I pulled off bloody hank of flesh after bloody hank and just handed them over and you were so coy, you averted your eyes and pretended to be embarrassed like the rest of them when really you were squirreling the hanks away and secretly stitching them together and building Frankenstein’s monster.
Starting again. Beer the third.
I was born in a small town. That is not such a big feat in this country. You were born in a small town, John Cougar was, Springsteen the Jew, everybody was born in a small town. Whoop-de-shit. Let’s not name a specific territory. We both know they are all the fucking same.
There was a dad, there was a mom. You know this too, approximately. The dad was a prick, the mom was a goddess. Gord and Sylvie.
Already this feels like a cliché, which is the fault of none other than Adam. It wouldn’t feel that way if you didn’t exist. It wouldn’t be part of someone else’s fairy tale, it would just be my own nameless stench, hanging over me. The biggest pisser? The fact that the cliché of me was all you really took, you boiled an entire life, an entire human being, Adam, down into his most basic, boneheaded elements. Good mom plus bad dad hinting at the predictable Oedipal (oh give me a fucking break) background of — voilà — Danger Man! One seriously messed up dude. Not very creative of you is what I’m saying.
Okay so anyway, she died, as you know, and left me with the prick. I know back in school I was always saying how my dad was a prick but I never got specific. What I didn’t say was that he was a prick because he had Small Man Syndrome. I heard that term just a few years ago and immediately thought: Gord. Dad was about 5 ' 5 ½ " and found this intolerable his entire adult life. When I shot up at fourteen, he was delighted — it was as if he had added my height to his own.
Here’s another cliché: every guy whose dad was a prick talks about that moment where he realizes he can take his old man — how empowering it is. But I always knew. I feel like I could’ve taken him at six if I wanted. I was a thug from the moment I popped from the womb, or so rumour has it. Ten pounds, bruiser hands and feet.
“How old is this kid?” my father is said to have hollered when the nuns brought me out from the cold storage room or the basement or wherever they stashed unwanted Catholic babies up for adoption — ta da! But Gord was suspicious. He thought they were trying to pass a toddler off on him.
Sylvie, however, immediately held out her arms to me, bracing herself, bending a little at the knees.
“The little bastard’s old enough to drive,” my dad insisted, watching as Sylvie heaved me against her shoulder into a burping position, which I made prompt good use of. Meanwhile a frost had crystallized the room. The nuns did not appreciate the B-word. Their slack faces tightened like sphincters. But what the tight-faced nuns failed to understand was that it had nothing to do with my illegitimate origins. Dad called people “bastard” as a matter of course. Anyone, really — men, women, children. Teachers, bankers, priests. Inanimate objects, even — a sweater with one arm turned inside out, a slippery fork. The nuns were just lucky he didn’t call me a cocksucker, seeing as how he used the terms interchangeably, depending on mood.
Sylvie always told the bastard part of the story reluctantly, but not Gord. He loved to recount the glory of that moment. Not the story of my arrival, but the story of the day he used the B-word in front of nuns.
He bragged about it. That, and the size of me, which — once he had satisfied himself I was an actual infant instead of a masquerading toddler — he took credit for. He felt it reflected well, somehow, on him.
That’s why the knowledge that I could take the prick never held any particular joy or pleasure for me. I didn’t want to take Gord, it would’ve tickled him to no end, he would have loved it. Look at that wouldya, broke both my arms and legs, that’s my boy did that — bastard barely even broke a sweat! I never wanted to take him. I just wanted to