I remember once, I don’t know how old we were, sometime in the sixties, Billy and I went with Vinnie and a couple other people over to one of those little islands just off the Toronto waterfront, if you can call it that. We sat and smoked cigarettes on the ferry, and before going to Vinnie’s mother’s place, we all dropped in on a famous young poet, beautiful girl with round cheeks and Cleopatra eyes. She had a cottage among the cottages, maple leaves falling on the wet roof, and inside she had a pet rabbit, plump white guy with purplish-brownish spots, big ones. At least that’s what it looked like to me, a somewhat colour-blind guy.
We sat around outside her door and smoked some hash, nice greasy stuff, in a little silver pipe that Vinnie produced from a high pocket in his little leather vest. He had a girlfriend with him that I had never seen before, but this was not unusual, because Vinnie collected female friends like no one you ever knew back then, and later. I have talked to a lot of women who never went with Vinnie and just plain did not dig him. But there were a lot who did.
The rabbit stayed indoors while we young artists lolled on the leaves outdoors. There were probably elves and fauns all over the island. We could hear a Jefferson Airplane album being played inside someone’s window. I don’t remember what the dormouse said, either.
Billy was dressed all in colours and kind of flowing.
“Wearing women’s clothes is a kick,” he said.
That’s the way we all spoke in those days. They weren’t halcyon, but they were pretty good.
“I know what you are,” said the famous poet.
“I am not a cross-dresser,” Billy said. “You know, cross-dressers are people you read about in serious books.”
I had once in a while put on my mother’s slip when I was a schoolboy. Who hadn’t? But back then I wouldn’t even wear one of her shirts in public. Well, unless it was in a play or something.
Billy was wearing red pedal-pushers, now that he mentioned it, and a silky blouse. I didn’t know what he had on underneath, so I asked him, in a hashish kind of way.
“Nothing at all,” he said. “I am kind of neutral.”
So we took him over to Vinnie’s mother’s place to have some lettuce and bread and stuff for mid-afternoon lunch. The fall sun was doing its best to warm our bodies, and there were still a few persistent sails in the nearby water.
“You know,” I told Billy while we kicked our way through the leaves, “Vinnie turned his mother on to grass.”
“I didn’t know that,” he replied. “It was different in my case. My mother turned me on.”
“Phew, Billy.”
“And not just grass,” he said.
I thought about my own mother playing badminton in a small town among the mountains of British Columbia. She didn’t know there was any such thing as marijuana. She smoked cork-tip cigarettes, but she didn’t bother drinking wine or anything like that, and she wouldn’t have known what we were talking about if my brothers and I ever mentioned smoking boo.
When I was a young lout in the air force, my best friend and roommate was a cook’s helper named Rick, or at least that was what he encouraged people to call him because back then, in the mid-fifties, all the young male movie stars and young male hit-parade singers were named Rick or Ricky. Rick’s real name was something like Ronald or Donald.
Rick got me welcomed into a poker game that started every two weeks, right after five o’clock on payday. On payday I would get about ninety dollars to do with as I pleased, and Rick said he would pull a few strings and get my ninety dollars invited into the game. It was always in a low-level cook’s room in our barracks, a fat speckled guy who weighed way over the limit for an airman at the time, and never had a roommate, though it was the rule that everyone had a roommate. No one asked this guy whether he needed a person to occupy that other bed and put pin-ups in that other locker.
I was one of those guys that if I sat in would win the first two hands and then be penniless after a couple hours of drinking beer and handling pasteboard. There was a guy in another room who never played poker but had enough money to lend you some till next payday, but his interest rate had nothing to do with the national guidelines, and so even if I did manage to get a ride into town, I would try to get through a whole night on a couple glasses of beer. Rick usually broke even in the poker games, so he would buy me a beer, pay my share of the taxi ride from the beer parlour to the dance hall, usually sixty cents with four airmen in their civvies and just drunk enough to swagger a little in the dance hall, where the mysterious nurses and farmers’ daughters were.
But I brought Rick into the story because of two things. One I will deal with later, that he was one of the two other people who knew I might have killed someone. Right now I just wanted to say something about Kirk the bare-chested man tied to the mast, listening to the bladder-emptying music, oh so romantic, and aching to be home in the arms of his Penelope, Penny, pen.
I mean Rick and I were so much alike, both having come all the way from the same valley to suffer winters and flatness in Manitoba, I with my locker full of books, Rick with a typewriter he bought off a guy who was broke and thirsty. Outside our barracks window was a line with a grey sky above it and a white ground under it, and for a skyline we got a long freight train that had been motionless all day. Sometime during the middle of the dark night we would hear a distant heavy bumping, and in the morning the train would be gone, and the first T-33 jets were warming on the tarmac.
We were so alike. But we insisted on having different favourites. His favourite B-movie starlet was Debra Paget. She was the princess of the Nile — as soon as some guy with cloth around his head would sit cross-legged and play his flute, she would lift her arms and arch her brows, and sway her hips, and all her limbs were within gossamer leggings and no armings. She moved like a snake, but snakes don’t have big round breasts that don’t jiggle. Charlton Heston would try to keep his male desert dignity, but we knew he was going to pudding tonight, and as for Victor Mature? Those fat lips were never going to make it out of the slave quarters.
Okay, Debra could have been the queen of the drive-in theatre, but I was not the sort of guy to go with the favourite. When I was a kid I went alone to see Gene Autry try to look convincing on a horse, while all the other boys were making a nuisance of themselves in the Lawrence Theatre while Mr. Gough shone his flashlight down the rows and Roy Rogers squinted his Okie eyes on the screen.
So while I might rub myself while imagining Debra Paget, my juvenile snootiness was fed by the screen career of Faith Domergue, who seemed even more wanton, sweatier, with more curls of black hair hanging in her eyes. And wouldn’t you know it? I have to admit that I spent an hour trying to remember her name, and searching hopelessly for her with my favourite search engines on this very computer. And, well, to hell with that. She was just an example. Faithless hussy etc. In the middle of the night her name sprang out of the dark, and the next day I looked her up. She isn’t as good-looking as Debra, and she was always showing up in genre pictures. Her last movie was a Russian science-fiction adventure, and then she said to hell with it and lived as a woman with a past in Europe. In This Is My Love, 1954, the year I met Rick, she played a woman named Evelyn Myer. Later I thought that was pretty interesting. I probably won’t tell you why.
Because I wanted to bring up Kirk again. In the movies those days my guy was Kirk Douglas. I was an innocent movie-fan lad, didn’t know Kirk was Jewish, didn’t even know he was a Yugoslavian or whatever, for he was a gladiator and a Viking and a tortured artist. He talked with a strangle in his throat and a cleft in his pointy chin. He usually had bare legs and a sword in his hand.
Rick favoured Burt, who also did his share of sword-flailing, swinging from pirate-ship ropes, turning somersaults high in the air. He didn’t strangle in his throat, but he had to grope for his words. His head was thick and his body made of heavy muscle. But he used to make sudden nifty gestures with his
hands, and Rick copied them.
It was not until forty years later that I knew Burt was a lot better actor than Kirk. I’m not saying that Rick knew this. He might just have been differing with me because he liked me so much. Here is what Rick would do after all our booze was gone and the pubs were closed and we were stuck in Portage la Prairie late on a Saturday night. Rick would walk me to the high grass behind the dance hall, reach down into a dry clump, and come up with a wine bottle wrapped in butcher paper as they used to do it in those days in Manitoba. As his hand was still rising from the grass, his thumb and forefinger would cling to the first triangle of brown paper and lift, and a full bottle of wine would fall into his other hand. Probably just the nifty way Burt used to do it behind some small-town dance hall.
I volunteered to twist off the cap.
I always thought that Vinnie was one of those lissome prophetic young poets that stared silently in another direction and would never be capable of driving a car. He used to walk along in bell-bottom pants made of rayon or linen or some such thing, once even had a couple bells in his cuffs.
But one time he surprised me. This was when I was living in London, Ontario, and can you imagine London, Ontario, which you always have to say, though some of the locals called it London Ont, and while my painter friends were in London Ont, a lot of my poetry friends were in Toronto, and one of the nicest things that happened to me during those two years was that I got to see my poetry friends make contact with my painting friends.
Now, my painter friends were just a little less with it than my Toronto friends, which is kind of funny because I always thought my Toronto friends were not quite as with it as my Vancouver friends. I guess it is a matter of perspective, especially if you are situated like a spider, in the middle of your web. All I know is that in Toronto their thing called a “Village” was a matter for the fashion pages of the daily newspapers, somewhere to catch ambitious folksingers in Third World cloth.
But one day a carload of Toronto poet types came a hundred and fifty miles south or, as it is called in Ontario, west, to London Ont, a medium-sized city with a university full of young women who owned fur coats. There were many insurance companies in London Ont, a city that prided itself on its acres of buildings with no smokestacks. A lot of millionaires who owned smokestacks lived in London Ont. So did a lot of young painters who secretly knew what was in the art magazines in Toronto and New York, but who pretended to figure out their new ideas for contemporary art all by themselves. One of them built a working model of Maple Leaf Gardens, with real ice and beavers in the goal creases. Another one did one hundred paintings of Sir John A. Macdonald dressed as a lacrosse player.
Well, we went from studio to studio, looking at paintings in progress or paintings abandoned or paintings ruined because Ronny Martin had dropped in while they were being worked on. There were three cars, counting mine, and unlike the Toronto painters, we did not drink much in the way of beer or wine or spirits. We had a lot of coffee, a lot of it, and from time to time we got a sandwich or a greaseburger. There was a Chinese restaurant the local painters liked, but it was pretty punk, one of those places where egg foo young was a Chinese dish. We all stopped there and flashed our chopsticks.
But we also had a little weed. London Ont was a strange city on weed. It was more of a Labatt’s town, you know? Could have been named Ogygia Ont. So whereas we would flaunt it on the Toronto Islands, or sit in the park and puff like cute ragamuffins, there in London Ont even the painters didn’t want it stinking up their workspaces, and we kept it inside the November automobiles.
At one time we were in whoever’s car Vinnie was inexpertly driving, passing around two little pipes at once, negotiating the boring downtown streets, and who could see anything? The windows were steamed because it was almost winter outside and there were eight people inside the Plymouth, and the air inside was almost totally replaced by a cloud of assassin smoke. It wasn’t Vinnie but someone else in the front seat, someone in a yellow and black toque, who pointed out that in the semi-dark of early evening and in the boring street behind us there was a police car with a police person driving. He did not offer siren, nor did he commit blue and red flashing lights, but what the heck, Vinnie pulled over to the curb anyway.
Thus the constable behind the windshield could opt to pass us by in his slow quiet routine. He chose, instead, to park behind us. I don’t think any of us at the time remarked the wonder of finding two sequential parking spots in downtown London Ont on a weekend evening in November. We were, most of us, waving our hands through the smoke.
“Don’t open a window,” said a man who often made life-sized replicas of large African animals out of discarded food cans. “The odour will alert criminals and law-enforcement agents throughout the county.”
I was fond of artist friends who spoke in such language.
Vinnie, having heard of this tactic from some more experienced drivers and codebreakers, got out of the car and closed the driver’s door quickly. We saw him walk back and have a discussion with the young male officer who too had stepped into the night.
“Ohh shit,” said one of us.
“No kidding,” said another.
“We ought to all breathe in as hard as we can and thus deprive the officer of his evidence,” said the animal sculptor.
But then Vinnie was back inside the car, lickety-split, and turning our heads, some of us could see the policeman opening his own door.
“How long will we be behind bars?” I asked.
I may have mentioned that Vinnie was the coolest and hippest of all the young poets at the time. After the police car had pulled away he told us what its driver had said to him.
“He told me I’ve got a burned-out tail light.”
“I knew it,” said a Toronto poet who used to be a London Ont art student and carpenter.
“Yeah, I was never worried for a second,” said an equally young and outwardly calm builder of miniature rock rinks. “Us warriors in the army of art will never be taken down by some ordinary draftee with a stripe down the outside of his trousers.”
“You know, this exact same thing happened to me and a bunch of my friends in Toronto, and the cops had no idea that we had a famous New York poet in the car,” said someone, I don’t know who.
Danaë liked to sleep in her mattress room, sleep naked and with one sheet over her at the most. She liked the aroma that remained in layers in the air of the little room, some layers collapsing onto others, so that she might smell all the liquids that come from jouncing bodies and then wafts of perfume, especially her preferred night-blooming jasmine.
She used to call herself that, but now she thought it was a little juvenile. Not that she was opposed to youth, even juveniles. But juveniles were seldom the source of poems, for it was to be poems that Danaë made in that room with the mattress floor.
Not sex poems, not love poems even, not even lyrical poems. Not necessarily. She was not twining with naked men and women in that room in order to harvest images for her stanzas. Not at all. It was the production of fierce energy she sought, the clash of appetites that entered all her sense organs and gave her the power to make herself open to words when she would court them a day later or later that night, at the frugal desk occupying half her kitchen.
And not every tumble produced a poem. She didn’t care. When she brought a naked man into that room until she let his frail shell back out, she was focused on her hunger and the meal that would cause it to rise and fall until she was finished, lying on her back, her large hard muscles moving as she panted for breath, her eyes glinting in the darkened room. Her nipples were two centimetres long and pointed straight toward the ceiling. There was still a tired man’s face between her heroic thighs. Human sweat was perhaps beginning to evaporate.
Last Friday night she had nearly frightened Delsing to death. Even while the poor guy was trying to hang on to his self-image as some kind of corduroy
ed rake, she knew that he knew himself a Protestant sinner, the unhappiest kind. She could see the guilt in his eyes even as she sat on him and squirmed, heavy and angelic at the same time.
“What are you?” he asked, perhaps theatrically.
“Open. I’m taking you in.”
“Ohh.”
“You will never see your mother again.”
Then he could not reply because she was sitting on his bony heroic chin. A little of this, and then she flipped him over onto his face, then lay on top of him, breathing heavily into the nape of his neck.
He had told her half an hour ago that was his nickname, Nape. Because when he was in high school he had a habit of putting his hand inside his shirt.
“Delsing,” she said, “just do what I tell you to do.” And she flung him to and fro. When she was finished with him she licked him up and down, along his rib cage, in his armpit. He was her kitten.
My best friend, Bob Small, went home with Danaë a few times. Maybe more than a few. Could be more often than I did. What am I supposed to do? Watch over him? After the pub there I would be, waiting for Small to find his way to my Datsun, and he wouldn’t show up. Gone in the muscular woman’s car. She liked driving the legally blind boy to her apartment in Kitsilano, top half of a nice craftsman house, grey blue in colour on the outside, if you want to know. Liked driving him home with her, because she could encourage the blind boy to put his hand on her leg.
I asked Small about it.
“I am not prying into, so to speak, your personal life. Just if you are interested in boasting a little.”
“You are just thinking of my happiness. Is that it?”
“No question about it.”
But he wouldn’t tell me much. A little. I had to put together the miniscule detail he gave me and my memory, smoothened off somewhat by all these nights’ beer, to get a sense of what the Valkyrie did to the innocent. Apparently she did not throw him around as she did me. He said it was because he was a Catholic, and his confessor had taken off the rough edges. With me on that room-sized mattress she was noisy, grunting, breathing, slapping me and herself, enjoying my cries of pain. With Bobby she encouraged complete silence. She would put the blind boy flat on his back and come at him quietly. With her mothering tongue.
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