Monsieur Delacroix and I sat in a booth in a roadside dive somewhere between Ashtabula and Cleveland. We’d been on the road for hours and both we and the van needed refuelling. I had to give hats off to the visionary who’d come up with the franchise’s retro decor of orange, yellow, and brown supergraphics, and white plastic tulip chairs along the counter. The visual caffeine perked me up. It was like a colour Xerox of the early ’70s.
Monsieur was still picking at his food, but I’d chowed down like nobody’s business. Limp-wristed jalapenos clung half-heartedly to a lava flow of microwaved Cheez Whiz hardening among the crevices of my few remaining nachos. The last of my curly fries gagged in the ketchup. My gut was filled with Pop Art repeating itself.
Monsieur sighed and sipped his antacid-pink shake. He took another bite of his patty melt. I swirled a finger around a cardboard plate to sponge up leftover salt, licked it, and stared at him.
“What?” he asked.
I pointed at the corner of his mouth.
“Oh.”
He put down his sandwich and dabbed his mouth with a monogrammed handkerchief, removing the globule of melted cheese single that had nested there since his first bite and was driving me insane. I gulped the last of my cherry Coke and looked him in the eye.
“I don’t see why it always has to be what you want,” I said. Monsieur sneezed and blew his nose, allergic to air conditioning.
“They’ll find out,” I continued. “We’ve got too many for them not to. They’ll sniff something at Customs. Why Detroit anyhow? Why not Buffalo? They’re less suspicious in Buffalo.”
“Oh please.”
We were starting to get on each other’s nerves. I was having second thoughts about our plan, which put Monsieur Delacroix a little too close to compromise for comfort. My best friend was a control freak, a tall, thin, walking-talking get-rich-quick scheme topped off by a mop of golden ringlets.
“We must be off soon, my dear. Time is money.”
Monsieur looked at his Mickey Mao wristwatch. The face featured China’s Great Helmsman wearing a Mickey Mouse beanie. When the watch moved, Mao winked. Monsieur had wrists that spun like propellers. Mao winked a lot.
“In a minute,” I said. “I’m the one doing all the driving, remember.”
Hazy light filtered through the window and illuminated his lineless skin. Monsieur looked remarkable thanks to a regimen of anti-aging personal care products. He flipped open his compact and checked to see how the Clairol was holding out. He caught me looking.
“It’s my natural colour,” he said. “It says so on the box.”
Reassured, he unflipped, sat back, and gazed through the window at the freeway traffic, past the gas pumps and parking lot and, beyond the stream of cars and trucks, a factory. July’s late-morning heat slithered, coiled, constricted, and slowly started to digest the scenery. Ventilation grates along the windowsill disgorged geysers of cold air. The silk ferns danced.
I reached across the table and began to feed from Monsieur’s untouched, now cold plate of fries. We’d spent the last few weeks pinballing through the boondocks in the northeastern pocket of the Midwest, bouncing from small town to small town in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and even Pennsylvania. Monsieur had a name for every place we’d stopped: “Dupesville.”
He’d spent his sweet time researching on the web, and the result was “a win/win sitch for the both of us — bottom-line-wise, my dear.”
We’d suckered clueless geezers into selling old typewriters to us at a fraction of their true value to collectors. They thought we were doing them a favour. They thought these were junk. Typewriters from before World War II were worth a pretty penny. Anything after was made of plastic and worth shit. We were heading home to Toronto to set up a website and sell them to well-heeled typewriter fanatics competing with each other for the best ones. It just goes to show that there are too many loose screws out there with too much money and too much free time.
“Fuck this noise!” said the guy in the booth behind me, loud enough for everyone in the rest stop to hear.
“Ah, the immortal observation of Confucius,” Monsieur chimed in.
He had a way of turning wherever we were into something you’d see on public television, even a fast-food joint, as though the burger grill sizzled with crinolines, bustles, whale-boned corsets, powdered wigs, and unbathed, perfumed flesh.
“Shhh!” I told him.
I half turned my head to try to see what was happening. I didn’t want to miss anything. A girl sobbed. The guy, presumably her boyfriend, freaked. It all came out. Apparently, she was pregnant, and she wasn’t going to have the baby. “It.”
“Over my dead body,” he told her.
There was a sucking noise, a straw interrogated ice, and I heard a swirl of ice cubes in a cup. She told him that no matter what he said he was wasting his breath, “Because it’s not yours Kyle so let it fucking go.”
Not his? Was she sure? She was sorry but yes.
“Fucking not mine. Wow. I mean. Wow.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry.”
Monsieur pouted because I wasn’t paying attention to him. He pulled his plate away from me, put some salt on his fries, and then ignored them. Taking out a well-thumbed Stephen King novel, he posed thoughtfully, trying his best to make sure that everyone knew he was beneath his element. I didn’t feel any obligation to tell him the book was upside down. Monsieur Delacroix was dyslexic, not just the way he read but the way he approached life. My friend hopscotched through existence like it was an M.C. Escher print, soaring upside down over the square that puts you out of the game.
Kyle said things like, “You’re a no-good fucking cunt,” and, “No way I’m sticking around with a fat slut.”
He stood up and I got a good look at him. Kyle was cute, young, built, and obviously hung. He wore a checkered flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off, blue jeans, work boots, and a pirate-style bandanna.
He was out the door. He stormed across the parking lot and flung himself into a beaten-up white Ford Fairlane pitted with craters of rust. The mufflers were shot — and loud — but the kid’s souped-up stereo was even louder, vibing over the angry rumble of ignition. Strains of Nirvana accompanied the helter-skelter screech of tires as he swung around and stopped in front of the window where we sat gaping at him. The dead lead singer screamed about the smell of teen spirit as Kyle mouthed “fuck you” at his girlfriend and took off down the feeder onto the freeway.
“My,” said a well-fed woman of around fifty sitting in the booth behind Monsieur’s ghoul-swelled noggin.
She helped herself to a forkful of a fajita salad with steak strips. She sat with two other women who liked their food. They looked like they worked together. I’d noticed a few mirrored office blocks nearby, plunked down by the freeway like big, glassy Rubik’s Cubes. One of them rolled her eyes toward God or whatever it was making the tube-lighting above her flicker. The other shook her head and patted her lip with a brown paper serviette that had the round-and-round recycling arrows on it.
“What would you do if your Presley talked to Krystal that way?” the lip-patter asked the woman with the fajita salad.
“Well, you know, it’s different. I mean, they’re married.”
“Oh Lord, Sara-Lynn, it’s almost two thousand,” ventured the woman with her eyes to God. “No man has the right.”
“Well, to be honest,” said Sara-Lynn, “I’d take him over my knees like when he was little and give him what for.”
“I hear they like that. It’s the thing now,” the lip-patter said.
That broke them up.
“I may be a Christian, God save me,” said Sara-Lynn, “but sometimes I think those lesbians have got one hell of a reason.”
This sent all three into paroxysms.
The woman with her eyes to God stopped laughing and began to focus on polishing her glasses. “You know as well as I do, no man has the right to speak like that to a woman.” She put her glasses on and leaned over the table. “Even a slut,” she stage-whispered.
“People have lost their manners,” said Sara-Lynn.
There was a silent mutual agreement and they ordered coffees. Their talk-show philosophy turned my heart into a question mark. I didn’t say anything to Monsieur. He had two phobias: spiders and sentimentality. Still, I felt sorry for the girlfriend.
I turned around completely to see if I could catch a glimpse of her but all I could fathom was the back of a tangled mess of bleached hair showing roots. She got up from the booth and tried to hide her face as she shuffled toward the exit. There was a payphone just outside the door. She went to it, and I saw her burrow in her purse for change she obviously didn’t have. I got up to help her out, dismissing with a shrug Monsieur’s doozy of a look. He disapproved of people who used telephones. He preferred modes of communication that he said didn’t rely on personality or emotional expression and were more accurate than the human voice, like text-based chat rooms and anonymous sex in public spaces. “Online or on your knees, dear,” he had said.
I went outside and gave the girl some change.
“Thanks,” she said. “You heard all that?”
I nodded. She was quite pretty.
“Oh. I heard what that old bag said. You must think I’m a slut too, huh?”
“No. I’d be a hypocrite,” I said. “You’re just young.”
“Oh. Yeah. Well. Gee. Thanks and everything.”
“He’s just hurt,” I said.
“You don’t think he meant that stuff he said?”
“Yeah, he meant it. But that doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Oh. Right.”
I turned around to see Monsieur inside at the cash register, paying. It was apparently time to go. He swivelled to inspect the girl as we headed across the parking lot toward the van. She was standing on the sidewalk waiting for whomever she’d called to pick her up.
“She’s not that fat a slut,” Monsieur commented.
I unlocked the door, got into the driver’s side, slammed the door shut, and didn’t let Monsieur in for a couple of minutes. When I did, he looked perplexed.
“I’m worried about you,” he said, fanning himself with Stephen King and pretending to be breathless. “You’ve developed a temper.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is conscience.”
Monsieur lit a cigarette. “My dear, it’s not our fault if people are suckers.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“All of our transactions were above board. Can we help it if the hoi polloi don’t know the value of an antique?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Monsieur tapped an impatient finger on the dashboard.
“Not everything’s about us,” I said.
He’d stopped listening. He was staring at our contraband. It filled our dented, rented budget van. There were dozens, all of them old and useless and worth their weight in gold. I turned on the ignition. To annoy him, I ground gears all the way onto the freeway. Monsieur feigned indifference.
“There’s nothing more reassuring than the rattle of typewriters,” he said. “Except, of course, the smell of money.”
He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a stained People magazine. Princess Diana had a coffee ring halo. About a mile along the freeway, I careened onto the shoulder and came to a screeching halt. I glared at Monsieur.
“What?” he asked, looking up.
“I’m not going another inch until you stop humming The Brady Bunch theme song.”
“Fine.”
Monsieur huffed and continued to flip, but he kept his trap shut.
I was wrong about Detroit. I’d thought so many people being bumped off in that city on a regular basis might make them more vigilant at the border, if not paranoid as all get-out, but no. Then again, we weren’t killers or even bona fide smugglers; we were quasi-smugglers or semi-smugglers or demi-smugglers, or whatever prefix meant we weren’t professionals. We were just two-bit cons — artists, that is, not jailbirds.
The customs guard didn’t know the value of our cargo either. My flirting with him didn’t hurt. I was always a pushover for a guy in a uniform. It was the cover-up, me batting my baby blues, that got us through. Things might be different now if I’d realized that I was the one being outconned. I was starting to believe my own deception and was susceptible to someone else’s hook, line, and sinker. My dishonesty was breaking down, and me with it.
Before we got to the border, we’d detoured for a quick eyeball at Cleveland and Detroit, cities we’d been through but never really seen. The business portion of our trip completed, Monsieur indulged one of his many hobbies, taking scrapings from highway, turnpike, and rest stop guardrails. “To see if America is rusting on schedule, my dear.” He’d brought jars with him to store samples, which he planned to analyze when we got home.
In Cleveland, we paused in front of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I wanted to go inside but Monsieur objected. We didn’t.
“It’s enough to be near fame, but not inside it,” he said. “There you lose the ability to age gracefully.”
Sitting at the steering wheel, I sipped my coffee, my peepers glued to the Hall of Fame. My brain bobby-soxed, boogied, did the Bump and Hustled; slam-danced, hip-hopped, and twitched in a mosh pit. When I flipped the dial on the radio and heard one golden oldies station after another, I wondered why people need sameness. I used to swallow the sound of the past too, like it was a sedative, becoming addicted to its comforting effects until I practically overdosed on familiarity. My life was charted in electric guitar chord progressions and everyone else knew the words. I hummed down the highway unwary of accidents.
The frequency was killing me and so was the pitch. I had to turn myself off. When the volume was up, I couldn’t think and didn’t really care to. Silence escalated the sound of my heartbeat drumming against tight, stretched skin. It was an odd sound, the tom-tom of mortality, but at least it was constant. Unlike Monsieur, who was draped in white noise like a crisp linen suit, my life was a Frankenstein of stitched-together pop songs, each one an echo of who I was fucking at the time — or wasn’t.
We went down to the shore of Lake Erie and stopped by a chain-link fence outside a private airport called, imaginatively, Millionair. The tarmac was a charm bracelet of Cessnas and small jets glinting in the sun. That cheered him up. Monsieur heaved an optimistic sigh. “Money flies, my dear.”
In Detroit we cruised downtown and wondered who drove the cars. They were parked everywhere but we didn’t see any people. At one point Monsieur made me double-park in front of a store called Black Beauty. It had a window filled with wigs. Inside, more than a couple of jaws dropped. Monsieur purchased a supply of his favourite nail polish, Hard Candy, in the gunmetal grey shade of Ghetto Girl he insisted was flattering on him.
Dusk descending, we got back in the van and headed through the emptiness of lengthening shadows toward the border. We waited for the light to change at an intersection on a forlorn stretch of condemned brownstones boarded up with plywood planks. I noticed a gap gouged out of the granite in the foundation of a crumbling building. In it was a cat with her litter of kittens. Below them, among the weeds, sprouting through cracks in the sidewalk, someone had placed a plastic jug cut in half and filled it with water. Once more my heart curved and formed a dot, like it was answer on Jeopardy! and the question was “What is hope?”
“It’s green, dear,” Monsieur said impatiently.
We joined the stop-and-go rhumba of red tail lights on the Ambassador Bridge. After an hour’s wait, we were finally interrogated by the cute-as-a-button border guard. I red-herringed him with my doe-eyed routine. I could practically hear the birds chirping and see the sparkles in his eyes like in an old movie as he did a half-assed flashlight deal on the back of the van.
“What’s with the typewriters, fellas?”
“We picked them up for a museum in Toronto, sir,” I said, trying to remember Monsieur’s script. “For their industrial design archives or something. From a benefactor in Pennsylvania. They hired us.”
“No kidding. You guys run a pickup operation?”
“Officer dear, you’re positively clairvoyant,” Monsieur piped in.
The guard ignored Monsieur and kept looking at me. There was something gentle about his expression that I liked.
“Everything’s computer this computer that these days, eh? It’s kind of hard to keep up,” he said.
“You got it,” I smiled, hating myself.
He grinned back at me. “Both Canadian?” he asked.
I nodded and handed our passports.
“You’re a day older than me,” he mentioned, passing them back.
“Small world,” I said
He looked at me funny. “Where you headed?”
Monsieur leaned over and was in my face. “Toronto. But we’re weekending in Windsor, officer darling. We’re going to do the casino thing.”
I demurely slammed my elbow into his ribs, and he backed off.
“Yeah? Where you staying?”
“Journey’s End,” Monsieur announced, giving me a look.
“Okey dokey then. Have a good time.”
The guard lasered me with his impish green eyes, piercing me to the core. He was just my type: small, taut, and boyish for his age. It was almost a fever, this need I had to rip off his uniform and find out what he was hiding.
“Make sure you watch your wallet now,” he said.
“Huh?”
“At the casino.”
“Oh yeah. I will. Thank you, sir.”
He waved us on. Monsieur rubbernecked to give the guard the once-over.
“He looks a bit like Brad Davis, my dear, don’t you think?” he said and turned to me. Midnight Express was one of his favourite movies. A handsome young American caught with drugs at the Turkish border is sentenced to life in a hellish prison, where he is repeatedly raped, beaten, and humiliated. But he manages to make a dramatic escape against all odds. Sex, peril, and liberation — Monsieur’s Holy Trinity.
“What?” he added when he saw my expression.
“‘We’re weekending in Windsor, officer darling?’ You always butt in when someone’s interested in me. You can’t stand not being the centre of attention, can you? Can you?”
Monsieur yawned. “You’ve become so dull since you took up weightlifting,” he soapboxed. “You need to do the nasty. A good fuck always does the trick. God knows your infatuations are hard to swallow but anything’s better than the truth-and-beauty kick you’ve been on lately. I swear, the self-awareness movement is giving narcissism a bad name. Before you know it, you’ll be reading self-help books. Then it’ll be crystals, too much Celtic music, and one day you’ll end up in a park wearing sandals with socks, doing something spiritual and bendy at an hour when decent people are at home sleeping off their martinis. Frankly, I wish someone would tell me why people are searching for their inner child when what they need to find is their inner daycare.”
“Okay, okay, I get the picture,” I said, taking the turnoff into downtown Windsor. Monsieur tapped into his internal customer years ago, and ever since, everything, it seemed, had a price, and I was the complaint department.
“We should celebrate our successful heist, my dear. I feel gamble-y all over.”
We passed by the blaring neon of the Caesars Windsor casino and Monsieur clasped his hands together. “Oh Canada, it’s good to be back. Well-mannered, well-behaved, polite, orderly, cold, no identity, lacking self-confidence. Hmm, I’ve just had a heartwarming thought.”
“What?” I asked as I swerved into our hotel parking lot.
“We carry the passport of a psychopath.”
I turned off the engine and pulled the safety brake. Monsieur went around to the back of the van to collect our bags. I sat for a minute while he fussed.
“My dear?”
Monsieur stood on the pavement and peered at me, holding his bags. I got out and helped him carry the luggage into the hotel, puffing and straining under the weight of Louis Vuitton.
It was just before noon the next day. My heart and balls were blue. A lack of love and a lack of sleep had left me randy and off-kilter. I put on my five-and-dime sunglasses and took a pea-green look around. I couldn’t believe my luck.
The next best thing to a man in uniform is a man in a union. The bistro’s terrace was cheek-to-jowl with butt-smoking trade, free and rough, sexy, striking autoworkers from both sides of the border blowing off steam. They were beautiful and they were everywhere, sitting on plastic chairs at garden tables, some with girlfriends, some with family, some with buddies, some not with anyone and looking self-conscious about it.
I coveted a table with a patio umbrella. I had wanted to go inside, out of the heat, but Monsieur refused to put up with any more air conditioning. We stood like two beached whales in the direct sunlight at the front of the brunch lineup, sweating while we waited. There was a braided yellow wait-to-be-seated rope. I felt like I was being restrained from a homicide instead of an all-day breakfast.
Monsieur cruised two teenagers at a nearby table.
“Chickenhawk,” I said.
He gave me the cold shoulder and continued to focus on his prey.
I was a little unsettled and confused by what had happened at the Happy Tap, a local watering hole, the night before, or rather what hadn’t happened. I’d left Monsieur in the hotel room to sleep off the all-you-can-eat buffet, six hours of losing at the slots, and a cavalcade of martinis.
It’d been quite a shocker to find our border guard at the bar. I confess he seemed tickled to see me. I know I was tickled to see him. When he told me his name was Danny, an Irish ballad trickled like treacle across my cranium. The fuzzy bar lighting made him look a little like a leprechaun and boy did he have the gift of gab. Bewitched by his blarney, I suction-cupped his lips and we were at it non-stop for over half an hour.
I heard a crash and snapped out of my daydream. A nervous kid with a first-day-on-the-job look started scrounging around on the patio pavement, picking up pieces of broken glass. They were all over the place. The humidity siphoned my pores, and I was close to running on empty. There was a short, welcome breeze whenever one of the panicky summer student servers flew by with trays of eggs Benedict, huevos rancheros, white wine spritzers, sangrias, and beer. A quick swish of movement cockteased me with coolness. Then it dissipated into the dimness of the restaurant like a shameless deb, leaving me tortured by longing. The steaming soup of carbon monoxide and chlorofluorocarbons made me antsy. In weather like this all I wanted to do was drink, fuck, and sleep.
Monsieur Delacroix turned away from his quarry and eyed me from beneath the brim of his floppy sun hat. The armpits of his light beige safari-style outfit were stained with circles of sweat.
“They can’t be more than sixteen,” I said.
“And your point is …?”
I told him he looked like Hannibal Lecter. He thought it was a compliment. “Come to think of it, a little Chianti would go down nicely. And I’ve always had a penchant for fava beans.” Monsieur popped his eyes wide open, pressed his top teeth onto his bottom lip, and made a long sucking sound. People stared.
A shirtless bodybuilder walked along the sidewalk beside us. Monsieur’s voice trailed away from me along with his eyes, as they followed the hunk to the end of the street. Monsieur sighed and he squinted at me, trying to look malevolent. “Tell me one of your secrets, Clarisse. And don’t lie. I can tell.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said. “You’re not normal.”
“Normal is the biggest four-letter word in the world, my dear, which is why they had to add two extra letters.”
The teenagers overheard us and were busting a gut. One of them smiled at me with tears of laughter in his eyes. A woman in a hostess uniform approached us.
“That young couple asked me to ask you two gentlemen if you’d like to join them,” she said. She pointed at the teenagers. I started to offer my no thanks when Monsieur interceded.
“We’d love to,” he said.
At least they had a patio umbrella. And an almost full pitcher of sangria. They asked the hostess for two more glasses, and she conferred with the nervous waiter who plunked them down in front of us lickety-split. They were still steaming, dishwasher fresh, and smelled vaguely salty with a hint of bleach. It was good to be in the shade.
“I’m Tate,” said the boy as he poured sangria for us.
“Sharon,” said the girl. She shook our hands vigorously.
I introduced the both of us. Monsieur sat down and showed a hint of talon.
The drinking age was nineteen. I was a bit surprised they’d been served. My curiosity obviously showed. Tate gave me a sheepish grin and mouthed “fake ID” to the syncopation of fruit slices and ice cubes plunking into a tumbler: one of the great sounds of summer. Then I saw the gold Amex card beside Tate’s side plate. There was only one way a boy his age had plastic like that. I smelled gated community.
“To all the great slasher films ever made,” said Tate, raising his glass. “Freddy, Mike, Jason, Leatherface, Hannibal” — he looked at Monsieur — “this is for you.” We all reciprocated. I drank almost the entire tumbler and set it down with a satisfied gasp.
“You’re an aficionado, I take it?” asked Monsieur, delighted.
Tate scrunched up his face. “Hunh?”
“He means fan,” I said.
“Oh yeah, big time,” said Tate. He squirmed in his chair and pulled a card out of the back pocket of his black jeans. He handed it to me.
“The Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club,” I told Monsieur. I handed it back. Monsieur nodded his head in approval.
“But he’s dead,” I mentioned.
Tate sat up straight. “He’s a fucking martyr, man.”
“No, he’s a serial killer and he’s dead.”
“Whatever,” said Tate.
The sun hit the top of his head, giving his dyed black hair a cherry-red aura. He boomeranged my glance and smiled. A cute set of choppers like his could cut through your average joe’s misgivings, but not me.
Sharon looked uneasy. “We’re not queers,” she advised us. “We’re Goths.”
Monsieur smiled. “Everyone’s got an angle,” he said.
Monsieur was an expert on angles and appreciated good lines, so long as they slanted but didn’t cross. He pretty much lived in a parallel universe, although parallel to what was the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
“And where, pray, did you two angels descend from?” Monsieur inquired.
“We’re from Detroit,” said Sharon. She made Detroit sound like a failed exam. “Grosse Point, if you’re totally into factoids. It’s a suburb.”
I was right. An affluent bastion of privilege built on cars.
“Our friend told us this thing you guys say when you march,” said Sharon. “How’s that thing that Blake told us go, Tate?”
“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not just shopping,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s right. Fucking hilarious.”
Monsieur contorted. “People who march should all be shot,” he said. “Of course all we’re doing is shopping.”
I told them Monsieur wasn’t very political and helped myself to more sangria. I was already feeling pleasantly buzzed but needed fortification for my date later.
“Oppression is no excuse for fascism,” Monsieur added.
I kept my lips sealed. Sharon and Tate furrowed their brows and nodded. Tate’s dog collar must have been uncomfortable in that heat, not to mention the black hooded robe Sharon wore. Her hair was dyed black like Tate’s. They were both quite gaunt and could have used a little sunshine. Monsieur may have set out to rob the cradle but it looked like he was closer to robbing the grave. Not that it would have made any difference to him.
“And you?” Tate asked, beaming me with his pearly whites.
“What?”
“Are you political?”
I shrugged and looked down at my drink. “Groups give me the heebie-jeebies.”
Tate stretched a leg under the table and tried to play footsie with me. It caught me off guard that Sharon didn’t know he was a three-dollar bill. Whatever game he was playing, the rules were being written on the spot. I pulled away and tucked my feet under my chair.
I tapped a finger against my forehead. “This is political.” I tapped the vicinity of my heart. “And this. Belief is action.”
“Kumbaya,” said Monsieur, waving his hand in the air to indicate another pitcher.
“Man, no kidding,” Tate said. He yawned and I noticed his tongue was pierced.
“Tate, get serious,” said Sharon. She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. I detected a faint scar on her wrist. “You have a point, kind of.”
I took off my sunglasses and rubbed my eyes. “I wasn’t trying to make one.”
I was preoccupied. I was thinking about last night, about Danny. I’d found myself even more drawn to him in civvies and itched to unravel the mystery of his jeans and T-shirt. “I’m not into one-night stands,” he’d said when I made my move at last call. The lights went up full. There was a hickey on his neck, a little bruise of pleasure. The Happy Tap started to drain so we left. I was hurt; I hadn’t said anything about one night. When I dropped him at his apartment, he gave me a peck on the cheek and said he wanted to see me again. What the hell was happening to me? I was usually comme çi, comme ça about being turned down. I could hear the mosquito drone of that little devil Cupid. He was circling with his arrow, waiting to draw blood.
Monsieur kicked my shin and I came to. Our waiter anxiously deposited another pitcher, spilling some sangria on my lap.
“Thorry,” he said.
“It’s okay.” I had a weak spot for braces, the poor guy.
By the time he was back with a cloth, I’d mopped up the stain on my pants as best I could, using a paper napkin decorated with a cartoon parrot sitting in a cabana chair and sipping a fruity drink. Monsieur and I ordered bacon and eggs over easy with toast, mine brown, his white. Then Monsieur topped up our drinks and proposed a toast to the younger generation. His accent had grown thicker, something he always pulled when he was trying to impress. It was a questionable dialect from one of Paris’s murkier arrondissements. Honestly, if the Eiffel Tower had ever cast a shadow on Monsieur’s curly bean, it was only in his imagination.
We clinked.
Tate downed his drink, wiped his mouth, and said, “It’s the law of the jungle out there, man. The hunter and the hunted.”
The kid had seen too many action hero flicks. Then again, so had I. He was sitting right next to Monsieur. From the corner of my eye, I noticed him grab Monsieur’s knee and give it a squeeze.
“So, if you guys don’t call yourselves queer, what do you call yourselves?” Sharon asked.
Monsieur leaned in, looking conspiratorial. “Thieves.”
He was such a liar. We were just dime store swindlers with a truckload of old typewriters we planned to dump on a bunch of collector queens.
Monsieur swelled his chest and began to pontificate. “As Andy Warhol once said, good artists copy, great artists steal.”
“That wasn’t Warhol,” I said. “That was Picasso.”
“Details, my dear, details.”
If God appeared in Monsieur’s details, so did his stand-in, that hot-headed, horn-topped hoofer waiting in the wings, ready to stage a ruse and take over the lead.
Our breakfasts arrived. I sat back and troughed, staying silent while Monsieur held court with the kids. They showed him some CDs they’d bought. He faked interest until one piqued his fancy. Monsieur stopped eating and put down his knife and fork. His chin was shiny with bacon grease.
“That’s Marilyn Manson,” said Sharon. “He’s awesome.”
“That’s our favourite CD of his,” Tate added.
Monsieur peered at it so closely his nose touched the jewel box. Astigmatism prevented him from wearing contacts and he wouldn’t be seen in public wearing glasses. I was trying to figure out how to tell him that his bronzer was getting dewy.
“Smells Like Children,” he said, reading the CD’s title aloud. “I agree entirely. It does.”
“You should hear it,” said Tate.
Monsieur put down the CD, picked up his knife and fork, and polished off a remaining rind smothered in congealing yolk. Sopping up guck with the last of his toast, he shook his head.
“I don’t care about popular music, my dear,” he said. “I care about popular packaging.”
He popped the toast into his mouth, swallowed, put down his implements, shoved his plate to the side, napkinned his puss, and lit up a fresh smoke. The ghost of a lectern seemed to waver before him, or was it a pedestal?
“Let me tell you my Theory of Plastic,” he announced.
I’d heard this theory before, but just in case he had any new insights I got out my pocket cassette recorder and set it on the table. Monsieur cleared his throat and was off to the races.
“Plastic as we know it had its start last century with the British Navy and the Industrial Revolution,” he said. “The Brits conquered the world without a shred of remorse, the dears. You have to be careful about remorse, which is anathema to building an empire. Guilt quickly purges offensive action. It is the enema of the people.
“The Brits invented a new kind of human being. It was called the middle class and its purpose in life was to assume control through consumption. It forged mutations of what it did not have and advertised itself into believing that looking like the people in power was the same as being the people in power. The British Empire was viral with new cultures from starving places. They spread out and ate at the fabric of the status quo. To keep themselves safe from bad mojo, the middle class drew the drapes and stuffed their parlours with reproductions of what the outside world looked like.
“Then the twentieth century threw in a couple of world wars to help establish marketing guidelines and America was defiantly on top. Plastic took over. It was popular because it could be made into so many things and wear so many hats, and quickly. It made life easier, more convenient. More people could consume. Some people confused it with democracy. What happened next, we can attribute to male adolescents who weren’t getting any sex.”
Monsieur paused to ogle Tate and I thought I’d have to pass him a drool cup.
He continued. “They flirted with binary consequences instead of cock and pussy. These they set into sequence and boxed in plastic along with a network developed by the Pentagon, which — being Goths you’ll no doubt appreciate this — has five sides echoing a pentagram, whose five-pointed star inside a circle is believed to ward off the devil. Fearing contamination, we drew the drapes, sat at home, and watched the plastic box’s version of what the world looked like. But our homes were just as viral as the world outside, teeming with an infectious babble of voices pretending to be someone they weren’t, most of them shopping.”
At this point Tate put up his hand and asked what anathema meant so I handed him my pocket Oxford, always handy when Monsieur got going. Monsieur continued with a shudder.
“The spiders were trapped in their own web along with flies who’d followed their own buzz in, and no one could tell the predator from the prey. It was fabulous. Mind you, any housewife in India who doesn’t even have tap water would roll her eyes if you told her the web is worldwide. But we don’t live in India, so who cares?”
Tate and Sharon stared at him. I excused myself and went to the john. After I took a piss, I splashed some cold water over my face and put eye drops in my red-veined bulbs. I looked in the mirror and tweaked a grey hair. The lack of sleep showed, even more gruesome in the harsh lighting, like I was wearing vampire makeup. I hadn’t had a chance to work out on the road, so I wasn’t as cut as I’d been, but I didn’t look too out of shape. The sangria stain had dried, forming a blood-red splotch around my groin. The automatic hand drier wasn’t working, so I wiped my hands on my pants, bought some condoms from a dispenser, and went back outside.
The patio had thinned out. Monsieur’s soliloquy was reaching its conclusion as I sat down in my chair. Our plates were gone, and the second pitcher of sangria was totaled. Tate was filling in a credit card slip.
“And so, you see, my dears, if you put Jeffrey Dahmer and Mahatma Gandhi naked into a locked room, their conversation would only be as good as the plastic that preserved it for future generations to hear and have a good laugh at.”
Tate scrawled his signature and put away his gold-plated pen. “Who is Mahatma Gandhi?” he asked.
“He led India to independence. He was a pacifist,” I told him.
“I think his biggest contribution was to fashion,” said Monsieur. “He really knew how to work an off-the-shoulder moment.”
“He was a martyr,” I added. “He’s dead.”
Tate shrugged. “Whatever.”
Sharon and Tate invited us to join them at a video arcade. Monsieur was bug-eyed at the prospect, but I declined. I skedaddled over to the hotel to bag a few beauty Zs before my tryst, condoms shuffling optimistically in my pocket. I wondered why a guy like Danny would be toe-in-toe-out about going to home base. Most guys who liked me headed straight for the sack, don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200. Maybe he’d been hurt, but who hadn’t? Besides, he seemed too sure of himself for that to be the case. Maybe that uniform of his really did hide something worth finding out. It gave me a hard-on just thinking about it.
I got to my room, set the alarm clock for an hour, and slipped between the sheets on one of the two twin beds, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there blinking at the ceiling fan. An out-of-whack spring gnawed into my back. Maybe Danny was just old-fashioned and wanted some kind of commitment. I guess if I was honest with myself, I had to admit that he’d tripwired my warning system. I didn’t want to get into something I couldn’t get out of without a ton of melodrama.
I suddenly remembered that I’d left my tape recorder on the patio table, so I got out of bed, had a shower, and went to retrieve it before I met Danny. The sky was starting to cloud over. As I walked at a quick clip to the bistro, my heart started to beat like a time bomb. It struck me that nothing in life was subtle anymore. People hunted for meaning the way they used to hunt for food, snaring diversions instead of sustenance.
“When I was a kid, I’d get so bored I’d come down here to watch the people in Detroit kill each other,” said Danny. He looked across the river and nodded his head at the city’s skyline. “That was this group of us in Windsor’s in-joke.”
We sat on the grass by the edge of the water, having a late-afternoon picnic.
“Didn’t you have a TV?” I asked.
“Sure. Cable. And before that we had a big honking antenna on our roof. Remember those?”
“Yeah.”
The front end of a tattooed dragon mounted his biceps and peeked out from beneath the right sleeve of his T-shirt. The dragon’s fire breathed his name. The sleeve was rolled up and I could tell he’d ironed it. Danny threw his bone into the bucket and got himself another drumstick.
“Scary, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Information, waves of it, penetrating our bodies without us seeing it, hearing it, or understanding it.”
“Or tasting it,” I said. I helped myself to a piece of chicken.
“Sperm counts are highly overrated,” said Danny.
I glanced at the darkening sky. It looked like there could be lightning anytime. Danny belched and excused himself. His belch joined his uniform on my go-for-it checklist, even if it was kind of contradictory. The contradiction was sexy too. I don’t know why I found bodily functions masculine. I was just as crass as the next guy on that count. A man was a man if he kept a cork in his heart but the more that flowed from other organs the better. Not caring was cathartic.
“Everything here was channelled in from somewhere else,” said Danny. “Not just on TV, but the jobs and everything. It’s so flat here no matter where you stand you see that rising above you.” He pointed at the city. “Maybe that’s why when I was growing up, I was always trying to be someone I wasn’t.”
The scenery evaporated as his voice reached out and wrapped around my heart like a snake. I wanted to be subdued, swallowed, to be inside him. Monsieur was wrong about voices. Dead wrong. I liked the gentle way Danny talked. It soothed me: part metronome, part poem, a stopgap in time. He was easy to be with. It was like having a brother.
He passed me the bottle. The brown grass crinkled as I rolled over onto my side, leaned on my elbow, and took it from him.
“Cheers,” I said.
He finished chewing, swallowed, and tossed away another bone, wiping his mouth with the back of his arm. “My old man was basically in front of the TV all the time. He got disability when his back screwed up at the plant. Beer and TV, TV and” — he took back the Bud — “beer.”
“The plant?”
“GM.”
“Oh, right.”
Danny sat quietly for a moment or two, then took a long pull from the bottle and wiped off his mouth again. I noticed for the first time how white and perfectly aligned his teeth were. I wondered if they were capped or even real.
“Why didn’t you leave, if you thought it was so shitty here?” I asked.
“Home is home, I guess. Besides, everywhere is the same these days,” he said and took a swig. “I did leave, once, a long time ago. I had to go to Toronto for a while.”
“Had to? Why had to?”
He didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes then got a thoughtful look on his face. He reached over and brushed the bangs out of my eyes. I hoped there weren’t any grey hairs I’d missed.
“You’re a good person,” he said.
It was fine by me if he wanted to change the subject, but I thought it was weird that he’d suddenly become reticent after being so candid. I didn’t believe in pressing people to dig up something they’d buried and left for dead. My closet had a skeleton or two, so I knew better.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m just me.”
“That’s what I meant.”
I wanted to get in his pants so badly I could taste it.
“Before it was called Windsor it was called South Detroit,” he said. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
“No, I mean no I didn’t know.”
“Oh. Yeah. Well, it was. That was in the nineteenth century.”
“Hmm.”
I followed his gaze across the Detroit River to the Renaissance Center. Its chrome pistons towered high above the water’s edge. The sun was completely gone. The prominent, sleek central tube of the complex rose like a fuck-you finger against a flat, surgical-tray sky. It was a last resort from the ’70s, stuck among much older bowel-coloured buildings. I perceived a hint of heyday in their good deco bones, but they were tired and succumbing to osteoporosis. The vibrant beat of Motown had left long ago. Aretha Franklin’s pink Cadillac had broken through the guardrails on the Freeway of Love and crashed. I thought about Monsieur’s scrapings of rust.
The slate summer storm clouds hung low above the city and moved slowly toward us. A scent of ozone came in from off the water, tendrilled past us, and diffused through the resigned neighbourhoods of Windsor, whose once manicured streets had chipped a nail. They could have used a little of Monsieur’s Ghetto Girl.
Danny passed me the bottle again and I finished it off, then tossed it into a trash can several yards away.
“Hey, good one,” he said.
I shrugged and smiled. “Good hand and eye coordination. In high school I played basketball, baseball, and soccer,” I lied.
He looked at me. My balls tingled and shrank. It was nice. I began to forget myself. Then he got shy. He scratched his head, folded his knees up to his chest, and rested his forearms on them. He said softly, “Y’know, you’re all right.”
“Thanks. I like you too.”
“Can I trust you?”
“No,” I said, and ruffled his hair. “Yeah.”
Danny smiled, blushed, and buried his head between his knees. I felt a rush of blood and my skin prickled pleasantly. A sweet and sour ache throbbed against my breastplate. I hadn’t felt that for a long time. We sat, not looking at each other, listening to the breeze rustle the leaves of a nearby poplar as our chemicals rubbed noses, giving birth to new DNA sequences, and committing multiple murders at the molecular level. I carried no condom to fit the air, no prophylactic for feeling. I was as vulnerable as I was volatile. For me it was like being a teenager all over again, without the music. That was okay. Our calm was the buildup to the 45 rpm hit single before the album came out. I heard it like an animal hears something in the silence beyond human earshot and in it finds the music of the future.
“You can touch me,” I said.
“Here? In public?”
“No. Here.” I drew his hand to my left pec and placed it there.
“No, keep it there,” I said.
“Sorry. It’s just that you don’t seem like the nipple ring kind of guy.”
I laughed. “I’m not that kind of guy. I just like to get my tits pulled every now and again.”
“Like that …?”
“Yeah.”
He smiled. The delicate crow’s feet around his eyes crinkled. Danny put his other hand on my chest and fell on top of me. I put my arms around him and kissed him, stroking his arms. His skin was unusually soft and smooth. We started to wrestle playfully, ignoring the stares of people who walked by as we rolled and tumbled over the ruined grass. Although he was smaller and lighter than me, Danny was strong. He managed to pin me down and straddled my hips. He held my arms against the ground. I couldn’t struggle out of his grip.
“Surrender?” he said.
“No.”
“Say Uncle.”
“Unh-unh. No way.”
I tried to break free, but the little guy was a tough son of a bitch.
“You don’t give up easy, do you?” he said.
“Okay, all right, I give in. You win.”
He relaxed on top of me. We started to neck. An elderly couple walking by us whispered and picked up their pace. I untucked the back of his T-shirt and slipped my hands underneath. He was muscular yet the skin on his back was as soft as his forearms, a child’s skin.
“Nice,” I said, looking in his green eyes, a forest I could get lost in and not care if I was ever found.
The entire sky lit up for a split second as lightning hit the top of the Renaissance Center. There was a crack of thunder. Then the rain started. We jumped up.
“Why don’t we go over to the Happy and shoot a few?” Danny suggested.
“Sure.” I was game to please him.
We ran all the way there, Danny a little bit ahead of me. He’d confirmed my second thoughts. I’d tell Monsieur he could do what he wanted with the typewriters. I was washing my hands of them. Danny was wrong, I did give up easy. I wanted to surrender badly. The best way to get control of my life was to let go of what little I had left and see what happened.
“They took it, my dear.”
“What?”
“They took it, the typewriter.”
I was standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the light shining from the hallway into our darkened room, casting a shadow. I’d been walking and walking and walking, trying to wrap my head around the truth about Danny. I was drenched.
Monsieur had drawn the curtains. I could make him out as a lump on the farthest bed. I walked in and turned on one of the bedside lamps, then went back and shut the door. I sat down on the bed beside Monsieur. He’d been covering his head with his arms. He put them down and stared up at the ceiling. He looked as hangdog as I felt and had a nasty bruise and cut on one side of his forehead. A bloodied hand towel was crumpled up beside his pillow. The pillow had some blood on it too, and bronzer.
“What happened?”
“My dear, you’re getting everything wet.”
He got up, pulled out some dry clothes, and started to change.
“So, tell me what happened.”
“I’m so ashamed.”
I wasn’t in the mood for Monsieur’s dying swan act. “Forget about that. Just tell me.”
“Well, on our way to the video arcade, I started to tell Sharon and Tate about our, um, vocation.”
“That was fucking brilliant.”
“My dear, don’t forget, I’m not attractive like you. I’m interesting.”
“Yeah, well, sorry about that.”
Monsieur propped himself on an elbow and lit a cigarette. “They said they wanted to see the typewriters.”
“You showed them.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t normally smoke but bummed one off Monsieur. He lit it for me.
“Oh,” I said. “I get it now. The Sholes and Glidden.”
“Yes.”
“Your favourite.”
“Yes. I was explaining to them that it was the first typewriter, as we know it. I told them that it looked like a sewing machine because Sholes and Glidden was in fact a sewing machine company. I said there was something poetic about the connection of type to clothing. They liked that.”
“I bet they did. I bet they also liked the fact that it was worth thousands and thousands of dollars.”
I fastened my belt and slipped on my cowboy boots. I went into the bathroom to comb my hair, keeping the door open so I could still hear Monsieur.
“I was in the middle of elucidating the QWERTY system, how it evolved so that the most commonly struck keys wouldn’t jam,” he said. “Suddenly I was hit on the head, and when I came to, the Sholes and Glidden was gone and so were they.”
I tossed my cigarette into the toilet and flushed.
“Thousands of dollars down the crapper,” said Monsieur. “Why are you smiling?” he asked when I peeked out of the bathroom.
“Crapper, I’ve never heard you use that word before.”
“Well, my dear, after all this time together some of you has got to rub off. What do you think we should do?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. They’ll be long gone by now, safe at home in daddy’s car. There’s nothing we can do.”
“But what about —”
“They’re American. Our word’s worth fuck this side of the border,” I said. Being stripped of my expectations made me lighthearted.
“Can I use your umbrella?” I asked Monsieur.
“Yes, I’m certainly not going anywhere like this. It’s over there on the chair by the desk.”
I told him my plans. I told him about Danny.
“My dear, that’s perverse,” said Monsieur.
“Look who’s talking.”
I took the umbrella and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I saw a sign in an all-night store down the street. I could use a job if I’m going to stay.”
“But here?”
“Yeah, here. I kind of like being on the border. The uncertainty gives me confidence.”
“But my dear, Windsor?”
“They used to call it South Detroit,” I said and walked out the door.
I went to the all-night store and filled in an application. The Rasta guy at the cash told me there’d been fifty people in that day about the job but most of them were kids. He said I’d stand a better chance, I was mature. I’d probably get an interview.
“How much does it pay?” I asked.
“Minimum.”
I got myself a cherry slushy and sat at a small counter by the window where a couple of losers from the casino sobered up on stale coffee. The store’s decor was orange, brown, and yellow, like that place in Ohio. I guessed some retail pooh-bah somewhere must have ordained those colours. There was Muzak. I recognized a sanitized AM hit from my high school days. I looked out at the rain.
At the bar, after a game of pool, I propositioned Danny and he invited me home. There was a break in the rain, so we walked. And we talked. And he told me.
I always had a knack for looking at a person and decorating where they lived in my mind’s eye and finding out that I was usually pretty accurate. Danny’s place was no exception. His apartment was predictably decorated, neutral beiges and browns, decked out in the kind of furniture they advertise late at night on TV. It was carpeted wall-to-wall and scented with air freshener. There were knick-knacks on the sills, trophies from amateur league sports on the shelves, pictures of his family and of himself on the TV and stereo, some showing what he used to be like. I was in new territory, one without borders.
They had a good clinic in Toronto. He’d aced all the psychological tests and there’d been no post-op complications.
“Thanks,” I said when he handed me a double rye and seven, “I need this.”
I finished it in two gulps and set the glass on the coffee table.
“Use a coaster. Here.”
“Oh. Sure. Thanks.”
We were in the living room on a sofa, at separate ends.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked.
“It wasn’t any of your business until now. It’s private.”
“You led me on.”
“No, I didn’t. You wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“You knew how I felt.”
“So? I didn’t know how I felt. I don’t make choices till I know. Do you? It seemed pointless to tell you until I knew if you were going to be a problem.”
“That’s a good one, me a problem. You’re the one pretending to be someone you’re not.”
“Pretending? I’m not the one pretending. She was pretending.” Danny pointed at one of the photos. He got up and walked across the room where he went through his CD rack and put one on. Shadowland, by k.d. lang. He sat back down on the sofa.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean what I said,” I said.
“Yeah, you meant it. But that doesn’t mean it’s true. Sometimes I get hit on by people who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. If you want to meet a borderline case, transition.”
I wanted to touch him but couldn’t. Instead, I said, “Well, you know what they say, there but for the grace of God …”
Danny gave me a thoughtful smile. “I’m more interested in the grace of men,” he said.
I needed time to myself. I told Danny so when I left his place. I said I’d call him.
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
Just before he closed the door, he said, “There are some things in life so much like love you can’t tell them apart.”
I thought about it and said, “It’s kind of like typing, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“They used to make copies on carbon paper, replicas of what they thought and felt.”
Danny smiled. “That’s what happens to bodies,” he said. “When we’re gone, all we leave behind is carbon.”
He leaned over and kissed me. It was the first time we’d touched since I’d found out who he was. It was scary but it was nice. I was turned inside out, my guts wrapped around my neck.
Earlier at the hotel, when I was in the bathroom combing my hair, Monsieur talked about things that didn’t matter to me anymore, I gave myself a good look in the mirror. They say some people succeed because they trust their gut instincts, as though instincts are a secret well and trust a divining rod. From where I stood, instincts weren’t that mystical, they were a squirming puzzle of pieces that somehow linked. It was a real art to put them in order. I needed to figure out how to rearrange my guts soon; they were tightening their grip on my throat. Maybe, I thought, it would be easier if I just let them choke me.
The rain subsided outside the all-night store. The window was prismatic with the lights of passing traffic. I finished my slushy. One of the casino types got up to go and bumped into me on his way out, almost knocking me off my stool. He didn’t even apologize.
It’s like that these days. People have lost their manners.