April 9, 2011 - Courage My Love

 Another day in paradise. Today we are shadowing Korean technicians who are here doing port upgrade mods to their vehicles. Easy peasy. It is a brilliant day on the west coast, the sun is bouncing off everything, the air is cool and it's just about as perfect as a spring day can be.

I was thinking about Larry today. Larry came into my life in 1988 and out of my life in 1989. It was one of those "what the hell relationships" that people have and when it is over, you wonder "What the fuck was I thinking??". At the time, I was sharing a house in Brampton with Andrea and Wayne. I was in the process of breaking up with a long time squeeze, and it was that painful, kicked in the gut kind of ending  that I have done my best to avoid since. Wayne was a welder (and incidentally a drunk but that didn't interfere with his natural talent with welding) and he worked for a little company in the city. That's where he and Larry met up, they hit it off and before you know it, Larry was a regular at our house.

The first time he came to the house, he was downstairs and I hadn't met him yet. Andrea pulled me aside and said "Don't be freaked out by this guy, Wayne will get rid of him". Who was she kidding, me freaked out - not likely unless he was wearing a Roman collar. I went downstairs to have a beer with the boys, and there was Larry. He was not really tall, maybe 5'9, but holy fuck was he built. He was wearing jeans and a vest, so a lot of his arms and torso were available for my jaw dropped scrutiny. He looked like a biker type, he had tats all over, major on the sleeves as well as everything else I could see that wasn't covered.

He and Wayne were into the beers and telling stories. Well, Larry was a story teller, and his stories were drop dead hilarious. He made me laugh. So in addition to the arms of steel, he had a mind like Robin Williams. A perfect combination to start me thinking about something other than the jackass that had cheated on me and broke my heart. Larry and I hit it off bigtime. Andrea was a little taken aback, she always had me pegged for the shirt and tie type guys, since that had been all I had ever brought home. Larry was a bad boy.

I did not follow my instincts and immediately drag him by his dick into my room, but the thought did cross my mind more than once that evening and eventually I did. Larry's story was a mixture of sadness, badness and hilarity. His mother had been a whore. She had the two boys, and the father had left, so Larry and his brother Murray were left pretty much on their own. He told me they used to watch his mother sucking his "uncles" cocks on the fire escape. How sad. The mother would go out drinking every night and bring home a new "uncle" for a few days, which meant the boys would have something to eat because the uncles would give them money to leave the rat trap apartment their mother had for a few hours so they could roger the old doll. They didn't have much money, they were always the poor and ragged kids at a school that they did not go to very much. In the summer, their mother would send them down to Sunnyside Beach in Toronto and they would hang out in the change room and steal shoes. Those shoes had to last them until the next year.

Left to their own devices, the two boys bonded very strongly, but play was extremely roughhouse. Once Murray had done something to Larry, like put his gold fish in a frying pan on the stove and threatened to cook them and it made Larry really mad, so he took Murray's turtle and put it in the oven and turned the oven on. Murray thought he was cooking something when he smelled it and came running into the kitchen. Larry told him dinner was in the oven. Murray sobbed for a week.

Another time they were visiting their paternal grandmother. She sounded like a typical granny, with a nice little house, but certainly not used to a couple of little hellions like this. The Canadian tradition is that you do not wear your shoes in the house, and so the boys would run around in their sock feet. They would come flying down the stairs, and then leap from about the third step from the bottom and come crashing onto the landing at the foot of the stairs. It drove her crazy. One day Larry found a package of carpet tacks and he got, what he thought was a great idea to teach Murray not to jump off the stairs. He went to the landing and took about 50 of the carpet tacks and stood them up on their heads on the rug at the foot of the stairs. Then he called out "Murray, come into the kitchen, granny has cake, Murray!" And sure enough, he heard the thump thump of Murray's feet coming down the stairs, heard the silence of the leap, and then heard the screams as Murray impaled both his bare feet on the carpet tacks.

Apparently they were in the emergency room for three hours while a doctor extracted over 20 carpet tacks from the soles of Murray's feet. They were sent home to their mother shortly afterwards.

When they were teenagers, and were briefly out of remand, they were at their mother's house. She had a budgie and both boys hated it. She cooed over it, talked to it, fed it special treats, in fact she treated the bird better than she had ever treated the two boys. Larry was sitting in a chair watching tv and he noticed his mom's sewing basket by the chair. There was a pack of needles on the top of the basket. There was a straw on the table beside the chair. Larry decided nothing would be funnier than to turn the straw into a blow gun and blow needle darts at the bird. He didn't think it was possible, but one of the needles pierced the birds chest and the bird ends up doing the funky chicken on its' perch and then keels over and dies.  Both Larry and Murray knew they would be in deep shit when the old lady got home, this bird was like a baby to her. They pulled the needle out of the birds chest, smoothed down the feathers, removed all the needles from the cage and left the bird lying in the bottom of the cage. They told her the bird must have had a heart attack, they didn't see or hear anything, they just found the bird on the bottom of the cage

Larry has his first sexual experience when he was 10 going on 11. He hung out on the fringes of the tough guys in the neighborhood. He ran errands for them, going to get cigs or pizza, generally he was their gofer (he would gofer this and gofer that). They paid him off by letting him hang around. One night there was a party at one of the guys apartment (this would be about 1959), one of the cool guys had gotten this young woman dead drunk and she was passed out on the bed. The guy decided nothing would be finer than for every guy at the party to fuck her. Last but not least was Larry. After about 15 guys had dumped semen in and on this young woman, they let Larry have a go at her with his tiny ten year old dick. It was the first time he had seen a naked woman, and even though he knew it was wrong, it felt wrong, he did it anyway. The guys were laughing and cheering him on, and dammit, that ten year old did have an erection, as tiny as it was.

I didn't find that story very funny, it made me sick, but it was insightful into what made Larry into Larry.

Larry and Murray spent considerable time at her majesty's request, first in the boys school system (a sort of juvenile facility for bad boys) and then a couple of years in the penitentiary. What they did get out of that time of leisure was a trade, both of them learned to weld. They considered that their "straight job" but they still had a vigorous sideline of stolen goods, cars, drugs, guns and girls. Once they managed to smuggle 200 hand guns in from the U.S. They dug a huge pit out in Caledon, lined it with plastic, made sure the guns were greased and wrapped and then buried them. There was a third guy, you know the type, got busted for something else and then to get his sentenced dummied down, ratted out Murray and Larry.

Well they got 10 years in Kingston for that one. They got out after 6, robbed a bank. The only reason they got caught that time was because Larry dumped all the money ($600K) onto a bed and took a picture of himself and the money. Didn't he send it to someone, who showed it to someone, and so on, until yes, once again they were caught. Got 20 years for that, got out after 10. Paroled to a half way house were they stumbled on the bright idea of robbing the Gold Exchange in Toronto using motorcycles. Fucking brilliant, easy to make a get away until they turned down what they thought was a side street with the cops in full pursuit, and ended up in an industrial cul-de-sac with absolutely no way out, save through a chain link fence.

Got 20 to life for that one. By some strange twist of fate, they both got early release. The pen was undergoing the strains of overpopulation, so they first got bumped to a lower security work farm and then out onto parole. When I met them, they were in their mid forties. Murry spent almost all his free time watching porn. Larry, not so much, but he vowed never to darken the door of a prison again. He said he would go out in a blaze of glory rather than be locked up. You think it would have dawned on both of them that their life of crime had not exactly been what they dreamed of, but like so many people, they did not have the best up bringing, the best education and they wanted what everyone wanted - the good life. The only way they could see to get it was to take it.

Larry taught me that any man who made me laugh was worth spending time with. Ultimately we did not last, because he scared me. He also still had that tiny ten year olds dick, that he could only partially compensate for by breathing through his ears. One time after making love, we were lounging naked on the bed, he sat up and reached over to grab the candle on the bedside table, to light a cigarette. The candle was about 5 inches in diameter and it had been burning for several hours, consequently there was a huge pool of blistering hot liquid wax around the wick. Larry did not realize that as he tipped the candle towards himself to light the smoke. That hot wax landed on his tiny dick, and splashed all down his legs. Ok, maybe that's not funny either, but it's like watching an old lady fall down, it's not funny but you can't stop laughing.

I have a million Larry stories, but as I read back on these ones, they are sad really. Being Larry, or then again, being with Larry takes courage my love.