Strip (24 page)

In contrast to this I noticed imperfections, peeling burns, wrinkled thighs, varicose veins, horny discoloured toenails at the end of crooked toes from a lifetime of badly fitting shoes. I saw everything and my senses exploded like the flowers blooming off the walls, over doorways, everywhere there was moisture, sun, rain, hummingbirds darting, cats in heat by night and dogs humping any old time. Black men wandered from shore to high-tide mark looking for something, full lips smiling, or puckered or squeezed. I experimented with my own lips in the mirror: withheld, wondering, coy, pouting.

I watched the natives as they gathered in groups along the shore casting their nets, bathing their bony cows. Dicks flopped in frayed loose wet boxers. I was dizzy wondering what they did in the heat of the day. I spent hours in the steamy bathroom (while my parents glugged sea breezes, daiquiris, mai-tais and Cuba libres). I hoped that someday I would be as big and as free as these men.

Tidy white men appeared for happy hour. “The boys,” whispered someone's wife—echoed, with raised eyebrows, by someone's husband as if these well-dressed men were freaks, doing something wrong because they weren't with women. “The boys” sipping their cocktails in their cruise-wear, espadrilles, flip-flops, tanned feet and pedicures. They laughed as I nursed a ginger beer, then a fruit punch, while other conversations flew past me. Someone said they were fruits. And why did they care? Were they as bad as commies? Why wouldn't the fruits look my way? Why was it only the husbands and wives and other tourists in prints and patterns who doted on me and then ignored me?

“I'm not with them,” I wanted to scream to those beautiful men. Why wouldn't they rescue me? Someday I vowed they would, or I would return alone, and never have to go back to the snow. Someday with my strong feet locked to the floor, a chest for a shield, a pelvis like stone, legs of steel and my dick shoved in my swimsuit, cocked like a pistol with a hair trigger, lips turned up in a sneer, I would return and no one would ever again, ever ignore me.

 

No matter how charmed
your life, winter in the East means a fuck of a lot of trudging, weighed down by layers of soaking Gore-Tex, wool, fleece and feathers—or fighting your way through a blizzard, or to a bus, or to a plane that is still whining miles above you in absolute zero. But the tropics mean wandering half-naked along the warm shores of the Caribbean with nothing but a few ounces of drip-dry nylon to care about.

In the morning Kent had coffee ready and got me in a cab and off to the airport without a hitch. “I'll do the dishes.”

“See you,” I replied. “And save New Year's Eve for us.” If there was a knife in my gut I couldn't have felt it more sharply; I didn't want to leave him behind. I smiled bravely, and somewhat falsely. He could see it in my eyes. I know.

In several hours, I found the richness, the thick air that floods into the plane as the doors open, the heat, the bright sun, the blue sky and white clouds close enough to touch, the intense colours and the sound of the sea. All that I was looking for. I was a free man, living in a little rented shack, one of a few that had seen far better days, by the sea. Ignore the cockroaches at night and the bedsprings and it was bliss. The beach as I remembered it hadn't changed much since I was a kid. I hadn't been alone like this in a long time—if ever—with only my thoughts for company. That first afternoon was spent thinking about Kent, and wishing that Christmas night could have lasted for another week.

The men still wandered the beach, thank God. The tourists ignored me; husbands looked at me with curiosity, perhaps longing. I hoped to spend uncharted hours trying, with the help of planter's punches, to gain back the sleep I had lost in the past months. At a nearby hotel, a fat Frankfurter bought me martinis. Said I was his friend. I was drunk enough to excuse the next part. I could never catch up to Kent's numbers in so brief a time, and the most I could do was fantasize about Mr. Clean from a decade ago—and those Latin lovers, or were they brothers? Where had they all gone? Where were the boys in their pastels?

I followed the chubby
Mein Herr
to an abandoned house blasted by the sea, which at night must have been home for the black magic of the beach. A stained mattress with a hole burned in it, hanging over the sill of a window, presided over bits of animal bone, iguana skin and feathers while stray dogs and feral cats cowered among the dried palm fronds and coconut shells. Everything was in a state of decay. We only made it to the middle of the dark driveway hidden by this tropical excrement, rotting fruit, more dried leaves and dog crap. We fell on this, and as I serviced him, his swollen face turned pink with pleasure. The next day he was by the bar with wife and kids in tow, and I knew the hangover he was concealing. He pretended he didn't recognize me. He looked far worse sober, like every other hot and bothered dad.

I was sitting on the steps of my shack when a bony West Indian man in a knitted cap came by, reached under my sarong, cupped my nether regions—or whatever Kent thought a decent white boy like me should call it—in his hand and we watched those regions swell. He smiled a mouth of gaps and gold. He turned and wandered under the trees along the road, and I caught up at the same ruined house from the night before. Pebbles pierced my feet. From the road, the house was faded corals and blues and the tourists wandered up to take photos of its quaintness through the chicken wire. If you squinted it could be the backdrop of many a travel brochure. He banged the walls to scare out the stray rats, cats and vagrants. Inside was worse. Rags of pillows and leftover mouldy mattresses along with more animal crap were rammed into the corners.

I followed him room by room through this bad dream, through a door to what once must have been a bathroom but was now a piss-stinking, toilet-less closet with a rotting hole in the floor. I couldn't see his face anymore. He was a skeleton to the touch, the same as his narrow, bone-stiff stubborn, coat-hanger dick that jabbed my thigh. I opened the fold in my sarong. “Here, hold my cock,” I said, but he shoved my head down to his smelling-like-shit spindle for me to gag on. Which I did. I had to. His knuckles burned my skull until he was satisfied. As I had been taught, I feared for my life.

I ran from the house retching, spitting, wiping. Anything to take this foul moment away, subtract it, make it not have happened. He shouted that I broke the law. “Faggot! Faggot!” he yelled after me.

The next night, out on the road, after having vowed a conditional, self-imposed celibacy until I went home—and truly engrossed in a very dark and velvety night sky—a carload of well-dressed white boys pulled up and asked me which way to town.

As
if
they didn't know.

I pointed. The car headed up to the main road. I watched the lights fade under that vast tropical starry night. Take me, I thought, returning to my sky. But no sooner than I sorted Orion's Belt from the Sword of Damocles, did they make a
u
-turn, come back full speed, pull up and stop. The well-fed one in the driver's seat stared at my crotch and asked me if I wanted to come along. Sure. These were the boys, the ones from years ago. They hadn't aged. They never would.

“I'm Dennis,” said the driver.

“John. Pleased to meet you guys.” But the seconds remained stilted, so I went on, “I mean gays.” The ice was broken and there was no doubt about me, not that I wasn't screaming it in bleached pink and turquoise. We drove and laughed and they slipped words in that Kent had introduced me to, like “Mary” and “sister” and “girlfriend.” Soon I felt comfort in missing Kent. I was with family. We were a whole new generation of cocktail-hour, pastel, argyle and espadrilled homos ready to be hooted at or hated. In town we settled into the only questionable bar in the West Indies. Christmas lights doubled for disco lights.

A gorgeous black man took me up and ground his groin into me on the postage-stamp dance floor. A gentleman, too. I sweated something furious, and wondered if I could absorb his African gyrations. It was so simple and so powerful. He kissed me and went back to the dark side of the room. I wondered how all of this could someday be integrated into a dance—the heat, the slow intoxicating rhythm. We drank in our respective corners and I learned my new friends were all junior bankers, junior accountants, junior this and that office workers from Toronto. You know, some of them pudgy and well fed, some losing hair, all of them with a paycheque and a mortgage. Grown-ups in training only a few years older than me—covering their sunburnt bellies in a beach ensemble or perma-pressed cruise wear with nothing torn, cut off, open-toed, bleached or bare. Socks definitely mid-calf in the summer and knee-height any other time of life. Everything tucked in and belted. How fascinating. I wanted so badly to be on the other side of the room.

“You dance well,” said the chubby one.

“Well, I'm a dancer.”

“Oh? Who with?”

“The Company, Winnipeg, but now I'm living in Quebec, working with a small company there.” I was drunk enough to go on, and he didn't seem to be listening anyway. “I have to moonlight in a club.”

“You strip?”

“Well…”

“I knew it!” His chubby face glowed at the discovery, his eyes popped open. “Hey, guys, he's a stripper. An honest-to-God stripper. I knew it.”

I felt good. I felt bad. Crotch-driven gyrating and fudged dance steps had won out over ballet. And there I was—summed up in one word by this earnest accountant called Dennis—
stripper
. Javex-straw blond. Shaved chest. Cancerously brown. Tank top this. Sleeveless that. Thong this. Ripped that. Untucked. Disillusioned. Sallow. A pouter. Now they had a story to take back to the water cooler. Their friends would be jealous. They told me to come to Toronto for a visit. Dennis seemed to want to take me under his wing, in a big sister way. “There's no way you won't be moving to Toronto at some point. Give me a call. Look me up. I'm serious.” But Toronto seemed to be nowhere on my horizon. I told them all to come to Quebec for Carnival, and that they could sleep on my floor. Then later that night it was drunken sex with someone's boyfriend by mistake on the beach, under a tree, in the night rain (when we were all supposed to be having a walk under the starlit sky), followed by an intense brief skin rash. I had tried to imagine I was having sex with Mr. Clean but it was not the case. “Look me up in Toronto,” the nameless boyfriend said. He might have been cute but I couldn't see him.

 

 

Eight

A dancer's chest is
the first and most accessible conduit to the universe, from which a dancer can express himself, and from which the universe receives the message that a corporeal story is in the process of being told. The centre of the sternum rises skyward, tugged at by angels. Once you have experienced weightlessness you can never tell yourself that you will be content to be earthbound, ever again. The upper back follows, the torso narrows, the heels rise and soon barely the toes touch the edges of earth.

 

I got Kent's message
from Quebecair's humpy tropical tourist rep, too late to be of any help. As for the rep, he stood at the gate of my compound (looking more like a tennis coach), bemused at my sparse accommodation. I wondered about him, too. How someone could be so satisfied with such a simple existence. Was I, alone, in love with martyrdom?

I only had hours to wonder about Kent's call before it was time to head to the airport. The message was to call collect, but I was coming home, which he had likely forgotten. Had my place burned down? His? Had all my stuff—leotards, dance belts, spandex, Mylar and hooker furniture gone up in an acrid, synthetic and sweat-stained smoke? Had someone died? I couldn't imagine my parents dead. And, as for Kent, at least he was well enough to get a message to me, that's what I told myself through many mini-bottles of bad wine as we flew north over the Bermuda Triangle, and frost gathered in the corners of the window panes, my tanned skin starting to crack like the bed of an emptied lake.

My flight was rerouted to join the last of stranded passengers, from a week of heavy snowfall and cancelled flights, draped on seats, luggage and corridors, at the airport in Montreal. People were arriving from the great beyond, as well as through the front doors, stuffing the departures and arrivals with bundled bodies. It was then I saw the profiles of two good-looking, freshly tanned males stepping off the Jetway of a Varig 707 shrouded in the weakening blizzard, all the way from Rio. They glistened. Their hair was touched, with help, by the sun. They looked superb and sleek in matching leather bomber jackets, worth more than everything I owned put together. Their shoulders jostled each other, they chattered and took no heed of the tired throngs. One was Daniel.

It's funny how cruel we can be toward our own selves in split seconds. It seemed farcical that I had ever thought the two of us made some kind of match, and so obvious that we were from completely different levels in the hierarchy. My life was an angry dance that was frantically whipping about this terrestrial stage, crashing into the edge of the proscenium, pulling on the flies, the curtain, the backdrop for support, putting other dancers on edge, at risk; Daniel's dance was order, perfection and a soulless, heavenly world of impressive accomplishments. What cruel entity had arranged this near-rendezvous, or collision? My throat contracted, my face heated, and I stifled a natural response to follow, shocked that I didn't care much that it was Daniel. And shocked, too, that I was experiencing nothing toward him more than disdain, not even hate. Okay maybe a little heartbrokenness, but the whole picture of two men, so apparently enamoured with each other, was what hit me. I certainly didn't want to spoil it.

Meanwhile
la belle province
was buried under a week of snow. There was nothing to do but sit and wait and then find out that New Year's would be spent in the airport. Hotels were all full and the best they could do was a bus to the train in the morning. I called Kent, his mysterious emergency still on my mind. He answered on the first ring. “Are you okay?”

“Oh sure, I was just checking in with you.”

“Oh God. I thought there was an emergency.”

“Are you back?”

“I'm at the airport, in Montreal, or somewhere near Montreal. Looks like you'll have to make other plans for New Year's.”

“Well, here's to you and me in '83—we'll toast for real tomorrow, all right?”

I felt like I'd been away for years. “I miss you.”

“Yeah, I could say the same thing at this end.”

I found a corner of floor. Floor is familiar for dancers—although I prefer sprung maple to terrazzo—and got as comfortable as possible. I had my book of Nelligan poems, the one Kent gave me, and slowly leafed through it thinking I was making sense of the verse. There was great comfort in having something of his with me. I opened it to a poem, “Soir d'hiver,” appropriately about lots of snow, and the pain of life as well, from what I could tell. Another, “Amour immaculé,” about loving someone, a saint perhaps, who remains silent, impassive and proud. Who would do such a thing? Vaguely familiar. I wondered about what Nelligan had suffered as I drifted into a deep sleep. Midnight I was woken by brief whoops and then dozed for the next six hours.

On the train, I stared through a smudge of coconut oil my forehead left on the window, at clouds of churned-up snow blowing past us, wondering about Kent, wondering about Daniel, his friend—why they would fly from Rio on New Year's; did they have something better planned? I even wondered about the clean-cut employee who had told me about Kent's phone call. My head was spinning. What would Daniel have thought if he had seen me tanned, fit, blond, experienced, jaded, older and nastier? I still would have been no more than a morsel to be tasted.

I knew then, in that instant, that it had been lust—it was so mixed up with hate and apathy that it couldn't have been love at any time. It was obvious. I prayed Nelligan and I were free of our bad memories,
notre désir
at last. I was forgiven. It all made sense. The shame at my obsessive behaviour was gone in the blink of an eye. There was nothing that would ever connect us to each other ever again. I was starting to understand what love was: generosity, patience and care, for now. I dozed as the dry air pulled at my skin. I woke to a split second of Daniel vanishing forever, being swallowed up in the funnel of snow that swirled in the path of the train. I was full of thoughts of seeing Kent. In fact I was dying to see him.

The cab skidded from the station and finally gave up at the gates of the old city. I walked up Sainte-Ursule and saw from the street that my apartment was still intact, so before dumping everything I knocked on Kent's door. I knew Kent was where I could find refuge. There was a long silence, but lights said that someone was home, then a bang on the stairs, several uneven thumps on the stairs and the door opened.

“Surprise,
mon ami
. I came back just for you.” Kent's broken up face greeted me: a plum-blue shiner streaked all the way down his nose. A swollen upper lip. He was leaning on a cane. “What the fuck?”

“There's not much left of me to come back to.”

He lunged onto me for a quick and awkward hug. I heard him sniff and knew he was crying. He sniffed and pulled away. “Fuck, you look good enough to eat. Through a straw is how I'll have to do it.” He turned and led me silently, half-step by half-step, up the stairs and into the living room. He said he fell down the stairs the day before, just after getting back from Montreal, and panicked, which was why he phoned me—said he just wanted to hear my voice and he didn't know when I was coming back. He denied he left a message about an emergency, says maybe it got mixed up in the translation. (From English to English?)

God, it was still winter and now things had gone from bad to worse, no club in flames, no job offer from the Paris Opera or the Moulin Rouge, not to forget the New York City Ballet. And these other pieces didn't seem to fit; he looked beaten up. When I joked that he needed someone to take care of him all the time, he broke down. He said crying hurt his ribs, said he had truly missed me. I sat with my arm carefully over his shoulder, for a long time. I wanted to undress him and make love to him for the simple reason that he was so vulnerable, less of a predator than I perceived him to be.

“Maybe you could take care of me,” he said.

“I'll be your nurse. I'm sure I can find a costume at the club.”

“I might need more.”

“I'll sleep on your couch if Henri doesn't mind.”

He was silent as he sat slumped with his hands clasped.

“Can I make some tea?” I went to the kitchen to fill the kettle.

“I had a fight with Henri.” He didn't cry as he spoke, but tears were flowing. “He's gone to Montreal and wants me out in the next few days. I was phoning to ask if I could move my stuff into your place.”

“He did this to you?”

“It was mostly an accident. I tripped. Thank God I was drunk.” But I had the feeling it was as simple and nasty as Henri shoving him down the stairs.

 

From this stairwell and
all that has happened since I got here, I can say with some certainty that gay men don't have roommates. They are either together or ex-something-elses—ex-lovers or ex-tricks—and if they aren't, then one of the two has a fantasy that their roommate is, or will be, the man of their dreams. Then, I had a feeling that there was much more to this than Kent was letting on. Prove me wrong. I'd like nothing more.

 

Kent asked me again
about us being roommates.

“I'm always on the other side of the wall.”

“Maybe we need to be closer.”

“We'd drive each other crazy.” I wanted to protect what we had. “I don't want us at each other's throats because we're cramped.”

“We have different schedules. I have lots of places to go when you need your space.”

“Okay,” I was hesitant. “As long as you don't smoke.”

So, for the next two days Kent directed the move, sometimes from his place and sometimes from under a blanket and leaning on a cane, in the falling snow. Most of the furnishings were Henri's, thank God. I hauled all of his things—grocery bags stuffed with clothes, some bedding, some dishes, his dismantled bed—past the Café Latin and up to my place, until it looked like Madame Talegdi's garage. But I worked swiftly to change that.

“Time for bubbly.”

“I'm on painkillers.”

“So I have to drink this by myself?”

“God no. Painkillers and booze, it'll be great. Here's to you and me in '83.”

I'd assembled his bed in the kitchen half of the place and we set up a little nest in the sheets, got naked and toasted everything we could think of. Counted all of our blessings, the roof over our head, each other, and the fact that 1983 started out so badly that it couldn't possibly get any worse.

Kent hobbled and chain-smoked along the hall outside the apartment as part of our fresh air agreement. “I don't know how you can do this to me, when you come home every night smelling worse than an ashtray.”

“Then you won't mind if I don't have a shower,” I said.

“Then I could taste you.”

I could taste the smoke when he kissed me. I can taste it now.

 

The next afternoon I
left Kent to recover at our place while I took the bus out to Ancienne Lorette, staring at grey car-lots and strip malls, wondering why I had come back from the over-sexed, over-sensual, sinfully fertile tropics to this never-ending eyesore. Loyalty? To Marcel? To Kent? To a bad dream? I had less and less to lose. Not coming back didn't really seem so strange a concept. Why not run away?

The snow started to slice past the windows and soon we were riding on the driver's instincts more than the ruts in the road. The ride became quiet and slow. Did normal people do this? Didn't they stay home with a book or a good show on television? I was really starting to drift in terms of motivation.

When I finally got to the club it was to Marcel's news that we had guest showgirls from Montreal. Real professionals. I walked toward the stairs. Some of the girls had taken holidays and looked strange, un-made up, well rested and needing to readjust back into the nocturnal life-under-a-rock world of Chez Moritz. Something was different. They were sharing a joke, a secret. Had someone died? Was Brittany back? Was it my birthday and there was a huge cake in the basement, from which some fabulous guy saying he was all mine, and holding a one-way ticket back to the tropics, would leap? When I got to the change area this playful atmosphere of giggles and glances all became clear: at a new makeshift dressing table complete with lights and a wide mirror with a hunk out of the corner sat two over-the-top drag queens that gave off absolute sweetie-I-love-you-but-don't-fuck-with-me-or-I'll-rip-your-head-off vibes—Mesdames
Bichon Frissé
and
Tarte au Sucre
. “Call me Sugar—Brown Sugar.” Bichon was lean and tall, and Sugar was as black as Grace Jones with a beautiful set of tight pink lips that she pressed when she meant business. They got up and stood on either side of me, looking me over with their hungry gazes. They must have each been about a foot taller than me. Sugar's bustier was folded down revealing curly tufts of black hair on a firm chest. Bichon's shoulders would have put any footballer to shame. These women were all men. But I couldn't be anyone else's appetizer. “Bitch, we struck it rich,” said Sugar.

“'e's mine,” said Bichon.

“'e's everybody's from what I hear. And you know—good news travels fast. And by God, 'e is good news.
Chèri
, if you gonna dance wit' us, you got to help us into our wigs, that's the deal. If you know what I mean.”

“I hear he's a handy man.” Sugar laid her muscled arm across my shoulder, but I had to look up, way up. Her hands and wrists were fine and long, and they twitched as she spoke. “You come wit' a best-before date, handsome? Can I call you handsome?”

“I'm known as
Le Grand Blond
.”

“But I'm grander and blonder, no kidding, but you can see for yourself some udder time.”

“You call me whatever you want. I was taught not to argue with the ladies.”