WordSlut

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.

Edit 2 with some new shit - literary erotica

“Gross,” Talon’s laughing so hard, he’s clutching his ribs.
“What’s he laughing at?” I say.

“Just a video. Have a look,” Garth says, his one seeing eye taking in my builder’s dark-grey-with-diagonal-black-lines spandex I wear to show off my quads and hams.

“Can’t,” I say, “Going to Strictly to train Barbara.” I coach three women at Strictly now—an Italian with straight jet black hair from World’s Gym who’s fed up with fitness-style instructors and wants to try hardcore, although hardcore core isn’t something you try like sampling a new dish, you move to the country, damn it, and you live like they live, eat what they eat; Alla, who bares her tanned midriff in a new outfit with that stylized “U” symbol on it every time she trains and worries because she doesn’t get off on her husband anymore although he’s a handsome Moroccan Jew and makes a pile of cash in his import/export business; and Gloria, a fashionably skinny, past or in her prime however you look at it, ex-hippie who’s made her fortune in the body bag business and setting up high-class abortion clinics in the Caribbean for women from South American countries, who find themselves in the family way as my Bobi would say.

“Just one look, it’ll take one second,” Garth says while Talon echoes and I can’t refuse, we’re still in our beginnings.

“So? I don’t see anything . . . What the hell is that!” I say as I stare at a puckered-up out of focus hole. Talon and Garth are out of control laughing and slapping their thighs.

“Wait,” Garth manages.

                 I shift from one foot to another, and then the focus becomes sharper and what I’m watching as Talon absolutely loses it and Garth does too, alongside, and he never loses it, is the rear of a woman bending over and her ass hole all puckered up and opening wider and wider until it’s the size of a melon, not a piddle of a melon, but a ripe, full-size grown one.

“Disgusting,” Talon’s yelling and skipping around.

“You two are crazy out of your minds,” I say. “And you . . .” I shake my head at Garth, but I’m grinning.

“No way is he going to be like his mom now,” Garth says.

            “Garth!  In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”

            “But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”

            “I know the route, Janice.”

            “Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”

            “You won’t have much to pack this time.”

            So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.

            “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”   

            “Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?

 In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards  of variable denominations in variety stores and supermarkets—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals just love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet.  It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I, a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK—at the Expo 67 fairgrounds Abie pulled me over to the Spider. “I hate rides.” I said. “C’mon. You’ll like it, you’ll see. C’mon. Trust me.” “I hate it. I hate.” I yelled from the moment we started spinning. Abie’s airplane glasses flew off.  “Hold onto the bar. It’s out of control!” he screamed, pressing me into the seat with his left arm. Looking back, deals had their seasons as predictable as the Ferris Wheel, but it living through them was like riding on the Spider, sure enough.

 

            And now Garth is working on a deal. He says it’s not a bank trading program like the one Abie was involved in, the one he lost two point five million in although he insists it was bad luck, the money being placed into an American account whose holder keeled and slam-bam kicked the bucket one spring day, the wife and step-son moving in and staking their claim. Garth says his deal is different—it’s a fund he explains, investors go in, the fund grows, and after a specified time, investors get their outlay back plus a pre-set portion of the interest. Simple and legit. Garth puts an ad in the Globe and Mail. Some guy from Sudbury has one hundred thousand, a widow from Toronto has only fifty and will that be sufficient she asks. Garth gets faxes. Contracts have to be rewritten; the wording in one clause is not acceptable to the British lawyer. The British lawyer is satisfied but the American attorney is not. “Garth,” I say my voice like sugar and sex, “are you sure this is not a bank trading scam? They’re cracking down you know. I don’t want to sound negative.” “Then don’t,” he says. “Why say ‘I don’t mean to’ and then go ahead?” I don’t know the lingo, but I hear the calls and read the contracts. And then I hear about delays, new signatures needed, clauses requiring alteration, and I know. I know the way I feel Garth’s cock slamming the back of my cunt when I lie under him, my legs cradling his neck, same as I lie on him and kiss his lips that are so miraculously smooth and soft and the way I know the span of his forehead. I just know. And I can’t tell him.
            Garth doesn’t have a job. We didn’t talk much about how he was going to make money when we started fucking. I knew about his neighbor in Guelph who sold stocks and bonds and moved to Florida to start a hedge fund. And that he planned to make his million before he was thirty. It’s his destiny, he says. He figures if he works smart, he could get by working four hours a day at first leading up to maybe two hours one day a week; he says when he was a bouncer those nine to fivers would head on down to their local bars every weekend and blow their paycheck. Dirt bags wear shirts with white and blue collars, at the bar you can’t tell them apart.  “Reminds me of Clearwater—you know that old quarry for nudists on the way to Freelton. Steel workers and university professors, you can’t tell one cock from the other.” I know I’m losing him, Garth being one of those linear types. I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations—I think like a drunken choreographer, which she appreciates. Maybe my style is impacted by my backlog of filed thoughts. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition. So I quickly slide in with “the thing is Garth, sometimes you have to work for what you want” even though I know the door on his face is going to slam shut and I’ll be left huddling in the cold without him.    
            Garth says people are afraid of being alone. He says you come into this world alone and you die the same way, so you better get used to it. “But you get angry when I visit Caroline every day.” I say. He says he didn’t visit Talon as much as I visit Caroline, even when he was a baby. “She’s sick,” I say. “And if you could have seen Talon every day, wouldn’t you have? And if I could have Caroline here—why isn’t she here? Tell me why she isn’t here with me!” On Nina Street Garth would talk me upright and back into the ring whenever grief delivered a packed ab punch.  Now he just watches from the sidelines.

            The old widow and the Sudbury man are threatening to sue. Garth isn’t afraid. He says he’ll get off with paying seventy-five dollars a month; he just has to show the courts he’s on a repayment schedule. His forehead remains as smooth as ever. If someone wants to gamble one-hundred thousand that’s not his business. He feels sorry for the old widow. I can’t remember how Garth got to keep one hundred thousand. I’m like the old man in Moonstruck in the closing kitchen scene when Cher and Nicholas Cage are sitting around the breakfast table and Cher’s fiancé returns from visiting his Mama in Italy: “I’m so confused,” the old man says.
            So Garth hops on a plane to Orlando and hands this American scammer named Jim Steel one hundred K cash. “What? You did what!” I said when Garth phoned. “Well, he had a suitcase with a live one hundred thousand.” “It was fake, Garth. Who carries around that kind of money and shows it to a stranger? The man’s a southern cracker for fuck’s sake. What’s he doing showing this huge black man cash?” Turns out Garth spoke maybe five or six times to an agent named Jack Tabac, and Jack passed on information about an owner of a thriving import-export company who was wanting to retire. For one hundred K, Jim would teach him the ropes and then move into the background, leaving Garth to manage the day to day.  Of course Mr. Steel skipped town. Garth left messages about personally hunting him down and calling out the FBI hounds, which Jim picked up, subsequently setting up a meeting with Garth in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side where, coming face to face with Garth’s hulking angry frame, he thrust out eight of the one hundred thousand and promptly disappeared. I never said “what were you thinking?” to Garth who had gotten such a laugh about Abie forking over that two point five million and his dog loyalty to shady deals. And now here is Garth pointing his finger at fat people, gullible investors, and charlatans.

             I’m in the kitchen cooking on a gas stove. There’s something sexy about gas stoves, something gesmucked. More than delicious, gesmucked has to do with smells that get the mouth watering, the eagerness of piercing food and holding it in place, the arc of fork to mouth, the satisfying roll of food in the mouth, and discovery of flavors. It has to do with texture. I’m thinking about geshmuked which I learned from Abie and how it’s one of those fulfilling all-purpose words and how it’s a zen word sweeping you into the moment, when I hear a syncopated long-distance ring. My father asks me about the girls. I tell him I miss Caroline. He asks about Lisa. I tell him she’s living in the east part of Toronto, she has roommates, she’s working in a call centre and she answers the phone in English and French. She’s had another poem published. Then I tell him I’m working on a new canvas. He asks where I paint and I say in the kitchen. I search for another topic. “I want to get married, Dad,” I say looking at my canvas­­—a female without eyes, a red open mouth, naked breasts nipples generous and rouged, a vertical crocodile in place of a  skirt and a butterfly wing as a wedding veil. To the left side, an old-fashioned face, a cherub with an ancient knowing visage. “I want to marry Garth,” I say. And my own father says something about Cultural Differences. “What do you mean, cultural differences?” I say. “There were cultural differences with Abie. Garth was born here. What do you mean?”  He repeats. “Cultural differences, that’s what.” And then he pulls out his sharp shooter and lays it on the table. “If that’s the action you take, I’ll have to rethink my will.” I stand quite still in this kitchen with its old gas stove and grey linoleum. My eyes dart through the diner-like opening in the wall with Garth and Talon head-butting on the other side. I’m the short-order cook. “Enemies in thy midst,” is all Garth says and walks away. I phone my father. “I can’t take your calls, anymore,” I say. “I can’t believe you told him. How could you misconstrue my words like that? That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant. How have we raised you?” “‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ Dad,” I say.
            I’m an instigator.

 

 

 

 

Melons and Cockroaches - edit 2 (literary erotica)

Fall 1996                                      Overbrooke           

 

There are those restless sleeps when you search out a groove to slide into and you settle into one, but that’s not it, so you rummage around for another—we’re moving again. This time to Overbrooke just three blocks from Strictly Fitness. We looked at so many places, Garth and I. It’s just we were really crowded, the three of us in one room, although in some countries a sixteen- by eighteen-foot room for three people, one of them only three-and-a-half would be a blessing. And even though Garth isn’t the noisiest lover, it’s kind of tough to fuck with a kid in the room. Garth’s lips are soft and deep and I know his heart is in his kisses, but he’s so quiet you wouldn’t even know he’s in the room. I listen for his hands on my skin. He shudders when he comes.

One place we checked out was smack over a pizza joint, but it was stark white gleaming with brand-new appliances and a Laundromat just downstairs. “Why don’t you drop by now, dear?” the agent said. “You sound just like the type of couple we’re looking for.” The agent was tanned a rich sepia brown any artist would admire, her lips, finger and toe-nails jumping out ruby red.

“It was just taken,” she said, opening the door just a crack.

“But five minutes ago, we were just around the corner, actually, and you said—”

            “Sorry, but someone came by with a deposit.”
            “In five minutes, someone came by in five minutes?”

Garth: “Janice, Janice it’s OK.”

            “No, no it’s not. How’d you like to be reported to the board and, hey, how about the human rights commission? I happen to know a contributor to Toronto Life—she’d pounce on this. Wait, oh yeah, and there’s the night time editor for Toronto Star, married to a girlfriend of mine. I think you chose to mess around with the wrong people this time. You’re Jewish, right? That’s what gets me.”

“How do you know I’m Jewish?”

“Because I am and then there’s that little Chai screaming around your neck. You should be ashamed, you know, didn’t Hitler teach you anything?”

“Did you see how she looked at us,” I said. “How would you describe it that look?”

“It’s that oh-I didn’t-know-you-weren’t-white look.”

“Which is, what is it? Really. Tell me.”

“You ask too many questions, you know that? It’s when the face takes on a confused look. And then it goes back to normal, whatever normal was for that person.”

“But what do you mean by confused? What happens to the features? You answer in such generalities.”

“I answer.”

“So tell me then.”

“It’s generally a sharp breath, a look of surprise, a few quick blinks, and then a quick regaining of composure. It’s very quick.”

“That’s what I want. That’s it. Thank you.

“You’re welcome.”

“I love you, you know that?” I rub his hair. I love the feel of his hair, it’s not just that it’s soft; it’s that you can get your fingers into and roll around in it, his hair has this sweetness like a whispered kiss. I love him, even when I know it doesn’t make sense.

         The Overbrooke flat is on the third floor. The old landlord and his wife live on the second. Garth says there’s a carbon monoxide leak in the building and we should inform the basement tenant next to the boiler room. “I thought you don’t care about people—if you had your way, anyone crossing your path would drop like a mosquito blasted with Helene Curtis’s hair spray.” “I don’t care,” he says, “They have a right to know. Simple as that. I’m not as complex as you think.” “So then— it’s your biblical sense of justice,” I say. Garth is convinced he should go into politics, and I tell him his mask would never hold up. Could he imagine himself shaking hands with all those detestable people and cooing at babies? “You may have a point there,” he says, although he has a thing for kids and babies. And they take to him. Babies smile back and kids attach themselves to his huge calves. At his discount dollar store, the old man called Garth a prince among men, which is understandable given Garth’s size and rich copper color. 

           Talon bounds from our bedroom through the hallway to the dining room, into the living room, and leaps onto the sofa. The old man below thumps on the ceiling. We buy Jamaican bread at the supermarket on Wilmington. Garth checks plantains and lets them ripen until they’re black. Then he fries them. “How can you eat this way?” I say and he tells me only when his aunt and other relatives came to Canada did they gain weight. It’s not the oil, he says, but all the enriched foods and the preservatives. Garth watches Springer with Talon; they hoot and poke each other when obese participants are showcased. I never knew who Springer was before I met Garth. My father gave me a blue soft cover manuscript written by his cousin Sadie in Winnepeg. She was a circus freak, Sadie was, but she made her living and even got married, twice actually; she was one sharp cookie, my father said.  And now I’m merrily flaunting the “f” word and sometimes I go all out and feature “ugly.” Not often and never with the fond gusto reserved for a hearty “Fuck!” There’s something cleansing about that word. People scatter off for a toxic cleansing, that up-your-colon power clean, when all they really need is an emphatic apple-a-day “Fuck!”  Too many times and it’s like an enema—you feel empty afterward.

      Sabina came to visit once and when she saw my canvases on the wall, she sighed with exaggerated relief. “At last, some color!” she said. “I get the walls,” I told her. “And you have a plant,” she said. Every day I pick up Talon from Dalemount. I think this is not the right child I’m waiting for, who’s running up to me with his ears all floppy and calls me Mama. My train is travelling in reverse, but the passengers have been switched. Or maybe I’m in reverse on a parallel track.          

    Today she says she’ll see me. She’s wearing a brown checkered flannel dress. She has the same one in olive green. The dress hangs on her. She has a canopy bed and a matching high bureau. Also a long dresser with eight drawers. Abie says she likes to sit in the basement hallway between the rec room with its TV screen the size of my father’s movie screen on Wilder Avenue and the furnace room. She sits surrounded by open books. My mind runs to Garth when I’m with her and back to her when I’m with Garth. I watched a race once, with Abie. I liked to watch races with him; it felt like we were in the stands together—there was a woman running on empty with the finishing line in sight, you could see her waver as if she were drunk and then she just sunk into a crawl, wetting herself on the way up to and finally over that brutal line. Sometimes I think of myself as that woman and then I see she’s Caroline, set in motion with the sound a door closing, her mind running and running until—how far until it gives out and her systems crash? Her dress hung on her like a cast-down frock.

 

Melons and Cockroaches

“Gross,” Talon’s laughing so hard, he’s clutching his ribs. 

“What’s he laughing at?” I say.

“Just a video. Have a look,” Garth says, his one seeing eye taking in my builder’s dark-grey-with-diagonal-black-lines spandex I wear to show off my quads and hams. 
    “Can’t,” I say, “Going to Strictly to train Barbara.” I coach three women at Strictly now—an Italian with straight jet black hair from World’s Gym who’s fed up with fitness-style instructors and wants to try hardcore, although hardcore core isn’t something you try like sampling a new dish, you move to the country, damn it, and you live like they live, eat what they eat; Alla, who bares her tanned midriff in a new outfit with that stylized “U” symbol on it every time she trains and worries because she doesn’t get off on her husband anymore although he’s a handsome Moroccan Jew and makes a pile of cash in his import/export business; and Gloria, a fashionably skinny, past or in her prime however you look at it, ex-hippie who’s made her fortune in the body bag business and setting up high-class abortion clinics in the Caribbean for women from South American countries, who find themselves in the family way as my Bobi would say.

“Just one look, it’ll take one second,” Garth says while Talon echoes and I can’t refuse, we’re still in our beginnings.

“So? I don’t see anything . . . What the hell is that!” I say as I stare at a puckered-up out of focus hole. Talon and Garth are out of control laughing and slapping their thighs.

“Wait,” Garth manages.
        I shift from one foot to another, and then the focus becomes sharper and what I’m watching as Talon absolutely loses it and Garth does too, alongside, and he never loses it, is the rear of a woman bending over and her ass hole all puckered up and opening wider and wider until it’s the size of a melon, not a piddle of a melon, but a ripe, full-size grown one.

“Disgusting,” Talon’s yelling and skipping around.

“You two are crazy out of your minds,” I say. “And you . . .” I shake my head at Garth, but I’m grinning.

“No way is he going to be like his mom now,” Garth says.

            “Garth!  In the kitchen, it has a hard brown back like a shell.” Garth can move quickly when he wants to. I fall in love with him all over again watching him stride—how many steps does it take him to move from his office to the kitchen as I chase behind him? “Cockroach,” he says, grinding it with my favorite white muscle shirt. “You might want to get rid of this,” he says. “There’s more where that came from. And by the way, when you move, you throw everything out. Everything. Unless you happen to be lonely and desperate for company.”

            “But Garth, again? We gotta move again? I like it here. It’s close to Strictly. And I’m just up the Allen and I’m at Talon’s school—and Caroline, I’m practically at Lawrence with the Allen and then I just take Lawrence.”

            “I know the route, Janice.”

            “Where we going to move to? And what about first and last?” I sit at the edge of the black sofa. “I’m not moving again. I know I shouldn’t have unpacked.”

            “You won’t have much to pack this time.”

            So much jostling in my brain. Like a whole schoolroom of chairs being moved around.

            “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll have plenty cash.”   

            “Oh yes,” I say, “the Deal.” She said, her lips curling. And it’s true, they do curl although there’s a sneer that sneaks up and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Whose life is this? Whose wild wingy life?

 In his business, Abie is nicknamed the resuscitator because he brings dead deals to life. Sometimes he exercises mouth-to-mouth on still-warm deals. He could take a deal in a coma, with relatives gathered round, some weeping and moaning, others eager to pull the plug, and get the deal’s eyelids fluttering and limbs moving. One deal involved Seven-Eleven and a machine delivering videos instead of pop; another one a shoe with replaceable heels of different heights and widths; a power line in the Congo; a company with the rights to sell credit cards  of variable denominations in variety stores and supermarkets—and wouldn’t immigrants and illegals just love that; then there’s due diligence, escrow, more due diligence, a sudden glitch which Abie triumphantly solves, signatures, a key player flies off to Spain for his mother’s funeral, another glitch, an additional clause necessitating more signatures. Closings in two weeks. Delays. It’s the end of summer and monsoon-time in Tibet.  It’s September 8 and Independence Day in the Republic of Macedonia. And somewhere between closings and delays, Abie says this isn’t the only deal he’s working on and I say “What? What else you got?” like I’m pulling seconds out of boxes on The Main. And though it may not be a good thing to suddenly switch similes, I know if this were a fuck and I, a tangy broad impulsively changing postures in mid-ride, it’d be OK—at the Expo 67 fairgrounds Abie pulled me over to the Spider. “I hate rides.” I said. “C’mon. You’ll like it, you’ll see. C’mon. Trust me.” “I hate it. I hate.” I yelled from the moment we started spinning. Abie’s airplane glasses flew off.  “Hold onto the bar. It’s out of control!” he screamed, pressing me into the seat with his left arm. Looking back, deals had their seasons as predictable as the Ferris Wheel, but it living through them was like riding on the Spider, sure enough.

      And now Garth is working on a deal. He says it’s not a bank trading program like the one Abie was involved in, the one he lost two point five million in although he insists it was bad luck, the money being placed into an American account whose holder keeled and slam-bam kicked the bucket one spring day, the wife and step-son moving in and staking their claim. Garth says his deal is different—it’s a fund he explains, investors go in, the fund grows, and after a specified time, investors get their outlay back plus a pre-set portion of the interest. Simple and legit. Garth puts an ad in the Globe and Mail. Some guy from Sudbury has one hundred thousand, a widow from Toronto has only fifty and will that be sufficient she asks. Garth gets faxes. Contracts have to be rewritten; the wording in one clause is not acceptable to the British lawyer. The British lawyer is satisfied but the American attorney is not. “Garth,” I say my voice like sugar and sex, “are you sure this is not a bank trading scam? They’re cracking down you know. I don’t want to sound negative.” “Then don’t,” he says. “Why say ‘I don’t mean to’ and then go ahead?” I don’t know the lingo, but I hear the calls and read the contracts. And then I hear about delays, new signatures needed, clauses requiring alteration, and I know. I know the way I feel Garth’s cock slamming the back of my cunt when I lie under him, my legs cradling his neck, same as I lie on him and kiss his lips that are so miraculously smooth and soft and the way I know the span of his forehead. I just know. And I can’t tell him. 

            Garth doesn’t have a job. We didn’t talk much about how he was going to make money when we started fucking. I knew about his neighbor in Guelph who sold stocks and bonds and moved to Florida to start a hedge fund. And that he planned to make his million before he was thirty. It’s his destiny, he says. He figures if he works smart, he could get by working four hours a day at first leading up to maybe two hours one day a week; he says when he was a bouncer those nine to fivers would head on down to their local bars every weekend and blow their paycheck. Dirt bags wear shirts with white and blue collars, at the bar you can’t tell them apart.  “Reminds me of Clearwater—you know that old quarry for nudists on the way to Freelton. Steel workers and university professors, you can’t tell one cock from the other.” I know I’m losing him, Garth being one of those linear types. I have to edit with him just as I had to with Abie. Only Sabina thrives on my presentations—I think like a drunken choreographer, which she appreciates. Maybe my style is impacted by my backlog of filed thoughts. A person can die from backlog. I know this from one of Caroline’s stays in Mount Sinai when she was trying on Resperidone to see if it would suit her, like clothes shopping. Except she almost didn’t come out of the changing room, that’s how backlogged she became. The nurses finally refused to continue the six-week trial run. “You saved her, you just don’t get the recognition you deserve, even the doctors wouldn’t stop although I told them her body couldn’t take it, wouldn’t, like that movie was it Network when Peter Finch tells everyone to open their New York windows and scream ‘I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore!’” I said this to every nurse on Nine South. They were overworked and hungry for recognition. So I quickly slide in with “the thing is Garth, sometimes you have to work for what you want” even though I know the door on his face is going to slam shut and I’ll be left huddling in the cold without him.    
            Garth says people are afraid of being alone. He says you come into this world alone and you die the same way, so you better get used to it. “But you get angry when I visit Caroline every day.” I say. He says he didn’t visit Talon as much as I visit Caroline, even when he was a baby. “She’s sick,” I say. “And if you could have seen Talon every day, wouldn’t you have? And if I could have Caroline here—why isn’t she here? Tell me why she isn’t here with me!” On Nina Street Garth would talk me upright and back into the ring whenever grief delivered its packed ab punch.  Now he just watches from the sidelines.

            The old widow and the Sudbury man are threatening to sue. Garth isn’t afraid. He says he’ll get off with paying seventy-five dollars a month; he just has to show the courts he’s on a repayment schedule. His forehead remains as smooth as ever. If someone wants to gamble one-hundred thousand that’s not his business. He feels sorry for the old widow. I can’t remember how Garth got to keep one hundred thousand. I’m like the old man in Moonstruck in the closing kitchen scene when Cher and Nicholas Cage are sitting around the breakfast table and Cher’s fiancé returns from visiting his Mama in Italy: “I’m so confused,” the old man says.
           So Garth hops on a plane to Orlando and hands this American scammer named Jim Steel one hundred K cash. “What? You did what!” I said when Garth phoned. “Well, he had a suitcase with a live one hundred thousand.” “It was fake, Garth. Who carries around that kind of money and shows it to a stranger? The man’s a southern cracker for fuck’s sake. What’s he doing showing this huge black man cash?” Turns out Garth spoke maybe five or six times to an agent named Jack Tabac, and Jack passed on information about an owner of a thriving import-export company who was wanting to retire. For one hundred K, Jim would teach him the ropes and then move into the background, leaving Garth to manage the day to day.  Of course Mr. Steel skipped town. Garth left messages about personally hunting Jim down and calling out the FBI hounds, which Jim picked up, subsequently setting up a meeting with Garth in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side where, coming face to face with Garth’s hulking angry frame, he thrust out eight of the one hundred thousand and promptly disappeared. I never said “what were you thinking?” to Garth who had gotten such a laugh about Abie forking over that two point five million and his dog loyalty to shady deals. And now here is Garth pointing his finger at fat people, gullible investors, and charlatans.

             I’m in the kitchen cooking on a gas stove. Something sexy about gas stoves, there’s a word in Yiddish­—gesmucked. More than delicious, it has to do with smells that get the mouth watering, the eagerness of piercing food and holding it in place, the arc of fork to mouth, the satisfying roll of food in the mouth, and discovery of flavors. It has to do with texture. I’m thinking about geshmuked which I learned from Abie when I hear a syncopated long distance ring. My father asks me about the girls. I tell him I miss Caroline. He asks about Lisa. I tell him she’s living in the east part of Toronto, she has roommates, she’s working in a call centre and she answers the phone in English and French. She’s had a poem published. Then I tell him I’m working on a new canvas. He asks where I paint and I say in the kitchen. I search for another topic. “I want to get married, Dad,” I say looking at my canvas­­—a female without eyes, a red open mouth, naked breasts nipples generous and rouged, a vertical crocodile in place of a skirt and one butterfly wing as a wedding veil. To the side an old-fashioned face, a cherub with an ancient knowing visage. “I want to marry Garth,” I say. And then my own father says something about Cultural Differences. “What do you mean, cultural differences?” I say. “There were cultural differences with Abie. Garth was born here. What do you mean?”  He repeats. “Cultural differences, that’s what” and pulls out his sharp shooter and lays it on the table. “If that’s the action you take, I’ll have to rethink my will.” I stand quite still in this kitchen with its old gas stove and grey linoleum. My eyes dart through the opening in the wall like a diner with Garth and Talon head butting on the other side. I’m just a short-order cook and everyone is strange. I tell Garth. “Enemies in thy midst,” is all he says and walks away. I phone my father. “I can’t take your calls, anymore,” I say. “I can’t believe you told him. How could you misconstrue my words like that? That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I meant. How have we raised you?” “‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,’ Dad,” I say.
            I’m an instigator. 

How Long Have You Been Evil? (edit 2)

Note: didn't like the other ending - tough when posting memoir chapters - so I threw in the ass-fucking bit.

Fall 1996                                      

The deal is I work from nine to twelve and then I drive Talon to junior kindergarten on Dalemount near his mother’s apartment where she lives with her girlfriend Diane. Actually Diane has lived in the basement of this triplex for nine years; she has a steady job doing the books for a Jewish furrier on Spadina. But then Nelly got evicted from her coop in the east end, which was the place where Garth first fucked me—I had to get on all fours after he tried every other way and I didn’t really enjoy it all, bashing down the front door of my uterus as he was. Garth got a kick out of keeping me up to date on Nelly’s eviction proceedings. I’d listen for a bit feeling antsy like when your bladders bursting and you’re doing your Kegals like a deep sea diver going for a world’s record. Garth says there’s nothing he can’t talk about. Even death intrigues him. “What can you talk about,” he says to me at these times.

Still, evictions aside, which I never thought I’d be writing—that old what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger and that bit about making lemonade—I met Sabina at Kelly’s Gym near the Austin Terrace house, and she’s been with me longer than anyone else except Abie who really doesn’t count since it wasn’t by choice, not really, my reasons being circumstantial. There are so many Kelly’s gym stories—a TTC driver from Iran who got off on muscled females took a liking to me. But that’s a whole other story, except he gave me fifteen hundred dollars so I and the girls could eat and Abie could pay some bills. And still he requested more. “What are you? Some fucking pimp? Don’t you have any pride?” I yelled. Of course he didn’t know anything about Iqbal or our post training ritual of frozen yogurt at Dutch Dreams or how he’d take me to his flat on Vaughn Road and whip my thighs and ass.  I have a high pain threshold, I guess I always did although my being a power-lifting bodybuilder sure set the meter higher. “Kiss Mister Whip,” he’d say among other stupid lines. “No,” I’d say, “No way.” “No way? No way?” he’d answer. I had bruises shaped like zoo animals on my thighs and ass. Once I stood in front of pink changing room lockers and showed a Kelly’s woman my thighs. “Wow,” she said. After the Austin Terrace eviction when we were settled into the Deloraine house, I left Sabina a message: “By the way, I never told you Iqbal was impotent.”  

Anyhow, Nelly with her new youth worker certificate and job in a group home for lesbian adolescents told Talon she was going to send him away to a foster home if his father didn’t take him for one full week every other week. She says she needs  more time to work on her relationship with Diane whom she punched out last week; actually, she punched Diane and Diane punched her clear out, which Garth said served her right, except that Talon was sitting quietly on his cot, watching and crying. Last night Talon asked Garth “What’s foster mean?” and Garth who doesn’t believe in shielding his son from life and its sordid truths laid it bare as a tree in winter in three sentences while they were playing Duke Nuke ‘Em. I drive Talon to Dalemount which is around Bathurst and Lawrence and then I go east on Lawrence to Yonge to visit Caroline. Sometimes she refuses to see me and I breathe really shallow on my way back to the basement apartment because otherwise my heart might crack like the skin of ice on puddles; when I was a kid walking home from school in Montreal I used to watch the water seeping out as the cracks spread like spiders beneath my feet.

Questions spring out at  me; I’m in my royal blue bathing suit in the shower with Talon who is also wearing a bathing suit; I’m sitting on our unmade queen-size bed eating Garth’s six alarm chili and I’m gulping down water while Garth and Talon are laughing away; Garth tries to airplane me at the park behind Seven Eleven but I fall to the ground and hold onto his ankle, then his shorts, “I’m going to pull down your shorts,” I say and he gives up because he’s not wearing anything underneath, I don’t know why. How come Talon is here with me and my girls are not?

 I can’t figure it out. Maybe I’m evil. We had this impromptu skit, the girls and I: “How long have you been evil?” one and then the other would ask. “All my life,” I’d say and we’d burst into giggles. We did that from the time they were little on Bluffwood Drive. And then there was another one: “Women of the world take over/ cause if you don’t the world will come to an end/ men have had their chance.” I made that one up in the mouse house in Haliburton. I was listening to Ian and Sylvia singing “Women’s World” and I wanted to compose a song on the guitar my parents gave me for my sixteenth birthday and which I still have. After everything it stays with me still. Caroline was four and a half; Josie, two and a bit when I brought them into the feminist fold. Almost two decades later, I kneel naked on an industrial grey carpet, being fucked from behind. "You love this, don't you?" he says. And I say, "Yes."

The Tattoo (first edit, comments welcome)

“I’m surrounded by white bigots. How can you trust them?” I say to Garth. 

“I have something to tell you,” Garth says.

I look up at him and wait. I have a feeling he’s going to tell me something, a new perspective maybe or his take on racial relations. “You’re white.”

“Am not!” I say, laughing. “Wait.” I call out to a builder chick at the other end of Strictly’s parking lot. “He says I’m white! What you think?”

“You? Na!” she shouts back.

“See? Maybe you better have your one seeing eye checked.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says and I put my arm around his waist. My hand goes as far as his back pocket which I look my thumb in. I tell him about Abie saying “so you hooked a jungle monkey at the gym” and to make sure Garth uses protection. “He says if I get AIDS he’s never going to let me see the girls again. And he says he’s not a racist, it’s a cultural thing.” 

 “Your husband is an asshole,” he says in a smooth voice.

“He’s not my husband, well, he is, but not in here,” I say touching my heart, “besides he’s lived in Europe for five years. How can a man live in all of Europe? What does he do, drive from country to country, town to town? Yeah, you know that’s what he does, he stays until he gets kicked out.”

Garth says maybe Abie’s like one of those guys who’s tired of being rich and decides to give poverty of try. But I’m stuck on Abie’s AID’s threat. When I turned forty, I got hooked on the idea of getting a tattoo. I’d prance around Gold’s checking out tattoos on forearms, biceps, triceps’ heads—triceps are that big, taking up more space on an arm than biceps, those peaks of speckled grey rock submerged in a country lake. The slippery formation sloping all the way down to lake’s bottom is the tricep. I’d strut right up, each time using the same phrases rehearsed with random stops and starts for the sake of spontaneity and freshness. The guys liked talking about themselves and they were really soft-spoken. Of course you had to know never to interrupt a set or a superset or when a builder was psyching himself up or just after a set when he was either proud or pissed off. But when he was just sitting it out, waiting two or three minutes between heavy sets, not into the third minute of course, and you slid a comment into the second minute just quick and easy-going, like “Hey man, cool tattoo. Where’d you get it?” And he’d say, “Oh you mean this?” and then you’d get a feel whether you could lift some info or not. 

Mostly I looked in the yellow pages or drove around the east end. I’d make appointments in the filthiest dives and never show up. Until I saw a place on the Danforth that had “Artistic Tattoos” burnt into a wooden plaque above a weathered black door.  Beyond the door, a room lay breathlessly waiting, a replica of my parents’ den or of any good Jewish communist’s living room with its Scandinavian modern arm chairs and teak coffee table. Even the standing lamp fit in. Against the longer west wall, a book shelf, also teak with height-adjustable shelves, boasted such prizes as Bresson’s black and white photography and a pink soft-cover copy of Toffler’s “Future Shock” that Abie had only skimmed through but kept on his night table for show, and I never read although I’d heard an in-depth review on Peter Gzowski’s morning show. The book of Van Gogh’s prints and pot lights clinched the deal. 

Four months later I was training at Golds in Ajax with Bill the young kid who used to work behind the desk at Fitness Connection on Esna Park Drive. Seventeen gyms and eight coaches—their sequence constantly shifting, I keep better track of the men I’ve fucked, not that they were more important. At Fitness Connection on Don Mills, I’d hold a straight bar on my shoulders as I did two circuits of walking squats on the green rubber running track surrounding the weight machines. One early afternoon, possibly spring or fall and certainly not summer or winter, because the gym wasn’t hot like Ron’s Gym where you thought you’d pass out in the summer and froze until your workout warmed you up in winter, a round-faced man rested between leg press sets while three women in halter tops and matching spandex tights and a man in a shiny turquoise gym suit looked on. 

“He sure as fuck looks pleased with himself and only four plates a side,” I said. 

“That’s because he’s Ben Johnston.”

“I’m  going over.”

“You can’t just go over to Ben Johnston.”

“Watch me,” I said as I walking lunged my way along the track until I was directly behind the leg press.

“Hey man, how many sets you got left?” I said. 

“Three or four, won’t be long,” the guy in the shiny suit said. 

Bill’s hand’s was going wild with his palm facing me and his fingers motioning me over, curling in and out like he had a bad case of the shakes.

“You crazy, you know that? That’s Charlie Francis.”

“Look if I could invite the Hell’s Angels over for supper, I could tell Ben Johnston to get off the leg press.” 

“You’ll tell me about the Hell’s Angels another time.”

“It’s all going in my book, you and your peroxide hair and Ben Johnston with his juiced-up pie-face, it’s all going in.”

Also the tattoo of a scorpion Bill got on his right ass-cheek. How we walked along the Danforth, fresh snow thick as sponge cake on the sidewalk. We were an Ed Sullivan scene, the one where James Brown falls to the floor and Ed walks to centre stage, lifts him up, then picks up the gold cape and places it around James’s shoulders—of course I was James without the cape and Ed was Bill although I never had the hots for Ed like I had for Bill. 

A dentist’s sort of chair, no, a doctor’s or massage table, cracked leather, covered in white tissue paper. I kept my clothes on. What did the tattoo man look like? Must have been like most of those guys because I can’t picture him, but then neither do I have an image of the Hell’s Angel I invited to supper at the commune the summer I met Abie. 

“I’d like something creative,” I told the tattoo man. “Something with a whip and cufflinks, I mean handcuffs, yeah, that’s it, but not too obvious, you know. And I want it here,” I said, lifting my hair and touching a spot below my neck and just above the first bump of my spine. “I have to hide it from my husband.”

“You wear your hair down?”

“Always, even when I train.”

“Might be painful, above the spine,” the tattoo man said.

“I’m a builder,” I said.

The tattoo is a flower, no color, just ink, with a whip winding through the stem and a pair of handcuffs like two kiss-curls at the bottom. I never thought much of it. But the process, man, oh the process. 

Abie is the one who gets us going on excursions. In this scene, Abie, Josie, Caroline and I stand poised at the top of a forest trail with its overlay of sienna wood chips, and to complete the scene, two atmospheric details referring to the sweeping wind and brooding medieval sky. There’s a storm brewing. Like a stormy sea laying claim to a small boat docked recklessly on the sand, the north wind winds through my hair. My arms stretch out take-me-I’m yours to the elements.  At this moment we stand linked and free. 

And then Josie says, “What’s that on your neck, Mom?”

And I say, “Nothing sweetie, it’s nothing.” I take her hand.

The wind is not on my side.

“A tattoo! It’s a tattoo!”

“Nah, it’s a rub-on, like the ones we buy at Shopper’s.”

“Let’s see that.” Abie pours some water from his old camp water thermos on his fingers.

On the way home, I sit in the back between the girls. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Josie whispers.

“That’s OK, sweetie. It’s all OK.” I say, sighing and staring up, blinking then skimming round and round the shiny silver rim of the ceiling light.  

“Girls,” I say. “How about you go to the park for a swing and a few times down the slide, so your dad and I can talk?”

Abie walks into the kitchen and sits with his back to the sliding balcony door and the forest behind. I sit across the table facing him and the tree tops beyond the balcony. 

“Are you a fucking idiot?” he says, his voice low and sneering. “What the hell were you thinking!”

I’m thinking just for a moment, when I’m about to answer, that he might be a friend. So I tell him about the year before and watching the parade of tattoos. I don’t tell him about Bill and his scorpion. I feel like an interpreter—my life is a foreign language. So I modulate my tone, I polish it until it sparkles while I translate feelings into solid sentences.

He stands and leans across the table toward me. He smiles.

Then he slaps me across the face.

My body standing is one taut line. My head almost touches the ceiling. My throat, long like a Modigliani, its inner corridor contracting, too narrow to hold words trapped without air, jostling each other at its base. Single file, single file, I say, and with my will, I pull each word up and out in the open air. Even though they stand naked and shivering, I announce each one. “You . . . Have . . . Lost . . . Me.”

He walks around the table, his arms puffed out at this sides. “You are a joke,” he says and walks out the kitchen into the foyer, its parquet floor lying broken under the forest green wall-hanging from our first apartment, and up the brown wall-to-wall carpets with their clumps of white Pyrenees fur in the corners of each stair. He stands at the top of these stairs, poses with his left hand on the banister and delivers his closing edict.

“You will give me the name and address of the your HIV parlor. I will report them and have their joint raided. And you. You will get yourself tested tomorrow and two times after that at six month intervals. And, are you listening, Janice?”

 If your dog is becoming fearful, her body language would include tension, stiffness, and hard eye contact. The eye contact has also been described as unnerving, a hard stare, etc. It is important to note that the dog's tail can be wagging in both possibilities. In the first, the tail may wag in a more frantic way, while in the second it may wag more slowly and/or deliberately. A wagging tail is not always an indication of friendly intent!

I wonder if I tap my foot, does that count? 

“Yes,” I say.

Now he’s saying if I have AIDS, and the girls, he’s going to take the girls, because I’m crazy and oh yes he has the documents to prove it, signatures aren’t hard to get, he’ll take them away and have me locked up. He’ll have me locked up and he’ll take my girls. Away. If I have AIDS, he says. 

I take care of the girls. I sing to them and make the streets talk the way I always do. I dash off silly jokes every morning and put them in their orange tiger lunch boxes. When I can’t think of any more jokes, I walk over to Shoppers and buy a Reader’s Digest book of Jokes, Laugh Harder, Live Longer with the Funniest Jokes Ever. I cry a lot. Walking on empty through the house, after I drop the girls off to school, at the Supermarket shopping for smooth skinned navel oranges, I break down, my knees give way, strange sounds that scare and thrill me—deep full-bodied howls, low rhythmic moans. After the second test, I say I'm not taking another. And during all that time I let him fuck me. I thought shooting off in me would make him nicer. Also I noticed he never wore a safe.

Atlas and I

   

Sitting at the edge of the double mattress that used to be my mother’s before she moved from the big house on Wilder Avenue, I take a deep breath through my diaphragm and breathe out to the count of five. I don’t know how people gather up enough breath to exhale to ten. After doing this three times, I’m still not relaxed, but I go ahead anyhow, pressing each number Garth scribbled on a yellow sticky note at Strictly Fitness.  A woman answers. “And who should I tell him called?” she says, her voice as slippery as aluminum slide on the hottest day in summer. “His training partner,” I say and tell her all about how I had wanted to compete by the time I was forty and here I am at forty-eight, how I’d noticed Garth training so focused doing his deads and clean and jerks, and I thought maybe with the right training partner . . .  And she tells me when she looks at him, really looks, she can see beneath his extra weight, as if he’s stepping out of his clothes—he has such presence. “He talks like an overnight bag so jam-packed you can’t close the zipper. I’ll be in the bathroom and he’s standing outside the door, going on about death and capital punishment and serial killers and the morbidly obese. He just likes to talk.  But not to anyone, you have to be special in his life, if you know what I mean. I have my wedding dress all ready, even though it’s eight months away—I put it in a clear garment bag so I can see it as soon as I open my closet door. That’s why Garth and I train in the afternoon. We’re going to lose twenty pounds each. We made a pact.”

Like Jonestown I think, but I tell her she’ll do it, that I can hear the love and determination in her voice. By the time I get off the phone, I’m hopping mad, but I’m hooked, plain and simple, which is why the following day I’m back for our morning workout, showing off my two-plates-a-side squats. Between sets, Garth tries to clear the books.
“I don’t want to pollute my workout,” I say. “And I hate scenes.”
“Then just listen and that’ll be it.”
“Actually that won’t be it, but go ahead. And don’t talk loudly.” Which I don’t have to worry about, he talks in such a low voice I sometimes wonder if my hearing is going like my grandmother on my mother’s side. My grandmother on my father’s side developed cataracts and went stone blind.

He says she’s not attractive anymore to him with the weight she’d slapped on her mid-section and behind, and I say, “But she was, wasn’t she?” I don’t believe him because he once asked me if I had a bit extra on my ass and how about some cellulite. I had never really thought about cellulite, but I said just a minute I’ll take a look, put the receiver down, paused for twenty seconds which I counted out, one Mississippi, and hoping it was the answer he was looking for, said yes, as a matter of fact I did.
“Come on. You want me to show you how strong you really are? You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met, except for psycho Crystal the boxer from Guelph. Now she’s going to kill someone some day—come on, you want to do three fifteen, one rep?”

I’m grinning and pacing in the black Tyrolean hiking boots I wear when I train, especially on leg days. “Nah—three fifteen? No way. Three fifteen, you say? There was this old geezer at Gold’s downtown, Lou, yeah Lou, said he was the head of the power lifting foundation or he used to be. I wanted to crack one and a quarter each side, so he puts on two plates a side. I’d walk in, lift the bar off the rack and put it back. He had me do that ten times.”
“I know the deal. Nope—you’re going to do a full squat, one rep.”
“I am?” This is a wild thrill. This is better than sex any day. Just like old Arnold said in “Pumping Iron.”
“So what I want you to do is wrap up, put on your belt, although I can’t understand why you do that stuff, never mind, and get in the cage, but not right up to the bar.”
He slaps on the three plates a side. I wrap up my knees with my wide white elastic wraps the way John my fourth coach showed me a decade earlier: twice around under the knee and then diagonally across in an “X” and then tuck under. I used to have wraps with Velcro, but they were stolen, and not at a tough gym either, but one of the little high-class gyms I was visiting for the hell of it and swore I’d never go to again. So here I fucking am, five feet one-half inch tall, one hundred and fifty-five pounds moderately lean, and I’m closing my eyes, breathing in and out slowly and deeply.
“I don’t see any grey smoke,” I say.
“Never mind the grey smoke,” he says. “Just breathe and see yourself going in and lifting off the weight and it’s light, stepping back, doing the squat, the whole thing.”
I close my eyes.
“And quit shaking your head,” he says.
I see myself do the lift; it sure as hell isn’t easy, but I don’t bottom out because I hear John telling me, “Through the floor, through the floor and stand up. Stand up.”
“OK,” I say.
“Now go in.”
I walk in. Two steps and I’m there. I walk into the bar so my neck is under the pad in the centre. I look side to side—three plates a side—I don’t grin. I adjust my stance, shoulder width, toes slightly out; I look at my eyes in the mirror; I let out a deep grunt and lift. Steady myself. Walk back slowly. Too fast and I’ll lose my balance. Again, getting my stance, just right. Garth steps up behind me and puts his flat hand on each side of my belt.
“Ready?” I say.
“Let’s do it.”

I’m feeling this incredible weight on my back and my spine is like an accordion and I’m thinking what the hell am I doing. But I’m there with this weight and I am so proud, I picture myself going down and no way is it easy to stand up, but I lift out of the bottom, I’m on my way—    
“Wait. I got to tell you something,” he says.
“What?” I say, getting all jumpy.
“Did I ever tell you the one about the guy—”
“Rack it,” I hiss, walking into the rack so I can put the bar back.

First I unravel my wraps. Second I fling off my belt. Third I face Garth. 
“That’s it.” I say. “We’re finished.” 
“I was just joking,” he says and smiles. Garth smiles. “Look I saw Arnold doing that to Franco on the bench. I thought it would be funny.”
“Funny? I’m there with my all-time-one-rep-max that took me ten years to work up to? Ten years do you hear me? And you tell me a fucking joke? 
“I just saw Arnold—”
“I’m not Arnold and I’m not Franco and that were three plates a side. And how many plates do you do?”
“Five aside.”
“And you weigh over four hundred pounds?”

He tells me he’s really sorry and he’s not smiling anymore. “Do it for yourself,” he says. He says, “You’re here now and you can do it. This is your moment. Even if you’re finished with me, do this one for yourself.”
“OK,” I say. “But if you pull any tricks, we are absolutely finished, do you understand.”
“Yes, yes. Just look at those three plates a side! Isn’t any woman nor most men in this gym who can touch you.”
“I’m going to do this squat and I’m never going to do it again, because it’s fucking heavy. But I’m doing it for my own record. And don’t spot me unless I need it, but stay with me, you hear? Stay with me the whole time.”

For the second time I prepare and this time I know what the weight of world on my shoulders feels like. And I, in my red and black spandex builder’s tights, am Atlas. Gender is irrelevant. Everything is still. Walk back, walk back. Garth behind me. Hands on belt. Feet planted. Oh well, oh well.
“OK.”
Holy shit. Control down, feet through the floor through the floor and stand up, stand up. Don’t help don’t help. Stay with me. Stay. With. Me. Standing up. Standing. Stood. Stood up!
“Rack it,” he says.
Walk in. Rack it.
“Just a minute. Gimme a minute.”
Turn around and walk across the gym with my wraps still on. “Yes!” I say. “Yes!” Arms up in the air, fists and all. See Ed, tanned builder from The Workout now at Strictly. “315! Squat. Just did 315!” “Saw it! Congratulations.” Next Mike, forty-five long-haired, balding on top, trains the frizzy Italian blond. “Hey Mike. Did ya see that man? 3 fucking fifteen squat. Full range no spot. Cool, eh?” I punch him in the shoulder. He laughs. Mike likes me. Then Little Mike also trainer, dating the Russian Jewish ex-stripper. Back to Garth.

“Had to do that. Sorry.”
“No problem.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“Told you,” he says.
“Yeah, you did, didn’t you?”

Comfort Inn

Georgia buzzes up. He answers, “Yes?” Her voice is sweet as a Halloween Macintosh apple with a razor in its centre. “You want me to come down?” he asks, biting into the razor. 

“You tell him,” she says as he steps out into the bright burglar lights. I tell him it’s over, forever and always, just like it says on my ring, and oh by the way, on Georgia’s bracelet too.

“I’m outta here,” I say, walking as if I’m on stilts to my car parked illegally in front of the building, my quads tight like after a set of squats, twenty reps continuous tension. 

“Let her go,” Georgia says, but before I get my key in the car door, Garth’s hand is on mine. 

“You go with her, we’re finished, you hear?” Georgia’s voice shrill and on the rampage. “You get in that car and I’m throwing you out.”

“Open the door,” Garth says real low without moving his lips. 

“You’re old enough to be his grandma! Crazy white whore!” Georgia hollers as she pitches Garth’s clothes off the balcony. 

“Doesn’t it look like they’re jumping off the railing, as if the building were on fire?” I say. Craning my neck, I take in the Downsview co-op with its foil shades and boarded-up windows and smoke-grey brick which must have white in its hey-day if it ever had one. Most likely the building was born tired and worn, except for a concrete awning swooping out like a grand brim on a Sunday hat. 

So now I’ve got this strange huge man in my car and we’re making a get-away as the Georgia runs toward us, waving her arms and screaming. 

“What’s she doing?” I say. 

“She wants to fight.”

“I’m a bodybuilder, not a fighter.” I turn the key in the ignition.

“Well then, you better move,” he says.

“This is not my life.”

He tells me I’m like the women who go to tough bars to slum it and they think they’re so cool until a fight breaks out. You’re supposed to stick by your man, he says, but these women either cower in the bathroom or grab the car keys and hightail it out of there. He knows because he used to be a bouncer. Guelph had three hard cold bouncers who were called in to clean up the town’s roughest bars. It was like an old western—Garth was one of the three, along with this guy Tony and another, the puniest of the three, Jimmy. Tony was six foot five. He had dark hair and a large hooked nose. Garth said that Tony rarely got into fights but he was intimidating. Also he was horribly accident-prone so he’d get more injured than the guy he was fighting. After the three split up, Tony moved to Yugoslavia because he had family in that country. There were rumors that he was killed. Others stories that he wasn’t.

Garth had promised to marry Georgia and give her legitimate residency status in exchange for a place to crash. Also he needed a place to crash. Besides, he was twenty-five and  most of his friends were getting married so he thought he’d give it a try. But the more he lived with her, the more he realized she was just too negative and he’d had enough of negative people. He knew this white woman Lee whom he said was ugly as sin and fat as a pregnant cow, and even though her mind wasn't particularly attractive either, she was smart. She had a good mind for business, went out west, and in the first year, grossed one hundred and fifty thousand opening her tree-trunk legs for strangers. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do. She could see right into a John’s mind and figure out exactly what he wanted. Garth says he’d be talking to her, she’d be mouthing off in a well-modulated voice, talking figures and getting all inspired, and suddenly she’d shove her hand between her legs, shag her monkey, come, and continue the conversation, not even skipping a phrase or parenthesis. She started these dances for weight-challenged women and directly went into the line of plus-sized sexy undergarments, so when some twig of man tried to pick one of the females up, he'd have something to gawk at. 

Georgia still had her looks; it was her attitude that bothered Garth. All this he told me. Anyhow Georgia grew to love him and he enjoyed chatting with her. She’d be in the bathroom and he’d be standing outside the door mouthing off on death and capital punishment and serial killers and the morbidly obese. Georgia said how they talked as much as a jam-packed overnight bag and how, her voice soaring so I thought she was going to take off, she was so proud of him. I think maybe he needed that. Meanwhile he says she’s fat and he doesn’t like fat women—which I don’t believe because he once asked me if I had a bit extra on my ass and how about some cellulite. I had never really thought about cellulite, but I said just a minute I’ll take a look, put the receiver down, paused for twenty seconds which I counted out, one Mississippi, and hoping it was the answer he was looking for, said yes, as a matter of fact I do. Anyway, he and Georgia had this power struggle because no way was she going to kneel down or get on all fours. Men get turned on by women who like to sub it according to one of Sabina’s friends who honored in history at UofT and now hosts a porn site and considers himself an expert in these matters. “Historically,” he said, “black women don’t like to sub it,” and I asked him how could he make such a generalization, and he said “I’m black aren’t I?” He said when you’re black there’s just no thrill in being a slave. “I understand, I’m Jewish aren’t I?” I said, although I know it’s not the same. It’s the sub who really holds the power, he said, and I said what a convenient rationalization.

“Where to?” I say.

“Comfort Inn, Finch Av West,” Garth says like he’s done this before or has a plane to catch (and put a step on it will you).

“Any luggage, sir?” the man at the front desk says. “Not at the moment, thank you,” Garth says. My ex, Abie, refused to say thank you. They were never taught that on the farm in Chatequay, and besides, he said, he didn’t feel the need to suck up the way I did. “But it’s common decency,” I said, and he said well, he didn’t believe in it. “How can you not believe in saying thank you?” I’d said. And here was Garth, thrown out just that night, with his pleases and thank yous rolling out as smoothly as new kitchen drawers on shiny silver tracks. 

We sit in a dimly lit room with a bar and round dark grey arborite tables with upholstered curved chairs set just a space away. “They should have spent less on the chairs and more on the overall décor,” I say. Garth says only two things matter, chairs and service. “If you’re sitting on a hard wood chair, you’re going to hightail yourself out before you’ve ordered your third drink. We order Bailey’s Irish Cream. First one, then another. Garth says when he was growing up there were so many bottles of liquor at his mother’s that he’d sell some off and she never missed them. He never drank like most teenagers, never smoked or doped up, he danced some but he was lousy at it then and says he sucks at it still. “I wouldn’t mind,” I almost whisper, but he chooses not to say anything. So I ask him about music and he says, flippant as an oatmeal and bran pancake, oh he gave up music when he turned seventeen. I want to know what songs he liked in those days and he says I could pick any song from that era and he would have liked it, everything from reggae, classical, all of Beethoven’s symphonies, hard rock, soft rock—he listened to it all.

I like interviewing Garth because it gives us something to talk about and even though it gets on his nerves, he still answers. Talon’s mother, Kelly, told me Garth is passive aggressive; once, in the aggressive part, he went through her place and slashed every piece of clothing she owned, he didn’t even miss a sock, and I said perhaps in his case that’s a good thing. I’m in a groove so I ask him what about gospel. He sighs. Like an actor reading a script where the line reads, “HE SIGHS.” “All the time until I was twelve, then it stopped. My mother tried to sing, but it was horrible.” Sometimes I catch him singing “If Tomorrow Never Comes.” His voice is low and pleasing and he never goes off key except one time at the last line of the chorus. Maybe he was thinking of how his mother used to slash his bare skin with chain whips—even when he was sleeping or in the shower, she’d barge in and have a go at him—and how he used to pray to see his tenth birthday. 

“I used to pray. I think I was reading ‘Little Women’ and my birthday was coming up. I wanted to set up a chapel under the basement stairs so I asked my mother for a prayer bench, and she told my father because she told him almost everything except how she felt, which might well have been the root of her depression. I once read depression is anger turned inward . . Hey—remember how you said anyone from your past would be shocked meeting up with you, I mean to see you walking free and not locked up for killing someone? Maybe you’re not doing the right thing, being so inward and isolated. Not that I mean you should go out and kill the first person you see. Not that I mean that at all.” I’m talking too much. Sometimes he says he can’t follow me and I tell him I’m a tangential thinker. 

“So, did you get it?” 

“What? Oh—my parents were staunch atheists. They never said anything and I never mentioned it again. I used my bed instead.” 

Garth thinks I’m too competitive. He mentions something and I’ve got to slide right in with something of my own. It’s about sharing and empathy, I say, but he doesn’t get it. Mostly I try to listen when I’m with him and save my unedited version for Sabina my best friend of seventeen years who jumps like a nymphomaniac from one topic to the next or even for my daughter Caroline when her mind is anchored. It has nothing to do with calm waters, she can still be adrift. When she comes to shore, and she does, I start talking, quietly, not too much to make waves, until she looks away like she has wander lust and she’s drifting again. To bring her back, I touch her arm or her shoulder or her leg, but by then she’s too far, and so I stand by the water’s edge and wait for her to come home again. After two shots of Baileys, I can see Garth is ready to leave. I don’t know how I figure that out. He doesn’t act any different. And I’ve never seen him yawn. Maybe the lid of his blind right eye begins to droop. He doesn’t fidget or look around, although he insists he takes in everything. 

We take off our clothes like an old married couple. He leaves his t-shirt on. We lie side by side, a contrast in colour and age, beneath the stiff hotel sheet. I wait. 

“Garth,” I say, which isn’t true since mostly I call him “sweetie.” I call him sweetie so much, he says it would be nice to hear me say his name even once in a while. I tell him it’s a love word. “Still it would be nice,” he says. One day I’m going to stop calling him sweetie altogether.

“So?” I say, putting my arm under my head so my head is high enough to see him. “You’re such an odd one, you know. Is your mind still? Does it stop? Do your words follow a pattern? I mean how do you think?” Talking to Garth is a matter of trial and error.

“I don’t know what you mean . . .”

“I just wonder whether you think all the time, whether your mind is ever still or does it rush around everywhere like it’s late for a show and searching for the keys and where you left your jacket and . . .”

“You asking or telling me?”

“Asking.”

“It’s never still. I think the way I talk.”

“Well you talk the way you walk.” Garth doesn’t answer. Either he has nothing to add or he just doesn’t get it. Resting my head on his belly, my whole body relaxes. Whenever he talks about becoming lean again, not competition ripped of course, I get nervous inside, like before a history test I hadn’t studied for or couldn’t remember any of the dates in the days when dates meant everything. His belly reminds me of mountains and picking blueberries in the hills behind our country house and the two mossy rocks with Appalachian curves in our front garden. “I’m going to miss your middle,” I always say, but I know I don’t have to worry because he’s got this thing for pre-packaged butter tarts—which I wonder about, I mean why the prefix “pre” and isn’t that redundant. I am plagued by these questions. After prefacing my concern with “this might not be the occasion for a query like this” and “you know how you find some topics cumbersome,” I raise the question about butter tarts. Garth thinks the question is a legitimate one—like calling a water heater a hot water heater; why you would heat water if it were already hot, he says.

“What I mean is I’ve never seen you rush, your steps are all measured.”

“I see no point in rushing,” he says, and then he turns to me and takes me in his arms and my skin is so parched it drinks him in; he lies half crouched over me, “kiss me,” I say, arching up, so he swoops down and I drink like a Jew in the desert, forty days and forty nights (in my case forty-eight). I’ve had four memorable comes in my life: one (because it was my first) in Melez’s cot at Pripstein’s Camp in 1965; another one a few years later with Abie, actually two with Abie—the first after I dropped a cindered marshmallow in the palm of my head, and Abie and I retired to the sunroom in Arlene’s Val Morin country house, I, clutching an ice pack to my injured hand while Abie massaged my breasts which seemed to develop lives of their own, they were that animated; the second in spring of 1988 in the rented house on Austin Terrace in the bed with a functional grey built-in head board and me coming while I gripped his shoulders, so this is what it’s like, I said; it took eight more years for the fourth on this night with Garth as my skin leaps and laughs each time he touches me. 

I’m writing everything down, scribbling notes like a third-rate sleuth. When he goes to the bathroom to wash his cock and his up-my-asshole finger, I turn on the overhead light and record the entire incident on the backs of unused cheques and unpaid bills. I’m writing a grand exposé, an inner journey of Kerouacian proportions. And this time no New York agent is going to die on the dentist’s chair while he's getting of on my erotic works. I waited two decades before submitting new shit. It’s like a bodybuilding competition, this book of mine—muscle, ligaments, and veins popping, resistant fat and symmetrical flaws magnified under stark stage lighting. I was reading a famous writer’s memories, a young-old guy, whose name starts with “V,” who always had more to say than he’d written. So he’d write something like “if you want to read more of that, well, check out the appendix” which grew to, maybe exceeded, the page count of all the chapters. 

I can’t wait that long. I live my life with a full bladder. So—it’s not that in forty-one years, my coming times totalled four. And I don’t come like a pre-set baking oven, warming up to three-fifty or three-seventy-five and then maintaining or turning off. It’s just that, in my personal equation, my level of come isn’t equal to my degree of passion. Maybe it’s because I’m process-oriented. When a fuck enthrals me, I’m on the move the whole time, turning and sliding this way and that. Like when someone skims his fingernails up and down your arm and you’re just loving it, hoping it’ll never stop. Or like that moment after a shower when your whole being, including breasts, feels full almost engorged and you’re thinking maybe you should masturbate, the doors of all your pores open and welcoming. 

Meanwhile, a guy with a beguiling smile and eyes as blue as the skies over Rio de Janeiro or New Zealand’s Bay of Islands or above Ayers Rock in Australia winks at my friend Sabina, a German rendition of Bo Derek, but without the tits and dreads, as she hands him ten subway tokens, and a few days later, he’s in her Parkdale futon or eating her out it beneath the ostrich ferns in her inner-city garden paradise. She also gets turned watching women at strip joints.

“I need a mind,” I tell her. 

“I just want to treat myself, like having a feast. You wouldn’t want a feast everyday. But once in a while . . .  And if he’d have talked, I would have told him to shut his mouth and put it where it’s appreciated.”  Sabina writes torrid romances while she’s fucking. Like scenes from the “Story of O,” only hers take place in the Muskokas in Northern Ontario. When she comes, her back arches and she shakes all over. She screams. But Sabina thinks in fiction; her characters are real and have lives of their own. While I, in one form or another, have always written memoirs.

And what does this have to do with Georgia and Comfort Inn—everything and nothing, I guess. It’s just that I swooped in and stole Georgia’s wedding dress right out of her closet. Not that I give a fuck. What thrills me is I still don’t know what to expect. I’m on edge and as much in love with myself even after all these decades. And these days how many relationships can make such claims? 

“Don’t worry about Georgia,” Garth says after I whisper good-bye. “One day you’ll see her and you won’t recognize her. She’ll be fat as a house.” 

“And me?” I say, “And me?” Garth has a way of predicting the future.

“Oh you. You don’t need to worry. You’ll be dead.”

So I kiss him with my semen lips.

Coming Round

We live on the eighth floor of a concrete and glass apartment building on Cote St. Luc Road. A doorman opens the door. The main foyer has marble floors. The apartment is furnished in Danish modern. Abie goes to university while I wait for the bookshelves and sofa to arrive. I wait for three months. I eat. When I was fourteen I won the Golden Spool award at Camp Manitou-Wabing for my black and white portrait of a Lauren Deckelbaum who never went through an awkward stage—she slipped through those years looking like she’d just woken up on a hazy morning or she was the hazy morning—and a snap shot of Bernie Hashmal canoeing solo, grinning and waving his paddle just before he tipped. I taught Abie everything I knew and he took it from there. The enlarger and trays are arranged on a wood plank over the bathtub. A glowing red bulb above the door frame signals he’s in his darkroom mode and not on the toilet reading Playboy with his worn-out underwear hanging like a sagging belly around his ankles while he’s taking a shit. He likes doing series: my flat wide feet with bunions poking through like spring bulbs; nudes of me sleeping, waking up, getting dressed with my left foot poised at the entrance of my underwear; doors with rusty hinges from the days when we’d break into deserted country houses. On these days when I’m a bird bathing in the sink, he calls me his little Faigele, my mother’s Yiddish name, and I pour cold water on his head. We take showers together. He fucks me after the late show and he slams in again around six in the morning. “You have entitlement issues,” I tell him. 

We have brown ceramic dishes that pile up on the counter. My mother sends Angelina over once a week. Angelina vacuums and reminds me of home. She used to wrap up her long hair in a bun, but she’s cut it now. “I’m too old to fuss with long hair,” Angelina says and I say, “I understand because my hair gets so knotted even Houdini couldn’t break out and Abie has to comb it out for me." “Who is Houdini?” Angelina asks, so I tell her. What I don’t tell her is I’m like my hair, all tangled and tied-up. 

I wet my hair and put olive oil on it. On my eyelids I paint a glittery black runway that takes off at the edges. “Hey, what colour are my eyes?” I really wonder about that sometimes. Abie tilts my head to the spot light. “Green,” he says, “no, hazel with emerald.” He takes photos of me, black and white: one with me holding my old guitar; one with me in a bath towel and holding my hair up with one hand; and one, one where my grandmother’s white shawl from the Weaver’s in St. Agathe is draped over my head. “Show me starry night with your eyes,” Abie says. All my life I wanted to be an actress. It’s what I do best. Constance Brown loves my photos. According to Abie, she says they’re better than the ones at the agency, and she loves my look─ethnic is in, she says. 

I write every day. I write I cannot grow on a still pond. Abie says it’s always the same thing. One Saturday spring morning, we climb Mount Tremblant─we take the chair lift to the highest ski peak, but Abie insists we continue to the top. “You’re wearing your Tyrolean hiking boots, the cleats will hold you,” he says. “We couldn’t afford the cleats,” I yell. He kicks the earth with the tip of his boot to make climbing ledges, grabs stumps, and takes off his belt so I can grab hold. “Don’t look down,” he says, but I look down anyway and I’m thinking I’m going crash like that American diver in Acapulco and the whole time he’s saying how beautiful it’s going to be at the top and how we will stand together at the top of the world.

Abie's walking in the forest behind Lake Alverna. He's like an animal in the woods and I love that about him. Trees are like long lost relatives to him. "Jan," he calls out, "a white spruce, and that one, black, black spruce, tamarak, and that . . .” He walks over to an eastern hemlock. "You gotta see this!" he whispers, pointing to a dead rabbit and her five mewling babies. He wraps them in his chamois shirt and on the way home, he turns the heater on high. We buy an eye dropper at the drugstore across the street from our building. “Don’t forget to put the clock near them,” he says as he walks around in his torn underwear and turns on the TV. I open the cedar chest and take out the extra scraps from the beaver coat my grandmother gave me for my twenty-first birthday. It’s a family custom. My coat is in storage at Holt Renfrew, and my mother, who has a lamb-lined coat and a new Kolinsky, mails me notes reminding me to have the coat delivered. 

 "Your mother has a mink,” Abie says and I tell him, “No, it’s a Kolinsky.”   

“When are you going to wise up? What animal is called a Kolinsky? You ever hear anyone say ‘Oh look, it’s a Kolinsky!’? 

“So maybe it’s one of those rare animals, you don’t know everything,” I mutter.

“They’re just embarrassed because they’re rich ex-commies,” he says. “And your sister with her dead seal hanging on her bony back thinks she’s hot shit when she’s just a dumb-ass housewife with a big nose.” I picture shit steaming on the stove and served steaming on my grandmother's Wood & Son’s china plates. 

“I’m putting them on the fur,” I say, “to remind them of their mother."

 “Don’t forget the clock,” he calls out from the bed. 

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. I’m really tired and also I’m pissed off because Abie throws out orders and ideas like ball practice while he’s watching TV or reading Playboy or Esquire. He’s a magazine freak. He doesn’t study much because he says he’s in the top two percent and remembers everything he reads. Mensa sent him a personal invitation which he refused─on account of his not being an elitist, “not like your family” he always adds, and I tell him his mother is the one who prices out her artwork and furniture when guests visit.

 

In the morning I can’t find the baby rabbits. 

“My rabbits, my little rabbits come out, come out,” I croon. “Wherever you are.”

“They died,” Abie says. “Must have been the fumes from the cedar chest.”

“But they weren’t in the cedar chest.”

“The fur was,” he says.

“So where are they?” 

“In the incinerator.”

“What!”

“I put them in a green garbage bag and threw them down the incinerator.”

“Did you ever think to ask, maybe I would have buried them, they were so tiny such little things. I was up most of the night, I even made them formula . . .” 

"And tell me, whose idea was the formula? Who went out in the middle of the night and bought all the ingredients?" 

“They’re dead, Abie. We should have left them in the forest. And why didn’t you wake me up and tell me?”

“Because you’d overreact, same as you’re doing now. They were all stiff anyway.”

“See what I mean, see? Maybe you have good intentions, but it hurts just the same.”  I go into the bathroom and lock the door. He rattles the handle. 

“Come on out,” he says. 

I crouch against the door and rock myself.  And while he’s asking me why are you so quiet and what are you doing, I’m checking out shapes forming and rearranging on the marble tiles beside the bathtub. I take off my clothes, lie on the cold tile and stare at the stucco dots on the ceiling. And then everything inside me is still. When I put on my jeans with the homemade paisley inserts and venture out, Abie’s in the bedroom watching TV. 

“Coming round?” he asks.

“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Coming round.”

The People's Elbow

“You have to ask me about my life. There’s stuff needs to be purged. Promise you’ll ask me.”
“I promise,” I said, carefully adjusting my body. Men get spooked like horses or cats. But how will I know what to ask?”
This is what I learned: Garth’s mother is Pentecostal. He was slapped around and chain whipped, I saw the raised lightning scar from boiling water poured on his thigh, traced the tip of my index finger on its raised worn smoothness in our early days when I sucked on his frostbitten toes, his mother having turned him howling into the Ontario winter small-town cold. He ate chewed food from garbage cans, sisters spitting leftovers on the floor, mother shrieking holy roller, eat or I’m going to whup you, metal chain five feet long tearing into his young back thighs shoulders buttocks.
 
Sometimes we 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 relayed their stories, 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 ‘Uncle,’” he said. So I spit in his face. His face shifted—the features rearranging themselves—the sky was summer blue one minute and the next, covered with a thick threatening wash, possibly Payne’s grey dark.  He let go. “Come, Talon,” he said and they walked off.
 “You’re lucky you’re alive,” he said later. In Guelph a gang of boys tied him to a willow tree; there weren’t many black families in Guelph back then. Maybe they threw stones at him or hit him with switches while he was there with the rope holding him. It took him two years 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 pummelled them into oblivion.

I can still hear the knocking—like a log being rammed against the door of a medieval hut. I opened the door. Would it have been any different if I hadn’t? If I had barricaded us in? I opened the door and a black boot wedged itself in—“Sheriff.” I was alone with Caroline. Lisa was at the Toronto French School. We had a car then—an Isuzu, that would later get towed when Caroline was in 9-south at Mt. Sinai and Abie, in another one of his flamboyant moods, parked it in a tow-away zone.
“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” the landlord, a tanned leather man, said.
“But I didn’t know . . .”
“That you’re six months behind in the rent? You didn’t know?”
“But he said there were jewels, he was going to give you jewels from Africa.”
“Jewels, my ass! He showed me glass. Glass!”
Caroline stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“Can I phone him? I’ve just got to phone him, we’re all alone you see, and my daughter isn’t well.”
“Let her phone him,” the sheriff said.
“Can I use your phone? Please.”
“Let her use your phone,” the sheriff instructed when I said we didn’t have one and I had to go out to the pay phone even in the coldest day of winter to speak to André who was coaching me at Ron’s gym—he was living in a friend’s office gratis and we’d save  pennies for the bus fare—I didn’t say that, about how I’d stand in the snow outside No Frills and gab and laugh on the phone with André and how talking to him made the seasons change.
“I have to give my daughter her medicine,” I said.
“What do you think we are—a god dammed pharmacy?”
“I have to take my meds,” Caroline said, “otherwise I’ll go into episode. You want me to phone Dr. Flak?”
Of all of us, Caroline is the best in emergencies.
“Come on, Mom,” she said already on her way upstairs. “We have to get some clothes.”
She got hangers. She went to Lisa’s closet and took out the one-of-a kind dress we had somehow managed to buy in Kensington Market for Lisa’s graduation. I think I got some of my clothes, some of Abie’s too. I forgot my jewelry box that held my grandfather’s watch.

I cannot write this without drinking one wine glass of French Rabbit Cabernet Sauvignon. I add President’s Choice orange juice into the pottery wine goblet I bought for fifty cents at the Cowan Street fair which is where Sabina, my best and long-legged German friend lives.

When Abie and I went back to get our things from the garage—for over a decade I could not use green plastic bags or abide by knocking and phones ringing—David Sheer said, “If you want the rest of your things, you’ll have to shovel your dogs’ shit.” You see, he also took the dogs. The sheriff and the dog pound at the door. Josie’s Pyrenees, Sara, and Zack, our Bull Mastiff. We were a Disney flick—the wretched family, the triumphant landlord, and the dog catcher. I stood on the sidewalk, watching Abie shovelling shit in the front yard. “Stop,” I called and then softer, “Stop. He’s not going to give us Bobi’s furniture. Nothing. You can shovel the back and front yard. Stop. I won’t let you. Come,” I said and led him to our car loaded with plastic bags, all my writing, my books, my art on D’Arches Rives cold-pressed 200, and the photograph of Bobi and Zadi at their fiftieth wedding anniversary, the glass and frame still intact.
“I know people,” Abie said. “who’ll break his legs—asshole will live out his life in a wheel chair. It’s illegal what he’s doing. Paul will take him to court and the cops—”

Garth was seven when he hunted down his pursuers. “How’d you know how to fight?” I asked him, sliding my voice up and down the scale so I’d sound spontaneous. He thinks I interview him for my writing. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just knew.”  I loved him for that.

Dark Sides and Butter Tarts

When I saw Garth for the first time, he was wearing navy blue sweats, top and bottom, and his skin was copper, sepia, and burnt umber all in one. He had one of those flat top do’s you could balance a plate on.  I thought what the fuck is a man like that doing in a place like this—although it was a builder’s gym and he sure as hell belonged there. I was forty-eight, full of muscle and heat, flaunting my quads, sixteen-inch biceps, and my high-shelf builder’s ass. It was one of those pure contact moments I’ll always remember. I never saw an aura before I met Garth. It was like an angel’s halo around his entire frame even though he was no angel. But then neither was I.

He was my lighthouse, standing there tall as night and strong as the sun. In that entire room at six p.m. building time at Strictly’s Gym when builders came awake and strutted their stuff, worked and groaned beneath the weight of the world, in that warehouse space filled with pumped body parts, the man who stood apart was the presence looking on in the corner.

“Are you a pro builder?” Garth asked, taking five strides towards me.

“No.

“How long have you been training?”

“A decade, hardcore.”

“How old are you?”

“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to ask a woman her age? I’m ancient,” I said, as if I were trying on the word for the first time, something right off the rack, and there I was twirling around in it, amazed at its fit.   

“Thirty-eight?”

“Told you—I’m ancient.”  I was a cool builder chick wearing red and black striped spandex tights and I wanted this towering man. Funny thing was I was there checking out a new gym, preening my muscles and cheating on my regular training partner, Nick, an Italian kid studying opera at the University of Toronto. Nick wanted to be a famous pop singer able to scale the high notes.  He was haunted by soaring vocals and would randomly shriek out an elusive note after a set of squats or a powerful deadlift. He had the body of a Clydesdale horse. Or so I thought until I spied Garth.       

“I’m just about to go on the stair master,” I told Garth at the end of our first meeting. “Getting ready for a show.” 

“Well, it was nice,” he said and walked away.

Months later, Garth confided he had stood for one hour in the snow and the cold, watching me through the gym’s glass wall. There’s a greenhouse in the centre of Sherbourne Street Park. It’s not the greatest part of town, but there’s an oasis in that hothouse. I think Garth was peering in and I was his oasis.

I didn't know about Tim Horton's until I met Garth. It was around alright, just like A & W was in Montreal when I tasted root beer for the first time with Abie. So one night after an intense leg workout, Garth poured himself into my leased silver Mazda and directed me (turn right, turn left here, get ready for a right) to Tim Horton's. I ordered two large cartons of milk because I couldn’t find anything else with protein. We were sitting at an orange table with attached swivel chairs and he leaned forward, his upper torso dwarfing the table.

“What?” I said.

“I have a dark side,” he said.

“So?”

“I’m just telling you. I thought you should know,” he said and bit into his butter tart.

I didn’t say anything about the butter tart.

Dark Sides and Butter Tarts

Challah with Muscle

The Bagel Rye is my favourite bakery on Grantbrook near Finch. It’s right near Mr.Grocer and Mr. Grocer is right near Leo Baeck, Lisa’s Hebrew school where we’re always behind on payments. Anyhow the Bagel Rye was initially owned by a Jewish couple, old, I think, or so they seemed to me—the husband still had a twinkle in his eye and very even false teeth, the wife was fat and bossy, except if you took the time to talk to her, she’d gossip about her customers and maybe take a shine to you. I adore bread. I love challah, the old man’s whole wheat rolls, croissants, muffins, but since I started bodybuilding I’ve stopped eating white bread although I occasionally relapse and devour a whole loaf of challah in one shot. I’ve managed to side-step stereotype Jewish guilt, but when I do suffer, I mean with what-is-the-meaning-of-life intensity, it’s after these bread episodes. Otherwise I’m practically amoral; I’m an ardent eudaemonist.
           
Eventually the baker and his wife sold the store to an Irishman with oily thinning red hair and a moustached skinny Lebanese fellow. Then Elaine started working at the Bagel Rye. I’d talk to her about bodybuilding and bread. Sometimes Mike the baker would listen in or list ingredients of his breads. He was trying out new breads and even had pamphlets made up to match—Irish soda bread, special muffins on order. I bought three dozen of the muffins on order, despised the first four, and became attached to the remaining thirty-two. I put them in our big freezer in the basement so I wouldn’t be tempted, but then I’d sneak downstairs and eat them frozen. I threw twenty-nine out. Or I’d leave one on the counter for twenty-four hours just to tempt myself. Sometimes I’d win. I learned to count to twenty when I opened the fridge. I’d talk to myself in the sweetest way—“Now, Janice, you just walk out of the kitchen, there’s a dear, and if you’re still in the mood after twenty minutes, possibly we’ll talk again. Now go on, there’s a good girl, find something to amuse yourself.”  I learned to go to close the fridge door and seek out my bathroom floor instead. Even the two-piece on the main floor. I’d squeeze into the space between the toilet and the corner of the door. 

Now I buy only one item when I drop by the bakery which I still visit once or twice a week. When I’m there I show Elaine my muscles, talk about Bernie and my anorexia, about John, even about ‘roids. Elaine says she had free-weights in her parents’ basement but now she lives in a house with three female room mates close to the bakery. She’s pretty in a full-bloomed way and her complexion is nearly perfect. She has blond-brown hair with highlights which she sometimes pulls back with a silver barrette or caught at the top with a gold bow or swept up pompadour style. I don’t know whether she has blue eyes or brown. Her figure is like her face. She thinks she’s terribly overweight, but she really looks like a healthy farm girl in a city bakery. She’s not particularly bright, but then the gym has made me less snobby than I used to be.

Anyhow the night Abie and I had our steroid discovery fight, Elaine phoned. I could see she wanted to talk. I had learned a variety of responses in my child development course at Guelph. At first I opted for repetitive empathy without being too obvious, which I quickly discarded in favour of bolstering dialogue. “I’m really glad you called. Really. I mean last week my coach John called me—he thought his best friend was ripping him off, gave him a used motorcycle when I gave him $600 cash for a deposit on a new one . . .”
“You bought him a bike!”
“Yeah well, we have this thing, like I’m his sugar mama although he doesn’t know I’m all of out sugar, know what I mean?”  Sharing sometimes takes the edge off. I have a feeling a story’s at the door and damn it, I’m going to let it in and copy word for word. “Anyhow I was honoured with him calling and all, because I guard my muscle sleep—I don’t give a fuck about beauty—but he needed to confide in me and it touched my heart.” I let my voice go all soft and sweet. “Now something is troubling you. I can tell.”

And then she started jammering about Bill the Lebanese baker. She could have snagged any man, she always had the cutest guys and even her friend said how come you got the hots for that creep, but then she fell hard for him although he was so skinny “you could pinch his ass and feel his bones.”
“Some guys just grow on you,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s what he did. I always gave him compliments. I was really good for him, I know I was. Sometimes he even told me so. I was always going up to him and telling him he was the best lover and how he had this great body and he made me so wet I started bringing in a change of underwear. Ten times a day I told him.” She started to sob. “Hey, hey,” I said, making little clucking noises with my tongue. Turned out Bill came by her place, left his car in the front with its flashers on, out front being a no-parking zone, came in, and closed but didn’t lock the door—“We fuck,” he announced.  “Sure,” Elaine said. She lay down on the beige sofa and hiked up her skirt. Bill undid his zipper, walked to the sofa, flipped her over and took her from behind. She said she could feel the heat on her face. “Bill,” she said, “Bill,” while he rammed in for about three minutes, grunted (or was it growled?), and came. She wanted him to kiss her, but he just zipped up his fly and walked to the door. “Aren’t you even going to kiss me,” she called out. “Aren’t you going to fuckin’ kiss me?” “Cunt,” he said under his breath, but loud enough for her to hear and slammed the door. Elaine sat on the sofa, a movie piece with smudged mascara and tears rolling and then called his wife.

I like the kinks in people. The discordant parts. Elaine is like that—a regular small town teenage kitten. One day she’ll kill herself over Bill. I befriended her because I’m fascinated with edges—round that should be square, square where there should be sweeping curves. I like her because of her dialogue and upward intonations. Part of me cares and wants to help and another part thinks let the cow eat her way into some gigantic bakery in the big beyond. Or as we Jews say let her grow upside down like an onion with her feet in the air and her head in the ground. Elaine was alright. She coped. I guess she’s better at coping than I am, and maybe I have something to learn from her. She met a guy her age at the Scarborough Roller Skating Palace—the kid is sixteen and inexperienced, she thinks he really looks up to her, sure has the hots for her, but he’s afraid; he’s real innocent and he treats her so nice. And he’s good-looking all clean like some young boys are. She feels older and experienced, a bit like her and Bill, only in the reverse.

I know I should be glad. But I’m getting bored with this kid who sees life through the eye-hole at the tip of a prick. After all those hours listening and commiserating, the truth is I don’t give a fuck and I miss my sweet girls. I worry about losing track of fame —I’m sailing off on an old yellow school bus with my mother frantically waving a brown paper lunch bag. Or the reverse. Mostly I miss my daughters. Even muscles can’t fill that empty space on my lap.  Before the evictions we had an old rocker, actually two — one was pale wood from my grandmother’s country house and the other a rich mahogany with etchings on the back. We’d sit, my girls and I, belting out every song we knew, like when Abie and I were camping in Kilarney and this brown bear came lumbering down the hill as we paddled in the stream at its base. “Sing!” Abie said, “Sing loud and don’t stop until I tell you.” The girls and I used to sing like that. Abie was the bear.

Decadence at the Gym

As long as I’ve known, there have always been chandeliers. In Bobi’s dining room on Rockland, in my childhood house on Wilder Avenue before it became Antonine Maillet, and now in this ramshackle Willowdale house, in my own dining room, this chandelier that cost seven hundred dollars when I didn’t think anything of the cost, the standing chandelier on the buffet—there’s a tall buffet and a long one with three drawers and two cupboards at either end. It’s a set, two buffets and a table with eight chairs, deep dark brown carved oak with my grandmother’s blue oriental carpet beneath. A rich royal blue tapestry table cloth is displayed on the table when we’re not eating in this room, which is almost all the time except for Friday nights and birthdays and our anniversary. I tell my girls their father and I are going to grow old in this house that’s falling apart before its time. 

We’re at the Mansfield Gym in North York. John’s biker friend Bob and his lesbian girlfriend join us. Bob wants Sophie to compete, but she doesn’t want to, she’s not sure, she doesn’t think her family will approve. “What do you want?” I say, but she doesn’t know, she sees a seesaw with Bob on one side and her parents on the other. Sometimes they balance and sometimes Bob’s up on the top, all alone, such a skinny little thing and then she feels sorry. Other times, he’s sneering at the bottom, holding her parents high in the air, and they’re screaming away in Greek, but no one comes to rescue them. “They’re not young anymore,” she says. “You have to figure out what you want. Abie says I’m wasting myself. He says I’m hanging around with gym monkeys.” John pulls me aside when I walk into the gym. His brush cut has that slept-in look like wind-blown grass. “Will you quit talking to her,” he says. “You’re uprooting all the seeds Bob’s planting. Sophie’s his business, not yours.” “That’s where you’re wrong. Women got to stick together and what’s all this shit about seeds like she’s a kid he’s moulding, his little woman.” “We’re not all as big as you are, Bev.” “Damn straight,” I say. 

Not much cash these days. We cart around our old Visa card. Sixty dollars at a pop at Kitchen Table and they won’t check it out. I don’t like answering the phone on account of collectors calling. Mr. Johnson from the mortgage company phones to ask where an alleged cheque is. He says he’ll have to turn the matter over to his lawyers. “What kind of man is your husband anyway?” he says. “That can’t even take care of his family. And you should be aware of your financial situation, don’t you think?” I tell him about Caroline. I try to explain how she grabs my heart and time, no use saying I’m losing my heart and I horde my time and that real life is shit. NSF cheques. Payments made and stopped. Fucking rich parents in their Highland Beach penthouse condo dealing with their residual socialist guilt as they watch their middle daughter and her family squirm under the financial knife. Then there’s a coach who’s got a habit, juicing up, shots in the ass. I guess I’m his sugar mama but I just want him to love me. So I phone my father collect and ask for cash. “What wrong with that swine you’re married to? There’s got to be some changes here.” I keep the phone an inch away from my ear so I can hear when he stops talking. “Love you Daddy. Thank you Daddy,” I say and place the off-white receiver quietly back into its cradle. 

John’s driving, lurching and breaking , wrecking the transmission, swerving on turns. Bob’s in the back seat—“We’ll tie her down, then we’ll blindfold her, you don’t like blindfolds, do you hon? Yeah, I know. Been there and back. I’m a master sweetheart. Anything you can think of. Done it all. See, I’m in retirement now. At your service sweetheart.” 

I follow John up the stairs of his mother’s pre-war house. Lately I’m not wearing panties; I’m in my decadent faze. I don’t tell Bob who’s behind me shouting obscenities. But the truth is I miss the closeness of my underwear. Bob says his glutes won a contest. “See?” he says, pulling down his sweatpants, bending over, and wiggling his ass. He’d been fading away for a year in a mental joint somewhere out west, maybe Vancouver, and John asked me for two-hundred and fifty dollars to bring his friend home—Bob was going to pull the plug, he said. So I gave it to him. Bob tells me he was a hit man with no feeling until he met his Sophie. He’d pop a guy off, watch him bleeding in the street and he’d walk off. But he also has this beautiful daughter who can walk in any tough part of town and he’s still tight with his ex, a Japanese artist. He can talk at length about Dali and Warhol. Even Rilke. “I’m teaching our John about the art of decadence,” he says and winks at me. 

I’m sitting on the floor pretending to pat John’s old bug-eyed dog, while Bob is shaking up a vial of GH or diabonal. A set of handcuffs dangle from John’s second drawer handle. There’s a scene in “Something Wild” and the wild thing is this chick bent on teaching a little man about life and salacious love. I told John about the flick, and the day before he went to visit his nurse girlfriend, I went downtown to Yonge Street and bought a pair of handcuffs all laid out in a black velvet box. “You having a party?” the tattooed salesman asked, winking at me. “Something like that,” I said, “I’ll take two.” I also checked out several whips but they didn’t look authentic. So I went to The Rider’s Crop on Avenue Road. “My daughter takes lessons at Sunnybrooke Park and I’m told she requires a switch for her competition,” I said. “Do you know what size or type?” the middle-aged saleswoman asked. “No, I don’t really. She’s not a beginner, actually, you know. What do you think?” The saleslady adjusted her forest green cardigan. “There are two I might suggest,” she said. So I bought both, kept them in the Rider’s Crop bag and stashed the handcuffs inside as well. And now John was using the cuff to secure his roids. I look at his flushed cheeks—fucking wasp choirboy. Bob sure has his work cut out for him. 

“John?” I say.
“Don’t even think of it.”
“Why not?” 

“Because I said so.” 

When he talks like that. I smile. Can’t help it.
 “You knew, didn’t you?” Bob says to John and to me, “Holy shit, aren’t you something else!”
“I’m jealous,” I say, “I want to be as big as you are.” 

“You’ll never be as big as I am, in mind or body,” John says. 

“Asshole,” I say. 

I’m taking Nilevar. Five feet one inch and one hundred and thirty pounds of muscle embedded in a modest amount of fat. Substantial tits. I’ve been juicing for two weeks. John gives me more shit which I put in my black gym bag. “Be smart,” he says. When I get home, I put my leather bag on one of the kitchen chairs, the navy blue ladder-back chair nearest the counter, and start making supper. Abie comes in and puts the gym bag on the floor. The pill bottle falls out. 

“And what is that?” Abie says. 

“Aminos,” I say. 

“Who are you kidding?” he says, his chest puffing up and his arms flaring. 

“Aminos.” 

“How about I call the police?” he says.

 “Anabolics, OK?” 

“What kind?” he says and I say “Nilevar.” 

He wants to know who gave them to me, was it John or Bob, he says, it was John wasn’t it? He says he’ll call the police and have both of them put away. He’ll call someone he knows and have John’s house raided. “How will your little friend like that?” he says. “You think I’d put my friends in that position?” I say. My throat aches. I hate myself when I cry.
 “Then who gave them to you?” 

“A jock at Gold’s. The guy in the grey flannels. Anyone can get pills at Gold’s.” 

He’s going to get the pills tested. I still have a half a bottle stashed away. I empty the pills into the whole wheat flour in the dark brown Tupperware container in the lazy Susan beside the stove and I’m thinking—what’s happening to you, what the hell is happening to you—while I’m sifting through the flour and Abie’s talking of police and broken kneecaps and dead bodies dropped off somewhere. And I’m just a forlorn child standing in rubble, German bombers flying overhead—an old flick in black and white. 

Elaine the sad bakery chick phones. Bill the baker is fucking someone else, she says. She’s hiding from Children’s Aid and living with four guys who screw her regularly. Except for Bill, she never feels anything, but Bill, she’d wanted him for so long, she just came all over the place but now he has another girl and she really needs to see me before she does something really crazy. “Alright,” I say, “I’ll try to get out, but my husband is really angry and he’s watching me all the time.” I put on a red plaid lumber jacket. In the ornate hallway mirror, I look too big. Sometimes I don’t recognize myself.

 “Fucking damn shit,” I scream, slamming my fists on the steering wheel. I use the pay phone at the Grantbook and Finch strip plaza. Bob is out. His father has a French-Canadian accent. John’s line is busy. I drive along Cummer to Bayview in search of payphones. Abie’s too broke to delegate. I check to see whether a silver Mercedes is following me. Sometimes I call John a schmuck or an asshole, “you’re only after my money,” I say, and then he talks away until I feel ashamed and laugh from the craziness of it all, because I’m fucking thirty-nine and wild in love with this vigilant twenty-three year old. Elaine’s street is dark and it takes me a long time to locate her house number.

Hitchhiking to Heaven

“I’d like to ask you a question,” Dr. Stein said, wiping his glasses with a white linen handkerchief.
Stein never asked questions other than the usual “why do you think you feel that way?” He was also fond of “uh huh.” So when he announced his intention of posing of a direct question, I perked up. “Janice,” he asked, “do you masturbate?”
I was in the midst of talking about my mother’s perverted interest in my brother’s bathroom habits when Dr. Stein cut in, which he never did—he’d sit back with his hands folded on his paunch and periodically offer me a Kleenex. He must have gotten a special deal. It was his thing. Some offer candies, share grass, proffer acid. I presented Stein with my most hellish thoughts and he thrust out boxes of Kleenex.
“I despise my mother.”
“Do you want a Kleenex?”
“I’m going to kill her tomorrow.”
“Oh? Sure you won’t take me up on a Kleenex?”
“I’m going to quarter her. Saw up her vital joints and incinerate them.”
“Listen. Take a Kleenex, damn it!”
When he asked me did I masturbate, I lifted my chin and looked squarely at him. “No,” I said.
“What! You! I don’t believe it! You’re embarrassed, perhaps? I’m a psychologist, I hear these things all the time. It’s a well-known fact—masturbation keeps the body healthy and the mind active. Now listen carefully. Tonight I want you to go home, choose a washcloth, a slightly rough one for friction, and find a comfortable spot. Do you have a lock on your bedroom?”
“No,” I said.
“Uh huh, no lock on the bedroom. No lock on the bedroom,” he said sliding his silver Parker pen between his thumb and index finger. “Well, is there a private place you could go to that has a lock?”
“I could use the bathroom on our floor—I share the bathroom with my sister and brother, but there are five bathrooms in the house, so I could use ours, I guess.”
“You could. Yes,” he paused. “You could certainly use that one. You’ve never . . . ?” He pushed his chair back and stood up.
You could tell masturbation was an issue he felt powerfully about. The way I did about the Bomb and Vietnam. He was a man of his convictions and I was determined to help him. I’ve never regretted it. A bird in the hand does not sing as sweetly as a hand in the bush.

When I returned for my Tuesday four-thirty session, Dr. Stein’s bald head was practically gleaming.   
“Well, Janice,” he said leaning sharply forward and quickly realigning himself, “how did it go?”
“Fine, Dr. Stein, it went fine.” I wanted to tell him of my melodic bird in the bush and its symphonic glories. He was a nice man and I knew he must enjoy the classics. He had that pale pinched look.
“Can you tell me about it?” he asked. His falsetto betrayed him. Over the years I’ve received compliments for my good heart; compassion has always been my strong suit.
“It was as you said—masturbating sure does keep the body healthy and the mind active. I can see your point.”
Stein’s smooth cheeks flamed.
“And it’s a sure fire diet trick. I’d be sitting at the table with Daddy lecturing in his best debating voice and Mummy bobbing her head agreeing with him as always and Susan popping up and slapping Julian across the face and I’d get this urge. So I’d politely excuse myself which my mother understands—she’s got this thing about elimination—walk stiffly to the kitchen door and make a dash for the upstairs bathroom, you know, the one you suggested.”
Dr. Stein bobbed his head.
“My mother worried I had bladder trouble that was interfering with my appetite, because usually I have the biggest appetite in the family, I’m always asking for seconds and sneaking leftovers. So I just transferred over. You know what I mean.”
Stein gripped the Kleenex box which had become positively misshapen and rose half way out of his seat. His crotch was reaching enormous proportions and the sound was deafening. I was getting off track. True compassion is not easy. But I guess that’s when it really counts—when giving is the hardest. I decided to get right into the heat of the matter.
“I found a nice private place like you said, Dr. Stein. But I couldn’t find a rough washcloth. My mother has these monogrammed ones, kind of a wedding present, FLC—the L being her maiden name, you know, anyhow, we have this loufah, kind of a scrubbing mitt and so I lay on the floor which ordinarily is really cold but I can tell you this time it was hot and I had on my mother’s loofah. Nothing else. Except my glasses of course because I have my father’s eyesight and I was holding my mother’s two-way hand mirror with the magnifier on one side, just to make sure I was on target. And then I started rubbing, slowly at first—but it made me twitch, my whole body felt like one gigantic nervous tick, so I increased my tempo—allegretto, molce allegretto, vivace, forte, fortissimo.”  (I had really taken to the whole thing, I was having a hard time focusing on anything else, like when you can’t tear some one away from one of those page-turners, but I wanted to sound cultured.) “I had an urge to tense my legs and point my toes. I listened to my body. I believe in the wisdom of the body, don’t you?”
“Uh huh. Uh huh. Oh, oh, yes, certainly.”
“But my calves and feet started cramping knots even Houdini couldn’t get out of. God was throwing obstacles in my way. I was determined. I continued rubbing even though my skin was scraped raw because of the loofah, you remember?”
Stein nodded. He was really focused.
“And suddenly I felt a tingle. I know everyone says tingle and I try to be original. I was raised to be a non-conformist, it’s a source of pride in my family. Tingle sounds kind of ordinary, don’t you think?”
“No, no, I don’t think so and sometimes you have to fall back on the ordinary to achieve extraordinary results.” Stein vigorously cleaned his glasses.
“Well that’s good, cause it did. Tingle. Like an EKG, this racy quiver growing higher and deeper, and I mean really deep, sort of spreading and smoldering. And then my whole body, even my eyeballs, lurched. It was like—”
“Yes?”
“It was like being on an elevator that reaches its floor and you feel the reaching and sinking in the pit of your stomach. I was rubbing so fast sparks were flying. I figured I was onto this great discovery. I mean who needs two stones? Anyhow, I was thinking with practise, I’d be positively flying. I have to say it stayed the same. Not that I’m complaining—it felt just fine. I was high on masturbation. Get that. A natural high.”

Stein was positively glowing. I could see he was a highly principled man who felt strongly about certain issues and I was becoming quite fond of him, imagining fireside Chanukahs together translating the classics into Freudian Lovelace jargon. And because of Dr. Stein’s insightful question, my response, his response to my response and my response to his, the ensuing decades have been most gratifying.

There have been some downsides. I got so used to coming on the floor that the bed just didn’t do it for me anymore. In our first apartment I asked Abie to put a board under the mattress—it would be good for my back, I said. But it wasn’t the same. And on the occasions I could entice Garth on to the floor, his four-hundred-pound frame took my breath away and his mountain of a belly stood between us. Over the years, I’ve tried to learn to love my bed and with effort I can. But I don’t want to mix work and pleasure. And so I continue to love the floor, any floor. I can wedge my way between the toilet and the door in the smallest bathroom or spread luxuriously out beside my bed. I have an ongoing challenge with myself, a yard stick for how I’m doing: I can come in ten seconds flat. Yoga doesn’t entice me. I think it’s sacrilegious.

Your Body is a Burning Furnace (edit 2)

Bernie is the first jock I’ve ever met. His tight white t-shirt is pressed and tucked in. At Nautilus One female members wearing assorted high-crotched leotards laugh and toss their heads back when they talk to him. I wear a black and brown imitation leopard suit with straps that criss-cross in the back. Young chicks and older chicks determined to look like the young chicks grind their way through an hour of aerobics while men on stair climbers and cycles look on. It’s one hell of a girlie show.  In their aerobic highs, the women shower and talk over the sound of steaming water, while I work on the Nautilus equipment. One set, maximum intensity, twelve sets total. Bernie says I’m the strongest woman in the club. I miss him when he moves to another club, and Miriam, who wears dramatic eye make-up and black lace underwear and was married to an Israeli who beat her so now she lives in a bungalow in Downsview with her parents and her little girl, says we should visit the new club on Chesswood Drive. I wear my skin-coloured shimmery tights and my leopard leotard under a one-piece steel-blue sweat suit cinched with a wide suede belt and my high cowboy boots, and I drive to Wingfield with the excitement of a Saturday night disco chick on the prowl. The ice on the streets shimmers in the winter sun. I slip every year. Most people walk with purpose, I walk and swear between steps—shit shit fuck shit fuck shit—until I reach the entrance. Swearing takes the edge off. This Wingfield is an impressive place: receptionist, courts, a lounge with round tables, a theatre-sized VCR screen. “I don’t know,” I say to Esther who is waiting for me, “I don’t know,” but I can’t help grinning.

I’m working on the bicep plateload, struggling through super slow reps and inching my way past pain. “C’mon, impress me. Keep coming. One more rep. Now. I’ll tell you when to stop. I want another rep or this workout is over. I’m walking away, do you hear?” Bernie says. I open my eyes wide wide and look up at him. I adore the man and his dialogue and I can feel a grin sneaking up. There’s a Nautilus rule: only the muscle being worked is allowed to respond. The face and body remain motionless. I stare hard at the metal bars in my hands. When “9 ½ Weeks” came out, I saw it six times and spent five-hundred dollars on lacy panties, bras, and garter belts at a bra boutique in a suburban strip mall on Leslie south of Cummer. “Look at her arms,” a customer said staring at my purple veins ripe as any junky’s. “You can have them too,” I said and proceeded to extol the virtues of bodybuilding and Bernie and Wingfield. The saleslady and customer didn’t say anything. I could feel the weight of their silence, but I was on my precontest high.

I don’t know when I started thinking about bodybuilding contests or even when I first heard about them. I worried Bernie might be getting bored counting all those reps. He had an image, he said, of me on stage, incredibly muscled and vascular. So one morning after my legs gave way from a leg press/leg extension superset, I told Bernie I was ready to compete. “You’re the only one who can help me,” I said, “who can make me work when I don’t want to and push me through pain. And the only one who can stop me from eating.” I bought little black books at Shopper’s Drug Mart in which Bernie would track the day’s exercises, weights, and reps, and at home I’d write little bits for him, logging my food intake, sliding in words about his grandeur as a coach, my doubts, goals, competitive longings and some home-grown conflict to ensnare my born-again Christian coach. Before each training session I hand him the book and he reads. Once I recorded eating twelve-hundred calories and he threw the book down and walked away. And another time, on a Saturday, I sat down in front of an open fridge and consumed over three-thousand calories in one sitting, I was that angry.

I have a soft-cover book that lists calories which I know by heart. You can call out any food and I know the calorie count. Bernie lets me eat five-hundred calories a day and I include lettuce, and cucumbers and celery and green peppers in the count. I eat tuna from the tin. I row on the Concept Two for two hours a day and for twenty minutes after each meal. One morning I visited another club, managed by a friend of Bernie’s, Fisher. “Fisher says you’re rowing all wrong,” Bernie told me the following day. “Oh yeah?” I said, because I’m proud of my rowing. I even have the Olympic Concept Two practice booklet beside me which I consult regularly. “Listen know-it-all, you’re rowing wrong. Fisher says you’re leaning way too far back and you’re going to hurt your back.” “So why didn’t he say anything?” “Because you’re mine,” Bernie says.

The contest is in November. In July I weigh a hundred and thirteen. On the first of August my bathroom scale with the yellow padding registers one hundred. Even on the third try. I drive to Wingfield with my window open and music blaring. “You look horrible,” Bernie says when I sit in front of his desk.  “But one hundred—I reached our goal,” I say. “You still look horrible,” he says. “I know, I feel horrible,” I say and walk off. “Where you going?” he says. “To eat,” I say.

An audio tape is playing as I drive north on Bayview. “You are a furnace; you burn what you eat quickly and efficiently. You are a burning furnace. . . ” I pull over. Wow, I think, this tape is working—red hot pokers twist in my chest. I replay the tape. The pain increases so I drive a block and pull over for the next.

Behind white curtains at the York University Sports Clinic, I sit in my cotton cutt-offs and black sports bra. A jabbing pain sears along the side of and behind my left knee. “Maybe you’re not warming up properly and the load is too heavy,” the doctor says, telling me to take one month off training. “You’re at eight percent body fat,” he says and I say, “Really?” and I smile. Our family doctor says my prognosis is good; I’ve got two daughters and every incentive to get better. “Bodybuilding is not about health,” I say. She wants me to come in once a week for blood work. I tell her about my chest pains and the hypnosis tape. Dr. Pariser has been going to India every year for the past five years, so I figure she’d understand. She arranges a test involving an X-Ray and video. In Montreal, in the summer of ’72, I thought I was pissing blood. Dr. MacKinnon at the Royal Vic almost did an emergency exploratory. First, I had to pee standing up and on film. “I can’t pee standing up,” I said although I liked the idea of being in the movies. He was checking his schedule and asked, “By the way, what have you been eating the past few days?” “I have this thing about beets,” I said. The doctor shut his day timer and showed me to the door. “We almost did an emergency exploratory,” he said. “Why didn’t you mention your diet?” “You didn’t ask,” I said, which is a line Garth deals out decades later to which I say how could I ask if I didn’t know and he says that’s your problem isn’t it?
 
Dr. Pariser says I have a peptic ulcer, so I phone Abie who comes home with five bottles of cherry Maalox. He’s good when I’m sick. Same with the girls. Years later when I study transformational psychotherapy with an eastern bent, hypnosis, Time Line, and NLP and I'm spitting up platitudes, my Inner Critic rears up with the photo of my fluorescent insides, “Your body is a burning furnace . . .”

Your Body is a Burning Furnace

I’m working on the bicep plateload, struggling through super slow reps and inching my way past pain. “C’mon, impress me. Keep coming. One more rep. Now. I’ll tell you when to stop. I want another rep or this workout is over. I’m walking away, do you hear?” Bernie says.

I open my eyes wide wide and look up at him. I adore the man and his dialogue and I can feel a grin sneaking up. There’s a Nautilus rule: only the muscle being worked is allowed to respond. The face and body remain motionless. I stare hard at the metal bars in my hands. When “9 ½ Weeks” came out, I saw it six times and spent five-hundred dollars on lacy panties, bras, and garter belts at a bra boutique in a suburban strip mall on Leslie south of Cummer. “Look at her arms,” a customer said staring at my purple veins ripe as any junky’s. “You can have them too,” I said and proceeded to extol the virtues of bodybuilding and Bernie and Wingfield. The saleslady and customer didn’t say anything. I could feel the weight of their silence, but I was on my precontest high.

I don’t know when I started thinking about bodybuilding contests or even when I first heard about them. I worried Bernie might be getting bored counting all those reps. He had an image, he said, of me on stage, incredibly muscled and vascular. So one morning after my legs gave way from a leg press/leg extension superset, I told Bernie I was ready to compete. “You’re the only one who can help me,” I said, “who can make me work when I don’t want to and push me through pain. And the only one who can stop me from eating.” I bought little black books at Shopper’s Drug Mart in which Bernie would track the day’s exercises, weights, and reps, and at home I’d write little bits for him, logging my food intake, sliding in words about his grandeur as a coach, my doubts, goals, competitive longings and some home-grown conflict to ensnare my born-again Christian coach. Before each training session I hand him the book and he reads. Once I recorded eating twelve-hundred calories and he threw the book down and walked away. And another time, on a Saturday, I sat down in front of an open fridge and consumed over three-thousand calories in one sitting, I was that angry.

I have a soft-cover book that lists calories which I know by heart. You can call out any food and I know the calorie count. Bernie lets me eat five-hundred calories a day and I include lettuce, and cucumbers and celery and green peppers in the count. I eat tuna from the tin. I row on the Concept Two for two hours a day and for twenty minutes after each meal. One morning I visited another club, managed by a friend of Bernie’s, Fisher. “Fisher says you’re rowing all wrong,” Bernie told me the following day. “Oh yeah?” I said, because I’m proud of my rowing. I even have the Olympic Concept Two practice booklet beside me which I consult regularly. “Listen know-it-all, you’re rowing wrong. Fisher says you’re leaning way too far back and you’re going to hurt your back.” “So why didn’t he say anything?” “Because you’re mine,” Bernie says.

The contest is in November. In July I weigh a hundred and thirteen. On the first of August I weigh myself on my bathroom scale and it registers one hundred. I drive to Wingfield with my window open and music blaring. “You look horrible,” Bernie says when I sit in front of his desk.  “But one hundred—I reached our goal,” I say. “You still look horrible,” he says. “I know, I feel horrible,” I say and walk off. “Where you going?” he says. “To eat,” I say.
   
An audio tape plays is playing as I drive north on Bayview. “You are a furnace; you burn what you eat quickly and efficiently. You are a burning furnace. . . ” I pull over. Wow. I know I’m good and suggestive as all hell, but this tape is working—red hot pokers twist in my chest. I replay the tape. The pain increases. I can drive only one block and I  pull over for the second.

I’m sitting behind white curtains at the York University Sports Clinic. There’s a jabbing pain at the side of and behind my left knee. “Maybe you’re not warming up properly and the load is too heavy,” the doctor says, tells me to take one month off training, and advises me to see my family doctor. “You’re at eight percent body fat,” he says and I say, “Really?” and I smile. The family doctor says my prognosis is good; I’ve got two daughters and every incentive to get better. Still, she wants me to come in once a week for blood work. “Also, I’m having pains in my chest,” I say and tell her about the tape. Dr. Pariser has been going to India every year for the past five years, so I figure she’d understand. She arranges a test. In Montreal I was hung up on eating beets and Dr. MacKinnon at the Royal Vic almost did an emergency exploratory. First, I had to pee standing up and on film. “I can’t pee standing up,” I said, although I liked the idea of being in the movies.
   
Why do doctors have to schedule appointments to deal out lab results?  “Peptic ulcer” was what Dr. Pariser said and gave me a prescription to eat every three hours. Abie came home with five bottles of cherry Maalox. Years later I studied transformational psychotherapy with an eastern bent, hypnosis, Time Line, and NLP. And even at those times when I was feeling quite exalted, my Inner Critic would rear up with the photo of my fluorescent insides, “Your body is a burning furnace . . .”

Pigs and Anarchists

I drive a temperamental Chrysler Caravan that refuses to start when it rains. “Did you prime the engine?” Abie asks when I call him on his private line. “Yes,” I say. “You pressed your foot on the gas?” “Yes.” “All the way down? And you released slowly?” “Yes,” I say again. “Primed and released. My fingers hurt from keeping the key turned.”  “You’ll have to call the CAA,” he says. “Oh—” I say, my voice trailing off.

After supper I tell him the story. “You should have seen him─he was this old hippie wearing a baseball cap and he had long hair and a long flowing beard to here. ‘Every time it rains,’ I told him and he said, ‘Right on.’ He said he’s started every caravan in the city. ‘Every rainy day,’ he said. You have to change the plugs every three months. How come you didn’t tell me?”

“What’s the point?” Abie says and of course I know what he means. The front door handle has been broken for a year, door knobs are stuck, faucets drip or leak, staining sinks and ceilings, then there’s the dishwasher, air-conditioning, humidifier─the house rebelled from the moment we moved in. Maybe it’s just an old hippie or wino or both. I go around without my glasses so everything looks fine.  My father is meticulous. Dates are sewn into his suit jackets and even his shoes. He shakes his head when he visits and I cry every time. He can’t talk to me, he tells my mother. Once he came for the weekend and sat in one of our two good rooms and interrogated me about Abie: what was he doing anyway and why didn’t he get a real job what with two children and all. Talking through tears constricts my throat. “Phil, Phil,” my mother said. Two days after they left my mother phoned. My father’s chest pains on the return flight. put him in intensive care. “Stress,” my mother said.  It turned out the visit left him with a bout of severe indigestion. When he did have a heart attack two years later and was in a Miami hospital for a double bi-pass, I wasn’t there with him.

I don’t remember why. Maybe it was money. Or I was afraid to leave Abie alone with the girls. Everything would get better with money, we would thank him, he said. I think he changed the summer of ‘75 after working in the Don jail. A guard had half an ear bitten off, and once in the back of the van, a group of anarchists raised a raucous, screaming and stomping their feet. The cop turned on the heat, full blast.  “What do you mean turned up the heat?” I said. “They turned up the heat all the way. On a record hot summer day.” Sometimes he makes things up to protect me or himself, because I know those pigs roughed up the anarchists. It’s an anarchist’s lot. Sometime during the summer, Abie started calling homosexuals fruits and queers and talking about voting conservative. 

But then there are those times when we’re watching the National Geographic about married conservationists, and we’re sharing together and identifying like crazy. Abie collects National Geographic and I used to cut out pictures for my school projects from my father’s journals in our living room built-in bookshelves.

 “He’s insane to drive off and leave her alone,” Abie says when the husband hops in his Land Rover and drives off.
“She’s not alone,” I said.  “See, she’s with the film crew.”
“Oh, yes, you’re right,” Abie said and put his arm around me. There was a certain heaviness in the room, like in the country after a rain storm, when the air is stagnant and has substance, yet is still so new and fresh.  I remember things like that.

Asses On Location

On Tuesday, this being Friday, after I put on my white cotton leggings, black leotard, and matching wool leg warmers, I checked out my ass in the sliding door mirror in our dressing room. I rate asses─at the gym and as I weave my way through life. My own is just embarking on its way to bright lights and stardom, while others were either born on location or have already worked their way up.  There are five mirrors off our master bedroom: Abie has a closet with a sliding set of two, as do I. And then there’s the mirror taking up the wall space above the two sinks. We had a choice, one or two sinks, and I said without hesitation, “Two, of course.”  The wall-to-wall carpet is chocolate brown and the bathroom tiles mottled brown and black like the dressing room counter, only the counter has no shine to it. Most of the walls in the house are beige. Except for Josie’s room which upon her request, she was a year and a half, is morning sun yellow. Her bathroom is like the midday sun on the hottest summer day on record. And Caroline’s room is the palest frailest pink, later she chooses wallpaper with rose flowers skimming on an amethyst backdrop.

On Tuesday I forgot both daughters’ library books and swore heartily though not happily all the way home. And Abie, glued to his toilet at seven in the morning started screaming for toilet paper, “Janice. Janice. There’s no toilet paper again. I’m going to speak to Sue. Can’t you do a simple thing like replacing toilet paper? Damn it, Janice.” Sue is our housekeeper, a doll-faced curly-haired twenty-one year old from Bath. When we found out she was moonlighting in the entertainment field, we told the girls not to use the blue bathroom toilet anymore. I went around spraying Lysol, a favourite from our Montreal Bourette days when my cousin’s wife’s sister’s boyfriend visited, and without notifying us, brought along his crabs as company. I spent the weekend following him around and spraying. So when Abie called out his itemized list which included syphilis, gonorrhoea, hepatitis B and C, chlamydia, genital warts, pelvic inflammatory disease, and a few others I've forgotten even with his tendency toward repetition, I cringed and locked the blue bathroom door from the outside. “Look under the sink,” I called from the main floor foyer and flexed my legs. With strong legs you can surmount anything. Which is one reason I suggest weights. 

One summer weekend at a rented Haliburton country house, Abie slew seventeen mice. “Relax, relax, I got them all,” he called out, sliding down the window of his Tornado and honking his horn a few times for emphasis before he drove off for the week, and the next morning when I found mouse shit in the oatmeal, behind the toaster, and in my apron pockets, I shrieked. I was in the country, fearing and exultantly awaiting various hoodlums to attack an unguarded mother sheltering her young daughters with one amiable Golden Retriever and a bumbling four-month old Great Pyrenees, and I was grateful for my legs. (I never thought of punching until I met Garth at Strictly Fitness and he introduced me to his psycho boxer-friend Leslie from Guelph.) Anyhow, I think Rose at the Women’s Gym on Steeles and Laureleaf is catching on. Last week I dived into a conversation she was having with Myra. Rose was boasting about being the same weight since November 24, 1952, her wedding day: “I was bigger in the boobs, though. Larry was crazy about my boobs. I wasn’t so smart, not like my younger sister, but my mother wasn’t worried because I was big on top. And after the children, I lost weight on top and put it on here,” she said, patting her impressive rear.  “And Larry doesn’t mind, he just grabs a little lower.”  Which got me to thinking about my ankle weights.

I’m a sharing nymphomaniac. So I flexed my biceps, showed off my quads, and even did the old pec pose with that fancy two-thirds body twist. Rose laughed. My nose got red as it does when my heart becomes involved. The following week Rose paraded through her workout with  two-pound velcro weights around her ankles. Muscles thrill me. You work and build them up. There’s nothing existential about muscle. Abie says I’m becoming a jock which I take as a compliment.  So now I’m out boozing and wrestling with the best of them. The truth is I hate beer and generally I can’t stand the rest of them. I like staying home and getting stoned and telling jokes and laughing with my girls. Although lately I’ve been talking with the women in the sauna and listening to dialogue.  Sometimes I get dressed up and go dancing with Abie. I wear black high-heeled boots, my black body suit under a white Egyptian cotton shirt with a wide silver studded cinch belt, a white and black beaded choker,  matching earrings, dark brown eye-liner, and emerald green eye shadow. I leave my hair long. Abie raises his eyebrows when I walk downstairs. Once I paraded downstairs and slipped on the green shag carpet that hides missing or loose pieces of the parquet floor. There are some things you have no control over. 

Resist, He Said

I’m sitting on our Willowdale balcony with its smell of dog piss, shit, and liquid Lysol. I’d use the back yard, but the retaining wall has given way. The Tridel lawyer pitched questions like curve balls at me, questions about dates, expectations, and documents signed. I was wearing a black and red knee-length wool dress and black heels. (I still wore dresses in those days.) “Not my area,” I said. “I’m an artist and mother. That’s what I do.” Abie said I frustrated the lawyer during the discoveries. “Tough cookie, your wife,” the Tridel laywer had said.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I don’t remember dates and details. That’s what you do.”
“I know,” Abie said, “But they couldn’t believe anyone could be so clueless, so they figured you were smart enough to outwit them.”
“They’ve never met an artist,” I said. I flinched at his “clueless” comment, the way a horse’s coat twitches when a fly explores it, but you have to pick your battles and I had been in too many already. I was weary and ready for furlough. Deserting was not an option.
“It’s got its pluses and minuses,” he said.

On this balcony facing the Leslie ravine, I sit on my grandmother’s ladder back chair and read D. H., and I think ahh like sipping and appreciating fine wine, noting its name and year, and picturing the farm and wide feet and sweat dripping from the churning effort. He is like that D.H., all finery and sweat. I wander into the kitchen; there are, in the mornings, cereal stuck to bowls, magic markers on and under the table, lunch boxes, vitamin bottles, papers scattered, and I think I cannot clean this, I am too old and go to the bathroom to search my face for lines and at the same time survey my muscles against the thin straps of my T-shirt and the collage of the muscles, sun tan, and t-shirt. I shall do this, I think, I shall have the muscles and the flesh held tautly across, and I shall be my own jungle even though I cannot clean this house or intoxicate like D.H. or eat to the heart of the apple.

“Resist, resist,” says the skinny man with adult acne.The last thing I want to do is resist. Wednesday is my easy day. I suffer with Bernie on Monday and Friday. Bernie wholeheartedly embraces no pain, no gain. The weights bombard me. Muscles buckle and thrust.  “One more,” Bernie says, “show me how much you’re made of, show me how much you want it. One more inch, don’t stop, I’m with you. Last one.”

Except he’s never with me. It’s my war. Sometimes as I groan─I swore I’d never groan─there’s a man with a powerful upper torso and slight legs encased in silver spandex who groans. The first time I heard the spandex man, I laughed wildly to myself and grinned out loud. But once when I thought the weights would crush me, I made that same sound, a vocal thrust, a muted roar─sometimes as I groan I wonder, which is like the plague for bodybuilders, asking ancient questions like who am I and why am I here? And then Bernie says, “Bonus reps.” “What you mean bonus reps?” I say. “Quiet,” he growls, “growth reps, bonus, give me two, just two and you’re finished.”

Why do I do it? Because I love muscles. I adore strength. Power. Abie thinks I’m an attention seeker. I used to follow the sun around the yard. I thought the sun would make me beautiful. I sat with my head thrown back, chest up, one leg bent and poised. The gym demands more work. Muscles emerge and make their claims inward and outward and lend me direction.

Three months ago I stopped writing. There was a choice. Words or muscles. I chose muscles. Sometimes I talk in the gym. Before and after. I throw out words four times a week in analysis with a balding rowing/cycling therapist. He sits quite still while he’s working. But now here I am writing, taking up with my old flame. Who said choices have to be permanent or have any meaning? Besides, I resist.

Rolling in the Sixties

I love the sky. People love the reliable blue. They adore the sun. They think sky, sun, and ocean, though not necessarily in that order or preference. One morning I’m able to seamlessly combine all three and I think Hey man, this is it. This is fucking cool. When I’m feeling particularly ecstatic I like to slip into the sixties and roll around in its smooth idioms. I find myself in a six-passenger helicopter sitting beside a sandy-haired pilot who looks exactly like Mike Nichols─when he was making records with Elaine May─a son’s somewhere in the deep spacey blue and his mother admonishes him: “You don’t even have time to phone your own mother,” she says. Abie is always telling me I start from the tail end or thereabouts: "Gimme the subject and get to the point. What’s the point? Well?” he says. I tell him he’s a business man and I’m a writer, but the truth is he’s a schmuck.
   
Our travel agent who owns Pacific Island Adventures, which is a solid and accommodating agency as far as I can see, even though Abie refers to the owner as bitch, "the bitch this and the bitch that, get the bitch on the line,"  booked us on a flight to Kauai where we’d go on a remarkable helicopter tour. The woman in charge of the seating arrangements told us to walk along a dotted white line marked out on the runway. Where the line halted and shifted into a right angle, she made sharp military adjustment and abruptly stopped, jabbing her index finger toward the dotted line. Abie grinned and swerved into a curved pass. But then I was placed in the front seat beside Mike Nichols and Abie was directed to the back along with the girls.
   
“What’s your name?” Mike says.
“What?” I don’t hear well unless I focus. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing, I just don’t open my ear drums unless I’m expecting company.
“Your name.”
“Janice.” I don’t like the sound of my name. Next time I’m going to say Pandora which is my pseudonym─Pandora Cohen. Janice just doesn’t fit.
“Have you been in a helicopter before?” he yells.
“Once. Over Niagara Falls.” I say, expanding my vocal chords.
“Well you’ll love this,” he says, flashing a celestial smile and rummaging through a black plastic case with tapes. 
   
I’m afraid of heights. I hate roller coasters. Even children’s rides at amusement parks unnerve me. But as we soar up the sides of sienna mountains into the cavernous blue to the theme from 2001, I fall in love. Shit, I think, shit, I’m never going back. The sky taps into my veins and I’m hooked. Tracking the mountain’s slope from valley to peak, catapulting into an ancient valley where Mike the pilot-historian says four thousand years earlier, tribes chanted and danced to sacrificial offerings. “Notice,” he says, “the same waterfalls. There are hippies in these here mountains who set up camp in the sixties and never left. Even the feds can’t find them.”  I can’t stop smiling. I sit encased in glass and I'm grinning away.

When I grow old and can no longer lift weights of any significance, I’m going to phone old Mike in Kauai and take a lesson or two. Then screaming all the while, shit this is it man, this is where it’s at, I’ll merge with these Hawaiian skies, flash an ethereal smile, and become a Jewish Amelia Earhart even though I don’t identify with my Semitic tribe and could be mistaken for Greek or Italian. Still when a Jew is lost, newspapers print name, sex, and religion the way they do in cases of any race besides white, which I read somewhere is two-thirds of the world, and Jews world-wide mourn for a lost relative. I don’t want anyone to mourn for me. I don’t care whether or not I’m remembered. I just need to get away and know my girls will be fine. Sometimes I sit with myself─forty-five, I say, my voice soft and reassuring, forty-five. It’s just a number I know, but I enlarge it, keeping the original black and white which is my preference since black and white illuminate shadows which are truer to life than colour. So I create a billboard with a numerical enlargement worthy of any photography annual. I’ve always been wary of false advertising except when I was a teenager and dyed my hair red because I heard blonds had more fun and I wasn’t having a great time at all. So I used Lady Clairol, and my hair turned a pale shade of purple. Still, I repeat the number even though I know, I really do, you can’t have faith in advertising, even when it’s your own.

Fishing

“Mind if I walk with you?”
“No.”
“You mind or you don’t mind?”
“No, I don’t mind, yes.”
“I’ve seen you walking before. I thought there goes a woman in great shape. You walk fast.”
“Thank you.”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you from?”
“Toronto.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
“Baby.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It just sounded good.”
“What?”
“You’re a long way from home, baby. A song from the fifties.”
“How do you remember the fifties? You look twenty-five, twenty-seven tops.”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Really? That’s amazing. Could have fooled me.”
“I work out.”
“So I noticed. All the way from Toronto, huh?”
“Yep. All the way.”

He stops and looks at me through his red sunglasses. The man has a flat mind. Good muscles. Handsome.This is one fucking big ocean, I’m thinking. Dumb schmuck and this turquoise-green ocean. Lots of sand. Some dog shit. Mountains. Volcanoes. A De Niro type walks by. Hair slicked back. If I look close I might see eyes radiating passion, intelligence, that sweet je ne sais quoi.

“So you’re a writer?” the man says and flexes his pecs.
“How do you know?” I say, holding back a smile.
“I see you writing on the beach. Anything published? Can I say I met a real writer?”
"Shit."
“Oh, I’ve got stuff in the works.”
“Really! Maybe I read something of yours, saw a book somewhere?”
“I use a pseudonym.”
“What?”
“A fake name.”
“Dirty stuff, huh?”
“Yeah sure, real dirty. Smut. But smart you know. I write smart smut.”
“You’re something else you know that? But then I guess being a writer and all.  Listen I’m going to ask you something. I mean I could be real phony and go through all the preliminaries, but I said to myself she looks like a down-to-earth type you could be real honest with, like speak your mind, you know what I mean.”
“People tell me I’m easy to talk to. They tell me things.” 

I start walking faster, heading back to the rented Oahu beach house. It sure as fuck isn’t working out, but then what did I expect of a man with shaved pecs? Everything is beautiful. Paradise has received many accolades─more descriptive, definitely more poetic. I can’t write these days. We came here by plane. Fourteen hours in two planes, fourteen years of marriage, and a husband who calls me a cunt. “Cunt,” he said, slamming his hands on the wheel, “Goddamn cunt.” We were on the way to the airport to catch the plane to Kauai. We left too late. He was lost. I can’t read maps in a car. I get nauseous. During car trips on the old highway to Lake Alverna, my mother used to warm me of the looming threat to the digestive system of reading-while-driving.
 
I wake up at six in the morning. I’m enamoured with the shore and six o’clock is a time we can almost be alone. I want a life together─me and the shore, the shore and I. I worry about grammar. But then I worry about everything. Whether or not my stomach is flat veering on concave, whether my complexion is clear, my nose too outspoken, does my ass show signs of age even though I’m a baby on the inside? Should I say hello to the old couple who still hold hands in their vigorous morning walks or the fisherman who greets me every morning?  I worry about life. Except when I’m stoned at which time I dream about and glory in it like sitting in the sun after a long winter. This morning I set aside my sky blue contact lenses and decided to face life head on with my two-hundred-and-sixteen dollar prescription sun glasses purchased from Braddock Optical in Bayview Village Mall. A real clip joint. I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s important to know these things.

Six o’clock is a nice time. The sun is just waking up and there’s a slight wayward breeze. I’m a more seasoned walker than I was nine day ago. I hum Beverly Hills Cop and I speed up the tune to keep my walking brisk when it’s in danger of lagging. Of course I sing silently. It’s all in my head. As for moving, I’m more confident lately. One leg steps forward and the other naturally follows. The beach is long. Three miles in one direction. Two in the other. The ocean is forever. I love constancy although I haven’t always been constant. I like waves muscling in. Yesterday I ventured out among them. I felt brave and simultaneously compliant. Pono, our Hawaiian guide, relishes the word “awesome.” The mountains. Lichee nuts. Taro chips. Glen Fry’s estate. All awesome. Usually he’s right.

On this beach, I wish to be awesome. I rein in my stomach and after a while my right side cramps up, but I’m a bronco champion; I keep my stomach on a short rope and I won’t let go. When I planted my feet on this fine Hawaiian sand, my stomach went wild inside, felt its right to freedom, unshackled its urban restraints.  My legs pulled out individually as if each was in therapy for different neuroses. Even my ass cheeks worked separately, each pulling to its singular rhythm and desire. Next time I’ll be leaner and tougher. I want to scale one of the mountains in the distance and remain forever on top or let this transparent turquoise water wash over me. I don’t want to be rescued and I’m tired of being grounded.

At seven the sand is already blemished with footprints. The woman with waist-length blond hair has already jogged both ways and is on her third jaunt. The old couple in their matching skimpy bathing suits and their greying dog have been out for half an hour, I guess. No one except my husband wears a watch on the beach. People go by their natural rhythms. There are many Californians here. Pono married a blond Californian teacher. Six years older than he, plump, slightly weathered from the sun, but still blond. “She moved to California, but she found paradise in Hawaii,” he said. I stand with the waves lapping around my ankles as I peer out to the edges of the ocean. Is paradise out there? On a grassy sand dune, a skinny man holds a silver tub of fish. I watch him walk ashore from his dinghy. “Good morning,” he says as I stride by gallantly holding in my stomach. “Good morning,” he says again. If I answer he might think I want him. Maybe he’ll throw me into the bushes or onto his boat and keep me here on this or another island. He will keep saying good morning until I look at him and then I realize all he knows is how to say good morning and maybe he’s just selling fish. “Good morning good morning good morning,” he chants. My bathing suit has slipped up too high. I consider swinging around and running to the fisherman: no more worries about my book being discovered, its cover spread open like a hooker on the prowl, no more trying to keep up with Abie’s panting when all I want to do is drop out of the race, no more preset smiles as I watch Caroline running like a newly born colt, her eyes clear blue as she jolts toward me. I turn around and face the fisherman. “Good morning,” I say and then I quickly walk away.

Copyright Janice Colman 2009

Hot Lines

       

In the winter, Caroline started falling. She’d walk up three stairs and lose her balance. Her doctor at Mt. Sinai said she had the flu and to keep giving her water. But she kept falling on those stairs. I phoned hot lines, the hospital pharmacy, our regular pharmacy, the family doctor, her hospital doctor, the mental health association, and left messages at Nine South, Mount Sinai’s in-patient ward where I knew some of the nurses. “Bring her in for blood work. And keep giving her lots of water,” her doctor said.  She should drink more water. Try to eat. Meanwhile that lithium kept climbing in her system—4.3 units, 5.1, and two days later after eight hours in emergency, 6.5. 

Time passes slowly and quickly in emergency. You slam down tears and related fears, and you stay in intensive for five days, head resting on the bars of bed side, eyes staring in.
“Boy, she’s tough,” the doctor said. “We’ve given her five times the regular dose and she’s not out yet.”
“You seem to have a way with her,” the doctor said.
I just stared at him.
“We’re going to cut holes in her thighs for the dialysis tubes. You’ll be alright?”
“Yes. We’re a tough bunch.”
“I see that. You hold her down and tell me if her legs start twitching.”
“They’re twitching,” I said. “Twitching again.”
After an hour, the doctor sent me out.
Abie phoned from Geneva.
“She’s going to die,” I said. “Come back. Take a plane and come back.”
“I can’t. We’re closing. We’re getting close.”
I could hear voices on his side.
“What could I do anyhow? What good would I be? Don’t worry, I’m on top of this. I’m calling every hour.”
“That’s what they tell me,” I said.
     
 I spent five days with my head pressed against the railing of that hospital bed. On the third day, I treated myself to an hour of training at the Y gym. I thought I was doing fine. I was calm, mostly I didn’t cry. Except when I’d go to the bathroom, I’d start sobbing and sounds like an animal wailing in the night would build in my chest and spontaneously erupt. Or I’d be walking to the subway and my legs would give way. But I was never alone, because in the midst of everything, all the evictions and sad times, my muscles remained intact and kept me going.
   
I hid the Western Union bank drafts in the folds of my deceased grandmother’s light blue satin tablecloth with its matching serviettes. One draft purchased a shoe box of steroids —Anavar, Clenbuterol, Winstol V—pure good shit—and later on, I added D Bol that Crazy Bobby, my coach’s best friend, gave me for my forty-seventh birthday. Bobby was in love with Sophie, a Greek lesbian whom he plotted to marry.  My coach was engaged to a sweet nurse named Kathy but he had the hots for me. That’s how it goes. Coaches fall in love with their athletes and athletes will do anything for their coaches. John was my mentor although there was a fifteen year difference between us. In my way, I was wild crazy in love with him—that is until I met Garth who stole my heart at Strictly Fitness, and by daring me to move into the Nina Street bachelor basement with him, saved my life.
   
By summer, I was slipping adavan down Caroline’s throat every two-and-a-half hours so she could sleep and stay calm. I once had dog Abie named Pluto after the planet although I never saw the link. When Pluto chewed at furniture, Abie would bind the dog’s mouth with silver masking tape and with old-fashioned zeal, he’d strap the puppy’s body whenever he ran off and when he wouldn’t listen to commands. So whenever the doorbell rang, Pluto would sneak up behind me, pry open the door and bolt.  Abie applied the same training techniques to our first born. “Disappear,” Abie would say to her as she’d approach him while was watching his TV. “Get lost.” And when she couldn’t sleep at night, the dark closing in around her, he’d yell, “I’m going to tie her down, you hear? I’m going to take off my belt and strap her and tie her down.” I never let him do any of those things. I’d stand in front of him with my strong voice and muscles and I’d say, “Not on my life, you won’t.” 

I don’t know how I found the strength to remain all those years and how I finally found the strength to leave. “You’re never going to do it,” Garth said and I took his dare. It was the only way I could exit and I guess he knew it. I left with my books and my canvases. My muscles kept me upright.

Robbing the Bank at Super Fitness (Naked Words excerpt)

“You’re the only one who comes to Super Fitness with a stash of books. You think you’re such a maven, don’t you?” says the leather-skinned consultant behind the glass and chrome counter.  I look at her royal blue spandex leotard and I think I need one of those all I wear are my spaghetti strap cottons maybe I should ask her, I talk about shopping to distract her while I rob the bank, because I’m getting in shape─two machine circuits, slipping the stick on the weight stacks lower and lower, two aerobic classes back to back. “You think you’re overdoing it?” an instructor on the floor asks, her thick legs in sturdy black cotton. She says she used to be a skater. Her hair is black, cropped close to her head and curly. I open my hardcover Schwarzenegger “Weight Training for Women” and strap on my metal sandals. “Thanks,” I say, “But I’m on a mission.”

I’m going to be thirty-six on March twelfth. I belong to two exercise clubs. Christine named the Laureleaf location after herself. She’s in all the Super Fitness commercials and when she walks onto the gym floor the women size her up: how even is her tan, look at the heeled sandals she’s wearing with those sheer shiny tights and high-legged leotard, “she sure doesn’t have a Jewish ass,” one woman in hot pink whispers and her friend says, “if she had more in the ass, she’d have more on top.” The pink woman elbows her friend.  Christine says if I want to do Nautilus then I have to work out three times a week and recommends the Sutton Place location.

“It’s going to cost more,” Abie says. “Maybe she thinks I’ve outgrown the women,” I say, “and besides I have the gold membership that lets me into any Super Fitness club.” And anyhow Caroline is going to school nearby, another private school─we’re always behind in payments. Mrs. Drummond, the obese accountant with short sandy hair and oversize plastic glasses, calls me and I say “oh I didn’t realize and I’ll have to talk to my husband he’s one of those forgetful business men, no problem, I just have to take over, you know how it is” and then I go to Abie─ “I’m there everyday and I’m embarrassed. I know they know and they don’t say anything, but they know.” Abie shrugs his shoulders.

“It’s like this,” I say to Abie one night while he twisting the fat on my inner thighs, “There are women’s days and men’s days, but it’s neat, see, because I just stride up and the stack’s at two-hundred maybe one of the guys from the day before and I hop on and press like it’s no big deal.”
“You crave attention, you know that? Turn over.”
“Why should I turn over?” I say.
“You want me to do your ass or not?” he says.
“You’re a leach.”
“Same as every other man. You know they tell the male instructors to flirt with female members. It’s part of the hype.”
“No one’s flirting with me,” I say. Although that morning a fresh-faced instructor with a crew cut showed me how to use the squat machine and placed his hand on my right quadriceps. “Not bad,” he said, “what are you worried about?” and walked off to a lady with impressive thighs on the Nautilus inner thigh machine. You have to open and close on that machine and I started checking for hints of stray pubic hairs. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re spreading ninety pounds and doing the old pubic check. So I’m buying one-hundred percent cotton tights. I want to look, need, to feel strong, Atlas strong and lean and competent in an effortless kind of way although I work out two-and-a-half hours a day, five times a week.

Massaging Back to Beautiful

“There are road bumps on the outsides of my thighs. I can’t recognize myself,” I say to Abie. “I was beautiful once.”
“You still are and you’re always beautiful to me,” he says without looking up from his magazine. He collects Men’s Health, but he doesn’t look any different.

I stand in the door way with my hands on my hips. “I don’t want to be beautiful to you. I want to be beautiful. I was an actress once. And I’ve lost it.” I lean over the brown mottled dressing room counter and put my head in my hands, my hair hangs over my face and chest.

“C’mere.” Abie says.
“What’s the point,” I say, “and don’t answer that.” He has a one-track mind. Sometimes I think he’s my male counterpart, until he makes one of his puckered-ass red-neck comments.
“It says here fat massages can speed up fat loss by thirty percent. Breaks down and helps metabolize cellulite. I kid you not. I’ve got my master’s remember?”
“You don’t have your masters.”
“Well I took masters courses. Pre-med. So you game or not?”
“Yeah. Sure. I’m game.”

And that’s when Abie began those nightly massages, using the edges of his hands like a deba bocho and then his two hands to grab and wring out fat like the old washer-wringer machine that stood in the screened veranda in our Lake Alverna country house. I didn’t mind because I was getting my body back and coming into my own again. Course he’d try to slip a finger or two up my cunt and I’d get really pissed off, but meanwhile he was getting all turned on so when he finished, I’d give it to him anyway. I wanted to shine in the sun again. One day, he came home with these red steel sandals─“Put your running shoes on and these over, see, and then you do those kick outs and all that shit from the Twenty Minute Workout. And if you want to take off your clothes, you can.”

I’m still in my Clearwater nudist mode, so I slap on those five-pound sandals over my hiking boots and do kick-outs, twenty to each side and twenty to the back. Abie reads his magazines with his eyebrows arched like kid’s rendition of a bird flying, his lids lowered and glasses slipping like jeans below the hips. I have to hand it to the man, even when we come home late after a flick or a fight, he’s there pulling my flesh. I’m getting my body back, hopes of youth and joy, sweetness and dreams─my skin’s going to shimmer stars in the daylight and glow hot as a mid-day summer sun at night.

A Job Works Every Time

“Lou moved into his new condo yesterday.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah, we took the kids out and later I went over.”
“You went there?”
“And I stayed for breakfast the next morning! So there’s Lou and I having breakfast, and his girlfriend comes in and he says, ‘I brought Edie over to show her the apartment and I invited her to join us for breakfast.’”
“You got weird relationship, Edie. So is she pretty?”
“Na. She’s kind of plain, but young. It would have been our twenty-ninth today. We’ve got a history behind us. Twenty-seven years and two kids. I didn’t ask for money, so we’re friends. We feel relaxed together, you know what I mean? Like we go to a movie and he farts. Whose husband doesn’t fart in front of her? And you know what he says? ‘You know, Edie, you’re still the only one I fart in front of.’”

Edie pours water from the bucket on to the coals even though the sign says “Please don’t throw water on the coals. This is a dry sauna.” She tucks the corner of her white gym towel under her armpit. Her legs are a map of veins, the dark blue lines blurring under the sepia wash of her Miami tan. It’s scorching hot on the third bench, but I lie flat on my frayed green bath towel and slide my memory’s doors open. They’re like those self-closing doors that keep out cold and heat, and I have to consciously keep them propped open. I’m thinking Jewish yentas would flesh out my book and I can't wait to tell Abie, so I swoop down on the sauna dialogue.

“So Myra, you coming to Vegas with the girls?”
“Who’s to know? I didn’t talk to Saul about it yet.”
“What you mean, talk to Saul? You’re a big girl, Myra. Look at that behind you got. Never mind, never mind─you need Saul’s blessing before you wipe yourself?”
“And who’s going to pay for the hotel and shopping? So I'll bring it up after supper and he'll say ‘sure if you really want’ and  I'll look at his face.”
“What’s all this looking meshugas?”
“It’s like this─Saul unbuckles his belt after dinner and he goes into the family room to watch the news, I finish off the dishes, have a cup of tea, maybe a little nosh, and when I go up, he’s in bed reading the newspaper, with his pillow and mine behind him─a man needs two pillows he says, a woman can use her own head, it’s so soft. When he said that I started adding extra schmaltz in his food whenever he complains about his weight. Nothing too fatty, you know, just a little extra olive oil.”

I gasp because I do that too. In Abie’s salad’s. The women look up at me. “The heat,” I say, leaning back and covering my face with a wet washcloth. Maybe if I can’t see them and my face is covered, they’ll continue. When Abie suggested I go to this women’s gym, he didn’t know the joint would be full of dialogue.

“Myra,” Edie turns to squarely face her friend. “Do like I do, give him a job . . . a job, you yutz, offer him a job.”
“Gonif! You do that?”
“Every time. I want something real bad, I offer Mort a job. Depends what I want. A dress─one job. A dress and shoes. Two.”
They’re laughing and nudging each other like two crazed schoolgirls.
“How much for a trip to Vegas?” Myra asks.
“Tell him a year and then schedule a lot of dentist appointments.”

Cunt and Cock Wars

After our six years living together, with my tears and recriminations on both sides, I wanted to tell Garth that I missed his cock wrecking havoc with my insides, his smooth forehead I loved to trace, and his big hands lying flat gently on my skin. Does he remember me with any fondness? He is one who recalls some of the good and certainly the bad.

Oh Garth, do you remember when you first said “Get on all fours,” and the pain, honey, how you pressed your cock against my cunt, pressed and slammed and still you couldn’t squeeze your way in. “Get on all fours,” you said, covering the span of my hips with your hands. Did you come into this world just to hold me so softly with those immense hands of yours? “Hold still, sh, sh,” you said, “that’s it, easy, easy now.” It hurt, really it did. And when you were in, bashing away and knocking at the end of my cunt which is my heart, you said, “You love this don’t you?” and I was thinking no, I don’t, but the thing is I loved you — so I placed my forehead on the bed, bit the pillow and my forearms, sucked in air and whooshed it out. Love hurts. It sears. Opens. So that love, in the name of Garth, or any name, any name will do, may enter. That’s the best time, when love stands before your cunt, doesn’t even ring beforehand, just plain out opens the door and enters. And looking back, I think Garth was right─love does win, but still, it’s one hell of a battle.

Copyright Janice Colman 2009

Maudit Juif

I sift through layers of a muddy lake until I settle at the bottom. There are no bubbles floating up to offer me hope. My heart slows down. I cross my legs and sit and sit. Sometimes I stretch my legs out. The water surrounding reminds me of my childhood room, that stream of light coursing from a ceiling corner to a pinpoint on my skin, except this water presses down on each pore, soaking me through and through. I wait. I am always waiting: for Caroline to wake up; for Caroline’s lids to become heavy with sleep; to walk through the house when hush is a sound; to be alone; not to be alone. 

I love gladiolas. Also ferns. Wild flowers. Every week I order gladiolas for each of our main rooms, even the ones without furniture. Young Brothers delivers all the fruit and vegetables and replaces flowers and plants that die from drowning or drought. Last week I added up the grocery tab, including the butcher, and it came to three hundred and fifty a week. 
“My banker says we’re overdrawn by one thousand every month,” Abie says and I say “oh” and “I’ll try to do better.” He’s a head hunter now and I think it suits him since he’s always talking about hunters and farmers. “Not everyone can be a hunter,” he says. When we go to those fast food places he says “Repeat” and “Is there someone here who speaks English?” I don’t stand in line with him anymore. Usually I wait in the car and refuse to go in. “You forget where you came from,” I say. “You spoke Yiddish on the farm until you moved to the city.” He reminds me that my grandparents were Russian peasants and my father is the son of a shoemaker. “Exactly,” I say.

I know my roots. Challah bread and the wind-up menorah, Sunday dinners and weekly visits to my grandmothers, kasha knishes and garlic bread, the Voice of Women and Tommy Douglas, dressmakers and Acapulco, the Bolshoi and the Soviet Army Chorus, Angelina in her blue and white striped uniform receiving the day’s instructions from my mother, Borden’s milkman in his brown uniform, my mother ordering meat from NDG butchers, the bald vegetable man, the gardener bringing flats of burgundy leaves and posies in primary colours for my mother to choose from, deliveries from Steinberg’s, our green station wagon for those rare trips to the supermarket. 

Abie was born in a DP camp outside Munich. After the war his mother, dressed as a nun, travelled from Poland to Siberia in search of her husband whom she had just married before he was sent away, and she, along with thirty-six others hid in the cave. One thousand days underground. Abie says he’s going to rewrite the Baba’s book. He says that after seders and weddings. In Canada, three brothers, one sister, and their respective families lived in a four-room farmhouse in Chateguay─each family to one room. At mealtimes the children would sit at the big table in the kitchen and grab food from platters of steaming potatoes, corn, and cabbage.

When I tell Abie he has no manners, he tells me another farm story. He also tells me how his mother used to scream out in her sleep every night, and when his family moved to the duplex on De La Peltie, how he and Mendel were chased by chain-wielding gangs yelling “Maudit Juif,” how they’d ambush the nuns, pelting them with snowballs, and how he’d stand, even in winter, on his back balcony so he could hear Oscar Peterson play piano. And then his family moved to the bungalow on Robinson Avenue while the uncles had their split-level custom houses in Hampstead. We both like money─Abie because he never had enough and I because we always had more than enough. 

Copyright Janice Colman 2009

Writing and Erotica

There are no pictures of mountains or fields on my wall calendar. I tear off the months as they pass, crumble and throw them in the metal trash can under my desk. Each month I hope to discover a book in my fingertips─I rotate my hands so my palms face up, close my eyes, and rub the soft edges of my fingers. Then I place my hands on my Smith Corona the way a musician’s hands light on piano keys. Some musicians set their hands in place and music just flows. Not me.  With Mme. Deslandres I practised right hand, left hand, sang notes, bar by bar. I write the same way. I’m hungry all the time.  Words gnaw at me.  I want I want I want. More than sex, more than love. When I was twenty, I was obsessed with acting and fame. Now when Abie calls me to watch a play on TV, he brings chips in a bowl for himself and a box of Kleenex for me. I walked out on the love of my life and I’ve never recovered.

The day before my wedding, I threw out all my pre-Abie writing─laboured poems, diaries chronicling love and hate and nothing in between, letters written to boyfriends and never mailed─I figured I should start fresh. These days I write erotic poetry inspired by midnight solitary sessions on a cold bathroom floor and sometimes I write about Abie when I’m angry at him and even when I’m not (mostly I am). I read both to him. “Write a Harlequin,” he says, “how hard can it be?” But you see, there are good writers and nice writers although I can never remember which is which. Erotic poems are just an easy lay, and like me, my short stories are all dressed up and raring to go with no idea of where they’re headed. And besides, I’m not good at making up stories. Lying is one thing; fiction is another.

   

My mother keeps her clothes in three walk-in closets. She inserts shoes trees and tissue paper in the toes of her shoes to keep their shape. Her stockings are rolled into clear plastic bags, striped hat boxes arranged in a row on the shelf above her quilted garment bags. Everything is labelled. Every time she looks at her writing, she makes plans to take a course in calligraphy, and she really means it. But then she gets depressed, sometimes for four months on end and then one morning CBC FM streams from her room on the top floor as she sets aside clothes for different seasons, sifts through her cedar chest, places mothballs in the feet of old nylon stockings─she works and pauses, each article reminding her of a certain time or episode or lost wish. And that’s how I am with my writing, some handwritten on papers lined and unlined, typed on sheets, scribbled in notepads. They’re my photo albums, I guess. 

“I like to write erotica,” I say one morning while Abie’s cooking up our Saturday breakfast of bacon and eggs, and I’m buttering four slices of my homemade rye.
“It’s no wonder. You were raised on a diet of communist propaganda and pornography.”
“See, but I want it to be more. Like my writing about our life. I want to write about Clearwater and marriage and chasing Pluto through the cornfield. And how you love to eat,” I say as he turns over the bacon and reaches over for another slice of bread.
“I am a sensualist,” he says. “You have to eat to live, might as well enjoy. If you knew the meaning of geschmuck─”
I say “I know what it means,” and he challenges me. “Oh yeah?” he says. “It means tasty. Like enjoy your geschmucked breakfast,” I say and leave the room.
“That’s it,” he calls after me. “Walk away.”

I sit crouched and waiting in the turquoise armchair by the picture window. He walks over to me with a plate full of eggs and bacon, two slices of bread, and an unpeeled navel orange.
“Here,” he says. “Have some geschmucked food.”
“Thank you,” I say and take the plate from him.
“See?” he says and wipes my eyes with his t-shirt.”
“You don’t take me seriously,” I say.
“Don’t be silly, of course I take you seriously.”
“You do?”
“You’re going to be a great writer. Up there with Anais Nin.”
“Sure sure,” I say, “but do you think it’ll be interesting?”
“I find it interesting.”
“But you’re my husband. I want to know whether it’ll sell.”
“Sex always sells.”
“And how will I work in dialogue? There has to be dialogue,” I say.
“Don’t worry so much. You’ll find a way.”
“And it has to be meaningful.”
“Sounds like sex. Come on, I’ll give you some content.”
“But will it be geschmucked?  See, that’s it. That’s what I want. I want my writing to be geschmucked. I want to write words that will be relished.”
He puts my plate on the coffee table and pulls me up to him.
“So you really think I’m a writer?” I say.

On Writing Erotica

Marriage and Nudism

“You got a compliment at Clearwater.”
“I did, really?”
“Uh, huh,” Abie says and opens our yellow-gold fridge. “You drank my root beer.”
“Didn't.”
“So where is it?”
“Why don’t you look before you accuse someone?”  My right hand clenches except for the middle finger.
“Well if you know, you could avoid all this by telling me in the first place.”
I worry about my heart which shudders and seizes up like an old car.
And I’m in love with Larry McMurtry who teaches my educational philosophy class. He has a wife and four kids. They live in a house with a wrap-around veranda and they’re enormously happy. No. They’re not. His wife is dying. It’s very sad.  
    
There’s an old man who wears a tight white bathing cap when he swims. Abie says he was a rower in the 1939 Olympics. When I’m at Clearwater, my head clears. My brain’s forecast is generally cloudy with light or heavy rain and frequent threat of storms brewing. Clearwater women walk with tropical ease even though extra flesh drags on them like a mother with six kids tagging on to the hem of her skirt. I think all the women are beautiful and that I am too. Abie and I have our favourite rock at the base of the quarry. It’s flat and specked with flecks of quartz that sparkle in any weather. Once I arrange our knapsacks with extra sandwiches for Abie and fruit for me, I spread out a bath towel, slip out my clothes as though it’s the most natural thing to do, lie down and close my eyes.

“Hey, ya hear Wally’s up for coke?”
“Figured he’d be up for something with those dogs of his,” Abie says.
“Yeah well, he’s turning religious on us, some high priest, something like that.”
“Oh yeah?”
“High Priest, Church of the Universe, so here we are naked before God.'
The man’s squatting between Abie and me. I open my eyes. It’s the man with drooping balls. He drives his shiny black truck down the path to these rocks and unloads his cooler of beer hunkered down with ice. Not everybody drinks and no one gets drunk and if they do, they’re quiet about it.

“That’s the guy who complimented you,” Abie says.
I turn onto my stomach. “The one you started telling me about?”
“That’s the one.”
“So?'
“So he says you’ve got the best tits here.”
“Really? He said that?”
“Yeah. You’re such a sucker, you know that?”
“So I like compliments,” I say.
“Like is putting it mildly,” Abie says.

I get up and walk over to the edge of the rocks and dip my toe in the water. The water is cold and clear because there’s an underground spring. The old rower says there’s a slope of rocks going down just like there is on the outside of the quarry. And one summer a diver bashed his skull diving off the rocks at the top. I just jump off the rocks at the quarry’s base. And then I’m so happy, I laugh and laugh and even Abie smiles.
“You want a towel?” Abie calls out when I pull myself onto the rocks.
“Na, I’m fine,” I say and I lean back as if I’m catching the last rays of sun although the sky is overcast and it’s the end of August.
“You’re so predictable,” Abie says on the drive home.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I say and I turn away because I can’t help smiling.
 

© Janice Colman 2008

Highway 6

From the time of her conception until today, thirty-three years later, I’ve been drunk on Caroline. Tried to kick the habit, but she stuck in my blood like a lost lover and the truth is I liked her being there. And I think that’s where my problems with Abie began. See, there’s a cunt-full of difference between life before and after children. Abie always figured his inflated cock would fill my heart and soul. Even though I soon grew to love and hate him, he was all I had. But when I lay eyes on Caroline, I was gone. No good-byes. I zipped up my heart, brought my luggage to the front door, and joined the wild snowflakes celebrating outside and pulling an all-nighter.

“What the hell are you doing? It’s freezing in here. Are you out of your fucking mind?” Abie screamed and turned up the TV. But I was ready for even the foulest weather and I laughed─with my baby wrapped inside my coat under my dress and strapped against the sweet-as-goat’s-milk warmth of my belly, I let out a long low belly laugh and left. Abie never knew what hit him.

[Decades later he emailed me from Moscow. “You never understood me”─capitalizing the adverb in the most annoying way. Had he bent over to contemplate the pin-point opening at the tip of his cock, he could have more introspective (with Abie there was no other way─his cock has always been his white cane).]

“You kept me awake all night,” he says.
“I was the one jumping up,” I say.
“You’re the one with tits,” he says.
I lean forward. "Yeah, well what do you think of this?" I say, pulling at the discoloured skin under my eyes.  When I was a kid spending summers in Lake Alverna, I smeared my mother’s steel blue and purple eye shadow on the skin beneath my eyes and paraded up to Robbie Dainow, “See what you did,” I said. “Make-up!” he scoffed and held my hands behind my back while Allen Herscovici wet his hands in the lake and knuckle-rubbed my skin. “Is not!” I said as the make-up morphed from my skin to his.

I look back on this life with a mixture of longing, humour, and regret. This morning Abie told me he’s closing his deal in Russia. He’s shacked up with his girlfriend Anya, who was living with him in Toronto until she got fed up and returned to her tiny Moscow walk-up. Abie was out of rent for his drab apartment hotel so he drummed up a ticket and now he’s in Russia wheedling and dealing.

“It’s going to be a nice Chanukah,” he said.
“Well, you just better enjoy your life” I said. “Because you’re in the last act.”
“The way I think of it, I have one-third of my life left and that’s a good chunk.”
"Yeah, but with what quality of life?” I said, looking out my kitchen window at the stark winter trees and cold grey sky.

                                                  **********************************************************

Abie bundles Caroline into the royal blue baby backpack he bought through the Mountain Co-Op Catalogue. He’s efficient getting us out of the house. We visit his cousin Claire, her husband Henry and their baby Joshua who’s the same age as Caroline. Henry and Claire’s Bathurst apartment is stuffed with Amway products and sometimes they take Joshua to Amway revival meetings. They used to be Buddhists and they’re still vegetarians though Claire sneaks chicken when Henry’s not around. She says the abrupt change in her diet makes her face break out and I think of Utrillo.

Even in excess snow which can never equal the mountainous stashes of my Quebec childhood, we go to the Farmer’s Market in Kitchener and the Elora Gorge. In early June, we head for Clearwater. This is one of the good things about Abie. He’s up for just about anything. We were driving on Highway 6 and picked up a long-haired hitchhiker. “Who’s gonna stop for a hippie around here?” I said, so Abie pulled over, the pavement crackling under the tires. (There are certain sounds that make me happy and sound of pebbles under a car’s tires is one of them─memories of my father driving up the path to our country house─headlights and stars and my mother with her skirt swirling, half walking, half running through the gap in the cedar hedge to greet him.)

“Hey you guys up for a swim in the cleanest water you’ll ever find?” the hitchhiker said.
“We’re just going into town to pick up books for school.” Abie said and I turned around and smiled.
“Thanks,” I said, “That’s nice of you to offer.” And I smiled again. There’s a warm rush following gentle words or gestures, a soulful swelling up that fills my heart and settles in my cunt. And that’s when we started going to Clearwater.

Of Drummers and Bodybuilders (Naked Words Excerpt)

“[Mark] sweetest baby of mine, I don’t know how you deal with me when I’m all riled up like this, when my soul overheats and seizes. Just fuck me baby, swing your hard-on over this way; it’s all OK in the end. And even though you’re miles away–with all our words and how fucking cool we are, throw me over your long-distance shoulders and hammer down my exposed nerves with one hardcore email fuck.”

The truth is, while trying to play it cool and easy, I’m pissed off. Listen schmuck, I want to say, I want details, like the date and time of day you first sucked and fucked your way into my heart. And what I’m wanting to know is you remember me, that you think of me, that yearning tugs at you like a lost child and will not let go.
       
“Lie on me,” I said that first night.
“I’ll crush you.”
“So how much do you weigh?” I said, although from my bodybuilding days, I was a pretty good judge of mass. Some men are really puny these days, although Mark was six-feet tall with moderate muscle mass.
“Two-hundred, maybe two-ten,” he said.
“Try me.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. All your weight. No prissy stuff.”
“You sure some woman,” he whistled. I didn’t tell him about my sumo-builder man, Garth. 

I hear the tongue of a drunk becomes thick and woolly and I’m thinking my clit must have felt like that. Did it? I need to know because it’s details that make even dreams seem real─like how many times you kissed my cunt because I read somewhere― and I thought, wow, what a fucking hip bit, my drummer man’s gonna spin over this―circling Kailish, that famous Indian mountaintop in India, could cleanse the sins of a lifetime. And for one hundred and eight koras, one would be granted access to Nirvana and complete emancipation. Which is a really neat concept. I’m offering Mark my flange, my hair pie, my piss flapper, my quim to tongue in mesmerizing swirls so he’d be granted not only absolution, but also access to eternal paradise.

I need to impress him. Hung up on making a dent in this man with the gold earrings, who could phone fuck like an angel and a pirate. Except those times when his voice travels so deep low down and dirty. I have trouble hearing certain tones. I get it from my grandmother.  So I’d moan and breathe whoo whoo into the receiver that he wouldn’t know low tones elude me and phone fucking is no great thrill anyhow. Not like skin to skin.

Phone fucking just doesn’t do it for me. Neither does body painting─when I was a builder, Crazy Bob the nighttime assistant manager of the Work-Out on St. Clair invited me over to his mother’s group home where he and his Greek lesbian girlfriend Sophie kept a room. Bob had this idea that if I painted Sophie’s tits and if she’d returned the favour and decorated mine, we’d all get turned on and fuck between all those swirls of colour. I’m an artist. I mean I paint, but painting tits doesn’t inspire me. I’m kind of good at design and colour, but I have a long ways to go in the rendering department. “Mind if I take a photo?” Bob said. “Sure thing,” I said. I grimace when I’m around cameras. My lips purse and the tip of my nose elongates. I have this thing about my nose.

“So, what ya think?” Bob was saying behind the camera.
“Kinda boring, really.” I said.
“You’re no fun,” Bob said, putting his arm around his Sophie.
   
There’s nothing like music. Music is like sex for me. (What was that Pygmalion quote? ─“Gin was mother’s milk to her.”) I stand at the side of the stage with the music streaming toward me. The audience is a backdrop. One night at Healey’s, I inched my way to my favourite listening spot. The room was packed. Some were there to revel in the music of a famous blues band. Others pissed away a night on the town, drinking and getting rowdy.

The band was American, most of them from Chicago–keyboard, drummer, bass player, lead guitar. I stood watching the bass player, his fingers shifting slides with such ease, shuffling his legs with a soft side-to-side hip tie-in. The lead guitarist wore a large gold cross on his chest.  And then I saw a mountain range of drums. Heard the swish of snares that draws women in, the hot symbols, a bit of a steady one, two, three beat, and just when the drummer was immersed in that scene, he’d switch, slide in more snares, and using the soft balls at the end of the stick, mute and ease the sound. He was in a different place, just jamming away and in the groove with his eyes closed and smiling.

I was wearing a white Lycra v-neck shirt and tight black shimmering gym pants. The room was packed─ strangers standing close to each other, shoulders and assorted body parts touching. A drunk’s hand arced out toward the lead guitarist’s instrument and my builder’s muscles tightened, tension branching out into my biceps and hands. “You don’t want to do that,” I said, seizing the guy’s wrist, which was small and bony. “I got no feeling left in my wrists,” the drunk whined. It was a sweet builder’s moment.

“Isn’t the bass player cute?” said a frizzy dark-haired chick to no one in particular. “I’m going to have him.” She swayed purposefully forward, her walk shifting into a ripe wiggle. I moved to the bar. The gym made me comfortable in my skin. Generally I ordered one white wine, two max. The whites were tasting cheaper and cheaper, so I usually brought gum for immediate after use. I flexed my pecs (for the sake of pecs and not tits, which are different entities). Flared my delts. Subtle flexing is an art.

The drummer ordered lemonade. “Thanks about the wrist thing. Man! You are strong!”
“It was cool, wasn’t it? Like the Olympics. Been training all my bodybuilding life for this moment. My arm was iron, man, one lead pipe. See I’m a certified hypnotist. So you got a witch and builder mix.”
The drummer stared. “My brother, Charlie, he’s the bass player, loved it. We were watching and man, you got some pipes there! I know he wants to thank you. We got this thing Charles and I, like if he sees you first, can’t have no fighting, two brothers on the road.”
“Where were the bouncers? My ex used to be a bouncer and he and his buddies would’ve been there in a flash. Probably broken the asshole’s wrist.” 

I’ve always been intrigued with Garth’s dark side as he calls it. Charlie walked over. Short guy with a navy blue cotton kerchief wrapped around his head and tied in back and shoulder length dreads. Decent delts. A bit of a paunch, but builders don’t give a fuck about fat in the off season. He wanted to get ready for a photo shoot for a new album, kind of jazzy this one, he said, maybe I could give him a few work-out tips, though he was really into Zen these days, did I know anything about Zen and maybe we could talk? He was sharing a room with his brother the drummer, but if he could get a lift with me that would be so nice, we could talk and then maybe go upstairs and meet up with his brother.

Hey little girl, why the fuck you messing around with a musician? I brought Charlie to my silver rental.  Almost slipped on the ice on Spadina Street, yelled whooeee,  got lost along the way to his hotel, skidded in the snow, giggled a lot, and parked in a hopefully acceptable zone across the street from Quality Inn on Lombard, diagonally across the street from Gilda’s Club. Cancer across the street in a renovated fire hall and I was sashaying around, hoarding every ounce of available nightlife.

“C’mon just one kiss.” I opened the car door. “Kiss me,” he said, “c’mon just a simple kiss, just one.  He leaned forward. His kiss was soft as candy and all the while I was telling myself off, even as we took the elevator to his room, which he did with such assurance, clinking his hotel room keys like he was congratulating himself. What the fuck you doing? Just another walk down another hotel hallway. I walked into the room. Two single beds with a small space between them and an equal space from one bed to the door, also from the farthest bed to the window and from each foot end of the beds to the window. He closed the door. I was definitely in.
   

“Your brother?” I said.
“Come let me kiss you.”  he said, slipping his hands under my top and laying them flat on my stomach.
“Such muscles,” he whispered. “I bet you have a six-pack.”
“It’s a myth, sweetie, about builders and six packs. Only in-season. See I’m in my off- season. The world has this thing for rippling bodies. It’s about mass baby. Bottom line. You’re such a fine man, but I can’t, really. I’m not playing, I can’t honey. You should’ve grabbed the frizzy chick that was fucking hot for you.”
“I could’ve had her anytime. I love muscles. I chose you.”

I didn’t want any loving with a potential musician for my festival, because then, well then I was just a female among how many other eager mouths and cunts. So I told him no, but I could give him a massage, one of those upper body tough massages pressing out muscle knots while the masseuse politely inquires, “On a scale of one to ten, how does that feel?” 
   
“Will you take of your shirt?” he said.
“No, but you can take off yours.”

At the end, I climbed over him, we both stood up,  he reached into the “v” of my Lycra shirt and gently lifted my right breast. Took tender hold of my nipple and  graciously kissed it. I will never forget.

“I can’t stay,” I whispered, straightening my clothes. “Gotta leave. You shoulda grabbed the young chick.with the dark curly hair.”
“But it’s you I want. I love a woman with muscles.”

I slid under his arm and out the door, apologizing all the way to the elevator. Can’t have the bass man fucking the impresario. There are those chicks who would run across hot coals for a musician. “Hey ya, honey,” a musician prick might call out, “you jest run across those coals for me and sure I’ll fuck ya.”  And the wacko chick would dash across, purse, tits, and fake jewelry flying. An impresario was different. I was full of my art and in love with my soul. I had deep-set eyes. The attentions of various artists and writers did not cause me to feel honoured.  I preferred   . . .  I didn’t know what I preferred, except I had no heroes and I liked it that way.

Copyright Janice Colman 2008

Lost in This World

“She’s hyperventilating.”

This is no joy ride. I’m doing all the exercises - relaxing opposite muscle groups, breathing in and out like a dimpled lady dozing off watching her late night show, and saying “lake” just like we planned, so Abie can tell me all about Killarney and the quartz mountains and how Pluto chased the bear and how I was chest high in muddy water. Abie has the time watch he used for sprinting at Wager High. I can’t imagine him sprinting, but then maybe I can. He’s got a lot of spirit and a heaping portion of competitive edge─he’s a hunter, he says.
 
Abie circles my belly with his fingers. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I say. “Rub my back, it’s my back,” because it feels like a dozen loggers have hauled off my lower back and they have a deadline with cash incentives. The lady across the way is yelling and wildly moaning “Yi yi yi.” “Will you tell her to shut the fuck up?” I say. “I’ve been here for twenty-two fucking hours and the bitch is screaming─” I feel a pulling and twisting: “Lake,” I hiss at Abie and he goes into his schtick which is what he calls his monologue. He says I’m not Jewish because I don’t talk Yinglish and I never set foot into a synagogue until I met him and then I broke out in hives.
 
“She’s ready.” Our procession speeds forward, nurse on one side, Abie dashing in front with his Minolta and I’m grinning away, giving Abie the finger as he clicks away. I adore fame.

“Sweetheart, my sweetheart, sweet heart,” I say, and I’m hers. From that moment there’s a change of scenery: the set with the husband glides stage left and is forever replaced by mother and child. He brings me yellow daisies and oranges and when I’m afraid to change her diaper, she is so skinny all arms and legs and big blue monkey eyes, he shows me “you see, you just ssslip the diaper under─”
“But it’s just as big as she is," I say. He changes the diaper like a seasoned cowhand and the nurse Dorothy flashes him a smile as bright as her red hair.

She cries all night. I ring for the nurse and still she cries. The nurse rustles in white, starched cool as a lily. “She’s just new in this world, poor little thing,” she says.

My heart ripped that night and never healed. I guess somehow I knew─she’d  always be a poor little thing, always lost in this world.

Copyright Janice Colman 2008
Lost in This World

Something about Fucking and Dead Rabbits

More from Edinburgh Road:

 Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and right now I believe him. 
 
“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” Abie says. “You need to add more grommets.”
He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he says he’s going to be published and famous in the scientific world. I bring him our maroon book of world maps.
“Show me,” I say. “I’ve got these gaps, you know. So where is it, this scientific world?” 
“Don’t be a smart ass,” he says.
          
But the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going so they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says, showing me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He parades documentation, although he knows I don’t read them, which is maybe why he shows them to me. He takes me to a locked room in the basement of an old university building. The door is grey steel. Inside, lined up against walls and cluttering space between, are moveable stacks of metal shelves loaded with cages containing white mice and sepia shavings. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him and he won’t jump out."
I blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.

Guelph 1972
 
There’s a Red Barn here and a movie drive-in just outside town. We watch one step for mankind from a rumpled bed in our motel room. “This is history,” Abie says, “do you realize what this means?”
“Yes, yes I do,” I say, staring at the moon shimmering blue on TV from our disheveled double bed parked like Parkdale billboard in the centre of the room and at Abie whose name I have never felt comfortable using, opting to use a parade of nicknames that come and go with moods and seasons, sometimes waiting for his eyes to pause on me before finding their way home to the TV screen.
            
We play with plans ─ moving to a moshav, a commune in Southern Ontario, renting an old farm house and taking care of goats, horses, and cows for the farmer. “I was brought up on a farm until I was seven,” Abie says to the farmer’s son.  Abie identifies with “Lord of the Flies” and I can see why.

I don’t know why we left the townhouse. I really liked skimming through the field of corn stalks with Abie and Pluto. Inside I was lonely, I guess. Some people grow fat to keep them company; I was hell bent on growing a baby. Maybe it was just time to move on, so I quit school two full courses before the end of my program. Abie didn’t mind; he’d stopped and started so many courses, and anyhow, he was always ready for a fuck, day or night. We ended up renting an upper duplex at the edge of highway six outside Guelph.

Behind our house there’s fenced in lot which, when I ask him and I ask about lots of things, Abie says is an acre deep and wide for three horses and two goats, and to the right, an old farm house with a verandah and curlicue wood carvings. Abie says it’s a drying-out facility for heroin addicts. We take the house anyway. I sew curtains with big sloppy stitches and make my own bagels with poppy seeds that require boiling before baking, my own challah and one-hundred-percent rye, and also strawberry preserves, and I hold my legs up when Abie fucks me so the sperm meets a wild egg and falls in love. “Maybe you should see a psychiatrist,” the school counselor said when I broke down after telling him how long I’d been trying. “Two months,” I said, “two months.” I didn’t check out another counselor. Instead I went home to Abie who fucked me while I held my legs in the air with a pillow beneath my ass. 
 
“You gotta stay like that for fifteen minutes. So the sperm travels up instead of leaking out,” Abie says.
“Keep me company,” I say.
“Sure thing,” he says, “be right back."
“Is it is time yet?” I call out.
“So?” I call again.
 “Now?”
“I thought you were going to keep me company.”
“Hey, you want a piece of challah with butter?” he says. “How about some red wine cheese on the side?

Abie takes a job at the Don Jail and comes home smelling like sweat and urine. Our downstairs neighbours have wild fights─screaming, banging, yelping, slamming doors, breaking glass. “Don’t listen,” Abie says. He doesn’t call the police because I’m alone during the day and sometimes at night. Meron’s arm is in a cast and Wayne hunts rabbits and skins them alive, which Abie says he knows because of the time he went on a truck ride with Wayne and his friends.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” he says, “I thought you’d be too upset.”
You went on a ride and watched them skin rabbits?” I say.
“Live,” he says. And then he tells me how he leaned out the window and threw up, even though his father used to bag kittens in a sack and drown them, there were just too many of them, he says by way of explanation. And Wayne and his friends were so drunk and whooping it up, they didn’t even notice.
           
“Why didn’t you get out and why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“We were in the woods and they had guns.”
“I know─” I say.
“So they would have thrown me out and left me there, or shot me and thrown me out and left me there.”
   
I’m so quiet inside I can hear the wind. "You should have heard them screeching,” he says and I think of my dead baby rabbits that first summer. I put my head on the curve of his neck just before his shoulder and he bends his head down to touch mine. 

Copyright Janice Colman 2008
     
   something about fucking and dead rabbits  
 

 

Ass Fucking (first edit)

"Where's Angie?" I asked. Her brother Tommy shook his flat crew cut, "My mom and dad aren't letting her come over anymore cause you pull down her diapers."
"They were falling off, stupid, I was just pulling them up."
"That's not what I saw," Tommy said.
"Get off my land!" I said.
Tommy climbed to the top of the slope and spread out his arms.
I ran to the screen door, "Ma, I told Tommy to get off our land. It's my land, too, isn't it?"
"My father's coming," I said, because Tommy's father had the spikiest crew cut and Tommy was always saying "yessir" and "nosir," and not much else.
"If you set one foot on my land, I'll shoot you," he yelled while he skidaddled down the slope and flagstone path leading to the front.
"And if you set one toe on my land, I'll skin you alive and you know where I'll start.  And better not leave your window open at night, neither."

Gary, who the whole time had been sitting his sister's Dale's balcony and practicing his Mississippi John Hurt licks, let out a wild whoop. The truth is I was a freak. Every time Tommy's baby sister climbed the hill in our back yard, I'd be there yanking down her diaper. Then there were those kleenex-up-the-asshole games with his sister Dale and my flashlight "Story of O" daily bedtime reads. No one on my list of eleven premarital fucks ever suggested ass fucking, except Philippe who adored sodomy though not with me. As it happened, I was a bodybuilder and forty-eight and living on Nina Street with Garth in a bachelor basement apartment with a ceiling too low for him to walk around full blown upright, when he first shoved his prick up my asshole.  Garth weighed four-hundred-and-twenty pounds and I guess if he were lean, he'd have weighed three-seventy-five. "I've been dreaming about this for twenty-eight years," I told him, as he rammed away. I didn't tell him I'd been practicing since I was five.

First version: I ask him what he might like. I lie naked on my side like one of Matisse's models and chat aimlessly on his new high bed, my arm draped carelessly around him, hoping he'll kiss me. In our beginnings, we used to spend all morning in bed. He would lie, his curly and sometimes shaved head pressing on my stomach, and confide to my belly while I outlined the circles of his hair, clockwise and counter clockwise. These days he’s hell bent on counter clockwise. He wants to talk about the relationship. "It’s not that I don’t love you or that I don’t want you,” he says. “I just don’t like being with you. I don’t like the way we’re heading. Romantically. I think I should tell you this although maybe it means something that I keep trying. My patience is running a bit thin." He says he has these mixed feelings.  He can’t tolerate me, but he loves sex with me.

“Why would you choose to share such information when you’re planning on fucking a woman? I mean you have your fucking arm around me for shit’s sake and I’m lying fucking naked.”
“You see, I can’t even talk to you.”

Fuck you fuck you. I hold my index finger in a staunch up-yours while visualizing climbing off that egotistical bed and leaving him there, alone on his raving mattress. But I’m quiet. If I speak, I might cry; there are too many words and recriminations welling up alongside all the tears. Finally I say, my voice tuned tight to stop sad notes spilling, “Well, perhaps we might be fucking friends.” Begging really, which he doesn’t realize. “Perhaps we might just be friends without romantic expectations who fuck.”

I know Garth isn’t good for me. He’s a closed man who cannot hold or wrap tender arms around me. He lies deadpan, all tangled up in my words and emotions. Garth hates constraints. He's like a superhero: tie him up and in the next instant he breaks free. But I figure if he would ass fuck me, I could lock him in.

He tells me to take a shower.
“I have,” I say.
“Now."
He says he won’t ass fuck me if I refuse. It’s for my benefit, he says.

His twelve-year-old son is in the other bedroom. I walk in the dark, my body, maybe an arm or a thigh, banging against a wall, the back of a chair, a doorway. I’m like that. Lacking direction it seems, when actually I am right on.

Next Version
I take a shower. Focus the spray on cunt and ass, using soap on top, and carefully, not in. I comfort myself with feather whispers and turn off the tap. There's no towel, so I put my jeans and shirt back on, returning with my breath just skimming the surface and some self-depreciating thoughts as to who I am and why the fuck I'm playing this. I tiptoe into the room and close the door. Why the fuck doesn’t he have a lock? Thoughts can be great time-fillers. There should be a lock. I take my clothes off and set them down, noting location and order: jeans, shirt on top, right side of the sofa, depending on which way you’re facing and isn’t the world like that.

“On your knees.”
“Where?” I ask, although I know. I lean my elbows against the beige leather love seat he keeps in his room, both for the look and the lack of space in his living room which also serves as his office. He has lube in his hand, some new kind of quick all-purpose moistening lube called "Dew" I bought at the Ex’s soft core, overpopulated sex fair with my drummer Mark in mind. I had him in mind, you see, because he was this new flame and I liked him. He was this moderately cool man who said "Baby!" every time I called, like he'd been waiting all his life to hear from me. So I thought we might fuck; I figured I'd do anything he requested which is always a great thrill for both sides. Now I have this new lube and it’s in the palm of Garth’s giant hand. Life is strange.

The truth is that I brace myself and that I'm afraid. I press my head down, my forehead touching the cool leather of the couch, my teeth grab the flesh on my wrist, leaving a  souvenir with my top front teeth angling inward. He squeezes wet lube on my asshole and his middle finger and wiggles two fingers up my ass.  I’m cold-hearted scared and that’s the straight dope.

He kneels directly behind me, his cockand balls brushing me, and presses in. The flats of his hands cover each side of my hips. I've written poems and had a few published about his massive hands soft and warm on my hips. When I’m home I think of his hands, the look and feel of his cock, his fuzzy orange pubic hair, and the shape of his eyebrows. One of his calves is the size of my thigh. His leg is a side quarter.

“Relax. That’s it. Relax,” he says. He has a gentle side.
“Rub your clit," he says, which I do, although, shit, I am so stressed out that all the rubbing in the world won’t stop the pain from his cock at its half way mark. Still he keeps pressing in, talking to me in his low rumbling voice.
“It hurts honey,” I say, “Oh honey, it hurts.”
“Sh,” he says, "sh sh."

He pushes, and rests and whistles, and then he's at it again. At times I say nothing or I gasp softly and then he stops, but stays his ground. “Ssh shhh, almost there. Soon.” I can feel the end of the earth, the edges of the flat earth, I know I’ll fall off and all I can think about is his cock and my ass and it hurts damn it really does, but I’m doing this for him so I can forget who I am and why I’m here. Ass fucking with existential motives. Finally he reaches that point where there is no crossing over. The line just stops. He’s familiar with the space just beyond that line where I fall in love with him all over again and he feels at home and free. So he settles in, deep, filling me up. Even though I cry out a few times, he stays, adding more pressure until I utter a high flying sound and a sigh, because he's in me, jamming all the way up my ass.

“Stay!” I cry, “don’t move, stay!” and he listens.
“Tell me. How you want it.”
“I said tell me how you want it.”
“Harder. I want it harder,” even though I don’t, not yet.
And then, because I know he's waiting for more, I say quietly, “Hurt me.”

At first it hurts like hell or heaven depending. He grabs my tits, squeezes my nipples between his thumb and index finger, and pulling my hair so my head flings back, rams fucking hard in, but I don’t care.  He's screwing me up the ass and I want him and that’s all there is. See, I just want to belong to him─his cunt, his ass, his tits, his mouth. I was a member of Voice of Women when I was eleven, but this is how it is between my Garth and me. I do it because I love him, although sometimes I'm filled with hate so big, it feels like a ball of wire twine stuck at the back of my throat. He says one day he's not going to have to use any lube, that's how wet I get when he slides his finger or cock up my asshole. Except he says penis instead of cock.

Encore:
I take a shower, aiming the water jets downward. There is no towel, so I stay wet, put on my clothes, and tiptoe back to the room. His room is dark. “Kneel against the sofa,” he tells me and leaves the room. I place my clothes on the floor beside the leather sofa: black pants, then black muscle shirt, mismatched socks. I arrange myself on the bed, bending my legs, one hip curved, and an arm flung to the side in a careless pose. I hear the door handle. When I think of Garth, his head touches a sky that's cerulean blue clear through and through. His presence fills the door frame.

I kneel by the leather sofa, my forearms on the pillow seat, and I wait. He brings something over from the bureau, and whistling all the while, he slides a hand along my flank. “Mm,” he says and squeezes cold lube near my asshole. I have bought this lotion, some lubricant with spectacular qualities, and have given it to him. He’s going to enter all holes, he says, and I ask him if he includes nostrils and ears in his plan.

“Of all things,” he says, “I love to fuck you in the ass.”
“Talk to me. Tell me about the first time, how it was the first time I fucked you this way.”
“I was scared,” I say.
"I wanted to belong to you."
“It really hurt.”
Garth presses his cock into my asshole. “Easy, easy now," he says.

He has wonderful, big hands. He slides his palm down my back, along the line of my ass, the outside of my tits.

“Relax,” he says. “Tell me about the first time. Remember what you did. What did you do with your hand? Do you remember?”
“I touched myself."
“Where?” he says and I say "Here."

He asks because he wants me to say it, to hear me talk of sex and fucking. “My clit,” I say. “I rubbed my clit.”
“And are you doing that now?”
“Yes.”
“What?” He presses his cock further into my asshole.
"I'm rubbing my clit," I say.
“Good,” he says, squeezing more lube onto his prick and opening up my asshole with his fingers.

Reinvented with spacing, although I cannot breathe . . .
I take a shower. Focus the spray on cunt and ass, use soap, on top not in. In is for later. I close the water.

I put my jeans and shirt back on, return with my breath held. Shit baby doll what the fuck you doing in a dark earth hallway, what the fuck you doing getting your ass ripped wide open?

I tiptoe into the bedroom, close the door, wishing for a lock. There is none. Thoughts weave easily through fears, settling a reassuring hand on my forearm. The sky shifts from a grey haze to softly glowing yellow. There should be a lock. I take my clothes off, placing them deliberately: jeans, shirt on top, at the right side of the sofa, depending on which way you are facing. And isn’t the world like that?

“On your knees,” he tells me.
“Where?” although I know. I kneel down and lean my elbows against the sofa. He has the lube in his hand, some new kind of quick all-purpose moistening lube I bought it with him in mind. I had him in mind because even after one decade, I love him. He’s a cool man in his way, so I thought we might fuck and he could do anything he wanted. Now I have this new lube he’s holding.
“Talk to me,” he says, “tell me about the first time I fucked you up your ass.”
“I was scared.”
"And you thought?”
“I thought, I thought I’m yours, you know, belonging to you. I wanted to belong to you. And I thought, that if you ass fucked me, that if you wanted to, anyway you chose, then I would. That’s what I wanted.”

He presses his cock against me.

“Sh, sh,” he says “gently now, just easy.” He places one large hand over my back, pressing me down, and slides his other hand along my back, ass, tits.
“Relax,” he says, “tell me more about the first time. Do you remember what you did with your hand?”
“I touched myself,” I say.
“Where?”
“I rubbed my clit like I am now.”
“Beg,” he says. “If you want it, you have to beg.”

So I say please and please again and thank you. He wants words, scenes in sharp colour, while my scenes are in black and white and the camera’s hand held. He pulls my head back and his cock brushes against my asshole.

“Please hurt me,” I say. “Pull my hair. Hard.”
“Good,” he says, squeezing more lube onto his prick, and using his middle finger, up my ass. He decides not to be gentle.
“It hurts honey,” I say, “oh honey, it hurts.”

 His cock stretches and fills my asshole. We’re from two different countries, Garth and I, and he’s pumping away in a language I don’t understand although I nod yes, yes. And then he comes to that border, that halfway mark and barrels right through. I think I’ve come to the end of the earth. I grasp its flat edges and I just know I’ll fall off. And then I stop thinking. Which is what I want.

 I brace myself oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, press my head down on the seat of the sofa and bite hard into my right forearm. The bottle cap pops and he spreads cold lube around my asshole.  He wiggles his finger up my ass. I’m afraid and that’s the truth. He positions the tip of his prick against my asshole, leans his body over mine, and covers my hips with his hands. “Relax,” he says. “Rub your clit.”

He presses in while he talks to me in his soft rumbling voice and I cry out again “It hurts, honey. Honey, it hurts.”  He’s just so cool and even. He stops, stays, pushes his prick in a bit deeper and croons “Soon, soon, almost there.” Which sounds sexy as all hell. I figure I’m at the end of the earth, right at the edge, and you know, if he’d ask me, I would jump clear off, right at that moment because he’s reached that point of no crossing back and the line just stops. Only there's a space past that line, such a sweet place where I fall in love with him all over again and I’m home and free.

I pull my breath up into my throat and heave it out nice and slow because he’s in me, all the way up my ass and I’m fine and loving his being there.

“Stay. Don’t move, stay.”
“Tell me,” he says, “tell me how you want it and I’ll consider it.”
“I want it harder,” I say, even though I don’t, not yet. “Harder, please. Please go hard.”

He starts to move in and out, just a bit at first, and it hurts like hell or heaven depending. He adds more lube and grabs my tits and my hair and he’s ramming real hard. But I don’t mind. He’s fucking me up the ass and I want him so bad. And that’s all there is.

I have to want him first you see, have to belong to him. I am his cunt, his ass, his tits, his mouth. I think when he fucks me hard up the ass that I can’t hold him. But still, I want to. After everything. Still. I am his cunt, his ass, his mouth.

© Janice Colman 2008

 

 

Lists

My mother kept lists. She had three calendars: a week at a glance, two days at a glance, and one day in grand detail. Even when my sister shoved her into the Waldorf straight from the Montreal General where she was treated for pneumonia and where my father had died the year before─“get me out of here you swine” he had screamed over and over until they gave him more morphine. He wasn’t against the morphine, he just wanted to die at home. “It’ll be easier,” my sister said, “trust me, I know her mind inside out. She won’t have to make decisions.” Which is when my sister, her telltale witch’s nose transformed into a sweet young thing, efficiently sorted, carted, and sold off my mother’s stores of her sixty-three-year married life. The only thing left for my old mother was the making of her lists.

In between pages she’d place articles for future review or to mail. Sometimes I’d receive plain brown envelopes in the mail with health tips. Nothing to dash to my bathroom floor and perform a sweetly seething rubbing-off to. Over the years, I’ve stopped and started at least one-hundred-and-twenty daily or weekly calendars. I arrive at this figure by multiplying a minimum of three calendars a year from the age of twenty until my current sixty. At first I’d select a pen with just the right flow and colour to fill in particulars having to do with name, address, phone number, and emergency numbers. And at the back, with the same smooth pen, I’d rewrite contacts and phone numbers.

I don’t want to say I’m a failure in the date book department. My mother was meticulous. Her date books were her memoirs. I always saw her writing lists, her books over-flooded with articles she felt were newsworthy. And I realize now she was my model. My own stash of papers fills a six-by-four-foot closet off my living room writing area. I see my life as an assortment of lists with various headings: houses, lovers, gyms, trainers, training partners, housekeepers, psychiatrists. I organize headings, sub-headings, shuffle, restructure, add, delete, rename. But I think houses will always be the main header. Twenty-one all in all. The subheadings saved me. I could go deep-sea diving in them, plan excursions, and create even further subdivisions, do the breaststroke through them, feeling ripples skim my chest, thighs, ass, the back of my thighs. Those subdivisions often migrated and became headings. I could deep-throat a heading and surface alive and shining.

More from Edinburgh Road:

Abie lies under our green Pontiac which is propped up with two steel girders. He’s replacing the transmission with a refurbished model, his legs reminding me of the underbelly of dead fish. “I’m a good man to have around in an emergency,” he calls out and I believe him.

“The cats are escaping from their jackets,” he says. “You need to add more grommets.” He’s doing a study on sleep deprivation and he’s going to be published and of course, he’ll continue with his masters. And the thing is these cats are hooked up to a treadmill that keeps going and going and they can’t sleep and I’m making canvas straitjackets for them. “Are you sure you should do this?” I say. “This is top level research,” he says and shows me Russian abstracts he’s photocopied. He takes me to a lab where he shows me white mice. “This one is mine,” he says and lifts off the cover. “Just keep blowing on him,” he says, “and he won’t jump out.” I carry and blow and blow and then I’m screaming, running around the table, “He’s on my head, he’s on my head,” and Abie’s laughing like a wild man.

Coyright Janice Colman 2008

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Jimmy Bob and the Kid

I'm not sure whether life clogs up the nostrils, damming them up and slogging in filters, or whether life and love just open the flow, all miry and dank. Maybe both. See Jimmy has left me. My Jimmy Bob McFarlin, tall man, walks slightly hunched over, sports rectangular lenses so chic and cool. He used to say we'd be two rickety old people on an old-time verandah swing, watching grandchildren, and we'd kind of glance at each other and then hobble to the shadey bedroom behind the kitchen.

Jimmy Bob comes from that bitch called the US of A─let’s put it all in small letters─the us of a. He’s impatient with anyone whose brain is like pink cotton candy; he despises line-ups and makes comments like “it’s just my luck to be here now." Before Jimmy appears, everything’s all quiet and serene, but when he places his size 15s on the war path, extras materialize from under the front desk, from behind life-size silver urns, swinging in from the streets─all push in line before Jimmy, who is really coming across like an AMERICAN.

But while Jim, he calls himself Jim, and yeah shit he has a right to─seems like every Tom Dick and the H guy have a brother or uncle or pa named Jimmy and then Bob. Jimmy Bob. My Jim thinks he’s different, while he’s wearing his telltale madras shorts and orange baseball cap. Also I think possibly a button-down shirt with short sleeves. He's got buttons at the points of collars, sneaking in at the back, and in the middle of each front pocket. I figure Americans like lots of buttons that have no other function than to stand out looking ornery.

Meanwhile Jim is saying he loves me. He just zooms right in to my face staring google-eyed; he’s kinda weird. Once Caroline and I took our Jim to High Park's restaurant. You gotta drive no more that 20 m.p.h., and that’s a long time to spend in the car in the company of a loon. I bet he was thinking that about Caroline, as he answered all her questions with pertinent details and a good measure of verbal respect. Like "I beg to differ" and telling her she sings like Ethel Merman when all she wanted was to sing "Over the Rainbow"  in her special high voice. Anyhow we’re leaving the restaurant and Jim’s wincing, feeling sick to his stomach (it’s his old hate punching him from the inside out). We walk from the back with its server-serves policy to the front pay-at-the-counter section, and I see the small head of a baby in a high chair. The mother is sitting on one side of the table and she’s leaning forward talking and laughing with a man and woman directly opposite.

The baby turns round and I see this is a mongoloid baby. So I look again and I’m thinking there is something wise in the boy’s face, an intelligence in the eyes like an old man. Jim follows me, and I follow Caroline, and then Jim starts laughing his loud ha ha ha, just slamming his laughter, bashing it against those four bodies.

“Why were you laughing?” I stop outside on the bottom step.
“You’re not going to like it,” Jim says.

I walk on ahead. No way am I going to look back, because then I would see his face and forever link it with this moment when he chooses to show his dark side. Because he knows, really he does, that he’s got to set something up so that we leave him, and he says, “I was laughing because the kid was a mongoloid.”  My right foot that's about to land full flat on the stone path stops mid-air. Even Caroline hears. “Because he’s different?” she says. “Are you afraid? Like I’m different? Is that funny?”

"I was laughing at my own response," he says to me and not to Caroline.
“Amounts to the same thing,” I say. 

And that's when things started to go wrong between Jimmy Bob and me.

Interlude with Garth

 

“I hope you know this is what millions of men fantasize about.”
“I didn’t know that you had a million of men wanting you.”
“Yeah, well now you know. Millions, plural. World wide.”
“I’m honored then.”
“And so you should be.”

Garth’s balls have really shrunk. He’s six feet three inches tall. Over four-hundred pounds. A man that size has big balls. When he lies down, each ball spreads over to the adjacent thigh. Usually I have to open my mouth to its fullest to engulf one ball and then I maneuver in the other. I figure I must look like Louis Armstrong at his most inspired.

Holy shit. In the fucking light, it’s a real turn off.

The night before, “So, you’re sure you’re coming over in the morning.”
Yes.” (I wasn’t sure.)
“Alright then.”

In the morning my back hurt. A stabbing pain shot down to my ankle. He told me to lie on the floor and realign my hips. If I had listened to him and hung upside down, I might be better by now. But what did he know anyway? He phoned back to invite me out to lunch. I accepted which was unusual for me especially at mid-day.

He took me to Swiss Chalet on Bayview Avenue. During the meal he made some comment about Jews.

“What did you say?”
“I said . . .”
“What? You said what with a Jew whom you just happen to fuck sitting right in front of you?”

He said that once again I had ruined both a perfectly good meal and his intentions. We hardly talked as he drove me back to my rented condo. Later, I worried that he might still be angry, so I called him at his office and asked ever so politely if I could come over, it would please and thrill me and so on. Then we had that interlude. Actually I was glad I did it. I was tired of crying. He could feel I was dripping wet right through my jeans. He didn’t even need to use lube which he kept in his top bureau drawer at home anyway. A day later he admitted it had been such a turn-on, although with him you would never know it. He’s such a closed man.

His balls had really shrunk.

After The Interlude

Garth calls at 7:26 a.m. I’m concerned about his balls.
“But how do you know they’ll grow back?”
“They’ll grow back.”
“Yeah, but how do you know?”
“I had a kid, didn’t I?”
“But that doesn’t mean they’ll grow back. Except if you know from past experience.”
“I do.”
“What? They got this small?”
“Smaller.”
“Oh my god, you’re kidding!”
“About the size of raisins.”
“Shit. You must have freaked out. You gotta be kidding.”
“Nope. I was really worried actually.”
“And how long does it take them, to grow back I mean?”
“About a month.”
“Well, that’s a relief. Cause they’re about half size now. Will they get much smaller?”
“Not much. I have only four to six shots left.”
“That’s good to know then.”
“I actually phoned to ask you how you’re feeling today.”
“Fine.”
“Really?”
“Uh huh.”
“Not sore at all?”
“Nope.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Yeah. Well so was I. I sure as hell wasn’t expecting that.”
“To tell you the truth, neither was I. It just happened. Did it feel OK, towards the end?”
“Well, I was scared, you know, because I didn’t think that natural was as effective.”
“You should’ve trusted me. I was watching the whole time, to make sure.”
“Easy for you to say. I thought I was going to be split open like Catherine the Great. You think spit works just as well?”
“Where do you think they imitated the synthetic from?”
“Wow.”
So when did it start to feel good?”
“When you said, 'Stop fighting me.'”
“You were wiggling around so much. I couldn’t aim properly to get it in.”
“It was fucking scary. You used to be proud of how little you had to use, remember. I never thought that you’d be using nothing at all.”
“Neither did I really. So you’re OK?”
“Yeah. Except my throat is sore.”
“Interesting.”
“Damn straight!”
“You sure they won’t get much smaller? I miss them, you know.”
“You’ll have them back. Don’t worry.”
“If you say so.”
“And if you put this in your book, I’ll fucking kill you.”

Garth gets off on ass fucking without lube. I get off on a dare.

 

Copyright Janice Colman 2008

Abie Fucks Me Over (Naked Words excerpt)

Abie really loves fucking. I like fucking all right but my nervous breakdown has wrestled me to the ground. I look at Abie's shoulders and the way his arms hang out and down, and I think here is a man with solid shoulders who hugs me like a humping dog. Besides I'm starting to like this little house. The first time I sleep over, there are two plump pillows on Abie's single bed. "I told you my parents are cool," he says. We lie down and he starts his vaudeville routine: french kissing, fingering tits, nipple twisting and squeezing (my bald Uncle Charlie used to pinch-and-twist my cheeks and I never liked that much either), then he Frenchy kisses me, I Frenchy kiss back, he rubs my crotch, I sway in time. It's like dancing - he leads left foot forward, I respond right foot back, only this time his cock leads which is less complicated since I'm not much of a dancer.

"Wait, I say, "I have to tell you something."
"Go ahead," he says reaching into my panties and twitching my clit like a hyperactive kid fiddling with a light switch.

"Stop," I say, but he keeps on rubbing and squeezing and pressing himself against me.
"I said goddamn it stop, get your goddamn hands off me."
"O.K. O.K.," he says. "Easy now."
"I just want you to know it's all an act."
"What's an act?"
"This. It doesn't feel good, I can't come."
"But I feel you inside."
"You feel yourself inside. Damn you, I said I can't come. I mean who the fuck are you? It's a dribble that's all, just a fucking dribble."

Abie sits up and looks at me, his low brow wrinkling. " But I'm in the top two percent," he says, because he comes, wakes up in the middle of the night for a second helping, building up for thirds and fourths by early morning. I think the workers topping his semen supply are overworked - no union there. I'm a union organizer's daughter setting up a picket line where it counts.

"Hey, it's like anything else, it takes practice," he says. He lies on top of me and kisses my neck below my left then right ear, “I love you, you know that, love you.” I know he means it, but like any mama's boy, he listens to his cock.

I'm listening with my eyelids forced shut to ease the passage of his words. I figure I can transport the essence of his message directly from his mouth to my cunt, no stop-overs, no detours. I'm trying to focus, clenching my eyes shut like I’m constipated and trying to take a shit when I catch sight of my mother.

"Oh my god Abie, I see her." I grab his solid shoulders. "I see her up there. She's coming at me. Hold me. She's coming down! Oh god I can't stop her! She's coming for me."
"Who's coming? Janice, who is it? Tell me who it is."
"It's a witch. Holy shit, the witch, it's Mummy. Her nails, she's going to rip at me with her nails. Cover me, lie quickly on me, she's coming closer, oh no, I can't, she's laughing. Oh Abie, her nails!"

I'm clutching on to the bony knuckles at the back of Abie's shoulders, and he spreads himself over me, offering up full-body protection. He soothes me with his kisses and sings soft songs into my hair.

"I can't breathe," I say, twisting my head out from his turtle shell.

Meanwhile, his prick is poking around like a divining rod. "Listen, my sweet, there's no witch, no mummy, only you and me. Only you and me. Let me come inside you."
"You think it’ll help?”
“Yes,” he says, “definitely.

All night he stays inside, sometimes just his cock’s cold tip slips in, other times the whole damn thing grabs space like a kid hogging the blanket, as I cringe from my mother and the witches. Even when I tell him how I hate him and bite his shoulders, he holds me. Then  I lie and say I love you too, and I rub against him grinding my hips which he takes as an invitation and zooms right on in. And all the while I'm thinking─in the end you'll go like the rest of them, you'll speed off in your Daddy's Pontiac and maybe I'm at the door waving and smiling my after-sex smile or I'm out there running after you, dust circling my ankles, my bathrobe coattails flying. "Stay," I'm calling, "stay, just one more,” and I lean against the doorway with your salt still on my tongue. The fuck was on me. On the house. But the next time you gotta pay. Next time. Although you know you'll never see me again. I won't be the same next time. Hold me, hold me close. I don't know where I'm going. Let me look at you. Kiss me, oh kiss me again.

Coyright Janice Colman 2008

LiveJournal Tags: erotica,sex,erotic blog,love,memoir,creative non-fiction,Colman

She Held Me in her Eyes

I tossed and turned all night:

The baby is sleeping on his back in the garage, the garage door full open. The floor is concrete, fresh white and so clean you could spread out a Sunday lunchtime tablecloth on it. "Janice," I say, "call me if he cries, will you?" He is sleeping after all.


He flips over like a leaf, summer to autumn to winter to spring, never lingering on one season. I tuck the edges of the blue blanket under the carriage mattress, so the blanket lies smooth and tight, and with my tip of my saddle shoe, I slip up the brake. The carriage is driving on its own─one two three down the driveway. Four five─ a head as small as a doll’s takes wing toward Van Horne Avenue, soft white shoes disappear under black rubber wheels, fingers flattened like Thursday’s dough under my mother’s wood rolling pin. I open my mouth to scream, but my heart freezes over like the deepest lake in the coldest winter. I walk to where the head lies, to the hands lying flat and still on the pavement, the feet sitting side by side, and I turn the baby onto his back as he had been before the carriage decided to make a break for it─away from that house and the sad lady in it. I fix the head so it sits like a pumpkin on his body, fix the feet so the toes point out ever so slightly, and set the hands just beyond the line of the his wrists, curving each finger just a little. Then I take a deep breath of air as crisp as fresh sheets flying on the line, and I walk, one double-bowed shoe in front of the other, into the house.



His head lies tilted like a mournful question. I reset it neat and square. I smooth out each finger and tie the bows of the little shoes. Then I scream and scream and scream.

I can't recognize him when they carry him out. He looks like a boy doll with a proper boy's haircut and little boy bangs. "Where's the neck?" I ask because all I see is a pocket of extra skin where a neck should be, but I hold him close anyway.



I set the bowl on my head and cut my hair right up to the rim. I used to sit on the living room stool while my mother turned each strand of hair round and round, a bobby pin like Cupid's arrow through each curl. “Why, why?” she says, but the ice around my heart is so slippery, the answers can't stay upright; they just fall and slip away. I watch lines grow like weeds between her eyebrows, her hair lying all limp and helpless like cut grass, and I sit down right close beside her. “I will never cut my hair again or push a baby carriage into the street,” I say. After supper I walk straight into my room. I pick up the doll with the red striped dress that snaps and ties in the back, and I cut her hair short short. “Smokey, Smokey," I call in my morning corn syrup voice and dress my cat in Julian’s baby t-shirt, laying him all safe and harassed up on his back in the shiny carriage my grandfather gave me and parade him down Wilder Avenue to Rockland Park. One day I whisper “tch tch tch” as I lift up my bedskirt, peer on tiptoes behind closet shelves, behind books, under my dresses, inside my mother’s hatboxes. I don't cry when I can't find him. On my maple bureau, there's a picture of me on my grandfather’s lap and Smokey on mine.


The phone is ringing. I pick up the receiver even though I know I'm in the middle of a dream and it’s not polite to walk out on company. Abie is calling from Russia. “I’m in Russia,” he says on his voice mail. Actually he’s in Moscow, staying at his Russian girfriend’s three-room apartment. Her daughter and ex-mother-in- law also live there. The apartment has no living room. Abie figures he’s completing a deal, so he’s gone over to Russia. Ninety days ago the manager of his apartment building gave him notice. But he kept thinking his deal was going to close and of course it didn’t, so now he’s in Moscow at Anya’s. “I don’t want movers touching my suits,” he says, “or my menorah or my photos.” I tell him, “I only wish I’d had that choice.”


When Abie talks, I shut my eyes. He gives my heart arthritis, I’m sure. It must be damp in there from so much sadness and crying. It aches; it really does─the left side at the top. Even when he stops talking my chest is still shuddering. Is it possible he’s damaged my heart? “Breathe in,” I tell myself, “nice and deep, breathe.” There was a car I once had that refused to start when the wheel was turned too far to the right; the key would not turn in the ignition. The only way to get that car going was to gently shake the wheel left, right, left, and bring the handle all the down. All the wrangling and cajoling, and the car might start. Might. I need someone to rock my heart. I close my eyes. It’s not that I want to get back to the dream, but I think maybe there’s something significant tucked away in a drawer and if I can sift through dressers and cupboard . . . A butterfly comes to rest on my eyelids and I close my eyes.



There’s no one in the house, no friend to call “hey, would you come over.” No one pops by and I like it that way. It’s only the second day after washing my hair and already it’s oily. I have to wait four days until I can wash it again. And then there are things to organize. I have a list in my pocket. The baby is in his carriage and I think, if I go inside to make one call, leave a message─one minute, maybe less, so I call “Janice, will you watch Julian for five minutes?”


One thing. There’s a man, big, huge actually. Doesn’t talk much. Doesn’t trap me with vile words neither. I watch him cradling my baby in one of his big arms and how Janice tags beside him, her arm raised so she could slip her small hand is his immense warm one. I peek through the hospital venetians. He stands in the middle of the parking lot, looks up and waves which is kind of funny coming from such a large man─the wave of a visiting dignitary. Later when a doctor in white walks in to talk to me, I stand sideways in front of the window. The large man is gone. There is no car in front of the yellow barrier, nor do I see the retreating back of a tall, wide man in a navy blue raincoat.


I was everything to her. Not my sister who was born without a heart. Something kept her alive, but it wasn’t her heart. I think she was just plain mean and staying alive for spite. My mother held me in her eyes until my brother was born. His soft blue blanket with shining borders lay folded in my lap. I held the soft wool to my face and breathed in its sweet country air. And then there it was, all round and full on my mother’s lap while I sat still and quiet in the back.

Ladies bustle from the boy baby’s room to the kitchen. The water pops before the bottles are lowered into the silver pot. I love the bottles and the round flat caps and the way the rubber nipples hide underneath, their tips just kissing the milk.

She rolls down the window and waves. She just slides into her brown velevt coat and goes and when she comes back, she lies in bed in her nightdress. I tiptoe into the room. “Janice,” she says. She’s so quiet, she almost whispers. She never twirls my hair again. She gets tired when she talks to me. Sometimes I’m mean and she gets sadder and sadder. I think she’s like one of the flowers outside, wilted and falling before winter. But when she opens her eyes wide, I hear rich full music streaming from them - voices and instuments twirling. Her eyes are clear and sweet as heaven. I hold my breath to keep the air from rustling. "Ma," I say, "Ma." And her eyes skim the room like bees in a desert.


Copyright Janice Colman 2008

Summer of '65

Melez simultaneously slides down his pants and underwear. I do the same and lie down as twigs scratch my ass and legs. I spread my legs. Melez sets himself on target and pushes. He presses against me and tries again.
“Melez,” I say, “maybe you’re not exactly in the right place.”
He fingers me.
“Nope. I’m in the right place all right. You’re just too small.”
“What?”
“I said I think you’re too small.”
I lift my legs in the air. “Listen, push harder, “I say. “Don’t worry about me, just push hard.”
Melez pushes, grunts and shoves.
I’m losing confidence. He’s smart all right and I love his profile—but when a girl gives a guy permission, lays it out there all wide and willing—“We’re going have to stretch you,” he says.
“You can do that? You think we’re going to make it tonight?”
He looks down, his eyes deep and brown glowing. “It’s going to take a week,” he says. I put my head on his bare strong shoulder. He wipes my eyes with his lips and pats down my matted hair. I’m learning about tenderness and loving it.
“Don’t you worry, one more week and you’ll be ready.”
I straighten myself up, tucking in my jersey front, sides and back.
“And Janice . . .”
“Yes?” I say.
“I love you.”

**************************

I enjoyed stretching. For one week, Melez fingered me.
“You’re ready,” he said one night after he’d wiggled five dove-tailed fingers up me. Melez poked in and out, slow and easy and then faster. I held my breath the whole time—I was like a novice swimmer just learning how to do the crawl. I wanted my life to be a wild fuck, free soul floating wild and home at last. I guess I saw cock to cunt as a lifeline—I was struggling in the deep end and fucking was going to be a life line pulling me to shore.
“It’s something you’ve got to learn, like walking or driving a car.”
I wasn’t reassured.
One night as Melez’s cabin mate, Martin Segal (whose voice never changed and who later became a double-chinned Conservative finance minister) lay asleep in the cot just two feet away, I lay flat pressed on top of Melez, his prick shoved up me as I grinded against his pubic hair. “Harder, harder, hey, don’t stop,” I said. I had a feeling this was an important moment—sun shining southern hot, its rays spreading like water rippling or a sand dune, skimming up to the surface, outward to my thighs, along tensed legs to pointed toes, breasts filling and swelling, skin all soft and velvet. I was hot. It was, we were, and then it was over, the tide slipped away. I wanted to hang on and ride the wave, and then I started grinning. I was gold-digger screaming happy. Marty, moralist virgin, yeshiva voyeur, woke up five minutes after I left which the following morning Juan remarked, “was impeccable timing.” I spent the rest of the summer on Melez’s wheezing cot, dancing on his cock and waving at Marty.
At the end of the summer Melez, shifty-eyed with promises of writing and weekend furloughs, hopped on a bus back to Buffalo. I had locked onto my north star which I’ve been following it ever since. After that summer I would bring my boys downstairs to the den and fuck them while grinding on top or beneath— it’s all about friction. Nothing hardcore screaming—I was just bent on the climb, reaching the top and planting another coming flag.

Exploding Bits and Pieces

Married life is a bad trip: our apartment building looks like one of those concrete store-it-yourself facilities. I stand at the far end of the corridor in front of  apartment 807.  This morning I asked  him,  “Are you sure this is a good marriage? Is this how it’s supposed to be?”   "Sh," he said, "of course it’s a good marriage. Don't be silly," and then he held me. My head rested on his neck like a duck asleep on its feathers and I thought finally a place to rest, a warm body on a winter’s night. I’m learning to love him in hugging bursts, in quiet longing, and then all the time aching, but sometimes my heart feels like a safe that's been sprung and looted.

It’s after eleven. I leave a note on the bedroom door. “Please keep the darkness away. Please don’t put the light out.” And I sign it, “Yours,” even though I don’t belong to anyone.

Abie wakes me up in the middle of the night to wish me Happy Anniversary. “Come on, come on,” he says, putting his green terrycloth robe on my shoulders. On the bathroom mirror, there's a foamy "I love you" written in capitals. Abie is a capital-letter, underlining, and exclamation-point man, and I, I’m a National Film Board animation. As soon as I take shape, a limb reaches out, twisting and transforming. I’m a devil and an angel─sort of a metaphysical hermaphrodite.
            
“Oh,” I say, “Oh.” And I start to cry. I guess he’s used to my crying─I don’t save my tears for fancy occasions─but still, he carries me to bed just like you see in the movies, possibly French or Italian with subtitles, and he kisses me, my neck, ears, and that space between my eyes where the world stands still. He lifts himself and lies full weight on top of me and rams in. I wrap my arms around him, tightly, so he can’t see my eyes unveiled and barren. And then he cups his palms on my ass, pushing it up, down-up and down like he’s priming an engine, and it’s true, he is.

He pokes his finger up my asshole. “Move it,” he says. “Move your ass.” He knows I need friction. I squeeze my eyelids closed and all the while I’m playing this old blues song in my mind, hush now baby come home baby, find your way home, until the brush of a snare drum grazes my thighs, and the back of my cunt like a camera shutter opens, closes, opens, closes, opens, letting in the pearl white light. The sun radiates. That’s what it is. I’ve got the sun in my cunt. Not the whole world in my hands; I’d tremble and drop the damn thing.  I’ve a cunt full of world, exploding bits and pieces like there's no tomorrow.

Copyright Janice Colman 2008

Abie Says He's in the Top Two Percent, Prick-Wise

 

"Hey," he says, grabbing my ass on the second step leading to the upper floor of the townhouse, and I think, you could have given me a few steps for myself, is that asking too much?—there is our bedroom, bathroom, small bedroom where I write term papers and study and Abie spends occasional all-nighters for courses he deigns to touch with his glorious intellect, and then a larger sun-filled warm bedroom, my baby’s room, except there is no baby. More and more I am thinking of babies and farms bordering a lake. Last weekend, we drove to a commune near Freelton."We do have some Jewish families in residence," the woman with cropped hair said as she looked at us. "Modelled on the kibbutz, you know. We even have sleeping houses. "You mean . . . ?" I said. "Oh yes," the woman said. "And is there a choice?" I asked. "No," she said, clearing away earthern pottery mugs from a coffee table with a tree stump base. Abie looked my face, ushered me out, opened the car door in an uncharacteristic gesture, and practically shoved me in. He knew I was about to have one of my melt-downs.

I guess, my sense of direction is haphazard ─ I followed my wayward sense of direction, landed in this god-for-saken marriage, and now there is no way out of this tunnel. It’s like the one Abie’s family hid in during for war. One thousand days underground, thirty-six people, first and second cousins, brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles. They had to strip the Baba and grease her so she’d fit down the foxhole. There were streams deep down in the tunnel and prehistoric drawings, and the brothers, Sam, Sholke, and Nissel built a chimney through the trunk of the tree to a top branch. Sixty feet it was. A dentist performed abortions. First cousins married first cousins, and seconds, seconds. At night, the men plumaged fields for potatoes. Most stayed in for one thousand days. When they emerged, they looked at each other and laughed. Their skin had turned blue. Of course they also cried. And Abie’s mother, Chana, not knowing if the man she had married just before she slid down the fox hole and whom she heard was taken to Siberia─Siberia!─was still alive. So she dressed as a nun, that she might be spared from harm, meaning rape and death, and set out from Poland, across Russia, to Siberia. Jose had been eating rats to survive, but he was alive.  And after all that, in her fifties and firmly established in her Cote St. Luc bungalow, although she would have loved to live in TMR with her wealthy brothers, Chana was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Three months and she was gone. She climbed on the silver table for her radiation treatment and her heart gave out. Her husband remarried within a year. He was used to being taken care of. He’s ninety-one now and waiting to join Chana.

The Baba wrote a book “We Fight to Survive.” Abie says she left out all the good stuff, the marauding and killing and sex. The uncles didn’t keep her in the loop. It’s said that Nissel could pick up a horse with one hand. He’s dead now. But he was never bent or stooped over. I keep telling Abie he has to write the book. He says he has to interview all the uncles and Sonya and Pepe in New York, as well as Henya, his mother’s sister. "Before they die," he says. “I’m going to tell this story,” he says. “And it will be better and bigger than any Dr. Zhivago.” Every so often he makes phone calls to producers. He has contacts.

I have to hand it to him; this one he could do. At first he talks about it every week, then once a month. He tells me it’s going to be a classic. "You’ll act in it," he says. "Maybe it will be your big break." Those acting surges wash over me, making me weak in the knees. Now’s the time I could fuck him, but he keeps on talking. I can’t see movies, can’t go to plays. The screen credits get blurry and I sob when the actors take their bows. “The most gifted young talent," Leon Major had said. Although I screwed up at the Saidye Bronfman centre – Louise Marleau was starring in the "Doll’s House" and Trudeau was in the audience, first row centre. Gina who was having an affair with a slight blond set manager slipped backstage in her black pantsuit and whispered grandly, “You’ll never believe . . . " I was the maid. I figured if Eisenstein could create memorable bits parts for his players, so could I, but when I entered stage left and looked at Nora all dressed in her finery, I forgot my lines. She repeated her lines. I used my character to get flustered, curtsied twice, burst into tears, and excused myself. The audience clapped. “Don’t you ever ad lib on me again, do you hear me?” Louise hissed. Robin Ward  patted me on the shoulder, “You did good kid,” he said. “Never mind.”

I even auditioned for the National Theatre School. “You didn’t get in,” Abie told me straight out one morning in our Bourret Avenue kitchen. “You needed three out of three votes. You got two. One thought your emotions were too powerful. It would be hard to match you up. They chose David Lazarus instead."
“What? He has no soul and he talks in a flat line.
"And Alan Migicovsky."
“You gotta be kidding me. He walks with his ego up his ass, and he crimps his hair."
“I know, Abie said. "I know." And then he called Pluto and we sat the three of us, as I cried on Abie’s shoulder and into Pluto’s fur. We sat like that for a few hours, then Abie said “I have to take a leak."

Constance Brown kept me on. She wanted me to see this director for a lead in a CinePix movie. 
"What's your sign?" the director asked me and I said "Pisces." 
"It figures," he said.   
 "I'm Aries," and then he paused. I hadn't a clue what all that meant, so I just stood there nodding meaningfully. 
"Do you do nude scenes?" he asked. 
“I do not,” I said.
“Aw, you’re kidding me,” he said.
“You’ll have to get a stand in,” I said.
“Won’t you show me a bit of leg?” he said, and I said, “Well, OK,” and I lifted my mother’s burgundy dress to mid-thigh. 
  
The next day I phoned Constance. “That’s it for me,” I said. “This is not my scene.”
“It may not be your scene, but it’s part of the scene,” she said. “You’d have the lead.” The movie did well in Quebec. And really it wasn’t even soft porn. But when I heard that, I was already in Guelph, enrolled in early childhood development, a five-year B.A.Sc. honours program. And Abie was either sleeping or eating or calling "Janice where are you?" or "Are you ever coming to bed?"
And I'd yell up, "That's because you're watching TV."
"You have any better alternatives?"  
I guess that's why I stayed. I didn't have any better alternatives.

Copyright Colman 2008

Another Naked Words Excerpt

I wander from room to room, into the bedroom to change my clothes, through the hallway in my Tyrolean hiking boots, to the living room doorway─black cotton backdrop stapled to one wall, mattress dressed up in orange and red Indian print beneath, green and blue shag Danish rug on the floor, morning snow outside the picture window. I lie face down on the orange rough wool sofa, then on my side, rearranging my legs to slightly bent, hips curving.

“Where are you?” I whisper. “If you love me, you’d be here. Come here if you really love me. I peak into the bedroom. He’s sleeping, his pale fat leering at me. I hate and love him. I take off my clothes and slide into bed. I know if he wakes up from my warm body pressing against his, he won’t be angry. But then he’ll want to fuck me, and I’m OK with that today; I’m tired of zig-zag flying and I figure fucking will help me land and glide into a gentle stop.

Leaving home. Green car filled with boxes and mismatched suitcases from my father’s collection. I was always homesick at camp. My first summer at Manitou-Wabing I cried every night for a week straight. I kept everyone awake, including Loren Deckelbaum who was the sweetest kid I ever met, then and ever since. In the second week, I took the train home and then I cried so hard to return that my mother drove me to Windsor Station and put me on the train back to camp. I pulled my two duffle bags across the main field to our cabin, opened the screen door and announced “I’m back."  No one looked up, except for Lauren who welcomed me with that gentle smile of hers. For the rest of the summer, I cried inconsolably for my grandfather. Now I’m homesick even before the sign that says Welcome to Ontario.

“What?” Abie says as I turn my head and stare out at the flat land passing by, one horizontal landscape perfectly aligned with the next.
“You know it’s not that I hated them,” I say.
“Speak English,” he says, “What’re you talking about?'
“My parents. It’s not that I hated them or like I didn’t feel loved, you know. It was expressions of love. Expressions, that I needed.”
What’d you expect? They’re goys.”
“They are not goys and anyhow I hate that word.
“You wouldn’t know the difference,” Abie says and turns up the radio.
“You know I threw out all my writing from the top drawer in my grandfather’s desk before we got married. I figured I should start fresh. There was a paper with burnt edges that my cousin Linda wrote on with invisible ink.
“So how’d you see it then?'
“You had to light a candle and heat up the paper from underneath without burning it.”
"You’re burning me, Abie, you know that?”
I’m a self-made orphan.
"You never left your acting behind, did you? Packed up all your melodrama to bring to Guelph with you."
“Well you should be fine, you’ve got your TV and Gerka knife."
"You’ll thank me one day,” he says.

I don’t thank him. Ever. He’s in love with his TV. He flips channels and calls out for tea with lemon, for pretzels, sometimes he announces shows. “Hey, you’ll really like this,” he says and delivers a sport caster’s play by play. Usually I say I’m busy, I’m studying, working on a term paper. I despise that TV. Abie skips classes. He drops out of courses. I take my mother’s calls in the kitchen.
“Tell her my father is increasing what he gives us,” he whispers, his breath hot in my ear.
“Tell her,” he says. “my father is increasing to forty a week.
I cover the mouth piece, jerk my shoulder up, and turn around.
“Tell her,” he says more loudly this time. And then he opens the fridge which is empty and points inside.

My father has this deal. He’ll help us out, alright, but only equal to what Abie’s father gives. At first, Abie’s father gave us twenty-five dollars a week, but now he sends cash presents on holidays. I know Abie won’t let up until I say something, and later he’s going to tell me my father forgets where he came from and what he married into. And I’m going to say, “And how are you any different?” My grandfather on my father’s side was a shoemaker. Abie’s father sells kosher chickens.

“The trouble with you,” I going to say, “is you feel entitled." I think it’s important for him to know. Before we left Montreal, Abie phoned Dr. Wisebord. "Is she going to be alright?" he asked. "I've done everything I could," Dr. Wisebord said, which Abie translated as she's crazy as a loon. There's an old black and white movie where the husband drives his wife crazy and has her committed. I don't remember the name of the film or who starred in it. My selective memory didn't swoop down and snatch those particulars. I guess it was too close to home. 

Another Naked Words Excerpt

Excerpt: Naked Words

.When I saw Garth for the first time, he was wearing navy blue sweats, top and bottom, and his skin was copper, sepia, and burnt umber all in one. He had one of those flat top do’s you could balance a plate on.  I thought what the fuck is a man like that doing in a place like this—although it was a builder’s gym and he sure as hell belonged there. I was forty-eight, full of muscle and heat, flaunting my quads, sixteen-inch biceps, and my high-shelf builder’s ass. It was one of those pure contact moments I’ll always remember. I never saw an aura before I met Garth. It was like an angel’s halo around his entire frame even though he was no angel. But then neither was I.

He was my lighthouse, standing there tall as night and strong as the sun. In that entire room at six p.m. building time at Strictly’s Gym when builders came awake and strutted their stuff, worked and groaned beneath the weight of the world, in that warehouse space filled with pumped body parts, the man who stood apart was the presence looking on in the corner.
“Are you a pro builder?” Garth asked, taking five strides towards me.
“No.
“How long have you been training?”
“A decade, hardcore.”
 “How old are you?”
“Don’t you know you’re not supposed to ask a woman her age? I’m ancient.”  I liked
the sound of the word. 
“Thirty-eight?”
“Told you—I'm ancient.”  I was a cool builder chick wearing red and black striped spandex tights and I wanted this towering man. Funny thing was I was there checking out a new gym, preening my muscles and cheating on my regular training partner, Nick, an Italian kid studying opera at the University of Toronto. Nick wanted to be a famous pop singer able to scale the high notes.  He was haunted by those soaring vocals and would randomly shriek out an elusive note after a set of squats or a powerful deadlift. He had the body of a Clydesdale horse. Or so I thought until I spied Garth. “I’m just about to go on the stair master,” I told Garth at the end of our first meeting. “Getting ready for a show.” 
“Well, it was nice,” he said and walked away.
Months later, Garth confided he had stood for one hour in the snow and the cold, watching me through the gym’s steamed up glass wall.

 

Naked Words

The Early Days (excerpt)

           I walk into an open space, green all─sky, land, water─hookers green dark, viridian, green-gold, emerald, blue-green. Like a snake, green slides around my legs, belly, up my left breast, behind my neck, around, down and across my right breast. And between my legs, my heart's pulsing dayglo red like it's in a showcase in Amsterdam.
          Married life is a bad trip; our apartment building a storage tank, piped-in music soothes while the elevator door glides shut. I stand in the eighth floor corridor. This heart, a safe that's been sprung and looted. Arguments about little things. I ask him, “Are you sure this is a good marriage? Is this how it’s supposed to be?” He says sh, of course it’s a good marriage and don’t be silly and come here, and then he holds me. My head rests on his neck like a duck asleep on its feathers and I think finally a place to rest, a warm body on a winter’s night. I’m learning to love him in hugging bursts, in quiet longing, and then all the time aching.
              It’s after eleven. I leave a note on the bedroom door. “Please keep the darkness away. Please don’t let the light out.” And I sign it, “Yours,” even though I don’t belong to anyone.

            Abie wakes me up in the middle of the night to wish me Happy Anniversary. “Come on, come on,” he says, putting his green terrycloth robe on my shoulders. On the bathroom mirror, a foamy 'I love you' in capitals. Abie is a capital-letter, underlining, and exclamation-point man, and I, I’m this fluctuating National Film Board animation. As soon as I take shape, a limb reaches out, twisting and transforming. Cause I’m a devil and an angel─sort of a messed-up hermaphrodite.
             “Oh,” I say, “Oh.” And I start to cry. I guess he’s kind of used to my crying─I don’t save my tears for fancy occasions─he carries me to bed just like you see in the movies, possibly French or Italian with subtitles, and he kisses me, my neck, ears, that space between my eyes where the world stands still and he lies full weight on top of me and rams in. I wrap my arms around him, tightly, so he can’t see my eyes unveiled and barren. And then he cups his palms on my ass, pushing it up, down-up and down like he’s priming an engine and it’s true, he is. He pokes his finger up my asshole. “Move it,” he says. “Move your ass.” He knows I need friction. I squeeze my eyelids closed and all the while I’m playing this old blues song in my mind, hush now baby come home baby, find your way home, until the brush of a snare drum grazes my thighs, and the back of my cunt like a camera shutter opens, closes, opens, closes, opens, letting in the pearl white light. The sun radiates. That’s what it is. I’ve got the sun in my cunt. Not the whole world in my hands; I’d tremble and drop the damn thing. No way, man. I’ve a cunt full of world, exploding bits and pieces like there's no tomorrow.

Naked Words -- Excerpt

The grass in our back yard is like my mother’s hair on a good day─springy to the touch, each strand equal in height to the one beside it. I spread out the blue and green plaid car blanket with cheerleader fringes and line myself up with the sun. The sun’s always on the move; you’re lying all still and quiet with the sun brushing over you like the greatest fuck you’ve ever had, you sink in, your eyelids closed and smooth as rose petals and you’re smiling with every pore, and suddenly your eyes flip open. You cup your hand above your eyes, readjust, spread your legs, and right at that moment when the smooth tip of the sun’s cock is about to kiss the soft pink flesh of your cunt, a cloud zooms in to camouflage the sun's escape. The sun’s just another con man.


I’m invited to a weekend party at Dy Griffith’s Trotskyite commune on Jean Mance. Dy speaks with a fresh South Wales' accent. He has wavy auburn hair and huge upper thighs. When my mother is finally out of another depression and tucked away at Charles of Westmount— getting her hair washed, trimmed, set in the tightest curlers, kiss curls scotch-taped to her cheeks— and placed for forty-five minutes under a hair-dyer on the hottest setting, I phone Gary.
“I’m packing my clothes and I’m wondering if you’d take me to this co-op on Jean Mance.”
“You going for the weekend?”
“Are you coming over or not?”
“Sure. Nothing’s happening here. So where you’d say this co-op is? And your father?”
“He called me downstairs for one of his formal den chats—I mean he was even wearing his navy jacket and tie.”

Gary whistles when he sees my luggage. He carries my four matching suitcases and assorted boxes to his car and arranges them in the trunk and back seat. We climb into his front seat, he places one arm around my shoulders, revs up his car’s engine, backs up and swings around in one impressive flash. I look back at the beige brick house with its aqua wood trim.
“You know I forgot to leave a note.”
“You wanna turn round, kid?”
“No. I do not want to turn round.”
“So where’d you say this place is?”
Gary keeps his arm around me all the way to Jean Mance. He carries my burgundy valises, boxes, and Ogilvy’s plastic bags up the narrow staircase, all the while flexing his muscles and blowing out. Then he notices the three guys hanging out in the living room with their jean zippers undone and their pricks panting.
“Hey, Janice. Welcome, kid. Be it ever so humble, eh?”
Bob, Dy, and Paul stand there grinning away. Gary starts posing: he raises one arm, flexes a bicep, turns, raises the other arm, flexes, and performs some deep knee bends, throwing in some choo choo choo boxing and breathing bits. The guys stop smiling. I’m just staring at Gary and I’m wondering what the fuck he’s doing because I sure as hell never saw anyone do that before. He’s making these smooth turns and twists and I’m thinking how cool he looks and I’m proud as hell.
“Mind you take care of her. Take care. You hear?”
“Sure man, no hassle. Sure thing. Listen, she’s gold, man.”
Gary calms down, until he sees my room.

The commune is on two floors. An old whining staircase leads to the main floor and continues its path to the second floor. Dy has the biggest room overlooking Jean Mance; Bob, the tall lanky guy, lives in a royal blue room next to Dy; at the brief L-shape at the end of the narrow hall is Paul, dark and brooding, in a room that allows one cot, a bureau and wooden folding chair; and to the right, a long bathroom—toilet, sink, bathtub, and a window you can climb out of and bask on the flat part of the roof.  Each room has a different coloured door with glossy white trim.
Dy turns a painted gold handle. “The Room,” he says.
Gary whistles and stares. I’m well-trained. “Thanks Dy. It’s nice really, colourful—has energy—yeah, that’s it—there’s a certain energy. It makes a statement.”
“You can fucking say that!” Gary says. He’s looking at the bed in the middle of the room. “Home,” he commands, swiveling around and cuffing my elbow. The double bed is flashing away in the middle of the room.
“The girl before didn’t have furniture,” Dy says. Bob looks down. Paul smiles. His teeth don’t show when he smiles. It’s a grimace that suddenly looms and disappears.
“Didn’t need any from the looks of it,” Gary says.
The bed is impressive. The posters, fashioned from industrial carpet rolls and sprayed gold, are attached with wires, also gold, to each corner of the bed. Stretched across the front of the bed is a tie-dyed sheet with “FUCK” scribbled across its width.
“Love the velvet purple spread, man,” I say. “Remember Candy, Dy?”
“Yeah, sure, although you didn’t see her face all that much—she was always making out with Chalky under his great coat.”

Dy and I go back to our McGill Union days, to acid and smoking dope, Trotskyite meetings, Diplomacy and Hearts in the Union basement, flaking out in the east corner on the first floor, hanging out on Josh Freed’s mattress, stoned and talking politics because Josh was a draft dodger from somewhere in the States and once I made it with him, actually a few times—he wasn’t great looking, most of them weren’t, but those were the times, intense and surreal.
Gary is shifting his weight from one foot to another. 
“God Janice, I don’t know,” Gary says, “I can’t just go off and leave you here.”
“So move in with me.”
I’m not in love with Gary, but I’m comfortable with him. I mean, fuck, I’ve known him all my life. And there’s something comforting about snuggling up to a limp prick.
“Oh, kid,” he says and hugs me.
 “I’m fine, really, I know these guys, and anyhow you’ve got Willa and her four kids.”
 
Gary is in love with Willa and Alaska. So he’s taking Willa and her kids and they’re moving up north. I think he traveled there once and he liked the way the sky looked. Maybe it’s because Willa’s black as can be and he figures the world isn’t ready for them yet.
 “I’m not a kid, Gary. Besides, Dy’s crazy about his millionaire American chick, and Bob, well, Bob’s in love with politics far as I can tell. As for Paul,  don’t know—he wears plaid shirts.”
 Gary’s shoulders touch each side of the doorframe. He’s standing there in the doorway, his arms hanging limply by his sides, and he’s shaking his head.
 “Well boys, guess we better let these two sort their shit out.”
 “What the fuck’s that supposed to mean, Paul wears plaid shirts?” Gary says after the boys file out.
 “Polio. He’s so busy hiding his arm, he forgets about his prick.”
 I hang my turquoise garment bag in the cupboard, create a table with my four valises, over which I drape Bobi’s shawl, thumbtack a hand-embroidered bedspread on the window, and replace the black satin sheets with my mother’s utility one-hundred-percent cotton sheets and my white Hudson’s Bay blanket. I climb up on the bed and remove the tie-dyed FUCK sheet. The gold carpet rolls remain intact. I take off my clothes, folding and placing them on top of my make-shift bureau, slide into my clean sheets and have a mediocre fuck with Gary.

*****************

“Hey lass, you OK? Stay cool, little virgin. We’ll take care of you.”
 We’re sitting on red velvet pillows in the living room. Dy is rubbing my back and stroking my hair and I burst into tears. Rubbing my back does that to me. Either I get really hot or I cry like a freaky cartoon character with faucets where the eyes should be. I’m pathetic when I cry. My face turns red, my nose a dark crimson, and my mouth crumples inward—I mean I really look tortured. But Dy knows me from our Union days and also I was his best friend’s girl, so he just sweeps me up in his strong working-class arms, carries me upstairs, and lies me gently down on the bed. He even takes off my shoes.
 “Dy, Dy, I don’t—I can’t.” And I start to cry again.
 “Shh. I’m just going to tuck you in. Sleep now, sweet lass. That’s it. Good lass, sleep now. That’s it.” He tucks the sheets in on each side and I cozy in, secure as a swaddled newborn. Maybe Dy’s my true love, a Trotskyite Welshman would be nice for a communist’s daughter.

Another Sexy Excerpt

          I was like some wild forest flower that had been transplanted into a landscaped urban garden. “How exquisite and rare,” a guest might comment at a summer evening gathering, while noting brilliance of hue and expansive foliage and then inquiring about propagation. The hostess would nod and smile mysteriously. I wasn’t cultivated, couldn’t quote passages, list authors, comment sardonically on world events, or spew slogans with easy footnote access. I couldn’t politicize, but I was a true as a naked baby.  “Politics is in my blood,” I’d say. “I was conceived while two card-carrying communists fucked with the Internationale blaring away in the background.”
         So when Dy who was a Trotskyite told me about The Living Theatre, I jumped up with my hands to my heart.       
        “How did you know that’s just my thing? I would love that,” I said.
         Dy grinned.
         “But I’m not, you know─it’s in my heart, you see, not in my brain.”
         “You’ll be a breath of fresh air,” Dy assured me. 
          It turned out the Living Theatre was run by Dan Daniels who’d been a party member alongside my parents. Except Dan never moved on. He stayed for the rosy-cheeked comrades who overlooked his inflated belly and his greasy grey hair parted in the middle. Dan would wander aimlessly, or as we Jews say, “Er drayt sich arum vie a fortz in russell.” (He wanders around like a fart in a barrel.) “I’m looking for my ideals, anyone see my ideals anywhere?” and finally, holding out the waist of his baggy pants and peering down, he’d sigh, “It’s alright. I’ve got ‘em. What would life be without ideals?” Things hadn’t really changed since my parents’ communist days when Dolly emerged from our basement toy room, wearing only a make-shift diaper. Sex was always the name of the game. Sex and power─which is sex anyhow─power’s just a cock in the dark, aiming for that spot between the legs and landing up a few inches behind target. Whereas sex even blindfolded can root out matching genitals. 
          Dan believed he could change the world through guerilla street theatre. I have to admit I was enthusiastic. We were marching, sitting down, signing petitions, handing out pamphlets. I met Philippe at the first Living Theatre party. He was a wisp of a man with olive skin and a mass of dark hair who wore a royal blue sky jacket in June. Luckily I came prepared. Everyone needs a gimmick. I brought my autoharp—I strummed and sang in my nasal country twang and everyone commented on what a great folksinger I’d make. Phillipe watched from a mattress as I, hot and flushed, sang “Banks of the Ohio,” a song about a jilted man who leads his love by her lily white hand to the Banks of the Ohio and drowns her. When everyone switched rooms, I just sort of stayed. Philippe got up, locked his purple door, switched on the single red light bulb that dangled from the ceiling, and stripped. A fuck is always a good ice breaker.                                                 
         The next morning he brought me home in his blue Volkswagen. He was an admirable gear shifter. I liked his wire sunglasses, the look of his stark white T-shirt against his dark blue jeans, the musky smell of his car, and the way he yelled “Fous-le camp” with his Parisian accent at Montreal’s wild drivers. I stayed with Philippe for five months, took the train to his family’s country house in Haliburton, and fucked him on the upper bunk above his eleven-year-old sister. The country is a powerful aphrodisiac. Whenever I venture up north and see a forest, I’m driven to run out of the car and into the wilderness, shedding clothes as I go. A moderate-sized city forest has the same impact. I’m proud to say nature turns me on. 
            The Living Theatre performed a third-world-war-cometh scene at Place des Nations during Expo 67. We were Gordon Lightfoot’s opening act. Dan Daniels was the bomb. He was dressed in black and hurled himself into our midst. We all wore black arm bands. I was supposed to be a young girl, horror-stricken, searching for her mother—stage centre, shaking, shrieking, and finally mute, dissolving into a quivering fetus on the stage floor. Then everyone, draped in coloured scarves representing the global community, gathered around me and joined hands. Twenty thousand people looked on as I was reborn, surging upward, reaching out to each nation and embraced by all. Lightfoot, wearing a fluorescent purple tie, came on stage. “Very good, very good,” he said, smiling at Sonia the blond Slav whom he later discovered fingering one of his wide bright ties in his dressing room. Gordon didn’t thrill me—he was too smooth, on and off stage, although I liked his ties. 
           In our third month together, Philippe moved into his own apartment. His friend Danny Rossman brought his sewing machine over, fashioning a perfect box-pleated bedspread, curtains, and pillow cases. Everything was done in red and black burlap. Each time I’d come over, Danny was there reading “Under Milk Wood” while Philippe lounged on his red cushions and sipped chamomile tea. Once, when I did catch him alone and quickly stripped, not wanting to waste a moment and being boldly body proud, Philippe just stared and then turned toward his red wall.
           “You know, Janice, that’s not all there is.”
           “I just wanted to get close,” I said.
           “My ass you wanted to get close. Fucking is the only way you know of getting close. Well fuck you and your fucking. J’en ai ras-le-bol!”
           “Goddamn you Phillipe, if you’re going to swear at me, the least you can do is translate. So I like to fuck.” I twirled around his room. “Fuck fuck fuck,” I sang and lay down beside him, rubbing my tits against his back. He sprang up and sat glaring at me from his burlap sofa. I was starting to feel pornographic.
           “And do you know why I like to fuck? Because I feel close, because fucking is a loving thing to do, that’s what it is. A loving thing. What the hell is wrong with you anyhow? It’s something with me isn’t it? Come on, I want to know. Is my ass too big?” I said, waving my ass at him. “Maybe it’s too small. Maybe you like bigger asses. Oh, and how about my tits? I don’t need this. I’m outta here is what I am. Permanently.” 
           The following Saturday morning I was on the Cote St. Catherine 129 heading downtown. By the time I reached Philippe’s building, my focus had shifted from sex to bladder. I always had to pee when I was nervous. The toilet was my refuge. I’d just beeline for the bathroom and piss away my fear. From the bottom of the stairwell I could hear the stereo blaring─“This is the end, my only friend, the end . . . . ” I knocked on Phillipe’s red door. No one answered. I still had his key, so I let myself in. The Doors were really blasting away. I closed the door behind me and walked toward the bed. Then stopped.  This time I really had to pee, was peeing, on the floor in front of Philippe’s bed while he lay naked on top of someone else, his ass flying in the air. Clothes jumbled on the floor and Philippe ramming into─Danny! His prick ramming into Danny Jew Boy seamstress. I mean they were going at it the two of them, my Frenchman biting Danny’s neck and shoulders and Danny wiggling away underneath, “Fuck me Philippe oh my love, fucking hurt me, Jesus Christ Philippe.”
           Danny was saying “fuck me.” Actually screaming in soprano falsetto and when I had breathlessly made the same request─“Your brain’s between your legs,” Philippe had complained. I just stood there watching and wet with piss and what hurt the most was Philippe was on top. If he’d been under I could have blamed Danny, but Philippe was on top shoving his prick into Danny’s screaming ass. And then Philippe pulled out and with a sigh lay beside his little seamstress, and Danny, god, I swear, closed his eyes─he had this beautific expression on his face like he was experiencing a divine moment, reverently licked off Philippe’s cock. The same prick I had hungered for, that had slammed right to the root of Danny’s hairy hole, was now in his foaming mouth. He sucked and slurped and licked Philippe’s balls while wiggling his ass like some champion hula girl.  You could tell he loved sucking.  And the thing was Danny with his skinny yeshiva body had an enormous cock. Not like my Garth’s, which is like a giant redwood in keeping with his massive frame and his spreading balls beneath, but a cock that might have been some sculpture’s joke─”we’ll give him skeeny legs, theen theen arms, you got that extra clay? Ha! We roll the clay theen theen, roll like long sausage.  Messaggero di Dio . . .” and he knelt before what he’d created. 
            I had never liked Danny whom I hear has become a celebrated choreographer (his cock having presented certain dancing obstacles), but I had to admit he was talented. Philippe was in heaven, pumping his ass up and down, gripping Danny by his hair and shoving his head down. And then he screamed─saw me; screamed; came. And burst out laughing. Danny, who had donated his heart and mouth sat up, spied me, and he too started shrieking. I just stood there─ I was never good with one-liners─betrayed and wet from my own piss. And what did they do?  Danny vaselined his dangling cock, conscientiously did the same to Phillpe’s now gaping asshole, flashed me a wide smile and plowed in. He didn’t even offer me a coffee. Politeness is a salve.  I mean he could have said, “Would you care for some coffee, Janice─we’ll be with you in just one minute.”
          Anyhow I wasn’t going to hang around and watch. Sometimes I’m not in touch with my feelings. One minute I was standing beside the bed and the next, I’d zoomed out of myself and was taking in the scene. It was like going on a sight-seeing expedition with a guide. “And now you’re seeing two men banging ass and there’s the jilted girlfriend wearing jeans with paisley inserts and an authentic Mexican gypsy blouse.”
          “Philippe,” I said, “this isn’t working out. I’m getting bored.”
           Philippe looked up at me with his velvet eyes. He really was beautiful. I wanted him to protest, to break down, his love for me blooming like a fast-motion National Film Board animation. But he just kept staring with his French eyes.
            “Shit Philippe. We’re not getting anywhere and I think I better leave now. It was nice. All the best, Danny.”
          I grabbed my purse and pea jacket. Philippe didn’t even see me to the door. One year later, when I was married to a good Jew although I said I would never marry one which shows you how strong my word is, someone phoned my cousin’s house and asked for me. The stupid shit said I was married (which I already regretted) and the caller said “oh,” he’d been in France for two years and had just come back. How long had I been married? “Almost a year,” said my cousin Laura who routinely shaved her eyebrows off and penciled in new ones. “Oh,” he said again. I never knew who it was. I looked up Philippe’s number, and my heart beating like the flapping of birds taking off, dialed half the number, hung up, dialed the whole number, held the receiver face down on my shoulder, then he answered the phone whoever he was and I hung up. After all I was married. Until death do us part and all that shit.

<BR><BR/>

Intermediary Pricks

"God," I whispered, "are you there?" I was lying in bed with my pressed pale green sheets neatly folded over my Hudson Bay wool blanket,one hand grasping the other in a prayer pose, alternating with fingers straight, tips touching. You can never take chances, even with minor details.

"I know it must be tedious for you to hear the same names every night, although I've added new ones for your interest. Not saying your mind wanders although I do wonder about the way you seem to let the worst things happen, so I'm thinking you might have turned your head for a moment and stared off into the universe which must be infinitely more appealing then my ticking off eleven inconsequential fucks-it's not that I need your forgiveness-some count sheep, I count cocks." My bedroom window slammed shut. "OK," I said, "I get the hint. You're running out of time and patience. No, you can't be running out of time, every time you take a step, the sky opens up. I can zigzag like Marcel Marceau on speed, but my road starts at A and ends at Z. Period. Or starts at D and ends at . . . Point is it starts and ends." I took a deep breath. "Wait. Do you count almost entry, like getting down and dirty but not exactly in?" The other window rattled. "Sorry sorry, I just love chatting with you; it's like having a sleepover every night."

I had been practicing holding my breath and talking, just selecting random words and syllables. My goal was to recite all eleven names in one breath — I was hoping I might dupe God into thinking all the names belonged to one guy. Mostly I needed to remember the names and so I rolled them off like chanting rhymes and skipping in the schoolyard even though I had always stumbled in both—"Melez, Bob, David, Gary, Coyle, Erwin, Freed, Philllipe, Hart, Howie . . ." I made two fists, springing up a finger with each name. Ten. I inhaled again. Still ten. Maybe the guy with spider legs and pimples, the one who walked with a stoop, his tweed jacket hanging limply in that nonchalant, scholarly way. I always remembered the names of fucks, although eleven did have a more relaxed ring. You can pass over an odd number, but even numbers sound ominous-like you can't trust anyone over thirty or life stops at forty.

Some count rosary beads, recount sins and beg for forgiveness. My entry into heaven and requirements for remaining in God's good graces involved a flawless recital of fucks. For practice, I'd fill up the bathroom sink and hold my head underwater. "Janice, Janice, what are you doing in there?" my mother would ask, her voice settling into a high worried whine as she rattled the handle. "I'm washing my face, Ma," I'd say and dive under again.

There are some friends who share their dirty and down-lows. I never had friends like that-I kept my overcoat buttoned and belted. And for God, who must have been blasé from seeing it all, I offered up a list of credits without a scene-by-scene narrative. Then I'd wiggle my ass into its familiar mattress groove and fall asleep as I watched my home movies: One scene with Gary Brown, the guitar player next door who fucked me and told me my cunt smelled which gave me a complex for decades afterward. I mean what kind of thing is that to tell a broad you've been fucking? The second with Melez, who should have starred in the opening scene, not because he was the best, but he was the first and dedicated to helping me out, although he dumped me, phoning me up when he passed through Montreal—
"Janice, this is Melez."
I clutched the edge of our teak hall table.
"I just want to tell you, I'm in Montreal but I'm not going to see you."
My throat tightened. It does that when I'm upset—constricts, causing words to force their way upward, making them sound like they're being squeezed out and spoken sideways.
"I handed over your name to my cousin Paul. Just so you know."
I hung up.

Three was David Grace the Jewish gym teacher who thought he shouldn't fuck me because I was all messed up, but what he didn't know was that sucking and swallowing clears the mind as well as the sinuses. Grace drove all the way to Montreal to fuck me. Twice. Each time he called me from the lobby of the Mont Royal, I told him I couldn't see him. I'd forgotten how he felt on my skin, I said. I was shy. It might have been hard to figure, but it was true. Still is. The fourth was my crazed mathematician and sword-wielding lover of Wagner, and five—Erwin, scrawny McGill kid from the folk music club who drove me up to Bonnie Goldberg's country house in St. Donat. I climbed in through the bathroom window, fell, unlocked the front door, and laughed. We fucked on a single cot in Bonnie's brother's room. Breaking in made my heart race. Fucking Erwin was no big deal, who, as he was about to come, slid his wet prick out of me, shooting his load all over my bare belly just as my father honked his horn outside the cabin. I slunk into the front seat of my father's green Cadillac convertible that he always drove with the top up and he didn't say a word all the way home through the five tolls on the new auto route. Six was a fuck with political overtones, a draft dodger from New York waving his bare ass and slamming into me while the bobby pins holding my fall slipped out, causing my wig to land on his pillow, which really freaked him out. I went home with my hair in my straw purse and maybe we fucked one more time as a gesture of national goodwill.

Meanwhile Coyle went to New York with the wasp bitch Irma. I had spent fourteen months apprenticing, sucking him off, wrapping my feet around his ass, and staring into his glazed cock-eyed eyes. He was a prick to feel comfortable with, to practice scales on and master technique. Anyhow there I was without Coyle, Grace or my neighbour Gary, alone without any infatuations and feeling the flow of my beautiful-sad—angst lush as water-lilies opening only under the veil of night. I'd walk home around midnight through Rockland Park, along the winding paved path flanked with maple and evergreen, it was spring and I'd walk barefoot with my cunt and heart open, flooded with wide-eyed passion. I couldn't understand why the world wasn't in love with me. I still can't. And sometimes, I'd hear footsteps and slow down. I walked through that dark deserted park, dangling my sandals, and no one even made obscene gestures at me.

I was in my second year at McGill, skipping the same first year courses, and relishing my status as Union corner regular. My hair was thick, finally to my neck, and turning under in a gentle page boy. I surrounded my eyes with molten black liner, wore black tight sweaters and "A" line skirts, saw Phil Ochs at the Purple Onion- he was wearing a bright red shirt and singing "I Ain't Marching Anymore" and Candy, bright on acid, called out, "Hey man, love your red shirt!" and we all felt really hip which of course we were.

One overcast October morning, I was sitting in my regular seat when the union saloon door swung open and this guy with a cowboy strut ambled in. He stood at the opposite end of the lounge and fastened his gaze on me.
"Hello sweetheart," he said.
Bogart overtones.
"Do you have a cafeteria in this here university?"
I stared at the crotch of his tight levis.
Yes, uh, well yes, yes we do. Actually, we happen to have two in this here university."
"Good, because I'm hungry. I haven't eaten all day," he said. I crossed my legs and slung my sister's oversize black leather purse over my shoulders. I thought the purse added a touch of insouciant cool. Soft leather does that. He followed my ass out of the lounge, across the foyer, up twenty-three concrete stairs and into the cafeteria. My body wasn't cooperating—left side of ass flaring into an exaggerated pull to right, right foot sifting blindly through thick air and seeking out dry land, left pressing through the same arc, shoulders squared bolstering tits and belly. Sometimes I feel really disjointed.
Up here from Virginia," the cowboy drawled. "Coming up north again in the spring, Gonna bring my Lady Jane."
"Who the hell is Lady Jane?" I asked.

Sex with Abie in 1980

            The night I finished typing my manuscript I got stoned and brought it to Abie who read it while intermittently snorting. He was lying in bed in his ratty blue underwear and torn-under-the armpit "Save the Whale" t-shirt and all the while I was thinking — I gotta go to the blue room and read my sex poems, I gotta read my sex poems—because watching Abie read while raising the right side of his ass and farting just wasn't doing it for me. Then he said, "I'm going to take a leak," which gave me the chance to dash off to read a few of my home-grown sexy poems until he called out, "So where are you?"
          "Your eyes are bleary," was all he said when I stood in our doorway.
          "I was just reading my love poems," I said clutching a stash of paper to my chest.
          I saw he was in The Mood—Abie claims to be in the top two percent in terms of his libido—so I said, "Well, alright, I'll put them away," and reluctantly walked my poems down the hallway with its chocolate brown wall-to-wall—wood wasn't in style in those days at least not in Willowdale. I padded into the Blue Room and deeply kissed my Man- U-Script with the same love and passion of a woman to a man and maybe more, and then I thought how poetic, I'll have to write this down, which I didn't because I knew Abie was waiting impatiently for his fuck which I hoped, as usual, would smooth his edges and which as usual, did not.

Copyright Janice Colman 2007

Sex with Abie in 1980

Naked Words Excerpt

I spent the first two and a half months away from my girls on the double mattress and box spring Garth bought in a Scarborough strip mall. We had five basic positions:  Garth on top with my feet on his shoulders, me on top facing Garth's feet, the old on-all-fours, Garth on top with me flattened beneath, and me lying on my back with my hair fanning out and Garth's massive head on my belly. And one more: Garth kneeling on the floor, his elbows on the bed, and his shoulders spanning three-quarters of the length.

"I've lost my girls," I'd cry.

"Sh sh. You haven't lost your girls."

"Yes I have. I swore I would never leave them and they'll never forgive me."

He'd rearrange my hair all caught up in my tears.

"What part of 'you didn't leave them' don't you understand?" he'd say, and I would say, "All of it," and I'd smile.

"Lie on me," I'd say.

"You sure?"

"What part of 'lie on me don't you understand?" I'd say and he'd smile. Garth has little teeth and a huge body. I couldn't stop crying so he did his best, lying on me or using his cock as a cork against my teary onslaughts. When he lay on me I couldn't think of anything but his weight and the air being pressed out of me.

"Do they love you?" he'd ask.

"Yes."

"You sure?"

"Yes."

"Then you haven't lost them."

"But how can you say that?"

"Because love wins."

"You're twenty-six. How can you know?"

And then he'd fuck me. He wasn't prone to using many words. He said I talked more than anyone he'd ever met.

When his weight or his cock couldn't hold back my tears, Garth would load me in my rented Mazda and we'd drive to the States, over the Rainbow Bridge and scam a bank, which always cheered me up. It was easy: you open an account. You say you're planning on moving  and you want to open an account ahead of time. Then you wait one month. At the end of the month, you drive back, wearing a long skirt and no panties, and the guy you're with writes a bum check for nine thousand dollars. You hang until midnightand you return to the bank and you park. He kisses you, with a bit of tongue, but not too much. You both go to the bank machine that you call the bankette because you're not young anymore and besides you're from Montreal, and you withdraw your cash. You walk back to the car in the wind and you hold your long skirt down to keep it from swirling up. When you get back into your car, which he is driving, he pulls you to him and kisses you, this time with more tongue.
              I didn't tell him that Abie had led us through our lean years, which were most of our twenty-eight together, scamming and switching banks. "It's a war," Abie said, "everything goes." When he lived in Europe, he'd send us catalogues of castles he said he slept in while I subdued the bank hounds with offers of his Western Union drafts.

It's true that when one door closes, other doors open. Not all at once of course, and maybe not straight away. Which makes closing the first door kind of tough.

Copyright Janice Colman 2007

Naked Words Excerpt

The Zen of Sucking Cock

"Hi, I'm phoning to speak to the Caroline." My voice cracked the way it does when tears get lodged in my throat.
"I don't know," Abie said. "What do you mean you don't know? I need to speak to my daughter."
"It's all about your needs, isn't it?"
"Please tell her I'm on the phone."

The sound of the phone being set down on the table echoed in my right ear. Garth was in the kitchen creating a shake with protein powder, fruit, and vanilla ice cream. He said he couldn't digest the protein without added the added fat from the ice cream. I was sitting at the edge of the bed with our black Zeller's quilt wrapped around me although it summer and we were in the middle of a heat wave.

"Hello," Abie said.
"Yeah?"
"She doesn't want to speak to you."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure all right. She says she hates you and of course I try to reason with her."

I huddled in the quilt and started rocking. Garth was standing in the kitchen doorway, his body filling the frame. "You OK?" he asked. I shook my head. There was bitter burning deep down the sides of my nose from tears being siphoned up. Garth ambled over, he always walked in measured steps, and lifted his cock out of his cotton shorts.

"Janice," Abie said.
"Mmm," I said.
"You can't blame them. You left.''

I shook my head. I wanted to say it the way it really was. I wanted to lay out just the right phrases that would sway even the most hardened wise-cracking Southern judge. Garth placed one hand on the back of my head and the other on my mouth. I couldn't help it. I laughed.

In those early months on Nina Street, I either cried, fucked or sucked Garth's cock. There's something Zen-like about sucking cock. It clears the sinuses and the mind. I was on the rack not about leaving Abie, but for skipping out on my girls which dismembered my mind, turning and twisting out coils of memory involving love and pain. Reflexology is supposed to be like that. You press one part of the foot and you feel a pinch under your armpit. I left my girls and I was on a rack set on auto and maximum. I was a tree bred for a certain soil, climate, location and time, and I uprooted myself, yanked out my roots like teeth hauled out by garden pliars, and replanted in strange dark and musky earth.

Leaving my girls was like walking on Yonge Street with a dagger rammed in my chest clear through and out my back. I whirled with pain, fell, crawled, and rose again, kind of like James Brown on the Ed Sullivan Show. At the end of his act, James would fall to the ground and a stage hand would come out of the wings, wrap a gold cape around James's shoulder and he'd struggle up, singing one more refrain, one final round.

I don't know whether Garth looked upon me with compassion. He saw a builder woman with fading orange hair, brown roots glaring, who bawled for hours on end, and he discovered I would stop crying under several circumstances: training at Strictly's, fucking, sucking his cock and marveling at his red-gold pubic hair against his mahogany skin and the burnt umber colour of his balls.

"How could you do it? How could you do such a thing?" Josie was crying into the phone. Even when she was five, she carried the weight of her world on her shoulders. Once I saw her square her shoulders as she walked down the concrete path to her school and my heart dove out to her.

I have a canvas of two bodybuilders side by side, one male, one female. One of the female's eyes is twisted sideways and the other slants in a downward angle outside the perimeter of her face. Over her arms and legs her veins which branch out in all directions are sliced in harsh horizontals. How could I explain all this to my Josie?

"I couldn't stay, honey, and he wouldn't leave."
"I don't know what you're talking about. What do you mean he wouldn't? How could you leave us?"
"Because he wouldn't, honey, he plain old refused. He said he paid the rent. I didn't leave you. I never could. I left Indian Road and my sadness with your father."

I was sitting at the edge of our new queen-size mattress—seems like I spent most of those early months with one part or another attached to that Nina Street bed—trying to make sense of that new dark space with its black surroundings. And I thought as I often have throughout my life, what have I done and is there any way back?

Copyright Janice Colman 2007

Zen of Sucking Cock


Copyright Janice Colman 2007