Vandal Love (26 page)

Over the years she shooed François’s concerns, and it wasn’t until Harvey was eight that François realized how far things had gone. That week a business acquaintance from Washington invited François for a drink. After a few, François shared his predicament. The American was heavy-set, with thick hands that didn’t move as he spoke, a tanned collar and pale forehead. Earlier, he’d suggested a few ideas for bumper stickers, all based on fishing. Now he sat back, hands limp on the nicked wood as he described what he called Playboy Therapy. His own son had been a twerp, he said, and his solution had been to bribe the boy with
Playboys
. He’d showed him a centrefold now and then and promised that for every month of twenty push-ups a day, the boy would get that issue.

The man let this sink in, hands like dead birds on the table, not even reaching for his beer.

Well, he did it, he said. He’s an All-Star linebacker.

When François got home, Peggy was in bed reading a manual on curing common ailments with dandelions. He went into Harvey’s room. He sat on the bed and said,
Son, I think you’re old enough. Harvey noted this new voice, bigger than his father’s. He looked at the magazine, the stockinged legs and lipped delight. He sensed the secret power of revealed bodies, the loneliness in the way the girls looked out, as if trapped. For François the talk went well. Harvey was receptive, even curious. He promised to do the push-ups and not to tell Peggy, though when François came home the following evening, she was stuffing grocery bags with clothes, the skin of her face and arms mottled with rage.

For Harvey the years before his parents’ separation remained clear. He dreamed of being a psychic, of levitating sheets of paper or blowing out candles with his mind. He’d been taught that God was one soul who was everyone and who, unconstrained by time, lived all their lives. His mother had told him that this divine energy was like the sun, and that he should imagine himself as its light, which he fancied. She said he was destined to be a holy man, and to help him along, she transformed his room into a New Age reading centre, its walls a gallery of saintly images. Together they drew pictures of him meditating on mountaintops, in temples. You’ll be a holy man of your own kind, totally original, she wrote in his birthday cards, along with various bits of wisdom remarkably similar to the twelve steps she’d heard nightly at the dinner table from her father when she was growing up.

But for all his dreaminess, aversions obsessed him: mud, rain, the smell of turned compost, of homemade
cheese and jars of souring yogurt unwrapped from towels, or the crumbling bread and radish sprouts his mother sent him to school with, for which he was teased. A dollop of mustard on his shirt brought him to the verge of tears. Bird shit on his shoulder or turds in the treads of his shoes froze him in a catatonic rage. He even hated his name. It sounded sloppy. He hated sports and bugs, the girl next door who collected spiders in jars. He avoided his mother when she was gardening or when she farted and swatted her hand and said, Lordy, pardon me. When boys at school gleeked or hawked up mucus to let it dangle from their lips or blew bubbles in it like chewing gum, he gagged. Just beyond the playground fence was a walking path, and during recess old people stopped and waved. He was afraid of their walkers and ugly clothes, their wrinkled heads like brown nuts.

Despite his mother’s love somewhere encoded in earliest memory was the knowledge that he made his father sad. Over the years this impression found words, a sense of fault. His father’s distracted gazes simmered on him. He was forced to go to tae kwon do, where kids swung their legs like staffs, to a boxing club where East Indians listened to pounding rap and wore Raiders jackets. They looked at him as if he’d floated downstream in a basket. He skinned his knuckles on the punching bag and cried.

Finally his father bought him a Lab mix. Harvey was skeptical, seeing in the dog’s tilted gaze a hell of ransacked rooms, dog prints on pants, shit to be scraped off shoes. A little white mouse would be better than the
dog, pawing and trampling, jerking its head at sudden unperceived interests, Totally ADD, his mother said. François then, after researching more manly activities, took Harvey salmon fishing, but he misjudged the dates, the runs almost over, rotting salmon on gravel banks, purple with humped backs and hooked jaws and reeking with the pent fury of brief lives. They caught nothing, fishing in gusting stench, the current tugging at their waders. The dog gorged itself on rancid meat and, in the dark cab of the truck, panted into their faces as they drove the long roads home.

The separation, when it came, was a release from inadequacy, especially now that he’d betrayed his father. Long ago he’d learned that everything François said was of interest to his mother. She’d shared various bits of wisdom over time, and Harvey had composed a list beginning with the badness of men and ending in his father’s being a man like any other. They just can’t evolve, she’d often told him. By the time François came to say goodbye, Peggy was already waiting in the taxi that would take them to the airport. Harvey wanted only to leave, to be as far as possible from all that he’d failed.

You’ll visit me, François said, and I’ll send money. If she buys you things, it will be with my money, so just know I’m there paying for everything, okay. And remember the push-ups. We’ll figure this out. When you visit, I’ll buy you those magazines, but don’t you tell her again.

In the cab, Harvey asked if they were leaving because of the magazines.

She laughed dryly. No, she said.

———

Harvey’s initial impression of the country south of the border was disappointing. When, years later, he wondered if Canada had been any different, he could not properly judge. Whereas Canada was open and windy, the States, the South at least, seemed closed, muggy, full of secret dangers, a slouching fat man wiggling his belt as he came out from an alley, spitting tobacco then saying, Hey, bud, or a spruce black boy surveying a quiet downtown street like a warlord and telling Harvey for no apparent reason, Go’n, get outa here.

His mother worked various jobs and made friends at a New Age bookshop and began to work the spiritual dating circuit. In her weeks of being single she got a perfectly round perm with a fringe of bangs, joined aerobics to keep her figure and talked on the phone, often in her yellow and blue leotard.

Jacqueline, she said, I knew it was you calling. I just knew before I picked up.

She talked about her chakras, the energy stagnation she was experiencing in her navel and went on, spurred by something said over the phone, to discuss how what had made Hitler such a bad man was the energy caught
in his throat chakra. All that trapped energy, she said. It must have driven him crazy. You can see it when he talks, all jerky, you know, in the movies.

Harvey sat, feeling his throat for heat or static, wondering what his energy was doing and clearing it with gentle coughs to see if that made any difference.

He’d read about alchemy, transmutation of the self into god-being, the gold of perfection. In New Age novels people entered dream worlds or became pure energy, and he could imagine this, his quiet size phased into light, now floating away. It was a pleasant thought. But how? In religious fables, the holy men illuminated only criminals. Feeling restless, he walked through the trailer park. He gazed out from a rise, bright embers in the dusk where kids smoked as they wove lazily down the streets on bikes.

Those years Peggy and Harvey moved from one subdivision to the next, always looking for a cheaper place. She graduated him from saintly picture books to the hard autobiographies of holy men. He read how Gandhi’s fasts had stopped riots and liberated India, and of his march to the sea for salt. He learned about the Buddha’s determination to end suffering, the years he spent alone and looked down upon by those he’d hoped to teach. Even Jesus had hard times and did some good work. But the Buddha had had the best deal, his father having secluded him from the pain of existence, old age and death, until he left one day and witnessed the manifold suffering of the world.

While adolescence sprouted around Harvey like weeds, he remained his same neat self though was loved no better. He mitigated loneliness by reading or practising esoteric breaths from pamphlets his mother brought home. She believed in him and told him this often. She’d gained weight, big in the chest and hips, and even when he was in his early teens, she still lifted him onto her lap and said, Tell me all about those brilliant ideas of yours. He’d speak, perched like a ventriloquist’s puppet, but he never voiced his loneliness, his feeling of being stranded.

One day, he read in a science book that domestication resulted in more delicate bone structure, that dogs, cats, horses, even birds became smaller when tamed. That night he held his hand over the flashlight and considered the transparency of his skin, his fine avian bones. Perhaps he was the culmination, the fully evolved human. Alone he could almost believe this. He had a natural attraction to purity. He’d grown up surrounded by pictures of bliss and enlightenment, a karma of learning. But where was the reality? He wished he’d been raised Jewish, could fall back on a rock-hard core of tradition that would give him the courage to dress like a weirdo and pray in public.

He stood at the window. He might search endlessly, might end up chewing a cola nut, all wrinkled and bony, in a breechclout, at the side of a dusty road. What was to guarantee that he’d be loved, that he’d attain some goal? The suburban lane reflected nothing, just trimmed lawns, unused sidewalks. Stop signs cast stretched
octagons as the sun descended somewhere far away. In the near dark he could see it all, row upon row of houses like cattle cars that might pull away in the night, occupy another field without the sleepers ever knowing, a field one stop closer to their destruction.

At fifteen he made his first friend, a hulking, mohawked delinquent brought from D.C. to a foster home. The boy had asked to cheat off him, and when Harvey had reluctantly agreed, knowing that his own answers were no doubt flawed, the two had become allies. It was thrilling, to be sought out and admired, the delinquent now pulling in Cs instead of Fs. But a few weeks later, both were given detention, and when the delinquent decided he was going to run away, Harvey couldn’t imagine the loss of his friend and so went with him. Unsure of where to go, the boy asked his advice and they ended up stowing away in Peggy’s garden shed.

During the next two days, the boy confessed his crimes—thefts, violence, sexual assault. Harvey forgave him. They snoozed, seeing each other by wands of light through the tin walls. Day faded. They heard hysterical voices outside. The delinquent soon wanted to give in. He hadn’t spent lifetimes seeking nirvana and living in solitude, meditating in caves. For Harvey it was easy. He wanted to impress this youth who fit in no more than he did, whose purple rages had had him throttling peers, flicking off teachers, tearing textbooks in half. Harvey had been terrified, but friendship had melted all barriers to his heart. At the delinquent’s insistence he snuck to the house for food.

What’re we going to do? the delinquent asked.

I’m going to live with my father, Harvey told him, in Canada.

In Kansas? the delinquent blurted.

No, in Canada.

Where’s that? You sure you don’t mean Kansas? There ain’t nothing in Kansas.

Canada, Harvey repeated, bitterly conscious of having to explain his lie.

Might be another way of saying Kansas, the delinquent told him, quietly, not willing to give up his position, his only real sense of the place from the Technicolor
Wizard of Oz
he’d seen in the detention ward, to which he would soon return. Enlightenment wasn’t for everyone. They sat in darkness, lawn mower between them, rakes and pruning shears and garden tools on the walls. It all smelled of dirt and mouldy grass. And still they waited, for something, for anything to happen.

At the age of seventeen, several months before he was to graduate, Harvey began his first fast. He’d been reading about contamination and the modern diet, colonic toxicity and its many effects, among them stunted development. He was five-one, ninety-six pounds, and hoped for a last growth spurt. Five-two would make all the difference, a world away from five-one with its questionable numerological significance. When Peggy came home and found him crosslegged on his bedspread and learned of
his plans, she blurted, But you don’t eat anything in the first place.

Harvey wasn’t dissuaded. He’d also read that fasting could restore an appetite stymied by toxins. It was spring break, and while his peers yanked the canvas off jeeps and raced for the coast or threw parties at which they groped girls they’d known since kindergarten and vomited in sinks, Harvey grew lighter. He liked the sense of airiness, of purity. He’d been a vegan for more than a year, but this was of another order. He lost the need to sleep yet never quite felt awake. His pee turned bright orange. Day three he began to feel feverish. Then it passed.

I’ll never get sick again, he told his mother when he’d finished.

Minutes after his first glass of cold apple juice he rushed to the bathroom. Later a tofu sandwich gave him horrible abdominal pain until he brought it up. Two days back to school he had swollen tonsils, a rash on the backs of his thighs from sitting in the heat. He took his books home to recover, perhaps to stay forever, and his mother, after wandering the supermarket uncertainly, brought him a dozen jars of Gerbers.

Apricot’s good, he told her.

You just needed to start slow, she said.

Perhaps it was the fast that broke his faith. Years he’d watched his mother pass from fad to fad, listening to cassettes about growing younger through positive thinking, checking her angel cards or standing at the mirror and screaming as if at an intruder, Wrinkles go away! She did the same with bone spurs and menstrual cramps. But
nothing stuck. He’d been raised in an aura of glib talk about enlightenment but felt no closer. It was time to check out Christianity.