-Friedrich Nietzsche
When I got too old to go trick or treating (according to my mother), I took up door answering duties at my grandmothers house. I would always dress up as some sort of character, and answer the door in character.
This year, since I’m living with my parents, I revived the tradition and answered the door at their house. This year I went as a drunken cat lady. This costume involved me being a lady who wore a cat costume and drank on the stairs in the dark , eating candy while waiting for kids to come to the door. My mom went as a drunk lady who owns a cat.
My step dad carved a Trumpkin this year. It took him 6 hours, but when he was finished he had an orange orbed likeness of the great and powerful one himself, complete with a saw in his head, and baseball hat that proclaimed “Make America dumb again.” The pumpkin, strangely, in an act of prophetic vegetation, began rotting almost immediately.
The carver himself sat in his den drinking scotch and reading Breitbart while I answered the door. Who understands the minds of artists?
Less than a week later, as we all know, the clock struck 12, and the rotting pumpkin turned into the President elect.
I’ve always wanted to live in a Philip K. Dick style alternate reality, so, there you go.
At first, I was surprised. Then I thought about it for a while, and I was no longer surprised. In fact, it all made total sense. It was so logical it was almost mathematical.
And it made me think of a particular conversation I had on the phone sex line in June.
It was with a guy named Marcus. I gave him my fake spiel about being a 23 year old stripper from Montreal. This really peaked his interest, since it seemed Marcus had a real thing for strippers. Or, for a very specific type of stripper.
He preferred them in their early twenties, skinny, hot and mentally unstable. He liked strippers who got into fights with other strippers, who had serious drug habits and who were ruthless in taking men for all they could get. He described the personal lives of some of the strippers that he was most enamoured with. He had gotten to know several of them because he was such a loyal customer at various jiggle joints. Their lives were a tapestry of tragedy and nonsense, woven together by their own continual bad behaviour and absolute refusal to change or take responsibility for anything they did.
Marcus spent hours talking about these women. He seemed to think I was some sort of oracle for troubled peelers, and he would ask me many, many questions regarding them. These were questions he probably knew the answer to already, but, he seemed to enjoy getting them reinforced.
“Are these girls slutty, I mean, really, really slutty?” he’d ask.
“Oh, yeah. These girls are human sperm banks, and they are always taking donations.”
Marcus would usually respond by grunting. I think he was jerking off, but it was difficult to tell.
“What type of sex do these girls like? What is their favourite position?”
“They like them all, but, missionary. All tough girls love being fucked like they’re savages being saved by a religious zealot.”
“Why?”
“They wanna feel that weight on them. It makes them feel owned, and it makes them feel safe, and it makes them feel trapped and captured. If you feel out of control most of the time, it’s nice to give it all up and feel crushed by the weight of someone who wants you."
“ What becomes of these girls? What happens when they get older?”
“Oh, old age is not their friend. Maturity and them do not jive. They usually get addicted to something, they dry out, they find some really nice guy to knock them up, they try to waitress, they suck at it, they try to go back to school, they suck at that, they try to be a wife, they suck someone else’s dick, the good guy husband takes them back regardless, and they end up someones shitty, fucked up mom that someone writes a memoir about that Oprah likes.”
“I think you’re right about that.”
Marcus had been observing strippers for many years. He was like the Jane Goodall of train wreck lap dancers. He had identified, according to him, their one Achilles heel, the one way to reach in and get to their battered hearts. The asshole boyfriend.
The good guy husband who knocked them up was the fall guy when their lives went sour, but the asshole boyfriend was the one who undid them. These girls all had the asshole boyfriend that they would do anything for and would put up with their bad behaviour like no other.
Marcus wanted nothing else in the world except to be a train wreck strippers asshole boyfriend.
“I’m too nice,” he lamented, “I treat them too well. They just want my money. I know I’m not good enough for them. I can’t give them what they want. I can’t fuck them like they want to be fucked. I can’t give them the fuck of their lives, which is what these assholes do, they fuck the shit out of them and have them dreaming about them. My cock is alright, but, I know it isn’t huge….it isn’t big enough for them….But you know what? I know one thing, I know that it won’t last for them. It won’t be forever. Someday they’ll get old, and they’ll get ugly, and no one will want them, and then they’ll feel like me. They’ll feel inside like I feel inside. They’ll feel ugly. I think about that, you know? I think about that and it makes me happy. It makes me really happy.”
I was fairly stoned when he said this, and it kinda freaked me out.
Marcus continued to call me. Our calls went on for hours. He was in his late 40’s and one day, he told me about the job he had once had. He had been an aide to a Senator for about 20 years. He was now independently wealthy…from what, I couldn’t say, and neither did he.
We ended up having lots of long conversations. He asked me a really personal question one night, and I answered him, truthfully. It wasn’t anything that put me in any danger, it was personal in a way that came from deep inside my heart, hidden behind a bunch of stuff. I was happy to pull it out of me and show it to him. It felt liberating.
“What’s it like in Canada?” he asked me.
“It’s like the States, but, not really. There’s like a bunch of white people here and then a bunch of people who aren’t white, and they all live in the same country. All together like.”
“Would you say that we’re different, the US and Canada?”
“Super different.”
“How?”
“Firearms.”
“How so?”
“Well, the laws are different. Mass shootings don’t happen here that often. We don’t have an ongoing debate about firearms. You can have a gun here, but, you need to be registered at a gun club, you need to have mandatory safety training and background checks, and you can only use your gun at gun club meetings. You can’t take your gun home, or carry it around in your car, and certainly not on your hip. You can own a gun for hunting, but, you have to have a hunting licence and there are rules and regulations for that too. Guns just aren’t a thing here.”
“What if you wanted an assault weapon?”
“They’re totally illegal. I have no idea how you would get one into the country without getting busted.”
“But, what if someone breaks into your house?”
“Jesus, what is with you Americans and your obsession with home invasion? It’s in all your movies. We don’t daydream about Amityville Horror taking place in our fucking houses. If someone breaks into your home, chances are, they don’t have a gun either.”
“See, we’re so mistrustful of the police here that people do worry about how to protect themselves, because they also have no faith in the government, and the police are an extension of that. Nobody feels like they can just call the police and everything will be okay. They want to take matters into their own hands because they feel they have no choice. And people can get their hands on guns easily, so, if someone breaks into their home, they want to be armed too, because chances are, whoever has broken in is armed.”
“Yeah, sometimes people here try to be tough and say ‘fuck the police’, but, in reality, cops here are not the notorious flunky’s that they are in the U.S. You have to have a degree to be a cop here. Not that our justice system is super great.”
“It’s not?”
“Well, it’s blundered pretty fucking badly on some major cases. Look up Clifford Olsen, or Karla Holmolka, or Robert Pickton, all serial killers, by the way.”
“They have serial killers in Canada?”
“They have serial killers everywhere. Ours are just quieter. Literally. They don’t get all Ted Bundy and yell and shit.”
Just then, Marcus paused.
“My neighbours are yelling again.”
“Is it bad?”
“It’s always bad. I can’t tell which condo it’s coming from. Fuck.”
“Do you need to call 911, or something?”
“I’ve called the cops before and they didn’t do anything. The neighbours just get pissed someone called the cops. I’m not doing that again. Fuck it. You know what it is? They’re Mexican. They yell. It’s a cultural thing. Latinos fight and beat their wives and it’s like, totally normal of them. It’s crazy.”
A few seconds later, without a shred of irony, Marcus asked:
“Do they have racism in Canada?”
“Yeah. They have racism everywhere. It’s just usually way more low key when it pops up here. Canada is very politically correct. After the Paris attacks, we took in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. For like a week and half there were some racial incidents. A woman in a hijab was attacked, someone wrote a shitty letter to their Muslim neighbour, some jackass in Quebec made a stupid video about killing Muslims. Our Prime Minister basically said ‘knock it off!’ and it died down. I mean, yeah, racists are everywhere, but, like guns, race isn’t like a big, contentious issue in Canada like it is in the U.S. Except when it comes to Natives. That shit is messed up. But even that is covert and low key. It manifests itself by them being ignored. We take the passive aggressive approach.”
“Would someone like Trump ever be able to run in Canada?”
“Fuck no. Our previous Prime Minister, this guy Harper, was a dick. He was like a sliver of the potential evil of Trump, like, a tiny fraction of evil, and people hated his guts. They called him Hitler and everything. People came out in droves to get rid of him. Everyone voted. It was wild. And now our Prime Minister is hot and does yoga and smokes weed and he put in a cabinet that is all diverse, gender wise and racially. We don’t like ostentatious show boats for politicians here. We get embarrassed really easily. We have shame here. Lobster, maple syrup, and fucking shame.”
“Shame is a good thing.”
“It can be, that’s for sure.”
“It sounds dreamy in Canada.”
“We’re having our honeymoon with our new Prime Minister, so, we’ll see. It’s better than what the U.S has going on with your insane election. Right now in Canada, it’s like a King Harvest song, everybody here is out of sight, they don’t bark, and they don’t bite, they keep things loose, they keep things light.”
“It’s a supernatural delight.”
“Do you remember that story from a few years back about the guy who got all mad because the bakery refused to decorate his kids birthday cake because his kids name was so fucking offensive?”
“No…I don’t think so.”
“Okay, so, this guy walks into a bakery to buy a birthday cake for his three year old son. The cake decorator asks the kids name, the kids name is Adolph Hitler. Specifically, Adolph Hitler Campbell. The cake decorator says no way, the man is outraged, he goes to the local news. The funny thing is, is that they guy was upset that they wouldn’t decorate the little kids cake, like somehow this was gonna ruin the kids life, or something. He seemed totally oblivious to the fact that naming his baby boy after the man prophesied by Nostradamus to be the antichrist was really the crux of the issue at hand. Then again, the guy also had a daughter named Aryan Nation. When I heard that story, I thought, that is truly something that would only happen in America. "
“Oh man. You’re right.”
People ask me often why anyone would want to call a phone sex line. It seems, to so many, like something from a bygone era. This makes me sad. Why should reaching out to find a connection be considered old fashioned? Haven’t you ever been alone and wanted something more than what a porn video had to give you? Haven’t you ever wanted to hear someones voice in your ear, and know they were talking only to you? I wonder often whatever happened to conversation and communication. I wonder when it became the last option, after text, after spewing an unfiltered opinion all over social media, after a cacophony of complaints and judgments written all over walls that will not go the way of those mysterious hieroglyphs inside ancient tombs first deciphered by torches.
There is nothing greater than connection. There is nothing like a person unfurling the hidden maps inside themselves to reveal the landscapes within. It is like lightning, which is simply two elements coming together to create a sudden electric charge.
To experience another person is to experience an alteration.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
-Carl Jung
