by Ivan Coyote
JOURNEY, MAN
I liked the journeyman electrician I was training under. James was a decent guy, the father of a three-year-old daughter, and from what I could tell, a good man. Sweet to his wife. We were working for a pretty big company, but for the most part, most days, it was just him and me. He never not once made cracks about having a female apprentice. He knew I had been top of my class, and that meant something to him. He had studied a bit of political science before he went into the trades. He read books. Played drums in a band. He wasn’t a redneck, which was probably why the big boss had put us together.
We were working out in Surrey on a big condominium complex, installing the fixtures and plugs and switches in mostly finished suites. It was fairly easy, clean, and dry work. A bigger crew had wired the building earlier on in the heavy construction phase, and now it was just James and me, finishing up. Labelling electrical panels, testing everything, making it pretty, like he always said.
I was down in the electrical room in the underground parking lot of the four-storey condo building. James was upstairs in one of the residential units. It was a Friday. I was doing an inventory of our supplies, and cleaning up to leave the jobsite for the long weekend.
I heard James come over the walkie-talkie, which was already docked in the charger.
“Hey, it’s 4:35 already. Where the hell are you? Let’s get out of here.”
I had lost track of the time. Quitting time was five minutes ago. I slung my tool pouch over my shoulder and locked the door behind me.
Nothing lonelier than a construction site five minutes after quitting time on a Friday.
The fluorescent lights hummed in the underground parking. I liked the wet smell of basement and concrete. James would be waiting in his brand new Ford F150 on the side street outside of the gate that led to the parking garage. We didn’t have fobs to open the gate and had to park on the street all day while we were working. Part of every one of my workdays involved repeated trips to plug the parking meter on James’ truck and moving it every few hours to avoid getting a ticket. This was a common pastime of apprentices from every crew on the site. It was a pain in the ass that James complained about at least twice a day.
I glanced at my watch. 4:41. We were going to get stuck in the middle of rush hour on the freeway heading back into the city and I was going to hear about it.
I had just rounded the corner from the second floor onto the first floor of the garage when I saw them. Six or seven dudes. The stucco guys, maybe? Or roofers? I had seen them coming and going here and there a couple of times over the last few weeks of working on this site, but I had never spoken directly to any of them. Up close I could see the white plaster dust on their work pants and steel-toed boots. Drywall guys, I thought. They stopped in a semi-circle in front of me.
I wasn’t paying close enough attention at first to be scared right away.
I went to walk in between the skinny one and the really tall one, and the tall one sidestepped and closed the space between him and the skinny guy. They both looked at me. Gave each other sideways eyes. Looked back at me. This wasn’t friendly. This was something else, I could smell it.
My heartbeat picked up and I snapped to attention. Counted six of them. Reached into my tool pouch. Rested my hand on a giant flathead screwdriver, about fourteen inches long. Dull but big. Every electrician has one in their pouch. It’s called your beater screwdriver, and it is literally meant for beating on things. Knocking out pre-punched holes in panels and junction boxes, hammering locknuts tight on box connectors, prying open cans of paint or glue or lubricant, chipping wood away from the inside of holes you drilled, shit like that. Part chisel, part hammer, part screwdriver. My right hand rested on the fat black and red handle of my beater and counted. Six of them. There were six of them.
The tall guy stared at me, then let his eyes travel up and down my frame. The skinny guy looked at the concrete floor. All six of them shuffled closer together, closer to me.
I made a move to the left, and a dark-eyed guy with a filthy white t-shirt stepped in front of me. I stopped. Stepped back. Watched dirty t-shirt guy look over at the tall one, who nodded in approval. The tall guy seemed like he was in charge, so I locked eyes with him.
“You guys want to fuck around? Is that what this is?” I pulled the big screwdriver out of my pouch and held it up in front of me. Poked it into the space between me and the tall one.
“Well, there are six of you and one of me, but I will not make this easy for any of you. Someone is going to get this stuck in between their ribs. So who’s first? You want to go first, Mr. Big?”
They all looked at the tall guy. He spat on the concrete between us. Sneered at me from under his moustache.
“What? What is your problem? There you go. Go home with your boyfriend,” he said, stepping aside and holding out his right hand, arm outstretched like he was welcoming me through his front door.
I stepped between him and the skinny guy and managed not to break into a full-on run until they had rounded the corner onto the second floor of the underground.
Fucking drywall guys, I thought. What were they even doing down here? Concrete walls down here.
James had the classic rock channel cranked up when I climbed up into his truck.
“Took you long enough. I was about to come looking for you. Thought maybe you got lost.”
I got in. Put my seatbelt on. Stared into the traffic.
“You’re uncharacteristically quiet,” he said about ten minutes later, resting his hand on the gearshift and sliding his eyes sideways to look at me. “Put the goddamn CBC on again if you want to.”
I shook my head. My heart had slowed down by this time, but I felt the bile in my stomach threatening to boil up into my chest and throat.
“Seriously. What’s up? You look pale. Did you see a ghost in the underground parking?”
We were stalled in traffic waiting to get onto the bridge when I finally told him what had happened. He cursed. He slammed his palms against the steering wheel. He swore he was going to call the site supervisor as soon as he got home and report the whole crew of drywall guys.
“For what, exactly?” I asked him calmly, staring straight ahead. “For standing in front of me in the parking lot?”
“You and I know full well that is not what they were doing.” James was shaking his head. He reached over and snapped the radio off.
“Of course. But I can’t prove anything. The word of six of them against one of me. I’m one of two female tradespeople on the whole fucking site. Remember what a hassle it was to even get a second outhouse?”
The outhouse had been a weeks’ long hassle, and Casey, the female plumber’s apprentice, had nearly quit her job over it. The one outhouse on site was a disgusting mess. It was shared by about sixty guys, and it was a nasty bit of work. I had been walking about four blocks away to use the public bathrooms at the Burger King in the strip mall on the corner, but Casey took a stand. She went to the first aid guy and said it was a matter of health and safety for her and me, and that we wanted a women’s biffy. It had been dropped off during the night finally, and was the object of much grumbling and glaring. Some of the guys complained that their biffy was filthy and started using ours. Someone had sharpied a giant cock and balls on the wall inside of it, and a couple of days after Casey and the rest of the plumbers had finished up and moved on to another site, I gave up and started going back to use the one at Burger King again. Some wise-ass had taped up signs on both outhouse doors, one that said “Clean,” and another that said “Landscapers.”
And that was the end of that.
“You can’t go to the site supervisor and tell them the drywall guys stood in a circle around me in the parking lot. Nothing happened.”
“This time,” James said.
I turned the radio back on.
Sunday afternoon, James called me to tell me that he had just heard from the boss and we were not going back to Surrey after the long weekend. We were goi
ng to get laid off for a couple of weeks and then start a brand new job in New Westminster mid-month.
“Take a break,” James said. “Put your feet up for a couple of days. I think I’m going to go fishing maybe.”
“Did you tell Richard about those fucking drywall guys? Is that what happened?”
James promised me that he hadn’t said a word, that it was just a slow time and that the boss was sending his knuckle-dragger of a nephew to finish up in Surrey.
I didn’t know if I believed him or not, but I didn’t care.
Two days later I got a call from a friend who was working on a movie set.
“Come check it out,” she said. “The film business is full of freaks and weirdos. Good money. We need someone who can wire up props with flashing lights and shit. You’re perfect for it.”
She said she would pick me up at seven a.m. on Monday morning if I was into it.
“Call time is eight a.m., unless it gets pushed,” she explained.
“What’s a call time? What does that mean, pushed? So much lingo,” I said.
“I’ll explain everything in the van on the way to set. You’re going to love it.” She laughed. “It’s a whole different world. Kind of like the army, except it’s all make-believe. And the guns are fake.”
Elderly lady in public bathroom #1: “Excuse me, sir, you are in the ladies’ room.”
Lady #2: “Leave her alone, Roberta. She obviously needs to pee, to risk the likes of you. You’re embarrassing us all.”
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH
In 2001 I was working on a film set, doing props for a television series. It was about journalists and terrorism and world events; it was actually a pretty decent show, and might have done okay if those airplanes hadn’t flown into the two towers that September. Many of the show’s plot lines corresponded too well with the actual current events rolling out on our televisions, and the series was shelved.
But that spring, before the planes crashed, before 9-11, we were shooting season one in Vancouver and the women who worked in the hair, makeup, and wardrobe departments decided that they were going to throw a party. The word went out: Saturday night at the head of the wardrobe department’s big old house in North Vancouver. It was going to be epic, and it was ladies only, and I was invited.
The grips and lamp operators and camera guys all caught wind of this ladies only party and started giving me a hard time about it. “How come you’re allowed to go?” The crane operator seemed particularly perturbed about it all. “The invite says Ladies Only. Right here.” He stabbed the photocopied party invite with a giant sausage-shaped finger. “How is that even fair? You’re more like one of us than them.”
“Years of homophobia. Never being able to use a public fucking washroom. This is my pay-off. The ladies have spoken. I’m invited and you are not.”
“It’s ladies only. How come you get to go? I’m more of a lady than you are,” said one of the gay set decorators.
I shrugged. “What do you care? There will be no action for you there anyway.”
But by the time Saturday night rolled around, I was pretty tired, and I had just spent seventy hours that week with the whole crew, and I almost didn’t go. I was curled up watching a movie at about eight p.m. that night when my cell phone rang. I ignored it, but it rang again. I picked it up on the fifth ring.
It was Sarah, a kind of bi-curious locations scout. “Ivan! Tell me you’re on your way to this party right now. And tell me you are stopping to pick us up three more bottles of tequila gold and some white wine.”
She sounded pretty drunk already. I got up, showered, and put some pants on.
I could hear the music thumping as soon as I rounded the corner and parked my shitty old Taurus behind the row of new mostly black cars and SUVs. All the lights in the house were on and a wall of party noise blasted me as soon as I walked through the front door. It smelled like beer and perfume and something almost burning in the oven.
Nearly every woman from the crew was there: the production assistants were smoking on the back deck, the wardrobe and makeup departments were playing a rambunctious game of Twister in the sunken living room, the female actors were gathered around a nearly scorched batch of breaded zucchini fingers someone had just taken out of the oven. The counters were already full of empty beer and wine bottles.
I held up the brown paper bag of booze I had procured on the way over and it was snatched out of my hand, and one of the hairdressers immediately began pouring tequila into shooter glasses arranged on a tray on the kitchen table. The white wine went directly into the freezer to chill.
One of the actors was named Jamie, and she was gorgeous in that airbrushed kind of Hollywood way that always left me feeling underdressed and unfinished. The only interactions I ever really had with her were taking her prop watch on and off at the beginning and end of each shooting day, and occasionally when she needed something for her character or a scene. At work she always spoke to me in her private school British accent like I was the hired help, which technically I was. Not all of the talent, as we called the actors, treated the crew like we were less than, but Jamie certainly did. I had never liked her, and I was pretty sure she didn’t even know my name.
But that night she was wearing jeans and a plain t-shirt, hardly any makeup, and was merrily forcing tequila shots on everyone, punctuated by her throwing one back herself every five minutes or so. She was cracking jokes and even let out a fart when she leaned over the arm of the couch to pass a shot glass to the third assistant director. I had never seen drunk and farting Jamie before, and I liked her a lot better than I did her on-set, at-work persona.
Lisa was there too, one of my favourite cast members. She had a couple of kids and lived in L.A. with her ex-husband and her new boyfriend. She told me one time she had learned to model her alternative family from all her queer friends, and that her kids had three loving parents and that was better than most kids could say. She was hilarious and real and we had hit it off the first minute of the first day of being on set together. She threw both of her arms around me and left a lipstick mark on my cheek. I had never seen her drunk before either. She smelled like hairspray and looked shorter without her character’s signature high heels on.
I had never seen most of the women I worked with drunk. I had seen them wet, exhausted, hung over, on the first day of their periods. I had seen them at three o’clock in the morning and at midnight. I had seen them pumping their breast milk into a bag in the makeup trailer at lunchtime. I had seen them in rain gear and shorts and before coffee in the morning, but I had never seen them drunk.
At some point a Polaroid camera came out, and then several other cameras. This was back when cameras had film and cell phones weren’t smart. The three bottles of tequila I had brought when I arrived disappeared, and someone phoned their husband and sent him on another liquor run. He wasn’t even allowed through the front door with it; his wife the set decorator kissed him on the front porch, took the bag of booze, and shut the door behind her and locked it. She turned around, held up the brown paper bag, and everybody cheered.
I had been to a lot of queer parties where it was all women, but I had never been to a party full of only straight women before. They were ramping it up pretty good, drinking hard and telling disgusting jokes and laughing until they snorted and shot wine out of their noses. It was like being at a party with a bunch of kids with no adults around, but it was a party where there were no men, no husbands, no kids, and so, maybe for them, in some way, no one to impress or behave for. There was a kind of abandon in the room, a kind of unhinged freedom. These women could drink and cut loose without being watched by the guys at work, without being judged. Without worrying about getting caught in a corner somewhere with a handsy teamster or beer-brave grip. All of their defenses came down like a curtain. Drinks were getting kicked over and dishes were being broken. The Twister game was getting pretty racy and I remember wondering if bachelorette parties got this out of control this f
ast.
That’s right about when the chocolate mousse cake appeared and things took a turn.
I think it was Jamie who first suggested we play Truth or Dare. This quickly turned into a round of Who At Work Would You Fuck If No One Would Ever Know, punctuated by long gulps of wine or a shot of tequila. I was taking it pretty easy on the booze because I had to drive back home over the bridge, but I seemed to be the exception.
“I would totally fuck Nathan,” one of the caterers confessed.
Jamie gasped. “Nathan the cameraman? He’s completely knock-kneed!” This sounded hilarious in her private school syllables, and then she cracked the whole room up by stumbling across the room with her knees pressed together like she was holding a quarter between them.
Then Jamie got quiet. “I know. We should do body shots.”
“What’s a body shot?” I asked, and the whole room exploded in another round of laughter, like there was no way I could possibly not know what a body shot was. I insisted I did not.
Jamie cleared her throat. “It’s when, for instance, I would drink this delicious shot of tequila, and then lick salt and lime juice off of Lisa’s lovely breasts.”
She demonstrated for the room, to a loud round of cheering. Lisa responded by swiping a fingerful of chocolate mousse and wiping it on Jamie’s cheek and licking it off. More whooping.
And so forth. The next thing I knew, a room full of drunk straight women were smearing chocolate mousse everywhere and licking it off each other, and someone was taking pictures of everything.
I’m not making this up.
I quickly realized that as the only out queer person in the room (as far as I knew), it just felt best for me if I remained a bystander. A straight married woman licking chocolate mousse off of her equally heterosexual coworker in a moment of tequila-induced abandon is one thing. A straight woman licking anything off of the only butch in the room, or vice versa, well, to me, that felt like something else. I felt like that might make Monday morning uncomfortable for someone, so I just watched.
