Читать книгу This One Looks Like a Boy - Lorimer Shenher - Страница 12

4

THE POLISH STUFF

(1979)

I GLANCED AT the large Dairy Queen clock: 6:45 PM. Fifteen more minutes until the next phase of my Friday night plan. I was fourteen years old and working my first real part-time job. As I cleaned the deep fryer and bleached the counters, Lynn exited the men’s washroom, bucket in hand.

“Men are so gross,” she lamented, as she did every shift we worked together. Our boss’s creepy son leered at Lynn’s breasts whenever he could and always assigned washrooms to her before leaving for the day. “You almost done?”

“Yeah,” I answered, spraying the fry area with degreaser and wiping it down. “What time should we come over?”

“After eight,” she replied. “When do your parents go out?”

“Their concert starts at eight, so they’ll be gone by seven thirty.”

“Perfect. James bought a ton of beer. I’ve already snagged some and put it in the basement fridge for us. Is Melanie coming?” She slipped off her DQ uniform and replaced it with a snug sweater. I changed too, eyes resolutely down, as always.

“She has to come—the only way I can go is if I sleep over at her house so my parents won’t know. They’d never let me go to a party without the parents home.”

“No, that’s fine. I like her.” Lynn set the alarm, locked the back door, and we exited into the cool, crisp October evening.

Melanie’s family was out that night when I came to call for her. She gestured for me to come in.

“Let’s hang out a bit here first,” she suggested.

“Okay,” I shrugged.

“Do you want a little drink?”

“Sure. What have you got?” I asked, trying to sound like my dad. I hovered over Melanie while she peered into her parents’ liquor cabinet.

“Wanna try this?” She pulled out a forty-ounce bottle of clear liquid with an incomprehensible label. “It’s the Polish stuff.” Rumored to be over 170 proof, revered and spoken of in hushed tones by the adults on our street, “the Polish stuff” was a potent vodka served on the most special of occasions and even then only in thimble-sized glasses, sipped with excruciating slowness.

Melanie pulled out two scotch tumblers and filled them with three fingers of the Polish stuff. “I usually add some water to mine,” she advised matter-of-factly as I followed her to the kitchen sink. We each added a splash of water and slammed it back, eyes watering, throats aflame.

“Gahhhhhhh,” I gasped. Melanie smiled.

“Good, huh?” I nodded. Since I was a small child I’d been given sips—and more recently full glasses—of beer and wine, and every time I had a first hit of alcohol, relief flooded through me almost instantly. I reached for the bottle and poured us both another. We tossed it back. I poured myself a third glass, but Melanie stopped me before I could pour hers. “I’m good. We still have a party to go to,” she reminded me.

“Right.” I slammed mine back, already well into my first experience of being drunk. “Let’s go!” I have no memory after that and only learned the remainder of that night’s story from Melanie, who shared her recollection with me over the next few days.

We reached Lynn’s house to find the high school party in full swing, mainly populated by her sister and brother’s eleventh and twelfth-grade friends. Their parents were in Hawaii and mine were safely ensconced at a Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra concert.

Apparently none of my friends could tell I was blind drunk, and my intoxication didn’t stop me from drinking several beers while there. From what Melanie said, I was fun, funny, and relaxed at the crowded house party. After a few hours, Melanie and I walked back to her house and crept inside, her family now home and in bed. I was making noise and goofing around, ignoring her repeated requests to speak more quietly. She led me down to their unfinished basement in an attempt to keep me from waking her parents and three older brothers on the top floor.

Once downstairs, I tried to recreate our childhood playacting games, beginning with Aquaman, my favorite, where I played the lead and Melanie played Aquagirl. But Melanie wasn’t playing along.

“C’mon, Mel, be Aquagirl,” I implored. Melanie shook her head.

“I think we should go to bed; I’m tired.” Ignoring her growing frustration, I began to set up the ironing board. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“It’s an underwater rock—I’m gonna swim over it,” I announced, backing up to the far wall. “Watch out!”

“Lori! No!”

I ran and leaped, hurdling the ironing board. I ran back and forth, jumping over it several times before catching a toe and crashing, ripping my elbow open on the rough concrete wall and smashing the iron into pieces. I crumpled to the floor, then bounced back to my feet, oblivious to the pain.

“You’re bleeding, Lor,” she said resignedly. “Don’t move, you’re getting it all over. Here.” She pressed a rag from a nearby laundry basket to the large gash. “Hold this on it, press hard.”

Still drunk herself, Melanie somehow controlled the bleeding, while steering me, loudly babbling about Aquaman, up two flights of stairs to her bedroom and into my sleeping bag.

I remember the morning. I woke up in Melanie’s bright bedroom, unsure of who or where I was for several long moments, my mind completely devoid of memory, my head pulsating painfully. I moved my arm to rub my face and a sharp pain seized my elbow. The smell of vomit and blood hit my nostrils in a rush and I gagged, but my stomach was empty. Inspecting my elbow, I felt encrusted blood and puke all over my arm, neck, and the side of my face. With my good arm, I touched my head, where dried vomit clumped in my hair. Just then, Melanie entered the room.

“Your mom’s on the phone,” she said, squatting beside me. “How’re you feeling?” Her nose wrinkled at the harsh smell.

“Terrible. I am so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she smiled. “You were pretty funny.”

“Does your mom know?”

“Yeah, but she’s just worried about you. She won’t tell your parents.”

“I know she wouldn’t. I feel so crappy, I don’t even care,” I moaned as I tried to get up. We walked slowly down the stairs, Melanie assisting me, my head spinning, stomach cramping. I reached for the phone with bloodied fingers and took a deep breath, summoning my most normal-sounding voice.

“Hi Mom.”

“What time did you get up?” I tried to gauge her tone.

“Just now, we stayed up late talking,” I lied.

“Uh-huh. Time to get home, we have things for you to do,” she said icily. She knows. I’d later discover she and my dad saw the party from the street as they drove home from their concert.

I showered, scrubbing hard in an effort to wash off my embarrassment and shame along with the filth. I ate a piece of dry toast and gathered my things. Mrs. Solesky had washed and dried my clothes while I’d slept, and I apologized and thanked her for everything. She smiled sympathetically and gave me a warm hug. I promised her I’d be back to take the sleeping bag to the dry cleaners and replace the iron.

Filled with shame and dread, I shuffled the full 120 feet from the Soleskys’ house to ours slowly, like a death row inmate on his last day. I found my parents sitting quietly in their recliners in the living room, unusual for a Saturday morning.

“Were you at the party at the Rowans’ house?” my mom asked before I’d even taken a seat.

“Yeah.” So intense was my hangover, I didn’t even consider lying.

“Were you drinking?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Melanie’s. And at Lynn’s.”

“The Soleskys were out? You said they’d be home.”

“Yeah.”

“What were you drinking?” Dad finally joined in.

“The Polish stuff. And then some Crown Royal. And beer.”

“You drank the Polish stuff?!” they exclaimed in unison, eyebrows raised. I nodded. My head ached more from the movement. I thought I detected a smirk on Dad’s face. His moustache turned down slightly when he was amused.

“Well,” Mom said. I waited several moments for more. She appeared uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “You’ve probably suffered more than you would from any punishment we could give you. Go help your dad clean the garage.” She banished me with a wave of her hand.

That was the last time either of them spoke to me about drinking. Socially, I was incapable of having just one drink. I didn’t drink daily and often went several weeks between drinks. Where some binge drinkers aim to get blind drunk, my goals were less clear: I simply couldn’t stop once I started, even knowing the result could be a blackout.

Drinking eased my social anxiety. When I drank, I didn’t worry about not fitting into my gender, or my skin. I was popular, and I enjoyed it, but I lived in constant fear of someone learning the truth about me. I had the high social standing that came with being an athlete and a good student. No one teased me, bullied me, or made me feel like the outsider I knew myself to be. I was keenly aware of the privilege I enjoyed as a white, middle-class, non-marginalized person, and I was terrified of losing it. Drinking helped me maintain my facade.

After graduation, many of my classmates came out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but I’m not aware of any other transgender people who attended school with me. I have tried for years to explain the dynamic around LGBTQ awareness at Bishop Carroll High School in the early 1980s, but I’ve never been able to. While the student population had its fair share of entitled frat-boy types, I don’t remember witnessing or hearing of anyone being called out or teased by any of the masters of the universe for being different or queer.

As an androgynous-looking teen, perceived by others as a tomboy, I certainly could have been targeted, but I never was, perhaps due to my popularity. My high school was an extremely classist place where it was very easy to determine where kids fell on the social and economic spectrum. As long as they fit in economically and didn’t challenge the status quo in any other ways, even the most effeminate boys and butch girls studied with, interacted with, socialized with, or were themselves members of the popular crowd.

Still, I tiptoed carefully, walking a tightrope between finding some comfort in my skin and maintaining a school wardrobe that wouldn’t attract negative attention. Working after-school and summer jobs at various places from Dairy Queen to an athletic shoe store gave me the means to keep up with the trends touted in The Official Preppy Handbook, a satirical 1980 paperback most kids in my high school were desperate to emulate. Calgary was the new Connecticut, and boat shoes, chinos, and polo shirts were all the rage for anyone who was anyone.

Formans Menswear occupied a busy corner in our local mall. Tasteful lighting and dark wood paneling gave the store a piano-bar vibe. Navy-suited and black-tuxedoed mannequins posed in the window displays, classy and Bond-like. Breathless, I drew myself up to my full height whenever I stepped inside that magical world of menswear, glancing shyly at the dapper salesmen gliding through the tasteful displays with confidence and efficiency.

I desperately wanted a Lacoste shirt, one of those pretentious little French alligator-emblem golf shirts that all the cool kids in school wore, but I feared a dark or neutral color would play up my masculinity and spotlight me as a gender outlaw. I chose a pink version, loose and unassuming, killing two birds with one crocodile—vaulting me into the realm of the cool and cloaking me in faux femininity. I wore that shirt two or three times a week for the next two years, convinced it was my protective cape.

The fact that today I can sit back and remember several schoolmates who I later learned were gay, lesbian, or bisexual and say, “Duh, of course they are,” only reminds me that I never considered any of us as “other” during my school years. So earnest were my own efforts—conscious and predominantly unconscious—to cloak my transgender self and adhere to mainstream behaviors, that I failed to consider that others might possibly fall outside the mainstream, too. Many of the queer kids I knew came from very affluent Calgary families whose fathers owned or held executive positions in large oil companies or law firms. While wealth and social standing brought these kids popularity at school, I can only imagine that the pressure to remain closeted as children of prominent people in a conservative city was a burden. The refusal to believe that anyone in the ranks of this elite Catholic high school could be anything other than straight and cisgender (the term for those whose sense of self and birth-assigned sex align, according to society’s norms) was so deep that bullying as we now know it did not exist, as far as I was aware.

One of my school friends was Attila Richard Lukacs, known then as Rick Lukacs. Today, Lukacs is a world-renowned painter and visual artist. He’s also an out gay man whose early career featured bold, homoerotic depictions of gay skinheads with a militaristic theme. While he wasn’t openly gay in high school, he was the only LGBTQ person I knew at that time who I suspect knew exactly who and what he was in those days. He didn’t seem to try very hard to hide it and had the confidence, carriage, and physical size to discourage any potential bullies.

Bishop Carroll High wasn’t a typical high school. It followed a unique independent study model, which drew many elite athletes. My initial plan was to continue my downhill ski racing training that first winter of high school, but the sad fact was, I wasn’t all that elite myself. Some of my friends went on to Olympic and World Cup success, but I remained a steadfast middle-of-the-pack finisher through my last racing season in the International Ski Federation system. Skiing six times a week throughout the winter—shivering in spandex racing suits awaiting my turn to launch myself down Rocky Mountain courses—plus rigorous dry land training spring and fall left me burned out.

That fall, I discovered the gym at school was frequently open during the day, and I soon joined regular coed pickup games of basketball. Basketball had called to me even back in junior high. It has a creative, spontaneous quality unique in competitive team sports; you can potentially make something amazing out of every touch of the ball, every defensive stop, every shot. If ski racing—beating the clock in the fastest run down the mountain—represents pure science, basketball displays athletic performance art. But I’d always been cut from the school teams, told by coaches that if they could carry fourteen players on a squad I would be one of them, but there was only room for twelve.

On a rare afternoon off from dry land ski training, I found myself taking an old orange rubber basketball to the schoolyard across the street, where I shot basket after basket and worked on my fledgling game. The only coaching I’d received was in junior high gym class, but the game came to me intuitively. I couldn’t jump very high, wasn’t particularly fast, and still hadn’t reached my full height, but I possessed good hand-eye coordination and quick reflexes. I love this game. After an hour and a half, I walked back across the street in the fading light and informed my parents I was quitting ski racing. Not even the iconic blue and black leather Skimeisters team ski jacket was enough to keep me racing.

“Are you sure?” Dad asked. “You love skiing.”

“We can certainly find other things to do with that money,” Mom chimed in.

“I think we should make sure it’s really what you want,” Dad said to me, eyebrows raised.

“I like the dry land training the most, but it’s so much time skiing every night and weekend,” I said. “I kind of want to try some other stuff.”

“Like what?” Mom demanded.

“Basketball,” I blurted. “I want to try out for the basketball team.” Dad tugged his moustache, as he always did when deep in thought.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “How long have you been thinking this way?”

“Since school started. I’m tired of being cold all the time. Plus, I’m never gonna make the national team,” I reasoned.

“True,” Mom agreed. I wasn’t sure if it was the being cold part or my lack of talent she concurred with. I drooped as I stood before them, suspecting it was the latter.

“Well, if you’re sure, it’s fine with us,” Dad said. “I’ll miss watching you race.”

“You can come to my games,” I smiled at him.

“There you go—I will do that,” he replied.

“If you make the team,” Mom interjected.

“I’m gonna make the team.”

Six weeks later, I made the junior varsity team.

The morning of my first early practice, I walked into the kitchen to find Dad making oatmeal. He made it for Jake and me every weekday morning before six, but I was usually asleep.

“What time do you want to leave?” he asked me.

“For practice?” I replied, surprised. “I was going to take the bus.”

“You don’t need to. I’ll drive you.”

“Great. Thanks.” We sat down and ate our oatmeal in silence, each reading the paper. From that day forward, he drove me to every morning practice for three seasons. Sometimes we spent our time together in easy silence, other times we talked about all kinds of things, from his job to the performance of the Calgary Flames to chemistry basics to the Farmers’ Almanac.

After a few short weeks of practice, the regular season began. Our first game was against Henry Wisewood High. I came off the bench late in the first half and took a position on the foul lane as one of my teammates shot free throws. The first shot swished through the net, but the second rolled around, hit the backboard softly and fell off the left side of the rim. I jumped into the lane and grabbed the rebound. One pump fake, then I gently laid the ball up toward the glass with my left hand. I watched, wide-eyed, as it kissed the backboard and fell perfectly into the basket. I pumped my fist in the air and shouted, “Yeah!” as I ran back on defense. I hollered joyfully, my fist still raised, all the way to the opposing team’s key. The coach nodded to me to start the second half, and I played the rest of the game.

Later, in the locker room, my friend Talia, a friendly eleventh-grader I’d played with in open gym throughout the fall and who’d warmed the bench the entire game, congratulated me.

“You did really great,” she said. “But I’m a little sad you played so much.”

“Really? How come?” I felt guilty, expecting that she’d lament her own lack of playing time.

“Because you would have been so fun on the bench with us. We gave each other hairdos.”

“Did you really?” I couldn’t imagine not watching the game, prepared in case the coach subbed me in.

“Yeah. It’s one of the best parts of being on the team!”