I remember the first time I met Audley, we were next door neighbours in NDG an uptown neighbourhood in Montreal. It stands for Notre Dame de Grace, but people say that it stands for No Damn Good, other people say that it stands for Naked Dancing Girls.
I had been listening to the CJAD 800 AM, and as usual Jim Duff sounded like he was having a stroke. There was all that to the talk radio but the channel wasn’t coming in right and was making loud feedback. There was a knock on my door and there was Audley. That’s A-U-D-L-E-Y, he said. I thought he was knocking to complain about the noise from the shitty reception on the radio.
But he continued - The fact is, I’ve been Audley George Coley the First since I kicked my way out of my mothers womb. I came to show the world what it’s possible for a man to be. That’s the reason I started to dance. To show what’s possible. And then he just cut past me into my living room and did a jig, some old time dance I didn’t know about, to the rhythm of the station coming in and out. That was Audley. That was five years ago, and in a way he has never left.
Audley was saying he was the Pharoah, saying he had the blood of a king pumping through his veins. But the doctors saw it different. Bi-polar disorder was the name they put on him when he was 28. I guess he wasn’t called Audley anymore. So they locked him away in the hospital for three years and put him on what he calls his “vitamins” to take him down. He tells me that - Isis moves in my skin. When he first got this in his head the police had to come to make him gone. But in the meantime, for now, Isis, the Egyptian god of Death, is living out of his next door basement apartment and teaching aerobics to turn a dollar and get what is his.
He settled in Montreal because he caught wind of some work and he got to dancing. He even got some Radio Canada TV gigs with Quebec super stars Mitsou and Remi Simard (now jailed). That’s when they came to tell him that he couldn’t dance anymore. They came to tell him that he couldn’t ever see his baby again. His son Jamal the one he had with a Quebecoise woman. Then they came to tell him his sister had been murdered.
So then, this is five years since I met the man - and I see him from my basement window, standing on the street just Audley, trying to see what it’s like to be only some mortal kind. But the people are just walking by. And his eyes are closed and I can see him picturing himself with maybe a couple of groupies with fake tits that he just signed his autograph on. Anything just to take him higher still and make him remember what it is to exist. Like Michael Jackson or Prince. A bloody immortal and only just unkillable.
So the only thing that really scares me is when he opens his eyes he is not dancing, but just standing here on Girouard.
And I imagine what he would look like not from my basement apartment window but from the sky. And I think I would see a boy moving through the years. And around him even the former signs of patriotism marking this neighborhood turn to tombstones. Lay out like a bad game of connect the dots intersecting the tops of so many empty flagpoles. No longer left are the flags of opposing tattered red and blue to map his future. But instead blue sky lay atop steel. Fabric worn down by time, worn down to nothing, on this here two square miles of people called Notre Dame de Grace. Fading to nothing over Audley’s 50 years. Till there is no pattern, no shape just empty flag poles fraying slow with Audley the man looking on them, even as they die. And I figure that is the way that the Egyptians would really see things from way up in the sky.
And after I do that in my head I come back. Remembering what it was he told me the first time we met, before I knew him as Isis, and he was just the man called Audley, — when he told me something to be true. He told me he came here from his mother’s womb, he came running to show the world what it is possible for a man to be…
And same time I remember him telling me that, I am listening to the call in show on CJAD AM, but this time it’s coming in perfect, and some caller named Sean from the suburbs is talking about some northern town Herouville that caught a ton of press, by passing a bi-law that says you can’t perform female circumcision or collapse a wall on someone within town limits, because as the caller puts it that is what the Muslims do. And when he says that the reception starts flitting in and out and feedback comes screaming in. So, I turn it up, and that is when I hear it. The sound of Audley Coley knocking at my door.
