Loose End

by Ivan Coyote

  Chris and I secretly applaud Francis and his refusal to let the world change what makes him special. Francis has made it into Grade Three with his beautiful self intact. His first day of school he wore a flowing velvet shirt over his new cords, and wedge-heeled boots. He can do this because he has what most queer kids learn to live without: the true support to be whatever he is.

  Because that is the bottom line. We have to support our kids in being whatever they choose to be. Even if it is a Barbie-obsessed fairy princess who wants to be a super-model when she grows up. Part of raising kids to question gender roles is allowing them to make their own choices, so if that little girl grows up and wants me to take her to see The Little Mermaid, then that is what I’ll have to do. She’ll just have to listen to old Uncle Ivan lecture her about how little princesses can grow up to be mechanics and heavy equipment operators too.

  In the meantime, I’m gonna get her that hockey stick.

  Hairy Christmas

  My mom is one of those people who they make the Wal-Mart Christmas commercials about, except she wouldn’t shop there.

  She lives in the Yukon, the land of the postcard-perfect Yuletide setting, and she goes full out. She likes her lights only blue and white, she makes her own front door wreath with holly and spruce and real cloth ribbon, and there are one-of-a-kind, handmade Santa statues from Norway and Russia all over the place. She starts preparing hors d’oeuvres in November and freezes them. She’s deadly into it.

  There are rules that go with Christmas, too: seasonal conduct guidelines, if you will. Some examples are: “Don’t wait outside the bathroom door to punch your sister when she comes out, it’s Christmas,” (even if she did just shrink your sweater on purpose and raid your stash); and “Get in the car. I don’t care if it is the greatest party in the history of Grade Twelve. We’re driving around and looking at the lights. As a family. It’s Christmas.” All her relations are expected to forgo fistfights and let broken marriages be bygones. Everybody will get along, even when together. It’s Christmas.

  It’s tradition, one she never broke, until Christmas 2001. In all her fifty-one years she had never been caught south of the sixtieth parallel at Christmas until then, when she decided to come down and stay with me at my place for a week, and we would do it up together. The queen of Christmas past was coming to my apartment.

  You can imagine the renovations that had to go down before she even got here. The bathroom needed to be painted, and proper matching towel and accessory racks installed. New linen was in order, and I had to rearrange my shop/single bedroom with a door to render it suitable for maternal accommodations. Things had to be spotless. Things had to match.

  I kind of got into it; anything that motivated me to re-sand the floors in the bedroom was a good thing. Anyway, I’d be the one reaping the lasting décor benefits. I would just go with the flow. I would make everything nice for her. After all, it was Christmas.

  The real work started right when I got her home from the airport. Turned out I didn’t have anywhere near enough serving plates for side dishes, not to mention cutlery, and I had forgotten all about napkins, of all things. I had fifteen friends coming over for dinner, and there was much to do. She started off by cleaning the bathroom that I thought I had just renovated. There was shopping, too – oh, there was shopping. We got a little one-bedroom apartment tree, and holly boughs were procured from my neighbours’ hedge. We picked up fresh parsley and rosemary for stuffing, a twenty-two-pound turkey, candied yams, and two kinds of pie.

  I was thirty-one and had never cooked a turkey in my own oven before. I didn’t realize it was a rise-just-before-dawn type of activity. I was exhausted already – we had been up late the night before rolling scented candles for gifts and decoration – but she got me out of bed and had me making croutons before I’d had coffee. I love my mom more than just about anyone else on Earth, but at some point during the previous day between trying to park on Robson Street and standing in line at the liquor store, we had begun to get on each other’s nerves.

  I knew she suspected that my commitment to the festivities didn’t run as deep as hers. I had started to feign interest when selecting salad spoons and had even suggested our guests could drink beer straight out of the bottle. I was slacking off during present-wrapping time and showed no concern that my only Christmas album was by Bob and Doug Mackenzie (a classic, though). I was starting to act like my father, whom she had divorced some years prior for similar infractions.

  I was mashing potatoes when I began to lose it a little. We proceeded to argue, about what now I can’t remember. She had spilled hot water from the Brussels sprouts on my arm by accident, causing me to jump and dump the cranberry sauce on her pants. I blame the lack of adequate counter space, now that I think of it. Our guests would begin to arrive in half an hour, she thought, and the stress was getting to us. Because they were my friends, I knew we had at least an hour, maybe more, but she wouldn’t believe me and wanted to put the boil-in-the-bag corn niblets on right away.

  “If you said anytime after five o’clock, then the corn needs to go in now,” she snapped. “Why would your friends be late? It’s Christmas. What kind of people are we feeding here, anyway?”

  I lost it and launched in on a rant about how Christmas was about being together, not about two kinds of stuffing and matching punch bowls, and that my friends were all lovely people who wouldn’t mind waiting for a while until the corn was done and she should just chill out. That’s when she began to cry. Not a little oh-I-burned-the-cake cry, more like a there-is-not-nor-will-there-ever-be-cake kind of cry.

  I should have been gentler with her, this being her first Christmas away from home. I had had so many that I had forgotten. All her friends and the rest of our family were two thousand kilometres away, and our Vancouver snow was heavy and wet and dark.

  “Take me to the airport. I’ll just go home right now. You don’t want me here, and I don’t belong,” she sobbed while spooning stuffing into a new bowl.

  My heart broke for her. She just wanted everything to be perfect. It was important for her. It was Christmas. It was Christmas and we had yelled at each other, mother and daughter, while performing a ritual passed down from uncountable generations.

  I appealed to her practical side. “Mom, you are going to have to calm down and quit talking crazy like that. I love you and I’m glad you’re here in my kitchen, and my friends are going to be here in twenty minutes and I don’t know how to make gravy.”

  She snapped out of it right away. “The trick is, you have to get all the lumps out of the flour and water mixture before you add it to your stock. We’ll have to get you a whisk. I mean, I’ll make do with a fork this time, but a whisk is what you really need to do it right. . . .”

  My friends still talk about that dinner, and how great my place looked.

  Slip Me a Little

  If you make a living as a writer or artist, you learn to be flexible. You learn to say things like, “Of course I can write a story about pap tests by Thursday. When do you need me to be at the clinic?”

  So when I was offered a couple hundred bucks for doing two fifteen-minute sets at the Oakridge Mall for something called “Mall Talk,” I didn’t bat an eye. I told them that I wasn’t a storyteller of the bring-the-kids-along variety exactly, and they said that was okay, they were trying to change the face of storytelling as a thing that’s just for kids anyway. As long as I didn’t say “fuck” all over the place for no reason, I should be fine. I even forgot about the change to Daylight Savings Time and showed up an hour early.

  I had never been to the Oakridge Mall. The stage was set up right in the big rotunda in the giant corridor, near the cell phone stand and the cheap sunglasses. It was still decorated from Halloween week, when they had a puppeteer in a skeleton costume doing scary tricks with witches and goblins. The risers were filled with pumpkins and the backdrop was a full moon with bats and spiderwebs. There was a huge cardboard jack-o-lantern hanging dangerously just a
bove me and the other two storytellers. The puppeteer must have been a short little fella.

  I don’t know if it was the spooky stage, the guy with the hand drum beside me, or the Irish poet on my left who pulled a harmonica and juice harp out of his canvas bag, but soon I was feeling unnerved at the sight of eight four-year-olds looking up expectantly at us. And I can’t even juggle.

  I told my most kid-safe stories, and bored the hell out of the children because I didn’t dance or have puppets or a hand drum.

  But I did what I had to do. I did my job. Fifteen minutes later, it was all over, and I was free to hang around the mall until the second set. I marveled at the concept of a $10,000 TV, had a coffee in the food court, and then went to use the facilities.

  Mall washrooms are not a friendly place for gender-expanding folks; they are right up there with theatre, airport, and ferry bathrooms in terms of visibility and risk, in my opinion. The line-up for the women’s was out the door and down the hall, strollers and matching twins and grandmas and all, and there was no way I was going to stand there and be stared or glared at by three generations of females from the same family, so I quickly ducked into the men’s room.

  Although busy for a men’s room, no one even looked up or made eye contact with me, so I bolted for the last stall and shut the door safely. I had a huge and intensely satisfying poop and then noticed that my little oasis was completely void of toilet paper. This offered me a new and interesting bathroom problem, and I’ve had many, I assure you.

  If I was in the women’s washroom, I would have simply called out to the kindly lady farting softly in the next stall, and she would gently wrap a length around her hand and pass it to me. But I have a less than masculine voice, especially when trapped in a men’s room with my pants down, and if I called out for help here the fellas might wonder what I was doing taking a dump in their territory. Could be bad. Never know.

  Fortunately, I heard a man slam the stall door open next to me, and bat a long bit off the roll next to me to blow his nose with. The roll kept turning and I watched with relief as the loose end dangled down to the floor beside me. I reached under and grabbed some for myself. I heard a zipper and the sound of an ass squeaking on to the seat next to me. I reached under the tin wall for one more bit before he broke it off too short, just in case, and then I felt it.

  A smallish, dry hand, belonging to the nose-blower I assumed, reached down and grasped my hand gently and squeezed once. I immediately drew my hand back, dropping the paper in shock. I made do with what I had, noticing the man’s matter-of-fact brown shoes, then I flushed, washed, and left without raising my eyes to anyone.

  Back in the hall I paced, pretending to wait for my lady friend who was busy in her proper washroom. I searched the shoes of the men who walked past me for the one I had just held hands with in the men’s room. Two with grey shoes left together, then one who was black and another with hairy hands. Not them. I looked down at my brown boots with the squared-off toes. Very identifiable among the Oakridge Mall set. Then he came out, so to speak. Brown shoes, dark blue uniform pants, and grey button–up shirt with no tie. Plain leather coat. An older guy, maybe sixty. He walked almost right past me without looking up, then checked out my package as he rounded the corner.

  I returned to the table next to the stage in the mall and sat between the Irish poet and the traditional storyteller and drummer. “Pity there’s no pub here,” said the Irish poet. “Me with an hour to kill and nothing to do.”

  “You should check out the men’s washroom over by the Sony Store,” I winked. “It’s hopping today.”

  No wonder gay men are such avid consumers. You really can get it all at the Oakridge Mall.

  I Like to Wear Dresses

  I hadn’t been to the Yukon for over a year, and had been absent from the fold the last three Christmases. I could hardly wait: I love how rush hour in Whitehorse is seven cars long, and how nobody even thinks about washing their vehicles until the end of May.

  I think my body was actually designed to function in minus sixteen degrees Celsius, in the clear, blue cold. I like when the air just starts to sting the backs of your hands, the inside of your nostrils, and the back of your mouth. I love to skate on lakes. It was only December, but I needed a fix to shake the grey edge of Vancouver off my shoulders.

  I got a chance to go up for the Longest Night Storytelling Festival and a free plane ticket, so I jumped on it.

  I hadn’t seen my friend Chris’s boys since September 2001, and they were all a foot taller now. During intermission, I snuck the three of them backstage. Galen was five and wide-eyed, standing dwarfed in front of the timpani drums. Emile was nonchalant at eight. “I know that,” was how he responded, coolly, to each of my careful explanations of rigging, and scrims, and backlights.

  And then there was Francis. Seven now and topped with a crown of red-brown curls, he was most impressed with my solo dressing room and the remnants of the smoke machine’s fog backstage from the rock star’s set just before the intermission. Francis has recently taken up the ukulele, his mother tells me.

  I noticed Francis was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt, even though the show is more than enough reason to dress up. Usually, he never passes up a chance to break out one of his velvet skirts or long-flowing ladies’ blouses. My stomach dropped for him. Chris, his mom and one of my fondest loves, told me a few months ago that it has started already. They have started calling him a faggot at school. We knew it was going to happen. I guess we were just hoping it would happen, well, later. He is allowing it to fold up the little flower inside of him. Now he mostly keeps his dresses in the closet and wears them only in the safety and freedom of his own home.

  Chris tells me later when the kids are in bed that Francis initially had on his long copper velour lace-up blouse, bell bottoms, and pumps when he heard tonight was going to be Uncle Ivan’s big show and they were going to the Arts Centre. When he swooped down the stairs to look for his little mittens on strings, Emile reminded him that Sebastian (from school) was going to be there, too. Francis went back to his room and changed into jeans without a word.

  I took him alone (after quite a bit of bickering with his brothers about us needing special time together) to see the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I for one am scared shitless of the Dark Riders or Ring Wraiths or whatever, and thought maybe it was too scary for a seven-year-old, but he reminded me politely that I had said he could pick. So he, my big old Cheshire cat-grinning dyke buddy Brenda, and I set off for a little queer quality time together, as per the request of his mother.

  Francis wasted little time. He spent three dollars on those plastic eggs with rings and miniature tea cups in them, bought popcorn with his own money, and started asking questions, the first of which were brought on by me going to the bathroom.

  Francis had leaned across my empty seat to enquire of Brenda just which washroom I used when out at the movies.

  Brenda told Francis that to the best of her knowledge, I utilized the ungendered wheelchair-accessible facilities whenever possible, so as to avoid confusing anyone in the men’s room or scaring anyone in the ladies’.

  Francis then asked Brenda if she knew for sure if I was a boy or a girl. Francis had asked me this himself on several occasions in the past, and each time I explained myself to him as best I could. I’m not sure if he forgets when I go away, or if he just needs to process it all again as a three-, then five-, and now seven-year-old might. Brenda told Francis that she figured that I was technically a girl, but that I had a whole lot of boy in me as well.

  I returned to my seat, and Brenda brought me up to speed on their conversation. Francis’s eyes were lit up in recognition and he grabbed my wrist. “I’m just like you, but the reverse.” He nodded repeatedly and sat up on his heels in his seat. “I’m a boy, but I have a little girl in me too.” He lowered his voice and looked left, then right, and continued. “I like to wear dresses,” he whispered in his most conspiratorial voice.

  My
heart felt like it was going to climb out of my mouth for the love of him at that moment, and I hugged him over the armrest between us. He was warm and sinewy and smelled just like his brothers, but he isn’t. I don’t love them any the less for it; it’s just that I love him more.

  “I know you like to wear dresses, Francis,” I said. “I’ve known you since you were a baby, remember?”

  “Since I was inside of my mom? Since Emile was?”

  I told him I knew his mom since before she even met his dad, and he shook his head in amazement, like he couldn’t fathom a time that long ago.

  “Is that why you like to kiss her on the mouth so much all the time?” he asked loudly, in the not-so-innocent way of babes. I shushed him because the movie was starting.

  Turns out that The Two Towers was too scary for both Francis and me, and at one point he grabbed my hand and bravely whispered, “If this is scaring you too much, I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to leave early.”

  But we stuck it out, and then the three of us drove up Grey Mountain and looked at the tiny, snow-silenced metropolis below us. All the way up the mountain Brenda and I told Francis about our people: those of us who are boys with girls inside, and girls with boys inside, and all of the beautiful in-between and shape shifters that are his ancestors. We told him that since before even his older brother was in his mom’s belly, there were people like us.

  Brenda told Francis that she was like me too, a girl with a whole lotta man in her, just it was harder to tell with her on account of her gynormous breasts.

  “Yes, they are big,” he responded almost with reverence at her frame, which for years now has been nicknamed by her friends as Tyrannosaurus Rack. We told Francis that his people have forever been artists and mystics and healers and leaders and librarians.