One in Every Crowd (9 page)

August, I974 † Whitehorse, Yukon

FIVE YEARS OLD AT THE QUANLIN MALL, Saturday shopping, and I was holding open the swing door for my mom and the cart. I remember I had half a cinnamon candy stick in my mouth and a red baseball hat with the plastic thing in the back pushed through a hole that was smaller than the smallest hole in the strap, a hole I had to make myself with the tip of a heated bobby pin.

So the rest of the strap stuck oddly out from one side of the back of my head, but I didn’t care, because it was my Snap-On-Tools hat that my dad had given me, just handed it right over to me when the guy at the tool place gave it to him, he was buying rivets or concrete pins or something, and the hat said Northern Explosives too, in black block letters in an arch over the hole in the back part, and come to think of it, what I wouldn’t do now for that hat.

So enough about the hat, this American tourist sees me holding the door open, and of course he assumes it’s for him, so he won’t bump his cameras together pushing past his belly to open it for himself, and he steps through the door, right in front of my mom and her groceries.

He thanks me down his nose in heavy Texan “Thank you, son,” and sucks more fresh Yukon air through his teeth. He is about to speak to me again, to meet the people, to engage in a little local colour, in the form of a polite little boy, and perhaps, via a patronizing conversation with him, get to meet his lovely young mother, too, who also had my little sister in tow, perpetual snot on her upper lip, even in summer like this.

My mom interrupts this quaint northern moment, pushing the puffed wheat, two percent, and pork chop-laden cart briskly through the door. “She is not your son,” she shoots out the side of her mouth and the door slams shut behind the surprised Texan. I can’t see him anymore, there is just myself reflected in the dusty glass, and the back of my mom smaller in the background, as she pushed the cart and dragged my little sister to my dad’s Chevy, where he was smoking behind the wheel.

We could hate the tourists a lot more back then, before the mines all shut down.

The pavement was so hot in the parking lot that the bottoms of my sneakers stuck to the tar that patched the cracks on the way back to my Dad’s truck.

April, 1992 † Vancouver, B.C
.

The van was packed when the call came.

“Is this the girl named Ivan?”

How much can you really guess about a stranger’s voice on the phone, but I listened to the soft, smiling lilt of hers rise and fall as she explained that she had been at a going away party for me the night before, a surprise going away party that my friends threw for me because I was driving up to the Yukon today to work for six months. Except the surprise part of the plan had worked just a bit too well, because what nobody besides myself knew was that I was teaching twelve inmates at the Burnaby Correctional Centre for Women how to make leather belts all night, and this was the first I had heard about my own party, and it was over. Quite the surprise it was.

“Great party,” she explained, and the sound of her laugh made me think of leprechauns. “Anyway, I was going to take the bus up to Whitehorse today, and well, how do you feel about some company? I cooked a whole ton of pasta salad for the bus.”

Now, no amount of gas money and pasta salad can pay for four days on the Alaska Highway with someone who is starting to get on your nerves, because after Prince George you really are in the middle of nowhere, but I liked her voice. I said I’d pick her up in an hour at her sister’s place on my way out of town.

Of course, driving over, the doubting began. Just me and the open road home—and a perfect stranger. What if she doesn’t smoke, or wants to talk about co-dependency or something like that for two thousand miles? She’ll be so glad she’s not stuck on a Greyhound that she won’t actually say anything; she’ll just silently roll down her window in a disapproving fashion and say things like, “I should give you my therapist’s number. She specializes in addiction issues.”

But I picked her up, she bungee-corded her beat-up mountain bike to the roof, loaded in her pasta salad, lit a smoke, and smiled with an elf mouth that matched her leprechaun laugh as she surveyed my van and said:

“So if she breaks down, I guess I’ll just double you the rest of the way on my bike.”

Three nights later, in a campground somewhere just outside of Fort Nelson, she slipped her tongue into my ear and her right hand into my Levi’s and whispered, “I’ve wanted to do this since we left Kitsilano.”

Six months later, I drove back to Vancouver to go to electrical school, and she stayed. She had met a sweet-faced French-Canadian boy who I thought looked like Leif Garrett, and she was, unbeknownst to all of us at the time, pregnant with their first son.

“You gonna write me, Chris?” I asked her as we loaded the last of my stuff back into my van.

“Probably not, but I’ll think about you whenever I eat pasta salad, and if that’s not love, then I’ve never been in it.”

This is the closest thing to a commitment you will ever get from a leprechaun, and I knew this at the time.

November, 1998 † Whitehorse, Yukon

It is a balmy November day at Chris’s cabin, about three below zero and still no snow. The grass is frost-frozen, sparkling under a sun that shines, not cold, but heatlessly, if there is such a word.

Chris wants to get the kids together and dressed and go into town, about a half-hour drive in a four-by-four. You could still make the road right now in a car, but not after a good snowfall.

I haven’t seen Francis, her middle son, since he was a babe in arms. He is now three, and his red brown curls and round face were the first thing I saw at six this morning, when I was still sandpaper-mouthed. He pulled the covers off my face and pronounced in a matter-of-fact falsetto: “I’m not sure who you are, but could you help me out?” His one hand still held the end of the sleeping bag up, and his other hand held a strip of toilet paper, which trailed across the cabin floor and into the cold storage room where I assumed he’d just performed his morning’s first production.

Because Francis performs everything. He has just pranced out of his and his brother’s bedroom, in a pair of emerald and blue-striped tights, red wool socks, and what looks like part of a sleeve from his dad’s old orange sweater stretched up and over his chest, like a tube top.

“Dat dah da dahhh …” sliding in his socks on the bare floor, his smile flits and then disappears, and he comes to a full halt in front of Chris.

“Francis. Warmer clothes. It’s minus three.”

His shoulders drop like sandbags, and he stomps, his censored artist head down, back to wardrobe, to change. Thirty seconds later, sliding socks and all, he is back out for act two, but with a purple hippie scarf he is whirling around his neck and twirling … his red socks making circles and figure eights, he knows no fear of slivers…

“A sweater. For chrissakes, Francis, don’t you want to go into town with Ivan?”

Again with the shoulders, and eventually he is forced to compromise his ensemble altogether and submit to a sweater, and a toque as well. I know how he feels—nobody wears a toque and a tube top at the same time, and then to have to cover it all with a sweater?

“What do you think of my three-year-old drag queen, Ivan?” Chris asks me like she is showing me a brand new old car she just bought with her own money. She thinks that he will be my favourite because he is … well, just like me, and I always thought it would be Emile, because he was the first, and because I was inside of her when he was in her belly and when she came I felt him kick and knew the magic of him then. And then there was Galen, too, and my mom said Chris told her in the truck one day that it was too late for an abortion with him, and that Chris cried when the midwife handed her her third boy, that makes four boys now and her, alone in the cabin, and she knew Galen was going to be the last of it.

But Chris never told me any of this, she just told my mom, and now Galen sits, too, under his crown of cotton ball hair and watches me eat an egg and toast. He is one-and-a-half and drinks cranberry tea from a mug with the rest of us. The kids picked the cranberries themselves.

Galen looks like a little old man shrunk right down, like an owl. There is no baby in his face, and my mom says he will be the most special because Chris almost didn’t have him, so he is more of a gift that way. But all Chris tells me is that she has been breast-feeding for five years now, and I couldn’t see her in the dark last night when we touched, but her hands felt older.

She smells of wood smoke, and I smell of hair products, and every time I see her the boys are bigger and there is somehow less of her and I meet her sons again, three secrets of her unfolding into their own in a tiny cabin forty miles from anything.

No wonder Chris couldn’t wait for me and Francis to meet again. Now that he’s walking and talking, and putting on shows. Now that we can relate as equals, he and I. Sure, he’s only three, but age has never mattered to a true queen, and it takes one to know one.

Say what you will of nature and nurture and the children of both, scientists and sociologists and endocrinologists and psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists and plastic surgeons can all have their theories, but none of them can explain to me this:

How did Francis get to be Francis in all his Francisness? He doesn’t watch TV. He listens to CBC. Francis doesn’t know that boys don’t wear tube tops. No one has told him this. He just has to wear a sweater too, if it’s winter. The magic of this is not lost on me.

He doesn’t get it from his father, who doesn’t eat anything he doesn’t grow, or pick, or preferably shoot, skin, and dress himself with, and his older brother is a five-year-old water-packing, bicepped bushman in his own right, and Galen is only a year and a half.

All four boys seem well aware that Chris is the only female in the house; she owns the only two breasts, the only one without what they have.

Yet Francis, three years old, triumphs like a crocus in a crack in a cliff; how does a lonesome queen even know he exists in a cabin in a frozen field in the Yukon with apparently not another soul around, with an ounce of fashion sense, or even the most minute grasp of the immense and innate drama of it all for miles?

No one but Francis. Until mom drags Uncle Ivan home for a night or two.

This is why I must be there for him, for all those moments, for those drag queen equivalents of baptism, first communion, confirmation, priest, and sainthood, and so on.

The first time he finds the right outfit, the one that really fits, I will hold up the mirror for him and say, “You go, girl.” If he wants his ears pierced, he can count on me. [The first time he necks in a closet with the captain of the basketball team, I will be his confessor.] The first time someone calls him a faggot, and he slowly comes to realize that they don’t think a faggot is a good thing to be at all, the first time he feels that fear, I want to be there. I will tell him of the time he was three and first did the red sock circle dance in the orange tube top ensemble. I will tell him then that he was born a special kind of creature, one that God never meant for everyone to understand, but that I understand. I will tell him that I will always love that little flower of him, that perfect unknowing differentness that blossomed and danced in a frozen field in spite of everything.

Because drag queens always dance in spite of everything. It’s part of the job description.

How can I look at him and not feel relief? He is living proof that I was just born this way. I don’t remember my version of the red sock circle dance, but ten to one someone told me to close my legs because you could see my panties when I danced like that, and how do you spell
unladylike
?

But things will be different for Francis, he who will start kindergarten in the year 2000.

Chris and I load the boys into the truck and head into town. I am on a mission: I am taking Francis to meet more of his people.

My friend Cody, the legendary creature with painted nails and black ringlets that reach halfway down his back. It is rumoured that he is a hermaphrodite, that he possesses extra plumbing, perhaps special powers. I have never asked him, because it is none of my business, and Cody has never inquired about the bulge in my own pants. He is a creature of immense grace and beauty, and that is all I need to know.

I take Francis into the cafe where Cody works, to introduce them to each other with all the pomp and circumstance required when in the presence of royalty.

“Cody, I’d like you to meet my godson, Francis. Francis, this is Cody.”

But Francis doesn’t acknowledge Cody, or his ringlets, or his fingernails at all. Something else more pressing has caught his attention. He reaches his small hand up to caress the fabric of Cody’s silver velvet shirt, tight and shimmering over his slender torso. Francis smiles in wonder to himself and his mother places her hand on my shoulder, and laughs like a leprechaun.

“That’s my boy,” she says, and for a second I am unsure whether she is referring to Francis, Cody, or myself, but it doesn’t matter, because we are all where we belong. Home.

I HADN’T BEEN TO THE YUKON FOR OVER A YEAR, and had been absent from the fold the last three Christmases. I could hardly wait: I love how rush hour in Whitehorse is seven cars long, and how nobody even thinks about washing their vehicles until the end of May.

I think my body was actually designed to function in minus sixteen degrees Celsius, in the clear, blue cold. I like when the air just starts to sting the backs of your hands, the inside of your nostrils, and the back of your mouth. I love to skate on lakes. It was only December, but I needed a fix to shake the grey edge of Vancouver off my shoulders.

I got a chance to go up for the Longest Night Storytelling Festival and a free plane ticket, so I jumped on it.

I hadn’t seen my friend Chris’s boys since September 2001, and they were all a foot taller now. During intermission, I snuck the three of them backstage. Galen was five and wide-eyed, standing dwarfed in front of the timpani drums. Emile was nonchalant at eight. “I know that,” was how he responded, coolly, to each of my careful explanations of rigging, and scrims, and backlights.

And then there was Francis. Seven now and topped with a crown of red-brown curls, he was most impressed with my solo dressing room and the remnants of the smoke machine’s fog backstage from the rock star’s set just before the intermission. Francis has recently taken up the ukulele, his mother tells me.

I noticed Francis was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt, even though the show is more than enough reason to dress up. Usually, he never passes up a chance to break out one of his velvet skirts or long-flowing ladies’ blouses. My stomach dropped for him. Chris, his mom and one of my fondest loves, told me a few months ago that it has started already. They have started calling him a faggot at school. We knew it was going to happen. I guess we were just hoping it would happen, well, later. He is allowing it to fold up the little flower inside of him. Now he mostly keeps his dresses in the closet and wears them only in the safety and freedom of his own home.

Chris tells me later when the kids are in bed that Francis initially had on his long copper velour lace-up blouse, bell bottoms, and pumps when he heard tonight was going to be Uncle Ivan’s big show and they were going to the Arts Centre. When he swooped down the stairs to look for his little mittens on strings, Emile reminded him that Sebastian (from school) was going to be there, too. Francis went back to his room and changed into jeans without a word.

I took him alone (after quite a bit of bickering with his brothers about us needing special time together) to see
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
. I for one am scared shitless of the Dark Riders or Ring Wraiths or whatever, and thought maybe it was too scary for a seven-year-old, but he reminded me politely that I had said he could pick. So he, my big old Cheshire cat-grinning dyke buddy Brenda, and I set off for a little queer quality time together, as per the request of his mother.

Francis wasted little time. He spent three dollars on those plastic eggs with rings and miniature tea cups in them, bought popcorn with his own money, and started asking questions, the first of which were brought on by me going to the bathroom.

Francis had leaned across my empty seat to enquire of Brenda just which washroom I used when out at the movies.

Brenda told Francis that to the best of her knowledge, I utilized the ungendered wheelchair-accessible facilities whenever possible, so as to avoid confusing anyone in the men’s room or scaring anyone in the ladies’.

Francis then asked Brenda if she knew for sure if I was a boy or a girl. Francis had asked me this himself on several occasions in the past, and each time I explained myself to him as best I could. I’m not sure if he forgets when I go away, or if he just needs to process it all again as a three-, then five-, and now seven-year-old might. Brenda told Francis that she figured that I was technically a girl, but that I had a whole lot of boy in me as well.

I returned to my seat, and Brenda brought me up to speed on their conversation. Francis’s eyes were lit up in recognition and he grabbed my wrist. “I’m just like you, but the reverse.” He nodded repeatedly and sat up on his heels in his seat. “I’m a boy, but I have a little girl in me too.” He lowered his voice and looked left, then right, and continued. “I like to wear dresses,” he whispered in his most conspiratorial voice.

My heart felt like it was going to climb out of my mouth for the love of him at that moment, and I hugged him over the armrest between us. He was warm and sinewy and smelled just like his brothers, but he isn’t. I don’t love them any the less for it; it’s just that I love him more.

“I know you like to wear dresses, Francis,” I said. “I’ve known you since you were a baby, remember?”

“Since I was inside of my mom? Since Emile was?”

I told him I knew his mom since before she even met his dad, and he shook his head in amazement, like he couldn’t fathom a time that long ago.

“Is that why you like to kiss her on the mouth so much all the time?” he asked loudly, in the not-so-innocent way of babes. I shushed him because the movie was starting.

Turns out that
The Two Towers
was too scary for both Francis and me, and at one point he grabbed my hand and bravely whispered, “If this is scaring you too much, I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to leave early.”

But we stuck it out, and then the three of us drove up Grey Mountain and looked at the tiny, snow-silenced metropolis below us. All the way up the mountain Brenda and I told Francis about our people: those of us who are boys with girls inside, and girls with boys inside, and all of the beautiful in-between and shape shifters that are his ancestors. We told him that since before even his older brother was in his mom’s belly, there were people like us.

Brenda told Francis that she was like me too, a girl with a whole lotta man in her, just it was harder to tell with her on account of her gynormous breasts.

“Yes, they are big,” he responded almost with reverence at her frame, which for years now has been nicknamed by her friends as Tyrannosaurus Rack. We told Francis that his people have forever been artists and mystics and healers and leaders and librarians.

We talked a lot about bullies and their ways. Francis blew me away, as seven-year-olds are known to do with relatives who don’t see them everyday as their brilliance unfolds, by explaining that he reckoned that his bully was mean cuz he’d failed grade two twice already, and his mother drank alcohol when he was in her tummy.

I wondered, as Francis’s fairy godfather should, when is too soon to warn my young friend about gay bashers, and how exactly I would go about explaining to a northern boy-girl a thing as incomprehensible as what happened to Aaron Webster, who was found naked in Vancouver’s busiest downtown park, beaten to death by a crew of teenagers armed with baseball bats and pool cues. Would I leave out the details, and not mention how the police couldn’t find any witnesses brave enough to come forward?

I cried at the sight of his face, so determined, and sure, and self-aware of his difference. So entirely void of shame. I cried with relief in the knowledge that my very existence in his life might make it easier for him to make it all the way through grade three. I cried for the hope he makes me feel, now that I’m not the only cross-dresser born in the Yukon in the family, that I will never be alone again. My own seven-year-old loneliness forged my promise to him to see that things will, indeed, be different for us as a team.

Guess what I got Francis for Christmas? Earrings, both dangly and sparkly ones, and fancy French cologne, the same stuff I wear. It all fits perfectly into the jewellery box he got from his older brother.