Three Sisters

There came a time in my life when I was surrounded by families of three sisters. The ambiance created by this phenomenon was sublime, in the old sense, beautiful and terrible all at once. I cannot imagine the difference in dynamic created by such a cohort in a family all other things being equal. Such hypotheticals can push the margins of what imagination is good for. But part of why I contemplated this difference could be attributed to the work of Dominick Fernow, a musician who has created a great body of work under the name Prurient.

Many of the Prurient albums I have come across (oh how I would like to do so literally; but I’m sure somewhere it has been done) create an ambience of ambiguous dark medieval tension, mostly of a sexual nature. Titles like A History of AIDS, for instance, or Roman Bath help the mind take the chaotic, abrasive noise and screaming to a fittingly loaded venue. This follows a tradition in noise music; names I am familiar with are Whitehouse, Bloodyminded, Macronympha. The descriptions of their songs I’ve read fit in the same world. I’m closely familiar with a band called Arab on Radar, whose vague but very suggestive lyrics were enhanced by a mentally damaged style of delivery and provocative syntax. The best example might be the line “hunting size madness for a death certificate”.

A friend who is a psychotherapist and I were talking about perversions, and she described a typical therapists’ response to hearing of perversions as being extremely bored by them. The same monotonous act repeated ad nauseum for something slightly less than real satisfaction. The meaning of ‘perversion’ is dicey, it gets connoted by ‘perverse’ and ‘pervert’. I read in Introducing Lacan, or was it Introducing Derrida, perversion described as “pere version”, which is French for the father’s version. This led me to some musing. Yes, we call it HIStory, but in our daily lives, the unfolding of family dynamics is really mostly appreciated by the great masses as felt, if not told, from the mother’s perspective, isn’t it? In my own experience, with a father who was unfaithful and left my mother for another woman, this was surely the case. Only in my twenties did I venture to ask my father his version of their relationship’s narrative. I am a man, and don’t believe I have to be to understand and appreciate his side of the story perfectly; to empathize and see the two of them as equals in their responsibility for the relationship. But the swerving, evasive abstractions that came out of his mouth fit my therapist friend’s definition of perversion nicely. I muse on that sexual perversions are perhaps an abstraction of love; which is why they are boring. Acts that create psychic pleasure, soothing some past trauma, but not containing any of the ingredients of human connection, love, profound emotion, and mutual consequence. They are abstractions and we just don’t connect with the emotions they bring out in those who practice them.

Arab on Radar’s career was crowned by one fan who gave them a gift befitting of their oeuvre; he crafted belt buckles for them. The band performed in a sort of costume onstage, which morphed over time from the original incarnation of janitor-green polyester uniforms, to a more lower-east-side new york stylish dressy all-black getup. The brass buckles, I was told by the guitarist, were casts the fan made of his girlfriend’s vagina at different stages of arousal. Each brass vagina was then fitted with a pair of wings. Perverse, for sure.

I was looking through a list of Prurient’s releases on the Discogs archive, marvelling at all of the different titles and song names assigned to his music, and the artwork, when I found one release titled Three Sisters. It made me think of some dirty jokes I’d heard but couldn’t remember, involving a lost traveler asking a farmer for a place to sleep, and discovering he had three daughters. You can fill in the rest. I found myself the subject of tame, bland versions of this joke several times over at this point in my life, befriending one or two or all of several sets of three sisters. It is of my encounter with the Rainville sisters I wish to tell you now.

 

The parents Tim and Sylvia had split up long ago. They had between them created Michelle, Clara, and Joan. Joan, the oldest, was a tall lady with airs, and a sweetness which was rarely on display but was overwhelming when revealed. Clara was a loud, a bit bossy, but truly and always a thoughtful and loving type. The youngest Michelle was at times a hopelessly victimized whiner, and at other times the most disarmingly gentle, down-to-earth and real of them all. I found each of them very beautiful in different ways. Three sisters is one thing; how much more of a tale you walk into when they all have the whitest of skin and the blackest of hair. Suddenly spending a lot of time with all three, I felt like the bartender who sees a priest, a rabbi, a horse, and a lesbian walk in to his bar all at once and says, what is this some kind of joke?

It started when I spent several weeks consoling Clara over the cancer which was slowly killing her father, and the unending pain of trying to care for him while he behaved most ungratefully, and doing so in the memory of his past cruelties which appear to have been numerous. Poor Tim is gone now, and I never met him; I wish I could have asked him for his side of the story. But that is the side of the story that I rarely get to hear, and when I do, feels horribly incomplete and lacking because of the general emotional stupidity of most men in my society. Again, stupidity here is meant in the old sense of the word, I picture it as oscillating between sloppy stupor, and wide-eyed wire-haired alarm. Clara had other woes too; a boyfriend, an eastern european emigre who embodied the ethnic cliche, firmly established in my mind by the enormously popular video game Grand Theft Auto 3. Our anti-hero is the worst kind of crook, not low-level, not high-level, but a bourgeois crook with the level of comfort with violence you’d expect from that tier of society. The boyfriend was not a crook, but felt comfortable mixing heroin, cocaine and entrepreneurship, which suggested to me a man with a certain set of scruples.

We spent evenings at her mother’s apartment. Sometimes we’d lie on the bed with her mother watching back-to-back episodes of Storage Wars, a show about junk dealers bidding on abandoned storage lockers. They had a dog, female, and Michelle was visiting to help care for the ailing Tim, bringing her dog as well, also female. With the female boarder Sylvia kept that made five plus me in what was a very small space stuffed with oversized furniture. I would bask in the wild energy bouncing around the apartment, trying to placate a most insistent dog who spent most of her time lunging at my face, while the sisters argued over who agreed to lend who the purse or leather jacket, eventually reconciling with a promise to do the other’s hair or makeup on her birthday. As their father’s condition worsened, Joan began coming to stay as well. Being a young man around all of this excited female energy I found myself trying to find some kind of connection or emotional satisfaction from a flirtation. And most of the time, the place which seemed to hold the deepest promise was of course in the eyes and conversational embrace of Sylvia.

The peak of consoling her was also the first time I saw a positive pregnancy test in my life. Just an ordinary day spent with Clara that ended rather abruptly with me confronting more intimacy than I was anticipating. Her subsequent abortion, told to me in great detail, was one of the most poignant experiences I have ever witnessed second-hand, not least because right before the procedure she let them tell her that she was carrying twins. I hope she has found peace with her decision, although based on her descriptions of the boyfriend I think that’s probably less difficult than you might expect. We should all be so lucky to live in a society that makes such peace even a possibility. As the military are fond of saying, peace always comes at a price. Life offers so many ways to pay.

Later when my relationship with her was at an ebb, she appeared in town around Christmas and we ran errands together in the car Tim insisted on buying her before dying. Another ordinary day until she took us to Venus Envy, to purchase herself a vibrator. It was gigantic. I guess dildos are meant to mimic the average as much as the women in skin magazines mimic the average.

Tim’s funeral was appropriately extreme for a serving officer of the RCMP— Canada’s government police for both domestic and international matters, a combination of the CIA and FBI with enough incompetence and boorishness to cover both. Thirty-odd uniformed members, a group of aviator sunglasses and leather jacket-clad undercover types, bagpipes, drums, officers on horseback, the works.

For her eulogy Clara chose to read a letter her father had sent to Joan on the occasion of their first Christmas apart, right after the divorce. Although as an idea this was touching, it was the strangest choice of reading I have ever seen at a funeral, an occasion which is a surprisingly strong field for bad choices. The letter was the definition of perversion, it was the father’s version of the scene, written in its full emotional grip. The emotions this father was trying to clumsily express to his daughters via his oldest, clumsy a choice as it gets, betrayed his benumbed state and inability to communicate anything close to the kinds of emotions one wants to feel when thinking about family connection, the ties that bind, blood. I felt such pity for this daughter who had that experience so familiar to many of us, of a child being burdened with a parent’s emotions. Emotions for which it is not equipped to deal, has no support to help decode (as its parents are too wrapped up in themselves and their projections on each other) and which put front and centre, in their face, the frailty and uselessness of the parent as a source of support, at the time when they need it most.

We marched out to watch them bury Tim, and then returned to have tea and go. But as we all stood around the reception room in what was a refreshingly warm atmosphere, two of the big booted moustachioed mounties asked for everyone’s attention for an announcement.

Tim had a request, from beyond the grave. Tim had hatched a plan for this very day, they announced, decades before, and we were to participate in its execution. Two bottles of scotch were produced, one from the year of Tim’s birth, sometime in the mid-50s, and one from the year he joined the RCMP, 1979. Tim’s wish had been to have all present at his interment drink this scotch together. He had carried them with him for a large portion of his life with this destination in mind. It all happened quite quickly, a hundred shots were poured, and we drank to Tim, we drank Tim’s liquor to him.

 

I’ve had good luck with funerals, I like to think I’ve been lucky enough to see the ‘fun’ in funeral at every one I have attended. Watching my girlfriend reach into an open casket and give her uncle a good shake with a smile was a startlingly funny snap out of the gloom; so too was my grandmother’s remembrance service, where the German caretaker was the first to arrive. His wife, with her gorgeous crooked face and lazy eye, making small talk with me, glanced up at the box of ashes on the altar momentarily and turned to me, looked me in the eye with her good one as the other drifted on, and drawled, sincerely, in the thickest of accents, “Vas she inzinerated?”. And the funeral of my dear friend CJ, who died at 31, where extremely heavy grieving was punctuated with huge laughs from his many obliging friends, who gave him the greatest send-off anyone has ever had.

But Tim’s scotch was exceptional. This is what’s meant when such favours are called spirits. To have a liquid pour into my body, a liquid which is renowned for its ability, over a period of a minute or two, to slowly work its way into deep places of tension and meaning within the body, felt first in the throat but soon in as unlikely places as the ears, the right shoulder, the bottom of a foot coming to life and grasping the ground. This liquid was of five dimensions as it contained in it all of the time of Tim’s life and working life, the time between his death and funeral, and also his idea. It was the good side of perversion. This was what an afterlife should be, pouring the weeping left behind a drink. Was it a tradition he created, or a once-in-a-lifetime ritual, never to be repeated? Tim got the last word in telling his version of his own life, and it reached deeper inside my physical body than the glassy eyes and trembling lips of his daughters ever could. The experience is gone, the daughters live on, and still melt my heart and open my spirit to them with their gazes and hugs that feel like more. Tim’s drink was a beautiful abstraction of those hugs, that my man’s mind can attach to easily because it is an idea and ideas are easier to think than emotions. But that moment is forever burned in my memory not just because of the gravity of the occasion, but because Tim found a way to be there on his terms, and in dying to give me a real sensation of his life and purpose, to reach into my body with his dead hand and to let me know he knew he was doing it, he planned to do it, it was premeditated. He had an idea of an emotion long before it ever would come to pass, and he found a way to participate in it with a simplicity and profundity that many spend most of their lives searching for.

bh 05 2012

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