She was beautiful. Twenty-one years old and poured into a clinging strapless black mini-dress, her short auburn hair worn like a Roaring Twenties flapper transitioning to a gang moll of the Dirty Thirties. She didn't simply suggest a young Tallulah Bankhead, she incarnated her. But she wasn't an incandescently beautiful stage and film actress with a razor wit and tongue to match. But still she was beautiful, with a wit and tongue and filthy mouth that would have made her an equal to the infamous Tallulah.
She was a sex worker. We often sat together in a late night corner coffee shop just half a block from where I live now, flanked by her many friends and admirers: a gender balance of female and male hookers with a generous contingent of drug dealers. One night at one in the morning she burst in upon our table and loudly proclaimed, "My C--- (sounds like runt) is BROKEN!" This following a couple days of frenzied sex with her fancy man de jour, one of the neighbourhood rent boys.
She was a girl with a dragon tattoo, a bat-winged sky devil straddled just above her breasts, descending in fire-tongued wrath upon her right breast. On her left wrist there was a tattooed bracelet of human skulls: one for each person she loved who had died. She was a mother whose two year old child was in foster care. Her eyes, such incredibly lovely dark wells with bottoms of black granite, became moist when she spoke of him, the only time she betrayed emotion. I read some of her poetry, about life on the street, and wondered why she wasn't already famous.
She was of course an addict, though she didn't mention this much, and a scam artist. I don't know why she liked me, if the word is indeed "like". I at first found her spell-binding, then frightening, beautiful, and eventually rather pathetic. We didn't stay in contact and really our socializing never went far beyond the all night coffee shop. I felt for her, I prayed for her, and hoped I might be some redemptive, nonjudgmental and caring presence to her, someone who didn't want anything from her. This likely was part of the problem: I don't think she could understand that anyone could care for her without wanting anything. I still at times have trouble wrapping my head around the concept.
The last time I saw her she was sharing a table with her disreputable dark side friends in a notorious café on Davie Street. They were all tattoos, highly-coloured or strangely cut hair, piercings, black leather and bondage and fetish gear and exposed white skin and they all smelled of drugs, stale beer and sex. Even as they became for me a pathetic side show they still were alluring. To preserve my self-possession I quietly slipped out of the notorious café and while walking away on the sidewalk outside composed in my mind this song that I still sing almost every day:
"Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.
He is our heart's desire, he is the consuming fire.
Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.
His sceptre the rod of peace, his kingdom shall never cease.
Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.
He washes his servants' feet, our master and servant complete.
Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.
He poured out his blood for you and me, setting us at liberty.
Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.
He bids us to walk in the light, our lamps burning in the night.
Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world."
I was carrying between my fingers a leaf of lemon balm as I was walking and composing this sacred anthem. To this day the sight and fragrance of lemon balm summons to mind the words of this anthem and my memory of the younger Tallulah and then I begin to sing it again as a prayer for her and our broken, beautiful and anguished world.
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