First Spring Grass Fire

by Rae Spoon

  Every time the furnace in the basement went off, it sounded like a gunshot. This time it snapped me out of not being able to move. I stood and picked up a picture of Rena, my girlfriend. I put it on top of my Bible and took a picture. Then I threw my Bible into the garbage. Not wanting my mother to discover this extreme act of blasphemy, I took my garbage out to the pail in the backyard, looked up at the sky, and dropped it in. I had made my decision.

  My father was gone. Our new home, half of a duplex, was dark brown against the huge, blue sky. I had the urge to look for blood raining down somewhere but resisted. I had picked a side. From now on I was going to talk myself out of these impulses. I was a non-believer, and no matter where I ended up for eternity, at least life itself would no longer be hell.

  With a Little Help from Grunge

  AS A TEENAGER, I NEVER considered myself grunge, but I still wanted to stand out. When I got dressed in the morning, I thought like the anger I felt inside would boil over and onto my outside. By grade nine, my V-neck vests and white Guess jeans failed to get the point across, so I started to dress all in black, ripped-up clothing. Looking at my frayed and oversized clothes in the mirror, I felt that I was getting closer to being cool. So I took it further.

  I tried to learn how to smoke. It was hard work; first, I had to find cigarettes. I smoked my first one in the bushes at a church picnic. My church friend who really liked AC/DC gave it to me when I caught her smoking and asked if I could join her. After that, I mostly found them on the ground. My sister had started smoking with her friends from school. She and I would spend our summer afternoons combing the ground at the nearby C-Train station. One day we smoked so many stale butts that she threw up on the bus on the way to our grandmother’s house. But by then we were both addicted and it was too late to quit. We started buying them from the older kids at school or at the one store in downtown Calgary where they didn’t ask for ID. Besides addiction, there was also dizziness to contend with. Too many cigarettes made me feel like I was on a ship in a storm. But at least I was cool, even though I often struggled to keep myself from weaving along Calgary’s land-locked city sidewalks.

  My sister and I were able to keep our habit from the family. A lot of my aunts and uncles smoked, but I knew our grandmother and mother would be crushed if they found out that we did. If we wanted to smoke when they were around, we would leave the house under the guise of going to get a Slurpee at 7-Eleven. Smoking is not a seasonal activity, and I’m surprised they never questioned our need for the icy drink when the temperature outside was minus twenty-five. At 7-Eleven we would buy a Slurpee and then go around the back of the store behind a dumpster, where we were hidden from view except for little puffs of smoke that looked like they came from two tiny chimneys. Afterwards we would soak ourselves with a bottle of CK1 cologne that I carried in my jacket pocket and walk back home. When I think about it, I’m surprised that I fooled myself into thinking we were hiding anything. Even so, we didn’t get in trouble, and the cigarettes made me look a lot tougher. One afternoon when I was standing outside the mall with one hanging out of my mouth, a lady shouted over her shoulder at me, “Delicate. Really delicate.”

  The day I started smoking publicly, I made a lot of smoke friends at school. They were easier to rebel with than my band friends had been. They drank beer and smoked pot instead of playing the clarinet or oboe. We had something in common besides cigarettes, too. A lot of them were bullied for being weird. The thing about Calgary was that boys didn’t really need to be gay to get called “faggot.” You only had to do something a little out of the ordinary, like grow your hair long or play the acoustic guitar. And if you were a girl, all you had to do was cut your hair short or stand up to boys and you would be called a dyke. There was one punk boy at school who had green hair; in grade ten he got beaten up so much that he transferred to the downtown school after a few months. There was danger in being different and there was safety in numbers. That’s why the straight kids who were grunge were treated the same as the gay kids. We were all fags in the eyes of our school.

  After school and on weekends, my smoke friends and I would spend all of our time together driving around in cars borrowed from their parents. We loitered in parks and alleys, and poured stolen booze into our Big Gulps. Sometimes we would even hang out with college kids who went to art school, which made me feel older than I was. But once at a party, just as I started to feel like I was blending in, a girl asked me, “What are you for Halloween … Obnoxious?”

  I don’t think we were searching for our adult selves because growing up felt like something that was never actually going to happen. So we tested the limits of our suburban lives without ever trying to escape them.

  Our antics continued even after high school was over. One night after graduation, we decided to break into an outdoor public swimming pool because we were hot and some people we had met at the bar that night had done it before. My friend Micah drove us there in his big white boat of a car. We climbed over the two-storey fence and dropped to the ground. In my underwear, I ran and did a cannonball into the pool. When the water went up my nose, it choked me just like it would have if we had gone swimming during regular hours. Why shouldn’t we be there? No one else was using it. We forgot to be quiet and loudly showed off to each other.

  “Hey Micah, check out how far I can swim under water!” I said before I plunged beneath the surface and held my breath, determined to stay under until my lungs felt like they were going to implode. I could see the blurry forms of the other swimmers lit up by the moonlight. I exploded out of the water expecting applause, but my eyes were filled with a blinding light and I could hear a loud hum from above.

  “Dude, it’s the cop helicopter!” I could hear Micah yelling as he was grabbing his clothes.

  “Shit!” I screamed, spitting water out of my mouth.

  I’d heard of the police helicopter, but I’d never seen it before. I pulled my waterlogged body out of the pool and lunged at my shoes. Everything moved slowly like I was still underwater. I threw my clothes over the fence and screamed at one of the boys from the bar to boost me over. As I fell from the top of it, I cut the palm of my hand on a piece of the fence that was sticking out. We ran across the field pulling our clothes back on and hopping on our half-on shoes.

  When we got back to Micah’s car, he drove slowly down the alley without headlights so we wouldn’t attract attention. Every motion sensor light on every garage went off as we crept past. I hung my head out the window and saw that the sky was dark and quiet again. That’s when we started laughing, first in quiet giggles and then uncontrollably.

  Micah drove us to an all-night diner that was half-way between our houses. We slouched across from each other smoking and nursing weak, bottomless coffees. I looked at my cut-up hand and grinned. It was more fun to be chased when you brought it upon yourself. I leaned my head back against the booth with a self-satisfied grin. My wet underwear was soaking through my clothes. We sure showed them.

  Sprint

  WHEN I WAS FIVE, MY mother dropped me off at school after a dentist appointment. She was young then, twenty-seven years old, and had three children. As she pulled our little silver Datsun up to the curb, I blurted out the question that had been bouncing around in my head as we drove: “Mom, what’s a fag?”

  I had heard other kids using this word the day before at the playground. My mother paused and then launched into a speech about how fags were men who were gay, which meant that they were men who slept with men, and that lesbians were women who slept with women. And that it was sinful. And that they were going to go to hell. She then took a breath and added that God made AIDS to punish gay people. I slunk low in my seat, sorry that I’d asked a question that had upset her so much. I slammed the car door and ran into my school without looking back. I was careful not to bring it up again.

  My mother had always been the fastest runner at school for her age. She’d also been a tomboy. One time she wanted to win a sprinting race so badly in
high school that she couldn’t stop at the finish line and ran into a wall, breaking her wrist. And when a boy chased her trying to kiss her in the fifth grade, she just turned around and chased him back. “You should have seen the look on his face when I turned around and he realized that I was bigger than him,” she told me, laughing.

  Her father, my grandfather, was a preacher in the little town of Bowden. She was the third of six kids in her family. Every Sunday my grandma would play music in the church and the children would sing along. They grew up in what used to be a liquor store. My mother says she was confused when they moved there; she thought it had been a licorice store and spent the first day looking for candy.

  My grandfather was a philanderer, but like in any small town, his transgressions didn’t stay secret for long. My grandmother endured his behaviour even when it became public knowledge, until he left her for a teacher. She raised her children by herself and eventually moved to Calgary with her two youngest who were still teenagers, working first for a bank and then an oil company until she retired.

  My mother was furious at her father. She hated his new wife. She tells a story about going to his house and kicking down the door with her cowboy boots because she thought he was pretending he wasn’t home. My mother’s eldest brother Carl won’t even speak to him, and ignored him at my brother Jack’s funeral.

  My mother helped raise her two younger brothers. They used to fight so fiercely that one of them threw the other through the front window of their house once; stunned for a moment, he then jumped out of the window and they continued the fight in the snow. She told me there were many times that she had to threaten to throw a rocking chair to calm them down.

  She never talked much about it, but there was a period when my mother gave up on the church, dropped out of high school, and started drinking. I only know of it because she was in a car accident when she was sixteen with a boyfriend who was driving drunk. Both of her front teeth got knocked out, and now she wears caps. She says she lost consciousness after suffering a concussion. “I could have never woken up.”

  It was a story she told often, about how the accident made her scared of being alone in the world and that it helped her to return to God. From then on she stopped her wicked ways and tried to be more obedient.

  My mother told me more than once that all she had ever wanted to do in life was to have children. That’s probably why she rushed into marrying my father when she was twenty. They met at church; she said he was charming. He played the saxophone and everyone liked him. She only found out he wasn’t as nice as he seemed after they got married when he became controlling and abusive, but she couldn’t break up her young family. She had five children with him, and stayed with him for almost twenty years.

  I faced the truth that my father was abusive before my mother did and tried to make her see it, quietly at first and, when that didn’t work, as loudly as I could. At the dinner table in front of him, I would pressure her. “Tell the truth,” I said. “You don’t love him.”

  Later, she told me that she wanted to agree with me but was too scared of him, although my outbursts helped her to realize that she had to leave him. So she secretly decided that she would leave him if he became abusive again. Which, he did, a few months later.

  When my mother left my father, it was our chance to be a different family. This time we could build something without him controlling every part of our lives. When my father showed up at our new house unannounced, I chased him away with a rake as the rest of the family applauded me from the window. We were standing up to him together.

  For a couple of months it seemed like I was going to live without so much fear. But that was the summer that I started dating Rena. She had been my best friend all spring during the last few times my father was hospitalized while I was living away from them. Then a shadow fell over everything again. When I moved into my mother’s new duplex, I hid my relationship with Rena, knowing better than to look for acceptance. I hid all of my relationships from my mother until I moved out when I was eighteen.

  I never talked to my mother about being transgendered. There didn’t seem to be a point after the way things went when I came out as gay, when I called her from a pay phone after I moved out, drunk, and blurted out a list of my sins before hanging up: “I drink. I smoke. I’m gay.”

  We spoke of it again. When my sister Karen came out to my mother some years later, she asked, “Is everyone gay?”

  My mother lost me even though she left my father to save her family. I know the divide between us will not be crossed unless she changes her entire belief system. It’s unlikely that will ever happen, but sometimes I wish she could be as tough as she was when she was a little girl. I wish she would realize that she’s bigger than what she is running from, like my sister and I had to when we came out as queer.

  Art Hanger

  FROM AS EARLY AS I can remember, during every federal election, my extended family’s lawns hosted signs for their local Reform and later Conservative party candidates. My sister and I became particularly suspicious of our grandmother’s consistent loyalty to her local Reform party MP, Art Hanger. One afternoon, as we sat on her front lawn gazing at the huge campaign sign with a black-and-white photo of him, we decided that the only explanation was that they must be romantically involved. In celebration, we took freshly trimmed pink flowers from her garden and decorated her long brown car with them wedding-style, giggling loudly. When she came outside to see what the commotion was, we chanted, “You love Art Hanger. Art Hanger is your boyfriend!” It made no sense, but we were convinced. She tried to explain that Art Hanger had a wife, but we knew that hadn’t stopped our grandfather, her ex-husband, from having girlfriends, so were not dissuaded. The joke continued for years. We teased our grandmother relentlessly every time there was an election.

  As a child I was the perfect candidate for a next-generation Conservative party member. At the tender age of ten, I was somehow able to simultaneously maintain my support for the death penalty while remaining pro-life, using well-memorized arguments that completely contradicted each other. Everything around me told me that the world was made up of two kinds of people: the sinners and the saved. Conservatives and other people who voted Reform would be saved, while those in the Liberal Party were clearly sinners. It’s easy to mark a ballot when it’s explained as a matter of avoiding hellfire.

  I am no longer a right-wing zealot, but I didn’t drop my loyalties overnight. When Rena arrived at my grandmother’s house for our last sleepover there, she noticed the election sign on the front lawn. (One of the advantages of living with Conservative relatives is their huge blind spot when it comes to queers in their midst, allowing for unlimited same-gender sleepovers.) When she got to my room, Rena looked at me with a disturbed look on her face and said the Reform Party sign out front was creepy. I laughed. “What, do your parents vote Liberal?” I asked, still convinced of the supremacy of my life-long convictions.

  “Of course. If the Conservatives had been in power when my family immigrated to Canada, we might not have been allowed in. Their platforms are messed up and racist.” She then proceeded to delicately explain why it was problematic for me to keep supporting the Reform Party if I was queer. Wide-eyed, I listened to her points and internalized them. That was the night that I parted ways with Reform Party leader Preston Manning and ended my stint as a gay conservative. I withdrew my blessing from my grandmother’s imaginary affair with Art Hanger, and I began to build as much contempt for their alliances as she would have had for mine if she had figured out the motivation behind my many sleepovers.

  I don’t talk about politics with my family. I don’t bring up my gender or sexuality either. The most I can do when I am around them is argue with their most pointed, off-base, bigoted comments—things I can’t stand to let pass, which I will not repeat here. I have never been confronted by any of them about my obvious leanings, which are so perpendicular to theirs that when I was nineteen I even moved left of Alberta, to Vanco
uver. I assume that most of my family is living inside a comfortable cocoon of denial because they have left the obvious alone. My great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, is bolder, however. The last time I voted in Alberta, she was sitting in my grandmother’s living room when I got back from the polling station. Given how overwhelmingly conservative Alberta is, voting there can be a moot exercise, but I did it because I wanted the candidate who ran for the left-leaning New Democrats to know that someone had voted for them. My great-aunt said, “I hope you voted the right way,” and winked, repeating the statement until she was sure that I knew what she meant.

  There is very little that I have in common with my family anymore, but once in a while there is some non-religious, apolitical moment that brings us together. One Christmas at my grandmother’s house, I brought a lover with me from Vancouver under the well-worn guise of “best friend.” It was late and we needed a ride to the C-Train. My cousin Casey offered. We said goodbye to my family and walked around the house from the back door toward Casey’s purple low-rider truck, parked out front under a gentle dusting of snow. He had bought it with some of his first earnings as a welder on the oil rigs, a sign he had joined the ranks of my uncles. As we were buckling our seatbelts, I looked back to the front window of the house. A crowd had gathered to watch. Even my uncle Jim, who had refused to leave his room for months, had gotten out of his bed and into his wheelchair. Casey turned the key in the ignition.

  Much to the horror of my “best friend” and the delight of my family watching, he put it into drive, but didn’t let off the brake as he hit the gas pedal, squealing his tires without the truck moving an inch. I looked up and saw my family silently cheering as they watched from the window. Casey squealed the tires again, producing a thick cloud of black smoke around the truck, and then shot into gear, racing down the road. This might sound weird, but that moment made me feel a huge amount of affection for my family. Finally, I thought, a display in front of my grandmother’s house that I can get behind.