Loose End

by Ivan Coyote

  “Why’s that, Nigel?” I asked him, because he had never shown any apron sensitivity before his friend Amanda showed up. “Are you insecure about your masculinity?”

  He didn’t even blink before answering me. “Well, sure,” he said, his face deadpan and serious. “Who isn’t?”

  Family Album

  I went home to the Yukon last month for three weeks and, like all of my trips north, I was visited by a revelation, a brief but exhilarating glimpse of what is actually important in my life. I realized that I am one of the fortunate few who truly loves the family I was born into. For all our foibles and fuck-ups and disturbing table habits and occasional dysfunction, overall I would say I scored big time. If I were up in heaven about to do it all over again, I’d rest my ass cheeks on the edge of the cloud and tell whoever is in charge to send me right back to where I came from, and not to change a single thing.

  I reckon that makes me one lucky fella.

  I won’t go on about what a pleasant and jovial baby Tony’s newest is, or how well my younger cousins are doing in college, or how cute Nick’s daughters are. I’ll just relate a couple of my favourite moments:

  I taught my mom to play street hockey in minus twenty-six below. Turns out she is an excellent goalie, a natural. My favourite quote of hers was directed at her boyfriend, the black belt from the opposing team: “My crease is getting too slippery, too slippery for the two of us to be in it at the same time. Back off, bucko.”

  One night my grandmother from my dad’s side drank three glasses of red wine and got a bit candid with my cousin Trish and I. We were watching the news on Iraq and she suddenly confessed that she had once had a brief yet scintillating affair with a Muslim man. “He was lovely, just lovely, and so charming. Very well-educated, and certainly more well off than we were. Hardly any body hair. We had a beautiful summer, but then I had to say to him . . . .” She narrowed her eyes directly at me. “You’ll get a kick out of this. I told him I’m a good Catholic girl from the prairies, and you practice another religion, one I know nothing about whatsoever, and you come from the other side of the world. Don’t you think it would be best if you went home and found yourself a nice lesbian girl, like yourself?”

  She paused while Trish and I looked confused, and then laughed out loud through her nose, like she does. “Of course, I meant to say Lebanese.” She drained her wine glass while we rolled around on the carpet, laughing until the tears ran.

  I was driving three non-Yukoners back down the Grey Mountain road, coming back from a jaunt up to the lookout to smoke and take scenery pictures. I was totally full of bullshit as I turned to my buddy Brenda and said:

  “My spidey senses are all a-tingle. Keep an eye alongside the road, I feel like we’re about to spot some wildlife. It’s about the right time of day for it.”

  Which was, of course, also a crock. But I had no sooner got the last word past my lips when a coyote trotted from the brush into the ditch and stopped in his tracks right beside the truck. He then chased two ravens off of a dead gopher, one of which promptly swooped down and pecked him on the ass. He jumped like a cartoon character and dropped his prize, disappearing back into the bush. The ravens swooped past our windshield, squawking triumphantly into the blue, blue dusk.

  Brenda knew it was just a fluke, that statistically speaking I was almost always at least partially full of shit, but the other two passengers were real impressed, like I was all at one with my natural habitat. A real Yukoner, still; after all those city years, I could still smell the wild game from inside the truck.

  I thought I saw a fox later that day, but it turned out to be a plastic bag from the Superstore, caught in a bit of shrubbery, fighting the wind. That northern light can play tricks on the eyes.

  One of the best nights I had was when I went to the inherited house of an old buddy of mine from high school. He was the tall, good-looking one from Grade Twelve when I was in Grade Ten.

  It turned out he was having a little bit of a party, just a few of the guys from the old days and their girlfriends from Edmonton, or Winnipeg, or Vancouver – wherever the guys ended up going to school to get their apprenticeships done with. They told me about working construction and selling blinds and how old all their kids were now and do you want to see pictures? We drank Coors Light out of cans that were almost frozen from being left in the garage too long, lit a fire in the shop, and smoked cigarettes with all the windows open, blowing the smoke into the flames. We all promised not to tell the girl from Winnipeg that Cam had a whole one to himself, not just a drag off of someone else’s.

  Ted cried a single tear when he told us about his dad dying, and then hammered out a beautiful drum solo on the rusty kit he had just recently dragged out of the basement and set up again.

  We put on AC/DC’s Back in Black and I seriously stubbed my toe on a crack in the concrete during my air guitar solo.

  “Been meaning to fix that,” Ted told me. “It’s on my list. Knocks the kid off of his skateboard, too.”

  It was just as good as the good old days, but better somehow, and I didn’t figure it out until later just what the difference was.

  I finally got to hang around with the guys from the block, without trying to pretend I wasn’t really one of them. No one told me I wasn’t like the other girls. No one said I was almost like one of the guys.

  Mark hugged me by the front door when I left, his stubble brushing my neck on its way by. “You ever need security blinds, now you know where to come,” he said.

  I could still smell his aftershave hanging onto my sleeve when I took my sweater off at home later. Stetson, maybe, or something along those lines. It reminded me of my dad. It was the kind of aftershave my dad’s wife would buy him, that he would stash in the cabinet under the sink to wear on special occasions.

  Damage Deposit

  On March 31, I left my house just before noon to run some errands. The day was colder up close than it had seemed from inside, so I ran back upstairs to grab my coat. On my way out the door for the second time, I decided to take the dogs with me, figuring it was cool enough that they could wait in the car and we’d have a romp on the beach when the chores were done.

  About thirty minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was one of my neighbours, who calmly explained that there were giant flames shooting out of the roof of my house, and at that very moment the firemen were kicking in my back door. He suggested that maybe I should come directly home and tend to my house fire.

  I could see the smoke from blocks away, and then the disco of lights on the fire trucks, six or so of them parked all kinds of sideways in the middle of my street.

  Then there were the blossoming clusters of neighbours with arms crossed, shaking their heads and staring solemnly from the safety of their square lawns.

  For some reason I thought the firemen would let me run in for a second, just to grab a few things I might need for later.

  My aunt tells me she nearly swallowed her bottom lip when she saw the news; how, unbelievably, there was me on TV with a fireman stuck on each elbow, being dragged across the grass backwards in the opposite direction of my burning house, and how all the while she could hear me yelling, “My laptop, my laptop,” even over the sirens and the hoses and the neighbours; still there is my voice screaming through the surround sound. How it shot a hole in her stomach and shook her by the spine.

  The fire raged behind my windows for over an hour before they could get a fireman inside to fight back, and it wasn’t fully out for three hours. It poured rain the whole time, but the flames were unfazed.

  One of my neighbours grabbed my left hand and wrapped it around a bottle of whiskey. The conceptual artist from up the alley brought hot coffee. Foam from the fire trucks ran in a white river down the sidewalk and I shivered under a soggy blanket.

  The front door on the main floor was kicked open from inside and a grey flood gushed down the stairs. There was a hole in my floor that opened up into sky where my roof should have been.

&n
bsp; I could hardly look at Charlotte, who had lived downstairs for over fourteen years.

  I had moved into the space upstairs in 1993, almost twelve years ago, when I was twenty-four and could still fit everything I owned into one carload. We had both lived in this little blue house longer than we had lived anywhere else. I dreamed up almost everything I ever wrote under that now blazing roof.

  I watched as two men in gas masks aimed a stream of water through my window into the corner where both my computers had been, and wondered why I wasn’t crying.

  I realized later it was because all I could feel was lucky.

  My dogs were safe in the back seat of my car. Charlotte’s dog had bolted when the firemen kicked the back door open, and a neighbour corralled her and kept her in his yard until it was all over.

  Both cats were scooped up later when they slunk back and meowed at the plywood the city workers had nailed up to cover the holes where the doors and windows had been. No one was hurt, and neither of us was alone. We had neighbours and friends and family. We both had house insurance.

  Later that night, I emptied the pockets of the only pair of pants I owned. They were full of phone numbers – if I needed anything at all don’t hesitate to call. The FedEx woman I sometimes see at the park insisted I take her only house key, saying not to worry about it, she could just crawl through the dog door. It took me a while to find her and return her key, because I wasn’t exactly sure which phone number was hers, as I didn’t even know her first name.

  The firemen let me into my charred and steaming apartment for five minutes before they boarded it up and went home.

  The corner where my desk and computers and back-up files had been wasn’t really a corner anymore, being as the walls and roof were gone, along with all my writing. I had prepared for my computers to crash, not burn.

  A stream of water had knocked over the old bureau where I kept my papers. It had landed front first on the floor, in three inches of water. Inside its charred shell, behind melted glass under six inches of still-smoking library books, I found my grandmother’s journals, an envelope full of baby pictures and old family photos from when everyone was still alive, and the one and only hard copy of my novel in progress, barely wet and only charred around the edges.

  The fire had devoured almost everything I owned, but in unexpected places – inside a water-logged cupboard, or beneath a burnt bed frame – I would come across something that had been inexplicably spared: half a love letter, a bone-dry box of matches, a lone book left on a shelf now empty except for ashes.

  Things I’d had for years became gifts I had just unwrapped.

  Seven days have passed since my house burned down. People keep telling me I’m still in shock, that any minute now the reality of what happened will set in and I will crash and cry and mourn what has been lost.

  They tell me I will wake up in a borrowed or rented bed in an unfamiliar room and I will feel vulnerable and alone.

  They tell me it will take years before I stop reaching for a book or a shirt or a bowl that I forgot was gone.

  Me, I’m just happy everyone made it out safe, that I am unburdened by that drawer full of unmatched socks, and that I never have to defrost that wheezing old freezer again.

  Deciding what I’m going to wear is a whole lot easier now, plus I finally got rid of my landline and all those jeans that don’t fit anymore.

  I lost a few stories, but stories breed like bunnies and grow like weeds. And I heard somewhere that ashes make great fertilizer.

  Outdated

  Ten years or so ago I was rolling in my old Econoline van down Highway 101, road-tripping the long and curvaceous route along the west coast. We had left an overcast April in Vancouver behind us, and had the high beams aimed at California. She had long, long legs and fingers, lips that could talk me into pretty much anything, and a babysitter for the next sixteen days. I had a half-racked Visa card, most of my last paycheque, and a pair of chocolate brown Italian leather pants. The van had a knotty pine tongue and groove interior, a leopard-spotted fun fur foldout bed, and a stereo that rattled the rearview mirrors so much that the screws kept coming loose and I had to Krazy Glue them back in so I could see to change lanes.

  We drove straight through Florence, Oregon without stopping on account of how the last time I was there, me and my buddy with the nose ring got chased out of a Texaco station in the middle of the night by a gas jockey, a cashier, and a mechanic waving a crow bar and screaming, “Run, you faggots, run,” and what not, and so we did. The whole experience had left me with a strong urge to fill up my tank anywhere but in Florence, Oregon.

  Instead, we stopped for gas in Yachats, a hippie beach town with too many espresso bars, and stores that sold sunscreen, semi-precious stones, and mini dreamcatchers for the rearview mirror. She wanted to freshen up in the ladies’ room and wash her panties out in the sink so she could hang them on the antennae to dry, like she liked to do. The ladies room was the last place I wanted to be caught with my pants down, so I ducked into a music store instead of sweltering in the car.

  My heart stopped and then dropped into my matching brown boots when I laid eyes on the woman behind the counter of Michael’s Music on Main. I could tell her silver hair had been jet black once, cropped short around an errant cowlick that curled above a row of creases wind-worn into her forehead. Laugh lines, too, appeared like parentheses on either side of her mouth when she smiled at me. The top two buttons of a denim work shirt were undone enough to show off a Stanfield medium white crewneck T-shirt, the kind that come in packs of three.

  I felt myself staring, hands undone at my sides, unable even to pretend I was shopping for records or perusing the wall of second hand ukuleles and beach guitars. I couldn’t stop looking at all of her: her bulging veins under the brown skin on the backs of her hands, the shape of her wallet traced by a faded spot on her back pocket, the line of her jaw still square and strong and handsome after at least six or seven decades.

  I left without speaking much or buying anything, and it took another hundred miles or so of coastal road for me to identify the emotion that had spun in my stomach since I had sighted Michael. Mostly, it was relief. Up until then, the oldest dykes I knew were in their forties, and though I had never asked the question out loud, I had often wondered where the older lesbians disappeared to when the time came. I guess I thought they were around somewhere, but that time had disguised them somehow; cloaked their queerness beneath cardigans and slacks and soft-soled sensible shoes, maybe slippers, even. Until I saw Michael, I had always been unable to imagine old age with me in it.

  Last week, I was in a Thai restaurant in Portland, on tour with a gaggle of poets from Seattle. We had an hour to eat and get to the theatre, and when the waitress came to take our orders, she turned to me first. I did as my grandmas taught us all, and I let the ladies at the table order before me. Courteous social etiquette and cultured decorum are highly valued in Thai culture, and our waitress nodded her head at me in approval and took my order last.

  The twenty-three-year-old slam poet who sat across from me shook her long blonde ringlets at me, and half-feigned disbelief at my behaviour.

  “You didn’t. You didn’t just let ‘the ladies’ go first. I can’t believe you just said that in public. You sounded like my grandfather or something.”

  I felt the blood heat up under my tongue, but remembered my cardinal rule of the road: no arguments or processing before show time, and no educating an American unless it’s an emergency, especially when travelling in a minivan with a bunch of other Americans.

  But then she kept talking. “You’re like, so stuck in the whole butch-femme thing, which just enforces the whole gender binary. It’s so over and done with. You’re so outdated.”

  I took a long, cool sip of tap water with crushed ice and lemon, and followed it with a slow, full breath. “You’re right,” I said. “I am outdated. In fact, I’m a fucking endangered species. A gentleman. Old school. Not male, but often read as on
e, making it all the more imperative that I come complete with decent manners. You may have read about my kind in your gay history class at university. I’m a butch, of the polite variety. Raised up by a family of kick-ass women, fine ladies every last one of them, who would have my hide if it were any other way. It is how it is done. I was also taught how to French braid long hair, and to carry a handkerchief at all times. You might not relate, raised by hippies like you were, and them being different cultures altogether, the hippies and the Irish Catholics.”

  I remembered to smile the whole time, and made a mental note never to jump out to fill up the gas tank when she was driving the van, and to be sure to let the door swing shut freely, should she be walking behind me. A real gentleman doesn’t waste favours on the unappreciative.

  I like to think that’s how Michael would have handled it.

  Brave New World

  Six weeks after my house burned down, I took a plane to Amsterdam. Even my lady-friend, amply aware of my penchant to overpack, was impressed with my minimalist approach to Euro-travel. One half-empty backpack, one laptop, and some papers. One small multi-tool and an iPod. Mini toothpaste tubes and the whole nine yards.

  Truth is, my wardrobe habits have morphed completely since the fire. Losing all your clothes makes any kind of a serious fashion crisis impossible, and since my extensive polyester shirt collection proved itself so very flammable, I find myself appreciating cotton in a whole new way, wrinkles and all.

  Packing light sure comes to me easier now. So does doing the laundry.

  But the changes go way deeper than mere fabric preferences. In fact, about a month after the fire, I realized that everything would be different forever, that what normal once looked like for me doesn’t exist anymore.

  Flames are oddly merciful in that way. A blaze takes things from you, and you know they’re gone, not just to you, but to everyone. It’s that simple, and finite. Three days after the fire, I had to go on the road for a bit, and when I got back to Vancouver, what was left of my torched belongings had been looted. Wet and half-torched private papers carpeted the remains of my living room. Drawers were tossed and the taste of an invasion stung in my nose, stronger somehow than the smell of smoke and scorch and soggy loss. Worst thing was, I had to face the fact that there are people in the world, in my city, in my hood even, who will jump on the opportunity to steal from someone who has just lost everything. I had to cancel all my credit cards and cheques in order to sidestep becoming an identity fraud poster child. As they say in Holland, “Ik vind het niet leuk,” which means, “I find it not nice.”