Thirteen Crucifixions 13

     2001

 

The sun was setting.  Towering cumulous clouds were being touched with violent hues of rose and golden flame.  The air was chilly.  Sheila’s first husband had built and painted this white wooden bench they were sitting on.  Michael was seven at the time, just after the planting of the cedar hedge.  The trees were tiny shrubs that reached as high as his knees.  Now, they had grown into a tall, impregnable wall of aromatic green that surrounded and protected on three sides the back yard.  Glen couldn’t stop looking at the apple tree in full blossom growing in the centre.  Its pastel blooms scented the cool clean air, which held also the fragrance of early lilac, bruised cedar, and a discreet pong of cat spray and dog shit.

“A cold spring always produces the most beautiful flowers”, Sheila said, lighting a cigarette.

“Lots of luck being able to smell them”, Michael said, eyeing his mother’s cigarette.

“I was making an observation.”

“It’s seven and a half minutes off your life.”

“And no one else’s.”

“You’ve never heard of second-hand smoke?”

“You’re both upwind.  Get over it.”

“Billions of mothers on the planet and mine has an attitude.”

“That’s a beautiful tree”, Glen said.

“Yes, isn’t it lovely?” Sheila said.  “It predated this house.  It’s at least a hundred years old, and it’s still producing.  It was once part of an orchard.  This is the only surviving tree.”

“What kind of apples does it produce?”

“Golden.”

“Golden-Delicious?”

“No.  Golden.  The apples, themselves shine like they’ve been dipped in gold.  They’ve been examined by botanists and by horticulturists up the wazoo, and they still can’t figure it out.  We’ve even been the subject of a few magazine articles.  And the fruit—they’re almost too sweet to be apples!  Especially after a cold spring.  I’ve never had such wonderful apples in all my life.  And this is the only tree of this variety in existence.”

“They haven’t tried growing cuttings?”

“They’ve tried everything short of cloning it.”

“And?”

“Diddly.  Only one ever produced anything.  They were like yellow-transparents.  Good for pies and apple sauce, but otherwise disappointing.”

“So this tree is unique?”

“This tree is sacred.”  After a long drag on her cigarette Sheila said to Glen, “You used to be part of the anti-nuclear movement.”

“I used to go on the marches.”

“Do you ever see any of those people?”

“No”, Glen said.  It was Doris Goldberg, and Carol Hartley-Atkinson, whom he’d particularly associated with the peace movement.  But Doris, at just eighty, had been felled last year by a massive stroke.  This had been particularly hard for his mother, given the length of their friendship.  Carol had moved up the coast where she was the village pastor’s wife at a Baptist church.  At Doris’ funeral she informed Glen that she was raising his two children for him.  He otherwise couldn’t remember when last he’d seen her.

“Those marches were nothing short of spectacular”, Sheila said.

“It was a global phenomenon”, said Michael.

“Listen”, Glen said.  “The robins.  Do you hear them?”

Sheila listened hard.  She could hear a large dog barking somewhere—it sounded like Elmer and Janine’s Rottweiler.  A thoroughly nasty animal, she thought, since it seemed to fully vindicate that breed’s reputation for viciousness.  Then she heard a distant siren—ambulance, she thought—and the constant drone of motor traffic.  And then she finally could hear them, several from different perches, warbling and fluting their clear sweet music.  Usually she only noticed them at dawn, during her morning meditation.

“Yes”, Michael said, who had only just learned to hear them.  In a corner, beneath the cedar hedge, the Japanese azalea Sheila had planted on Michael’s thirteenth birthday blazed in a flaming bank of crimson.

“You do hear them?” Sheila asked her son.

“Yes.”

“It’s the same song”, Glen said, “and it has its own life, which it carries across the country, each robin passing it west to its brother, as the earth turns, so that it is the same song being carried from the East Coast, then slowly across the provinces, from Newfoundland, to Quebec, Ontario, the prairies, over the Rockies and across B. C. to the West Coast, ending somewhere near Tofino.  Then, in the early morning that is where the song begins anew, and it is returned east again to Newfoundland.”

As the birds’ song increased and grew louder in the fading light Michael got up silently and returned to the house, followed by Glen, leaving Sheila alone, on the white wooden bench that Frank had built, staring at the blooming apple tree, while the robins sang in the cool twilight and her cigarette was slowly burning out between her fingers.  Only when it became intolerably cold for her to sit out there any longer, did she go inside, leaving behind her the robins’ persistent singing, and even they would soon grow silent, as their brothers on the islands to the west would take up the song.  The rotweiller was barking again.  There were no sirens.

Resisting Suicide

This morning I bumped into my former psychiatrist.  Not literally.  I'm sure he's still standing.  I didn't recognize him at first and wasn't really looking to run into him or anyone else since I was really focussed on getting to the bus stop in time.  I was on my way to church, if you need to know.  When my ex-shrink said hi I suddenly knew him and marvelled that I hadn't realized before how short and small he is.  He would be in his seventies now.  When he retired in 2006 I was one of his last patients.  We agreed together that after four years of meeting together every other Wednesday for fifty minutes I was as recovered as I could be from post traumatic stress disorder and that from now on it was going to be entirely up to me.  I accepted this challenge with mixed feelings but on the whole I accepted it and have since done rather well with the rest of my recovery.

Of course there are setbacks.  They are always going to occur.  As I mentioned in yesterday's post I ran into a difficult confrontation with one of the participants, a bigoted poor-basher, in my Spanish conversation group.  The fallout for me has been intense.  I found myself actually seriously thinking of walking onto the Granville Street Bridge, only one block from where I live, and taking a swan dive into False Creek.  My motive?  Not for attention.  These rare urges towards self harm have nothing to do with wanting attention and everything to do with the battle that I sometimes have to wage against the Self Hater.  I did get over the urge to harm myself and did fall asleep after a fairly good evening of watching documentaries online in Spanish and English.

I am a newcomer to the parish I was visiting today.  This is my fifth time.  It is a small, well educated and diverse congregation and unlike the parish I have just left, for me a very welcoming environment.  I was at the previous parish (Anglican) for nearly seven years, never felt fully welcome there and even managed to make quite a few enemies.  Let's just say that it is not a very supportive parish and there is a very Darwinist, survival of the fittest mentality making it very difficult for anyone who doesn't really fit to feel comfortable.  What complicates things is this is my parish church, which is to say, I live in the neighbourhood.  Following one final indignity I left this parish in May.  Out of a desire to find some route towards reconciliation I sent an email this morning to the rector's warden.  She was neither welcoming or supportive so it looks like I have to cut my losses.

Following the service today in the new parish as I sat down with a cup of coffee in the ample narthex, a lady of the parish approached me, sat down and with one of the kindest faces I have seen in ages looked at me and said "I can tell that you are looking for healing here..." and then began to offer very wise and gentle counsel especially about taking care of myself and allowing God to just envelope me with his love. In nearly seven years at the other church nothing like this ever happened.

Later I went for a hike in the forest.  During my meditation (instead of yoga or tai chi I walk and quietly pray and sing as my form of meditation and exercise.  Try it sometime!) it occurred to me as I thought and prayed about it that it was my confrontation with the poor-bashing bigot yesterday that had motivated me to want to harm myself.  His argument is very simple and hugely ill-informed: that poor Canadians are on welfare because they don't want to work and they deserve the ill treatment that they get.  For me, a poor person, formerly on welfare for a whole variety of very valid reasons that are really none of anyone's business, and now an anti-poverty activist, Fighting Words.  But he still dealt me a mortal wound.

I saw that the urge towards suicide came out of a deep-seated sense of shame and helplessness over my long term poverty and my absolute sense of helplessness to explain or justify this to people who are completely sold on capitalism and meritocracy.  Like my parents.  Despite all my years of educating and empowering myself and others and acting to try to eliminate discrimination against poor people I never entirely disowned my parents' way of thinking: that welfare is for losers and anyone who doesn't work should starve to death.  It seems to be in my DNA.  And that since yesterday afternoon I have been turning this position against myself.  I really at a deep level have had to struggle and struggle hard against believing that my life does not have value, because of my experience of poverty, underemployment and mental illness, not to mention that I am still poor, though working full time, and that living in government subsidized housing I am still not fully supporting myself.

This is when the light really came on for me and it shone bright and strong and I can still see it shining.  I had unconsciously consented to devaluing myself, through listening to this guy's right wing nonsense.  I unwittingly accepted that because I was on welfare, because I am still poor, I am somehow worthless, will always be a burden on society and for this reason I had might as well end it all.  And I would be doing exactly what the right wing, the Neo-Darwinists of unfettered global capitalism want to see.  My destruction and the death and destruction of everyone whom to them is a burden on society and isn't somehow making money, generating wealth or at least devoting their lives to serving The Man.  And then I told myself.  No way.  I am not going to give this individual nor anyone else of his ilk the pleasure or satisfaction of my death or self-destruction.  By staying alive I am offending and goading them and by staying alive I am giving myself one more day to resist their pernicious and destructive lies and nonsense and I am going to continue to celebrate this gift of life because as long as I am here I will continue to fight and resist and do everything I can to expose and undermine these lies of capitalist materialism and advocate for the vindication of all the human rights that are ours as human beings by Divine Entitlement.

I will conclude by telling you two little things that happened today to get me over this hurdle.  When I was about two years into my psychiatric treatment I was going through a struggle about suicide.  In my psychiatrist's office I wrote down twice on two bright yellow lined sticky notes the words "I will do myself no harm."  One copy I gave to my psychiatrist who put it in a small onyx box for safe-keeping (or, I think it was an onyx box.)  The other copy I took home with me and stuck it just below my bathroom mirror where I see it every single day.  It is still sticking there.  Seeing Ed, my ex-shrink, this morning, has reminded me of this pledge and encourages me to stay true to it.  The other thing that happened today was during my hike.  I sat to rest on a bench. Soon a medium size dog, black and white with soft shaggy fur approached me, sidled up and rested her head on my lap while I stroked her head.  Her human, a young woman came over and said that her dog never does that with strangers and that she must really like my energy.  Shortly after a similar, black dog came over and sat next to me while I patted him.

While later reflecting on this unusual encounter with two dogs in a row I heard God speak to me deep in my heart: "What is the value of those two dogs?  Do they work for a living?  Do they make money?  No? Then would you have them destroyed or done away with because they do not pull their weight?"
I replied, "Lord, they do not need to work for their living.  They are loved and they love and that is their value, it is the beauty of their existence and presence."
It was as though God replied, "So it is and so it shall be with you and for all people.  Never measure the value of a human life by money and work and money earned.  You are loved, you are greatly loved and that is your worth and that is your value."

Coping With Bourgeois Ignorance

I have been part of an informal Spanish conversation group since February last year, or almost a year and a half.  There have been ups and downs to this group, for me anyway, but I have persevered and the people are generally nice and civil.  Most of them are what I call very middle class, or should I say bourgeois.  Not all of them, but I would say, the majority fit this category.  Yes we are all human beings and we all look very similar under our skin (no visuals, please!) but social class, education, economic and ethnic background also play a role and sometimes a very strong one.

I will be the first to admit that I have not been the easiest person for some of the people here, the facilitators or the participants, to have to deal or cope with.  We share very little in common and I highly doubt that outside of this group that any of us could be friends.

I do my very best to live, cope and get along in this world, even if others seem not particularly interested or friendly towards values and principles that I hold dear.  This is often a struggle and in some ways I have to sideline or shelve my own values in order to live well and congenially with others, for the simple reason that even though we speak Spanish and English, we otherwise do not speak the same language.

This has become actually quite easy for me in recent years, especially as I have come to accept and respect the many differences we have and I have to say that I have also learned tremendously from others.  Where I draw the line is at disrespect.  A frequent participant in the Spanish group and I appear to be diametrically opposed on just about everything that I value and hold dear.  He even grudgingly mentioned once that he has had to really struggle with my being in this group with him.  I was quite surprised by this comment as I had never perceived any problems between us.  Since he made this comment I have since come to see not only how different we are but how hostile he is towards me and my values.

This all came to a head today when he began to openly poor-bash.  He is from a visible ethnic community and seems to be of the opinion that workers of his ethnicity, be they legitimate immigrants or temporary foreign workers are better workers and by default better people than we are because they never end up on welfare, an allegation which by the way, is quite far from being true.  I asked him how many poor people he actually knows.  He said very few, which likely translates as meaning none.  I asked him please to not judge me or my people as I also am poor and was on social assistance myself for more than three years and contrary to his ignorant opinion my ending up in this situation, as is the truth for many others who have been on welfare, has absolutely nothing to do with  being lazy and unwilling to work, and much more to do with a lot of other issues that I already could tell he would not have the patience or interest to hear about.  Then I declared the conversation to be over and asked if we could please talk about something else.

There was an unpleasant feeling that, because I was upset and, by extension upsetting others by being upset that I had somehow done something wrong and that I was being somehow violent, but I did not raise my voice or utter threats.  I simply expressed out of my own personal experience a difference of opinion and openly challenged a hateful bigot who obviously does not like people who are poor.  I will not be put in the wrong for doing this.

It would be very easy for me to abandon this group and the temptation is right now very strong.  I will probably keep attending for a while, anyway.  Regardless of how upset I could get by this individual he is only one person and I really could stand to learn from the experience.  I hope the facilitators don't take sides on this one.

And should anyone from the Spanish group be reading this post.  I have nothing to apologize for.

Fair Trade Blues

I used to try as hard as possible to buy fair trade, especially luxuries such as chocolate and coffee.  Yes, chocolate and coffees are luxuries.  They are so.  Yes they are.  Don't argue!!!!!

I still try to buy fair trade coffee.  When I buy coffee.  Which, since I broke myself of my addiction to caffeine I really haven't felt a huge need for, not in seven years.  For six years, as consolation I bought fair trade cocoa.  I would use it to make cocoa every single morning.  An innocent and expensive pleasure which gained me a good forty or fifty pounds.

This was not just any old sissy cocoa, it was chocolate with legs.  Every morning while listening to the Mozart Requiem I would read over my twenty-eight affirmations of wellness and recovery that are taped on my kitchen cupboard while waiting for the butter to melt.  Yes I said butter.  Roughly one or two teaspoons of butter in each batch.  As soon as it was melted, always at a high heat, I would remove the saucepan from the element and measure in two heaping tablespoons of light brown sugar followed by two heaping tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa.  I would stir them together in the melted butter then add enough milk for two to three mugs, return the saucepan to the heat and stir rapidly to the music.  I would usually want it to be ready and finished in time for the beginning of the Sanctus of Mozart's Requiem then using a ladle pour it into my favourite mug. 
This is a Google image of my mug, design by Laurel Burch.  I just located on Uncle Google Laurel's obituary.  It turns out that she died in 2007 from complications due to osteoporosis.  She was sixty-one.

A woman who lived in pain, she said her goal was to pass on her joy. Ms. Burch described herself this way on her Web site:
“I live within the vivid colors of my imagination ... soaring with rainbow feathered birds, racing the desert winds on horseback, wrapped in ancient tribal jewels, dancing with mythical tigers in steamy jungles.”

I must say that that beautiful mug that she designed has long inspired me as an artist and as a human being.  The mug was a Christmas present back in, I think, 1991 by the two women I lived with in Christian community.  I have long treasured this mug.  When I was homeless I was unable to carry it with me and for a while some friends kindly kept it for me.  The cocoa, already rich and beautiful, tasted all the richer and all the more beautiful in this beautiful mug, especially as the Mozart Requiem ended and Charpentier's Te Deum would begin.  The opening bars to this baroque masterpiece was intensely even more beautiful while sipping this cocoa from this lovely mug.  Here, I will ask Uncle Google again and see if I can come up with a couple of lovely Youtube links for you. First Charpentier:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh1Oi596MDs

And now, the Mozart Requiem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPlhKP0nZII

Both these breathtaking, sublime works of music I have on one CD that I bought quite spontaneously one day in 2006 at a shop in Vancouver's historical Gastown, while I was out with one of my mental health clients.  For six years I played this CD every single morning until just over a year ago when the fifty extra pounds that my morning cocoa ritual packed on my body and the doctor found that my blood pressure was up along with my cholesterol.  It was also during this time that I stopped reading the Globe and Mail.  I mentioned in an earlier post, Goodbye Globe and Mail, that the increasing targeting as its audience the hideously wealthy One Percent made the very idea of buying this paper, no matter how great the journalism for me absolutely unconscionable. 

Simultaneously, I no longer needed to spend two to three hours in the early morning, lounging around reading from cover to cover the Globe and Mail while sipping on decadently rich, but fair trade, cocoa and listening to the strains of Mozart and Charpentier's music of the French High Baroque.  The need was to completely change my diet to facilitate weight loss.  There went the cocoa.  I no longer wanted to contribute to the wealthy largess of the Globe and Mail.  There went my morning newspaper (the Province and the Sun, which I never read anyway, don't count).  There went the lovely music, since there was no longer any reason or excuse to stay around in my apartment so late into the morning.  Besides which, my work day was starting earlier, I needed the hours and the income and also the discipline of working a regular professional day.

I began getting my news sources primarily from CBC Radio One, in the evenings, while resting in my apartment from my hard day at work, making and having dinner, doing professional paperwork, painting, reading, writing this blog and later shutting it off in order to watch documentaries and videos and films in Spanish online.

In order to facilitate weight loss with a tolerable change of diet I began to munch on semi-sweet chocolate chips, no more than three, often just two modest handfuls.  With a couple of small glasses of one percent milk following dessert of fresh fruit, usually strawberries.  The chocolate chips are like methadone.  They are the only sweet treat I usually allow myself and they are not that sweet really.  I cannot do this with fair trade chocolate which is hideously expensive and to my palate a little bit horrid.

This is my difficulty with buying fair trade, and with participating in product boycotts.  I am on a low income.  I also enjoy foreign travel, particularly in Hispanic countries where I can hugely improve my Spanish by spending a month or longer there.  I have found that in order to do this I have to make personal sacrifices, even at the expense of my conscience.  Yes, I did love the fact that by buying Fair Trade cocoa I could help send the children of the campesinos in Peru and Honduras growing and harvesting the product to university.  Never mind that no one did anything really to help me make it through university and indeed I had to drop out before finishing my second year because none of that kind of support was available to me and I did have to pay the rent as well as put food on the table.
 
I live on a tight and sometimes unforgiving budget.  Giving up my daily cocoa and the Globe and mail helps me save up to one hundred dollars a month.  I cannot forget either about the child labourers in cacao plantations in Africa who are underpaid, mistreated and abused by their unforgiving task masters and with every mouthful of chocolate I consume I hope that they will find it in themselves to forgive me.  Neither can I use this as a justification for my own chronic self-indulgence. 

Writing this piece and making this concern known to you, my readers, does challenge me and I think eventually will help me find a better way of doing this.  In the meantime I have already lost more than thirty pounds and I'm still reducing weight.  Pray for me.

Thirteen Crucifixions 12

Here's the latest from my novel.  I am too tired and burnt-out from work today to write something original so you'd better like it.

                                                          1985

He could not avoid noticing him, since the café they sat in was so tiny with six small tables and a lunch counter.  He sat with his breakfast at the next table, gourmandizing on one of the resident creative variations on eggs benedict.  Stephen knew who he was.  There could be no mistaking.  The queenie owner of the establishment had already lisped out loud in his flawless French-Canadian accent “Hi, Rafa-EL.  I haven’t seen you in ages.  It feels almost like years.  Where have you been, DARLING!”  Yes, he did look like Stephen, almost exactly like Stephen, but for a difference in age by a decade or so.  He couldn’t call him handsome so much as beguiling.  He had noticed him observing him ever so discreetly, and briefly, through the corner of his eye.  He wore black jeans a black pullover and a dark grey sports jacket.  His hair, tending a bit long and slightly curling over the ears was peppered with a little early grey, but flawlessly groomed.  His chin was accentuated by a campily sinister vandyke.  Someone used to being held in awe, accustomed to dominating and controlling, and so much like Stephen himself and yet unlike him, absolutely unlike him.  They sat parellel, each facing the door.  Stephen struggled to think of something, to think of anything he could say.  Maurice the proprietor saved the day as he swished in like a performing drag queen and announced, “So talk to the young man, already, Rafael, he is cute, after all.”

Rafael glanced at Stephen and muttered sonorously, “Eres un varón guapísimo.”

“What language is that?”

            “Espanol.”

            “Huh?”

            “Spanish.”

            “Are you Spanish?”

            “I am from Argentina.”  His English, though flawless, had a beguiling lilt.

            “And what did you just say to me.”

            “Sois varon guapísimo.”

            “Which means.”

            “Sois muy bonito.”

            “In English?”

            “You are very good looking?”

            “Because I look like you?”

            “Me piensas que soy narcisista?”

            “Huh?”

            “Do you think that I’m a narcissist?”

Words To Live By 10

"I'm gonna die with my boots on."

The first time I really remember hearing this saying was in 2001, just following an earthquake.  Now, we do not get a lot of earthquakes here in Vancouver and when they occur they are scarcely felt.  ("Did the earth move for you, darling?" he asked.  "Oh Yes!" she lied, "Yes, yes, yes, a hundred times, a thousand times, YES!)

I have seldom felt the earth move.  During an earthquake, I mean.  Certainly not during our infrequent little milquetoast tremors that occur every five to ten years.  Meanwhile we are regularly, sometimes daily, reminded and exhorted to make ourselves earthquake ready.  We have to have a regular store of emergency supplies: canned food, bottled water, candles, matches, flashlights, batteries,  battery operated radios; and we are in many workplaces taken through regular earthquake emergency drills, and money is constantly being put aside to upgrade old buildings that would otherwise crumble like dead leaves in a major earthquake and especially during the proto-legendary "Big One" that is supposed to wipe out the entire West Coast and convert Richmond into a vast wok of hot and sour soup any time between this evening and three hundred years from now.

And earthquake or no earthquake, I'm gonna die with my boots on.  That's what a friend of mine said about me when I told him that when the earthquake that struck that day in 2001, the day of my forty-fifth birthday I was painting.  I paused for a few seconds, waiting for the shaking and rattling to stop, then continued to apply brush and paint to the canvas.  I didn't know what else to do.  It was a mild quake, more of a tremor, Three point something on the scale.  What's the big deal?  It wasn't the Big One.  "Is that all there is?  Is that all there is?  If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.  Let's break out the booze and have a ball, if that's all there is." 

I have always loved that song made famous in 1969 by the Great Peggy Lee during my parent's ugly and bitter divorce.  Is that all there is to a divorce?  (Dad: Did the earth move for you?" Mom: "Shut up!")

Is that all there is to an earthquake?  The ground shakes for a while and nothing gets destroyed.  Or the ground heaves and groans in a gigantic tectonic orgasm swallowing whole entire cities.  Is that all there is to an earthquake?

A couple of months ago, when I expressed interest to some people I was having coffee with one day, my interest in continuing to work into my seventies and even into my eighties if I can, an elderly woman in our group warned me, likely with the best of intentions, that I shouldn't make any plans because there is no telling what might befall me.  As true as her words were she was delivering them much like a witch invoking a curse and, if you read some of my blog posts just after that time, late April and early May of this year, I was having an awful time of things after her little warning.

Regardless of what happens, whether I live to one hundred ten and fade off into sleep, succumb to Alzheimer's next year, suffer a stroke, arthritis, Lou Gehrig's, death by accident or earthquake I am going to continue living out my dreams and my passion: I am going to continue to dream, continue to paint, write, advocate for vulnerable people, support others towards recovery, speak Spanish and as long as I have working legs take long hikes in the forest here or through the streets and markets of foreign cities.  Even when I have to stop, I'm not gonna.  I'm gonna die with my boots on.

Words To Live By 9

"Hit the ground running." 

This is pure recovery-ese if it's anything at all.  Or recovery propaganda of which the mental health system is full these days.  Now don't get me wrong, everybody, I am completely absolutely and unequivocally in favour of mental health recovery.  I believe in it, I have experienced it myself, and I promote it.  Enthusiastically. 

What I don't believe is that everyone is going to recover, or that everyone even has the capacity or potential to recover.  I am lucky.  I have been blessed with this capacity and I have been exploiting it to the max.  When I had finally found a room in a shared apartment  following nearly a year of homelessness (with a very eccentric Czech who appeared to have undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome) I knew that I wasn't well.  I often felt tired, had difficulty focussing on finding work, and when I did find it had trouble focussing on my job and staying employed, and felt a tremendous need to protect myself from others.  I was frightened.  I felt disoriented and that I was missing half my soul. I also felt very wary and suspicious of others.  I had post traumatic stress disorder.

Four years later I was seeing a psychiatrist, living in government subsidized housing, and working in a homeless shelter, mostly nights.  The job was too much for me.  I was fired just after a year and went straight to my faithful employment counsellor to whom I declared that I was going to hit the ground running.  And I did.

I have done well with this approach, very well I'd say.  This isn't true for everyone.  Some never recover, never get over it.  They never will.  I used to want to believe that they would get better if they wanted, but no, some of us get so damaged and broken by trauma, illness and ill-treatment, that we simply implode, self-destruct, and can only hope for sufficient support and help from others that will slow and cushion the fall and even make the experience marginally enjoyable.

Sometimes when you hit the ground, the impact is so great that you end up making a crater, or a bottomless hole, and you are the one falling down through it.  Other times you lie on the hard rock, too damaged and broken to ever heal or get up and walk again.  Or you lie there, stunned, dazed, perhaps unconscious, and all you can do is stay there while others attend and take care of you and you wait till your eyes open, till you can sit up, then stand up, then walk unassisted.  Then you learn to walk again, then maybe run, and then maybe you will be ready to move on with your life.

We are fragile, strong, delicate, tough, weak and so very complex that no single aphorism is going to define who we are or how we are going to handle tragedy or disaster.  In my work as a mental health peer support worker, I work and have worked with individuals who live in and experience all of these different stages.  Some do well in recovery, live independently, work, and lead full happy healthy and meaningful lives.  Others need support, still suffer from delusions, depression, cannot live alone, or be left alone and can barely deal with the bare minimum of self care.  Some get better.  Some get worse.

Maybe it's something admirable that I have hit the ground running.  This does not make me better or of greater value than those who through no fault of their own languish in illness and despair.  But I can use and channel my strength and ability to support and walk beside them.  And they are so kind that they accept my small offer of my self and teach me every day about the things that really matter in life and help make me more human.

Thirteen crucifixions 11

                                                2001

 

Sheila called this the “Perfect Meal”: lentil soup, salad, bread and cheese. The cheese was a ripe Swiss that she’d purchased at an Italian market nearby, as well as the bread, which was Italian with generous broad slices.  The lentil soup was meatless, savoury and rich with garlic and butter, a recipe that had taken her years to perfect.  The salad was a mock caesar, dressed with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh lemon juice, and an abundance of grated parmesan, romano and ripe provolone, all purchased at the same Italian market.  Sheila had always taken the greatest pains over food, since she regarded eating as a sacrament.  So she took exquisite care over procuring and buying groceries, always from the abundant markets in the neighbourhood, taking care to balance quality with economy.  She never hurried over preparations, taking time to chop, grate, saute, stir-fry, peel, bake, steam.  She only used the microwave for heating drinks.  Through this sacrament of food shared in the common meal, Sheila best poured forth the contents of her heart.  She loved food, and she loved unconditionally all those whom she fed.

It was a silent meal, there was almost a monastic flavour to their fellowship.  They required only a reader.  Sheila had taken several retreats in recent years at a monastery with Madge, who was Catholic.  Sheila was United Church, by upbringing.  She seldom went to church, but almost, while on retreat, did she choose to become Catholic.  Not through the ritual of the mass, but the silent common meal.  A brother read from a biography of Gandhi, while everyone else silently clinked cutlery against porcelain as they dished into their hushed mouths the simple and wholesome fare.  She might easily have lived there, for the idea of living among celibate men devoted to God she had come to find appealing.  She couldn’t imagine doing so among women.  Perhaps with Madge, but there was never a time that Sheila and Madge had not been friends.  They had grown up almost as sisters.  She was the only close, consistent friend that Sheila had ever known.  She was perhaps her only friend.  She couldn’t think of anyone else.  Bill?  He was an ex, and mentally ill.  She still suffered over him, struggled against blaming herself for his illness.  Glen was rather like a friend.  But too young.  More her son’s friend.  Sheila had known him for some twenty years, since he was a shy youth living in the blue house near the corner.  A home similar to Sheila’s, and almost as grand.  It was now divided into suites.  She could recall the last family who’d lived there.  Madge and she, just after the war, had played hopscotch, and jacks, with their little girl.  They moved, it was cheaply renovated, and soon the beautiful completeness of the place had been dissolved into inadequate suites and house-keeping rooms, hosting various poor lost souls, drifters, drinkers, the working poor, and then artists and musicians, and finally Glen and that whole motley horde of straggling young people who, try as they might, could never be cut, shaped or trained to really fit in anywhere.  She had always liked Glen, who had what she deemed “good energy”, though at first a little wary of the interest he was showing in her son, especially after he’d come out to her.  But then she began to worry more about Glen, who she was certain had become an object of unwanted desire from Michael.  How she could tell, she couldn’t say.  These were things that Sheila always had simply “known”.  In spite of Michael they began to visit, becoming acquainted.  She honestly liked Glen, always a bit shy and deferential, but very intelligent, sensible.  Good company.  An attentive listener. Once a week or so he would stop by the house.  And now he was back.  Living with her.  It was all right.  There was room.  He didn’t seem to demand space or attention.  She imagined that Glen wouldn’t prove more obtrusive a presence here than a friendly cat, or a philodendron.  Yes, she thought, she could consider him one of her friends.

Sheila had a dream of filling her house with people, that they would be daily breaking bread together in the most sublime spirit of community.  Here, at this chrome and arborite table that she and Frank had bought at Eatons in 1958, just as they were buying the house.  Sheila had never lived anywhere else outside of her childhood home, which stood still around the corner, now renovated beyond recognition.  But this house she had always…wanted?  Or the house had wanted Sheila.  It had had a reputation for being haunted.  It was once the domicile of an ancient Portuguese widow, who was disparagingly known as “The Hag.”  Madge’s mother, alone, had taken the pains of becoming acquainted with Mrs. De Souza, bringing her groceries, and helping her around the house and yard.  It had been built in 1905 by Mrs. De Souza’s husband.  They had immigrated together, as pioneers, from the Azores in the 1880’s.  Children would throw rocks in her yard, then run away screaming.  Madge’s mother had had to work hard to break her and Sheila both of this habit.  It was just when Sheila’s father was blown to bits in Korea that she had also learned of the mysterious demise of Mrs. De Sousa.  In the back garden, underneath the apple tree, were found her clothes.  But no human remains.  As though she had been pulled out of them.  The house stood derelict, and then the public trustee took possession.  Five years later, Frank and Sheila, newly married, were able to purchase the house from the city at an outrageously low price.  There was a lot of work ahead of them, cleaning, painting, restoring.  At that time, wood interiors were considered unfashionable and unmodern.  Still, on Sheila’s insistence, they lovingly stripped the wood beams, trim and wainscotting down to the original grain, which they carefully varnished and polished to perfection.  Sheila was determined that this house look exactly as it had been intended.  She had never lived in a place so large and grand.  They seemed, she and Frank, really too young and inexperienced to properly enjoy it.  It seemed an ideal venue for entertaining, though they didn’t have that many friends, thus ruling out parties, much less elegant soirees.  Frank and Sheila were not elegant.  They could put on extended family dinners, particularly during Christmas and other holidays, but the house remained otherwise under-utilized, especially as Frank’s business trips became increasingly lengthy.  There was plenty of room for the children to play in, and their friends.  Then Sheila began to take in boarders.  Then refugees.  She felt guilty about having all this wasted space to herself. 

Madge had tactfully asked her if that was her reason for marrying Bill.  He was a buffer against all this solitude, protection against her having to inherit the mantle of the widow De Souza.  Within a week of returning from their honeymoon in Jamaica he was already becoming withdrawn, temperamental.  Soon he wasn’t showing up at the West Wind.  Instead of going to sleep, he would sit up in bed, muttering to himself.  Sheila thought that he was seeing things, not necessarily having hallucinations, nor a psychotic episode, but that Bill was actually seeing things in the house that simply weren’t…there?  Or perhaps were invisible to everyone else.  Everyone but the cat, who often seemed to be observing and following the movements of something.  You don’t see them, do you? He had once asked her.  See whom?  But he didn’t answer.  After he was hospitalized, following his failed attempt at gassing himself in his car, Bill said to Sheila that they had ordered him to kill her, that that was why he came after her with a butcher knife, that they would otherwise go on tormenting him.  Who?  She asked, but he didn’t answer.  He was diagnosed with paranoid-schizophrenia, and on Bill’s insistence Sheila consented to a divorce.  Since then, she had lived in this house, alone.  Four years of solitude.  Only Sheila.  Only her children, and Madge visited her.  Having a restaurant to run left her with very little time or energy for feeling lonely.  She wasn’t lonely.  Her children had become her friends, for Sheila had succeeded against alienating them.  She was one of those “cool” moms.  Always she appeared to regard her offspring with an ironic mixture of respect, detachment, affection and humour.  She had always been careful to not love them too much—or to forbid them from noticing the gaping wound of love they had each ripped into her.  With meticulous care and finesse Sheila had tamed and caged her own maternal dragon.

This house, which was the grandest of the neighbourhood mansions, alone had not been tampered with, it had not been subjected to the indignities of bad renovations, or ugly aluminum windows, or hideous paint jobs.  This house alone remained intact, a single family dwelling.  It had never been subdivided into suites or housekeeping rooms, it had never deteriorated into rooming house squalor.  It remained whole, it had kept its integrity.  Sheila felt that she was its custodian, its keeper.  Maintaining this house for her was a sacred trust.  She was its steward, but not its owner.

She hadn’t felt compelled to explain to Michael her son Bill’s visit.  Simply it was none of his business.  Bill stopped in at the café again at closing time.  Sheila invited him back for a cup of tea, making it clear that she was expecting company for dinner.  The visit had gone well, he was clearly improving.  She was determined as well to protect Bill from the judgment of her censorious progeny.  She was sure that she would be safe alone with him.  Sheila had never before or since been threatened by a knife.  Glen felt like a welcome diversion; once Sheila was alone with her son, Michael, he would be grilling her, he would be giving her the third degree, and he would be lecturing her all the while about her wrong-headed stupidity in having put herself at risk again.  Sheila was also embarrassed to admit how much she enjoyed her son’s lectures and reproaches, all these cumulative small evidences that she, the care-giver, was also being cared for.  Still, she would never trouble to explain anything to him.  And this was the basic truth about Sheila Watson: nobody knew her.  Not even her children, not even Madge.  She had never been one for self-disclosure, which she’d always thought of as vulgar.  No longer in love, she still felt protective of Bill.  Briefly, he had been the love of her life. No other man had ever brought Sheila there, to that state of being which she could only compare with the birth of her first child, Michael, when the doctor had lain his perfect new little body on her naked stomach.  Bill still summoned in Sheila a kind of phantom pain, which she cared not to try to name or identify.

They’d first met at her first husband’s funeral. There he was, dating Frank’s cousin, and Sheila, shaking Bill’s hand in the receiving line, felt a certain voltage pass through her.  A widow on the rebound, she found out quickly that he owned the West Wind, where she began to appear regularly with Madge for lunch.  The drop-in centre they had been operating in the neighbourhood together was being phased out.  Sheila was being faced with the challenge of having time on her hands.  Frank had left her with enough money to keep her comfortably.  In the West Wind Bill began to sit with them both, flirting equally between Sheila and Madge.  Eventually he talked them into going into partnership with him.  Unable to stand him, Madge quickly bowed out.  They became lovers, Bill and Sheila, and it wasn’t long before they were married.

The onset of Bill’s illness was still a puzzle to Sheila, as it was even to the doctors.  Soon Sheila was single-handedly operating the West Wind while Bill would spend hours in all kinds of weather standing in the backyard, muttering or shrieking at the apple tree in an unknown tongue.  His hygiene went rapidly downhill, prompting Sheila to move upstairs to Michael’s room, where she still slept.  Then he tried to kill her.  Sheila escaped, took a cab to her daughter Suzanne, from where the police were summoned in time to prevent Bill from asphyxiating to death in his BMW.

Sheila had since become rather nervous around knives.  For this reason she nearly fired Walter, her cook.  This had surfaced a year after Bill’s aborted attempt on her life.  Almost to the day.  Walter, a childhood survivor of the German refugee camps after the war, Sheila had inherited from Bill.  A short, loquacious man who tended to gesticulate wildly while chirping loudly in his heavily accented English. While explaining to Sheila why he was late with the potato salad, he seemed unaware that he hadn’t put down the knife he was using to slice mushrooms.  For two weeks after Sheila could not cease to find things wrong with his work performance—he was sloppy, dirty, uncooperative, irritating.  Just irritating.  Madge, herself a trained counselor, told Sheila what she was really feeling, or refusing to feel.  Acknowledging her friend’s astuteness, Sheila went home, where she cleaned top to bottom the bedroom she had shared with Bill, sweeping, scrubbing, scouring, dusting, turning the mattress.  Then she sat on the bed and wept.  Only now had she decided that she was going to move back to the master bedroom, leaving Michael his old room, if he wanted it—she was sick of climbing so many stairs.  Or maybe Glen would want it.

Did she really want both of them together, up there in the attic?  But why not?  Even should they become more than friends, was it any of Sheila’s business as long as they were both quiet and discreet about it, and Sheila would be sleeping directly downstairs from whatever business they might get up to and noise traveled very easily in this house.  Never, in Sheila’s memory, had her son brought any of his boyfriends home…for that.  And her other two children, both of them conventionally heterosexual?  There was Jason’s girlfriend, that nice blond thing, Elizabeth, whom one Christmas stayed over, upstairs from Sheila, who heard every creak and groan emitting through the floorboards, bedsprings and conjugating young bodies…Sheila had scarcely batted an eye at her own hypocrisy.  Michael had never even had Matthew here for a night.  Not that she never would have countenanced the arrangement.  But the age difference, Michael could nearly have been that man’s offspring.  Even now, Sheila was fully conscious of her hypocrisy, considering the eighteen years between her and Bill, but…that was different?  Was it really different?  Did it matter really worth a damn that her son should prefer men over women, and older ones at that?  She had always prided herself in being open minded.  With admirable equanimity she had accepted her son’s disclosure about his sexuality.  He would never make her a grandmother.  Suzanne had.  Twice already, popping out two delightful, robustly beautiful little girls.  And Jason still might, one day.  But Michael, her first and most beautiful?  But Suzanne was lovely, and Jason was handsome… Michael outshone them both, and his inability to breed normally and provide Sheila with equally luminous grandchildren left her feeling absolutely barren.  She would never dare disclose this to anyone, not even to Madge.  This secret umbrage Sheila carried like a discreet deformity.  She felt bitterly ashamed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Words To Live By 8

"No matter where you go, there you are." 

I really loved that saying the first time I heard it some twenty-five or twenty-six (twenty-seven?) years ago.  It still appeals to me despite the feel good, warm and fuzzy New-Age-ishness  about it.  My apologies to those who are into New Age.  I know, we may not agree but let's disagree agreeably, and so I will. Or to put it succinctly, I will not be an asshole about it.

I just asked Uncle Google and there is nothing certain about the origin of the phrase.  And instead of dismissing it as New Age nonsense (and not all things New Age are nonsense and this is a Christian talking!) I have long been aware and intrigued of the be-here-now truth and truthiness about "No matter where you go, there you are.  It is truthy, it is a truism and it is true.  Not all things succeed in being all three.

It is truthy because it sounds like it is full of pith and essence but doesn't necessarily promise to deliver.  One has to think of this phrase for a while, it's be here now-ness.  Who and what we are is never really changed by the fact of where we are, whom we are with, or what we are doing.  We will be influenced of course and impacted and yes I think we are all natural chameleons who will change our skin whatever way we can to fit in and adapt.  There is something about our essence that never really changes though.  I am referring to that still dark centre that envelops and obscures the light we all carry within.

It is also a truism in that it has been quoted for so long, so often and by so many that it now has the ring of truth to it, without necessarily being the truth.  This is what happens whenever a profound and eloquent gem falls into common usage and becomes rather cheapened by its popularity.  Rather like the way we would cease to value diamonds or rubies or sapphires or emeralds if they were suddenly universally available and cheap and available in Walmart.

Regardless of where I live, there I am.  Regardless of where I am working, there I am.  No matter where I travel to, there I am.  I have especially found this to be true in my experiences of foreign travel.  In Mexico City I was just as likely to find myself in the middle of a mass demonstration, riot police included, as I am in Vancouver.  In Costa Rica I was wowed and held spellbound by the power of nature and the wonder of biodiversity just as I am here on the west coast of Canada.  Costa Rica has of course a much richer biodiversity, but nothing there compares to the smell and the cool fragrance of our evergreen forests, and nothing in our forests here can hold a match to the wonderful cloud forest of Monteverde.  In London and Amsterdam I also found myself every bit as capable of getting into incredibly messy and complex jams and at times barely escaping with my life, just like here in my familiar old Vancouver where I have argued with police and other authority figures with the same eloquence and scorn as I have reserved for obnoxious customs officials.

Every time I have returned from one of these trips I have always felt exactly the same person as the one who flew off.  Only more so.

No matter where you are, there you go!

Words To Live By 7

"The show must go on."

But where else can it go?  When my mother died I went straight to work, after visiting with my aunt, and my sibling and father for a few hours.  Why?  Well, I was needed at work.  Pay wasn't the issue because this was unpaid ministry work I had been involved with for three years.  People were kind, supportive.  I was exhausted but not exactly a weeping mess.  I did take some days off to rest but then got right back into things.  I cannot think of a more appropriate way to grieve though death and loss affect different people differently.  Take some time for myself, but focus on getting back into the pool while I still know how to tread water.

Every single challenge, difficulty, tragedy and disaster that I have experienced I have dealt with in more or less the same way.  By getting on with life.  Not always easy.  Part of my recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder involved me returning to places where I used to go walking in the years before and leading up to the traumas that hobbled me for a while.  I would retrace these walking routes every day for weeks as a way of mapping my brain and re-habituating my mind to how I was before I became ill.  It was a very effective way of returning me to the grounded reality I knew before the shit hit the fan.

Instead of finding a new advocate to help me get my disability claim I decided that I didn't need it after all.  I had a good employment counsellor, looked for a job, found one, got fired after a year, then two and a months later got into training and found new work in peer support that I am happy to say I am still doing ten years later.  I didn't have time to be ill.  Self-pity was and still is a luxury I cannot afford.

Was I really ill?  Yes.  Did I need time away from everything?  Within limits.  I was on social assistance, basic assistance and also working casually as a house cleaner and showing and selling some of my paintings.  And for those of you from the provincial government who would like to know if I declared all my earnings while subsisting on your piddly five hundred ten bucks a month, please don't waste my time asking stupid questions!

We always need time to rest, get our bearings and figure out what has happened to us whenever we are sideswiped by life's big black wrecking ball.  Someone might need a good night's sleep on the day of his mother's passing then go straight to work in the morning because that's what pays the bills and also helps maintain a semblance of normal life and routine.  On the other hand an experience of sexual assault could send someone else spiralling down into mental illness and she might feel lucky if she can even do volunteer work after years of therapy and treatment and might never get back to work again.

To every aphorism there is going to be an exception.  In the meantime, the show must and does go on, even if the show is nothing but...a show.

Thirteen Crucifixions 10

 Here's the latest from my novel.

                                                      1985

Glen, as usual, was not surprised to see Pierre and Stephen at their usual table in Chino's.  It seemed early in the day, for Stephen, who usually did not rise before noon. He hadn't expected to see Barbara with them.  Stephen, as usual, pretended to ignore him as he sat down at their table.  Barbara raised her arms to hug Glen, then slid over for him to sit beside her.

“What brings you out so early?” he said to Stephen.

“It’s already ten for fuck sake.”

“It’s actually only ten thirteen”, Pierre said, smirking.

“Oh we are very witty and on the ball today now aren’t we?”

“You guys!” Barbara said.  “Glen, it is so wonderful seeing you.  How have you been?  You are looking great.”

“Thank you.  So are you.”

“Oh, God no, I look like crap today.  Everything’s out of whack right now.”

“I haven’t noticed.”

“Don’t mind me. " She looked flustered and lowered her head, as though to avoid looking at a bright headlight.  "It’s retired catwalk syndrome.  I’m never good enough.”

“When did you leave the industry?”

“At least three years ago.  I was only in it for a couple of years.  Just enough to make my splash, and then the camera couldn’t forgive that first wrinkle.  I really can’t complain though, I mean how many women don’t get into modelling until they’re thirty-four, then sweep the whole international scene off it’s feet for a while.  Rafael always told me that I was a one and only.”

“Do you still see him?”

She shuddered.  “Just the other day.  I don’t know what he’s doing here and I don’t want to find out.”

“Who the fuck’s Rafael” Stephen asked.

“Someone who looks just like you only at least ten years older.”

“Then I want to meet him.”

“No you don’t”, Glen said.

“I’m not going to suck his cock, not if he looks like me.”

“I look like you and you suck my cock”, Pierre said.

“Hey, there’s a lady present”, Glen said.

“There’s more than one lady at this table,” said Pierre.

“It’s okay, Glen, I’m sort of used to it.  And actually, I think they’re just doing it to get you.  Until you joined us they were both being almost perfect gentlemen.”

“I would have loved to see that.”

“Blackmail will get you nowhere”, Stephen said.

“So what brings you out this morning?” Glen said.

“Boredom”, Pierre said.  “You just missed Pamela.”

“Pamela?”

“That rich old lady whose husband Margery is taking care of.”

“How did you meet her?"

“She tried to pick us both up here yesterday”, Stephen said.

“No.  Get serious.”

“We’re going to be her fancy boys, once the old man’s dead”, Pierre said.

“Tell me you’re joking.”

“Have you ever met her?” Barbara said.

“No.  Margery’s told me a little bit about her but you know how discreet and taciturn she is.”

“What was she doing in a place like this?”

“Slumming”, Pierre said.

“If she wants to slum, then I’m sure she could set her standards a little bit higher.”

“Never mind”, Stephen said.  “You should of seen her.  All decked out in mink.”

“Get real.”

“No, seriously”, Barb said.  “She might be rich but that woman has no fashion sense whatsoever.  The makeover I’d give her if she’d let me get my hands on her.  And she’s a beautiful woman.  But typical rich British matron.  They don’t know how to dress themselves.”

“So who is Rafael?” Stephen asked Barbara.

“Maybe another time.”

“What?  Is he nasty.”

“Evil is the word.  Please, could we change the subject?”

“Introduce us.”

“Promise you’ll change the subject." Barbara said in a flat voice.  "I’m quite serious."  The sight of her arched brow and firmly pressed lips were enough to shut him up.  "So Glen, what are your plans today?”

“I don’t have to work.  I’m free all day.”

“Then, let’s hang out, shall we?  I mean all of us”, she said, nervously eyeing Stephen and Pierre.”

“Oh, don’t let the children spoil all your nice grown-up fun”, Stephen said.

“He isn’t used to getting up this early in the morning”, Pierre said.

“Like fuck I’m not”, Stephen said, doling out to everyone the same poisonous glance as he got up, threw on his jacket, and stormed out of the coffee shop.  Pierre went running out after him as Barbara and Glen tried to act as though nothing had just happened.  He at least felt relieved now of the usual baby-sitting duties that had come to characterize their visits.  Finally, a day off without Stephen or Pierre, and now someone interesting and not so familiar to share it with.  He almost expected that Barbara would take out her compact from her purse and powder her nose, or apply mascara or lipstick or something.  Then, looking at her closer, he saw that she wore no discernable make-up at all.

Words To Live By 6

"I'll think of something.  I always do."  or "I'll figure something out.  I always do."

This isn't as arrogant as it may sound.  It is rather the voice of experienced desperation speaking.  I began this kind of self-talk as a result of having survived some incredibly tight scrapes.  Where shall I begin?  How about the trusted friend who turned out to be a sociopathic coke head who scammed several thousand out of me on the currency of his AIDS condition then left me stranded in Edinburgh?  Or soon after when on my first night in Amsterdam when I was robbed at knifepoint and narrowly avoided getting my passport stolen as well?  Or the day after when some very unsavory looking individuals (I think they were accomplices of the guy who robbed me) were stalking me throughout Amsterdam?  Or when we were out of money, had nothing to pay for food or rent and were close to getting evicted?  Or when I was homeless and didn't have a clue where I would be staying that night?

To name a few.

I got through it all.  And more.  Sometimes through the kindness of friends.  Sometimes the kindness of strangers.  Sometimes the hand of God.

Honestly, I don't know really how I survived all this and worse but I got through it.  I always thought of something even if it involved asking others for help and they weren't always willing, ready or available.  Sometimes the crisis seemed to resolve itself.  (Touch wood) I'm still here.

On the basis of accumulated experience I always say to myself now if I have lost something or if I am facing a crisis "Don't worry, I'll think of something.  I always do."  Really it is an affirmation of faith.  Faith in God, faith in myself, faith in others and faith in the universe.  I accept that nothing is random and that these are all threads being woven together into the tapestry that makes up our collective lives. 

I don't feel alone in the universe.  I never have.  And I don't believe that I ever will.

Thirteen Crucifixions 9

                                                    2001

Pierre was all handsome rippling muscles packaged in a tight canary yellow t-shirt. The lithe youth Glen had once known had since beefed-out into Mr. Universe proportions.  Now his sweet-natured boy- face appeared to have been fastened onto the wrong body.  Only a few gray hairs in his goatee suggested that he might be aging.  He now had a tattoo—a turquoise Celtic band around his left bicep.  His tight black jeans left nothing to the imagination.  He worked as a waiter in a gay bar.  “At least he no longer sells his body”, Michael said on their way over.  They sat in his impeccably clean livingroom drinking beer out of bottles.  Michael and Glen had each been to bed with Pierre. 

“Do you work tonight?” Glen asked Pierre.

“It’s my day off, so I’m staying here.”

“You never used to be a homebody.”

“I’m aging gracefully.”

“You haven’t aged”, Michael said.

“Look at the lines around my mouth.  Time doesn’t stand still for anyone.”

“You look marvelous.”

“I’m getting sick of it.”

“Of looking great?”

“It’s too much work. I’ve quit going to the gym.”

“You’re not going to let yourself go!” Michael said.

“Yes I am.  I’m sick of having muscles.  It’s not bad seeing them on other guys, though.  But, I tell you guys, I get treated like a piece of meat wherever I go.  And I get it equally from women and men.  Even from straight guys.  Others treat me like I’m a brainless bimbo, a human muscle machine, or whatever.  I’m sick of it.”
            Glen had just slept the last five nights on the couch he was sitting on.  It was oatmeal colour, like it belonged in an office.  There was a black coffee table with a glass top—immaculate.  A red, orange and green sarape on the wall provided the only colour in the room.  The entire apartment suggested neatness, order, hygiene—so unlike his shared arrangements with Stephen Bloom.  They really were very different.  But most people are.  Pierre had invited Glen to sleep with him but he really hadn't been in the mood for a very long time.                 

“So, are you staying with Michael?” Pierre asked.

“We’re both staying at my mom’s,” Michael said.

“You’re not with Matthew?  What happened?”

“He left.”

“Matthew?”

“He joined a religious community.”

“Are we talking about the same person?”

“Do people ever talk about the same person?” Michael said rhetorically.

“Oh”, Glen said, “You mean, given that our experience of the same person is going to be quite individual, yes, I know what you mean.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Funny, my mom just asked me that.”

“Well”, Pierre said when he saw they were getting ready to leave, “When do I get to see you guys again?”

“You actually still want to see me?” Michael said, his voice not quite ironical.

“I’ll never stop wanting to see you.”  Michael, upon realizing that Pierre was not being camp, just managed to suppress his smirk before he could catch it. 

“Hey Glen”, Pierre said, caressing the gray patch on his goatee, “I seriously want to buy one of your paintings for my bedroom.”

“When do you want to talk more?”

“I have Sunday off.”

“I’ll call you.”

            It had been for Michael a strange courtship, when he was seeing Pierre on a regular basis.  He hadn’t exactly planned it, since Pierre was pursuing him.  Now, Michael, a control freak by his own admission, would never give the time of day to anyone who was sufficiently needy to want to chase him.  Usually he did all the chasing.  He had even initiated things with Matthew, whose antique shop he visited daily until he could get him to date him.  But Pierre reminded him a lot of Stephen, who was now dead.  Pierre was healthy, and extremely good looking.  But he didn’t interest Michael, except for Stephen. 

At this time Michael was spending a lot of time in the West End, since that was the location of the office out of which was published the small weekly tabloid that he edited.  It wasn’t a specifically gay publication, though queer issues often dominated the pages of the Radical Faerie, whose format was focussed upon anarchy and alternative lifestyles.  Radical Gender Fuck became its nickname, with so much print being devoted to Queer Studies, Gender Studies and the transgender community.  Week after week, pretending that he was not the pampered fancy boy of a mature antique dealer in a luxury Shaughnessy townhouse, Michael would collate and bring together all the disparate articles, columns and contributions into a weekly format that would have more accurately reflected the locus of squat-dwelling transgendered anarchist punks set to raze the evil heterosexist system to the ground.  Pierre lived in the building next door.  The West End was like a small town within a not terribly large city that longed to be given “World Class” status.  They were encountering each other almost daily, since Pierre also waitered at the local pasta bar around the corner, where Michael usually took his lunch.

They were friendly enough with each other, and Michael, generous by nature, and prone particularly to rewarding people for having stunning good looks, never thought twice about tipping Pierre well and above the customary fifteen per cent.  Pierre was a seasoned rent boy.  One thing led to another, and soon Michael was encountering him everywhere.  He would have minded Pierre a bit less had it not been for that simpering, excessively moist smile he couldn’t keep off his excruciatingly handsome face.  And that thin Latin Gigolo moustache he had grown!  He gave Michael his phone number. He didn’t rise to the bait.  In the various bars where they frequently encountered each other, Pierre would remind Michael pointedly that he should give him a call sometime.  Then one night, when they were both just a little bit drunk, Michael went home with Pierre, to his small West End apartment, where after another drink or two, he was led into his small bedroom, and into his sumptuous bed where in each other’s arms they both closed their eyes together and thought of Stephen.

For a while, they became an “item”.

On the whole, things weren’t bad between them.  No real ecstasy or heights of passion.  But Pierre soon became for Michael a warm and comfortable body to hold onto.  As a pair they quickly became cause for local envy—particularly Michael, since nearly every gay man in the West End was wanting to undo Pierre’s trousers for him.  He didn’t see what the big deal was.  He would have on any day preferred Stephen, whom because of death and old mortality was no longer available.  He never once asked Pierre about his sex life with Stephen.  Tempted as he was at times, Michael would not stoop to such appalling bad manners.  With Pierre the connection was primarily physical, and perhaps marginally emotional.  Michael expected that it wouldn’t take long for things to run their course, like a bad flu, between them.  Pierre did not want to give up.  Two years later, they were still… Michael could not use the word “together” to describe their relationship, if indeed this was even a relationship.  Two or three times a week they were together, usually in Pierre’s apartment.  They rarely had sex any more, though they still slept in the same bed, so vivid and present remained between them the Ghost of Stephen Bloom.  If he didn’t quite love Pierre, he couldn’t say that he disliked him either.  Apart from his snoring and his preoccupation with his obvious physical beauty, there was really nothing in Pierre for one to dislike.  He was always pleasant, cheerful.  Michael had never seen him out of countenance.  Like he was always on duty.  His manners were impeccable.  If not a brilliant conversationalist, he was still, to Michael, one of the best and most attentive listeners he had ever encountered.  And Pierre, always in need of a guru, seemed to worship the water he walked on.  He was in love with Michael’s intellect, even more than his body. 

They sometimes shared men together, though usually to their mutual dissatisfaction.  What they shared between them was primarily and peculiarly theirs.  Michael, always a stickler for physical, hard evidence, found at times quite frustrating, the ephemeral nature of this—relationship?  “It’s really quite simple”, Pierre had often said, “You like my body, I like your mind.  Your body is also quite nice, by the way, and I hope you’re not too bored with my mind.”  But for Michael, it wasn’t the sex either.  He couldn’t name it.  They didn’t exactly drift apart.  Other people and other interests began to dominate.  Pierre became a fitness fanatic, practically living in the gym.  Michael felt repelled by his steadily expanding muscles, who preferred the gleaming smooth limbs of a Gannymede over the exaggerated musculature of Heracles.  They were surprised to be seeing each other as often as once a month.  The passion was gone, but the connection remained.

Michael’s father already had full-blown AIDS.  He said nothing to Pierre, outside of his father being seriously ill.  Michael said very little to Pierre about his family, and almost nothing about Matthew.  They had created between them a kind of fantasy reality,  forbidding entry to any of the exacting vicissitudes that either of them was normally subject to.  They discussed Stephen constantly, and Glen, who remained between them a steady presence.  Michael liked Glen, but never felt inclined to reach out to him in friendship.  He supposed that he admired him for his spirituality, which also made him one of the most beautiful persons he had ever encountered.

Michael went straight to Pierre’s from his father’s funeral.  “Did you say, ‘Frank Watson?’” he said.  This man, Michael’s father, it turned out, had been Pierre’s regular sugar daddy for two years, while he was still a teenager.  Michael watched him, and listened attentively as he described how they had met, the car his dad was driving, where he would take him, the apartment he had arranged specifically for their trysts, and then he couldn’t take any more.  “That was my father”, was all he could say to a silent Pierre.  Three times Michael said it.  “That was my father.  That was my father.  That was my father.”  He left, allowing whatever had lived between him and Pierre to breathe its last.  After this they only saw each other in the pasta bar where Pierre waitered.  After six months of not speaking, he gave Michael a perfect dark red rose.  They met later, for drinks.  At last they were friends.

Now Michael felt doubly betrayed by his father.  First Matthew, now Pierre.  There was no one to whom he could tell how horrified he was.  Michael, for the first time since his turbulent adolescence, was depressed.  He had become distant towards Matthew, and otherwise withdrawn.  He honestly hated him now, only not troubling to avoid him if he wanted a fight.  He continued to visit the pasta bar, where he responded in monosyllables to all of Pierre’s attempts at conversation.  He wanted only to glower at him.  He was sufficiently intelligent to realize that he was experiencing incest trauma.  Never had any such thing occurred between him and his father.  But that he should gravitate towards Matthew, in whose bed his dad had spent many hours of pleasure, and then to Pierre, for two years his favourite catamite—how had Michael possibly managed to find his way into their arms, two men who had lain with his own father!  It was worse than disgusting.  What had led him there?

At the time, he was covering the protests against APEC.  Where he was pepper sprayed and rounded up with the other protesters.  In detention, the Nordically handsome Officer Crawley took him aside, brought him into a small windowless room, closed and locked the door. “Take off all your clothes”, he commanded, and stood watching as Michael reluctantly removed his jacket, then his shirt.  While Officer Crawley watched.  He took off his shoes, then slid down his jeans, removing them one leg at a time.  While Officer Crawley watched. He removed his left sock, then his right sock.  ”Your shorts”, said Officer Crawley.  “Take off your shorts.  No, don’t just slide them down.  Take them off.”  When he noticed Michael’s erection, he said, “You’re enjoying this.”  Michael shook his head, vigorously.  “Don’t you lie to me”, Officer Crawley snarled, grabbing him by the hair.  “On your knees, faggot!” he commanded while unzipping himself.  When they continued to meet every week in Officer Crawley's’apartment, it was always sex, a pure, raw rage of passion and animal rutting—no warmth, no tenderness.  Certainly nothing that resembled love.  The ritual never changed.  Michael would wait on a designated corner.  He would get into the car, where he would consent to being blindfolded.  On Officer Crawley’s command he would lie down in the back seat.  Even though he tried he could never learn to memorize the route by its stops and turns.  Officer Crawley always took a different route.  In an underground garage, Michael could take off his blindfold, and Officer Crawley would lead him by elevator into a spacious one bedroom apartment, in a fairly new building.  He lived in suite 1104.  It was always night, and the curtains were always drawn.  Michael knew better than to even think to ask for permission to look out the window.  The place was clean, well-ordered, spartan.  Ikea furnished.  When they were finished, Officer Crawley would return Michael, blindfolded, to a different corner.  Always to a different corner, from where he would have to find his own way home.  For six months this went on.  Michael told no one, not even Matthew.  He was too ashamed, too terrified to speak to anyone.

One night, he realized, that he’d memorized the license number of Officer Crawley’s car.  Having friends in the Motor Vehicle Branch, Michael, on the pretext of his credentials as a journalist, did some research, tracking Officer Crawley’s address to a building in Metrotown.  Having informed him in a letter that he was a journalist with credentials well-respected in the Press Council, Michael threatened to make a public scandal out of their liaison, unless certain conditions were met.  Being publicly and openly gay himself, Michael knew that he had nothing to worry about.  Officer Crawley yielded to his demands.  The public investigations into police mistreatment of protesters were no longer being obstructed, and Michael was finally a free man.  He still harboured a personal desire to kill Officer Crawley, even if thanks to marginally legitimate blackmail, Officer Crawley had made him twenty-five thousand dollars wealthier.

Bill was seated at the kitchen table with Sheila.  Michael thought that he seemed almost well.  His clothes were clean, his hair well combed and freshly washed.  Only his slow and deliberate manner suggested that all was not entirely normal for him.  It wasn’t as though Michael had forgotten his former stepfather—there had been scant time or opportunity for anything other than a vague mutual distrust and unease to develop between them.  They disliked each other.    Bill had made it clear that he found distasteful his stepson’s sexual proclivity, though he had usually vented this by trying to argue with Michael about politics.  Michael pitied his mother on her rotten luck with men.  It didn’t make sense to him.  She wasn’t a bad looking woman—as much as he could judge the looks of any woman, particular his own mother—and she was nice.  Competent.  Intelligent.  Caring.  Her droll irony and dead-pan delivery simply masked a tender heart that was always too easily broken and betrayed. Michael knew his mother.  Mother.  Bill, and Michael’s father? Had wanted a mother.  But isn’t that why most men get married?  Why wouldn’t a wounded male be drawn to this mender of broken wings, though Michael would much rather have fed such birds to the cat.  Bill was a very good-looking man, though Michael had always found him repellant, almost for the same reason that his feelings toward Pierre had always remained mixed, ambivalent and uncertain.  There was something a little too professional about their good looks.  Mentally ill and medicated, he could only find Bill pathetic.  An object of pity, who summoned in Michael simultaneously compassion and loathing.