 This month's man selected by Alison Gordon |
This month's man selected by Alison Gordon |
Tarts . . Motel . . Madness . . Mom's . . Route 66 . . Dungeon . . Mall . . Starlite . . Message BoardLeonard Cohen, poet and troubadour, is everything a tart could want. He’s got experience, he’s got poetic sensitivity, and he still exudes a raw animal sexuality.Okay, yeah, he is sixty-five years old. (He can have a senior’s discount at my all-you-can-eat-buffet any day). And, sure, he spends a lot of time these days on some strange mountaintop making tea for his Zen Buddhist guru. But really, when it comes right down to it, who among us wouldn’t walk barefoot across broken glass if he was naked on the other side?
Cohen started off as a poet in Montreal in the fifties, when being a poet was considered a very cool thing to be. I was at the same party as he was back in those days. He took another girl home. Mind you, at the time, I was an earnest university student, still a few cherries short of tartdom, but Damnit, he should have realized! Leonard Cohen should have looked past my ponytail and shirtwaist dress, buttoned to the neck, and seen the banked and smouldering fires lurking within. Spurning the raven-haired beauty with the kohl-rimmed eyes, pouting lips and heaving bosom, Leonard Cohen should have taken me by the hand and led me to his room at the Princess Court Motor Inn and taught me the Meaning of Love.
But he didn’t. I gave up on poetry, and lost my virginity to a boy who went on to make something of himself in the business world, instead. This is something I seldom admit. I held this against Leonard for years. I scoffed at his music: Suzanne and her damned oranges that came all the way from China, and all the other toneless dirges.
Until one day, when I was a tart who had been around a block or two, I turned on the radio to hear him singing directly to me, growling at me, with a saxophone wailing in the background. 'If you want a lover,' he sang, 'I’ll do anything you ask me to. He got my attention right away. By the time he got to the part about 'I’d crawl to you baby and I’d fall at your feet, and I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat, and I’d claw at your heart and I’d tear at your sheet,' I was finding it difficult to breathe. 'I’d say please, please, I’m your man,' he sang then. And I said to my radio, 'Okay, Leonard, I’ll give you one more chance. Come on over.'
So far he has only shown up in some rather spectacular fantasies. But I’m ready for him. And if he wants to fall at my feet and howl like a dog in heat, I won’t even make him say please.
Alison Gordon was the first woman to cover major league baseball in North America. She has written five acclaimed novels featuring sports reporter Kate Henry and recently completed a non-fiction piece for an anthology on legendary Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. She can drink anyone under the table, outswear the saltiest sailors, and her star-studded parties bring the cream of Canadian literati to her fabulous Toronto house. She wouldn't want anyone to say this but she's also a real sweetheart and for a nickel, she'll show you her moose tattoo.
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