Free Knucklehead & Other Stories by W. Mark Giles Page A

dead people. The original rock’n’roll headbanger. I guess I owe this whole damn thing to him.
    V. Reader
    Al kept his book a secret for a long time. He had no reason for doing so, other than a vague sense of embarrassment at the thought of being a writer. And then too, he had no good reason to show it to anyone.
    Sandra, he was sure, would not like it. She would think it morbid. She would worry, tell him that the past was not important when he had so much future to look forward to. She would sulk. She would argue. She would convince him to drop it. She would probably be right.
    His family would find it disturbing. His wild youth, his drugs and drinking, his unsavoury friends. His mother and father were retired, they lived a quiet life. They wouldn’t want to remember. His sister was a holy-roller now, she’d want to save him.
    None of his current friends or business acquaintances would get it. The sharks at head office would see it as a sign of weakness.
    Al finally showed it to his friend Stan Walker. Stan was a filmmaker, teaching at an art school in Toronto. He and Al still managed to hook up a few times every year. In the middle of the night during one of Stan’s trips to Vancouver, Al took Stan to his office. On the drive there, he couldn’t talk about his book. Al sat in the shadows as Stan read the book by the light of a desk lamp. At first, Al was nervous. He had never watched anyone read his work. As the minutes passed, his nervousness faded. He dozed off.
    It was getting light when Stan finished reading all of the eighty-three pages. He embraced Al in a big bear hug and wouldn’t let go. His voice a hoarse whisper, Stan said, “Most of us don’t know shit about.”
    It was a line from the book:
    Eddie van Dyk
Eddie went on a bender and never came back. Alcohol poisoning complicated by downers. He was dry for almost a year before that.
    Everybody loved Eddie. I saw him the Thursday before he died when I was in Edmonton on a trip. Just dropped by his mom’s place as I was driving by, and there was Eddie on the couch, watching the soaps and playing with his dog. I could write a whole book about Eddie. Once we had the same dream on the same night, about shooting stars and rocket ships in a 7-Eleven parking lot. One afternoon, I got Eddie out of bed to deal me a chunk of hash, and he said, “Some day I’m gonna die of a hangover.” He was on and off the wagon a lot. He wasn’t real good in school, but he was deep and took a lot of stuff seriously. He fought with demons most of us don’t know shit about.
    VI. Character
    Unlike many of the people in his book, Al had never been busted by the cops. He had never been rushed to hospital with an overdose. He had never been suicidal. He had spent the better part of ten years in a lifestyle that killed and injured the weak and the strong alike, but Al survived. He liked to think it was because he was neither weak nor strong, just average.
    His first impulse had been to document the most sensational deaths: all those suicides, overdoses and car wrecks. Even a guy he knew who was murdered. But as the book grew, he added entries that were ordinary by comparison. The cancers, heart attacks and strokes were no less deadly, just as random. That line between the here-and-now and the there-and-then was arbitrary.
    The earliest death experience he could remember was this:
    Sally Boychuk
Sally died the summer between grade seven and eight. She had a virus in her heart or something like that.
    Sally was the most popular girl in our class. I had a crush on her most of grade seven. I even got to kiss her once in the shacks behind the hockey rink. She played the violin and went away to summer school all the time, except that last one. If it happened today they’d give her a heart transplant.
    VII. Climax
    A year and one hundred and thirty-one obituaries later, Al ran out of dead people.
    After two months without an addition,