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Too Many Georges by Brian Preston

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Too Many Georges by Brian Preston 1 Too Many Georges A novel by Brian Preston Copyright Brian Preston 2004 2 Too Many Georges Chapter One From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Hey Meghan, Hey, what’s it been? Six years? Peace be with you too. I like your address. I got it from Rachel, I ran into her on the Drive, right outside where La Quena used to be. Remember La Quena? Slide shows about Guatamalan peasants and bad coffee in chipped cups? The Drive’s changing, La Quena’s dodo dead. You probably knew. Replaced long ago by some high end pot palace selling 500 dollar bongs, displayed in glass cases like crystal at Birks or something. Crazy. People make a shitload of money growing weed around here, but still, 500 for a bong? 3 Not that I know much about weed anymore. Lately it just makes me paranoid. Supposed to heighten your existing mood, so I guess I’m paranoid. So let’s reconnect. What’s up? From: [email protected] To: [email protected] hey dalton! grate to hear from u! Holy shit its been a while so much has happened since those days when I thought school was where u learned :) Are u still in touch with any inmates of East Pender? brenda and Len? what happened to them? is that house still a co-op or did it self-destruct? Don’t have time for more right now. i snuck an email check while I’m sposed to be cookin dinner only computer (shared by everyone, fourteen of us) is in a corner of the kitchen here I’m in the mountains Yeah I’m a woodswoman now. used ta be a woodnymph but hey we’re all growing up now. Rachel has a baby, did you see him? Noticed my first wrinkle laugh line at 29 just the other day. You must have crossed over to the 30s now right? bet yer getting handsomer and handsomer peace and generous love 4 M From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Hey Meghan You’re psychic. I just turned thirty a few days back (Aaack!), you’d say thirty years young I know, but it’s old, trust me. I’m at a crossroads. I just graduated from u of be cyrius, finished up all the paperwork at the start of June. Done. Every September since I was six I’ve been packed off or packed myself off to school. Not sure it was good for me. This fall I’m liberated. Time to make my own way. No structure! Fuck just think, my 20s are gone forever, and I spent em snorting paper dust in the Rare Book Room, which is really three little interconnected wormy smelling windowless rooms at the Main Library. To show for it, what do I have? A fresh-baked Masters Degree in History from a decidedly mediocre, runt of the litter university. I only admitted that to myself lately. When you’re there, you think it’s so fucking important. I have a part time job at Kopyklasm Copiers, which my manager Gary insists could become full time at the merest gesture of acquiescence (spellcheck is so great!) on the part of myself. 5 I like Gary, but someone should really tell him, he reeks of toner. Even on his days off. So far I’ve kept Gary at bay. I’ve demurred- like a lawyer I’ve objected, but only to delay. Delay because really, I had no other plan of action to commit to, beyond finishing up that Masters Thesis. Now it’s done, six years of my life devoted to a document called “Mother-Son Separation and Spousal Loyalty: Transgressive Family Anxieties in the Life and Reign of George II of Great Britain.” I slaved over that fucking thing! I loved it, I doted on it, I dithered over it, straightened its bow tie, I tidied it up a million times. Sticking with the metaphor , I think I know how a welfare mom would feel if she had to prepare her little boy, her pride and joy, dress him up and send him off to some swank party in a rich family’s garden. Is he clothed too poorly, too nicely, altogether just too consciously dressed up or down? Will he know what to say and how to say it? Will the other parents smirk, or feel pity? Is he good enough? God, I was in that mindset for years! Trying to live up to someone else’s standards sucks. I did my best to raise him right, but in the end the kid was a disappointment, he barely made the grade. He got the rubber stamp of tepid approval from a committee of academics, five in all—three of them couldn’t be bothered to actually read the thing, judging by the questions they asked at my defence. Defence? It was all over in thirty-five minutes, not counting the addendum of a token, hasty, mid-afternoon beer at the faculty club. “Six years of work, Smiley? Rather a long haul for a mere Masters Thesis, isn’t it?” 6 That last remark came during the beer drinking, when everyone decided they could breathe normally again, and talk about other shit like mortgage rates and kitchen renos. Of course I just sat there thinking of my student loan debt load. The defense was tense, I now realize, because in the faux rigorous discussion of my opus everyone was avoiding an unspoken subtext. The subtext is: my work is mediocre and they are mediocre and the university is mediocre and we’re all just fucking mediocre! “Oh for the love of Christ let’s just pass the Jeezly boy, kick him out before he becomes part of the furniture.” Like that coat stand in Jay’s office (remember Jay, Prof. Sizemore?), that elaborate Eiffel-like edifice with curly-cue hat hooks where the same silly Tilley hat perched up top like it was glued there. Yeah, I tell you that fucking hat never moved once in the entire six years of our one-on-one meetings, third Wednesday afternoons of the fall and spring terms, when I would weekly weakly sit myself down like a petty criminal checking in with the probation officer, I’d natter on about what I’d read, he’d look at what I’d written if there was anything to look at, and then he’d very gingerly, in that terse, bashful way of his, cajole me into sprinkling more of our era’s popular academic jargon onto the thing, spreading it evenly like weed killer on a lawn, sucking all the life out of it. In honour of Saint Foucault the word hegemony or one of its derivatives had to show up on every third page, or the poor thing just wouldn’t count as discourse. “Mother-Son Separation and Spousal Loyalty: Transgressive Family Anxieties in the Life and Reign of George II of Great Britain.” I should have listened to my mom. She thought it sounded silly. 7 One slow evening at KopyKlasm I reset the font, reduced the size and printed it double sided, to make it look more like an actual book, and then tried my best to get my Kopyklasm-ko-workers interested in reading it. Which led to the following conversation with Brendan the staffroom ironist: ME: Hey you should have a look at this book I wrote, it’s kind of interesting, all about how when George II of England was only eleven years old, his mother was taken away from him by his Dad, and locked in a castle in Germany for the rest of her life, and he was never allowed to see her again. Can you imagine what that would do a kid’s psyche? And then later he’s supposed to grow up and rule a great nation? HIM: Huh. What’d she do got his Dad so steamed? ME: Adultery. She had an affair with a dashing Swedish cavalry officer. And she was made to suffer for it, even though her boorish husband had all kinds of mistresses already, and neglected her terribly. Incredibly unfair double standard in those days. HIM: Huh. What’s it called, yer book? ME: Mother-Son Separation and Spousal Loyalty: Transgressive Family Anxieties in the Life and Reign of George II of Great Britain. HIM: Uh. Naaah. Dude. Wanna be in our Survivor pool? New Survivor starts Thursday night. New staff pool starting up- Ten bucks, and if you guess who wins, you get at least one eighty. Tha’d be sweeeet. ME: Hey, I have a better idea. How about a pool to see who around here can read my book first? Everyone can enter, and I’ll test the claimants, ask skill testing questions to make sure they really read it. 8 HIM: Dude, I’ll stick with Survivor. Survivor’s about overcoming hardship ‘n shit, but it ain’t about TORTURE! See what I live with? Rachel told me you’ve joined a neo-hippie Valhalla tucked away up some steep little watershed in the Kootenays, right? Sounds your style. Beautiful mountains, right? Pot growers and glass blowers and tree-huggers, right? That’s how I got your email, from Rachel. I told you I ran into her, right? Peace and whatever Dalton 9 Too Many Georges Chapter 2 From: [email protected] To: [email protected] hey dalton u gave me a giggle, same old Dalton, weird mix of humour and bitterness u can’t look back and have regrets…u didn’t waste yer 20s, it must have done u some good… maybe ur on to something with the story of George, u were meant to spend those years studying him look at it this way: ur trying to give something to the world, not just take that’s charity, not greed, n we all should try n live like that maybe u need to retitle it for yer copyshop bud, make it less painful sounding Yeah i’m in kind of a commune up here, but we don’t call it that, just a buncha people shipwrecked from society ended up on this island together we just call it the farm hiding in the woods :) we try to keep it about the earth.
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