Month: September 2016

“I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” George said suddenly, “My name’s George. It’s my guilty duty to inform you that I’m spying on Drew right now.”

“You are!?” she said.

“It seemed prudent,” Jesse said, mostly because he was tired of being the silent sidekick.

George shot him a look, then turning his attention back to the neighbour and briefly smiled that smooth, almost greasy, professional smile. Then the smile vanished. He looked almost apologetic. “They’re coming.  I planted a bug on Drew. You need to get back to your apartment, this instant.”

She stood and squeezed Chris’s hand, nodding. Then, with creditable speed and grace, Chris’s neighbour heeded George’s advice.  They heard her door quietly close and then the hisses and squelched giggling as the two men shushed themselves. George left the apartment door ajar and peered out as they dopily took the stairs.  He motioned Jesse and Chris into the kitchen, where they couldn’t be seen when the door opened wide. Jesse stood between Chris and the door and waited.

“Where’s Chris?” Drew asked. His boyfriend stood next to him, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Elsewhere,” George said.  “Leave or I’m calling the cops.”

Figuring it was two to one, they tried to crowd through the door.

George, with no apparent effort, pushed them both back and closed it.

Thunderous pounding and provocative cursing followed.

“Beat it,” said George through the door. “You’re holding Schedule I, II and IV drugs, you’ve been drinking and driving, and you’ve already committed mischief and uttered threats.  Unless you want to spend the night in the central lockup, get the fuck away from this door and shut up.”

There was shuffling, and then giggling again.

“They’re going to beat the door in with the fire extinguisher in the hall,” George said in disgust.  He jerked open the door as Drew tried to smash the door handle, and once again Drew fell over, this time onto his face, simultaneously discharging the fire extinguisher. In the chaos, the boyfriend started to scream and took off down the stairs like a scalded cat. The door to the parking lot banged and reverberated through the stairwell and corridor.

George hauled Drew to his feet and said, “I was going to call the cops, but honestly I don’t think that would help.”

Jesse bodily restrained Chris when he heard Drew’s voice.

“Fuck you,” Drew said. “Who the fuck do you think you are. If I want to talk to Chris you can’t stop me.”

“Wishin’ won’t make it so,” George said.  He shoved Drew, who was resisting vigorously, back out the door, and put a hand over his mouth since, once again, the volume had maxed out.

Then he pushed him down the stairs and called 911.

“Give me your phone.”

“Not a chance,” Chris said.

Jesse felt sorry for him.  He mentally predicted what would happen.  George will reach out an arm, yup, put it on his shoulder, and there ya go, Chris is off the stool, and for a second they look like they’re gonna dance, and then — called it! — George is standing back blinking with the phone in his left hand.

Chris tried to hit George.

Jesse couldn’t take it anymore, it was like watching a baby get punched out.  He scooted behind Chris, put his hands between Chris’s elbows and back, and said into his neck, “Nuh unh.”

“Get the fuck off me, ya goon, I need my phone!” Chris said, pumping his feet uselessly and squirming.

“And you’ll find it, with its battery, once you unpack,” George said. “In the meantime I don’t want you to have easy access to Drew’s social media, or the texts he never stops sending you, or the texts his new squeeze sends you for fun when Drew hands his phone over.”

“What?”

“Textual analysis indicates two different kinds of illiteracy,” George said, looking at Chris’s phone.

“All this and a grammar Nazi too?” Jesse asked, aghast. Raven was always going on about how class and worth were policed and bounded by a narrow and stultifying interpretation of grammar rules that were dying at the time they were first codified. From this Jesse had slowly and painfully extracted the idea that you shouldn’t assign moral value to another person’s chosen mode of communication. He painfully resisted this conclusion, mentioning people like Derrida and McLuhan (whom he only knew about because Raven was always going off about them) and he kept coming up with exceptions until Raven got mad at him for being so pointillistic. “Quit looking at the dots and look at the whole picture!!” she would say. It had been a relief when she stopped going to university and got into local activism and shelter work instead.

He didn’t hear George say, “If textual analysis helps me figure out that both of them are involved in gas-lighting Chris, yes.”

“Wait a minute,” Chris said slowly. “How did you get access to my texts.”

“I’m looking at them, and I’m listening to them send you one.  You know that them texting you is against the peace bond you swore out, right? Ditching your old phone and getting a new one would really help with that now.”

“I can’t get next to removing Chris’s agency like this,” Jesse said. He knew George would ignore him, but if he didn’t make it clear he was on Chris’s side he’d never get him out of the apartment when the time came. It still was not clear to Jesse where Chris was going to end up or whether he would even come out of his emotional coma and flee like a sensible person, and George was in a mood he’d never previously displayed.  He knew George would be perfectly happy to restrain and remove Chris, but Jesse was already tiring of this approach to miscreants, as much fun as it had been at first; to decide it was the appropriate way to treat clients tonight seemed a bridge too far.

He knew that was one of the reasons George was so adamant about being paid up front, a rule he’d broken twice, once with a happy outcome and once with a night which had been expensive and painful and humiliating even before the police had arrived. But as George said, if he got paid up front, he still had the money if they decided not to like him afterward.

“I don’t want to go to the police,” Chris said plaintively.  He was in his late thirties, but apart from a tiny paunch, he looked a decade younger, and younger still in his misery.

“Then don’t,” Jesse said. “But you have to get out of here tonight, and go someplace safe, and let us deal with them if they come back. The last time you were lucky you didn’t get hit in the head with flying glass.”

“They’re still out there. I think they’re snorting something, they sound a little confused,” George said, putting his finger to his ear.

“Couldn’t you have lifted that off them while you were planting the bug?” Jesse said, referring to the drugs they were ingesting.

“It was in the car,” George said, shrugging.

“I can’t not have a phone,” Chris said.

George pulled out a burner and held it and Chris’s Samsung up. Gesturing with them, he said, “You can have this one. You’ll get this one back when things have died down. If they did turn on tracking, the battery’s out now, and that’ll prevent you from giving away your location. Since he knows where you work, you should either quit, go on vacation or ask for a leave of absence.”

“I can’t do that,” Chris said numbly.

What a fucking gumptionless numpty this guy is, Jesse thought. His feelings did not show on his face. And he’s a victim of the worst domestic violence I’ve seen so far. My history of abuse and my understanding of the mechanics of DV mean nothing.  I see a man in this situation, and rather than pity I have contempt.  What a long fucking way I have to go, Jesse thought.

“Well, you should,” George said in a much more reasonable and pleasant voice than he’d previously used. “They’re actually plotting to kill you.”

George pulled the earbud out, and once again, before Jesse could get a good look at it, he swiftly put it in Chris’s left ear. Chris jerked his head away, and said, “That’s freezing.”

Then, as he heard their voices, hotly contesting how they should kill him, and where and when, laughing with harsh ragged hoots, pounding the dashboard, his eyebrows rose higher and higher and higher. He listened for perhaps two minutes, an eternity to Jesse as he watched the hurt and confusion rush in successive waves across Chris’s face. Then George, reading his body language, plucked the earbud out before Chris could touch it. Chris sagged. His eyes were wet, but he didn’t weep. He made a hiccupping noise which might have been a sob.

“Will you leave now?” George asked Chris, exasperated.

His mouth opened and closed. He took a breath and said, very quietly, “I guess I have to. How could he? I knew he was a diamond in the rough —“

Holy shit, thought Jesse.

“ — but I never thought he could do something like this.  It’s that fucking drug addict new boyfriend of his. If he was gone Drew and I could go back to how it was —“

And again, thought Jesse.

George broke up the sweet alternate reality reunion which was happening in Chris’s head. “Uh, Drew is talking about sawing your head off and the two of them taking turns having sex with your neck. Chris, I truly think the barque of reconciliation has shoved off — and now he’s snorting something again,” George said in disgust.  “I don’t think he should be driving,” he concluded uneasily.

“You could always zap strap them to the steering column until this is over.” Jesse said.

“I’d love to, but a) you hate it when I do that — “ at which Jesse made a mild sound of disbelief  “— and b) I’d prefer it if whatever they’re tied to is a long way from here. We still have a lot of work to do.”

“It isn’t Drew, it’s the drugs,” Chris said anxiously.  “He’s really a very cool guy.”

George said, “He’s put you in hospital twice.”

“He’s got a temper,” Chris said.

George pulled at his face with one hand like a cartoon character, and then said, “You’ve been abused by Drew for a long time, and you’re in a very precarious mental state. Can you trust us to look after your long term interests tonight? It’s hard to believe now, but your situation will look and feel different to you when you’ve got some distance.  You have more friends than you know; they’ve all been scared off by Drew.”

“If they were my real friends, they would love Drew as much as I do,” Chris said.

“No they wouldn’t!” Jesse said, more energetically than he intended.

“You can love someone body and mind without sacrificing your one wild precious life to him,” George said, and the anger had now vanished, leaving only a melting sadness.

There was a bang on the door.

Chris jumped.

“Showtime,” said Jesse.

“Oh God,” Chris said, and folded himself up into a tight ball on the sofa, arms wrapped around his knees.

George, who didn’t look concerned, answered the door to a stout black woman in her mid-forties, who started when she saw George and then looked past him to Chris.  “You know Drew’s in the parking lot, right?”

“Has Drew ever bothered you?” George asked.

“Bothered?” the woman asked. Her tone was gentle, but she frowned.

“You okay, Chris?” she called into the apartment.

“No. Drew wants to kill me,” he called back.  He had started to shake, very slightly.

“You gotta get out of here! It isn’t safe.”

“We’re trying,” George said. “We haven’t figured out where the furniture is going or where he’s going to stay.”

“May I come in?”

She picked her way across the floor, along a pathway cleared of debris, and sat, bolt upright, next to Chris.

Seeing his distress, she sagged a trifle. She put a hand on his knee and looked into his face. “Chris you’ve got to leave. He’s on fire, and you’re gasoline,” she said tenderly.

“Okay,” he said, and his voice broke. 

Returned inside with the bin, he pulled it closer to the worst of the carnage and said to Chris, “I think George scared them off.” Jesse was relieved when George slipped in behind him a moment later and locked the door.

George said, “They’re sitting in Drew’s truck, trying to work each other up into having a shot at me since I’m obviously a circus acrobat and not a combat fighter.”

Jesse said, “Heugh! Like either of them are.” It was irritating to know that George would mop the floor with both of them and yet be unable to bet on the outcome.

George stared at Jesse. “He is most assuredly a karateka of some renown! — but that doesn’t help if you fall over backward when startled.”

“Yes,” Jesse said. “After that, it’s all grappling and ground game.”

Chris said, “I don’t even think I can go through with this. Maybe I can get an extension from the landlord.” It was month end.  Chris veered between low-grade panic, snarky humour and catatonia. Panic was definitely winning.

George was dismissive. “You’ve paid us, we’re here, you’re in shock, sit down, shut up.” Jesse looked at him.

“I will not,” Chris said.

“Please keep talking, but sit down,” Jesse said, and walked noisily through the mess and stood with him.

This being a much more palatable request, Chris sat down and stared up at him. Jesse bore the attenuated but still irritating assessment of his fitness-to-bang with as good grace as he could, and moved away to find something useful to do. There was a lot of broken glass, but the squeeze had only found some of the kitchen boxes, and it looked worse than it was.

“You don’t have a lot of sympathy for people in this situation, do you,” Chris said, addressing George.

Jesse didn’t let the smirk reach his lips, but his eyebrows missed the memo. “That’s enough out of you, Jesse,” George said.

“Me? What? Fuck d’I do?”

George didn’t answer the customer right away, and considered Jesse’s question unanswerable.  He found the broom and the dustpan where Chris had let them drop in the dining area, carefully moved to the far wall of the kitchen, and started to push broken glass into the middle of the floor. The sound of the sweeping, and the crunching, sliding glass, was rhythmically interspersed with George’s response.

“I have sympathy for few people in few situations,” George said. “Victims of domestic violence get what little I have, in the form of a service to help them stay safe, and keep all their belongings safe, during periods when the cops won’t help them because there’s no threat, and their friends won’t help them because their friends absolutely know there is a threat, and hope that by avoiding helping they may also avoid the brutal treatment they know is likely. I make people pay for the service, and if this culture wasn’t a pile of maggots feasting on a dying planet, I’d have no reason to take your money because you’d never have taken up with such a person. You’d have had the sense not to, since you would have been raised properly, and he wouldn’t be an asshole, because ditto.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jesse said, appalled that George would say such a thing to a customer.  In the truck, afterward, on the way home, sure, let ‘er rip, but holy fuck. And is he reefing on Chris so hard because he’s a guy? Or gay? He looked at George, no longer trusting what he thought he knew about him.

Chris sat on a kitchen stool and looked at George, stricken. After a second he dropped his eyes and watched the floor slowly be cleared of its burden of shards with slow, steady strokes.

“You’re saying I asked for this,” Chris said. “You’re blaming the victim.”

George stopped, and remained awkwardly posed.

“No, sir,” George said coldly, sweeping again. “By no means. I’m saying you’re lucky you can buy your way out of the problem. This problem, the one we’re dealing with right now. We can have you out of here by dawn. I have a storage facility I will let you use for sixty days at no charge, but I have three conditions, each one of which you’re going to hate more than the last.”

“I’m the customer,” Chris bleated.

Jesse blew through his lips and quietly said, “Like that means fuck all in end-stage crony capitalism.”

George fixed a quelling gaze on Jesse, and then said to Chris, “You don’t have a place to move your stuff to, unless you have connections or qualities so far unrevealed.”

“You are a fucking prick, you know that?”

No argument here, Jesse thought, once again trying to keep the smirk on the inside.

“I am the very model of a rational social justice warrior, and you need to give me your phone, leave this apartment by cab and report the damage in person to the police, indicating that you’ve left the movers in the apartment so they don’t come in and try to thump us on general principles. Then you need to go to the last place he’d ever look for you. We’ll move your stuff into the locker. I’d come back and clean but by the looks of things it would make no difference to your security deposit. The kindest thing you can do for your landlord is get the hell out so she can fix it.”

He contemplated what looked like a lot of drywall work for a handyman; enough for a weekend, anyway.  There were holes, some gaping and dramatic, others like a succession of hammer head impressions, made in a row to illustrate some point.

George continued, “I’ve got a spare key and and card for the locker, which I will give to you, so it’s not like we’re trying to run off with your stuff. We witnessed the two of them exiting the building and heard lots of screaming, and you’d already asked us to help you move, as will be evidenced by the phone records, if it comes to that. You have witnesses and a good timeline, and those two morons are still out there in the truck.”

To Jesse he said, “I planted a listening device,” and briefly pulled out and waggled an earbud, replacing it before Jesse could get too close a look.

George said, “Now I have to say something that’s going to be hard to listen to.”

“Oh really,” Chris said. “Because everything’s just been a Roger Whittaker song up ’til now.”

Jesse, who had found another dustpan brush and was removing glass from the cloth furniture, coughed. Or at least, so he hoped it would be interpreted.

There was a door slam.  Two men exited the apartment onto the shared balcony, bolted down the stairs and took off.

George said. “Either the police have been called or somebody threatened to call them.”

“Looks like.”

George said, “We should wait until he calls.”

Jesse said, “Okay. Anyway, Rhonda came down to see us a couple of times, and that was it.  I haven’t seen my mother in almost ten years, and nothing she says or does will ever put me in a room with her again. My gift to her is not killing her. Well, that and learning to understand the source of family violence and how it echoes through generations.  If a man she knew had done to a girl-child what that fucking maniac did to me, she would have brained him with the nearest paperweight. She can’t see the hypocrisy of this but I know she’s crazy, not an emblem of all womanhood. I was abused by a feminist, but feminism gave me the legal tools to escape from her, so I’m not going to ditch feminism just because my mother was a flaming asshole.”

George’s phone rang.

“Hello,” he said, putting it on speaker.

Their client’s voice was tired and distraught. “Hi, it’s Chris. I have to clean this mess before we can do anything… can you wait half an hour?”

Jesse waggled his eyebrows and shrugged to show he was happy to help clean up.

“Not a problem. We can help. We’re just across the street,” George said, “See you in a minute.”

Chris’s ex Drew, and his not-to-be-named herpes-ridden rent-boy side-piece (Chris’s take on him, not theirs) had done a spectacular job of wrecking the apartment.  They had indeed knocked a hutch over. Jesse spent the first five minutes of the move trying to talk Chris into for fuck’s sake putting sturdier shoes on. His flip-flops were a health hazard, Jesse said sternly, and he stood over Chris as he found a broken-glass-free chair to sit in, and swapped shoes.

“Much better,” said Jesse. “Hokay, let’s get the broken stuff in a plastic container,” and volunteered to go downstairs to get a wheelie-bin for the debris.

As he was sorting through the bins to find one that was empty, and with luck not too smelly, Chris’s ex and current squeeze got out of their car and approached him.  Not having George’s hearing, he didn’t notice until they were upon him.

“So you’re Chris’s new boyfriend,” the younger one said.

“Jesse,” Jesse said, sticking out his hand.

Finding no takers, he ignored them and hauled the bin up the stairs.

“If you’re not crazy now, you will be,” Drew yelled after him.

“I’m not the one who trashed Chris’s apartment,” Jesse said. “If ya don’t want two years less a day in Agassiz for mischief, under Section 430 of the Criminal Code, kindly to fuck off now.”

“It’s his word against ours,” Drew said.

Jesse burst out laughing.

“My partner and I were watching from across the street,” he said, enunciating his contempt with care, “And while I don’t see George going to court, I’m happy to testify.  Now get lost before George gets hold of you, that guy will fuck you up.”

“Someone call my name?” George said with greasy amiability, coming out onto the landing and looking at their upturned faces.

Jesse gave George a little wave and then stabbed his finger down at Drew and his noisy little chum. “Okay, I warned you two fuckers, it’s time to take out the trash in East Van,” Jesse said.

He looked back at George.

“I can’t watch what happens next, it’s too upsetting,” he said with mock sadness.

“I’m a brown belt in karate,” Chris said, and took up a stance. Jesse shook his head. “Seriously,” he said under his breath.

“Good, good!” George said. “But it won’t help.”

Jesse was not able to give much credence to his eyes for what happened next. It seemed to him that George threw himself down the stairs, cleared Jesse (and the bin) by perhaps 10 centimetres and then bounced on his left arm like it was a pogo stick. Spinning right way up, he landed on his feet about a meter from Drew, bending his legs only slightly and not even grunting. Faced by this apparent suspension of the laws of physics, Drew was so startled that he fell over backward with a cry.  The other man, yelling, “Jesus! What the fuck, man?” backed up at speed but stayed on his feet, his eyes out on stalks.

“Boo,” George said pleasantly. “Do either of you want to go?”

Drew’s buddy hauled him to his feet, and with many a curse and slur, the two of them booked it. They stood by the car, gazing wildly at the back door of Chris’s building and waving their arms.  

“You know,” Jesse said, face screwed up, “If a fully grown adult man throws his entire weight onto his arm, it breaks.  He doesn’t bounce like Tigger.”

“The circus is in my blood,” George said, as he climbed the stairs.

Since Jesse could not think of anything to say that didn’t involve calling George a monstrous new specimen of liar, he returned to the task of helping the client.

By the end of the summer of 2013 George liked and trusted Jesse as much as he could remember trusting anyone.  He had tried to like Ágnes’ special friend, back in the day in Budapest, but there had been a quiet accumulation of insults from Mátyás and he hadn’t the temperament to pretend to be his friend.  It was as an act of penance for ever being that much of a poltroon that he maintained his waxen civility, able at any time to cool into a pleasing shape or disperse in heat and light, and smoke, for George saw much of himself in Mátyás. In the way he clung to Agnes, and moaned about her sex work, he reminded George of his bad–tempered pleading with his own mother. 

He had pretensions to being a revolutionary too, and George had distinct notions of what the order of operations would have to be to take down the current régime, while Mátyás was full of pamphlets and empty of practical notions like how to keep the proletariat fed properly and transportation and power production running while the grim legal stuff like a new constitution was worked out.  He liked demonstrations, and George loathed them. “By all means, Mátyás, let’s put all the state’s enemies into one cozy pile in the middle of a lovely broad intersection across which troops can have a spiffing field of fire and when you’re done with that carnage you can watch the previously injured randomly be crushed by men on horseback or stand up to flee merely to be pounced on at the first choke point and hauled off in wagons. Foolishness. Absolute foolishness.”   

Family lore said large gatherings of anything were a criminally bad idea.  He had said that offhandedly to Jesse once.

Jesse said, “I’m going to have to start keeping track of your family lore.  Tell me again about the not driving.”

“We don’t drive ourselves; we hire vehicles,” George said.  

“While living in rural Romania, nay, even Transylvania.” Jesse briefly considered imitating Bela Lugosi but decided against it.

“I can’t help where I was born,” George said tartly.

“Or how,” Jesse said. “I’m getting a mental image of your mother riding on horseback to the delivery room like a boss.”

“You’re not getting that mental image from me; she was never on a horse in her life. I was born at home, as is proper. Being born in a dirty, badly-lit hotel full of strangers with ghastly infections is no way to start life,” George said.

“Were you guys Roma?” Jesse said, believing he’d at last figured it out.

“No,” George said. “If I was Roma I’d still be there. They are not often given a chance to emigrate.”

He changed the subject. “You haven’t told me much about your family, except Raven, who seems to be a species of angel.”

“The name-taking, ass-kicking kind,” Jesse said amiably.  He’d started to study how George could dodge a direct question, and with some downtime, now was as good a time as any to practice.

They were waiting for the all-clear from the client. There was some kind of three way slap-fight going on up there, and if the police weren’t called, one of the combatants would eventually stomp off and he and George could finally get in. At one point, from the café across the street, where the harassed manager had allowed them to sit on the patio after closing, as long as they put the chairs away, they’d heard something wooden crash, with a spatter of exploding crockery, like a cabinetful of Royal Doulton getting knocked down some stairs.

“You don’t talk about your mother,” George said.

Jesse scowled.  “You know she abused me; I told you that, and you never forget anything.”

“I’m very fortunate to have an excellent memory for the spoken word. How were you abused?” George asked, and got another scowl.  George said in a flat voice, “It’s hard for me to say how my mother abused me, because not everyone who witnessed it thought it was abuse, and a child needs to be believed before the abuse is real. Before anyone believes you, it’s just how things are, at least as far as the child’s concerned. I had something wrong with me, health problems I’ve since more or less grown out of.”

Jesse said, “She bullied you because you were weak.” George certainly despised weakness now, even as he took steps to protect it with that unselfconscious superiority of his.

“Almost to death,” George said. “It wasn’t what she did, it’s what she let others do.”

Much of the time Jesse thought he wouldn’t be able to tell if George was lying; he had no tells. Now he was convinced that George was being truthful, although he knew he had no way of confirming anything he said.

“My mother was not physically abusive, but she didn’t have to be,” Jesse said. “She terrorized all of us, but I got it worst because my mother hates men, and I was a little man and going to be a big one, just like my useless sperm donor father, and no matter how she tried to make me a good man, I was still a man. And then of course her sister got pregnant by the same guy three months before she did and when Rhonda told them, he took off without learning that he’d also knocked my mother up. She was a little tetched even then.”

“And yet you’ve managed to be a feminist. I’ve observed you very closely,” George said.

Feminism doesn’t stop being necessary just because my mother never got a diagnosis, Jesse thought. Aloud he said, “She didn’t hit me. But I wasn’t really a human being to her. Rhonda did what she could. When she was twelve, Raven decided to run away from home with me, and when we were fourteen, she made it happen.”

“Running away from home can be dangerous.”

“The exact opposite. We went to school.  It was fucking amazing. We got a year and a half in the regular system in the Interior when HellMom took to her bed and didn’t homeschool us anymore, so we managed to get caught up to our grade levels. It wasn’t too hard, academically, anyway, getting from where we were to an alternative high school in New Westminster, and it was on the Skytrain line, and we lived in a fucking dump of a one bedroom apartment and went to school 24/7. Raven got a scholarship and went to UBC.” Jesse closed his mouth and compressed his lips. There had been another crash from across the street, and one of the voices had risen to a shriek.