XX
Truth be told, I did need a lot of healing throughout my teen years. I am The Vacuum for a reason; drinking became a problem for me early on. I loved how alcohol made me feel; it gave me confidence, courage, and when I was drinking was the only time I could love and be loved. Desperate drunk boys flocked to me like leeches to a pickerel. In their blacked-out haze they’d tell me almost anything for a blowjob, and I’d do them. I loved it when they said, “I love you, Jonny, I do,” like a personal mantra that would make them come harder. They wouldn’t get me off, but I found my own sustenance from making straight NDN boys love me like their pow wow trail hookups. They’d cuddle me at night and then kick me out in the morning, denying any closeness and blaming it all on the drink. Truth be told, I think I was more a leech than they were. I loved the burning hot flesh of brown skin turning red from tension and friction. I loved seeing the blood throb in their veins, popping like earthworms on their forearms and wrists—blood that said I’m surviving and you can too. Like the leech, I too felt like a hermaphrodite: part boy, part girl, and always needed by hunters and fishermen. And I always left a red mark on their bodies somewhere, as if to say: I was here.
Plus, leeches are medicine, didn’t you know?
After a while, these black-out hookups became the norm for me, and I, The Vacuum, was expected to perform as the drunkest one at the party. The boys would feed me shots and the girls would try to fight me through the night. It was a dysfunctional loop of love and hate. Such is NDN life. My jaw would often be sore, stretched too much from fingers and cock, and my ass would bottom out from these random hookups. Sex, for me, just became an expectation of every rez party.
Love-making was a term that wasn’t part of my vocabulary. I learned to be sexy and have sex thanks to alcohol. I lost my virginity at fourteen to a boy whose name I can’t even remember. In fact, all of my sexual experiences are similar: I rarely, if ever, had sober sex.
I remember one night regaining consciousness at a house party, in a bed that smelled of piss and Labatt Blue, while a man stood over me. I was on my back, buck-naked, my neck curved over the side of the bed and my eyes staring up at this man’s penis that was lacerating my tonsils. The next morning I woke up with a patch of semen cemented on my chest. I was like a map of DNA, a living river, you could read my body like a book and pinpoint where you’d been and where you would want to go.
My shirt was nowhere to be seen, nor was he, but his wallet was, so I took forty dollars and also stole a sweater from the mound of clothes on the floor. I never did find out who he was, never really cared. But he was my first in-person client.
I was sixteen.
XXI
I was eighteen the first time I realized I was a drunken NDN. The Peguis Hotel and Casino had just opened and everyone on the rez decided to throw a big party there, especially since almost all of us had been recently hired, including me. The hotel manager, who was a newish client of mine, got me in as a dishwasher. The pay was shitty, but I didn’t really do it for the money, it was more so that I could pass out my number and screenname to any potential new customers I met, of which there were plenty. Gay men have this weird way of recognizing each other, like facial recognition software or some cyborg skill from The Terminator. It’s not gaydar, but more like a secret sign written on the face. My kokum says the eyes never age or lie, and I found out that a gay man’s eyes always give him away. Sometimes it’s written in the cheekbones, other times it’s written in the walk, but it always hangs like a veil over their eyes.
There was this older gentleman, grey hair, great build, and a real catamite ass that Zeus himself would have smote. Hell if I remember his name, but I remember his eyes—a powder blue speckled with light grey, like the stones that glittered at the bottom of the Peguis rapids in the middle of July. We ran into each other at the casino party while everyone was in a stupor, even my kokum was sipping and jigging to Conway Twitty. He cracked us a couple beers from his cooler full of Labatt Lites and we drank on the VLT stools while Lobstermania spun behind us in a haze of colours and bright lights. As the beers set in, we both got a little friskier. I found his hand on my knee. We had both read the queerness in each other’s eyes. Both wanted a little more. Both a little thirstier. Our fingers pruned from spilled beer. The tips of his ears reddening. My cheeks heating up. Pupils dilating. Stone iris. Flared nostrils. Deep smile lines. Pores open and sweating.
I awoke in the hospital the next morning, with five stitches that haphazardly ran down from the nape of my neck to the centre of my back, skin glue on my nose, my arms and shoulders darkened with bruises. I was groggy for two whole days afterwards—I never found out exactly what happened. All I know is that no hangover had ever incapacitated me like that before. The nurse told me the police brought me in for falling through a lobby window. She asked me if I had any drinks and I could only reply, “I think so.” I was crying and the nurse tried comforting me. I asked if I was being charged. Where were the police? Was I going to jail? I cried into her scrubs and asked to call my mom. When Mom picked up the phone and I explained what had happened, she only said, “You’re a real NDN now,” and hung up.
I started weeping profusely.
Later that night, I was allowed to go home. The nurse dug into her purse and snuck me a twenty-dollar bill for a cab. She hugged me and said young boys like me shouldn’t be drinking as much as I was. Bless her white heart, I said to myself, she didn’t know that getting a cab to go to the rez at night was damn near impossible. Nor did she know that we used depressants to offset our deep depression. I’d have better luck going home in a police car, or better yet being sent to the drunk tank. I took the twenty and thanked her. I hobbled to my feet and realized that my keys, my wallet, my phone, all of it was gone. There were rips down the back of my shirt from where the glass cut me. I didn’t even try to get a cab; I pocketed the twenty and walked the hour-long trek in between bouts of near unconsciousness.
I remember snippets of my walk home. The howls of coyotes along the backroads, and gusts of wind that burnt my face. The night sky looking like soot and a blood-orange supermoon hung above me. Lights flying across the sky like a dollar-store sparkler; I thought it was aliens. The black-beaded eye of a rez dog glistening from a ditch; it sounded like it was ripping apart a jackrabbit. An ATV tearing by me, spitting gravel into the air. Ravens cawing from atop evergreens. The smells of smoke and sage.
As I finally rounded the corner of my house, the sun was rising and the sky was a blend of custard and corn-kernel yellows. The entire rez was silent, everyone either asleep or passed out, more likely the latter. A few fires still crackled and the air was full of thick, sweet smoke. My feet were bruised from the gravel road and prickled with pain. Inside my house, I fell asleep on the couch, crying for my mom.
I didn’t fully sober up until two days later when Mom, Kokum, and Roger came back from their own bender. Mom gasped when she saw me and scooped me into her arms. She smelled like a stale Chanel knock-off and her sweat tasted like beer. Her beaded teal earrings caught my hair, but I let her hold me and cry even if it hurt me to do so. “M’boy, my sweet boy, kisâkihitin, kisâkihitin.”
I told myself then and there that I’d quit the firewater. I learned later that the dazzler in the sky wasn’t a UFO, it was a meteor shower named the Perseids. My kokum told me it was a lesson to be learned and that the stitches on my back was Nanaboozhoo’s handprint. She said those meteors haven’t been seen in 133 years and were a part of this comet called Swift-Tuttle. When I Googled “Perseid” later, I discovered that it is the “single most dangerous object known to humanity.” Now, when I think back on that night, I still see that beady black rez-dog eye and the mane of dust that looked like Sasquatch on the backroads.
“I can be this too,” I tell myself. “I can be this too.”
When I look in the mirror at the handprint on my back, I see the same lifelines on it that are on my palm: a radiant ‘M’ that if twisted, spells Me. Seeing the scar a
nd remembering the shreds of skin that inlet into my body, I am reminded that I can die here too.
There are times when you have to scare yourself to find yourself.
XXII
I told Tias about that night a few weeks afterwards. He came over while my mom was at bingo and my kokum was in Winnipeg for the weekend. My body was shaking involuntarily as I recalled the story for him. I had to sit down and he took me to my room which was less an Ikea showroom and more a hand-me-down mattress without a boxspring on the floor and a hamper for a dresser. My saving grace was my box TV and our pirated satellite. He brought me a cold cloth and laid it on my forehead and told me everything was going to be okay. I asked him if he could hold me and say that. He did.
After a few minutes, he took my hand in his and we laid our legs over top each other like a wishbone. We both stayed there looking at each other, not saying a word, sweat forming on our brows in the dry heat of August. I moved the cloth so it draped over both of us and we slid our heads that much closer. The tips of our noses touched and we left them there, puckering for a kunik.
We clasped one another like a zipper. The cloth blocked out all light and we lay side by side in darkness. I felt the heat of his breath on my cupid’s bow. We slid off our jeans and raised our T-shirts to press our bodies closer, our nipples kissing too. Our breaths grew heavy. His thighs were bony and my clavicle dug into his, but it was the most comfortable I’d been in a long time.
After our bodies were drenched in sweat, we pulled off the cloth and laughed. He stared at me for a long time. I saw new parts of his body I’d never seen before: a chickenpox scar on his cheek, the width of his bottom lip. We both knew what the other was feeling.
Instead of saying we liked or loved each other, we just lay there on our backs, our brown skin shiny in the rosy light that poured in from the evening sun. We surveyed each other’s body: him seeing the scar above my clavicle from when I fell down the stairs as a kid, and me seeing the patch of hair missing from his scalp. I knew then that I loved him.
Funny how an NDN “love you” sounds more like, “I’m in pain with you.”
XXIII
Lucia died when I was twelve. Tias asked her, meaning me, if we could meet up, and I, thinking maybe I was girl-boy enough to elude his anxieties, said yes. We went to the Pine Cone Dairy Bar and I wondered what he was expecting. I spotted him in the back corner of the restaurant. He was wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt and brown khaki shorts. His black hair was ruffled into a mess and faux-hawked. His shoes were muddy Nikes—basic, I thought, but cute nonetheless. We went to the same school but we hadn’t ever talked. Lord knows why, we were both at the bottom of the school’s popularity spectrum. He stuck to art classes and liked to paint while I was more interested in learning how to cook apple crisp in home ec and smoking on the steps of the Holy Eucharist church with the “Bad Girls.” They used to hate being called the Bad Girls. Really, all we did was refashion cigarettes from the butts of others and make each other laugh. We had nowhere to go, no one to turn to, so we stuck to ourselves. “Donna Summer,” I told them, “man, she’s a badass-bad-girl.” Bad Girls was the first CD I ever saved up enough to buy, and I worshipped it like nobody’s business. The girls didn’t care for it, but I thought, hell yeah, I’m a bad girl.
Sitting on those church steps, I would look up at the porcelain-skinned man crucified over the main door and would think of the photos my kokum showed me of lynched NDNs hanging from trees. I had no concept of their being dead, I just thought they were these beautifully arranged, angelic, aerial dancers serving face and body from these great oaks like real children of the forest. I wanted to be that too, so I would vogue on the church’s front lawn and lock my eyes with christ’s as Donna Summer moaned and came into my headphones.
At the Dairy Bar, I let Tias sit there by himself for a while, awkwardly surveying the room for a hypersexual, blessedly-breasted, plastically-altered, red-headed Russian glamazon named Lucia. His defeated look was a sad sight, but I took some joy in watching him writhe—his face was flushed a dusky pink that complemented his skin tone well. Tias has always been so wondrously pained; it would become something I’d learn to love. Pain only intensifies the real emotions worth feeling; hell, every NDN knows a thing or two about intensity.
After I had taken enough pleasure watching him bottle up his fantasies and agonize over the fact that he’d be returning home a virgin, I approached his table.
“Stood up, ’er what?”
“What?”
“You’re Mathias, eh? We go to the same school, y’know?”
“Yeah, I thought I recognized you. You’re the queer in Ms Blackbird’s class?”
“Yeah, man, that’s me.”
I sat down and asked him who he was waiting for. I looked at the hairs on his sandy brown arms as I listened to him tell me about the girl he met online. He told me that he got money for his date by stealing from his mom’s bingo change. We started talking and soon learned that both of us were broke as hell—heck, I paid for my sundae with rolled coin—but we had fantasies, dreams, and big imaginations that would last us through the rez and beyond. We both wanted houses like the ones on MTV Cribs and we idolized Ed the Sock. Looking back, I take a little pride in knowing that I was Tias’s first lesson on the difference between fantasy and reality—he wished for a Russian princess and instead got the reservation’s only gay NDN.
The sun was beginning to set when we finally left the Dairy Bar and we were both late for dinner. We chalked it up to our parents’ most infamous excuse: we were running on NDN time. We laughed but knew this wouldn’t do, we knew full well the lickin that awaited us at home. We walked together down the backroads, both a little scared of the bears and coyotes that lurked in the bush. We had our keys interlinked between our fingers and our hands curled into hard fists in case anything, or anyone, jumped out at us. We walked so close to each other that the hard bone of our middle fingers continually knocked together. Our boniness hurt but neither of us broke our pace—the friction of our raw knuckles banging together was oddly comforting.
As we neared our homes, Logan and his cousins passed by us on their four-wheelers. Tias panicked and stopped in his tracks. They often beat up Tias, so he was used to trying to become invisible in their presence. The boys spun around and drove up behind us.
“Hey, gayboys,” one of them yelled.
“Tias, is this your new girlfriend?” another asked.
“Two little faggots, sitting in a tree,” Logan laughed.
“He’s not—” Tias started.
“We’re just friends, Logan, heck, obsessed much?” I said.
The boys circled their four-wheelers around us and stood up on their seats with their arms crossed.
“K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” Logan continued.
“I’m not—”
“Hey, gayboys.”
“H-I-V and A-I-D.”
“There’s an S in there too, Logan, at least get it right,” I said.
Logan got red in the face and nodded to the other boys, who were now surrounding us. Tias crouched down with his head between his knees, repeatedly saying the word “No.” The boys all grinned and unzipped their pants.
“Hey Hoover,” Logan exclaimed, “here’s some cock for you.” And then each boy pulled out their floppy penises and urinated all over me. My clothes were soaked and my hair was shiny with piss.
“Hey Tias, if he ain’t your girlfriend then piss on him too, eh?” Logan said.
Tias was still crouching behind me, his eyes closed. Logan and his posse, waiting for Tias to join in on their golden shower, crossed their arms and waited. One of Logan’s friends slapped his fist against his palm. Tias opened his eyes and I held his gaze as he slowly stood up. His hands were shaking as he slowly undid his zipper. I closed my eyes and nodded. The warmth of his urine splashing on my shirt startled me. When I opened my eyes, he was crying. His limp penis hung and the last few drops of piss leaked from his fingers. His eyes were sunk deep in hi
s head and his arms were wrapped around his waist. His entire body read regret, but even then, I thought, no boy has ever looked so goddamned precious.
XXIV
Tias and I used to hustle Mush when we were kids. I liked my mushom, he was a gentle, soft-spoken man who loved Werther’s caramels and Budweiser. He used to buy me party-sized chocolate bars, like those Jumbo Mr. Bigs that were twice the size of your head. He wasn’t NDN like us, but Kokum insisted we call him Mushom. His real name was Pierre LeClerc and he was the luckiest, and only, môniyâw on the reservation. He won $100,000 on a scratch ticket when he was in his thirties and from then on out he became popular among the family and all the rez girls. He bought my mom a used Cadillac Seville and that forced her to called him Mush—half liking him, half detesting him. He used the remainder of his winnings to buy a gas station that was quite successful while he was alive. He liked to give all the NDN kids a piece of candy whenever they visited, and overloaded their bags with Twizzlers and Pop-Rocks on Halloween. He was a dandy fellow.
But there were better ways to get money from him than by simply asking. Sure, if you asked kindly enough, he’d throw you a few dollars, maybe ten bones if you were really lucky, and then shame you for it when he was on his benders. If there’s one rule I’ve learned from hustling, it’s never to put yourself into a situation where you owe somebody—always leave your clients owing you. Though, if you were patient enough, you could swindle forty to fifty bones from Mush by waiting for him to pass out and collecting all his empties. His house would be littered with aluminum: cans in his sink, cans in his bed, cans in the pockets of his coat, crumpled in his war chest. Tias and I used to wait at his place and listen to him and Kokum tell us stories about the good ol’ days which would usually erupt into an argument about who had it worse—that’s the thing about old folks, they think life is a competition of scars and suffering.
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