The skies are grey these days and I got used to telling myself that it’s just my kokum having a great smudge in Saskatoon and that this smoke, which smells of cedar and ash, is her medicine floating across the border. But it hangs in my living room and seeps into my drapes, clings to my skin, and nestles itself deep inside the threads of my star blanket—which now lies in the shape of a body since gone. My apartment is a room of scents that stick to the walls: the smoke from a Saskatchewan forest fire, kush, the too-sweet smell of browning bananas, the pungent stink of sex. I start my mornings like this: I wake up, take a piss, warm up last night’s coffee, and open the rickety window in my bathroom where I usually do my smoking, since my building is a no-smoking zone. I butt them out in an old Diet Pepsi can that has seen better days. There isn’t much to see beyond my bathroom window but the grey-grit of the Odeon’s bricks, a rusting fire escape, and a pigeon building its nest on the windowsill of an abandoned building across the alley. Every morning we meet here: me, rubbing the ash and crusty scum from my lips, and that bird neatly piling little sticks, roaches, and chicken bones on the ledge. Silly little bird, I always think, building a home in a dead place.
During the time it takes me to smoke my cigarette, we stare at each other. The pigeon cocks its head from side to side, keeping its beady eyes fixed on me, and I bob mine along to the hum of the street below. I wonder if the bird thinks the same of me, if, in its own pigeon-head, it’s saying: what a silly man, making a home on the land of ghosts. We are both two queer bodies moving around in spaces that look less like a home and more like desperate lodgings; both trying to make our beds with other people’s garbage. Maybe we are both dreaming of utopia, thinking that these places once used to house celebrities and other important people, and that it will imbue us with a similar vivacity? Puffing on the remnants of my cigarette, inhaling smoke more from a burning filter than tobacco, I nod at the bird and say, “I’ll think you are if you think I am,” and blow a cloud of smudge from my lips that smells less like the stink of ass and cock and more like the bear root that my kokum always drank. “It’s magic,” she’d say. “This is what woke Mistahimaskwa up.”
I go and fry a couple of eggs and the heart-shaped pieces of bologna I have left, then pour myself some orange juice which only fills about a third of the glass, so I mix it with Tang and top it off with tap water—an NDN breakfast if I ever did see one. I scroll through Facebook on my phone and read lengthy monologues by people I went to high school with: so-and-so is pregnant, my cousin’s cousin’s boyfriend is on another bender, a rez fire, a little boy attacked by wild dogs, and a million posts about missing girls.
A beep goes off and I see a new message blinking on my screen. Someone named Hatehound has messaged me asking, “DTF?” I type back, “Who’s this?” and see the three little dots telling me he’s replying. He’s quick, I tell myself, and I think that’s a good sign for some easy cash. Quick guys don’t take much work, I usually don’t even have to work my way up to fingering myself, usually a few playful dick-pics will get them off and earn me a solid twenty to thirty bones; it’s the slow guys you have to be careful of, they’ll exhaust you and your body and still want more. Pictures and webcam shows are one thing, but let me tell you how tiring it is to create an entire world for clients that fits your body and theirs, and no one else. I can be a barely legal twink for them if they want, but that’s going to cost extra—and I don’t charge them for the ugly memories those fantasies dredge up. Most times, though, they only want me to play NDN. I bought some costumes a few Halloweens ago to help me: Pocasquaw and Chief Wansum Tail. Once I know what kind of body they want, I can make myself over. I can be an Apache NDN who scalps cowboys on the frontier, even though truthfully, I’m Oji-Cree.
Once, one of my clients told me I had a “red rocket” and while I moaned for him while Frank Waln rapped in the background, I continually asked him, “You want my red rocket?” Later, I looked up what “red rocket” means, and I found out that it’s the dick of a dog. I thought for a second, then accepted it: I added “canine” to the list of entities I could morph into and started charging an extra few bucks per session.
Hatehound’s reply showed up on my phone. “April told me about you this morning, apparently you blew his mind last night?” April? He must mean “hardck22,” I think he said his name was April—I never ask for real names, but I remembered his because I laughed thinking he was joking or feeling nostalgic for spring. A part of me wanted to say, “April, eh? Yeah, and I’m fucking January Jones.” Another part of me wanted to cry and confess that April was the month my kokum died. But I just laughed and I think he got mad—I wish he knew that when an NDN laughs, it’s because they’re applying a fresh layer of medicine on an open wound.
“Give me twenty minutes?” I replied to Hatehound. I saw the three little dots pinging on my screen and pondered who I wanted to transform into this time. I can inhabit so many personas while the client can only be one—that excites me. I have so much power when I transform—all that power over blood, veins, and nerve endings.
“Sure,” he replied, and I squealed a little. I took my black velvet bodysuit from the closet. For the next thirty minutes I’d not only be Catwoman but every iteration of her, the better parts of Michelle Pfeiffer, Julie Newmar, and Anne Hathaway. When I slid the bodysuit over my calves and onto my shoulders, I watched my brown skin disappear beneath the pull of a zipper and felt so much more in control. Maybe as Catwoman I’d have the courage to ask how he could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us?
“Catwoman?” Hatehound asked after I sent him a picture. “April says you dress up as yourself, you know, with the fringe and shit? Why are you acting weird?”
I scoffed, and upped my fee to thirty dollars for the session. When he declined and sent only twenty-five to my Snapchat piggybank, I took off the cat ears and asked him: “Who are you pretending to be?”