Roberta

After leaving Calgary six years ago I never saw her again. She passed away last year, in her home country, surrounded by family, and she had the most beautiful hair I had ever cut and colored, and I had never cut and colored hair before I met her, or after. She just assumed I could do it. The fairy flies into the room, and within minutes of meeting him she looks across the kitchen table, lifts the box of Clairol with one hand and the scissors with another, and says - “can you do this for me?” So instead of donning my indignant reaction around the stereotypical assumptions people have made about effeminate gay men in my half-century of living, I smile and say, “sure, I’d love to.”

While I massaged her head with black dye and combed it out in preparation for a sizeable trim, she would roll cigars from curved sheets of tobacco sent to her by relatives all the way from the Philippines. When other white family members spoke of her past, in stage whispers, it was a slightly gleeful kind of exoticizing shaming that they seemed to take semi-delight in.

“She was born in a prison in China. Her mother was Chinese and her father was Filipino. They were both imprisoned for opium dealing.”

“She has six kids, all girls and one boy. Two of the girls snagged white North American husbands online. The boy’s always sick or in trouble and getting money from his sisters. One of them married a rich guy in Switzerland. All of Roberta’s kids are from the same guy - a married man she had an affair with for twenty years, and she was his wife’s best friend!”

These little tidbits made me like her more. No one, not even Roberta herself, seemed sure of her age, but it probably all began somewhere not far from the nineteen twenties.

I met Roberta in Calgary in the late nineties not long after she had come to Canada to care for my brother’s youngest son. Her daughter, my brother’s second wife, was a trained nurse who could only get support staff work in a nursing home and had to go back to work right after the birth. Roberta was, in a very real sense, unpaid labour. In a small suburban bungalow for four - there were six at first, and then seven - she slept in the same bed with her youngest grandson for the first five years of his life. She was his mother and grandmother, and she was often made to feel unwelcome in my brother’s home, and from time to time would leave for extended periods and stay with other friend’s who had left the Philippines for similar reasons around family and childcare. I always felt that she tied for first place with my mother for beauty and grace of the hard won kind.

So I did her hair. If I sit and close my eyes and conjure memories from that time the most calming ones, in the midst of turbulence and relative mayhem, are those monthly, ritualistic moments with her in the bathroom, my hands feeling the warm water through the plastic gloves, re-reading the directions from the Clairol box to make sure I wasn’t screwing up, her face hard pressed against a towel as I rinsed, the thickness and the blue black darkness of those shiny, lush follicles, and then the move into the kitchen for the final cut. She was a patient and appreciative subject, and would make rice and delicious fried pork for me whenever I - the neophyte hairdresser - arrived. I would make a Greek salad and she would pick lightly at it, pushing the black olives to the side and later giving them to her middle grandson who had an over developed taste for popping many of them into his mouth at the same time and almost choking on the pits.

We wouldn’t talk a lot. There was a language difference that made it difficult. But we seemed to communicate very well. And when my own mother died in Calgary, not long after moving there with me and adding one more to an already crowded bungalow, Roberta urged all of us, on the day of the funeral, to refrain from washing our hair or raking the leaves in the front yard for fear of blowing our souls away with the dead. It was part of a ritual she never fully explained, and although I respected it, I couldn’t take part in that one. I’m way too much of a fairy to deliver a eulogy on a bad hair day.

But I could be her hairdresser. And when I overheard remarks from her to her daughter about how I was just like a woman, the way I pitched in and helped with all of the wife’s tasks - without having to question her, or even be wary of her gender politics, I just decided that this was a very positive thing, and that I would make the most of it. The sudden loss of my own mother made me acutely aware of how time just doesn’t stand still long enough for all good things to come full circle between loved ones before we have to say goodbye.

Long before I met Roberta I had already made a very conscious decision not to become a hairdresser, despite the encouragement of the people in my life who felt an appropriate ‘trade’ would be my lot in life. And over the years I have felt grateful for my choice. I would have been closer to Sweeney Todd than Miss Clairol. But with Roberta I willingly and lovingly made an exception that enriched my life with an unexpected and satisfying routine. Instead of the demon barber of Fleet Street I was a Steel Magnolia for a short period, and the blossoms of that memory, that rich and marvelous routine, have never died.

Steve & Eydie at Loblaws

It was a day like any other day, inspiring sentences like so many other sentences. Nothing original about it. In fact, if one were to adopt a literary model it could be argued - and won - that the day had stolen all of its best lines from so many other days. But I still got up out of bed, against my better judgment, remembered how to put on my clothes, and began to prepare for whatever life had borrowed from other lives for me to experience over the course of the next thirteen installments of sixty minute intervals all designed to lend order to our chaotic lives.

It was eleven am so almost half the day was gone. What a difference that makes to twenty-four little hours, to cut them in half and spare one’s self the luminescent glare of another god damn sunny morning. I like to keep my sunglasses on the bedside table just in case the curtains have accidentally been left open and I am wakened by the unpredictable energy of my least favorite star.

Forgetting how to put on my clothes has been something that has haunted me ever since I witnessed an elderly gentleman - in the nursing home where my mother lived - struggling to put on his sweater. He seemed much too distressed and angry for a stranger to approach him. At one point he had the armhole over his head. It was kind of an interesting look, like Garbo in Nintochka with a seamless opalescent veil. I was about to offer assistance when a nurse came to his rescue. My mother nonchalantly looked at me and said, “He’s from the third floor, the Old Timer’s ward.” She always said old timers instead of alzheimers after hearing someone refer to it that way in a TV movie. I had come over to take her for pizza. She loved pizza and it was a welcome change from the nursing home food she hated but I loved. I always finished her meals for her.

So that morning, like any other morning, I got out of bed, dressed myself, and boiled an egg. My room mate’s leftover pizza in the fridge acted as an appetizer before the egg, and a small crystal juice glass, half filled with Prosecco and the other half filled with a pulpy fruit medley, helped to wash down my elegant impromptu late morning snack. There had been a faintly sexual and undesignated celebration the evening before in my room mate’s bedroom and some booze had found its way into one of my favorite heirloom tumblers - just the right size to act as juice glasses. Well, actually I poured it in before going to bed, after leaving her room, so I would have a little pick me up when I awoke. Champagne and fruit juice at home always make me feel like I’m still in my early thirties and living in an expensive hotel.

I  dressed quickly, in case I forgot how to put on socks or underwear part way through, or when exactly to put them on. I have an irrational fear of leaving the house one day without realizing that I have slipped my underwear on over my trousers. So I dressed at breakneck speed, had breakfast, put on my hat and coat, and went out to greet the day. As I got off the elevator I looked at the bulletin board in the lobby and let out a little squeal.

“Shit, not today. I hate those fucking members meetings.”

I only went for the pizza, and the armed police officer. I don’t like guns, but there is  just something about all that bulk, the tight heavily packed uniform and the ambient bulges here and there with the little Velcro or domed flaps concealing whatever it is they carry in those little pockets placed strategically all over their uniforms. The decision to have an armed police officer present at every member’s meeting had been made by the board of director’s after a violent altercation between two warring residents who actually stopped an elevator once long enough to have an uninterrupted fist fight. It seemed to be the only place on the premises where their outbursts would go uninterrupted, at least for as long as it took the fire department to arrive. What on earth would a firefighter do?  Spray them? But that seemed to be the order of the day when someone was trapped voluntarily or otherwise on an elevator in the co-op where I live. In the excitable meeting that prompted the board to hire police officers they just slapped each other and cried out in elevated tones and stormed out of the room. I often wondered whether they took separate lifts back to their apartments or got in the same one and just kept slapping all the way up. They both lived at the top of the building in side by side units, one of which had been raided when a former tenant was found to have firearms. Apparently he threw a small loaded pistol into the street from his balcony when the police broke down the door. He was evicted soon after and many residents were up in arms - very angry with the board of directors - that he had even been allowed to live there in the first place. All I could think was, it must be very hard to design applications and interview procedures where you can find out for sure whether or not the future tenant might ever be in possession of an illegal weapon.

The board had also decided to offer free pizza and soda pop at members meetings. This was done in order to attract more people and raise numbers to a level that would provide a quorum and the continuation of meetings designed to pass budgets and other pressing items on any given agenda. Eventually they had to add a contest for twenty five dollar gift certificates form a nearby grocery store in order to further entice members.

But this particular meeting, the day of my Prosecco breakfast, was happening at a

particularly inconvenient time. I had forgotten to jot it down and had made somewhat conflicting plans to go to a late afternoon film that would end only ten minutes before the meeting started, and the leftover Prosecco in my water bottle, to consume during the film, that I had stolen from the half empty bottle my room mate had left in the bathroom sink, would be delightful with buttered popcorn, but would ultimately exhaust me by the time I got back to the co-op. But at the end of the day, all things considered, free pizza was not something I could pass up on my limited budget. So I would rush home and go to the meeting.

After the film ended, a ninety minute romantic comedy about an eighty year old American lesbian couple fleeing homophobic idiocy to get married in Canada, I went to Loblaws with my film companion and we reminisced about all the celebrities we had seen there when it was Maple Leaf Gardens.

“When I saw Frank Sinatra here he was so out of it he couldn’t even follow the lyrics on the monitor, and he made xenophobic remarks about Kurt Weill’s name when he sang Mack the Knife, followed by some insipid comment about Richard Rodgers and the great American songbook. Moron, did he even know anything about Rodger’s German Jewish heritage, that his original surname was Abrahams, changed by his father, a prominent surgeon in Queen’s, and that Lorenz Hart, one of Rodger’s greatest collaborators was a lovesick homosexual who was obsessed with Desi Arnaz and stood up for him when he married Lucille Ball? But when Frank sang My Way I just cried. It was so beautiful, even though he did seem a little unsure of the lyrics.”

“And Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme opened for Frank and she was in such a             bad mood. I could have sworn she was drunk the way she lugged herself across the stage in some horrific watercolor chiffon caftan and said such snippy things to Steve. I always loved Steve, and Eydie, but she was so off that night”

“And when I saw Freddy Mercury here I had no idea who he was. A friend made me go to see his favorite new brand named Queen, and I thought it was such a weird name for a rock band, but I went because I had such a crush on that friend, even though he was straight, and dating my best girl friend, and he kind of looked like Freddy, and had a very sexy moustache and large breasts in high school, so I couldn’t resist.”

“And Linda Ronstadt, she said during the concert, in between songs, that she was going to sing another Elvis song after singing Love Me Tender, and I was so disappointed it was Alison by Elvis Costello and not Jailhouse Rock or Burning Love.”

As I finished blathering on about Elvis and Linda I noticed frozen pizza with roasted garlic and asiago cheese on sale for $2.99. So I stuffed four into the shopping cart and felt very pleased with the bargain, half forgetting I had already eaten leftover pizza for breakfast and that there would still be lots more to consume when I got home.

It was a delightful visit to Loblaws, the former home of Canada’s greatest pastime, hockey, and countless summer concerts when the ice was gone and the stage was set for touring acts from all over the world.

Halfway back to my apartment I suddenly remembered the co-op meeting. I was strolling slowly, a little worn out from the Prosecco during the movie, and had completely forgotten about the meeting. I began to walk much faster and got there about ten minutes after it had started. And there they were, six large boxes filled with pizza -  one Hawaiian, two pepperoni and cheese, one vegetarian, and two tomato feta and mozzarella - with cans of Ginger Ale, Coke, Diet Pepsi, Seven-Up and some kind of carbonated cranberry drink. Wandering through Loblaws, overwhelmed by the bittersweet cinematic romance of an aging lesbian couple, I had forgotten about the pizza and now had four frozen ones in my bag that would be half thawed by the time the meeting ended. As much as I loved it, pizza was going to be an unwelcome staple of my diet for the rest of the week.

And as I sat there, trying not to stare at the beautiful bulky lesbian police officer - I shouldn’t have, but just assumed she was lesbian because she was a police officer and very butch, she probably had four kids and a cute skinny house husband at home for all I knew. But there she stood, instead of the hefty muscular tightly packed police officer of the biological male persuasion that usually attended members meetings. I wasn’t really all that disappointed. My faint but notable bisexual tendencies were given a little air time and I settled into an unexpected bout of voyeurism while the rest of the room ate their pizza and listened to a lot of boring shit about budgets and how to discipline your pet when in public areas in and around the coop - especially on the elevator where house pets can really pose a problem for anyone terrified of being bitten, or worse, pissed on, in confined spaces. 

And then, for some inexplicable reason, as I caught the eye of the woman police office, I quickly looked away and then down at my trousers to make sure I wasn’t wearing underwear over them. Lucky for me, I wasn’t. That would have been very embarrassing. And as I stared at my pants, and reached for a slice of Hawaiian on the table beside me, I thanked god for the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, and remembered a performance I had seen by an ex porn star, Annie Sprinkle, where she asked for an audience member to take her panties off for her before she did a procedure with a speculum where she let spectators look at her cervix with a flashlight. I raised my hand, ran up, carefully slipped off her black lace panties with the pearl below the navel, then slipped them over my own trousers, and pranced back to my seat. It was an exciting night in my life that I will never forget, well, so long as I don’t get alzheimers. But sometimes people with alzheimers do inexplicable things, like wearing a pair of treasured underwear over their trousers for no apparent reason, even though deep in their brain there could be imbedded the memory of an especially exciting night of live performance. I also have a photo of Annie with her right breast on my head and her left breast on my lesbian friend’s head. She was selling them for five dollars after the show.

That night, after the members meeting, like any other night, as I readied myself for bed, washing my face and brushing my teeth, things I often felt too tired to do but always tried to force myself, at least the teeth since the face isn’t a priority in the area of health insurance. If the face goes social services definitely won’t help. If the teeth go they will give a bit of assistance. But as I readied myself for bed I began to mutter the serenity prayer under my breath.

            I thank God for the small but beautiful way

            in which alcohol has touched my life today

And then of course I instantly remembered that this was not the serenity prayer. It was my serenity prayer. I had written it in response to an Ala-non meeting where one of the participants became enraged that no one seemed interested in listening to their longwinded diatribe about a philandering lover. It just wasn’t her turn to speak but that didn’t seem to be an organizing principle she had any time for. So she stormed out, and smelled of booze the entire time she was there. One couldn’t help but wonder whether she had mistaken herself for someone profoundly affected by the behaviour of alcoholics rather than an alcoholic herself. But that would be her mission perhaps, not mine. 

So I put my thoughts to rest with the proper version of the serenity prayer and went to sleep. It had been a day like any other day. Except, of course, for the pizza.

Hortense                          

He knew it would never happen. But they couldn’t stop him from dreaming about it. So he dutifully set out the saucer with the piece of fruitcake on it, beside the glass of Coca-Cola, on the kitchen table. And then he kissed his mom and dad goodnight and went to bed.

“Get me a glass of water.”

The whining sound of his older brother’s voice wakened him from a deep sleep where he had been imagining baby dolls and beautiful carriages with himself at the helm, walking along the street happy and proud to be the new owner of a pram and a lifelike china infant.

Dutifully, he got up from his bed, only a few feet across from his brother’s identical bed, and walked across the hall to the bathroom. He took a Dixie cup from the dispenser beside the medicine cabinet and filled it with cold water and returned to the bedroom

“That’s not enough. I want some more. Bring two this time, and think of something to sing to me when you get back.”

He would sing Old Doctor Sun or Sweet Hortense. He liked singing them both, and if the first one didn’t work then maybe the second one would put his brother back to sleep long enough for him to have more dreams about all of the things he desired.

            Old Doctor Sun please shine your lovely light

            On the sick children, pale children, those who are in pain

            Old Doctor Sun please shine your light again

            “More. I want more. I can’t get to sleep.”

            Oh oh oh my sweet Hortense

            she ain’t good lookin’ but she’s got good sense

            I gave Hortense a diamond ring

            boy it was the most beautiful thing

            She got married now I’m alone

            She gave me back the ring but she kept the stone

           

            Hortense has dandy teeth in her mouth

            one pointing north and the other pointing south

            oh my sweet Hortense

            she ain’t good lookin’ but she’s got good sense           

           

            Rain makes flowers pretty I hear

            I hope it rains on her for a year

            Every time I kiss Hortense

            I always buy a nickels worth of peppermints

He could hear his brother chuckle a little as he fell asleep with the empty Dixie cups lying crumpled beside his head. But he couldn’t get to sleep himself. Singing to his older sibling always got the adrenaline flowing and it became a little bedside performance that took awhile to come down from when it was over. So he just lay there thinking about all of the excitement awaiting them both when they got out of bed in the morning and went downstairs.

And there it was, to his complete surprise, sitting on the kitchen counter, and when he stood on his tiptoes and peaked inside he could see the baby’s pale face and rosy cheeks with a little wool blanket pulled up around its neck. He couldn’t believe it. They had actually bought him a doll carriage and china doll. He hadn’t believed in Santa for a few years but they still did the ritual of leaving food out for him when he delivered all of the gifts from the North Pole. The fruitcake was half eaten and the glass of Coke was empty. But then he noticed crumbled bits of dark bread and green and red maraschino cherries on the floor beside the counter where the carriage was perched, and realized his dad had dropped the piece of cake and hadn’t noticed. But it didn’t matter. He had what he wanted, and the next step was to get all dressed up in his winter coat and take that doll for a nice walk around the neighbourhood in her brand new buggy. But just as he was heading for the closet in the front hall he heard his brother whining again.

            “Get me a glass of water” - and he suddenly realized he had in fact been able to fall asleep again after his medley of Sweet Hortense and Old Doctor Sun. He got up out of bed, trying to relish the memory of his little doll and carriage dream, and headed for the Dixie cup dispenser.

            He always wished that Old Doctor Sun would pay more attention to him, and he felt so sorry for Hortense, the way his brother laughed at her when he sang the song. There was something about her that - as a child - he couldn’t quite put his finger on. But he knew she was like him. She was never going to get what she really wanted, but she would spend all of her life trying to find ways to feel surprised and delighted by all of the things she did get.

MEALHAPPY

the cheese filled brunch upon the counter

the guests in dim attire flounder

the sun has given up - what else to do

the dusk filled day would rather stew

upon the dinner table’s rack

upon the lamb’s once sturdy back

lie slices of the freshest mint

drizzled with a salty hint

 of all we’ve taken from the earth

and what remains but broken mirth

as smiles lie deadened on the floor

as guests have slithered out the door

a midnight snack is all that’s left

one would think the hosts would feel bereft

but there is a grand uplifting way

of feeding staff when cannibals have spent the day

guiding pool boys into rooms

swooning like complete buffoons

upon the rotting remnants 

of all those meals

upon the maid’s stillettoed heel

upon the leftover dawning hunch

that food has never been so crunched

beneath the sloth of plenty’s horn

the table napkins look forlorn

the forks have lost their lust for life

the spoons crave each other’s cradled strife

the knives are lurking in the sink

the pool boy's brawn in fleshy pink

the counter grins

blue cheese may blush

the guest who stayed can feel the hush

the sun may squeal

the dew may die

mimosas stagger toward the sky