A Boy at the Edge of the World

by David Kingston Yeh

“Five months.”

  “It was intense.”

  “Were you in love with him?”

  “What? I dunno.”

  Pat slapped his knees and jumped up. “Dude, we need to get you out! I’m taking you out. Come on, finish your drink. We’re heading out.”

  “What, right now?”

  “Yeah, right now. It’s Saturday. Did you think we were just gonna sit on our butts all night? This is my first official weekend in the big T.O.! We’re going out to celebrate. We’re going to have a good time. We are going to a gay bar. You want to go back to El Convento?”

  “No, I don’t want to go back to El Convento. And no, we’re not going to a gay bar.”

  “Sure you are. I’m taking my gay brother to a gay bar.”

  “No, I’m not going to a gay bar. I’m not, Pat. You can’t make me. I’m not going to any fucking gay bar.”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t blow a gasket. So we’re not going to a gay bar. How about Sneaky Dee’s then? Is that un-gay enough for you? We’ll shoot some pool, have a few beers, just like old times.” He picked up my shoes and threw them at me one after the other. “We are not staying in.”

  “Alright.” I caught my shoes. “Alright, fine.”

  We ended up walking to Sneaky Dee’s so Pat could have a smoke. As usual, when we got there, the place was packed with student-types and the tables were loaded with platters of nachos and pitchers of beer. Layers of graffiti covered practically every visible surface. Pat shouted out the name of one of the bartenders, acquired two pints, and found us a corner in the back. I was a decent bar pool player. Pat was a shark. Last summer, between the two of us, sometimes we’d hold a table for hours taking on all challengers. Tonight, we chalked up our names and found ourselves facing off against two girls named Nadia and Sam. They were good but we were better. I could tell Pat was holding back. I was taking my time lining up the eight ball when I overheard Pat comment how they could stare at my ass all they wanted, and that while it was a great ass, they should know I was gay, which was a pity since gay guys always had the best asses, didn’t they agree? I missed my shot. When we finally won, Pat offered to buy the girls a round. Inexplicably, the conversation turned to how Nadia and Sam had never actually been to a gay club. By then, I was feeling my buzz and, even though I saw it coming a mile away, I went along with the eventual plan to take the girls out.

  The four of us took a cab to Fly Nightclub, which was the biggest gay club in the city. Karen had come here once with me on New Year’s Eve. Since then, I’d gone back a few times only because Parker insisted on it. As usual, the house music was pounding, and the go-go boys were gyrating up on their pedestals beneath the blazing disco balls. A catwalk circling the dance floor offered a kaleidoscopic view. We were at Fly about an hour before I began to notice how guys kept coming up and chatting with me. Eventually I asked one of them flat out if my brother had set him up to it and he said maybe. After that, I found Pat at the bar, and let him know I was done and calling it a night. When he started to protest, I just gave him a hug, told him to tell the girls bye, and left.

  After the chaos of the club, the night was eerily quiet. Stars glimmered overhead, and I could hear the leaves rustling in the trees. I was strolling down the street wishing I’d bummed a cigarette off Pat when someone said: “Hey, 305.” I was on a residential block just outside the Village. At first I couldn’t make out who it was. Then I saw it was some skinhead sitting on his front stoop smoking a cigarette. When I kept walking, he jumped up and started following me. “Hey,” he called out. The street was poorly lit and my fist in my pocket gripped Blonde Dawn’s pepper spray. I would’ve preferred a roll of quarters, but I figured it’d have to do. When he called out a third time. I stopped and turned.

  The guy approached me. He was wearing a sleeveless hoodie and his arms were covered in tattoos. “You don’t remember me, do you?” He flicked his butt aside. “You were Room 305. I used to have a mohawk?”

  Then I remembered him. It was the staff from the bathhouse. Room 305. Right. “You gave me a T-shirt.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  I blushed and looked away, suddenly grateful for the dark. “Sorry about that.”

  “No worries, man.”

  “I was having a bad day.”

  “I was glad I could help.”

  “I can’t believe you remember me.”

  “You were memorable.”

  “Fuck.”

  “S’okay. We all have those days. You were having yours.”

  “So, what happened to the mohawk?”

  “Shaved it off.”

  “It was a good look. Why’d you do that?”

  “Chemo.”

  “Chemo. Oh. Chemo. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be, it’s all good. I’m in remission. I did it just last month. It still feels fucking weird.”

  “Being in remission?”

  “No, man. Losing my hair.”

  “I’ll bet.” I reached out and felt his head. “It feels nice.” My hand came to rest on his shoulder.

  “Look, buddy, I’m actually straight, okay? I just wanted to say hi.”

  I let my hand fall to my side. “Sorry.”

  “No worries.”

  “Alright.”

  “Except now,” he said, laughing, “I look like some piss ass skinhead.”

  “No. No you don’t.”

  “You heading out somewhere?”

  “I’m not sure. I think I was just going home.”

  “It’s a nice night.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “You want a beer?”

  “I dunno.”

  He shrugged. “I’m offering.”

  “Okay.”

  I followed him back to his house, a dilapidated semi-detached set back from the street. I sat and waited for him on the front steps. After a minute, he came back out with two beers. “Here.” He opened a bottle and handed it to me. “I’d invite you in except my nephew’s sleeping.”

  “Your nephew?”

  “My sister’s kid. She’s working tonight.”

  “What does your sister do?”

  “Bartender down at the ACC.”

  “That’d be the Leafs playing the Flyers tonight.”

  “If you say so.”

  “The game should be over by now.”

  “Then she’s out drinking with her girlfriends. Girls Night Out, y’know. Woohoo.”

  “You’re not working?”

  “Naw, not tonight. It’s my night off.”

  “And you’re baby-sitting?”

  “Yeah, well, we all live together, my sis, the kid and me. I don’t mind. It’s family, the three of us, y’know?”

  He held up two cigarettes. I took one and let him light it for me. Individual letters on his knuckles spelled out the word PATIENCE. “Thanks. Should you, you know, be smoking?”

  He snapped his Zippo shut. “It’s all good.” He took a drag off his cigarette and smiled at me sidelong.

  “Okay.”

  “Wanna see something?”

  “Sure.”

  He leaned into me. “Check this out.” He lit his lighter again and held it up to his wrist. On the inside of his forearm was the image of a winged baby.

  “Is that your nephew?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Cute, eh?”

  “He is.”

  “Damn right he is.” He put away the lighter. “He just turned two. He looks just like his mom.”

  “Where’s his dad?”

  Mohawk Guy made a face and shrugged. A helicopter passed overhead. The city gave off too much illumination to see actual satellites. As he gazed up at the night sky, I wanted to put my arm around his shoulder, but I didn’t. “My nights off,” he said, “I like sitting out here. It’s quiet. Nobody can see you. It’s like you’re invisible, you know what I’m sayin’? You get to observe a lot of interesting things. Once I saw this drag queen pull down her panties and fuck this other guy right over there.”

  “N
o kidding.”

  “You coming from Fly?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t seem like a Fly guy.”

  “I’m not.”

  He nodded. We both watched a cat cross the street. “The best thing about this neighbourhood is the raccoons. They remind me of home, y’know? There were these coons used to live in this big hollowed-out tree just behind our barn. Sis and me, we start feeding them. Hell, they’d come up and eat right next to our cats. They had these babies one year and trooped them right up to our back door. Then sis brought one inside the house. Big mistake.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pop found out what was going on. He stayed up the next night and shot ’em. Then he torched that tree. We watched it go up in flames.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  “Yeah. Well, that man was a fucker. I don’t blame our mom for leaving him.”

  Police sirens rose and fell faintly. “My parents,” I said, “died in a car accident.”

  “Shit.”

  “One minute, they were there, telling us to go to bed on time and kissing us on the tops of our heads. And then they were gone. Just gone. Just like that. They were coming back from some party. I learned later their car rolled and caught fire. It made page two in the news. At the funeral, it was all closed caskets. We didn’t understand at the time why it had to be that way.”

  “Shit.”

  “Our grandfather raised us after that.”

  “How’d that turn out?”

  “It was okay. He’s a good guy.”

  “Alright. Here’s to good guys.”

  We knocked bottles. Mohawk Guy’s hoodie was only partially zipped and I could see his bare chest underneath. I butted out my cigarette and dangled my beer between my knees. “So where’s your girlfriend?”

  He leaned back against the railing and tiredly stretched out his legs one by one. “In this city? Shit, I don’t have a girlfriend. I work sixty hours a week. I don’t got time for no girlfriend.”

  “You get all those hours at the bathhouse?”

  “Naw. I bus tables at Black Eagle weeknights. They like me there.”

  “You sure you’re straight?”

  “Yeah, buddy. I am.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  He glanced at me and smiled crookedly. “You think?” I noticed he was missing a tooth. He was good-looking in a rough trade kind of way. “I saw this guy get gaybashed right over there,” he said, pointing, “right outside Fly. There were three of them and they had him on the ground. It was bad.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I broke a bottle and went after them, and they took off. Someone else called 911.”

  “You just keep coming to the rescue.”

  “Yeah, well. That guy died.”

  “What?”

  “The gay guy who got bashed, he died, like a year later. Overdosed on painkillers. I didn’t get to him fast enough.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “That didn’t get into the news. You’d be surprised what shit doesn’t get into the news.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Look, buddy, you can blow me if you want.”

  I picked at the label on my bottle. “I thought you said you were straight.”

  “I am.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just normally charge people.”

  “What kind of people?”

  “People. People who’d pay to blow someone.”

  “Oh.”

  “There’s no charge tonight.”

  “I dunno.”

  He shrugged. “I’m offering.”

  The label came free, mostly intact, and I folded it into a tiny square. “Sure. Inside?”

  “No, like I said, my nephew’s sleeping.”

  “Where then?”

  “Right here.”

  “Right here? People can see.”

  “Did you see me?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Alright.”

  Mohawk Guy unbuckled his belt and opened his pants. I set aside my beer and knelt on the bottom step. When he took it out, it was medium-sized, soft and uncut. I pulled back the foreskin and put it in my mouth. He tasted salty, musky. My arm rested on his thigh. It took a while before he started to get hard. By then, my other hand was in my own pants. In the end, I jerked both of us off, also using my mouth and my tongue. Mohawk Guy didn’t say anything, but his breathing got harder through his nose. I could tell when he was getting close. Then I timed it so I came the same time he did. It trickled out of him in weak pulses. Afterwards, he pulled up his pants and buckled his belt.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  It’d been a long time since I’d come, and I’d dropped a huge load. I wiped myself using the bottom of my shirt and a crumpled napkin I found in my pocket. We finished our beers in silence. He offered me another cigarette, but I’d had enough. I wasn’t a smoker. Across the street there was a movement in the shadows. As we watched, a huge raccoon crossed the front drive of an apartment building, followed by four baby raccoons. “Well I’ll be damned,” Mohawk Guy said. Down the block, someone stumbled out of Fly Nightclub and threw up. When I looked back, the raccoons were gone.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yeah. They were cute little fuckers.”

  I sat up on the top step next to him. We sat like this for a while. I draped my arm over his shoulders. He didn’t stop me or say anything. Eventually, he finished his cigarette and flicked the butt onto the front lawn. “Well,” he said, “it was nice talking to you.” He held out his fist and I pressed my knuckles against his.

  I got up. “Good luck,” I said. “You know, you still look good without your mohawk.”

  “Thanks. But I plan on growing it back.”

  “You do that.” I started down the walkway. When I reached the sidewalk, I shouted back at him: “I’m counting on it.” I could barely make him out. He was lying down on his back, one foot propped up over his knee. He’d pulled his hood up over his head and was smoking another cigarette. The ember glowed, a single point of light in the dark. I could still taste him in my mouth, his saltiness and his muskiness. I had an urge to go back and lie down next to him, to spoon him and wrap my arm around his chest and tell him everything was going to be okay. Invisibly, far above, satellites passed overhead. Instead, I turned and walked away.

  The Free Times Café at College and Spadina was one of my favourite places. In the late afternoons, I’d pack my textbooks and laptop and go there to study. I’d order a pint and nurse it for hours. Sometimes I’d order food (their latkes were the best in the city). In the back Club Room the walls were covered with portraits of some of the more famous musicians who’d performed on their tiny stage over the years. Every night, seven days a week, they’d host live music, local and regional artists hawking their EPs or CDs out of a guitar or violin case. The venue didn’t hold more than fifty people. It was intimate and dark, it was beautiful and perfect.

  Last summer I’d introduced Pat to Free Times. He took it upon himself to get to know the owner Judy Perly who’d run the venue close to twenty-five years. She was short with big red hair, and could be spotted personally managing the space every night. This summer, Pat and Blonde Dawn planned their world premiere as a duo for the Monday Nite Open Stage. Back in our senior year, Pat’s band Krypton had won second place in Sudbury’s Teen Battle of the Bands. Once Krypton performed at the mayor’s niece’s house party with all five members wearing nothing but socks. (That show went on to become an urban legend.) Boys and girls fell in love with Patrick Garneau wherever he went. But when Pat told me his plans to perform at Toronto’s Free Times, I was secretly worried how his talent might hold up in the big city.

  The night he was to step up onto the Open Stage, I arrived early to make sure to get good seats. I’d brought Parker, Charles and Megan with me. Sign-up started at seven p.m., but by eight p.m., Pat was still n
owhere to be seen. He wasn’t answering my calls or my texts and the performers were about to begin. After three acts, I gave up on Pat, apologized to my friends, and resigned myself to enjoying the evening as best I could. There was still beer, great food and live entertainment. I figured Pat and I had simply gotten the date mixed up. When the final act came up, I had to do a double take. It was Pat and Blonde Dawn, each decked out in a black suit, sunglasses and a fedora. They’d been sitting in the back all along, and I hadn’t recognized them in the crowd. Pat slung his old Martin over his shoulders, adjusted his harmonica on its neck rack, pointed me out in the front row and announced he wanted to dedicate their opening number to his brother Dan who’d broken up with his boyfriend back in February and hadn’t yet gotten over it. Three more musicians, a bass, a trumpet and a saxophone, joined them on stage. “We do sincerely hope you’ll all enjoy the show,” Pat declared, “and please remember people, that no matter who you are and what you do to live, thrive and survive, there’re still some things that make us all the same. You, me, them, everybody, everybody.” After that, with Blonde Dawn on drums, Pat launched into a cover of “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” By the third chorus, he had the entire Club Room on its feet, clapping, stamping, and chanting along. Then Pat attempted to haul me onto the stage. When I refused, Parker, Megan and Charles pushed me from behind. When I still refused, Judy Perly herself came out and escorted me up. The Blues Brothers had been one of Dad’s favourites. Jake and Elwood Blues were among Pat’s heroes. Even Liam could quote lines from that movie, and this song ranked up there as one of our all-time favourites.

  Pat and I shared the mic, cheek-to-cheek, belting out the final refrain.

  We brought the house down.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wake Up to the Sun

  On our twenty-first birthday, Pat convinced me to come out to a concert at the Kathedral on Queen West. The headliner was some band called Alexisonfire. The venue turned out to be a huge purple-painted cinderblock of a building with filthy, sticky floors. Pat bought me a Jägermeister and a beer and introduced me to a dozen of his friends. “The Kathedral,” Pat explained enthusiastically, “it’s like Cheers for punks.” In the three years I’d lived in Toronto, I’d spent most of my time in campus pubs and cafés. I wasn’t used to this bizarre display of tattoos and piercings. But Pat was Pat. He could be best friends with anyone in the world.