What I wrote today:
So Chris put the moves on me, and I decided I may as well use him like a dildo. It went like that for about a month. I’d started a women’s employment program, and one day after school, I was feeling lost and down. Chris called, and asked how I was doing. I answered that he wouldn’t understand, but he said “Try me!”, so I blurted out what seemed to me to be gobbledygook. Much to my surprise, his response showed me that he’d understood, and I was so impressed, that I suddenly fell completely in love with him. He was now much more than a dildo to me.
To be continued…
I first met Chris 8 years prior to falling instantly in love with him. He’d only ever been Charlie’s friend, as everyone was, Charlie’s friend, and not mine, with little exception. Suddenly, Chris was a compassionate Jesus figure in my mind, and the center of the universe. Of course the compassion had only been a crumb Chris threw my way in passing, and those crumbs would be few and far between in future, it would turn out.
The more in love I was, with the projected image on Chris, the nastier he became. It would take 5 years of him chipping away at the image I maintained, for it to finally be eroded enough that I would see through it, to the man underneath, who was mean. He started telling me about feminism he’d been studying at university, and that I was getting duped by patriarchy. I knew that Charlie was likely with his other woman in Montreal,… Victoria, whom I liked. She was a beautiful virgin, who worked in a record shop, and took a broadcasting course at one of the universities.
The way I found out about Victoria, was when Charlie had come over to my apartment and told me that he’d met his “dream girl”. He said he’d been looking at records in a shop, and another day, when he was barreling down the Park Avenue (Avenue Parc) sidewalk, she blocked his way deliberately. This was when I was celibate, but I’d believed, in my fantastical head, that Charlie intended to get himself clean from hashish and adopt kids with me, and live wholesomely like The Waltons on TV.
As he was telling me about having gone to Swiss Chalet and bonded with Victoria over chicken dinners, I was thinking to myself “In his mind, we’re just friends!”, and when he left, I felt my world had lost its gravity, and though I’d been raw vegan for over two months without feeling any cravings, suddenly I reached for the phone and called for a meat submarine and pizza. For months I gorged.
When I first met Victoria, she’d come to Charlie’s apartment during a time Charlie and I were officially platonic. I was at his place doing my shift, selling hashish for Charlie. Charlie and Victoria were at the door, and she, like Charlie, was wearing a black motorcycle jacket, and she had long black ringlets. My first reaction was to feel protective of Charlie, because she looked slick to me. When she left, he told me that she was a virgin, a student, and from New Jersey.
The next time I saw Victoria, we were both walking down Hutcheson street, and I started to run because I was late for a shift. She raced me! I don’t remember who got there first, but I recall she was wearing a sweater and looked like a clean living, studious person that time. When I was alone in Charlie’s apartment, I noticed the smell of perfume emanating from the Charlie’s bed. I sniffed at it, and developed an obsessive desire to wear that perfume myself. It was called Lauren, by Ralph Lauren. They don’t make it anymore.
Charlie couldn’t keep his hands off me for long though. Weeks after meeting his “dream girl”, he was having sex with me. At one point, he bought her a bicycle, and teased me that he might buy me one too. He did, from Canadian Tire, the one I broke my leg on. It had steel wheels, which don’t brake well in the rain, and it had shitty brakes on top of that. At another point, I remember walking in on Victoria kneeling before Charlie, entertaining him somehow. I was envious, thinking to myself how lucky Charlie was to have such a sweet girl devoted to him. She’d bought him a book. Midsummer Night’s Dream, I think.
Another time, Charlie called Victoria and invited her to come over to his place. She came, but she hadn’t been told I’d be there. She walked straight from the front door, through the apartment, to the back door, and kept going down the alley homebound, without saying a word. One of the times I saw Victoria, Charlie had been away, and called me as soon as he got back. We were cuddling in the bed in his van for some reason, not his apartment, and Victoria came through the mist, peered in through the windshield, and kept going down Hutcheson street toward her apartment.
After I fell for Chris, I lusted after him like a slimy slug. I would ride my bicycle out to Port Coquitlam from New Westminister often, being whatever his whim asked for. A delivery service for beer, Oh Henry chocolate bars, frozen personal size pizzas, or sex. Eventually he would use me as pest control, to drive out Charlie and his new girlfriend Catherine out of his apartment, repeatedly. One thing I am thankful for, is that his friend Ken introduced me to The Smiths, and Morrissey. The music.
eBay. It's SO the way to go if your taste doesn't match your income. Oh, but... even more exciting than snaffling a bargain on eBay is selling on eBay! I have made £158 this month from selling just a handful of things I didn't need any more.
