Mean Boy Read Online Free PDF

like Jim. It’stelling how the less interesting professors are thrown into teaching these monster classes while the higher-ups get nifty little seminars. Jim’s only been here a few years, but he’s got cachet because he is what I’ve overheard Claude identify as a “rock star.” This is the Canadian way of saying people in Toronto know who he is. He could be there right now, Jim’s given us to understand, getting drunk with the likes of Greg Levine and Dermot Schofield, were he not so appalled and disillusioned by what he saw during his time there, after
Blinding White
was published and he was the toast of the town. I’m dying to know. What he saw, what it was like. He drops tantalizing little hints in class from time to time about “rampant dilettantism” and “flagrant hucksterism.”
Ism ism ism
, like the song says.
    “Yeah, but he doesn’t have a cold, it’s bullshit,” says Sherrie.
    “He was coughing and sneezing, Sherrie—he has a cold.”
    Everybody talks during Dekker’s lecture. You feel guilty, but you do it anyway. He doesn’t ever say much about it. Sometimes engineers or economics students here to get their despised arts credit will put their feet up in the back rows and talk at full volume about how hungover they are or how big a shit they took that morning, and Dekker will stand there going, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, until they stop out of pity more than anything else. Sherrie and I half-whisper as a courtesy, and because we’re both suck-ups, ultimately. We don’t want Dekker to look up and see us gabbing, to lump us in with the undergraduate rabble.
    “Well, it’s mighty convenient,” Sherrie hisses after a long pause. She always stops to pretend she’s listening to Dekker for a few moments before leaning in to talk some more. “Did you know he had a class last Friday when we were in the Stein?”
    “When?”
    “Then. Three to five.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I know someone who takes it. He didn’t even put up a sign or anything, so they all just sat there for an hour. That’s why I was kinda surprised to see him at the Stein.”
    I sit there thinking back to Friday. My breakthrough Friday when I ceased to be a student poet. I had thought Sherrie looked surprised. I had thought she was surprised to see me there, hanging out with Jim.
    “He had that fight with Doctor Sparrow,” I recall.
    Sherrie nods open-mouthed like she’s encouraging a simple child to form a word.
    “I thought that was about women.”
    Sherrie closes her mouth. Her whole face seems to close up. “What?”
    “He was going on about women for the next three hours.”
    She turns away and listens for a few seconds to Dekker talk about being unsexed by the thick night. Then she speaks from the corner of her mouth.
    “Well, whatever he talked about afterward, he was pissed off because they’re not going to grant his tenure.”
    “That’s terrible,” I say after a moment. I can’t let Sherrie know I don’t quite understand what tenure is.
    “Well, yeah,” says Sherrie, back to her retarded-child expression as she fakes paying attention to Dekker. “What did we come to Westcock for if Jim’s not going to be here?” She flicks her hand toward Dekker, being ignored and yawned at below us.
    “Jim won’t be here?” I say.
    “Why would he stay? God, he’ll be snapped up by U of T, if not somewhere in the States. They’re crazy.”
    All at once, I smell rum. It’s me. Sweating.
3 .
    IT CAN’T HAPPEN because it’s like I’m being pulled back across the strait. It can’t happen because one minute I’m on the other side of a great man’s kitchen table with my poetry spread out between us and gold and fire painting the kitchen, and the next he’s a brilliant, distant, fading light on one shore and I’m a small, insignificant blotch on a small, insignificant island with no one to guide me across.
    When I was in high school I stole all the poetry books out of the school