My desire went in cycles. Sometimes I would spread out several magazines and masturbate compulsively, as much as three times in a row. Like a sultan going through his harem, I would flip through the Playboys searching for just the right smile, just the right breast, to push me over the edge. As I got to know my Playmates I became pickier, flipped longer. At other times I felt bloated with overconsumption; it came with a feeling in my stomach, a pit of solitude. Then I masturbated to a single picture, or none at all, using only my imagination.
In this erratic hunger for paper women -- I want many! I want none -- I might have perceived the real poverty of my diet, an intimation of what it was doing to me, but the pleasure was too great. It's the way I see myself then: I binged on paper women, stuffing my mouth, then I vomited them out violently. Can you see a boy on his knees over a toilet bowl, a finger down his throat, vomiting pictures of naked women? That's me. A boy suffering from pictorio-sexual bulimia. Although, in truth, that's not the way it went. At the time, I ate. It was so good, so amazingly good. It's now that I vomit. Now, when I see pornography, I am instantly seized by nausea. It's beyond my control. My stomach flips and my mouth waters unpleasantly.
I was busy (there was school, there was exercise, I read books and saw movies, I watched plenty of television -- no longer an enemy but the companion of my lonely hours -- there were my furtive minutes of ecstasy, there were all the moments of anguish, idleness and discovery that make up adolescence), but I would say that my busyness took none of my time, for the one thing that truly consumed me was emotions -- and my consistent approach was to shy away from the greatest source of these emotions.
In the lineup at the school cafeteria, Carolyn once got close to me and pressed one of her breasts against my arm in a way that penetrated even a shyness as obtuse as mine. I feigned not to notice, then masturbated about it at home. Some time later, when I first saw her holding hands with Graham, I felt all the pain of dashed love. When they languorously kissed by their lockers for minutes on end, eyes closed, heads gently moving, I pretended to be busy at my locker but in fact stood there in cold misery. She was so pretty, Carolyn, as pretty as a Playmate. I knew well enough the pleasure she could give as a picture, but what I wanted was the pleasure she could give in person, her soft lips pressed to my lips, her glossy paper body pressed to my body.
If you'd asked me then what love was, I would have replied in terms of a deep, upsetting beauty-hunger, with at its centre, the tang of it, lust; and I would have said that love was my favourite emotion, though I was far less familiar with it than I was with desolation and frustration.
In 1979, at the age of sixteen, I entered Mount Athos School, an all-boys boarding school. This unexpected turn of events came about because the powers that be had decided that there was a need for more women ambassadors, and so my mother had been plucked from relative juniority and appointed Canada's representative to Cuba. My father, who by then was sick of the civil service and gladly accepted a golden handshake, was going to run from Havana his Ediciones Sin Fronteras/Editions Sans Frontieres, which would specialize in the two-way translation of Quebec and Latin American poetry, an affair of little profit but great love. But the rub was that there was no secondary school for foreigners in Castro's republic. Thus, with funding from the Department of External Affairs, the un-Canadian option of boarding school presented itself. My parents were heart-broken at the idea of being separated from their son, but I jumped at the idea. Boarding school! It set my imagination on fire. What an adventure it would be!
I passed the stone and iron gates of Mount Athos on a sunny September afternoon. I had a trunk and two suitcases, I had a name tag in bright red letters tirelessly sewn onto my every item of clothing by the ambassador-designate to Cuba, I had three new blazers, a smart new trench-coat and a fine selection of my father's ties, I had bright hopes and great expectations.
The vista that offered itself as we drove up the long, curving driveway was promising: expanses of green lawns and playing fields bordered by great leafy trees, a well-integrated assortment of grey-stone and red-brick buildings, some old, some new, a number of neat gravel paths, a chapel with stained-glass windows, and one large stone cross in the centre of the grounds; and the village we had just come through was one of the prettiest I had seen in central Ontario.
My room, my new home, was a perfectly symmetrical arrangement of two cupboards with drawers, two beds, two desks and two wrought-iron windows with a third-floor view, from atop a hill (the said Mount Athos), of a rolling apple orchard and, in the distance, Lake Ontario. I was assigned the right half of the room. This parcel of territory delighted me. I tested the bed. In my hand I had a thick manila envelope containing all sorts of information on the school, omen of further promise.
I felt my life was beginning.
I don't have fond memories of my two years at Mount Athos. As a school it was good enough. We learned our calculus and biology well, that sort of thing. But what I mainly remember is the climate of disrespect that pervaded the institution, a disrespect that often descended into emotional savagery. Just about the only delicacy I can trace to my Mount Athos days is the fact that when I pass through a door I hold it open for anyone coming through behind me.
TWO REASONS WHY I HATE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:
(1) I asked Gordon, the returning boy who was showing me around, what my roommate was like. "Croydon?" he said. "Oh -- he's nice." But in saying this he looked away. I should have taken note. Instead I rolled this odd name around in my mouth, taking a liking to it, already considering it that of my best friend.
Gordon's reply contained another sign of things to come: the propensity of boys and masters at Mount Athos to call the boys by their last names. For Croydon was a surname, and Croydon was Croydon, not John. The intimate first name disappeared, was reserved for only the best, closest friends. To others one became an impersonal last name, like a brand name, a turtle with a word painted on its shell, a wall with a single window too high to look into.
As I was sitting on my bed, reading the information in the envelope, two boys came in carrying a trunk.
"Are you Croydon?" I asked the first, a smile on my face. He had a sharply featured face and sandy hair.
"No, he is," he said with a smirk, jerking his head towards the other, who laughed. They dropped the trunk and left.
A minute later, the first boy, the one I had spoken to, returned. He opened the trunk and started unpacking it. He didn't say a word or even throw me a glance.
He was Croydon.
He didn't want a roommate. He had asked for one of the few single rooms in Baxter House. He didn't get it. He got a double room and me.
One day we were in our room, each at our desk, back to back, studying for a math test. From the corridor, not loud but coming through, we could hear Kleinhenz and another boy arguing. I suppose Kleinhenz was a little pompous and disdainful. The argument was not acrimonious or even personal -- I found out later that it was about the merits of different systems of education, and that Kleinhenz was quite satisfied about the excellence of his native German Gymnasiums -- but it was enough for Croydon to grab the garbage can, walk out, throw the garbage can at Kleinhenz's head and start punching him in the face. Thus would Croydon make him pay for his accent, with the personality it suggested! Kleinhenz put up as good a fight as he could -- he brought up his fists in the classical stance of boxers and danced about -- but though he was taller and had a greater reach, he was fifteen years old to Croydon's seventeen, and even if things had been otherwise equal he lacked Croydon's hard edge of nastiness. With every punch that met its target, my roommate took increasing pleasure in the contest. It ended when Kleinhenz unexpectedly turned and fled down the corridor. My image of him will always be of the multicoloured mask of abuse he wore for days afterwards: the greenish-blue rings around his eyes, the red welts on his cheekbones, the purple cuts on his lips.
Like the other boys, including the one with whom Kleinhenz had been having the argumen
t, I did nothing but watch the fight, mesmerized by its violence. Not the first time, and certainly not the last, that I would display moral deadness at Mount Athos.
That was Croydon. Not a rogue element at Mount Athos, but a rogue in his element.
(2) I remember McAlister. There were three classes of boys at Mount Athos. There were the elites: the top athletes, the best students, those with a certain charisma, those with famous last names -- these could do no wrong. The institution coddled them, humoured them. Beneath these elites floated a slightly oppressed but complacently content middle class, the average element in contrast to which the elites could shine, the spectators who did the clapping and cheering. Lastly, there was a class that was lower and marginal (though it paid exactly the same astronomical tuition fees). These were the "zeros", the nobodies of Mount Athos, those who were unable to fit in for whatever reason -- a curious physical appearance, a social awkwardness, an ineptness of one sort or another.
I was a zero. My acne and messy hair advertised it, my petulance confirmed it, my French name sealed it. Only my good marks and the cachet of Madam Ambassador My Mother placed me in its upper echelons.
But McAlister of the stupid face and the cheap blue suit -- he was the zero of zeros. He suffered unremittingly. His ego must have been shattered so many times that I can't imagine he ever managed to put it back together again, like all the king's horses and all the king's men with Humpty Dumpty. That's how I see McAlister: a boy with broken eggshells in his head.
They used to whip him viciously with wet towels; he stopped taking showers after sports, waited till evening, when he hoped the showers would be clear. They dumped fresh garbage into his bed. They shit on his books and notes. They threw buckets of cold water on him in bed at night when he was asleep, something that was done to me several times. Once he ordered himself a pizza and it was taken from his very hands as soon as it was delivered; he later found the anchovies on his pillow.
I never saw such an unhappy boy as McAlister, poor Andrew McAlister. May his sufferings be memorialized here.
ONE REASON WHY I LOVE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:
(1) On a class trip to Toronto we saw an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario called "Turner and the Sublime". I have never forgotten it. We had a guide and we heard the usual art history blather, but I paid no attention to it, for these paintings spoke to me directly. The show consisted of oil paintings and a small number of watercolours. Though I can't recall any one work in particular, I vividly remember the effect of the whole. I looked upon mountains and gorges, lakes and ruins, meadows and streams, each landscape tinged with such colour, infused with such light, that I indeed felt a sense of the sublime, a sense that has never left me, that has given me my one rough axiom of aesthetics. These vast canvases, probably smaller in reality than the imprint they left on my memory, made me feel powerfully, durably, that beauty has meaning, that beauty is meaning.
FOUR MORE REASONS WHY I HATE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:
(3) There was the institution of "gitching", which consisted in holding down a boy, reaching behind to grab his underwear and pulling it until it ripped. Alas for the boy who had quality underwear that did not rip easily. This action was prefaced by the long shout "Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch!", which would make the intended victim turn in terror, and was perpetrated to a barking chorus of "Gitch! Gitch! Gitch!" Funny to all except the younger or weaker boy who was the target of this gang attack. It went around the school, with chortles of laughter, I tell you, when it was discovered that McAlister, that shadow against the wall, no longer wore underwear.
(4) There was huge, fat Wilford, who, on a lark, threw me to the ground and sat on me. I can still remember the compression of my chest, the horrifying sensation of my organs being squeezed and pushed about. I struggled to keep breathing. But boys and masters -- this was in the dining-hall during lunch hour -- seemed to find the sight of a mouse of a boy squashed under an elephant of a boy very amusing, right out of a cartoon, perhaps. I remember that when he got off me and I could sit up, my face very congested, my thoughts confused, feeling faint, the only sound I heard, other than my heart pounding in my ears, was laughter.
(5) There was the night when the light was suddenly turned on in Karol's and my third-floor room -- this was in second year; I had changed houses and roommates -- and I awoke to recognize Croydon and his gang standing around my bed, all of them wearing pillowcases over their heads with eye-holes ripped in them, in the manner of the Ku Klux Klan. If I had had three seconds' warning, I would have seriously considered jumping out the window, trusting the lawn below and my ability to grab tree branches to cushion the blow. But they were hunting for Preston, thank God, and they were just checking to see if he was hiding in our room.
Preston was nowhere to be found. He spent that night, as he had others, hiding beyond the football field, behind trees, two suitcases in his hands jammed with his schoolbooks, class notes, clothes and other valuables, ready to skulk away should the gang start roaming the school grounds. Which they didn't. They merely sacked his room, upturning the furniture and destroying anything he had left. He forgot his calculus notes in his room and had to use Karol's to study for the final exam. But the theft and destruction of material objects, that was routine at Mount Athos, banal, not even worth going into. We were a community, a tightly knit brotherhood -- so why should we be allowed to lock the doors to our rooms? Of what spirit of distrust, of suspicion, would this speak? Such was the noble philosophy of the institution, whose masters walked around to the jingle-jangle of the keys with which they made secure their apartments, houses, offices and cars.
(6) Indignities were dished out by masters, too. I recall one who, when asked in class what "pusillanimous" meant -- the word was in a book we were reading -- looked around, landed his eyes upon me, and said, "Here, this is an example of pusillanimity." The class, though still no wiser as to what the word meant, burst into laughter.
ANOTHER REASON WHY I LOVE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:
(2) The setting. Such a constant, daily beauty -- I was there two autumns, two winters, two springs; I have mentioned the expanses of green grass and the great oak trees and the stately old buildings and even Lake Ontario, but I forgot to describe the shimmering jewel of a little river that coursed through the area -- such a beauty would have a durable echo in even the most brutish mind. And the school was a small, self-contained community; within it, away from the forces of disrespect, took place unforgettable moments of friendship. I remember the midnight munchies with Karol -- making toast and peanut butter, scrambling to pull the battery out of the smoke detector when a burnt toast set it off. I remember the two of us walking to the river on a green spring day of such clarity I can't tell you. We slipped into its calm waters and swam downstream with it, just two heads moving along the surface, insects skimming by, the swaying trees filtering the sun, fish dimpling the surface of the water. It was magic, pure magic. We could have swum like that to the Pacific. I remember a bunch of us playing "brick" in the pool, the brick in question being made of rubber and fitting perfectly into the pool's excess-water trough, thus giving us our ball and our goal. I remember jogging down to the lake in the dead of winter and discovering the accumulations of snow and ice along its shore and scrambling over them to get dangerously close to the open water, to death, and staying there for an hour, thinking about my parents, turning to see Holt-Royd, a boy two grades below me whom I knew only slightly, standing just behind me. "I thought you were maybe going to jump in," he said. With calm and simplicity, we talked.
It is memories such as these that explain the legions of Old Boys who, to their dying day, donate money to the institution, with the McAlisters and Prestons at the forefront of these nostalgics, as if pain and humiliation were the seeds, and time the water, of the plant Amnesia.
ANOTHER REASON WHY I HATE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:
(7) When disrespect is a climate and a system, it becomes contagious.
I remember standing about and watching as a group of boys
gitched and did I don't know what else to Preston, who struggled like a fish out of water. I watched with a degree of satisfaction, because Preston really was a jerk. I felt the same when his room was wrecked yet again.
The real reason why I hate Mount Athos School is that I was the one who put the anchovies on McAlister's pillow.
"Ante todo, el viento y el ruido. Aquel dia el mar estaba como un espejo sin nada de viento. Yo estaba femando. Oi algo como un grito, un grito de nina, no mas, y al darme la vuelta vi un inmenso chorro de llamas viniendo hacia mi. Cayo del cielo azul como un volcan. Vino un viento para dejar sordo, apabullante, como el ultimo suspiro de Dios. Tenia el color de una naranja. Aquello me echo del barco, el ruido tanto como el soplo. Pensaba morir de calor pero me salvo el agua. Nade hacia la barca, temblando de miedo. La vela estaba en pedazos. Un trozo de algo se estaba quemando, clavado en la popa. Segundos despues vinieron las olas. Enormes olas de agua ardiente. Era el infierno. La barca estaba en llamas. Una ola apagaba el fuego y la otra lo volvia a encender. Yo gritaba y gritaba y gritaba. Me tiraba al agua para salvarme y despues me salvaba otra vez subiendo a la barca. Apenas si podia respirar. No podia ver mas alla de las llamas. Ya le digo, era el infierno. El infierno. No, no me acuerdo de donde venian las llamas cuando el avion estaba en el cielo. Era un humo gris oscuro, con hebras negras. Olia a petroleo y a gazolina. Y la madera de la barca que se quemaba. No, no pienso que ha sobrevivido nadie. Nada mas que cosas flotando en el agua. Me gustaria irme ya, por favor."
"First there was the wind and the noise. That day the sea was as flat as a mirror and without a whisper of wind. I was rowing. I heard what I thought was a scream, a little girl's scream, no more, and I turned to see an enormous flaming streak of colour coming towards me. It fell down from the blue sky like a volcano. There was a deafening, roaring wind, like God's last breath. It was orange. I was blown clear off my boat, as much by the noise as by the wind. I thought I would die of heat, but I was saved by the water. I swam back to my boat, shivering with fright. My sail was in tatters. A piece of burning matter was lodged in the stern. Then, within seconds, came the waves. Huge waves of burning water. I was in hell! My boat was on fire, one wave putting out the flames, the next setting everything on fire again. I screamed and screamed and screamed, one moment saving myself by throwing myself overboard, the next saving myself again by clawing my way back aboard. I could not breathe, I could not see beyond the flames. I was in hell, I tell you, in hell! No, I don't recall where the flames came from when the plane was in the air. The smoke was deep grey, with wisps of black. The smell was of gas and oil. And the burning wood of my boat. No, I don't think there were any survivors. Only things that floated in the water. I would like to go now, please."