There’s a war in her brain, her mental landscape blighted by bombs that explode with two hundred volts of electricity. She’s convulsing, the current coursing through her while I stand by watching her toes. Her toes will curl, watch, they tell me, so I do. The nurse holds her head as it starts its rebellious journey, jerking backward. Her toes curl. I glance from her toes to the second hand on the circular wall clock and back to her feet. It has to last so many seconds, how many did he say? My mind is stuck.
As Dr. Flak outlines ECT procedure, grief rains upon me like the ashes of Vesuvius, binding my forehead and scalp and the mass of particles beneath. “The thing to remember is that this method is performed while the patient is unconscious,” he is saying, “which is induced by a short-acting barbiturate. Not only that, you should know that patient is also given succinylcholine.” He pauses. Possibly he notices my vacant stare and mistakes it for confusion. “. . . temporarily paralyzing the muscles to prevent self-harming. After this, a breathing tube is inserted into the patient's airway. Beside this, a rubber mouthpiece is also inserted into the mouth to prevent teeth grinding or tongue biting during the electrically induced convulsion. Then, we have the electrodes. These electrodes may be placed on both sides of the head—bilateral— or one side and an electric current is passed through the brain. In this case, I would advise bilateral.”
I am covered with ash. I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve blinked. Today, for the debriefing, I have driven Abie here. I will not transport him home. “How strong is electrical current?” he asks, using his business voice. The edgings around his ears are on fire. Dr. Flak adjusts his glasses. “Well,” he says, “the usual dose of electricity is 70–150 volts for 0.1–0.5 seconds. This stage lasts approximately 10–60 seconds.”
As I stand on this deceptive shoreline so smooth that it threatens to sneak out from under me, a rogue wave thunders in and crashes over me. I don’t thrash about like a fish at the end of a line. I’ve become a silent shadow—-I know I’m thinking but I have no thoughts; I see but no image appears within the curve of my retina. And though I hear, I can’t distinguish the words above the bellowing wave which is Dr. Flak’s voice—“The physician in charge will try to induce a seizure that lasts between one-half and two minutes. If the first application of electricity fails to produce a seizure lasting at least 25 seconds, another attempt is made 60 seconds later. The session is stopped if the patient has no seizures after three attempts.” There is one scene I will never forget: one on perpetual playback. I saved only myself, fleeing from the firestorm that was Abie.
A nurse in green scrubs asks if I’m alright. “I have to be,” I say and let her catch my eyes. For an instant I let her in to the bewildering wildness behind these eyes of mine and then I shut her out. There is an eclipse behind my eyes and even I cannot look inside, although sometimes I think if I do, if I stare unblinking and lose my sight, the past will dissolve, and with it the present. But for now, I stand beside my frail daughter in her Day Surgery bed, my face hovering above hers like a mist or lover so that she might see me when she fades and again as she reenters.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
This Gossamer House (edit 1)
Life is lived in fragments in this house.
Abie visits Caroline is the hospital every three or four days. He stays for thirty minutes each time.
Where is Lisa? Years later in the next house and again in the house after that, I ask Garth who, in this part of my life, is the string around my finger, where was Lisa? In Europe? Living with Nadavi in Israel? In another of her houses? We once counted out all our houses, each of us listing streets and street numbers (we were bent on listing full addresses only).
"Nineteen," I said.
"Twenty-eight."-Lisa.
"Twenty-eight? Wait." I said, counting again. "Twenty-one. Yup, that's it. How do you get twenty-eight?"
"My memory is shriveling like an old woman's tits," I say to Garth in the next house when I ask him to pencil in those rubbed out times. Garth tells me we fought over Lisa. My voice rises one full octave: "We fought over Lisa! You never cared, you didn't even like--" He says he's not going to lie and tell me he actually liked her; they had a personality clash is all. It was just he thought Caroline wasn't Lisa's responsibility, Lisa had to get on with her life, he said. "But her own sister!" I said, although I understood. Guilt is like lead in my veins.
Julian phones. "Don't visit," I tell him. "Are you sure?" he says. I don't want him to see Caroline this way, not for myself, but for her, out of respect. I don't want visitors paying their respects, watching from the shore as her mind thrashes in treacherous waters.
Although the trees are barren on the Outside, in Nine South, it's spring with
lilac-colored walls, daffodils, tulips, and crocuses sprouting on window sills in the Group Therapy Room and patients' lounge. Gloria, Pat, Dorothy, Kim-these are the nurses. Hair dyed beet red, blond with insistent brown shoots, clipped black hair like a cap. Voices like cream and morning coffee.
Time goes slowly and quickly.
Dr. Flak schedules a round of shock treatments. When I see Abie, I weep on his shoulder. He's going to check his sources, he says. Maybe we won't have to, maybe--Like the evictions, there are no maybes. I know this.
She laughs like a crazy person, whooping like a trapped bird, flapping and hooping with unflagging insistence. "Trogolite!" she shrieks. "Trogolite!"
"Honey," I once said, "there is no such thing as a Trogolite. What does it mean to you? Honey sweetie, tell me, what is it?"
"It's an old word." she said.
"Can we check in the dictionary?"
"It's an old word, from England," she said, her head drooping and then from her throat, a hum like a motor idling.
I sat with her, my hand on her knee. To ground her, keep her in this world from which any visitor would scuttle away. Not a good place. Bad things happen in this place. I breathe in. Five seconds later I breathe in again, this time lightly, my stomach lifting and receding only slightly; I tread lightly.
"Tell me then. What it is. A trogolite."
She grinned then. A lewd sneering smirk.
"It's a hermaphrodite."
"Who, honey? Who's a hermaphrodite?"
"You. You are," she said and flew off with her whooping laugh as wings, her laugh so searing that it scorched my eyes. And I can't save her. I would leave my mind, tear into her untamed planet and scoop her up; I would make deals with the ruffians--mother for daughter, I would plea, mother for daughter.
The first in the round of twelve electroshock treatments is scheduled for tomorrow morning at eleven-twenty.
Abie visits Caroline is the hospital every three or four days. He stays for thirty minutes each time.
Where is Lisa? Years later in the next house and again in the house after that, I ask Garth who, in this part of my life, is the string around my finger, where was Lisa? In Europe? Living with Nadavi in Israel? In another of her houses? We once counted out all our houses, each of us listing streets and street numbers (we were bent on listing full addresses only).
"Nineteen," I said.
"Twenty-eight."-Lisa.
"Twenty-eight? Wait." I said, counting again. "Twenty-one. Yup, that's it. How do you get twenty-eight?"
"My memory is shriveling like an old woman's tits," I say to Garth in the next house when I ask him to pencil in those rubbed out times. Garth tells me we fought over Lisa. My voice rises one full octave: "We fought over Lisa! You never cared, you didn't even like--" He says he's not going to lie and tell me he actually liked her; they had a personality clash is all. It was just he thought Caroline wasn't Lisa's responsibility, Lisa had to get on with her life, he said. "But her own sister!" I said, although I understood. Guilt is like lead in my veins.
Julian phones. "Don't visit," I tell him. "Are you sure?" he says. I don't want him to see Caroline this way, not for myself, but for her, out of respect. I don't want visitors paying their respects, watching from the shore as her mind thrashes in treacherous waters.
Although the trees are barren on the Outside, in Nine South, it's spring with
lilac-colored walls, daffodils, tulips, and crocuses sprouting on window sills in the Group Therapy Room and patients' lounge. Gloria, Pat, Dorothy, Kim-these are the nurses. Hair dyed beet red, blond with insistent brown shoots, clipped black hair like a cap. Voices like cream and morning coffee.
Time goes slowly and quickly.
Dr. Flak schedules a round of shock treatments. When I see Abie, I weep on his shoulder. He's going to check his sources, he says. Maybe we won't have to, maybe--Like the evictions, there are no maybes. I know this.
She laughs like a crazy person, whooping like a trapped bird, flapping and hooping with unflagging insistence. "Trogolite!" she shrieks. "Trogolite!"
"Honey," I once said, "there is no such thing as a Trogolite. What does it mean to you? Honey sweetie, tell me, what is it?"
"It's an old word." she said.
"Can we check in the dictionary?"
"It's an old word, from England," she said, her head drooping and then from her throat, a hum like a motor idling.
I sat with her, my hand on her knee. To ground her, keep her in this world from which any visitor would scuttle away. Not a good place. Bad things happen in this place. I breathe in. Five seconds later I breathe in again, this time lightly, my stomach lifting and receding only slightly; I tread lightly.
"Tell me then. What it is. A trogolite."
She grinned then. A lewd sneering smirk.
"It's a hermaphrodite."
"Who, honey? Who's a hermaphrodite?"
"You. You are," she said and flew off with her whooping laugh as wings, her laugh so searing that it scorched my eyes. And I can't save her. I would leave my mind, tear into her untamed planet and scoop her up; I would make deals with the ruffians--mother for daughter, I would plea, mother for daughter.
The first in the round of twelve electroshock treatments is scheduled for tomorrow morning at eleven-twenty.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
This is Not a Good House:erotic memoir, creative non-fiction
This is not a good house. Bad things happen in this Gossamer House. Policemen wearing black padded vests and carrying rifles surround a house at the end of the cul de sac. They ring every bell and tell us to keep our blinds down and stay inside. In number nine, someone has taken hostages. For a split second I think Garth is taking the man in number nine down, but he's beside me looking out the window in our bedroom which is not the one overlooking the garden, the room with the ensuite and walk-in closet, Garth refusing to sleep there until we have a bedroom set. He takes me to remote shops in Scarborough strips and Keele and Highway Seven. So we set our box spring and mattress in the front room and I store my clothes in six stacked black plastic bins in the cupboard. During the week Talon is here, we fuck in the walk-in closet. We save ass-fucking for alternate weeks.
The man in number nine is holding three people hostage, a wife, her lover, and her teenage daughter. "How do you know?" I ask Garth. "I asked," he says. He has a way of reducing matters to their basics which I don't really call reducing-he hones in. He says he listens and pays attention to detail. If I have a problem and need to understand the underlying issues, I go to him. "I need some foundational listening," I say and he stops everything. I'm a mental pack rat and Garth is a stark minimalist which impresses me.
Toward the end in the Indian Road house, on one of Abie's two week returns from Geneva, as I lay stiff and unmoving in the middle of the night while Abie pounded away-it wasn't yet morning and he had woken up with an itch--Abie's prick finally wilted. He shoved me out of bed and I fell on the floor against the sliding mirrored doors of the wall-to-wall closet. "Don't you ever--" I said and I meant it. Ineffectual pricks have a way of sticking around; Abie's winding its way into the Gossamer House. The car dealership is after him. Payments are owing. Do I know anything about his whereabouts, a phone number or address? "But you must know," they say, "do you have children? Wouldn't they--""I'm the daughter of a union organizer," I say. "I know you want your cars back and goodness knows my girls and I have been through enough, but I can't. It's not in me."
I phone Abie. The hounds are after him. I bring in the red Neon the same afternoon. Yola co-signs the contract for a used Explorer. Around the same time Lisa receives an eviction notice, her father spewing his standard scenarios about holidays, delays, funds in transit across the Atlantic, and moves into the basement.
"Will you tell Lisa to close her lights?" Garth says showing me the electricity bill. "And would you tell her if she turns off the lights instead of conserving water by not flushing the toilet, our bill would be lower?"
"Tell him I'll pay for my electricity," Lisa says. I don't tell her about her decomposing shit in the basement toilet.
In this house, the ache in my heart takes root. Memories fall away like leaves in autumn. Even Garth can't help me remember the order and details of events. I need to remember how everything unraveled and I have only two photographs: in one, snapped at Kortwright when we're living in the Overbrooke house, a Rousseau rendition in which I'm smiling, arms akimbo, surrounded by ostrich ferns, and a second, a sparse backyard shot two months after we moved into this Gossamer house, in which I'm wearing Caroline's navy blue and white long cotton dress that is now too large for her and so has been passed on to me, and I'm not smiling, my already thin lips pursed together.
She refuses food. I visit Abie at his Teddington House. Sylvia has made a deep pot of sausages in gravy and sauerkraut for Christmas. "How about some yogurt?" I say, yogurt having been her first food,y homemade yogurt brewed overnight in the Highway 6 house. Still she refuses. Abie says hold her hands and tries to force food in her mouth. She turns her head side to side. And the thing is, the damned and evil thing is, I listen. I hold her hands. The same way I ran over the snapping turtle, over and over, back and forth with my Jeep Wagoneer, one eyeball popping out, a giant white marble on the freshly moved grass, the turtle flipping over. "Easy," Abie said when I called him, "you got the soft part now. You've got a jeep for god sake, just drive it like you're stuck in snow. Like we did in Montreal." I got back in the jeep and drove over that turtle, forward, brake, reverse, brake, forward again, a green leg, a thalidomide limb with claws at the tip, stirred. I screamed-three shrill wrenching notes. With poor Lisa riveted on the patio steps. And Caroline huddling beside the wood stove in the kitchen. The turtle was rabid, Abie said, otherwise it would not have left its place near the lake, finding its way to the pebbled walkway. "It can break a tree's limb in half. You have two children. Get ahold of yourself and do what I told you," he said.
She is so thin now, ninety-nine pounds just skin, bones, and heart ache. I lost all reason and listened to Abie. There are certain times I will always regret.
Abie says she goes into her closet and puts hangers around her neck. "Good thing she's a clutz," he says. One day he finds her holding a broken mirror. I live with Garth and his son. I work from seven to noon and sometimes one, counting reps and listening to complaints-a cleaning lady has the flu, a hairdresser's streaks are not thin enough, there's packing for a two-week cruise, and the strain of choosing kitchen tiles. How can I leave her alone with Garth who has hardly spoken to her in two years? He doesn't know what to say so he says nothing. "How about hello?" I say. "How about 'how are you?'" He says he'll try. "Two sentences," I say. "I go to work in the morning, rush home for lunch, sometimes there's no time even for that, and then I pick up Talon, talk to his teachers, play with him when you're on the phone, and you can't promise two simple sentences!" He stands in the doorway watching me cry, hearing my throat constrict after sentences, then phrases, and finally on words as they twist their way up, tangling and gasping as they surface.
Dr. Flak is Caroline's link at Mt. Sinai. She's been his patient since she was nineteen when she was being assessed. I was searching for another hospital, some place with a spot of light. Sunnybrooke would let me visit every two days and then just for an hour. "Let me out. Please let me out," an old lady had wailed from behind a locked door. Caroline had a once-a-day quota to call me. On her second day there, I took her out. "I'll take care of her at home," I said. I lose track of doctors: There was other doctor at Sunnybrooke--Dr. Bolous and also Dr. Theodoro, a handsome young Greek resident who later gained weight which is understandable given the wear and tear in his line of work. Caroline was an out-patient, just starting to take epival and gaining thirty-pounds with each additional capsule added on. I saw young girls with pretty figures grow larger and larger from one visit to the next. Caroline's hair changed texture; I didn't know how to manage the curls and rebellious jungle of tangles. Caroline can remember the names of all her doctors, only not when you ask her to list them. She's not good at sequencing. But sometimes she'll be going on and she'll name one of her doctors, like the one she saw in the Deloraine House whose name I often forget. "Remember Dr. Wright?" she'll say and I'll answer "What a memory you have!
We're at Dr. Flak's, Abie and I and Caroline. "Let me see if there's a bed," Dr. Flak says. I brush my eyes with the back of my hands. My nose burns, then fills like sink with the tap left running. My eyes overflow. I turn my head just as my face crumples. We settle her into a bed in a private room. She has a locker in the room and a bathroom with a shower. There are floral curtains. The windows are thick and impenetrable. I pull up a blue padded chair and sit with her.
I can't remember if she kept on talking- "minus levels thin, minus level plus, minus levels thin," or calling out "Trogolite! Trogolite!" her head rooting from side to side, or whether she sat unmoving, her head drooping. There is a song I remember playing on my autoharp when the girls were little, in the houses before the harp was seized along with my piano: "If somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me, you would lose them, I know how to use them, give them all to me." It's like that when they give her Adavan and ask me if I want to stay, a tube has to be inserted down her nose. "Yes, I can," I say, and I talk to her, "They have to do this sweetie, I love you, it's going to be alright now, I'm here, the tube is to give you food," I say holding her hand in mine, my voice soft and full; I have travelled to that dead zone beyond despair, where my breathing is shallow and my eyes hollow.
"You're amazing," they say. "So good with her."
"You're so brave."
"Thank you," I say, "Thank you."
Dr. Flak stands at the end at her bed. "I see you're sitting up," he says. She spits at him.
Twice she pulls out the tube and twice they reroute it down her nose. I gasp the first time. After the second time I rush out to Hasty Market and buy eight small containers of Astro blueberry yogurt.
"I want these on her tray," I say.
"These are for you, honey. I'm going to sit outside. I'll be right outside." I say, and I tell her that I love her, that she is my light as I gently close the door. And then I wait.
The man in number nine is holding three people hostage, a wife, her lover, and her teenage daughter. "How do you know?" I ask Garth. "I asked," he says. He has a way of reducing matters to their basics which I don't really call reducing-he hones in. He says he listens and pays attention to detail. If I have a problem and need to understand the underlying issues, I go to him. "I need some foundational listening," I say and he stops everything. I'm a mental pack rat and Garth is a stark minimalist which impresses me.
Toward the end in the Indian Road house, on one of Abie's two week returns from Geneva, as I lay stiff and unmoving in the middle of the night while Abie pounded away-it wasn't yet morning and he had woken up with an itch--Abie's prick finally wilted. He shoved me out of bed and I fell on the floor against the sliding mirrored doors of the wall-to-wall closet. "Don't you ever--" I said and I meant it. Ineffectual pricks have a way of sticking around; Abie's winding its way into the Gossamer House. The car dealership is after him. Payments are owing. Do I know anything about his whereabouts, a phone number or address? "But you must know," they say, "do you have children? Wouldn't they--""I'm the daughter of a union organizer," I say. "I know you want your cars back and goodness knows my girls and I have been through enough, but I can't. It's not in me."
I phone Abie. The hounds are after him. I bring in the red Neon the same afternoon. Yola co-signs the contract for a used Explorer. Around the same time Lisa receives an eviction notice, her father spewing his standard scenarios about holidays, delays, funds in transit across the Atlantic, and moves into the basement.
"Will you tell Lisa to close her lights?" Garth says showing me the electricity bill. "And would you tell her if she turns off the lights instead of conserving water by not flushing the toilet, our bill would be lower?"
"Tell him I'll pay for my electricity," Lisa says. I don't tell her about her decomposing shit in the basement toilet.
In this house, the ache in my heart takes root. Memories fall away like leaves in autumn. Even Garth can't help me remember the order and details of events. I need to remember how everything unraveled and I have only two photographs: in one, snapped at Kortwright when we're living in the Overbrooke house, a Rousseau rendition in which I'm smiling, arms akimbo, surrounded by ostrich ferns, and a second, a sparse backyard shot two months after we moved into this Gossamer house, in which I'm wearing Caroline's navy blue and white long cotton dress that is now too large for her and so has been passed on to me, and I'm not smiling, my already thin lips pursed together.
She refuses food. I visit Abie at his Teddington House. Sylvia has made a deep pot of sausages in gravy and sauerkraut for Christmas. "How about some yogurt?" I say, yogurt having been her first food,y homemade yogurt brewed overnight in the Highway 6 house. Still she refuses. Abie says hold her hands and tries to force food in her mouth. She turns her head side to side. And the thing is, the damned and evil thing is, I listen. I hold her hands. The same way I ran over the snapping turtle, over and over, back and forth with my Jeep Wagoneer, one eyeball popping out, a giant white marble on the freshly moved grass, the turtle flipping over. "Easy," Abie said when I called him, "you got the soft part now. You've got a jeep for god sake, just drive it like you're stuck in snow. Like we did in Montreal." I got back in the jeep and drove over that turtle, forward, brake, reverse, brake, forward again, a green leg, a thalidomide limb with claws at the tip, stirred. I screamed-three shrill wrenching notes. With poor Lisa riveted on the patio steps. And Caroline huddling beside the wood stove in the kitchen. The turtle was rabid, Abie said, otherwise it would not have left its place near the lake, finding its way to the pebbled walkway. "It can break a tree's limb in half. You have two children. Get ahold of yourself and do what I told you," he said.
She is so thin now, ninety-nine pounds just skin, bones, and heart ache. I lost all reason and listened to Abie. There are certain times I will always regret.
Abie says she goes into her closet and puts hangers around her neck. "Good thing she's a clutz," he says. One day he finds her holding a broken mirror. I live with Garth and his son. I work from seven to noon and sometimes one, counting reps and listening to complaints-a cleaning lady has the flu, a hairdresser's streaks are not thin enough, there's packing for a two-week cruise, and the strain of choosing kitchen tiles. How can I leave her alone with Garth who has hardly spoken to her in two years? He doesn't know what to say so he says nothing. "How about hello?" I say. "How about 'how are you?'" He says he'll try. "Two sentences," I say. "I go to work in the morning, rush home for lunch, sometimes there's no time even for that, and then I pick up Talon, talk to his teachers, play with him when you're on the phone, and you can't promise two simple sentences!" He stands in the doorway watching me cry, hearing my throat constrict after sentences, then phrases, and finally on words as they twist their way up, tangling and gasping as they surface.
Dr. Flak is Caroline's link at Mt. Sinai. She's been his patient since she was nineteen when she was being assessed. I was searching for another hospital, some place with a spot of light. Sunnybrooke would let me visit every two days and then just for an hour. "Let me out. Please let me out," an old lady had wailed from behind a locked door. Caroline had a once-a-day quota to call me. On her second day there, I took her out. "I'll take care of her at home," I said. I lose track of doctors: There was other doctor at Sunnybrooke--Dr. Bolous and also Dr. Theodoro, a handsome young Greek resident who later gained weight which is understandable given the wear and tear in his line of work. Caroline was an out-patient, just starting to take epival and gaining thirty-pounds with each additional capsule added on. I saw young girls with pretty figures grow larger and larger from one visit to the next. Caroline's hair changed texture; I didn't know how to manage the curls and rebellious jungle of tangles. Caroline can remember the names of all her doctors, only not when you ask her to list them. She's not good at sequencing. But sometimes she'll be going on and she'll name one of her doctors, like the one she saw in the Deloraine House whose name I often forget. "Remember Dr. Wright?" she'll say and I'll answer "What a memory you have!
We're at Dr. Flak's, Abie and I and Caroline. "Let me see if there's a bed," Dr. Flak says. I brush my eyes with the back of my hands. My nose burns, then fills like sink with the tap left running. My eyes overflow. I turn my head just as my face crumples. We settle her into a bed in a private room. She has a locker in the room and a bathroom with a shower. There are floral curtains. The windows are thick and impenetrable. I pull up a blue padded chair and sit with her.
I can't remember if she kept on talking- "minus levels thin, minus level plus, minus levels thin," or calling out "Trogolite! Trogolite!" her head rooting from side to side, or whether she sat unmoving, her head drooping. There is a song I remember playing on my autoharp when the girls were little, in the houses before the harp was seized along with my piano: "If somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me, you would lose them, I know how to use them, give them all to me." It's like that when they give her Adavan and ask me if I want to stay, a tube has to be inserted down her nose. "Yes, I can," I say, and I talk to her, "They have to do this sweetie, I love you, it's going to be alright now, I'm here, the tube is to give you food," I say holding her hand in mine, my voice soft and full; I have travelled to that dead zone beyond despair, where my breathing is shallow and my eyes hollow.
"You're amazing," they say. "So good with her."
"You're so brave."
"Thank you," I say, "Thank you."
Dr. Flak stands at the end at her bed. "I see you're sitting up," he says. She spits at him.
Twice she pulls out the tube and twice they reroute it down her nose. I gasp the first time. After the second time I rush out to Hasty Market and buy eight small containers of Astro blueberry yogurt.
"I want these on her tray," I say.
"These are for you, honey. I'm going to sit outside. I'll be right outside." I say, and I tell her that I love her, that she is my light as I gently close the door. And then I wait.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Edit 2, with some new shit slipped in: literary erotica
“Gross,” Talon’s laughing so hard, he’s clutching his ribs.
“What’s he laughing at?” I say.
“Just a video. Have a look,” Garth says, his one seeing eye taking in my builder’s dark-grey-with-diagonal-black-lines spandex I wear to show off my quads and hams.
“Can’t,” I say, “Going to Strictly to train Barbara.” I coach three women at Strictly now—an Italian with straight jet black hair from World’s Gym who’s fed up with fitness-style instructors and wants to try hardcore, although hardcore core isn’t something you try like sampling a new dish, you move to the country, damn it, and you live like they live, eat what they eat; Alla, who bares her tanned midriff in a new outfit with that stylized “U” symbol on it every time she trains and worries because she doesn’t get off on her husband anymore although he’s a handsome Moroccan Jew and makes a pile of cash in his import/export business; and Gloria, a fashionably skinny, past or in her prime however you look at it, ex-hippie who’s made her fortune in the body bag business and setting up high-class abortion clinics in the Caribbean for women from South American countries, who find themselves in the family way as my Bobi would say.
“Just one look, it’ll take one second,” Garth says while Talon echoes and I can’t refuse, we’re still in our beginnings.
“So? I don’t see anything . . . What the hell is that!” I say as I stare at a puckered-up out of focus hole. Talon and Garth are out of control laughing and slapping their thighs.
“Wait,” Garth manages.
I shift from one foot to another, and then the focus becomes sharper and what I’m watching as Talon absolutely loses it and Garth does too, alongside, and he never loses it, is the rear of a woman bending over and her ass hole all puckered up and opening wider and wider until it’s the size of a melon, not a piddle of a melon, but a ripe, full-size grown one.
“Disgusting,” Talon’s yelling and skipping around.
“You two are crazy out of your minds,” I say. “And you . . .” I shake my head at Garth, but I’m grinning.
“No way is he going to be like his mom now,” Garth says.
“Garth! In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”
“But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”
“I know the route, Janice.”
“Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”
“You won’t have much to pack this time.”
So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?
In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards of variable denominations in variety stores and supermarkets—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals just love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet. It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I, a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK—at the Expo 67 fairgrounds Abie pulled me over to the Spider. “I hate rides.” I said. “C’mon. You’ll like it, you’ll see. C’mon. Trust me.” “I hate it. I hate.” I yelled from the moment we started spinning. Abie’s airplane glasses flew off. “Hold onto the bar. It’s out of control!” he screamed, pressing me into the seat with his left arm. Looking back, deals had their seasons as predictable as the Ferris Wheel, but it living through them was like riding on the Spider, sure enough.
And now Garth is working on a deal. He says it’s not a bank trading program like the one Abie was involved in, the one he lost two point five million in although he insists it was bad luck, the money being placed into an American account whose holder keeled and slam-bam kicked the bucket one spring day, the wife and step-son moving in and staking their claim. Garth says his deal is different—it’s a fund he explains, investors go in, the fund grows, and after a specified time, investors get their outlay back plus a pre-set portion of the interest. Simple and legit. Garth puts an ad in the Globe and Mail. Some guy from Sudbury has one hundred thousand, a widow from Toronto has only fifty and will that be sufficient she asks. Garth gets faxes. Contracts have to be rewritten; the wording in one clause is not acceptable to the British lawyer. The British lawyer is satisfied but the American attorney is not. “Garth,” I say my voice like sugar and sex, “are you sure this is not a bank trading scam? They’re cracking down you know. I don’t want to sound negative.” “Then don’t,” he says. “Why say ‘I don’t mean to’ and then go ahead?” I don’t know the lingo, but I hear the calls and read the contracts. And then I hear about delays, new signatures needed, clauses requiring alteration, and I know. I know the way I feel Garth’s cock slamming the back of my cunt when I lie under him, my legs cradling his neck, same as I lie on him and kiss his lips that are so miraculously smooth and soft and the way I know the span of his forehead. I just know. And I can’t tell him.
Garth doesn’t have a job. We didn’t talk much about how he was going to make money when we started fucking. I knew about his neighbor in Guelph who sold stocks and bonds and moved to Florida to start a hedge fund. And that he planned to make his million before he was thirty. It’s his destiny, he says. He figures if he works smart, he could get by working four hours a day at first leading up to maybe two hours one day a week; he says when he was a bouncer those nine to fivers would head on down to their local bars every weekend and blow their paycheck. Dirt bags wear shirts with white and blue collars, at the bar you can’t tell them apart. “Reminds me of Clearwater—you know that old quarry for nudists on the way to Freelton. Steel workers and university professors, you can’t tell one cock from the other.” I know I’m losing him, Garth being one of those linear types. I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations—I think like a drunken choreographer, which she appreciates. Maybe my style is impacted by my backlog of filed thoughts. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition. So I quickly slide in with “the thing is Garth, sometimes you have to work for what you want” even though I know the door on his face is going to slam shut and I’ll be left huddling in the cold without him.
Garth says people are afraid of being alone. He says you come into this world alone and you die the same way, so you better get used to it. “But you get angry when I visit Caroline every day.” I say. He says he didn’t visit Talon as much as I visit Caroline, even when he was a baby. “She’s sick,” I say. “And if you could have seen Talon every day, wouldn’t you have? And if I could have Caroline here—why isn’t she here? Tell me why she isn’t here with me!” On Nina Street Garth would talk me upright and back into the ring whenever grief delivered a packed ab punch. Now he just watches from the sidelines.
The old widow and the Sudbury man are threatening to sue. Garth isn’t afraid. He says he’ll get off with paying seventy-five dollars a month; he just has to show the courts he’s on a repayment schedule. His forehead remains as smooth as ever. If someone wants to gamble one-hundred thousand that’s not his business. He feels sorry for the old widow. I can’t remember how Garth got to keep one hundred thousand. I’m like the old man in Moonstruck in the closing kitchen scene when Cher and Nicholas Cage are sitting around the breakfast table and Cher’s fiancé returns from visiting his Mama in Italy: “I’m so confused,” the old man says.
So Garth hops on a plane to Orlando and hands this American scammer named Jim Steel one hundred K cash. “What? You did what!” I said when Garth phoned. “Well, he had a suitcase with a live one hundred thousand.” “It was fake, Garth. Who carries around that kind of money and shows it to a stranger? The man’s a southern cracker for fuck’s sake. What’s he doing showing this huge black man cash?” Turns out Garth spoke maybe five or six times to an agent named Jack Tabac, and Jack passed on information about an owner of a thriving import-export company who was wanting to retire. For one hundred K, Jim would teach him the ropes and then move into the background, leaving Garth to manage the day to day. Of course Mr. Steel skipped town. Garth left messages about personally hunting him down and calling out the FBI hounds, which Jim picked up, subsequently setting up a meeting with Garth in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side where, coming face to face with Garth’s hulking angry frame, he thrust out eight of the one hundred thousand and promptly disappeared. I never said “what were you thinking?” to Garth who had gotten such a laugh about Abie forking over that two point five million and his dog loyalty to shady deals. And now here is Garth pointing his finger at fat people, gullible investors, and charlatans.
I’m in the kitchen cooking on a gas stove. There’s something sexy about gas stoves, something gesmucked. More than delicious, gesmucked has to do with smells that get the mouth watering, the eagerness of piercing food and holding it in place, the arc of fork to mouth, the satisfying roll of food in the mouth, and discovery of flavors. It has to do with texture. I’m thinking about geshmuked which I learned from Abie and how it’s one of those fulfilling all-purpose words and how it’s a zen word sweeping you into the moment, when I hear a syncopated long-distance ring. My father asks me about the girls. I tell him I miss Caroline. He asks about Lisa. I tell him she’s living in the east part of Toronto, she has roommates, she’s working in a call centre and she answers the phone in English and French. She’s had another poem published. Then I tell him I’m working on a new canvas. He asks where I paint and I say in the kitchen. I search for another topic. “I want to get married, Dad,” I say looking at my canvas—a female without eyes, a red open mouth, naked breasts nipples generous and rouged, a vertical crocodile in place of a skirt and a butterfly wing as a wedding veil. To the left side, an old-fashioned face, a cherub with an ancient knowing visage. “I want to marry Garth,” I say. And my own father says something about Cultural Differences. “What do you mean, cultural differences?” I say. “There were cultural differences with Abie. Garth was born here. What do you mean?” He repeats. “Cultural differences, that’s what.” And then he pulls out his sharp shooter and lays it on the table. “If that’s the action you take, I’ll have to rethink my will.” I stand quite still in this kitchen with its old gas stove and grey linoleum. My eyes dart through the diner-like opening in the wall with Garth and Talon head-butting on the other side. I’m the short-order cook. “Enemies in thy midst,” is all Garth says and walks away. I phone my father. “I can’t take your calls, anymore,” I say. “I can’t believe you told him. How could you misconstrue my words like that? That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant. How have we raised you?” “‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ Dad,” I say.
I’m an instigator.
“What’s he laughing at?” I say.
“Just a video. Have a look,” Garth says, his one seeing eye taking in my builder’s dark-grey-with-diagonal-black-lines spandex I wear to show off my quads and hams.
“Can’t,” I say, “Going to Strictly to train Barbara.” I coach three women at Strictly now—an Italian with straight jet black hair from World’s Gym who’s fed up with fitness-style instructors and wants to try hardcore, although hardcore core isn’t something you try like sampling a new dish, you move to the country, damn it, and you live like they live, eat what they eat; Alla, who bares her tanned midriff in a new outfit with that stylized “U” symbol on it every time she trains and worries because she doesn’t get off on her husband anymore although he’s a handsome Moroccan Jew and makes a pile of cash in his import/export business; and Gloria, a fashionably skinny, past or in her prime however you look at it, ex-hippie who’s made her fortune in the body bag business and setting up high-class abortion clinics in the Caribbean for women from South American countries, who find themselves in the family way as my Bobi would say.
“Just one look, it’ll take one second,” Garth says while Talon echoes and I can’t refuse, we’re still in our beginnings.
“So? I don’t see anything . . . What the hell is that!” I say as I stare at a puckered-up out of focus hole. Talon and Garth are out of control laughing and slapping their thighs.
“Wait,” Garth manages.
I shift from one foot to another, and then the focus becomes sharper and what I’m watching as Talon absolutely loses it and Garth does too, alongside, and he never loses it, is the rear of a woman bending over and her ass hole all puckered up and opening wider and wider until it’s the size of a melon, not a piddle of a melon, but a ripe, full-size grown one.
“Disgusting,” Talon’s yelling and skipping around.
“You two are crazy out of your minds,” I say. “And you . . .” I shake my head at Garth, but I’m grinning.
“No way is he going to be like his mom now,” Garth says.
“Garth! In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”
“But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”
“I know the route, Janice.”
“Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”
“You won’t have much to pack this time.”
So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?
In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards of variable denominations in variety stores and supermarkets—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals just love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet. It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I, a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK—at the Expo 67 fairgrounds Abie pulled me over to the Spider. “I hate rides.” I said. “C’mon. You’ll like it, you’ll see. C’mon. Trust me.” “I hate it. I hate.” I yelled from the moment we started spinning. Abie’s airplane glasses flew off. “Hold onto the bar. It’s out of control!” he screamed, pressing me into the seat with his left arm. Looking back, deals had their seasons as predictable as the Ferris Wheel, but it living through them was like riding on the Spider, sure enough.
And now Garth is working on a deal. He says it’s not a bank trading program like the one Abie was involved in, the one he lost two point five million in although he insists it was bad luck, the money being placed into an American account whose holder keeled and slam-bam kicked the bucket one spring day, the wife and step-son moving in and staking their claim. Garth says his deal is different—it’s a fund he explains, investors go in, the fund grows, and after a specified time, investors get their outlay back plus a pre-set portion of the interest. Simple and legit. Garth puts an ad in the Globe and Mail. Some guy from Sudbury has one hundred thousand, a widow from Toronto has only fifty and will that be sufficient she asks. Garth gets faxes. Contracts have to be rewritten; the wording in one clause is not acceptable to the British lawyer. The British lawyer is satisfied but the American attorney is not. “Garth,” I say my voice like sugar and sex, “are you sure this is not a bank trading scam? They’re cracking down you know. I don’t want to sound negative.” “Then don’t,” he says. “Why say ‘I don’t mean to’ and then go ahead?” I don’t know the lingo, but I hear the calls and read the contracts. And then I hear about delays, new signatures needed, clauses requiring alteration, and I know. I know the way I feel Garth’s cock slamming the back of my cunt when I lie under him, my legs cradling his neck, same as I lie on him and kiss his lips that are so miraculously smooth and soft and the way I know the span of his forehead. I just know. And I can’t tell him.
Garth doesn’t have a job. We didn’t talk much about how he was going to make money when we started fucking. I knew about his neighbor in Guelph who sold stocks and bonds and moved to Florida to start a hedge fund. And that he planned to make his million before he was thirty. It’s his destiny, he says. He figures if he works smart, he could get by working four hours a day at first leading up to maybe two hours one day a week; he says when he was a bouncer those nine to fivers would head on down to their local bars every weekend and blow their paycheck. Dirt bags wear shirts with white and blue collars, at the bar you can’t tell them apart. “Reminds me of Clearwater—you know that old quarry for nudists on the way to Freelton. Steel workers and university professors, you can’t tell one cock from the other.” I know I’m losing him, Garth being one of those linear types. I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations—I think like a drunken choreographer, which she appreciates. Maybe my style is impacted by my backlog of filed thoughts. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition. So I quickly slide in with “the thing is Garth, sometimes you have to work for what you want” even though I know the door on his face is going to slam shut and I’ll be left huddling in the cold without him.
Garth says people are afraid of being alone. He says you come into this world alone and you die the same way, so you better get used to it. “But you get angry when I visit Caroline every day.” I say. He says he didn’t visit Talon as much as I visit Caroline, even when he was a baby. “She’s sick,” I say. “And if you could have seen Talon every day, wouldn’t you have? And if I could have Caroline here—why isn’t she here? Tell me why she isn’t here with me!” On Nina Street Garth would talk me upright and back into the ring whenever grief delivered a packed ab punch. Now he just watches from the sidelines.
The old widow and the Sudbury man are threatening to sue. Garth isn’t afraid. He says he’ll get off with paying seventy-five dollars a month; he just has to show the courts he’s on a repayment schedule. His forehead remains as smooth as ever. If someone wants to gamble one-hundred thousand that’s not his business. He feels sorry for the old widow. I can’t remember how Garth got to keep one hundred thousand. I’m like the old man in Moonstruck in the closing kitchen scene when Cher and Nicholas Cage are sitting around the breakfast table and Cher’s fiancé returns from visiting his Mama in Italy: “I’m so confused,” the old man says.
So Garth hops on a plane to Orlando and hands this American scammer named Jim Steel one hundred K cash. “What? You did what!” I said when Garth phoned. “Well, he had a suitcase with a live one hundred thousand.” “It was fake, Garth. Who carries around that kind of money and shows it to a stranger? The man’s a southern cracker for fuck’s sake. What’s he doing showing this huge black man cash?” Turns out Garth spoke maybe five or six times to an agent named Jack Tabac, and Jack passed on information about an owner of a thriving import-export company who was wanting to retire. For one hundred K, Jim would teach him the ropes and then move into the background, leaving Garth to manage the day to day. Of course Mr. Steel skipped town. Garth left messages about personally hunting him down and calling out the FBI hounds, which Jim picked up, subsequently setting up a meeting with Garth in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side where, coming face to face with Garth’s hulking angry frame, he thrust out eight of the one hundred thousand and promptly disappeared. I never said “what were you thinking?” to Garth who had gotten such a laugh about Abie forking over that two point five million and his dog loyalty to shady deals. And now here is Garth pointing his finger at fat people, gullible investors, and charlatans.
I’m in the kitchen cooking on a gas stove. There’s something sexy about gas stoves, something gesmucked. More than delicious, gesmucked has to do with smells that get the mouth watering, the eagerness of piercing food and holding it in place, the arc of fork to mouth, the satisfying roll of food in the mouth, and discovery of flavors. It has to do with texture. I’m thinking about geshmuked which I learned from Abie and how it’s one of those fulfilling all-purpose words and how it’s a zen word sweeping you into the moment, when I hear a syncopated long-distance ring. My father asks me about the girls. I tell him I miss Caroline. He asks about Lisa. I tell him she’s living in the east part of Toronto, she has roommates, she’s working in a call centre and she answers the phone in English and French. She’s had another poem published. Then I tell him I’m working on a new canvas. He asks where I paint and I say in the kitchen. I search for another topic. “I want to get married, Dad,” I say looking at my canvas—a female without eyes, a red open mouth, naked breasts nipples generous and rouged, a vertical crocodile in place of a skirt and a butterfly wing as a wedding veil. To the left side, an old-fashioned face, a cherub with an ancient knowing visage. “I want to marry Garth,” I say. And my own father says something about Cultural Differences. “What do you mean, cultural differences?” I say. “There were cultural differences with Abie. Garth was born here. What do you mean?” He repeats. “Cultural differences, that’s what.” And then he pulls out his sharp shooter and lays it on the table. “If that’s the action you take, I’ll have to rethink my will.” I stand quite still in this kitchen with its old gas stove and grey linoleum. My eyes dart through the diner-like opening in the wall with Garth and Talon head-butting on the other side. I’m the short-order cook. “Enemies in thy midst,” is all Garth says and walks away. I phone my father. “I can’t take your calls, anymore,” I say. “I can’t believe you told him. How could you misconstrue my words like that? That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant. How have we raised you?” “‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ Dad,” I say.
I’m an instigator.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Ferris Wheel Fuck (Up) - edit one, erotic non-fiction
There are those restless sleeps when you search out a groove to slide into and you settle into one, but that’s not it, so you rummage around for another—we’re moving again. This time to Overbrooke just three blocks from Strictly Fitness. We looked at so many places, Garth and I.
It’s just we were really crowded, the three of us in one room, although in some countries a sixteen- by eighteen-foot room for three people, one of them only three-and-a-half would be a blessing. And even though Garth isn’t the noisiest lover, it’s kind of tough to fuck with a kid in the room. Garth’s lips are soft and deep and I know his heart is in his kisses, but he’s so quiet you wouldn’t even know he’s in the room. I listen for his hands on my skin. My hair feels like it’s held in the tightest tony tail when he gathers it up in his fist. He shudders when he comes. One place we checked out was smack over a pizza joint, but it was stark white gleaming with brand-new appliances and a Laundromat just downstairs. “Why don’t you drop by now, dear?” the agent said. “You sound just like the type of couple we’re looking for.” The agent was tanned rich sepia brown any artist would admire, her lips, finger and toe-nails jumping out ruby red.
“It was just taken,” she said, opening the door just a crack.
“But five minutes ago, we were just around the corner, actually, and you said—”
“Sorry, but someone came by with a deposit.”
“In five minutes, someone came by in five minutes?”
Garth: “Janice, Janice it’s OK.”
“No, no it’s not. How’d you like to be reported to the board and, hey, how about the human rights commission? I happen to know a contributor to Toronto Life—she’d pounce on this. Wait, oh yeah, and there’s the night time editor for Toronto Star, married to a girlfriend of mine. I think you chose to mess around with the wrong people this time. You’re Jewish, right? That’s what gets me.”
“How do you know I’m Jewish?”
“Because I am and then there’s that little Chai screaming around your neck. You should be ashamed, you know, didn’t Hitler teach you anything?”
“Did you see how she looked at us,” I said. “How would you describe it that look?”
“It’s that oh-I didn’t-know-you-weren’t-white look.”
“Which is, what is it? Really. Tell me.”
“You ask too many questions, you know that? It’s when the face takes on a confused look. And then it goes back to normal, whatever normal was for that person.”
“But what do you mean by confused? What happens to the features? You answer in such generalities.”
“I answer.”
“So tell me then.”
“It’s generally a sharp breath, a look of surprise, a few quick blinks, and then a quick regaining of composure. It’s very quick.”
“That’s what I want. That’s it. Thank you.
“You’re welcome.”
“I love you, you know that?” I rub his hair. I love the feel of his hair, it’s not just that it’s
soft; it’s that you can get your fingers into and roll around in it, his hair has this sweetness like a whispered kiss. I love him, even when I know it doesn’t make sense.
The Overbrooke flat is on the third floor. The old man and his wife live on the second floor. They own the whole place which was also home to Danny their middle son who is as fat as Garth; it just doesn’t suit him. Fat curdles on white skin. Garth loves hardcore descriptions while I grew up in a staunch politically correct household where I was summoned for even minor transgressions. At the close of one of my parents’ garlic-bread Communist parties, I was not yet twelve—I know this because Zadi was still alive and it’s not that in my fishbowl memory I can see him at the party that night; I just don’t have a physical sense of his being absent—I surveyed my father’s second cousin Harry Mayerovitch as he stood in the foyer under the hanging gold lantern, my father being proud of finishing touches. “Your resemblance to my father is uncanny,” I said. “Except you’re shorter.” “How could you say that?” my father said after the guests had gone and I was in the kitchen, sipping my bedtime milk like fine wine with the party staff environs in their black and white uniforms clearing and sorting. I did a thorough memory search. Which can take a while. Here I am at forty-eight and still I haven’t learned how to organize life and mind. Instead I go around moving furniture, sorting contents of rooms, cupboards, drawers. I’m the opposite of a squirrel, I guess. Still, I couldn’t find what I’d said until my father located it. Harry was short. I’d said that. And now I’m merrily flaunting the “f” word and sometimes I go all out and feature “ugly.” Not often and never with the fond gusto reserved for a hearty “Fuck!” There’s something cleansing about that word. People scatter off for a toxic cleansing, that up-your-colon power clean, when all they really need is an emphatic apple-a-day “Fuck!” Too many times and it’s like an enema—you feel empty afterward.
I would like to share all these thoughts with Garth or anyone for that matter. But I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations which are like flipping through a book, reading the last page first, then the opening paragraph, a bit in the middle and back—I think like a drunken choreographer—but Sabina’s never home, working for the TTC as she does and doling out her spare time to friends with their palms up like any old street beggar: any time, any time? Maybe my writing style is fueled by my backed-up words. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition.
Garth says there’s a carbon monoxide leak in the building and we should inform the basement tenant next to the boiler room. “I thought you don’t care about people—if you had your way, anyone crossing your path would drop like a mosquito blasted with Raid.” “I don’t care. They have a right to know. Simple as that. I’m not as complex as you think.” “So then— it’s your biblical sense of justice,” I say. Garth is convinced he should go into politics, and I tell him his mask would never hold up. Could he imagine himself shaking hands with all those detestable people and cooing at babies? “You may have a point there,” he says, although he has a thing for kids and babies. And they take to him. Babies smile back and kids attach themselves to his huge calves. At his discount dollar store, the old man called Garth a prince among men, which is understandable given Garth’s size and color.
Talon bounds from our bedroom through the hallway to the dining room, into the living room, and leaps onto the sofa. The old man below thumps on the ceiling. We buy Jamaican bread at the supermarket on Wilmington. Garth checks plantains and lets them ripen until they’re black. Then he fries them. “How can you eat this way?” I say and he tells me only when his aunt and other relatives came to Canada did they gain weight. It’s not the oil, he says, but all the enriched foods and the preservatives. Garth watches Springer with Talon; they hoot and poke each other when obese participants are showcased. I never knew who Springer was before I met Garth. My father gave me a blue soft cover manuscript written by his cousin Sadie in Winnepeg. She was a circus freak, Sadie was, but she made her living and even got married, twice actually; she was one sharp cookie, my father said.
Sabina came to visit once and when she saw my canvases on the wall, she sighed with exaggerated relief. “At last, some color!” she said. “I get the walls,” I told her. “And you have a plant,” she said. Every day I pick up Talon from Dalemount. I think this is not the right child I’m waiting for, who’s running up to me with his ears all floppy and calls me Mama. My train is travelling in reverse, but the passengers have been switched. Or maybe I’m in reverse on a parallel track.
Today she says she’ll see me. She’s wearing a brown checkered flannel dress. She has the same one in olive green. The dress hangs on her. She has a canopy bed and a matching high bureau. Also a long dresser with eight drawers. Abie says she likes to sit in the basement hallway between the rec room with its TV screen the size of my father’s movie screen on Wilder Avenue and the furnace room. She sits surrounded by open books. My mind runs to Garth when I’m with her and back to her when I’m with Garth. I watched a race once, with Abie. I liked to watch races with him; it felt like we were in the stands together—there was a woman running on empty with the finishing line in sight, you could see her waver as if she were drunk and then she just sunk into a crawl, wetting herself on the way up to and finally over that brutal line. Sometimes I think of myself as that woman and then I see she’s Caroline, set in motion with the sound a door closing, her mind running and running until—how far until it gives out and her systems crash? Her dress hung on her like a cast-down frock.
“Garth! In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”
“But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”
“I know the route, Janice.”
“Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”
“You won’t have much to pack this time.”
So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?
In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards like Bell long-distance cards—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet. It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I ,a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK; we’re on the deal Ferris wheel again.
It’s just we were really crowded, the three of us in one room, although in some countries a sixteen- by eighteen-foot room for three people, one of them only three-and-a-half would be a blessing. And even though Garth isn’t the noisiest lover, it’s kind of tough to fuck with a kid in the room. Garth’s lips are soft and deep and I know his heart is in his kisses, but he’s so quiet you wouldn’t even know he’s in the room. I listen for his hands on my skin. My hair feels like it’s held in the tightest tony tail when he gathers it up in his fist. He shudders when he comes. One place we checked out was smack over a pizza joint, but it was stark white gleaming with brand-new appliances and a Laundromat just downstairs. “Why don’t you drop by now, dear?” the agent said. “You sound just like the type of couple we’re looking for.” The agent was tanned rich sepia brown any artist would admire, her lips, finger and toe-nails jumping out ruby red.
“It was just taken,” she said, opening the door just a crack.
“But five minutes ago, we were just around the corner, actually, and you said—”
“Sorry, but someone came by with a deposit.”
“In five minutes, someone came by in five minutes?”
Garth: “Janice, Janice it’s OK.”
“No, no it’s not. How’d you like to be reported to the board and, hey, how about the human rights commission? I happen to know a contributor to Toronto Life—she’d pounce on this. Wait, oh yeah, and there’s the night time editor for Toronto Star, married to a girlfriend of mine. I think you chose to mess around with the wrong people this time. You’re Jewish, right? That’s what gets me.”
“How do you know I’m Jewish?”
“Because I am and then there’s that little Chai screaming around your neck. You should be ashamed, you know, didn’t Hitler teach you anything?”
“Did you see how she looked at us,” I said. “How would you describe it that look?”
“It’s that oh-I didn’t-know-you-weren’t-white look.”
“Which is, what is it? Really. Tell me.”
“You ask too many questions, you know that? It’s when the face takes on a confused look. And then it goes back to normal, whatever normal was for that person.”
“But what do you mean by confused? What happens to the features? You answer in such generalities.”
“I answer.”
“So tell me then.”
“It’s generally a sharp breath, a look of surprise, a few quick blinks, and then a quick regaining of composure. It’s very quick.”
“That’s what I want. That’s it. Thank you.
“You’re welcome.”
“I love you, you know that?” I rub his hair. I love the feel of his hair, it’s not just that it’s
soft; it’s that you can get your fingers into and roll around in it, his hair has this sweetness like a whispered kiss. I love him, even when I know it doesn’t make sense.
The Overbrooke flat is on the third floor. The old man and his wife live on the second floor. They own the whole place which was also home to Danny their middle son who is as fat as Garth; it just doesn’t suit him. Fat curdles on white skin. Garth loves hardcore descriptions while I grew up in a staunch politically correct household where I was summoned for even minor transgressions. At the close of one of my parents’ garlic-bread Communist parties, I was not yet twelve—I know this because Zadi was still alive and it’s not that in my fishbowl memory I can see him at the party that night; I just don’t have a physical sense of his being absent—I surveyed my father’s second cousin Harry Mayerovitch as he stood in the foyer under the hanging gold lantern, my father being proud of finishing touches. “Your resemblance to my father is uncanny,” I said. “Except you’re shorter.” “How could you say that?” my father said after the guests had gone and I was in the kitchen, sipping my bedtime milk like fine wine with the party staff environs in their black and white uniforms clearing and sorting. I did a thorough memory search. Which can take a while. Here I am at forty-eight and still I haven’t learned how to organize life and mind. Instead I go around moving furniture, sorting contents of rooms, cupboards, drawers. I’m the opposite of a squirrel, I guess. Still, I couldn’t find what I’d said until my father located it. Harry was short. I’d said that. And now I’m merrily flaunting the “f” word and sometimes I go all out and feature “ugly.” Not often and never with the fond gusto reserved for a hearty “Fuck!” There’s something cleansing about that word. People scatter off for a toxic cleansing, that up-your-colon power clean, when all they really need is an emphatic apple-a-day “Fuck!” Too many times and it’s like an enema—you feel empty afterward.
I would like to share all these thoughts with Garth or anyone for that matter. But I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations which are like flipping through a book, reading the last page first, then the opening paragraph, a bit in the middle and back—I think like a drunken choreographer—but Sabina’s never home, working for the TTC as she does and doling out her spare time to friends with their palms up like any old street beggar: any time, any time? Maybe my writing style is fueled by my backed-up words. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition.
Garth says there’s a carbon monoxide leak in the building and we should inform the basement tenant next to the boiler room. “I thought you don’t care about people—if you had your way, anyone crossing your path would drop like a mosquito blasted with Raid.” “I don’t care. They have a right to know. Simple as that. I’m not as complex as you think.” “So then— it’s your biblical sense of justice,” I say. Garth is convinced he should go into politics, and I tell him his mask would never hold up. Could he imagine himself shaking hands with all those detestable people and cooing at babies? “You may have a point there,” he says, although he has a thing for kids and babies. And they take to him. Babies smile back and kids attach themselves to his huge calves. At his discount dollar store, the old man called Garth a prince among men, which is understandable given Garth’s size and color.
Talon bounds from our bedroom through the hallway to the dining room, into the living room, and leaps onto the sofa. The old man below thumps on the ceiling. We buy Jamaican bread at the supermarket on Wilmington. Garth checks plantains and lets them ripen until they’re black. Then he fries them. “How can you eat this way?” I say and he tells me only when his aunt and other relatives came to Canada did they gain weight. It’s not the oil, he says, but all the enriched foods and the preservatives. Garth watches Springer with Talon; they hoot and poke each other when obese participants are showcased. I never knew who Springer was before I met Garth. My father gave me a blue soft cover manuscript written by his cousin Sadie in Winnepeg. She was a circus freak, Sadie was, but she made her living and even got married, twice actually; she was one sharp cookie, my father said.
Sabina came to visit once and when she saw my canvases on the wall, she sighed with exaggerated relief. “At last, some color!” she said. “I get the walls,” I told her. “And you have a plant,” she said. Every day I pick up Talon from Dalemount. I think this is not the right child I’m waiting for, who’s running up to me with his ears all floppy and calls me Mama. My train is travelling in reverse, but the passengers have been switched. Or maybe I’m in reverse on a parallel track.
Today she says she’ll see me. She’s wearing a brown checkered flannel dress. She has the same one in olive green. The dress hangs on her. She has a canopy bed and a matching high bureau. Also a long dresser with eight drawers. Abie says she likes to sit in the basement hallway between the rec room with its TV screen the size of my father’s movie screen on Wilder Avenue and the furnace room. She sits surrounded by open books. My mind runs to Garth when I’m with her and back to her when I’m with Garth. I watched a race once, with Abie. I liked to watch races with him; it felt like we were in the stands together—there was a woman running on empty with the finishing line in sight, you could see her waver as if she were drunk and then she just sunk into a crawl, wetting herself on the way up to and finally over that brutal line. Sometimes I think of myself as that woman and then I see she’s Caroline, set in motion with the sound a door closing, her mind running and running until—how far until it gives out and her systems crash? Her dress hung on her like a cast-down frock.
“Garth! In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”
“But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”
“I know the route, Janice.”
“Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”
“You won’t have much to pack this time.”
So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?
In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards like Bell long-distance cards—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet. It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I ,a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK; we’re on the deal Ferris wheel again.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
How Long Have You Been Evil? (erotic memoir)
Fall 1996
The deal is I work from nine to twelve and then I drive Talon to junior kindergarten on Dalemount near his mother’s apartment where she lives with her girlfriend Diane. Actually Diane has lived in the basement of this triplex for nine years; she has a steady job doing the books for a Jewish furrier on Spadina. But then Nelly got evicted from her coop in the east end, which was the place where Garth first fucked me—I had to get on all fours after he tried every other way and I didn’t really enjoy it all, bashing down the front door of my uterus as he was. Garth got a kick out of keeping me up to date on Nelly’s eviction proceedings. I’d listen for a bit feeling antsy like when your bladders bursting and you’re doing your Kegals like a deep sea diver going for a world’s record. Garth says there’s nothing he can’t talk about. Even death intrigues him. “What can you talk about,” he says to me at these times.
Still, evictions aside, which I never thought I’d be writing—that old what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger and that bit about making lemonade—I met Sabina at Kelly’s Gym near the Austin Terrace house, and she’s been with me longer than anyone else except Abie who really doesn’t count since it wasn’t by choice, not really, my reasons being circumstantial. There are so many Kelly’s gym stories—a TTC driver from Iran who got off on muscled females took a liking to me. But that’s a whole other story, except he gave me fifteen hundred dollars so I and the girls could eat and Abie could pay some bills. And still he requested more. “What are you? Some fucking pimp? Don’t you have any pride?” I yelled. Of course he didn’t know anything about Iqbal or our post training ritual of frozen yogurt at Dutch Dreams or how he’d take me to his flat on Vaughn Road and whip my thighs and ass. I have a high pain threshold, I guess I always did although my being a power-lifting body builder sure set the meter higher. “Kiss Mister Whip,” he’d say among other stupid lines. “No,” I’d say, “No way.” “No way? No way?” he’d answer. I had bruises shaped like zoo animals on my thighs and ass. Once I stood in front of pink changing room lockers and showed a Kelly’s woman my thighs. “Wow,” she said. After the Austin Terrace eviction when we were settled into the Deloraine house, I left Sabina a message: “By the way, I never told you Iqbal was impotent.”
Anyhow, Nelly with her new youth worker certificate and job in a group home for lesbian adolescents told Talon she was going to send him away to a foster home if his father didn’t take him for one full week every other week. She says she needs more time to work on her relationship with Diane whom she punched out last week; actually, she punched Diane and Diane punched her clear out, which Garth said served her right, except that Talon was sitting quietly on his cot, watching and crying. Last night Talon asked Garth “What’s foster mean?” and Garth who doesn’t believe in shielding his son from life and its sordid truths laid it bare as a tree in winter in three sentences while they were playing Duke Nuke ‘Em. I drive Talon to Dalemount which is around Bathurst and Lawrence and then I go east on Lawrence to Yonge to visit Caroline. Sometimes she refuses to see me and I breathe really shallow on my way back to the basement apartment because otherwise my heart might crack like the skin of ice on puddles; when I was a kid walking home from school in Montreal I used to watch the water seeping out as the cracks spread like spiders beneath my feet.
Questions spring out at me; I’m in my royal blue bathing suit in the shower with Talon who is also wearing a bathing suit; I’m sitting on our unmade queen-size bed eating Garth’s six alarm chili and I’m gulping down water while Garth and Talon are laughing away; Garth tries to airplane me at the park behind Seven Eleven but I fall to the ground and hold onto his ankle, then his shorts, “I’m going to pull down your shorts,” I say and he gives up because he’s not wearing anything underneath, I don’t know why. How come Talon is here with me and my girls are not?
I can’t figure it out. Maybe I’m evil. We had this impromptu skit, the girls and I: “How long have you been evil?” one and then the other would ask. “All my life,” I’d say and we’d burst into giggles. We did that from the time they were little on Bluffwood Drive. And then there was another one: “Women of the world take over/ cause if you don’t the world will come to an end/ men have had their chance.” I made that one up in the mouse house in Haliburton. I was listening to Ian and Sylvia singing “Women’s World” and I wanted to compose a song on the guitar my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday and which I still have. After everything it stays with me still. Caroline was four and a half; Josie, two and a bit when I brought them into the feminist fold. Almost two decades later, I kneel naked on an industrial grey carpet, being fucked from behind. "You love this, don't you?" he says. And I say, "Yes."
The deal is I work from nine to twelve and then I drive Talon to junior kindergarten on Dalemount near his mother’s apartment where she lives with her girlfriend Diane. Actually Diane has lived in the basement of this triplex for nine years; she has a steady job doing the books for a Jewish furrier on Spadina. But then Nelly got evicted from her coop in the east end, which was the place where Garth first fucked me—I had to get on all fours after he tried every other way and I didn’t really enjoy it all, bashing down the front door of my uterus as he was. Garth got a kick out of keeping me up to date on Nelly’s eviction proceedings. I’d listen for a bit feeling antsy like when your bladders bursting and you’re doing your Kegals like a deep sea diver going for a world’s record. Garth says there’s nothing he can’t talk about. Even death intrigues him. “What can you talk about,” he says to me at these times.
Still, evictions aside, which I never thought I’d be writing—that old what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger and that bit about making lemonade—I met Sabina at Kelly’s Gym near the Austin Terrace house, and she’s been with me longer than anyone else except Abie who really doesn’t count since it wasn’t by choice, not really, my reasons being circumstantial. There are so many Kelly’s gym stories—a TTC driver from Iran who got off on muscled females took a liking to me. But that’s a whole other story, except he gave me fifteen hundred dollars so I and the girls could eat and Abie could pay some bills. And still he requested more. “What are you? Some fucking pimp? Don’t you have any pride?” I yelled. Of course he didn’t know anything about Iqbal or our post training ritual of frozen yogurt at Dutch Dreams or how he’d take me to his flat on Vaughn Road and whip my thighs and ass. I have a high pain threshold, I guess I always did although my being a power-lifting body builder sure set the meter higher. “Kiss Mister Whip,” he’d say among other stupid lines. “No,” I’d say, “No way.” “No way? No way?” he’d answer. I had bruises shaped like zoo animals on my thighs and ass. Once I stood in front of pink changing room lockers and showed a Kelly’s woman my thighs. “Wow,” she said. After the Austin Terrace eviction when we were settled into the Deloraine house, I left Sabina a message: “By the way, I never told you Iqbal was impotent.”
Anyhow, Nelly with her new youth worker certificate and job in a group home for lesbian adolescents told Talon she was going to send him away to a foster home if his father didn’t take him for one full week every other week. She says she needs more time to work on her relationship with Diane whom she punched out last week; actually, she punched Diane and Diane punched her clear out, which Garth said served her right, except that Talon was sitting quietly on his cot, watching and crying. Last night Talon asked Garth “What’s foster mean?” and Garth who doesn’t believe in shielding his son from life and its sordid truths laid it bare as a tree in winter in three sentences while they were playing Duke Nuke ‘Em. I drive Talon to Dalemount which is around Bathurst and Lawrence and then I go east on Lawrence to Yonge to visit Caroline. Sometimes she refuses to see me and I breathe really shallow on my way back to the basement apartment because otherwise my heart might crack like the skin of ice on puddles; when I was a kid walking home from school in Montreal I used to watch the water seeping out as the cracks spread like spiders beneath my feet.
Questions spring out at me; I’m in my royal blue bathing suit in the shower with Talon who is also wearing a bathing suit; I’m sitting on our unmade queen-size bed eating Garth’s six alarm chili and I’m gulping down water while Garth and Talon are laughing away; Garth tries to airplane me at the park behind Seven Eleven but I fall to the ground and hold onto his ankle, then his shorts, “I’m going to pull down your shorts,” I say and he gives up because he’s not wearing anything underneath, I don’t know why. How come Talon is here with me and my girls are not?
I can’t figure it out. Maybe I’m evil. We had this impromptu skit, the girls and I: “How long have you been evil?” one and then the other would ask. “All my life,” I’d say and we’d burst into giggles. We did that from the time they were little on Bluffwood Drive. And then there was another one: “Women of the world take over/ cause if you don’t the world will come to an end/ men have had their chance.” I made that one up in the mouse house in Haliburton. I was listening to Ian and Sylvia singing “Women’s World” and I wanted to compose a song on the guitar my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday and which I still have. After everything it stays with me still. Caroline was four and a half; Josie, two and a bit when I brought them into the feminist fold. Almost two decades later, I kneel naked on an industrial grey carpet, being fucked from behind. "You love this, don't you?" he says. And I say, "Yes."
Friday, August 21, 2009
A Love Poem (erotic poetry)
Note - this is a love poem I wrote possibly six years ago (which seems like a lifetime) from a collection I am forever editing.
She remembers his hands traversing
(her skin) a colossal wave crossing continents and how
he stood beside her silent startling
all in black. Naked before his eyes, she is
a quivering leaf lacking strength, folding
in at the knees, cunt turning
over starting and restarting, a throat,
the nape of a tender neck, a mind where
images collide, a seeking tongue
without words, legs apart, tensed,
veins like waterfalls on a raring
downward course, caught
in the net of his glance, her eyes
the wanderings of his soul.
A soul searches for a lifetime, gliding
over land, sinking into oceans silently soaring,
slow dancing over to rest
gently on a disarming prick, and if
he whispers in his low voice, she will
come in the rumblings of his timbre—
when a man enters a woman, his cock
leaves a mark, a memory a measure, sits
country swinging inside, rocking
her to the heavens and back that
she might sing the only song of oh and
honey sweetie and yours. But when
a man’s heart finds its point in his prick,
dislodging barriers, in that moment
life is what it is meant to be, has substance,
power, lacks certainty, and appearing frail
trembles—the leaf sways and dips, landing
lingers with curved edges under
the midday sun’s perennial burrowing,
heat streaming always summer, yet ever
a shady spot, a wraparound porch with
one of those gliding chair swings. A cunt
is a place to stay in, find repose, gather
music, and this morning, with clothes
sliding over, she is naked for him.
She remembers his hands traversing
(her skin) a colossal wave crossing continents and how
he stood beside her silent startling
all in black. Naked before his eyes, she is
a quivering leaf lacking strength, folding
in at the knees, cunt turning
over starting and restarting, a throat,
the nape of a tender neck, a mind where
images collide, a seeking tongue
without words, legs apart, tensed,
veins like waterfalls on a raring
downward course, caught
in the net of his glance, her eyes
the wanderings of his soul.
A soul searches for a lifetime, gliding
over land, sinking into oceans silently soaring,
slow dancing over to rest
gently on a disarming prick, and if
he whispers in his low voice, she will
come in the rumblings of his timbre—
when a man enters a woman, his cock
leaves a mark, a memory a measure, sits
country swinging inside, rocking
her to the heavens and back that
she might sing the only song of oh and
honey sweetie and yours. But when
a man’s heart finds its point in his prick,
dislodging barriers, in that moment
life is what it is meant to be, has substance,
power, lacks certainty, and appearing frail
trembles—the leaf sways and dips, landing
lingers with curved edges under
the midday sun’s perennial burrowing,
heat streaming always summer, yet ever
a shady spot, a wraparound porch with
one of those gliding chair swings. A cunt
is a place to stay in, find repose, gather
music, and this morning, with clothes
sliding over, she is naked for him.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
The Tattoo (first edit, comments welcome)
“I’m surrounded by white bigots. How can you trust them?” I say to Garth.
“I have something to tell you,” Garth says.
I look up at him and wait. I have a feeling he’s going to tell me something, a new perspective maybe or his take on racial relations. “You’re white.”
“Am not!” I say, laughing. “Wait.” I call out to a builder chick at the other end of Strictly’s parking lot. “He says I’m white! What you think?”
“You? Na!” she shouts back.
“See? Maybe you better have your one seeing eye checked.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says and I put my arm around his waist. My hand goes as far as his back pocket which I look my thumb in. I tell him about Abie saying “so you hooked a jungle monkey at the gym” and to make sure Garth uses protection. “He says if I get AIDS he’s never going to let me see the girls again. And he says he’s not a racist, it’s a cultural thing.”
“Your husband is an asshole,” he says in a smooth voice.
“He’s not my husband, well, he is, but not in here,” I say touching my heart, “besides he’s lived in Europe for five years. How can a man live in all of Europe? What does he do, drive from country to country, town to town? Yeah, you know that’s what he does, he stays until he gets kicked out.”
Garth says maybe Abie’s like one of those guys who’s tired of being rich and decides to give poverty of try. But I’m stuck on Abie’s AID’s threat. When I turned forty, I got hooked on the idea of getting a tattoo. I’d prance around Gold’s checking out tattoos on forearms, biceps, triceps’ heads—triceps are that big, taking up more space on an arm than biceps, those peaks of speckled grey rock submerged in a country lake. The slippery formation sloping all the way down to lake’s bottom is the tricep. I’d strut right up, each time using the same phrases rehearsed with random stops and starts for the sake of spontaneity and freshness. The guys liked talking about themselves and they were really soft-spoken. Of course you had to know never to interrupt a set or a superset or when a builder was psyching himself up or just after a set when he was either proud or pissed off. But when he was just sitting it out, waiting two or three minutes between heavy sets, not into the third minute of course, and you slid a comment into the second minute just quick and easy-going, like “Hey man, cool tattoo. Where’d you get it?” And he’d say, “Oh you mean this?” and then you’d get a feel whether you could lift some info or not.
Mostly I looked in the yellow pages or drove around the east end. I’d make appointments in the filthiest dives and never show up. Until I saw a place on the Danforth that had “Artistic Tattoos” burnt into a wooden plaque above a weathered black door. Beyond the door, a room lay breathlessly waiting, a replica of my parents’ den or of any good Jewish communist’s living room with its Scandinavian modern arm chairs and teak coffee table. Even the standing lamp fit in. Against the longer west wall, a book shelf, also teak with height-adjustable shelves, boasted such prizes as Bresson’s black and white photography and a pink soft-cover copy of Toffler’s “Future Shock” that Abie had only skimmed through but kept on his night table for show, and I never read although I’d heard an in-depth review on Peter Gzowski’s morning show. The book of Van Gogh’s prints and pot lights clinched the deal.
Four months later I was training at Golds in Ajax with Bill the young kid who used to work behind the desk at Fitness Connection on Esna Park Drive. Seventeen gyms and eight coaches—their sequence constantly shifting, I keep better track of the men I’ve fucked, not that they were more important. At Fitness Connection on Don Mills, I’d hold a straight bar on my shoulders as I did two circuits of walking squats on the green rubber running track surrounding the weight machines. One early afternoon, possibly spring or fall and certainly not summer or winter, because the gym wasn’t hot like Ron’s Gym where you thought you’d pass out in the summer and froze until your workout warmed you up in winter, a round-faced man rested between leg press sets while three women in halter tops and matching spandex tights and a man in a shiny turquoise gym suit looked on.
“He sure as fuck looks pleased with himself and only four plates a side,” I said.
“That’s because he’s Ben Johnston.”
“I’m going over.”
“You can’t just go over to Ben Johnston.”
“Watch me,” I said as I walking lunged my way along the track until I was directly behind the leg press.
“Hey man, how many sets you got left?” I said.
“Three or four, won’t be long,” the guy in the shiny suit said.
Bill’s hand’s was going wild with his palm facing me and his fingers motioning me over, curling in and out like he had a bad case of the shakes.
“You crazy, you know that? That’s Charlie Francis.”
“Look if I could invite the Hell’s Angels over for supper, I could tell Ben Johnston to get off the leg press.”
“You’ll tell me about the Hell’s Angels another time.”
“It’s all going in my book, you and your peroxide hair and Ben Johnston with his juiced-up pie-face, it’s all going in.”
Also the tattoo of a scorpion Bill got on his right ass-cheek. How we walked along the Danforth, fresh snow thick as sponge cake on the sidewalk. We were an Ed Sullivan scene, the one where James Brown falls to the floor and Ed walks to centre stage, lifts him up, then picks up the gold cape and places it around James’s shoulders—of course I was James without the cape and Ed was Bill although I never had the hots for Ed like I had for Bill.
A dentist’s sort of chair, no, a doctor’s or massage table, cracked leather, covered in white tissue paper. I kept my clothes on. What did the tattoo man look like? Must have been like most of those guys because I can’t picture him, but then neither do I have an image of the Hell’s Angel I invited to supper at the commune the summer I met Abie.
“I’d like something creative,” I told the tattoo man. “Something with a whip and cufflinks, I mean handcuffs, yeah, that’s it, but not too obvious, you know. And I want it here,” I said, lifting my hair and touching a spot below my neck and just above the first bump of my spine. “I have to hide it from my husband.”
“You wear your hair down?”
“Always, even when I train.”
“Might be painful, above the spine,” the tattoo man said.
“I’m a builder,” I said.
The tattoo is a flower, no color, just ink, with a whip winding through the stem and a pair of handcuffs like two kiss-curls at the bottom. I never thought much of it. But the process, man, oh the process.
Abie is the one who gets us going on excursions. In this scene, Abie, Josie, Caroline and I stand poised at the top of a forest trail with its overlay of sienna wood chips, and to complete the scene, two atmospheric details referring to the sweeping wind and brooding medieval sky. There’s a storm brewing. Like a stormy sea laying claim to a small boat docked recklessly on the sand, the north wind winds through my hair. My arms stretch out take-me-I’m yours to the elements. At this moment we stand linked and free.
And then Josie says, “What’s that on your neck, Mom?”
And I say, “Nothing sweetie, it’s nothing.” I take her hand.
The wind is not on my side.
“A tattoo! It’s a tattoo!”
“Nah, it’s a rub-on, like the ones we buy at Shopper’s.”
“Let’s see that.” Abie pours some water from his old camp water thermos on his fingers.
On the way home, I sit in the back between the girls. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Josie whispers.
“That’s OK, sweetie. It’s all OK.” I say, sighing and staring up, blinking then skimming round and round the shiny silver rim of the ceiling light.
“Girls,” I say. “How about you go to the park for a swing and a few times down the slide, so your dad and I can talk?”
Abie walks into the kitchen and sits with his back to the sliding balcony door and the forest behind. I sit across the table facing him and the tree tops beyond the balcony.
“Are you a fucking idiot?” he says, his voice low and sneering. “What the hell were you thinking!”
I’m thinking just for a moment, when I’m about to answer, that he might be a friend. So I tell him about the year before and watching the parade of tattoos. I don’t tell him about Bill and his scorpion. I feel like an interpreter—my life is a foreign language. So I modulate my tone, I polish it until it sparkles while I translate feelings into solid sentences.
He stands and leans across the table toward me. He smiles.
Then he slaps me across the face.
My body standing is one taut line. My head almost touches the ceiling. My throat, long like a Modigliani, its corridor contracting,too narrow to hold the room full of words trapped without air, jostling each other at its base. Single file, single file, I say, and with my will, I pull each word up and out in the open air. Even though they stand naked and shivering, I announce each one. “You . . . Have . . . Lost . . . Me.”
He walks around the table, his arms puffed out at this sides. “You are a joke,” he says and walks out the kitchen into the foyer, its parquet floor lying broken under the forest green wall-hanging from our first apartment, and up the brown wall-to-wall carpets with their clumps of white Pyrenees fur in the corners of each stair. He stands at the top of these stairs, poses with his left hand on the banister and delivers his closing edict.
“You will give me the name and address of the your HIV parlor. I will report them and have their joint raided. And you. You will get yourself tested tomorrow and two times after that at six month intervals. And, are you listening, Janice?”
If your dog is becoming fearful, her body language would include tension, stiffness, and hard eye contact. The eye contact has also been described as unnerving, a hard stare, etc. It is important to note that the dog's tail can be wagging in both possibilities. In the first, the tail may wag in a more frantic way, while in the second it may wag more slowly and/or deliberately. A wagging tail is not always an indication of friendly intent!
I wonder if I tap my foot, does that count?
“Yes,” I say.
Now he’s saying if I have AIDS, and the girls, he’s going to take the girls, because I’m crazy and oh yes he has the documents to prove it, signatures aren’t hard to get, he’ll take them away and have me locked up. He’ll have me locked up and he’ll take my girls. Away. If I have AIDS, he says.
I take care of the girls. I sing to them and make the streets talk the way I always do. I dash off silly jokes every morning and put them in their orange tiger lunch boxes. When I can’t think of any more jokes, I walk over to Shoppers and buy a Reader’s Digest book of Jokes, Laugh Harder, Live Longer with the Funniest Jokes Ever. I cry a lot. Walking on empty through the house, after I drop the girls off to school, at the Supermarket shopping for smooth skinned navel oranges, I break down, my knees give way, strange sounds that scare and thrill me—deep full-bodied howls, low rhythmic moans. After the second test, I say I'm not taking another. During all that time I let him fuck me. I thought shooting off in me would make him nicer. Also I noticed he never wore a safe.
“I have something to tell you,” Garth says.
I look up at him and wait. I have a feeling he’s going to tell me something, a new perspective maybe or his take on racial relations. “You’re white.”
“Am not!” I say, laughing. “Wait.” I call out to a builder chick at the other end of Strictly’s parking lot. “He says I’m white! What you think?”
“You? Na!” she shouts back.
“See? Maybe you better have your one seeing eye checked.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says and I put my arm around his waist. My hand goes as far as his back pocket which I look my thumb in. I tell him about Abie saying “so you hooked a jungle monkey at the gym” and to make sure Garth uses protection. “He says if I get AIDS he’s never going to let me see the girls again. And he says he’s not a racist, it’s a cultural thing.”
“Your husband is an asshole,” he says in a smooth voice.
“He’s not my husband, well, he is, but not in here,” I say touching my heart, “besides he’s lived in Europe for five years. How can a man live in all of Europe? What does he do, drive from country to country, town to town? Yeah, you know that’s what he does, he stays until he gets kicked out.”
Garth says maybe Abie’s like one of those guys who’s tired of being rich and decides to give poverty of try. But I’m stuck on Abie’s AID’s threat. When I turned forty, I got hooked on the idea of getting a tattoo. I’d prance around Gold’s checking out tattoos on forearms, biceps, triceps’ heads—triceps are that big, taking up more space on an arm than biceps, those peaks of speckled grey rock submerged in a country lake. The slippery formation sloping all the way down to lake’s bottom is the tricep. I’d strut right up, each time using the same phrases rehearsed with random stops and starts for the sake of spontaneity and freshness. The guys liked talking about themselves and they were really soft-spoken. Of course you had to know never to interrupt a set or a superset or when a builder was psyching himself up or just after a set when he was either proud or pissed off. But when he was just sitting it out, waiting two or three minutes between heavy sets, not into the third minute of course, and you slid a comment into the second minute just quick and easy-going, like “Hey man, cool tattoo. Where’d you get it?” And he’d say, “Oh you mean this?” and then you’d get a feel whether you could lift some info or not.
Mostly I looked in the yellow pages or drove around the east end. I’d make appointments in the filthiest dives and never show up. Until I saw a place on the Danforth that had “Artistic Tattoos” burnt into a wooden plaque above a weathered black door. Beyond the door, a room lay breathlessly waiting, a replica of my parents’ den or of any good Jewish communist’s living room with its Scandinavian modern arm chairs and teak coffee table. Even the standing lamp fit in. Against the longer west wall, a book shelf, also teak with height-adjustable shelves, boasted such prizes as Bresson’s black and white photography and a pink soft-cover copy of Toffler’s “Future Shock” that Abie had only skimmed through but kept on his night table for show, and I never read although I’d heard an in-depth review on Peter Gzowski’s morning show. The book of Van Gogh’s prints and pot lights clinched the deal.
Four months later I was training at Golds in Ajax with Bill the young kid who used to work behind the desk at Fitness Connection on Esna Park Drive. Seventeen gyms and eight coaches—their sequence constantly shifting, I keep better track of the men I’ve fucked, not that they were more important. At Fitness Connection on Don Mills, I’d hold a straight bar on my shoulders as I did two circuits of walking squats on the green rubber running track surrounding the weight machines. One early afternoon, possibly spring or fall and certainly not summer or winter, because the gym wasn’t hot like Ron’s Gym where you thought you’d pass out in the summer and froze until your workout warmed you up in winter, a round-faced man rested between leg press sets while three women in halter tops and matching spandex tights and a man in a shiny turquoise gym suit looked on.
“He sure as fuck looks pleased with himself and only four plates a side,” I said.
“That’s because he’s Ben Johnston.”
“I’m going over.”
“You can’t just go over to Ben Johnston.”
“Watch me,” I said as I walking lunged my way along the track until I was directly behind the leg press.
“Hey man, how many sets you got left?” I said.
“Three or four, won’t be long,” the guy in the shiny suit said.
Bill’s hand’s was going wild with his palm facing me and his fingers motioning me over, curling in and out like he had a bad case of the shakes.
“You crazy, you know that? That’s Charlie Francis.”
“Look if I could invite the Hell’s Angels over for supper, I could tell Ben Johnston to get off the leg press.”
“You’ll tell me about the Hell’s Angels another time.”
“It’s all going in my book, you and your peroxide hair and Ben Johnston with his juiced-up pie-face, it’s all going in.”
Also the tattoo of a scorpion Bill got on his right ass-cheek. How we walked along the Danforth, fresh snow thick as sponge cake on the sidewalk. We were an Ed Sullivan scene, the one where James Brown falls to the floor and Ed walks to centre stage, lifts him up, then picks up the gold cape and places it around James’s shoulders—of course I was James without the cape and Ed was Bill although I never had the hots for Ed like I had for Bill.
A dentist’s sort of chair, no, a doctor’s or massage table, cracked leather, covered in white tissue paper. I kept my clothes on. What did the tattoo man look like? Must have been like most of those guys because I can’t picture him, but then neither do I have an image of the Hell’s Angel I invited to supper at the commune the summer I met Abie.
“I’d like something creative,” I told the tattoo man. “Something with a whip and cufflinks, I mean handcuffs, yeah, that’s it, but not too obvious, you know. And I want it here,” I said, lifting my hair and touching a spot below my neck and just above the first bump of my spine. “I have to hide it from my husband.”
“You wear your hair down?”
“Always, even when I train.”
“Might be painful, above the spine,” the tattoo man said.
“I’m a builder,” I said.
The tattoo is a flower, no color, just ink, with a whip winding through the stem and a pair of handcuffs like two kiss-curls at the bottom. I never thought much of it. But the process, man, oh the process.
Abie is the one who gets us going on excursions. In this scene, Abie, Josie, Caroline and I stand poised at the top of a forest trail with its overlay of sienna wood chips, and to complete the scene, two atmospheric details referring to the sweeping wind and brooding medieval sky. There’s a storm brewing. Like a stormy sea laying claim to a small boat docked recklessly on the sand, the north wind winds through my hair. My arms stretch out take-me-I’m yours to the elements. At this moment we stand linked and free.
And then Josie says, “What’s that on your neck, Mom?”
And I say, “Nothing sweetie, it’s nothing.” I take her hand.
The wind is not on my side.
“A tattoo! It’s a tattoo!”
“Nah, it’s a rub-on, like the ones we buy at Shopper’s.”
“Let’s see that.” Abie pours some water from his old camp water thermos on his fingers.
On the way home, I sit in the back between the girls. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Josie whispers.
“That’s OK, sweetie. It’s all OK.” I say, sighing and staring up, blinking then skimming round and round the shiny silver rim of the ceiling light.
“Girls,” I say. “How about you go to the park for a swing and a few times down the slide, so your dad and I can talk?”
Abie walks into the kitchen and sits with his back to the sliding balcony door and the forest behind. I sit across the table facing him and the tree tops beyond the balcony.
“Are you a fucking idiot?” he says, his voice low and sneering. “What the hell were you thinking!”
I’m thinking just for a moment, when I’m about to answer, that he might be a friend. So I tell him about the year before and watching the parade of tattoos. I don’t tell him about Bill and his scorpion. I feel like an interpreter—my life is a foreign language. So I modulate my tone, I polish it until it sparkles while I translate feelings into solid sentences.
He stands and leans across the table toward me. He smiles.
Then he slaps me across the face.
My body standing is one taut line. My head almost touches the ceiling. My throat, long like a Modigliani, its corridor contracting,too narrow to hold the room full of words trapped without air, jostling each other at its base. Single file, single file, I say, and with my will, I pull each word up and out in the open air. Even though they stand naked and shivering, I announce each one. “You . . . Have . . . Lost . . . Me.”
He walks around the table, his arms puffed out at this sides. “You are a joke,” he says and walks out the kitchen into the foyer, its parquet floor lying broken under the forest green wall-hanging from our first apartment, and up the brown wall-to-wall carpets with their clumps of white Pyrenees fur in the corners of each stair. He stands at the top of these stairs, poses with his left hand on the banister and delivers his closing edict.
“You will give me the name and address of the your HIV parlor. I will report them and have their joint raided. And you. You will get yourself tested tomorrow and two times after that at six month intervals. And, are you listening, Janice?”
If your dog is becoming fearful, her body language would include tension, stiffness, and hard eye contact. The eye contact has also been described as unnerving, a hard stare, etc. It is important to note that the dog's tail can be wagging in both possibilities. In the first, the tail may wag in a more frantic way, while in the second it may wag more slowly and/or deliberately. A wagging tail is not always an indication of friendly intent!
I wonder if I tap my foot, does that count?
“Yes,” I say.
Now he’s saying if I have AIDS, and the girls, he’s going to take the girls, because I’m crazy and oh yes he has the documents to prove it, signatures aren’t hard to get, he’ll take them away and have me locked up. He’ll have me locked up and he’ll take my girls. Away. If I have AIDS, he says.
I take care of the girls. I sing to them and make the streets talk the way I always do. I dash off silly jokes every morning and put them in their orange tiger lunch boxes. When I can’t think of any more jokes, I walk over to Shoppers and buy a Reader’s Digest book of Jokes, Laugh Harder, Live Longer with the Funniest Jokes Ever. I cry a lot. Walking on empty through the house, after I drop the girls off to school, at the Supermarket shopping for smooth skinned navel oranges, I break down, my knees give way, strange sounds that scare and thrill me—deep full-bodied howls, low rhythmic moans. After the second test, I say I'm not taking another. During all that time I let him fuck me. I thought shooting off in me would make him nicer. Also I noticed he never wore a safe.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Atlas and I
Sitting at the edge of the double mattress that used to be my mother’s before she moved from the big house on Wilder Avenue, I take a deep breath through my diaphragm and breathe out to the count of five. I don’t know how people gather up enough breath to breathe out to ten. After doing this three times, I’m still not relaxed, but I go ahead anyhow, pressing each number Garth scribbled on a yellow sticky note at Strictly Fitness. A woman answers. “And who should I tell him called?” she says, her voice as slippery as aluminum slide on the hottest day in summer. “His training partner,” I say and tell her all about how I had wanted to compete by the time I was forty and here I am at forty-eight, how I’d noticed Garth training so focused doing his deads and clean and jerks, and I thought maybe with the right training partner . . . And she tells me when she looks at him, really looks, she can see beneath his extra weight, as if he’s stepping out of his clothes—he has such presence. “He talks like an overnight bag so jam-packed you can’t close the zipper. I’ll be in the bathroom and he’s standing outside the door, going on about death and capital punishment and serial killers and the morbidly obese. He just likes to talk. But not to anyone, you have to be special in his life, if you know what I mean. I have my wedding dress all ready, even though it’s eight months away—I put it in a clear garment bag so I can see it as soon as I open my closet door. That’s why Garth and I train in the afternoon. We’re going to lose twenty pounds each. We made a pact.”
Like Jonestown I think, but I tell her she’ll do it, that I can hear the love and determination in her voice. By the time I get off the phone, I’m hopping mad, but I’m hooked, plain and simple, which is why the following day I’m back for our morning workout, showing off my two-plates-a-side squats. Between sets, Garth tries to clear the books.
“I don’t want to pollute my workout,” I say. “And I hate scenes.”
“Then just listen and that’ll be it.”
“Actually that won’t be it, but go ahead. And don’t talk loudly.” Which I don’t have to worry about, he talks in such a low voice I sometimes wonder if my hearing is going like my grandmother on my mother’s side. My grandmother on my father’s side developed cataracts and went stone blind.
He says she’s not attractive anymore to him with the weight she’d slapped on her mid-section and behind, and I say, “But she was, wasn’t she?” I don’t believe him because he once asked me if I had a bit extra on my ass and how about some cellulite. I had never really thought about cellulite, but I said just a minute I’ll take a look, put the receiver down, paused for twenty seconds which I counted out, one Mississippi, and hoping it was the answer he was looking for, said yes, as a matter of fact I did.
“Come on. You want me to show you how strong you really are? You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met, except for psycho Crystal, now she’s going to kill someone some day—come on, you want to do three fifteen, one rep?”
I’m grinning and pacing in the black Tyrolean hiking boots I wear when I train, especially on leg days. “Nah—three fifteen? No way. Three fifteen, you say? There was this old geezer at Gold’s downtown, Lou, yeah Lou, said he was the head of the power lifting foundation or he used to be. I wanted to crack one and a quarter each side, so he put two plates a side. I’d walk in, lift the bar off the rack and put it back. He had me do that ten times.”
“I know the deal. Nope—you’re going to do a full squat, one rep.”
“I am?” Grinning—this is a wild thrill. This is better than sex any day. Just like old Arnold said in “Pumping Iron.”
“So what I want you to do is wrap up, put on your belt, although I can’t understand why you do that stuff, never mind, and get in the cage, but not right up to the bar.”
He slaps on the three plates a side. I wrap up my knees with my wide white elastic wraps the way John showed me a decade earlier: twice around under the knee and then diagonally across in an “X” and then tuck under. I used to have wraps with Velcro, but they were stolen, and not at a tough gym either, but one of the little high-class gyms I was visiting for the hell of it and swore I’d never go to again. So here I fucking am, five feet one-half inch tall, one hundred and fifty-five pounds moderately lean, and I’m closing my eyes, breathing in and out slowly and deeply.
“I don’t see any grey smoke,” I say.
“Never mind the grey smoke,” he says. “Just breathe and see yourself going in and lifting off the weight and it’s light, stepping back, doing the squat, the whole thing.”
I close my eyes.
“And quit shaking your head,” he says.
I see myself do the lift; it sure as hell isn’t easy, but I don’t bottom out because I hear John telling me, “Through the floor, through the floor and stand up. Stand up.”
“OK,” I say.
“Now go in.”
I walk in. Two steps and I’m there. I walk into the bar so my neck is under the pad in the centre. I look side to side—three plates a side—I don’t grin. I adjust my stance, shoulder width, toes slightly out; I look at my eyes in the mirror; I let out a deep grunt and lift. Steady myself. Walk back slowly. Too fast and I’ll lose my balance. Again, getting my stance, just right. Garth steps up behind me and put his flat hand on each side of my belt.
“Ready?” I say.
“Let’s do it.”
I’m feeling this incredible weight on my back and my spine is like an accordion and I’m thinking what the hell am I doing. But I’m there with this weight and I am so proud, I picture myself going down and no way is it easy to stand up, but I lift out of the bottom, I’m on my way—
“Wait. I got to tell you something,” he says.
“What?” I say, getting all jumpy.
“Did I ever tell you the one about the guy—”
“Rack it,” I hiss, walking into the rack so I can put the bar back.
First I unravel my wraps. Second I fling off my belt. Third I face Garth.
“That’s it.” I say. “We’re finished.”
“I was just joking,” he says and smiles. Garth smiles. “Look I saw Arnold doing that to Franco on the bench. I thought it would be funny.”
“Funny? I’m there with my all-time-one-rep-max that took me ten years to work up to? Ten years do you hear me? And you tell me a fucking joke?
“I just saw Arnold—”
“I’m not Arnold and I’m not Franco and that were three plates a side. And how many plates do you do?”
“Five aside.”
“And you weigh over four hundred pounds?”
He tells me he’s really sorry and he’s not smiling anymore. “Do it for yourself,” he says. He says, “You’re here now and you can do it. This is your moment. Even if you’re finished with me, do this one for yourself.”
“OK,” I say. “But if you pull any tricks, we are absolutely finished, do you understand.”
“Yes, yes. Just look at those three plates a side! Isn’t any woman nor most men in this gym who can touch you.”
“I’m going to do this squat and I’m never going to do it again, because it’s fucking heavy. But I’m doing it for my own record. And don’t spot me unless I need it, but stay with me, you hear? Stay with me the whole time.”
For the second time I prepare and this time I know what the weight of world on my shoulders feels like. And I, in my red and black spandex builder’s tights, am Atlas. Gender is irrelevant. Everything is still. Walk back, walk back. Garth behind me. Hands on belt. Feet planted. Oh well, oh well.
“OK.”
Holy shit. Control down, feet through the floor through the floor and stand up, stand up. Don’t help don’t help. Stay with me. Stay. With. Me. Standing up. Standing. Stood. Stood up!
“Rack it,” he says.
Walk in. Rack it.
“Just a minute. Gimme a minute.”
Turn around and walk across the gym with my wraps still on. “Yes!” I say. “Yes!” Arms up in the air, fists and all. See Ed, tanned builder from The Workout now at Strictly. “315! Squat. Just did 315!” “Saw it! Congratulations.” Mike, forty-five long-haired, balding on top, trains the frizzy Italian blond. “Hey Mike. Did ya see that man? 3 fucking fifteen squat. Full range no spot. Cool, eh?” I punch him in the shoulder. He laughs. Mike likes me. Then little Mike also trainer, dating the Russian Jewish ex-stripper. Back to Garth.
“Had to do that. Sorry.”
“No problem.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Told you,” he says.
“Yeah, you did, didn’t you?”
And that’s what memories are made of.
Like Jonestown I think, but I tell her she’ll do it, that I can hear the love and determination in her voice. By the time I get off the phone, I’m hopping mad, but I’m hooked, plain and simple, which is why the following day I’m back for our morning workout, showing off my two-plates-a-side squats. Between sets, Garth tries to clear the books.
“I don’t want to pollute my workout,” I say. “And I hate scenes.”
“Then just listen and that’ll be it.”
“Actually that won’t be it, but go ahead. And don’t talk loudly.” Which I don’t have to worry about, he talks in such a low voice I sometimes wonder if my hearing is going like my grandmother on my mother’s side. My grandmother on my father’s side developed cataracts and went stone blind.
He says she’s not attractive anymore to him with the weight she’d slapped on her mid-section and behind, and I say, “But she was, wasn’t she?” I don’t believe him because he once asked me if I had a bit extra on my ass and how about some cellulite. I had never really thought about cellulite, but I said just a minute I’ll take a look, put the receiver down, paused for twenty seconds which I counted out, one Mississippi, and hoping it was the answer he was looking for, said yes, as a matter of fact I did.
“Come on. You want me to show you how strong you really are? You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met, except for psycho Crystal, now she’s going to kill someone some day—come on, you want to do three fifteen, one rep?”
I’m grinning and pacing in the black Tyrolean hiking boots I wear when I train, especially on leg days. “Nah—three fifteen? No way. Three fifteen, you say? There was this old geezer at Gold’s downtown, Lou, yeah Lou, said he was the head of the power lifting foundation or he used to be. I wanted to crack one and a quarter each side, so he put two plates a side. I’d walk in, lift the bar off the rack and put it back. He had me do that ten times.”
“I know the deal. Nope—you’re going to do a full squat, one rep.”
“I am?” Grinning—this is a wild thrill. This is better than sex any day. Just like old Arnold said in “Pumping Iron.”
“So what I want you to do is wrap up, put on your belt, although I can’t understand why you do that stuff, never mind, and get in the cage, but not right up to the bar.”
He slaps on the three plates a side. I wrap up my knees with my wide white elastic wraps the way John showed me a decade earlier: twice around under the knee and then diagonally across in an “X” and then tuck under. I used to have wraps with Velcro, but they were stolen, and not at a tough gym either, but one of the little high-class gyms I was visiting for the hell of it and swore I’d never go to again. So here I fucking am, five feet one-half inch tall, one hundred and fifty-five pounds moderately lean, and I’m closing my eyes, breathing in and out slowly and deeply.
“I don’t see any grey smoke,” I say.
“Never mind the grey smoke,” he says. “Just breathe and see yourself going in and lifting off the weight and it’s light, stepping back, doing the squat, the whole thing.”
I close my eyes.
“And quit shaking your head,” he says.
I see myself do the lift; it sure as hell isn’t easy, but I don’t bottom out because I hear John telling me, “Through the floor, through the floor and stand up. Stand up.”
“OK,” I say.
“Now go in.”
I walk in. Two steps and I’m there. I walk into the bar so my neck is under the pad in the centre. I look side to side—three plates a side—I don’t grin. I adjust my stance, shoulder width, toes slightly out; I look at my eyes in the mirror; I let out a deep grunt and lift. Steady myself. Walk back slowly. Too fast and I’ll lose my balance. Again, getting my stance, just right. Garth steps up behind me and put his flat hand on each side of my belt.
“Ready?” I say.
“Let’s do it.”
I’m feeling this incredible weight on my back and my spine is like an accordion and I’m thinking what the hell am I doing. But I’m there with this weight and I am so proud, I picture myself going down and no way is it easy to stand up, but I lift out of the bottom, I’m on my way—
“Wait. I got to tell you something,” he says.
“What?” I say, getting all jumpy.
“Did I ever tell you the one about the guy—”
“Rack it,” I hiss, walking into the rack so I can put the bar back.
First I unravel my wraps. Second I fling off my belt. Third I face Garth.
“That’s it.” I say. “We’re finished.”
“I was just joking,” he says and smiles. Garth smiles. “Look I saw Arnold doing that to Franco on the bench. I thought it would be funny.”
“Funny? I’m there with my all-time-one-rep-max that took me ten years to work up to? Ten years do you hear me? And you tell me a fucking joke?
“I just saw Arnold—”
“I’m not Arnold and I’m not Franco and that were three plates a side. And how many plates do you do?”
“Five aside.”
“And you weigh over four hundred pounds?”
He tells me he’s really sorry and he’s not smiling anymore. “Do it for yourself,” he says. He says, “You’re here now and you can do it. This is your moment. Even if you’re finished with me, do this one for yourself.”
“OK,” I say. “But if you pull any tricks, we are absolutely finished, do you understand.”
“Yes, yes. Just look at those three plates a side! Isn’t any woman nor most men in this gym who can touch you.”
“I’m going to do this squat and I’m never going to do it again, because it’s fucking heavy. But I’m doing it for my own record. And don’t spot me unless I need it, but stay with me, you hear? Stay with me the whole time.”
For the second time I prepare and this time I know what the weight of world on my shoulders feels like. And I, in my red and black spandex builder’s tights, am Atlas. Gender is irrelevant. Everything is still. Walk back, walk back. Garth behind me. Hands on belt. Feet planted. Oh well, oh well.
“OK.”
Holy shit. Control down, feet through the floor through the floor and stand up, stand up. Don’t help don’t help. Stay with me. Stay. With. Me. Standing up. Standing. Stood. Stood up!
“Rack it,” he says.
Walk in. Rack it.
“Just a minute. Gimme a minute.”
Turn around and walk across the gym with my wraps still on. “Yes!” I say. “Yes!” Arms up in the air, fists and all. See Ed, tanned builder from The Workout now at Strictly. “315! Squat. Just did 315!” “Saw it! Congratulations.” Mike, forty-five long-haired, balding on top, trains the frizzy Italian blond. “Hey Mike. Did ya see that man? 3 fucking fifteen squat. Full range no spot. Cool, eh?” I punch him in the shoulder. He laughs. Mike likes me. Then little Mike also trainer, dating the Russian Jewish ex-stripper. Back to Garth.
“Had to do that. Sorry.”
“No problem.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Told you,” he says.
“Yeah, you did, didn’t you?”
And that’s what memories are made of.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Comfort Inn
Georgia buzzes up. He answers, “Yes?” Her voice is sweet as a Halloween Macintosh apple with a razor in its centre. “You want me to come down?” he asks, biting into the razor.
“You tell him,” she says as he steps out into the bright burglar lights. I tell him it’s over, forever and always, just like it says on my ring, and oh by the way, on Georgia’s bracelet too.
“I’m outta here,” I say, walking as if I’m on stilts to my car parked illegally in front of the building, my quads tight like after a set of squats, twenty reps continuous tension.
“Let her go,” Georgia says, but before I get my key in the car door, Garth’s hand is on mine.
“You go with her, we’re finished, you hear?” Georgia’s voice shrill and on the rampage. “You get in that car and I’m throwing you out.”
“Open the door,” Garth says real low without moving his lips.
“You’re old enough to be his grandma! Crazy white whore!” Georgia hollers as she pitches Garth’s clothes off the balcony.
“Doesn’t it look like they’re jumping off the railing, as if the building were on fire?” I say. Craning my neck, I take in the Downsview co-op with its foil shades and boarded-up windows and smoke-grey brick which must have white in its hey-day if it ever had one. Most likely the building was born tired and worn, except for a concrete awning swooping out like a grand brim on a Sunday hat.
So now I’ve got this strange huge man in my car and we’re making a get-away as the Georgia runs toward us, waving her arms and screaming.
“What’s she doing?” I say.
“She wants to fight.”
“I’m a bodybuilder, not a fighter.” I turn the key in the ignition.
“Well then, you better move,” he says.
“This is not my life.”
He tells me I’m like the women who go to tough bars to slum it and they think they’re so cool until a fight breaks out. You’re supposed to stick by your man, he says, but these women either cower in the bathroom or grab the car keys and hightail it out of there. He knows because he used to be a bouncer. Guelph had three hard cold bouncers who were called in to clean up the town’s roughest bars. It was like an old western—Garth was one of the three, along with this guy Tony and another, the puniest of the three, Jimmy. Tony was six foot five. He had dark hair and a large hooked nose. Garth said that Tony rarely got into fights but he was intimidating. Also he was horribly accident-prone so he’d get more injured than the guy he was fighting. After the three split up, Tony moved to Yugoslavia because he had family in that country. There were rumors that he was killed. Others stories that he wasn’t.
Garth had promised to marry Georgia and give her legitimate residency status in exchange for a place to crash. Also he needed a place to crash. Besides, he was twenty-five and in those days, most of his friends were getting married so he thought he’d give it a try. But the more he lived with her, the more he realized she was just too negative and he’d had enough of negative people. He knew this white woman Lee whom he said was ugly as sin and fat as a pregnant cow, and even though her mind wasn't particularly attractive either, she was smart. She had a good mind for business, went out west, and in the first year, grossed one hundred and fifty thousand opening her tree-trunk legs for strangers. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do. She could see right into a John’s mind and figure out exactly what he wanted. Garth says he’d be talking to her, she’d be mouthing off in a well-modulated voice, talking figures and getting all inspired, and suddenly she’d shove her hand between her legs, shag her monkey, come, and continue the conversation, not even skipping a phrase or parenthesis. She started these dances for weight-challenged women and directly went into the line of plus-sized sexy undergarments, so when some twig of man tried to pick one of the females up, he'd have something to gawk at.
Georgia still had her looks; it was her attitude that bothered Garth. All this he told me. Anyhow Georgia grew to love him and he enjoyed chatting with her. She’d be in the bathroom and he’d be standing outside the door mouthing off on death and capital punishment and serial killers and the morbidly obese. Georgia said how they talked as much as a jam-packed overnight bag and how, her voice soaring so I thought she was going to take off, she was so proud of him. I think maybe he needed that.
Meanwhile he says she’s fat and he doesn’t like fat women—which I don’t believe because he once asked me if I had a bit extra on my ass and how about some cellulite. I had never really thought about cellulite, but I said just a minute I’ll take a look, put the receiver down, paused for twenty seconds which I counted out, one Mississippi, and hoping it was the answer he was looking for, said yes, as a matter of fact I do. Anyway, he and Georgia had this power struggle because no way was she going to kneel down or get on all fours. Men get turned on by women who like to sub it according to one of Sabina’s friends who honored in history at UofT and now hosts a porn site and considers himself an expert in these matters. “Historically,” he said, “black women don’t like to sub it,” and I asked him how could he make such a generalization, and he said “I’m black aren’t I?” He said when you’re black there’s just no thrill in being a slave. “I understand, I’m Jewish aren’t I?” I said, although I know it’s not the same. It’s the sub who really holds the power, he said, and I said what a convenient rationalization.
“Where to?” I say.
“Comfort Inn, Finch Av West,” Garth says like he’s done this before or has a plane to catch (and put a step on it will you).
“Any luggage, sir?” the man at the front desk says. “Not at the moment, thank you,” Garth says. My ex, Abie, refused to say thank you. They were never taught that on the farm in Chatequay, and besides, he said, he didn’t feel the need to suck up the way I did. “But it’s common decency,” I said, and he said well, he didn’t believe in it. “How can you not believe in saying thank you?” I’d said. And here was Garth, thrown out just that night, with his pleases and thank yous rolling out as smoothly as new kitchen drawers on shiny silver tracks.
We sit in a dimly lit room with a bar and round dark grey arborite tables with upholstered curved chairs set just a space away. “They should have spent less on the chairs and more on the overall décor,” I say. Garth says only two things matter, chairs and service. “If you’re sitting on a hard wood chair, you’re going to hightail yourself out before you’ve ordered your third drink. We order Bailey’s Irish Cream. First one, then another. Garth says when he was growing up there were so many bottles of liquor at his mother’s that he’d sell some off and she never missed them. He never drank like most teenagers, never smoked or doped up, he danced some but he was lousy at it then and says he sucks at it still. “I wouldn’t mind,” I almost whisper, but he chooses not to say anything. So I ask him about music and he says, flippant as an oatmeal and bran pancake, oh he gave up music when he turned seventeen. I want to know what songs he liked in those days and he says I could pick any song from that era and he would have liked it, everything from reggae, classical, all of Beethoven’s symphonies, hard rock, soft rock—he listened to it all.
I like interviewing Garth because it gives us something to talk about and even though it gets on his nerves, he still answers. Talon’s mother, Kelly, told me Garth is passive aggressive; once, in the aggressive part, he went through her place and slashed every piece of clothing she owned, he didn’t even miss a sock, and I said perhaps in his case that’s a good thing. I’m in a groove so I ask him what about gospel. He sighs. Like an actor reading a script where the line reads, “HE SIGHS.” “All the time until I was twelve, then it stopped. My mother tried to sing, but it was horrible.” Sometimes I catch him singing “If Tomorrow Never Comes.” His voice is low and pleasing and he never goes off key except one time at the last line of the chorus. Maybe he was thinking of how his mother used to slash his bare skin with chain whips—even when he was sleeping or in the shower, she’d barge in and have a go at him—and how he used to pray to see his tenth birthday.
“I used to pray. I think I was reading ‘Little Women’ and my birthday was coming up. I wanted to set up a chapel under the basement stairs so I asked my mother for a prayer bench, and she told my father because she told him almost everything except how she felt, which might well have been the root of her depression. I once read depression is anger turned inward . . Hey—remember how you said anyone from your past would be shocked meeting up with you, I mean to see you walking free and not locked up for killing someone? Maybe you’re not doing the right thing, being so inward and isolated. Not that I mean you should go out and kill the first person you see. Not that I mean that at all.” I’m talking too much. Sometimes he says he can’t follow me and I tell him I’m a tangential thinker.
“So, did you get it?”
“What? Oh—my parents were staunch atheists. They never said anything and I never mentioned it again. I used my bed instead.”
Garth thinks I’m too competitive. He mentions something and I’ve got to slide right in with something of my own. It’s about sharing and empathy, I say, but he doesn’t get it. Mostly I try to listen when I’m with him and save my unedited version for Sabina my best friend of seventeen years who jumps like a nymphomaniac from one topic to the next or even for my daughter Caroline when her mind is anchored. It has nothing to do with calm waters, she can still be adrift. When she comes to shore, and she does, I start talking, quietly, not too much to make waves, until she looks away like she has wander lust and she’s drifting again. To bring her back, I touch her arm or her shoulder or her leg, but by then she’s too far, and so I stand by the water’s edge and wait for her to come home again. After two shots of Baileys, I can see Garth is ready to leave. I don’t know how I figure that out. He doesn’t act any different. And I’ve never seen him yawn. Maybe the lid of his blind right eye begins to droop. He doesn’t fidget or look around, although he insists he takes in everything.
We take off our clothes like an old married couple. He leaves his t-shirt on. We lie side by side, a contrast in colour and age, beneath the stiff hotel sheet. I wait.
“Garth,” I say, which isn’t true since mostly I call him “sweetie.” I call him sweetie so much, he says it would be nice to hear me say his name even once in a while. I tell him it’s a love word. “Still it would be nice,” he says. One day I’m going to stop calling him sweetie altogether.
“So?” I say, putting my arm under my head so my head is high enough to see him. “You’re such an odd one, you know. Is your mind still? Does it stop? Do your words follow a pattern? I mean how do you think?” Talking to Garth is a matter of trial and error.
“I don’t know what you mean . . .”
“I just wonder whether you think all the time, whether your mind is ever still or does it rush around everywhere like it’s late for a show and searching for the keys and where you left your jacket and . . .”
“You asking or telling me?”
“Asking.”
“It’s never still. I think the way I talk.”
“Well you talk the way you walk.” Garth doesn’t answer. Either he has nothing to add or he just doesn’t get it. Resting my head on his belly, my whole body relaxes. Whenever he talks about becoming lean again, not competition ripped of course, I get nervous inside, like before a history test I hadn’t studied for or couldn’t remember any of the dates in the days when dates meant everything. His belly reminds me of mountains and picking blueberries in the hills behind our country house and the two mossy rocks with Appalachian curves in our front garden. “I’m going to miss your middle,” I always say, but I know I don’t have to worry because he’s got this thing for pre-packaged butter tarts—which I wonder about, I mean why the prefix “pre” and isn’t that redundant. I am plagued by these questions. After prefacing my concern with “this might not be the occasion for a query like this” and “you know how you find some topics cumbersome,” I raise the question about butter tarts. Garth thinks the question is a legitimate one—like calling a water heater a hot water heater; why you would heat water if it were already hot, he says.
“What I mean is I’ve never seen you rush, your steps are all measured.”
“I see no point in rushing,” he says, and then he turns to me and takes me in his arms and my skin is so parched it drinks him in; he lies half crouched over me, “kiss me,” I say, arching up, so he swoops down and I drink like a Jew in the desert, forty days and forty nights (in my case forty-eight). I’ve had four memorable comes in my life: one (because it was my first) in Melez’s cot at Pripstein’s Camp in 1965; another one a few years later with Abie, actually two with Abie—the first after I dropped a cindered marshmallow in the palm of my head, and Abie and I retired to the sunroom in Arlene’s Val Morin country house, I, clutching an ice pack to my injured hand while Abie massaged my breasts which seemed to develop lives of their own, they were that animated; the second in spring of 1988 in the rented house on Austin Terrace in the bed with a functional grey built-in head board and me coming while I gripped his shoulders, so this is what it’s like, I said; it took eight more years for the fourth on this night with Garth as my skin leaps and laughs each time he touches me.
I’m writing everything down, scribbling notes like a third-rate sleuth. When he goes to the bathroom to wash his cock and his up-my-asshole finger, I turn on the overhead light and record the entire incident on the backs of unused cheques and unpaid bills. I’m writing a grand exposé, an inner journey of Kerouacian proportions. And this time no New York agent is going to die on the dentist’s chair while he's getting of on my erotic works. I waited two decades before submitting new shit. It’s like a bodybuilding competition, this book of mine—muscle, ligaments, and veins popping, resistant fat and symmetrical flaws magnified under stark stage lighting. I was reading a famous writer’s memories, a young-old guy, whose name starts with “V,” who always had more to say than he’d written. So he’d write something like “if you want to read more of that, well, check out the appendix” which grew to, maybe exceeded, the page count of all the chapters.
I can’t wait that long. I live my life with a full bladder. So—it’s not that in forty-one years, my coming times totalled four. And I don’t come like a pre-set baking oven, warming up to three-fifty or three-seventy-five and then maintaining or turning off. It’s just that, in my personal equation, my level of come isn’t equal to my degree of passion. Maybe it’s because I’m process-oriented. When a fuck enthrals me, I’m on the move the whole time, turning and sliding this way and that. Like when someone skims his fingernails up and down your arm and you’re just loving it, hoping it’ll never stop. Or like that moment after a shower when your whole being, including breasts, feels full almost engorged and you’re thinking maybe you should masturbate, the doors of all your pores open and welcoming.
Meanwhile, a guy with a beguiling smile and eyes as blue as the skies over Rio de Janeiro or New Zealand’s Bay of Islands or above Ayers Rock in Australia winks at my friend Sabina, a German rendition of Bo Derek, but without the tits and dreads, as she hands him ten subway tokens, and a few days later, he’s in her Parkdale futon or eating her out it beneath the ostrich ferns in her inner-city garden paradise. She also gets turned watching women at strip joints.
“I need a mind,” I tell her.
“I just want to treat myself, like having a feast. You wouldn’t want a feast everyday. But once in a while . . . And if he’d have talked, I would have told him to shut his mouth and put it where it’s appreciated.” Sabina writes torrid romances while she’s fucking. Like scenes from the “Story of O,” only hers take place in the Muskokas in Northern Ontario. When she comes, her back arches and she shakes all over. She screams. But Sabina thinks in fiction; her characters are real and have lives of their own. While I, in one form or another, have always written memoirs.
And what does this have to do with Georgia and Comfort Inn—everything and nothing, I guess. It’s just that I swooped in and stole Georgia’s wedding dress right out of her closet. Not that I give a fuck. What thrills me is I still don’t know what to expect. I’m on edge and as much in love with myself even after all these decades. And these days how many relationships can make such claims?
“Don’t worry about Georgia,” Garth says after I whisper good-bye. “One day you’ll see her and you won’t recognize her. She’ll be fat as a house.”
“And me?” I say, “And me?” Garth has a way of predicting the future.
“Oh you. You don’t need to worry. You’ll be dead.”
So I kiss him with my semen lips.
“You tell him,” she says as he steps out into the bright burglar lights. I tell him it’s over, forever and always, just like it says on my ring, and oh by the way, on Georgia’s bracelet too.
“I’m outta here,” I say, walking as if I’m on stilts to my car parked illegally in front of the building, my quads tight like after a set of squats, twenty reps continuous tension.
“Let her go,” Georgia says, but before I get my key in the car door, Garth’s hand is on mine.
“You go with her, we’re finished, you hear?” Georgia’s voice shrill and on the rampage. “You get in that car and I’m throwing you out.”
“Open the door,” Garth says real low without moving his lips.
“You’re old enough to be his grandma! Crazy white whore!” Georgia hollers as she pitches Garth’s clothes off the balcony.
“Doesn’t it look like they’re jumping off the railing, as if the building were on fire?” I say. Craning my neck, I take in the Downsview co-op with its foil shades and boarded-up windows and smoke-grey brick which must have white in its hey-day if it ever had one. Most likely the building was born tired and worn, except for a concrete awning swooping out like a grand brim on a Sunday hat.
So now I’ve got this strange huge man in my car and we’re making a get-away as the Georgia runs toward us, waving her arms and screaming.
“What’s she doing?” I say.
“She wants to fight.”
“I’m a bodybuilder, not a fighter.” I turn the key in the ignition.
“Well then, you better move,” he says.
“This is not my life.”
He tells me I’m like the women who go to tough bars to slum it and they think they’re so cool until a fight breaks out. You’re supposed to stick by your man, he says, but these women either cower in the bathroom or grab the car keys and hightail it out of there. He knows because he used to be a bouncer. Guelph had three hard cold bouncers who were called in to clean up the town’s roughest bars. It was like an old western—Garth was one of the three, along with this guy Tony and another, the puniest of the three, Jimmy. Tony was six foot five. He had dark hair and a large hooked nose. Garth said that Tony rarely got into fights but he was intimidating. Also he was horribly accident-prone so he’d get more injured than the guy he was fighting. After the three split up, Tony moved to Yugoslavia because he had family in that country. There were rumors that he was killed. Others stories that he wasn’t.
Garth had promised to marry Georgia and give her legitimate residency status in exchange for a place to crash. Also he needed a place to crash. Besides, he was twenty-five and in those days, most of his friends were getting married so he thought he’d give it a try. But the more he lived with her, the more he realized she was just too negative and he’d had enough of negative people. He knew this white woman Lee whom he said was ugly as sin and fat as a pregnant cow, and even though her mind wasn't particularly attractive either, she was smart. She had a good mind for business, went out west, and in the first year, grossed one hundred and fifty thousand opening her tree-trunk legs for strangers. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do. She could see right into a John’s mind and figure out exactly what he wanted. Garth says he’d be talking to her, she’d be mouthing off in a well-modulated voice, talking figures and getting all inspired, and suddenly she’d shove her hand between her legs, shag her monkey, come, and continue the conversation, not even skipping a phrase or parenthesis. She started these dances for weight-challenged women and directly went into the line of plus-sized sexy undergarments, so when some twig of man tried to pick one of the females up, he'd have something to gawk at.
Georgia still had her looks; it was her attitude that bothered Garth. All this he told me. Anyhow Georgia grew to love him and he enjoyed chatting with her. She’d be in the bathroom and he’d be standing outside the door mouthing off on death and capital punishment and serial killers and the morbidly obese. Georgia said how they talked as much as a jam-packed overnight bag and how, her voice soaring so I thought she was going to take off, she was so proud of him. I think maybe he needed that.
Meanwhile he says she’s fat and he doesn’t like fat women—which I don’t believe because he once asked me if I had a bit extra on my ass and how about some cellulite. I had never really thought about cellulite, but I said just a minute I’ll take a look, put the receiver down, paused for twenty seconds which I counted out, one Mississippi, and hoping it was the answer he was looking for, said yes, as a matter of fact I do. Anyway, he and Georgia had this power struggle because no way was she going to kneel down or get on all fours. Men get turned on by women who like to sub it according to one of Sabina’s friends who honored in history at UofT and now hosts a porn site and considers himself an expert in these matters. “Historically,” he said, “black women don’t like to sub it,” and I asked him how could he make such a generalization, and he said “I’m black aren’t I?” He said when you’re black there’s just no thrill in being a slave. “I understand, I’m Jewish aren’t I?” I said, although I know it’s not the same. It’s the sub who really holds the power, he said, and I said what a convenient rationalization.
“Where to?” I say.
“Comfort Inn, Finch Av West,” Garth says like he’s done this before or has a plane to catch (and put a step on it will you).
“Any luggage, sir?” the man at the front desk says. “Not at the moment, thank you,” Garth says. My ex, Abie, refused to say thank you. They were never taught that on the farm in Chatequay, and besides, he said, he didn’t feel the need to suck up the way I did. “But it’s common decency,” I said, and he said well, he didn’t believe in it. “How can you not believe in saying thank you?” I’d said. And here was Garth, thrown out just that night, with his pleases and thank yous rolling out as smoothly as new kitchen drawers on shiny silver tracks.
We sit in a dimly lit room with a bar and round dark grey arborite tables with upholstered curved chairs set just a space away. “They should have spent less on the chairs and more on the overall décor,” I say. Garth says only two things matter, chairs and service. “If you’re sitting on a hard wood chair, you’re going to hightail yourself out before you’ve ordered your third drink. We order Bailey’s Irish Cream. First one, then another. Garth says when he was growing up there were so many bottles of liquor at his mother’s that he’d sell some off and she never missed them. He never drank like most teenagers, never smoked or doped up, he danced some but he was lousy at it then and says he sucks at it still. “I wouldn’t mind,” I almost whisper, but he chooses not to say anything. So I ask him about music and he says, flippant as an oatmeal and bran pancake, oh he gave up music when he turned seventeen. I want to know what songs he liked in those days and he says I could pick any song from that era and he would have liked it, everything from reggae, classical, all of Beethoven’s symphonies, hard rock, soft rock—he listened to it all.
I like interviewing Garth because it gives us something to talk about and even though it gets on his nerves, he still answers. Talon’s mother, Kelly, told me Garth is passive aggressive; once, in the aggressive part, he went through her place and slashed every piece of clothing she owned, he didn’t even miss a sock, and I said perhaps in his case that’s a good thing. I’m in a groove so I ask him what about gospel. He sighs. Like an actor reading a script where the line reads, “HE SIGHS.” “All the time until I was twelve, then it stopped. My mother tried to sing, but it was horrible.” Sometimes I catch him singing “If Tomorrow Never Comes.” His voice is low and pleasing and he never goes off key except one time at the last line of the chorus. Maybe he was thinking of how his mother used to slash his bare skin with chain whips—even when he was sleeping or in the shower, she’d barge in and have a go at him—and how he used to pray to see his tenth birthday.
“I used to pray. I think I was reading ‘Little Women’ and my birthday was coming up. I wanted to set up a chapel under the basement stairs so I asked my mother for a prayer bench, and she told my father because she told him almost everything except how she felt, which might well have been the root of her depression. I once read depression is anger turned inward . . Hey—remember how you said anyone from your past would be shocked meeting up with you, I mean to see you walking free and not locked up for killing someone? Maybe you’re not doing the right thing, being so inward and isolated. Not that I mean you should go out and kill the first person you see. Not that I mean that at all.” I’m talking too much. Sometimes he says he can’t follow me and I tell him I’m a tangential thinker.
“So, did you get it?”
“What? Oh—my parents were staunch atheists. They never said anything and I never mentioned it again. I used my bed instead.”
Garth thinks I’m too competitive. He mentions something and I’ve got to slide right in with something of my own. It’s about sharing and empathy, I say, but he doesn’t get it. Mostly I try to listen when I’m with him and save my unedited version for Sabina my best friend of seventeen years who jumps like a nymphomaniac from one topic to the next or even for my daughter Caroline when her mind is anchored. It has nothing to do with calm waters, she can still be adrift. When she comes to shore, and she does, I start talking, quietly, not too much to make waves, until she looks away like she has wander lust and she’s drifting again. To bring her back, I touch her arm or her shoulder or her leg, but by then she’s too far, and so I stand by the water’s edge and wait for her to come home again. After two shots of Baileys, I can see Garth is ready to leave. I don’t know how I figure that out. He doesn’t act any different. And I’ve never seen him yawn. Maybe the lid of his blind right eye begins to droop. He doesn’t fidget or look around, although he insists he takes in everything.
We take off our clothes like an old married couple. He leaves his t-shirt on. We lie side by side, a contrast in colour and age, beneath the stiff hotel sheet. I wait.
“Garth,” I say, which isn’t true since mostly I call him “sweetie.” I call him sweetie so much, he says it would be nice to hear me say his name even once in a while. I tell him it’s a love word. “Still it would be nice,” he says. One day I’m going to stop calling him sweetie altogether.
“So?” I say, putting my arm under my head so my head is high enough to see him. “You’re such an odd one, you know. Is your mind still? Does it stop? Do your words follow a pattern? I mean how do you think?” Talking to Garth is a matter of trial and error.
“I don’t know what you mean . . .”
“I just wonder whether you think all the time, whether your mind is ever still or does it rush around everywhere like it’s late for a show and searching for the keys and where you left your jacket and . . .”
“You asking or telling me?”
“Asking.”
“It’s never still. I think the way I talk.”
“Well you talk the way you walk.” Garth doesn’t answer. Either he has nothing to add or he just doesn’t get it. Resting my head on his belly, my whole body relaxes. Whenever he talks about becoming lean again, not competition ripped of course, I get nervous inside, like before a history test I hadn’t studied for or couldn’t remember any of the dates in the days when dates meant everything. His belly reminds me of mountains and picking blueberries in the hills behind our country house and the two mossy rocks with Appalachian curves in our front garden. “I’m going to miss your middle,” I always say, but I know I don’t have to worry because he’s got this thing for pre-packaged butter tarts—which I wonder about, I mean why the prefix “pre” and isn’t that redundant. I am plagued by these questions. After prefacing my concern with “this might not be the occasion for a query like this” and “you know how you find some topics cumbersome,” I raise the question about butter tarts. Garth thinks the question is a legitimate one—like calling a water heater a hot water heater; why you would heat water if it were already hot, he says.
“What I mean is I’ve never seen you rush, your steps are all measured.”
“I see no point in rushing,” he says, and then he turns to me and takes me in his arms and my skin is so parched it drinks him in; he lies half crouched over me, “kiss me,” I say, arching up, so he swoops down and I drink like a Jew in the desert, forty days and forty nights (in my case forty-eight). I’ve had four memorable comes in my life: one (because it was my first) in Melez’s cot at Pripstein’s Camp in 1965; another one a few years later with Abie, actually two with Abie—the first after I dropped a cindered marshmallow in the palm of my head, and Abie and I retired to the sunroom in Arlene’s Val Morin country house, I, clutching an ice pack to my injured hand while Abie massaged my breasts which seemed to develop lives of their own, they were that animated; the second in spring of 1988 in the rented house on Austin Terrace in the bed with a functional grey built-in head board and me coming while I gripped his shoulders, so this is what it’s like, I said; it took eight more years for the fourth on this night with Garth as my skin leaps and laughs each time he touches me.
I’m writing everything down, scribbling notes like a third-rate sleuth. When he goes to the bathroom to wash his cock and his up-my-asshole finger, I turn on the overhead light and record the entire incident on the backs of unused cheques and unpaid bills. I’m writing a grand exposé, an inner journey of Kerouacian proportions. And this time no New York agent is going to die on the dentist’s chair while he's getting of on my erotic works. I waited two decades before submitting new shit. It’s like a bodybuilding competition, this book of mine—muscle, ligaments, and veins popping, resistant fat and symmetrical flaws magnified under stark stage lighting. I was reading a famous writer’s memories, a young-old guy, whose name starts with “V,” who always had more to say than he’d written. So he’d write something like “if you want to read more of that, well, check out the appendix” which grew to, maybe exceeded, the page count of all the chapters.
I can’t wait that long. I live my life with a full bladder. So—it’s not that in forty-one years, my coming times totalled four. And I don’t come like a pre-set baking oven, warming up to three-fifty or three-seventy-five and then maintaining or turning off. It’s just that, in my personal equation, my level of come isn’t equal to my degree of passion. Maybe it’s because I’m process-oriented. When a fuck enthrals me, I’m on the move the whole time, turning and sliding this way and that. Like when someone skims his fingernails up and down your arm and you’re just loving it, hoping it’ll never stop. Or like that moment after a shower when your whole being, including breasts, feels full almost engorged and you’re thinking maybe you should masturbate, the doors of all your pores open and welcoming.
Meanwhile, a guy with a beguiling smile and eyes as blue as the skies over Rio de Janeiro or New Zealand’s Bay of Islands or above Ayers Rock in Australia winks at my friend Sabina, a German rendition of Bo Derek, but without the tits and dreads, as she hands him ten subway tokens, and a few days later, he’s in her Parkdale futon or eating her out it beneath the ostrich ferns in her inner-city garden paradise. She also gets turned watching women at strip joints.
“I need a mind,” I tell her.
“I just want to treat myself, like having a feast. You wouldn’t want a feast everyday. But once in a while . . . And if he’d have talked, I would have told him to shut his mouth and put it where it’s appreciated.” Sabina writes torrid romances while she’s fucking. Like scenes from the “Story of O,” only hers take place in the Muskokas in Northern Ontario. When she comes, her back arches and she shakes all over. She screams. But Sabina thinks in fiction; her characters are real and have lives of their own. While I, in one form or another, have always written memoirs.
And what does this have to do with Georgia and Comfort Inn—everything and nothing, I guess. It’s just that I swooped in and stole Georgia’s wedding dress right out of her closet. Not that I give a fuck. What thrills me is I still don’t know what to expect. I’m on edge and as much in love with myself even after all these decades. And these days how many relationships can make such claims?
“Don’t worry about Georgia,” Garth says after I whisper good-bye. “One day you’ll see her and you won’t recognize her. She’ll be fat as a house.”
“And me?” I say, “And me?” Garth has a way of predicting the future.
“Oh you. You don’t need to worry. You’ll be dead.”
So I kiss him with my semen lips.
Monday, August 3, 2009
Coming Round
We live on the eighth floor of a concrete and glass apartment building on Cote St. Luc Road. A doorman opens the door. The main foyer has marble floors. The apartment is furnished in Danish modern. Abie goes to university while I wait for the bookshelves and sofa to arrive. I wait for three months. I eat. When I was fourteen I won the Golden Spool award at Camp Manitou-Wabing for my black and white portrait of a Lauren Deckelbaum who never went through an awkward stage—she slipped through those years looking like she’d just woken up on a hazy morning or she was the hazy morning—and a snap shot of Bernie Hashmal canoeing solo, grinning and waving his paddle just before he tipped. I taught Abie everything I knew and he took it from there. The enlarger and trays are arranged on a wood plank over the bathtub. A glowing red bulb above the door frame signals he’s in his darkroom mode and not on the toilet reading Playboy with his worn-out underwear hanging like a sagging belly around his ankles while he’s taking a shit. He likes doing series: my flat wide feet with bunions poking through like spring bulbs; nudes of me sleeping, waking up, getting dressed with my left foot poised at the entrance of my underwear; doors with rusty hinges from the days when we’d break into deserted country houses. On these days when I’m a bird bathing in the sink, he calls me his little Faigele, my mother’s Yiddish name, and I pour cold water on his head. We take showers together. He fucks me after the late show and he slams in again around six in the morning. “You have entitlement issues,” I tell him.
We have brown ceramic dishes that pile up on the counter. My mother sends Angelina over once a week. Angelina vacuums and reminds me of home. She used to wrap up her long hair in a bun, but she’s cut it now. “I’m too old to fuss with long hair,” Angelina says and I say, “I understand because my hair gets so knotted even Houdini couldn’t break out and Abie has to comb it out for me." “Who is Houdini?” Angelina asks, so I tell her. What I don’t tell her is I’m like my hair, all tangled and tied-up.
I wet my hair and put olive oil on it. On my eyelids I paint a glittery black runway that takes off at the edges. “Hey, what colour are my eyes?” I really wonder about that sometimes. Abie tilts my head to the spot light. “Green,” he says, “no, hazel with emerald.” He takes photos of me, black and white: one with me holding my old guitar; one with me in a bath towel and holding my hair up with one hand; and one, one where my grandmother’s white shawl from the Weaver’s in St. Agathe is draped over my head. “Show me starry night with your eyes,” Abie says. All my life I wanted to be an actress. It’s what I do best. Constance Brown loves my photos. According to Abie, she says they’re better than the ones at the agency, and she loves my look─ethnic is in, she says.
I write every day. I write I cannot grow on a still pond. Abie says it’s always the same thing. One Saturday spring morning, we climb Mount Tremblant─we take the chair lift to the highest ski peak, but Abie insists we continue to the top. “You’re wearing your Tyrolean hiking boots, the cleats will hold you,” he says. “We couldn’t afford the cleats,” I yell. He kicks the earth with the tip of his boot to make climbing ledges, grabs stumps, and takes off his belt so I can grab hold. “Don’t look down,” he says, but I look down anyway and I’m thinking I’m going crash like that American diver in Acapulco and the whole time he’s saying how beautiful it’s going to be at the top and how we will stand together at the top of the world.
Abie's walking in the forest behind Lake Alverna. He's like an animal in the woods and I love that about him. Trees are like long lost relatives to him. "Jan," he calls out, "a white spruce, and that one, black, black spruce, tamarak, and that . . .” He walks over to an eastern hemlock. "You gotta see this!" he whispers, pointing to a dead rabbit and her five mewling babies. He wraps them in his chamois shirt and on the way home, he turns the heater on high. We buy an eye dropper at the drugstore across the street from our building. “Don’t forget to put the clock near them,” he says as he walks around in his torn underwear and turns on the TV. I open the cedar chest and take out the extra scraps from the beaver coat my grandmother gave me for my twenty-first birthday. It’s a family custom. My coat is in storage at Holt Renfrew, and my mother, who has a lamb-lined coat and a new Kolinsky, mails me notes reminding me to have the coat delivered.
"Your mother has a mink,” Abie says and I tell him, “No, it’s a Kolinsky.”
“When are you going to wise up? What animal is called a Kolinsky? You ever hear anyone say ‘Oh look, it’s a Kolinsky!’?
“So maybe it’s one of those rare animals, you don’t know everything,” I mutter.
“They’re just embarrassed because they’re rich ex-commies,” he says. “And your sister with her dead seal hanging on her bony back thinks she’s hot shit when she’s just a dumb-ass housewife with a big nose.” I picture shit steaming on the stove and served steaming on my grandmother's Wood & Son’s china plates.
“I’m putting them on the fur,” I say, “to remind them of their mother."
“Don’t forget the clock,” he calls out from the bed.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I’m really tired and also I’m pissed off because Abie throws out orders and ideas like ball practice while he’s watching TV or reading Playboy or Esquire. He’s a magazine freak. He doesn’t study much because he says he’s in the top two percent and remembers everything he reads. Mensa sent him a personal invitation which he refused─on account of his not being an elitist, “not like your family” he always adds, and I tell him his mother is the one who prices out her artwork and furniture when guests visit.
In the morning I can’t find the baby rabbits.
“My rabbits, my little rabbits come out, come out,” I croon. “Wherever you are.”
“They died,” Abie says. “Must have been the fumes from the cedar chest.”
“But they weren’t in the cedar chest.”
“The fur was,” he says.
“So where are they?”
“In the incinerator.”
“What!”
“I put them in a green garbage bag and threw them down the incinerator.”
“Did you ever think to ask, maybe I would have buried them, they were so tiny such little things. I was up most of the night, I even made them formula . . .”
"And tell me, whose idea was the formula? Who went out in the middle of the night and bought all the ingredients?"
“They’re dead, Abie. We should have left them in the forest. And why didn’t you wake me up and tell me?”
“Because you’d overreact, same as you’re doing now. They were all stiff anyway.”
“See what I mean, see? Maybe you have good intentions, but it hurts just the same.” I go into the bathroom and lock the door. He rattles the handle.
“Come on out,” he says.
I crouch against the door and rock myself. And while he’s asking me why are you so quiet and what are you doing, I’m checking out shapes forming and rearranging on the marble tiles beside the bathtub. I take off my clothes, lie on the cold tile and stare at the stucco dots on the ceiling. And then everything inside me is still. When I put on my jeans with the homemade paisley inserts and venture out, Abie’s in the bedroom watching TV.
“Coming round?” he asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Coming round.”
We have brown ceramic dishes that pile up on the counter. My mother sends Angelina over once a week. Angelina vacuums and reminds me of home. She used to wrap up her long hair in a bun, but she’s cut it now. “I’m too old to fuss with long hair,” Angelina says and I say, “I understand because my hair gets so knotted even Houdini couldn’t break out and Abie has to comb it out for me." “Who is Houdini?” Angelina asks, so I tell her. What I don’t tell her is I’m like my hair, all tangled and tied-up.
I wet my hair and put olive oil on it. On my eyelids I paint a glittery black runway that takes off at the edges. “Hey, what colour are my eyes?” I really wonder about that sometimes. Abie tilts my head to the spot light. “Green,” he says, “no, hazel with emerald.” He takes photos of me, black and white: one with me holding my old guitar; one with me in a bath towel and holding my hair up with one hand; and one, one where my grandmother’s white shawl from the Weaver’s in St. Agathe is draped over my head. “Show me starry night with your eyes,” Abie says. All my life I wanted to be an actress. It’s what I do best. Constance Brown loves my photos. According to Abie, she says they’re better than the ones at the agency, and she loves my look─ethnic is in, she says.
I write every day. I write I cannot grow on a still pond. Abie says it’s always the same thing. One Saturday spring morning, we climb Mount Tremblant─we take the chair lift to the highest ski peak, but Abie insists we continue to the top. “You’re wearing your Tyrolean hiking boots, the cleats will hold you,” he says. “We couldn’t afford the cleats,” I yell. He kicks the earth with the tip of his boot to make climbing ledges, grabs stumps, and takes off his belt so I can grab hold. “Don’t look down,” he says, but I look down anyway and I’m thinking I’m going crash like that American diver in Acapulco and the whole time he’s saying how beautiful it’s going to be at the top and how we will stand together at the top of the world.
Abie's walking in the forest behind Lake Alverna. He's like an animal in the woods and I love that about him. Trees are like long lost relatives to him. "Jan," he calls out, "a white spruce, and that one, black, black spruce, tamarak, and that . . .” He walks over to an eastern hemlock. "You gotta see this!" he whispers, pointing to a dead rabbit and her five mewling babies. He wraps them in his chamois shirt and on the way home, he turns the heater on high. We buy an eye dropper at the drugstore across the street from our building. “Don’t forget to put the clock near them,” he says as he walks around in his torn underwear and turns on the TV. I open the cedar chest and take out the extra scraps from the beaver coat my grandmother gave me for my twenty-first birthday. It’s a family custom. My coat is in storage at Holt Renfrew, and my mother, who has a lamb-lined coat and a new Kolinsky, mails me notes reminding me to have the coat delivered.
"Your mother has a mink,” Abie says and I tell him, “No, it’s a Kolinsky.”
“When are you going to wise up? What animal is called a Kolinsky? You ever hear anyone say ‘Oh look, it’s a Kolinsky!’?
“So maybe it’s one of those rare animals, you don’t know everything,” I mutter.
“They’re just embarrassed because they’re rich ex-commies,” he says. “And your sister with her dead seal hanging on her bony back thinks she’s hot shit when she’s just a dumb-ass housewife with a big nose.” I picture shit steaming on the stove and served steaming on my grandmother's Wood & Son’s china plates.
“I’m putting them on the fur,” I say, “to remind them of their mother."
“Don’t forget the clock,” he calls out from the bed.
“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I’m really tired and also I’m pissed off because Abie throws out orders and ideas like ball practice while he’s watching TV or reading Playboy or Esquire. He’s a magazine freak. He doesn’t study much because he says he’s in the top two percent and remembers everything he reads. Mensa sent him a personal invitation which he refused─on account of his not being an elitist, “not like your family” he always adds, and I tell him his mother is the one who prices out her artwork and furniture when guests visit.
In the morning I can’t find the baby rabbits.
“My rabbits, my little rabbits come out, come out,” I croon. “Wherever you are.”
“They died,” Abie says. “Must have been the fumes from the cedar chest.”
“But they weren’t in the cedar chest.”
“The fur was,” he says.
“So where are they?”
“In the incinerator.”
“What!”
“I put them in a green garbage bag and threw them down the incinerator.”
“Did you ever think to ask, maybe I would have buried them, they were so tiny such little things. I was up most of the night, I even made them formula . . .”
"And tell me, whose idea was the formula? Who went out in the middle of the night and bought all the ingredients?"
“They’re dead, Abie. We should have left them in the forest. And why didn’t you wake me up and tell me?”
“Because you’d overreact, same as you’re doing now. They were all stiff anyway.”
“See what I mean, see? Maybe you have good intentions, but it hurts just the same.” I go into the bathroom and lock the door. He rattles the handle.
“Come on out,” he says.
I crouch against the door and rock myself. And while he’s asking me why are you so quiet and what are you doing, I’m checking out shapes forming and rearranging on the marble tiles beside the bathtub. I take off my clothes, lie on the cold tile and stare at the stucco dots on the ceiling. And then everything inside me is still. When I put on my jeans with the homemade paisley inserts and venture out, Abie’s in the bedroom watching TV.
“Coming round?” he asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Coming round.”
Monday, June 22, 2009
The People's Elbow
“You have to ask me about my life. There’s stuff needs to be purged. Promise you’ll ask me.”
“I promise,” I said, carefully adjusting my body. Men get spooked like horses or cats. But how will I know what to ask?”
This is what I learned: Garth’s mother is Pentecostal. He was slapped around and chain whipped, I saw the raised lightning scar from boiling water poured on his thigh, traced the tip of my index finger on its raised worn smoothness in our early days when I sucked on his frostbitten toes, his mother having turned him howling into the Ontario winter small-town cold. He ate chewed food from garbage cans, sisters spitting leftovers on the floor, mother shrieking holy roller, eat or I’m going to whup you, metal chain five feet long tearing into his young back thighs shoulders buttocks.
Sometimes we wrestle. “You think you got me,” I say and give him the Rock’s people’s elbow. I giggle when we wrestle, which doesn’t mean I’m enjoying it. But I know about Mankind and that he was really smart before he got all messed up from jumping off twelve foot scaffolds and China when she paraded her massive muscles in black leather before she had her face redone, including having her jaw broken and wired to reshape her square steroid jaw and the two Hart Brothers before one jumped to his death. I can’t say it was my scene. “But it’s all fake,” I’d say until Garth relayed their stories, how hard they trained, and the chances they took. Once on a wooden platform in the park near our house on Gossamer, Garth and his five-year old son lay on top of me, Garth holding my hands down so all I could do was move my head from side to side.
“Get off me, you creeps,” I yelled.
“Say ‘Uncle,’” Garth said while Talon hooted.
“No fucking way,” I said. “Same here,” Garth said and tightened his grip on my wrist.
“I can’t breathe,” I said, “Really, it’s enough.”
“Say it,” he said. So I spit in his face. His face shifted—the features rearranging themselves—the sky was summer blue one minute and the next, covered with a thick threatening wash, possibly Payne’s grey dark. He let go. “Come, Talon,” he said and they walked off.
“You’re lucky you’re alive,” he said later. In Guelph a gang of boys tied him to a willow tree; there weren’t many black families in Guelph back then. Maybe they threw stones at him or hit him with switches while he was there with the rope holding him. It took him two years to hunt those guys down. “You make sure there are no witnesses,” he told me, “know where they’re going to be and when, and you be there waiting in the shadows.” There were six or seven of them and he pummelled them into oblivion.
I can still hear the knocking—like a log being rammed against the door of a medieval hut. I opened the door. Would it have been any different if I hadn’t? If I had barricaded us in? I opened the door and a black boot wedged itself in—“Sheriff.” I was alone with Caroline. Lisa was at the Toronto French School. We had a car then—an Isuzu, that would later get towed when Caroline was in 9-south at Mt. Sinai, and Abie, in another one of his flamboyant moments, parked it in a tow-away zone.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” the landlord, a tanned leather man, said.
“But I didn’t know . . .”
“That you’re six months behind in the rent? You didn’t know?”
“But he said there were jewels, he was going to give you jewels from Africa.”
“Jewels, my ass! He showed me glass. Glass!”
Caroline stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“Can I phone him? I’ve just got to phone him, we’re all alone you see, and my daughter isn’t well.”
“Let her phone him,” the sheriff said.
“Can I use your phone? Please.”
“Let her use your phone,” the sheriff instructed when I said we didn’t have one and I had to go out to the pay phone even in the coldest day of winter to speak to André who was coaching me at Ron’s gym—he was living in a friend’s office gratis and we’d save pennies for the bus fare—I didn’t say that, about how I’d stand in the snow outside No Frills and gab and laugh on the phone with André and how talking to him made the seasons change.
“I have to give my daughter her medicine,” I said.
“What do you think we are—a god dammed pharmacy?”
“I have to take my meds,” Caroline said, “otherwise I’ll go into episode. You want me to phone Dr. Flak?”
Of all of us, Caroline is the best in emergencies.
“Come on, Mom,” she said already on her way upstairs. “We have to get some clothes.”
She got hangers. She went to Lisa’s closet and took out the one-of-a kind dress we had somehow managed to buy in Kensington Market for Lisa’s graduation. I think I got some of my clothes, some of Abie’s too. I forgot my jewelry box that held my grandfather’s watch.
I cannot write this without drinking one wine glass of French Rabbit Cabernet Sauvignon. I add President’s Choice orange juice into the pottery wine goblet I bought for fifty cents at the Cowan Street fair which is where Sabina, my best and long-legged German friend lives.
When Abie and I went back to get our things from the garage—for over a decade I could not use green plastic bags or abide by knocking and phones ringing—David Sheer said, “If you want the rest of your things, you’ll have to shovel your dogs’ shit.” You see, he also took the dogs. The sheriff and the dog pound at the door. Josie’s Pyrenees, Sara, and Zack, our Bull Mastiff. We were a Disney flick—the wretched family, the triumphant landlord, and the dog catcher. I stood on the sidewalk, watching Abie shovelling shit in the front yard. “Stop,” I called and then softer, “Stop. He’s not going to give us Bobi’s furniture. Nothing. You can shovel the back and front yard. Stop. I won’t let you. Come,” I said and led him to our car loaded with plastic bags, all my writing, my books, my art on D’Arches Rives cold-pressed 200, and the photograph of Bobi and Zadi at their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the glass and frame still intact.
“I know people,” Abie said. “who’ll break his legs—asshole will live out his life in a wheel chair. It’s illegal what he’s doing. Paul will take him to court and the cops—”
Garth was seven when he hunted down his pursuers. “How’d you know how to fight?” I asked him, sliding my voice up and down the scale so I’d sound spontaneous. He thinks I’m interviewing him for my writing. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just knew.” I loved him for that.
“I promise,” I said, carefully adjusting my body. Men get spooked like horses or cats. But how will I know what to ask?”
This is what I learned: Garth’s mother is Pentecostal. He was slapped around and chain whipped, I saw the raised lightning scar from boiling water poured on his thigh, traced the tip of my index finger on its raised worn smoothness in our early days when I sucked on his frostbitten toes, his mother having turned him howling into the Ontario winter small-town cold. He ate chewed food from garbage cans, sisters spitting leftovers on the floor, mother shrieking holy roller, eat or I’m going to whup you, metal chain five feet long tearing into his young back thighs shoulders buttocks.
Sometimes we wrestle. “You think you got me,” I say and give him the Rock’s people’s elbow. I giggle when we wrestle, which doesn’t mean I’m enjoying it. But I know about Mankind and that he was really smart before he got all messed up from jumping off twelve foot scaffolds and China when she paraded her massive muscles in black leather before she had her face redone, including having her jaw broken and wired to reshape her square steroid jaw and the two Hart Brothers before one jumped to his death. I can’t say it was my scene. “But it’s all fake,” I’d say until Garth relayed their stories, how hard they trained, and the chances they took. Once on a wooden platform in the park near our house on Gossamer, Garth and his five-year old son lay on top of me, Garth holding my hands down so all I could do was move my head from side to side.
“Get off me, you creeps,” I yelled.
“Say ‘Uncle,’” Garth said while Talon hooted.
“No fucking way,” I said. “Same here,” Garth said and tightened his grip on my wrist.
“I can’t breathe,” I said, “Really, it’s enough.”
“Say it,” he said. So I spit in his face. His face shifted—the features rearranging themselves—the sky was summer blue one minute and the next, covered with a thick threatening wash, possibly Payne’s grey dark. He let go. “Come, Talon,” he said and they walked off.
“You’re lucky you’re alive,” he said later. In Guelph a gang of boys tied him to a willow tree; there weren’t many black families in Guelph back then. Maybe they threw stones at him or hit him with switches while he was there with the rope holding him. It took him two years to hunt those guys down. “You make sure there are no witnesses,” he told me, “know where they’re going to be and when, and you be there waiting in the shadows.” There were six or seven of them and he pummelled them into oblivion.
I can still hear the knocking—like a log being rammed against the door of a medieval hut. I opened the door. Would it have been any different if I hadn’t? If I had barricaded us in? I opened the door and a black boot wedged itself in—“Sheriff.” I was alone with Caroline. Lisa was at the Toronto French School. We had a car then—an Isuzu, that would later get towed when Caroline was in 9-south at Mt. Sinai, and Abie, in another one of his flamboyant moments, parked it in a tow-away zone.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” the landlord, a tanned leather man, said.
“But I didn’t know . . .”
“That you’re six months behind in the rent? You didn’t know?”
“But he said there were jewels, he was going to give you jewels from Africa.”
“Jewels, my ass! He showed me glass. Glass!”
Caroline stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“Can I phone him? I’ve just got to phone him, we’re all alone you see, and my daughter isn’t well.”
“Let her phone him,” the sheriff said.
“Can I use your phone? Please.”
“Let her use your phone,” the sheriff instructed when I said we didn’t have one and I had to go out to the pay phone even in the coldest day of winter to speak to André who was coaching me at Ron’s gym—he was living in a friend’s office gratis and we’d save pennies for the bus fare—I didn’t say that, about how I’d stand in the snow outside No Frills and gab and laugh on the phone with André and how talking to him made the seasons change.
“I have to give my daughter her medicine,” I said.
“What do you think we are—a god dammed pharmacy?”
“I have to take my meds,” Caroline said, “otherwise I’ll go into episode. You want me to phone Dr. Flak?”
Of all of us, Caroline is the best in emergencies.
“Come on, Mom,” she said already on her way upstairs. “We have to get some clothes.”
She got hangers. She went to Lisa’s closet and took out the one-of-a kind dress we had somehow managed to buy in Kensington Market for Lisa’s graduation. I think I got some of my clothes, some of Abie’s too. I forgot my jewelry box that held my grandfather’s watch.
I cannot write this without drinking one wine glass of French Rabbit Cabernet Sauvignon. I add President’s Choice orange juice into the pottery wine goblet I bought for fifty cents at the Cowan Street fair which is where Sabina, my best and long-legged German friend lives.
When Abie and I went back to get our things from the garage—for over a decade I could not use green plastic bags or abide by knocking and phones ringing—David Sheer said, “If you want the rest of your things, you’ll have to shovel your dogs’ shit.” You see, he also took the dogs. The sheriff and the dog pound at the door. Josie’s Pyrenees, Sara, and Zack, our Bull Mastiff. We were a Disney flick—the wretched family, the triumphant landlord, and the dog catcher. I stood on the sidewalk, watching Abie shovelling shit in the front yard. “Stop,” I called and then softer, “Stop. He’s not going to give us Bobi’s furniture. Nothing. You can shovel the back and front yard. Stop. I won’t let you. Come,” I said and led him to our car loaded with plastic bags, all my writing, my books, my art on D’Arches Rives cold-pressed 200, and the photograph of Bobi and Zadi at their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the glass and frame still intact.
“I know people,” Abie said. “who’ll break his legs—asshole will live out his life in a wheel chair. It’s illegal what he’s doing. Paul will take him to court and the cops—”
Garth was seven when he hunted down his pursuers. “How’d you know how to fight?” I asked him, sliding my voice up and down the scale so I’d sound spontaneous. He thinks I’m interviewing him for my writing. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just knew.” I loved him for that.
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