Mean Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

to do.
    Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t pick apart everything about the night in order to determine why. I need to know, though. I am terrible at having a good time. It’s the self-consciousness thing, it’s the pressure. Whenever I’m out with people, the stated purpose being “to have a good time,” all I can do is sit there neurotically checking myself every five minutes: “Is this fun? Am I enjoying myself now? I think I’m having fun, but what if I’m not? What if thepeople I’m with don’t think it’s fun at all? Are
they
having fun?” And on and on it goes. And eventually I’ll start to even resent the people I’m with, thinking, to hell with them if they aren’t having fun, they’re no fun anyway. It’s a crazy, fun-destroying compulsion I can’t seem to resist. But I resisted it Friday night. Because I got drunk. I forgot to keep checking myself.
    Therefore, when poet Jim Arsenault offers me a rum toddie at 1:18 on Monday afternoon, I accept. I accept with aplomb. I say, “You’re goddamn right I do, Jim,” and do you know what Jim does in return? Yes. On his way to the cupboard, he rests his palm on my head. Indeed, he ruffles my hair.
    Oh, we speak of many things that afternoon, Jim and I. He coughs and horks into a Kleenex and tells me he loves my new poem. He calls it a breakthrough. He doesn’t mind that it’s terse, brief, scant. He doesn’t say it should have a murder in it. Jim tells me my new style is “muscular.”
    I can’t quite let myself believe it. I’m afraid an alarm clock is going to ring somewhere and I’ll find myself back in Summerside, in grade 9, maybe—the purgatory of high school stretching before me wide as the Northumberland Strait—Jim and poetry on the other side, far and wee.
    “You don’t think it needs to be more exciting?” I venture. It feels almost dangerous, this conversation. How precisely it seems to be lining up with my dreams.
    “Ah, Larry,” Jim ducks his head, wearing an expression that is completely new to me.
Abashed
is the word. “I was having some fun with you that day. I’d been marking student poetry all afternoon.”
    I tell Jim that I understand. And I do. The rum flows into my cheeks and the afternoon sunlight filters through the changing leaves and turns Jim’s dingy farmhouse kitchen agilded, fairy-tale pink: the searing, summertime colour of good.
    I no longer am a student poet. That is what Jim means.
    I don’t find out about the tenure thing until I get back to campus two hours later, having walked back from Jim’s place out near Rock Point. It was way too long a walk, and Jim told me I was crazy, but I had an evening class and had to sober up for it somehow.
    “Oh, fuck your class and stay for dinner,” Jim told me. The entire afternoon he gave no hint of what was going on in the department. “I’ll make pasta,” he said. He even went so far as to open the cupboard and brandish a can at me. I was dying to. There was something so homey about sitting at a kitchen table with a man who had a cold, a blanket around his shoulders. Intimate. And I still hadn’t met Jim’s wife, whom I anticipated to be this protean mass of female sensuality, if
Blinding White
was any indicator. Moira. Jim’s muse.
    But part of me wanted to leave. It’s hard to explain. It was so good I couldn’t bear it after a while—I knew it had to get wrecked at some point. I would drink too much and then get nauseous or worse—say something stupid to Jim. Nothing gold can stay, that cheesy, depressing poem dictates, and there’s a cheesy, depressing truth to it. The afternoon was nothing if not gold. Golden. The rum and the sunlight.
    “He doesn’t have a cold,” says Sherrie.
    “I was just there.”
    We’re hissing at each other in a corner of the lecture hall. Professor Bryant Dekker is up there talking about Macbeth. Shakespeare—every English undergrad has to take it. Dekker isn’t much of a commanding presence—nothing