I keep remembering the two guys in the AIDS snuff film Silverlake Life. Both had the big A. One complained to the camera of having to care for his bf when he has his own AIDS.
A couple of days ago, I finally got my BR records back. I am living, if one can call it that, in the one-bedroom apartment of a married couple I know. They’re a very sexy couple, I think. Seven-year-old sons who, despite being identical twins, are distinct. The boys approve of me. They love having me here. I’ve been cooking for this family for the whole summer. They have never eaten better in their lives. For those of you with high-school educations, couple + twins + me = 5 people.
I haven’t felt this kind of overcrowding in 20 years. We visited my uncle Joe, after whom I was named, in their inner-city apartment in Montreal. No fans or AC; Montreal is stultifyingly hot. Six or seven of us were hanging around in a bedroom. I had just been given a new shirt, but it was a button-up shirt whose top button was at the neck and whose second button was too low for comfort. Young fags cover up their bodies. We are too sensitive and self-aware. Being virtually naked amid all these at-close-range people prompted me to turn around and face the wall, until my mother told me it was rude. I knew it was rude. It was necessary.
My friends’ marriage is in trouble and it is killing the husband, whom I like. I have to constantly bail him out; most days he barely stops himself from crying and often cannot speak for long periods what with the frog in the throat. I also like the wife, though less so now. The kids know something’s up; they listen to our every word and are not stupid. They are upset and cry a lot in bed. Another severe incident this evening. The kids suddenly stopped being hungry and were very still and quiet, sitting together on the chair (yes, the chair) watching TV as the wife and husband spoke in the bathroom. Then one boy upturned his bowl onto the floor. Tears flowed. Ages and ages later, everyone ate, except me; I had to graze. And do the dishes for 45 minutes, and sweep the floor, which I had already swept and mopped today, along with vacuuming the rug and the couch, doing three loads of laundry, and sanitizing their bathroom, and finishing the breakfast dishes. And amending my ongoing criminal complaint with the police, which is why I am here in the first place.
I have to nursemaid the husband. I have myself to worry about. No one else is, certainly.
The other night, while trying to get to sleep, I found batteries for my Discperson. I played Stranger Than Fiction, looking so much forward to “Slumber,” which, paradoxically, I always thought was called “Suffer,” making me wonder why rock groups name albums after songs on other albums (e.g., Smithereens’ “Especially for You” on Green Thoughts and Especially for You).
I was not prepared for the wallop of “Tiny Voices,” which contains the single richest line in the entire BR oeuvre: “And from somewhere in our black, subconscious minds when we’re asleep comes a haunting, swelling mass of voices resonating. It’s screams of forgotten victims and the cries of innocents and the desperate plea for recognition and recompense.” (<Martha Stewart mode>It’s our Preferred BR Song of the Week</MSm>.) Tears came to my eyes. I couldn’t believe it.
How can music as aggressive, loud, and manly as Bad Religion have such a centering effect for us?
Tomorrow, despite my considerable trepidation, I look after the kids for the whole day. What they’ll eat is something of a question. We have enough, but nothing convenient. I plan to take them to the library, then bring them back and read, which effectively never happens in this pre-literate house. I have to remember them now before their world collapses. When I leave, they will also be hurt. I have been more consistent with them than their parents lately.
I grow more and more convinced that the samizdat/official lyrics for “Tiny Voices” – that is, the lyrics posted on various Web sites, including <http://thebrpage.tierranet.com> – are simply inaccurate. “And from somewhere in our black subconscious minds when we’re asleep comes a haunting, SWIRLING mass of voices resonating. It’s [blank] of victims and the cries of INNOCENTS and the desperate plea for recognition and recompense.” Swirling, not swelling. Innocents (people), not innocence (quality). And I defy anyone to tell me unequivocally what words are uttered in the [blank] passage. Sounds like “utopia” in there somewhere.
Very shocked this morning when the husband said “You’re not going to believe this, but I could really use a hug right now. I don’t have anyone else to....” So I held him. He managed not to cry. This is a taboo-blaster. Inverts of my generation are all dysfunctional people. We did not have a real childhood, and we had a fraudulent adolescence. Ask any presently-decloseted fag in his 30s when he came out, and the age he gives you will never be less than 19. It usually begins with a 2. So we spend a good ten years, ten very important years, untouched by anyone, hiding and covering up and enacting sins of omission. (OK, there’s the Pet Shop Boys “Can You Forgive Her?” case: “Remember when you were more easily led behind the cricket pavilion and the bicycle shed? Trembling as your dreams came true, you looked right into those blue eyes and knew it was love. But now you can’t pretend you’ve forgotten all the promises of that false friend.” Yet they too are furtive, secret, and shameful.)
Then, when we have the big coming-out experience, those rusty, tightly-wound coils are supposed to magically unkink. We then are supposed to be just like straight people, except for that one difference, or significantly unlike straight people, but in neither case are the hurt and the dents and nicks of growing up special acknowledged. Because they don’t go away.
Inverts under 25 years of age know nothing of this. Kids in-between those generations have varying experiences.
I spent a lot of time walking around with rectilinear Borg force fields surrounding me. Human touch is never automatic. There’s always a hesitation filter. Hesitation kills you. It kills you deader than the hiding and biding time and festering and drowning in still waters of the closet years. You’re out of the closet now. Things are supposed to be better, the shackles removed, the fairy wings unfolded from the pupa. Then every single time you try to do more than shake a hand there’s this little fermata in the space-time continuum – read Nicholson Baker’s Fermata, or listen to the audiotape, even better – that queers the moment. Of course it queers the moment. It pushes you into another moment.
And kids. Cripes. I don’t know how gay teachers and daycare workers survive with their sanity intact. Men are suspect now that sexual abuse is an understood phenomenon. Statistics be damned, queer men are most suspect. Even though I pose no threat to any child, having my hosts’ kids treat me like any other member of the family, which involves running into me, hugging me (spontaneously, and it’s never happened before from anyone, and it would be heartbreaking if I did more than like the kids, which truly is all I do), climbing onto my shoulders, holding my hand, lying down with me, sitting on my lap, has triggered hundreds of fermata. I have steeled my guts and I now pick them up and grab their hands when necessary to get them from A to B. (Get the odd glance from an ivert when we’re out in public. Straight people notice only that they’re twins.) I put on their shoes and socks and straighten their hats and shirts. I will not put sunscreen on, and forget about the bathroom. It’s too risky, particularly in any subsequent divorce proceedings.
The husband has only me to confide in, really. He needs me. I am calm in other people’s emergencies, but there is only so much my talking can do for him. For weeks, without knowing it, he has needed me to hold and reassure him. I haven’t done it, and I have watched him get red in the face, pop out the cords of the neck, tensen every muscle in his body, cry, tic – everything a worried-distraught-frantic man who finally discovers he has emotions when they hit him by the truckload would present. I held his feet once for 20 seconds, patted his back once, held his hand for a minute. That was it. I already envisage prosecutors imputing a sexual relationship or some kind of unrequited love or crush here, and am trying to hedge my bets. A much bigger fermata, this kind of second-third-guessing.
But he needed me enough to actually say so this morning, so I did it. I told him later that we both need to let our guard down and do whatever it takes to keep him together. He tries to sound convinced, but he is not 100% there when I tell him it is inconceivable that I would take advantage of him. That trace percentage is the fly in the ointment.
We’re both very vulnerable here, in different ways. (I was up as long as they were last night, and was almost as upset, while they had their nightly rehash.) And we worry about ourselves, the future, and the children. It will be a cruel irony if I end up being the most consistent force in their lives. (Even their grandparents might not be.) I’m already an uncle, but I don’t know where that young man is. Now I am a de facto uncle of three men, with combined ages of 50. I really need to be alone more.
It screams of forgotten victims and it cries of innocense.
This, at least, is one claimed interpretation of the most-contested line in Bad Religion, in “Tiny Voices.” But that one doesn’t work: What’s articulated i “the cries of innocents” (“the” is unmistakable), and “it screams of forgotten victims” does not match GrGr’s mumble.
Note to Joe Manis: Let’s put a write-in poll at www.theBRML.org asking for most-misheard Bad Religion lyrics. Mention up front that we know already about the backup vocals to “American Jesus.”
The current Poz carries an interview with Maurice Sendak, the famed children’s illustrator. He drew a mural at Gay Men’s Health Crisis’s children’s floor, and there’s also a matching fake tree for the kids to play under. His book Where the Wild Things Are, we were told, evoked anger because it counseled kids to defy their moms. The husband here said he had that book, pulled it out instantly, and opened it up, finding the inscription he wrote in it commemorating the cold day he bought it, when the twins were newborns. Shortly tears began to fly from his eyes. It took us the better part of an hour to get him breathing normally and able to pass more than a few minutes without crying more or having his nose run like a faucet. I daubed at his tears and sat with him and waited it out. Then the boys got home, finally, and it was off to the playground. I stayed here and cooked. The wife didn’t get home till after 8:00.
Wanted to read to the husband the other part of the interview:
Q. And how might parents with HIV talk to their children about it?
A. Be as fervently honest with them as one possibly can. If you’re dying, tell them you’re dying. Explain it as best you can. We don’t understand it any better than children do – we’re as frightened of it as they are. It’s our responsibility to make children comfortable with it so that afterward they remember – in their bitterness or unhappiness – that the dead parent made every effort to comfort them and be honest with them. I think that is essentially it – to allow them to express their mixed emotions.
This advice, I thought, will be relevant to the kids. They know something is up and an actual talk with them is necessary. The wife will dodge it; the husband will barely make it through alive, even with me there. I will wait for a better moment to read him that passage. Tonight’s going to be difficult enough. It’s the Wife’s Night Out with her Platonic Male Friend.
Visited a downstairs neighbour till 0130 hours. Came back up, and upon opening the door, voices suddenly quietened in the bedroom. They are still discussing things, still, even now, even after their nightly rehash-shower, at this hour?
I engaged my ritual of playing “Tiny Voices” and a few other songs and eventually fell asleep. This morning, when they were puttering around getting ready, I was convinced the husband had upturned something or other and created a huge mess that he didn’t have time to clean up and for which he was berated by the wife. This of course was similar to one of the twins’ accidentally tossing his bowl of macaroni on the floor the other night. When fully awake, I verified that the husband’s accident never happened. And two nights ago I saw a spider, with the wrong number of legs and the wrong body shape, descend from the ceiling straight for me, causing me to yell out loud and awaken momentarily, which the husband pointed out the next day.
We’re not a happy ship. I was, however, able yesterday to buy the current Punk Planet and sip a soy latte at Vienna Home Bakery, where Gay Couillard, the proprietress, likes me. She’s made vegan spider cookies specifically for me. Much later, real life had to recommence.
Northwood was a CBC TV series in the early ‘90s about teens at a Vancouver high school. Lochl{y/i/a}n Munro, later seen in appalling MTV Films productions, graduated from that show. Munro’s character gets busted up and paralyzed from drunk driving. Standard bitterness we expect to see in TV depictions of paralysis and disability. Eventually, though, he is released and sent back home, which is now semi-accessible. Mom pulls him aside after a long day and sez, When we heard you were in an accident and seriously hurt, we thought you might not make it. But then you didn’t die and we still have you now and it’s like getting another chance. (I have since borrowed this trope in something I wrote.)
The husband fell out of an apartment balcony when he was 24. No paralysis, but did break vertebrae. In hospital for a long time. Scars on his chest, which I noticed only tonight, from intubation from collapsed lungs. We know that the only ways to permanently and substantively alter adult personality are religious conversion and near-death experience. He changed: He stopped being a survivalist and took up cycling. The husband thus has a before-and-after experience.
He will now have a second before-and-after experience: Before the Bombshell dropped and after. He was very fragile and low-function yesterday. We got him home after grocery shopping, where he had multiple anxiety attacks in the Loblaws and I handled the kids, and he ended up in bed, the worst place to be, according to him, because the darkness and loneliness grip him. I went in and talked, lying down alongside him, which may have freaked him out. I was supposed to send the kids in after The Simpsons; actually, he’d get up and brush their teeth and they’d all go to bed.
I read the BRML and responded. I checked after 11:00: All asleep. A major victory. This guy has not slept a single night through in five weeks. But the wife was still out. I figured the door buzzer would go off after midnight, waking us both up.
Instead, in the middle of the night I heard him get up. Actually, a psychic thing is going on, and I have several times woken up spontaneously a few seconds before he left the bedroom.
– Is [the wife] back?
Shakes head.
– Are you OK?
Tries to speak and can’t. Gestures. Goes back to bed.
Later still he gets up again. He retches in the bathroom. The phone rings. The wife declares that she is having dinner and will be home “later.” Please come home tonight. Please come home, dear. I can’t. I can’t. No. Please come home tonight, dear. I do love you.
I have never heard a broken-up voice quite like that. I’ve been watching his heart break for weeks, but now I heard it crack.
He’s going insane. I get him some water and sit with him and hold his hand and get him tissues and wipe his tears. I insist that he cry if he needs to, because I’ve seen it before, no one is watching, and he’s out of commission longer if he doesn’t. The correct thing to do is lie down with him and hold him from head to toe and protect him from the world. But he can’t even sit up straight without puking, and I don’t want to freak him out.
It’s the worst day of his life. As on every Friday, he feared she will simply not come home tonight. He still loves her. How can someone be so cruel to a man who loves her?
It’s 0130. He can’t believe what she did, and I can’t believe her audacity. She wants him to simply go to bed. (“I can’t. I can’t.” Could you?) She planned to come home in the morning. The kids get up in the morning. Just how many kids in “normal” households find their mom coming home on a Saturday morning when they wake up? Coming home from a male friend’s place?
He’s afraid of being alone. I tell him he will very likely keep his kids, plus he has his parents, me, and his other friend. This isn’t the same as being married, but it is not... alone. (And the kids are progressing. Today the moment seemed exactly right. They let me shut off the computer monitor while they played a game. Your daddy has had a difficult week and needs you to be strong for him, I said, telling them exactly what I tell him. One twin nods immediately. The other does, too, and says “He needs a long vacation.” The monitor goes back on and life unpauses.)
Later he finds he can lie down on the couch. 0230 she lands home. I play dead. Shower-rehash. She again adopts the Nazis-dictating-terms-to-occupied-France tone. If she calls and says she’ll be back later , he has no right to be demonstrative and apply a guilt trip (my term). He has to stop his crying; when he cries she has the opposite reaction; it repulses her and she wants to get her shoes on and run out of the house. (Honey, go for it! Can I lace ’em up for you?) If she decides that she doesn’t feel up to coming home until the morning, she will do so, and he has no business laying any kind of trip on her. I am astounded once more.
We get up the next morning. He makes the kids porridge and goes back in.
1130: Now everyone is up.
– We had a discussion last night.
– I know. I heard the Nazis dictating terms to France.
Pause.
– I get the kids.
One mound of trouble, amid a mountain range, reduced to dust.
But everything else is over. I found this out tonight.
I recognized the rock-bottom-scraping undercurrent in his voice and it worried me. I haven’t been worried before, per se. Instead of crying and fretting and being swamped with emotion he never knew he had, now he will be barren and unremittingly sad. I don’t know how to treat that symptom.
The husband will now have had two before-and-after experiences: Falling off the balcony; becoming a single father. What I keep telling him is that he will have a third before-and-after experience: Finding a new mate, and falling in love again, and forgetting and relearning.
And unexpectedly, to this day I do not love the man. You’d think I should, or at least would. But he needs me to do right by him, even though I am not exactly what he needs. I sort of apologize for that from time to time.
Since some kind of BR content may be warranted, particularly for the impatient and/or macho readers of this list: What does GrGr think of “Struck a Nerve,” with its downcast conflicted melancholy themes, written in the usually joyous time after his kids were born, now that he is separated from them? The husband here has an advantage: His children will remain his.
I may no longer be necessary as the husband’s second, to use the Japanese terminology. He’s scraping the barrel. I dunno how much I can help him.
You know those days when you’re in a bitter, sarcastic mood for no externally-visible reason whatsoever? I was like that on Sunday. Or maybe there was an externally-visible reason. After the wife’s late night, it wasn’t until 11:30 that everyone was up. And they took one of their one-hour rehash-showers, which they usually reserve for bedtime. But weirdly, after chewing him out on Friday that his crying repulses her, gives her the opposite reaction, and makes her want to walk right out the door, this time she’s the one who’s crying.
Later they emerge. She plans to spend the afternoon, normally reserved for a family or pretend-family outing, with her paramour. Then within minutes, the plan changes: They’ll go mushroom-hunting.
Still bitter and sarcastic, I asked how they could go from apartheid to sunny cooperation in the blink of an eye. Got a lot of the anger out, he said.
That night, I get the lowdown. She, in tears: “What else do you want from me? I gave you the kids. I gave you everything.” (In exchange for your diktats and unquestioned, unlimited freedoms, and in exchange for destroying your husband.) He sat there and looked and sounded defeated. Hurt/wounded/broken-up/destroyed I can handle. Defeated is harder, because I’ve been there, and I recognized the stillness of the body and the tone of voice. A zero is harder to fix than a minus one.
I did, however, make scalloped potatoes, and rice pudding. But today we drove off to do every stitch of laundry in the house (and didn’t make it: Only five triple-sized washers’ worth!). I nursemaided everything while he got the kids lunch. At halftime, the husband mutters to me that one of the twins knows what’s going on (we know they know, but this is big). The boy asked “Are you and mommy getting a divorce?”
And what was he supposed to do? Lie? (Maurice Sendak’s advice: Full disclosure.)
The husband was back to his fragile, teary self. Other twin was OK. First twin rested his head on the back seat and fluttered his shut eyelids. Never saw him like that. Stop at drugstore. Other twin walks right over to me and buries his head in my stomach. After a while, I bend down and ask “Whazzamatter?” and the response is...
“It’s too damn hot.”
Big laughs. Love that kid. (He’s the one with no filters at all between mind and action or mind and speech. The other boy bottles everything up, tries to be helpful and considerate, and talks constantly of killing and maiming people and frequently kicks and hits family members.)
Get ’em home. Husband is now found face-down on bed in underwear (inside-out underwear, at that). I tell him he is not allowed on the bed and its spiral emotion vortex. Eventually, late, after her Monday with her paramour (where she took money with her to buy him lunch), mama-san shows up. First thing out of troubled twin’s mouth is “It’s not true that you don’t love daddy anymore? because that’s what he told us.”
Wife wants to go for a walk with the kids alone. I scotch that idea, let alone husband. So kids are ushered into bedroom. 45 minutes of wailing straight out of a pediatric surgery ward, and 9 out of 10 of the wails come from the troubled twin. I repair to the balcony. Shortly, I see other twin calmly playing Sim City on their computer. He is totally blasé, and has me read him two books on the balcony. When we get in, other twin is back. They play; I check E-mail. The Woman’s Intuition told me the exact moment to say “You know, I’m going to be here for a while yet, and you still have your grandparents. So the news isn’t all bad.” They pretended not to hear me.
Husband needs to take a walk. Wife has confessed to loving the paramour and wants to move in with him. The latter part we knew. Take husband out for dinner; he can actually eat. Latest weird psychic shit in my life: A year ago he dreamed that the wife had left him for a guy similar to the current paramour. He awoke as if from a nightmare and remembered it to this day.
Talk about cycling and physical exertion and sexuality; gotta get him back in the game. Buy Volkswagen porn (he: old Bugs, Syncros; me: Golf IV, baby!), water. I tell him about myself, and how he, as a dazzlingly attractive, startlingly fit, slim, salt-and-pepper-haired 36-year-old, is bursting with possibility with girls, while fags in this town not only don’t find me attractive, they consider me actively unpleasant-cum-repellent.
Walk some more. Talk further about sharing a house once the breakup is over, which, at its current schedule, is ludicrously drawn-out; if the money were there, she should leave tomorrow. I really want to be living by myself again, but it’s out of the question now. I decided yesterday, though, that, in my highly predestined life, living with him and the kids would be a fair compromise. (The kids, he said, will love me. But I am only neutral with them. I wish I had stronger feelings, or I figure stronger feelings would be expected here, but I don’t.)
– And you need me.
– I’ve told you that before.
– No, you haven’t. Do you mean you actually thought that yourself before?
– Yes, he says, sniffling.
I’m pretty touched. Pretty strongly touched. Yet because I am so calm with him, there are no tears or even much of a hit. I’m a hive of contradiction.
– That’s the kindest thing anyone’s said to me in a long time.
We walk.
– So I don’t get love and sex, and you get me, I said, neutrally. He sniffled some more. I rubbed his back, damp with sweat.
I don’t know which is better – having him breaking down all the time and my being useful or having him bottom out and leaving me pretty much useless. No, I am not selfless. I am involved. It’s a feedback loop. But which is better?
The wife plans to be out Friday and Saturday night. I’ve told him twice he has to let down his heterosexualist male guard and stop being the protector, the top. Rufus Wainwright lived with and slept alongside a straight guy for a couple of years. It’s not inconceivable. And when this divorce finds a girlfriend, she will adapt.
For the kids? First day of school tomorrow, and of daycare. Now I’m not neutral. Now I’m concerned for them. But they have to get through it.
“This doesn’t make sense to me because Brett got hooked on crack.”
Greg had a problem too early on, and no bad religion didnt form as a no-drug using group.
Not according to the Alternative Press interview of ~2.5 years ago. GrGr specifically told that august journal that he wanted a pot-free rock band. Presumably if pot is verboten, everything farther up the drug chain is, too.
And exactly what drug problem did GrGr ever have?
Extra credit for keeners who noted my egregious mistake of yesterday: Posting a message with an unchanged subject line! Naughty, naughty.
I am playing dead this morning while the adulteress gets ready for work and the husband acts all appeasing, which he told me was finished. “Joe.” I turn over. He nudges my leg. “Joe.” Asks me to do him a favour by taking the kids to school with him. This requires me to comb my hair, put on clothes (and Gore-Tex, what with the pouring rain), and pretend to be clean and responsible. The kids pile on me later (why are they dressed identically for the first day of school?) and are very well-behaved indeed when the husband is off driving the adulteress to work. Where’s her usual ride? Why can’t she take the bus?
Walking back from school, it is revealed that, while I sat here listening to Mods & Rockers last night and composing my latest opus for you, my indifferent public, the adulteress confessed to actual adultery. And there I was pegging them as sexually platonic, if not emotionally so, with maybe the other man as an invert. (You want tacky? Two months ago she breezes in after 6:00 with the other man, pulls the kids out of the apartment literally as I finish cooking dinner for them, and disappears until the husband comes home and drags them back. I did not get major hetero vibes from the 24-year-old milquetoast during that f2f incident. But as we know, I am tragically mistaken a lot of the time, which explains why I am a spinster.)
So he’s got her for infidelity and emotional cruelty. The divorce will be uncontested anyway.
The husband is badly broken up even by his standards but kind of runs away from me when I move from my litter to a chair. I would not necessarily have tackled him.
I spent the day sanitizing the place, reading, ironing, and looking for jobs, of which I found seven, most of them in Finland. (My ongoing Nokia Crusade may end up in a Viking funeral, but I am giving it my best shot. I am willing to move to Finland for a job. Or Oz. But not Mississauga or Ottawa.) Surprisingly, the adulteress gets the kids home on time today. She leaves to buy milk and cold cuts, which takes her nearly an hour and a half. I feed the kids, do the dishes. Husband comes home and he’s “tired,” his typical excuse in the past for not baking cookies at night after his sexually-arousing marathon bike ride. (This middle-aged man wins mountain-bike races.) It didn’t work then (it was enraging, in fact, given that all I had to eat most days of the week before coming over here were those cookies) and it don’t work now.
Phone rings. “Is [adulteress] there?” “No.” “Um, can you tell her [paramour] called?” I scoff. “No.” Hang up. Shit will hit the fan about that. I never answer their phone and only did so today to catch a call from the school principal, who must be Informed so that the kids’ inevitable misbehaving will be dealt with right.
One of the couple’s major failings is a cash-free existence, doing absolutely every transaction with one Interac card. So the fuckers never have five bucks to give me so I can go get a double fucking espresso down at the Beach. “If every night is going to be like this, I might as well move out.” Will they be putting the kids to bed and doing their standard hour-long shower-rehash, turning the air into molten lead? No, they promise.
The lads, engrossed in Sim City, have to hit the bathroom at 8:15 to be in bed by 8:30ish. At 8:18 one parent enters the bathroom and is followed one minute later. Another minute and the door closes. Oh, for fuck sakes.
At 8:33 I walk over and say “The kids need their bath and you did this last Tuesday –” and I am immediately interrupted by the husband barking “Joe! Please!” How dare he raise his voice to me?
One of the boys has to do #2. I score every non-penny coin they have, producing all of $1.50, pack my purse and head out the door, telling the kids I’d see them the next day. One more pit stop back here (to tape Kurt & Courtney), which kind of steals my thunder. One boy says something about not sleeping here anymore. What did you say? He repeated it and it still made no sense. I’m vulnerable here and you shouldn’t make jokes like that, I told him. He claimed not to be making a joke and seemed baffled. I’m sure he meant nothing by it.
I started walking to the Beach and gave up, cruising Gerrrard instead. They live in an oddball neighbourhood: Little India is one block away and the very exclusive Upper Beach literally begins at the latitude of their apartment building, but in-between is Coxwell Ave., full of the most disagreeable kind of lower-working-class poor, and the shops and bingo hall (home to a drive-by shooting last month) that cater to them. I can say this because I grew up poorer than them and have been trying to put distance between them and myself for 34 years and am apparently failing. (Read Class and The Canadian Book of Snobs, both of which are miserable failures of a book in exactly the same way, save for Class’s hierarchy of the classes.)
I walked in the Upper Beach direction, found the well-lighted stoop of the Forward Baptist Church, and sat and read Mother Jones.
Later I come back. He apologizes right away. The kids are in school and need a consistent bedtime, I tell them. They agree. If you’re both going to maintain the cover story that you’re “concerned about the kids,” you need to act it! And he used up his only chit.
Did I mention that this was 9:55 and the kids were still awake and being tucked into bed? Will they be zombies tomorrow morning, by any chance?
So the happy couple cuddled on the couch for the last 45 minutes, talking sotto voce and letting the husband kiss the adulteress as if tenderly. I suppose it is tenderness for him, but she doesn’t deserve it.
And where are they now? Re-rehashing it in the goddamn shower.
ObBR: “Loneliness was the bond that made me stick like glue.”
I’ve actually been writing, in longhand, notes on the current fiasco for use in eventual court cases. But these here missives, with all the effect of a neutrino whizzing through the earth, seem to be taking the place of the handwriting.
ObOffspring: I can’t say I like them much, but Dexter Holland is otherworldly beautiful. Blond eyelashes and eyebrows – or, much, much better, red lashes and brows – melt me to a puddle. (When I visited Vancouver they were on every streetcorner, but then again, so were drunken natives.) Lash me and browbeat me, boys. You know how few redheads there are, and how few are really attractive, and how few of them are interested in me? In recorded history, one. In dreamlife, a few dozen.
ObPopPunk: Pluto’s “When She Was Happy” is a classic. “Things aren’t working out the way she planned and she wants a divorce. All her friends, they don’t understand – they think she’s gorgeous. [...] Sex so free, it’s so hard to sell; now she’s popping back pills. And it wasn’t even hers to sell. Now everything’s gorgeous.” Visually inventive video, with no tie to the song at all; at one point the lads sing into coloured light bulbs for microphones. I still have a few sheets left of superexclusive toxic-shock-orange-coloured Pluto Post-It Notes.
ObDissolvingMarriage: Profuse, borderline-teary apologies from the husband for yelling at me. You are forgiven. He’s touched that Killer Twin came out of bed – late; they got to sleep late – and lay down next to me. Didn’t gravitate toward or cleave unto either parent. But the kids do something like that to me every day. Sleeping alongside the adulteress is like sleeping alongside her and the paramour; from now on he intends to sleep on the floor by the bunk beds. If I had a home, or my own room, he could sleep with me. And not on the floor. In bed. Invulnerable, with me to shield him, a feeling he has never had, being a breeder husband.
I hate the period between the adulteress’ bringing the kids home (whereupon I feed them and myself, but not her) and his arrival home. You could cut the air with a light sabre. And I have to be here. Among other things, there are only two sets of keys for three adults.
A near-repeat of last night’s late-bedtime disaster. I leave at 2020 hours, arrive back at 2240 after talking to the police about a couple of assaults I witness at a corner store (en francais, un depanneur; in Southern, a convenient store). (Note to Joe Manis: Make this digest MIME-compatible immediately. I am getting sick of being unable to use accents.) She has agreed to give him custody in writing, with me as a witness, and not to do her astoundingly contemptuous multi-hour phone calls to the paramour in this house.
The husband is remarkably calm tonight. The business – and I haven’t mentioned any of that, but he’s setting up a manufacturing miniplant from scratch – is finally improving after several weeks of setbacks and jitteriness. He told his parents; mom cried, but they’re behind him.
What is the problem?
The problem is that they have decided to roast a chicken. I am a vegan and, while I consent to serving the kids milk and mayonnaise, will not serve them meat. Recall that this is a one-bedroom apartment, and that I sleep on the floor. In other words, tonight I get to sleep inside the rotisserie of a Kwik-E-Mart. You can believe the door’s gonna be open and/or the AC will be on, noise be damned.
Things are stabilizing here in the House of Dissolution. I’m kind of sad, actually. I liked being needed. It’s as in the Space: 1999 episode (“The Lambda Factor,” <http://cybrary1999.com/episodes/scripts/z43tlf.html >) in which a citizen of Moonbase Alpha develops paranormal powers that seep into everyone on the base, giving them telekinetic abilities. Yet after the citizen loses a confrontation with Commander Koenig, Alpha in turn loses its collective and singular telekinesis, and everyone must slowly readjust to a life without a power, a strength, a pleasure, and an extension of the senses they had never enjoyed before.
The husband has had a few conversations with the wife, necessitating my staying in the bathroom or on the balcony. Much has been settled. No involvement with the paramour in the kids’ lives at all. They signed a custody agreement, which I witnessed. She has repeatedly told him that she will pay child support if necessary, which we hope it won’t be. There is now an actual schedule for her to be home: Sunday through Wednesday evenings; Thursday is the husband’s night out, and he will need me as chaperone; she comes home Saturday morning and remains here the rest of the weekend or stays out the entire weekend after visiting the paramour directly after work on Fridays. (They work together. Convenient.)
The husband has not been crying much.
Saturday, with the wife home, I took the kids to the Beach, ostensibly to the library. They know the hood and can echolocate the exact coordinates of every playground, leading me on what seem to be wild-goose chases that culminate, inexplicably, in a playground. (I looked after them a couple o’ weeks ago and we had to find a washroom in their school. After a few doors were locked, these seven-year-olds led me through every cubbyhole in the building as they mapped out where each subsequent restroom was and how to get there. They ran right up to doors and hit the panic bar – obviously experienced in opening doors made for nondisabled standing adults – and guided me like a Sherpa.) They were dressed in their near-identical Adidas gear Saturday, bought by their aunt, who disapproves of the husband and has advised the wife to leave him for years. Well-behaved on the streetcar and bus. I was so distracted by minding them that I didn’t notice how handsome, hirsute, and well-built my seatmate was until he left the streetcar. Story of my life.
At the second playground – modeled after a ship – I was able to sit at the prow, lean back onto the projecting boards, and rest my arms on the sides of the ship. It was a spectacularly comfortable and commanding vantagepoint. Most of the parents there were fathers. Told the kids to stop pretending there was such a thing as girl germs – mentioned by one dad – and to include girls in their activites.
It took three attempts over 45 minutes to get the kids on the bus home. They’d been at playground two for 90 minutes and we had been out 4.5 hours. They had long since become tired and cranky, but because they know what I say doesn’t stick, I couldn’t get them back home. Ultimately they relented, crying and risking their lives looking into sewer-construction holes on the way. At home, a huge explosion over one twin’s demanding to slice his own mozzarella for a bagel I had already grated mozarella on and toasted for him. Lots of kicking and threatening me. Stop taking out your frustrations on me! I told him. Next to no discipline from the husband. (“They’re just kids.” Right. They’re just kids who do anything they want and are never, ever punished beyond just holding them and giving them a 10-minute timeout.)
Considerable argument with the husband, with lots of condescenscion from him of the “You don’t understand kids” variety. We never argue. But this twin has a serious problem with aggression. It has gone effectively untreated. He’s the one who went nuts when the divorce was announced, and the one who sniffed it out without being told; he tries hard to be nice and considerate to everyone, but he’s a tightly-wound kid who comes unsprung at unforeseen moments and talks constantly of killing and pulverizing.
They drove me to the laundromat, where five quadruple-sized washers were needed. (40 minutes of folding alone.) While they were back at the house, husband asked twin what was really wrong. He missed mommy, who by this time was out with the paramour. (She phoned him at work that day for and hour and a half, tearfully complaining of being alone. You made your bed, sister.) The twin and the husband degenerated into tears. When the three of them came to pick me up, the boy was back to normal, the man sniffling a wee bit.
I gave him a big hug later (the abs on that man) and made sure there were no lingering disagreements, which we cannot afford. I was right, he said (quit telling me I’m right); the kid needs help, and by coincidence the husband has an appointment with a shrink this week, ostensibly to talk about the other twin, who has a speech impediment, cannot read or produce correct English, and has poor motor skills. That twin is easier to fix. The whole thing was fated: I was going to take the kids out, we were going to stay too long, the boy and I were going to fight, as were the husband and I, and the boy was going to burst. It had to happen.
The man is concerned about getting back in the loop. His entire sexual being was enmeshed with his wife, so much so that he cannot identify any erogenous zones of his body except his scalp (ignored altogether by the wife) and his intact penis, which I have not seen yet. Ask him about what satisfies him and all he can do is talk about what he likes doing to his wife. Yet he is in spectacular shape, is lean beyond measure (in part due to his destroyed appetite lately), and is blessed with a beautifully symmetrical head and face. With enormous blue-grey eyes, a nice profile, good teeth, salt-and-pepper hair.
Did you see the movie Kiss of the Spider Woman, I asked him? No. Bill Hurt asks Raul Julia, Do you know how hard it is to find a real man ? And he finds one, quite by surprise: a waiter in a restaurant, whom he chats up and gets to know. What can the waiter do? He’s heterosexualist and married. He understands what Hurt needs, but cannot help him. And that is the eternal conundrum of the invert: We want what we cannot be and cannot have. Homosexualists are ersatz. In the words of Camille Paglia, the real butches are straight.
I explained this to the husband, held his feet, asked him if he understood he bore a great advantage in his upcoming life as a single father. No. So I told him: You are a real man. And explained how so, which boiled down to a summer afternoon where I found him and the boys at the wading pool. He’s in a T-shirt and shorts and sandals and his floppy hat and shades. The sons, and other kids, run up to him from time to time to get him to fix their Super Soakers or equivalent. Sometimes he can do it, sometimes he can’t. But he unselfconsciously walks right into the water, leans over, showing the astonishing hamstrings and the jet-black hair on his trim, sinewy legs and his arse, works the spray guns without clumsiness or hesitation, hands them back, sits down again. What a comparison with, say, me, who is hairier, balder, vastly out of shape by comparison (even by comparison with myself a few years ago), adept only at fine-motor skills like typing or sewing, and so monumentally clumsy I cannot reach for a plate or a vegetable in a bin without banging one of my fingers on another plate, the edge of the cabinet, or the edge of the bin, and who, while no longer selfconscious, maintains indelible racial memories of being that way that create a hesitation filter about many actions.
I’m sorry, but we, and I, are ersatz, and he is the real thing.
So why should he enter the world of dating with optimism, I ask? Because I am a real man. And you are beautiful.
Lots of coaching on how to chat people up – ironic considering (a) Toronto City Bylaw No. 1 makes talking to strangers illegal; (b) I am terrible at it – and reminding him that, before the bombshell hit, he walked the streets as if he owned the place and cut a dashing figure.
He has got to stop thanking me and telling me I’m right. I want him to stop doing so in exchange for letting me do anything necessary to assist him. On Saturday night, that included talking till 0100 hours, holding and rubbing him, scratching his head, getting him water, telling him not to simply lie there in the dark at night but to come out here and get me to talk to him or listen or sit with him or something other than tumbling into the inevitable emotional vortex.
And Shannon, the tarty young lifeguardess at the wading pool, with her T-shirt tied in a knot just above the navel, talked to him. And the day before, she couldn’t believe he was 36 and sat there with her knee touching his. And now he’s remembering all that, and kicking himself. But he’s in no legal or emotional shape to go for a one-night stand. Strangely, his recollections of that episode are only one or two evolutionary rungs above what passes for a life for me. Like today, heading out to gobble a double espresso. Guy with girlfriend walks by. He’s shaven-headed and has the thick fair skin epitomized by the actor J.K. Simmons, known for his roles on Homicide and as Schillinger on Oz, also green eyes, which lock with mine. But he’s confused. Why am I looking at him? We walk on by. And that’s a Good Day for Joe: I got to look a sexy man in the eye.
So I am a bit concerned about my long-term health if I live with the husband and his kids in a different house. I decided last week that, if necessary, if we were living together, and if there were enough income, I would become a legal guardian of the kids. The husband, who thanks me profusely for the smallest things, barely acknowledged this substantial movement of the glaciers. But if we live together, do I get no love or sex, but he gets me? He is everything you could want in a man except homosexualism. If, as the months wear on, he meets one or more chicks he fancies and I remain a spinster, and a homely one at that, what happens next?
But he’s been keeping himself together reasonably well this weekend. As he becomes more independent, I learn the standard parental lesson of loss of influence. Who better to quote on this topic on the Bad Religion Mailing List but Céline Dion? Think of “Les blues du businessman,” on Dion Chante Plamondon:
J’aurai voulu être un chanteur pour pouovoir crier que je suis.
J’aurai voulu être un acteur où tous les jours changer de peau.
J’aurais voulu être un artiste pour avoir le monde à refaire,
pour pouvoir inventer ma vie,
pour pouvoir dire pourquoi j’existe.
But I already am an artiste. And it ain’t getting me anywhere. Just why do I exist, apart from my function keeping this man alive? Don’t ask me to justify my life.
I cleaned the apartment from stem to stern – swept, mopped, vacuumed, did three racks o’ dishes – and wrote an application for a job. Husband and I have to do grocery shopping. Wife comes home with kids, who are in fine spirits, and starts making them spaghetti, using the largest possible pots, which in turn are an increased pain for me to clean. I usually feed them.
In the car later, husband tells me wifey is getting irked that I don’t say hello to her when she drags the kids home, purely out of duty and sentimentality, at 1730 hours. Let’s cut to the chase, I say. You mean if I don’t start saying hello to her she’s going to kick me out? Yes.
Fuck you, honey. How fucking dare you act like my former host and threaten my life that way. How dare you not stick up for me. His whole schtick now is that his lawyer tells him he is in a precarious position because, since he is not the breadwinner, a judge could decide she is the better parent, signed custody agreement be damned. Show me the clause in the Family Law Act that invalidates voluntarily-signed custody contracts, I told him. And for fuck sakes, even if all that is true, she doesn’t know it. Not for the first time, I tell him to line up a vicious men’s-rights attorney, and to file for divorce before the month ends.
He’s all pussywhipped, but I’ll be damned if I will be. He’s taken a huge dent to the karma, and lost a great deal of goodwill. So I will say hello to the adulteress, through gritted teeth. Still no eye contact, which I wouldn’t give her even under court order, and the husband is under obligation to tell the wife to go fuck herself. She has every fucking convenience: Her only chores are picking up the kids and ironing her skirt in the morning. (I refuse to do her ironing anymore.) She gets full-on maid service, a cook and cleaner, and a completely cowed, cuckolded lame-duck husband and a boyfriend and every freedom she ever demanded. The nerve.
It takes over 20 minutes to unpack the huge haul o’ groceries, which at least gives me something to do tomorrow, like cook tabbouleh (with quinoa, not bulgur, though we’re low on that) and mushroom risotto and maybe an apple pie. Wife is watching Mambo Kings too loudly on TV. Husband fires up shitbox Wintel computer and the radio. I ask him twice if we really need a loud television talking to us in Spanish and a radio. It’s my house, he says.
That’s the first and last time you’ll ever get to say that to me, I warn him.
I sit down alongside and read my goddamn E-mail. I needle him a bit. He asks if I ate today. Of course I ate today. I even made coconut rice pudding for him and the wife, since he can’t really eat anything spicy these days and can definitely eat that. I am not costing them more than a few dollars a month, I am approved by their children, and I save them immense time in housekeeping. In fact, I indirectly facilitate the adulteress’s adultery. They have no fucking right to complain. “A man’s home is his castle” doesn’t cut the mustard with me. I am much more vulnerable than either of them.
Oh, but things got better, for a while. After my hollering at the husband in the car, he and the adulteress had their usual shower-rehash. As if there’s anything left to talk about. For the first time ever, I heard him shout at her. This was while I was ostensibly listening to Mods & Rockers on headphones. I cheated a few times to eavesdrop. (They put me in a difficult position. I effectively have to stay up until they finish their rehashes; if I try to lie down on my litter in the living room, I end up hearing every word. Keeping busy somehow is the order of the night.)
A mere couple of weeks after she self-importantly declared that she needs to work out! and needs to go dancing! she now declares that she needs to buy a real dress, not from Goodwill, and sexy jeans. She feels she has to ask permission to get her hair done or a pedicure. (She does. She’s in the top 5% of social-assistance recipients in the province: She is part of the Ontario Works slavery program. But they don’t have a lot of money, thouh they manage it quite well. This does not allow for extensive beautician appointments. And if you’re wondering why I am not also a welfare recipient, [a] it was denied already, [b] the hoops they put you through are astounding-slash-infuriating and are deliberately designed to humiliate maximally, and [c] it would draw undue attention to my host family, threatening everyone.)
Now, this chick has a model’s body, which means “tall, no tits, no ass.” Face vaguely courtneylovesque, as I noted in from still photo in the documentary Kurt & Courtney. She literally can wear her seven-year-old sons’ shirts. Super-petite sizes fit her no problem. In fact, she scores hugely at the Goodwill: Other girls give away the items they bought in a fit of optimism that they could actually fit into them. All her Goodwill clothes are indistinguishable from store-bought. It’s a class thing, I think. Remember, she flipped: In the last month she has changed from a married breadwinner mother to a 28-year-old freelancing party-girl hipstrix.
The shower-rehash conversation eventually returned to me. My yelling at the husband was reported. He did point out, in a watered-down way that was actually quite effective, all the things I do do around here. That, he told her, was my method of communicating. He then took a quick detour to Jupiter and muttered something about my parents’ being some kind of influence on the way I am dealing with their divorce. (Mine divorced when I was 2, at which point my mom fled the backwater of PEI with all of us and we grew up in another backwater, New Brunswick. I deny absolutely that any part of my parents’ lives influences me today. I am entirely self-made, and I have no links with my family at all.) This caused further rage. I ate it and somehow got to sleep.
Told him he was full of shit the next morning, which he accepted. But weirdly, the rest of the day was fine. Last night we even were talking as though we were all adults with no simmering hostilities, a la the entire summer, when I acted as their Uberfrau.
I have bitten my tongue and I do say hello to the adulteress when she finally drags the kids home from daycare one minute before they close. It occurred to me today that simply saying “Hi, everyone!” neatly sidesteps the issue. Ah, today. Things were going pretty well. She breezes in at sixish. The kids immediately start up Sim City. She heads out to withdraw money (for the weekend, and for her repaired shoes, which I dropped off for her, facilitating her party-girl lifestyle) and shop a bit. I ring the husband to get an ETA. He tells me not to take the kids to the playground and to sit tight.
Now, the adulteress had a sugar daddy for a while, an upper-middle-class 50-year-old she and the kids visited most weeks to do laundry. Some money was slipped here and there. She cut the whole thing out completely this summer after he got “too sexual” with her. (Apparently the sugar daddy also has cancer. Not a lot to lose to make a pass, I guess he figured.) But today, she and the sugar daddy had a talk. She bruited the idea of bringing her kids and her paramour over to the sugar daddy’s for a visit. The husband found some backbone and scotched the idea. Still, he worries – needlessly – that the sugar daddy will complicate things. How can it? Reacquainting herself with a man she dropped like a hot potato after he started making advances to her makes her look even more adulterous and unfit. And if he wants to fund her divorce lawyer, more power to him: She gets to keep her own money to work out! and go dancing! while the divorce will still be uncontested.
I was trying to talk the husband down, and also deal with the very hyperactive kids (the disturbed twin kicked me only once today, which I figure is progress), when she breezes in, late. No money withdrawn, and no shopping done. Instead, she had a tiff with the paramour, and announced she would be heading over there.
On a schoolnight. After explicitly agreeing to spend Monday through Thursday nights here steadily.
Bizarrely, the husband was quite cheerful over the 90-some minutes it took her to pack an overnight bag and eat dinner.
He’s his usual wreck now. His new line is that he has to somehow get used to sleeping alone. Well, he’s barely slept at all in a month and a half. I told him if he ends up sleeping only a few hours tonight, the next time this happens I hold him until he does fall asleep. I apologized again for the twist of fate that his confidant is not a girl, but by his own admission he can only fall asleep holding the wife in his arms, even now. What I offer is an order of magnitude better than lying there in the dark feeling the seconds tick off like glacier motion. And for heaven’s sake, I wear PJs to bed. I wear more to bed than he wears outside the house; he will ride his bike wearing only shorts, socks, and shoes if he feels like it, and sleeveless vests are de rigueur. It’s a hurdle for him, but if he shuts up, turns off his residual macho heterosexualism, and lets me help him, he will wake up the next morning, alone, to discover that he slept the night. Weaning himself off me will be easier than going cold turkey.
Turkey. Hmpf. Did I mention how their hamburger meat contaminated the bottom shelf of the fridge yesterday by bleeding all over it, and how the adulteress ignored my repeated warnings not to do X, Y, and Z, which would only cross-contaminate the entire kitchen? (She headed out of the house again – another phone call, presumably – and I mopped everything down with a bleach solution. These people refuse to take any of my advice on food safety. I assume they will only get with the program when their kids are puking their guts out in hospital with E. coli poisoning, which, if brought up at divorce hearings, will reflect unfavourably on both of them.)
What did the husband cook tonight? Hamburgers. You can bet I didn’t wash those dishes.
So the adulteress Spent the Night Out yesterday. Husband took a shower, refused to let me accompany him to bed, refused also to come out and nudge me awake after staring at the black ceiling for hours. You won’t get better if you won’t let me help you. “I have to get used to it” doesn’t cut the honey mustard, honey.
In the morning, I hear him getting the kids’ porridge ready. I fall back asleep. Exactly an hour passes. One of the kids piles on me; I say hello. I muttered that the other twin would like an orange peeled and sectioned for him, which doesn’t happen. Husband prods the kids into getting dressed. What I don’t understand is why this family always, always waits until just before the kids must head to school to get them dressed. I figure they are ready for dressing after porridge.
But today the kids are slow. They are slow most days. But today the husband is already yelling at them. And I mean yelling. They won’t get their shoes on. But they cannot tie a bow, and even I have trouble untying the husband’s double bows, and their sneakers are tied tightly from yesterday. They cannot put their shoes on unaided, but that’s what he’s yelling at them for. I get up to help, as I do several days a week. “Joe! Back!” Like I am a too-curious housepet.
Violent twin is getting very upset at this treatment. In fact, he says “You have no idea how upset you’re making me” in that Marvin the Martian voice he uses. He does know, the husband replies. Twin is also upset that his pants are too long, kids will laugh, and he’ll trip on them. After a few minutes of this, I get up again and look at the pants, which are actually jeans. (The family refers to the kids’ shorts as pants, so real pants are always going to seem too long.) I dunno, they look like normal pants to me, I tell the boy. “Joe! I’m asking you! Please!”
So this time I sit down on the couch. Where’s mommy? Did she go to work early? the violent twin asks. No. She stayed out all night with her boyfriend, the husband says. Now the husband has jekyll-and-hyded back to maudlin sniffling. He keeps telling them to get used to it; it’s just the three of them now; I need you to help daddy. This is of course bullshit. There are no fewer than six of us: husband, boys, me, grandparents.
They head to school. He’s back shortly. I tell him not to be snippy with me, or with the boys. He’s unusually high-strung and vulnerable. She had phoned this morning, and asked to talk to the boys, which he scotched. Sit down and have a drink, I start telling him. Joe! I’ll find my own equilibrium, he starts replying, when the phone rings, as it does every single morning. I tell him he doesn’t have to answer that. “Yes, I do.” It’s his dad, with whom he is snippy, because dad is asking too many questions. In a conceptual repeat of a couple of weeks ago, the adulteress’s night out is mentioned.
Husband is in no condition to drive. His partner will do it this morning. He expects to be home early; he’s arranged with the adulteress to pick the kids up; she doesn’t have to. (Another freedom.) Come 1700 hours, he won’t let me go with him to get the kids. He’s still irritable. Thursday is his agreed night out, but he’s “not up to it.” I tell him if he doesn’t make use of this “privilege,” he risks losing it. I don’t let up on him about this. I tend not to let up on them when they’re being irrational. But the husband is all-but-entirely-incapable of admitting he made a mistake; the first time ever was Saturday after the big fight with the violent twin. So he is now saying that tomorrow! will be our big night out. It isn’t “our” night out, I tell him. I had also told him that I am expected to chaperone him indefinitely but we aren’t allowed to go where I want. He should drop his claim that he doesn’t like bars. In truth, he just doesn’t want to be surrounded by fags. (On Pride Day evening, we sat on Church St., and he was visibly nervous. Push-pull of wearing his sleeveless fleece vest, but zipping it up to the neck. He claims to be OK with homosexuality. This is his claim.)
And making big plans sets us up for failure. Being casual is the way to have a good time on the town.
I give up and go for a double espresso at the beach. Returning three hours later, the place is a mess. Other twin tells me they just got back from shopping, and would have returned earlier if the wife hadn’t been out so late. She too was shopping: For a black leather vest and corset, hanging in the corner. The ki-i-id is hot tonight. Whoa. So hot tonight.
While walking into the building, a swarthy young man in track pants and an I’M A KNOCKOUT T-shirt is loitering at the entrance. He takes a look at me that lasts one beat too long and walks away. Is this the paramour?
Will the five of us be sleeping here tonight? I ask the husband. Maybe not, he says.
Kids are anesthetized. The no-longer-loving couple pretend to be relaxing by channel-surfing. Shower-rehash. Very little conversation. He emerges wearing a thin, short towel, asking to go to bed. “It’s late.” No, it is’t. It’s 2230 hours. We’re watching E.R.
As usual, I got the kids their covered glasses of water tonight, which the husband bothered to get up and bring in to them only after announcing they ought to go to bed.
That’s twice in two weeks he’s been snippy to me. My role as psychotherapist, life-support system, and second is optional for me, I ought to remind him.
Everyone’s in bed now but me, and there aren’t enough spare change or subway tickets for me to go out tonight, which I would actually like to do. So hot tonight.
We pick the kids up on Friday from their grandparents, who are never referred to by name or by terms like grandma/grandpa/grandparents but rather by obscure German-English diminutives I ruthlessly mock. They seem to be in good spirits, as does the husband, comparatively. This was after we had gone out for sushi at Lily, our preferred hangout, which we had not visited in months. I had the vegetable California roll and the avocado roll; I am the only vegan customer of the vegan chef and he knows my tastes. The husband enjoyed tempura shrimp roll, uni hand-roll, white-tuna nigiri, and a small sake. (I’d never been that close to the stuff before. Who knew it was piping hot and, from its smell, could be used to strip engine parts?)
The kids:
– Mommy is sleeping not at home tonight, half a question, half a statement.
– No. Mommy is away for the weekend. With her boyfriend.
– But we can sleep with you tonight...
– Yes. You can sleep with daddy, who loves you very much, he says, reaching back to touch one boy’s leg. And your [German-English diminutive] love you very much, too.
– Because they’re your parents.
– That’s right.
– And we’re your sons.
– That’s right. You are my sons, and daddy loves you very much.
We bake cookies, watch Iron Chef, send him to bed with the boys on either side of him. I feel a tad left out, but the husband is in such good humour, and the kids, too, that all is well in the universe.
This, of course, was after a very long day. Thursday night, after their pretend-relaxation in front of the TV, I decided to Go Out. Since the adulteress now hides her subway tickets from me and they never, ever have cash around the house, putting $3.50 together to add to the $0.50 in my pocket for bus fare was impossible. So I dressed warmly, borrowed the husband’s cellphone and Nike watch with which to time my trip, packed water, and walked. Over 70 minutes either way, grinding my left little toe to hamburger. Watched the last minutes of the Woody’s Best Chest Contest, which really ought to be renamed the Woody’s Most Laughable Excuse for a Painfully Skinny, Underdeveloped, and Hairless Faggy Chest contest. We just love it when the 110-pound Hong Kong guys get up their and prance around, as if they were remotely attractive. Most nights there isn’t even a field at the Best Chest Contest, though the Sunday-night Best Legs Contest isn’t as dire. Did the Black Eagle. Got home threeish, asleep fourish.
I spent Friday schlepping around, on the hamburgered toe, buying bagels for the family and trying to find a copy of the new Poz, which I had held in my hand the other day but did not have the whopping $3.45 on-hand to buy with. Rather frustrating. Poz is the best gay magazine that isn’t a gay magazine, and I read it from cover to cover. I never feel more poor than when I do not have two doubloons in my pocket to buy my favourite magazine. It’s not like Wallpaper, which costs $8.50.
When Saturday comes, the husband is in good enough spirits to attempt a bike ride. To say this man is skilled on a bicycle is an understatement. I run the Icebike mailing list on winter cycling and know this man from that forum. There are no conditions in which he will not ride – not even the big storm in January where they called in the army – and he takes pleasure rides on the surface of the lake in midwinter, jostling over the bumps of windswept, sub-Arctic frozen surf on his Snow Cat extra-wide wheels and Nokian 296 studded tires. He’s in his late 30s and has won a few bike races overall , which is rather surprising and impressive given that most hotshot cyclists are about 21 and, on paper, orders of magnitude more fit. He appears to be naturally talented. He is also fit and handsome, among other things I am not. Those comparisons were resonating a bit more profoundly this weekend than usual (think Tacoma Narrows Bridge), but I tried to pretend otherwise.
So we finally got him out on his bike – a near-daily occurrence before the bombshell. The last time he attempted this, he bailed after 45 minutes and came home on the verge of tears (and would present with wet cheeks from suppressing the tears later that afternoon). That meant I had to mind the kids while he’s out. Downstairs neighbour comes to visit and the kids go apeshit, but in a boisterous, fun, youthful way.
Dad comes back from ride. They all go to the playground. I head downtown. Get my hair cut, after months and months of going insane. With hair – on my head – as sparse and unpicardlike as mine, maintenance is a full-time job, and I tired of looking like Andy Sipowicz. See two fags I actually find sexy, exceeding the number I usually see in the run of a month. Head back. The ride was good, as was the playing, I am told. The problem is that the violent twin had been kicking and threatening and defying me all day. Remember, he is a boy of seven. He dared me to lock him in the bedroom, which I did. I rat him out to daddy-o when I return, and some kind of slap-on-wrist punishment is meted out.
Things go downhill from here.
For reasons I do not understand, possibly something like compassion fatigue, I’m feeling very sad and lonely and vulnerable. But I have to bundle up all the laundry for the weekly trip – while he’s in the shower, with the door open courtesy of the kids, who have carte-blanche access to their parents’ bodies. I had been asking him, the other day, why he is so modest with me. He closes the bathroom door all the way and walks around with a towel at the very least, but he and the wife have mentioned on four separate occasions that they are OK with nudity. I have been told not to open a door several times while occupants scurry to put something on. He takes showers and baths with the boys.
Everything is a reference from a Michael Chabon short story. She complains, long after she let the horse bolt from the stable, that he never gave her foot massages. In a Chabon story, a warring couple is advised to give one another hot-oil foot massages as Al Green croons to them. The husband finds feet entirely unsexy, and Al Green, reverend or not, does nothing for him. In another story, a single dad and his young daughter are at a party at a friend’s house. She’s irritable and ends up in the bathroom upstairs, which she refuses to leave. Until, that is, daddy takes a bath with her. He breaks down and does so.
FIRST ASIDE: I have learned to be modest. I am not hypocritical; it’s a two-way street. I had a houseguest for six months in 1998, and the deal was no walking around unclothed. The houseguest was as hirsute and out-of-shape as I am. Being both at once is too much to handle. I am stared at routinely in dressing rooms, not that I have been to a gym in ages. Even other hairy guys look at me, perhaps as a misguided form of bonding; Nardwuar the Human Serviette experiences this, too, at concerts. I wrote a story on hirsute men in sports and have a much larger clipping file than that article would suggest. It is not considered OK to pick on guys because they are, say, very fair- or dark-skinned; that’s racist, because skin colour is something you cannot control, apart from summertime tanning. (Maybe it’s OK to pick on albinos, some of whom are also people of colour, and in fact there’s a very handsome young albino black guy in town here. But albinism is rare.) Not only is it OK to pick on guys whose skins carry another hereditary, immutable attribute, namely hairiness, it’s actively encouraged. Even this family’s kids makes fun of my hirsuteness.
In summertime, I wear the standard short-sleeved shirts, but over a T-shirt; it helps with sweat (we wick, allegedly an evolutionary advantage) and covers more hair. I’m not fooling anyone with any kind of life experience; you don’t get this kind of male-pattern baldness with hair all the way to the elbows and over the wrists if you can’t also follow that path, unbroken, right down to the toes. I have never been “slim,” and I am mesomorphic only on the front half of the body. In fact, I was examined by a specialist to determine if my skimpy back muscles were saddled with a benign form of muscular dystrophy. (No.) In a tucked-in T-shirt, I look pregnant. Even ten years ago, when I had some muscle tone and worked out regularly, I had a wee gut. We have to go back 15 years to find a time when that was not so.
I do not have a love-hate relationship with myself. Unlike some guys I’ve felt, my fur is soft, not wiry. Amusing patterns can be created with Wahl hair clippers, and back stubble is much sexier than back hair, what with the whorls and the grain. There are times when I’m kind of proud of myself. Sometimes I even feel sexy, despite everything else. But my pelt, which I never asked for, which apparently came from my mother’s side, which she called me “Ape!” for, is the only part of me I would change. I would put up with absolutely everything else.
But the husband has the modesty of an heterosexualist. He has no recollection of any time in his life when he hesitated to take his shirt off. He rarely wears pants, always shorts. I wear more to bed at night – L.L. Bean pyjamas, at least bottoms plus T-shirt, sometimes the whole ensemble – than he wears out of the house nine months of the year.
I feel I stick out a bit here in my really, really closing the bathroom door. The kids have not quite gotten used to the idea of not being able to walk right in. I could probably handle a lower degree modesty, like standing there in a towel or underwear or even letting the damn kids in, if the husband treated me like a member of the family. If, in other words, he were as naked as often as usual. It’s like: Can’t be naked around the man who is keeping me from going insane, because he is a man and a gay one, at that.
SECOND ASIDE: Isolation takes many forms. The downstairs neighbour loves nothing more than living in the very, very far north, in communities of maybe 300 people. I consider a town like New York City to have the working minimum population for an interesting vacation. I don’t like overcrowded buses any more than you do, but I am a person who needs people. But I am also sarcastic and am despised by 20% of people, forever, on sight. That was true when I was four and it is very true now. Friends, acquaintances, and even my old hairdresser either go SPLAT! after a while (“You have pushed me farther than anyone I have ever known”) and eXcommunicate me or make use of convenient moments to X me off their list of friends. My hairdresser, whom I’d been seeing for nearly a decade, refused to call me back after I missed my first appointment ever; in effect, she fired me. Another friend, who fell off the event horizon three times in five years and for whom I worried while lying in bed most nights for a month, came back from E addiction, poverty, breakup with his bf, and unemployment to be my friend again, until the latest disaster happened, which he used as a convenient pretext to ignore me completely.
I am unpopular. I can live with that. What I cannot live with is the rectilinear Borg force fields. I have a chequered history with physical affection. I get none of it. I have a sporadic sex life, and there is no way on earth I am ever going to have a bf again in this accursed town, but that does not cut the mustard, does it? No one ever touches me. It is to the point where patting neighbourhood cats is the highlight of my week. Or when my back, covered in its layers of cloth and natural insulation, brushes up against a pole or something, I cleave to it. (Cleave. Good word, huh? And in one of my many ironies, my back is highly sensitive to the touch.)
Being an on-call psychiatrist for the husband 24 hours a day for weeks has allowed wounds to fester. He needed to be held and comforted. And I enjoyed holding and comforting him, even when he was stiff as a board, as he often was.
It only became apparent on Saturday night, after the laundry was done and the kids were anesthetized in their bunk beds, while sitting with him on the couch as he read bike porn, that the last weeks had been built on a house of cards. I was weak and vulnerable and, by definition, friendless, and on the verge of crying. Apart from the occasional sad film or even the occasional affecting music video, I never cry. I am, unfortunately, stoic.
My heart was pounding and I was imagining all the ready-made excuses he’d give me, rooted in that little core of machismo he still has in him. My voice was sounding like his lately, with the quavering and the shallow breaths, when I told him I was weak and vulnerable and friendless and for some reason today things are worse than ever (“You’ve been edgier than usual,” he admits, not at all helpfully), and after everything we’ve gone through can we please maybe help each other, because I need to lie with him in bed and just hold him and have him hold me.
– I can’t, he said, immediately. The kids will be sleeping with me.
– They’re in their own beds.
– Yeah, but at midnight, 1 o’clock, they’ll crawl down and come in.
Worst-case scenario well underway. I was now embarrassed and humiliated on top of everything else. That’s not the real reason, I tell him. I can’t, he repeats. I’m not asking you to steal. This isn’t sex. It’s not that you can’t ; you won’t. Why not? I dunno. It’s just the way I am. Your friend is asking for help. I can’t help you, not now and not ever.
Oh, that is bullshit, I tell him. It’s the way heterosexual men are, he tells me. Affection can only be... sexual. What about the boys? They’re my flesh and blood. It’s different. Like fuck it’s different. Why don’t you be honest and admit there’s some little core of machismo down in there? Your friend who has been helping you nonstop for weeks is hurting and needs help and you can’t do it because he’s a boy. Yes, he says, not in the slightest way abashed. A bit smug and snippy, even. The clock ticked and my watch ticked, a quarter-second out of phase, both of them too loud.
I care about you and I’ll continue to be your friend, he said when I asked him just where the fuck we go now that a cat this big is out of the bag. He did not take the bait. He did not acknowledge the enormity of what I had done and the desperation that made me take such a chance. Like he doesn’t understand those feelings now, at least in himself. But we cannot expect empathy from his kind. The Pet Shop Boys: I ask you if you care. You stand and stare, aloof.
I look at my watch stagily. Well, now you have something else to think about lying in bed staring into the blackness, I tell him. It’s too early to go to bed. (It was 10:30.) You said you were tired before. But now I’m upset. You’re upset? Stop acting like I’ve offended your conscience here. I didn’t ask you to commit murder.
I get up and go to the computer and download that night’s BRML. We exchange more words. Where are these fences coming from? Who put up these fences around you? This is a considerable failing. This is a major flaw for a real man.
We sit for a while. I tell him that no matter how untired he may be, he’s sitting in my bedroom and I want to go to bed. Ohh-kaaay, he says sarcastically, and fucks off.
Needless to say, I slept poorly. I would take a fucking bullet for this man. Weeks ago I wanted to hold and protect him, to give him a night off from being the top. It would have helped him, but now I saw that it was designed to help me more.
The next morning, I am as pissy and distant as you would expect. Good morning, Joe. How are you today? Adequate. Husband gets the kids ready to go to grandparents. Eventually calls me out to the balcony. Now what? Don’t be angry. I thought about it and you were right. I care about you and I’ll be here for you. While he’s saying this he is continuously rubbing my back, or rather, the pyjama and T-shirt covering the pelt over my back. I kind of melt a bit and am embarrassed, but am OK with it, because he is holding the olive branch and stroking me with it.
Kid comes out. We get rid of him; daddy-o’s hand rests on my back. I guess this blows my cover story out of the water. Which cover story? he asks, insinuating that I have a selection to choose from. No. You know I am... truthful. It’s just, maybe holding and touching you was actually to help me as much as you. I guess that is only apparent now. We sort of talk a bit. Reality intervenes when the phone rings.
I don’t know where to go from here. Everything now is going to be forced and meta and self-aware, that is, anything where either of us touches each other. It was just getting automatic. I was just at the point where I could scratch his head as he sat there with a smile on my face and jovially, like kids I knew back when could do, like wrestlers do without thinking.
Job interview tomorrow. The chick with whom I have traded no fewer than three voxmails has still not told me what address to go to. I got it from their Web site and the phone book, but this bodes ill.
The single important phrase I forgot to add to last night’s instalment – which was actually a rush job – is “I didn’t used to be good with kids.” Free soyaccino to the first reader who slots it into the right place.
The other twin will now be discussed, the one other than the violent one. He’s a bit uncoordinated and has a speech impediment and does not really speak English (question formation is a joke, at age 7) and can’t read very well and has poor gross- and fine-motor skills (leading to the speech impediment, we are told). Their mother is wee. The kids were born over a month premature and were not breathing, making them so-called blue babies. Hypoxia caused the mild twin’s problems, we assume. I assume further that the violent twin’s violence is due to temporal lobe damage.
But the mild twin’s deficiencies were very high-profile from the word go, and he’s been seeing the requisite shrinks and speech pathologists, which visits will continue. He kind of hated me and complained a lot for a while, and acted out in ways that showed he expected to be indulged, because he always had been. I call it Playing the Exceptional Card. “I see [name] is playing the exceptional card again,” I’ll say to a parent when he’s making some kind of demand. It doesn’t work with me. I don’t respond to any question that isn’t a question or any declaration that isn’t understandable English.
Since I “moved in,” this child has come to love me. Even the violent twin likes me more. The fact that the violent incidents have increased is evidence he likes me; remember, this is a boy, and male emotions can find expression sideways and crooked rather than straight up.
On Saturday, when we were out washing five quadruple-sized washers’ full of laundry, the husband took the violent twin home because he was being rambunctious, leaving the mild twin with me. I said I was not keen on minding him for two hours, assuming he’d be just as rambunctious. Quite the contrary. Very humbling experience from the mild child.
There’s only the two of us and this addled queen in the joint. Twin twists my arm and we are watching cartoons (with captions: I insist), which they do every minute of the day that they aren’t out of the house, in bed, or in the bath. We sit around for a while, and then I get the question. I’ll translate the following into parsable English for you rather than the jarjarisms he usually comes up with.
– When we nobody aren’t home, do you get lonely?
– Yeah, actually.
– Lonely means – when there aren’t other people –
– Lonely means when there are no other people around, you feel sad and you don’t like it and wish there were people.
– Yes. Do you feel lonely?
– Every day of my life, pretty much.
He takes that in without comment. Remember, this kid is blasé.
The rest of the time we spent was a model of well-behaved childhood. “Remember to tell daddy I was good,” he said, and I certainly did, because the mild child was very alert to everything going on, made friends with the cleaners’ kids, was keen to help me out and actually did what I asked instead of trying to do everything, didn’t act bored, and only nagged me every five minutes to play pinball. He wanted to share his apple juice with me.
So believe what people say about children and love.
But the kid tops himself. Sunday night, after the adulteress has deigned to come home, the parents are taking yet another shower-rehash – this after the husband showered alone a few hours previous. The kids have a ritual of hollering for daaady! or mooommy! about 15 minutes after they’re tucked in. It’s entirely pro forma. They never have any complaints or anything to say. This time the hollering went on for a while because the rents couldn’t hear it over the noise of the shower. So I took matters into my own hands and went in.
– Daddy-o can’t hear you with the shower running. What’s the problem?
– It’s too loud.
– What, from the street?
– No. I like listening to the cars, but the shower is too loud.
– Oh. Yeah, they do this every night. Your parents get in the shower late at night and stay there for an hour and talk.
– About what?
– The usual.
– The divorce? We know already!, he sez, with a big grin and a hammy sweep of the arms.
– Yeah. Like they’re getting anywhere with that discussion.
– Mm.
As I keep telling the parents, they’re listening to every word we utter and they forget nothing. They understand more than we think. And this kid seems able to handle it. So of course he’s going to call a spade a spade. In the immortal words of Paul Simon, why deny the obvious, child?
Our next task is getting the violent twin to reduce his aggressions. I think there’s a doriangrayism going on here, and however much the mild twin is blasé the other one gets tense. But today was a good day. He only hit me once, and nearly scalded and mangled his fingers only twice, and was given delicious home-cooked food, including a four-star milkshake (secret: frozen banana!), which obviously was cause for revolt. I think we all can see that whacking me was justified. Could it be love?
All is largely quiet on the eastern front.
I embezzled $6.50 today and bought admission to American Beauty, starring the lovely and talented Mr. Kevin Spacey, whose powers of communication through sheer vocal inflection and delivery are unmatched. It pretty much is as good as they say. I found that someone had materialized a frog in my throat, and caused tears to flow, at one surprising and one less-surprising point: A red brick wall, with narration; the dialogue “She really is happy.” “I’m glad.”
I will have to make the husband see it. The trick is divining the actual point when. He currently refuses to see any picture. This film, though, contains every element of our current whirlwind shaken up and reassembled, like jetsam twisting in a breeze.
Perhaps later I will discuss the parallels between Kevin Spacey and one of my longtime friends, of instalments previous, who has dropped me off his event horizon. I hope he sees the picture and thinks of me. I add that to my list of unrealizable hopes.
Last Thursday was the first Official Night Out for the husband, as bartered with the adulteress, who now has demanded uninterrupted time with her bf from Friday after work through Monday after work. The only times she’s here, acting as ostensible wife and mother, is five mornings and three evenings a week. And today, the mild twin was in tears because neither of them is permitted to play Win Commander.
[Too violent. The kids already have enough bad habits, like eating too many desserts and watching too much television, and not reading enough, and (this is the parents’ fault) not hanging around with friends, because they have none, though every week they beg to visit acquaintance X’s or Y’s house. I consider this unhealthy, speaking as a child and adult largely without friends.]
The adulteress reiterated the rule that neither boy could play Wing Commander, adding, to my surprise, that ultimately it was not her “decision” but their father’s; she is just there to take care of them after school; it is the father’s “decision” that things should be this way (making, by my count, two decisions, only one of them valid). This explanation, unintentionally revealing and self-serving though it was, did nothing to stanch the tears.
Thursday: Lily. Sushi. Went fine. The problem is that, from the minute we left the front door, the husband did his standard thing of consistently walking two paces ahead of me. If you can consistently walk two paces ahead of me, you can walk alongside me! I tell him repeatedly. There is a problem here. I tend to walk behind whoever I’m with. But not two paces. That, simply, is rude. Like my engineering buddies who always kept right on walking if I had to stop for any reason back in Halifax. On the streetcar, he huddles with the crowd up front and refuses to follow me to the back, where there was a seat for him. He wouldn’t wait at the last corner we had to cross to reach the restaurant. All this was typical male behaviour, and I’m sorry, I am too important to be treated this way. We are not reliving Saturday Night Fever, which, like Blow Up, has been entirely mis-sold: It isn’t a disco movie, it’s an examination of fucked-up uneducated suburban New Yorkers. The husband must be discouraged from acting maneroesquely.
I was a bit full afterward. Our plan was to do College St., formerly the nexus of Little Italy, now an astonishingly hip strip of boites, nightclubs, cafes, and joints. He’d been talking about it for weeks. I kept saying: Stop building it up, because we can’t live up to that image. By his own admission, he hasn’t been out in eight years. (Why should he? He was married, and, shortly, a father.) Instead of hopping on the eetcarstray, I opted to walk us down Broadview to wake me up a bit.
Nice night, actually. Full or fullish moon. Spotted a pair of inverts, before I even saw their faces, leaving the Loblaws. (Was it the tightly-tucked-in T-shirt, the artfully unbuttoned overshirt, the shorts with too-short hems, and the precious deck shoes, along with the overmuscled body and the fact that his companion was a he?) Oddly, I was the one who attracted attention, not the beautiful real man. Perhaps this bodes well.
Did a lot of talking. I asked him to name the last period, before meeting the wife, in which he was aware of being happy. In his previous relationship, he sez, which lasted all of four months. (He didn’t meet even the first Ms Right until he was in his 20s. He had, in effect, the delayed sexual expression of the thirtysomething invert.) Eight years and four months of uninterrupted happiness is not bad for a 36-year-old, certainly in comparison to me, who felt happy for less than a month in 1991, when I was the Other Woman with the 6’2”, 210-pound Dutchman. Of course, I pointed out what I actually believe: We cannot aim for happiness. As a conscious goal, it is unattainable. You wake up one day and realize you are or were happy; it isn’t a place you can bring yourself to. So he ought not to hope for happiness for his kids. There’s nothing he or they can do to set it up.
The husband wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to me in the eetcarstray to College. I was explaining the weird psychic shit I underwent with Ian, my dead friend.
That’s Ian Stephens, the journalist-poet-raconteur-musician. In 1986, in Montreal, I worked the night shift at a lousy typesetting firm. (Never again.) Someone else got the job to typeset the lyrics, in unpunctuated Helvetica, for an actual LP record, the eponymous debut of Disappointed a Few People, a good name for a band. “I used to work at the Velvet Cock, the worst bar in the world,” I remember reading on the proofs. The chick typesetting it was OK with the content, but the lack of punctuation and the wide measures made the job a tough slog.
The better part of a decade later, I’m writing the music column for the local fagrag and somehow start talking to Cargo Records, formerly a big-name indie distributor here and in the U.S. of A. The publicist was Ian. He was kind enough to send me a pile of uninteresting LPs, including 1000 Homo DJs, which I bitched him out for. But we talked on the phone a lot – at work, which for me was a government ministry – and after a while he confided the news that he had turned up plus. He was a bit worried. In fact, very worried. But I asked him: Do you feel sick? No. Do you have any actual diagnosed illness? No. Then you’re not sick.
A lengthy correspondence ensued. He owned an Amiga with a dot-matrix printer and used the particularly bizarre Amiga WordPerfect to write everything, saving it on discs I somehow converted to Macintosh when we bought him a proper PowerBook. I did not know what Ian looked like for a couple of years. We had a close, if platonic, epistolary and telephonic relationship, but we had never set eyes on each other – until a book launch brought him to Toronto, where he stayed with me in my “junior one-bedroom.” (Is that like a training bra? Either it’s a one-bedroom or it isn’t.) I still remember the off-kilter first half-hour, where we spent a lot of time reconciling what we actually looked like with our long, involved, and self-baring correspondence.
The coincidences would be “cosmic, man!” if they were really coincidences. Ian’s old band was... Disappointed a Few People. His first boyfriend was... a fellow I would name-drop here but for the fact that he is the only man on earth with that name and he’s sure to find this eventually if named, my mentor at McGill, the first out fag I ever dealt with, and a linguistics student, to boot. [Name] made a couple of passes at me, but I wasn’t ready. I was a greenhorn until I was 28.
Now, though, Ian had a bf, Alex, a Filipino. After he came up +, he quit the philandering. But Ian was not exactly repentant about the philandering, which is what changed him from a negatoid to a positoid. Everything he did was an act of love, including fucking French guys on Mont Royal, with their mandatory grey work socks rolled down like foreskins. Ian wrote straight journalistic reviews for the Montreal Mirror and even the hoary old Gazette, and a number of more impressionistic pieces, including an excellent memoir of hospitalization. He published a book of poetry, Diary of a Trademark, which I was not allowed to edit or proof until after production. DaFP never re-formed; he later attempted to pull together a band called Wining, Dining + Drilling that produced a lousy cassette; two later spoken-word tapes carried the title Wining Dining + Drilling, if memory serves. A somewhat confused oeuvre.
A high point was his inclusion in a book/CD of spoken word, Word Up. It brought him to Toronto again for a performance, even though the British chick who greenlighted his inclusion dismissed his work as “self-indulgent.” Imagine her surprise when Ian and only Ian is featured in the Star, complete with excellent photograph. The performance, at the Rivoli, was not a stunner for Ian; indifferent cold haughty Toronto crowd, too much self-effacement (i.e., an iota of self-effacement, and that kills you onstage). And the poem he recited began: I used to work at the Velvet Cock, the worst bar in the world.
This was 1996 at the latest. Triple therapy had not been invented. Ian developed lymphoma. Spectacularly invasive surgery bought next to no time. He was in and out of hospital, ultimately in palliative care. We talked on the phone. I was frustrated with myself at being “abnormal,” rather than talking to him as I always had. (He was my outlet, and, to a much lesser degree, I was his.) He was a bit short-tempered, and I guess he did a Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment and showed little interest in anything other than being sick. Well, that’s an exaggeration, I suppose. It was a tricky two months for me.
I found myself at a matinee of the disgraceful, infuriating AIDS snuff film It’s My Party. I resented being manipulated. I resented feeling tears well up from such schmaltz. I loathed Eric Roberts. I was outraged. I knew everything I had written was a thousand times better than this sappy, maudlin projection of liberal Hollywood guilt. I knew while watching the film that Ian had died that day. It was a truth that coalesced in my mind, like hardening taffy.
Leaving the accursed wretch of a film, bundling the Gore-Tex in the freezing rain, I heard myself thinking, Well, now what do I do? There was a kind of echo. And I meant: What do I do with the rest of my life, now that Ian is dead and tripe like this actually makes it to celluloid? Keep writing scripts, I told myself in an echo. Yes. Do that, I was told. It’ll work out. There were no more thoughts but the echo remained for a while. I was aware of it. Upon my return home, the phone rang, and I let Alex dictate the message into the machine without answering. I did not cry for long. It was not a surprise.
I got into a lot of trouble on another mailing list last year for acting in what was seen as an uncaring and callous fashion after a participant in the mailing list’s topic died in a car accident. I spent weeks hurling back the shit that was piled on top of me, and I eventually vowed never, ever to post to that list again. (And I won’t.) One of my later postings:
To all those who knew and loved [the dead guy], my condolences, and to the rest of you who didn’t (as I) it seems as though we missed knowing quite a young man
Those of us who have been around the block note the tendency to valourize young people who die. I’ve done it myself.
JOAN in Parting Glances: It’s true what they say: The good die young. I’ll probably live to be about 150. [...]
MICHAEL: Sometimes when I’m over there, all I can think of is “I’m so glad I don’t have it.”
JOAN: Who wouldn’t be? And don’t worry, a few years down the road we have lung cancer or heart attacks to look forward to.
MICHAEL: That’s different. When you’re 50 or 60, impending death doesn’t freak you out so much.
JOAN: I bet it does. I bet it’s a fucking drag even if you’re 80.
[...] It’s not the obvious thing to do, at least initially, but it helps to calibrate the veneration of the deceased to the actual feelings you had. Then you have a much more reliable comparison later on when your feelings change (or don’t). Those who wept when Kurt shot himself, this means you. (Also Lennon. Also Di.) Only now do I really appreciate the personality of one of my dead friends, for example. I was just too immature at the time to really get him. I really only miss my dead cat now, for some reason. At the risk of sounding superstitious, half my problems these days are caused by not honouring my dead writer friend’s memory enough. If I were doing more of the shit I was doing when he croaked, I’d be better off.
It is something of a constant struggle, akin to religious devotion, to keep a memory alive, because you have to constantly or regularly remind yourself to think of the deceased. You name-drop and inject the sacred topic into unrelated conversation. You learn, in other words, to second-guess yourself[...].
[...] If there is an afterlife, my theory is that the deceased are no longer doing what they did in life; they’re on an ineffably and unimaginably elevated plane of wisdom and beneficence. So [the dead guy] is probably not [doin’ what he did when alive] and my dead friend is probably not writin’. Probably. But, rather like the face of Baby Jesus who smiles down on the Teletubbies every day, they want us to [...] write. Because we need to honour that fucker’s memory.
I explained to the husband, in the eetcarstray, how my problems are really caused by failing to uphold Ian’s memory. The other day I had to think for several minutes before I could remember the title of one of my own scripts. Just what is wrong with me?
The real world intervened as we cruised past Bathurst. The plan was to sashay majestically up and down the strip, sizing up possible joints where biker chicks would likely be found. Inevitably, I knew, we would end up at Bar Italia, the centrepiece of the du College strip, particularly in its spiffy new form (they moved next door and upscale, if you’ll forgive the zeugma). I’ve scarcely ever received anything but condescending service at Bar Italia. (One Sunday, years ago, when I was writing in my notebook, a woman came up to me and asked me everything about what I was doing; she found it unusual and unique that someone could simply write from scratch. I spotted the type a mile away – the oh-I’d-just-love -to-be-a-writer lonely type, as if a faghag, burned by straight guys who can barely fill out lottery tickets – but she was still invading my space.) The husband could barely handle this. It took several requests for him to stop, for example. Then he looked around nervously instead of brazenly checking out the habitues at Kalendar or any other spot.
This pattern persisted along the whole street until we passed El Convento Rico, a homo-/heterosexualist bar with drag shows alongside flamenco-dancing administrative assistants. Apparently the adulteress and the paramour go LATIN DANCING! here. No chance of being spotted by them, but just the very thought threw him off. I attempted to find Ciao Edie, known for its bisexualist nights on Sundays, where Eye sexualism advice columnistrix Sasha has spotted many nubile females. (I think the husband and Sasha should have a fling or two once it is legally and ethically permissible.) This required retracing our steps along the entire strip. Ciao Edie, with its bead curtains and 1970s-harem decor, looked fabulous, but not tonight, dear; my date is too fragile. It was decided to return to the nexus, Bar Italia.
I made the mistake of filling the nervous silence created by the husband by kvetching about the last fellow I myself had a fling with, met via a particular club I set up. 6’5” and rail-thin, but well-equipped, if also a drug addict and alcoholic. While I figured out early that I actively disgusted him, having more body hair than a newborn (or himself), what I refused to concede was his claim that we were sexually incompatible. Really? Who else have you achieved simultaneous orgasm with on the first try, I wanted to ask him?
Except I ended up involuntarily asking the husband. Of course he had. With the wife. In fact, the wife never has had any reason to complain, because she is capable of multiple and multiple multiple and multiple multiple multiple , and he is capable of giving them to her. When he first told me this, I thought, jeez, how gauche, and said, Well, women are anatomically at an advantage there. But he pressed the point, over and over, multiple and multiple times, until I got a bit tired of his rubbing my nose in his sexual availability, which he’s done before. One demerit, I told him.
This cast rather a pall over our Bar Italia experience. I was in a lousy mood anyway, when not in a bouncy fine mood, from having been left in his dust when making our way to Lily. And from being his chaperone; to do my job properly, he eventually has to score and/or find a gf or wife, while I remain the redhead in Fame.
We eventually found a choice patio seat (I faced him toward the sidewalk) and he ordered house red. We made conversation. I did the ironic thing and read the other patio denizens and passersby, particularly the secretaries and the two overdressed chicks to our left who paid with a gold Visa and left a $15 tip, suggesting a $100 charge, and the low-class muscle lunk with his two female friends, and the sexy man with his three female friends and his cellphone with headset. (Running keys on the side?) A very tall blond fellow passed by whom I swore I knew. And I did: He was Snake in the Degrassi (Junior) High series!
We did decide on something unexpected. At a former location, I answered the phone one day (for no good reason: the Woman’s Intuition told me to: I never got calls there) and was met with a more sarcastic man than me. So sarcastic that I had to work and think fast just to keep up with the conversation. I was in a sweat when we rang off a mere three minutes later. Only once before in my entire life did I have to work to maintain sarcasm supremacy. Frankly, I was impressed. And the mutual sarcasm was taken the right way. Up people persons do not understand that curmudgeons get along famously; we’re all idealistic and, as a result, jaded and eternally disappointed, hence we have the same outlook on life, hence we work together well. It’s curmudgeons and everyone else who don’t get along.
Some weeks later, I open the door and a Mark Tewksbury look-alike in a tight T-shirt is standing before me.
[Mark Tewksbury: Olympic-medal-winning Canadian swimmer; major fag; came out in 1998, finally, at long last, as though we never knew; my long posting to LGB-Sports about his one-man expose-cum-apologia- cum-coming out is mysteriously absent from the archives.]
And Christ, what a neck. We’re talking the best combination of adjectives you will ever hear in the gay world: long and thick. There was a little zing while I sized him up. Tall and muscular, an unlikely combination. (And handsome, in a toothsome Tewkie way.) It was the same fellow from the snarky phone call. Unfortunately, he visited with his bf, who, in the grand tradition of sodomites, had the identical given name. (“Same-name relationship!”)
Throughout the brief visit, there were glances shot here and there. The Tewkie doll asked questions like “You used to go to the Y, right, Joe?” No one ever noticed me at the Y, except to stare. I was astounded. I found out what he did for a living (a lawyer); he mentioned a contentious public issue; I told him that he was denied standing at the hearing, as reported in the paper. Pushy and obnoxious, in other words, and he rolled with it. We got the long bandy arms with the veins, and the tightly-clean-cut hairline suggesting hirsutism, and the age of maturity (his 30s), and, for the first time in years and years and years, something unmistakable happening in the room.
And he’s already got a boyfriend. Of the same name. Who is an up people person and a sweetie. But, the husband told me at Bar Italia, maybe there’s an intellectual difference at work here, maybe some dissatisfaction despite “having it all.” Maybe some stalking is in order, the husband tells me. Hmm, I thought, remembering a fellow with a bf who gave me a big kiss in his car one Saturday afternoon. I was a bit too freaked to follow through; two years later, he moved to Vancouver because his bf had moved there to be with another man. My friend’s take was: I can either buy you out of the house and be alone and miserable or find a way to make this work. So they did. The three of them. (Just like Mark Tewksbury, actually, though that is not widely known.) I’m not keen on being the other woman just now, and I have absolutely nothing material to offer to a bourgeouis lawyer, but I think I will look this fellow up and find out if every part of him is proportional to his arms and neck.
In-between this ironic banter, I needled the husband for embarrassing me yet again. I don’t need reminders that he is physically capable and I’m not, though that stance would be amended later on. He cheered up considerably once the liquor took effect, and remarked on all the biker chicks cruising by, but of course not stopping, so they might as well be on television.
He was hungry, but the kitchen was closed. We amscrayed. He insisted on garlic bread. It’s Little Italy; I eventually found it for him, at Grazie, served by an order-taker who smiled equally at me and him. Perhaps she is a naturally up people person, a species I encounter from time to time, rather like raccoons or the occasional fox. I was interested in heading to Church St. to “be with my people” after nursemaiding this heterosexual through the echt basics of living in a big city. We ended up walking down the very deserted stretch of College just west of Spadina.
I needled once too often, and got a big “fuck you, Joe” out of the husband. I’d never seen him so angry. I’d pretty much never seen him angry at all. He never used to swear. I liked him the old way, clean-mouthed. “‘One demerit.’ That’s what I get from [adulteress], measuring everything. I don’t need this.” He ranted for a while, and I gave it back to him while also trying to calm him down. Well, I’m sorry that your only confidant is a fag, and I have feelings too, and a month and a half of acting as your on-call psychologist is going to raise tensions.
More revisiting of last weekend, when he was unwilling and claimed to be unable to help me through my own emotional trough. Well, it’s not “can’t,” it’s “won’t,” I told him again. I didn’t used to be good with kids. This is really pissing me off, he says.
He was still on the warpath. I calmed him down and we sat outside one of the various UofT buildings. We had a long talk. He flip-flopped on his earlier apology and claims to have reverted to a state where any kind of physical affection is impossible (“because we’re not fucking and I’m not your son,” I retorted). I explained why his modesty around me was getting my goat: He’s naked everywhere else, and my fascination with his beauty and his foreskin will not result in taking advantage of him (there’s a glass ceiling – literally a glass ceiling I imagine myself scrunched against, as if on a spaceship that dropped to the earth all of a sudden). In fact he claims that, growing up with brothers and sharing rooms, nudity was a preciously-held indicator of privacy. He’s only naked at home because, over time, he and the family have become familiar with each other’s bodily functions. I saw my wife’s legs split open, he sez, demonstrating with his hands. I saw my son’s head crowning. I felt her convulsions. Also, he told me, the close quarters forced him to hold onto the remaining thread of self-determination, to use my word. Maybe that will change in the future.
I further explained, as I had broached that fateful breakdown Saturday, that after nearly a decade I am finally going through with a complaint against my former doctor. Not for any kind of abuse, merely for a resentment of male patients and an ignorance of male anatomy. For full details, read Foreskin: A Closer Look and research the topic of phimosis, one of my several birth defects. (It occurs in at most 1% of adults and runs in my family, along with the other birth defects. One of my brothers could not urinate as an infant.) While merely a stern letter will be sent to my urologist – very much an old-school cold fish of a doctor, very much a proponent of circumcise-first/ brook-no-questions-later – I intend my former family physician to offer an apology for pain and suffering and to take training in the anatomy of male genitalia. And stop fucking obsessing about her pregnant patients, who are irrelevant when I’m in her damn examination room. And that, kids, is all I’m going to tell you about this. I have a fully-functioning dick now, and the entire experience may be documented in a future book, Hell with the Lid Off.
And that fully-functioning dick functions surprisingly fully. Mr. 6’5” can’t possibly claim he didn’t enjoy himself. Every boyfriend I’ve ever had has wound up with the living daylights fucked out of him. Never any complaints of any kind, and in fact I had a couple of bfs who were driven absolutely nuts to the point they were talking me up to friends and refusing to get lost when they turned out to be too dumb and/or inarticulate for me to put up with. Shocked tones of awe from one-night or ten-minute stands. I apparently have two viable physical skills, actually: Computer use, chiefly typing, and l’amour. But few are the boys who learn of the latter, because I simply turn them off.
The husband was still steamed, but every single thing was out on the table, and we began to feel remorse and spent ten or fifteen minutes apologizing to each other before cabbing it home. That doesn’t mean I haven’t learned a new codeword. Whenever he indulges in braggadocio, I just say “Multiple-multiple-multiple.” And honey, I’ll believe it when I see it.
We did College St. again with the kids on Saturday, shopping for new frames for his stunning wide eyes at Rapp, enjoying ice cream, taking out Magic School Bus books and back-issue Advocates at the library, where we were interpreted as a de facto couple (when the adulteress is away and we’re out with the boys, we are a couple and I am a parent). Scott the Love God Beveridge walked by and actually deigned to notice me. I was, however, annoyed he didn’t notice the kids and the beautiful man, and put 2 and 2 and 2 together. I’m OK with leaving the wrong impression on occasion.
The only problem? The husband was paranoid the whole time that the adulteress and paramour would walk by. Well, his new divorce lawyer sez we need to prove they’re together. (His position is otherwise strong. The details are extraneous here.) Sounded like the best way to me.
It gets either harder or easier from here: Next Thursday, after PTA, we go out again.
Handshakes are nothing but a subtle fuck-you, and context determines the best friendships.
By far the worst day of my tenure here.
The husband arrives home late. The wife has already buggered off to the hairdresser. (“I feel like I have to ask permission to get my hair cut.” If I do, you do, sister.) He immediately heads out for grocery shopping. On returning home, he announces peremptorily that the kids will eat meat every day from now on, thereby setting in motion a long chain of insinuations. What do the kids eat every time they visit the [German-English diminutive for grandparents]? Meat! Meat, meat, meat! Feed them what they crave! he tells me.
We went through this already. I reminded him that I spent three weeks entering into a spreadsheet everything the kids ate. He was concerned at that time that the kids weren’t getting enough protein on a vegetarian diet. If you’ve read anything written by a credible nutritionist – even Laurel’s Kitchen, but especially Becoming Vegetarian by Melina et al. – you will understand that it is difficult not to ingest too much protein in a Western diet. Ovo-lacto vegetarian diets, which the kids essentially eat, are rich in protein, and complementary protein at that. What do you think makes up rice and beans, pasta, and vegetables? In descending order of relevant concentration, protein !
You want to start another spreadsheet, I ask him tauntingly? No. I don’t need a spreadsheet. The kids are not protein-deficient , I tell him. Yes, they are. Well, OK, if you think so, have them checked out by the school nutritionist. I don’t need to see a nutritionist, he replies.
Well, I’m not making it, I say. I will make the kids ovo-lacto foods, but I certainly draw the line at hamburger or anything remotely similar. Then don’t, he says.
Now, during this conversation, which is taking place as the kids play computer games and the husband attempts to put everything away in the fridge and the cupboards, which I spent the better part of three hours cleaning and reorganizing that day after a carcinogenic roach spraying the night before, the husband grows more and more livid, and starts to yell, and stares at me with fury in his eyes and bulging neck muscles and a set in his jaw, which he turns slightly as if to suggest he’s ready to fight me. The kids are very aware that we’re arguing, and mild twin comes close to asking us to stop.
It goes downhill. His schtick is: I am causing him too much stress. He cannot support four of us, only three. The adulteress has for weeks been a hair’s breadth away from expelling me from the apartment.
(I cost next to nothing in dollar terms and facilitate her swinger adulteress lifestyle. I facilitate the husband’s lifestyle, too. Neither can name a 48-hour period in the last four months in which they had to cook even two meals a day and wash even one rack of dishes. I do the laundry, the household cleaning, including vacuuming and mopping, and nearly all cooking and dishes. They arrive home to a spotlessly clean house with food already on the go for the kids’ after-school snack and/or dinner. And for the record, the kids adore plain rice with soy sauce, and in fact I got a big hug from the killer twin early on for cooking such good rice. Meat, meat, meat! Right.)
I’ve been trying to tell you this for a long time, but every time I tried you blew up at me, he says. It’s been eating and eating and eating away at me and I can’t take it anymore. You have to get a job. Any job. For any wage. Become a secretary. Have you applied for those jobs? (No.) What salary would you accept? (A living wage.) I can’t support you. The first priority is the kids. You and me are zero [i.e., to the adulteress, he is zero; to him, I am]. I’m in a very precarious position here.
– Uh, you are in a precarious position? I have noplace else to go. If you boot me out of here, I’ll be dead within a week.
– Fine. You’ll be dead within a week, he replied boldly, staring at me with contempt in his raging eyes.
We repair to the living room. I keep my voice down; I do not want to cause a scene. The kids are completely silent, as they always are when shit is hitting the fan within earshot. (They’re silent a lot these days.) You don’t get it, do you? he keeps asking. You’re not getting it. You’re not getting it. You’re not getting it.
I accuse him of doing the same dirty tricks as my last host. There’s no comparison, he tells me. You can think that all you want, he tells me in that tone affronted people get when they want to suggest their interlocutor is living in a dreamworld of denial and only they know the full scope of the truth. [Name] has a house, has a job. I have none of those things. I’m in a very precarious position right now. You have to get a job. Any job.
If [adulteress] has a problem with me, she should talk to me , I tell him, not for the first time. Maybe I should talk to her about it. If you talk to her, he warns me instantly, you’ll be out [snaps fingers] right then and there. You’d be out tonight. (I elected not to remind him that such actions would amount to Criminal Code violations, which my former host is facing, too.) He told me this a couple of times. Throughout the grilling, he adopted his version of the Nazis-dictating-terms-to-occupied-France voice the adulteress used to crush him to a pitiful smear weeks before. Trust the experts when they say that abuse is learned and later perpetuated.
Why are you staring at me with contempt in your eyes? I ask him, and again, and again. He denies it. Ah, but when he came home he mentioned that their shipper fucked up and lost three pieces. His mini-manufacturing plant is finally filling orders, and after a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears, one went out the door, only to arrive several days late and three pieces short. Once the adulteress returns from the hairdresser, he recounts this story, adding the detail that the client refuses to pay.
Aha. The husband has always harboured fears, ever since the bombshell dropped, that his business, which he’s been working on for four years, will go tits-up and the kids will be given over to the adulteress, who on paper has a steadier source of income. It is possible his business could fail. It is, however, spectacularly unlikely. Within a year, I expect he will have been wholly or partly bought out by a giant in his industry, making him a multimillionaire. (I have counseled him repeatedly to take the money and run, and not hold out for, say, a $100 million payout ten years down the road. Take the $8 million or whatever and live for yourself and the kids.)
So, after the manner of referred pain, the husband’s lashing out at me clearly derived from a big scare riding on a wave of small scares. A client is refusing to pay. What if things bottom out? Then I lose the boys!
And I am an emotional drain, he says, in so many words. And a financial one. You’re a grown man, he who could not get through a day for three weeks without crying tells me.
I will mention again, dear readers, that pretty much everything he said he said repeatedly. I was quite aware of my heart beating all the way through it. Are you getting it, Joe, he asks me? You have put the fear of God into me, I say with undetectable irony.
They go to bed, after delaying the kids’ bedtime, again , by 40 minutes. I lie on my litter, scared to death. I am too hot overnight, too cold the next morning. We have to talk, he tells me then. Fuck you, I feel like saying. The husband gives me two months to get a job and get out. What will you do? What jobs will you apply for? he grills. Jobs for which I am qualified, I reply firmly. That’s not good enough. What do you consider a living wage? We support four people [more like 4.5] on 22,000. I think 22,000 is more than enough for a single person. Not to afford a bachelor apartment, it isn’t. And anyone who pays more than 1/3 of their salary in housing is at severe risk of homelessness, I begin to remind him, before he interrupts me.
Do you have anything to say? Apart from bringing up the past month? (Revealing.) I tell him he cannot bring up the subject again. If I am on death row, I think, I don’t need daily reminders. And if you want to cook food every day, (a) you have to consider how the hell you are going to schedule this, and (b) we have to arrange it. You can continue to cook and clean if you want, he tells me, and if not, [adulteress] will make a decision. Another in his litany of insinuations, this one more of an actual threat.
I’ve let you into my home. I’ve let you change my home, he says, sounding exasperated at himself. (Meaning: I’ve let you force your life-threatening starvation diet down my throat.) The undertones to what he’s saying are “And I shouldn’t’ve.”
I ask: What if I get a good-paying job, and things go wrong here and you need shelter? Well. I’d expect you to give us what I gave you. No more. (The plan was to pool our resources and, if necessary and desirable and affordable, live together. This will come up later.)
I’m sorry, he says before he leaves. No, you’re not, I tell him. You don’t know how I feel, he retorts, trying once more to return the conversational focus back to his exquisite, overpowering pain, and finally walks out the door.
Readers will keep in mind that evicting me from this apartment will result in my death. I will be expunged from the earth. I add the husband, whom I dug out of a number of graves over the past month, to the list of people who do not give a damn. In fact, now I do not have any names on the list of people who do. Literally everyone I know in this town, where I have lived for 12 years, has knowingly written me off.
I visit my present doctor to discuss the complaint I will file against my former doctor. Throughout the entire morning, as the previous night, I hear my heartbeat and am frightened. I drink tea at Future Bakery and check the want ads. I grow anxious and return “home” on the subway, short-turning at our stop due, presumably, to a jumper at Main station.
I surf for jobs. I do this every couple of days anyway. I find several, as I always do. I apply for anything for which I am reasonably qualified. Overqualified people are not hired, and I have experience being fully qualified – meeting every listed qualification – only to be dismissed as overqualified. My intelligence, forwardness, and articulateness turn off managers, who are too stupid to know they should hire people smarter than themselves.
I planned to make vegan mashed potatoes and worried about timing. I worried about everything. Still with the audible heartbeats. I decide I can justify a nap on the couch before the kids come home with the adulteress at 1735 hours. The door opens at 1650, waking me up. Hi, Joe, says the husband.
I eventually get up off the couch and move to my computer.
– Any luck with the job search today?
– You’re not allowed to needle me.
– What?
– You don’t get to needle me on that.
(Who the fuck does he think he is, some fucking welfare tonton macoute?)
He appears behind me and starts rubbing my back.
– I’m sorry, he says repeatedly. – Take your hand off me, I insist without looking. – Fine, he replies, annoyed.
I then use the opportunity to punch holes in everything he told me. I have learned lately that everyone is willing to put a price on my life, I say. For the benefactors [a family who supported me for 2.5 years], it’s $40,000. For [my former host], it’s $12.50 a month in excess hydro bill. For you, it’s some portion of $400 a month in support payments [from the adulteress upon divorce]!
If you want the kids to eat meat more often, fine. It will not harm them, and I would not stand in the way. I am perfectly capable of making vegetarian side dishes to meat courses. And the reason why they eat meat at the [grandparents’] is because they give the kids anything they want ! (Including trips to McDonald’s on demand, I did not point out, and toys and Lego. They spoil their grandchildren. It’s what grandparents are for.) If you think the kids are protein-deficient, your theory ought to stand up to knowledgeable scrutiny and you should have no objection to asking a nutritionist to give an opinion. If you want the kids to eat more meat, fine , but don’t dress it up in the insinuation that I am somehow harming your children by feeding them a vegetarian diet!
And when you said if I mentioned this to [adulteress] “I’d be out like that,” I figured later you meant you would do it. (He denied it.)
You have betrayed me and stabbed me in the back. I have helped you all through the last month. I would not knowingly harm you or the children or allow you to come to harm.
He was still giving me the contemptuous glare, which I called him on. (And the bulging neck, and the compulsively rubbing the face and head, like the previous night. His tics speak.) Emotionally I am difficult for him to bear, he tells me, straining credulity anew. My doctor says I have to reduce stress, and you are a cause of stress. What, with [adulteress] giving you grief about me? No, he says, implying volumes. To this instant I categorically reject his claim. Furthermore, two weeks ago he told me I am not that hard to live with.
Shortly he’s looking like he’s about to cry on top of everything. He mentions that he is pretty much useless at work. He says: I am worried about being able to provide for the boys. (He has a friend doing much of the work. The friend, actually the downstairs neighbour, is an Armed Forces survivor and has nerves pretty much of steel. He’s been through worse mental-health crises than the husband, too.)
Things are calming down.
And, after a long while: I’m afraid I’m going to have a nervous breakdown [one of these days].
I say, When this all began, I failed you because my journalistic skills were rusty and I didn’t do enough digging on psychiatric help for you. (We had to wait a month for an appointment with his family physician [!], and all she told him to do was keep speed-dialing a hospital clinic until maybe they answered.) I explained that an article in the current Eye told of mobile psychiatric teams that come to you.
Not today, I told him, but if you have a crisis again like last night, we will call them and they can come over. But I have an appointment with my doctor on Monday, he reveals. Fine, but these people have access to things. They can probably jump the queue for you and link you up with real doctors quicker.
We cool off further.
I’m not ready to go out on Thursdays, he says. Not today and not two weeks ago, I tell him, but you were all right last week.
If I got a good-paying job, I reminded him gently, I could be of use to you. I could do what we talked about before. I could help you and the boys. (And I would do it. I put up a friend for six months. And I sure as fuck didn’t give him a get-out-or-I’ll-get-you-out deadline. I try to reduce my hypocrisy.)
I need to spend time alone. I need my space. I need to spend time alone with the boys.
Well, all right. You should have just said that, calmly. Monday to Thursday that’s pretty much impossible, but we can arrange it otherwise. I am perfectly happy to go away for whatever period. I like nothing more than to sit and drink a cup of tea and read a book. We can arrange that. I will do whatever you want, including leaving you alone or whatever, I say, meaning it.
I am calm in other people’s emergencies, I remind him. I am not calm in my own. Do not make something an emergency for me unless you absolutely have to. He nods.
I would do anything necessary to help you, I tell him. He nods. That’s the first thing you should think of when you think about me: “Joe will do anything necessary to help me.” Except eat a cheeseburger, I add, or steal. (The full form, I guess, would be “Within my ethical constraints, I will do anything necessary to help you.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.) Unspoken is the suggestion that I would move out if it helped him.
The rest of the evening went well. He brought the kids and the wife back. They headed out on an errand. I fed the boys (including hot dogs, which I am OK with; we had a conversation about protein deficiency and I told them their father was not an expert and they get protein from virtually everything they eat). Quite normal conversations with the adulteress later. I can believe intellectually that she is a hair’s breadth away from slitting my throat, but Jesus, is she playing it cool.
However:
As far as I am concerned I am still on death row. He actually rang tonight from the car and wanted to kvetch about the wife’s yammering about her paramour. Uh, hold it, I interrupted. If I’m on death row, I don’t have to listen to you complaining.
He thinks this weekend will be better.
Even if he recants everything he said – and I mean everything – he has punched a hole he will not be able to fill. He is untrustworthy.
Saturday. Laundry. Or at least, it starts out with folding.
The kids are up early, and the husband immediately turns on the TV for them. I watched as much TV as they do when I was growing up, as do the Simpson kids and the Simpsons writers, and arguably We All Turned Out Fine, but I dunno – aiding and abetting Saturday-morning TV sounds like buying Cocoa Puffs when the kids are perfectly happy with Shredded Wheat. (Which they are.)
Husband dicks around on his computer. Eventually he checks messages. He phones someone back on the topic of the kids, leaving a vague name-and-number please-call-me-today message. I get up, start folding my litter, say something innocuous on the order of “How are we today?” And the response is: Joe. Back off. I need my space now. Just – I need my space.
As if I was impinging on his space. I was in the living room, he in the kitchen.
But he had the now-familiar tone of atavistic vitriol that would peel not only paint but primer off any car. Very frightening. Kids are dead silent while transfixed by their corporate-tie-in entertainment/toy crossover product.
I keep folding, pick a few things up, ask “Do you need the bathroom?” “No.” Ask kids. Take shower. Emerge. Husband: “Daycare is dicking me around. They say I signed a contract for [X dollars],” and, they insinuate, his now opting for a cheaper plan violates the contract. I don’t say so much as a word.
Begin the dishes. Soon he calls his parents, holding one hand over his free ear. Shortly he turns to me lightning-fast and, still with the look that could kill, snaps his fingers angrily and makes a CUT! motion. I put down the plate, which entails more noise, and stand and wait in the corner. Like, they’re his parents; he can’t say, “Hold on a sec, dad. Joe, can you hold off on that till I’m off the phone?” He rings off and complains, in a seemingly normal and chipper tone, that he has a hard time talking on the phone with dishes in the background. Funny, you hadn’t mentioned that at any time in the last four months, I respond evenly.
I dress.
– Should I go get the paper?
– OK.
I sequester myself on the balcony so he can Have His Precious Space. It is eventually decided that we will do laundry early, i.e., now, and he might take the kids for a walk and/or do grocery shopping while I slaved away. He is normalish, says he’s in a better mood, asks how mine is, and he’s using the apologetic overnice tone.
Two fags are at the laundromat, one who smells of smoke. I poke myself in the forehead, which is already prominent enough and has enough scars already, with a post on a laundry cart. I hope it doesn’t leave a permanent mark. I am 3/4 of the way through the exasperating, dehydrating 40-minute sort-and-fold process when he shows up with the kids, who, mesmerized by a pinball machine and a crappy Space Invaders-era video game and a vibrating chair that malaprops “Hello, and welcome. Please insert the coin” when you sit on it, are annoying as fuck, repeatedly deadpanning Do you have 25? Do you have five cents? Do you have a coin? Can I have 25? Can I have five cents? Can I have a coin? over and fucking over again.
Killer twin keeps defying dad’s order not to touch the pinball machine, in play by someone else and eliciting rapturous attention by the kids. Dad keeps telling the twin not to touch it, from a distance of 15 feet. And again. And again. I foresee a major lower-working-class scene upcoming, with the father grabbing the kid and speaking angrily to him in full view of other people, which, Camille Paglia’s reminiscences notwithstanding, is something middle- and upper-class people do not do.
If you think that is complete bullshit, you do not live in this neighbourhood. En route here a few months ago, a fat short woman with her two kids was walking down the street. She had the haggard features and bad hair of the lower orders, plus the sleeveless clothes made of the wrong kind of artificial fibres, and – most significant of all – a bright-yellow No Frills shopping bag in her hand. The very mark of poverty. (Shopping bags from the upper-middle-class No Frills corporate sibling, Loblaws, are understated white. Yellow=generic=inexpensive in Canadian food packaging, but yellow=poor, too.)
Everything about her screamed “I have never made more than $20,000 a year in my life, and neither did my dad or granddad, and neither will my kids. High school? Fuck that. I dropped out when I was 16.” One kid was walking well behind. The paragon of working motherhood became more and more volubly insistent that he catch up to her RIGHT NOW. Well, honey, he’s walking by a schoolyard, and he’s maybe 8. Why should he stick behind you, Miss Lardarse, on the paved sidewalk? Let the kid explore.
But no. Twice she raised her voice, and once actually threatened him with a slap, stopping and turning around in that primo lower-class way. His sister, about 9, wisely walked 20 paces in front of mom, glumly staring at the ground with her arms crossed.
Fine, maybe the upper orders are just as impatient with their kids. Is it better that they aren’t shouting on a residential sidestreet while displaying multiple signifiers of their hopeless lives and their unfitness as parents? Yes. If you judge me a snob for this, read me well: I am. I grew up one notch below this level, in the sinkhole known as New Brunswick, and I am prejudiced. My mother gave birth to a member of two species not her own: An upper-middle-class invert. I told you already, read Class and The Canadian Book of Snobs.
I sez to the husband, If you want to be helpful instead of merely decorative, you can sort and fold the kids’ clothes, pointing to the vast basket of newly-desoiled pants, shorts, underwear, socks, shirts, and sweaters. He took it away to another table. Shortly I am done. I head over to see him, and he’s managed to pair up a few socks that were coincidentally near the top of the pile and fuck-all else. Sort first, then fold, I tell him, reaching in to help.
He turns to me and shouts “Down!” as though to a household pet.
I pack up. We leave. The kids are, as usual, in no hurry to hold the doors for us, and almost get run over, which makes the husband even angrier. In very low tones in the car, I explain that he is not to speak to me as if I were a dog. Well, I didn’t ask for your help. You just came over and barged in – Um, that’s irrelevant. You can’t talk to me as if commanding a dog to sit.
Look, I need to be more independent. If I’m doing something, don’t offer to help no matter how bad you think I’m doing it. Just let me do it myself. You’re not ready to be independent, I tell him. He objects to this. Well, on Thursday you said “I’m not ready to go out yet.” Yeah, that night, he says. No, you meant “I’m not ready to be going out yet.” You’re not ready to be independent.
And if I make the mistake of trying to help you, you have to come up with some way to tell me to leave you alone other than talking to me as if I were a dog. (I suggest “It’s OK. I’m handling it.”)
He recaps the morning, and apologizes for biting my head off, but claimed to have needed his space. I wasn’t infringing on your space. And there was no way for me to know that you’d received an upsetting phone message from daycare. He says it was a difficult week, and admitted that he snapped on Wednesday.
We’re silent for a while. The kids were either oblivious or quite upset, because they were singing along to themselves (one of them well, the other tinnily). I say: You are getting worse.
This is an abusive relationship, I tell him. This is not a relationship, he interrupts, attempting to head down the trite, predictable, self-serving and false path of “get your head out of the clouds, you deluded lovesick faggot.” Friendships are relationships, I reply firmly enough to shut him up. I feel like I’m on tenterhooks all the time. Whenever you feel you have to alter what you do or watch what you say to avoid setting someone off... it’s abusive. You need to get looked at properly. Before, you just used to be a danger to yourself. Now I feel like – I figure it’s only a few more steps until you actually hit me.
Saturday night he equalizes and goes for a bike ride with his only other friend, who isn’t really, and who has no friends himself, and is crude and echt-lower-class (like: in restaurant, has no idea what even a paper napkin does, and squirms), and sneers and acts assholish with me even though I singlehandedly hooked him up with a guaranteed one-year government job. (He ought not to spit in my face like that. He’s queer as a $3 coin – the signs, though hard to see at first, are now unmistakable – and is miserable because of it, and I could act as mentor for him if I could just stand to be in the same room.)
Sunday we argue about the killer twin, whom he now claims has no problems with aggression or violence whatsoever. No, you don’t understand. You don’t spend time with – He’s no worse than the other kids in the playground, and [mild twin] hits, too, says the husband, as if he actually believes that tripe. Um, well, I don’t care. He hits me , and his brother, and his mother. He doesn’t hit you , so you figure there’s no problem. No! See [scoff], you don’t understand. Oh, don’t give me that. We have a scientific control group here. No, we don’t. Yes, we do. No, we don’t. They’re genetically identical. [Mild twin] doesn’t hit people. And what happened to two weeks ago when you were very firm with him about not talking about killing and pulverizing anymore? Huh?
If what you’re saying is true, then an expert will verify it. You should have no objection to getting him seen by someone who knows more about this than you or me. I explain how I deal with them when no one is around (very mildly and without anger, and by ratting them out to the parents later) and when a parent or parents is around (obliquely: “[Name], should you be hitting me like that?” I’ll say too loudly to be talking only to the boy).
I also say: I no longer believe you should not be on medication. What? I no longer believe you should not be on medication. So you think I should be. No. There’s Neutral and Yes; I’ve just scratched No off the list is all.
And I told him: Your watchwords for the week are “Think before you snap” and “Take no irrevocable actions.” He accepts these, and repeats them to himself a bit.
Monday morning. Killer twin scrapes a toy across the (closed?) eye of mild twin. Husband takes him aside, in fact, into the bedroom, and very sternly lectures him. I hear the telltale tone of daddy-can’t-hold-it-together-and-is-taking-it-out-on-the-boys, not the telltale tone of disciplining-the-boy-for-a-serious-infraction-using-appropriate-seriousness. Killer twin cries continuously. Mild twin sniffles and says “You’re hurting my brother’s feelings.” They go off to school. He returns, clangs around (is he suiting up on the bike?), and leaves. I think he’s going to the doctor and thence to work, so I wish him good luck. Thank you, Joe. He’s back in less than an hour, sniffling heavily and pulling out a convenient trial size of... Zoloft.
I very strongly caution him against diving headlong into antidepressants. I tell him everything at least twice so it’ll sink in. Like: Takes two weeks to start working. Possibly severe side-effects till then. Zoloft, like Prozac, is vastly more expensive than the older drugs. And you’ll never have an erection again. Yeah, I heard about that, not that I’m using it much anyway. A great deal more talking persuades him to put the blister pack back in the box. And I think you are dealing with spikes in the graph, so you may be better off with anti-anxiety medication. No, the doctor said depression. Well, anxiety and depression overlap significantly.
It’s just, every time she comes back I relive the whole thing over again, and she keeps wanting to tell me what she was doing on the weekend, and she talks to the boys about her “friend.” (Apparently a previous question was “Do I look sexy?” Um, to whom? Your boyfriend or the man who, while still being your legal husband, you have destroyed?) The doctor said I’m in an impossible situation, he says. I’ve got to find a way to keep myself together for the next [wave of hand]. [Adulteress] probably won’t last past New Year’s, then she’ll be out. But I’ve got to get through till then.
I’m angry at [wife]. I’m taking it out on other people, he admits.
Your tone of voice is heartbreaking, I tell him truthfully. If, on the fateful Friday night his wife didn’t come home till 2:00 a.m., his tone of despair – a hair’s breadth away from death – was the worst I had heard from a human being, his tone today, with the catches in the throat and the incipient tears, set new records for day-to-day despair. Despite everything, we don’t want this man setting those kinds of records.
I was amazed when he stopped sniffling and could speak normally mere minutes later. I wished him good luck again, and he thanked me again, and headed off. He had a good day at work, but now the wife announces she wants to go swimming and to boxercise Mondays and Wednesdays. Convenient. For her.
[He doesn’t need to know this, but I applied for three jobs today (two a day is my quota), and someone from Nokia actually bit. It now becomes a question of money even before I get an interview. Finland is expensive; I tell her that, for a corporate shill in a company as big as Nokia, pay starts at $40,000 here, which equates to 151,000 Finnish markka. We’ll see tomorrow how she reacts to that. I am willing to move to a foreign country that, despite its heavy English fluency, speaks and writes a language unlike any other on earth if it means I can have an income, a job, and a home. The biggest city in, as the Canadian government keeps reminding us, the country the U.N. declared the best to live in cannot provide those basics.]
All in all, a difficult week. Tuesday starts out fine, and the husband is in more-than-adequate spirits, until his every-morning phone conversation with his dad, who needles about what’s going on with the wife. His parents are confrontational, aged people from the old country. I am the only person who doesn’t put up with the bullshit from his mother. His father is a dangerous driver. While this may sound fairly damning, it isn’t. We all get along day-to-day quite well, and the [German-English diminutive]s are an essential part of the twin boys’ caregiving.
But the husband’s dad never takes no for an answer. He always pursues the most obstinate and the sorest angle in a conversation – about anything, like buying mundane production supplies (“Dad, we can’t get that at the Home Depot. They don’t sell it. Would you just – I know where to go to get them, OK? We have to make a special trip. Me and [neighbour]. No. Nooo! They don’t carry it at Home Depot”) or when to pick up the kids. Conversations about the ongoing marital dissolution never go well. And they didn’t today. Dad kept pushing for more and more information, which he couldn’t possibly need (isn’t a one-sentence summary from the only son who successfully reproduced sufficient?), and the husband eventually gave up and told him to drop the subject, then rang off.
We then suffered for the next several hours. The downstairs neighbour, a peach of a fellow who has lived and worked all over the world, came up. The husband decides to do quick grocery-shopping to get it over with. We should make a list, I say. I’ll make a list, he says. Both kinds of milk, peanut butter, jam, I begin, only to be interrupted with a very firm “I’ll make the list.” And the look of fiery contempt has returned to his eyes, as if by demonic possession.
He sits sullenly at the end of the couch. I figure he’s an inch away from slugging me, as usual, so I sit far away. A long period of silence while the neighbour uses my computer to check his Yahoo snatchmail. (I never let anyone use my computer. With him it seems OK.) I say: Shreddies. Husband rotates his eyes up and utters my name in an unmistakable one-more-word-and-I-will-snap-your-puny-fucking-neck tone.
40 minutes later, he returns with bags of shopping. I start putting things away; it’s my job. He sits, again sullenly, wearing his shades, and glares at me and/or the neighbour. I ask if he’s made a lunch yet. No, I’ll make one later, he says. I keep putting items away (in the newly-reorganized kitchen). Neighbour and I are still having normal conversation while he finishes up snatchmail, which is always slow on Web-based systems, slower still for a man who understands DOS but not Macintosh.
Soon: Can you get out of the kitchen, Joe? I need to make my lunch. This is taking too long.
And I’m thinking: For fork sakes. Just saying “I need to get my lunch ready” would be enough to twig this houseguest’s impulses to get out of the way.
Neighbour notes closed captions on television, and asks about them. I explain the stenographic process used for live captioning. Neighbour, being in his 40s, can’t keep up with the captions. I explained that it’s generational; after two weeks of watching nothing but captioned TV, anyone my age or younger can handle all the input simultaneously and we miss nothing. (The claim that captions are “distracting” is a big lie. They certainly are distracting if your only exposure to them is 90 seconds standing in a crowded electronics store watching a demonstration set. You must live the medium.)
This was happening not seven days after I had told the neighbour that I had turned on the captions on his little TV when I stayed over there. Every television that has captions gets them turned on when I’m around, I said then. In this conversation, though, the husband angrily pokes his head around the kitchen wall and states (I paraphrase here) that I’d been shoving captions down his throat. In fact, he says, he still finds them distracting. I go: Well, you’ve had several months to make that complaint, and you haven’t watched captioned TV consistently, and you have backed me up several times when I’ve re-actuated the captions after the kids turned them off, when I told them “TV with captions or no TV. You’ve got to learn to read sometime.” (Then a discussion about their real value in literacy. For kids aged 7, the effect is small.)
He continues to yammer on. I cut to the chase. Ever since you argued with your dad on the phone you’ve been pissy, and you’re taking it out on me. I am not taking it out, he says. We go back and forth for a moment, and I shut him up altogether by reminding him of the maxim of the week: Think before you snap.
He and the neighbour gather their things and leave. Thank fuck.
Wednesday: Working very well that morning. Husband declares his mood as a 5 out of 10 – to use the NASA terminology I fancy, “nominal.” And then the phone rings. It’s the adulteress. All of a sudden she’s saying that, when she is financially secure, she will take the kids. (Naturally, the conversation takes a good 15 minutes, and I’m not allowed to do the dishes while it’s happening, so I just sit around listening. He’s nearly in tears again.)
He gets off the phone. I spend ten minutes listing a host of objective, legal reasons why that’ll never happen. She signed a valid, enforceable custody agreement; there is ample evidence that her paramour does not want kids encumbering them, and we would need active evidence that he and the kids had developed a relationship and he did wish to assume parental responsibility; he would be deemed unsuitable by virtue of alcohol and drug use; the adulteress’s flightiness and changing moods on this score do not speak well to her consistency in what would by definition be a lifelong commitment to her children; her actions – of staying away late at night, and now staying out of the house altogether for half the week – show she has divested herself of maternal duties; she told the boys that she merely takes care of them after school and all decisions are now made by their father. And that’s just part of the list.
I get him to calm down. I add a new maxim to the top of the list, care of Douglas Adams: Don’t panic. Think before you snap. Take no irrevocable actions.
It’s an off day at the manufacturing plant, so the husband, to my surprise and pride, really, drags himself down from a 10 back to a 5, calls up his other friend, and heads off for a long country bike ride. You’d think he’s getting better, wouldn’t you?
The wife had declared that she would be out all night Wednesday, again in contravention of their agreements, but she backed out of it and merely did laundry, which I assisted with normally.
And on Tuesday and Wednesday, I had completely sanitized the house (swept, mopped, vacuumed, dusted, did interminable dishes) and reorganized the kids’ clothes (warm stuff up front, shorts ready for storage, created an entirely empty drawer for future expansion), and made sure some kind of food was ready when the kids came home, like rice, anise-seed cookies, gingerbread, and seasoned almonds a la Martha Stewart. I spoke very normally with the wife, who was delighted by the almonds and gingerbread. I also arranged not to be here for most of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, so (a) the husband could be “alone” or “alone with the kids,” (b) they could have togetherness (seemingly at odds, but that is a longstanding catchprase of mine), (c) to get out of their way, (d) to let them cook dead meat. Whose foul, caked and slimy, pathogen-ridden dishes I was stuck washing even after the husband agreed to do them himself.
Thursday: Quite nominal, really. It’s the husband’s night out; he visits a gallery opening with the neighbour. I return “home” late after buying bread at the Loblaws. (En route back, I spot Samir’s VW repair shop and examine a Vanagon to determine if it’s a Syncros. It isn’t. Just then, a tow truck shows up with a Vanagon Westfalia camper, rear wheels supported on steel pads and front wheels on the road. The truck stops, does a Uey, then backs the Westfalia into the lot – quite a feat, and a spectacle, given how weird a Volkswagen camper pointing backwards and downward looks when chained to the arse end of a towtruck. The owner of the camper is in too foul a mood to catch my eye so I can deliver the line “Samir’s – where Vanagon Westfalias go to die.”)
I return to the house. I am nervous about this. Any exposure to the wife alone gives her an opportunity to kick me out. She emerges from a quickie shower and declares that, at 10:00, she would make a phone call. I’m offline, I say, looking at my watch: It’s 9:40. I suit up and, for some reason, assemble my litter in the living room. I plan to head downtown, watch the Woody’s Best Chest Contest, and do the Black Eagle. Behind the Music on Blondie is on TV, and we kibbitz about the band’s formative influence in our respective lives. (I won all their records in contests growing up and listened to them late at night, on planet-sized earphones connected by two extension cords to an LP player, exactly as I do now listen to Bad Religion. John Waters sez on that show that, for a certain generation, Deborah Harry is as Elvis Presley. For certain queers, this is especially true, and any fag who would prefer to listen to “Hanging on the Telephone” than “It’s Raining Men” is immediately awarded hundreds of brownie points in my book. I have never met such a fellow.) I leave.
I am told today that, when the husband got back at 10:15, she was still on the phone. I know, I say. She went really nuts, I was told, screaming at him (with the kids asleep?): You’re the meanest fucking person I’ve ever known, etc., etc. She calls the paramour back and has a fight with him. The paramour, who is gainfully employed at the same workplace as her, wants to borrow money. More quarreling between the wife and husband, the details of which are probably irrelevant. Husband discovers her later writing the paramour a four-page love letter, putting the money together, and leaving for his apartment – at 4:00 a.m., again in violation of their agreements.
Husband doesn’t sleep a wink all night. He is a wreck when he delivers mild twin home early at 1400 hours (kid was a bit sick and was sent home from school), waking me up from my litter on the floor in the absolutely devastated apartment, which, even with neighbour’s help, requires two hours to clean up. We researched antidepressants further (specifically, tricyclics, which are dirt-cheap and lack the side-effect of deactivating your penis), and we are, as I write this, pretty much satisfied that he will survive till his doctor’s appointment on Tuesday. (Monday is Thanksgiving; adulteress is away; should be tense.) It was a touch-and-go evening; we called one of the mobile mental-health services aforementioned, who weren’t much of a help. Dead tired and falling asleep in his chair, he and the boys turned in early, though his spirits were noticeably raised. You’d think he’s getting better, wouldn’t you? Perhaps he is.
Except:
At the Black Eagle, I met someone. Apart from many other desirable qualities, chief among them talkativeness, sarcasm, looks, complexion, and wits, he relishes my distinguishing, dealbreaker feature (hair) as avidly as I relish his foreskin. He was too liquored-up and I was flying at half-mast, and he screeched us to a halt for five minutes just as the Hindenberg was taking flight, but then I talked him back down, reasserted my inner top, and rogered him into another dimension for three hours. I hurt him in all the right ways, deploying, at one point, many more fingers and knuckles than he thought possible. It’s a bit early, and I am not all that optimistic, but have I hit the jackpot?
Saturday, after the husband went out for a constitutional, leaving me to babysit the kids (using my computer to parcel out time on their computer exactly equally), we repaired, as planned, to Vienna Home Bakery on Queenstrasse, one of my haunts. It’s been the Vienna Home Bakery for over 40 years, and indeed the flowers painted on the walls (noticed only that Saturday, after they were pointed out) are dated 1958. It looks like a prototypical diner from that period, but was actually carefully built to look that way, with not a lot of original-equipment pieces, by Gay Couillard, sister of Toronto Uberchef Greg Couillard. She’s owned it for maybe four or eight years. It’s got a counter, a milkshake blender (green enamel, with the long chrome stick and tiny yet inexplicably functional blades), some scattered tables, just the right off-pastel colours. Gay is a spectacular baker, and even makes spider cookies vegan when she can get canola margarine. At 75 cents each, they’re worth it. She’ll also make me a delicious soyaccino.
I’ve spent many an hour relaxing there. It is difficult for me to relax. I remember visiting Ian in Montreal once and, after about day 3.5, feeling relaxed, telling myself “Hmm. So this is what relaxation is like,” and then the next day thinking “OK! Come on! Let’s get busy again!” During a previous visit to Vienna, I witnessed this conversation: Grrrl: “Oh, your backpack is really nice!” Grrrl 2: “I just had it sent direct... from Milan! [Pause] I know. It’s like a... pod.” Later a man of questionable sexualism but “blessed” by a stentorian voice he loved to hear in action described his extensive journey through Chile and Ecuador (coca tea! can you imagine?!) while the grrrlz ate their omelettes and sandwiches in the most modish and self-aware manner possible. It could be worse: I have found myself sitting alongside Erica Ehm at Vienna before.
Gay used to have a strong brunch crowd, but this summer, within a two-week period, all her staff quit, for various reasons personal to them. So she has scaled that back and now serves only desserts, plus a soup, and granola and yogurt. All her desserts are sweetened mainly with viscous, dark honey and/or maple syrup, and apparently she does a mean lemon curd. Her pie shells are picture-perfect. I kind of really like the place, and her.
So we arrive, and take a table. But wait! The counter became free! Just the perfect vantagepoint to watch a milkshake being made! I asked for “the usual” and was handed two spider cookies, which aren’t the usual at all; that’s a soyaccino, which I asked for. The husband had a cappuccino and an apple crumble, and ordered an apple-gooseberry pie for next week.
This was our second social outing together with the boys. (I exclude a couple of restaurant visits, one of which was followed by a playground escapade where a fireman [sic], robotically and overzealously pushing his blond child on the swing, stared at me with great suspicion for several minutes. I could hear him thinking “goddamn faggots taking over and screwing up goddamn kids’ lives.”) It was the second time I felt a kind of referred smug wound-plastering satisfaction at being mistaken for the boys’ “co-parent.” The husband defensively argues that he wonders what people think, because I’m an invert and he’s not, but I point out that anyone from the big city witnessing two very similar men together with two very similar boys is going to jump to only one conclusion.
And I like that conclusion. Though somewhat ill-gotten, it amounts to indirect evidence that I have somehow been successful in my social life. I gots him and I gots the kids, right? And take a look at him , wouldja. Man, I scored big.
So, chez Vienna, I told a mother with a newborn that this was what she had to look forward to, only not in stereo; I was outside keeping the kids from running away. This was after killer twin, feeling a bit full from the choco milkshake and follow-up homemade toast with honey, decided to get some exercise and do jumping jacks on the sidewalk. (They explored every nook and cranny of the tiny restaurant, except the kitchen, and except the downstairs where the restrooms are, which was too scary for mild twin. Gay let us pick some hissop leaves for tea. Minty-lemony-licoricey aroma.)
We left, cruised through Future Bakery (nothing worth eating). Walked down the street. I espied a bleach-blond invert in a tight white textured T-shirt and fashion-glasses staring into a store vitrine. When passing by, he turned around and revealed himself as... Mark Leduc, the gorgeous exhibitionist invert Olympic-silver-medallist boxer, who actually has strawberry-blond hair, a perfect body (shockingly tight, high, meaty tits now), a bf I believe he cheats on, and a propensity to walk up and down Churchstrasse wearing only a kilt. (Ask me sometime about the sexy Barbwire Barber Shop ads he posed for, and his bringing a drag queen along to a Canadian Olympic Assn. fundraiser.) We know each other socially at best. I gave him a nod, wondering why he dyed his hair. I doubt he recognized me.
In the van later, I underwent a darkening mood. We had to stop off at the Loblaws, filled to the brim with inverts and yuppies, for provisions. En route, I warned the husband that I was getting hungry and was disappointed about not getting the callback. But spool the film back now, to Saturday.
Everyone was tired (and the husband a bit sad and vulnerable), so, after cleaning up the house, we watched Iron Chef and the husband dragged himself to bed. I went to the Roastery for a cup o’ tea in the rain, BR playing on the Discperson that I managed to break nonfatally when it dropped out of my jacket after coming home from the Roastery on Friday. That noise had not woken the husband up, but he did comment the next morning that I talked in my sleep, again. This time it was just like a phone call, apparently: I spoke. I waited. I spoke again. I waited. I have been told by three different people that I talk in my sleep, yet no one tells me what I say. This is worse than Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s not being told why she is being sent away to Arizona. Don’t tell me my subconscious is taking control of my body without also saying what it’s doing in my name. (I have to assume there is some sexual component.)
Sunday was trying. Being Thanxgiving, the family had planned a trip to Movenpick Marche, their restaurant of choice, and it all seemed to be coming together until 1400 hours, when husband and mild twin unexpectedly walked through the door as I ironed and watched my tape of Oz. Mild twin had puked in the Marche elevator. Husband was vulnerable, and went for a ride. Husband was far too solicitous of ill mild twin on return, and he vegged in front of the TV. I packed up and left wordlessly, and did the Roastery again, trying hard to improve my mood by cranking No Substance.
In fact, as I walked the now-well-trod 45-minute route, I was very meta and thought back to my own question from the birth of this diary: “How can music as aggressive, loud, and manly as Bad Religion have such a centering effect for us?” Now I was willing it to effect that effect, condensing it out of the air. Only on the last half-block of this safe stroll in a middle-of-the-road community did I feel readjusted.
You see, I don’t like being snubbed. Especially when we were both flying at half-mast and are so obviously compatible otherwise, meaning second helpings are justified. In the van, before leaving for Vienna, I celldingled the Someone and left a message beginning with a reference to his favourite rock band (does the phrase “Evolution calling” ring a bell?), asking if he’s up for a rematch, and suggesting he ring the shoephone, whereby husband would answer it in befuddlement and then hand it to me with a conspiratorial wink.
A FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK: It’s roughly 1992 or ’93. I’m in New York, staying at my friend’s choice Gramercy Park apartment. We do New York Pride, which is a several-day affair. It starts off with the dance by the pier from afternoon to evening, and then a cornucopia of entertainment options. One fellow at the pier dance, which I find interminable and so alienating that I simply go and sit down in a corner for a while, is short and wears a YO! BROOKLYN! road-cycling cap.
Later, dinner at a tacky Mexican restaurant. I meet a Latino dancer in a world-renowned company who is one of those up people persons; he tracks me down a couple of times later when he tours Toronto. Today I would have handled it differently; back then it was hard to make conversation. Perhaps that was the problem.
Nighttime, at Mars, a three-story building with different DJs on each floor, one of them allegedly a dyke DJ who played nothing but Madonna, but that’s urban legend. We avoid all of them and head to the roof to degust of drag DJ Dinah Cancer’s 1970s camp hits. My friend was surprised that I could ID “Kung Fu Fighting” within a second (I was always good at theName That Tune home game) and shocked when I knew the words. (“There were funky Chinamen from funky Chinatown.” Not that any Chinatown I’ve been in has been funky. Why do so many American blacks love martial-arts movies? What is the link between black Americans and the Chinese?)
This was going on for a while. It was inevitable that Dinah would play “Dancing Queen.” When it happened, I had been dragged onto the dansepit by YO! BROOKLYN!, who turned out to be 5’7”, a Russian-Jewish-American, and in good shape. We disco-danced and I cracked a bone. We slow-danced at his insistence and he reached in for an inspection and had the usual response. At eightish the next morning, my friend telephoned YO! BROOKLYN!’s apartment to ask if he’d seen me, because I had disappeared. “Oh” was his term of surprise when the phone was handed to me.
And then: While walking around with my friend the next day, I was strongly advised not to fall in like with YO! BROOKLYN!, because he’s a love-’em-n-leave-’em type. And I’m: Well, of course not, [friend]. Give me some credit. I say now that these were acts of kindness. We pass kindness on to the next person, not come back for more. It’s the pleasure beam zapping from alien to Guttenberg’s chest in Cocoon. You don’t hog the stuff.
I also think back to the illicit days of being the other woman with the 6’2”, 210-pound articulate Dutchman, who whispered to me one night some self-searching words, as if they were occurring to him for only the first time and were tumbling out with a life of their own. The words were “I .could. love you,” with the mildest of emphasis on the word, as if its full gravity occurred to him only as he said it. The heart leading the mind leading the conscience. Later he did love me, enough to flee to Vancouver with his two-timing milquetoast boyfriend of seven years.
I can’t simply forget any of this. In the most trite psychobabble terms, they’re learning experiences. I have always hated the way gay culture tells us to forget every tryst we have the moment we’re zipped up and well on our way. It promotes interchangeability and reduces us to light bulbs and sockets. Au contraire, remember them all. I am reading Martin Amis’s Night Train, written in the voice of a hard-boiled murder police named Mike, who is a she.
March 5
I woke up this morning and Jennifer [a dead friend] was standing at the end of my bed. She was waiting for my eyes to open. I looked, and she was gone.
The ghost of a dead person must divide into many ghosts – to begin with. It is labour-intensive – to begin with. Because there are so many bedrooms to visit, many sleepers to stand over.
Some sleepers – maybe just two or three – the dead will never leave.
Evolution calling, Ian, you Astro-creep. He agreed with me on this. And he had no regrets whatsoever, despite the big A. Everything he did was an act of love.
I sit here now, undergoing one of several deja-vu experiences I’ve had in writing these, and will say what I knew before I would someday say: I am not naive and I know the score. I can separate shell from nut, avocation from vocation, surface from substance, fleeting from enduring. I am not Warren on This Life, unmanned by a man after years of fast-track cottaging action. But I’m sorry, the Someone I hurt Thursday is a Someone I could love. For his profile alone, really. Adam Mars-Jones, in The Waters of Thirst, offers us a man with polycystic kidney disease, a snob and a gourmet and a voice actor, who contends with a hamster-hung bf who’s always apologetic and self-conscious about it. But the kidney man loves him for his arse, which is all he needs. And the bf never realizes it. So stop already. You had me with your profile, wrapped in the SexKittenySoft skin.
But it didn’t happen. The callback.
So I looked up the fucker’s author posting history on Dejanews. He is sarcastic as hell and does not suffer fools gladly. We like this in a man. He also claims “can bottom/top for the right man,” though he copped only to the former. (They’re devious, these bottoms. They think they’re in control. We let them think that.)
I planned to bump into him again, namedrop another of his fave bands (does the phrase “Astro-creep” bang a gong?), tell him we needed to give him another go when he’s sober and I’m at the peak of my cycles (which I wasn’t by the time he wanted a more perfect union), and that if you bottom types want to be in charge, act like it and respond the next time I call you. And that my natural politeness is in fact a cover for my natural forwardness, which he also has, which comes in handy when we get to a battle of dominance. The plan later was to invite him to Mods Night at Lava on College on Wednesday, which, I figured, was the logical place to go if you liked rock & roll, because you got to enjoy rock & roll in the company of men in narrow-tied suits pulling up to the club on Vespas.
A conversation I had with a Roastery employee figures now. Here we return to the eternal theme of predestination. The lad, who plays his rock tapes at the Roastery and whom I mentioned Mods Night to, now tells me, unbidden, that the place, the Lava, went tits-up. He knows two guys who worked there. We later discuss plans to hold Mods DJ Night at the Roastery, which I will suggest to the owner. Except: It scuppered my brilliant plan. All those brilliant plans have failed before.
And we recall Martin Amis’s London Fields. Actually, we recall Money, where the petty crook who drives the story visits his pub twice and bumps into “that writer guy, Martin Amis.” And in London Fields, Nicola Six is set up as the murderee right from the outset. Very meta, the amisian style, never more so than in Time’s Arrow, where everything happens in reverse sequence: food is degorged from mouths onto plates, candy is taken from babies, we return home from work in the morning for a well-needed sleep and uncombing of hair. There’s a nuclear apocalypse always bouncing around in Amis, like the roulette ball in Run Lola Run. Will it fall onto 20 black by itself – once more – or will someone have to raise a voice?
Nicola Six is not murdereed. His approach is like: Except: What if everything about how Nicola strung me along was unreal, was a response, in the instant before, to the knowledge of what really happened, which was the Bomb? What if everything you were reading were a last grasp at life before everyone’s was snuffed?
What if everything I planned with the Someone were a vain tilting at predetermined windmills? Why was I reminded of “Subdivisions” last week? Something did it, the reminding. It’s been sticking with me. “Growing up, it all seemed so one-sided – opinions all provided, the future predecided, detached and subdivided in the mass-construction zone.” Is this, in the words of another Brit writer, Ben Elton, a cruel glimpse of an unattainable reality?
The Waters of Thirst: He knew the kidney transplant wouldn’t work when... and there were still 30 more pages left in the book. The future predecided, but the film hasn’t spooled off the reel yet.
Huge scene Sunday with the killer twin, who acted up for a half-hour, hit me 23 times (lightly), prompting me to toss water on him after the husband failed to come out to stop him and after I warned I would do it after 20 hits. Of course, this boy does not have a problem. Still, it was the wrong thing to do. I should have retired to a neutral corner. I apologized to the boy this morning. The husband, contrary to expectations, seems not to hold it against me.
I started writing this last night and then went Out, to the Toolbox and the Barn and the Eagle, and it was tedious and fruitless, except for the audible reaction to my grand entrance in Gore-Tex x2, canvas shorts, vest, and unbuttoned henley at the Toolbox, and the stares of not fitting in at the Barn, which speak to my being onto something, like my stage presence, which I tamp back into submission most of the time just to get along with people.
It’s hard to know what to think about this. I have many theories. I want to leave the realm of the theoretical. I want the world of the physical, especially his tongue, shoulders, and meat. What he gets in return are a pelt and everything under it. You’d think this would be enough.
A phone call today or tomorrow, rehearsed. Better left on voxmail, actually. Not exactly top behaviour.
So what would you do if you were 34 years old but feeling like a giddy schoolgirl? Apart from die of embarrassment and question your every move?
I will continue with my cinematic references, rather like the Star Trek: TiNG episode where the aliens spoke only in metaphors of ancestral battles. Election, OK? The dyke sister Tammy is punished by being sent away to... Catholic school. (Can you say “Christmas every day”?) And she meets... Jennifer. Within the 70 mm widescreen picture, we suddenly see 16 mm home movies, a la Boogie Nights, of Tammy and Jennifer on the swings and acting blissful. And it’s the music that’s the killer: Charles Aznavourish
LA-la-la-la-la LA-la-la-la-la LA-LA-LA LA-la-la-la-la LA-la-la-la-la
Imagine a 1960s perfume commercial featuring apres-ski babes in big hair and fur-lined brassieres. That kind of music. (I think it was custom-written for the movie. It’s killer.)
So that is the impression I figger I left with the Someone: Schoolgirls dreamily swooning, all the higher functions of the human mind disconnected because, dammit, this is love.
All right. I take my medicine. I tell myself to stop acting that way. But it takes me the entire day to listen to myself.
In the meantime, it’s Tuesday after the long weekend. The wife is expected home after work. But both kids were sick this morning, and were shunted off to the [German-English diminutive]s to recuperate. I am capable of taking care of one sick child at a time (though I think it taxes my abilities), but certainly not two. The husband brought the kids home minutes before the wife showed up. As a political gesture, I had cooked an onion upside-down cornbread for the adults (note to self: do not substitute green peppers for red), which we all like. Except the husband is saying the kids had a difficult day emotionally. We received the quarterly Lego porn, which was of course labeled Winter 1999. This spooked the mild twin to tears. “It isn’t winter! It’s fall! Cut it off !” The killer twin started uttering threats about what would happen if we did cut off the cover or at least the title block, using his bloodless bone-chilling deadpan evil voice, which is not an affectation. We eventually had to amputate, which required convincing the killer twin that he could still read the cover if he wanted to despite its being detached.
The wife had a migraine, so wasn’t obstreperous. I didn’t know how the hell I was going to last the night. I planned on doing the Eagle and having a talk with the Someone. But that was a good four hours away. Separate showers were taken; the kids calmed down, especially when fed bacon; they played some kind of computer game while my computer precisely allotted each twin’s play time. Mild twin states, out of nowhere: It’s good to have mommy home. I’m glad she’s back. We missed mommy. And shortly, of course, the couple were having another one of their discussions, this time in the bedroom. The kids got to bed only half and hour late.
An old friend (not flame, kids, friend ) who now is a major komputer kween in Vancouver was scheduled to be in town for something like 16 hours and snatched me to set up a phone call at tennish. I arranged to borrow the shoephone of the husband. I dressed. The woman’s intuition was speaking with unusual calm and clarity. In fact, maybe it wasn’t just the woman’s intuition; I was getting the echo effect that happened only once previously. This could have been due to my walking home the night before and chastizing myself because I felt I needed help from the beyond, but I can’t exactly summon Ian on command. Someone set a wave in motion, and it washed ashore last night.
The echoing intuition said exactly what to wear, and told me to walk downtown – at least a 70-minute trek. The Vancouverite would call at some point, and we would talk. I was shockingly calm and neutral. Now we must discuss this concept of neutrality, or nominality, to borrow the Space Shuttle terminology. David Frost asked Pierre Trudeau: If someone shook you awake in the middle of the night, which language would you speak upon rousing? And he said something like: I dunno. I might say “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” or “What’s up?” depending. The language you hear me speaking when there are no expectations about my performance is my neutral voice. It is widely misinterpreted in Toronto. It’s seen as hard-nosed, unembroidered, and vaguely pushy. I also have intense eyes (even my mother complained about them) and, when speaking this neutral voice and looking you dead in the eye, I tend to rub you the wrong way.
Small numbers of people over the years have been able to tolerate that neutral voice. I almost never use it with the husband; I’m usually chipper. Ten years ago, when I had a large social circle, friends divided into two categories: Those I’d never had a cross word with, and those with whom I quarreled every week. I used my friendly voice with the former category and my neutral voice or something neutral with overtones of annoyance or impatience with the latter. My cheerful, punning, one-liner demeanour is as much a part of me as the neutral voice, but it’s an adaptation. I have had to become clever to compensate for other things. But even the clever voice is laced with sarcasm, taking the piss, and, I am told, bitterness. Like: I was invited to a Christmas party years ago. I stood around talking with these two heterosexualists and their female friend. We spoke mostly about dogs. I was about ready to leave, so when I returned with jacket on to say goodbye, I was greeted with “Oh. We were just discussing how bitter and cynical you were.” And that was using my chipper voice.
I got dressed and overheard the couple talking. Well, if it were daughters, it would be totally different, the husband said. I could see where that was going.
While walking downtown, at a very measured pace, I was rather calm. I did not bring the Discperson, and instead played mental MP3s to myself from start to finish. It was a 95-minute trek. I hit Churchstrasse and was told to sit down on the stoop of a store, wondering if the Vancouverite would call. I was told at a certain moment to get right up and walk smartly into the Black Eagle, where I immediately ran into the Someone.
– Hey. Just the man I want to talk to. What is that [pointing to cloudy mixture in stein], chocolate milk?
– Coffee.
– Ah.
The Someone exchanges a word with a tall fat bearded guy.
– Let’s go find a wall.
Scoff from the Someone.
– I’m getting a beer [pulls out a five], and then I’m going to pick that man up.
We leaned on the counter.
– I rarely get to lean on service areas, not being a drinker.
Pause.
– Did I get up your nose with my phone conversations? – Pardon? – Did I get up your nose with my phone message? – No.
Beat.
– But you are with this conversation. – Sorry.
There is then an explanation that he was busy over the weekend with company.
– What kind of company?
– Company.
– Mm.
– And tomorrow some more company comes in until Saturday.
– I see.
I’m pretty much nose to nose. This puts me at a disadvantage. I find it hard to focus at that distance. The Someone is looking POed and mean.
– I’m up for second helpings.
– OK.
– If I call you on Sunday, will you answer it?
– If I’m home, yeah.
– Or return the call.
– Yeah.
Ding-ding-ding.
– What time do you –
– It’s the weekend. I don’t do schedules.
– You do on Fridays at the Barn.
Like, touche, honey.
– I have a life. I don’t have to revolve everything around [other people’s] sexual demands. If I want to stare at the TV all Sunday, that’s what I’ll do.
– Fine.
Stand there for a while. Get out of the way of the service area. I make teeter-totter equilibrium gestures.
– Are we OK with this conversation?
– Yeah. I just don’t like the faux-aggressive tone.
– Oh, it isn’t faux.
– Mm, he says, not buying it.
– I contain multitudes, like Walt Whitman.
We stand for a while. He’s still looking mean, really.
– OK. You’re going to go over there and make off with that man
–
– Or get shot down in flames.
– I see you on a Fokker triplane
I say immediately. The zingers are still there even in the neutral voice, apparently.
– And I’m going to go upstairs and stand by the window and wait for a call from my friend who’s in town from Vancouver on the shoephone.
– The shoephone?
– Yeah. Like on Get Smart.
Loiter.
– And the last thing you’re going to do is feel my chin.
– Yes, it is.
– The last thing before I go.
I was meeting his sarcasm with equal firepower. So he fiddles with my chin.
– Ah. Growing a little goatee.
– Little? I’ve grown 15 of these things in the last five years.
He sort of belittles the short hairs.
– Please. This is only day three.
Some other guy comes over and they greet. I say seeya and head upstairs.
GUT CHECK: One secret to relaxing is to let your abs go. This is psychologically difficult when one’s abs are covered by flab. Releasing the muscles accentuates the flab. But it had to be done. The echoing intuition told me how to handle it. I stuck to the script a tad too much, but it seemed to work.
Upstairs, I bumped into my acquaintance Dan from Newfoundland. Now, I’m usually in my chipper voice with him, and he’s pointed out how sarcastic I sounded before. I explained that I was taking the piss. Dan is tall, pretty much hairless (but very fit: his legs are firm, cool, and smooth as an android, a singular feeling), and a bit neurotic. He has a Cuban bf in New York he’s sponsoring for citizenship. I got to asking him about how one handles my predicament, which included nearly blowing it on Thursday, recovering strongly (I thought then), rogering the Someone even though we were both wet lasagne, and now getting back for a round two. A top v. bottom discussion. An elucidation of the various ways we deal with trysts: Cheefully from then on, but no future contact (I can think of an example), cheerfully and ongoing (I lost that example’s number and really ought to look him up), etc. But sometimes, I tell him, a tryst seems more cosmic and you get to liking the guy. And that becomes tricky.
Dan had no advice to give. But I was talking to him in my echt-neutral voice. It’s dead calm and self-assured. I know just when to speak and what to say, and am unhurried, and do not filter anything. He claimed he’d never heard me use that voice before – not standing on ceremony, he called it. I sez, I thought I always talked like this about objective matters like your lover’s immigration. But no, apparently.
My feeling is that the neutral tone will be the winner with the Someone. I am stuck undoing my appearance of neurosis, however. And nothing says the Someone will actually invite me over for seconds. I have to make it till Sunday, but I am relaxing my guts. It’s going OK so far.
Dan leaves. I eye a former Mr. Leather Toolbox, who has stunning black eyes, apparently a brain, and a stutter. The phone rings. The Vancouverite and I have a 42:58 conversation about pretty much everything. He gives good advice; he’s been around in ways even I find exceptional, and has made pretty much everything work. This all happened while sitting on the stoop, and while walking around occasionally later to avoid a beggar walking up the stoop’s stairs right at me. It was all very pleasant. Very reassuring. We would put him in the debased, discredited category of role model. They do exist, here and theer.
I want to be able to turn off chipper mode at will, like the Krusty the Klown doll’s good/evil switch. I once worked at a government ministry and soon located all the inverts. We spent a lot of time on the Vax VMS DEC All-in-One chat mode. Chief invert had a name of the form X McX, where X=X, a la Laurie Anderson. He was in his twenties, tall, very fit, a cyclist, hung spectacularly, with a frenum ring under his skin. (He’s the one who really propelled me into cycling. He rode a Rocky Mountain Cirrus or whatever with one of those solid Tioga wheels, and thought nothing of riding down staircases or in the winter. Later, neither did I. Later still, my interest in such trialsin-like manoeuvres would crash flaming to the ground, like a Fokker triplane. Should I look him up again?)
He was kind of inconsiderate at times, particularly at parties chez lui. Yet he still liked me, and he summarized how I should deal with the world in a message over the government’s E-mail system: Fuck ’em if they can’t take a Joe.
I just have to find the guts to live that.
We spoke the language of the ancestors this week. At 0600 one morning – I think over the weekend – the phone rang. Husband answered it, only to find the wife’s parents on the phone from a faraway European nation. Soon the wife’s father, who speaks better English, is put on. No. [Wife] and I are all finished. No. Finished. It was her decision. She has a... friend.
Days later, a voxmail message for the husband to call the wife’s parents. He does. The same facts are reiterated. Mild twin talks to grandpa, asks if Pokemon is seen there. (The kids are obsessed beyond any measure by Pokemon. They spend their entire waking lives, when out of school, watching television. If this were a bigger home, they might have greater private space; if these were different parents, they wouldn’t be TV addicts themselves.) Husband asks killer twin if he wants to talk to [obscure diminutive for adjunct grandparent]. Slight pause. “No,” killer twin says, in his cold murderer voice.
Once off the phone, I ask if we can interpret this as a de facto rejection of the wife and her entire family and (I didn’t add) another example of the twins’ thinking of themselves as the [father’s surname] family explicitly. “Yes.” (The kids carry the wife’s surname as a middle name. It is never used in public. The conceptual leap is somewhat camouflaged by the fact that the kids aren’t suddenly using the other parent’s name, but it has definitely happened. They are daddy’s sons, not mommy and daddy’s sons. That’s settled forever now.)
The grandpa also makes it clear that he supports keeping the kids with the husband, and disapproves of the wife’s actions. Late this week, upon arriving home, the wife called her parents and spoke in a specific foreign language for an hour. I didn’t bother doing anything special to provide privacy, telling her the only things I’d understand were proper names from here. (I did get her a Perrier with lemon as a political gesture.) I can’t say she was especially heated, except for one passage, and she mentioned the husband’s name about four times; naturally, he could be described as “he” or by some other phrase that wouldn’t stick out to an English-speaker. Husband returned home about 15 minutes in and was on the verge of a panic attack for the entire time. He figures she was reciting a well-planned self-justification.
Surprisingly, the adulteress is spending the weekend here. This is a major fucking pain in the neck and complication. The paramour has rented his body to science as a pharmaceutical guinea pig (nasogastric tube? We can only hope!) and is thus unavailable for nonstop adultery. She’s also on the warpath that we are spending too much money on food, food that she doesn’t eat. Like fuck. What a stupid-cunt thing to say, obviously prompted by the stupid-cunt paramour. The bitch is practically anorexic as it is; she has not eaten three square a day for easily three months. (I know this because I’ve been feeding them for longer than that.) I assume this ties into some psychosis of feeling sexier for the paramour, and as we know, fat girls aren’t sexy. But she’s not fat and never will be. She’s simply refusing to eat. We have two kids, a husband, and a governess to keep alive, and, apart from the dead meat the husband buys, we eat dirt. It just so happens that, every two weeks, we run out of everything at once and require a $100 run to Loblaws and a $30 run to the bulk store.
(Can you imagine being a vegan living in a house with no rice whatsoever, apart from arborio? And no way am I into risotto for two meals a day.)
She broke her promise again by being away last night, Thursday, boy{‘s|s’} night out. Husband was a wreck after she eventually left. “Joe, leave me alone, OK?” he said, halfway to using his enraged I’ll-wring-your-fucking-neck voice. Tonight she didn’t come home at 1900 hours, as she suggested she would (they were late “doing inventory” at work), but left a message that she was going out drinking. 2230 saw her breeze through the door after I had just returned. (It was a difficult afternoon. The kids were biting (!) and crying and arguing. Husband refused to go do laundry; he’s afraid of spending the money. Well, I don’t give a fork. Laundry should be presented as a fait accompli. It costs $20 to $30 a week and the results are spectacular. There is no long-term backlog and everything dirty – everything – is washed, sorted, and folded, and most of it is stowed properly, too, all by me.)
THE FACTS: I had a Woman’s Intuition several years ago. I was doing work on computer and was told to turn the television to Adrienne Clarkson Presents. The imperious, “naturally regal” Adrienne “I’m sorry. Do I know you?” Clarkson, nee Poy, is a 60something Chinese immigrant who has dominated CBC television programs for as long as I’ve been alive. I watched her on Take 30 and other shows when I was a kid. She ate up huge chunks of the dwindling CBC budget for years on her vanity variety show, which admittedly was aggressively programmed and never showed anything remotely stupid. (Sometimes gratingly, irrelevantly highbrow, after the manner of the brittle WASP culture of Toronto into which Clarkson assimilated early on, but never stupid.) Last week, Clarkson was invested as Canada’s new governor-general. The chick has been around.
But that evening (1995, evidently), Adrienne Clarkson presented a staged reading, after the manner of experimental video art, of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, the short story by Yann Martel in which an upperclassman at Trent U. in Peterborough befriends a freshman who suddenly comes down with the big A. As he wastes away, they spin a tale of an imaginary Italian immigrant family in Finland, the Roccamatios, working in actual events from each year of the century from 1901 to the ‘80s. A rather self-aware literary device – twice removed, in fact? Yes. And stunningly effective, producing a Mozart/Salieri dialectic.
THE FACTS BEHIND THE FACTS: The actor doing the reading on Adrienne Clarkson Presents – right to the camera, in close-up, with, if I recall, montages of the historical events appearing behind him – reminded me of my dead friend Ross. This was the bf of the now-dead artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres. He had an original Andres Serrano “Piss Christ” on the wall, blue-painted floors, a puce bedroom, and cats who hated me. And, I add, a Mac Plus, which I coaxed into performing miracles, and Bang + Olufsen stereo with linear-tracking turntable, on which I played records in the correct European way. And Harry, a black Lab, whom Ross escorted illegally onto the New York subway by attaching a harness and wearing dark glasses.
I was too green to really get Ross. I met him through AIDS (in)Action Now. This was maybe in 1988. Ross was one of the <quote>visible</quote> PWAs, being stuck with the largely benign but very stigmatizing KS lesions on the face and elsewhere. (In extreme cases Kaposi’s sarcoma can and will attack the organs, like the lungs and liver. Usually, though, KS lesions are a cosmetic nuisance, a patchwork of scarlet letters.) But Ross, from Calgary, was the sommelier at Scaramouche, an A-list restaurant in Yorkville, and was stocky, handsome, well-dressed, and bearded. Was attracted to hairy guys. So why doesn’t this drive you nuts? I asked, pulling some of my hairs. Because I already have Felix, he said. (Thinking about it for the first time in years, one reason he liked having me around is now apparent.) Except that Felix lived in New York, as Ross had. I assume he returned to Canada for the health coverage, but I was never sure. I don’t think I ever asked. I was green.
I would visit occasionally. He lived at 59 Roncesvalles, just above Queen, in deepest Parkdale. It is very far away and tedious to get to; I babysat his house for the last six months of ‘89 while Felix taught in California. I seem to remember good food and good conversation (on his part), and also his somewhat gratefully letting me massage his back. No one in town would touch him. I doubt he’d actually let them do so if it came to that, having a lover and all, but it’s be nice to be wanted. After we determined that the lesions had no appreciable thickness and didn’t hurt, it was nonstop relief for Ross as he lay under my thumb.
The man had a lot of stage presence. “Like my overalls? They’re Girbaud.” I remember a wintertime outing to a Thai restaurant in someone’s car, with Ross driving. Accompanying us were Felix and Ross’s upstairs neighbours, a terminally sincere boy-girl couple. I sat in the back. What I recall, as we drove through the snow, were the ears of Ross’s fur-lined Elmer Fudd cap sticking right out from his head.
(Felix also liked me. I get along well with famous people – much better than with civilians. Among other things, I don’t treat them special. I actually gave Felix typographic tips – like “Don’t use Trump Mediaeval Bold if you want italic, because there is no Trump Mediaeval Bold Italic.” He invented a form of art in which the spectator was expected to take part of it home. Like baby-blue tissue paper with brief inscriptions – in one case, major dates in the history of gay liberation, plus “Ross 1987” – in small type, all stacked in a three-foot pile. Help yourself. Take one. When the “stacks” depleted, he printed more of them. A later piece united lights on strings and a large pyramid of candy kisses. Help yourself. Take one. Felix also adorned a billboard with similar gay milestones as in the stacks, but is most famous for another of his billboards, appearing at a site visible from the former Stonewall Inn in Manhattan: A stark photograph of an empty bed, with the sheets drawn back and two indentations in the pillows and mattress.)
Ross croaked in 1990 or ‘91. We held a wake that was rather sad, and the kids of the Scaramouche chef swiped – on whim, just for a lark, not because it meant anything to them – a snowglobe of Ross’s that I wanted. I have no mementos of him whatsoever. I still toy with the idea of asking for the snowglobe back.
The title The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios stuck with me. I got away from the dysfunctional family here last week and reread it down at the Beach. The last bits are rather sad, in an unexpected way; the ill man rallies, but in a manner only his friend knows about and understands.
The family of the ill man notes his kindness toward their son.
I’ve gotten to know the Atseas quite well. They’ve taken to me, as I have to them. I used to call ahead and ring at the door when I came to visit Paul at home, but quickly I was given a key and told that I was welcome any hour of the day or night.... Jack pats me on the back and Mary smiles at me and touches my forearm lightly and informs me that there are sugar-cane yogurts in the fridge now, my favourite, for when I come to their house next.
I used to be a second son, or their only half-daughter, to my benefactors (not the husband and wife – another couple, older, whose son I met in university, who supported me for two years), and have the run of the current place.
The big thing that Ross told me was actually a small thing: I’ve gotten to know Felix really well, he said, and I don’t mean what he used to wear in high school.
Thursday I go out. I’m in shorts, Reebok hiking sneakers, and the tight military-issue green sweater, with the nylon patches on elbows, shoulders, and inner forearms (for machine-gun kick). Crossing Wood St., I look to the left to see if a car’s going to hit me, postprocessing the fact that the man walking dead toward me is the Someone. We stop in the middle of the street.
– Hey.
– Where you off to?
– Zippers, he says, grimacing a bit. (It’s a Komrads manque for the ‘90s, in the former PM Toronto site on Carlton.) – I prefer button-fly myself, I say, thinking how much fun it would be for him to unbutton mine right then and there.
– I’m meeting my friend from Montreal, Jeff, there.
– Ah.
– Heading to the Eagle?
– No, I’m going to the Most Pathetic Chest Contest at Woody’s first, and then I’m doing the Eagle.
– Mm. Too bad you’re not into threesomes, says a dirty old fag who walks by us.
We both stare.
– Even if we were, you wouldn’t be on the menu, honey, the Someone says.
– No shit.
We turn back to each other. I note his sparse but tidy hair. There’s a beat, and a zing, then a zinger.
– You must really like Jeff, I say, pushing his lock around a bit, because you combed your hair.
– Bye, he says, as we both spin around jovially and head off.
At Woody’s, no contest. What’s going on? But I do run into a man I wrote an article about, one of the few out cops in the city. He’s very well-preserved. We have an enjoyable conversation – about out recruits, gays who want to be cops, getting out of the public eye, early retirement. We are ignored altogether.
Quickie cruise around this stand-n-model (S&M) bar. Booor-ing, though the titanically gorgeous bartender Steve was at work. He’s tall, lanky, and muscular, a difficult combination. I asked the doorman what gave with the contest. Ehh, it’s early, he sez. It runs on drag time.
Mosey to the Black Eagle. The Someone is standing on the stairs flipping through a tawdry gay magazine.
– I thought you were with Jeff.
– He’s inside, trying to pick someone up.
– Ah.
Think.
– And he’s staying at your place?
– Mm.
– You know you’re hurtin’ when all you’ve got to do is flip through the Fab.
Jeff, it turns out, is from Alexandria, Virginia, and moved to Montreal ten years ago.
– To enjoy the winters, I say.
Short guy in baseball cap walks out, mistakes the Someone for the doorman.
– Good night, the guy sez.
– Hey. Where you off to?
– Pardon?
– Where you off to?
– Uh, the S... the Stables?
– Oh. The Barn. Where you from?
– Sicily.
– How long you here for?
– Till Sunday.
The Someone and the Sicilian say goodbye.
– He took you for the doorman.
– [Chuckles] That’s OK.
I announce that I am now going into the Eagle. The Someone announces “I’m off to the Barn to pick up the midget,” and leaves.
I give up flying like an Eagle to the sea and let my spirit carry me to Woody’s again (contest underway, but no contestants old enough to drive), thence the Barn. I actually enjoy their music for a change. Upstairs, I am heckled: “Now, that’s a lovely outfit.” I spokesmodel my sweater in retaliation. Shortly a conversation is struck with an American visitor, a 30something-year-old in leather jacket, mock turtle, streetsweeper jeans, chain wallet, and truly excellent boots, and a translucent rubber studded ring around his stubby, hypersensitive privates. In mid-chat, “the midget” reappears, quite alone.
The thing about the Someone is that he has prompted me to know myself better, as Ross did Felix. He gives me the option, for the first time ever, to express my savagery and tenderness. The public, verbal faces of these personae are my chipperness and wit and my sarcasm and jadedness. They are not in opposition. They are all me.
I know, from experience, that the Someone doesn’t find it easy to track down guys who can keep up with him. Me, neither. Presently he has the upper hand. There needs to be a rebalancing of terror, and the only way to do that is to drop my shields, give in, like leaning the wrong way to round a turn on a bike. What he needs to hear is: I want you to help me. You have to push me to push you. You can start by kissing me.
There’s a degree of psyching myself up involved. This is a dusty, unexplored realm of my persona. I have to dress myself up before I take myself out. To continue with my theme of vocal delivery as destiny, if I don’t say this in the right dead-serious dispassionate voice, exactly similar to Everlast’s in the opening seconds of “Ends,” he ain’t gonna buy it. Or maybe I won’t. I’m still trying out this persona. But it’s a one-shot deal. I have a limited launch envelope here.