by Ivan Coyote
Turns out I have combination skin, with a fair but clear complexion, most suited to spring colours. I spent seventy-two dollars, and left with a tiny bag of exquisitely packaged products.
Halfway down Granville Street, I recognized the swagger of one of my friends approaching, his hands deep in his pockets.
“Hey man. What’dja buy at Eaton’s?” His voice was even deeper than last month, stubble starting to sprout on his chin and upper lip.
“You know, couple things,” I almost whispered, trying to sound casual. “Rehydrating cream, stuff like that.”
“Stuff like what?”
“It’s rehydrating cream, okay? And a soothing cream cleanser. Oh, and eye supplement. I’m just holding it for a friend.”
“Are you wearing mascara?” He narrowed his eyes at me, leaned over, and sniffed. “And each to their own and everything, buddy, but I gotta tell you, you smell kinda like ... roses, man. You smell like flowers, dude.”
I changed the subject. I didn’t tell him I smelled of evening primrose oil, which uplifts and boosts your everyday moisturizer when applied beforehand. I didn’t tell him that according to Madeline, you’re never too young or too butch for a good three-step beauty regimen; five minutes in the morning, five at night. I didn’t mention that I had just been exfoliated and that my face felt fucking great.
I didn’t tell him that testosterone often brings on puberty-grade acne, and that he might want to invest in a good epidermal cleanser, perhaps even an astringent.
I didn’t say anything. That is why they are referred to as beauty secrets. Because I, myself, plan to age gracefully.
THE TEST
When my union benefits finally kicked in, I decided to make good on my New Year’s resolution: doctor, dentist, new glasses, the full tune-up. I take good care of my car, why not myself?
I like my doctor: late fifties, kind, doesn’t balk at my tattoos or nipple rings, pretty much everything I need in a health care professional. I called and booked myself a physical.
A week Tuesday? Great. Her receptionist has a soft, sleepwalker-like voice. I can’t imagine her in an emergency.
I didn’t find out until I was in the waiting room that my doctor was on holiday, and that her replacement would be seeing me. I was vaguely disturbed, but sat down to wait. I was already there. I don’t usually go to the doctor unless something is bleeding or about to fall off, and here I was being all responsible and stuff, no sense turning back now.
A young, fresh-faced dyke walked into the waiting area, glancing at the chart in her hand. She called my name. “Come with me,” she said briskly. I followed her down the hall.
A new receptionist? How forward thinking of these guys to hire a queer receptionist. I like these community clinics. We sat down in my doctor’s office. My chart was on the desk. Same posters on the wall: signs of domestic abuse, colour poster of male and female reproductive organs, wear your helmet or you could look like this watermelon here, nothing ominous to be found.
“So....” the young dyke extended her hand. “I’m Doctor Giovanni. You’re here for a complete physical?” I looked at her face. Not a wrinkle to be found. She looked fresh out of her wrapper. I thought medical school was supposed to be stressful.
Now, I don’t mean to be ageist or anything, but I must admit there are instances where a person might naturally feel more comfortable with someone of a more elderly persuasion at the helm: helicopter pilot, flight instructor, bomb technician. And doctor. Doctor springs to mind.
I nodded. Try to act natural, I told myself. “So Doctor Witherspoon is ...”
“... on holiday. I’m filling in for her.” She knitted her brow and searched my chart. “Don’t I know you under a different name?” Her finger was resting on my legal name.
Know me? The cappuccino I just drank was now also becoming disturbed. I was here for a pap smear, for chrissakes, she wasn’t supposed to know me. This was a private affair, one to be conducted by a kind and ageing woman who lived in a big house far from this clinic. She had to shop and dine in places I did not frequent, and she did not know any of my friends, unless she had also examined their breasts for lumps in this clinic, in which case she would not know that they are my friends....
“Ivan, right? That’s you’re other name. Thought I recognized you. You know, I could write it down here that you prefer to be called Ivan, they’re pretty cool about that kind of thing here. I loved your book, by the way.”
My doctor didn’t know my other name because my doctor didn’t need to. My doctor didn’t read my books. Because my doctor did not have a brush cut like me, or baggy pants like me, and, oh, my God.
I looked at her again. I knew her from somewhere.
I could not get a pap test from anyone that I knew from somewhere. Especially when, in my panic, I could not place exactly where I knew her from. She was too young for us to have gone to high school together, thank Christ.
I kept my panic to myself. She must think me strange, I thought, this storyteller who hadn’t said a word.
“So ... I’ll give you a minute to undress and change into this” – she held up the prerequisite paper dress – “and I’ll be right back. I’ll go warm up my hands.”
Was that a wink? Did she just wink at me? The door shut behind her and I quickly searched the room.
No windows. Okay, okay. Plan B. I tried to figure out how to call myself on my own cell phone and feign an emergency. No good. I was giving serious consideration to faking an epileptic seizure when I remembered that she was a doctor, and this was a doctor’s office. I would be rushed to where I am right now and forced into a paper dress anyway.
I removed my clothes and hid my prosthetic penis in the pocket of my leather coat.
I was a coward in a paper dress, and it was cold in there.
She returned, looking chipper and self-assured, as I imagined it would be easy to feel when you are twenty-one and already a doctor. Where do I know her from? Think, man, think.
She checked my pulse, heart rate, felt my breasts. My mind raced, sketching one humiliating scenario after another.
I wake up with a cute girl in a shared east end house. We are smiling at each other over coffees when my doctor walks into the kitchen in her boxers and retrieves the orange juice from the refrigerator. “Oh, Ivan, this is my roommate, the doctor.”
The doctor winks at me and drinks from the carton. “We’ve met. As a matter of fact, under all those shirts, Ivan has quite a nice rack, dontcha Iv’?”
You see, this is the curse a writer must live with everyday of their life. An imagination. It’s not all hot cars and fast women. I have to live inside this head. All alone, on a good day.
“So ... just scootch your butt down to the end of the table, and put your feet into these little foot things, so your vagina is right on the edge here.”
She said vagina. In reference to myself. I couldn’t believe she said vagina. And isn’t there a technical term for those little foot things? I was shocked by her casual bedside manner. I was about to undergo a rather traumatic medical procedure here, wearing a paper dress, no less, and she was acting like we were changing a carburetor together. And where have I met her before?
My heart was pounding, every ounce of my flesh fighting with my brain which was screaming, run boy, while you still can, while you still have the strength, no one’s gonna blame you, she said vagina....
I heard the snap of a latex glove, and may have lost consciousness at that point for a moment, I’m not sure.
From outside my body I could see myself standing at the bar, bad music pounding, and the doctor talking to a group of girls with nose rings, gesturing at me with her beer. “That Ivan sure has a healthy looking cervix.”
“You might feel a slight pinch, we need a little tissue sample, there you go, it’s all over, until next year.”
She snapped off her glove and threw it into the little garbage can. “So....” she rubs her cold hands together. “We’ve missed you at hockey the
last couple of months. You been working too much?”
WEAK NINE
At least this time I didn’t feel like killing anyone. They say that it only takes four days for the nicotine to leave your system, that any craving beyond that is purely psychological. I don’t know who “they” are, or if “they” ever found themselves at the business end of a Player’s Light Regular, because I’ve talked to folks who quit ten years ago who still longingly watch the orange glow in another’s hand on its peaceful rounds: mouth, lap, hip, little circles in the air when they speak. I love watching someone smoke in the dark.
I prepared this time: quit drinking coffee, bought gum and cinnamon sticks. I avoided places and activities which I would associate with smoking. I found that it wasn’t so bad, as long as I didn’t work, eat, drink, sleep, or have sex with anyone, I only thought about cigarettes most of the time. But I stuck it out.
One month later, pink-tongued and righteous, I was overheard exclaiming that I would never smoke again, that I didn’t miss it a bit, this was it, I was so over it all. I believed I was cured.
When the guy in the basement suite of the house next door lit up, I could smell it, sharp-toothed and stagnant. I could tell a smoker from ten paces. “To think, I once smelled like that,” I would say, like a born-again Christian, so convinced was I of my own salvation.
I had a dream that I was walking the empty hallways of my elementary school. I passed a classroom door that was open. Inside was a kindergarten class, thirty or so five-year-olds going about their kindergarten business, finger-painting and block-stacking and what not, all of them with cigarettes dangling from corners of their tiny mouths like construction workers. I stopped, and was staring, when a little boy walked up to the door.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” he asked me in his little boy’s falsetto, ground out his butt with the heel of his blue and red sneaker, and slammed the door in my face.
Eight weeks gone, I carefully washed all the ashtrays in my house and stowed them away in a cupboard. I removed my silver lighter from my right front pocket and tucked it into a drawer.
Then I got drunk. Four scotches and two sweaty dances later, the tall blonde sipped her drink through a straw and offered me a smoke. Sure, why not? It’s not like I’m still addicted or anything, besides, it’s only a Du Maurier, how good can it be?
How good can it be. I had another one later, at her place, watching the smoke curl lazily around her long fingers and catch the streetlight seeping through her bedroom window.
Truth was, I never felt like a non-smoker. I was just a smoker who didn’t. I wasn’t ready to trade in my leather jacket for Gortex or fleece. I was tired of smelling good. I missed my nagging cough.
The guy at my corner store hadn’t seen me in nine weeks. “I thought maybe you moved from the neighbourhood,” he said as he took my six bucks and slid the blue and white package across the counter.
“No, I didn’t leave, I just quit for a while.” I said with resignation.
He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe now it will be easier the next time, huh?”
That’s what they say.
STUPID MAN
I like the cheap produce, and the fresh flowers, and the Rice Dream (for guests), but mostly I shop there because of her attitude.
She single-handedly fights to fend off the stereotype of the docile, soft-spoken Chinese woman behind the counter. I see her on the front lines for everyone, heating up samosas and sliding packs of Player’s Lights and setting an example for all of us.
I went in one night for cigarettes, and asked her how she was doing, more out of good manners than conversation, but she told me the truth; few ever do.
“I ask you now, what time is it? A quarter after nine o’clock? The only thing I ask my husband is for Tuesday nights I watch a – how do you say – Chinese soap opera? He is supposed to come here at eight o’clock, so where is he at? And where are my friends? Waiting outside my house maybe? I don’t know, I am stuck here all night. And then some fucking guy, he just stole a whole box of Oreo cookie ice cream sandwiches, so I ask you, what kind of a life is this?”
I took my cigarettes and left meekly. I was almost afraid to ask her how she was the next time I went in. When you ask someone how they are doing, you rarely expect them to actually tell you how they are doing.
A couple of weeks later I went in on a Friday night to pick up a few things for breakfast the next day. Never being one to shy away from the truth, I asked her, “How’s it going?”
Her eyes flashed hard and sharp, and she snapped her answer back at me, her head jerking towards the back of the store: “Why don’t you ask stupid man how am I doing?”
Her husband had his back turned towards us, quietly pricing cans of coconut milk; his wide shoulders slumped inward. I went to get some crackers and he met my eyes, nodded hello, and looked back down.
“What’s up with her?” I asked him. “Good thing you can get a deal on flowers, huh?”
He smiled weakly, like January sun, and cleared his throat and spoke, quietly. “I was in the back, and I hear her scream that we’re being robbed, so I come running out to see a tall, skinny, white man running out the door. I chase him up to Twelfth Avenue, and across the traffic and down past the Mohawk. I jumped him on the grass by the apartment, and he rolls over on his back and says: ‘Don’t hurt me don’t hurt me I’m sorry, here is your orange juice, here take it back,’ so I give him one kick in the ass and let him go. He runs away. I come back here and give her back the orange juice.”
“And she’s mad at you? She didn’t even say thank you?”
He shakes his head like a wet husky and motions for us to lower our voices. “No, all she said is: ‘Very good, there is my orange juice. Now where is my eight hundred and fifty dollars?’ She didn’t tell me he took the money from the till, too.”
I managed to wait until I got in the car to start laughing at him. Why don’t you ask stupid man how I’m doing? Not that robbery is funny at all. I myself lost all my CDs (again) the night before last; theft in the East End is never funny. None of us have insurance.
It’s just that her husband is a black belt, could have killed the guy, and chose not to. He is a gentle man, great with produce, fresh flowers, sweet to his two daughters. Next time they get robbed, he should call in the heavy artillery. Next time he should send his wife.
OLDER WOMEN
He has the nicest yard on the block. Ours has the tallest sunflowers, and the lilacs, but the old guy on the corner has the time to really prune his shrubs. His grass is always cut golf green short, he has one of those ice cream cone flowering trees and wisteria vines around his windows, and cherry trees, both pink and white in spring. He also has the veggie plot, with tomatoes in rows like soldiers and beans at attention, tied up with bits of blue jerrycloth towels. Even his broccoli looks organized.
He was a tough nut to crack. I’ve lived here two houses down the block from him for nine and a half years now, and he only started to like me last January, when I bought a Ford Taurus station-wagon just like the one he has, except his is white.
I was okay enough to nod at before, when I drove the beat-up van, mostly because we kept the yard and he saw us leaving for work early in the morning and dutifully walking our dogs at night, but in eight years he never actually spoke to me until the Taurus.
His wife had always chatted over the fence to everyone when he wasn’t around, but she had passed on about two years ago. I remember the red lights swirling on my wall and ceiling when the ambulance came, and how he kept all the blinds down for a couple of months after she was gone, and for a while there were all these cars parked on the street outside with Ontario and Alberta plates.
“Nice looking car. Good shape. Good car. She a ’93?” He was letting his old, almost blind and deaf shepherd out for a stretch.
I nodded. “It’s not the sexiest ride, but I travel a lot. I can still sleep in the back, room for the dogs. I still miss my Valiant.”
Son? No wonder he didn’t talk to me for nine years. He thought there was a sixteen-year-old boy living next door with no apparent parental guidance all this time. He was probably concerned for his car stereo and the tools in his garage.
Soon thereafter he started to salute me whenever he saw me, fan rake at his side, as I walked by on my way to the park or unloaded my groceries. We started to bitch about people who never adhered to the playground speed limit, and how crazy drivers would never slow down to let even baby carriages or strings of ducklings cross safely these days. Last month he gave me a Safeway bag full of pears from his tree when I walked past with the dogs. I gave him a jar of peaches my aunt sent down for my birthday. An exchange of fruit seemed in order.
Last week my girlfriend from Montana was in town. I introduced her to Anton when we were all dressed up and getting in the car to go out for dinner. She was wearing a velvet dress and tall black boots. Anton made exaggerated movements above his head, like he was doffing an imaginary feathered cap, and bowed deeply to her from his side of the chain link fence. “A pleasure, miss. Have a lovely evening, you two.” He winked approvingly at me as I opened the car door for her, and smiled and waved as we drove off.
The next time I walked by he motioned me over to the fence conspiratorially. “Come, come,” he whispered. He seemed excited, and there was a spark in his watery eyes. “She is beautiful.” He smiled widely, his chest and arms still powerful under his cardigan and grey t-shirt. “She is maybe a little older than you, no?”