Canavan the Asian Man

Just a piece from a book Ive been working on!

Canavan the Asian man and I became friends in second grade when he brightly told me he wanted to f**k our teacher.

I had absolutely no idea what this meant at the time, and apparently neither did he because he was thoroughly upset when the principal made him apologize to me and the teacher by writing us each our own one page (god forbid one whole page) apology letters for his foul language. Apparently, he told me this many years later when I realized how creepy this incident was, he thought that f*****g someone meant telling them they were very a nice person and giving them a big hug. His mother had given him this explanation of the phrase after a night when he caught her watching HBO, with a big brown bottle and a box of Hot Pockets.

If you’ve ever seen HBO you know that situations like this are the EXACT reason you never want a small child to walk in on you watching it.

I never met Sam Canavan’s dad, I never really got the whole story but I think he left sometime before I met him, which would explain the Hot Pocket situation. She never seemed to upset about it, and neither did Sam. They were really two of the most well adjusted people I had ever met. I like that about them.  It’s always good to make friends who are well adjusted early on, because when you really love people it’s hard when they’re sad.

Ever since second grade I watched Sam Canavan the Asian Man find excellently inappropriate ways to curse. Early on, the inappropriateness usually was like the f**k the teacher incident…by a misunderstanding of the word itself. Later on, it was just because he wasn’t supposed to curse at all.  Recently, it was to shock the people around him (his mother thought he was going through a small rebellious phase that has lasted since I’ve known him)…but our foul mouthed peers weren’t shocked by “damn” or  “s**t” or even “f**k” so he took it upon himself to make people doubt the meaning of every day words such as “donkey mustard” or “bustin’ babies”. They weren’t really anywhere close to curse words but, I guess, in the right context anything can mean anything. He’s my best friend.

In seventh grade, we moved to middle school, our situation became precarious when it came to being in the same class. We now had six teachers to worry about sharing instead of one, not to mention lunch, which was an unholy nightmare in itself.  Middle school was a cess-pool of anxiety driven eating, uncomfortable smells and obsessing over people that aren’t obsessing over you. Of course, we thought we were above all of that and swore not to ever succumb to anything that could possibly allow us to learn anything you’re supposed to learn in middle school.

The night before the first day I chose my outfit. I had these cute light blue capris that shimmered a bit in the light, and a barrette that matched. My older sister’s best friend straightened my hair for the first time and used some kind of grown up product on it. The best thing, at the time, was the shirt I was going to wear. It was huge and brown, and had a picture of a deranged looking ape on it saying it was going to live inside the reader’s closet. I mean it was an ugly looking animal, aggressive and hyper-realistic. I f*****g loved this thing. I mean, I was so excited to wear it.  My mother only raised her eyebrows and laughed when she saw me, and my sister tried to talk me out of it. But I had no intentions of changing.

My backpack broke on the way in, so my mother gave me one of her company regulated briefcase creations that she used on trips so her nice one wouldn’t get hijacked.

Imagine me with my raging ape and IRS briefcase, god I hate me.

The only thing about that day that upset me was that I was not ANY (I repeat) ANY of the same classes as Sam Canavan. (In case you were wondering he had donned his brothers knee high buckled boots and what appeared to be a black sparkle sweater dress, we were quite the twat-babies, yes we were).  

Unfortunately for us, we were the last in our grade to get cell phones so communication throughout the day was difficult for us. We tried meeting up at certain times, but we only had five minutes to get to our locker, and to the next class and we hadn’t quite mastered the art of doing as much loitering as possible during these breaks. I think this is when Canavan started hiding things. I mean this literally, he would hide s**t all over the f*****g school like a goddamn squirrel. It started with a note in my locker, which isn’t a hard leap to jump when you’re thirteen. Then it grew to notes stuck in the grate of my favorite water fountain, cookies wrapped in plastic left in previously specified areas of previously specified classrooms, poofy topped pens periodically stolen from Carolina Grant the girl who stole his poofy pen in third grade whom he never wanted to let forget, and of course the three inch tall naked statue he stole from the vice principal’s desk which he kept in the loose ceiling tile in the girls bathroom. Supposedly it was a gift from a Tchaikovsky, and the principal had never ever stopped looking for it.