by Rae Spoon
Escape Hatch
I BROKE UP WITH RENA for the last time over the phone. She told me about how she had met a guy at a Take Back the Night March the evening before. He was a friend of a friend that we had casually met at Lilith Fair that summer. “He was running along the outside to keep up with me,” she said. “He was waving a black flag.”
I could hear the lump in her throat from the excitement. It was over.
I had a job at a gas station that wasn’t going anywhere either. I thought that graduating from high school would mark the end of my feelings of being trapped, but I found myself working full-time at the gas station and spending even more time in the basement of my mother’s house. To make matters worse, my best friend Micah was a supervisor at the gas station and made twice as much as me. He got to sit indoors with the sexually ambiguous cashier, and measure how much gas was left in the huge underground tanks. It seemed like a pretty cool job, but I overheard the manager explain once that women just couldn’t be supervisors; they would be too vulnerable if the gas station was ever robbed late at night. So that was that.
What I really wanted was to be a professional musician. But how? Do I go to the heads of record labels and give them the 4-track cassette demos that I had been selling out of my lunch kit in high school? No. I was seventeen; it was time to be more grown-up about things. I pondered this while washing every single window on every single car that came into the gas station.
At work the day after Rena and I broke up, I washed the car windows methodically, without my usual zest. The cashier with the ambiguous sexuality noticed my mood and invited me to stack promotional pudding packs inside to cheer me up. During a lull, she asked, “What’s wrong? You seem sad.”
My lower lip quivered and my eyes brimmed with tears. “Nothing,” I said. I was fighting to keep from sobbing, pretending to be immersed in the pudding packs that I was carefully stacking to form a pyramid. So this is being an adult? Stacking pudding packs on your knees at a gas station? I worked “feeling sorry for myself” into my job description for the rest of the day.
At the end of my shift I caught the bus back to my mother’s duplex up the hill. Summer ends in Calgary on the day the northern wind decides to turn its attention back to the prairies. It was only the middle of September, but the leaves were already turning yellow and falling onto the brown grass. The grass is brown in Calgary most of the year, except, of course, for the green patches that appear after a grass fire. I looked out the window of the bus at Nose Hill Park, the biggest park in Calgary, and where the foothills begin. I wondered to myself what it would look like if someone set fire to it. Afterwards, for a brief moment, the whole thing would be electric green.
At home, getting past my mother without crying was hard. She hovered in the kitchen and wanted to talk about Crow River College, where she was doing a year-long course in office administration. Our father had left her with nothing but four children after the divorce and she was determined to have her own career. She loved being in college and I was proud of her, but all I could do at that moment was shrug my shoulders and work my way towards the basement door.
I pounded down the stairs into the unfinished basement and ran toward my bed but couldn’t quite make it, falling dramatically onto a pile of laundry on the floor. Tears rolled down my face and onto the clothes beneath me. I could lay here forever. The phone rang. My mother called down. I performed a miracle and pulled myself up.
“Hey Rae,” the voice said. It was Terry, my friend who had been a year behind me at school. “I heard you broke up with Rena. I’m sorry … ” I bit my lip. “I was wondering if you want to go to Fields Café tomorrow? It’s your day off, right?”
Going out was the last thing I wanted to do, but I liked hanging out with Terry at the café, smoking cigarette after cigarette and making fun of each other. “Sure,” I said. “That sounds like a good idea.”
The next afternoon Terry pulled up in her dad’s brown and tan ’80s hatchback and I piled in.
“Where’s your guitar?” she asked.
“Why?”
“You should ask to play a show at the café. You could audition.” I rolled my eyes.
“The manager was there when you played the open mike a couple weeks ago. You can talk to him,” she insisted as we pulled away from the curb.
There was always a thick haze of smoke at Fields Café. It attracted a mixed crowd of high school students, university students, and adults like. The orange and green walls were covered with colourful flower paintings that were for sale. Terry and I had been going to Fields for the last couple of years because no one cared there that all we did was chain-smoke and buy coffee refills on an hourly basis.
As we walked in, Terry turned to me and whispered, “He’s here.” The manager was standing behind the counter. But I wasn’t ready to talk to him and made Terry get the coffee while I went to our favourite chairs by the window and lit a cigarette. Terry came over with two steaming cups. “Come on. Just ask him. I know he loves your music.”
“Okay. In a minute,” I grumbled. “How’s school this year?” I asked, changing the subject.
“It’s okay. Weird without all of you guys, but I’m just focusing on getting into university.”
A knot formed in my stomach. Rena was going to the university. Almost all of my friends that I graduated with were going there. On the first day of Rena’s classes, I went with her to the welcome concert on the school lawn. I felt like they were all flying away from me and soon Terry would too, but I didn’t want to join them. I wanted to play music, but all I was doing was pumping gas and cleaning car windows. Suddenly I felt myself standing up and striding confidently toward the counter. I cleared my throat, which made the manager look up from his work. “Hi, Rae. What can I do for you?”
“Hi,” I stuttered. “I was wondering … if I could play a show here sometime,” I said, nervously putting my hands in my pockets.
“I think that’s a great idea,” he said. I felt my face start to glow.
He opened his date book. “When do you want to play?”
“How about September 24?”
“You can play from eight until eleven. We’ll pay you seventy-five dollars.” That was almost twice what I made for a shift at the gas station. “You have to bring your own PA. Some people play acoustic, but your voice is so quiet, you should probably use a microphone.”
“Sure, that sounds good,” I said, trying to be casual as I turned to walk away. But as soon as I had my back to him, I was grinning from ear to ear. I had my first gig.
I spent the rest of the afternoon cutting letters out of a magazine for a poster and dubbing cassettes on my boom box in my room. The cloud from my breakup with Rena had lifted. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was moving forward toward something I wanted rather than running away from the things that I was scared of.
I put the poster in the window of Fields a few days later. I started practicing every moment I could, as soon as I got home from work and changed out of my gas station uniform. I used my four-track recorder as a mixer and my mother’s stereo speakers from the ’70s as my PA. Then I slowly put together the songs. Three hours was a lot of material, so I polished off a bunch of Paul Simon and Bob Dylan covers along with the songs I’d written in the stairwell at high school. My mother found out about the show after she heard me practicing. My family wanted to come see me, but aside from my sister, I didn’t want them there. When I wrote songs, I didn’t hide things about myself like I did at home. There was no way that I was going to come out to them before I moved out, and my songs would likely confirm any suspicions they had about me. This show was another thing I needed to hide from them, even though I longed to see my mother and my uncle John proud of me, in particular.
I got nervous as the date of my show approached. Finally, just as the last leaf of summer fell off the tree in our front yard, it was time. Terry pulled up in her dad’s car and my sister and I dragged the stereo speakers, amplifier, four-track r
ecorder, and guitar case out of my house.
By the time we got to the café, the sun had almost set. We hauled the gear in and I got to work putting together what I was trying to pass off as a PA system. My hands were shaking, my palms were sweaty, and I was cursing under my breath at the cords I was struggling to plug in correctly. Why am I doing this? I thought. What if it’s horrible? I wish Rena was here. I scanned the crowd looking for her, forgetting that I had purposely not invited her. I had to do this without her. I sat back on a stool and picked up my guitar. This is what I wanted to do with my life and it was time to start. I looked down at the three-hour set list I had scribbled onto a piece of loose leaf. First song. The one about meeting Rena. Here we go.
Then I saw them. My sister, Terry, Micah, Terry’s boyfriend Bud, and a lot of the grunge kids from high school were sitting at tables and standing at the back. There weren’t enough chairs for them all. The café was full. My confidence swelled. I closed my eyes and began. At first I sang quietly, but got louder as I went. Even though my eyes were closed, I could see something that had never been there before. It was an escape hatch with light pouring out from behind it. When I sang, I moved towards it, floating, with my arms out in front of me. This was the way out. I wasn’t sure how yet, but my voice would carry me forward to where I needed to be.
And then the song was over. I opened my eyes. The applause hit me hard, a thundering sound that I had never heard before. It was coming from my friends, but from strangers too. I felt myself grinning. The fire was inside me now.
Ice Blue Light
SMALL TALK AND TRAVEL are inextricably linked. The further I am from home, the more generalized my response to questions about where I grew up. Outside of Canada, whenever I mention Calgary, I often end up talking about the mountains instead of the prairies. The Rockies are only an hour away, and they’re more impressive than anything else I can think of to talk about.
I grew up in several houses in different suburbs. Now when I visit, the colours of the beige aluminum siding and peach stucco make me sleepy when I see them. I still remember the long waits for buses that ran infrequently but would eventually take us downtown, where we would feel free to find some kind of meaning to our lives. Calgary is a relatively young city; even some of the houses in other cities that I’ve lived in are older than my hometown. Since moving away, I have been trying, yet failing, to grow a new history for myself. Many things happened to me in Calgary, and most of them are too painful to think about.
For this reason I don’t think of Calgary when I’m homesick or feel overexposed. In those moments, I close my eyes and end up in the Rocky Mountains, at the foot of the Athabasca Glacier. As you climb past the markers of years showing where the ice has retreated, you can reflect on the passing years of your own life. A knee-level chain barrier is meant to block hikers from approaching the glacier, but most casually step over it. There are signs warning people about falling into one of the crevices. When someone does, it swallows them whole.
I once visited the Athabasca Glacier as a child, although I can’t remember when exactly. But I return to it in my mind whenever I feel unsteady. If you crouch below the glacier and look up into it, there’s an ineffable blue glow. It’s the light that travels through thousands of metres of ice before being spit out again on the grey rocks. I often find myself reflecting on that vibrant blue. It’s a childhood memory I can hide inside of instead of cower from. As far as small talk goes, I still haven’t figured out a way to say that I was born in Calgary, but my heart lives in the blue glow under a frozen lake of water on top of a mountain in Alberta.
RAE SPOON is a transgender musician/writer/workshop facilitator originally from Calgary, Canada. Rae has been nominated for a Polaris Prize, toured internationally, and released six solo albums, the most recent of which is I Can’t Keep All of Our Secrets (2012). Rae was published in the Arsenal Pulp Press anthology Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, edited by Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman, composed the instrumental score for the National Film Board film Dead Man, and will soon be the subject of a National Film Board documentary. Rae lives in Montreal.
raespoon.com