Ferris Wheel Fuck (Up) - edit one, erotic non-fiction

There are those restless sleeps when you search out a groove to slide into and you settle into one, but that’s not it, so you rummage around for another—we’re moving again. This time to Overbrooke just three blocks from Strictly Fitness. We looked at so many places, Garth and I.

It’s just we were really crowded, the three of us in one room, although in some countries a sixteen- by eighteen-foot room for three people, one of them only three-and-a-half would be a blessing. And even though Garth isn’t the noisiest lover, it’s kind of tough to fuck with a kid in the room. Garth’s lips are soft and deep and I know his heart is in his kisses, but he’s so quiet you wouldn’t even know he’s in the room. I listen for his hands on my skin. My hair feels like it’s held in the tightest tony tail when he gathers it up in his fist. He shudders when he comes. One place we checked out was smack over a pizza joint, but it was stark white gleaming with brand-new appliances and a Laundromat just downstairs. “Why don’t you drop by now, dear?” the agent said. “You sound just like the type of couple we’re looking for.” The agent was tanned rich sepia brown any artist would admire, her lips, finger and toe-nails jumping out ruby red.

“It was just taken,” she said, opening the door just a crack.
“But five minutes ago, we were just around the corner, actually, and you said—”
“Sorry, but someone came by with a deposit.”
“In five minutes, someone came by in five minutes?”
Garth: “Janice, Janice it’s OK.”
“No, no it’s not. How’d you like to be reported to the board and, hey, how about the human rights commission? I happen to know a contributor to Toronto Life—she’d pounce on this. Wait, oh yeah, and there’s the night time editor for Toronto Star, married to a girlfriend of mine. I think you chose to mess around with the wrong people this time. You’re Jewish, right? That’s what gets me.”
“How do you know I’m Jewish?”
“Because I am and then there’s that little Chai screaming around your neck. You should be ashamed, you know, didn’t Hitler teach you anything?”
“Did you see how she looked at us,” I said. “How would you describe it that look?”
“It’s that oh-I didn’t-know-you-weren’t-white look.”
“Which is, what is it? Really. Tell me.”
“You ask too many questions, you know that? It’s when the face takes on a confused look. And then it goes back to normal, whatever normal was for that person.”
“But what do you mean by confused? What happens to the features? You answer in such generalities.”
“I answer.”
“So tell me then.”
“It’s generally a sharp breath, a look of surprise, a few quick blinks, and then a quick regaining of composure. It’s very quick.”
“That’s what I want. That’s it. Thank you.
“You’re welcome.”
“I love you, you know that?” I rub his hair. I love the feel of his hair, it’s not just that it’s
soft; it’s that you can get your fingers into and roll around in it, his hair has this sweetness like a whispered kiss. I love him, even when I know it doesn’t make sense.

The Overbrooke flat is on the third floor. The old man and his wife live on the second floor. They own the whole place which was also home to Danny their middle son who is as fat as Garth; it just doesn’t suit him. Fat curdles on white skin. Garth loves hardcore descriptions while I grew up in a staunch politically correct household where I was summoned for even minor transgressions. At the close of one of my parents’ garlic-bread Communist parties, I was not yet twelve—I know this because Zadi was still alive and it’s not that in my fishbowl memory I can see him at the party that night; I just don’t have a physical sense of his being absent—I surveyed my father’s second cousin Harry Mayerovitch as he stood in the foyer under the hanging gold lantern, my father being proud of finishing touches. “Your resemblance to my father is uncanny,” I said. “Except you’re shorter.” “How could you say that?” my father said after the guests had gone and I was in the kitchen, sipping my bedtime milk like fine wine with the party staff environs in their black and white uniforms clearing and sorting. I did a thorough memory search. Which can take a while. Here I am at forty-eight and still I haven’t learned how to organize life and mind. Instead I go around moving furniture, sorting contents of rooms, cupboards, drawers. I’m the opposite of a squirrel, I guess. Still, I couldn’t find what I’d said until my father located it. Harry was short. I’d said that. And now I’m merrily flaunting the “f” word and sometimes I go all out and feature “ugly.” Not often and never with the fond gusto reserved for a hearty “Fuck!” There’s something cleansing about that word. People scatter off for a toxic cleansing, that up-your-colon power clean, when all they really need is an emphatic apple-a-day “Fuck!” Too many times and it’s like an enema—you feel empty afterward.

I would like to share all these thoughts with Garth or anyone for that matter. But I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations which are like flipping through a book, reading the last page first, then the opening paragraph, a bit in the middle and back—I think like a drunken choreographer—but Sabina’s never home, working for the TTC as she does and doling out her spare time to friends with their palms up like any old street beggar: any time, any time? Maybe my writing style is fueled by my backed-up words. 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.

Garth says there’s a carbon monoxide leak in the building and we should inform the basement tenant next to the boiler room. “I thought you don’t care about people—if you had your way, anyone crossing your path would drop like a mosquito blasted with Raid.” “I don’t care. They have a right to know. Simple as that. I’m not as complex as you think.” “So then— it’s your biblical sense of justice,” I say. Garth is convinced he should go into politics, and I tell him his mask would never hold up. Could he imagine himself shaking hands with all those detestable people and cooing at babies? “You may have a point there,” he says, although he has a thing for kids and babies. And they take to him. Babies smile back and kids attach themselves to his huge calves. At his discount dollar store, the old man called Garth a prince among men, which is understandable given Garth’s size and color.


Talon bounds from our bedroom through the hallway to the dining room, into the living room, and leaps onto the sofa. The old man below thumps on the ceiling. We buy Jamaican bread at the supermarket on Wilmington. Garth checks plantains and lets them ripen until they’re black. Then he fries them. “How can you eat this way?” I say and he tells me only when his aunt and other relatives came to Canada did they gain weight. It’s not the oil, he says, but all the enriched foods and the preservatives. Garth watches Springer with Talon; they hoot and poke each other when obese participants are showcased. I never knew who Springer was before I met Garth. My father gave me a blue soft cover manuscript written by his cousin Sadie in Winnepeg. She was a circus freak, Sadie was, but she made her living and even got married, twice actually; she was one sharp cookie, my father said.

Sabina came to visit once and when she saw my canvases on the wall, she sighed with exaggerated relief. “At last, some color!” she said. “I get the walls,” I told her. “And you have a plant,” she said. Every day I pick up Talon from Dalemount. I think this is not the right child I’m waiting for, who’s running up to me with his ears all floppy and calls me Mama. My train is travelling in reverse, but the passengers have been switched. Or maybe I’m in reverse on a parallel track.

Today she says she’ll see me. She’s wearing a brown checkered flannel dress. She has the same one in olive green. The dress hangs on her. She has a canopy bed and a matching high bureau. Also a long dresser with eight drawers. Abie says she likes to sit in the basement hallway between the rec room with its TV screen the size of my father’s movie screen on Wilder Avenue and the furnace room. She sits surrounded by open books. My mind runs to Garth when I’m with her and back to her when I’m with Garth. I watched a race once, with Abie. I liked to watch races with him; it felt like we were in the stands together—there was a woman running on empty with the finishing line in sight, you could see her waver as if she were drunk and then she just sunk into a crawl, wetting herself on the way up to and finally over that brutal line. Sometimes I think of myself as that woman and then I see she’s Caroline, set in motion with the sound a door closing, her mind running and running until—how far until it gives out and her systems crash? Her dress hung on her like a cast-down frock.

“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 like Bell long-distance cards—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals 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; we’re on the deal Ferris wheel again.