Lounger

Pencil moustache

Le Boeuf (Cruising, continued - or an Adonis on blades)

He was a hockey player, which perfectly fitted the fact he was also Franco-Ontarien.  My grandfather was just such a type, passing from a backwater called Fort-Coulonge into the mineral rich Northeastern Ontario region in search of work.  This was the origin of the trans-migration of the French.  Unfortunately, I never picked up the quaintly ugly and impossible Franglais spoken by this venerable group of Northern Ontario habitants.  Not that it mattered, for as much as they speak it, many are essentially bilingual.

I was standing in a bus shelter.  It had just snowed a pile and heaps of the stuff were deposited in empty spots off the sidewalk.  I was downtown, this corner of the city being a sort of unofficial drop off and pick up point for the public transit.  I heard rowdy voices to my left in the distinct Joual one comes to associate with the French where I am from.  I turned and saw a stream of boys, some in jerseys, with hockey bags and sticks, flow past me.  The last of the boys, tall and solid, stopped.  I looked at him through the filthy shelter window.  He looked at me.  The world could have exploded right then and I'd not have cared.

To arrest a boy in his tracks, immobilise him essentially - stop the world so to speak - was a magical feat seldom left to my short, if curly-haired, presence.  We peered at each other in a beat of time that seemed to encapsulate everything about the man.  I noted his height, his square shoulders, and his letter jacket. Chemistry.

His teammates were now metres ahead of him.  He broke the stare, as if waking from a trance, and without betraying even the slightest annoyance or interruption, continued on as if nothing had happened.  "What the Hell was that all about?" I asked myself.  It was just the beginning.  The first time I saw Le Boeuf was a smack to my face that I desperately held to.  It's too bad that a slap is warm and stings at first, but also fades.

The staring game (see Cruising at University) started up in a small library in one of the colleges haunted by a whole mix of science students.  Again, as the fates would have it, I seemed to be where he was, by no fault or design of my own.  This library was a sort of hidden gem of quiet and civility, many of the others being noisy - and usually peopled by the less studious and rowdier beer drinking university-as-marriage-market types.

On a busy bus one day he happened to be right beside me, a friend of mine on the other side of him.  I got a very good look at him on that occasion.  Some of the French in Canada seem to hold onto a tropical complexion that defies the snow and cold that this race of Gauls emigrated to.  His skin was darkly pigmented, his beard line distinct and dense.  The line of the stubble on his cheek went down past his vocal cords and met his chest hair.  His razor, I'm sure, could have made a continuous line from his bottom lip to his navel.  A square jaw was topped with perfectly chiselled sideburns.  Brown eyes and dark brown hair, cut short.  As we talked with him between us, I couldn't help but look at him, so much so that at one point it was like he was also in the conversation, for he began smiling and nodding.

There is a long corridor that makes up the Arts department of my old university.  It is so long and open and banked by large windows, that it was often used for job fairs, presentations, and product sales.  One day between classes he happened to be ahead of me in that long corridor, knowing I was behind him.  There is something about the gait of a person who knows they're being watched that shows in their steps, as if each foot was planted with a purpose, breaking the natural and unconscious rhythm one takes when unawares.  A friend of mine had a name for it .. Grind Ass.  The observed caboose, unlike the watched kettle, always boils.  His did on that long walk to the Great Hall that day.

I was later either found out by his friends (my bare jaguar gaze) or he said something to them.  One saucy girl in his circle approached me one day and told me to lay off.  "He's not like you," she said loudly for all to hear, "leave him alone."  I didn't have the heart to tell her that he was the one who stopped and stared at me, but felt very ashamed and quite crestfallen anyway.  I half-suspected she had her own designs on him.

I suppose it could have been called a case of casual stalking, but technically I only just saw him from time to time at the university.  If he was in my orbit, I looked at him.  It was hard not to.  He was physically arresting.  An Adonis on blades for Christ's sake.

He had a close male friend who I always saw him with who also played hockey.  If Le Boeuf was my dark fetish, then his friend was of that slice of Québécoise that descended from the Irish.  It is not uncommon in Quebec to come across last names such as McGee, Johnson, Nelligan, or Roy.  A Catholic connection and a wave of emigration to Lower Canada started in earnest around 1815.  It ensured a seam of ginger complexion in the province.  His friend was just such a type, freckled and red-haired.  Shorter than my man on skates, he was what came into my head as the Watch Dog.  Not to denigrate the fellow, but soon whenever I saw Le Boeuf his ginger companion was there, staring me down with just a hint of hatred.

I remember a particularly intense performance by the Watch Dog waiting for another bus in the spring sunshine.  He eyed me with contempt.  What caught my eye, though, was not that ginger stare, but the look of sheepish guilt and half glances from Le Boeuf.  The poor fellow seemed to have mixed feelings, and I sensed he preferred his friends not take his side with the kind of vehemence displayed by the saucy girl or his Watch Dog.  If only we could be happy friends!  Alas my eyes, big and brown, were too hungry and I scared the sheep instead of attracting them.

Shortly after receiving my degree I fell in love with a Sicilian fellow and moved away to the big city.  And here we are, thirty years hence.  The year is pearl.  About five years after I moved away I was visiting the farmhouse and made a trip to a shopping centre across town.  It is situated in what was, and still is, a predominantly french-speaking area.  How should I find myself, but to see him again, and for the last time.  There he was, across from the tacky food court, coming my way.  He was pushing a stroller.  She had a baby in her arms.  Mère et père followed behind.

He is frozen in amber for me. It is hard to believe he is probably in his fifties now, his dark brown hair turned grey and his children grown up. But like someone who has died and never grows old, his face in my head reigns supreme. It's not every day that you can stop a man in his tracks.

Cruising at university

I started seeing him around, walking down the steps of the old library tower usually, in cotton pants and a pastel golf shirt.  I noticed him before he took note of me.  We must have had some sort of symmetry in our class schedules that my memory of him involves this man descending steps in a pair of white runners.  And at the time I guessed correctly, I was lamentably to find out later, that he was straight.  Such is my luck, but as I have written before, the availability of a limp-wristed sure thing up north was as rare as spotting a bird of paradise in a boreal forest.  

Nonetheless, as I have elaborated on more than one occasion in these memoirs, I am that classic breed of homosexual manqué.  But in the desperation of isolation, I was always and ever hopeful.

It was his eyes that gave me hope.  I started to notice him.  He saw me.  I looked at him.  This seeming endless loop of staircase encounters between classes started to resemble the repeated scenes from Last Year at Marienbad.  I looked at him one day and held my glance.  He started to do the same.  He had green eyes, I remember, which dominated his face.  It started now to resemble a match, which was fitting, because I found out later that he was a wrestler.  We played chicken with our glances.  Some days I would win and some days he would win, but not a word was spoken between us.

Sandy-haired on top, he had a wide muscled chest, with a pelt of dark curly hair peaking out of his unbuttoned golf shirt.  Those green eyes I mentioned, like a deer's, sat above a stubbly dimpled chin.  The guy was totally adorable.  For once we were equal in height. He had the extremities that suited a wrestler.  He was compact, thick-limbed, stubby-fingered.  The crème de la crème, a gorgeous rounded ass, fixed on a pair of legs pressing the form of his ever-constant rotation of cotton pants.

The Marienbad stairs continued for some weeks it seemed.  We played with our glances.  Some days I was bold and he, coy.  Some days, the tables turned and I felt like the bottom, he the top.  Breakdown or pin, neither of us was winning and I was tiring of the game.

One day on the steps, I gathered up my courage.  I had to break this deadlock.  I did it disastrously, with a naivete only a farm boy could confabulate in his head. On one of his endless descents after our eyes met, I said, "What's going on?"  Unfortunately, this was said in an accusatory, not in a breezy "What's up?" fashion.  "Fuck off," he said to me.  A friend later laughed at me, "Oh my God, why didn't you just say hi?!"

Then something happened which I didn't expect and had not even been aware of.  Taking literature, I did have to rack up at least one science credit, Biology 101.  It was in a large auditorium that easily sat over 200 students and was often almost full.  One of my classes was close by so I usually got there before time and had the choice of seats.  He must have come from a bit further off and sat above me more often than not, because lo and behold, one day, there he was in that sea of faces.

Changed venue, but the game continued, and he seemed to be enjoying it more than I did.  Biology started to resemble more a classic experiment in psychology than the study of taxonomic rank.  Like a sadist he seemed to take pleasure in knowing that I would look around for him, and as I did, there he was looking at me. Always. Boldly.  He was asserting dominance.  I let him win, for I did like to look at him.

Then one day he came early and sat down right beside me in the almost empty auditorium.  This completely unnerved me.  All I could do was nod to him, I had lost my voice.  I think I was literally shaking.  I could feel my pen in my hand, quivering.  He nodded back, the Bro Code of an even playing field.  All was forgiven, we could rest.

Things moved quickly after that.  Carrying himself as he did (that is, handsomely), he was able to insinuate himself into the small group of friends that I knew.  Who of them he knew, or how he did it, I don't know.  I shortly found myself sitting across from him, he having lunch with my girls.

Then one day we were sitting alone together, the girls pairing to study, or absent, or hungover.  So there we sat.

"I know you like me that way," he said.  Headlock. Take down.
"Yes, I said, It's true."
"I like girls, " he said.
"I know that, " I said.
"I was playing with you," he said.

I can't remember his name.  For the life of me I wish I could.  There are a handful of men who I've stumbled across in my life, having not paid enough heed to recall their names.

We chatted after that and I explained myself, how I had seen him, how I found him so attractive that my eye contact turned into a sort of obsession - which only increased a tension that ended with him insulting me on those stairs.  He was ok with it, he said, but re-affirmed his preference in girls.

Emboldened, I let him know how I really felt.  "If I had my chance, I told him basso profundo, I'd eat you alive."

Those sweet green doe eyes widened into a sort of heterosexual fear.  I was pleased with myself.  I had won the match.

The art of Kurt Walters

Framing

Ever since I was a child I have had an affinity for paper.  Old prints, stamps, postcards and museum brochures.  Books, of course, follow not far behind, if not precede everything.  Old hotel luggage labels I especially like, as they often evoke a bygone era with kitschy art and humour.

About 20 years ago there was a Goodwill on Jarvis Street at Adelaide here in the city.  A condo has now taken up the space, but it was there among the books and furniture some decades ago that I espied what I knew to be a genuinely old print.  I guessed that it had probably been cut from a book and dated to sometime in the 1850s or so.  It was an English steel lithograph of the poet William Cowper.

The only problem was that in its bottom right hand corner was a large black blotch.  Knowing that the old paper making process involved cotton or rags woven into the pulp, I grabbed it.  For the princely sum of five dollars I brought it home.  The cotton fibres would keep the print in one piece as I bleached the stain out.  I filled the tub and poured the bleach.  Suitably framed in muted black oak, it currently occupies a spot in the living room.

In my first years of university I took full advantage of the libraries offered with my tuition and even ended up working at my university library one summer.  One day in winter I happened to stumble across a large volume on Bosch.  Tucked inside it was a gate-fold of his magnificent and terrifying triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights.  I spread this revelation across my carrel.  My eyes glowed.  I had seen it before, but decided then and there that nothing would complete my bedroom hovel more than Bosch's Earthly Delights.

I splurged.  I gathered up one hundred dollars (a lot for me then, being a poor student) and sent away to the New York Graphic Society.  A sturdy packing tube arrived at the farm some weeks later.  Quite strapped from the purchase, it would be some months before I was able to afford the frame needed to house my monster print.  It was fully a metre and a half across and some seventy-five centimetres high.  A ten centimetre white border couched the three panels on acid-free card about a millimetre thick.  In its tube, it rested above my head on a shelf before I was able to afford even the simplest frame.

I decided that I would put it into a very thin metal frame, faced with plexiglass.  I knew from where I had worked at the theatre downtown that a frame shop was close by.  For me, that shop seemed to have been there forever.  The window was always somewhat junky and full of an assortment of jumbled products.  Armed with my print, I went to the shop for consultations on how to best move forward.

Bells rang over my head as I pushed the door in.  The frizzy bouffant of an older woman floated among a sea of mattes and frame styles.  She was gluing a torn photo back together.  Across from her in this isosceles arrangement was a young man who was about my age at the time.  At the door myself, I completed the triangle.

There is a combination of features that, taken together, leave me smitten.  He had them.  Not only was he dark-haired and cleanly shaven with a pronounced beard line, he wore glasses.  He had beautiful soulful eyes and full lips.  He was in shorts, and hairy powerful legs belied the nerd touch of socks pulled up over his calves.  His cargo shorts were beige, which gave him the comical air of being ready for safari.

It was his hands, though, that caught my eye.  His hands were large, masculine, and exquisite, fine and unblemished.  He had the hands of a piano player, or a priest.  They were devotional, perfectly groomed, but not manicured.  As I drew closer I could see the free edges of his nails were symmetrical.  Each finger displayed clear white lunula.  This man was gorgeous, from his face down to the tips of his fingers.

Seemingly meticulously, he flitted over his work.  Cutting a matte, wrapping something, folding paper?  I can't quite recall.  She was talking to me, but I was stealing glances at him.  I decided on a simple frame and agreed that the print itself be affixed with glue to the backing cardboard for a small extra cost.  Dark beige aluminium frame with a half centimetre trim.

While she was speaking to me, she was also raising her voice to him - orders for this and that, making sure something was completed, packed, or mailed.  I sensed tension.  Was this boy her son, a hired relative, a new employee?  She seemed clearly unsatisfied and he seemed nervous.  His meek nervous state made him seem vulnerable to me, which made him even more attractive.  "Come with me," I thought, "and I will keep you safe."  This siren need in my head to protect him seemed odd to me, considering how he towered over me at probably 180 centimetres or more.  Height has always equalled presence to me, but his seemed sorely lacking.  He seemed to me the perfect sort of chap to sit under a tree with and read.  And do other things with.

I completed the arrangement and left.  I was told to return the following week and pick up my framed Bosch.  Aside from seeing my treasure suitably squared, I was also excited to return to the shop and see my Dark Percival.

Doubly excited, I returned the following week.  The frizzy bouffant turned to me in her swamp of mattes, recognised me, and without saying a word, departed to the back of the shop.  I looked around for my tall meek friend, but did not see him.  She returned with my monster, covered completely in craft paper.  I had to ask, "Where is .. ?"  I didn't even know his name.

"Him?!  Oh, he's gone."

"What?" I asked.  "Where?" 

"Oh, I don't know, just gone."

She said that one day he had simply not come.  And I suppose, having had the experience of decades, and having probably gone through a mill of shop boys, had not even the energy or care to inquire of an outcome.

I kept the print for the duration of my university years.  At the end of my degree, my life, like my tastes, changed.  I gave it to a concession shop and got a little over one hundred dollars for it when it was finally sold.  I was in acquaintance with the shop owner, and did see it one more time hanging on a far wall in the sunshine before it disappeared.  It did look very stately.

Small pictures of a fat uncut ginger

Lars Stephan