Rebent Sinner

Ivan Coyote

• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781551527741
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Award-winning trans storyteller Ivan Coyote takes on the patriarchy and the personal in their latest collection of essays.

1. BLOOD

MY GRAN USED to smoke the cheap cigarettes. John Player Specials, Craven A menthols, Number 7s. She’d buy them by the carton and squirrel them away in the closet in her bedroom.

My uncles would swipe one from her open pack on the kitchen table, and cough and stare down at the red cherry between their fingertips and say, “Fuck, Mum. These are awful. Why can’t you get Du Mauriers? Export As?” She would make that noise with her tongue and tuck the rest of the pack into her purse.

She had one of those little cigarette machines, too, where you buy the filters and tubes and the tobacco in a tin, and she and my aunts would sit around the table and stuff little wads of tobacco into the groove in the machine and slide it back and forth, and a cigarette would pop out the end. You had to get the perfect amount of tobacco in there to get it to burn just right, “But look how much cheaper it is,” they would all say, like they were trying to convince each other of something none of them truly believed.

My gran unknowingly smoked her last cigarette on a Friday afternoon, and she broke her hip that night, when her foot fell off the footstool during Jeopardy! and her heel hit the floor at a weird angle. She always said that new hardwood floor was easier to sweep than the carpet ever was to keep vacuumed. She was hospitalized right away, went into a coma, and died the following Wednesday without ever really waking up again. She was almost ninety years old. It all happened so fast, but hey, “At least she never had to quit smoking,” everybody said.

DEAR FAVOURITE UNCLE: I’m going to have to insist you stop using my deadname. I changed it in 1993. That was … more than twenty-five years ago. I’m afraid “I just can’t get used to it” is no longer an acceptable excuse. Lesser uncles are gaining on you. I still love you, but collect yourself.

I’M COMING HOME in fifteen days. I will come and see you in the new place. I look like your sons did when they were my age. I look like your grandson, and his son looks like me. You might be confused, but I know you will recognize the blood in me. Your blood in me. I will touch your supersoft hands and marvel at all those blue maps on the backs of them.

“What should I get you for your ninety-seventh birthday?” I will ask you.

“What?” you will say.

“Your birthday,” I will repeat louder.

“My what?” you will say. “Oh, that. I’m good. I have everything I need right here. These people, they take good care of me,” you will say.

LAST MONTH I was home in the Yukon and I went to visit my ninety-seven-year-old grandmother in the nursing home where she has been for the last year, since her accident. It had been a few months since I had seen her. It was about eight p.m., dark and cold outside. The heat was cranked up inside the nursing home. I was sweating in my unzipped parka as I walked down the maze of hallways, through the dining hall, and into her room. She was asleep, and my heart twisted in my chest at the sight of her: asleep on her side in her hospital bed, her nightdress pulled up to reveal her unbearably thin and bruised legs, and her diaper.

She woke up as I sat in the rolling chair next to her bed. “It’s you!” she cried out, with joy and surprise. “Look at you! My beautiful boy!”

She sat up and patted the mattress beside her withered thighs, pulled her nightdress down a little, but not all the way. I sat beside her. The plastic sheet on the mattress crinkled under us both.

“My beautiful, beautiful boy. You’re so handsome. You’ve always been so handsome. I’m so glad you are here.”

She reached out a pencil-like arm and pulled my head down to what was left of her once ample chest. She stroked my head and cupped my cheek. She was never very physically affectionate before, but she’s changing, my uncle Rob had warned me on the phone months ago. “She’s slipping a little mentally, too,” he had said. “She is getting confused easily, not recognizing people some days. Don’t take it personally if she thinks you’re one of the staff or something,” he told me.

Does she think I’m Rob, or my dad, or one of her other sons? I wondered, and hugged her back. She felt like she was made of bird bones and tissue paper.

“My beautiful, beautiful boy,” she cooed over and over. Then she looked me right in both eyes, her papery palm still cradling my cheek. “Is that what I should call you? Do I call you my beautiful grandson, or my granddaughter? I never know with you.”

IN LATE MAY 2017, my uncle Rob went to visit his mom, my grandmother, Patricia. She asked him what day it was. “It’s Saturday,” he told her.

She took a small breath and announced it was going to be her last Saturday on this earth.

“You don’t know that, Mom,” Rob said, but she gave him that look. Her look. She had a real withering look she could lay on you—it was kind of terrifying—and she remained capable of wielding it far longer than she should have physically been able to. It was usually paired with a frustrated blast of nose breath, exhaled over pursed lips.

“This is my last Saturday,” she repeated. “I feel a … new kind of tired coming over me. There’s a girl that works here, her name is Crystal. She only works weekends, but she’s not here today because she’s in Las Vegas with her sisters, so I won’t see her again. Please tell her how much I enjoyed our little chats. Tell her that she is really good at her job, but she should keep up with her studies. Tell her to stay in school. And I need you to do me one last thing.”

Rob nodded.

“I need you to go and get me a few things. I need”—and if I know her, she counted them off on her left hand with the first slender finger of her right—“four cards, four envelopes, four blank cheques, my exact bank balance, and a pen.” She shot him that look again. “A good pen.”

So, ever the dutiful son, Rob went downtown and got everything and came back about an hour later. He pulled the little rolling table over and she half sat up in her hospital bed. She divided her remaining money into four exactly equal sums and wrote four cheques, one for each of her four sons. She tucked each cheque into an envelope and told Rob to make sure they all cashed them right away. “Don’t wait, even a day. Don’t let the bank swallow up even a penny of this in their red tape.” She was adamant about this.

Then she opened up the first card and wrote: Dear Robert. You were always my favourite son. Don’t tell your brothers. In the second card she wrote: Dear Donald. You were always my favourite son. Don’t tell your brothers. Then, Dear Fred. You were always my favourite son … and so on.

I was in a hotel in Melbourne, Australia, when I got the call. It was the middle of the night. It was my mom. I knew from the sound of her breathing, before she even said a word.

“I’m so sorry to wake you,” she said. “She had a stroke on Sunday morning and never really woke up again. We didn’t call you because we knew you wouldn’t make it home anyway, and you two had such a good visit in February. Your uncle Rob wanted me to be sure to tell you she was herself, right up until the very end.”

ABSENCE MAKES THE smart grow harder.

Absence makes the heart go longer.

MY DOG CHIPPY was nearly eighteen when he died. It was three years ago on March 1, 2019. His real name was Goliath, but I never called him that. I named him before I knew him, I guess. He was so little I thought he needed a big name, but he didn’t. He wasn’t small and mighty; he was tiny and deep. When I think back on our many years together (he was seven weeks old, I think, when we first met), I think I loved our last few years together the most. Sure, it was great when he was young and could climb mountains and still want to go for a walk when we got home. But I learned to cherish those slow, slow, slow totters around the same block in the last few years even more. How he would still make a little helping jump whenever I picked him up. How he would find the little dips in the curb when his bones got too old to step down too far. I recorded his snores, and I still have them on my phone, videos too. I will probably listen to them after I finish typing this.

He taught me so much in those last years: how to slow down and be patient, how to nurture and take care in a different way, how to love him through shit and blood and watery eyes and midnight meds. How to love him still when he forgot who I even was some days, in the end. How to not leave the chairs pulled away from the table after he went blind. I will never forget any of those last years, and I cherish all of them. Falling asleep listening to his wheezy snoring. Waking up and listening for him to still be breathing.

IT IS THE morning of June 13, 2016. The day after a twenty-nine-year-old security guard killed forty-nine people and wounded fifty-three others in a mass shooting inside Pulse, a gay dance club in Orlando, Florida.

I talked to my dad today. It’s been a while. He’s been sick, with a fairly serious condition, and his dog broke its leg, and it cost him a lot of dough. He’s nearly seventy and still working a physically hard job, welding heavy equipment. He’s alone, even in my big family, partly because he can be mean and he pushes people away. I don’t think he means to, but he does. We talked about all of this, even the hard stuff. That’s the thing about him and me. We’ve always been able to talk. It wasn’t perfect, that conversation, but neither is either of us.

We talked about Orlando. He must have seen it on the news. He brought it up, asked me how I was doing.

I told him I was hurting, that everyone I knew was hurting. He said even though he only knows a bunch of redneck old Yukoners, none of them cares if anyone is gay anymore. He said, “It’s getting better, isn’t it? I mean, aside from shit like this, isn’t it getting better?”

I said, “Yeah, maybe so, Dad. Maybe it’s getting better some days, but they are still passing laws to keep us out of bathrooms, they are still passing laws to make it okay to fire us, or to not sell us a fucking wedding cake.” And I said I figured that was part of the shit that creates the hate that twists a man’s head enough that he could go in there and do something like that. I said, “Dad, did you know that queer people lined up to donate blood yesterday in Orlando, Florida? They lined up down the block to give blood, and they wouldn’t take it.”

He started to cry. Then I started to cry.

I wasn’t even going to call him today because I’ve been so mad at him. But I’m glad I did.

I’M GOING TO miss having the writer Richard Wagamese in the world with us. I really am. His death gutted me in a very visceral way, so hard that I knew right away it wasn’t just because we were both heart storytellers, not just because we looked each other right in the eye bones every time our paths crossed and just saw. Richard’s death rattled me because of my own father. Because even though I still don’t know how Richard died, I know it was because of booze and pain and the past always there, rapping and banging on a man from inside.

When I heard, my heart crumpled because if handsome, talented Richard, with his enormous heart full of stories, with his good teeth and always the best shirts and so much wisdom and generosity and awards and books and accolades couldn’t outrun it, how will my father? My father, with his bent back and burning eyes and shaking hands, still welding greasy, filthy equipment in the cold in the Yukon at seventy-something years old and going to bed not wanting to get up—how’s he ever going to make it?

Well, it’s not perfect, but he’s making it today. He’s going to a meeting today. He says he hates telling the same story over and over, but the people are okay. They’re all just drunks like him, with awful stories too, he says, but he does feel better after.

YESTERDAY I MET a painter. He is seventy-eight, a distant cousin of my partner Sarah’s, and he lives in a little Swedish fishing village. He has lived in the same house for thirty-eight years, and painted pictures of his village and the harbour there for all thirty-eight of those years. I fell in love with one particular painting, of the piers and the ocean and two little boats.

“Ah, that one.” He pointed from where he was sitting on a little chair next to the door of his gallery. “I had a health problem not too long ago. I had too much blood pressure here, in my head. They had to operate and put a thing in my head, a little …” He searches for the English word for it. “A valve? It goes down here …” He makes us both touch a lump, a tube, that now lives under his thin silver tuft of hair and his tender scalp. “It very much affected my balance, this condition, and for some time, I lost the ability to paint at all. While I was healing, I would lie on the beach and study the clouds. I began to understand them better, then, their characters and how they behave. I would watch them all day. When I began to be able to paint again, I included more sky. The sky is now bigger to me in my paintings. This one, the one you noticed, it was the first one I finished after I learned more about the sky.”

He touched my face when we said goodbye.

Sarah bought that little painting. I could not stop looking at it, propped up on a chair in the corner of the room. I knew it contained a magic story that I would remember and return to whenever the pressure in my head started to affect the balance of my life.

TORSTEN ERASMIE, SARAH’S cousin the painter, died ten days later, on a Sunday afternoon. His daughter had come to visit the day before.

That little painting of two boats and the piers in his harbour now hangs on the wall in Sarah’s living room, right next to a needlepoin...