Chapter 5.

I had this red-faced Russian literature professor when I was in university who, whenever you asked him "How are you?", would say, "Oh, about 5' 6", average build, greying hair. Some daddy issues, I was neglected as a child ... How much time do you have?" And then he'd explode into laughter, as if we hadn't heard the joke before, he did it almost every time we saw him. He was a drinker and had a suitably thick, woolly Russian accent and I would always chuckle at the joke, because he was jolly and a nice guy and a good teacher, and I always laughed nervously at peoples' jokes anyway, even if I didn't find them funny. I sometimes suspected that if we all kept a straight face and humoured him, he really would have unloaded all his existential angst onto us, and then we all would've moved on to some dimly-lit dive bar and drank vodka and had blini and caviar, eventually stumbling out into a snowstorm with our shoulders slung over each other in an exhausted rabble, everyone newly-minted soulmates in a doomed romantic universe.

So let's go there. How are you, Adam? Who are you?

My first glimmers of memory are all bathed in golden sunlight. This might come as a surprise to you. I've traded in gloominess and cynicism for so long now it's become something of a trademark for me in my circle of friends. But when I try to pierce into those very first memories, I'm on my back in my room, on the carpet or in my crib kicking my little legs, and there's a rich quality to the sunlight pouring through the window, it's late summer, and late afternoon, I know this somehow, and the air is warm and there's a variety of smiling female faces looking down at me and they're filled with love and I'm happy.

We lived in a large country house, surrounded by fields and forest, and in later years those mid to late summer afternoons were equally golden but I started dreading the end of summer as the light changed and became harder and more mineral. I remember tearing through the fields as a kid and jumping out of trees and I can see big swirls of pollen in the air and leaves whipped up into vortices by the wind and it was always allergy season, it seemed, and I had terrible trouble breathing from day one. There was so much mold and dust in that old house and the empty barn next door with its rows of hay bales piled up to the high ceiling, there were frozen cat carcasses between the bales and happy but cruel dogs and mud-splattered cows in the fields cycling placidly in their mysterious zombie-like way, in a miasma of dung and earth smells, prisoners of a lower tier of consciousness, presumably, ruminative sentinels amidst a backdrop of blooming spring flora and thunder storms and damp autumnal rot. That golden afternoon light remained embedded in my soul or psyche and I never wanted it to end but of course, around the age of five or six, I became aware that it always ends, sometime after September, and I started to dread the endings terribly, before the cold came, and then I was an older child and our father left and the mood in our home darkened and there were tears and fighting and yelling and all that, but I digress.

Before all this, as an infant, the women looked down at me from above: it felt like I was in a museum gallery surrounded by ancient masks or artifacts, and I was the centre of their attention and this pleased me greatly. I thought they were all beautiful and they smiled at me and I smiled back at them - my hippie mother with her long straight hair and my glamorous French-Canadian grandmother (not the stern Scottish one, she was dead by then) and my nerdy older sister with my father's thick black hair and her pretty blonde French-Canadian friends, like Julie Daigneault and Mylène Charbonneau.

The universe seemed filled with women, aside from my brother and I it was all women and they did everything and chatted amiably amongst themselves, and then when I went to school the teachers were mostly all women, and they did all the disciplining and the administration and the managing of things and for some reason there were far more girls in our class than boys, and my brother and I were two of the only Anglophones in our grades. That means English-speakers if you don't know anything about Quebec, it's kind of complicated, but not really. Anyway, I liked being outnumbered by girls, by having everything seemingly run by women. Men were for driving the bus and giving mass at church and mopping the floors, they were the creepy priests in the confession booth and the greasy mechanics at the garage who spoke in rough cadences. All the country kids were wild and the French-speaking Québécois had an added reputation for being a little crazy and uninhibited, at least compared to us staid, uptight Anglos. These are all the old stereotypes that get thrown around in the province, tea and crumpets and stiff extended pinkies versus red wine and stinky cheeses and loud yelling and chainsmoking, but I mean, alot of the clichés are kind of true, though probably not for much longer. Now in the globalized world we're all just in a big boiling pot of hybrid mythologies and cultures, different tribes bleeding into one another all across the internet-connected planet, and frankly that's probably for the best, who knows?

But regarding the Québécois, I guess if you develop as an isolated society deep in the woods on the northern fringes of North America for 400 years, well, you get pretty tight, as a society, you become as salt-of-the-earth as can be, you lose any hang ups about bodily functions that might exist in more uptight, bourgeois societies and develop a somewhat scatological sense of humour. There's a kind of tribal solidarity that comes into being among smaller or more marginal cultures and if you throw a history of chronic poverty into the mix, say 14 to a family in a small cabin with no running water and a deep catholic religiosity mixed with folkloric superstition and brutal winters, well, like I said, you get a wonderfully tightly-knit culture that's different from the rest of North America, and this can be a boon and a curse. I've always thought of Quebec as a kind of Sweden or Norway, or maybe a mid-sized Balkan country - there's a lot of similarities, I have to admit, but I wouldn't know any of this for many years, not until I left the province and saw the rest of Canada and then the world.

We'd be in Madame Hélène's first grade class and during breaks Mélissa Boisvert would try to make out with me, or she'd drop her thick woolen tights to show me her vagina, and I was taken aback. I was pretty sure I wanted all this, as a boy, but even then I thought, wow, it's happening kind of early. I was a little prissy as a child, with my straight blonde bowl-cut and the preppy pink overalls and brightly-coloured turtleneck sweaters my mother chose for me. That's another story, but I'll just give you the broad strokes: the rougher farmer's kids would torment me about these cute little princely outfits my mum made me wear, they were over the top, bright orange bellbottoms and big rainbow-coloured sweaters with thick neck rolls and ruffles, pink corduroys and turquoise turtlenecks. What did I know? I thought they were cool, too. But it made me a target for all the rougher farmer's kids and mutliple schoolyard bullies.

One day my brother Billy comes back from school and tells my mother, "You have to stop dressing Adam up in those preppy colourful clothes, he's getting massacred by the older kids in the schoolyard." And my mum told me this story more than a few times later on, always howling with laughter, acting as if it was the funniest thing she'd ever heard. But she shed a tear back then, I can assure you, because it wasn't great having Mario Tremblay, aka Momo the redheaded brute, punch you in the gut repeatedly while telling you what a faggot you are, day after day.

Anyway, the girls at my school were always really nice to me, even the older ones, we got along royally and later we'd have these earnest heart-to-hearts on all kinds of topics in the back seats of the school bus, my other friends thought it was kind of weird and never knew what we were going on about. These were early versions of the classic French-Canadian emotional confessional, where you bare all your feelings and no one judges you and then you hash things out and leave feeling closer to one another. Maybe it was Quebec girls and their openness and general sensuality and sex-positivity who messed me up from an early age, I felt it even then, I don't know, there's a thought.

When I think back to the family home in the countryside in the late 70s and early 80s, it appears bathed in the soft, glowing light of a 1970s Playboy photo shoot. Have I added this detail myself  retroactively? It's hard to know. But we were coming out of the 70s, and my parents were in their physical primes and there was a certain liberalism in the air at the time which is maybe hard for younger people to understand now. The house reeked of sex, seemed suffused with it. I remember the smell of my parents' bedroom, the sweat and musk, alcohol-and-cigarette-laced morning breath smell. There was the aformentioned and very frightening painting of the kneeling, whorling, storm-woman in my parents' bathroom, and my father also had these erotic Thai prints hung up on the walls throughout the house, depictions of bare-chested Asian women dancing with their tongues out and skimpy sarongs around their hips. His stashes of Playboy and Penthouse were only half-heartedly hidden beneath the bed and in various strategic nooks, and it wasn't long before we were leafing through them in an enraptured state of open-mouthed awe. How beautiful the women were, I thought, though unreal seeming and plastic, with their big bushes of pubic hair and natural breasts and sensual pouts. I drank in the enticing geometry of the womens' shapes, the descending Vs and Us and buoyant Os. Playboy showed full frontal nudity only, they never showed womens' legs spread wide open, you had to go to Penthouse for that, and that was the Holy Grail. Like some sort of primitive fish searching for oxygen this was what I subconsciously craved, even at that young age - to see the cleft between a woman's legs spread wide open, how fascinating it was, I didn't yet have the physical hunger for it, but I was already hypnotized by the sight of these explicit images when my brother and I could find them, in my parents' underwear drawer or hidden in the bookshelf or the back of the closet. I was like Elijah Wood in Lord of the Rings fixated by the Eye of Sauron, I couldn't understand what I was seeing but I was immediately, deeply hooked, my mind was instantly and totally rewired.

So back to me as an infant: I'm watching the faces of these beautiful women stare down at me as I'm on my back, cooing and blowing little kisses and tickling my belly, and already I wanted to please them, wanted to impress them, wanted to be the centre of their attention. I felt animated by something else beyond me but also within me, there was another urge or spirit inside my body and my soul, of this I'm certain. And I know it might sound ridiculous, but if I think back, it was a hormonal urge. My initial life-sensations, in my memory, all seemed focused around my genitals and between my legs, in my crotch chakra, I guess you could say, the root and sacral chakras, and then radiating up into my gut and stomach, the solar plexus chakra. I learned these terms later on, of course. All my first sensations are of the low sort, the sort that puritanical WASP culture has made us feel guilty and dirty about for centuries, though I was only half-WASP, on my mother's side, and because she was the one who raised us I consciously chose to identify with my absent father's side - the heavy-drinking, rakish, Irish catholic-cum-French-Canadian side. I suppose a guru or a swami could tell you exactly what that means, this initial, burning chakra-vitality between my legs and in my gut, or maybe a Freudian, but I think we all have enough familiarity with these concepts to get the idea. My first earthly impressions are all related to soiling and shitting myself, as well as to the pleasure I could find between my legs if I squeezed and pawed there, which led to a growing wave that could reach a pinnacle, even then, in a sperm-less climax that was always followed by a feeling of nausea and a kind of anxiety or distaste settling in my gut. And this feeling was so strong and present in my stomach that after, whenever I thought of food, I recoiled and grimaced. Other than as basic sustenance I hated food, my mother for years couldn't get me to eat, I was skinny as a twig and remain so today, as you can see, and we had these epic standoffs at the dinner table because I refused to eat. (The French, of course, have a term for taking pleasure in the abandon or degradation of wallowing in fluids, be it one's own or any other kind, they call it 'Nostalgie de Boue', and apprently this accounts for all kinds of kinks and perversions later on in adults, trying to get back to this state of childlike abandon and submission.) 

Is there such a thing as being a horny kid? If so, I'm pretty sure I was a horny kid. This was complicated by the fact that I was also a Mama's boy and a god-fearing, enthusiastic catholic until the age of about 13, soaking up all kinds of metaphysical guilt with every catechism class, mass and confession. I became convinced there was a something deeply wrong with me, and I felt ashamed, deeply ashamed, those burning floods of sensation and pleasure between my legs became married very early on to feelings of intense shame - the aformentioned nausea, I think, was the shame, or became the shame. At that age I thought all adults and teachers were severe and intimidating, ready to castigate, except maybe Madame Denise, who was young and lighthearted and pretty, but she died suddenly one winter when her car hit a deer at night on a country road. The pleasure I experienced below my belt felt too secret, too hot and intense, it had to be a secret and remain a secret. It had something to do with how we grew up, I mean, we still went to church, mostly at my catholic grandmother's insistence, and I still have memories of the local parish priest showing up at our house unannounced at dinner time to, quote, check in on us. Pleasure and joy couldn't possibly be good or natural, in my family we didn't talk about these things or any bodily sensations or functions, even though we were a regular hyper-intimate family existing in our own miasmic bubble of fart and shit smells and various body odours. We just didn't talk about it, except Billy and I, and between us brothers those interactions were usually weaponized in one form or another, meaning him pinning me down to rip one on my head, or trap me under blankets in a brutal Dutch oven.

I think it was the uptight WASP gene from my mother's side that caused my to feel this pleasure-shame instinctively (my brother became something of a prig as an adult, so it runs in the family to a certain extent), that and the intensity of my urges which, as I mentioned, had always been there within me from day one - in a bodily and later a spiritual sense, you could say, given the extent of my neverending longing, of which the sexual and corporeal was but one manifestation early on, but this I only learned with age and hard-won wisdom.