French Tips or Busting My Balls (edit 1, erotic memoir)

Busting My Balls

“What I can’t understand is why you’re showcasing those people,” Harriet says, her French tips lounging on the escalator railing, “when you could be giving all this energy to your own.” I’m busting my balls, working my builder’s ass off twelve hours a day to pay musicians who dig my giving back to the arts and the whole RANG mentorship system while charging full scale SOCA rates. And although he left me one million, I don’t have my grandfather’s cash, my father wanting to put all the capital together, Julian’s, Susan’s, and mine. Abie brought Judge Gold’s son Mark over to advise me. “You’ll never see it again,” he said, but I worried about my father’s love and inheritance since he was still moderately thirty-million dollars’ rich, so I returned that million dollar cheque to my parent who, one year later, was scammed by the same guy who ripped off the Steinbergs which almost gave honor to my father’s reduced state, except the Steinbergs remained rich and my father used his capital to mortgage his award-winning twin Highland Beach condos. Still I had my builder’s mass and a steady gig training females in their LuLu Lemons. I just wanted to show a little love, you know, hold close and slow dance cheek to cheek, cock to cunt. And so I set up my gentle non-profit with its mentorship system for young up-and-comings, telling my story to NOW, EYE, Whole Note, Maple Blues, CIUT, CKLN, the Barker man at 91.1 Jazz FM, branding cards, postcards, posters, the works, ten thousand dollars worth of free advertising, a spot on 680 AM, press releases. I let it all hang out—all the houses, Caroline, my two solo art shows, the ex, my long days at the gym. This was the story I was full speed running with. There was a long distance runner at Number One Nautilus, such a skinny beetle—marathons and music festivals never intrigued me.  But once I started running, I was in the race and for the sake of promotion,  I spread my story out to musicians, clubs, sponsors—like selling cars, the story the same but always fresh. Maybe a new twist or detail—the sheriff at the door this time, Caroline’s body a twisted tree in emergency the next, and always music like a eiderdown quilt or an angel. I never said I wouldn’t have preferred cash. 

“So what are you getting out of it? What’s in it for you? And I mean profit.”
 “I don’t think there’s going to be a profit.”
 “So you’ll break even.”
 “I don’t think so. I did. I thought I’d at least get my investment back. I’m so tired, Garth, I don’t know. I mean, what the hell was I thinking!”
 “You’re asking the wrong person.”
 “Yeah. I work all these hours and then I do all the producing stuff and you have no idea how crazy it is behind the scenes, all this technical shit, the sound man and getting musicians there for a sound check, and tickets and TicketMaster, and Charles Mack won’t let the opening act from Montreal use his drum kit—oh, and then there’s food for the musicians and do you know how much all that’s going to cost? Five hundred dollars, that’s how much and the musician who said what a great thing I was doing and he’d lower his rates, well, fuck him, he wants one thousand for forty-five minutes and Levitasyon, that Zouk group, guess how much!”
 “I haven’t got a clue.”
 “Two thousand.”
 “You’re kidding!”

“Nope. So I called Charles Mack who’s driving all the way here from Detroit and I told him, I got to cancel. How am I going to come up with all this cash? And he gives me this bit about the show must go on because that’s what his Daddy used to say.”

“So what are you going to do? If you cancel will you get your deposits back?”

“Nope. But that’s still a hell of a lot easier than coming up with twelve thousand more dollars. I’m so tired. And my back is hurting me, my lower back and you know that shooting groin pain? I can’t walk. How will I coach when I can’t even walk?”

“What does Pariser say?”

“She says I have to go for physio, she says it’s my lower back. You think it’s my piraformis?"

“You need to see a specialist.”

“See, I asked her and she said it’s your lower back and then she sighed. I can’t afford physio. And the other day, at the gym, I had to sit down. Well you know I never sit down, so along comes Karen and she says it doesn’t look good if I’m sitting down and what if someone tours the club and sees me? And Greenspan, I don’t think he listens to me, and I have this fear when he cracks my neck. ”

“He’s good. But it’s true he doesn’t listen. Hubris.”

“What?”

“He’s thinks he knows it all. But it would help to listen to the patient, especially when the patient is a trainer.”

“Last time he stretched my right leg to the side and it felt like my tendon was being ripped. He said it’s tight. But what I’m afraid of is how I’m going to work. How can I work with those women? I pick out their weights, I bring the weights back, then I pick out other weights. And I count. Remember when I broke my finger at Strictly and the shit Barbara, the one with the art dealer husband who liked my work but I couldn’t make it to one of his artist’s openings—I was having that skin thing done under my eyes the next morning—so there I am with my finger in a cast and she’s sitting, blabbing, and rolling her eyes, waiting for me to pick up her weights, and I’m limping like a parakeet because I couldn’t walk or pick up weights because of my broken finger.”

“Why a parakeet?”

“Well, when I was seven, my—” 

“Your point?”

“And my point is what’ll I do? You’re telling me to lie on the floor for two hours which I don’t have and Greenspan is telling me it’s my back and tight muscles and referred pain, and Pariser is telling me I have to go to physio when she knows I can’t, I mean, she knows.” 

“Maybe you have to find something new.”

“Yeah. Right. Remember I asked you when we met, how will I take care of myself? I mean how? And who’s going to help me? I’m going to talk to my mother. I’m going to tell her I have to cut back, I have to stay with Caroline and it’s true you know. I’m scared. I hate being scared. I spent so much time being scared and then I met you, and you’re not here anymore. So what’ll I do?”

“You’re the one who told me to leave. I didn’t walk out.”

“ And you’re the one who was telling me he was going to leave for how many years?”

“But you know me better than that. The fact is I didn’t. Until you insisted.”

“I’m not going to do this. You’re not going to do this to me.”

“Let me guess, you don’t want to talk about it now. So when will be a good time? Later? When later? Give me a time.”

“I can’t give you a time, I can’t. I phoned because my body won’t even let me walk and I need to work to support me and Caroline and Lisa. You’re never going to pay me back. I know that. You said you were keeping track of every penny. That’s not true. How much do you owe me? Do you even know?”

“It always goes back to money with you, doesn’t it?”

“And with you? It doesn’t with you?”

My grandfather gave me maroon bank shaped like a book without a key, the idea being to fill the book with coins and set up an account at the Bank of Montreal, Van Horne and Davaar branch. I filled up the book bank and broke into it. A few years later I stole eighty dollars from my grandmother. Green turns me on. Garth talks about his plans for grand wealth and we’re back in our beginning, my index finger tracing the breadth of his forehead down his fine profile “do you know your nose has the slightest bump in it?” I say each time, and each time he says “yes, broke it in a fight when I was ten.” It’s part of our love dialog, just as money is. “One million is nothing,” I say, “Ten is like one used to be, and what’s ten anyhow?” I like when he thinks big. 

     

What Have I Got To Do?

It’s a grand morning. I’m inspired which always makes me happy and horny. I’m thinking history and intimacy are of greater value than passion and decide to part with existing online men and the minor fucks pending. Life and love are becoming too complicated, although there is something about my men and how they make me feel―like I’m eighteen again and love is all new. Only better, because finally at age fifty-six, I have learned how to exult. But then in the most fundamental way, I love Garth, even as I wait for his next breaking up summons.  Because he lives in me. And he’s family.

I eat a leg of chicken Garth cooked in the “Total Oven” I had regifted him with. “But you regifted me,” he reminded me when I had complained about his inattention to holidays including my birthday, using my ambling tone even with my sad urge for a briskness.  

“How quickly they forget,” I said. “There were cards and Chapter’s coupons.”

“Coupons,” he said. 

“I wanted to give you books. Remember that bible I bought you. I looked at all these bibles for over an hour. St. James, the English Standard Bible, the New American Standard, the New Revised Standard, the one with my father’s name, the Phillip’s Modern English Bible, even the Daily Bible in Chronological Order. You were disappointed because I gave you the wrong bible, you said I hadn’t been paying attention all those years. I’m Jewish for fuck’s sake. So now I give you coupons. Sometimes I go to five stores for just the right card.”

“They’re meaningless.”

“And it’s meaningful that you give me nothing, no fucking cards, no presents.” My voice strains and cracks when I get upset, my words like abused dogs.

“See what I mean, I can’t even have conversation with you.”

Garth is working on his red and green trading graphs. He keys clients’ numbers with the pads of his fingers. I learned to play piano en pointe. I couldn’t play by ear, skipping out a tune, my fingers demi-pointe just knowing the way home, the way Garth keys words and numbers and lives his life. I sit with my legs pulled up beneath me on his beige leather sofa purchased from the Brick on credit and watch him. “Look, if you’d have gone short when I told you, pulled out instead of getting greedy, you wouldn’t be down. I told you what to do, you chose not to listen,” he’s saying, as he approaches and places his prick in my mouth, although I’ve just had my lower and upper lips enlarged for one thousand dollars, the freezing still intact and bruising setting in. Sucking Garth off plumps up my lips. I like the look which is why I went and had them enlarged.

He thinks I am satisfied. Or maybe he figures it’s not his place to say anything.  He’s odd that way, like a cactus in the middle of an English garden. Anyhow, I’m more process than product-oriented and I like those solo coming times on the carpet beside what used to be his side of the bed or on the tiled bathroom floor. Still, when I pray, which comes and goes with the weather, I’m sure to slip in, “Please God, let me come while he fucks me. And if you could and I’m thanking you n advance, could it be with me underneath and his finger up my ass?” I’d be pumping away, moving my hips and cunt around and Garth would say, “Move your ass baby, that’s it.” But his belly is a mountain which I loved when I met him and still do. I might need some of God’s help on that one too. He’s larger than life, Garth is, and I can’t leave him. I’ve grown “attached” which was the word Garth used for his feelings about me when I requested five positive adjectives relating to what he likes about me. “Attached” was what he said, pissing me off at the top of moderate.

I email and discard two local men. Mark is back on BlackPeopleGreet with a new profile. “How can I your JCT when you’re on the computer prowl again?” I say my voice light as sideways glance. “Hey baby, don’t do this. I’m just connecting with old buddies,” he says, so I renew my membership. I hide my profile, delete it, and return online, although I click “view as offline.” “Why are you after geographically unavailable men?” Lisa asks when I tell her about the good ones, from LA, Washington, Atlanta, New York, North Carolina, Texas. I prefer words to tin can voices.  A man from out west whines. Another sounds drugged or bored. Written words thrill. They wake me up in the morning and warm me at night. I adore life and myself. I’m an ancient, weary soul with my eyelids half-closed, unable to move my limbs and taste life. It isn’t Garth. One artist needs the understanding of another. But oh, this Washington man sounds fine, still Lenny — I would do anything for a man who could fuck my heart.

Louis is a Vietnam vet. I found him on BlackPeopleMeet. He’s from Mississippi and he has no intention of moving up here. He’s a country man all the way, he says. And then he’s going on about long-haired hippies slamming their placards on sides of the bus when he came back home and  I say, “hey man, I just happened to be one of those hippies” and he tells me he damn well near killed one of them which was why he moved to the country. I ask him questions and scribble down his dialog, flipping pages, writing on a pocket-sized lined yellow pad.  Now he lives with this giant cactus, maybe the biggest on record, the only black man in Lincoln. He can talk gently to me alright, but he can also murder and maim which is why he’s out there in the country. But sometimes the woods aren’t deep enough and the only place that can hold him is China. I know he’s too much like Garth. Harsh as a hundred-year old tree. But the next moment speaking to me with such gentleness, I cry. And when he says he’s starting up two businesses, something about archiving medical histories and broadband in the off-country, my cunt sparkles with those Canada Day sizzlers.  Abie, Garth, Louis—wild men panning for gold. Some say I’m nice and I guess I am, but inside there’s a feral part and when I smell that in a man, I sidle right up, I’m on his track. 

Louis has various ailments as a result of the war. He’d fade out, totally paralyzed, for one minute. “Never know when it’s gonna happen. They put me in this damn hospital, cause I was claiming for benefits, see, so they put me under observation. Well I had one of these fits you know, and this fucking cunt of a nurse kept jabbing her pen into my hand, hurt like hell and she asks me, ‘Do you feel this?’ Askin’ me if I feel this! And she’s plunging and plunging this pen tip straight into my damn hand!  Fuck! ‘What do you think, you fucking cow?’ Treatin me worsn an animal! Shit! ‘Do you feel this?!’ Fuckin ram it up her ass and see what she says!” The war scooped out most of his gut and his hip got shot off. He’s like an old gun slinger, tossing on his prosthetic hip when he goes into town. I talk to him about My Lai because I’d just heard a show on CIUT FM saying it was the whites committing atrocities. 

“Whites!” he shouts. “Listen, I got no fondness for bigots, but here’s the fuckin’ truth, and that’s where the media comes in, stickin’ their noses in where it don’t belong!” he says, shooting out each word like a machine pistol. “Makin’ things worse, makin’ trouble, more killings. What happened was twenty was killed, and those women and children . . .”

“What about those women and children, for god’s sake!”

“Well ya see, you up there in Toronto, the Reds put these grenades round these kids’ necks and then they tell ‘em, ‘Go up and ask for a chocolate,’ or ‘Give the American a chocolate.’ And I don’t care who the fuck, or how old the fuck, who’s comin at me with chocolates and a grenade round his neck, gonna blow me up―I learned how to stay alive that day and what the fuck does the press know about that!”

Louis says he licks pussy bettern’ any dyke and some of them’s damn good at what they do. I don’t understand these one-dimensional men. Technique will get you to first base, but it doesn’t come close to passion and heart. Maybe Louis will stalk the country side and poach all its cash. I need saving and that’s the simple truth. Truth is a strange bird; its plumage changes according to season so it’s almost unrecognizable. Also it’s known to be quite elusive.

“Do you know that Mao couldn’t read or write?”  I listen to this man, Louis, and I wonder if he’s crazy or misguided, or both. “But the Red Book!” “Ghost written,” he says. 

He tells me to buy a web cam so he can see my eyes. “The eyes are mirrors to the soul,” he says which he knows because he’s half Cherokee, his mother having been full blooded. He says his momma always told him,” Ain’t no one bettern’ you, no one.” All his life he could hear her say that and it stuck. His son used to say he was half white, hung himself from a willow tree over it. In a quiet way I care for Louis. We make plans. He comes up to Toronto. The phone rings once, twice, six times. I don’t answer. He emails. He says God may forgive, but he no way he can. I wish I’d have seen him, so I phone and leave messages until he says he forgives me, him and God, both. He calls me “my love” when he says good-bye. I say “sweetie” since I don’t want to hurt his feelings. He’s been through enough. It’s the same with Garth. Scary men intrigue me. 

Garth

Garth knows my father is dying. “Take the train in,” he says. “He doesn’t have long now.” Lisa stays in the condo with Caroline. Abie says he’d drop by to relieve her. I know we’ll get maybe one hour out of him and that’s alright. Otherwise I’ll come back to trees uprooted, limbs blocking entranceways, books thrown off their shelves, scattered. 

Demanding two servings of eggplant lasagna, three Little House on the Prairie reruns, and the remote, Caroline wields her mental illness like a battle sword. Lisa enters the field with a forced smile, while I, on this train ride to my father at his dying time, scan scenery and take photos. 

My mother stands by my father’s bedside in the Montreal General. She’s holding a spoon with red jello. “Why are you doing that?” my sister says. She has a tan and pearls and her tough skin is covered with wrinkles. “Maybe he’ll eat,” my mother says, holding the spoon to my father’s mouth. “If it makes you feel better. But I’m telling you, he’s not going to eat,” my sister says in her smoker’s voice. I look at my mother. Better not to say anything. I move forward and put my arm around her.. My arm spans her back and down her shoulder. She’s lost weight. 

“Daddy,” I say. “Daddy.” He lies propped up on two pillows. There are clear and opaque tubes. I see the attachment points on his wrist and in the crook of his arm and I understand. Because of Caroline. “I love you, Daddy,” I say. He doesn’t blink. “Daddy,” I say. “Caroline and Lisa are fine. They love you. I love you. So much, Dad. Do you know I sold a painting? A huge canvas.  It’s commissioned work and maybe they’ll want another. I did a portrait of you. Your hair is fluorescent green and you’re wearing a royal blue bathrobe, but it’s you alright. And you have a twinkle in your left eye.”

 “He won’t talk to me, not to anyone,” my mother says. 

I put my hand on his and gently press. “I love you,” he says. 

Later he calls out “Swine, swine.” Also, “Take me home.” “He needs more morphine,” my sister says. 

On my train ride back to Toronto, my eyes feed on scenery and latch onto its tail end as it passes. 

I phone Garth from Union Station. “He’s dying and I left him.”

“It’s your last chance. Go back,” Garth says. He knows about these things. He has a gift. Because he was abused, maybe.

I don’t want to write about my father dying. He was a powerful man who became reduced. He wore diapers. My mother took care of him until he started soiling himself and then PeeWay came in. PeeWay loved him. When my father died, my sister told Peeay not to come to the funeral. “You better stay here. They read the obits and break in.” PeeWay just looked straight ahead, her brown eyes dark and mournful. As my sister was leaving, she called out, “You might as well come along, we’ll alert security, so you come on now.” 

My mother didn’t know how she could manage the reception after the funeral. “You have to be present for your visitors. You’re the hostess,” my sister said. 

“I don’t know if I can,” my mother said, her eyes darting the way they always did when she was depressed.

“You will,” my sister said.

I wrote my father’s obituary in five minutes. “Write about his love for music,” my brother said. “His storytelling,” my sister, Susan, said. “Oh, and he took care of his shoes.”  She was walking on two canes at the funeral. She’d had one hip replaced and then the other and she wasn’t healing well. But then her idea of exercise was isle shopping at Steinberg’s in Cote St. Luc mall. For my referred pain points on my right side, I had one wood crutch Abie had used when his back gave out in the Bluffwood Drive house. It’s odd, some of the items that have stayed with me.  My sister had insisted on unpainted pine for the casket. “He would have wanted it that way. Do you remember those ten blocks he walked so he could save twenty-five cents on a lousy ball-point? In the middle of winter?” she’d said. “It was the principle.” I said. “And what about the green Cadillac convertible and the pink jeep with the candy-striped canopy at Los Brisas?” Even though I had to steady my hands on Paperman’s lectern, reading my speech pleased me. It was like being on stage again, slipping into my father as he dragged out the first syllable of my mother’s name, “Flooorence! Flooorence!”  He spent his final years falling asleep at the TV and calling for her. She’d click her tongue, “Coming Phil. I’m coming, I’m coming.” Sometimes she’d take her time, so he’d call out again. “Just a minute, just a minute,” she’d say. He said she was his angel, in those years. She always was although I’m not sure he knew it. 

So there I was intoning with just the right degree of expression, not overacting, in the swing as my rowing crew would have said, with my sister swaying her clasping hands, oi va voy, from side to side, like Baba used to.  The tips of Julian’s ear’s were red, his office hair parted neatly on the side. I don’t know if I cried. That came three months later, racking howls, great forces of nature. 

The night I returned from my father’s funeral, Garth invited me over to his basement apartment. I called him from my car. “I’m two blocks away,” I said. He liked to unlock the door ahead of time so if he were in the middle of something, he wouldn’t have to interrupt himself by letting me in. Usually when I came over he’d be working on his computer or watching his favorite TV show or cooking on his electric wok or attending to his Total Oven.

 Garth sat like a Sphinx on his beige leather sofa. “Janice,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Sit down.”

“I think I’ll stand.”

“I think you might want to sit.”

“That’s alright. Maybe it’s better for me to stand,” I said, eyeing the open bedroom door. 

“Up to you. You may recall our conversation while you were in Montreal. This is where you answer.”

“I don’t know, I was distraught, I was in the kitchen, with my mother and Susan was there. I wasn’t focusing.”

“Yes. I know.”

“You were cleaning up your life.”

“So you do remember. Cleaning up my life. Whatever it takes. I looked at my life while you were in Montreal. You’re holding me back.”

 “You’re telling me this now? My father just died, for fuck’s sake and you call me over to tell me this? What kind of a man are you? I mean couldn’t you wait? Maybe a week? I just got back. He’s dead. My father is dead, and you—I don’t believe you.” 

“Find a therapist,” he said. “I’m going places. I want a simple life. Mental illness just doesn’t fit in.” 

“But Caroline doesn’t live with you.”

“Like I said, I’m cleaning up my life.”

A week later, as I was about to walk into our mutual gym, he emerged from his silver Acura. 

“I’m warning you,” he said, “you bust into my training session and I’m erasing your name from my cell.”

“So you’re training that dirt bag, Sharon. You’re just a gym gigolo, you know that? She can’t even do a fucking squat and she has a back like a set of train tracks. ” 

“It won’t be the first time I’ve erased people from my life. I cut out my own mother and sisters. You’re the next in line.”

“But Garth.” 

“Recall one small detail—who signed your lease? You come in and I swear I’ll get you and crazy daughter evicted.” Garth doesn’t raise his voice. You have to look closely to observe any shift in his features. 

“No, no, please don’t do that.” I cried, inhaling air like a junkie.

“Take my advice, then. Get in your car and drive away.”    

“You fucking evil asshole!” I gunned the accelerator of my second hand Grand Prix, its tires screeching. For emphasis, I drove around in two more wild circles before exiting.

I shall never forgive him. 

Still, it’s important to know that Garth is a man with a vision, that he will be phenomenally rich and that there are always two sides to these “he said, she said” stories. I could play him. I could walk free and clear and unafraid of the sheriff’s loud knocking at my door. But I am writing this book, which he will read and never will he understand that each time he said he was leaving, I died. I drooped closer and closer to the ground. I wilted. And each time the only thought that could pick me up was there was an online man to slow dance with and love me. I would have killed myself otherwise. Garth stole my heart one night at Strictly Fitness and  almost hammered it to death. Through passion I am hoping to reclaim it.