She is really one of the most amazing people I have ever known. I think the first time I ever really clued into her was when I was on my second acid trip. I was nineteen and had been given three hits of blotter by a fellow who seemed to fancy me. The first hit I did alone which took me on a wild ramble through the forest at night. This time I did it with a friend of mine and we went downtown together for an evening of hallucinogenic bar hopping. We ended up in a rather notorious gay establishment at closing time during the small hours of the morning. We were invited back to the home of a friend of a friend.
She was there with him and his brother and actually visited with us briefly before she left. She had the look of a film star and dressed and carried herself like a supermodel. Yet without arrogance. She was very direct, very positive, friendly, truthful and gracious. A highly intelligent and creative person who seemed to endue everyone and everything she touched with light and grace.
We never became particularly close, but there was a connection between us, and a mutual fondness. We always, it seemed, had time for each other should we find ourselves in the same place. She was very tall and there were features about her bone structure and the way that she carried herself that suggested not merely androgyny but a possible sex change. That is what we used to call them anyway, before political correctness made it impossible for anyone to let a word slip without the thought police coming down on them hard. Mutual friends and I would whisper and wonder among ourselves. She, a goddess in her own right, revealed nothing and no one dared to ask her.
I remember one day when I visited her in the morning. I was twenty, looking for work and living in a house full of intolerant Christian fundamentalists. I myself had just found my way again as a penitent young Christian following my two dissolute years of drugs, partying and bad living. But I met the Goddess during this time, a callow nineteen year-old whacked out of his gourd on LSD. And she not only fascinated me. In a way, she was me, but a higher, more refined and purer me. Or that at least was what I seemed to be touching in her. She was living in a shared turn of the century house long since converted to a bed and breakfast in the West End. She represented something precious and of infinite value about myself that the Christian fundamentalists all demanded that I lose and I knew that if I lost that I would gain, not Christ, but a psychic abyss that contained no bottom. My friendship with the Goddess was like a bulwark against this looming tragedy.
She was studying dance and theatre at the time and was dressed in a fuchsia body stocking. She joked with me that people in her class were all trying to pressure her to convince them that she wasn't a sex-change (oops! sorry, politically correct thought police. I believe the word you want is transgender, or better, trans woman. But this was 1976 and we all were very young and callow.) I dared not ask the question.
It was just months before in Toronto when I had just returned to the faith when I would meet her sometimes in a hip basement café called the Ritz. A couple of months previously I had become locally notorious for sitting in the back, rolling joints and selling them. This time I was reading the New Testament. The Goddess looked over my shoulder and mentioned, "Oh! You're reading Romans." It was either then, or on another day soon after when I gave her a book titled "The Problem Of Pain" by CS Lewis, in my opinion his masterwork of Christianity (far better than "Mere Christianity" if you must ask). It was a bit later on that I discovered that the Goddess was herself a Christian, a very faithful and committed Christian, but free and unfettered by the ridiculous self-hatred that often passes for piety and humility; someone for whom life was a cause for gratitude, celebration and the enjoyment of beauty. I needed to be converted by her.
One day I sat with her and her boyfriend in a tearoom long banished from Robson since the ugly chain stores took over. He was an intellectual, intense and powerful sort of individual. He didn't seem to like me and during the conversation declared that I was a delicate flower that would be destroyed by others because of my frail sensitivity. I was shocked, then outraged, then I swore at him and left. Sometime later the Goddess expressed remorse for his behaviour. I was still just twenty.
Another time she had no time to talk as we ran into each other in passing and simply announced after giving me a hug with her usual joy that she was flying off to Europe today.
I think the last time we saw each other I was in my mid or later twenties. We were on the bus, where we'd just encountered each other and she told me about her experience in a local Russian Orthodox Church during a mass. She was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the liturgy that she suddenly fainted. She then told me that she was rehearsing with a local theatre company where she would be the first woman to play the role of Hamlet.
I do not know what has happened to the Goddess since. We haven't encountered each other in at least thirty years or more. She would be in her sixties now. I just did a Google search for her. Nothing. I only pray that she is well and happy wherever she is and that one day I can thank her to her face for the gift of beauty and grace with which she touched me, how she helped prevent me from losing myself when I was living with people who wanted every life to be as impoverished as theirs, and how she has helped me in my journey of becoming the person that God created me to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment