Edit 2, with some new shit slipped in: literary erotica

“Gross,” Talon’s laughing so hard, he’s clutching his ribs.
“What’s he laughing at?” I say.
“Just a video. Have a look,” Garth says, his one seeing eye taking in my builder’s dark-grey-with-diagonal-black-lines spandex I wear to show off my quads and hams.
“Can’t,” I say, “Going to Strictly to train Barbara.” I coach three women at Strictly now—an Italian with straight jet black hair from World’s Gym who’s fed up with fitness-style instructors and wants to try hardcore, although hardcore core isn’t something you try like sampling a new dish, you move to the country, damn it, and you live like they live, eat what they eat; Alla, who bares her tanned midriff in a new outfit with that stylized “U” symbol on it every time she trains and worries because she doesn’t get off on her husband anymore although he’s a handsome Moroccan Jew and makes a pile of cash in his import/export business; and Gloria, a fashionably skinny, past or in her prime however you look at it, ex-hippie who’s made her fortune in the body bag business and setting up high-class abortion clinics in the Caribbean for women from South American countries, who find themselves in the family way as my Bobi would say.

“Just one look, it’ll take one second,” Garth says while Talon echoes and I can’t refuse, we’re still in our beginnings.
“So? I don’t see anything . . . What the hell is that!” I say as I stare at a puckered-up out of focus hole. Talon and Garth are out of control laughing and slapping their thighs.
“Wait,” Garth manages.

I shift from one foot to another, and then the focus becomes sharper and what I’m watching as Talon absolutely loses it and Garth does too, alongside, and he never loses it, is the rear of a woman bending over and her ass hole all puckered up and opening wider and wider until it’s the size of a melon, not a piddle of a melon, but a ripe, full-size grown one.

“Disgusting,” Talon’s yelling and skipping around.
“You two are crazy out of your minds,” I say. “And you . . .” I shake my head at Garth, but I’m grinning.
“No way is he going to be like his mom now,” Garth says.


“Garth! In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”
“But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”
“I know the route, Janice.”
“Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”
“You won’t have much to pack this time.”

So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”
“Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?

In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards of variable denominations in variety stores and supermarkets—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals just love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet. It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I, a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK—at the Expo 67 fairgrounds Abie pulled me over to the Spider. “I hate rides.” I said. “C’mon. You’ll like it, you’ll see. C’mon. Trust me.” “I hate it. I hate.” I yelled from the moment we started spinning. Abie’s airplane glasses flew off. “Hold onto the bar. It’s out of control!” he screamed, pressing me into the seat with his left arm. Looking back, deals had their seasons as predictable as the Ferris Wheel, but it living through them was like riding on the Spider, sure enough.

And now Garth is working on a deal. He says it’s not a bank trading program like the one Abie was involved in, the one he lost two point five million in although he insists it was bad luck, the money being placed into an American account whose holder keeled and slam-bam kicked the bucket one spring day, the wife and step-son moving in and staking their claim. Garth says his deal is different—it’s a fund he explains, investors go in, the fund grows, and after a specified time, investors get their outlay back plus a pre-set portion of the interest. Simple and legit. Garth puts an ad in the Globe and Mail. Some guy from Sudbury has one hundred thousand, a widow from Toronto has only fifty and will that be sufficient she asks. Garth gets faxes. Contracts have to be rewritten; the wording in one clause is not acceptable to the British lawyer. The British lawyer is satisfied but the American attorney is not. “Garth,” I say my voice like sugar and sex, “are you sure this is not a bank trading scam? They’re cracking down you know. I don’t want to sound negative.” “Then don’t,” he says. “Why say ‘I don’t mean to’ and then go ahead?” I don’t know the lingo, but I hear the calls and read the contracts. And then I hear about delays, new signatures needed, clauses requiring alteration, and I know. I know the way I feel Garth’s cock slamming the back of my cunt when I lie under him, my legs cradling his neck, same as I lie on him and kiss his lips that are so miraculously smooth and soft and the way I know the span of his forehead. I just know. And I can’t tell him.

Garth doesn’t have a job. We didn’t talk much about how he was going to make money when we started fucking. I knew about his neighbor in Guelph who sold stocks and bonds and moved to Florida to start a hedge fund. And that he planned to make his million before he was thirty. It’s his destiny, he says. He figures if he works smart, he could get by working four hours a day at first leading up to maybe two hours one day a week; he says when he was a bouncer those nine to fivers would head on down to their local bars every weekend and blow their paycheck. Dirt bags wear shirts with white and blue collars, at the bar you can’t tell them apart. “Reminds me of Clearwater—you know that old quarry for nudists on the way to Freelton. Steel workers and university professors, you can’t tell one cock from the other.” I know I’m losing him, Garth being one of those linear types. I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations—I think like a drunken choreographer, which she appreciates. Maybe my style is impacted by my backlog of filed thoughts. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition. So I quickly slide in with “the thing is Garth, sometimes you have to work for what you want” even though I know the door on his face is going to slam shut and I’ll be left huddling in the cold without him.

Garth says people are afraid of being alone. He says you come into this world alone and you die the same way, so you better get used to it. “But you get angry when I visit Caroline every day.” I say. He says he didn’t visit Talon as much as I visit Caroline, even when he was a baby. “She’s sick,” I say. “And if you could have seen Talon every day, wouldn’t you have? And if I could have Caroline here—why isn’t she here? Tell me why she isn’t here with me!” On Nina Street Garth would talk me upright and back into the ring whenever grief delivered a packed ab punch. Now he just watches from the sidelines.

The old widow and the Sudbury man are threatening to sue. Garth isn’t afraid. He says he’ll get off with paying seventy-five dollars a month; he just has to show the courts he’s on a repayment schedule. His forehead remains as smooth as ever. If someone wants to gamble one-hundred thousand that’s not his business. He feels sorry for the old widow. I can’t remember how Garth got to keep one hundred thousand. I’m like the old man in Moonstruck in the closing kitchen scene when Cher and Nicholas Cage are sitting around the breakfast table and Cher’s fiancé returns from visiting his Mama in Italy: “I’m so confused,” the old man says.

So Garth hops on a plane to Orlando and hands this American scammer named Jim Steel one hundred K cash. “What? You did what!” I said when Garth phoned. “Well, he had a suitcase with a live one hundred thousand.” “It was fake, Garth. Who carries around that kind of money and shows it to a stranger? The man’s a southern cracker for fuck’s sake. What’s he doing showing this huge black man cash?” Turns out Garth spoke maybe five or six times to an agent named Jack Tabac, and Jack passed on information about an owner of a thriving import-export company who was wanting to retire. For one hundred K, Jim would teach him the ropes and then move into the background, leaving Garth to manage the day to day. Of course Mr. Steel skipped town. Garth left messages about personally hunting him down and calling out the FBI hounds, which Jim picked up, subsequently setting up a meeting with Garth in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side where, coming face to face with Garth’s hulking angry frame, he thrust out eight of the one hundred thousand and promptly disappeared. I never said “what were you thinking?” to Garth who had gotten such a laugh about Abie forking over that two point five million and his dog loyalty to shady deals. And now here is Garth pointing his finger at fat people, gullible investors, and charlatans.

I’m in the kitchen cooking on a gas stove. There’s something sexy about gas stoves, something gesmucked. More than delicious, gesmucked has to do with smells that get the mouth watering, the eagerness of piercing food and holding it in place, the arc of fork to mouth, the satisfying roll of food in the mouth, and discovery of flavors. It has to do with texture. I’m thinking about geshmuked which I learned from Abie and how it’s one of those fulfilling all-purpose words and how it’s a zen word sweeping you into the moment, when I hear a syncopated long-distance ring. My father asks me about the girls. I tell him I miss Caroline. He asks about Lisa. I tell him she’s living in the east part of Toronto, she has roommates, she’s working in a call centre and she answers the phone in English and French. She’s had another poem published. Then I tell him I’m working on a new canvas. He asks where I paint and I say in the kitchen. I search for another topic. “I want to get married, Dad,” I say looking at my canvas­­—a female without eyes, a red open mouth, naked breasts nipples generous and rouged, a vertical crocodile in place of a skirt and a butterfly wing as a wedding veil. To the left side, an old-fashioned face, a cherub with an ancient knowing visage. “I want to marry Garth,” I say. And my own father says something about Cultural Differences. “What do you mean, cultural differences?” I say. “There were cultural differences with Abie. Garth was born here. What do you mean?” He repeats. “Cultural differences, that’s what.” And then he pulls out his sharp shooter and lays it on the table. “If that’s the action you take, I’ll have to rethink my will.” I stand quite still in this kitchen with its old gas stove and grey linoleum. My eyes dart through the diner-like opening in the wall with Garth and Talon head-butting on the other side. I’m the short-order cook. “Enemies in thy midst,” is all Garth says and walks away. I phone my father. “I can’t take your calls, anymore,” I say. “I can’t believe you told him. How could you misconstrue my words like that? That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant. How have we raised you?” “‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ Dad,” I say.

I’m an instigator.