He stood behind me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and pushed his pelvis against me with a hardness that could crack rocks. Ignoring him, I walked over to my closet, picked out a red plaid shirt, and threw it at him.
“Wear this, you’ll look hella good in it,” I said.
It had zippers up the sides so that you could be both classy and a little slutty. He took off his shirt and I eyed up the divot in the middle of his sternum, the sprouts of hair on his nipples. I wanted to touch him right then, to taste his musk, lick his pits—but I controlled myself, I wasn’t a homewrecker. He buttoned up the plaid, tousled his hair, flashed me a smile. I laughed—the confidence on this boy—and zipped up the sides of his shirt; I took pride in being the first one of the night to touch him, feel the outline of his waist. He was a man built simply—and the sight of him gave me a hard-on.
“You owe me a dance tonight,” I said, and winked. I wanted to taste him again, to swallow him like I owned him, for him to call me sexy and for me to believe it. I wanted him so fucking bad, I wanted him to say, “Me, too.”
“Say it,” I said.
He looked confused. “What?”
“Say it,” I repeated.
“He looked sheepish.
“Just fucking say it, you pussy.”
“Okay, okay. I love her, all right?”
It wasn’t the response I was expecting. But before I could say anything, Jordan came out of the bathroom, her lids winged, her eyes the colour of rust, and her lips lined into some serious DSLs. But she wasn’t wearing blush, and the foundation framed her face with a cakey pigment.
“Come here, Jord,” I said, “let me add a little flair.” Part of me wanted to say me too, part of me wanted to say fuck you.
I took her back into the bathroom, took out my Nars blush and fan brush, and applied a soft pink to her cheeks, then fanned it up towards her temples ever so slightly, giving her a beautiful sheen. She gasped when she saw herself in the mirror, and I thought at that moment that damn, I give good blush.
It was nine-thirty in the evening and we were all ready to jig our little hearts out. We each took a final shot, then called Peggy back for a ride to Fame. It was a hell of a lot cheaper than Duffy’s or Unicity and we felt better knowing the money went to her. Once we arrived at the club, we learned it was men’s night, so Tias and I got in for free, though Jordan intimidated the bouncer enough with her scowl for him to say, “Okay, yeah, you too.” The bar crowd was more breeder than queer that night; when a couple of men came up to Jordan and asked to buy her a round, she took their drinks and told them, “Cheers, now fuck off.” No one bought Jordan, you had to earn her—don’t ask me how Tias did it. When she went outside for a smoke break, Tias bought me a shot of Fireball. As we waited for her to return, we stood at the bar and danced to Britney Spears’ “Work Bitch.” As the beats grew more intense, and Brit asked if we wanted a Maserati, Tias started grinding his hips against mine, and before I knew it our arms were wrapped around each other’s waists and our chests were touching. A boy walked by and said, “You two are cute together,” which made us laugh.
Tias pulled me even closer and whispered, “Don’t ever change, man, you hear me? Don’t ever change.”
I’ll always remember what he said, it stays in my head like it’s another personal mantra. Tias and I separated our bodies a few moments before Jordan returned and then we all danced to Gloria Gaynor, Missy Elliott, and Lady Gaga. Jordan pulled Tias in close and they began grinding to every song, including the slow ones. When I started feeling jealous, I went to the bar and let boys buy me drinks until I forgot all about it. I learned this trick on how to get drunks to buy you rounds. Tias and I bought these fake wedding rings from Wal-Mart and would wear them to bars and parties. When we told people we were recently engaged but couldn’t afford a proper wedding, people would swoon and feel sorry for us—then they’d buy us a drink or sometimes two, and all you had to do was avoid them for the rest of the night. It was an easy way to go to a party with ten dollars and leave fucked up as shit. I pulled that card three times that night, those white suburban gays lived for that sentimental bull and bought me drinks like my life depended on it.
I got drunk pretty quickly, three shots in a row will do that to you—meanwhile, Tias and Jordan were still grinding on the dance floor and my petty levels started to go through the roof. I took one of the boys who bought me a drink by the hand and dragged him to the dance floor. We swayed to Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” our bodies pressed together like leather straps to a bundle of sage. He kissed my neck as I slid my hands down the back of his jeans—and I made sure that Tias saw us. He looked distraught, which turned me on, but then I saw Jordan whisper something to him, pointing at me. But I didn’t care. I was on fire. I turned to watch the go-go boys with their twenty-eight-inch waists earn their fives and tens in their Andrew Christian underwear, their chests bare like skinned rabbits, their skin red from all the slaps and dirty money, then made dance-floor love with other boys who thought romance was a two-for-six shot of whisky and a dry hump on the stage. “Buckle up, ima give it to you stronger.” We climbed onto the stage, but the bouncer said we had to take off our shirts to dance there and then he tried to remove mine. Eventually I had a smoke outside with a hobo named Mikhail who smoked from a pipe and every time he inhaled, he said the world was turning to ashes.
I came to in St. Boniface, on the steps of an apartment building, my jacket curled around my body. A couple walked past me speaking French: “Est ce que tu vas bien?” The only word I had to reply was “Têyi,” but they thought I was speaking gibberish and threw me a toonie. A car drove by with the license plate “S3T H0M” and I thought, Yeah, me too. I sat on French steps not speaking a lick of French aside from Lil Kim’s ruminations and knew that two a.m. had come much too quickly. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes—then all of a sudden I felt a man grab me, his hands a revenant to my body’s memory; he picked me up and threw me over his shoulders. I remember the lights of bursting cherries, the smell of rubbing alcohol, the sound of someone saying, “Yeah, I picked up another one.”
I woke up in my own bed the next morning. I fashioned a cigarette out of butts left by Peggy and checked my phone. There was a text from Tias: “Text me when you wake up you fucking boozer!”
I fucked up, I knew that—but a part of me said: It’s-okay-it’s-okay-it’s-okay, you’re on your way now.
XXXVI
If you asked me what my kokum tasted like, I would tell you Bee Hive corn syrup. She put that thick golden syrup on everything: on our French toast, in her tea, drizzled over her jello cake. And she found every excuse in the book to use that syrup in other ways: to wash her hair, clean her face, and once, when I burned my hand on an element, she soothed my burn with it. Heck, she even kept a baby jar full of corn syrup in her first aid kit. “For ’mergencies,” she’d always say. “You never know when someone’s gonna fall into a shock.”
One day when one of my aunties’ blood sugar fell too low and she fainted, my kokum scooped her off the floor, cradled her neck in the crook of her elbow, and fed her a tablespoon of corn syrup. “It’s magic,” my kokum said. “This here is some magic in a two-dollar can.” Sure enough, within thirty seconds my aunt roused back to life.
My kokum always stood by that magic, even as her diabetes began to consume her feet and legs. One of her kitchen shelves was completely lined with those bright yellow bottles. Nowadays, my mom makes fun of that shelf when we look at photos. “She loved that syrup so damn much that she even styled her hair after the goddamned bottle!” And in fact, it was true, my kokum’s hair used to be coned into a beehive. While I may never understand my kokum’s odd hairstyle choices, I will confess: I too can’t stop myself from buying that syrup. Every time I’m sick, I still take a spoonful—and when my taste buds fizz with that familiar sweetness, it feels like I’m with Kokum again in her too warm home.
After she died, I found her recipe book tucked away in a box. It w
as the only keepsake of Kokum’s I took: a little wooden box with a flower painted on the top. There were hundreds of recipes inside, all handwritten on an assortment of paper: napkins, cards, envelopes. There I found her famous recipe for sweet and sour meatballs, which everyone loved. I found myself staring at it and tracing my fingers along the fine ridges of her writing—she was the only person I knew who always wrote in cursive. I could see her whole life wrapped up inside that little box of wonders—the loops of her “l’s” and “t’s” are perfect in the recipes she wrote when she was young, but her later entries are increasingly harder to read, as her hands became hardened by arthritis.
One day on a whim, I decided to make her meatballs. Kokum usually used ground-up elk or deer meat, but all I had was some regular hamburger. I cracked an egg, crushed up some saltine crackers, diced a week-old onion, and kneaded it all together. I tried to be meticulous, like Kokum taught me to be—patience makes for a delicious dinner. I folded the meat mixture into itself, then rolled it into fat little balls, trying to keep them as uniform as possible, and then I fried them up in a pan, giving each one the love it deserved. I layered them gently in my crock pot, sprinkled salt and pepper over them, and closed the lid.
The sauce was the hardest part: two cups of ketchup, brown sugar, vinegar, and soy sauce, in a pot over high heat. But you have to keep stirring. I used to watch my kokum at the stove stirring her pot, the wobble of the loose skin beneath her arms—skin we used to call her bingo wings—but also the flexing of her hard muscles as she stirred.
“I learned this from the Hutterites, m’boy,” she said once as I watched. “The Waldners, they’re nice folk.”
When I was a kid, one of the trailers on the rez caught fire and killed two young boys. Later, everyone on the rez had a feast in their honour. The Waldners, a white family who lived across the fields, arrived to pay their respects in a procession of large white vans. They took off their hats, placed them on their chests, and shook the elders’ hands, who greeted them with toothless smiles. The Waldner women came bearing trays of food: chicken, pies, perogies, and those sweet and sour meatballs. Boy, everyone ate good that night. After dinner, the family of the deceased spoke about their boys and how they were learning to become firekeepers, about how they died when one of them passed out with a lit cigarette. The Waldners then told us about how they had lost a boy recently too in a farming accident. My kokum spent the evening talking with the Waldner women, sharing sewing tips and recipes, including the one for the meatballs—she wrote it down right there on a napkin.
When my sauce started to come together, I thickened it with cornstarch and water. Still, it was runnier than my kokum’s, and tasted more sweet than sour, but it would do. I poured the sauce atop the meatballs in the slow cooker, tossed everything together, and let it simmer for a few hours. When it was nearly done, I texted Tias: “Dinner tonight?” and it took only a few minutes before I could hear footsteps barreling down the hallway.
“Heck those smell right good,” Tias said, opening the lid.
“Get outta there, for godsakes,” I said, slapping his hand away.
“Just a little sample, make sure you did it right.”
I rolled my eyes. “Go ahead then.” Tias never had no patience, that boy. I stuck a teaspoon into the bubbling sauce and gave it to him. He slurped it down, but it burned his mouth, which made him stick out his tongue and pant like a dog—like I said, no patience whatsoever.
“Let it simmer for a bit yet,” I said.
“Whatchu wanna do while we wait?”
We decided to cab it to Wal-Mart, which was every urban NDN’s favourite pastime. We scanned the aisles and looked at the furniture, fantasizing about what kind of houses we’d have when we really grew up and had money.
“What do you wanna have with the meatballs?” Tias asked.
“Hell, I used up about every bit of food I had to make those.”
Tias took out his wallet, emptied his coat and jeans pockets, and pooled together a few dollars in change. “Prolly got enough here for a box of Stovetop, maybe two.” He had an obsession with that stuffing and it was about the only food he could cook well besides those old Cheemo perogies. So we bought a couple boxes and cabbed back to my place. Tias’s mom had an account with the cab companies that she said was for emergencies, but we figured having a side dish to go with our dinner was excuse enough—so we charged our bill to her account.
Tias made his stuffing and took pride in his work as he fluffed it up with a fork. We then gorged ourselves on our meal, which basically was hamburger and wet croutons—but it hit the spot. Afterwards on my couch, I spooned him from behind and we watched a movie on his cellphone, thanks to my neighbour’s wifi. I stroked his head and felt the spot where his hair was missing.
“You never did tell me what happened here,” I said.
“Ah, it’s nothing.”
I braided my leg through his and nibbled on his shoulder. “C’mon, don’t be slack.”
He turned around to face me. “I don’t know, it’s stupid.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“So I guess I used to have long hair as a kid, you know? My mom liked it a lot, said it looked handsome, but my dad said I looked like a queer.” He shuffled closer to me, put his hand on the patch of skin. “You remember when we had to do that fundraising for the Fishermen? Selling chocolates and shit? Don’t know why the fuck we were selling chocolates when just about every house on the rez had a kid in school—shoulda just had an ol’ booze bingo, y’know?”
We had two methods of fundraising on the rez: we’d either throw a big social, invite the community, get everyone drunk off four-dollar drinks, and then hope we raked in enough, or else we’d have a booze bingo. The booze bingo always attracted lots of people, especially the elders, who played twenty cards at once like goddamn automatons and still had time to check other people’s cards around them—“Oh, you missed B12, dear”; and of course the adults who brought their kids to help boost their chances. Everyone wanted a chance to win a bottle, especially the Texas mickey, either for themselves or to sell it and triple the money they spent. And when you did win, everyone knew about it and sucked up to you hardcore until it was gone.
Back then was when you’d catch ol’ Peggy front and centre, throwing down twenties for cards, arranging her good-luck charms in front of her. “Okay-am-I-winning-someone-check!” she’d yell at her neighbours, trying desperately to keep up with the calls. It took a special kind of NDN to want to sit beside her during bingo. She always had her eyes on that Texas mickey, and got mad every time she lost it, which was a lot.
“Yeah, I remember,” I said to Tias.
“So I sold some boxes down at the gas station, mostly to white folks driving through. I told them if they bought a couple boxes I’d let them use my treaty number so they could save the tax on a fill-up. And this old woman bought three, but I guess she gypped me without me noticing, gave me a fiver instead of a ten. So I go home, right? And my dad counts my money, checks my stashes, tells me I’m missing some cash.”
Those chocolate fundraisers were discontinued after two years because we used the cash like a personal bank. My mom would take the money I earned, leave an “IOU thirty” note in the envelope, and go buy groceries and smokes. It was always so goddamned embarrassing returning the envelope to your teacher and telling them sorry, your mom needed the cash.
“So he grabs me by the collar of my coat, pushes me up against the wall, lifts me off the floor. He says, ‘Oh fer fuck sakes, you’re useless, you know that? You go get that goddamn money right now!’ and left me dangling there in the air, feet stretching to the floor, my cheeks turning red because my coat was pressing into my throat.”
And we never could pay back those IOUs, so the money would be owing on my account. “Jonny owes thirty dollars” hung over my head like I was a goddamn Sims avatar. I couldn’t take out library books, couldn’t go on the school computers, couldn’t sign out gym equipment.
“And I tell him, ‘Chill, man, it’s just five dollars’ and then he lets go of me and I slump to the floor, y’know? And that sets him off. ‘Just five dollars?’ he says, ‘You don’t know nothing of responsibility, boy, just five dollars, why I oughta take five dollars outta your ass right now.’ And he takes off his belt and I know that that man could brand your ass like a steer, so I take off, right?”
When I visited my kokum, she asked, “C’mere m’boy what’s wrong?” and I told her I was too embarrassed to go to school anymore—that the kids knew about my IOUs, and they made fun of my clothes, which all came from the Sally Ann. My kokum dug out her purse from beneath her chair, wrote me a cheque, gave me a kiss on the forehead, and told me not to tell my mother.
“But as I’m running away he grabs me by my coat—why the fuck did I used to wear that big-ass coat anyways? Always got me in trouble. And I squirm my way out of it so I can get away and then he grabs a chunk of my hair and yanks me back, pulls the hair clean out.”
My kokum was as poor as they came, she only lived off a small bit of CPP and welfare cheques that was barely enough to pay for her medicine.
“And then I’m squirming on the floor, my hair still in his hands, him horrified for a second, my head bleeding. ‘Ah, it’s about time you got a man’s haircut anyways’ he says to me, ‘get rid of that mop of a head you call hair.’ And he sits me down at the kitchen table, pulls a metal bowl out from the cupboard, grabs a pair of kitchen shears, gives my hair a bowl cut so I look like a fucking Beatle.”
“You should have called me,” I said. “I would have given you a stellar weave.”
Tias laughs, then we are both quiet. We start watching the movie on his phone again.
I press my lips against the back of his head, feel his bald spot, which makes him wince. I curl myself around him tighter.
XXXVII
When I was thirteen we had something called Culturama at school. Everyone was divided into groups and assigned a country, and then learned about its terrain, its population, and its foods. Ours was Sweden. I was with three keeners, all of them white. Brooke, a blonde-haired girl who liked to wear glittery silver headbands, took charge of our group, claiming she was an expert on Sweden because her room was outfitted with IKEA furniture. She used IKEA-speak with words like “Malm” and “Hemnes,” and described her colour schemes such as “bone white” and “mahogany brown.” She looked me dead in the eye when she said the word “brown.” I took some pride in the discomfort it caused her.
Jonny Appleseed Page 11