One Hit Wonders Read online

  ONE HIT WONDERS

  P.O. Box 2188, St. John’s, NL, Canada, A1C 6E6

  WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 Patrick Warner

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Warner, Patrick, 1963-, author

  One hit wonders / Patrick Warner.

  ISBN 978-1-55081-613-6 (paperback)

  I. Title.

  PS8595.A7756O54 2015 C813'.6 C2015-904887-7

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We acknowledge the [financial] support of the Government of Canada and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA.

  Breakwater Books is committed to choosing papers and materials for our books that help to protect our environment. To this end, this book is printed on a recycled paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

  ONE HIT WONDERS

  PATRICK WARNER

  BREAKWATER

  to Rochelle

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  1

  WERE SHE TO walk into the room even now and regard me with that quizzical tilt of her head, her grin unwavering as she unwinds her long wool scarf and unfastens the button at her throat, her amber eyes narrowing, my image warming in the dark mirrors of her pupils, in an expression that says I am happy to see you even when I am not happy to see you, because it is myself I am unhappy with most of the time, but that unhappiness dims the second that I see you, because it is halved or shared, because I am understood, because we are together, because together we are a conspiracy, because what we are is a secret, because we are tethered in our togetherness and whatever fray or tension arises from our separation is instantly repaired when we see one another again, which is why, even now, were she to walk into the room, I would run to her, ignore the belligerent chorus of voices in my head, the opinions of all those who told me and would tell me still that she was and is unworthy, unworthy in death as she was in life.

  Such lines express an emotional truth about grief. Even more than words, the run-on syntax signifies a psyche in which all the windows and doors are blown open. When Lila was alive, I would never have talked about her in this way. If I did, the whole passage would have been inflected with irony and my delivery of it deadpan. She wouldn’t have stood for anything less.

  The sun clearing from behind a cloud lights up red and blue glass panels in the front door, giving the porch a church-like atmosphere. Everything in our home bears my Lila’s mark. I think of the week we spent stripping paint from the entranceway trim, trying to get down to the original hardwood. I see her small hand pulling the triangular scraper, the acid-softened colours rolling off in burrs. I hear her singing, even as I abandon her, inevitably slipping away to jot down some idea. What ideas do I have now? None but the sensory memory of her step on the outdoor step, the key tuning in the lock, the door swinging in. I will run to her and cover her lips with mine, eat the words as they come out of her mouth, suck on the root of her tongue until I dislodge every shard of her confession, swallow it down.

  More vulgarity, more public expression of sentiments that should only be spoken in private. I agree with those who say you have to let it all out before life can begin again. What I don’t agree with is the how of letting it out. I will not be the rocky crevice that tides rage through. I will not be a Job-like figure calling on the God-Not-There to tell me what can take hold, what can live here, in me, now. Much better are these armoured thoughts, these second thoughts.

  Lila died. Isn’t it enough just to say that? Where else but in death is the active voice so passive? Only the coarse or insensitive would press for details when the logical inference is that Lila succumbed to natural causes. And if hers wasn’t a natural death then it must have been an accident, a horrible tragedy, the details of which will be revealed slowly and over time, after a period of mourning.

  Move on, I am told; but what they mean is break, break down, break through, break out, break something. What they want is for me to break my silence, prove through some hysterical display—a drinking spree that ends on a bridge where I turn into the figure in The Scream; a crazy summer in which I bed every young thing I can get my hands on, male or female; a memoir about this time of grief, a bestseller, a book to reveal how hollow my life has become, how hollow it was all along. Tell the truth about Lila’s death, they say, name those responsible. My shame exposed will eliminate the need for public shaming. What they want from me is renunciation, a statement that shows I have grown up, that I see in life some holy rosy core of meaning, some ultimate good. Move to the suburbs, they say. Get away from the downtown, the old life. Reaffirm the value of ordinariness. Be one of us. Start again, they say, when they have no idea of what they are asking or how great the distance.

  I play along, imagine myself following their advice. I picture myself a year, two years down the road, living in a modest split-level bungalow. Outside I hear the tinny slam of van doors closing. The glaziers are here: a father and son team with roots in Alabama, the rotund and seemingly affable Hermann in brown dungarees, white t-shirt and work boots; his son in rapper’s gear—deep spongecake trainers, jeans slung so low they hobble him, oversized Chicago Bulls jacket, Ray Charles shades, and a Toronto Blue Jays cap the boy wears in the conventional style, back-ass-wards.

  Here they come, I think, Tube-a-Caulking and Tube-a-Caulking junior. A bad joke, but that is all I have right now. All of life is a bad joke. Not that Hermann would take offence. He’d throw back his head and guffaw, lean forward and slap his knees: “Y’all should do stand-up.” But Hermann doesn’t fool me, not for a minute. I’ve seen enough of people to know that his candy-coated surface is there to temper the bitterness that regularly bubbles up from inside. Either that or he’s a saint—which he definitely is not. Five minutes with him will tell you as much. He’s touchy as a boil. I suspect the source of glazier-the-senior’s resentment and self-loathing is that he is African-Canadian instead of African-American.

  They stand on the other side of the shattered window and look in.

  “Not again, Freddy.”

  “Yes, again, Hermann.”

  The older man scratches the grey bristles on his chin. “You just go on with what you’re doing and we’ll get this all fixed up. You can even watch us if you want. Just pretend like you’re watching TV. Reality TV.”

  I know from experience that getting any work done will be impossible if I stay anywhere near them. Hermann will talk and talk as he claws out strings of blackened silicon and will keep going even as he fits the new double-pane slider into the moulding. Glazier-the-senior is obsessed with the entertainment industry: he will regale me with stories about Bill Cosby’s extra-marital affairs, which he doesn’t believe, and tales of Oprah Winfrey’s days as a hooker, which he does believe. “Man, that chic
k would do anything for a toaster oven.”

  “No problem,” I tell him. “You won’t disturb me.” I get up and walk from my office into the living room, where the neighbour’s kid from down the street is watching cable. Being around young people brings consolation, the sense of expectation they have of life, the confidence they have that it will all work out for them.

  The boy has grown, long in the leg and long in the sideburns. He seems to change every time I see him.

  “Shouldn’t you be at school?”

  “We’ve been through this.”

  He is watching Survivor on an old floor-model swivel TV, solid walnut cabinet, the kind that weighs about six-hundred pounds. The scene he is watching looks like it has been shot through mustard gas. Now and again the picture dog-ears at the top right-hand corner before righting itself. I suspect that my secondhand TV might have been previously abused, thumped one too many times by a hockey dad. The screen shows a tropical island. There is a fire. The camera pans the tree line slowly, scanning back and forth in a narrow band, as though waiting for someone to emerge.

  “Survivor,” I say.

  “No, Lost.”

  “How can you watch shows like that when you know they’re scripted from the very beginning? The outcome is pre-determined.”

  The boy changes to another channel. A man who looks like the least-known Marx brother is juggling dinner rolls and bouncing his Adolf-Hitler-moustache eyebrows off the twin trampolines of his eye sockets while mouthing the word “abundance.” The word A-Bun-Dance, with hyphens between the syllables, flashes in white at the bottom of the screen.

  “I thought you came here to draw.”

  “Finished,” the kid says, nodding towards the striped armchair next to the TV.

  I pick up the spiral-bound sketch pad and flip to the most recently used page.

  “Hey, I saw this one yesterday.”

  “Look on the back page.”

  I flip the book over and lift the cardboard back cover. On the last page is a charcoal drawing of a bra with six cups and three fastening straps; underneath it is an otter lying on her side, her six black milk-swollen teats showing. Underneath that again is the caption: Mrs. Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band.

  I want to laugh, but am afraid to. Instead I walk to the kitchen, pick up the milk carton I left on the counter at breakfast time, before I went into my office to write. Saliva has weakened the spout. I bring the separating cardboard to my mouth and drink. My eyes under my closed eyelids squirm, like beetles under loose clay.

  “Hey, Freddy,” glazier-the-senior shouts from the adjacent room, “I heard on cable last night that Maya Angelou had her pubes shaved off so she could have a birdcage tattooed on her mound of Vernis. What you make of that?”

  I lurch towards the carton. Milk spills from the corners of my mouth and down my shirt. I wipe my face with the back of my hand and put the carton down. I decide not to engage, instead walk out to the patio. Hermann is clearly in a mood.

  Once outside, I stop to inspect the small green globes on one of several potted tomato plants that are staked with half-inch dowels. I have always wanted to grow tomatoes. I note that all the plants’ leaves show evidence of tooth wear. When I lean in close I can see dozens of jade-coloured and semi-translucent aphids. I contemplate capturing these tiny sap suckers and placing them in offering on the anthill that recently erupted underneath my lone sunflower. It was the kid who took it upon himself to inform me that ants and aphids demonstrate mutualism.

  “It’s called dairying,” he said.

  “Like farmers. You don’t say.”

  “The ants milk the aphids by stroking them with their antennae.”

  “Really.”

  “Then they eat the honeydew the aphids expel from the terminations of their alimentary canals.”

  “You mean from their butt holes?”

  “It’s like sugar.”

  “It causes sooty mould,” I said, “the bane of ornamental gardeners.”

  “Whatever.”

  I am wearing my pink two-piece waffle-weave underwear set. It’s what I wear when I sleep and when I write. I only dress for the day when I have finished my five hundred words, which is usually by early afternoon. On days when I have no plans to go out, I sometimes forget to get dressed. I become aware that I am outside in my underwear only when I hear the slam of a screen door in the house next door. Enter a new character: Phil-the-Birdfeeder.

  I moved to the suburbs to get away from a lot of things, one of them being my posse: hangers-on who were at first attracted to my “fame” and stayed out of some ghoulish curiosity, perhaps wanting to see me self-destruct. Phil the Birdfeeder is one such animal. His PhD thesis on my breakout novel was entitled Never Hire an Electrician with Straight Pubic Hair, the title carrying over to the book version, published by Oxford University Press. The appearance of boyishly enthusiastic Phil on my front lawn on the day I moved in made it clear that moving forward, moving on, pushing ahead would be no easier in the suburbs than it had been downtown. The joke was on me.

  Phil, a newly minted assistant professor, goes to great lengths to deny to himself that his entire idiom is my head-birth. His anxiety about my influence is the source of his relentless joking. Last week I ran into Phil at the video store. He appeared to be fully caffeinated. He complimented my hair, approved of my video choices, and then told me he just had to rent Reuben, Reuben at least once a month. He held the video case up for my inspection. There was an awkward pause that ended when I caved into pressure and asked why he felt compelled to watch this movie named after a smoked-meat sandwich. “So droll,” he said, appearing less than amused by my pastrami reference. Hostility simmers right under the surface of all our encounters. He then launched without further hesitation into an explanation that was part movie review and part confession about his deadbeat Beat poet dad, Bart, who was also an alcoholic.

  While he talked I studied his sleeve of tattoos. Each one of them was a variation on the same theme: the vagina—squiggly lips, hooded clitorises, and tumbleweed pubes, with here and there an asterisk. The inspiration for this artwork can be found on page 357 in the first Canadian edition of my breakout novel, Serge Protector, the now much-copied “sleeve of twats” paragraph.

  Phil, a la Gay Mondrian, the main character in said novel, has a penchant for tasteless literary jokes. “I read a shitty trilogy last week,” Phil will belt out over the boxwood hedge: “Bridgit Jones’s Diarrhea, The Diarrhea of a Bad Year and—big pause—The Diarrhea of Anne Frank.”

  That nobody laughs—least of all me—is no deterrent to Phil. Recently awarded tenure at a third-tier university (an institution with the footprint of a vole), he is cocky as all hell about his abilities.

  “A meringue made in the city of Doha should rightly be called a Qatar Meringue,” he says, poker-faced; and then, as if to demonstrate his skills as an improviser, points to two sparrows sitting on the telephone wire and barks, “I say the fat one on the left manages a hedge fund.”

  Lila used to tell me to take this kind of thing as a compliment. Instead of looking embarrassed, instead of looking down at your Jesus sandals, instead of toeing something indecipherable in the dirt, you should take it as a compliment. I look down now at my bare foot, lifting my middle toe, the one that has no toenail, that looks like a tiny erect penis. I am still waiting for the critic who will find the parallel between it and chapter seven of my novel, the chapter most academics agree is a parody of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles.

  Phil is interrupted by the blue-jay shriek and slam of the screen door from the neighbour’s house on the other side. It’s Miriam of the freckled cleavage and spicy herbal teas. A veritable vegetarian burlesque queen, I know she’d fuck me given half a chance. I haven’t been able to sleep with another woman since Lila’s death, not that there haven’t been offers. My only release these days is a savage form of masturbation in which I penetrate objects and penetrate myself with objects, often breaking the skin.

 
Miriam is my No. 1 fan. She’s confident I will get past my fear of the sophomore jinx and become an even bigger name. She keeps a scrapbook of my press clippings: literary prizes awarded; my appearances on talk shows and on the festival circuit; the Publishers Weekly report about movie rights to my first book being sold for a high six-figure sum (David Lynch was mentioned); the Book-of-the-Month-Club nomination from Christmas 2000; and most recently, an ad for the new paperback edition, “Over 500,000 copies sold” in a jagged speech bubble on the front cover. Miriam had bought into the whole book-biz spectacle.

  I once overheard her speculate to Phil that I must have made close to a million on royalties alone. What impresses Miriam is money, not literature. I suspect she hasn’t even read my book. And if there is one thing that impresses her even more than money, it’s celebrity. As far as Miriam is concerned I’m a star. “Tell me about meeting Prince Charles.” “Tell me about Atwood.” “Oh, tell me about Ondaatje,” she gasps.

  Miriam is talking. I look right through her, which makes her even more desperate to get my attention. Her Chinese husband is rarely seen—rumour has it he gambles. When he does make an appearance, he speaks in monosyllables and never cracks a smile. Serious Lee, Phil calls him.

  Both Miriam and Serious Lee love gardening. “A rake and a hoe,” says Phil, shamelessly borrowing from me a line by me.

  Ignored, Phil will turn his attention to Miriam. “Mir, did I tell you about the Aquafina conference I went to in Buenos Aries last year? Super conference, heard one great paper on data mining, about filtering nineteenth-century literature through twentieth-century concepts. Awesome how it turned time on its head, made the twentieth century seem like an antecedent to the nineteenth. Made Sam Johnson—that old douche bag—seem like he was the latter half of Masters and Johnson.”

  “But wasn’t Samuel Johnson eighteenth century?”

  “Exactly. My point exactly, Mir. Anyway, the second night there, we go to this little bistro in Buenos Aires and after a heavy meal—man!—that Argentine beef (and I’m not talking the Falklands here)—the waiter spots me rubbing my belly and asks if I would like a cup of spiced tea, spiced tea made with milk. To settle my stomach, he said. Know what I said?”