Leper Tango

by David MacKinnon

  “I hope I’m long gone when you two hit the streets.” Later that day, my father returned from one of his business trips. Surprise, surprise, he announced as he strode into the living room.

  “Daddy’s home early!! Where’s your mother, Francky?”

  “Gone to the moon.”

  “Don’t be funny, Francky. Where is she?”

  “She went to the moon.”

  “Where’s Richard?”

  I pointed towards the basement. His features darkened.

  He about-faced, and crashed his way down the stairwell into the basement. I heard an extended moan.

  “What the hell!”

  Followed by more rapid, heav y breathing, as my father, a four-pack a day Marboro man, chugged his way back up the stairs. “What the hell did you do to your brother?” “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing! You call nothing being strapped into the jolly jumper in the basement!”

  I stood on the other side of the table, gripping onto its edges, considering escape routes. He ran around the table. I dove under it, but slipped and he clamped his bear paws onto my leg.

  “You little bastard.”

  After swatting me a few times, father figured out that I was no wiser than he.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  That evening was a noisy one around the house. But, the part I recall best was long past our bedtime, as I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep. I heard a sort of sick whelp, like a dog, except it was my father.

  “You’re nothing but a goddam whore. Nothing but a whore. Nothing but a whore.”

  Then mother’s sweet as molasses, mock conciliatory tone.

  “Don’t worry, Maurice, come to mommy now, everything will be rosy tomorrow, c’mere peachykins, it’s been a long day.”

  My father never forgave Grandpa for not naming him Franck, particularly since it should have been his automatic birthright, being the eldest in the family. But, Grandpa passed him over, preferring to call him Maurice, and conferring the patronym Franck upon the second eldest, in another display of the recurrent Robinson genetic snobbery that causes all of us to overlook moral qualities in favour of good looks.

  Franck II returned the favour by forcing Grandpa to hand over the family business for a derisory sum while he lay on his deathbed. And my own father thanked him for that piece of work by robbing the business of half a million while Franck II was stupid, or felt guilt y enough to allow him control over the books of the company, despite being nothing more than an ad weasel.

  Franck II had a beautiful mistress who stuck to him like a f ly on shit once he came into the money. My mother. Mother understood the famous words of Sam Goldw yn. A verbal contract ain’t worth the paper it’s written on. So, she had everything made out in her name through something even Franck II’s legitimate wife could not attack. Insurance policies.

  It was a sweltering hot summer day when Franck II was nailed for arson. He violently denied everything, despite a professional arsonist pinning his name on the deed that burned every asset of the Robinson Pulp and Paper Works, covering the full stretch of the Fraser River Delta. Once Uncle Franck was safely lodged courtesy of the Attorney General, mother only had one last reminder of her liaison with Uncle Franck. My brother Richard. Mother used to enjoy visiting Uncle Franck, and would playfully taunt him from the free side of the penitentiary visit ing room with references to her “scorched earth policy.”

  After Grandpa died, people would glorify him at the sporadic family gatherings, when they drank too much, or when they got maudlin and were lamenting the good old days when men beat the shit out of their wives and then bought their way out of it, and generally acted like criminals, which is what the New World is all about, and for that matter, the old world.

  I think it was at one of those family gatherings, probably Franck II’s funeral after he killed himself in prison, that someone asked me to name Grandpa’s greatest achievement. No one really spoke about my uncle, for whatever reason, but Grandpa seemed to inspire a lot of stories, and of course it was de rigueur to praise him to the skies. That question stumped me for a long moment and, while I hesitated, several of the attendees now turned their attention towards me. What will the boy genius have to say about this now?

  “I think his greatest feat was hanging himself in the garage after he had his stroke.”

  I looked across the room, taking my focus away from the uproar of protesting voices clamouring and fingers pointing at me, and moved into the abstract zone which preceded the rain of blows which my father was sure to let fall in my direction. Against the dining room wall, between an early Munch sketch of The Scream and a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, I could make out my brother Richard, staring at me. He was still pretty young, and so quiet I had always thought him autistic, but, this time, though I couldn’t exactly guess what he was thinking, he definitely seemed to be paying attention.

  I lived in San Francisco for a while, mostly working assembly line on the Oakland side of the bay, when that type of thing still paid money, and spent most of my leisure time drinking beer and playing pool in a string of dead-end bars located at the core of skid row. I had been drinking since mid-afternoon in a bar called the Cobalt on my twenty-first birthday, when a blonde girl, rasta beads in her hair and a jean jacket, threads hanging in shreds from the cuffs, sat down and drawled, “buy me a drink ” in an Aussie accent. Like that. She had something in her eyes, but she was too friendly for her good looks, which to me spelled dependency, as did the needle tracks at the top of her left forearm.

  We spent the afternoon drinking beer and shooting 9-ball in the Cobalt, then staggered across the street to the Hotel St-Regis. I think her name was Donna. She made ends meet turning tricks on a low-end stretch of Union Street. Or at least that was her story.

  At about 3 p.m., I proposed to her. We weaved down to the courthouse, where we tied the knot in front of a justice of the peace who looked to be in similar shape.

  I rented a room at the St-Regis and brought up some cheap and warm bubbly from a Chinatown liquor store. I don’t recall much, or even whether we made love. But, when I woke up, she had robbed me of all my money, and all but one of my credit cards. I never saw her again. Our marriage had lasted four hours.

  Several days later, it was still raining and I was still inside the St-Regis. The room I rented was on the top floor of the hotel, just under a leaky aluminum roof in sore need of repair. I wasn’t thinking a lot about anything. Just listening to the rain ping off the metal, like someone drumming their fingers on the roof. It was a good feeling, going into full drift like that, probably as good as I had ever felt about anything. As if I no longer had any form. On the desk in the room, I had a tumbler filled with crushed ice at all times, which served as a receptacle for the Long Island Ice Teas I was using for fuel as I ploughed my way through a book of crossword puzzles.

  On the second or third day, I dropped some blotter acid after ordering another book of crossword puzzles from room service. Then it became hard to tell whether it was day or night. I recall looking in the mirror, and seeing my face stretch out and take on hues of emerald, jade, chlorophyll, as if I were turning the lights on and off. I dropped to all fours, and started crawling around like a baby until I spotted a battalion of scorpions scuttling inside ever y orif ice in my body. My guts were steadily torquing as if I’d swallowed some arsenic. Then, my tongue split into two, and I became convinced that I had transmutated into a human reptile. I only got that under control when I pushed my fist through the mirror.

  I left the hotel by a rear stairwell which served as a fire escape, climbed down to the hotel parking lot, and took my Grand Prix for a spin towards the waterfront to cool down. I had cut my hand pretty badly, but it had slowed the brain down to operational. At least thoughts were percolating, and not bubbling right over. It was nothing special, just a mental zone. My brain had more or less liquified, derivative strands of the recent past now streaming down cerebral eavestroughs i
nto a grey, polluted sewer.

  I criss-crossed the Golden Gate a few times, staring out the driver-side window at Alcatraz, Monterey, Carmel, thinking shit, Clint Eastwood is mayor and Ronald Reagan is president, what’s next? I doubled back East for another cruise through the hookers’ quarter. For me, just like a return to the womb. A nocturnal ticker tape parade of bordellos, transexual haunts and strip joints run by the mafia with the tacit blessing of the city’s forefathers.

  I cruised up Union and down Columbus Avenue, then down around Powell and Union, doing what I like best, which was drifting. Nothing much around the square caught my eye, outside of a longshoreman repeatedly clubbing a drunken Indian prone on the sidewalk. I recall thinking, a drunken Indian is a cliché, then that there were a lot of clichés in that part of town. Then automatic pilot kicked in, the way it always did, and I was drifting, like the other drifters, ten miles an hour, where I spotted her, chewing gum and flashing a stretch of leg from beneath a black leather miniskirt. I was not much older than her myself, and, like I say, I was making a pretty good salary working in a factory at the time. My ’57 Chev Bel-Air was a slick, scarlet machine red/black interior, with a 400 four barrel under the hood, mag wheels and an engine purr so powerful the police pulled me over regularly on sight and sound alone. I had taken it up to 130 mph within city limits and despite its huge size, had lost the cops twice during high speed chases while high on a mix of various highoctane cocktails.

  She made a big show of climbing into the car. On her way to the Oscars ceremony. So to speak.

  “Wow.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “You want a name? No problem. Michelle. That’s a

  name.”

  She bounced her butt up and down on the front seat a couple of times. I could see she really took to the car.

  We drove up to a parking lot she pointed out, just behind an old art-deco theatre the city fathers had declared part of the sacred urban heritage.

  Later, after she had finished sucking my cock, I lit a Marlboro, and debated whether I would ask her to start all over again. She didn’t seem in any hurry to leave, so I offered her one of my Marlboros. As I passed her the cigarette, I noticed her right hand was a little on the knotty side for a girl. Whatever. She gave good head, her scarlet lipstick was liberally smeared on her mouth and the miniskirt looked good on her. That was enough for me.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Around. Portland. Whatever.”

  “Like your work?”

  “What do you mean like my work? Oh, I get it. You mean, like, do I like my work.” She smiled, and something told me that despite her young age, this one had travelled places I would never see, “I just love sucking cock.”

  I let her off at the corner. Her tight butt carved a lazy serpentine curve down the sidewalk like some garden variety of snake. Her black purse hung loosely from a discount ersatz gold chain, and was sw ung over her shoulders. Her general attitude was far too contrived, far too theatrical, and with far too much of a sense of vocation, to belong to a woman.

  For a while, I continued cruising up and down the waterfront, near the Bay, letting my mind drift. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. An undercurrent of percolating, vacuous thoughts streaming through the brain, then halting abruptly for a moment. Like the neap tide. I was thinking, this will not change. I had no intention of really getting formed into anything for society.

  Out in the bay, five or six ships waiting to moor in the San Francisco container port facilit y. Strings of homosexuals, half of them with trimmed moustaches, the other half wearing mascara, hanging around the washroom facility, or sitting on the benches, waiting for someone to come by and suck their cocks, but not willing to pay for it. As I lit another cigarette, my mind shifted to a recollection of the old Marlboro man ads, portraying a rugged cowboy on a horse in Montana or wherever they still rode horses and gazed out on the rugged, limitless prairie. The first five male models to work as Marlboro models died of lung cancer. Like that. They were like Michelle. They believed in what they did. Funny. I remember Michelle’s name, but I am not 100% sure about my first wife. I think she said it was Donna.

  W hile flipping through the classifieds of the San Francisco Chronicle, I spotted an ad about a university in Montreal with a law faculty, who accepted just about anyone who could speak basic French and hadn’t been convicted of felonies. Law school couldn’t be any worse than factory work. I’d at least figured out that, if you didn’t have the guts for crime or the inclination to slave your life away for a medal and a pat on the back, it was important to get your paperwork in order, before someone else did it for you. I quit my job the next day, collected two weeks’ severance, and returned to the cold country. I found a cheap walk-up on the Main located just beneath Cleopatra’s, next door to Fong’s Saigon Success.

  I hadn’t seen Richard in five years. Mother had arranged to have him placed in an asylum in Upstate New York under a nineteenth centur y “ward of the State” provision no one but her thousand dollar an hour attorney had ever heard of. After his release, he became a drifter, and more or less fell off the map for a while, then recontacted me, saying he’d found employment as a bus driver. I fell into a routine of sending a case a month off to Richard at a post office box address in Albany. They were a coded conversation between Richard and myself. One of our favourite Hall of Fame precedents was Regina vs. Zont, [1977] C.C.C. 2d 351, a murder case involving an 18 year old chess grandmaster with severe eczema who had stabbed his mother to death for trashing his onyx set of chessmen, then sliced off her ears and sold them to a wholesaler named Zont who specialized in Cambodian remedies and placebos. Zont claimed he was nothing more than a middleman, that the appendages were unrecognizable, as they had been brought to him inside two glass milk bottles filled with formaldehyde, labelled “Eustachian tubes.” The charge was possession of stolen property, a tough rap to beat, as no mens rea had to be proven, but Zont’s attorney succeeded in proving that an ear is not a chattel, and therefore “ipso facto outside the perimeter of the incriminating provisions, which, in any event, must be afforded a narrow reading as is customary with penal provisions,” another phrase which brought Richard reck lessly close to the precipice of a smile. In short, it had all the ingredients to please Richard. It was macabre, sordid, but most importantly involved arcane legal technicalities which were incomprehensible to the public at large.

  The other case I had specially filed for sending to Richard was Flint vs. Southall [1973] A.C. 1184, Lord Denning dissenting, a civil matter. The owner of a prizewinning English sheepdog, Treanor, sued Southall, an East London Cockney for having sodomized his dog while under the influence. In his dissenting obiter, Denning J., as he then was, referred to the only bestiality precedent on the rolls of the Old Bailey, an incident which had occurred in Newfoundland, Canada forty-seven years earlier, involving a still operator and a barnacle goose.

  I had no idea what was really going on inside his head, but I knew that Regina vs Z ont and F l int vs Southall confirmed something for him, as it did for me. Sometimes R ichard would send me a one line note, speaking in scraps of Regina vs Zont obiter. “Not within my jurisdiction,” or “mens rea not having been demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt,” and the necessity of having a “narrow reading of the matter.”

  Strippers performing upstairs at the Cleopatra were regulars at Fong’s. They usually dropped in during the late afternoon. A mix of TVs and real girls, but their banter, as they ordered their coffees and lit their cigarettes, was more secretarial pool before the boss arrives. The trannies in particular were big on the things girls must have been big on forty years ago. Powder packs. Pocket mirrors. Furr y handbags and petticoats. The atmosphere was kind of Paris Music Hall, backstage. One big family of oddballs, rejects and genetic freaks.

  I slid into the booth, ordered Fong’s $3.25 pork vermicelli special and a pot of tea. Through the window, I could see a list of cheap Asian destinations at the KarWah Travel Agency acro
ss the road. At the bottom of the list, there was a gaudy poster announcing sex tours to Bangkok. The door to Fong’s swung open, bringing in a gust of wind and five or six girls for coffee before the early evening revue.

  One of the girls stood for a moment, lit a cigarette, then, spotting me alone in my booth, walked over and sat down across from me. She had a peasant ruddiness to her cheeks, looked like she had jumped out of a Millet painting or had her skin scrubbed off in a wooden tub. Her breasts were compressed together and upwards under the combined pressure of different parts of her push-up bra. She ordered tea, and waved Fong away when he pointed a menu at her. She tapped her cigarette twice on the table and pushed it into her mouth.

  “Every day, I come in here, and every day you are eating this same soup.”

  “I live just under the club.”

  She glanced at my bowl, half full of vermicelli and pork floating in a brackish consommé. Fong flashed her a smile through his stained gold teeth. She looked back at me.

  “Quit staring. I know I need a facelift. What’s your name?”

  “Franck.”

  “My name’s Samantha. Actually, that’s my stage name. You work, Franck?”

  “Kind of between jobs.” “Sure.”

  “I just finished law school.”

  She sized me up, lit a cigarette, decided to smile.

  “How old you think I am?”

  A tall Haitian girl, standing at the counter, wearing a leopard skin top, like the top of a one-piece bathing suit, jean miniskirt, called over.

  “Hey, Sam, he’s just a kid. Leave him alone.”

  “Fuck you, Geena.”

  She turned back to me.