by Kyp Harness
“Do you do art?” he asked, thinking that was the right thing to do.
“Yeah,” she said. “I draw too.” Looking to the street where a city bus had just pulled up at the stop, she added, “There’s my bus—gotta go.” She began a quick sprint over the snow to the bus. “See you in class on Monday,” she called out, her voice now louder, bell-like in the icy breeze.
She took the city bus, he thought as he watched her join the line to board, because she’d transferred from the other school that was further downtown. He trudged on up to the road as the bus merged into the afternoon traffic with a billowing exhale of exhaust. He crossed the road, jogging over the grey flattened slush to mount the dune of plowed snow on the other side and vaulted over. He walked from the road down a curved street on his way to the plaza where his dad’s barbershop was and made his way through the subdivision.
Around him were the quiet split-level homes and bungalows of post-war vintage, the burgundy-bricked and aluminum-sided exteriors alike enough to be comforting in their uniformity yet different enough to be distinguished from their brethren. In front of each, the snowcapped arrangement of shrubs or bushes varied, and more rarely, a young fir tree stood sheltering a corner of a yard.
Tim had asked a girl from this neighbourhood out on a date the year before. He’d never had any experience with the opposite sex, and felt badly about this mostly because of the shame: in front of other males—his relatives, his father and his brother—his lack of female companionship and his seeming indifference to it were highly suspect. His abstinence from sports didn’t help. He also felt that his slight physique and lack of muscles barred him from having any appeal to girls.
That was certainly the case according to his father and brother, and seemed to be validated by his surroundings. All the guys who had girlfriends were the large jock types. “Hey kid—you work out?” one of his classmates had asked him with a grin when he took his shirt off in the changeroom after gym one afternoon, and all the rest of the guys laughed. When Tim confided in Dirk about the comment, it was adopted as his new catchphrase whenever Tim was seen around the house without his shirt on: “Hey kid—you work out?” So Tim took to wearing long-sleeved shirts and long pants, even through the hottest days of the summer.
He had asked out the girl from the subdivision behind the plaza more from a sense of duty than anything else. He thought he’d seen her looking at him one morning during home room: their eyes met, he’d smiled, and she returned the smile after a moment of looking at him blankly. Tim didn’t know whether the smile was a reflex or a sign of encouragement.
He arranged to be near the door when she came out of the school at the end of the day. As she headed home he fell into step beside her. They talked about goings on in their homeroom and in the one course they shared together. As they walked across the asphalt of the schoolyard that stretched to the plaza’s parking lot, he suddenly murmured, “Your hand cold?” and took her hand in his and she allowed him to hold it for the rest of the walk. She had blonde, puffy hair, and her face and posture seemed already to have taken on the demeanor of a woman in middle age. He felt the absence of a girlfriend and she seemed like the best bet.
A couple days later he looked up her name in the phonebook and called to ask her on a date from the phone in his parents’ bedroom. Her voice was friendly but flat, her words weighted down with a strange listlessness. She agreed to go see a movie, but it was difficult finding the right night to do it. She had lots of tests to do, and a major project to turn in. She was an honours student. A date was finally decided on. She would pick him up in her parents’ car. They talked on the phone about school and homework. Her main courses of interest were math, science, chemistry and physics.
Tim was hoping he didn’t come off as too weird. He’d chosen a movie with Christopher Reeve playing a priest. He thought that likely there would be little in it that would offend her. The movie was appropriately sombre and pious until it was discovered that a brothel was being run out of the Catholic church, and the screen was emblazoned with scenes featuring naked prostitutes. Tim was nervous and embarrassed, sneaking side glances at his date’s face, an unreadable profile.
Her profile was still impassive as she drove him back to his house. He suggested going for something to eat or drink at the mall, but she had to get home early because she had a chemistry exam. There was vague talk of getting together and doing it again. The girl smiled sweetly, reflexively as she said it had been nice.
He got out of the car and walked into his house. “Hey, Tim’s home,” his brother Jason called out.
“Didja punch her panties?” asked Dirk from the couch.
“Didja get your dick wet?” his brother asked. Dirk and Jason often spoke like this. Tim sometimes joined in, but mostly his brother and father communicated in a language that was a near equal mix of scatology and pornography. At the dinner table, the code flourished into full flower. Instead of saying, “Pass the salt and pepper,” it was always, “Pass the salt and pecker.” Peanut butter was “penis butter.” Ketchup was “cat shit.” And mustard was invariably referred to as “mussy turd.”
“Hey, Tim punched her panties!” his brother continued.
“Well, don’t imagine he’d have too hard a time getting in there once he unleashed that role of tarpaper he’s got between his legs,” his father observed. Part of a coping mechanism Dirk had for the fact that his eldest son had no interest in sports or virtually any other type of manly behaviour was the idea that this deficiency was compensated for by the fact that Tim had an abnormally large penis. Dirk began the assertion once Tim hit puberty, often with humour at the incongruity that one so slight and effeminate should be so well-endowed.
Once, a man waiting for a haircut in the barbershop eyed Tim skeptically and grunted to his father, “Your boy play hockey?” Dirk, who in his time had played hockey, baseball, football, golf and pool, who had hunted, swam and boxed, gestured with his scissors and replied, “No not that one, he’s not built for fightin’. He’s built for lovin’.” He winked, and over the tide of knowing laughter added, “I’m not gettin’ out of the shower when he’s in the room anymore, no way!”
Tim waited for weeks for an acknowledgment from the girl about their date together. He watched her as she walked through the halls, but the most he got was a polite, weak smile. He tried to follow up on their suggestion of a second date, but exams had started and she was busy studying for them. In his nervous despair he was driven to seek the advice of Dave Finestone, one of the popular and attractive boys at the high school whom Tim knew from elementary school. Dave had always shown acceptance, or at least tolerance, toward him.
“So maybe she’s shy,” Dave offered, gesturing as they stood where the wire mesh fence at the back of the schoolyard opened onto the weeds of the empty lot by the subdivision. “Some girls are like that. You just have to say to her, ‘Cathy, I need to know what you’re feelin’.” With his dimpled features and feathered bangs, Dave Finestone inspired the sighs and longing looks of the girls at the high school—Tim had often noticed girls murmur in the school library as Dave walked by.
“You don’t have to be shy about it. Just ask her how she’s feelin’, what’s goin’ on,” Dave offered. “It’s all about confidence, Tim. That’s what girls like. You gotta have confidence.” As they parted ways, Dave suggested, “You should get in touch with Russ. He’s interested in a lotta the same things you are, and he don’t have too many friends either. You should give him a call sometime.” Dave made this suggestion often. Russ was Dave’s younger brother, an introverted, bespectacled loner who was as scrawny and ungainly as Dave was compact and attractive. He had long, thin, white arms with red blotches that looked like burns. Tim knew him resentfully as the boy who had won a cartooning competition he’d entered several years before.
In spite of Dave’s advice, Tim was never able to get an acknowledgment from the girl of their first date,
much less ask for another one. He would see her in the hallway and she would smile in the same bland, noncommittal way that the religious girls smiled at him, a gesture in the service of niceness. He still prayed each night that he would find a girlfriend, and to that end he would periodically refrain from masturbating for weeks at a time, entertaining the belief that that would bring him one.
Tim’s bedroom wall adjoined the living room where his father watched television and it had not been long before that Dirk was moved to observe, as an aside in conversation at the barbershop, “The way this guy goes at it, I’m afraid he’s gonna come bustin’ through the wall sometimes at night!”
“That’s alright, just do it in the shower,” his father advised Tim over the wave of laughter. “But don’t do it every day—it takes all the good out of ya!”
Tim walked through the snowy park past the bleak empty swing set where he had fought Ran Hutchison, and shivered as he remembered how the very sight of it from the back of his mother’s car used to fill him with dread. Rounding the wire mesh fence, he came to the back of the plaza to Dirk’s barbershop. Across the massive back wall of the plaza, above the dumpsters and the parked cars, the words The Dognoisers were emblazoned. He never knew the origin of the words, nor did any of the adults he asked.
Tim walked down the plaza to begin his shift at the variety store. He had started working there at the beginning of the school year. The store was owned by the wives of two brothers who worked in the oil refineries. Aside from Tim, it was staffed almost exclusively by women of late middle age. Tim would be paired with one of them on each of his shifts. Each of them complained about the behaviour of the other women as they worked the cash register, sold lottery tickets or doled out penny candy.
At the end of his shift, after Tim had replenished the milk and pop in the coolers at the back of the store, he walked out into the black snowy night, his footprints leaving a fresh trail across the unblemished fluffiness of the parking lot. He walked back across the park and through the yard of the elementary school, the silent chill of the night ringing in his ears and all around him, back before the golden lit windows of the humble suburban bungalows and out to the road that led him home, which curved and glowed with the smearing white glare of steady traffic.
As he walked in the slush at the side of the road he rounded the curve where the fuzzy blast of headlights seemed to come directly toward him in the moment before they swerved to the side, and always Tim imagined the lights continuing toward him, mowing him into oblivion. When they turned he detected disappointment in himself, and at times he imagined jumping into their path, even counting to three in order to egg himself on. He considered this plan and reproached himself for lacking the courage to carry it out. If a car could have obligingly veered off the road and hit him, that would have been okay. But then, being hit by a car was no guarantee of death. It might only leave him paralyzed for life, or in great pain, and both these scenarios would only make worse the misery from which he sought escape. Still, he remained hypnotized by the oncoming headlights of the rushing, hissing traffic as he walked through the black night, the brazen, unyielding beams mesmerizing him with promise and danger.
2. The Clown
“Nobody in this class did as well as they should have on this test,” the teacher was saying. “And there’s no excuse for it. It was a simple case of lack of preparation.” He had just finished laying the marked tests on the desks of his students. “You people want to go on to university next year. Well, I’ll tell you, they’re not going to be holding your hand and walking you through everything in university. You’re going to have to take responsibility for yourself and your choices. You make the choice not to prepare, to go do something else instead, and you’re going to fail. Does it matter in the larger scheme of the things, in the long run, if you fail a test?” he asked, outstretching his arms.
“No, of course not. It doesn’t matter at all. But it’s like a baseball game. It won’t matter an iota to the history of the universe if you win or lose a baseball game. But while you’re playing the game you can’t think that way. When you’re in the game you have to believe that nothing in the world is more important than winning that game. Otherwise, you won’t win the game. That’s the way it is with these tests. A hundred years from now it won’t matter in the least whether you passed or failed a single English test. But in order to succeed, you must believe that nothing is more important.”
Tim passed through the halls after class, his large binder beneath his arm. If he didn’t have a friend or a girlfriend, if he was so disinclined to athletic activity that the teams in gym argued about who had to take him for a player—if his ineptitude at sports was such a wonder that a teacher was prompted to remark, “You don’t mind if we laugh at ya, do you, Tim?”—if he had disappointed his father by failing at every male task known, still there was one certainty: he could draw. It could not be denied by anyone who saw his drawings, which had been a source of astonishment to others since he was very young.
He had begun around the age of six. The fluid and evocative lines of the Disney characters seemed magical to him, and he tried to capture them on paper. He worked dedicatedly, practising obsessively, and after a while he was able to reach a level of proficiency, and so attained an ability to create a sort of magic of his own. It allowed him to transport himself out of his time and place for hours. At times he would get so excited by what he was creating that he went into a trance and needed to rhythmically gyrate his fingers in front of his eyes. For the last several years, he had become rather glib about his drawing. It was a reliable way to impress people. There was little doubt in his mind that he would earn his living from cartooning when he grew up. In fact, he could not conceive of being able to bear any occupation other than that of an artist.
Tim walked with a special sense of purpose through the crowds now bottlenecking toward the doors at the end of the school day, for he had been watching the petite girl who had greeted him last week. He knew now that her name was Sherrie, and he had wondered at the back of her head and at her profile—her upturned nose and her cheekbones just visible beyond the brown curtain of her shoulder-length hair—as she sat three seats ahead of him in the next row in their English class.
She had said that she did art herself. She was unlike the other girls. Her compact form was usually in blue jeans, sneakers and sweaters. He had seen her again in the hall and had been too shy to look at her, afraid that she would ignore him like the others did. But he had hazarded a glance at the last moment and found her smiling at him, unreservedly, welcoming, like an unexpected cloud-parting.
He pushed open the brown metal door and crunched across the ice-laden sidewalk. Tim knew that Sherrie would be hurrying to catch the city bus now arriving at the stop to idle for a few minutes in front of the school. His eyes, blinking against the sudden whiteness of the snow, strained to find her figure among the clots of teenagers dispersing across the school’s front yard. He saw her moving toward the bus and instantly began jogging to her, jostling against other students at either side. Just before he caught up to her he settled into a casual saunter, trying to keep his shortness of breath out of his voice as he greeted her with a note of surprise.
He made up a reason to be taking the city bus along with her, saying that he was going to the library downtown to research a project. In truth, he planned to ride into the city only to take the next bus back home. Sherrie seemed happy to see him, and as they moved with a knot of teenagers into the bus, finding seats near the back, Tim kept up a nervous babble of conversation, the words spilling out of him with excitement and increasing confidence, almost without his awareness or consent.
Her smile encouraged him, and from time to time she would make a comment but the hum of the bus as it pulled out onto the road and the murmur of the people around them made it harder to hear what she was saying, her voice was so quiet and faint. He bent to hear her words, and when he bent close he was dumbf
ounded by her eyes and her lips. As stricken as he was by the nearness of her face, he was also carried away by its expression of keen and welcoming interest.
She appeared as surprised and perplexed by the words tumbling from his mouth as he was. With his eyes locked upon hers, Tim was emboldened further in his humorous monologue, his words flying out and tangling in comic rhythm so that other people standing or sitting on the bus turned to look at him and laughed along with the girl as the bus made its way through the slush-filled streets into the small downtown core of the city.
From an early age Tim sought to make people laugh. He took falls and danced around in the manner of the old slapstick films he saw on television. He would spend his recesses at school improvising comedy routines for the laughter of the other boys. Tim’s father would become angry about Tim acting stupid in the same way he would become about him “diddling” his fingers in front of his face. All of this troubled and dismayed his parents.
The reasons for their embarrassed discomfort seemed to present themselves most forcefully in a performance he gave at his grade five Christmas assembly. His class, led by a teacher who was a sports enthusiast, was contributing a display of tumbling to the program of musical numbers and skits. They rehearsed on mats in their classroom, and at one point each student was to execute a backwards somersault in succession. The first time Tim tried it, he found himself stuck with his backside in the air, looking up at his teacher and laughing classmates from between his legs.
When his turn in line came around again, he affected more difficulty with the manoeuvre, straining as he tried to complete the somersault to the loud amusement of his audience. The teacher was inspired by this to conceive a new role for Tim within the presentation: whereas the rest of the children would be dressed in identical T-shirts and shorts, he would wear a clown suit and whiteface. As they went through the drill of somersaults and flips, he would incompetently try to do the same—his bungled backwards somersault being the centrepiece of his performance. At the end, when all the rest of the kids had assembled themselves into a pyramid, Tim would run in front of them, shouting, “Merry Christmas, everyone!” causing their structure to collapse.
