Barbara is entertaining. “Starla, this is Dr Rahn Johnson,” she introduces the man with a greying moustache who sits so casually on the sofa that I can tell this is not a first date. Second clue: he’s wearing shoes in the house. Nobody wears shoes in the house on a first date. His leather loafers are Gucci, though—the classic kind with the red-and-green stripe and a miniature horse bit. “Rahn is a pediatric surgeon at Women & Children’s Hospital in Buffalo.” Translation: this man is a hot ticket so make yourself scarce.
I hightail it to my room as Dr Rahn Johnson says, “She inherited your good looks.” Barbara whoops theatrically. She would have to entertain on my night off.
I pop Bongwater’s ninety-minute Double Bummer album into my Sony Discman. I also have the Love and Rockets, Vol 5: House of the Raging Women, a 125-page comic book with which to occupy myself. My favourite comic book characters of all time are Maggie and Hopey. If only they’d make out more. My sex life is down to reading comics, so here’s hoping for some graphic action. The problem is that Love and Rockets is still inside the brown bag from Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street West. If I pull the comic out of the bag then another one of my belongings will be unpacked. Bag by bag and box by box, it’s happening. I live here, in Crystal Beach.
My room is cluttered and confused by half-unpacked items from Toronto and the two dusty boxes I hauled up from the basement, the first labelled Starla Age 15 & 16, and the second Starla Age 17. My senior yearbook rests on top of the second box. Terribly happy-go-lucky for age seventeen, I find “DIE” scrawled across the photos of several of my classmates, and “STRAIGHT TO HELL” over a few others. Senior year was tough—I haven’t forgotten—tough enough for bitter death wishes, apparently. I flip to Tamara Matveev’s senior photo. To my surprise the very page is bookmarked with a felt Crystal Beach Amusement Park flag pendant on a yellow yarn string necklace. Five plus years ago, why had I marked Tamara’s page? Coincidence? Her senior superlative reads “Most Likely to Be Famous.” I put the pendant on, tuck the little flag into my T-shirt. It seems to thud against my sternum, like a locket or key might. I pull the pendant back out to look at it. Our logo wasn’t much to look at. A smiling sun with the “C” and “B” (for Crystal Beach) awkwardly forming the sun’s eyes and nose. It’s cheap, but instantly I am attached to it. Nostalgia, I suppose. Maybe I’ll wear it every day, just like I always wore my blue scapular of the Immaculate Conception under my clothes. Back when I was into church.
Sprawling out on my bed, my gaze seesaws between Tamara’s yearbook photo and the Are You Afraid of the Dark painting that looms over me. I’ve grown fond of the sailors’ oversized red lips. Drag queen lips—at any minute they might start lip-syncing Carol Channing. Hello, Dolly.
I slip my headphones over my ears and Ann Magnuson scream-sings about wrist slitting. I wish I could poach the song “Frank.” Bongwater is exactly the type of post-psychedelic hardcore noise band that I would form if I formed bands. I’d do a speed-metal cover of the Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack. Sort of Judas Priest meets rock opera à la Andrew Lloyd Webber. The live stage show would feature fake-blood stigmata and homoeroticism between the guitar-playing apostles. I’ve got so many ideas and pretty much no capacity. I’ll hit my stride. I bet I’m on the brink of a big creative bang.
According to some, I can cure rabbit fever, maybe alcoholism too. Not that I really did those things. I wonder what other ersatz stuff goblin fruit might pull? I wonder what is happening at The Point without me. Does Lucky miss me?
No more than three tracks elapse before I grow stir crazy. I press pause on my Discman only to hear Barbara’s sound bite from the living room, “I have no filter. I say every darn thing that pops into my head …” Literally, that’s what she’s saying to her date, as if her endless prattle hasn’t already demonstrated her point. Quick! Press the play button again.
I roll off the bed and open my closet door. All these gorgeous clothes I may never wear again, or at least not around here. Many are second-hand, found during meticulous searches through Kensington Market. As much as I detest shopping malls, I admit that Lime Rickey’s Restaurant in the Eaton Centre beckoned to me. An embarrassing number of dresses in my collection came from that mall—purchased directly after I devoured a cheeseburger and root beer float. I grab a black Bill Blass silk chiffon bustier dress and swing it on its hanger, admiring the weightlessness of the fabric. I never wore this number in Toronto either. It’s what I’ll wear to my funeral—at least that was my intention when I bought it. Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.
Macramé Jesus hangs in the closet with the rest of my clothes. I take him off his hanger and hold him in front of my torso like a dress. The reflection in my vanity mirror cracks me up. Jesus’s head droops around my breasts. His legs dangle above my knees. When I kick my legs, his floppy legs kick too. Like a puppeteer, I make him wave “hello” and salute the sky. Here’s exactly what I grew up doing—entertaining myself in my room while Barbara entertained men in every other room in the house. Maybe I should call a friend in Toronto, like she suggested, reach out or something? Gloria Orr referred to herself as my best friend once. She might miss me? Josie Cruz and her fiancé Zed always liked me, even if they did set me up on that terrible blind date, so I guess they only liked me enough to have a threesome with me. Therese from the campus bookstore was a generous listener, or at least generous with her feedback. Always so ready and willing to offer odd advice that I would never actually heed. What comments would she offer me now? See a doctor, a priest?
My crotch is still sore from the phantom kick I am not entirely certain I took yesterday. I shut down the associated thoughts that seem to link my sore crotch and having been molested in this very room by turning the volume way up on my Discman. Ann Magnuson sings a Johnny Cash cover while some musical instrument that sounds like an overplayed jack-in-the-box knells in the background. I love this song.
Tentatively, I grab hold of macramé Jesus’s knotted penis, positioned just over my own pubic bone. It scratches my hand as I stroke it. I pause my CD. “Hey, Tamara, it’s me, the big JC. How about I turn your water into wine?” I coax. “Come here, and I’ll heal your sick.”
Call me a sodomite.
Why must I torment myself?
What if I want this ghost thing to be real?
What if I want it to be all about me? Like unexplainable shit is actually happening because of me. I know, I know! Amour de soi is my high; it’s the swing side of depression. Toronto is over, I’m so sure. The Twilight Zone has closed, and besides, they hadn’t booked a good band since the Beastie Boys. Mayor Eggleton will never proclaim the Pride Parade or commission an AIDS Memorial because he hates gays. And everyone under thirty with their arts degree is vying for the few crappy jobs left in the city. I can’t think of a single true friend I had in Toronto. But there is fucking magic in Crystal Beach. Like, on par with David fucking Copperfield walking through the Great Wall of China kind of magic.
A guitar ballad lulls outside my window. At first, I think the din is coming through my headphones, but the CD inside my Discman is perfectly still. With a horrified yet giddy keenness, I listen closer. “I don’t want to set the world on fire …”
“Maybe I want this to be real.” It’s titillating, those words in my mouth.
“I want this to be real,” I say louder. Outside, the sumac and maple trees feel fucking alive in the breeze. My heart pounds right up to my throat as I scan the darkness. She heard me. She’s out there waiting for me. I pop the rusty screen out of my window. Only thing in this house my mother didn’t replace, the screen windows. I’ve got one foot out, dangling. For a second, the night seems to pull back the velvet curtain of a vaudeville stage. She’s not quite vaudeville, but another age. She flickers before me like old film, her beauty dimpled by light burns and flashes, like a leading lady for Bela Lugosi.
Then only her tiny fire glows ahead. I race to catch it, past the neighbours’ vinyl-sided bungalows, past dogs barking behind chain-link fences, past the last street lamp, past the bumpy rim where the asphalt turns to gravel road. I run and run until she is standing smack in front of me. “I can see you,” I say.
And as if saying it makes it all the more real, she reacts, steps back. Startled, I step back too. I hardly expected a ghost to have facial expressions. She seems rattled. “Can you speak?” I ask.
“I have been talking this whole time, ever since you woke me up. I was having a little snooze in that stunt of yours,” she says as clear as the living. “The real question is, can you hear me? Please, say you can.” I suddenly find myself barefoot. Did I lose my slippers? Was I wearing slippers when I left my room? The bottoms of my feet throb against the dirt and gravel path we stand on.
“I can hear you,” I whisper. I’m not sure where I am. The neighbours’ homes seem very far away. Did I run toward the lake or away from it? I can’t smell the algae anymore. I don’t know where I’d run, in which direction I would flee.
“How ’bout that. Word for word, or do I sound like gibberish to you?”
“Word for word.”
“And touch? It’s been an age since I touched somebody.”
I flinch as she reaches for me. She makes time skip like a scratch in a vinyl record. We stand together as she takes form. She is tiny, like me, and my knees meet her knees, my hipbones meet her hipbones, my breasts meet her breasts. My breathing becomes stronger than my body, like my lungs might burst, like I’ll balloon up and float away. Her arms circle my waist. She looks me in the eye, and I am so worthless. I am invincible. We are goddesses together. I’m her dog. I’ll do anything for her. My brain is leaking out my ears.
“You want this?” She touches her cheek to mine.
“Yes,” I tell her. But it’s not the real me talking. There is no real me. Not anymore. Her kiss is the extinction of everything. All thoughts halt. I will no longer ask myself if this is happening or if this is about me. All creation vacuums out around us, leaving our bodies the last two burning stars. Her tongue on my skin, and I’m burning. I am breaking. She can break me. I am willing to explode. Supernova. I will get what I have coming. Then I hear myself screaming, “Stop, it’s too scary. It’s too scary.” She raises a cross eyebrow.
“Frankenstein’s monster is scary. Me, I’m hot stuff, don’t ya know.” She turns her back to me as she fades away.
Am I standing upright? After her, I can’t make sense of my physical relationship to the world. I rake my fingers through the air. Air? Yes, air. I am not on my hands and knees, like the last two times. My body thinly undulates on two leaden feet. A very small dance. The air is maliciously cold. Why did I tell her to go?
The sound of each footstep startles me.
I find my way to a long gravel path that seems unreal. Trees are plastic, and as I make my way back toward the houses again, they are also two-dimensional. Everything is trying to trick me. But now I understand so much more than this artificial place. I can’t help but laugh at every fake thing around me. A man walking his pitbull stops to stare. I laugh harder when he asks me if I’m all right. He walks away shaking his robot head. I swallow back the urge to call after him, ask him if he is real or not. Ask him if he’s out to get me.
Ask him if he knows I’m the most powerful bitch he’ll ever meet.