Rebent Sinner, page 7
I bought a pound of coffee, an eighth of indica, and six albums on vinyl at Red Cat Records, and I got to work.
In 1992, when I was twenty-three years old and home in the Yukon working for the summer to make money for school, my buddy Chris Clarke called my parents’ landline to tell me that Tuck & Patti were coming to the Alaska Bald Eagle Festival in Haines and it was only a five-hour drive and she was going to bring her new canoe and could I bring my tent and the blue cooler? We could take the Subaru, she said; she just got new brakes, finally.
She had a whole plan, and I guess, in retrospect, maybe I should have asked more questions. First of all, Chris was new to tying canoes to the roofs of Subarus, and the boat slid off sideways and also a little bit forward in the wind like a drunk guy’s ball cap the first good corner we took on the road just before the junction and the turnoff to Highway 3.
She said we were going to camp at Mosquito Lake and canoe down the Chilkat River into Haines, stash the canoe and walk into town, and then get our friend Lori to pick up the canoe with her truck after the concert and drive us back to the campground. I’m looking at the proposed route on a map on my phone right now as I write this, something I definitely should have done in 1992, before I got into that canoe and pushed off from the shore of that peaceful if buggy Mosquito Lake. Well, obviously not a map on my iPhone back in ’92 but a real paper map, of course. You get my drift.
I could tell you all about the salmon and the eagles and the gigantic bear we saw while floating serenely down the Chilkat for most of that day, but the story really picks up when the river began to widen at its mouth and the current smacked up against the force of the frigid waters of the north Pacific Ocean. We hadn’t checked the tide tables, either, and the river’s determined waters stood up sideways to meet the indifferent and indomitable incoming tide. Icy Alaskan water slopped over the sides of the canoe, and I quickly could not feel the fingers on my hand as it scooped and bailed with the top half of a plastic four-litre milk jug with the blue lid screwed on tight.
Chris was at the stern, being stern. We bailed and paddled into the tide for what seemed like an hour but Chris swore later was only fifteen minutes or so. My shoulders and arms were rubber holding the paddle. The wind picked up. We just weren’t moving at all. My feet were soaked and I couldn’t feel my toes now, either. I started singing a song and the lyrics went something like, “We’re not going anywhere, we’re not moving at all,” and I could see the shore about a klick away, calling to us, but Chris kept steering us straight into the middle of the mouth of the river.
I fixed my eyes on a yellow sign glinting in the conifer green next to the little road that curled alongside the riverbank. The road sign was lined up with the tip of the canoe. I closed my eyes and counted for 100 strokes of my paddle and opened them up again and found the sign again. It was now a couple of canoe lengths in front of us, meaning that even paddling full speed ahead, we were actually going backwards.
Chris caved and stuck her paddle upright in the chuck and swung the nose of the canoe so we were bound for shore. I whooped triumphantly. We were going to stash the canoe and hitchhike into Haines, and I would live long enough to see Tuck & Patti play live in a big field under the midnight sun.
I remember watching them that night, entranced by how much they looked like they loved each other up there, still, after all those years and all those stages. Patti rolling out jokes and anecdotes in her honey-over-gravel voice. I remember her telling this story about waiting tables, just like one of the jobs I was doing that summer, and her words shot possibility into my chest.
She was an artist, but she used to be just like me, I thought. She used to pour coffee and count tips and dream about being something else. She used to dream about getting out of that town for good and being a singer and making people feel things. And here she was. Something else up there on that stage. Something magic. Something real but not really real, at the same time.
In 2012, Chris Clarke called me up in January and said, “Coyote, let’s go to Frostbite this year. Come home. Let’s go and see some music. Let’s get inspired again. Like that summer.”
“Okay,” I said, “but this time we’re driving in a fucking car and parking right outside and walking into the theatre like normal concertgoers.”
The night of the concert, Chris and I went over to our friend Brenda’s place and ate moose meat stew and drank whiskey and played the ukulele, and it was super fun, even though it was still two years or so before the impending divorce, so things were pretty tense between Brenda and her now ex-wife. I picked up on all the unspoken hidden-by-Christmas- jam-cookies-and-tinsel-still-on-the-tree tension between them right away, because I recognized it from my own home, back in Vancouver.
And then off we went to the theatre. We had flasks full of Jameson and a healthy joint in a Sucrets tin, and we pretty much cried non-stop through the entire show, because it was four different songwriters all trying to sing the saddest songs they knew. But it was a good cry, because tears set to music are almost always the good kind of cry.
Our buddy Michele Emslie told us after the show that there was going to be a closing party for the whole festival at the Bauer brothers’ place and asked us did we want to go?
“The Bauers’?” I asked, one eyebrow raised. “The party bunker?”
I had grown up with Greta Bauer, the only daughter of the Bauer brood. I knew all her brothers: the Bauer boys. They were famous in Whitehorse, the dad too: Old Man Bauer. Werner. More infamous, I guess, with their red-gold curly, curly hair, and how hard it was to tell them apart unless you grew up with them, like I did, and even then, I had to do a double-take sometimes. Andreas smiled more. And Thomas was slightly better looking, like he had the same features as his brothers, but they were just put together a bit different. And Victor was the oldest and scariest somehow, something mean, maybe, in his eyes, but it was hard to say, really, because he talked the least, as I remember.
The Bauers lived in a rambling house in Crestview, a subdivision of Whitehorse, just a little farther north and across the Alaska Highway from Porter Creek, where I grew up. Crestview was less than half a klick from the industrial section of Porter Creek, where Hector Lang’s compound was, where my dad rented his shop. Greta used to come over to play with me and my sister and Hector’s granddaughter Sara and a couple other grubby local kids whose dads were mechanics or welders or autobody guys or crane operators. Her brothers were more elusive, spotted briefly dropping Greta off with their dirt bikes and then disappearing into the pine trees, indistinguishable from each other until you got up close, even though no one wore a helmet back then, hardly ever. The Bauer boys. They were weird, everyone seemed to think. They kept to themselves, they were German, they were dangerous, maybe even, though no one seemed to know exactly why. Their old man hung out at the dump and salvaged old wood and straightened out bent nails and saved them in coffee cans to build additions on their house across the highway.
The Bauer boys had burned that rambling house down a few years ago, but instead of building another house on that giant lot on the hill, they kind of just stitched three trailers together and tacked a giant tin roof onto one side that was held up by four-by-four beams painted with creosote, and the party bunker was born.
Frostbite Music Festival had taken to hiring out the Bauer boys and the party bunker for the festival’s closing night festivities so all of their volunteers and staff could have the night off after the last show and celebrate, and someone else would clean up after it was all over.
So Brenda, Chris, and I squeezed into my mom’s boyfriend’s truck and off we went. I hadn’t seen the party bunker before; I had only heard tell of it.
It looked like what it was: three trailers tacked together with kind of an open-walled airplane hangar propped off one side, with a corrugated tin roof covering steel rafters and beams. There was a roaring campfire inside the airplane hangar and a gathering of mismatched couches and nailed-together two-by-ten benches clustered around the crackling flames. It smelled like burning tires. There were three teal portable outhouses lined up just to the right of the front door, a new skiff of fluffy snow on their roofs. I bet the neighbours just love living next to the party bunker, I thought, shaking my head a little.
“It’s pretty loud in there,” I said. “It might get a bit … Yukon. I’m not sure I’m up for this tonight, not after having my heart torn out by thirty sad songs in a row. When either of you is ready to go, just tug on your earlobe like this, and we can leave right away.”
Brenda and Chris both nodded inside their parkas and Sorel boots and woollen mitts with wolf fur trim. They were well bundled, as my mom would say.
The door had a sign on it that said PLEASE KEEP YOUR BOOTS ON INSIDE, and the crowd on the other side of it was so huge I had to squeeze the door open wide enough to slide my body sideways into the mash of people inside.
The first trailer held the stage, and a punk band was playing. Orange extension cords fed smoking PAR can lights with orange and red and blue gels clothespinned to them. The lights were clamped and haywired to criss-crossed pipe and two-by-four rafters in the ceiling. People were moshing in their snow boots and parkas on the muddy plywood floor.
The second trailer had pretty much been gutted, except for a bathroom way at the back with an Out of Order sign on the door. A row of refrigerators lined one side of the trailer, and a row of avocado and harvest-gold and white electric stoves lined the wall facing the refrigerators. Someone was pulling multiple take-home frozen pizzas out of the ovens with a scorched dish towel. A giant vat of something bubbled on a stove and crusted around the burner, and the sink overflowed with dishes. There were also industrial rubber garbage cans lined with black garbage bags in every available corner.
The third trailer contained multiple couches from the seventies and eighties, and La-Z-Boy chairs bleeding foam stuffing, and the lights were dimmed a little. Every time someone opened the back door to go out into the backyard, a guy who appeared to be fast asleep opened one eye and barked to close the door.
The backyard on the other side of that door contained another had-to-be-illegal-in-the-city-limits bonfire and about 100 more people. The sky was crystal clear and whizzing with one of the most spectacular displays of northern lights I had ever seen in all my years. The sky had shimmered a little here and there on our drive up the highway to Crestview, but now the lights were out in all their green and pink ball gown splendour.
The giant bonfire shot hot air balloons of sparks up into the aurora borealis every time someone threw another log onto it. The punk band pulsed from inside the first trailer, competing with tendrils of “For Those about to Rock (We Salute You)” by AC/DC bleeding out from a pair of speakers propped on the railing of the stairs that led up to the back door of trailer number three.
We all stood around the fire with the northern lights swirling above us, our faces glowing and our asses freezing, stomping to keep our feet warm and sidestepping to keep the smoke out of our eyes when the wind shifted.
Then a guy wearing a red down jacket with duct tape patches finished his beer and smashed the can against his own forehead, which made him stumble backwards a little and knock the guy standing directly behind him on his ass. Knocked-down guy leapt up and charged at beer-can-to-the-head guy, slamming him in the kidneys with two closed fists and catapulting him right into the bonfire. He nimbly leapt through the coals and sparks, and emerged on the opposite side of the fire with only the bottom hem of his jeans aflame. A giant ooh rippled through the crowd, and everyone kicked snow at the flames. Someone kept yelling, “Stop, drop, and roll!” but the guy heeded none of these commands. The pant-leg fire was extinguished in short order, and someone handed him a new beer.
I shook my head again and looked over at Brenda and Chris, who were both tugging on their earlobes repeatedly, signalling time to go, time to go.
I dropped them both off downtown and then pulled into the parking spot behind my mom’s condo, the engine of the truck ticking and the heat in the cab quickly giving way to the cold air outside.
A red fox padded from behind the dumpster next to the empty lot next door and sat down under the street light, watching me watch it. It licked its lips and picked up its front paws one by one and shook them a little, tipping its ears toward me and coiling the muscles of its back legs to spring when I shifted in my seat.
We both sat like that in the alley for a long while, each of us waiting for the other to move, until the sound of an approaching snowmobile broke the quiet, and the fox loped off and disappeared under the wooden stairs of the shitty apartments, the ones with the peeling paint and the giant penumbra of flattened cigarette butts around the back door.
I tiptoed up the stairs and squeaked across the fresh snow on the deck that led to my mom’s back door, slipped out of my boots, hung up my parka, and padded in my wool socks up to the spare room.
I fell asleep that night wondering if I ever wrote a song about my hometown, would it be a love song, or maybe not?
I’m sitting here now in my office, drinking coffee and listening to Joan Armatrading. “Are you for or against us? We are trying to get somewhere,” she sings. To me, her music has always been songs of resistance, songs of difference.
I asked my friend Clyde the other day if he had ever heard of her. Maybe one of my first queer heroes.
“Joan who?” he said. “How do I spell it? Should I check her out?”
We are in danger at all times now of forgetting our elders. Forgetting to cry to their songs, and to learn from their words. I realize that I have only myself to blame for this. I haven’t handed any newly out baby queers today’s equivalent of a Joan Armatrading cassette or a copy of Stone Butch Blues. I am supposed to repeat the names Alberta Hunter and Minnie Bruce Pratt and Joan Nestle and Jeanne Córdova and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera and Stormé DeLarverie and Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and the Daughters of Bilitis. I am supposed to whisper those names into the ears of a nineteen-year-old baby butch from rural Manitoba in a dyke bar at the bottom of a flight of piss-smelling stairs that lead to a greasy alley behind a hotel in a big city full of small-town homos looking for each other. I am supposed to especially remember the bull dykes and the trans women and the black and brown queers, because the white gay men who have fallen will have airports named after them, and Hollywood will remember the cleaned-up and sterilized versions of their stories, but the remembering of the rest of us will still be up to the rest of us. I am supposed to be the bridge, and somehow, I have forgotten this.
But I can’t whisper history into younger ears in the dyke bar because the dyke bars are all gone now. I have no idea where the young queers are gathering. I guess I could go and ask around on Instagram.
And I will pick up my pen and remember to remember.
NINE: UNBECOMING
I WAS NEVER really all that pretty. I pretty much knew that my whole life. Not pretty. Good at other stuff, though, I would tell myself way back, when it seemed like the most important thing a girl could be was pretty. When I was nineteen years old, in 1988, a girl kissed me on October 13, and I realized maybe I was something else, not pretty, but still, maybe something. Then I switched to trying on handsome. I’m not pretty, but I could be handsome. Maybe that would feel less ugly, I thought.
So now it’s thirty years later and I see my friend on Instagram, and they are transitioning, a little more each day, with each bathroom-mirror selfie. But more importantly, this morning they changed their lipstick colour dramatically, going from an everyday no-nonsense red to a delicious dark purple, with an even darker, most immaculate liner, under very bold eyeshadow too, and the lashes, I mean, they had really applied themself, and they looked … divine.
I was so inspired, I remembered to moisturize.
Several months ago, my friend David A. Robertson began to grow his hair. Like, I’m talking the man now has some luscious hair. He’s Cree and over six feet tall and has fathered five children even though he’s a vegan, so I’m well aware that I’m not ever going to sport a virile mane like David A. Robertson’s, but—
I’m turning fifty years old and suffice it to say I am capable of growing a lot more hair than a lot of dudes my age. In fact, my trans buddy around my age (which can now mean ten years younger than me—I think he’s forty-one) even said to me once, several years back, after I had just had another every-three-weeks, millimetre-long barbershop fade, “Man, if I still had any hair, I would grow Justin Bieber hair, dude. That shit would be in my eyes. I would learn to flick my bangs. I swear, maybe a topknot. Whatever, I’d grow it.”
So I started growing my hair out, about two months ago now.
There is a line at the end of a story I wrote called “Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?” that goes, “I am grateful that I can now afford a well-cut shirt and a real silk tie, and a tailor. A good haircut once a month. A fancy jacket with these cool elbows on it … ”
I was in Tokyo last month, day two of my Asia tour, and the first hand that shot up belonged to this young woman from Laos, who was just learning Japanese, and English. I heard later at lunch from her teacher that she was a real thinker, a rebel, a writer, a philosopher.
