Right Away Monday, page 38
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A Lifetime in a Heartbeat
Last week he was playing with Lego blocks on the floor. He built a stairway, lifted it up to show me. I said:
—Oh, good job. Is that the stairway to Heaven?
He took on that broody look he’s salvaged from my side of the bloodline and said:
—No, it’s the stairway to Hell.
And I said:
—Good, very good.
I found it funny for a moment and went back to my book. I glanced at the clock to see if it was getting close to his bedtime. I stood in his doorway around midnight to listen to him breathing, and it echoed through my head, what he’d said. I was numbed for a moment, standing there. How in a few small years his world had been tainted to such a degree that he now understands the opposite of Heaven to be Hell and that one place is much easier to access than the other.
Trucks and action heroes and all things “boy.” I choose to believe he came to these on his own. Ask him what he wants to be when he grows up—he says he wants a punk rock band. Ask him his favourite band and he’ll tell you it’s The Stones or The Clash. Then he’ll glance at me out of the corner of his eye to check if he’s gotten it right. It started as a party trick of sorts, something precocious he could pass on to those leaning in to hear what he’d say next. But it’s just his way of getting the nod from me. It’s already begun, this corruption I cant help but contribute to, pushing him down the paths I wish I’d taken. How the parent lives vicariously through the child. He said it to me just the other night again, lying in bed with his stories all read:
—When I get bigger, I’m going to have a band…
And me, a selfish attempt to reverse, repair, rearrange our dynamic, alleviate my guilt somehow:
—That’s fine baby, so long as you’re happy. You can be a garbage man, or a cop, or a writer for all that…
—And what are you going to be, Dad?
—I have no clue, no idea.
And I kissed his cheek and shut out the light, closed his door. One more day in his life gone forever. Never coming back.
“I knew, in some dark pocket of my heart, that it’d never get any better than that day.
When he was one and a half we took him to Shallow Bay in Gros Morne National Park. Miles and miles of fine, hot, golden sand, the salt water warm and tropical from midday on. Wade out for ages and never go over your head. And him, skipping, falling, splashing and squealing in the salt water for near on two hours. Peaceful and wild and happy and pure and absolutely fearless. Dash back to the blanket for a juice box and cheesies. Myself and his mother were drinking O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beer, back when my path was a little clearer. I finished my first one and filled the empty bottle with sand from a small mound he’d dumped from a plastic bucket. I put the cap back on the bottle and stuffed it into my duffel bag. Something told me to do that, a little keepsake, because I knew, in some dark pocket of my heart, that it’d never get any better than that day.
That bottle of non-alcoholic golden sand sits on my windowsill right now, in my new house where he lives with me part-time, where he sits with me in my office and draws bogeymen and car wrecks and constructs the stairway to Hell.
Yeah. It’s the modern way, the new-fashioned Globe and Mail–style parenting: go splitsville for the sake of the child rather than slugging it out for too many years and letting him grow up in a house of resentment and stifling anxiety. And who would we all be today if our own parents had been a little less constricted by the opinions of outsiders, if they hadnt been so concerned with keeping up the appearance of the functional family unit? Had they stopped and said:
”The first time I looked into his eyes he was a minute old. He looked wise.”
—You know what? We’d all be a whole lot better off in the long run if we went our separate ways.
I look across the table at him now, his brow scrunched up just so, his little fingers peeling the paper wrapping from the tip of his crayon, and I try to remember him, the bundle of pure innocence that he was just a few short years ago. A lifetime ago. His world passing in a heartbeat. The first time I looked into his eyes he was a minute old. He looked wise. He looked like he’d come a long way and had seen things I could barely comprehend. How suddenly aware I was of the shadows I’d cast on the people who tried to love me. How small I felt for having thought such things, the compulsions I’d acted upon over the years, the dank and dirty suicidal roads I raced down before I was even twenty years old. Cut loose in the world.
Then that shifting inside I hope every new parent gets to feel: how I would not hesitate to kill or die for this little human in my arms. How I’d take someone’s life in a heartbeat, for him. And for the first time, here is a reason to live on.
A friend of mine once said to me that the best and worst thing about having children is that suicide is no longer an option. Because you have to live on. You cant ever again let yourself fall into those dark holes you’ve been drawn to. You have to look toward the light from there on in. Or fail your child.
He shows me his new drawing, a snarbled, multi-coloured scramble of scribbles. I study it for a moment and then tell him how it looks like a merry-go-round. He nods and says, Yes, maybe it’s Bowring Park. My gut tightens, time slipping away. It’s been a while since I’ve taken him for a good romp in Bowring Park. “Real” life comes along and fucks up the best of what you’ve got.
I remember a day last year when we were breaking the crest of the hill that leads to the Bowring Park swimming pool. It was a sticky summer day. He was running ahead of me in the grass. There was a couple playing with a Frisbee, some picnickers, little people’s shouts and whoops from the playground, the roars and screams from the waterslide. He stopped midway and looked back at me, held out his hand for me to catch up. Before I reached it, he was off running again, toddler-mad toward the bottom. And I was struck with the notion that this must be Heaven. That if he were to pass out of this world somehow, and if there really is such a thing as Heaven, such a place to go when we’re through with this life, a place of rewards and relaxation and peace and magic, then this is what his would be—merry-go-rounds and swings and Frisbees and waterslides, the sun high in the sky, no wind, fearless in the knowledge that he’s loved and watched over. Then, in the blink of an eye, he’s constructing the stairway to Hell. And when I tuck him in tonight, this day will be gone and said and done for the rest of time.
He looked up at me today when I picked him up from daycare and asked me when he would be a grown-up. And I said:
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—Not for another long, long time.
But I’ll lift my head someday soon and he will be twenty. Twenty-five. Thirty. And I’ll look back through our days and remember always checking the clock, waiting to drop him at daycare, waiting to put him to bed at night so I can get on with what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. And how each day slips so uselessly into the next, the time come and gone for good, the clock ticking.
Real Heaven, right here and now in the palm of my hand.
His Lego blocks are scattered across his end of my desk. Before I rest my head tonight, I’ll build a wall. I’ll build a stairway that rises up and up beyond the edge of the wall. I’ll stabilize it as best I can. He’ll come in the morning and have a look and play with it for a while, try to rearrange it to suit his own tastes. And it’ll break, it’ll fall, collapse. Because everything does.
Then I’ll help him build it back up again.
ACCLAIM FOR RIGHT AWAY MONDAY
“Hynes sure does give good mean streets, and this is another rough ride that never flinches.”
—Toronto Star
“Hynes knows the horrors of a hard-liquor, cocaine-spiked hangover at four o’clock in the morning. But he also understands the ecstasies—a woman with her shirt half-open, the wild plunges of conversation and occasionally, just occasionally, the authentic glimpses of wisdom—that happen while you’re getting there.”
—DAVID GILMOUR, author of
A Perfect Night to Go to China
“Hynes shows his literary expansion in this novel about a young man burning with the resentment and angst of an abusive childhood. Both the hated villain and comic victim, Clayton Reid blunders through his days, riddling everything with passion and destruction, leaving love and loathing in his wake. Written in the tough language of its hero, Right Away Monday is a beautiful, suffering story by a gutsy new novelist.”
—DONNA MORRISSEY, author of Kit’s Law
“A rip-roaring and chaotic down-and-out-in-St.-John’s novel about an alcoholic drug-addicted bartender and the women who love him in spite of himself. It’s a raw comedy about how lost the lost can get before detox and redemption. Its hero is the Energizer Bunny of self-destruction and the anti-Christ of political correctness. It’s the grunge rock of Can Lit.”
—DOUGLAS GLOVER, author of Elle
Acknowledgements
Much gratitude and thanks to my tireless agents, Shaun Bradley and Don Sedgwick, at TLA; my editor Iris Tupholme, for her invaluable wisdom and unfaltering belief in my writing; and to Noelle Zitzer and all the dedicated staff at HarperCollins who made this book possible.
Thanks to all who’ve come out to my shows and gotten behind my work in recent years. I would not be here without your support.
Thanks to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, the City of St. John’s, Resource Centre for the Arts, Rattling Books, the March Hare Committee, the CBC, Newfound Films, Pope, Insight, 2M and Kickham East Productions.
If I thanked you in my first book, then thanks again. That’s not including those of you whose names didnt really belong there in the first place. You know who you are.
If this book had a soundtrack it would be Blair Harvey’s latest album GutterBeGutted. Hunt it down and buy it—it kicks ass.
Now, throughout the construction of Right Away Monday there were people who gave me the keys to their homes, fed me, booked plane tickets and hotels, hired me, let me know it was alright to bawl my face off, talked me down from the ledge, opened their hearts and just generally loved me and accepted me at times when I really didnt deserve it.
Thanks to the lovely and beautifully talented Jenny Rockett. And to Mary-Lynn Bernard, Sarah Blenkhorn, Erin Breen, Lois Brown, Mark Callanan, Steve Cochrane, Alicia Loving Cortez, Hugh Dillon, Kim Farewell, Risa Bramon-Garcia, René Garcia, Debbie Hanlon, Jonny Harris, Connie Hynes, Lily Hynes, Lois Hynes, Mary Hynes, Michael Hynes, Andy Jones, Robert Joy, Nicole Kane, Susan Kent, Ruth Lawrence, Mary Lewis, Tony Nappo, Adriana Maggs, Shaun Majumdar, John Peddle and family, Helen Peters, Dave Picco, Elizabeth Pugh, Justin Simms, Sheila Sullivan, Alana Steele, Monique Tobin, Sir Charles Tomlinson, Todd Wall, Mary Walsh, Des Walsh, Sherry White, Dyane Gjesdal. And above all, thanks to my son, Percy, for bringing me into the world.
Also by Joel Thomas Hynes
Fiction
Down to the Dirt
Stageplays
The Devil You Dont Know
(co-author with Sherry White)
Say Nothing Saw Wood
Audiobooks
Down to the Dirt
Copyright
Right Away Monday
© 2007 by Joel Thomas Hynes.
P.S. section © 2008 by Joel Thomas Hynes.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40162-3
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
This Harper Perennial edition: 2008
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hynes, Joel, 1976–
Right away Monday / Joel Thomas Hynes.
ISBN 978-1-55468-232-4
I. Title.
PS8615.Y54R53 2008 C813’.6 C2008-901819-2
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Joel Thomas Hynes, Right Away Monday
