Boreal

LOVE, SEX & ME

Preface

(2.1 Draft)

A Los Angeles production company stumbled upon Love, Sex and Islam and called to offer, for a price, to make it more marketable to movie studios by creating a script that was all about sex and relationships and nothing about Islam.

What they suggested I had already considered after I failed to find a producer for Remembering Uzza - If Islam Was Explained to Me in a Pub with Islam as the focus. This, despite praise for what makes for a compelling production, and that is the characters.

We... particularly appreciate the level of thought that went into crafting each character and their relationship with one another.

A factor that we also take into consideration is that CBC does not produce content in-house, we license content from production companies. Because of this, we typically require projects to have a production company attached to them before we can move forward with development or production consideration.

CBC Scripted Content Team

It’s late in the day, and Farewell Posting was supposed to be my last attempt to get you interested in my scholarship; but, if you’re holding a copy of Love, Sex and Me reading this Preface, then I have been successful in transforming Love, Sex and Islam into a book strictly about women that have left their mark on my psyche. With these relationships no longer required to be an introduction to Islamic scriptures I have added three more that hold a special meaning for me.

Since the ultimate goal is to get a movie studio or producer interested in a production of Love, Sex and Me I invited an insightful aspiring script writer to provide additional dialogue and a female perspective. These imagined conversations that seek to compensate for a fragmented memory of what was said are in italics.

Recalling these relationships from years gone by without scriptures as accompaniment has raised, for a man my age, the embarrassment factor somewhat. I keep telling myself that if it gets you interested in more edifying stuff I have written the embarrassment will have been a small price to pay. 

I only use first names, and in one instance only an initial. If you recognise yourself in a character, I hope you will not be displeased, but flattered that I still fondly remember our time together after all these years. 

Father T.

(1st Draft)

I was born in Hearst, Ontario, a mostly French-speaking town about 150 miles southwest of James Bay on a northern leg of the Trans-Canada Highway. When the glaciers retreated, they deposited a lump of clay in the middle of the great Canadian Shield, and on this lump of clay, in the middle of muskeg and stunted pine trees, grew the town of Hearst. On this lump of clay, hardy farmers managed to grow some vegetables and enough forage to support some animal husbandry—mostly dairy cattle—but it is with the logging industry that Hearst is foremost associated.

I was twelve or thirteen when, with my brothers and a few friends, we hitched a large flatbed trailer used to haul heavy equipment such as bulldozers to logging or construction sites to a farm tractor and all, except for the driver, jumped onto the trailer and headed for a lake about seven miles down a solitary country road.

A short distance from Lake Pivabiska, it started to rain. We had brought a tent. To shield ourselves from the rain, we partially unfolded it and raised it above our heads. I was closest to one of the two large wheels between which the trailer bed was balanced like seesaw.

For only a fraction of a second, I saw the wheel closest to me spinning in my direction before I felt myself floating in the air, landing on my back somewhere by the side of the road looking up at the sky. The wheel had caught a corner of the partially unfolded tent and dragged it and me with it, crushing a few vertebrae and less valuable bones and organs.

Eventually, a car came by and the driver was sent into town to fetch an ambulance. The town’s only ambulance was out on another call. Rather than wait for it to return, Father T., hearing that his altar boy was in trouble, jumped into his black station wagon and rushed to the site of the mishap.

They had laid me flat on my stomach on the trailer and everyone waited in the pouring rain for the ambulance. When the priest got there, he decided there was no time to waste. They wrapped me in some blankets and slid me into the back of his station wagon and I was rushed to the hospital.

I thought we got there in plenty of time. I was still aware of my surroundings as the hospital's nursing staff (nuns, mostly) started taking off my clothing; I could hear them complain about boys playing with tractors before I finally passed out. I was later told that, if they had waited for the ambulance, I would have died from internal bleeding.

"Correct conduct,” according to Mencius [372–289 BC], “arises, not through external forces, but as a result of virtues developed internally through observation of laudable models of behaviour.” A laudable model of behaviour for me was the priest who saved my life.

Father T. always tried to do the right thing, even when it was not convenient—especially when it was not convenient—for that was the test; it was a test I would always try not to fail. One test he would fail is how we seek to satisfy a fundamental human need for a physical connection that can be as simple as a heartfelt hug to physical intercourse.

I often failed at making that connection because of a personality that turns people off to this day; but, there was always hope, therefore no need to coerce or manipulate an innocent or a reluctant participant into providing you with what your body and mind craved at the time. But for Father T., and most priests, because of an insane twelfth century canonical law there is no hope, and when human nature cannot be denied, they seek that physical connection with whomever is at hand. One evening that was almost me.

It must have been after a late mass when I found myself in a reception room in the presbytery sitting on Father T.’s lap, my pants and underwear around my knees and a fully erect penis at attention as he was explaining to me the facts of life using my exposed genitalia as a visual aid.

He had yet to touch me, assuming that was his intent, when the phone rang. It was my mother telling him to send me home. I don’t know what else she told Father T. but he never again tried teaching me the facts of life, with or without my pants on.

The first person to touch me the way my stiff-as-a-board manhood obviously expected to be touched by the man in whose lap it was lounging, was another boy my age. I have read that for most postpubescent boys, before girls become the all-encompassing focus, that is often how it unfolds.

We were fooling around in a small tent in his backyard when, the next thing you know, he is jerking me off and doing a good job considering he was working with modified equipment where both a rapid and a light touch is normally required with the sensitive head having lost its protective covering.

The Elaine character of Seinfeld, in the episode The Beard, had an explanation as to why men are better at manipulating the “equipment” after her boyfriend, whom she thought she had converted, went back to his gay boyfriend.

Jerry: He went back? What do you mean he went back?

Elaine: He went back.

Jerry: I don't understand it. You were having such a great time, the sex, the shopping.

Elaine: Well here's the thing. Being a woman, I only really have access to the, uh... equipment, what, thirty, forty-five minutes a week. And that's on a good week. How can I be expected to have the same expertise as people who *own* this equipment, and have access to it twenty-four hours a day, their entire lives.

Jerry: You can't. That's why they lose very few players.

Elaine: Yeah, I guess I never really stood a chance.

It has been my experience, in keeping with Elaine’s observation, that women, based on that one time in a tent, cannot expertly manipulate, for any length of time, without the benefit of some hand lotion or some form lubricant a penis missing its foreskin without causing some discomfort. But that may be just me.

My experience with a boy friend turned out to be a one-time thing as he expected me to reciprocate but I could not bring myself to touch it. It would be years before another human being, this time a girlfriend, touched me the way he did.

It was not that I didn’t get offers, especially after, as a young man, I moved into a commune with gay cohabitants. More about this in a later chapter.

It would have been my mother’s decision to get me circumcised. She did not warn me when she took me to the hospital for a tonsillectomy that I would also be getting another piece of my anatomy removed. It was only after returning home the next day and waking up the next morning in a bloody bed that what had been done became obvious, and that what had been done was in need of immediate repair.

It was undoubtedly mother’s decision, and hers alone that I be circumcised. I was told that, shortly after I was born, she warned her husband that he was to have nothing to do with my upbringing after he got it into his head that I was another man’s son after overhearing an aunt’s thoughtless remark that I looked like the neighbour. This did not mean that he was unkind to me and did not include me in outings with his other sons, fishing being the most common activity we did together, even if often I felt he was treating me like a guest not his progeny.

As long as mother was alive, I don’t remember him ever saying a cross word to me, even when I deserved a bucketful such as the time I broke a window. I was in the backyard slinging rocks à la David of biblical fame when one flew in the wrong direction. Dad was called and with me standing only a few feet away got a stepladder cleared some pieces of glass, took some measurements and left to get a new window. Not a single word was exchanged or would be.

Dad, except for when mother suffered a stroke that left her partially paralyzed, held a grudge against her that manifested itself in accusations and threats when he drank too much. I wonder, as I am writing this, if I was not the cause of all that resentment? They say that writing about your experiences is therapeutic. Not always.

I felt sorry for Father T. when I heard he had lost his parish of Saint-Pie X and been exiled to a First Nation reserve about thirty miles out of town. I even wrote the friggin Pope telling him about my relationship with Father T. and how their celibacy policy forced good men to live unnatural lives with the inevitable results.

From my perspective Father T. was the victim of a greedy church that, in the twelfth century, to avoid having to share an inheritance with a priest’s wife and kids, declared that, henceforth, priests must remain celibate and when they pass, all that they own belongs to the Church.  

Ella

(1st Draft)

Ella and I were grade 11 classmates at Hearst High School. Ella lived in a shack with her father and two sisters at the end of a street on which we used to live. People whispered about what went on in that shack. Saint-Pie X parish’s only school was St Anne elementary. Like me, before we moved across the track, Ella, to get to school, had to negotiate a lumberyard next to a sawmill and a set of railroad tracks that separated the parish from the town of Hearst. My parents decided to move across those tracks after our home in Saint-Pie X burnt to the ground.

It was sometime in June after midnight when I was awoken by people shouting and the glow from a fire that illuminated the basement bed-room where I slept. The house next door was on fire. The family home, along with most of its contents, was quickly reduced to a pile of smoldering embers when the fire next door caused a rupture in the natural gas line where it entered our house. This momentarily turned the gas line into an impressive flame thrower that spewed fire into every corner of the basement where three of my siblings and I, only a short time earlier, had been sound asleep.

I don’t remember the first time we said hello. What I remember is the day we both stayed after school, for some forgotten reason, on an exceptionally warm late September or early October day when I offered to walk her home.

On our way to her place, we passed by the sawmill. Next to the temporarily unoccupied building was a small mountain of sawdust. We looked at each other. I took her hand, and without a word being spoken we started walking towards the pile of sawdust. When we got there, with her standing in front of me, I started unbuttoning her blouse. I half expected her to slap my hand away. She didn’t! She let me take off all her clothing while standing there motionless except for when she stepped out of her granny-panties and maybe her skirt.

We let ourselves fall unto the welcoming sawdust. We rolled around for a bit, clutching at each before she pushed me away and just laid there her legs close together. She just wanted to be caressed, and that is what I did. Then she rolled over onto her stomach.

It was getting dark when she got up and put her clothing back on, but not before I had wiped the sawdust still clinging to her skin. Her home was now only a short distance away. I had never kissed a girl. I leaned forward to kiss her as we were saying goodbye on her doorstep when the door burst open and an unkempt figure holding a shotgun appeared in the doorway.

With both barrels aimed at my head he shouted: “Get out of here you son of a bitch.” Ella had quickly squeezed passed by the man I assume was her father and disappeared inside the house. I slowly backed away, more startled than scared, before turning around and making a run for it.

The next morning at school a sheepish Ella would not even look at me. When I finally did get to talk to her, it was as if it had never happened and it would never happen again. I did not press her. She had enough trouble at home from what I could tell. Ella was the closest I came to having a girlfriend while in Hearst. About six weeks after that bit of fun on a pile of sawdust, the family left Hearst for British Columbia.

Whenever a new sawmill opened in or near the town, Hearst experienced a mini economic boom. Those who could profit from these periodic booms, by risking big and not going bust, would be set for life. Many of the people who got rich were those who obtained the contracts to supply these sawmills with trees and, to a lesser extent, the vendors who sold and maintained the equipment to harvest the forest for these sawmills. My father was one of these vendors.

I was not yet a teenager when Hearst experienced another of these economic booms. This time it was not just another sawmill that was coming to town, but a plywood plant whose appetite for trees would dwarf the demand of most of the sawmills that doted the Hearst landscape. The owners of the logging companies, who would get the contracts to supply what some claimed was destined to become the largest plywood plant in the world, would be the new millionaires. My father teamed up with one of the owners of a small logging operation. His company financed the purchase of the equipment the logger would need to make him a serious contender for these lucrative contracts. The logger did not get the sought-after contracts and my father was left with having to pay for a large assortment of expensive logging equipment, only a portion of which could be resold to the successful bidders.

My middle-aged parents loved our nondescript little town anchored on a lump of mud in the middle of a swamp. Hearst was home. They rebuilt the family home after the fire, but not enough time had passed to build any equity when their worst fear became reality. In the fall of 1967, Traders Finance forced them into bankruptcy.

On a cold Sunday afternoon in November, in a scene reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath, with a snowstorm threatening, the family set out on a journey of more than 2,000 miles to begin again. A few hours into the journey, the gently falling snow became a blizzard. Somehow, we made it to Thunder Bay where we spent the night.