What a Beautiful Face

Three scars on my body are from dead people. The first one is on my left cheek, the cheek on my face, just outside my first dimple. The scar beside the dimple is a small thin line. It’s from D’Arcy. We were three and four years old, and my mother had let us play with adult sewing scissors. I had the yellow ones, and his were orange. I really wanted the orange scissors. When D’Arcy said no, I snipped the air in front of my face. D’Arcy took his orange scissors and snipped the skin on my face. The doctors taped it together. My mother once said that D’Arcy was a strange child, perhaps because he was a test tube baby. But I started the fight. In his early twenties, D’Arcy died suddenly and mysteriously in his sleep, lying in his girlfriend’s arms. They think he choked.

My second scar blends in almost perfectly with my forehead wrinkles. It’s above my left eyebrow. The dent runs seamlessly into my lines of premature ageing. This scar is from Yarrow Viets’s s goggles. A swimming collision. My fault. I was always so focussed and obsessive that I did a terrible job looking in front of me. We were doing a bunch of 300’s when we crashed. I remember Yarrow covering her eye and weeping so delicately. I have never been a delicate weeper. Yarrow Viets was very beautiful. For the rest of practice, she rested. I plowed through, logging in 5000 or 6000 meters. When I got home, my mother pointed out that my forehead was cracked open. This time, the doctors closed up the wreckage with glue. On June 18, Yarrow Viets died of stage 4 colon cancer.  She had young twin boys and hundreds of friends. It was unbelievably sad.

My last scar is from Simon. A vague, faded red blob on my left thigh. All of my dead people scars are on the left.  This one happened on a Saturday morning. My friends Bobbi and Fern were going to pick me up and drive me to an A.A. meeting. Fern says that all the addictions are kind of the same, and so you can go to A.A. even if you just only have an eating disorder. Well, I love A.A. meetings. And I have put in sincere time trying to be an alcoholic, with minimal success. So I was getting ready. I had just poured boiling water into the French press when someone unlocked my door. It was Simon. Without thinking, I pushed down the plunger. The spout was open and coffee spilled all over my left thigh. Simon gave me ice. He asked if he could come to the A.A. meeting. I said yes, but I was terrified he would say something obnoxious and embarrassing. He did say something, though it wasn’t obnoxious. It made me kind of proud.

“Hi, my name is Simon.”

“Hi Simon.”

Simon was nine hours sober. He told us a story about him and his pop. They’d been going through rough times, not really communicating. Then a couple of days earlier, they’d had a moment.

“We were together, and my pop said something touching. And I knew that I loved him. And I felt at peace. Or close to peace.  And… I’m just glad I was sober.” With that, Simon started sobbing. He went up to the front of the room and took a beginner’s A.A. chip. At the end of the meeting, there was coffee and doughnuts. Everyone went to shake Simon’s hand. His was the share of the meeting. Simon basked in the doughnuts and the handshakes, until Bobbi cut in. “Good share. Let’s go,” said Bobbi, always down to business. For months, Simon said this over and over again. “Good share. Let’s go.”

The burn on my leg looked horrible and purple. I was afraid it would lead to blood poisoning, and that this would lead to amputation. Bobbi and Fern dropped us off at my shitty downtown apartment on Overdale Street. Simon and I fucked on my disgusting futon, on my disgusting floor. It felt like the start of something redeeming.

That afternoon, Simon brought aloe vera to the swimming pool where I was a lifeguard. That evening, he got drunk again. Everyone knows that Simon jumped off his apartment building on January 4^th. Since he was a child, he always wanted to know what it was like to throw himself in the air from way up high. For three to seventeen seconds, I guess he got to know. His building is so high.  I brought daisies to the rooftop last Sunday. It was Simon’s 36^th birthday, so wet and dreary and cold. I couldn’t look over the edge.

Good share. Let’s go.

I once helped get Simon a job, working with a man with cerebral palsy at a day centre. The man’s name is Antoine. (I changed it for the blog) It is nice when men with disabilities get to have male caregivers. So many caregivers are female and they’re lovely, but when you’ve been surrounded by women for much of your life, maybe you appreciate a change. Simon didn’t view Antoine as someone he had to take care of. He wanted to be his friend.

“I feel so ready to give my inconditional love to someone like Antoine,” he wrote.

I just looked up these words in our old emails. In my head, I remember him saying: “I am ready to go crazy and open my heart and give Antoine all of my love.” He was so excited. Right before he got the job, he’d been kicked off welfare. Now he wouldn’t have to do so many drug studies for cash.

Together, Simon and Antoine had a wonderful blast. The teacher gave lessons on pictograms and phonograms. Simon made jokes the whole time, and Antoine burst into one fou rire after another. Fou Rire, crazy laugh. For an entire year, they worked on a text about hot dogs. I never got a chance to read it. Even after Simon left the job at the centre, he and Antoine used to go out for movies and hamburgers. Last fall they went to a safari park. There’s an amazing photo of them in the car. Simon’s feeding a camel a carrot. Antoine has this radiant and exquisite smile all over his face. One day after the movies, they went to McDonald’s. Together, they bought extra hamburgers. Simon led Antoine into the street where some kids were squeegeeing cars. Antoine gave the kids the bag of hamburgers. In this little moment, there must have been something for everyone.

*

On Sunday, June 28, I climbed the stairs of Simon’s apartment building. There were 23 floors, except the 12^th floor skips to the 14^th. Our world doesn’t believe in anything, and still, nobody wants to live on the 13^th floor. Simon’s stairwell was grey and stark, with no windows. Like a prison cell made out of stairs. Layered in heavy clothes, Simon used to climb up and down. He wanted to get sweaty and skinny, without having to see or talk to anyone. Fair enough, I suppose.

My arms full of daisies, I climbed up. I peaked at the eighth floor, where Simon used to live.  As though gazing down the carpeted hallway would bring some sort of closure or revelation. Not really. At the top of the 23^rd flight of stairs, the door was locked. It led to the pool. From there you could climb up onto the roof.  Some guy who was doing his laundry let me in.

“My ex-boyfriend jumped off this building in January.” Right away, the guy dropped his laundry hamper.

“Sorry about that,” he said. I stood on the lookout for a while, staring at Mont-Royal, the financial buildings, the wet streets. During my first year creative writing class, some girl wrote story about a woman with a dead boyfriend. It opened with the girlfriend standing in the rain carrying flowers.

"It is raining. I am wearing my shiny red dress. I am standing at your grave and watching the puddle form in front of it. My shoes are getting muddy."

Simon adored this beginning. Excellent, he called it. But my writing teacher said that its potential for narrative development was limited. “Her shoes can only get so muddy, and her dress can only get so wet.”

On top of Simon's building, there were stairs that led down from the lookout to the rest of the roof. It was covered in medium sized stones. I ducked under the yellow danger tape, and climbed down the stairs. Walking around the periphery, I remembered the rooftops in India. Under the moon or in the hot sun, I would sit there and think about the orphans. I could only stay for so long.

I had meant to throw the daisies off the building, but it was too high. Using a random cement block, I wedged them into the Northeast corner. That might have been where Simon jumped. I’m not sure. I picked one of the daisies off the bouquet, and let it go. I couldn’t see where it went. I was wearing my bright red raincoat. It was totally wet. So were my shoes and pants. I could only stay for so long. Before I left, I took another daisy. This one was for Simon’s front door. As I placed the daisy in the door frame, I listened for noises from inside his apartment. I heard nothing.

That day, I was out in the rain for so long that my teeth started to chatter and my hands went numb.

The End.



Simon Girard (1979-2015)

Title Inspired by all the beautiful faces, and by the Song, "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." Neutral Milk Hotel. It is the new song of my life.

 "What a beautiful dream that could flash on a screen in a blink of an eye and be gone"

Simon Girard (1979-2015) 

Guillaume, Part Two (Asking People About Their Lives, Episode Two)

(As you know from the blogpost “Too Ugly For Prostitution,” I met Guillaume at a grown-up barbecue where there were cheese curds, mojitos, and opportunities to learn a great deal about life insurance. Guillaume is my second guest for the blog series “Asking People About Their Lives” in which I do just that.)

Guillaume (Not too ugly for prostitution)
Check out Part One: Too Ugly for Prostitution Here
 

Guillaume, Part Two
(Asking People About Their Lives, Episode Two)

Guillaume grew up in Boucherville. His parents were not that rich but not that poor either. When he was eighteen, it was somewhat of a crapshoot that Guillaume ended up with a job at a homeless shelter. He needed a summer job and out of MacDonald’s, the library and the homeless shelter, it was the homeless shelter that got back to him. They hired him as an “intervention worker.” Basically it meant that he was a “social worker with no training.” At one of his first shifts, a resident attacked a senior worker who had been working in the field for more than twenty years.  The resident was extremely drunk, and the scene was extremely violent. In the end, Guillaume’s co-worker broke his back and was never able to resume work. None of this seemed to phase Guillaume, despite being only eighteen at the time. Very quickly he became very comfortable in this milieu where drugs and violence were run of the mill. I asked him why he thought this was so natural for him.

Part of it was because he spent his adolescence “right in the middle of everything.” He was never a junkie himself, but many of his friends were. And though he feels like he was never directly involved in violence, he witnessed it happening all around him.

For most of his teenage years, Guillaume alternated between living with his friends and his parents. “I was not good at school, not good at anything.” When he was younger he was good at hockey, but he stopped that. Then he got into music. He had long hair down to his butt, and a huge beard. Before discovering the homeless shelter, Guillaume tried a whole bunch of different stuff. He built board games, worked in metal factories, and studied human sciences. Then he found the shelter where he “grew a lot very very fast. I got to know myself better in a very short time.”

Guillaume’s attitude towards serving people seems different from that of the folks I meet who have vast ambitions to change and save the world. I got the sense that a great deal of his work was simply about listening to people, and accepting them exactly as they were. He seemed really grounded.

Guillaume: "Need to be present to the idea that it can be different. People can have a very different life, and it’s their own choice. You’re not going to be there to save anyone, you’re just going to be there to be present to them for whatever it is they are going through. Starting there was a good start for me.”

Eventually, Guillaume moved to Montreal, where he got a job at the Salvation Army. There, he was in charge of a floor of 27 men who were dealing with various mental illnesses. Although he continued to maintain positive relationships with the residents, it was harder because the Salvation Army is a church, and Guillaume’s an atheist. When it came to the residents, Armée du Salut had a clear agenda. Often their philosophy conflicted with what Guillaume believed in. I asked Guillaume about the homophobia situation. 

Guillaume: "In Canada, they are going to be negative about it and they are going to try and cure you."

Erica: "Yah, but that’s super violent."

Guillaume: "I know, but (in contrast to the States) they are still accepting you to come in. It’s just that they’re going to be very severe that you don’t come around anyone else because it’s only men who are there.”

Even worse were the priests who were saying that the people who had mental illness were being conjured by demons. After three years, Guillaume could no longer watch this happen and he had to leave. For a while, he applied his intervention and people skills to being a bouncer at night clubs. This was fun, but the scene got old. When he got the chance, he went to work at a syringe exchange site. There he gave out syringes, crackpipes, lubricants and condoms to anyone who needed them: “cocaine addicts, heroine addicts, people who are mixing it up… most of them are into prostitution, male prostitution, female prostitution.” The exchange site focusses less on making people better and more on trying to help them be as safe as possible in the life they’re leading right now. If people are interested in other resources such as housing and rehab centres, the staff has that information. That said, nothing is forced on anyone. 

Guillaume frequently emphasized the simplicity and power of just being present to people. For him, the job was about “being present and open and welcoming them. Nobody welcomes them in the street.  They’re being spit on, ignored …. They’re garbage, they’re garbage in the street.” The centre is “the only place they can be welcomed, where people know their name. Hi Andrew, how are you? Who asks them how are you? It’s a strange world out there for them. It’s a very very harsh world. They’re a nuisance, they’re being thrown around, pushed around.”

We can say we have open hearts, but we all have blind spots, people we choose not to see. It is a harsh world. Guillaume met all sorts of people at the syringe exchange site. Musicians, well-known artists and hockey players, rich people, poor people.

“I’ve seen everyone from every place in the hierarchy,” he said. Some men have lost their families through breakups or accidents. They lose everything and they just can’t deal with it. More common than you might imagine is people who have accidents and become addicted to narcotics during the rehab process. Guillaume knows a man exactly his age who had an accident on a mountain when he was fifteen. Since then, he’s been on the street, in pain, and addicted. “He has no veins to inject anymore,” said Guillaume. Guillaume is very adamant that anybody could end up on the streets. It’s just a matter of circumstances. And we have no idea how brutal it can be.

Guillaume: "So what you do is you inject yourself so you don’t feel the cold anymore, you don’t feel the solitude anymore, you don’t feel...  You get addicted to being paranoid smoking crack. It’s hard to understand but people are actually looking for those sensations because when they’re being paranoid and freaking out, they’re actually not thinking about their own lives. Because their own lives are freaking painful, even more painful than anything."

***

Addiction and the recovery process make up some of my greatest fascinations. I devour any memoir about alcoholism and drug rehab, and I light up whenever I see an A.A. meeting on T.V. For a certain period of my life, I even decided I was an alcoholic just so I could attend A.A. meetings. In truth, I make a pitiful alcoholic. But so far, A.A. meetings have been one of the only places in my life where I haven’t felt compelled to talk my ass off.  I really wanted to hear what Guillaume had to say about Narcotics and Alcoholics Anonymous, and the various options for addictions recovery. Guillaume thinks it’s great that A.A. works for some people. Any amount of abstinence from an addiction constitutes a success, a victory. That said, Guillaume has reservations about the Christian framework that lies at the heart of A.A. philosophy. He “can’t stand the fact that they keep telling them that they’re powerless when they’re not, that they’re telling their stories over and over again. And you’re just looking at the past. You’re not looking at what you’re doing now.”

For those of you who are not A.A. junkies, the first of A.A.’s twelve steps is to “admit that you are powerless over alcohol and that your life has become unmanageable.” I would tend to agree that the lives of most alcoholics or addicts spill over into the unmanageable. And yet, I sometimes question the insistence of uttering this truth aloud day after day, even after thirty-three years of sobriety. To me, part of it says, “I’m a fuck up, I can’t make my own choices. Ever.” Of course, black and white, never-ever-do-this -again sort of thinking can be helpful for some people. One example would be Simon, my ex-boyfriend who jumped off a building this January. Would have been great if he had come to the decision to never ever drink again. Still, I think Guillaume makes a good point in acknowledging that in fact, nobody, regardless of the mess around them, is truly and entirely powerless. 

Guillaume: “They’re the experts of using those drugs, that have been selling their bodies… I’ve never done that… they’re the experts of their own world we’re there to help them to be better experts, to allow them to have a break, a pause, from whatever they’re going through.”

Although the relentless monologues of an A.A. meeting may prove to be excessive, Guilllaume absolutely recognizes the healing potential of giving a voice to your experience. This made me think of being fifteen and in the psych ward for my eating disorder. One morning a bunch of doctors came into my room. They wanted to hear all about what I’d been through. I remember sitting up in bed and realizing, “Oh, I’m allowed to talk about this now. People care about my experience, and it is beyond what I should have to go through.” It was such an immense relief that I’ve been talking about it ever since.

At the syringe exchange site, Guillaume made sure that people had the opportunity to share. And if they wanted his perspective or advice, he would give it to them. He always encouraged people to take everything they’d been through and put it towards the present moment.

He described a pep talk he gave at the centre, years ago. He remembers saying, “You’re gonna do it in the present tense, you’re not gonna do it in the future you’re not gonna do it in the past. You’re gonna use everything, but you’re gonna do it NOW.” Over a year later, some man stopped him on the street, and shook his hand.

“Do you remember me?” he asked. At first, Guillaume didn’t. He had seen so many men, so many stories. The guy who shook his hand had been through a bad divorce, and had gotten into sniffing cocaine. Guillaume hadn’t been talking to him, but he had overheard the Now talk. The next morning, as he left the shelter, he was about to sniff some cocaine he had stored in his locker. But he kept hearing Guillaume’s words.

“I got stuck with the Now,” he said. He threw the cocaine in the sewer, and hasn’t touched drugs ever since. Within a few weeks he had built up his landscaping business and when Guillaume saw him, he had five employees. 

Guillaume: “As of today, it’s one of my first and greatest achievements.”

***
Towards the end of our interview, I brought up suicide. As all of my readers can probably tell, these days, the topic has been pretty prevalent in my head, due to the fact that my ex-boyfriend Simon jumped off a building this past January. During my stints in the psych ward and day treatment program for eating disorders, a number of the teenagers I met were suicidal. At the time, the protocol for suicidal people was to put them in isolation for 72 hours. This practice continues in hospitals across North America. It only recently occurred to me what a terrible idea this is. I just feel like such a huge part of mental illness and suicide is feeling isolated and alone. How is it that we’re treating the problem with more isolation, more seclusion?

Guillaume agrees that isolation is one of the worst things you can do for people who want to kill themselves. At the syringe exchange site, many of the people who came into the centre felt suicidal. 

Guillaume: “Nobody actually wants to die, but everyone wants to stop suffering. .. a huge part of most suffering is that you’re silent and nobody is listening to you and you’re alone in your pain… Just having someone listen usually relieves part of the initial crisis, and they realize that they can come back.”

But I wonder if part of the issue is that some people really do want to die. Or at least, they want part of themselves to be dead. And maybe we need to let people be honest about this part of them.

Erica: "In high school, they present us with power points that say don’t ever do this, you will hurt those you love. What about acknowledging the part of a person who wants to die?"

Guillaume: "Nobody actually wants to die, you want to stop suffering from whatever you are suffering from. You want to stop that pain. We have to look for solutions. It’s not that in talking about it that you are going to find solutions but if you talk about what’s actually going on to the relevant people you might find that you’re not all by yourself. You might find some solutions."

I feel like for Simon, any solution would have been too little too late. The fact that he would always have to endure hard times, maybe this was unacceptable for him after a while. As though he had already put in his time with the misery. He was all done. In my speeches about Simon, I always say, “I just feel like he would have had one more good day.” I said something along these lines to Guillaume.

Erica: “There would have been at least one more thing that he would have enjoyed. He seemed to enjoy sex. Or the exchange with the cashier at the depanneur, something … But I don’t know what it was like to be Simon for that long… he was probably like shit, I’m still me and it’s still this.”

Simon is dead, and I think about him so much more than when he was alive. It’s like by jumping off the building, Simon wrote this piercing and haunting book that I’ll never get out of my head. Fucker. Since Simon was a child, he imagined throwing himself from way up high. Resources or not I suppose it was inevitable. And Simon was pretty adamantly against treatment services, or being labelled with a condition or a problem. Volatile, impulsive, filled with alcohol, Simon wanted to stay Simon, whatever that means.

G: "In public services, you are a number, and you are one out of so many. They’re overencumbered So many requests for so little support that is available. And… people are actually numbered, they’re issues. So you’re schizophrenia, and you’re neurotic and you’re this and you’re that and what I’m saying is that you’re a human being who is just as worthy as I am, who is going through different issues than I am but you’re just as good, you’re just as worthy as any human being. You’re not a case, you’re not an issue, you’re not a problem.”

Hear that, folks. Not a problem. Just as worthy as any human being.

The End.

Guillaume is currently working on broadcasting content on a website called Twitch.
You can find his stuff here.

Follow me on Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
Like My Facebook Fan Page: Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Read the Book: I Let Go

I am looking for more interview candidates, for Asking People About Their Lives. So far the process has been empowering for everyone involved. I am interested in all kinds of humans. Let me know if you would like me to ask you about your life, or to ask someone else about theirs.

Also, the call-out for the Internet Diagnosis of Every Three to Six Weeks is still on. Thanks! Strange earwax, odours and involuntary twitches are all welcome. Thanks!

 

Guillaume, Again

Related Posts:

 

Guillaume, Part One, Too Ugly For Prostitution

 

Not Separate From All That Is

Twenty-First Century Yoga and an End to Self-Care

Simon Girard (1979-2015)

How I am violent

Cardboard Box 

God Box

Thursday, February 19, 2015

On Tuesday, I translated three sentences about barley.

With its varying hues, the barley gives this dish a two-toned appearance. This colouring is due to the fact that the hulls are still wrapped around some of the grains. This dish makes a wonderful accompaniment to chicken, fish, or pork.

On Thursday, I translated a letter for a bank that is firing all its employees and switching to automated machines.

In 2009, I drew my body in the shape of a small gingerbread man. I drew a circle in the throat area and inside the circle, I wrote green. My old psychologist Dr. Henderson used to teach me how to colour code my day. Pink meant happy. Orange was average. Okay or mediocre but not horrendous. Green equalled shitty. While she was explaining the code to me, she used smelly markers on her big chart paper. As I went through the day, I was supposed to rate my mood. Whenever there was food or eating disorder symptoms, I would automatically say that it was green, even though sometimes puking something tasty into your mouth felt soothing. Other times, it was just disgusting and it made me feel ashamed. My fear for you, Dr. Henderson said, is that the eating disorder will continue to insert green into moments that would otherwise be pink or orange. She explained that it was important to leave room in your life for orange moments. Sometimes life is just orange, she said. Not terrible or catastrophic, but also not spectacular. You don’t need to let the eating disorder add green and make it bad. This makes her sound dumb, but she was actually quite a good psychologist.

The gingerbread man with green in his throat

I always felt pressured to rate my eating disorder times as green and unpleasant and terrible. Except that the vomit wasn’t always particularly unpleasant. Sometimes it felt better than faking it. More honest. The insides matched the outsides.

Dr. Henderson told me that eating disorder or not, I would probably always be a fairly anxious person. I found this news to be remarkably disappointing. I had the vision that once I stopped puking in my mouth, I would transform into someone exquisitely calm. Someone who remains impressively unphased by life’s whims. A Chill Chick. Alas, this is not quite me.

Back when I tried to do the twelve steps for overcoming alcoholism in attempts to overcome my eating disorder, I made a God Box. It was in the shape of a long rectangle. I covered it with sheets of paper which I decorated with splatters of pink, yellow and purple paint. Maybe there were also other colours. Naomi, my friend and roommate at the time, called it the Allah Box. We wanted to be inclusive of all religions and cultures. Probably we were also being a little bit obnoxious. The Allah Box was for putting all your problems and worries into. I wrote down my problems on small square sheets of paper, folded them in half and slid them through the rectangular slot on the top of the Allah Box.

The A.A. people recommend writing all your character defects down. You can make a list or write them down on small squares of paper, and put them in your God slash Allah Box, or throw them in the Lachine Canal. I think I tried all of these things. I have a list of all the character defects I put in the God Box and on a list and in the Lachine Canal. It is not that interesting. I think I got a bunch of my character defects from the sample list on the A.A. website. Oh well.

Erica’s List of Character Defects

Easily discouraged                                                   resentments

Give up easily                     tendency to create drama

Hypochondria                                   disorganization                                        prejudice

         Perfectionism                                        distractedness

                         INTOLERANCE                                     selfishness

Judgementalness                          carelessness                                        jaded facetious skeptical

Pride                  greed            seeing the negative all the time

Defects isn’t the kindest word.

Before I left Montreal to live with the Boatman in Halifax, I gave the Allah Box to Simon.  Even though we didn’t get along that well, Simon kept the Allah Box until January 4^th. Then he jumped off a building and died. Maybe it wasn’t very nice to give someone a box filled with my character defects.

On my bedside table, there is a dusty lamp that doesn’t work. There’s something wrong with the plug, and perhaps also the lightbulb. Not sure. The Boatman and I are terrible at following through with stuff like that. We could spend the rest of our lives looking after shit like that. Lightbulb after plug after leaky shower head.

The End.

I Let Go
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor

Simon Girard 1979-2015

Recycling Day
Rumplestiltskin