Sports and Pastimes

By Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard and Aimee Wall

Inspired by Erik Satie's work of the same name, Sports and Pastimes is the latest novel by acclaimed Montreal playwright and author Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard.

Translated by Aimee Wall (whose translation of Vickie Gendreau's Testament for BookThug in 2016 drew critical reviews), this fast-paced story follows the daily life, at once empty and overloaded, of a group of friends who spend all their energy trying to distract themselves with huge hits of endorphins, art and various substances, navigating pleasure and boredom, the extraordinary and the banal, as (more or less) worthy representatives of the best and worst of what their era has to offer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: Oct 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781771663519

Book preview

cover.jpg

first english edition

Original title Sports et divertissements © Les Éditions de Ta Mère, 2014

English translation copyright © 2017 Aimee Wall

The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. BookThug also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Book Fund.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013–2018: Education, Immigration, Communities, for our translation activities.

BookThug acknowledges the land on which it operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

Baril Guérard, Jean-Philippe, 1988–

[Sports et divertissements. English]

       Sports and pastimes / Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard ; [translated by] Aimee Wall. – First English edition.

(Literature in translation series)

Translation of: Sports et divertissements.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

softcover: ISBN 978-1-77166-350-2

html: ISBN 978-1-77166-351-9

pdf: ISBN 978-1-77166-352-6

kindle: ISBN 978-1-77166-353-3

       I. Wall, Aimee, translator II. Title. III. Title: Sports et divertissements. English. IV. Series: Literature in translation series

PS8603.A73545S6613 2017 C843’.6 C2017-905396-5 C2017-905397-3

Karaoke

Everything is upside down and everything is in its place. Félix-Antoine throws back his fifth shot of Jack Daniel’s. David leans against the bar, judging everything that moves with undisguised revulsion. I’m pulsating, damp, even wet in places, sometimes slipping through, sometimes pushing. The bar orbits around me and I am happy.

I’ve reached a higher level, a comfortable one, difficult to maintain, a precarious balance on the stilts of drunkenness. I hold the night high above me in my arms; it is perfect and at risk of sliding out of control at any moment.

I didn’t come here to hunt, but prey has thrown itself in my face. A friend of David’s. Right now he’s onstage singing Ghost Riders in the Sky, the Johnny Cash version. A song of morals. A song of warning. Stand tall, cowboy, the song says. Or else you’re going straight to hell.

Down here, we’re all going to hell and we know it, no need to warn us.

This is Gabriel’s karaoke classic, David says, a curled upper lip still advertising his disgust.

David is terribly cool, and so contempt is his natural state. No point in worrying about it too much.

Going to fuck him tonight, I say.

Gabriel? David asks.

If that’s his name, yes.

He’s a good guy, he says.

He said we’ve met, I say. Don’t remember where.

The short film you were in. With the sex scene in the shower. He was the director of photography on it.

Oh, right. How do you know him?

This Gabriel, up there bowing. A bit of applause. A guy next to me shouting, giving a thumbs up. I raise my glass.

Way back, high school, David says. He’s the director of photography on my film too. I like him.

It’s a good move?

Couldn’t say, he says. I haven’t fucked him.

You might have heard whispers.

I haven’t heard whispers, he sighs.

David occasionally wants to sleep with me, when he’s horny, and he gets a little bitter because we all know that would never happen. He’ll be okay.

Events jostle around below me before I have the time to analyze them, I think about what I’m going to say and already the words are outside me, someone says something about another round and already Gabriel is licking a drop of Jack from the corner of my lip. I don’t really know if I’m even that into him but I’m turgescent, and I never say no when my body says yes. So I never say no.

I sniff Gabriel’s neck, his oozing armpit, I notice the top of a tattoo beneath his clavicle, I pull at the collar of his shirt to see the rest: a stag’s head. I keep whispering into Gabriel’s ear, bullshit, everything I say is bullshit and I know it as soon as I open my mouth. He must be pretty pleased with me because he’s doing a great job of pretending to be interested in what I’m saying. If I was someone else, I’d find everything I’m raving about right now to be completely incoherent and extremely boring.

It strikes three o’clock, already the bartender is yelling for us to get out, this is an establishment where they don’t know how to live, where they throw people out the door instead of letting them stick around, and so we stick around, someone manages to breach the last call, a last shot of Jack, Gabriel pours it into my mouth, David takes a photo of us.

A blur of motion, red, blue; at the top of the frame, an overexposed white hand pours a stream of whisky into the open mouth of a woman at the bottom of the frame; in the background, dark silhouettes.

I remember that this fucking bar is on the second floor only as I watch Félix-Antoine nimbly fall down the stairs, ending up ass over tits at the door, then, not wanting to open the door that way, trying to get up and rolling again, knocking his head against the concrete, and finally getting to his feet, standing on the sidewalk bowing at us as if it had all been planned out and he was the Nadia Comaneci of drunks.

David says goodnight, he kisses my cheeks too close to my lips, hugs Gabriel, goes down to join Félix-Antoine on the sidewalk. Félix is saying about the after-party, about coke and poutine, but none of these options are particularly tempting to me right now. I grab his shirt to say bye, he reminds me about our climbing plans for tomorrow, leaving at six-thirty. I formally order him to make me come no matter what state I’m in because I’m going to have to burn off a lot of calories to make up for tonight. He gets in his car and I ask, out of habit, if he’s able to drive, as if I’m really in a position to judge his abilities. David gets in with him, Félix steers his Jeep like a go-kart, and they disappear, cutting off a bus. If they die tonight in an accident, at least I won’t remember having been partly responsible, alcohol has that as a positive. A friend of Gabriel’s leaves the bar, taps him on the shoulder, shakes his hand, and glances at me with a half-smile before mounting a bike and disappearing.

So. Me and Gabriel then, alone, together, on the street, which street, I don’t remember; reading a sign is too much effort for this time of night, for this blood alcohol level.

I’m not sober or patient enough to play the hesitation game, the maybe game, to inspire the thought in him that I might yet say no, that he’ll have to pursue me, insist, plead. I kiss him full on the mouth, a mouth as hot and wet as the air weighing down on our skin, and we walk toward my place. A walk that should take about seven minutes but ends up taking forty, because the alleys, because the nooks, because the darkened street lights.

Then, after we get all tongue-twisted up next to a dumpster I don’t even smell, too fixated on the musk emanating from Gabriel’s pubis, when I’m on my knees in front of him, two curly hairs away from a gross indecency, we are interrupted by loud laughter and yapping. A cavalcade of cyclists appears at the end of the alley, the male kind, desperately attempting coolness: red beards, polo mallets on their backs, old-fashioned little cycling caps, septum piercings, dark glasses in the middle of the night, one hand on the handlebars, a can of beer in the other. I barely have time to get my ass up against the wall before the first of the pack, a predator with wolf fangs tattooed at the base of his neck, yells in English:

Don’t you guys try to hide yourselves, we saw you!

I get up, wipe the corner of my mouth, make it look as if I’m fixing my eyes on his right through his glasses to provoke him, and I growl just as his bike zips up in front of my face:

I’m glad you did!

A second one, very ginger, very ugly, nasty teeth, catches my gaze and yells out as he flies past:

Watch yourself, naughty girl, you know you’ll get punished if you start doing bad things like that!

And they zip past again, barely inches from us, one bike, two bikes, three bikes, four bikes, five bikes, and three dogs running after them, yapping joyfully, then a siren rings out and we lose the swine amid the white noise of the city at night, and Gabriel and I burst out laughing, and we go at each other again, and I ask him:

Hey you, you have anything against naughty girls that do bad things like that?

You haven’t done anything too terrible up till now.

So we’ll leave it at that for tonight?

Certainly not.

The beginnings of a rain shower mix with the sweat beading on our skin. I purr under my breath:

That guy said terrible things were going to happen if I keep going.

I’m prepared to take that risk.

Then we should make it worth our while.

He grabs my ass and lifts me up against the wall and, between two kisses, murmurs:

The dumpster, you want it there, or can we go to your place?

The ascent to my place is very promising: he starts unbuttoning my pants while I desperately try to get the key in the lock, repeats the lifting my ass up onto the wall move in my entrance, kisses my neck until I’m meowing, skilfully unhooks my bra, and devours my breasts. I’m completely soaked and full of promises. I get back down on my knees to finish the project commenced in the alley and it’s suddenly less fun. His cock is soft. Sucking it helps a little, but when I stop for a few seconds he loses volume again. He brings me into the bedroom with slightly less of a warrior’s gait. He sluggishly lays me out on my bed and executes a polite and brief cunnilingus, barely worthy of foreplay. He mutters the word condom. I open the drawer of my nightstand for him and he helps himself. It’s arduous. I can’t see what he’s doing, but the sounds suggest a teenager trying on his first condom in his parents’ bathroom at fourteen. He tosses the condom. Opens another. Finally manages to get it on. He climbs onto me. I can’t tell if he’s inside me or not. I can only feel a subtle chafing of latex against the outside of my vagina. I notice his puny muscles, those of a weakling who barely works out but also doesn’t get fat, the body of a guy who lives on art, beer, and coffee. I could definitely beat him at arm wrestling. I think again about the short film we apparently shot together, with that sex scene in the shower. I think about my climbing trip with Félix-Antoine, happening in just a few hours.

I’m pretty far away in my head for a girl in mid-fuck.

After five minutes of growling and murmuring that I’m so beautiful, so hot (lies, clearly, or else he’d be hard), he pulls out and collapses next to me. I look over in time to see him pull the empty condom off his lamentably flaccid penis. The orange glow of the street light outside reveals a beautiful fresco of indistinct tattoos on his forearms, his shoulders, his right side, his thighs, his chest. He’s handsome, anyway.

Outside, the sky has begun disgorging itself. I open the balcony door to light a cigarette. The sound of the downpour fills the room. The air clears and assumes a more tolerable consistency.

He sighs, stretches out in the bed, murmurs:

So how old are you?

Twenty-two, I say.

You’re so young.

Meh. You?

Twenty-seven, he murmurs. Terribly old.

A clap of thunder.

Terribly, I repeat.

A sigh later he’s already asleep, leaving both of us deprived. My eyes are wide open. I won’t be able to fall asleep right away. Irritating.

The ginger cyclist did predict that I’d be punished for my sins. I should have listened to him.

Climbing

The next morning,