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kootenaygoon · 4 years ago

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So,

Niles was on crutches, watering his garden.

It was late Tuesday afternoon, and we’d just put the Wednesday edition of the Star to bed. Despite the fact it was mid-October, the weather was still summery, with a light wind rustling its way up the valley. The Slocan River had a magical sheen in the distance as my RAV broke out of the trees. Brutus was running laps of the yard with a dog I didn’t recognize, too busy to bark at my arrival, so I followed the driveway around to the barn unmolested and parked beside a mud-spattered, half-deconstructed Jeep. Niles had invited me over to discuss his latest manuscript submission, which was over 100,000 words long. It sat hefty and dog-eared on my passenger seat, riddled with highlighter and scribbled notes, alongside a six-pack of Blue Buck. I wasn’t looking forward to this feedback session, because I wasn’t sure if he was mature enough to hear what I had to say.

“We’ve got the house to ourselves tonight, Goon. I’ve got the second season of Fargo queued up, plus I’ve acquired some fabulous Afghani Kush that will blow your hair back,” Niles said, his crutches squelching in the mud as he clopped over to my side door.

I lifted up his manuscript, which was called The Fox and the Fawn. “Did you forget about this?”

Since my arrival in Nelson I’d been keeping a small roster of three to five students, helping them develop everything from a fictional account of the Rwandan genocide to a fantasy novel about an autistic teen adventuring through an alternate dimension. The trouble was, I was starting to feel like an imposter. My repeated attempts at finishing Whatever you’re on, I want some hadn’t resulted in the fame and glory I was imagining, and now I was wondering if I’d been kidding myself this whole time. Yeah, I had my Master’s, but so what? Could I really be a writer? And if not, was I really worthy of being a teacher? Who was I kidding?

“I figured you would’ve burned that thing the moment you realized what a gargantuan turd it is,” Niles said, his blond hair hanging limply around his dishevelled face. He wasn’t looking healthy.

I climbed out and shut the door. “I read some of it to my new roommate Mika, actually. We had a little reading in my living room.”

“You didn’t.”

“Yeah, she wanted to hear the sex scene.”

Niles roared with delight. That’s what he was always looking for, an audience to the lewd reality of his existence. As far as he was concerned, he was the best kind of criminal — the kind that never gets caught. The Fox and the Fawn was a fangirl tribute to himself, to his gangster exploits as a Slocan Valley weed king. With legalization finally here, he felt it was time to tell his story. The manuscript was Bukowski mixed with Kerouac, demented and perverse and shockingly violent. At one point he even casually admits to date rape, including a scene where his girlfriend rages at him for taking advantage of her while he was drunk.

“I didn’t know you had a new roommate,” he said. “What happened to Brendan?”

“Nothing. I just found a new place, levelled up. Teamed up with this girl Mika who works at my pot dispensary. She’s got a pet rabbit.”

“You’re still getting your shit from there? Why aren’t you coming to me?”

Niles was wearing a brown bathrobe. He opened his front door, told me not to worry about my shoes, then handed me the crutches while he hopped on one foot up the carpeted staircase. He grunted and sighed with each step, muttering swear words under his breath. I’d never seen him like this. When we reached the top I gave him his crutches and the beer, and he motioned for me to take a seat in the living room. As I passed by the familiar John Cooper paintings, I noticed that he’d hung the self-portrait I’d given him as a present a month earlier. I’d painted it with Natalya.

“You hung my painting upside down?”

He laughed, opening the fridge. “Yeah, I dunno why I did that. Just seemed to me like it looks better that way. I get a kick out of it.”

I shook my head. For the past month I’d been painting furiously, and it felt like a swirling green portal had opened up inside my brain. My writing may have stalled, but this was a way to channel my creativity into something other than journalism. I was getting sick of the Star, getting sick of taking the same pictures of the same fundraiser events, getting sick of the constraints. My relationship with Ed and Kai was strained too, as they were tired of my entitled laziness. Maybe they knew I was stoned every day, slumping into the office uninspired and half-assing my stories. I felt like the universe was wasting me, but painting had become a soothing therapy, something I did exclusively for myself. I was giving myself permission to be sloppy and flamboyant and outrageous, slathering my canvases with dribbling glitter and chaotic streaks of inspiration. This painting I’d given Niles was my first.

As he banged around in the kitchen, I walked over to the living room window and looked out at the Slocan Valley. The trees were the colour of flames, red and orange and electric yellow, and they matched the darkening sky. Lately I’d been feeling a subtle dread, like the magic was slowly draining from my surroundings. Winter is coming. I hated being single, hated being a chronic stoner, and hated how much of my life I spent stressing out about money. In university I’d become so convinced that I had life sorted out, that I was on a consistently upwards trajectory, that it was only a matter of time before I would be rewarded with creative success and lifelong fulfillment. Now I wasn’t so sure. It was easy to blame Paisley and all the drama she’d brought to my life, but she’d been gone for over a year now. At some point I would have to address my own shit without using her as a scapegoat.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, man.”

Niles scuffed back into the living room holding our beers. “This?”

“The Kootenays. The Star. I got into a bit of a scrap with Kai and Ed today, in the newsroom,” I said. “Over our coverage of Me Too.”

He laughed, sinking into his recliner. “You’re too radical for them?”

I shook my head, crossed to the couch. “I’ve just been seeing all these posts, right? Women sharing their trauma, men self-flagellating, but the discourse isn’t actually going anywhere. It’s not actually accomplishing anything. But I wanted to do something tangible, so I interviewed the superintendent and a bunch of principals about how they’re responding to it. Just to get it official, on the record, how they plan to change things.”

He snorted. “I’m sure they loved that.”

“So I hand in this 1200-word behemoth of a story, with all these different angles and perspectives, and they told me it didn’t have any teeth. They said it’s just a bunch of talking heads. I tried to argue, you know, that it’s important to be holding these people accountable and that their words are powerful, but they weren’t hearing it. They said if I’m going to write a story about sexual assault then I need a real sexual assault.”

He frowned, shrugged. “So what’re you going to do?”

I felt myself getting worked up. For the past few days I’d been endlessly scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, feeding on the outrage and vitriol. It was bringing everything up, Trent and Galloway and my strange obsession with crucifixion. The topic of sexual violence was like an intricate bomb I was trying to defuse with nothing but a screwdriver. As far as I was concerned, the conversation had to move beyond the rage to solutions. Men had to own their complicity, with more than just empty words, and propose tangible solutions. I was determined to prove Kai and Ed wrong, to show that my journalism had real teeth.

“Well, I’ve already started writing a column about it. About my personal feelings on the subject. And I’m going to illustrate it with a picture of my face with the words ‘Part of the Problem’ scrawled across my forehead.”

Niles laughed. “That should piss off the right people.”

“Not only that, I’ve found two girls who are willing to go on record about their assaults. One who was a student at Elephant Mountain Secondary, and the other from Selkirk College. If I do this right, this could be the most powerful story I’ve written since coming to the Star. Like, I think it could be a really big deal.”

“Well, Goon,” he said. “I think your saviour complex is alive and kicking.”

Eventually we pivoted to discussing his manuscript, and I flipped through it on the coffee table as I took him through my notes. All of his female characters came off as interchangeable, he had a tendency to summarize scenes rather than depict them, and by the end of the narrative he came off as completely unlikeable. Being self-deprecating is one thing, but it was like he was going out of his way to shock the reader with his shitty behaviour. It felt like he was daring his audience to hate him. At times it reminded me of the memoir A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden, by Stephen Reid, so I recommended he check it out for inspiration. I felt Reid struck a fine balance between owning his mistakes and aspiring to be a better human being.

“That’s the bank robber?”

“Yeah, they made a movie about him. Point Break.”

“That surfer movie with Keanu Reeves?”

“I think they fictionalized it a bit. The point is, there’s a guy who has actually grappled with his own soul. That takes balls.”

He nodded. “A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden. I like that.”

Once we were finished with notes, Niles padded off into his bedroom and returned with an elaborate dragon-themed bong. As we smoked together I thought of the caterpillar from the animated version of Alice in Wonderland, asking in his condescending tone “Who are you?” That was the sort of question that was getting harder to answer all the time. Thinking about rape culture all day had me hating myself to the point where I felt physically sick, but at other times I was convinced of my own prophethood, my special destiny to save the world somehow. If I could tackle this Me Too story from exactly the right angle I knew it could have a legit impact. Everyone was encouraging women to speak while men listen, but I had been listening. And now I had something to say. I leaned back in the couch and examined the light fixture in the ceiling, composing my column in my head.

“Here,” Niles said. “You want another hit?”

The Kootenay Goon

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