The Journey Prize Stories 27 (6 page)

I
t is 1979 and the silkscreen letters on my
DISCO SUCKS
T-shirt are all cracked and falling off, so it just says
I CO UCK
. Better not be too much of a butch rocker chick here anyhow with those girly het-girls in strappy sandals and spandex dresses and everyone a little on edge from doing poppers all night. Cocoa Cherry Divine, aka
Mon Cherie
, the Divine Cocoa Puff, steps off the stage and begins to circulate through the crowd. She hugs Billy from behind, shedding glitter on his sweaty black satin shirt. “You be wantin’ a cock up yo’ ass and tits aflappin’ on yo’ back, honey.” Her long green nails caress his hair. Billy’s wasted: “You need permission from my girlfriend here first,” he says to Cocoa, winking at me. Katrina’s is a mixed bar—a lot of David Bowie groupies with bi-curious chic: Toronto’s provincial outpost of the Studio 54 avantgarde. I’m sipping a tequila sunrise, chewing the ice cubes to stave off drunkenness. I look into the glass as the coloured layers dance into one orangish liquid cloud. Staring beyond the bevelled edge of the tumbler, I can see the reflection of my
eye swimming toward the half-submerged cherry garnish. Alcohol tastes like shit but ordering ginger ale is the damn stupidest way for a juvie to get blown off the scene. You’ve got to tip well but not so much as to seem like a bribe. Better to be really nonchalant, like you’ve got some citified
ennui
.

Jacques weaves through the crowded dance floor hefting a tray of drinks over his head. He works out at Gold’s Gym on Yonge; he keeps his arm slightly bent under the weight of the tray to show off his muscles. Even his forearms have little bulges, like Popeye’s. Angelo swaggers over, gold chains snaking through his bushy chest hair. His shirt is unbuttoned to the waist. “My girlfriend thinks you’re cute,” he slurs, handing a fiver to Jacques. “
Merci, merci beaucoup, ooohlala
,” says Jacques, sizing up the breeder and pretending not to speak English. Jacques tucks the fin into his jock strap and blows Angelo a kiss. He smacks Cocoa’s ass on his way back to the bar.
“Cochon
!
”
she exclaims in mock outrage.

Angelo sulks back to his girly-girl with the Farrah Fawcett hairdo; her kohl eyeliner has smudged into a bruised boxer kind of look. Jacques winks back at Cocoa, his
amour
. Angelo and boxer girl start necking to give them a show. He pulls her onto the dance floor and feels her up to the music; then he stops suddenly and points to the ceiling. I look up to see what he’s pointing at and the mirror ball makes me dizzy. Then I realize he’s trying to strike that John Travolta pose and the Bee Gees are singing “Night Fever,” their creepy falsetto voices whining mosquito-like against the pneumatic backbeat. I hate the Bee Gees. I hate their saccharine harmonies and their blow-dried hair and their pretence of wholesomeness: the Brothers Glib. Give me synthesizers that pound like
electronic jackhammers, not polyester snare drums. It’s the deceit that gets to me.

I stare up at Cocoa just trying to look bored. “Billy is an asshole, saying I’m his girl,” I say. I reach over to her shimmering fingers, where her cigarette is idle. I bring her hand to my lips and I take a long haul off her smoke before I say anything. “Fuck him, Cocoa. I’m nobody’s girlfriend and I would pay you to screw him up the ass.” She looks down at me with a raised eyebrow. I realize that she must be nearly as old as my mom: thirty-five, at least—she’s the mom and dad I really want, all rolled into one tall, black drag queen with a penetrating eye. She snaps out of her vernacular: “I am not some common whore, you know!” I’ve fucked it up. She gazes down into my pupils and takes back the last drag of her smoke. She says something about being a true libertine, like it’s got to have rules. I’ll think about it later. I’m too fuzzy now. I suck in my cheeks and bite down on the insides of my mouth. I taste a little blood, but I have to bite harder to feel any pain, trying to find a way to shake off this tequila buzz. “Coffee,” I think, and the next thing I know I’m at work.

I’m training Stacey-Jane. “Just be sure there’s a new paper filter in there before you open the bag. Just dump it in—that’s right, the whole bag. Remember, if you push the button without putting in coffee, you just get a pot of hot water. If you don’t put in the paper filter, the grinds clog the hole and boiling water spills all over—like that mess we just cleaned up.” We scalded our fingers trying to stanch the flow of boiling
water and coffee grinds that flooded the counter, and we’ve dumped a pot that looked like a giant’s urine sample because Stacey-Jane pressed the hot water button without changing the used filter. Cocoa has dropped by for a coffee. I can feel her waiting for her caffeine fix, captive attendant to the slowly brewing pot. I gently touch Stacey-Jane on the shoulder: a reassuring pat, a tiny feel of her soft arm. I go a little further, Cocoa’s gaze daring me from behind. I give Stacey-Jane a pals-y shoulder squeeze, brushing my fingers through her hair as if by accident.

Stacey-Jane is a Roman Catholic girl from Saskatoon. She’s sweet and pure and perky and so supremely gullible that even the concept of religious hypocrisy is far beyond her grasp. Her honey-brown hair curls a bit at the shoulders. She has big brown eyes and full lips and a slight gap between her front teeth. I love saying “Stacey-Jane”—the long assonant
A
’s feel delicious in my mouth. Whenever I suspect that someone might suss me out as a naive country girl, I just sidle up to Stacey-Jane’s farm-fresh face and feel like a kick-ass urban butch intellectual. She makes me feel canny: not just by comparison, but there’s something genuine about her aura that helps me think before I open my mouth. She is so completely without artifice that she’s sexy, and the air kind of tingles around her.

We have two head waiters, John and Steve. They both have wispy blond hair, little moustaches, and rectangular chrome-framed glasses. John moves like a
premier danseur
from the Bolshoi, while Steve walks like he has a pickle up his ass. The problem with Steve is that he is a born-again sanctimonious asshole who just can’t leave shit alone. “Bronwyn,” he says,
“check the table bottoms for chewing gum. Kitchen will give you a putty knife to scrape it off.” For an extra twenty cents an hour, Steve takes the head waiter thing pretty seriously. He’s gunning for the title of evening shift manager. He probably has wet dreams about getting it embossed on his plastic name tag, like getting a medal pinned on his chest. Lots of folk have a narrow compass, see only the part of the world that fits between horse blinders; but Steve’s gaze rules a microcosm that contracts into the crosshairs of a rifle sight: pop-gun tyrant of serviette dispensers, invigilator of the extra creams. We’re all just moving targets. He is a cardboard parody of the dinner table dictator who I tried to leave behind. It’s been over two weeks since I got the hell out of there, but my brain still drags some luggage along. The filial Sunday dinner switches on in my head.

Dad sounds like he’s loud, but he’s not. He’s just got righteous intensity. That’s a different thing, he says, than those neurotics, always flying off the handle. “Ed Sullivan should be shot for what he did,” says Dad, staring me down like it is news, like I’ve done something wrong. “Take your elbows off the table, Bronwyn. Bringing the Beatles to America; what insanity he let loose on this generation of heathens.” I just keep eating. Beatles got their place in history but I’m not old enough to remember them as a band, and Ed Sullivan is dead. My music is Poly Styrene, Lou Reed, Bowie, Queen, Joan Jett, Sex Pistols, Siouxsie Sioux: no point in saying so.

Dad complains that Diefenbaker scrapped the Arrow and that Trudeau, French and effete, joined Ed Sullivan’s conspiracy. “Beatle-mania, Trudeau-mania. Mob psychology,” he
says. “All those kids screaming like rabid animals. No discipline. Is that roasted chicken? Damn that rock and roll and those crazy hippies. What we need is another war. Pass the green beans. Please! What do
you
think about this women’s lib malarkey, Bronwyn?” It’s not a question. It is a test for The Amazing Kreskin. He wants me to read the secret answer in his head, not tell him what I really think.

I dress like a boy because girls can’t do shit if they dress like girls, and what I really think is that Dad can take a great word like
liberation
and make it sound like a bad taste in your mouth, like something loud and fat and embarrassing:
lip
or
lipid
or
libido
. I haven’t heard the term
hippie
since grade five, and Trudeau is old, and
malarkey
comes from the kind of brain that’s been mummified in a Canopic jar. There’s a new indie-punk glam scene that comes in from campus stations late at night on my clock radio, and those new rocker chicks and club queens and androgyny philosophers are taking over from white-boy cock-rockers like The Who and The Stones and Rush and Styx; and I’m trying to figure out why all the cool black rock-and-rollers are selling their souls to disco, and why the hell Grace Jones is singing synthesized Broadway tunes when she could be kicking ass with real skin drums. My dad says there’s a generation gap. It’s the fucking Grand Canyon. All he sees is this freckled kid who doesn’t say what’s in her head and he makes her feel dumb and small.

He has piercing blue eyes. He can make you feel ashamed for nothing; like shame is made of live seeds germinating in a forbidden-fruit core. The shame seeds sprout in my stomach like kudzu vines, invasive, embarrassing, with budding leaves that grow out my nose and ears. They creep up the glands in
my throat and get in the way when I swallow. I’ve taken a chicken leg that I can’t eat. The shame in my throat gets bigger when I think about the dead chicken. It’s my job to feed the chickens. They come when I call them, let me take their eggs, and then my dad chops their heads off and we pluck them and eat them. I just shut up and help Mom clear the plates.

Mom’s still dressed up from church, sort of. She’s wearing the floral cotton dress that she made with a Vogue pattern: high femme. She even made the matching cloth-covered buttons. But the weather is too cold and the farm house is too drafty for the dress, so she’s got a plaid lumber jacket draped over her shoulders and she’s taken off her good shoes and put on grey work socks, the kind that are made of itchy wool and have the little white-and-red band at the top. Over the socks, she’s got on a pair of men’s Kodiak work boots. She says nothing, but she’s smiling. She is fifteen years younger than my dad. I went through her nightstand once to try to figure her out. No diary, no pills, no makeup, just a little jar that said
vanishing cream
. You think she’s right there, but she’s not: receding like the Cheshire cat until all that’s left is her smile and her busy hands. My grandpa pounds the table with his fist, vehemently agreeing with my dad: “Kids today; and that music—no religion, no respect.” He knows the script so well he doesn’t need verbs. In his time music was decent. Men were men.

Dad dropped out of grade eight and started working in a Pittsburgh steel mill, turning gun barrels on a metal lathe at fourteen. That’s what it meant to be a man. “When I was your age,” says my dad, “we didn’t have milk. We just poured coffee on our oatmeal.” He had the last of his teeth all pulled when
he turned thirty-three, just after getting married. He clicks his dentures together and smiles as Mom takes the percolator off the gas stove and fills his cup with coffee. Her grandmother’s inheritance paid for his dentures. It’s an open secret. She thinks of her silence as dignity, appropriateness. It’s the routine, the predictability that creates our roles, our purpose; a meaningfulness that seals away the sin of doubt.

Sunday dinner is always served at noon. Mom puts the chicken in the oven before church, comes back, and serves it. She gets up and down during dinner, checking the pie, picking up dropped utensils. Then she washes the dishes. Dad gets annoyed if Mom leaves any dirty cooking pots in the sink while we’re eating. “Dirty dishes are unsightly and unsanitary,” he says. “Discipline,” he says, “discipline and faith: that’s what makes people strong in the face of terror. It’s the narrow gate that guides a soul from the path of destruction.” He will not allow us to work on the Sabbath, except for Mom cooking and cleaning, which doesn’t count. Everyone else has to sit around all day and be quiet. Mom smiles. “Would anyone like dessert?”
Oh, God, in whom I do not believe, please don’t let me become my mother!

“Yes,” I say, less patiently to my customer, but still smiling, “that’s eight different desserts, all fresh not frozen. Would you like me to recite the list again?” Mostly, it’s families at dinner hour. Lots of sticky little kids who have temper tantrums after their second glass of pop and start to throw their food on the floor. Half the job is cleaning. They call it side work: getting the crumbs and the crispy cockroaches out of the toasters, washing the counters, polishing glasses, refilling the Heinz
ketchup bottles with some generic red shit that comes in big drums with plastic pumps at the top.