SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT ON THE FIRST DAY BACK
AT FAIREVILE DISTRICT HIGH SCHOOL, GRADE ELEVEN

It was Saturday
I washed my car
Drove up and down the dock past the ice cream bar
See and Be Seen
It was the Summertime Law

Billy called shotgun Ray back with Dean
Cranked down the windows
Turned up The Max Machine
One-arm-suntan-poses
Were critical

Beach and ocean
Through a rose-coloured windshield
Sun-bronzed bodies
Like wheat in a sand field
If I dare to touch one
Will she die in my hands?

Every day like a pop song
All backbeat, no danger
I steer with my knees
and dream safely of strangers
Speakers thump out bravado
(It’s critical)

The last night of August
When Summertime ends
She leans through my window
It’s half-past ten
No longer pretending
(It’s critical)

She says “Let’s go to the boardwalk”
I say “okay”
The buzz of the radio
And seagulls and waves
I ‘ve got beers in the trunk in a cooler
(Also critical)

My heartbeat thunders
Deep in my ears
It may be passion
It may be fear
The boys will wonder why I was late
I don’t know what I’ll say

Okay, so I stole the rhythm from a tune on an old Joe Walsh album, but I’m still kind of pleased with the way it turned out. And I guess the cool thing is that I didn’t tell anyone, not even Billy or Dean, about what happened that night, which makes the title sort of ironic (which might have got me a higher mark from Mr. Alvinstock if he’d known). Why didn’t I tell my buddies about the one occurrence which almost every guy in the history of grade eleven lies about experiencing? Well, I have my reasons.

I am more in love with Zoe Perry than ever. At first it was her stunning beauty which drew me in, but after engineering a few study sessions with her in grades nine and ten, I came to realize that she has more than enough intelligence, wit, and personality to match her appearance, and my attraction to her has increased exponentially (even if I have become a little afraid that she might be too good for me). Alas, because of the exploding Pontiac incident during our first and only car date in grade ten, Zoe has decided that I am the biggest geek on the planet, and she has fallen out of the habit of speaking to me on a regular basis — or at all, actually. She occasionally rolls her eyes and shakes her head when I say something stupid in class while trying to be funny, but mostly she just pretends that she doesn’t know me.

It hurts me terribly, but fortunately, I have rented Casablanca several times and I’m still in with the local bootlegger, so I’ve been following Bogey’s example and drinking my sorrows away. I’m sure even the heartbroken Humphrey Bogart barfed a few times — off camera, of course.

Anyway, Zoe has continued dating that phony-baloney pretty boy Jimmy Tanner. Jimmy has enough hairspray in his salon-perfect hairdo to have his own personal hole in the ozone layer. He wears a pretentious looking trench coat and has a bristly little goatee, and he always walks around with his eyebrows arched as if he either knows something the rest of humanity doesn’t, or else he’s been the first to smell another person’s fart. For some reason, the girls at school all believe that this puffed-up pansy is some sort of Casanova. Yet, rather than throwing a banana peel under his immaculately polished shoes (which, admittedly, is the only idea I had for a while), I have decided to beat him at his own game and learn everything there is to know about pleasuring a woman.

I read the letter sections in the skin magazines I borrowed from my uncle’s garage in grade seven. I read all of the books my mom kept carefully hidden at the bottom of her underwear drawer. I secretly exercise my tongue and lips while chewing gum. I even go so far as to drive to another town to buy a pack of those special ribbed-for-her-pleasure condoms. When Zoe finally comes to her senses and dumps Jimmy Tanner, I am going to be ready to satisfy her every need.

Right at the end of summer, an opportunity presented itself for me to put all of my studies and endurance training to the test.

I was cruising up and down the beach in my crummy old rust-perforated pickup, looking for a quiet, unpopulated place to pop a beer, watch the sun go down, and pretend that I was the hero in a forties movie who could take it like a man. I was making a U-turn just in front of the Faireville Docks, the town’s most popular outdoor pickup spot, when she waved me over. Winifred Bright. The legendary Winifred Bright.

Winifred Bright lives in one of the apartments above one of the little stores in downtown Faireville. She is considered the Devil’s representative when the sins of the flesh are discussed in hushed tones by Faireville’s tea-and-cookie social elite. Because she is thirty-two-years old and still single. Because she embraces the people in Faireville who others try to ignore. Because many years ago she spent some time in a mental institution dealing with depression. Because she allegedly had a daughter named Robin, who was sent away during Winifred’s time in the mental hospital. But mostly, Winfred Bright is the object of their scorn because she does not attempt to hide any of this.

Whenever the teenaged daughter of a town busybody is caught in the act of kissing a boy in a car (or some similar atrocity) a finger is pointed invariably in the direction of Winifred Bright as an example of what happens to girls who offer their affections indiscriminately. I suppose Winifred eventually decided to accept the role in which the more tightly wound townsfolk had cast her, because she slinks down the sidewalk in plastic wrap pants, and loose, low-cut blouses that allow for much jiggling and bouncing. She has the type of physique that inspires certain men to lean out through the windows of their rusting, hubcap-free vehicles, and hoot “Whew-wee! Would’ja lookit THAT!”

Most of her time is spent atop a barstool in a dark corner of The Outpost, a windowless, stucco-splattered watering hole about two miles outside the town limits. Most non-clients refer to bar as The Outhouse, a fairly accurate moniker considering the bar’s clientele. Winifred brings a man home from the bar nearly every night, and, according to rumour (nobody will admit to having discovered this first-hand) Winifred never demands anything in exchange for a night in her bed. Also according to gossip, she is fond of initiating boys into manhood, although I can personally attest that I felt no nearer to manhood afterward than I did before. In fact, after it was over, I felt a little smaller, a little more overwhelmed by the world.

Everybody in Faireville knows that Winifred has posters of Chairman Mao Tse Tung plastered all over the walls of her apartment. It isn’t that anyone has ever been there, of course — you can see them from the street at night. Winifred rarely bothers to lower her blinds; some say that this is a clever advertising technique. Whenever the Beatles’ tune “Revolution” gets played on the radio, certain righteous citizens of Faireville figure jokingly that the Beatles never knew Winifred Bright, because she owns pictures of Chairman Mao, yet she makes it with practically everyone, anyhow. Others scratch their heads and wonder aloud just who in the world Mousy Tongue is.

Her reply to such queries is usually a version of this statement: “Mao Tse Tung is a man who said that we should all work together, that we should share our talents and our gifts with our fellow human beings.” I really don’t know if Chairman Mao said anything like that, but maybe it doesn’t matter that much. People believe what they want to believe.

Anyway, I stopped the truck halfway through a U-turn in front of the Docks, and Winifred Bright leaned through the open driver’s side window of my truck, in a way that allowed the maximum amount of cleavage to burst forth from her scoop-necked top. Smiling slyly, she asked me if I knew who she was.

I told her that I thought I might have met her before.

She asked me if I would mind giving her a ride home.

I told her I was going to the beach, not back downtown.

She said she wouldn’t mind coming along for the ride.

I told her I was in love with someone, and that I probably shouldn’t.

She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “So, I guess you have nothing to learn then, eh?”

I didn’t protest when she walked around the front of the truck and climbed into the cab with me.

She laughed later when I asked her if she enjoyed the ribbed-for-her-pleasure condom. She touched my hand and said, “It wasn’t just the condom. You are going to make that someone feel wonderful.”

Then she offered a strange, faraway grin, got out of the truck and walked away into the night. I sat in the truck for the rest of the night, the sound of the surf filling my ears, staring at the moonlit glow of my knuckles hanging from the steering wheel. I had expected to feel larger, more manly, more secure, more knowing, but it was the exact opposite. It was the world that seemed a lot bigger, a world filled with many more questions than answers.

Since then, I’ve gone back to my old habit of admiring Zoe, mostly from a distance, like I’m doing right now in Mr. Alvinstock’s English composition class. I’m thinking about Zoe in ways I couldn’t have even imagined a few months earlier, and I’m wondering how many things she knows which I still don’t. Women always seem to be two or three steps ahead of us guys, and it’s a bit unnerving sometimes. This makes me feel like a small child lost in a dense, noisy jungle, so I mentally downshift and decide to simply admire certain points of interest beneath the folds of Zoe’s William Shakespeare caricature T-shirt. Then an idea comes to me, which stretches and grows into a poem. I know rhyming isn’t cool, but this is what I’ve written:

GREAT UNANSWERED QUESTIONS OF HISTORY

I wonder if Shakespeare was ever eighteen
Did he work at a gas bar, tell stories for free?
Did he hike to the East side to the beatnik cafe?
To hide in the shadows and drink underage?

I wonder when Plato got his first kiss
When she offered her lips, did he pucker and miss?
Did he make up tall tales to tell loafers at school?
Did he put on black leather, pretend to be cool?

I wonder if Einstein ever worried about
The zits on his face, while he made out
Had the cops in the campground heard the noise in the tent?
Had he saved enough money for his college rent?

I wonder if Freud got weak in the knees
When a girl like you began to tease
Would you be there beside him when he woke up?
Would you head for the sunset with him in his pickup truck?

Here tomorrow, gone today
History seems to work that way
Here today, just you and me
As for history, we’ll just wait and see

My muse has found me! And she returns again, just as that fuzz-chinned, trench coat-wearing weasel Jimmy Tanner goes strutting past me in the cafeteria, with his nose held high like he’s doing the air a favour by inhaling it. This is the final version:

STUNT MAN

Unlike the moving picture
Projected on that silver cloth
Who plays the lover’s role
Who plays the hero’s part

There’s no need here for a mannequin
With plastic hair and breasts
To complete a movie still
Behind a plate of plastic glass

Won’t see me in a tailored trench coat
Playing dress-up debonair
Blowing smoky movie promises
As the camera lens inhales

But when the script calls for your body to
Thrash helpless through the air
And the leading man can’t take the risk
of messing up his hair

The stunt man will be me
I’ll be there

Neatly transcribed in my best handwriting (which is only slightly more decipherable than ancient hieroglyphics), I drop a copy of this poem on the floor beside Zoe’s desk (ooops!) as I brush past her in English composition class. I hope she’ll pick it up, read it, and realize that I am the man for her. Alas, she doesn’t even look at it, or at me.

So, between bouts of self-pitying boozing while sitting in the back of my crummy pickup at the beach, I wait. For weeks it feels as if I am holding my breath under water. I wait, with all of my new sexual knowledge and experience coiled up inside me like red-hot magma, bubbling beneath the surface, straining to erupt. I wait for the moment when Zoe Perry will finally release it all, and for the moment that will change forever the landscape of our lives, with explosion after explosion of ecstasy.

In the meantime, though, my hands are getting pretty calloused.

Mr. Alvinstock finally returns our graded poetry assignments. I get a B+ along with the comment, “The rhyming poems are pretty predictable, but I like the last one — Nice. Different.”

Our fearless (if somewhat fragrant) teacher asks each of the students who have earned an A or A+ to come to the front of the class to read their poems. Zoe is one of them. Her poems are about the beauty of the things that surround us all the time, which most people never bother to notice. Her words describe the Victorian buildings in our little town, the scents and sounds of the beach, the slow motion fireworks of the sunsets, and the thick, scented forests just outside of town. Her voice trembles slightly as she reads. Surprisingly enough, Mr. Alvinstock loves this kind of stuff — just write about forests, and beaches, and old houses, and you’re practically guaranteed an A+ from Quentin. Yet, even if Zoe’s poems are a lot like the ones the other kids in our class write, the sound of her voice gets right inside me. Her delivery is so clear and musical, her conviction so real, that I can’t look at her face for fear of a tear working its way loose in front of all the guys.

“Wonderful work, Zoe, wonderful,” Mr. Alvinstock says, nodding and stroking his chin, his eyes glazing over as Zoe returns to her seat. Is it possible that Mr. Alvinstock also thinks Zoe is gorgeous? He clears his throat. “Anyone else want to share their work?”

“Yeah,” I say, my voice unexpectedly and ridiculously cracking. “I’ll do one.”

“How interesting,” Mr. Alvinstock says, “our most vociferous anti-poet wants to share his words with us. Please, Dak, share!”

A few of the guys snicker, but I don’t care. At this particular moment, there is no one else in the room but Zoe. I look right at her as I clear my throat and read:

INVITATION

You tell me
You grew up in a town
Where smiles disguised intentions
You tell me
You were brought up in a house
Where dreams were never mentioned

This is an open invitation
to come as you are
no need to dress up or down
no need to make a reservation
to dance without light
to drink all the night
from the shadows

We can tango through
this rainy syncopation
with heartbeats as strong and steady
as ritual drums
This is your invitation
To dream
With me

When I say the last two lines, I catch Zoe’s eyes for just a moment. Then she looks down at her desk, pretending for the remainder of the class to be examining the glowing comments written in red on the back page of her own poetry assignment. She doesn’t even once glance across the room at me after I return to my desk.

But she has a smile on her face.

And for that, Mr. Quentin Alvinstock, I thank you.