The Age of Cities (21 page)

“Okay, okay,” Johnny continued. “We sat around for a while. John's father offered us some beer, which we accepted like it was an everyday event. Not too much later we headed upstairs to John's bedroom. It was his mother's suggestion. ‘I'll bet you two want to talk on your own,' she'd chimed. Up there he told me he'd always thought we were quite alike and I guessed that he meant we both wanted to get out of Flin Flon. Nope.

“He put his finger to his lips for a sec, then kept talking about Parisian this and that, then put his ear to the door. He was painting a picture with his words, but eventually—just like Dickie's mystery beau—he grabbed my hand and placed it fly level on his trousers. Then he sat right next to me and ran his hands along my shirt toward the waist. He unbuckled my pants. I just sat there witless.”

Johnny stopped and looked from Ed to Dickie. “Another round, gentlemen?” he asked with the hint of a smile.

“I can wait,” Ed said.

“So can I, till you finish your story at least,” Dickie said.

“Okay, so in about ten seconds flat, he had my pants at my knees and his around his ankles. He sat directly on me. I slid in. Just like that. All the time he was downstairs with his family, he had been greased up and planning to take it from me. With him bouncing up and down like a fiend—a very quiet one, mind you—I lasted all of a minute.

“He must have done that all a time or two before. With whom, I could never fathom. It did give me pause, though, a fresh perspective on Flin Flon's twilight society. He was like a pro. I'm not exactly bantam weight, as you might have heard on the grapevine.”

“Or read on the men's room wall,” Ed said.

“Of course, Johnny. You're a giant amongst men.” Dickie rolled his eyes.

“And, of course, I never had a chance to ask. I didn't see him again after that night.”

“He didn't waste any time, did he, right down to business?” Dickie asked. “The donut man kept my face muffled in his lap for the whole year. We never did anything else. Not even a kiss.”

“Edwina? It's your turn,” Dickie said.

“Well, you know that I grew up just south of Calgary, right?” Ed said. “We'd hire guys around harvest time. His name was Bran.”

“Bran?” Dickie squealed. “You have got to be kidding. Are you sure it wasn't ‘Husk' or maybe ‘Chaff'?”

“Be nice, Dickie. We didn't make fun of your Mr. Donut,” Johnny said.

“Very well. Fix us another round, perhaps? It'll calm my frayed nerves.” Dickie tilted his empty glass back and forth with mock insistence.

“Ed?” Johnny was already on his way to the bar.

“Please. Just a smidgen less sweet this time.”

Johnny stuck out his tongue in reply.

“Would you mind if I fixed us a snack, Dickie, some crackers and cheese?” Ed asked. “I'm peckish. You know what they say about Chinese food.”

“Help yourself,” Dickie said. “There are some dill pickles too. Check the refrigerator.”

The sudden bustle silenced the rain that had been loudly announcing its arrival through the ceiling.

Ed returned with a stack of side plates and an oval platter strewn with crackers, a mound of cubed cheddar, and sliced pickles. Johnny distributed cocktails.

“You weren't exaggerating when you said you were hungry again. Now, let's get back to your story,” said Dickie.

“Alright, just give me a minute to fix these for us.” With toothpicks he stabbed cheese, then pickle, and settled the pairing on crackers. The men devoured their midnight snack.

“Let me see, now. To be honest, what I remember the most was, um, he had an unusual smell. Reminded me of hay, but sweet too, like fresh grass. I'm not kidding. And soft hair the colour of honey. He was a talker, big plans for himself. One day he invited me to come into the barn.”

“Where else!” Dickie snorted.

“We stretched out on some hay bales and he told me that one day soon he was going to drive from sea to sea to sea. He wanted to make it to New Orleans eventually. It was right at sunset, and the light made him look like an angel.”

“He was a couple years older than me, maybe twenty-one. I'd never given a thought to being anywhere but on the farm, so I have him to thank for that.”

“Well?” Dickie asked.

“Oh, right. He was telling me about surfing in California that day, and he said that a man could find paradise there. Then, just like that, he flipped open his overalls, pulled up his shirt, and played with himself with his eyes closed, talking about pretty girls in bikinis dancing at beach parties.”

“What did you do, Ed?” Johnny asked.

“I watched till he finished. I suppose that he expected me to grab him or help him out or something, but I was too timid.”

“Hmmm. I don't think that counts,” Dickie decided.

“I concur,” Johnny said.

“Oh, really? Then I have to skip forward a few more years. My first day here: the train station men's room. It was nothing special, but, boy, at the time it was heaven. That old fellow knew a thing or two!”

“Ah, yes, that terminus,” Johnny said. “A place, I've no doubt, where many a boy has become a man. Maybe some Indian tribe made it a place for a sacred fertility ritual centuries back. There's got to be some reason for its popularity.”

“Well, Johnny, it is the major departure and arrival point,” Ed said with no little sarcasm.

Dickie stood up. “Another time, gentlemen.” He picked up the side plates. “At the risk of offending your tender sensibilities, I'm going to close up shop for the day. I have an engagement in the morning, unlike some of you.”

Afterword (An Introduction)
by A.X. Palios

Then there is the catch: where does justification end and degeneracy begin? Society must condemn to protect. Permit even the intellectual homosexual a place of respect and the first bar is down. Then comes the next and the next until the sadist, the flagellist [sic], the criminally insane demand their places, and society ceases to exist. So I ask again: where is the line drawn? Where does degeneracy begin if not at the beginning of individual freedom in such matters?

—James Barr,
Quatrefoil
(1950)

 

Allowing same sex marriage will affect the society. New trends will be set which will not be desirable. Marriage benefits would have to be provided to them as well and a new air of freedom will be provided where all sorts of crazy behaviours might be expected, adaptation to which will be almost impossible.

—Letter to the editor,
National Post
(2005)

 

An enigmatic phenomenon with a rareness that rivals emeralds, the literary
objet trouvé
—whether the Dead Sea Scrolls or Heinrich Böll's
The Silent Angel
—possesses a mystique borne of its very obscurity. Unearthed after being waylaid for eons in an arid cave or long forgotten in a trunk lodged in the attic of the author's remote ancestor, the manuscript is radiant with the secrets its fragile pages have sequestered. “I hold great knowledge,” those pages whisper with the otherworldly gravitas of an ancient sibyl.

In our era, it is virtually only the lost manuscripts of canonical artists (Hemingway's
The Garden of Eden,
for instance, or a newly recovered Beethoven symphonic score) that are judged publishable by the vested interests that guide university presses and commercial houses. The foregoing “novel” has an exceptional status, then, insofar as it appears with no pedigree, no oeuvre, and indeed no name appended to it at all. The work's anonymity guarantees its status as
sui generis.
The manuscript can reveal nothing about the overall nature of the author's work because, of course, it has no claimant. Thus, if the editor's principal rationale for publishing a newfound manuscript relates to edification—its shedding further light on (and so ameliorating the fragmentary understanding of) the literary figure—and the marketer's impetus stems from assurances of a secure audience (those interested in the literature as well as those entranced by the celebrity of the charismatic author), then there is no conventional justification for bringing under public scrutiny the never-told tale of fictional Mr. Winston Wilson, resident of fictional River Bend City, British Columbia, Canada.

No trifling literary curiosity, though, this long-shrouded volume performs invaluable services. For the curious soul, it encourages questions about its very nature: “What is it, who wrote it, and why was it hidden away?” And its pages act as goads, urging a closer examination of the culture by which its author was enveloped. Uniquely positioned as a particularly talkative historical artifact, moreover, the manuscript also incites the inquisitive reader to grow introspective and to speculate about how extensively national culture has transformed and progressed over the last half-century. Or, indeed, the cynic with an awareness of the 1996 Republican-sponsored, Democratic President-authorized Defense of Marriage Act and recent distraught politicking in Canada about same-sex unions might hypothesize that this ostensible progress has in fact been sluggish, uncertain, and by no means assured.

Though the manuscript bears witness to a discrete historical moment, that era is not so distant as to be unrecognizable. To my long-observant eyes—on the frigid November night that Winston Wilson is led into the “enchanted forest” of the manuscript, I was a nine-year-old innocent in Manchester; and such autobiographic candor here merely highlights the fact that I have endured several feast and famine decades of so-called gay liberation—these pages expose an archetypal conflicted authorial preoccupation that to a large degree results from rigid (if not wholly stifling) and profoundly intrusive social institutions. The narrative reflects the dilemma of a character whose emergent sexuality is an unwelcome surprise because its visibility will cause him profound distress, placing the newly criminalized man in direct opposition to the terra firma of his homeland. This protagonist quite understandably intuits that if chosen, his transition from comforting normalcy to the aberrant and completely unfamiliar fringe will be accompanied with great pain. The manuscript's epilogues illustrate the conservatism of his eventual choice(s). Eerily, as a historical artifact, the manuscript appears to echo the story it tells, since the person who wrote what amounts to a gay
Bildüngsroman
either circulated it privately or else decided that circa 1959 Canadian society (or the Canadian publishing industry) was not hospitable to his perspective. Before proceeding with a tentative assessment of the revelations of this local if “lost” author, however, it seems appropriate to begin with the tale of its serendipitous discovery.

 

 

At the beginning of the 2002 autumn semester, a former student
[1]
appeared at my office door holding an indigo plastic bag from The Gap; here, apparently, was the “find” about which he had sent me an email a few weeks earlier. Just returned to campus from his family's home in the Fraser Valley's suburban sprawl (where he had taken a summer job at an American retail giant located in some massive consumption/entertainment complex), his eagerness to bring in an object—one that he had promised me was “really cool”—beamed from his face. In his email of mid-August he had explained that while exploring a collectibles shop, Tina's Trash & Treasures, one afternoon, two peculiar volumes bound by elastic bands in the pell-mell piles of faded Tupperware, chipped porcelain figurines, and miscellaneous ersatz antiquities had caught his eye. He'd also said that he planned for me to wait until his return to campus before I could physically see what was so interesting about these mysterious publications. Since students commonly have an odd yet ardent belief that any book older than themselves is a relic worth its weight in gold, I presumed his treasure would be at best nothing other than a dusty first edition.

 

Figure 1

Junior Homemaking
and
Reeves Business College Guide to Beauty • Charm • Poise

 

It was this prize that he had now carried across campus for my bibliophilic eyes to peruse. Removing the bulky material from the bag, he snapped off the elastic bands that kept the shape intact. He placed two hardcover books on my desk. They were mid-twentieth-century, kitschy tomes that would amuse, inspire, and appall feminists and scholars of gender: a high school Home Economics textbook titled
Junior Homemaking,
[2]
and
Reeves Business College Guide to Beauty • Charm • Poise,
[3]
the etiquette manual for a formerly august, now defunct institution in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan that promised to transform ill-mannered adolescent females into elegant young ladies. He opened the front cover of the textbook and slowly turned the preliminary pages. The volume did not contain the expected series of chapters, however. My student revealed a hollow core: a secretive or anxious soul had dedicated an afternoon to cutting out a cradle in which to rest a prized fetish object. One might easily imagine a penitentiary inmate or a privacy-obsessed teen proceeding with such a compulsive undertaking. Yet to our eyes, this
cachette
held nothing resembling contraband; it was tightly stacked with bundles of not even yellowed paper.