Mean Boy

by Lynn Coady

  But you know what? It was there. I got to see it before anyone else in my grade because that was the year Cousin Wayne got hired, when I was fifteen. Wayne made an age exception for me. It was his first job. It was the only job Wayne had ever wanted in his life. He was eager to show off his realm.

  Wayne didn’t really have the imagination to build it up to me, however—to try and weave an air of suspense around the hidden exhibit’s unveiling. It wasn’t even his idea to let me see. When I found out he’d been hired, I sought him out and asked him point-blank whether or not it existed.

  “You mean the Torture Chamber?” he said. “Yeah, come by this week and I’ll show you when nobody’s around. It’s really gross.”

  I remember being disappointed. I had been planning on rounding up a few guys and taking them with me to witness this greatest of our childhood mysteries revealed. But Wayne’s offhand affirmation—sure, the hidden exhibit existed; yes, it was gross—stripped the thing of its allure. It sounded like nothing; it was probably boring. The hidden exhibit was just another story the island told itself about the world beyond its shores—a world of spooky shadows, plastic bogeymen. I decided it was no big deal, that I could just as well see it alone.

  That’s what I was dreaming about last night. The day Wayne showed me.

  Jim arrives not quite ten minutes into class, rosy with rush. He favours us all with a grin and an apologetic wave, dumping a pile of handouts onto his desk and raking a hand through his windswept, unrutted hair. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without the comb ruts all of this new year. He looks like Claude after his congratulatory noogie. Jim hums to himself—the long, quavering notes of Hank Snow—taking a few moments to organize the handouts into piles, and pausing between hummed verses to glance up at us all and mutter various benedictions—good to see everyone, hope we’ve all been writing, everyone ready for the Creighton reading, and so forth. A few people up front, including me, answer him. It’s impossible not to—he meets our eyes in expectation and his demeanour draws it out of us. The atmosphere Jim has brought with him—and, I realize only today, Jim always brings an atmosphere—is light, intangibly festive. It reminds me of how he was at the beginning of the year, and, now that I’m reminded, the exhilaration of that time comes burbling back, like a stream unleashed, water bursting through ice.

  The Jim-thrill—there it is again—straightening my spine, singing through my veins. I am surprised to realize how long it’s been, but already I’m forgetting what the lack of it was like. I lean forward. Jim winks as he places a batch of copied poems on my desk for me to pass back. He goes to tousle my hair with one hand but enjoys the feel of my head so much, he brings his other hand into it and massages my head like I’m a dog, growling with affection.

  The class laughs. Jim laughs. I laugh. And—it’s spring. In real life I was alone—ushered by Wayne—but in the dream Janet was with me, although sometimes it seemed as if Janet, like Wayne, was an employee of the museum and had known about the exhibit all along. In real life it was Wayne who drew back the curtain, but in the dream, sometimes, it was Jim. In real life the first thing I looked for was the naked lady on the table, and that’s what I looked for in the dream as well. In real life she wasn’t really naked, but naked under a sheet, and you could see the dent of her groin, the muscular triangle of her legs, spread open, tied apart. You could see her nipples, eternally erect. The look on her face was stunned and the requisite leering madman hovered a couple of feet away, hands clasped against his chest as if to say, Goody!

  In the dream the lady was naked. It was as if I had come upon her too late. The sheet had been torn aside, the stunned look had been wiped from her face. She was no longer tied up because there wasn’t any reason. She had been alive just moments before but now she was dead, and the madman was nowhere in sight—perhaps hiding.

  She was Brenda L. She had been Brenda L.

  “That asshole,” said Wayne in my dream, annoyed in a janitorial kind of way. “Shit.” And he went and placed the sheet back over Brenda L.’s torso and tied her hands and feet again, which I thought was ridiculous.

  “You’re not fooling anyone,” I complained to Wayne, who was Jim, and told me to shut up.

  “I won’t shut up,” I declared, feeling nervously audacious and wandering off toward the next exhibit. Janet had gone off on her own ahead of me but every once in a while would cast an amused look over her chubby shoulder.

  It was true. In real life most of it was true. There were spikes through heads. There were dangling eyeballs. There was a guillotine—even though a guillotine has nothing to do with torture, per se, a guillotine is simply death—and I doubt if it actually worked, as people had said. The guillotine cradled a freshly decapitated victim—you could see the severed spinal cord in his neck, surrounded by a red murk of muscle and tissue. Placed before the guillotine was a basket, of course, and in the basket, a baffled head.

  In real life Wayne remarked, “I mean, that’s sick. They really did that, apparently, back in the old days, the goddamn frogs. What in hell is wrong with people, eh?”

  “I hear it’s actually pretty humane,” I said for something to say. “As far as executions go.”

  We stood side by side gazing into the basket.

  “Yeah, it looks really goddamn humane,” Wayne replied. He killed living things for sport, my cousin Wayne. It struck me for the first time that this bestowed its own kind of wisdom on a person.

  Next, Jim lets us know about everything we can expect from Abelard Creighton’s visit to Westcock this week, making it sound like a kind of intellectual Mardi Gras. Creighton will be giving a lecture in the Social Sciences department as well as an unprecedented two readings—one in the daytime for students and faculty only, and one in the evening for whoever wants to come. Jim encourages us to attend both events and ask questions, particularly at the student reading. To that end, he hands out five of Creighton’s poems. I flip through the pages. All mercifully short.

  After the Thursday-night reading, he adds, a reception will take place in the lobby of Grayson Hall, to which we are all of course invited.

  “The reading’s at Grayson Hall?” I ask, not bothering to raise my hand because it isn’t that kind of day.

  Jim nods, “Yes, Larry—thanks. I should have made that clear to begin with. Grayson Hall, everybody. Eight o’clock. Write it down, please.”

  A murmur sounds among us, for we are impressed as a group. Grayson Hall is where convocations are held. Jim must be expecting a huge turnout.

  In the dream there was no guillotine, but there was a head—a tiny one like the kind you see in movies about cannibals, who carry them around on sticks. The head had been shrunk, and looked like a shrivelled orange gone brown and hard, forgotten in the fridge—an oversized raisin with a pinched, angry face. A wild dog sat chewing and pawing at the head compulsively. Panda. Panda with rabies.

  “Everybody,” says Jim, placing himself in his favoured pedagogical position—in front of his desk, buttocks lightly poised against its edge. “One more thing before we begin today. I don’t think I’ve told you all how much I’ve appreciated your support this year, let alone what a great group of students you’ve been. We’re coming up toward the end of the year and, yes, it’s been a bumpy one. You’ve all been patient, loyal, and somehow not one of you has managed to lose sight of the most important thing going on here—the thing that really matters. The work. You’ve all continued to grow and develop and explore, and I want you to know I really admire you for that.”

  There is something going on here. Jim’s words are generous and wonderful. I can feel the people around me loosening at the sound of them—hardened layers of tension, built up like plaque on teeth over the past few months, now crumbling away. Behind me, I hear actual sighs wafting toward the ceiling.

  But I’m not loosening. I’m tightening. My shoulders seem to be inching themselves up toward my ears.

  Jim shakes his head, smiles whitely. For a guy who’s never
placed that high a premium on personal hygiene, his teeth have always dazzled.

  “Anyway, we’re coming into the home stretch here folks, and I just thought you should know how well you’ve all done in your own way. You’re one of the finest groups I’ve ever taught, and I thank you. I just really thank you.”

  This sounds like the end, but Jim continues to ramble a bit longer and I know why. He has to say more, because he’s not really saying what he’s saying. He’s saying something else. I know it, and so does one other person in the room.

  “Anyway, I’m rambling,” apologizes Jim. “I just wanted to say thanks to all you folks. And let you know that you’ve done great, and—all is well. All is well.”

  Somehow I know the code. I know the message. The message is forgiveness, and it isn’t meant for me.

  31.

  THE DREAM SETS OFF this mini-cascade—it’s as if a dammed-up part of my brain has broken through. I write sixteen ghazals in the course of one marathon afternoon at Carl’s. Six are about the hidden exhibit, its various displays. Four are about the Hollywood Horrors itself, and going there with my friends as kids—forcing ourselves to get used to all the awful human dummies in their monstrous predicaments. Tippi Hedren squinting through her spider-lashes at the descending flock of crows. The violent mess of black in the air above her.

  dangling, mid-attack, I describe the crows,

  from dusted wires

  Another one is about staring into the guillotine basket alongside Cousin Wayne. I describe the anticlimax of finally seeing the hidden exhibit, and the way Wayne’s dull, familiar presence de-toothed it in my mind. But then the last few couplets evoke how Wayne surprised me with his compassion for the head—how he saw the guillotine as not just a cool, gross gimmick the way thugs like him were supposed to, but a mark of something real and upsetting about people.

  his humanity, I end the couplet,

  throwing heat into mine.

  I sit back after that one, liking it. I’m not sure about the word humanity, it might be too straightforward, but I like the last line, the idea of shared heat. I can go back and work on humanity later. This is wonderful. This hasn’t happened to me in ages.

  I wonder if there is a word for developing an immediate fascination for something, or someone, you immediately despise. For fixating on it, and being able to speak and think of nothing else, precisely as if you were in love. I read somewhere that hate isn’t the opposite of love—indifference is. So if hate isn’t anti-love, it can only be a sort of insulted version of it.

  I should say first and foremost that the five poems Jim gave out by Abelard Creighton were not bad. They read a bit like jokes, some of them—or cocktail party anecdotes—starting with an image or a scenario, usually well evoked, and then ending with a wry kind of punchline observation which tied the thing together, made you sort of go, huh! They were clever. They were too short and sharp to really blow my mind, but they made me interested enough to want to read more. As Jim might say, they held promise.

  The poems Creighton reads today are not short. In fact, he is about five minutes into the first one before I even understand that it’s a poem. He announced he was about to read a poem. He said the poem had to do with an experience he’d had in Paris with “the tourist trade,” and smiled around the room for a moment. Then he gathered up the sheaf of papers resting on the lectern before him, glanced down at them through a pair of bifocals and started to talk.

  “There I was in the city of Proust,” said Creighton. “City of poets. In Hemingway’s cafés I lingered, light-footed in the city of lights. Ah, but those bastard sons of the great white hunter and gun, there came the American dreamers …”

  This went on for a bit, Creighton telling us about Paris, what the women were like (“smokey-slim”), and how young he was (“green as grapes”), how entranced by the city’s romantic past, when a bunch of Americans showed up and ruined everything by being vulgar and boorish. Eventually I leaned against Sherrie.

  “I wish he’d get on with it,” I whispered.

  She lowered her head to hiss back. “You don’t like it?”

  “I just wanna hear the poetry.”

  Sherrie turned her head to listen. I thought for a second she was just pausing to pretend she was listening, the way she did in Dekker’s Shakespeare, but after a few more stories of cobblestones and cafés she ducked her head toward me again.

  “I think this is it, Lawrence.”

  I sat up and searched Sherrie’s face for seriousness. She nodded. I turned and paid very close attention after that. Todd was leaning so far forward, his ass was practically hovering over the seat of his chair.

  So Creighton reads for forty-five minutes. Every single poem he reads is about Americans or America. Every single poem begins with the words I was, or There I was, or Here I am, or I am. Every single poem talks about Creighton being somewhere and meeting Americans, and the Americans being some combination of stupid and greedy and vulgar and cruel. Actually, that’s not true. Some of the poems talk about Creighton being somewhere and talking to a Canadian who doesn’t think Americans are all that bad. Then the poem goes on to reveal the combination of stupidity, greed, and vulgarity in the featured Canadian.

  Forty-five minutes of this. I keep waiting for Jim, sitting up front, to throw up his hands in an uncontainable show of mirth and yell April Fool’s or something. I keep looking around expecting someone to leap to his or her feet in outrage, denounce the proceedings as a sham, a joke. At the very least, I expect to meet the indignant eye of someone like me, someone desperately looking around for someone like them.

  Finally, Creighton stops talking and smiles. He’s been pausing between lines of poetry to smile deliberately around at us throughout the recitation. The smiles always arrive on the heels of what Creighton obviously believes to be his wittiest, most cutting lines, as if to help us along in our understanding of his drollery: Clever, no? It’s a taut, closed-mouth, crinkle-eyed smile, and insufferable.

  In the hallway, after the reading, Sherrie keeps begging me to keep my voice down, and I’ll look around before hunching toward her and reiterating my objections in an urgent series of mutters. I think I’m doing a pretty good job, but a few minutes later Sherrie hushes me again, and I realize that I was practically shouting and people on their way down the hall had to duck to avoid my flying arms.

  “You get so angry, Lawrence,” Sherrie hisses.

  “I’m not angry,” I hiss back. “I’m perplexed. I don’t understand.”

  “Shh!”

  I pull my arms in and glance around. Jim is herding Creighton out into the hall, hand resting on one of the poet’s shoulders. Todd trails in their wake like a flower girl after a bride and groom. Claude is also nearby, leaning against a wall with his arms folded, close enough to hear what I’m saying but bodily placing himself outside the conversation.

  “I feel like I must be missing something,” I hiss.

  Sherrie puts on a patient, teacherly face.

  “It’s just a different kind of poetry, Lawrence. It’s kind of Bukowski, I thought. In the narrative sense I mean. You don’t have to like it.”

  This infuriates me.

  “No! That’s bullshit!”

  “Shh!”

  I look around again. Jim is now standing between Creighton and Todd, as if mediating their conversation. He looks over at me and grins.

  “He heard you,” Sherrie accuses.

  “I agree,” says Claude.

  “What do you mean, you agree?” says Sherrie. Meanwhile, I’m agape because, looking at Claude, I already know.

  Claude hoists one shoulder as if he can’t even be bothered producing a full-on shrug. “I mean I agree with Lawrence. It’s jingoistic claptrap.”

  My gape widens into an open-mouthed, all-embracing smile. “Yes! Yes! See?” I pinch Sherrie’s shoulder by way of emphasis. She gives me a look before rounding on Claude again.

  “I’m surprised at you. You’re usually so tolerant of
different kinds of work.”

  “I am, if it’s good,” admits Claude. “But this—” He gestures down the hall toward Creighton. “—is no good. The only difference between me and Lawrence is that I don’t see the point in getting worked up about it.”

  “It’s jingoistic claptrap,“ I exclaim. “It’s just one big polemic.”

  Claude’s nodding. “Polemics and poetry don’t work.”

  “No,” I agree. “They don’t.” I have to suppress an urge to slap Claude on the back, or start pumping his hand or something.

  Sherrie seems to have taken a micro-step away from us both. “Well,” she says, “Jim seems to like it.”

  We all glance toward Jim and note that he’s approaching. He ambles smilingly down the corridor, taking his time, trailing his still-sunny atmosphere along with him, warming the hallway. Our faces turn to him like flowers.

  “Folks,” he greets, arm landing soft across my shoulders, like a blanket. No crazy heat burning from his armpit these days, but there’s a smell. The unlaundered Jim-smell of outdoors and woodsmoke and dog. I haven’t noticed it since before Christmas.

  “So howdja like that?” Jim asks of us all.

  “I enjoyed it very much,” says Sherrie after a moment.

  “What about you, Claude?” asks Jim, grinning as if he’s just set some sort of ingenious trap. It occurs to me that I have never seen Jim speak to Sherrie directly, except when he answers her points in the seminar. But even then he’s responding in a general, classroom-oriented way.

  Claude smiles and shrugs. Jim points an endless index finger at him.

  “That,” he says, seeming pleased, “is exactly what I was expecting.”

  He laughs, and turns his laughing face to me. For some reason, I’m the guy appointed to laugh with him.

  I don’t let Jim down on this front. I don’t see how I can. Claude just keeps smiling, arms folded tightly as if to lock himself into a permanent shrug. Sherrie, after a moment or two, turns away—either to look for Todd or else just to look at something else—and I feel, for some reason, queasy. Lately a pair of words keeps popping into my mind unbidden, always accompanied by the feeling I associate with Janet and her bedroom—an eight-year-old’s bowel-level shame.