The Beast destroyed my brief peace. Before him I could live without guilt, unwatched; for the first time in my life I found myself in the unfamiliar situation of having no one to disappoint. My wife, Victoria, had walked out on me months before, and although I wished she hadn’t, her departure meant I could do more or less as I liked. My father, recently retired, had removed himself and my mother to a mobile-home park near Brownsville, Texas, a sprawling anthill of pensioned worker ants, thousands of miles away. That meant Pop no longer had his eye on me. There was no one left to offend, no one to despair of me and my misdemeanours. After a fashion, I was free.
Free to do what? To give up selling china in a department store and to spend luxurious mornings in bed, rereading The Last of the Mohicans, Shane, Kidnapped, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My father, if he’d known what I was up to, would have disapproved most severely of the former, my wife of the latter. Not that they would have cared for either. It’s merely a question of emphasis. Pop’s preference is for successful and dutiful; Victoria’s for the successful and intellectual.
Which is why I’ve been such a thorough disappointment to both, and why I resent so much The Beast calling public attention to my failings. I suppose I ought to forgive him by reminding myself it isn’t his fault that he lacks the imagination to see what he is doing. But I can’t. Particularly when I look back on those glorious, innocent mornings, that paradis perdu, before the Great Persecution began.
Now, lying on my side, comforter tucked securely under my chin, I struggle to dampen my rage while the February morning sunshine leaks into my bedroom. The thick glaze of ice and frost on the windowpane filters this winter light of all warmth and colour. The scarred dresser with one jammed drawer, the cardboard wardrobe with Allied Van Lines stencilled on its side, the shoulder-high smudges on the wall plaster, the books heaped in the corners of the room or cracked open on the floor so that they rise in wedges, spines lifted to the ceiling, all look discoloured and neglected in this spent, tired sunshine. It is difficult to read the titles of the books from my horizontal position. Cheek pressed into the mattress, one eye narrowed in a squint, I can decipher only one. The Heart of Midlothian.
The sound of The Beast’s voice has given me a headache. Downstairs, in the apartment directly below mine, old McMurtry has his radio tuned to the local open-line show. I can imagine McMurtry seated beside the set, his angular old shoulders raised in a buzzard’s hunch, hairy ear cocked to capture every wrathful syllable spurting from The Beast’s lips. The old man’s devotion to the homo horribilis who “hosts” this Roman circus of the airwaves is fervent, complete. I am regularly treated to a tinny harangue rising up through my floorboards, the words fantastically distorted by the demands McMurtry’s deafness places on the speaker of his cheap transistor.
Between the two of them, The Beast and McMurtry, I have almost been driven from my apartment. I would have been gone long ago if this building weren’t old enough to fall under rent controls. There is nowhere else I could find to live as cheaply, and given my circumstances, living cheaply is necessary.
So, one might ask, why not make the best of it? Why should I desire to deny a gentleman in his declining years the grisly pleasure of feasting on the carrion The Beast serves up to his audience as Food For Thought? I have never considered myself a particularly illiberal man, a man who would wish to dim the joy of a fellow adrift in the sunset days of a long and blissfully cantankerous life.
Because The Beast and McMurtry talk about me on the radio. That’s why.
It’s an old joke. The madman is informed by the psychiatrist that he is paranoid. “That may be,” he replies, “but that doesn’t stop people from plotting against me.” My point exactly.
I have heard them. To be specific, on six occasions in the last two months. They started slandering me some time after I quit my job as a salesman in the china department of Eaton’s. No, not delusions. I heard them.
The first time was at breakfast. There I was, hung over but still manfully shovelling home the Cocoa Puffs, my radio blaring away keeping me company, when the intro music for The Beast’s program began. Even at that early date I had a pronounced loathing for The Beast and all his works, a loathing so strong that the mere sound of those gruesome strains would have ordinarily sent me clattering and clawing my way to the radio to switch stations before The Beast began to bay. But that morning I was so dolefully and deeply sunk in the post-alcoholic whim-whams that I just kept mechanically spooning home my sodden puffies while the dirge played on.
There was to be no guest that day, The Beast informed us. Instead, we were to be treated to two hours of “Brickbats and Bouquets.” From his description of this dark festival I gathered that anyone with a compliment to hand out or a grievance to vent was being encouraged to phone in. Human nature being what it is, one could be sure that the air would be thick with brickbats, and not at all fragrant with flowers. The Beast, of course, was counting on this. Oh, he knew he would have to put up with the common run of do-gooder: some dear mom arguing in the face of all experience and evidence that most teenagers are pretty good kids. That sort. But that was a small yet necessary risk one ran to land the real bona fide carpet-chewers, foamers at the mouth, and public breast-beaters. Yes sir, it was from their ranks that one got real entertainment value. Give The Beast a crusading lacto-vegetarian, a One World Governmenter, a British Israelite, a bimetallist, or a confirmed pothole-watcher and his heart is glad. He knew he had a show. The reservoir of unarticulated misery, craziness, and loneliness out there is inexhaustible. No matter how many times The Beast goes to these particular wells the bucket never comes up dry.
The very first caller captured my complete attention.
“ ‘Brickbats and Bouquets,’ Tom Rollins here,” trumpeted The Beast. “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
“Hello? Hello?”
“Sir, you’ll have to turn your radio down.”
“Hello? Tom?”
“Sir, you’ll have to turn your radio down. We have a ten-second delay. That’s what’s causing your confusion. Just turn your radio down.”
“What?”
“Turn your radio down!”
An earlier instruction must have penetrated. I heard a clunk, as if a phone had been dropped to dangle. Nothing. The Beast began to scold into the sudden silence. Dead air was anathema. “Please, folks, if you want to call in, turn your radios down first. I don’t know how many times I’ve said it. It’s very important. Especially for you seniors out there who might be a little hard of—”
“Hello, Tom? Is that you?”
“None other. In the flesh, sir. We hear you loud and clear. Fire away. We’re all ears, I assure you.”
“Am I on?”
“Indeed you are. Let ’er rip.”
There was a pause, then, “You know what really gets me, Tom?”
The Beast gave Radioland a knowing chuckle. “No, I don’t, sir. And I guess I won’t until you let me in on the secret.” Rollins is such a dink.
“These guys who won’t work get me is what. We got one of them in our building here. Just a young guy. If he was crippled or simple or something that would be one thing. I mean now they even put the simple ones in those workshops and make them do something, don’t they now?”
“Retarded,” said The Beast.
“What?”
“We say retarded on this program, sir.”
“Yeah, well, whatever. Now you tell me, Tom, how does the government allow this guy, this guy in particular I’m talking about, not to work?”
“Well,” said The Beast, “I don’t know, sir. I’d be the last person to explain this so-called government of ours. It allows a lot of things which make no sense to me. But then you and I are just taxpayers, what do we know? They put child molesters in fancy hospitals and feed murderers steak in jail. Have you seen the price of steak lately? I don’t get fed half the steak your average murderer does. My wife’s got me on bread and water.” He chortled.
“It’s a damn crime, Tom. That’s what I used to say to the wife, I used to say, ‘It’s a damn crime.’ No wonder this country is in such a mess. Two months now and that guy hasn’t hardly stirred out of his apartment. Like I say, it isn’t that he can’t work. I seen him working once before, downtown in Eaton’s—”
Somebody in the studio hit the cut button; the tirade was scissored off. I froze, cheeks bulging with Cocoa Puffs. Two months? Eaton’s?
“Whoa there,” admonished The Beast. “Steady as she goes. We don’t want to get personal here. Let’s keep our comments nonspecific.”
“Well, anyway, what I mean to say,” the caller suddenly continued, brought back from the void, penitent, “is I seen him working once.” He sounded chastened by The Beast’s displeasure. For the huddled, wretched, and nutty the man is a tin god, I swear. “And he’s not working now,” said the caller, “so you got to figure he’s on the unemployment. What gripes me is how come I’m paying taxes to keep him sitting on his fat rear end up there, God only knows what he does all day, and I’m a pensioner?”
Sitting up there? Fat rear end? Pensioner? McMurtry. It had to be McMurtry. He had had it in for me ever since our quarrel over the parking stalls. Since that time I had occasionally caught sight of him peeking out from behind his curtains, watching me as I scraped frost off my windshield – or I’ve glimpsed a faded blue eye studying me through the gap between doorframe and door while I toiled up the staircase panting and puffing, lugging home the week’s groceries.
It all began innocently enough. I had been patient. I had been as understanding of human foibles as only Ed can be. He’s old, I told myself, perhaps his eyesight is failing.
But his fifteen-year-old Chrysler New Yorker kept slowly creeping to the right, week by week inching into my space until Leviathan one day firmly and triumphantly straddled both our parking stalls. McMurtry had finally shut me out.
I had no choice but to knock on his door and ask him to move his car. When he answered, an old man in khaki work pants, suspenders, and yellowed T-shirt, I caught a whiff of pungent socks and boiled turnips from inside his apartment. Past one bony shoulder I could see a shabby chesterfield pocked with old bum hollows; a blackened china cabinet festooned with family portraits; some dirty braided rugs; and a black felt pennant thumbtacked to the wall. In letters formed of silver sparkle the pennant recommended a visit to the Reptile Gardens in Montana.
“Excuse me, Mr. McMurtry. My name is Ed. I live upstairs. I was wondering if you could move your car. You see, the thing is, er …” Polite hesitation. “The thing is, I can’t quite get into my parking space.”
God, McMurtry looks old. There are wattles on his neck and canyons in his facescape that hold little white bristles he’s missed shaving. His ears are enormous. Years ago I read somewhere that as you grow older your kidneys shrink and your ears get bigger. If that implies some transfer of matter, McMurtry’s kidneys have dwindled to the size of raisins. At the time, his mouth was hanging open the way an old person’s often does. It was interesting to note it was no longer pink inside but the colour of raw liver.
“You the character drives that little yellow Jap thing?”
“That’s right. That’s me. Well, actually it’s Italian. That little yellow thing is—”
“You don’t need all that room for a car like that,” he said.
This claim took me aback. “Well, maybe not, but you see I need some room. I’ve got to get into my space.”
“You got room.” A pall of obstinacy had settled on his face. I was not sure what I had done. Had I annoyed him by implying he was an incompetent driver? I hadn’t meant to do that.
“This time of year,” I said, “with the snow and everything, it’s hard to see those darn white lines.” Ed mending fences.
“I ain’t blind. I can see them fine. And I seen you got lots of room for that Jap car of yours.”
To understand all is to forgive all, as Madame de Staël was so kind as to remind us. Had he been taken prisoner at Hong Kong in ’42? He looked a little old to have seen active service. Still, work on the Burma Railway would put years on a man and indignation at things Japanese in his heart.
“If I could get my car in my parking space I wouldn’t bother you. But I can’t. I’m very sorry but you’ll have to move your car.”
“Don’t put the blame on me for your lousy driving.”
I flared. “Lousy driving has got nothing to do with it. You couldn’t park a coffin in the space you left me. I defy anyone to get my car in there.”
“Huh!”
“I defy anyone to get my car into that space.” I was repeating myself, never a good sign.
“I’ll get her in,” he said.
“Well …”
“Singing a different tune now, eh?”
“I’m not singing a different tune.”
“Just lemme get my coat, Mr. Wiseguy.”
Jesus, I’m stupid, I thought as I watched him strike off down the hallway, struggling into his coat. He strutted with the deliberate jerkiness of the barnyard cock, head pecking forward, eyes frozen to glittering glass by his anger.
I sighed and trudged off after him.
Of course, if he was going to err he was going to err on the side of the garbage bin, not his precious New Yorker. Still, I am convinced he did it on purpose. While I shouted and frantically waved my arms trying to catch his attention, McMurtry kept gunning the engine as metal shrieked and a three-foot strip of paint was flayed off my car by the corner of a Sanuway Disposal Unit.
When I finally did get him halted, his crusty, malevolent old face betrayed not a flicker of contrition. He sat behind the wheel, stolid, his peaked cap pulled down level with his eyebrows in a futile attempt to get the flaps on his hat to cover more than half his enormous ears.
I must admit I lost control. “You stupid old fart!” I bellowed, beating the car roof with my fist. “Get out of my car! Get out of my car! Take a look at what you’ve done. This is an atrocity. This is carnage. I’ll never get a paint match. Never. Look at what you’ve done, you fucking, antiquated vandal!”
“There’s something wrong with your steering linkage,” he informed me, unperturbed.
“There’s something wrong with your steering linkage! Yours. Upstairs. Understand?” Picture this: I was actually jabbing myself in the temple with a stiff forefinger. “Get out and look! Look!”
He obliged me. McMurtry carefully eased himself out from behind the wheel, tottered around the car, and peered at the gleaming strip of exposed metal.
“I’ll never get a paint match,” I said. “Never. I’ll have to repaint the entire car.”
“You ask me,” said McMurtry, “I done you a favour. That yellow there you got looks like dog piss on snow.”
In a saner moment I would have had to agree with him. The yellow had been Victoria’s choice. Victoria, my estranged wife. She had read in Consumer Reports that yellow was a highly visible colour and for reasons of safety was an excellent choice for a car. That’s why yellow was replacing red on fire engines. She had insisted on yellow.
“Dog piss on snow! Dog piss on snow! That’s my car you’re referring to, you superannuated Hun!”
“That ain’t a car,” he said, glancing up at me from under his duck-bill cap, “that’s a sewing machine with tires.”
I let that pass. “What did I ever do to you?” I asked, trying to get a grip on myself. “What? For God’s sake, tell me!”
McMurtry pointed to my automobile. “Dinky Toy,” he said. He made a contemptuous putt-putt noise with his dry old lips.
Something snapped in my head. I lunged at his New Yorker. The terrible crack of cold metal breaking was succeeded by a silence wide and vast enough for me to realize what I’d done. I had a radio antenna in my mittened hand.
McMurtry’s eyes narrowed. “I’m calling the cops,” he said, creaked round on his heel, and began to shuffle for the apartment building as fast as his decrepit pins would carry him.
Cops. I saw immediately this was big trouble. You can’t wrench the radio antenna off a senior citizen’s mode of transportation without having society turn on you like a mad dog. And there’s no point in pleading provocation. I was hip deep in shit on this one.
It took a half an hour of abject pleading and spectacular self-abasement outside his apartment door to get him to accept thirty dollars’ damages. Thirty goddamn dollars! He never did bother to get the antenna replaced, either. He just wound a wire clothes-hanger around the stump.
Now McMurtry had the effrontery to go public with his vendetta. Mouth crammed with Cocoa Puffs, spoon suspended in mid-air, I had heard him tattle on Ed to The Beast.
“I mean, Tom,” McMurtry said, “what can be done about these bums? I mean to say, is there somewhere I could call to have this here character looked into?”
“Far be it for me to suggest anybody report anybody else to the proper authorities,” said The Beast. “But doggone it, the fact remains there’s just too many freeloaders in this so-called country of ours. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. There are just too many unemployment benefits and welfare rip-off artists getting away with blue murder. Anybody that tunes in to my program knows that Tom Rollins isn’t afraid to use plain language. My motto is, call a spade a spade. I want to give a name to what your young friend is doing. Let’s call it fraud. Fraud pure and simple. And fraud’s just a highfalutin name for stealing. Stealing hard-earned money out of your pocket, sir, out of my pocket, out of our neighbour’s pocket, out of poor old John Doe Taxpayer’s pocket.
“Now the last thing I want to say on this matter is this. If we saw some guy ripping off our neighbour, stealing his colour TV, say, what do you think we’d do?”
“I know what I’d do. I’d call the cops.” He certainly would. The merest hint of the illicit had his dialling finger poised and quivering. I could testify to that. The old fart was just crazy keen to call the cops.
“And so would any other John Q. Decent Citizen,” said The Beast stoutly. “But please, sir, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. It isn’t my job to tell you what to do. My role is that of communicator. Tom Rollins’s program exists only to facilitate an exchange of ideas. Which reminds me, by the by,” he said, “all my lines are lit up. You wouldn’t want me to deny an equal chance to all those folks out there to exercise their God-given democratic right to speak their minds on the issues of the day, would you? So …”
“So maybe I ought to call the Unemployment?”
“Far be it for me to tell you what to do, sir. We got to run now. But be sure to give us a call and let us know what the bureaucrats who hand out our money have to say for themselves on this one.” Click. “This is Tom Rollins here for ‘Brickbats and Bouquets.’ Speak now or forever hold your–”
I get hit with an anxiety attack whenever I think of those two. Right now I’m having a humdinger, a real Ed special. I’m sweating, my breathing is rapid and shallow, my heart is bumping my breastbone. I heave the covers off in one convulsive movement.
Calm down, Ed. Calm down. I roll on my back, stare down the expanses of my ample, pale body. Eyes trained between the little hillocks that are my breasts, I survey a white swell of belly; a little coppice of hairs rises in the vicinity of my navel. In the beyond, hidden below all this, lie legs and feet and orangish, ridged toenails.
God, The Beast is slowly, day by day, week by week, driving me crazy. He has sat in judgment on me and pronounced me guilty. There is no appeal from his terrible court. Just ask me how that loser, K, felt in The Trial.
Victoria used to tell me it was a symptom of my immaturity that I can’t let things like this go. The inability to make distinctions of value, she called it. But it isn’t that. Very well, I know there are greater injustices being borne than the ones I bear, there is injustice in the very air we breathe. Infants are scalded by hapless and drunken mothers, concert pianists contract multiple sclerosis, Martin Luther King is assassinated, and Idi Amin is granted political asylum. In the scheme of things what has happened to me is nothing, less than nothing. I know that. For God’s sake, nobody even knows who McMurtry and The Beast are talking about, and if they did, no one would care except my father. He would be ashamed.
Pop sends me snapshots from Brownsville and on the back of them he writes things such as “Old Ralphy Madigan took this one. He admires your mother’s legs,” or “Photo courtesy of Shirley Phillipotts,” as if I knew these people. They are his world now, these new friends from Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Michigan, and Saskatchewan whose life journey has been a pilgrimage to a shrine distant from the snows.
In these photographs he and my mother sit under a striped canvas awning tacked to their junky trailer and held up by spindly aluminum poles spiked in the dusty earth. I barely recognize them. In the freer air of the great Republic to the south, mother has dyed her hair chocolate and taken to wearing red rubber sandals and one-piece swimming suits. Pop is a stranger in a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, Bermuda shorts, and mirror sunglasses. I never saw him in shorts before in my life. Never.
I could have believed he was born in his khaki work pants. I could have believed his first words were: “It isn’t right. Fair’s fair.” For it’s from Pop that I absorbed my bittersweet understanding of injustice. We’re very much alike, although he can’t recognize it.
You see, Pop was a small-potatoes building contractor and big-league idealist. He never understood business. What drove him to despair was that he couldn’t land the larger jobs. “I was low tender,” he’d say to my mother, “what the Christ is going on there?”
Whenever I look at the Polaroids he mails me I wonder if, behind the mirror sunglasses and the white smile in the dark face, he isn’t still asking that bewildered question: “I was low bidder all those years, wasn’t I? What in Christ was going on? How come I never got it?”
Not that he didn’t inquire. My father doesn’t have much formal education but he used to write eloquently stilted letters to boards and committees requesting explanations. Of course, he never got satisfaction and their evasions only made him melancholy. “I was low,” he’d mutter. “I’m always low. I pare my costs to the bone. No fat. There’s practically nothing left for me. Don’t they trust me?” he’d ask, turning to my mother.
And then he’d write another letter asking, Didn’t they trust him to do quality work? Because he could guarantee quality work.
They almost never deigned to answer the second time. Pop was such an innocent.
No, nobody knows who The Beast is talking about, so who cares?
I know. I care. I have phoned the open-line show to explain to him that I receive neither unemployment insurance nor welfare, but live on the capital I raised from cashing in my life insurance policy. What an act of blind faith that is, my throwing myself on The Beast’s mercy in hope of redress. I barely begin to make my case when the line goes dead, and then in the background The Beast speaks from my radio. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s him again. This high wind we’re having today must be shaking the nuts out of the trees.”
I have written him letters begging him not to encourage McMurtry in his persecution of me. I flatter The Beast and remind him that with great power comes great responsibility. It does no good.
I have never set eyes on The Beast, but in my fantasies I see him seated behind a microphone in a deserted radio station. He is forty-five years old or thereabouts. His rich brown hair has been permed into a profusion of pubic-looking curls. His shirt, undone to the third button, exposes a baby-pink, hairless bosom, on which rosy expanse dangles one of the last great bronze medallions to grace a chest west of Warsaw.
From his voice alone I have extrapolated this, I have invented his biography. I can see him. I know The Beast. He is the kind of man who cups and conspicuously hitches his genitals before taking a seat. He went to a radio arts academy in Oklahoma. He orders his wife to lose weight. He has turned his son into a bed-wetter and his daughter into a drum majorette. I would be willing to wager dollars to doughnuts that this monster of iniquity has decreed one night a week Family Night and on that hallowed eve his children, denied television, are compelled to talk to him.
My fantasies lean toward strangulation. I have broken into The Beast’s studio. He is alone.
He springs to his feet, upsetting his chair in terror. It makes an ominous sound toppling over in the studio. “You!” he exclaims.
“Yes,” I intone solemnly, calmly advancing. “It is Ed. It is he whom you have wronged.”
“No! No!”
We grapple. My righteous thumbs embed themselves in his Adam’s apple.
“Aarrgh! Aarrgh!” cries The Beast, tearing at my swelling forearms with his fingernails. Homo horribilis is being strangled on air, live. Ten thousand watts of power are pumping out his death agony across the province, into thousands of households.
And then the bloody phone rings. Rings and rings and rings. Just when I had the son of a bitch where I wanted him.