Close to Spider Man

by Ivan Coyote

  I looked just like a boy. To me, I looked like my long lost brother would, if I knew him. To my work partner, I looked like trouble.

  “Here, here’s a napkin, wipe it off, you’re creeping me out. You look like my first boyfriend.” She seemed a little nervous now, and would not meet my eyes.

  “Is he a fag now, by any chance?” I asked, my smirk pulling up one corner of my ’stache. I winked at her. “I’m gonna leave it, it’s kinda sexy, don’tcha think? I bet the girls would love it, if there were any dykes in this godforsaken land.”

  She shook her head and shrugged like she always did when I said anything queer, and drove.

  I turned up the AM radio, and sang along to a country tune about pick-up trucks, and looked in the rear-view mirror. Couldn’t help but look in the mirror. My eyes kept returning to my reflection, like a tongue to a loose tooth. Myself in a moustache. Something about it fit. It suited me, I thought.

  That was the first one.

  THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER THING

  I DON’T HAVE THE RECIPE WRITTEN down, so it tastes different every time. You need chipotle peppers, the smoked Mexican ones; I’ve seen them dried sometimes, but mostly I get the canned ones.

  My friend Deanne Loubardious showed me how the first time, her striped shirtsleeves rolled up and over her tanned landscaper’s forearms, and an unlit cigarette dangling in one corner of her mouth, as she chopped chicken into chunks with short, callused, dirt-Worn-in fingers.

  †

  Step one:

  First you boil the chicken in a stock pot with three or four peppers and about eight cups of water. Save the stock, let the chicken cool enough to take the bones out, and cut into bitesize pieces.

  †

  There is a feeling like none other that I know when I have a big batch cooling in the fridge, or simmering on the stove; it is a broad, back-turned-against-the-wolf-at-your-door kind of feeling, a you-don’t-have-to-Worry-about-hungry-Company-showing-up-unexpected kind of feeling.

  As I was about to feed my chosen family – feet planted firmly on the kitchen floor, toes staring down the dust bunnies cowering between the stove’s legs – I thought, rather stereotypically, of my mother, which is odd really, because my father is the weekend gourmet, and I cooked for my sister and me on weekdays. My mother was usually out, either working late or taking night classes; I don’t have any Mrs Cleaverish memories of her in the kitchen.

  But my mother knew how to cook the standards: Sunday roast with Yorkshire pudding, turkey with all the trimmings, cream of turkey on toast for leftovers, boiled-carrots kind of stuff, passed on dutifully to her by her mother, my shrinking and pale grey grandmother.

  Cooking made my mother nervous; she could have made prime time commercials for boil-in-the-bag corn and Royal City canned peas. I can even see her now, exclaiming over their convenience and home-cooked goodness, snipping open bags and pulling things from a spotless microwave with red and white checkered mitts on, smiling at the camera, and truly meaning every word of it.

  Holiday meals were extravagant, yet conservative, served in heavy eighties handmade pottery bowls on matching woven placemats, cooked with great care but no love, cooked in reverence to obligation, not art.

  †

  Step two:

  In a large, preferably cast iron pan (I’m a little old-fashioned in that way), make a roux, you know, from melted butter and flour; this will be the backbone of your cream sauce. Add a couple of cups of stock, tons of garlic, sautéed onion, and four or five more chipotles.

  †

  My father made Sunday breakfast for us all, crepes or waffles or buckwheat pancakes, fussed over sauces and served helpings all around with flourish and a showman’s hand; he made too many dishes for what got done, ate too much, bloated, gloated over compliments from my mother’s duly impressed girlfriends, and loved every last sliver of green onion of it all.

  †

  Step three:

  While you’re making the roux, boil eight or nine small potatoes in the stock, and when they are done, strain them out and chop them into bite-size pieces. If you are like me and have yet to purchase the entire Martha Stewart pot collection, you are now going to have to pour the stock into a large bowl to cool, so that you still have a big huge pot to keep on cooking in.

  †

  They divorced last summer, after twenty-Seven years, and my mother has lost fifty pounds since. At first, she didn’t eat at all.

  When I went home in August, she was a carbon copy of her former self, picking at a bagel for breakfast and drinking only hot water with a squeeze of lemon.

  Someone had to teach her how to cook for one.

  So I took her to the Food Fair. She pushed the cart with resignation up and down the aisles, and I circled her like a babysitter, patiently extolling the virtues of couscous and Ichiban noodles.

  “Purple cabbage,” I explained, “is the bachelor’s very best vegetable companion. Cheap cheap, and you can leave one of these fuckers in the crisper for two months and still make coleslaw, no problem, adds colour to a salad,” etc., etc.

  I’m not sure where exactly I had lost her, or even if she had heard anything I’d said at all, but I looked up from the plethora of produce suddenly and realized that she wasn’t listening, that in fact her eyes were focused somewhere between the wheels of the cart and the permafrost always located about three feet under the concrete foundations of anything built in the place I come from, and she had begun to cry.

  “I don’t care anymore, that’s why. That is why I can’t eat. I don’t care whether I live or die.” She confessed this to me, as if no one was listening, and then she shook her head, as if someone else had spoken, and she couldn’t quite agree with them.

  †

  Step four:

  Pour the sauce base and onions into the large pot, add the chicken, the potatoes, a whole whack of sliced mushrooms, Zucchinis, squash maybe sometimes, carrots, and a can of chickpeas (I myself never have time to soak the little fuckers). Add a few more cups of stock and stir, like a cauldron, thinking always of your mother, even if she’s not Mexican and doesn’t like to cook really, and simmer, adding more stock as you boil it off.

  †

  My mother hired a moving company when the house was sold, and insured everything she owned. Two months before she could move into her new house on her own, the mover guy showed up, in tight Levi’s and a big brass belt buckle with a front end loader on it, to drop off the boxes: special boxes, reinforced for dishes and collectibles, and long, flat boxes for pictures, and rolls and rolls of brown packing paper, tape, labels, pens, and detailed, photocopied instructions for wrapping everything.

  “You have to wrap the bowls in four pieces each, four pieces, or it’s not covered if anything gets broken, it says so right here. Four pieces each, or it’s not covered.”

  She said this over and over to us all, like a mantra.

  My father had conveniently left for Australia only days before, leaving her to sort, separate, itemize, wrap, box, label, or throw out everything they had collected together in the last twenty-Seven years of marriage. We only moved once, six blocks down Twelfth Avenue, from Hemlock to Grove Street. My parents have had the same phone number all of my life.

  I was kneeling on the carpet in the living room, packing up the cuckoo clock and an abstract stone carving of an owl, I think, listening to my mom giving orders to two of my almost uncountable cousins, Rachael and Lindsay, eleven and ten years old respectively, around the corner, in the kitchen.

  “Four pieces each, remember, Rachael? Or else it’s not covered, if anything gets broken.”

  “You throwing this out, Auntie Pat? Can I have it then?” one of them asked in her little girl falsetto.

  “Lindsay,” her mother, my aunt, interrupted, “what the fuck are you going to do with an hors d’oeuvres tray, you tell me? Just more junk to clutter up your room with. You can’t see the floor in there as it is. Give it to the Sally Ann, Pat, it’s still perfectly good,
” Roberta said, scrubbing the tops of the cupboards.

  “Put it wherever you want it, just get rid of it,” my mom said. “I don’t want to see it again. I want to get rid of most of this stuff. How we ever collected so much stuff, I don’t know. I don’t even remember getting some of it, much less using most of it.”

  Their voices faded and mixed in the back of my head, as did the sound of dishes being wrapped in brown paper, and Fleetwood Mac on the tape deck. My dad had already taken the stereo and most of the CDS, and so, ironically and downright bittersweet at the time, we were forced to listen to sunfaded tapes from when I was a kid as we packed – I had scrubbed walls to America, vacuumed to Supertramp, sorted photos to Burton Cummings.

  And now I was crying to “Lay Me Down in the Tall Grass.” Tears obscured the cardboard box that I knelt in front of, and only the lump in my throat was keeping my heart from falling right out of my mouth and into the box.

  I had been so busy packing and scrubbing, fending off the inevitable and largely looming family feud, making sure my mom ate enough, and my dad didn’t drink too much, that I had forgotten to mourn. Mourn the dissolution of my family, and the passing on of the only house I really remember living in.

  My mom walked in to the living room and noticed the tears before I could choke them off, and dropped to her knees beside me.

  “I know this is hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t think I can make it through this. I fucked everything up, didn’t I? Everything is gone, everything, and it’s all my fault. This is all my fault.”

  Her hands meant this, this home packed into boxes. She held her palms up, empty.

  †

  Webster’s Handy Pocket College Dictionary defines pain in the following fashion:

  • 1: n. as the suffering of body or mind. 2: pl. great care (as in taking pains to ensure. . .). 3: v. to cause suffering to.

  Also listed is painful, an adjective.

  In reference also to pain, Leslie D. Weatherhead, the author of such illuminating reads as After Death, The Transforming Friendship, The Afterworld of the Poets, Jesus and Ourselves, and The Mastery of Sex Through Psychology and Religion, wrote in Psychology in Service of the Soul that without pain far back in the time of animal creation, we might never have come to be. We must allow a place for that minimum of pain which is how Nature warns us that something is wrong. The animal not warned by pain would have been destroyed. But there is evidence to show that when pain has given that warning, it ceases to be beneficial and becomes an evil thing.

  And he cites as an example an experiment with two blisters inflicted by suggestion under hypnosis on a patient, one of which he suggested should be painful and the other nonpainful, in which the painful one took twice as long to heal as the nonpainful one. I think what he is saying is that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you live.

  Time takes the edge off of the unbearable, turns wounds into scars, agony becomes just an ache. What used to hurt all the time only bothers you when you move it just so.

  Tragedy has a short shelf life.

  This is how the world apologizes for being such a bitch sometimes. Eventually, crisis becomes just a circumstance, a situation that just must be dealt with.

  So that’s what happened. Time turned the gaping wound where my father had been into just an empty ache. Somewhere between her mouth and her chest and eventually minutes and then hours and then even days would pass between bouts of overwhelming lonely.

  And this was a good thing.

  †

  Step five:

  Right before you serve, take a cup of cooled stock and mix in five or six tablespoons of yogurt or mayonnaise, and blend until smooth. Pour this mess into the bigger mess and you have an awesome batch of spicy chipotle chicken in a light cream sauce to serve over brown rice or couscous. Make a salad, too, and you’re set.

  Feed yourself and three or four friends for at least three days, for about twenty-five bucks, if you have a big enough stock pot. Good for whatever ails you.

  †

  My mother has started to date the English chap she hired to paint her new guest bedroom. He is a creative and giving gourmet cook, and an amateur photographer. They hike a lot together.

  She is taking tap dance lessons, and willow chair-making classes with a couple of girls from her office. They are all recently divorced, and just went in on a barbecue together, all having lost custody of their respective hibachis.

  My father bought an airstream trailer, parked it behind his welding shop, and has not cut back on his drinking.

  I look, and cook, just like my father, but I have my mother’s teeth, and tits.

  THERE GOES THE BRIDE

  WHAT CAN I SAY? GUESS I’LL START with what everyone else is saying. Congratulations. So you’re all married up now. Weird, huh? Do you feel any different than you did an hour ago? I do. That could be the three scotches I had in a row, though, just to take the edge off.

  Your father is freaking me out a bit. He seems rather thrilled to see me here. He’s the one pouring me drinks, he keeps patting me on the back and saying “Good to see ya” like I was his long lost . . . whatever. He was never this friendly when his eldest used to sit on my face in her spare time. He still can’t remember my name, but I wouldn’t hold something like that against the guy I always liked him, even if he is enjoying my position in this whole affair just a little too much.

  I always cry at weddings, always have. ’Member when Laura got married in Little House on the Prairie? I lost it even then. I get this from my mom.

  But I was trying not to today, seemed to me the ex-lover should remain dry-eyed, lest her feelings be misconstrued, but the truth is even the thought of all that true love and sickness and health and having and holding and all still sneaks past my cynicism somehow and pulls at some ancient believer in me, and I cry every time. Every time someone dares speak such lofty hopes aloud.

  He seems like a nice guy, your . . . husband. I was afraid he’d be an asshole and I’d hate him, or that I’d be an asshole and he’d hate me, but so far we both just smile at each other, more like teammates than adversaries, like we both know what it’s like to step up to the plate when you’re pitching.

  Your friend – you know the one who never liked me so was always extra nice? She keeps putting her hand on my arm or my shoulder and asking, “So how are you?” like any minute now I’m bound to break down and confess to her my true feelings, unleashing the bitter testament of a lonely homosexual, but even if I were, lonely that is, I would never giver her the pleasure. Instead I keep asking her if she has seen either of my dates, and finally I shake her hand off me and say, “I’m fine, for chrissakes. It’s her wedding, not her funeral.”

  Oh, well. She was always looking for proof that I was, indeed, an asshole. I try to be helpful.

  I was just helping myself to more food – I forgot how much food there is at these functions – and this cute little old Irish lady struck up an interesting conversation with me:

  “Couldn’t help but notice how much you’re enjoying my broccoli cheese casserole there, dear.”

  “Did you make this?” I said. “This is some of the finest broccoli cheese casserole I’ve ever come across. I guess I should leave some for everybody else though, huh?”

  She laughed and asked me if I played in your band, if that’s where I knew you from.

  “No, not exactly,” I said.

  “Did you work with her at the restaurant then?” she asked.

  “No. No, I did not,” I said.

  “Down at the pub then, you work together down at the pub?”

  “No, no we didn’t work together down at the pub, either.”

  She looked puzzled, so I blurted it out. “We were lovers for a couple of years. That’s how we know each other.”

  She didn’t blink a wrinkled eye or skip a beat.

  “So you take about a pound of broccoli and steam it, just a little, because you’re going to bake it all for a while, once you’v
e made your cheese sauce. You’ll need some cream, not milk, and I find the older cheddar has more of a snap to it.”

  I laughed all the way out to the backyard, after one of your brothers rescued me and we all snuck out back to smoke a spliff.

  I always liked your brothers. I see shadows of you in them sometimes, when they turn their faces just so; they feel like family, remind me of my cousins.

  Your oldest brother was drunk, had his tie off already, and was feeling sentimental. “We always liked you the best, you know,” he whispered, one arm slung around me, like it was a secret. “We thought you were the best of all of them.”

  Your little brother was stoned, self-reflective. “Ironic, eh?” he pondered. “She dumps you, to marry a guy in a kilt. Sorry, dude, no offense, but you know what I mean?”

  You looked beautiful today, getting married. “She looks just radiant.” Everyone kept saying it, and it’s true. You did.

  Your face alive with that kind of wide-eyed love that used to make even me wish that I could want that picket fence as much as you did. I could never believe like you could. We broke our hearts, you and I, figuring that one out.

  But the truth is, I could never give you this. A wedding that makes your grandmother happy. What’s it like? “Legitimate” love, I mean. The gifts and congratulations and tax relief, not to mention the relief in your father’s face, what is that like?

  Because I can’t even imagine it, and reality provides that I probably won’t ever be that blushing bride, and I don’t quite cut the husband mustard, either. Motorcycles and nonmonogamy, or a mortgage and a mini-van: I am old enough now to know that none of this is your fault, or even mine.

  There will be no church bells for me, but I cannot bring myself to mourn the loss of something I never wanted. Toasters and linen and casserole dishes, the blessings bestowed when one does as our mothers did, I will never know, and you always had the option.