Tomboy Survival Guide Read online

  And that is a true story.

  Everyone was still going at it pretty serious when I left around midnight, quite sober, and drove home. I got an incoherent pocket call from Sarah the locations scout at about 3:30 in the morning. I could hear her giving directions to a cab driver and then it sounded like she was making out with an unknown female subject in the back seat of the taxi. I hung up the phone and went back to sleep.

  Monday morning was fun, it was like all of us who had been there had our own giant, private, no boys allowed club-house secret. Lisa was already in the line-up for breakfast outside the catering truck when I got there. She grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me to one side, stage whispering.

  “Everything that happened is classified. We’re not telling any of the guys anything about the party. It’s driving them nuts. Mum’s da word. Pass it on. Got it?”

  I nodded and she let my arm go.

  Several women who had been at the party were gathered in a circle on set just before call time. Much smirking and winking at each other ensued and knowing smiles were exchanged. The first assistant director was perusing her call sheet and the grips were setting up track for the camera dolly, and I was unfolding the director’s chairs and arranging them around the monitor when Nathan, the cameraman, lumbered past us all, and nodded good morning to everyone. “Ladies,” he fake-saluted to us all. He was so knock-kneed that his legs looked like a bony X as he strolled past and headed for the coffee and donuts table. We could barely wait until he was out of earshot to explode with raucous laughter.

  By the time the coffee truck showed up at about ten o’clock in the morning, the rumours were flying fast. It wasn’t because any of us were talking. It was because none of us were talking.

  Grips, lamp operators, caterers, and male actors all tried to pry the details out of me.

  “Ivan Coyote. On set props department. 604 …” I kept repeating my name, department, and cell phone number like I was a captured soldier in enemy territory.

  Then it all exploded. Lisa had left an envelope full of Polaroid shots from the party in the pocket of her cast chair and one of the set decorators snuck a peek at them before she snatched them out of his hands, but he started talking. All he had to do was mention Jamie and chocolate mousse and a body shot of tequila and the rumours replicated like a virus.

  At one point late in the morning, I had to run up to the production office to pick up some beer can labels with a fake brand name on them that the art department had printed up for us, and one of the producers grabbed me by the sleeve and hauled me into his office, shutting the door behind us.

  This guy was a Hollywood dude. He had produced some pretty decent television series in the past, and everyone was a little scared of him. He was demanding and didn’t like shooting in Canada. He missed Los Angeles and told the entire crew all about it at every possible opportunity. He had also never spoken directly to me in six months of fourteen-hour days.

  “Ivan. You are just the person I was looking for.”

  I didn’t even know he knew my name. Suddenly he was looking for me? This couldn’t be good, I thought.

  “Tell me about this party on Saturday night. I heard it got pretty off the hook.”

  I turned my walkie-talkie down. Stood on one foot, then the other. “I … uh, can’t. I took an oath. I’m sworn to secrecy.”

  “Come on. Just between you and me. I won’t tell anyone. Did Lisa really lick chocolate icing off Jamie’s … off Jamie?” He waggled his eyebrows at me, like we were old pals, like we chatted like this all the time.

  I think his name was Kevin. Maybe it was Keith? I could Google it now, but I won’t.

  “Listen, man,” I said. “That party was ladies only and I barely made the criteria as it was. I can’t reveal anything at all. If I tell you anything, I won’t be allowed to go to the next ladies only party, and I very much want to stay on that invite list.”

  “That good, huh?” He let out a low whistle and shook his head slowly.

  “No comment.” I nodded solemnly. He narrowed his eyes at me. “Sir,” I added, and left his office door open when I exited.

  By the time lunch rolled around, which happens six hours after morning call time in the film industry, the boys were whipped up into a full on fury of curiosity. The rain pounded on the roof of the lunch tent, and the propane heaters made the air inside warm and eggy.

  We remained tight-lipped. The boys for some reason thought I was the most likely candidate to talk, but I remained steadfast in my silence. Saturday night, that party, it had been for us, not them, and we were keeping it.

  Finally, the gaffer snorted out loud and threw his napkin onto his half-eaten plate of pasta, and fished around in his jacket pocket for his smokes. He stood up.

  “They’re just yanking our chains, boys. Nothing happened at that party. They’re not telling us what happened because there is nothing to tell.” He turned on his heel and stalked out of the lunch tent and into the rain to smoke.

  Lisa licked her lips and smiled slow. She raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow into a question mark.

  “That’s right, Richard,” she called after him. “We simply drank white wine and exchanged recipes and gossiped and supported each other as women.”

  All of us who were at the party cracked up. The boys crossed their arms.

  Lisa pointed a manicured finger at the open flap of the door that Richard had just disappeared through and raised her voice, and did her best Jack Nicholson voice.

  “You can’t handle the truth!” she boomed.

  Marguerite, one of my favourite hairdressers, stood up and made a beeline for the door, announcing that she was about to pee herself. She walked out holding her knees together, which all the boys thought was her not trying to pee her pants.

  Everyone who had been at the party, of course, knew she was doing her best Nathan the cameraman impression, and we really lost it. Lisa laughed until she cried and her mascara ran and she had to head back to the makeup truck to get herself fixed up before we started shooting again.

  I wasn’t used to feeling like one of the girls, but I did that day, and I had to admit, it felt pretty good.

  Me to a guy carrying a baby in a Snugli next to me in the grocery store line-up: “If you had a half-chewed piece of cracker stuck to the side of your head, would you want someone to tell you?”

  Guy with baby says, with resignation: “Probably not.”

  “Well then,” I say, “forget I said anything.”

  TOMBOYS STILL

  Linda Gould was a friend of my mom’s. Linda was from somewhere not here, somewhere not the Yukon, she had family down south and she had raven black hair. One time I asked my mom why Linda’s name was Linda Gould but her husband was still called Don Dixon. My mom told me that some women chose not to take their husband’s last name when they got married. It was 1974 and this impressed me for reasons I did not fully comprehend just yet.

  Linda and Don lived in a rented house next to the clay cliffs downtown, and had one wall in their living room covered in that mural type of wallpaper, depicting a picture of a forest of giant pine trees. Linda wouldn’t let Don paint over that wallpaper or tear it down; she said it reminded her of California.

  I was a Yukon kid and had never seen a real tree that big in my life, I could only imagine them.

  Linda played hockey, and she also coached a girl’s ringette team. As soon as I turned five years old I was allowed to join up. I had never really heard of the game called ringette but wanted to be good at it because Linda was good at it. It turned out ringette was kind of like hockey light, but only girls played it. It wasn’t as much fun as hockey looked like it was, but I kept going to practices because my mom had spent all that money on skates and a helmet for me. There were barely enough girls to make one team so we never got to play a real game, we mostly skated around and practiced stopping. That’s the truth, and also a metaphor. Some of the girls came in figure skates, but not me.

  One day Don Dix
on showed up early at practice and watched us run a passing drill for a while. He told Linda after practice that I was already a better skater than half the boys on the Squirts team he coached and so did I want to come and play with the boys? he asked.

  I didn’t even have to think before I said yes. My mom said hold on, she had to talk it over with my dad, who was only half listening because he was reading that book Shogun and it was a super good book he said, and my mom said yes, I guess, you can play hockey, but be careful out there. Linda taught me how to do a slap shot and told me never to skate with my head down. I was the only girl playing in the Whitehorse Minor Hockey League for eleven years after that. I made it all the way up to junior hockey. Left wing.

  When I turned sixteen they wouldn’t let me play hockey with the boys anymore. I was now a legal liability, they told my parents, and the minor hockey league just couldn’t afford that kind of insurance, and besides, what if I got hurt, the boys were so much bigger now, plus body-checking. Come and play on the women’s team with us, Linda said, and so I did.

  That was how I met Donna Doucette, who played defense and worked as a bartender at the Kopper King on the Alaska Highway. Donna Doucette wore her long brown hair in a whip-like braid that swung between her shoulder blades when she skated back hard for the puck. I think I pretty much fell in love with Donna Doucette the first time I saw her spit perfectly through the square holes in the face mask on her helmet. She just curled her tongue into a tube and horked unapologetically right through her mask. It shot like a bullet, about fifteen feet, straight out onto the ice. I had never seen a woman do anything like that before, I could only imagine the back-of-the-head slap my gran would lay on me if I ever dared to spit anywhere in public, much less turn it into an art form like Donna Doucette did.

  I remember hearing her playing fastball one midnight sunny summer evening; I was playing softball on the field next to the women’s league. All the women on my hockey team played ball together in the summer; like serious fast pitch, they were not fooling around. Hockey was for sport but fast pitch was for keeps. Donna Doucette played shortstop and would spare no skin to make a catch, and she spat all over the goddamn place out there on the field too, and cussed and catcalled. Hey batter batta batta swing batta batta. I remember her in silhouette, bobbing back and forth on the toes of her cleats, all backlit by the sun and gum a-chew, a mouthy shadow, punching the pocket of her gloved hand with her red-nailed fingertips coiled into a fist.

  That’s the thing about Linda and Donna. They weren’t like me. Linda wore sapphire studs in her ears and a red red dress to our Christmas party. Donna swore and stole third base wearing what my mother claimed to be too much eye makeup for daylight hours, which even back then I thought was kind of harsh, it being summer in the Yukon and it never really getting dark and all.

  Donna and Linda. My memories of them are sharp, hyper-focused. I was paying attention to every detail of them, I was searching them for clues to who I wanted to be, but I already knew I couldn’t be like them. I wanted something else. Something close to what they had. They hinted at a kind of freedom, a kind of just not giving a fuck what anyone said about them that made me want things I didn’t know the words for.

  Theresa Turner drove her two-stroke dirt bike to school every day we were in grade eleven, appearing out of the willows and trailing a tail of dust as she gunned the throttle and skidded to a stop by the tree line at the edge of our high school parking lot. She would dismount and stomp her kickstand down with the heel of her buckled biker boot and shake her mane of mahogany ringlets loose from under her helmet and strut in her skin-tight Levi 501s past the heads smoking cigarettes by the back double doors to the wood shop. Fuck you looking at? she would sneer at them. This for some reason made them blush, and pretend they weren’t watching her ass swing as the door hissed shut behind her. I was old enough by then to be full-on smitten.

  Carolyn O’Hara was Theresa Turner’s very best friend from Cedar. Cedar was a suburb of the pulp mill town of Nanaimo where I was living with my grandmother. Theresa Turner and Carolyn O’Hara had grown up out there together and had known each other all their lives. They also knew all about all the boys from the rural working class outskirts of Nanaimo. Knew all the boys who had to skip school in the fall to bring in the hay and miss entire weeks in the spring when the lambs came.

  They knew all about the boys with the jean jacket vests with ZZ Top or Judas Priest album covers recreated in ballpoint ink. Houses of the Holy. The boys whose older brothers were doing time.

  Carolyn O’Hara had a necklace strung of these diamonds in the rough, these boys who would punch locker doors and prick the skin in between their forefinger and thumb and rub ink into it in the shape of a broken heart all for the love of Carolyn O’Hara. She had her brother who died in a motorcycle accident’s acoustic guitar and she would play “Walk on the Wild Side” by Lou Reed at lunch. I remember her swinging her honey-brown hair in the sun in the front seat of Eddie Bartolo’s midnight blue Nova with the windows rolled down and saying, “So what if I am on the rag, you asshole. I’d like to see you go to gym class and do your fucking flexed arm hang exercises if you’d been bleeding out of your ass like it’s going out of goddamn style for the last three fucking days. You going to smoke that thing or pass it on, you selfish bastard?”

  Carolyn O’Hara could out-swear even Theresa Turner, it’s why they were the perfect pair. Carolyn O’Hara was gorgeous. Could have been a model, everybody said so, but she was very practical and took the dental hygienist’s program up at the college right after we graduated.

  I ran into Theresa one day about five years ago, on my way to Vancouver Island for a gig. Theresa was wearing false eyelashes and an orange reflective vest at the same time, which I thought was awesome. Hugged me hard and told me she had been working for BC Ferries for seventeen years now, doing what my gran had always said was a good, clean, union job if you liked people. Said Carolyn O’Hara had opened her own dog grooming business. A real cool place where you can drop your dog off to get groomed, or rent a big tub and wash your own dog in the back. She said they were both happy, they still kept in real good touch, in fact they were going for mani-pedis for their fortieth birthdays just next week.

  Mia Telerico. Fall of 1992, she had just moved to town from Toronto. I met her in my friend’s coffee shop on the Drive, she smoked Du Maurier Light King Size and I smoked Player’s Light regulars. I, for reasons unexamined by me at the time, I guess I was trying to impress her, so I spontaneously leapt up and did a dramatic reading for her of The Cat in The Hat, and we briefly became lovers, and then, so far, life-long friends. Mia Telerico said in my kitchen one night that first winter It’s E-Talian, not Eye-Talian, you sound like a redneck if you say it wrong, and then she showed me how to peel a bunch of garlic all at once by crushing it with the side of the butcher knife.

  How many ways do I love Mia Telerico? I love that she refinishes furniture and owns all her own power tools and that it takes hours for her curls to dry so she has special hair-washing days, because washing her hair is like, a thing, right, and she is missing part of a finger from an accident she had cleaning the chain on her motorcycle and she is tough as nails but with the softest heart and bosom, can I even use the word “bosom” anymore? I don’t know. Her hugs feel better than nearly anything is all I’m saying, and when she lets me rest my head there for a second I feel so untouchable, so unhurtable somehow, so magically protected by her soft cheek and rough hands ever capable. I called her just now and left a message asking her if it was okay if I called her a femme tomboy, how does she feel about me pinning those words on her femme tomboy, but really, all I’m trying to do here is broaden the joining, I tell her voice mail. All I want to do is honour all the femme tomboys I have ever loved, and thank them for showing me the possibilities. Anyway. Mia’s father was from Malta and her mother is Italian and her dad was a janitor and her ma worked in a chocolate factory just like I Love Lucy and Ethel except less funny and for decades
until it wrecked her back.

  I left Mia Telerico a message but I haven’t heard back yet. I hear through the grapevine that she is going through a breakup and, well, I guess I am too, and both of us, we take these things pretty hard, artist’s hearts pumping just beneath the skin of our chests like they do.

  The woman working at the Tim Hortons in the London airport and I just did a tattoo show-and-tell session together. Her co-worker even helped her undo her uniform shirt and pull the back of the collar partway down to show me the wolf on her back. It was funny and we bonded, and then we both just stood there for a minute, both of our shirts disheveled and unbuttoned, smiling at each other, kind of embarrassed. I asked her where the tip jar was. She said they had to keep it under the counter. We both agreed this was no fair.

  SHOULDN’T I FEEL PRETTY?

  On June 25, I received the following email:

  Dear Ivan:

  I was just wondering if you always knew? When did you become comfortable in your own skin? See, I always felt not quite right ... I’d put on dresses or high heels and makeup and look in the mirror and I just didn’t feel right. Shouldn’t I feel pretty? Why didn’t I like what I saw? I’m forty-four years old and I think I’ve just realized that maybe girls and women’s clothes weren’t right for me all along. I feel stupid that it took me so long to realize what I am. It breaks my heart that it took me so long.

  I don’t even know where to begin to feel right, to feel good, to feel beautiful. Any tips?