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.

Dark Sides and Butter Tarts

When I saw Garth for the first time, he was wearing navy blue sweats, top and bottom, and his skin was copper, sepia, and burnt umber all in one. He had one of those flat top do’s you could balance a plate on. I thought what the fuck is a man like that doing in a place like this—although it was a builder’s gym and he sure as hell belonged there. I was forty-eight, full of muscle and heat, flaunting my quads, sixteen-inch biceps, and my high-shelf builder’s ass. It was one of those pure contact moments I’ll always remember. I never saw an aura before I met Garth. It was like an angel’s halo around his entire frame even though he was no angel. But then neither was I.

He was my lighthouse, standing there tall as night and strong as the sun. In that entire room at six p.m. building time at Strictly’s Gym when builders came awake and strutted their stuff, worked and groaned beneath the weight of the world, in that warehouse space filled with pumped body parts, the man who stood apart was the presence looking on in the corner.
“Are you a pro builder?” Garth asked, taking five strides towards me.
“No.
“How long have you been training?”
“A decade, hardcore.”
“How old are you?”
“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to ask a woman her age? I’m ancient,” I said, as if I were trying on the word for the first time, something right off the rack, and there I was twirling around in it, amazed at its fit.
“Thirty-eight?”
“Told you—I’m ancient.” I was a cool builder chick wearing red and black striped spandex tights and I wanted this towering man. Funny thing was I was there checking out a new gym, preening my muscles and cheating on my regular training partner, Nick, an Italian kid studying opera at the University of Toronto. Nick wanted to be a famous pop singer able to scale the high notes. He was haunted by soaring vocals and would randomly shriek out an elusive note after a set of squats or a powerful deadlift. He had the body of a Clydesdale horse. Or so I thought until I spied Garth.
“I’m just about to go on the stair master,” I told Garth at the end of our first meeting. “Getting ready for a show.”
“Well, it was nice,” he said and walked away.
Months later, Garth confided he had stood for one hour in the snow and the cold, watching me through the gym’s glass wall. There’s a greenhouse in the centre of Sherbourne Street Park. It’s not the greatest part of town, but there’s an oasis in that hothouse. I think Garth was peering in and I was his oasis.

I didn't know about Tim Horton's until I met Garth. It was around alright, just like A & W was in Montreal when I tasted root beer for the first time with Abie. So one night after an intense leg workout, Garth poured himself in my leased silver Mazda and directed me (turn right, turn left here, get ready for a right) to Tim Horton's. I ordered two large cartons of milk because I couldn’t find anything else with protein. We were sitting at an orange table with attached swivel chairs and he leaned forward, his upper torso dwarfing the table.
“What?” I said.
“I have a dark side,” he said.
“So?”
“I’m just telling you. I thought you should know,” he said and bit into his butter tart.
I didn’t say anything about the butter tart.spandex