Kiss and Tell (6 page)

EYE MAKEUP AND 70’S FASHION AT THE MALL.

My friends from the housing district were Laurie (my sleepover partner in crime), Wanda, Cheryl and their sister Helen. The oldest was Helen, but the genetics in that family were phenomenal. What great bodies they had! I was jealous of their well-developed busts and butts—mine wouldn’t ripen until much later. Apparently, however, I was grown-up enough for Helen’s boyfriend, Andy, the son of a doctor. I went to a party at his house and lost my virginity to him in a five-minute fit of drunken passion. I never saw him again and always regretted giving that special gift to someone I didn’t love and who didn’t love me.

While I was still in ninth grade, I met my next serious boyfriend through my older brother. Lance had set up his own living area in the basement of our town house. He had a mattress on the floor next to his stereo and was always down there with his friends listening to music. His best friend was a Ukrainian guy named John, who was—surprise!—very into oral sex. John lived with his mother, naturally enough, because he was still in high school. I used to sleep over at his house all the time—in his room, in his bed, any night of the week and walk home in the wee hours of the morning before my mother got up. I remember meeting his mother. She just looked at me and asked Johnny something in Ukrainian. He answered, and she shook her head…and fired off a lot more rapid Ukrainian that I could not understand. I’m sure she was asking John, “What does her mother say?” or “Why is she here; you can’t sleep with a girl with no birth control! You two are going to wind up with a baby!”

Johnny had a powder blue ‘67 Mustang he used to let me drive. He was a good, straight kid who went off to class every day while I cruised around in his car. I would drive around all day in his Mustang, hang out with the hippies at the mall, and pick John up after school. I don’t know what either one of us was thinking… I didn’t have a license!

My relationships with boys at the time did have some positive effect on my self-esteem. John was a budding artist and drew a portrait of me. After he presented it and I had the chance to study it carefully, I thought for the first time that I wasn’t bad-looking. If John thought I was pretty, maybe I really was pretty. Murray had thought I was pretty, too. I started thinking,
Hmmmm. Okay, maybe…
and started plucking my eyebrows and wearing a little makeup.

When I was 15, Johnny and I broke up, and I headed into tenth grade by the skin of my teeth. I was barely passing. One of my girlfriends, Lynn, liked my brother Lance, and we got pretty close. We used to sit in the washroom at school smoking cigarettes. The teachers had to know that we were sitting in the bathroom smoking. I’m sure it smelled up the whole school. But everybody smoked then; it was no big deal. There I was in a washroom in a school in Saskatchewan, speculating with my friend on the chances of us making a go of it as hookers, rationalizing that because if we liked having sex for free, why not get paid for it? (Lynn ended up staying in school, going to university, and doing very well, though sadly, she was diagnosed early in life with multiple sclerosis.)

ME AND TRACY SITTING ON THE NEIGHBORS’ STOOP. WE STILL CAN’T OPEN OUR PALE BLUE EYES IN THE SUN.

I never took up prostitution, thank God, but my mind was obviously elsewhere, and eventually I dropped out of high school altogether. My memory of exactly when I left school is vague, but my mother reminds me that I was only one semester short of graduation. There was no conscious decision to quit, but clearly my heart wasn’t in it, and I had missed so much school, so many days in a row, that I eventually just never went back. I got a job as a hostess in a nightclub. It was illegal because I was underage, but I lied and said I was 18, and no one had any reason to doubt me. The owner of the club was another pervert—and I mean that in the nicest way possible—tall, dark, handsome, and worldly.

Certainly there was a part of me that was always attracted to this type of man, but this particular club owner was much older, probably 35 or so, which was ancient to me since I was still 16. We had brief intimate moments until I turned 17 and met a devastatingly good-looking guy with a mustache from Holland at the club. We started seeing each other regularly. He was a window dresser at one of the department stores in town, and he wanted to “fix” me. He drank heavily and was highly critical of me, but I loved him, and we did things together that didn’t involve sex: cooking, decorating, fishing, and traveling. He even bought me my first real “ensemble,” a cream-colored knit three-piece skirt suit. He was very fashion savvy. Bob E. even took me to visit my father for the first time—we took a road trip in a green Vega. It took having that support—and cash—behind me to get me there. The three of us shared a joyful long weekend until Bob had to get back to work. I was grateful to him for opening up the lines of communication between me and my father again.

Bob E. and I stayed together for a while, and I worked in all kinds of places: bars, a tie store, the shoe department of an Army/Navy store, a hotel, a ski resort, even pumping gas on the graveyard shift at a Mohawk gas station. I think at that time my boyfriend was still completely unaware of his true sexual orientation, or at the very least couldn’t bring himself to admit his true preferences. He had a mustache, but I was the beard. When his employer transferred him to Ottawa, the capital of Canada, he took me with him—after a trip to Holland to attend his sister’s wedding. I was getting somewhere, little by little. Somewhere else—I always wanted to be somewhere else.

BOB AND I, VERY FASHIONABLE AT THE TIME. HE BOUGHT ME MY FIRST GABARDINE SUIT.

BOB AND ME ROASTING A PIG AND FISHING IN NORTHERN ONTARIO.

THE OH-SO-HANDSOME AND TROUBLED BOB EGELIE WITH ME IN HOLLAND AT THE WEDDING OF HIS SISTER. DON’T REMEMBER WHO THE BABY BELONGS TO.

Immediately after arriving in Ottawa I got pregnant, though certainly not on purpose. Bob E. was clearly not pleased; nor was I. The details of making all the arrangements are a bit fuzzy, but through a friend of mine and a friend of his I was somehow shuffled one night onto a bus to New York for an abortion. I had to scrape all my money together, get on some bus, and go to New York alone. I mean,
New York ? Me? The little farm girl from Canada?
It was crowded with young women going down to the big city to get abortions. On the ride back I was bleeding heavily, but I changed clothes in our apartment and went right to work at my job as a cocktail waitress at an upscale hotel bar the next day.

It wasn’t a bad job. People in that government town usually got off work around three-thirty in the afternoon, and they’d hit the bars and start drinking. At some point the other waitresses and I would stop taking orders, grab beer from the bar, and go out and sell them, because it was too crowded to take individual orders. I developed really strong right-arm muscles because my tray was always so heavily loaded down with beer. After a while my tray would be weighted down with money, stacks and stacks of bills with beer spills all over it—and I was still too young to even be served in a bar, much less work in one. The money was great—the money we made and the money we stole, after we lost count and our good judgment.

It was just another night at work when I returned from New York. I was feeling okay. I put on my little outfit, cut up to here and down to there, with legs forever. But I was also wearing tons of pads because I was bleeding so heavily, and I’m sure it looked like I was wearing a diaper. All of a sudden, in the middle of my shift, I felt kind of woozy.

A regular customer of mine, a really handsome Lebanese man named Henry, someone I’d always liked, came up to me. He said, “Hey, are you okay? You don’t look so good. Let me take you home.” Well, his intentions were kind of good: he took me to
his
home. We talked for awhile about the problems I was having with my boyfriend and he told me how much he’d always liked me. Then I had sex with him. I was confused and needy, and on some level I appreciated him “saving” me. He didn’t know what I’d done that week, but he knew something wasn’t quite right. I started bleeding heavily later that evening. Henry called a doctor for me and took me to the hospital, where I was given blood and fluids. I recuperated and kept the new doctor as my gynecologist.