Holding Still for as Long as Possible (8 page)

[ 4 ]

Billy

Mid-September was unusually warm. The day I met Josh, I was hoping to do absolutely nothing, other than carry a bag of groceries from Price Chopper to my apartment. I planned to lay down on a towel on the back deck with a book and a cocktail and try to cultivate an easygoing personality. I wore a holding-onto-summer tank top. I was not expecting to meet someone who might alter the rest of my life. Or whatever.

While waiting in the checkout line, I covered Paris Hilton's face with my to-do list and marked a thick red satisfying line through
groceries
— accomplished! For an agoraphobic, shopping is sometimes a feat, although that day I wasn't so bad. The fluorescent lights didn't sear. The floor didn't sink. I remained a living body in a public space. Victory. I tucked the crumpled list into the back pocket of my faded, dirty jeans.

Most days, I would have had to rush to work at a café on Roncesvalles, or to school at the University of Toronto, where I was half-heartedly attempting a part-time English Lit degree. I'd been accruing an overwhelming number of sick days in both settings. And let me tell you, taxis owe much of their livelihood to the anxiety prone. I had spent most of my extra cash on cab-metre sums and bar tabs, prescriptions for Ativan, and, of course, coffee.

I'd been alone — sans Maria, totally friggen independent for the first time since the
Are You There God? It's Me Margaret
days — for seven weeks. Leaving my house was hard, because the panic attacks hit me at random, and I drank too much coffee and ate too few vitamin-enriched foods. Even though Maria and I had been alternately at each other's throats or completely bored with each another for the last two years of our relationship, I still felt like I needed her for simple tasks. Like, how do you make rice?

Yesterday she'd asked me via text — the main way we were communicating —
Have I ever had the measles?
We were each other's memory banks. I answered:
Yes, Grade Three. You also had mumps — twice
.
When we were together, I would help her fill out whatever form she had on hand, because I wasn't scared of ticking boxes and had a freakishly good memory for detailed health histories. I also did all our budgeting and taxes. She made the rice, and fixed our bikes, and handled all the mechanical stuff. Without each other, we had a lot of learning to do. I was stumbling, splayed. Maria could always calm me down.

Now, I was learning to do everything alone.
Good Will, motherfucking Good Will.
Fifteen steps to the ground-floor landing. Three to the cement laneway. Five squares to the street. Gladstone. My new street. Maria and I had lived around the corner on Argyle for seven years, so I didn't have to break in a new neighbourhood. I hate new places and not knowing where I am. There was something about looking up at buildings for the first time, adjusting to a new skyline, that made me feel like I could just fade away by accident. I could fall into the street, and no one would know where to find me.

Maria had moved right downtown. She craved anonymity and an under-seven-minute subway ride to work. I never went east of St. George any more. Why bother? I'd rather get spit on in my own neighbourhood. If I was going to collapse, I'd want to do it near my house, so people would recognize me and tell the ambulance crew or police or whatever that if they just brought me back to my doorstep, I'd be fine.

Seventeen sidewalk squares to Price Chopper. I'd forgotten to count that morning, that's how triumphant I felt. For no reason, and that's the best thing. The possibility of stars colliding, chemicals balanced. Fucking right!

Despite my unafraid, totally happy mood, the air was wet and tragic — and making that pronouncement was factual, not pessimistic or overly poetic or whatever. Even in Toronto, 1,791 kilometres from New Orleans, people wore the after-effects of Hurricane Katrina on their faces like badly matched liquid foundation. Strangers with deep caverns under their eyes had conversations on the subway about whether or not the world was ending. The biblical people looked more purposeful, strutting confidently, clutching their pamphlets.

I was afraid that every surface I touched would be sticky, so I pulled my arms into my sleeves and opened things with my elbows.
Trying to open my apartment door,
I dropped my bag of groceries, but nothing broke. A head of iceberg lettuce, a bag of cherries, four yellow plums. One plum bounced down the concrete step and under a cedar bush. I accepted its release from my capture, picked up the bag, and walked inside. I closed my eyes walking up my apartment stairs, trying to see how long I could make it and still know where I was.

I started counting steps, then floor tiles.
I'm a Tilt-A-Whirl.
Good Will.
I was waiting for a certain emergency. How quickly things can go from calm to freak-out.

When I was in primary school, I had a prayer ritual every night — a specific order of blessing people and keeping them safe: Mom, Dad, Grandma, sister, classmates, babysitter, mail carrier, school-bus driver. Then, in the same order, those people were to be guarded against cancer, car accidents, kidnapping, facial disfigurements. ( It was the era of
Mask
, after all, the book and movie. ) I had a big thing for kidnapping, probably because I had watched a made-for-
TV
movie about a girl who was kidnapped and didn't find her family again until she was fifteen, at which point she was a stranger to them all. If I forgot anyone, or forgot the order, I had to start over from scratch. Sometimes it took about an hour. I stopped doing it when Kimberly Actonvale was actually kidnapped in Grade Seven, and my grandfather died of cancer.
Fuck that
,
I thought.

I opened my eyes, clutched my bag of bruised produce and double-jumped the splintery, wooden blue stairs, landing with two solid feet on the kitchen floor. Roxy sat at the table reading
The Globe and Mail
.

Her short black hair was a bird's nest. She was dressed in her work clothes for catering: white button-down men's shirt over her mostly flat chest, black dress pants and men's dress shoes, a sparkly pink Care Bear hoody overtop. Most people couldn't peg her as a girl or a boy, even from one foot away. Our cat, the adopted stray with one remaining piercing blue eye, was curled on a placemat opposite her, like a place setting. Her name was Joan Nestle, or Smoosh for short.

I ran one of the plums under the tap in the sink.
I'm fucking lu
cky!
I felt like yelling to whoever controlled my various mental disorders. We're all so lucky. Who cares if I was afraid of aneurisms, nosebleeds, spontaneous blindness? If I had a heart attack right now, and it was my time, then shouldn't I be happy I had lived such a struggle-free life? I took a bite. Sour. I threw the plum in the sink, where it landed in a bowl of half-eaten instant oatmeal.

Roxy smoothed out the newspaper on the kitchen table and started rolling tobacco on top of the Business section. We were just starting to have a roommate routine, something also entirely foreign to me. The exaggerated politeness, the am-I-in-your-way? feelings were fading. Roxy was fun to observe. She seemed to operate entirely in the present, with no obvious worries or preoccupations. She had a lot of friends, many hobbies, too many idiosyncrasies to mention.

I wished I were one of those “grateful for what I have, aren't we lucky to be alive today” people. I was without a doubt deeply terrified of the inevitability of death. And so I did what I could. I counted. I repeated. I breathed deeply. I distracted myself.

Despite Roxy's stripper name — the actual name on her birth certificate was Roxy Barbara Streisand Gillard, and I'm not even kidding — she was as far as possible from the way you'd expect a Roxy to look. Roxy was a connector — or was it a nucleus? At school I had always skipped biology, so I wasn't good with scientific metaphors. Anyway, she connected people. She was pretty much how I made all my friends in Toronto. She made an effort to make plans with friends, and to introduce them to others, like a community hub. There — Roxy was a community hub. She was rarely alone. She was always up to something interesting.

We called our apartment — a second-storey two-bedroom number just north of Queen Street — the Parkdale Gem, after the area in Toronto where we lived. “A gem”— that's how it had been advertised in the local paper when Roxy found it a few years ago, a gem amongst the high-rise shit-holes, crumbling old Victorians, and rooming houses. The apartment's best feature was the large kitchen that opened out onto an expansive fenced-in balcony that could, if one wanted, fit a small yoga class. Our bedrooms were small, and the living room more of an idea squished between them in the long hallway of the house, but the kitchen made up for it and we spent most of our time there. Even though Roxy owned most of the furniture and had lived here for five years, I knew it would eventually feel like my home too. If I ever really unpacked.

Still, there was a new form of uncertainty in the air, and you could taste it in Parkdale. The west end of the city was experiencing a growth spurt along Queen Street west of Ossington Avenue. On the sidewalks I often kicked giant screws that had fallen from fast-rising construction sites. The area was definitely deep into adolescent tantrums, boisterous claims and lots of architectural posturing that hid massive insecurities.

A hotel that used to provide the neighbourhood a certain visible sketch factor had been rebuilt into a boutique hotspot called the Drake Hotel, with a hipster happy hour and over-priced entrees. The first Starbucks. Residents had reacted as if someone had taken a big shit on their front porch. The graffiti condemning it was witty. Roxy's friend Richard, a local multimedia artist, made pins that read
Blame the Drake
. Roxy wore one, somewhat ironically. Condos were sprouting like acne on every block. Rents were rising. Our landlord, who was old, usually drunk and lived in Mississauga, only remembered to cash the rent cheques half the time. We were lucky he probably wouldn't think to raise it. When Maria and I moved out of our place on Argyle, our landlord there said he was selling to a developer.

Roxy organized walks around the neighbourhood trying to mobilize residents against the encroaching virus of progress. She was full of historical tidbits, and she rallied against the takeover. Me, well, I secretly hoped they really would build the rumoured Loblaws or Shoppers Drug Mart. Then I wouldn't have to stand between peed-pants man and boob-touch guy at the 1–8 items aisle at Price Chopper. I was thankful for the occasional latte, sick of the syrupy swill from the doughnut shop next to the train tracks. I knew this made me a bad person, but whatever. You pick your battles. You do what you can. I was trying to cultivate some sense of balance.

Roxy stood up to reach for the sugar and pulled the white shirt out of her pants, her protruding beer belly sticking out slightly over her belt. “Listen to this, Barbara Bush is reported to have said this about the Superdome shelter: ‘So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this [chuckles] — this is working very well for them.' ”

My coat halfway undone, I shoved the groceries into the crisper, checked the freezer, and found the coffee tin empty. Another cup. Doughnut shop.

“Coffee? I'm going back out.”

Roxy poured a pink package of sugar substitute into her Diet Pepsi. She liked to drink things that taste like tinfoil. She preferred food with molecular properties akin to plastic bags. “Isn't that fucked up?” she asked, not waiting for me to nod my head or add anything.

Roxy liked to talk. I liked to listen. The roommate situation would probably work out well.

Roxy was raised in rural Quebec in a gay commune and didn't taste Coca-Cola until she was eighteen. Or not a commune, really. The way she explained its evolution, it seems that her two dads purchased a farm, and slowly their friends left the city to join them. They became an insular social movement, with solar-panel huts and organic gardens. Goats and pigs, donkeys and bunnies.

Needless to say, the time Roxy did spend in rural elementary school was hard on her, the only Jewish, ambiguously gendered kid raised by a group of men. Consequently, she grew an incredibly thick skin and uniquely independent disposition. Her dads ( The Donalds: one Don, one Donnie ) sent her care packages of home-made jam, photos of lambs, and an annual holiday letter like no other. She made meals out of Pixy Stix and hard yellow banana candy, chocolate sauce on microwave popcorn; she had an overgrown bubble-gum dispenser sitting between the toilet and the sink in the bathroom. Her teeth were a battleground.

Best of all, she hadn't had television in the 1990s. She never saw my music videos. She never went to any big concerts. I was just an ordinary fuck-up to her.

I zipped up my jacket and fished through a pint-glass of change on the shelf beside neglected vegan cookbooks, half-full bottles of vodka, and our near-finished collection of Smurfs figurines. I sorted the nickels from the quarters. “Want anything from the outside?”

“C'mon, Billy, this isn't really shocking, is it?” Roxy had that tone of voice like she wanted to debate something.

I didn't bite, just turned around and walked back down the stairs, kicking aside single dust-covered Converse sneakers, stiletto boots, orphaned mittens, and neglected Sports sections of the daily paper.