by Ivan Coyote
Last week I was strolling the drive with my cousin Dan, and we ran into a friend of mine.
“Let’s go grab a table at the Roma,” she gestures with a toss of her curls. “I’ll buy us all a coffee.”
Dan and I both look down at our shoes, sheepish. “Neither of us can drink coffee anymore,” he says, and I feel a blush creeping from under my collar. “It make us both anxious.”
She laughs, secure still in her late twenties. “Well maybe I can buy you both a nice steamed milk, then, maybe with a bit of almond syrup in it.”
I cough, my ears on fire now. “Actually, we’re both lactose intolerant, too.”
“And nuts make my throat swell up,” Dan adds. I think he’s joking, but I’m not sure.
She shakes her head, just like I used to. “Herbal tea? Organic peppermint?”
I look at my watch, shake my head. “I gotta run. I have to get to the vet before it closes. My little dog needs special prescription food now. He has bladder stones. It’s not his fault. He’s getting old.”
Imagine a Pair of Boots
Imagine a pair of boots. A sturdy, well-made, kind of nondescript pair of boots. They are functional enough, but kind of plain. Imagine that you live in a country where every citizen is issued this one pair of boots at birth, and that there are no other footwear options permitted by law. If you grow out of or wear through the soles of these government-issued boots, you may trade them in for a new pair, always identical to your old ones. Imagine that everyone you know wears these very same boots without question or complaint.
Now imagine that your right foot is two sizes bigger than your left one. That no matter what you do, one boot will chafe and the other will slip, and both will cause blisters. When you mention your discomfort you are told that odd-sized pairs of boots are forbidden, because they cause confusion and excess paperwork. It is explained to you that this footwear system works perfectly for everyone else, and reminded that there are people in other countries who have no boots at all. You are beat up in grade three because none of the other kids have ever seen feet like yours. The teacher tells you that you should probably just learn to keep your boots on. Your parents blame each other. You end up wearing an extra sock on your small foot to compensate, and never go to swimming pools. Your feet sweat profusely in the summer and you always undress in the dark. You hate your feet but need them to walk and stand up on. You hate your boots even more. You dream of things that look like sandals and moccasins, but you have no words for them. You learn things will be easier for you if you just never talk about your feet. One time on the bus, you spot a guy with the exact same limp as you, but you pretend not to see him. He watches you limp off at your bus stop and then looks the other way. You can’t stop thinking about the man with the limp for weeks. You are nineteen years old and until that day on the bus you thought you were the only person in the country who couldn’t fit into their boots.
I have always felt this way about gender pronouns, that ‘she’ pinches a little and ‘he’ slips off me too easily. I’m often asked by well-intentioned people which pronoun I prefer, and I always say the same thing: that I don’t really have a preference, that neither pronoun really fits, but thank you for asking, all the same. Then I tell them they can call it like they see it, or mix it up a little if they wish. Or, they can try to avoid using he or she altogether. I suggest this even though I am fully aware of the fact it is almost impossible to talk about anything other than yourself or inanimate objects without using a gender specific pronoun. It is especially hard at gigs, when the poor host has to get up and introduce me to the audience. No matter which pronoun the host goes with, there is always someone cringing in the crowd, convinced that an uncomfortable mistake has just been made. I know it would be easier if I just picked a pronoun and stuck with it, but that would be a compromise made for the comfort of everyone else but me. A decision that would inevitably leave me with a blister, or even a nasty rash.
Perfect strangers have been asking me if I am a boy or a girl as far back as I can remember. Not all of them are polite about it. Some are just curious, others ask me like they have every right to know, as if my ambiguity is a personal insult to their otherwise completely understandable reality. Few of them seem to realize they have just interrupted my day to demand I give someone I don’t know personal information they don’t really need to sell me a movie ticket or a newspaper. I have learned the hard way to just answer the question politely, so they don’t think I’m rude. In my braver days, when someone asked if I was a boy or a girl, I would say something flip and witty, like ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘makes you wonder, doesn’t it?,’ but I found that this type of tactic greatly increased the chances I would get the living shit kicked out of me, so I eventually knocked it off. Then I went through a phase where I would answer calmly, and then casually ask them something equally as personal, such as did they have chest hair or were they satisfied with the size of their penis or were those their real breasts, just so they would see how it felt, but this proved just as ineffective.
A couple of months ago, as I was smoking outside the Anza Club after a gig, this young guy marched up and interrupted the person I was talking with to ask me if I was a man or a woman. I told him I was a primarily estrogen-based organism, and then I asked him the exact same question. He took two steps back and dropped his jaw.
“I’m a man.” He seemed visibly shaken by the thought of any other option.
“And were you just born male?” I continued, winking at my companion.
“Well, yeah, of course I was.”
“How interesting.” I lit another smoke.
“Hard to tell these days,” my friend chimed in.
The guy walked off, looking confused and kind of vulnerable.
“He’s gone home to grow a moustache,” my buddy said, then laughed and shook his head.
I thought about it all later, how the guy’s ego had crumpled right in front of us, just because a stranger had questioned his masculinity. How scared he was of not being a real man, how easy it had been to take him down. It dawned on me that if you’ve never had a blister, then you’ll never have a callous, either. And if your soles are too soft, then you are fucked if you ever lose your boots.
The Bathroom Chronicles
Lately, I find myself on the road a lot. Sleeping in beds unfamiliar with the shape of me, feeling along strange walls to find the light switch in the dark, waking up to wonder at a ceiling I’ve never seen before in the daylight of a different town. Wearing the same pair of pants for a week and running my fingers over a calling card in my pocket when I miss my girlfriend. Airports and a highway and little tiny soaps and MapQuest and gas stations. Always gas stations. Because no matter where you are, or how much time you have until you have to be somewhere else, you’re going to need gas, and someone always has to pee.
For me, the best gas station bathroom scenario is the single stall version with the sturdy locking door with a sign on it that says men-slash-women and you don’t have to ask for the key first. These are the bathrooms most conducive to a stress-free urination experience for me, for a number of reasons. First of all, you don’t need to ask for the key. The key for the gas station bathroom is usually somewhat wet for some reason, which I find unsanitary and disturbing, and is invariably tied or chained to a filthy germ-harbouring item which is hard to pocket or lose, such as a piece of hockey stick, a giant spoon, or a tire iron. You have to ask for the key from the either bored or harried and always underpaid guy behind the counter, and if there are two keys, one for the men’s and another for the women’s, then the cashier has either no time if there’s a line-up, or lots of time if things are slow, to decide for himself which key he should give you. Keep in mind that he is probably feeling unfulfilled about the fact that he is ten times more likely to be robbed at gunpoint than he is to get a raise anytime in the near future, and that deciding which washroom he thinks I should be using is the most arbitrary power he’s been afforded by this job since h
e caught that twelve-year-old shoplifting condoms and decided not to call the cops because at least the kid was stealing responsibly.
So this is the guy who gets to decide where I get to pee. I have learned that asking for the key to a specific wash-room will only increase the odds that he will notice that the washroom I wish to enter doesn’t match the hair or voice or footwear of the person he sees in front of him. Maybe he couldn’t give a fuck which bathroom I use, maybe his favourite sister is a dyke. But maybe his religion tells him I am damned, maybe him and his buddies almost killed a guy once for wearing a pink shirt, just in case he was a queer, just for fun. Maybe he dreamt of kissing his best friend all the way through grade eight but never did, and he hates me because I remind him of how scared he is of his own insides. I cannot know his mind. I am in a strange town, and something about me doesn’t fit. It is best if I let him decide, and don’t draw attention, or alert anyone in the line-up behind me to his conundrum.
Maybe you think I’m just paranoid, that I’m a drama queen, or that I exaggerate to make a point. I would say good for you, that your gender or skin colour or economic status have allowed you to feel safe enough that you still think the rest of us are making this stuff up. You probably don’t even realize how lucky you are to be able to not believe me when I tell you that every time I have to pee in a public bathroom, I also take a risk that someone will take issue with me being somewhere they believe to be the wrong room, depending on who they mistook me to be, based solely on that first quick glance.
I can pray for a wheelchair-accessible stall, or one of the ungendered kind with a baby-changing station in it, and then hope that no one is waiting there when I slip out, able-bodied and childless. I can cross my fingers that the ladies’ room is empty, or bolt quietly for the closest empty stall if it is not. Unfortunately, women and children have many good reasons to fear what they think is a man in their washroom. I have learned to be more forgiving of their concern, and try not to take any hostility too personally. They only want the same thing I’m looking for: a safe place to pull down their pants and pee.
I can hold my nose and use the men’s room, and if I’m lucky there will be a seat on the toilet and the guy who comes in to use the urinal will not be the type who hates slightly effeminate men, or the type who likes them a little too much. In men’s rooms, I squat and pee quickly, simultaneously relieved and terrified when I am alone.
Over the years I have learned a few techniques, like not drinking pop in movie theatres and holding my pee for probably unhealthy lengths of time. I do my best to be polite and non-confrontational, even when confronted or questioned rudely. One of my favourite methods is to enter the women’s room with a preferably ladylike companion who has been previously instructed to ask me if I have a tampon in my purse. I answer her in the most demure and feminine tone I can muster that I left my purse in the car, or that I’m down to my last pantyliner, and dash for the first open stall.
Just recently, I accidentally improvised the perfect line to deliver to the nice but confused lady that I often meet on my way out of the gas station bathroom. She was standing with her hand on the half-open door, looking first at me and then again at the sign that said “Women” on it. She was in her later sixties, and I felt bad that I had startled her, or maybe made her feel even for a moment that she was lost, or in the men’s room, where she might not be safe. That I had scared an old woman with a full bladder. Again.
“It’s okay,” I smiled and said calmly. “It’s just me.”
Thicker Than Water
Everybody always says I look just like him. Every once in a while, my grandmother hauls out the second oldest photo album from her closet and opens it on the kitchen table, next to the cut crystal bowl of sugar cubes and the matching cup that holds the little silver teaspoons. She slides the teapot aside to make room and squints over her bifocals. If I have brought a friend with me, this is the part where she makes them try to pick out which face in the faded black-and-white photos belongs to my father. My dad has three brothers. They are wearing matching plaid shirts, or bathing suits, or cub scout uniforms, or hand-me-down pajamas and holsters for their cap guns. In the background there is a Christmas tree, or a lopsided front porch, or a wall tent, or a brass statue of a war hero from the summer the old man took them to Winnipeg to see the army base and learn some respect for the soldiers who fought and died so the rest of us could sit around in our underwear and read comic books and not eat the peas or the broccoli he worked all day to pay good money for. It is always easy to find my dad’s face in the photographs. I look just like him, but without the ears. My grandmother named him Don, after his father, she tells my friend. This is the part where if it is raining or her knees are bad she will confess that she never really loved the old bastard, that he was never half the man his sons turned out to be.
More and more, I find little bits of my father in me. Not just around the eyes or in the shape of my jaw, but how I can’t stand to have less than half a tank of gas in my car, because you never know. How I hate cheap tools and dull knives and loose screws. How I own twenty pairs of the exact same underwear. How I can’t stop looking for something until I find it, even when I’m late, even if I don’t need it until the day after tomorrow. I have to know where it is. My smokes are always in my left pocket, lighter in the right. I can’t sleep if the dishes aren’t done, can’t read only half of a book, and I never turn off the radio until the song is over. I like a little bit of egg, potato, and bacon in every bite of my breakfast. It is a finely tuned ratio, constantly being weighed and adjusted throughout the meal. Nothing worse than winding up with only hashbrowns in the end. Always let your engine warm up before you drive anywhere and cool down a bit before you turn it off. You can double the life of a motor if you treat it right. Driving fast burns more gas and is hard on your brake pads. Besides, you just spend more time waiting for the light to turn green. Don’t go grocery shopping on an empty stomach. All of these things I learned from my father. Most of the time I do them without thinking of him, but every once in a while I remember; these are inherited habits. Other fathers might have saved their bacon until last, or ran out of gas, or hired someone else to build their house. Other fathers might have worn dress shoes to work instead of steel-toed boots. A different kind of dad might not have taught me how to weld. A man with sons might not have let his daughter drive the forklift.
Who would I be if he had been someone else?
A couple of months ago, I had a gig in Calgary. An all-queer spoken word show at a sports bar downtown, right in the middle of the hockey playoffs. Strange, but true. I was wearing a dark blue shirt with thin stripes, and a sky blue tie that subtly highlighted the secondary tones of my shirt. The waitress liked my stories and kept slipping me free scotch on the rocks after the show, and I had about four stiff drinks in me when this huge guy in a Flames jersey grabbed me by the necktie and pulled my nose right into his chest hair.
“Your tie is all fucked up. Where’d you learn that? Nobody ever taught you how to do a proper double Windsor? Fuckin’ disgrace. Come here, lemme show you.”
I tried to explain that I had been drinking, and was thus unable to engage in activities that required concentration or hand-eye co-ordination, plus it was dark and my tie was fine anyway, but he pulled my substandard knot loose and laid a drunken death grip on my right shoulder.
“I’m in the fucking Mafia. The fucking Mafia knows how to tie a tie. You going to argue how to tie a tie with the Mafia, or you going to shut up and watch me do this right?”
I mentioned that I had read somewhere that the real Mafia never admits that there is a real Mafia, and that Calgary wasn’t known for being a hotbed of organized crime, and that the odds were neither of us would remember any of this in the morning anyway, but he insisted.
I ended up getting a nonconsensual thirty-minute lesson in proper manly attire from a guy with one leg of his track pants accidentally tucked into his white sweat sock. He started with the double Windso
r knot demonstration and went on to sum up the billfold versus money clip conundrum for me. He was pontificating on the merits of French cuffs when his buddy interrupted to announce they were all leaving to go catch the peelers.
I woke early the next morning, dry-mouthed and blurry. I pulled a clean shirt and a different tie out of my suitcase and was amazed when my fingers remembered what tying a perfect double Windsor knot felt like. I don’t remember who taught me the wrong way to tie a tie, but I know for sure it wasn’t my dad. He never wears neckties. He taught me how to tie a boat to a dock, and a fishhook to a line. How to tie double bows in your bootlaces so they never come undone halfway down a ladder or get caught up in a conveyor belt or a lawnmower blade and end up costing you a toe. My father is a wise man. He taught me all the important knots. The double Windsor I learned from a wise guy.
Hot For Freezer
I can’t pinpoint exactly where it all changed. I know the house fire had a lot to do with it: nothing will feng shui your life faster or more thoroughly than an old-fashioned, six-hour inferno, and nothing makes you re-think your relationship to material possessions quite like losing them all. But even that aside, my priorities are all different now.
I haven’t replaced my assless chaps, and I no longer dream of owning an old BSA motorcycle. Instead, I salivate over my neighbour’s refinished hardwood floors and get hard-ons walking through the stainless steel appliance section at The Bay.