I can't say that J and I ever got to know each other well. She was very protective of herself, her soul, her identity. She wasn't all persona, rather, she channelled her intense and very frightening energy through a take-no-prisoners kind of persona. She must have lied a lot. Everyone I knew on the street did. I had come to accept lying as a fact of life in the area and just learned to roll with it, or to accept that they were telling me everything they wanted me to believe, or thought that I might want to believe.
J was more than just a knockout. She was preternaturally beautiful. She suggested a young Tallulah Bankhead, but even prettier and with a much nicer nose:
With a mouth to match. Both the infamous US actress and J had the most horrifyingly foul potty mouths that I ever heard, whether on a trucker, a soldier, or a gutter-punk.
I remember one night we were all sharing a table in the local diner on the corner of Davie and Granville, called Oliver's, kind of a vintage all night greasy spoon. Now it's a sports bar named Two Parrots. Don't go there. J suddenly burst in like a category five hurricane, resplendent in her tiny form fitting strapless black micro mini showing to advantage her legs and the huge dragon tattooed on her upper chest. She announced for all to hear, "My CUNT is broken." As she sat down with us she repeated this foul mantra over and over again. She was truly frightening.
She told me lots of stuff about her life, about her two year old (she would have been herself just twenty) but I can't remember any of the details of her dreadful childhood. She told me that the skulls tattooed around her wrist each represented a friend of hers who had died. A lot of people in those circles died, very young and often very suddenly. She always had her guard up and I don't think she ever really permitted anyone to know her.
Her boyfriend was a friend of M and J's, mentioned in yesterday's post. Like the others he was a rent-boy. He had a certain retro charm and rather suggested a young Bogart with a sense of humour, especially when he wore a trench coat. Of course he was flawed, and possibly a psychopath. He quickly lost his boyish appeal and soon couldn't make a living hocking his "wares" on the street corner. Last I saw him, he had obtained a wheelchair from which he sat on sidewalks begging, hoping that enough passersby would actually believe that he couldn't walk.
These were not necessarily nice people. They were very resourceful even if they did have to sell their bodies in order to get by. To this day I still cannot accept some of the trendy harm-reduction nonsense about prostitution. I did distance myself from the Pivot Legal Society, those heroic defenders of the homeless and marginalized, when they came out supporting sex work as a legitimate occupation, forget about the loser men who pay for their services, or their spouses and children who might be wondering where the hell is daddy tonight.
I was myself traumatized while caring for those traumatized sex workers. My mother had just died of cancer and a lot of my friends had already left this mortal coil, or were about to. Still, those same people I was trying to minister the love of Christ to, held me up and supported me as I supported my own mother through her final days and they were also there for me the day that she died, and that evening I found myself surrounded by those young friends whose lives had already been snatched from them at such a very young age.
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