Tomboy Survival Guide

by Ivan Coyote

  “Yes, you, right there with the Boy George t-shirt on,” I said. He looked around him, like there might be other Boy George t-shirts in his vicinity, and pointed to his own chest, me?

  I nodded.

  He flicked his long highlighted bangs out of his eyes, which immediately returned to their place directly in front of his eyes. He paused and then spoke.

  “I’m sorry about your cousin,” he said.

  I thanked him.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, because you are a very good stand-up comedian and everything, and I had fun and all, but I had to get up like, over an hour earlier than my usual time so I could get bussed in here for this, because I go to Pine Crest Alternative school and our whole GSA came here especially to hear you perform today, and well, no offense, but you didn’t say a single gay thing at all.”

  I felt the evangelicals lean forward in their seats, holding their collective breath. This is it, I could feel them thinking.

  The principal placed her hand on the walkie-talkie clipped to the waistband of her pencil skirt.

  I smiled at the kid, let my shoulders relax.

  “Well,” I said, “thank you for travelling to see me perform. I’m honoured, and it’s great to see so many proud and out students here today. You all give me hope, you truly do. I was not as brave as you when I was fourteen. I wasn’t brave enough to come out until after I graduated from high school, and I’m so very proud of you, I am. But I’m actually here for every single kid in this gym today. Every last one of you. Because I think we all deserve to be able to go to school and get a public education without fear or harassment or emotional, physical, or spiritual violence. No matter what race you are, or your gender, gender identity, or sexuality,” I paused, giving a half a glance sideways to the row of concerned Christian parents. “Or your religion, no matter who you are or what you believe, or how you look or who you love, you have a right to feel safe in your school. I won’t stop working until all of you do.”

  We talked for a bit, I can’t remember about what exactly now, the adrenaline was starting to turn into tired and hungry and I felt a bit light headed. I needed another coffee, bad.

  After it was over, the principal shook my hand hard and posed for a picture with a manicured hand around my shoulder for the school newspaper. The superintendent thanked me and gave me his business card. I got several hugs from sweaty ninth-grade boys with fragrant armpits and soft voices. More hugs and a huge round of selfies with the GSA kids. Some tears. Theirs at first, and then mine, too. A girl from the eighth grade who loomed a foot taller than the rest of her peers gave me a bouquet of roses she had made completely out of coat hangers and three different colours of duct tape. They smelled like fake vanilla. I asked her why and she said it was because they really smelled like duct tape so she sprayed them with the air freshener she found in the gender-neutral bathroom in the nurse’s office. The bell sounded for lunch and the gym emptied as the hallways filled. I picked up my water bottle and headed out the side door of the gym, walked across the waterlogged grass to the parking lot, and found my truck.

  There was a man waiting on the sidewalk. I had seen him earlier, driving one of the black SUVs full of evangelical Christian protestors. As soon as he saw me he stepped forward, holding the lapels of his suit jacket closed against the wind, placing his sturdy body between me and my vehicle. Squinting from under his red-blond eyebrows against the stinging rain.

  Fuck, I thought. I can’t handle a confrontation. I haven’t eaten. Those free breakfast rooms in mid-range hotels depress the shit out of me, especially in the US. I should have gotten up earlier. All I had in me was a banana and a black coffee. Things were going so good. Just be cool, I told myself. You did your job. You did okay. Don’t ruin it all by getting snippy when this asshole tells you you’re going to burn in hell for eternity or that you are spreading disease or whatever it is that is about to come out of his mouth. I took another deep breath and stopped, my keys clinking against my stainless steel water bottle. Almost every school I perform in gives me a school water bottle, or a hoodie bearing the name of their school team. I’ve got one of nearly every animal. The Hawks. The Cougars (I save those and give them to my friends as jokes). The Tigers. The Bears. My favourite is the Garden City Gophers from Winnipeg. I’ve always had a thing for the underdogs, and the Gophers always ended up in the semi-finals with the Grizzlies from the other side of town. I will always root for the small but determined rodent in a battle with a giant fanged mammal any day, I guess it’s just my nature.

  Anyway. I took a deep breath and stood there, waiting for this guy to tell me what an abomination I was. A woman that I assumed was his wife and another woman and several kids were waiting in the SUV behind him, staring solemnly at me through rain-streaked windows.

  He shook my hand and introduced himself. Stephen something, I didn’t hear his last name and didn’t ask him to repeat it.

  “Might I have a word?” he asked, and I nodded, looking over his shoulder to see if the principal or any of the school board folks were still milling about. They were not.

  He cleared his throat, played with the loose knot in his necktie, glanced over his shoulder at the waiting vehicle. Smiled at me.

  “I wanted to tell you how moved I was by your presentation today.”

  I tried not to let my jaw fall open.

  “Really,” he continued, “and I have to be honest and tell you I did not come here today expecting to enjoy myself. Quite the contrary, in fact. We all came here because we were pretty convinced we would disagree with most of what you had to say. We intended to … inter … uh … to speak up if you said something we found particularly offensive or problematic. And I can only speak for myself, but that is not what happened for me here today at all.”

  I let a tentative smile reach my face as he continued.

  “Your cousin was twenty-two, you said, when he … passed?”

  I nodded. “He was twenty-two. And a half.”

  His eyes began to fill with tears, making them look startlingly blue in all that grey sky.

  “I was twenty-one when I first attempted suicide,” he confessed, as a giant tear escaped and rolled down his stubbled cheek. He glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at me. His face looked weather-worn, like he worked outside.

  “I grew up in a very small town in a very big Mormon family. I had a real tough time at school too, like your cousin. I thought I had gotten over most of it, you know, put it in the past, but today, well, listening to your stories about Christopher, it all came rushing back to me. I was expecting to be offended by what you had to say, not moved. The good Lord brought you to me to teach me, and I thank you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We stood there for a moment, looking right into each other’s eyes.

  “I’m so glad you made it through,” I told him. “And here we are today. I have to tell you I did not expect your words to me to be kind ones. Maybe we both learned something.”

  He nodded. His chin was puckering a little, his eyes shining with tears. He blinked them back.

  “Do you have a kid that goes to school here?”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingertips. I do that too sometimes, when I am trying not to cry.

  “My daughter, Hope. She’s in the eighth grade.”

  “Do you think Hope is having a better time at school than you did?”

  He expelled a large breath, like he had been holding it in and it hurt a little. “So far, so good, I think. She’s only twelve. She and I can really talk. We’re good friends.”

  “So many kids are not that lucky,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I sure wasn’t.”

  Then he shook my hand again, shook his head to get it together, turned and jumped into the SUV and drove off, his winter tires hum-singing against the wet pavement.

  His hand had felt like cracked leather. Firm grip, the kind that doesn’t realize how hard it felt in
my writer’s hand.

  I got the feeling he would have hugged me if we had been alone.

  KRAFT SINGLES FOR EVERYONE

  My grandmother Florence Amelia Mary Daws died on May 13, 2009. She was almost ninety years old. There were twenty of us in the room, including my gran, when she passed.

  Her children, my uncle Dave the Catholic priest, my uncle Laurence the furniture salesman, my aunt Nora the accountant and her husband Kevin the electrician, my aunt Roberta the telephone operator, and my mom, a retired government worker.

  Her grandchildren, my cousins, Dan, Jennifer, Katy, Lindsay, Rachael, Robert, Dan’s wife Sarah, Lindsay’s fiancée Cameron, Robert’s girlfriend Dana, and myself, the third generation of us. Florence’s grandchildren are a tattoo artist, a personal assistant, her father’s furniture salesman, a hospital office worker, stripper, brew master, librarian, fireman/carpenter, med student (not related by blood), and a writer/storyteller.

  Dan and Sarah’s daughter Layla was there too, and unbeknownst to anyone but perhaps fifteen-year-old Layla, there was a fifth-generation present that day too, a small fetus that would one day become little Odin.

  Why do I list us all? Because this matters.

  I just read this over, to make sure I didn’t forget anyone. I did. I forgot my mom’s boyfriend Chuck. Chuck’s a good guy. Quiet, not like the rest of us, which is maybe why I forgot him the first go-round. And oh yeah, Jennifer and Katy’s husbands Rod and Mike were both at home in Vancouver, taking care of the kids. The ones too little yet for stuff like why do we all have to die one day, Grandpa? And how did a little tiny grey lady like her make so many big giant babies like all of us? How did that happen? An even harder question to explain to little ones than where do we come from is where do we go when we are done here? At least in my family. Sex and death. Hard topics for the Catholics. Always have been. Even us recovering ones.

  So. This is my family, the Daws side anyway. This is a story of ours, a big story, and like all big family stories, it is made up of many little ones, and was many years unfolding.

  My mom called me on a Sunday night. I had just landed from a long spell on the road, just crawled into bed in fact when the phone rang. All she had to say was, “It’s your gran. I think maybe it’s time. I think you better come home.”

  And so I did. I flew home the next morning and arrived in the Whitehorse airport first thing, bleary-eyed and all the edges blurry. My mom and my Aunt Nora were there to meet me, they loaded my suitcase into the trunk of Nora’s little car, and we drove straight to the hospital. Didn’t even go home first. It was raining. I remember that it was raining.

  My mom stopped me with one small cold hand on my shoulder outside the hospital room door.

  “Tell me,” she said. “I need you to tell me honestly, how does she look? It is hard for us to really see her anymore, she’s been slipping so slowly.”

  I thought I had steeled myself, but still my stomach fell like a stone at the sight of my grandmother, so impossibly small now under the thin blue hospital blanket, just a slip of her left between the two rises of her grey head and gnarled old toes.

  “Talk to her,” my uncle said, and waved two fingers, “the nurses say she can still hear us.”

  And so we did. We talked. To her, to each other. Remember her bad cooking? Baloney roast? Boiled hamburger? Lemon hard cake, cousin Dan had dubbed her attempt at meringue. How she loved us all, no matter who we were, no matter what we did, her whole band of misfits. I am so proud of you, she would say. That was all she ever said. Never questioned us, except, “And have you been to mass lately? A bit of church never hurt anyone, you know.”

  I volunteered for night shift and sat next to the laboured-breathing shape of her with my two uncles, whispering stories through the dark to each other. Once or twice she opened one eye, staring scared at nothing. “She’s not really awake,” the boys said. “It’s just the pain that brings her back.” And the nurse would come in and give her a needle and she would disappear back into her broken hipbone coma dreams.

  Just before dawn, her sons slipped downstairs to smoke. I held her hand, cold blue veins mapping her nearly ninety years, her skin now worn so soft and thin.

  And then she moved. She squeezed my hand and opened both eyes, blinking, surprised that she still breathed, seemed to me. Tried to speak. Struggled with her mask. I pulled it from her mouth and leaned in close. She whispered that she loved me and then the boys burst back into the room.

  “She’s awake,” I scream-whispered, and the northern spring sun made the dust bits dance in the beginning of this day.

  “It’s just the pain,” said Dave. “I’ll get the nurse.” I shook my head, and dragged Laurence over.

  “She is here,” I repeated. “Say something, she was talking to me just now I swear it, say something she would like, go ahead and see for yourself.”

  Laurence leaned in and her eyes widened at the sight of him. “Mum,” he said. “I’m here, and know what? I took a paid holiday to come up. I’m getting paid right now.”

  “Good boy,” she gasped, and he stood up straight.

  “It is her,” he said. “Call everyone right now, she heard me all right.”

  My cousin Robert came in around six and she half smiled, reached for his hand a little. “Guess what, Gran,” he said, “I got half price on my plane ticket home for bereavement.”

  “Good boy too,” she squawked, and we all laughed because she was back in the room with us and she wasn’t before, not like this.

  She remained awake and sort of talking until everyone showed up and then the coma came again and stayed. She died the next morning, surrounded by all of us, her babies and their babies and their babies too. All of us around what was left of her in a circle with our hands touching her like it was a ritual, which was weird because we are Irish Catholic Yukoners and we don’t really do rituals, unless they involve a TV show on a certain night or maybe Sunday roast with those little canned peas and also roast potatoes with the skins off.

  Anyway, her tiny chest rose and fell and then stopped, and I saw it, I saw her spirit leave her, really, it was like it was her one second and then no more breath and no more her, where she had been just then was now something else just a shell maybe or something, and what is the difference I used to think but now I know because I saw it happen watched her leave herself. I hesitate to say her death was beautiful, because it means I have to miss her now, but it was.

  And I don’t want to sound weird here but when she left, she left something behind in me, I felt it enter through my fingers and settle itself deep inside my marrow like her blood in me but even better, immortal. And sometimes now I can feel her, she is almost right here, still in the room somewhere, she lives. Everything she gave me, I still have.

  Every time I recycle a Ziploc bag, every day that I work hard, every time I remember to be grateful, she lives in me. Every time I remember my scarf and gloves, every time I eat the leftovers instead of letting them go to waste. Every time I eat a raspberry hard candy and stuff a used Kleenex into my jacket pocket. Every time I light a candle, she is there in me. Every time I have faith.

  So maybe that is what it is called. My inheritance. Maybe what she left me was faith. And by faith, I do not just mean faith in God. I mean so much more than just that.

  I have thought about heaven a lot, the last few years, as does everyone who mourns and wants to believe, wants to remember. Some thoughts on heaven? I have this theory that heaven is different for everyone. It has to be, or it wouldn’t be heaven. My grandmother’s heaven? In her heaven she doesn’t have to share the remote with anyone, and it is Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune on all the time, with nary a rerun ever, and the old lady always wins the big money and a trip to Europe to tour a castle or somewhere warm but not too hot with nice churches. In her heaven your knees don’t hurt and your back doesn’t hurt and you get to be whatever age was your favourite age to be and you still have all your teeth and there are bingo games right after
dinner and raspberry hard candies and no one ever has to do the dishes. In my gran’s heaven, you can still have yourself a proper smoke in the living room and it doesn’t ruin the new paint job and the lawn never gets too long and the foxes don’t chase the birds off the birdfeeder. In her heaven, a nice bit of cheese won’t give you the bad stomach and real men don’t beat their wives or fuck their children, and every day is payday, and the Friday of a long weekend. Floors wax themselves, but you still get to hang the laundry, but only if you feel like it.

  My wee gran has been dead now for seven years. I am seven years older and she is not. She will never be any older, only younger, and laughing, and sweeping, and having a thimbleful of brandy at the kitchen table late at night, for her throat troubles.

  This last October 21 was my gran’s birthday. She would have been ninety-five, but she is not. My mom and aunties went to the graveyard to put flowers and say hello and to do the rosary for her. (It’s a Catholic thing, it’s kind of boring except for the part where you get to say, “Fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” which for some reason cracked us all up when we were little.) When I am home, I like to drive up past her house and up to Grey Mountain to the cemetery to visit her there and talk to her, even though the thought of her little bent body and tired old bones alone in all that permafrost slays me every time I have to leave her.

  I know it is only her bones in that cold box. I know this. I still wish her bones didn’t have to be alone. I wish we could have buried her in her own back yard, under the patch of lawn, next to the pole for the clothesline that my cousin Dan carved and painted a sunflower into, because they were her favourite, next to fireweed and cornflowers and the humble poppy because they come back every year on their own steam. The dogs would run around in circles on top of her, and the back yard would smell like the dryer vent on Saturdays, and she would be impressed at how the cucumbers did even with all the rain we got last spring and that late frost we got second week in June if you can believe that nonsense.