Close to Spider Man

by Ivan E. Coyote

  Did I mention how beautiful you look today? Happy and hopeful, what more could I wish for you? I mean, what more could I wish?

  YOU’RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

  IT SOUNDED LIKE SHE WAS CALLING from a pay phone, what with all the background traffic and passers-by. I had to listen to catch all the words.

  “So, Ave have to get together to do this thing. Call me and we’ll go do this thing.”

  We had decided to go together, for moral support. It is an intimidating task, involving forms and government agencies, unfeeling civil servants poking blank-faced into one’s private self.

  But it has to be done. We need to finally legally change our names. This should be easy, this should be free, but it is not.

  Who came up with the plan to legally name a child the day he or she was born? Whose bright idea was that? So many mistakes to make, such a wide margin of error.

  The exhausted young mother cradles her still sticky newborn to her heaving chest. She lets her head rest against the sweaty forehead of the dry-mouthed new father, and they both watch, incredulous, as this tiny life form opens and closes her still wrinkled fingers and they exclaim together:

  “Let’s call her Dorothy. After her grandmother.”

  But they have no means of foretelling young Dorothy’s future. In fact, they know nothing about her at all. They only want the best for her, her parents, but she’s only minutes old and they’ve already burdened her with a weight she will carry for years, perhaps for the rest of her life.

  Because what they don’t know is that Dorothy is not a Dorothy. This name will appear on birthday cards, and be felt-penned on stickers she will be forced to wear on the first day of pre-school, but it will never ring true to her ears. People will call it out and she will be obliged to come, scabby knees and baseball hat on backwards, because that is her name, and someone has called it out. But she will know that something is wrong, that someone made a tragic mistake, someone wasn’t thinking straight, and now she, Dorothy, must pay for it.

  Until Dorothy is old enough to stand in line at the office called Vital Statistics and name herself again.

  “Her heart beat and blood pressure seem normal, doctor, it looks like the sticks and stones just missed her bones, but someone named her Dorothy. Is there anything we can do?”

  Dorothy is a mechanic, one hundred and seventy-five pounds of biceps and brush-cut, and looks more like her father than her brothers do.

  So, you stand in line, you fill out some forms, take out a couple of ads in the paper, no big deal, right? You just change your name if they got it all wrong.

  I’ll tell you what I’m worried about: do they make you explain yourself? Does the form make you say why you feel you must change your name? State reason below. Choose one of the following. Provide documents. Use a separate sheet of unlined paper if necessary. Please print in black or blue ink only.

  I can see myself, palms sweaty and stammering.

  “My legal name doesn’t fit the rest of me. It never has, Your Honour. See, here, how I was born with no hips at all, and how my t-shirt hides my tits? I have hair on my chest, too, and well, everyone makes mistakes. I just need one more chance to get it right, if you will just allow me to write Ivan down on this form, if it pleases the court, I would be much obliged. I just turned thirty Your Honour, and it’s time something about me matched.”

  This is a dramatization, of course. It probably won’t be all that bad. And my name is not Dorothy.

  RED SOCK CIRCLE DANCE

  August, I974 † Whitehorse, Yukon

  FIVE YEARS OLD AT THE QUANLIN MALL, Saturday shopping, and I was holding open the swing door for my mom and the cart. I remember I had half a cinnamon candy stick in my mouth and a red baseball hat with the plastic thing in the back pushed through a hole that was smaller than the smallest hole in the strap, a hole I had to make myself with the tip of a heated bobby pin.

  So the rest of the strap stuck oddly out from one side of the back of my head, but I didn’t care, because it was my Snap-On-Tools hat that my dad had given me, just handed it right over to me when the guy at the tool place gave it to him, he was buying rivets or concrete pins or something, and the hat said Northern Explosives too, in black block letters in an arch over the hole in the back part, and come to think of it, what I wouldn’t do now for that hat.

  So enough about the hat, this American tourist sees me holding the door open, and of course he assumes it’s for him, so he won’t bump his cameras together pushing past his belly to open it for himself, and he steps through the door, right in front of my mom and her groceries.

  He thanks me down his nose in heavy Texan “Thank you, son,” and sucks more fresh Yukon air through his teeth. He is about to speak to me again, to meet the people, to engage in a little local colour, in the form of a polite little boy, and perhaps, via a patronizing conversation with him, get to meet his lovely young mother, too, who also had my little sister in tow, perpetual snot on her upper lip, even in summer like this.

  My mom interrupts this quaint northern moment, pushing the puffed wheat, two percent, and pork chop-laden cart briskly through the door. “She is not your son,” she shoots out the side of her mouth and the door slams shut behind the surprised Texan. I can’t see him anymore, there is just myself reflected in the dusty glass, and the back of my mom smaller in the background, as she pushed the cart and dragged my little sister to my dad’s Chevy, where he was smoking behind the wheel.

  We could hate the tourists a lot more back then, before the mines all shut down.

  The pavement was so hot in the parking lot that the bottoms of my sneakers stuck to the tar that patched the cracks on the way back to my Dad’s truck.

  April, 1992 † Vancouver, B.C.

  The van was packed when the call came.

  “Is this the girl named Ivan?”

  How much can you really guess about a stranger’s voice on the phone, but I listened to the soft, smiling lilt of hers rise and fall as she explained that she had been at a going away party for me the night before, a surprise going away party that my friends threw for me because I was driving up to the Yukon today to work for six months. Except the surprise part of the plan had worked just a bit too well, because what nobody besides myself knew was that I was teaching twelve inmates at the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women how to make leather belts all night, and this was the first I had heard about my own party, and it was over. Quite the surprise it was.

  “Great party,” she explained, and the sound of her laugh made me think of leprechauns. “Anyway, I was going to take the bus up to Whitehorse today, and well, how do you feel about some company? I cooked a whole ton of pasta salad for the bus.”

  Now, no amount of gas money and pasta salad can pay for four days on the Alaska Highway with someone who is starting to get on your nerves, because after Prince George you really are in the middle of nowhere, but I liked her voice. I said I’d pick her up in an hour at her sister’s place on my way out of town.

  Of course, driving over, the doubting began. Just me and the open road home – and a perfect stranger. What if she doesn’t smoke, or wants to talk about co-dependency or something like that for two thousand miles? She-ll be so glad she’s not stuck on a Greyhound that she won’t actually say anything; she’ll just silently roll down her window in a disapproving fashion and say things like, “I should give you my therapist’s number. She specializes in addiction issues.”

  But I picked her up, she bungee-Corded her beat-up momitain bike to the roof, loaded in her pasta salad, lit a smoke, and smiled with an elf mouth that matched her leprechaun laugh as she surveyed my van and said:

  “So if she breaks down, I guess I’ll just double you the rest of the way on my bike.”

  Three nights later, in a campground somewhere just outside of Fort Nelson, she slipped her tongue into my ear and her right hand into my Levi’s and whispered, “I’ve wanted to do this since we left Kitsilano.”

  Six months later, I drov
e back to Vancouver to go to electrical school, and she stayed. She had met a sweet-faced French-Canadian boy who I thought looked like Leif Garrett, and she was, unbeknownst to all of us at the time, pregnant with their first son.

  “You gonna write me, Chris?” I asked her as we loaded the last of my stuff back into my van.

  “Probably not, but I’ll think about you whenever I eat pasta salad, and if that’s not love, then I’ve never been in it.”

  This is the closest thing to a commitment you will ever get from a leprechaun, and I knew this at the time.

  †

  November, 1998 † Whitehorse, Yukon

  It is a balmy November day at Chriscabin, about three below zero and still no snow. The grass is frost-frozen, sparkling under a sun that shines, not cold, but heatlessly, if there is such a word.

  Chris wants to get the kids together and dressed and go into town, about a half-hour drive in a four-by-four. You could still make the road right now in a car, but not after a good snowfall.

  I haven’t seen Frances, her middle son, since he was a babe in arms. He is now three, and his red brown curls and round face were the first thing I saw at six this morning, when I was still scotch and cigarette sandpaper-mouthed. He pulled the covers off my face and pronounced in a matter-of-fact falsetto: “I’m not sure who you are, but could you help me out?” His one hand still held the end of the sleeping bag up, and his other hand held a strip of toilet paper, which trailed across the cabin floor and into the cold storage room where I assumed he’d just performed his morning’s first production.

  Because Frances performs everything. He has just pranced out of his and his brother’s bedroom, in a pair of emerald and blue-striped tights, red wool socks, and what looks like part of a sleeve from his dad’s old orange sweater stretched up and over his chest, like a tube top.

  “Dat dah da dahhh . . .” sliding in his socks on the bare floor, his smile flits and then disappears, and he comes to a full halt in front of Chris.

  “Frances. Warmer clothes. It’s minus three.”

  His shoulders drop like sandbags, and he stomps, his censored artist head down, back to wardrobe, to change. Thirty seconds later, sliding socks and all, he is back out for act two, but with a purple hippie scarf he is whirling around his neck and twirling . . . his red socks making circles and figure eights, he knows no fear of slivers. . . .

  “A sweater. For chrissakes, Frances, don’t you want to go into town with Ivan?”

  Again with the shoulders, and eventually he is forced to compromise his ensemble altogether and submit to a sweater, and a toque as well. I know how he feels – nobody wears a toque and a tube top at the same time, and then to have to cover it all with a sweater?

  “What do you think of my three-year-old drag queen, Ivan?” Chris asks me like she is showing me a brand new old car she just bought with her own money. She thinks that he will be my favourite because he is . . . well, just like me, and I always thought it would be Emile, because he was the first, and because I was inside of her when he was in her belly and when she came I felt him kick and knew the magic of him then. And then there was Gailon, too, and my mom said Chris told her in the truck one day that it was too late for an abortion with him, and that Chris cried when the midwife handed her her third boy, that makes four boys now and her, alone in the cabin, and she knew Gailon was going to be the last of it.

  But Chris never told me any of this, she just told my mom, and now Gailon sits, too, under his crown of cotton ball hair and watches me eat an egg and toast. He is one-and-a-half and drinks cranberry tea from a mug with the rest of us. The kids picked the cranberries themselves.

  Gailon looks like a little old man shrunk right down, like an owl. There is no baby in his face, and my mom says he will be the most special because Chris almost didn’t have him, so he is more of a gift that way. But all Chris tells me is that she has been breast-feeding for five years now, and I couldn’t see her in the dark last night when we touched, but her hands felt older.

  She smells of wood smoke, and I smell of hair products, and everytime I see her the boys are bigger and there is somehow less of her and I meet her sons again, three secrets of her unfolding into their own in a tiny cabin forty miles from anything.

  No wonder Chris couldn’t wait for me and Frances to meet again. Now that he’s walking and talking, and putting on shows. Now that we can relate as equals, he and I. Sure, he’s only three, but age has never mattered to a true queen, and it takes one to know one.

  Say what you will of nature and nurture and the children of both, scientists and sociologists and endocrinologists and psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists and plastic surgeons can all have their theories, but none of them can explain to me this:

  How did Frances get to be Frances in all his Francesness? He doesn’t watch TV. He listens to CBC. Frances doesn’t know that boys don’t wear tube tops. No one has told him this. He just has to wear a sweater too, if it’s winter. The magic of this is not lost on me.

  He doesn’t get it from his father, who doesn’t eat anything he doesn’t grow, or pick, or preferably shoot, skin, and dress himself with, and his older brother is a five-year-old water-packing, bicepped bushman in his own right, and Gailon is only a year and a half.

  All four boys seem well aware that Chris is the only female in the house; she owns the only two breasts, the only one without what they have.

  Yet Frances, three years old, triumphs like a crocus in a crack in a cliff; how does a lonesome queen even know he exists in a cabin in a frozen field in the Yukon with apparently not another soul around, with an ounce of fashion sense, or even the most minute grasp of the immense and innate drama of it all for miles?

  No one but Frances. Until mom drags Uncle Ivan home for a night or two.

  This is why I must be there for him, for all those moments, for those drag queen equivalents of baptism, first communion, confirmation, priest, and sainthood, and so on.

  The first time he finds the right outfit, the one that really fits, I will hold up the mirror for him and say, “You go, girl.” If he wants his ears pierced, he can count on me. The first time he gives the captain of the basketball team a secret blowjob, I will be his confessor. The first time someone calls him a faggot, and he slowly comes to realize that they don’t think a faggot is a good thing to be at all, the first time he feels that fear, I want to be there. I will tell him of the time he was three and first did the red sock circle dance in the orange tube top ensemble. I will tell him then that he was born a special kind of creature, one that God never meant for everyone to understand, but that I understand. I will tell him that I will always love that little flower of him, that perfect unknowing differentness that blossomed and danced in a frozen field in spite of everything.

  Because drag queens always dance in spite of everything. It’s part of the job description.

  How can I look at him and not feel relief? He is living proof that I was just born this way. I don’t remember my version of the red sock circle dance, but ten to one someone told me to close my legs because you could see my panties when I danced like that, and how do you spell unladylike”?

  But things will be different for Frances, he who will start kindergarten in the year 2000.

  Chris and I load the boys into the truck and head into town. I am on a mission: I am taking Frances to meet more of his people.

  My friend Cody, the legendary creature with painted nails and black ringlets that reach halfway down his back. It is rumoured that he is a hermaphrodite, that he possesses extra plumbing, perhaps special powers. I have never asked him, because it is none of my business, and Cody has never inquired about the bulge in my own pants. He is a creature of immense grace and beauty, and that is all I need to know.

  I take Frances into the cafe where Cody works, to introduce them to each other with all the pomp and circumstance required when in the presence of royalty.

  “Cody, I’d like you to meet my godson, Frances. Frances, this is
Cody.”

  But Frances doesn’t acknowledge Cody, or his ringlets, or his fingernails at all. Something else more pressing has caught his attention. He reaches his small hand up to caress the fabric of Cody’s silver velvet shirt, tight and shimmering over his slender torso. Frances smiles in wonder to himself and his mother places her hand on my shoulder, and laughs like a leprechaun.

  “That’s my boy” she says, and for a second I am unsure whether she is referring to Frances, Cody, or myself, but it doesn’t matter, because we are all where we belong. Home.

  Ivan E. Coyote is a writer and circus performer, and a member of the celebrated performance collective Taste This, who collaborated on Boys Like Her (Press Gang, 1998), a critically acclaimed and award-winning book on gender and desire. Ivan lives in Vancouver.