Daredevil

I knew something was happening when my smartphone started chirping like crazy. About five million people were messaging me: “Marty! Did you hear about Kerry? Did you hear about Kerry?”. I followed a link to a news article someone posted and when I read what it said, I laughed. He was dead. They’d found his body at the bottom of the Falls, trapped in the rocks. I read the article and laughed. Not because I didn’t think it was sad. Everyone around me was freaking out, but I had to laugh. A week ago, he had disappeared after he’d gone nightfishing with his dad. The boat capsized but only his dad managed to swim to shore. At least that’s the official story. The truth is he had been smuggling cigarettes over the border from New York with his dad that night. He told us the day before that he’d be doing this and was all proud at how much money he would be making. His father did this all the time and made a wad of cash from it. His dad was smart that way. Tax free money, don’t have to do much more than you normally would if you were gone fishing. So when I found out that he was missing, I thought, oh man, something happened. You should have heard Kerry’s mom screaming at his dad that day. Christ, if you were down the street and in your basement, you would have heard her. You can’t even look at him now; Kerry’s dad. He looks like death himself and now he has to bury the son that he, himself had lost, in the most complete, profound and real way.

For Kerry though, I had to laugh. I always looked up to him. He was 17; two years older than me, but he always seemed a thousand years ahead. I just marvelled at some of the things he would do. He would throw himself into any situation without any fear and just DO IT! I never saw anyone skateboard like him; he was completely reckless in his endless search for the most air, the greatest revolutions, the craziest stunt. Needless to say he’d broken more bones than anyone else I had ever seen too. 2 or 3 times a year he would be in one form of cast or traction or both. It was a comical routine to ride up to the bridge where we’d hang out to swim and see him in bandages. So now he is dead. And I laugh. Is this hubris? Am I feeling schadenfreude? I know these words. I know what they mean. Yeah, I think he tempted fate and yeah, I’m laughing at it. I guess I’m congratulating him. He beat the odds for so long, and now he’s gone to the place where fate is manufactured, his body held in state where so many daredevils have kept their wake. That’s why I laugh. Hubris goes with Schadenfreude and queues the next round of pride. I think about his body trapped in the rocks at the bottom of the Falls. The word always was that if a body goes over the Falls, the worst place he could end up was in the rocks. You can’t get close to it, with water the weight of a pickup truck falling down on you every second, the rocks so sharp and jagged. It’s like the Niagara is holding on to him like he’s a prize or something, like a dog that will nip at your hand if you reach for its food bowl. You can slap a dog’s nose but you can’t fight Niagara Falls.

My room is stifling hot. We’re piss poor and can’t afford air conditioning. I turn on the fan in my room and open up my laptop to check on Kerry's FB wall. Already the online tributes are adding up. “You were the best, Kerry, man. We’re gonna miss you!” It's weird because they speak to him like he could read them from where he was, sitting at some ethereal portal, checking up on his Mafia Wars. But again, maybe this is the afterlife. Maybe this is Kerry's immortality. I imagine everyone's thoughts about him becoming the new ‘him’, like we’re keeping him alive this way. Maybe that’s all we really are. No one notices us unless we do something, no one see us unless we move or make a sound. That`s it. We’re nothing but our impressions. I’m not talking about the body being a vehicle for the soul and all that crap. I don’t believe in the soul. All I’m saying is that the sum of our lives comes from what we do with them and how people take notice of what we do. If you don’t do nothing, you are nothing. So you should live out loud like Kerry did. Leave a mark, leave a bruise, carve a niche or your life is all for naught. Leave them something to talk about. Pretty high thinking, eh? If I were to tell the others something like this, they would think I’m insane. Hmm. Maybe I should say something then. That would really fuck them up. Hmm.

I come out of my room, and I see my stepdad Ralph asleep on the couch, in the oblivious, toxic sleep of the drunkard, snoring at a greater rest than any man so ornery and angry should ever deserve. How does he rest so deeply when he does nothing to tire himself? The Drink robs him of his ambition. A year ago, he was laid off from his job at the steel mill and has been living on assistance ever since, claiming that he makes more money that way than getting one of the piddly low end jobs that exist in the city. And it’s true. What else is out there? We live on the outskirts of a tourist town. Can I see Ralph bussing tables at the Sheraton Fallsview? Sweeping deer droppings off the walkway at Marineland? I can’t see him doing anything else but what he is doing right now; moulding his ass into the sofa. It’s all he ever does. I hate him. I jump down from the top of the stairs, landing on the floor with a delicious tympanic boom. Ralph wakes with such a loud snort that you could swear to god he exaggerated it for optimum effect.
“Fuck!” he screams, too stupid and senseless to even find out what had awakened him.
“Time to go to work now, Ralphie.” I say. “Recess is over.”
“Little faggot! Why don’t you just fuck off!” he says, zeroing in on my voice.
“Why don’t you get a job first, fat ass?” I say, taking the pillow from under his greasy head and throwing it across the room before I leave the house. Outside, up above and behind me, out of the corner of my eye, I can see Sarah from next door looking down at me from her bedroom window to see what all the noise was. I flip her a bird and ride away, smiling from ear to ear.

You can always see the Niagara River behind the houses while I ride into town. It’s like an expanse of ocean, like the stars, like the edge of the world. I always think about that current, know about it, was warned about it by my parents. They told me how it carried people away like a lecherous monster, held you in a reptilian death roll and drowned you while ripping you to shreds. Every Friday night in the summer, fireworks would go off over the Falls further down river. Their concussion beats on your windows all the time. We make it a ritual to go out and watch it from Kingsbridge Park, me and my friends. That’s all we have to do. Then when the show is over, we sit and watch the tourists drive by, looking as lazy and malevolent as possible, like lions contemplating the hunt. They pass by and never notice us, but our thoughts still damage them somehow. That’s what I like to believe anyway.
I head out to the bridge, the one going over Chippawa Creek, where I knew I would find everyone. All the kids in town swim off this bridge, even though the city has tried to get us not to. Generations of us have swum here and they think they’re going to stop us? We will always be here, as long as the bridge is here and as long as the Creek is here. You would think the Creek would flow into the Niagara River; small river into big river, but no. The Creek actually gets sucked into a service canal to feed the turbines at the power station a few miles away, drawing water from the Niagara rather than flowing into it; opposite to what nature and the laws of physics would dictate. It’s easy to do with this river apparently. It’s so slow and sluggish. Someone actually once called it the world’s longest pond. It’s just when the canal has to shut down for maintenance that things get crazy. No longer feeding the canal, the flow turns back to its natural direction, as if given the chance to exhale after months of holding its breath. A zealous rush of gravity takes the water down to its primordial mouth and pushes a great plume of silt out into the larger, faster moving Niagara. It’s pretty interesting to watch and I‘ve been lucky enough to see it happen a few times The mood of the river changes almost right before your eyes; its flow more aggressive. Then you notice it; that the direction of the water has changed. This is when you have to avoid swimming in it because the current is so weird and strong. I’ve seen Kerry jump into that briny rush, though. He was a strong swimmer. He was able to tread it for a good while, but at that time, it was like he didn’t move at all, swimming in place, swimming still. Finally, he got tired have to let himself drift off, swimming back to shore but coming out a good distance away. I gauged how close to the merge with the river he was as he drifted ever closer to it. He wasn’t dangerously close but when he finally climbed out, I looked at the Niagara in the distance, looking empty and waiting, so grey and far away. You could hear its constant hiss; its rapids sounding like breath.

I ride up to the bridge and it does look like there was an empty space there without Kerry. Braydon is here. Jason is here, Amanda and Kendra. The girls look so sexy in that delicious wet gloss when they climb out of the water, the way their bathing suits cling to their bodies. One day I will do one of them, or maybe even both of them. Everyone looks down and depressed. You could say it’s so quiet without Kerry, but it’s more that nobody wants to talk about him, even though we’re all thinking about him. I look at their long faces and they piss me off. I want to dash them out.
“Did you guys hear about Kerry? They found his body at the bottom off the Falls, eh?”
Amanda looks up, looking like a dog that’s about to bite. I laugh at that look.
“What the hell are you laughing about?” she asks.
“I’m laughing at how weird it is that you’re all sitting here sulking. He’s gone. Deal with it.”
“You’re an asshole. That’s no way to talk about him.”
“What’s wrong with how I’m talking? He was a great guy!”
I climb up on the railing of the bridge and stand up with my back to the water, the open expanse of space, my ass to the world. I stand up straight and don’t move for a good long while. Then I jump. I go so high and push so hard that I flip backwards, like I plan to do, though I do it too hard and I hit the water halfway into another revolution, slapping my back as I go in. It hurts like hell and I yell into the murky water where no one can hear me. I use up my air down there and when I come up to the surface, I gasp and sputter like an idiot. Then I hear the laughter and the applause. I look up at everyone and they’re all laughing and clapping as if Kerry had never died.

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There’s a hat that I like hanging behind the counter at the corner store. I don’t have any money but that doesn’t meant I can’t have it. It doesn’t take money. I don’t know why I like it so much. Maybe it’s the design of it. But every time I go into the store buying a popsicle or whatever, it’s there, calling to me.
I think it belongs to me. I can see it on my bedpost, taking its rightful place as my hat. It definitely does not belong sitting in a store, threatened by the precarious possibility of being bought by someone less deserving. That should not and will not happen. I ask Braydon to come with me to the store. He has no idea what I have in mind because I didn’t even let on, but he is a good follower and he would love to help me pull something like this off. I tell him to ask where the pencils were and then pretend he can’t see them so he can get the clerk to go out to the aisle. Bray smiles as I tell him this. He knows exactly what’s up and I know he’ll totally go along with it. We walk in and he does what I ask him to do in total faith, looking confused and lost to perfection. When the clerk; a little Chinese man, takes the bait and goes over to the aisle to show Bray where the lost pencils are, I scoop up a chocolate bar to reward Bray, then creep up behind the counter and snatch my prize as fluidly and soundlessly as I can. I’m beelining it for the door when I hear the shout:
“Hey!”
When I hear that, I laugh out loud- possibly the loudest laugh I’ve ever made in my life; almost a scream and break into a run. I throw open the doors with a crash and run like crazy. I jump over obstacles like garbage bags and fire hydrants, then run into the co-op where the houses are all within feet of each other. I look back and see Braydon trying to keep up with me, and there’s no little chinaman running with him. We’re in the clear, we’ve gotten away. That’s when I go all parkour. I climb over fences as fast as I can and before I even think of it, I’m swinging on the bars of swingsets in people’s backyards, leaping over fishponds, somersaulting over lawns, popping up and scaling another fence, frightening another renter with my acrobatic trespassing. I’ve got the hat in my hand and the biggest smile on my face. I then run between two houses that are just four feet apart and make like I seen once in a video online. I jump up and my foot catches the brick on one side and use that to step up even higher. My other foot does the same and before I know it, I’m halfway up the building. The eavestrough is even within reach, the sky looks closer than ever and I am amazed at what I’ve been able to accomplish. I make one last push and get some beautiful air, but while I’m up there, I forget what I’m doing. I can’t really explain it. I guess I’m so involved in experiencing the high that I totally disown the next step. I float, lose momentum, fall, and when I hit the pavement, it’s with a sickening crush on my feet and then a sharp crack of my skull. That’s the last thing I know; that crack of my skull hitting the pavement when I land on the hard, unforgiving ground.

When I wake up, I’m surrounded by paramedics and Braydon is standing over me telling me how amazing I was before I fell. I smile, but I’m bleeding something fierce from my head, which hurts like nothing I’d ever felt before, just like my foot; throbbing and angry. I’m gurneyed into an ambulance and brought to Greater Niagara General where they x-ray me and stitch me up. I’m told I was lucky not to brain myself, but I was going home with a concussion and a broken right foot. Nothing is said about my shoplifting. My mom came after a few hours and stayed with me, but left me overnight so they could watch me. A nurse wakes me up every half hour through the night and the next day I feel like hell. Mom picks me up and as we’re just leaving the parking lot, I notice a weird street sign; Temperance Avenue. What a funny name to be near a hospital, I think. I wonder why it all of a sudden jumps out at me and makes me notice. It means restraining yourself; Temperance. I don’t think so. The hat is in my hand. I can’t wear it ‘cause I’m wrapped in bandages but it’s going to go proudly on my bedpost so it can remind me of the crazy way I came to make it mine.