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.
Friday, August 21, 2009
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.”
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