One in Every Crowd (8 page)

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO I WAS CRAMMED into a Honda Civic hatchback with four poets, squinting through the furious wiper blades to find the right exit off of the Number One Highway into Surrey. We were on our way to a suburban high school for a gig.

The slam poet in the back seat with the relentless bad breath squeezed his face into the front seat. “It’s Valentine’s Day tomorrow. I think we should all do love poems.”

There was an exuberant round of agreement from everyone but me. I cracked the passenger window just a little, and an icy spray of February rain hit my cheek. I took a deep breath and rolled the window back up. I was the only storyteller in the car. I am used to this. Used to being lumped in with the poets. This doesn’t bother me. I have even stopped telling people I have never written a poem in my entire life. Storyteller, poet, close enough, I guess, for most people. Even though they are not the same thing at all.

“I can’t read a love story in a high school in Surrey,” I blurt out, feeling a bit like a parent who just busted in on a pillow fight.

“Why not?” the slam poet heavy-breathed from the back seat, his eyebrow raised in a question mark.

I was also the only queer person in the car. I am used to this. This almost never bothers me. Gay person, straight person, what is the difference anymore, right? Aren’t we over all that?

Truth is, I have been over it for decades now. Most of us mostly are. But not in a high school. And not here in Surrey, British Columbia. Surrey, where they banned the
Harry Potter
books from school libraries for encouraging witchcraft. They also banned
Heather Has Two Mommies
and
One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads
for promoting anti-family values.

“Because,” I say, letting out a long breath, “it is scary enough to be a homo in a high school in Surrey in the first place.”

His face shows no sign of recognition, of understanding, of camaraderie, and I suddenly feel in-my-bones tired.

I take another heavy breath. “For you, a love poem is just that. A love poem. And I am glad for you, I truly am. But for me to read a love poem in a high school in the bible belt is a political statement, whether I mean it to be or not, someone will think I am recruiting, armpits will grow moist with tension, I will be pushing the homosexual agenda on unsuspecting adolescents, I will be disrespecting someone’s interpretation of the words of their God, you know, the whole tired routine.”

“So what?” pipes up the anarchist beat poet who had been slumped in the backseat beside the slam poet. “We’ve got your back, Coyote, fuck them all, rock the boat. Surrey needs it.”

“What if I just want to tell a love story?” I asked. Only the thump of the windshield wipers responded.

I met her the first time eight years ago, in the hospitality room of the Granville Island Hotel, during the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival. She was wearing tall red boots and her wool jacket and handbag matched. Silver and black ringlets surrounded her dimples and sparkling smart eyes. Some people you can see how brilliant they are from a distance, like there are little invisible sparks coming out of their brain while it is working, creating static electric charges in the air above their heads. She was electric spark smart, and all I remember is I could make her laugh. Every time she laughed, my heart pounded possibility. When I saw her from across the room, she kind of shone. Like God Himself was pointing her out to me with a glowing finger. I left with too many plastic glasses of free wine in my belly, and without her phone number in my pocket.

I ran into her on the Drive a couple of days later, just like I knew I would.

It was one of those early spring days in Vancouver, where all of a sudden the grey of the previous week gives way and suddenly it is raining cherry blossoms everywhere, a crushed and scented carpet of them underfoot. We were talking about music. Somehow the band Nirvana came up, I can’t remember why, I like them all right, maybe they reminded me of some other band I liked better, I can’t remember, but she told me that the album
Nevermind
was her favorite all-time record when she was in grade seven. I quickly did some silent math in my head. How could the sexiest, smartest, silver-hairedest woman I had ever met be too young for me to go out with?

“Grade seven?” I blurted out. “How can you be twenty-three? How did I get to be … if I had met you in 1991 when
Nevermind
first came out, you would have been …” I shuddered.

“Twelve years old.” She laughed again. Like this didn’t matter at all. “It’s the grey hair, right? That fooled you? I started going grey when I was sixteen. Runs in the family.”

My shoulders seemed too heavy to hold up all of a sudden. I told her I was too old for her. She told me that age doesn’t matter. I told her the only people who think there is no such thing as too old for you are usually too young to know any better. She told me that she had just come out of the closet, that she wanted an older lover. She told me I was being ageist. I told her I used to think people were just being ageist too, when I was her age. She told me I was being ageist. I told her I know. Then I let out a long sigh. Did what I had to do. Told her that I was a dirty rotten rotter, that I had been around the block a million times, that I had slept with more women than … that I had slept with a fair number of women in my long and lucky life of loving, and that she should pick someone special, that this was her second chance at having a first time, and most people never get a second first-time chance at anything, that she was lucky, and not to waste that chance on a pussy crook like me. Go, I told her, and fall in love with a nice woman. Fall in crazy stupid dumb-struck love and move in together and figure yourself out, don’t get a cat, though, and then fall out of love, suffer through a hopefully short but nevertheless nether-region-numbing bout of lesbian bed death, and break up. Lather, rinse, and repeat. I told her that if she still wanted me five years from now, to come and find me. I told her that if she still wanted me then, that I would be honoured. Told her I had to go, before I changed my mind.

I would see her around from time to time. Usually at poetry readings. Started going to a lot of poetry readings. Started dressing up to go to poetry readings. Started ironing my shirts to go to poetry readings.

Five years later I am in my car, waiting to turn left off of Commercial Drive onto First Avenue, on my way to the Home Depot. My girlfriend and I have recently broken up. We still live together, which could have been awkward, but luckily she was often in Portland with her new lover, who made more money than me, had a really hot truck, and a brand new Harley. So of course I was doing what any self-respecting butch does in this kind of situation: I was throwing myself heart-first into a complicated home improvement endeavour.

This next part seems like magic, but it is true. Some would say this is evidence that magic is for real. I was listening to classic rock and Fleetwood Mac was singing about don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, and so I was thinking about tomorrow, about how maybe this breakup was for the best anyway, right, because look, I was finally going to get the new floor down in my office, and wasn’t I now free to do what I wanted with whomever I wanted, plus, hadn’t it been five years now, so couldn’t I take that silver fox out on a date now? Thirty-eight and twenty-eight wasn’t so bad, right?

And that’s when I saw her. Standing on the corner with a coffee in her hand. Her hair now more silver than black, somehow even more beautiful. She waved when she saw me. I unlocked the passenger side door and she jumped in.

“Where you going?” she smiled, showing her one crooked tooth.

“Home Depot,” I told her.

“I love Home Depot,” she said, and winked.

We didn’t get out of bed for three days. She did a lot of yoga, it turned out. I vowed to quit smoking, so I could keep up with her. Eventually, I did. Quit smoking, that is.

Last month we went home to the Yukon. My family loves her, especially my mother. I think she is actually the daughter my mother always wanted. She is so smart and dresses so fine and almost has her PhD and it almost makes up for my mom having me and my even blacker sheep sister as her real children.

I drove her out to one of my favorite places in the world, the Carcross Desert. White sand and mountains and so much sky all over the sky. Some dirt bikers had accidentally burned a huge heart shape into the sand with their back tires. We stood together in the centre of that accidental heart, and it seemed like the perfect spot to put that big old diamond ring on her finger.

My family is beside themselves. At dinner, my cousin Dan insists that I tell his sister the whole story of how we met. It’s so romantic, he says. It is just such a love story.

I GOT THE CALL ON A SUNDAY NIGHT. My gran was in the hospital, and the doctor had advised the family that it was time. Time to call everybody home.

I arrived bleary-eyed at the Whitehorse airport the next day. My mom and Aunt Nora were both there to meet me and my cousin Robert and his girlfriend. They looked so tired and worried; the skeleton was showing behind their faces, their eyes red-rimmed and puffy. They took us directly to the hospital, our suitcases stowed away in the trunk of the car.

I knew my gran wasn’t going to look good, and I thought I had steeled myself for the worst. Still, my heart stopped and dropped when I laid my eyes on the tiny shape of her, the outline of her hips and legs barely visible under the green sheets and blanket. Impossibly frail and little. Almost gone already, it seemed. I had promised myself I would be strong for my mom, that I wasn’t going to cry. So much for that.

“Talk to her,” my Uncle Dave said, waving two fingers at Robert and me. “The nurses say she can still hear us.”

And so we did. All afternoon we sat and talked. To her, to each other. Remember her bad cooking? Baloney roast? Boiled hamburger? Lemon hard cake, cousin Dan had dubbed her attempt at meringue. How she loved us all, no matter who we were, no matter what we did. I volunteered for night shift, and sat next to the laboured breathing shape of her with my two uncles, whispering stories through the dark to each other, into her ear, slipping our warm hands under the covers to grasp her limp, cold ones.

By early the next afternoon all of us were there. Five of her children, eight grandchildren, plus partners. I began to worry that we were pissing the nursing staff off a little, them trying to work around us, asking us to leave the room so they could change her sheets. Ten or fifteen of us at a time, filing like exhausted soldiers out into the hallway to stand around, teary-eyed and sometimes bickering. I asked one of the nurses if we were driving anyone nuts yet, wasn’t it hard trying to do her job with the whole lot of us underfoot? She shook her head and said no, that the First Nations people had taught the nursing staff what an extended family could really look like, and that it is often easier when the family is there to help keep an eye on a patient. She said that what was really hard was when someone was dying without anyone there at all. This choked me up a little, and she shoved a no-name box of Kleenex across the counter at me with a latex-gloved hand. She had said it out loud. The doctor was kind, and had talked around it. Don’t get your hopes up, she had said. We are keeping her comfortable, the doctor said. The doctor didn’t lie, but it was the nurse who actually said the words. My grandmother was dying.

Florence Amelia Mary Lawless Daws passed away a little after eleven a.m. on May 13, surrounded by seventeen members of her family. Our hands made a circle, all touching her tiny body as her chest rose and fell, and then stopped. I hesitate to say her death was beautiful, because it means I have to miss her now, but it was.

My family asked me to write and read her eulogy. Blessing from the family, the Catholics now call it. I call it what it is. Of course I said yes, I would be honoured, and I was.

I wrote about the values the tiny little Cockney/Irish/Roma woman had lived and died by, and raised us all up to believe in. Love your family, work hard, save your money, have faith, and be grateful for what you have. I worked really hard on the eulogy. I wanted to do justice to her memory, to honour everything she was. There were over four hundred people at the service, and not a dry eye among them when I was finished.

Up at the graveyard, after the internment, I hugged strangers and shook hands. Suddenly I found myself surrounded by Catholic priests. They were being uncommonly nice to me, the queer granddaughter in the shirt and tie. Maybe they make special allowances in the case of a death in the family, I thought. Or maybe they were still hoping to save my soul. The bishop hugged me, and then held both of my hands in his too-soft ones.

“Excellent job, young man. Your grandmother would have been very proud of you today, son. Strong work, young fellow.”

My mother heard him too. I saw her freeze. Waiting.

“Thank you, Father,” I said. That was why he seemed to like me so much. He didn’t know who I really was.

The bishop caught up with me again at the reception, back at the funeral home. We were both leaned over the cheese platters, when he addressed me a second time.

“Once again, I must say, you are a gifted orator. A natural, even. Have you ever considered the priesthood?”

This time it was my Aunt Nora within direct earshot, and she stopped in mid-bite, half a baby carrot removed from her mouth and dropped on a small paper plate. Her eyes met mine, and she tried not to wince.

I took a deep breath. Thought about my beloved gran, about how much she loved the Church, and respected the bishop. He seemed like a nice enough guy.

I’m not going to lie and say that one hundred wise-ass quips didn’t run through my head and gather on my tongue. They did. But what counts is what I actually said.

“No, Father, I have to admit, I have never considered the priesthood. But thank you again for the compliment.”

The bishop nodded, and everyone around us relaxed and resumed eating and talking.

I like to think my gran would have been real proud of me.