Rebent Sinner, page 6
WHEN I FIRST started really writing, like for real writing, like not a story for English class or in a journal but for really real writing, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg was the only book I could hold up and say, “I want to do this. I love this book because this is a story about someone like me, and before there was this book, there were no stories about people like me written by people like me. I want to write a book just like this one, except less sad. I want to be like the person in this book, except funnier. I want to write a book about this hard life, except I need this hard life to one day be easier.”
Last year I got a letter (well, a Facebook message, actually) from a young trans guy who said he had read all my books, ever since he was in grade eight and a counsellor had given him one, and that my writing had given him hope, had helped him come out and transition and feel less alone, but now he was contacting me for the very first time ever to complain about something I had recently read at a live show I had done with some other writers. Their stuff was really heavy, he said, about sexual abuse and misogyny, and then I got up and told a funny story about how when I had top surgery, I was worried Did they switch my nipples around and stitch the wrong one back on the right side? or whatever, and how dare I make light of body dysmorphia issues like that? and he was so disappointed and so forth, and P.S.: Why didn’t I also talk about capitalism and the environment and other important issues?
I called another writer friend of mine and read her the message. I was nearly in tears, and she was trying not to laugh at me but not succeeding. She has three books out and is working on her fourth, but she was breastfeeding her second son right then as she was talking on the phone to me, and the dog, or maybe the cat, just puked on the stairs and it was still all over her sock, not to mention the carpet, and she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since the first son was born and he just started grade one, so don’t hold your breath waiting for this novel, she told her agent last week.
“Wait,” she said. “Back the fuck up. Do you mean to tell me you can’t feel your nipples, like at all? God, what I wouldn’t give to not feel his little teeth coming in, day by day by day. I believe this is why babies are born toothless. No one would breastfeed at all if the little fuckers were born with a mouth full of teeth. You have to ease yourself in to excruciating pain like that,” she informed me.
I could hear water running in the background and the dog barking.
“Besides, switching nipples is serious fucking business, and anyone who can’t see that hasn’t had their nipples removed and stitched back on again. Yet. He’s young. It’s his job to turn on the ones who made him, who fed him, who taught him. It’s a rite-of-passage thing. It’s in all those fucking parenting books Jin is always bringing home. I tripped over How to Raise a Feminist the other day and fully felt like killing him for two days. It’s the lack of sleep, I tell him, but some days I suspect I actually do want to kill him.
“Anyways, don’t take any of this personal. It’s not even really about you, or what you wrote or said, or didn’t write or say. It about him flexing his brand-new biceps or spreading his newly feathered wings, or whatever it is the kids do these days to make sure we know that we are officially irrelevant now, and that they invented everything radical. You probably did it to someone too, pal, think back. Next.”
She has a way of putting things into perspective. That’s why I called her.
FIVE: BY ANY OTHER NAME
I WAS LUCKY, I know, growing up like I did. Weekdays in the summer when my mom couldn’t find a free sports camp or Boys and Girls Club outdoor activity, and my grandmother Flo was living in Nanaimo still, and Grandma Pat was up cooking in one of the construction camps or on a trip in her camper with Pearly, her dog, or whatever, and everybody else was busy, I would just go to work in the shop with my dad. It started pretty young, with sweeping and bolt sorting, if I remember right. I will have to ask him.
Sweeping, sweeping, there was always sweeping: aluminum shavings that peeled from the tips of drill bits into razor-sharp silver curlicues, long like phone cords and all over the greasy concrete floor. There was cat litter scattered from dusty bags to soak up spilled oil, and ruby-red transmission fluid and antifreeze and shiny-on-the-inside clumps of dirty bearing grease. Floating bits and slivers of blue foam insulation, busted-off bolts and stripped screws and lost nuts and cotter pins and washers.
And you had better know the difference. You better know a stripped and useless screw from a stainless steel irreplaceable last bit off the new antenna on what’s his face’s boat or trailer or truck that my dad had dropped a week ago and been looking all over for ever since.
My dad was a welder back then, and still is to this day. He’s seventy-two and still working. Back then, he had his own big shop, with the bay doors at either end for pulling giant equipment in and through, and squeaking—fuck, what are they called?—hoists, up on tracks in the ceiling for lifting engines and heavy shit out of heavier shit so you can fix it. It’s been too long, I guess, since I went to work with my dad, so I’m forgetting the names of things he taught me about.
But I can still tell an inch-and-a-quarter-length, three-quarter-inch head fine thread bolt from a two-inch-long coarse thread one-inch head bolt, and a lock washer from a spacer by sight at a distance, to this day.
I’m calling him right now. It’s 6:30 a.m., I’m jet-lagged from my tour in Southeast Asia, and he has already been up for hours. The dude barely sleeps anymore.
It’s a chain hoist, he tells me. I’m on the phone with him for an hour. He’s trying to learn the internet and wants to figure out how to email me these pictures he took on his iPad of the sauna he is building, but the other old guy who is teaching him the internet went to Germany for Christmas, so it’s going to have to wait, unless this lady who works at the corner store he’s having over for dinner tonight is some kind of computer wizard too and knows how to work Netflix, he tells me.
He taught me how to drive and weld and measure twice and saw a two-by on a perfect ninety by eye and work the forklift and back up a trailer and make a jig out of scraps and chop kindling and, and. Everything he taught me and all the jobs it got me over the years so I could eat and pay the bills and keep a truck on the road and tour and do shows so I could be a writer one day. It all started with sweeping and sorting the bolts.
Landscaping. First for the city, and then for Jeff at Iditarod. My dad bought me a lawn mower for my sixteenth birthday and told me, “Here, you won’t ever have to work for anyone else now if you don’t want to.” It was a good one, too: four-stroke, gas-powered, with a clutch and a drive chain, a shiny red Honda that I paid the rent with more than a dozen times in my early days, for sure.
It was when I was landscaping on the deep mansioned west side of Vancouver in the rain, trying to dig a ditch through the tree roots, that I decided to go to school to be an electrician. A good trade.
I learned wiring from an ex-German-soldier-turned-electrician named Otmar Weltzelmeyer, and how to actually wire stuff from a carpenter named Richard, who hired me to help him build solar houses on small islands off the coast of British Columbia. This turned out to be the best straight job I ever, ever had, but I was too stupid to know it then. I learned more about building and fixing stuff from Richard than I did from any other man in my life, next to my dad, and my uncles Rob and Kevin and John and Fred and Jack.
Then it was the movies. My neighbour Lynn, the lesbian filmmaker, said, “Hey, if you can wire a house, then you can totally be a lamp operator,” and she wasn’t wrong. I worked hauling cable and lights and gels for a couple of years. And because I could wire stuff, I got hired to build some props for a show called The New Addams Family, and then come on set to operate Uncle Fester’s light-up lie detector or make Lurch flash green and red when Wednesday made him into a Christmas tree. And that was how I ended up switching over to the props department.
My boss in the props department—hey, I guess I better change her name because of the story I am about to tell about her, but before I start, can I just say there was so much more to Debbie Shore than this shitty story? She was funny and let us all smoke in the props room and worked it out with the production office so that me and Chris, the other props guy, could split the job so both of us got to work forty hours a week, instead of eighty like everybody else. She lived with her ex, the fading rock star, and her new boyfriend, and everybody got along for the kids, and they had a huge house to all share anyways. She was a lot more than what happened in the props room every Thursday afternoon when the paycheques arrived on her desk from the production office upstairs. I don’t even know if she knew how much it broke me down every week, and I can’t even blame her for that because I didn’t even know until years later, looking back on it all.
You get paid once a week in the film industry, on Thursday afternoons around two p.m. Someone from accounting does the rounds of the set, bearing the blessed bundles of cheques elastic-banded into stacks for each department: electrics, grips, carps, greens, craft services, props.
This was back before I changed my name legally. Production was cool with me and put Ivan on the call sheet, so that is what everyone called me. But the accountants were accountants and still had my legal name on all payroll paperwork, so only the people who processed, printed, and passed out the cheques knew my legal name. Enter Debbie Shore.
Looking back, I can’t understand what would have possessed her the first time even, and why she would have chosen to repeat this ritual every Thursday for the nearly two years we worked together on fifty-six half-hour episodes that each took four twelve-to-eighteen-hour days to shoot.
Anyhow. I would pop into the props lock-up in the studio to have three drags off of someone’s already-lit cigarette while they were tweaking the lights or turning around on set, and Debbie would jump up from her desk with my paycheque in her hand and laugh her too-little-girl-for-her-age laugh and say, “Whose cheque is this? And who are you? Sorry, can you repeat that, [insert deadname here]? And who do we have here, Miss [Deadname]? [Deadname], here you go, now don’t spend it all in one place.” And so forth. Every week. Every Thursday.
I would cringe. I never laughed back, and she never seemed to notice that I didn’t. My gums would tighten around my teeth, my eyelids would ache, my tongue would go dry and scrape at the back of my throat when I tried to swallow around the unnamed ball of squashed-up silence, and I would suck it up and try to smile and stuff the white envelope into my back pocket. It was the most money I had ever made, and everybody knew there was a lineup of probably more qualified props probably guys down at the union hall, waiting to take my job if I didn’t like the sound of the name on my paycheque.
I wasn’t out at work about being trans. I mean, I looked pretty much how I look now, only younger. And I dressed for the most part how I dress now, only cheaper and more prone to wide-collared vintage polyester shirts. And I had gone by the name Ivan for years already, but I didn’t actually use the word “trans,” and I hadn’t ever had any kind of conversation about pronouns with anyone, even myself. It was 1998, and unless you were a bearded trans man, if you had been assigned female at birth, then your pronoun was she back then. I wouldn’t have ever even considered asking to be called anything else, especially at work. It’s hard to explain if you weren’t around for it, and I know it’s been said a million times, but things really were different back in the day.
I had a kid in Singapore ask me last month how I cope emotionally with being misgendered all the time. They were a thin wisp of a kid, in their first year of college and tender all over, I could tell, tucked into an armchair in the multi-purpose room on campus, wearing a scarf pulled up around their chin and mouth, and hiding wing-like shoulder blades and collarbones under an oversized jean jacket, even in that heat and humidity.
I realized as I was saying it out loud that I am almost impervious now to someone using the wrong pronoun for me. It is an irritant at best, like a black fly behind my ear when I’m trying to put a fish hook on my line, not even a mosquito, and certainly not capable of taking any of my flesh, like a horsefly. I notice it, but it is easily swatted, and crushed. It does not touch me inside in any way, and simply gives me intel on the person who is speaking to or about me. It helps me categorize the speaker, no more, no less: friend, ally, stranger, unhip layperson, oblivious cis, lazy host, or intentional foe. Good to know.
It’s hard to see a kid in pain like that. It’s important to say the right thing when asked a question like this. But sometimes there really isn’t a right thing to say.
What I really wanted this kid to know is that they are going to need to somehow build up the calluses around their heart a little. That they cannot and should not ever give up their power so easily to another, shouldn’t put any shred of their own self-worth into the sloppy hands of a stranger, or anyone.
I stumbled through my imperfect answer to that kid, and I know that I prefaced it with a disclaimer, something to the effect of “I can only ever speak for myself … ”
I wish I had told them to stand up full inside themselves and imagine that they are protected by a full suit of shimmering armour made of feathers, made of sequins, made of the six hundred skins they have already shed to become what they are right now in this minute. I wish I had told them to live inside their feathered armourskin with such surety and self-love that who they really are inside could never be shaken by any words stuck to or shot at them from outside of themselves, ever, not ever, no way.
But then I remembered payday in the props lock-up and I knew that they are not ready yet. They are eighteen and unarmoured. I remember how it felt to stand there, swallowing my silence because I didn’t know the words for me yet.
I wish I had told that tender kid that there will come a time when all those wrong names and words will bounce and roll off of their back like they do mine now, and they will one day be able to say, “Bring it on, I got this. Call me what you want, you can’t touch me, but if you get it right, it will touch me. It’s up to you, so you decide.” And this will be the truth. Most days.
Some would say I should thank Debbie Shore for teaching me to be tough, but fuck that. I say it’s a terrible way to learn anything. And she was more than this tiny, petty, cruel dance she made me do with her on Thursdays, but you know, that is what I remember first, and most, about her now. So you decide what you want me to remember about you because, it’s true, I forget almost nothing. It’s a strange kind of blessing that I can still hear her words in my head right now, and find the memory so easy on my tongue like it was yesterday, not two decades later.
Oops, I meant to change her name to protect the parts of her that weren’t guilty, but I forgot. Her name was Debbie Shore, but let’s call her Dianne Small, shall we?
SIX: TO BE CLEAR
I WANT IT said for the record that I don’t believe the answer to making the world safer for our youth is teaching queer and trans kids that they need to toughen up to face down this world. They should not have to. A kid shouldn’t have to learn to live through trauma and swallow a diet of other people’s ignorance simply to become themselves. We need to be changing this world faster. We need to soften this world up, not make our kids harder.
SEVEN: MONTHLY DUES
I HAVE MADE a living writing and performing these last many years, and I haven’t had to work a trades job since 2003 or so, when I quit the film business for good after I got that first teaching job up at Capilano, then College now University. That at least covered the rent and then a little back then. It wouldn’t now, though, so I know I’m lucky, especially in this goddamn city these days.
I miss physical labour, though, I do. I mean, the road can pound your body, make no mistake: planes and trains and that thing my Achilles does now after thirteen hours of driving, and my back is tweaked permanent too, from hauling gear and merch and suitcases and who knows what else over the years. I know my knees and back are grateful I’m not pulling wire on a construction site or humping dollies of gear up mountainsides on a film set or mowing lawns and digging ditches, but man, I used to sleep good back then, and I loved it when my biceps were hard like apples, and I remember the salt taste of farmer-tan-and-good-work-in-the-hot-sun sweat, not nervous or slept-on-a-plane sweat. And calluses, man, I miss those too. I mean on my palms, not my fingertips from playing guitar, though those are cool as well.
I have days when I dream of quitting the road and getting a job as an electrician again, buying aluminum checker plate tool boxes for the back of my truck and a new hard hat and digging out the old tool belt. I’ve still got it, and I know exactly where it is right now. I could be ready for work in a couple of minutes, still, to this day.
I know it wouldn’t be that easy. I mean, I never saw any fifty-year-old, female-assigned trans people, ever, on any of the job sites I was on, in any of the trades I did. I know they’re out there somewhere, probably more of them now than ever before. I just don’t know any.
My ticket is expired, too, and my union memberships lapsed years ago. IATSE were real bastards about it, to be honest, and repeatedly referred to me as “sister” when they called to say they were taking my name off the register, and no, there was no way to keep my name on any of their lists unless I was paying monthly dues, working or not, writing career or not. I remember that day, in the late fall of 2003, standing outside Continental Coffee on Commercial Drive and telling the woman from the union hall, “Yes, I guess I am saying I’m no longer interested in being in the union. I just can’t afford it on my writer’s income.” That was a hard door, a scary door, to close behind me, but I closed it and never looked back.
I was going to be a writer. I was going to quit the International Alliance of Theatre and Stage Employees and become a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada.
The dues are way cheaper, as you would imagine they’d be.
EIGHT: ANALOGUE
SO I’M WRITING this series of essays, starting in 1989, about when I first came out, and looking back over thirty queer years now, and figuring it out in between the lines. And I think to myself, I wish I still had that Joan Armatrading cassette, and I wish I still had any one of the many camper vans I have owned over the years. I still love that kind of mouldy smell of the sleeping bag that lives on the bed in a camper van. It’s how I write; it’s how I remember: smell, taste, sounds, and especially music. If I want to write about the summer of 1989, then I’m going to need that album, but on cassette, or maybe the record, something real-time, a hard copy, analogue, physical thing that you have to put on or flip over or rewind and fast-forward. Spotify is great, but it’s not the same. I’m also going to need Tuck & Patti’s Love Warriors and Pirates by Rickie Lee Jones and Blue by Joni Mitchell.
