Urban Romance

By Dana Aaron Mather

Sentenced to two years less day, convicted felon Christian Dufort relates the perverse series of events and relationships that lead him to incarceration.  From his beautiful mother, who sent naked pictures to rock stars, to the accounting teacher, who inspired a dehabilitating form arithnomania, we see the origins of this perverse, neurotic, and eventually criminal man.  Addicted to chatlines, neurotic about numbers, inexplicably driven to deposit his eyebrow hairs into unpurchased books in bookstores, Dufort is man destined to fall.  When he finally does, you just might feel sorry for him.  Or not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dana Aaron Mather
• Release date: Nov 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781497741638

Book preview

Prologue

Fucking is all that matters, baby!

I'm not sure about the baby part, but the rest I remember for certain. I blurted it out the way another man might yell Eureka or Hallelujah. It was the same sense of revelation in quite a different context.

I was with a woman named Linda at the time, fucking her quite hard from behind. I saw the shock waves running through her ass and torso; in the bedroom mirror I saw her full breasts flap together in time with my thrusting.  Rather than a porno movie, it reminded me of those old black and white movies that chronicle man's early attempts at aviation—the ones in which some strange contraption shakes and shimmies with a lot of promise, but then ultimately falls over and combusts. It was a similar kind of hope and effort, a similar amount of distance traveled. I pressed the sweat out of my eyebrows.

Outside it was hot. It was Toronto in July in the middle of a heat wave. The apartment window was open with a fan blowing and still we were soaking wet. We were making those slapping flesh sounds that resonate like applause and travel through walls like a rap song on heavy base. We didn’t care about the noise though. Neighbors and thin walls be damned, we were spewing out the hi-octane exhortations of good fitness instructors, some guttural noises, and quasi-animal grunts.

It was enough commotion that I thought that a little non sequitur like fucking is all that matters baby, might slip by unnoticed. Previously, phrases much worse than this had flown by without a hitch. Something about this one, however, the fact that it came after she had finished so to speak, made it hang in the air a little longer than the others. It echoed back several times and then, before I knew it, had transformed itself into a neon sign on my bedroom wall. There would have to be a talk about it I supposed.

I let out one last exulted groan and then stretched out on the bed beside her, exhausted, and out of breath. I relaxed for a moment as the portable fan blew back and forth across the length of my body. I could feel my heartbeat in my eyes. Next to me I could feel Linda’s petite body begin to stiffen in the breeze. She was thinking, and I knew almost exactly what she was thinking about. She was thinking about that neon sign on the wall and how she felt about it. She was putting her feelings into thoughts and her thoughts into words and lining up those words like little soldiers to march into battle. I wished it could be otherwise.

Beneath my window, cars were driving by honking their horns because France had just won the World Cup. I was one-half Quebecois French and therefore one-half winner of the greatest contest on earth today. Coming on the heels of an orgasm and a momentous insight, it was one of those rare moments of almost complete contentment. Like many such moments, it would soon vanish with the onset of human voices.

Linda took a drink of Evian water and then turned to me.

So did you really mean that?

Mean what?

You know what.

Oh that.

Yes that.

I shrugged.

I don’t know. I was having sex at the time.

But there was truth in it, wasn’t there?

I was having sex, what does it matter what I said?

She was silent for a moment as she took another mouthful of Evian.

Because I think maybe it’s the truth. I think you tell the truth when you’re having sex like most people tell the truth when they’re drunk.

In coitus veritas, I said, and closed my eyes. I thought it was the smartest thing I had said in weeks. The conversation should end right here, I thought. But Linda thought differently

It's true though isn’t it? She touched my shoulder. Just tell me and I’ll leave you alone.

That’s the problem. You will leave me completely alone, I thought.

If I had shouted out I love you, would you have believed that too?

"But that’s not what you said. You said fucking is all that matters to you, and I think maybe it’s true."

My words repeated back to me in a state of clear thinking made me cringe. Linda was right—these were like the words of a drunken man.

So what if it was true? I asked. What would you think of me if it were?

I don't know. It wouldn’t matter I guess. It would just be kind of sad I think.

I gave up trying to hide behind closed eyelids and opened my eyes. When I did, I found Linda’s small face much different than when I had left it.  There was pity in her eyes—so much pity that I thought for a moment that I must be dying. In her eyes at least something about me was very ill. The last of my post orgasmic contentment slipped away.

Well it’s not true, I said, rising to an elbow. A lot of things matter to me.

Like what? she asked evenly.

I sighed and tried to look insulted.

Like what? she repeated. Her head resting on her cocked arm, I knew she would stare at me all day if I didn’t answer her.

My writing matters to me, I said.

You write pornographic poems.

It’s still writing. And my family matters to me.

I didn’t even know you had a family.

I looked at her hard in the eyes.

Give me a break, alright. It was sex talk.

She waited half a beat before dropping the bomb on me.

Sex talk is all we ever have, she said.

I dropped my head back to the pillow. That was the knockout punch.

Linda left a short time later and I went to the window to watch her cross the road and disappear down Huron Street. I knew from the hurried way she had snapped on her bra and kissed me good-bye that I wouldn’t be seeing her again. The sub-text to that little spat we’d had was that sex mattered to me, and she perhaps did not. I thought she might have taken it better than this. It was Linda after all who had clanged beer bottles with me two weeks before and said here’s to sex buddies, claiming not to want anything too complicated right now. Maybe I hadn’t heard her right. Or maybe I had given her too much of the sex part and not enough of the buddy. It was too late to worry about it now.

I lay back on the bed. The sheets were cold and damp and I didn’t feel so French anymore. If I were truly French and not just a poser who liked to sprinkle his conversation with French writers, I would have enjoyed my sorrow and looked forward to the next girl; I would have written a new poem. Instead I thought about Linda and the series of twists and turns and subway transfers that she would now be taking for the last time. The finality of it made me sad.

In most ways Linda was very replaceable. Standing just five-foot two and bleached blonde, she was at thirty an uncomfortable six years older than me. She had some crooked teeth at the front and a perpetual zit in the center of her forehead.  An entity unto itself, that zit had spoken to me one night and told me not to take her too seriously. Soul mates, after all, didn’t come six years older with big zits on their forehead now, did they? No of course they didn’t.

But now that Linda was gone, the thing that haunted me about her was not that zit, but how funny she had been. Not just sarcastic funny or ha, ha now give me your panties, funny, Linda had made me gut laugh. She said that the zit on her forehead was the Eye of Allah, and that I should worship it; she woke me up one morning by trying to suffocate me with a pillow like in her favorite movie One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You want breakfast? She had said in her best Jack Nicholson. You can’t handle breakfast!  But then lo and behold, she had made me breakfast.

Because for all her insanity, Linda was nice too. And when I think about it that might make her the only nice one I ever slept with in Toronto. She was the only one that never asked for cab money or used our post coital talks as therapy sessions to drop bombs like "I haven’t had sex like that since I was five years old". No, Linda never did that. She was cool. In better hands she would have been girlfriend material.

The only real problem with Linda was that she was too smart for me. She figured me out in six easy lessons and made her exit before I even had time to realize how great she was. Not that it would have made a difference in the ultimate outcome, but at least if I had known how great she was, I could have gone through the motions of trying to change myself for her.  I could have kept my mouth shut during sex, for instance, or taken her to a movie. I was too young at the time. Linda was too cagey.

Full credit to her, Linda was already figuring out my little smoke and mirrors act on our second date. That’s when she pulled one of my poems out of the garbage and read it out loud while I was changing CDs. It was a sexy sort of poem that had gotten thrown out for sounding too much like a dirty limerick. She laughed when she read it and then put it back in the trash where it belonged.

You just write poems to get laid, she had said with a laugh.

Pretty much.

I can’t believe how shallow you are. I thought writers were supposed to be deep.

They probably are. I never said I was a writer.

So what are you then?

I shrugged my shoulders

A pervert I guess.

She laughed.

Just my luck, she said. I think I’m sleeping with the next great French writer of our millennium, and he turns out to be another pervert.

Could be worse, I said.

And of course it was.

Linda, if I could have told her, was sleeping with a man so polymorphously perverse that ten months from now he would be in prison. Worse yet, he would write a book in prison and include her real name in the intro.

1  The Beginning

There are two natural ways to begin this story. The first way is to begin six months ago in Toronto with the events that lead directly to my incarceration.  The story is very straight forward and scintillating this way, but also very incomplete. It leaves you with the impression that I am a normal small town boy who simply got lost, twisted, and bamboozled by the big mean city. It’s a notion that my lawyer tried to sell twice, but both times to no avail. Where it falls short is that it isn’t true. It overlooks the idea of personal accountability, and also the well-documented presence of small town perversion. The ending doesn’t really make sense this way.

The better way to tell this story is to take a brief detour back twenty-five years ago to the point of my own genesis. In this fuller version of the story that I call insemination to incarceration, you get to meet all the people that I’ve met and who arguably helped to shape me into inmate number KP98-4523. In this second version of the story I get to say some of the things that never got said at the trial, but that I think help to explain what I did. I get to take my time in this version, and try to understand myself how it all happened. I have the time. Two-years-less-a-day, may sound like a bargain (the dollar ninety-nine of jail sentences), but two-years-less-a-day is still a very long time.

My story begins therefore, not in Toronto in 1997, but in the small town of Petewawa, in the relatively innocent year of 1972. It was the beginning of summer and school had just gotten out. Planet of the Apes was number one at the box office and Candy Man was topping the music charts. A man landing on the moon was old hat by now, but a man wearing bell-bottoms was a few years ahead of his time. In downtown Petewawa a new water tower had been built that looked like a Volkswagen spaceship and had a peace sign painted on its side. The peace sign was causing a small controversy that wouldn’t end until a yellow smiley face was painted over top of it.

Somewhere in all of this excitement, I know as a hand-me-down fact that two teenagers met at a house party, shared a stubby bottle of Labatts 50, and started talking. One was a French girl originally from Northern Quebec, and the other was an English boy born right there in Petewawa. On a muggy moon-bright night perfect for romance, they started talking in a mixture of French and English. I don’t know what they talked about and I’m sure it doesn’t matter. What’s important to this story is that at some point during the conversation they both got the idea that their genitalia might like each other. A short time later they went for a drive together and never came back to the party.

In this haphazard and hormonally inspired way, I, Christian Dufort, got my start in the life business. It was June 30th, 1972. According to the world census there were already 3.9 billion people in the world.

2  My Mother

Of all of those billions of people, by far the most beautiful was my mother. I don’t just say this as a dutiful doting son, but as a full-grown convicted felon observing objectively an old family photo taken at Sears. I am three years old in the photo and looking clean and disgruntled, as though my face has just been spit-shined against my will. My father (stepfather#1) looks equally sour and wears a dark suit and long Elvis style sideburns. But as though she doesn’t even belong in this Technicolor archive, like somebody has digitally transposed her as a joke, my mother sits there demurely cross-legged in an orange turtleneck and brown suede skirt. She is beautiful beyond words. With long straight brown hair and fresh blues eyes she radiates with the robust beauty of a forties movie star. It’s the kind of beauty that will outlast the gaudy fashion of the day to leave an indelible impression on my mind as to what a woman should be.

My mother's name was and, despite several marriages and divorces, still is Catherine Dufort. She is one of four daughters born back to back in the early 1950s to Eric and Josephine Dufort of Montreal. Her father was a military Colonel, attached for a time to the very prestigious Queen's Own Guard. A very ambitious and selfish man, he moved his family with him from post to post every five years, until they all finally got sick of it, mutinied, and refused to move from a house in Petewawa. From here the girls all married military or policeman, and scattered across the country.

Except for my mother. My mother was the dreamer of the group, the black sheep. Although assumedly created by the same two people in roughly the same manner as all the others, my mother was different from her sisters. Something about the alignment of the planets and stars had made her unique. My mother you must know was born on February 17th 1954, at 4:12 in the morning. This made her the second born of her sisters and the only Pisces in the family. (Pisces: creative, thoughtful, prone to mad changes of heart) More than this, however, it made her the baby girl with the exact same birthday (right down to the minute but not the same year) as John Winston Lennon born in Liverpool. It's a funny bit of happenstance that most people would put down as an interesting bit of personal trivia. For my Pisces mother, however, it was the first installment in a long series of parallels that in the twilight of the Beatles would convince her that John Lennon was her soul mate. It's a small bit of insanity that has shaped her life more than you could ever think possible.

Even though she never said it out loud, I know that my mother in her heart of hearts has always believed that she was meant to marry John Lennon.  I have divined this knowledge from several sources, the most obvious being the long series of bespectacled Marxists and half-assed musicians she has married: Patrick, Dave, and Anthony with the horse teeth. Never quite John enough, she divorced them all in short order. Sensing what I sensed, several of these pseudo-John husbands did damage to my mother's John Lennon memorabilia collection before they left. They were jealous of a man she had never met, and in some cases (those coming after Dec 9th 1980) jealous of a dead man.

Another revelation of my mother's secret love came to me one day via the United States Postal Service.  I was eight years old at the time and as bad luck would have it, I was at home faking a stomach flu (a can of soup thrown into the toilet works like a charm) when a mysterious package was delivered to our house. My mother was out in the garage painting at the time and Patrick, my stepfather du jour got to the package first. He took the package directly from the postman and carelessly tossed it on the dining room table as he headed to the kitchen to make a four o’clock Martini.

Patrick didn't care about the package and left to his devices probably wouldn’t have bothered with it. I, unfortunately, felt differently about the package. It was around my birthday and looking at the package I couldn’t help but think about all of the distant aunts that might send me something. I dragged myself off the sofa to check it out.

The package was about the size of a coloring book wrapped in the same nondescript paper that my mother wrapped her paintings in after she had sold one. I knew almost immediately that it wasn’t a present. The big address was to John Lennon's apartment in New York. It had a slash through it and the words Return to sender written in marker.

Just as my interest in the package was waning, Patrick re-entered the dining room with his four o'clock martini in hand, surprised to see me up.

I thought you were supposed to be sick, he said.

Getting better, I said.

Yeah right.

He looked at me with squinted accusing eyes that I now realize were supposed to be playful, but seemed deadly serious at the time.

What are you looking at? he asked.

Nothing , I said. Just a package for my mom.

He came over and took the package out of my hands. He flipped it over in his soft musician hands a few times. He squinted at the address.

This is your mother's writing, he said nervously. What the hell is she sending to John Lennon?

Open it, I said.

Patrick paused for only a moment and then, with the permission of an eight year old, put down his martini and started ripping. Three layers of paper later, he got his answer.

The package contained in order of discovery: one love letter, one lock of hair and about five naked photographs of my mother. Strangely, it was the letter that Patrick seemed most interested in. I watched as his thin lips slowly shaped the words that caused his brow to furrow. He was in another world now, barely aware that I was still beside him. I looked on with keen interest at the photographs he had tossed on the table. 

The pictures had been taken in our music room. My mother was completely naked in all of them, spread-eagled on the orange carpet, amongst candles and propped up John Lennon album covers. She was smiling with a smile I had never seen before. It was what romance novelists call an alluring or lascivious smile.

After what could have only been a few minutes of gawking, my real fully clothed mother entered the room. Suddenly I felt like I was naked, caught once again by my mother in the midst of a perverse act. But this time, unlike the day before when I had been caught smelling my toe jam, I was not the issue here.

Patrick and my mother exchanged glances and my mother froze. Patrick went back to his reading then as my mother stood and watched him, knowing by the movements of his eyes what part he must be trying to understand.

What seemed like a long time later, Patrick put down the paper and did a quick shuffle through the photographs.

He looked back to my mother.

So what the fuck is this? he asked bewildered.

Pictures, said my mother. Go to your room Christian.

I didn't move.

Patrick scrunched up his face in a look of disgust.

Are you fucking demented? Are you some kind of fucking schoolgirl? This man doesn't know you're alive. Do you think he cares about your tits and ass?

My mother stood stoic.

I am entitled to my fantasy, she said simply.

Is that right?

Yes.

Patrick nodded slowly.

Right.

He turned his crazy brown eyes towards me.

What do you think Christian? he said flashing one of the pictures at me. Is this a nice picture?

The picture was the worst of the bunch, raunchy and bad lighting to boot, but if this pseudo-John idiot expected me to be shocked and revolted by my own beautiful mother he was going to be disappointed.

It’s art, I said and coolly walked away.

It was quite possibly the coolest moment of my childhood.

3  Beautiful

My mother had me before her John Lennon phase. She was a teenage poetess and painter back then, too young it turns out even to know the difference between labor pains and a stomachache. She was hunting for driftwood along an isolated beach one day when her water suddenly broke, and she had to give birth to me right there on the beach. The place was called Saint Christian’s Island and as the story goes I was delivered onto its stony shores by my mom’s friend Ruthie and a passing fisherman. My umbilical cord was cut with a fishing knife. 

Although it sounds like a romantic beginning, Saint Christian's Island is an island about the size of a car, located in a small lake in the very mundane township of Petewawa. It's actually not a good place to be born in at all.  Especially when it's 1972, and your mother isn't married. In rural Ontario in 1972 there was no such thing yet as political correctness. Especially in Petewawa people still liked to call a spade a spade, a fag a fag, etcetera, etcetera. So you can imagine what people would have said about my mother's little mishap.  Ten years later I would have been called a love baby, but as it was, there was no other word for me except bastard child. Not a big deal for me, but for my mother it was a bit of a nuisance. All of her friends, even Ruthie, eventually disappeared.

All I ever knew about my situation was that my mother was much younger and more beautiful than everybody else's. Somehow, even at a very young age, this struck me as an amazing gift. It gave me happiness, pride, and to some extent wisdom. My mother's beauty would teach me early on some of the lesser known rules of worldly physics. For example, that while ugly things must trudge through life, beautiful things are allowed to float. In nature it means that the lion and the butterfly moved much differently than the snake or wart hog; in the human world it meant that my beautiful mother often succeeded where her uglier peers floundered. When I was young, and my mother at her most beautiful, I saw firsthand how beauty could make your life better. There was always an extra smile for my mother, always an extra joke.  Women looked up to my mother, and men couldn’t do enough for her. It made me worry sometimes whether I would turn out to be a lion or a warthog.  My mother always told me I was very handsome, but in the chrome reflection of the toaster I would fight a battle for most of my early years. One day I would look at the face in the chrome toaster and lick my lips I thought I was so sexy. The next day I wouldn't even want to go to school. Nothing anyone said could change my thinking. 

My interest in beauty made me an artist for a while, good enough to get a painting sent to the Canadian National Exhibition. Then it stopped me from being an artist, when at ten years old I tried to paint a portrait of my mother. I was nervous and mucked it up terribly. I’ll never paint anything as beautiful as even the ugliest woman, I realized, and I quit that same day. My mother agreed with my decision. She sat me down on a paint can and showed me a book of Picasso's Paintings. Picasso never liked women, she told me, as she flipped through the fractured images of a woman. Picasso, she said, spent his whole life being jealous of woman’s beauty, angry that he couldn’t possess it. She ruffled my hair with her hand. Be a writer, she said. The materials are cheaper.

Sexual Fantasy #1 (age 8)

After committing some sort of petty crime, Wonder Woman captures me with her magic lasso and makes me tell the truth. I confess to her that I am in love with her, and after hearing my story she realizes that all my crimes have been a childish attempt to gain her attention. She releases me.

After release, however, I continue to commit crimes, and Wonder Woman must continually capture me and let me go. Eventually it occurs to her that the only way to prevent me from committing crimes is to marry me.  We get married.

4  Carl Tin

My mother married again and by age eleven my family had settled down in a middle class neighborhood of London Ontario. My new stepfather had a job here selling educational books. My mother stayed at home doing oil paintings in the garage. I watched her sometimes. I remember that she always wore a handkerchief in her hair and that the paint dripped onto her sandaled feet as she painted. For some reason it was the paint on her feet that interested me more than the paintings. It was the early beginnings of a foot fetish I think.

Except for the foot fetish though, I was a normal kid about this time.  I was happy. I had friends that made me laugh and a dog that came when I called it. I was a good student and I went to church. I believed in God at the time and a lot of other things as well. I believed in Big Foot, Sea Monkeys, aliens, and ESP; I believed that actors did their own stunts and that the fastest way to run was in sock feet. Overall I was a trusting and optimistic kid. I thought I had a bright future ahead with lots of great people in it. It was going to take Boy Scouts of Canada to change my mind about this. 

Carl Tin (a.k.a. Colonel Sanders) was the person, who first brought it to my attention that I was a deviant with a grim future ahead. Not that he was any expert on the matter. Carl was my scout leader. He was sixty years old and had two missing fingers on his right hand. About the whereabouts of these missing fingers he was always evasive. If anyone asked about what happened to his fingers he would always do the same gag: look at his hand in astonishment and then frisk himself as though looking for his missing fingers. Now where did I put those?

Although he never did tell the real story, I feel certain in retrospect that his fingers were not laying on the beaches of Normandy or on any other field of battle. Carl liked to pretend that he had been in the Special Forces at one time, but even at eleven years old it wasn’t hard to guess how a retired carpenter might have lost his fingers. We played along out of respect for his scouting knowledge as well as his preternatural devotion to imparting that knowledge. It was Carl Tin, for instance, who taught a whole generation of London kids how to offset the effects of chlorine gas by breathing through cloth soaked with urine, and how to make plastic explosives with fertilizer and diesel fuel. You have to remember that these were the days before the Internet, when this sort of knowledge was obscure and people thought it best that children didn’t know about it. Carl thought differently.

Carl was an old-school scout leader who still regarded the Scouts as preparation for war. He felt it was his Canadian duty to teach young children survival skills, and then put them in situations where they had to practice those skills or die. He was the only scout leader I’ve ever heard of who liked to take his scouts camping in the middle of winter. In subzero weather he would take us out into the cold, crackling wilderness and have us reenact Napoleonic death marches. There was never a destination involved; we didn’t use compasses or learn about nature. We just marched until