Flagged Victor (15 page)

No doubt, these moods, that kaleidoscope of longing, regret, panic, and elation, were good for my writing. I felt emotions more keenly and painfully than ever before. I drank too much in order to hide and massage my deeper worries and insecurities. As a result, I wrote tense, nervy scenes and sometimes whole stories that wound in on themselves so tightly, they barely breathed. Rivers told me he’d reappraised my potential, upgrading me from a plot-driven craftsman like Sidney Sheldon or Irving Wallace, to a modern Hemingway like Robert Stone or Thomas McGuane, writers I promptly devoured.

Then one evening, the carousel of date nights came to an end. Chris showed up at my house as dinner was starting. I would have invited him in for spaghetti but my parents were not the type to welcome strays. So I asked him what was up, bolognese sauce on my chin, and he told me Radha was through with me. I took the surprise blow hard to the stomach but didn’t flinch. Instead, I managed to shrug and ask, Did she say why?

Chris shrugged in turn. Bad enough I’m stuck delivering the message. Didn’t bother to get all the why stuff too.

Fuck why, I agreed.

But back at the dinner table, I spilled my milk.

With the end of the run of such an intense and rewarding social life, you’d think I could have sublimated all my energy and ripped off straight As and a novel or two, but it was all I could do to manage my course load. I drank even more frequently instead, and occasionally my belligerence got me into trouble, the odd scuffle and push, the occasional pounding on the sidewalk outside some sordid establishment. I fancied my activities as extra credit in the writing school of real life.

The
encounter with my father, what Chris and I thereafter referred to in Robert Ludlum fashion as the ass-fucking accusation, inspired my desire to get a place of my own.

Ultimately, this effort sprang the trap I was trying desperately to avoid.

Chris seemed to understand the vulnerable position I’d put myself in, because he offered a complicated and self-serving plan to secure my freedom. I would need money to move out on my own, and money, in ordinary circumstances, required a paying job. Therefore, I should volunteer to my parents that I was going to double down on work that summer. I would accede to my father’s wish that I serve as a replacement teller at the bank, and I would spend my evenings and weekends pulling rickshaw with Chris.

Why would I do that? I asked, never as rapidly devious as Chris.

Rickshaw is a great cover for money making, Chris explained. You can make enough in rides and tips to flash bills whenever
you want, and we can hang out and drink all summer. But if you work at the bank too, you’ll make your dad happy, and you can scout security and help plan a heist. It’s a win-win.

It didn’t feel like a win. It felt like death. But I could come up with no rebuttal worth uttering. My misgivings were not moral, they were steeped in the fear of getting caught and the dread of betraying my father. I doubt Chris would have understood either concern.

For this reason among others, I was occasionally petulant with Chris. But he seemed to take my moodiness in stride, never making much of it, allowing me to dissociate even further from any sense of responsibility, like a child. Robbing a bank involved more reconnaissance and study, more dedication and even professionalism than I thought Chris had in him. But like a secret hobby, he let the pursuit absorb much of his time. I understood that robbing a bank wasn’t about the money to him. It was a theory he had to prove. And this gave me hope, however dwindling, that he would not get serious with the deed. Sometimes he asked me questions about my father’s bank and my own experience as a summer teller, never so intrusively that I was put off by them, but frequently enough that I knew he wanted my secret knowledge. I supplied him—again grudgingly, petulantly—with as little information as I could, as though the conversation was merely boring. I began to feel sick just seeing a bank. Whenever I walked by one, I put my head down and strode a little faster to make it go away. Inevitably, at such moments, the sun was breaking through the clouds and the shards of light jabbed a migraine into my fevered brain.

Having said that, I must concede we barely talked about the
bank-robbing idea at all. Percentage-wise, we spent more time talking about the level of fitness I would need to acquire to work rickshaw.

Chris insisted that, in terms of body cut, I had more natural talent than him for muscle development, but I knew I lacked other more important ingredients, such as will, discipline, and desire. Still, he scared me good with stories of how difficult it was to pull a rickshaw up the steep Halifax streets, and got me into the gym and out onto the road on a pretty consistent training regimen. Two days a week, we did chest, triceps, and abs; two days, shoulders, biceps, and legs. Three days a week, I went running, but this I did by myself, on the sidewalks around both lakes, the Sony Walkman headphones on, Wagner or Pink Floyd playing. The closest thing to a great novelist is a composer, Rivers said. I heard novels that way, before I wrote them. I understood that mood and language and metaphor got introduced as themes with their own specific notes and refrains, and that they came together over the course of a piece in new and surprising ways.

I was less comfortable and meditative at the weight pit. The rubbery, mouldy smell of the place was the odour of intimidation. I felt like an interloper in a world of giants, men who pumped and groaned, heaved and clanked, stared like mesmerists at the bars above their eyes and lifted them by flaring their nostrils before letting them come crashing down like great continental plates smashing together. Most were athletes putting in their time, hockey players, football players, discus throwers, shot putters, but the truly serious were just bodybuilders, monk-like in their devotion, living to rep, repping to live.

By the time I began to feel somewhat confident about my abilities, Chris must have grown tired of my mood swings. After I bragged about a series of squats I’d just done, he called me out.

Don’t kid yourself, he said. You ain’t shit.

I guess that hurt, so I dared him back, and before I knew it, I bet him I could do fifty reps on a curl bar with twenty pounds.

Chris snorted. You do a hundred reps with an empty curl bar and I’ll give you twenty bucks.

That was doubly insulting. A curl bar was the feather in your hands before the weights went on. I could curl it forever and not even feel it.

But Chris said, You just try, big talker. Give it your best shot.

The bar was light as air. I began my reps, counting quickly, running past ten before I knew it, feeling practically sorry for Chris and how foolishly he’d be parted from his twenty. At fifty reps, I was no longer smiling because I was bored. This was taking too long. At seventy, I started to worry. It wasn’t the weight of the bar but the fact that my biceps were now engorged with blood. Soon it became difficult to lift the bar and I saw Chris’s thin smile growing.

Fuck you, I said.

And Chris just nodded. Yeah, we’ll see, tough guy.

At ninety, I knew it was impossible not to make it, and yet my biceps and forearms were screaming in agony. In fact, I was no longer sure where bar ended and flesh began. Through prayer and the fear of unbearable humiliation, I managed to contort and fling my body sufficiently to complete the last few reps.

See? I said.

You would have bet me five hundred reps if I’d suggested it, he said.

And though he was right, I still took the twenty.

That night, I knew my body was wrong. A mental limit had been surpassed. I felt broken inside and had a premonition that bad things were about to happen. I joined my parents for television, something I rarely did, because I did not want to die alone, but I spoke only in monosyllables and hissed breath. I had the strangest fear that I was turning to stone.

I went to bed early and woke in darkness unable to move my arms. They were frozen, bent at the elbows. Half awake, I tried to sit up but couldn’t. The pain in my arms was too extreme. I went back to sleep and began to think, even before the restless dreams took me, of Rivers’s missing leg. I wondered, half-deliriously, if I would still be able to write with no arms. I remembered the story of an armless boy who learned to play the flute with his toes. Perhaps I could type that way, I considered, or peck the keys with some stick taped to my forehead, an industrious woodpecker hunting for a good phrase.

By morning, I understood that the nightmare was real. I could not, no matter how I forced myself, move my arms up or down. The tendons were high-tension cables. In the bathroom, I could hold my toothbrush but not reach my mouth, so I bent and sucked paste from the tube, then swirled it with my tongue. Wiping my ass was like flailing with a mannequin’s arm. In the shower, I could not reach my hair to shampoo it. Desperate, tearful, worried, I finally squirted shampoo on the wall and rubbed my head into the tiles.

It was a week before I could fully bend my arms again. During that eternity, I could not type or jerk off, and I realized that working out was a distraction from more important matters. I stopped going to the weight room. I stopped running. How hard could rickshaw be? I decided writers didn’t need to be Olympic athletes, they just needed to be Olympian drinkers, and I adopted a sullen, wounded pose as my new drinking stance.

There
was a good reason Chris did not consider two jobs to be any great shakes. While going to school, he was still working at Canadian Tire Mondays and Saturdays, and he had also taken on Tuesday and Thursday night shifts as a bouncer at the Billy Club, a bar whose customers were primarily police or police related. You might not have thought that a bar frequented by law enforcement types would require the services of a bouncer. A coat-check girl, maybe. A bartender for sure. But police and the people who loved them were heavy drinkers and indiscriminate brawlers and troublemakers. It was a measure of Chris’s success in the weight room and on the speed and heavy bags that he had the size and vibe to serve as a general deterrent and occasional enforcer to unruly cops.

He invited me in, one slow Tuesday night, to hang out. It was strange to see him at the door in his button-down shirt and black pants, with his thin moustache and his surprisingly bulging muscles, looking adult and serious, but he gave me a grin and told me to hit the bar, and promised he’d pop by when he could.

I drank Jameson neat, because that seemed right for a writer undercover, and also ordered a Labatt Blue chaser, hoping at least one of them would be on the house. I took in the bar like a connoisseur of bitter dives. It was a low-key place, with lots of dark wood rails and round tables, and space for the dance floor and a disco ball overhead. Chris kept a drink behind the bar, which the bartender lifted up for him whenever he came by to talk. The DJ started up around nine and some dance music came on and a few of the women went out to the floor to groove together. I watched. One caught my attention. She wore a sexy but quietly sophisticated black dress and tall black boots, and when she danced, she did not exert herself overly but made the most of small, exquisite movements. Everything about her was mature and classy, except for a studded dog collar around her neck. This simple token, this elegant mark of outrageous perversion, fixed me with desire.

Chris came by on his break, and we spent the next half hour on stools as the place began to fill up. The men were thick-necked and bristle-cut, except for the occasional long-haired hippie type that Chris would mention, offhandedly, was in drug enforcement or an undercover agent in a biker gang. The women were mostly wives and girlfriends, Chris said. They were older, not quite old enough to be our parents but out of our league, and I felt like an imposter playing at adulthood. Nevertheless, I was on fire for the one in the dog collar and I kept an eye on her. She sat with a man and another couple, but every so often, I swear I caught her looking my way.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

Do you see her? Oh my God. What’s her story?

Chris figured out who I was talking about, and turned back to the bar before answering.

She’s a schoolteacher.

I couldn’t believe it. What school?

Some elementary.

I pictured innocent children, and a leather boot–wearing teacher chained to the desk.

Dude, she’s been looking at me.

But Chris just laughed and shook his head.

What’s so funny? It’s about time I banged a teacher. I’ve been imagining it for years.

She’s a friend of mine.

A friend?

He lowered his voice. I’ve kind of been fucking her since I started here.

What do you mean? Her? Why didn’t you tell me?

I was as shocked by the news as I was by the ever-so-casual betrayal of Susan.

I didn’t want to make a big deal about it. She’s married.

She’s married?

Yeah, to a decent guy, too. He’s here now and then. Works a lot of extended shifts though. She’s lonely, I guess.

And she fucks you?

I think she thinks I’m older than I am. The other night, she finally figured out I’m only in college, and it kind of threw her.

What do you mean?

She told me she wasn’t sure she could do this anymore. But when I woke up in the morning, she was blowing me.

Jesus. I paused to gather my thoughts. With the dog collar on?

He just grinned.

Handcuffs?

Not as of yet.

Is she kinky?

He burst out laughing. What do you think?

I did not know what to think.

I was still bewildered, and even more hammered, by the time Chris came back for his second break around eleven. I was reading a paperback, something by Bukowski, and the alcohol and the dance music and thoughts of dog collars were the rhyme and metre of my surreal Bukowski buzz.

I think we need to really do this, Chris said, when he sat back down. He was drinking openly now. There was no more need, apparently, to nurse and hide his cocktail.

Do what? I asked.

The bank thing, he said.