One in Every Crowd (10 page)

I PICKED HIM UP AT THE AIRPORT LAST WEEK. What struck me first was how ugly his hat was. A fleece baseball cap. I blamed his mother, signed the Unaccompanied Minor form they made him wear on a red elastic string around his neck, crammed the offending hat into his overstuffed yellow backpack, and we left. No checked baggage. I love a kid who travels light.

Often when Francis and I hook up, some time has passed since we last saw each other. This time it had only been three months, but when you’re seven-and-a-half, three months can hold a decade of things to catch up on. I studied him out of the corner of my eye while driving over the bridge. He was taller, and his legs were beginning to take up more of him than they looked like they should. Stick legs folded into oversized green rubber boots with laces. Very practical footwear. I always appreciated that trait in his mother too. Warm, lined, navy blue rain jacket.

Just a normal little boy, right?

He touches everything, runs his hands over things, opens the glove box, wide-eyed, staring, and pointing at accordion buses. His knees bounce, his head turns, and his fingers tap. Then I see it.

His pinky fingernails are very long. I’m pretty sure that even Whitehorse Elementary, a notoriously tough place to endure grade two, does not yet have a cocaine problem, even though it is right next to the Quanlin Mall, right in the heart of our throbbing downtown Yukon metropolis.

No, I’m pretty sure Francis has long pinky fingernails because somehow, even though there’s a guy in grade two who should by age and weight be in grade four who calls him Francis-pees-his-pantses, Francis has managed to keep a hold on something of the smaller boy he once was: the fairy child bedecked in the sunflower-print dress, before public school, divorce, and reality set in, and someone started calling him queer.

He left his dresses at home in a box under his bed, even to come to Vancouver to see me, but he did bring his blue crushed velvet hotpants and velour copper-coloured top. I breathed a sigh of relief that night when he came out of his room dressed for dinner.

I realized at the Value Village the next day how much I had invested in this little boy, how much my heart counted on him making it through school whole. How much I hoped elementary school wouldn’t kick the difference right out of him.

We were going to be pirates for the Fool’s Parade, and fortunately, I was already quite prepared. A short stop at the home of the girl up the street (not to be confused with the girl next door) produced a virtual pirate’s booty of baubles, sashes, and bandanas.

We were searching through the girl’s pants in the Village when it happened.

A pair of black, crushed velvet pants with gold lamé parrots embossed around the bell-bottoms. My eyes lit up and I ripped them off the hanger. The perfect pirate pants. Francis ran his hands over them, and I watched his face go from sparkling to something else altogether. A small cloud crossed inside his brown eyes, a picture played behind it in his head, and he shook it out. He made a face and dropped the pants. “A pirate wouldn’t wear those,” he said with fierce commitment.

“Dude, are you joking? They have parrots on them.” I began to argue with this seven-year-old for a minute, and then stopped myself. I was doing what my mother had done. I remembered the summer I turned eleven, and a yellow and grey dress for my Aunt Norah’s wedding had me paralyzed in a dressing room. The shopkeeper stood next to my mother pleading, “Come on out, honey, it’s okay, I’m sure you look just lovely. It’s a beautiful dress, Pat, and one she can wear anywhere.”

I had felt panic that day: both at the thought of looking beautiful, and at the very concept of owning a dress that was both “formal enough for a wedding, but not too dressy for school.”

I made a promise to myself to always let the boy dress himself how he wanted, even if it was boring and didn’t match at all, and bought him the black cargo pants that he thought a pirate should wear.

He did love the tiny little black patent leather dress shoes we found, almost as much as I did, and I took some comfort in that.

We were standing in the line-up the first time it happened. Women talk to you when you have a child with you, and this woman had been watching Francis try on plastic pearls and clip-on earrings as I waited to pay for our booty. She had been checking me out too, and when I caught her, she gave me the old, “Isn’t he just a darling” face.

“Now, are we picking out some jewellery for Mom?” she piped up, in that voice used by women who don’t have any children anymore.

Francis froze, his shoulders squared, and he returned the pearls to the metal hook they had been hanging on. He looked guilty, maybe, or sad.

“Oh dear, I do hope I haven’t said the wrong thing.” She reached for my arm and stroked it, and left her hand on the inside of my elbow.

Francis looked like a small child busted doing something he knows everybody thinks is wrong or weird, and my heart broke for him.

The woman thought he was the confused child of a broken home, and thus I was the grieving divorced single father of one, and her heart broke for us.

“Everything is okay with Mom,” I said, letting her off the hook. I smiled, which was easy to do when I imagined Chris in her wool army pants and felt jacket, reeking of wood smoke and wearing rubber boots, Francis’s string of plastic pearls, and a clip-on hoop earring.

She breathed a sigh of relief. I was just a nice guy taking my boy out shopping for Mom. In the middle of the day. Maybe I was even one of those new-fangled stay-at-home dads.

Me and the kid, we kind of look like each other too.

I began to revel in my new disguise, my new cloak and mirror. A child: proof of my heterosexuality, even if I was a little swishy myself, and apparently it was rubbing off on the kid. At least I was fertile.

I realized this must suck for straighter-looking moms or dads trying to seek a little action, but it was some novelty to me. No one, no matter what gender they mistake me for, ever mistakes me as straight. I might even have a chance to come out of the closet, for the first time ever, I thought with a kind of glee.

I dropped Francis off at the airport yesterday; he was wearing his sensible shoes. Me and four other Spring Break single fathers milled around the security gate, seeing off our respective unaccompanied minors. We called out last-minute reminders to not eat any dairy, and tell your mom to call me, and don’t drink any pop even if they give it to you, and tie up your boots. Francis didn’t look back as he let the pretty stewardess take his hand.

The guy with the tight pants and John Deere belt buckle’s little boy started to bawl, and his dad teared up himself and waved through the glass, yelling, “Daddy loves you,” unabashedly. He turned to me and someone’s grandparents and said in a choked voice that pulled at the corners of my eyes, “Now, that’s harder than a guy would think, huh? Won’t see him till September. I’m a merchant marine.”

I nodded like I understood, because he thought I did. I felt secretly proud that Francis didn’t cry one bit, that in fact my kid was the toughest one of them all.

THE FIRST TIME I WROTE ABOUT MY little friend Francis, the little boy who liked to wear dresses, he was three years old. The middle son of one of my most beloved friends, he was the fearless fairy child who provided me with living, pirouetting proof that gender outlaws are just born like that, even in cabins in the bush with no running water or satellite television. He confirmed my theory that some of us come out of the factory without a box or with parts that don’t match the directions that tell our parents how we are supposed to be assembled. Watching Francis grow up taught me that what makes him and me different was not bred into us by the absence of a father figure or a domineering mother, or being exposed to too many show tunes or power tools at an impressionable stage in our development. We are not hormonal accidents, evolutional mistakes, or created by a God who would later disown us. Most of us learn at a very early age to keep our secret to ourselves, to try to squeeze into clothes that feel like they belong on someone else’s body, and hope that the mean kids at school don’t look at us long enough to find something they feel they need to pound out of us. But Francis had a mother who let him wear what he wanted, and Francis had evidence that he was not alone, because Francis had me.

He is eleven now, and I got to hang out with him and his brothers last January, up in Dawson City. He doesn’t wear dresses anymore, and I didn’t see much of his younger self in the gangly boy body he is growing into. He is a tough guy now, too cool to hug me when his friends are around, full of wisecracks and small-town street smarts. He can ride a unicycle, juggle, and do head spins. He listens to hip-hop and is not afraid to get in a fist fight. He calls other kids faggot, just like his friends do, but only when his mother can’t hear him.

I can’t help but wonder if the politics of public school have pushed him to conform, or if he has just outgrown his cross-dressing phase and become as butch a son as any father could hope for. I try to imagine what it would be like for him to be the only boy in a dress on a playground full of kids whose parents are trappers and hunters. To be labelled queer in a town of 1,700 people and more than its fair share of souls who survived residential schools, families with four generations of inherited memories of same-sex touches that left scars and shame and secrets. I don’t blame him for hiding his difference here, for fighting to fit in.

I walk past his school one day on my way to buy groceries, and watch him kick a frozen soccer ball around in the snow with his buddies. He sees me and stands still for a second, breathing silver clouds of steam into the cold. When he was little, he used to fling himself out his front door when I came to visit and jump on me before I was all the way out of my truck. He would wrap his whole body around my neck and hips and whisper wet secrets and slobber kisses into my ear. Now, he barely returns my wave before he turns and disappears into a sea of snowsuits and scarf-covered faces. I find myself searching the crowd for a boy I barely recognize, a Francis who has outgrown my memory of him. I miss the Francis he used to be, the boy-girl who confessed to me when he was five years old that I was his favourite uncle because we were the same kind of different. Now, I can’t tell him apart from all the other boys wearing blue parkas.

I realize later I am doing to Francis exactly what I wish the whole world would stop doing to our children: wanting him to be something he is not, instead of just allowing him to be exactly what he is. I don’t want Francis to spend his lunch break being tormented and beaten up. I remember growing my hair in junior high and wanting everyone to like me, and I will never forget the blond boy from school who walked like a girl, and that time in grade eight someone slammed his face in a locker door and gave him a concussion because he wanted to try out for the cheerleading team. By grade ten, he had learned to eat his lunch alone in an empty classroom and wear his gym shorts under his jeans instead of braving the boys’ change room, but everybody acted like they were his best friend after he shot himself in the head with his stepfather’s hunting rifle during spring break the year we all graduated. They hung his school photo up in the hallway, and all the kids pinned paper flowers and rest in peace notes to the wall around his picture, but nobody wrote that they were sorry for calling him faggot or sticking gum in his hair or making fun of how he threw a ball.

I made a silent promise to Francis the day I left Dawson City to always love what he is right now as much as I loved who he was back then. Whether he grows up to become a textbook heterosexual he-man or one day rediscovers his early love for ladies’ garments, I will always be his favourite uncle, no matter what he’s wearing.

EVERY SATURDAY MORNING ALL SUMMER LONG, the parking lot across the street from me is transformed. Friday night, it’s full of sports cars and sparsely moustached, beer-guzzling boys with cell phones and car stereos that shake the glass in my front windows, but come Saturday morning at eight, it’s a farmer’s market. There is the fey fella selling homemade dog biscuits, the family-run fireweed honey corporation, the lesbian cheese makers from Saltspring Island, a grumpy potter, and a sunburnt man selling bundles of organic mustard greens and butter lettuce. You can buy cherries and maple syrup, visit the latte wagon, and get gardening advice. You can sign petitions and join a jam-making group that donates to the food bank. There are face painters and banjo players. People wear sandals and the dogs rarely get into fights, because everyone is too busy saying hello and showing off their new bedding plants. Yard sales spring up spontaneously on street corners.

All of this appeals to the increasingly not-so-latent hippie in me. I mean, I still like to wear shoes in the city and I wholeheartedly believe in the frequent washing of one’s clothing, but there is still something of the small-towner in me—I like to know my neighbours, I like to meet the guy who picked the cherries I’m about to eat.

I usually throw on a pair of jeans and take the dogs with me. We always complete a loop around the lake before we hit the market, to avoid any unsightly squatting in the middle of the town square.

I saw them getting out of a late model minivan, a young, slender mother and her maybe six-year-old kid. She was in a wind-blown dress that wrapped around her legs, the kid in blue cords with frayed cuffs, a red and yellow striped T-shirt, and now colourless canvas sneakers. The mom had a canvas shopping bag over her shoulder and the kid had a comic book rolled up and pushed into the back pocket of his cords.

“Mom, lookit the little dog, he’s sooo wee …” The little boy bent down to pet my Pomeranian, and his mom stood up straight and slammed the door of the minivan shut.

“Olivia, you have to ask the man if the dog is friendly before you touch it. Maybe it doesn’t like little girls.”

I looked at the kid again, and she stared back up at me. Her hair was straw yellow, and cut short. She had one hand on her hip, her elbow resting on the comic in her back pocket. The knees of her cords were worn and grass-stained. One shoelace was hanging untied, flattened, and muddied. The only things about her that matched her name were two tiny stud earrings, dark blue and sparkling, out of place with her tomboy face.

I wondered if Olivia got her ears pierced to make Olivia happy, or her mom. Maybe her grandma took her to the salon in a last-ditch feminine attempt to make up for the striped t-shirts and dirty knees.

“She’s not a mister, Ma.” Olivia spoke matter-of-factly, rolling her eyes back like kids do when their parents say dumb things. “So can I pet your dog, or what?”

I nodded, struck as dumb as her mother. I couldn’t make my mouth work, and there were tears in my eyes. I wanted to show Olivia my new fishing rod; I wanted to build her a tree fort with a rope ladder. I wanted to make her a belt with interchangeable brass buckles and teach her how to perfect her wrist shot. I wanted to play street hockey with a tennis ball, and get headaches from eating our Slurpees too fast.

I wanted to pass her a note written in pencil on a piece torn from a brown paper bag that said: You are not the only one. And one day everything will be fine, I promise you that. Oh, and learn a trade you can fall back on.

Olivia’s mom stood next to me on the sidewalk. “She really loves little dogs. She’s always begging to get one, but we live in a one-bedroom apartment.”

Goliath was flat on his back now, all four legs in the air, working the cute angle. Olivia was scratching his belly with both hands.

“Come on, honey, we have to shop. You’ve got karate at noon. Say goodbye.”

Olivia jumped up, wiping her hands on her faded red and yellow shirt. She looked me up and down. Her eyes rested unabashedly on my dusty workboots, then my jeans, my Snap-On Tools belt buckle, the wallet in my back pocket, my black t-shirt, naked earlobes, and freshly shorn hair. She chewed her gum slowly on one side of her mouth and hooked her thumb through an empty belt loop.

“Thanks fer lettin’ me pet him. He’s real cute, huh? What’s his name?”

“Goliath.” I could still barely talk, I was still afraid the tears were going to spill over my bottom lids. I wanted her to remember me as being tall and dry-eyed, just in case I was the first one of her people she had met so far.

“It was really nice to meet you, Olivia.” I extended my hand, and she shook it, her face deadly serious. Her mother nodded a polite goodbye. Olivia just kept shaking my hand.

“One more thing …” she said, squinting up at me, the sun bright over my shoulder, “I need to know, where’d ya get that cowboy hat?”