Jonny Appleseed

by Joshua Whitehead

“No one’s going to come down here,” he replied cockily. How the fuck you know, I thought, you’ve never even been here before.

  “Lots of people snag here, hell, that’s what that there is for.” I lip pointed toward the mattress in the corner.

  He sighed and got up. He pulled the mattress over to the door to block it.

  “Here, now if anyone comes in at least we’ll have a few minutes to throw something on before they can move this,” he said. He stood over me, his tall figure barely visible as my eyes adjusted to the dark. The floor was cold but his large hands were like coals over me. They seemed bigger now, wide enough to papoose me. He unbuckled his fly and let loose a hard flap of skin that pointed back up at him. He pulled my legs and slid me down while he maneuvered his hip against my ear and with a slight twirl I was tasting him. The roux of his juice—the leaking of white ectoplasm swishing in my mouth. I wanted this but didn’t know what to do with it. I always wondered how he performed that magic, how he shapeshifted his body in the dark, how his edges poked me but never cut me, how he fit into me like a nipple fits into a baby’s mouth, how I could read him upside down. His transforming body wrapped around me, blanketed me, made me sweat ceremonially. When he came, he grunted like a sow and his body clamped down on me like a snout.

  Sex has always had a magic, an ability to awaken things in me that have died. After we wiped each other off, he buttoned up his jeans and left. I cried. My skin was warm and scratched raw. Maskwa, I thought, I travel with my tongue just to meet you.

  The funny thing about Grindr is that it’s full of treaty chasers. They’ll fetishize the hell out of you if you tell them you’re a real NDN wolf-boy, that you got arrows pointing at their faces and cocks. But I was a professional—work smart, not hard. I used the collage that I had made of dick-pics to help me gather clients. At least Grindr had a category called “Native American” which did a lot of leg work for me. “You’re Indian, eh,” someone would message me, and I’d reply, “Yeah, wanna see?” and link them to my websites. It was easy as pie—everyone on that damned app was obsessed with New Age shit like van-folk-Kerouacs playing gypsy in Canada and hipster shamans who collect crystals and geodes looking for an NDN to solidify their sorcery. “Want a stamp of validation? Here’s my website!”

  I’d get solicited for excursions from men saying things like, “Let’s go on rad adventures to mystical forests and take a swim through the galaxy.” The only mysticism I knew was on the backroads of the rez, like when you came face to face with a coyote who clears the path of birds with her howl, or a fox that appears in the same spot on the road every damn night just to look at you. And I always got a tickle out of how you could anthropomorphize yourself within the gay animal kingdom: “bear,” “otter,” “wolf,” “fox,” “cubs.” If only these gays knew how powerful Mistahimaskwa could really be.

  To be a gay bear, you need to be husky, hairy, and super masc, but when I picked a tribe name on Grindr, I chose bear since it was my clan. When men looked at my profile and saw my fierce jawline, they’d write, “You’re a twink, not a bear”; funny, I’d think, neither are you. When I’d correct them, they’d get annoyed and tell me not to get so butt-hurt, with a dumbfounded obliviousness; truth be told, if anal sex is hurting that much, well, honey, you’re doing it wrong. And I always had a good laugh at the ol’ Creator for being so mischievous as to put the male g-spot in the anus. I read once that Anishinaabe and the Algonquins translate to “beings made out of nothing” and that we were created by the breath of gitchi Manito. I used to think that meant I had no body, so I learned how to make love as a feral a long time ago—the pow wows taught me how, they sang the skin back onto my bones.

  III

  Nobody prepares you for the sting when you’re about to leave home. All my life I wanted to leave the rez—and every time I was about to, I stopped myself. It hurt. Leaving hurts. It’s not glamorous like Julia Roberts makes it seem. I can’t eat anything other than fried bologna or Klik for breakfast; I can’t pray to a God I’m afraid of; and believe it or not, even in the twenty-first century, two brown boys can’t fall in love on the rez. Sorry, Julia, your rah-rah-we’re-all-the-same walk-through didn’t work for me. I’m still me: a brown-skinned boy who loves the X-Men and Jake Bass.

  One fact I’d learn is that leaving always hurts—home isn’t a space, it’s a feeling. You have to feel home and to feel it, you have to sense it: smell it, taste it, hear it. And it isn’t always comfortable—at least, not an NDN home. In fact, quite often, it’s uncomfortable. But it’s home because the bannock is still browning in the oven and your kokum is still making tea and eating Arrowroot biscuits. It’s home because it has to be—routine satiates these pangs. And, given time, it becomes mobile—you can take those rituals with you, uproot your home as if it were a flower. Yeah, maybe home is like a flower, a sunflower whose big bright head follows the sun; or maybe that’s too fancy a metaphor for NDNs? Maybe we’re more like dandelions, a weed that’s a pest in the yard but pretty to look at. Yeah, an NDN home is like a dandelion: pretty but disposable, and imbued with a million little seeds that dissolve into wishes for little white hands that pluck.

  My home is full of hope and ghosts.

  IV

  At the entrance to my rez there used to be this man who’d sit in a lawn chair and wave at everyone arriving. We called him “Smiling Steven,” but I always called him the hostess-with-the-mostess. He’s not there anymore—he’s gone, like so many others. This rez is like a haunted house now. In my mind I’m there, and I look up at the empty sky that’s glazed with stars that look too much like sugar. The land is barren save for the howling-talk of rez dogs and sometimes coyotes. The spring water puddles around the rez like a blanket—the muggy fog a polluted haze that reminds me of Venus, even the air hurts us now. I wonder if my uncles are still out looking for sasquatch, wonder if aliens are looking down at us and saying “I told ya so” over there from Jackhead where the NDNs all say the military stole a UFO, wonder if my kokum still remembers how to cook rice pudding. I wonder how Tias is doing, ask the Creator to exorcise his pain so he never gifts it to his children, never re-gifts it to himself.

  I look at the nothingness, at the wasteland of filth, a holy hell if there was one. I look at you and feel the tears welling up. I want to ask you if you’re still here listening, want to ask if you’ve disappeared too? They always said our fate was to disappear and here I am thinking by god, we’ve mastered the art of dissolution. “Hey you,” I yell into the abyss, “are you even here anymore?” And I guess the excitement and the dry harsh wind gives me a nosebleed—I feel like Elle from Stranger Things holding weights much too heavy for little girly-boys. I feel the blood seeping from my nose, speaking a forgotten Cree that repeats: freeme, freeme, freeme.

  These days I find myself far too often talking with myself. The wind ruffles my hair; I hold my palms out to the darkness and wait for someone to take me.

  V

  The skies are grey these days and I got used to telling myself that it’s just my kokum having a great smudge in Saskatoon and that this smoke, which smells of cedar and ash, is her medicine floating across the border. But it hangs in my living room and seeps into my drapes, clings to my skin, and nestles itself deep inside the threads of my star blanket—which now lies in the shape of a body since gone. My apartment is a room of scents that stick to the walls: the smoke from a Saskatchewan forest fire, kush, the too-sweet smell of browning bananas, the pungent stink of sex. I start my mornings like this: I wake up, take a piss, warm up last night’s coffee, and open the rickety window in my bathroom where I usually do my smoking, since my building is a no-smoking zone. I butt them out in an old Diet Pepsi can that has seen better days. There isn’t much to see beyond my bathroom window but the grey-grit of the Odeon’s bricks, a rusting fire escape, and a pigeon building its nest on the windowsill of an abandoned building across the alley. Every morning we meet here: me, rubbing the ash and crusty scum from my lips, and that bird neatly
piling little sticks, roaches, and chicken bones on the ledge. Silly little bird, I always think, building a home in a dead place.

  During the time it takes me to smoke my cigarette, we stare at each other. The pigeon cocks its head from side to side, keeping its beady eyes fixed on me, and I bob mine along to the hum of the street below. I wonder if the bird thinks the same of me, if, in its own pigeon-head, it’s saying: what a silly man, making a home on the land of ghosts. We are both two queer bodies moving around in spaces that look less like a home and more like desperate lodgings; both trying to make our beds with other people’s garbage. Maybe we are both dreaming of utopia, thinking that these places once used to house celebrities and other important people, and that it will imbue us with a similar vivacity? Puffing on the remnants of my cigarette, inhaling smoke more from a burning filter than tobacco, I nod at the bird and say, “I’ll think you are if you think I am,” and blow a cloud of smudge from my lips that smells less like the stink of ass and cock and more like the bear root that my kokum always drank. “It’s magic,” she’d say. “This is what woke Mistahimaskwa up.”

  I go and fry a couple of eggs and the heart-shaped pieces of bologna I have left, then pour myself some orange juice which only fills about a third of the glass, so I mix it with Tang and top it off with tap water—an NDN breakfast if I ever did see one. I scroll through Facebook on my phone and read lengthy monologues by people I went to high school with: so-and-so is pregnant, my cousin’s cousin’s boyfriend is on another bender, a rez fire, a little boy attacked by wild dogs, and a million posts about missing girls.

  A beep goes off and I see a new message blinking on my screen. Someone named Hatehound has messaged me asking, “DTF?” I type back, “Who’s this?” and see the three little dots telling me he’s replying. He’s quick, I tell myself, and I think that’s a good sign for some easy cash. Quick guys don’t take much work, I usually don’t even have to work my way up to fingering myself, usually a few playful dick-pics will get them off and earn me a solid twenty to thirty bones; it’s the slow guys you have to be careful of, they’ll exhaust you and your body and still want more. Pictures and webcam shows are one thing, but let me tell you how tiring it is to create an entire world for clients that fits your body and theirs, and no one else. I can be a barely legal twink for them if they want, but that’s going to cost extra—and I don’t charge them for the ugly memories those fantasies dredge up. Most times, though, they only want me to play NDN. I bought some costumes a few Halloweens ago to help me: Pocasquaw and Chief Wansum Tail. Once I know what kind of body they want, I can make myself over. I can be an Apache NDN who scalps cowboys on the frontier, even though truthfully, I’m Oji-Cree.

  Once, one of my clients told me I had a “red rocket” and while I moaned for him while Frank Waln rapped in the background, I continually asked him, “You want my red rocket?” Later, I looked up what “red rocket” means, and I found out that it’s the dick of a dog. I thought for a second, then accepted it: I added “canine” to the list of entities I could morph into and started charging an extra few bucks per session.

  Hatehound’s reply showed up on my phone. “April told me about you this morning, apparently you blew his mind last night?” April? He must mean “hardck22,” I think he said his name was April—I never ask for real names, but I remembered his because I laughed thinking he was joking or feeling nostalgic for spring. A part of me wanted to say, “April, eh? Yeah, and I’m fucking January Jones.” Another part of me wanted to cry and confess that April was the month my kokum died. But I just laughed and I think he got mad—I wish he knew that when an NDN laughs, it’s because they’re applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.

  “Give me twenty minutes?” I replied to Hatehound. I saw the three little dots pinging on my screen and pondered who I wanted to transform into this time. I can inhabit so many personas while the client can only be one—that excites me. I have so much power when I transform—all that power over blood, veins, and nerve endings.

  “Sure,” he replied, and I squealed a little. I took my black velvet bodysuit from the closet. For the next thirty minutes I’d not only be Catwoman but every iteration of her, the better parts of Michelle Pfeiffer, Julie Newmar, and Anne Hathaway. When I slid the bodysuit over my calves and onto my shoulders, I watched my brown skin disappear beneath the pull of a zipper and felt so much more in control. Maybe as Catwoman I’d have the courage to ask how he could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us?

  “Catwoman?” Hatehound asked after I sent him a picture. “April says you dress up as yourself, you know, with the fringe and shit? Why are you acting weird?”

  I scoffed, and upped my fee to thirty dollars for the session. When he declined and sent only twenty-five to my Snapchat piggybank, I took off the cat ears and asked him: “Who are you pretending to be?”

  VI

  When we were kids, Tias’s parents took us camping at Hecla, which was about an hour east of the rez. It was in this park, Grindstone, and full of trees, water, and white people. We took out our tents and set up in one of the lots: a little tribe of brown-skins camping in pup tents while next to us a family of three was hunkered down in an RV worth more than our house—I always wondered what the inside of those giant machines looked like. Tias and I got on our swimming trunks and headed toward the beach, which was a twenty-minute walk through the park. All around us dandelion seeds billowed through the air, twirling like ballerinas. Tias’s face always seemed to soften whenever he was surrounded by nature; his usual pained expression disappeared, and the dimples in his cheeks rose like little stars.

  On the beach the large waves whipped up from the wind swallowed us like crawfish. We waded into the water until it went up to our stomachs. Tias laughed and put his hand on my pouch and a finger in my navel. What a funny word, navel, but perhaps it was fitting, as my skin had pruned in the cold lake water and bubbled up like the skin of an orange—I too was full of juice. His finger continued to prod me, it felt like a leech suckling on the rump where nikâwiy cut me free. I pushed him away and then jumped on his back, laced my feet around his waist, and wrapped my arms around his shoulders, our long wet hair coming together like sweetgrass. He carried me out in the water as far as we could still stand, the shore drifting farther and farther, the water throwing our laughs back at us. When Tias was finally exhausted, he let go of me, and we stood there, looking at one another, the waves throwing us back to the shore.

  “This is like Titanic, eh?” I said.

  “Hated it, it was so long. Two fucking VHS tapes, what the—?”

  “Don’t be such a smart ass.” I slugged him in the arm.

  “Okay fine, I’m Jack, you can be Rose,” he said and put his arm around my head like he was rescuing me.

  “You sure?” I said. “You know I’m dink-eyed as fuck. I’d cut your damn hand off if I had to chop you free with an axe.”

  We continued to play in the water as our bodies became raisins—we looked like elders with tiny bodies, like NDN Benjamin Buttons. And time passed too quickly for two little Nates to measure. The sun was going down and we had drifted much too far to recount our steps. Our bodies were tired, legs drained of energy, so we linked arms and filled our bellies with air so that we could float like salmon swimming upstream. We stopped resisting the waves and let the water push us back to the shore, our shoulders and hair moussed with seafoam.

  When we got back to dry land, our bodies were exhausted. I sat on the sand to catch my breath while Tias ran ahead to look for the towels we had recklessly thrown down. The sun was falling and tinted the sky lavender. Tias left a trail of prints in the sand, some disappearing from the pulse of the waves, others filling with water. I got up and followed the steady path of prints; I found him not too much farther ahead, lying exhausted in the sand. I quietly watched him for a few moments before he noticed me, his forearm glittering in the purple haze, his skin so bronzed that he melded with the sand. I sat down beside him, our nak
ed shoulders rubbing, shaking our hair loose of the water like wet dogs, telling stories.

  “You know,” he began—much like he always does, the way NDNs expect you to know every story like a telepath—“I have this photo at home.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. Of my sister, she’s a baby—”

  “You have a sister?”

  “Yeah, well, had a sister.”

  “What happen? She die or something?”

  “Worse. She was taken.”

  “You mean, like Liam Neeson kind of Taken?” I’ve never been able to handle uncomfortable situations very well. I always try to use humour to deal.

  “You think this is a fucking joke?” he said, his hands rolled into fists. He kicked me and knocked me over and before I had a chance to get up, he climbed on top of me and punched me in the side of the head.

  “What do you know about anything, Jonny?” Another punch. “You think because you’re gay you’re the only one with problems in this world?” And like that his face was pinched up with pain again, his wet ass up against my cock—I guess I got a half chub. I could tell he felt it pushing against his rear, and at first he sat there dumbfounded, didn’t move, just looked down at me, his eyes like two brown wormholes. And then he jumped off me.

  “You’re sick, you know that? Who the fuck gets horny from being punched?” We sat in silence for a few seconds, then both burst into laughter. “You’re really something, you know that, Jonny?”

  We got up and started to make our way back to the campsite—ready for the lickin we were bound to get for being so damned late. But first I wanted to collect a souvenir from the beach. As he went on ahead, I found a snail shell poking out where Tias had pushed me into the sand, and put it in my pocket. I looked down at the outline my body had made in the sand, and his right next to it; I traced the mark left from the soft hollow between his legs.