I’d become a mini-celebrity, complete with photo and ensuing article on the front page of The Toronto Star. I read the story now to fill myself in on any aspects of the “incident” that I might not been aware of:
Matt Templer attacked on location
(Associated Press) Veteran Hollywood superstar Matt Templer was physically assaulted by a deranged admirer yesterday at 11:53 EST. Following emergency surgery, in which Mr. Templer had his fractured jaw re-set and wired shut, he held a press conference where his publicist, Stan Rosenberg, issued this statement: “Earlier today, as Mr. Templer walked from his trailer to the set of his film-in-progress, a construction worker of considerable proportions flew out of nowhere and attacked Matt from behind. In this unprovoked attack, the obsessed fan broke his jaw, delaying the shooting of his upcoming hit, Guts ’n’ Glory, for several weeks.”
When asked how a man of Mr. Templer’s renowned prowess could be subject to such a sound beating, a testy Rosenberg responded. “Beating? What beating? As I said, Matt was attacked from behind. And if you must know, when the dust had settled, his attacker lay on the ground, curled into a fetal position and wailing like a baby … a baby, damn it, as most cowards do when confronted on even terms.”
A magnanimous Templer did not press charges, Rosenberg continued, although he did request that his attacker, Jim Kearns, a forty-five-year-old resident of the city, be removed from the job site he was working on near the movie shoot. Kearns’s employer, Defazio Bros. Paving, responded swiftly, saying not only did they have no idea of their long-time employee’s mental instability, but that mere discipline was not enough and that they had fired him upon receiving full police detail of his conduct.
“These things happen,” Rosenberg concluded. “When you reach the stature Matt’s attained over the years, there’s always a deluded or infantile individual lurking out there somewhere who thinks an act of this nature will earn them notoriety or boost the flagging mental image of their own pathetic masculinity.”
All of this was news to me. But my memory might have been faulty because of the blows I’d absorbed. I sported a lump the size of a small kiwi on the left side of my head, courtesy of the billy club, a multicolored shiner from Templer’s fist, and a knotted abrasion on my right cheek (its existence a puzzle, as I’m sure that initial whack of the cop’s nightstick had already beaten the rage out of me).
What I do remember is waking up with Officer O’Malley standing spread-eagled over me, smacking the oft-mentioned billy club repeatedly into his meaty palm.
“Get up,” he said, “and put your hands behind your back.”
As I staggered to my feet an ambulance pulled up, its light flashing but its siren hushed. “It’s all right. I don’t need an ambulance,” I said, although I did feel disoriented, as if I were seconds removed from a nightmare, and my head throbbed.
O’Reilly laughed, cuffing my wrists and shoving me towards an unmarked cruiser waiting beside us at the curb. As he pushed my head down to stuff me into the back seat, I glanced up and took an eyeful of paparazzi flashbulb (the picture on the front page of the newspaper, I believe, with me slack-jawed and glassy-orbed, a strand of drool swinging from my chin. Put a wig on me and I could have been a crack-crazed hooker busted before I even had a chance to wipe my lips); he walked around and slipped into the passenger side up front, sitting beside the uniformed cop behind the wheel. As we drove off, I saw a woozy Templer being helped into the back of the ambulance.
We drove for about ten minutes with the cops sitting up front, gabbing about the previous night’s baseball game, discussing the weather, steadfastly ignoring me. Okay, I lie. They talked to me once. When I asked where we where going, O’Neill turned to me and said, “Shut the fuck up, Dimbulb. You’ll find out when we get there.”
We pulled into the East York emergency bay a few minutes later and parked beside a row of on-call ambulances; the two police officers ushered me past registration in the waiting room. About thirty heads turned, all eyes riveted on me, as we trooped through and straight down a hallway to a room marked CT SCAN.
The cop who drove said, “Why don’t you get the paperwork, Bill. I’ll wait here with him.”
An hour later I’d been scanned; standing outside the CT room, a doctor briefed me. I’d suffered a concussion and could stay for observation if I wished, or I could sign a release form stating I’d been informed of my condition and its side effects and would exonerate the hospital of any liability upon my departure. I signed.
And that’s when the cops told me that Templer, in a magnanimous gesture, wouldn’t press charges. I was free to go, with the one caveat: I couldn’t talk to the media about the incident.
“What’s this bullshit all about?” I said. “What if I want to press charges?”
“Well then,” O’Connell said, grinning, “I suppose it would be your lawyer against his … Johnnie Cochran. You’d be looking at a year, maybe two.”
“There were witnesses,” I said. “I saw them.”
“Not as many as you’d think,” the other cop said. “And none on your side, which is all that counts.”
The big pink guy winked at me. “Look, buddy, it’s no big deal. Shit like this happens every day. Just keep your nose clean for a while and it’ll all blow over.”
I followed them down the hallway. When I stepped into the waiting area, Maddy saw me and rushed past them. “Jesus, Jim! Are you okay?” She took me by the shoulders, careful not to hug me lest I break.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Except for a massive headache — and just having experienced the most bizarre fucking day of my life.”
As I brought her up to date on what happened, her look turned more and more quizzical, until finally she interrupted me.
“If what you’re saying is true, why did Herschel say you were fired? He must have apologized twenty times, but when he phoned my office he told me Defazio was going to have to let you go.”
It was my turn to look at her quizzically. Herschel Scott, head of personnel, issued the paycheques; I assumed he had his facts straight, but…
I marched for the exit as fast as my head would allow, stepped out onto the cigarette-butt-laden sidewalk, and looked to my left. Twenty yards down, the two cops were opening the doors to their cruiser.
I strode towards them, yelling. “Hey! I thought you said this would blow over, that it was ‘no big deal.’ Well, I’ve got news for you, pal. I’ve been fired.”
O’Hanrahan paused at his open door and looked at me, deadpan, from across the cruiser roof. “It is no big deal … to me.”
He laughed and slid into the car. Maddy arrived at my side as they pulled away.
In nature, duplicity is a trait honed through an evolutionary process, enabling a species to either escape predators or catch prey, to eat or avoid being eaten. Only with humans do you find it used for outcomes as petty as a hearty guffaw or a good old-fashioned porking.
I could hear the big pink cop’s laugh, a galling sound, physically gone but still ringing in my ears, when I felt Maddy’s small, warm hand work its way into mine.
Mankind’s tradeoff, I guess, for its casual use of deceit was just that — the ability to extend a hand.
She squeezed ever so lightly and said, “C’mon. Let’s get the car.”
* * *
A handful of days had passed since the “incident” occurred, but I remained confused. Not with post-concussion syndrome, and not because I’d lost my job, the only way of life I’d known from the beginning of adulthood … and not because I now loafed on a backyard chaise lounge with five beers and a few pints of self-pity sloshing around my insides.
How events unfolded, not the events themselves, confused me: with lightning speed, finality, and, of course, injustice. Considering my unwavering opinion of the human race, you’d think I’d have learned long ago to not to let injustice shock me, but this had been levied against me, not some nameless yahoo.
I peeled myself from the chair’s plastic webbing and checked the barbeque. The chicken breasts still showed pink on the inside. The corn, already husked, sat in a pyramid on a side tray, and the salad chilled in the fridge. The kids hung out somewhere inside the house (I could hear them shift around on occasion), and I waited for Maddy to return from work.
That was my new job: waiting for Maddy. Neither of us liked it much, and I could sense something — not resentment, something much purer than that — emanating from her when we were together. But that would change. How and when, I wasn’t sure, but it would.
I heard a car pull up out front as I closed the barbeque hood, and I waited expectantly for her to appear at the end of the lane. Maybe change would come today, and she’d round the corner of the house with a smile on her face.
But as the footsteps grew nearer, I recognized the shuffling, slimy gait: Weir. I hadn’t seen him since the “incident” and I didn’t want to now, but it was too late. He stepped from between the two houses with his gaze, seemingly laser-guided, already locked onto me. It stayed locked as he walked to his deck stairs; all the while he shook his head, tcchh-ing like a schoolmarm and oozing a toxic smile.
Finally, I had to speak. “What the hell are you staring at, Weir?”
His gaze didn’t waver, although his head continued swiveling. “You reap what you sow, don’t you, Kearns?”
“Okay. Now what the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a quote, you uneducated oaf. And here’s another one. ‘His attacker lay on the ground, curled into a fetal position and wailing like a baby.’”
I’d had no idea what to expect from Weir when I finally ran into him, but here it was … and I found it pathetic. “You’re quoting Matt Templer’s publicist and the Star verbatim. I’m shocked at your gullibility, you being a literature professor and all.”
“That’s right, a professor of literature … not an unemployed bum with a penchant for unprovoked violence.”
“I was being facetious, asshole. You don’t lecture at Harvard, you teach at a fourth-rate community college; your entire curriculum can be summed up in one sentence: the little engine does make it up the hill, after all. You’re a bad comedy, Weir — The Nutless Professor. So why don’t you wipe that superior smirk from your flabby face before I do it for you.”
He searched his key chain now, looking for his back door key. Maybe it was my paranoia, or maybe it was my keen sense of deduction, but it seemed to me he was unfamiliar with entering his house this way and had come through the back (upon smelling the barbeque) with the sole intent of taunting me. Finally, he docked his key in the lock and looked over at me.
“So typical of your kind. All chest-puffing strut until you run across someone you can’t bully.” He opened his door and hovered at the entrance. “That image will stay with me forever, Kearns. Like a baby.” He placed the knuckles of each forefinger to his eyes and rotated, the old schoolyard parody of a teat-sucking sissy-boy, while bleating like a lamb. “Whaah! Whaah!”
“Why don’t you step over here, and we’ll see who changes whose fucking diaper.”
“That’s the exact response I’d expect from you. But here’s a bulletin: all you’re ever going to be is the small cock of a tiny walk … and even you should be smart enough to understand those limitations after eating a few humbling knuckles from a truly rugged man.”
And so, Simon Weir, button-pusher par excellence, worked his magic anew, as was his practice over the years. His mocking my alleged beating hadn’t bothered me nearly as much as his insistence that Matt Templer was just the man to do it: once again, the injustice. The world wasn’t as it seemed, never would be, and I couldn’t do anything about it — as is always the way down here in life’s minor leagues, I suppose — but I could do one thing. The urge to teach him a lesson, a harsh physical lesson, overwhelmed me. I spit out my words as I strode towards my deck stairs.
“That’s it, Weir. I’m going to take you over my knee and spank you like a baby — and there’s not a fucking thing y—”
“Jim!”
I turned and found Maddy thrust halfway out our back door. How long she’d been there, I don’t know. In my madness, I’d been aware of nothing but Weir, who held a mirror-image pose to Maddy’s on his back deck, halfway into his house and ready to flee even as she straddled our doorway, ready to step out. All three of us stood frozen for an instant, then Maddy and Weir retreated, their doors slamming simultaneously behind them.
I should have expected this — or something similar. My existence had become a series of calamities: bad timing, misunderstandings, questionable judgment. But I wasn’t about to chase Maddy down and babble any half-assed explanations or apologies. I walked back to the barbeque and flipped the chicken breasts, with my barbeque tongs now jittering from the sudden duress, all the while questioning how life could get any worse (assuming, of course, that it would).
Dinner, however, unfolded quietly (maybe too quietly, as the old platitude goes), with no mention of the altercation, and afterwards, we fell into our newly established post-“incident,” midsummer eve pattern of cleanup and dispersal.
Shortly after, snippets of the usual sounds slipped out of rooms and floated through hallways: DVDs, CDs, bits of conversation. But at eight o’clock, when Maddy closed the door to the den, presumably to pedal the exercycle for a while and then lift some hand weights, the sounds of one of her music mixes didn’t pump from the stereo and rattle the floorboards. Instead, I heard long stretches of silence, followed by short, muffled bursts from the computer keyboard.
Not until the next morning did I realize that those bursts had indeed been akin to jungle drums breaking the ominous quiet I’d mentioned earlier.
And the news she’d pounded out? As I put down our breakfast coffees, she stepped into the kitchen and laid it on my place setting without preface or fanfare: two pages, double-spaced.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Read it first, then ask questions,” she said, sitting.
So I did, instantly realizing I’d been handed a manifesto of sorts; and the more I read, the more panic swept over me — the kind of panic I guess you’d feel if you were drowning, grasping at the wispy flotsam bobbing around you, wondering if life as you knew it was slipping away at that very moment. Sure, the last few days had been strange … okay, bad … but was she merely issuing some kind of ultimatum or was she leaving me?
“So … what do you want? What does this mean?” I held up her pages.
Maddy remained collected as she spoke.
“It started out as … I don’t know … musings, I guess, a few months ago. Just things I’d jot down to clear my mind of clutter, and a pattern started emerging. You’re angry, Jim, most of the time — which seems ludicrously obvious now but wasn’t so obvious when you were still growing into that state.”
“What do you mean, angry?” I countered. “I’m not angry.”
“You’re angry almost every moment of the day: in the car, around the house, at work, obviously.”
“Whoa. Hold on a minute. Just because I got into a scuffle that wasn’t my fault? I didn’t start it, you know.”
“No, but you sure did finish it, didn’t you.” She paused briefly, gathering her composure. “Don’t you see how events have escalated? You used to throw around words, maybe shake the odd fist, and that was bad enough. Now you’re throwing punches, and your so-called scuffle landed two men in the hospital — with you losing your job in the process.”
“What was I supposed to do? Let that pompous bastard stomp all over my work?”
“You want the truth? Yes! What if you’d killed him and wound up in jail for life? What if he’d injured you permanently? Don’t you see it’s just not worth it? It’s never worth it.”
I didn’t say anything to her. I couldn’t. Either you understood the concept of defending more than just your physical being or you didn’t, and if I talked, I’d only land myself in bigger trouble.
But Maddy had more to say. Lots more.
“What’s next, Jim, now that you have so much time on your hands? Are you going to join a band of bar brawlers, where you all sit around scratching your hairy bags and slamming pitchers of draft while you wait for the gang at the next table to look at you sideways?”
“I think you’re being unfair here, Maddy.”
“I’m being unfair. I’m not the one jeopardizing our way of life. I’m not the parent who’s totally out of control as a role model. Just last night you were going to chase down our neighbor and beat him to a pulp on his own back deck. No … I take that back. You were going to change his fucking diaper for him. And I counted your empties, by the way.”
“The amount of beer I drank had nothing to do with it,” I countered.
“No, it didn’t. And that makes it worse. What’s happened, Jim? You used to be such a nice man, such a witty man. Sure, you had some edge — and I liked that part of you — but now you seem … I don’t know … so hurtful.”
Her emotional dam had started to give way on witty, and she fought to spit out the rest of her sentence; now she sat with her face buried in her palms, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed.
I waited, wondering and worrying, stuck in that age-old bad spot until she’d composed herself somewhat. Finally, she quit quaking, but she didn’t look up.
“Maddy, please … talk to me,” I finally said, now quaking on the inside myself. “You have to tell me what these mean.” I looked to her pages, held them up. “Are they a list of demands I’m supposed to meet? Are you threatening to leave me? What?”
She pulled back from her palms and put her hands on the table; her eyes were red-rimmed, her cheeks shiny. “Yes … no… Jesus, Jim, your wording is horrible. They’re ideas I took from my free-writing, exercises for you to do, and no, I’m not threatening to leave — not yet. But I’m totally serious when I say we can’t continue to live this way.”
Picking up her coffee, she said, “How drastic the final measure has to be is up to you,” and walked out of the kitchen. Her list remained in my grasp; the pages felt slick between my sweaty fingers, and their weight seemed far heavier than two sheets of twenty-pound bond. They felt as if they held the weight of my future.
I looked at the list again and read.
Exercises for Jim
Keep a journal. Work at it one hour a day, more if you feel the need.
What the hell was that all about? And more than an hour if I felt the need? I doubted I’d need even that.
Get to know a neighbor.
Of course, she’d appended a substantial paragraph — as she had to each labor; this one talked about how I’d let friendships and acquaintances slide over the years, how the one neighbor I did know I wanted to injure severely, and how opening my heart and mind might be a good idea.
Get to know your CHILDREN — through a camping trip, a set of activities, or whatever; find out who they are and what they are at this time in their lives.
Apparently, a grapevine existed in our household that I knew nothing about, because she’d added, And, by the way, 75% of the earth’s population are not assholes. She followed that with the assertion that it was not apropos for a twelve-year-old girl to wander the house bobbing and weaving, thumbing her nose as she threw scythe-like left hooks at imaginary heavy bags (or imaginary loud-mouthed neighbors); and, above all, children of their particular age, virtually on the threshold of young adulthood, did not need an advanced course in cynicism on top of all the other issues they had to deal with.
Certainly not. They needed to be forewarned of the world’s many niceties.
Read the Bible.
Hold on a minute. This was therapy? Some of the most violence-prone cynics in the world toted the Bible or the Qur’an or the equivalent in the same gunny sacks as their homemade bombs, and I’d put a bullet into my own head before I’d send Eric or Rachel to a summer camp run by a group of frisky priests with their swelling members straining the fabric of their devotions.
And it got more confusing still.
Renovate the third floor.
If I stretched my imagination, I could grasp at least a sliver of reasoning behind the previous exercises. But this one? Our house had a third-floor loft accessed by a pull-down ladder; unused except for storage, we occasionally earmarked it as a renovation project for a den or kid’s room — basically, just extra living space. We never got around to it because we already had plenty of room, and unless we were selling and wanted to up the value of the house, we had no real need for it. And we didn’t now, especially if I wanted to use my time to start looking for a new paving company to catch on with.
Which brought me to my next exercise: Do NOT look for a new job.
What was this? The anti-goal? A Zen exercise? A new job will look for me?
But just when I thought she couldn’t get more cryptic, she unfurled the last one:
Surprise me! Surprise yourself! You’re capable of so much more.
I thought I’d reached my peak with the movie star. Was there a world leader in need of a sound beating?
So there I had it: my seven labors. Not quite as many as Hercules had to deal with, but considering I didn’t understand the purpose of a single one, they were at least equal in scope.