Chapter 14: Red-Breast - Asbestos

Monday, September 30, 1991

I wake in a panic. My alarm didn’t go off, but my internal clock did. My memory of the weekend is vague, clouded by a feeling of wrongness, of failure – a rush of bad dreams. The day before, I’d swum to the sound of my same old songs from Starmania.

I’ve never had both feet on the ground, I’d rather be a bird.

The same fifteen syllables, ad nauseam.

The day before, I’d saved Sébastien Gosselin (broken collarbone), Émilie Grenier (thigh cramp), Isabelle Goupil (respiratory arrest, pulse present). Marilyne Fortin saved me (hemorrhage), then Jessy Champagne misdiagnosed me (sunstroke). We even did backboard manoeuvres for spinal injuries, the ultimate pool rescue. It was our last practice before the Bronze Cross exam next Saturday.

This morning, I have school. The sun floods my curtain. 7:55 a.m. The bus will be here in ten minutes. It’s Monday and I have school.

Not dressed, lunch unmade, teeth unbrushed, bus to catch, French homework due in second period – I have plenty of reasons to panic, but another sensation pre-empts the great onrush of practical things waiting for me on the other side of the bedroom door. Something impassive and nonsensical sweeps over me, as I lie with my back propped up on my pillows and knees tucked under the sheet, my body opening into its reading position, sucked into a gentle void whose overpowering silence extinguishes the heavy machines in the crater behind our house. My room is a fortress.

Now it’s 8:15 a.m.

Without getting out of bed, I stretch over to grasp a corner of the sunrise-orange curtain and sweep it open wide. I lie down with the sun at my feet. A breeze drifts in through the window, caressing the dampness on my skin, which dissipates, and making my body hair tingle, first on my arms and then down to the thin trail below my navel that disappears into the soft fabric of my pyjama bottoms. Arching my back to lift my bum, I pull my pyjamas to my knees with my thumbs, then shove them the rest of the way off with my toes. I take deep breaths, savouring the draft of fresh air, alert to the contrast between the surfaces of my skin, my body temperature, and the coolness of the room. My nipples harden, imperceptibly at first, but then I feel their slight tugging internally, connecting through thin but fleshy roots under my skin to the epicentre of this gentle tension, radiating into my testicles and penis, which stiffens at the touch of my fingers and my palm.

In this bed, I’m at once insulated and opened, exposed to the elements, naked and sheltered. I close my eyes and masturbate, slowly at first and then harder, for minutes that go uncounted. Few clear images form behind my eyes, something more like movements – breasts rising out of the water in a white swimsuit, that place where the neck meets the shoulder, a member stretched out in the open air, masses of remembered flesh – anonymous sensual images come at me all at once. My cum coats my thumb and lower abdomen in viscous jam. My breathing slows. I climb back out of my skin.

I head for the bathroom, not even bothering to cover up my nakedness since my mother is surely light-years away in the polar depths of her sleep. A long shower lets me push all thoughts of my day ahead to the back of my mind: let the sweet sound of hot water lapping at my scalp flow down my body; fragrance and lather.

Back in my room, the warmth leaves my body, and my precarious detachment, like a soap bubble, threatens to burst. I’m dazed and throw on whatever I can find, my stomach growling with hunger. In the kitchen, at the sight of the black phone hanging on the wall, an intuition. My fingers reach for the receiver and dial 335-6505.

A yawning voice answers. Cindy.

Hey, it’s Steve.

Hey … Happy Birthday, Stevie Baloney!

My birthday. Today’s my birthday. My sky is unblemished again.

Ah! Thanks! Uh, do you have class this morning?

Nope, you know I don’t have classes on Mondays.

Oh yeah, that’s right.

Before I can explain the unexpected path of denial my morning is leading me down, Cindy has a flash of inspiration.

I just had the best idea. I’ll be at your place in an hour.

Cindy’s never been to my house before. I spend the hour hesitating between my blue jeans (too blue) and some black pants (too boring). I go to the kitchen, eat a mouthful of cereal, then back to my bedroom. I make my bed and put my dirty clothes in the laundry basket. I check myself out in the bathroom mirror as I’m brushing my teeth. Dun hair, brown eyes, and on my temple at the corner of my eyebrow a few zits that I can’t stop fiddling with; under my nose, the fuzz on my lip wrinkles into a pout of annoyance. As I pass by the front window, I take a quick look to see if Cindy’s here. I decide I’ll wear my jeans. No hesitation on my T-shirt: the worn-out grey Dio band tee with black three-quarter sleeves, handed down from my brother. In my wallet, the five two-dollar bills from ten days earlier, plus a five from yesterday – I’ve given up on my balance from August; it’s fine as long as the new allowances keep coming. There’s also a sad one-dollar bill that has been sitting there for months. Sixteen dollars total. Worst number ever.

My restlessness is anxiety, is lethargy. I’m tiptoeing around the house less to avoid waking my mother than because I’m skipping school, as if someone could somehow hear me. Above all, I hope the phone won’t ring.

A car horn jolts my heart into my throat. A grey car pulls up in front of the house. Cindy’s driving. She motions for me to get in, looking pleased with the figure she cuts. I don’t recognize the car, and my inevitable stress over anything new takes the form of a million questions – Where did you find it? How did you pay for it? Did you steal it? All questions I suppress with a sigh and clenched teeth. I take a deep breath, strain my ears one last time for any sign of life in the house – still nothing – and cross the threshold, closing the door gently behind me.

Where are we going? Is it far? Should I bring some tapes? My voice is almost a whisper.

We’ve got everything we need, get in.

Cindy turns right, heading toward Black Lake. So we’re leaving Thetford. I fight the urge to ask questions. Cindy says little and hums along to the radio.

She smiles and looks at me from the corner of her eye.

I’m making you skip school for your birthday. Not too stressed?

I smile. No. It’s a lie. I smile even harder.

On both sides of the road, the tailings heaps rise pinkish grey in the morning light, relinquishing their hold as we drive on. The leaves are turning, red, orange, and yellow.

Cindy mocks me for being Mr. Silent and announces that we’re going to Montreal. Dynamite in my heart. It’s her first time driving there, she needs a navigator. Hard to imagine one with less experience. Cindy isn’t done with her surprises.

Oh, and you’ve got two and a half hours to pick your tattoo.

I’m stunned. Getting a tattoo has never crossed my mind. The permanence, the likelihood of regret, the social stigma, and an implicit family taboo – Daniel doesn’t have any, as far as I know – have aborted any thoughts of inky rebellions, even in my daydreams. But after weighing each of these considerations, I start to see Cindy’s plan for what it is: the coolest idea in the world.

My eyes are wide: Are we getting matching tattoos?

Nah, man! We’re each getting our own. I want a spiderweb on my knee … I think it’s gonna hurt.

Cindy perks up as she tells me about all the ideas she has gleaned from magazines and music videos. She breaks down different designs, colours, body parts, trends. She also makes it clear that she’s paying for us both – her birthday present to me, and an early one for herself, it’s coming up soon, in November I think – but that she doesn’t have enough money for anything too big or ornate, or more than one colour. I don’t know what price range we’re talking. I don’t know how much pain to expect, or how long it will take to ink, or to heal. I have no idea what tattoo to get, what colour to choose, or where to put it. I’m struggling to keep up with Cindy’s monologue, my brain and senses are shooting off every which way. Sweat is beading on my scalp and in my armpits. My usual reflexes – counting, grouping, and sorting ad infinitum – are no help; I’m faced with a process whose end solution is permanent, unchanging. Almost due south, the sun is beating down on my cheek through the window, which I suddenly crank open like a drowning man. Cindy watches me.

Listen, you don’t have to. Anyway, you’ve got time, we’re not even on the highway yet. Just try to picture an image on your skin.

Skin wants to burn.

I swim away.

* * *

Mr. Freeze A summer afternoon, 1986

Days of torrid weather, even in our pine forest. The water holes had thickened into stagnant breeding ponds, unleashing hundreds of millions of mosquitoes and fat pustulent flies whose density rendered the woods unbearable. Day followed upon day and no storm came to break the heat, no ozone- bearing lightning to vanquish the humidity. Our neighbourhood was a dank morass, forsaken by the gods, even Jupiter. Outside, the cacophony of cicadas in heat vied with the mining racket piercing the sultry air. Even the Boeing engines thirty thousand feet overhead were clearly audible. The pump of Poulie’s pool whined; our bike chains squeaked.

Our boredom was tumescent, tranquil and scalding as our summers themselves.

In our rounds as bike-riding neighbourhood dowsers we absorbed every ounce of available shade and emptied the corner-store freezers, only to end up where we always did, at Charlélie’s pool.

Friends from as far away as the Saint Alphonse parish joined us sometimes. As twin kinglets of this backyard, Charlélie and I welcomed the outlanders. Camille kept us fed and enforced a strict rule: no swimming for an hour after eating the sandwiches she served with celery sticks and milk. She would read under a parasol or work on her tan, oiled up and outstretched in the sun. Péloquin shamelessly ogled her, strutting over like a little wet rooster to strike up a conversation about her book or ask about her dissertation.

Oh yeah, Verlaine. Sure, I’ve heard of him. Poems and stuff.

Ouellet snickered, but Binette didn’t care: our pool gave him an audience for his antics, and a break from the emptiness of his house, which was not unlike my own – his mother, Annette, worked and his father had cleared out so long ago he hadn’t left them even a last name.

Poulie and I both liked Binette a lot. Having a kid in your class who monopolized the teacher’s attention was always a relief. The Christian Binette show never stopped – he was the champion of after-school detentions for talking in class, and he had delved into more serious crimes as well. One time when he was given lines to write during a detention for chewing gum, he’d written out I will not chew bubble bum in class – or so he claimed. For now, he was keeping us in stitches with his scheme for a new restaurant where no one could speak, called Thetford Mimes. Peals of high-pitched laughter filled the yard.

Big Ouellet’s constant cannonballs sent so much water splashing over the sides that we had to leave the hose running to keep the pool full.

Péloquin chimed in again. Hey, where are the girls? Has anyone asked Drouin’s sister? She lives just over there. Charlélie said he thought they’d moved away. Péloquin answered with a pffff.

Pépin finally showed up with his cousin Martine. Sébastien Gosselin from Poulie’s class was there, and so to my dismay was that jerk Lachance – Poulie shrugged – and some girl named Nadia who Ouellet knew; more sandwiches, freezies, and the sun trowelling thick slabs of heat onto our roasting heads.

To escape the sun’s glare, Charlélie and I held underwater breath-holding contests. With bleary eyes and cheeks and lungs full to bursting, we’d stare at each other underwater for what we imagined was a minute, our shrivelled fingers pulling on each other’s shoulders to keep ourselves below the surface a little longer. Our hair floated up every which way, but our stares did not waver.

The previous summer, Charlélie had had no problem winning – he just had to make one of his funny faces, exaggerated by a missing incisor and squinting eyes in a comically oversized diving mask, until I burst out laughing. But now we were enmeshed in a more languid liquid choreography. Without having to set rules, we’d fallen into a game. Poulie and I were two jellyfish, our friends’ turquoise legs the school of fish swarm ing us. I can’t now say whether my nine-year-old self was conscious that Poulie’s lovely foxlike face, the anemone stillness of his lashes and the cyan of his thin lips, engendered such feverish feelings, a desire to be beheld forever in these eyes that made me new, to meld into him and have him take my place and live forever in his pupil; or whether, swayed by the hypnotic infatuation that bound me to my friend, that moment was no more than an omen of his disappearance.

These silly water games in our tropical neighbourhood stretched on deep into the afternoon, well after the mine’s daily blast.

By the time the evening crickets started chirping, everyone else had gone home. An exhausted Camille had retired to her room. We were left to heat up pizza pockets for dinner. I was groggy myself, sitting somewhat unsteadily on Poulie’s bed. I could feel the day’s excitement in my shoulders, a nettling sadness, a burning hearth in the nape of my neck.

Your back’s all red, said Charlélie as he got up.

I was in a bad mood. Pépin had hardly spoken to me. Péloquin thought he was king of the backyard. And what was Lachance even doing there? What do you see in him?

Poulie sighed. Just let me know if you want some lotion on your back.

I stopped my babyish whining. I wanted to cry. I was tired, nauseated. I squeezed out a barely audible Okay.

A sense of relief stole over me, like stripes of cold pain, and then radiated through me as I let out little moans. Charlélie’s hands could artfully stay the downward spiral of my mood, pull me back to the surface. His clumsy, imperfect caresses seeped under my skin and brought comfort, like everything my friend did, his every word and look.

Only he could make me simmer down.

* * *

Monday, September 30, 1991

I want a robin, I say, lifting my shoulder toward Cindy. Right here.

She nods. Bicep, classic. I like it.

Yeah, but high enough for a short sleeve to hide it. And I want it all red!

That’s so cool, Stevie! She shakes the steering wheel with joy. Cindy’s thrilled, I’m ecstatic.

Immaculate cumulus clouds dot a radiant sky. Through the open window, the helium of cool wind buffeting my face is intoxicating. Just having Cindy by my side fills me with all the confidence in the world, makes it feel like I’m the one wearing her black leather jacket. Even in the heat it is never too warm, always just right, like a kind of glimmer from deep in the hearth, a flash of light, a blast of goodwill in the mine. Cindy is at my side in the overbright light. My arm reddens, like a bird trainer’s. I’m a falconer. I’m the dispatcher guiding the yellow trucks, sending them up to the sky, burning the incombustible coal of the town we’re leaving behind; I’m the one who bleeds under the sun, the one destined to light up the night sky. I want that red-breast on my skin.

I absorb the asphalt heat under our feet.

I don’t know why my thoughts keep coming back to Poulie. My small-town grunge rebellion will not avenge his death. And my father died almost two months ago; who’s even left to be angry at my disobedience? If I no longer fear one dead person, why should I keep on loving another? I hate and I love, in vain. Loss and safety, two things I’ll never get used to. All I know how to do is whimper, all I can do now is shed a little blood.

I listen to Cindy as she talks and steers and gesticulates all at once, like a boss. She thinks the first layoffs will come down after Christmas, to send a message, but the Bell Mine will stay open for a few more years at least. That’s what her father says.

It’s too bad. Your dad would have gotten a good severance package when he got laid off.

Cindy’s lawyer father wasn’t going to make any friends in this town. He’d already overseen the closures of the Normandie and King-Beaver mines a few years back, before the Drouins went into exile in Toronto. They left early, when Cindy and her brother started suffering the repercussions of the ‘85 and ‘86 layoffs: dark looks from parents in the neighbourhood, friendships abruptly ended, hostilities culminating when Cindy’s teacher, Jeanne-Mance, furious that her student’s father laid off her husband, made an outrageous accusation of plagiarism. I point out that it’s dirty work, and as happens so often, Cindy surprises me. She’s proud that the mining company tapped her father for this job. No job should threaten workers’ health to enrich private interests. Thetford Mines just got what it had coming. A company solution for a company town.

It’ll force people to reinvent themselves. They could take up theatre. Or feminism.

I lap up Cindy’s every word, each passing minute like gaining a year in maturity. She tells me about the Show des femmes, a feminist theatre project in Thetford Mines in the late 1970s. Lays out some basics of patriarchy, feminism as anti-capitalism, and the violence of the mine. The mine and the violence of the hole it carves out of the landscape, the mine and the violence of its minerals on our health, the mine and the violence of its hold on its vassals. Meanwhile, the mirror to my right catches a ray of sunlight and reflects it back into my eyes. I imagine the mine shaft overtaken by a great white fire, sealing and cauterizing once and for all the source of a poison I somehow know has contaminated my lungs and my blood and my skin. The mine is violence visited upon certain parents, and upon certain children too; the mine is what insulates the children, and insulation breeds boredom, and boredom breeds the violence that took my friend. And now violence is my new friend.

In Montreal, we park and go into a Burger King, where I lay down a five-dollar bill for a Whopper combo and get back fiftyfive cents change. Before I can so much as burp, Cindy’s already tugging me out the door. She points across the street and a few doors down.

That’s Solid Rock. Where we’re getting our tattoos.

An indescribable flash runs through me.

Inside, every wall is hung with laminated photos of guys from metal bands. I recognize an Iron Maiden guitarist. All these stars got tattooed here, before or after playing at one of the clubs further down Sainte-Catherine, Foufounes Électriques or the Spectrum. Other photos show sexy, tattooed women. One has a split tongue, like a snake. A stereo plays something heavy that I’ve never heard. A blond rocker dude greets us.

How old are you guys? We’re not supposed to tattoo anyone under sixteen.

I keep calm, in this temple of rock, this sixteen-and-over version of my own bedroom.

Cool. Today’s my birthday.

I feel Cindy’s proud gaze. My evasive answer is rewarded with a thick binder of crumpled plastic sleeves plunked down on a glass counter, displaying a wild array of rings and piercings.

All right, man, pick your poison.

In the animal section, I immediately alight on my red bird.

I take a seat in a dentist’s chair and roll up the left sleeve of my Dio T-shirt. The whole process takes barely twenty minutes. And the entire time, I’m intimidated by the tattoo artist’s face, just inches from mine. Since I don’t dare stare at him too long, I look over at Cindy leaning back in her chair. One of her black-and-red-striped knee socks is down around her ankle. Her black pleated skirt comes down to her mid-thigh. Her closed eyes are tense, her face expresses a silent, controlled pain she’s managing through her breathing. A complex web is taking shape on her knee. I try to make conversation with my tattoo artist, whose name I didn’t catch.

What’s that playing? I ask with a nod toward the speakers.

Venom.

Cool.

Cindy’s tattoo artist is more attentive. He gives her advice on how to care for her scars, and they chat as the strands on her skin weave into a web. My guy – Sven, I think – has retreated to his station behind the counter and lit up a smoke, leafing through a magazine. While I wait for Cindy, I check out the display case of pipes and bongs and the rack of band tees – I want the orange Use Your Illusion shirt, but it’s fifteen bucks! – and the innumerable photos on the walls. I resist the temptation to glance too often at my robin, coated with a generous layer of amniotic Vaseline, just as I resist the temptation to grin like a fifteen-year-old kid.

It’s 1:45 p.m., and the sun is high in the sky above Montreal’s Red-Light District.

Know what ‘Solid Rock’ makes me think of? That SolidRok show on MuchMusic!

I can see where Cindy is going with this. Speakers Corner! The MuchMusic studios are nearby, and right across the street is their famous booth where you can film your ‘voice on the street’ take, make a special request, drop some funny moves on video. Of course, Cindy knew that all along. I’m bursting with pride as I slide three quarters into the slot. It’s not much bigger than a photo booth and covered in graffiti and stickers. We take our places, and then a green light comes on to tell us that the camera is rolling.

Hey, I’m Cindy, this is my friend Steve – Hey MuchMusic! – and we love SolidRok, hey, hey Paul Sarrasin I love yoouu, and all the shows of course – We’re from Thetford! – [here Cindy shoots me a dubious look] – Yeah that’s right, that shithole Thetford Mines, get us out of there Please, but we’re in Montreal for the day and wanna make a request for [we spontaneously say it together] Smells Like Teen Spirit By Nirvanaaa, Yeaaah!

When the light turns yellow, Cindy grabs me by the neck and plants a kiss on my cheek, flashing a devil’s horns at the camera.

* * *

Dear Steve Evening, September 30, 1991

Steve, my dear son,
For your fifteenth birthday, your dad wanted to give you a dirt bike. Here’s the money for it. Daniel will take you to the store and take care of the paperwork. You’ll have fun riding with your friends. And I hope it reminds you of your father, who loved you very much. You’re so grown-up now! I love you.
Happy birthday!
Mom XOXO