Shelby (14 page)

For the first time since Lucy mentioned it, I also had opportunity to research the origin and function of the necktie—and proceeded to put my findings to paper.

TIES

Its original use was of a military nature; a regiment of Croation mercenaries wore ties in the mid-seventeenth century, purpose unknown. From there the French took fancy and passed the fad across the channel at the time of the plague where it caught on more quickly than Newton's discovery of the New Math. How remarkable that two such polar inventions would come out of the same tide of thought—not unlike moon voyages and Hula-Hoops in the sixties. But, alas, ties are just ties, without function, right?

Wrong
.

Ties are the closest thing to a hangman's noose that isn't considered barbaric. Ties are the closest thing to a human leash not considered pornographic. Ties are a constant subliminal message to a man that if he isn't strangling somebody's spirit, he's just one shift of a position from being hung up by his own lack of morals. In short, ties are a disguise for the wicked, breed paranoia and I will wear one no more
.

A short list of people who wear ties
.

Businessmen
.

Politicians
.

Televangelists
.

Wiseguys
.

X

Thank God I was never sent to school

To be flogged into following the style of a fool

—
William Blake

September 4th came and for the first time in fifteen years school began without me. I passed the morning watching T.V. and reassessing options. I got into the devil's water (one beer and a half bottle of peach schnapps) after screening a phone call from my parents wishing me good luck and good fun on my first day back at the university, and asking me if I would be coming home for Thanksgiving. It was the misty-eyed feeling in my heart of guilt and loss that led me wayward. By the middle of
General Hospital
I was soused and titillated (which in my now sober state I can see is the program's objective—as opposed to entertainment). I hid beneath the covers with Minnie—why
Minnie
?—in my mind's eye and so began another episode of
As The Ache Blows
. Alas, drunkenness left me slogging until my thoughts had segued to ways of ridding the planet of Frank. Strangely, this led to insight into the uprisings of lower classes through the ages—be it the English serfs in the Dark Ages, the French peasants charging the Bastille in the 1700s or even the L.A. riots from the 60s through to the present. I realised that having nothing but shabby lodging and excessive amounts of free time will always leave the underprivileged person prone to thinking up violent means of annihilating his or her oppressor. On rare occasions the unemployed layabout (e.g. Joan of Arc) will find his and/or her reactionary ideas being reshaped under the watchful eye of God. This was not one of those occasions. My hand stopped and I lay panting beneath the sheets before eventually pulling them back and reaching out to an empty Kleenex box.

Desiring structure, I picked up a copy of the
Vancouver Sun
the following morning and scoured the classifieds for employment opportunities. How quickly it bored me. Why couldn't there be a position for an enthusiastic young man to teach poetry to foreign students or the mentally ill? Because the health care system has no idea about holistic healing and even less about the therapeutic potential of 18th century poetry. From experience I
know
a dose of Matthew Arnold can soothe panic attacks better than any amount of high school counselling.

Desiring intimacy, that afternoon I dropped by on Lucy for an hour or so before she had to go to work. It was a remarkable meeting. We sat on the steps and for some reason broke into a discussion of the human condition that must have mirrored Plato and Socrates—answering questions with questions—doing the same thing thousands of years earlier sitting on the steps of the Parthenon in the hot Greek sun.

“… haven't we lost the nurturer?” Lucy asked. “Are humans a people without a home?”

“Do people need a home?” I replied.

“Or is
in
the womb the only place humans feel at home?”

“Or is home somewhere we go after we die?”

“Or is it neither, and do we spend our whole lives trying to get something that cannot be gotten?”

“Or—”

Lucy raised her hand to stop me. “Or,” she said, “is the earth that womb?”

“And we don't know it?”

“If we did, would we do what we fuckin' do?”

“Who can say what we'd do if we didn't do what we do?”

“I mean it's like what do you get when a drug-addicted mother gives birth?”

“Do you get a baby?”

“Or do you get a
drug
-addicted baby? Extrapolating that to the world, have we made this planet so sick that it gives birth to sickness?”

“Lucy?”

“What about the womb, Shel?”

“Do you think you and I will ever make love again?”

“My friend Marj took primal therapy in L.A. and reexperienced the second and third trimesters of her own gestation period. She said she felt like God in there.”

“Not that I want to force the issue.”

“That's why I'm quitting.”

“I miss it, though.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I think so.”

“What did I say?”

“I'm not sure.”

“I'm
quitting
.”

“Smoking?”

Lucy glanced at her cigarette. “Stripping.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because when I'm up there dancing,” she said softly, “it doesn't feel at all like a womb.”

“Did you hear what I asked?” I asked.

“Do you know that before God there was the Goddess?”

“I miss it,” I said.

“But is what you miss really what you want?”

“I miss
you
,” I said.

“I'm right here.”

“Yes, but—”

“I'm right here.” She smiled. And what could I do? Alas, the conversation had led her to Mother Earth, me to Sigmund Freud. I shrugged, too horny to be rational, and smiled back.

While watching television later that night after Eric had gone to bed, it occurred to me that all the major characters from
Bonanza
were dead (except the foster brother and Hop Sing). Moreover, in 120 years everyone who is now alive will be dead, too. I lay back, closed my eyes and recalled two disturbing statistics that I'd read in
The Sun
earlier in the day. One, 1 in 500 college students in a recent random survey had tested positive for the AIDS virus; and two, 1 in every 23 black men in the U.S.A. is murdered. Turning off the T.V., I felt both thankful to be alive and fearful of the future. My boney chest became covered in goose pimples, my nipples erect. I started to tremble and recited
Dover Beach
in my head, then aloud.

Sophocles long ago heard it on the Aegean
,

And it brought into his mind the turbid ebb

and flow of human misery …

It was time to start moving. But where? I didn't know. What was my destiny? The phone rang and it scared me. Reaching for it in the darkness I knocked it off the bedside table and onto the floor.

“Hello!” I said, unable to find it.

“Fuck,” I heard back. I found it.

“Hello?”

“I've had a crummy night.”

“
Lucy
?”

“I was at work … and all I had on was cowboy boots—those ones with the tassles—and a cowboy hat—”

“I like them.”

“And this front-row dick yells out: ‘You ain't no cowgirl, honey, you're just a fuckin' cow!'”

“What?”

“So I laugh and say, ‘Hey, aren't any o' you brutes gonna defend me?' I guess I was gettin' used to it with you. Anyway, no one notices—there's a ball game on the big screen. Then the same guy goes, ‘Just fuckin' dance and shut up before someone takes your place, you stinkin' whore!'”

“He said that?”

“So I danced a couple o' seductive steps in his direction …”

“Why seductive?”

“And kicked him right in the face.”

“My god.”

“When I was young, like five maybe, my old man used to call me that—‘a whore just like your mother,' he'd say. I've never forgotten it.”

“Oh my … oh—”

“I think I knocked some teeth out. Everything went flyin'. Down he went, crackin' his head like a watermelon. The club was packed. It got rowdy. Some people were screamin' at me. Some were cheerin' for me. I just stood there, naked down to my tassled boots and hat, lights flashing around me like a pin-ball machine, wishin' there was a Lone Ranger to come ride me home.”

“Are you okay?”

“Dammit, Shel! I was sure I'd grown outta those kinda outbursts. I mean I feel
bad
—right in the face. Some poor, drunkin' schmuck gettin' his jollies—oh, I got fired, to boot.”

“This is terrible.”

“Charges might be laid. Hey, could I come over?” The question surprised me. Lucy had never been here before.

“Of course.”

Despite protests, Lucy insisted on taking a cab. I gave her directions and waited.

Upon arrival, she was sad yet calm—less depressed than I thought she'd be. Barely a word was spoken about the incident. We wound up prostrate on the pull-out couch, munching butter-saturated popcorn and watching the late show until five in the morning. Lucy fell asleep just before dawn, her head resting precariously on my chest, her troubled heart seemingly stilled.

It had been both two days since I'd comforted Lucy and two days since I'd heard from her. Worried, I paid her apartment a visit; the curtains were drawn, the cat was gone and the door was locked. Her mention that she might go to Seattle was all that prevented me from filing a missing persons report. To my surprise, on my drive home I spotted Suzanne in black waiting at a bus stop on the corner of Commercial Drive and Broadway. I offered her a lift. Ten minutes later and despite my admittance to being nonpartisan on the abortion issue, she had convinced me to at least watch from afar the demonstration I was driving her to—if only to get a glimpse of civil disobedience in action. Upon arrival, Suzanne offered a thankful grin, surveyed the crowd of people and stepped out of the car.

“You know, Shelby,” she said, “maybe you shouldn't park so close to the building.”

“It's fine,” I said, stepping out. At that moment the side door of the clinic opened and I was swept up into the throngs of a suddenly enraged mob. Suzanne clasped my hand and I became an uncommitted link in a human chain of Pro-Choicers blocking Pro-Lifers from a group of three or four women seeking abortions. A sudden push from behind caused my link with Suzanne to be broken, and before I could firmly replant my feet, a placard declaring JESUS IS THE ANSWER—NOT ABORTION had cracked me on the forehead with such force I momentarily lost consciousness. In the resulting melee I was literally trampled, punched and kicked by both feminist peaceniks and religious fanatics who obviously cared more about zygotes than me. My arrival to the periphery of the gathering was the result of a sheer will to survive. Before I could inhale, a reporter had swooped down on me demanding explanation and a disclosure of my position. According to the CBC news later that night, and with blood gushing from my forehead, I replied: “Could you spare me bus fare?” Eric deemed me an irreverent hero à la John Lennon, and asked me to play on the sixteenth of September in a new band of his called Void of Paisley. Suzanne in black deemed me an irreverent fool à la Abbie Hoffman and cautioned me on making blanket statements. My parents deemed me an irresponsible young man à la me and were appalled that I supported radical Pro-Choicers. Gran never said anything. My head hurt.

One week to the minute after I'd last seen Lucy I saw her again. It was 11:05 in the morning and I was sitting on her steps reading
Portnoy's Complaint
and chewing on a cracked nail and a Hershey Bar beneath a sky almost as blue and warm as it probably was in the late 60s. By then, having received nary a word from Lucy and knowing about both her situation with Frank
and
the kick in the face, I feared abduction or worse. It turned out, of course, she had been in Seattle, visiting her oft-mentioned girlfriend, Marj.

“What are you doing here?” she said with a confused smile.

“Waiting,” I said, smiling back. After pleasantries, a much needed hug and an explanation of the gash above my eye which led to unbridled laughter from Lucy, we went into her apartment and started up where we'd left off; talking.

The story goes she and Marj once stripped together, and it was Marj who encouraged Lucy to follow her psychic instincts. At the same time, in the late-mid 80s, Marj was considering joining the Rajneeshees, a pseudo-cult-like group based in Oregon and led by the now dead but once enlightened Baghwan Shree Rajneesh. Lucy assured me that this guru was actually on the level, despite rumours of orgies, fondlings and a fleet of Rolls Royces. But on the evening before Marj was planning to move down there, a seventy-two-year-old tycoon from Seattle approached her after she had finished dancing and, with a massive bouquet of flowers and a selection of gifts, proposed to her. After careful deliberation, dinner and three or four Bloody Marys, she consented.

“They got married?”

“Big time,” Lucy said with a grin. “You're lookin' at the maid of honour.”

“Is the man …
perverted
?”

“Marj refuses to talk about their sex life—anyway, who isn't? All I know is they seem happy living in their mansion.”

“Mansion!”

“Twelve bedrooms?”

“Wow. Separate beds?”

“Nope. One four-poster beauty made for romantic romping.”