Desiring structure, I picked up a copy of the Vancouver Sun the following morning and scoured the classifieds for employment opportunities. How quickly it bored me. Why couldn’t there be a position for an enthusiastic young man to teach poetry to foreign students or the mentally ill? Because the health care system has no idea about holistic healing and even less about the therapeutic potential of 18th century poetry. From experience I know a dose of Matthew Arnold can soothe panic attacks better than any amount of high school counselling.
Desiring intimacy, that afternoon I dropped by on Lucy for an hour or so before she had to go to work. It was a remarkable meeting. We sat on the steps and for some reason broke into a discussion of the human condition that must have mirrored Plato and Socrates—answering questions with questions—doing the same thing thousands of years earlier sitting on the steps of the Parthenon in the hot Greek sun.
“… haven’t we lost the nurturer?” Lucy asked. “Are humans a people without a home?”
“Do people need a home?” I replied.
“Or is in the womb the only place humans feel at home?”
“Or is home somewhere we go after we die?”
“Or is it neither, and do we spend our whole lives trying to get something that cannot be gotten?”
“Or—”
Lucy raised her hand to stop me. “Or,” she said, “is the earth that womb?”
“And we don’t know it?”
“If we did, would we do what we fuckin’ do?”
“Who can say what we’d do if we didn’t do what we do?”
“I mean it’s like what do you get when a drug-addicted mother gives birth?”
“Do you get a baby?”
“Or do you get a drug-addicted baby? Extrapolating that to the world, have we made this planet so sick that it gives birth to sickness?”
“Lucy?”
“What about the womb, Shel?”
“Do you think you and I will ever make love again?”
“My friend Marj took primal therapy in L.A. and reexperienced the second and third trimesters of her own gestation period. She said she felt like God in there.”
“Not that I want to force the issue.”
“That’s why I’m quitting.”
“I miss it, though.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I think so.”
“What did I say?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m quitting.”
“Smoking?”
Lucy glanced at her cigarette. “Stripping.”
“Really? Why?”
“Because when I’m up there dancing,” she said softly, “it doesn’t feel at all like a womb.”
“Did you hear what I asked?” I asked.
“Do you know that before God there was the Goddess?”
“I miss it,” I said.
“But is what you miss really what you want?”
“I miss you,” I said.
“I’m right here.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m right here.” She smiled. And what could I do? Alas, the conversation had led her to Mother Earth, me to Sigmund Freud. I shrugged, too horny to be rational, and smiled back.
While watching television later that night after Eric had gone to bed, it occurred to me that all the major characters from Bonanza were dead (except the foster brother and Hop Sing). Moreover, in 120 years everyone who is now alive will be dead, too. I lay back, closed my eyes and recalled two disturbing statistics that I’d read in The Sun earlier in the day. One, 1 in 500 college students in a recent random survey had tested positive for the AIDS virus; and two, 1 in every 23 black men in the U.S.A. is murdered. Turning off the T.V., I felt both thankful to be alive and fearful of the future. My boney chest became covered in goose pimples, my nipples erect. I started to tremble and recited Dover Beach in my head, then aloud.
Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean,
And it brought into his mind the turbid ebb
and flow of human misery …
It was time to start moving. But where? I didn’t know. What was my destiny? The phone rang and it scared me. Reaching for it in the darkness I knocked it off the bedside table and onto the floor.
“Hello!” I said, unable to find it.
“Fuck,” I heard back. I found it.
“Hello?”
“I’ve had a crummy night.”
“Lucy?”
“I was at work … and all I had on was cowboy boots—those ones with the tassles—and a cowboy hat—”
“I like them.”
“And this front-row dick yells out: ‘You ain’t no cowgirl, honey, you’re just a fuckin’ cow!’”
“What?”
“So I laugh and say, ‘Hey, aren’t any o’ you brutes gonna defend me?’ I guess I was gettin’ used to it with you. Anyway, no one notices—there’s a ball game on the big screen. Then the same guy goes, ‘Just fuckin’ dance and shut up before someone takes your place, you stinkin’ whore!’”
“He said that?”
“So I danced a couple o’ seductive steps in his direction …”
“Why seductive?”
“And kicked him right in the face.”
“My god.”
“When I was young, like five maybe, my old man used to call me that—‘a whore just like your mother,’ he’d say. I’ve never forgotten it.”
“Oh my … oh—”
“I think I knocked some teeth out. Everything went flyin’. Down he went, crackin’ his head like a watermelon. The club was packed. It got rowdy. Some people were screamin’ at me. Some were cheerin’ for me. I just stood there, naked down to my tassled boots and hat, lights flashing around me like a pin-ball machine, wishin’ there was a Lone Ranger to come ride me home.”
“Are you okay?”
“Dammit, Shel! I was sure I’d grown outta those kinda outbursts. I mean I feel bad—right in the face. Some poor, drunkin’ schmuck gettin’ his jollies—oh, I got fired, to boot.”
“This is terrible.”
“Charges might be laid. Hey, could I come over?” The question surprised me. Lucy had never been here before.
“Of course.”
Despite protests, Lucy insisted on taking a cab. I gave her directions and waited.
Upon arrival, she was sad yet calm—less depressed than I thought she’d be. Barely a word was spoken about the incident. We wound up prostrate on the pull-out couch, munching butter-saturated popcorn and watching the late show until five in the morning. Lucy fell asleep just before dawn, her head resting precariously on my chest, her troubled heart seemingly stilled.
It had been both two days since I’d comforted Lucy and two days since I’d heard from her. Worried, I paid her apartment a visit; the curtains were drawn, the cat was gone and the door was locked. Her mention that she might go to Seattle was all that prevented me from filing a missing persons report. To my surprise, on my drive home I spotted Suzanne in black waiting at a bus stop on the corner of Commercial Drive and Broadway. I offered her a lift. Ten minutes later and despite my admittance to being nonpartisan on the abortion issue, she had convinced me to at least watch from afar the demonstration I was driving her to—if only to get a glimpse of civil disobedience in action. Upon arrival, Suzanne offered a thankful grin, surveyed the crowd of people and stepped out of the car.
“You know, Shelby,” she said, “maybe you shouldn’t park so close to the building.”
“It’s fine,” I said, stepping out. At that moment the side door of the clinic opened and I was swept up into the throngs of a suddenly enraged mob. Suzanne clasped my hand and I became an uncommitted link in a human chain of Pro-Choicers blocking Pro-Lifers from a group of three or four women seeking abortions. A sudden push from behind caused my link with Suzanne to be broken, and before I could firmly replant my feet, a placard declaring JESUS IS THE ANSWER—NOT ABORTION had cracked me on the forehead with such force I momentarily lost consciousn
ess. In the resulting melee I was literally trampled, punched and kicked by both feminist peaceniks and religious fanatics who obviously cared more about zygotes than me. My arrival to the periphery of the gathering was the result of a sheer will to survive. Before I could inhale, a reporter had swooped down on me demanding explanation and a disclosure of my position. According to the CBC news later that night, and with blood gushing from my forehead, I replied: “Could you spare me bus fare?” Eric deemed me an irreverent hero à la John Lennon, and asked me to play on the sixteenth of September in a new band of his called Void of Paisley. Suzanne in black deemed me an irreverent fool à la Abbie Hoffman and cautioned me on making blanket statements. My parents deemed me an irresponsible young man à la me and were appalled that I supported radical Pro-Choicers. Gran never said anything. My head hurt.
One week to the minute after I’d last seen Lucy I saw her again. It was 11:05 in the morning and I was sitting on her steps reading Portnoy’s Complaint and chewing on a cracked nail and a Hershey Bar beneath a sky almost as blue and warm as it probably was in the late 60s. By then, having received nary a word from Lucy and knowing about both her situation with Frank and the kick in the face, I feared abduction or worse. It turned out, of course, she had been in Seattle, visiting her oft-mentioned girlfriend, Marj.
“What are you doing here?” she said with a confused smile.
“Waiting,” I said, smiling back. After pleasantries, a much needed hug and an explanation of the gash above my eye which led to unbridled laughter from Lucy, we went into her apartment and started up where we’d left off; talking.
The story goes she and Marj once stripped together, and it was Marj who encouraged Lucy to follow her psychic instincts. At the same time, in the late-mid 80s, Marj was considering joining the Rajneeshees, a pseudo-cult-like group based in Oregon and led by the now dead but once enlightened Baghwan Shree Rajneesh. Lucy assured me that this guru was actually on the level, despite rumours of orgies, fondlings and a fleet of Rolls Royces. But on the evening before Marj was planning to move down there, a seventy-two-year-old tycoon from Seattle approached her after she had finished dancing and, with a massive bouquet of flowers and a selection of gifts, proposed to her. After careful deliberation, dinner and three or four Bloody Marys, she consented.
“They got married?”
“Big time,” Lucy said with a grin. “You’re lookin’ at the maid of honour.”
“Is the man … perverted?”
“Marj refuses to talk about their sex life—anyway, who isn’t? All I know is they seem happy living in their mansion.”
“Mansion!”
“Twelve bedrooms?”
“Wow. Separate beds?”
“Nope. One four-poster beauty made for romantic romping.”
“Good God. Does Marj still dance?”
“Are you kidding?” she said, lighting a cigarette. “She now juggles her weekdays between volunteering at a youth centre for runaways and eating chocolate cherry bonbons on the couch with her ugly, overweight chihuahua, Peppermint.”
“How cliché and yet fascinating. And you know nothing of their sex life?”
“Okay, Shel … one secret,” she said. “He’s hung like a baboon.”
“Is that healthy?”
“I’m kidding. All I can tell you is Marj is a saint. She’s got a heart the size of an oil drum.”
There was a pause. “Hey, Lucy?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to appear childish,” I said, “and I in no way want to pen you in, but I worry about you when I’m unsure of your whereabouts for extended periods of time.”
“You do?”
“See, I don’t have a lot in my life these days; reading, waiting for my calling. Therefore I’ve fully committed myself to caring for the people close to me—with hopes of expanding that as my confidence grows.”
“Thanks … I didn’t know that it worried you. If I would’ve, I would’ve filled you in.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“Hm … Hey, Lucy?”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.”
Later that evening while Lucy cooked up a stir-fry, I volunteered to go to Safeway and buy some ice cream for desert. Bouncing up the stairs on the way back, I was startled to hear screaming from the front room. I sprinted into the apartment.
“Lucy!”
“You!” Frank yelled the moment our eyes made contact, his as angry as a boil. I braked in mid-stride, the ice cream tumbling from my hands.
“You wife-fuckin’ adulteratin’ son of a bitch!” he screamed as he lurched towards me from the other side of the room. Lucy attempted to slow him down and got knocked out of the way. I turned and ran, sprinting out of the apartment, diving over the railing and tumbling into a juniper bush. Frank pounded down the porch steps to my left, screaming mean things. And there we were; the hunter and the hunted, galloping into the darkness of that Vancouver night, the sound of traffic and the sea upon us; and there I was, bulldozed to the most basic of instincts, survival, and inches from the most primordial of functions, defecation, all the while yelling:
“We’re friends! Just friends!”
In the process of sprinting towards my car I opened up a space between us of perhaps a hundred feet—enough, I presumed, to give me time to get into my car and pull away. Getting the key into the door lock while trembling, however, hadn’t been calculated into the equation. Frank closed in quickly. Again I was forced to flee, his desperate breaths now within earshot. Perhaps thirty seconds later and without obvious reason, Frank ended his pursuit. I stopped and turned around to see him walking away. The brute had given up chase. I, the victor, bent over and leaned my hands on my knees, gasping for air, keeping my eyes on him. Just when he reached my car he stopped, glanced to his left, and stared at it. There was at that moment the type of silence that allows a person to hear all their own inner workings; blood flow, peristalsis and so forth. I jumped when, with a god-like tour de force, he punched out my driver’s side window. He then elbowed in the left back window. Before I could react he climbed onto the hood and in a series of frightening kicks with his gargantuan boots, smashed the front windscreen. My reaction was childlike trembling and a welling of tears. Finally, while staring at me, he unzipped his pants and revealed a penis so large it appeared to have a life of its own. Mesmerised by fear and awe, I watched in silence as he peed through the broken window and all over my seat and dashboard, his massiveness silhouetted by the streetlight behind. At that moment I knew what it felt like to be gelded.
In the days that followed I was so ashamed by what had occurred, I was unable to disclose the truth to anyone. How could a man have his car urinated in by another man and offer no rebuke—and then drive home in it? To myself, I blamed my nondefense of Lucy on the fact that our lack of lovemaking had weakened our pair bond. Although a lie, it didn’t come close to what I said to my companions. I told Lucy I pelted Frank with insults until he just gave up. To Eric and the insurance lady, I blamed the damage on unruly teenagers seeking acceptance among their peers. To Gran I made no mention of the violence whatsoever but ventured into the philosophical and asked her: “What does it mean to be a man?” Her reply: “How the hell should I know?”
XI
All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in the old molds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows to be monstrous.
—Oswald Spengler
At the Void of Paisley concert on September 16th Eric dropped a Molotov cocktail by telling me he had reason to believe that Bryan was homosexual, and that his anger was probably a result of confusion. Despite my desire to not stereotype, I was flabbergasted. Bryan was so gruff; so big. And yet, ironically, my toosh may be what turned him on.
As for the venue we were playing at, The Big Easy, it rippled with “big hair” women in glossy Spandex pants w
hose look I would never confess arouses me, but nonetheless does. What is it about wantonness that stirs one’s innards and calls to free the individual from sexual constraints? And was this establishment a bastion for ignorance or self-confidence?—for even women with Minnie’s dimensions wore form-fitting attire.
To Eric’s chagrin the keyboard player never showed up, so essentially we were SMEGMA BOMB! with an alias. An eight-foot banner that Eric designed was suspended at the back of the stage. The words Void of Paisley were cut out of a thick purple paisley material that hung somewhat buckled on a white cotton backdrop. Eric said he used the paisley to emphasize irony. “Pure genius,” was my response. I think he took me seriously.
We were the last band of the night after three heavy metal acts. Eric’s opening comment through the microphone was delivered with a roll of the eyes: “I assume you’ve had enough of glam rock!” Midway through the opening song (halfway through the set) the banner fell onto the stage in a crumpled heap. Eric’s closing comment through the microphone was: “You’re all ugly.” The crowd was punishing.
Suzanne was at the concert and we went for coffee together afterwards. Her critique was forthright: “The band was horrible but I liked your pants”—which were actually Eric’s, and ridiculously big. We went back to her parents’ house and she showed me a selection of her sculptures, the zenith being a fabulous series of clay figurines entitled Modern Genetics. My two favourites were Fish-tail and Plane Jane; Fish-tail being an old fashioned Chevrolet Oldsmobile that tapered into the back end of a fish, Plane Jane a Boeing 747 on top and a faceless nude woman underneath. We chatted on her bed until four in the morning and, to her amazement, I recited select verses from a couple of her favourite poems. Mostly, though, she discussed the impressionists she most respects and her refusal to tolerate relationships that come between her and her art. Upon leaving, an awareness of the chemistry Suzanne and I shared left me mildly guilt-riddled in knowing I was still in some sort of esoterical way committed to Lucy (and indubitably still in love with her). I also knew that continued repression of my sexual urges and an awareness that Frank was thrice my size in every way had affected me enough to speculate on the possibility of other relationships.
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