Loose End

by Ivan Coyote

  I blame it on us all being Catholic in origin. Catholics are fucked up when it comes to sex and nudity and what’s a sin and whatever, especially with women, that is no news flash. How come nobody in the family gets all high and mighty when one of us takes a job where they have to suck in toxic fumes or paint cancer-causing chemicals onto things for nine and a half bucks an hour? The aunts and uncles all take drags off their smokes and say, “Well, at least it will put food on the table and keep the roof over her head. Everyone’s gotta eat.”

  I figure, as long as you stay away from the hard drugs and you’re happy, then I reckon I’m proud of you for making that kind of money without a college degree. Just don’t forget to put a little aside for RRSPs, because it looks like the silver spoon kind of jumped right over this family. Our inheritance has always been being able to take care of ourselves. Remember how Gran used to keep a sock full of dimes and quarters and dollar bills in the freezer? She called it her mad money, for a rainy day, or to get herself something special every once in a while.

  That reminds me, it’s your brother’s birthday coming up. Wanna pitch in and get him something really nice? I hear you’re pretty flush these days.

  Battle of the Bulge

  I’m going to get a little personal here. I like to pack. There. I’ve said it. Almost anyone who has seen me in jeans over the last five years or so already knows this about me, but it is something I rarely talk about, for all the obvious reasons. My ninth edition copy of The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “pack” in quite a number of ways. The closest to my meaning is:

  Pack: /pak/ 1 (n.) a collection of things wrapped up or tied together for carrying. And then, in its verb context: to fill (a suitcase, bag, etc.) with clothes and other items; or in its transitive form: to put closely together, to crowd or cram (as in packed a lot into a few hours). This last definition only works with tight pants, of course, but you get the idea. There is also the transitive colloquial form, which is: to carry (a gun, etc.) or to be capable of delivering (a punch) with skill or force. All definitions sort of hint at but don’t exactly apply to what I actually mean.

  Perhaps, a few years and a couple of editions of the dictionary down the line, there will be a queer vernacular definition which will say, “to fill, crowd or cram ones tightey-whiteys with a dildo, sock, or some other bulging object meant to represent a phallus or prosthetic penis of some sort.”

  Myself, I find packing a hard dildo, full time, well, too hard, frankly. Aside from the obvious uncomfortable drawbacks of sweating and chafing, I find it rather unsightly. Ask the Viagra generation how fun it is to walk around all day with a woody, they’ll tell you. Any fella who ever managed to make it through high school has an embarrassing tale to tell about being called to the chalkboard at the wrong time. Nope, not for me. A sock? Well, this method of augmentation may have worked fine for eighties rock bands, but I prefer something with a little more substance. The model I use is called, I believe “Mr. Softee,” and comes in three sizes – small, endowed, and ridiculous – and a variety of skin tones, from cappuccino to Caucasian, if you’ll pardon the pun. It provides a pleasant little bulge and feels good to rub up against. Some folks wear a jock strap or soft harness to keep their business in place. I find that a newish pair of briefs works just fine, provided the elastic is still trustworthy.

  Think I’m over-sharing? You just wait. Now, I’m sure the Freudian analysts and the radical feminists have a myriad of theories as to why I like to pack, and for sure I’ve questioned my motivations myself. Turns out I’m not a pawn of the patriarchy, full of self-loathing and internalized misogyny. I’m proud of who and what I am, and I’m about as okay with my body as I’m going to get. I just like to pack. Leaving home without my little friend feels, well, empty to me now. I can’t explain it other than to say it is similar to leaving the house without feeling my car keys in my pocket or the weight of my wallet on my ass cheek. Some women can’t leave the house without lipstick or their purse on their arm. Same thing, if you ask me.

  But there are obvious political consequences to packing a penis substitute in your pants and refusing to conform to anyone’s gender box, of course, which put my dick in a whole other category. My dick is not the same thing as your purse, or his favourite lighter, or even her push-up bra, but to me, it is just something that makes walking through the world a little less hard.

  A few years back I could leave it at home, if the situation required it, but lately it feels . . . well, even more wrong than it used to. That is why I was packing last week when my mom came to town and I took her shopping.

  I’ve had a few dick-related incidents in the past. There was the time I was up at a university to do a gig, and the women’s studies bigwig was escorting me to the auditorium and my dick fell out of my manties and down my pant leg. I was forced to feign a dislocated knee and hobble into the washroom to tend to my wardrobe malfunction. Then I had to remember to limp for the rest of the day.

  One other time I was at a bar, and a young trans fellow was in the bathroom stall next to me. When he pulled his pants down and sat, his number hit the concrete, and rolled to a flaccid stop just in front of my right foot. Do unto others, I thought, and there but for the grace of God go I. I silently nudged his errant prosthetic back under the wall with my foot and never mentioned the incident, reminding myself to be extra careful when I’ve been drinking. Kind of gives “keeping it in your pants” a whole new meaning.

  My mom is a shopper. She loves to shop. She loves it more if you shop right along with her, and last week she insisted that I try on this particular pair of pants. The good thing about these pants was that they gave me a great package. The terrible thing about these pants was that they gave me a great package, such a nice one that I could not bring myself to leave the change room and face she who birthed me. I thought about removing my cock and hiding it, but there was no time.

  “Come on out and show us.” My mom and the salesgirl were looming right outside the door.

  “They’re perfect, I’ll take them.” I pulled the pants off, and was bent over picking up my jeans when the unimaginable happened: my mother whipped the curtain back, revealing me in my briefs to the whole store. My polyester shirt was hanging down in front of my package, thank Christ, but I was afraid to lift my arms to close the curtain.

  “Mom, what the fuck, close the door, I’ve got no pants on.” I was frozen on the spot, and she was staring at my crotch. I guess it only makes sense that my mother would wonder what was in my pants. She of all people knows I wasn’t born with a bulge. She pulled the curtain back.

  “Relax. I’m your mother. I’ve seen it all before.”

  I leaned against the bench in the change room, trying to deep breathe around the lump of panic in my throat.

  “Not all of it, Mom. And not lately.”

  Good Fences

  I’m going to go against my better judgment and tell a little story about my neighbours. When I first moved to Vancouver from the Yukon some seventeen years ago, I was really just a small-town kid who grew up in a house on Hemlock Street that my dad was pouring the foundation for when my mom went into labour with me. When I was in Grade Three, we moved into a bigger and nicer house my dad and my uncles also had built, which was on Grove Street, exactly four blocks up Twelfth Avenue. I didn’t even have to change schools.

  When I first moved to the city, the only way I knew to treat my neighbours was what I had learned from back home, which is you get to know them. You chat to them as you are walking by with the dogs. You ask them their names, and tell them yours. You invite them over the fence to have a beer in your backyard, get to know them a little; strange, small-town customs like that.

  I attempted to practice these habits in this new land that was East Vancouver. One of the first differences I noticed was that knowing your neighbours can be harder to stay on top of when they are constantly moving in and out, as people who lived in cities seemed more apt to do. I suspected that this was because it was the c
ity, and there were more places you could move to.

  I also soon discovered that for some reason some of my neighbours didn’t seem as interested in meeting me as I was in meeting them. I wasn’t Don and Pat’s kid anymore, a little tomboyish for sure, but from an old, well-known family. Here I was just a stranger, one who some of them couldn’t place anywhere known to them on the gender spectrum. They didn’t want to chat, or even chit.

  I continued my custom of never moving very far, and I have lived, over the last seventeen years, in a variety of places in East Vancouver: on 7th and Victoria, 3rd and Victoria, Georgia and Victoria, and finally, here, on 14th and Victoria, for a renter’s record of eleven years, last September. I am now officially the guy who, by East Vancouver standards, has been here forever. I have met, supped, chatted, played music, and even hot-tubbed with most of the folks who lived within a two-block radius of my house. I have what I always wanted since I left Whitehorse: my own little small-town neighbourhood. We swap recipes and beers and barbecues.

  Last summer, I was taking care of my vacationing friend’s plants across town in Dunbar Heights, so I had to leave my village every other day whether I liked it or not. I couldn’t help but notice that almost as soon as I crossed Main Street, when the house numbers were tagged west and not east, there was a whole lot more room between the houses, and a whole lot more big trees. A lot more green space altogether. These people had elbow room. The world seemed to get quieter the further west I drove. If I went to water the plants after five o’clock or on weekends, I didn’t even hear lawn mowers or weed whackers droning, because on the west side the lawns got mowed by other people during business hours, landscapers who probably rented the place next to me and had to mow their own lawns in their spare time, which seemed to be between the hours of seven to nine a.m. on weekends.

  It got me to wondering: were rich people quieter than folks in my neighbourhood, or were they just further apart, so you couldn’t hear them as much?

  Which brings me to my new neighbours, the bunch living in the basement suite of the house next door to me. Not the quietest lot. Unfortunately, the only door to their suite is directly under my bedroom window, about six feet from the end of my bed. There appears to be anywhere from four to eight people living in this one-bedroom apartment, and since their individual rents are probably fairly minimal, none of them seem to have to work that much, giving all six of them plenty of time to party, right underneath my head. The unfortunate part of this situation is amplified considerably by my suspicion that their drug of choice seems to be crystal meth, not known for its relaxing effects. I don’t mean to slander all those hard-working, dependable, polite meth users who make fine neighbours and friends, but these guys do not ever seem to sleep. They are not allowed to smoke cigarettes inside their suite, though, so they do so at any and all hours, right under my head.

  I have repeatedly requested of all of them, on various occasions in a variety of tones, that they keep it down, as has the woman downstairs and several of the other neighbours, yet they still fail to see things from our point of view. I even went against my family heritage and called their landlord to complain. She insisted they were both nice boys. I guess she hasn’t met her other four tenants yet.

  The police don’t seem to think my new neighbours are all that nice either, as they were camped out in the guy across the street’s upstairs bedroom most of last summer, doing surveillance on their house.

  I have pretty much given up on them quieting down, and have resigned myself to wishing the police would bust them for whatever it is they are doing in there, or that they pull a midnight move and a quiet lonely woman with six cats moves into their place.

  In the meantime, I am compiling a list of the absolute best things I have overheard the speed freaks next door saying while I was trying to sleep:

  #3. “I don’t know what you’re freaking out about, man, so I punched you in the head. You’ve kicked the shit out of me tons of times. Relax, we’re roommates.”

  #2. “It’s easy for you to say, you’re a guy. It’s way more acceptable for guys to do crime.”

  #1. “Dude, could you try not to puke so loud, you’ll wake up those nasty dykes next door.”

  I’m working on the rest of the list. Shouldn’t be long, as they’re a non-stop source of material. I’d move, but where? Everywhere I’ve ever lived in East Van, there has been something going on next door. On 3rd, it was the guy downstairs yelling at his wife when he was drunk, and the time we finally called the cops because it sounded like he was getting physical, it turned out it was she who had finally snapped and broken his leg with a cast iron frying pan. The cops took her away and then we had to listen to him scream at the dog.

  I guess I could move to Point Grey, but then I’d have to get a real job to pay the extra rent. Besides, then I’d have nothing to write about. Nothing ever happens over there. It’s too quiet. Kind of creeps me out.

  Game On

  On September 12, 2003, Johnny Cash passed away at the age of seventy-one. Naturally, this deeply affected the butches of East Vancouver. How would we properly honour the Man in Black? How to celebrate his legacy? Where would we gather to mourn? We did what made the most sense, what seemed at the time to be the most heartfelt and reverent activity we could engage in.

  We dressed in black and played street hockey all afternoon. It was sunny, and the leaves were turning. We toasted Johnny, raising our sticks in the air before the first face-off. We laughed, we sweated, we coughed the black from our lungs, and one of us lost the skin off of three knuckles on her right hand.

  The goalie worked as a locations guy in the film business, so we used his pylons and cordoned off the block. One by one the neighbours came out and moved their cars to avoid dings in their door panels, widening our rink as the day wore on. We played until the sun hung too low to light up the ball anymore. We played until the pavement reminded our knees that we weren’t getting any younger. We didn’t keep score, so nobody ended up on the losing team. We had such a good time that we did it again.

  That was almost two years ago, and the day Johnny Cash died now marks the birthday of the Memorial Hockey League. We play every Sunday that it doesn’t rain, and before the ball drops we raise our sticks and dedicate the game to someone who has passed away. We’ve played street hockey for Nina Simone and Ray Charles, for Iraqi civilians and American soldiers too poor to avoid Bush’s war machine. We’ve raised our sticks to Aimee’s grandfather, Ange’s aunt, and my mom’s friend Claudia, who fell to the cancer. Sometimes, I wonder if there is indeed a heaven up there, and if souls really can look down and watch the living live, and if any of the departed can hear us from where they are, and if they can, then what do they think of us? We are a rather rag-tag bunch of dykes and artists, dishwashers and delinquents, ranging in age from seven to sixty-five and covering every corner of the gender spectrum, playing road hockey to remember people most of us have never even met.

  The only rules are no slapshots, and to try and avoid doing anything that might injure anyone else. When you score, you have to sub off and let someone else have a go. We have no referee or whistle or penalty box. You don’t have to pay, or sign up, or promise to show up next week. We even have extra sticks for passersby in case someone’s brother or girlfriend or Saturday night trick drops in and wants to play. We collected our communal Canadian Tire money to buy goalie pads and tape and ice packs. We have one set of shoulder pads but two goalies, so priority is given to the goalie who has the biggest breasts, because taking a direct hit to the boob can smart like something terrible. One of our best defense women, the one who plays in a kilt, took it upon herself to have a trophy engraved, so we now have a Most Valuable Player award, which is brought back next week and given away all over again. Teams are decided by piling the sticks up, and someone dividing the one pile into two with their eyes closed. The piano player donated a fun fur bag of mostly frilly aprons, which are worn by one team in lieu of uniforms, so everybody can tell who is on w
hich side.

  As perfect a game as street hockey is, sometimes the outside world and its ways infiltrate our utopia. Sometimes the dykes and the straight boys clash cultures. I think it’s because men are taught to win every game they play, even when nobody is keeping score, and the dykes can be less than patient when it comes to the occasionally wobbly learning curve of your average male hockey enthusiast. The heterosexual women usually get caught in the middle, unsure whether to side with the sisterhood, or stick up for their boyfriends. We even had one half-assed fistfight. I wasn’t there that day so I couldn’t say for sure who started it, but both the slam poet and the guy from the Yukon have been banned for life for sullying the otherwise perfectly non-violent history of the MHL. Some said men are biologically unable to curb their aggression; some said it was social conditioning that leads to hockey-related fisticuffs. I wasn’t quite sure, but I voted against making hockey women-only, because I still can’t decide where that would leave me and the rest of my tribe. Also, if it were girls only and another fight broke out, who could we blame it on then? Besides, I figured, if we kicked all the boys out, then none of us would have the pleasure of watching a twelve-year-old girl score on a full-grown man wearing an apron, and let’s face it, you can’t buy that kind of bliss.

  I wasn’t sure how to the aprons were going to go over with the young ruffian boys who show up to play, but Gage, the oldest and coolest of them, decided right off the bat that he wanted to be on the apron team, and even traded with his brother so he got to wear a mauve frilly number over his baggy track pants, and the rest of the kids followed his lead.

  Last week his brother Nigel was showing off because there was a young girl playing with us. He exclaimed loudly that it sure was a good thing he wasn’t on the apron team, because he couldn’t actually wear one on his body, he’d have to tie it to his stick and it might get in the way of him scoring another hat trick like he did last game.