Cheeseburger Subversive Read online

  CHEESEBURGER

  SUBVERSIVE

  CHEESEBURGER

  SUBVERSIVE

  RICHARD SCARSBROOK

  © Richard Scarsbrook, 2003.

  Second printing, 2003; Third printing, 2004; Fourth printing, 2005; Fifth Printing 2010

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for photocopying of any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Scarsbrook, Richard

  Cheeseburger subversive / Richard Scarsbrook.

  ISBN 1-894345-54-1

  I. Title.

  PS8587.C396C43 2003 jC813'.54 C2003-910396-X

  PZ7.S32712Ch 2003

  Cover photograph: Peter Lavery/Masterfile

  Cover and book design by Jackie Forrie

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Thistledown Press Ltd.

  118-20th Street West

  Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, S7M 0W6

  www.thistledownpress.com

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The following stories have been previously published, in different form:

  “Hell On Wheels”, NeWest Review, August/September 1996.

  “Benjamin’s Aliens”, Backwater Review, September 1998 (Winner of the Backwater Review’s 1998 Hinterland Award for Prose).

  “Cheeseburger Subversive”, Storyteller: Canada’s Short Story Magazine, Winter 1999.

  “Renaissance Man” was published in significantly different form as “The History of Western Art”, Winners Circle Anthology 8, The Canadian Authors Association, 2000.

  “Tristan’s Quarter”, The Harpweaver, Summer, 2000 (Second Place, The New Century Writer Awards 1999, Short Fiction Category).

  The poem “Invitation,” which appears in “Thank You, Quentin Alvinstock,” was originally published in the author’s poetry chapbook Guessing at Madeline (Cranberry Tree Press, 1998).

  Thistledown Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for its publishing program.

  CONTENTS

  Lawn Boy

  (Grade seven)

  Invasion of the Blood Relatives

  (Grade seven)

  Hell on Wheels

  (Grade seven)

  Dogs That Lick and Dogs That Bite

  (Grade eight)

  Pushin’ Pickle

  (Grade eight)

  Benjamin’s Aliens

  (Grade nine, with grade three flashbacks)

  Searchlight TV

  (Grade ten)

  Cruisin’ Machine

  (Grade ten)

  Thank You, Quentin Alvinstock

  (Grade eleven)

  Renaissance Man

  (Grade eleven)

  Cheeseburger Subversive

  (Grade twelve)

  Tristan’s Quarter

  (First-year, university)

  Lawn Boy

  (Grade seven)

  Summer vacation is here, and my dad sees the other boys in our subdivision neighbourhood emulating their fathers in manly ways. While our backyard neighbour, Mr. Potzo, tinkers with the engine in his car and curses in Italian, his son, Enzo Jr., tightens the brake calipers on his bike and curses in English. The neighbour to our left, Mr. Denney, plays garage-door goalie while his son Tommy slaps a street hockey ball at him. Across the street, Mr. Cobb slouches shirtless on a lawn chair on his porch, a beer bottle perched on his pumpkin-sized belly. He screams at his wife to bring him another beer, and his boy, Danny, who lounges beside his father, barks, “Yeah, Ma! And I wanna Coke!”

  My father and I don’t play driveway hockey together, nor do we work on mechanical things, nor do we abuse my mother as a father and son team, so Dad is beginning to worry that perhaps he isn’t raising a well-rounded boy. As a high school teacher, he is concerned that when I enter grade nine there will be a very real danger of me getting my ass kicked frequently by hormone-addled goons.

  So, Dad is doing the only thing he can think of to put me in contact with the world of real manhood: he is introducing me to our lawn mower.

  At first, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. Since our house is built beside a steep, grass-covered hill, which is pretty difficult to keep trimmed with a push mower, Dad had recently dusted the cobwebs off his wallet and purchased a second-hand lawn tractor. As I am not yet old enough to pilot a fighter jet or race a powerboat or even push the redline on Mom’s Honda Civic, I figure that our riding mower is the only kind of engine-powered excitement I’m going to get any time soon. As such, I have agreed to take on the responsibility of mowing the grounds of the Sifter estate — not that my compliance really makes any difference to my dad.

  Dad throws open the garage door and the bright summer daylight floods over the mower’s hood, making it glow greenish yellow like a captured alien vessel. As it turns out, an alien spaceship might be easier for a human to get running. It requires the skills of a mechanical engineer and the magic of a shaman to coax the old beast to life, neither of which are dominant traits in my English teacher father. I watch earnestly as Dad does a strange ritual dance around the rickety old lawn tractor, rapping on the fuel line with his knuckles, pinching wires together with one hand while pulling on the throttle cable with the other, and sticking his finger in the carburetor to keep the engine from flooding a second time.

  “Hey, Sifter!” hollers Mr. Cobb from his seat on his front porch across the street. “You want me to send my wife over there to help you get that thing started?”

  “That’s okay, Chester,” Dad answers back, “but thanks anyway. We’ve got it under control.”

  “Well, okay,” Mr. Cobb brays, “I guess you teachers have got the whole summer off to get yer mowers going, eh?”

  “I think he’s making fun of us, Dad,” I say, master of the obvious as usual.

  “He’s just jealous. Line workers at the pickle factory only get three weeks vacation. You just have to ignore people like him, Dak.”

  Dad wipes his brow, and resumes his shaman mechanic dance, until eventually the old engine starts backfiring and belching black smoke through the mostly functionless muffler.

  “See?” says Dad, his forehead beaded with sweat and his forearms streaked with grease. “Nothing to it.”

  I nod seriously, somehow understanding that Dad’s words are intended less for me than for Mr. Cobb and his son, who he imagines are snickering at him from their front porch seats.

  “You have to take things like a man, Dak,” Dad says in a philosophical way. “That’s what it’s all about.”

  And with that, he retires to the house to recover from the engine starting ordeal. I picture him sipping from a tall, cool glass of lemonade in front of the television with the fan blowing on his legs, while his only son sweats in the summer heat and bounces around the yard on top of Ol’ Smoky.

  After some grating and grinding, I eventually figure out how to put the old beast in gear and I carefully steer the lawn tractor around the perimeter of the front yard. I bang the mowing platform off the first nine fence posts on the far side of the yard, but with catlike reflexes, I manage to steer around the last one. With mathematical precision, I follow the tire tracks of each previous pass around the yard, so that not a single blade of grass will be left standing when I’m finished.

&nbs
p; I am sitting up tall in the driver’s seat, turning the steering wheel to make my triumphant final pass down the middle of the yard when Mr. Cobb wanders across the street to the edge of our lawn

  “Hey, Lawn Boy!” he bellows over the sputtering engine, “while yer drivin’ around in circles, ya might wanna actually turn the mower blades on and cut some grass!”

  Oh. Right.

  I reach down and pull the engage-mower knob. With a metallic screech, the mower blades began spinning beneath the tractor, and I yet again begin my journey around the front yard. I manage to improve my original record by dinging the fence only four times on this journey, which causes Mr. Cobb to shake his head even more fervently as he retreats back to his front porch. I am careful to keep an eye out for the dozen baby evergreens that Mom planted in the front yard, and it is only by accidental over steering that I turn two of them into mulch. Oh well. I figure that ten trees left standing out of twelve works out to more than eighty per cent, which is like getting an A grade at school. Dad will be proud of me!

  Eventually, I repeat my triumphant final pass down the middle of the yard, and I steer the beast into the driveway to head to the backyard. In the neighbouring driveway, Mr. Denney and his son Tommy drop their hockey sticks and run to the other side of their yard to escape the flying driveway gravel that the spinning mower blades scatter like machine gun fire. Oops!

  As the tractor rumbles onto the now enormous looking backyard lawn, I feel the eyes of every man and boy in the neighbourhood burning holes in the back of my neck. My discomfort is increased exponentially as I run over the garden hose, which gives me an unexpected and frigid enema when the water comes bursting up through the holes in the seat.

  At this point, Dad comes running outside. He has been awakened from his nap by the sound of gravel blasting against the side of our house, then summoned outside by the water hissing against the window of his study. He has appeared just in time to witness my lawn mowing coup de grace, as I drive the tractor’s right-side wheels up the steep slope that runs along one side of the backyard. I feel like one of those stunt drivers you sometimes see at county fairs who drive cars up on two wheels, and I can almost hear the crowd screaming with delight, until I realize that it’s my dad who is screaming.

  “Sit on the right fender before it flips over on you!” he hollers, but by the time I hear him over the roar of the broken muffler, the tractor is up on two wheels. I react exactly the opposite to the way a stunt driver would, by panicking and jerking the steering wheel back and forth. Luckily, I jump off as the tractor dumps over on its side, but less luckily, I land on top of one of Mom’s beloved rose bushes.

  The mower rolls over upside-down, its nearly bald tires spinning in the air like the twitching legs of fresh roadkill. Its engine coughs, sputters, then dies.

  Mr. Potzo, Mr. Cobb, and Mr. Denney come running over from their yards and driveways, with their sons trailing close behind.

  “Shit! You okay, Dak?” Mr. Denney asks.

  I am lying on my back in the blazing sun, grass in my hair and mouth, rose bush thorns digging into my freshly irrigated ass, with every other male in the neighbourhood standing around me in a circle, looking down on me. I am far from okay.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I reply.

  “Damn! What about the mower?” gasps Danny Cobb.

  They all abandon me and form a new circle around the upside-down lawn tractor.

  “Shit, Sifter,” Mr. Potzo says to my dad, “it’s toast.”

  “It’ll be cheaper to buy a new one than to fix it,” is Mr. Denney’s analysis of the situation.

  “Too bad. They don’t build ‘em like that anymore,” Mr. Cobb sighs, with more affection in his voice than his wife likely ever hears.

  While they all stand around, heads bowed, mourning the loss of the old lawn mower, I beat a hasty retreat into the house. I go into my bedroom and shut the door. I want to lie on my bed and pull the covers over my head, but the dirt and grass and little pinpoint bloodstains all over me make it impossible to do this without messing up the sheets, so I crawl under my bed instead.

  Against the hardwood floor, I can feel the bruises forming on my back and elbows, but the bruises on my ego are much more painful. What’s worse, one of the boys will probably tell the other boys at school about this travesty, and the story will eventually get around to Zoe Perry. God, that would be terrible. All the funny short stories and school bus bravado in the world will never compensate for this humiliation. Zoe will never be able to look at me again without laughing. I am never going back to school again!

  I have almost convinced myself that I can adapt to life here amongst the dust bunnies beneath my bed, when I hear Dad coming down the hall towards my bedroom door. His footsteps are slow and sure, like those of a boss walking into an employee’s office to tell him he’s fired, or an executioner coming to take a condemned prisoner to the electric chair. Before I am able to scramble out from beneath the box spring, Dad enters the room.

  “What on earth are you doing under there, Dak?” he asks.

  “I dropped a pen under my bed,” I lie.

  “What do you need a pen for?”

  “To write you a letter of apology,” I say, thinking quickly.

  “Ah, knock it off, Dak. It was an accident. I should have shown you what to do rather than leaving you to figure it out for yourself.”

  That, by the way, was the closest my father ever came to admitting that he might have been even slightly wrong about something.

  “We’ll do better next time, Dak,” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say, “we will.”

  FOR SALE

  1972 John Deere 110

  LAWN TRACTOR

  Best Offer!

  (Needs Work)

  Contact: Voicemail Box 74

  Ask for Mr. Sifter

  Invasion of the Blood Relatives

  (Grade seven)

  Our English teacher, Mrs. Mulvey, had given us a writing assignment to complete over the Christmas Break. “Each of you,” she said, in that smooth, melodic voice of hers, “is to write about the true meaning of Christmas, as reflected in your own experiences of the season.”

  “I don’t get it!” was Cliff Boswink’s immediate response. This was usually what he said when he didn’t feel like doing an assignment, which may explain why Cliff was taking grade seven English for a second time.

  “Well, Cliff, what are some of the traditional things that come to mind when we think of the Christmas season?”

  “Gettin’ stuff!” he responded. Several of the boys sitting around him laughed, more likely to avoid getting punched at recess than due to any real hilarity in Cliff’s response.

  “Well, okay,” sighed Mrs. Mulvey, “giving and receiving gifts is certainly a part of the Christmas holiday, but what else is there?”

  Jake Bellows put up his hand. “The celebration of the birth of Jesus?” Jake suggested.

  “Church is for weenies,” Cliff grunted, casting a disdainful look at Jake meant to communicate that he could expect to be injured sometime during the next recess.

  “Okay, then,” Mrs. Mulvey continued, “what other non-religious aspects are there to the Christmas holiday?”

  Zoe Perry raised her hand and offered, “Family! Everyone has family traditions. We could all write about those.”

  “Now there is a good idea!” Mrs. Mulvey beamed.

  It is the first day back from the Christmas Break, and Mrs. Mulvey is asking for volunteers to read their compositions to the class. Cliff Boswink immediately jumps to his feet and says, “Me! Me!” He clears his throat, removes a crumpled page from his back pocket and reads:

  “‘The Meaning of Christmas,’ by Cliff ‘Blaster’ Boswink.

  “For Christmas I got a new helmet, gloves, and a tank of gas for my dirt bike, which means I can race around being cool a lot as soon as the snow melts. I got a new baseball bat, which means I can hit baseballs, rocks, and other stuff with it. I got a pellet gun, too, which
means . . .”

  Mrs. Mulvey interrupts him at this point, because many of the boys are now giggling, and she doesn’t want things to get out of control.

  “Yes, thank you, Cliff,” she says, and I think she would add the words “you moron” if teachers were actually allowed to say what they’re thinking. “We get the idea. A very literal interpretation of the assignment, to be sure. Now, would anyone else like to share what they wrote? How about you, Dak?”

  Follow Cliff Boswink? Does she think I’m suicidal?

  “Um, no, that’s okay,” I reply.

  “Come on, Dak,” says Zoe Perry, “your stories are funny!”

  She bats her eyelashes at me, and I am momentarily mesmerized by those big brown eyes of hers. I think Zoe is the prettiest, nicest girl I’ve ever seen, but of course, I’m not stupid enough to let anyone else know about this — particularly not Zoe! Nevertheless, there is something about impressing Zoe Perry which makes me feel a little bigger and stronger than usual, which is enough to make me rise to my feet and begin reading, even if it means upstaging Cliff Boswink, and risking potential injury.

  “This is called ‘Invasion of the Blood Relatives,’” I say, “and it goes like this:”

  In most households throughout suburbia, Christmas morning is a warm and happy family affair. Inside the cluttered split-level in which I grew up, the first few hours of December the twenty-fifth count among the happiest moments of my life.

  My sister and I would wake up no later than five o’clock, and soaring high on a wave of hyperactive excitement, we would zoom around the living room, hollering and bumping into things, until our raccoon-eyed parents finally emerged from beneath their warm blankets. Occasionally, they made us suffer in anticipation until as late as six o’clock; even a minute longer than this usually resulted in my sister and me actually tugging them onto the cold floor and out into the hall. Mom and Dad were always really good sports about this, and although they always put on a great show of acting cranky and tired as they plodded down the stairs in their housecoats, I know that they were secretly delighted to see us in this annual state of euphoria.