Loose End

by Ivan Coyote

  What did I learn from my little incident last Friday, just after three o’clock? I learned that when it comes to mechanics, an ounce of new starter is worth a pound of tow truck, and that I am glad I have the auto club. I also learned that if ever I am to find myself lovelorn, I will drive down to Davie Street on a nice day and feign car trouble. I will then pull out anything that could be mistaken for a tool, lift up my hood, and proceed to feign knowing what to do with it. This would not be half as effective on Commercial Drive, back in my neck of the woods, as broken down cars and queers with tools are more commonplace there, but it sure works downtown. I’ll just have to remember not to wear my Friday clothes.

  The Smart Money

  I write about my little godson Francis a lot. He is one of my greatest joys, and my most beloved muse. I wrote my first story about him when he was barely three and I was twenty-eight, and that story went on to be published in my second book. I have not stopped writing about Francis because I write about all the people I love, and he is still his little courageous almost eight-year-old self, bravely cross-dressing his way through Grade Three now, in a rough school in a rough town. I know how he feels. I grew up in that very same town. His dresses are even harder to explain now than my corduroy suit and double holstered cap guns were back then. School is always harder on the nelly boys than the tomboys. At least we are good at throwing balls.

  Every time I read anything I have written about him, it moves me. I cry. Ask anyone who knows me. I can’t help it. I’m a crybaby. Writing and reading about him to people is like a heart balm for me. Other people know it too, and by the number of sobbing drag queens and teary-eyed transgendered fellas I’ve seen in the audience over the years, I am not the only one. We all need to hear stories about people like us. What do they call it? Positive representation of something we can see ourselves in? I call it knowing I’m not the only one.

  Francis’s mom called me on the radio phone from the cabin one fall to ask me if I had been thinking of Francis at approximately eight o’clock the evening before. I had been, as it turned out, during a reading for two hundred people all packed into a club somewhere on the east side, all of us thinking of Francis. When I read his story, all of us got choked up on account of his bravery, his little fighting faggoty self, and his beautiful, gentle, unintentional, pure-hearted resistance.

  “I knew it,” his mother confided. “We were walking down the trail to the lake last night to go fishing, and he spun around on one heel and asked when you were coming home again.”

  He was four then, and I hadn’t seen him since he was dancing around in red socks and a tube top. I always carry that moment with me, and to this day every time I face a crowd to tell a story about Francis I think about it. And then I tell a room full of strangers about me and my little fairy child. Crazy way to make a living, I know, but it works for me.

  A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from Francis’s other uncle, Brenda. She lives in the same small town, but she is not “from there,” even though she has been a resident for almost a decade. It is how we are, us Yukoners. Anyway, Brenda is in a book club in Whitehorse, of course with a couple of gals I maybe went to high school with, or my sister did, or maybe I blew one of their brothers at a keg party on the Marsh Lake road in 1985 or something. Whatever. Point being, it is a very small town, and Brenda and her book club read my second book. The one with my first Francis story in it. So of course it turns out one of the women knew me, and knew Francis and his brothers, and Chris, his mom. She returned to Brenda’s place the next first Tuesday of the month looking stricken. “I read this book,” she told Brenda as they were reheating the scones and making the tea. “I have to tell you, it made me feel nauseous. I mean, actually sick, thinking of that poor little boy and his brothers, and she talked about them all too. Even the husband. Why couldn’t she have changed all their names, at least? He is going to have to grow up and live with those stories hanging over his head for the rest of his life. They all will. Didn’t she think of anyone other than herself, and making some money?”

  Brenda ended up defending my honour (which has always been dubious in that town at the very best) in front of an increasingly indignant and hostile group of fiction readers, and I still feel vaguely responsible for her having to go through such an ordeal. I received the following e-mail from her, which I will excerpt for you here:

  “Thank you so much for taking the time to talk through those issues with me. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking (obsessing) about it. Kelly Anne [her partner] and I spent all yesterday morning talking about it too. It’s really challenging to me to hear someone feel they have the right to tell us how to tell our stories. As if we don’t already have a big enough problem with hearing and seeing representations of ourselves anyway. KA asked whether or not an analogy might be drawn with another community and I told her I don’t think so. Who in this day or age would tell someone it’s not okay to write a story about a young black person or a young native person for fear someone is going to think they’re black or native? Invisibility and non-acceptance are the issues. Should be a barn burner of a book club.”

  I talked it all over with Brenda. We discussed different methods of explaining to straight people things we thought they might have already figured out by now without sounding strident, and we left it at that.

  Then I sat down and tried to write. Politics aside, I thought to myself, (the faint beginnings of a bout of existential angst descending upon me and my keyboard), what if Francis is straight? What if it is a phase? What if some redneck kid reads my book, and he endures even one more taunt, one more fistfight (which, according to his mom, he is starting to win now, and even start, in some cases), even one more hassle once he makes it to Grade Four?

  What if my writing about him does make his life harder, somehow, somewhere, in some as of yet unforeseen way that I can never know until it happens? What if it happens, and he doesn’t tell me? What if Francis grows up to be a huge, hairy football player whose best friend the tight end teases him at practice one day? What if his buddy bugs him about liking to wear dresses once when he was little, like he read in that book, and Francis is forced by peer pressure to deny himself, and curse my name?

  I guess I had never considered the possibility. I guess I have always known exactly what Francis is and what he will grow up to be because he has never been made to hide it. I guess I thought Francis would continue to grow up into a world where being queer is nothing to be ashamed of, the safe world his mother and brothers and father and Uncle Brenda and Aunt Kelly Anne and Uncle Ivan live in, where he is loved and adored because of what he is exactly, not in spite of how he turned out. You see, I forget, sometimes, about the rest of the world.

  I cannot stop to think about what if. What if because we let Francis be such a fag, people are going to hate him because he is a fag? How could we stop him anyway? That never worked for our parents.

  I cannot phone up that woman from the book group and patiently explain to her that I didn’t change Francis’s name in my book because way back in the day when I asked his mother what I should change her son’s name to, to protect him, she told me that God had whispered the name Francis to her in her head when he was still in her belly, that it had happened with all her boys that way, and that she thought we didn’t have a right to change it for him until he was old enough to ask what he wanted his new name to be. She told me that his name came from God, as she understood these things, and that besides, being a cross-dresser is nothing to be ashamed of anyway.

  So we kept the names real, and as a result, thousands of people know Francis, and love him, and call him by his name. He really exists, and we know it. We are rooting for him. But I worry about Grade Eight. Grade Eight is when any shit around is likely to hit anything in its way, fanlike or not. I fucking hated the grade that was eight.

  I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see what Francis grows up to be. I know that that is up to Francis, and I know where the smart money is, but I’ll te
ll you what: if he grows up to be just a really nice, sensitive straight guy, it sure will make one hell of a story.

  Catholic Girls

  Whenever I go to Toronto I get to stay with one of my favourite cousins. I have thirty-six, and counting, and mostly I love them all, but I really dig my cousin Trish. She’s my second cousin, really; her dad is my dad’s mother’s brother, or her dad and my grandmother are siblings – whichever way makes sense to those of you with small, two-dimensional families. The way I understand things, you don’t have third cousins in two-dimensional families. Or maybe you do, but you just don’t know who they are. But with my blood, we know. We write Christmas cards. We fight and gossip and bitch and laugh and help each other out. We pass cars on to the younger generations. We hire the drunk or down-and-out or recently divorced among our ranks to build a fence or paint the garage, to give them a little mad money (that’s what my grandmother calls it, and so now the whole family says it) and then we gossip and bitch and fight about it all.

  On a good day, you can feel surrounded by children, kin, unconditional love and acceptance, and excellent comfort food. On a bad day, you can feel like you’re trapped in a David Lynch-y/ Beverly Hillbilly-ish/Kafka-esque bad coffee-induced nightmare where the cops, lawyers, and the judge and jury all look vaguely like you, and the neighbours are watching you being led away in restraints. The news cameras are rolling, and it’s all being broadcast live, via your aunties on the telephone.

  Ah, family.

  But I love my cousin Trish. She is a puppeteer, a mask-maker, and a wanton woman. She never married and bore no children. She is an artiste, and has travelled almost the whole world over. She has honey spoons from France, and tells stories about her lovers rolling hash one-handed while standing up like they do in bars in Barcelona, and she used to work for Jim Henson. She owns the most excellent brick house in Toronto, with honeysuckle and wisteria and a swing chair. When I stay there, I get to sleep in her fully detached studio, with skylights and vines around the windows and raccoons on the roof. I sleep like a teenager back there, surrounded by shelves of half-painted masks and puppet parts. She makes fresh croissants in the mornings and has a stainless steel cappuccino machine. Her mother, the wife of my Great Uncle Bob, or Trish’s dad – whichever makes sense to you – was a concert pianist. Trish is from the Leeper side, her mother is Spanish on her mother’s side: the cultured half of my family. Her brothers are violinists, interior designers, and portrait painters.

  I am from the Yukon branch: the Irishmen, the welders and mechanics and camp cooks; my mother, the child of a typesetter and a drunk. We are all Catholics, on both sides.

  Which brings me to my lovely third cousin Celeste, whom I had the great pleasure of meeting for the first time this week. Her father, my second cousin, and Trish’s brother Cyril, the portrait painter, has kept Celeste rather under his wing for the last twenty-one years. She has been living in a small town north of Toronto, playing classical piano for ten hours a day, until two weeks ago. She is in the big city now, living with her wanton aunt, meeting her cousin the queer writer. She has never had a job or a serious boyfriend. She still goes to Latin Mass every week, when Cyril and his wife drive down from their small town to take her to church. Celeste is in Toronto because she has a repetitive strain injury from playing the piano and needs to be closer to an acupuncturist. Lucky for the rest of us.

  I guess I have always been a dirty pervert, as I have always been slightly attracted to the thought of kissing my cousins, even though I have never done it. I have always been sort of turned on by the thought, probably because it is dirty and wrong and against God’s Law. Which is why I am exactly the type of cousin that second cousin Cyril would rather not have introduced to his gorgeous, radiant, and unsullied youngest daughter Celeste. Especially since Celeste’s older sister was married and pregnant by nineteen. Ah, family.

  I fall instantly in old-fashioned Victorian love with my third cousin Celeste. She is funny and sweet and so excited to be out of her dad’s house and living with her wanton aunt in the big smoke. I can’t help it, I sing “Catholic Girls” by Frank Zappa to her. She blushes in the most beguiling of ways.

  I discuss my theory with Trish as we make salad alone in her perfect kitchen with a fireplace. Celeste is in the bathroom. She spends a lot of time in the bathroom. “I have a theory about cousins,” I tell Trish. “I think the whole societal taboo thing we have going regarding the kissing of one’s cousins is a completely heterosexual construction. It makes sound genetic sense to avoid your opposite sex relatives, but what could God possibly see wrong in kissing your third cousin who is of the, um, basically same gender as you?”

  Trish agrees, which is one of the many reasons she is one of my favourite cousins. She takes the cinnamon buns out of the oven and pours tea. There are fresh flowers on the table. It is two minutes to ten in the morning. The rest of the girls will be here any minute – the door opens and in come Trish’s army of mask painters, all blonde, all beautiful, all under the age of twenty-three. One is an actor, one an artist, one a nanny from Romania. Rough life for me in the studio; if I sleep in, I am awakened by a posse of babes on their way to work.

  They like to be called “the girls,” but you will be hit with a paintbrush if you call them chicks. Their favourite TV show is Sex and the City. They each fancy they are like one of the characters. Celeste comes down in her new jeans. The decibel level in the room reaches new heights as they all tell her what a fabulous ass she has, and then scream in laughter as they notice Celeste’s white cotton granny underwear bulging in a roll above the waistline of her J-Lo pants.

  “Girlfriend, you got to get you some thongs,” says Candace, miming Miruna’s Romanian accent.

  Cyril is going to freak, I think to myself, when he gets the bill for his daughter’s, my third cousin’s, new pair of jeans that barely cover the crack of her thong-covered ass. He is going to have a Catholic father-induced kind of aneurism. He’ll blame it all on his sister, my second cousin, the wanton woman, and me, the lesbian deviant writer, his second cousin, the granddaughter of his Aunt Pat, the one who married beneath her. See what happens?

  Ah, family.

  Butch Like Me

  There’s this guy named Dave who lives in my hometown, and if I were to ever imagine myself a straight guy living a salt of the earth life in a small town, well, then I’d wanna be just like Dave Who Owns Fourth Avenue Esso.

  I met him thirteen years ago, that summer before I went to electrical school. He hired me to mow his lawn. He picked me because he saw my Honda self-propelled four-stroke mower in the back of my pick-up when I stopped to get gas one day.

  My father had just bought me the shiny red mower for my twenty-first birthday. “There you go,” he had said all in one breath, his cigarette dangling perfectly from one corner of his mouth so the smoke, as always, never got in his eye. “Happy birthday. Now you’ll never be out of work again.”

  My dad was right. Dave Who Owns Fourth Avenue Esso hired me not the very next day to mow his lawn Every Friday After Work, but only after he made sure the mower had a self-propelled clutch, which meant the thing mows the lawn for you; you just have to walk behind, cigarette a-dangling, and steer.

  That was because Dave – which I found out the hard way the very next Friday – also turned out to be the Guy Who Owns That House On The Hill On Twelfth Avenue. It was the kind of a hill that we used to wish as kids didn’t belong to Old And Scary Guy, or we would have tobogganed down it after school. But that guy died and Dave bought his house, and now I had to mow the Hill On Twelfth.

  Lucky for me, I had my new-fangled mower what my pa got me, I figured, until I realized after one pass of Dave’s newly seeded, staked, and taped-off lawn, that every time I engaged the clutch of my self-propelled lawn mower, the wheels spun and dug dark brown trenches into Dave’s perfect new grass.

  So I mowed Dave’s lawn the rest of that summer with a mower heavier than a regular one, what with all that extra machinery
I couldn’t use, the thing was a fucking monster. But I was too proud, and Dave was too butch for me to tell him anything other than, “Yeah, this thing works like a charm. Easy-peesy.”

  “Nice machine,” Dave said in return, one hand tracing the clutch handle of my mower, and the other hand opening a beer all by itself. The one-handed beer can open is a good move to cop off the guys in the neighbourhood; ladies really dig that move, though most are loathe to admit it.

  By the end of the summer, I had calves that you could crack an egg on, and I had grown to really like my buddy Dave. Hated the lawn, but loved the man. Dave, of course, paid me in cash.

  Back then Dave had a shock of dark brown hair and blue, blue eyes. He used to wear faded Levi’s and a tight white T-shirt that wrapped around the muscles in his chest, and work boots. That was his after-work outfit. If he was down at the garage, then he’d also put on his blue and white striped mechanic’s shirt with his name on it. He was like James Dean back then, but with brown hair and a pregnant wife. And a day job.

  It wasn’t until years later, when I had really blossomed into my fetish for gay male porn from the seventies, that I truly realized how hot my buddy Dave really was.

  I introduced him to my second cousin Trish last week when we were both in the Yukon for a visit. She is from Toronto, and travels the world for her work. She has rubbed elbows and shot Ouzo with beautiful Greek fisher boys with long eyelashes who could make you write home for more travellers’ cheques. She has sipped merlot in a café with a French poet and been paddled down a canal in Venice. Even she swooned at the sight of Dave, buff and Levi’ed, his hair shot full of silver, wearing his trusty striped shirt with his name sewed on it, and smiling, pumping gas in the Land of the Midnight Sun, with a clean rag in his back pocket. His nails were trimmed square and wide, and his forearms were wrapped in veins like ropes from spending time at the business end of a wrench, as my father would say. My mother would call him a healthy specimen.