Thirteen Crucifixions, 64

                                                       1984

            “Why do you want me to read this?”

            “We thought it would be a good idea”, Carol said.

            “We?”

            “Dwight, Margery.  Me.”

            “Why me?”

            “Glen, you don’t have to, not if you really don’t want to.”

            “How long is it?”

            “Long.”

            “Fifty pages?  Sixty?’

            “More than a hundred.”

            “How many more?”

            “You don’t have a lot of time, I guess.”

            “I’m afraid of that thing.”  Glen was shocked by the violence in his voice.  He was trembling.

            “You have the gift.  You have the key.  Glen, you are the key.”

            “Funny, someone just told me that recently.”

            “Who?”

            “Greg.”

            “Greg—oh, that nice bald guy.”

            “Him.”

            “Dwight and Margery positively adore him.  They’re having him for dinner next week.”

            “Am I dessert?”

            “Yes, you’re invited too.”

            “Not if they haven’t told me.”

            “I’m sure Greg would love to see you.”

            “I prefer to see him alone.”

            “You’re not—”

            “Nothing at all like that.”

            “Is he mentoring you, or something?”

            “We seem to be sharing some kind of journey together.”

            “But not romantic?”

            “No. We’re brothers.”

            “There is an odd likeness between you.  Are you the same age?”

            “We are, actually.”     

            “Dwight and Margery seem to be doing similar for me.  But we’re not the same ages, actually we’re all exactly four years apart—Dwight’s thirty-six, Margery’s twenty-eight and I’m smack-dab in the middle.  I just turned thirty-two yesterday.”

            “Many happy returns.”

            “Thanks.”

            “Uh, Carol?  This journal of your ex—Richard.  Is there a chance you and I could go over it together?”

            “I want you to read it alone, first.”

            “And then?”

            “You can help us interpret it.  But, listen, I have to get back to work.”

            “How’s Derek?”

            Her face cracked into an unwilling smile.  “Later”, she replied, “Much later.  Please.”

            It was a quiet afternoon of mid-August.  His attention wandered between the battered brown envelope in front of him and the art that was hanging on the wall.  Each was a strongly coloured abstract about the size of a dishwasher door, with roundish shapes and motifs that suggested a series of ovulations.  They weren’t badly done, though Glen felt that the artist still needed to develop her sense of tonality.  At least he assumed that they’d been painted by a woman.  Could he do better?  It had been so long, and still all that he could do was draw. Carol, at least, seemed happy.  More than three months ago she had quit the peace movement.  She said that she needed to start over again, from scratch.  Small.  And she had a boyfriend, of sorts, since she was now seeing that creepy journalist Derek Merkeley.  Margery and Dwight were also happy, having been married now for over a month.  Not much of a surprise, really, to anyone but themselves.  One evening, Dwight proposed, and ten days later they were tying the knot.  So, everyone was happy, except for Glen?

            Stephen had given up drugs and was now working alongside of Glen and Pierre at the Pitstop.  His sister Marlene had had one brief, messy and unsatisfactory fling with Randall which culminated in her firing him.  Glen’s mother had sworn off young men and had, as they say, completely let herself go.  Salt white hair was forcing its way out of her scalp, ending in three to four inches of honey blond.  She eschewed make-up and now wore frumpy, shapeless dresses of the sort that she might have borowed from Doris Goldberg.  She still looked ravishing.

            The world hadn’t ended.  Pierre still flirted with Glen.  And Stephen still obstinately refused to flirt with him as though by principle.  They still lived together.  Everything for Glen had taken on a bland, mildly saline sameness.  He was bored.  He was resisting, growth?  He certainly resisted reading this collection of drug-induced panegyrics from a man who got blown to bits stepping on a landmine.  His death was still under investigation for a likely CIA link.  Suicide had been definitely ruled out in his case.  Carol had shown Glen pictures of a strikingly handsome man with blond, teutonic good looks, a come-get-me smile and blue eyes to die for.  Marlene had given Glen five days off.  He wanted time away from downtown and certainly away from Davie Street.  The door opened and into the café walked a young man with an anxious face. Only when he spoke to Carol did Glen realize that it was Derek.  But somehow he had changed, had lost his foxy sharpness.  His face now reminded him of a rat, maybe more like a mouse or worse, a shrew.

            “Did I say you could come in here?” Carol said.  “Did I give you permission?”

            “No.  Sorry.”

            “Then you have to leave.”

            “Yes Carol.”

            “Now.”

            “Yes Carol.”  He turned around and left.  Glen looked at Carol.  She gave him a fiegned-looking, forced smile.

            “More coffee, Glen?”

            “Sure.”

            “I’ll tell you later.  I’m off in half an hour.”

            “Sure.  I can wait.”  He pulled from the yellow envelope one hundred fifty or so pages of loose-leaf.  The writing was cramped and scarcely legible.  Just like a doctor, he thought, glancing over page after page.  One stood out to him.  He read about the dead raven on the beach.   He read it again, then a third time.  He wanted to leave, to let Carol have her manuscript back.  This was too freaky.  He looked at it again.  But how?  How could this have happened?  How often did ravens drop dead from the sky at someone’s feet?  How often did two persons completely unknown to each other, and several years apart, get the same idea—pulling a flight feather from the LEFT wing, keeping it, then burying the raven beneath a cairn of twelve stones?  Where had Glen got the idea?  And where Richard?  He had never read about, nor anywhere heard of such a thing.  Richard somehow from the realm of the dead had summoned him, instructed him?  Scary.  What should he tell Carol?  But what else would he tell her, but everything, for Carol demanded this.  He badly wanted to get up and leave, to go walking, walking and walking till he dropped.  He thought of phoning Greg, but they never phoned each other. Every Wednesday, Glen visited him in his basement apartment, and there they would talk for several hours.  Two days surely he could wait.  Chris, the café owner’s son came in. “Hi Chris”, Glen said.  He sat down at his table.

            “So how’s life?” he said to Glen, without quite looking at him.

            “Pretty good.”

            “You work in the Pitstop now?  What’s it like there?”

            “I’ve got the week off.  Benefit of working for my sister.”

            “Your sister runs it?”

            “General manager.”

            “What’s the clientele like?”

            “You get a bit of everything.  It isn’t just gay.”

            “Yeah—I go there sometimes with my girlfriend after hours.  It’s like a Fellini film.”

            “Which one?”

            “All of them.  Have you seen our menu?”

            “I’m sometimes here for breakfast.  I like your omelettes.”

            “Custom made.  Why don’t you work for us?”

            “I have a job.”

            “What do you make?”

            “Minimum.  The tips are fairly okay.”

            “You’d be perfect for this place.”

            “Thanks.  Let me think about it.”

            “What’s that you’re reading?”

            “Carol can tell you.  It was written by a friend of hers.  She wants me to read it for some reason.  He died a few months ago.”

            “Tragically?”

            “He was blown up by a landmine in Nicaragua.”

            With Chris Glen always thought they owed each other better than this.  There was liking between them, strong liking.  But what had they to talk about, what could he possibly discuss with a café-owning student microbiologist?  That he was Chinese had nothing to do with it, since Glen paid scant if any attention to race.  Perhaps because of race he felt he owed him better.  Which was itself a form of racism?  His upbringing had been liberal, progressive.  His father during the sixties had had a Chinese mistress, one of his undergrads, just seventeen, second generation Canadian daughter of a fresh off the boat Taiwanese professional.  The scandal sent shock-waves.  The parents sued, Glen’s father counter-sued.  This was the big one that had precipitated Glen’s parents’ divorce.  He had never himself had any close friends who weren’t Caucasian.

            Glen had never had any close friends at all.  He grew up, not simply with a sense of being different from other children but as it were beneath a cloak of invisibility.  No one seemed to know that he even existed.  He was quiet, studious.  He was never bullied, but only because he was never noticed, otherwise he would have been dog meat.  He had a certain notoriety by association of being Marlene’s little brother.   His sister’s exploits with drugs, alcohol and sex had made her infamous.  Her tough-girl demeanour generated considerable fear and respect.  No one was going to touch her darling little brother, not even if they were to notice that he even existed.

            Bonding had been always difficult for him.  He read abundantly, and by the time he was thirteen Glen had already a good working knowledge of the literary classics.  He drew, he painted, he hiked almost daily in the forest surrounding the university.   He often made brave forays down the cliff to Wreck Beach, where he would peak furtively at the nudists, where he first witnessed two naked men having sex together.  This for Glen was scary, a baffling experience.  He was fourteen at the time and did not know whether he was homosexual.  He wasn’t even entirely sure of what sex was until Doris Goldberg’s nephew, Scott, appeared on the scene.  He had not connected with any of the boys in school, who generally ignored him though Glen secretly perished with unrequited desire.  The showers during gym class were the worst and the best as Glen would discreetly torment himself over the naked developing young manhood that surrounded him.  And still nobody noticed him.  At sixteen he got himself a girlfriend, with whom he fumbled unsatisfactorily, then at seventeen, down at Wreck Beach, an older man, Timothy lured him into a tryst.  They became lovers, and moved to Toronto together where Glen enrolled in art school.

            Scott was his first.  He was rooming with his aunt and uncle, Doris and Sam Goldberg, while attending university.  He was encouraged to take in Glen a mentoring interest, not difficult, given his taste for pubescent boys.  Glen, starved and deprived of male friendship, laconically welcomed the diversion.  They smoked pot and drank beer together while watching vintage Marx Brother’s movies on late night TV.  Glen’s mother’s frequent two and three day absences made sex between them convenient and thoroughly enjoyable.  This went on for a year, then two years, then Scott graduated and returned to Edmonton.  They never saw each other again.  Glen didn’t know that he was heart-broken, nor could anyone figure out why he would want to overdose on his mother’s sleeping pills.  Alice blamed herself, and Glen’s father.  He spent a year in psychotherapy being told that he must accept his sexuality.  He could not get it across that that was not his problem, that he had loved, had lost, and now felt irreparably abandoned.  Only during his three years with Timothy did Glen learn not simply to discuss his feelings, but that he had any feelings and that they were worthy of discussion.

            “So, what did you read?” Carol was stirring cream into her coffee.

            “Are you ready for this?”

            “Read it to me.”

            He read her the account of the dead raven.

            “Pretty freaky, eh?”

            “Want to hear something even freakier?”

            “What?”

            “The same thing happened to me.”

            “When?”

            “The night of the walk for Peace.  After I left the Pitstop.”

            “Just like Richard.”

            “Just like.”

            “But, how?”

            “I was walking on the seawall, then went over to English Bay, then—Thump!—it almost landed on my head.  I covered it with stones—twelve—but first I pulled out a flight feather from its left wing.  Here, I’ve got it in my bag.”

            “That is freaky.  But, why?”
            “Like, I should know?”

            “No, I guess I can’t expect you to.  Say, what if I call Dwight and Margery and see if they’re up to a visit from us?”

             “Don’t you have something on with Derek?”

            “Who?”

            “You didn’t seem too enchanted with him when he came in.”

            “Standard procedure.  He loves being humiliated.  Why do you think he gave me his card after I publicly exposed him at the rally?”

            “Kinky.”

            “He also likes being tied up and spanked.”

            “You don’t, do you?  You do!  You enjoy it?”

            “I’m a dirty naughty little girl.  Stop laughing.”

            “Can you say that while doing your nails and cracking gum?”

            “You’ll have to pay me first.  He was stalking me.  I began to confront him.  I nearly called the police, but—well, I sort of liked him.  So, when he was standing in front of my house for the umpteenth time I let him have it.  I flew at him like a fury, then I cracked him one across the face.  He started crying.  Then I shook him by the shoulders, then I kind of felt sorry for him so I put my arms around him and let him cry like a baby.  He was so pathetic, I brought him up to my place for a cup of tea, and we’ve been together ever since.  I’m the only woman, it seems, who’s ever done this to him.  He seems to need discipline.”

            “What are the chances of it lasting?”

            “I have my doubts about it.  I enjoy being dominant, but I don’t feel right about it.  I never had any of this sort of nonsense with Richard.  On the other hand, I seem to be keeping him in line.  And he’s always such a sweetie after I’ve spanked him.”

            “Does anyone else know?”

            “Just you.”

            “I won’t tell anyone.  I promise.”

            “Thanks.”

            “Chris just asked me about working here.”

            “Go for it.  You need a wholesome environment.”

            “Carol, after what you’ve just confided to me, I’m not sure that wholesome would be the word.  I might be safer at the Pitstop."