The Slow Fix

by Ivan Coyote

The subject never came up during the half-hearted heterosexual phase of my life, and the girl I finally kissed in my first year of college couldn’t pry her closet door open wide enough to tell her best friend the truth about me.

  My next girlfriend was a long-winded socialist who informed me that the institution of marriage was a capitalist invention, designed to oppress women and protect the property and profit of the ruling class. Marriage had nothing to do with love and everything to do with power, she told me. I was nineteen and she was forty, so I believed her.

  Then I met a black-haired anarchist at a squatter’s rights potluck, and really fell in love for the first time. She worked in an organic food warehouse; I was a landscaper and part-time pool cleaner. We were too busy photocopying manifestos and taking back the night and freeing Mumia Abu Jamal to talk about long-term commitment anyway. Besides, everybody knew that marriage was a sexist tool of the patriarchal state, and monogamy was a counter-revolutionary construct used by organized religion to regulate human sexuality.

  It is almost impossible for me to believe that twenty years have passed since I kissed my first girl. That we somehow found each other and flirted and fucked without the help of email or cellphones, or even voice mail. Back then, I wouldn’t have believed that one day I would be saving up for high-quality cookware and dreaming of my very own mortgage. I never imagined that my writing would pay the bills. Who could have known that twenty years later I would propose to my live-in life partner in a Ford Taurus station wagon while we were stuck in traffic on our way back from getting the Pomeranian groomed, and that both of us would find this romantic.

  I knew she was the one right from the get-go. It’s like that for us: we fit perfectly, she and I, and it only made sense. She likes the overcooked brownish potato chips and I don’t, so I save them for her. She likes the outside slice from the roast beef, and the crusty end piece from the loaf of gluten-free rice and flaxseed bread. Not to mention the fact that she didn’t dump me when we found out I have Celiac disease and it’s all my fault we have to eat stuff like gluten-free rice and flaxseed bread.

  I thought we had the usual ‘who would we get to do the honours’ conundrum already sorted out, on account of my Uncle Father Dave and all. He has married everyone who is anyone in my family. Why shop it out to a stranger?

  Last week, the good father himself was in town to have the battery in his pacemaker replaced, so naturally we took him out for dim sum and asked if we could book him in advance so as to avoid the summer rush. Imagine our shock and dismay when he shook his head sadly and lowered his pork dumpling long enough to inform us that he was already in enough trouble with the bishop as it was, and he would be unable to marry any homosexuals, even his own flesh-and-blood niece, at least until the storm around his most recent religious infraction had time to blow over. Apparently last month he had gone against Catholic doctrines and married a couple who both had MS, even though he was well aware that they could not procreate. Needless to say, he was in no position to risk another holy scolding.

  I never dreamed I would one day find myself carefully drafting a stern letter to the Pope himself. I would never have imagined there would come a day when I wanted a good old-fashioned church wedding just like the ones my mother dragged me to when I was a kid. My younger cousins say they don’t get what the big deal is, why can’t we just get the Unitarians to do it for us, or maybe just hire a pagan or a Wiccan priestess or a ship’s captain or something? What’s the difference, they say, a wedding’s a wedding, isn’t it?

  But they’re too young to remember the Jell-O salads, the fist fights and the rock ‘n’ roll-related lower back injuries, and they’re too old to need their favourite uncle to slip rum into their sodas. Kids these days.

  Teach the Children Well

  Every time I do a storytelling gig at a public school, I swear to myself that I will never do it again. I promise myself that this is the last time, that the next time they ask me I will remember that I have decided to avoid attempting to entertain large groups of teenagers for health reasons, that breathing gymnasium air makes me dangerously dehydrated, that hallways lined with lockers can cause painful grade eight flashbacks. High schools remind me of high school, I can’t help it. I graduated twenty years ago, but all it takes is the sound of the first period buzzer going off or the smell of floor wax and it is 1985 all over again, when I am skinny and self-conscious. I hate my legs, my flat hair, my flat chest, my chipped front tooth. I am scared of change rooms and crowded cafeterias. I am scared of myself, of the secret heart inside me that doesn’t beat like it is supposed to and makes me different. I don’t know I’m queer yet, but I know what happens to kids who don’t fit in.

  Every time I walk through the front doors of another high school, I remember what it was like to hide, to pretend, to practise not being different. I watch the kids, noticing the ones who avoid my eyes instead of staring. I am not here to change the minds of the many. I am here for the kids who think they are alone. The skinny boy with the long eyelashes who knew he was a fag even before they started calling him one in gym class. The Catholic girl who confesses only to her journal and prays that God will make it go away. The oldest daughter of a former beauty queen whose mother makes her see a shrink once a week ever since she got busted French kissing a girl named Marie on the couch in the rec room when they were supposed to be working on a three-dimensional model of a molecule. These are the kids I want to be seen by, the kids I want to stand in front of, unashamed and unafraid. I don’t say I’m queer, because I don’t need to. I wear cowboy shirts and big black boots and tell stories. I tell them that my writing pays all my bills, that I love my job, that they can be artists too, not just lawyers and dentists and assistant managers.

  A couple of months ago, I got an email from an English teacher asking me to come and perform in a high school in Surrey, the conservative town situated southeast of Vancouver. Surrey, with a school board prone to banning books with titles like Heather Has Two Mommies. Did I want to risk a gig in Surrey? Absolutely not. I was halfway through writing a polite letter saying that I was busy that day, when I stopped to consider what school must be like there for young homos. How could I turn my back on the queer kids who needed me most? How often was a gay storyteller even allowed inside a high school in Surrey? I said yes, and immediately started to stress out about it. I arranged to bring my friend the punk-rock cello player with me, for moral and musical support.

  A couple of weeks before the gig, I got another email from the English teacher. He explained that one of the other teachers had done some research on me and had raised concerns about “inappropriate sexual content” in my work, and would I mind sending copies of all the stories I was planning to read so that the staff could make sure I wouldn’t say anything that might offend anyone? There would be a couple of Mormon kids in the audience, he added, and the school wanted to avoid any trouble.

  I took a deep breath, smoked two cigarettes, and called him on the phone. I liked him, and I knew he meant well. I told him that the reason I do gigs in high schools is to show the kids that being an artist is a viable career option, to inspire them to believe that writing or painting or playing an instrument is just as important as algebra or volleyball. I told him that I would never do or say anything that would jeopardize the chance to bring other artists into his school, and that I was there to encourage creativity, not homosexuality. I told him that I wouldn’t say anything too gay, but that I looked queer and if looking queer was also against school rules then I could recommend another talented storyteller who also might offend the Mormon kids because he is from the Dogrib First Nation and believes in magic and different gods, but at least he was heterosexual.

  So the cello player and I did two one-hour sets in a Surrey school last week. I told wholesome stories, and she swore once in one of her songs, but none of the teachers batted an eye, they were so relieved that we didn’t bring up how obviously queer we both were. The principal gave us each a mug and a matching pen,
and a thank-you card with a cheque inside.

  That night we both received MySpace messages from the girl with the purple brush-cut who sat in the front row during the afternoon set. She was smiling in her picture, her cheek pressed up against her girlfriend, who had orange hair and a nose ring. She was just writing to tell us how much she loved our show; that it was the best thing her school had ever seen. I clicked on her profile. It said she was sixteen, a lesbian, and an aspiring writer.

  Many Little Miracles

  It is a bit of a miracle that I was there at all. It was an accident that almost didn’t happen, a detour that I didn’t mean to take. I was there only because I said yes, I would love to come and tell stories in a small town in northern Ontario. What I meant to say was no, I do not want to take a five-hour flight followed by a six-hour bus ride to do a one-hour gig. But I have never excelled at the fine art of saying no, so instead I asked for too much money and hoped someone in Ontario would just say no for me. My bluff was called, and I was forced to say yes, because of the money. Yes, I would be happy to go to Port Elgin, Ontario, and entertain 200 gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered members of the Canadian Auto Workers Union during their annual “Pride in the Workplace” conference. I would fly home from Calgary on a Thursday afternoon and take a plane to Toronto first thing Friday morning. Port Elgin was too far, and I was tired of the road.

  I should have stayed home and mowed the lawn. I had a week’s worth of emails to answer, and a garden full of weeds to pull. I missed my dogs. I almost didn’t go. If I were even marginally better at saying no, I would have missed the whole thing. If I had been invited by a group of overzealous academics from the women’s studies department, or a subversive high school drama teacher, or even an earnest collective of liberal librarians, I would have stayed home, done my laundry, and made a giant pot of chili.

  But I was curious. I had never met a queer auto worker before. Fags who built Fords. Transsexuals who assembled transmissions. Were they built tougher than big-city gay waiters were? Were they harder than hairdressers, more calloused than a carpenter dyke’s hammer hand? Could they get me a discount on a Ford Focus station wagon? Did they get a union job on the assembly line right out of high school just like their dad and older brother did? Did they dream of this job, or did they drop out of college and into dark blue coveralls? Did they ever lay awake in bed at night and wonder how many more brand new Trans Ams the future world will actually need, or did they sometimes wish they owned a Toyota or one of those hybrid things the yuppies like to feel good about driving, not for looks or reliability, but because of the price of gas these days?

  The LGBT members of the CAW were there to organize, to strategize and fight for the right to work alongside their straight union brothers and sisters without fear or harassment. Together they imagined a workplace where they didn’t have to lie or leave out parts of their lives when the guy who worked beside them asked what they got up to over the long weekend. They dreamed of a day when the truth didn’t cost them a promotion, a day when they could walk all the way across the parking lot alone without needing to look over their shoulder to see if anyone was following too close behind, even after a graveyard shift.

  They were there to fight for all of these things, and I was there to entertain them. I wore my steelworkers T-shirt to show some solidarity, but one of the organizers took me aside and told me to change because auto workers and steel-workers had been in a longstanding feud over fundamental beliefs that were too complicated to get into, and it was a sore spot that I would be better off not bringing attention to.

  I made a muscle-bound leather daddy who was the shop steward in a muffler factory cry like a baby when I told the one about my nephew the crossdresser. I sold a book to a man who leaned across the table to tell me in a low whisper that he couldn’t read, and that his boyfriend had promised to read my stories aloud to him in bed before they fell asleep at night.

  Later, in the bar, I met a sixty-year-old woman who had worked on an assembly line since just after her sixteenth birthday, and had been forced into early retirement by a twenty-eight-year old manager with a Master’s degree in squeezing blood from stones. When I asked her what she was going to do next, she pretended she hadn’t heard my question, then whipped out her gold Visa card and ordered another round of tequila shooters for everyone at the table.

  There was a painfully shy transwoman sitting quietly alone in the corner of the bar, her shoulders slumped forward in an attempt to shrink some of her six-foot frame into the smaller body it looked to me like she wished she lived inside of instead. She mouthed the words to the tinny karaoke songs, and sipped ginger ale through a thin pink straw. The leather daddy finished off his beer and strutted across the room and asked her to dance with him. When she looked up at him, I saw the lines that framed her lipsticked mouth stretch into a beautiful grin that revealed a face that seemed suddenly thirty years younger, when her life was simpler and less lonely.

  “How could I say no to you?” she purred, and covered her mouth with one palm.

  I watched the two of them slow dance to “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette, and it was such a beautiful sight, him in his GWGs and her with a run up the back of one leg of her nylons, that I had to just thank providence that somehow I ended up being there to see it.

  Ramble On

  I love how once you hit Lillooet, 250 kilometres northeast of Vancouver, the big-city dank disappears into thin dry air somewhere halfway around a corner into the past in your rearview mirror and all of a sudden the smell of sage and tinder dry desert tells your nostrils you have officially left the city.

  I love the muted sand and burnt bark brown of the ponderosa pines and the cerulean shine of a sun that will burn the mercury into the thirties later in the day. But right now it’s dawn and the dew still shines cold and silver in shiny beads on the hood of my brand new Ford Ranger Supercab pickup truck with suicide doors and Sirius satellite radio. The only thing that could make this day any sweeter would be a little sixteen-foot travel trailer to tow behind, which I also bought last week, full of mismatched seventies dishes and the smell of bacon cooking. I immediately mounted two sparkling new propane tanks like fresh dentures on the front hitch, put on a pair of brand new biased ply tires, and hit the road Monday afternoon, sixteen hours after I had wrapped up my last gig for a month and mere minutes after the mechanic on the corner finished re-packing the wheel bearings on my trailer with fresh clean road grease and my laundry was close enough to being dry.

  This has been a dream of mine since I was eleven and my Great Uncle Jack, my dad’s mom’s favourite of her three brothers, took me and my husky BuckBuck camping at the warm springs outside of Atlin, BC, for a week. Those seven days smack in the sunburnt stretch of late summer in 1980 are etched epic into my childhood mythology: for once I was the only kid, which felt light years away from my usual reality, where I was the eldest of over twenty cousins and the chronic babysitter and default fall guy. I was always the one who should have known better and/or been setting a proper example whenever one of my many charges came back to the house bleeding or busted for shoplifting Jelly Tots or Lick-Em Stix from the corner store.

  My Uncle Jack’s birthday was August the twenty-third, and mine was the eleventh. We cooked pork chops and Minute Rice and canned cream corn every night, plus bacon and eggs of course for breakfast and either Lipton Chicken Noodle soup in a box or Zoodles and white bread toast for lunch, depending on what we felt like, since it was our birthday month and who would be any the wiser since it was just the two of us. We never made broccoli or anything like that because my mom wasn’t around to tell me to eat something green and his mom, my great grandma Monica, who was never a big fan of vegetables herself, died three years earlier at the ripe old age of 100 and who knows, maybe that’s where we both got our broccoli aversion from, but it didn’t seem to have done Great Grandma Monica any harm, so what the hell. Besides, skipping the greenery just leaves room in your stomach for another pork ch
op, or so went our logic.

  I slept in my very own pup tent and at night I could hear wild horses grazing in the meadow all around me and I was scared for sure, but never enough that I had to wimp out and go sleep in the trailer like my little sister Carrie would have done if she wasn’t back home in Whitehorse going to Boys and Girls Club all week long to play badminton and make stupid stuff out of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners because my mom couldn’t take her to the office anymore since her promotion, and unlike myself, Carrie tended to get bored hanging around my dad’s shop and was always under his feet whenever he turned around, whining that there was nothing to do.

  I spent all week catch-and-releasing frogs and tadpoles, reading Hardy Boys novels from the nickel bin at the Sally Ann, and perfecting the finishing work on my tree fort, which was cleverly camouflaged in the willows on the other side of the warm springs so I wouldn’t have to share it with any of the American tourists’ kids who came and went every couple of nights or so.

  But what I remember most about that camping trip was that Uncle Jack let me go shirtless all day every day, saying that there was no difference between my chest and that of a little boy’s, at least for another couple of years or so, not to mention it was hot, and since when had they passed the stupid law that said little girls had to wear shirts while swimming in the back country anyway?

  So I slipped through a week of summer bare-chested, sunburnt, blissed out, and feeling blessed, and I have wanted a truck and trailer of my very own ever since. Mine is a ‘71 Skylark, tan and white with a brown and orange interior and harvest gold appliances. For some reason, it reminds me of growing up in the seventies. Something about the smell, I think, or maybe it’s the beanbag ashtray. It feels like freedom, like I can go anywhere and still be at home. Like I own the roof over my head: it’s not rented from someone else, and best of all, it moves. If my neighbours aren’t friendly, I can pull out and go find a friendlier place to mooch free wireless from. I can eat pork chops every night for a week if I feel like it. I can go topless. I can smoke in my sleeping bag and burn candles almost too close to the curtains and leave the dishes if I want and listen to Led Zeppelin II over and over again and no one will complain or change it to The Cowboy Junkies. I can go for days without wasting valuable stomach space digesting anything green. Hey, Uncle Jack lived like this for years, and it didn’t hurt him any. Besides, I always wanted to be just like him when I got old enough to not have to ever grow up.