For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  These conversations sometimes sent heat into my hips, just below my stomach and above my crotch. I used another one of their stock lines: “You wouldn’t know what to do with her.”

  “I’d squeeze her tits together and fuck ’em with my balls in her face,” he said, like it was a challenge. He held the bowl against his body with one hand and squeezed the back of my neck with the other, brushing the bottom of my hair. My lips curled in. I resisted the shudder. “Come on, haven’t you always wanted to fuck a redhead?”

  The question struck me as somehow ungrammatical, subject and object reversed. Like Ollie’s question: Do you want girls to suck your dick? I realized what I had been picturing. Large breasts sliding sideways on my chest, his hands—those hands—stopping their momentum. Men squeezed each other’s necks. “Sure.”

  I’d assumed Ollie’s girl from Innisfil was an invention—who didn’t have an out-of-town girlfriend?—but she materialized at our fourth workout. She looked enough like Ollie to be a sister or cousin, the same small eyes squashed under her eyebrow ridge, the same scrawny frame topped by thick, oak-colored hair. The effect, on a girl, was even more rodent-like.

  She was in the center seat of the truck. She chewed a wad of bubblegum and knocked her knees against the gearshift between them. “This is Jeanine,” Ollie said. She might have smiled. The movement was too lazy to tell for sure, dominated by the gum stretching behind her teeth.

  Our routine didn’t change. Jeanine ran slowly on a treadmill that had a bump where the belt had kinked, taking an extra leaping step each time it came around. Ollie started back at the bar. I sat on an empty bench. “She seems nice,” I said.

  “I’m thinking of breaking up with her,” he said. She was only a few feet away. She continued to snap her gum and jog.

  “Why?”

  Ollie gestured at the room, like what was wrong with Jeanine was all around us. He lifted the loaded bar from the floor to his waist with a grunt, then from his waist to over his head with another. I was still trying to puzzle out the gesture. Maybe he meant Fort Michel, and Innisfil, and our provincial lives.

  As though reading my mind, he asked, “Where are you planning to go to cooking school?” He dropped the bar and started the motion over again. I was struck once more by the focus and intent of his expression, probably the same one he’d had when he sliced through the Achilles tendon of a former friend as easily as through taut string.

  “Not sure.”

  “You should come to Montreal with me. My brother will let us stay with him.” His arms trembled from the shoulders. I could tell he wasn’t sure about that second part.

  “So you’re quitting this year?” Most kids at Brock stayed on for the full five years, some for six. A couple of the football players who attacked Ollie were on their second victory lap, barrel-chested men with full beards. They filled the width of the hallway like overgrown trees: in need of pruning, trimming back. I’d stacked my schedule to get out in four years, as Adele and Helen had before me.

  Two reps, and sweat beaded up on his nose and forehead, wet the collar of his gray T-shirt. “Yes,” he panted. This time he moaned as he dropped the bar.

  “Maybe you should use less weight,” I said, like a child pointing out the obvious.

  He shook his head. “The plan I’m on, you have to add weight every time. It’s the same one Schwarzenegger uses.” He did one more, making a long, low, guttural sound. The weights clanged onto the floor. “It’ll be great. We’ll party every night. Meet hot French chicks.”

  We left the loaded bar where it fell and went to another rack so I could do squats. Ollie didn’t bother to spot me this time. He just sat dripping on the bench. Ollie wanted me to face the mirror to see my form, but I refused, facing the treadmills instead. The girl in the poster with her prodigious spandex-covered breasts and ass. Jeanine’s upper thighs, skinny as Ollie’s, jiggling on the bone as she ran and chewed. “What will you do for money?” I asked.

  “I’ll get a job. I’ll work construction or some shit,” Ollie said.

  I thought about living with Ollie. I imagined the kind of apartment I’d seen on TV, with a big living-room window framing a cityscape. I thought about having Ollie on my side. My loyal monster. “Ollie,” I said, “when . . . when you . . . in the locker room . . .”

  “I told him I’d cut his throat or his ankle. He chose. He bled a fuck-ton.” Ollie was watching my knees in a protective way, making sure they were steady. “It made a loud noise. It was weird. Like when you pluck a guitar string and then stop it really fast against the wood.”

  I wanted to be horrified. I felt nothing. I looked at Jeanine, chewing away; Ollie would never tell her what it sounded like when a tendon snapped. I racked the empty bar myself after five squats. Ollie said, “You’re getting stronger.”

  I don’t know why any of us like or dislike people based on so little. Why I might love Chef as zealously as a supplicant loves a god, why Ollie would be my friend and Simon my enemy when they were both small-hearted, dangerous men. Why I felt like Jeanine was an intruder on a world I had barely entered, glimpsed through a doorway, seen through the steam of a high-pressure hose.

  On a quieter Thursday night, before the quiet nights started to worry the management, Chef asked if I would come work for him full-time after I graduated. I told him what I planned to do—maybe culinary school, maybe Montreal with Ollie. He objected to the first option. “Nah, nah. Don’t do that. You’ll have debt up to your ass and no one will respect you any more than they did before. You gotta pay your dues.”

  He yelled his life story at me from a distance, turning steaks for the broiler cook. At the end of the night, the arm he used to hold the tongs would be completely smooth, all the hair burned off.

  Chef started in the dish pit when he was thirteen. At sixteen, he hitchhiked through the farmlands of southern Quebec, offering to cook and work the fields in exchange for food and a bed. He went to Europe without a visa and hopped from one cook job to another, learning that most countries don’t refrigerate eggs and will scoop ants from the cooking oil and flies from the red-wine silo with a pool skimmer. He stayed in Budapest the longest because of a girl. She worked as both a bank manager and a nude model—he described the process of her undoing the buttons of her double-breasted suit at great length while the broiler cook and the two hot-appetizer cooks hollered—and then died in a car accident, her red Citroën AX crushed like a ladybug by a delivery truck. The girl’s mother came and shooed Chef out of the apartment they’d shared, and he came home to Canada.

  “To Fort Michel,” Simon chimed in, his painful contralto appropriate for once.

  No, there were a lot of years in between, so his dead Hungarian love had had time to become just another flicker in an erotic slideshow. There were a lot of kitchens before he was a head chef, and many more before the investors in this restaurant asked him to lead their new property. Culinary school was not a shortcut to Chef’s life.

  “But Montreal,” he said, abruptly turning back to me, though I hadn’t spoken in nearly half an hour. “You should definitely go. It’s like . . . Paris, only lamer. Great food, good wine, beautiful women, and no one sleeps.”

  “My friend said the same thing.” But when Chef said something, it carried more weight. I had discounted culinary school in an instant.

  “I fucked a guy in Montreal.” He plated a steak that had been resting, the juices flowing back to its center, and passed it to Simon. Simon fumbled for the plate. He was behind on the vegetables that were supposed to go with it, and a hard look passed between them.

  The expeditor tapped his fingers on the pass window, glowering at the servers about the finished meals that were waiting there. “You tell this story all the time.”

  “Wong hasn’t heard it,” Chef said. He leaned over and put a cover over one of Simon’s pans. “Speed it up, Squeaky.”

  “Tell me,” I called feebly. The dish pit was larger than the rest of the stations, at the very end of the line
, hidden in a web of hoses and pipes. Standing there made me feel disconnected.

  “Not that much to tell. I met a girl, I fucked her, and she turned out to be a he.”

  Simon had had enough of being humiliated for rock-hard carrots and green beans. “Okay, wait just a minute. How the fuck does that happen? How did you not know?”

  Chef shrugged. He watched the blood and clear juices beading up on the slab of meat, knowing the color inside as clearly as if he had cut into it. “She was gorgeous. I was wasted.”

  “No. I want more details than that.” Part of me was glad that Simon was pursuing this line of questioning. “How exactly did you manage to start fucking him without noticing that he didn’t have a cunt?”

  “We went to her place. She went into the bathroom and came out in this short, sexy kimono thing.” Chef made a round shape in the air with his tongs that could have meant any number of things. “I was so drunk I could barely stand. She lay down on the bed on her stomach, pulled her kimono up, and told me to fuck her in the ass.”

  “Her hairy man ass,” Simon said.

  “Nope. Smooth as a baby’s. Greased up. Like perfect, firm pillows and round as peaches.”

  “Squats,” I offered. The broiler guy laughed.

  “And then what?” Simon pressed. He lifted the lid of the pan, slid the vegetables onto the plate, and passed the dish to the expeditor behind him.

  “If they complain that the steak is cold, comp their drinks,” Chef said. The expeditor nodded, wiping the edge of the plate with a cloth. “And then I fucked her, Squeaky. What do you think?”

  “And he leaped up afterward and waved his cock in your face,” Simon guessed. He grabbed his crotch. “‘Ha-ha! Gotcha!’”

  “No, she rolled over to yell at me for getting cum on her kimono, and I realized something was off.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Chef’s muscular shoulders rolled under his jacket as he put more steaks and chicken breasts on the grill. The alcohol in the marinade dripped off and flared up on the coals. “What do you mean? Nothing to do. A good fuck’s a good fuck. Didn’t change that.”

  We went on chopping, frying, washing, stirring, but for a few moments, no one spoke, absorbing Chef’s words: A good fuck’s a good fuck. Simon took a peeled clove of garlic from his station and whacked the side of a knife against it, crushing it, then threw it into a pan. “I would’ve cut his fucking balls off,” he said. He smacked another clove. “Wants to be a woman that bad, enough to trick normal, God-fearing, pussy-loving men into having sex with him—I’d fucking help him out.”

  Unrattled, Chef said, “Just focus on my side dishes, Squeaky.”

  One morning, a Saturday, I awoke with a fever. For a couple of years in my teens, I sometimes got fevers, with no other symptoms, that lasted a day and a half—thirty-six hours, like clockwork. My mother said it was related to growing; my father said it was a sign of weakness, of a delicate constitution. Some people, he said, mostly women, got sick whenever they were needed, when there was work to be done—vague, mild illnesses that let them continue to do things they enjoyed, like lying under fresh, cool sheets and complaining. “Sick in their heads,” he said.

  In the afternoon that Saturday, I called into work and told the waitress who answered the phone that I wasn’t coming in. She passed the phone off to Chef. My father walked into the hallway. When he saw that I was on the phone, he came and stood stonily nearby. Chef shouted over the clamor in the kitchen, so my father was able to hear both ends of the conversation.

  “We need you, Wong.”

  “Sorry, Chef. I’m really sick.”

  “Well, get better, kid. Hope you’ll be in tomorrow.”

  I hung up. I shivered as I padded back to bed, my father following close behind. The hot, dizzying exhaustion let me ignore him as I crawled under the covers. I would normally have stood straight and waited for him to speak.

  The curtains were closed, but the bright afternoon leaked in, murky and mustard-colored. My father appeared as a dusty shadow. “Why aren’t you going to work?”

  “Because I’m sleeping,” I murmured. I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying.

  “Have you ever seen me miss work?”

  I didn’t answer. The bed felt good. Firm but lulling, like strong arms lifting my back.

  “This job doesn’t mean much to you now because you’re a kid, and I feed you and clothe you and put a roof over your head. When you have a wife and kids, you won’t be able to laze around in bed whenever you feel like it. They’ll all starve.” His shadow stayed the same: a defined head and shoulders, everything lost to darkness below. My father did not gesture with his hands.

  He left the room. I got up about half an hour later. I leaned on the wall as I dialed. I told the waitress that I felt better and was coming in for my shift after all.

  That night, the surgical lights and gleaming surfaces assaulted my senses. Sweat soaked through my shirt and my jacket, poured down my face and back. The sound of the dishes clicking against each other, of a knife’s shink against the sharpening steel, embedded itself in my forehead like shrapnel. I could imagine reaching up and digging the shards of noise out of my skin.

  Chef kept looking at me. He didn’t ask if I wanted to go home. He came by once with a bottle of water from the bar cooler and pressed it to the back of my neck. My spine arched like a stroked cat’s. The cold came in a rising wave, engulfing, a strange, fevered ecstasy. He held it there for a solid minute, and then left it on my station for me to drink.

  A few weeks into my routine with Ollie, I started to notice a change in my legs. It was most noticeable in the backs of my thighs, where rounded muscle had grown. There’d been nothing there before.

  Ollie and I talked a lot about Montreal, spinning fantasies. We’d work in the day, party at night, sleep on his brother’s floor, drown in money and freedom. Learn French. Take up smoking. Take up cocaine. We’d never be sober again. I’d become a world-renowned chef and he’d fuck supermodels. We’d leave my father and the ruined football stars in the Fort Michel dust.

  Jeanine came with us half the time. Sometimes they were late to pick me up, and when they arrived, Jeanine’s hair was stringy with sweat, and there’d be a foul smell in the cab of the truck. (Later, when I worked in a combined restaurant and bakery, I figured out what Jeanine smelled like: sourdough bread as it rose, homey but tainted.)

  One night, Jeanine fondled Ollie in front of me, with her hand in his lap, cupping as though jangling the change in his pocket. He sank deeper into his seat, fingers resting lightly on the steering wheel. Without comment, he pulled over just before the bridge. He turned off the engine at the side of the road, the headlights dying with the key turn.

  “Peter,” he said, as Jeanine climbed on top of him, her bony fingers locking behind his neck, the three of us sitting there in the dark, “do you mind getting out for a bit?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He gathered her body in his arms as he looked me straight in the eye, conveying that we were part of a brotherhood: Help me out, man.

  I got out of the truck. I slammed the door. I heard Jeanine’s hand smack against the window as I walked down to the river. When the dirt became worn rocks, I took off my socks and shoes and held them in one hand. I buried my feet in the water, focusing on its icy, alert flow. The truck rocked on its shocks. I glanced back now and then, not able to make out anything through the windows. I started to wonder how I would know when it was safe to go back. Would they come get me? Honk the horn?

  At some point, maybe sooner than I’d expected, the passenger door of the truck opened. Jeanine’s legs swung out. She threw her sneakers on the ground, stepped into them, and started to retie them. The cab light came on behind her. I took that as my signal and ascended the riverbank. I stayed barefoot, feeling the change from rock to dirt to craggy asphalt.

  As I climbed back into the truck, thinking about what was probably soaked into the upholstery, Ollie s
aid, “We’re going to drive her back to Innisfil.” They were done with each other for the night. She pulled out a wrapped, already-chewed piece of gum and put it back in her mouth. She must’ve tucked it away at some point in the action.

  During the half-hour drive, I could feel something radiating off their skin, something more than heat and smell. Ollie and I didn’t speak, and Jeanine gave sparse directions.

  We watched her going up the steps of a small house with a screen door and beige siding. In the front yard, visible in the porch light, was a Halloween decoration—a stuffed witch that had survived many seasons outdoors. Stuffing oozed out between the seams.

  After the screen door banged behind Jeanine, Ollie didn’t start the engine right away. I sensed he was going to apologize or tell me about it in detail, and either way, I didn’t want to hear it. I looked straight ahead through the windshield. “Dump her,” I said. “And let’s go to Montreal.”

  The weekend after Ollie and Jeanine left me on the riverbank, Chef asked if I wanted to train at sauté. Some of the guys applauded and gestured to suggest I had sucked Chef’s dick, tongue bulging in cheek. “Simon’s switching to daytime next week,” Chef said, “so we’ll get a new dishwasher, and you can take his station.”

  The garde-manger, Lyle, yelled while balancing shrimp tails on the rim of a martini glass, “Hey! I asked you if I could switch to daytime and you said there was no way. Why does Simon get the hours?”

  “You’re too good. I need you on nights,” Chef said. Simon smiled grimly.

  The night progressed as usual. The novelty of the restaurant had worn off on Fort Michel. Most families could afford to go only once or twice a year. During the brief dinner rush, Simon dropped off some pans at the pit. “Would you get me some more frozen carrots? I’m not supposed to leave the line.” He spoke softly, so the high pitch was less noticeable.