“What?” I asked, grabbing my board and standing on it. I knew he hadn’t been talking about me because there’d been something a little lurid in his tone, a gleam in his eye I knew I could not be responsible for.
“So, anyways,” Donald stammered, “there was a—well, so that’s what I’m gonna do my project on.” Rob nodded enthusiastically, playing along.
“Cool. That sounds rad!” he said.
“You think his school project is rad?” I asked. They nodded, too vigorously. I knew they hadn’t been talking about school. This was a weekend, and these were thirteen-year-old boys. My throat clenched a little and I felt like I might cry if I thought any more about what they could possibly be excluding me from. And so I got on the half-pipe. Sidney stepped off to watch me as I rode as if possessed, climbing higher and higher up the plywood, moving from fakies to rock-to-fakies to rail grabs and stalls. I pulled off moves I’d never nailed before.
“Whoo! Give ’er, Lor!” Rob yelled. I heard the others hooting their approval. They’re such good guys. They didn’t mean to exclude me; they have no idea I’m really one of them. My board thundered up and down the ramp, and I grabbed the top rail so often my hands became sore, my thighs burning. Still, I rode higher and harder. This is it, I thought. Nothing’s the same, everything’s changing. Finally, I began to slow, no longer fighting for height, resigned to gravity and my own physical limitations. Accepting what was.
“Holy, that was wicked,” Donald marveled as I stepped off the ramp. “You’re sweating like crazy!”
“You shredded,” declared the usually laconic Sidney.
“Yeah,” I shrugged sheepishly, grateful I was no longer on the verge of tears. “I should probably get going.”
“Me, too,” Donald said, kicking up his board. We said our goodbyes to the others and walked the several blocks back to our street, our conversation easy and uneventful. Almost like normal—but I knew it would never be this easy again.
That summer, the hormonal magma of my loosely associated group of boy and girl friends collided, creating new bonds and solidifying others. The games we played morphed from Easy-Bake Oven and football to truth or dare and a kissing game we dubbed “Races” where a pair of one boy and one girl would run around the yard we were gathered at and kiss when out of sight of the group. The pair would run off for a minute or two—from the backyard to the front and then back again—while the remainder of us sat around and talked, arousing no suspicion if a parent were to come outside for any reason.
No one forced anyone to participate, although, looking back on it, the game was rife with teenage peer pressure and performance anxiety. I may have been the only one who cared about running fast in between the make-out portions of the game. I once suggested we time the racing couple, but the others laughed it off, not believing I was serious. Lynn raced with Rob, Melanie with Donald, and I was paired with Alvin, a nice—albeit quirky—lifelong member of our gang with poor handwriting but surprising kissing prowess.
Until then, I had felt neutral and resigned about my own sexuality. Kissing Alvin produced a strange throbbing between my legs, but still, nothing about the experience made me want to be his girlfriend. I noticed boys and found them attractive, but much of my admiration lay in wanting to look like them. I really liked Donald, but this was based far more on mutual interests than attraction. When the time came, though, it seemed to me that he would be the logical boyfriend choice.
I was so sexually repressed and convinced that my attraction to girls was really admiration of their femininity that it never occurred to me that I might be a lesbian—I didn’t even realize that was a life option. I understood enough to know that lesbians were women who liked women, but I felt sure I was destined to become a man and a husband to a woman one day. My sexual longings were all focused on an imaginary future where I existed in a male body.
At that age, my friends and I were inhibited, sheltered Catholic kids. Sex rarely came up in conversation, even among my closest friends. We had no language to describe sexual orientation, that there might be options in terms of who we were attracted to, gender-wise; nor did we have any way of describing gender identity, one’s internal understanding of one’s own gender. Gender was never questioned; it was seemingly immutable for everyone but me. Lezzie and fag were slurs I occasionally heard in the schoolyard, but more as general insults than loaded put-downs.
I had never paused to consider what the life of a lezzie or fag looked like or meant for such people romantically. My imagination held them fixed in the schoolyard into infinity, stuck in a kind of purgatory of junior high taunting. In the Catholic, conservative Alberta of my 1970s youth, nobody talked about gay people, let alone any LGBTQ role models.
Meanwhile, transgender people were strictly the stuff of circus acts.
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,