What I wrote today:
I took a stray red dog home when I was a kid, sometime before I turned 11, and after I was 8. I fed it hot dogs I think. Next thing I know, I’m walking down a path in the field, and I see what looks like the dog’s pelt, full of dust. I didn’t make the connection at the time. It’s all these years later, that I finally do. Around that time, I came across a dilapidated shack, and inside were bones. The dog’s bones? I wonder. Did Anne kill that dog I wonder. Wouldn’t surprise at this point, now that I’ve opened my eyes about her.
For many years, I was in the habit of forgetting, that she’d tried to kill me. It must have been a coping mechanism, to either forget, or to say to myself in later years that she’s grown up, grown out of her shenanigans. Eventually, Anne came to Vancouver on a business trip, and took me out to dinner, at The Keg on Granville Island. I thought that since she was making an effort to relate to me, I would clear the air. So I mentioned that she’d tried to kill me.
I said that she tried to drown me. She said she didn’t remember. I said she hit my face with a baseball bat. She said she hadn’t known I was there. I mentioned the electrocution. I don’t remember what she said. Probably, that she’d thought I was playing a prank on her. A few years later, she flew me to Toronto for Christmas, on her Air Miles. I stayed with her for about a week or 10 days, her and her fiance.
We were at one point, watching movies from when she and I were kids. Mum was there in the living room with her boyfriend Walter. On the screen, I saw us kids on the beach, and again, I wanted to clear the air. I said “You tried to drown me.”, and this time, with her fiance sitting beside her, she didn’t claim not to remember. She said, for her fiance’s benefit I’m sure, “I was trying to save you! I thought you were drowning.”
She was nice to me during that stay in Toronto, letting me use her library card, walk her fiance’s dog (Well they never walked him!), supplied food and alcohol. I was vegetarian at the time. I remember eating raw broccoli while everybody tucked into eggs and bacon. No one chided me about it, surprisingly.
But she wasn’t always so accommodating. I’m sure the reason she had me over, was to make herself look like she was normal, you know, is on good terms with her sister. So that her fiance would go ahead and marry her. Another time I lived with her, also in Toronto, I was a stripper, and in hindsight I think the only reason she invited me to live with her was that she saw that I wasn’t getting chewed up by the skin trade, so she must have thought that I had mob protection or something, which, of course, she’d want to rub off on her. I think that when she figured out that no one was protecting me, that was her cue to kick me to the curb, in the middle of winter, with not a cent, and nowhere to go. More about that later.
I admit, that one time, I brought a John to her apartment, when I knew she’d be at work. It was unusual for me to prostitute in Toronto, but I did do it a few times. This guy had me dance for him in Cheaters strip club, and asked me if he could pay me to have sex with me, and for some reason unknown to me I said yes. I must have been broke. He came buzzing at the agreed upon time, and entered the apartment, and claimed some excuse for not having the money, and he wanted to know if we could have sex anyway. I said “No money, no candy.” I was astonished I’d said that. He left without incident.
But Anne wouldn’t have known I did that, and I never did it again. I gave my head a shake. I did sell sex to another man who had me dance for him at Cheaters. Or rather, instead of having me dance for him, he’d dole out cigarettes to me. I was in a desperate state of mind obviously, scrounging for cigarettes. He told me he wanted to buy sex from me, and I accepted. I remember thinking, how skinny he was, while we did the deed. I guess it was a hotel, and I think he drove me there in a van, and I was hoping he wouldn’t turn out to be a serial killer. He had long stringy blonde hair, and a big penis, which made him look even skinnier. The sex wasn’t painful, but neither was it pleasurable. I just wanted the cash.
When I first started at Cheaters, the owner took me out for dinner, and said that if I would be his mistress, I wouldn’t have to strip. I declined, because I wasn’t attracted to him, and being a mistress seemed to me to require more than just mechanical sex. He’d had me dance naked for him before taking me out to dinner. As I did, he said he loved redheads. He ended up paying me 20 or 25 dollars per shift, and would dance to 3 songs in rotation with the other strippers’ 3 songs per set. I had to do hawk table dances, for anything more.
At that time, there was no touching allowed. I’d never heard of lap dances. They were $5 a song. You’d place your wooden box at the client’s table, closest to his chair, and stand on it. I had one regular customer at Cheaters who was awfully good looking, warm, kind, and generous. He drove me home one night, and asked me outside the house (Anne had moved into an apartment in a house by then.), if I’d like to smoke a joint with him. I said no, stupidly. Then he asked if he could take me out to dinner sometime. I declined that offer too, because I valued my own monogamy, and I’d just started ‘seeing’ someone.
That someone, was some small greasy musician who flirted with me at a subway station. I’ll call him Tim, because I can’t remember his name. I went with him to his practice space in the basement of a strip mall, which was also where he lived, with two of his bandmates. They had partitioned off the back area, with hanging bedsheets, into three cubicles to sleep in (and have sex in). There was a curly haired blonde guy, who Tim would always make fun of, calling him Herpes.
One time, Tim and I had particularly grimy feeling sex in the small bathroom, and the next day or so, I felt these painless sores on my vulva. They were kind of numb. I took the long trip out to see Tim, and we went for a walk. I think he knew what I wanted to talk to him about, hence the walk, away from his bandmates. I asked him if he had herpes. He answered that he noticed something when he was taking a bath at his grandmother’s place. That was the last thing that was said between us. We both knew, that we both knew, that he’d given me herpes, and I never saw him again. No recriminating words. Just absence.
I went to an STD clinic, but have never been diagnosed with herpes. I’ve never had the blood test for it though. I probably have antibodies. At one point, I was in a library, and read in some book that a 1/3 of females can fight off herpes. I believe I’m in that category, at least for the two strains I’ve been exposed to. For some time afterward, I’d warn anyone I was about to have sex with, that I had herpes, but no one even flinched. Just dove right in!
Charlie came out to Toronto from Montreal, and went for me sexually as always, and I warned him as if I were radioactive to keep his mouth away from my vulva. Because of his paralysis, that was how we had sex. He’d use his mouth and filthy fingers. But his mouth was like a magnet to metal. He didn’t develop a rash, surprisingly.
The next person I warned, was Jim, who lived in a disused canteen truck, in a parking lot. I don’t remember how we met. He was a soft spoken ex Hare Krishna devotee. Short, compact, physically gentle, and wonderfully vegetarian. He had a few books on the subject in his tidy canteen truck, that I would peruse while he was out. There was a store nearby that sold dates and almond butter. When I had money, I’d grab some and gorge in the truck while waiting for Jim. I think there was a trick to unlocking that truck, and Jim had showed me it.
Before we had sex, I warned him I had herpes, and was sure such a clean living person would be thankful that I’d told him ahead of time, but next thing I knew, we were cuddling on his bed. I used to feed raccoons, on the roof of the truck. I’d perch there, under the canopy of trees at the side of the parking lot, the whole family of raccoons waiting for me to hand them raw almonds. They’d take them carefully from my fingers with theirs.
One day, I tried to urge Jim to come up onto the railroad tracks where I would often run (while listening to Echo and the Bunnymen), sometimes in darkness, I tried to urge him to go there and exercise with me. His response was to accuse me of only wanting to exercise to make myself sexy. For some reason, that put a terrible damper on my mood. He really hurt my feelings with that. I mean, it was partly true, but I exercised mostly because it made me feel good. Strong, agile, and calm.
Eventually a ‘friend’ of Jim’s came to the truck while I was there alone, and invited me to the park nearby. I went with him. I think he called himself Peter, but he looked a lot like Patrick Swayze. This was before Swayze became famous.
To be continued…