the_red_tie_club raze i can't remember how my dad met jess. i think it was through one of his clients. she'd been an escort before. now she was trying to start her own business selling cosmetics. she was one of the only people who got my dad's sense of humour. he didn't have to ask her to hold his hand. she just did it. she had a friend she would cuddle with when she needed to know the heart she felt moving in time with hers belonged to someone who didn't want anything from her. his name was jack. one of them would show up at the other's house and they would collapse on top of each other in bed without saying anything. they would sleep, or cry, or try to find a way to keep breathing a little while longer. jess got me a john martyn cd. "solid air". she played "teach your children" on my twelve-string the first time i met her. the guitar wasn't in standard tuning. she fumbled around for chords that weren't where her fingers expected them to be while her voice kept chasing the melody. when the two of them went to colasanti's, jess took my dad to where all the birds were. she found the ones that could talk. "watch this," she said. she screamed "FUCK OFF!" as loud as she could. the birds screamed back. FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF! FUCK OFF! she smiled. she had a son named joe and a daughter named amanda. they were twelve and six. she would leave them alone in the house for days at a time. then she'd show up at midnight on a wednesday with a bottle of coke and a bag of chips and they'd call it dinner. i lost count of how many times my dad drove out to leamington to feed joe and amanda and drive around looking for their mother. usually he'd find her in some run-down old house smoking crack or snorting pills with a bunch of people who were half-dead. their house was a mess. no one ever did the dishes. jess never did any laundry, so the kids never had any clothes to wear. my dad would fill garbage bags with all their shirts and socks and pants and underwear and take them to a laundromat to get them clean. then joe and amanda would throw all their clothes on the floor and let them get dirty again. once, when my dad was trying to clean up the house, amanda showed him a desk. "look," she said. she pulled the top drawer open. it was full of unpaid bills. my dad took the train to montreal with jess to see her brother and his kids. jess kept ducking into the bathroom to smoke. in the hotel room, she pulled out half a joint. they each took a hit. they watched "about schmidt". the weed was cut with something. jack nicholson looked like an arthritic monkey. my dad couldn't understand what he was saying. "this is pretty fucked up," he said. "gab gab gab gab gab gab," jess said. "what?" "gab gab gab gab gab gab." when they made love, it felt like their bodies were charged with electricity. my dad bought jess a blue chrysler intrepid so she'd have something to drive. i think maybe she had it for a week before she crashed it. she was driving on the highway, out of her head on one drug or another, when she nodded off. she went off the road and slammed into a cement post. if she'd been straight, she would have been killed. if she'd been wearing her seatbelt, she probably would have been decapitated. but she wasn't straight, and she didn't have her seatbelt on. when the car hit the post, she slumped down into the tiny space between the dashboard and the floor mat like a sleeping child. my dad was in the middle of a meeting when someone called his pager. he called a number he didn't recognize and a man he didn't know said, "your girlfriend's been in a car accident. it's bad." he left the meeting and drove to the hospital. he saw jess. she had scrapes and cuts all over her face and arms. she had a few bruises. other than that, she was fine. "i should have fucking died," she said. "i should be dead right now." she wasn't in shock. she wasn't grateful to be alive. she was angry because she wasn't dead. he brought her back to the house. i had a few tylenol 3s left over from when i had my wisdom_teeth taken out. i gave her the bottle. i poured her a glass of water so she could take a pill for the pain. i put a band-aid on one of the uglier cuts on her hand. my dad was doing something on the computer in the other room. "how are you doing in there?" he asked. "i'm good," she said. "your son's a good nurse." my dad got to see the car the next day. it was a pancake. no one who saw it could believe the driver wasn't a corpse. there was no way to salvage the thing. it was a write-off. jess expected him to buy her another car. she got angry when he wouldn't do it. "i can't believe you cashed it in," she said. i think there was snow on christmas day that year. i think we still got snow for christmas back then. i wore a suit and tie. so did my dad. jess wanted to start a tradition. every christmas, all the men would wear red ties. the ties she got us were tacky as hell. she thought it was something we could do together. something that would bond us and make us a family when she couldn't even keep the one she already had from falling apart. i came here in the morning and wrote crimsonxmas. i didn't know i would be here eighteen years later writing another christmas message for a different group of 'skites. i felt naked. i wanted to be a part of this small but vibrant community. i wanted that so much it was hard to type those sixteen words without my hands shaking. after a little less than three years of writing in this red place, i still didn't know who i was or how i fit in. but i felt safe here. i felt like i belonged. i played miles_davis and turned the music up loud enough to fill the house. it was a compilation of songs miles recorded for prestige in the early 1950s. blues-themed pieces. jazz always felt like the best christmas music to me. i don't know why. when the album was over, i played a classical piece i still don't know the name of on the piano. i watched jess and my dad dance in the kitchen. i kept speeding the song up. they laughed as their movements grew more manic and exaggerated to match the music. jess made the best stuffing i've ever had in my life. it even looked amazing. the yellow bell pepper made it pop. she said "butt fuck idaho" at the dinner table. amanda laughed and repeated it without the b sound. "what's that mean?" she asked. "it's something you shouldn't say," jess said. after dinner, joe sat on the floor and listened to "deja entendu" by brand new on his discman with a spare pair of headphones i gave him. his headphones were shitty and old and broken. mine were less shitty and not so old and not broken. i could hear screaming, but there wasn't enough sound getting past the ear pads for me to make out the words. a week and a half before christmas, i was in bed listening to "selected ambient works volume ii". i couldn't sleep. amanda's class was giving a christmas presentation the next day. her mom was struggling to keep it together and her brother was trying to kill her every other day of her life. i wanted to give her a good memory. something that might make her forget about all the awful shit for ten or fifteen minutes. somewhere between "lichen" and "spots" i thought of white roses. i could be the first person to give her flowers. they didn't have to mean anything. they could just be something beautiful. now she wanted to give me a hug before she went to bed. "my hair smells really pretty," she said. "smell." she wrapped her arms around my neck. her hair smelled like the shampoo her mother used when she gave her a bath upstairs. it smelled like strawberries. it smelled like everything that was innocent and good in the world. joe was still up after everyone else had gone to bed. he wasn't tired. we stood at the foot of my bed and he acted out some of his favourite scenes from "bruce almighty". then he did "kung pow! enter the fist". he performed the whole movie as a one-man show while christmas day bled into boxing_day. he explained the transitions and camera angles. he voiced every character. jess was supposed to meet my dad at a restaurant on his birthday in the new year. she didn't show up. he called her. she said she had a migraine. she told him to come to the house. he found her in the bathtub. she was high. when she was able to stand up again, she made him an ice cream sandwich. it was just two cookies with some vanilla ice cream shoved between them. she gave him a letter instead of a card. she thanked him for loving her. she wrote, "you are the best thing the universe has ever sent me." my dad tried to put together an intervention. it fell apart. he tried again. her brother said he'd been through that shit with her before. he wasn't going to go through it again. he said she was a lost cause. joe tried to stab her with a steak knife one morning. another morning he tried to set the house on fire by melting a candle on a stove burner. she thought he was trying to kill her. i thought it was his own version of an intervention. he was trying to scare her into staying home and being his mom again. it didn't work. after things went bad, jess called the house late one night. she said she needed to come over. my dad said that couldn't happen. some drug dealers had already dumped a bag of her clothes on our porch after she gave them our address. the cell phone my dad gave her was in the bag. i watched him smash it with a hammer. "i just want to lay with you," she said. he hung up on her. she kept calling. he let the phone ring. she showed up and asked him to let her in. she wouldn't leave. he called the cops. "you're the coldest, most callous man i've ever known," she said. she took off before the cruiser showed up. the cop thought the whole thing was hilarious. "look on the bright side," he said. "at least there isn't a rabbit boiling on the stove." jess called again the next day and said, "don't worry about what you did last night." he let her sleep over for thanksgiving. he fed her. she was wearing a sweater that wasn't hers. i listened to her growl "fuck" and "shit" all night from his bedroom. i thought they were having sex. they weren't doing anything. she was swearing because someone threw her against a wall and fucked up her shoulder. he spent thousands of dollars trying to get her out of trouble. when i asked him what he was doing, his eyes filled up with tears. "i don't want her to die," he said. she came by one last time when she was straight. she said she was getting clean so they could be together. they both knew it was a lie. he started seeing her face in every woman he saw around the city. women who looked nothing like her. he couldn't shake her. jess tried to get back into escorting. i found pictures of her online. there was nothing sexy about them. they were just sad. her clothes were old and ratty. she couldn't hide the shame in her face. i wanted to erase the memory of seeing her that way. my dad had a picture she gave him when she was in better shape. it was taken at one of those photo places they used to have set up at every mall. her eyes were so different, each half of her face started to look like it belonged to a different person if you stared at the picture long enough. he threw it in the garbage after she skipped town. i fished it out of the trash when he was sleeping. there was food all over her face. i cleaned the picture up as well as i could and hid it in one of my dresser drawers. i thought he might want it back someday. after jess got evicted, she jumped the fence and broke into her own house. she grabbed what she could. she called my dad and said she was getting out of town. she said she didn't care about her kids. then she was gone. joe and amanda ended up with their godparents for a while. then they lived with their dad. i don't know what happened to amanda. joe lives in toronto now. he's a chef. he has a son. i don't know if jess is still alive, but she's right there in her son's face. i have a drawing amanda made before she hugged me and went to bed on christmas day all those years ago. she drew jess and my dad together. there are snowflakes and hearts inside of diamonds floating above their heads. there's a flying snowman. amanda's up in the left corner, away from everything. she's flying too. my dad is standing next to jess, the two of them suspended in this sort of smoky haze. they both have thin bodies that look too stiff to move. there's a single star beneath their feet and one word written beside them. "love." 211227 what's it to you? who go blather from