The Antagonist

by Lynn Coady

  Or perhaps Gord will talk endlessly about all the bastards and assholes who have betrayed and conspired against him, always casting an accusatory eye at yours truly, and perhaps yours truly will grit his teeth until he has to make a dentist’s appointment and be fitted with a mouth guard to wear at night, and his stomach acid will churn until he can digest nothing but mushroom soup from a can and he will want, very badly, to get drunk and give nary a thought, for a couple of days, to how our Lord and Saviour, in all his compassionate wisdom, would’ve handled a trial-in-the-desert like Gord.

  And perhaps all that new-found, Christ-inspired patience came crashing at last to the ground when Gord made the mistake of referring to his son as a hockey hero, or, more specifically, a failed hockey-hero, in the girlfriend’s presence.

  As in: “This fella here coulda been another Al MacInnis. Coulda gone all the way to the NHL if only he’d listened to his old man.”

  To which I pleaded: “Gord, don’t be a goof.”

  “But no,” continued Gord. “Listens to everyone but. Telling him he was no good. Story of his life.”

  Which of course would be a nugget of information to pique any girlfriend’s interest.

  “Really Rank? People said you were no good?”

  “No, he’s full of crap,” I replied. With maybe a bit too much volume. “No one ever said I was no good. But nobody ever said I should go into the NHL either, except for you, Gord. Gord likes to imagine the whole world is busy judging my every move, going boo or yay.”

  “You’re the one who thinks that,” Gord countered, happy now to be arguing after all the uncharacteristic nice-making in honour of the girlfriend’s visit. “Your exact problem’s always been that you believe it. You believe the judgement, when you should be looking at the facts. Even when the judgement is clearly a load of BS.”

  This was about the time Kirsten started to realize that the father-son banter had shifted away from the great game of hockey into mysterious, dangerous new terrain. The big hint, she told me later, was the way I’d started moving my jaw minutely back and forth, producing a faint, unconscious twitch beneath my temples. Kirsten always called this my “warning signal.” She said it reminded her of when a cat starts swooping its tail.

  Which meant it was time to change the subject. “What say we put the steaks on, Gord. Or you know what?” I reached — maybe grabbed is a better word — for Kirsten’s hand. “How about a prayer?”

  This won me a sneering once-over from the old man. He wasn’t exactly buying the new me. “Where I come from, you say grace before dinner, not ten times a day before you sit down and before you light the stove and before you wipe your ass — pardon me, dear.”

  “Oh that’s nice, Gord, thanks.”

  “All I know is this: when the whole goddamn town — sorry, dear — turns against a boy for doing what’s right, for doing what the cops are too goddamn — pardon my French, dear — chickenshit to do themselves . . .”

  The ancient lawn chair beneath me gave a rusty squeal as I got to my feet, yanking on Kirsten’s arm to make her do the same. This after months of painstaking effort trying to prove myself a gentle man — the blissed-out, easygoing kind of guy who walked in the light of Christ’s love and all that.

  I knew it wasn’t going to work, is what I’m saying, and it didn’t. My shiny new halo flickered and fizzled out like past-date Christmas lights. It was no match for Gord. We’d been in his company for scarcely an hour and the whole time it had felt like sitting inside a cloud of mosquitoes — every word he spoke a needly humming in my ear. It made me want to swat.

  I announced that I wanted to take Kirsten down to Jessop’s for a beer — her mouth just kind of dropped open at the word “beer,” I remember, as if her jaw had abruptly unhinged. And I did take her to Jessop’s, but first I took her to a motel on the highway and booked us a room, where we proceeded to argue into the night.

  Kirsten didn’t get it. She thought I was crazy and insisted I had to at least call Gord and tell him we wouldn’t be staying the night as planned. She said she couldn’t believe how rude I was being toward my poor old father. “What?” She kept saying. “So he’s a little crotchety — so what?”

  I yelled at her that he wasn’t “crotchety,” he was a fucking prick. It was the first time anyone had done any yelling in this relationship, let alone any wielding of the F-word. I could feel all my work with this girl — all my good behaviour and act-cleaning-up — start to flake away like dandruff.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said fast. (The problem with being a man of my size is that I can’t get away with displays of aggression in mixed company. I can’t shout around women no matter how angry or frustrated I get because it scares the living shit out of them. They start cowering, and then I feel like a monster. I remember one time riding the bus I was sitting beside a baby and I sneezed — I just sneezed — and the kid nearly turned itself inside out with screaming. It’s not a nice way to feel.)

  So I got my act together and said some other things about Gord, trying to explain myself. I strove to paint Gord as a kind of evil genius. Every word he uttered, every gesture, I explained, was a jab at me — a perfectly timed, precisely aimed barb.

  Admittedly, I was just desperate to get my girlfriend onside. I knew how ridiculous this portrait was even as I was painting it. Gord shrimpy in his polyester workpants, floating in one of my discarded hockey jerseys as he waved us a confused goodbye. Anyone who watches him in operation can see my dad is not exactly a man of strategic foresight. Gord is a nerve ending, an involuntary muscle — he fires according to certain stimuli.

  “Rank,” I remember Kirsten saying — this astonished girl who had accepted Jesus as her personal saviour when she was all of eleven years old and never looked back with even a hint of nostalgia on her pagan childhood. “He’s an old man,” she said. “He’s a frail, little old man.”

  And then she held her arms out toward me, not in invitation, but as if to say Behold. She shook her head at me. As if to say Good lord, you could snuff him like a birthday candle.

  And Gord is now twelve years smaller and more frail than he even was then.

  And, look at this: I still can’t stop talking about him.

  05/25/09, 10:56 p.m.

  All right. Jesus. Here we go.

  I was born, and next thing I know I’m a teenager and my father runs the Icy Dream.

  But you realize if I tell this story, it’s just going to be more Gord.

  I find, writing this, I keep getting caught up. Sometimes this is fun and at other times it isn’t and other times it’s not exactly one or the other. I just get caught up and forget who I’m talking to. Not who exactly, but what version of you, Adam. It keeps shifting around. I forget about the thief and liar on the back of the book, the guy who needs regular reminders of how portly he has become given that he was once so afraid of it because what kind of friend would I be if I didn’t make him aware of the gradual bloating process to which he, middle-aged fatso, has succumbed?

  I forget about him and I instead remember you. And I think by you what I’m really getting at is a person who doesn’t exist. There’s the angle-y Adam with glasses in my memory who I was at first a bit put off by because he never said much and had that quiet observer thing going on of which any sane person, I think now, would be suspicious. You reminded me of a certain type of spectator from my hockey games. Guys who’d sit directly behind the net and be so immersed in the action that even when the puck came straight at them and bounced against the Plexiglas in front of their faces, they wouldn’t blink. They’d even lean forward sometimes, as if to meet it. So they were completely absorbed in the action, these guys, but at the same time completely apart. And they knew it, they never forgot for a second. They never doubted they were safe.

  And instinctively, I didn’t like that about you at first. It goes to show a guy like me should always trust his instincts.

  Later — and this gets to the heart of the You I’m speaking of, the You who
doesn’t actually exist — I took the fact of how you sat and stared, how your eyebrows went up and then went down, how you spoke one or two sentences in response to my five hundred — and even those only after a long, agonizing, eyebrow-jimmying silence — I took all this to mean you must be some kind of oracle, a man of profound sympathy and insight. Someone, in short, who understood the way things were, who got it. Who maybe even got me.

  One time, I remember, you put your hand on my forehead. You probably don’t remember this. We were very drunk, or I was anyway, and dawn was going to break at any minute, and I was talking — I’d been talking for hours and it was like labour or something, like giving birth, I was working myself up and now I could feel it coming, I could feel it coming, I was going to tell it, and I broke out in a sweat and started talking faster, willing it to come but terrified and the next thing I knew I was telling it, telling you, and the fluorescent light from the kitchen was glinting off your glasses in a way that drove me crazy, so that I actually got up and moved at one point, closer to you, mid-sentence, just to change the angle so I could see what was happening behind your eyes.

  But that was when you held out your hand, as if to stop me from seeing, or as if I had moved toward you precisely to receive a kind of benediction. You leaned forward and held up your palm like a traffic cop or Diana Ross mid-routine and you placed it against my forehead and your hand felt fantastically cool, which made me realize how heated I’d become with all this talking and confessing.

  And everything stopped. I don’t know how else to describe it. I wasn’t talking anymore because words seemed not to exist. And that was wonderful — it was a wonderful feeling, the sudden nonexistence of words — like a cool shower after a long gruelling hockey practice.

  And morning light started fingering its way through the gaps in Kyle’s shit-green velvet curtains. Curtains he’d hung precisely to keep the morning light from doing this very thing and auguring its way into our hungover dreams, but curtains that consistently failed to hold up against the tenacious morning rays.

  And long fingers of light, I remember, gradually stretched themselves across the room, illuminating the beer bottles. I’m sure you don’t remember. Probably it only lasted for a second, your hand against my head. It would be years before I hooked up with my church but I think I had a moment of precognition then. Faith-healers, charismatics, weeping, shrieking supplicants, the laying on of hands and then — all that pain followed by all that peace.

  But you know what Adam? Fuck this. That’s what I have decided, just now. Fuck you, traitorous fat man, and you, skinny cryptic four-eyes, and most of all You — lying disappointment you have been, it turns out, all along.

  4

  06/01/09, 1:12 a.m.

  SURPRISE! RANK HERE.

  Adam, this has begun — there’s no way around it. That’s what I’ve been realizing this past week. I gave up writing to you and I felt this incredible relief — no doubt you did too. In fact that was the only thing that tainted my relief — knowing you were probably relieved as well. But fuck it, it was over! It had been started, but now it was stopped, and so was over. Cooler heads prevailed and all that. I’d just go back to doing what I’ve been doing all along — working and coaching and going to the gym — and you would go back to whatever it is you do — vampiring the good and the real out of people’s lives — and we’d forget about each other as we’d already done and should’ve kept right on doing.

  So let’s take another run at this, shall we? I’ve been reading over what I sent you so far trying to figure out why in God’s name I can’t just settle into a nice, neat, chronological version of the story of my life. I keep going off on these pointless tangents. It seemed like such a simple idea at first — all I had to do was sit down and write it out. But it’s actually a lot harder than you would think.

  Now that I’ve read everything over, however, the problem has become clear. It appears I’d rather talk about pretty much anything other than working for Gord at the Icy Dream. But if I don’t the rest of the story can’t happen. Which is precisely the hurdle, come to think of it.

  The interesting thing about this whole process is that I find myself realizing what I think about everything at the exact moment I’m typing it out. Then I sit back and read it over and go: Huh.

  Is that how it works for you? This never really occurred to me before. I have to admit I kind of imagined you sitting around rubbing your hands together and cackling to yourself as you plotted out your miserable theft, not just typing away and suddenly looking down and going, Oh hey, check that out. I just completely screwed over a guy I used to be buddies with.

  And I’ve also just realized that even though my outrage resulting from the above has led me to launch myself at you across the ether hollering Hey nice story you thieving bastard but guess what, I have the real story right here — so get comfortable, chump! That is, even though I was completely gung-ho when I initiated this little back and forth between us, there is a big part of me that keeps trying to bow out.

  But I am going to do this, Adam. Neither of us is getting out of it. Every time I think fuck this and fuck you — and I think it with approximately every other sentence — I imagine your relief at never having to open another email from me and it propels me right back here in front of my ancient computer, constantly hitting the wrong keys and having to go back and start again in all my enthusiastic umbrage.

  Gord used to go over the counter. That was the crux of the matter. I had two jobs at Icy Dream — well, three, if you counted working the till and manoeuvring the soft-serve into two perfect undulating bulges balanced in the cone — three bulges if the customer ordered a large. That was something I eventually got very good at, executing perfectly undulating soft-serve — I felt like a sculptor at times. So I did that, I even took a bit of pride in it, but I was mostly at Icy Dream, according to Gord, to “bust punks’ skulls.” So I busted punks’ skulls, but I also had a third job, a private job that I had not been assigned but ended up inevitably assigning to myself.

  And that was to keep Gord from going over the counter.

  The problem, which my father could not have foreseen when the Celestial Fast-Food Overseer descended from the heavens and demanded he choose between ID and JJ’s, was the existence of punks. Punks abounded in our town, as they do all towns, big and small, and were the bane of Gord’s existence as a small-business owner.

  Everywhere kids went in our town they promptly got thrown out of, was the thing. Nobody wanted teenagers anywhere out in public. I knew because I was one. I was the worst kind of teenager — superficially speaking, that is — the kind that grownups like the look of least. Big and thuggy. I could take them. I could take anyone, obviously. And if you put me with another two or three guys, no matter what the size of the others might be, we were terrifying. We were punks.

  I remember getting thrown out of the mall once — for doing precisely nothing. We’d been sitting on one of the benches outside the Pizza Hut waiting for it to be time to go to a dance when a cop sauntered up carrying a grease-pocked bag of garlic fingers and told us to get lost. Our very existence was offensive to the other mall patrons, he explained. They couldn’t abide the sight of us, a clutch of jean-jacketed menace huddled on the bench.

  The cop didn’t call our parents or curse us out and it was, as far as this kind of thing went, a pretty innocuous incident, which is why I didn’t think it was something I should keep from Gord. But it turned out it was. When I mentioned it the next day at dinner he took a fit. I didn’t raise you to be a goddamn punk, he screamed, handing me a bowl of mashed turnips. So why are you going around hanging out in the mall like a goddamn punk?

  I wasn’t doing it like a goddamn punk, I protested. We were just sitting there.

  Sitting there like a goddamn punk! Give me the salt! Like you got nothing better to do!

  I don’t have anything better to do.

  Then you get your ass home if you don’t have anything better to do! Help yo
ur mother! Do your homework! Straighten up your goddamn room! Where the fuck is the butter?

  And so forth. There was no arguing with Gord on the punk front, not since he opened Icy Dream. Punks streamed in at all hours, hot and cold running punks, and Gord discovered his group nemesis. They scared off the kind of customers Gord wanted — moms with kids, for example, not to mention the considerable number of people who shuffled in solo just to buy a single cone or hot fudge sundae, some small confection to brighten up their lonely, ho-hum lives. These customers were depressing, yes, but at least they didn’t make trouble. There is not much sadder than a fat guy in his fifties sitting alone in the back of an Icy Dream plastic-spooning soft-serve into his mouth, but there is one thing sadder, and that’s watching the same guy flinch every time the jolly group of teenage dicks in the next booth erupt into gales of comradely yet somehow malicious laughter.

  The punks would invariably order small orange pops and skulk in the corner booths spinning coins and shooting the shit under their breath until the gales of brain-dead testosterone-stupid laughter erupted, a sound that was like the pig-squeal of microphone feedback to my father’s ears. For a while he tried the “Eat something or get out” tactic, at which point the punks would invariably pool their change and place a single order of small fries to see them through the next hour of customer alienation.