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.