I ride her shoulders all the way up to the nosebleeds, where the drunks are swaying in the aisles with plastic cups of beer. We steal their seats but then decide to hang out with them on the cement staircase and scream out song titles, sure that our throaty requests from the 400 section will be heard and honoured, that our trip through the blizzard has given us the courage of volume, that it liquefies and spills out of us on its own frequency. It turns out we’re right.
ABBA plays our song.
She looks at me, and at first I wonder if she’s trying to tell me something. Maybe Benny Andersson has more secrets than we do. But then I realize the whole band is looking in our direction. They’re looking right at us and so is everyone else, even the drunks, and then the spotlights hit, and we still have snow on our heads so we light up like disco balls and splinter the light back into the crowd. I can’t believe this moment was here waiting for us, not only all night but also for the duration of my four-years-long life. We dance and people copy us.
Sadly, after you become an ABBA disco ball, the only way to go is down. Life will become a permanent fall from accidental pop stardom.
The snow eventually melts.
I’m not inclined to say what our song is. Mainly because I’ve already said too much.
CHIQUITITA
Of course she believed me.
Now that I think back, she knew about the existence of woolly mammoths and other incarnations that strange men took for camouflage or other reasons. Perhaps she was even hyper-aware of them.
For the first few years of my life, I observed her constantly looking at men. I just assumed she was man-hungry. But eventually, I figured out that she was watching out for me by watching out for them. When we were on the bus, and I busily validated paper transfers by feeding them into my mouth, she monitored the men around us, hiding under beards and clean-cut masks, behind sunglasses, reading past the pages of their books, signalling each other with their eyes. Their subtle body language. Men offered me candy all the time, and she slapped it to the floor as if they were handing me mustard gas pellets.
When I went to daycare so she could work, she skipped work to peer through the windows and make sure male janitors didn’t sweep by me with their broom alibis. I imagine this surveillance got expensive for us. When the young man working at the ice cream parlour offered me an extra scoop for free, she whipped a Polaroid camera out of her purse and snapped his mugshot, no doubt for her album of budding pervs who wanted to get me. Doctors had to be women, and when they were men, she forbade them from checking anything unless I consented four or five times in complete, affirmative sentences that incorporated language directly from the question.
I have a feeling that most of her security work was done unseen. I imagine it was tireless and thankless and exhausting, and I’m sure I was a rotten little client.
I was a rotten little client who felt safe.
But I wondered why the security detail had to be so intense. Indeed, I did start to think I must have had diamonds or gold bricks in my gut, that possession of me was valuable in some kind of monetary way. Maybe I was money. Ever the patient one, she would sit me down and pull the scratched and creased Polaroids out of her purse and ask me if I remembered any of the faces. Yes, of course, these were the men she constantly yanked me away from, seconds before she snapped their sudden, perplexed frowns. Guilty by flashbulb. Then she compared them side-by-side to grainy black-and-white portraits in newspaper clippings, taken from the crime pages, which were always strangely adjacent to the comics. There were some similarities, but their ages confused me. Weren’t these men little boys once, roughly my shape and size? She said, of course they were, but they’d been taken from their mothers.
Whenever we passed a woman on the street who was alone, she said, Aha! there’s one whose boy was taken away. Where did the boys go? I started to peer into alleys and basement apartments, and I’d run into forbidden zones like men’s rooms where I peered under every stall, curious to see where these lost boys of the city were. I began to suspect the boy mannequins at Eaton’s and Simpsons of being boy-shaped cases where they were kept. I swore I could see them move sometimes.
I could slip through cracks quite easily.
I began to suspect that they kept lost boys at the zoo. There were plenty of places to hide them. Kids and animals weren’t much different; we were monsters of similar size and temperament and went into cages when ordered to do so or were sometimes trapped in dens with each other. We visited le Zoo de Granby once, where she paid her own admission but told me to sneak behind her through the turnstiles.
Here’s where the story gets weird, where it re-quantifies everything I know about music. I’m always weird about music; I’m sure it’s a degenerative condition of some sort.
I remember her trying to teach me animal names. It didn’t go very well because I called every animal I saw a chiquitita. Aardvark was a chiquitita. Emu was a chiquitita. Hippo was an exception because it was either a poppomis or a chiquitita. Everyone was a chiquitita, and it frustrated her.
As we passed the cages and pens and pits of chiquititas, I examined the enclosures for ways we could break in to kidnap them. But I just couldn’t see it happening. The glass was too thick, the walls too high, the moats too deep. But then we saw butterflies in a greenhouse, and they looked catchable. She must’ve read my mind because she sat us on a bench and left her purse hanging wide open, an improvised lure. The understanding was that we were hunting or, more specifically, trapping. This was a secret, and we had to stay still; if we twitched even a muscle, everything would be over and people would know, and the poppomisses would eat us and maybe even worse.
After a long time, an exotic blue butterfly landed on the metal clasp of her open purse. Last of the species, I hoped. With a deft move she flicked it in with a fingernail and snapped the clasp shut.
With my cheek pressed against the leather, I serenaded the imprisoned butterfly, and the rest of my life began to fall into place.
I hoped that Chiquitita would tell me what was wrong
I was sad to see something enchained by its own sorrow.
As a little starlet, I started to demand that she be my personal paparazzo and constantly take my photo. Our relationship was changing; I became her client. I became a poseur, sidling up for photo ops with every dog we came across, comparing our panting tongues. I found celebrities on the street, and we posed for the most outrageous Polaroids. These were career-making shots that we later sold for a whole five bucks. We did Barbra Streisand, Leo Sayer, Patti Smith, and even some Québécois stars like Robert Charlebois and Ginette Reno before deciding it wasn’t the career for us. A shame, because we were damn good at it. We eventually had to turn the celebs down. Peter Gabriel didn’t take it well.
I wanted the simple life. My favourite thing in the world was to eat at the casse-croûte on l’avenue Papineau. It had posters of the Montreal Canadiens, a signed and yellowed photo of Yvan Cournoyer and Guy Lafleur eating smoked meat, shelves lined with giant jars of red bell peppers, and, near the window, a poster of Andre Dawson that was so sun-exposed that all the reds had faded and the Expos uniform was white and blue. He could’ve been a Blue Jay. The smoking customers divided themselves into tribes: the Rothmans King Size, the Matinée Lights, Player’s, Export A’s, the Du Mauriers, the unfiltereds, a kind of royal family who all avoided each other expertly, a caste system delineated by booths. Because of these divisions, the ceiling panels above them were stained differently. You shall know them by their tar. They were sworn bowling enemies.
The Craven A’s hated the Export A’s for obvious reasons.
The booths had red vinyl benches and jukeboxes into which I plugged quarter after quarter to the electric hum of my little heart. I listened to the metal clink down through the machinery, then we chose our three songs with the numbered and lettered buttons. I didn’t have to flip through the Rolodex of artists encased in glass. Not anymore. We knew what we wanted.
My favour
ite song was brought to us by the letter C.
Here, most of the rules regarding my safety didn’t apply. It was a relief. The smokers winked at me and took turns having me in their booths, and that was okay with her. They were good people. I pillaged their poutines and stole their quarters, then came back to our booth covered in sauce brune and with a fistful of new music money. I was wrapped in the smoke of lovely older folks. These were my grandmothers and grandfathers, themselves wrapped in emphysema and Vicks VapoRub, and time slipped away. Coughing, choking, with crow’s feet full of kindness and despair. I crept from tribe to tribe indiscriminately, yet they all trusted me implicitly. Nobody took me for a spy.
That night, we mucked around with Rush and Jim Croce for awhile, then Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, John Denver, and Cat Stevens. I ploughed through a plate of greasy fries until my face was bloodied with ketchup. Then I saw a look come over her face. She stared into her purse. I assumed it had to do with the butterfly we had stolen earlier, and she said yes, it was dead, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that it had munched through our paper money, leaving only the Queen’s cheeks, her crown, and a few other bits and bobs. There was no money left to pay for the fries. We had spent the coins on music. I suggested we just leave, but she said that wasn’t an option. These people knew us. We were in a situation.
I told her to get the camera ready.
“Chiquitita” started to play on the jukebox.
I stood on the table, and the other diners all turned to look. I opened my heart to the music, displayed all of my songbird feathers. My tears weren’t crocodile, they were real. I was a singer completely lost to the gods, and standing that close to the ceiling, I could feel the glory, the adoration of my fans, the clouds of French fry grease. They had paid only a quarter for this performance—almost free. I could track my biggest fan by her hair, the tones of russet and mahogany, sunny apple red, and deep summer wine. I fixated on these colours through the crowd, and they were my anchor. I sang to her, but I also sang to the dead butterfly, the one we had killed somehow. I wanted her to know that the joy and love and good memories we shared were so bright they would fill me with happiness for the rest of my life.
The Du Mauriers gave me a standing ovation.
The Craven A’s banged the table with salt shakers and glass ashtrays.
The Export A’s stormed out, perhaps suspecting me of betraying their bowling secrets in my interpretive dance.
The Player’s wept.
The waitresses waltzed with each other and paid for our meal.
She snapped the photo.
I’ve had it for years but never studied it. Now I can see someone looking through the window behind me. A man, I think, peering between the jars of bell peppers. The edge of the rounded glass warps his face so I can’t see it clearly, but he’s smiling, and I can tell he’s listening through the window. Beyond his beard, I can see the marshland of his dreads, and beyond the sweat on his massive forehead, I can see the frost setting in. Beyond the summer, I can always see the winter, and beyond the man, there is always the beast.
Now that I think back, we were never not together, not even for a second.
So it’s hard to imagine how any of this story could’ve happened. Outwardly, it’s damn near impossible. Yet not all experiences can be explained through a cold retelling of the plausible facts. Sometimes dreams and feelings tell their own particular and peculiar stories, and we must believe them, even when nothing makes sense. There are recurring dreams I haven’t told you about yet, persuasive and persistent and violently colourful. Despite the mystery of them, they probably tell me more than memory could. At this point, anyway.
Things turned out differently than how I thought they would. At first, I feared that looking for a bad memory would either upset and shock me or leave me stranded in a dead-end. Instead, it has led me to love and forgiveness, enough to fill any void my memory is capable of creating.
Beyond the song I’m looking for, there’s always another more arresting one.
CONTRE LE FROID
I’ve developed some curious habits of late. They mostly involve the homeless of Montreal.
In winter I seek out the indigent, the people curled around hot air vents in cardboard coffins that don’t keep out the cold, wrapped in cocoons of their own devices, functional and unfashionable, screaming their frustration into the piping, the losses and disappointments of long ago and the anguish of the day, wrapped in bacteria and memory, hope filtered through untreated mental illness, beyond depression and into something deeper than polar vortex.
I creep close to hear what they say and how they say it. I catch the fluency and the disfluency. There are many stutterers among the homeless. They have means beyond mine to mangle a language: the growls, mutterings, angry repetitions. Maybe because no one is listening, they are free from expectations, they can finally speak their minds without censorship, and beyond speaking their minds, speak their bodies, allow whatever possesses, ails, and disenfranchises them to come out.
I leave gifts of food in exchange for my eavesdropping. Meals that Eric made. The homeless can keep our best Tupperware.
I suppose I’m just trying to relive my childhood, looking for another Grand Antonio, as if there will ever be another obese prophet of the street, brutish, bravado coasting on the strength of garlic cloves, inventing his own body language for a unique body, reviled and monstrous, worshipped but not rewarded, obscure but convinced of international fame.
What does frost look like as it settles into a cerebral cortex?
It was the coldest night of the year. The firefighters were out fixing burst pipes everywhere. They were too busy with that to deal with the cigarette fires that turned the East End into an inferno. The smoke blew west. Dreams went up in a final puff.
That night, I wanted to hold as many people as possible. I found myself hugging the inconsolable and stinky. Eric kept a lookout while I wrapped my arms and legs around entire torsos. On the coldest night of the year, no one questions your motives, the angles of your limbs. Some of them hugged back. Others gave me a cold shoulder.
I began to notice the shoes of some of the overweight men we visited that night. The soles had given way to their weight, and they split at the sides, letting in all kinds of weather. The men were shocked that we cared, but perhaps more shocked that we gave them plastic bags and elastics instead of new shoes. It felt good to earn the respect of the people who guarded the street, who prevented neighbourhoods from becoming too gentrified and vapid and expensive, who planted tenderness on otherwise faceless corners of urban blight and kept them vital.
Can piss freeze before it’s fully pissed out?
It’s shocking to lay warm soup at the head of the person who most reminds me of a certain someone, and to cradle their head and shoulders, feel their dandruff fall on me like snowflakes, only to find out much later that they were dead at the time.
It’s shocking to cuddle someone under the chassis of a car, antifreeze leaking onto both of us, feeling the shape they were as a child, and then to realize that a family of cats lives in their coat.
It’s shocking to realize how brave the people with the lowest self-esteem are.
There are times when I think that I truly recognize Antonio. When I see a man of no fixed address, hair silvered and long and matted, hundreds of pounds heavier than the nearest curious bystander, verbose and at the top of his sputtering powers, fighting off five police officers, thrashing his way into certain arrest, resisting cuffs, and spitting at the law, not intentionally but because the mouth is mysterious with rhythm and fluid, hiding all feelings of resignation behind defiance, he is the only one who doesn’t feel sorry for himself, even when they take him down, which they do with nightsticks, frozen over and soon covered in blood. They Taser him and his makeshift shoes rocket off his feet.
You’d think that when the police haul this man away, that it shatters my childhood fantasy. But, in fact, this is when I realize it’s Antonio. The
re has always been an Antonio—there have been many of him—and I can finally let him go. I can collect the shoes as part of forgetting, give them to someone who needs them.
Does snow remember the shape of a body? I get so damn curious in wintertime.
Ultimately we save and help no one.
Usually I was the one who started strange conversations, but this time it was Eric.
I have something to tell you.
Everything has already been said.
Hardly. There are things you don’t know about me. Most of which I’ll tell you, but some of which I won’t.
You need to try a weird kind of sex?
No, I’m not you. First of all, I’ll never leave you. It’s something I’ve long known and kept to myself. I want you to hear it from me before you hear it from someone else.
From who?
From whom? Nobody.
Well, thanks, that’s sweet. But why would you leave me?
I wouldn’t.
Then why bring it up? You obviously have more to tell me.
My audiologist said some interesting stuff recently. It looks like I can be treated and there’s a good chance it’ll…stick.
Huh. Are we talking cochlear implants?
Stapedectomy. I’ve been saving up, and the bank will finance the rest. I’ve started to imagine what it’s like not being deaf anymore. Weird, eh? And I don’t want to feel ashamed for not having any particular attachment to my deafness. What do you think?
Can’t say. I don’t know your bank.
Not about that, moron.
Um, I don’t know what to think. Maybe if you ask me something specific.
Will you ever leave me?
Don’t be silly. Of course I’ll never leave you. But I want you to think about something. When we start speaking differently to each other, we’ll be different people, no? So if one of us left the other, it would be like leaving a new person. Or something like that. We’ll probably be drifting in and out of strangerhood for the rest of our lives, anyway. That’s what people do.
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