SEVEN
Performance Lab being a place of experimentation, halfway through theatre school I decided to take another risk. Wearing a nun’s habit, I stood at centre stage and recited text from a hard-core porn novel I had purchased at an XXX store. The book was so vile that I’d found myself throwing it across the room between chapters and gulping in air before resuming my reading during late night rehearsals. Being a feminist, I had not only avoided XXX stores like the plague, I had religiously stuck my middle finger out the bus window whenever I passed the stretch of porn shops on Granville Street. As a teenager I had sported a button proclaiming that Real Men Don’t Need Porn, quoted from Andrea Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women, my anti-porn bible, and had joined marches to shut down Red Hot Video. For all these reasons, I found it logical to plunge headfirst into some hard-core porn text in order to learn how to embrace, embody, and own language that went against every fibre of my being.
Taking a deep breath, I had walked right into one of the stores that offered peep shows, sex toys, and S&M gear and boasted an exhaustive selection of pornography. Confounded as to where to begin looking for the vilest thing in stock, I ended up explaining to the cashier, a scrawny, bald nerd in glasses, that I was looking for the most misogynistic thing he could think of.
“I’m talking teenage girls being raped who scream out ‘No’ but really mean ‘Yes.’ No pictures, just text,” I clarified.
“Ah, yes. I’ve got just the thing,” he murmured without a pause.
After disappearing into the back, he returned with the novel.
“We don’t put these out on the floor,” he said in a conspiratorial tone.
“Oh, right,” I winked back.
I read the first page on the spot. It introduced a Mother Superior character who ran a convent where men, under her enraptured supervision, raped and tortured the young nuns.
I swallowed hard.
“Perfect. I’ll take it.”
Pulling my wallet out, I stuttered that I was an acting student about to do a language code exercise that consisted of speaking text that went against your belief system.
He nodded. “Uh-huh.”
I placed the book at the bottom of my backpack, emerged from the store with a mix of pride and shame, and gave the finger to the Cecil strip club across the road before making my way down Granville.
For the second time since starting theatre school, I stood on the Performance Lab stage. Playing the Mother Superior in the habit borrowed from the costume room, I spoke in a style referred to as hyper-naturalism, about how my young nuns loved being gang-raped and tortured. I went into graphic, unbearable detail, every single word taken from the novel. In the background, my classmate Andy, sporting a Grim Reaper cloak, face fully covered by the hood, played Harry Dacre’s “A Bicycle Built for Two” on the piano. I wanted to see how far one could go, how much I could get into believing and revelling in every word I said while in front of an audience that wouldn’t judge me. I knew my experiment in owning the text was working when my peers started to plug their ears, heads dropped in horror. Faces frozen, eyes wide like saucers, the faculty sat in the back row, arms crossed.
Halfway through the piece, the director of the school told me to stop and get off the stage. Shocked that she’d taken over the student-run event, I defied her and continued. She again told me to stop. I kept going. On her third attempt, I paused, numb as an iceberg.
“I’m just trying something,” I explained.
She ordered me off again. Some of my peers protested that Performance Lab was a student-run safe space free of censorship and faculty control so us novices could try anything. No staff member had ever stopped a student while they were pushing boundaries on its stage. After some arguing, I told the director I would take my exit even though I disagreed with her demand.
I suspected that was the end of theatre school for me. Disgraced, I waited in the hallway. When the director came out flanked by the co-artistic director and the voice teacher, I debated with them for an hour. But the director stood by her actions, and I stood by my exercise. To my great relief, I wasn’t expelled.
The experiment, and the reaction it caused, taught me a valuable lesson. If my first foray into Performance Lab, telling the story of the coup through my five-year-old eyes, had been too personal, this attempt had gone too far in its grisly violence, shock as opposed to insight being its primary value. I still had to learn how to talk about violence onstage without it being too personal or so offensive that it turned people off instead of simply engaging them. It would be a lifelong search in my artistic journey, trying to find that balance, for I knew that the stories I wanted to explore would inevitably include violence. I had failed twice, the second effort being the most humiliating onstage experience of my life to that point, but also worth every minute, precisely because of the lesson learned that could not have been absorbed any other way.
Up until then, my biggest onstage catastrophe had been the time I peed my pants from laughing too hard at my cousin Gonzalo’s rendition of Revolutionary Cinderella. Ale and Lucho had been playing the stepsisters, Macarena the clock, the mouse, and the pumpkin, and I had been the evil stepmother. The pee had trickled all the way down the legs of my chair. Said performance had taken place at the rented preschool. We kids would put on shows that I wrote, directed, and acted in that featured Pinochet as mentally challenged, and Cinderella as a revolutionary who took up arms against the stepmother and the rest of the ruling class. My incontinence caused the adults to laugh so hard that my mother and Aunt La Huasa, whose nephews would appear as if by magic at that Buenos Aires rally years later, almost wet their pants as well.
Whether it was an evil stepmother in a slapstick comedy or the vile Mother Superior in a serious drama, what I knew thus far in my short acting life was that playing an oppressor was hard. It was a formidable challenge for me, to embody a torturer, a psychopath. But it wasn’t the first time I’d tried to put myself in those shoes. My first attempt at entering the mind, heart, and soul of a person who committed serious crimes against innocent people was a short story I had written at the age of sixteen, three years after I’d been raped.
In it, I visited the rapist in jail and heard him out. He asked for forgiveness after telling me how depressed, lonely, and fucked-up he’d always been, that all he’d ever wanted was love, and then I told him that I would try to get him out of jail so he could be free to pursue love without hurting people. It was a fantastical story in every sense of the word; the man who’d raped me was still at large and assaulting girls around Vancouver’s Lower Mainland when I wrote it in 1984.
Referred to as the Paper Bag Rapist because he covered his victims’ heads with a paper bag or with a piece of their own clothing, he was infamous, police sketches of his face appearing on the evening news in the early 1980s on a regular basis. During his reign of terror in the city and its suburbs, girls were instructed by their parents and teachers to walk in large groups, not even in twos or threes. His pattern was to attack a duo, sometimes even a trio, of girls at once. His youngest victims had been two eight-year-old girls, the oldest in their mid-teens. I’d been thirteen, my cousin Macarena twelve.
At the time of my Performance Lab disaster when I was twenty-four, the idea of writing a play about the rape hadn’t fully formed, for I was at a loss as to how it could be done. Infuriated by the depiction of rape on the big and small screens, where the victims were mere victims and the rapists one-dimensional monsters, where the rape was sexualized and therefore titillating, where the story revolved around the rapist as opposed to the victim, I still didn’t know how I would approach that story myself, how I would turn it into art, or why I would even want to. But presenting at the Lab what I had lived through by embodying the oppressor in a hard-core porn text was a first step, because I knew that if I were ever to create a play based on the rape, I would have to tackle every angle of that afternoon, which of course featured the rapist himself as a central figure—thou
gh in my theatrical take on the subject he’d be the antagonist, not the protagonist. Or would he still be the protagonist? In either case, I needed to inhabit his psyche and soul, to embrace him in all his complexity. If I was going to make art out of that experience, I would not only have to stare the horror in the face, I would also have to explore the beauty of it.
It happened on a sunny late April day in 1981, the first hot Sunday of the season. Ale and I were back from Bolivia, where we’d spent a year with Mami and my stepfather Bob, there to set up a safe house for MIRistas and to do border runs into Chile through the Atacama Desert. They had stayed behind while we returned to be with Papi, now married to Aunt Tita, Macarena and Gonzalo’s mother. On that Sunday, Tita was cleaning other people’s houses, Ale had ridden her banana-seat bike to her friend Madeline’s, my cousin Gonzalo was roller skating around the neighbourhood with his buddy Joel, my father was locked away in his upstairs bedroom working on his PhD, and Macarena and I had spent the morning slouching around the Salmo Court house in our crumpled jammies, sleep still in our eyes. Bored out of our skulls, we’d called my new best friend Amber, who lived in neighbouring Oyama Court, to see if she wanted to hang out, but she hadn’t answered.
Eventually, we decided to go for a stroll. A Colombian friend of the family had given me a skirt she’d brought from a trip back home. It was my first wraparound skirt, made of printed white cotton. Yet to be worn, I decided that this first hot, sunny day was the perfect day to sport it. I wore a white cotton button-up shirt to go with it and my new wedge Brazilian brown leather sandals. After some rambling in which nothing of interest happened (in other words, no cute boys were spotted), we made our way to my school grounds, a few minutes away from our house. Surrounded by forest, University Hill Secondary School was right next to the courts.
The week prior, I had attended a lunchtime presentation by Rape Relief. As the women talked about sexual assault, the causes of it—according to them, the patriarchy—and the notion that it was rarely about sex and almost always about power, all I could think was, “That will never happen to me.” I shook off the shudders after the talk was through and made my way down the hall to my humanities class, feeling sorry for those faceless rape victims, whoever they were, wherever they cowered. The following day, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer came to the school and issued yet another warning about the Paper Bag Rapist, who’d been attacking girls for three years now.
We arrived at the school grounds to find a soccer game about to begin in the field adjacent to the gym. One of the teams was Chilean. Thrilled to see our uncles, aunts, and cousins, we decided to stay awhile.
“Look! There’s Uncle Moustache and Uncle Groovy!” Macarena pointed to a couple of the men standing on the sidelines, cigarettes dangling from their mouths.
“Hmm. I guess they’re back from the sea,” I commented, in reference to their commercial salmon-fishing jobs, a smile forming at the sight of them.
By that time, eight years into exile, the Chileans who had not gone back to join the underground, as my mother, Bob, Aunt La Huasa, and so many others had done, had formed their own little sub-communities, delineated along political lines. There were the MIRista families, which included us, the Communist Party families (the majority), and the Socialist Party families. For those who had put solidarity work aside, the division happened along class lines. The soccer team was made up of the working-class Chileans, those who had come from the Santiago shantytowns, from Valparaíso, and from the northern mining region. Some of the dishy boys were there, and Macarena and I high-fived each other; the dullest afternoon ever had taken a turn for the better.
A cop car turned the corner and we spotted Chris and Mark, the two gorgeous young officers who patrolled the UBC area. Their windows were down, and we waved at each other as they made their way to the school parking lot. Before making our presence felt at the game, we decided to duck into the woods to apply Bonne Bell Lip Smacker and smoke the Benson & Hedges Light cigarette Macarena had stolen from her father, Boris.
We walked into Fairview trail, right off the parking lot. Its entrance faced the front doors of the school. The trail took you through a stretch of woods and spit you out onto University Boulevard, right where the number 10 bus stopped, the one we would take downtown to catch matinees at the Capitol Six on Granville and then grab some fries at McDonald’s on the corner of Smithe. Tommy, my first Canadian boyfriend, and I would always sit in the back row and hold hands. Our first movie together had been Arthur, featuring Liza Minnelli and Dudley Moore, which was followed by a debate wherein I criticized the movie’s message that money makes happiness and he exalted the wonders of the free market that made a millionaire of anyone who worked hard enough, regardless of class, race, or gender. “Ha!” I’d laughed in his face, fists on my waist. He’d walked me to the door of my house and, as usual, I’d made a fool of myself while trying to look sexy, falling through the door when I’d leaned up against it. Ale, Macarena, and Gonzalo had opened it a crack to spy on our goodbye. I’d landed on top of them, got up, closed the door behind me to drown out their laughing fit, and leaned again, hoping Tommy hadn’t noticed the glitch.
I’d had my eye on him since the first week of grade eight. He was in grade ten at the same school, lived in a mansion on Chancellor Boulevard, had blond hair, blue eyes, and a freckled face, and hung out with all the other WASPS from one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Canada. In short, he was everything I was not. Oblivious to my existence, months had passed and he had never once looked at me, no matter how many times I “bumped” into him in the halls, how close I sat to the bench during his basketball games, or how often I wore my tight jeans from the discount floor at Army & Navy.
Finally, after looking up his number in the white pages, I’d got my cousin Gonzalo to phone him and pretend to be a girl. For weeks, Gonzalo, calling himself Bo—”Just like Bo Derek”—in a falsetto, talked to Tommy while Ale, Macarena, and I hovered around the receiver, listening in, hands over our mouths to stifle the giggles. I would break into spontaneous dancing fits, kickball-changing my way around the carpet before returning to my post. After “Bo” quizzed him about his hobbies, favourite movies, and family history, Gonzalo asked him who he liked. Keeping his privacy intact, Tommy skirted the question. Then Gonzalo asked him if he was going around with anybody. Tommy answered no. Using hand signals, I directed Gonzalo to ask him if he liked me. Tommy said he had no idea who I was. So Gonzalo recited the speech I had prepared for him.
“Carmen is this really pretty, really intelligent, super-mature girl in grade eight. Everybody likes her. Like, all these neighbourhood boys and even university guys are after her. Frat boys chase her down the street. That bitch.”
“Oh,” was Tommy’s response.
The following day, Gonzalo urged me to call him myself.
“These white boys are scared, cousin. And he’s so white, he’s like ‘let’s go hunting’ white. So you gotta do all the work yourself, cuz.”
As I inserted my index finger into the rotary dial on the telephone, my knees shook so hard they knocked into each other.
“Hi, this is Carmen from grade eight,” I said.
“Oh.”
I dived right in.
“Wanna go around?”
There was a pause, then a succession of uhs that threatened to stretch into eternity, and then an utterance.
“Yes.”
“Okay,” I said, and hung up.
Gonzalo, Ale, and Macarena had surrounded the receiver and I bowled them over with my outburst of disco moves.
“He said YES! He said YES! He said YES!”
Grabbing Gonzalo by the shoulders, I shook him so hard while screaming in his face that it was a wonder I didn’t give him whiplash, what with his head flopping all over the place. I ran up and down the stairs, pounding the air with my fists, blasted Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” on the stereo, and danced like a maniac while continuing to yell, “He said YES!” Ale crossed her arms and r
olled her eyes, Gonzalo, in shock, stated the obvious—”Jesus, Carmencita, you’re fucking boy crazy!”—and Macarena lit up a cigarette and gave me a high-five, saying, “All right!”
She was a diminutive yet badass twelve-year-old who wore a T-shirt that proclaimed This body runs on beer and bullshit. Later, at the age of fifteen, she would buy the most popular white T-shirt of the time, worn by WHAM!’s George Michael in the “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” music video; Choose Life was printed on the front in massive black letters. Macarena bought it in extra large, crossing out the statement with a black marker once she got home. She sported this T-shirt while we elbowed our way through anti-abortionist crowds blocking the doors to a talk we attended by Henry Morgentaler, the renowned abortion doctor. Once, at the age of eight, Uncle Boris had sat her down and asked, in the sternest voice he could muster, “Macarena, have you been stealing my cigarettes?” to which she responded, “No, Papi. I quit a while back.” At twelve, she already wore heavy black eyeliner and loved to rock out to Led Zeppelin, the Who, and the Rolling Stones.
As for me, disco was the love of my dancing life. On weekends, we’d attend the Latino fundraisers, now not only for Chile but also for Nicaragua and El Salvador. There, we’d dance the cumbia we’d been born into, pump our left fists in the air and chant, “Que Viva Nicaragua Sandinista!,” and make Miguel Enríquez Rebel Youth Brigade speeches (the MIR’s youth group we were part of, the local chapter run by Boris), crossing from the Latino-exile world into the mainstream one like the bicultural children we were, so adept in both that we were monocultural in each.
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