by Ivan Coyote
Any lingering doubts that the fellow sitting next to me was as gay as a cross-Canada flight was long dissipated immediately upon take-off. As the plane groaned against gravity and left the tarmac behind, he batted his eyelashes in a dramatic panic. Then when the plane bumped and dipped through a bit of turbulence as we rose above the cloudbank blanketing Vancouver, his hands escaped his lap altogether and fluttered around his face like two terrified hummingbirds. That is when I noticed that his hands were so white and soft and nubile they looked like they would have belonged better on a marble church statue of a cherub. His pretty boyfriend patted his lover’s thigh in sympathy, and then promptly put on his complimentary headphones and dialed up some cartoons on his little TV screen.
So of course we get to talking. It is both true and somewhat tragic how much of my human interactions take place in, on my way to, or waiting for an airplane as of late, but there it is; I like to meet people and find out what they are about and how life has been treating them.
This guy was a lawyer and his boyfriend was an art student studying painting, which was cool with the lawyer, who could afford to bring home the bacon for both of them if they were to need bacon, but from the looks of them, the lawyer was more likely to be bringing home the bacon-flavoured textured vegetable protein-based meat-free substitute, were I to guess, which I try not to do.
I don’t remember how it came up, but in addition to being a young, gay, hip, well-educated, and well-to-do urban professional, all of which seemed fairly in character to me, he was also a card-carrying member of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, a staunch fan of none other than Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself, and a self-identified libertarian.
I had heard of such a creature and read first-hand accounts by others about their encounters with right-wing gays, but he was the first one I had ever actually came face to face with in the wild. I guess I have been sheltered for years by life in East Vancouver, what with the west coast being a rather hostile environment for conservatives in general, and the gay ones being especially rare, often avoiding danger by camouflaging themselves as young gay liberals.
But this guy was shameless, practically flaunting his neo-conservative plumage in broad daylight.
Now I know a lot of queers that would have just assumed they were sitting with the enemy, brushing thighs with his pink-hued designer sheep’s clothing, but I was fascinated. Descending proudly from a long line of Yukon frontiersmen with heavy survivalist tendencies and plenty of cash and ammunition buried somewhere on their property as I am, I was curious as to how a velvet-palmed lawyer living in a condo boasting its own Second Cup on the ground floor could self-identify as a libertarian. This fellow was as queer as a tulip in a cornfield, and obviously didn’t even shovel his own driveway, much less own a decent generator in case of natural disaster or war or the eventual collapse of our bloated and ineffective government infrastructures.
At least we could both agree on gun control, but for very different reasons. Him because he believes that all persons are the absolute controllers of their own lives and should be free to do whatever they wish with their persons or property, provided they allow others the same liberty, and that a limited government is necessary for the maximization of such liberties. And me because I travel a lot and sometimes strangers want to kill me for no other reason than that they think I am in the wrong bathroom, and the next time a redneck with a moustache chases me and my girlfriend for over an hour on a logging road in the bush just because he doesn’t like the look of us, I don’t want to be the only one without a firearm, just in case. Plus, next spring my neighbour Pete said he’d take me wild turkey hunting.
Of course I had to ask the obvious question. Didn’t he have trouble aligning his love of Stephen Harper’s politics with his own personal, I don’t know, gayness? He admitted that he and old Steve didn’t see eye to eye on everything, of course. But he lost me when he started in about global warming being only one theory, and I told him he needed to get his ass up north if he wanted evidence, and then all of a sudden it was time to return our tray tables and seatbacks to their upright position.
I kept his business card, just in case, though. You never know when you’re going to need a corporate lawyer these days. Especially one with powerful friends.
Coffee Club
When I first rented the little yellow house on the river back in September, I thought my first winter in a small Ontario town might take some getting used to. I thought that as the nights got longer and the dark got colder and the snow got deep enough, I would miss big city life and long for urban luxuries like lattés and dim sum and gay bars and street-lights, but I don’t.
My favourite thing about living in Fitzroy Harbour, Ontario, population 600, is coffee club. Coffee club meets at eight o’clock every morning seven days a week except for Sundays in the winter, when everyone sleeps in a little bit and we start at nine. Rain, snow, or shine, we cluster around a well-worn wooden table in the back room of the Harbour Store, our post office-slash-liquor-slash-video-slash-corner store. From two to eight p.m., the back room of the Harbour Store doubles as a pizza and burger place and a second home and first part-time job for the town’s crop of baggy-panted bored teenagers, but in the morning, it is where we gather to drink drip coffee and tell stories.
Not everyone is there every day. Sometimes the fireman is working nights or the cattle farmer is busy with a sick calf or the retired plumber’s knee is too sore to risk the icy sidewalks. The old guy with the snowplow comes late when there’s a blizzard, and his wife skips Sundays to go to mass, but there is always someone around. We tell jokes and do the crossword in the Ottawa Sun together and talk politics. Shooting the shit, I believe, is the technical term for what it is we do.
Membership comes with benefits, such as free turnips and septic tank advice and someone’s mother’s shortbread cookies and a never-ending round of talk. For any storyteller worth his or her salt, it’s basically a dream come true. This morning, I dragged myself out of a January slumber to don my down parka and big black Sorel snow boots to tromp the two snow-blown blocks up the street, and as always, it was worth it. I just got back from a gig in Florida, so I had alligator sightings and a New Year’s Day swim in the Atlantic Ocean to recount to everyone. There was hockey talk of course, and the morning paper to skim through and discuss. This morning’s Sunshine Girl had breasts that looked bigger than her head, a ratio even the fellows agreed was disturbing. There was a tearful moment and a heartfelt round of condolences when the engineer showed up for the first time since his elderly mother passed two days after Christmas. The salesman’s thirteen-year-old son moped in to stay warm until the school bus showed up, certain that his life was unbearable ever since his school’s snowboarding field trip was cancelled on account of the freezing rain we got last night. Carole, his mother, kissed him goodbye in front of everyone, and then after he had left for school, she took off her toque and showed us that her hair had started to grow back in after the chemotherapy, and we all said another silent prayer in our heads for her and her family.
By nine a.m, almost everyone had left for work or headed into town to pick up groceries, except for the self-employed writer, the lady who works nights at the store, Carole who is off work at least until the next round of chemo is over, and one of the twins.
It took me awhile to be able to tell the twins apart, until someone pulled me aside and explained that one of the two big burly brothers had a goatee and the clean-shaven one was gay; that was how to keep them straight, no pun intended. So Dave, the gay twin, starts complaining about being single for way too long. Sharon, the lady who works nights at the store, listened and nodded for a bit, and then piped up that her sister, who lived just a couple of towns over, happened to be recently single too, through no fault of her own of course, and maybe she could introduce the two of them, you never know, right, maybe they would hit it off. Dave blinked a couple of times and then looked at me, and then back to Sharon.
�
�But I’m gay. Didn’t anyone tell you by now?”
Sharon’s jaw dropped, then she fumbled around with it for a split second, and picked it back up again.
“Oh Dave, I didn’t know,” she said, swallowing hard. “I’m so sorry.”
Dave crossed his big eyebrows, looking confused.
Sharon waved both hands in front of her, a bit panicked and backpedaling. “I mean, not that I’m sorry you’re gay, that is not what I meant to say, I mean ... what I meant was I’m sorry I didn’t know, how embarrassing, not that there is anything wrong at all with you, I mean please don’t get me wrong, it is totally okay to be gay.”
I tried so hard not to lose it, because she was trying so hard not to be rude, to be nice, to say the right thing, so it seemed the least I could do was not fall off my chair laughing at her, but then Dave placed a forgiving palm on her shoulder and said, “I know there’s nothing wrong with being gay, Sharon. I’m the gay one, remember?”
I nearly shot Tim Horton’s brand drip coffee out both nostrils.
That’s the thing about living in a small town. There is only one place to get yourself a coffee. Somehow everybody just has to get along. And this always makes for a great story.
Broccoli and Cheese Sauce
With some people you can just tell, even from a distance. Maybe it was how his shoulders slumped in a kind of tired sigh, or the slow way he put one old foot in front of the other as he walked toward us. Whatever it was, I could see it in the shape of him, even from a hundred feet away. Somehow this guy had lonely written all over him.
I was in Florida for a gig, and my friend took me on a little nature walk to see alligators, which for a Yukon kid is kind of like spotting a dinosaur, they were that foreign to my Northern eyes. We were meandering along the board-walk that led back to where we had parked the car when my friend’s dog approached the old man’s aging cocker spaniel and exchanged sniffs and wags.
Dogs are good for that. They can get two strangers talking who otherwise might cross the street to avoid each other. We exchanged the usual information: what kind of dog is that, how old is he, I have an old dog myself at home, her hips are sore in the winter but not so much since the glucosamine tablets, you should try them they really work, stuff like that.
The man seemed so eager to talk that I pulled out a cigarette and rested one elbow on the hand railing, settling myself in for a bit of a chat.
“Canadian, huh? Never been, but there sure are a lot of yous living in the trailer park where I’ve got my rig. Me and the missus retired here from New Hampshire in 2000, we used to have a little house in Sarasota, but she passed this last February. The place was too big for just me and the old dog here, we were rattling around inside that house alone, so I sold it and bought myself a little travel trailer.”
It was the first week of January, but he hadn’t said that his wife passed away last year, or a year ago. He said February. I knew what that meant. He was still counting his loneliness by the month. I bet if I asked him, he could still tell me how many days it had been.
I travel a lot, and over the years I have become an expert at talking to strangers. Most of them just want to talk, mostly about nothing, the weather, their kids, their old dog’s hips, how often Air Canada has lost their luggage, that kind of thing, just to pass the time.
But there was something about the watery way his eyes caught mine and held them. I just knew.
“How are you doing?” I asked him softly.
“Today we’re great, aren’t we, boy?” He ruffled the fur on top of the spaniel’s head. “Nothing like the sun to keep the old bones happy.”
He thought he was answering the question most people ask, the kind of polite question you are never supposed to answer with the actual truth. So I asked him again.
“I mean, how are you really doing? It must have been tough for you, these last couple of weeks, getting through the holidays for the first time. How are you really doing?”
His eyes opened wide, like he was seeing me standing in front of him for the first time. Then he shook his head a little, as though he couldn’t quite trust his ears, making the skin of his old cheeks jiggle in disbelief. It took him a minute to compose himself. I saw his shoulders relax, and then he let out a long breath.
“To tell you the honest truth, I’m having a real hard time eating my vegetables. I make a mean fish chowder, and a pretty decent cheese and onion bread, but I’m at a loss when it comes to cooking vegetables.”
It’s strange, the things you miss. Me, I miss the way she used to wear her socks to bed and then pull them off with her toes. I would find them hidden in the sheets when I made the bed in the morning, crumpled into little black balls, covered in dog hair. It used to drive me nuts, but not anymore, in retrospect. Now it seems kind of adorable. I miss her dirty socks, and how she never took out the recycling. He misses the way she made him eat his vegetables.
“Can I give you a bit of advice? From a seasoned bachelor?”
“Please. Please do.”
“Purple cabbage.” I told him. “Purple cabbage is the very best vegetable companion a bachelor could ever have. It’s cheap, and you can keep one of those suckers in the crisper for two months and still make coleslaw. Full of fiber. And cheese sauce. You’d be surprised how much broccoli you can trick yourself into eating if it’s covered in cheese sauce.”
He nodded, his brow knitted in concentration, like he was trying to remember what broccoli looked like.
“My wife liked cabbage a lot. Used to grate it on top of a salad. Cheese sauce. Hmm. I’d forgotten all about a good cheese sauce.”
We chatted a bit more, until he glanced at his watch and realized he was almost late for lawn bowling back at the trailer park.
“I should be off. I can’t be late, or old Mrs Simpson will get her panties all up in a knot. I don’t know why we have to be so punctual, we’re all retired for heaven’s sakes, but God help me if I show up late for lawn bowling. It really was a pleasure talking to you.”
He shook my hand. His was dry and still calloused. He used to work for a living, I could tell.
“You too, sir. I mean it. It was nice to meet you. Things will get easier. You’re going to be just fine, you know.”
“Yes,” he said, almost under his breath, bending over slow and careful to clip the leash onto his dog’s collar. “I suppose I will.”
You Are Here
ONE: DOWN THE TWO MILE HILL
It used to be that the only way to get to downtown White-horse from the Alaska Highway was by going down the Two Mile Hill. The story I always heard was that the Two Mile Hill is called that on account of how it’s two miles long from the highway cutoff right down to Main Street, but just recently someone cornered me in the Capital Hotel at happy hour and informed me that actually, the Two Mile Hill got its name because the hill itself is only one mile long coming down, but it sure feels like two on your way back up. Who knows the real story, since the guy who told me that last bit was drunk at the time, plus almost everyone in his family is known to be playing a long game with a short hand, as my grandma would say.
However it came by its name, the Two Mile Hill wraps itself like a bent elbow around the clay cliffs that frame the west side of downtown Whitehorse; the old part with all the little wooden houses built by the soldiers in the forties so they would have a place to live when the highway was finished. The clay cliffs, well, I guess the clay cliffs are called the clay cliffs because they’re made from real clay, cool and soft and grey and silky between your fingers when it rains.
A couple of years ago, someone from the government who didn’t grow up here and so didn’t know any better decided that the Two Mile Hill wasn’t metric enough for the times, and they tried to change the name of the hill to Jack London Boulevard. They put up a new sign and everything, but only the tourists ever called it Jack London Boulevard, and nobody else knew what you were on about if you said turn down Jack London Boulevard, or I was driving up Jack London Boulevard
one day, and so it never stuck. When I went home last Christmas, I noticed that they had given up on the whole Jack London Boulevard thing, and an even bigger sign had been erected that said Two Mile Hill, just so people knew to keep on calling it what they had been calling it all along.
It’s stuff like this that makes my dad want to bury his cash in the ground behind his shop, just so the government won’t get it and spend it on fancy signs for old roads with new names that nobody uses.
“Wonder how much that fiasco set the taxpayers back?” he said, gearing down for the curve halfway down the hill and steering with one elbow, so he could light a smoke.
It used to be that at the bottom of the hill on the left hand side of the road into town there was a marsh, all full of willow bushes that flashed the silver side of their leaves when the breeze picked up and scruffy pine and spruce trees reaching their long roots down into the permafrost for a foothold to fight the wind from. The marsh filled the space between the river that ran alongside my hometown and the road that led into it, lush and green by northern standards, full of birds and antique cans and bottles left there by the old-timers, the dreamers and the drunks that lived down by the river before the city tore their shacks down and made them pay taxes and built a proper dump to put all the empty bottles in.
I used to drive past the marsh every morning at five o’clock, on my way to work to serve breakfast to busloads of retired Americans on their way to see their forty-ninth state. I worked the five-thirty a.m. to one-thirty p.m. shift in the dining room of the Travelodge Hotel for four summers, and on weekends in the winters. Everyone still called the hotel the Travelodge, even though the new owners had bought the hotel years ago, and they renamed it the Sheffield and printed up different menus and made us wear sea-foam green uniforms instead of the usual black pants and white shirts. Then they put in a buffet breakfast table so they could feed more busloads faster, which meant less tips for us since the customers got up and filled their own plates, all we had to do was bring coffee and water and prune juice and the bill and clean up after them. Then an American chain bought the hotel and called it the Westmark, just like their other hotels all over Alaska, and we had to wear gold name tags and bring around a little tray of sour cream and chives and fake bacon bits for the baked potatoes, and say things like, “Welcome to the Westmark Whitehorse, gateway to Alaska, the last frontier. Would you care to look at our menu, or just help yourself to our breakfast buffet?”