left for England when I was 14, but I felt 5 that morning at Terminal One; red-eyed and clutching a bag of licorice all sorts she’d bought for me, not knowing when I’d see her again.
Less than six months later — around the time of the Mayaguez incident — my parents split up. One evening, while Dad was recounting the problems jiving the chronologies of the synoptic Gospels, she walked out and into her old classmate’s apartment. All she’d taken was her Bible and tampons; four days later she returned with her friend for the rest of her things. A month later she had a rented bungalow and I went too, because everyone expected that of me.
Left with scant sanctuary from my mothers grasping faith — not to mention my roaring antipathy towards her for the meltdown of our nuclear family — my father’s politics suddenly seemed a liberal, inviting alternative. Though weekly Mom would cajole me into joining her for Pastor Vern Filmore’s three-point, 40-minute sermons, I slowly began to cultivate a secret life of subversion that I thought would make my old man swell like the Red Flag seized by an eastern gale.
It began with my Radio Shack short-wave radio — an old, didactic gift from my father to wean me from American television. I’d hardly used it before, but within a month of moving out I’d graduated from the white noise of the police band and was regularly tuning in to Radio Peking. I spent hours, some evenings, twiddling the dial for gossip from Mao’s China. The Great Helmsman was still alive then, and the news was intoxicating and strange. I toyed with my geometry homework while listening to reports of campaigns to educate the masses by the examples of exemplary peasants. I hummed along with the heroic operas of the Long March, celebrated the weeding out of capitalist roaders, and nodded sagely to the warnings against Brezhnevian revisionist hegemonism. Occasionally I’d listen to Havana and Hanoi and, on rare nights, quite late when I wasn’t masturbating to the grainy memory of my science teacher’s panties when she crossed her legs on a classroom stool (“why Mrs Pocaradi, I had no idea…!”), I’d pick up a weak English transmission from Albania. It sounded as distant as Alpha Centauri.
It was 1975: Nixon was gone, Angola was free and we could still believe that Pol Pot meant well.
I embraced communism only when my Mom no longer approved, so it felt properly wicked and delicious. She found me out on account of my having requested a programming guide from Radio Peking. One late afternoon after soccer practice, I clopped home in muddy cleats to find her sitting at our kitchen table clutching my mail from the People’s Republic. The rice paper envelope had been slit and resealed in a clear plastic pouch stamped with the mark of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “What will the mailman think?” I remember her moaning.
She didn’t know what to make of me. Her bilious self-assurance that it was “just a phase” only encouraged further acts of civil disobedience. I took down my Guess Who posters and entered my period of socialist realism. Agitprop collages with block red caps began popping up. “SOLIDARITY WITH THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS OF SOUTH YEMEN!” wheezed one. “USA OUT OF NORTH AMERICA!” another bawled. My bedroom was a Marxist Magic Kingdom where I could liberate Alaska and deliberate with my fantasy cabinet. (Minister of Finance, Milton Acorn? My eyes watered at the thought.)
I wasn’t surprised — though I was surprisingly hurt — when upon my 15th birthday, upon the counsel of Pastor Filmore, Mom chose to trust the Lord for my soul and let me live with my father, who had decided he wouldn’t mind having a little fellow traveller around the house.
I didn’t mind, either. It was good to sniff about the only place that had smelled like home to me.
It stank of solidarity forever.
To credit my father, my nascent Maoism was never much of an issue to him, even though, down to his Troskyite bones, I was committing egregious heresy. He dismissed it, largely, as youthful ignorance and overzealousness; something I would undoubtedly outgrow given the right literature and emotional muzak. After all, I was only fifteen, and discounting an hour spent on the American side of the Falls six years before, I’d never left the province. How could I be expected to appreciate the vanguard role of the urban proletariat or be on guard against the Stalinist fallacy of socialism in one country, let alone know the essentially reactionary nature of the petty land-owning peasant masses? Besides, he seemed honestly happy as hell to have his son back.
At this time, I was working after school and on Saturdays in a musty shoe store on Mount Pleasant Avenue. It was where I had my first close encounter with a woman’s privates.
Mylo’s Discount Shoes typically drew mature women smelling of mothballs and perms, searching out sensible shoes to fit their insensate feet. Our shop specialized in the hard-luck cases: the women the chains wouldn’t look at once if given the chance, who had bunions like hazelnuts but still wanted to cha-cha-cha. There was a sense of mission about Mylo’s that I picked up naturally. If these hobbled souls had faith enough to brave the smouldering cigarette butts, the pools of bitters piss and rotweiller excreta of our store front, then I wanted to be able to tell them with confidence, “Take up thy bed and walk.” Mylo’s was the problem foot’s Hail Mary, and I saw us — sometimes — as miracle workers, helping our customers make it to the grave on their own two legs. Other times, the Great Commission meant nothing more than 20% off the top. Mylo’s served no men, and few women below pensionable age, so when a slender, late-20s beauty with a close-cropped black bob strolled in, bare-legged in two-inch heels, a black skirt and red halter that clung to her with sweat, she did not go unnoticed
I may have just turned 16, but I had a cock that, like a colicky babe, cried hysterically for attention every half hour. She smiled at me; I blushed and twisted awkwardly to hide the bold new crease in my pants.
With me in the store were Barry Myron, grandson of the “My” in “Mylo,” who was working his way through a degree in endocrinology, and Nick Granakis, the thick-lipped, pooch-faced assistant manager who had been selling shoes since he’d left the Greek army half his fifty years before. The three of us were occupied with other customers, but Barry and Nick began to rush their sales, each hoping to be the one to serve her. She just browsed, occasionally scratching the back of her neck and smirking in the mirrors at nothing in particular.
Nick beat us to her, but the woman was still “just looking.” Barry was so distracted that he fit a left walking shoe on a decrepit regular’s swollen right. (She liked it, however, and eventually bought two pair.) My customer finally strolled, and when I asked the dark-haired beauty if I could help she promptly smiled again, sat down and stretched a leg between mine. “Fit me for a pump,” she sighed. I found a foot scale and crouched before her. When I dared to look between her legs, I saw she wasn’t wearing any panties. Omigodomigodomigod: the first live, naked girlie-equipment of my life.
I might have shown her a dozen shoes but I wasn’t counting, or even giving much thought to what I showed her. The store’s selection, by design, wasn’t sexy, but with each fitting I’d hold her higher on the back of her calf, letting my hand slide slowly over the contour of her heel as I’d slip it into the shoe. She stayed long enough for the crowd to thin, and through much of it Barry and Nick sat staring at us, whispering to each other and shaking their heads. Eventually Nick left, looking clammy and agitated, for his usual lunch across the street at Mr Submarine, and Barry muttered he was going downstairs to “rotate stock.” We were alone, and couldn’t be seen from the doorway or windows thanks to a rack of canvas sandals reduced to clear.
I licked my lips and looked again between her legs. Did she know? Of course she did. Her carnal smile bearing down on me said she did. But nothing like this had happened to me before. Could I trust my good fortune? I wanted to let my tongue trace her salty, soft leg till I found the sticky sweetness where one thigh met the other, but I was still afraid the moment I stuck out my tongue for her she’d run screaming for the cops. (It didn’t even occur to me that she might get in trouble too, for corrupting the morals of a youth.) Pussy
