Thirteen Crucifixions 36

A solitary heron stood like a black paper cutout against the softly lapping water.  As Glen approached, the bird flew ahead of him, landing a few metres further by the water’s edge.  Glen slowed and softened his pace, again approaching the heron before it flew off again a shorter distance.  He got nearer the bird than before, when it flew off again, yet a shorter distance.  Glen stopped and looked out on the water. What few stars had not been blotted out by light pollution shone weakly over the lights of the distant freighters.  On his left and his right shone the lights of West Point Grey and the North Shore.  He imagined that almost everyone living in those distant lit homes had their television on.  They might have company over, be having dinner parties, making love, sitting alone with a book or their dog or cat, or playing with themselves.  They likely were all, or were almost all, watching TV.  Glen didn’t watch television, which he had also given up after the fire.  The heron flew back in the other direction, landing a safe distance beyond where Glen had begun walking

Already there were several solitary men stalking the dark beach.  This had never been part of Glen’s scene.  He had to remind himself that most of them were there to have five minutes of anonymous sex.  Why was he here?  What had lured him?  He wondered when someone might come along to shock him out of his seven-year celibacy.  Was this what he wanted—what he really wanted?  Glen sometimes missed sex: Tim, the intimacy, the warmth, the pleasure, the fire, the thrill, the sense of danger, of being safely encircled by strong naked arms.  Ever since stepping into this zone, this part of the beach Glen had been feeling sex.  Of course.  He was picking up signals, energy, the hunger being directed at him.  He should leave, get out.  Now.  While there was still time.

            Against the wall of the bathhouse stood two young men.  They were silent, they glanced at each other furtively.  “At least be nice and say hi to each other”, Glen blurted.

            From a different direction, someone said, “It has fuck-all to do with being nice.  This is lust, honey.”

            It was Pierre.

            Pierre had decided not to be Tanya’s escort.   “I’m going to the Fruit Loop, instead”, he said.  Stephen replied, “Suit yourself, dear.  You always do anyway.”  This particularly stung, since Pierre had always given well and beyond his reasonable share in their relationship.  Stephen had always dictated the terms for them, as to when they should be lovers, when they should be just friends, when they ought to be more like brothers.  It was Pierre who’d befriended him, rescued him, taught him a trade—all right, the sex trade, but still an honest profession.  He’d at least kept him away from the worst kind of drugs.  Pierre had found them an apartment, made sure that rent and bills were always paid on time, bought and paid for the groceries, cooked, cleaned and rendered Stephen a thousand and one ministrations in order to cover his sorry little ass for him.  He carefully coached him in the art of hooking, taught him the interpersonal skills, how to identify a bad date, how to handle and manipulate difficult men, how to make sure that he always got his money, not to mention how to fake the heights of passion while maintaining a steady erection when servicing some of the ugliest trolls that had ever crawled on the surface of the earth.  Stephen was selfish, supremely narcissistic.  A taker.  Pierre loved Stephen, who dictated the terms of their relationship, who was the relationship.  Now, for Pierre to suddenly get up and leave Stephen like that, to do something that he wanted to do instead—this was most unusual.  And Stephen didn’t mind?  Right now he was Tanya.  And Tanya—but it was always Stephen, and only Stephen.  Which made Pierre his appendage?  His auxiliary.  One of Jupiter’s moons.  Stephen had only to snap his fingers and hey! Presto! Pierre had come to resent this power that he had over people when he wasn’t himself enjoying being absorbed into it.  Stephen had absorbed Pierre?  And now he was but a cellular membrane holding the nucleus, Stephen?  What still remained of Pierre?  For a couple of weeks, Tyler had been there filling the void while Stephen had gone chasing after Marlene’s brother who stood now in front of him, slack-jawed and awkward. Still he was glad to have Stephen back.  He always welcomed familiarity.  Pierre could never bear being left alone for too long.

            Tired from three days of weeping and making love, Maria slept now in her lover’s arms.  She was tired like she’d never been tired in her entire life.  Not even childbirth had been so exhausting to her.  Like a blessed drug, sleep had finally come to Maria, the recent widow of Richard Bertholdt.  Jose, the man they had shared, now clung to her for comfort.  They had no consolation to offer each other.  Only a shared loss, an emptiness that neither of them could fathom.  On this typically warm night in Managua, they lay naked together on top of their bed, covered only by each other’s arms and Maria’s long hair, while outside the open bedroom window the night creatures sang their dissonant anthem.  They were the children of diplomats.  They had grown up together between England and Nicaragua.  They had been always inseparable.  In London, in her father’s house, they took each other’s virginity.  They were both thirteen.  In Managua, Jose had brought Richard to her, who loved them both.  It had always been assumed that Jose and Maria would eventually marry each other, so perfect were they together.  As far as they were concerned, they had always been married, that no nuptial agreement could make this fact any more real between them.  Between them, marriage had never entered their minds.  They made love, they were like cousins, like a sister and brother—but to become husband and wife, to have children together, such was not the nature of their union.  No one had known for certain about their arrangements though many had already guessed that Maria Beltran had two husbands.  Maria and Jose hated the Sandinistas, though they loved Richard, who hated no one.  She had been shocked to learn that the two men in her life fancied each other.  She could accept them both loving other women, for men often did.  But each other?  In the presence of Richard, Jose told her that she would have to get used to it.  “No van a compartirme en la misma cama”, she replied.  You are not going to both have me in the same bed.  In the next room slept her two year old daughter, who had inherited Richard’s blonde hair and blue eyes.

            Maria liked Canadians, having met others besides Richard. She found them nice, polite and blander than cornmeal tortillas.  Reassuringly bland.  She was sick of the violence.  The Contras she was growing to hate as much as the Sandinistas.  They were killers, all of them.  With Richard dead, Jose was threatening to join the Contras.  He blamed the Sandinistas for his death.  Who else would have planted those land mines?  Stupid violence.  Stupid male violence.  Machismo was the undoing of her people.  She might move to Costa Rica, where the men were still swine, though there was no military to threaten their lives.  But she was going to Canada.  Probably in a few months, to live with Richard’s parents, who had already invited her, on receiving news of their son’s death.  They didn’t want their granddaughter growing up in the carnage of Nicaragua.  Maria liked Canadian men, who were like the English, though better looking.  But the English were sexier.  Like Jose and Richard, whose blonde and blue eyed good looks could not be matched.  But Jose, he had only to smile in a certain way, to touch her in a way that Richard had never learned.  Jose, infinitely desirable, but not marriageable.  And the handsome doctor from Canada was hardly a match for Jose under or on top of the covers, but so infinitely a husband, so infinitely a father.  Perhaps it had been better between the two men?  Maria didn’t want to know.  By unspoken fiat they had all known to never discuss openly their private arrangements as couples.  And yet the very idea of tasting Jose inside of Richard’s mouth, or Richard inside of Jose’s mouth sometimes lifted her to such heights as she had never known before.  One day, Jose ventured to break the taboo.  He began to tell Maria about his private life with her husband, to which she responded with a hard smack across his mouth.  Now he obeyed her slavishly.  But this nonsense about his joining the Contras.  She didn’t want him to.  She didn’t want him to get killed.  She didn’t want to be widowed again.  Now they needed each other.  But the child.  Jose was not built for fatherhood.  He tolerated the child.  He never played with her.  Mariana, Maria must raise her alone, or find her a proper father.  She didn’t want to think about remarrying.  And if Jose joined the Contras and got himself blown to bits….

Thirteen crucifixions 35

Doris had been very careful.  To not prepare her speech too meticulously.  Too much control hindered the dance.  For her it was all a dance.  Everything: a great intricate choreography, a Divine configuration of infinite steps, movements and combinations.  One must find one’s place, one’s step, rhythm and movement in the Dance in order to fully participate.  Yet even those who resisted the Dance, through their very resistance became part of it.  Their very negation fulfilled their part in the Dance.  As a young woman she had had questions, nothing but questions.  No answers.  At sixty-three she still had no answers, though she felt that she was running out of questions.  She felt that the first half of her life she’d spent trying to find and formulate the questions.  And now she was learning how to ask them.  The answer was in the asking.

            The chamomile tea steamed in the mug next to the National Geographic.  A bird of paradise had been painted onto the mug.  Doris had opened the magazine to a photo of two huge blue parrots.  Alice gave her the mug for her birthday.  She bought it at Murchie’s, Vancouver’s vintage coffee and tea emporium, and Doris knew she paid handsomely for it.  Alice with her taste for fine things, shopped regularly there, and in other establishments where Doris wouldn’t think of setting foot in.  They were very different sorts of women.  Even their shared profession teaching English Literature they approached differently.  Doris always challenged her students to apply to their present day lives and the needs of their community the moral dilemmas and lessons contained in the great works of English literature.  Alice tended more towards aesthetics and metaphysics. Sam had dismissed her as an “Ivory Tower Tootsie.”  Never in her life had Doris had such a devoted friend as Alice.  They could comfortably pass hours together in each other’s presence without having to mention a single word.  She had told Doris once that she had on her a very calming effect, and by her own admission Alice had a very anxious, nervous and high-strung nature, which she concealed artfully.  The first time they met and chatted together in the faculty lounge, Doris had found Alice to be slightly intimidating, with her blonde good looks and her film star glamour.  She was new, having just completed her practicum, and immediately Doris loved her, and particularly because Alice looked nothing at all like anyone’s idea of a professor of English literature.  But she never failed to bring into a room with her a presence of beauty: she was a beautiful introvert.  Too beautiful to be bookish and possibly too bookish in order to be beautiful?  She had never been short of male admirers; Doris had always held in check her prim moral outrage over Alice’s tendency towards pathetic young men.  She had so much more going for her than her looks, but Alice didn’t really appear to know this.  She wasn’t envious of Alice, she didn’t think that she was.  Even at Alice’s age Doris looked much older.  But many women of forty looked older than Alice who was well into her fifties.  Doris herself had never been a beauty.  The men had never lined up to court her and she had never expected that they would.  Unlike so many of her compatriots who, during the war, had cheerfully sacrificed their maidenhood in the service of England, Doris had remained a virgin until she married Sam, just shy of her twenty-eighth birthday amid the guns and bombs of the fledgling state of Israel.  Their passion was short-lived.  Theirs had been a marriage of minds?  Sam had been practical to a fault.  The niceties of courtship had never worked for him, and besides, having already been through one war, here they were, three years later, getting married in the midst of another one.  Not that Doris had expected much.  There was a war on.  But Sam, with his large nose, saturnine face and premature baldness already suggested a brooding vulture.  His three years in the death camp had left him flayed, eviscerated.  He had nothing left to give, and Doris was a seasoned care-giver.  She must have nursed over a thousand bomb victims in London.  Had they ever really loved each other?  Theirs had been a pragmatic union.  She didn’t weep at her husband’s funeral and then for three months she maintained a decorous silence to calm the light and dancing heart she had been struggling to subdue.

            This had lately become Doris’ way of unwinding at night, seated thus at her kitchen table, sipping herbal tea while looking idly at a National Geographic. These pictures of the Amazon Rain Forest were particularly lovely.  The blue parrots were  called Hyacinth Macaws.  A beautiful name.  There were two in the photo.  They were huge, the world’s largest parrots it said, with massive, frightening charcoal-coloured beaks and gleaming feathers—what colour would she call that?  Like the flowers.  Hyacinth.  Deep ultramarine blue with hints of violet and turquoise.  And they were endangered?  Threatened.  By the pet trade, and by environmental degradation.  Were Glen to ever begin painting again, Doris would try to commission from him such a painting, or maybe of a bird of paradise, with its sweeping golden plumes.  Perhaps a painting with both?  And then she’d give it to his mother for Christmas, since Alice had more of a penchant for fine and beautiful things than Doris ever would.  It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate beauty.  She simply didn’t enjoy having to own anything.  Unlike Alice she had always striven to keep her earthly pilgrimage as simple and uncluttered with things as possible.  Doris didn’t really know how Alice would welcome such a gift, were it executed by her son, but commissioned by her.  It might be awkward.  And there was this whole matter of getting Glen interested again in painting.  He still hadn’t recovered from his trauma.  But all healing had to come from within.  It couldn’t be imposed on him.

            Doris was worried about Carol, who was clearly traumatized.  Who drove herself relentlessly.  Not unlike Doris, before her health started to break down.  She was better now. The cancer was still in remission.  Unlike Sam, she had been very lucky. She was sure that the death camp had thoroughly ruined his immune system.  It was during her illness that Doris learned of the Dance.  As she was sure that Carol would once she was older.  She had slowed a little, with age, and since her cancer had not recovered her full energy.  Likely she never would. She had no other health issues, no arthritis.  Doris sometimes longed to return to Israel, to the kibbutz and to the olive groves they’d tended.  She had never seen an olive tree in Canada.  But for their decision to live in a Palestinian refugee camp, they might have remained in Israel.  They were expelled for being anti-Zionist, for being un-Jewish, for being traitors, for treason.  Doris and Sam Goldberg had publicized that the Jewish Nation might eventually disinherit itself by pursuing similar policies to what the Nazis had inflicted on them.  Sam, for having survived the death camps, was a particular embarrassment.  By his very existence he had shamed the nation-state of Israel.

            They never had children.  Sam had no wish of bringing into global peril another generation.  Doris conceded, though on entering menopause she had experienced nine months of black depression.  Never before nor since in her life had she wanted to kill herself.  Unconsciously her left hand ran deftly across her breasts, then rested gently over her stomach.  She thought that she just might try to bribe Glen to do her this painting, that maybe this would kick-start again his artistic career.

            “BASTARD” was the only word that Dwight could form with his selection of Scrabble tiles.  Carol spelled out “PINOCHET”, which Margery protested was a proper noun.  “Not in my vocabulary he ain’t”, Carol said.  Two damsels in distress for Dwight to rescue.  As he’d done for Jeanne who had stolen his children from him. Their children.  Dwight had been an exemplary father, raising his infant son almost single-handed while Jeanne worked full time in the library.  She almost couldn’t wait to get back to work.  Dylan was just three months old and off she went.  What kind of mother… Dwight still managed to finish two plays while his son was being toilet trained.  And what Jeanne had missed of their son’s progress, his little crises, his small triumphs.  Dwight and not Jeanne had seen him cut his first tooth, and Dwight and not Jeanne had witnessed their son’s first smile, watched him sit up for the first time, begin to crawl—she hadn’t even been there for his first unassisted footstep.  When Dwight first met Jeanne in university he was rescuing her from an abusive boy friend.  She sought refuge in Dwight’s apartment, moving from his couch to his bed.  In six months they were married.  It was when their infant daughter was taking her first steps that Jeanne was swept off her feet by an oil executive twice her age.  The divorce was sudden, quick, brutal and seamless.  They moved to Toronto after the court had ruled that Jeanne’s new husband in his Rosedale mansion would be providing a better life for the children.  Jason would be six now.  Annie was almost four.

            Margery told Dwight to start dating again.  He didn’t want to.  He was through with women?  How could he know?  He was still seeing a psychiatrist in order to cope and unravel the Sargasso tangle of the breakdown that had followed.  Dr. Elizabeth Montague was still trying to convince Dwight that either he dump Margery or marry her, that she would otherwise be standing in for Jeanne in a way that couldn’t possibly be healthy.  That his insistence on regarding Margery as his sister was an acting out of denial that was simply prolonging his need to come to terms with the castration that Jeanne had visited on him.  But he didn’t need to date since he reasoned that Margery adequately filled his void for female companionship.  She wasn’t merely a sister to him, and this he was sure was understood if unspoken between them.  He had remained for more than three years completely celibate.  Dwight thought that he might have a monastic vocation.  In carefully measured professional language Dr. Montague told him that he was being ridiculous.

            Dwight had never in person spoken to nor seen his ex-wife’s second husband, though he’d seen his picture in the paper.  Smug, balding and jowelly.  That Jeanne would desert him for such a troll, such a toad, someone so unabashedly repulsive.  He’d made an utmost effort to not even think of visualizing how their possible—or theoretical—sex life might look.  Dwight wanted his children back.  Not simply to see them, but to have them, possess them.  They were his.  He still had fantasies of killing both Jeanne and that hideous old bastard she was fucking.  Dwight, not himself a violent man, had confessed this to Dr. Montague.  But now he had Margery to take care of, and the beautiful Carol, who could stay with them forever as far as he was concerned.

            As though reading Dwight’s thoughts, Carol said, “I’m going home tomorrow.  I think I’ll be okay.  You’ve both been very kind.  Thank you.”

            Not even Margery knew that he was seeing a psychiatrist.

Thirteen Crucifixions 34

Derek Merkeley wasn’t surprised that Alice didn’t want to see him tonight.  Soon it would be over.  It wasn’t her age—she looked great for fifty-four.  Alice would look great for forty.  For any age.  But Derek was twenty-eight, and by the time he was forty, in twelve years, Alice would be a senior citizen.  It wasn’t that she was physically flawless.  She had on her thighs a very light scattering of varicose veins.  Hardly noticeable, but he knew they were there.  She had stretch marks, and a slight abdominal sag, just enough to indicate that she had borne children.  She seemed embarrassed about these minor defects.  She was at first quite shy about undressing in front of Derek.  Her defects were for him a turn-on.  Derek detested perfection, though he wasn’t convinced that she believed him when he told her this.  For him, an older woman’s body could be like a precious encoded document, a living Rossetta Stone.  Alice had never asked him if he loved her, as if she knew better.  Such was the pleasure of loving an older woman.  For him, this romance had been pure, vintage Colette.  But he was no Cherie, and Derek already had an incipient appreciation of the transient perfidy of the flesh.  Alice, at fifty-five might suddenly mutate into a slovenly hag.  She might become fat and gross.  He didn’t want to be surprised by this.  Still, she made on him no demands.  She didn’t expect that he’d stay, nor that anything between them should last.  Alice knew that for her, time was running out, lending to every aspect of their liaison an exquisite urgency.  Why then had Derek called her, if he didn’t feel like seeing her tonight, either?  To begin closure.  Soon, so soon it would all conclude between them, quietly, gently, maturely, like autumn giving way to winter.

            Depending on her level of cooperation, Derek might have yet another article on Carol.  He didn’t entirely question his desire for her.  She was emotionally unbalanced. Derek was irresistibly drawn to damaged goods. He wanted to be handed a juicy assignment in Angola or Nicaragua.  Even in South Africa. Perhaps that nasty famine over in Somalia.  He felt like a small potato hack, doing his apprenticeship with a small time rag like the Vancouver Sun.  The Globe and Mail didn’t want him.  That contentious young homosexual Michael Watson had suggested that if he changed his writing style just a little, then maybe he could write for the National Enquirer.  Audacious faggot. But Derek liked Michael, and though to his knowledge he had never been sexually interested in another man, this one might just be the one for him to experiment with.  They often met in the Press Club.  He’d never known anyone so enjoyable for getting drunk with.  But Michael had never made a pass at Derek, nor even suggested a more than platonic interest in him.  He felt deprived, cheated.  But Derek liked women.  And Michael…he was going to phone him tomorrow and ask him out for a beer.

            He felt almost sorry for Carol, with all the bad shit that she was going through, but one should expect this if one is going to play in the big leagues.  For Derek, Carol was the very image of fully and freshly-ripened womanhood.  He found her fresh, interesting, and full of a naïve and girlish exuberance: “always ready to firmly plant both her Birckenstocked feet in her mouth if need be, and will gladly accept the loan of a good shoe-horn”, as he’d recently written about her. He wondered if she’d phone him.  Derek harboured her no ill-feeling over having publicly-exposed him during her speech today.  For him it was merely love-talk, since he throve on humiliation.  He could tell that Carol liked him; in the case of women, Derek was never wrong.  She was putting up a fight and courting her would be like landing a marlin.  Then he’d be stuck with her like a beached whale; but Whoa! Easy on the cliché’s, Buck-o!  Well, Derek’s editor couldn’t read his mind, and neither could he help it if he often thought in cliches.  He trusted that Carol’s breakdown would be making her just a little more approachable.  A little more vulnerable.  He was almost certain that, the other day, when she’d invited him up for that interview, that barring that unexpected phone call about her lover’s death, he might have had her then and there.  But Derek didn’t like to move fast with women, preferring the slow, suspenseful and carefully played-out hunt.  He wanted to fully savour the kill.  Slowly, as though he were riding a stegosaurus, he steered his land-rover into the underground parking of the building he lived in.

            This café, where Bryan and Glen used to meet regularly had already changed hands twice since they first begun patronizing the place.  They hadn’t met here in more than two months.  Bryan had yet to forgive Glen for having robbed him of Stephen.  Not that Glen had stolen anybody.  Stephen had simply made on him his claim and Glen, like a jerboa cornered by a viper in the desert, had given his assent.  Bryan had often told Glen that his passivity would one day be his undoing.

            He wanted to change tables, to create distance with the crowd of young people that had just descended on the next table like a flock of starlings on a cornfield.  On his last day at Good Shepherd Glen had seen two starlings gourmandizing on a puddle of fresh vomit near Hastings and Main, their iridescent plumage shining violet and green splendour in the spring sunshine.  He realized that he recognized two of the young people: a Chinese girl and a Caucasian youth.  They lived in his neighbourhood.  The girl was cuddling another, younger Caucasian boy. The older youth, his name was Michael Watson, who had lived with his mother and siblings in the blue and white mansion nearby.  He was gay, an aspiring journalist, now living with a wealthy antique dealer.

His mother, Sheila, sometimes invited Glen in for tea or coffee.  Operating a drop-in centre for street youth and ex-mental patients herself she was very interested in knowing more about Glen’s work with the Good Shepherd.  He didn’t know how long it would take him to inform her that he no longer worked there.  Not that he owed her any explanations, but Sheila commanded in Glen a great deal of respect.  Or he seemed to still think that he owed the world an explanation, a justification for his existence.  She had been surprisingly candid with Glen about her son’s sexuality—perhaps by means of testing him?  But Glen had never been particularly interested in Michael, except as a friendly blond-haired boy in the neighbourhood who always said hi to him.  This evening, Michael didn’t appear to notice him, neither did the Chinese girl.  There also sat with them a South Asian girl.  She sat with her black West Indian boyfriend.  There was also a Latina girl, probably from Mexico, and another boy, whose origins Glen could only guess.  Green eyes set in toffee-coloured skin, and short black wavy hair, the light he exuded made everyone else look drab and frumpy.  Glen had rarely seen anyone so beautiful.  This was the future?  A photo-op for Canada Mosaic?  But Glen was looking at the future, and he could see that it was very good.  And bad.  If he was going to write in his journal then he must have quiet.  He was afraid that they might take it personally were he to change tables.  But they didn’t appear to notice that he was there, apart from Michael, who was suddenly smiling and flirting with him.

            Glen felt very old in their presence, and with them he felt also the invisibility of the old among the young, who might never recognize the old, whose existence would simply remind them of their own future decline.  But Glen was still younger than thirty.  He was young himself, but for recalling that when he was eighteen he considered as ancient anyone older than twenty-five, apart from Tim.  While the young had no eyes for the old, the old could never stop noticing the young, whether across a span of ten years or sixty, whether through desire or disapproval or envy, Glen was already marking the beginning of his reluctant maturity, exercising his judgment and his regret as whether through Michael and his entourage or through Stephen, he could mark again his earliest experience of youth.

            He had moved to the window where he looked out on an artificially lit street and the black but for the lights of anchored freighters water of English Bay.  “You are all people”, he wrote in his notebook, “And all people are you.”  The words seemed to stare back at him, redolent with meaning.  Then he wrote “Rejoice in the many that are you, and rejoice in the you who are many.  You are being awakened; you will touch the lives of many, your heart shall become an open portal, and your life a highway to the places of God.”

            Tears welled in his eyes, and unselfconsciously he let them roll down his cheeks.  Glen was feeling restless, he wanted to walk by the water’s edge.  The waitress, who might be Bangladeshi or Indian, smiled sweetly at him.  As Glen approached the door Michael Watson called out, “Hi Glen”, and the Chinese girl, who might also be Korean or Japanese, also smiled and waved.  The beautiful green eyed youth, who he suddenly realized to be Metis, also smiled and Glen smiled in response and waved as he left the café.

Thirteen Crucifixions 33

Halfway through yet another beer, Bryan was beginning to realize that he must make a decision.  He hadn’t spoken to Rochelle since before she’d had her surgery last year.  In more ways than he could imagine, Bryan had helped her.  They always turned on him eventually.  Or they abandoned him.  He had passed the day drinking.  Margery with those staring pale eyes of hers had truly frightened him back in the Pitstop Café.  That stupid fool of a psychiatrist of hers should never have permitted Margery to go off her meds.  She had far too soon left the House of Unconditional Love.  She had done very well under his tutelage.  One year after Margery had abandoned Bryan, Love House was no more.  The funding had been withdrawn  There had been complaints.  Not exactly scandals.  One or two younger male residents had complained that Bryan was showing them an excess of attention.  But he had done as much for Margery, who’d complained that he was using her as a decoy, since his heart really lay with the boys who were under his care.

            Margery had become strong, powerful.  She frightened him.  He felt somehow answerable to her, which made him feel rather creepy.  And that boyfriend of hers, Dwight.  What kind of power did he have over her?  Glen was becoming distant.  Dear sweet Glen.  Bryan’s protegee, whose mind, whose very worldview Bryan had done so much to form and develop.  Poor boy, he had been so lost after surviving that fire, so needful of a helpful hand for rebuilding his life.  He had needed religion, and St. Jude’s and the high church liturgy had surely been of service to Glen, who no longer seemed interested in attending mass.  And what now the condition of his soul as he kept missing the nourishing Blessed Sacrament?  They no longer had their weekly coffee chats. Glen had shown forth very well the fruit of Bryan’s labour.  Unlike Margery, who was now an extreme disappointment.  They were friends now, Glen and Margery.  She had led him astray.  They were conspiring against him?  Certainly not Glen’s idea, who was pliable, easily led.  Margery had control over him.  You could never win with a woman.

            A most unpleasant spectacle, her going on like that this evening, publicly airing their dirty linen. He blamed this on Margery’s lack of religion.  She had always resisted going to St. Jude’s, she above the other residents of Love House.  She had seemed entirely oblivious to her need of religion.  Margery was like—a witch?  More like an ancient priestess, perhaps a Delphic Oracle.  During her single and only visit to St. Jude’s Margery protested that contrary to Anglican policy there were no woman priests at St. Jude’s.  Not at St. Jude’s, Bryan had replied, never at St. Jude’s.  She was a casualty of radical lesbianism feminism.  Ungrateful, like so many people these days.  They had no moral values.  Bryan, at least, contrary to the gossip that had circulated about him, had never once taken sexual advantage of the young men in his charge.  He had remained faithfully and obstinately celibate.  In spite of his alcoholism.  He had never entered a Twelve Step Program.  Drink was his single weakness. He did try to control it.  At least he had values, having grown up with the best of religious traditions, being a fourth-generation Anglo-Catholic.  To his horror, he had watched an entire generation of young people ruined by godless secular humanism.  He only wanted to do his part, however small, to heal the damage.  If only the House of Unconditional Love had not been sacrificed to the funding rollbacks.  He could have helped save so many casualties of post-modern godlessness.

            From the handsome young waiter Bryan ordered another beer.  In contrast to his pretty bum, he seemed to have rather a surly disposition.  Like so many young homosexuals.  He thought he might see Rochelle in here.  He had lived with Bryan from before his surgery.  A breathtakingly beautiful young hustler whom Bryan had swept off the street and into his beneficent care.  He had always been there for him—and even though he’d often seen him fully naked, Bryan had still taken the utmost care to lay not a finger on him.  Then Donny began to wear make-up and dresses, eventually going in for not quite the full surgery, from which he emerged armed simultaneously with 38D breasts and an eight-inch cock.  And an evil disposition.  Brutally, Donny, now Rochelle, turned on Bryan.  Tonight, Bryan was going to track her down and teach her a lesson she would never forget.

 

Unconditional WHAT!!!!?????

Full disclosure: I do not believe in unconditional love.  Between humans there is no such thing, not even between a mother and child.  Human love, such as it is, is flawed, imperfect because humans are, well, flawed, imperfect.  I do believe in God and I believe in a God of love, but the smarmy, sappy, unconditional slop that was getting shilled from encounter group, to therapy group, to recovery group in the eighties has been nothing but a bill of goods.  We have been scammed.

I know a Christian pastor who once told me that he loved me unconditionally. I should have run out of the coffee shop screaming.  Fast.  Like everyone who uses these words he likely meant it at the time but he was still lying through his teeth.  Within months, after I told him I didn't like it when he was talking on his phone when we were out for dinner together and he walked out in a huff, then, after I emailed him pleading for reconciliation and he replied that our friendship was over and would not be revived and he still had the gall to tell me that I was always welcome in his church.

I have known others like him.  Never use those words "unconditional love" because in doing so you are making yourself a liar while defrauding the other person of a friendship that is honest and real.  None of our mutual transactions are going to be one hundred per cent altruistic.  We are too selfish, too flawed and too cynical for this.

We can only try.  It is not license to give up.  We are always going to fail but if we do not at least make an effort of love without conditions we run the risk of further dehumanizing ourselves and each other.  Each one of us is born with this obligation: that we are going to somehow improve what we already are.  We are also all going to fail at this and fail miserably.  That's okay.  The very effort towards love itself will make us grow.

We may never see heaven on earth but we can always celebrate small victories.

Crazy Little Motherfuckers

How's that for a title?  Well, they were.  I just saw today one of the survivors of the CLM, as they were also known.  He knew me before I knew him.  Time and a very hard life has aged him beyond recognition.  He still isn't old and of course is still younger than me.  He would be in his early or mid-forties? 

He was pushing a grocery buggy that contained empties and his worldly possessions and most of his teeth are missing now, one of many people in this country who cannot afford dental care.  He smiled when he saw me and I was honoured that so many years later that he would recognize and be glad to see me.  In the early nineties, more than twenty years ago I used to take him and many of his friends on the street for a bite to eat in local restaurants and food courts.

I, or should I say we, had money in those days.  I was part of a Christian community and one of our members had bequeathed to us the proceeds of the sale of her condo.  I had at my disposal a seeming bottomless pot of money to feed and shelter the many young people languishing on the streets, early casualties of the kind of global capitalism that has pushed many to the margins.  I didn't think twice about what I was doing.  For me it was Christ's work and I felt surprised and a bit annoyed when some people tried to laud me for being courageous.  But these people were not dangerous.  They were my friends.  I was able to help them at least for the moment. 

What I lacked was the resources to be able to help them leave the street.  They were almost all on drugs and alcohol and almost all were hobbled by issues of trauma and childhood abuse and poverty.  For the most part they didn't trust anyone.  To the extent that some, for example my friend pushing the grocery buggy, were able to give me trust during that time was for me an honour I still do not feel worthy of.

I do know that at least three of them, probably more now, are dead.  They were all in their early twenties or late teens: suicide, overdose, illness.  I did not pretend to have the answers for them nor the ability to help them in the long run.  I only could do my part to help keep them alive long enough to still be a problem tomorrow.  I could not help nor even suggest to them that they go in for treatment.  They knew this already.  In some ways I was practicing a kind of early form of harm reduction, I suppose.

One of them told me back in 1989 when I took him for coffee and a bite to eat that they were named "Crazy little motherfuckers" by racist skinheads who tried to attack them only to get the crap beat out of them by these rangy street punks or crazy little motherfuckers.  So they adopted this name, CLM for short.  Many stayed together in the same squat, becoming a street family, taking care of one another but also keeping each other from getting out or getting well.  I became their friend.  I would say some of them even loved me.  In a way I was just doing my job (I was in full time street Christian ministry then) and that I was being obedient to God.  I believe this to this day.

When the community and the street ministry came to an end there were no supports available for me to help transition me into ordinary life.  I was also traumatized by the deaths and the heart ache that had seared my life.  My church did nothing to help or support me and eventually I was also homeless for a while and ill with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

I have long since recovered.  I am not able to help my friend or others the way I used to.  I work at a real job now, a job that is also a ministry supporting peole with mental health diagnoses towards recovery.  After work I am too tired to take street people our for meals.  Sometimes I do offer money but not often, knowing that it will end up going up their nose, in their arms, or their lungs or worse.  I accept the trade off though I still regret this paralysis I have to live with when I see my old friend or people like him.

As a condition of my recovery I have acquired a strong sense of self-preservation.  I sometimes fear that the self-preservation has turned into selfishness.  I also know that I am not God and that I have to accept the limits of what I am able to do.

I sometimes hate this arrangement.

Time Management 101

Here's how it works.  You plan everything, carefully, but not down to the last detail.  Things almost never work out the way we plan them.  I have had to learn this the hard way, the long hard way.  I have over the years become a lot better organized and I tend to try to get things done right away or as soon as possible.  I have eliminated from my life most forms of procrastination though it still happens from time to time.  I like to get things done and to do them well.  I also have become inexhaustible in my painting and drawing as well as my writing.  There is a very simple reason for being so recklessly prolific.  I am not getting younger and I want to get everything done while I am still able.  I could have another half century left.  Or another year.  Get busy.

Today, as usual, I have had to juggle professional and personal obligations.  Not always easy but fortunately never impossible.  I had three major headaches that I had to figure out: how to find time to buy enough food to make dinner tonight, how to find time to make dinner without knocking myself out too late in the evening, leaving enough time to get at least an hour in to work from home.  Along with all this I still wanted to get in my minimum of five miles of walking today and still find time to work on my current drawing.  All this I wanted to accomplish without compromising or cutting corners on my three professional obligations (two clients two hours each and a professional meeting (another two hours) later today.

I resolved that I would get just one thing accomplished: following my first professional appointment, which always ends early, I would attempt to buy groceries and bring them home before heading out again to see my next client.

I was up early enough to fit in a half an hour at home working on my computer for the art project I am preparing for one of my worksites (gleaning from Wikipedia biographical information about Vincent Van Gogh while deleting unnecessary or superfluous information.  This has to be ready by mid-September and it is going to be one of six sessions.  Each session I will be focussing on one of six colours with a presentation about a famous artist and paintings by the same and other artists who use said colour particularly well.  As well as Van Gogh I will also be profiling Emily Carr, Claude Monet, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Georgia O'Keeffe, And the Group of Seven.  Wish me luck everybody.  The good news is I get paid for all the research time.)

I walked a half mile to the Canada Line station on my way to meet my client.  Later, from a different station, I walked with him another half mile to his destination.  That's one mile walked.  I walked back to the market, another half mile, where I bought all the left over produce I would be needing this evening.  From the station in Yaletown I walked another half mile to my home.  Two miles walked this morning, three to go.  At home I spent an hour working on the art project, then I walked over the Granville Bridge to the home of my next client (one and three-quarter miles).  My client made one of his b s excuses for not wanting to go out today so we had a cancellation.  I walked back home, another mile and three-quarters, or altogether or three and a half miles, five and a half hours altogether.  I had already walked more than my quota.

At home, while suffering through a nasty allergy attack (sneezing fits and drippy nose), I steamed a large pot full of broccoli in water and lemon juice as well as boiling whole wheat rotini pasta and six hard boiled eggs.  I finished up an hour of work, drained the broccoli, pasta and eggs.  Cooled everything and put it in the fridge, blew my nose and sneezed some more.  A lot more.  Altogether I had logged six and a half hours of paid employment and it was only two in the afternoon. 

I took the bus within one and a half miles of the office which is in Marpole, quite far from where I live and walked a half mile to a favourite café of mine (Bean Around The World)  It was inexplicably closed, a bit of a disappointment because the owner and I are on friendly terms and I haven't been able to get over there since sometime in May.  So, I walked another mile to a different Bean Around The World Café, closer to the office, where I passed more than a half hour savouring an iced Americano while getting some work done on my current drawing. 

Then I walked another mile to the office which added to the mile and a half I had walked already from bus stop to coffee shop number one, then to coffee shop number two means that I walked two and a half miles this afternoon, on top of five and a half this morning and midday or at around eight miles today.  Not at all bad.  The client we were going to meet with did not show up, which gave me time to chat and debrief with my supervisor, strategize with a co-worker and get caught up on my paperwork.  Also another two hours pay, or eight and a half hours today in total.  On the bus I was reading a book of Octavio Paz's writings, in Spanish, a renowned Mexican writer and philosopher and thinker as well as a Nobel laureate and I was in stitches laughing about his comparing the human face with the human posterior.

I am at home now.  I had extra time to prepare dinner, relax and eat it and write yet another goddam post on this goddam blog of mine.  Cheers!