Close to Spider Man (7 page)

“What do you think of my three-year-old drag queen, Ivan?” Chris asks me like she is showing me a brand new old car she just bought with her own money. She thinks that he will be my favourite because he is . . . well, just like me, and
I always thought it would be Emile, because he was the first, and because I was inside of her when he was in her belly and when she came I felt him kick and knew the magic of him then. And then there was Gailon, too, and my mom said Chris told her in the truck one day that it was too late for an abortion with him, and that Chris cried when the midwife handed her her third boy, that makes four boys now and her, alone in the cabin, and she knew Gailon was going to be the last of it.

But Chris never told me any of this, she just told my mom, and now Gailon sits, too, under his crown of cotton ball hair and watches me eat an egg and toast. He is one-and-a-half and drinks cranberry tea from a mug with the rest of us. The kids picked the cranberries themselves.

Gailon looks like a little old man shrunk right down, like an owl. There is no baby in his face, and my mom says he will be the most special because Chris almost didn't have him, so he is more of a gift that way. But all Chris tells me is that she has been breast-feeding for five years now, and I couldn't see her in the dark last night when we touched, but her hands felt older.

She smells of wood smoke, and I smell of hair products, and everytime I see her the boys are bigger and there is somehow less of her and I meet her sons again, three secrets of her unfolding into their own in a tiny cabin forty miles from anything.

No wonder Chris couldn't wait for me and Frances to meet again. Now that he's walking and talking, and putting on shows. Now that we can relate as equals, he and I. Sure, he's only three, but age has never mattered to a true queen, and it takes one to know one.

Say what you will of nature and nurture and the children of both, scientists and sociologists and endocrinologists and psychologists and psychiatrists and therapists and plastic surgeons can all have their theories, but none of them can explain to me this:

How did Frances get to be Frances in all his Francesness? He doesn't watch
TV
. He listens to
CBC
. Frances doesn't know that boys don't wear tube tops. No one has told him this. He just has to wear a sweater too, if it's winter. The magic of this is not lost on me.

He doesn't get it from his father, who doesn't eat anything he doesn't grow, or pick, or preferably shoot, skin, and dress himself with, and his older brother is a five-year-old water-packing, bicepped bushman in his own right, and Gailon is only a year and a half.

All four boys seem well aware that Chris is the only female in the house; she owns the only two breasts, the only one without what they have.

Yet Frances, three years old, triumphs like a crocus in a crack in a cliff; how does a lonesome queen even know he exists in a cabin in a frozen field in the Yukon with apparently
not another soul around, with an ounce of fashion sense, or even the most minute grasp of the immense and innate drama of it all for miles?

No one but Frances. Until mom drags Uncle Ivan home for a night or two.

This is why I must be there for him, for all those moments, for those drag queen equivalents of baptism, first communion, confirmation, priest, and sainthood, and so on.

The first time he finds the right outfit, the one that really fits, I will hold up the mirror for him and say, “You go, girl.” If he wants his ears pierced, he can count on me. The first time he gives the captain of the basketball team a secret blowjob, I will be his confessor. The first time someone calls him a faggot, and he slowly comes to realize that they don't think a faggot is a good thing to be at all, the first time he feels that fear, I want to be there. I will tell him of the time he was three and first did the red sock circle dance in the orange tube top ensemble. I will tell him then that he was born a special kind of creature, one that God never meant for everyone to understand, but that I understand. I will tell him that I will always love that little flower of him, that perfect unknowing differentness that blossomed and danced in a frozen field in spite of everything.

Because drag queens always dance in spite of everything. It's part of the job description.

How can I look at him and not feel relief? He is living proof
that I was just born this way. I don't remember my version of the red sock circle dance, but ten to one someone told me to close my legs because you could see my panties when I danced like that, and how do you spell
unladylike”?

But things will be different for Frances, he who will start kindergarten in the year 2000.

Chris and I load the boys into the truck and head into town. I am on a mission: I am taking Frances to meet more of his people.

My friend Cody, the legendary creature with painted nails and black ringlets that reach halfway down his back. It is rumoured that he is a hermaphrodite, that he possesses extra plumbing, perhaps special powers. I have never asked him, because it is none of my business, and Cody has never inquired about the bulge in my own pants. He is a creature of immense grace and beauty, and that is all I need to know.

I take Frances into the cafe where Cody works, to introduce them to each other with all the pomp and circumstance required when in the presence of royalty.

“Cody, I'd like you to meet my godson, Frances. Frances, this is Cody.”

But Frances doesn't acknowledge Cody, or his ringlets, or his fingernails at all. Something else more pressing has caught his attention. He reaches his small hand up to caress the fabric of Cody's silver velvet shirt, tight and shimmering over his slender torso. Frances smiles in wonder to himself
and his mother places her hand on my shoulder, and laughs like a leprechaun.

“That's my boy” she says, and for a second I am unsure whether she is referring to Frances, Cody, or myself, but it doesn't matter, because we are all where we belong. Home.

Ivan E. Coyote is a writer and circus performer, and a member of the celebrated performance collective Taste This, who collaborated on
Boys Like Her
(Press Gang, 1998), a critically acclaimed and award-winning book on gender and desire. Ivan lives in Vancouver.