Hitchhiking ot Heaven

“I’d like to ask you a question,” Dr. Stein said, wiping his glasses with a white linen handkerchief.
Stein never asked questions other than the usual “why do you think you feel that way?” He was also fond of “uh huh.” So when he announced his intention of posing of a direct question, I perked up. “Janice,” he asked, “do you masturbate?”
I was in the midst of talking about my mother’s perverted interest in my brother’s bathroom habits when Dr. Stein cut in, which he never did—he’d sit back with his hands folded on his paunch and periodically offer me a Kleenex. He must have gotten a special deal. It was his thing. Some offer candies, share grass, proffer acid. I presented Stein with my most hellish thoughts and he thrust out boxes of Kleenex.
“I despise my mother.”
“Do you want a Kleenex?”
“I’m going to kill her tomorrow.”
“Oh? Sure you won’t take me up on a Kleenex?”
“I’m going to quarter her. Saw up her vital joints and incinerate them.”
“Listen. Take a Kleenex, damn it!”
When he asked me did I masturbate, I lifted my chin and looked squarely at him. “No,” I said.
“What! You! I don’t believe it! You’re embarrassed, perhaps? I’m a psychologist, I hear these things all the time. It’s a well-known fact—masturbation keeps the body healthy and the mind active. Now listen carefully. Tonight I want you to go home, choose a washcloth, a slightly rough one for friction, and find a comfortable spot. Do you have a lock on your bedroom?”
“No,” I said.
“Uh huh, no lock on the bedroom. No lock on the bedroom,” he said sliding his silver Parker pen between his thumb and index finger. “Well, is there a private place you could go to that has a lock?”
“I could use the bathroom on our floor—I share the bathroom with my sister and brother, but there are five bathrooms in the house, so I could use ours, I guess.”
“You could. Yes,” he paused. “You could certainly use that one. You’ve never . . . ?” He pushed his chair back and stood up.
You could tell masturbation was an issue he felt powerfully about. The way I did about the Bomb and Vietnam. He was a man of his convictions and I was determined to help him. I’ve never regretted it. A bird in the hand does not sing as sweetly as a hand in the bush.

When I returned for my Tuesday four-thirty session, Dr. Stein’s bald head was practically gleaming.
“Well, Janice,” he said leaning sharply forward and quickly realigning himself, “how did it go?”
“Fine, Dr. Stein, it went fine.” I wanted to tell him of my melodic bird in the bush and its symphonic glories. He was a nice man and I knew he must enjoy the classics. He had that pale pinched look.
“Can you tell me about it?” he asked. His falsetto betrayed him. Over the years I’ve received compliments for my good heart; compassion has always been my strong suit.
“It was as you said—masturbating sure does keep the body healthy and the mind active. I can see your point.”
Stein’s smooth cheeks flamed.
“And it’s a sure fire diet trick. I’d be sitting at the table with Daddy lecturing in his best debating voice and Mummy bobbing her head agreeing with him as always and Susan popping up and slapping Julian across the face and I’d get this urge. So I’d politely excuse myself which my mother understands—she’s got this thing about elimination—walk stiffly to the kitchen door and make a dash for the upstairs bathroom, you know, the one you suggested.”
Dr. Stein bobbed his head.
“My mother worried I had bladder trouble that was interfering with my appetite, because usually I have the biggest appetite in the family, I’m always asking for seconds and sneaking leftovers. So I just transferred over. You know what I mean.”
Stein gripped the Kleenex box which had become positively misshapen and rose half way out of his seat. His crotch was reaching enormous proportions and the sound was deafening. I was getting off track. True compassion is not easy. But I guess that’s when it really counts—when giving is the hardest. I decided to get right into the heat of the matter.
“I found a nice private place like you said, Dr. Stein. But I couldn’t find a rough washcloth. My mother has these monogrammed ones, kind of a wedding present, FLC—the L being her maiden name, you know, anyhow, we have this loufah, kind of a scrubbing mitt and so I lay on the floor which ordinarily is really cold but I can tell you this time it was hot and I had on my mother’s loofah. Nothing else. Except my glasses of course because I have my father’s eyesight and I was holding my mother’s two-way hand mirror with the magnifier on one side, just to make sure I was on target. And then I started rubbing, slowly at first—but it made me twitch, my whole body felt like one gigantic nervous tick, so I increased my tempo—allegretto, molce allegretto, vivace, forte, fortissimo.” (I had really taken to the whole thing, I was having a hard time focusing on anything else, like when you can’t tear some one away from one of those page-turners, but I wanted to sound cultured.) “I had an urge to tense my legs and point my toes. I listened to my body. I believe in the wisdom of the body, don’t you?”
“Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh, oh, yes, certainly.”
“But my calves and feet started cramping knots even Houdini couldn’t get out of. God was throwing obstacles in my way. I was determined. I continued rubbing even though my skin was scraped raw because of the loofah, you remember?”
Stein nodded. He was really focused.
“And suddenly I felt a tingle. I know everyone says tingle and I try to be original. I was raised to be a non-conformist, it’s a source of pride in my family. Tingle sounds kind of ordinary, don’t you think?”
“No, no, I don’t think so and sometimes you have to fall back on the ordinary to achieve extraordinary results.” Stein vigorously cleaned his glasses.
“Well that’s good, cause it did. Tingle. Like an EKG, this racy quiver growing higher and deeper, and I mean really deep, sort of spreading and smoldering. And then my whole body, even my eyeballs, lurched. It was like—”
“Yes?”
“It was like being on an elevator that reaches its floor and you feel the reaching and sinking in the pit of your stomach. I was rubbing so fast sparks were flying. I figured I was onto this great discovery. I mean who needs two stones? Anyhow, I was thinking with practise, I’d be positively flying. I have to say it stayed the same. Not that I’m complaining—it felt just fine. I was high on masturbation. Get that. A natural high.”

Stein was positively glowing. I could see he was a highly principled man who felt strongly about certain issues and I was becoming quite fond of him, imagining fireside Chanukahs together translating the classics into Freudian Lovelace jargon. And because of Dr. Stein’s insightful question, my response, his response to my response and my response to his, the ensuing decades have been most gratifying.

There have been some downsides. I got so used to coming on the floor that the bed just didn’t do it for me anymore. In our first apartment I asked Abie to put a board under the mattress—it would be good for my back, I said. But it wasn’t the same. And on the occasions I could entice Garth on to the floor, his four-hundred-pound frame took my breath away and his mountain of a belly stood between us. Over the years, I’ve tried to learn to love my bed and with effort I can. But I don’t want to mix work and pleasure. And so I continue to love the floor, any floor. I can wedge my way between the toilet and the door in the smallest bathroom or spread luxuriously out beside my bed. I have an ongoing challenge with myself, a yard stick for how I’m doing: I can come in ten seconds flat. Yoga doesn’t entice me. I think it’s sacrilegious.

Your Body is a Burning Furnace

Bernie is the first jock I’ve ever met. His tight white t-shirt is pressed and tucked in. At Nautilus One female members wearing assorted high-crotched leotards laugh and toss their heads back when they talk to him. I wear a black and brown imitation leopard suit with straps that criss-cross in the back. Young chicks and older chicks determined to look like the young chicks grind their way through an hour of aerobics while men on stair climbers and cycles look on. It’s one hell of a girlie show. In their aerobic highs, the women shower and talk over the sound of steaming water, while I work on the Nautilus equipment. One set, maximum intensity, twelve sets total. Bernie says I’m the strongest woman in the club. I miss him when he moves to another club, and Miriam, who wears dramatic eye make-up and black lace underwear and was married to an Israeli who beat her so now she lives in a bungalow in Downsview with her parents and her little girl, says we should visit the new club on Chesswood Drive.

I wear my skin-coloured shimmery tights and my leopard leotard under a one-piece steel-blue sweat suit cinched with a wide suede belt and my high cowboy boots, and I drive to Wingfield with the excitement of a Saturday night disco chick on the prowl. The ice on the streets shimmers in the winter sun. I slip every year. Most people walk with purpose, I walk and swear between steps—shit shit fuck shit fuck shit—until I reach the entrance. Swearing takes the edge off. This Wingfield is an impressive place: receptionist, courts, a lounge with round tables, a theatre-sized VCR screen. “I don’t know,” I say to Esther who is waiting for me, “I don’t know,” but I can’t help grinning.

I’m working on the bicep plateload, struggling through super slow reps and inching my way past pain. “C’mon, impress me. Keep coming. One more rep. Now. I’ll tell you when to stop. I want another rep or this workout is over. I’m walking away, do you hear?” Bernie says. I open my eyes wide wide and look up at him. I adore the man and his dialogue and I can feel a grin sneaking up. There’s a Nautilus rule: only the muscle being worked is allowed to respond. The face and body remain motionless. I stare hard at the metal bars in my hands. When “9 ½ Weeks” came out, I saw it six times and spent five-hundred dollars on lacy panties, bras, and garter belts at a bra boutique in a suburban strip mall on Leslie south of Cummer. “Look at her arms,” a customer said staring at my purple veins ripe as any junky’s. “You can have them too,” I said and proceeded to extol the virtues of bodybuilding and Bernie and Wingfield. The saleslady and customer didn’t say anything. I could feel the weight of their silence, but I was on my precontest high.

I don’t know when I started thinking about bodybuilding contests or even when I first heard about them. I worried Bernie might be getting bored counting all those reps. He had an image, he said, of me on stage, incredibly muscled and vascular. So one morning after my legs gave way from a leg press/leg extension superset, I told Bernie I was ready to compete. “You’re the only one who can help me,” I said, “who can make me work when I don’t want to and push me through pain. And the only one who can stop me from eating.” I bought little black books at Shopper’s Drug Mart in which Bernie would track the day’s exercises, weights, and reps, and at home I’d write little bits for him, logging my food intake, sliding in words about his grandeur as a coach, my doubts, goals, competitive longings and some home-grown conflict to ensnare my born-again Christian coach. Before each training session I hand him the book and he reads. Once I recorded eating twelve-hundred calories and he threw the book down and walked away. And another time, on a Saturday, I sat down in front of an open fridge and consumed over three-thousand calories in one sitting, I was that angry.

I have a soft-cover book that lists calories which I know by heart. You can call out any food and I know the calorie count. Bernie lets me eat five-hundred calories a day and I include lettuce, and cucumbers and celery and green peppers in the count. I eat tuna from the tin. I row on the Concept Two for two hours a day and for twenty minutes after each meal. One morning I visited another club, managed by a friend of Bernie’s, Fisher. “Fisher says you’re rowing all wrong,” Bernie told me the following day. “Oh yeah?” I said, because I’m proud of my rowing. I even have the Olympic Concept Two practice booklet beside me which I consult regularly. “Listen know-it-all, you’re rowing wrong. Fisher says you’re leaning way too far back and you’re going to hurt your back.” “So why didn’t he say anything?” “Because you’re mine,” Bernie says.

The contest is in November. In July I weigh a hundred and thirteen. On the first of August my bathroom scale with the yellow padding registers one hundred. Even on the third try. I drive to Wingfield with my window open and music blaring. “You look horrible,” Bernie says when I sit in front of his desk. “But one hundred—I reached our goal,” I say. “You still look horrible,” he says. “I know, I feel horrible,” I say and walk off. “Where you going?” he says. “To eat,” I say.

An audio tape is playing as I drive north on Bayview. “You are a furnace; you burn what you eat quickly and efficiently. You are a burning furnace. . . ” I pull over. Wow, I think, this tape is working—red hot pokers twist in my chest. I replay the tape. The pain increases so I drive a block and pull over for the next.

Behind white curtains at the York University Sports Clinic, I sit in my cotton cutt-offs and black sports bra. A jabbing pain sears along the side of and behind my left knee. “Maybe you’re not warming up properly and the load is too heavy,” the doctor says, telling me to take one month off training. “You’re at eight percent body fat,” he says and I say, “Really?” and I smile. Our family doctor says my prognosis is good; I’ve got two daughters and every incentive to get better. “Bodybuilding is not about health,” I say. She wants me to come in once a week for blood work. I tell her about my chest pains and the hypnosis tape. Dr. Pariser has been going to India every year for the past five years, so I figure she’d understand. She arranges a test involving an X-Ray and video. In Montreal, in the summer of ’72, I thought I was pissing blood. Dr. MacKinnon at the Royal Vic almost did an emergency exploratory. First, I had to pee standing up and on film. “I can’t pee standing up,” I said although I liked the idea of being in the movies. He was checking his schedule and asked, “By the way, what have you been eating the past few days?” “I have this thing about beets,” I said. The doctor shut his day timer and showed me to the door. “We almost did an emergency exploratory,” he said. “Why didn’t you mention your diet?” “You didn’t ask,” I said, which is a line Garth deals out decades later to which I say how could I ask if I didn’t know and he says that’s your problem isn’t it?

Dr. Pariser says I have a peptic ulcer, so I phone Abie who comes home with five bottles of cherry Maalox. He’s good when I’m sick. Same with the girls. Years later when I study transformational psychotherapy with an eastern bent, hypnosis, Time Line, and NLP and I'm spitting up platitudes, my Inner Critic rears up with the photo of my fluorescent insides, “Your body is a burning furnace . . .”

Pigs and Anarchists

I drive a temperamental Chrysler Caravan that refuses to start when it rains. “Did you prime the engine?” Abie asks when I call him on his private line. “Yes,” I say. “You pressed your foot on the gas?” “Yes.” “All the way down? And you released slowly?” “Yes,” I say again. “Primed and released. My fingers hurt from keeping the key turned.” “You’ll have to call the CAA,” he says. “Oh—” I say, my voice trailing off.

After supper I tell him the story. “You should have seen him─he was this old hippie wearing a baseball cap and he had long hair and a long flowing beard to here. ‘Every time it rains,’ I told him and he said, ‘Right on.’ He said he’s started every caravan in the city. ‘Every rainy day,’ he said. You have to change the plugs every three months. How come you didn’t tell me?”

“What’s the point?” Abie says and of course I know what he means. The front door handle has been broken for a year, door knobs are stuck, faucets drip or leak, staining sinks and ceilings, then there’s the dishwasher, air-conditioning, humidifier─the house rebelled from the moment we moved in. Maybe it’s just an old hippie or wino or both. I go around without my glasses so everything looks fine. My father is meticulous. Dates are sewn into his suit jackets and even his shoes. He shakes his head when he visits and I cry every time. He can’t talk to me, he tells my mother. Once he came for the weekend and sat in one of our two good rooms and interrogated me about Abie: what was he doing anyway and why didn’t he get a real job what with two children and all. Talking through tears constricts my throat. “Phil, Phil,” my mother said. Two days after they left my mother phoned. My father’s chest pains on the return flight. put him in intensive care. “Stress,” my mother said. It turned out the visit left him with a bout of severe indigestion. When he did have a heart attack two years later and was in a Miami hospital for a double bi-pass, I wasn’t there with him.

I don’t remember why. Maybe it was money. Or I was afraid to leave Abie alone with the girls. Everything would get better with money, we would thank him, he said. I think he changed the summer of ‘75 after working in the Don jail. A guard had half an ear bitten off, and once in the back of the van, a group of anarchists raised a raucous, screaming and stomping their feet. The cop turned on the heat, full blast. “What do you mean turned up the heat?” I said. “They turned up the heat all the way. On a record hot summer day.” Sometimes he makes things up to protect me or himself, because I know those pigs roughed up the anarchists. It’s an anarchist’s lot. Sometime during the summer, Abie started calling homosexuals fruits and queers and talking about voting conservative.

But then there are those times when we’re watching the National Geographic about married conservationists, and we’re sharing together and identifying like crazy. Abie collects National Geographic and I used to cut out pictures for my school projects from my father’s journals in our living room built-in bookshelves.

“He’s insane to drive off and leave her alone,” Abie says when the husband hops in his Land Rover and drives off.
“She’s not alone,” I said. “See, she’s with the film crew.”
“Oh, yes, you’re right,” Abie said and put his arm around me. There was a certain heaviness in the room, like in the country after a rain storm, when the air is stagnant and has substance, yet is still so new and fresh. I remember things like that.

On Writing Poetry

On Writing


behind my knee caps and under
my toes, my ancient back and the line
down my shins─slaving over a hot computer. How
is that different from the fifties when I walked
through Rockland Park to home-cooked
meals and then dashed off? All day,
I selected ingredients, added
spices, don’t ask for specifics, all I know is

I reached into the heart of my fridge, surprisingly
empty even on a Monday after a full weekend─I cut,
shredded, cooked, stirred, testing just a spoonful
for anything forgotten, not too late
to throw in like a stone cast sideways, one ripple
if lucky possibly two, imagery helps
on a hot cooking day. I burned my toes,
my soul aches, can’t even say

I created a banquet, that guests arrived
in limousines, the menu standard fare, clothes
still in the dryer, ready to fold. I hear words
as continuous sounds tumbling
round and round, I see love in the same
way, mildew in a dryer rotating
without heat. I’m very.

Very, very. So kiss me madly, letting me lie
here in the shade, nothing required, nothing
ventured and not a thing gained. I’ve been
cooking all day, no one complimented me on
inspired creations, asked for seconds, chatted
after desert. It’s been a long scorching
day at this writing stove and I have
to sleep. Won’t wait up for you.


Copyright Janice Colman 2009

Asses on Location

On Tuesday, this being Friday, after I put on my white cotton leggings, black leotard, and matching wool leg warmers, I checked out my ass in the sliding door mirror in our dressing room. I rate asses─at the gym and as I weave my way through life. My own is just embarking on its way to bright lights and stardom, while others were either born on location or have already worked their way up. There are five mirrors off our master bedroom: Abie has a closet with a sliding set of two, as do I. And then there’s the mirror taking up the wall space above the two sinks. We had a choice, one or two sinks, and I said without hesitation, “Two, of course.” The wall-to-wall carpet is chocolate brown and the bathroom tiles mottled brown and black like the dressing room counter, only the counter has no shine to it. Most of the walls in the house are beige. Except for Josie’s room which upon her request, she was a year and a half, is morning sun yellow. Her bathroom is like the midday sun on the hottest summer day on record. And Caroline’s room is the palest frailest pink, later she chooses wallpaper with rose flowers skimming on an amethyst backdrop.

On Tuesday I forgot both daughters’ library books and swore heartily though not happily all the way home. And Abie, glued to his toilet at seven in the morning started screaming for toilet paper, “Janice. Janice. There’s no toilet paper again. I’m going to speak to Sue. Can’t you do a simple thing like replacing toilet paper? Damn it, Janice.” Sue is our housekeeper, a doll-faced curly-haired twenty-one year old from Bath. When we found out she was moonlighting in the entertainment field, we told the girls not to use the blue bathroom toilet anymore. I went around spraying Lysol, a favourite from our Montreal Bourette days when my cousin’s wife’s sister’s boyfriend visited, and without notifying us, brought along his crabs as company. I spent the weekend following him around and spraying. So when Abie called out his itemized list which included syphilis, gonorrhoea, hepatitis B and C, chlamydia, genital warts, pelvic inflammatory disease, and a few others I've forgotten even with his tendency toward repetition, I cringed and locked the blue bathroom door from the outside. “Look under the sink,” I called from the main floor foyer and flexed my legs. With strong legs you can surmount anything. Which is one reason I suggest weights.

One summer weekend at a rented Haliburton country house, Abie slew seventeen mice. “Relax, relax, I got them all,” he called out, sliding down the window of his Tornado and honking his horn a few times for emphasis before he drove off for the week, and the next morning when I found mouse shit in the oatmeal, behind the toaster, and in my apron pockets, I shrieked. I was in the country, fearing and exultantly awaiting various hoodlums to attack an unguarded mother sheltering her young daughters with one amiable Golden Retriever and a bumbling four-month old Great Pyrenees, and I was grateful for my legs. (I never thought of punching until I met Garth at Strictly Fitness and he introduced me to his psycho boxer-friend Leslie from Guelph.) Anyhow, I think Rose at the Women’s Gym on Steeles and Laureleaf is catching on. Last week I dived into a conversation she was having with Myra. Rose was boasting about being the same weight since November 24, 1952, her wedding day: “I was bigger in the boobs, though. Larry was crazy about my boobs. I wasn’t so smart, not like my younger sister, but my mother wasn’t worried because I was big on top. And after the children, I lost weight on top and put it on here,” she said, patting her impressive rear. “And Larry doesn’t mind, he just grabs a little lower.” Which got me to thinking about my ankle weights.


I’m a sharing nymphomaniac. So I flexed my biceps, showed off my quads, and even did the old pec pose with that fancy two-thirds body twist. Rose laughed. My nose got red as it does when my heart becomes involved. The following week Rose paraded through her workout with two-pound velcro weights around her ankles. Muscles thrill me. You work and build them up. There’s nothing existential about muscle. Abie says I’m becoming a jock which I take as a compliment. So now I’m out boozing and wrestling with the best of them. The truth is I hate beer and generally I can’t stand the rest of them. I like staying home and getting stoned and telling jokes and laughing with my girls. Although lately I’ve been talking with the women in the sauna and listening to dialogue. Sometimes I get dressed up and go dancing with Abie. I wear black high-heeled boots, my black body suit under a white Egyptian cotton shirt with a wide silver studded cinch belt, a white and black beaded choker, matching earrings, dark brown eye-liner, and emerald green eye shadow. I leave my hair long. Abie raises his eyebrows when I walk downstairs. Once I paraded downstairs and slipped on the green shag carpet that hides missing or loose pieces of the parquet floor. There are some things you have no control over.