China Blues (12 page)

I didn’t talk to Fran at all over dinner, maybe a few words at one point; but The Skate, after some of the wine Bev’s husband was passing around and extolling, he’d bought a case of it in New York through some big jobber up in the Bronx, became passionately animated.

He did imitations of
TV
stars, really droll stuff, he did Geraldo, he was good at that, he did Jay Leno and made a couple of remarks about Italians, forgot himself I guess but so what, I don’t regard any guy with an Italian last name as being Italian, Bobby De Niro is Italian, Frank Sinatra’s Italian, Liza Minnelli is Italian, they’re symbols of passion and excellence, he didn’t do Rocky Balboa but he did Johnny Rotten and he did him to a blister, as they say, used lots of 4-letter words, talked about Johnny Rotten, the lead singer for a group called the Sex Pistols, cutting off his hemorrhoids with a razor blade and so on. Fran’s mouth fell open, I think she was shocked that I would arrive with somebody like this, he’s a nice guy, actually, during a period of mourning. That’s what Fran thinks
she’s in, an official period of official mourning. Bev’s husband looked a bit perplexed but he seemed to think The Skate was funny, like a comedian on television, and Beverly seemed very amused.

“Your friend, ah, drinks a bit?”

I turn to Enid and shake my head. “No, I don’t think he’s drunk, I think he’s a bit gone in the hopper.” I tapped my head by way of explanation.

“Oh,” she says, nodding, playing with her dessert spoon. It was quite a well-set table. She smelled of grass and flowers. I felt like leaning over and kissing her shoulders. It’s winter but she has a wide neck dress that almost comes down over whichever shoulder she lowers. Handy kind of dress to have I expect.

I began to feel drunk myself around 9 o’clock. They were all talking at once, up and down the table, I’m not sure if The Skate was still in full swing or not. I felt drowsy, just one of those passing hits, and then you blink your eyes for a minute and you feel fresh, more or less, again.

I excused myself to this lush flower of Toronto bourgeois womanhood, Enid, and went upstairs to the washroom. There was a study or
TV
room, I think, it was a
TV
room, with its door open, on my way down the hall to the can.

In the john I look at myself in the mirror and shake my head. Poor Tom, you look glom. A friend of mine in high school used to say that if I had a really serious look on my face. Glom for glum, joke, okay? I was going to wash my face, cold water, nice big basin, fancy taps, but I thought it might make me feel like throwing up, hitting
the wild beets, making a phone call on the big white porcelain telephone. So I had my slash, watered my gator, as they say, and just drank a handful of the water. It tasted good, very clear and cold, after all the warm red wine and smoky conversation downstairs around the table. “So that’s cool,” I said to the mirror, thinking of Enid downstairs. She had said, sure, that would be nice, when I asked her if she’d like to see a film tomorrow night.

Walking back along the big red hall carpet, I stand in the doorway of the TV room/study looking at things, prints on the wall, that stuff. There is a yellow&blue jersey, sporty, just a cheap jersey in coloured sections, lying on a small leather couch. I can’t imagine whose it is. Too big for the husband, sometimes women wear deliberately oversize jerseys or shirts or t-s. I walk over and pick it up, throw it up in the air, let it fall like a pizza chef in the big front window of Massimo’s on College Street, near the Diplomatico and the Sicilian Ice-cream Parlour. Yellow and blue, rah rah rah. Those were the colours at my high school, where when I was really hot in Grade 12 and
OAC
, I would go into games in the evening and they couldn’t stop me, I would be up in the air, one foot way out moving around somebody without touching the ground, I would go around, I would fake, pass over my head without looking, don’t look back don’t look back, I would go right over them if I couldn’t fake and weave around, up up up and hit that basket, I can still feel the slight change of air, fresh, hot at the same time, as you come down bouncing on the hardwood and break back into the game.

And over there in the bank of spectator seats, when I glanced over after making a spectacular play or sinking the ball, perhaps, would be my father. Giacomo. Always sitting hunched is not quite the right word, splayed perhaps, forward, elbows on his knees, but easily the tallest man sitting there among the other, mostly Anglo,
parents. His lank greying hair would be pushed back from his forehead and ears, a bit sloppy around the collar, and he would have his work clothes on, those dark green workpants, or those pale tan pants he wore a lot. And he would have a windbreaker. Sometimes there would even be, and I swear that even with sweat in my eyes and a sore rib and my heart pounding, I could see it from where I was on the floor, a splash of cement, or grease maybe, or paint, on his pants. He would have that big soulful but tough fleshy expression on his face, thick eyebrows jutting out a bit over his eyes. And he would have a dead half-smoked cigar in one hand dangling beside his knee.

I ball the blue&yellow jersey, soft, heavier than the shirt I used to wear over my shoulders before going on the court, into a sort of blue&yellow puppy, I jam it a bit between my fists. Then I bury my face in it, smelling I don’t know what, a woman’s perfume, cigar smoke, not sweat. The room goes completely dark. Naturally, I’m blind, right. I can feel this big jagged thing like a tin-can lid coming half-loose in my stomach, up around my chest, where the heart pounds. My mouth feels dry, and my eyes are wet. I wipe the crumpled balled-up jersey across my face and eyes. Catch a trace of it. But I don’t cry, still staring down into the crumpled big flat ball of a jersey. Boys don’t cry. I wish I could, Jackamo, Jukamo. Truly and really. But I can’t.

I THINK I KNEW THAT SARAH WAS GOING TO MARRY SOMEBODY ELSE THE FIRST NIGHT WE SLEPT TOGETHER
. We fell in love at my friend Pete Carter’s birthday party. It was at his parents’ place on South Drive, there were 2 big living rooms and a huge French provincial kitchen that gave onto a large backyard green as glass dark. This was when we were leaving college. I think it was a
rite de passage.
She was in 2 of my classes at Trinity College, we had noticed each other a lot but we had never really talked. She was sitting on a couch by herself in the front living room tilting a glass of beer and looking very aesthetic. Maybe the French comes from the fact that the Carters had this big French kitchen.

I remember we sort of lost each other somehow after we got into the swing and anarchy of the evening. There was a savage discussion about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir going on in the blond oak rec-room downstairs in the basement. Somebody had put a girl’s bra on one of the moose heads. I don’t know where Cart’s father got those moose heads. I don’t think he shot them, he’s a big red-faced plump guy, he’s a corporate lawyer, he’s bland and pleasant but he doesn’t talk very much. I don’t think Mrs. Carter shot them, maybe it was her father, so it’s a sort of class-perpetuation kind of thing. And there were pale green squash pies laid out on one of the kitchen counters. Nils Effren and his friend Doug were doing coke over and over, they were making it last, doing it in very small hits, in the ground-floor washroom, and Carter told them to get their ass downstairs into the basement can because there were respectable people lining up and wanting to piss. But we started talking and important things were said, over large amounts of food out
in the kitchen, late, sometime before the party ended. And we stayed up and drank coffee and small glasses of brandy or Grand Marnier or something until around 4 or 5 in the morning.

We went out together maybe once a week or so for the first couple of weeks and then we slept together for the first time. It was summer, school was over, everything seemed wide open. I was planning on staying in Toronto for most of the summer, but I was going up north with The Cambodian Rebels, a punky homemade group from East Scarborough. I’ve got a
BA
in pre-meds now, which I think is pretty useless. I’m not sure if I can possibly fight my way through 3 years of med school. And stay sane. It seems unlikely. So I’ve got a degree, and I’ve got thousands of photographs, I’m a photographer I’ve decided that’s what I am, so I’ve made a basic life decision fairly early when you come right down to it, come on, admit it, I’ve been clear and decisive. All my photographs are punk, of punks, of musicians, of clubs, specific neon signs, ones I like, I climbed 15 storeys of the Grover Hotel in Detroit, up the back stairs to an equipment room where there was an open window just to get a shot of a huge 60ft pink&skyblue flamingo that was on a Dutton Travel Lines building down the street. I could have taken the elevator, I could have tried to use a pass from the front desk and shoot from an unoccupied room, or the roof perhaps, but no, it just wouldn’t have been the same thing. It wouldn’t have been an adventure, it would have lacked principle, it would have been cheap and vulgar and commercial. I got my photograph.

She was going away for August, to England, to see her mother’s parents and go to plays and go hiking, the same time I was slated to go up north with The Cambodian Rebels, so we fit together like two perfect design concepts, I said to her, and she said yeah, we make sense.

We went out together maybe once a week or so for the first couple of weeks and then we became a serious couple. That means we felt seriously about each other. I’m not really sure what else it means or meant. We clicked in a big natural way, as if she were something I’d always wanted, and as if I were someone she just couldn’t get enough of, or couldn’t see too much of. We talked about going to Ireland together, we talked about going to Italy together. We had great sex, we went out with other people quite a bit, I almost had an accident with her father’s car, but, I didn’t, I didn’t roll it, it was on 2 wheels for what seemed like an unusually long time going around a very long curve on the way to Grand Bend one afternoon, but I didn’t roll it.

It was great. We were great. That’s what we said to each other, sitting up in bed with the last of our wine, talking after making love, and slowly working our way through her massive album collection. Blues, Dylan, Baez, Randy Newman, a Dory Previn album I’d never heard before.

We almost never spent time at my cluttered 2nd floor apartment down in Kensington Market. Because of my roommates, both of whom were slobs, that’s true, or for some other reason, whatever.

But she would ask me questions sometimes about the groups I was listening to. She would say, Well you like the Sex Pistols. How can you listen to stuff like that? They just bray, like donkeys. And I would say, O well, I listen to a lot of odd stuff. I think, when I look back on this, that in some respects she didn’t really believe that I took all these punk groups seriously. She would probably say to one of her girlfriends, O well, Doug just has these vague secondary interests, you know, not affectations, but yeah, sort of like affectations. Whereas the truth is, I like a lot of punk. I don’t like any
garbage punk, I get tired of really good stuff after listening to it for too long, but, in general, O yeah, I like a lot of punk.

We were having dinner at a little place down in the Yorkville area, they call it Yorkville Village, which is really a bit trendy, it’s not a village, for Christ’s sake, it’s just both sides of 2 east/west streets and a small section of Avenue Road, where the new Dakota apartment building is going up, if New York has a Dakota, which is old and grainy and atmospheric, then we have to have a Dakota, which will be new and perfect with lots of new sandstone techniques and techy hunter-green steel exposed and so on, but anyway, it’s an okay area, this was a restaurant called A Passy, with an outdoor patio, and we had had some very good chicken.

They had fresh peaches with raspberries on the menu and I asked the girl if I could just have a bowl of sliced peach halves, or quarters, whatever, with some cream poured over them. Nothing like simple, and this struck me as a perfect simple dessert, after the chicken and with some coffee.

So we’re sitting there with our coffees and desserts, there’s a bit of wine left, I cashed a cheque for about $450.00 the other day for some publicity shots, she’s got a really neat little fruit flan and I’ve got my bowl of peaches.

I took a large peach half dripping with 10% cream on my spoon and I said, Sarah, isn’t this peach, just by itself, outlined against the dark night, it was dark, it was night, and there were cars of course, I told you, this is Yorkville, you’re sitting in these outdoor patios with white tablecloths and black railings or whatever and there is a steady stream of cars, isn’t this peach beautiful? And she smiled, she looked embarrassed, maybe she thought it was an off-colour allusion,
something like Rupert’s comment in
Women in Love
about the fig, and then he tears it open, savage beast savage beast, one of my roommates, Colin, who is quite gay, always says, during that scene, and he proceeds to eat.

In this way, perhaps, Kate Millett was born, ripped prematurely out of her mother’s womb at the very idea of a man, even symbolically, wanting to eat, to eat means to consume, and then of course there is all this stuff about the act of eating being aggressive of and by itself, although lovers often bite or nuzzle, kiss and graze with the teeth.

I don’t really think her reaction had anything to do with this. I said, No, it really is beautiful, isn’t it? And you get real contrast holding it up to the dark but under the light like this.

And Sarah said, You really are a bit of a hippie or something, Doug, sometimes I think you’d be really happy living on a farm somewhere outside of Toronto, complete with your roommates, and maybe some dogs, she added.

So the great and perfect love of our graduation summer was not perfect after all. It was obviously meant to flare up, gestate some real red and blue flame colours, I like that image of Sarah, red lips, blue eyes, and hot all over, silken skin that almost in the summer burns you when you touch it for a second.