by Ivan Coyote
This book is dedicated to Richard Spencer, Luna Roth, and the one and only Shelley Frankenstein, for putting it to music. I would like to acknowledge the support and tireless work of Blaine Kyllo, Brian Lam, and Robert Ballantyne at Arsenal Pulp Press, for going above and beyond so many times for me. I would also like to thank the other editors I have had the opportunity to learn from: John Burns of the Georgia Straight for his keen eye and kind heart, Teresa Goff at the now sadly defunct loop magazine, Yvonne Gall at CBC Radio, and Gareth Kirkby at Xtra! West.
I would also like to thank my guardian angel, who insists on remaining anonymous.
“Mavis for Prime Minister” first appeared in loop magazine. “Weak Nine” first appeared in CRANK magazine. An earlier version of “More Beautiful” first appeared in the Georgia Straight. “Stupid Man,” “Older Women,” and “Fish Stories” were originally Loose End columns that appeared in Xtra! West. “Fear of Hoping in Las Vegas” was earlier published in Xtra! West, a multi-media version was on CBC Radio’s 120seconds.com, and it also appeared on-line on nerve.com.
[THEN]
The Queen Mother
It Doesn’t Hurt
My Hero
Just Reward
Three Strikes
[NOW]
Clean and Sober
Mavis for Prime Minister
The Safe Way
Makeover
The Test
Weak Nine
Stupid Man
Older Women
Fish Stories
[THERE]
Trick Road Trip
Leave It to Beaver
More Beautiful
Fear of Hoping in Las Vegas
[THEN]
THE QUEEN MOTHER
My grandmother, Florence Daws, born Florence Lawless, keeps a newspaper clipping carefully folded into a tin in the right drawer of the dining room bureau.
The box also contains old photographs, cards, birth and death certificates, her passport, the brass door knocker that family legend has it my grandfather – when he was a young guard during the war – stole off of Winston Churchill’s back door, and as-sorted locks of hair and baby teeth.
But it is the newspaper clipping that begins this story. It was the front page of the Yukon News, dated February 19, 1969. It is a photo of my mother shaking hands with Jean Chretien, our Prime Minister.
Our Prime Minister now, of course, not then. Back then he was just a minister of something or other, probably not all that important or he wouldn’t have been in the Jim Light Arena in Whitehorse, Yukon, at the Ice Capades shaking hands with a nineteen-year-old girl.
Not that my mother was just any girl. She wasn’t yet my mother, of course, but a young maiden who had just been crowned Rendezvous Queen. She is smiling prettily at him, and her tiara is sparkling. Jean Chretien is not looking at her, but at the cameraman, smiling from only one side of his face, as he still does today.
Rendezvous is quite a big deal to Yukoners, even now.
Rendezvous is our winter festival, held each February since the Gold Rush, they say, to fend off cabin fever and give frostbitten and exhausted miners a chance to cut loose.
We have flour-packing and log-sawing contests, dog sled races, sourdough pancake breakfasts, a longest beard contest for the fellas, and a hairy leg contest for the ladies. It is winter in the Yukon, after all.
We have the Keystone Cops, who tow a cage on wheels behind a Studebaker and blow whistles and burst into pubs to arrest men without facial hair and ladies without garters. Then they drive you around town in the cage with their sirens on until you donate money to charity, and then drop you off at a different bar.
People get very drunk and play pool with toilet plungers.
And then, of course, there is the Rendezvous Queen.
Every business in town sponsors a candidate, who then must demonstrate her ties to the community, sell tickets that pay for prizes, perform a talent, and make a speech on what she would do if elected.
Potential Rendezvous Queens must also be female. And unmarried.
The winner gets a blue sash and a tiara, copious bouquets of flowers, and a trip around the world.
My mom also won a fur coat and a food processor.
Mere weeks after her victory (her queenly duties had thus far consisted only of shaking hands with Jean Chretien, announcing the skaters at the Ice Capades, cutting the ribbon on the new Robert Service wing of the museum, and selling tickets for the Shriner’s lottery at the mall), my mother was tragically forced to step down as queen, which meant giving back her fur and appliances and turning over her tiara to her runner-up. Needless to say, she didn’t get the trip around the world either.
She was pregnant, you see. Four months along and due in August, and thus engaged to my somewhat shell-shocked father, who was working in a bridge-building camp somewhere near Teslin Lake.
After a brief round of rumours, they were married in June. My dad poured the foundations for our house on Hemlock Street, bought a welder and a flatbed truck, and gave up his dreams of returning to New Zealand to work on the swordfish boat.
My mom’s nemesis, Brenda Fraser, stepped up and became Rendezvous Queen. She broke three toes on her trip around the world when she slipped getting out of a gondola in Venice. She returned to Whitehorse early and was married that summer and pregnant before the leaves fell.
Every once in a while, when me and my aunties and gran get to smoking cigarettes and drinking black tea and telling stories, we pull out the tin box and sort through the photos.
Every time we do I hear the story of how my mom was Rendezvous Queen once upon a time and then had to give back the crown and the fur and the trip, on account of how she was pregnant with me.
They tell me this like I am somehow guilty of stealing this honour from her, like it is somehow my fault that I came along and she was prematurely stripped of her tiara, and the beauty queen dream of every girl.
Every girl except me, of course.
I smile at how beautiful and radiant she looks in the newspaper clipping. How rosy-cheeked and long-lashed and glowing. How pregnant with me she looked.
Thirty years later, in 1999, someone decided that for this year’s festivities they were going to do a Rendezvous Queen retrospective. They were going to contact as many previous queens as they could, throw them a dinner, and take their pictures wearing their sashes and altered versions of their royal dresses.
My mom was contacted by a Rendezvous volunteer, someone who was not a Sourdough as we say, as in, not a real Yukoner, also referred to as someone from outside. She was sent an invitation, got her hair done, and bought a new dress. She had made her own gown back in ’69, but she had stopped sewing years ago.
A couple of days before the dinner she got a phone call from Brenda Fraser, her runner-up and fur inheritor. Brenda informed my mother that there had been a mistake, that the volunteer had been from out of town. That the volunteer had gotten my mom’s name off of an old list. That the volunteer couldn’t possibly have known what of course my mom and Brenda knew too well, which was that my mom had only been queen for a couple of handshakes and an Ice Capades and had been forced to step down because Rendezvous Queens were supposed to be single young maidens and my mother had found herself in the family way.
My mom and dad had been split up more than two years, and my mom had transformed herself from a recent divorce´e who was concerned about who would mow the lawn into a still beautiful bachelorette who could light her own pilot light and operate a power drill with confidence and finesse.
“What a crock of shit,” she told Brenda firmly, but politely. “We are approaching a brand new millennium here, and you are not going to tell me I can’t go to the reunion because I got pregnant thirty years ago. It is
archaic and small-minded to suggest it. Besides, I won fair and square. As far as I’m concerned, you owe me one fur coat and a food processor, sweetheart.”
My mother went over the head of Brenda the beauty queen and talked to the Rendezvous board of directors. They were sheepish and apologetic, and insisted that of course she could come. She was, after all, the reigning Rendezvous Queen of 1969 and besides, hadn’t she gone on to make quite a success of herself, and by the way, how is your daughter?
Time has a way of getting revenge, especially on beauty queens. I saw the pictures. My mom wore a pale blue dress, with a simple corsage, and looked every inch a royal lady.
Brenda Fraser, on the other hand, was frumpy and puffy in her pale green number, with the blue sash stretched across her middle like the string on a ham.
My mother looks serene, and thoughtful. Her face is a little more tan than the rest of the Rendezvous Queens, probably from cross-country skiing with her friend Rhona up the street.
My mother looks at least ten years younger than the woman standing next to her does, the now divorced real estate agent who was crowned in 1976.
IT DOESN'T HURT
My cousin claims he invented the game, but I swear it was me. You need what they call a rat-tail comb, one of those plastic ones you can buy at the drug store; they come in bags of ten. They have a comb part, and then a skinny plastic handle, which, I suppose, is where the name comes from.
You take the comb and heat it up over an element on the stove so you can bend a curve into it, like a hockey stick. Then you get a ping pong ball, or one of those plastic golf balls with the holes, and there you are. Comb ball, we called it. Let the game begin.
The game was invented to be played in a long, narrow hallway, so a mobile home is the perfect stadium. You close all the bathroom and bedroom doors, and each opponent gets on their knees at either end of the hall. Kind of like a soccer goalie, only shorter. Whoever has the ball goes first.
You hold the handle of the comb in one hand and bend the comb back with the other, and let go. The ping pong ball rebounds off the walls and floor at speeds approaching the sound barrier, and the other guy tries to block the ball with any part of his completely unprotected body.
A ping pong ball striking naked skin at the speed of sound is bound to hurt. So there were the obvious injuries: circular welts about the face, neck, and arms were common. There were other hazards, too: carpet burn, bruised elbows and knees. Once, my sister leapt up to block a shot and smashed her head on a door handle and just about bit the tip of her tongue off. My cousin sprained his wrist trying to flip himself back onto his feet for a rebound.
My aunt stepped in, in an attempt to reduce the casualties. She tried to ban comb ball altogether, but was met with such a united front of dismay and pouting that she was forced to compromise. We were only allowed to play until someone cried. And we had to scrub off all the little white marks the ping pong balls left on the wood panelling.
We were only allowed to play until someone cried. Of course, this added a masochistic element to the game we all enjoyed. I would take a stinging shot to the lower lip and kneel motionless in the hallway, breathing deep through clenched teeth. Everyone would stop, searching my face for any sign of moisture, which would signal the end of the game. “Doesn’t hurt,” I would whisper bravely. “It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. Let’s go. My shot.” Everyone would let out their breath and continue.
Whoever cried ended the game. Whoever cried sucked. My aunt would march in and grab our combs, and send us outside to play. “It’s a beautiful day out there. Quit killing each other in my hallway and go get some exercise.”
Playing outside was okay, but there was nothing like a rousing, bloody match of comb ball. We would compare scars afterwards, like soldiers. “Took the skin right off, bled all over the rug too,” we would brag, our striped shirts pulled up over our elbows. “And not one tear. Kept right on going.”
My cousin Christopher ended it all the day he broke his thumb. This required a trip to emergency, and a splint. He forgot to try not to cry, and the combs were confiscated for good. For a while we were impressed with his sling, and his need for painkillers, but then reality set in. No more comb ball. Christopher was a wimp, and prone to accidents. Remember, he got that concussion that one time and they took the tire swing away? We all mourned the loss of the greatest game that ever came to the trailer park.
We came up with a version of cops and robbers that satisfied our bloodlust for a while. It involved riding around on our bikes and wailing on each other with broken-off car antennas, but it wasn’t the same. Crying while playing outside was a different story, because you got to go back into the house. The stakes weren’t as high. There was nothing to lose.
I worry today, about my friends’ kids. Nothing hurts when you play Nintendo, not even when you die. What are we teaching our children? I still utilize the skills I learned playing comb ball. Just the other day, I fell off the back of a five-ton truck helping my friend move. I leapt up immediately, exclaiming, “It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt.” And a couple of weeks later, it didn’t. Just like the good old days.
MY HERO
Webster’s New School and Office Dictionary defines a hero as a man of distinguished courage, moral or physical; or the chief character in a play, novel, or poem.
Her name was Cathy Bulahouski, and she was, among other things, my Uncle John’s girlfriend. She had other titles, too – my family is fond of nicknames and in-jokes – she was also referred to as the girl with the large glands, and later, when she left John and he had to pay her for half of the house they had built together, she became and was remembered by the men as “lump sum.” The women just smiled, and always called her Cathy.
Cathy Bulahouski, the Polish cowgirl from Calgary. I’ve wanted to tell this story for years, but never have, because I couldn’t think of a better name for a Polish cowgirl from Calgary than Cathy Bulahouski.
I remember sitting in her and John’s half-built kitchen, the smell of sawdust all around us, watching her brush her hair. Her hair was light brown and not quite straight, and she usually wore it in a tight braid that hung like a whip between her shoulder blades. When she shook the braid out at night, her hair cascaded in shining ripples right down her back to just past the dips behind her knees.
She would get John to brush it out for her, she sitting at one end of a plain wooden table, he standing behind her on their unpainted plywood floor. I would be mesmerized, watching her stretch her head back and showing the tendons in her neck. Brushing hair seemed like a girl-type activity to me, but John would stroke her hair first with the brush, then smooth it with his other hand, like a pro. My father rarely touched my mother in front of me, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of this commonplace intimacy passing between them.
The summer I turned eleven, Cathy was working as a short-order cook at a lodge next to some hot springs. She was also the horse lady. She hired me to help her run a little trail ride operation for the tourists. My duties included feeding, brushing, and saddling up the eight or so horses we had. And the shoveling of shit. I wasn’t paid any cash money, but I got to eat for free in the diner, and I got to ride Little Chief, half Appaloosa and half Shetland pony, silver grey with a spotted ass. Cathy and I were co-workers and conspirators. Every time we got an obnoxious American guy she would wink at me over his shoulder while he drawled on about his riding days in Texas or Montana, and I would saddle up Steamboat for him, a giant jet black stallion who was famous both for his frightening bursts of uncontrollable galloping and for trying to rub his rider off by scraping his sides up against the spindly lodge-pole pines the trails were lined with.
I always rode behind my aunt; Little Chief was trained to follow hers. Her horse would plod along at tourist speed in front of me, and I would try to make my legs copy the way hers moved, the seamless satin groove her hips fell into with every swing of the horse’s step.
Sometimes we would ride alone and she would w
histle and kick the insides of her boots in and race ahead of me. Little Chief would pick up the pace a bit like the foot soldier he was, and my heart would begin to pound. Cathy would ride for a while and then whirl her horse around, her long braid swinging around and hanging down her front as she rode back towards me.
One day we were lazily loping alongside the little road that led back to the hot springs when one of Cathy’s admirers came up from behind in a pick-up. He honked hello as he and his road-dust drove by, which spooked Little Chief and he bucked me off.
On impact, tears and snot and all the air in my lungs were expelled. I lay on the hard packed dirt and dry grass for a minute, bawling when I could catch little pieces of my breath.
“Get on,” Cathy said, hard-lipped as she rode up beside me. “Get back up on that horse right now. Do it now or you’ll be too afraid later.”
She was tough like that.
One Christmas Eve shortly after she and John had finished drywalling, our family all had turkey dinner out at their place. We were each allowed to open one present, and my mom had suggested I bring the one shaped just like a brand new toboggan from under our tree at home.
The coolest thing about Cathy was how she would gear up in a snowsuit in thirty below in the blue black sky of a Yukon night (which begins at about two in the afternoon around solstice) and go play outside with the rest of the kids. Not in a grown-up, sit-on-the-porch-and-smoke-cigarettes-and-watch kind of way, but in a dirty-kneed, get-roadrash-kid kind of a way. Right after I ripped the last of the wrapping paper off my gleaming red sled, she was searching through the sea of snowboots by the door for her black Sorels and pulling her jacket off the hook behind the door.
“Let’s go up the hill behind the house and give it a try. Not much of a trail in winter, but we’ll make one.”
I suited up right behind her, followed by my sister and a stream of cousins with mittens on strings.