Rebent Sinner, page 5
SOME DAYS I struggle with doing school shows. They’re tiring and early and really, really hard work. I did three today. First 600 kids, then 700 kids, then 350 or so this afternoon.
I met this kid. She hand-drew and coloured this poster of Gendy the Unicorn for me to sign for her so it could be put up in the hall of her school.
And I met a different girl who was too terrified to come out to her evangelical father. She said she worried she would be homeless if she told him.
I told her what my grandmother once told me: “God doesn’t make mistakes. You are exactly who you are meant to be. There is nothing sinful or unnatural about you. Nothing. Always remember that.”
I also told her she didn’t need to tell anyone if it would make her unsafe. She asked me for a hug and I gave her one. A long and really big hug. I should have thanked her for reminding me why I was there.
MY SOUND GUY for this morning’s performance is named Nathan. He is twelve years old.
“I’ve got the settings just perfect,” he tells me. “Just stay in the middle of the stage and you’ll be good.”
9. THE LAST TIME I SAW RICHARD
ONE: THE LAST TIME I SAW RICHARD
AN OLD FRIEND of mine recently broke up with her partner of twenty-seven years. They had to sell their house on the Island and split up all their finances, and go through nearly three decades of stuff they had collected together and divide all of that up, too.
It was pretty rough, my friend told me, and weird, too, just how and what a person gets attached to over the years, without even realizing it, until you all of a sudden have to pack it, or throw it out, or give it away to someone you’ve somehow fallen out of love with. She said there was stuff she would rather throw out than leave to her ex, and that realization made her feel small, and unlovable. Like no one would ever love her again if they found out that truth about her, she told me.
“Anyways,” she said, “enough about all that. Enough about my trivial nightmares. I’ve still got my health. Isn’t that what everybody says in times like these? I’ve still got my health, and I’ve still got seven boxes of old papers from back in the day,” she told me over the phone. She’s not one for texting, she always tells me when she calls. She just never took to it.
“Any fucking way,” she said. “So, I’m going through all of this goddamn stuff. There’s an entire tub of old photos, and you’re in a bunch of them. Going way back, pal. Like, the Pride parade in 1989, it looks like? You were still a baby. The summer after the winter we first met. Skinny like a sapling. Fresh, right out of your wrapper. You were what, twenty years old, maybe? You want ’em? I know you don’t have too many old photos left after your house fire. I need to unload most of it. No room for memories in a one-bedroom. I’m going to miss that fucking garage more than I ever will my ex-wife, I tell you that much.”
She dropped those photos off last Labour Day long weekend. It was the third photo from the top that stopped me, heart like a hot rock in my chest and my mouth all dry and my eyes all wet.
Pride parade 1989. Vancouver. The photo had been taken by someone standing on the curb, probably my friend’s ex-wife; she was always the one who had the camera slung around her neck back then.
I am marching with the ACT UP contingent. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. AIDS activists walk, fists in the air behind a spray-painted Silence = Death banner with a bleeding pink triangle.
1989. I had come out of the closet only ten months prior to that day. It was my first ever Pride parade. Some of us felt like we were marching for our lives, and most of us really were. It was the pinnacle of the AIDS crisis: infection rates were on the rise, and Saint Paul’s, in the heart of what we didn’t call the Village yet, was the one hospital in the province with an AIDS ward. The government wouldn’t pay for AZT, the only antiretroviral drug in town back then. People with HIV were being turned away from housing, schools, organized sports, being fired from restaurant jobs. The right-wing conservative evangelical Christian premier of the province had just proposed Bill C-34, which called to quarantine anyone with HIV. Fear and poverty were on everyone’s tongues.
I was marching with about forty people, mostly gay men, almost all sporting at least one piece of black leather something. Leather chaps that were too big now. A leather vest dangling from a man’s surfacing collarbones. What was his name? Kevin. He used to be a lawyer. He’s gone now.
I ran my fingertip over all those faces. Matthew. He was Mohawk. Richard. Richard is still around. John.
I hadn’t even thought about John in years. I searched his name on Facebook and found an archival video interview with him shot in 2014. So, he was still around four years ago. That didn’t seem possible the last time I saw him, around 2011 or so, at another funeral, in his motorized chair. I almost hadn’t recognized him, and he knew it, I could tell that he could tell.
“It’s me, John,” he said, and squeezed my hand with his impossibly long and slender fingers. “You probably don’t recognize me with my beard all gone grey,” he whispered, and winked.
I remember his hands were cold that day, and he let me warm them between mine in the faded lobby of the community centre.
I googled around to find something more recent about John. John couldn’t be gone. He was too much of a shit disturber. I would have sensed a shift in the force if John were gone. Someone would have told me. He was always so fearless, chaining himself to the doors of politicians’ offices and throwing red paint on Premier Bill Vander Zalm that infamous night outside the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Blood on the hands of those who would not fund the few drugs that might help prolong the lives of the people who were sick. We chanted. We raged. We both got arrested that night, and released without our shoes into the alley behind the cop shop when it used to be at Main and Hastings.
John always said his secret to living with HIV and AIDS was to eat Kraft Dinner at least once a day, swore by it, and he had been diagnosed in 1984, before they even had a test for the antibodies. He had survived and thrived with full-blown AIDS for well over three decades, so nobody could argue with him about his Kraft Dinner theory. I stopped looking for John so I wouldn’t have to find out that he was no longer to be found.
I searched through all the faces in that photograph. Some angry, some joyful, all determined.
All gone now, except me, and maybe John, and Richard.
I reminded myself to call Richard, invite him over to dinner or something. We will talk about his recent vacation to Palm Springs and where he had found a vintage pink tuxedo shirt and his shitty landlord and how he’s thinking about moving to the Island still. And I will tell him I’m thinking about leaving the city, too. Come next June, I’m going home to the Yukon for the whole summer, and I feel good about it.
Yeah, I thought, I will have Richard over for dinner before I leave Vancouver, and I will not show him this photo of us from thirty years ago so we won’t have to talk about how maybe it’s just him and me still alive now to remember it all. We won’t talk about how somehow it is thirty years later and maybe we are the only two faces left.
POSTSCRIPT
I CALLED UP a few folks and asked around some more about John. He was spotted just last week smoking and telling jokes outside of the Pumpjack Pub.
TWO: THIRTY-ONE YEARS NOW
IT’S COMING OUT Day today. I nearly forgot. It is October 12. On October 13, 1988, I kissed a girl for the first time.
I didn’t even know I was queer until she kissed me. I was nineteen; she was twenty-eight. She was a jazz singer, and I played the saxophone. That was thirty-one years ago tomorrow. I can’t believe it. We were the only two queers I knew.
We told her roommate, the actor, first. Her roommate’s mom was a lesbian, so we went on a pilgrimage to meet the lesbians on their lesbian homestead on Vancouver Island. Where else? I am still friends with one of those women. The other has passed now, years ago, from a heart attack. I loved them both on sight. Still do. The First Lesbians I Ever Really Knew gave me two cassettes to play in my van: Shadows on a Dime by Ferron and Joan Armatrading, her self-titled album, the one with that song “Down to Zero” on it. I know every song on that record by heart, to this day.
So. Love to the jazz singer who kissed me, and love to her roommate, the actor with the lesbian mom, and love to the lesbian mom’s lover, and finally, love to the lesbian mom, may she rest in power and live on in all of her children, one of whom I consider myself to be, in some small way.
I carry with me today a little part of each of them: in the corners of pockets in old coats, tucked into that drawer in the kitchen where you keep spare batteries and manuals, inside the stronger, stiffer silver hairs that grow now from my temples.
THREE: DEPARTURE GATE
AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS of life mostly on the road, you get familiar with airports.
There’s a waitress in the breakfast place in Ottawa who has outlasted three different name changes on the restaurant where she works the early-morning shift. Her name is Naz, and she knows I’m going to have black coffee and scrambled eggs and no toast. And I know she has three daughters and gets up at 3:45 a.m. every weekday to come to this job so she can be home at three p.m., when her kids get off school. Her middle daughter is a gymnast and her youngest loves to read and her oldest is obsessed with a white boy two years older than her who Naz has nicknamed Not Good Enough.
I know never to connect in Chicago in the winter months and to avoid the shrimp at the Thai place in the international terminal in Toronto.
I never forget my phone charger or my Kobo eReader or my reusable water bottle because my shoulders know the feel of what my backpack weighs with everything in it.
Airports are the only place I ever see my friend the cello player and my other friend the famous young adult apocalyptic fiction author.
Anyhow. A couple of weeks ago, I was at the gate right next to the Starbucks in the domestic terminal of Vancouver International Airport when I spotted another queer in the crowd, tapping on her iPhone with a chewed-up forefinger. I had met her several times in Toronto, and we have many friends in common. I flipped through the Rolodex of names and faces in my head. Ella? No. Ava, her name was Ava.
She nodded hello and dragged her backpack off the seat next to her and deposited it between her Blundstones to make room for me to sit.
So I did.
We got to talking. She was coming back from Salt Spring Island, she told me, from seeing her terminally ill friend, probably for the last time. She was kind of like a surrogate matriarch for her, a chosen mother, and Ava was going to miss her, she said, but it had been so good to get to say a proper and intentional goodbye.
“She is kind of an elder to me,” she said, and looked down at her boots, quiet for a beat. “I modelled myself after many bits of what she taught me, even though she was straight and vanilla and not an artist.”
“Who are your queer elders?” I kind of blurted out, this half-formed question that had been rattling around in my own head and chest so much lately.
“My queer elders?” Ava said slowly, her forehead showing its lines. “I don’t think I have any. Not really. I’m forty-six. Aren’t I too old now to have queer elders?”
My eyes met hers. Her eyes were full of tears, and it was contagious.
She told me that she never really felt like she had a queer elder she could fully relate to, because she wasn’t a butch, but she never felt she connected much to the word “femme,” either.
I told her most of my queer male elders were dead, and that many of my lesbian elders turned out to be TERFs, so I had to turf them. We talked about me turning fifty, and her having just turned forty-six, and how somehow, all of a sudden, there we were, looking around, and we were the oldest ones on the bill, the oldest one with paintings on the wall in the gallery, the oldest ones. How we would probably be the oldest ones at the dyke bar now, if there was still such a thing as a dyke bar, and if we ever actually went out to a bar anymore. We wondered how we could possibly turn into elders without help from actual elders. What would that even look like? How could we provide any wisdom at all without guidance?
Then they called us to board. We were in different boarding zones, and she was swallowed up by strangers. I didn’t see her again when we landed in Toronto.
I revisited our conversation over and over in my head for days afterward, though, like my lips and teeth returning to a hangnail. I chewed it until it began to bleed a little.
I ran through the butches and femmes and trans men and non-binary people I had ever known who were older than me or wiser than me, or had come out before me or transitioned longer ago than I did.
Mary had three heart attacks and moved to the Sunshine Coast. The woman she sold her pet store to screwed her out of a bunch of money, and now she works part time in a shop in the ferry terminal to make ends meet.
Bet used to work at the longest-running lesbian centre in North America, until she was ousted from her position in the late nineties and lambasted in the queer media by the much younger women who took over and then closed its admittedly imperfect doors forever less than a year later. Turns out those old dykes knew a thing or two about getting shit done that we forgot to learn from them before we discarded them for newer models.
Bet also moved to the Sunshine Coast and does home renovations to pay the bills. It took her ten years to recover from East Vancouver’s queer community politics and begin to do any political activism again. She now works mostly with water protectors fighting the pipelines and rural voter registration. She is seventy-five years old and just had her heart broken again by an Australian woman whose affections faded somewhere between the first five-day fuck fest and the second nineteen-hour plane ride back to Canada, Bet told me when I called her out of the blue to catch up.
I was secretly thrilled when she told me that she just turned seventy-five and is still having five-day summer fuck fests with international strangers, but I didn’t say so because I didn’t want to seem insensitive given the latest developments in that relationship.
“It was one very long and awkward seven-day kayak trip, let me tell you,” Bet said, and we both laughed.
I was also impressed that she is seventy-five and still going on seven-day kayak trips. I am turning fifty and wouldn’t plan a seven-hour kayak trip, but I didn’t say so because I didn’t want to seem ageist, or lazy.
I hung up and looked at my list again. Catherine. Plane crash. I used to be able to talk to her about anything. And I do mean anything. She worked at Three Bridges Community Health Centre and I once went to her for medical advice about a tragic anal tear situation that I was asking about for a friend.
“Tell your friend to take a laxative and take it easy for a couple of days.” She laughed at me with those eyes. “Tell your friend not to put more on their plate than they can eat in one sitting.”
Then I thought about Bear. The other Bear. Heart attack. Then there was Star. Suicide. Frances. Alzheimer’s. Janine. I need to call and check in on Janine. Parkinson’s.
Most of my American queer elders are dead now because of poverty and, until recently, no queer marriage, so no benefits and no health care, and that catches up to a person.
Except Jack. He is still around. Jack is a few months younger than my mom, so he is turning sixty-nine this December. He’s had two minor strokes and lives in a subsidized seniors’ housing unit in the suburbs of Seattle with his two fat cats. He custom-makes corsets and costumes for theatre and movies. He created all the dresses for all of the female characters on that TV series Deadwood. He was really proud of the fact that all the prostitutes’ fancy dresses were made true to their time period. No zippers back then, he told me, so no zippers now. Eyelets and lace and hooks, instead. No plastic invented yet, so that is real whale bone in those corsets, he bragged. He calls me boyo and I call him Da, in honour of both our Irish blood. We usually talk a few times a year: on Father’s Day and Mother’s Day, on his birthday, and on the anniversary of the death of his only son, who was the only person on the planet who ever, ever called him Mom.
I forgot Kate. The writer. Two battles with cancer now, or has it been three? She once bought me a suit that fit me perfectly without any tailoring at all from a thrift store in Eugene for twenty-five bucks. We were roommates at a writers’ retreat in a cedar-and-glass lodge on the Oregon coast, and when I came out of the bathroom wearing my new-to-me suit, she screamed and clapped her hands and told me I looked like Brad Pitt. She said it was the best twenty-five bucks she had ever spent. We both marvelled at our good fortune to find a suit of such quality that fit twenty-four-year-old me. We wondered who it had originally belonged to. I found an envelope in the inside left jacket pocket with a faded card that said, Congratulations, Jacob, on your bar mitzvah. Love, Aunt Felice and Uncle Stanley. When I read the card to her, Kate laughed until her mascara ran and said my suit was even more perfect now.
Kate was the first trans person I ever saw naked who wasn’t me. This turned out to be a much more important milestone than I was capable of realizing at the time.
Jim Deva used to be my dirty rotten cocksucking scoundrel role model until he fell off a ladder trimming a hedge on his lunch hour and broke his neck and died. It’s been four years now and I’m still mad at him for that, even though one day I hope to die quickly doing something stupid that everyone told me I was too old to be doing for myself anymore.
I guess my only other elder was Leslie Feinberg, only we never met. S/he never friended me on Facebook and I never read hir tweets or saw hir Instagrammed breakfast photographs.
But I read and then reread Stone Butch Blues in 1993, and found bits of myself in those words. Even though they were written by a big-city American butch about a world I would not even be born into for twenty more years, I recognized myself in someone else’s story for the very first time.
I recognized myself and picked up a pen, and now it’s twenty-six years later and I have not put it down.
FOUR: HOW DARE YOU?
