Leper Tango (10 page)

“I'm not going to repeat myself, Franck.” “Sure, I'm sure.”

“You are not hiding anything from Mommy, are you Franck?”

This went on for awhile. I tried crying to break the impasse.

“C'mon, Franck, Mommy was just kidding. Let's go home.”

She drove for a minute or two without speaking.

“So, what is a prostitute, Mom?”

“A prostitute, Franck, is a woman who sells herself to men.”

“Oh, you mean like a
whore
?”

I was born on September 11 at 11:11 a.m. My first core belief as a child was that I was the only human being alive on the whole planet, and that others were phantoms, either working for some god who was testing me for something or they were just generally alien beings.

My second unshakeable conviction was that I would die on my eleventh birthday.

I didn't die, but in its own way, my eleventh birthday proved memorable. I mark it as the day I discovered things could change in an instant and nothing would look the same ever again. Early that morning, I heard R ichard, my brother, cr ying from the other room. I guessed he had pissed himself again, but instead of going back to sleep, I decided to check it out.

Mother was in front of a vanity mirror dressing table, wearing a long satin bustier, circa 1950s, the style with bones, and a set of cups on it, with attachable black garters holding up cream-white panty hose. It was the first time I had seen her undressed.

“Now, Richard, you be good today, Mommy is talking with Santa Claus about next Christmas, and you don't want Santa to abandon you, do you Richard?”

She spoke to Richard in the same tone she employed with everyone. A brassy, I'm in a hurry, so don't screw up the program tone. For a moment, I watched her breasts pulsate inside the cups of her bustier. She slipped on an off the shoulder ruffle top and a flare skirt, and puckered her lips in front of the mirror, verifying her lipstick. As she splashed on some Guerlain
eau de toilette
, Richard started jacking off. She turned around, swatted his hand, then returned to her task, which was burnishing her mouth with Coco Chanel mud lipstick. Then, she stopped, laughed, shook her head.

“I hope I'm long gone when you two hit the streets.” Later that day, my father returned from one of his business trips. Surprise, surprise, he announced as he strode into the living room.

“Daddy's home early!! Where's your mother, Francky?”

“Gone to the moon.”

“Don't be funny, Francky. Where is she?”

“She went to the moon.”

“Where's Richard?”

I pointed towards the basement. His features darkened.

He about-faced, and crashed his way down the stairwell into the basement. I heard an extended moan.

“What the hell!”

Followed by more rapid, heav y breathing, as my father, a four-pack a day Marboro man, chugged his way back up the stairs. “What the hell did you do to your brother?” “Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing! You call nothing being strapped into the jolly jumper in the basement!”

I stood on the other side of the table, gripping onto its edges, considering escape routes. He ran around the table. I dove under it, but slipped and he clamped his bear paws onto my leg.

“You little bastard.”

After swatting me a few times, father figured out that I was no wiser than he.

“Where's your mother?”

That evening was a noisy one around the house. But, the part I recall best was long past our bedtime, as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. I heard a sort of sick whelp, like a dog, except it was my father.

“You're nothing but a goddam whore. Nothing but a whore. Nothing but a whore.”

Then mother's sweet as molasses, mock conciliatory tone.

“Don't worry, Maurice, come to mommy now, everything will be rosy tomorrow, c'mere peachykins, it's been a long day.”

My father never forgave Grandpa for not naming him Franck, particularly since it should have been his automatic birthright, being the eldest in the family. But, Grandpa passed him over, preferring to call him Maurice, and conferring the patronym Franck upon the second eldest, in another display of the recurrent Robinson genetic snobbery that causes all of us to overlook moral qualities in favour of good looks.

Franck II returned the favour by forcing Grandpa to hand over the family business for a derisory sum while he lay on his deathbed. And my own father thanked him for that piece of work by robbing the business of half a million while Franck II was stupid, or felt guilt y enough to allow him control over the books of the company, despite being nothing more than an ad weasel.

Franck II had a beautiful mistress who stuck to him like a f ly on shit once he came into the money. My mother. Mother understood the famous words of Sam Goldw yn. A verbal contract ain't worth the paper it's written on. So, she had everything made out in her name through something even Franck II's legitimate wife could not attack. Insurance policies.

It was a sweltering hot summer day when Franck II was nailed for arson. He violently denied everything, despite a professional arsonist pinning his name on the deed that burned every asset of the Robinson Pulp and Paper Works, covering the full stretch of the Fraser River Delta. Once Uncle Franck was safely lodged courtesy of the Attorney General, mother only had one last reminder of her liaison with Uncle Franck. My brother Richard. Mother used to enjoy visiting Uncle Franck, and would playfully taunt him from the free side of the penitentiary visit ing room with references to her “scorched earth policy.”

After Grandpa died, people would glorify him at the sporadic family gatherings, when they drank too much, or when they got maudlin and were lamenting the good old days when men beat the shit out of their wives and then bought their way out of it, and generally acted like criminals, which is what the New World is all about, and for that matter, the old world.

I think it was at one of those family gatherings, probably Franck II's funeral after he killed himself in prison, that someone asked me to name Grandpa's greatest achievement. No one really spoke about my uncle, for whatever reason, but Grandpa seemed to inspire a lot of stories, and of course it was
de rigueur
to praise him to the skies. That question stumped me for a long moment and, while I hesitated, several of the attendees now turned their attention towards me. What will the boy genius have to say about this now?

“I think his greatest feat was hanging himself in the garage after he had his stroke.”

I looked across the room, taking my focus away from the uproar of protesting voices clamouring and fingers pointing at me, and moved into the abstract zone which preceded the rain of blows which my father was sure to let fall in my direction. Against the dining room wall, between an early Munch sketch of
The Scream
and a reproduction of Picasso's
Guernica
, I could make out my brother Richard, staring at me. He was still pretty young, and so quiet I had always thought him autistic, but, this time, though I couldn't exactly guess what he was thinking, he definitely seemed to be paying attention.

I lived in San Francisco for a while, mostly working assembly line on the Oakland side of the bay, when that type of thing still paid money, and spent most of my leisure time drinking beer and playing pool in a string of dead-end bars located at the core of skid row. I had been drinking since mid-afternoon in a bar called the Cobalt on my twenty-first birthday, when a blonde girl, rasta beads in her hair and a jean jacket, threads hanging in shreds from the cuffs, sat down and drawled, “buy me a drink ” in an Aussie accent. Like that. She had something in her eyes, but she was too friendly for her good looks, which to me spelled dependency, as did the needle tracks at the top of her left forearm.

We spent the afternoon drinking beer and shooting 9-ball in the Cobalt, then staggered across the street to the Hotel St-Regis. I think her name was Donna. She made ends meet turning tricks on a low-end stretch of Union Street. Or at least that was her story.

At about 3 p.m., I proposed to her. We weaved down to the courthouse, where we tied the knot in front of a justice of the peace who looked to be in similar shape.

I rented a room at the St-Regis and brought up some cheap and warm bubbly from a Chinatown liquor store. I don't recall much, or even whether we made love. But, when I woke up, she had robbed me of all my money, and all but one of my credit cards. I never saw her again. Our marriage had lasted four hours.

Several days later, it was still raining and I was still inside the St-Regis. The room I rented was on the top floor of the hotel, just under a leaky aluminum roof in sore need of repair. I wasn't thinking a lot about anything. Just listening to the rain ping off the metal, like someone drumming their fingers on the roof. It was a good feeling, going into full drift like that, probably as good as I had ever felt about anything. As if I no longer had any form. On the desk in the room, I had a tumbler filled with crushed ice at all times, which served as a receptacle for the Long Island Ice Teas I was using for fuel as I ploughed my way through a book of crossword puzzles.

On the second or third day, I dropped some blotter acid after ordering another book of crossword puzzles from room service. Then it became hard to tell whether it was day or night. I recall looking in the mirror, and seeing my face stretch out and take on hues of emerald, jade, chlorophyll, as if I were turning the lights on and off. I dropped to all fours, and started crawling around like a baby until I spotted a battalion of scorpions scuttling inside ever y orif ice in my body. My guts were steadily torquing as if I'd swallowed some arsenic. Then, my tongue split into two, and I became convinced that I had transmutated into a human reptile. I only got that under control when I pushed my fist through the mirror.

I left the hotel by a rear stairwell which served as a fire escape, climbed down to the hotel parking lot, and took my Grand Prix for a spin towards the waterfront to cool down. I had cut my hand pretty badly, but it had slowed the brain down to operational. At least thoughts were percolating, and not bubbling right over. It was nothing special, just a mental zone. My brain had more or less liquified, derivative strands of the recent past now streaming down cerebral eavestroughs into a grey, polluted sewer.

I criss-crossed the Golden Gate a few times, staring out the driver-side window at Alcatraz, Monterey, Carmel, thinking shit, Clint Eastwood is mayor and Ronald Reagan is president, what's next? I doubled back East for another cruise through the hookers' quarter. For me, just like a return to the womb. A nocturnal ticker tape parade of bordellos, transexual haunts and strip joints run by the mafia with the tacit blessing of the city's forefathers.

I cruised up Union and down Columbus Avenue, then down around Powell and Union, doing what I like best, which was drifting. Nothing much around the square caught my eye, outside of a longshoreman repeatedly clubbing a drunken Indian prone on the sidewalk. I recall thinking, a drunken Indian is a cliché, then that there were a lot of clichés in that part of town. Then automatic pilot kicked in, the way it always did, and I was drifting, like the other drifters, ten miles an hour, where I spotted her, chewing gum and flashing a stretch of leg from beneath a black leather miniskirt. I was not much older than her myself, and, like I say, I was making a pretty good salary working in a factory at the time. My '57 Chev Bel-Air was a slick, scarlet machine red/black interior, with a 400 four barrel under the hood, mag wheels and an engine purr so powerful the police pulled me over regularly on sight and sound alone. I had taken it up to 130 mph within city limits and despite its huge size, had lost the cops twice during high speed chases while high on a mix of various highoctane cocktails.

She made a big show of climbing into the car. On her way to the Oscars ceremony. So to speak.

“Wow.”

“What's your name?”

“You want a name? No problem. Michelle. That's a

name.”

She bounced her butt up and down on the front seat a couple of times. I could see she really took to the car.

We drove up to a parking lot she pointed out, just behind an old art-deco theatre the city fathers had declared part of the sacred urban heritage.

Later, after she had finished sucking my cock, I lit a Marlboro, and debated whether I would ask her to start all over again. She didn't seem in any hurry to leave, so I offered her one of my Marlboros. As I passed her the cigarette, I noticed her right hand was a little on the knotty side for a girl. Whatever. She gave good head, her scarlet lipstick was liberally smeared on her mouth and the miniskirt looked good on her. That was enough for me.

“Where are you from?”

“Around. Portland. Whatever.”

“Like your work?”

“What do you mean like my work? Oh, I get it. You mean, like, do I like my work.” She smiled, and something told me that despite her young age, this one had travelled places I would never see, “I just
love
sucking cock.”

I let her off at the corner. Her tight butt carved a lazy serpentine curve down the sidewalk like some garden variety of snake. Her black purse hung loosely from a discount ersatz gold chain, and was sw ung over her shoulders. Her general attitude was far too contrived, far too theatrical, and with far too much of a sense of vocation, to belong to a woman.

For a while, I continued cruising up and down the waterfront, near the Bay, letting my mind drift. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. An undercurrent of percolating, vacuous thoughts streaming through the brain, then halting abruptly for a moment. Like the neap tide. I was thinking, this will not change. I had no intention of really getting formed into anything for society.

Out in the bay, five or six ships waiting to moor in the San Francisco container port facilit y. Strings of homosexuals, half of them with trimmed moustaches, the other half wearing mascara, hanging around the washroom facility, or sitting on the benches, waiting for someone to come by and suck their cocks, but not willing to pay for it. As I lit another cigarette, my mind shifted to a recollection of the old Marlboro man ads, portraying a rugged cowboy on a horse in Montana or wherever they still rode horses and gazed out on the rugged, limitless prairie. The first five male models to work as Marlboro models died of lung cancer. Like that. They were like Michelle. They believed in what they did. Funny. I remember Michelle's name, but I am not 100% sure about my first wife. I think she said it was Donna.