The Withdrawal Method

by Pasha Malla

  ON THE OTHER side of Sticky Fingers was a song Bogdan knew the words to better. Mick Jagger sang clearly and sometimes his mother would sing along and so would Bogdan. But this song opened with something Bogdan didn't think was true: "Childhood living is easy to do." What? Sorry? For people like Trish, maybe. For people with thermally regulated lunch bags and Nike Airs and ankle socks; people who got good, curly, cute haircuts at proper salons, not one owned by their mothers with all middle-aged women for clients except one kid, her son.

  WHAT MUSIC DID Miss listen to, at home alone in the basement where she lived? Not the music of many cultures: whatever was playing from the radio-alarm clock beside her futon (U2, The Eagles, Cher). On nights her calls to Lindsay went unanswered Miss poured herself a glass of pink wine and cranked the volume and the music came out tinny and faraway from the clock radio's speaker while around her one-room apartment she twirled and sipped and spun.

  At the front of the classroom Miss sat with her pen hovering over a test on the various dances of the Spanish-speaking world and suddenly missed very much playing her trumpet in the free-jazz band she and some other students had formed - was it already five years ago now? But then she had been robbed of her trumpet (as well as all her CDs, her stereo, her VCR, and a very expensive knife) by a roommate with a coke problem. Something inside her left with that trumpet. It had never come back.

  She should buy a proper stereo. By the monophonic rattle of a clock radio, that was no way to live. Miss marked the test B = iBueno!, the pen carving down through the paper and into the enamel of the desk below. Bogdan watched, imagined the tip of the pen etching some sort of secret message on the other side.

  The students kept up their whispering. Miss flipped to another test, Trish's, always a struggle not to give an A+. She stared at the test, but instead of marking it laid her head o1 the desk, forehead first. And then, seeing this, it came: Bogdan had an answer, a crazy answer. Miss had been giving him a signal. She had been using a code. She had been sending him a message. He knew now what it was. Long, short-short, long: Mission X.

  IF SHE GOT HER haircut done in time, Bogdan's mother whisked off the apron and pulled her son down from the chair and danced with him in waltz-time to the next song on the record. They swung each other around, one-two-three, one-twothree, and though it was fast and fun, Bogdan couldn't help but think slow thoughts of his father and mother doing the very same dance to the very same song in the kitchen of their old apartment. "Ta, tee-tee, ta," "Long, short-short, long,"-.. -- these were all waltz-time too: one-two-three, one-two-three. Bogdan and his mother laughed and waltzed while the guitar jangled and the drums drummed and Mick Jagger sang, "I'm gonna tear my hair out just for you."

  HIS FIRST GRADE four math test Bogdan had (a) got back, (b) seen his result (14/45), and(c) eaten. It was on fractions. The other students were eyeing one another's papers, commenting on the marks - "Trish got perfect!" - and out of fear that someone would see his, in a panic Bogdan tore into little pieces which he popped in his mouth, chewed to mush, and swallowed down. The test was one page, double-sided, not too much to eat, but Trish noticed what he was doing and started screaming.

  "Why?" Admin asked when Bogdan was sent down with the ragged page as evidence. After three years in Canada Bogdan's English was good, but on occasions when he needed it most, it failed him. So he sat there in silence. Admin sent him back to class, but instead he went home. And at home he sat with his mother and cried and cried and cried.

  The next day he came to school and kneeled on The Arab's chest and spat in his face. Miss again found him doing it and this time took him down the hill and watched him cry, and although spitting on someone was a horrible thing she said nothing, just sat there. After a while The Arab came over and sat with them too. The Arab put his hand on Bogdan's back and said, "It's okay." When the bell rang the three of them waited a long time, well after everyone else had disappeared into the school, to go back inside.

  Sitting in the classroom surrounded by whispers, watching Miss with her head down on her desk, Bogdan knew it was time. He accepted his mission, Mission X. He knew what he had to do.

  He opened his desk. The contents were ordered neatly into piles: textbooks on the right, workbooks on the left, a nifty row of ruler, pens, pencils, and a math-set in between. And the scissors. He slid his thumb and forefinger into the two loops and removed them slowly, opening and closing the blades as he did, and the sound of metal sliding against metal sent a shiver through him. They came together with an icy snick. And he opened them again so he could see how, yes, they formed a cross. Or the letter X.

  THE LAST SONG ON Sticky Fingers was Bogdan's favourite. Sometimes his mother had another client coming in for a haircut and they couldn't make it to the end; other times her afternoon was free and they would get there. She took Bogdan in her arms, held him close, and he laid his head against her chest and closed his eyes. They swayed gently in place like that as the song rose up slowly from the turntable: pretty guitar and piano and singing from somewhere faraway. Bogdan nuzzled into his mother, the two of them wobbling there amid clumps of hair strewn all over the floor, and for a minute that was all there was in the universe: the two of them, and the song.

  BOGDAN STOOD. The whispers continued. If any of his classmates noticed him it was in passing. They were mostly watching Miss, her face buried in her marking. Bogdan looked around, back at Trish. She regarded him at first with disdain, as usual, and seemed to be readying herself to mouth his nickname, but then noticing the scissors in his hand Trish's face changed. It took a moment for Bogdan to realize what that look was, her mouth parting slightly, the eyes widening: fear. For once, Trish had nothing to say. Bogdan slid out from behind his desk.

  The scissors in his hand felt light; his body seemed distant. It was as though part of him were there in the classroom and part of him were moving through his life leading to that moment: now tapping out Morse code back home with his father, now lying down with his mother on a mattress on the floor of their new duplex in The Co-op in London, now dancing, now eating a math test, now from across the playground watching The Arab sitting alone on the portable steps, now here. And through it all he heard that song, the last one before the needle would lift and leave them in silence: the cymbals crashed like waves and the drums came rumbling - and, oh, the violins! They were saddest of all.

  Bogdan stepped toward Trish. The class went quiet, snapped off like a radio. Bogdan raised the scissors, now at Trish's desk. Miss looked up blearily. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. What she saw was a shaggy-haired boy standing there in the middle of the classroom with a pair of scissors in his hand, and the girl at her desk beneath him staring wideeyed at the blades, and every face in the classroom turned toward them in wonder.

  "Bogdan," said Miss. "What are you doing?"

  It was Mission X, he wanted to say. But he was elsewhere. In his head he heard the song at the end of the record, the one he and his mother would dance to, and things were rising up and rising up and it was all cymbals crashing and the music became thunder.

  He moved in. His thumbs worked the hinge and opened the blades of the scissors. Trish's hair was a perfect little nest of golden curls. He reached out with one hand and grabbed a fistful. Everything seemed to happen at the same time: Trish screamed and he snipped, and a big clump of sand-coloured ringlets went spiralling down and landed on the floor beneath her desk.

  Miss put her hand to her mouth. But she didn't do anything else. She made no move to stop him. She said nothing, just watched Bogdan looking down at the little blonde twists lying between his Zips. Trish had gone white. She sat there staring up at Bogdan with her mouth a perfect round 0. No sounds came out. Bogdan grabbed more hair and cut again, snipping away another chunk from the top of Trish's head. "Short-long," mouthed Bogdan. "Short-long."

  But then he was tackled. Someone hit him from behind in the lower back and took him down, hard, onto the classroom floor. "You freak," came the voice of a boy pinning hi
m to the tiles, and then there were hands wrestling the scissors from his fingers. He heard Mick Jagger singing softly, "Let it go, now," and then, "Yeah, let it go." So he let it go.

  Lying there on the floor Bogdan had a perfect view up the row of desks to Miss, sitting there at the front of the classroom covering her mouth. The song in his head was fading: the end was just like the beginning, with the guitar light as air and piano sprinkled over top like bits of glass. Bogdan's eyes met his teacher's. Was she smiling behind her hand? In her eyes was something.

  As one boy crushed his face into the floor and another twisted his arm behind his back, the song in Bogdan's head disappeared. In its place, with the wisps of Trish's hair scattered all around him, Bogdan could hear whimpering, and the whimpering became weeping, and Bogdan smiled, because the weeping was desperate, wailing and lost, and it was the most beautiful music he'd ever heard in his life.

  DIZZY WHEN YOU

  LOOK DOWN IN

  AFTER ABOUT TEN minutes of me catching him stealing looks across the waiting room, the big guy finally speaks. "I know you," he says, wagging a rolled-up Sports Illustrated in my direction. "Northern, right?"

  "Yeah, Northern." I still can't place him.

  "Point guard."

  "These days?" I laugh. "Thursday nights at the Y, sure."

  "But in high school you played point, right? For Northern?"

  "Wow - that's, what? Ten years ago?"

  He nods, that big head bobbing slow like its batteries are dying out. "1 went to St. Paul's."

  He comes over, sits down with a seat between us. The magazine gets dropped and then there's this slab of a hand coming at me. Shaking it feels like sticking my arm inside a turkey.

  "Brad Bettis," he says. "You're Dizzy Calder's big brother, right?"

  "Yeah, that's right." I remember Bettis now, a monster of a four-man who'd bang away at our guys in the paint, knocking them down and then offering a hand to help them back up. A brute, all power, but classy - a yeti with a Catholic conscience. He's gained about sixty pounds, most of it under his chin. I don't ask him why he's here.

  Bettis grins. "Dizzy Calder. Man, that kid could play."

  I wait it out. The announcement for Dr. Singh comes on the PA again, the nurse starting to sound flustered. A little brown guy in scrubs rushes by flipping pages on a clipboard. His footsteps go clopping down the hall and then I'm left with Bettis, still grinning.

  "Dizzy Calder," Bettis says again, shaking his head. "Whatever happened to him? They were asking for him all over the country, I heard."

  "He went to Guelph for a semester."

  "I heard that!"

  "Yeah. Didn't play. Well, he was on the team but never saw the floor. They said he was too small to play three, and didn't have the outside game for a shooting guard."

  "So, what? He dropped out?" Bettis has this look like I popped his favourite balloon.

  Above Bettis's head, the clock on the wall reads a quarter to two. The anesthesia should be taking hold. They'll be starting now with the saws and blades and whatever else. But Bettis is leaning in, ready for some gossip. I can hear his breath coming in puffs. I tell him what he wants to hear. "He quit the team, finished the year at school, and then went down to Cuba."

  "What, to play ball?"

  "No." The PA crackles to life and it's the same nurse, sounding tired now. Bettis is waiting for more. "To build houses. He worked on some community project, building houses and pipelines and whatever. Ended up staying down there for six years."

  Bettis sits back, all three hundred pounds of him slumping against the plastic chair. "Oh, yeah," he says, eyes narrowed, considering. You can almost hear the squeak of the hamster turning its wheel. After a moment, he picks up his Sports Illustrated from the floor, unrolls it, and smooths out the cover. Opening it, looking down, he says, "Too bad. That kid could play."

  WHEN I GOT BACK to my folks' place, my mom had put together a box of Dizzy's basketball memorabilia for me to look through. Almost lost in that mess of offers from various schools on Athletic Department letterhead and MVP awards was a postcard that Dizzy kept tucked into the frame of his locker back in high school. Now, sitting here with the fluorescents buzzing overhead, Bettis beside me flipping through his magazine, I take it out from my jacket pocket and give it another look.

  I don't know where he picked the thing up. It wasn't addressed or anything, it wasn't like anybody had sent it to him. Just a blank postcard, no postage. The picture is from a Celtics-Bulls game at Boston Garden, taken from high in the stands, up in the nosebleeds. Way, way down on the court you can make out ten players: the white and green of the Celtics' jerseys, the Bulls in their road red. Bill Cartwright and Horace Grant are out wide on the baseline, with Kevin McHale and Robert Parish hedging inside, and Larry Bird's sagging off Scottie Pippen down to the elbow. And over on the other wing, on the guy with the ball, is Danny Ainge. Poor Danny Ainge with his hands up, knees bent, feet shoulder-width apart - all fundamentals, all hope. In front of him, middribble, casual, like he's playing a game of pickup with some buddies and afterwards they'll all go out for a beer and wings or whatever, is Michael Jordan.

  The Celtics are frozen, waiting, and the Chicago guys are like that too, standing there, no one with their hands up, no one looking for a pass. The rest of the Bulls are out for the show - best seats in the house. Maybe John Paxson's up there at the top of the key thinking about all the times in practice he's been left ducking while Jordan's up swinging on the rim over top of him, and he's thinking, All right, Danny Ainge - good fucking luck.

  Before games, Dizzy took that postcard down from his locker and stared at it, finishing off the highlight reel in his head. In his mind he'd be way up there with his head scraping the roof of the Garden, bouncing around in that crowd of lunatics splashing whisky into big cups of fountain soda, leaning forward to see what the hell law of physics Jordan was going to break this time.

  "WHAT YOU GOT there?" This is Bettis, curling and uncurling the Sports illustrated in his hands.

  I hold the postcard up so he can see it. Bettis squints. "What's that? Celts-Bulls?"

  "Yeah," I say, "from Boston Garden."

  Bettis nods. He's sweating now - dark circles around the armpits of his shirt and hair slick at the sides. And he's looking at me, all intent, and I know what's coming; he's opened up a door and he's on the other side ready with that question certain people who don't have any good sense ask one another in places like this. I put the postcard back in my pocket.

  "So," he says, puffing, "who you here for?"

  DIZZY WASN'T REALLY a huge Michael Jordan fan. He went through phases, obsessed with a whole bunch of different players, copying their moves in the driveway. Isiah Thomas used to drive him crazy with his dribbling. Dizzy's handle was good, sure, just never enough to run point. But we'd watch Pistons games on Tv and Zeke'd be down there low to the ground, ball parumping off the floor like a drumroll, between the legs and behind the back and spin-dribbles, socks halfway up his calves - and smooth. And Dizzy'd be all over those moves, all winter working the ball in the garage until it was warm enough to get a good bounce going, and from inside the house we'd hear him through the wall, dribbling away, then after a while inside, all sheepish and bashful like he'd been beating off to the Sears catalogue out there or something.

  But the one thing he never had was a favourite player. Back when we were kids, all of us would call who we were on the playground. I'd be Kevin Johnson, Mark Price, Tim Hardaway. Big guys were Ewing, Olajuwon, Mutombo. You'd usually get six or seven kids arguing over who was Michael Jordan. But Dizzy was just Dizzy. It was like he thought of the pros as just regular guys and pretending to be them was about as weird as pretending to be your favourite scientist when you wrote a biology test. He borrowed bits from here and there, certain moves - but everything he took he made his own.

  Like his routine from the line. It was a weird mishmash he'd put together from guys he liked in college or the pros. He'd line up with
the hoop, then take a half-step right -just off-centre, his feet right together. Then he'd get that shock of blond hair that hung in front of his face out of the way with a flick of his head, take a couple dribbles, and pull the ball up to his mouth - he either kissed it or said something, a little message, maybe. Guys lined up around the key would beak him for that, but usually they'd shut up once they checked the score sheet and saw he'd accounted for half our points. Then a knee bend and another dribble and a pause, and the ball would come up just over from his forehead, another pause, then that sweet left hand, all wrist: his shot would trace an arc you could teach math with before landing with a thock, the mesh catching the ball like a pair of hands and releasing it bouncing on the baseline.

  BUT HERE'S BETTIS, staring at me, mouth hanging open like he's waiting to be fed. What do I tell this guy? I can just imagine him backtracking, all apologies with his big chubby arms around me. When I finally answer, I make sure to turn away a bit to show him that I want this conversation to go only so far. "Waiting for someone in surgery. You?"

  "Yeah, me too. My wife." He holds up his ring finger, a sausage wrapped in a strip of gold, as proof. "She's having an operation for endometrial cancer. Know what that is?"

  "I work in pharma. We practically had to go through med school our first year." Then, almost as an afterthought, I add, "Sorry to hear that," and surprise myself when, thinking about Jen, back home in Oakville, I realize I actually am.

  "Yeah. She'll be okay." Bettis nods at this to reassure himself. And just when I think the conversation's over, he goes on. "So you're in sales?"

  "That's right. Four years now. Regional manager, Peel- Halton." By reflex, I find myself going to my wallet to hand over a business card, but then think better of it.