Missed Her, page 2
“I’m not going to lie to you and say I don’t miss smoking,” I tell her. “And I’m not going to give you some bullshit line about how smoking isn’t cool.”
“Smoking is cool,” Dan agrees. “I loved it.”
I nod in agreement.
“But if I had it to do all over again, I never ever would have started,” I tell her. “Think yellow teeth. Think smelly clothes. Think about how much longer it will take you to save up for that digital camera you want. Think of the nonsmokers who won’t want to kiss you. Then when you’re done thinking about all that, it will be time to consider the cancer.”
I remember this time when I was about fifteen, sleeping the afternoon away, when I was awakened by my cool Uncle John.
“I love you,” he whispered. “And that’s why I woke you up to tell you to quit smoking that stuff. Take it from me.” His breath smelled like beer and his flannel shirt smelled like cigarettes. “Do yourself a favour.”
I didn’t listen to him then, just like Layla wasn’t listening to me now.
I was supposed to be the cool uncle. I was supposed to be the one she could come and talk to about stuff she couldn’t go to any of her four parents about. I was supposed to hook her up with wine coolers and let her smoke pot in my rec room and get her concert tickets for Christmas. I had the tattoos and everything. Instead I was giving her a lecture about smoking, something I had seen fit to do myself for most of my adult life, until a mere four months ago. Just when had I become so totally uncool?
And wait, it gets worse. Layla made the mistake of telling me that her great grandpa had left her a small inheritance, and that she planned to spend it traveling around Europe for a couple of years after she finished high school.
“I want to, you know, see the world and stuff, before I go to college. Just in case I get into an accident or something, and can’t get around.”
I shook my head violently. I couldn’t believe the words my mouth was making, even as they passed over my lips. “You really should think about taking that money and investing it in yourself. You should spend it on school, so that you get an education, which will get you a good job, so you can travel later in life whenever you want.”
I believe my mother had given me this exact speech, some twenty odd years ago.
Just then my girlfriend called me on my cell phone. She’s almost done her PhD. I passed the phone to Layla, hoping she could convince my niece of the value of an education.
“Nothing much,” Layla says. “Dan and Ivan are just telling me how I should open up a savings account before I go to Europe.”
That is not at all what I was just saying. In one ear and out the other. Kids these days.
Which Doctor
I spent the better part of the last six weeks on the road, and it finally caught up to me. Over twenty gigs and twelve airplane rides in forty days, and finally my carbon footprint kicked me in the ass. I woke up the first morning home with a throat full of razor blades and a fever, and two days later a nasty green monster had taken up residence in my chest.
A week later it was worse, not better. My girlfriend, my mother, and the little old lady across the street were all in agreement—I needed to go see the doctor and get me some pills. At least get myself checked out, since there were some nasty things going around, and it was best not to take any chances.
I have had the same doctor in Vancouver for the last eighteen years. She never blinks an eye at my tattoos, or my chest hair. She is unfazed by piercings. As much as I hate going to the doctor, I have learned to love and respect her over the years. She works at a clinic on Commercial Drive. She calls me Ivan. She knows I’m queer and couldn’t care less. She reads my books. The only thing she has ever questioned me about is smoking cigarettes, and even then all she did was ask me if there was anything she could do to help me quit.
But I wasn’t sick in Vancouver, I was sick in a small Ontario hamlet that doesn’t even have its own gas station, much less a queer- and trans-positive walk-in clinic. Every time I tried to imagine driving myself twenty minutes into Arnprior and taking off my shirt in front of a strange doctor in a small town, a prickly lump of panic would swell up in my chest. I could see it unfolding like a homo horror movie plot in my mind: the doctor walking into the waiting room with my chart in his hand, and calling out my legal name, and then doing a double take when I stood up to follow him. Even though all I needed was a stethoscope on my chest, in my nightmare I am naked except for a paper dress, on my back on the examination bed with my icy feet in the stirrups, trying to explain my complicated gender identity to an aging ex-military doctor with a brush cut and still muscular forearms. There are needlepoint Bible verses framed and hung on the walls of his office. His wife likes to do needlepoint, when she isn’t teaching Sunday school or volunteering on the right-to-life pregnancy hotline. I am crying and he is frowning.
It probably wouldn’t have been anywhere near this terrifying, but I am cursed with an active imagination. So I didn’t go.
Ten days later, I still wasn’t getting better. My girlfriend sent me a link to a walk-in clinic in downtown Ottawa. There were rainbow flags all over the home page of their website, so I called to see if I could book myself an appointment. The receptionist explained to me that I lived outside of their catchment area, and would have to find somewhere closer to where I lived. I told her I was living in a very small town, and that I didn’t really fit into a gender box, and that I was a bit afraid to go to a small-town doctor. She told me I was just going to have to get over my social phobia if I wanted medical attention.
I swallowed, not quite believing what I had just heard. I thanked her for all her help, letting the sarcasm seep into my voice, and hung up the phone. I paced back and forth across the kitchen floor twenty times or so, trying not to let the tears spill over my bottom lids, then picked up the phone and hit redial. I asked to speak to the clinic’s director, and explained to her what had just happened.
To her credit, she was as horrified as I was by what I had just been told. She apologized profusely and assured me that a terrible mistake had been made, and that she would talk to the receptionist and make sure that nothing like this ever happened again. She said that because I worked in Ottawa, I could come in the next day and see a doctor. A doctor who didn’t care if I had chest hair and a girlfriend.
All the way into the city the next morning, I thought about it all. I’ve heard the stories. Trans men who are saving up for top surgery and haven’t had a breast examination or a mammogram in years because they felt the same prickly lump of panic in their chest at the thought of a stranger touching the breasts they didn’t like to be reminded that they still had. The lump of panic weighed more than the lump the doctor would be feeling around for, so they didn’t go. Trans women with prostate glands afraid of judgmental doctors with unkind hands. All those bodies that belong to my people, people who have learned ways to hide their breasts and tuck their penis away and shave and pluck and bind parts of themselves. People who can’t be touched in certain places by their lovers in the dark, much less a stranger in a white coat under a fluorescent glow. When was the last time I had a pap test?
I thought of all the small-town queers and trans folks out there, who don’t have access to the (sometimes) progressive-minded inner city clinics that fly the rainbow flag, because their postal code gets in the way. I realized that finding a doctor who I felt comfortable and safe with was only the first step. The hardest part was convincing myself to go.
Je Suis Femme
I used to have two dogs: Deja, a big hairy old husky mix, and the little guy named Goliath, a Pekinese-Pomeranian cross with a foreskin abnormality. I gave him a tough name not only because he would go on to weigh eight pounds when full-grown, but also because his penis can’t descend like the penises of other, less special dogs do. When he gets an erection, which is often, instead of a little lipstick appearing, he gets a lump in his tummy.
Three months ago Deja, my old lady dog, passed away after fifteen years of friendship and shedding. So now it’s just me and the little guy. Goliath and I had a hard time adjusting at first, him wandering around the house looking for his friend and me trying not to cry every time I swept the hairless floor, but slowly we are getting used to life without the old dog. I have taken a bit of flak in the past for being a butch with a fluffy little dog on a leash, but then the big dog would run up with a giant stick in her mouth and whoever was hassling me would back down, their masculine image of me somehow repaired and intact again. Having one big dog and one little one was kind of like those guys who drive a mini-van with two car seats in the back and a bumper sticker that says, “My other car is a Harley.” Deja was my Harley, but she’s gone now. The other day a butch friend of mine met Goliath for the first time, and she laughed out loud, right in his fluffy face, which was right beside my face, because I was holding him under my arm.
“I never pictured you with a lap dog,” she smirked.
“I am a multi-faceted and complex individual,” I told her.
She snorted.
“My truck is bigger than yours,” I retorted, which shut her up.
Later that night, in a bar in Ottawa, she offered to buy me a beer.
“I can’t drink beer, I am gluten intolerant,” I explained, hating the way this sounded before it even left my mouth.
She raised an eyebrow. “How about a white wine then?”
“How about I kick your ass?”
She bought me a vodka and cranberry juice, which came with a thin pink straw and smiled smugly at me for the rest of the night from behind a butch-looking pint of dark beer.
My girlfriend was in town last weekend, and we ran into an old co-worker of hers on the street, a professional lesbian in a smart two-piece pantsuit. Small talk was exchanged, and then we parted ways.
“Have you ever met her partner?” I asked my sweetheart.
“Once, at a wine-and-cheese type thing. She and her girlfriend were both wearing skirts. It kind of freaked me out.”
I shuddered. “What do you think they do in bed?”
My girlfriend shrugged, and then we laughed. We both know already that we are a little old school when it comes to things like all-femme action or butch-on-butch love. It’s not that I don’t completely support the rights of others to do what they want with whomever is consenting; it’s just that it’s not how I am wired. The landscape my libido responds to is curvy and wears lipstick, and is attracted to biceps and big black boots.
I took my curvy and lipsticked lady friend to Montreal last weekend for a romantic getaway. We walked and shopped and fucked and ate and walked some more. My new big black boots were killing my feet, but I tried to keep this to myself. My sweetheart went to French immersion school when she was a kid, whereas I was a lucky participant in a pilot project where I learned Tlingit, a First Nations language spoken mostly in the Southern Yukon. Learning Tlingit was cool, but not so handy later in life when ordering cappuccinos in Montreal. I did study some French in high school and I have had a few Québécois girlfriends over the years, so I mostly understand the gist of a conversation, but I often freeze up a little when it comes to actually speaking it, especially when nervous or overly sober. I’m more of a listener en français, which I like to think of as a welcome change of pace from my English self.
On our last morning in Montreal I managed to mumble my way through ordering two medium coffees, one orange juice, and a bottle of water in French, and then ducked into the women’s washroom. There were two middle-aged ladies washing their hands, which they immediately began to wave in my face as they cursed me in what I can only guess was most likely French, pushing me with their words backwards toward the bathroom door as they advanced.
I panicked, forgetting even how to speak much English for a minute. I fumbled frantically around in my head for the right words in French. The only words I could find were simple, a baby sentence, lacking in grammar or style, which I blurted out crudely, my last defence:
“Je suis femme.” What I meant to say was I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to frighten or alarm you, but contrary to what you seem to think, I am a predominately estrogen-based organism and I wish to avail myself of the facilities. What I actually said was, “I am woman.”
They both stopped for a millisecond, looked at each other and then back at me, and continued to scold me out the door. I turned and bolted for the men’s room, which seemed to have been hosed down with stale urine and was out of toilet paper. Someone had also borrowed the stall door and toilet seat and forgot to return them. Next time I need to use the salle de bain, I will have to remember to bring a pink cocktail and my little dog.
Hair Today
I had the same barber in Vancouver for fifteen years. When he left Commercial Drive for the West End, I mourned him like a long-time lover. A less than satisfying roll in the hay with a stranger I can shake off in a couple of days, but a bad haircut, well, that shit takes time to heal.
When I first got to Ottawa, I made the mistake of stumbling into a fancy salon in gaytown. My bangs were hanging over my eyes, I couldn’t see my own ears, and I was desperate. Eighty dollars plus tip and a disturbingly sensual mint-and-rosemary-infused scalp massage later, I emerged back onto Bank Street with a slightly more effeminate replica of the hairdo I had walked in with, approximately three-and-one-half millimeters shorter than it was when I woke up that morning. It looked great for about four days, then I needed a haircut again. It was a great consumer experience, but at that rate it was going to cost me approximately six hundred bucks a month to keep my bangs out of my eyes. I needed a barber. A good, old-fashioned, wait-your-turn-twelve-bucks-take-a-little-off-the-top kind of guy like the one I used to have back home.
I found him at the other end of Bank Street. A sunfaded swirling barber’s pole led to a staircase, which turned into a narrow hallway humbly covered in decades-old carpet hammered down by thousands of work boots and dress shoes, a worn-out roadmap that directed me to a doorway.
You know you’ve got the right place by the smell. Old Spice-scented men’s talc, cologne, that weird blue stuff they dip the combs in, and the leftover waft of someone smoking a cigar late last night when everyone had gone home and the doors were all locked up for the day.
My new barber is Lebanese, with hands the size of small hams, boasting a handshake that could crack a walnut. The first time I went in, I brought my sweetheart with me. This turned out to be an accidentally brilliant move. She is, of course, gorgeous, and her silver curls and dimples bought me the kind of street cred that a barely bicepped, moustacheless guy like me needs when being introduced to all the good old boys from the neighbourhood. Maybe I am a soft-spoken young fellow with long eyelashes, or maybe I am one of those kinds of women who could never land herself a good man. Who knows what they are thinking. But at least my girlfriend is hot.
“Sit down right here, boss.” He always calls everyone boss. “And will you take a look at your lady friend? What a beautiful girl.”
He got no argument from me. I’m not sure exactly what it feels like for her to be talked about in the third person when she is actually present to overhear conversations about how attractive she is, but we both just assumed he meant well. Some would call this allowing my female partner to be treated as an object, and trading on patriarchal standards of female desirability in order to garner favour in a male-dominated environment. I call it getting a cheap haircut.
After he was finished giving me the perfect haircut in under ten minutes for a total of fifteen dollars with tip, he whipped off the towel around my neck with a flourish and held up a hand mirror for me to take a look at the back.
“Would you take a look at that? Handsome guy.”
There is always a chance that at any point in this interaction something, and it could be anything, will tip the scales and whomever I am talking to will all of a sudden realize that I am not what they may have thought I was. They might not care at all. They might care a whole lot. They might change their body language, their tone of voice, or their mind about how much they like me. I have no control over any of this. My options are limited. I could choose to go about my everyday, ordinary, human business, and each and every time I interact with a perfect stranger I could say, “Hello, my name is Ivan and I need a haircut, car wash, library book, or a latte. In case you are wondering (are you wondering? Sometimes it is hard to tell. And in case maybe I am obligated, am I obligated? Who knows. Anyway…), I am a predominately estrogen-based organism. You may proceed to treat me thusly, based on how much you respect women, and how you feel inside about people who, even when forced into a gender box, refuse to close the lid.
But this would be unwieldy, none of their business, and most importantly, it would be a definite overshare. Mostly I just try to be personable and polite, not assume anything about anyone, and hope for the best.
I went in for a haircut again before I left town. My barber went on at length about how much he missed my beautiful lady, and why was she breaking his heart by not coming in to visit more often?
“You are lucky guy, that such a beautiful girl loves you like that. I am going to tell you a secret, where to get a leg of lamb, the best butcher in all of Ottawa. You get a nice bottle of wine, okay, and make sure she keeps coming back here to see us?”
I asked him how long he had been married.
He shook his head, sweeping the back of my neck with a brush coated in talcum powder. “Me, boss? I been divorced now twenty-six years.”
