“Hold your hair up, chin up and to the left, look that way, now this, now twist a little, arc, that’s it—and twist,” Alex says, clicking away.
“I love this,” I say.
“I can see how you must have looked when you were an actress. It’s like you’re right there. Yes, absolutely. Doesn’t she, hon?” he turns to Lisa.
“Yeah, she really does,” Lisa says. “And she’s still beautiful.”
“You two are the best,” I say, "What memories!" Lisa thinks we're creating a portrait album and I do have a box of photos even after all the houses. But these ones, these are for my men.
The base of the white studio wall curves into the wood floor. A black velvet cloth covers the Polaroid camera propped on a silver industrial tripod. Lisa has wrapped my red silk kimono like a turban around my head and transformed my black stockings into elbow-length nylon sleeves. My muscles are for the most part not even in the pictures and I’m alright with that.
Around one in the morning, I drive Lisa home. It’s a freezing winter night and I don’t realize until I’m on the highway alone in my car that my cunt has actual weight to it. I’m an elitist when it comes to my cunt and I think there’s a uniqueness to the way I sense details and sequence. My cunt is a destination, what’s that expression? Something about Rome and all roads. Or—at the end of a narrow hallway, a room with pressure from the inside spreading out, and radiating from the hand-hewn warped wood door is a glow, not white, but yellow, cadmium yellow light like the background in a watercolor of mine, “My Heart is So Unruly Truly Part 1,” like that one or maybe “My Unruly Heart Part 2, AKA Slipping into the Sweet Wilds.” That’s it. A new scene for the drummer man. “What a fucking turn-on!” I’ll write, “Wow—it makes me want you— shit, you’re fine! Oh baby, sitting here at this early morning time, typing furiously and wishing to come for you, all quiet except for this shivering because there you are with your cock leading the way. And when you lean down to kiss me, I turn my neck causing you to kiss the side of, nape, and hollow beneath my throat, and I sigh ‘baby, baby, baby, you sure do that thang to me.”
I play them all, they just fall right into place. This one, this drummer one and the others, hard and heated from these words, words, words. “So I ask you please fuck me and you ram in and in and in. Out my window I see my come all spruced up and shining, hovering at the edges of this early morning moon. I straighten my legs, which honey is what I do, tighten and tense, you hold my hair the way I like and your finger is up my asshole, I’m fucking your finger and your cock and I can feel the come inching up the insides of my thighs, swinging into my cunt, spreading and branching out while the moon’s hanging full and bright. Sex is such a wonder, isn’t it? Oh baby, I am hot for you!”
Babies. They’re all fucking piss asses. Words turn them on and deliver how-to’s, so when they come into town and want some action, I don’t have to say anything and they know what to do. I don’t fuck them all. Sabina’s fine with one-nighters. When she needs some flesh, she’s on on the prowl. She needs a certain look—high ass, tall, dark skin, some mass although she doesn’t require a builder. Also she’ll make do with a flat ass. I’m not sure how sticky she is about height. Sabina says with one-nighters there’s no follow-up.
“It’s like there’s a protective bubble. They just have to shut up and fuck me—I’ll do the rest.”
“Not me,” I say. “I love music and words. Mostly music. Sometimes their words are so lame, ‘fuck me baby, you like this don’t you?’ and all that shit. Even the smart ones, and I only like smart ones, have lousy fucking dialog.”
Sabina says “not me, turn on music and I can’t concentrate. No music, no words—those are my rules. And don’t fall asleep in my bed.”
“I wish I could be like you,” I say. “Garth never played music and he’s not much for talking. But then I once had this guy and he was really smart, decent dialog too. I’d say ‘tell me again, honey.’ He thought I wanted a rewind, his words being so sexy, but the truth was I couldn’t hear him. I figured if I told him I’m going deaf like my mother and grandmother, would he please speak up, that would destroy the mood and his hard-on. And you know how it is when you ask someone to repeat something—they speak up alright, but they also slow down, like you’re some idiot. Garth does that. I have this trouble with surround sound, not that there’s any when he’s fucking. Maybe he just mumbles, like youlikeitdon’tyac’montellme.”
“You’ve always been particular,” Sabina says, “which is why I never understood some of your choices, like Garth and Abie.”
“Yeah, well, you know the book about smart women and their choices—anyhow back to the dialog bit, I was just remembering about fucking and not hearing—there’s this time I can’t hear Garth and I say ‘honey I’m really sorry but I can’t hear you’ and he says ‘YOU . . . REALLY . . . LIKE . . . SUCKING . . . MY . . . COCK . . . DON’T . . . YOU?’ like he’s talking to some dull, deaf two-year-old which makes him a pervert, doesn’t it? Anyhow I’m not sure Garth was such a bad choice. You don’t agree, I know, and there are parts of him that aren’t nice, but he told me from the start, ‘I’m a mean guy,’ he said. And I guess I liked that. I identified, being evil myself and all.”
“Deceitful, perhaps, but evil? Never.”
“I did stuff,” I say. “I grabbed at things because I had to stay alive and I’m impulsive. I grabbed at Garth. He was so big and I thought he’d protect me. And I can’t end it. I mean I guess I can. I could. If I had the money— but I don’t know, I really don’t.”
Maintaining the Family
I smoke up before breakfast and Caroline’s morning meds and check my emails. My men must love me, different from a collection, separate from ego. They hold me up the way a dancer balances his partner in the air, freeing her from earth’s common aches and heartbreaks, then placing her so gently back that she maintains her balance, just the tips of her toes touching the ground.
Mark has something for me: “Picture this—a bed, huge, one of those circular things, and there’s a man and a woman—actually, there’s a man and two women. Of course he really digs the one with the long dark hair, but she sort of gets off on the other woman and he’s cool with that.”
“I don’t know about this storyline, I mean, it’s just not my thing, sweetie.”
“She’s not really into the woman,” Mark assures me, “it’s her old man she digs, she’s doing this for him, you see, and that’s the cool thing.”
I tell him, “You straight men are all chauvinists to the core and I guess that’s just the nature of the beast, but I’ll see what I can do and it’s sure not going to be easy. Because I like to involved when I write and no way is my head going to get around this one. And what would you do about a female saying there’s two men and this broad, see, and—”
Garth would fucking never let me forget the scene. He’d laugh his flat ass off. And if I were to explain, “It was the drummer—remember you and I were talking about the book needing more variety? I mean there’s got to be a limit to ass-fucking and sucking-off scenes. So when the drummer thought—I just want you to know it sure as hell wasn’t easy writing that shit,” Garth would answer, “right, anything you say.” Then I’d remind him about the time he told me for one million he’d let anyone fuck him up the ass.
“One million—don’t you think your ass is worth at least ten?” I said. “What about half a million? Would you do it? You’re so fucking weird,” I say. “You like this conversation. I mean it makes you laugh. Look at you. I gotta tell Talon. Man oh man, he’s going flip. ‘Exposed,’ he’s gonna say, and if you ever tell Lisa about these conversations—”
Slipping, stoned almost all day long, writing in 3-D, lungs shot, smoking through my asshole. I write with an old wine glass of red or white beside me because the image appeals to me. This morning I woke up with the Garth’s semen coating my tongue. Only prissy women brush their teeth after swallowing a mouthful and some tight-laced shits brush and gargle before they even wade into a cock. And then there are those Women’s Workout members who shake their heads and purse their lips.
I used to admonish the religious ones about their lack of protein. A body requires protein to built muscle, I’d say, and muscle consumes fat. Gorges on it. I’d count up their daily protein intake.
“Thirty grams!” I’d shriek. “You can’t build muscle on thirty grams!”
“But I want definition ,” they’d say.
“Look, if you want definition, it’s quite simple. Build muscle and watch what goes in your mouth. You’re deficient,” I’d say, shaking my head. And then in a softer voice, “Look, if you don’t have more protein you won’t lose weight.” I sigh. “I know there’s children and meals and Shabbat is a lot of work. I know. So what I’m telling you is there’s an easier way.”
“There is?”
“Thirteen grams of the best quality protein.”
“Nu?”
“Simple. And everyone’s happy. Next time you suck off your husband, swallow. He’ll love it, you’ll lose weight. Twice a day, maybe three. Right there, let me see—thirty-nine grams. Never mind what he wants. Be selfish for a change!”
Ebonics
I want to share my writing with Garth. There’s not much that holds us together these days. We don’t work out together. I sob when he phones me. Sometimes I don’t answer the phone. “I tried to phone you, but no luck,” he says. “What’s luck got to do with it?” I say.
When I started writing the book, this one, I wanted to write about my online men. I thought I’d better screw the subject before the groupies line up. So I climbed on top and gave it my all, grinding, flinging my head back, my tits waving in the fuck. And while I’m naked and my words are spreading ‘em for a drummer, professor, and two ex-cons, it’s no big deal to add one more to the line-up.
“You sent me Ebonics! How long have you known me and you insult me this way?”
“I said how long have you known me?”
“What year is it?”
“2004.”
“So we met in 96—”
“Eight years. You’ve known me for eight years. And in all that time did I ever say anything about stereotyping, for example?”
“About Talon, yes. You didn’t want him to dance or listen to certain music. And you didn’t encourage him in sports. You wanted him to know about Matthew Gaines, Marcus Garvey, George Washington Carver, Lewis Latimer, Dr. Daniel—I forget that one, the heart surgery doctor, I know it, wait—”
“Williams. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams,” he says, sighing the way people do when the morning streetcar is running late, it’s winter and a work day.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to write in a demeaning way. Jews have words, slang that even you use.
“It’s not the same and you know it.”
This is what I sent him:
Coming
Do it baby he says, do it shugga do it baby sweet theng, do it for me now. oh, I say, oh oh baby―wearing my Australian boots, tight jeans no panties cropped black t-shirt while he stands in the doorway, his arms crossed, watching me lifting my ass, sliding jeans down, black shirt up not off, tits, lower legs bound by jeans, index and first finger poised, I place my heart in my clit for him—mouth open, arching back and neck, fingers back and forth, rounding over slow, sl o w, ss low, low over and over—is this what you want? yes, he answers, saying only yes and baby and shugga honey. you are honey and sweet with double s sounds and a long e; the sound of his voice so low it winds its way into my cunt, and somewhere deep in my heartcunt a tingling making me cry from my throat oh honey, come rising from cunt to belly, up throat into mouth and out to him, oo ahh oo shi-it, whoo oh shit baby babeee my legs wide, tight, tensing, flexed, breath a jagged mountain climb. baby honey love, again and again, wild for him the shape of my come his prick in me. and all he has to say is baby, shugga, sweet thang and I will lie at his feet all for coming and all for passion.”
“You know, if that’s how you write don’t send me anything. I expected more of you.”
“But Garth.”
“That’s it, Janice. You’ve disappointed me, but why should I expect you to different from the others.”
“Because I am,” I say and he hangs up.
Garth, Good-bye
It’s hard to say goodbye when my cunt lurches like one of those old standard shift and clutch contrivances and my heart just bottoms out. Tears heavy on my eyelids, folding into the corners of my mouth, I am remembering how we were in those first months, but life was like that and now this and none of that. “It’s just hard,” I type in font size four and a whimper. It is Christmas Day, I’m Jewish and still tangled in love.
Diary Excerpt, New Years 2005
Just before New Years, missing my large man, that four-hundred and twenty-some odd pounds one, the one with large hands and cock like a redwood. But tonight I’m going to dance, shine and twirl, swing and shimmy, my long hair tumbling down.
The bouncer at the door of the El Mo has a shaved head and if you look closely you can see stubble on the sides and in the back. He is tall and has narrow shoulders. They don’t make them like they used to from what I can see.
“ID please,” he says.
“Very sweet of you,” I say. “Do you know you made not only my day but my entire year and possibly a decade.” I piss words. It’s my way of pleasing myself and flirting.
“Your I.D. ma’am.”
Ma’am! I rummage inside my purse: receipts, scraps of writing, a leather change purse from my grandmother, handkerchief that belonged to my Aunt Bertha.
“Thank you.” His face is blank. He has already moved on.
I don’t know which door to enter.
The Om party is upstairs. A side door leads to the main floor stage. The stairway is open and unguarded. On the landing two smiling girls stand behind a laminated table loaded with pamphlets, and at the top landing, an old wooden table, and another girl, also smiling. I wish I had worn long earrings. I am disposed to wear jeans, blundstones or the equivalent, and a black V neck sleeveless jersey—my intention is to parade my pared down builder’s arms, delts, and a bit of tits. I wear eyeliner and mascara and glossy natural tinted lipstick. My dark brown hair hangs loosely to the middle of my back. I wash my hair at night and go to sleep without drying it so that even when I’m afraid it might look wild. Some have naturally wild hair that lasts and lasts. Mine is short-lived.
I meet a fat man at Second Cup. “FunMic,” author and teacher of politics. I had agreed to meet him outside the York Theatre on Eglinton Avenue. An obese casually well-dressed man limps across the street in my direction. His ankles are swollen and his knees ache, he says, his body cramping after his five-hour drive from Windsor.
I don’t mind at all, I tell him, but I have to leave, a daughter waiting at home.
“Show me what you’ve got baby, show me what you’ve got. Let me taste some honey, baby,” he says as I open the door of my used brown car with all its dents and scrapes. I can’t see over the hood and I’m always banging into posts and concrete blocks. I need to be high up to have a proper sense of perspective. Dead, perhaps. And please don’t hear and grant this wish born from wanting. All locked and wanting inside. I wonder whether men can recognize when a wild woman is crouched and ready to pounce? I was never good at plyometrics so I go through life on all fours, crazed with readiness and heat streaming from my swollen eyes. Maybe I’ll go hear music. Maybe a movie. Smoke up. Paint. Masturbate on the bathroom floor. Fuck. Which is the way to the wild side?
“I love this,” I say.
“I can see how you must have looked when you were an actress. It’s like you’re right there. Yes, absolutely. Doesn’t she, hon?” he turns to Lisa.
“Yeah, she really does,” Lisa says. “And she’s still beautiful.”
“You two are the best,” I say, "What memories!" Lisa thinks we're creating a portrait album and I do have a box of photos even after all the houses. But these ones, these are for my men.
The base of the white studio wall curves into the wood floor. A black velvet cloth covers the Polaroid camera propped on a silver industrial tripod. Lisa has wrapped my red silk kimono like a turban around my head and transformed my black stockings into elbow-length nylon sleeves. My muscles are for the most part not even in the pictures and I’m alright with that.
Around one in the morning, I drive Lisa home. It’s a freezing winter night and I don’t realize until I’m on the highway alone in my car that my cunt has actual weight to it. I’m an elitist when it comes to my cunt and I think there’s a uniqueness to the way I sense details and sequence. My cunt is a destination, what’s that expression? Something about Rome and all roads. Or—at the end of a narrow hallway, a room with pressure from the inside spreading out, and radiating from the hand-hewn warped wood door is a glow, not white, but yellow, cadmium yellow light like the background in a watercolor of mine, “My Heart is So Unruly Truly Part 1,” like that one or maybe “My Unruly Heart Part 2, AKA Slipping into the Sweet Wilds.” That’s it. A new scene for the drummer man. “What a fucking turn-on!” I’ll write, “Wow—it makes me want you— shit, you’re fine! Oh baby, sitting here at this early morning time, typing furiously and wishing to come for you, all quiet except for this shivering because there you are with your cock leading the way. And when you lean down to kiss me, I turn my neck causing you to kiss the side of, nape, and hollow beneath my throat, and I sigh ‘baby, baby, baby, you sure do that thang to me.”
I play them all, they just fall right into place. This one, this drummer one and the others, hard and heated from these words, words, words. “So I ask you please fuck me and you ram in and in and in. Out my window I see my come all spruced up and shining, hovering at the edges of this early morning moon. I straighten my legs, which honey is what I do, tighten and tense, you hold my hair the way I like and your finger is up my asshole, I’m fucking your finger and your cock and I can feel the come inching up the insides of my thighs, swinging into my cunt, spreading and branching out while the moon’s hanging full and bright. Sex is such a wonder, isn’t it? Oh baby, I am hot for you!”
Babies. They’re all fucking piss asses. Words turn them on and deliver how-to’s, so when they come into town and want some action, I don’t have to say anything and they know what to do. I don’t fuck them all. Sabina’s fine with one-nighters. When she needs some flesh, she’s on on the prowl. She needs a certain look—high ass, tall, dark skin, some mass although she doesn’t require a builder. Also she’ll make do with a flat ass. I’m not sure how sticky she is about height. Sabina says with one-nighters there’s no follow-up.
“It’s like there’s a protective bubble. They just have to shut up and fuck me—I’ll do the rest.”
“Not me,” I say. “I love music and words. Mostly music. Sometimes their words are so lame, ‘fuck me baby, you like this don’t you?’ and all that shit. Even the smart ones, and I only like smart ones, have lousy fucking dialog.”
Sabina says “not me, turn on music and I can’t concentrate. No music, no words—those are my rules. And don’t fall asleep in my bed.”
“I wish I could be like you,” I say. “Garth never played music and he’s not much for talking. But then I once had this guy and he was really smart, decent dialog too. I’d say ‘tell me again, honey.’ He thought I wanted a rewind, his words being so sexy, but the truth was I couldn’t hear him. I figured if I told him I’m going deaf like my mother and grandmother, would he please speak up, that would destroy the mood and his hard-on. And you know how it is when you ask someone to repeat something—they speak up alright, but they also slow down, like you’re some idiot. Garth does that. I have this trouble with surround sound, not that there’s any when he’s fucking. Maybe he just mumbles, like youlikeitdon’tyac’montellme.”
“You’ve always been particular,” Sabina says, “which is why I never understood some of your choices, like Garth and Abie.”
“Yeah, well, you know the book about smart women and their choices—anyhow back to the dialog bit, I was just remembering about fucking and not hearing—there’s this time I can’t hear Garth and I say ‘honey I’m really sorry but I can’t hear you’ and he says ‘YOU . . . REALLY . . . LIKE . . . SUCKING . . . MY . . . COCK . . . DON’T . . . YOU?’ like he’s talking to some dull, deaf two-year-old which makes him a pervert, doesn’t it? Anyhow I’m not sure Garth was such a bad choice. You don’t agree, I know, and there are parts of him that aren’t nice, but he told me from the start, ‘I’m a mean guy,’ he said. And I guess I liked that. I identified, being evil myself and all.”
“Deceitful, perhaps, but evil? Never.”
“I did stuff,” I say. “I grabbed at things because I had to stay alive and I’m impulsive. I grabbed at Garth. He was so big and I thought he’d protect me. And I can’t end it. I mean I guess I can. I could. If I had the money— but I don’t know, I really don’t.”
Maintaining the Family
I smoke up before breakfast and Caroline’s morning meds and check my emails. My men must love me, different from a collection, separate from ego. They hold me up the way a dancer balances his partner in the air, freeing her from earth’s common aches and heartbreaks, then placing her so gently back that she maintains her balance, just the tips of her toes touching the ground.
Mark has something for me: “Picture this—a bed, huge, one of those circular things, and there’s a man and a woman—actually, there’s a man and two women. Of course he really digs the one with the long dark hair, but she sort of gets off on the other woman and he’s cool with that.”
“I don’t know about this storyline, I mean, it’s just not my thing, sweetie.”
“She’s not really into the woman,” Mark assures me, “it’s her old man she digs, she’s doing this for him, you see, and that’s the cool thing.”
I tell him, “You straight men are all chauvinists to the core and I guess that’s just the nature of the beast, but I’ll see what I can do and it’s sure not going to be easy. Because I like to involved when I write and no way is my head going to get around this one. And what would you do about a female saying there’s two men and this broad, see, and—”
Garth would fucking never let me forget the scene. He’d laugh his flat ass off. And if I were to explain, “It was the drummer—remember you and I were talking about the book needing more variety? I mean there’s got to be a limit to ass-fucking and sucking-off scenes. So when the drummer thought—I just want you to know it sure as hell wasn’t easy writing that shit,” Garth would answer, “right, anything you say.” Then I’d remind him about the time he told me for one million he’d let anyone fuck him up the ass.
“One million—don’t you think your ass is worth at least ten?” I said. “What about half a million? Would you do it? You’re so fucking weird,” I say. “You like this conversation. I mean it makes you laugh. Look at you. I gotta tell Talon. Man oh man, he’s going flip. ‘Exposed,’ he’s gonna say, and if you ever tell Lisa about these conversations—”
Slipping, stoned almost all day long, writing in 3-D, lungs shot, smoking through my asshole. I write with an old wine glass of red or white beside me because the image appeals to me. This morning I woke up with the Garth’s semen coating my tongue. Only prissy women brush their teeth after swallowing a mouthful and some tight-laced shits brush and gargle before they even wade into a cock. And then there are those Women’s Workout members who shake their heads and purse their lips.
I used to admonish the religious ones about their lack of protein. A body requires protein to built muscle, I’d say, and muscle consumes fat. Gorges on it. I’d count up their daily protein intake.
“Thirty grams!” I’d shriek. “You can’t build muscle on thirty grams!”
“But I want definition ,” they’d say.
“Look, if you want definition, it’s quite simple. Build muscle and watch what goes in your mouth. You’re deficient,” I’d say, shaking my head. And then in a softer voice, “Look, if you don’t have more protein you won’t lose weight.” I sigh. “I know there’s children and meals and Shabbat is a lot of work. I know. So what I’m telling you is there’s an easier way.”
“There is?”
“Thirteen grams of the best quality protein.”
“Nu?”
“Simple. And everyone’s happy. Next time you suck off your husband, swallow. He’ll love it, you’ll lose weight. Twice a day, maybe three. Right there, let me see—thirty-nine grams. Never mind what he wants. Be selfish for a change!”
Ebonics
I want to share my writing with Garth. There’s not much that holds us together these days. We don’t work out together. I sob when he phones me. Sometimes I don’t answer the phone. “I tried to phone you, but no luck,” he says. “What’s luck got to do with it?” I say.
When I started writing the book, this one, I wanted to write about my online men. I thought I’d better screw the subject before the groupies line up. So I climbed on top and gave it my all, grinding, flinging my head back, my tits waving in the fuck. And while I’m naked and my words are spreading ‘em for a drummer, professor, and two ex-cons, it’s no big deal to add one more to the line-up.
“You sent me Ebonics! How long have you known me and you insult me this way?”
“I said how long have you known me?”
“What year is it?”
“2004.”
“So we met in 96—”
“Eight years. You’ve known me for eight years. And in all that time did I ever say anything about stereotyping, for example?”
“About Talon, yes. You didn’t want him to dance or listen to certain music. And you didn’t encourage him in sports. You wanted him to know about Matthew Gaines, Marcus Garvey, George Washington Carver, Lewis Latimer, Dr. Daniel—I forget that one, the heart surgery doctor, I know it, wait—”
“Williams. Dr. Daniel Hale Williams,” he says, sighing the way people do when the morning streetcar is running late, it’s winter and a work day.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to write in a demeaning way. Jews have words, slang that even you use.
“It’s not the same and you know it.”
This is what I sent him:
Coming
Do it baby he says, do it shugga do it baby sweet theng, do it for me now. oh, I say, oh oh baby―wearing my Australian boots, tight jeans no panties cropped black t-shirt while he stands in the doorway, his arms crossed, watching me lifting my ass, sliding jeans down, black shirt up not off, tits, lower legs bound by jeans, index and first finger poised, I place my heart in my clit for him—mouth open, arching back and neck, fingers back and forth, rounding over slow, sl o w, ss low, low over and over—is this what you want? yes, he answers, saying only yes and baby and shugga honey. you are honey and sweet with double s sounds and a long e; the sound of his voice so low it winds its way into my cunt, and somewhere deep in my heartcunt a tingling making me cry from my throat oh honey, come rising from cunt to belly, up throat into mouth and out to him, oo ahh oo shi-it, whoo oh shit baby babeee my legs wide, tight, tensing, flexed, breath a jagged mountain climb. baby honey love, again and again, wild for him the shape of my come his prick in me. and all he has to say is baby, shugga, sweet thang and I will lie at his feet all for coming and all for passion.”
“You know, if that’s how you write don’t send me anything. I expected more of you.”
“But Garth.”
“That’s it, Janice. You’ve disappointed me, but why should I expect you to different from the others.”
“Because I am,” I say and he hangs up.
Garth, Good-bye
It’s hard to say goodbye when my cunt lurches like one of those old standard shift and clutch contrivances and my heart just bottoms out. Tears heavy on my eyelids, folding into the corners of my mouth, I am remembering how we were in those first months, but life was like that and now this and none of that. “It’s just hard,” I type in font size four and a whimper. It is Christmas Day, I’m Jewish and still tangled in love.
Diary Excerpt, New Years 2005
Just before New Years, missing my large man, that four-hundred and twenty-some odd pounds one, the one with large hands and cock like a redwood. But tonight I’m going to dance, shine and twirl, swing and shimmy, my long hair tumbling down.
The bouncer at the door of the El Mo has a shaved head and if you look closely you can see stubble on the sides and in the back. He is tall and has narrow shoulders. They don’t make them like they used to from what I can see.
“ID please,” he says.
“Very sweet of you,” I say. “Do you know you made not only my day but my entire year and possibly a decade.” I piss words. It’s my way of pleasing myself and flirting.
“Your I.D. ma’am.”
Ma’am! I rummage inside my purse: receipts, scraps of writing, a leather change purse from my grandmother, handkerchief that belonged to my Aunt Bertha.
“Thank you.” His face is blank. He has already moved on.
I don’t know which door to enter.
The Om party is upstairs. A side door leads to the main floor stage. The stairway is open and unguarded. On the landing two smiling girls stand behind a laminated table loaded with pamphlets, and at the top landing, an old wooden table, and another girl, also smiling. I wish I had worn long earrings. I am disposed to wear jeans, blundstones or the equivalent, and a black V neck sleeveless jersey—my intention is to parade my pared down builder’s arms, delts, and a bit of tits. I wear eyeliner and mascara and glossy natural tinted lipstick. My dark brown hair hangs loosely to the middle of my back. I wash my hair at night and go to sleep without drying it so that even when I’m afraid it might look wild. Some have naturally wild hair that lasts and lasts. Mine is short-lived.
Kids are dancing, waving their arms up high, and wiggling their hips. I want to go home. Lisa arrives with her photographer boyfriend who takes pictures of us. I hug and kiss her various friends on both cheeks. I laugh. I dance with Lisa and ten minutes before mid-night, I’m outside breathing in the cold and watching it waltz in the winter air when I exhale.
Of course, I’m sad for myself. Garth doesn’t believe in New Years and his ponderous frame lacks animation. I come home, drink two glasses of red wine which I always find more potent than cheap white, lie on the floor to the right side of my bed, masturbate while I count how many seconds it takes to come once, twice, three times to make up for inferior quality, take an adavan to flatline my mind, and climb into bed. I’m trying to lead a mindful life, grateful for roof and bed and food, but I still hear banging and see the sheriff’s steel-toed shoe wedged in the door. I hate answering the phone. I’m afraid and that’s the fucking truth.
Which Is the Way to The Wild Side?
I meet a fat man at Second Cup. “FunMic,” author and teacher of politics. I had agreed to meet him outside the York Theatre on Eglinton Avenue. An obese casually well-dressed man limps across the street in my direction. His ankles are swollen and his knees ache, he says, his body cramping after his five-hour drive from Windsor.
At Second Cup, FunMic talks of politics in South Africa and the cable television show he hosts, periodically lowering his rimless glasses to make eye contact, touching my hand, and stroking my forearm. The contrast of our skin tones pleases me. He caresses my upper arm. “Hey you nice man, easy easy,” I say. He talks about the various women he’s met. Nice women. Even without romance, he sends truckloads of roses on their birthdays, he’s just that type of man, a romantic he doesn’t mind admitting, yes, that rare breed of man.
“But you do it for me, I hope you don’t mind me saying. I’m attracted to you, I find you alluring.”I don’t mind at all, I tell him, but I have to leave, a daughter waiting at home.
“Show me what you’ve got baby, show me what you’ve got. Let me taste some honey, baby,” he says as I open the door of my used brown car with all its dents and scrapes. I can’t see over the hood and I’m always banging into posts and concrete blocks. I need to be high up to have a proper sense of perspective. Dead, perhaps. And please don’t hear and grant this wish born from wanting. All locked and wanting inside. I wonder whether men can recognize when a wild woman is crouched and ready to pounce? I was never good at plyometrics so I go through life on all fours, crazed with readiness and heat streaming from my swollen eyes. Maybe I’ll go hear music. Maybe a movie. Smoke up. Paint. Masturbate on the bathroom floor. Fuck. Which is the way to the wild side?
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