I ran through a sprinkler park wedged into the middle of a block of rowhouses, walked up and down the Main, bought beads in a shop by the bus station, drank the best coffee I’d ever had and ate things I’d never tasted before – Chilean avocado sandwiches and heart of palm salads. I was so hungry for all of it, for the whole city full of languages, the clatter of old Portuguese guys playing dominoes, the cold beer for sale at every dépanneur on every corner, the way people looked and talked and danced. I was in love.

When I came back the following year it was November. The city was frozen, snowless, bleak and ugly. I walked all over looking for traces of the things I loved. There were only grey streets, à louer signs in storefronts, barren rings of hockey rinks waiting for ice. Montreal was on the skids and I was without prospects. But somehow, it was all exciting.

I got a job as a waitress and then as a reporter for a tiny newspaper that paid me by the column inch. At the top of my stories they misspelled my name. My roommate and I lived on reduced-price cheeses from La Vielle Europe and frozen perogies. Our landlord controlled the heat in our cheap St-Urbain apartment and it was the warmest place I’d ever have. I slept with my window cracked open; swaddled up in bed I could feel feathery snowflakes kiss my nose. We lit our kitchen and its ugly linoleum with a desk lamp and a string of fairy lights. Though the green shimmering Montreal I’d first met was nowhere to be found, it was still the early days of love. Nothing could get me down.

The “i love you…” graffiti on the walls of Mile End makes me think of all this. The first time I glimpsed it, I crossed the street to get a better look. It was on St.-Viateur East, low-down, close to the sidewalk. As I would later notice on other walls, the writing was loopy, the way a schoolgirl would write in a diary. Sometimes the i is capped with a heart, and the words are always followed by a pensive dot, dot, dot.

There is something wistful about the loopy writing. Or maybe it’s the dot dot dot that sends me back to when I first loved this city, before I ever got my bike stolen, or my brakes stolen off my bike, or my handlebars stolen off my bike, before I ever got sick of bagels and waiting for the 55 bus. It takes me back to when I used to go out late and come home later and we seemed to subsist on beer and ginger candies; back when our Greek landlord greeted us shouting, “Beautiful girls! Beautiful girls!” (The way he pronounced girls made it sound like he was complimenting us for having breathing organs like fish.)

It’s like a little valentine. A note scrawled on a garage door or on a bit of stucco close to the ground. The words are like seed bombs that guerilla gardeners throw into fenced-off vacant lots, planting flowers in cracks in the concrete.  These messages are surprise gifts, company in an unexpected place.

I asked people in the neighbourhood if they’d seen the “i love you…” and they nodded and smiled, saying, “Oh yeah…” as if it reminded them, too, of falling in love.

I took pictures of the graffiti, which really seemed too sweet and gentle to call graffiti. I started a small collection. But after a while, the writing on the wall turned into one more familiar thing that I actually knew nothing about, like so many of my neighbours, people I saw all the time without knowing their full stories.

Then I noticed the i love yous are fragile. When I go back to try to find them again, I discover they’ve been scrawled on top of or painted over. This is to be expected, not much stands still, untouched. Bikes get stolen, businesses change hands, and my giddy infatuation with the city and the neighbourhood has turned into something more complicated. Yet in the noisy blur of snowplows, car alarms, and bike thieves, someone is still out there, writing love on the wall, surprising us and triggering a thousand different thoughts, with the words, and the dot dot dot…

In the statistical aggregate, girls’ names are a cultural artifact, certainly as anthropologically valuable as a pottery shard or a necklace. They hint at the prevailing feminine ideals and aspirations of the day.

From the 1890s to the 1930s, Americans had the most affection for the sanctified name “Mary.” I imagine that successive waves of Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants in the early 1900s helped to boost Mary up the chart. They put a new inflection on the American Puritan habit of naming girls after virtues (“Prudence:” the Madison of the 1620s). Mary held steady as the #1 name all through the 1940s, but in real numbers she began to slide in the 1950s. As Marys had their own daughters in the postwar years, they might have aspired for their girls to become more secular, assimilated, and modern. It was a new age, the optimistic American Century.

The popular 1950s names capture the decade’s fabled if admittedly overgeneralized zeal for conformity. The McGirl name Jane reached its peak popularity during these years, and many of the top names—Linda, Patricia, Karen, Donna, Cynthia, Sandra—seem almost defiantly ahistorical, lacking firm touchstones in culture, nationality or religion. All but a few of them end on the softening, gently benign “ah” sound. If femininity could have its own phonic, it might well be that.  It’s hard to imagine a “Sandra” or a “Linda” as mannish or overbearing, as if the cadence of the name itself would protect against the 1950s specter of a tomboyish girl. Nor are these exotic or feisty “ethnic” names that proclaim themselves contrarily and uniquely in the world. This was not a time when parents aspired to have the most unique and offbeat girl, or name. Fitting in to the American consensus and being an Every Girl Jane, safely fungible with others, was considered a good, even patriotic, thing.

The most popular girls’ names of our own decade—Isabelle, Lily, Emma, Abigail, Madison, and Olivia—look like inverted icicles on a graph. They skyrocketed exuberantly and nonlinearly from statistically invisible in the early 1900s, to the uncontested frontrunners by 2005. These names are bridesmaids to “Emily,” which was the single most popular American girl’s name for many years, although unseated by its cognate Emma in 2010. Canada’s census is similar to that of the United States. In the first half of 2010, the three most popular girl names were Emma, Emily, and Olivia.

These are all lovely, pretty names—earnest, formal, dignified, and strong. They’re also palpably old-fashioned if not anachronistic. They convey strength with tradition; independence with convention; spunkiness with formal propriety; and rebelliousness, but with a softening, antique patina. The pantheon recalls Henry James heroines. A friend of mine calls them “old lady names.”

The feminist chic decade of the 1970s had snubbed these currently vogue names. It makes sense. The future held such promise for girls in the 1970s, and the present was an exciting, revolutionary eruption against the past that made relics of its Emilys, Abigails and Lilys, too.

But 19^th-century names have resurged today in a culture that looks propitious for middle-class girls and women, who are the emerging winners in schools, the professions, and even in neuroscience, where the much-touted linguistic and social aptitudes of the female brain have come into economic fashion. A bevy of research in 2010 asserts girls’ and women’s superiority in colleges and corner offices. Hannah Rosin of the Atlantic proclaimed “The End of Men” as jobs and managerial styles shift more toward conventionally feminine domains. Women outpace men in the achievement of college degrees. They are a majority in law schools. In 2009 for the first time they earned more Ph.D.s than men. College-educated women now out-earn their male peers, at least in the early years of their careers; and they have weathered the recession more easily than men, with markedly fewer layoffs.

It’s a curious paradox: Western culture in the 21^st century belongs to girls of the middle and affluent classes whom we name from the 19^th century.

The paradox becomes clearer, or at least richer, if we consider another ubiquitous artifact of a girl’s life: dolls.

During those miasmic post-WWII years of feminine conformity, in a country bursting at the seams with pregnant Donnas, Lindas and Sandras, Ruth Handler had a fateful epiphany about her daughter.  Barbara, she noticed, preferred to play with cut-out paper dolls of adult women rather than with three-dimensional, lifelike baby dolls. In 1956, baby dolls were, literally, babies. Girls “played” with them by pretending to be their mothers and nurturing them. Domesticity bored Handler. Pretend domesticity bored her daughter just as intensely. But in her shopping trips Ruth found no suitable dolls or alternatives for Barbara. Handler stumbled across her life’s muse on a trip to Europe in the form of what a documentarian would later describe as a “slutty doll from Germany” named Lilli, a leggy, busty sex toy intended for men. Where men saw titillation Handler saw liberation.

Handler’s Lilli-inspired doll, “Barbie,” debuted at the 1959 Toy Fair in New York, flaunting herself in a skimpy black and white striped swimsuit and her signature ponytail. She was the first adult toy doll in the US—the first doll with breasts (and how). Today, if all of the Barbies ever purchased were laid blond head to high heel-deformed toe, they would circle the equator seven times over. Barbie has been blitzed with attention and criticism in media and pop culture, and even scholars have tapped her dry.

It’s low-hanging fruit to elaborate political critiques and scholarly theory on something nonbiodegradable that lacks the means to defend itself or talk back while reality has a way of refusing to stay put. But there is still this delicious irony at the core of Barbie’s biography: what would become a feminist dishonor, a mark of sexual oppression, started as a feminist inspiration. Barbie’s breasts augured freedom and a carefree, adventuresome, self-realized life. She stood for womanhood unyoked from motherhood and, from the ground level of a 1959 littered with maimed baby dolls under the charge of seven-year-old mothers in training, that was a feminist brainstorm. Handler entrusted the doll with her own daughter’s name, proud to imagine her girl more “Barbie” than “Barbara,” more Swinging Single, less Mom.  “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to become,” Handler explained in her 1994 autobiography. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.”

When Handler died in 2002 several columnists across the country emerged from the closet of Barbie love to rehabilitate and praise Ruth’s creation, in the New York Times’ words, as the first “adult looking doll” that “allowed children to think about who they wanted to grow up to be rather than who they wanted to grow up to nurture.” One eulogized Barbie as her touchstone for imagining a future defined by “the jet set, whatever that was, and groovy digs with a shag rug, fuzzy pink makeup stools and heart shaped mirrors.” Those who played with Barbies were just “a tad more with it than our homey sisters who cuddled plastic dolls.”  Barbie belonged to the future. So do girls, for that matter.  She was “a woman with a history, but no past.”

In the winter of 1983, just before Christmas, Pleasant Rowland spent a frustrating morning scouring the toy stores of Manhattan. She faced the same dilemma that Ruth Handler had 30 years earlier. She found no good dolls for her young nieces to play with. Only Barbie. By this time, Barbie had descended from avatar of liberation to slave of objectification, from too outré to too conventional. Hillary Rodham Clinton, still unknown and, therefore, perhaps, still an unmodified feminist, had vetoed a Barbie for Chelsea as “too sexist” a doll. Rowland, too, wanted something more girl-like, and less demeaning or sexually trivial, for her niece.

Barbie never saw Samantha Parkington coming. She was looking so intently to the bright horizon and future for girls that she missed Rowland’s sneak attack from the past.

Like Handler before her, Rowland created dolls to fill what she perceived as a need and a gap in the market. “American Girl” dolls are inspired by distinct, easily sliced moments of US history, including a slave girl, a Victorian orphan, “Kit,” a clever Depression Era girl, a Revolutionary War girl, an Irish factory worker girl, and Samantha Parkington, an early 20^th century girl. (In 2009 American Girl released a new historical doll, Rebecca Rubin, only to discover that their plastic resurrection of a nine-year-old Jewish immigrant girl from New York’s tenements shared a name with an “armed and dangerous” international eco-terrorist and prolific arsonist on the FBI’s wanted list.)

Accompanying books and accessories detail each doll’s history and create miniaturized virtual dollhouse worlds for her. The Company’s facts are meticulously checked, and the garnishing narrative details often fascinating, unusual, and thoughtfully attuned to the particular interests of children. The stories do wrestle with challenging, unpleasant themes. But the historical gestalt is delicately airbrushed and cherry-picked like the “living history” reconstruction of colonial Williamsburg from which Rowland drew much of her inspiration.

Rowland’s American Girl dolls are the fastest selling ever, and the focal point of a pre-teen girls’ mania. The graph of American Girl sales figures most likely would overlay with those for the meteorically popular names of the largely middle-class and affluent girls who purchase these dolls and ensembles for over $100 a pop. In 2000 Rowland sold the company to Barbie’s home corporation, Mattel, for 700 million. By 2010 they had sold 18 million dolls and 132 million books (over 25 percent of their sales are non-US), and marketed well over 3,000 products. Living under the same corporate roof, Barbie slid as her old-fashioned alter ego Samantha ascended.

Children still have their full imaginative faculties intact, so they probably customize and animate their dolls in their own ways. The dolls most likely reveal less about the girls who play with them and more about the women who purchase, banish or pre-screen them. “When you buy an American Girl product” for your daughter, says Adrienne Fonatanella, who oversees Barbie and American Girl as president of Mattel’s “Girls” unit, “you buy into a long term philosophy.” Critics and devotees agree that American Girl promotes a “way of life,” an enveloping “philosophy,” or what one critic less charitably indicts as a “cult” or “parallel universe,” replete with its own websites, magazines, “Innerstar University” virtual world, fashion shows, birthday parties, matching Mom and Daughter and Doll clothing lines, and furniture.

What is this “way of life” and the “long-term philosophy?” For their part, mothers appreciate that the dolls insinuate an historical education, of some form, into their children’s play, which reassures a generation of middle-class parents notoriously consternated about missing brain development opportunities in their children’s leisure time or sleeping hours (“The idea is to breed girls who are smart, just not so smart they can do the math” and comprehend the exorbitant doll prices, a contrarian from Canada complains). “Mothers who buy the doll figure they’re not just buying a doll—they’re buying an education,” explains Dorothy Singer, a psychology professor at Yale. More important, though, mothers love American Girl’s “empowering message,” and its “embrace of multiculturalism.” And, perhaps most of all, the absence of Barbie-like sexuality, or any sexuality. Indeed Rowland wanted to offer an alternative—an antidote, even—to dolls such as the putative bimbo Barbie.        

American Girl appeals to middle-class mothers and girls in a way that defies caricatures of both traditional femininity and feminism. The dolls and their devotees are not quite of a type with either. American Girl is old-fashioned, but not antifeminist, per se. The dolls aren’t weak, submissive or mild characters; nor are they threatening, subversive, abrasively rebellious, or sexually unsettling. They convey what are really a set of feminist-prone values that have acquired the absolving patina of history. The dolls exhibit the virtues of pluck, smarts, and spunk, but diluted of their pungency by the workings of history and time. These traits elicit more admiration and affection retrospectively, like the works of a deceased artist, and in any case America often admires female rebels and feminists when they are dead. No one can accuse an American Girl of radicalism, grating feistiness or feminism. But nor is she a meek figure. The spirit and American Girl “way of life,” as with our name fashions, is probably best summarized as antiquarian feminist.

I don’t mean to sound like a doll crank. I can understand the appeal, certainly, of American Girl and the antiquarian feminist mannerism that it embeds. There is something reassuringly safe about having your girl play with a doll that is not of the present or the future, which are, respectively, dangerous and uncertain places. When my goddaughter was turning 11, I found myself momentarily debating between an American Girl accessory as a gift or an item of clothing that had the baffling, unnerving but apparently urgently-cool words “JUICY COUTURE” imprinted across the rear. I didn’t fancy either choice. The enticing image of myself as the hipster godmother, down with the Juicy Culture, whatever that may be, trespassed quickly across my mind before I remembered that I didn’t want any boy thinking my goddaughter to be juicy. It felt like my consumer choice was between a frumpy, antiquated vision of girlhood or a racy cheap one.

Pleasant Rowland’s invention was a gesture of caring and stewardship toward girls, just like Ruth Handler’s, but one inspired, significantly, by a vision of past restoration instead of future liberation. The American Girl way of life, while not weak or conventionally feminine, isn’t “progressive,” in any literal or figurative sense, either. If nothing else, it seems that being a progressive, the new term of art for the American liberal conscience, must mean being forward-looking, and having a love of the perfectible and unknown future over the flawed but known past.

Revisited from the vantage point of American Girl in our time, there is something brave and touching in the otherwise unremarkable fact that Handler entrusted girls with a sexy, adult woman doll, as if female sexuality were nothing to fear or dread, as if girls could play with it, in many senses—as if imagining being a grown-up woman in the future might be more beguilingly unfettered and boundless than playing at being an eternally pre-teen and sexually latent historic dead girl.

But I get the sense that American Girl succeeds precisely because it reconciles competing impulses of a confused moment, which is what every idea, person, or object that charms us manages to do. It’s a moment when the middle and affluent classes who name their girls Isabelle and buy them American Girl dolls want to embrace and nurture girls’ success and growing clout, while de-clawing that success of the currently unpopular (even politically unmentionable) feminism that secured and defends it. They want girl power for their daughters, but they want girl power that is softer, and not so socially objectionable or polarizing.

I have only a son, but if I had a girl I would probably hope privately for a similar resolution, or comfort, for her. Few parents aspire after all to have children who grow up to be at social loggerheads, or subversive—even if we do dream for them of the opportunities and ambitions that politically or socially subversive acts often obtain for us in the first place.

What’s in a name or a doll, though, you might be thinking. Certainly, these artifacts on their own are harmless enough. But it seems to me that like any other worthwhile relics, the shared antiquarian feminist manner in name and doll encapsulates a more consequential social drift.

Consider a cultural paradox that in some ways mimics the feminist antiquarian style: Girls and women are succeeding in school and the economy at a time when popular views of gender roles and differences are more conservative, even retro, than they have been for some time. Nature over nurture, for example, has been a resurgent gender ideology for many years, most widely and popularly distilled in the mega-bestseller Women are from Venus, Men are From Mars and other defenses of “natural” female and male roles and female roles. Single-sex public schools and classes are back in vogue, a 19^th-century model of sex-segregated schooling revived as a cause among wealthy American patrons of girls’ education such as Ann Tisch, benefactor of the Young Women’s Leadership schools.

Likewise, ideas about motherhood, staying at home and “opting out” of the workforce in western cultures are more retro and domestically tethering than they were three decades ago. And young women’s newfound earning power and academic clout hasn’t made them more sexually bold or confident in their own skins: attitudes toward sexuality among college-age women are more timid and hesitant than they were even twenty years ago, according to historian of sexuality Dagmar Herzog. In the popular imagination, the nineteenth-century idea of natural sex differences in thought and cogitation has been gently refurbished even in vernacular brain science, oxymoronic as such a thing may sound. An emblematic book on cogitation has the simple, declarative title, Boys and Girls Learn Differently!

On the one hand we’ve soared ahead and, on the other hand, we’ve seen the gains given back, or at least softened and undercut in their power, by antiquated cultural fashions that revive pre-feminist attitudes about everything from sex difference to neurology.

In short, imagine a world in which girls and women are powerful without being powerful. That is the antiquarian feminist mannerism.

“Who’s Felicity Merriman, a friend of yours?” I asked a weedy, garrulous neighborhood girl (an Emily) some time ago, before I first encountered Rowland’s brainchildren. Felicity! A strange neo-Puritan girl’s name, I thought to myself.

Emily plays soccer and aces her classes and interacts confidently with the children on her street like the lawyer—or the vet, or the doctor—that she wants to be when she grows up. I know her mother and it would be fair to say that she wants her daughter to live the feminist dream while fitting in amiably to an anti-feminist moment. It’s not an unusual dream.

Emily giggles and tells me, no, Felicity’s her Revolutionary War doll. She’s an American Girl.

I met Albert Murray two years ago. I was working as a Community Chaplain for the Correctional Service of Canada. Al was just finishing a 26 year federal sentence for armed robbery and was living, as he still does, in social service housing on the west side of Montreal.

At 89 years old, Al leads a very quiet life. He can’t hear and can barely see.  His interaction with the world is extremely limited. Other than the couple that runs his house, I was (past tense because I have since moved to Connecticut) his all-but only visitor.

And, I was the only person who engaged Al in anything more than perfunctory conversation. Conversation? How do you converse with someone who can’t hear, whose profound deafness is beyond the help of auditory aids? For the first year, I brought my laptop to our meetings and wrote brief questions and comments in very large font, bold letters. (Remember, Al can’t see much either). Later, I began using inch-high printed letters on a handheld chalkboard instead.

As for Al’s half of the conversation, well, Al may be deaf, but he certainly can talk.  My simple written questions inspired a thousand tales of Al’s life, tales told with the traditional volubility and wit of his Nova Scotia/New England Irish ancestors.  What follows is a compilation of a fraction of these stories.   In transcribing Al’s stories by hand and by computer, I have tried to keep my editorial influence to a minimum, only changing syntax or grammar where necessary to maintain good English sense and ease of reading.

Robert Bergner

I’ve got to start at my first time in reform school.  The Lyman School was on the Worcester turnpike about 30 miles from Boston.  The first time I went there, I came in with three other kids.  While we were in the office being registered, a kid we knew came up to us and said, “Tell them you’re Protestant.  That way, you get out from polishing the floors on your hands and knees every Sunday.”

~ ~ ~

I had an old Chevy when I first came to Montréal and I didn’t have much money.  I was working for eighty-five cents an hour as a labourer.  It was raining and I had to go across the Victoria Bridge.  About half way across, I got a flat tire.  Me, I decided to get the tire fixed myself.  I didn’t want to run on the flat tire because that would ruin it.  It’s a narrow bridge, but I stopped my car, got out the tools and took the tire off with cars whizzing by me just inches away.  I carried the tire across the bridge to a gas station.  The guy there fixed the flat.  Then, I carried the tire all the way back to the car and put it back on with all those cars whizzing by.  I said to myself, “This is crazy.  I could get myself killed!  I’ve got to get some money.” That’s when I decided to get back into bank robbing.

~ ~ ~

When I visited Boston, someone asked me how I liked Montreal.  I said, “It’s great.  It’s got a church on every corner and a bank in between.  But,” I said, “it’s getting bad. There’s too many bank robbers.  Last month, one gang of bank robbers was about to go into the front of a bank while another gang was running out the back with all the money.”  That was in the newspaper.

~ ~ ~

In Boston, my brother was in the hospital having a cancer operation.  So I went down to the corner where I used to hang out.  I went into the tavern, and the owner was there.  And the owner told me, “Yeah, your brother comes in once in a while.  He picks up a guy’s glass and drinks it ‘cause he doesn’t have any money.  When I tell him to stop it he says that I better watch it or he’ll get his brother Al on me.”

I also went to see my first girlfriend.  I went to see her where she worked, in a supermarket.  I had a very nice suit on and the manager thought I was a cop.

Her husband came in to pick her up. They met when I was in the can.  She was going to a skating rink and met this guy and she married him.  I heard about it in the reformatory.  I was playing handball and one of the guys says to me, “Guess what?”  I said, “Yeah, I know.  Eda’s getting married.  I saw it in the newspaper.”

When she saw me she didn’t recognize me.  I had to tell her who I was.  She says, “I thought you were in Canada.”  I says, “I got a car.”  I had a nice Dodge Dart convertible — blue.  It was a hell of a nice car.  It looked like a Cadillac.

When her husband came up, she introduced me to him, whatever his name was.  He says, “Not the Al Murray!”

I said, “The only one I know.”

My old girlfriend said, “He’s the only one I ever loved.”  Right in front of her husband!

They wanted me to go to their home on Cape Cod for the weekend.  But the cops had a watch on my car.  There weren’t any warrants out on me, but they wanted to know where I was whenever I went to Boston because I had done so many crimes there.  I didn’t want to cause my girlfriend and her husband any trouble so I didn’t visit them on the Cape.

~ ~ ~

April fools is an appropriate birthday for me. A joke on my mother.  My mother had eight kids, one died in childbirth.  Later, when she must have been in her sixties, an Italian contractor fell in love with her.  In the end, he committed suicide.  He had left his wife for her.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the sex drive gets you in a lot of trouble because you do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do.

~ ~ ~

Once, I was working for my girlfriend.  She had a bar and I used to mop up the floors the next day.  One morning, I found a wallet.  A guy called her and said he had lost his wallet.  I knew what it was like to lose a lot of money, so, me, I said I found it.  I should have kept twenty dollars for a reward.  When he came to pick it up he didn’t even say, “Thank you”.  It turned out he was a prison guard.  If I had known that, I would have kept it all.

~ ~ ~

I got in a poker game in Boston with some of the guys I knew when I was younger.  One of the guys there was a card manipulator.  He could deal you a hand and tell you what cards you had.

Someone had a pair when I had three of a kind.  He got mad and threw the cards at me.  One of the cards hit me on the ear.  I said, “Hey, it’s the weekend we can’t get more cards.  No more card throwing or I’m going to get a gun.”

He said, “Anyone can get a gun.”

“Yeah,” said one of the other guys, “but Al will use it.  So no more card throwing.”

~ ~ ~

At the reform school, there were six or seven cottages holding thirty or forty kids each, all between the ages of about ten and sixteen.  After sixteen, you went to a reformatory where the population was from seventeen to old age.

At thirteen, I wet the bed every night.  The shame of coming down the stairs with wet sheets made me run away.  I hitchhiked a ride when I got about five miles back towards Boston.  The guy turned the car around and went back to the reform school.  When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was the assistant superintendent of the school and he was taking me back.

I had changed clothes with a scarecrow, but he said, “Take a look at your socks.”

They had Lyman School printed on them.

~ ~ ~

When we got back to the school, it was assembly time and all the other kids were in their daily assembly.  When they saw me come into the meeting hall, they all laughed at my appearance. I was assigned to the disciplinary cottage.

Each of the cottages was run by a husband and wife team. In the disciplinary cottage, in the evening, you had to stand in line from supper to bedtime with your face four inches from the wall.  At bedtime, we went to the dormitory where we slept with a night watchman in a cubicle that overlooked us all.  This night watchman was supposed to give care to anyone that got sick.

The superintendent of the school came to see me and asked why I had run away.  I told him that I had been scrubbed with a scrubbing brush to stop me from wetting the bed.  He didn’t believe that anyone would do that to me.

He was a doctor and I took off my shirt to show him my back, which was covered with bruises.

He immediately took me out of the disciplinary cottage and sent me back to my own cottage where he gave the master a warning not to use physical means on me.  He asked me to promise him that I would never run away again without coming to him, which I did.

Three months later, he died in an automobile accident and I ran away again.

~ ~ ~

After I got shot in the leg, I was laying in bed in traction and the doctor came in to see me.  He said, “I did the work on your leg. Who’s gonna pay me?”  I answered, “You get paid by Medicare.  I’m facing twenty years in prison, do you think I care who pays?”  He just walked away.

~ ~ ~

Anytime there was a runaway, the boiler room blasted a horn to notify the surrounding countryside. They gave five dollars to anyone who returned a runaway.

I was again picked up on a road several miles away and was sent to the disciplinary cottage for the older kids.  Some months later, at that cottage, three kids faked a toothache, knowing that the watchman would come in and give them medicine for relief.  They took the weight off the toilet seat return, put it in a pillowcase, hit him on the head when he came in and killed him.  They each got twelve years.  One of them was later in the gang that robbed Brinks.

~ ~ ~

I broke into a house with some friends on a Sunday.  A neighbour called the police who surrounded the house and got us to come out.  The service in the church across the street from the house was just ending, so the congregation also gathered around the house we’d broken into.  When we finally came out, one of the cops grabbed me rather roughly and I hit myself intentionally on the nose, causing my nose to bleed in front of all the people.

When we got to the police station, they told us to empty our pockets.  When I emptied my pockets, I had a set of rosary beads there.  One of the cops pushed me into the telephone booth and started to hit me calling me a protestant bastard.  I immediately I started stomping on his feet causing him to drag me out of the booth where all the cops were laughing and saying, “That’ll teach you a lesson.  Don’t take a tiger in a telephone booth.”  Famous, famous words.

The judge was my father’s Sunday school teacher and they came to some kind of an agreement so that I could stay at home.  But, when the judge saw me, he remembered that I had been before him a month earlier.  He said, “All bets are off.  He’s got to go to reform school.”

~ ~ ~

While I was on parole from reform school, I got caught with a stolen car.  They sent me to the Concord Reformatory where they sent men 17 years and older instead of the state prison in Charlestown Massachusetts.  All this time, in reform school and in reformatory, I was making friends with men who I met again and again all through the system.

~ ~ ~

Between the reform school and the reformatory, I had my first girlfriend. She was the head of a group of girls who didn’t pay much attention to the law.

I was coming home late one night.  I had a stick and I was hitting a can with it and two girls stepped in front of me.  One of them said, “We’re going to give you a beating.  You’ve been telling everybody that she [the other girl] was in the hospital with a miscarriage.”

I said, “I don’t even know you two.”  They had got me mixed up with my partner whose name was the same as mine, Al.

I later began to visit her in her house, in the evening when her father was working in the shipyards.

I wasn’t 17.  And she introduced me to sex.  That was like opening Pandora’s Box.  I couldn’t get enough.

~ ~ ~

I was told about a beer joint where, at the end of the day, the bartender put the remaining cash in an empty bread package and then put it in a wastepaper basket.  I went by when they closed.

The beer joint was on a corner.  I got in by breaking a window on one of the side streets.  It just happened that a Special Service Squad of the Boston police heard the noise.  They came to the broken window and told me to come out.  I picked up a full liquor bottle and threw it the length of the bar and out a window at the far end of the room.  The whole Special Service Squad ran to the corner and around it, thinking I was coming out at the other end of the building.

When they left the side window where I had broken in, I ran out and got away.   Some Special Service Squad!  They’re supposed to be the best of the best!

~ ~ ~

What made me go to the gun?  I was stealing with two guys and they told me they were going to crack a safe in a theatre.  One of them said to me, “It’s hard to get in there.  Will you stay inside when the theatre closes and let us in when everybody’s gone.”

So I went into the theatre and sat in the toilet until I couldn’t hear anybody.  When I came out, the theatre was dark except for a light in the manager’s office.  I went over and saw that he was counting the money from the evening.  If I had had a gun I could have just taken the money.  But I figured we were going to crack the safe, so we’d get the money anyway.

I waited until twelve midnight and let the other guys in. They had said that they knew how to crack a safe, but we spent a couple of hours banging away at it.  Finally we had to use a hanger to push the tumblers out.  And, when we got in, we only found 16 dollars in the safe.

I told the guys, “If I had had a gun earlier I could have gotten it all.” So that’s why I started carrying a gun.  From then on we had plenty of money.  I think a must have held up every liquor store in my hometown and half the liquor stores in the next.

~ ~ ~

In downtown Boston, I noticed a fur store across the street from the Ritz Carlton Hotel with a fur coat in each side window.  There was a fur jacket on a chair and a mannequin with a full-length coat.  I found a driver and a stolen Lincoln Zephyr.  We went back that same night.  There was no one on the streets after six o’clock.  I told the driver to pull up in front of the store.  I said I would break both front windows and he should take the jacket and I would take the long fur coat.  When I went to get the coat off the mannequin, it was too hard to take off, so I picked the mannequin up with the coat still on and took it to the car.  The driver took off in a hurry with me in the back seat.  I told him to slow down, but, at the corner, he took a wide screeching turn.  A police car happened to be passing by and saw that we didn’t stop at the stop sign.  The chase began.

We were being chased by a very fast police car, but it wasn’t as fast as our Lincoln.  We took off along Tremont Street just as people were coming out of the theatres.

We couldn’t shake the police car, so I again told the driver to slow down.  This time he did.  I got the coat off the mannequin, opened the rear door and booted the mannequin out.  It slid under a car parked on the side of the street.  The cops chasing us screeched to a halt to pick up what they thought was a fully dressed person.  We took off and got away.

About a month later, when I got caught for another crime, a cop came up to me and told me that he was the one that had stopped for the mannequin.  He said that the local newspaper had used the headline:  Cop Stops For Dummy.  Everyone at the police station had laughed at him.

~ ~ ~

When we were in Virginia, the hotel we were in was half hotel and half whorehouse.  While we were drinking a couple of sailors came by – our door was always open – and said, “We came here to get laid, but all the girls are busy.”

I said, “I’ll take care of that.”

I went out in the hallway and yelled, “Shore Patrol!”  All the doors popped open and the sailors came stumbling out, trying to get their pants on, and ran out into the street.

‘There you go,” I said. “Take your choice.  There no more sailors here.”

“Thanks,” they said.

Later, one of the ladies came out and asked, “Who shouted Shore Patrol?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t know anything about Shore Patrol.”

“Well, whoever it was, it gave us a break.  We get paid in advance.”

~ ~ ~

I worked for a guy who founded a church in Park Extension in Montreal. He was a contractor, building houses.  One of the church members came to him and said,  “Will you build a house for me?  How much will it cost?”  The contractor gave an approximate figure.

Halfway through building the house, the price of steel beams skyrocketed and the contractor said to the church member that he would have to charge more for the house.  The church member said, “Oh, no!” and took him to court.  So, then you had two church members fighting over money.  For all the good intentions and for all their pious mouthings, Church people are just like everybody else.

~ ~ ~

I started four AA groups while I was inside.  I was the chairman of the groups.  We used to have outside people come in every week and they said that my groups were the best that they attended.  I asked why.  They said, “Because you have them open up and admit why they are alcoholics.  In our outside meetings, there’s a little of that, but here everyone of your guys speaks.”  I started with just couple of guys in a group and ended up with as many as sixteen.  Not bad, considering that in one of the places I was there weren’t that many English guys.

One time, the prison Chaplain got a letter from Ottawa.  I was doing all his paper work, writing all his reports.  Ottawa said that his reports – which were my reports – were the best in all of Canada because they covered so many angles, such as the number of English and French guys in the institution, the percentage of the English guys who attended Alcoholics Anonymous, etc.  In the end, I didn’t get that high of a percentage in my groups because most guys wouldn’t admit they were alcoholics.

~ ~ ~

I go back over some of the things I’ve done and, when you’re broke and somebody’s bugging you for the rent and you don’t have a job, you only have one alternative, which is to go out and steal some money with the least chance of getting caught.  You get caught; you do the time.  If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

I read the paper every day and someone is stealing from the big companies, their own employees are doing it.  And they’re supposed to be the straight people.  But, my father told me, “Wherever you find a lot of money, you’ll find somebody’s stealing.”  I’ve found that to be true.

I’ve asked a couple of straight people if they would rob a bank if they knew they wouldn’t get caught.  And they said, “Yes, if I knew how.”

There is among the men who earn the title of Marine a certain joy in self-destruction. I know; I was one of them. We were masochists. We thought of pain as a hammer that shaped us and molded us and it was how we defined ourselves. We never spoke of it in these words but we felt it all the same. In the absurd crucible of fire that was my time in the infantry, I enjoyed seeing parts of myself, parts I hated, destroyed.

I was young when I enlisted and I enlisted to escape my life of comfort. I wanted more than the world’s promises. I saw a nation of people so obsessed with money and success they became slaves to it. I saw weakness and arrogance and a disparity earned or unearned and I wanted no part of it. I wanted to prove myself. To rise above myself.

There is among us a shivering joy on the range or in combat when we slap magazines into our rifles and yank back on the charging handles and put the stocks to our shoulders and aim down the sight. A screaming, brutal, incredible joy. There is joy in being a monster. There is joy in dominance. There is joy in suicide.

It’s a humid spring night and we stand out on the balcony and watch the storm sweep in from the west. The trees rustle in the wind and lightning flares in the high reaches of the sky too distant for thunder. The clouds are thick and dark, their underbellies purple with city light. We’re wet now, our clothes soaked through, but we stand here anyway looking at the rain and not speaking. Him against the doorjamb, smoking. Me leaning with my arms on the wooden rail, leaning and staring out across the parking lot below where the streetlights stand in their swirling skirt of amber rain, where every reflection on the asphalt is long and bleary.

There is a small table between us and on it a bottle of rum. The bottle is half empty and the rain runs down the side like sweat and in each droplet a perfect and wall-eyed world. We are drunk. Drunk and thinking of times shared.

I’m looking out at the parked cars but my mind is a world distant and I smile and say, Do you remember our first drill?

Which one was that?

The mortar shoot. When it was so fuckin muddy, remember? We had to fuckin lay prone to look through the sights, dude.

He laughs there in the darkness. Yeah. When we had to seat the baseplates I took that facial. Fuckin mud from head to toe.

I turn and put my back to the rail and look at him. It was miserable, dude. Like the fucking worst drill you can imagine.

Yeah.

But it was fun. It was a fucking blast. I grab the bottle and drink and cough and set it back. You know. I can talk about it all fuckin day long to my friends but they don’t understand. They can’t. Like not even my fuckin girl.

My friend, who is recently divorced, who now sees his son every other weekend, who lives away from the house he lost, nods. Yeah. I know what you mean.

That drill up north, that nine driller when we were all slippin around and shit in the ice, us fucking busting our heads, you remember that one? Remember how fucking stupid that was?

Yeah, man.

End of that drill, Sunday I guess, I was sittin up in a humvee, shivering my balls off, miserable, fuckin terrible. But I was sittin there and the sun came out and for a minute I was happy. Happy, you know? Just that little bit of warmth. It was fuckin sublime. There’s like this fuckin feeling you get, like pride in pain. Like you’re so miserable for so long that normalcy is fuckin heaven. When people ask me what it was like, that’s what I tell them. But they still don’t understand.

They can’t, man.

No, I say. I guess they can’t.

He flicks his cigarette out into the dark and it spirals through the air and disappears over the balcony like a wayward firework. I think of flares fired from the mortar tube. Flares like false suns.

After a time he says, I’ll tell you something. When you’re over there home’s a dream, isn’t it?

Yeah, I say. Of course.

It’s all you can think about. You think when you get home you’ll make things right. Maybe you do for a while. But then home just becomes more bullshit, you know? Work, fuckin college, bills, you got girls pissin in your ear. And now you got nothin to look forward to. No dream. This is it, there ain’t nothin fuckin better, and you gotta learn to live with that. People wonder why we kill ourselves. Why suicide rates are so fuckin high. That’s why, man. That’s it right there. That’s a hard fact to come to terms with.

I think about the long first days home from the war. Carousel days of fast food and whiskey and drunken sex. I agree. Absolutely.

I’ll tell you. Sometimes I just want to drop it. Drop everything. Give it up and go walking. Just leave everything behind and just go the fuck out there somewhere. It don’t matter where. Just give it up. I can’t, not no more, since I got my son. You gotta come outn see him sometime, man. He’s gettin big. Almost three.

Three, I say. An echo. The age doesn’t bother me so much as the idea behind it: that slippery sense of time here where every day is the same. Where it isn’t defined by pain. Three years here in comfort.

I know, man. Like we went over there in 2003. Seven fuckin years ago. It feels like my life ain’t changed at all. I mean I know it has, fuckin obviously, but still. It might as well be fuckin yesterday. There’re kids I work with that were in fuckin elementary school for Nine Eleven. Fifth fuckin grade, dude. And there we were in basic.

I smile at that. I can’t help myself. I remember thinking it was a joke, a way for the drill instructors to fuck with us. I hadn’t known it was real until I graduated. Talk about terrible fuckin timing on our part.

I guess, man. I don’t know. He tilts his wrist up to the light and wipes the face of his watch clear. Listen. I gotta get. I won’t be worth shit tomorrow.

What time you work?

Zero six. Always do on Friday mornings.

Fuck. Terrible.

Yeah. Tell me about it. Least I’m off on Sunday.

I’d hope so. Be fuckin retarded to work on Easter.

We shake hands and hug and I say Listen, dude. Drive safe. If you need me give me a call.

I will. Take it easy.

You too.

He walks down the stairs and out into the parking lot and there is the sound of the car door and the slow grind of the engine with the bad starter and then the flare of taillights. They turn every puddle into blood and the close walls of the complex into burnt skin and mortared veins like architecture in some deep circle of hell. He drives off in the rain and catches the curb as he makes the corner. Leaving me to stand and watch the storm, entirely unaware of the absurdity of telling him to stay safe while letting him drive home drunk. But standing here in the rain, that doesn’t matter. It can’t. We’ve been through training together and combat together. He won’t get into an accident. And if he does, so what? There is a joy in self-destruction. We knew it once. Sometimes we still do.

I take another drink. After a time I go inside and stumble into bed and sleep. I dream of a country where I dreamed about this one and it is a good dream and a sad one and lost when I wake up. I won’t remember much of this night. Little worth remembering because the memory is already there. Talk of memory is not the memory or the dream. Only words to share and bring to life things forgotten.

Walking the diagonal to her place. Up Gilford, right on Hotel de Ville. Ringing her buzzer. This door, so recently the door of a stranger. How foreign it was the first time, the boulevard, the traffic. The blue graph and spinning galaxies on the computer screen.  The vaulted whiteness, the spareness. How impossible to love a woman who lived this way.  Who was so poised, so elegant. So remote. Not to mention so beautiful. Yet why did this thought occur to me at all?  Because already I was doing just that—imagining it.  Now the distance has been breached. But the strangeness persists. Cooking together, eating together, lovemaking, waking up to each other… no getting used to it.

She the unapproachable. Unreachable. Unassimilable.

We like to eat out together. After two years of gazing into restaurants envying the people inside drinking smoking eating talking, now to be among them, to be seated across from my dinner companion, she with her wine, I with my beer, lighting up before dinner.

But not tonight. The new Thai restaurant on Laurier in Outremont.  Her idea. All plate-glass windows, upscale. Ascending tiers, tables jammed, mostly with young couples. Professionals–it’s Friday night.  Sudden aversion. Revulsion. What kind of life is she reeling me into? How well she fits in. Sitting back with her wine, gazing at me, enjoying herself. I can’t sit back. Can’t return her gaze. Won’t help out with conversation. Walking silently back to her place in raw drizzle. Slightly ahead of her the whole way. A bourgeois individualist, that’s what she is. A few more nights like this and I’ll be a bourgeois individualist too.

My class at McGill.  Women and literature. I’m turning them on to feminism, the radical kind, Woman and Nature, Of Woman Born. They read passages aloud. When I walk in the room now the air is thick with complicity. Often there are tears. One night I stop over at her place afterwards. Hoping to convey some of this to her. Her TV is on with sound muted.  Images of a French talk show host flicker on the screen.  She leads me into her bedroom to show me her new $130 sheets. What was I thinking? I make an excuse and fly down her stairs out the door. Relapse into “can’t do this,” into recoil. Bad fit. Impossible fit.

She comes to see me on her break. She only has an hour.  It starts slowly, with protests and feigning of surprise. Then it goes very fast. Off with her grey flannel pants, her black shirt.  My sweater, my jeans, our bras, etc. The pile on the floor by my bed.  Afterwards she pats herself down, checks herself out in the full-length mirror downstairs. I point to her face—telltale flush. She says she’ll put on some powder. I watch her being carried off in the cab. In a daze, in my robe and slippers at two in the afternoon. Whatever’s come over us?

Looking into her eyes again across the table at la Cucina, enjoying this again, being one of the anointed ones, drinking and talking, and feeling that unearthly shock at her beauty, that dark secret passionate self so unmanifest in any of her daytime personae. When it comes back it does so rushingly it seeps in through all the cracks, and the doubts I had just hours before. . . evaporate. Make no sense at all.

Stop, go. Open, closed. Fits, starts. There is no getting used. Distance between our two homes—a sixteen-minute walk—yesterday a blessing, today a torment.

The films we go see together: “l’amante,” “Damage,” “Un Amour de Swann,” “la Femme d’a Cote.”  Always her choice, always a romance. Stormy. Dangerous. Bourgeois. Heterosexual. “Timeless,” she says. “Love doesn’t change.”

I rent “A Question of Silence” from La Boite Noire. Three women who murder a male shopkeeper and the woman psychiatrist assigned to their case. An initiation into the world of women’s silent suffering, and bonding.  I’ve talked about this film in class, I’ve seen it three times. Now I want to watch it with her. We play it after dinner. She falls asleep halfway through.

Why? Why? What is the place where we meet? What is our third thing?

Next morning she’s on her exercise bike. Reading an English exercise book. Her hard white face, thin mouth betraying nothing  (to think she’s accused me of being rigid).  Did she even notice the distance I kept all night? Bodies never touching. Feeling of doom so familiar. No way out without great devastation on both sides.

I’m coming down with a cold. She will never care about the things I’m passionate about. When I try and talk to her about this she looks stricken. She starts to sniffle too. We are making each other sick. Time to admit I’ve made another mistake and cut our losses. This one is getting more costly all the time.

I dream of women who speak my language. I dream of earth and big trees and birdsong and forests in Maine and Vermont.  Thinking she’ll never understand this part of my life, thinking I’ve got to find a friend to talk to who understands what I mean when I say feminism. Thinking I’ll die if I can’t talk about these things.

Reading about Christa Wolf in exile in Santa Monica. Wanting to explain to her: that’s what this city is for me: a place to survive, to keep on. After the fall. After life, it feels like sometimes. The meaningful part of my life being over.

Tonight when she touched me, put her hand on my forehead, put her hands on my hands, they were the hands of a stranger. Formal. Strangers trying to reassure each other they really aren’t strangers.

“You just want to be free… politics is just an excuse. An escape!”  Her stony white impassive face. Furrow between her eyes so deep.

I put my hand on her forehead and she sighs, then tears come down, then sobs. She can’t stop. Says she doesn’t know why. Then she rubs my back and neck—they’re so tight—and I cry too.

We go to bed and there it is all over again. The fit of her limbs of her chest of her lips. The sweetness suffusing, enveloping.  And I think she may have a point about my politics. Because when she opens she is so open it astounds me sometimes, and I’m so tight, so tense, she kisses me all over my face trying to let me know how she loves me but I know deep down I can’t take it in.

Coming in from the cold, “un frisson dans le dos,” she wants me to warm her and I do, we throw ourselves on the futon and I hold her and rub her and nuzzle in her neck. And am so happy. We make dinner and eat in front of TV, not really watching it.

Standing in her hallway putting on my boots. Late morning light.  She on the threshold of her office, face pale, worried but rallying her arguments. Why she loves Proust, or any writer who tells it like it is, in all its complexity. Why she hates political art, art that tells you how to think. Finds it so narrow, reductive.

“But what if all we’re left with are the old ways of knowing? Of loving?” (Marcel and his obsessive fantasies.) “Don’t we have to look for something new when it comes to love?” Anticipating her answer. What’s wrong with the old ways of loving. Love is love. You could do with a little more of those old ways of loving.  “Don’t you ever feel like shaking up the old order?” I continue.  “Are you really satisfied with the way things are?”

“Of course not. But women are no better than men, look how they act when they’re given a little bit of power. Lesbians aren’t anything special we’re just a sexual minority. Why can’t you accept that?”

Wanting to cry violently, to get up and leave. I can’t love someone who thinks like this. One last thrust, boots are on. Wanting only to have my body all over hers to be all pressed up against her.

“This is no way to love,” she says.

I leave to get the Sunday papers. Out in the wind on the way to Le Lux.  Am I just desperate? We don’t have a goddamn thing to talk about. All we have in common is sex. Music sometimes. We could disappear from each others’ lives without a ripple, the ties that bind are so frail, so few. We wouldn’t even write each other letters—what would they say??

Lesbians, she is saying, I’m back in her hallway taking off my boots. All your ideas about lesbians. But she’s opening her arms to me as she says this. She’s asking for forgiveness. Admitting she was bad. She was infantile, reactionary. All the things I’d wanted to say but didn’t. It was because she felt abandoned. She wanted to get back at me.

What begins to surface. The dark side the hidden. Soft vulnerable beneath the carapace. She the fourth of six children, too many for her mother to cope with, she used to pray to God every day before they came home from school “que je puisse les supporter.”  A teacher once wrote on her report card, “Elle manque d’affection.” Easily feels abandoned.

“You’ve got to learn to be patient,” she says. “This is just the beginning.”

I say I’ll try and believe her.