I turned around and told myself, Just one, then made my way to O’Calcutta. I bought a pack of Pall Malls for ten bucks, took one out, and lit it up. That feeling of relaxation came over me, the kind that burns your throat but makes you feel like you’re back home even if you’re hundreds of miles away. A good cigarette is like a familiar story. A Nate saw me spark one up and made his way over to me.
“Hey cuz, can I bum a light?”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
“Oh hey, can I bum a smoke too?”
Damn trickster, I thought, someone’s taught him well. I laughed, handed him a few, and then continued on my way home. I told myself to throw out the pack because Tias and I had made a promise to one another. I will when I’m at home. Yeah right, do it now. Okay, okay. So I tossed them aside, disgusted at myself for wasting ten dollars on a single cigarette and handing them out like Popeye’s candies to randoms. What was I, made of money? My mom would have given me a good lickin if she found out I had not only wasted cigarettes but money too. I made it about twenty steps before I turned around to fish them back out from the bin and put them back in my pocket. Can still use them even if I don’t smoke them, I thought. Always good for ceremony.
I stood there on my balcony, cigarette in my fingers, and the lighter flicking hard against its stone. Schht, schht, schht—my eyes began to lose the ability to focus, the bright flares of the lighter imprinted into my retinas. When I closed my eyes, I saw those squiggles of light on the back of my lids. Lights jagged, sharp like lightning, and bursting into a million little dots that lit up what looked like a city. I opened my eyes again, they were watering now, the edge of the flint still being dragged through metal. It was a soft groove by now and my thumb was sore from flicking the lighter.
I looked down but only saw light, light like an egg blanketed in darkness, my vision was a circle, and there, in the middle of it all, was the red glow of Tias’s cigarette burning like a comet. This, I told myself, must be how worlds are made.
“Tee, you coming up, ’er what?” I said. “Element’s redder than the devil’s dick.”
“Well?” he said, exhaling. “You gonna stand up there and stare at me for an hour like I’m some wannabe Wilson?”
He was trying his damnedest to stump me on a Tom Hanks joke ever since last week. We had been watching Captain Phillips and I convinced him it was the prequel to Cast Away. He believed me and tried to lecture Jordan on the intricacies of Hank’s filmic history, turns out she gave him a slap upside the head. “Idiot,” she said, “you just told me that Cast Away is about some guy named Chuck Noland and then you go and try and tell me that Captain Phillips is him before he crashes? How in the hell that make sense?” He later bitched me out for tricking him like that.
“Tick-tock, doc, you gonna stand there like a stick in the mud all damn night?” he said when I didn’t respond.
“Coming,” I said, my eyesight returning to normal. Funny, that boy might not know his movies, but he knew a thing or two about hustling time. Tick-tock, eh? Made sense if we live and die by the clock.
XXXIII
There are only a few sounds that always hurt me and one of them is the sound of my mom crying. It seems like my mom is always in tears on the phone with someone who is either dying or in pain, or knows someone who is. There aren’t enough jokes in the world to stop her from weeping and there aren’t enough stories to stop me from feeling. I think that’s why she turns to the bottle and why I sometimes follow. But regardless of her bouts of drinking, I love being around my mom. Like with my kokum, I used to like to watch her put on her makeup for the night, although sometimes I thought Momma’s bordered more on drag than natural, which made me love the process all the more. She had a knack for experimentation when it came to getting into full-face with only drugstore makeup and a lip pencil shaved down to a nub. My mom took a great deal of pride in her makeup routines. One night she meticulously explained her process to me.
“This colour right here? This is eyeshadow, but you can also use it to colour your lips if you’re out of lipstick, remember that. And if you’re out of liner, you can always use your lipstick.”
I nodded vigorously, diligently noting her tips.
“You want to snag yourself a man? Then you best slather this shit around your eyes, really smoke them out. You want to be like smoke yourself, you know? These boys smudge for good luck to snag on the pow wow trail, well, m’boy, what you want to do is beat them at their own game. Smoke your eyes and they’ll be begging to smudge you. That’s a fact.”
I noted this too.
“And if you really want to make sure you win them over, there are only two accessories you need: a damn good perfume and a hell of a lot of confidence. Even if you have to fake the latter. And heck, you can fake smelling good too. Take some ashes from Kokum’s smudging bowl and rub it into the hollows of your jaw. You’ll snag yourself a mighty fine piece, m’boy. A mighty fine piece, just like your momma did.”
Now instead of putting on makeup she cries on the phone, her eyes puffy and her lips constantly cracked. I don’t tell her that sometimes when I’m on the phone, I hang up and I cry too—all those tears collecting into a pool on my desk. I used to wonder if I might run out of tears; that if I kept crying, all that saltwater would conjure up a whole new ocean. Sometimes I imagined that when I shook my hair, Sky Woman fell out of it; she’d look up at me and say, “Baby, you’re home,” and I’d say, “Momma, this for you too.”
XXXIV
The year that I came out to the people back on the rez, I had this one cousin who texted me that if he ever saw me, he’d kick the living shit out of me. As much as I wanted to go home then, I sure as hell didn’t want to make that a reality. When I told Jordan this, she said she’d come back to the rez with me: “I’ll fix his wagon,” she said, a phrase she stole from her dad after her baby was taken away a few years back. She threw a house party one night after her daughter had gone to sleep, but it turns out she did mushrooms and went on a hardcore trip. Family services stepped in the next day and labelled her an unfit mother. “She was my rainbow baby,” she says when she’s drunk. “Supposed to make everything better. My aunties told me that a baby fixes things.” I never met her daughter, but knew that her kid was her life—her entire fridge was plastered with pics of her. “Madilyn took after her momma,” she said once. “Piss her off and she’d get mad as a goddamn coyote.” I always wondered just what in the hell fixing a wagon had to do with giving someone a beat-down, but these were the types of questions you never asked Jordan.
“Treat him like a buffalo,” she also said as she cracked her knuckles, referring to my cousin. “Smash his ol’ head in.”
I never took her up on that offer, I didn’t want to go there and end up with a bloodied face—hell, I wasn’t the one from Bloodvein. So we partied at her house instead. She called up her friends, who were all pretty cool, and told them to come on down, but only if they had chip-ins. We all scrambled enough cash to get a two-four and some whisky from Peggy, who horded alcohol like gold—she was smart that way, stealing bottles and selling them during holidays, or pow wows, or reserving them for after-parties where she’d sell them for twice their worth. Desperate times called for desperate measures as they say, annit? The whisky, though, was a poor choice on our end because everyone knows whisky does two things to us: makes us rowdy, or nostalgic as all hell. But we gathered up a good crew of people—most of them Nate, but she knew a couple East Indian guys who did stick-and-poke tattoos and sold them to rich white kids who thought they were traditional henna. All us NDNs, I thought, sure know how to turn pennies into bills.
We had a little gathering at her place, a room full of brownness in a shoddy apartment down on Magnus Avenue. We could be as loud as we wanted to be—Jordan’s neighbours knew not to file any noise complaints on account of how her screams of rage could shake their walls and knock down portraits. We played that drinking game “Never Have I Ever” which was pretty slack because it was super easy
to get me out, all they had to do was say “never have I ever sucked a dick” and I would immediately lose. As we grew drunker, we slapped on A Tribe Called Red and had our own stadium pow wow. None of us knew the words but we sang along anyways, “way, yah, hey-ya-how.” We thought we were hardcore traditionalists, but we probably sounded like a pack of rez dogs. We did shots of whisky, danced to electronic pow wow, and hugged each other and cried all night. That’s how NDNs are, once the firewater kicks in we all become straight-up storytellers. We said prayers for dead cousins, for the stillborn, for the friends we lost in snowmobile accidents. Hell, we cried for those we didn’t even know—so-and-so’s cousin who we met once who died from fentanyl, or that girl who OD’d in the band office last year. That’s how NDNs become friends, though, over a good story, a damn good cry, and then a right righteous laugh when the next little NDN pulls up in a rezzed-out van. “Holy hell,” we’d all say in unison, “look at Fred Flintstone over here.” That night we drank into the wee hours of the morning and one of Jordan’s friends got drunk enough to think that his reflection in the mirror was his dancing partner; he punched his own reflection and tore his knuckle up pretty good. “Howa, he’s just snapped,” someone said, which made Jordan laugh. “Oh heck, that guy’s feeling no pain,” she said. That saying is weird, “feeling no pain.” I used to laugh at it too, but nowadays I think that they’re drunk because they’re feeling all kinds of pain.
In that tiny living room with lawn chairs for furniture and an air mattress in the corner, we all danced until our feet were blistered. We linked arms in a circle, feeling the music we loved but in a language that haunted us. And of course, little ol’ gay me vogued in the middle of the circle—a little Willi Ninja went a long way to a bunch of breeders, but you know, you got to earn your street cred somehow. They round danced around me at a pace that seemed impossible, until the room was spinning, the lights weaving in between their bodies, and me, sweaty, crusty-eyed, and horny as all hell, slowly lounging into a half-baked death drop while they cheered, thinking I was some goddamn ballet dancer.
“This ceremonial enough for ya, Jon?” Jordan shouted.
“Hah, not even—” I jested.
But truth be told, I wanted that—me, time-stepping in the middle of a group of Nates, dancing like Kokum taught me whenever the “Red River Jig” came on NCI radio.
XXXV
Tias and Jordan drove in from the rez and helped me move to a new apartment from the North End to the Exchange—the rent there had a decline after they called it Canada’s “most racist city” and that lawyer’s wife went on an NDN rant. It was always a little weird when the three of us were together. They both gave me housewarming gifts: Jordan brought her smudging bowl and a coil of sweet grass for the house, while Tias got me a crock pot he picked up at a garage sale. Inside I found a pressed daisy and a little note, “Dinner soon?” Tias winked at me as he watched me take out the flower. Jordan wasn’t stupid, she knew what was going on between us but turned a blind eye because of how long we had been friends. She never asked about it in the same way that I never asked about them.
After we were done, Jordan told us to put on our jigging shoes because she was ready to dance. I called up ol’ Peggy and had her sell us a bottle from her stash; she gave me a discount like usual because she had been so close with my kokum. She delivered us a two-six of El Dorado rum and charged us thirty bones plus a chip-in for gas. She always delivered her goods in person—brought cigarettes to the moms who couldn’t make it out of the house, Percs to the kids who were “feeling no pain,” McDonald’s to the crews of Nates hungover as all hell. We asked her if she wanted to come in for a drink—she was one of those dealers who had no qualms about dipping into her own cache.
“So-where-you-kids-headed-eh?” she said. She always spoke like she was in a hurry, rarely taking breaths between words. It always confused anyone who wasn’t from the rez.
“Ask Jonny, it’s his day,” Jordan said.
“I’m thinking—maybe, Fame?”
“Oh-that’s-the-ol’-gay-bar-eh?”
“Yeah,” I said, a little embarrassed. I still always felt a wave a shame rush through my body whenever someone might associate me with being Two-Spirit, even if Tias and Jordan were bordering there too.
“I-heard-they-play-the-best-music,” Peggy said with a giggle, then playfully slapped Jordan on the arm, who shaded her with a side-eye before laughing and slapping her back. Peggy had a great sense of humour. A lot of people didn’t like her because they thought she overcharged them on her sales, but she had to make a living too, annit? She told us a story of how she once threw her back out while working at a Burger King—she slipped on a bun that had fallen on the floor, ruptured a disc in her back. She ended up getting a prescription for Percocets with Dr Levi, the doctor downtown. All the Nates went to him because he had used to work on the northern reserves. Maybe he got more money for working with the Nates, but he had a roster of them as patients, in fact there were so many coming in with all different kinds of pain that he usually only had a few minutes to spend with each of them. And you know us NDNs, we’re good storytellers, you could earn a living that way if you wanted. Peggy did, playing up her chronic pains, and getting a monthly prescription for Percs, which she sold for $10 a pop, $12 if she had to deliver them. So a monthly scrip could earn close to a grand, which paid for her rent and left her with enough cash to send to her kid. She thought she was doing a good thing, selling clean Percs to people who needed them, saving them from a fentanyl overdose, but we all knew she was enabling others—hell, sometimes you have to do what you have to do to survive.
“Oh yeah, you wanna come?” I said.
“Maybe-yeah-I’ll-have-to-see-okay-gotta-few-deliveries-to-make-yet.”
Peggy may not have been everyone’s fave person, but I had mad respect for a woman who could make ends meet for herself. Sometimes survival can be a hell of a game—we all knew when we moved off the rez, but living in the city was a whole different animal. Who was I to judge? We gave her a hearty cheer and hug.
“Okay-call-me-if-you-need-a-ride-later-okay?”
She had this way about her, a motherly instinct that she extended to everyone she knew. Sure, she’d charge you an arm and a leg to bring you a bottle, but if you knew someone who OD’d or needed a ride to rehab, she had your back—free of charge. We all needed Peggy, even if we rarely said so.
“Will do, Peg, drive safe,” I said.
“Okay-yeah-okay-love-you-bye,” she said, and then soon after we heard her car take off like a bat out of hell back down Princess. I loved how she always punctuated her sentences with “okay” like a true-blue rez girl, and how she told you she loved you every time she said goodbye. The last time I talked to my kokum while drunk, I told her I loved her—but it killed me that I had to be drunk to do it.
“Man, that woman has the energy of three men,” Tias said. We made some fresh drinks with the rum Peg delivered and then Tias and Jordan sat on the couch cuddled up against one another while I sat on a lawn chair across from them.
I caught Tias stealing a glance at me every now and then, but I ignored it while Jordan was right there beside him. We decided to play a game of Fuck the Dealer and downed drinks much faster than we anticipated, but that’s the thing with us NDNs, we’re competitive as all hell and hate losing.
“Jordan, drink two,” I said.
“Oh, you just made a powerful enemy, my friend.”
She laughed, then punched Tias in the arm. I was happy it wasn’t me being hit this time. I could hate her, I tried to, but she had a fucking redeeming quality about her that reminded me of my kokum—they were both little women with the ferocious power of a behemoth inside them. Jordan said she wanted to put some makeup on, so I let her borrow my collection. She decided on applying a thick-ass Cara Delevigne brow—they say your brows don’t need to be sisters but at least cousins, well, hers were cousins who hooked up on the pow wow trail and found out they were related in the morning.
While she was still in the bathroom, Tias patted the seat beside him and motioned for me to sit with him. When I did, he pecked me on the cheek.
“What are you going to wear tonight?” he asked.
“You?” I joked, and then I kissed my fingers and slid them between his lips. “Probably just a shawl and a tee. You?”
“What you see is what you get.”
“And what I see is what I want.”
“Hey Jon, where’s your mascara?” Jordan yelled from the bathroom.
“In the travel bag, the pink case.”
“Better-Than-Sex?”
“Yeah. Benefit makes a solid mascara, waterproof too!”
“Cool, brah.” She started humming a song that echoed off the bathroom tiles.
I went to my bedroom to change and Tias followed, asking if I had a shirt he could wear.
“You killing it and me looking like some homeless Nate. Hola, yeah right,” he said.
He watched me as I slid my pants off and then my shirt. My ribcage was poking through my chest and I felt pleased that my bones presented themselves to Tias.
“Can I borrow this lip liner?” Jordan yelled, rapping to Biggie now.
“You sure lost a lot of weight, Jon,” Tias said.
“Not enough,” I replied, feeling his eyes surveying my body.
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