Strip (12 page)

“Who then?”

“God. Sometimes God sees that people are so happy with one child that he sends more to another family. God will give us different gifts. You'll see.”

That afternoon my mother surprised me. After tea she said we should get some groceries but she took me to my first movie. We sat in the theatre and watched
The King and I
, my mother's second-favourite movie after
The Red Shoes
(which, she said, I was too young for) and my first homoerotic experience: Yul Brenner dancing barefoot, with a woman who looked like my mother.

I figured that since she couldn't have children, she got different gifts. God had sent her a black mink coat and a black convertible Pontiac Parisienne, no station wagon for her, not like the other mothers. And the rooms in our home stayed empty, the boys' bathroom became the men's cloakroom and the girls' bathroom, the ladies' powder room. And my room stayed my room. And I just wanted to play outdoors with brothers and sisters. Instead I wandered in the dry prairie heat, hoped no one would know I had a scar. Prayed for the broken part to go away, no matter what the cost. I knew she was broken, too, and that God's wishes were as strange as Santa's. All I prayed for was to not be like her, or worse, like him. I wanted to leave myself, like a prairie rattlesnake shimmies out of his skin.

 

Kent stood naked in
the light. His body small, hard from the vertebrae under his skin to his tight ass to the veins under his calf muscles. “This has been such a good night,” he said. What was it that made me trust him? He moved the curtain aside and looked down on the street. “There's a gay bar outside the gate, on the way to Lower Town,” he said. “If you're ever looking for love, and Daniel doesn't come through, it's called Le Cirque—or you can pay me a visit.”

“I'm going to go back this weekend,” I said, “and stay with him.”

“Good luck. You can sleep here you know. You don't need to try out your new mattress tonight.”

“No. I think I need to be alone. Thanks anyway.”

Later, when I was dressing, he squeezed some bills in my hand. “For the bus,” he said, “to Montreal.”

Back in my apartment, I lay on my new mattress. I stayed dressed to keep the chill away. I woke the next morning, having had one of my deepest sleeps in months, and got myself ready for the bus ride back to Montreal.

 

It wasn't until I
was on the back of this bus, in a drooling dry-aired reverie, that certain things became a little more obvious. First, Kent must have thought I was a masochist. Second, I had arrived at a jobless, moneyless dead end.

Hugues had moved or was away. Phone numbers had been changed. I walked to the Old Port—walked past the jewellers where I had believed he was buying my engagement rock, and stopped and waited—as if a magic portal would open and I would be transported back to that day. I was a mess of instincts and fantasies. I wandered Montreal and ended up outside his place, waiting for him to answer the door. There was no “I know you're up there.” I'd done that as a kid—tried to wrangle my way into someone's tree fort.

I spent the rest of that night on a bench at the bus station while the winners in Montreal filled the clubs, and glistening cars and cabs left the rest of us to sleep on our broken dreams. I dreamt he came to the bus station, and we cuddled and ate
croque monsieur
and drank red wine out of a thermos. We even had sex. He left with no messages of how to meet, ever again. I woke with that familiar stickiness in my crotch and a stained zipper. As I tried to dry myself at 5:45
a.m
. in the can some old guy wagged his dick at the urinal for me. There's always someone around to make you feel wanted.

That morning, dirty, stained and tired I got the bus back to Quebec City; the ride took forever. There were some gigglers and partiers who had been up all night and were making the fun last as long as possible. Fatigue won out, for all of us, and the bus droned silently along the highway. I thought of my parents and wondered if they were thinking about me.

I dragged myself off the bus and up to the Old Town. As I walked up Sainte-Ursule I fought the urge to ring Kent's bell. But he stepped out his door and draped his arm over my shoulder. “Welcome home.” Over café au lait and croissant, which he treated me to, he told me how he finally let the guy at Kresge's suck him off for my mattress, and throughout the conversation, with the tact of someone consoling someone at a funeral, he had the decency not to ask me how Montreal went.

 

The last of my
money went to the first month's rent and security deposit. At the end of each day of bad dancing I wandered restaurant foyers and hotel lobbies looking for work. Wasn't this a tourist town, for God's sake? Employers weren't impressed with my French, but hell, weren't the tourists English? It didn't matter; no business in Quebec City would hire a
wasp
with high school French. The slim and slimy maître d' at the Chateau Frontenac curled his upper lip as if I had just shit in the foyer. (Believe me, no matter how quaint the lobby of a hotel or the dining room of a restaurant, you can be sure that the personnel office stinks of leftover food, cigarette smoke and butts older than rotting leftovers, and anything else dried up, crusted, forgotten, tossed over or snatched from the kitchen.) Meanwhile others brushed me off with a single wave of the hand, with no more effort than you would use for a housefly.

How would I survive in a fairy-tale town with a four-hundred-year-old wall around it, nursing a broken heart and a broken ego? One fucking
Oui
to a job could have changed my life. On the other hand, it might have meant that I would still be working at the Chateau Frontenac. I wanted another meal with Kent that night, just to be able to share my exasperation, but there was no answer at his door and the lights were off. I had a full set of cutlery at home, chairs and a table, and while I could have returned to my standby of pickles and spaghetti, I used my savings to buy a large bottle of red. I sat at the table and looked out the window—perhaps I'd see Kent come down the street.

 

I make my way
to the ground floor of this white tower, hoping that, by some miracle, my clothes will still be waiting for me. I freeze when I hear a door open, hear voices, car keys jingling, and sigh when I hear it shut. I still curse those bastards and the doors slammed in my face; why the hell was it so hard to hire an Anglophone? In the Canadian public school system you may learn that there are two official languages but,
mon ami
, halting classroom French isn't one of them.

My high school French teacher, Monsieur Laflamme, pointer in hand, prodded the language out of us. I sat in the second desk for an undetected crotch view. He was cute; a dark testosterone machine,
coureurs-de-bois
with the trimmed beard and big butt in hug-your-ass Hudson Bay Co. wool blends. Thick stubby fingers. Against the rules for him to teach
Joual
. You know:
ouai
instead of
oui
,
Chez-K
for K-mart,
Chez Kreszh
for Kresge's, Pepsi for Coke,
tabarnak
for whatever,
trou-de-cul
for asshole,
tapette
for homo, et-cet-e-ra, et-cet-e-ra, et-cet-e-ra. I worshipped him—my study partner and I set elaborate costumed dialogues based on ballets. We draped the desks, wore costumes. None of it made sense. My speech centres were frozen but my brain was popping with inspiration. Laflamme stood back and watched open-mouthed as I haltingly played to him.

After I graduated, I heard that my study partner had made a different career choice: to dance at a bar downtown. Then he got a government job, and they paid him to study French full-time for two years so he could lick envelopes in our two official languages. Where is he now?

If you can afford it, red wine is good at a dead end, and it might be your only option. I was so sure Kent would wander up Sainte-Ursule that night but I woke, tumbling off of the chair.

 

 

Four

A dancer's legs curve
like a gentle “S” reaching from the base of the back, around and under the buttocks, the front of the thigh, through the knee and into the calf, folding then extending into a
développé
—presenting itself like a meal to be served—or a
battement
—the swinging pendulum from a body that is solid and unmoving. To plié, the muscles release, as if in agreement that—as supple and controlled as they must be—they will lower and then return you to the stature of a mythical god. To
sauté
, there is an explosive power, rock solid if trained properly, that slingshots the dancer into a precise trajectory, the sum of body, mind and instinct, as the knee recoils and summons all available physical elements to order. The thigh, the calf, each joint, each tendon, each tissue rallies to elevate the privileged being to a place of otherworldly experience and expression, before becoming earthbound once more.

 

Kent's French was really
no better than mine and yet he had found a job. But a little voice in the back of my mind told me that he had that rare gift called
charm
. My famous blank stare revealed my lack of charm and enthusiasm at the prospect of more restaurant schlepping. I was transparent. Kent had met a couple that found his accent quaint and they admired his effort to speak, no matter how badly. He ended up waiting tables in their small restaurant. It was a hole in the wall where the furnishings hadn't changed in four hundred years and the food was “exquisite,” according to him. I prayed his luck might rub off on me.

I could never have walked into a gig like that, let alone find it. And though there is something to be said for dedication and perseverance, the chances of getting work do not increase per miles searched.

Late Friday afternoon, I sat on my floor beside a phone that had forgotten how to ring, leafing through
Le Soleil
, making no money by the hour. The last dollars had been spent to and from Montreal, and the last spare change spent on a café au lait to weep into, leaving a jar full of pennies standing between me and a beer in which to drown my final sorrows. My father had made it clear after I dropped out of pre-med that there was no road home, and though we had reconciled when I proved that I could do it, and proved him wrong—I'd made it clear I would never again need their help—there was no way now to eat crow and phone home for a loan. If they knew what I had done to pummel my career they would be dumbfounded, and rightly so.

A newspaper ad for a nightclub, showing leggy feathery girls,
à
la Las Vegas revue, surrounding a guy who had way too much hair on his head, caught my eye, and I considered my chances of serving drinks there. Maybe they attracted tourists, and needed an English-speaking waiter.

What the hell had gotten into me? It was a cabaret. They dance there. Dance. I dance. Was I blind? They advertised this place with showgirls in silver sequined
g
-strings, feathers shooting out the tops of their heads, a big-haired guy in the front with two more hot guys in the back in glove-tight pants. It all looked so polished, so French, so cosmopolitan, so
Folies Bergères
, so alluring, so damn exotic for this boy from Strathcona, Edmonton. It would be a job related to my chosen profession,
mon métier
. I had the same skill set for this job. And you don't have to know how to conjugate verbs to dance in faux
Moulin Rouge
—you don't even have to speak. Dance, like music, is the international language, spanning borders, cultures and millennia. If some woman is waggling her tail feathers in your face, I think we know what she's trying to say (get me outta here and get me some money). No question, I wouldn't need a translator.

I called the club and repeated the two most important words:
travail
and
danseur
. Above a noisy background and a throbbing bass, someone shouted in French and told me to call
Agence en Vedette
. There was more incomprehensible squaggling. Some guy shouted the phone number at me, which I didn't understand, and then I let my crossed fingers do the walking through the yellow pages.

I paid a visit on Friday to the
Agence
, after class. It was on my route home. At the agency, a woman, Martine, with cigarette-rotted teeth and hair that had had way too much attention and looked similar to a rusty, teased bird's nest, chattered in a smoky, cluttered office with two tough guys. She waved me in and stood up behind her desk, revealing most of herself in a tight leather vest and leather miniskirt.

“Je cherche travail comme danseur,” I ventured.

She babbled something back at me that was very quick and incomprehensible, but for some reason we knew we were speaking the same language. I had a product that she seemed to be in need of, which was a far cry from the past few months of rejections. She smiled, too, and in spite of the bad teeth, it was endearing, confident and open. I couldn't help feeling like the two guys she was entertaining were thugs, but for now she liked me, and all seemed to be well with them. From her desk she took a business card that shimmered red and gold 3-
D
and swirled depending on the angle you looked at it. On the back she scribbled the number and name of someone: Marcel Missoni. It seemed it was his show. He must have been the big-haired one I'd seen in the paper. She told me to give him a call on Monday.

I wanted to skip all the way home at the prospect of having some cash come in, and also because she had been so damn nice. When I got home, I called Kent to see if he could lend me twenty dollars, but not before telling him my good news, so he would know he'd get paid back.

“You can have it if you let me blow you. Why do you need twenty dollars?”

“For the weekend.”

“The whole weekend? You can survive a weekend on twenty dollars?”

“I'm thrifty.” The hole in the wall at the end of the street sold pints to locals for two dollars, and I was rich—I had a jar of pickles and some spaghetti to last me for the weekend.

“Sounds like someone needs taking care of. Let me buy you a beer or two.”

And from that moment on, Kent called me every day. Funny how comforting that ringing phone became.

 

My job follow-up was
limited to later that moody Monday, after Madame had a run at us, leaving our spirits even less intact than our bodies. Her bad mood reflected an especially pissed off state, which I figured was because of my good mood at demonstrating some grain of independence and successfully finding a home I referred to as
spectaculaire
, and my job prospects, and as a result out-dancing everyone that day.

I raced home with the single thought that the nightclub would work out. I called Marcel Missoni before I'd even dropped my dance bag, and he told me in perfect English, spiced with some kind of Franco-Italian accent, to come to the club that night. This request involved the hunt for bus fare. I mean,
fucking bus fare
. Pocket bottoms. Jacket liners. I cursed having spent all of Kent's twenty. But I hit the jackpot: a fiver in some trashy cut-offs I wore two summers ago up on Lake Winnipeg, long before poverty had set in.

Which bus? On the phone Marcel couldn't say because he'd never taken one. Who does? I wandered around the
carrefour
outside the city gates to find the bus to rue Lévesque, a sweaty ride in the back corner out to the Chez Moritz that busy September rush hour. An Indian summer had nosed its way in from New England for a moment. Could things get any better? Free transportation—Company buses, planes, trains, taxis and limos—was a thing of the past. This idea of me riding out to the suburbs of Quebec to work in a tits-and-feathers show would have disappointed anyone who had invested their hopes and efforts in my career, but fortunately there weren't many. Not fair I suppose: Lisa, my first teacher, as well as my ex-roommates Peter and Rachelle, and the kind souls Bertrand and Louise, and others I have most likely and selfishly overlooked, played a role. Still, I was blindly optimistic.

Small-town Canada had been a family curse for several generations: Great Grampa Ramsbottom became Rottam. Dad showed them, and moved to a plusher place, got a college education, turned to dentistry—big money in big mouths. Big house. Only one kid, leading to suburban slanderous whispers of what a wife does alone; then years later what their son had being doing at a ballet studio. They tried their best: Dad with hockey, Mom with ballet and symphony. And I took my little opera glasses everywhere. At the hockey games, I watched the half-time figure skaters, while Dad and the men left their seats to drain their beer-bloated bladders in the common urinals and return with hot dogs.

Even at the ballet it was tough to conceal an appreciation of the human form. Timing with opera glasses was everything. My mom knew I loved the ballet but it was unheard of to have a son learn ballet. I would be the prisoner of a lumpy seat, an observer. She dreamed, too; when we weren't at the ballet, my mother spent time in her sewing room, talking to my aunt on the phone while mending my socks and trousers, under that framed poster of Nureyev and Fonteyn on the wall above her, with classical music on a portable record player. “Swan Lake” crackled endlessly; “The Nutcracker” at Christmas—mostly things by Tchaikovsky and the Russians. When it was a ballet or a concerto, I fell asleep with patterns dancing in my head. My escape to university in another town brought freedom—and gave my parents the prestige they craved—but I surrounded myself with the familiar, the music mostly.

God. Family history flashing before my eyes on a desperate bus ride to the suburbs of Quebec by the only Rottam son (of the only Rottam son), who would most likely never carry on the family name. Shame does that. I stared at the backs of heads, wondered for a moment what was driving me forward, but knew the answer so well. By the time I got to rue Lévesque, the bus was almost empty and all I could see was the Chez Moritz standing out on the edge of the highway next to a motel, like the last remaining bulb in a dressing room mirror. That was it. No trees. No Dairy Queen. No Country Time donuts on Pembina Highway running south to the American border. No nothing. Just land ugly enough to be developed. The bus stopped midway along that nothingness. A stop made for the future inhabitants of dream homes.

The bus driver must have known why I got off there. I was reeking of lost soul. I risked being a statistic to walk the highway where there was no shoulder. The club probably had windows in a previous life. Maybe it had been a restaurant where people went for Sunday dinner. But now there were only frames surrounding boarded-up sections of wall with metal-screen grating nailed to that, all coated in matching flat brown paint—one nasty-looking compound. A neon sign spelled out the name,
c-h-e-z m-o-r-i-t-z,
letter by letter, with a cancan dancer whose one functioning pink leg flickered spastically from behind. I hauled open the door.

In the dark, I noticed the thick smell of beer and cigarettes first, then recognized the shape of that head of hair I'd seen in the paper. “Mister Missoni?”

He sat at the bar, looked over his shoulder. “Marcel, please, Marcel.” He was Louis
XIV
from a children's book: very froofy, with glistening curly black locks, a near-handlebar moustache, great nose and chin. Handsome. He had a mouth that read slightly disgusted with everything. His small and slightly effeminate manner—like a tropical bird preening while clucking to himself—betrayed his masculine looks. He wore tight, black pants, and a vest over a dress shirt that made him look like a matador. Nothing seemed to be said or thought without a coif adjustment. He stirred a tall drink with a swizzle stick, his wrist bent at a ninety-degree angle. “You must be John. Have a seat.”

I sat on the stool beside him. He clicked his fingernails on the bar and the bartender quickly slid a beer in front of me. He must have seen my concern at not being able to pay, and winked. The bar extended from just beyond the front door and curved toward the back. Marcel sat closest to the door. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness behind him, silhouettes of bodies became women on small boxes dancing for slouching men at small tables. And soon I saw the bodies were naked—moving like wild animals on their stoops at the circus. I see them all now as I steady myself. I control this step by step to the bottom floor of no man's land. I remember thinking it was like a kind of hell on earth, and here I am in this stairwell.

The naked bodies danced like they were in love with themselves. The agency never mentioned that part. Did they think I wouldn't be interested? It wasn't the chic nightclub of my fantasies. Still, bills had to be paid; I couldn't ask for a twenty from Kent each time I needed to eat. I had rent to pay. In restaurants, booze prices carry the food losses. At the Chez Moritz I'd say the table dancers paid the bills, and the feathers-and-sequins burlesque passed things off as wholesome family entertainment. In the dark, men in the audience could have been dead for all I knew. But there was a stage against one wall where the legitimate
spectacle
, that I had come to be part of, happened. “We do three shows a night,” said Marcel, “at 10:30, midnight and 1:30.” He spoke perfect English with that hint of an accent. “You can come back tonight and see if you like it. Watch the show. Did you say you studied at the Conservatoire?”

“A little. Don't hold it against me. I mean I can easily do this kind of…”

“Then we're family. Best years of my life.”

“I was just there this summer. Before that…” I didn't tell him before that. And I could tell he was one of those whose world only existed between Quebec and Montreal. The country was full of them, whether it was knowing just Toronto or just Edmonton or just Vancouver, Sudbury, Fredericton, Wawa or Medicine Hat, and believing that your place was the centre of the universe. Besides I didn't want him to know what I'd left, or how promising I once thought I was.