Pageboy, page 8
My mother and I shared a two-bedroom suite. And her being the daughter of an Anglican minister born in 1954 in Saint John, New Brunswick, well, it made it complicated when I met someone, the first woman I had a suitably consensual sexual relationship with.
I was taken aback the moment I saw Olivia Thirlby. Embodied and bold, her long brown hair moved in slow motion. We were the same age, but she seemed so much older, capable, and centered. Sexually open, far removed from where I was at the time. But the chemistry was palpable, it pulled me in. I was embarrassingly shy with Olivia. She had much more experience. I was closed off. It was rare I let anything in, but I felt comfortable with her, and I began to poke my head out of its shell. We became friends quickly, spending a lot of time together.
We stood in her hotel room. Billie Holiday played. She was about to start making lunch, when she looked directly at me and said point-blank, “I’m really attracted to you.”
“Uh, I’m really attracted to you, too.”
At that we started sucking face. It was on.
I had an all-encompassing desire for her, she made me want in a way that was new, hopeful. It was one of the first times someone would make me cum, the first time I would open up. And we started having sex all the time: her hotel room, in our trailers at work, once in a tiny, private room in a restaurant. What were we thinking? We thought we were subtle. Being intimate with Olivia helped my shame dissipate. I didn’t see a glint of it in her eyes and I wanted that—done feeling wretched about who I am.
I do not know if my mom suspected anything. She probably just thought Olivia and I had become fast pals. Which was true. But still, I kept it hidden. Olivia came to my suite maybe once.
We would sometimes hang out in Michael’s room, and once Jonah Hill came to visit. It was after they had made Superbad but before it had come out. There was weed and gin. Michael had a groovy little keyboard out and was tinkering around with Jonah. He would make music when he wasn’t filming, just always being perfectly, annoyingly cool. We all got baked and wandered Vancouver together. We trekked down to Stanley Park, a massive, jaw-dropping green oasis. The gargantuan trees bring you to your knees. The Douglas firs, the western red cedars … some towering up to 249 feet. All of these moments brand-new adventures.
Making Juno reinvigorated me, inspired me, strengthened me. We said our sad goodbyes in a curling rink, a very Canadian wrap party. My heart hurt as I traveled home. Switching planes in Toronto, I boarded a flight back to Halifax. Listening to the Moldy Peaches as we broke through the clouds on our descent. I stared out the window, nothing but trees and lakes and rivers below.
What will happen with that little indie? I wondered as the flight landed on the tarmac. The sudden lurch caused me to jump.
11
ONLY KIDDING
I did not vomit from the age of eleven until I was twenty-eight, a few months after I came out as gay. At a party at a friend’s house in Brooklyn on July Fourth, we climbed up to the roof to watch the fireworks. BANG! POP! I looked to the sky, out over the river the colors exploded across the backdrop, the moon staring down quizzically at us funny humans and our funny things. I became light-headed and my ears started to ring.
Am I really about to vomit? I thought. Is this the moment my streak is over, like that episode in Seinfeld with the cookie?
Mescal and dessert flew out of my mouth, landing all over my chest.
My inability to vomit until then always felt poignant. Eleven was the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent. As an adult, I would say, “I just want to be a ten-year-old boy,” whenever dysphoria belted out its annoying song, a pop hit that you know the words to and don’t know why. It’s hard to explain gender dysphoria to people who don’t experience it. It’s an awful voice in the back of your head, you assume everyone else hears it, but they don’t.
Eleven was when I last felt present in my flesh, not suspended above, transient and frantic to return. It was a departure of sorts, a path to a false identity in a shell of a disguise, entering witness protection. He’d seen too much.
I broke it apart slowly, cracking the nuanced layers to rebuild, only to shatter it all again. That pop song remained on loop for more than two decades. Now I hear it seldomly, startling me on shuffle. I’ve forgotten most of the words, thank God.
My inability to vomit did not mean that I didn’t get sick. When I was fourteen I became severely ill with food poisoning the day before a Nova Scotia Provincial Soccer practice. I rushed to the toilet at my father’s house. Shitting my brains out, I rested my head on a small, decorative hand towel that dangled on the wall. Fading in and out of reality, as if I could be sucked right out of it, flushed away. E. coli had recently been in the news, mass recalls of produce and meat, and I wondered if I had it.
Eventually my body stopped expelling excrement, and I placed my hand on the counter and lifted myself to standing. One step. Two steps. In the mirror was another face, empty and pale, barely a person. My vision blurred. Light-headed, I left the bathroom, turning off the light as the world went sideways, complete darkness and then, SLAM! I fainted, collapsing hard, my jaw and chin taking the bulk of the impact, jolting my brain. Only a few feet from Dennis and Linda’s room. I didn’t ask for help, I didn’t call for my dad. I did not want to be reprimanded for having disturbed their slumber, or eating whatever I shouldn’t have eaten.
My head pounding, I crawled back to my room, and as I was pulling myself up into the bed, Linda came to the door. She must have heard the thump. She was alone.
“What are you doing?” she said with a cold laugh. She left to get me a cool cloth and a bucket when I sputtered in response.
The next morning my mother insisted I still go to soccer. When you play for the provincial team, every practice is a tryout. They overstack the team with the best players in Nova Scotia, and you can be booted at any time. Attendance crucial, soccer was more important than anything. Perhaps my mother exhaled a sigh of relief seeing me run with all the girls.
Sixteen was my soccer number. My favorite number. Only in adulthood have I realized its connection to the date I returned to my mother’s for the second half of every month. At first, going over to Linda’s had been, between Nintendo and playing with my stepbrother, for the most part fun. But that was different from living together, where her antipathy toward me seemed to grow. I felt her annoyance at this burden from her husband’s first marriage. She could get away with it. I never actually talked to my father about how she treated me until I was an adult and I never, not once, stood up to her. I suppose I felt I deserved it, and why the hell wouldn’t I? My father knew and did nothing about it.
“Ninety percent of our fights were about you,” my father told me many years later, claiming that he did protect me and I just wasn’t privy to it.
My guess is Linda was not the only one who resented me. I felt that my father did, too. It seems like he was annoyed he had made a baby in the eleventh hour with someone he didn’t desire to be with, a puny human, relentlessly keeping the cord strong and taut.
I didn’t like growing up in that house. Anything that forced me back home as an adult caused my anxiety to spread like a brushfire, chest aflame. I’d try and surround it with large rocks, like the ring around the bonfire at my father’s cabin, firm and solid, unflinching. Instead, my body betrayed me, energy abuzzin’. Pulse rate rising, I’d overcompensate, sparing no effort to buoy up, to hide the hiding, cutting a rug three centimeters above the floor, eggshells everywhere.
The scent of my childhood home, hitting me on the way in, made me nauseated. Taking off my shoes, yelling “hi!” up the stairs, wanting to turn around, no desire to linger long enough to know the why of it all.
They’d all tease me together. “Skid mark” was a nickname Linda coined. We were all at the cabin my dad’s father built along Sable River in the early 1980s. It was in a small clearing, nearly a kilometer into the middle of the woods. There is no other structure in sight, aside from the outhouse. No running water or electricity, you collect water from a well with a silver bucket attached to a thin yellow piece of rope that echoes loudly when it meets the surface down below.
The cabin sits close to a family of beavers, their impressive lodge constructed of mud and sticks. The old winding river swerves and snakes its way through a massive meadow until morphing into a narrow, straight stretch. The current accelerates, small rapids muscle through the dam assembled by the family of beavers. Playing in the forest, I’d stumble upon evidence, their teeth having gnawed through a yellow birch.
Only once did I see a beaver fully out of the water. Sitting on the “swimming rock,” my siblings and I looked across the river as the beaver climbed onto the shore. The body, taller and thicker than I imagined, held up by its short back legs and webbed, wide feet that resembled the hands of the Babadook. Beavers can weigh up to seventy pounds, reaching about four feet in length, the largest rodents in North America. It would have been bigger than me at that point.
I observed them for my entire childhood, their bodies appearing at dusk, smooth in the river. Their large, powerful, flat tails slapped the water. An echoing force. The beavers claiming their place. Swimming in the river, the color a dark brown with a tint of yellow, like English breakfast tea … THWACK! Panicking, I’d dog-paddle to shore, frightened my leg would suddenly snap. Their strong, chiseling teeth clamping, snapping my femur like the birch. They can munch through an eight-foot tree in five minutes.
The cabin is tiny, two stories, everything wood. The kitchen had a little chrome table. The woodstove stood in the center of the cabin between the kitchen and the small couch and two chairs that sat in front of the windows that look out toward the meadow. Knees on the couch, elbows on the windowsill, I would watch deer trot through the grass. And one time only, off in the far distance …
“Bear!” Dennis and Linda yelled from the little upstairs balcony off their room.
I raced to the glass with Scott and Ashley, and there it was, running and bouncing, almost a dance. A reminder that we are the scary ones.
Chilling together in the living room, my stepmom would get a look, picking out things I did wrong or embarrassing, and flinging it on a canvas to show. Sort of like all the abstract art she made when I got older and gave to us as gifts.
“Skid Mark,” Linda would say, and they would laugh. Calling me the name together, like bullies. The nickname was obvious: birthed from skid marks in my underwear. I’d disassociate, go quiet, just let it happen.
I remember this particular instance because I removed myself and quietly slunk up the pull-down ladder. The piercing sounds from the hinges that needed WD-40 humiliated me further, as if my fault, all that noise. My ears filled with their giggles, causing my shoulders to slump more.
I lay down on the futon where I slept. Crawling into my sleeping bag, I turned to face where the slanted roof met the floor. I closed my eyes and started to cry, soft enough so they could not hear. I never watched this happen to my stepbrother or stepsister—they never had the entire family, all of us, focused in and picking on them, making them feel ashamed to the extent that their little body rose and exited the room. A tiny parade of hurt.
Thunks and squeaks from the ladder, I cringed as my dad came and sat next to me on the floor. He put his hand on my spine, I felt my insides retreat.
“We are just kidding around,” he said, whispering, rubbing my back. “It’s just a joke.”
No sorry. Never a sorry. No stop. Never an “Are you okay?”
“I know,” I said, masking my sniffles, making the words sound like a smile.
As I got older, I did not want to go to Dennis and Linda when I was in pain or afraid, any negative or disruptive emotion that veered from my usual “happy” self, a performance in its own.
I would shove it back down. As I held my breath, it would leak into my stomach, finding a place to rest.
* * *
In the late 1990s, I loved to Rollerblade around Regatta Point.
“What’s the hardest part of Rollerblading?”
“Telling your parents you are gay.”
Is it bad I love that joke?
I’d take a left from the driveway, head down Spinnaker. Pumping my legs, parallel to the park, alone with the raspy caw caw caws, backup courtesy of seagulls, the crows serenaded me. The tinkling bells from the docked, swaying boats, performed as chimes.
I’d pass the Explosion Memorial on the right, the anchor always there, always waiting. I’d turn on Anchor Drive, passing the town houses on the left and rounding the block back to Spinnaker. I enjoyed the speed, the fantasies, outdoor private play. A spy escaping the enemy. A boy racing to his true love. Olympics for the gold.
Spinnaker Drive begins flat and steady, then curves and begins its decline. Thrilling enough without being too fearsome, I loved zooming down the hill. One day I lost my footing, or perhaps a rock caught in my wheels, small enough not to see but big enough to send me flying. I didn’t manage to turn, or stop, and I ran into the curb full-throttle. My feet went in opposite directions as I hit the ground. Stretching, tearing, the hurt unparalleled. Pain radiating out from my groin. When I opened my mouth, guttural sounds I’d never heard before flooded out, ripping through my body. Cavernous, animalistic, from somewhere beneath the vocal cords.
I went into shock, the body a loyal protector. I attempted to rise but couldn’t. It was a quiet neighborhood and no one was out. A searing pain shot through my legs as I tried to stand, and I sunk back down. I crawled toward the house, slowly making my way, my bare knees digging into the concrete.
I reached the house and made my way up the driveway to the door. The only person home was Linda. Fear swirled in my belly—I didn’t want to need her in this moment.
I struggled out of my Rollerblades. I was silent now, frigid, my body blank. I snailed my way upstairs, not wanting to be seen or heard. Reaching the second floor, I took a tight turn to head to the third. Linda was in the kitchen, preparing food. I didn’t say a word, neither did she. When I made it to my room and closed the door, I realized my pants were wet, my crotch utterly drenched. I lowered my pants to see my underwear beet red, the cotton sodden with blood. Panicking, my hands shook as I carefully removed them, brushstrokes from my bloodstained panties leaving evidence on my thighs. The white undies now a dark velvet.
My breaths were short, just managing to accomplish the in and out. I went to the bathroom and wiped myself. I left the crimson drawers and went down to the kitchen.
“Linda?”
A pause.
“Yeah?” she said with that tone, her constant aggravation with me.
My mind had left my body, my mouth on autopilot. “I fell Rollerblading and there is blood in my underwear.” I kept it simple.
She shrugged. My throat froze, afraid to be admonished, unable to force out more words. As if hypnotized, I went back upstairs. But staring at the evidence, I knew this wasn’t insignificant. I returned with the underwear to show her. She stood in the kitchen between the island and the oven. I held them up with both hands. I can still see her face when she saw them, her eyes big and wide, an uncontrollable reaction to the grotesque quality of a kid’s underwear soaked in blood.
She snapped into gear, reaching for the phone to call my father, who was thankfully already on his way home. We piled into the car and headed to a nearby clinic. I sat in the back seat and watched as they exchanged panicked whispers, with an intermittent look back at me, then back to the road.
A doctor with long brown hair greeted me kindly, moving quickly but maintaining a sense of calm. I had slipped into a dream, hovering, disassociated, feeling faint. Alone with the doctor, I lay on the examination table, the top of my body covered, the bottom bare. Her gloved hands moved as she spoke to me, talking me through what was next while I looked up at the lights on the ceiling, then back to her, slightly blurred, my eyes adjusting. She started to stick her finger inside my vagina, it made me clench my jaw and tense, halting my breath. She explained what had happened in detail, but all I remember is the words “torn something,” and the cold realization that that something was inside of me. Luckily, the tear was just small enough that it could be repaired with a dissolvable adhesive tape to avoid stitches. She finished up, and I was returned to Dennis and Linda in a daze.
Years after, I was concerned that something was wrong with my vagina, conceivably due to this incident. The thought originally came at sixteen while I was dating a lovely boy named Kenneth. We met in grade ten at Queen Elizabeth High School in Halifax.
Kenneth played the guitar and was in a band. They’d play at the Pavilion, a music venue on the commons that had all-ages shows, mostly punk concerts. Moshing, a pit overflowing with pubescent pheromones. His house was a fifteen-minute or so walk from school. He’d practice with his band in the basement, his brother, Skyler, on drums. I found it far too loud but acted like I didn’t, secretly desperate to be cool.
Kenneth was sweet, sensitive, and cute. A unique face, with prominent cheekbones and electric eyes, his hair dark brown and floppy. I was at his place mostly. His mom, whom I really liked, wasn’t often home, and if she was, she didn’t care what we were doing. She was warm and spoke to each of us like we were actual human beings rather than just teenagers. It was so easy for adults to forget the fullness of our experience.
We’d fool around upstairs. I didn’t really like it, but I didn’t mind it either. The kissing, meh. The dry humping, all right. I would pretend to cum, not that Kenneth wasn’t or wouldn’t be fantastic in bed, I am certain he would be a selfless and generous lover. When we tried to have sex, his dick just would not go in. That whole “wet” thing wasn’t happening. We’d try and then stop, try and then stop, try and then stop, and then we stopped trying. I was lucky it was with someone as lovely as him, it could have ended a different way.
