Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  Then one day, I called to make an appointment and they told me Mike had left.

  We had not had personal conversations. We talked about bands and clothes and bars. These were practical sessions—I used him as a lifestyle guide and personality crutch. As long as Mike, this evidently cool person, thought I was cool, then I was.

  He seemed to get a kick out of this strange mentoring role, an hour or so of it every two months for a couple of years. Big Brothers for goths.

  But he had this same light relationship with all of his clients. I’d seen many old ladies squirming delightedly in his chair as he teased or flattered them. He wasn’t a person who made distinctions. I was one of many. I didn’t even know his last name.

  In the post-Mike grief stages, I had my hair shaved briefly into a mohawk, but that was even more work. When you see mohawks in popular culture, they are standing up. That is a lie. Mohawks tilt. That’s what they do.

  So I chopped off my hair and went back to being a square. I shed some things (the buckle boots, the pants pinning) and kept others (the leather jacket, the sneer).

  Of course—of course, of course, of course—I started to go bald in my late twenties. Genetics are to blame (and possibly concrete), but I still suspect French Formula.

  I was lucky in my timing. By the early aughties, the greatest hero of all bald men—Michael Jordan—had made a shaved head fashionable. I had the misfortune of seeing a photograph of myself taken from above and behind. I was twenty-nine. I wasn’t bald, but I was headed in that direction in a hurry. That same day, I had my head shaved.

  I haven’t had a barber of any description for fifteen years. I’m back to home care.

  Once, when I was away for work for six weeks, I decided to grow it out and see what was left. I thought, “Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe if you give it a little length off the back it’ll look cool in that British aristo, Michael Gambon in ‘Layer Cake’ way.”

  It’s that bad. And, no, that won’t work.

  If I live to a decent age, hair will have been only a small part of my life. It’s a reminder—make sure to enjoy childish things while you are a child. I like to think I did that part right.

  THE SUBWAY

  THE ONLY PERSON IN MY FAMILY who could drive was my father. He wasn’t very good at it.

  Around the time I was four or five, he went on permanent disability and dedicated his waking hours to drinking. If you were going to get into a vehicle with him, it was advisable to do so in the morning.

  On one of those early shopping trips, he pulled his pickup out of a parking lot and turned directly into oncoming traffic. There was a low-speed head-on collision. I was sitting in the front seat thinking that this was all quite exciting. The police came and everything.

  The parking lot was in front of the liquor store. He’d been in there buying a couple of forties of Captain Morgan. I’m not sure how he talked his way out of that one, but he had a knack for escaping.

  After my parents split up, my father downgraded to a decrepit Volkswagen Rabbit. It was so rusted out, there was a hole the size of a dinner plate in the driver’s side wheel well. This was literally a Flintstone car. You could push it with your feet.

  He told me he’d bought it because it was good on gas. The starter went wonky. Rather than get the car fixed, my father’s solution to this problem was to shut the car off as rarely as possible. During the day, he’d leave it in his garage running. When he needed to go somewhere, he’d run out, cover his mouth, lift the door, wait for the cloud of carbon dioxide to drift off toxically into the neighbourhood and then head out.

  He had a plan for the car. He was going to wreck it and get the Blue Book value from insurance. That was real money. He couldn’t just run it into a wall, of course. That would be suspicious. I still remember the Blue Book value—three thousand dollars. My father would say it a lot, hitting a high note on the second syllable—“three THOUsand dollars.”

  Alongside drinking and using his home as a rooming house for oddballs and degenerates, pursuing this idea had become his job. I never did tell my mother about it. There didn’t seem much point.

  The best way he could think to get away with his auto-destruct caper was to lure someone at a red light into a drag race. He’d get out ahead, slam on the brakes and the following car would catastrophically rear-end the Rabbit. With him in it. And possibly me.

  In fairness, the seatbelts worked fine.

  He tried this many times. Stop at the light. Significant look over at the guy alongside him. Total confusion on that guy’s part (“Why is this man staring at me?”). Theatrical revving of the engine. Anxious, false bursts toward the line. And then the launch when the light turned. Either the other guy didn’t take him up on it or the other car was so much more powerful than the pathetic Rabbit that it sped off ahead of us.

  Of course, I knew it was a gigantically stupid idea, but there was no arguing with him when he was in that car. I’d once tried—some pointless digression about politics—and he’d become so angry that he’d pulled over to the side of the highway and told me to get out. Then he drove off. The highway cut through downtown a half-hour from where I lived. I climbed over the guard railing, skittered down an embankment and walked home. I was eleven years old and it had long before occurred to me that my father wasn’t quite right in the head.

  Every friend of mine was obsessed with the idea of hitting sixteen and getting a car. But cars made me anxious. Every time I got in one, it was Death Race with absurdly low stakes. My mother had never learned to drive. We couldn’t have afforded a car in any case. There wasn’t any real need of one and I didn’t feel its loss. I had the subway.

  The subway gets a bad rap because it is seen as a conveyance of need rather than desire. But I thought of it rather the other way around. You went to certain designated spots and professionals—people who didn’t want to crash their vehicles for the insurance money—were on hand to take you to your destination. A transit system is chauffeuring for the masses.

  The subway is predictable. It comes by every few minutes. It goes to the same places in the same order every time. Even children can figure it out. It is consistent.

  You could stand at the front of the train, look out the window and feel its speed. When it got hot in summer, the driver left his door open and you could watch him turn the big lever. The subway was all my fantasies about motion, dependability and power come to life.

  When I was nine, my friend Aaron and I began going downtown on Saturdays to the Eaton Centre, a large, ugly mall. There was nothing in the Eaton Centre for us. We had no money, and no idea how to spend it if we had. We went so that we could take the subway. Once there, we hung around until it made sense to go back.

  On one occasion, a security guard stopped us while we were stealing coins from a fountain.

  “Where are your parents?”

  “Home.”

  “Why aren’t you with them?”

  “We wanted to take the train.”

  “Well, you can’t be here.”

  Which was fine with us. All he was doing was telling us to get back on the subway. Which was the goal.

  I went home and told my mother about it.

  “I think he was worried that someone would kidnap us.”

  My mother nodded.

  “Are you worried that someone would kidnap us?”

  “Why would someone kidnap you?”

  “For money, maybe?”

  “You see any money around here?”

  She had this way of turning things around until they made sense. Or, at least, made sense in a way you hadn’t considered.

  Sometimes Aaron and I would take the subway out to its final stop and sit in the station awhile. No one lived out there (or so it seemed). It was quiet. We didn’t talk a whole lot. We liked to sit there, assessing the distances we’d crossed. And then we’d get back on the train. It was a pointless way to spend the day, but I suppose we could’ve been up to much worse. We’d get there soon enoug
h.

  In high school, we used the subway as a twisted playground. It was the place you went for that hour after school when nothing good happens. Each of us kept a collection of nickels that had been flattened by passing trains. In retrospect, the only reason we did this was to enjoy the thrill of watching people lose their minds as we jumped down onto the tracks to place and retrieve the coins. The souvenirs produced were useless. One looked exactly like any other, all its nickelly features flattened into a silver disc half as thick and twice as wide. I had dozens of them.

  We played a game of chicken that involved “riding” the trains out of the station. As the doors closed and after the conductor had stopped paying attention, we’d step from the platform into the indentation of the doorway and brace ourselves against the sides. The idea was to hang on to the exterior of the train for as long as possible without being crushed by the barrier at the end of the platform.

  Obviously, this was an unbelievably stupid thing to do. Most of us—including me—couldn’t make it more than a few feet without panicking. As we sprang from the doorway, we’d occasionally glance off a pillar or into a wall. The floors were slick marble and we’d end up taking a humiliating fall, hammering into a bench or garbage can on the way down. We all agreed it was great fun and then limped off home to moan in our rooms.

  It was performative masochism. Whom exactly we were performing it for was never clear. For a while there, jumping off things became a sort of mania for us—garages, fences, walls. Anything we could get on top of. We should have died many times over, but it never ended in anything worse than a turned ankle or chipped tooth.

  I watched a guy leap out of a window in grade eleven math class. He’d been in an argument with the teacher and, in order to bring his point home with the proper dramatic flourish, he got up on the sill and announced that he was going to jump.

  “So do it,” the teacher said.

  And he did.

  It was at least two storeys down. Twenty-five feet minimum. I didn’t see him land. I only saw the aftermath. He’d hit a wall splay-legged on the way down and shattered his tailbone. He lay there on the grass shrieking while the teacher had what looked to my inexpert eye something like the opening stages of a nervous breakdown.

  One afternoon, a friend named Peter took train riding further than any of us ever had. He hopped onto the last car and rode it the full length of the platform. For a horrible moment, it seemed as if he might ride it right into the tunnel. The idea that anybody might be able to get by the barrier—a low steel gate—had not occurred to us. We were watching the clouds part and a miracle in the offing. My God, what a legend Peter would have been if he’d managed that.

  Far too late, Peter thought better of the idea. With perhaps forty or fifty feet of platform remaining and the train now moving close to full speed, he leapt from the doorway.

  I understood inertia in theory, but the true awfulness of Newtonian physics did not become apparent to me until this moment. Peter came cartwheeling off the train, arms akimbo, legs flailing. We could only see his back, but we all felt his despair. There was something sad and resigned in his spastic movements.

  He broke into an exaggerated, involuntary sprint. He was Wile E. Coyote going over the cliff’s edge. Then he hit the wall at the end of the platform face first and bounced off it like India rubber. There was a lot of blood.

  The rest of us waited to see if he was still twitching. When he began pathetically rising to his feet—nose broken, almost certainly concussed—everyone laughed. Hard. Even Peter.

  Later, Peter robbed a drug store by kicking a hole in a long, vertical plate-glass window and crawling in underneath it. He wanted cigarettes. While he was on the way back out, what remained of the window dislodged and a shard of glass gouged a horrific hunk of skin and hair from his skull.

  Rather than call it an evening, Peter went on to the house party we were all attending. When the cops broke it up, they couldn’t help but notice the kid whose head was bleeding profusely through his hoodie. One of the brighter bulbs on the force then recalled the piece of scalp they’d recovered at a robbery earlier in the night.

  Peter was arrested and housed temporarily in a juvenile unit. He was the sort of person who had a supernatural ability to get on your nerves, like a werewolf of irritation. He managed his trick again in the wrong place and one of the other pipsqueak convicts stabbed him right through the hand with a pencil. Peter returned incredibly proud of this numbskull stigmata. He’d show the hole to anybody who asked.

  I could not tell you now very much about the lives of most of my work colleagues. Where do they live, who with and what do their parents do for a living? I have no idea. But in high school, I knew those things about dozens of classmates. I knew where they worked and who they were seeing and the model of car they drove.

  The ones I kept closest track of were the achievers. They were doing things and going places.

  My best friends were not achievers. They were cheerful nitwits and scholastic failures. They didn’t expect to get anywhere and we never spoke of the future. It did not interest us in the least. We were creatures entirely of the present. What could be done today? That was the focus.

  Without achievements, we instead took our pride from endurance. We could get through things. Pain was a big part of that. Hurting ourselves for others to see. We liked to play another variant of chicken, with cigarettes.

  Two guys press their forearms together, and then drop a lit cigarette in between. You don’t feel much at first. You smell it before you feel it—hair burning, flesh melting. And then you really feel it. You lose by pulling your arm away, allowing the cigarette to fall to the ground.

  I still have those scars. I can go up and down my body cataloguing all the other marks left by the recklessness of childhood—the time I accidentally hit myself with an axe, the groove left after John dropped a stereo speaker on me, the spot on my neck where a sliver of metal flecked off a bar as someone was hitting me in the head with it. There’s a chance I’m slowly dying of lead poisoning as I write this.

  I once woke up and found what I thought was a thick, black hair sticking out of my forehead. Instead, it was stitching thread that had worked its way to the surface over time. I couldn’t remember when I’d had it stitched. There was a lot of stitching at the time.

  Enduring was the key, and the subway was symbolic of that for me.

  I did not expect that I would ever get the chance to go to interesting places or see new things. If you’d asked one of us about backpacking through Europe or whatever it is that people with money do when they are on the cusp of adulthood, we’d have laughed at you. Yeah, give us that money. We’ll buy a hundred two-fours and have the most epic summer in history without ever having to leave John’s or Brian’s or Ned’s garage. Europe. Go fuck yourself with Europe.

  What I hoped for my life was that it would stay essentially the same. I craved orderliness and stability. Like my father, I had a dollar figure in mind—forty thousand.

  If I could find a job that paid me forty grand, I could have all the things I wanted. I wouldn’t fear disruption or disaster. I wanted to know that when I left in the morning, there would be something to come back to at night. Forty thousand would settle that for me.

  On that pay packet, I’d never be able to afford my own car. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t drive and felt no need to learn.

  Eventually, my mother got her driver’s licence and bought a car—a little VW. I noted that she waited until I was out of the house to do it. So, in revenge, I got my driver’s permit as well and decided I would be borrowing it often.

  On one of those first trips, I rear-ended someone. My mother then forbade me the car. So I went back to the subway.

  I know every stop by heart. I know who lived within walking distance of what station—Brian just up from Keele, Ned a few blocks from High Park, Ronan ten stops on the Runnymede bus.

  I still live in the city. I own a nice car. I bought it because it scoops
—a 305-horsepower turbo-charged engine. If I’d owned it as a teenager, it would have been a very expensive coffin.

  I rarely drive it, because I still prefer taking the subway. Unlike everything else about my life, and in particular my expectations, it has not changed.

  DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

  IN THE MID TO LATE EIGHTIES, no hobby marked you as a sexually deficient weirdo with no hope in life quite as much as Dungeons & Dragons. Every one of the dozens of books you needed to figure the game out should have been subtitled “Losing at Everything: A Guide.”

  My contemporaries were arranged into three broad swaths—the people who played Dungeons & Dragons; the people who secretly played Dungeons & Dragons; and the people who had heard of Dungeons & Dragons but did not play it because they knew people who played Dungeons & Dragons and didn’t want to end up that way.

  I was in a subset of the second category. I didn’t play Dungeons & Dragons. That wouldn’t happen until much later, and only the once. But I knew everything about it and told no one that I did.

  I got interested in the game—if that’s the right word for something as Byzantine and immersive as D&D (don’t laugh at me)—when I was helping my friends buy modelling glue.

  By age fifteen, many of my friends were jaded drug users. They’d smoked all the weed, dropped all the acid and were looking for new flavours of escapism. None of us knew how to get hold of heroin or cocaine, or could afford it if we had. Crack wasn’t a thing yet. There were no designer drugs, or none that we’d ever heard of.

  Then one of my friends heard about glue. It was cheap, easy and got you stupidly high.

  I watched my buddy Adam do it once. He took a tube of modelling glue, the sort that is used to put together miniature replica airplanes or attach tin soldiers to an ersatz battlefield. He squeezed the glue into a plastic bag, held the bag to his face and breathed in and out. We called it “huffing.”

  Some things are ugly and some things look that way. Huffing glue is both. From the first inhalation, Adam’s eyes started rolling around and he began listing to one side. The smell was metallic and repulsive. After a few minutes, he dropped the bag and his hands fell slowly into his lap in a bizarrely simian gesture, palms up. He wasn’t aware of me anymore. Or of anything really. He was staring at a point over my shoulder, looking confused. He’d lost control.