Mean Boy

Praise for Lynn Coady’s
mean boy

ALSO BY LYNN COADY

Saints of Big Harbour

Play the Monster Blind

Strange Heaven

Victory Meat
(editor)

HE SAT ON HIS DESK
, positioned in front of this enormous window with the sunlight streaming all around his outline. I could barely look at him without going blind. He saw me squinting and shading my eyes and squeezing them shut when they started watering, but he didn’t move, or close the curtain. He had a little teapot on the desk beside him and he kept picking it up and listening to it. He told me my poem should have a dead person in it.

“Maybe a murder or something,” he said, “to make it more exciting.”

I didn’t know what to say so I talked about what was in the poem already. I said I thought that maybe it was a little wordy, that I hadn’t figured out how to distill my ideas yet. I figured he could speak to this—none of his poems are any more than ten lines long, and half the time each line has no more than three or four words in it. He just sat there listening to his teapot as I rambled away, carefully using words like
distill
and
cumbersome
.

“I think maybe it’s a little cumbersome?”

Everything I said went up in a question. I sounded like I was still in high school. I knew I had to learn how to stop talking like that, especially around this guy, but it got worse when I was nervous.

“No, no, it’s not cumbersome. It just needs something to
happen
. Nothing
happens
in it. There’s nothing wrong with a lot of words—I like words.”

“But your poems are so …” I wanted a really perfect word for this.
Terse. Brief. Scant. Scant? Scant
was good. But did it have any negative connotations? Would he think I meant insubstantial?

“… short,” I said, before the silence could thicken.

“Those are
my
poems,” he said. “And my poems are great. I’m trying to learn not to insist that other writers write poems like mine. In fact I prefer that they don’t. Listen to this for a minute.” I thought maybe he was going to recite something, but instead he extended the little teapot so that I was compelled to get up out of my chair and come toward him.

I listened. It was full of tea. I could feel the heat radiating toward my cheek. It was making a buzzing sound, sort of like a horsefly.

“Hm,” I said.

“It’s
buzzing,”
he said. “Why do you suppose it does that?”

“I think maybe air is trapped in there or something.”

“Well, it’s
weird,”
said Jim Arsenault, the greatest living poet of our time.

I sit obsessing on this, fingers poised over my typewriter keys. Every time I blink, the silhouette of Jim outlined against his sun-filled window flashes inside my head, like it’s been burned into my corneas. I hear him saying,
Well, it’s weird
. I hear him saying everything but what I wanted to hear about my poetry. I hear
more exciting
, which means
not exciting
. It’s hard to come up with something new, hearing that. It seems like it might be easier—more fun, more inspiring too, somehow—to tear the page from my typewriter’s grip, slowly, without releasing the catch, so that it kind of shrieks as if in drawn-out pain.

I have a poem called “Poem Poem” taped to the window above my typewriter—by Milton Acorn, who is my hero because he is an unschooled genius who, like me, is from Prince Edward Island. The poem is about the good days and
the bad days of writing poetry. The first stanza talks about a good day, how
Poems broke from the white dam of my teeth. / I sang truth, the word I was … Heart and fist thumped together
, it says, a line I love.

Then the second stanza describes the poem “I write today,” how it “grins” at him while
I chop it like a mean boy / And whittles my spine. It is truth
, says Acorn with regard to this poem,
the word I am not
.

That’s the poem. I look at it when I’m feeling lonely, and when I feel like a moron—a
not exciting
moron—for sitting in front of my typewriter thinking I’m a poet. Sometimes I love it, though—some days are as different from one another as the two stanzas of the poem. That’s why I have it up there. Sometimes, even if I’m not writing, just the feel of being alone in my apartment in front of the typewriter is enough. I take off my shirt. I can see myself, I can see what I look like sitting here wearing nothing but jeans and glasses, me and my pale teenage limbs. I look like a poet. I know that I do. I believe in it, those days.

I
, I’ll type. And that will be enough.

Then there are the other days, when nothing is enough. The poem grins. It grins because it knows it is a terrible poem. It grins in embarrassment. It grins in pity. It grins in superiority. I may be a terrible poem, it grins, but at least I have one comfort. At least I’m not a terrible
poet
. At least I’m not the guy who sat in front of a typewriter for two hours coming up with the likes of
me
.

A girl named Sherrie is busy reading her work for Jim and the rest of us—mostly for Jim. I am busy being made uncomfortable by it. It’s all about desire and sex, but there is nothing arousing going on in the least. I expected to not like it because it would be sentimental, but that isn’t the problem. It’s just
Sherrie standing up there with her yellow curls going everywhere like a doll or a crazed cheerleader, semi-whispering about “folds in flesh” and “shimmering” this and “shuddering” that—it makes me queasy. It’s only our second class, for God’s sake.
Meeting
, Jim wants us to call it.

Jim doesn’t seem to mind Sherrie’s stuff. He stands with the same demeanour he has whenever anybody reads. He leans slightly against his desk, stares at the ground, and folds his arms way back behind his head, so that his elbows stick out on either side of it like huge animal ears, a rabbit-man. He’ll stand that way for as long as twenty minutes sometimes, depending on whatever anyone’s reading. There is a guy named Claude from Moncton who writes villanelles. These villanelles go on forever sometimes, and Jim will just stand there all contorted until the very last line.

Sherrie gushes the last line of her poem, which is actually about gushing in one way or another. I don’t know whether to take it literally or not. Probably I shouldn’t. It’s a metaphorical orgasm. I will say that if asked to comment—I will remark upon the “metaphorical orgasm” at the end. Will I say that I liked it or not? Maybe neither. Better to be noncommittal.
I was intrigued. I was intrigued by the metaphorical orgasm in the last line. I thought perhaps it was a little too clichéd, however
. No, I can’t say clichéd. A little too … 
apropos
.