Mouthquake

by Daniel Allen Cox

  Memory. I don’t understand it. It’s not a video recorder with a tape you can just play back; it’s more like the highs and lows of life get stamped into blood and tissue particles like icons imprinted onto tabs of ecstasy, which then float away into remote corners of the brain until a weak signal is sent to retrieve them. A memory can totally mutate on the way back or melt away completely. Maybe forgetting is a good thing. Our minds must do it for a reason. Maybe memory is a giant storage warehouse that bombs itself to hell every year to make room for new stuff. Who knows? How could I possibly trust a therapist to muck around in there? With my luck, I’d be bound to meet someone who earned their diploma with a save-the-children thesis on how every element of human behaviour can be explained by past trauma, so that when they find a trace of trauma, it never occurs to them they might have accidentally implanted it there.

  For the record, it’s official: Yes, I welcome danger to fuck up the elements of my life that have become too static to be useful. I welcome it to completely dismantle everything I love because I know the reward for something that painful must be exceptionally good. My most dangerous ideas are also my most creative, and restricting them to nighttime agonies and compartments of paranoia cannot possibly be useful to me. I wonder how truly creative I am, if I even have the visionary faculties to imagine my own disappearance, the death of old versions of me, as an extreme act of transformation, the unique chance to learn something about myself in a different world, far from the monotonous and stupid. All the meaningless fears that grip us at random moments but that don’t actually matter are just the inner walls of a brain that hasn’t learned to think big and beyond self-criticism and endless boredom. Bring me danger and bring it now.

  Maybe I’m too dense to realize that Eric welcomes danger into relationships too, if this is what we’ve come to. Sometimes I have to remember that we’re broken people, Eric and me. I have to forgive us for that. We’re broken people looking for answers.

  But after our argument, I was too angry to consider that. I decided to cool off by writing a letter to somebody else. A guy two boyfriends back.

  Dear First Boyfriend,

  It has been a long time. Your face is still fresh in my memory, every one of your smoking wrinkles, smiles meant for me or otherwise, but I forget your name. I remember it was rhythmically pleasing. It was at the bottom of every postcard you insisted on sending to me, even though we only lived a few doors away from each other.

  I’m well (I think). How are you? To me, you’re a ghost. You haunt me with the memory of my former self. I hope this Hotmail address still works. I am writing to apologize to you. You see, there’s a chance that I’m damaged goods, as they say in the furniture moving business, and perhaps also in the industries of the heart.

  In telling you this, I’m saying that what happened was probably not your fault. Absolve yourself, if you haven’t already.

  When I recoiled from you in bed, preferring the coldness of the wall to the warmth of your breath, that wasn’t a conscious choice, but rather, it was informed by the museum of my past. When I refused to kiss you in public in a place where it made sense to do so, I didn’t intend for you to go kissless, made a fool of. When I treated your affection as though it were a plastic bag coming to suffocate me, when I spun your shows of affection as tools of control and then allowed that to bloom into distrust, when I rebelled against you as if I were your child, that wasn’t me—it was the things I was escaping. Am still escaping. Or trying to, at least.

  You had no way of knowing that I was damaged goods. I apologize for not letting you see my struggle, for in hiding that, I became a mystery to you, and unlovable. When someone has a secret to hide, they usually cover up more than they mean to, to make sure the secret doesn’t get out. I’m sorry for robbing you of someone knowable, for the theft of me from you.

  Maybe you just thought I was an asshole.

  That’s only half the story.

  What do I mean by damaged goods? I’m still working on that. Expect a second email. You are a precious and painful memory that I need to quell like a headache. Maybe you have become a hatred, and that is all we are to each other now.

  I must get to the real apology, to the story of damage and all of its collateral representations. Think back: To hide my own damage, I broke things around us, pretended we were broken, that our union was pure disrepair. Beyond fixing. I projected the museum of me onto our relationship, and it crumbled in our hands. You never knew the weight that was crushing us. I never answered your questions—they were piercing and heartful, but I pretended that they were misguided. And here comes the most painful confession: It took you only a few words to reach into the core of me, to the self I couldn’t deal with.

  You came too close to the me that I couldn’t face. And so I broke us. I threw us out. That time we got “evicted,” all of our stuff thrown crashing to the sidewalk—that wasn’t the landlord tossing us out because of unpaid rent. Our clothes lay on the sidewalk, mashed into the mud in the shape of boot treads, and our vinyl records tossed from the landing were smashed under their own weight, a constellation of shards. We were suddenly without music, and every appliance was reduced to a mini hardware store of its own components. You stared at me with the hopelessness of having to rebuild our home from scratch, so devastated that you actually still envisioned me in your future. Newsflash: Our rent was paid on time, and it wasn’t the landlord, it was me who put us on the street. I was so desperate not to be damaged goods that I tried to damage everything else as an act of camouflage. I hope you don’t find it gauche of me, at this time, after all this, to show you the poem I wrote for you that day. The last poem I ever wrote. More of a song lyric. I’m already embarrassed by it, but here it is, because I’m certain you’ll never speak to me again.

  watching your fingers trawl through our stuff

  discovering newly the shape of things upside down

  as if you didn’t belong in your own life

  made me hopeful that you could learn the lessons of pain

  I wondered if I had devised the perfect exit from you

  to go examine myself in the pain of peace

  but throwing objects you are never free of the memory of their weight

  Dear First Boyfriend: Were you really the first, my first? Do you want to be half of the first relationship I destroyed? After all this time, I don’t know what your ego can support. And the truth: I can barely remember your face.

  I hope to God this is the right email address.

  I cannot imagine ever writing this again. No matter who it’s for.

  When I was done, I saved the letter in my Drafts. I never sent it to my first boyfriend because as soon as I was done, I knew I had written it to Eric.

  DANS LA FOSSE AUX LIONS

  I had volunteered at CKUT for more than six months. The deejays had grown to like and even respect my programming. I’d find little smiley faces on Post-it notes where my blue sticker choices used to be. Were they the thieves? Corrupted by the thick blood of kin, I looked the other way.

  Processing all this new music was having a dramatic effect on me. This reckoning with the self was too graphic, too much. Of course, I found every memory except the one I was trying to locate.

  One day, we got the most curious package. An oversized Kraft envelope. I thought I recognized the handwriting: shaky, cursive, sloping, and hard to decipher. It suggested someone to me, although I couldn’t figure out exactly who. My life seemed to be a litany of people who forever floated on this periphery of recognition.

  It wasn’t a package from a record label promoting new material, nor was it from the artist themselves. No sycophantic letter or other markings. Inside was a vinyl 45 of a Marilyn Monroe song. We never got old music like that.

  I finally understood why I was alone in that cubicle: Sometimes you need to be in a small, enclosed space when big realizations come to you so you can grasp them before they dissipate into the atmosphere. Sometimes you must be in a pressure cooker
with your own shock because it’s good for you. My cubicle didn’t have a turntable, so I went to an adjacent listening booth to find one. It had been awhile since I had handled vinyl. I’d forgotten how ritualistic the experience was: pulling the sleeve out of the jacket, then the record out of the sleeve, holding it at the edges to avoid smudging, laying it on the turntable just so, affixing the 45 rpm adapter to hold it in place, spinning the disc to remove dust with an anti-static brush, dropping the needle exactly where the song should start so there’s no time spent waiting, missing it by a few seconds, and trying again.

  Although well outside my preferred decade, it was an exquisite listen.

  Marilyn Monroe. Yes, I used to be her.

  It’s funny trying to remember little boy experiences in the larger and much emptier mind of a man. It’s hard to explain the blank pages in my story.

  Who had sent the envelope? Nobody aside from Eric even knew that I volunteered at the station.

  I needed a drink, so I walked down to the Vieux-Port to nose out a bar. I found one on rue Saint-Paul festooned with old empty wine bottles lining the walls, all the way up to the ceiling. I made my way to the back of the bar by instinct, to the sound of people talking in low voices, which dropped off completely when I came in. The small room was full. There was only one free table near the piano, so I took it. I ordered a beer and sat sipping it. People smoked.

  A strange man approached me. At first I mistook him for a waiter, but then he sat at the piano right in front of me. The man was dressed in red velvet rags carefully sewn together into what resembled a tuxedo. It was trimmed with brocade and had a Nehru collar. Mother-of-pearl buttons ran halfway up the sleeves. The suit fit him impeccably but was covered in dust or maybe silica, what looked like sparkles, and cigarette ash. From where I sat, I could smell expensive French cologne and rotten milk. His hair was a greasy pompadour, arranged cavalierly and with a flourish. There was an immaculately pressed and starched white handkerchief tucked into the front pocket of his suit. This spectre held himself with the air of a king, a corpse, a Mozart aged like old cheddar. His face was carved with wrinkles and knife scars that were impossible to tell apart. His eyes I did not see.

  The pianist started to play Jacques Brel as I drank my beer. After a few songs, he paused to smoke an unfiltered Gauloise bleue. I figured I could hazard a question.

  Vous connaissez les chansons de Hall & Oates?

  Les Halles et Utz? C’est qui, ça?

  Un groupe américain.

  Pardon, mais je n’écoute pas la télévision…Croyez-moi, je ne connais pas ces conneries, quoi. Vous m’avez pris pour un con? Allez vous faire voir avec ces trucs américains…

  Sorry for asking.

  Zut!

  He turned his back to me dismissively to make love to his cigarette, and make love he did, fellating every puff of smoke like a gentle and experienced lover, with the doting concern of an old man. I could not immediately understand the difference between his roughness and his softness.

  Vous connaissez les chansons de Marilyn?

  He turned to me, and I finally saw his watery eyes, melted in his head like raw oysters. They were ugly but kind. He nodded as he took a drag and blew smoke in my direction almost artisanally.

  Mais oui, bien sûr et certain, mon beau…Pourquoi vous ne m’avez pas dit ça avant, hein, bijou? Vous allez me faire pleurer… Alors, laquelle chanson?

  “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”

  Merveille…vous me faites fondre.

  The pianist started to play the song, and I have to say, I almost didn’t recognize it without the horn section. It was lugubrious and slow and I think he played it that way deliberately. He wanted to throw me off. That’s what I accused this pianist, this beautiful and hideous stranger, of trying to do. After my high school band had dissolved, I vowed never to sing again, but I could feel a change of wind in the waft of cigarette smoke. After all, I had something to prove.

  I jumped up on the table, swaggering on the creaking oak. The patrons froze and stared up at me. Head pointed at the ceiling, I opened my throat and let it out. I began to unfurl the tongue from my mouth and sing a song to set our woes on a sailing ship. I sang hard. My heart belonged to daddy, but it also belonged to everyone in the bar.

  At the next table, six men in their eighties were drinking pints of 1664. It was clear that they’d borne the sadness of war and that they’d been filtering it through decades of alcohol. They were waiting to see me entertain the troops one last time, or perhaps they were waiting for a young fellow Canadian to storm the beach.

  Six men went erect.

  Six beer glasses clinked.

  Five men crawled around the table on goat legs and bleated.

  One came around the back and stuck ten dollars down my pants.

  Four men tried to sing along into a microphone of suds.

  Lost two men to uncontrollable weeping.

  Smiles all around.

  Some liked it hot. All of them liked me.

  Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, I had to remind them.

  Nobody did Montreal like Marilyn.

  When I was done, I got down off the table and took my seat. There was applause and the pianist winked at me, but I was sad. I looked at the strangers around me, and I considered the tragedy of the people I had never met. Their stories were so similar to mine, but I would never hear them told. It would take a hundred lifetimes of random bar encounters to hear them all.

  The pianist didn’t have a tip jar, so I bought him a Pernod by way of thanks. He decided to play me out with “You’ve Got a Friend” by Carole King. He lurched into an aching instrumental version of it, all broken chord changes and heart strings. He played it wistfully and almost without rhythm.

  I had to piss something wicked, but the bathroom was hors service. I went outside to the alley, unzipped, and started to let it out. Soon someone unzipped beside me. I stared at the penis and at the gnarled fingers holding it. The pianist was pissing in concert with me. Condensation rose like curls of cigarette smoke. His dick—had I seen it before? Hard to say.

  Tu pisses comme si tu n’avais rien bu…Il faut lâcher contre le vent ou bien le garder dans ton pantalon. Do you live around here?

  N-n-n-nnnon.

  Ah, un petit chaton loin de sa mère. You stutter…que c’est mignon…too cute.

  Unless I’m mistaken, I know you from somewhere.

  Si, tu ne te trompes pas. But you are quite drunk, Marilyn, n’oublie pas…Écoute, tu devrais passer chez moi pour un verre. It seems like you have something…comment peut-on dire, to work out, quoi?

  Why did I go home with him? It could be that I detected the delicate strains of BDSM in him. It’s hard to know when I became curious about the taste for punishment, when I got the idea to teach myself lessons about physical pain and anguish and put myself through it all, knowing I would learn nothing and merely cover myself with meaningless bruises, the jagged edges of my scars unreadable, healing or not healing. Or perhaps it was inevitable that I gravitated to extremist views regarding sensation. I had soft-pedalled and dismissed them for years, and now was the time to call bullshit on that stance and throw myself into a final crucible, test the volume of my cries, the limits of my pain. I needed to inflict upon myself the cruellest elements of speech therapy. How far into darkness could my imagination go?

  Luckily, the world is full of people skilled in the art of sexual exorcism. They can wrench a cry from deep in the soul, pull sweet music from unrefined pain just before the victim passes out, and bring them closer to ecstasy and god and death and the sun than they could ever go by themselves. Take it to the liminal.

  Luckily, there are people who enjoy making this happen.

  When we got to the pianist’s apartment, a surprisingly boring and conventional-looking place, I told him I wasn’t there for sex. He just smirked at me, said everything we do is for sex, and asked me if I wanted a glass of wine. I asked him what kind. He led me into his wine cellar, which th
rough its coldness and vastness, its global selection of vintages and regions and grapes, and its refinement of storage practices, utterly silenced me. This seemed to please him.

  He led me deeper into the cellar, into the mist of my own fear. I knew him from somewhere, this mystery just a few feet ahead of me, the long unwashed hair, the slouch that held sadness a certain way. The problem with strange men was that I seemed to recognize them all. I was a victim of my own desperation for answers. I followed, unable to resist his pull.

  Perhaps I had been reading too much Gaston Leroux.

  We had walked the distance of at least one Metro station, past millions of dollars of rare wines, and I didn’t know where he was taking me. Without pause, he grabbed a bottle of 1982 Mouton Rothschild, broke the neck off by smashing it on the low stone ceiling, and offered me a swig. I told him I didn’t drink cabernet but could make an exception. I downed half the bottle as we headed through an unlit corridor into a colder part of the cellar, deeper underground. I could feel the earth closing in over us.

  I was unusually hard.

  We finished another bottle of wine together. I shivered through the last dregs. The pianist had built a tunnel at least three Metro stops long, his own catacombes. I wondered what price I would pay for seeing something so secret. I soon got the feeling I couldn’t afford it.

  The tunnel ended, and we came to a high-ceilinged chamber cut into the stone of the earth. Calcite deposits decorated the walls. It was both primitive and majestic, like le Stade, in a way. I could tell by the chisel marks that he’d carved it out by hand. I turned to the pianist and suddenly felt a great compassion for him, for the loneliness it took to create a place of such darkness and beauty. He had even recreated parts of Cimetière du Père Lachaise, my favourite. Broken headstones poked out of the floor here and there, wrapped in the undergrowth of time, plants and flowers that bloomed without daylight and wrapped around the birth dates of the dead. The smell of decay.