Close to Spider Man Read online

The twins were eleven, and blonde, and from outside. Being from outside was a catch-all term used by people from the Yukon to describe people who were not from the Yukon, as in:

  Well, you know how she’s from outside and all, and always thought she was better than the rest of us, or, I couldn’t get the part and had to send it outside to get fixed, cost me a mint, or, well, he went outside that one winter and came back with his ear pierced, and I’ve wondered about him ever since.

  The twins were only there for the summer. Their dad was there to oversee the reopening of the copper mine. They wore matching everything, and also had a little sister, who was seven.

  That’s where I came in.

  The plan was a simple man’s plan, in essence. As we worked out the details, we all stood straddling our bikes in a circle at the end of Black Street where the power line cut up the side of the clay cliffs.

  We were all going to pedal over to where the twins and their little sister lived. We had already hidden the supplies in the alley behind their house. The supplies consisted of a small piece of plywood and a short piece of four-by-four fence post.

  We would take the plywood and prop one end of it up with the four-by-four (Jimmy and I had two uncles who were carpenters, and he would himself go on to become a plumber) and build a jump for our bikes. Then we would ride and jump off it, right in front of the twins’ house, which was conveniently located right across from the park (good cover). This would enchant the unsuspecting kissees-to-be (and most likely their little sister), drawing them out from their house and into the street, where they would be easier to kiss.

  We would then gallantly offer the girls a ride on the handlebars of our bikes, having just proven our proficiency with bike trick skills by landing any number of cool jumps. The girls would get on our handlebars, and Jimmy and Grant would ride left down the alley with the twins, and I would take a right with their little sister and keep her occupied while they carried out the rest of the mission. The kiss-the-twins mission.

  The only person more likely to tell on us than the girls, after all, was their little sister, and I had it covered. Keep her occupied. Don’t tell her the plan. Don’t wipe out and rip the knees out of her tights. Drive her around the block a couple of times, and drop her off. Grant and Jimmy would take care of the rest.

  We thought we had pretty much everything covered. We even had secondary strategies; if the jump didn’t work right away, we could always make it higher, and if that didn’t work, I could bravely lie on the ground right in front of it, and they could jump over me.

  It was a good plan, and it worked.

  What we hadn’t foreseen was, I guess, unforseeable to us at the time. The girl factor, that is.

  How could we have known that the twins’ little sister would think that I was a boy?

  And how had the girls already found out that Jimmy and Grant wanted to kiss them?

  And what was I supposed to do if this girl, who was one year older than I was, slid off my handlebars as soon as we rounded the corner into the alley, planted both of her buckle-up shoes in the dust and both her hands on her hips, wanting me to kiss her like my uncle was kissing her older sister?

  It hadn’t crossed our minds, but that is exactly what she did (and I can’t remember her name to this day, and so can’t make one up, because this is a true story): the twins’ little sister wanted me to kiss her, and I’m sure I must’ve wanted to oblige her, if only for the sake of the mission. Because that is the first most secret, sacred tomboy rule: never chicken out of the mission.

  There was only one problem. The girl problem. She didn’t know I was one.

  It wasn’t that I had deliberately misled her, it just hadn’t really come up yet.

  And since me kissing anyone was never part of the plan as I knew it, I had not given much thought to the girl factor. But this girl had a plan of her own.

  There she was, all puckered up and expectant-like, and it seemed to me I had a full-blown situation on my six-year-old hands.

  A mistake had been made, somewhere, by someone. But what was it?

  I had a number of options at that point, I guess.

  I could have put my left hand on the back of her yellow dress, my right hand over her smaller left one, and given her a long, slow. …

  No, I would have dropped my bike.

  I could have leaned awkwardly over my handlebars and given her a short, sloppy one, and just hoped for the best, hoped that there wasn’t something about kissing a girl the boys couldn’t tell me, any slip that might reveal my true identity.

  I might even have gotten away with it. Who knows? I would have liked for this story to have ended that way.

  But it didn’t. And because this is a true story, I would like to tell you what really went down with me and the twins’ little sister in an alley by the clay cliffs the summer I turned six.

  But I don’t remember.

  What I do recall was that unexplainable complications had arisen because we did not take the girl factor into consideration, rendering this mission impossible for me to carry out.

  According to Grant and Jimmy, the little sister started to cry when the dust had cleared and she found herself alone, in an alley, in this weird little town where her dad made her come for the summer, and the twins had to take her home.

  And when all three left, two weeks later, unkissed, Grant and Jimmy still considered me a major security risk.

  But I don’t remember my retreat.

  My Aunt Nor ah was seventeen, and babysitting us that day. She said I came flying up the driveway, dumped my bike on her lawn, streaked past her into the living: room, and threw myself on the couch, sobbing incoherently.

  I would like to think that at this point she patted my head, or hugged me, or something, to calm me down, but we weren’t really that kind of a family. It’s not like I was bleeding or anything.

  She said that when I finally calmed down enough for her to ask me what was wrong, all I could say was three words, over and over.

  I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.

  Girls. We can be so complicated.

  STICKS AND STONES

  IT SEEMED LIKE A FINE IDEA AT THE TIME. Of course, now I look back and count my ten fingers and toes, my two legs and arms that still function properly, shake my head that sits on top of the neck I have never broken, and thank my guardian angel that I still possess these blessings. But it seemed like a fine idea at the time.

  My father is a welder, and his shop was located in the middle of a large and potholed industrial section just off the Alaska Highway on the edge of town. It came complete with snarling guard dogs and broken-down bulldozers, and even had its very own forgotten car and truck graveyard. If you looked up from the dusty ground and buckets of used oil, out behind colourless mechanics’ shops and the skeletons of scaffolding, you could see the whole valley stretched out, the Yukon River sparkling blue and snaking through the painted postcard mountains. If you looked up, which I rarely did. There was too much to do.

  There were any number of stupid and dangerous activities to pass the day with, untold numbers of rusty edges to tear your skin and clothes on, a myriad of heavy metal objects to fall off of or get pinned beneath. I don’t remember whose idea the tires were. They were not just any tires; they had once pounded dust under earth movers, or dump trucks. They were monsters, and they were everywhere. It took the whole pack of mechanics’ kids and welders’ daughters and crane operators’ sons to move them; getting them up and onto their sides was a feat of team effort and determination, aided by crowbars we pinched from the backs of our dads’ pick-ups when no one was looking. Rolling them to the edge of the power line without being noticed involved lookouts and quick action. We knew they would stop us if they found out; we didn’t need to ask. The covert element of the operation only added to the thrill of it all.

  Only two of us could fit in at a time, which was okay, because we had all summer and plenty of tires. Three or four kids would hold the tire stead
y, teetering on the edge of the cliff at the top of the power line, and two would climb inside. Kind of like gerbils on one of those exercise wheels, except you would face each other, arms and legs pushing out into the inside of the tire to hold yourself in. Gravity pretty much took care of the rest.

  It was better than any roller coaster, not that any of us had been on one. It was the random element of the tire’s path that did it. There was just no way to know what that tire was going to bump into or off of, and the only thing more fun than the roll down was when the tire started to come to a stop at the bottom, and did that roll-on-its-side, flip-flop dance at the bottom of the hill, kind of like a coin does when you flip it and miss and it lands on the linoleum. Only this was a huge dump truck tire with two dirty kids inside, laughing hysterically, laughing until tears ran and our sides hurt the next day. Only one of us ever puked: the heavy duty mechanic’s oldest daughter lost her lunch all over her brother one day, and so we never let her ride after that, just sent her into her dads shop to distract him while we rolled tires past his big bay doors out front.

  I think it was the smell that finally gave us away. My mom kept asking me what the hell had I been up to that day while my dad was at work. There is something unmistakably foul about the smell of the inside of a tire, a cross between pond water and cat pee, I would venture, and my mom couldn’t quite pin it down, but she got suspicious.

  It was a bright August morning, the day it all ended, and we had a beauty of a big tire all loaded up and ready for take-off when we heard a noise inside our heads, a skull-piercing shriek that stopped our blood. We all froze in our tracks. My mom appeared from out of nowhere and it dawned on me that the noise was originating from her mouth, the words becomeing slowly recognizable as she beelined toward us, her face all veins bulging red, and the whites of her eyes all you could see: “What the fuck are you stop right now stop that stop it stop …” and so forth.

  There was really no explaining our way out of this one. What else could we possibly have had in mind? More damning, of course, was the pile of tires already situated at the bottom of the power line; we couldn’t even argue that we were just thinking about climbing inside one and rolling it down the hill, but were just about to prudently change our minds and go help our fathers sort bolts and sweep up.

  An ad-hoc committee of irate parents was called immediately, and our dads did what any fathers would have done when catching their child about to engage in activities which could only result in grievous bodily harm: they spanked us all senseless. Nothing like pain to remind you of how much you could have been hurt. It was, after all, the seventies. I was also given plenty of time to mull over my decisions for the next two weeks: I was grounded, and spent the rest of the summer inside at home, watching the Seventh Day Adventist kids safely ride their bikes on the road. What could you do? Like I said, it seemed like a fine idea at the time.

  THE CAT CAME BACK

  WHEN YOU’RE IRISH, AND CATHOLIC, and the oldest, you babysit a lot.

  I have thirty-Six cousins, so I pretty much had to book my weekends off if I had plans of my own, plans that didn’t involve the baths and bedtimes of any number of little ones in pajamas, most of them with blue eyes just like mine. We all vaguely resemble each other, me and my cousins. This made it easier to get mad at them, and harder to stay that way for very long.

  There was a routine, which changed only slightly, according to which aunt and / or uncle I was sitting for, which house I was in, and how many kids I had being the variables.

  I would ride my bike over, or get picked up if it was winter. My uncle – no matter which one – would pull his truck up into our driveway, and honk the horn, because invariably he was late. I would skid across the ice in my running shoes, because snow boots were so uncool, and climb up into the cab of his pickup, which was usually a four-by-four, and almost always blue.

  This was how things were done in my family.

  This night it was my Uncle Rob behind the wheel. He was a car salesman, and always smelled like aftershave, and sometimes like rum and coke.

  “Whatcha got in the backpack?” he would say.

  “Homework,” I would answer, usually lying.

  “It’s Friday night, for crying out loud,” he would reply looking at me sideways, his right arm draped over the seat between us as he backed up the truck. “You read too much.”

  I would shrug, he would shift into first, and we’d be off.

  There would be chips, and pop, and sometimes a video. There would be bathtimes, and bedtimes, and numerous glasses of water, and eventually, finally, all my cousins would be asleep.

  Leaving me blissfully alone. To do whatever I liked.

  This is how I discovered Playboy magazines, vibrators and dirty videos, condoms, feminine douches, hemorrhoid creams, and vaginal suppositories.

  I have to admit that most of my earlier knowledge of the strange and smelly world of adult bodies came from snooping in the bathrooms and under the beds of my mother and father’s brothers and sisters and their significant others.

  Nobody had cable back then, and a girl can’t keep herself occupied with CBC North all night. Boredom forced me to it, you see. My parents either had a remarkably unaccessorized sex life, or they hid things better.

  Anyway, it was a Friday night that had passed like any other, and I was alone in my Uncle Rob and Aunt Cathy’s bed-room. It had apparently been the scene of a rather frantic fashion crisis on his part earlier, because his clothes were strewn everywhere.

  I took off my t-shirt and slipped on one of his car salesman suit jackets. It was scratchy wool on the outside, with suede sewn over the elbows. But it was lined with caramel-coloured satin inside, and felt cold and kind of nice up against my nakedness.

  There was a walk-in closet, a big one, with a sliding door. Everybody had them, you know the ones, covered in mirrored tiles with gold veins running through them.

  My pants didn’t match, so I took them off. There was a tie, tied and then abandoned on a chairback. I slipped it over my head and slid the knot to the base of my throat. I looked left, and then right at myself, sucked my cheeks in, flexed my biceps. I tried on his cologne, slicked my hair back, and danced with myself in the mirror, singing “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield.

  I was a twelve-year-old dork, and I didn’t care.

  Except my legs looked too skinny protruding naked from his suit jacket, so I dug a pair of his clean underwear out from an open drawer and put them on. I grabbed a pair of dress socks, too, the ones made of all man-made fabrics. I believe I had every intention of putting them on my feet when I originally removed them from the drawer, but somehow they ended up down the front of the underwear. I was on my way to finding a pair of his dress pants when I was again distracted by the mirror.

  I believe it was the Rolling Stones I was singing when he walked into the bedroom.

  I froze, covering the bulge in my – I mean his – under-wear, and just tried to act … natural.

  “Forgot the tickets,” he said, perfectly calm, reaching for an envelope on the dresser. He stuffed the tickets into his inside pocket, turned without even cracking a smile, and was gone.

  I stripped in a panic, I don’t know why, having already been caught quite in the act. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t said anything. In my family we rarely turn down an opportunity to torture and harass each other, and he had just been handed the opportunity of a lifetime. Maybe he couldn’t think of any-thing good right away that was it, I would be in for it later, I’d never hear the end of this one, I knew it.

  But he never did say a word to me about that night, not the next day, nor the next. Not even years later, both of us drunk in his boat, talking about why we both like girls, did he even ask me about it. Maybe he didn’t know what to say. What do you say to your half-naked niece when you catch her in your bedroom with a pair of your dress socks stuffed down the front of a pair of your underwear, singing “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” and licking your gold-Veined, mirror
-tiled closet door? Maybe the shock was too much, maybe he blanked it out.

  Or, maybe the black panties and fishnets I found under his and Cathy’s bed weren’t Cathy’s, who knows?

  He always was my favourite uncle.

  CLOSE TO SPIDER MAN

  There are strange things done, under the midnight sun,

  by the kids of the guys who work for the men who moil for gold,

  The northern lights have seen queer sights,

  and one of the queerest I happened to see,

  took place on a night,

  bathed in midnight sunlight,

  A scene created and witnessed only by me.

  BUT, LET ME BEGIN NEARER TO THE beginning.

  I met her working the breakfast shift at the Travelodge, which was later sold and renamed the Sheffield Hotel, and then the American guy bought it and named it the Westmark, just like his hotels in Skagway, and Dawson City, and Juneau, Alaska, but, ask any of the old folks, and they still have coffee at the Travelodge, regardless of what whoever owns it now may call it.

  Our shifts started at 4:30 AM to set the tables and warm up the industrial toaster, and opened for buffet and breakfast à la carte at 5:30. Busloads of retired American tourists on a last chance economical pilgrimage north to Alaska, and we were the last stop for excuse me miss, can i have some more coffee?

  Now, waitressing with someone can result in a very particular kind of bond, or betrayal, and only a fellow waitress can truly understand the depths of gallantry involved in pouring coffee outside of one’s section, the security of a good busboy and the treachery of toast thieves, and those who don’t polish their own silverware and never make coffee, and leave full buspans for the next guy.

  Her name was Sylvia Wadsworth, and she was then and probably still is one of the worst waitresses I have ever apologized to hungry Texans for.

  We had both just finished our first year of college. She was at Concordia, I was at Capilano College; she was going to grow up and be a psychologist, and did, and I was going to be a saxophone player with a degree, just in case my waitressing dreams fell through.