Gabrielle Taylor's "Cockluck"
January 10, 2002
The weekend was quiet -- no phone calls, no one dropping by -- a quiet fog. I fed myself all the drugs it takes to keep me going: drugs from Utah via one doctor, steroids from another, other pills I'd worked out on my own. I showered. I worked and threw the work away. The sun came in and went out. I walked to Blockbuster on Rideau Street and rented "Metroland", "Small Time Crooks" and "Everyone Says I Love You". Naked, I watched them, wrapped in a white duvet with yellow daisies on my hard narrow brushed steel futon couch. I drank mediocre red wine out of the bottle and ate pizza from Colonnade. As usual, I slept on the couch -- as usual when Fort's away. There's too much space in the bed when I'm alone and even both my fat fat cats -- Riesling and Offenbach -- were not enough. Auntie would advise me to fill it with a human presence; that's what she would do.
My guts clutched each other. That was what she would say to do -- and persuasively at that. She would completely disrupt the calm I'd cultivated over the last two years with Fort. They'd never met; he'd heard of her and she once of him. If he disliked her he wouldn't say -- it wasn't his style. If she disliked him and I made one slip, said one uncomplimentary thing without thinking, I could wake up in a vacuum fishing trawler bound for Japan with him reading a note saying I'd joined the World Wrestling Federation as a traveling continuity editor.
That situation was what I was paying Bertram to find.
Was I so unhappy?
Well, was I?
I stayed in for three solid days. When the phone rang Monday night -- when Bertram called saying he'd found her, that easily -- I still didn't have a damn idea what the hell was wrong.
"She's at a monastery near Quebec City."
"A monastery?"
"A co-ed monastery."
"They have co-ed monasteries?"
"God moves in mysterious ways."
"Can I go there? Do I need a permit?"
"They're expecting you."
"Does she know?"
"If they told her. I didn't see her myself. I can if you like."
"No! I'll be there tomorrow. I don't want her to..."
"Leave before you get there?"
"Yeah."
"She probably won't. She's been there about a year. They're... looking forward to seeing you. Half of them are convinced she's possessed -- which is why she went there, she demanded to be exorcised -- and half of them are convinced that she is, ah, what she says, Saint Dynamite of the Last Stand."
"Maybe she's Saint Dynamite of the Last Standard and that's why it went bankrupt."
"Meckler said--"
"I know what Meckler said. Jumped up old-- Anyhow." We talked a little more about money and that was that. You can burn muffins as long as you want or you can go buy a new stove for a lot less than your time's worth.
So I set my G4 burning a CD of driving music and printed the map and the CD was done burning practically before the map was done printing. I put a bag of sandwiches and cans of Diet Coke in a yellow insulated nylon bag in the fridge. Partway through watching "Revenge of the Pink Panther" I fell asleep clutching the remote control.
I dreamed I was a jewel thief, at a house party for jewel thieving gangs, and my gang had fingered the house so everyone was going to be busted but us. My gang members were slipping outside one at a time. I was scuffing thick ivory pile carpet with pointy black patent leather high heeled shoes. My shoes had thin six-inch forked spikes extending from the eyelets. I was nervously talking to a matronly fence who somewhat resembled Margaret Thatcher. She seemed to suspect nothing; she talked about her nieces and nephews and wished she had children of her own, but with her work, you know. I excused myself and went outside to where I was supposed to meet the rest of my gang. The shoes were surprisingly good at gripping the soft, mucky hillside in the dark. I pulled myself carefully up the slope in the mid-evening darkness, hand over handing a nearly invisible steel cable, to where the others waited with a young Robert Redford... Was he Butch or Sundance? I couldn't remember.
I woke up early on Tuesday, loaded the Mercedes, and drove out listening to Eric Clapton and Adrian Belew and the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy. It was a perfect day for a long drive, blue skied and crisp. All the trees along the highway were turning pink and orange.
Quebec is hilly and for one reason or another CBC Radio 2 doesn't have good reception there so I kept the driving CD on. About eight in the morning I stopped for gas in St-Remi-de-Napierville and stood before Pierre Trudeau's crypt like I'd been meaning to do since he died last year. When he died I stood outside Parliament Hill in the hours-long lineup in a little black dress to touch his flag-covered coffin. As a kid I thought Canadian politics were always going to be exciting, I didn't know he'd made them that way. I wanted to be there; I wanted to give myself up to a huge exciting country where my leader would wear bermuda shorts and swear at his opponents. I wanted to be where everything was magic and crazy and anything could be done -- abortion made legal, divorce made easy, metric imposed nationwide -- if there was a a reason and a will. But when I looked back at the wet grass, smudged dark with my footsteps, and over the crypt to the warming morning sky, I saw nothing but sky.
I drove past the four-lane highway to Jean Chretien's hometown and gave it the finger because there still wasn't a four lane highway to Ottawa, capital of Canada, but somehow the bucks were there to lay one in to a town of twenty thousand people. I drove past billboards advertising Quebec City as the nation's capital. As I drove I remembered Fred Lapides writing to Matt Welch that "the Left is filled with Guilt" and "the Right is filled with Rage" and as I burst into astonished infuriated tears and drove on, I thought with curious detachment that I'd never considered myself Right before.