by Ivan Coyote
The
Slow
Fix
The
Slow
Fix
stories
Ivan E. Coyote
THE SLOW FIX
Copyright © 2008 by Ivan E. Coyote
Second printing: 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 101, 211 East Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 1Z6
arsenalpulp.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
Earlier versions of these stories appeared in Xtra! West
Text and cover design by Shyla Seller
Cover photograph by Dan Bushnell
Photograph of Ivan E. Coyote by Laura Sawchuk
Printed and bound in Canada on 100% post-consumer recycled paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Coyote, Ivan E. (Ivan Elizabeth), 1969-
The slow fix / Ivan E. Coyote.
ISBN 978-1-55152-247-0
I. Title.
PS8555.O99S56 2008 C813’.6 C2008-904099-6
This book is dedicated to my grandmothers, Florence Daws and Patricia Cumming, for their strength and spirit. They just don’t make them like they used to.
CONTENTS
By Any Other Name
Welcome Wagon
Open Sesame
Schooled
Home Sweat Home
The Curse?
To Whom It May Concern
The Slow Fix
It Works Like This
Pushing Forty
Imagine a Pair of Boots
The Bathroom Chronicles
Thicker Than Water
Hot For Freezer
Judging a Book
How I Knew
Just In Case
Up Here
The Future of Francis
Rat Bastards
Something Old, Something New
Teach the Children Well
Many Little Miracles
Ramble On
Dirty Rotten Cock Knockers
Pass the Time
Window Seat
Right-Winged
Coffee Club
Broccoli and Cheese Sauce
You Are Here
By Any Other Name
I learned most of what I know about being a man from my Uncle Rob. Uncle Rob has never let the fact that I was declared female at birth get in the way of our male bonding, and I’ve always loved him best for it.
Uncle Rob taught me how to fish, drive a standard, light a match off of my front tooth, and open a beer with a Bic lighter. He taught me how to make a fist, turn into a skid, light a fire, and shoot a gun. He passed on to me everything he has ever managed to learn about women, and all the Zippo tricks he has ever been shown. He taught me how to tell a story, and how to hold my liquor. All the important stuff. Some of the family reckon I look more like my Uncle Rob than I do my own father, and everyone agrees I look just like my Dad.
Uncle Rob and Aunt Cathy flew to Vancouver last week, because Rob had an appointment with a fancy eye doctor. Whitehorse General Hospital is equipped to handle your basic medical tests and common ailments, but anything involving a specialist or an expensive machine requires a trip to the big city. Rob called me from the hotel and told me to round up the stray cousins and bring the girlfriend; he was taking us all out for dinner. Cousin Darryl’s brand new baby had somehow turned into a seven-year-old girl, and I hadn’t seen my cousin Garth since Grandma Pat came to town for her knee replacement three years ago.
I rarely bring a date along to family functions, because more than two or three of us in one room can be hazardous, especially if you are shy, offend easily, clean and sober, or don’t eat meat. The way my family demonstrates our love and affection for each other has occasionally been mistaken for verbal abuse by outsiders, so I usually don’t take the risk.
But I knew she could hold her own; she is smart and strong and can take a joke. She loves fishing and hates hippies. There was common ground, and she might just fit right in. Besides, I figured, how could she love me and not like my Uncle Rob? He was the man who taught me everything I knew, and I look just like him.
The appetizers arrived in the middle of a raucous debate about flatulence and love: was unabashed farting in front of the fairer sex an expression of intimacy, or the sign of the death of romance? Was pulling the covers over her head actually a form of foreplay? Was our whole family actually lactose intolerant, or did we just not chew our food enough?
My sweetheart was unfazed, and retained her appetite. Maybe she really was the perfect girl for me.
By the time our entrees arrived, the talk had turned to embarrassing stories from when I was a kid, how I had panic attacks when forced into a dress for weddings, and how I finally gave in and wore a satin gown with dyed-to-match pumps to my high school graduation, just like the normal girls did.
“She looked so pretty,” said Aunt Cathy solemnly, like she was giving my eulogy.
“I looked like a drag queen.”
Darryl shook his head. “I can’t imagine cousin Ivan in a dress.”
“I can’t imagine calling her Ivan.” Cathy stabbed a bit of broccoli with her fork. “She’ll never be Ivan to me. That’s just, like, your writing name, right? Nobody actually calls you Ivan in person, do they?”
Cathy asks me this, even though the entire table had been calling me Ivan all night. I stopped using my birth name over a decade ago, but Cathy likes to pretend she doesn’t know this because it makes her uncomfortable. I love her enough to allow her this tiny corner of cozy denial, and my continued silence on the matter helps to hold up my half of her little charade.
I have lots of people who call me Ivan. I only have the one Aunt Cathy. She has never understood why I changed my name, or why I vote NDP. I’ve never understood why she collects Santa Claus dolls, or how she can smoke menthols. It doesn’t mean we love each other any the less for it.
“I’ve always called Ivan Ivan,” states cousin Darryl, God bless him. No wonder everyone thinks he’s gay.
“Are we allowed to have dessert?” squeaks second cousin Rachael.
“Anybody want to try a prawn? Going, going, gone.” Rob speaks around a mouthful of his dinner.
“Don’t chew and talk at the same time, Robert. You’ll set a bad example. There are children present.” Cathy half-feigns disgust and backhands her husband in the upper arm, right where his shirtsleeve stopped and his tanline started. This signaled the official change of subject.
“Set a bad example for little Rachael?” Rob smirks, rubbing his arm where she had whacked him one. “It’s already too late for Rachael, too late for all of them. I saw it on the Learning Channel. A child’s personality is fully formed by the time they turn three. We might as well relax and let it all hang loose. The kid is already who she’s gonna be, all we can do now is love her. It’s out of our hands.”
Rob leans across the table to pinch one of my fries. “Did Garth tell you him and Allison are getting hitched in Fiji? Cath
and I are going. You and your lovely lady friend should come too. I’ll rent us a boat and we can go fishing. The wedding is still over a year away, so start saving up. Maybe even Darryl will have a girlfriend by then, and we’ll all go. A family that fishes together stays together, isn’t that what they say? And you two girls would love Fiji. It’s the perfect place for you, really: it’s beautiful there, and the policemen wear skirts.”
Welcome Wagon
When I got back from my last stretch of road-gigs there was a message blinking on my brand new landline. This was unusual—I’m on the road so much that my friends have my cellphone number programmed into their speed dials, and the only person I had given the new number to was my grandmother, and she doesn’t believe in leaving messages.
The voice belonged to a stranger. “Hullo. My name is Pauline, and I’m calling on behalf of the Welcome Wagon. We heard you are new to Squamish, so if you would like us to drop by for a visit, call me back and let me know.”
I called her back immediately. Of course I would love a visit from the Welcome Wagon. It was just this kind of small-town hospitality that I had left the big city for, I told her, and sure, Friday morning at ten would be perfect.
I spent most of Thursday scouring my house. I mopped, washed the windows, and coerced my girlfriend into baking a fruit crumble. She seemed to think I was overdoing things a bit.
“Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? I thought the Welcome Wagon was supposed to bake you a fruit crumble. I thought that was the whole point.”
“We’ll pop it back into the oven just before she gets here, so the house smells like baking, like I cook in here all the time.”
She shook her head at me, and I resumed hand scrubbing the grout between the tiles on the kitchen floor.
By nine a.m. on Friday, my mood had shifted. I woke up worrying that the Welcome Wagon lady was rich and lived in a spotless mansion at the top of the mountain. I woke up thinking she would notice that my apartment building needed a paint job and that the hallways smelled like someone else’s supper. I woke up embarrassed that I had hardly any furniture yet, and only owned two towels.
By nine-thirty I was convinced that the Welcome Wagon’s job wasn’t to welcome people at all, it was actually a covert tool of social control, an organized posse of judgmental socialites sent in to survey the homes of newcomers. Pauline was going to show up, look around, drop off some muffins, and then report back to head office that a self-employed homosexual artist had somehow infiltrated the town’s perimeter, and that my dishcloth didn’t even match my tea towels. How could I have fallen for a transparent scam like this?
Pauline turned out to be a soft-spoken slender woman with the remnants of an English accent. She was on a diet and turned down a piece of fruit crumble. She took her coffee black and got right down to business. And business it really was.
Her basket wasn’t full of muffins, like I’d imagined it. It was full of gift certificates and small gifts from various businesses in town. I was welcomed to Squamish with a bag of cat-treats, a bottle of Vitamin C, a funeral parlour pen, and an Extra Value meal from McDonald’s. I had to sign a form saying I had received the aforementioned merchandise from Pauline on behalf of the Welcome Wagon, to ensure that Pauline had indeed welcomed me properly and not shirked her duties and just kept all the key chains and cat treats for herself.
“So how long have you lived in Squamish?” I asked her, once all the paperwork had been filled out.
“Just since June.” Pauline had a way of exhaling when she talked, which made it sound like everything she said was accompanied by a little sigh.
I raised my eyebrows. “And you’re already working for the Welcome Wagon?” I guess I had been expecting a more long-term resident.
“I resurrected it myself after we had been here for three months, and none of the neighbours had come around yet to introduce themselves. I was out of my mind with loneliness, and I thought it would be a good way to meet people.”
I sat up straight. “So you don’t find this place all that friendly either, huh?” I found this oddly comforting, to know it wasn’t just me.
Pauline stared down into her coffee, trying to hide the tears that threatened to spill over her bottom lashes. “I’ve almost stopped crying whenever my friends from home ring me up. It’s not like this in Nova Scotia. People there know how to be neighbours.”
We chatted a bit more, and when Pauline left she pressed her phone number into my hand, saying maybe we could go hiking together sometime.
“What does it mean when the Welcome Wagon lady is crying from the lack of new friends?” I asked my sweetheart. She agreed that it wasn’t a good sign, and served me up some warm fruit crumble.
The next day we packed up and headed south into Vancouver, a ninety-minute ride. “Notice how the air smells all smoggy?” I commented as we crossed the bridge. “Listen to how loud it is here. All the traffic, and the sirens. There is never anywhere to park. It’s not like this in Squamish.”
I spent the day in my old neighbourhood, on the Drive, picking up my mail, doing some banking, drinking too much coffee, running into people I knew, people who were glad to see me. Wendy from the credit union smiled wide as she stamped the backs of my cheques. I almost leaned across the counter and kissed her, it was so nice to be known, so great to not be asked to see some identification.
“So how are things in Squamish?” she asked me.
“Great, great. It’s really beautiful, and quiet. It’s so quiet out there.” I said, like a mantra. I had said the same thing to everyone who had asked me that question, over and over, all day.
I’m hoping that if I repeat it enough, I’ll eventually start believing it myself.
Open Sesame
I’m starting to get used to the sound of my new life in Squamish. Every place has its own sound; its own flavour of normal noises. Part of making this new place home for me is teaching my ears what familiar should sound like. There are big trucks with engine brakes that growl around the corners on the highway. There are country-and-western-slash-classic-rock-inspired parties in the building next door, and thus whooping noises and hollering are somewhat commonplace, and for the most part are to be ignored. A siren, once an auditory backdrop in my place on Victoria Drive, will now bring me along with the rest of my neighbours out onto our balconies, coffee cups in hand, just to see what all the excitement is about.
Everything sounds different here, but mostly it’s the sound of kids playing. I’m not talking about the fevered cadence of a fifteen-minute recess across the street. Kids can still really play outside in Squamish. I’m talking about the sun-ripened drawl of kids with a whole summer stretched out in front of them, and nothing to do but ride bikes in the courtyard or catch bugs in jam jars.
Squamish is the outdoor recreation capital of Canada, or so the sign on the highway proclaims, but not if your parents can’t afford rock climbing gear or kite-surfing lessons. One rainy day I listened to six kids amuse themselves all afternoon by tumbling Matchbox cars and Barbies down the stairwell, and opening and closing the door for anyone who came in or left the building. My little dog could have ten walks a day if I said yes every time one of the little girls knock on my door to ask if Goliath can come out to play.
The kids build bike ramps out of rocks dragged up from the river and worn-out bits of plywood, and then ride around in endless aimless circles popping wheelies and taking jumps until the lady who heads up the strata council dismantles them one night after bedtime, and then the cycle begins again.
I’m starting to learn their names now, who is who’s little brother, and which building they live in. So far, Kristy and Mouse are my favourites. Kristy is the oldest I think, with her T-shirt stretched over her plump middle and her arms often crossed to hide her tiny boobies. Kristy watches everything all the time, and doesn’t miss a thing that goes on anywhere. She is definitely the one to ask if you want the goods on anyone. Then there is Mouse, her other half.
How
can you tell a tomboy before she even opens her mouth, from inside the car with the windows rolled up? It is something about the way she stands, how her jeans hang below her hips and the cuffs are long enough that she wears holes in them with the heels of her Bay sneakers.
Maybe it takes one to know one.
Mouse watched me pack stuff out of my car into my apartment one day.
“That a microphone stand?” she asked me out of the corner of her mouth.
“Sure is,” I told her.
Mouse squinted into the sun. “You gotta microphone to go with it?”
“Sure do.”
“Maybe can I borrow it one day? I’m extremely responsible, ask anyone.”
I scratched my chin, pretending to think about it. “Let’s see...should I lend the amplification equipment out to the children?”
Silence hung between us. Mouse opened her eyes really wide, hanging there for an answer.
“Sure, I can do that.” I tell her, and a smile explodes across her face. “But I have to meet your mom first, and ask her if it’s okay with her, too.”
Mouse nods like a hammer drill. My heart warms, and then remembers to go cold at the reality of it all.
This is my big fear, you see. I’m pretty sure I’m the only queer residing in the Westway Village apartments, and for some reason I pass as a young man a lot more here, at least with the grown-ups. Children, in my experience, are far less likely to be fooled by shallow gender stereotypes than their parents are; kids hardly ever mistake me for a boy or a man, or maybe they just care a lot less what gender I am.
They’re more interested in whether or not I will lend them my microphone or play street hockey with them.
What I worry about is that the kids will go home and tell their mom the nice lady named Ivan lent them the microphone, and the mom will freak out about a homosexual interacting with the children. Some folks have a thing about queers being around their kids. Even though the statistics show that it is far more likely that their new boyfriend or their husband or their brother will be the one molesting their son or daughter, still they worry more about the homosexual up the street.