Tomboy Survival Guide

by Ivan Coyote

  Her hair was browny gold and rippling, like a long mane, and she held two bobby pins in her mouth and hummed along to Janis Joplin on the dusty radio on the windowsill and handed my uncle John a wide hairbrush and he took it. Just took it and started brushing her hair like he did this all the time, long even strokes from the crown of her head nearly right down to the bare plywood floor.

  I remember feeling like I was witnessing something I shouldn’t be there for, that I should turn and leave the room or they should stop, but it just kept happening and I couldn’t take my eyes off of them. Couldn’t stop watching this simple but beautiful thing. A man brushing a woman’s hair. A woman that he loved. His chapped wide carpenter hands suddenly so tender. So sure.

  I had never seen anything like it in my life. I love the smell of wet long hair and fresh shampoo to this day. I sometimes roll that memory around in my mouth like a smooth round stone whenever John says something crass at my grandmother’s kitchen table these days. I use that image of him to chase his cruel words out of my ears. I remember this better him, and it helps me keep my mouth shut, because there is no sense fighting with him, it just upsets my grandmother and she’s turning ninety-six and doesn’t need the headache.

  Cathy had a horse, and John loved her and built a pasture for her to keep her horse in so he could keep her there in that house with him.

  He built her a little shack in one corner of that pasture, with a dusty window and a workbench and hooks for her saddle and tack and gear. It smelled like sunshine and dust and horse in there, and sounded like bees buzzing lazy in the long grass just outside.

  It was the height of summer in the Yukon, early July, when the sun just dipped behind the mountains for a couple of hours and it never really got truly dark. A lawn could grow a foot in a week under that much sun if you watered it even a little bit, and you could tell who was new in town because they had packing blankets taped up over the windows in their bedrooms so they could sleep.

  I was born and raised in the Yukon, and didn’t even have curtains on the window in my bedroom because the back of our house looked over nothing but bush and pine trees and there was no one out there to look in, and I could sleep all night with the midnight sun shining and the lights on, too. Still can to this day.

  We probably had Lipton noodle soup from a box for lunch, with grilled cheese sandwiches on white bread with a dollop of ketchup to dip them in. Or maybe Kraft dinner or ravioli from a can. I don’t remember where my sister was.

  I was out in the front yard of John and Cathy’s place, throwing the ball for Rube, John’s old golden retriever. The sun baked the dirt driveway and the air smelled like pinesap. Eventually Rube dropped the filthy tennis ball and flopped on his side in the pine needles in the shade under the front porch.

  I creaked open the door to Cathy’s shed and walked into the dusty fingers of light streaming through the four-paned window over the workbench. There was a bullwhip hanging in a coil on a nail half-pounded into a wall stud. I had never seen her hit a horse with it, but I had watched her swing and crack it in the air many times, her boot heels dragging half-moons in the dirt and the muscles in her shoulders rolling underneath her faded denim shirt. Smiling.

  I took it down and the coils fell to the plywood floor. It felt almost alive, like a leather snake.

  I stepped out into the corral, squinting into the sun.

  It was way too big for me, and I had no clue how to use it, but I played with it for at least an hour, trying to flick the seed pods on the top of long grass stems, dandelion heads, a glowing brown beer bottle, a stone. I got to almost feel it crack a couple times, felt the whip extend out of the flick of my wrist and coil back towards me like a breathing thing.

  My elbow started to ache and the sun beat down and still I swung the whip in a giant circle above my head, and then tried and tried and tried cracking it into all that pale blue northern sky.

  I could feel the whip summoning the strength in my scrawny arm and pulling my right foot forward as it extended. I could feel my body starting to listen to the whip. My bones and muscles gathering back the energy of its length as it cut through the air with a seductive swish. The whip rallying itself to nearly crack.

  And then the tip of my right ear exploded in fire. The kind of pain that makes you forget until you feel your knees hit the dirt and all the air is stolen out of you. That kind of pain where you forget even to cry for a minute until your brain catches up with the red hot angry of what just happened.

  My hand clapped over the right side of my head and my fingers wet with red and dirt and dried grass in my mouth and the smell of horseshit. My legs kicking the rest of me in a circle of agony on the ground and a noise in my head that turned out to be me howling into my own ears.

  Someone touched my shoulder, and I stopped kicking. Managed a raw breath. Looked up. Cathy was staring down at me, her long braid hanging down over one shoulder, the lines in her forehead knit in crosshairs of concern, an unlit cigarette dangling from one corner of her mouth.

  “You okay, kiddo? I heard you scream and thought you chopped your own arm off or something. Nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  I sat up, my hand still welded to my ear. She pried it back with one hand and winced. Looked around. Spotted her six-foot long bullwhip in the grass.

  “You crack yourself in the head with that thing? Youch. I’ve done that a couple of times. Fucking hurts, doesn’t it? Right in the ear, too. Let’s go inside and put something on it.”

  The mirror in her and John’s downstairs bathroom was still fogged up from her shower. She sat me down on the toilet seat and washed the blood off of my ear and neck and both of my hands, like I was a little kid again, and I let her. She put some Polysporin on the open slice on the tip of the back of my ear, and called it my war wound.

  Then we sat down at the plywood kitchen table on mismatched chairs and she poured me a glass of iced tea. The kind you make yourself by pouring boiling water over a bunch of tea bags in a glass pitcher and letting it sit out in the sun for a while and then adding your own sugar and lemon and putting it in the fridge.

  She pulled up her pant leg and showed me the jagged white scar from when she broke her leg tobogganing. Then she showed me another between her thumb and forefinger, a thin line that wrapped right around the base of her thumb and traced into her palm.

  “This was trying to make a willow chair. X-Acto blade. Twenty-one stitches. They had to operate to reattach the tendon.”

  She rolled up her sleeve and showed me a pink and wrinkled patch that ran up the side of her right forearm. “Deep fryer when I was cooking in that camp out on the Dempster highway. Hurt like a son of a bitch.”

  Pulled up her hair. Back of her neck on the right side, behind her ear. Shaped like a check mark. “Barbed wire fence.”

  Unzipped her jeans and pulled down her pants and underwear. Left hip.

  “Kicked by a mare during a breeched birth. Back in Alberta. Should have heard the swearing. Me and my grandpa. Had to drive me to emergency in Calgary in the middle of a snowstorm. I was sixteen.”

  She smiled and put her forefinger on my chin. Tilted my head so she could look at my ear.

  “It’s going to leave a little scar. Coulda been worse for sure, though. Still got both of your eyes, right? Now you will remember this day forever.”

  She was, of course, totally right.

  STRONGER THAN THE SKIN

  Under my chin. I was six years old. It happened out at the Takhini Hotsprings. It was a party for my mom’s work, and I tried to jump from one tiled edge of the pool to the other deck, on an angle. I don’t remember why. I didn’t quite make it and cracked the bottom of my chin on the tiled edge. Head wounds. They bleed a lot. I remember someone driving my mom and I back into town to the emergency. I remember the pressure of a rough white hand towel twisted into a knot full of chipped ice from the restaurant next to the pool. They used to make such good hamburgers out there. When we got to the hospital they laid me out on th
e paper-covered cot. A nurse unceremoniously pulled the towel away from my chin, and my mom fainted a little from the sight of all that blood on me and had to go sit out in the hall with a cold cloth on the back of her neck while they stitched me up. Eight stitches. It looks like a pale white staple now, fatter at one end than the other.

  Chickenpox scars. One on my forehead, another on my leg. I remember getting to stay home from school, but I wasn’t allowed to use my Lite Brite because your eyes are very sensitive when you have the chickenpox. I don’t know if this is true or not, and I also don’t know if it was chickenpox or something else that I couldn’t use my Lite-Brite while I was healing from it. I always blamed the chickenpox, and now I think of that Lite-Brite kit whenever my fingertip slips into the dip of that scar on my forehead. It reminds me of those craters you can see in really good pictures of the full moon.

  Vaccination scars. One on my arm, another on the side of my calf. Do they still give those to kids? Have they figured out a way not to leave a scar? I don’t remember even getting them. They must not have hurt too bad.

  Right leg, just under my knee. About two inches long. Straight, like it was done with a scalpel. I was around eight years old. I was tobogganing, early in the winter, and there wasn’t really enough snow yet. Patches of frozen dirt and yellow grass showed where our sleds had rubbed the snow away. I was kneeling on my blue plastic crazy carpet and sliding down the hill and I leaned too much to the right, and almost rolled right off my sled. My knee scraped along the snow, and there must have been a piece of broken glass buried there or something. It sliced right through my snow pants, my jeans, my long johns, and into my leg. I don’t remember how many stitches, which is weird, because we used to brag about stitches. “I needed four stitches right in my head.” “Oh yeah, my brother had twenty-one when he nearly chopped his thumb off on the band saw.” But I don’t remember how many stitches. Maybe they used that butterfly tape. Was it even invented in 1977?

  Middle finger on my right hand. Right underneath the fingernail on the left side. Shaped like a drunk comma. Slammed my finger in the passenger side door of Hector Lang’s little moss green Toyota pick-up truck after Heckie took Sara and I to the Dairy Queen for Mr. Misties. Hector’s dog Scotty barked non-stop until I quit crying. No stitches, but I had to wear a splint in case it was sprained.

  Top of my right foot. Between my big toe and the long toe. Red and round, about the size of a watch battery. We were chasing each other around playing acorn wars and I jumped off of the Marchewa’s shed on to their woodpile and landed on a piece of two-by-four with a rusty nail sticking out of it. Had to go to the hospital with the board and nail still dangling from my sticky and bloody sneaker. No stitches, but a tetanus shot.

  Base of my thumb on my right hand. My sister and I got into a fight in the kitchen when my parents were both at work and she hucked a cereal bowl at me and I raised my hand to stop it and it smashed and cut my thumb pretty bad. I was about fourteen, and she was twelve. We were afraid of getting in trouble for throwing dishes at each other inside the house so we swept up every piece of broken bowl and wrapped it in a brown paper bag and took it out and snuck the evidence into the Marchewa’s garbage can next door so our mom wouldn’t find it. I probably needed stitches but bandaged it up and it eventually healed up without them. The scar is about an inch long, and one time when I was working on a movie set someone noticed it and told me I could never be a hand model because of it. Up until that point I didn’t know being a hand model was even a real thing. Apparently you can make pretty good money being a hand model, but I am out of the running because of my scar and also because my hands don’t look feminine enough to sell dish soap or jewelry and they aren’t hairy or muscly enough to sell power tools or razors. The hand modeling business is pretty gendered. I looked it up after someone told me I wasn’t right for it.

  Two semi circles, one on either side of my chest, where my breasts used to be. About seven or eight inches long on each side. Also two small round red scars under my arms from where they put the drains in. I was forty-four years old. My first real surgery, because stitches and having an ingrown toenail removed don’t count.

  Two and a half years later, there is still a spot next to my sternum, just to the right of the centre of my chest where if you poke it, I feel it about four inches over, almost under my arm. Something about rearranging the nerve endings. I healed up pretty good, I think; the scars are smooth and not raised. When I am shirtless at the beach I tell myself you can’t really see them, unless you are looking. They have faded, red to pink to white now, and I am very pale.

  The surgeon told me in the initial consultation months before surgery that my nipples would be insensate after the operation. That I wouldn’t be able to feel them at all. I heard him say the words but I told myself that the doctors have to say stuff like that, to protect themselves from lawsuits and accusations of malpractice. I told myself that doctors always give you the worst-case scenario, you know, so that you are grateful when some of the sensation comes back, so that you feel like one of the lucky ones, because you didn’t have any expectations.

  I didn’t get to see my nipples until nearly two weeks after surgery. I had gauze bandages stitched right onto my chest to hold them in place so they could reattach to my body. I remember standing in the steaming bathroom after the first shower I had been able to have in ten days, staring down at my new shape. I have always had a little red mark on my right nipple, and found myself strangely relieved that that little red mark was still there, still on my right nipple.

  I had spent an inordinate amount of time laying around healing and wondering if they had switched my nipples around when they detached them and cut them to make them smaller and then stitched them back onto me. I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance that they got it right, but had often wished in the last ten days that I had thought to remind the surgeon not to mix them up. I’m not sure why this would have bothered me, but it would have. Right one in the right spot, I thought, and smiled.

  It’s weird, seeing a part of your body but not being able to feel it. I’ve had a couple of alarming moments since surgery, one time dragging myself out of a lake onto a wooden dock, and another time when I pulled a very heavy Rubbermaid tub off of a shelf, when I scraped my chest really hard and had a heart-pounding moment, pulling my shirt up in a panic to make sure I hadn’t peeled one or both of my new nipples off of myself and just couldn’t feel it.

  My nipples used to be so sensitive. I was one of those people who everyone always made “is it cold in here?” jokes about. My nipples were a big erogenous zone, and they brought me a lot of pleasure and heat. I loved my nipples, I just hated having breasts.

  If I had had an extra thirty thousand US I would have gone to see this surgeon in New York state that I had heard about, he has developed a procedure where he keeps the nerve stem attached to the nipple intact, and can perform the mastectomy without losing nipple sensation, but I didn’t have the money. So I made a deal. I traded the nipples I loved for the chest I needed. For the most part I’m happy in my new shape, and twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes out of the day it seems worth it.

  But sometimes, in the dark when she puts her palms flat on my chest and presses, or when we are on our way out to a show and she fixes my tie and smooths it down over top of my dress shirt with the red tips of her fingernails, I wish. I wish. I wish I could feel everything. The skin of my chest now seems hypersensitive, like it is trying to make up for the fact that my nipples are basically two big scars now.

  They are beyond numb. They feel nothing. Sometimes I think I can feel the flesh underneath them, maybe I can feel pressure there, maybe. But I can’t feel her fingertips or her tongue, or her teeth. I can’t feel the cold lake or the warm sun either.

  But even still, every morning that I get up and just slip a t-shirt over my head and pull my jeans on and take the little dog out, every time I swim or shower or sweat or lift weights or button up my shirt and step in front of a
mirror, I feel grateful. I feel like I am standing inside the right shape of me now and I know I would make the same trade over again tomorrow if I had to.

  Now, when I run, or swim, or dance, or fuck, or ride my bike really hard, I can look down, and see my own heart pounding there, just beneath the thin and tender skin of my new chest. My own heart pounding perfect, right beside my left nipple, which is exactly where it should be.

  I am not saying that all femmes must love a butch, or that all butches are really or will one day be trans, or that a butch cannot love another butch in that way, please, hear me when I tell you I am not saying any of those ridiculous things.

  Sometimes I imagine what if penis enlargement spam was really ads for men to become better people? More spiritually evolved? Better fathers?

  Gain more for less with our patented male enhancement cream.

  Would you rather have more than enough to get the job done or fall short? It’s up to you.

  We show you how to grow.

  We give you the keys to the world of real manhood.

  STEVE SAID IT WOULD BE OKAY

  Last fall I had a gig in Nelson, a beautiful little town tucked into the Kootenay mountains, right next to a sparkling lake. I had a day off after my show before I flew home, and everyone told me I had to visit the hot springs.

  Hot springs in a cave, they said, you gotta go check it out.

  “What is the change room situation like there?” I asked, and got a couple of cocked heads and raised eyebrows.

  “You know, for trans people,” I explained.

  “Oh, that. Right.” A shrug. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  I went to the tourist info place at the bottom of a steep hill to get a map and some more info. The woman working behind the counter had been at my show the night before, said she loved it. I was relieved, because I figured that might mean maybe she would be a little more helpful or understanding about my next question. It’s one of the privileges of being an artist, and I am not above using it when I need it.