|
Not all scars have stories. Most people have scars but only have medical records to go with them. Each precise in measurement, deliberate in an effort to sustain, to heal, to relieve and to minimize its ultimate presence. Mine have stories with beginnings and endings. Mine are tales told, inflicted in anger, driven by fear and asked for. Mine are a life reflected in the mirror of dead flesh. There’s disaster and blinding rage in the stories etched upon my ageing body. How often have I stood just as naked as I am now before similar wardrobe mirrors running my hands over the stories I’ve never told aloud to another soul. At least not the truthful. Naked, without a place to hide. Naked, with shame. I’ll always find myself standing in places like this with my anthology of torn and never recovered flesh. Standing naked, body sagging from the ravages of life’s corrosion makes the absurdity of the lies I’ve fabricated to explain the violence done to me even more pathetic and unworthy. To burn off the lies, to peel them away, to reveal them as the lies is what is demanded. How many times in the years past have I professed that the jagged tears that track over face and upper chest were the result and residue of a boating accident, drunkenly earned in a summer’s challenge of bobbing on the ends of a canoe. Ahhh, the lie that so many accepted given the presentation of apparent sincerity. But here alone, naked, unobserved, the truth grins hideously at the man defeated so long ago. Above the left corner of the left eye, across the left breast and along the upper left thigh, she touched me thrice, touched me forever. A drunken boating accident at times like this would be preferable as a truth. But it wasn’t and isn’t. Poignancy crafted this damage. Disfigurations delivered as poetry; rhythmic, deliberate. A razor whip brushed my body thrice with an exquisite delicacy, sculpted as if by the hand of Giacometti. It was street theatre in one of a thousand anonymous alleys as much a part of Vancouver’s soft underbelly as were the hotel/whorehouses they separated. Mine was but a stones throw from the rail yards and light years so it seemed from the courthouse steps safety. But then that’s where all this started, out on courthouse steps in sultry afternoons and desperate nights among those summer refugees. With them in all our summer youth and withering innocence I had my anonymity. I never had my safety. We, all of us at that time in the collisions in that place were young enough to thrive on wasting summer’s time waiting for the opportunities of languid nights. Courthouse steps, our hunting ground; their marketplace. You couldn’t help but thrill at the weird juxtapositioning; inside the building we rested our backs against, upon whose steps we traded cigarettes, addresses, a cheap fix or a furtive entanglement, justice was for sale to those with the coin to get it. And here, outside the leather upholstering, the wood panelling and the briefcases filled with inducements or blackmail, were our young bodies. Rentals, some of them; by the hour some of them, by the afternoon, fewer. The lucky ones by the night. No justice, not out here for young bodies on courthouse steps, where payment for services rendered were as often in the ability to survive, being able to just stand and walk out as it was a handful of soiled bills. Justice on courthouse steps. Out here, on courthouse steps the degraded and the brutal preyed on the unlucky, the unwise, the naïve, the desperate, or the foolish. Sitting it out on the courthouse steps. Waiting for retrieval. Time passed slowly, gauged by the reappearance of those who’d had a hit earlier and were now back, restless, strutting, bragging, drunk, stoned, working it, waiting for it, begging for it and deserving of the exchange of heat for money. Who’d notice another body? Would I? Didn’t think so. But I did as afternoon had started its slow desperate decline. A tan too perfect for the street, for the steps of this summers, or any summers justice. Nothing of our urban pastiness which was our colour down here. Her’s was a coloured testimonial to privacy and privilage. The angularity of her body was almost obscene. In an undersized tank top and faded jean shorts, cut to crotch and ass flesh exposure, her presence was disconcerting, disquieting. She’d appeared from beyond the northside of the building and moved down the sidewalk passing before the steps upon which the desperate felt suddenly less significant than just that instant before she appeared. Could panhandle for more than change in faded crotch cut jean shorts and summer strained tank top. Christ I’d steal for her, oh God, I’d kill for her. Crotch cut jean shorts and faded tank top. So would you. And she moved on by, eyes of the zealous, the jealous, ravaging in minds eyes what lay beneath the remnants of cloth covering her firm breasts with winking nipples and hand begging ass cheeks daring you not to moan aloud in hunger. Sirens by the pack howled off to the left and it was only the screams of an unlucky being clubbed into sidewalk of concrete that pulled us from our angel nymph. And then she was gone. Hot damn! Cigarettes were cheaper than food out here on courthouse steps. You’d share a smoke, but never a fucking sandwich. As the shadows of this lost day lengthened over the front of our communal hunting ground, I finished the second to last cigarette I’d bummed from a guy I’d never seen ten minutes before shaking him down. Now he was working the corner. Blue Mustang Man would be cruising within the hour. The money was good for a drive through the core, head in his crotch, mouth filled with his sex. Money depended on the amount of stain on his shorts, on his pants. Semen free underwear and dry pants earned top dollar. Cigarette boy was good, but I knew I was a top dollar lad and I was hungry for it and the money. Prospects seemed few and another night without food and a place to crash loomed. "Son of a bitch," As a Gemini, alone, I’d learned to develop an ability of conversing with myself as if another persona sat on courthouse steps as fevered as I. It accentuates loneliness but prevents lunacy. "Son of fucking bitch!" Desperation gave the words edge. I watched for Blue Mustang Man, working my fly, slightly, and kept an eye on Cigarette Boy with his hairless complexion, tight ass and hyped boy bulge straining his fly, trolling through the gutter for the same benefactor. "Son of a bitch," I mumbled without conviction, getting colder, always hungry, with one cigarette and no hope. "Who you talking to?" Her voice was distant as if more an idea than actuality. But she was there, on the step behind me, to my right and her left knee, sweat warm rested against my shoulder. I glanced, disturbed by her proximity, but I’d nothing to add, couldn’t. Hard On Girl. "No matter." She’d a cigarette in her three fingered left hand, "You got a light?" Three fingers? The small finger was completely severed, healed stump, clean removal. I refused to let our eyes meet. Her face thin and hidden beneath dark waxen hair clinging to highboned cheeks. Breasts visible through rice paper tank top, nipples like tiny fists punching free and parted thighs, oh dear God, parted, confirming that beneath crotch cut shorts was shaved girl sex. The requested light exploded in a paroxysm of infantile heat and I knew I gasped at her exposure. She knew of her achievement and merely held the cigarette closer in her three fingered grip. Three fingers? I shifted slightly groping through my pants pockets pulling out rolling papers, gum wrappers before scoring the crumpled matches. As I fumbled, her left knee, thigh warmed my shoulder, pressed with articulate _expression. Suggestive? Inquisitive? Indifferent? She had the matches, and I needed a shower. The cigarette she lit she passed to me as she snapped a match head over a second. Blue Mustang Man at the turn up the corner and Cigarette Boy was moving along the sidewalk, balancing his hungry mouth between sidewalk pedestrian and front seat orgasm. I inhaled heavily, held the poison deep in lungs of seventeen summers and knew I didn’t give a shit about Blue Mustang Man as long as Hard On Girl kept her thigh pressed into me. Even though it was going to cost me, I froze to her. Down here at this time, you took what you could get. Here sunpleasant seductiveness blinded me to the fortune to be won from taking everything lying in Blue Mustang Man’s unfastened pants driving out toward the setting sun off toward Pacific turbulence. I could smell, was drowning in her sunpleasant seductiveness. So to could half the men in the human ooze leaking from the core of the darkening city, heading out to suburb safety. They could smell this soiled nymph, her left thigh sticky to my shoulder. I enjoyed their sniffing envy. Goddamn right, I thought nearly aloud, pressing into her, this one bucko, is mine. "Plans?" She inhaled, spitting bits of tobacco on the step between her sandaled feet. "None," I replied, turning enough so that my right arm draped over her thigh. "that a few bucks won’t change." "We all have plans," she replied indifferently, scratching beneath her right breast, "or we wouldn’t be here?" "Me," I shifted to watch for Blue Mustang Man, half losing attention on the girl and giving thought to challenging Cigarette Boy, "I need bread, a fucking place to crash and…" Blue Mustang Man again in sight. Dinner and breakfast was circling toward us again. "and…" "I haven’t seen you around here before?" Her three fingered hand rested on my arm. How many are too many questions I was thinking? Down here any question could be one too many. "Maybe you weren’t looking for me." Good retort, smartass but not stupid. "I’m always looking." Her fingers caressed my upper arm, fingers slipping under the sleeve of my T-shirt. Cops and questions, that’s the match I understood. Last time I gave a smartass answer it almost cost me a tooth. Where’s the badge hidden on this one? In crotch cut, ass cheek riding jean short remnant? Or maybe its pinned inside the faded tank top so matted to her that is was little more than an extension of flesh? Badge in hard on wear? Not a prayer. No, she was after something else. God! I was sensing panic creeping out from the shadows of the halls of justice onto the steps where there is no justice, there is now less reprieve from her shifting body pressing into mine. Blue Mustang Man. I find myself begging for him to come back and come back for me. Turn the corner unzipped, with that wink in your eye, and cash in your hand. I’m growing more frightened than hungry, my willingness to alter the course she is setting and eagerness for another outcome than that emerging, sliding away like sand in an hourglass. Her chin rests on my shoulder as I almost call out for you Blue Mustang Man and she knows, she knows as I feel her teeth bite into me, her left hand slips down my back and up under my gritty T-shirt. For the last fading time I gaze toward the corner, past Cigarette Boy; hurry Blue Mustang Man, hurry your way through these plagued streets for I know I’ll be lost, more victim than I am with my face buried in your sour pants. Hurry, save me for back there, not far, inside, her hot breath wafts over me, her spit staining my shirt sleeve as this half naked beauty beast begins to devour me, body and soul. I searched worthlessly now the merging traffic as it merged into a filthy pavement river between canyons of dirty steel and glass, searching for a better ending than a woman could offer. Yet I knew Blue Mustang Man could not save me. I wanted it otherwise and I had already surrendered. Hard On Girl. At the corner there he was, again, Blue Mustang Man, alone, waiting. Sitting, idling in the no stopping zone. Waiting in the zone, unzipped in the zone. Waiting for… waiting for… "Let’s go." Her words rolled into my head from behind lips breathing close. Waiting for… I was better than Cigarette Boy. She was on her feet standing down a step in front of me, left leg propped one step up, her foot nudging mine her naked shaved sex, flesh petals thick, flowering before me, her rounded breasts with nipples taut, nuzzling toward me, and now her hands, three fingered left and full complimented right reaching down and drawing me into her. Without saying where, and I not caring, she had me on my feet, my hand in the three fingered left and feeling the loss in my grip. I couldn’t find the strength to look back. Not waiting for me. Blue Mustang Man had scored as Cigarette Boy climbed into the seat next to driving Blue Mustang Man. The car moved free of the no stopping prohibition as Cigarette Boy disappeared face first below the dash board as Blue Mustang Man pressed back into the seat and accelerated. I was better than Cigarette Boy. Bastard! I thought with sincere anger. I was better than any of these little pricks out here, male, female or those betwixt and between! Blue Mustang Man, he’d been mine, he’d have waited for me, he’d have waited longer for me, but… "Bitch." I the word bouncing along between us as we reached the sidewalk and she pulled my hand severely. "What you do that for?" I railed helplessly at her, as a child does to its mother, railed angrily and helplessly, without virility, without warrenting respect. "You worry too much." Her answer was indifferent, from someone who could afford it. Smartass bitch! Might be goddamn easy for you. Look at her. I had and I knew. All she had to do right now, last night, tomorrow night, any afternoon, is stand still and they’re all over her, like flies on shit, leaving behind more than enough to get her and to keep her. Hard On Girl. "I’m hungrier than he is." I was writhing over Cigarette Boy’s scoring with Blue Mustang Man, when all the time I knew I was better. She laughed, still with my hand in hers, still moving into the setting sun with me in tow, "They you’re only hungry. Not ravenous. Not like us." Us? Us? "Us you little pecker," She held her right arm out ahead of her, as if she wanted to point in the direction the ravenous were located, and then thought better of it. "We are ravenous and will settle for nothing less," She turned, stopped, her hazy mouth, hot breath into mine, "we must be slaked, our hunger satisfied." I could feel her body heat, hard nipples pressing from firm breasts, greasy overheated flesh cavorting, her tongue stealing into my mouth as she reached around my shoulder, capturing me, holding, binding me to her conspiracy. As suddenly she turned and we were walking arms around bodies, mine under her tank top, squeezing over slick flesh, as we moved west, into the sun, toward the bay, toward Asia out beyond the horizon of water and sky emptiness. Deep into canyons of high living and ostentatiousness, into the heart of privilege and prosperity. Ravenous? You better be to live up here at this altitude! And she was and I was determined to claw my way up from the mediocrity of being just hungered. At a corner in the midst of BMW/Jag traffic jam she turned into me, taking me in arms of anger and pulled me into her, lust exploding as I was under her tank top, groping without limit, exposing her without shame. High above the Bay of English in cut glass eyrie, I watched the nymph, everyone’s Hard On Girl, cavort from setting music to our dance, to finding hidden joints to pouring tumblers of parental imbibement. I watched as she pulled her remnant tank top over her head and strode breast naked across the room. Too tanned for the street, no tan line, breasts the colour of back. She dropped and kicked free of crotch cut shorts, now naked hairless having cleansed her full sex with deft razor strokes. And then she stopped and stood, in outline before sun declining into distant Asian sea and waited, joint in right hand, three fingers of left pressed to her belly. I felt mountain ranges east slip beneath the curtain of blue to black. "Get undressed." She said matter of factly and I knew nothing would follow, not a motion, not a word until I stood naked with her. Great sea west lay endless and still, water heading off with the sun, water the colour of pure light, sky into sea, sea into distant horizon. "What happened to your hand?" I couldn’t resist the question, pulling free of shirt, pants and underwear. Naked I felt oddly assured, more certain as I moved across the plush decored room to her. She seemed to tremble, slightly. Holding her left hand before her, examining the fingers and mutilated stump of the fourth she seemed to ponder whether to lie to me, and decided against it. "I’m Catholic and I see and experience the Trinity in all things." And she flashed me all three of her trinity left hand. Father, daughter, spirit between them. Mother? "Cut her. Cut her down." She touched tongue tip to small finger stump, watching my fear. "Right hand of God, left hand of God." Her trinity left hand spoke of the abandonment, of being damned in the eyes of Her, of our God, for I too was of Her faith and beheld the same sense of righteousness and the same swelling repulsion/attraction to our mutual damnation. Three fingers, three pieces of clothing, meeting at three o’clock, walking three blocks north, three blocks west, three blocks north, three blocks west. She finished the joint and reached out to me, drunk, stoned, naked and hard on for her. I was defeated, lost, surrounded, captured and succumbed. Photographs on the mantle suddenly stole into view, child in the arms of a tall, faired haired man and… and… the woman in the photo had been removed, cut out viciously with razor anger. I puzzled over this contradiction of love and hate. She stepped further into me, diminishing far off Pacific setting sunlight, haloing her lithe ravenous nakedness, "All things worthy are thrice done." She wasn’t smiling, wasn’t pleased, "You want to make love to me? You all do." The photos on the mantle joined us in our naked confrontation, referees? Judges? That fair haired man, the child, the mutilated missing woman. She was upon, into me, wrapping me, rolling over me like a heavy weather Pacific tsunami tide, inescapable. In sweat tainted violence, in fear of violence and in anticipation of it, I performed the rituals she demanded. Sex, tearing and hurtful were inflicted through me on her, filling her, consuming her. I fucked her mouth, performed into her cunt and deep into her ass. Driving into her holy trinity as if I belonged there, I’d work until… until ….. Semen was mixed with the shared sweat upon her face, her belly, her back. Nothing from me inside her. In exhaustion we culminated under starlit elegance upon the high balcony, naked under blanket from stained bed, passing joints, drinking Remy Martin and waiting for dawn to alter the rest of our lives. I awoke upon the windscape, surveying from high above affluent bay below, boats and yawls bearing pure white sails gliding, dancing, frolicking among the great tankers of rust and burden in the bay each and waiting their turn under the Lion’s Gate. I awoke alone. Escape and its requirement took hold and I dashed unapologetic from the midst of empty wealth, the fair haired man, the child and razor removed woman upon gilt mantle. Now hours later I was still lying about being on courthouse steps. On the steps of justice without peace, I searched for my Hard On Girl and spoke to no one of our holy trinity lasting until the darkness was exhausted with us. I sweated through the afternoon, smokes bummed and stolen. Trysts begged from cars, men for boys, women for children, all begging for our young attentions. And I ignored their heated and moneyed pleadings, calling out as they moved past for just a half hour, a lousy fucking half hour hump, a quick sticky suck, or a desperate fondle leaving them fumbling for zippers, buttons, hiking up pants, pulling down hems of dresses. They offered me nothing, I was waiting… waiting… waiting. Across the street she appeared as an apparition from the concrete upon which she now strode. Hard On Girl in flowing summer dress of flowers and colours of glorious pastel, shoulder bag, hair tied back tight and how she stepped forward, drifting upon the earth, cutting through the mere mortal world which divided as Red Sea before the voice of God’s messenger herself. I wanted to wave, raise my hand, beckon to her, run to her, beg her to take me home, to take me to heaven, if that be the place. Seeing her stride half way down the block and stop, I froze in place and time. I did nothing, said less and in that instant prayed she’d not see me for the terrified, for no reason fathomable, soul I was upon courthouse steps. But she did and I was, without asking where, walking with her. Toward the yards where freight trains jostled and cavorted into nights made restless by the pursuit of the few for the wealth from the many, where great trains collided and ground there way down lines into open country beyond the flats east. Past derelicts and junkies, past the confused and lunatic, walking with punks and corrupted whores, we two weaved our way downward. Into one alley between hotel/whorehouses and then into another, as if taking stock, as if we two were selecting the right location, like a couple of regular folks on the hunt for that new house. Down here the alleys are as blind as the desk clerks. Down here I was in and out of alleys, blind Ravenous. Ravenous. Wedding band on third finger, left hand, last finger of her trinity. Wedding band of the razor removed woman, razor removed wife and mother. Wearing her summer dress of lovely, inviting, alluring pastels, promising me, taunting me, she lured me and with quick hand my heaven quest was straight razored to hell. Agility and motion. A graceful wind whisper slipped forever over my left eye, trailing off into some distant beyond. And then she was back, thrice in all. Left hand swept from right to left opening me above the eye; from left to right opening my left breast; from right to left searing open my left thigh. Blood oozed, didn’t spout, didn’t flow, didn’t spatter, oozed. Without flinching, feeling nothing of any pain I’d ever known, I stood. Blood oozed over me, down my face, my chest, my leg. I was frozen as I could feel myself losing. I didn’t scream. Her eyes, shark like, dead, cold - ravenous. And then as suddenly as the flashing tore me open, everything was an emptiness into which she disappeared. Hard On Girl. She’d never have run. She knew she would never have to. Now decades on, I remember my Hard On Girl and I knew I was one among many. Sitting again on steps of concrete on a late summer’s afternoon under filthy once azure sky, looking again in Blue Mustang Man’s no stopping zone I feel a fierce burning of torn flesh never healed, never innocent, never loved and for a brief terrible moment see her, summer dress and razors smiling back at me.
|