Thirteen Crucifixions 26

Alone with Randall.  In the Pitstop.  Glen felt like his babysitter.  He couldn’t really say that he was WITH him.  There were people, many actually, with whom one could never be authentically WITH.  Co-exist, maybe.  Without hostility, but not really peacefully.  At least not Glen’s idea of peaceful.  He thought that such people as Randall could best be assessed in negatives: nonviolent, inactive, nonparticipating, impartial, immobile, nondiscursive.  Not that Randall had nothing to say.  He had already expounded at length about the peace march, the anti-nuclear movement, Carol and her speech, that he found her still attractive.  Also his ex-wife, who was now in a convent in the Netherlands beginning her postulancy.  That he was looking for work.  Guy talk.  He didn’t seem to want to leave Glen, having silently reclaimed his friendship following a six month absence.  But now, as before, Randall still had not really given anything of himself.  Self-contained, self-absorbed.  Self-centred?  Randall, while he worked at Good Shepherd, was a silent presence.  Bryan had hired him, likely on the basis of physical attraction.  He hadn’t left Good Shepherd on the warmest of terms and Bryan didn’t even appear to know that Randall was there sitting next to him. 

            Glen had himself been captivated by Randall, whose lean stark handsomeness mesmerized and gripped him.  Of himself, Randall revealed little—the silent type.  But Glen?  For him a visit with Randall was like going to confession.  One evening following a particularly gruelling shift together at Good Shepherd, they broke the ice over a beer.  Since Randall lived a few blocks away, Glen stopped in at his apartment—a suite in an old house, much like his own—on the way home. Over several cups of strong coffee they, or rather Glen, talked, and talked, and talked, revealing to this colleague, this virtual stranger nearly every buried secret of his being.  Randall gave nothing in return.  Glen, having flung open the gates of brass—to what?  To what force of light that had been waiting to further penetrate him? But with Randall he had surely been opened.  In the small hours of the morning he walked home, feeling both cleansed, but also haunted, by the feeling that he had thoroughly betrayed himself.

            Randall left Good Shepherd and Vancouver the following month and Glen ached with loss.  Bryan wouldn’t say if he’d been fired, just that it was time for him to move on.  Randall, who had never responded to Bryan on any level that was not strictly professional, soon fell out of favour.  Bryan expected more than a merely professional subordination.  Not really the tacit assumption that any handsome man in his employ should be willing to sleep with him, but at least some acknowledgement of Bryan’s unspoken need and interest.  Glen had so deferred to him well and adroitly.  But Glen was genuinely fond of Bryan.

            Glen had been very careful to not reveal to Randall the secrets of his sexuality.  Not that he had anything to hide.  He had mentioned Tim, but not that they had been lovers.  Sex was not Glen’s peculiar struggle, and he had quickly learned how easily his difficulties and conflicts could take on an erotic disguise. What he most wanted to reveal, and had striven to do with Randall, was this deep, intimate and overwhelming connection that he experienced with other people.  That this poignancy often reduced him to silent tears while lying on the floor in the dark, spread-eagled in a posture of loving vulnerability.  They were due to join the others in the cocktail lounge across the street to where they had vacated the Pitstop half an hour ago.  But Glen felt held, where he sat, by Randall, who with his consent had just made his claim on him.  And Randall, now on his fifth beer, was beginning to show it.  Glen was already feeling overwhelmed, engulfed, that he had to fight for air.  And Randall could get away with it.

            “It doesn’t bother me that you’re gay.”

            “Yeah.  Whatever.”

            “No, I mean it.”

            “What makes you think I’m gay?”  

            “I just assumed it, I guess.”

            “Why?”

            “This is a gay environment.”

            “Well, you’re sitting here, too.  Does that make you gay?”

            “Hey, wait a minute.”

            “Well, yes or no?”

            “Of course not.”

            “Well, there you go.”

            “So, you’re not gay.”

            “Does it matter?”

            “I said it doesn’t.”

            “Then why bring it up?”

            “Just in case, I guess.”

            “Just in case what?”

            “In case you’re attracted to me.”

            “Sexually?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Well, what if I’m not?  Do you wish that I was?

            “No.”

            “Okay then.”

            Marlene slumped into the chair next to Glen and put her head on his shoulder.  She sat up.  “Christ, I’m beat”, she said.

            “Go home.”

            “In two fucking hours.”

            “You can’t leave now?”

            “I’ve got a new waiter coming in to train, but maybe he won’t show.  They often don’t around here.”

            “You’ve met Randall?”

            “Hi”, Marlene said smiling as she reached across her brother to shake Randall’s hand.  “Marlene’s my name.  I’m Glen’s sister.”

            “She’s single.  Ow!”  He said when Marlene jabbed him with her elbow.  They were both laughing.

            “So’s he!”

            “Never mind!”  She couldn’t stop giggling.

            Randall was smiling.

            “Be kind to the sleep-deprived.”

            “Been a long day?” Randall said.

            “Fuck, I’ll say it has.  Sat up till three this morning with a fucking crossword puzzle, then I was here at nine.  Don’t have time for a life, working here.”

            “Do you like working here?”

            “Done worse.  Almost all the men here are gay so no one hits on me.  Dammit.”

            “I’m not gay.”

            “Wanna job?”

            “Here?”

            Glen was laughing.

            “No, seriously.  You can train with my little brother here.”  She eyed him up and down in a slow and langourous Mae West leer.  “You’ll be just dandy.”

            “You’re tired”, Glen said.

            “You’re not homophobic, I hope?”

            “I’m here aren’t I?”

            “You’re not going to meet a lot of women here”, Glen said.

            “Just seven foot trannies”, Marlene said. 

            Pierre was suddenly hovering over Glen.  “Can I get you anything else?”  He was smiling.

            “More coffee would be good.”

            “He just adores you, Glen”, Marlene said.  “He wants to be my sister-in-law.  And yes brother-dearest, Pierre is going to be training you.”

            Randall shifted uneasily in his seat.  Marlene again gave him the Mae West look.  She stifled a yawn.

            “Telephone, Marlene”, Pierre said.

“Do me a favour”, Randall said.

            “Maybe”.

            “Ask her if she’d like to go out with me.”

            “Ask her yourself.”                  

            “Hey, if it’s too much to ask.”

            “She’s my sister.  I don’t know how she’d react to you.”

            “Don’t have to get personal.”

            “I’ve only just met you and you want to date my sister.”

            “Should I date you, instead?”

            “I can’t believe you’d say that.  Anyway, I’m very protective of her.”

            “Why don’t you just admit that you’re gay.”

            “Ain’t nothin’ to admit.”

            “Don’t be like that.”

            “Darling!  Our first fight.”

            They both burst out laughing.

            In the cocktail lunge Glen had at least other people to distract Randall from him.  He really wanted to home.  He didn’t move.  He felt stranded.  Needed. Everyone at the table, as well as Randall, appeared to have made on him a personal claim.  He wanted solitude, a nice lonely walk over the bridge, then along the streets of his east side neighbourhood.  Alone.  Each one here at this table had touched him, had in a way penetrated him: Carol, Randall, Margery and Dwight.  He couldn’t shake them loose.  They loved Glen?  It was too soon to tell.  Their need summoned him.  Glen loved these people?  Each of them?  Or, more simply, Glen loved.  Glen, ever since his death and resurrection, lived as an open channel for love and good will to come pouring through him.  He couldn’t control it.  He had not consented to this.  And now he felt like everybody’s hostage.  It wasn’t simply Randall, nor Margery, nor Stephen, nor Pierre.  Such had become his ongoing experience of others, where they would simply pick up on this current of love in Glen, and depending upon their need, their openness: and so Glen had learned that he really must protect himself from the clamour of this need.   He was feeling overwhelmed.  He really ought to get up and leave, but love compelled him, and commanded him that he remain.

            “You’re a friend of Doris Goldberg? Dwight asked.

            “She is my extended family.”

            “How so?”

            “I’ve known her since I was thirteen.  My mother and I moved into the building that she and her husband were managing.”

            “I’d hardly imagine her as a landlady.”

            “They actually bought the building on the strength of their book royalties and turned it into a co-op.  My mother met Doris in the college where they both teach.”

            “How would you describe her?”

            “Doris?”  Kind.  Incredibly kind.  One of the kindest persons I’ve ever met.  But I can’t really say that I know her.  She’s never really opened herself to me.”

            “And her husband?”

            “Sam was quite a different story.  He never talked much to anybody.  Very withdrawn, actually.”  Glen couldn’t continue, partly out of respect and circumspection, but also—frustration?  He really didn’t know what to say about Doris or Sam Goldberg.  He must have been fourteen at the time.  It was summer.  Sam had been outside cutting the grass.  Even then he looked very old, but Glen had never been able to envision this taciturn man as having ever been young.  He always used a push mower for cutting the grass, as much for the environment as for the exercise. Glen had been drinking ice tea with Doris in her kitchen.  Sam came in, hot and sweaty in a white t-shirt.  Glen had never before noticed his bare arms.  Then, for the first, and only, time, Glen saw the numbers that had been tattooed on the inside of Sam Goldberg’s left forearm.  He asked him what the numbers meant.  Sam flatly replied that the Nazis had done this to all the prisoners in the death camps.  Unceremoniously, he left the kitchen, soon returning in a long sleeve shirt.  Glen never again saw his bare arms.

            Feeling gauche about asking him, Glen said to Dwight, “You said that you’re divorced?”

            “Four years ago this month.”

            “Kids?”

            “Two.  They’re with her in Toronto.”  Glen was already starting to lose the connection he had been feeling with Dwight.  He noticed that he had rather beautiful hands, very white with tapering long fingers.  His left middle finger wore a silver ring that had a large green malachite set in it, rather similar to Margery’s jade ring.  Glen thought that there might be a story to both these rings, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask either Dwight or Margery.  His connection, for now, with Dwight, seemed almost entirely lost, and this was grieving him terribly.

            “Peter and I used to hang out here a lot”, Margery said.

            “Was he drinking?” Glen said.

            “Of course he was drinking.  I was his little enabler.”

            “What’s it like, being here now?’

            “It’s a bit weird.  Like I’m sitting among ghosts.”

            “Guests?” said Dwight.

            “Ghosts.”

            “So you’re having ghosts for guests?”

            “It never ends.”

            To Randall Carol was saying, “I think I’d like to change the subject.”

            “I would like an answer”, he said.

            “No is an answer.”

            “I only want to have a drink with you.”

            “We’re doing that right now.”

            “Alone.”

            “I like being chaperoned.”

            Margery said to Glen, “It was actually my idea to come in here.”

            “With Peter?”

            “This evening.  But, yes, with Peter, also.”

            “Did you ever bring Megan in with you?” Dwight asked Margery.

            “No.  Never with Megan.  But I did the night I tried to kill myself.  This was so not the place for me to be, which made it perfect.”

            “Perfect?” said Glen.

            “This place was full of all these plastic, artificial people, all of them gathered together for their drinky-poo, or hunting down a nice piece of sex for the night.  They were just horrid, pathetic and horrid.  I’ve never seen such ugly, wretched people before. But I don’t think that they were really that ugly.  I wasn’t seeing things very clearly at the moment.  Or maybe I was seeing them a little too clearly.  But, believing that I wasn’t going to be waking up tomorrow, I think that it really heightened my perceptions for me.  It was like being at a masked ball. Everyone wore the same mask.  It was very creepy. There were some authentically attractive people there.  They looked even worse.  I was seeing into everyone’s dark, ugly little soul, and there was their ugliness, staring right back into my own ugliness.  It was like being inside a hall of mirrors.  No one seemed to really fit here.  All the women were wearing way too much make-up.  They were like costume whores.  Their hair was all wrong—permed, curled, artificially waved, artificially coloured.  Artificially everything.  They were all trying to look like Cleopatra or Petula Clarke.  Perfectly ordinary people, with ordinary lives and ordinary occupations, and they were all trying, with the help of alcohol, bad lighting, and make-up, to weave a sense of magic into their lives.  They all looked like circus freaks.  Their clothes were all wrong—often revealing far too much unhealthy looking skin, veins, flab.  And yet I don’t think that some of them, anyway, would have looked bad naked. Quite beautiful perhaps, some of them anyway, if they didn’t hate themselves.  But there they were, as though they were indeed naked. How they sat, positioned themselves, bringing disgraceful emphasis to breasts that were too small, or too large, or sagging or misshapen.  And the way they positioned their hands and arms when they spoke, beating the air like participants in a mad, sick ritual dance, and shrieking hysterically like torture victims, or souls in hell.  The women’s hands resembled claws with filed and sharpened nails dripping with the fresh blood of their victims.  And all the metal they wore, and the cheap costume jewelry, or diamonds—it all looked equally grotesque, unnecessary, equally wrong.  It was all wrong.  And the men were every bit as bad as the women.  They all sounded horrible, like barking dogs or pigs being slaughtered, while poisoning and drugging themselves with cigarettes and alcohol.  They were all desperately having a good time, when it was obvious that if there was any other place where they could be then they would have gladly gone there, if only they knew how to get there.  Or that such a place might possibly exist.  But what was the use of their going anywhere else, since they’d be bringing with them their sick ugly selves, they would only end up polluting and defiling whatever paradise they might accidentally stumble into.

            “It was their eyes that gave them all away. All of them.  I have never seen human eyes that were so full of fear, remorse.  Guilt.  Shame.  It was like being stranded in one of Dante’s circles of hell. I was weeping when I left.  I could no longer stand it in there.  But I couldn’t run away from it either.  I was carrying inside me this same ugliness.  I was the ugliness that I was loathing as I beheld it in these awful, pathetic lounge lizards.  It was like being locked in a small windowless cell and the light is always on.  Out on the street, it was more of the same.  People were headed in droves down to the beach to see the fireworks.  With the crowd, I walked down the slope of Davie Street as far as Denman.  Instead of continuing on to the Beach, I went against the crowd, against the tide, along Denman.  Again, it was the people’s eyes.  They all had the same kind of eyes. empty, bored, tormented.  Deprived.  And these were all physically healthy, well-dressed persons who clearly didn’t want for anything materially, who looked after themselves well.  Every single person who passed me had presence for me; I could see the entire sum of their lives.  As if the Akashic Records had just been opened for me.  Each one that I saw... Was.  Simply was.  And not one of them seemed even to know that they were, much less what they were. It was horrible. I was only too glad to get into my hotel room.  And while the fireworks exploded like the garish flowers of Armeggedon outside my window, I swallowed all those pills and then went to sleep.

            “I started coming in here again when I was living in the House of Unconditional Love.  Even in my psychotrophic haze I knew that I would have to start working on recovering myself.  My sense of who I was.  Only when I was seeing Warren did I really feel connected with myself. Otherwise, with Megan, with the women’s collective—Warren was like a false spring in midwinter.  Had I not ended the pregnancy, had I not permitted Megan, nor the other women, to put all that pressure on me; had I simply walked out of my cage through that open door into freedom—but there’s really no point in dwelling on that.  Killing the baby, my baby.  No, I can’t just write this one off as a first trimester fetus.  For me this was a living, wanted child.  And yes I am pro-choice.  But that ended it for me.  No Warren, no baby.  No Margery.  Bob’s yer uncle.  With Bryan at the House of Unconditional Love I felt like a walking amnesiac.  It was like walking in my sleep.  Now as a diagnosed crazy I had that baggage to carry as well.  Thank God that the drugs, even if I didn’t need them, helped me forget the stigma of being branded as “mentally-ill”.  And even though I’ve since been declared as “misdiagnosed”, I think it’s still a stigma that I will be carrying for the rest of my life.

            “But then, in that house, with Bryan and all those other kind, well-meaning professionals to rebuild my life for me, I might as well have been living in a coma.  I did not know who I was.  Me—Margery Germaine, remained for me a distant, discontiguous memory.  I had to get me back.  So, one year later, I sat here, in this lounge, at this very table, to try to recover what I had lost.  The crowd was much the same.  Only, I no longer found them quite so menacingly ugly.  It might have been because of the medicated haze that I was in.  I wasn’t drinking alcohol.  I knew better than mix it with my meds.  I went into the ladies’ where I was touching up my face.  At Love House, the women were encouraged to wear make-up and look as feminine as possible.  I’d never bothered before, having always considered make-up to be bourgeois and patriarchal.  So, in the ladies’, staring back at me in the mirror, was this tarted-up doll, just like one of the regulars in the lounge.   I looked again, and I recognized me, Margery.  But it also was not me.  After this, I stopped taking my meds.  The staff at the House thought I was regressing, that I was having a relapse.  Much to my amazement, it was my psychiatrist who came to my rescue.  She saw my defiant resistance as a sign of progress.  It didn’t take her long to convince me that I had been misdiagnosed.  She only warned me that I had to be very careful about who I told this to, or they would quickly invent a pretext for recommitting me.

            “It was a rude awakening.  It was like discovering that I actually have a face, that there is a me, just as there is a unique image in all of us, that sleeps uneasily behind that mask of uniform ugliness.  But society conspires to forbid us from showing our true face.  They want everything uniform, bland, homogenized.  Or we think that it all exists somewhere else.  That we can’t possibly have, or be what we really want, where we are.  Here.  But sitting among those stupid, tarted-up middle class people, each trying to evade the present reality, I decided, and I discovered, that here it was.  Me.  Where I sat.  I could be anywhere. And here I was.  Me.  And it filled my heart with joy.  Not even while I was married to Peter could I lose this sense of my present reality sitting with him through his drunken episodes.  I remained myself.  Margery.  Because I had finally touched and embraced in myself that which is permanent.”

            Feeling that she really should have shut up half an hour ago, Margery looked around to see if she still held their attention.  She didn’t want to break this connection.  They seemed still attentive, though subdued, as though they had just witnessed an elephant giving birth, or a python swallowing a pig.

            “And now you’re back with your ex-husband?” Dwight said.

            “Temporarily.”

            “You’re still back with him.”

            “He’s no longer drinking.”

            “You’re still with him.”

            “But we’re no longer husband and wife.”

            “You mean that you’re no longer his wife.  He still thinks he's your husband.  You are still back with him.”

            Of course, Dwight was, as always, right.  It was impossible for Margery to argue with him.  Better to shut up and just let him be right, to go on being right, which for her was a supreme test of character.  She had not yet known Dwight to ever be wrong or mistaken, about anything.  

            “So Margery when are you moving back with me?”

            “What?”

            “I’m keeping the apartment for you.”

            “Since when?”

            “Since now.”

            “When can I move in?”

            “Tonight.”

            “Yes, tonight.”

            Carol had just punched Randall in the face.  He was holding a seviette to his bleeding nose.  Carol sat very still, her face white like a death mask.  Randall, without speaking, got up and left.

            “He tried to grope me”, she said quietly.  “On my left breast.”  Then, as the others looked on, Carol collapsed into a loud, wailing keen.  As she broke down and wept, Glen suddenly noticed, in the dark back of the lounge, seated alone, and looking intently at the weeping woman from behind a half-empty glass of beer, the journalist, Derek Merkeley.

Thirteen Crucifiixions 25

                                                               1984

            All Stephen really wanted was a moment of freedom. Margery, with her speech about Bryan, had rescued him in the nick of time from yet another lecture from Glen.  Stephen sat there and took it, like a little dog being scolded for peeing on the carpet.  Glen would not have spoken that way to Tanya, into whom Stephen would be transforming himself in less than two hours, before knocking back a couple of mai tais at Burst Arteries, his favourite sleazy gay disco. Then he, or she, would be standing on the street corner, the skirt of her white cocktail dress fluttering in the cool April breeze.  There was a gap in the traffic.  He’d forgotten to pay for his coffee.  Whatever.  He was almost run over by a fat woman in a black BMW.  “Fucking fat-ass yuppie!”  He flashed her his middle finger.  In a corner store he bought a Mars bar, a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips, and cigarettes.  So easily he could have had Glen.  He really shouldn’t have pushed so hard, frightening the little virgin.  Or spinster, being what, almost thirty?  Young for his age, he looked younger than Stephen, except for those lines on his forehead.  He actually fell for Stephen’s ploy, believing him to be homeless when he let him stay in his place.  The timing worked out well, since Pierre was busy entertaining that little Tyler twit, making Stephen indeed homeless. The bachelor suite they shared together was tiny, and even though Pierre wasn’t shy about fucking his new snack-boy’s brains out in front of Stephen, still, to everything there is a limit.  They quite insisted that he was more than welcome to join them any time.  “I will if you pay me first”, Stephen snarled as he walked out into the rain.

            He had been stalking Glen.  He just couldn’t help it.  He found him handsome and gentle and nice and kind.  And handsome.  Nurturing without going overboard like Bryan who was overwhelming and oppressive.  But Bryan was ugly, unlike Glen.  And needy.  But Pierre, who was gorgeous, was just as needy and clingy as Bryan.  But Glen made him feel all mushy and delirious.  Stephen could never forgive anyone for making him love them.   Not that Glen had put a gun to his head saying, “Okay, from now on you’re in love with me, or it’s schnitzel for you, Tootsie!”  Stephen just couldn’t help himself—for over a year he’d been trailing Glen, hunting him down, stalking him. A Christian social worker and likely gay, and unlike Bryan, nice, and kind and handsome. An easy touch. So Stephen provided Glen with someone to help—himself. And he fell for it.

            Staying with Glen, for Stephen, had not been quite the heaven, or haven, he had anticipated.  There were rules.  It was like living again in a group home.  Up at seven every fucking morning because of Miss Glenda’s stupid day job.  When Glen showed an unexpected tendency for getting Stephen off the couch in the mornings by yanking the blanket from him, he responded by going to bed naked.  Oh, the look on Glen’s face upon discovering Stephen’s magnificent hard-on.  “He’s just happy to see you”, Stephen said with a smile on his face.  But trying to seduce Glen with his big toe had been the ultimate mistake.  He should have known better.  He always ended up pushing things too far.  After that he couldn’t stay, so he bailed while Glen was out for a walk.

            Glen was worse than a wife, worse than a Jewish mother, in the Pitstop scolding Stephen like that for taking off on him.  Yes mommy, no mommy, I’m taking my vitamins mommy, and I say my prayers every night, mommy, down on my knees while giving fifty dollar blow jobs, mommy—and yes, mommy, I’m still taking all my drugs like a good little boy—coke, pills, mushrooms and meth, mommy, you name it mommy, right along with my vegetables.

               Stephen and Pierre had become like an old married couple.  They couldn’t seem to get rid of each other even if they wanted to.  Tonight he thought that maybe he’d leave Tanya in the closet and go to work as a boy.  Working in drag did pose its hazards, even for Stephen, who was equally convincing and alluring in either gender.  There was that vicious jock who put him in hospital last year.  Stephen, as Tanya, was giving him a blow-job in the back seat of his Chevy when the handsome college boy asked him to stick his finger up his bum. Forgetting himself, since Stephen was in seventh heaven at the time, he asked him in his deepest baritone voice if he’d like something else up there as well.  He nearly lost his spleen from the beating that followed.  Stephen as Tanya made a very convincing woman.  “Flawless.”  Therefore he could have his pick of gorgeous young heterosexual males paying him to do what he most enjoyed doing.  Some of them were thrilled to learn that Tanya was also Stephen, though this had never really sat well with him.

            Pierre wasn’t home yet.  He’d be at the Pitstop working till six.  Tyler was gone, leaving Pierre broken-hearted and in need of such comfort as Stephen alone seemed able to give him, though this also meant having to suffer through his clinginess.  Stephen curled up on the single comfy chair in the apartment where he lit himself a cigarette.  The curtains were drawn.  He enjoyed sitting in the dark. There wasn’t much of a view. The window looked out onto the building next door.  In the apartment directly across lived a handsome trashy young guy who sometimes got naked and jerked off just for Stephen and Pierre to see, presumably while his girlfriend was away.  They had never really met, and whenever they saw him on the street he would avert his eyes and keep walking.  Though he still “entertained” them.  Stephen did not feel like being entertained tonight. He wasn’t in the mood.  He didn’t even bother to turn on the radio or TV.  He lost track of time, and after a while it dawned on him that he was sitting alone in the silence. He didn’t care.  He was comfortable.  He wasn’t waiting for Pierre.  Right now Stephen didn’t really care about Pierre.  He didn’t care about anybody, or anything.  He reached for the TV remote and channel surfed, then turned it off.  Stripping naked he crawled onto the unmade mattress that he shared with Pierre, pulled up the blankets, and fell promptly asleep. 

Email To A Friend

Thanks again for the commission.  The money is already being well used.  The first thing I did was treat myself to dinner.  I finished early with my last client and went to the Naam which is Vancouver's premier vegetarian restaurant.  Do you know the place?  I think they first opened in 1967-8 and I began going there in 1973 when I was seventeen.  I had a friend who was working there at the time so sometimes I would come by to visit.  He was an interesting person himself, an artist who looked like the singer Cat Stevens long before he converted to Islam and lived on Wreck Beach.

 

I became a regular at the Naam (located at W. Fourth near Macdonald in Kitsilano) and spent a lot of time there throughout the seventies.  I met a lot of interesting people there and some became lasting friends.  It was so much a part of the hippy scene that used to define Kits that it has come to symbolize that legacy and in some ways could be considered the soul of Kitsilano.

It still has a beautiful serene atmosphere with lots of wood and farm house funk but, as I mentioned to my two servers, a boy and a girl both in their twenties and not having been born in those days, it has acquired a bit of an edge, though curiously they can't see this, and this doesn't surprise me because they are so much of the zeitgeist nowadays that they really can't see or appreciate the flavour of the times they live in, but isn't this the truth for all of us, no matter when we were young.  Lovely people by the way and took quite an interest in the drawing I was working on there.  One of them has also suggested I do an art show there and I think I might (I did show some paintings there ten years ago).  I had one of my favourite dishes there, the avocado and cashew enchiladas.

At the time I couldn't help but think of the first time I had enchiladas.  I was fifteen at the time and just finished grade nine.  In those days I was hanging out with the Jesus Freaks in Vancouver and we had a coffee house in the Broadway and Granville area called the Shepherd's Call.  It was Friday afternoon and I hitch hiked into Vancouver from Richmond where I lived (hitch hiking, though never safe, was done a lot in those days and yes, I had a lot of close calls which I will tell you about some time).  When I arrived they were serving enchiladas for dinner (free) and they were so delicious I was hooked and you know something?  Enchiladas remain my favourite Mexican dish.

I made my meal at the Naam go slow while reading a novel in Spanish.  This is a library book so I have to read it and read it fast because of the due date so it has become a bit of a priority.  Now that the commission is finished as well as the online university course I have some extra time.  It is an interesting read, 621 pages by a Uruguayan writer, Isabel Pisano (she is also a journalist and actress and has also appeared in a Fellini film) and the book is about an ancient Egyptian/Atlantean manuscript a journalist comes into contact with that touches on the origins of the human race, gets the woman into a lot of trouble and jumps all over history, including episodes from Alexandria in Egypt when Christian hordes murdered Hytapia, the female mathematician and astrologer, as well as jumping around in Enlightenment Europe, the Iraqui War and the French Revolution.  It's all in Spanish and a really great exercise for my language fluency.  I'm reading it good and fast.  I have it for three weeks, have read almost 450 pages and have nine days left.

After the dinner I took the bus to Pacific Spirit Park where I did a four and a half mile walk in the forest.  It is particularly beautiful in the early summer evening and the light on the trees is just magical.  Then I arrived at St. Anselm's, the Anglican parish I'm attending, for a concert put on by a fifty voice youth choir from Germany.  They are professionally trained and just amazing.  It was a benefit by donation for the church's homeless ministry and I was able to contribute twenty dollars.  I also spent the concert working on the drawing which was kind of my way of coping with not sitting with anyone since almost everyone else came with friends or significant others.  I don't know if it bothered anyone or not, if they even noticed and I'm hoping that it didn't and for me there was a beautiful synergy between the music and my art so I think it went very well.

Anyway, I'm sorry about the long and boring email, but there has just been such a beautiful poetic flow to my day today, largely thanks to your generosity through the art commission that I just had to thank you and share some of it with you. 

I Sold A Painting Today! WHEEEE!!!!!!

That's right everyone.  I just sold my first original artwork in almost six figgin' years.  Count 'em.  Six.  The last painting I sold was to a woman who liked one of my bird paintings she saw in a local café.  I no longer show in this place, even though the owner has asked me to, for the simple reason that she cannot be trusted.  The last time my work hung there it was all transported to a Thai restaurant unbeknownst to me, in another municipality and it was not easy tracking them down.  Then, the owners of said restaurant, who were in cahoots with the café owner, decided that they had an "agreement" with me and decided to keep one of them:



I had to work hard to get all my paintings back from these scoundrels including resorting to threats of police involvement and legal action. Then I put the parrot painting through a few changes, adding a huge white magnolia flower in the lower left hand and shining mango leaves above.  In 2008 this woman, a lady of a certain age bought this small beauty of a quetzal: She had never heard of or seen a representation of a quetzal and thought it was a pretty baby bird, rather like another woman of a certain age who commissioned a painting of a quetzal from me in 1997 because "They have such cute fuzzy little heads."  That's the sound of me gagging right now, in case you're wondering.

The painting of the quetzal was bought during one of our worst winters on record, between Christmas and New Years, 2008 and I had to trudge through some incredibly deep snow to collect for the art.  She seemed to expect friendship from me as well but this is a boundary I like to keep secure unless I am really aware of a positive and healthy connection, and that certainly did not exist for me with this dear lady.

My friend today bought actually not a painting, but commissioned from me a drawing of pencil crayon and coloured ball point pen of a painted bunting.  I don't have a photo image of the drawing but here is something from Uncle Google:

I think I've already mentioned it in an earlier post so I will try not to bore you again with it.

This commission also feels like a bit of a vindication.  The day after my friend gave me the commission I brought some sample paintings to the art and framing store next door to the café where we usually met.  The owner disdainfully refused to even look at my paintings and sent me packing.  Today, next door to his store, I collected $120 for the commissioned drawing and now I feel vindicated.

My friend also commissioned another painting from me in 2007 and here is the image:

I've got some cool friends, eh?

Thirteen Crucifixions 24

                                                           1986

            Barbara saw him again.  This time he was standing across the street, looking at her as she left her apartment building.  He had made not one single attempt to communicate with her, nor did he conceal that he was indeed looking at her.  But it had become clear, unmistakably clear to Barbara that Rafael Alfonsin was following her.  She felt menaced.  Three times this month already, and June was not even half over, she had seen him here at this spot, usually at this time of day.  Surely he must be observing her.  Surely he must be.  He had made not one single effort to communicate with her, for which she was thankful.  But he wanted something, he surely must be after her soul again.  With Hans her ex-husband he had come close to destroying her.  It was Rafael who had discovered Barbara at that dinner party less than ten years ago.  Not having in those days formal dinner attire she had improvised with a shimmering swathe of deep blue cotton fabric from Afghanistan that she managed to drape just so over her body, Grecian style.  At the party she was told that she appeared to have just stepped off the Elgin Marbles. Rafael, sinisterly handsome in a black jacket and shirt, could not stop fingering the soft fabric Barbara was wearing.  “Yes, that is beautiful, just beautiful.  You will do, you will do very nicely, indeed.”  They were in a mansion near Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria.  Barbara, suddenly drowsy, asked if she could lie down somewhere, and was conducted to a large darkened room somewhere off in a remote wing of the house.  The brown blanket with which she covered herself transformed into a heap of damp, cold earth under which she was buried.  She awoke again and the entire room was lit up with black candles everywhere and naked bodies belonging to persons she had been chatting with at the party downstairs copulating around her in a full range of positions and varieties of genders.  Rafael introduced her to Hans, whom she later married, and to the modeling career that launched her into some international renown.  The nightmare repeated itself throughout her sojourn in Europe, until Barbara finally escaped in Amsterdam with the help of a visiting British Catholic priest who found her refuge in a London convent.

            Almost she called to him.  Perhaps she ought.  She had only walked less than a half block.  Turning around, there he was still standing there, as though anchored to the pavement.  Barbara slowly retraced her steps, then she crossed over to where Rafael was standing.  He seemed unaware of her approach, he looked more like a wax figure than a human being.

            “Hello Rafael”, she said.

            “Hi.” He glanced at her.  Was he frightened?

            “How are you?  I haven’t seen you in ages.”

            “Fine.”  He sounded anxious, truly frightened, like a child.  Surely he was faking it.

“Are you living in Vancouver?” she asked inanely.

“For a while”, he whispered.

“Are you all right, Rafael?”

            “Fine”, he said in a near-squeak.

            “No, tell me please, if there’s anything wrong.”

            He started trembling.  Tears were rolling down his face.  He fell to a sitting position on the grass, and began rocking back and forth with his face buried in his lap, softly moaning and shaking.

            “What’s wrong, Rafael?  Is there anything I can do?”  She had never seen him like this.  He said nothing, and continued to weep.

            “Rafael, don’t move.  I’m coming right back. I’m going to get help.”

            When she returned he was still sitting on the grass.  Even though the rocking had stopped she could see that he was still weeping.  She sat down on the grass next to him, daring not to touch him, while waiting for the paramedics to arrive.

Thirteen Crucifixions 23

                                                              1984

 

 

            The sleeping medication that Suzanne had given Carol was potent indeed. Depending on the cab driver she would be at least ten minutes late for the rally.  She had never missed a peace march before, but she still would be able to deliver her keynote address.  In the back seat of the cab she held like a cat on her lap her briefcase.  Sixteen hours she had slept.  Carol seldom needed to sleep for even six hours.   Richard, her only love, was dead.  Blown to bits by a landmine.  A finger here, a foot over there.  And his head. Whither his beautiful head?  Suicide!  Not suicide.  Not Richard.  The rear view mirror showed Carol that her hair looked fine.  No make-up, as usual.  “Telegenic” was the word that Derek Merkeley had used to describe her.  “Doyen of the Peace Moment.”  Carol a doyen?  Like an aging debutante?  She was flattered.  She would likely be back on t. v. today.  She was circumspectly dressed in a black turtleneck and blue denim skirt.  Black stockings, and sensible black loafers.  She thought that she looked like a librarian.

            She paid the driver, who was Iranian, a handsome refugee from the Ayatollah’s wrath.  His English seemed adequate, though he had nothing to say to Carol, who hadn’t much to offer this time in the way of small talk. She might have sat with him in the front seat, but not this time.  She had to prepare for her speech.  Richard was dead, his beautiful body scattered across the mountains of Nicaragua.  Carol, in her medicated state, felt unable to reach this stranger in the driver’s seat.  He had grown up in a culture that hates women.  Did he hate Carol, who was a woman?  She nearly did climb into the front seat with him, but he gave her such a look of warning and thinly veiled menace that Carol went immediately to the back.  She had long prided herself in her ability to reach people across cultural barriers.  Today, she felt like a miserable failure. 

            Carol made her way through the assembled mob to the stage where a locally famous singer was bleating out lyrics of justice and peace.  She waved to Doris, who smiled back, then climbed onto the stage.  As the applause faded Carol introduced herself.

 

            “I am standing in today for Jim Larson, the renowned nuclear physicist from Berkeley.  Jim was a young man when he was on the team, known as the “Manhattan Project”, that developed the bombs that fell on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.  As well as that of the nuclear fallout that destroyed and devastated two cities and hundreds of thousands of human lives, Jim has also had to live with the moral fallout that for many years devastated his life.  He recovered from the loss of his family, and two breakdowns, and spent the later half of the fifties devoting his efforts to exploring possibilities for the peaceful use of nuclear technology.  Gathering evidence of the resulting environmental hazards soon brought his work to a halt.  Being just about the only person in the industry with sufficient integrity to address these issues, regardless of the personal consequences, he soon made himself many enemies.  He gave it all up, and went into exile.  Incognito, he travelled the world, eventually focussing his attention on the indigenous peoples of some of the most remote regions of the earth: the Jivaro of the Amazon Basin, the Penang of Borneo, as well as tribes in New Guinea and the Kalahari: staying among these peoples, who technologically live in the Stone Age, he was deeply impressed by their profound spirituality and their reverence for the Earth that sustained them.  Mr. Larson was among the first post war scholars to accurately document the destruction of such entire cultures by the benevolence of modernism.  He also, in his subsequent writings, eloquently recorded these people’s messages to our planet.  It is a message of warning, laced throughout with the greatest hope and the deepest despair: that our failure to live in harmony and in humble submission to the forces of nature may ultimately result in the extinction of our species and the destruction of much of the intact biosphere; that we have fallaciously presumed to live outside of and in control of nature, and that our only salvation, for ourselves and the planet, will be in our re-occupying our position of being a part of the natural order, and to see again our lives and communities become re-integrated into the earth’s beautiful and complex web of existence.

            “When Mr. Larsen returned to the United States he promptly immersed himself in working against the war in Vietnam, as well as the nuclear arms race.  These activities quickly made him a target of suspicion, investigation and perpetual harassment by the American government.  He is known, hated and feared by the Pentagon.  He has cumulatively served more than three years of jail time.  His phone is tapped, his mail, if it gets to him, has usually been already opened and read.  He is followed and spied on everywhere. While on his way to speak here at this Walk for Peace, he was intercepted and turned back at the border.  Then, when he telephoned one of my colleagues the line went inexplicably dead.

            “This all goes to show us that, especially as the Reagan Administration has brought the Cold War to its most chilling intensity since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we still have a long uphill battle ahead of us before we can ensure that, once and for all, this planet will be rid of all the nuclear weapons before the nuclear weapons have a chance to rid this planet of us.”

            As the crowd cheered, Carol spied Derek Merkeley standing near the front, taking notes.

            “I can see here one very encouraging trend: it is this huge massive turnout of public opposition against nuclear war.  I just heard that here, today, there are nearly two hundred thousand of us standing out here, today, one for each of the two hundred thousand children, and women and men who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  That is so amazing.  That is so fantastic.  And this show of strength and solidarity is happening all over the world: in Britain, in Western Europe, and even in the U. S. A.  You people are just amazing!  You’re awesome!  You’re beautiful!  Keep it up.  Not just for one Saturday at the end of April, but constantly.  All the time.  Keep on organizing, keep on mobilizing.  When the people lead, the leaders will follow.”

            Carol couldn’t keep her eyes off Derek Merekely.  Something took hold of her.  He caught her gaze.

            “As many of you know, I was detained in police custody Thursday night, along with thirty fellow activists.  We’d been demonstrating against the visit here of the U. S. Secretary of State.  The women, myself among them, were strip-searched.  Only the women.  I came home the next morning, harassed and pestered by journalists, one of who is today standing here among us, this very moment.  His name is Derek Merkeley, and he has written quite extensively about me for the Sun.  There he is, near the front.  Say hi to the nice people, Derek.”  As soon as the laughter died out, she said, “And now that we all know who you are, Derek, maybe you’ll start taking a little more care with the quality of your journalism.  Have you thought of writing for the National Enquirer?” There was more laughter.

            “Yesterday, in the afternoon, I actually invited Derek up to my place for an interview.  He had been waiting for me in front of my house.  His second time that day.  So, we went up to my apartment, and just as soon as we were going to proceed with the interview over a nice cup of tea, I get a phone call from Nicaragua, of all places, from a colleague of a dear friend of mine, Dr. Richard Bertholdt.  Richard devoted many years working among our poorest and most destitute citizens in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.  Moved to tremendous compassion by the effects of the brutal civil war on the people of Nicaragua, particularly the indigenous and the campesinos, he went there three years ago to help relieve their misery.  He married a young woman there by whom he has an infant daughter, who is going to grow up without a father, because Richard Bertholdt has just lost his life to a landmine.”

            The words began to flow through Carol, unbidden, uninvented.  She knew what was happening.  This had occurred, when that torrent of wisdom came pouring out of her mouth as the police were landing her into the paddy wagon.  Only now, unlike the previous occasions, was she conscious of what was occurring.  This time, for the first time, she would hear herself speak, she would not forget what she was saying, what was being spoken through her: “I am telling you this by way of illustrating that getting rid of nuclear weapons is but one of many steps that we are going to have to take in order to bring peace to this planet.  It isn’t only nuclear weapons, or any other kind of murderous technology, be it conventional or nuclear.  These evil technologies are but the material manifestations of the very real evil that we, as technologically advanced beings, have bought into.  We must face this evil—we must face it, and we must reject it.  It is our own human warlikeness, our tendency towards violence, and all the greed, evil and fear that resides in our human natures that sows the seeds of war, murder and destruction.  Like that landmine that killed Richard.  One casualty among thousands, all over the world.  This is the time, now, more than any other time in the history of our humanity, that we must learn the ways of peace.  To learn and live peace, we must—it is within all our capacity as human beings, here at Sunset Beach in Vancouver, and equally so in Washington and in the Kremlin.  It begins here.  It begins now.  It begins with us.  It begins with me.  It begins here.”

            She raised her fist in the air.  “My sisters and brothers, I am tremendously moved to see all of you here.  We come from so many walks of life.  Here on these grounds are two hundred thousand lives, stories, individual histories.  Together, let us be strong, let us work together to bring peace into our lives, into our communities, and the nations together will sing in triumph the anthems of peace and reconciliation.  Over the ruins of rusted missiles and warheads shall the lion and the lamb lay down together in peace, harmony and mutual love, as the Dove of the Holy Spirit descends upon a renewed humanity in overflowing goodness and blessing.  Together let us be strong, together let us resist, together let us prepare in the face of the nations the way of life, reconciliation, and peace.”

 

            “You were wonderful, dear”, Doris said, embracing Carol while the applause died down.  “Now, please go home.”

            “There’s someone I need to see, first.”

            “Not that journalist.”

            “I think he’s left.  Glen.”

            “Oh, hello, Glen”, Doris said to Alice McIntyre’s son, who was standing together with a balding man in a black trench coat and a slender woman in a black sweater.  Glen also wore black.

            “Hi Doris”, Glen said.  “Carol, that was a fantastic speech.”

            “Thank you.”

            Glen introduced Bryan and Margery to Doris and Carol. Bryan, Carol found detached, officious.  Almost churlish.  She thought she could smell on him alcohol.  She didn’t care for his sinister, campy affectation.

            “Touche, Carol”  It was Derek Markeley, who gave her his card.  “Call me.”

            “For an interview?”

            “That too.”  He disappeared into the crowd.  She kept staring at his card in her hand. Almost she let it fall to the ground.  Carol instead dropped Derek’s card into her briefcase.  She knew that she really ought to heed Doris’ advice and go home.  Even after sixteen hours of medicated slumber she still wanted more sleep.  Carol also was craving solitude.  She was just managing to dodge whoever wanted to comment on her speech.  She didn’t want to have people around.  But she needed them?  Glen?  And this girlfriend of his, or whoever the hell she was.  Margery?  Who had just looked at Carol as though seeing through her.  But they liked each other.  This was already evident.  Bryan she could do without.  He seemed to have some sort of power over Glen.  She really wished that he would go away.  And why did she accept Derek Merkeley’s card?  She should not have addressed him like that during her speech.  Why such tit for tat?  This revenge wasn’t sweet, it tasted bitter.  So what if he’d so crassly misrepresented her in one of the city’s dailies?  Now what would he be writing about her next?  Carol knew all about media accuracy.  It seldom was.  This tendency towards misrepresentation of facts ran with the grain.  Not even the most rigorously honest, objective journalist could be expected to get it right, to report accurately without distortion or embellishment.  There was truth.  Carol believed this passionately.  She had always been passionate about the truth.  But truth-telling?  Truthful and accurate truth-telling. Try as she might, she could never quite accurately say what was, in such a way that it would be heard and received as truth by truthful ears.  She wondered, sometimes, if we were all liars, that not even Diogenes prowling the streets of ancient Athens with his lamp could be so blessed as to encounter one honest man. And was Diogenes true?

            Carol recognized Glen and Margery as true authentic souls.  But not Bryan.  Derek Merkeley?  A venal shit to the very marrow.  She had better toss his card.  Fast.  Richard was true.  Stan and Suzanne?  Don’t be ridiculous.  Nice, enormously kind and generous they were.  But thoroughly lacking in ethics or values.  To Carol’s chagrin she had become very attached both to her ex-husband and to his common-law wife.  She now perceived them as a matched set—like bookends, or salt and pepper shakers.  Sometimes Carol wanted to blame Stan and Suzanne for her feeling stranded in that house.  

             She was giving Bryan but a courtesy of her attention, as in the most supercilious accents he bored her about the inner workings of the Good Shepherd.  Carol’s mind was wandering, nor could she really focus on the other speakers, nor the next singer which was a shame given that she was a famous soprano with a legendary voice.  And then it was Doris Goldberg’s turn:

            “I would like to thank you, all of you, for having turned out here on this fine day.  This solidarity, this presence of so many people here today is a fulfillment of the vision that so many of us have held longingly since the anti-nuclear movement was in its infancy.  I only wish that my husband, Sam, who had devoted his life to the cause of world peace, could be here to witness this glorious spectacle of all of you being here.  He unfortunately passed away nine months ago from untreatable thyroid cancer.

            “My husband’s life has been a testimony to peace, to the barbarism and brutality of the twentieth century, and to the longings and aspirations of women and men everywhere for a better life, a better earth, and a nobler humanity to pass on to our children, our children’s children, and to our children’s children’s children.  Sam was born in Vienna in 1918, November 11, the same day that the Armistice was signed.  During the Second World War he survived for four ghastly years in the Nazi extermination camps.  When they were liberated in the early spring of 1945, Sam and the other emaciated starving prisoners broke into the officers’ barracks and their kitchen where they encountered massive quantities of food.  Real food, good tasty and nutritious food such as they had never tasted, smelled or seen in all of the horrible years of their confinement.  Suddenly, after years of privation, of moldy bread, rotten potatoes and thin cabbage soup, they had for themselves the finest schnitzel, sausage, eggs, cheese, vegetables and fruits.  In horror, he looked on as some of his comrades literally ate themselves to death before his eyes.  Amid such unexpected plenty they had completely forgotten themselves.  Liberation, and sudden, unforeseen abundance, became their death sentence. For Sam this was a foreshadowing, a prophetic warning about the unprecedented plenty and prosperity that has since inundated the West; such unrestrained material abundance, freedom, and technological progress as has strangled and spiritually suffocated us.  It has filled us, bloated us, and now it threatens to undermine and destroy us, because it is making us forget and remain oblivious to the higher position and calling of our humanity.  This horrible reality, of course, found its ultimate consummation on August 6, 1945 when the first atomic bomb was dropped on the people of Hiroshima, in a nanosecond obliterating an entire city and tens of thousands of human lives.  Then came the nuclear arms race, and the bitter enmity between the two wartime allies—the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, causing a most bitter arsenal of nuclear weapons and mutual propaganda and sabre rattling that, thanks to the current bellicose rantings coming from the White House and the Pentagon under the Reagan Administration, has pushed forward the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock to just three minutes before midnight, thus imperiling to an unprecedented degree all of our diverse humanity, cultures and languages, along with the rich and interconnected biodiversity of the earth.

            “My husband and I first met each other in 1948 in Palestine, where, as a foreign correspondent for the Times of London, I was covering the violent and bloody birth of the modern state of Israel.  Sam had been fighting under David Ben-Gurion with the notorious Stern Gang.  Had he been a Palestinian Arab doing the same thing he would have been a terrorist.  We fell in love and were soon married.  We both became horrified to witness that, perhaps at a lesser intensity, we were treating the Palestinians much as the Nazis had treated us Jews.  We were expected to despise our conscience and to tolerate, or worse, to accept and endorse this kind of wholesale barbarism.  Neither am I prepared to white-wash the Palestinian atrocities against the Israelis.  No people is immune to the stupidity of violence.  We emigrated from Israel to the United States, in reverse to many of our Jewish compatriots.  We settled in a small town in Nevada with the full intention of observing the nuclear weapons being openly tested almost in our back garden.  Our house soon became an unlisted tourist attraction as gormless visitors from all over the continent came to witness the spectacle.  Living in the shadow of the Mushroom Cloud in those days, we remained for the greater part innocent and blissfully ignorant of the impact of what we were being subjected to.  People still believed everything their governments told them.  Not Sam.  He would lock us both indoors, sealing shut the windows.  They thought of us as cranks and spoilsports.  But we knew that our health and our environment were being seriously jeopardized.  We became Quakers, then we returned to Israel where till they expelled us five years later we attempted to build bridges of reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.  I am still barred from that country.  We moved here to Canada where we expected to encounter an environment that would better foster our ideals of peace, community and international co-operation.  This country has been very good to us.

            “In 1976 Sam was first diagnosed with cancer.  We already knew that it was from the nuclear contamination we’d been previously exposed to in Nevada.  The following year, in a less advanced stage, I was given the same diagnosis.  In my case, the cancer has remained in remission.  My husband was not so fortunate.  Like many others we launched  lawsuits against the American government.  They still remain in full denial, total

impunity.

            “The infamous White Train is one of the nuclear weapon’s industry’s dirtier state secrets.   From Alamogordo in New Mexico all the way to the Trident Base in Bangor Washington just across from the border here, this train has been carrying its murderous cargo of nuclear warheads.  For my husband this was particularly traumatic.  Ever since he was crammed into one of the cattle cars that were shipping the Jews and other, er, undesirables, off to D--, he has refused to travel anywhere by train.  “Now we are carrying bombs instead of Jews”, he would say, “And now they’re going to destroy everyone.”  Sam was already too sick to do anything, so I went alone where I joined with others where we held vigil together in Washington State against the White Train and its horrific cargo.  In silence, last November, two hundred of us were gathered on the tracks, where we fell to our knees, right in the path of the oncoming White Train.  While we expected that it would stop, each one of us was prepared to give up our lives, to see this nuclear cargo stopped.  The state police rounded us up, detained us overnight, then expelled us the following day.  Twice I have held vigil against the White Train and I expect to return there again and again and again, where we will continue to hold vigil, until every white train bearing such lethal cargo is permanently stopped, and every sword and nuclear weapon is dismantled and beaten into the ploughshares of peace.”

 

 

 

            In the Pitstop, following the Walk for Peace, they sat together on a stage in the back.  Their table held three brass candelabras festooned with grisly looking bright red tapers.  Bryan sat next to Carol, who felt stranded with him, and Margery, who she already liked, sat to her right.  Randall, a friend of Glen’s who’d suddenly appeared, occupied the head of the table.  Glen was seated across from Carol, flanked by Dwight and Stephen.  In Victoria, Carol almost lost her virginity to Randall.

            Stephen was scowling into his coffee, resisting every one of Glen’s gentle overtures of conversation.  He had created an entire space around himself, his own personal microclimate.  To Carol he appeared rather to be surrounded by a forcefield, or minefield.  She did not want to think about minefields, nor of Richard’s far-flung body parts—in the crotch of a mahogany rested the hand that once so tenderly caressed her perfect breasts.  And that beautiful head? Whither now my beloved’s head, severed and tossed across the mountains of Central America?  Dwight she found particularly interesting.  His glasses lent him a certain bookishness.  A playwright?  And what was Margery’s connection with him?  There was a likeness there, a certain saturnine energy.  And Margery?  Carol couldn’t put her finger on it.  She had the wary grace of a wild exotic creature that had just stepped out of the forest.  An arresting, unconventionally beautiful woman.  Stephen and Bryan alone appeared to be miserable.  Bitter.  Friends of Glen, who was certainly not in the least bitter.  The complete opposite to bitter. His sister had just left.  They didn’t look at all alike.  One of them was adopted?  Nervy woman.  Just the type of tarted-up trailer trash party slut that Carol had always shunned.  Marlene, Glen’s sister, managed this café, this gay establishment, though she herself surely wasn’t a lesbian.  Still, she wasn’t sure if she could tell. “Gay” was perhaps a misnomer?  Almost anyone here might make themselves welcome among this diverse and eclectic clientele.  The mad, funky and eclectic décor resembled much of the clutter that Carol had crammed into the apartment when she was married to Stan.  The candelabras—three of them with four tines each, just so, with Art Nouveau serpents coiled around the stems, and the tines were all serpentine, sensuous twists, and the brass was just so.  Carol had picked them up second-hand, nearly six years ago at an upscale garage sale.  Such a coincidence.  To Bryan she did give a token of her attention, which was marginally better than having to make conversation with Randall, whom she hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. He had lavishly complimented Carol on her speech and she was flattered.  He was still handsome.  Still irritating.

            Bryan was on about his childhood in Oshawa—no, Ottawa.  They were both cities in Ontario, and for different reasons, neither place held any interest for Carol.  Bryan had attended a private school, had one or two or three thousand awards for his academic excellence, and now he was wasting his career and his life taking care of the less fortunate, when he could be finishing the novel he had begun writing while in his early twenties.  Having a PhD in English, he regarded literature as his only true vocation.  He had written his doctoral thesis on the gnostic influences in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

            When he overheard Margery describing to Glen how her own experience of being sexually assaulted had motivated her into participating in the founding of a shelter and advocacy service for battered and sexually exploited women Bryan said in a tone that Carol did not like, “So then, Margery, would you still consider yourself a radical femin-IST?”

            “I don’t consider myself a radical anything these days.”

            “Do you still approve of a-BORTION?”

            “This is an inquisition?”

            “I’d like to know.”

            “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

            “You murdered both your children, Margery.”

            “Don’t start with me, Bryan.”  In her left hand she was clutching onto a serviette.

            “Tell all these good people, Margery, from where you and I owe the pleasure of knowing each other.”

            Dwight said, “Let’s give it a rest, eh, Bryan?”

            “I’m not talking to YOU!” he shrilled.

            “I think I can handle this, Dwight”, Margery said.  “Hey everybody.  I have something to say, and I want all of you to listen, please.  Glen, Randall.  Stephen, you too.  Listen, all of you.  Okay?  Do I have everyone’s attention?  Thank you.  Now, Bryan, I am going to talk about the House of Unconditional Love.  This was the name given to a therapeutic community, rather like a Christian transition house for ex-mental patients.  I had been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, following a devastating breakdown and suicide attempts six years ago.  I had been the less than willing participant in having an abortion that my lover at the time—a woman—had pressured me into.  The father of the child, with whom I’d had a six month fling, returned to England, as ignorant of the fact as I was that I was carrying his child.  When I found out, I told Megan, who couldn’t digest the fact of my loving a man as much as I loved her.  I stupidly yielded to her pressure.

            “The women in our collective—we were all lesbians—assured me, after I had the abortion, that I’d done the right thing.  I tried to agree with them.  You know, it was like being part of a religious cult.  Radical lesbian feminists, like any other in-group, have their own unique dogma, and one simply agrees with it because that’s the atmosphere into which one becomes submerged.  But the dogma doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.  And the reality was, that I loved that child I was carrying.  I wanted that child.  But Megan and the women’s collective had this incredible power over me.  With Warren, my English lover, I almost broke free.  But then he left, and I had inside me this wonderful remnant of our love together, who would soon emerge as our child.  But I was again vulnerable, fragile, alone.  I began again to lean hard on Megan and the other women for support.  I fantasized that together Megan and I would raise the child.  That he would be ours.  Together.

            “Well, Megan thought differently.  I wanted to please her.  I didn’t want to lose her support.  I was afraid of falling into a bottomless chasm without having her, or somebody, to help bear me up.  So, I had the abortion.  My second.  The first happened when I was seventeen, the result of rape.

            “They told me I’d be just fine, that I had done the right thing.  The depression was devastating.  I couldn’t get out of bed, I became terrified of people.  I wanted to die. Megan refused to accept the legitimacy of my depression.  She thought that she could shock me out of it by springing on me an exhibit of paintings that depicted aborted fetuses.  She didn’t even tell me where we were going.  But she was used to getting her way, since no one would dare stand up to her.  So, I obediently followed Megan into the art gallery.  That was my breaking point.  I walked away from her. I bought some sleeping pills at the pharmacy, then I checked myself into the Sylvia Hotel for a little suicide-by-the-sea.

            “I went from the psyche ward to the House of Unconditional Love.  Bryan became my Svengali, and while I was dosed on medications, I did his bidding.  Whatever he wanted.  He was Pygmalion.  He reconstructed my life for me.  In his own image.  I was too drugged out passive to fight, resist, or even care.  His intentions were unimpeachable.  He was slowly killing me.  Not that I’m complaining.  He did get me into that nursing program, and now I have a good, if difficult job because of him.  It was a trade-off.  Whoever I was, I wasn’t myself.  I had turned into a pliant, obedient zombie.

            “Everything changed when I quit taking my meds.  It was like being reborn.  I was assigned to a new psychiatrist, who declared that my diagnosis was bogus.

            “Bryan, I’m sorry.  I’m truly and deeply sorry that things didn’t turn out as you’d expected. And you have helped me.  But I also needed to know when it was time to detach from you, to reclaim my autonomy.  You were like a wounded healer.  I couldn’t for ever be your damaged little rose petal.  I felt like an extension of you, I felt like your satellite.  That you were Jupiter and I was one of your moons. 

            “When I left the House of Unconditional Love I married Peter.  Like you Bryan, he is an alcoholic.  He was like a homeopathic dose for freeing me from your control   I’m divorced now, even though I’m living with him again.  But seeing you now Bryan for the first time in almost five years I realize that I haven’t yet set you free from me.  And right now I want to do that.  So Bryan I’m setting you free.  I forgive you everything.    And please forgive me for my lack of gratitude.  Forgive me, Bryan.”

            Slowly, Margery’s left hand released the seviette which tumbled, a crumpled origami sphere onto the table.  As tears streamed down her face, the sphere began to loosen and become undone.  In spite of the surrounding noise, crowd and chaos, a tight attentive silence had overtaken everyone at the table, isolating them like a tiny island surrounded by churning water.  Bryan without replying without saying a word without even looking at Margery nor at anyone else at the table got up, produced his wallet out of which he fumbled for his share of the bill, setting the money under his plate.  As though concealing himself in a protective darkness he shrouded himself in his trench coat, wrapping it tight around his body and briskly walked out of the Pitstop.