The cute guy who comes in and buys cigarettes actually drove me home today. Yay! His name is Neal and he’s thirty-one and I kind of think he likes me because he blushed when I said goodbye to him in the driveway and there was like practically no reason for him to blush, and his face went red as a big cherry. It was kind of sweet! He even gave me--ME!--his phone number in case I ever “needed a ride home again.” He even likes a lot of the same kind of music as me. I’m contemplating calling him on Friday night and pretending like I had a fight with Mom to see if I can stay over at his place for a while because his parents are gone. I don’t think he’ll mind. Probably like it. I mean Lizzie’s up at her Uncle’s for the weekend and Holly is like soooooo excited about her date with Jared on Friday, so there’s nothing really to do at the Beach (what else is new!?) Who knows I may not even have to pretend to fight with Mom the way things are going lately . . . anyways, I’d love to play GWISUE (Guess What I’m Singing Underwater Edition for those unfamiliar) with Neal in his Jacuzzi. Well okay, I just want to see him in a bathing suit, but still.
I know exactly what I’ll sing too. Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl. That’s the joke right? Because it’s such a long title to say underwater. I’ll be surprised if he gets it. I’m so funny ha ha ha! Will report back tonight (or hopefully tomorrow morning *wink*wink*).
SMOKES
“Pack of Peter Jackson, small king, blue . . .” I said, probably for the third time this week. I smoke about half a pack a day, and like a wind up toy with one line, I utter the same phrase every time I buy my tobacco.
I’m waiting for the day that the teenage girl behind the counter just knows what I want and gets the pack of smokes without me actually having to say anything. I’ve only been in this beach town a few weeks so it’s entirely excusable that she doesn‘t yet know that I want, every time the same refrain: a pack of Peter Jackson, small king, blue. Maybe when--or if--I’m still living here in the months to come, she still hasn’t figured out what I want then there might be problems. For now I’ll let it slide.
I know she’s only a teenager, sixteen or seventeen, who can really tell these days, could be fourteen with all the right makeup in all the right places. She’s undeniably attractive, good bone structure, big green eyes and naturally beautiful smooth skin, long neck, perfectly angled shoulders, and thick straight healthy hair . . . even if she does streak some strands on the front with the colours of the rainbow, and she puts on a disaffected attitude, and paints her fingernails with tiny images of black hearts. Ah! To be a rebel again with youth on my side!
The fact does not escape me that she’s a little on the young side for a man of my age to even consider dating, let alone to fantasize about in the privacy of my own thoughts. My high school days are long behind me--not so far away that I can’t see my shadow waving goodbye in the rear-view--but certainly it’s inappropriate to flirt with a girl of her age. I wouldn’t even know how to be honest. In fact, propriety pushes me the opposite way and I become very cordial and without any personality, unwilling to engage in any extracurricular conversation unnecessary to the situation at hand (hence the cyborgian declaration Pack of Peter Jackson, small king, blue). I only ever buy cigarettes from this shop, never any of the dizzying array of sugar doped ice cream treats, or chips, or chocolate bars, or the bongs, both regular, all business functional ones and also gas mask ones that hang throughout the shop (I have my own bong thank you very much).
My Grandpa--who served for the Canadian forces in WW2, god rest his soul--if he set foot in this modern day convenience store, he would undoubtedly be thrust back to Italy circa 1942 and end up shaking in the fetal position behind the Cool Ranch Dorrito aisle once he sees what we do nowadays with gas masks. Can you think of a modern day accoutrement of war where the use has been totally repurposed to do the exact opposite of the thing it was designed to do? Think about it: Instead of insulating the user from poisonous gases, we now use these same masks to suck in these (some will say poisonous) gases--marijuana, hash, tobacco, crack, DMT, herron, freebase, salvia, and god knows what else. In times of peace there’s simply too much of nothing to do.
AT THE STORE FOR SMOKES, AGAIN, SOME DAYS LATER
“Pack of Peter Jackson, small ki--,” I said for the umpteenth time to the teenage girl with the rainbow hair since I moved up to this beach town, a town which is decidedly bi-polar. In the summer it’s full of rowdy teenagers with gelled hair and rock hard bodies, like a tsunami hit the Jersey shore and the detritus washed up here on Georgian Bay. Soon as October comes a-knockin’ it becomes a total ghost town. A mass exodus until only the crusty locals are left to deal with the snow. The whirs of snow blowers and the crescendos of snowmobiles driving down my street provide the dominant cacophonic backdrop.
While I was mid-order, the girl with the rainbow hair turned and headed to the concealed bins where the cigarettes are hidden, as if only we can hide our addictions behind plastic flaps they’ll magically disappear, and pulled out the exact right tobacco product--the right brand (Peter Jackson), the right strength (Blue), the right amount (20) and the right size (King). Lord knows that if you get a smokers’ order wrong, they’ll be quick and ruthless to make the correction. I was stopped cold in my tracks. She just gave me a sly little smile, we made eye contact for the briefest of moments before she broke first and looked down, handing me the change.
BACK AT THE STORE FOR SMOKES, AGAIN, AGAIN. SORRY
There were no other cars in the small parking lot and no pedestrians about, so I left the car running. Pretty much all of my driving years I spent in the GTA (not the game). Would I do that in Brampton? Toronto? No. Never. But it still feels okay for whatever romanticized bucolic reason to leave the car running up here at the beach, if only in the winter time when there‘s no one around. I’m in and out in a jiff. Only need a pack of smokes. And why I go almost every day to buy a pack I’ll never know. Why not buy a carton and save the gas, save on tobacco, and save the time? God only knows. I’m a regimented man and I don’t like breaking my routines so 4-5 times a week it is.
Stepping out of the car there is only one lonely soul, a woman walking her two dogs down the bridge and to the beach. She is also regimented because I see her at least two times a week so it’s not going too far to extrapolate that she probably walks the dogs everyday through the same route. If this were July, there would be gaggles of scantily clad teenagers milling about with floatation devices and whooping it up on the streets leading to the main drag. It’s a decidedly bi-polar beach town that I live in. Though it’s desolate in the wintertime, there’s an odd sense of impending doom as the winter ends knowing that this quiet semi-hick city will be--there’s no other word for it--invaded by young adults and teenagers looking to get rowdy and see what kind of trouble they can stir up. Hence the tiny cottages that dot so many of the streets. If you’ve never been here, it would be forgivable to think I live in a city full of elves.
Maybe this year will be the year that no one shows up and all the cozy cottages will remain empty. No mass exodus out of Toronto once the summer rolls around. For no particular reason, just an inexplicably strange emptiness. People go somewhere else. Never happens though. They always come. The stretch of beaches are simply too pristine and like the way freshly hatched turtles instinctively know which way the sea is, we too naturally flock to this Canadian oasis, our own endless postcard horizon.
The girl was engaged in a conversation on the store’s phone, and when she noticed me come inside she turned her back and started twirling a sizable strand of rainbow streaked hair around her index finger until the pressure was too much and her scalp started to burn and she relented, only to start all over again in the next moment. I patiently picked up a copy of the Toronto Sun and flipped it open to page two to check out the day’s Sunshine Girl, letting her know that I’m in no hurry. Another white trash broad with what appears to be the tattoo of a poem starting at her left lateral ribcage area and running down the side of her hip bone. On her stomach is a flock of birds. Really. No shit. I still haven’t figured out why the Sun insists on almost exclusively using girls with multiple ridiculous tattoos. Class would be near the bottom of the list of words I can conjure up to explain most of the Sunshine Girls. Don’t get me wrong, I find a lot of them attractive in a bestial way. And there’s the odd gem, the rare needle in the haystack, but boy, sometimes there’s weeks in between.
It was now becoming clear, as I continued to flip through the fluff that takes up most of the Sun’s ink, reading a line or two but not really taking it in, that the girl was not in some banal conversation. Though I couldn’t make out every word (I didn’t want to be rude and seem like I was eavesdropping so I kept a safe distance from the counter), I could sense the general thrust and it was not a comfortable chat, of that much I‘m sure.
DRIVING THE GIRL HOME FROM THE STORE
“I’ll just move that into the backseat,” I said, the both of us eyeballing at the same time the six pack that was preventing her from sitting down in the passenger side. She slunk herself into the seat and fastened her belt. I was nervous as all hell. What the fuck am I doing driving this teenage girl home? Every little thing I say to her will, no matter how commonplace, be reflexively filtered through a thought checkpoint to root out any potential sexual references to this minor that I have no familial or long-time-family-friend-type relation to, and no good reason to be with, so that now I’m obviously taking great pains to avoid any kind of talk of sex or boys or whatever, and that makes it seem like I’m creepy for acting like sex talk is unnatural. Or so I think, turning the ignition.
“So . . . where to little lady?” I asked, backing out of the parking lot.
“Hey thanks for driving me, I don’t live far. I was talking to my Mom on the phone. She’s totally hammered and couldn’t pick me up,” she said in a way that suggested it wasn’t the first time that sentence had sprung from her lips. “My name’s Sadie, by the way.”
“Nice to meet you Sadie. My name’s still Neal,” I said smiling as warmly as I could at her.
“Still?” She chuckled and I chuckled back, her one word question phrased more rhetorically rather than inquisitive. I didn’t answer.
There was a moment of silence while I backed up and she looked out the window indiscriminately at the same slushy sights of dirty snow that she saw everyday and I nervously scratched a phantom itch on the back of my neck to fill the empty space and tried to think of something to say, also feeling a hint of an odd kind of inchoate guilt as I thought of the aforementioned six pack that was now ominously situated in the middle of the back seat. Like I’m somehow implicated in her mothers’ irresponsible behaviour.
“Just keep going up Main until you hit the lights at River then go left. You live around here I guess?”
“Yeah, by the police station. Just looking after the folks’ home and the cat while they’re away this winter in Florida. It’s great. I can grab a beer and relax in the Jacuzzi anytime I like.
“Ewww . . . a Jacuzzi.”
“I lived in Toronto for five the past ten years or so, but wanted a change, to get away from the city and live out in the country for a bit. ” This line of reasoning was SOP when trying to impress someone, or put a nice glaze over the rotten facts that my life has become. Though it was mostly true, I was leaving out what most would consider an integral factor to the story, a game changer, a TSN Turning Point: I quit my job a year ago and didn’t do much of anything towards finding a new job in the first six months until my meagre stash of money saved up from my security sales job rather quickly evaporated and I was faced with not being able to pay next month’s rent (let alone beer, pot, smokes, groceries, et al). I had to schlep all my crap two hours north and move back in with the folks. What other choice did I have? I read an article that said more and more Canadians are moving back in with their parents, whether it be the economy, lack of opportunity, whatever. It made me feel marginally better, I suppose. If Sadie dug a little deeper my vague cover story would fall apart, and if that happened, I’d simply tell her the truth, every pathetic detail. Try to pull off a quick turnaround redemption. I didn’t have the fortitude to spin some elaborate web of deceit about the events that led to my current loserdom status living in my parents‘ basement. I prefer to weave a simple, uncomplicated web when I lie and deceive; then come clean if prodded.
“I’d love to live in Toronto. I’ve only been a few times to visit my aunt. I’ve lived here my whole life,” she said and sighed, looking blankly out the window at the rows of semi-squalid beach motels that give way to the carefully delineated box stores.
“Some of my favourite band’s are from Toronto . . . but I‘ve never seen any of them,” and Sadie proceeded to drop a few names, taking the awkward first step when discussing music with a stranger, and/or perhaps to gauge what my preferences were. “Crystal Castles, Metric, Broken Social Scene, Drake.” She stopped listing musical groups and looked at me, “I could go on and on if you like.”
“What about Neil Young? He’s from Toronto.”
“Oh yeah, definitely him too. I love Heart of Gold.”
“That’s a good one but there’s better. A lot of his ‘70’s stuff that you don’t hear on the radio is his best. Zuma, On The Beach, American Stars N’ Bars.” I looked at her and with a smile said, “I could go on and on if you like.”
I continued: “I’m only familiar with the one Broken Social Scene album, You Forgot It In People, but it’s one of the best Canadian albums ever. The kind of album that is pretty much impossible to duplicate, and all future attempts have a lingering sadness because it can never be that good again. That‘s the way I--”
“Oh my God! That’s totally my favourite album from them too!” Sadie jumped in. “I found it last year and have been listening like religiously.”
I relaxed, satisfied that there was some common ground between us no matter the age gap--music is a universal language!
I told her, “Whenever I think of the title, I think of it as, ‘forgot what in people? Like a toy or something?’”
Sadie looked at me with a stern face and said in a monotonous deadpan, “I’m glad I let a complete psycho drive me home.”
“You would probably like The Sadies,” I told her, showing off my Hogtown indie scene knowledge and connecting it to her namesake.
“There’s a band called ‘The Sadies?’” She asked, clearly unaware of their hitherto existence.
“Yeah, they’ve been around a long time. Pretty good, too; straight up mother fucking rock and roll. Awesome guitarists.”
I knew it was wrong, this unstoppable swelling of attraction to this teenage girl. I would never make a pass, she’s too young, I told myself. But good people are capable of bad things if put in the right wrong situation. Believe me, I’ve assimilated modern North American values regarding acting on sexual impulses towards young teenage girls. My baser instincts are firmly held in check, and it’s fine because I really do like women that are my own age, refined women in their late twenties and early thirties, not teenagers with multi coloured streaks in their hair. There’s no getting the toothpaste back in the tube, I ‘spose.
We are cruising through a residential area, I‘m purposely driving slower than usual so we can continue our conversation (thankful there‘s no one behind me). “I live up here on the left, mine is the one with the gnome in the yard with a red toque holding a beer mug . . . my Mom put it there. She‘s kind of a drunk, if you don‘t know already. Sometimes, when she‘s really messed up, and sitting on the couch watching Hoarders or Housewives of Whatever, she‘ll say, ‘Sadie! Get Momma a drink from the litter cabinet, and don‘t forget to clean Kiki‘s liquor box.”
“Sounds like a real hoot,” I said, pulling into her driveway, coming to a stop. “Well, here we are.” I put the car in park.
I don’t have a sound rational reason for what I said next, I think I said it to cut the silence, and you know when you quickly flip through the rolodex of possible topics in your head and you’re pressed for time--someone has to say something right now!--and the longer the silence drags on you just grasp for any old dumb thing to say even if the consequences of saying said thing are worse than not saying anything at all in the first place? She asked me to drive her home. What was I supposed to say? “Get outta my face, lady!?”
“Hey, take my phone number if,” and that’s a very loaded ‘if’, I’ll admit, fraught with innuendos, “you ever need a ride home again.”
Sadie quickly took out her cell phone, which was encased in a pink plastic cell housing bedazzled with little red hearts, some of them faded and not really even hearts anymore where she must hold the phone. She opened up her contacts and entered my name and number, manipulating both her thumbs around the screen of the device with the efficient dexterity that teenagers now display with any handheld device.
She smiled right in my eyes, her twin spotlights lighting me up, and put her phone back in the front pocket of her jeans, bulging noticeably against her thighs. “I’ll call if I need a ride,” she said, lingering by the open door, “Just don’t drink any of those,” and her eyes moved to the six pack with the who me? expression in the back seat, “If I let you drive me home again.”
“I wouldn’t dare, Sadie.”
She closed the door, insulating me from the frigid, dandruff inducing, soul destroying air that whipped off the bay. Alone in the car. I watched Sadie walk up the walkway, shovelled so narrowly as to barely allow a human being to trek through. I didn’t actually watch her open the front door. I didn’t want to seem like a creep, sitting there in her driveway not leaving, as if driving her home and giving her my phone number wasn’t creepy enough.
I’m fucking thirty one years old! Ahh! I got the hell out of there and drove home and resolved to forget about Sadie with a few pints and a few puffs. Shit, am I going to have to buy smokes from a different store now to avoid future potentially embarrassing situations with this girl? Why did I involve myself with the local convenience store clerk? I chided myself for needlessly complicating my simple life. I debated the pros and cons of funnelling my future tobacco dollars towards the other convenience store which was definitely much farther away than the current one, and from what I remember, there was a whiff of something rotten in the air. That was two strikes against.
And then I was pulling in to the driveway of my empty suburban house, waiting for the automatic door to fully ascend.
SADIE COMES OVER
I didn’t recognize the number but the voice on the other end was hers. Of course she could come over if she needed to get away from her mother for a few hours, I told her. She was walking over this very minute.
I convinced myself that I didn’t even think of Sadie like a seventeen year old. She seemed sweet and clever, and yes, kind of attractive too. It’s hard to choose to be attracted to somebody because that’s what the culture you live in tells you to. You just kind of are, am I right?
There’s a ton of moral diversity within the thirteen to nineteen range and what’s permissible, both legally and culturally. Not many would bat an eye if a twenty year old male dated an eighteen year old female. Happens all the time. A few heads would certainly start turning if a twenty five year male dated a seventeen year old female, and heads would possibly start rolling (either from law enforcement or paternal rage) if a thirty eight year old male dated a thirteen year old female (the disgust of this summed up neatly by the fact that no one would actually call it ’dating’, it’s called something else entirely).
Thirty one and seventeen. I pondered the mathematical range of our ages and couldn’t keep the clichéd platitudes from bubbling to the surface. Age is just a number. . .
I shouldn’t have even offered her a ride home. What am I doing inviting her to my home? Do I need to hop onto the net and look up Sex Laws in Ontario? This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Remember to ask her when her 18th birthday is. Okay, there’s a force field around her and I’ll simply just not touch her at all, not in a sexual way or a friendly way, only if she’s choking and I have to give her mouth to mouth, then and only then will I reach out and connect my lips to hers.
Without warning the doorbell says, “Ding-dong.”
I exhale loudly (if a man sighs alone in a house does it make a sound?) and hop down the small set of stairs that lead to the front door. I can see a slender persons’ silhouette through the stained glass pattern, bathing them in a translucent, multi-coloured, ethereal glow.
We say our hellos I lead her up the stairs to the main area of the house. There is a definite power when welcoming a guest into your home for the first time. You‘re in charge. The family house was an open concept, combining the kitchen and t.v. room; it was where friends and family congregated to engage in conversation and whatnot. Sadie was no different.
“So this is it,” I said with a sweeping motion, gesturing at all the stuff--sixty inch flat screen hanging on the wall as if put in place by the hand of God, leather couches with matching ottomans, hardwood floors, sleek modern kitchen where pots and pans dangle, ready for use.
“Thanks for letting me come over for a while, my Mom’s annoying the shit out of me. I promise it will only be for a few hours, until she passes out.”
“Hey, it’s all good. I could use the company. Kind of lonely by myself all the time here. I’m used to living in an apartment on Bloor Street in Toronto and having to close my curtains because too many people are walking by.”
I open my pack of PJ’s and perfunctorily offer her one and she declines.
“I remember that you said you have a Jacuzzi,” Sadie said with a conspiratorial sideways grin. “So I brought my bathing suit.”
I cleared my throat and said, “Great, great. We can definitely do that. She’s all warmed up and ready to go.”
There was freshly diced vegetables, flour, bread crumbs and spices for my deadly fried chicken all laid out carefully on the kitchen counter. I didn’t really know what else to do for this girl except feed her. It’s all about the Panko!
“Not hungry I take it?”
“Maybe later. Got somewhere I can change?”
IN THE MOONLIGHT & JACUZZI
The jets they are-a bubbling and we sit down at the same as far away as possible on opposite ends of the tub. We both let our bodies acclimate to the water which was perfectly set at just-hot-enough-to-hurt-so-good.
If you haven’t slaked your thirst with a few Moosehead’s and then waltzed through subzero temperatures in nothing but a bathing suit towards a tub full of hot water and laid back and smoked a cigarette looking up at the moon, the stars, the sun, well than you haven’t caught a glimpse of paradise yet, my friend.
“Lot of stars out tonight,” I shot across the ocean between us, my head cocked to the heavens. It was something, anything. Did I want a response? I don’t know.
“Let’s play a game,” Sadie said.
I’ll admit, there weren’t too many games I wouldn’t play with her at this moment.
“Okay then.”
“Turn off the jets and we’ll both take a deep breath and go under water. I’ll sing the first verse to a song and you have to guess which song.”
Well I‘ve gone this far. To turn back now would be as bloody as moving forward. I flexed my stomach muscles and stood up, leaning over to where the main control panel was located and punched one of the buttons, killing the jets.
Like when you play Jeopardy! or Trivial Pursuit with your friends, I was confident that I would know the song, whatever song she decided to choose. She’s only a teenager, after all.
A silence that was always there, hidden by the jets, suddenly revealed itself and, I’m sure, caught both of our attention at the same time, but it went unacknowledged. We crouched down onto the floor of the tub, the dying swells from the jets making our kneecaps gently tap, tap, tap, together. Two heads and four shoulders our only parts above water. Spumes of heat rise over the surface, the only things moving at this moment in the backyard, the whole world. We sucked in what was all around us and what we were sucking in all the time when you stop and think about it, but was now wholly precious and uncommonly dramatic considering how crucial oxygen was to the game, and then we disappeared beneath the surface.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Monday, January 28, 2013
Online Sweetheart
I am not a Facebook stalker or anything like that. I’m really not. No more than any of you out there.
I barely go on the damn thing. But there is this one girl, who shall obviously remain nameless, that I find very attractive and I keep tabs on her. Okay. . . that sounded creepy, “keeping tabs” on somebody you don‘t even interface with, I’ll concede that, but it’s not like I go to her page daily, and obsessively think about her when I’m not on her page, refreshing the browser over and over checking for new pictures. God no! It’s more like a bi-weekly check up. Like getting a paycheque. Maybe I occasionally go to her boyfriends page to see other pictures of her as well, but come on, leave him out of it, this is about her.
I’m happy to report that as this divine Jewish woman from the GTA moves into her mid-twenties, whom I’ll refer to as M, her petite, well proportioned features light up every picture she’s in, making her friends, who are okay by comparison, look like Bruce Vilanch. With Aids.
M is still going steady with her boyfriend. Appears she’s been dating him for about a year because that’s how far back pictures of the two of them together go. Her boyfriend (who does not come across as a douche-nozzle, as nice as that would be. Sadly, he doesn’t have a thumb ring and/or a ponytail). Of course he’s from good stock--tall, nice wavy brown hair and clear skin. I expected as much; M would certainly not date any scrubs. Not on my watch.
By the way, who are you kidding? It’s not like you don’t look up old flames and former classmates to see you how stack up. Sitting behind your anonymous screen surreptitiously peeling back the curtain and taking a look. How can you not? Humans (and Canadians) are naturally curious, and our past lives are only a click away, so . . . what are you waiting for?
Let’s face it: we are a culture of cyber stalkers and we do it without even thinking. It’s not like I set out to find this woman--I accepted her sisters’ friend request and came across her rather organically (excuses excuses). I wasn’t intentionally looking for a beautiful Jewish woman to do bi-weekly Facebook checks on. Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.
Facebook: What a tool forManti Te’o wild and crazy guys!
It’s just too easy nowadays for weirdos and creeps, innit? In the good old days, they (not we, I‘m not one of them!) would have to brave the bone shattering cold of a Saturday night in February peeping through windows and pulling on a flaccid penis trying to hid inside your body with an old pair of soft mittens. That’s so 90‘s. Enough already with all that heavy lifting! Once humans find a shortcut there’s no stopping us. It reminds me of that scene in True Stories where the fat rich lady is laying in bed being fed by an electronic spoon. If we have the means and the technology, well . . . make it so number one.
It’s digital, but our lives are so digitized that it’s even better than the real thing.
At this point I’ll address the elephant in the room. I have never, repeat never, masturbated to any pictures on her page. Maybe YOU do that, you sicko. Not for this cowboy. Maybe I’m a desensitized 21st century digital boy, but generally speaking, I need hardcore sex scenarios to get my rocks off, not some picture of a woman at a poetry reading, no matter how heavenly looking. Date and love and sire children with her? Yes. Jerk my crankshaft to? Negatori. Plus, M’s a good girl. Her pictures, like most seemingly normal women in the GTA, consist of M at her sister’s graduation from university, and on holiday in some tropical paradise with the whole extended clan, what looks like aunts and uncles and grandparents. And call me crazy, but it’s tough to get the poison out with Auschwitz survivors flanking the object of your desire. Very distracting.
One night, after months of watching her from afar, like Neil Young, but definitely not watching her every step and every breath, like Sting, I decided to reach out and make contact. I was stoned and drunk and just didn’t give a flying karate kick anymore. Though I resolved to make contact, I was still much too scared and sensible to send her a personalized message--like, umm . . . I’ve been watching you for a while and I just wanted to say that you’re totally fuckable; here’s my digitz. I tried a different approach: I sent her a link to my website without any accompanying message. One cup of anonymity with a sprinkling of mystery and a dash of intrigue. That’s me. The line up’s over here ladies. It was probably some article about getting head from a tranny, or smoking crack, or smoking a tranny cock, or sucking a crack pipe and smoking a tranny cock at the same time. I know, I know, kinda super lame for an introduction. The next morning when I woke up and turned on my computer with a clear head I couldn’t believe I actually reached out to her, albeit only digitally, across the vast expanse of cyberspace. Half of me was praying that there wouldn’t be a message from her in my inbox, that the cruel hands of actual love in the real world wouldn’t be able to go for my throat. The other half of me hoped that this was the beginning of our march towards marriage and true love, a happy life together achieving our goals and buying a home, raising children, reading the Sunday newspaper, being concerned about planet Earth, what we’re putting into our bodies, what the world we leave will be like for our kids . . .
I hesitantly opened up my ‘favourites’ tab and clicked on my hotmail account, fourth from the top, my mouth dry and head throbbing, clicker finger trembling over the mouse. Before the page loaded, with the blue circle on the screen going roundandroundandround, my overheated and impatient mind took off on a tangential daydream, allowing the fantasy of our potential future life take over.
They would be half Jewish, after all--our kids, that is--and religio-social-political decisions that will shape their young lives would need to be made. As parents it‘s our duty to nudge them in the right direction: do we celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, or some combination thereof? Maybe Chrismukkah? Or maybe Hanukkismas? Should they learn Hebrew as a second language, or French? Or Spanish? I can already see myself at a dinner party arguing vehemently for Israel against encroaching Palestinian territories and missiles--they have a right to defend themselves, ya know! Jesus would have wanted that land for the Israelites!
After years of love--five? Ten? Who knows--our union slowly, but inevitably, crumbles, as love in the real world is wont to do, and one night, after imbibing too much, as I am wont to do, we argue, and I drunkenly hurl a Menorah at her right at the throat--going for the kill shot. Eight candles of death spinning through the air like a pimped out ninja star and only barely missing her head, lodging firmly into the wall. She tearfully declares, “I’m taking Seth and Nina to a kibbutz, away from your tyranny!” And that’s the end of familial bliss, I think to myself, alone in the house, hung over as fuck, spackling the eight gashes in the wall and sipping on a morning beer, waiting for the mud to dry so I can sand ’er down.
I call M’s cell phone and immediately get her voicemail. I decide that the last message I ever leave as her better half will be in the form of a joke: “Do you know why Jewish women like circumcised men?” Dramatic pause.
“They like one third off.”
Click.
Divorce.
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that she didn’t get back to me--(sigh)
In today’s economy, who needs a restraining order, so I gathered my wits about myself and went back to gazing at my ethereal Jewish beauty from the telescopic confines of my computer screen, as if combing the skies of a distant galaxy . . . a galaxy full of buxotic Jewish girls, and half French, half Swedish girls, 50/50 where it counts!
At work one day I popped on to her page to make sure all was well in her world. A typical day; she was due for her bi-weekly check up. For whatever subconscious, inexplicably slippery and fleeting reason, I was assaulted by the futility of the whole enterprise. The feeling hit me like lightning. I mean, what could I possibly do if there was a death in the family, or some guy broke her heart? All I am able to do is click onto her Facebook page and piece together her life from the images she has posted and the comments that are left. We are still separated by a divide that the digital world can never bridge. If something tragic (or wonderful) happened, there’s no way for her to know that my heart would break (or glow) right along with hers, that if we’re lost, we are lost together. Well, I haven’t been to her page in months since that day.
M was the star of my Truman Show.
This is the eulogy.
I barely go on the damn thing. But there is this one girl, who shall obviously remain nameless, that I find very attractive and I keep tabs on her. Okay. . . that sounded creepy, “keeping tabs” on somebody you don‘t even interface with, I’ll concede that, but it’s not like I go to her page daily, and obsessively think about her when I’m not on her page, refreshing the browser over and over checking for new pictures. God no! It’s more like a bi-weekly check up. Like getting a paycheque. Maybe I occasionally go to her boyfriends page to see other pictures of her as well, but come on, leave him out of it, this is about her.
I’m happy to report that as this divine Jewish woman from the GTA moves into her mid-twenties, whom I’ll refer to as M, her petite, well proportioned features light up every picture she’s in, making her friends, who are okay by comparison, look like Bruce Vilanch. With Aids.
M is still going steady with her boyfriend. Appears she’s been dating him for about a year because that’s how far back pictures of the two of them together go. Her boyfriend (who does not come across as a douche-nozzle, as nice as that would be. Sadly, he doesn’t have a thumb ring and/or a ponytail). Of course he’s from good stock--tall, nice wavy brown hair and clear skin. I expected as much; M would certainly not date any scrubs. Not on my watch.
By the way, who are you kidding? It’s not like you don’t look up old flames and former classmates to see you how stack up. Sitting behind your anonymous screen surreptitiously peeling back the curtain and taking a look. How can you not? Humans (and Canadians) are naturally curious, and our past lives are only a click away, so . . . what are you waiting for?
Let’s face it: we are a culture of cyber stalkers and we do it without even thinking. It’s not like I set out to find this woman--I accepted her sisters’ friend request and came across her rather organically (excuses excuses). I wasn’t intentionally looking for a beautiful Jewish woman to do bi-weekly Facebook checks on. Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.
Facebook: What a tool for
It’s just too easy nowadays for weirdos and creeps, innit? In the good old days, they (not we, I‘m not one of them!) would have to brave the bone shattering cold of a Saturday night in February peeping through windows and pulling on a flaccid penis trying to hid inside your body with an old pair of soft mittens. That’s so 90‘s. Enough already with all that heavy lifting! Once humans find a shortcut there’s no stopping us. It reminds me of that scene in True Stories where the fat rich lady is laying in bed being fed by an electronic spoon. If we have the means and the technology, well . . . make it so number one.
It’s digital, but our lives are so digitized that it’s even better than the real thing.
At this point I’ll address the elephant in the room. I have never, repeat never, masturbated to any pictures on her page. Maybe YOU do that, you sicko. Not for this cowboy. Maybe I’m a desensitized 21st century digital boy, but generally speaking, I need hardcore sex scenarios to get my rocks off, not some picture of a woman at a poetry reading, no matter how heavenly looking. Date and love and sire children with her? Yes. Jerk my crankshaft to? Negatori. Plus, M’s a good girl. Her pictures, like most seemingly normal women in the GTA, consist of M at her sister’s graduation from university, and on holiday in some tropical paradise with the whole extended clan, what looks like aunts and uncles and grandparents. And call me crazy, but it’s tough to get the poison out with Auschwitz survivors flanking the object of your desire. Very distracting.
* * *
One night, after months of watching her from afar, like Neil Young, but definitely not watching her every step and every breath, like Sting, I decided to reach out and make contact. I was stoned and drunk and just didn’t give a flying karate kick anymore. Though I resolved to make contact, I was still much too scared and sensible to send her a personalized message--like, umm . . . I’ve been watching you for a while and I just wanted to say that you’re totally fuckable; here’s my digitz. I tried a different approach: I sent her a link to my website without any accompanying message. One cup of anonymity with a sprinkling of mystery and a dash of intrigue. That’s me. The line up’s over here ladies. It was probably some article about getting head from a tranny, or smoking crack, or smoking a tranny cock, or sucking a crack pipe and smoking a tranny cock at the same time. I know, I know, kinda super lame for an introduction. The next morning when I woke up and turned on my computer with a clear head I couldn’t believe I actually reached out to her, albeit only digitally, across the vast expanse of cyberspace. Half of me was praying that there wouldn’t be a message from her in my inbox, that the cruel hands of actual love in the real world wouldn’t be able to go for my throat. The other half of me hoped that this was the beginning of our march towards marriage and true love, a happy life together achieving our goals and buying a home, raising children, reading the Sunday newspaper, being concerned about planet Earth, what we’re putting into our bodies, what the world we leave will be like for our kids . . .
I hesitantly opened up my ‘favourites’ tab and clicked on my hotmail account, fourth from the top, my mouth dry and head throbbing, clicker finger trembling over the mouse. Before the page loaded, with the blue circle on the screen going roundandroundandround, my overheated and impatient mind took off on a tangential daydream, allowing the fantasy of our potential future life take over.
They would be half Jewish, after all--our kids, that is--and religio-social-political decisions that will shape their young lives would need to be made. As parents it‘s our duty to nudge them in the right direction: do we celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah, or some combination thereof? Maybe Chrismukkah? Or maybe Hanukkismas? Should they learn Hebrew as a second language, or French? Or Spanish? I can already see myself at a dinner party arguing vehemently for Israel against encroaching Palestinian territories and missiles--they have a right to defend themselves, ya know! Jesus would have wanted that land for the Israelites!
After years of love--five? Ten? Who knows--our union slowly, but inevitably, crumbles, as love in the real world is wont to do, and one night, after imbibing too much, as I am wont to do, we argue, and I drunkenly hurl a Menorah at her right at the throat--going for the kill shot. Eight candles of death spinning through the air like a pimped out ninja star and only barely missing her head, lodging firmly into the wall. She tearfully declares, “I’m taking Seth and Nina to a kibbutz, away from your tyranny!” And that’s the end of familial bliss, I think to myself, alone in the house, hung over as fuck, spackling the eight gashes in the wall and sipping on a morning beer, waiting for the mud to dry so I can sand ’er down.
I call M’s cell phone and immediately get her voicemail. I decide that the last message I ever leave as her better half will be in the form of a joke: “Do you know why Jewish women like circumcised men?” Dramatic pause.
“They like one third off.”
Click.
Divorce.
* * *
You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that she didn’t get back to me--(sigh)
In today’s economy, who needs a restraining order, so I gathered my wits about myself and went back to gazing at my ethereal Jewish beauty from the telescopic confines of my computer screen, as if combing the skies of a distant galaxy . . . a galaxy full of buxotic Jewish girls, and half French, half Swedish girls, 50/50 where it counts!
At work one day I popped on to her page to make sure all was well in her world. A typical day; she was due for her bi-weekly check up. For whatever subconscious, inexplicably slippery and fleeting reason, I was assaulted by the futility of the whole enterprise. The feeling hit me like lightning. I mean, what could I possibly do if there was a death in the family, or some guy broke her heart? All I am able to do is click onto her Facebook page and piece together her life from the images she has posted and the comments that are left. We are still separated by a divide that the digital world can never bridge. If something tragic (or wonderful) happened, there’s no way for her to know that my heart would break (or glow) right along with hers, that if we’re lost, we are lost together. Well, I haven’t been to her page in months since that day.
M was the star of my Truman Show.
This is the eulogy.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
UFC: Both In The Flesh & Not
Because of the NHL lockout, I have changed my stubborn ways with the sports I like and become genuinely interested in other ones, namely the UFC. I always enjoyed a good knockout as much as the next guy, but never actually sat down and watched the sport and kept up with it. Saw a few highlights here and there.
It was the UFC on Fox that aired in December where Rory Macdonald beat the ever living shit out of B.J. Penn that made me think twice about the sport. The main event was Benson Henderson mugging Nick Diaz. Both fights were simply fantastically entertaining bouts between two men laying it all out on the line with mind and body. Who cares if you don’t understand the nuances of full guard or Ju Jitsu arm locks. All that techno-jargon doesn’t matter. You have to love the brute simplicity of the sport: knock the other muffa-fuffa out. That’s what you gotta do. And in fifty years it’ll be the same damn thing. How can you not love that? Sheer power and domination over another human being. Making him your bitch.
I had never heard of the Canadian fighter Rory Macdonald before the night. The TV played a clip of him walking through the bowels of the stadium in Seattle before the fight. He was immaculately doffed in an overcoat, neatly concealing a sharp suit and tie underneath. His hair was slicked back a la Patrick Bateman. Here was a legit Canadian Psycho! An absolute fucking death squad killer.
In the ring against Penn, a guaranteed future hall of famer MMA fighter lured out of the doldrums of retirement, he faked kicks to the chest and with a snap of the ankle hit Penn right in the face. Granted I’m new to the sport but I’ve never seen kicks like that before. He pummelled Penn with unpredictable, unique combinations, and Penn never even had a taste; only landed a few nice rights which Macdonald easily ate up. Too bad Rory didn’t finish him. Was damn close. Heard Penn had to go to the hospital after the fight with broken ribs. He visibly winced when Rory landed with a clean gut shot. Penn’s a tough guy, and the tough absorb so much punishment without being KO’d, and man, he looked fucked up at the end. A big bald bean of a man bruised and broken. Refried. He’s probably still limping around to the grocery store with a techno-coloured faced. Late in the fight with the only thing left to decide was whether Rory would put him to sleep, Macdonald did the Ali shuffle, a gesture not so much about taunting, it seemed to me, as rubbing it in the opponents face the fact that he’s beat and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s about humiliation. It was funny as all hell to me. The kind of guy you love to hate. Knee jerk boo’s immediately poured from the stands. But if any athlete can get away with obscene arrogance it’s MMA fighters. I can’t think of another sport where an inflated ego and confidence helps more so than the UFC. This ain’t curling.
Rory is one of the two archetypal types of fighters. There are those who mock and trivialize their opponents before a fight on social media, during the weigh-ins, and what have you. Rory even takes it so far, in a humorous twist on the arrogant archetype, to feel sorry for his opponent, as in, “Gee whiz, I wish the guy the best, but it’s just too darn bad that he chose me of all people to fight.” He’s goddamn funny. To add to his Canadian Psycho persona, he’s entirely flat and affect less in interviews and his general demeanour, and he drives around in Porches, and has an unusually strong interest in men’s fashion. I mean come on! He’s Bateman North for Chrissakes!
The other fighter archetype, of course, is the respectful warrior. The man who will always be quick to hug his opponent even in defeat, his face a rearranged bloody mess, barely conscious. Though he is engaged in a violent sport, there is absolutely no personal hatred towards the other fighter. It’s all about the craft, the art of martial arts. It’s a poetic dance of carnage.
You’ll find this type of respectful warrior/arrogant prick dichotomy in most other sports. There’s just something so visceral and raw about the dichotomy in the UFC. It’s more pronounced. The adrenaline pumped through my body as I sat up on the couch, back arched and leaning into the TV and yelled, my teeth gnashed and snarling, “Fucking knock ‘em out!” Rory had Penn stumbling against the ropes. Penn was peering into the abyss, only half there, somehow hanging in there and hobbling around the octagon. The clock must have been ticking in slow motion.
Though it was fun to watch my fellow countryman absolutely molest his opponent, it’s equally fun to watch a similarly arrogant fighter, Nick Diaz, absolutely humbled by Benson Henderson.
I’d never seen either of the two guys ever in my life. Nick Diaz, a scowling, swaggering lithe Latino bad boy from California versus “Smooth” Benson Henderson. Now this Henderson kid, his long curly black hair swaying with each attack, is a pure fucking warrior with legs like two trunks of mighty oak. He destroyed Nate Diaz. Made him his bitch. Even when Diaz was bloodied and on his back, Henderson measuring him out to slam a fist right into his face to end the contest, he was still taunting Henderson, gesturing as if to say, “Is that all you got?” Well . . . yeah, it is all he’s got, and he’s pummelling the shit out of you, kid. But at least Diaz stays in character until the bitter end. An arrogant fighter can never break character. The only way he’d stop being the hot shot is if he got K-the-fuck-O’d. There would be no Nate Diaz there to tell Nate Diaz to be a hard ass. Henderson was close but Diaz’s consciousness remained intact, albeit a bit wobbly; might not have known which planet he was from by the end. A solid victory.
There are secret places in our nature that are stimulated when a man is beating another man senseless. It’s some kind of primordial erogenous zone.
I was downtown Barrie recently, which is delightfully seedy and full of Southern Ontario scum. I was making my way back to my parked car, waiting for the light to change so I could cross the intersection. There was a Latino couple waiting alongside me. The female half was cradling a Chihuahua, the creatures’ tiny matchbox legs trembling in the cold.
I knew trouble was brewing, though. Up ahead on the other side of the street, some crazy guy was sitting on one of the benches and yelling horrifically racist epithets at no one in particular. People were staring at this guy, and it was just plainly obvious that there is a nut looking for trouble in our midst. He was just kind of yelling racist nonsense out to the heavens above and then singling out people who passed him by, repeating the same phrases over and over. “It’s these Paki’s coming in and ruining our country! They should get outta here!” You get the idea.
“Where you from buddy?” Crazy Guy picks out a hapless slender black man in glasses.
“I’m from Mississauga, buddy,” he replied, quietly defiant.
“You should go back to fucking Africa!”
The man continued down the street, unwilling to engage, walking ten paces and then unable to control the urge to look over his shoulder, he makes sure Crazy Guy is still sitting leisurely on the bench.
I imagined what would happen if Crazy Guy singled me out for derision? What would I do? Maul him like a tiger the second he engaged me, pummel him with deadly lefts and rights to the ribs--switch--then work on his face a little, then--switch--back to the ribs? In the Octagon they call me . . . The Surgeon--cause I do work on mothafuckas faces. Ahh, I’m only pulling your leg. I’d keep on walking--walk on home boy . . .
The three of us began crossing the street, me lagging comfortably behind the couple a few paces. I was the weatherman and I knew which way the wind was going to blow. I’d known since we were waiting on the other side of the street. The couple were too engrossed in their conversation to take much stock of Crazy Guy’s rantings back then. Now that we were destined for a head-on collision, the couple could see and hear that they were walking right into a shit storm and they stopped their conversation and stared at Crazy Guy. The three of us were now almost parallel with the small cluster of benches that Crazy Guy has been using as his makeshift pulpit. We are moving through the belly of the beast. It’s now or never for Crazy Guy to strike.
What did he think of when he awoke this morning? Did he have this outburst planned? Or was it spontaneous? Did he know this is how his day would turn out? The guy doesn’t look mentally ill--in fact he wasn’t bad looking at all for a man in his 40’s.
“I bet you’re fucking Mexican, right?” Crazy Guy yells right at the Boyfriend. Boyfriend, clearly the larger of the two, a thick Latino man who wouldn’t look out of place in Maplehurst, snickered at him dismissively, like he wasn’t worth his time, and kept walking down the street.
“You fucking spic!” Crazy Guy ratcheted up his game a notch, getting bolder, going for the kill shot. “Get outta my country motherfucker! And take that fucking faggot little dog, too!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle about the dog. I knew it was going to factor in there somewhere. Put this man on a stage!
Other pedestrians were starting to really take notice, milling about in small groups trying to decide what to do, like office workers suddenly left without a boss.
We are now so close that Crazy Guy could lash out and, who knows, pry the Chihuahua out of the girlfriends hands and kick a forty yard punt down Bayfield Avenue.
The boyfriend is now getting visibly aggravated, and had to say something, perhaps to save face in front of his woman, perhaps because of the last comment. “Yo man, shut the fuck up or I’ll knock you the fuck out,” the Boyfriend said firmly.
Oooohhh, no he di’in’t.
Oh no, Crazy Guy is going to go for the invitation to rumble and what am I gonna do? Break it up? Hang by the sidelines with the girlfriend? I’m no hero. I mean, I am, in my head, until a situation that requires heroism actually unfolds. Crazy guy stands up and the Boyfriend stops walking and in turn, the Girlfriend stops too. Boyfriend turns to face Crazy Guy directly. At my close vantage point, I could tell that Boyfriend was very angry, not a man to be fucked with, and his words were merely vocalized vehicles for the sole purpose of inflicting damage. It didn’t matter so much what he said as how he said it. “You better sit the fuck back down you retard,” the Latino man says, letting the insults fly. No forethought whatsoever about what was coming out of his mouth. Pure emotion spilling out of him, heart thumping in his throat.
“You should get the fuck out of my country!” Crazy Guy inches closer, yelling, spittle sprinkling Boyfriend’s face. That’s got to piss him off.
I’m stunned, stopped right in my tracks.
Out of nowhere, Crazy Guy fakes a punch, or appears to make a quick ambiguous, vaguely aggressive movement, maybe he even stumbled, and the Latino guy apparently hears a ding ding ding somewhere, so he approaches Crazy Guy in a fighters stance and clocks him with a strong punch right on the button, and Crazy Guy crumbles into a heap on the ground. Not much of a bout. I’m feeling like I have to do something, but really what the fuck am I supposed to do? I stay on the sidelines with the Girlfriend and listen to her scream and her little rodent dog yap away at Crazy Guy. That damn dog wanted so badly to get out of Girlfriend’s arms and have her turn at Crazy Guy but it was over. He is trying to get to his feet, but the minimum requirements of equilibrium have not yet been reinstalled. He staggers, groping for something solid to grab hold of and failing miserably, he gives up and face plants into the ground, moaning unintelligibly.
I finally opened my mouth for the first time, not really sure of what to say. “Well . . . he deserved it,” I said, looking at Girlfriend reassuringly while Boyfriend muttered about how crazy that muthafucka was--in English now--how he shoulda known what was coming to him if he kept talking shit. Blood was cascading out of Crazy Dude’s mouth. He was simply a broken shell of a man; looked like a cheap Halloween costume.
The three of us walked away, continuing down the street, the couple walked faster now, away from the scene before the law showed up. No one went to help Crazy Guy. What did it matter? Should he lay there and bleed awhile? Would that be punishment enough? Some time to let the unorthodox thoughts screaming in his skull die down? Who knows. I didn’t offer my help. What could I do? He’d probably tell me to get the fuck out of the country. So I kept on keeping on. Someone will sort it out. Sort him out. That’s how this whole trip works. All gets worked out in the wash. Or something like that. Diffusion of responsibility, right? Maybe I’ll be a warrior one day. I got to my car, and drove all the way home before realizing I had witnessed a real life UFC event, a KO at the ten second mark of the first round. Goddamn, there's just no trainers in some corners.
It was the UFC on Fox that aired in December where Rory Macdonald beat the ever living shit out of B.J. Penn that made me think twice about the sport. The main event was Benson Henderson mugging Nick Diaz. Both fights were simply fantastically entertaining bouts between two men laying it all out on the line with mind and body. Who cares if you don’t understand the nuances of full guard or Ju Jitsu arm locks. All that techno-jargon doesn’t matter. You have to love the brute simplicity of the sport: knock the other muffa-fuffa out. That’s what you gotta do. And in fifty years it’ll be the same damn thing. How can you not love that? Sheer power and domination over another human being. Making him your bitch.
I had never heard of the Canadian fighter Rory Macdonald before the night. The TV played a clip of him walking through the bowels of the stadium in Seattle before the fight. He was immaculately doffed in an overcoat, neatly concealing a sharp suit and tie underneath. His hair was slicked back a la Patrick Bateman. Here was a legit Canadian Psycho! An absolute fucking death squad killer.
In the ring against Penn, a guaranteed future hall of famer MMA fighter lured out of the doldrums of retirement, he faked kicks to the chest and with a snap of the ankle hit Penn right in the face. Granted I’m new to the sport but I’ve never seen kicks like that before. He pummelled Penn with unpredictable, unique combinations, and Penn never even had a taste; only landed a few nice rights which Macdonald easily ate up. Too bad Rory didn’t finish him. Was damn close. Heard Penn had to go to the hospital after the fight with broken ribs. He visibly winced when Rory landed with a clean gut shot. Penn’s a tough guy, and the tough absorb so much punishment without being KO’d, and man, he looked fucked up at the end. A big bald bean of a man bruised and broken. Refried. He’s probably still limping around to the grocery store with a techno-coloured faced. Late in the fight with the only thing left to decide was whether Rory would put him to sleep, Macdonald did the Ali shuffle, a gesture not so much about taunting, it seemed to me, as rubbing it in the opponents face the fact that he’s beat and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s about humiliation. It was funny as all hell to me. The kind of guy you love to hate. Knee jerk boo’s immediately poured from the stands. But if any athlete can get away with obscene arrogance it’s MMA fighters. I can’t think of another sport where an inflated ego and confidence helps more so than the UFC. This ain’t curling.
Rory is one of the two archetypal types of fighters. There are those who mock and trivialize their opponents before a fight on social media, during the weigh-ins, and what have you. Rory even takes it so far, in a humorous twist on the arrogant archetype, to feel sorry for his opponent, as in, “Gee whiz, I wish the guy the best, but it’s just too darn bad that he chose me of all people to fight.” He’s goddamn funny. To add to his Canadian Psycho persona, he’s entirely flat and affect less in interviews and his general demeanour, and he drives around in Porches, and has an unusually strong interest in men’s fashion. I mean come on! He’s Bateman North for Chrissakes!
The other fighter archetype, of course, is the respectful warrior. The man who will always be quick to hug his opponent even in defeat, his face a rearranged bloody mess, barely conscious. Though he is engaged in a violent sport, there is absolutely no personal hatred towards the other fighter. It’s all about the craft, the art of martial arts. It’s a poetic dance of carnage.
You’ll find this type of respectful warrior/arrogant prick dichotomy in most other sports. There’s just something so visceral and raw about the dichotomy in the UFC. It’s more pronounced. The adrenaline pumped through my body as I sat up on the couch, back arched and leaning into the TV and yelled, my teeth gnashed and snarling, “Fucking knock ‘em out!” Rory had Penn stumbling against the ropes. Penn was peering into the abyss, only half there, somehow hanging in there and hobbling around the octagon. The clock must have been ticking in slow motion.
Though it was fun to watch my fellow countryman absolutely molest his opponent, it’s equally fun to watch a similarly arrogant fighter, Nick Diaz, absolutely humbled by Benson Henderson.
I’d never seen either of the two guys ever in my life. Nick Diaz, a scowling, swaggering lithe Latino bad boy from California versus “Smooth” Benson Henderson. Now this Henderson kid, his long curly black hair swaying with each attack, is a pure fucking warrior with legs like two trunks of mighty oak. He destroyed Nate Diaz. Made him his bitch. Even when Diaz was bloodied and on his back, Henderson measuring him out to slam a fist right into his face to end the contest, he was still taunting Henderson, gesturing as if to say, “Is that all you got?” Well . . . yeah, it is all he’s got, and he’s pummelling the shit out of you, kid. But at least Diaz stays in character until the bitter end. An arrogant fighter can never break character. The only way he’d stop being the hot shot is if he got K-the-fuck-O’d. There would be no Nate Diaz there to tell Nate Diaz to be a hard ass. Henderson was close but Diaz’s consciousness remained intact, albeit a bit wobbly; might not have known which planet he was from by the end. A solid victory.
There are secret places in our nature that are stimulated when a man is beating another man senseless. It’s some kind of primordial erogenous zone.
* * *
I was downtown Barrie recently, which is delightfully seedy and full of Southern Ontario scum. I was making my way back to my parked car, waiting for the light to change so I could cross the intersection. There was a Latino couple waiting alongside me. The female half was cradling a Chihuahua, the creatures’ tiny matchbox legs trembling in the cold.
I knew trouble was brewing, though. Up ahead on the other side of the street, some crazy guy was sitting on one of the benches and yelling horrifically racist epithets at no one in particular. People were staring at this guy, and it was just plainly obvious that there is a nut looking for trouble in our midst. He was just kind of yelling racist nonsense out to the heavens above and then singling out people who passed him by, repeating the same phrases over and over. “It’s these Paki’s coming in and ruining our country! They should get outta here!” You get the idea.
“Where you from buddy?” Crazy Guy picks out a hapless slender black man in glasses.
“I’m from Mississauga, buddy,” he replied, quietly defiant.
“You should go back to fucking Africa!”
The man continued down the street, unwilling to engage, walking ten paces and then unable to control the urge to look over his shoulder, he makes sure Crazy Guy is still sitting leisurely on the bench.
I imagined what would happen if Crazy Guy singled me out for derision? What would I do? Maul him like a tiger the second he engaged me, pummel him with deadly lefts and rights to the ribs--switch--then work on his face a little, then--switch--back to the ribs? In the Octagon they call me . . . The Surgeon--cause I do work on mothafuckas faces. Ahh, I’m only pulling your leg. I’d keep on walking--walk on home boy . . .
The three of us began crossing the street, me lagging comfortably behind the couple a few paces. I was the weatherman and I knew which way the wind was going to blow. I’d known since we were waiting on the other side of the street. The couple were too engrossed in their conversation to take much stock of Crazy Guy’s rantings back then. Now that we were destined for a head-on collision, the couple could see and hear that they were walking right into a shit storm and they stopped their conversation and stared at Crazy Guy. The three of us were now almost parallel with the small cluster of benches that Crazy Guy has been using as his makeshift pulpit. We are moving through the belly of the beast. It’s now or never for Crazy Guy to strike.
What did he think of when he awoke this morning? Did he have this outburst planned? Or was it spontaneous? Did he know this is how his day would turn out? The guy doesn’t look mentally ill--in fact he wasn’t bad looking at all for a man in his 40’s.
“I bet you’re fucking Mexican, right?” Crazy Guy yells right at the Boyfriend. Boyfriend, clearly the larger of the two, a thick Latino man who wouldn’t look out of place in Maplehurst, snickered at him dismissively, like he wasn’t worth his time, and kept walking down the street.
“You fucking spic!” Crazy Guy ratcheted up his game a notch, getting bolder, going for the kill shot. “Get outta my country motherfucker! And take that fucking faggot little dog, too!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle about the dog. I knew it was going to factor in there somewhere. Put this man on a stage!
Other pedestrians were starting to really take notice, milling about in small groups trying to decide what to do, like office workers suddenly left without a boss.
We are now so close that Crazy Guy could lash out and, who knows, pry the Chihuahua out of the girlfriends hands and kick a forty yard punt down Bayfield Avenue.
The boyfriend is now getting visibly aggravated, and had to say something, perhaps to save face in front of his woman, perhaps because of the last comment. “Yo man, shut the fuck up or I’ll knock you the fuck out,” the Boyfriend said firmly.
Oooohhh, no he di’in’t.
Oh no, Crazy Guy is going to go for the invitation to rumble and what am I gonna do? Break it up? Hang by the sidelines with the girlfriend? I’m no hero. I mean, I am, in my head, until a situation that requires heroism actually unfolds. Crazy guy stands up and the Boyfriend stops walking and in turn, the Girlfriend stops too. Boyfriend turns to face Crazy Guy directly. At my close vantage point, I could tell that Boyfriend was very angry, not a man to be fucked with, and his words were merely vocalized vehicles for the sole purpose of inflicting damage. It didn’t matter so much what he said as how he said it. “You better sit the fuck back down you retard,” the Latino man says, letting the insults fly. No forethought whatsoever about what was coming out of his mouth. Pure emotion spilling out of him, heart thumping in his throat.
“You should get the fuck out of my country!” Crazy Guy inches closer, yelling, spittle sprinkling Boyfriend’s face. That’s got to piss him off.
I’m stunned, stopped right in my tracks.
Out of nowhere, Crazy Guy fakes a punch, or appears to make a quick ambiguous, vaguely aggressive movement, maybe he even stumbled, and the Latino guy apparently hears a ding ding ding somewhere, so he approaches Crazy Guy in a fighters stance and clocks him with a strong punch right on the button, and Crazy Guy crumbles into a heap on the ground. Not much of a bout. I’m feeling like I have to do something, but really what the fuck am I supposed to do? I stay on the sidelines with the Girlfriend and listen to her scream and her little rodent dog yap away at Crazy Guy. That damn dog wanted so badly to get out of Girlfriend’s arms and have her turn at Crazy Guy but it was over. He is trying to get to his feet, but the minimum requirements of equilibrium have not yet been reinstalled. He staggers, groping for something solid to grab hold of and failing miserably, he gives up and face plants into the ground, moaning unintelligibly.
I finally opened my mouth for the first time, not really sure of what to say. “Well . . . he deserved it,” I said, looking at Girlfriend reassuringly while Boyfriend muttered about how crazy that muthafucka was--in English now--how he shoulda known what was coming to him if he kept talking shit. Blood was cascading out of Crazy Dude’s mouth. He was simply a broken shell of a man; looked like a cheap Halloween costume.
The three of us walked away, continuing down the street, the couple walked faster now, away from the scene before the law showed up. No one went to help Crazy Guy. What did it matter? Should he lay there and bleed awhile? Would that be punishment enough? Some time to let the unorthodox thoughts screaming in his skull die down? Who knows. I didn’t offer my help. What could I do? He’d probably tell me to get the fuck out of the country. So I kept on keeping on. Someone will sort it out. Sort him out. That’s how this whole trip works. All gets worked out in the wash. Or something like that. Diffusion of responsibility, right? Maybe I’ll be a warrior one day. I got to my car, and drove all the way home before realizing I had witnessed a real life UFC event, a KO at the ten second mark of the first round. Goddamn, there's just no trainers in some corners.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Fifty Shades of Tay
Beach 1 is crowded with hard bodied teens, thick, meaty throngs of human bodies sunbathing and frolicking in the shallow clear water of Georgian Bay. The boys have their hair gelled up to the heavens, and the women have their cell phones caught in their thong strap. Everything is frozen in the vice grip of youth.
On this day, July 2nd, the busy Canada Day long weekend, one can smell in the air hormones being cooked by the relentless midday sun. There are so many young Italians it’s like a tsunami hit the Jersey shore, the detritus washing up here in Wasaga Beach.
A short distance westbound up from the main beach, the sticky hot air still languishes over at Beach 2 like gasoline, but it’s less dense with people, and more family oriented and pet friendly. The saliva inducing aroma of wieners roasting on portable BBQ’s wafts through the air. Golden retrievers romp in the water, chasing toys. Small children sit and allow gentle waves to lap against them.
Two women, both fit and attractive, a blonde and brunette, are lackadaisically lobbing a Frisbee back and forth, the plastic disc hitting it’s apex and then fluttering down into the others’ eager outstretched hands.
Invariably, the blonde throws an errant pass and the Frisbee lands by the feet of a tanned and toned gentleman in his early thirties. He patiently bends down at the knees, the proper way, and picks up the hard red orb.
“Good thing your friend doesn’t have the best arm in the business,” he says, “Or I wouldn’t have had the chance to introduce myself.”
The woman would normally rebuff any advances from strangers, whether at a nightclub or the beach, but there was a magnetism and warmness to the man’s smile that was difficult to resist. She takes the Frisbee and smiles, “Thanks.”
“My name is Mr. Shade,” he says and extends a friendly hand before she can turn around and toss the Frisbee back.
“Anna,” she says. His large hand envelopes hers and he shakes it with just the right firmness. She looks into Mr. Shade’s azure eyes. He had an air about him, that however friendly, he commanded respect, and there was a line not to be crossed. She sensed a vague allure of his power just being in his presence.
“What would you say, Anna, if I told you to meet me here tomorrow at the 19th St exit to Beach 2, thirty yards or so behind me.” he threw a thumb over his shoulder, “At exactly 2pm?” Mr. Shade says, not breaking eye contact. “Do not bring any change of clothes or any other amenities, all will be provided. Simply swim out to the buoy that is in line with 19th St., about one hundred yards into the water. Can you swim, Anna?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Good. You’ll have no problem reaching the buoy. I will pick you up in my boat and take you aboard. The next stop is my home on a private island that I own where we will have dinner. How does that sound, Anna?”
Anna barely picks her jaw up off the sand to mutter in astonishment, “Okay.”
Mr. Shade continues on his walk, nodding in polite acknowledgement to Anna’s friend before blending into the hordes of beachgoers in the horizon. This guy seemed to be one cucumberously cool number.
The brunette jogs up to her friend and says, “Anna, OMG, who was that guy? Can you say hot! He give you his number or what?”
“Umm…not exactly.”
-------------------------------
Telling herself that this whole thing is absolutely crazy, Anna arrives at the 19th St. entrance to Beach with nothing but the two piece number she has on. It’s her favourite bikini; a spaghetti stringed blood red number that shows off her ass, bouncing every time she took a step.
She surveys the stretch of shore laid out before her, another top drawer day at the beach, shrugs, and makes her way into the water towards the buoy. It’s another beautiful day and the water is bath warm. Gaggles of beachgoers jump into the small waves and enjoy the day, oblivious to Anna, who is wading deeper and deeper into the bay.
She is out so far that her tippy toes can’t reach the bottom anymore, and proceeds to swim at a leisurely pace out to the buoy. Momentarily, she brings up her left arm to check her wristwatch, the three other limbs forced into picking up the slack.
1:58pm.
Anna took in a gulp of air, plugged her nose, and submerged herself in the warm clear water. She sunk and sunk until her feet hit the spongy floor and she grinded them in, fogging up everything around her. She held her breath for what seemed like an eternity in hell, until she could barely take it, though it was in reality only thirty seconds, and pushed her lithe, honey flecked legs up and she shot up out of the water like a missile.
She wiped the water out of her eyes and squinted into the horizon. There seemed to be a form materializing in the distance--only a vague speck, quite possibly only inside her mind. Anna vigorously rubbed her eyes this time and focused again. Definitely, without a doubt a man standing up at the wheel of an aerodynamically sleek mid-size yacht, his open collared shirt flapping wildly from sheer centrifugal force. Must have been hitting the speed hard, his boat was sharply going up and down over each tiny swell, the largest waves being no more than three feet on a windy day. A face was emerging on the figure but it was hard to read. Dark sunglasses provided an alibi for the eyes.
There he was, getting closer all the time, his stone cold and steel jawed frame standing tall, a cool hand wrapped around the top of the steering wheel. Effortless. He was going so fast even his taught, defined abs appeared to be rippling.
Anna checked her watch: 2:00pm on the nose, and it was now definitely one-hundred percent clear to her that it was Mr. Shade behind the wheel. He slowed the boat down and turned exposing the name, S.S. Dinoman. She could climb up the steps.
Mr. Shade is right there to present her with a towel. “Here you go,” he handed the towel over and gave and caressed her upper right arm. “We’re due back at my estate shortly, my dear.”
“Okay--so, is this your house where you live all year? Or is it a summer house or something?”
“I reside there most of the year, yes. A couple trips sprinkled to various locales here and there. Europe. The Orient.”
Mr. Shade went to the wheel and took control of the metal beast, revving the engine and then taking off, jolting Anna back into a plush leathered seat. It was too loud to talk even if she wanted to try standing up and tightrope walking over to him. They were going so fast she was pinned to her seat, unable to lift an arm, like when she was twelve, riding The Scrambler at Centre Island with Daddy.
Shortly thereafter, perhaps twenty minutes, though feeling like more because Anna’s mind was left to follow the possibilities of the evening to their own fantastical conclusions. Mr. Shade was slowing down and guiding the boat into a dock, with nary another boat in sight. He helped her off the boat onto the old rickety dock. The dock was so thin that Anna had to trail a few steps behind Mr. Shade.
“Which do you prefer, Anna? Chanel or Hermes?”
“Oh, ahh…I’d say Hermes--no, Chanel.”
“Wonderful. I’ll have Gerard make the arrangements for the gown.”
“Gerard?”
“Yes, he’s my assistant. You will be meeting him shortly. A lovely fellow.”
They made it ashore and walked through a narrow gap in the shrubbery and the resplendence of Mr. Shade’s estate assaulted her eyes for the first time. It was difficult to take in all at once, this palatial monstrosity of a home. There in the middle of a circular driveway was an opulent marble fountain that, upon closer examination, contained coy.
“Ohhh…I love coy,” Anna exclaimed, running up for closer inspection.
“Yes, they’re imported from Japan, but not since the tsunami. Not the cost so much as the radiation.”
“I see.”
“This is Gerard,” Mr. Shade said, alluding to the older black gentleman with a head full of short curly pubic like hair. He was impeccably dressed, standing rigid at the arched front door and greeted Anna. “Well hello there, ma’am,” Gerard said congenially with a blinding smile, “Please follow me…”
Gerard took off at a healthy pace down a cobbled path to a nearby door with Anna trailing behind. She looked over her shoulder, besieged with a tinge of anxiety, and through a window she could see Mr. Shade ascending a spiral staircase. Anna shook her head at the impossibility of it all and let a wry smile spread across her face. What have I got myself into now, she thought.
Gerard opened the door and she entered the room. It appeared to be a sparsely decorated single room apartment. There was a t.v., couch, and kitchen. The only thing that seemed out of place was the sequined black Chanel dress hanging on a hook attached to the bathroom door.
“Please get changed and meet me outside at your leisure and I will escort you to the dining facilities.” Gerard bowed and retreated out the front door.
“Okay, then.” She shut the door and had a look around the apartment. How many other women have been in this position before, a Chanel, or Dolce & Gabana dress hanging languorously on the bathroom door? She kept that nasty thought at bay, consumed with the moment, of how a great story it will be to tell her friends.
The black dress fit her impeccably, hugging her hips just so and ending mid-thigh. She looked absolutely ravishing. Anna had her back to the mirror and turned her neck as far as it would go and checked her butt in the mirror.
She exited the room, and upon hearing the door opening, Gerard spun around to escort her to dinner. “You were just waiting out here all this time?” She inquired.
“That’s what I get paid the big bucks for,” Gerard said with a smile. Anna smiled back and they made their way towards the main house.
“So what does Mr. Shade do exactly to have such a nice place?”
“Oh, a little of this and a little of that. I’m sure he’ll explain it better to you over dinner, ma’am. All I can say is, be a little careful ‘round him. Sometimes…he’s not hisself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it. I shouldn’t have even brought it up.”
She let the matter drop, following in silence behind Gerard.
-------------------------------------
Anna walked into a dining hall with a large table, Mr. Shade seated at one end and fifteen feet across the table, the vast majority of which was empty mahogany, there was a plate and utensils set. She went to her seat and settled in.
It looked delicious. Quail and ribeye with asparagus and a small serving of roasted potatoes.
“Smells great,” Anna offered up. While setting the napkin on her lap she added, “Could you please pass the salt?”
They both smiled at each other from across the expanse, worlds apart.
“So…what do you do exactly to afford such a luxurious place?” Anna asked. Mr. Shade wasn’t exactly a chatty Kathy.
He methodically placed his knife and fork down on his plate. “You’ve seen Jurassic Park, right?”
“Sure--I loved that movie! Do you dig up dinosaur bones or something?”
“Not exactly--I’m a paleo-geneticist, actually.”
“Oh. That sounds fun…”
“I am involved with extracting DNA from fossils that have been preserved in amber and ice. You’d be surprised at how close I am--rather, my team is--to being able to regenerate dinosaurs from extracted DNA.”
“Wow, I always thought that was just sci-fi.”
Mr. Shade swallowed a bite of quail. “Yes, it would appear that tomorrow is here today.”
Dinner was finishing up, Anna leaving most of the potatoes because she’s on a low carb diet. Anna loves potatoes almost as much as life itself. When she was younger, when Daddy was still around, he would buy her a large poutine from Sonny’s. It was as big as her head but she was always determined to finish it, even if she never did.
“Anna, dear, can you please stand over by the Manet and tell me what you see?” He said, referring to the large painting of a nude woman reclining on a bed, her wonderous breasts jutting out. A black servant is presenting a fresh bouquet of flowers, perhaps a gift from a potential suitor.
“I really like the black cat! I love kitty cats. I have one called--”
And at that very moment the floor disappeared from under her, one giant tile gone, just like that, and Anna fell, fell, fell.
----------------------------------
Anna was sliding down a tunnel that reminded her of Wild Water Kingdom, twisting in an industrial tube this way and that, a serpentine journey through the bowels of the Mr. Shade’s humongous house, going deeper and deeper until she came out the bottom, free falling for ten feet, and landed on two mattresses stacked on top of each other.
She was unharmed but the Chanel dress was ruined.
A soft, “What. The. Fuck,” escaped her lips. Her heart was thumping in her throat and she could barely swallow. The enchanted evening had taken a decidedly unexpected turn. She knew something didn’t seem quite right about Mr. Shade but not what was laid out before her: some kind of sex dungeon.
She scanned the room and it just about knocked the architecture out of her knees. Hung from the walls were dildos, mouth gags, different whips for flogging--some frilly and some sturdy, metal studded handcuffs, leather padded tables with all manner of belts and laces for restraint. One of the tables was right in the middle of the room, if that‘s what you could call it--it looked more like a deranged dentists chair made with black leather.
Anna was a proper Ontario girl. She had boyfriends and even once tried to put it up her ass but it hurt too much and she told Lloyd to stop, and he did, thankfully. Nothing beat a good old missionary orgasm, but somewhere inside her there lurked a dirty girl waiting to get out.
As Anna was running her red fingertips along the end of a whip, she felt a presence behind her and turned around to see Mr. Shade standing robustly in nothing but a pair of skin tight boxer-briefs. Her eyes immediately locked onto the sizeable bulge emanating from his underwear. Anna blushed when she looked up into Mr. Shade’s steely blue eyes but he remained stoic and under control of his emotions.
“Glad you dropped by,” Mr. Shade said.
“Oh my god! What the fucking hell is wrong with you!” Anna screamed at him. “You’re…you’re not gonna rape me or anything are you?”
Mr. Shade chuckled, “No, Anna, I wouldn’t do that to you. I simply want to…play. Don‘t you like to play, Anna?” He asked rhetorically.
Mr. shade went over to one of his S&M props hanging on the wall, went for a whip fit for a light flogging, but decided first on a mouth gag, a simple one with an orange rubber ball, the kind used in floor hockey. He brought it over to her
“Hold still while I strap this on.”
She wouldn’t open wide for the gag at first, her nerves tightening every muscle in her body into complicated knots, so Mr. Shade jabbed a finger into her side just hard enough to get Anna to gasp and he popped the gag in, fastening the leather buckle in back of her head. Anna squirmed and made guttural sounds in place of words, but Mr. Shade had a firm grip on her. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“Shh-shhh…” He cooed into her ear. “Nobody‘s going to hurt you, dear. Haven‘t you wanted to journey through hidden corridors?”
Mr. Shade ripped open the top of the Chanel dress to expose Anna’s youthful mammaries. He began sensuously rotating his fingertips over Anna’s nipples and alternately giving each breast a nimble pinch until they hardened. She was still struggling, but slowly her groans of anger became indecipherable from moans of pleasure. She couldn’t help grinding her ass into his groin. She’d never had a ball gag in her mouth before and she kept biting down on to it hard, but there wasn’t much give in the hard orange plastic ball. There was pain in her gums and it almost felt good to bite down hard into the ball and shoot lightening bolts of discomfort from the root of her teeth up to her brain; anything was better than the dull throb.
With a hand still tweaking one of her nipples, he disengaged his left hand and headed south for her vagina. Anna was so scared and turned on at the same time, she was half-thrilled and half embarrassed-to-death when his hand went into her panties and found that she was sopping wet. He circled her clit for a moment, gyrating his hips into her backside, and slid in two fingers with slim steamy resistance. She practically collapsed into him and he cradled her with his body, supporting her deadweight, and like a furious piston he plunged his index and middle fingers into her repeatedly.
They had a rhythm going, Mr. Shade dry humping Anna from behind and finger-banging her roughly, not letting Anna squirm free.
After a couple minutes of their bodies writhing together, Mr. Shade, in full control, breaks the embrace and tells Anna to get on the table in the middle, the main one.
She is panting uncontrollably.
“What are you, what are you gonna do to me, Mr. Shade?” She asked, visceral fear quivering in her voice.
“First, I’m going to strap you in. Lay down on your back.”
Anna couldn’t see any means of escape, the room was claustrophobic because she couldn’t see a door, knew there was no way to physically fight with Mr. Shade.
She didn’t even know some abdominal muscles existed until she looked at his Adonis-esque stomach. There was no other options but to do what he said.
He strapped her arms and legs into his special chair which was like some ungodly piece of foreign gym equipment, her legs spread eagle, arms above her head.
He took a pair of scissors and cut through the tattered Chanel dress, angling one of the blades so he could cut without snipping. Anna lay naked totally exposed. Naked as lunch. She futilely writhed her body, trying to free herself from the apparatus but it was no use, the leather manacles were too strong.
Mr. Shade walked over to the wall and pulled off a large purple dildo. Amazing how the eyes of those who are gagged can express so much with the eyes. It was a regular missile shaped sexual device except the base was large and square. Mr. Shade opened a drawer and pulled out a set of controls, setting the dildo down on top of a table. He pulled up the antenna on the controls and pushed the thin knob up with his thumb. The dildo roared to life, pulsating like a jack hammer. He pushed it up all the way and the dildo became a hummingbird, the motion so fast that it was all a goddamn blur. Satisfied that the sex machine was in working order, he carried the thick, eight-plus-inch rod over to Anna who was laying still, coming to the painful realization that when shackled and under someone else’s control, it’s best to conserve your resources.
Her eyes were drawn to the thermos thick bulge in his pants and then to the equally large purple dildo. She surmised what was about to happen, or at least the gist of it.
Mr. Shade squirted a dollop of KY onto the tip and spread it around the top half, leaned over Anna almost like the purple cock was his own and flicked at her clit with the bulbous purple tip.
“Anna, regrettably you’ve fallen into the velociraptor enclosure and it’s inhabitants are very, very, starved for attention,” Mr. Shade whispered close to her ear, a single strand of hair fluttering in the wind of his wistful whisperings.
He plunged the dildo into her boiling meat cauldron, a slight moan passing through her lips under protest from her better judgement. He gradually amped up the dildo, holding the controls with one hand and nudging the knob upwards, the device slamming into her faster and faster, his taught forearms flexing, holding the base of the dildo in place by her vagina. The dildo motor was buzzing at its highest speed, stretched to its motorized limits, like a blender trying to chop up walnuts, and Anna was screaming, her face lined with both hate and inexorable pleasure. She bit down harder on the gag, her gums radiating waves throbbing with heartbeats of pain.
Mr. Shade produces two nipple clamps and attaches them to Anna’s pencil eraser hard nipples and lets go, the springs relentlessly pressuring themselves back to their point of origin, and Anna shrieks, an unleashed, feral feminine wail; it was the kind of impulsive scream a woman does when no ones around.
“Velociraptors love nipple clamps. Yeah…you like that prehistoric penis don‘t you?”
Anna was absolutely delirious; she was screaming, “I’m cumming!” but it came out more like, “Ahh Ahh Eng!” Her face contorting into shapes of sheer madness, frothy rivulets of saliva cascading down the gag. Mr. Shade lowered the intensity a notch and grabbed her neck hard, but not too hard, right while she was cumming her guts out, having a life shattering orgasm, the kind a woman remembers her whole life.
Mr. Shade unbuckled the gag in her mouth to let her jaw rest. Anna was clearly not used to this type of lovemaking and it must have been hard for her to relax her jaw and not bite down too hard. The poor thing.
“Now you’re going to get the real thing…my slice of Veloci-meat.” He doffed his boxer briefs, revealing an impressive semi-erect clean cut penis and climbed on top of Anna, guiding it in slowly.
“My god, Mr. Shade, it barely fits…”
“Don’t worry, my dear--somehow life always finds a way,” he says to her, brushing a few sweaty strands of her beautiful brown hair that were plastered to her forehead.
Anna was squirming with renewed vigour now that Mr. Shade was really fucking her. Her manacled limbs possessed by demons, as Mr. Shade’s cock shot into her, each thrust like a dagger into her guts; he was pounding against her pelvis so hard their moistened bodies created a suction cup sound adding to the cacophony of grunts and moans.
“Jesus!” Anna screamed, “If you’re gonna fuck me this hard…” Mr. Shade was pumping as fast as his well defined body would allow, grinding his hips so every inch of his massive rig got right up into Anna…“The least you could do is tell me your first name.”
He bit down onto her neck, almost hard enough to draw blood and gnawed for a moment, then answered, “It’s Chrisanto.”
“Chri” -- thrust! -- “Santo” -- thrust! -- “Shade” -- thrust! -- “The 3rd” -- THRUST!
---------------------------------
Chrisanto Shade stopped plunging his turgid cock into Anna and pulled off the nipple clamps, exposing her raw, red, puffy areolas. He placed a tender kiss upon each one and gently played with her clit. “You want out of these shackles, sweety? Okay--we’ll release you from your prison,” he cooed.
“Chrisanto is an unusual name for an all-Canadian, blonde hair blue-eyed man such as yourself.”
“How observant of you, Anna. Wise beyond your years.” After a brief pause of looking into the distance, which happened to be a shiny full body latex rubber suit that zipped 360 degrees like a body bag, he added, “My parents are not originally from this land. They’re from Valencia, Spain. I was put up for adoption by my biological parents. Apparently, I was born in Sarnia, but the records were destroyed in a fire. A real bad one. It was a smoker. Some patient out front in his gown huffing in tobacco. He started it--that’s what the newspaper said.”
“Oh, you poor thing, Chrisanto, but can you please get me out of these things? It‘s killing me,” Anna pleaded. “I…I wanna go home.”
“We’re not done yet, I’m afraid,” Chrisanto said, making his way over to the wall and pulling down a whip. “You’re going to get a lashing now, dear.”
As she whimpered, he positioned her on all fours; doggy style. The table is tilted down, jutting her ass out, proffering it, like two gigantic kidney beans. “If you move,” he grabbed a handful of ass, “It’ll be twice as bad,” he warned.
Anna was shaking, maintaining a white knuckle grip on the sides of the table.
“Though I have only Canadian blood, it has over the years become poisoned with Spanish blood. Little by little. But now it courses through me and I’m rather a tad bit like Zorro. Now I must whip you and then take you from behind.”
SMACK!
Chrisanto snaps the whip against Anna’s supple bottom and she lets out a scream. “Not soo hard, Mr. Shade,” she pleaded futilely with him. Individual strips of vessels that had burst were slowly becoming visible on her ass, forming delicious strips of flesh bacon. Chrisanto went nuts with the whip snapping over and over in quick succession, wearing out his arm, until there were rivulets breaking through the wall of skin and leaking down her cheeks, pooling on the cold hard dungeon floor. “Oh my god! Why are you torturing me?” Tears were streaming down her face which was now red and puffy from crying.
“Can I please go now? I’ve had enough. I won’t tell anyone about your secret island or how you fucked me as a velociraptor. I promise…” She was whimpering in a pathetic tone.
As soon as Anna muttered the word, ’velociraptor’ there was a twitch in Mr. Shade’s left eye, and he went rigid, almost like something was taking hold him, invading his body. His lower jaw was trying to gyrate itself from the clutches of his face; a frothy drool was trickling down his chin and he was dripping sweat.
“I…I…I can’t fight it,” he barely managed to get out.
Mr. Shade seemed to have metamorphosed into some manosaur, a velociraptor violently attacked Anna and started biting at her neck, going for the jugular. Instinctively, Anna slapped at each side of his head, futilely trying to fend him off. Chrisanto, or Mr. Shade, or whatever he was now, arched his back and let out a high pitched screeching warble, and dug in hard onto her chest, right where her necklace was. He went at her like a pig at a trough, trying to eat her alive. A gaping wound was forming in her chest, the all consuming panic of life and death setting in for Anna.
THUMP!
Another body landed on the mattress in the corner of the room.
It was Gerard!
Mr. Shade didn’t notice, he was too busy tearing up her chest to get at her innards. Anna was feeling light headed, losing the battle against the velociraptor, and she almost laughed, daydreaming that she was only a small herd type of dinosaur roaming in a prehistoric field picked off by a predator; this is the cycle of life.
Gerard ran full bore at Mr. Shade and body checked him off Anna, Mr. Shade flying into the wall, crushed into the boards like a hit from Scott Stevens. Momentarily dazed, Chrisanto was in the process of shaking it off, slowly getting to his feet.
“Anna! Pull that huge black dildo hanging on the wall over there, like a lever,” Gerard was imploring in his baritone, “It will open the door. You gotta make it to the boat. I hid an extra pair of keys under the in the compartment between the two front seats. There’s no other way off the island! Go Now! Hurry!”
Anna rose to her feet, clutching her chest, her body naked, greasy with sweat and smeared with blood. She hobbled uneasily towards the black dildo jutting upwards at an erect angle from the wall.
Meanwhile, Mr. Shade jumped from the S&M torture chair and landed directly on Gerard. Both men collapsed in a heap on the floor but Gerard was limp, his head having hit the corner of the torture chair on the way down. He lay there like an injured hadrosaurid. Salivating, Mr. Shade laid into his neck and started tearing the flesh apart, Gerard turning a chalky ashen colour as his life essence dissipated from his body. Mr. Shade was sloppily eating from his neck gash as Anna stood on her tippy toes and grabbed the large black dildo with both hands, not able to get her hands around the girthy circumference of this monumental dildo, yanking it down with all her might, like the Price Is Right wheel. There was an electronic beep and an adjacent door that appeared to be part of the wall opened up into a darkened hallway.
She tore into the hallway until her eyes adjusted. There were doors on either side. She had to go up to escape his mansion. Luckily, up ahead there was a stairwell and she hopped up the steps taking two at a time. The door opened into an opulent foyer--the front of the house. It was lit upstairs and Anna noticed large human size abstract paintings and stuffed animals scattered throughout the room--a Grizzly bear in mid-roar, a prowling cheetah, and a schnauzer, perhaps a beloved pet. She smacked the small sturdy dog off it’s podium, the furry creature falling to the floor on his side but remaining in its standing position.
She was feeling faint, losing too much blood. It was running down her arm that she kept clutched to her sucking chest wound. With her free hand she opened the arched front door, a foot thick of pure mahogany, and ran out into the humid summer night, not bothering to shut the door. There was a thick layer of fog caressing the air and she could barely see. She jogged in a random direction, enveloped by clouds. They entered through a clearing in the trees that lined the property, so she had to find it somehow. All she could think about was the glory of seeing the boat tethered to the dock, like winning the best prize in the Showcase Showdown. She’s got a ticket to ride.
Somewhere behind her she heard the screeching wail of the velociraptor. A drawn out screech of longing, of a hungry predator lusting for flesh. A new wave of panic set in now that her pursuer was done with Gerard and she was now the only other living prey on this godforsaken island. Her breathing was becoming louder, quicker, shallower, blood still gurgling out of her chest wound. She was hopelessly groping through the trees dying to stumble onto the dock. Spider webs were collapsing across her beautiful face, and normally this would drive her crazy, but she wilfully ignored them considering the circumstances.
Miraculously, she emerges into a clearing, the full moonlight playing against her chestnut hair. The entrance to the dock was right in front of her. She almost couldn’t believe her luck, again, considering the circumstances. Anna scampered down the rickety dock, the boards croaking and swaying under her weight. In the stillness she could hear the trickle of her blood hitting the boards. The boat was now in view, beckoning for her to escape to freedom. She slowed down and awkwardly tumbled into this steel horse. In the darkness she used her hands as eyes, palms splayed, feeling around for the compartment where Gerard hid the extra set of keys.
She opened the compartment between the two front seats and after a few stabs at the ignition, the key went in and she gave the yacht a little gas. The engine roared to life.
A tentative wave of relief flooded her as she carved the boat away from the island and out into the darkness, cascaded in fog. She didn’t know what direction she was heading, just away, far far away.
From the shoreline she heard a roar that hit levels no human was capable of making.
RAAAAAHHHHH!!!
Her breathing was almost too shallow to support life, her extremities tingling and numb. Was she just going to keep going in one direction until she runs into shore…or a rock? She eased up on the gas, tried to stay focused, though there wasn’t much to be focused on.
Anna mustered a feeble, “help!”, barely audible if there had been anyone else on the boat let alone someone on land. It was becoming clear she was dying alone from a sucking chest wound in Georgian Bay. What’ll her family think when she’s discovered naked in this blood soaked opulent yacht, just drifting to nowhere on the S.S. Dinoman. There will be a full investigation, the federal police called in. Lord knows the local Wasaga Beach police aren’t equipped to handle much more than brawls on the beach and speeding through community safe zones. Her mind was too clouded to put together that the police would link the boat to a one Chrisanto Shade, the enigmatic white-latino Paleo-geneticist who has a sprawling mansion on his own private island.
The engine began sputtering, running out of gas; she couldn’t see the gauge anyways. Fumes in the gas tank and fog on the water. Everything is so blurry.
Anna fell back into the captain’s chair and let out a sigh--with the exhalation a waterfall of blood poured out of her chest. This is how it ends.
There was nothing left to do. No further measures could be taken.
Anna took the blood stained fingers of her right hand and slid them down her exposed torso, leaving a viscous snail trail. She started caressing the circumference of her clit. She couldn’t remember anything from before this night, nothing at all to fantasize about. She could barely remember who she was.
All she could do was stick two fingers in, knuckle deep, and think about how mysterious Mr. Shade was, even though he had a predilection for acting like a dinosaur. For a while there, before he tried eating her, he fucked her so good, it was like heaven-- nothing could top it.
She was wetter than Georgian Bay; her slimy fingers sliding in and out of her pussy like a pneumatic drill. She moaned softly, the yacht lolling up and down on the calm waters. She grabbed the back of the plush leather head rest and dug her nails in.
Her voice travelled across the silent bay, echoing against the jagged rocks…the last words she would ever mutter on this earth, blood oozing out of her chest and womanly juices leaking out of her vagina, “Uhh…I’m cumming!”
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Will Nature Make A Man Of Me Yet?
When I was in grade 6 I sat in a group with five or six other students but two of them became my bestest friends for the year. One of the guys was Darius Ali, a clean cut nice looking kid with an infectious laugh from somewhere in the West Indies who came to Canada as an infant; he’s got the brown skin but not the funky accent, so when he says, “It’s total gridlock!” it sounds just like any other white kid from Ontario. Which is sad. My other friend, Quac Tuan Do, was a recent Veitnamese immigrant who barely spoke a lick of English. To add to his discomfort he had bad skin and teeth that even Shane McGowan would recoil in horror at; A veritable dental graveyard. It was bad enough he was dealt a bum hand from the neck up, but to also be in a country that is wholly foreign and only have the most basic grasp of the language was just cruel.
Somehow, we got along fine with Tuan and whiled away the hours busting balls, joking, and maybe learning a thing or two. We laughed so hard that we wished we could stop because it hurt our faces.
We were all just beginning puberty and I had almost no hair on my body (except my head) to speak of. My arms and legs and most importantly, armpits, were lily white and hair free. There are no words to convey the jealousy I had of Darius for the swaths of thick dark hair underneath his arms and also, albeit to a lesser extent, the hair on the back of his hands and the small tufts of hair that grew on the joints of his fingers. I couldn’t believe it! Boys get hair there? Oh, will nature make a man of me yet? I looked at my baby bottom smooth hands and wondered every night when hair would start sprouting. I’d close one eye, squint, and tilt my hand horizontally, but natta--not even one lousy mosquito leg. Shit, I’m still looking.
Tuan, though he didn’t possess much of the language, was a natural comic--he conveyed sarcasm with a subtle twinkle of his eyes, something he learned deep in the jungles of Vietnam, I supposed. His specialty was drawings. He would draw self-portraits and give himself the biggest, vein-bursting, bulbous penis that you could possibly imagine fitting on a single notebook page. It was his way of connecting with his new classmates. While Mrs. Zarana was conducting a lesson he’d surreptitiously slide his binder over to Darius and Tuan would giggle at Darius’ reaction while I waited for Darius to slide it over to me. Every drawing was a variation on the penis-with-a-man-hanging-from-it theme. Look, there’s Tuan using his dong as a firehose to put out a blaze at the CN Tower; look, there’s Tuan at the beach with a gaggle of bikini clad beauties applying sun tan lotion to his cock. Ah, the universal language of laughter.
Every now and then, Mrs. Zarana would separate us, when our rowdy antics became too disruptive to the natural course of learning basic grammar (maybe that’s why I only recently conquered they’re, their, & there). But the next day we’d be seated right back at the same crude circle of desks pushed together. Mrs. Zarana could sense that Tuan got along with me and Darius and she didn’t want to plop him down at some other group and worry about his assimilation being disrupted. Ironically, Tuan became the one to assimilate Darius and myself--dun, dun, dun--
Into porn.
As the school year progressed the three of us took the next step in our relationship and started hanging together outside of school. Tuan told us to come by his house one weekend because he had something to show us. It was a quaint townhouse in a newly developed section of Brampton, but the Do’s, or the Tuan Do’s, or the Quac’s, had successfully carved out a slice of the Canadian Dream for themselves. Darius and myself immediately headed downstairs to Tuan’s small unfinished bedroom that only had three walls, which means no door, and took a seat on his bed while Tuan rifled through his sock drawer. He produced a VHS tape and popped it in his VCR.
Darius and myself sat in silent anticipation while Tuan fast-forwarded through the opening credits. Unrecognizable names flashed by in the blink of an eye. As soon as two actors, a man and a woman--a vivacious, busty woman--appeared on the screen, Tuan let go of the fast forward button and took a seat on the bed with us. The quality of the camera along with the hairdos and clothing told us me this was a dated film; probably the early 80’s. The three musketeers sat on the edge of the bed, legs dangling, and watched the bedroom scene unfold. I can’t speak for Darius but I for one had never seen a porno before. My interest in girls was only starting to blossom--I had a crush on a couple girls in school, but the crushes were still in prepubescent bloom, bursting with the colours of wholesome innocence. I didn’t even know what I liked about these girls; there was an overall pleasant sensation that swept over me when thinking about them compared to all the other girls.
The actors began sucking some serious face. Real dirty, too: inappropriate groping and way too much tongue. Not at all like Kelly Kapowski kissing Zach Morris. Shortly thereafter the embrace was broken but instead of cutting to commercial, or the next scene, the camera focused on the woman, who on a whim decided to disrobe. This is odd, I thought. She doffed her impossibly tight tank top and the cameraman zoomed in on her embarrassingly large fake breasts, mathematically round, with pencil eraser nipples. All six of our eyeballs collectively bulged out of their sockets and we laughed at the shock and impropriety of it all. It was all so brand new.
There was a quick cut and now the woman was sloppily fellating the guy and we all burst out laughing. This guy had such a massive purple headed donger, we just couldn’t believe it! Wow! So that’s what girls do with our penises? Take it down their throat to the root and gag all over it. What a life! (Though I was steadfastly focused on the woman sucking on the dick I couldn’t help but notice the man had a thick thatch of hair under his arms and I said a silent prayer to the armpit hair Gods)
She worked at his junk more and more frantically until he leaned back and with a final emphatic moan covered her face with a dollop of his gobbledegook while she sat at his feet, relieved the whole sordid affair is over.
The video quality squiggles and fuzzes--another scene coming into focus. The setting is an Oktoberfest event somewhere in Switzerland or Germany. There is a whale of a woman laying on a table with her dressed pulled up while four men in lederhosen, merrily swing one of their smaller, naked, brethren back and forth, one man per limb, heave-ho-ing him into this beast of a woman. Did not see that coming when I woke up that morning. Memories!
Predictably, we broke out laughing at this unlikely scene, too. What a way to be introduced to sex. In my young mind, I thought that if I eventually married an obese woman, I’d need four good friends to help me have sex. It would be an expensive honeymoon.
It was late summer, early September, right before school starts again. We were young, dumb, and full of marijuana. And cum.
Jessie and myself were smoking his dad’s pot that he grew bushels of on his farm. Jessie skimmed a little off the top. But when you skim from 30 pound bags, well, it fills a large Ziploc bag. For stoner kids with limited financial means it was a blessing of the highest order that we had a renewable resource of the stuff.
Freshly baked and looking for something to do, we absent-mindedly thumbed through the classifieds section in the Star. I came across an ad that was soliciting male ‘performers’ for an upcoming adult film. First timers were welcome; no experience necessary. Call Mirna. Hmmm…this seemed interesting.
“Why don’t you give ‘em a call?” Jessie asked mischievously. It seemed good for a laugh, so I picked up the phone and told the lady on the other end that I was an eighteen year old man looking to get into the ‘business’. No, I didn’t have any previous experience I told her. The call was short and curt, and an interview was set for the following day. I scribbled down the address and hung up the phone.
I looked over at Jessie, “You’re looking at the next Dirk Diggler,” I said with a smirk. “I have to be at some house in Scarborough tomorrow at 10am. Think you can drive me?”
Being warm blooded, heterosexual suburban teenage males, how could we not be fascinated by the strange and distant land that is pornography; porn stars didn’t even seem real to us. They were some type of subspecies with a sheen of sleaze, living the high life in the California sun. FTP. Fuck. Tan. Party. Shit, it’s better than grade 10 general math.
The next day Jessie picked me up and we left the ‘burbs of Brampton en route to the GTA’s mildly retarded gay cousin with a chinstrap: Scarborough (I hope the Galloway Boys don’t read this). Jessie sparked up a joint and offered it to me but I declined, wanting to be clear headed for my big interview.
“I changed outfits three or four times in my room before you showed up. I don’t really know what kind of clothing is appropriate for a porn interview.”
“You look fine, dude, relax…even if it does look like you‘re auditioning for a Christian Mingle commercial,” Jessie said, but I was still unconvinced. I had on jeans and a long sleeve grey sweater. “I think it gives me a ‘boy next door’ quality,” I said, trying to convince myself, my nerves torn and frayed. I knew I was in over my head on this one. What was I doing? I just wanted to get stoned with Jessie and watch The Simpsons or Mr. Show. Why am I going to some sketchy house in Scarborough for a porn interview? What the hell am I going to do if I actually get the job? Morph into Tay D. Trousermeat?
Dreams of living in the hills of Hollywood were dancing through my head--doodooloo-doodooloo-doodooloo-doodooloo). And there I am, high-fiving Ron Jeremy as we skewer a former playmate of the year, looking out at the mirage of twinkling lights below, the City of Angels.
We’re almost there; I flip down the visor mirror and contort my face in faux orgasm, practicing my cumsies face. Not bad. Not bad at all, kid.
“I guess I’ll need a catchphrase when I shoot my load…”
Jessie offers, “Oh yeah! Swallow my unborn kids!”
I contemplate some alternatives until we arrive at a nondescript townhouse. In a dramatic tone, I warn Jessie that, “If I’m not out in half an hour call the cops.”
I skip up the steps and pause at the door, lick my index finger, then thumb, and smooth out my eyebrows. I take a deep breathe…exhale, and open the door, now entering the point of no return. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the dim interior; no immediate signs of porn sleaziness and debauchery. I didn’t see any other aspiring ‘performers’ in the living room, I seemed to be alone, which made me feel half an inch taller. The last thing I wanted was to walk into my first porn interview, the rookie, and find ten knee-bucklingly handsome guys with bulges in their boxer-briefs, thick as thermoses, sizing me up and taking me apart with their eyes.
I walk up to the receptionist, who was right out of the top drawer, and say, “Hi, my name’s Taylor, I’m here to see Mirna at 11.” She looks me over with no emotion, her eyes like a dead china doll, then looks at her computer screen to confirm the appointment, and with her gaze still planted on the screen, tells me to have a seat.
I saunter over to a leather couch and plunk myself down into a well worn ass groove. The t.v. is on without sound and the whole living room of the house is uncomfortably silent. What is on the t.v. you ask? It was not CP24 but hardcore porn, of course.
I sat in silence and kept one eye on the generic boy/girl scene and one on the cute secretary. Got two eyeballs full. What is a boy to do? I was much too nervous to even think about achieving wood, not that I was trying to. Pornography’s powers are rendered impotent when experienced with others. It’s a decidedly solo sport--like tennis. Just You vs. Penis. The semi-awkward silence is broken by the sound of the front door opening. Great… I’m thinking, some competition. But the way this man walked in, so casually, and said hi to the receptionist, calling her by name, I knew he was not vying for my job. Seemed like he was important, maybe calling the shots around here. He was a dead ringer for Luis Guzman, the short, pudgy Latino actor from Traffic and Boogie Nights. He oozed both sleaze and chest hair. Around his neck was a large gold chain with Jesus on the cross, and believe me, the saviour needed a machete if he was to make it out of this jungle. He glanced in my direction and I managed a feeble nod of the head, praying to god that I’m not inserted into some interracial threesome scene with him, but Porno Guzman didn’t acknowledge me. Okay then. I turned back to the t.v. and pretended to be enraptured by the proceedings. I was glad the sound was off, because the fake plastic woman was screaming her lungs out at what I’m sure was ear-piercing decibel levels. I quickly checked my right armpit to see if I was sweating. No pit puddles. Okay. Good.
“Taylor?” A shapely, exotic woman appeared in a doorway wearing glasses and sassy business attire, the skirt just that much shorter and her top with just one too many buttons undone.
Gulp.
I sat down opposite her in the office, and by all appearances it was like any other job interview, except in this case there was no way to forget my resume. Mirna got right down to it. She asked me if I would have trouble maintaining an erection while on camera with a crew watching mere feet away.
“No,” I lied, or at least it felt like a lie; I’d never had sex on camera before, so technically it wasn’t a lie, only a sound guesstimation.
Mirna goes on to tell me that because of my age, thin build, and meek attitude, I would be perfect for an upcoming boy-next-door type movie. She grabbed hold of her screen, and with some effort turned the fifteen pound box monitor to face me. “You’ll be working with Gia,” she said.
I gazed at this airbrushed silicone beauty, fake as the day is long. Whoa, whoa whoa. I’m supposed to stick my D in her P? I start getting excited, like I’ve made it into the business, and I blurt out that I’ve acted before, only in high school movies, but still I got an A. I can memorize lines, I’m totally your man.
“Because you have no experience, we’ll have to set up a photo shoot just to see what kind of chemistry the two of you have.”
“Yeah, yeah, definitely, a photo shoot is definitely in order.”
“How does next Tuesday sound?”
“Oh, next Tuesday’s fine. Terrific.”
“Great. It will cost $500 so we can have a professional portfolio of you for future projects. Is that a problem?”
It was like thinking you won Lotto 649, and even after checking the numbers over and over, the floor plan of your beach house complete, only to find that it was a prank pulled by your friends. My heart sank into gut.
“Oh, okay,” a pause, mulling it over, “I have to pay for the photo session?”
“Yes, because you’re new to the business and you don’t have a portfolio yet. Once you do that, you’re set, and you can get work with us and launch a career.”
“Right. Okay. Tuesday at 11am.”
I just wanted to get the F out.
I left the office and the house, smiling at the receptionist on my way out, feeling more like the chump next door, and into the golden summer sun. Bet she thinks I don’t know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad! I was so confused. Was this a scam or a legitimate business? If she thought I was perfect for an upcoming part, why would I have to pay? Aren’t they supposed to pay me? Tom Cruise doesn’t pay to be in Mission Impossible does he?
I opened the passenger door to Jessie’s car with mixed emotions and stained pits. Sitting idle in the car for the last half an hour he was clearly eager for me to spill my guts.
“Soooo?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure. They want me to be in some movie but I have to pay $500 for a photo shoot because I don’t have any kind of portfolio.”
“What!? Dude, that sounds like total bullshit. You‘re not supposed to pay. They pay you-- for like, sex and stuff.”
“Yeah, it does sound suspicious. I have an appointment for Tuesday but there’s no way I’m going to pay them $500 for this,” I say, pointing at my naughty bits. “They got their priorities all jumbled. I’ll cancel tomorrow.” Resigned, I stare out the window while Jessie puts the car in reverse, putting his arm around the back of my chair, checking the traffic in back of him.
All roads lead to Brampton.
I look one last time at the door of the house where all my porno glory lies, a blinding Stargate to another universe.
It’s back to the ‘burbs, school starts on Monday.
Somehow, we got along fine with Tuan and whiled away the hours busting balls, joking, and maybe learning a thing or two. We laughed so hard that we wished we could stop because it hurt our faces.
We were all just beginning puberty and I had almost no hair on my body (except my head) to speak of. My arms and legs and most importantly, armpits, were lily white and hair free. There are no words to convey the jealousy I had of Darius for the swaths of thick dark hair underneath his arms and also, albeit to a lesser extent, the hair on the back of his hands and the small tufts of hair that grew on the joints of his fingers. I couldn’t believe it! Boys get hair there? Oh, will nature make a man of me yet? I looked at my baby bottom smooth hands and wondered every night when hair would start sprouting. I’d close one eye, squint, and tilt my hand horizontally, but natta--not even one lousy mosquito leg. Shit, I’m still looking.
Tuan, though he didn’t possess much of the language, was a natural comic--he conveyed sarcasm with a subtle twinkle of his eyes, something he learned deep in the jungles of Vietnam, I supposed. His specialty was drawings. He would draw self-portraits and give himself the biggest, vein-bursting, bulbous penis that you could possibly imagine fitting on a single notebook page. It was his way of connecting with his new classmates. While Mrs. Zarana was conducting a lesson he’d surreptitiously slide his binder over to Darius and Tuan would giggle at Darius’ reaction while I waited for Darius to slide it over to me. Every drawing was a variation on the penis-with-a-man-hanging-from-it theme. Look, there’s Tuan using his dong as a firehose to put out a blaze at the CN Tower; look, there’s Tuan at the beach with a gaggle of bikini clad beauties applying sun tan lotion to his cock. Ah, the universal language of laughter.
Every now and then, Mrs. Zarana would separate us, when our rowdy antics became too disruptive to the natural course of learning basic grammar (maybe that’s why I only recently conquered they’re, their, & there). But the next day we’d be seated right back at the same crude circle of desks pushed together. Mrs. Zarana could sense that Tuan got along with me and Darius and she didn’t want to plop him down at some other group and worry about his assimilation being disrupted. Ironically, Tuan became the one to assimilate Darius and myself--dun, dun, dun--
Into porn.
As the school year progressed the three of us took the next step in our relationship and started hanging together outside of school. Tuan told us to come by his house one weekend because he had something to show us. It was a quaint townhouse in a newly developed section of Brampton, but the Do’s, or the Tuan Do’s, or the Quac’s, had successfully carved out a slice of the Canadian Dream for themselves. Darius and myself immediately headed downstairs to Tuan’s small unfinished bedroom that only had three walls, which means no door, and took a seat on his bed while Tuan rifled through his sock drawer. He produced a VHS tape and popped it in his VCR.
Darius and myself sat in silent anticipation while Tuan fast-forwarded through the opening credits. Unrecognizable names flashed by in the blink of an eye. As soon as two actors, a man and a woman--a vivacious, busty woman--appeared on the screen, Tuan let go of the fast forward button and took a seat on the bed with us. The quality of the camera along with the hairdos and clothing told us me this was a dated film; probably the early 80’s. The three musketeers sat on the edge of the bed, legs dangling, and watched the bedroom scene unfold. I can’t speak for Darius but I for one had never seen a porno before. My interest in girls was only starting to blossom--I had a crush on a couple girls in school, but the crushes were still in prepubescent bloom, bursting with the colours of wholesome innocence. I didn’t even know what I liked about these girls; there was an overall pleasant sensation that swept over me when thinking about them compared to all the other girls.
The actors began sucking some serious face. Real dirty, too: inappropriate groping and way too much tongue. Not at all like Kelly Kapowski kissing Zach Morris. Shortly thereafter the embrace was broken but instead of cutting to commercial, or the next scene, the camera focused on the woman, who on a whim decided to disrobe. This is odd, I thought. She doffed her impossibly tight tank top and the cameraman zoomed in on her embarrassingly large fake breasts, mathematically round, with pencil eraser nipples. All six of our eyeballs collectively bulged out of their sockets and we laughed at the shock and impropriety of it all. It was all so brand new.
There was a quick cut and now the woman was sloppily fellating the guy and we all burst out laughing. This guy had such a massive purple headed donger, we just couldn’t believe it! Wow! So that’s what girls do with our penises? Take it down their throat to the root and gag all over it. What a life! (Though I was steadfastly focused on the woman sucking on the dick I couldn’t help but notice the man had a thick thatch of hair under his arms and I said a silent prayer to the armpit hair Gods)
She worked at his junk more and more frantically until he leaned back and with a final emphatic moan covered her face with a dollop of his gobbledegook while she sat at his feet, relieved the whole sordid affair is over.
The video quality squiggles and fuzzes--another scene coming into focus. The setting is an Oktoberfest event somewhere in Switzerland or Germany. There is a whale of a woman laying on a table with her dressed pulled up while four men in lederhosen, merrily swing one of their smaller, naked, brethren back and forth, one man per limb, heave-ho-ing him into this beast of a woman. Did not see that coming when I woke up that morning. Memories!
Predictably, we broke out laughing at this unlikely scene, too. What a way to be introduced to sex. In my young mind, I thought that if I eventually married an obese woman, I’d need four good friends to help me have sex. It would be an expensive honeymoon.
***
It was late summer, early September, right before school starts again. We were young, dumb, and full of marijuana. And cum.
Jessie and myself were smoking his dad’s pot that he grew bushels of on his farm. Jessie skimmed a little off the top. But when you skim from 30 pound bags, well, it fills a large Ziploc bag. For stoner kids with limited financial means it was a blessing of the highest order that we had a renewable resource of the stuff.
Freshly baked and looking for something to do, we absent-mindedly thumbed through the classifieds section in the Star. I came across an ad that was soliciting male ‘performers’ for an upcoming adult film. First timers were welcome; no experience necessary. Call Mirna. Hmmm…this seemed interesting.
“Why don’t you give ‘em a call?” Jessie asked mischievously. It seemed good for a laugh, so I picked up the phone and told the lady on the other end that I was an eighteen year old man looking to get into the ‘business’. No, I didn’t have any previous experience I told her. The call was short and curt, and an interview was set for the following day. I scribbled down the address and hung up the phone.
I looked over at Jessie, “You’re looking at the next Dirk Diggler,” I said with a smirk. “I have to be at some house in Scarborough tomorrow at 10am. Think you can drive me?”
***
Being warm blooded, heterosexual suburban teenage males, how could we not be fascinated by the strange and distant land that is pornography; porn stars didn’t even seem real to us. They were some type of subspecies with a sheen of sleaze, living the high life in the California sun. FTP. Fuck. Tan. Party. Shit, it’s better than grade 10 general math.
The next day Jessie picked me up and we left the ‘burbs of Brampton en route to the GTA’s mildly retarded gay cousin with a chinstrap: Scarborough (I hope the Galloway Boys don’t read this). Jessie sparked up a joint and offered it to me but I declined, wanting to be clear headed for my big interview.
“I changed outfits three or four times in my room before you showed up. I don’t really know what kind of clothing is appropriate for a porn interview.”
“You look fine, dude, relax…even if it does look like you‘re auditioning for a Christian Mingle commercial,” Jessie said, but I was still unconvinced. I had on jeans and a long sleeve grey sweater. “I think it gives me a ‘boy next door’ quality,” I said, trying to convince myself, my nerves torn and frayed. I knew I was in over my head on this one. What was I doing? I just wanted to get stoned with Jessie and watch The Simpsons or Mr. Show. Why am I going to some sketchy house in Scarborough for a porn interview? What the hell am I going to do if I actually get the job? Morph into Tay D. Trousermeat?
Dreams of living in the hills of Hollywood were dancing through my head--doodooloo-doodooloo-doodooloo-doodooloo). And there I am, high-fiving Ron Jeremy as we skewer a former playmate of the year, looking out at the mirage of twinkling lights below, the City of Angels.
We’re almost there; I flip down the visor mirror and contort my face in faux orgasm, practicing my cumsies face. Not bad. Not bad at all, kid.
“I guess I’ll need a catchphrase when I shoot my load…”
Jessie offers, “Oh yeah! Swallow my unborn kids!”
I contemplate some alternatives until we arrive at a nondescript townhouse. In a dramatic tone, I warn Jessie that, “If I’m not out in half an hour call the cops.”
I skip up the steps and pause at the door, lick my index finger, then thumb, and smooth out my eyebrows. I take a deep breathe…exhale, and open the door, now entering the point of no return. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the dim interior; no immediate signs of porn sleaziness and debauchery. I didn’t see any other aspiring ‘performers’ in the living room, I seemed to be alone, which made me feel half an inch taller. The last thing I wanted was to walk into my first porn interview, the rookie, and find ten knee-bucklingly handsome guys with bulges in their boxer-briefs, thick as thermoses, sizing me up and taking me apart with their eyes.
I walk up to the receptionist, who was right out of the top drawer, and say, “Hi, my name’s Taylor, I’m here to see Mirna at 11.” She looks me over with no emotion, her eyes like a dead china doll, then looks at her computer screen to confirm the appointment, and with her gaze still planted on the screen, tells me to have a seat.
I saunter over to a leather couch and plunk myself down into a well worn ass groove. The t.v. is on without sound and the whole living room of the house is uncomfortably silent. What is on the t.v. you ask? It was not CP24 but hardcore porn, of course.
I sat in silence and kept one eye on the generic boy/girl scene and one on the cute secretary. Got two eyeballs full. What is a boy to do? I was much too nervous to even think about achieving wood, not that I was trying to. Pornography’s powers are rendered impotent when experienced with others. It’s a decidedly solo sport--like tennis. Just You vs. Penis. The semi-awkward silence is broken by the sound of the front door opening. Great… I’m thinking, some competition. But the way this man walked in, so casually, and said hi to the receptionist, calling her by name, I knew he was not vying for my job. Seemed like he was important, maybe calling the shots around here. He was a dead ringer for Luis Guzman, the short, pudgy Latino actor from Traffic and Boogie Nights. He oozed both sleaze and chest hair. Around his neck was a large gold chain with Jesus on the cross, and believe me, the saviour needed a machete if he was to make it out of this jungle. He glanced in my direction and I managed a feeble nod of the head, praying to god that I’m not inserted into some interracial threesome scene with him, but Porno Guzman didn’t acknowledge me. Okay then. I turned back to the t.v. and pretended to be enraptured by the proceedings. I was glad the sound was off, because the fake plastic woman was screaming her lungs out at what I’m sure was ear-piercing decibel levels. I quickly checked my right armpit to see if I was sweating. No pit puddles. Okay. Good.
“Taylor?” A shapely, exotic woman appeared in a doorway wearing glasses and sassy business attire, the skirt just that much shorter and her top with just one too many buttons undone.
Gulp.
I sat down opposite her in the office, and by all appearances it was like any other job interview, except in this case there was no way to forget my resume. Mirna got right down to it. She asked me if I would have trouble maintaining an erection while on camera with a crew watching mere feet away.
“No,” I lied, or at least it felt like a lie; I’d never had sex on camera before, so technically it wasn’t a lie, only a sound guesstimation.
Mirna goes on to tell me that because of my age, thin build, and meek attitude, I would be perfect for an upcoming boy-next-door type movie. She grabbed hold of her screen, and with some effort turned the fifteen pound box monitor to face me. “You’ll be working with Gia,” she said.
I gazed at this airbrushed silicone beauty, fake as the day is long. Whoa, whoa whoa. I’m supposed to stick my D in her P? I start getting excited, like I’ve made it into the business, and I blurt out that I’ve acted before, only in high school movies, but still I got an A. I can memorize lines, I’m totally your man.
“Because you have no experience, we’ll have to set up a photo shoot just to see what kind of chemistry the two of you have.”
“Yeah, yeah, definitely, a photo shoot is definitely in order.”
“How does next Tuesday sound?”
“Oh, next Tuesday’s fine. Terrific.”
“Great. It will cost $500 so we can have a professional portfolio of you for future projects. Is that a problem?”
It was like thinking you won Lotto 649, and even after checking the numbers over and over, the floor plan of your beach house complete, only to find that it was a prank pulled by your friends. My heart sank into gut.
“Oh, okay,” a pause, mulling it over, “I have to pay for the photo session?”
“Yes, because you’re new to the business and you don’t have a portfolio yet. Once you do that, you’re set, and you can get work with us and launch a career.”
“Right. Okay. Tuesday at 11am.”
I just wanted to get the F out.
I left the office and the house, smiling at the receptionist on my way out, feeling more like the chump next door, and into the golden summer sun. Bet she thinks I don’t know the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad! I was so confused. Was this a scam or a legitimate business? If she thought I was perfect for an upcoming part, why would I have to pay? Aren’t they supposed to pay me? Tom Cruise doesn’t pay to be in Mission Impossible does he?
I opened the passenger door to Jessie’s car with mixed emotions and stained pits. Sitting idle in the car for the last half an hour he was clearly eager for me to spill my guts.
“Soooo?”
“Well, I don’t know for sure. They want me to be in some movie but I have to pay $500 for a photo shoot because I don’t have any kind of portfolio.”
“What!? Dude, that sounds like total bullshit. You‘re not supposed to pay. They pay you-- for like, sex and stuff.”
“Yeah, it does sound suspicious. I have an appointment for Tuesday but there’s no way I’m going to pay them $500 for this,” I say, pointing at my naughty bits. “They got their priorities all jumbled. I’ll cancel tomorrow.” Resigned, I stare out the window while Jessie puts the car in reverse, putting his arm around the back of my chair, checking the traffic in back of him.
All roads lead to Brampton.
I look one last time at the door of the house where all my porno glory lies, a blinding Stargate to another universe.
It’s back to the ‘burbs, school starts on Monday.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
The Warden is out to Lunch and the Rats have taken over the Joint
I’m one of those hopeless guys without any politics. That doesn’t mean I don’t ravenously consume political tinged articles from all manner of newspapers and online sites. The last one I read was about how it would be a big money shot if someone can snap a current photo of the vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan’s abs, and to a larger degree, why haven’t we seen his abs yet? The article also raised the possibility that Paul Ryan has ‘manorexia.’ I’m not sold on that yet, but he is whip thin. At 6’2”, a buck sixty three, you know he’s a dedicated exerciser. Just get lost in his his taught arms and pecs, clear skin, and chiselled face; throw in his Herman Munster hairline, baby blue eyes, Ayn Rand Individualism, and let’s be honest...he’s in Pat Bateman territory.
But who am I to judge? I am one of those awful men without any god or politics. It’s like Lady Gaga says, I was born this way. Born a man who cannot identify himself as a Liberal or Conservative, Catholic or Scientologist. So it is here I raise my glass to the nobody‘s! An empty dank dark corner of the internetosphere. Dare I say we are the most sane in this partisan world, the most sensible when discussing politics, religion, civics, etc. We are not as biased in our discourses, we come from a purer place.
I’ve always had problems officially identifying with groups. There are some issues, be them social, health, military, big government, small government, where I may lean Liberal and some where I may lean Conservative. But am I one of these things? No. Sometimes I wish I could be one or the other and better identify with my fellow people. I could go to Conventions and talk to empty chairs. But I can’t. That chip is missing from the program.
Nothing drives this point home for me more than watching coverage of the U.S. election. Most candidates possess a snarling fervour and unending willingness to throw the other party under the bus. There is an acute sadness to it all: Jack would happily destroy America if he could beat out Bob for the promotion, if only Jack could win. In American politics people don’t work with each other for a greater good, they attack each other to win at all costs. Maybe America never was one country. More than ever, it’s the old embarrass and shame game. Make the other guy LOOK bad. It doesn’t matter what YOU’RE for, just KILL the other guy (but when the Olympics are on, pause for a couple weeks and hold hands [even if the hand you’re holding is sweaty, and even worse, a sweaty invisible Obama hand, just suck it up and scream together, “U-S-A-! U-S-A-! U-S-A-!”)
AHHHhhhh!!!
…Doesn’t that feel better? Now they can go back to living with the enemy. I read about this poll in an article, that forty six percent of Canadian Conservatives would rather be Bin Laden’s neighbour in Abbottabad than a Liberal’s in Abbottsford. Fuck it, I’m just going to say it, or type it, or whatever…it should be Obama Vs. Romney. The death cage match. Whoever survives the two man fight to the death earns the presidency. Done deal, pal. It’s only fair. They can definitely hit below the belt; the only rule is: no smearing…with bodily fluids.
After consuming a healthy amount of what passes for political debate in the U.S. on television, the only conclusion I come to is that the Republicans are the right hand and the Liberals are the left hand, and I am sitting here watching the whole American monster electoral machine masturbate all over itself with both hands. Sometimes the right is jerking, but then that hand gets tired -- and without missing a beat -- the left hand takes over and keeps on stroking away like a jackhammer tearing up a city street. But the result is always the same…a chalky, goopy mess all over the stomach, and everyone gets it. Some get drenched and some get a residual drizzle, a barely perceptible sprinkle. That’s the measure of success, the measure of our dreams, whether you can towel off the mess or if you drown in it.
It has always seemed to me that politics in years past was more about loftier ideals like righteousness and social justice; actually making the country a better place for all. Now it’s about slinging mud, polarizing the electorate with emotionally resonant issues, making you seethe with rage at the other side. Though I am man without any god or politics I care deeply about justice, just like many of you out there. I care about what is basically right and good, the things that needn’t be explained that grow in your gut. I feel prideful about my country -- though it is incredibly wasteful and bureaucratic, how can I be against universal healthcare? If the government is going to mostly pay for something isn’t healthcare number one on that list?
But maybe I’m lying to you when I say I have no politics. I have voted. I do vote (albeit less now than in my early twenties -- call it apathetic pessimism). I’ve voted for ‘em all at one point or another -- Liberal, NDP, Green Party, I think I voted for the Communist party as a lark once the novelty of being eligible to vote seriously tapered off and I was dissatisfied voting like a normal person (normal being Lib or Con). Upon putting a thick X in the circle and walking smug and ironic out of the booth, I wondered if I was the only one to vote for the Communist party in my district in suburban middle-class Brampton. I have yet to vote Conservative. It may happen but probably not. There is a subconscious aversion to Conservatism that runs through me so maybe I am a closet Liberal Commie Pinko bastard, who knows.
Back in the late 90’s and early 00‘s, the heyday of my joy with democratic participation, my parents would co-opt my vote and tell me during dinner the night before the election to, “Just vote Liberal.” There was no explanation, I just did what I was told. My parents have this thing where they don’t talk about who they vote for. It’s uncouth in some way. Impolite to some degree. Not condescending in any appreciable way, it‘s kind of like salary -- you just don‘t talk about it with others. So I never figured out exactly why they wanted me to vote Liberal, I simply trudged my stoner ass into the booth stall and X’ed my local Liberal representative.
During the most recent mayoral election in Toronto where Rob Ford emerged victorious I only had to walk fifty feet to the church next to my three floor walk up to vote. There was no excuses: no subway, bus, AND streetcar journey to get to some school or community centre in the ‘hood. I only had to put on a pair of jeans and walk next door.
But I was driving back from work, and was eager to get home after another grinding, soul destroying day at the office. I had totally forgotten it was even vote night until I drove by the church with my left turn blinker on, ready to pull into my building’s lot when I saw a a suspicious amount of people milling about outside, where it was usually closed for business most evenings. From my experience, church business took place early in the day. Then I clued in and remembered that, indeed, tonight was the night to cast a vote for the next mayor of Toronto. Cunt-fucking Christ on a Cruci-cracker! I don’t waaaaannnnt to vote, Mommy! I don’t want to engage in any more social functioning today. That’s fucking it!
I walked into my apartment and placed a nice amount of high grade marijuana into my glass bong, thought about changing the fetid water, and decided to light up instead. I exhaled a massive plume out my bedroom window that is almost at street level on Bloor, the smoke dissipating into the faces of three thirty-something’s on their way to the church. Sensing the unmistakably pungent odour they looked in my direction and all six of their eyes locked on mine and I just stared back at them blankly. Maybe I just changed their vote. I was now definitely much too stoned to vote, consumed with a cup of glassy euphoria that heightened comedy and music with a dash of paranoia. There’s no way I can stand in line just to saunter into a curtained booth and put an ’X’ (an ’X’? What does that even mean MaaaaahhhhhNNNNNN!)
Though it’s a moot point now, during the campaign I didn’t know who I was going to vote for though I had read a few articles and couldn’t help but catch some t.v. coverage of the candidates. I didn’t know much about Rob Ford at the time, only that he was a large ruddy faced balding blondy councillor who was known to go on and on about government waste, and was very vocal about his frugality as an elected representative. You wouldn’t catch him ordering a $16 orange juice at a swank hotel in London.
What slightly endeared me to him was marijuana, if you want to know the truth. Ten years prior he was charged with impaired driving and pot possession in Florida. If this bloated dipshit lard ass could get nailed for being drunk and stoned and then go on to become mayor of Canada’s largest city, that would be something. He’s plain spoken and to the point, so I was leaning in his direction if and/or when I made it to the polls.
As ordinary citizens ambled by my bedroom window I wished Rob good luck and packed another hit in the bong. If it’s meant to be, then he certainly doesn’t need my help. Just like in Jurassic Park, the right candidate finds a way, too.
The next day at work I was happy for the man. He had won! Wow! Dreams really do come true. Ford was the embodiment of the everyman and he really pulled it off, gave the finger to the intelligentsia of Toronto (though Ford comes from a well-to-do family, when entering politics one has to choose a personality, and he‘s chosen ‘everyman’ so he really isn‘t part of the intelligentsia). He’s the kind of man you can go out with and have a beer and discuss body parts and whether the Argos have a shot this year. But I’m a little concerned about his weight. Though he’s a Ford, he’s not built like a rock; definitely sink like one though.
Now he is the mayor of our fine city. Has been for years. There may not be a ‘mayor’ in front of Rob Ford’s name much longer if he’s found guilty in his conflict of interest case. I haven’t read much about it, but my gut instinct is telling me it’s a hatchet job. Ousted from office over this? It’s conflicting for me, too, because I don’t like his persona very much and don’t like him as mayor of the fine city of Toronto, but this isn’t the way to take a guy out. He could lose is mayoral authority over a lousy $3,000 that went to his charity for equipment? If he was knowingly and willingly engaging in this why would he launder a paltry 3,000 bucks? And also -- fuck! -- this dude is out of control with football. He spends more time coaching than mayoring (not a word, but wtf it works). There are palpable undercurrents of disdain that radiate from his being during his press conferences, and he looks so darn happy when he’s cavorting on the field with all those beefy ethnic teens, why didn’t he become a coach instead? Probably be a lot happier, a hell of a lot closer to self-actualization.
My parents didn’t live anywhere near Toronto during the Ford campaign, but they still told me not to vote for him like they had told me to vote for the Liberals in years past. “He’s a buffoon!” my Mom would tell me over the phone.
“I think I’ll vote for the Green Party, Ma. Once the Green Party become as big as the Liberals or Conservatives, then I’ll help push through another little guy. The little guy is always more honest. Has to be to survive at all. Plus, what difference does it really make? All the strings are pulled behind the curtains. Maybe I just won‘t even bother.”
“Well, if you don’t vote than you can’t complain.”
“Good, I want to complain, so I won’t vote.”
(sigh)
But who am I to judge? I am one of those awful men without any god or politics. It’s like Lady Gaga says, I was born this way. Born a man who cannot identify himself as a Liberal or Conservative, Catholic or Scientologist. So it is here I raise my glass to the nobody‘s! An empty dank dark corner of the internetosphere. Dare I say we are the most sane in this partisan world, the most sensible when discussing politics, religion, civics, etc. We are not as biased in our discourses, we come from a purer place.
I’ve always had problems officially identifying with groups. There are some issues, be them social, health, military, big government, small government, where I may lean Liberal and some where I may lean Conservative. But am I one of these things? No. Sometimes I wish I could be one or the other and better identify with my fellow people. I could go to Conventions and talk to empty chairs. But I can’t. That chip is missing from the program.
Nothing drives this point home for me more than watching coverage of the U.S. election. Most candidates possess a snarling fervour and unending willingness to throw the other party under the bus. There is an acute sadness to it all: Jack would happily destroy America if he could beat out Bob for the promotion, if only Jack could win. In American politics people don’t work with each other for a greater good, they attack each other to win at all costs. Maybe America never was one country. More than ever, it’s the old embarrass and shame game. Make the other guy LOOK bad. It doesn’t matter what YOU’RE for, just KILL the other guy (but when the Olympics are on, pause for a couple weeks and hold hands [even if the hand you’re holding is sweaty, and even worse, a sweaty invisible Obama hand, just suck it up and scream together, “U-S-A-! U-S-A-! U-S-A-!”)
AHHHhhhh!!!
…Doesn’t that feel better? Now they can go back to living with the enemy. I read about this poll in an article, that forty six percent of Canadian Conservatives would rather be Bin Laden’s neighbour in Abbottabad than a Liberal’s in Abbottsford. Fuck it, I’m just going to say it, or type it, or whatever…it should be Obama Vs. Romney. The death cage match. Whoever survives the two man fight to the death earns the presidency. Done deal, pal. It’s only fair. They can definitely hit below the belt; the only rule is: no smearing…with bodily fluids.
After consuming a healthy amount of what passes for political debate in the U.S. on television, the only conclusion I come to is that the Republicans are the right hand and the Liberals are the left hand, and I am sitting here watching the whole American monster electoral machine masturbate all over itself with both hands. Sometimes the right is jerking, but then that hand gets tired -- and without missing a beat -- the left hand takes over and keeps on stroking away like a jackhammer tearing up a city street. But the result is always the same…a chalky, goopy mess all over the stomach, and everyone gets it. Some get drenched and some get a residual drizzle, a barely perceptible sprinkle. That’s the measure of success, the measure of our dreams, whether you can towel off the mess or if you drown in it.
It has always seemed to me that politics in years past was more about loftier ideals like righteousness and social justice; actually making the country a better place for all. Now it’s about slinging mud, polarizing the electorate with emotionally resonant issues, making you seethe with rage at the other side. Though I am man without any god or politics I care deeply about justice, just like many of you out there. I care about what is basically right and good, the things that needn’t be explained that grow in your gut. I feel prideful about my country -- though it is incredibly wasteful and bureaucratic, how can I be against universal healthcare? If the government is going to mostly pay for something isn’t healthcare number one on that list?
But maybe I’m lying to you when I say I have no politics. I have voted. I do vote (albeit less now than in my early twenties -- call it apathetic pessimism). I’ve voted for ‘em all at one point or another -- Liberal, NDP, Green Party, I think I voted for the Communist party as a lark once the novelty of being eligible to vote seriously tapered off and I was dissatisfied voting like a normal person (normal being Lib or Con). Upon putting a thick X in the circle and walking smug and ironic out of the booth, I wondered if I was the only one to vote for the Communist party in my district in suburban middle-class Brampton. I have yet to vote Conservative. It may happen but probably not. There is a subconscious aversion to Conservatism that runs through me so maybe I am a closet Liberal Commie Pinko bastard, who knows.
Back in the late 90’s and early 00‘s, the heyday of my joy with democratic participation, my parents would co-opt my vote and tell me during dinner the night before the election to, “Just vote Liberal.” There was no explanation, I just did what I was told. My parents have this thing where they don’t talk about who they vote for. It’s uncouth in some way. Impolite to some degree. Not condescending in any appreciable way, it‘s kind of like salary -- you just don‘t talk about it with others. So I never figured out exactly why they wanted me to vote Liberal, I simply trudged my stoner ass into the booth stall and X’ed my local Liberal representative.
During the most recent mayoral election in Toronto where Rob Ford emerged victorious I only had to walk fifty feet to the church next to my three floor walk up to vote. There was no excuses: no subway, bus, AND streetcar journey to get to some school or community centre in the ‘hood. I only had to put on a pair of jeans and walk next door.
But I was driving back from work, and was eager to get home after another grinding, soul destroying day at the office. I had totally forgotten it was even vote night until I drove by the church with my left turn blinker on, ready to pull into my building’s lot when I saw a a suspicious amount of people milling about outside, where it was usually closed for business most evenings. From my experience, church business took place early in the day. Then I clued in and remembered that, indeed, tonight was the night to cast a vote for the next mayor of Toronto. Cunt-fucking Christ on a Cruci-cracker! I don’t waaaaannnnt to vote, Mommy! I don’t want to engage in any more social functioning today. That’s fucking it!
I walked into my apartment and placed a nice amount of high grade marijuana into my glass bong, thought about changing the fetid water, and decided to light up instead. I exhaled a massive plume out my bedroom window that is almost at street level on Bloor, the smoke dissipating into the faces of three thirty-something’s on their way to the church. Sensing the unmistakably pungent odour they looked in my direction and all six of their eyes locked on mine and I just stared back at them blankly. Maybe I just changed their vote. I was now definitely much too stoned to vote, consumed with a cup of glassy euphoria that heightened comedy and music with a dash of paranoia. There’s no way I can stand in line just to saunter into a curtained booth and put an ’X’ (an ’X’? What does that even mean MaaaaahhhhhNNNNNN!)
Though it’s a moot point now, during the campaign I didn’t know who I was going to vote for though I had read a few articles and couldn’t help but catch some t.v. coverage of the candidates. I didn’t know much about Rob Ford at the time, only that he was a large ruddy faced balding blondy councillor who was known to go on and on about government waste, and was very vocal about his frugality as an elected representative. You wouldn’t catch him ordering a $16 orange juice at a swank hotel in London.
What slightly endeared me to him was marijuana, if you want to know the truth. Ten years prior he was charged with impaired driving and pot possession in Florida. If this bloated dipshit lard ass could get nailed for being drunk and stoned and then go on to become mayor of Canada’s largest city, that would be something. He’s plain spoken and to the point, so I was leaning in his direction if and/or when I made it to the polls.
As ordinary citizens ambled by my bedroom window I wished Rob good luck and packed another hit in the bong. If it’s meant to be, then he certainly doesn’t need my help. Just like in Jurassic Park, the right candidate finds a way, too.
The next day at work I was happy for the man. He had won! Wow! Dreams really do come true. Ford was the embodiment of the everyman and he really pulled it off, gave the finger to the intelligentsia of Toronto (though Ford comes from a well-to-do family, when entering politics one has to choose a personality, and he‘s chosen ‘everyman’ so he really isn‘t part of the intelligentsia). He’s the kind of man you can go out with and have a beer and discuss body parts and whether the Argos have a shot this year. But I’m a little concerned about his weight. Though he’s a Ford, he’s not built like a rock; definitely sink like one though.
Now he is the mayor of our fine city. Has been for years. There may not be a ‘mayor’ in front of Rob Ford’s name much longer if he’s found guilty in his conflict of interest case. I haven’t read much about it, but my gut instinct is telling me it’s a hatchet job. Ousted from office over this? It’s conflicting for me, too, because I don’t like his persona very much and don’t like him as mayor of the fine city of Toronto, but this isn’t the way to take a guy out. He could lose is mayoral authority over a lousy $3,000 that went to his charity for equipment? If he was knowingly and willingly engaging in this why would he launder a paltry 3,000 bucks? And also -- fuck! -- this dude is out of control with football. He spends more time coaching than mayoring (not a word, but wtf it works). There are palpable undercurrents of disdain that radiate from his being during his press conferences, and he looks so darn happy when he’s cavorting on the field with all those beefy ethnic teens, why didn’t he become a coach instead? Probably be a lot happier, a hell of a lot closer to self-actualization.
My parents didn’t live anywhere near Toronto during the Ford campaign, but they still told me not to vote for him like they had told me to vote for the Liberals in years past. “He’s a buffoon!” my Mom would tell me over the phone.
“I think I’ll vote for the Green Party, Ma. Once the Green Party become as big as the Liberals or Conservatives, then I’ll help push through another little guy. The little guy is always more honest. Has to be to survive at all. Plus, what difference does it really make? All the strings are pulled behind the curtains. Maybe I just won‘t even bother.”
“Well, if you don’t vote than you can’t complain.”
“Good, I want to complain, so I won’t vote.”
(sigh)
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