The Queen of Hearts

I write this as I cannot sleep, because I cannot stop thinking about Myrai Lavoie, whom I have just finished having drinks with earlier this very evening. Perhaps it is premature to write this piece now, without the golden seal of hindsight to grant me assurance, or even a good night’s sleep to sober me up. But I cannot sleep. Perhaps, if I write this now, I could be done with it by early morning. 

Myrai and I met at my favorite joint in all of Vancouver; a karaoke dive on Hastings, where folks from all walks of life gather to make merry and dance and sing. One by one, we commoners take the stage and belt our broken hearts out, while the crowd slams their desperate sweating palms against the front stage. For some, it is the closest thing to stardom they will ever know. But not for Myrai Lavoie.

The circumstances that brought me to this bar the night I met Myrai were entirely strange. I was sober as a saint, and it was 11:30 pm on a Friday. The place was packed and rowdy as hell. I stood under the purple and red lights near the front stage, letting the crowd of drunks roll me through the rapids of their ecstasy. When I heard the announcer say “next up, we have Queeeeen”, I remember thinking to myself what a bold choice that was, for someone to write “Queen” as their name on the call sheet. Then the Queen walked on stage, and my jaw dropped. Everyone’s jaw dropped, I think.

She was wearing these fabulous colorful heeled platform boots – adding about a foot to her actual height – and these big rimmed diva sunglasses that covered most of her face. She kissed the light, flashing her fangs at us from behind her bold red lips. A glittering tattoo across her neck read “off with their heads” in wispy cursive letters. People immediately began migrating towards the stage from every corner of the bar. I turned to my friend and said what I believe we were all thinking: “I just know she picked the best song.”

It was “Dog Days” by Florence + The Machine, but it could have been anything. Never have I ever seen the likes of what the Queen pulled off that night. Every time she raised her arm, the people reached. When she put her big colorful heel up on the edge of the stage, I swear to god I saw someone actually kiss it. People were crying and whooping and breaking their fingers against the stage front. I was starstruck. 

Later that night, the Queen and I got into a whirlwind conversation as my companion and I were running out the door. Somehow, I got her contact and the promise of a story. Towering over me in her heels, she took off her glasses, took my hands in hers, and said (in a thick Québécois accent) “I am here to help artists.” 

That brings us to Cactus Club Cafe on a Monday afternoon. I was smoking in the parking lot, daydreaming about what this new story could be. I knew I would see Myrai coming from a mile away, and I absolutely did. I believe the first thing I said to her was “Queen, you are unmistakable.”

As we walked inside, it became obvious to me that all the server girls already knew – and were obsessed with – Myrai. Everyone was chattering and giggling. We sat and Myrai ordered a tall glass of wine “with ice on the side”; I followed suit. It took the entire restaurant a moment to recover from our arrival. 

I asked Myrai about what she had meant on the day we met, when she said that she was “here to help artists.”

She explained that she was a mastermind, whose life’s work was to assist her fellow man in their various endeavors and make the world a better place. She said she was a mother to this world, and that she was not capable of hating anyone – no matter what cruel things they may have done – because she could see the hearts of people, and found that she had only love and pity for their tortured, tangled souls. I don’t believe I had even touched my drink before she proclaimed her true destiny to me: That she was born to be the very literal ruler of the world – our omnipotent Queen of Hearts. She also told me that she could see the future, and that she could not lie. 

“This is just the background information,” she said as I groped for my notebook, “I always wanted something written about me before I became really famous, so that I can prove I have known all along.”

She went on to confess that she never wanted to be the Queen of the world (who would wish for that burden?) but that it was something she had to accept about herself over the course of her life. She spoke about her premonitions – I asked her, “Have you ever been wrong? I mean, predicted something that didn’t come true?” and she said, “No. I’m never wrong.” 

The Queen had a vision for a better world. On the day Myrai Lavoie becomes Queen of the world, there will be no more famine, no war, no pollution. She explained how these poor men who rule the world today have nobody to guide them; That’s what the Queen is here to do. I wish I could list off all the places in the world that she has visited and lived, the celebrities she has done cocaine with, the wealthy and powerful narcissists she has dated. She was fascinating.

But by now we had emptied our frosty glasses, and Myrai asked me if we could do the real story in her apartment, which was in a nearby building. As a rule, I do not take storytellers to secondary locations; as a much stricter rule, I always trust my instincts. I knew I had to see the Queen’s apartment – fuck, wouldn’t you?

Plus, I was gasping for a cigarette, and so was she.

“What do you smoke?” I asked her when we stepped outside.

“Menthols” was her answer – fabulous. We smoked and talked all the way to her place. 

Stepping in the door, I was immediately surrounded by neon lights and hanging vines; Books and plants and art and artifacts. She showed me the “jungle room”, her own bedroom – where the ceiling was strung up with chochin lanterns and the bed looked as if it was breathing on its own – and the balcony. The view was Vancouver; from 10km away and thirty-eight stories up, the city seemed ironically passive and peaceful. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said. She gazed with me for a moment, then waved her long acrylic nails down toward the industrial buildings surrounding us, as if she were stirring them up in a pot. 

“When I’m Queen of the World,” she said, “all these buildings will have trees on the roofs.”

I took a moment to picture it, then I went inside, got my recording device and notebook, and sat down on the velvety green sofa. Myrai got us each another glass of wine, with ice. 

“The story I want to tell you is, like, the baby Queen,” she said, “the story of the baby Queen is: Someone who [wants] to explain how much it’s painful to be a protagonist… It’s really lonely, and it’s not something that’s easy because if you have a good heart, you want to be sure to do everything good.” 

I would come to find out that Myrai Lavoie was born in Quebec to a single mother; They lived together in a parked trailer until Myrai was about two years old. Then, when her Mother’s partner landed a big promotion at work, they all bought a house together in Stoneham-et-Tewkesbury; A cozy, upper-class neighborhood about an hour out from Quebec City. Myrai herself got to pick the house out and, of course, chose the one that most resembled a castle. In this new house, Myrai had the entire basement floor to herself; She learned to hunt and fish and make camps in the woods; She had a horse named Jimmy; She took figure skating lessons; She had everything a baby Queen could want. Unfortunately, circumstances were dark in ways she hadn’t realized then.

“He (Myrai’s Stepdad) really never liked me, because I was this bastard, but the thing was – me, I didn’t see that because I love everyone – and in my head, every second he was spending time with me, I thought he was loving me, but he was really violent to me a lot.”

She was also bullied by her peers, primarily for being something other than “white” in a “white community”. With no siblings and no real friends, our Queen of Hearts was incredibly isolated, and so she looked inwards for company. She would spend most of her time in the woods behind her house, speaking to the bugs and plants, and spending time with her “imaginary friends” – which she now understands as being the spirits of the forest.

“I just think I just get stuff without even knowing. This is why I understood English without understanding it; This is why I can talk to plants or animals. Like, my brain [works] in a way of just understanding [with] my heart. I just get it.”

Then, when she was six years old, Myrai’s mother gave birth to her second child: A baby girl with Down syndrome who Myrai loved with her whole royal heart. It was then that Myrai’s Mom finally realized the danger she and her daughters were in, and so in the middle of the night, the three of them snuck away to a transition house. They stayed there for a period before being relocated to a two-bedroom suite in a ghetto neighborhood right under the doormat of Quebec City. Now, Myrai was helping her mother run a household and raise an incredibly needy newborn, all without a friend in the world to help her, and still having never attended primary school. 

“The weird shit was, in my head, I saw it all beautifully like it was an adventure. I [knew] I didn’t belong there, but I was going with the storyline… Every bad moment whatsoever – even at school, every moment I got bullied, or whatever – in my head it’s so beautiful. I didn’t have no moment [where] I didn’t [see] something beautiful.”

Of the many tales I heard about the baby Queen, my favorite by far was when the young Myrai Lavoie realized the true strength of her powers. It was her seventh birthday, and her mother had invited some girls from Myrai’s class over for a party. Myrai believes they had only come for the goodybags. These girls would be quite cruel to her in school, but would come to Myrai’s house on weekends to participate in the plays she would write for them. They were undoubtedly “fake” friends, and Myrai knew that, so on this, her seventh birthday, she decided to take the Queen’s revenge.

She told me how she had led these girls into the woods, and as she did, she began telling them about “the invisible man”. She told them that only she could see him, while she pointed her finger from tree to tree. “He’s there,” she whispered to them, “he’s right there”. Wherever she pointed, she said that the wind would thrash through the branches and blow up the dust in that direction. Just as everyone was becoming truly frightened, the baby Queen said to her classmates, “I think we should go back,” and in that exact moment, a massive tree branch crashed to the ground directly behind Myrai’s head. All the girls screamed, dropping their lousy goodybags and slipping frantically through the mud.

“I [wanted] to karma them. I wanted them to feel scared as much as I feel scared all the time… It worked so well, I was like ‘oh shit’, but in the end that’s when I discovered ‘ok, im scared of that power’, you know what I mean? I don’t want to use it.”

While she was telling me all of this, the fully grown Queen of Hearts was smoking a cigarette under the kitchen fan, she was lighting incense, she was topping off our wine glasses, she was running to the bathroom for something; As if possessed by the energy of a child, she was doing laps around me. At one point, she left my view and returned with this luxurious silk robe thrown over her, which was covered in these chic black leopards. She never stopped talking as she did these things; She never stopped mixing the big pot around and around with her long acrylic nails. 

We breezed through the details of how she had dropped out of school and left home as a young teen. In these early years, Myrai took to the world full of fire, and had run it all over by the time she was in her early twenties. I could have written a short novel with all the stories she gave me then. The two of us standing against the stove, smoking into the whirling overhead fan – we gabbed and gabbed. It was so undeniable to me that Myrai Lavoie was a person who loved people. She loved them blindly, and aggressively, and wholly. Throughout our conversation, Myrai spoke a lot about her history of abuse in relationships. Never did she say a bad word towards any of her abusers, nor did she drop a single name the entire time we spoke (saying that “names hold power” and that she did not want to send “evil eyes” to anyone by accident). It was more than that; It was her unbreakable spirit, and her joy. Looking at the woman in front of me, I thought about everything I had heard and everything she had been through. And yet, and yet, and yet, she had space – more than enough space – in that royal heart for this whole cruel world, including a scrappy little ghost writer on her own chosen mission. 

The sun was still out when I left, but it was headed for the horizon. We hugged goodbye, and she slipped me an unopened pack of menthol cigarettes as a going-away gift, although I knew it would not be the last time I saw Myrai Lavoie. This monarch had left her mark on my heart, no doubt, and I buzzed all the way home as eager as a bee to get to writing. Now the hour is late, and the menthols are beckoning me toward the final word. I suppose I’ll leave you, readers, with only this: That the Queen of Hearts is in Vancouver, pouring love into our city with every click of her massive heels. If you see her, bow and be true to her. You can’t miss her – she truly is unmistakable.