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) 

Soul Fucking

So I went to Halifax to meet the Boatman for the second time, and have sex with him for the first time. My timing was impeccable and my vagina started to bleed the second day I arrived. We still had a lovely time and gave in to fucking on soft white towels.  I got his penis and the towels all bloody. Even so, the day before I left, as we lay post-coital on the bloody towels, the Boatman kissed me and invited me to stay with him in Halifax for as long as I wanted.

The day I left Halifax was rainy and sad and I was still bleeding. I knew that I had to go back. In Montreal, there was only lifeguarding and yoga and a few friends. Not as good as the Boatman.  The timing was right. I was leaving.

On my last day as a lifeguard, my last Saturday in Montreal, I gave my celebrity friend Ronald a yoga class in his hotel room.  Ronald was playing one of the dwarves in a remake of Snow White. He happens to be of a small stature, a little person they call it, and he's extremely athletic. In his room, he had wooden benches to climb onto his queen-sized bed and into the shower.  We did yoga on the carpet.  His arms were just long enough to get his hands over his head.  It was hard for him to bend forward because his torso was so much longer than his legs.  Everywhere, his muscles bulged.
The class lasted 20 minutes.  Ronald said that it was fun and he gave me forty dollars.

That night, I invited Ronald to Parc Lafontaine, where I was meeting two friends to drink. With Ronald’s forty dollars, I bought Raspberry vodka and perrier, pita carrots and hummus.  I got drunk with the only guy I ever kept in touch with from my online dating career.  I call him my Magic Mushrooms Friend.  He does psychedelic drugs and is obsessed with female orgasms.  He thinks that both of these things are the cure for neuroses.  Someday I’ll try psychedelic drugs and the world will become one with all of my organs. So far my orgasms are not that powerful

When the world becomes one with my orgasms, I will see things as they really are.  The Buddhists are always talking about this.  Seeing things as they really are.  This frustrates me.  How are things really?  Whatever I see, it isn't how things really are.  I fuck and I see this.  I get drunk and I see that.  I never get the right answer. I need more orgasms.  I need more drugs.

My Magic Mushrooms Friend says that orgasms are the beginning and end of the world and that the secret to orgasm is knowing you can shit in your partner’s face while they’re licking your snatch.  You can shit and know that everything will be okay.  In the park, I drank 5 or 6 or 7 shots of vodka.

“I think I’m drinking too much,” I said.

“It’s okay,” said my Magic Mushrooms Friend.  “You can push a little tonight.”

What did we talk about?  Probably only about magic mushrooms and orgasms.  And about how I wanted to fuck the Boatman’s soul.  My friend Emily joined us and we ate more hummus and pita bread and carrots.  We waited for Ronald but it was too far for him to come so we offered to meet him at a bar that was closer. Benelux.  There was not much to drink there except for beer.  I was too drunk to care.  The strap of my sundress broke so I put on my bathing suit with my lifeguarding t.shirt and short shorts over top.

“Would you like to see my boob?” I asked my Magic Mushrooms Friend. My Magic Mushrooms Friend said yes and I showed it to him.  The left boob or the right boob, or both. Months later, on Facebook, he told me how much he appreciated this gesture.  I told him that he was welcome.

Ronald arrived and bought us all beer.  Now my boob was hidden and we got to talking about something that I wasn’t paying attention to.  I decided to put both of my legs behind my head.  Ronald took a picture.  Now I was wearing a black and white bathing suit with no lifeguarding clothes over top.  In the bathing suit, I wondered if I was still capable of standing up from a backbend.  I was concerned so I lay down on the bar’s dirty floor and made my body into a semi-circle.  Half a wheel or half a bridge or whatever the yogis call it.  My arms and legs were almost straight.

A yoga teacher I know says that doing yoga when you’re drunk is dirty. Why is it dirty?  You look almost exactly the same as when you’re sober.  After twenty-five tries of bending my arms and straightening them again I transferred all of my weight onto my legs and stood up.  

I didn’t want to forget how to do this ever again so I dropped back into a backbend and stood up a bunch more times.  Ronald came behind me and said, “You could do handstand drop overs.”   Ronald used to be a personal trainer.   He pushed my legs backwards over my arms and crashed my legs down.  We repeated this movement a couple of times.  To this day, I can barely pull this off by myself.

At the very same moment in Halifax, the Boatman was having drinks with his friends.  They were toasting my arrival.  They were toasting my existence.  The Boatman texted me to tell me, and I texted him back, “I WANT TO FUCK YOUR SOUL.”

Soon it was four in the morning and time to go home.  I hugged everyone, bending myself in half to hug Ronald.  My Magic Mushrooms Friend held me in his arms mumbling and murmuring and whimpering for what seemed like hours.  I have no idea what he said.  Afterwards, he texted me and thanked me for my majesticness. “We could have worked, you know,” he’d written.

I drove Ronald home on the back of my bike.  He sat on the rack, held onto my waist and rode me all the way to his hotel.  Maybe I could have gone upstairs to his hotel room where I’d given him a yoga class.  I might have discovered the answers to all the different questions of the universe.  I could have seen things as they really are.  At the very least, I would have seen his penis.  But I’d promised the Boatman that I wanted to fuck his soul.  The Boatman’s soul and not Ronald's.  Everyone I tell this story to thinks I missed an opportunity.  Even the Boatman. The Boatman and I have lived together for two years and seven months. We are in the habit of fucking each other’s souls on Saturday and Sunday afternoons.  The Boatman says that the next time Ronald or another cute celebrity who happens to be a little person comes along, I’m allowed to fuck him. He has permitted it, but I know it’s too late. 

The End.

The Soul-Fucking Honkies
 

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Chuckie the Horse and the Day Jack Layton Died

Jack Layton died two years ago today. August 22^nd, 2011. He was the leader of the New Democratic Party. One of the reasons I like him was because he ate granola and blueberries for breakfast. Stephen Harper the conservative prime minister apparently eats something much grosser. Despite the blueberries, Jack Layton died of prostate cancer. On August 22^nd, 2011, I had been living with the Boatman for just over a month. During the afternoons, I often got drunk, tired of pretending I had something meaningful to do before the Boatman came home from work. The day Jack Layton died, I got drunk on gin and diet soda and I thought about Jack Layton and I thought about writing another book.



Jack Layton, our optimistic NDP leader. Source.

 Jack Layton wrote a letter to Canadians and he told them to be loving, hopeful, and optimistic. Filled with gin and other carcinogens, I hardly felt any of these things. I felt mild despair. But Jack Layton said that optimism is better than despair. I should try to be optimistic. And change the world.

So I tried. I tried to write this story about Chuckie the Horse and the Day that Princess Diana died.

The first time I ever saw a horse’s dick was the day Princess Diana died. It was an enlarged version of my father’s and about one and a half times the size of the wooden rulers we used in math class. I was at the Perth fair, watching the equestrian competition with my friend Janine. Janine had long, thick blonde hair that went down to her waist. She’d gotten a ninety-nine percent average in grade seven and she was so good at the piano that she’d been the pianist in the school’s performance of The Pirates of Penzance. Janine used to ride horses too. She knew all the horses in the Perth Fair and we were allowed to go back into the stables to pat their heads and brush them with a shell-shaped comb. The horse show was two days before our first day of grade eight. I was eleven and Janine was twelve.

Chuckie was the horse’s name. Maybe he was a thoroughbread. His hair was dark brown and his back legs looked like enormous chicken drumsticks. I didn’t know much about horses because my family lived in town. Janine and I squeezed into either side of his stall.



Chuckie the Horse and his long dick looked something like this.  Source

 “Yes, Chuckie, yes,” Janine cooed, stroking his nose. It was my turn to use the shell-shaped comb to brush his mane.

“I heard Princess Diana puked up her food,” I said.

“That’s revolting,” said Janine. Chuckie snorted. Janine's always said that her stomach stuck out more than mine did, and that it was softer. I said that she was smart and beautiful she had long perfect blonde hair and so she beat me.

“I think Princess Diana was beautiful.” I sucked in my stomach and rubbed Chuckie`s neck. During the school year, I swam two hours a day with the Perth swim team. In the summers, there was a break and I became intensely afraid of gaining weight. I spent my days walking our family dog around Perth’s perimeters, counting my steps and making sure I made it to at least 6000, or else I did not deserve lunch. While I stood still, I clenched and unclenched my buttocks, in the hopes that it would remain firm. Every night before bed, I performed 1000 abdominal exercises. I looked forward to the fall when swim practices would resume and someone else would have the responsibility of inflicting weight-management strategies upon me.

“I miss riding you, Chuckie,” said Janine. “Good luck.” We walked toward the end of Chuckie’s stall to comb his belly. That’s when his dick went down. Or up, I suppose. I knew very little about dicks at the time. Chuckie’s dick was long. Wide for its length, but still wide. In nine years, a sixty-eight year old intellectually disabled Polish woman named Jadwiga would ask me, “Erica, why men have the long thing?” Alas, I never had no satisfactory response for Jadwiga. Or for me.

“That’s really gross,” I said to Janine when I saw Chuckie the Horse’s dick. Grosser than Diana puking up her food. Much Grosser. Way Grosser. When Janine and I sat down on the bleachers, there were sixteen hours left if we wanted to die on the same day as Princess Diana. There were seven and a half years before I would touch a real cock. Eleven years, eight months until I would touch and suck and vaginally penetrate Simon’s.

The special thing about Simon’s dick was that he could cum from a blowjob and remain hard for a full blown session of intercourse. Shorter than Chuckie the Horse’s, but harder. Hard as wood. I was never thrilled about giving extensive blowjobs before sex. It took too long and by the time he came, I wouldn’t be in the mood anymore.
That’s as far as I got. I didn`t know what else to say. I wasn't in the mood anymore.
The End.



Oh, and here's Princess Diana. Source.
She died before Twitter even started.

Jack Layton's inspiring letter to Canadians

Exuberant Bodhisattva on FacebookTwitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

What the fuck should I do with my life, Part Two
What a Beautiful Face
How I am violent, by Erica J. Schmidt