Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  Every time Matt quits laughing, Zane starts up again. Every time Zane quits laughing, Matt starts up again. Until finally, “By the way,” says Matt, “a gun?” Zane’s tucked it away now, reached over and slid it back under the driver’s seat. Matt got only a glance but the thing looked serious, the sort of unit you could pull out on Law and Order and not get razzed.

  “Gift from Mercedes. She wanted me to have it after that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know, that thing. Didn’t I tell you?”

  Zane, as it turns out, has not so long ago had the freaking shit beaten out of him. Two guys, fists and then feet. “I took off but one of them tripped me up with, get this, a Swiffer. One of those broom things? He must have grabbed it out of a Dumpster. The whole time they were waling on me I had the ad running through my head. Stop cleaning, start Swiffering! Dying thought.”

  “Were you … I mean was stuff broken?”

  “A couple of cracked ribs. They left my face alone, they were worried about blood I guess. It was after this big AIDS fundraiser, it might as well have been right there on the poster. Wanna Beat Up on a Fruitcake? Tonight’s Your Night!”

  “You invited me to that.”

  “Could be. You should have come. I did an animated video, this Norman McLarenesque deal of a virus breakdancing. Plus we could have got punched out together.”

  They cruise quietly for a while, watch the city start to slip away, the country recover. A gun, what’s gotten into the guy?

  “But maybe we shouldn’t run,” says Matt.

  “What?”

  “River. Maybe I shouldn’t have run.” That moment standing over the man, what was Matt ready to do? Little reason to be angry (you had to feel for the guy) and yet this rage rose up in him. “I don’t know. I have a feeling I’d be good at violence if I ever got started.”

  “Sure,” says Zane. “All that waspero indignation stored up in there. But if you’re looking for a hobby … paragliding, maybe?”

  “Pottery.”

  “Stamps.”

  “Birds.”

  Yeah, birds. Matt’s definitely going to get his checklist under way. Swallows are they, those swoopy ones? Look how they bunch up on a power line—beads on an abacus, halfway through some tricky calculation. Whereas the hawks go it alone, rugged individualists. Each one perches on top of its own power pole, tips its head as you whistle past.

  Matt digs out his cellphone (pleased with himself for thinking to grab it in the scramble) and gets Zane to ring the front desk. Would they mind storing his gear for the day?

  “Uh-huh,” says Zane into the phone. “Uh-huh … Well that’s odd, there should be plenty of credit left on that card.” He throws a what-a-loser look over Matt’s way. “Uh-huh … Uh-huh … Okay, let me check into that and I’ll get back to you … Will do. B-bye.”

  “Fricking hell,” says Matt.

  “That’s sad, man,” says Zane, clicking shut the phone. “That’s incredibly sad.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Think Mariko will bail you out?”

  “No. Yes, if I ask her.” He shakes his head. “Hey, will you ring back, leave a message for Kate? Just, you know, to be careful. Tell her River’s gone off his nut. And tell her I’ll give her a shout tomorrow or something.”

  Zane makes the call. “Off his nut,” is how he finishes, and then he hangs up and says to Matt, “Off his nut?”

  “I don’t know. Or post, what does that mean?”

  “Post?”

  “Yeah. Like if I said to you, ‘Dude, that’s so post,’ what would I mean? DennyD used it in his message today.”

  “Denny …?”

  “My fan.”

  “Oh. Postmodern?”

  “Yeah, okay, but what does that mean? I keep thinking I’ve got it, but then I don’t.”

  “It means everything’s broken, everything’s in pieces.” Zane hacks at his thigh with the blade of his hand. “It means you have to do what you do without knowing why anymore.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows what postmodern means, that’s what it means.”

  “Whoa,” says Matt. “You’re deep.”

  “Damn straight.” With the air of a man abandoning the frivolous, then, in favour of the sublime, Zane shifts his attention to the radio. News, music, news. “Also dead is Santa Claus.” Ho ho ho. But apparently it’s a real guy, a guy who played Santa at malls and stuff for so long he eventually changed his name. Kids tried not to believe in him, he’d flash his ID.

  “Oh, great,” says Zane. “Now I suppose I’ll never get my G.I. Joe.”

  “And I’ll never get my Barbie.”

  Back to music. Here’s a ‘70s station, ‘80s, their era. Big riffy guitars, girly hair on testosterone-crazed guys. Zane cranks it up. Matt cranks it up. Zane cranks it up. The cruddy car stereo starts to distort, evoking the acoustics of certain fetid gymnasia. They’re both howling out the lyrics, Zane solo-ing on the moulded plastic drum-skin of the dash. Matt cranks it up. Zane cranks it up. Matt cranks it up. It occurs to him that this, this is as good as it gets, cruising with a buddy to too-loud tunes.

  “Hey, you know what?” he hollers. “Life? It isn’t so bad.”

  “What?”

  “Life. It isn’t so bad.”

  Zane’s reply deteriorates into a dilly of a coughing fit, but he seems to be trying to agree.

  The last time they were out this way, the two of them, they were three, Mariko along for the ride. It was a few years ago—it must have been March, since Zane was making a major production out of Matt’s birthday. He had them all wearing big game–hunter hats, which kind of blew the surprise.

  The big thing about the African Lion Safari was that the creatures weren’t in cages but running “wild.” You inched along the track in your car as though it were a jeep out on the Serengeti. Baby baboons jungle-gymed on the side mirrors, picked bits of bug off the windscreen. Giraffes swung their heads up to the windows and batted their false eyelashes, cheetahs gazed at you from grassy knolls with that worried expression they all seem to wear. Wildebeest (gnus?), baby elephants fuzzy as mouldy fruit …

  Matt and Zane were complete idiots the whole time. Zane babbled in Swahili, a little of which he’d picked up in Africa when he dropped down there after his Europe tour with Matt. “Unasemaje what kwa Kiswahili?”

  “What?” said Matt.

  “How do you say what in Swahili?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “No, I mean that’s what I said, I said how do you say what in Swahili.”

  “What?”

  And so on. Matt contributed a verse or two of the theme song from Born Free, the sum total of his safari lore. Both boys hooted and screeched like a cheesy Tarzan soundtrack. Mariko did her best, going for a balance between play-along and tolerance, but that night, back at the Dadinator’s condo, she was pretty pissed. It’s the one time she’s ever really lost it over Zane. “You two didn’t even know you were leaving me out, that’s how much you were leaving me out” kind of thing.

  Fights—maybe they should have had more of them. They’re supposed to be good, you get it all out in the open. What if he picked one with her now?

  Zane says, “It’ll still be there.”

  “What? Oh right, sorry.” Matt checks his speedometer, slows, slots the car into the right lane behind a school bus. There’s a whole gallery of kids at the back window, a whole gang of umgirls. Summer school, bummer. Or hopefully camp. The kids wave, cross their eyes, stick out their tongues.

  “Hey,” says Zane, “did I tell you? Mercedes wants to convert.”

  “Convert to what? What are you talking about?”

  “Judaism. She’s taking this marriage thing kind of seriously.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake. You aren’t even married. Is the marriage consummated? No, so get a grip.”

  “Well actually, mister nosy-drawers.” The girls are doing that thing where you suck in your chee
ks, make your eyes go big.

  “Actually what?”

  “If you really want to know.”

  “Hang on. You and Mercedes humped?”

  “I plundered her honeyed folds, is how she puts it. Niagara Falls on our wedding night—we took this same route.” He waves at the highway ahead of them. “Bloody sheets, the whole bit. We were both virgins.”

  Matt does an incredulous face out the windscreen. The girls are all a-giggle. “The virus?”

  “We were safe. A french tickler on top of a double duty. Wedding gift from Nico.”

  “Jeezuz aitch. And now she’s converting.” The girls are doing Popeye poses, pushing their biceps up by hand. “Does she know you aren’t Jewish?”

  “No. Haven’t found a way to break that to her yet.”

  Matt remembers thinking, what a rip-off. They were at film school, maybe fourth year, when Zane told him the story. All the guff he’d already taken, all the grief for being a Yid, and then to be tossed out on a technicality. Zane’s dad was genuinely Jewish but his mum was born Leblanc, a Catholic. To keep life simple she’d gone along with the customs, but she’d never officially converted. According to the letter of the law this excluded Zane. Anybody with a putz might be your dad, after all, but you can only push your way out from between your own mum’s legs. If she’s Jewish, you’re Jewish. If not, not.

  In a sense, then, Matt’s second fake review was inspired by his friend, just as his first was inspired by his father, his third by his wife. The Wall. For his protagonist Matt conjured a Catholic housewife who’s disturbed, but then delighted, to find out she’s Jewish. “So many troubling things suddenly make sense to her,” as Matt explained in his review. “The kink in her hair, the way she craves a bagel, rather than the Eucharist, of a Sunday morning.” Hardy har. “But most of all the deeply personal quality of her grief over the Holocaust. We’ve all been hurt by the Holocaust, but Sara’s been positively haunted by it, as though it’s part of her own personal past—as, indeed, it turns out to be. Those millions who perished are her people.”

  Except that no, they aren’t. The ironic reversal. After a year or two, during which she’s completely overhauled her life to suit her new heritage, a second bit of news reveals that Sara (now Sarah) isn’t Jewish after all—the original documents had been forged by Nazis to incriminate her family. Sara isn’t Sara any longer, but she isn’t Sarah either. She isn’t her old self, she isn’t her new self. Now what? Matt’s favourite part of his review was the nifty bit of Northrop Frye he managed to weave in. “The story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of all literature. Okay, Northrop, but what about people who go the other way? What about people who gain their identity and then lose it?” Lovely.

  “Hey, Zane.” The bus is signalling now, searching out its exit ramp. Soon it’ll bear its load of youth off to their field trip, to their wildlife preserve or Group of Seven gallery. The girls are flinging kisses at the boys—old men?—clutching at their hearts as though they’re being broken. Matt and Zane clutch theirs too.

  “Yeah, Matt?”

  “I’ve been wondering.”

  “Super.”

  “That piece, you never said what you thought about it.”

  “Which piece?”

  “You know, now-I’m-Jewish, now-I’m-not.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s good. A little hard maybe, a little harsh, but good. I’d like to make it. The two of us, you and me. If I don’t die first.”

  “Really?” says Matt. “So maybe a trilogy, we could do all three.”

  “Have your people call my people.”

  “No, have your people call my people.”

  “No, have your—”

  “I could kill myself,” says Matt. “Before you can even die I could kill myself. What about that?”

  Zane flaps his hands, forget it. “You’re too much of a wimp.”

  Any point telling the guy? I’ve still got my kit, man, tucked under the futon … “Yeah, you’re probably right. But what if I just plain die? Heart attack or something, all this stress? Did I mention I’ve been having chest pain this week?” Sure, the pain has all but ebbed away, but no need to share that part.

  “Really? Are you serious?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Shit, man, you should get that checked out.”

  “What, you mean I should live?”

  Hm. That wasn’t quite the tone he was going for. Zane flinches, falls silent. After a stretch of silent driving Matt says, “Price of fame, I guess. Heart trouble.”

  “Fame?”

  “I’m a hotshot now, do you not read the papers? I figured that’s why you were suddenly kissing up to me. Yeah, the counterfeit reviews, people are lining up for a piece of this action.”

  “No kidding. I like it.” Zane grips an invisible mike, waves it in Matt’s face. “So Matt, how long have you been full of crap?”

  Matt strikes a pose for the photographers, lets it go. “God, it must be awful. How did you get so good at it, the media thing? It’s like you’re yourself almost.”

  “I make sure to spend time with the little people,” says Zane. He gives Matt an appreciative pat on the knee. “Plus a stable home life.”

  Matt shakes his head. “So you really did it? You plundered her honeyed folds?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Have any trouble? I mean, did you have to think about Nico or somebody?”

  Zane groans. “Mind your own beeswax.”

  “Who do you guys think about anyway? I mean Brad Pitt or somebody? Or does the guy you think about have to be gay too?”

  “I thought about you, Matt. I always think about you.”

  Big raspberry. “So you really are married then, you son of a gun.” He punches Zane in the shoulder. “Hey, remember in Morocco? That wedding?”

  “Hanna and Helena,” says Zane.

  Hanna and Helena. Two blondes from Helsinki—the boys hooked up with them at the end of their big trip together, on a boat from Spain to Morocco. Europe had been great, but so hopelessly European, so white, so known-world. The boys decided to go wild, slip down into North Africa, wrap up with an exotic flourish. They hit it off with the girls, so they all four made their way to a campsite on the beach at a place called Martil. They got blitzed on the make-believe blue of the Mediterranean, and on a pipe or two of black hash bummed from fellow travellers. Then they pitched their tents and headed into town.

  Stroke of luck, there turned out to be a wedding on that day, local colour or what. Out front were musicians banging on drums, clapping cymbals, wailing away on funny-looking horns. At the heart of about a hundred partiers bobbed a big box, born aloft by four strapping chaps and draped with fancy fabrics. Hanna pointed. “The bride is in there. They have been to the mosque. Now they are taking her to her husband’s home. He can divorce her if anyone sees her in the next fifteen days.”

  Helena shook her head in disgust. “Paskan marjat,” she said. And, in response to the boys’ puzzled stares, “Shitberries.”

  The Finns, as it transpired, were geniuses. They spoke about seven languages each, and were soon to start at the Sorbonne. They seemed to know more about Morocco than the Moroccans.

  Matt said, “Cool little snake charmer thingies those guys were playing, eh?” The four were strolling back to the campsite, swigging by turns from a bottle of retsina.

  “They call that a ghaytah,” said Helena. “It’s double-reeded, like a zurna from Turkey.”

  “Or a mizmar from Egypt,” said Hanna.

  “Or a zamr from Lebanon,” said Helena.

  “Or a shenay from India,” said Hanna.

  So there were patches of conversation from which the boys were more or less excluded. They handled it by getting all giggly, cracking puerile in-jokes. They riffed like mad, needless to say, on Casablanca, the famed city being just a couple of hundred miles down the Atlantic coast. Hanna and Helena were weirdly tolerant. They didn’t exactly flirt but they didn’t throw u
p their hands and flee either, or make a fuss about boyfriends back in Finland. And there were two of them, for pity’s sake. A sign.

  “Or a sunay from China,” said Helena. Matt smiled, contrived a shoulder-brush with her. She smiled back, but then grabbed Hanna and scooted ahead for some girl-talk.

  Matt fell in beside Zane. “So what’s the plan, buddy? Hanna or Helena, your choice.”

  Zane said, “Yeah, tough call. Hey listen, here’s another one for you. How would you … What if one of us were gay?”

  “Gay?” said Matt. “You’re so fugging bizarre. Though if one of us were faggy I guess it’d be better if both of us were.” Snort of hilarity. “That way we could ditch the geniuses, it’d just be the two of us idiots again.”

  Zane shrugged.

  All he did was shrug. It was like that day Erin told Matt about Santa, or rather didn’t tell him about Santa. Matt was busy listing the Christmas gifts he’d ask for that year, Etch A Sketch, Spirograph, Creepy Crawlers. Erin said, “You know about Santa, don’t you?” And he did. In that moment Matt knew about Santa, felt the knowledge rise up from where it had been lodged within him, a burp that just needed patting. Santa was a crock, some old gaffer in a goofy costume. Matt knew it, had been unwittingly knowing for some time. In this fashion, too, everything he was ready to know about Zane was let loose in him by the shrug. His best friend was into guys.

  “Oh,” said Matt.

  Back at the campsite the girls rejoined them, but Matt and Zane brushed them off and went walking. They followed the white trail of the beach towards the darkening bulk of what Hanna had identified as the Rif Mountains. They paced back and forth pretty much until dawn, under a toenail-clipping moon, talking not about the issue but in light of it, rejigging their friendship to function under this new dispensation. The big thing was to steer clear of the tent, which all at once looked so puny.

  In the morning Zane bundled up his stuff and split for Casablanca. He’d keep on going through Marrakesh and into Algeria, Niger, Nigeria (Shanumi would have been a toddler at the time), further and further south to consummate his love affair with Africa. “Come for the animals,” he’d later scrawl on the back of a pride-of-lions photo mailed to Matt, “stay for the people.”