“Hey, hey, not for you,” she said.
“Why can’t I have a beer?”
“You’re too young.”
“I am not too young. What am I gonna do, maybe get a bit drunk and fall asleep in my own bed? Wow.” I paused. “But you’re giving Clint beer.”
“Clint is almost sixteen. He’s old enough to have a few beers,” she said, patronizing me.
The new triangle was forming.
It wasn’t routine behaviour for a parent to buy alcohol for a teenager, but my mother knew he liked to drink. She treated him like a contemporary, a friend. She was slick, could charm my friends with food or alcohol all she wanted, but I knew the real Helen. Lou had warned me. She once called our mother a black hole. How were we to deal with a parent that gave our friends the things they desired? It made her cool, fun. Everyone liked Mrs. V., until they crossed her. Even Lou would not escape her wrath that night, but Clint sat obliviously drinking his beer while hers sat untouched on the table. She didn’t like beer. I didn’t want to look at her. I went to my room and went to bed, but Clint stayed at the table, wanting to drink.
I woke up to a fight, opened my bedroom door and peered around the corner. Lou and my mother were arguing. I heard my mother say, “You’re a bad influence on Joanne,” and more, until she screamed, “You have to leave, Lou. I’ll be damned if I let you stay here. I’m not stupid. You don’t think I can teach you a thing or two, why, you got a big surprise coming.”
“I know why you are doing this —”
Mother interrupted. “You shut the fuck up, Lou, you hear me?”
“I know what you are up to, buying beer and keeping them home —”
“Shut up!” My mother screamed so loudly I jumped out in full view.
They stared at me and everything went quiet. I didn’t want Lou to leave, couldn’t understand why she was being ejected from our home. She hadn’t done anything that was worth being displaced.
“Where am I supposed to go? I’m only eighteen.”
My mother told her to find an apartment, reiterating that she was a bad influence on me, which was a lie. Lou and I barely spent any time together, and all the “bad” behaviours I exhibited were a result of my actions, not Lou’s. But once again my mother had a way of creating a reality that didn’t exist, pitting child against child, tossing Lou out because of me — or so she said. I didn’t want to be responsible, but that was the script, or what I felt internally.
“Take it back,” I said to my mother.
“I’m going.” Lou cut me off.
I couldn’t see beyond my own culpability and I wanted to fix it, but my mother sat defiantly as if she had been hard done by. Always the fucking victim.
I followed Lou to our bedroom while she packed a bag, but we didn’t speak. She crammed a skirt, a bra, a shirt, and other belongings into her luggage. I found a crumpled red two-dollar bill and gave it to her. Lou pushed the money into her purse as we stared at each other awkwardly.
“Lou … don’t go,” I said as I followed her out of our room to the front door. I tried to stop her, but she didn’t have a choice. Mother sat at the table, resolute. Lou looked at me before opening the door as if she wanted to tell me something, but instead she turned and walked away without another word.
I left my mother at the table, slammed my bedroom door, and sat on my bed. I opened a wind-up ballerina jewellery box and pulled out a small tinfoil packet, unravelled it until I found the white papery acid, and put it under my tongue.
Every other family member had slowly been removed. The only one who had made it out normally — off to university — was Diego. He was the only one who could do no wrong in our house.
It wasn’t his fault he was the only boy. It may have been a blessing for him in our family, but he learned horrible lessons about gender, too. My father once told him that if we girls got out of hand while our parents were out, he should beat us. Diego followed those orders, and once he beat Lou up with a broomstick. I watched it all, hiding around corners, behind furniture, listening, learning everything there was to know about men and women, girls and boys, our worth. But Diego didn’t get hugged or read to at bedtime, either. He was expected to be a man, not cry, be strong. If he ever cried, he got shit.
I wished that Diego could have stopped my mother from throwing Lou out. Sometimes she listened to him, our surrogate father. He sat with her during “family” discussions, scolding the girls over something, her partner in crime. Consequently, he became hated by his siblings and respected by his parents. He was the capable one, the good child, the man.
When the acid kicked in, I could forget about my siblings, forget about Lou’s departure. I went on a child’s acid trip, stepped inside Barbie’s trailer with her for tea and ended up in an amusement park on a Ferris wheel with the crowds below me.
I heard a voice inside myself speaking to me, and I responded until I decided the voice wasn’t real. When I checked my watch, it was four in the morning. I went to the fridge and pulled out a single carrot. I peeled the carrot down to the size of a baby finger and put it in my mouth. I lit a match, trying to light the carrot stick until I realized it was a vegetable and not a cigarette at all. I tiptoed to my bedroom and fell onto my bed laughing. The white walls were breathing, moving in and out.
I stuck my head out the window to get away from the moving walls. I stared at a tree, but it was breathing too. Everything was breathing in and out — the night sky, the leaves, parked cars, even the moon. Why hadn’t I seen the moon breathe before? I held myself and rocked back and forth to the rhythm of breath all around me. I looked at the moon again and wondered if it were possible for the moon and sun to collide, to explode and scatter fallen ashes around the Earth like dust.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MARTHA’S POLITICAL children’s theatre company was a hit in Montreal. We brought attention to the issues of our generation. We talked and wrote plays about parents, education, race relations, choice, and gay rights. This was unique in the 1970s and 1980s, giving voice to race and gender issues. We carried signs about social justice issues up and down the streets — “Children’s rights are human rights” — and sang “Give Peace a Chance.” Reporters and other members of the press reviewed our shows. Newspaper clippings piled up. The famous cartoonist Aislin even did a cartoon about our theatre company.
We younger kids talked politics and sex with the older ones. They were far more knowledgeable, and I tried to pay attention as they bantered about HIV and AIDS. One kid called it a gay disease, a plague.
Clint and I discussed sex all the time. We were in love and it was mostly innocent, exploratory. But that innocence fell away one day.
“Your mother asked me what you and I do together sexually,” Clint said. “She told me I was too old for you, that kissing was okay, but nothing more.”
“Seriously? Seriously!”
It felt like another deep violation: My mother inserting herself into my first relationship, asking questions about what we did sexually, crossing new boundaries, and manipulating my boyfriend. It felt like she was taking more away from me. Nothing was sacred, private, not even sexual exploration as a teen with another teen. It was the beginning of the wedge between Clint and me.
The only person I trusted was Steffin. Somehow, he seemed to know everything, could see the storms before they arrived. But he was only a boy — well, hardly a boy. His life changed after his mother died. He had to fend for himself in ways children shouldn’t, for shelter, safety, money. But it wasn’t our queerness alone that connected us (I was still in the closet and would think about girls only on rare occasions, then deeply bury those thoughts); like so many damaged kids, we gravitated toward each other and toward darkness.
Steffin and I met up on Saint Catherine Street one afternoon before rehearsal, outside an old pub with darkened windows. It was a small place that older men frequented. The midafternoon sun was bright and the bar was filled with local drunks and businessmen in suits stealing away for
drinks and more; the family men, Steffin called them, the ones with wives, who sought out sex with boys.
“I’m going to hide under the table and suck the dick of that guy in there. Don’t get caught staring at him. Wait for me here. Quick twenty bucks, then I’m outta here and we can go get some beer.”
I knew Steffin sold himself to older men for money, but I never expected to go with him and stand guard.
“I’m a minor, so I can’t get caught in the bar,” he said. “I won’t be long. If you see any cops, bang on the window. And don’t stare through the glass, Cinderella. You look out of place!”
“No kidding!” I was so uncomfortable.
Steffin finally came outside with forty dollars in his fingers, all smiles. “Did two,” he said, grabbing me by the shirt. We ran toward the nearest depanneur. “You could do it, too, Jo. There’s always an adult wanting to buy sex from a kid.”
Steffin opened the door to the depanneur and we went in. We walked up and down the alcohol section filled with cheap wine and beer.
“Isn’t there another way to make forty bucks?” I looked at the produce in the aisles of the store as we casually talked about child prostitution, though somehow it seemed normal. It was our normal.
“I make more money sucking dick than anything else I could do. Who’s gonna hire me, Jo?” Steffin grabbed a six-pack of beer.
We drank in a deserted parking lot behind an apartment building. I pulled a half-smoked joint tucked inside tinfoil from my cigarette pack and lit it. “You could be a personal dresser,” I said.
“Code for cocksucker.”
“You could work as a babysitter!”
“Then I’d have to suck the father’s dick.”
I told him that not every man wanted him to suck his cock, but then he described how a police officer had raped him in the back seat of a cruiser when he was twelve years old. He was busted for prostitution. It seemed bizarre, arresting a twelve-year-old after adult males had had sex with him.
“You were raped by a cop?” I asked. Up until that point, I had thought of officers as people who kept order, not as people who raped little boys. “Did you ever tell on him?”
“Tell who? They’re the cops. They’re the ones you’re supposed to tell.”
I squeezed in closer to Steffin, tucked strands of his long blond hair behind his ear, and wrapped my arms around his midsection. After he smoked the last few hits of the joint, he smothered the heater and hugged me back. We just held each other as if neither of us had been hugged in years.
We made our way to the monument in the park at the foot of Mount Royal where Steffin usually looked for gay men cruising along the paths, a hot spot for nightly encounters.
I sat on the concrete stairs beside one of the four green lions and stared up at the monument; above me was a figure with wings. Steffin took out a pill bottle and swallowed a blue pill with his beer. He gave me one.
“I think your mother has a thing for Clint,” Steffin said.
I socked him in the arm, hard. Steffin always pushed people, crossed a line verbally. It was his habit, and he liked to get reactions out of people. My mother hated him. Many adults were turned off by him, but I always thought it was because they were homophobic. But I would not discuss my mother or anything sexual with him. That was off-limits. “You shut the fuck up.” I punched him again.
“Okay!” Steff said. He put the cap back on the pill bottle.
I straddled the green lion, my face resting against the cold metal. Steff was lying down on the stairs below me. I touched my belly under my shirt, pinched my waist, a habit of checking for fat. We heard the voices of two police officers approaching us. We got up and ran, chased off the grounds by them.
“Rapers!” I screamed over and over, until we were both screaming “Rapers!” at the top of our lungs while our hearts raced and we couldn’t catch our breath between running and raging, late for rehearsal.
Our troupe was rehearsing a new play. We jammed, strummed guitars, recited poetry, and pretended we were members of the Beat Generation, painting on walls as if they were giant canvases.
After rehearsal, Splash wanted to go to the park with Georgia, Steffin, and me.
“What about me?” Clint asked. His hair was matted. He had showed up late for rehearsal that day, drunk.
“You can come if you want but you have to wipe that look off your mug,” Splash said as he studied himself in a mirror, puckering his lips. He always looked so beautiful compared to the rest of us with his carefully chosen wardrobe, sparkling eyeshadow, and multicoloured fingernails.
Clint blurted out that he wasn’t going to hang out with us faggots anymore and that he was quitting the show. I ran after him into the stairwell and grabbed hold of his arm. He tried to put his arms around my waist, but he smelled like beer, so I pushed him away. He grabbed me by the arm, pulled me back toward him, then pushed me down the stairs when I tried to get away from him. I stumbled down and landed on the stone landing. Clint ran down to see if I was okay, but I smacked him and screamed at him to fuck off and leave me alone.
“Please don’t leave me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know.” He was crying. I had never seen Clint cry.
I had never told him about my father and he never asked, so he didn’t know about the childhood of violence, or understand that he had done something we could never recover from.
“I’m sorry,” Clint said.
I pulled away when he reached for me. His reflexes weren’t as fast with booze in him.
“Fucking … come here!” he screamed.
I left him on the stairs as quickly as I could. Georgia, Steff, and Splash were huddled behind a door, listening. I heard them whispering: asshole, caveman, Homo sapien.
When I got home my mother was waiting for me. She held my journal in her fingers. I ran to my room to see my belongings scattered everywhere.
“You’re doing drugs,” she declared.
I screamed at my mother while she stood in the doorway to my room. I tore my journal out of her hands and threw it on my bed.
“You live under my roof, missy, and I have the right to check and make sure —”
“No, you don’t. It’s my journal. Get out of my fucking room!” I pushed her.
“Don’t you dare shove me. Are you trying to hurt me?”
I used both of my hands and pushed her a second time, in the chest, until she stumbled back. Then I slammed the door.
Everything seemed to fall apart that day. My relationship with Clint was over. He wasn’t the same boy.
I later walked by her bedroom, where she was lying on her bed. She saw me staring at her. “Please come here. Come sit with me.”
I didn’t move, could barely look at her. Hearing those words always made me feel ill, just like when she said “I love you.” I hated it when she asked me to go closer to her or sit with her, particularly if she was on a bed or the couch.
A number of weeks went by. Clint and my mother spoke several times on the telephone, something I found weird and unbearable. Then Clint showed up at our rehearsal studio looking for me. He had stubble on his face and wore dirty clothes, smelled of booze and cigarettes. He had bandages on his hands up to his wrists.
We walked to the park in the snow. We huddled together in a gazebo. Clint unwrapped his bandage and showed me a large gash on the palm of his hand. He had broken a beer bottle and cut his palm with it.
“I think I’ll kill myself if we don’t get back together.”
I gently rubbed my finger over his cut, rubbed the exposed flesh to keep it warm, then let go of his palm as a group of children came charging past us, making big footprints in the snow and dropping down to make snow angels before running off.
“I gotta get back,” I said, wanting to get back to rehearsal and away from him. He was lost somehow, broken. I wished I could have helped him, or picked up his heart to put it back in his chest. I wished he could be the same arrogant, confident kid I had met that first time,
with a smoke tucked behind his ear and that smug smile. He wasn’t that boy anymore.
I said goodbye and left.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I WAS FOURTEEN and had found a new look: thick black eyeliner and black clothes (shoes, socks, jeans, and shirts). I decided I was grown and would make my own decisions — to cut classes, get high, drink, steal.
Mother became less and less interested in parenting and couldn’t force me to follow her rules. The more I pushed the boundaries, the more she let go. I didn’t realize that she had already given up.
It was a Friday night like any other. I walked into the kitchen to get a drink. My mother was at the table with a pen and notebook.
“We are going to Toronto. There’s a school there and I think it could be a good place for you,” Mother said casually. “It has a theatre program. What do you think?” she asked, as if my opinion mattered.
I grunted, lifted my shoulders to my ears. I had known the day was coming — the day she would get rid of me — so it wasn’t so much a surprise. Maybe she thought she would get a fight. She looked half ready for one, but I walked to the fridge and pulled a can of soda out. “Toronto is fine,” I said. I opened the can, watching it fizz over as I inhaled and sipped at the bubbles before sauntering to my room.
End of discussion.
I heard Mother on the phone, squawking away like Charlie Brown’s teacher. I didn’t care anymore. It had been building ever since she ransacked my bedroom, looking for reasons to send me off. I preferred New York, but Toronto would do. She’d been trying to find a place for me to go for nearly a year, and maybe this one would stick. What I hadn’t figured out was why. Why had my mother been trying to find a place to send me? It wasn’t that I didn’t want to get away from her — I did, but I must have been just horrible enough for her to want to get me out. I smoked, I drank, I cursed. I actively hated her. I was an adolescent and needed help. Instead, I was being sent away as if it were normal.
All We Knew But Couldn't Say Page 6
