by Tom Moore
“You can keep that,” he said. “It’s an old copy. But watch out for those stains on it. Ha.”
I blushed, and he burst into laughter, rolling back on his bed and slapping his thigh. “Ha, just kidding.” Then his face changed to sudden seriousness. “But don’t eat the cream puffs.”
“What?”
“Cream puffs. In the cafeteria. We had an outbreak of salmonella food poisoning here last year. It was the cream puffs. So, if you go to dinner tonight at the cafeteria, have apple pie.”
He got up, rummaging through his closet. “Got to wear something hot downtown tonight. Got to please the ladies.”
“Thursday night?”
“Sure. There’s downtown every night if you know where to find it. Not much action in Curlew, I guess.”
“How do you know I’m from Curlew?”
“I found out about you at dinner.”
“How could you do that? I just moved in an hour ago.”
“You don’t think I was goin’ to shack up with some guy I don’t know about, do you? How dumb do you think I am?”
“Is there a file kept on everyone?”
“No, nothing like that. We have some, shall I say, mutual acquaintances. You’ll see.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Now you’re catching on.” He smiled. “Grand Falls.”
He picked out his clothes for the evening and laid them out on his bed. Then he showered and came back to the room smelling of aftershave. He carefully put on his shirt and tie, pants and suit. He opened his bottom drawer and took out the brown paper bag, pushed in his hand, and extracted a handful of bills. He shoved them in his pants pocket and returned the bag to the drawer. He went to the mirror to study the total effect, then turned and looked at me. “How do I look?”
“Great,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Don’t wait up. Ha.” And he was gone.
I spent the evening studying the two books I had. Soon I got into the firm bed with the tight sheets, but sleep came quickly. I didn’t even hear Malacat come in, so he must have done so quietly at a late hour. A good quality in a roommate.
I woke up starving. John’s long body was mostly under the covers of his bed. One arm draped out to the floor, and a big foot splayed out at the other end. His mouth was open as he snored, and he reeked of beer and cigarette smoke. I got out as quietly as he had gotten in and went looking for the cafeteria. I had scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, tea, and orange juice, paid in cash, and sat down by myself like a king in a new country. This was going to be okay, I thought. Peyton College would be my backyard for the next two or three years.
The residences were filled with kids like myself from outside the city. Most were from the larger centres like Corner Brook and Grand Falls, but some, like me, were from the outports. It wasn’t long before I met other people, and the easiest to meet were the hundred or so guys in Doyle House. Soon we were up till dawn playing sergeant major, a three-handed version of hearts, much like bridge.
I still remember the night a buzz went through our corridor and we all crowded in Bill Docker’s room to hear the just-released Beatles album, Abbey Road. The music as much as the words conspired against the adult world that had spawned us. The rude, moral, melodic sexuality of John Lennon pointed to a new way of seeing life. Ten of us jammed in a room built for two, realizing that something amazing was happening in the music and in the world. We each went back to our room with a little glow in our eye, a little awed, reflective, and not quite the same as before. It was the same awareness that I first tasted at the Lukey’s Boat dance.
When you didn’t want to be interrupted in your room—say you had a girl in—you locked the door. If you were afraid your roommate would intrude, you taped the inside of the knob so the button wouldn’t pop when his key turned on the outside. One day, I walked into Bill Docker’s room and immediately realized someone had forgotten to lock the door. The pungent smell of parsley or sage or rosemary or thyme hung in the air like a bad fart. Docker, Malacat, and one or two other fellows looked at me with slack jaws.
“Felix, shut the door, quick,” said Malacat as he rushed to open the window. Docker was pushing something into a small plastic bag and putting it into his desk drawer. His roommate, Weasel, was lighting a stick of incense. “Hari Krishna!” he greeted me with an unusually wide smile.
“What’s happening?” I asked, but I already knew.
Docker turned to Malacat. “Are we in shit?”
“No, Felix is cool. It’s okay.” He came over to the door. “This kind of stuff has to stay absolutely secret. Do you understand?”
“Sure.”
“No! Absolutely! If you had been the proctor or anyone from the college office, we would all be expelled, our university days over. Understand?”
“Yes,” I said, and turned to go. Then I felt pissed off about what had just happened and said, “You guys should lock your friggin’ door.”
Lots of people smoked up, and a few did acid and other drugs. Some of them couldn’t handle the chemicals, and their academic careers drifted away from them, and sometimes their lives. I never saw marijuana cost anyone’s career or life, and toward the end of my stay at MUN, most everyone was trying it.
When John and I walked through the tunnel to Hatcher House for our first meal together, it was all, “John! Hi, John! Hey, Bad Jack! Hi, John!” Every second person greeted him. He responded to some and nodded to the rest. I walked silently beside him, very impressed. Once, a guy beckoned John aside, and they huddled, heads together under the big insulated heating pipes. Then he resumed our walk as if nothing had happened.
We sat at one of the long tables and were soon joined by other fellows and a few girls from Burke and Squires House. We chatted hockey, courses, professors, and music—the Beatles, Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Fleetwood Mac. Nothing Canadian, although Tammy and I liked Gordon Lightfoot, but definitely nothing from Newfoundland.
More and more we talked about American politics. Even as children, most of us had been shocked by the assassination of JFK in 1963. The killing of his brother Bobby and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 affected us at a deep, seminal level. We were moved to fight oppression and right wrongs, and we all looked around to find an oppressor near at hand. The music of the Beatles and Stones contained a moral urging we recognized as true and real in a way no church or parent could teach us. And we had found it on our own.
We read about student marches in other cities across North America and the heavy-handed attempts to control them. We needed someone to protest against, and once again Joey Smallwood helped us out.
I remember the student march on the Confederation Building, the province’s seat of government, on a cold day in 1969. We were protesting an end to free tuition, and we marched in our thousands. We were loud and peaceful and carried Joey’s election signs with his picture upside down, a black X drawn through the face. Joey, in the final years of his reign, looked down from his Berchtesgaden, his tenth-floor office high over St. John’s, and saw his children marching in anger below. It must have hurt.
At home, Father cheered as he watched the march on News Cavalcade.
We were young, we were strong, we were a generation of Newfoundlanders aware of our place in a world that begged for improvements. A new morality was needed by our parents’ generation, and we were the ones to provide it. We were just starting, and casting about for other institutions of power to attack. We occupied the Arts and Administration Building like students were doing all over the Western World. It was thrilling to read about the big student uprising in Paris in 1968, which, when the trades unions joined in, almost toppled the government of Charles de Gaulle. Heroes of one generation were becoming the bêtes noires of the next.
The floors of the Arts Building now echoed to our sneakers instead of to the soulless
soles of our masters, and the walls and halls echoed to our youthful cheers and confused slogans. We ran upstairs and took over the faculty lounge. Someone broke open the food lockers and threw sandwiches to us all. It was an experience, a sacrament, sweeter than life. We were like Che Guevara run to ground in Bolivia by the CIA, and later, like Salvador Allende and the last of his loyal followers in the presidential palace, surrounded by armed American puppets. We were against evil, murderous assassins both here and everywhere. Viva! If only we knew who they were. Until we found out, we blamed poor Joey Smallwood and ran him from power as soon as we could. I wrote poems about the whole experience, which have mercifully been lost over time.
John Malacat did not march or occupy. When I got back from the occupation flushed with zeal and glory, his great length was stretched out on his bed reading the current Playboy. He rested its buxom beauty on his chest and inquired, “Well, how’d it go?”
“Great!” I raved on about the occupation with sparks flying from my eyes.
“That’s really great, Felix.” There was a pause. “But dinner ends in fifteen minutes. You better get moving.” I grabbed my meal ticket and chased the mundane demands of the flesh, forgetting my battles with slavery and oppression.
After mid-term break, Malacat came back to residence with two pairs of red Winnwell boxing gloves. He’d been an amateur boxer in school and was quite good. His reach and skill were magnified by the ring he used for sparring—the narrow space between our two beds. He allowed other guys in to see the matches and to try their luck with the gloves. He also encouraged friendly wagers, and these soon became popular with the dozen or so boys permitted to attend. He offered odds, and before long, sums of money, considerable to a student far from home, were being exchanged. Malacat, the house, was doing just fine.
It all ended one night in a violent splash of blood.
Malacat was often encouraged to fight, but he didn’t like it because he couldn’t bet on himself, and he saw it as senseless loss of revenue. He always won, and often in a frenzy of blows that left his opponent groggy on the floor or draped over the bed.
“Don’t bleed on my bed,” he once screamed at a luckless opponent and bounced him on the head with a red glove. He always fought like a frightened animal, even if his opponent was inferior or weaker. His long arms delivered punishing hooks, bloodying cheeks and ears. Body blows took their breath away, and when the elbows dropped to defend, a crunching right cross or overhand usually finished the event.
One Saturday night, Malacat was still hungover from Friday and not yet ready to face another evening downtown. The matches had been boring that night, and most of the boys had already left when Docker, or Weasel Wicks, said, “Hey, John, what about a match between you and Felix?”
Malacat had not been listening. “What?”
“Yeah,” someone else said, “that’d be fun to see.”
“No, it wouldn’t. I never boxed in my life,” I said.
“None of us have, except John,” was the reply.
“Yeah, we all had to try it.”
“Boys, give me a break, I’m not up to it tonight,” Malacat said.
“You’re not up to fighting Felix!” They all laughed.
“No, not up to standing up,” he said.
“John, we come here night after night losing our money to you. The least you can do is offer us a fight. Show us how it’s done.”
Money talked to Malacat, so to my horror he got off the bed and reached for a pair of red gloves. The other pair lay on my bed. There was no way out. I knew he liked me and would not deliberately hurt me, and I also knew the fight would be brief, because I was going to take a dive.
“Put ’em on, Felix.” To their surprise, I did.
John assumed the position and backed up to the window to give me lots of room. I was going to let him hit me only once, even if it were only on the gloves, and then I was going to throw myself on the floor, or perhaps on the bed.
I had seen Father practise lots of times on the big heavy bag he had set up in the stable. The crossbeams of the old building would shake when he landed hard right and left hooks with his head down. I’d sit and watch him, not really interested, although he often asked me to try. He would name the punches as he threw them: “Right cross, left cross, uppercut, roundhouse, overhand right, left hook, right hook,” and so on.
“This is a jab, Felix,” he once said. “Cutest punch in the book.” He extended his left arm straight as a clothesline.
“Why?”
“Because it’s short and sweet. Comes so quick it almost always lands. But it rarely does much damage.”
“What’s the good of it, then?”
“It keeps your opponent at bay. Keeps him off you, especially if you’re hurt or he’s big.”
“Show me again,” I said, and stood up by the bag.
“Just straighten out your left arm like this.” He snapped out his left arm so fast and hard it looked electric. The bag sounded and shook with the sudden jolt. “The trick is to shift the impact straight from your left shoulder to his jaw. Your arm must make contact perfectly straight. It’ll put most men back on their heels if you land it right.”
I tried it, and he showed me how to straighten my arm properly. “The trick is surprise. If he knows it’s coming, just as well not bother to throw it. So glance away from his eye, or feint with your right hand to distract him. Count one, two, three, and hit him on one.”
“On one?” I asked.
“The fight is over by two and three.”
It all came back to me as I assumed the position between the beds. Malacat looked at me, like a cat eyeing a bird, and moved toward me as if he moved on oil. I put my gloves up to my eyes like I was supposed to. Another second and he would hit me below the elbows in my solar plexus and I would lose my breath.
I moved my right glove a bit and saw his eye follow it. Then I snapped out a perfect left-arm jab, straight as a clothesline, and he walked into it with a thud.
I opened my eyes when I heard him shout, “Jeez,” and saw him back up with one hand to his face. His nose was bleeding. His back bounced off the window ledge, and, when he saw the blood, he launched himself at me. I thought this a good time to revert to my original plan and threw myself on the floor as he hurtled over me. He tripped over me and went head first into the edge of the closet with a horrible crunch. He took a step back and fell to the floor.
Dead silence in the room. When we were sure he was not going to get up, we crept over to him. The gash in his forehead went clean to the white bone and hardly bled at all.
“Man, you are dead when he comes to!” said Weasel.
I was struggling to get out of the stupid gloves. “Go down and get the proctor,” I said.
“No! We’ll all be in deep shit if anyone finds out. John, too. He’ll kill us all.”
“He needs stitches. Take off his gloves and we’ll just say he fell,” I said.
It took eight stitches to close the gash in John’s head. When he came back from the infirmary, he was alone. I stood up, not knowing what to expect. The stitches were covered with white sticking tape over his eyebrows, and his normal pallor was worse.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’m not mad with you. You did the right thing.” He sat down at his desk. “At least you didn’t break my nose with that jab, you sneaky little shit. I got to stay pretty for the ladies.” He laughed at himself, then winced in pain.
“Go get me a couple of aspirin.” He cupped the side of his head in his hand, and I ran down the corridor looking for aspirin. I never saw those red gloves again.
8
Tunnels
Tammy usually met me at the entrance to the main tunnel, and we’d walk to class together. It was a five- or ten-minute walk from residence to the Education Building, and I’d walk with her as far as the A
rts Building.
The tunnels ran dry and warm under the snow and sleet of the world above. They were about twelve feet wide and seven feet high, which allowed two-way traffic for even the tallest among us. The bulk of traffic was usually going one way, from the residences at 8:45 in the morning and to the residences at noon and suppertime. Like the tide going in and out. Two huge hot-water heating pipes ran from the steam plant to the academic buildings along with us. They were about eighteen inches in diameter and encased in white insulating cloth, much like very long mummified snakes, one atop the other. The tunnels were not for claustrophobics, but they were very convenient for thousands of students, and they still are today.
Five-foot-high lockers ran along both sides of the main tunnel, used mainly by students who lived or boarded in the city. They stacked away wet coats and boots, lunches and books as we walked warm and dry past them to class.
Tammy always phoned me at night before she went to bed. We would be working on assignments or studying for exams in our rooms. Sometimes we worked together, especially on weekends, and alone in my room or hers, we would soon start necking. The tape would be applied to the button on the doorknob as our academic pursuits were pushed aside.
Tammy wanted us to be a couple, and I went along for the ride. I was very fond of her, but I didn’t see my future as Mr. Tammy Fagan. Her nightly calls were fond and welcomed. She said sweet things to me, and I guess I did to her. We were a comfort to each other in a strange and challenging world, and a warm place to go no matter how difficult the day had been.
Some days were very difficult. I had a devil of a time with basic economics, which was one of my electives. Elasticity of supply and demand, Keynesian economic theory, charts and graphs were foreign to me, and it took a while before I could wrestle them to the ground.
One day, I ran into a first-floor bathroom at Doyle House and saw a large, familiar shape with his head in a sink. His head came up covered with soap and two fat hands. I said, “Monk?”
“The same. And do I recognize the voice of Felix Ryan?”
