by Ivan Coyote
At school we didn’t have a trombone player for stage band, or enough of what our band teacher called “bottom end,” so he asked me if I wanted to play the baritone saxophone as well. I loved the alto, but the first time I managed to gather up enough breath to blow a real note on that horn that was nearly as big as I was, I knew. I belonged in the bottom end. The band teacher would give me both trombone parts, the bari part and the alto part, for each song he assigned, and I would flip through them all and pick out the best bits from each and create my own hybrid score of awesome. I’d carry both horns home every night, my fingers cramping in the cold and my backpack full of books, sweating inside my parka even on the coldest days of winter as I huffed through the bare willow trees and silent lodgepole pines and frozen blue spruce, following the skidoo tracks up and down the sides of the little valley of bush that separated our house from the new junior high school on Hickory Street.
I don’t remember anyone complaining about me practicing ever, not once, not even my sister, which amazes me now when I think about it. I played every night and no one ever told me to shut up or keep it down. This seems so unlikely that I just called my mom up in the Yukon to confirm my memories of it.
“How come you never ever told me to shut up, not once? The baritone saxophone? I played it once here in my apartment and my neighbour told me the next day in the elevator that it rattled the artwork on his walls. That thing is loud. I played it for hours every night. How did I not drive you crazy with it?”
She sounded distracted on the other end of the line. I glanced at the clock: 8:22 p.m. I had caught her in the middle of Midsomer Murders.
“It was never an issue for me. I liked it,” she said. “You just kept getting better, I could hear you working little bits out and then doing them over and over. I was glad you had something that made you that happy. And your dad worked late almost every night back then.”
By the middle of October of my last year in high school, everyone was talking about what to do next. Go to mechanic’s school in Edmonton like Shaun White wanted to? Charlaina Ross was going to France because she had an uncle there or something. Claudette MacGowan was going to take computer science. Kim Rumley was going to be a social worker. Sandra James already had a good union job at NorthWestel, who needed university anyways?
I wanted to study music. There was a two-year university transfer program at a community college near where my cousin was living in North Vancouver. I wanted to study music but it seemed kind of like a silly dream, a dream a seventeen-year-old small-town girl might have until she got pregnant or married or both, or had to take a job as a clerk in a grocery store to pay the bills. It seemed like the plot of a music video or a gritty movie where eventually the main character has to come to their senses and face reality.
I went into the office in the back of our band room and waited for our band teacher Mr. Campbell to get back from his lunchtime meeting in the staff room.
“What’s up, kiddo?” he smelled like coffee and Old Spice deodorant. His hair was always perfect, chocolate brown with just a few grey hairs slicked back from his temples. All of the girls at school thought he was handsome. Shadow of a beard. I thought he looked a little too much like a Lego man, with his exceptionally square jaw. I liked the way the veins bulged in his neck when he played the trumpet, though. I liked how he talked about how his wife was smarter than he was.
“I want to go to music school,” I said. “I have straight As. Almost no one in my family has ever gone to university, and my mom wants me to go to law school. But I want to study music. My dad says the night shift at White Pass is full of mechanics that wanted to play guitar. So do you think I have what it takes to be a musician?”
He looked straight at me, stopped drumming on his desk with the eraser end of his pencil.
“I think that being a musician is like being any other kind of artist,” he said. “All kinds of people are always going to tell you that it’s a waste of time, to get a real job, that it will never pay, that you are not good enough. I want you to hear this, because it is important: my opinion is only one opinion. I am only one person. And if you are going to take the opinion of any one person that is not you and make a decision as important as what you want to do with your life based on what one person says, then I would say that you don’t have what it takes to be an artist. But if you are going to do what I think you are going to do, and not listen to what anyone says and do what you feel most called to do, then I say go for it. Go to music school while you are young. Learn everything you can. Only one way to find out and that is by doing it.”
So I did it. I moved into a two-bedroom basement suite in North Vancouver with my cousin who was dating a guy named Drew with an electronic monitor on his ankle because of “a little misunderstanding” he had about a few cars he was selling. Started music school. Class piano. Saxophone lessons. Choir. Ear training. Music history. I tried out for stage band and made it. Second alto. Someone was already playing the baritone saxophone. Her lips looked soft and her hair even softer. She wore black eyeliner and drove a teal blue 1967 Mustang. Her name was Ellen.
I drove an orange ’74 Volkswagen van that I had to park facing down a hill so I could jumpstart it every other time I turned the key.
Ellen lived in a red brick and stone apartment building in the West End with two actors. One of them had a very famous brother, a Canadian kid who had struck it big with a sitcom in the States. The roommate with the famous brother wouldn’t take his money so he bought her fancy gifts instead, like the leather-bound complete works of Shakespeare and a brand new camera and tripod. Ellen used to have horn sectional practice in her tiny living room on some Friday nights, six or seven of us crammed in there, the trombone players emptying their spit valves onto little bits of rag they put down on top of the worn out hardwood floor. We would play until the downstairs neighbours thumped on their ceiling with a broomstick, then pack up our horns and drink a beer or two and go home.
Except for the night of October 13, 1988. We wrapped up horn practice around ten o’clock. The night felt warm to me, especially for a Yukon kid still new to the city. I had parked my van around the corner, and when I climbed in and tried to start it, I couldn’t get it to turn over. I crawled underneath it and whacked the starter with the back end of a crescent wrench like my uncle Rob had showed me to. Nothing. Not even a click. Parking was so tight in the West End that I had been forced to park on a little bit of an uphill slope, and the car in front of me had boxed me in. No way to push-start myself. I got out and walked back to the front door of Ellen’s apartment building, buzzed number 306.
“Uh, it’s me again. My van is broken down. I think I need to use your phone and call a tow truck or something.”
Ellen had changed into sweatpants and put her hair up. Taken her makeup off. “Come on in.” She stood on one foot and then the other in her doorway, waving me in with one hand. “My roommate has been dating another actor guy who works at a mechanic’s shop. I think he’s staying here tonight. You should just wait until they get back, maybe he can help you.”
We sat at opposite ends of a rose-pink satin antique couch and drank beers. Talked about school, about music, about our band conductor, about the first alto guy who showed up late almost every practice but then blew the best solos so we nearly forgave him for the egg yolk stains on his one good concert shirt and his chronic tardiness.
I don’t remember her suggesting that I spend the night there when her roommate and her mechanic boyfriend never did show up, but I am sure that is what must have happened, because I never would have asked. She was a jazz singer with a real band and gigs at the Railway Club and a funky apartment. She owned more than one pot for heating up soup in. I was eighteen and she was twenty-nine. She was way out of my cool zone and I knew it.
The curtains in her bedroom had the same pattern on them as the accent pillows on her bed. She lent me a way-too-big-for-me t-shirt to sleep in, which I changed into in the bathroom, folding my jeans and sh
irt and socks into a tidy pile and placing them right next to my boots just inside her bedroom door. She lit a candle on her desk with a match.
The pillow smelled like shampoo. Her feet were cold and mine were not. I don’t remember thinking about kissing her, or even touching her, but my heart was thrumming in my throat, and I could hear the blood in my veins pumping past my eardrums. I was on my side and felt the heat of her behind me, an electric magnet feeling pulling at the little space between us. I did not move, I barely even breathed.
She slid a cool hand around my waist and let it rest on my belly. We stayed like that for a really long time, talking in the dark.
And then she moved her hand. I thought about stopping her, but didn’t. And then she moved her hand again, pushed her hips into that curve where my ass became thighs.
I remember staring at myself in the foggy mirror of her bathroom the next morning.
“I kissed a girl. I kissed a girl,” I whispered. When I opened the bathroom door, fully clothed and smelling like Ellen’s deodorant and the communal Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap, her roommate Denise was standing there.
“Hey kiddo. Walter’s making omelettes. Then he’s going to see what’s up with your van.”
I was sure she could see it all over me, my queerness, my girl-kissing tendencies, but she breezed past me with a flip of her hair and turned on the shower.
No one said a word at breakfast, nobody asked why I had spent the night or looked at either of us sideways. Nothing.
I told no one. Who would I tell? My mom? No way. My classmates? My friends from high school? I didn’t know any other gay people besides Ellen and me, and Ellen said she wasn’t really gay, she just liked people, not their bodies. She just liked me, she said, no matter what bits I had or didn’t have.
“If it’s no big deal, how come we haven’t told your roommates yet, or the guys in your band?” I asked her. She shrugged and said she would tell them when it was the right time.
So I carried her around in my secret inside pocket for a while, the smell of her perfume getting caught in the collar of my shirt, finding her long hairs in my clothes when I folded the laundry. Pretending not to watch her in band practice. Showing up at her gigs and sitting with her roommates and their friends from acting school and the thee-ah-tah.
“You got a boyfriend?” her piano player would slur in between sets and slide his chair closer to mine.
“Yeah,” I would lie. “He works as a welder on an oil rig up in the Beaufort Sea.”
“Sounds like a tough guy,” he’d say, getting up to go get another beer.
“He is,” I’d tell him, looking him straight in the eyes without smiling.
Later that semester I went into a barbershop, paid an old Italian guy named Mino ten bucks, and asked him to cut off all my hair. The piano player stopped asking me about my boyfriend after that. Stopped buying me beers, too.
Once I came out, I stayed out. I got a regrettable pink triangle tattoo on my shoulder and plastered Queer Nation stickers on my leather jacket and went to kiss-in protests at the old coffee shop on Commercial Drive. I wanted to fight homophobia everywhere, in everyone. I wanted to Act Up, to act out, to have sit-ins, and not stand for it anymore.
I wish now I had been kinder to my mother about it all.
Ellen moved into a big house in East Vancouver and started to date a guy who played trombone in her jazz quintet. I told her I couldn’t spend too much time with her and all her straight friends anymore lest I be homogenized by their infectious heterosexuality. My politics didn’t leave anyone, including me, a lot of room for nuance, or grey areas.
I wish I had been kinder to a lot of people about it all, come to think of it.
I met an old man today. Stanley used to be an electrician and he bought that big old house thirty-seven years ago for sixty-eight thousand and now it’s worth a million maybe more but who cares what does that mean when he’s not selling? How is he going to pay the tax on that you tell me? He asks me where did I get that lamp? What did I pay? He looked shocked. Said he was just looking for a goddamn lamp to better read his paper by now its winter but he went to Home Depot and they were all so expensive.
I told him that I was getting rid of the one that I was going to replace with this one I had just bought. I said I could drop it by tomorrow.
He said 1803 William Street, just leave it around the side under the awning next to the garbage if no one answers the door. Can’t hear the doorbell if I’m watching the home and garden channel, he said.
WORK EQUALS FORCE TIMES DISTANCE OVER TIME
I worked as a landscaper for a few years when I first got to Vancouver. It was wet, dirty, hard work, but I loved it. I loved how hungry I was by the time dinner was ready after a long day outside, and how deep I slept. Loved the sight of a perfectly mowed lawn, a weedless flowerbed, a freshly trimmed hedge. Loved feeling my thighs grow hard and my biceps curl into apples from the labour. Permanent farmer tan and the smell of new topsoil. We worked in North and West Vancouver a lot, on huge properties that overlooked the ocean or had icy streams running through them. When you turned the hedger or weedwhipper or leaf blower or lawnmower off, it was quiet. Rich neighbourhood kind of quiet. No sirens, no traffic. Just squirrels and cedar trees waving in the wind and sometimes the sound of someone else’s landscapers mowing or trimming something up the street.
It was the end of October, and work was getting scarcer and more difficult, and the mornings were cold. Most of the maintenance kind of landscaping was over until the spring, it was mostly just raking leaves and planting bulbs, building retaining walls or laying brick walkways. Hard on the back. Our boss took a contract to put in an underground sprinkler system in a giant McMansion up near 70th and Granville somewhere. The owner’s son had gold-plated rims on his dark purple sports car, I remember that.
We were there for days, digging trenches for the irrigation pipes in the hard-packed clay and big tree roots in the back yard. It never stopped raining once, not for a second.
We would sit in the truck on our breaks with the windows rolled up and steamy, the heater on full blast, holding our hands up against the vents to chase the ache and stiffness out of our fingers so we could go back to clutching the shovel or pick handle for another couple of hours. I would try to dry my boots out at night next to the heater but they would still be half wet in the mornings, and we would all be the same colour of mud from head to toe come five o’clock every night. The kind of work that makes you seriously reconsider your life choices about every ten minutes, all day, every day.
It was a Friday, and the rain was coming down sideways. I was digging a trench right alongside the house, and I had just ripped a hole right through my raincoat, my work shirt, and the skin of my upper arm on a rough piece of drainpipe. The side door of the house opened up and three workers came out wearing clean Carhartts and work boots, their leather tool pouches slung jauntily over their shoulders, pushing a shiny red tool chest on heavy casters. They loaded it into a clean white windowless van and drove away. A to Z Electric, the sign on the van read, with a yellow lightning bolt striking between the A and the Z. Those guys looked clean. They looked dry and warm and had nice tool belts.
I signed up for the Electricity and Industrial Electronics program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology on my next weekday off, and started school that following January.
There were two women and me, and 650 guys in the Electrical Trades building. One of the women dropped out after about three weeks, she was quiet and slight, a single mother with four kids. I don’t remember her name now but I remember missing her after she was gone. I wanted her to graduate with honours and get a union job. I wanted her to be one of those stories. The ones they would put in the pamphlet. Take pictures of her wearing an orange reflective vest and a white hard hat and put it on a poster. I think she lasted nearly a month and just didn’t come back one Monday morning.
The other woman was a tall, foul-mouthed waitress named Nikki with
two K’s and her dark roots showing. I liked her immediately, and we sat next to each other at the same table in class every day.
Nikki and I basically had the women’s bathroom on the second floor of the Electrical Trades building all to ourselves, like it was our office. We would smoke cigarettes at lunch in there on rainy days, her sitting on one end of the counter top with her sensible shoes resting on the lip of the sink, me at the other end, my one shoulder propped against the paper towel dispenser, my grass-stained steel-toed work boots leaving dried up bits of tread-shaped mud on the countertop. Sometimes we would laugh in there until her mascara ran. She would run her pink lipstick-stained butts under the tap and then flick them into the silver trashcan, and check the corners of her mouth and scrunch her hair up in her fists and make a pouty face in the mirror before we went back to class.
The only other women in the building worked in the kitchen downstairs and used the bathroom on the ground floor. The women who worked in the kitchen smiled at Nikki and me when they passed us our chicken burgers with fries at lunch, asked us how school was going, like they were sort of proud of us but also didn’t trust us. We weren’t one of them anymore, and we had our own bathroom upstairs to prove it.
Nikki liked Bon Jovi and really tight jeans and she flicked her long hair like she learned how from a Guns 'N’ Roses video and talked like she was from the prairies, which she was. I was the only lesbian she knew, she told me, except for maybe a woman who lived down the hall in her building, but she didn’t know for sure, except she had the same haircut as me.
She might just be German, I said, making a joke, but Nikki nodded like she thought this might be a possibility.
I kept my mouth shut as much as I could in class and worked hard, doing a couple of hours of homework every night. Most of the guys in the class had been told all through school that they weren’t university material, or they weren’t related to anyone who had ever been university material. Lots of them spoke English as a second or third or fourth language, and most of them had saved up their tuition and living expenses working hard labour jobs. A lot of them really struggled with the math and algebra portion of electrical theory.