The Handsome Man, page 13
It’s Boxing Day, we stay in bed, we start to drink a bottle of wine but it feels bad to be drinking, bad on our bodies, only water. We try to eat but it all makes us nauseous, we stay in bed watching movies, feeling restless, wanting to be outside in the world in New York because we’re here so why not but we stay, drunk sick and hungover, thin, barely speaking, slipping in and out of sleep and outside it’s snowing and the wind makes a sound like the steady sound of the inside of an airplane coasting high above, flying over the ocean.
* * *
“We can’t stay inside on your last day,” Coral says the next morning. “I’m feeling so much better today, let’s go out.”
“Yeah, I’m feeling a lot better too. What do you want to do?”
“Have you ever been to Coney Island?”
“No, never.”
“What? How could you live so close to New York and have never been to Coney Island?”
I laugh and I say, “I don’t know, it’s just never happened. It’s probably pretty closed up today.”
“Yeah, it’s winter and it’s Christmas, probably everything is closed. I came farther than you came, I want to go there. You can’t come all this way and not, right?”
She brings me there and the abandon of the place is stark and jarring. A roller coaster ravaged from simple time, hanging by a thread. I remember she holds my hand on the boardwalk and everything is crystalline and it’s shining and we’re holding hands in this abandoned place, sharing a flask in the cold with this woman and it’s so quiet and time stands still now.
One thing I should mention too: in the middle of all the drinking and the drugs and the faces of the party at her friend’s apartment Coral tells me about her dog and she says one year to a dog is like seven years to a human which is like seven hundred years to the oldest living tree which is named Methusela, named after Methusela who lived a thousand years or a thousand solar years which is roughly seventy-eight years, she says that we only dream about ninety minutes in sleep but those dreams warp time to their whim to brief moments passing like beams of light or entire lifetimes, isn’t that neat? That there are other worlds we hold in our memories through time forever, psychic and subconscious worlds, that we can’t understand infinity because there is no point of reference. Another night, a different one, I think the second night we met and she held my hand that night, we walked past a restaurant and we could see inside, an old couple celebrating their fifty-year wedding anniversary and everyone was happy and everyone was saying congratulations and we looked good together, our reflection in the window outside looking in, and it’s love again and the universe is one long yawn now, a long yawn from the mouth of a woman waking up in a bed, in the morning, the sun in the sky still burning I suppose, something burning between us.
And that was it. We made love that night for the last time, we slept and we dreamt, we lived an entire lifetime. Something coming back to me. The next day she walked me to my bus after a nice morning of coffee and breakfast and we didn’t talk about what we’d done together and we didn’t say goodbye, she kissed me lightly and said thank you. I said the same. Then she was gone, nothing else to say and what better way to part than that way, a thank you and gone. She never told me about the man who hurt her, I never mentioned mine. Would things have been different if we’d known? If she’d pulled back the mask and I’d seen the machinations of pain moving like the inside of an ant farm, would I have stayed? If I’d shown her the chasms of my forgetting?
The New Year
it’s ten minutes to midnight and the bar is full and I’m uncorking bottles of sparkling wine to hand out to everyone, all of us waiting for something new, another chance and Petra says, “They say the way you spend your New Year’s Eve is a good indicator for how your whole year will go.”
“Who says that?”
“I do.”
“Does that always work out for you?”
“I spent my last New Year’s Eve crying.”
“You cried a lot this year.”
“I did. But I’m happy tonight. I’m happy I’m at work, I’m happy to be working with you, that’s good.”
“Did you see that couple making out in the corner?”
“Of course, everybody has.”
“Did you notice she has her hand down his pants?”
And she looks and she laughs and she says, “Oh my god, should we tell them to stop?”
And I say, “Nah. This is how they’re spending their New Year’s Eve, this is how they want their new year to go. We shouldn’t stand in their way,” and we’re all moving into something new now, all of us together, me and a woman who’s happy to be with me and a guy getting fucked.
* * *
We’re there all night, well into the morning and the next day is quiet, I can’t sleep. I walk through my neighbourhood early in the afternoon and Toronto is another city now. The city like it is in the quiet hours before the sun when it’s dark but it’s no longer night, the city where the danger has passed and there’s a hum in the streetcar wires like a song, like a light spring shower from every spiderweb of wires tangled above every humming intersection. I think of the people I’ve loved and the places I’ve been. I’m in a city drinking itself sick on condos and if everything goes well maybe soon I’ll be living in a van, the best I could wish for in the shadow of a million homes worth a million dollars each, the million homes of Toronto. What if I’d stayed in Montreal or Berlin or Taos or anywhere other than this? Would I be anything more if I weren’t me but the other man, the man from last night, the man with a hand down his pants? All these strangers coming in and out of my life, gone. What is this love I harbour for them? Will any of this amount to anything when I again meet the eyes that say forever then pass into the next life? Why can’t I forget this, as hard as I try. I don’t want to die. There’s something inside of me I wish would be dead. But once it’s died, who would I be. It’s part of me now. The thing I wish dead I’m protecting. We might all be micro-organisms, our fate the same as the orchid and the wasp. I’m starting to write again, what you’re reading here I write.
* * *
The first night of the year is always our slowest night but we stay open and I’m the only one willing so I go in to work and I open the bar and I sit reading Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés and Bill comes in and he sits at the bar.
“Lots of love! Are you excellent?” he says.
“I’m doing okay.”
“You look like you’re excellent. You look like you’re raging.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m raging! I’ve been editing my book all day, I still don’t quite know where it’s going to go, the next phase of it. I think I know but I don’t because it’s all about taking out six pages. When it was about taking out twenty pages they seemed subtle but easier too and now for six pages I go…I’m not really sure. If I take out a three-page poem here and a three-page poem there that changes the facing pages through the whole book. So then that will get readjusted. And with the visual work that’s quite a lot of work to do if it destabilizes them. So I’m not sure. I don’t have to know yet anyway. But I’m experiencing validation and what’s that word… Is it simulacrum? Similarities in tinctures and themes throughout the poems. So all the poems are commenting on each other if you read it that way. But most people don’t read books of poems that way so it’s just something I’m noticing. It’s guiding me in the editing but it may make no difference to the finished book. Some people care about that. Do you?”
“I think everything is interacting, yeah.”
“Excellent!”
“What are you writing about?”
“Partly I’m writing about the use of narrative. Do we really need narratives? What are they good for? Do they create more separations? More exclusions than inclusions and acceptances? It’s just a question not a conclusion because I don’t jump to conclusions, I don’t swim a lot, I don’t do much jumping. Now I’m swimming a lot. What is this thread? So is this like the lady in the Scots play? Out damn narrative! Out! Out damn thread! I love you thread! We love all the threads. That’s what’s lovely about writing a novel because there are characters and it is not an extension of oneself. When you’re writing a personal poem about grief that’s quite long and quite complex then really it’s only about me and my friends and the loss that it’s talking about. That’s an extension of myself to the nth degree, that’s very hard to write, I find. As Gertrude Stein said, ‘Writing is what you write.’”
“What did you do yesterday?”
“Oh yesterday! Yesterday was New Year’s wasn’t it? I forgot. It was excellent. Well, first I watched an amazing episode of Days of Our Lives while I had lunch. And this one character, she said, ‘Sex trumps everything.’ And the person she said this to was a much younger guy and he was going with her daughter and she didn’t want him to go with her daughter because she wanted her daughter to have a better life than he was able to offer. Why she was able to know that when he was like eighteen and her daughter was eighteen is unknown to me. I don’t know what her zeal and her urgency was all about except maybe to make sure her daughter was actually never happy. There’s some awful things inside there. So the young man has come to confront the mother to leave him and her daughter alone, that they really love each other. And they get so intense with each other with accusations and threats, they arouse each other’s libido and again they get it on, the mother and him. And this will destroy her daughter, who he’s in love with. And now of course the mother can blackmail the young guy to stay away from her daughter or she’ll tell. If they keep getting it on, someone will find out. Maybe the daughter will find out. But right now she’s in California and the mother, last time we saw she was pulling the young guy’s T-shirt off and he’s been working out.”
“Why do you watch that show, Bill?”
“I think I’m interested to see if love is proprietary or if it can be open-minded and if it really is based on possession. And if it is based on possession it’s delusional, to be based on that, because it will never be satisfied. People can’t possess each other. I’ve known people who have been very possessional or proprietary. I haven’t been very much. So I find it interesting to watch people for which love is proprietary because I’ve always been puzzled by that. I think I’m more open because I was sick a lot when I was a child and my mother went to spirit when I was young. So I don’t expect anything to last. I’m not gloomy about it, I just don’t expect it to. Some people with different kinds of early lives think that everything will last and I think they’re shocked when it doesn’t. Not that I’m also not shocked. I don’t know. It doesn’t actually make sense. It makes sense but it doesn’t hold up. Most people I’ve been with have been proprietary and I don’t at times understand it or actually know what’s going on. So I’m looking at Days of Our Lives like it’s actually going to teach me something.”
“So what did you do after you watched that? Did you do anything special last night?”
“Oh yes, after Days of Our Lives I went down the street to get a tea and lately there’s this person, she’s always sitting at the counter and she’s always really nice and I’m always really nice to her, we’re nice to each other, it’s excellent. There was this dude sitting there with her and he had longer hair like mine and yours, not as long as yours, and he was older like me kind of and he had black-and-white hair and he was explaining to her or narrating, I guess he was saying to her, about the days of ‘In-a-Gadda-da-Vida’ and the Doors and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and he was quoting some of the lines and then he started talking about the acid and I started going, ‘Oh microdot?’ and he said, ‘Microdot!’ I said, ‘Orange?’ and he said, ‘Orange!’ then we were going, ‘Blotter paper?’ and we were going like this and she’s in between probably you and us and she was happy with all of this and amazed by it, I think she really likes that guy and she’s very nice to me as well and then he goes, ‘Nights in White Satin?’ and I’m going, ‘Never reaching the end!’ and it was so amazing because that night, me and my friend Sweetheart went to 6 St. Joseph Street and they had a dinner for people that wanted a dinner and it was great and then there was karaoke which I don’t really get but I got into it eventually! It was hard to get my head there but I did and someone actually sang ‘Nights in White Satin’ and I thought, ‘I’m going to melt. I’m going to fucking melt.’ It was so beautiful to hear that, never reaching the end.”
“That’s amazing.”
“It’s so amazing! The threads that run through all this. And when him and me were doing microdot acid was in sixty-seven, sixty-eight, you know what I’m saying? It was so different then, there were no terrorists and shit. I remember I took some to get on a plane. I was going to a reading in Calgary and then I did an interview on CBC with Phyllis Webb and Barrie Nichol sometime around then but I was taking so much acid I don’t remember exactly which city it was, I’m guessing it was probably Toronto. I think it was Calgary… Oh but the plane stopped for a break and I just got off the plane and I walked toward the sun on the tarmac, on the runway, and the steward came, I was very stoned, and the steward came in a little truck and took me back to the plane and it wasn’t considered unusual, I wasn’t jailed for this. Today I would be jailed, you know? So just for these few minutes this person and me were just screaming it all out, how great it was, it was excellent. Life moves so fast. It still really does but…does life move really fast for you? Life itself changes its speed it seems like, doesn’t it?”
“It does, yeah.”
“Back then I’d only stay in a place for three months. I never was anywhere long enough to go to a funeral of anybody’s. There’s a lot of things I missed. I don’t regret it but I would have liked to have seen more daily life in places. I was very lucky and I just kept moving with it as long as it was going on. I don’t know if a phase like that will ever happen again. I was just thinking about it this morning, I was actually reflecting just a little bit, how wonderful it was, how trustworthy everyone was. I was always travelling. And it was an amazing way to not look at some things in my life. Millions of people live like that, I met a lot of them. They don’t stay anywhere more than three months. And very quickly you know everyone that’s in the network. You know enough people to know. Then you hear, so and so, this and that, it’s all good, you meet them, it’s fine. And it’s good. Nothing ever went wrong. Well okay, one person, she threw herself off the balcony, that was sort of wrong but she survived and recovered. So it wasn’t really wrong. I still believe in magic. As Leonard Cohen said in that poem, ‘God is Alive, Magic is Afoot.’ Everything will go to spirit but magic. Magic is the spirit. I do believe that. And it’s the new year, it’s brand new! Magic is afoot! Are you raging?”
The Self Portrait
there was once, in las vegas, i sat in the airport waiting for a plane to take me anywhere else, anywhere else than where I’d been, and I looked out the window and the window was facing east and the mountains in the distance bore the straight line of light, precise as the cutting of a knife, a line of light from the setting sun behind me to the west separating the light from the dark and I watched that line of light climb to the peak and disappear and the mountains turned purple blue like a bruise and the sky faded orange red like a candle burning low and it happened every day, I thought, this ritual. It happened every day to countless people, all of us indistinguishable if you pulled out and looked at us all together. I wasn’t sure what I felt as I bore witness to this incredible beauty in this terrible place that took everything, beat me up, left me in this airport to never come back. I wasn’t sure if anything here felt anything toward me. I loved it still I suppose, I was brought here to find something and I didn’t know what yet.
Why was I in Las Vegas. Why was I anywhere. I remember once standing at the grave of a man who was buried in the Memphis Zoo, his grave overlooking the tiger pit where small waterfalls fell over the bodies of animals meant for another world. I remember sitting in a hot tub with a Norwegian man in Reykjavik, he was thin with a long beard and he hummed because he couldn’t hear and he might have been the oldest thing I’d ever seen, I wasn’t sure anything else could ever live that long, and the two of us sat in that water and it was like he was singing for me only and a light snow fell softly on us, just us two. I remember walking through a forest on the east coast and the snow was heavy on the ground and I was sure I was lost and there were small dots of dark red like blood there in the pure white snow, I was sure a bear would find me or a wolf and then that would be that there in the brisk morning of early winter and I came upon an abandoned house, all the windows broken out and I couldn’t stand to step inside of it because of the quiet that radiated from the broken walls, there might have been someone upstairs, there was a sound and the sound brought a darkness to the forefront of my mind so I left quietly and I found my way out of the forest and the people in the town that I was in, they spoke to each other as if they weren’t surrounded by this mystical darkness, this wild world full of spirits and death. Why was I in any of these places?
I remember back when I was in Montreal Laura asked me something and I remember it still, she asked why are you always up and leaving everywhere and I said because no one ever asks me to stay. I didn’t think I’d say that, didn’t even know I thought it, but here it came out, as much truth as I’d ever hid from myself. No one ever said: I wish you’d stay here. With me.
