How Long Have You Been Evil? (erotic memoir)

Fall 1996

The deal is I work from nine to twelve and then I drive Talon to junior kindergarten on Dalemount near his mother’s apartment where she lives with her girlfriend Diane. Actually Diane has lived in the basement of this triplex for nine years; she has a steady job doing the books for a Jewish furrier on Spadina. But then Nelly got evicted from her coop in the east end, which was the place where Garth first fucked me—I had to get on all fours after he tried every other way and I didn’t really enjoy it all, bashing down the front door of my uterus as he was. Garth got a kick out of keeping me up to date on Nelly’s eviction proceedings. I’d listen for a bit feeling antsy like when your bladders bursting and you’re doing your Kegals like a deep sea diver going for a world’s record. Garth says there’s nothing he can’t talk about. Even death intrigues him. “What can you talk about,” he says to me at these times.

Still, evictions aside, which I never thought I’d be writing—that old what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger and that bit about making lemonade—I met Sabina at Kelly’s Gym near the Austin Terrace house, and she’s been with me longer than anyone else except Abie who really doesn’t count since it wasn’t by choice, not really, my reasons being circumstantial. There are so many Kelly’s gym stories—a TTC driver from Iran who got off on muscled females took a liking to me. But that’s a whole other story, except he gave me fifteen hundred dollars so I and the girls could eat and Abie could pay some bills. And still he requested more. “What are you? Some fucking pimp? Don’t you have any pride?” I yelled. Of course he didn’t know anything about Iqbal or our post training ritual of frozen yogurt at Dutch Dreams or how he’d take me to his flat on Vaughn Road and whip my thighs and ass. I have a high pain threshold, I guess I always did although my being a power-lifting body builder sure set the meter higher. “Kiss Mister Whip,” he’d say among other stupid lines. “No,” I’d say, “No way.” “No way? No way?” he’d answer. I had bruises shaped like zoo animals on my thighs and ass. Once I stood in front of pink changing room lockers and showed a Kelly’s woman my thighs. “Wow,” she said. After the Austin Terrace eviction when we were settled into the Deloraine house, I left Sabina a message: “By the way, I never told you Iqbal was impotent.”

Anyhow, Nelly with her new youth worker certificate and job in a group home for lesbian adolescents told Talon she was going to send him away to a foster home if his father didn’t take him for one full week every other week. She says she needs more time to work on her relationship with Diane whom she punched out last week; actually, she punched Diane and Diane punched her clear out, which Garth said served her right, except that Talon was sitting quietly on his cot, watching and crying. Last night Talon asked Garth “What’s foster mean?” and Garth who doesn’t believe in shielding his son from life and its sordid truths laid it bare as a tree in winter in three sentences while they were playing Duke Nuke ‘Em. I drive Talon to Dalemount which is around Bathurst and Lawrence and then I go east on Lawrence to Yonge to visit Caroline. Sometimes she refuses to see me and I breathe really shallow on my way back to the basement apartment because otherwise my heart might crack like the skin of ice on puddles; when I was a kid walking home from school in Montreal I used to watch the water seeping out as the cracks spread like spiders beneath my feet.

Questions spring out at me; I’m in my royal blue bathing suit in the shower with Talon who is also wearing a bathing suit; I’m sitting on our unmade queen-size bed eating Garth’s six alarm chili and I’m gulping down water while Garth and Talon are laughing away; Garth tries to airplane me at the park behind Seven Eleven but I fall to the ground and hold onto his ankle, then his shorts, “I’m going to pull down your shorts,” I say and he gives up because he’s not wearing anything underneath, I don’t know why. How come Talon is here with me and my girls are not?

I can’t figure it out. Maybe I’m evil. We had this impromptu skit, the girls and I: “How long have you been evil?” one and then the other would ask. “All my life,” I’d say and we’d burst into giggles. We did that from the time they were little on Bluffwood Drive. And then there was another one: “Women of the world take over/ cause if you don’t the world will come to an end/ men have had their chance.” I made that one up in the mouse house in Haliburton. I was listening to Ian and Sylvia singing “Women’s World” and I wanted to compose a song on the guitar my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday and which I still have. After everything it stays with me still. Caroline was four and a half; Josie, two and a bit when I brought them into the feminist fold. Almost two decades later, I kneel naked on an industrial grey carpet, being fucked from behind. "You love this, don't you?" he says. And I say, "Yes."