Jericho (8 page)

Sometimes the kids told me afterwards what they liked or didn’t like about the little brown ones that looked like laxative and the white jobbies that looked like thin aspirins. “Dude, I gave my girlfriend the one with the light purple spots and like twenty-four hours later she’s still curled up naked on the floor talking to herself and sort of giggling.” I collected all this info like a good field rep and was planning to pass it up the line to—who? I have no idea. No one saw Boots any more. Suddenly he wasn’t in a position to let himself be seen. I assumed this was mostly because he couldn’t afford to have his fingerprints on anything, but looking back it might have been fear of a turf war too. A person heard stuff. In the old days, I guess, the ethnic groups, they hated one another because they were different. But now, ever since Brian Ef Mulroney, it’s all about hating em for business reasons. I don’t know which is better and which is worse.

I rose late that day, as I hadn’t been keeping regular hours. I went to this place where I often ate breakfast and grabbed a booth. While I’m waiting for the eggs to come, I pick up the paper, which was lying back to front. When I turned it over, you could have knocked me over with a coke spoon. M
URDER AT RAVE CLUB
is what it said. The story was about how Boots was with two others, one of them female, ID still unknown or withheld (but I figure it might have
been Annie, that straight girl he liked). They were standing outside this club on Hamilton Street like they were waiting for something. I know the joint well. It’s in an old warehouse. If you put back all the original filth, it would fit right in along the river back in Windsor. It’s the kind of building with a roof, turned up at the end, that extends out way over the front, to keep the trucks out of the rain in the old days. These days the insides are a big open dance floor with a bar running almost the whole way down one wall and really bad loud music all the time: the kind of place where they stamp your hand and the bouncers have cell phones. Seems Boots and his friends were standing out front at two in the morning on what used to be the loading dock when somebody guns him down from a car. The paper said witnesses—maybe his old lady, maybe the other guy, or maybe just some twinkie who happened to be watching from the wrong spot at the wrong time—told the cops it was Chinese or Vietnamese guys (ethnic Chinese from Vietnam is probably what they meant).

The news really put the fear into me, man, and not just because I was probably out of work all of a sudden. I liked observing Boots or at least how he built things, but I didn’t like dealing in chemicals instead of what you actually grow. I’m old-fashioned that way even though I’m not a back-to-the-land type. Organics had always been part of my retirement plan, part of the Project. What worried me about the situation was I knew how somebody would checkmate somebody else and then a third person would retaliate right back at em. Eventually the damage starts to trickle down like water dripping through the ceiling. Hey, I grew up listening to Lonnie talk about stuff like this.

Over the next little while I read the papers really close. The story got worse and worse, with hints that the politicians might be mixed up in it somehow. When I wasn’t busy doing that, I was thinking hard, even when I was busy at something else. What I figured was that it was time to cut out. So I was selling the inventory, quietly, and getting rid of my stuff. Like a Boxing Day sale in springtime. I knew I should be gone before summer came up north and everybody started killing everybody else and the parents of customers start pressuring the city to clean house. I had a plan. I even had the Stick. My trusty Stick.

What makes lesbians different from other persecuted groups is that we are discriminated against because of how we are supposed to look rather than on the basis of the way we’re accused of talking. The insensitive may think this sounds nonsensical. What about the racially disenfranchised, they will say. So permit me to explain it to you.

What lies behind white racist attitudes towards African-Americans in the United States? Not skin complexion as such, for there is no standardization with regard to
either
race, no universal standard or set of charts that are consultable. The point of entry for the white racists is how black people are shown talking on television and in movies. That is, in oral fashion. All that jive-talkin’ mutha hoe upside-the-head stuff signals to the white ear: here is the enemy. So too with prejudice against First Nations people, which begins with reaction against their poetic language—soars like eagle and all of that. It always reminds white racists of that Canadian Native actor, what was his name, Chief Dan? Anti-Semitism is not unsimilar this way. The specifics of
Jewish speech as practised in eastern Europe in, say, the late nineteenth century—initial w’s becoming v’s, the hard final
g
in words like
long
and the liberal use of certain supposed phrases uttered by Jews in show business entertainments—are the things that activate the alarm in anti-Semites. Wit French Canadians it’s da same t’ing (though of course anti-Catholic hatred is also a major factor in that case).

Following along those lines, what triggers homophobia against gay men is that fey diction you commonly hear in the real-life West End and with even greater certainness whenever fags are featured in pop culture. But there’s no such thing as lesbian speech. Instead there’s only the stereotype of the large bull dyke dressed like a biker.

That leaves me the most discriminated-against of all. I do not conform to the image, being neither butch nor femme in how others see my appearance. I’m nowhere near imposing enough for the former—to have such a thought is to laugh. Nor, which is humorous in its own way to the same extent, am I fluffy enough for the other one. In fact, not fluffy at all. I’m small and blonde with this pointy chin like an upside-down piece of fruit. People used to mock me about having to buy clothes in the kiddie department, and I never let on that it was true, or used to be so, well into very very late adolescence. I have no body art or piercings, for I am of the wrong generation. More importantly, I have few discernible curves beyond my face. Looking at me, one could not say with certainty where my centre of gravity is. So homophobes intolerate me while fellow lesbians do so as well, gratuitously and with calculated effect. Always have done. But if my free-time study of the science of the mind has taught me anything, it is that it doesn’t matter
what people think of me because they wouldn’t like me anyway.

Don’t miscomprehend me. This is not self-pity speaking. There’s nothing scientific about self-pitying behaviour, and we must bring at least some science to the job of assessing ourselves. I’m just looking at the facts. I’m
staring
at them without expression.

Sometimes, in rare cases, a person’s coming-out is actually more of a going-in. It’s a liberation from having to pretend, yes, but also liberation from having to try—try to look like the people in media photographs, try to sound just the same as everyone else, try as hard as you can to make other people like you by being socially artificial and unnecessarily cheerful. I stopped buying into this fallacy when I was a teenager. My school uniform was never actually uniform with everybody else’s. My shoes were scuffed, one knee sock was almost falling downwards from elastic fatigue, my tunic never hung right. The other girls looked alike, which is to say they looked more girlish, and they didn’t have hair like old straw. They all spoke exactly alike too. They zeroed in on my mastery of language as the evident symbol of all the ways in which I was set apart at a distance from them. Often I sought out silence as my response to these cruelties on their part. They couldn’t ignore me if they couldn’t see me, so I cleverly turned myself invisible. But this only made me even more conspicuous—the only invisible person in the crowd. What I’m describing is pretty much the pattern on which life has been lived by me. This is how it is.

Which brings me to the matter of desire. I experience desire, you know, just like other people. Lesbian desire, my own at any rate, is like that of straight persons as I understand
it from the culture they continually bombard me with. You meet someone, either without expecting to or in some venue intended for that purpose, and there is something about her that you find attractive that you have never seen or noticed in anyone else before or, conversely, something that reminds you, though usually not consciously, of a quality you have admired in others in the past. You are reluctant to approach for fear that experience will rear its ugly face and you will be rejected. You don’t know how to proceed. This is especially difficult when you’re dealing with people who have so-called “good personalities” (the term has no scientific validity whatsoever—it’s a mass-media concept). They simply go around being polite to people all the time, completely without any discrimination, hoping to ingratiate themselves, living a constant lie. Thus you never know what they’re really thinking behind their smokescreen of—would you call it affability? I call it hypocrisy.

Beth was nice that first day when she came into the office, but I don’t mean that in a negative way. I didn’t get the impression she was being nice because she wanted my help, though of course that’s exactly what she wanted, or needed. Sure, she has the type of body I find attractive. She isn’t heavy but she has a broad back. Also, her legs looked a little stronger than most; I immediately guessed to myself that her calves were strong, possibly from growing up someplace where there are a lot of hills. But it was not merely her physicality that made me want to get to know her, important though this is. Helping people with my knowledge is how I have gradually come to respond to the world’s awfulness towards me that I constantly experience, and I sensed that she could use a wise friend. Possibly being a couple one day,
weaning her off the self-limiting narrow-mindedness of exclusively straight experience, of course occurred to me the moment she appeared in my doorway like a golden retriever or some other type of dog with similar emanations of questioning vulnerability. After all, I’m talking here about desire, which though it must never be misshaped by abstract emotion is not totally a logical thing by any means—we all accept that. Or such was my thinking at the time. More recent events have caused me to reconsider some of my initial responses, which I always seem to do only in the middle of the night when I should be getting back to sleep.

I can tell that she too is a victim of desire, though not towards me, but towards that devious phony she keeps talking about. I know just by looking that he is the type of individual with a police file that has his name on it. She, coming from a different sort of background, cannot recognize him for what he is. Such is my fear. When we meet I hear in her voice a clear indication of what she believes to be his long-term bed-appeal. Or if it didn’t start out that way, such seems to be the way it is heading. I can only hope that her interest recedes. Beyond telling her what I think and know, giving her the benefit of my understanding of such things, I cannot exactly tell her what to do. I cannot actually say: “If you have to have a straight man, almost any other one would be better than him.” Nor can I actually say, as my mother used to say to me, “Now you listen to me, young lady.” That would send a message that I am competing for her against him. As she is fragile and he is insane, such a signal might be reacted to in ways not foreseeable by me. Look at it this way: I have an investment in her, not of money but of desire, and I have to protect my investment. What else am
I to do? I ask myself this query but cannot come up with a worthwhile response, not even at
3:21
in the morning, which is what I observe it to be.

Talking to myself, not intruded on by other people’s sounds, has long been my most productive means of inner-conflict resolution. That plus, in recent years, my notebook of clinical observations, mostly in the field, which I hope one day will be transformed into something of even greater substance. I should get up right now and do what I do best. I could fill pages with the psychology of this dilemma with which I have been burdened. How do I make her transcend “nice” and respond to me in the affectional dimension I seek (or that in any case I certainly would not reject if offered)? For one thing, I must keep her from being damaged by this warped and careless non-thinker. How can I prevent this if I am not present on-site? This is the dilemma that was forced on me when she invited me to have a coffee with the two of them.

My first big mistake was accepting the invitation, the second was not speaking up when it was obvious that the slow-witted malcontent was being allowed to choose the restaurant. He preferred places frequented by other characters like himself, where he had protective coloration. That’s how we ended up in a decrepit diner, as I guess you would term it, with a few dirty chrome stools upholstered in red vinyl and a couple of Formica-topped booths, of which we occupied one. There was a sign that said C
USTOMERS ONLY WASHROOM
. The owner or manager, in any case the presiding authority figure, was a white-haired man with Chinese-Canadian ethnicity. He was reading to himself.