We’re waking up the house in Vermont now and soon we’ll hit the US border, drop the in-law Mom and Aunt back in St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu, hopefully hit the Ganq’s casino for $40 and finish the long road back to George Hamilton.
This opening sequence is so cryptic I can’t even begin to tell you. Pics of a Cabane a Sucre, creepy cake and more later. Thanks for your patience.
At 4 am, I startled awake after sensing a presence in my room, standing at the foot of my bed.
“JesusfuckingChrist!!! What the fuck, Javier?”
Javier (“Hav!” I would call him) and I had been dating about a month. I had given him a key the week before because I felt I could trust him. Plus the apartment I had was massive: it was a long flight and a half to get downstairs to open the front door. My legs are lazy, my heart, not so.
“I missed you. I wanted to be sure you were here,” Jav says, sitting on the corner of my bed. I turn on the light.
“Wait. You drove from Ajax to see if I was sleeping? You don’t trust me?”
Thus began the end of our emotionally charged whirlwind dating. Javier was a closeted Uruguayan, first gen Canadian, testing the gay waters for the first time in his early 30s while living in the basement of his deeply religious parent’s home. At the time I was working the odd bar shift at The Black Eagle while working at Rogers in their iMedia department (yes, Rogers jumped on the “iBandwagon” back in 1998-2001) and would come home on the weekend at odd hours. Needless to say our relationship was moving along at a slow pace, since I had very little free time. Because of my lack of enthusiasm in our love affair, early on in our relationship, Jav accused me of sleeping around and not finding him attractive and that I’d prefer to be with bigger, bearish type guys simply because I worked at a rough leather bar.
I did find Jav extremely attractive: he was one of those hairy Southern Latinos, slenderly well built, well groomed, and playful. He had beautiful eyes and the whitest teeth of anyone I’ve ever been with. And apparently had no sense of boundaries.
“I’ll go,” Jav says and rises off the bed. A switch-whipped puppy couldn’t look sadder
“Oh for Christssakes, Jav. You better stay.”
The above mentioned incursion happened early Saturday morning. Sunday we met up and I called it off. It was surprisingly swift and without incident – Jav accepted that he was being a bit smothering and we parted without drama. I was relieved that I dodged an emotionally crippling bullet.
Monday morning at the office, I get a call from reception as soon as I sit down at my desk saying I had a visitor.
Uh oh…
I come around the corner to find Jav in tears in the middle of the reception area. Like Jav’s tears, co-workers are streaming by us, offering odd sympathetic glances. The receptionist has her head down, ears wide open.
I drag Jav out into the hall for some privacy. He begs me to take him back, he can change, it will change, he’ll give me my space. I stand firm and say that we need to go our separate ways. After a long pause, he leaves.
The remainder of the day I am sent 40 to 50 emails from Javier’s gal pal telling me that I am a horrible person, god will punish me, I’ve ruined Jav’s life, his heart and subsequently his career. I am scheduled to rot in hell and be miserably alone for the rest of my life, according to her. I am a monster who cannot possibly love anyone. I have lost the ability to love when I cut Jav loose. I was scum.
I call IT to ask how to block an email.
My boss notices my distress and after listening to my story, tells me that sometimes our hearts are unbalanced. In both senses of the word.
The man who “unofficially” deflowered me, I met at a drunken new years eve party somewhere in Brantford back in 1983. I say “unofficially” because I really should have let him be the one, but that’s another blog post all together.
Anyway, his name was Rick and looked startlingly a lot like the guy I had my first crush on: blond feather back hair, chiseled good looks, own home, car… Without going into details, it was a post New Years Eve shag that was fueled by cheap Freixenet champagne and horniness.
I called Rick a couple times after New Years and we hooked up once and I was smitten. After one date and two schtuppings, in my head I was already married off. I would call him constantly to see when we could get together again. And then phone calls stopped being responded to.
My last talk with him I offered to make him dinner, just the two of us. I was so desperate for him to come over that I absolutely didn’t see the non-commital “Sure, maybe” response I got to my invite. It was ON! I was living with my Dad at the time and made him promise to clear out after Rick arrived. I cooked the food, set the table, and lit the candles. And waited. And waited. Dad waited, reading the paper silently in the living room, saving me the embarrassment of having to admit my school girl style miscalculation of affections.
After an hour no show, it was evident he wasn’t coming and I asked Dad to join me for some overcooked dinner. He put down the paper and said to me the most developmentally sound thing I’ve ever heard:
“You can’t make them love you, Ted.”
Getting my “Red Shirt” ready!
Punk comes to your sofa!
SharkBoy may have brusitis in his knee. He’s been in pain steadily since Monday and today I convinced him to go to Toronto General Hospital after work because his knee was “pulsating”.
Ew.
4.5 hours later (I guess that ain’t too bad) we’re getting an xray.
Whatchoo guys doing?
It’s 1996 and I’m working in a quiet cafe just inside the doors of a fading gay favorite gym called The Bloor Valley Club. All the members had to cut through my dining area to get to the change rooms or the cardio area, giving me a great vantage point for people watching. In the spring of that year a regular to the gym started to slowly, shyly, order snacks and cappuccinos from me and in doing so, started friendly small talk.
He was a nice guy. We started to talk about books and books into movies and theatre. We talked about music and pop culture and various gossip. We would make comments at the day time TV playing over the bar and confess our secret shames in the love of soap operas. We would shout out answers to quiz shows and try to outsmart each other. He was sharply funny and subtly witty and could smile easily. You can guess where this is leading: after several weeks of chatting, when he inevitably asked me out on date, I turned him down.
Why? Because he had long hair.
He had a slight goatee, stunning blue eyes and was over 6’2″. Because he was a regular to the gym, I noted that he had tree trunk legs and I could get glimpses of chest hair through his workout clothes. But I couldn’t get past the shoulder-blade length hair! His mane wasn’t ratty or look pre-Tyra makeover or anything, it was just long. At the time I was trying to pigeon hole my tastes into a well defined scheme: skinheads and ubermacho tattooed motorcycle freaks. I was so hell bent on self conditioning I couldn’t see myself being with any other type of guy.
I let him down rather inelegantly too. I did let him know I only dated smoothed headed dudes because of a “shaving” fetish I claimed to have at the time. I don’t recall his reaction but I do remember there was an awkward silence after my shot through his heart. I remember him walking away in disappointment.
A week or so passed and I was doing waitressy things, as one does when they work in a small restaurant. The front door opened and down the hallway towards the cafe came a tall, goatee’d man with the slightest 5 o’clock shadow adorning his genetically perfect cranium. Of course, my whoremoans went into overload as time slowed down as he walked towards me like a hot chick in a Michael Bay movie. Yes, it was my “friend”. He had cut all his hair off and had gone skinhead. He. Looked. Amazing.
I know my eyes said “HELLO!” and I think I said, “Hello!” and he leaned in close and said: “This is what you’re missing.”
And never said another word to me ever again.
Like George Lucas I’m going to jump back to a time before my move to England with a couple stories that inspired me to travel across the pond. Enjoy!
I’m 18 years old and I’m sitting in line with other hopefuls at OCAD (then The Ontario College of Art). I’ve not decided entirely what I want to do with my life and my father is getting nervous that he’s going to have a live-in son until he shuffles off this mortal coil. I do know I want to stay in the art field but I had not decided exactly where I was going to take my talents. My portfolio, chock full of wildly coloured pastels of muscular torsos I had been drawing for months, sits on my bouncing knee. Compared to the rest of the hopefuls, my manner of dress is utterly “Sears” to their “Queen Street West”: one small girl is decked out entirely in leather in her shock Rough Trade look, her hair teased higher than my hopes. This is 1983, remember. I’m there to sign up for their Fine Arts program and let that take me wherever I wanted to go.
I enter the room and here is where my memory shatters up to a point: The room is narrow, almost another hallway. It’s dark, or I sort of recall that it was dark. There are three people at a desk and two look through my portfolio. I was so nervous that I didn’t catch who everyone behind that desk was. Only now, in my 40s, someone told me that one of the people looking at my work was a student and I assume the one not looking at my portfolio was a teacher or admissions officer. I do remember they asked all the questions.
What were my interests, favorite art period, method, incentives, history, my personal history, more personal history? Suddenly it was over. Fast. They breezed through my work and shut the portfolio. Not a good sign.
Then one of them laid it on the line (and I’m paraphrasing here): I was a privileged middle class white kid who had not experienced anything in life, certainly not enough to create any kind of meaningful art and that I should get out of Ontario and see real art. It was like a punch in the gut. The fact that I was living in my Dad’s basement and working nights at a hotel and had never travelled further than , made the OCAD’s assessment of me sting a little more.
They were right. If I wanted to be a serious artist I had to go see the real thing. Including all life’s little roadbumps that came up getting to those galleries. Of course, for weeks I was utterly crushed and moped around like my life was over.
Then my sister called. She asked how I was and offered words of encouragement and then suggested that I move to England under the Student Work Abroad Program. I can remember vividly how a light came on over my head. This is exactly what I needed to do.
For the last couple months I’ve been putting off my promise to myself for losing 20lbs. I had been weighing myself religiously with every visit to the gym and had not noticed any great flux in my weight – it was hovering nicely around 225lbs, but 20lbs sounded so easy to do: no chips, no eating after 8pm, more salads, less sugar, bla bla bla, which made me complacent to actually doing something about it. I was making promises to myself that I’d lose it before Disney and what the hey, I had a few months to go so what’s the rush?
Last week I was standing nude waiting in line for the scale in the change room (I love walking around nude in there, no towel wrap. Freaks out the repressed Islamic/Catholics), when the guy on the scale steps off and blurts: “Finally! They fixed it!”
Huh?
I step on.
It’s one of those doctor office ones with the sliding weights. I snap the weights to 225. Nope. Too light.
227? Nope.
235? No, the weights stayed put, not enough.
242? Finally the weights balance. Oh fucking shit on a toasted English muffin with a side of fucking home fries. With ass hollandaise sauce.
I felt cheated. I felt angry. I felt like some Fat Ass Fairy came and blessed me in the night with a gift of fat. I wanted to stride naked out of the change room to the administration office of the gym and wave my blubber at them while shouting: “YOU DID THIS TO ME!!” To say this was a wake up call was a bit of an understatement. I was nearing 1/8th of a ton.
I have friends who went on various Jenny Craig/Weight Watchers programs and while I honestly commended them for their choice of healthy eating (they all looked amazing after their run), when they talked about their food intake for the day like their relationship with food resembled a troubled loved one going through rehab, I would silently thank my lucky stars I wasn’t a “food Nazi”.
These things are cyclic: I have become a Food Nazi. So I’m eating more salads, less sugars, nothing after 8pm and getting back to the gym to do an hour of cardio for each visit. This is the last I’ll speak of it, though.