Erotica Artist Ch. 03: Wilderness

It was one thing, of course, to crack the shell of an imprisoning isolation and taste a semblance of liberation, and quite another to know what to do with the freedom. There was no more coastal exile, for the time being, and I was no longer mute. I could string together several sentences in a row in less and less of an accent with each passing month. I'd liberated myself to the point where I could actually direct some of my sentences to real live women and most of the time get a civil response. But what, oh what, were my next steps? Rambling, stumbling, false steps all, as it turned out.

I'd known all along that my four years of liberal arts university would qualify me for no profession. They'd improved my ability to read, and sharpened my critical writing skills and exposed me to authors I'd been only vaguely aware of before, but that was about it. In fact the greatest lesson I'd learned in my post-secondary career had been a modest one in how to live: I'd cracked open my shell enough to speak, to act, up to a point, to make a friend and call up a woman on the phone.

Maybe not such a big deal for the average pubescent, but after all my years of silence and passivity, quite an accomplishment. Thanks to my brief tryst with Mia I'd also lost my virginity, another major achievement for someone of my temperament.

But I still lacked the confidence to function in a course seminar. Talking one on one was enough of an effort. Speaking in front of a group was way beyond my capabilities. I skipped all the optional seminars and attended even my regular classes with less and less frequency in the last two years of university. I read the books and handed in the papers, but I began to keep odd hours, staying up all night and going to bed for the day as soon as breakfast was over. My life at the close of my university career was out of sync, directionless.

My first major post-Kirsten false step came when, against my better judgement, and because I had no idea what else to do with my mediocre BA, I enrolled in a fifth year Education program. Just how out of touch could I have been? I knew I did not have what it took to be a teacher. School had always felt like prison. Why would I want to spend an entire working career locked in a classroom?

As far as jobs went, teaching pretty much embodied everything I loathed. I disliked getting up early in the morning and working dayshift. I abominated public speaking and all forms of performance and group activity. And I wasn't sure I was all that fond of children. I was a chronically shy introvert with no interest in trying to instill a love of language and literature in a pack of disinterested and unruly teenagers.

Yet enroll in the Education program is what I did. I lasted about two months.

I showed up for my fall practicum in a junior high classroom in suburban Richmond and found it disheartening beyond endurance. I needed practical advice on the dynamics of classroom control and instead had to endure pointless and irrelevant group projects and seminars on the theory of education. A program less in touch with my fundamental needs would have been difficult to conceive. I stood before a grade ten class and knew at once I was out of my element. I woke every morning dreading the day ahead.

The practicum was the death knell of my university life. I abandoned my classes, my seminars, my year, with nary a backward glance. I was a dropout.

My course advisor, a pleasant, well-meaning, middle-aged lady, phoned to ask what was going on.

"I can't do this anymore," I told her. "I can't attend these ridiculous courses that have nothing to do with what's happening in a real classroom. I've honestly never felt more helpless than when I stood alone in front of those grade tens. I'd make a terrible teacher. I don't have the calling."

It was an immense relief, as if some huge, spirit-draining burden had been lifted from me. I would gladly have dug ditches or cleaned toilets or slaved as a roofer for the rest of my life rather than spend another minute in front of a class of sullen, disinterested teenagers. It brought back too many memories of my worst nightmares: standing in petrified shock in front of a class of my peers delivering the obligatory book report.

And so I left university without job prospects, without a girlfriend, without direction, without a future. In a way I had the freedom I'd been in search of since childhood. Why wasn't I ecstatic?

I took flight, quite literally, putting my VW in storage, packing a bag in mid-November to fly to London. This was my next big step in the wrong direction.

It was my first trip back to the UK since the emigration seven years earlier, and I had almost forgotten the numbing, unremitting cold. But not quite. Europe in November, with three or four months of winter to go! Had I learned nothing? What was I thinking?

I explored London for the first time, the city I'd lived two hundred miles from for fifteen formative years without once being able to visit. And I knew it was a place I could grow to love, under the right circumstances. But not now. Not yet. I looked up a few old friends in the northwest and found little to say to them, or they to me. I sat in pubs with them and listened to their talk, but I was no longer part of their lives. And they had virtually no curiosity about North America. I was forever cut off from them, from my old country.

But the scope of my colossal mistake only fully dawned on me in Paris, where I felt the kind of loneliness I'd experienced only once before, on first landing on the west coast of another foreign country seven years earlier. Then I'd been surrounded by family, with the settled routine of school and part-time work to distract me. Now I was truly on my own and at a loss.

England had at least been familiar. In a way I still felt comfortable there. But once in Paris I was a lost soul, plunged in the abject misery of a rare solitude, without purpose or direction. In the City of Light I was in total darkness.

I roamed the streets Henry James and Joyce had passed along, the boulevards and alleyways Hemingway had written of in "A Moveable Feast" and Henry Miller had memorialized, even with an empty belly, and my desolation was crushing.

How did they do it? The city that nurtured countless giants of culture was alien territory to me. They of course had their work, their talent, and I had neither.

I did not even have my language anymore. I may have taken French four years into university and written essays, in French, on the likes of Corneille, Moliere and Racine, but could I string together half a dozen sentences and carry on a basic conversation with someone in the street? I could not. Though the question of actually speaking the language rarely came up. I had no one to talk to but waiters and hotel clerks. I knew no one and no one knew me.

I was wandering the same streets Marcel Proust once strolled along, and I was alone, alone, alone. I could not have felt more cut off from warmth, from congeniality, and from my language if I had been in Addis Ababa, Tashkent, Rangoon. I could not spend four or five months speaking only to waiters and desk clerks in elementary English or broken French. There were only so many museums or cathedrals you could wander through alone before wanting to howl in pain. Europe for five or six winter months, I discovered in my first ten days, was no place for someone as isolated and sick at heart as me.

Yet I refused to catch the next plane home. After three days in Paris I was as homesick and heartsick as I'd ever been, but I was determined to persevere, to work my way through the loneliness. I would stick out this half year of frigid purgatory if it killed me. I didn't know what else to do.

What I should have done, I thought later, was take the next flight back to the west coast, phone up Kirsten, and beg her to forgive my lunacy of twenty-odd months ago, beg her to give me another shot at getting to know her, confess that I'd not had a moment free of regret since I'd so coldly and stupidly avoided her back then.

Why didn't this new level of misery and isolation give me the strength, the courage to do that?

There were times, on my cold, lonely walks, when I'd pass a department store window and stop to stare at a display of living-room furniture warmly lit in a homey, conventional setting, the kind of scene that would have made Henry Miller puke, and I'd fantasize how, if I'd only had the guts, I could have been comfortably settled in just such a cozy, family place with Kirsten as my partner, the vacuum in my heart filled with peaceful devotion.

But just as suddenly I'd recognize the absurdity of such a premise and see it for the romantic daydream that it was. A daydream born of my current aimless and isolated existence.

I moved on to Amsterdam and checked into a youth hostel instead of a cheap pension, so that I could at least exchange a word or two each day with fellow travelers. The big attraction here, of course, after the Rembrandts, was the red-light district, where for a very few dollars you could spend a little time in a soft-lit curtained storefront with the lady of your choice. I must have cruised those tempting alleyways a dozen times trying to screw up the courage to cop a blowjob at least. But I couldn't do it. Something so normal, so natural for most males, all a part of growing up, and it was way beyond me. I cursed myself for my timidity.

And so began weeks of dreary hostels and pensions and trains and stations. I was free to come and go as I pleased and take trips to exotic capitals, something I'd yearned for as a lonely child, but there was little romance in the experience, just more cold and deprivation and drafty train stations at four am.

I headed south in search of warmth and spent ten days strolling the Promenade des Anglais, savoring the sweet Mediterranean air but still wondering why I'd come. I visited Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and the Costa del Sol. I hooked up with two Californians in a bar in Malaga and spent four eye-opening, deeply depressing days with them and their VW in Morocco, my first taste of a third-world country. I couldn't wait to get out.

Rome provided a respite: each turn of a corner had my heart racing at the sheer spectacle of the place. And I was invited for dinner to a suburban apartment by a kind family met on the train south. The elder daughter introduced me to two friends of hers, one of whom drove a Fiat. They showed me some out of the way sights before dropping me back at my pension. It was a brief oasis of warmth in a frigid January.

But I grew morose again in the claustrophobic streets of Venice. Maybe they were too literal a representation of the imprisoning labyrinth I was still struggling to escape. And I had no Tadzio, or Nordic Kirstens to pursue through the maze. I did the obligatory tour of St. Mark's and spent days searching in vain for the window from which Henry James's friend Constance Fenimore Woolsen dropped to her death. But more typical was the entire rainy afternoon spent in bed reading an American pornographic novel I found in a weird little book-cum-drugstore. Such were the vagaries of my taste.

After Naples and Pompeii I ferried from Brindisi to Athens, where I was accosted in a park in broad daylight, in a very unthreatening manner, by a homely but amorous middle-aged fellow built like a line-backer. It was another chance for human contact, but one I couldn't bring myself to accept.

I moved north again on a night train through Belgrade to Budapest, where I stayed two nights on my transit visa in a suffocating hot room in a maze-like apartment rented out by a retired university professor. The sad-eyed Economics expert exchanged banalities in fractured French with me before retiring.

At the Austro-Hungarian frontier the border guards peered under the seats of the train compartment in search of stowaways. Yet in a matter of hours the drab gray of a communist regime gave way to the bright lights of Vienna and I realized just how much of a Westerner I really was.

I hadn't really needed the trips to Morocco and Hungary to show me this, but they added extra emphasis. I realized as I passed with impunity that Hungarian frontier that I did indeed possess more freedom than much of the world ever knew. I had suffered some deprivations and I would continue to suffer them, but they were tame and often self-inflicted and were mine to overcome in the west.

Was there such a thing as too much freedom? Here in Europe I'd been as free as I was ever likely to be, free of family, of career, of everything, and I'd been desolate. For I'd also been free of friendship, of virtually all human contact, of physical warmth, of music, of language, of work. I'd been stripped down to nothing, zero. In such isolation, without aim or direction, without work, without affection, I was nowhere. I suddenly craved some kind of permanence, security, stability.

I roamed on for the last few winter weeks through Germany and Scandinavia, the highlight of which was an afternoon spent in a spotless basement emporium that specialized in legal hardcore pornography. Yet another new level of freedom for me to enjoy. I was distracted enough from my loneliness by this to sketch a few more pages of blistering erotica.

Then I straggled back to the sun of the Riviera for a last time. But by now even the warmth and light of the most benign parts of Western Europe were not enough. I knew now more than ever that I was a North American. I missed the plumbing, I missed the music, but most of all I missed the English language.

I had taken it for granted. I had even grown self-conscious over my ugly accent and had chosen to remain mute for much of my early adulthood. Now suddenly I cherished my fluency, accent be damned. I now longed for the crisp, clear cadences of North America.

I missed Canada. I suddenly realized I had fallen deeply in love with my language and my adopted country on this journey through old Europe, and my appreciation of both from here on would never waver.

On my first trip to Canada, seven or eight years earlier, I was an alien, and I was to remain so until this trip. Now I knew where I belonged, and I would never again feel like an outsider. I was going home.

And so I left Europe with a sense of relief, as if some kind of trial by travel were coming to an end. My only souvenirs of the trip, apart from my new perspective on life, were two or three samples of hardcore Swedish pornography.

I flew into New York exhausted and totally unprepared for the mega-experience that is that city. I was still in foreign territory, I realized. I wasn't home yet, not until I crossed that forty ninth parallel.

Two days later I was flat out on the back seat of a Greyhound bus heading west to Chicago, Seattle, and the Canadian border, trying to work out on the way what I would do with the rest of my life.

For the time being it didn't matter. I was so elated to be back in Vancouver that nothing bothered me. Not only had I fallen head over heels in love with my country on my trip through a frigid continent, I'd fallen more deeply for this city also.

I'd always loved it, but never so much as now. I had my language back, and I had a hometown.

I roamed around the university, though I had no plans for future enrollment, and the place could still cause me a sharp twinge of regret over Kirsten. But it was a haven of peace and beauty for me still, away from, but still close enough to the city's excitement. It was the only home I'd known, away from my family.

To stay connected to it in some way I re-started my postgraduate life like many people with degrees in English Literature: I slopped dishes in the cafeteria of the residences I had lived in as a student just a year earlier. I gazed out through the racks of soiled trays at a new group of hopefuls and wondered if they had any more focus in their lives than I had. I was without profession and without hope of one in the immediate future. What do you do when your major interests are music, literature, and sex, not necessarily in that order?

I postponed thinking about it. I tracked down Nick, who did seem to have a future mapped out. He was wrapping up his final year of Honors English and had begun some teaching assistant duties in the faculty. He was planning on postgraduate work in the fall in Saskatchewan.

Since neither of us had any real plans for the summer we decided to share the expenses on an apartment in the city's west end till September. Yet another false step, it turned out, amidst my euphoria over being back in my new home town.

I'd always pegged Nick for such a positive force, successful with the ladies and with his academic career, master of his destiny. I had no experience of another side of him: his desperate melancholia.

In the university residence, whenever Nick disappeared for a day or so or, rarest of rarities, closed his door, I assumed he was either working hard or involved with one of his lady friends. It never occurred to me that someone apparently so much in charge of things might be chronically depressed. I soon began living with Nick's withdrawals on a daily basis.

There were no female visitors that summer, and though he stayed very busy wrapping up his faculty obligations and preparing for his graduate work, there were many times when he stalled and sank into thunderous gloom.

I was tolerant of his silences. I too needed peace and quiet. But after a while the prolonged withdrawals and monosyllabic conversation grew oppressive, even for me. I tried to talk to him about this but his responses were so hard to follow, so abstract, that I found it easier just to leave him alone. For someone so articulate on the subject of music, or film, Nick was hopeless at explaining his own melancholy. It lasted for weeks that summer and I spent as little time as possible in the apartment. I'd had my own share of depression the past few years, but compared to Nick I was laughing boy.

I had started a vigorous exercise program out at the university, where I ran a circuit of my own devising in the cool and quiet of the evening before swimming laps in the pool and winding down in the steam room and hot tub. This kept me away three or four nights a week. During the day I hacked away with my tennis racket down by the Stanley Park lagoon, sometimes with someone at my own mediocre level or often all alone at the practice wall.

I dragged Nick down there once or twice, in an attempt to prove a pet theory that exercise, or strenuous physical labor, preferably outdoors, were good antidotes to melancholia. It had been my observation, I added ponderously, that sometimes depression went hand in hand with laziness, or vice versa, though I admitted this was maybe not true of Nick.

Our games were not a success. Nick's heart clearly wasn't in it. Nor, I suspect, were his lungs. He'd been a heavy smoker for as long as I'd known him, and his attempts to quit never lasted long. I quietly gave up. But I continued my own exercise regimen, and always felt better for it.

One evening in mid-July Nick came home very late. His shirt was torn and there were cuts on his face. His nose appeared to have been bleeding. He brushed off my queries and offers of help but later, after he'd cleaned himself up, he sat down and started to talk.

"I was stepping across a wet grass verge and I guess I minced or something. These two louts started calling me names."

"You didn't just run?"

"I tried to move away without running. But they cornered me."

"And they beat you up?"

"After a fashion. They weren't very effective. They were pretty drunk."

"Son of a bitch."

"It happens all the time here in the west end, Mason. There's a huge gay population and gay-bashers come from all over town for a little fun. Most poor guys don't get off as lightly as I did."