Leper Tango

by David MacKinnon

  Whatever kind of bird Bourque was, it was in danger of extinction. Pterodactyl? Albatross?

  “Mon cher Franck, I don’t give a whit about your motives. Just give me the facts — chronologically.”

  “There aren’t any facts. I just up and left her.”

  “You up and left her!”

  A grin found its way onto his dung yard fowl of a head. He shouted the phrase in mock outrage, as I had recounted the story a number of times.

  “You can’t just up and leave your wife, Robinson!”

  “It was early in the morning. I told her I would make breakfast. Do you love me still, Franck? Never more than today, honey. I couldn’t overplay my hand. Wait here, I said, this morning, I have a surprise for you. What kind

  of surprise, Franck, she gurgled in her usual tapioca tones.

  Just promise you’ll wait for me here. Then, I descended the stair well, took the keys from the kitchen table, walked out the door, and drove away.”

  “How did she react?”

  “I have no idea. My lawyer took care of matters.”

  “Did she not even tr y to approach you, track you down?”

  “You, obviously, have never met my lawyer.”

  “Franck, I will tell you why other men detest you.

  You do what they all long to do, but lack the courage to execute.” “That’s not my problem.”

  “ You lack moral f ibre, Franck. You are what we French call a lâche. A faux-jeton. I confess that there are times when I admire you. But, I cannot think that it will end well for you.”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Does it end well for anybody?”

  The next time I was in Cleopatra’s, I ran into Lola’s husband, a transvestite with a heroin addiction who performed shows at the Love Affair, a booze can located in the rear of the Beijing restaurant. I sat down with him in the centre stalls, which had been purchased from a diner. He was skinny, had one of those long rectangular heads that look okay on camera and inhuman on the street. His hair was done upwards in a small pony-tail, like a medieval Samurai warrior, except he was an end of the mil lenium she-ma le stripper married to the woman with the biggest tits on the planet.

  “Where’s Lola?”

  His eyes were dead, but the death was only caused by drugs, not some deeper illness.

  If I were undergoing a word-association test and he were mentioned, everything would be coming up: fish, gills, carcass, scales. He smoked a cigarette in the way only a drag queen or an alcoholic actress seems to be able to pull off convincingly, letting it hang in a gravity-defying dangle off the tips of his elongated fingers.

  “Lola died in her sleep last Tuesday.”

  His tone was off hand, bored, but I could see he just couldn’t repair himself sufficiently to get his emotions into synch with losing someone he loved.

  “How did she die?”

  “In her sleep.”

  “Like that.” “Yeah, just like that.”

  He talked to me for a while about Lola in a blunted, etherized tone, occasionally laughing callously when he came across an incongruous fact from their past. Apparently her cosmetic surgeon was a former aircraft maintenance engineer, ex-employee of Boeing, where he worked designing control panels. Everything was a convertible skill, he said, quoting Lola. You only had to have the imagination and work on your sales skills. That, and him stubbing out his cigarette, concluded his eulogy. Not a word about her tits. It all came down to sales.

  It was a short-term market, but the buyers were there.

  VIII

  I liked Emily, as far as shrinks went. Her whole family had been murdered in the holocaust, and she had watched a trio of thugs pump bullets into her husband ’s head during a road rage incident on the Santa Monica turnpike. So she knew a thing or two about bad luck. After I brushstroked the general picture, she stated I was dealing with a comparable situation, more I thought by way of gaining the confidence of her new client, but no, she insisted, I had definitely just done a few rounds with a real contender, and fundamentally, I was still ahead of the game, being alive that is, and that it was time to cut losses before something really bad happened.

  Her office was in a walk-up brownstone, cubby-holed into a bourgeois neighbourhood on the West side of the city. Plexiglass entrance with the name “NRC Consulting” in copperplate Gothic font, engraved into the glass.

  Cushioned reception area with a brown-haired receptionist, sexy but toned down with a conservative tweed jacket and her hair tied back into a bun. Just enough to keep the clients inside the office, without knowing why. NRC’s fees were guaranteed by the Law Society, and the Law Society only spent that kind of money if they had to. From a business standpoint, it was like insuring thirty year old oil tankers or houses on the San Andreas fault. Just a question of when and where. That explained the glass-encased African fetish art and Brassai photography gracing the reception area.

  Emily waited for our second interview before asking what I thought the main reason was I’d come to see her.

  “Not a hundred per cent sure. Maybe the dreams.” Emily smiled. It was a smile I would have labelled saintly, if the saint business hadn’t been usurped by the head-shavers, anorexics and self-flagellators. She looked like she had found that smile somewhere else, on a road of her own making.

  “Franck.” “Emily.”

  I liked the sound of her name. Uttering it was like taking a mild analgesic and watching a 60s sitcom.

  “You know the personality tests freaks like us like to give? There’s always the .05% that fall off the graph. You’re in the 0.05%.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  “You’re sui generis, Franck. One of a kind. Or almost.

  You fall between the cracks. I’ll have to think up a new name for you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You’re utterly random, without being passive.”

  “What does that make me? A psychopath?”

  “Definitely not. Although I wonder about your recent

  acquaintance.”

  “I already feel like we’re getting to know each other.” Emily glanced at her bookshelves. They were filled with black binders, marked with file numbers. There were no books on the shelves.

  “Depending on how you look at it, my profession, and I use the term loosely, is either a laboratory or a garbage can. And, if the law societies are any indication, Franck, spitting out alcoholics, neurasthenics and shell shocked delayed stress syndromes on a daily basis, it’s getting pretty hairy out there.”

  “And those are the success stories.”

  Emily smiled. I knew this wouldn’t last, that she really couldn’t do anything for me, and that she knew it as well but, in the meantime, there were worse ways to spend an hour. It was like wandering into a video arcade and finding a game which suited a hidden addiction.

  “How would you define your glitch, Franck?”

  “You think I have a glitch, Emily?”

  I placed Emily in her late fifties. I wondered what it would be like to fuck her at various stages in her life. As a virgin. During her travels. The day after her husband was murdered. In the sub-basement of a community centre while a B’Nai B’rith meeting was being convened on the main floor. I decided she would be a generous lover, but would only suck cock as a favour for the man she loved, and not out of intrinsic enjoyment. But, a favour she would indulge in once or twice and never again. Something of ritual significance.

  “Everyone has a glitch, Franck. We’re humans.”

  “If you had to pin me down, Emily ...”

  “I’m not the pinning down type, Franck.”

  “... I’d say my glitch was sexual.”

  “So would I, Franck.”

  “So, where does that leave us? Sex is a big world. It could mean anything.” “It leaves us at square one. Tell me a bit about your past.”

  “Oh, like the child within. The victim.”

  “That’s right. If we find something, may
be we can sue somebody. Blame them for your glitches.”

  “What about my dreams? Can’t we do some Jungian shit, as long as we’re at it?”

  “Are you the type that asks dentists to pull all their teeth out before you even get cavities, Franck? Just to get it over with?”

  “Why do that when you can go for a cap job?”

  “So, Franck.”

  “Where do I start?”

  “Start at the very beginning. As far back as you can remember.”

  “It might take a while.”

  “I get paid by the hour, Franck. Take your time.”

  

  My first memories are auditory. The tackety-tack of high heels across a linoleum floor. The slap of a face. The deep, steady acceleration of breathing from my mother’s bedroom. The click of a powder pack being shut. The ring of a doorbell. The sound of sirens. Coughs in the hallway. Mumbled dialogues uttered in gravelly, sneering masculine voices. And the false soothing drawl of my mother’s voice, which could bring everything to a slow governable tempo, all of which she controlled.

  My paternal great-grandfather was the largest individual landowner in British Columbia. To this day, there are rivers, islands and highways named after him. His father was killed in a dispute over a five card stud game during the heyday of the Klondike Gold Rush. His only son, my grandfather, inherited enough money at the age of sixteen to set up a small sawmill on the banks of the Fraser River. To say my grandfather was a fighting man would be banal. Every man fought in those days. But, my grandfather was the dirtiest streetfighter, and in his own words, meanest sumbitch in town. Once he got a man down, he laid the boots to him, and what was left — usually not much, as nothing made Grandpa crazier than watching a man go down under the wrath of his own blows — would be transported to the local hospital or even, on one or two occasions, to the morgue.

  Grandpa drank Seagram’s Canadian whisky or Charlie Rosen’s Fraser River Bourbon straight up from noon to dusk, and he preferred the company of whores to that of his own wife. My father and his siblings were often woken up by the raucous cursing of my grandpa stumbling across the threshold of the family home with whores he’d picked up from the King Eddy hotel, setting off unholy rows that kept my own Uncle Franck wetting his bed until age fourteen.

  To appease Grandma, Grandpa would buy her perf ume and scar ves directly from Paris’ Hermes and Lancôme shops, some Cartier jewelry and the odd fur coat. If his behaviour had been bad enough, and the mill had just experienced a strong f inancial quarter, she might get a Dusenberg, the only one West of Winnipeg, or a Caribbean cruise, before that became the commonplace. Grandma never referred to herself by name. She was always Mrs. Franck Robinson. Children shared the same fate. We didn’t have names either, until our midteens. We were the Robinson boys.

  Grandpa went insane on his seventy-fifth birthday. Things started out all right, and finished badly. Grandpa was always home for dinner, which was held in the drawing room of our second house, one we referred to as “the stables,” our family home and horse farm located on the southern fringe of the city. At the dinner table, children were to be “seen and not heard.” I spent my time counting the number of Charlie Rosen’s Fraser River bourbons Grandpa would finish before dinner. One particular Sunday, he had downed seven. Bourbon was Grandpa’s way of saying: I can’t walk straight and I can’t think straight; my prostate is no longer doing its job and I will never have two women at a time again, but I can drink, and christ if I won’t drink until my sides split.

  It must have been Sunday, because we were eating roast beef, scallions, onions and Yorkshire pudding. Except for Grandpa, who on top of everything else demanded a sixteen ounce rib-eye, cooked blue, so he could still see the blood seeping through the meat, topped off with a fried egg, and placed in a pre-heated plate next to his regular meal. I always sat at Grandpa’s side. At Sunday dinner, ever ybody was, children, parents included, to be seen and not heard while Grandpa told us what and how to think bet ween shovelling first class food down his throat. Along the length of his Borneo teak table on the starboard side, sat Uncle Franck, my mother and my father. I was still short enough to scope out mother’s left hand stroking father’s right thigh, and her right doing the same on Uncle Franck ’s left, while the two of them drank like fish, and generally grinned stupidly at Grandpa’s stories.

  Grandpa mentioned that Khrushchev, one of his favourite targets, was the son of a Commie whore. What’s a Commie whore? I asked. I think I was about seven. Figure it out, he answered. It was his answer for everything. Why is the sky blue? Figure it out. How do you ride a bicycle? Figure it out. “ That sumbitch, Sean Kelly, is a son of a Commie whore. I’ll break him one day. In two.”

  Sean Kelly was an ex-IR A thug who was shop steward in Grandpa’s mill.

  “What’s a Commie whore, Grandpa?” I persisted. Grandpa turned towards me, grabbed my bicep, gripped it while staring fiercely into my eyes.

  “Son, all you need to know is that, if the goddam Commies win, the schmucks down at city hall will steal the augur drill at Grandpa’s mill and use it to grind up little boys into dog chow!”

  The thought of this curled Grandpa’s face into a red, choleric mass of suffocating laughter. His breath grew shorter, until his lungs collapsed into a sibilating wheeze, as if somebody had stomped on a bagpipe. We all watched, knowing better than to interfere. Then he began chok ing. Finally, Grandma walked down the length of the table from the opposite end, and pounded him bet ween the shoulder blades, until he spat out a semi-masticated cube of rib-eye steak onto the table.

  This was followed by his dentures. For ten endless minutes, we watched Grandpa desperately suck in nanopockets of oxygen. When he finally recovered from his fit, he fell strangely silent for the remainder of the meal.

  W hile the cheesecake and coffee were being ser ved, Grandpa broke his silence, and announced he was disinheriting everyone but Jason, an arthritic, fifteen year old Doberman, whose residual life vocation had become eating Grandpa’s leftover baked potato skins. By the time Grandma brought the Porto into the living room, Grandpa was mumbling about hiring a hit man to kill Sean Kelly. That night, Grandpa had his stroke.

  For the next six months, until his death, nothing further emerged from his mouth except for spittle. While in primary school, I delivered the South Fraser Columbian afternoon newspaper. Part of my route included a diagonal one block street with half a dozen houses. No 17 Park Row was a brothel. In addition to visits from a regular flow of men seeking company, number 17 received the South Fraser Columbian from my sack six days per week. One summer afternoon, as I completed my deliveries, I noticed my mother, observing me from the driver’s side of a canar y-yellow, 1966 Ford Mustang convertible, her right hand resting on the three-speed column gearshift, and her left waving me over to the car. She wore cream-coloured gloves at all hours of the day and a pillbox hat with a front veil, and smoked DuMaurier cigarettes. She was just returning from her extended afternoon absence, which usually took place while my father was off doing advertising work in the United States. When leaving me alone in the house, she would say, Franck, be good, Mommy is going to the moon for the afternoon. Or, Franck, Mommy needs to see the American president, so be good.

  I climbed into the off-white, upholstered bucket seats of the Mustang. She scrutinised me for a long moment.

  “Is everything all right, Franck?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you sure, Franck?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, unsure what she was driv-

  ing at.

  “Franck?”

  “Yes, mom.”

  “Do you know what a prostitute is?”

  “Sure. It’s sandwich meat. From Italy.”

  “That’s prosciutto. I said prostitute, Franck. Now, stop playing games.” She wiped something from her eyebrow, and gazed out the window, drumming her fingers on the top rim of the steering wheel.

  “Are you sure, Franck?” “Sure about what?”

&n
bsp; “I’m not going to repeat myself, Franck.” “Sure, I’m sure.”

  “You are not hiding anything from Mommy, are you Franck?”

  This went on for awhile. I tried crying to break the impasse.

  “C’mon, Franck, Mommy was just kidding. Let’s go home.”

  She drove for a minute or two without speaking.

  “So, what is a prostitute, Mom?”

  “A prostitute, Franck, is a woman who sells herself to men.”

  “Oh, you mean like a whore?”

  I was born on September 11 at 11:11 a.m. My first core belief as a child was that I was the only human being alive on the whole planet, and that others were phantoms, either working for some god who was testing me for something or they were just generally alien beings.

  My second unshakeable conviction was that I would die on my eleventh birthday.

  I didn’t die, but in its own way, my eleventh birthday proved memorable. I mark it as the day I discovered things could change in an instant and nothing would look the same ever again. Early that morning, I heard R ichard, my brother, cr ying from the other room. I guessed he had pissed himself again, but instead of going back to sleep, I decided to check it out.

  Mother was in front of a vanity mirror dressing table, wearing a long satin bustier, circa 1950s, the style with bones, and a set of cups on it, with attachable black garters holding up cream-white panty hose. It was the first time I had seen her undressed.

  “Now, Richard, you be good today, Mommy is talking with Santa Claus about next Christmas, and you don’t want Santa to abandon you, do you Richard?”

  She spoke to Richard in the same tone she employed with everyone. A brassy, I’m in a hurry, so don’t screw up the program tone. For a moment, I watched her breasts pulsate inside the cups of her bustier. She slipped on an off the shoulder ruffle top and a flare skirt, and puckered her lips in front of the mirror, verifying her lipstick. As she splashed on some Guerlain eau de toilette, Richard started jacking off. She turned around, swatted his hand, then returned to her task, which was burnishing her mouth with Coco Chanel mud lipstick. Then, she stopped, laughed, shook her head.