Threads of Life

Chapter 5-2

“So, why’s it back here?”

“Dad couldn’t believe his audacity. Here we were giving him … I mean, making a very generous donation to the university, and he had the nerve to tell your dad to hold it up so he could stand there and inspect it, and then he told us that he wouldn’t accept it in its current condition. What a shithead.”

Despite the potentially humiliating if-ever-disclosed fact that my parents had to bribe the Dean of Admissions to get me into a decent university, I was feeling a bit better about myself that summer, and now and then made an effort to say something funny.

“That’s definitely the definition of a shithead,” I said.

My mother smiled. “Anyway, instead of getting it re-matted and re-framed—because, really, it looks perfectly fine—I took it to Rosemary’s gallery and asked her if it was possible to make a reproduction of it. I told her the whole story and asked her to keep it a secret. She said she knew an artist who could easily copy it and that it would only cost a few hundred dollars. I picked it up yesterday and delivered it to the admissions’ office. The shithead wasn’t there, so I left it with his secretary. It looked exactly like the original, even the signature was perfect, but with different matting and a new frame of course.”

“Do you think he’ll notice?”

“Dad thinks he will, the way he inspected the first one.”

“What happens if he calls?”

“Dad said I should tell him he had his chance to have the original, but he was a greedy pig and that if he says a word to anyone, we’ll report him to the university’s board, and he’ll lose his job.”

“Oh.”

“There’s a lesson to be learned from all this. I’ll let you know when I think of it.”

Just then Simon came running upstairs with his hockey bag over his shoulder. “Greed turns everything into nothing,” he said, running past us and into our bedroom.

* * *

Simon and I moved into our first-floor apartment on Alexander Street, in the centre of Toronto’s gay district, across from a tall cylindrical building referred to by everyone in the neighbourhood as Vaseline Tower—because of all the shirtless gay men who hung out the windows, waving to people on the streets—and a block away from the notorious steps of a coffee shop, Second Cup, where gay men hung out watching other gay men parade by, and where hook-ups occurred at a staggering rate. Our neighbours, all gay singles and couples, assumed we were also gay, and displayed no inhibition in telling Simon how delicious he looked and in telling me I was one lucky queer.

And it was no wonder. At nearly eighteen years of age, Simon was six-foot three, with a pile of messy black hair on his head, lean and muscular at the same time, and with a big smile, perfect teeth, and piercing eyes that looked like a night sky with two bright stars in it. I had also grown over six feet in height, just barely, but had hair that was receding and grew in uneven clumps, so I had to keep it cut short. And even with my unbridled dedication to junk food and soda, I was still really skinny, the kind of skinny that I thought made my head and feet look too big for my body. And unlike Simon, whose eyesight was perfect, I wore glasses. How’s that for a charming picture?

* * *

Simon’s path through university was preordained. To the disappointment of at least two varsity coaches who called the apartment and left dozens of messages, he wouldn’t be participating in team sports. Instead, he would work out in the early morning at Hart House or the Athletic Centre so he could study as hard, or harder, than ever. There was no question in his and my father’s minds that after a couple years of undergraduate studies in Humanities and Arts and Sciences, he was going to law school and then to work for Parr, Athole & Athole, where my father had closed the three biggest real estate deals in the firm’s long history, personally billing clients in excess of ten million dollars, and was now the managing partner.

As for my path through university, it was as dark as Simon’s was bright. I was just happy to have made it into a decent school, and to have my own room. And while Simon’s courses were standard fair for overachievers looking to get into law school, mine were a joyride, made up of what students referred to as bird courses, probably because you could fly right through them without much difficulty. Even their titles were an embarrassment: Understanding Canadian Media, Introduction to Cinema, The Short Story, The History of Folk Music and Psychology of Sport.

* * *

Our apartment on Alexander Street consisted of two bedrooms, one washroom, a small kitchen, dining area, and a medium-sized den. It had three large windows that had probably never been washed, one in each bedroom and one in the den, and dim off-white walls, and scratched-up parquet floors. My mother furnished it mostly with second-hand furniture and gave us kitchen and cleaning supplies from Hampshire Court. And she bought us each a queen-size bed, a bedside table, drawers, a desk, a lamp, and a typewriter. My father, who called our entry into university a “two for one deal” because Simon was costing him nothing and I was costing him everything, bought us a Toshiba television set and, at my mother’s insistence, a Volkswagen Rabbit, so we could come home every weekend, with or without laundry.

* * *

Besides trying to achieve law school worthy marks, Simon had another goal, which he shared with me during our first night in our new apartment, after my mother called crying to say goodnight, while my father yelled at her to leave us alone in the background.

“We’re going to get you laid,” he told me. “And judging from how much time you’re spending watching Gilligan’s Island, the sooner the better.”

Gilligan’s Island* * *

By the middle of grade twelve, Simon was having a lot of s*x, first with Tracey Pollack and then with Christine Davidson, usually on Friday and Saturday nights in a house that was free of parents, after which he and his friends would meet at a restaurant, called Golden Star, eat cheeseburgers, and talk about the girls they just laid. And maybe because of all the s*x he was having, I began to notice something different about him, probably imperceptible to everyone but me.

What I noticed was that his hyper-dedication to high achievement in everything had taken a slight downturn. He may still have been getting near-perfect marks and performing like a superhero in athletics, but for the first time he wasn’t the smartest kid in school. That auspicious bully-attracting unofficial honour went to a nerd named David Bidwell, who could have taught grade thirteen math, and most university math courses as well. And Simon wasn’t the best athlete either. That equally auspicious (and less hazardous) unofficial honour went to Kirk Kavanagh, who grew a foot in height between grades eleven and twelve and looked like he could do anything he wanted on the basketball court, like a man among midgets. I admit I took some joy in Simon’s slipping status and when I found out that he wasn’t going to be valedictorian—an honour going to an irritating self-righteous kid named Arnold Bowman who had started a charity for street kids—I couldn’t stop smiling for two weeks.

* * *

Anyway, Simon was determined to end my virginity and unlike in high school, when I told him to leave me alone every time he told me about a scheme he’d concocted to get a girl to consider being intimate with me, I was now more than desperate to have s*x with someone real rather than in my imagination and didn’t object.

During our third evening together in our Alexander Street apartment, while I was lying on the couch listening to music and Simon was reading a campus newspaper, he told me, as if he had just decided that second, that we were going out later.

“And don’t wear that shirt.”

“Why not?” I was wearing what I always wore: jeans and a grey sweatshirt.

“You look like a nerd.” Simon stepped around three guitars, a keyboard, and a set of free weights that were already cluttering our den, went into his bedroom and came back holding a black t-shirt. “Put this on.”

I put on the t-shirt. It had New York written diagonally across the front in red letters and Tower Records written horizontally across the back, also in red letters.

New YorkTower Records“And take off your glasses.”

“I can’t see without them.”

“Then take them off when we get there.”

“Where?”

“Hillel House.”

* * *

Simon and I were on our way to Hillel House, a brownstone on Spadina just south of Harbord, where one of at least thirty freshman parties was being held, this one for Jewish students. I asked Simon why he chose that particular party and he said, a bit cryptically, “It’s your best chance.” Then he said, “Make sure you act Jewish.”

“What does that mean?”

that We were in the Volkswagen. Simon was driving. He had passed his licence on the first try while I kept knocking over the orange cones when attempting to parallel park and had to repeat the test three times before passing.

“Tell them you’re planning on going to medical school or law school, and that your father is a successful lawyer.”

We were inching along College Street behind a streetcar.

“Jewish girls away from home the first time might think they’re looking for something new and exciting, like having s*x with a random guy, but what they really want is something safe that they can pretend is new and exciting. You need to be safely new and exciting.”

Traffic in the city was, and still is, a twenty-four-hour ordeal. Simon pulled around a streetcar and found himself behind another one, moving just as slowly.

“If they ask you what synagogue you go to, tell them Beth Tikvah. It’s a conservative synagogue. Mentioning a reformed synagogue can be a deal breaker.”

Simon had been to Beth Tikvah on Bayview Avenue a number of times because some of the Jewish girls he knew belonged to that synagogue and had invited him to their bat mitzvahs.

And he had more advice for me. Comments I should make about Israel. Comments I should make about current events. Comments I should make about wanting to work on a kibbutz next summer. Comments I should make about music. “Remember: you like Stevie Wonder, James Taylor and Neil Diamond, and in that order.”

“What about Bob Dylan?”

Just before we left the apartment, I was listening to Street Legal, one of Dylan’s records.

Street Legal“Oh God. No.”

There were rumours in the newspapers that Dylan was becoming a born-again Christian.

It took us a while to find a parking spot. We had to park a few blocks away on Major Street. In Toronto, September still felt like the middle of summer, and it was a warm night. We walked to Harbord Street and then over to Spadina. Simon told me, as if it was a fait accompli, that he was going to get two of the girls at the party to come back to our apartment with us.