by Joey Comeau
On the wall above the bookshelf, the teacher has hung up all these drawings that the kids made of their families. There are a couple single-mother families, but everything else is mom, dad, little brother, dog, cat, budgie bird. Michelle grabs some crayons from a bucket and starts to draw on one of the pictures.
She draws a stick man in the same style as the mom and the dad, with stick arms and a receding hairline. She gives him a little bottle of something red to hold. Above the stick man she writes “Dad’s boyfriend” and by the bottle she writes “Rev” and hands me a crayon. “Get to it,” she says.
I find a picture of a single mom and a little girl, and I draw another little girl beside the first one, and I write “My favourite kissing cousin Judy.” I give Judy long blond hair and a nice little skirt. With a brown crayon from the jar, I make it so she’s holding a football. I step back to admire it, but it feels weird. Some kid drew this picture and was proud of it.
Michelle is drawing a room full of men standing around a nuclear family.
“I don’t know about this,” I say to her.
“You what?”
“I don’t know about this. I mean, this kid’s family.” I point at one of the pictures. “His family probably is really like this — a dog and a mom and a dad.”
“If it wasn’t, do you think he’d have the guts to draw two dads?” Michelle says. “Everyone else is drawing mom and pop and little Skippy, and you think some six-year-old is going to go out on a limb and draw his dad’s fuck buddy?” She tosses the crayon down and grins. “You’re so full of shit, I can’t believe it.”
“Well, maybe we should draw on every single one of them.” I say. “So nobody gets singled out.”
“You need to have all these crazy justifications for doing what you want,” Michelle says. “You really think there are moral grounds for breaking into a school in the middle of the night. It’s hilarious. You know damn well that you’re doing this for the same reasons I am. You’re doing this because it’s awesome.”
I almost say something, make some argument against her, but she’s right. I’m doing this children’s book thing because I want to, because it seems right in my head. Whether that’s because of the moral arguments I’ve been attributing to it, or because I’m angry and juvenile, I couldn’t say. And to be honest, I don’t really care. Right now I’m having a good time. I pick up the crayon she’s thrown down.
“Let’s draw one for the teacher,” I say. “And let’s make the teacher straight, so she’s the odd man out.” But we can’t figure out if the teacher is a boy or a girl. There’s nothing on the desk, no name or anything, and it’s dark and we’re drunk. “Let’s turn all the desks around so they face the other way,” I say, but it’s too late. She’s already at the door.
“Who do you think is topping?” Michelle asks, as we slip back out the door we came in. I remember that Richard and Alex are waiting in the car, just as drunk as we are, but maybe more naked.
“Alex,” I answer. “Richard’s a total woman.”
When we get back to the car, Richard and Alex are asleep in the back seat, their pants around their ankles. Richard is handcuffed to the door, and Alex has his arms around him. It’s sort of sweet, and so Michelle and I take a walk instead of waking them up.
The next morning I wake up to Alex climbing into bed with me, pressing against my leg. There’s something hard in her pants, and I scramble out of the bed, half of me awake and half of me still in some dream about insects covering the earth. I’m not sure that she’s real.
“Hey,” she whispers, and she sits back on the bed. I try my best to smile. “I just thought maybe you’d want to . . .” she says, but I shake my head.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
“You still see me as a girl,” she says, and there’s as much accusation in her voice as self-pity. But what can I say to that? I want to tell her, no, I see her as a boy. I want to say that just because she’s a boy doesn’t mean I’ll want to sleep with her. I don’t fuck every man I meet. If I told her that, it would turn the situation around. She’d be the guilty one, for assuming, for implying. But that’s not why I’m still standing.
“You are a girl,” I say. “You’ve got tits and a vagina, and whatever that is in your pants, it’s not going to come on me, or in me. It’s fake.” Her face falls a little, but then it goes hard. She stares at me in silence. “I know that gender is a construction,” I say, and I tap my temple. “Right here I know that you’re as much a boy as you are a woman, but knowing something is different from knowing something.”
“You know what I think?” she says. “I think that if it wasn’t born with a cock, you won’t fuck it.” And I want to argue that I’ve fucked post-op trannies, but the fact is that they were all MTF and not the other way around. “You talk big about gender being a construction, but you aren’t willing to apply that to sexuality. You don’t believe a word of the shit you say.”
“Gender is a construction,” I say, and she pulls at the front of her pants. They come open and the dildo pops out.
“Make me believe it,” she says, and what the hell. I climb on the bed with her. I pull my own pants open, and she takes my cock in her hands. His hands. I mean, he takes my cock in his hands and squeezes. It hardens and I press against his naked stomach. I moan and hope that Richard doesn’t hear us. Would he be jealous? I don’t know anymore.
Alex lies on his back, and I lower myself to his cock, hard and dark. My hand snakes up his chest and I take his breast in my hand, pulling at the nipple. I start to gnaw on the cock with my teeth, harder and harder, my free hand going between my own legs.
And then Richard is behind me, pressing a finger cold with lube into me and saying to Alex, “I didn’t know where you were.”
Alex moans softly, and Richard enters.
Chapter 5
Michelle parks Richard’s car in the mall parking garage. Consumerism is a devastating creature, don’t get me wrong. It crawls across the world again and again, destroying the older, weaker versions of itself. Walmarts eat mom-and-pop shops, malls eat the Walmarts, and super-malls (like this one here) eat all the little malls, chewing them like gum, and stretching them across six floors and eight blocks of conformity. It’s disgusting. But if you’re in the mood to cause trouble, there’s nowhere better.
“I don’t want you to make any jokes about Sheryl’s clothes,” Michelle says as the two of us walk to the elevator. “She’s on this kick about beauty and fashion, and so she’s been wearing suit jackets over these awful yellow sundresses. You probably won’t offend her, but she’ll think you’re an idiot.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. We go inside where Sheryl and her friend Gilyan are waiting for us.
We find a woman walking with a baby carriage, and we rush over to her, all smiles. “Oh my goodness!” Sheryl squeals as we look down into the carriage at the pink blankets and wispy hair. “Oh my goodness, what a cute little boy!” and the woman opens her mouth to say something, but Gilyan cuts her off, reaching in to gently tickle the baby’s pink bootie.
“What a handsome little boy! What’s your name? What’s your name?” Gilyan does the baby-talk voice so well that I want to laugh.
The mother opens her mouth again, and this time it’s Michelle who cuts her off.
“He looks like an Alfred,” she says. “A little Alfie. Are you going to grow up to be an Alfie?” she says. “You’ll get all the girls, won’t you? Won’t you? I bet you will!”
I lean over to take a look. The baby smiles up at me, and I can’t help smiling myself.
“He’s handsome,” I agree, and I turn to the mother. “But why do you have him dressed up in pink, like a little faggot? That shit can seriously warp a child.”
“It’s a girl,” the mother says. She turns to Michelle. “Her name is Meg.”
And I roll my eyes.
“You can’t raise a little boy like he’s a girl,” I say. “He’ll grow up all confused. You have to instill in
him right from birth that boys and girls are inherently different. If you don’t teach him that, he may never figure it out, and then what would happen?”
“Madness! Utter madness!” Michelle says. “It would be chaos! Boys and girls would have similar life goals! They’d treat each other as individuals instead of as potential mates or acquisitions! Could you imagine?”
“How would they know what to wear to prom?” Gilyan says. “How would they know who to fall in love with? They might be guided by their interests instead of societal norms!”
“She’s right,” I say, putting my hand on the woman’s shoulder. “You need to take this boy upstairs to Baby Gap and get him into some overalls before he starts fagging up the whole world.”
She stands there silently, looking at each of us in turn, and then she gives a sort of half smile like you give to homeless people who want to tell you about their chicken-and-cat-sandwich recipe. She walks away.
“Goodbye, Alfie!” calls Gilyan, and she turns away before she lets herself laugh.
On the second floor, I buy a Coke from McDonald’s and drink it. Michelle and the others are sitting near me, pretending we don’t know each other. They’re laughing and talking, and I wonder what they’re talking about. Sheryl really does dress like an idiot. She’s great. They all are.
I walk up to the front and slam the Coke down on the counter beside the cash register. “The manager,” I say to the twelve-year-old girl they’ve got working. I think she’s twelve anyway; I have no idea how quickly girls develop these days. I saw something on TV about it, I think. All these hormones in their milk at breakfast, in their cereal, fucking them up. Maybe little girls are born with tits now?
She’s still young enough to be a ballerina, isn’t she? I’ve missed so many opportunities. I’ll never be a ballerina. It’s too late. I missed the boat. I made the wrong choices. I couldn’t even be a high school dropout if I wanted to. Still, I’ll get to be a cantankerous old man one day, with a walking stick to shake at all the little five-year-old girls with their tits hanging out.
The manager is skinny and balding. “Is there something I can help you with?” he says, and I give him a long stare, and then look down at the Coke. He follows my gaze. “There’s something wrong with your beverage, sir?” he asks.
“You tell me,” I say, and push the Coke toward him. “I bought this Coke five minutes ago. I thought I would stop off on my way home and buy a book at the mall, maybe have a Coke. It’s my girlfriend’s birthday though, so I didn’t want to take too long. I planned on slipping her the dick, if you know what I mean.”
“What seems to be the problem, sir?” he says, and it’s like he’s reading lines out of a fast-food-manager script. Everyone talks the way they’re supposed to these days. It’s like we’ve become the voices for our institutions. He’s the fast-food manager, and I’m the disgruntled customer. In a few seconds I’ll go back to being the frustrated genderqueer faggot and he’ll be the frustrated manager. Either way, you could listen to us talk for five minutes and figure out who we are.
“This Coke made me gay,” I say. I hold out my hand for him to examine it. “Look at that. I’ve never had a manicure in my life, but now my nails are neat and tidy. Neat and tidy! I work in a factory, man. I can’t have the guys at work thinking I’ve been filing my nails instead of biting them down.”
“The pop made you gay?” he says, and now he’s the sarcastic fast-food worker, embittered. The big-titty twelve-year-old is covering her mouth, pretending not to laugh. He gives her a dirty look.
“What am I going to do now?” I say. “I have a girlfriend at home, waiting for my Johnson Special, and all I’m thinking about is how to do her hair!” The manager is looking behind me now. “Hey! I said my girlfriend loves cock! You look at me when I’m talking to you about my lost heterosexuality.”
“I’m sorry, there are customers waiting,” he says. “If you have a valid complaint, you can call the head office.”
I open my mouth to say something, but Michelle interrupts me.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” she says.
The manager is smiling again, and he shakes his head.
“Not at all, ma’am,” he says. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“I sure hope so,” she tells him. “I think this Coke turned my friends gay.” She points over her shoulder, where Gilyan and Sheryl are making out in their chairs. Customers all over the store are staring. “I don’t mind or anything,” Michelle says. “I mean, six in ten people are queer these days or something. Whatever. It’s just that we have to get to a swim meet, and I’m worried they’ll be too busy thinking about vaginas to focus on their warm-up exercises. Is there anything you can do? Have you got any Pepsi maybe?”
“You probably have to call the head office,” I tell her, and Michelle nods, thoughtfully.
“Oh, okay,” she says, and smiles at the manager. “The food was really good.”
After that we’re just wandering around the mall, trying to think up things to do to fuck with people. Nobody can think of anything else, and everyone just wants to get in the car and go find some beer.
“Okay, we’ll go,” Michelle says, but there’s disappointment in her voice, like she’s looking for one last hurrah before we head off. One last complete mindfuck to leave people with their jaws hanging, thinking about things they never thought about before. Unlikely.
I’m having a blast though, and I come up with one last idea. I find a girl that’s skinny and blond and Paris Hilton–fake. She’s got a dainty little bag slung over her shoulder, and her skin sort of glitters. She’s standing beside this boy with cheekbones I want to run my fingers over. He’s fucking hot is what he is, and she’s got her arm in his.
“Wait here,” I tell Sheryl and the others, and I walk over to them. As I approach, I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach that I get when I see a straight guy with some ditsy-looking pin-up girl. I want to push her down stairs. I want her to step out in front of a car and leave a makeup smear for blocks. This is how I react to the beauty myth, I guess.
Normally I push those feelings down, or turn them into sarcasm. Not today. Today I punch the girl in the gut. She bends a bit and steps back, and I wonder if I should say something here. Make some comment about reinforcing an unrealistic standard of beauty, or about perpetuating the cycle. I want to kick her when she’s down, but instead I turn and smile at the boy. “Do you come here often?” I say.
His fist connects, and then Michelle is there, her knee in his groin, and she’s pulling me in the direction of the elevators and laughing. “You are fucked in the head,” she says, and I run along beside her, looking back. The girl is climbing to her feet, looking around. She doesn’t help the boy up.
I have no idea where Sheryl or Gilyan are. In the elevator Michelle just looks at me, this half smile on her face. “I wanted to be you there,” she says. “Fuck.” There are no security guards waiting for us, and we get in the car and we’re gone. We pick up Sheryl and Gilyan on the street outside. They’ve come out the front doors of the mall.
We drive with no destination in mind. I think about the look of shock on the blond girl’s face when I punched her. She’s as much a victim of the beauty myth as anyone else, and I’m not sure whether what I did is justifiable or not. She was born that way, skinny and blond and tall.
Michelle takes a corner fast, and I press my hand against the door. I still feel weird about fucking Alex and Richard at the same time. Fucking Alex’s cock didn’t feel like sex. Or it did, but it felt like Richard was fucking me with a dildo. It’s just that the dildo could talk.
We stop at an adult video store, pile out of the car. Gilyan asks the guy behind the counter, “Do you have anything with Asians in it?” The guy nods and leads us all upstairs. There’s a whole wall of boxes. Before the clerk can leave, Gilyan says, “Is any of this gay porn?” and he sighs and leads us to the back.
“Here you are,” he says. “Gay Asian porn.�
�
“Thank you so much,” Gilyan says. She pretends to look at a box. “Oh, I can’t tell from looking, are any of these Asians born in Canada, but living in Europe?”
“What?” he says, and Gilyan smiles.
“I have a thing for gay porn starring Asians who were born in Canada, but who were living in Europe at the time of filming. It’s kind of my fetish, I guess. I don’t like blond Asian guys though. A lot of the Canadian-born Eurofag Asian porn you get has blonds in it. It just looks so fake.” She turns to me. “It’s really gross, don’t you think?” she says.
“Disgusting,” I say. “Unconscionable.”
Our next stop is the liquor store, and then to Michelle’s. The television is showing footage of a “family values” rally that went on today, and there’s a dark-haired man standing at a podium with his finger pointing out at the crowd.
“You care about your children,” he says. “I know you do. That’s why you’re here.” There’s a little boy standing beside him, holding on to the fabric of the man’s black pants. He reaches down and picks the boy up. “That’s why I’m here too,” he says.
“Can you imagine what it must be like to be that kid?” Michelle says, taking a sip of her beer. “Every day you wake up and pad downstairs in your dinosaur slippers to a breakfast across the table from that.” She points her beer at the TV just as it cuts to a close-up of the man’s face. The caption says “Dr. Verge.” He’s still pointing.
“Political correctness and the truth are two different things,” he says. “Maybe it isn’t politically correct to say that homosexuality is a disease, that it needs to be cured or destroyed. It might not be polite to say so, but I know that it’s the truth, and I have a right to defend my child’s future.” The camera pans to the boy’s unsmiling face.
