Strip

by Andrew Binks

  But it was my mother’s voice that replied. “You have a merry Christmas too, and we’ll talk soon”—something we often said when we knew it would be some time before another call.

  After the call I went back to bed. The quiet sounds made it feel more like home than ever. I managed to wake in time to get the tourtière in the oven, potatoes boiling and squash boiling, too—a ballerina’s nightmare meal—before Kent showed up, and when he did, he looked oh so good. I’d never seen in him anything other than a t-shirt, a parka or his birthday suit. He wore a red shimmering dress shirt and a green bowtie he’d made from ribbon. When I saw him standing there at the door with his bottle of bubbly, I could have eaten him. “Real French champagne,” he said. “Méthode champenoise.” He raised his eyebrows. “Can I come in?”

  “Life should always be so fine,” I said, following him to the kitchen. He seemed so self-assured from the back, kind of strutting. I loved that about him. Everything, the nastiness of the Company, the distracted pressure of the club, the guilt over having more or less dumped someone on Christmas Eve, vanished.

  “It is fine, this very moment. I have something for you.” He turned, held up a small, wrapped package. “Open it.”

  “Oh, why did you do that? I completely… I was so concerned with my own…”

  “Just open it.”

  It was funny to think that not only had he gotten me something, but that he had taken the time to wrap it.

  “A book of…”

  “Dancers should read. You should read. This.”

  “It looks French.”

  “Every word of it. It is French. It’s the poems of Émile Nelligan. You’re living in his province so you should read something by him. I’m sure you know enough words—amour, mort—to get the gist.”

  “I’ll read it, you’ll see. I can read. Thank you. Merci, mon ami.”

  “De rien.”

  “You look like the biggest Christmas cracker I’ve ever seen.”

  “Pull me. There’s a big surprise waiting for you.”

  “You may have been celebrating all day, but I’ve been in a coma.”

  Kent relaxed, let out his inner flamboyance, which made him that much more endearing. He hummed a few carols with a resonant basso profundo, and then sang a very fruity version of “I’ll Be Homo for Christmas.” I was so used to him being the tough guy with his short, quick movements and a voice that held no hint of affectation. Often, recently, we’d had so little time together. It would be a blessing to sit down for more than one course. He wandered the place and hummed while I fussed at the stove and turned the table into a tableau dripping with Christmas sentiment, from candles to crackers to fake holly. It occurred to me then, with him keeping himself busy, that I had more than the usual good feelings for him. I was full of good feelings. But I think, for me at least, those kinds of feelings were the elephant in the room.

  We sat at the table, tucked our napkins, pulled crackers and uncorked the champagne. I unloaded huge servings of tourtière, he served up my effort at vegetables. I lit candles and we both looked out at snow falling on the empty street, and listened to the silence. Golden light glowed behind drawn curtains up and down the sidewalk. At last a holiness had descended, and I still had time to make the peace of the Christmas my own. I watched him closely and differently than I had before, as he talked about Christmases with friends in Toronto and his reluctance to participate in family Christmases in Windsor since leaving home. His family turned their backs on him. They thought they were sleuths discovering he had no girlfriend. He said his leanings were more obvious with his too-fabulous blond hair, when he had hair, and very expensive taste when he was with someone who could support it. You could shut gay behaviour in a closet or excuse it away as “ladies man,” “bachelor” or “loner,” or just turn your back on all of it. Kent’s family hadn’t talked to him in years.

  “It will be nice for you to catch up with friends in Montreal.”

  I knew he wanted more of what he was looking for—Quebec City was too small and too much work for him. “Don’t let me know if you run into you-know-who.”

  “See? You’ve already forgotten his name. You might not even remember mine by the time you get back from down south.” I untied his bowtie, and he tossed his shirt by my mattress, pretending for once that he was the stripper. He did a very endearing routine with a lit cigarette, mimicking yours truly, and then we got under the sheets, me in his tight grip. We watched the candles flicker and die on the table while the snow fell outside and then we fell asleep, naked, together.

  As I slept I saw the snow bringing neighbours like us together. Then I dreamt of the land down south where the heat opens every pore, and feeds this man’s testosterone like a leaky faucet. A pleasurable torture if you know how to control it. I saw the pale adolescent I was, my first and only Christmas in the tropical sun. We were two travel days away from Edmonton, Alberta, but all the same old faces had come along.

  Sometimes a breeze pushed away the heat. But I learned the effects of sun on a man’s back all day, the steam from the shower and my own light touch. There was a man on the beach who reminded me of Mister Clean—bald-headed and bulges of muscle as he flexed his crossed arms. Something stirred in me. The Edmontonians chuckled to each other at the small black Speedo that covered Mister Clean’s family jewels and perfect ass. I watched them try not to look. I hoped the same firmness would find me someday. Could I ever hope to look like that? What would muscles look like on me? Would muscles grow? He was perfect. Why did the pear-shaped, soft-assed, sunburnt dentists laugh at this living statue? In an answer to a prayer, two more lean bodies, brothers or best friends, came down the beach in briefs. I made sure to spread out my beach towel in their path, but they didn’t notice a horny prepubescent as they spoke a foreign language and stared into each other’s eyes.

  In contrast to this I noticed imperfections, peeling burns, wrinkled thighs, varicose veins, horny discoloured toenails at the end of crooked toes from a lifetime of badly fitting shoes. I saw everything and my senses exploded like the flowers blooming off the walls, over doorways, everywhere there was moisture, sun, rain, hummingbirds darting, cats in heat by night and dogs humping any old time. Black men wandered from shore to high-tide mark looking for something, full lips smiling, or puckered or squeezed. I experimented with my own lips in the mirror: withheld, wondering, coy, pouting.

  I watched the natives as they gathered in groups along the shore casting their nets, bathing their bony cows. Dicks flopped in frayed loose wet boxers. I was dizzy wondering what they did in the heat of the day. I spent hours in the steamy bathroom (while my parents glugged sea breezes, daiquiris, mai-tais and Cuba libres). I hoped that someday I would be as big and as free as these men.

  Tidy white men appeared for happy hour. “The boys,” whispered someone’s wife—echoed, with raised eyebrows, by someone’s husband as if these well-dressed men were freaks, doing something wrong because they weren’t with women. “The boys” sipping their cocktails in their cruise-wear, espadrilles, flip-flops, tanned feet and pedicures. They laughed as I nursed a ginger beer, then a fruit punch, while other conversations flew past me. Someone said they were fruits. And why did they care? Were they as bad as commies? Why wouldn’t the fruits look my way? Why was it only the husbands and wives and other tourists in prints and patterns who doted on me and then ignored me?

  “I’m not with them,” I wanted to scream to those beautiful men. Why wouldn’t they rescue me? Someday I vowed they would, or I would return alone, and never have to go back to the snow. Someday with my strong feet locked to the floor, a chest for a shield, a pelvis like stone, legs of steel and my dick shoved in my swimsuit, cocked like a pistol with a hair trigger, lips turned up in a sneer, I would return and no one would ever again, ever ignore me.

  No matter how charmed your life, winter in the East means a fuck of a lot of trudging, weighed down by lay
ers of soaking Gore-Tex, wool, fleece and feathers—or fighting your way through a blizzard, or to a bus, or to a plane that is still whining miles above you in absolute zero. But the tropics mean wandering half-naked along the warm shores of the Caribbean with nothing but a few ounces of drip-dry nylon to care about.

  In the morning Kent had coffee ready and got me in a cab and off to the airport without a hitch. “I’ll do the dishes.”

  “See you,” I replied. “And save New Year’s Eve for us.” If there was a knife in my gut I couldn’t have felt it more sharply; I didn’t want to leave him behind. I smiled bravely, and somewhat falsely. He could see it in my eyes. I know.

  In several hours, I found the richness, the thick air that floods into the plane as the doors open, the heat, the bright sun, the blue sky and white clouds close enough to touch, the intense colours and the sound of the sea. All that I was looking for. I was a free man, living in a little rented shack, one of a few that had seen far better days, by the sea. Ignore the cockroaches at night and the bedsprings and it was bliss. The beach as I remembered it hadn’t changed much since I was a kid. I hadn’t been alone like this in a long time—if ever—with only my thoughts for company. That first afternoon was spent thinking about Kent, and wishing that Christmas night could have lasted for another week.

  The men still wandered the beach, thank God. The tourists ignored me; husbands looked at me with curiosity, perhaps longing. I hoped to spend uncharted hours trying, with the help of planter’s punches, to gain back the sleep I had lost in the past months. At a nearby hotel, a fat Frankfurter bought me martinis. Said I was his friend. I was drunk enough to excuse the next part. I could never catch up to Kent’s numbers in so brief a time, and the most I could do was fantasize about Mr. Clean from a decade ago—and those Latin lovers, or were they brothers? Where had they all gone? Where were the boys in their pastels?

  I followed the chubby Mein Herr to an abandoned house blasted by the sea, which at night must have been home for the black magic of the beach. A stained mattress with a hole burned in it, hanging over the sill of a window, presided over bits of animal bone, iguana skin and feathers while stray dogs and feral cats cowered among the dried palm fronds and coconut shells. Everything was in a state of decay. We only made it to the middle of the dark driveway hidden by this tropical excrement, rotting fruit, more dried leaves and dog crap. We fell on this, and as I serviced him, his swollen face turned pink with pleasure. The next day he was by the bar with wife and kids in tow, and I knew the hangover he was concealing. He pretended he didn’t recognize me. He looked far worse sober, like every other hot and bothered dad.

  I was sitting on the steps of my shack when a bony West Indian man in a knitted cap came by, reached under my sarong, cupped my nether regions—or whatever Kent thought a decent white boy like me should call it—in his hand and we watched those regions swell. He smiled a mouth of gaps and gold. He turned and wandered under the trees along the road, and I caught up at the same ruined house from the night before. Pebbles pierced my feet. From the road, the house was faded corals and blues and the tourists wandered up to take photos of its quaintness through the chicken wire. If you squinted it could be the backdrop of many a travel brochure. He banged the walls to scare out the stray rats, cats and vagrants. Inside was worse. Rags of pillows and leftover mouldy mattresses along with more animal crap were rammed into the corners.

  I followed him room by room through this bad dream, through a door to what once must have been a bathroom but was now a piss-stinking, toilet-less closet with a rotting hole in the floor. I couldn’t see his face anymore. He was a skeleton to the touch, the same as his narrow, bone-stiff stubborn, coat-hanger dick that jabbed my thigh. I opened the fold in my sarong. “Here, hold my cock,” I said, but he shoved my head down to his smelling-like-shit spindle for me to gag on. Which I did. I had to. His knuckles burned my skull until he was satisfied. As I had been taught, I feared for my life.

  I ran from the house retching, spitting, wiping. Anything to take this foul moment away, subtract it, make it not have happened. He shouted that I broke the law. “Faggot! Faggot!” he yelled after me.

  The next night, out on the road, after having vowed a conditional, self-imposed celibacy until I went home—and truly engrossed in a very dark and velvety night sky—a carload of well-dressed white boys pulled up and asked me which way to town.

  As if they didn’t know.

  I pointed. The car headed up to the main road. I watched the lights fade under that vast tropical starry night. Take me, I thought, returning to my sky. But no sooner than I sorted Orion’s Belt from the Sword of Damocles, did they make a u-turn, come back full speed, pull up and stop. The well-fed one in the driver’s seat stared at my crotch and asked me if I wanted to come along. Sure. These were the boys, the ones from years ago. They hadn’t aged. They never would.

  “I’m Dennis,” said the driver.

  “John. Pleased to meet you guys.” But the seconds remained stilted, so I went on, “I mean gays.” The ice was broken and there was no doubt about me, not that I wasn’t screaming it in bleached pink and turquoise. We drove and laughed and they slipped words in that Kent had introduced me to, like “Mary” and “sister” and “girlfriend.” Soon I felt comfort in missing Kent. I was with family. We were a whole new generation of cocktail-hour, pastel, argyle and espadrilled homos ready to be hooted at or hated. In town we settled into the only questionable bar in the West Indies. Christmas lights doubled for disco lights.

  A gorgeous black man took me up and ground his groin into me on the postage-stamp dance floor. A gentleman, too. I sweated something furious, and wondered if I could absorb his African gyrations. It was so simple and so powerful. He kissed me and went back to the dark side of the room. I wondered how all of this could someday be integrated into a dance—the heat, the slow intoxicating rhythm. We drank in our respective corners and I learned my new friends were all junior bankers, junior accountants, junior this and that office workers from Toronto. You know, some of them pudgy and well fed, some losing hair, all of them with a paycheque and a mortgage. Grown-ups in training only a few years older than me—covering their sunburnt bellies in a beach ensemble or perma-pressed cruise wear with nothing torn, cut off, open-toed, bleached or bare. Socks definitely mid-calf in the summer and knee-height any other time of life. Everything tucked in and belted. How fascinating. I wanted so badly to be on the other side of the room.

  “You dance well,” said the chubby one.

  “Well, I’m a dancer.”

  “Oh? Who with?”

  “The Company, Winnipeg, but now I’m living in Quebec, working with a small company there.” I was drunk enough to go on, and he didn’t seem to be listening anyway. “I have to moonlight in a club.”

  “You strip?”

  “Well…”

  “I knew it!” His chubby face glowed at the discovery, his eyes popped open. “Hey, guys, he’s a stripper. An honest-to-God stripper. I knew it.”

  I felt good. I felt bad. Crotch-driven gyrating and fudged dance steps had won out over ballet. And there I was—summed up in one word by this earnest accountant called Dennis—stripper. Javex-straw blond. Shaved chest. Cancerously brown. Tank top this. Sleeveless that. Thong this. Ripped that. Untucked. Disillusioned. Sallow. A pouter. Now they had a story to take back to the water cooler. Their friends would be jealous. They told me to come to Toronto for a visit. Dennis seemed to want to take me under his wing, in a big sister way. “There’s no way you won’t be moving to Toronto at some point. Give me a call. Look me up. I’m serious.” But Toronto seemed to be nowhere on my horizon. I told them all to come to Quebec for Carnival, and that they could sleep on my floor. Then later that night it was drunken sex with someone’s boyfriend by mistake on the beach, under a tree, in the night rain (when we were all supposed to be having a walk under the starlit sky), followed by an intense brief skin rash. I had tried to
imagine I was having sex with Mr. Clean but it was not the case. “Look me up in Toronto,” the nameless boyfriend said. He might have been cute but I couldn’t see him.

  Eight

  A dancer’s chest is the first and most accessible conduit to the universe, from which a dancer can express himself, and from which the universe receives the message that a corporeal story is in the process of being told. The centre of the sternum rises skyward, tugged at by angels. Once you have experienced weightlessness you can never tell yourself that you will be content to be earthbound, ever again. The upper back follows, the torso narrows, the heels rise and soon barely the toes touch the edges of earth.

  I got Kent’s message from Quebecair’s humpy tropical tourist rep, too late to be of any help. As for the rep, he stood at the gate of my compound (looking more like a tennis coach), bemused at my sparse accommodation. I wondered about him, too. How someone could be so satisfied with such a simple existence. Was I, alone, in love with martyrdom?

  I only had hours to wonder about Kent’s call before it was time to head to the airport. The message was to call collect, but I was coming home, which he had likely forgotten. Had my place burned down? His? Had all my stuff—leotards, dance belts, spandex, Mylar and hooker furniture gone up in an acrid, synthetic and sweat-stained smoke? Had someone died? I couldn’t imagine my parents dead. And, as for Kent, at least he was well enough to get a message to me, that’s what I told myself through many mini-bottles of bad wine as we flew north over the Bermuda Triangle, and frost gathered in the corners of the window panes, my tanned skin starting to crack like the bed of an emptied lake.

  My flight was rerouted to join the last of stranded passengers, from a week of heavy snowfall and cancelled flights, draped on seats, luggage and corridors, at the airport in Montreal. People were arriving from the great beyond, as well as through the front doors, stuffing the departures and arrivals with bundled bodies. It was then I saw the profiles of two good-looking, freshly tanned males stepping off the Jetway of a Varig 707 shrouded in the weakening blizzard, all the way from Rio. They glistened. Their hair was touched, with help, by the sun. They looked superb and sleek in matching leather bomber jackets, worth more than everything I owned put together. Their shoulders jostled each other, they chattered and took no heed of the tired throngs. One was Daniel.