by John Gould
The night Zane barfed on his mum’s magazines, maybe? Yeah, that was probably the first time Matt ever bailed his buddy out.
They were about the umgirl’s age, maybe a little older. Zane’s folks were away overnight so the boys had the place to themselves. As usual they flaked out on the Levins’ giant bed, working their way through Mrs. Levin’s collection of Life magazines—surfing the net, or as close as you could come in those days. They’d made a stop at the liquor cabinet on the way up and, cunning little twerps that they were, decanted a little each from a whole bunch of bottles, a little rum, a little gin, a little scotch, a little Cointreau, a little Christ knows what. When Zane puked, the good news was that he didn’t get much of it on the white bedspread. The bad news was that he got it all over Life. Lifes. Lives?
“I’m so dead,” he moaned. “I’m so dead I’m so dead I’m so dead …”
Matt, who’d only guzzled about half his glass, found himself dabbing frantically at a whole gallery of famous faces. Paul Newman clean-cut as Butch Cassidy, Robert Redford doing his tousled Sundance Kid. There were other kinds of pictures too—a couple of big-eyed kids from Biafra, for instance, the place mums went on about when you wouldn’t finish your Kraft Dinner—but most of the cover shots were of movie stars. Richard Burton haunted as Hamlet, Sean Connery almost hideously hairychested as Bond …
When Zane’s folks got home the next morning Matt took the fall. Flu, he called it. He had a crush on Mrs. L., who was perplexingly hot for a mother, but he knew about her temper too. She kind of bought Matt’s lie, kind of didn’t. To seal the deal Matt went into the washroom, stuck a finger down his throat and barfed for real, even getting a verisimilitudinous streak or two on the polka-dot wallpaper. The barfing initiated a little chain reaction in Matt, upsetting his stomach so much that he stayed home from school the next day. Cause and effect gone topsy-turvy.
So there was that, the time Matt made himself sick for his friend. And so many others. What about the time—
“Um, sorry? Oh, I was just … I’ll have the chicken, please.” Matt stirred, clonked his seat into its upright position. Why does he always get the guilts when somebody catches him drifting off? He took a bracing gulp from his Chardonnay, then peeled back the foil and prodded, with his hijacker-proof plastic fork, at the cordon bleu. Starve a cold, feed a fever—or was it the other way around? Out his porthole, cloud was heaped up like ploughed snow, a splash of dog-piddle here and there where the sun had stained it. And suddenly more mountains: shark’s teeth, shards of glass on a compound wall.
“My friend Zane?” he said. He canted his head confidingly in the umgirl’s direction. “The friend I’m visiting this week?”
“I thought you said your dad.”
“Oh, right. Well, I’m visiting both of them, actually. Kind of a twofer. Do you have a best friend?”
“Not really. I have tons of friends, I don’t see why one of them has to be my best.”
So, a spiky bit of business, this youngster. “Huh, see, I was the other way around. Anyway, just say for a sec that you did, that you had a best friend. Twenty years go by and you’re living way far apart but she’s still your best friend, and she’s doing something nuts. Something beautiful but like, barmy, right? And you realize you’re the only one who can stop her.”
“‘Her’?” The girl hooked the air with two fingers of each hand. “Why ‘her’?”
“Oh, I guess—”
“Most of my friends are boys. Anyway, what does it matter, boy, girl?”
“You said it,” said Matt. “That’s the thing with friendship, isn’t it, that you … Well anyway, where was I?”
“Jane.”
“Pardon me?”
“Your friend Jane.”
“Oh, Zane, actually. But right, so his eyes? They’re different colours too.”
“Different than what?”
“Than each other. Like David Bowie, but the other way around.”
“What?”
“Bowie. On the cover there? Yeah, see his eyes, one blue, one brown?”
“Weird.”
“Yeah. Hey, my wife met David Bowie once. She designs websites, for magazines and stuff but also for rock stars and movie stars and stuff. I’m in movies too.”
“Really?” The girl raked him with her eyes, raked him again. Finally, an ember of interest. “Hey, were you in Home Alone? Were you that bad guy, the tall one?”
“What, Daniel Stern?” Matt hadn’t realized he was looking quite so hangdog these days.
“Yeah. Was that you?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Actually, I’m not really … I’m a critic, more than anything. I, you know, rip movies up? I’m not really in them. Well, except … have you ever seen Kissed?”
“No.”
“Of course not. Bordello of Blood?”
“Sorry.”
“No, no, that’s okay. But so yeah, I write movie reviews and my friend, we grew up together? He makes movies. Wild, eh?”
“Do you rip them up?”
“Pardon me?”
“Your friend’s movies. Do you rip them up?”
“Oh, no. No, they’re good.”
“But what if they sucked? Would you say so?”
“Probably not, no. Anyway, we used to make movies together back in school.” Matt gave his empty Chardonnay a hopeful waggle. No sign of that flight attendant. “Purple Jesus, do you kids still drink Purple Jesus? Grain alcohol and Kool-Aid? No, of course you don’t, not at your—”
“Vodka coolers,” said the umgirl, clearly warming to him now. “Up to four I’m okay, but then it’s puke city.”
“Oh, right. Well anyway, my friend and I made a movie once called Purple Jesus. About, you know, Jesus.”
“Huh.”
One night, six months or so ago, Matt set up a private screening, just him and Mariko, of some of the old Matt-Zane collaborations. He’d recently got them transferred from Super 8 onto digital, Purple Jesus and half a dozen others. “Zany,” Mariko called them, hardy har. But that was just about right. The movies were funny, and full of reckless energy, and all lined up like that they made Matt sad. His plan had been to draw Mariko closer, to re-spark their passion by introducing her to a younger, more devil-may-care version of himself. In a way it worked. She went tender on him, but wistfully, as though she too were overcome with nostalgia, an achy longing for some other trajectory through time.
Had she started up with Sophie by that point? Close, anyway, close enough that not saying something was a lie. And before long Matt was lying too, though of course he did it in print.
“Anyway, I do the website thing too,” he said to the umgirl, “work on that with my wife. For my wife.”
“That’s nice. What about swollen members?”
“Pardon me?”
“The band Swollen Members? Did you do their website?”
“Oh, no. Sorry. But back to this friend of yours. Twenty years go by, okay? You live thousands of miles apart but that doesn’t matter, none of it matters. One day he—”
“Headsets?”
“Pardon me? Oh right, thanks.”
The umgirl ripped frantically into her little plastic pouch—a toddler greedy for her party favour—and set about fussing with her earphones. It must be tricky, Matt thought, what with all that hardware. She had the standard earring in the lobe, but also one high on the arch, in the little runnel there, and one in the toughest bit, the flap you press when you don’t want to hear something. That must have hurt. It looked inflamed, as though maybe she’d done it herself with an ice pick earlier in the day. She couldn’t be thirteen, could she? That would push her into the previous era—sweet, nutty Meg.
Matt said, “Ouch.” He made pincers of his thumb and forefinger, pinched the flap of his own ear—as fuzzy these days, as furry as Toto’s.
“What?” said the girl. “Oh yeah, that one killed.”
“Did you like it? I mean was that part of the t
hing, toughing it out?” They were missing the opening credits but who cared. He was reaching out here, he was making contact.
But no, the girl had moved on. She fiddled with her volume, she tinkered with the tilt of her chair. She was checking in, she was checking out.
A little boy, ten or so. You get that he’s Jewish. He’s being humiliated, pants yanked down to reveal his teensy pecker (schmuck, doesn’t Zane call it, when he’s showing off his Yiddish?) just as he puckers up to kiss the little girl. Then the flash forward to his abject adulthood, the whole anger management bit …
Right. Matt remembered this one, an obscenely popular bit of pap from a few months ago. Better yet, he remembered his kritikal take on it, his slant, his angle.
It’s Matt’s practice to launch each of his reviews—featured, until this week, in Vancouver’s moderately hip Omega Magazine—with a riff so ludicrously tangential that folks will be left in a state of painful suspense. How the heck is he going to tie this in to the movie? Or, as Omega’s editor tended to put it (before the real shit hit the fan), “When the hell are you going to get on with it, McKay? What do you think we are here, the New bloody Yorker?” Laszlo Nagy, the über-nag.
As intro to his review of a recent action flick, for instance, Matt philosophized about the nature of The Good. The Good had been much on his mind since Zane’s revelation, his suicidal swerve into virtue, so it was natural that Matt share this fixation with what Nagy referred to (with sly sarcasm) as his “readership.” Was The Good absolute, Matt’s piece inquired, or was it relative? Could an action be said to be inherently good, or good only by virtue of what it accomplished? He segued from this mystifying malarkey to the question of The Bad onscreen. “What The Bad guys are astoundingly bad at in this movie, and in most movies of its ilk”—Matt way overuses the word ilk and he knows it—“is violence. Other than the hero’s wife and daughter the thugs don’t seem to be able to kill anybody. On one occasion twenty-two of them (I counted) armed with Glocks and grenades fail to take out our hero, this despite catching him kerchiefed to the bedpost by his prankish new mate. Then again, he’s The Good guy: he’s good at violence.” And so on.
This was a couple of months back, about the time Matt initiated his postcard campaign, his pre-emptive strike at Zane. If Zane believed that refusing the drugs was good, that it constituted a Gandhi-like cry for justice, then the first step in rescuing him would be to destroy his notion of virtue. Goodness isn’t so great—this has been Matt’s message in each instalment, seven so far (all northern nature shots, raven, beaver, bear). He knows his arguments are weak, that they can all be made to self-destruct, or at least he’s pretty sure they can. He suspects, furthermore, that being good will turn out to be the only good thing, the only thing that matters. Being uncareless. Being uncruel. Still, his goal here is to keep his friend alive (which would be good too, wouldn’t it?), and he hopes that cumulatively his arguments might shake the man’s faith. Worth a try.
In the case of today’s movie (now eliciting great guffaws from its captive audience), Matt’s intro had been statistical. He’d trotted out a whole horde of figures to demonstrate that people would spend, altogether, a hundred lifetimes watching the wretched thing, a hundred lives. Was it worth it? Matt’s piece took the position, perhaps unsurprisingly, that no, it wasn’t. As he fumed his way through the film again today, up there in the jet-streamed azure, some of his choicest zingers came back to him. Here was the aging star, “a winded bad boy who rustles up the requisite pastiche of all his worn-out old performances, glowering and simpering like an impotent satyr.” Here was the new kid, he of the meteoric career, “only slightly more irksome, in his droll delivery, than your neighbour’s coked-up cockapoo.”
On cue the umgirl gave a great hoot-snort of laughter. Fair enough, who could resist a big-wang joke? It had taken Matt himself two viewings to stop finding it funny.
“There isn’t one authentic”—or had he gone with genuine?— “instant in this whole cynical cash grab. The scenario’s so fixed, so phony you can hear the shriek of cellophane as each scene is dutifully unwrapped.”
Another howl from the fizzy child. Matt suddenly wanted to touch her. He wanted it bad, the way you want to jump off a balcony when you get too close to the edge. What with the new dispensation at home, Matt’s pretty much perfectly starved of contact. Right now he’d take anything, a swat, a knee-bump, a jab in the ribs.
“This film can’t be funny because it can’t be serious. It doesn’t care about anything so it can’t betray anything.”
The teenybopper was really going at it now, booting Pepsi out her nose. Matt took another peep out his porthole. Spindly ice crystals, like flattened jacks, had formed on the glass. Or was it plastic? Plexi? And down below, badlands, dry as bone but puckered, pruned like waterlogged skin. This must be the edge of the old ocean, not far from McKay country, the Alberta wheat field from which the old man arose.
Mariko had once—no, more than once—described Matt to himself as “an artist without an art.” Then she’d fancied that up with a bit of French, he was an “artist manqué.” Artist aborted? Something like that. He was a textbook neurotic, a creative guy with nothing creative to do. Thwarted. Bent. “A lot of the screwiest people in the world have been failed artists,” she’d kindly observed. “Hitler, Stalin.” Ah yes, fascists, film critics. Why didn’t he just tell her to fuck off? He’s certainly never had any luck explaining it to her, how she’s right, how she’s wrong.
“Eeeeeeee!” The umgirl was nearing, surely, the zenith of her delight.
“Careful, though”—Matt’s review built here towards its own climax—“there’s a surprise awaiting you at journey’s end. Our diffident doofus is transformed from a sweet, ineffectual schlemiel into an assertive prick who swaps his whole private life for an instant of public approval, a standing O from a stadiumfull of strangers.” And that was before he read the crowd book.
In a sense the movie had worked, at least in Matt’s case. Its subject was anger, and it had sure as hell pissed him off. Mariko had come up with this bit of pith when the piece first ran, and had been mightily pleased with herself. She viewed anger as the key to all Matt’s problems, recently remarking that for such a doll (doll?) he was the angriest guy she’d ever known. It was anger, she suggested, that held him back—anger at his dad, at his sister, at himself, whatever. This ticked Matt off too, of course. How could she claim he was angry? Docile, more like. Had he ever, even once, let loose over Sophie?
Well, yeah, once, but Mariko wasn’t around so you couldn’t count it. Searching for the car keys one day he found, in her jacket pocket, a pair of unfamiliar panties, a pink thong (not Mariko’s thing) with a flaky stain (did he have to go looking for this?) at the steep V of the crotch. He confiscated the pair, thinking to use them on his wife someday. But use them for what? She wasn’t hiding anything anymore, so what was the point of the revelation? He put the panties back. Then he went outside, grabbed a scrap of two-by-four from under the back porch and beat the bejeezuz out of a stand of cedar saplings. By the time he was done his hands were satisfyingly blistered, and Toto was looking on terrified from an upstairs window. “It’s okay, puss-puss,” Matt called up to her. Then he nipped around the corner and smashed himself in the head with the two-by-four. The blow was powerful enough to stagger him, draw a bead of blood. Mariko never found the welt (what business had her hands in his hair these days?), but she did remark on the damage done to the trees.
“Deer, probably,” Matt said to her. “This is fucking nature we’re living in, remember?”
So yeah, the anger thing pissed him off. And anyway, what was anger supposed to be holding him back from? And why anger? What about fear? What about grief? What about guilt? Weren’t these things holding him back too?
“If the movie were free,” Matt’s review had concluded, “and fifteen seconds long, I’d say yeah, go see it.” Done. Slam-dunked.
“What?” The umgirl was turning to him, tugging at h
er earphones.
Oops, was that out loud? “No, sorry, nothing.” Matt waved it away—tell ya later.
The strange thing was that he didn’t used to believe in judgment, he used to reject it outright. As a much younger man, as a stick-drawn teen Matt spent a lot of cross-legged, lotus-pose time trying to cure himself of judgment by curing himself of judge, of ego. This was a practice inspired by Mr. Kumar—who could be spotted, on a clement day, squatting mysticlike out by the science portable—and it never worked. Matt destroyed his knees but only wounded his ego, about as effective (another of Mariko’s annoying lucidities) as wounding a problem bear. Why had he chosen to saddle himself with this spiritual know-it-all? She’d started down the path of enlightenment way later in life yet scooted way ahead. How did that work, exactly? What were Matt’s chances of turning it around now, catching up? She’d say it wasn’t about catching up, of course, more evidence of his ignorance. “You move towards what troubles you,” she’s many times explained to him. “Only by going at your suffering can you be freed from it.” This trip, then, mightn’t it count as a spiritual quest? All the loss he’s headed for, how can it fail to liberate him? And how can she fail to be impressed?
Matt quick-peeked down at the girl. Her face was tilted up at the screen, a satellite dish searching for a signal. Scooped out. Scary.
Erin. Was it Erin? Yeah, that’s who the umgirl had been reminding him of all along, his sister. That same toughness suddenly shucked off, that same drawn bow of a body. If you deepened the umgirl’s orange streaks you’d have the orangutan red of Erin’s hair. And that frill of baby fat around the elbows and knees? That survived in Erin too, until the swimming kicked in.
Erin always gets realer as Toronto approaches, her absence more palpable, more appalling. Matt never lived in Toronto without her—he took off for the West as soon as she was gone, as soon as she’d finished wasting herself away. He must have imagined that if he left he’d stop losing her, a screwy bit of sorcery which backfired, you’d have to say, since he’s been losing her ever since. What leaving did was intensify his parents’ grief, which of course cranked up Matt’s guilt. Erin was just shy of twenty-five when she died, which made him twenty-two, half what he is today. Half his life she’s been gone, bizarre. For a long time he came home just once a year, but with the Dadinator alone now it’s twice or three times that. The added bonus of course being his Zane-times, his spirited bullshit sessions with his oldest—in a way his only—true buddy.
