In her lush garden, which is heaven on earth, Sabina reclines on her lime green chaise lounge. This garden is part jungle, English mansion enclave, pristine sanctuary, and natural yoga den. I bring all my men to Sabina. Straight off she worried about Garth. I should have listened. Maybe not, because I’m free now, still afraid of phones ringing and knocking at doors, but free of Abie and that’s all I have to say about that.
Beside Sabina, this new man perches on one leg, taking deep breaths and spewing them out, five times maybe more, pauses, then cries out in a shrill falsetto. William S. Grieves has been taken by the spirit. His hand hovering one quarter of an inch from skin contact scans Sabina’s wonderful legs. Her left knee has been making its presence known—the kneecap hurt, she cannot do squats with her Norwegian trainer. Sabina has marvelous legs with diamond-shaped calves, moderate muscle in her upper body, arms specially, cheek bones that demand attention, and a long ass.
William is intent on calling me his own, and even though he sends me packages of the finest music, bringing joy into my life, no fucking way will his dick enter my body or wind its way into my spirit. Any man wearing his pants so damn high that the sun glints off his belly might have a prick lying somewhere, perhaps on a mantle in an old musty rooming house—might—but that prissy prick will never find its way home to my door. Even a woman running overtime and late for her next fuck, has certain standards.I know how to hold a man. When I phone Garth he answers in his reverse-exclamation voice. So I say “I miss your cock,” which settles him right down. We set a suck-off time. I’m always late. Garth doesn’t like to fuck right away; first he likes to talk, to get acquainted. He’s old-fashioned that way.
“What’s it called in church when someone starts shaking and screaming out, you know, and the spirit moves them?” I say. I plan to write about the new man.
“I don’t know.”
“But you should, your mother being Pentecostal and all. There’s a word or a phrase. Like what’s the verb—is it moved? Like when the spirit possesses someone? I’ve seen it on the evangelist shows, the ones you told me to watch so I could get my speaking voice right. Remember when I did all that NLP motivational shit with the B’nai Brith broads?”
“Why you asking?”
“Because,” I say, tracing his eyebrows with my index finger, “I was watching this show about healing, you know, and the effect of belief, religious belief, how it really can heal. Mind over body kind of thing and I thought it would cool to write about. But there’s a word I’m missing.” And I slide down between his legs to his famous balls. “So?”
“Maybe taken,” he says, his voice remaining constant. I can flick my tongue over his balls, taking one and then the other into my mouth, his voice and breathing never waver. He has great presence of mind. It’s his background of abuse, I guess, and having to be on guard all the time.
“So,” I lift my head, “taken by the spirit, then? That’s the expression?”
“Yes, yes, that’s the expression.”
“Mmm,” I say, twirling my tongue toward his cock. It’s an art, maintaining contact from one move to another—balls in the mouth, then tongue snaking around cock, cock in mouth, only the tip, more tongue swirling, more cock, until Garth touches the back of my throat and my soul opens.
I just don’t like the pressure, driving over, leaving Caroline, and worrying all the while. Sometimes I think—with Garth, I’m like Patty Hearst, when she was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, joined them and became Tania. Like Che Guevera’s comrade. "Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there," she said after she was sentenced for an SLA bank robbery. I don’t know why I think this way. I guess I’ll have to figure it out.
Hooked
I am hooked on my online men. They’re my morphine and D-Bol. They punctuate my life. When I’m high on a new man, I phone Sabina and leave her messages although she has no need to live vicariously. Men still flock to her. She doesn’t even throw out bread crumbs, the way I do with my profile and exuberant follow-ups. She just stands there and they fly in, detouring from their migrations.
Sabina has a local one for me, James who is in love with her. Sabina is a goddess and remains so at forty-five. James messages her back when she’s tired. She takes off her top and lies on her stomach, her small tits sticking to the burgundy leather sofa. Last time he massaged her back, she felt a bug crawl in her ear and swatted, causing James to yelp; he was standing beside her in his bare skin, his skinny prick pointing to the west. When I realized that I didn’t intrigue James, I was pissed off. It’s not that I wanted such a skinny flat-minded man who insists kinky and passion can be played as one word—kinkypassion—“In whose dictionary?” I ask him. Lisa and I have taken up Scrabble. She wins every time, knowing her way around that board the way I know a man’s body. “Props don’t thrill me,” I tell James. “And anyhow, if I’m desiring a prop, I just grab a man. You’re a prop, honey.” He laughs. “Really,” I say. He tells me I’m the embodiment of kink and invites me to a College Street peeper’s club.
James checks out two women kissing, each of their men seated on art deco leather love seat at opposite ends of their booth. “Do you mind if we come in and watch for awhile?” he says. James’s British accent and exotic dark skin serve him well in this Somerset kind of club. He takes his cock out of his pants and motions to me like a cop directing traffic. Patrons enter and exit. “She’s still at it! Wow, she’s really into it, isn’t she?” I shift my weight from my right to left knee, my throat feels raw, I have to pee. Meanwhile James is chatting away in his brisk English accent, adjusting my head, taking his time.Sabina tells me James has a porno site with a 1-800 number and hook-up to Pay Pal. “Holy shit, our James—a fucking pimp!” I say, hooting and snorting.” “Don’t put this in your book,” she says. I tell her “of course not” and play her for details.
“He has about a dozen strong women,” she says.
“You mean builders?”
“He calls them strong women, but they’re bodybuilders, alright.”
“Holy shit,” I say. “You know I had this coach in my early days, I think I was forty-three. Yeah. I was forty-three and you and I had just met at Kelly’s Backyard Gym and this builder, Rita, was setting up my programs. I remember I was working out, we were in the Austin Terrace house, and this builder comes in and squats three plates a side, rock bottom, three sets of ten, so I go up and ask her if she coaches. Anyhow, Rita’s doing this threesome thing, with a female builder named Val and some guy, and on the side—I can’t say for sure, but John, you remember John my second coach, the one I put a down-payment on a motor cycle for? So what I heard was she was posing and doing tricks for guys with a thing for builders. You know, like Igbal had for me. Fuck! The shmuck’s a pimp!”And then I wonder whether he’s asked me to this peeper’s dive with his porno site in mind.
Lenny and a Few Others
Before Will and Lenny and others with their invigorating letters, there were two white Jewish men who brought sustaining warmth and friendship into my life. Late at night, I would spread out in my bed, wrapped in my words and warmed by theirs, rediscovering words could be round, not flat and brittle like Garth’s. I twirled on the tips of my words without fear of falling off, spun round and round sprouting random phrases as the sky changed colors, and they loved it—all these lines bursting out without any target in mind. And I thought if I were to look inside, my spleen, liver, all those organs would have disappeared. If I were to grab a corner of my skin and steal a glance underneath, I’d see stars instead, and I laughed. This is what I learned from a white Jewish match.com man, a gentle magic man, teacher of stuntmen and lover of life.
There were good men-souls: Bruce, a seventy-two-old professor of ancient English literature with a bird feeder on his balcony, a birder from Boston, who whispered “I wanted to be the first to kiss your eyes” in his morning calls as I struggled with my flaying Caroline. He wanted to drive to Toronto; I told him it was too soon. But the truth was he looked like Einstein and I couldn’t imagine him kissing my eyes in the morning.
Onegoodbro “Didn’t you know this is a black dating site? Doesn’t the name say something to you?”
“Why do you whites think you can get in anywhere you want? How can you be so fucking selfish? And anyways, why do you want a black man? Relationships have enough challenges without adding mixed race."
“Why you after black cock?
“Get the fuck off territory that don’t belong to you.”
“Listen sweetie,” I wrote, “I live according to my beliefs. It’s one thing to talk about integration—it’s another thing to live it.”
“Damn straight. You got it now.” He said his black sisters and brothers were better off without guilty and jealous white people trying to sneak into the fringes of black culture.
“Look, I respect your devotion to your people and your sense of responsibility, but I’m sure as hell not moving,” I said. No one was going to bully me out of the neighborhood.
His Name Is Mark Towne
I saw his picture on “Black People Greet”— a man with earrings in each ear, beret, and James Baldwin eyes. He’d call, cruising down Highway 78, windows down, wind, music and his words whooshing into my ear.“Well, it’s been fine, really,” I’d say all foam and breathy, and he’d answer “I’ll squeeze you later” with a triple “e” in squeeze and upswing in later, and I’d laugh because I had no idea what to say to this smooth man. Instead, I left him a message of my coming― a score of escalating, sighing, swooning sounds with slices of dialog. “You are soo sexxxy,” he said, “that was so bee-u-teeful and sweeet of you. So so sexxxxy! My God! Babay! You are my JCT.”
But, even with my moaning into his cocked ear, when Mark arrives at Pearson National Airport on the coldest night of winter, I can’t recognize him. A man with a navy blue beret, two gold earrings, navy duffle coat, and tan leather bag slung over his shoulder strides by. Let this be the one. This one, this is the one I want. The man walks in a diagonal line toward a red exit sign beside which are two others, taxis and washrooms. I hide behind a post, watch the other arrivals, and unzip my ski jacket. Play it, honey, let a little tit show. The beret man reappears.
“JCT!” he says. “Are you my baby? You are so cute!”
Fucking shit. Cute is not a good thing. My ass, fucking shit, cute. But here he is, looking down on me, so I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him full on the lips, kissing and kissing him in front of Arrivals, and I’m nervous and shy and so fucking pleased. Shit shit shit I’m thinking all the while. Shit shit shit. There is stuff between Mark’s arriving time and the hotel room, paying the airport parking ticket, how to do that, do I have enough change and is my hand trembling? There are paint-free patches in front of my car and the license plate is held in place with rusty wires. I take the 427 south and then the 401 east into Toronto. “I’m always getting lost but my heart’s knows the way,” I say. “Sweet and hot, honey, sweet and hot.” He puts his left hand on my thigh. A Drake man, I decide. I can’t take him to a seventy-nine-dollars-a-night flophouse even with sax strains streaming from its lobby. There’s a reason sax and sex share all letters except the middle one, and there’s no mistaking what a woman grooving at a jazz club wants when she screams out, “Give me some sax, baby!” Mark is a Drake man. His face is leaner and more angular than in his photos—a different man than the one I had come with, saying, “Oh my god oh . . . baby, babay!”
Abie’s dating this psychiatrist he met on JDate where he posted a photo I took of him, standing on the rocks at Lajoie Falls. His hair is windswept and he’s grinning. Before he met the psychiatrist, he kept a running count of women responding to his profile. “Listen,” he’d say, “I have forty-nine women waiting for me and I can’t answer them. I know you have a credit card.” Three times I paid for his JDate membership. I didn’t want to alienate him. He’d call a week in advance. They were doing due diligence. A deal was closing. Funds were in escrow and release scheduled. Then he’d ask for cash. “I won’t forget,” he’d say and I’d look over at Caroline talking to herself and no one in particular.
Abie has a theory about these meet-ups. You have to kiss right away. You search out a spot, lie down with your arms each other, close your eyes, and you share memories—when you first saw his picture, first emailed, first spoke. You share. Occasionally you open your eyes and steal a glimpse. And so you slide beyond that online space.
The long-haired concierge flips through a glossy pamphlet. “What do you think, sweetie?” I say, my hand in Mark’s pant’s pocket. He taps The Den with his middle and index finger —“glass everywhere, JCMT,” he says and there is: glass bathroom door, glass partition between toilet and showers cubicles. Bathrooms intimidate me. The room’s purpose is clear, I know, but I like to be genteel about it, delivering a soundless stream. In private I’m this noisy slogger and I like that. But posing on the Drake pedestal, I’d have to deliver a controlled flow while reining in my abdomen. It would look silly to dress up just to take a piss. My mother used to wear a hat and leather or linen gloves to match her shoes and purse when she went to a movie. And what if a fart steps up to the mic, deciding its time for a solo?I pay with my Gold card although I can’t figure out why the hell they gave it to me anyway. I figured I’d somehow pulled a fast one. As soon as I received the card, I called Garth, bought a leather three-seater, matching love seat, and TV stand at The Brick, botoxed my entire forehead, removed sagging flesh beneath my eyes, and here I am, whipping it out for a drummer standing first beside me, then with a sidestep turning away while I fork over my five C’s at the Drake Hotel on Queen Street West.
Something Slightly Kinky Perhaps
Mark brightens my life. Even with thousands of miles between us, I can feel his breath; he uses his voice like a cock when I need release as he calls it. He has these gifts.
“It’s my baby! How ya doing shugga?”
“You sure know how to make a woman feel good.”
“I sure know a good woman.”
I close my bedroom door and lie down on the standard grey wall to wall. The carpet like a lover brushes against the skin on the small of my back. There is a softening of my hips and my ass rubs into the roughness of the industrial carpet. The space at the back of my neck tingles. Sex and drugs have a way of setting a scene.
“Sweetie man, you leave a female who comes to words unable to locate any of her own.”
“Let me help you baby. Tell me what you want.”
“You,” I whisper.
“I didn’t hear you. You want what?”
“You. I want you, in me. I want you to fuck me. Please fuck me baby.” Men don’t give a damn whether they’re fucking a poet or a Forum freak.
“I am fucking you, baby. I am fucking the hell out of you,” his voice low and gravelly.
“Well sweetie, if that’s hell, heaven must be one eternal come.”
I love coming over the phone for him, hearing his jagged breath over all those miles, his steamy words sliding in space.
Once he wrote “lovie” and when I read that, something in me shifted over to his side and sighed with soft delight. I call him from my bedroom, lying down on my bed—I have trouble with smooth talk while standing. In our first days, I spoke to him while I stood in my kitchen, then walking around the condo, describing the images and colors of seventy-six of my paintings. I sashayed around in bikini underwear, a muscle shirt, and a pair of toeless high heels my mother had passed down to me. All other times I lie on this light gray carpet behind my bedroom door or on the tiled bathroom floor, and sometimes I single out the floor on the right side of my bed or the left. I can’t do it standing up. I mean I can lean against the bathroom counter and he can ram in from behind or I can hold my upper torso against his with my legs around his waist, his cock in its rightful place and my arms around his neck, but for coming, the build up and flow, I need a floor. Beds are fine, but a floor, a floor is hard and soft and inviting all at once.
There are black and white tiles on my bathroom floor. I am wearing a snug black t-shirt with “Adrenalin” written on the front and “PUMP,” part of a dial-up gym number on the back. My hair is uncombed. I unbuckle my leather and metal belt, pull my jeans down to my shins, keeping my socks and Blundstones on, and spread out a worn blue-and-white synthetic bathrobe. I weigh possibilities—if I lie constrained, can I spread my legs wide enough? Phone coming involves posture and timing: to lie down, to place the receiver on breast or belly, to spread legs and rub a clit—up and down or back and forth depending—while another finger pushes upwards inside. It’s an art. I rub, tensing my legs until I feel that low lurching as my come slides into place. A clock hand ticks out the seconds: one—fingers moving over and across; two—the sun starts to sink; three— sinking and shining still brightly; four—sinking more, quite brilliant and changing color, yellow to red; five— head arching back, a line forming from behind the eyes to the mouth, finding its path to the back of a throat, tracing across breast to breast with clear cunt intention. “Oh baby,” I breathe. Using a cheap rate, I dial the number 10159451, his area code and number that my fingers know so well, and press talk. I’m adept at timing. I hear his voice and my cunt swoons. “I wanted to call you,” I say all breathy like brewed foam, “I wanted to talk to you about sucking you off when you’re involved in commerce and I wanted to make you hard while you talked numbers or whatever it is that you do, when all that I want, baby, is you here with me and we’re fucking, honey, and shit, I am loving it.” And sure enough, I feel a snare drum brush on my thighs and the sun’s nighttime glow at the back of my cunt, and wanting to please this man who calls me “baby of mine, lovie, shugga,” signing “one love, yours to hold, one to one and one in one,” it happens. Five times, baby, five fucking sweet times. It’s simple, wanting to please a man—I start to come, smiling all the while knowing I’m almost home, with a pressing down, just a gentle kind of pressing down, one of those simmering volcanoes with the top opening and closing, ledges overflowing—something warm between my legs bringing me home again and again, all warm and wet from the pressing down. I test the wetness with my fingers and I laugh.
“Wet honey, really fucking wet!” Thick opaque wet, that smooth just oozing wet from which memories are made. From pissing. From fucking pissing.
I write, then release these words like homing pigeons to Mark, also Lenny, and my New York ex-con, Robbie. I wear my cunt on my sleeve, I tell them—listen to music, touch words, journey through life all with my cunt. And that’s poetry.
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