Savage

by Nathaniel G. Moore

  Dearest Mega Power partner Andrew:

  So, listen. Here are Some ideas for our presidential campaign:

  Send it to the radio day (we make up new remixes of songs and try and get them on air: the whole school sends in hundred of tapes!)

  Come to School Naked Day!

  Food drive (run over food)

  Video dance party with Erica Ehm

  Erica Ehm Day

  Roof Day (classes on the roof, suntanning, barbecues, concerts, just like The Beatles!)

  Wednes-Day

  This is the end, my only friend, the end. We should go to the meeting (it’s 15 mins.) at 3:20 tonight and see who’s runnin’; then we either run or run for the door! Imagine: Don’t be sour, vote Mega Powers! Also, I think I’ll be playing hockey in the same league as that guy in our Eng. class, Steve, Stevie.

  Signed truly,

  Nate Savage (co-Mega Power)

  *

  "Ohhh yeeeah!" I shouted down the sunny third-floor hallway. "Andrew!"

  He was wearing his now-trademark green zippered sweatshirt and Boston Red Socks ball cap, blue jeans and tennis shoes, the same combination of attire he had started wearing last spring. He appeared to live in that crusty green thing, lumbering around the halls, his books and Alpine car stereo in one hand. A part of me began to really associate him and his constant rejection of our friendship with the evil forest tone.

  A part of me still had hope.

  I pointed my finger in the air majestically, then at Andrew.

  "What?" Andrew said, glaring quizzically, car keys in his mouth.

  "Did you get my note?"

  "Yeah, but it made no sense." Andrew said. "So I put it in a pile with the others."

  "Did you read the part that went: DON’T BE SOUR, VOTE MEGA POWERS!"

  "Kind of hard to miss. What does that even mean?"

  "Did you hear the morning announcement yesterday?"

  "No," Andrew said, not slowing down his pace.

  Inside my own production-studio mind, I was culling up music suitable for montages and spliced my thoughts with campy video shrapnel: cottage go-karts; road hockey; remote-control car racing; a photo still of Andrew and I and another boy from 1983 in front of the church before I went camping on a cub-scout weekend retreat. My recent co-op placement at Rogers Sports made me think in timing and cuts and fades, in voice-overs and sound bites. I was learning new terms like "SWIPE," the button that put text on the screen. Or "FADE-EDITS" from the top left to the lower right, a wash of video, the passage of time and space with crisp toggles and adjustments of frames.

  "Mega Powers all the way, oh yeah!"

  "We’re not running. Are you crazy?"

  "Come on, we have a shot."

  "No way," Andrew said, dismissing the suggestion.

  "So what do you think?" I said. A slight manic tone in my voice cut through the hallway chatter.

  "It’s stupid."

  "I’m playing in the same league as Steve; did he tell you?"

  "Yeah, I asked him. He has no idea what you’re talking about," Andrew said, squinting into the sun, his large head and thick blonde hair, moderate in personal grease, were kept hidden under his aging baseball hat.

  "So what do you think?"

  "No way."

  "Why not?"

  "You’re totally nuts. No way!"

  "We could run!"

  "Not."

  "The meeting is tonight. We have to go. Just think of it!"

  Andrew popped the doors and started to walk up the roadway toward Bayview Avenue. I gave slight chase.

  "Where are you going?" Andrew asked.

  "I don’t know. You have a spare now?"

  "Yeah."

  "What are you doing this weekend?"

  "Squash probably with Alex and Scott."

  "What are you doing now?" I asked. I wanted to tell Andrew about Blade Runner returning to theatres after ten years. We had seen the original together with Andrew’s dad a decade earlier.

  "Going home," Andrew said.

  "Can I get a ride?"

  "I guess so. Don’t you have class?"

  "No, my co-op placement thing; it’s only three days a week. I don’t have to go in today."

  "I can’t believe they let you work on television."

  "I mostly just walk around with video tapes and move equipment. It’s not like I’m hosting a show in my driveway about road hockey or something."

  "I’m sure you’ll suggest it."

  On the bus rides to and from the television station, I would sketch mythological friendship logos while a haunted, possessive tone filled me with a sense of comfort and belonging. I lived inside the energy of the drawings, until the faint blue-ruled line became filled with clutter and intrigue, the page entirely consumed in my dark etchings and explosive contours.

  "I got a tape we can listen to."

  "No way."

  "It’s good."

  "What’s on it?"

  "Doors. Simon & Garfunkel. Some New Order, and I also got this cool mixed tape from this guy at my co-op: Pink Floyd, its really—"

  "You like all old music, from like a thousand years ago."

  "What?"

  "It’s crap," Andrew said. All week I had been trying to trade CDs with Andrew—U2 for Pearl Jam was my latest offer—even going so far as to borrow from my sister’s collection.

  "The madness can formidably be felt, all around the world, yeah, I am gonna take it to the limit. No one can stop me!"

  "You see, you start to drift into like, I don’t know, outer space, and its goodbye Nate. There you go. You’re gone: you go into another dimension."

  "Wanna play hockey?"

  "Hockey-Hockey!" Andrew laughed. He had this staccato tone when he said the line, mocking me, reflecting my enthusiasm for playing. "Maybe. But we’re not keeping score or anything. I have to pick something up from my dad at work."

  "OK."

  "Just don’t smoke or anything," Andrew said. "You’ll get me in trouble."

  "I don’t smoke," I said, sliding my seatbelt across my chest.

  "My dad said you came over the other day and you smelled like smoke."

  "It’s not me, it’s my Dad," I said, shaking his cassette tape.

  "Sure," Andrew said. He took his car stereo from his knapsack and placed it carefully into the dashboard.

  "I smoked, like, one time," I said.

  "Well it must have been that one time. You and your dad smoking, best buddies."

  "No way! He stinks. He has grey skin. He’s turning into The Undertaker!"

  Andrew’s silver Camaro chortled along the familiar streets. The radio blared. My cassette jostled inside his pant pocket. He left me in the car and went inside the funeral home. The music continued to pump. I looked at the street from the rearview side mirror. Andrew’s form slowly returned to view.

  "I might get a sun roof put in," Andrew said.

  "Oh, great," I said. "That’s good for fishing and stuff."

  "Yeah, for fishing," Andrew said. He gunned the engine and peeled around the corner.

  "So you got your licence, but your Dad won’t let you drive the car?"

  "No."

  "That’s dumb," Andrew said. "Does Holly drive?"

  "Yeah, but only when she’s in town. She doesn’t have a car at school."

  The trees were wild with sun and wind; fluorescent backpacks, shorts and T-shirts popped in the late-afternoon electricity.

  Andrew stopped his car in front of my house. "I got to go home first and get my stick."

  "OK," I said. "I’ll get the nets out."

  "You’re in net," Andrew said.

  "Urine net, OK." It was my favourite road-hockey joke.

  I struggled with the seatbelt. Andrew honked his horn as his car tore down my street towards Laird Drive. I opened the large brown metal door where the hockey nets lay in wait. The smell of grease, dried grass clippings and mildew filled me. I had a quick coughing fit, then dragged the plastic net from the garage’s
uneven shadows.

  As I fished the nets from the garage, I saw my bundle buggy with bits of newsprint and plastic in the bottom fermenting in the garage’s dank atmosphere. At seventeen, I felt like the oldest paperboy in history. I looked up at the overcast sky, then to the driveway and prayed the rain would hold off for at least another hour.

  That night, I spent time with the tourists. The space pricks were working faster than normal.

  When something pierced my throat, I asked them, silently, What was that?

  It was an injection, thought one, slapping the middle of my face with its large hand.

  An injection of what, you piece of shit?

  Another thinks to me, It’s like a virus.

  What?

  It will protect you.

  I don’t get it.

  If you die, we will have to find another like you and start over.

  You guys are total fucking douche bags, you know that? I hope you all get murdered.

  Where is the moon?

  Oh, fuck off.

  All of the space pricks become still, seemingly lifeless. There are no outside thoughts. I become aware of a distant sound. If it is not an alarm, then their music sounds as bad as they smell.

  What’s going on?

  The lights go out. I panic. I do not like being in the dark with them. One night, they blinded me while they sampled my brain through a nostril. They made note of the various ways in which I had imagined killing them.

  After nearly two minutes, the light returns.

  The one that slapped me is close to my face, looking into my eyes. After the initial fright, I grimace at the stench.

  It seems to be sorting through my thoughts, making some kind of assessment. I am afraid to move because this one is obviously bat shit. It straightens and, extending its spine, makes itself a few centimetres taller.

  Aiming for the middle of my face, it raises its hand.

  My skull vibrates as his silent voice grinds my brain. I hear another voice under it, screaming. It take a few seconds before I recognize it as my own. Every atom shakes with the absurd question.

  Where is the moon?

  The lights go out. I wait, cringing at the sound of the alarm, waiting for the hand to strike.

  10 )

  Confusion

  Thursday, November 26th, 1992

  I had asked my supervisor, Steve Spice, if he could tape the WWF’s Survivor Series event, which was airing on pay-per-view on Thursday night. I was excited about getting the tape from him first thing Friday morning.

  I was shocked that morning, walking up to Steve Spice with a bit of trepidation, nervous to get the tape. Giddy even. "Oh, no, I forgot," Steve Spice said, shuffling papers at his desk.

  I had been looking forward to watching the event all week. Getting the courage to ask my supervisor to tape it had been a big deal; this omission to tape it was just cruel, humiliating and awkward. I got on the phone with Andrew when I got home that night.

  "He didn’t tape it," I said on the phone to Andrew.

  "Oh, well, call me later or something," Andrew said and hung up.

  Earlier, I’d even bragged to Andrew about watching the event live and had tried to lure him into coming to Rogers that night to watch it with me, hoping somehow that Randy Savage’s replacement tag-team partner might be a surprise return of Hulk Hogan. Of course, that turned out to be a rumour I had conjured in my own mind. Days before the event, it was announced that "Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig was Savage’s new tag-team partner, replacing the suspended Ultimate Warrior. My backup plan was to watch the taped event sometime that week with Andrew. That, of course, didn’t work out either.

  Now at home, the early evening was filled with my usual near-silent bedroom activity. I was cuing up tapes on my VCR. Just before dinner, Mom and I visited Grammy at the hospital. She was barely holding on in her giant hospital bed. They told me to take the video camera out of the hospital. I filmed Mom in the elevator; she scowled and waved her hand at me like I was a mosquito. I managed to capture a grim shot of Grammy’s hand and a bit of her cheek behind the steel bars of her bed.

  Her small body, tangled with tubes and monitoring systems, replaced the humorous vigour I had known her to possess while playing piano or frolicking in the park when we fed the geese. Grammy would call them "dirty birds."

  Mom’s voice snapped down the stairs from the kitchen.

  "Nate, it’s for you," she said. "I think it’s your supervisor from Rogers."

  Scraps of bright neon material had covered my bedroom floor for days. I put off vacuuming for days, and opted instead to pick things up manually, at my leisure.

  "Just a sec," I said, lifting the phone. My head was a haze of neon glows, of frayed hope and determination, obsession drove me as I cut jaggedly this nightmarish outfit, a poor man’s version of Randy Savage’s hyperbolic ring jacket, complete with cowboy fringe and disco glitter.

  "Yes, hello?"

  "It’s Steve Spice. Can you meet me tomorrow at 10 a.m. instead of 8 a.m.? The shoot time has been changed."

  "Yeah, that’s no problem," I said.

  "See you tomorrow."

  I gazed down at the remnants of my tailoring project. The fluorescent routine had consumed me for the last month. A late Halloween costume that would never fully materialize in public, its assembly ate up countless hours, including trips to fabric and hardware stores.

  Once I had the long segments pinned in position along the inner arm, I had Mom sew things into place, turning a once-simple jean jacket into a bright laughing stock.

  Each arm had six eighteen-inch strands that fell to the ground to create a curtain of colours. With glitter paint I wrote the words "MACHO MAN" on the back, added more glitter and covered a garage-sale cowboy hat in orange spray paint. Wearing the hat and jacket, I turned on my video camera and stood in the southeast corner of my bedroom.

  I cued up Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance on my cassette player, dubbed from Holly’s A Clockwork Orange soundtrack, did a dramatic twirl in my low-lit bedroom and pointed my finger at the camcorder. In a soft growl of a voice, one that tried to conceal my intent to my buzzing family, who coffee-slurped, newspapered and dish-washed above me, I laid out a challenge to Andrew, to face him one on one, somewhere down the road. It was the usual spiel I’d send him in letters or live talks.

  "The Mega Powers will explode! Andrew, I’m gonna getcha! You’re in the danger zone, oooohhh yeeeaaahhh! Eleven years is a long time, brother, yeah, the Mega Powers, the irresistible force meets the immovable object, and we will finish the score!"

  I raced towards the camera, fraying neon streaked at my arms. I was winded, in frenzy, trying to hit the PAUSE button; the neon strips drooped from my arms and got tangled in the armpits of my insane coat.

  I shook them free.

  Peering into the camera’s view piece, I relived recent history: "I’m gonna getcha! You’re in the danger zone—"

  The eerie taunt clip would appear at the end of a thirty-minute VHS video that featured road-hockey clips mixed with wrestling audio, a few minutes of George Harrison’s "All Those Years Ago," and the pivotal chorus in Simon Garfunkel’s "Bridge over Troubled Water." There were also clips of George Michael’s "Monkey" and even original audio dubs of Andrew and I from a 1986 audio cassette, play-wrestling in the basement.

  NATE: "I’m Macho Man Roddy Piper!"

  ANDREW: "Macho Man Roddy Piper?"

  NATE: "I’m Macho Man and Roddy Piper, put together..."

  ANDREW: "Put together as one...there are people dying..." Andrew sang, channeling his best recollection of "We Are the World."

  The editing I was proudest of was the final shot of Andrew walking to his car some six months earlier, shot from my front porch, with me in the foreground, cleaning up the road-hockey aftermath, as Andrew walked west to Glenbrae Avenue where he had parked his silver Camaro. To me, it all looked unbelievably real. As the shot’s simple trajectory played out, an interview clip from George Michae
l was dubbed in:

  It was an incredibly intense four years, you know, um, and I think I lost maybe some of my, uh, perspective during that time I became, uh, very negative about a lot of things which I should have been very grateful for I think I got back that kind of perspective. Also I’ve had time to remember myself as an individual again as opposed to being part of what was called a phenomenon. And I worked very hard to create that phenomenon, but, um, having created it, it did kind of run away. And it’s taken me a while to see where I want to go and what I want to do with the rest of my life. But I’m happy now, I’m much happier than I’ve been in probably four or five years and I think I’m very balanced at the Moment.

  I showed Mom the clip. "Balanced? Good one," she scoffed. I had asked her to watch that particular segment, not fully explaining the context of what I believed to be an epic film. After weeks of editing, re-editing and culling references that only Andrew and I would know, I prepared his package.

  "DEATH OF THE MEGA POWERS: 1987–1992" was etched across the front load label in a fat green marker, wrapped in hardware-flyer newsprint.

  One of the last clips was Andrew and I in low-fi (and low-lit) resolution racing our remote control cars on the street with jagged lightning beckoning the night. Andrew had left because of the pending rain, but I remained outside, filming the lightning from the safety of the garage, sitting on a discarded couch while the camcorder wheezed in and out of focus, sounding blind and frightened, watching the jagged storm scar the night and lick the houses.

  I slipped the VHS anonymously in between Andrew’s screen door and front door. I pedalled home, my bike a seamless tool along Broadway Avenue, then Brentcliffe, traversing the slackening rain-wet pavement, my heart pounding, feeling lost, defeated, souring and slithering in the neighbourhood’s hostile groves.

  *

  When I awoke the next morning, I peeked through the thin curtain on my window: a blanket of fresh snow that guarded my basement bedroom windows was now being eaten by an intense morning sun.