Loose End

by Ivan Coyote

  “Absolutely,” I continued, “I just spent fifty bucks at the chiropractor and the massage therapist. I’m not wasting my back wiping up the sidewalk with your pathetic ass. Now fuck off.”

  I saw a glimmer of fear in his eye. Through the drunken haze, he conceded defeat. His friends were still laughing at him. I wouldn’t back down, and my friends were on their way. He wobbled off, defeated, with grass stains on the ass of his jeans.

  The performance artist and his friend the mural painter showed up moments later, heavy metal on the car stereo rattling the rear-view mirrors as they pulled up, car seat in back. We all laughed at the thought of our aging gang, balding and bulging and lactose intolerant, and with sore lower backs, descending upon the park to rumble because I’m too sore to get up and run like I used to.

  I’ll tell you what, though. We sat there for two hours, smoking and drinking coffee and telling stories about the good old days, and nobody bugged us.

  Off-Leash

  You might not be able to pick us out of a crowd, especially in our streetclothes. We blend in well, because our kind crosses all boundaries; we truly are of all races, genders, and economic breeds. We gather in parks and on beaches, along trails and back-streets. We come together to address a very basic and common need.

  We are the Dog People, and our little buddies have to go. At least twice a day, every day, sometimes more on weekends.

  Some of the Dog People I walk with I see more regularly than I do my closest friends. A few I’ve known by name, most only by association. I might not recognize a regular dog person on the street if she is without Sparkplug the terrier cross or Mikey the black lab with the flashing collar. I will not be able to place just where I know her from without her paw-stained track pants with the Safeway bags poking out of both pockets. People look very different in rain gear.

  There is a sub-section of the Dog People, aptly named the Little Dog People. I was a dog person for many years before I accidentally got Goliath the Pekinese Pomeranian cross, and all of a sudden I was initiated into an entirely different club. Little old ladies smiled wider at me than ever: the clean-cut lad confident in his own masculinity, yet obviously sensitive enough to sport a Kleenex box-sized pet on a six-foot leash that my Husky wouldn’t be caught dead on. In fact, the benefits of being a Little Dog Person almost outweigh the sideways glances some Shepherd-cross butches give me now and the razzing I get whenever I take Goliath home to the Yukon and he attacks whole herds of musk ox at rest areas.

  The lady at the corner market barely tolerated me before when I was only a Dog Person. My Husky takes being on a leash as a personal affront, so I would usually leave her pining on the sidewalk, untied, while I went in to buy smokes. She would sit in the stairwell directly in front of the door, which the proprietor right-fully frowned upon; she would take my money with tight lips and never crack a smile. But the first time I walked in with Goliath under my arm, she sold me a twenty-five pack from under the counter for the same price as a regular one and gave me two dog biscuits, one for him and one for the misbehaved Husky. I was one of the Little Dog People now; those cookies didn’t go to just any old mutt. Now, if I go in the store alone, she shakes her head and asks me, “Where is your little man today? You take this for him, you tell him I say hello.” She never asks after the Husky.

  I met Stewart the Dog Man at Trout Lake years ago, when his Husky had no grey hair yet and his Great Dane was only a pup. Stewart wears his leashes around his neck while he walks around the park. He has special park pants and park shoes and claims he will never own a new truck. “No sense in that,” Stewart says. “Wouldn’t be new for long, would it?”

  He is the archetypal Dog Man, of the five-thirty clockwork variety. Stewart is a guy whose path would never cross mine in any capacity were we not both Dog People. He works in a slaughterhouse. He kills cows and pigs all day with some kind of stun gun thing (I’ve never asked for details), eight-hour shifts, five days a week.

  “How is that for you, Stew?” I asked him one spring evening. “You know, karmically and what not, killing things all week? How do you feel by Friday?”

  Stewart gave me an eyebrow for using the word karmically, somewhat like the look he gave me when I showed up with a Pomeranian, since I had showed no such hippie tendencies thus far in our relationship. Mostly, we just talked about hockey, and how the Great Dane had a dry skin condition, and that’s what you get for having a purebred.

  “Karma?” Stewart snorted at me. “What’s it got to do with that? You eat meat, don’t you? We all eat meat; it has to come from somewhere. It’s my job. On Friday I feel like tomorrow’s Saturday, same as everyone.”

  Stewart’s girlfriends keep leaving him because the big dog eats everything, like all the knobs off the cupboards or the steering wheel in her new car or the futon. “Met an ex-cheerleader,” he tells me. “We went out to a movie and had fun, but she’s deadly allergic. Couldn’t even be in my truck. What can you do?”

  I shrug in sympathy. My dog once dragged a gynormous double–ended dildo out of my girlfriend’s roommate’s bedroom while her dad and his new wife were over for dinner. I didn’t tell Stewart this, even though it might offer him some comfort. Instead, we talked about hockey.

  I walk my dogs with a postal worker, a film industry painter, a photo lab technician, a tai chi instructor, an accordion teacher, an armoured car guard, a shoe salesman, and a man with a profitable gardening operation in his basement, among others. Between these people and the people they talk to when they walk their two dogs, I can pretty much get anything I need. Come to think of it, we could easily organize and take over the world. Make this all one big off-leash area. But we won’t, because it is not our way. We are, after all, a gentle breed, us Dog People.

  Coming Up Roses

  “It’s gonna be you or me,” he told me, somewhat resigned to it all. “One out of two smokers will die from this, you know. That means you, or me.” He stepped on his butt and sidled back into the theatre for the second half. We were strangers, making smoker talk.

  I thought about it a lot, vaguely horrified every time I pulled out the shiny, squared-off foil from the inside of a new pack. Her or me, I couldn’t help but think when I smoked with my sister. Him or me, every time my Cousin Dan and I lit up. Then, just over a year ago, Dan quit.

  I guess that means it’s down to me, I thought. What’s it gonna take?

  “I remember reading about these poor little bacteria, these little scrubber guys,” my buddy said. I could see her and her brushcut in the rear-view mirror, flashing brighter in the backseat everytime we drove under a streetlight. “Their only job is to sweep around in your lungs and eat anything bad you breathe in. And I thought to myself: what about doing that job in a smoker’s lungs? Those poor little fellas, no matter how hard they try. . . .”

  “So you just quit right then?” I asked her, riveted.

  “No, I smoked for five more years, but I always felt bad about those scrubber guys.”

  So I’m on day twelve now, no cigarettes, no coffee. Coffee was the bath water, it had to go too, or I wouldn’t stand a chance. Coffee and a smoke. Something rhythmic about it. They were my cherished companions, like protein shakes to a weightlifter, like guilt to a Catholic.

  No one but me is aware that a day and a half has passed between this line and the last one. Writer’s block due to lack of anything to do with my hands when I need to think for a minute. Where was I?

  So my brushcut buddy also had this wisdom to impart: “You got to change your lifestyle too. Like, radically. Take up a sport, whatever. Don’t go to the same cafés. Change everything.” She quit almost a year ago, and has yet to follow her own advice, but it made good sense to me.

  I got one of those blue flyers for a free yoga class at the new place on Commercial Drive. A regular ten-dollar value. I couldn’t resist.

  Why didn’t anybody tell me about yoga? Not only was I radiant and well-postured afterwards, but I got to spend over an hour in a warm, pea
ceful room with thirty gorgeous women. Flexible women. Lying on a rubber mat. With just me, a five-foot tall guy with bulging eyes and baggy track pants, and the teacher.

  My friend Zoë recently became a yoga instructor. Those quiet ones really are the smartest. She quit smoking three years ago. She has been telling me about yoga for a while, but I never went because of my aversion to sportswear.

  But I went to the gym too. Note to recent ex-smokers: don’t go to the gym with extremely attractive female companions. Guys wearing only track pants will hit on you incessantly, which will infuriate everyone in your party and make you want to smoke, counteracting any physical gains made by the aforementioned workout.

  “Vitamin C,” I was told. “Take this herb. Drink this concoction. Chew licorice, or cinnamon. Cleanse your colon. And your apartment.”

  Did I mention it’s been twelve days since I had a cigarette? It’s going all right, I guess: a little insomnia, an incessant need to vacuum, and random bouts of vacant staring.

  On the plus side, my apartment smells great, I smell great, and the five bucks in my pocket will still be there tomorrow.

  I think my teeth may even be whiter.

  There was that one little incident on day seven, but I don’t think it’ll happen again.

  I was driving up Victoria Drive at a reasonable pace and this guy in a pickup turned right off 13th Avenue into my lane without looking or slowing down.

  Instead of screeching to a stop and honking, I yanked the wheel right and gunned it straight at him. Not until I saw the whites of his eyes did I snap out of it and swerve away from him. I pulled over and let my girlfriend drive.

  The worst thing about this hopefully isolated incident is how good it felt: the horrified look on his face, imagining how I could realistically blame it on him and get away with it, the adrenaline; I mean, hardly anybody can afford to drive into something on purpose. Scary, how good it felt.

  Almost as good as that cigarette I used to light up when I finished writing something.

  Emergency

  I’ve always had a special little fetish for safety gear. You know, emergency orange with reflective strips, chainsaw pants, stuff like that. This guy was wearing those full-length insulated coveralls, with the always eye-catching dirt spots on the knees.

  He had ear protectors too, but slung jauntily about his neck instead of perched atop his head, and his hard hat was on backwards, the way the younger guys wear them. He was clean-shaven, packing quite a bulge, and I like how he smiled at me.

  His crew was ripping up Commercial Drive to lay new pavement, and he had been stuck on traffic duty. I took in the way he rested one hip higher than the other, how he lazily spun his stop sign in one buckskin-gloved hand, how stainless steel was wearing through the toes of his boots. Sexy boy. I smiled back, gave him an eyebrow.

  Then the light turned and I crossed the street and pulled up a barstool at my coffee joint. Ten minutes later I looked up from my newspaper, and he was seated next to me, his hands wrapped around a mug of hot coffee and the top part of his coveralls pulled down and tied around his waist.

  Coincidence? Well, maybe.

  “That soup any good?” Sexy boy asked Jeff, the proprietor. I winced.

  “This soup?” Jeff retorted, like he’d been waiting for this all morning. “No, the good soup I keep in the back. This stuff is just slop I’m trying to get rid of.” Jeff has a list of ten or so stupid answers for stupid questions. I swear he practices them when he’s alone, like a gunslinger in the mirror.

  Sexy boy smiled and nodded, and just the butchest hint of a blush began to creep up his neck from inside the collar of his long underwear.

  “One bowl of beef vegetable it is.” I heard a bit of a lilt in Sexy’s voice, and Jeff raised his eyebrows at the same time I did. Newfoundlanders and Yukoners, we just can’t help but get along.

  “Where you from then, bye?” Jeff laid it on like he had just got off the Greyhound.

  “Born in Bishop’s Falls, grew up in St. John’s,” Sexy Boy said.

  Jeff gave him a free bun, just for being from where he was from.

  I watch him eat his soup out of the corner of my eye, trying not to look like I was watching him eat his soup out of the corner of my eye. His hands looked remarkably clean for a road construction guy, his fingers were slender, his nails trimmed and buffed. Jeff caught me staring and gave me a strange look.

  I took my Styrofoam cup and paper and headed outside. “Come on, Jeff, it’s nice outside, come have a cigarette,” I said. “I’ll sit right next to you and tell you how bad it smells so I don’t want one.”

  All three of us sat around the little plastic table in the weak sunlight. Jeff got four or five drags in before one of his regulars came around the corner. “Ham and cheese on rye, side of potato salad,” Jeff said, butting out his smoke and heading inside.

  Leaving me alone with Sexy Boy.

  “Can I ask you somethin kinda personal?” he said as he pulled his chair right up to the table and leaned in, kind of conspiratorially like.

  Oh, why talk now, just when we were getting along so well, I thought. “I guess so,” I shrugged. Here it comes.

  “How do you know if you’re. . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.

  “Queer?” I finished for him. He nodded twice and swallowed, looking down at his watch.

  I leaned in further and motioned for him to bring his ear closer. “The nail of your baby toe on your left foot will glow pink in the dark,” I whispered, because sometimes I can’t help myself.

  He snorted at me and sat back in his lawn chair, crossing his arms.

  “Seriously,” he said. He pulls his eyebrows close together and shows the lines around one side of his mouth. “Look at me, do I look gay to you?”

  “Not if you don’t count the Village People, dude.”

  He slapped his gloves down. “Come on, do I?”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t actually know. I mean, I had this one friend. . . .” He looked up, and I motioned to him to get on with it.

  “Well, we didn’t have sex, we just kissed a lot and jerked off together and, well, I sucked him off once when we were both drunk. . . .”

  I knew this was when I was supposed to embrace him in a cloud of rainbow-scented wisdom and acceptance, reassure him in a nurturing fashion, and then take him directly to a potluck full of shiny, fully employed faggots with time shares in Costa Rica, but honestly, I didn’t know what to say.

  “Why are you asking me this? I’d have to write a whole book to answer that one for you. Maybe two. Why ask me?”

  “Because you look just like him.”

  “Huh?” I said as I raised my eyebrow at him for the third time in twenty minutes.

  “My friend, from school. You look just like him. His name was Steve.”

  We both stared at the empty umbrella hole in the centre of the picnic table for a minute without speaking.

  “So. . . .” I patted my empty coat pocket where I used to keep my smokes, out of habit. “If I ever run into a guy that looks just like me, should I tell him hi from you, then?”

  He stood up to leave, but didn’t, like there was still something that needed saying. He looked at his watch, played with the zipper on his coveralls. Whatever he was thinking about made him smile. “Yeah. Tell him Rick from the wrestling club still thinks of him whenever he hears The Cars on the radio.”

  They had promoted him to the business end of a shovel when I walked around the tear in the sidewalk half an hour later. He didn’t return my nod, pretended he hadn’t seen me, he was so caught up in his shovelling. Pretended I didn’t know, that he hadn’t told me, that I didn’t remind him of anyone. I understood.

  Knew he couldn’t. Not in front of the guys.

  Note

  Jeff the proprietor clipped that last story and the one about Roger the Rascally Rabbit out of the paper and proudly Scotch-taped them up in the front window of his store until the sun turned them yellow.
Then Jeff married a girl from Finland he met one day when she came in to buy smokes and a calling card. He sold the store, married Flo, and they moved to the Yukon in a camper van to work as short order cooks. The guy who bought the place ripped out the sandwich counter to make room for more potato chip racks and will smile and sell you milk after the expiry date without blinking an eye if you let him. He also did away with the used paperback section in the back; all the true crime and cowboy novels are gone, replaced by a giant photocopier that rarely works. I don’t go there anymore.

  Act of God

  I have never met a man with hairier legs than Tony. He lives in the house right across the street, and the first couple of mornings I saw him come out onto his porch for his newspaper, I thought he was wearing tights under his housecoat. Tony’s house is a classic East End number: a three-storey heritage place complete with stained-glass bay windows, a funky little patio off the top-floor bedroom, and cherry trees in the backyard. Tony grew up in this house, inherited it when his dad passed away, who had inherited it himself when his dad passed away. He lives there with his wife, his divorced sister and her three-year-old son, and his mother-in-law.

  None of what I know about Tony I actually heard from Tony, so the following story must be considered nothing more than hearsay, neighbourhood gossip whispered over fences and at yard sales and in passing at the farmer’s market.

  I know that Tony drives a diesel truck and leaves for work at 4:30 in the morning. This is a fact because diesel trucks make an unmistakable gurgling grind when started up, and Tony’s four-by-four wakes me up more often than the guy two doors down with the Honda Civic that needs a new power steering pump.

  Tony is an electrician, and rumour has it that he repairs the wiring on houses that used to contain grow operations. Nothing like job security in these trying times.

  About seven years ago, a guy named Manuel and his young family bought the place next door. The feud started off slowly enough, when the cat owned by Tony’s mother-in-law kept shitting in Manuel’s wife Maria’s new lilac bushes. Manuel got tired of cleaning it up, and one day he just scooped it up and tipped it over the fence onto Tony’s manicured lawn. Or so the story goes.