by Ivan Coyote
We talked a lot about bullies and their ways. Francis blew me away, as seven-year-olds are known to do with relatives who don’t see them everyday as their brilliance unfolds, by explaining that he reckoned that his bully was mean cuz he’d failed Grade Two twice already, and his mother drank alcohol when he was in her tummy.
I wondered, as Francis’s fairy godfather should, when is too soon to warn my young friend about gay bashers, and how exactly I would go about explaining to a northern boy-girl a thing as incomprehensible as what happened to Aaron Webster, who was found naked in Vancouver’s busiest downtown park, beaten to death by a crew of teenagers armed with baseball bats and pool cues. Would I leave out the details, and not mention how the police couldn’t find any witnesses brave enough to come forward?
I cried at the sight of his face, so determined, and sure, and self-aware of his difference. So entirely void of shame. I cried with relief in the knowledge that my very existence in his life might make it easier for him to make it all the way through Grade Three. I cried for the hope he makes me feel, now that I’m not the only cross-dresser born in the Yukon in the family, that I will never be alone again. My own seven-year-old loneliness forged my promise to him to see that things will, indeed, be different for us as a team.
Guess what I got Francis for Christmas? Earrings, both dangly and sparkly ones, and fancy French cologne, the same stuff I wear. It all fits perfectly into the jewellery box he got from his older brother.
Cougar Sightings Make Residents Uneasy
You showed up even though I forgot to call and tell you I was in town. The audience was small, well dressed, and vaguely uneasy, so I was really glad to see you.
You whisked me away in your Jetta as soon as I had the cheque in my hand, halfway through my second beer. You took me to the party of a red-faced poet/clown and I promptly broke my toe on a doorjamb when the graduate student with the attentive nipples hid my leather jacket, possibly in a obsessive-compulsive attempt to clean the living room of a house not her own; I can’t say for sure because I had just met her and she didn’t talk much. I had gone in search of my cigarettes when I found out we could smoke inside, only to discover the front door ajar and my jacket missing. While calmly panicking, I whacked my left foot on an oak baseboard corner and my second from pinky toe swelled up to resemble a large gooseberry.
At your place, we smoked too much hash (for medicinal purposes only) and I slept on your couch and was awakened painfully early by your parrot, whom you swore until I almost believed you, that you had never heard squawk that loud that early.
You made coffee and put golden scented beads in my bath and said you’d drive me in your car to Drumheller to make a poet’s pilgrimage to the HooDoo rock formations, to smoke cigarettes and walk on the bones of dinosaurs.
I would go anywhere with you to avoid spending the day in my sister’s new house in the suburbs; the dinosaur bones were just a bonus. You had never been to Martindale, even though you were born and raised in Calgary, because until two years ago, it was a hayfield. I read the directions out loud over the noise of the heater in your car and we laughed as we turned left at the “new communities” sign then left onto Martin Valley Boulevard and again onto Martin Valley Road, past Martin Valley Lane, Street, and Crescent, past Martin Valley Bay and onto Martin Valley Way, where my sister and her boyfriend had just purchased their very own piece of postage stamp lawn paradise complete with an anaemic fourteen-month-old birch tree jerry-clothed to a stake in the front yard and a cement pad out back in the mud to park the company truck on. Everything, everywhere, shaded beige, ivory, or grey to house the middle echelons of mediocrity. My little sister’s neighbourhood makes me want to take a nap. The land developer had plowed the hay under and slapped up a second-part-time-job and first-child-starter-home, Scrabble board subdivision, and the thought of my little sister waiting with a pot of stew on for Barry to come home dirty and late from work makes me feel sad and strangely ashamed of her in front of you.
“Oh for chrissakes, give me a break,” you comforted me. “When my mom comes out to my gigs, she shellacs her hair up like a helmet, and she once actually said to me: we didn’t just buy a condo, we purchased a lifestyle.”
I immediately felt better. We notice that the glass in all the houses is cheap and thin and warps in the sun like Plexiglas, lending a house-of-mirrors twist on the reflection of your sports car as we slink by.
“Its like a trailer park for houses,” you whispered as we pulled up in front of my sister’s house.
We shuddered, picked up my toque, scarf, and borrowed mitts, and hit the road.
There was only one place in Drumheller with an espresso machine. We ordered chicken salad sandwiches and cappuccinos from a woman named Annalise, who for some reason was painfully polite to me, yet treated you like you had just walked in with shit on your boots and had a little tiny Satan sitting on your shoulder. You pondered this as you picked the crust off your sandwich, and I suggested it was because of your Che Guevera hat and red jacket. “Maybe she’s got a thing about serving Communists?” I posed.
It all changed when I went to buy smokes. The guy at the corner store across the street asked me for ID, and I had to come back for your keys because my wallet was in my bag, locked in your car. Annalise was pouring us more coffee.
“I just got ID’ed to buy cigarettes,” I said with a blush, and you laughed out loud.
“She’s thirty-four years old,” you explained to Annalise, who snorted, then slopped coffee into my saucer and stood back, narrowing her eyes at me.
“Well, of course, you cut your hair that short, what do you expect?” She shuffled off judgmentally to load the dishwasher and wouldn’t even look at me after that.
Our tables had turned, and I had fallen from favour, but Annalise smiled and waved at you when we left.
You sat back in the driver’s seat and I lit your cigarette for you.
“Ohhh . . . I get it now,” you said slowly, exhaling and studying the red end of your smoke. “She thought you were a boy at first, a boy too young to buy his own cigarettes.”
I nodded and smiled.
“And that means at first she thought I was a. . . .”
I nodded again.
“And then she realized you were . . . and then she thought we were . . . and so she thought you were the . . . and then that means I would have been the. . . .”
I nodded, slapped my leg, and pointed both forefingers at you. “You got it.”
“Hmm. . . .” you said, looking pensive for a bit. “You’d think she’d have liked me better when she thought I was a cougar.”
A Week Straight
I picked him up at the airport last week. What struck me first was how ugly his hat was. A fleece baseball cap. I blamed his mother, signed the Unaccompanied Minor form they made him wear on a red elastic string around his neck, crammed the offending hat into his overstuffed yellow backpack, and we left. No checked baggage. I love a kid who travels light.
Often when Francis and I hook up, some time has passed since we last saw each other. This time it had only been three months, but when you’re seven-and-a-half, three months can hold a decade of things to catch up on. I studied him out of the corner of my eye while driving over the bridge. He was taller, and his legs were beginning to take up more of him than they looked like they should. Stick legs folded into oversized green rubber boots with laces. Very practical footwear. I always appreciated that trait in his mother too. Warm, lined, navy blue rain jacket.
Just a normal little boy, right?
He touches everything, runs his hands over things, opens the glove box, wide-eyed, staring, and pointing at accordion buses. His knees bounce, his head turns, and his fingers tap. Then I see it.
His pinky fingernails are very long. I’m pretty sure that even Whitehorse Elementary, a notoriously tough place to endure Grade Two, does not yet have a cocaine problem, even though it is right next to the Quanlin Mall, right in the heart of our throbbing downtown
Yukon metropolis.
No, I’m pretty sure Francis has long pinky fingernails because somehow, even though there’s a guy in Grade Two who should by age and weight be in Grade Four who calls him Francis-pees-his-pantses, Francis has managed to keep a hold on something of the smaller boy he once was: the fairy child bedecked in the sunflower-print dress, before public school, divorce, and reality set in, and someone started calling him queer.
He left his dresses at home in a box under his bed, even to come to Vancouver to see me, but he did bring his blue crushed velvet hotpants and velour copper-coloured top. I breathed a sigh of relief that night when he came out of his room dressed for dinner.
I realized at the Value Village the next day how much I had invested in this little boy, how much my heart counted on him making it through school whole. How much I hoped elementary school wouldn’t kick the faggot right out of him.
We were going to be pirates for the Fool’s Parade, and fortunately, I was already quite prepared. A short stop at the home of the girl up the street (not to be confused with the girl next door) produced a virtual pirate’s booty of baubles, sashes, and bandanas.
We were searching through the girl’s pants in the Village when it happened.
A pair of black, crushed velvet pants with gold lamé parrots embossed around the bell-bottoms. My eyes lit up and I ripped them off the hanger. The perfect pirate pants. Francis ran his hands over them, and I watched his face go from sparkling to something else altogether. A small cloud crossed inside his brown eyes, a picture played behind it in his head, and he shook it out. He made a face and dropped the pants. “A pirate wouldn’t wear those,” he said with fierce commitment.
“Dude, are you joking? They have parrots on them.” I began to argue with this seven-year-old for a minute, and then stopped myself. I was doing what my mother had done. I remembered the summer I turned eleven, and a yellow and grey dress for my Aunt Norah’s wedding had me paralyzed in a dressing room. The shopkeeper stood next to my mother pleading, “Come on out, honey, it’s okay, I’m sure you look just lovely. It’s a beautiful dress, Pat, and one she can wear anywhere.”
I had felt panic that day: both at the thought of looking beautiful, and at the very concept of owning a dress that was both “formal enough for a wedding, but not too dressy for school.”
I made a promise to myself to always let the boy dress himself how he wanted, even if it was boring and didn’t match at all, and bought him the black cargo pants that he thought a pirate should wear.
He did love the tiny little black patent leather dress shoes we found, almost as much as I did, and I took some comfort in that.
We were standing in the line-up the first time it happened. Women talk to you when you have a child with you, and this woman had been watching Francis try on plastic pearls and clip-on earrings as I waited to pay for our booty. She had been checking me out too, and when I caught her, she gave me the old, “Isn’t he just a darling” face.
“Now, are we picking out some jewellery for Mom?” she piped up, in that voice used by women who don’t have any children anymore.
Francis froze, his shoulders squared, and he returned the pearls to the metal hook they had been hanging on. He looked guilty, maybe, or sad.
“Oh dear, I do hope I haven’t said the wrong thing.” She reached for my arm and stroked it, and left her hand on the inside of my elbow.
Francis looked like a small faggot child busted doing something he knows everybody thinks is wrong or weird, and my heart broke for him.
The woman thought he was the confused child of a broken home, and thus I was the grieving divorced single father of one, and her heart broke for us.
“Everything is okay with Mom,” I said, letting her off the hook. I smiled, which was easy to do when I imagined Chris in her wool army pants and felt jacket, reeking of wood smoke and wearing rubber boots, Francis’s string of plastic pearls, and a clip-on hoop earring.
She breathed a sigh of relief. I was just a nice guy taking my boy out shopping for Mom. In the middle of the day. Maybe I was even one of those new-fangled stay-at-home dads.
Me and the kid, we kind of look like each other too.
I began to revel in my new disguise, my new cloak and mirror. A child: proof of my heterosexuality, even if I was a little faggoty myself, and apparently it was rubbing off on the kid. At least I was fertile.
I realized this must suck for straighter-looking moms or dads trying to seek a little action, but it was some novelty to me. No one, no matter what gender they mistake me for, ever mistakes me as straight. I might even have a chance to come out of the closet, for the first time ever, I thought with a kind of glee.
I dropped Francis off at the airport yesterday; he was wearing his sensible shoes. Me and four other Spring Break single fathers milled around the security gate, seeing off our respective unaccompanied minors. We called out last-minute reminders to not eat any dairy, and tell your mom to call me, and don’t drink any pop even if they give it to you, and tie up your boots. Francis didn’t look back as he let the pretty stewardess take his hand.
The guy with the tight pants and John Deere belt buckle’s little boy started to bawl, and his dad teared up himself and waved through the glass, yelling, “Daddy loves you,” unabashedly. He turned to me and someone’s grandparents and said in a choked voice that pulled at the corners of my eyes, “Now, that’s harder than a guy would think, huh? Won’t see him till September. I’m a merchant marine.”
I nodded like I understood, because he thought I did. I felt secretly proud that Francis didn’t cry one bit, that in fact my kid was the toughest one of them all.
Whip It Out
I went to the newspaper office last Friday at 2:30 p.m. to pick up my cheque for last month. These details will become relevant as the following story unfolds:
My car was parked on Davie Street in the downtown West End, right in front of the Fountainhead Pub. The aforementioned establishment has quite a large sidewalk patio. It was a Friday. The Canucks were in the playoffs. It was hot outside.
When I got back to my car, it would not start. Before then, I had chatted outside with some fine ladies, drank half a cup of coffee, and smoked two cigarettes. It was now eleven minutes to three, and the lane I was parked in was about to turn into a rush hour tow zone, and I was stuck.
I already knew what the problem was, as it had happened a few weeks back on my way to teach a class; my starter was going. The last time it happened, I whacked the starter with a hockey stick and it worked fine for another three months or so, an old trick I learned from my consummate handyman father. But here I was with starter trouble again.
I was wearing a dark blue flecked polyester wide-collar shirt, a light bluechecked polyester jacket, and my new jeans. I work at home, usually in my underwear, but Friday is my dress-up day. Office workers everywhere are whiling away the afternoon in casual jeans and T-shirts, but Fridays I put fancy clothes on before sitting down to work. I don’t know why. It’s just what I do.
So I removed my new jacket, rolled up my sleeves, and dug around in my trunk for something to bash my starter with. I found, under my travel tackle box and roll-up camping chair, a fish club. It looks like a miniature baseball bat, and it was a gift from my Yukon godsons, always a very practical bunch. Perfect.
When I stood up and walked around to the front of my car with it, I heard a voice call my name.
“Ivan, is there anything I can do to help you? I’m not half as useless with these situations as I might look, you know.” It was Darlene, the Ambassador’s Wife, in the ever-charming flesh, leaning over the patio railing. I never recognize her right away without her wig and fishnets.
“Thank you, Ambassador’s Wife, but it’s just my starter.” I tip my invisible cap to her with my fish club. “It has a bald spot on its coil or whatever. Bashing it sometimes can be effective,” I said, explaining all this because I like to believe everyone might be interested in mechanics, if offered the opportunity.
/>
“Lucky for you, you happen to have a miniature baseball bat in your car,” she said.
“It’s a fish club,” I explained again, for reasons stated above.
“Whatever is it for?” She shaded her eyes from the sun with long, slender hands.
“It’s for clubbing fish,” I said, matter-of-factly.
“You carry it with you all the time?” She smirked at me, as did the older fag with creased trousers, and the guy with him at a table next to the sidewalk, and the semi-circle of softball dykes beside them, all of them eavesdropping.
“I have all my camping gear with me all the time,” I said, which is the God’s truth, I do. It is the reason I endure the flak I get over driving a dark purple Ford Taurus station wagon. I am always ready for anything in this car. It is what the spiritual essence of camping is for me. Being ready. For anything.
A large round of guffaws emanates from the patio. Lesbians, I can see them thinking, are so tool conscious. I am a stereotype.
“You mock me now, but wait until you need something.” I felt the blood rising in my face, and my ears were glowing pink. “Where will you be when you need a ratchet set, or a battery operated latte whipper? Coming by the old station wagon, that’s where.”
With that, I promptly rolled my sleeves up again and crawled under the front end. I wailed on my starter with the fish club, slid out, and tried to not touch anything in the car with my now filthy hands. Much to my chagrin, the fish club fix didn’t work this time. The solenoid still clicked helplessly under the hood. I went back to the trunk to look for a bigger tool. By the time I crawled under my car for a second time on Davie in rush hour with a small ax and hammer combination, I had quite a crowd gathered around. Bang bang, bash clunk. This didn’t work either, and now my knees were dirty too.
The trousered man said it was my battery, and then added that Fords were a piece of shit anyway, and that what I needed was a Chevy. I knew it was my starter, and that what I really needed was a tow truck. The softball dykes wanted my phone number. They made their friend tell me they thought I was cute, and offered to buy me a beer. I could have gotten a blowjob from the single guy with the Jack Russell terrier, I could tell by how he was looking at me and my axe, but I didn’t have time to explain to him what he would actually be getting himself into. The tow truck driver was sweet, and let me smoke in the cab all the way home if I gave him one too.