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.