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  MORE ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MOUTHQUAKE:

  “Mouthquake, the most vividly palpable Montreal novel in English since Mordecai Richler, puts the legend back in urban and the realism back in magic. Part queer amour fou and part personal demon-wrestling, this tall tale evokes like none other the delirious world of childhood subjectivity, Alice in Wonderland meets The Tin Drum meets The 400 Blows. Tectonically written, from pavement abjection and hallucinogenic dream life to the intensely lived-in body and space of an unforgettable narrator, Mouthquake demands to be read under sturdy furniture or on an open park bench.”

  —Thomas Waugh, AUTHOR OF The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema

  “Daniel Allen Cox is a maestro of form-querying-queer. You think you have his number, you think he’s in the bed beside you, but he’s up, off, boldly probing. Our pleasure as readers is to keep pace with his intriguing corpus. In Mouthquake, Daniel mouths the music of memory as he dials us into the minutiae of stuttering.”

  —Anakana Schofield, AUTHOR OF Malarky AND Martin John

  “In Mouthquake, Daniel Allen Cox ventures into the lions’ den of language and unleashes his extraordinary stutter. The result, a shimmering, always surprising frottage of Montreal, has the queer wit of a Britten aria.”

  —John Greyson, DIRECTOR OF Zero Patience AND Lilies

  MOUTHQUAKE

  Copyright © 2015 by Daniel Allen Cox

  Afterword copyright © 2015 by Sarah Schulman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 202–211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6 Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  Part of the chapter “Coprofagia” was published, in a different form, in Crooked Fagazine, Issue 2, 2013.

  The creation of this work was made possible by the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

  Design and cover photograph by Gerilee McBride Edited by Susan Safyan

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Cox, Daniel Allen, author

  Mouthquake: a novel / Daniel Allen Cox.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55152-605-8 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8605.O934M69 2015

  C813’.6

  C2015-903344-6

  C2015-903345-4

  I am delighted to add another unplayable work to the repertoire.

  —Arnold Schoenberg

  Contents

  Antonio

  Uncertain Music

  Imaginary Friends

  Champion Des Champions

  A Queerest Abdication

  Polaroided

  La Glace

  In all Innocence

  Marilyn Does Montreal

  E = MJ Squared

  Eric

  Cries and Whispers

  The Millipede

  Punishment for Record Thieves

  Penises I have Loved and not Loved

  Speech Therapy for the Bent

  Screaming Handful of Nothing

  Brought to you by the Letter M

  In the Lions’ Den

  Coprofagia

  The Meat of It

  Presenté Par La Lettre E

  Broken People

  Dans La Fosse Aux Lions

  Referendum Question

  Requiem

  Tes Enfants Les Ti-Pauvres

  Freedom of Information Request 1475997

  Thaw

  Bigger than Both of Us

  Chiquitita

  Contre Le Froid

  Afterword: Lost and in Trouble Somewhere

  Acknowledgments

  ANTONIO

  UNCERTAIN MUSIC

  I’ve come to realize that if anything happened, there was probably music.

  Now I lean in close to listen.

  It has come back to me in variations, in music I don’t recognize. Memory can defragment, but it never resembles the original experience.

  The image itself is fairly uncertain. I’m small and standing in front of a record player. The receiver is silver and covered with dials. There are tiny tuning meters in little glass windows filled with yellow light, stacked like apartments in a building. The needles wobble back and forth, showing the science of the music. In this image, I’m not sure what the song is. I’m staring at the record spinning on the turntable. The label hypnotizes me, creating a swirl of colour in my head that didn’t exist before. The grooves orbit past me like black oil, smooth and perfect. I’m just discovering my relationship to the substance of vinyl. This record doesn’t have any scratches. The arm bobs as the record turns. There’s a slight warp. I want to see the needle up close so I pretend I’m tiny and jump onto the turntable in my mind. You might say I haven’t come back since.

  As soon as I land beside the arm and admire the boy-sized diamond tip at my feet, I begin to feel I’m not alone. There’s a presence behind me. Don’t ask me what the clues are: shadow, body heat, breath on the back of my downy neck. For whatever reason, I don’t want to turn around. Maybe it’s because I know the music will stop.

  That’s all I have at the moment.

  Now, certain music gives me certain feelings.

  Uncertain music gives me uncertain feelings.

  When I speak, it comes out like a weird kind of song-making.

  I don’t always understand myself, the same way I don’t always understand lyrics.

  This is where we stand for now. I wonder what this all means. In the meantime, I open my mouth. Play every song I can find, full volume, and backward. Pronounce every word, no matter how it comes out.

  I listen and try to remember.

  I speak.

  IMAGINARY FRIENDS

  The 1970s were all about strange men talking to little kids on the street. These were adults that none of the other adults saw. Our imaginary friends, if you will.

  Take Sesame Street. For years, nobody believed Big Bird that Mr. Snuffleupagus was real, that a woolly mammoth lived just up the block. He was never there when they went to find him. I somehow feel that even if they had looked right at Snuffy, he’d be invisible to them. Amazing how their minds were closed, especially back when everybody smoked pot. In a closed mind, a notion is extinct before the evidence can be presented. There’s an inner eyelid that our tear ducts always forget to lubricate.

  I never saw it as a kid, but there’s a Sesame Street episode in which an adult finally believes in Snuffy. The first person who ever told Big Bird that they believed was Buffy Sainte-Marie. She didn’t have to see the mammoth to know his trueness. She said so in a song, and it changed everything. It broke the hardness in Big Bird’s young heart. When an animal that big and that yellow gains hope, it becomes bright and powerful. Blinding to the spirit.

  Sometimes it takes music to make something real. Sometimes you have to sing it out in a song.

  But was Buffy real? She and Big Bird both had feathers.

  As a boy, I didn’t know whether or not I believed in the existence of woolly mammoths. On TV they l
ooked too exaggerated and fake—lips too human and eyes too big. In colouring books, the lines were always drawn too sharply. The mammoths were placed in impossible situations, fraternizing with animals they’d never encounter in the wild. For years I assumed that Big Bird was making it all up.

  I suppose my perspective started to change the day we went to the Musée des beaux-arts. The museum was hosting a travelling Smithsonian exhibit that featured a woolly mammoth skeleton, complete with tusks. Extinct and chilled, it had an extreme case of freezer burn.

  My mom tried to get me to say “mammoth,” but it came out “Chiquitita.” I was a strange boy.

  I was less of a boy, however, and more of a German Shepherd. I’d always had a keener sense of hearing than is appropriate for a human. I’d always been more interested in the sounds toys make than in the toys themselves: The click of unlocking the docking port on the Death Star. Drooling wet swish of rolling marbles in my mouth. Clatter of plastic bowling pins scattering hollow down the hallway. Rain of random Lego spilling on the floor. Tiny metallic thunder of toy cars reaming each other in smash-up derby. The snap and fart of blowing bubbles into toxic green goop. The ping of an Easy-Bake Oven when the cake was done. Soft thud of Nerf balls pounding dents into delicate tufts of cat fur. Satanic growl of a talking Teddy Ruxpin running low on batteries. Heart-breaking plastic crunch when an adult stepped on a toy and destroyed it.

  My ears were permanently pricked.

  Another indication was the affinity I felt for the main character on the TV show The Littlest Hobo, the German Shepherd who rescued people. My favourite episode was the one where the lost boy was trapped in a meat fridge. The dog found him and alerted the adults with a series of intelligent barks. He wasn’t even thinking of all that meat, just the boy. How unselfish. Of course, the boy was a kind of meat, but still.

  I cried at the end of every show because when the grownups went to thank the dog, he was always gone. He would walk down the road into the sunset, then turn around once, with his tongue hanging out. Was that a goodbye? Where was he going? Why didn’t he stay if he liked the people he saved? If he had a home somewhere, why did he always leave it? Why didn’t he have a name? I cried and cried during the credits. For me, sadness was confusion. It was a scrunched-up face that got red and hot, a runny nose that spilled into my mouth, and not being able to catch my breath. Forever panting in front of the TV.

  The truth is that the Littlest Hobo was called away. I could hear a dog whistle being blown just off-screen. It made me turn and look. I was old enough to know that the Littlest Hobo had a life outside the TV. The best way to find him was for him to find me. I had to get lost and in trouble somehow. Couldn’t be too hard. If I wasn’t going out to buy Rothmans King Size cigarettes for the neighbour, then I usually didn’t know where I was going, so it was perfect. I put on my boots, coat, and hat, but couldn’t find my mitts so I wore another pair of boots on my hands. I turned the door knob with the heels, and left the apartment for nowhere in particular.

  Montreal was a nonstop blizzard. Hockey fans couldn’t get to the Forum in time for the puck to drop. Babies couldn’t get through the snow on the highways so they were born in ambulances and taxis. This was decades before the mega-city merger, so determining the town of birth was kind of a toss-up. Drivers guesstimated where they were, because they couldn’t see through the blinding white. Parking meters were lost under drifts and became snow people, so parking was free if you could get anywhere close to the curb. But no one could. Snow got in our boots because boots weren’t high enough. Toe bones hardened into icicles. Snow rose up the windows so high that the horizon was over my head. And it was only January.

  I tried to take a bus, but the driver wouldn’t pick up a kid with four feet. He totally misread my species. I slinked through the alleys peeking through half-open doors into restaurant kitchens, waiting until the cooks cleared off so I could run in and steal a meatball or two, or a plate of fries, careful to avoid taking any vegetables by mistake. I was good at dodging kicks from the staff. But those restaurant back doors mostly turned out to be mirages. I was cold and hungry, staring into fantasies in the cinder block.

  Still no celebrity CBC dog.

  I was lost for sure. It was where I wanted to be…but now what? My face was freezing off, nose starting to hurt. I had fallen so many times on my booted hands that I just started to walk on all fours. The sound of a Snoopy Sno Cone machine crushing ice. I was famished, so I scoured my pockets and picked through the fur under my toque. Not a scrap. I stuck my schnoz through holes in garbage bags. Other animals had been there before me. My sniffer got happy because I found pizza crusts—tomato-flavoured popsicles—my favourites.

  The more I wondered where the Littlest Hobo was, the more I wondered if I had become him.

  It got dark really fast. The street lights gave everything long and jagged shadows. So many weird shapes on the snow in front of me. There was one that grew and grew even when I stayed still. Waiting to cross the light to wade through the snow, I encountered a species unknown to me. A monster. He must have weighed more than 500 pounds. He had long silver and brown dreads twisted like industrial cable and frayed at the ends like a stiff boot brush. He wore giant boots of floppy black leather, and a thick miasma of garlic hung around him, bad breath swirling in a cloud. The lines of his face were contoured with the soot of bus exhaust, and his nose mushroomed blackheads and collected runnels of oil. Heavy iron-link chains swung from his neck. He moved with the grace of a snow bank.

  This creature said something to me. It came out of his mouth not as words, but as snowflake shapes. I nodded to the shapes, and we had an understanding, there on the corner in the thick of winter. He laid a hand on my head, which made me still. When he patted my toque, it felt like I was being bashed by a warm, raw steak. When he laughed, it sounded like the engine of a bus in trouble.

  I may have been mistaken about his laugh; there actually was a bus revving its engine uselessly, wheels spinning because it couldn’t cross the intersection for all the snow. It was full of passengers. The mammoth lumbered to the front of the bus and attached one of his chains to the front bumper. He leaned forward, strained against the chain, and started to pull. The wheels didn’t turn. They slid. The passengers cheered through the foggy windows.

  I had just seen my first live woolly mammoth.

  It has been years since the winter has given us such snow.

  I still watch Sesame Street faithfully to this day. It’s not that painful to be a believer.

  Now, enough time has passed for me to understand what happened that day: It was my knighthood as a weirdo. I felt a strange energy pass from his hand through the top of my skull, the energy of outsiders and the misunderstood or the not-understood-enough, those who do not apologize for their strange behaviour. I’ve felt the weight of his hand ever since. The sound of the rattling chains follow me everywhere and interfere with the signals I have to intercept as part of daily life. He was my first imaginary friend, but not my last.

  I’ve since learned that if you have more than one imaginary friend, there’s no guarantee they’ll speak to each other.

  CHAMPION DES CHAMPIONS

  Back then, when winter thawed in Quebec, it came as the end of an environmental siege. The weather usually held us captive for more than six months at a time, locked inside our dry, over-heated apartments dreaming of the day we would see vegetation again, even a single blade of grass, or be able to cross the street without getting killed by a snow plough. There were several fake thaws we didn’t trust. False starts. But once spring came for real, it was a violent beauty. Avalanches of ice fell off roofs and crashed onto sidewalks. Icicles rained like spears. Lakes formed in intersections, forcing cars to drive around ice floes and other debris. The snow melted to reveal the hideous wreckage of lost and abandoned bicycles that had become mere piles of rust, battered by the sidewalk ploughs. We were happy not to be casualties of the season like that.

  The Grand Antonio and I
didn’t speak, but we understood each other nonetheless. The world around us overvalued speech. They were putting their energy into all the wrong things.

  He’d belly laugh whenever he saw me. It sounded like a cement truck rumbling down the street. I’d crawl onto the tiny space beside him on the sidewalk bench, the small corner not occupied by his fat. I had to puff myself out not to get crushed—it was a really tight squeeze. One of his braids always landed in my lap. Before we’d start the day’s business, I had to pluck the clover and beetles out of his hair, leftovers from whatever park he had slept in the night before. I had to untangle caterpillars from the wires that knotted his braids, and pick out ants that had gotten crushed in the beeswax that he used to keep them together. We had a symbiotic relationship that way. I was an obedient dog.

  I always wondered where he slept, but it remained a mystery to me. He just kind of wandered off at the end of the day. Couldn’t have been the mountain because it was too far and too high, given his weight. Parc Père Marquette was likelier. But wasn’t any park too cold in the winter? I have a hard time picturing him cooped up in a Montreal apartment, boxed in between neighbours, confined to a living room barely twice his size (sitting on a couch and doing what?), a kitchen with a mouse’s refrigerator and a thimbleful of dinner, a bathroom the size of one of his legs.

  I didn’t know much about the history of my position except that the previous employee was another dog. I got the feeling that it had died. Dogs died all the time in the ’70s. The summers were too hot. I never asked about it, because I could see the pain in his face whenever a dog came by, sniffing. He often gave our dinner to strays. Made me so jealous!

  My primary job was to bring people to the bench, to find suckers we could sell to. I knew instinctively what to do. Sometimes I pretended to fall on the sidewalk and skin my knee, and someone would inevitably pick me up and sit me on the bench. Then they belonged to Antonio. My favourite scam was to crawl between a gentleman’s legs when he was distracted, say, waiting for the bus and reading the Montreal Star. I’d tie his shoelaces together and he’d fall into Antonio’s lap, where the selling would begin. Antonio would reach into the garbage bag beside him and pull out a postcard at random. The postcards were bricolage curiosities he made himself, warped with LePage’s wood glue not fully dried, old photos of him in his fat youth, twenty years prior, posing with the famous and influential, defaced by inscriptions in block letters and black ink declaring his greatness. How someone with sausage fingers could create such elaborate and delicate bas-relief is just another mystery I’ll add to the heap.