by Ivan Coyote
My face and ears were on fire. Did they think I couldn’t hear them? I calmly put my right hand on the seat back in front of them and leaned into their row. I placed one word in front of the other, in an orderly fashion.
“Why don’t you just ask it what it is? Maybe it is a human being with ears, and feelings. Why don’t you just ask it what it is? Maybe it can talk, too, and maybe it will tell you. Go ahead, ask it. Because it is standing right here.”
They just stared straight ahead, wordless. They pretended I wasn’t there, like I didn’t exist.
I splashed cold water on my face in the tiny bathroom. I thought about finding Steve or Rick or Darryl and telling him that his girls had failed to leave a positive impression here. Then I decided against it. I didn’t feel like explaining myself, or receiving a forced, toe-kicking teenage apology.
The girls were still whispering mercilessly as I walked past them. They fell silent when they saw me. My hands were shaking. I hoped they couldn’t see that.
I’d calmed myself down by the time the plane landed. I don’t like standing up and waiting in the aisle while some guy way up in first class drags his laptop down from the overhead compartment and puts his jacket on in slow motion, all the while holding up the entire disembarking process, so I usually stay in my seat reading until almost everyone is off the plane.
I caught a flash of red hair in my periphery. I swear I didn’t think about it. It wasn’t planned. I sent no conscious signal to my leg to move, but just as Colleen passed my seat, my foot shot out and tripped her, all on its own. She fell perfectly, knocking over the two girls in front of her as well. The girl behind her tripped over the resulting tangle, and all four of them went down.
The blonde in the striped bell-bottoms leaped up first. “Jesus, Colleen, watch where you’re going. I could have chipped a tooth. I just got my braces off.”
They righted themselves and left the plane without looking back. I don’t think even Colleen knew what I had done.
I sat in my aisle seat, shaking my head at myself. Good thing the two nice old ladies who had been seated next to me had already gotten off the plane, or they would have thought I had cruelly tripped an innocent sixteen-year-old girl with absolutely no provocation.
I tried to feel guilty. I tried to feel ashamed of my behaviour. I was an adult, I told myself, and I should have known better.
But I couldn’t. I thought of Andrea Mullen, who is a lawyer now. I thought of Alice Byers, who overdosed on sleeping pills in her third year of university.
I smiled to myself. Take that, Wendy, Tracy, Sandra, Jeanie, and Kerri-Anne. Truth is, I never liked you guys anyways.
Spare Change
Corner of Pender and Abbott, just before midnight. Whose bright idea was it to build a multiplex theatre and high-end mall here? Remember when it was a parking lot? I think I liked it better as a pit filled with water. I knew a guy who was arrested once for canoeing in the flooded hole that gaped where this mall now is.
I light a smoke into cupped palms. Orange glows bright, then dimmer.
Streetlights leak shifting spilled paint reflections off shining sidewalks and pavement. It is chilly tonight, like this evening belongs in a whole different month than the rest of this week.
I smoke with one hand and run fingertips over the ridged edges of quarters in my pocket with the other.
There’s a woman, she’s just rounded the corner off Carrall onto Pender Street, she’s walking towards me. Her dress has two straps; one has fallen to her elbow and remains there, the other clings to a prominent collarbone. I watch her only because there is nobody else on the street to look at. She shuffles along the sidewalk, fists blossoming into five narrow fingers and then closing again. Repeat. Eyes down, back and forth, she searches the sidewalk and gutter. She scoops up a flat cigarette butt and places it into the shapeless front pocket of her dress. A small baggie is picked up, opened, sniffed, licked, and dropped again. She runs a yellow tongue over peeling lips, passes a sleeveless wrist under her nose. Repeat.
I look down as she starts to get close to me. I can hear the sound of her flip-flops sucking and slapping against the wet pavement. The sound stops in front of me. I don’t look up. Both hands are in my pockets. My half-smoked cigarette is crushed and soggy, an inch away from the toe of my boot. What a waste, I think. Too late to fix it.
“Spare some change, young fella?” Her voice is deeper than her small frame seems capable of.
I shake my head.
She lifts one lip a little, in my direction. “I know you’ve got change in your pockets. I can hear it. Heard it all the way up the street.”
“You asked me if I could spare some change, not if I had any.”
She raises her eyebrows. They have been plucked and then painted back on, but she raises them nonetheless. “We got a wise guy, huh?” She flips then flops back two steps and surveys me closer. “You go to college? Because that, my friend, is lawyer talk.”
I shake my head. “I’m a writer. I tell stories.”
She snorts. “Same diff. Makin’ shit up. Twisting the facts so they end up on your side. I’ll ask you again, counsellor. Can I have some of the change I can hear in your pocket?”
“It’s not change. It’s my car keys.” I jingle them for evidence. Exhibit A.
“Other pocket. Nice try. What, are you afraid I’ll go spend your hard-earned money on drugs?”
I half-shrug, half-nod. “What if I get you something to eat?” I motion over my shoulder to the McDonald’s behind me, which is getting ready to close up.
She snorts again. “That garbage? Now, that stuff will kill you.”
We both laugh. I pull my other hand out of my pocket. Two loonies, a twoonie, three quarters. I hand it over. A nicotine-stained hand shoots out and collects. The change disappears before I can squeeze out a second thought. She doesn’t thank me.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
“What? You want me to thank you now? I took your money to make you feel better about having more of it than me. I just did you a favour, if you think about it. Don’t you feel like a better person now, helping out an old woman? I’m the mother of four children. I have three grandchildren. I’m almost sixty-five years old.”
“You don’t look a day over eighty,” I quip.
“Why, thank you.”
We laugh again, she coughs.
“Where are your kids, then?”
“My kids? Where are my kids? You mean why don’t my kids swoop down and rescue their poor old mother from the mean streets of the Downtown Eastside?”
“Well, yeah I guess that’s pretty much what I mean.”
“And argue over whose turn it is to keep me in their basement suite? All the free cable I can watch? I tried that. There’s one catch. There’s always the one catch.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m never allowed to bring my heroin.”
I nod, because there seems to be nothing to say.
“Shit happens, kiddo. Sometimes life gets in the way of all your plans. I’m too old to live under someone else’s roof, someone else’s laws. Had enough of that when I was married to the bastard, may he rest in peace.” She makes the sign of the cross in the air with her right hand and falls silent for a bit.
I nod again and reach into my pocket for my smokes. I offer her one, light both.
She inhales deeply, stares at the red end of her cigarette. “It’s the simple things. Tell you what – how ’bout you spare me a couple more of these for later?”
I look down into my pack. There are two left.
“I’d offer to buy them from you, but you’d probably just go spend the money on more cigarettes.” She smiles, raises one eyebrow, and then winks at me.
I hand her the rest of the package. Up close, she smells like rose water.
“There now.” The pack disappears. She pats my forearm. “Doesn’t that feel better?”
My Dad Told Me
It was a Friday afternoon, sunny and
lazy. I ran into my friend Sir coming out of her apartment building, and we went for a coffee. She grabbed a table outside on the deck in the warm sun and I went inside for two Americanos.
I squeezed past the lady in the hippie dress and sat beside Sir and her cowboy hat, across from two biker types and their overfilled ashtray. Sir passed me a piece of the newspaper.
“Business section?” I asked her. “What am I gonna do with this? Check my stocks?” She passed me the New Homes, smiling. “Smart ass,” I said. “At least give me the Lower Mainland bit. Don’t make me roll up Fashion and pummel you with it.”
She passes me the front page. A true friend, indeed.
“It’s not the same as inside,” the bigger of the two bikers laments. “Inside there is a code, you know, a way of being that makes sense . . . then when you get out. . . .”
“It’s an adjustment,” his buddy nods. “Took me over a year to be able to sleep past six a.m. Ate pork chops every Tuesday for a while, until I got used to Tuesday isn’t pork chop night for the whole planet. You’ve only been out a coupla weeks. It gets better. When’s your kid gonna be here?”
“Ten after.”
The second guy stands, extends his hand. Slaps the other guy on the shoulder. They half-hug, awkward. “So I’ll make a move, leave you to it. Take care, buddy. Same time, next week?”
My face is hidden behind pictures of Iraqi prisoners. I can’t face the news; instead I am eavesdropping on a rare bonding moment between these two men. I sneak a peek at Sir. She is watching the second man disappear around the corner; his wallet is wearing through the denim of his right back pocket, the chain swinging, smokes, cell phone, and truck keys in hand. The sound of his boots on pavement fades with him. She smiles at me. We were both witness.
A tall, pimply boy gets off the bus and crosses the street. He squints into the sun, holds up a knuckly hand across his eyes. He jumps over the guardrail and slumps into the empty chair. He is all right angles and straight lines. His feet seem impossibly big in brand new white runners. One shin is road-rashed and picked.
The biker leans across the table to hug him, the kid moves to meet him and knocks over a half-empty bottle of apple juice. His father catches it before it hits the table.
“Sorry, Dad.”
His dad smiles and surveys the boy. “You look great. I think you’re finally taller than your father.”
“By three-quarters of an inch.” The boy raises his eyebrows and grins.
“Your mom?” Dad is staring at his fingernails.
“She’s good. You staying at Uncle John’s?”
“For a while. I’m looking at a place this weekend. There’s a skatepark a block away. I’m getting a pull-out couch for you.”
They talk like this for a while. I’m smoking and getting involved in the sorry state of the planet, enough so I’m almost not eavesdropping anymore, until I hear the man ask his kid if he’s having any luck with the ladies.
The kid swallows, his oversize Adam’s apple plunging in discomfort. He shakes his head. “There was that one chick from Kelowna, remember? She was staying at her Grandma’s? That was a while ago. . . .”
“That was last summer, little dude. School’s almost out again.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not like you. Girls don’t like me too much, mostly. I don’t have the magic touch like you.”
“It’s not a magic touch. You want to know my secret? My fail-proof method?”
The kid leans forward. Behind my newspaper, I find I have leaned forward too. Sir has cocked her head, too. We are all waiting. “Let me just grab myself another coffee, and I’ll tell you all about it. Hold that thought. You still drinking iced tea?”
The kid nods. His dad gets up and goes inside. All three of us sit back, impatient. I watch him make his way back to our table. Average height. Over-size biceps. Bleeding tattoos. Not an ugly man by any stretch, but, as my aunts would say, nothing to write home about. He resumes his seat, lights an Export ’A’, and stirs his coffee with a hand that makes the spoon look like it came from an Easy-Bake Oven Set.
“Where were we?”
“You were going to tell me how to meet chicks.”
“Right. I’ll tell you the one thing that women cannot resist in a man. The one thing that will always keep them coming back for more.”
For the love of Christ, spit it out already, man, I’m thinking. We all need to know here.
“Listen to them.”
The kid sits up straight with a sideways glance.
“I mean, really listen. Ask her about how her day went. Be interested. Don’t just act that way, I mean really be interested in her. What she has to say, what she thinks about things.”
“And then. . . ?”
“That’s it, son. That’s all. You’d be surprised how many guys never figure that one out, but that’s it. My big secret. Really listen to her, and then if you’re lucky, when you come home from work, there will be a good woman there. Cooking for her every once in a while never hurt a guy in the long run, either.”
The kid looks at his father. I look at Sir. Sir looks at the biker, then she meets my eyes. Again, we were both witness.
The biker drains his coffee. “C’mon, kiddo, I’ll buy you a slice.”
The two of them stand up and walk together down the block – noisy black Dayton boots and silent white runners, respectively.
Sir is shaking her head, smiling. “That was just about the sweetest thing I ever heard. Did you get all that?” she asks me.
I nod reverently.
For the first time, the lady in the hippie dress lowers her paperback and speaks up, her eyes moist and bright blue. “Now if only someone would have told my fucking husband that, I might still own half of that cabin on Salt Spring Island.”
Fly Right
Last Monday was writing class night. One of my students showed up wearing this awesome skirt, like all black and white geometric funkicity with matching nylons and pumps. Eileen likes to be matching.
“Eileen,” I said, putting the kettle on, “what a smoking skirt you have there. I would totally wear that, you know . . . if it was a shirt.”
I love Eileen. Eileen’s specialty is comedy. She’s dead funny. She’s one of those women the girls in the office would say was a gas. Her stories are about being the best friend of the pretty girl, the bridesmaid, the neighbour whose lawn isn’t dandelion-free. She’s funny – deep kinda funny.
During class, Eileen waited a remarkably long time before blurting out to us that she had sold an article she had written to Women’s World, a major ladies’ magazine for, da-da-da-dah: a cool one thousand dollars US. I almost sucked cinnamon tea into one lung. One yankee dollar a word.
We were all beside ourselves. She has sold a couple of things to CBC Radio and a local news weekly, but this was the cheque. The one you get to call your mom about. The one you have to photocopy and frame. The one where you get to start telling people at staff parties that you’re a writer. You have been one for a long time already, but now you can say it out loud.
I am proud, like a father whose kid scores the winning goal in overtime. She filled us in.
“I didn’t even really like the story that much. I wrote it in class, you know, the one where the woman wakes up and writes the list of all the reasons she hates her husband and then kills him? Well, I read the writer’s guidelines, and it said they were looking for happy endings, so I changed it so she doesn’t kill him. Instead she figures out that she in fact still loves him through the process of writing about why she hates him, and ends up staying married, and they bought it. The cheque will be in the mail as soon as I fax back the contract.”
I was amazed. I have never written a story that you could buy in the line-up at Safeway. I looked at Jan, the other dyke in the room. She was thinking what I was thinking, I could tell. One thousand dollars. We look up Women’s World in the Writer’s Market, which lists guidelines to potential contributors. See, this is what I instruct my students to do. R
esearch your market. Find out what they publish, what they’re looking for. Read it. Write something you think might fit, and send it in. That is exactly what Eileen did. Eileen is no square; she’s hip. But she knew they were looking for something unabashedly family-oriented with a happy heterosexual ending, and she gave it to them. Now her plane ticket to Europe was paid for.
I could do that, I thought.
“I should do that,” Jan said.
According to the Writer’s Market, Women’s World is a “women’s service magazine.” We laughed. Jan and I have that part down, at least, we all agreed. Women’s World offered to its readers a blend of “fashion, food, parenting, beauty and relationship features, dramatic personal women’s stories and articles on self improvement, medicine and health topics. Human interest stories and service pieces of interest to family oriented women across the nation.”
We were perfect for this gig. I had had dramatic, food-filled affairs with fashionable women who were parents, and later needed medicine to regain my health, and the whole experience had been riddled with self-improvement. No problemo.
The magazine also wanted stories of triumph and courage (my favourites, too) or light romantic themes, written from a masculine or feminine point of view.
We could even do both, we reckoned.
It was also accepting mysteries, including true-crime, provided the story wasn’t too sordid or grotesque, and it included a “resolution that clearly states the villain is getting his or her come-up-pance. Women characters may be single, married or divorced.”
Okay, so it didn’t say queer, of course. Here we were, typing away at a living in the alternative press, when we could be bringing in some decent coin if we could just straighten up and fly right, and only for a thousand words or so.
Maybe we could even take our old homo stories and change the pronouns, (if need be) so they sounded straighter. “I would need a pseudonym,” I said, and then remembered that I already am a pseudonym. My birth name was discarded years ago partly because it sounds a bit like a fake porn star’s name, and I never could hack the razzing I took. I would, ironically, need a pseudonym for my pseudonym to pass for straight.