Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 28-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
I went to visit him in the suburbs. I took the SkyTrain after stopping at a dollar store to buy him a couple of pairs of plaid cotton boxers he liked. I’d never gone to his place on public transit. I was hoping that he’d be at the station to meet me. He’d talked about driving his 20-something son back and forth to the station. He wasn’t there. But hey, I’m fearless, strong, capable. I can walk. Not quite sure where he lives, but I’m smart, I can figure it out. Just keep going uphill and along empty industrial roads, under a Trans Canada highway viaduct where a man is camped in the bushes, past a construction site with a man relieving himself in public and just keep walking, must be something familiar soon.
It was a very depressing, run-down building with the siding torn off, plastic all over it. His place was no great shakes. Sure, it was dirty—he was recently divorced. He didn’t have any photos of any part of his life. It was the apartment of a guy approaching 60 who had never lived alone.
He lay on the couch. His back had been giving him trouble. I was tired of wondering what was really going on with him. I forget what we talked about, how long I stayed, if he offered me anything to eat or drink, but I do recall, as our visit was coming to an end, he said, “How come you didn’t take your clothes off?”
I was instantly someone else, some other woman who dropped by and took her clothes off instead of keeping her clothes on. I didn’t really get what he meant. Why would I take my clothes off? Did most women who visited him simply remove their clothes while standing in the living room?
I felt small and alone in the huge gulf between who I think I am and how he regarded me. I stood there in a wave of humiliation accompanied by a depressing sense of worthlessness, of being profoundly misunderstood as a human being, as a woman. I caught a glimpse of his inability to know me—his refusal to know me—and my stupidity for thinking that he was seeing me in a way that I was content with. I felt like a hooker.
I didn’t take off my clothes with him again.
He emailed me a story he’d written about hookers, hockey, abuse, hatred and violence. Seedy, lousy, slimy and poorly executed. In email, I asked him if he thought of me as a prostitute. No reply. I broke up with him—in email—wishing him all the best. He emailed one of his standard two-liners, saying that was fine with him.
