Fifty bucks would be enough cash to make my way to Selkirk—but I was looking for a ride back to Peguis and that was going to cost at least a couple hundred bills. If I had some cousins out here who actually liked me, I could probably bum a ride from them, but it’s hard to convince these Rambo-bravado, gangster-wannabe thugs that they share any quantum of blood with an urban NDN, Two-Spirit femmeboy.
Roger, my mom’s boyfriend, who she insisted I call stepdad, died from cirrhosis of the liver yesterday. He was a pigheaded, alcoholic, homophobic sonuva—but he made my mom happy, I don’t know why or how, never cared to ask. Maybe it was because he sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” to her at their wedding, which was less a wedding and more a tarp-covered jig-and-drink. Dolly was my mushom’s favourite singer, and my mom used to tell me he’d sing it to her when she was a little girl. All the NDNs on the rez loved that song; it’s like a rite of passage or something. Everyone in my family has taken a piece of Dolly. My mom took her lips, my real dad took her lyrics thinking he was always in the way and that was why he had to go, my kokum took her grace, and I took her body by becoming, what my clients like to call me, the best little whorehouse. It used to bother me, whore, but not so much anymore because, one: I don’t sell sex, I sell fantasy and companionship; and two: when they call me what they call me it only helps me to know that I’ve found a home in my self. I learned that when I read this poem in high school by a dreary old white lady named Emily Dickinson. In it she calls herself nobody and asks the reader, “Who are you?” When our class first read that poem, they all laughed, thinking the line read, “I’m nobody, whore you?”
Then Kelly, one of the toughest NDN kids on the rez because he had six brothers and fifteen cousins, loudly announced, “Hey Hoover, sounds like you, you ol’ cocksucker, you,” and the whole class laughed. But so what if I liked sex, right? God, we all think about it; you’re probably thinking about it right now. So I took these women and sewed them to myself like a tattered rag doll. I’m a little bit of Dolly and I’m a little bit of Em.
I’m nobody, whore you?
We’re all here, like Em, on what she calls this undiscovered continent, hell, the reservation is a ghost-world, a prison, a death camp. Although, unlike Em, some of us just have deeper prisons on this undiscovered continent. There was me, feeling like the only gay NDN in the whole world, voguing and serving face in the basement of a reservation death camp situated in the farthest reaches of this undiscovered continent—now I tell my clients to dial “1” if they need me.
So anyway, Roger, my semi-stepdad, mostly-hated pseudo-father figure, yeah, he died yesterday and my mom called me to ask me to come to the funeral. I have two more days to get to the rez, which is about a five-hour drive away when combined with all the stops and pickups you’d have to take riding with a roundup driver. The wake will be going on until Friday, I’d never make it to that but, I told myself, I will make the funeral, I have to. Problem is, I have no money. I spent it all on some bronzer and banana powder at Sephora—I’m big into contouring these days, and a bit of bronzer really makes my cheekbones look like Maleficent, trust me, clients eat that shit up. So I have to earn nearly three hundred dollars in two days to raise enough funds to bum a ride and hitch my way back to the rez. Lord knows I didn’t care about seeing Roger, truth be told—part of me is happy to see him go—but I have to be there for my mom. She’s the toughest NDN in the world, I tell you, but I’ve seen how easily she broke when Roger went on his benders, so I can’t even imagine how messed up she is feeling right now.
That, and I am dying, unconscious pun I swear, to visit my kokum again. On my birthday two years ago she called me and told me she needed to see me, that she had a story for me. See, my kokum is the first person in my family I’ve ever come out to, aside from my mom who I came out to a year later. And it was tough. I thought she would give me a lickin with her wooden spoon and tell me “Nononono!” But she just listened on the other end of the line while I cried into the receiver. All I could hear was her breathing deeply. When I eased up on the waterworks, it wasn’t clear if she was still there—the line had gone silent. I wasn’t sure if I was confessing to myself or maybe even some voyeur at MTS listening in on my conversation. Had she hung up? Was that the end of my kokum and me?
“Gran, you still there?”
“Mm-hmm,” she replied, and as I hiccupped from all the crying, she asked, “You done, m’boy, or what?”
When I caught my breath and softly answered yes, she laughed. “Heck, like I didn’t even know, Jonny. Why you think I gave you them earrings last year?”
“Because I told you I needed them for art class?”
“Jonny, m’boy, your kokum old but she ain’t dull. You’s napêwisk-wewisehot, m’boy, Two-Spirit. You still my beautiful baby grandkid no matter what you want to look like or who you want to like.”
I wanted to question her on what she meant by Two-Spirit, but she cut me short by yelling that she had to go, her frybread oil was ready.
“You come down here, m’boy, and I’ll tell you a story about who you are. You come and you’ll know. Kihtwâm, m’boy, kisâkihitin.”
It’s funny, NDN families only seem to reconvene when someone’s dead. It doesn’t take much to make an NDN cry, but a death, that makes them stoic as all hell; well, stoic and maybe hungry. You’ll never have a better meal than at an NDN funeral.
And that’s the truth.