But as I said, we liked each other, did things for each other, and as I look back on that day now, in search of the highs and lows and rights and wrongs, I do find that pretty amazing.You would never see a cougar or rhino pitching a friend’s virtues during mating season; it would be all snarls and head-butts. Of course it’s normally that way with humans, too, during the mating years, at bars, parties, wherever, but those moments exist that separate us from the lower animals. And here was one now, as Katie, obviously calling the shots, tried to present me as civilized, intelligent, even nice.
I turned with my open beer and sat at the table, close enough to catch Maddy’s scent for the first time. Her scent.How’s that for romantic bullshit? But it’s true, too. She smelled clean and pretty (words I normally wouldn’t assign to a smell), and beneath that, I guess, pheromones floated, plying a subtle magic that men and women can never consciously wield.
I spent my first minutes at the table — if it’s possible to remember being in a daze — just looking at my right hand wrapped around my beer, watching the ingrained grime in the crook of my thumb turn slick from the bottle’s sweat as I listened to them talk and laugh; and then Katie struck again, guiding the conversation to common ground.
“So, anyway, Maddy,” she said. “You mentioned earlier that you’d studied P.G. Wodehouse in one of your courses last year. Jim’s a huge P.G. fan.”
“Really,” Maddy said, turning to me.“That seems like a rarity these days.”
I believe I responded in the affirmative, with something like: “Oh yeah, uh-huh.”
Luckily, Maddy, trooper that she is, kept going.“I ran across him at the end of Grade 9. I don’t think I stepped outside a single day that summer — except to go to the library and back.”
That was it.Together, they’d tossed me some sort of mental lifesaver as I’d floundered in my choppy sea of nerves and exhilaration. I took a huge swallow of beer. “It was Grade 11 for me,” I said, my brain and tongue finally starting to mesh like gear and cog. “I read every book in the Jeeves/Bertie series, including the short stories, during Christmas break.”
“Well take my advice and never sign up for a course called Twentieth-Century English Masters,” Maddy said, shaking her head.“Having to listen to theories about the Drones Club representing the downfall of the British Empire came close to ruining it all for me.”
Not an auspicious start, I know, but short of pulling someone from a flaming car wreck, what is? And relationships do have to start somewhere.
We talked through dusk and into the night, the words coming easier and easier for me; throughout the rest of the house, people came and went, introducing themselves to Maddy as they passed through the kitchen. On occasion the stereo would rumble to life from the living room, spewing out Lou Reed or the Stones, and still we sat, perched on our small, hard chairs. By ten, a small party had broken out, and the smell of weed drifted into the kitchen. By eleven, the party and the smell of weed had drifted off, to the Vince or another house, as did Katie, winking at me as she backed out the kitchen door, and still Maddy and I talked.
By one o’clock, as I pulled off my boots and peeled away my work clothes in preparation for my shower, my thoughts were a total jumble. Maddy was by no means mine; serious courting and planning lay ahead. But at that particular time, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, really. All at once was I, several stories high.There weren’t no mountain high enough, there weren’t no ocean deep enough ... all of that crap crowded my head, if not the songs themselves, their imagery and feeling, from the most perceptive right down to the corniest.
Maybe, when it’s all said and done, that’s partially what rankles now. Those initial months of true love, when you stagger around in a delicious fog, perhaps comparable only to that instant you first hold your newborn to your heart and know you’d die for him — when do you acknowledge that you’ll never reach those heights again?
And once you have acknowledged that, what’s left to do but mark time?
I like to mark time, or a small part of it anyway, by hitting the heavy bag. I hung one in the garage the year Rachel turned seven, the year ... well, never mind that for now. I put it up five years ago, screwing a heavy-duty eye hook into a crossbeam, clearing all unnecessary items to the side, and setting a boom box at low volume on some raucous radio station twenty-four hours a day to keep the raccoons away. Once they set up shop in a place, they wreak havoc and the stench is unbearable, but the radio’s presence makes them think the garage is constantly occupied.
Punching the bag has been my tai chi, my yoga.When I let my hands go, I feel all tension and negative thoughts go with them. I transfer everything into that swinging, sixty-pound sack; it must be pure evil by now, a black hole of bad karma, with its true weight approaching immeasurable, because, let’s face it, mad, bad, and sad weigh a fuck of a lot more than glad. These are things you notice in your step, in every movement, in fact, when you have to carry them around year after year.
So three times a week I slip out the back door with my hands taped, from my knuckles up to just past my wrists, and with a pair of sparring gloves slipped over the wraps. I probably should wear twelve-ounce gloves to prevent knuckle separation, but then I’d lose what little feeling of speed I enjoy. Besides, my hands are already screwed from decades of gripping shovels and clutching paving stones, the tendons and ligaments stretched to their limits under the constant parade of loaded wheelbarrows.
My choice of exercise must seem pathetic, I know. A forty-five-year-old labourer does not tattoo a sagging, duct-taped heavy bag with the rattattattatt of a ring craftsman.As I lumber around the garage, the sound of my slow-motion combinations squeeze, muffled and wet, from under the half-closed roll-down door: poop, poop, pause for a beat, poop, poop, poop. Then sucking sounds, the desperate sounds of the catching of lost breath, follow, as if the creature within is pre-emphysematous (and all bets are off on that).
From the street, passersby peering down our lane would hear these strange noises and see the doughy legs and shuffling feet of a heavy-set white man, the garage-band equivalent of an aging Chuck Wepner, as he performed his slow, awkward dance around the bottom of a swaying cylinder in preparation for some non-existent fight.
This is what my neighbour, Simon Weir, sees too, when he peeks out his kitchen window each Wednesday evening, with his nose crinkled and his forehead V’d as he drinks in my vulgar display. I’ve caught him looking this way, rearing back from his partially open curtains too late as I ducked under the garage door and into the driveway in search of fresh air on those muggy, dusky summer nights.
When you throw in the fact that the music tapes I find my rhythm to out there, the Pearl Jam/Roxy Music/Pixies mixes (not to mention a round or two of the newer breed: Moby and Fat Boy Slim), stick a thumb in the eye of his Glen Gould sensibilities, of course there’s going to be friction. But what can you do? Our troubles lie far deeper than our musical tastes.
This became obvious the week he moved in, no, the day he moved in ... hold on, the hour he moved in three years ago this summer. Although our houses are detached, our garages aren’t; they’re semis, and we access them through a shared driveway that flares out into our separate backyard properties. The garages themselves straddle the property line, but, as with our tastes, property lines aren’t really our problem either.
The problem is our mere co-existence,