Laurence(s) by Kim Poirier
Photo by Michael Giugliano for Pexels
TW: Intimate partner abuse, terminal illness
Look: I’m dying.
Nobody likes it when I put it that way, but what else can I say? It’s the truth. Jesus fucking Christ, it’s the fucking truth, even though it sounds absolutely terrible — and it smells even worse. Like human faeces, hospital-grade disinfectant, and naphthalene. Like wet coughs. Like a cottonball drydown.
I’ll spare you the details. You’ve seen dying people before, if only on cigarette cartons. The image is already there, in your mind: grayed, emaciated, tunnel-eyed. I am that image. That image is me.
Do I believe in an afterlife? Not really. Reincarnation? Even less, truth be told. But whatever happens, wherever I go — I pray I get to keep my memories. I pray they all come with me.
The tightness of Okanagan peaches. The humiliation of losing my first job. The kiss I shared with Jack McDermott when I was twenty years old. The nervy skittering of his hand; the ecstasy and the terror of lying on the blow-up in his hot, musky apartment. The moments of plentitude, the moment of pleasure; sitting in a West Island diner with my best friend, sliced-up sunlight spearing through the window slats.
The night I met Laurence Paul Godin.
If it were up to me, I’d take them all with me. The pain, the love, the regret, whatever — all of it. I would secret them away into the silky, soporific dark: I’d make off like a jewel thief makes off with a rucksack of diamonds. Like a high school boy makes off into his bedroom with a physique magazine.
But it isn’t up to me.
#
I first met Laurence on a red-hot Saturday in downtown Montreal. It was St-Jean Baptiste. If you don’t know what St. Jean-Baptiste is, it’s Quebec’s fête nationale, like the Fourth of July. In other words — an excuse for everybody to pour out of their houses and into the streets, drink light beer and get stupid.
I guess I was twenty-six or twenty-seven at the time, still slogging through undergrad long after all my old high school friends had already graduated. In order to sustain my meagre existence, I worked at the coat check of a pretty well-loved punk club called La Maquina.
In hindsight, I guess it could be considered a pretty cool job — but I don’t have any good stories about La Maquina. I never really got to meet anyone famous, and I never actually witnessed any memorable chaos. All of the wild stuff that went down there was just shit I heard about.
I was on my way home from work, and the street was swarming. Rue St-Catherine had been blocked off by police; the sections that were normally studded with cars were instead packed with human bodies.
I watched these human bodies with a degree of anthropological interest: kids running around with fleur-de-lis facepaint and temporary tattoos, teenagers hauling huge backpacks, university students drinking Corona in roving packs. They were all feeling good about being French Canadian, which is the general aim of holidays like St. Jean-Baptiste. They were all luxuriating in the feeling that nothing was wrong with them, that this feeble, unloved crux of their identities was valuable and meaningful. They roasted in the feeling. They slow-cooked in it, like pork hock stew.
I wasn't French Canadian. Nor was I drinking Corona. I was on the periphery of the celebration: I shared a physical space with those revelers, but as a reveler myself I was a non-participant.
Which block did I find him on? I’m not entirely sure. It was definitely near the Faubourg Tower, so it might’ve been on the corner of St-Catherine's and Pierce. I guess it doesn’t really matter, in the end. What matters is that I did find him: I glanced down and I saw him there, slumped against the pavement like a bum. The first thing I noticed about him was his hair, which was black and glossy like fresh tar.
The second thing I noticed was his punched-up face.
His nose was bloodied. His lip was busted. His jeans were busted too, busted open at the knee, but I figured that was on purpose. And he had a black eye, like I said. A big fat shiner.
To tell you the truth, I’m not sure why we call them ‘black eyes’ — or shiners, for that matter. The bruise in question was not black: it was bluish-brown, like Sangiovese grapes. It wasn’t shiny, either, or at least any shinier than the rest of Laurence’s face, which was like a large, flat moon. The shiniest part of him was actually his hair. His hair glittered as though shellacked.
I stopped and I looked down at him. The eyes ringed with Sangiovese; the crushed lips, the savage hurt in his face. He looked hard-up.
Living in the city, you see a lot of hard-up folks. Junkies, runaways, panhandlers, whatever. And truth be told, you learn to tune them out. You learn to be selective with your empathy. If you aren’t, you’d be emotionally overrun. You’d be stampeded by sorrow. Traveling from point A to point B often requires briskly passing by up to three or four pitiful, visibly suffering human beings in need of aid. If you opened your heart up to all of them, you’d quite literally never get anywhere. You’d never reach point B.
But I guess I was feeling like a good Samaritan, because I squatted down and said, “Hey, man. Are you okay? Were you mugged?”
I thought about repeating the question in French, just go make sure he understood. But I couldn't quite figure out the French word for 'mugged,' and while I was in the process of puzzling it out, he answered back in English, “No. Do I look like I've been mugged?”
His tone was crisp and acidic, like a green apple. He looked like he was a couple years younger than me, maybe twenty-ish, so I gave it a pass.
“Yeah, you do,” I said. “Your face is all fucked up.”
“Your face is all fucked up,” he sulked.
I rolled my eyes, hands braced against my knees.
“Don’t be a brat. I’m trying to be nice.”
“I wasn’t mugged.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, like, did you throw yourself against a wall, or…”
“I got in a fight.”
“Yeesh. Should I call the cops?”
“No,” he said. “I fucking hate the cops.”
Keep in mind, I was working with a bunch of anarcho-communist punks at the time — so this party line sounded completely reasonable to me. I nodded seriously.
“What happened to the other guy?”
“I guess he ran off.”
“Did you at least get to even the score?” I mimed a punch.
“Yeah,” he said. Then, relenting immediately, he blurted, “No, sorry, that was a lie. It was totally one-sided. I was fucking trounced.”
“Ah.”
“In my defense, he had a good sixty pounds on me.”
“I’d believe that,” I said. He was a scrawny guy. Soaking wet, he couldn’t be more than one-fifty. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Laurence.”
“What?”
“My name’s Laurence.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “That’s my name.”
We swapped IDs to confirm it: him, Laurence Paul Godin, and me, Laurence Hakimi-Taherian. “Well, that’s sorta fun,” I said. “Laurence and Laurence.”
“Laurence and Laurence,” he agreed tiredly, pushing his hands into his beat-up eyes.
“I guess that means I’m obligated to help you out. Solidarity between Laurences and whatnot. Do you smoke?”
“Yeah,” Laurence Paul Godin said.
“Here, I’ll light you up.”
I pulled a beat-up pack up Pall Malls from my pocket, gave him a fag and a light. He took an awkward pull, holding the cigarette between two fingers, and then hacked up a sputtering, smoke-tailed cough.
“You’re a dirty liar,” I said. “You’ve never smoked in your life, have you?”
“Well, no time like the present, right?” Laurence sucked in another lungful, coughed it up again. This, to me, was nearly as pitiful as the bruises.
I clapped my hands over my thighs and asked him, “Can you stand?”
“Oh. Probably.”
“Do you live nearby?”
“Not really.”
“I left my car parked a couple streets away. If you can walk, I’ll give you a lift home.”
“I don’t wanna walk,” he said.
“Well, I can't pick you up here,” I said, gesturing towards St. Catherine’s, which was still absolutely swarming with beer-toting revelers. “The street’s blocked.”
“I don’t wanna walk,” he said. “You’ll have to carry me there.”
“You really wanna test the limits of my generosity?”
“You’ve gotta carry me,” he said. “‘Cause I’m a Laurence in need.”
He turned his mordant gaze on me; black brows a shock against his white face. His skin was soft and youthful, smooth as a new leaf — asides from the bruises, at any rate. His eyes were dark and rich as loam, and they were warm, too. They were warm in the way used coals are. The warmth of something that had, until very recently, been burning.
I said, “You’re a little brat, aren’t you?”
#
Like I said, Laurence was scrawny. So carrying him wasn’t actually very difficult. He didn’t fuss or squirm or anything, either, which was helpful. He just pressed his face against my back and permitted me, with princely dignity, to haul him down the road and through the crowd.
“So, who was the other guy?” I asked him. “The one who rocked your shit.”
“Some asshole I know.”
“Why’d he beat you up?”
“Because he’s an asshole.”
“Right,” I said. Then, lightly, “Lover’s quarrel?”
Peeved: “Are you calling me gay?”
“I don’t know, I’m just guessing. You seem kind of gay.”
“In what way?”
“Well, you’re skinny.”
“Lots of guys are skinny, that doesn’t mean they’re all gay.”
“You’re skinny like Timothée Chalamet.”
“Timothée Chalamet isn’t gay.”
“He isn’t?”
“He isn’t, Google it.”
Crunching over shattered glass and loose gravel, I thought about it for a few moments. Then, I said, “I’m pretty sure he’s gay.”
“He’s dating Lily-Rose Depp. You know, Johnny Depp’s daughter?”
“No?”
“Yeah, it was all over Twitter.”
“You know, the fact that you know this much about Timothée Chalamet’s personal life is kinda...”
“I don’t know it on purpose. Like I said, shit just shows up on my Twitter feed.”
“Okay, fine. Fine. Timothée Chalamet isn’t gay,” I said. “But you are being carried by another man. You’ve gotta admit, that’s pretty gay.”
“And you’re carrying another man. That’s also gay.”
“Okay, yeah,” I conceded. “So I guess we’re a pair of homosexuals.”
“A pair of old queens.”
There was a beat.
Then, Laurence shifted against my back, and he said, “Yeah. It was my boyfriend.”
“Oh,” I said. “Really?”
I could feel him nodding, short and tight.
“That’s, uh,” I turned my gaze towards the vanishing point on the horizon; the gray, cobbled sidewalk lifting towards the Montreal sky. “Domestic violence, you know.”
There was a profound silence, in which I suspected he was thinking unflattering thoughts about my level of intelligence.
I prompted him again, “Did you dump him?”
“Not yet,” he said.
“Are you going to?”
“...I don’t know.”
“You better,” I said, and it came out more vehemently than I’d intended; a tone of aggression I hadn’t thought to modulate. Even to my own ears, it sounded inappropriate, so I backpedaled: “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be, you know. I mean…”
“No, I get it,” he said. A beat. Then, he said, “It’s whatever.”
“It’s not whatever. It’s not remotely whatever. Did he always hit you?”
“Not always,” he said. Then, in a questing tone: “Have you ever been hit before?”
“In my life?”
“By a partner, I mean.”
“No,” I said. With a pulse of humiliated honesty, I said, “My — boyfriends, they never. No.”
“Ah,” he said, illuminated.
We came around to my car. At the time, I was driving around a truly heinous 2003 Saturn Ion. The body of the car was off-white — like demi-sec champagne, in the words of the dealer — which meant it only ever looked dirty, no matter how many quarters I fed into the carwash.
I deposited Laurence into the passenger seat very gingerly. He regarded me, wary. “Where do you live?” I asked him, coming around the other side and buckling in.
“Where do you live?”
“Verdun.”
“Nice place?”
“It’s alright,” I said. “Why do you care?”
“I wanna see it.”
So I keyed in the ignition, drove us over. I pulled up outside my apartment building, pointed up along the side. My finger hovered over the top-left balcony, covered in potted plants, and I said, “That one’s mine.”
Laurence said, “Can I come in?”
I took him up.
“My boyfriend’s name is also Laurence,” he said, kicking his shoes off.
“You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
“You don’t,” I said. “Too many goddamn Laurences.”
“He spells it Lawrence, with a W. Like the river,” he said. “But a Laurence is a Laurence is a Laurence.” Then, padding deeper into the apartment, “You live alone?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where’s the bedroom?”
“Over here.”
He pushed his way in, completely shameless, as if this was his home and not mine — as if I were the intruder and not he. He glanced around the room, which was dark, assessing. Then he began to take his clothes off.
His movements were workmanlike, efficient; he didn’t tease, didn’t make a show of himself, just pulled his shirt off over his head, so that the moonlight caught on his sheetpaper skin.
I dropped my keys onto my bedside table, cleared my throat. “You know, I wasn’t trying —”
“Shut up,” Laurence said, pressing his body up against mine. “Just shut up, shut up. Don’t say anything. Just let me feel this.”
He put his lips on mine. I wish I could tell you they tasted like malt liquor, or vanilla, or cinnamon sugar; they did not. He tasted like nothing at all, not even the cigarette I’d given him. My hands found his naked waist. His fingers found my zipper.
Someone outside my building was lighting rocket fireworks — quite illegal in the city — and as he pushed me to the edge of the bed, my ears were filled with the whistle-pop of them rising and bursting.
“Laurence.”
I was still inside him when I fell asleep. When I woke up, I was alone.
#
Did I ever see him again?
Yes and no.
We never spoke again. Nor did we ever touch again.
But I did see him.
We were both in line to vote at the 2021 federal election. I was masked and he was masked — this was mid-pandemic — but I still recognized him in an instant. It was his hair that did it. His shiny, jet-black hair. Hair like fresh tar, like fresh nail polish: that slick, chemical black.
If he’d dyed it any other colour, I probably wouldn’t have recognized him at all, and the story would be over. But he did keep it black, and I did recognize him. We were too far apart to say anything to one another, and leaving the queue was out of the question — but we made eye contact. The look in his eyes was one of total recall, and I felt myself returning it.
Laurence and Laurence, once again.
Laurence pulled his mask down to his chin and smiled at me. I did the same. Then Laurence lifted his hand up and pointed to his finger, and I saw that he was wearing a gold wedding band. Next, he pointed to the man in front of him — a tall, sun-bronzed Christiano Ronaldo-type, talking loudly on his phone in badly-accented French. He seemed to be wearing a matching ring.
Laurence had no bruises — none that I could see, at any rate — so I gave him a thumbs up.
In the moment, I thought he was trying to convey to me that he had followed my advice dumped the asshole Laurence. Without words, I thought he was trying to tell me, “I moved on and found a better man, a better Laurence; a Laurence who loves me and treasures me, who treats my heart with tenderness.” That’s why I gave him the thumbs up back. I was trying to say, “Good for you.”
But now that I think back, I’m not entirely sure I correctly interpreted the situation. Was the look in his eyes one of triumph or defeat? Was his smile prideful, or self-abasing? Was the ring on his finger a promise, or a shackle? Was he wearing a turtleneck because it was September, or for some other reason? The man on the phone — did he scowl into the receiver? Or did he just laugh?
It’s very possible that I misread the moment entirely. Maybe the man on the phone was Laurence-with-a-W, the man who’d given him a Sangiovese black eye on St. Jean-Baptiste. I really don’t know. If I’d gotten out of line and gone to ask him, I could’ve found out. But I didn’t. And now I can’t even get out of this fucking bed — I don’t think I’ll ever know.
My memory isn’t a yard of film I can roll out and re-examine at will; it’s amorphous, immaterial, and in a state of active decay. Sometimes, when I pull up that image of Laurence smiling at me in a City Hall voting block, he looks breathily elated. Sometimes, he’s gritting in total despair, and he needs me.
If you’re reading this and you’re not a Laurence, then I just want to thank you for your time. For holding the memory; squeezing in your hands its fluid, squirming shape. And if you are a Laurence —
And if your name is Laurence Paul Godin —
And you touched me in the dark and pricked me like a bramble —
Just give me a sign, before it’s much too late.
We may still need each other.
Kim Poirier (she/her) is a Montreal-based writer, anthropology student, and overall poor person. She was the 2021 recipient of the Dawson College SPACE Award for Short Fiction and has been published by OFIC Magazine. Yeehaw.
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