Gender Failure

by Ivan E. Coyote

  Anyway, we were better than sisters, until the start of grade eight when they finally finished that new junior high school on Hickory Street, and for some reason Janine signed up for home economics class instead of shop like we had planned to, and it turned out it was because home-ec was what Jeanie and Sandra and Wendy and Tracey and Kerri-Anne and tall Rebecca were taking, and she was into hanging out with them more, ever since they all went horseback riding together at the summer barbecue for Janine’s mom’s work. Who knew all their moms worked together at the Department of Motor Vehicles office? What a coincidence.

  Next thing I know, Janine is bra shopping with all of them, and I am not invited because I don’t even need or want a training bra yet. So I guess the first things that ever truly came between the two of us were those breasts. They set us apart; how could they not?

  It seemed to me that those breasts of hers had appeared kind of overnight the summer after grade six, and they were a C cup, easy, by the time we hit the new junior high. Of course there were the grade nine boys there, the older boys, and of course they noticed, and come to think of it, that was the second thing that would eventually split us up: those boys. The third thing was cheerleading. Oh Mickey you’re so fine you’re so fine you blow my mind hey Mickey. Hey Mickey. There was no way I could dance to that or shake any pom-poms; just the thought of moving my hips in front of anyone much less a crowd made me freeze ice cold blood in my ears but Janine was so into it and even liked the skirt that came with it. Who was this new girl, anyway? And what had she done with my friend who only liked blue jeans or brown cords, just like me?

  The fourth and final element of our undoing was the slumber party. Every birthday for six years before that one of hers in the fall of grade eight had been the same: our moms would rent us a couple of movies and buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner. But not the fall of 1983. That year Janine decided she was having a slumber party and that all of her new friends from horseback riding and home-ec and cheerleading were coming too. We had Chinese food instead of fried chicken because the cheerleaders wouldn’t eat fried foods, and we watched Pretty in Pink instead of Monty Python, and I fell asleep early because I was tired from playing that day in a boys’ hockey tournament, which everyone also thought was weird.

  I was curled up in my Smokey the Bear sleeping bag in one corner of the rec room near the electric piano and woke up some time in the wee hours of the night. I must have heard my name being spoken in my sleep because they were all talking about me. Wendy, Tracy, Sandra, Jeanie, Kerri-Anne, tall Rebecca, and worst thing ever, my best friend Janine too, talking about me, and laughing at my flat and training-braless chest and hairless armpits. I could feel my dinner churn in my stomach and burn in the back of my throat like I had drank battery acid, and the tears welled and fell and rolled, rolled, I could not control them at all. And then it got so much worse.

  My best friend’s voice hiccupped, it was all just so hilarious, and hopped over a giggle when she told the rest of the girls that I had no hair down there yet either; bald as an egg, she said. “And you should see her thing. Her, you know. It is huge. As long as half my pointer finger, seriously, and it hangs right down past her lips and looks just like a tiny you-know-what.”

  “How sick!” someone said, then another peal of laughter, another voice, it sounded like Wendy, and I pictured her talking through her retainer and headgear; she wasn’t so perfect, either. Then I heard the swish of her, so weak from laughing at me, that she fell backwards into her dad’s down sleeping bag.

  The last time I ever took my clothes off in the open space of a women’s change room, I was thirteen years old and had just started grade eight at a new school. To this day, when in strange gyms, I still change in a bathroom stall, and I have a scar on my elbow where I split it open on the rough edge of a toilet paper dispenser to prove it.

  Janine and I didn’t hang out much after that night, and we never talked about why. She lives in Manitoba now, and runs a pizza restaurant with her husband and two kids. Still plays the flute and does a little theatre. Every once in a while she will drunk dial me on a Friday night and tell me she is an artist too, you know, that she is writing down some stories about when we were kids. I never ask her if she knows or writes about why our friendship fell apart. It was partly those breasts and partly those boys and partly that home-ec class, but for me it was mostly the way she talked about my little dick that night in the rec room in the half basement of her parents’ house on Poplar Street. I have been carrying that night with me for thirty years, and just now was the first time I ever put it down. Put it down in words.

  Girl Failure

  For the first nineteen years of my life, my gender was a like an amusement park ride that I couldn’t escape from. My mother often told me that I looked like a tiny doll when I was born. She’d say, “You didn’t have any dents on your head like the other babies. You had a full head of hair, and the nurses would fight over who got to hold you. Such a beautiful baby girl! Must have been because I have strong stomach muscles.” She would say this while patting herself on the belly.

  Being a girl was something that never really happened for me. The first day of junior high gym class, I was horrified when I realized that we were going to have to change our clothes in a locker room. The other girls collected near the rows of beige-coloured lockers and talked about shaving their legs. I dodged into a bathroom stall. I could hear them all singing a song together as I hid, pulling my t-shirt over my head. I think the song was “I Will Always Love You.” How do they all know the same song? I thought. My Pentecostal parents had only ever let me listen to Christian music.

  During gymnastics that day, I was on the parallel bars trying to hold myself up when I felt a hot ripping pain in my chest. My arms gave out. I started crying, crumpled up on the floor. The gym teacher came over and said, “You’re okay. You’re not hurt,” and pulled me up to my feet. I could feel my face turn red. One of the other girls came up to me with a wide grin and said, “Hey, it’s okay. I used to want to be a boy too.” I felt the floor giving way beneath me. This was the second time she’d gone out of her way to point out that I was bad at being a girl. She was on to me.

  A week later, we moved into the dance aerobics portion of gym class. The boys were outside playing rugby, which looked violent, but not as dangerous as moving around to dance music. I had never been allowed to dance in my life. My parents thought it was sinful. When the pumping beat of “Rhythm Is a Dancer” came on, the gym teacher started to call out moves and demonstrate them, which we were supposed to follow. I could feel my body resisting as I urged it to move to the music like a limp scarecrow. I knew that if I didn’t dance, I’d be in trouble, but if I did, I might go to hell. I thought I saw the gym teacher raise her eyebrow at me as I shimmied robotically behind all the girls who seemed to be genuinely enjoying the experience. At the end of the class, the gym teacher said, “Good job, girls! Tomorrow you’ll break up into groups and come up with your own routines.”

  That night while I was in the bathtub, I looked at my mom’s pink razor. I grabbed it and turned it over in my hand. I could still hear the girls in the locker room that day talking about shaving. I had to do something. I dragged the razor up my leg, slicing off the tiny blond hairs. But then I slipped and cut my knee. Blood dripped into the bath water. Can’t stop now, I thought. I bit my lip and continued. Afterwards my mother saw my legs covered in cuts. “What happened to you?” she asked.

  I hung my head. “I shaved my legs.”

  “But you’re only twelve,” she said. “You don’t need to.”

  “Yes, I do!” I said. She didn’t know how much I needed to do something that made me seem like a girl.

  “Well, did you use soap? Next time, use soap.” She patted my head and walked away.

  In gym class the next day, no one noticed my attempts at becoming a woman. The teacher broke us into groups. “Come up with a routine to the song I give you,” she instructed. Our group was assig
ned “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).” I had never heard the song before. We took our tiny stereo and went to a corner of the gymnasium.

  “We should start in a line,” one girl said, trying to take control, “and then we can wave our arms up and down like this. It will look like water!”

  Kill me now, I thought.

  Slowly our gymnastic routine unfolded. It involved a lot of loosely choreographed manoeuvres that we tried to do in unison. We made the routine longer by doing our moves close to each other, and then further apart. By the end of the class, I was certain that we had created a performance that would not only confirm how deeply flawed I was at being a girl, but also send me straight to hell, forever.

  The next day was showtime. One by one, groups went up and managed to perform their routines through waves of giggles. Suddenly it was our turn. I stood up and joined my group on the blue gym mat. My heart was racing. The gym teacher pressed play on our song and we stood motionless in a line, waiting for the right note to kick in before starting the routine. As the synthesizers washed over us, though, something happened to me. Something far back in my mind snapped. I can’t do this, I thought. From some distant part of my psyche, one word came to me: Run.

  I bolted out of the line and out of the gym like someone had pulled a pin out of a grenade. By the time the lead singer had started, I was halfway down the hallway. I was inside a school in the far reaches of suburban Calgary, surrounded by neighbourhoods with schools exactly like it. I had no idea where I was running to.

  Older butch sightings in airports make me feel like I am part of an army. A quiet, button-down, peacekeeping brigade that nods instead of saluting. Silver hair and eye wrinkles are earned instead of stripes or medals.

  Rosie

  I was nineteen, almost twenty, when I first met Rosie. I still had long hair when I met her; that’s how many ages ago it was.

  I was living in Vancouver’s West End, still wet behind the ears, having just arrived from the Yukon in a Volkswagen van. It was only the second apartment I ever rented, and the first time I laid eyes on Rosie it was raining, and there she was, skinny, wiry, restless-eyed Rosie right behind me on the sidewalk that led to our building’s front door with both of her arms burdened down with grocery bags. So I held the door open for her, just like my gran had taught me to.

  “Chivalry lives,” she snorted as she clunked in past me in her skin-tight Levi’s and low-cut blouse and kitten heels. Of course, I did not know the words for kitten heels. Yet.

  Except her voice was low, like an eighteen-wheeler gearing down with its engine brakes grinding on a long steep hill down from the summit, and her bare skin above her black bra was covered in five o’clock shadow and painted with now bleeding-edged and sailor-flash faded tattoos.

  I had never met any other woman quite like Rosie before. Still haven’t, really. I tried chatting her up in the laundry room a couple of times after that, but she ignored me like she hadn’t heard me speak at all. Made me think of the she-wolves back home in the Yukon, at Danny Nolan’s game farm on the hotsprings road. You could tell those wolves wanted to come up and sniff your palms and lick your fingers and take a bit of moose meat or a bone from you, but the wildness still inside them wouldn’t allow themselves that kind of trust, that kind of closeness to a possible enemy just acting like it was a friend. Those she-wolves, they would go without meat, just so as not to be disappointed by a stranger’s ill intent again, and Rosie, she made me remember those she-wolves, she sure did.

  It took me months, slowly, slowly, to get her to smile, and then chat, and then one day, accept my third or fourth invitation to come in for a cup of tea. I referred to her as “he” only once, early on, I didn’t know, I was still so small-town back then. I used the word “he” for her only once and it was barely out of my mouth when she caught it in one manicured and muscled fist and tossed it back at me. She wasn’t mad, just certain. “Don’t ever call me ‘he,’” she said calmly. “Ever. I hate it. I am a she. Her. Hers. Got it, kid?”

  Seemed simple to me. And it is. I loved her already. I wanted to make her happy. Call her what she wanted. Call her what made her happy to hear.

  Somewhere in there, she took to calling me Luigi. I don’t remember why. Luigi the bricklayer, even though I was working as a landscaper at the time. We would garbolocize at night after work, garbolocize she called it, a word she had made up, meaning I would drive my van up and down the alleys behind rich people’s houses and she would smoke her hand-rolled cigarettes with the sliding door open and look for antiques and other quality stuff that the rich people discarded. You wouldn’t believe what people would put out with the trash back then. Rosie had a one-bedroom, same as me, but she slept on a pull-out in the living room with her bird and her plants and her cat Miss Puss, so the bedroom could be used as a shop. We stripped those antiques down and refinished them with love and sweat and fancy carpenter’s wax, old school ways, she taught me, oak and teak and bird’s eye maple even, one time we found a radio cabinet with a phonograph and everything worked perfect and we shined that sweetheart up and sold it right back to the rich folks in an antique store not a block away from where we got it.

  I mostly bought weed and t-shirts with my profits, but Rosie was saving up for her surgeries and electrolysis. She hated the electrolysis, called it the never-ending story. She would come home after with her eyes rimmed red from crying. And she called me Luigi, and he, and I never asked her why. Didn’t need to. It made me happy.

  One day after about ten months of us being friends like that, eating dinners that we cooked for each other and listening to Nina Simone until I would cry and she would laugh at me and punch me in the arm because both of us avoided hugging anyone back then as best we could, my friend Archie came to town for a visit. Archie the fag from Red Deer, Alberta, a chef and a fellow tinker and traveller. He slept on my couch for five days or so, and put out his Camels unfiltered in the houseplant Rosie had given me, and left his smelly, crusty socks around and the seat up and was generally pissing me off and overstaying his welcome, but I still loved him, and he told great stories, Archie did, but anyways what happened was Rosie came down one night with some homemade baked beans for me with the bacon cooked right in because she knew they were my favourite. She hung around in the doorway, too shy to enter with Archie the stranger sprawled out on the couch behind me. She was even whispering.

  “It’s cool,” I told her. “He’s my friend. Come on in, I’ll make you some tea. I missed you these last couple of days. Archie is cool. He’s gay himself.”

  “Gay has nothing to do with being cool at all,” she said, hissing a little, and she came in and drank a cup of tea, but didn’t stay for long.

  And Archie was cool. Enough, I guess. He called her Rosie in a weird way, though, said her name like it was in quotation marks, kind of, hard to describe but I remember hoping she couldn’t hear it in his voice since she didn’t know him. Maybe he just said everybody’s name like he didn’t quite believe that they were who they said they were?

  After Rosie left too soon, Archie lit a smoke and grinned mean and big. “That was the ugliest drag queen I have ever seen in my life,” he said. “And I thought I had seen it all. Girlfriend, give it up already. Who does she think she’s fooling?”

  I remember the feeling of hating someone I loved at that moment. I had felt it before but only with my blood family. Hating Archie and his ten-percent spandex t-shirts and his Docksider shoes with no socks and his callous heart and how could he talk like that about Rosie when he should know better, since he was gay from Alberta. And I was the one who said he could be trusted, so he made me a liar by accident.

  That three-storey apartment building was sold a couple months later and torn down to build a high-rise. Rosie ended up in a single room occupancy hotel on Cordova Street, and was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer at the end of that summer. Her doctor told her she was going to have to go off her hormones and take care of her real medical condition, but s
he told me on the phone that she wasn’t going to do it. She asked a neighbour to cat-sit Miss Puss for the weekend, left him with every can of cat food she could get her hands on, and disappeared. Her friend Rachel and I opened up a missing persons case for her after the front desk guy at the hotel she was staying at called us and said we were the only two numbers she had written down and left on the bedside table before she up and bailed out on him and did we want to come and get her stuff then? “Some old tools mostly,” he said. He must have liked her. He didn’t have to do that, and most guys like that wouldn’t have. I still have some of Rosie’s tools; they were in my garage when my house burned down and so they have survived, just like I sometimes dream Rosie did, too. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the shape of her or see a footstep that looks like the way she walked in someone else on a sidewalk some days and my heart skips, but it always stills quickly. I know Rosie is dead. She wasn’t for a while when she was first gone, but she is now, I can feel it. I still remember everything I learned from Rosie. She taught me how to take something some people might just throw out, and then sweat and work and love it back to beautiful.