Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  “Yup,” Adrian said. “You gonna go?”

  No shit, Sherlock.

  CXCI

  On Friday morning I visited June at the Sisters Who Gave Good Hope. She didn’t seem to remember anything about our lessthan-perfect trip to Three Rivers, and was happy to see me, as usual. Still I felt guilty, and to make up for it I brought her a plastic overnight bag in the shape of Minnie’s Mouse’s head and two carob bars to ruin her cafeteria lunch. We played a gazillion games of ping-pong, until we lost all the balls and June was so winded she had to sit down. June wanted to go to a movie but I couldn’t take her. After lying about Three Rivers, General Dawes had given orders to the nurses that I wasn’t allowed to take June outside anymore that year.

  That was okay by me.

  The weather sucked anyway.

  CXCII

  That afternoon I went to Pete’s arraignment at the courthouse. I didn’t get to speak to him. He was brought in handcuffs into the courtroom through a side door. He was whisked out again as soon as the whole thing was over. I sat in the back while Pete was arraigned. The judge set his court date and denied bail. The judge decided that there was enough evidence to warrant a trial, and likely a pretty good one at that. I watched Pete’s back the whole while. He had let his black hair grow even longer than before and had it tied up in a ponytail. He was also wearing a blue suit — most likely provided free of charge by whatever jail he was currently in; it looked kind of incongruous with the long hair. Despite the fact that he was handcuffed and heavily guarded, Pete didn’t look at all upset, at least what I could see of him. He stood up straight and tall, kept his head up. I wanted to shout to him to let him know I was there, but I was afraid that the bailiff would kick me out if I did that. So instead I just sat there and watched and waited. Everyone in the courtroom that afternoon knew that this was it for Pete. He was going away for a long, long, long, long time.

  I also knew that Pete and I would probably never see each other again. In my head I was repeating over and over to myself, “Turn around and look at me, Pete. Just turn the fuck around!”

  After the arraignment was over and the judge had come down off the bench, just before they led Pete out the side door and back into whatever lovely little designer cell he was occupying this month, he did turn his head around. I was standing now, we all were, but Pete picked me easily out of the crowd, almost as if he knew I’d be there. He smiled, winked at me, and silently mouthed my name. My Sally Ann name.

  Annie, Pete said.

  I shook my head, smiled ruefully back, and then Pete was gone, quicker than you could say Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

  CXCIII

  Christmastime at the Salvation Army Treatment Centre is the worst time of the year for guys heading back out onto the street. Some Christmases more than half the guys disappear between Christmas Eve when the counsellors go home and when they come back the day after Boxing Day. One Christmas all the guys went but two; there was some kind of secret rally on the floor at midnight on Christmas Eve and they all made the decision together. Most of them had been using already, but it must have been an awesome sight: twenty-two jonesing drug addicts hitting the streets of the city at the same time. I heard from one of the counsellors that over half of them ended up in jail, one of them overdosed, and two more — the lucky ones — ended up back in the treatment centre a few weeks later. When the counsellors came in after the mass exodus they could have thrown a brick down the hall on the dormitory floor and not hit anybody. The two guys that stayed showed up at group therapy amidst a host of concerned counsellors. One of them broke down halfway through group and started crying. He had once been married, and he told them how he and his wife had given his daughter a Scottish terrier puppy for Christmas. He got jealous of all the attention she gave it. A few days later he got stoned, took the puppy downstairs to their basement, crushed its skull with the broad side of a shovel, and buried it out back in the neighbour’s yard. He told his daughter the dog had run away. Even with all the things they’d heard — all the scams pulled, all the old ladies robbed, all the people killed — the counsellors had a tough time getting over this one.

  “Can you believe it?” one of them said to me later. “A defenceless little puppy! That may be the worst thing I’ve heard since I started here.”

  I could have reminded him of the Christmas the year before, when an addict admitted that he had gone on the nod in his bed on Christmas Day with a needle still stuck in his arm and his baby daughter asleep on his chest. He rolled over in his sleep. Or the baby did. Whichever. Somehow the baby got poked, and plunged with just enough left-over heroin to put her on the nod for good.

  Needless to say, Christmas was never full of joy and good cheer at the Sally Ann Cocaine Corral.

  CXCIV

  Christmas was never a particularly good time for me either. Because I did the gay bars on Christmas Day, hunting for stories and losers who know that they are losers, I always asked for Christmas and Boxing Day off. To make up for it, I worked Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. I had no family to go to, so I didn’t mind being at the centre then. I did what I could to stop the guys from going out, and sometimes even managed to talk one or two of them into staying until their counsellor came in after the holidays. More often than not I was a doorman. I played Trivial Pursuit in the smoking lounge with the guys who stayed, or watched movies on the acceptable list, or I listened to some addict play guitar. There was always a musician or two in the centre, just as there was always a writer or two. All addicts want to be something they’re not. The bigger the addict, the more passionate they are about whatever it is they want to do. If I had a dime for every time I heard a wannabe artist sitting in the smoking lounge, telling me they would kill themselves if they didn’t publish the great North American novel, or write another “Stairway To Heaven” or paint the Mona Lisa, I would be able to afford a da Vinci myself, or serial rights to a bestselling book. I never heard that a single one of them ever did do any of these things when they got out. Even the ones who stayed clean and sober.

  Christmas of the year I met June was worse than usual. Christmas Eve I was busy running around all night while guys headed out after curfew one after the other, or just didn’t return. Piss tests were automatic on holiday weekends and celebrations, so I was dealing with that too. I ran up stairs and down, in between trying to remember how many shekels of silver Judas betrayed Jesus for (thirty) or who the forty-second president of the United States was (Bill Clinton). I let guys in, made them take a piss in the pill bottle, put that in the refrigerator, and ran back upstairs to join the game. Two guys got in a fist fight over ping-pong, if you can fucking believe it. I had to break that up (“Tomorrow”) and run downstairs to write them up, whiz-bang, in the log book. Some woman mistook the Treatment Line for a suicide hotline; I had to talk her out of taking a bottle of sleeping pills. By the time Adrian came in at three o’clock, four guys had gone awol, the suicidal woman had hung up on me, and I had spilled a half-bottle of some guy’s warm yellow piss on my shirt and jeans because I didn’t screw the cap on tightly enough. I was exhausted.

  “Merry Christmas,” Adrian said, taking off his coat and

  gloves in the office. “Fuck you too,” I said, putting mine on. “I’ll have to write that up in the log, Annie,” Adrian told me

  gravely.

  “You write that up,” I said, “and I’ll come back in here in an hour and take a picture of you with your ass asleep on the cot in the exercise room and your dick in your hand.”

  “Asshole,” said Adrian. “Merry Christmas,” I said, and left.

  CXCV

  Excerpted from

  The Scar: The Three Rivers Stories

  by Cameron Dodds

  Christmas on Big Panty Lane was never the greatest of shakes. About a week before, my mother would put up the tree in one corner of the living room and decorate our little house with strings of leftover garland. June always got too excited and ended up breaking a few dozen coloured
ornaments, a comically surprised look on her face each time she dropped one. Our mother didn’t seem to mind. During Christmas she managed to throw off her crippling moods and marshal herself for the sake of us kids. After she died, my father ignored the approach of the holiday, and only on Christmas Eve let himself loose, with more whiskey-and-waters than usual, singing drunken Christmas carols at the top of his lungs while June and I were trying to sleep. One Christmas Eve he fell into the Christmas tree. There he was, lying on the floor, wrestling with the fully decorated tree while I shouted at him. June, not understanding, stood there and laughed.

  “Daddy fell down!” she screamed in delight. “Daddy fell down!”

  “I’ll knock you down, June,” he said, climbing unsteadily to his feet with icicles clinging to his clothes and his hair, “if you don’t shut your goddamned trap.”

  These are the Christmases I remember. These are the Christmases June thankfully doesn’t.

  CXCVI

  I’m not good with hangovers. I’ve tried all the miracle cures — drinking lots of water, taking aspirin before going to bed, not mixing types of alcohol, drinking hard liquor straight or mixed with water and avoiding sodas, especially Coke or Pepsi. I’ve even tried, on the advice of a drunken friend, downing a raw egg before I stumbled into bed for the night. It came back up ten minutes later and added soiled and offensive-smelling sheets to the typical hangover misery. The only hangover cure I’ve found that works with absolute certainty is not drinking the night before — a charmless prospect, even for a guy who works at a drug and alcohol treatment centre. The second-best hangover cure is going back out and drinking the next day. So, on Christmas Day, having drunk three quarters of a bottle of Scotch after I got home from work the night before, I got up late in the afternoon, took three aspirin, brushed my teeth, dressed, and headed to the gay bars for my yearly round of story-gathering and encounters with losers who don’t know they are losers.

  The first two bars I tried were closed. The third, a disco bar with practically no one in it, was open. I ordered a double whiskey and water from the lesbian bartender, downed half of it and waited for the hangover to abate. I might have even left to find some place more exciting, if I hadn’t at that moment noticed a man who, I was to discover, was straight out of Darrel Greene’s miserable past.

  Coincidence is God’s way of maintaining his anonymity.

  So say the sages at the Salvation Army Treatment Centre.

  The fucking retards.

  CXCVII

  Perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed him at all if he hadn’t kept staring at me. There were maybe a dozen people in the bar — half of them women, the other half at death’s door. This guy and I were the only men in the place who didn’t remember the sixties and the summer of love. I sat at the bar, and he was leaning against the wall on the other side of the dance floor where I couldn’t see him very well. Still I knew he was young, only a few years older than me I guessed, and he kept staring. It took me a while to realize I was being cruised.

  I’ve never had the nerve to go up to a guy in a gay bar and talk. The few times I’ve done it it’s been a disaster. The music’s too loud and they think I’m a travelling salesmen or something. Or they just nod and don’t say anything and act all cold, then halfway through one of my sentences say, “I gotta go to the bathroom, okay?” Which is gayspeak for, get lost you fucking loser.

  I’ve never been good at rejection. That’s why I am and am likely to remain a failed writer. I get one story rejected and I am in the pits for days, with no desire to get out. One of those snotty, impersonal form letters saying, “We regret to inform you that your story is not right for us, blah, blah, blah,” and I’m fucking crushed. I’m the same way with men. One guy says he’s got to go to the bathroom and I assume I’m going to be single for life. Except this guy was still staring. The music wasn’t that loud. It was Christmas Day, for fuck’s sake, and not an interesting story in sight.

  I downed my drink, ordered another, and, as casually as I could, got up from the bar and sauntered across the dance floor to where the guy was standing. If he had looked away at the last minute, or even blinked, I might have changed my mind, pretended I was going to the bathroom or something. But he didn’t look away. He followed me with his eyes until I got right up to where he was leaning against the wall, and before I could even open my mouth he said hello.

  “Hi,” I said. After those words of wisdom to a potential sex partner in a gay bar, I inevitably dry up.

  “Wanna hang out?” he said.

  “Sure.” I leaned against the wall beside him.

  “What’s your name?” he said, eyeing me over the top of his beer bottle. No glass. I liked that. Butch. And he was handsome — tall and lithe and blonde and blue-eyed. No muscle boy, but I didn’t go for those anyway. No designer fag either — plain blue jeans and a white Levi collared shirt left untucked. A thin face — a bit too thin if the truth be told — but a nice profile. He smiled. Perfect teeth. I go crazy over perfect white teeth.

  “Cameron,” I told him, my dick already getting hard in my pants.

  “Mine’s Ted,” he said. His voice was deep, throaty, and masculine. “Ted Williams.”

  He half-turned and offered me his hand and I nearly dropped my drink on the floor. He must have seen my eyes widen, or some expression on my face that told him something was wrong. The music stopped playing at that moment. The DJ was fucking around at the bar and had forgotten to mix. He went running across the floor to the DJ booth, but I didn’t take much notice of him. “Are you all right?” said Ted.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. I couldn’t believe my luck. Or fate. Or whatever Millennium Prophecies Aborted and Taoism for Dummies would call it.

  “You look familiar,” Ted said. “Have we met before?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” This as casually as I could manage. I think I would have remembered you, I could have said. But I asked where he was from instead.

  Ted shrugged. “I live here. But I come from a little town up north a ways. Real shithole, actually.” He laughed. “Where you from?”

  “Here,” I said. “What’s the name of the shithole?”

  “Three Rivers,” Ted answered. “Ever heard of it?”

  “No,” I said, and tried to hide the lie by taking another sip of my drink.

  I couldn’t believe I had just run into the guy from Darrel’s file. The failed Narrator of The Three Rivers Historical Revue, the engineer of the biggest high-school protest in Three Rivers’ history, and the guy who carved up Darrel’s arm was gay!

  And still leaning in spirit against the proscenium arch.

  CXCVIII

  The life of Ted Williams was laid out thus:

  1. Born in Three Rivers to the son of the local banker, the third of three brothers with two younger sisters. His mother was head of three local charity councils and could have been a candidate for the Sally Ann Treatment Centre if she hadn’t been female and a small-town socialite.

  2. Ted graduated high school in the middle of his class, then went on to university in the city. He broke up with his girlfriend the day before he left, on purpose, and she gave him a gold watch with his initials carved on the back to remember her by. He pawned the watch for sixty dollars in his second year when he was broke and his frat mates wanted him to go out drinking.

  3. In university he enrolled in drama classes and a few English literature courses. His father and mother fought him on this, arguing that acting would never get him anywhere and he should consider accounting or business management instead. It turned out they were right, but Ted enrolled against their wishes. They threatened to cut him off financially but never did. Ted figured he got away with it because all three of his older brothers had taken business management and related degrees at university. One of them worked at his father’s bank. Another worked as a financial manager at a tomato soup and juice company. (“Can you believe it?” Ted asked. “We used to call him Mr. Ketchup behind his back!”) Th
e third brother ran his own accounting firm.

  4. Ted’s first acting gig in university was the role of Algernon in The Importance of Being Ernest. Algernon is a pretty fey character to be played by someone who was a high-school jock and a ladies’ man. But Ted played the part flawlessly. So well, in fact, that he got a reputation around college for being gay. To make up for it, in his second year he took the role of Stanley Kowalski in a fated performance of A Streetcar Named Desire at a small amateur theatre downtown.

  “I was stupid,” Ted told me. “How did I know that Stanley Kowalski was a fucking gay icon? I just thought he was a prick!”

  5. Ted’s reputation didn’t go away, though his frat brothers laughed at it. They stopped laughing when Ted was hit on in a bar by a good-looking young guy who had seen Desire and Ted went home with him. The guy spread it around that he slept with Stanley Kowalski; Ted wasn’t pledged to his house the following year. He was on his own.

  “It was tough,” he said. “Going from popular to unpopular in one year is worse than never having been popular at all.”

  “Sure,” I said. I wondered how much tougher that was than having your arm carved up with a rusty screw. But I kept quiet and let him go on.

  6. The one place Ted Williams did find he was still popular was in gay bars. He went to them often. He even convinced his parents that he would be able to study harder if he had a place of his own off campus. They agreed. Ted took a small, rundown apartment uptown and started bringing guys home. He decided that he had always been gay, and even made a few gay friends, though always masculine like himself. Never what he called “fems” or “draggies.”

  “If you had been sitting with your legs crossed,” he told me, “I wouldn’t have looked twice at you.”