Shelby

by McCormack, Pete;

  Then I thought about how wonderful Lucy was for going against the norms of avant-garde natural selection by spending the last couple of weeks mating with a genetic outcast. Sure enough I became aroused, and wondered if I was now free to drop by Lucy’s apartment at will—perhaps even to initiate intimate interactions. In short, were we lovers?

  I got off the bus at Davie Street and walked northbound up Granville Street. The city had an electric quality, the most recent disco pop hits bellowing out of record stores, breezes of warm air floating head level and the lighting doing wonders for what was left of Vancouver’s pasty winter complexion. I stopped at a Muffin Break for a cup of coffee and gazed at the passers-by. Eventually my coffee made its way to my lap and the table had to be cleared. I was wearing brown corduroys and didn’t care. One of the staff, a Mediterranean woman in her late teens, smiled at me in an almost come-hither way. I declined, my returned smile indicating I was spoken for.

  By about nine o’clock the crowds began to thin out so I took a left on Robson and walked all the way down to the ocean. Then I wandered back. The breeze was starting to get colder. By ten it was dark out and the wind was blowing hard. I took a right off Robson and walked up Seymour Street. A dozen or more prostitutes were there taking advantage of the drier weather. One particularly buxom, platinum blond with an appealing face moved right into my path, our eyes smashing like a head-on car crash on a desolate highway. I blushed and she smiled—a warm, sad smile. Instantly I was overcome with the image of her staggering home as the sun comes up to stand for the thousandth time beneath the hot stream of a shower, pounding on mildewy tiled walls with tired fists, vowing to never again be used as a spittoon for semen. Words rolled from my quivering lips:

  “Would you care to share some pastries and coffee, my treat?”

  Again that lonely smile. “You got wheels?”

  “Wheels? Uh … well … yes, but not here. I … I thought we could just go to little yonder bistro,” I said, pointing to a quaint cafe just up the street.

  She glanced at it and then back at me. “Fuck off,” she said.

  “What did I say?”

  “Fuck you.”

  I left, the wind calling to me as never before. I crossed streets, noticing mannequins in windows, concert posters, construction sites and parking lots. Heading north up Homer Street I skipped in and out of shadows and talked to myself aloud, feeling less self-conscious with every word. I felt a few drops of rain on my hand as I turned right onto Hastings Street. I was slightly lost. A bus passed and in its wake of noise the rain became heavier. I pushed my pace into a trot and sprinted between awnings. Before long I was running in the eye of a North American monsoon. Another bus passed—the Fraser, my bus!—but I didn’t flag it down. I couldn’t. I was wet and I was cold but I kept moving, running into the rain like it was holy water, my mouth open and inviting, my heart beating into my throat, my lungs gasping for air, my eyes barely able to see where I was going. Every step became a lesson in trust and geography; at any moment I could have crashed into a telephone pole and broken my nose or smashed my reproductive organs on a parking meter. Still I didn’t wipe the water from my eyes. I didn’t even squint.

  I just ran.

  And then I stopped.

  Where Hastings Street crosses Cambie Street I stood staring into the face of Victory Square. The plaque read: “THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE”—a salute to the dead. I wiped the rain from my face and raked my fingers through my hair. There was a man lying down on a bench about twenty feet to my left, in as close to the fetal position as space would allow. The sky offered him no relief. I wondered if the heavens would. I sat down next to him and figured there should be a drunk memorial here, too, in remembrance of the contribution alcoholics make to road repair work and street cleaning via liquor taxes.

  Reading the plaque again I had a burst of literary inspiration but no pen to write down, Life is a horror show where everybody dies. It wasn’t brilliant but I’d read worse in published works. I reached into my pocket, pulled out some loose change and slipped it into the bum’s wet jacket pocket. He didn’t flinch. I hoped he was still alive. How strange it would be to put change into a dead man’s pocket—it would make him a sort of a welfare Tutankhamen. Then I wondered, what’s the point of being dead?

  I started to walk again, drawn eastbound as if by another force. The rain kept coming. I felt like a soldier returning home to no one, but happy to be back just the same. For a moment I feared I was being pursued. My heart kicked in. I looked back but didn’t see anybody. I sprinted across the road and stopped by a few wet, empty benches sitting silent and lonely in the rain; no people, no pigeons. I shook my head and smiled—even benches need validation! I moved beneath the shelter of a maple tree and watched the wind-strewn, almost horizontal rain dance in the lamplight. I started walking again, and across the road saw a couple running arm in arm the opposite way. They were laughing and happy. I smiled and moved on. Protective awnings became less frequent. I didn’t care. I just kept walking until the traffic from Main Street got so loud it poured into my brain like a mechanical river, smothering my thoughts beyond recognition. I tilted my head backwards and let a few drops of water land on my tongue.

  And there it was.

  The Number Five Orange, its neon light shining in my eye like the last few embers of a dying sun.

  I peeked inside the door. There was a show in progress.

  Dripping, I crept into a seat at a back table and sunk low. A thick haired, sandy blond waitress dressed all in black approached me immediately. I smiled.

  “I’m not really a regular, I … uh … a friend of mine dances.”

  “What can I get you?”

  “Oh … uh … I’ll have a … I’ll have a Sprite, please.”

  “A Sprite?”

  “Yes … please. With a slice of lemon. Her name is Lucy. Perchance—”

  “Lemon?”

  “Yes, please. Just a—”

  “And maybe you’d like some milk and cookies for later, too?”

  “Milk and cookies? No. I … would … make it a beer.” She grinned. I didn’t actually see it but I’m sure it was there—one of those internal grins. In a bar for men, she’d crushed one of my balls. Moments later, a man approached.

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen—I mean twenty. Just turned.”

  “Do you have any I.D.?”

  “Yes.” We looked at each other.

  “Can I see it?”

  “Oh, sorry.” I removed a damp driver’s license from a wet wallet and handed it to him. Back and forth he looked at it and then at me. Then he tossed it on the table and walked away.

  I watched a woman with no pubic hair caress her vagina and jiggle her breasts for ten minutes. It was difficult for me to believe that Lucy did that. Then again, she had a wonderful body.

  By the time the beer came, I needed it. It cost $3.95 and the waitress gave me fifteen bucks back from a twenty dollar bill and I told her to keep the change. I gave her a twenty-five percent tip for treating me with the respect one gives over-chewed gum. Round two and my scrotal sac had been hung from a flagpole half-mast.

  The next woman’s name was Vulvanna Plenty. She was a flexible, confident dancer, hanging off the pole like an angry anaconda. I thought of Lucy and ordered another beer.

  After my third beer, I became aware of how cold, wet and uncomfortable I was—and thinking about Lucy and the voluntary spreading of her vulva didn’t help. I was disturbed that she’d spit out such educated views to me about metaphysics and goddesses and oneness and female exploitation and then climb up nude on a stage and gyrate her naked loins to some patriarchal backbeat.

  I ended up drinking four beers on an empty stomach. At closing, I was wobbly, nauseous and still wet so I remained seated with my chin resting in my hands and my elbows on the table. Everybody left me alone. Maybe I appeared to be waiting for somebody. A man left the bathroom zipping up his fly and I said to myself, “A barfly,�
�� and laughed aloud. Right then I received another flash of inspiration, borrowed a pen from one of the employees and wrote on a napkin: Life is a lunatic refusing to get help. I liked it more than the first one—and being a non-writer, receiving two gems in less than three hours was invigorating. I folded the napkin over, slipped it in the chest pocket of my Gortex jacket, loosened my tie and stumbled towards the exit. Glancing back one last time at the empty stage, I felt turned on by my lover’s profession. It was time to go home.

  Lucy and I spent the following three nights together, indulging in generous amounts of intercourse in various positions that left me feeling both mildly manipulated and more than willing. Several times afterwards I would lie staring into nothingness, wondering what she saw in me. All I came up with was our mutual love for reading.

  The days, by comparison, were lazy; ambitions and other social perversions drifting like empty canoes on a placid lake. Mostly we drank coffee and discussed unattainable phenomena; manifestations of God and the potential for human well-being. As for her job, for which from a technical standpoint I had a newfound respect, I hinted over sandwiches that an alternate form of employment would in no way decrease her sexuality. Her response was: “At least I have a job”—and beyond that offered few insights. In the end I concluded that if a thirty-two-year-old woman sees no clash between feminism and stripping, why should I? Truth is it was none of my business.

  Needing answers, on Friday morning I journeyed to the downtown library to research this mobile form of pornography. Unfortunately, all I uncovered were newspaper clippings about pay decreases, attempts to unionize and two poorly written autobiographies that offered nothing more than insight into the writer’s superficiality. Only one article offered a theory on the trade’s psychology. It was based on castration fear, which, according to the text, is intensified when men see a woman’s vulva because the vulva, in its loose-skinned pinky way, reminds men what it would be like to be castrated. Subconsciously, therefore, men feel they have to subjugate women to keep their genitals intact. This is done by making her an object: hence, strip joints. Such an idea had to be absurd. If not, any strip joint on any given night would be a veritable human time bomb capable of erupting at the whim of one man’s fury!

  Arriving at Lucy’s apartment just before lunch that afternoon, I found her spread out and relaxed on her couch like a modern day Goddess. I sat juxtaposed in a big, soft, greeny-beige chair. After awhile she looked up from her book and smiled. I smiled back. She went back to her book. A minute or so later she looked up again.

  “I’m feeling very open today, Shel,” she said, “very grounded.” I could tell she was. There was a lightness pouring out of her eyes. “I think it’s time we did a full reading,” she said, smiling that smile that always gives me the impression she knows something I don’t. I imagined her telling fortunes in the back of a caravan with bad lighting somewhere in Transylvania—and damn if I wasn’t next.

  The reading had nothing to do with fortune telling. It was about auras and chakras and pastlives and oversouls. Lucy sat about ten feet from me with her back upright and her feet flat on the ground. She had one hand up at the side of her face and the other one gently waving across the front of her body. She said it was for clearing away energies that weren’t applicable to the reading. I found the whole process relaxing and sensual—or maybe that was Lucy. Either way, I got aroused a couple of times.

  Lucy said I was having some blockage of energy in my second chakra—the chakra pertaining to my sexuality. That was disconcerting. On a positive note, she also said that my fourth chakra, pertaining to the heart, was open and loving.

  “There’s a little bit of grayish-blue around the outside,” she said, “which is generally an indicator of sadness—the blue being harmony and the gray being fear—greyish-blue being sadness. But for the most part, I see a pinky-red kind of thing which is definitely a sign of love and affection …” I smiled. Then she helped me clear away a bit of unnecessary angst that was hanging around. I appreciated the gesture.

  After awhile, what with deep breaths and closed eyes, my mind wandered to a time—I was perhaps ten years old—when I walked into the front room of an apartment my Dad was either renting or staying at—I’m not actually sure what it was, but it was sometime during Mom and Dad’s trial separation. Dad was sitting in a battered old chair—sort of like the one I was sitting in at Lucy’s—staring blankly through a window that overlooked coats and coats of snow that sloped towards town as freely as a white-water river. Dad’s eyes were very red. I’d never seen him with red eyes before.

  Dads don’t cry.

  I stood off to the side, about fifteen feet away, just looking at him. For some reason the memory of the image is bathed in wonderfully rich earthtones—a commendable attempt at optimism. The sky appears as an amazingly vivid blue, and for that I am thankful. He let out a little sob.

  Dads cry.

  “You seem to be coming to me as a woman,” Lucy said, her eyes closed, her hand in the air, “a soothsayer … the town herbalist … you’re in your late twenties—twenty-eight, twenty-nine, two children … somewhere in the States and I … Massachusetts, yeah … late 1600s … you’re in trouble … you’re being … Salem, Massachusetts, that’s it … you’re being burned at the stake—”

  “What?” I yelled.

  Lucy’s eyes were still closed. “I’m as shocked as you are, Shel, but I’m telling you, this is what I’m seeing.” She shook her head. “Do you want me to go on or not?”

  “Yes, I want you to go on.”

  “Okay, you’re … you’re with several other women … you’ve been hounded by religious fanatics on a mass witch-hunt.”

  “Come on!”

  “This is what I’m getting! But it ain’t easy with your interruptions.”

  “I apologise,” I said, “but I just can’t believe—”

  “I don’t screw around with psychic ethics, Shel. I have a moral responsibility to be truthful here—and this is what I’m seeing.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. Go on. I won’t say another word.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Okay … now … you’re blocking here … you’ve got to relax … you’ve got … oh shit … God I’m going down the tubes.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve lost it …”

  “Lost what?”

  “Wait,” she said, raising her hand.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got a female guide … she’s a part-time guide … she’s trying to show you the way towards yin expansion.”

  “Towards what?”

  “Stop talking!”

  “Sorry.”

  “I see a name … Belinda. Her name is Belinda.”

  “Are you sure it’s not Bart?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” she said, “I quit.”

  “No!”

  “I quit—it’s all a joke to you.”

  “No it’s not. I’m sorry, it’s just that … let me explain. Bart was an imaginary friend I had when I was a child. He’d watch over me when I was playing with my chemistry set or lawn darts and so forth.”

  “We’ll do it again some other time … my concentration is shot.”

  “I’m sorry. Were you serious about that witch-hunt?”

  “I told you,” she said, “I wouldn’t joke about this stuff.” Lucy’s eyes were like two fine crystals. “Believe whatever you want.”

  “I believe you,” I said. Lucy started waving her hands all over the place. “What … what are you doing?”

  “I’m cleaning the room of any negative spirits and I’m thanking my guides for helping out.”

  “Thank them from me, too,” I said. Lucy smiled. “Hey, Lucy, I must confess, I thoroughly enjoyed that. How did … is one … what do you see from one person to the next?”

  “It depends. As for you, your spirit seemed surprisingly open for an anal-retentive kind of guy.”

  “Anal retentive? I’m a university dropout.”
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  “Why do you wear a tie all the time?”

  “Because I … it … habit, I guess. Why not?”

  Lucy shrugged and left the room. I sat thinking about her, and no matter the memory I was filled with glee. This, it would seem, was living; to experience and expand, all the while avoiding social constraints. Lucy returned to the room with a lit candle that she put on the coffee table. She turned off the main light and closed the curtains across the calico cat, the outside lamplight causing a ghoulishly distorted silhouette of its body. Lucy lay down, and when the flame flickered, the highlights on the contours of her body altered shape like a dancing shadow in a house of mirrors. She motioned me to the floor and kissed me. It was then I realised all the truly warm feelings I’d ever experienced had been with women. We made love with our pants half down—a scenario that left me feeling remarkably manly. Afterwards, conversation was comfortable. Even the soggy condom was bearable. Lucy lit a cigarette and the scene bordered on pornographic. Not knowing what to do, I stretched in excess.

  Making love half an hour later was a shock to my senses. Never had I even masturbated twice in a day, save during periods of excessive exam anxiety. Stamina fading, I felt like a soldier fallen victim to stimulation overload; out of ammunition and frightened, my war-weary loins soaked in a battlefield of skin-like mud. I closed my eyes and wondered how long I could stand the jungle heat; how one minute I was a young Canadian boy in a small community just north of nowhere collecting empty pop bottles to raise the funds to purchase additional flasks and test tubes for my Junior Chemistry Set and the next minute I was fighting for my life in a country where dogs are a delicacy and the only language is fear. News-reels from Vietnam flashed like machine gun fire across my consciousness. Then Minnie appeared out of nowhere for three or four flailing pumps before a black-and-white clip of some Indonesian jungle took over. I closed my eyes, straining to hear what sounded like the gentle mumblings of an English journalist: