Ass-fucking and the People's Elbow (erotic memoir, edit 2)

 1999                                                    Gossamer Street

                                                           

            “I have a surprise for you,” Garth says.

            “What?” I say. “Tell me. What?”

            “A house.”

            “A house. You bought me a house!”

            “Well, yes and no.”

            “Garth, there’s no yes and no about buying a house.”

            “OK,” he says giving his little teeth full play. “I did get a house, but, I rented it.”

            “Oh Garth, a house! Caroline and Lisa could—”

            “First things first, we have to move in.”

            “Yes.” I’m picturing Garth and Talon and me and Lisa and Caroline. The house has four bedrooms and an in-law’s apartment in the basement. With Abie and the girls, I was the third man in the ring; I’d get right in there calling the shots, fouls, knock downs, delivering the 8-count. Being a referee is a tough job.

            “So, where is it?”

            “It’s in a nice area.”

            “You like the area?”

            “That’s what I said.”

            Garth doesn’t like old houses. Also he doesn’t like wood.

            “So you like the area—North York. It’s in North York, isn’t it?”

            “It’s in the Bayview area.”

            “Bayview and?”

            “Bayview and Steeles.”

            “East or west?”

            “West.”

            “Oh. I see.”

            “What are you doing?”

            “I’m phoning Lisa.”

            “To tell her the good news, right?”

            “Yeah, something like that.”

           

             “Guess where it is,” I say and then I tell her it’s just off Bayview and Steeles, maybe a five-minute drive from the Bluffwood Drive House. I’m sobbing because I despise the suburbs, and I’m moving to someone else’s house in the suburbs when I had my own although it showed signs of age and misuse even before it reached a ripe age, like a woman haggard before her time, overworked and underappreciated, crumbling inside and out, like the Steichen photos of Appalachian women. I don’t write much in this house. I plant sunflowers in the garden. I dig a bonfire pit for Talon. Talon and I hide from Garth—it’s a big house. I hide from Garth and Talon. Under the carpenter table in the furnace room. In the low cupboard in the rec room which has a counter and sink and where I’ve painted four new canvases. Crouched in a corner of the garage with an old flannel sheet pulled over me.
           

            Garth has two sisters, Yola and Audraine. Audraine devotes her life to God in London, Ontario. She’s the breadwinner, God being more of a homebody, trying to keep his household in order which should never be under appreciated as any homemaker will tell you. The part I don’t agree with is she hands over most of her hard-earned cash to God, but shit I did that with a flawed mortal when I mortgaged the Bluffwood house those two times. Lately Yola’s taken to phoning Garth for advice; she’s convinced Sean Paul is her boyfriend. I tell Garth his sister’s a groupie, that maybe Sean Paul fucked her once or twice. She complains he never calls her and when she calls him, someone else answers. He’s never home. He doesn’t return her calls.          

            Yola bore witness to her mother’s righteous attacks on Garth’s person, never uttered a word of protest. “Why do you talk to her then?” I say to Garth every time she phones. He says he doesn’t listen while she rambles on, that usually he’s doing something else, and you never know when you’re going to need somebody. “I think you miss her and you need family, otherwise you wouldn’t spend that time on the phone. You’re not as cold and reclusive as you think,” I say. She’s a curiosity,” he says. “I thought you said she bored you.”
            Yola is staying over because it’s Sean Paul’s birthday even though she hasn’t been invited, but then she’s his girl and since when does a girlfriend need a formal invitation? While she worries about what to wear, she disinfects the upstairs’ bathroom. “You don’t have to do this,” I tell her. She says she wants to; I come back with “I prefer you wouldn’t”; she walks into the hallway and standing beside Garth, she says, “Why don’t I ask my brother? After all he’s the one paying the rent isn’t he?”              “Garth,” I say. He stands there, mute, in the hallway.

            Yola smiles. “So where the Javex?”
            “You have to leave.” I say, walking to the guest room. “Take your bag and leave.”

             “Touch my bag and I’ll slap you.” I pick up her bag. Her slap is full and fast.        
            “Garth, you can see your sister out. Well, little girl, you will not visit here again nor will you phone. Garth?” I lift heavy weights. I don’t fight.

            He pauses. “Yola, you have to leave.”

            Yola lets loose a shriek like a Green Cheek Conure which I’ve never actually heard, but once read about on the Internet when I was searching out bird calls, plugging in adjectives like shrill, piercing, primordial.

            “You!” she screams, “you ugly old honkey! Don’t you see he’ll get tired of you?” And as he’s opening the side door, she sashays into the hallway. “And do yourself a favor when I leave­? You know the mirror in the upstairs bathroom that I cleaned so now you can actually see yourself? Why don’t you check it out, old woman!” She throws out a gaudy laugh. The screen door closes and then reopens. “Janice, can I use your car to take Yola to the bus station?” I want to say “let the bitch take the subway.” “Yes,” I say. “Do you have the keys?” he says in a high-pitched voice which is disconcerting, even annoying to hear coming from such a big man. “Yes,” I sigh. There’s a bottle of port waiting for me in the fridge. Half a tea-cup will knead out the knots entrenched in my chest and deliver a welcome home that sits like mulled apple cider in my base of my cunt.

            Heather, who manages the Woman’s Fitness is a lush. I didn’t know until Garth met her at reception when he came to pick me up. He was wearing a white, red, and blue nylon windbreaker and his face was so smooth and glowing; he looked like a star, really he did. Anyhow Heather was chatting him up and he was answering in the easy straight way he does, so I grabbed my shit, walked right up to him with the women looking on, and slipped my arm in his. “You know she’s an alcoholic?” he said in the car. He has to slide and tilt the seat back all the way to fit into the driver’s seat. I watch his giant hands guiding the wheel. “How do you know?” I say. “Broken capillaries around and on the nose and chin, flushing on the cheeks, the eyes­—­” “The eyes? What about the eyes?” “If you’ll let me finish,” he says. “Sorry. Really. I’m sorry. I won’t interrupt again.” He sighs and continues. “The eyes are watery.” “That is so interesting!” I say. “So you think she is?” “She is.” “Wow, that’s so cool.” He says he doesn’t see anything cool about it and I have to explain it’s not her drinking that’s cool, it’s my knowing about it.
            I learned about port from Heather. Bailey’s was too fattening, I said, but wine was bitter and I didn’t want wine with a high sugar content like Manushevitz that was served at my in-law’s Seders and at Chanukah. “You should try port, you’ll like it,” she told me. So I went over to the liquor store on the ground level of the Promenade and asked one of the staff, a skinny middle-aged guy with a dark-brown pageboy, “I’m wondering about port which a friend tells me I should try.” Sometimes sounding innocent pleases me, which is why I held out the verb “wonder.” And there’s a certain sweetness in a present participle.
          

                 In the Bluffwood Drive house I went out with Sandy our housekeeper whom we couldn’t afford, owing as we did on everything else, to a bar in the Hudson Bay Centre, the one on Bloor and Yonge. North east corner. She used to laugh with Abie, she had wild wacky laugh, until she discovered that she despised him whereupon she turned to me. “If it’s the last thing I do,” she said, “I’ll get you to switch sides.” “Not going to happen,” I said. Once she offered to massage me, I insisted on keeping my underwear and muscle shirt on, and I could swear someone was standing outside her basement window even though it was a winter night that reminded me of my childhood in Montreal. “How come the laundry room door is open?” I said to Abie who was wearing his old save-the-whale t-shirt. Sandy believed getting smashed would do me a world of good.

             “I’m wondering if you could help me,” I said to the bartender. “I mean, I want to experience what it’s like to get drunk. Only I don’t know what to order because, you see, we mostly smoked up in the sixties—­” My ears buzzed for two days. Turned out I didn’t like getting drunk. You couldn’t act cool when the only way to walk in a straight line was to keep your legs stiff and your cunt drawn tightly in. So I took Heather’s port tip and ceremoniously allowed myself half a tea-cup at 5 p.m. daily.           

           

            Sometimes Talon, Garth, and I wrestle. “You think you got me,” I say and give him the Rock’s people’s elbow. I giggle when we wrestle, which doesn’t mean I’m enjoying it. But I know about Mankind and that he was really smart before he got all messed up from jumping off twelve foot scaffolds and China when she paraded her massive muscles in black leather before she had her face redone, including having her jaw broken and wired to reshape her square steroid jaw and the two Hart Brothers before one jumped to his death. I can’t say it was my scene. “But it’s all fake,” I’d say, until Garth told me how hard they trained and the chances they took. Once on a wooden platform in the park near our house on Gossamer, Garth and his five-year old son lay on top of me, Garth holding my hands down so all I could do was move my head from side to side.

“Get off me, you creeps,” I yelled.

“Say ‘Uncle,’” Garth said while Talon hooted.

“No fucking way,” I said. “Same here,” Garth said and tightened his grip on my wrist.

“I can’t breathe,” I said, “Really, it’s enough.”

 “Say it,” he said. So I spit in his face. “You’re lucky you’re alive,” he said later. In Guelph a gang of boys tied him to a willow tree, throwing stones at him and whipping him with branches; there weren’t many black families in Guelph back then. It took him one full year to hunt those guys down. “You make sure there are no witnesses,” he told me, “know where they’re going to be and when, and you be there waiting in the shadows.” There were six or seven of them and he pummeled them all, into oblivion, he said.

I went too far.

It’s winter. Garth is in the back yard, wearing his navy sweats. I lock the patio door and walk away. He stands in the cold calling my name, knocking, then banging on the door. From the upstairs window, I watch him walk down the patio steps, slip on the black ice, and land with his four-hundred-and-twenty pounds on his left knee.

I went too far.

 

“Do you still want to get married?”
            “Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

            “And you’re still willing to change your name to Chambers?”

I think what am I going to tell Caroline and Lisa? “Yes,” I say.
            “Shall we go upstairs to celebrate?”  he says. “Oh, it might be a good idea for you to have some port. I’ll meet you in the bedroom.”

I don’t know why I want him to think I like it so much.
            This is what it’s like. He says “where do you want to do it?”  I miss the sofa. On the sofa I can lean my hand on the seat and cradle my arms around my head. There are two sofas in this house in two separate rooms on the main floor. I remember Nina Street. This is a big house. We drift apart. I look around the bedroom. The bed is too high.
            “Garth, do you remember the sofa on Nina Street?”
            “I do,” he says, his under-face showing.
            “Do you think?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Yay,” I say and he smiles. I love making him smile.

“Don’t forget,” I say.

“What do you take me for,” he says, pulling out the lube from his pocket.

When I hesitate in the doorway of the family room, he knows.  “Well?” he says.

“Well what?” I say.

“You’re really going to get it hard,” he says.

“Yeah, so?”

“You think you’re tough, don’t you?”

“Hey man,” I say, swinging into a double bicep pose and sliding into a three-quarter chest.

He’s grinning.
            “It’s been a while, you know,” I say. “I may not be as talented as I was.”

He tells me to stop stalling. It takes ten steps to walk from the doorway to the sofa. I face the wall. It’s easy to pull down my grey muscle pants that are elastic around the waist and ankles and balloon around the legs. I put one leg back, going into a reverse lunge, both hands on the edge of the sofa. Kneeling now, arms akimbo on the sofa; now too close to the sofa, knee by knee back and back some more, head into arms, ass up and wiggling, back scooping in like a ladle.  He whistles softly, just a few notes.

 Ass fucking hurts. I don’t like ass fucking. He puts his hands on each of my hips. I like that part because his hands are so big they cover the span of my hips. He rubs his cock against my left and then right cheek. Says “uh huh, uh huh,” wets his up-yours finger in his mouth, goes vibrato on and into my asshole with it, then out and slowly in again. I bite my arm. I chide myself what are you doing silly girl what. But then he’s pressing his cock against my asshole, lube cold jelly, presses and slips, guides, rooting again, now in, now slowly. Stop, I say, please wait, just for a bit. But don’t pull out, because then you’re going to have to start again and it hurts, don’t you know it hurts? Sh, he says, sh.  He’s so gentle, no one else can imagine him so easy and warm and gentle. Oh baby man, fuck me hard now hard, you’re the first smart fuck I’ve ever had, won’t you slide your hands along my hips, down my flanks and didn’t D.H. say flanks?  I close my eyes tight tight, clench them shut. Wait, I say, wait, but he grabs my hair pulling back so hard I think this is what horses feel like being sharply reined in, and I shake my head but still he holds it back while he’s pushing not listening to me anymore about stopping and starting, and I want to tell him there’s no way in, I’m closed, all stopped up, and anyhow I don’t want to anymore, I’ve had enough pain in my life, but he says sh sh again which just slays my heart really it does.
            And then he shoves. He plows right through that dividing line even though my gasp is loud and jagged. He fills me; that’s what he does. “Alright?” he says. And I know he would stop in an instant, sliding out like a fish in a pan, so I say, yes go hard and I add please because I know he likes it, but he wants more, more words—sometimes he likes words and then I don’t know what to say. He asks me if I like it and I say yes. He asks me why I like it and I say I don’t know, I just love it, I love to have you hard up my ass. And because I’m all out of words, I say go harder, I love when you hurt me, which just sends him, causes him to pull my hair even harder, and he’s ramming away but not pulling out too far, just slamming ba ba’, ba ba’ like a trot maybe, growling low in his throat, grabbing my left tit and squeezing my nipple with one hand, and yanking my hair with the other.

 

He hands me a towel. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says. He has to clean his cock and his hands.  I wipe between my legs and up and down, also the crack of my ass and in my asshole. Then I lie full out on the cold wood floor with my legs straight and tight and my toes en pointe like a dancer except for my bunions. Sometimes I can come to the count of twenty. Once I counted to ten. I’m a bit of a glutton; I want more, so I come again, my ass and cunt linking up, and I’d eat the whole damn thing, but Garth comes in with my our old black Nina Street quilt. “I thought you might want this,” he says.