Boreal

LOVE, SEX & 2 1/2 SUICIDES

Aborted Suicide

(Formatted for the web)

With Lucette gone, living became less of a priority. In 2017, I was diagnosed with a rising aortic aneurysm. Every eight months to a year, I went in for an echocardiogram to check if it had expanded to a size where surgery to cut off the damaged portion, to be replaced by some type of polyethylene tubing, was called for.

After her death, when I got the call informing me of my next scheduled echo, I cancelled any further measurements and decided to let nature take its course, hoping it would not keep me waiting. But it did!

In 2024, I let myself be convinced by my caring family doctor, who hoped that I would consider the operation should it be necessary, to have my first echo in more than five years. The results were disappointing: the aneurysm had barely grown and I still had many surgery-free years ahead.

Since her passing, I have preferred spending Christmas by myself having failed to make a meaningful connection that would warrant not spending Christmas alone with Lucette’s ghost.

Last year was no different except that I had had enough of waiting on a lackadaisical aneurysm to do its thing and decided to hurry things along by doing what I had been contemplating ever since I changed my will to reflect my beneficiary’s passing.

I had asked my lawyer to include in my new will a clause that stated that if I passed away during sex, the woman I was with at the time was entitled to $10,000 from my estate. Why did I Iet myself be convinced that it was a bad idea because such an unusual clause might delay probate? Why should I have cared? I was going to be dead and my last wish might have been fulfilled.

He suggested I find some other way. I hoped to die nursing a tall glass of well-aged single malt scotch, and not while watching a porno, but in the company of a real woman—hope springs eternal—with whom I will have had dinner before inviting her to my place to test if sex and alcohol will do for me what assisted death did for my Lucette: die happy.

What I had been contemplating since her death, but never found the courage to carry out, was a Leaving Las Vegas type of exit. For those unfamiliar with the movie, which I have yet to watch, it stars Nicholas Cage as a despondent character who “decides to move to Las Vegas and drink himself to death. Once there, he develops a romantic relationship with a prostitute played by Elisabeth Shue.”

Finding a working girl like Mary, or even Jasmine, whom I could get to know before surreptitiously making her an accomplice to my demise proved problematic. In desperation, I even tried to interest my waitress/bartender by telling her about a ten-thousand-dollar reward for any woman who would spend time with me then fuck me to death (I can’t believe I said that) not unlike the character played by Madonna in Body of Evidence.

I expected her to say something like: “You’ve gotta be kidding!” All I got was a “huh?” She may have been thinking about it—collecting the reward, that is—before changing the subject.

I asked my doctor if sex could cause my aorta to go ballistic before its time. She said no, but drinking to excess was another matter. Sex, it would seem, would make for a more pleasant transition but was not necessary for a successful outcome.

Over four days, starting Christmas Eve, I emptied a full bottle of Glenfiddich, then a full bottle of Glenmorangie, followed by half a bottle of Johnny Walker Black. So as not to diminish the impact of the alcohol, I stopped taking my blood pressure pills. I am borderline, no big deal.

The second day, my handy wrist monitor reported that my blood pressure was way above where it should be. But low and behold, on the third day, it was back to normal. Go figure.

It’s not that easy drinking yourself to death, as I discovered. Drink too slow and the next thing you know, you’re fast asleep on the couch with no harm done. Drink too fast and you’re running for the bathroom while trying to avoid crashing into the furniture, after which you’re lying on the floor next to the toilet, unless you managed to drag yourself to the bedroom and crawl onto the top of the bed powerless to continue with your plans.

For four days I was unable to find that happy medium. Maybe I should not have downed a bottle of wine before hitting the scotch. We will never know. On the fourth day, after waking up with a half empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black next to me, I gave up and poured what was left in my last bottle of Scotch down the drain. I couldn’t risk him finding it next to me.

He said I saved his life. He more than returned the favour after the person he called his sister left us, calling (in the days and weeks following her passing: morning, afternoon and evening) or visiting to chit-chat, as he calls it, but it was so much more than that. Two Muslims, Abbas and her with the Koran-inspired name are largely responsible for my not attempting to end it all after Lucette died.

Not that I am contemplating becoming a believer again after coming to my senses so many years ago, but if I was, it would not be a return to Christianity. 

I met Abbas at the Clocktower Brew Pub on Bank Street. He had made his way to the bar and was sitting kitty-corner to me a few stools down. He ordered a vodka shooter, then another, and then mumbled into the empty glass, loud enough for me to hear, “This is the worst of times.”

I couldn’t resist: “… and the best of times,” I replied. "A Tale of Two Cities."

He looked up at me with a perplexed look on his face. "You know Dickens?"

"Of course, I know Dickens! Have you read Bleak House?"

"Yes, I have," he replied.

"Do you read Shakespeare? I just love Shakespeare."

"Yes, I have read Shakespeare."

"How about Hemingway?"

"For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, that guy and the sea."

"What about Marx, Engel, Nietzsche and Goethe?"

"I know of them," I admitted.

We discussed Engel’s influence on Marx and his significant contribution to Das Capital. Abbas was exposed to the discredited ideology of the man who famously condemned religion as “the opium of the people” during the time of the Shah; as for me, it was as a student at Simon Fraser when I took a course on Marx’s labour theory of value.

Our conversation would veer into the nature of evil. What can you expect when you throw Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche into the mix? I listened to what he had to say, for he obviously had to come to terms with evil in a very personal way.

I don’t usually give out my phone number to someone I have just met in a bar. However, when he took out a book from his well-stocked bag and asked me to write my number in it, I couldn’t resist. The book was Emma by Jane Austen, the book that had marked my transition from, “I think I want to be economist” to “I want to be a writer.”

Abbas called the very next day and asked if we could meet for coffee at a Tim Hortons establishment a few blocks from Parliament Hill. On my way, I picked up a copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. From our discussion the previous evening, I assumed he had not read it. I was wrong.

He also had a book for me, a pre-war biography of Goethe by Von Houston Stewart Chamberlain… in German. I had assumed he had not read Lolita; he had assumed from our discussion that I could read German. We both agreed that we may have had a little too much to drink the night before.

He had brought with him some poems which he took out of that same well-stocked bag and asked if I would take some home with me to read and we could talk about them the next time we met. I immediately started making excuses. As he was putting those rumpled sheets of paper back into his bag, I recognized the look.

“Give me a few of your poems and let me read them now,” I said. The first line from a poem by Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad said it all: “All my being is like a dark verse.”

“That is a very lonely poem,” I heard myself saying.

Then there was the following, said to have been written by an Iranian dissident awaiting execution by firing squad.

Momentarily with pain

 for my wounded heart

 in this desert of pain

 there is

not

 a

road

whereof

 there is

no end.

From my eyes the water

 of

grief’s rain.

A red moment,

 as you know,

is on the way.

Sooner or later,

 a rage from Hell

 will yell

“Fire!”

I would come to understand why a man whose life experiences completely transcended the simple cottage-like existence of ordinary Canadians would choose such poems to describe his existence.

We started getting together in the morning at Tim Hortons where we would review his poetry, and that of others, and discuss current events (mostly news from the Middle East and Iran), and his extraordinary life. It was both fun and somber at times, but always informative, until one morning when he was particularly argumentative about an obvious grammatical error in one of his poems.

I know, it sounds ridiculous: two people whose second language is English arguing about English grammar. He started slurring his words. It was eleven in the morning and he was drunk. I then realized that at other times when I had overlooked his difficulty in expressing himself in English, it was not because he had an inadequate command of the language.

My father was an alcoholic. I told him that I had disowned my father because of his drinking (I had not, but I could have) and that I was prepared to disown him as a friend if he ever showed up drunk again.

The next time we met, he displayed no signs of intoxication. For our next meeting, for which I was late, he had managed to secure our favourite corner table with windows on Bank and Cooper.

He had made himself at home. Papers were scattered everywhere: on the table, on the floor, with books acting as paperweights. In the middle of this paper tsunami was Abbas, slumped in his chair. His enthusiasm at seeing me could not obscure the fact that he was stone cold drunk. I stood there telling him it was over, that I never wanted to see him again, with a packed Tim Hortons looking on.

I had never done something like that before. I glanced back as the door to Tim's closed behind me. There he was, still slumped among his papers; not the slump or the look of a drunk anymore, but that of someone whose world has just come crashing down around him. It took everything I had not to rush back in and do something. But I knew I couldn't help him. Like I said before, my father was a drunk.

I hadn’t heard from him for at least a week when he called. He asked if we could still be friends. Before I could answer, he said he had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and moved into a place where no drugs and booze were allowed. The place he moved into was a large house in Ottawa’s French enclave of Vanier where he cooked and looked after impoverished Christian men diagnosed with a mild to moderate form of schizophrenia.

The house was the property of a Pentecostal Minister. In return for looking after the men, Abbas was given free room and board and a small stipend that Lucette supplemented as needed. Once Lucette got to know Abbas and what he had been through, she was more than happy to help as long as he was trying to get his life back together. Abbas and Lucette became good friends.

--------------------

Abbas had a Muslim’s love of perfume. That friendship was put to the test early one morning when Abbas, wearing a particularly overpowering scent, came to see me at home when Lucette had yet to have her morning coffee.

I could never bring myself to tell him that sometimes he put on a bit much. It was not a problem for Lucette. He needed to be told, and being told by a friend was better than a stranger. Still in her bathrobe, she shouted from the top of the stairs that he smelled like a woman. It's not the words I would have used. Abbas took it stride, and they both laughed. Mission accomplished.

--------------------

Whenever we talked over the phone he always asked, “How is Lucette?” or “How is my sister?” After she died, if I told him I was visiting her grave, he would insist on coming with me to visit his sister.

Abbas has a key to my condo. He is supposed to check in on me in person if I don’t answer my phone for 24 hours. On the morning of the fourth day of my amateurish attempt at drinking myself to death, it dawned on me: “What if he finds me dead with an open bottle of scotch next to me? I could be responsible for him falling off the wagon.” I could not take that chance.

At this writing, Abbas has been sober for nearly 21 years, almost as long as we have been friends.

There we are. I will now try to silence an old man’s absurdly unrealistic eternal teenager and be content with the memories I have revealed to you in this book—and begrudgingly grateful for a bartender who will serve me my scotch, but not be a party to my passing.

Cheers!