When he was young, it seemed to him that summer had never really begun until they’d reached the rock cut. It ran for half a kilometre, and the whole time they were passing through the canyon blasted out of a hump of Canadian Shield, Taylor would be kneeling in the back seat, pressing his nose against the window’s glass, staring up at the pine trees perched at precarious angles atop the bluff and tracing over the cracks in the stone, all of them leaking water and growing deeper every year so that it seemed to him it was only a matter of time before the whole thing would come crashing down.
His mother would cast him reproachful glances from the passenger seat, telling him to sit back down and put his belt on, but the tone of her voice wouldn’t become insistent until the rock walls had begun to taper as they sloped towards the lake. Only then she’d say, “I mean it,” and Taylor would slump back into his seat, though he wouldn’t yet put his belt back on. Instead he’d lean forward, craning to look through the windshield where the canyon’s terminus would seem like a doorway opening onto a summer wonderland: the road curving as it dipped towards the bay, the azure of its waters glimmering as it lapped against the expanse of sand that curved along the shore. On the near side of the beach, the two dozen or so log cabins comprising the Meeford Bay Resort were scattered about the wooded glade that ran between the shore and the highway. At its far edge, there was a channel leading into a lagoon harbouring a fleet of sail boats, their bright orange and red triangles catering to the wind as those in use angled for the open waters of Lake Mesaquakee. And beyond them, the motor boats carving deep grooves far out on the lake would tease thoughts of the Wanes’ thirty-five-foot Baja Outlaw and how his father would spend hours at its wheel dragging him behind on an inner tube, Taylor never so happy as he was when he was laying on his back, watching the clouds scroll by, the heat of the sun tempered by the cool spray of water spattering against his bronzing skin.
But as the headlights sparkled off the quartz running in veins through the granite, the canyon now seemed to him more like the walls of a prison than a doorway, a feeling heightened by the dark and the fact that he’d been relegated to the back seat of his own vehicle.
That it was one of his childhood heroes driving only added insult to injury. Throughout his career with the then-burgeoning UFC, he’d been known as The Reaper, in deference to his fighting name, Grimm, though, earlier that afternoon, he’d been introduced by Bryson Wane as Davis Grimes, both father and son knowing full well that an introduction was hardly necessary. Taylor had seen every one of his dozen fights as a heavyweight, three of them live on pay-per-view and the last at the Bell Centre in Montreal where his father had wrangled two ringside tickets for the UFC’s first event north of the border. So he’d been on hand to see The Reaper lose his final bout, one that would have put him in line for a chance at the heavyweight title if a submission hold hadn’t broken his right arm in the second round, forever ending his career in the octagon.
Earlier that afternoon, he’d been dumbstruck when his father had led him into the glassed-in dome off their kitchen that housed their Olympic-sized swimming pool and he’d seen that man standing beside their Jacuzzi wearing nothing but a pair of black fighting trunks and glaring at him with the same stone face he’d greeted each one of his opponents.
“Well aren’t you going to say hello?” his father had finally asked, nothing in the way he smiled at his son as he nudged him forward with the tips of his fingers to indicate that the man standing at the far end of the pool wasn’t anything but an early present for his son’s birthday, being as it was, less than a week away.
“Go on, then.”
Taylor didn’t need to be told twice. He’d set off at a jog towards Davis, whose head was now lowered, bent to the task of fitting a pair of sparring gloves over his hands. At the time, the gesture hadn’t meant more to Taylor than the red bow his mother had tied around the hood of the Mustang GT they’d bought him for his sweet sixteen. And that thought coming into his head at that exact moment added a little skip to his step. The Reaper being here, hired by his father nonetheless, signified to him that all those years trying to wear his father down had finally paid off, the same way the brochures he left scattered around the house when he was fifteen had netted him his dream car. It was only later when he was sitting on his bed after Dr. Coates, the Wane family’s physician, had given him a thorough going over to make sure nothing was broken that he’d understood he’d been mistaken about that and maybe a lot of other things too.
He’d heard his phone ka-ching, the ring tone he’d given his father’s number ever since the day he’d complained that his kids treated him more like an ATM than a father.
Here’s something else for you to post online, the text had read.
It had been accompanied by a video from the security camera standing guard over the pool and its first few frames clearly revealed his father nodding his head at Davis Grimes the moment after he’d prodded his son forward. Davis seemed to take it as a sign that the reason he’d been hired was fast approaching and towards that end he’d begun putting on his gloves. To Taylor, that subtle lilt to his father’s chin would come to mean something else entirely. It was the moment, he saw, that signified the end of his dream of fighting in the UFC. His father was telling him, in no uncertain terms, that the time had come to put away such a childish notion, and since Taylor had proven he wasn’t man enough to do it himself then it was left to him to show his son the error of his ways.
But that realization was yet to come.
In the two seconds that it took him to traverse the space between himself and The Reaper, Taylor had never been happier. When he reached Davis, he put out his hand and said, “Mr. Grimm, it’s so nice to meet you. I’m a big fan, really, a huge fan.” His back was to his father so he wouldn’t see him nod again until he’d watched the footage an hour later, his father as stone-faced as the man before him suddenly striking out with a left jab, catching Taylor square in the jaw. The force, and more so the surprise, knocked him off his feet, the shock in his eyes plainly visible upon replay as he stared up in static befuddlement at the giant towering above.
The camera wasn’t equipped with sound, so it was left to his memory to recall what his father had said then.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” he’d chided. “Defend yourself.”
Dutifully, Taylor pushed himself back to his feet, firming his resolve, not so much against the next blow but because he was still trying to give his father the benefit of the doubt, still trying to believe that he’d tracked down one of his childhood heroes to provide him with a few tips rather than as a means of teaching him a different lesson entirely, that realization still as hidden as the kindly doctor who was then secreted somewhere in the wings, waiting to act out his role in a rich man’s play, the same way Davis Grimes was waiting on Taylor beside the pool, his arms lowered and his hands relaxed as if he needn’t worry about defending himself from the barely-a-man standing before him.
The fight, if that’s what it could be called, lasted less than a minute. The Reaper got on top of him and his “ground and pound” left Taylor feeling like he’d been stonewashed
and his face mottled into a ghastly mask. Seeing it now reflected back at him in the window, his hands balled into fists as if he meant to pound at the seat, screaming, “It’s not fucking fair!”—an act of paltry outrage that wouldn’t accomplish anything except, perhaps, providing The Reaper a small measure of satisfaction. That was the last thing Taylor was inclined to do just then, and he took a long slow breath, same as he would have the moment the referee dropped his hands signalling the match was to begin, the expression in the window’s reflection assuming the blank stare that he always carried within him onto the mat. It was a look he’d cultivated over the hours he’d spent skipping rope in front of the mirror in the Wane family’s personal gym, meant to impress upon his opponent that he really didn’t care one way or the other how the match might unfold, a notion immediately confounded by the deft precision of his movements and the ferocity of his attack once the fight had begun.
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