by Ivan Coyote
Both Nikki and I had sailed through math in high school, and a couple weeks into classes we found ourselves tutoring several of our male classmates through power factor calculations and word problems after school. They had names like Tyler and George and Mustafa, and they were farmers and pizza delivery guys and line cooks. Many were still working nights and weekends to pay the bills, nodding off in class in the first part of the morning until coffee break when they got some fresh air and a double-double into them.
I grew up around very capable men, and I also grew up sort of thinking that being raised male meant certain kinds of knowledge came with the territory. When we moved out of the classroom and into the shop for the more practical hands-on parts of school, I was surprised to find how many guys hadn’t learned things I took for granted that men just somehow learned by osmosis. I couldn’t believe that Edward, who sat right behind me and was smart and funny and bespectacled, didn’t know how to cut a two-by-four on a right angle with a hand saw. In fact he didn’t even know what a two-by-four was. Ritchie from Hope had spent a couple years in juvie already but somehow didn’t know a Robertson screwdriver from a Phillips.
I found myself grateful to my dad and my uncles, and my aunts too, for everything they had taught me. All those hours in my dad’s shop, in my uncle Rob’s boat, tagging along while my dad and his brothers built our new house on Grove Street. I had already learned more from them than most of the guys in my class at school. I knew a little about how to weld, some basic mechanics, a little carpentry, some electronics from my Great Uncle Jack, and now some electrical stuff. It was easy to do well.
About ten weeks into school, the first round of marks were posted in the hallway on the second floor of the building, right outside the administration office. I was top of my class, and Nikki wasn’t too far behind. I’m not sure if what happened next was a coincidence, or if it had to do with me having some of the highest grades in the class.
I noticed my locker first. Someone had written FUCK OFF DIKE on my locker in bold felt marker. I took my books out, found an empty locker at the opposite end of the hallway, and moved all my stuff into it. Same handwriting, same felt marker had written PUSSY EATERS on my and Nikki’s table, so I just dragged it into the classroom across the hall and swapped it for a graffiti-free one. I felt bad about the table, though; since Nikki was a dedicated cock lover, I felt like the plural bit was sort of uncalled for.
I always arrived to school early, so all of this got done before most of my classmates got there. Nikki hadn’t seen the table and I didn’t tell her about it. When I first started electrical school, my grandmother Patricia had given me a little advice on working in a very male-dominated environment, as she had done for most of her life. “Pick your battles,” she had told me. “Don’t stand in front of the river. There will not be enough time in the day for you to take them all to task for every off-colour comment, for every slight against women, for every nonsensical thing they are about to say or do in your company. You are in a man’s world and they will all feel obligated to remind you of this on a daily basis. Only tackle the important offenses, and always do it one on one, alone, just you and whichever asshole you can no longer tolerate. Never challenge him in front of his peers. That will get you nowhere at all. Take him aside, and whatever you do, don’t cry. Save your tears for the car ride home. I always did.”
So I said nothing to no one and went to class like it was any other day. Maybe that is why what happened next happened, because he didn’t get a rise out of me the first go-round.
Our class had about thirty guys, plus Nikki and me. A couple of months in, we finally got to leave the classroom and spend some dedicated time in the shop, actually touching tools and wiring things. Our instructor, a small but terrifying old German guy named Dr. Wetzelmeyer, would draw a simple electrical blueprint on the board, like a light fixture switched from two different places, and a couple of electrical outlets, and then we would wire them up on our own little section of a plywood wall.
I really dug this part of electrical school. The circuits we were assigned to wire got slowly more complicated, and I never got tired of that moment when Dr. Wetzelmeyer would look over my work and nod his curt and moustached yes and I would get to plug my circuit in and watch the light bulb glow or the amber light blink. Electricity was both magical and logical at the same time. If you wired everything correctly in the right order, it worked. An invisible power somehow coursed through the wires and made stuff happen. Lights went on and switches worked and fans hummed and heating elements glowed.
I was proud of my toolbox, and kept everything inside it neat and orderly. I had saved up and invested in a set of top-of-the-line Klein screwdrivers, and I loved the heavy, balanced rubber grips on them. Loved picking them up and feeling their solid heft in my palm. My circuits were all right angles, wires tacked equal distances apart from each other, my screws flush and straight and tight. I pretty much took everything I had learned from my father in his shop and my uncles on different jobsites and applied it to my projects, and nearly every day our instructor pointed out my work to the rest of the class as an example of the kind of attention to detail that would make me into a fine tradesman. It made me proud enough that I didn’t need to mention the man part. I was proving to the guys in my class that I was every bit as much of an electrician as they were, and that was what mattered to me. I liked the order and math and measurement of it all. I liked that it required skill and could be dangerous if you made a mistake or didn’t know what you were doing. It made a kind of easy and natural sense to me, and every day that passed in the shop I grew more and more sure that I was really going to love this job once I got out of school, and that I was going to be good at it.
One day I came back from lunch a little earlier than the rest of my class. It was a Friday and I was nearly finished wiring a particularly challenging circuit and really wanted to complete it before the weekend. I flipped the light switch in the doorway to the back room where all the plywood walls were mounted. The fluorescent lights flickered and then hummed to life. The room smelled like plywood and Pine-Sol and dust burning on the baseboard heaters and wet rain jackets left slung over the backs of chairs clustered around the desks in one corner of the workroom.
I turned on the radio that sat in the weak middle-of-March sun on a windowsill and spun the dial from top forty to CBC and turned it up.
I reached into my spotless toolbox for a Robertson No. 3 screwdriver and felt something wet and almost warm. At first I thought the roof was leaking, but when I looked up I couldn’t see any evidence of this. I picked up my toolbox and carried it over to the industrial sink in the corner of the workroom and held my tools inside with one hand and tipped it upside down to empty the water out of it. Except it wasn’t water. It was piss. I could smell it. One of the dudes in the building had pissed into my toolbox. I dumped everything into the sink and started wiping it all down with paper towels. My brand new multi-meter that my mom had given me for Christmas. I had to peel off its rubber case to clean it properly, gagging a little bit and trying to blink through the tears I could not keep from welling up in my eyes. I looked at the clock on the wall. I had eleven more minutes to get this cleaned up and get myself together before everyone else started trailing in after the lunch break. I was certainly not going to give whoever had done this the satisfaction of seeing me scrubbing their piss from the inside of my beloved toolbox, and I for sure wasn’t about to let any of them see me cry about it.
I was whistling quietly and listening to the CBC and wiring away on my project wall by the time the first of my classmates came in. Pretending like nothing was wrong. My toolbox was dry and spotless and neat, just like it always was. I studied all of their faces as they strolled in through the door, trying not to look like I was checking them out. It couldn’t be Tyler or George or Mustafa or Edward, I told myself. None of those guys would do something so disgusting to anyone, let alone one of their classmates. It might not have even been a guy in my class
; it could have been any one of the 650 dudes in the Electrical Trades building. But how would they know which toolbox was mine, I wondered? It had to be one of my classmates, unless the school had a random toolbox pisser on their hands. What were the odds that it was not a targeted thing? Was I being paranoid or realistic?
Everyone returned from lunch. No one else had a toolbox full of someone else’s urine. No one looked guilty. I didn’t tell Nikki, because I knew she would stomp about and swear and make a scene, and I didn’t want to deal with a scene. Even though I loved her scenes, and they were always justified and awe-inspiring to behold, I just couldn’t deal that day. Besides, I had already cleaned up all the evidence.
But I found myself watching my classmates carefully after that day. Watching their eyes to see if they would meet mine. Watching their body language. Watching my back.
I knew it wasn’t Tyler or George or Mustafa or Edward. They were my friends. Tyler stopped by his grandmother’s house every Thursday to take the garbage cans out to the curb and rake leaves and swap her snow tires off her car and listen to her tell the same stories over and over again, and George was raised in Poland and brought both Nikki and me flowers on International Women’s Day because it was a national holiday in his country. Mustafa and Edward were both gentle and soft-spoken. I just couldn’t see it being any of them. Nikki and I were spending an hour after school at least once a week helping them with their math, or explaining things in slower English than our instructors used in class. After a week or so of wondering, I tried to put it all out of my mind.
There was a really quiet giant of a man who sat across the aisle from me in class. His name was Bruce, or maybe Bill. Something with a B. Brian? I think it was Bruce. He barely spoke, never asked questions, and got a solid B minus on all of his tests. I didn’t take much notice of him other than to note that he often smelled like wood smoke when he first sat down in the mornings, before he took his GWG jean jacket off.
One day just as we were wrapping up at the end of class, he stood awkwardly in front of my desk, his backpack slung over one shoulder, swallowing and blinking repeatedly as I packed up my textbooks and notes.
“Have you, uh, got a minute to spare for me?” He rested his considerable bulk on one foot, and then the other. “You, know, uh, privately?”
“Sure, thing Bruce.” I smiled at him. “Math question?”
He shook his head slowly. “My name is Barry. It’s not a math thing. It’s personal.”
“I’m sorry. Barry. Right.”
We waited while everyone else cleared out of the room. I motioned for him to sit down next to me. He stayed standing. Seemed to reconsider. Turned a chair around and straddled it, resting his furry forearms on the chair back. Squeaked the chair forward and leaned over my desk and spoke quietly.
“I need marriage advice,” he confessed.
“But I’m not married,” I told him.
“Yeah, well, but you know women, right? I mean, more than I would, you know? Since you date them plus you are one, I just figured, I don’t know, I hope I’m not offending you, really, maybe this is all a stupid idea, I just thought …” He squirmed in his chair, squinting one eye nearly shut at me.
“I’m not offended.” I smiled at him.
He let out a long breath.
“Just try me. If I can help, I will.” I smiled again, raised my eyebrows a little.
“It’s my wife and I,” he leaned even farther forward. “We, uh, haven’t been … intimate much for the last while. The last year or so. Maybe closer to two years, you know? We used to be all over each other. Even after our son was born, and I hear from other couples that sometimes when a kid comes along things … slow down in that department, you know? But that never happened with us.”
I nodded to him to keep on talking. He did.
“But a couple of years ago she went back to school to get her Master's, plus she works nearly full time, and that’s I think when we started to, well, grow apart a little? So, I uh, thought maybe you might have some … you know, insight? Advice? I dunno. What do women want? Any ideas?”
Barry was blushing hard, a red stain oozing out of his chest hair and up his neck, throbbing in his big round ears. He looked so cute, I felt like hugging him.
“I feel like hugging you right now,” I said.
He sat back a little, eyes wide. Put the palms of both hands flat on the desk between us.
“I won’t,” I reassured him. “But you are incredibly sweet right now.”
His cheeks glowed crimson. He stared at his square fingernails like they were suddenly a complete mystery to him.
“She’s tired,” I told him. “I don’t claim to know what women want, or what anyone really wants, for that matter, but I bet you any money she is tired as shit all the time right now. I bet I know what might help.”
He sat up straight, his eyes met mine and stayed there.
“When does she get home from school tomorrow night?”
“Uh, tomorrow’s what, Thursday? Around 7:30 on Thursdays.”
“You get home around four or so? Plenty of time. Okay. Here’s what you’re going to do.”
He took his pen out of his pocket and started to write.
“First off, send the kid to grandpa and grandma’s house for the night if you can. Second, clean the house. I mean clean the house. Vacuum, mop the kitchen floor, and change the sheets on the bed. Scrub the bathtub and clean the toilets. Put a new toilet paper roll actually on the holder thingy. Get a scented candle. Not a cheap one. I will give you the address of a place on the Drive. Get her some bubble bath while you’re at it, too. Do at least two loads of laundry. Do the dishes and, write this down, buddy. Put them away. In the cupboards.” I checked his list. He had very tidy handwriting. I took this as a sign of his great potential to succeed with this mission. I continued.
“Get some flowers. You don’t have to spend a fortune. Just a little bunch. And bust out the good napkins. Set the table. Then all you need is a chicken to roast and some yams and potatoes and broccoli, and a decent bottle of wine. I’ll write the recipe down to make homemade gravy. It’s easy. You can do this. Put the chicken in the oven around an hour before she is supposed to get home. Open the bottle of wine. Don’t pour any until she gets home and takes her shoes off and pees and finds out you cleaned the tub and scrubbed the toilets. And be wearing her apron, if she has one, over your own clothes. No t-shirt. Wear a button-down. Seriously. No t-shirt. Make sure your socks match and wear your best underwear, because if all goes well she is going to be in them right after you finish dinner.”
He tilted his head. “Wear her apron?”
“Trust me on this. Wear her apron. At least until you are about to serve dinner. Eat dinner, drink some wine, and then pour her a bath. In the clean tub. With the candle and the bubble bath. After she’s done her bath go down on her for at least twice as long as you ever have before. Start slow. Don’t walk right up to the front door and ring the doorbell right away, if you know what I mean. Commit yourself. Don’t be cheap with the head. And shave first. Like, shave at five o’clock. Let me know on Tuesday how it all goes. Have a great long weekend. Happy Easter, dude.”
Barry spent a few minutes writing it all down like a champ, asked for clarification on the finer points of both gravy-making and cunnilingus, and then slipped his notebook back into his backpack and headed for the door.
I ended up in the lane next to his truck while I was driving home. He in his big truck and me in my little truck. He didn’t see me, I don’t think, his eyes were fixed straight ahead on the road in front of him, he took the ramp east onto the freeway, I went west. He was bobbing his head to the stereo. His hair was a little too long. I should have told him to hit the barber, I thought. His window was rolled down just a couple of inches. I caught a little bit of the song before he accelerated and disappeared into the traffic.
He was listening to k.d. lang. Her early stuff. I was starting to really like Barry.
I ended u
p going to Seattle for an S&M party, had a half-drunk threesome with a cute couple who both worked for Microsoft, and kind of forgot all about Barry and his marital woes until Tuesday morning when he sauntered into our classroom. He grinned with his whole face and opened both of his arms wide when he saw me and gave me the first and last hug I ever witnessed him engage in, right there under the fluorescent lights next to the desk I shared with Nikki.
Nikki shot me a suspicious look. I sat back down, shrugged, and whispered sideways that I’d helped him with a little bit of homework. She didn’t ask any questions, and neither did I.
Barry smiled shyly at our shared secret for several months after that, and his wife hugged me at our class barbecue in June, and winked at me whenever she caught my eye all that night.
We graduated the following October. I ran into Tyler once a couple of years ago, at Costco, both of us waiting for the free chicken and rice samples to come out of the convection oven set up on a table in the frozen foods aisle. We got to gossiping about folks from school, and how had twenty years gone by anyway? Tyler told me he had heard through the grapevine a couple of years ago that Barry had died of some kind of cancer, of the pancreas maybe, leaving his wife and three kids behind.
Barry only had the one son, all those years ago when I instructed him to don his wife’s apron and roast her a chicken.
I guess our plan must have worked.
I am talking to two of the construction workers who are almost finished building the new condo kitty-corner to mine. I ask them if the new apartments are nice. They are holding their coffees, looking up, shaking their heads. They’re nice enough, they tell me, but small, and rents start at $1,350 a month for a studio, one guy says. “I can never afford the rents on the places we work on, much less the down payment, and I build them, fifty hours a week.”