Sodom Road exit?”
Lampoonist question. I almost answer, Yes sir, before the driver comically clears his throat. His hired Lincoln’s front grill is so bug blemished from countless trips between Toronto and the boondocks that clearly he knows exactly which route to take. Exiting on to Bowen or Bertie would add fifteen-odd minutes to the trip. The driver’s question is for amusement’s sake. Sodom Road is the joke of the Niagara Peninsula. Travel south on Queen Elizabeth Way and you can’t miss the radiating letters under a bald sun, or at night, the reflective aluminum letters that rush to meet your headlights. They read “Sodom Rd. Crystal Beach,” with an arrow pointing to the expansive stretch of overgrown brush. The road’s name nods to the late 1880s when Crystal Beach was a religious colony and Chautauqua assembly. True story. The village was settled by Jesuits or maybe Methodists who soon found more secular entertainment and more profitable ventures than Bible Camp. The Holy Trinity was replaced by a dance hall, a vaudeville theatre, and a carousel. Hailed as the “Coney Island of the North.” Pity Sodom Road was never renamed. I might enjoy returning home via Vaudeville Road. Painted Pony Parkway. Something nostalgia-worthy.
Will the driver also think it clever when Sodom Road becomes Gorham Road? Gorham (like Gomorrah) Road has never earned the same heckling. It’s unfair—both Sodom and Gomorrah were cities of grievous sinners, both destroyed by fire and brimstone, and so shouldn’t both share equal rights to innuendo? Lewd animal butt-lust sodomy is what stuck around our pitiful noosphere. Sodom. So be it. Welcome home.
I make no attempt at eye contact in the rear-view mirror. I can’t be bothered with his grin. And I don’t want to invite any other jokes he may have about the backwards track of my childhood.
Over the past week, friends and acquaintances spawned our gross jokes. My return to the village is considered foolish funny, not ha-ha funny—as if I would immediately be gifted a straw hat and oversized hammer upon arrival. Torontonians believe that anywhere outside of Toronto is a pantomime stage—a place where mute actors perform a dumb show.
My farewell party was an LSD dropping and viewing marathon of The Prisoner. I hemmed my bachelor apartment in with back alley mattresses and borrowed blankets. Acid was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek—as in, psychedelics are the type of drugs only found in 1960s television or in small-town Ontario—but everyone around The Annex actually showed up ready to trip. A clique of Ontario College of Arts and Design students brought several giant white latex balloons. “Contact imminent,” they parroted. “Turn back before it’s too late.” One fawn-like girl I’ve never seen before walked in circles wearing only a white bikini with the number 6 painted on both breasts and butt cheeks. Where did they come from? “Starla fucking Martin,” they greeted me by name, “don’t leave us.”
As the night wore on, I recognized fewer and fewer of their faces. This panicked me at first. My skin itched. I pulled at my hair, follicle by follicle. Fawn-girl appointed herself the bad-trip nurse and calmed me by instructing me in breathing. “In. In. In,” she cooed, then, “Out. Out. Out.” Hours later I was said to be shouting, “I’m not a number, I’m a free man.”
A few wrote their phone numbers and some intoxicated propositions on my bathroom wall. “Starla fucking Martin, you can’t leave this city before sucking my cock”—one example, written in lipstick. Not one of them helped me pack and haul my stuff to the curb. In Toronto, it’s every asshole for themself. No farewell kisses. Maybe adieu is only bid when you’re going somewhere big.
Crystal Beach’s population is 3,000 year-round residents, give or take.
Once upon a time, the village was famous. Or between the twenty-fourth of May and Labour Day we were famous. Known throughout Erie and Niagara Counties in New York State, as well as around Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, we were famous for the largest dance floor in North America, the most terrifying roller coaster, allegedly, in the world. Sunbathing on white-sand beaches. Picnics on perfect lawns. Crystal Beach was where workers from the Lackawanna Steel Plant or Welland Wabasso Cotton Mill would take their staff retreats. People who didn’t have to live here loved this place. I could be a tour guide, except we haven’t hosted any tours for a long, long time.
The grass is parched, not gaily kept like on the Crystal Beach of yesterday’s postcards. Crab grass and dandelion claim each yard. Oaks are topped with billowing caterpillar nests. Vinyl-sided bungalows hunker low to the flat earth.
The first billboard off the highway shows a collage of fraternal group emblems: the Kinsmen, the Lions, Knights of Columbus, Order of Eagles, Odd Fellows, Masonic Hall Palmers Lodge 372, and their matriarchal counterparts: the Kinnettes, the Rebekahs, and on. Just a quick glimpse of the perfectly symmetrical maple leaf wreath logo of the Kinsmen conjures the taste of hot dogs. Today, I cannot name a single fellow from the kin of beer lodge good-doers who hosted potato-sack races and Easter-egg hunts in my childhood. The brothers are a single oversimplified archetype in my mind. Only moustaches. Polo shirts. Fishing caps.
I do remember posing for photos at their Christmas food hamper giveaway. Snap. Adorable fatherless brat accepts hand-out.
The second billboard displays a similarly crowded arrangement of religious banners. Saint George’s—where I was baptized Roman Catholic and prayed for god only knows how many Sundays—displayed on the top left of the sign. I always thought the exterior of our church looked like a flying saucer: short and round, a low conical roof topped with an otherworldly spherical crown of polished steel. It was an ongoing disappointment to enter and see the queue of wooden pews, like in any other church.
The stained glass was something. Or at least it was something significant to my child’s sense of wonder. As a girl, I insisted on sitting next to the stained-glass window that portrayed the sixth station of the cross: Veronica wipes Jesus’s face with her veil. I imagined myself as Veronica. She was there at the right moment. From out of the crowd of bystanders Veronica was chosen to receive the Holy Face, the miraculous swatch of cloth said to quench thirst, cure blindness, possibly raise the dead. One opportune moment, and Veronica became legend.
I’ve since learned from an Early Christianity Studies course that Veronica was not a historical figure. Why are most of the women in the Bible mostly myth? Were they always fiction, or did time fictionalize once living, breathing women?
Years before university wrecked everything, Veronica’s rose-coloured lips were truly holy. On the right kind of Sunday morning, the sunshine would send a slice of pink light through the glass window and down to the marble floor. If I reached my hand out, pink light would make my fingers glow.
St. George’s congregation, like the Kinsmen, has also become in my memory a lump sum of Sunday-best-dressed. Besides my own mother, I can’t remember a one. Even the priest’s name is consigned to oblivion.
These lapses in memory mean I am returning to the village a stranger. I am returning as a failed Torontonian and a university dropout. For four years, seven months, and twenty-eight days, I managed to live as far away from here as I could. Only a two-hour drive, really, but another fucking world.
Now I am the only passenger in the back seat of the Niagara Car Service with all my belongings audibly bouncing around in the trunk behind me. My thighs are smeared grey by the unread pages of The Globe and Mail that I’ve allowed to wilt on my lap. The early appearance of cottonwood seeds dot the humid air and make me sneeze. I am returning on the hottest day of, not only the year, but, according to 91.1 HTZ FM, the hottest spring day in the last sixty-two years. April 28, 1990.
“Air con is on the blink,” the driver says. “Boss wasn’t planning on fixing it until June, but this sure feels like June to me. Like July.” What appears to be a gnat has drowned in the sweat on the back of his neck. I stare at the pin-sized blot, then scold myself for looking so closely at him. For looking at any of it.
This is temporary, I tell myself. A blip. I will write a novel. I’ll find a sugar daddy—not a dock foreman or a plumber, but an art dealer or entertainment lawyer. I’ll become a one-hit-wonder pop star. I will set myself on fire and film it. I’ll do something. I’ll be someone. I will.
A third billboard once welcomed countless tourists. “You Can’t Beat the Beach! Crystal Beach Amusement Park, since 1889.” Now there is something I remember: a sign that’s no longer standing. A small mound of overturned dirt—like the grave of a beloved pet—marks where it was torn from the ground.