The late-December rain pounded Pussy’s cab as it pulled up to the curb. She paid the driver a handsome tip, collected her umbrella and shoulder bag, and swung open the door. A puddle glistened beneath the street lights, its surface slick with oil. Pussy watched its fragile rainbow fade into fragments as a party limo rolled by, strafing decibels and basslines.
“Excuse me, driver. Can you pull up a bit?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Um, can you close your door?”
“Of course.”
The cab jerked forward, hitting the pothole and spraying the sidewalk.
“Hey, what the fuck!” someone shouted in a dimly lit doorway.
“You sure you want off here?” the driver asked Pussy. “This isn’t really a neighbourhood for someone like you.”
“This is the only neighbourhood for someone like me,” she said, staring at him in the rear-view mirror. “Or was,” she added.
“All I’m saying is that the Downtown Eastside isn’t a safe place for a beautiful woman. Especially with what’s been going on. You’ve seen the news, right?”
“Don’t let the Burberry, Gucci, and Cartier fool you, sweetheart,” said Pussy. “I worked the street here for a while. It’s not safe for any woman.”
Pussy noticed the driver staring at her legs as she stepped onto the sidewalk. Wishing she hadn’t tipped him so well, she slammed the door, pulled up the collar of her trench coat to keep out the chill, then bent down to the driver’s half-open window.
“Here’s the tea,” she said, opening her bag to show him a hunting knife. “I’ve got bear spray too. Oh, and this.” She rummaged around her bag and pulled out a spool of polypropylene rope. “No woman’s ever safe. And the women around here, their troubles really start when they get into a car, and that car drives away. So, you ask yourself this, sugar. Are you safe doing what you do when someone like me who’s packing what I’m packing gets into your cab … and could take you from behind?”
The perplexed driver couldn’t shut his window fast enough. Pussy pulled a cigarette and lighter from her purse as she watched the cab swerve into the busy Friday night traffic. The driver couldn’t know that the knife and rope were professional tools, specialties for some of her clients. Not the bear spray, though. She’d gotten that from Estelle.
Pussy Esperanto started out as a professional name, after she moved to Toronto to be anonymous and live completely as a woman while she spent a year preparing for her reassignment surgery. Her boy name had been George. Now her passport and provincial ID said Georgina Gavreau. That was her legal name, but she wanted a pseudonym for her work, or rather a nom de plume. Her classified ad in The Toronto Sun said, “Pussy Esperanto, The Universal CXXX.” They wouldn’t print the last three letters: proof yet again, said Pussy, that “people always draw the line when it comes to cunt.”
Pussy went online before most. She was always forward-thinking, even when she was still George. George was born and raised in a small mill town up the coast outside Ocean Falls. His mother slipped away into the night when he was twelve and went back to her reserve near Peace River. George’s father was a mean drunk. The reserve was no great shakes either, but their father was white so they could call the cops if he showed up on reserve land uninvited. George and his sister Estelle stayed, partly because of school, also because they were Métis. That was when being mixed meant you didn’t have official Indian status. Not seen as Indigenous, not seen as white, George and Estelle weren’t seen at all. They lived in a no man’s land. All they had were each other.
George idolized Estelle, who was several years older. She looked out for him. Life there was tough on an effeminate boy. But when George was fourteen, Estelle left for a job running a bar up in Whitehorse. Things got worse for George. At sixteen, tired of getting the shit beaten out of him, he fled south to Vancouver and hustled, first as a boy then as a girl, and did drag in the clubs. He took martial arts — tae kwon do — to protect himself.
He stopped doing drag for a while to finish high school on the dole. Then he hooked as Georgina to pay for college courses. Always one with a book on the go, he started a journal. He knew that one day the truth would be his meal ticket. Over time, George faded into the background, a phantom pain at first. Then a ghost. And finally, a stranger.
Pussy hit the motherlode with her ad in The Toronto Sun. The city was full of straight men on the down-low. “They don’t call it Hogtown for nothing,” Pussy would later say on the promo circuit.
Then the recession hit. Now even sex workers had to go vertical and specialize. Value added and all that stuff. Pussy hit the nail on the head with sadomasochism, bondage, and discipline. All that hitting, slapping, and making someone lick your boot had caught on like wildfire. It was safe sex. It had an artistic edge too. Pussy was all for art and safety. She became a dominatrix.
No one who knew her was too surprised when she wrote a memoir based on her experiences. A shelf in her apartment was crammed with her journals. She often read from them to friends. Everyone agreed that her writing was excellent, especially after a couple of joints. She sifted through her journals for the best parts, changed the names of a prominent media magnate, a former provincial leader, and a famous hockey player, among others, and out popped a book. The book people convinced Pussy to keep her professional name because it got attention. They said it would sell books. It did. The Indelible Woman became a bestseller.
It wasn’t enough money for Pussy to hang up her whip and fuck-me pumps.
“Prostitution pays better than art,” she told her friends. “The general public appreciates it more.”
The book was published internationally, selling out in Japan, Germany, and several former East Bloc nations, even making it onto The New York Times bestseller list. American sales had gone through the roof after some evangelists in Cincinnati held a book burning that made the U.S. news, propelling Pussy to cult status. Her publicity tour was electric.
There was a new print run too, and it flew off the shelves like hotcakes. Pussy said this was a good thing because “no one wants to see my remainders on a discount table.” The Indelible Woman snagged Pussy more pots of money when the book people sold the rights for a TV movie to an American cable company with a studio in Vancouver. They were going to call it The Pussy Esperanto Story. She was thrilled to the now-much-talked-about tits. But then all that shit went down with Estelle, the thing with the bear.
Pussy’s lighter was dry. “Hey, hon, got a light?”
“Pussy?” The figure in the shadowy doorway stepped into the light.
“Thumbs?”
“Guilty as charged,” he chuckled, lighting her cigarette.
Pussy was surprised to see Thumbs A) out of jail and B) away from his usual place down by the Orange Door, a gentleman’s enterprise. When he was younger, Thumbs worked in the Alberta oil patch. Two fingers on his left hand were severed in a machine accident. Then, working as a rodeo hand in the bucking chutes at the Calgary Stampede, he crushed the pinkie finger on his right hand while he was adjusting a bronco’s flank strap. A tall, burly Cree guy from Manitoba, he first showed up selling along the strip, around the same time Pussy started working the street. He was clumsy at first, constantly fumbling with his product and dropping it.
“Dude, you’re all thumbs!” people would tease him. The nickname Thumbs evolved, and stuck.
“I got out last week,” said Thumbs. “Two years, can you believe it?”
“But you’re still holding?” Pussy asked. “No big life changes?”
“The trust fund never came through. You know how that is,” said Thumbs, laughing. He shrugged. “A guy’s gotta make a living, Puss.”
“But this isn’t your usual spot.”
“I’m diversifying my distribution network. And I adjusted my stock so that it’s more risk-averse,” he said in a put-on snobby voice. He took a drag from Pussy’s cigarette. “Just weed now. They don’t care so much about that these days. They’re after the hard stuff. Need anything?”
“No. Thanks. But you take care of yourself. I’m off to the Smith. They’re throwing a going away party for me.”
Thumbs stopped and stared as a dark grey van drove slowly by. The driver wore a hoodie and dark glasses, not a good sign after nightfall.
“What is it, Thumbs?”
“That grey van, it seems to be around a lot,” he said, keeping his eye on the van as it rolled away. “Like almost every time someone disappears, that van’s been around. Like the night before last. I seen Ginger that evening, but not since. No one has. I seen the van that night too. Funny thing is, it’s got different licence plates every other time. You know, so people don’t get suspicious.”
Thumbs stared at the van, moving his lips as he quietly repeated the licence plate number.
“I’m recording them,” he said. “Whenever I see that van. Maybe someone will want to know sometime, like the cops or something. Or maybe not. You never know. I’d write them down, but” — he chuckled, holding up his hands — “well, memorizing them is faster and easier.”
“I get it,” said Pussy. She took a long drag from her cigarette, making smoke rings as she exhaled. “Do you think it’s the Farmer?”
There were rumours of a guy with a farm in the Fraser Valley not far from Chilliwack, who picked up women and took them to wild parties on his property. People said that all kinds of crazy shit went down, but no one offered specifics.
“Could be,” said Thumbs. “Then again, maybe not.” He sighed. “You’re going away? Where?”
“Away from this,” said Pussy. “To something else.”
“That sure sounds cryptic.”
“You know me, Thumbs,” said Pussy. “Always a woman of mystery.”
Thumbs laughed. “No lie. Hey, before I forget, I read your book when I was inside. Four times. I got it right here.” He stepped back, dragged a rucksack from the doorway where he’d been standing, and pulled out a well-thumbed-through paperback. “I folded back the page corners of my favourite parts. Okay, the parts with me in it. Can you sign it for me?”
“Sure, sugar.” Pussy grabbed a pen from her shoulder bag. It was encrusted with Swarovski crystals.
“That’s quite the pen you got there, Puss,” said Thumbs.
“That’s because the pen isn’t just mightier than the sword, Thumbs, it’s fiercer. You take care of yourself, baby. Things around here are changing. Maybe for the good but probably not. Anyhow, there won’t be room left for the likes of you and me once the developers are done.”
Pussy gave Thumbs a kiss on the cheek, adjusted the strap of her purse, swivelled on her Louboutins, and strode into the neon-lit drizzle of Hastings Street.
Thumbs opened the book and looked at what she’d signed on the first page. “All my love, dearest Thumbs. Pussy Esperanto, The UC.”
“There’s nothing real about real estate,” Estelle had said to Pussy once. “There’s nothing estate about it either. All you’re buying is space between walls. All you’re buying is air.”
Pussy thought about what Estelle said as she looked up at the cranes and girders ascending from the street, towering over faded, two-bit hotels all dressed up with fancy names by the owners who built them way back when, although even then they were little better than last chance digs for worn-down people with worn-out shoes: the Empress, the Astoria, the Balmoral. Not that the names of the new condos going up were any less misleading, according to the development signage: Arcadia, the Olympus, Xanadu. Pussy marvelled at all the pretty little coffins rising high to heaven, soon to house the gods of a new century, and witnessed around her the sacrifices in play paving the way for their arrival.
She paused at the chained door of the shuttered Smilin’ Buddha, the carcass of a former strip joint turned punk palace. She strolled by the boarded marquee of the old Pantages Theatre, once a vaudeville mainstay; then a burlesque venue; then an art cinema; now a crack house — at least to those who knew where the loose board in the back alley was. Dives were disappearing all along Hastings, yet the street itself was getting more and more crowded. People had pitched tents among the dealers and sex workers. Fly-by-night stalls and market spaces had popped up amid the syringe caps and used condoms. Pussy wondered what anyone would want with old 8-track or VHS tapes, a Baywatch lunch box, one left shoe, a Super Mario fanny pack, lamps without shades, or a game of Monopoly with missing pieces.
The shadowy scaffolds hovering overhead were impervious to the tents below. The city was expanding upward and outward, laying down the groundwork for snazzy condos, swanky restaurants, luxury lofts, and chic “retail destinations,” razing the past and scattering the peasants. Or burying them. The cops and developers had dreamed up a gimmick called broken windows policing. If you removed visible elements of criminal activity from the street, and then added a fresh coat of paint, everything would be hunky-dory. Expensive new buildings with sky-high cribs that cost the moon would change the character of the neighbourhood for the better, they said. Because no one in a penthouse ever committed a crime, no one in a townhouse with all the mod cons ever pushed dope, no one in a condo with world-class views ever overdosed, and no one in a designer loft ever pimped out their bitches.
Pussy stopped for a moment at the Wall of Tears, a stretch of plywood nailed to the facade of an old welfare hotel being converted to fancy live/workspaces. It was covered in photographs of young women, with names and contact numbers.
Women were missing, that was how the news put it. As though they’d been misplaced. Or had disappeared, like in a magic show: here one minute, gone the next. Poor women. Native women. Trans women. Desperate women from desperate places, smuggled across the border, then abandoned by the men who had brought them here. Women from ruinous homes in small, hope-starved towns, side-eyed by society and called trash. Nameless women no one cared about, except for everyone who knew them. Some were drugged. Some were beaten. Most were forced to work the street because what else was there.
It wasn’t a mystery if you lived in Canada’s poorest postal code. You knew different. Abducted and probably killed, that’s how you’d put it. You knew that a lot of those young women had fled well-to-do homes in the suburbs. You knew their names. And you knew what they’d left was sometimes worse than where they landed. Pussy sighed when she saw that someone had put up a picture of Ginger.
Before turning onto Abbott and hitting the Smith, she stopped at the window of Model Xpress, where she used to buy her thigh-highs. On display beyond her reflection was footwear aplenty for every kink, from gold pleather zip-ups to schoolgirl Mary Janes.
Around the corner, a block down Abbott, at the corner of Pender, was the Smithmore Hotel, known as the “Smith” by locals. It straddled the derelict cusp of Chinatown where brick and limestone warehouses and walk-ups were waning in the wake of glass and steel high-rises. The city had recently declared the Smithmore a heritage building, so it was safe from demolition, plus the hotel got a subsidized facelift. Before that there was a joke about which was a bigger dump, the Smithmore or the Smithrite dumpster beside it.
Now the Smith had become respectable, looks-wise. A big American science fiction TV series used it as a location for an episode set in a conservative Midwestern town, which gave the patrons a good laugh. But the clientele didn’t change too much except for the occasional A-gay who gym-bodied his way into the hotel foyer via a recommendation in OUT magazine, which promised a view. This claim might have been said to be a bit of a stretch. If you stood facing north in the middle of the one-way street outside the lobby door while the light at the adjacent intersection was red, and if there was no traffic on the five consecutive cross streets, you could see the waterfront, a few tankers, and the mountains rising over the buildings on the North Shore.
The Smithmore had been Pussy’s “office” for a few years. It was still pretty much a dropping off point for sex workers, street kids, queer tourists on the cheap, and people on welfare. Or a picking up point if you think about it. A democratic community of eyes peeled for cops looked out for the safety of the guests and the guests’ guests. Fire escapes and other quick getaways were hospitably indicated upon registration, with a special mention that on each floor the showers were to be found at the far end of the east-west hallways. Toilets were separate. Try to hide your stash there and you were out on your ass.
Most of the main floor was a gay club, which was divided into three sections. There was a dance floor with a stage for drag shows, a karaoke bar, and a bar where male strippers performed.
Truth be told, they weren’t technically exotic dancers. They were rent boys on the hustle. Yet sometimes the production values were entertaining. Everyone still talked about a kid from Kamloops whose specialty was a Star Wars theme. He’d dress like Darth Vader and do suggestive interpretive dance moves with a plastic lightsaber while he disrobed. One time he was so high after his set that he ran out onto the street buck naked but with his Darth Vader mask still on, waving around his lightsaber and shouting like a maniac, clearly feeling the power of the dark side. The cops chased him three blocks before catching up with him.
Car lights twinkled red and amber on a nearby viaduct as Pussy approached the bar. Graffiti and concert posters layered the fence around a construction site. A lone seagull screeched, scraping the darkness like a fingernail on slate. Pussy could smell the sea a few blocks away.
She reached the club’s main entrance and swung open the door. Dance music pounded briefly until the door whooshed shut, silencing Destiny’s Child and relinquishing the night to the tap-tap-tap of a drainpipe and, in the distance, a wailing siren.
If there was a Roget’s Thesaurus for slap and tickle, Estelle would be prominent among the list of synonyms for diesel dyke. Not too long after Pussy headed east, Estelle hauled her ass down to Vancouver from Whitehorse to thaw out. Her heart had been chilled by an icy breakup. The two-timing femme she’d lived with for years had run off with a bush pilot.
Years of managing a tough Yukon bar paid off. Almost right away she landed a job as a bouncer at the Smith. She also maintained the Smith’s security in exchange for a room of her own, “which is all,” said Estelle, “a woman really needs.” That and the money she stuffed in her mattress.
As a bouncer, Estelle had the gift. One look from her could stop a scrap. Sometimes, though not often, Estelle had to use brute force. It wasn’t a good idea to let her calm manner fool you. Something hot slow cooked inside her and it wasn’t pretty when the lid came off. Brass tacks, though, she detested violence of any kind and felt badly when she had to deck someone for losing it.
It took Estelle a long time to get over the woman in Whitehorse. Sometimes, in the wee hours of the morning after the bar closed, she would stand in that spot in the centre of the road and stare toward the mountains, smoking a cigarette. It was quiet then, no traffic, no anything. Just a faint clicking sound as the traffic light changed.
A port city is a city of drifters and summer is the driftiest season. Summertime saw the Smith grind down to a slower pace. This being the case, Estelle decided to take up tree planting and find a replacement for her two months’ absence.
Pussy was Estelle’s replacement. Thanks to her tae kwon do, the bar was in good hands when she came out from back east on her bike every summer. Pussy liked escaping the Toronto humidity. Taking over the reigns from Estelle was Pussy’s way of keeping a hand in the community. Like Estelle, she didn’t give airs. And like Estelle, she believed you’ve got to remember your roots. Even if they were dyed platinum like Pussy’s. Mind you, one or two of the Bay Street business types she serviced were none too pleased. No one delivered a spanking like she did. Her attitude was, “What are they going to do, call the Better Business Bureau?”
Like clockwork each June, Pussy arrived on her Harley with her laptop and lingerie packed in a custom Harley Davidson tail bag strapped to the back of her bike. Last summer was the same as the years before; the journey had become a kind of ritual. The sun was beating down hot and dry. Estelle could hear the Harley humming blocks away. Around the corner zoomed Pussy in a great big blur of black and chrome, a road warrior Cleopatra. Pussy Esperanto could wear a Hawg like jewellery.
She pulled up in front of the Smith, parked, took off her red spangly helmet, and dazzled everyone waiting for her by the hotel entrance with a blinding ear-to-ear grin, showing off her new teeth that the made-for-TV movie paid for. Pussy wasn’t big like Estelle, she wasn’t as tough, but she wore a lot of black leather. Sometimes that’s all that’s necessary.
Estelle gave Pussy a bear hug and helped her into the hotel with her things. After she’d settled in, they retired to the bar for a cocktail catch-up with some of the regulars. Everyone wanted a piece of Pussy, fussing for her attention, telling her what they’d been up to for the last ten months.
“Hey, Pussy, you hear about …?” “Hey Pussy, those teeth come out?” And so on. She’d radiate a smile at whoever was speaking like they were the only person in the room. Heads got to spinning from all that Toronto glamour.
The next morning, Pussy helped Estelle pack up her pickup. A small group congregated to wish Estelle well and see her off.
The tree people would’ve made Estelle a saint if they could. Her first summer, Estelle held the all-time provincial record for tree planting. She had a knack with a plunger, the whatsit they use to shoot saplings into the ground. She had a finesse. Something to do with angle and twist. No one could match her. The logging people left their scars on the land and along came Estelle to soothe the forest with a balm of new life.
Most of the time she was assigned to a camp on Vancouver Island but this time she ended up at a harvesting location deep in the Kootenays. The team comprised seasoned hands except for a kid called Jace. Estelle didn’t take to Jace, and he didn’t take to her. Jace was a skinhead from a small Okanagan town, thick-headed and thick bodied too, with a swastika tattooed on his left upper arm and a Canadian flag on the opposite arm.
“Butt-ugly squaw,” Estelle heard Jace mutter under his breath as she passed by him the day she arrived.
For the next few weeks, she kept her distance to keep the peace. A summer storm broke her resolve.
A heavy rain fell the night Jace tried to get into Estelle’s pants. It’d been like that all day, and they hadn’t planted a single tree. Conditions were impossible. The mud on the slopes was ankle-deep. The planters stayed in their tents. Estelle played solitaire and napped. Just after nightfall, she heard someone trying to unzip the flap of her tent.
“Who’s there?” she said, not in the mood for company.
There was no answer. Just clumsy fingers fumbling with the zipper.
“Who is it?” Estelle tried again. “Go away.”
“Aw shit!” came the reply.
Estelle heard a thud, a bottle falling on the ground.
“Go away,” she said again.
The fumbling fingers finally got lucky. The flap came open and in slipped Jace, drenched from head to toe and stinking of rye. Estelle smelled weed too. Whatever sense he had when he was sober, if any, was gone. All he was now was a slobbering bundle of animal needs with hungry eyes. Estelle sat up and leaned on her elbows.
Jace whipped out a knife and pointed it at Estelle. People make a mistake of looking at the blade when someone waves a knife at them. It’s psychological; your eyes want to go for it automatically. Your attacker counts on it. It’s a little like hypnotism; it sets you off guard and you lose that moment or two of quick thinking that could make all the difference. Estelle had seen more than her fair share of knives. She didn’t give it a second glance. She kept her eyes on Jace nice and steady. He circled the knife at her, acting the tough guy. Anyone who’d been around could tell that Jace didn’t know what he was doing. Too many movies.
The fumbling fingers went to his belt. He unbuckled it, popping the button at the top of his tight jeans. Down slid the zipper. His jeans fell to his hips, revealing the waistband of his tighty-whities. Jace wobbled as he tried to keep his balance. He jerked to a surprised standstill, looking around for a minute like he didn’t know where he was. Then he focused in on Estelle with swimming eyes.
“You’re going to lie there and take it. If you make a sound, I’m going to slice you open,” he said. “You butt-ugly squaw fuck.”
Estelle stared at him.
“Did you hear what I said?”
She stared.
“Say something bitch!”
Estelle stared.
“Okay. If that’s how you want it, it’s how you’re going to get it.”
It was like someone feather-tickled Nature herself. Nobody in the camp had ever heard a laugh like that before. They came running to see what the joke was. In no time there was a crowd around Estelle’s tent. Someone opened the flap and inside was a spectacle no one was going to forget for a long, long time, at least not until the drinks dried up or the story was overtold. There was Estelle, smiling away with a knife clenched between her teeth, as cool as a cucumber, holding Jace, three sheets to the wind, in one hell of an arm hold. What tipped the iceberg was seeing Jace with his pants wrapped around his knees.
Estelle spit out the knife.
“Have a good look everyone!” she said, laughing so hard there were tears in her eyes.
They did. They all had a good look. No one could believe it. It was unreal. Couldn’t be. But it was. No bigger than a thimble.
“Four inches full mast, I reckon,” Estelle announced.
Seems that the minute Jace lowered his drawers and Estelle got a front-row view of the show, she bust a gut. Caught off guard by the ridicule of his manhood, Jace suddenly got self-conscious and tried to cover up, dropping his knife. Estelle had the knife in her mouth in a second, and Jace in a nice, firm lock. For the rest of the encampment, until the end of tree planting, Jace was known as Thimble Dick. He steered clear of Estelle from then on.
The weather turned hot and dry after that night, and stayed that way for weeks. Estelle planted saplings into the slopes like there was no tomorrow. She was on her way to beating her own record. She could smell the thousand-dollar bonus that would top off her earnings. Only one more week to go.
Man and Nature do a dance and take turns leading. No one knew that better than Estelle. The last week of August, they were working on the side of a tall mountain with a peak that stayed snow-covered all summer. People were sparse in this part of the Kootenays. There wasn’t a town for fifty miles. The mountain looked across a valley with a turquoise lake. It was man-made, the result of flooding some thirty years earlier when they built a dam for hydroelectricity. Invisible to the eye, forgotten ghost towns from the gold rush days rotted hundreds of feet below the surface of the lake. People from all over the world had come here in the eighteenth century to find fortune, some so desperate they had nothing to lose but lost it anyway. For many, the road to hope led to dead ends. They went missing. Now their boardwalks, saloons, and shanties were disappearing too, drowned by progress and obscured by history.
One night over whiskey by the fire, the planters tried to outdo each other with tall tales about prospectors. Someone had gone into the bush alone and never returned. Had they lost their way? Did they freeze on a glacier? Did they slip from a rock? Were they mauled by a bear or eaten by wolves? Only the Kootenays, the mountains themselves, knew the answers. Maybe while planting they’d discover a skeleton clutching a satchel of gold. It was an unsettling thought, being all alone in those mountains where anything could happen. Estelle said that as they tried to outdo each other with scary stories, you could almost hear the lake below moan with the ghosts of drowned fortune hunters. She couldn’t get to sleep that night.
The next day, overtired, Estelle forgot her sense. Maybe that’s why she wandered so far off from the others, losing track of time and distance. The land had become parched from lack of rain. Twigs, bracken, and dried-up moss crackled under her heavy boots as Estelle worked the slope. She’d just about run out of saplings and would have to get back to camp to replenish when she realized she hadn’t heard a human sound for almost half an hour. She looked down the slope, and across it. No one. She yelled but there was no reply. This didn’t shake her. Estelle had a sense of direction. She’d find her way back. But she was hungry, real hungry. As luck would have it, she found herself standing by a dense thicket of salmonberries. She grabbed a few and sucked them back. She reached for more and that was when she heard the sound that made her heart skip a beat. You couldn’t mistake a sound like that. She was up Shit Creek without a paddle.
One of the deadliest things alive is a grizzly sow cornered with her cubs, or thinking she’s cornered. An animal driven by hunger, say a wolf or cougar, is one thing; if you’re hard to get, it just might pass. Not a grizzly, she’s driven by something else. Estelle hadn’t packed her bear spray because she couldn’t find it the day she left, so she lay still playing possum. But there was no fooling the bear. She came up close and snuffled, then raised herself sky-high on her massive hindlegs. She took a swipe at the air before swooping down, enormous jaws wide open. It was one clean bite beneath the elbow, tore Estelle’s forearm off right at the joint.
They never found her arm, but they found Estelle in time to airlift her to Revelstoke. They’d fanned out into the bush when they’d realized she was late returning. It took about an hour before one of the guys shot up a flare that sent everyone running. It took another hour for the helicopter. She was lucky to be alive with the blood loss. It almost defies believability that Estelle had the wherewithal to rip a strip from her clothes and use her teeth to tie a tourniquet before she passed out, but she did. The doctor put it down to shock. He said shock for a short spell can clear your mind like nothing else.
“If there’s a God, that’s it,” Estelle said later. “God’s a shock that saves your life.”
Pussy paid for Estelle’s prosthesis. She was a real crutch for Estelle to lean on those first few weeks of rehab. After she’d flown up to the Interior to collect Estelle’s truck, Pussy decided to stick around for a while and help with things until Estelle came out of her depression.
Estelle wasn’t herself. She wouldn’t visit the bar. She couldn’t pull it together. To be a bouncer you need two real arms, she said. Not one, two.
“This is a salad tong,” she said, holding up her prosthesis, “not an arm.”
People say you can break the body, but you can’t break the spirit. Seems that in Estelle’s case, one good swipe did both.
Pussy had a few tricks up her sleeve. She knew what’s what when it came to being between a rock and a hard place. It saddened her more than she could say to see Estelle all bunched up inside herself and squeezed to death by misery. Given Pussy’s unique circumstances in life, she’d learned to look on the bright side of disappointment by changing the rules and breaking the mold with a new blueprint. Original model or newly reconstituted, there are people who like to put you in your place for being a woman, as she explained in her first book. Pussy was transgender, not a martyr. Her body was her living. She needed to defend that privilege.
Back when she started taking her first tae kwon do classes, the other students stared at Pussy like she was a three-ring circus. But they were quick to realize that they had a prodigy on their hands. Pussy could jump, spin, and kick her way around everybody.
“You already understand the chi,” the master had told her in front of the class, meaning Pussy’s balance of body, breathing, and spirit.
By the time of Estelle’s accident, it’d been nine years since Pussy had taken up tae kwon do. She was almost ready to earn her yeedan, second-level black belt. Pussy decided it was time to take Estelle in hand and navigate her back to a sense of herself by using her knowledge of the martial arts, and reverse psychology.
A couple of months after the accident, Pussy and Estelle were sitting in Estelle’s room heating up water for instant coffee in the microwave. Estelle was down-in-the-mouth, rubbing what the doctor called a phantom pain where her artificial arm was now. Pussy was a regular Chatty Cathy, making jokes, small talk, and whatever came to mind to cheer Estelle. Nothing Pussy said struck a spark. Estelle stared out the window like a zombie. It gave Pussy the creeps. It wasn’t until the ringer on the microwave went off and Estelle got up to make their coffee that she saw Pussy standing in her tae kwon do outfit.
“What’s that getup for?” she asked glumly.
“Nothing,” said Pussy, giving Estelle a brush-off voice. “Here. Would you tie the belt for me?”
Estelle looked at her and held up her prosthesis.
“Sorry. I’ll do it myself. You can’t keep using that as an excuse, Estelle. You’ve got to start getting used to it.”
Estelle scowled, dolloping a spoonful of instant coffee into two mugs. She handed one to Pussy.
“Where’re you going in that?” she asked.
“Just downstairs,” Pussy said nonchalantly. “Thanks. Mmm. Good coffee.”
There was a knock at the door and Estelle opened it to find one of the regulars from the bar standing there grinning. She was wearing a tae kwon do outfit too, with a white belt.
“Pussy here?”
“Yeah, she’s here,” Estelle said, looking suspiciously back over her shoulder at Pussy as she opened the door wider.
“I’m just on my way down,” Pussy trilled. She breezed past Estelle, pausing quickly to say, “I’m giving some of the girls a class. We’ll be in the bar if you want company.”
A minute later, Estelle strode down the hall to the fire exit door and marched down the stairs. Nothing happened in this hotel, in this bar, without Estelle’s knowledge. If they thought that just because she was short one arm that they could put her out to pasture, she was going to show them they were dead wrong.
Albert, the rake-thin old queen who’d been working the hotel’s front desk for years — ever since retiring his legendary drag career as Ida Dunnit — was watching The Young and the Restless on the portable black and white he kept on the counter for slow periods. He had no idea what was going on, but later he told everyone that he knew something had hit the fan when he saw Estelle’s face. She barreled across the lobby to the entrance to the bar and stopped cold in her tracks when she saw the cardboard sign perched on an easel. In big black letters it said: “TAE KWON DO. The best defence is Self Defence. Let’s take back our streets and lives! Classes with Pussy, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, 5:30 p.m. sharp.” Someone had crossed out TAE with a felt pen and scribbled DYKE above it, so it said DYKE KWON DO.
Estelle slowly walked into the bar, passed the coat check, and peered around the corner at the dance floor. The place was packed. News about the classes had spread like wildfire. And it wasn’t only women. There were almost as many men in the class.
Gay bashing was getting worse. A group called Canadians for Safe Families had set up shop in some rundown offices down the street. The organization’s website deployed a kitschy cacophony of maple leaf flags and Biblical quotations to highlight its convictions. But it didn’t look like there were too many families involved. It seemed to be mainly young and middle-aged men with chips on their shoulders, who got their kicks from hanging out in gangs and beating the crap out of people outside bars, clubs, bathhouses, and cruising spots. The cops were never around when they were needed. They made a big deal about setting up a community policing unit with an outreach bus and anti-bashing flyers. But the thing is, someone bludgeoning you with a baseball bat is unlikely to stop even if you hand them an informative brochure.
The serious nature of Pussy’s tae kwon do class hadn’t stopped a couple of queens from showing up wearing festive workout looks. “If I’m going down, I’m going down looking fabulous!” one of them announced, curtseying to applause.
“That’s what she said,” someone yelled at the back, and everyone groaned.
Estelle joined the others sitting in rows facing the stage where Pussy stood. Behind her on an easel was a picture of General Choi Hong-hi, founder of tae kwon do.
“Always remember that the best way to deal with an attacker is to run or scream or do both,” Pussy told the group. “Tae kwon do is a Korean form of the martial arts. The martial arts are a skill to be used only in extreme situations. The weak person must develop herself, the blind person must learn to sense her opponent’s moves, the person who is crippled or disabled” — she looked right at Estelle — “must learn to compensate for her inadequacies. That is the philosophy of the martial arts.”
The first class was a little awkward for all concerned. There were plenty of nervous giggles and people felt foolish they would fail. Pussy introduced them to the first in a long series of training movements, which in Korean are called hyung. You could see the jokes coming a mile away about who was “well hyung” and who wasn’t.
Within a few weeks, Estelle had taken to tae kwon do like a fish to water and was soon swimming in chi. Pussy was right, Estelle’s confidence boomeranged back.
Over time, the classes became so popular that they had to turn people away. One night, Pussy took to the stage after class, looking like she had something important to say.
“It’s not enough just to defend ourselves,” she said. “We need to reclaim our neighbourhood. Estelle and I — Estelle, would you stand up …”
Estelle stood up begrudgingly, half-heartedly waving her prosthesis at the group. She didn’t share Pussy’s love of the spotlight.
“Estelle and I talked about it, and we think that we need to do more. We need to start our own vigilante group and start patrolling the streets around here. We all know the cops won’t change anything. But we can.”
There were murmurs of agreement throughout the group. This was followed by an impromptu meeting that lasted well beyond midnight because everyone had an opinion. It took more than an hour to establish the meeting’s agenda. Then there was a testy discussion about parity, resulting in the decision that everyone present would each have five minutes to voice their ideas and concerns. They finally had something like a charter and, even better, a name. And fashion.
The media started paying attention when Pussy Patrol hit the street wearing hot-pink sweatshirts emblazoned with a big black maple leaf on the back and front, and the group’s name in reverse pink. Photos and videos of Pussy Patrol policing the Downtown Eastside arm-in-arm in groups of four started to pop up online. What with Pussy’s reputation in the literary world, journalists were soon lining up for interviews with her. Newspaper articles featured a PR photo from Pussy’s publisher of her showing off her new teeth.
The publicity garnered its fair share of adversity. A transgender sex worker — and even worse, a writer — leading militia-style posses of people embracing an alternative lifestyle through the streets of our fair city was not tickety-boo with everyone. There was an influx into the hood of even more thugs eager to protect Canadian families. Some brought knives. Someone, a gun.
“Say my name, bitch!” said Feng, taking a pause from ticketing hangers to give Pussy a pose for the ages. Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name” was playing full blast on the sound system. “God, I love this song!”
“Well smell you, Beyoncé,” Pussy shouted above the din as she shook off the rain. She tossed her trench coat onto the coat check counter. Not her bag, though. She never relinquished her bag.
“We all know I’m a Kelly,” said Feng. “You’re the Beyoncé, mother.”
Feng was one of Pussy’s un-asked-for drag daughters. His drag name was Fu Ling Yu. Feng’s parents owned the city’s most celebrated Chinese restaurant, and other ones in Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, and Montréal. He’d been studying business at UBC because they were grooming him to take over the family company. Then one day his mother discovered something in the pocket of his jeans while she was micromanaging the housekeeper’s attempt to do laundry: a room key attached to a tag that said Steamworks Baths. He’d forgotten to hand it back when he’d left the tubs the night before. His mother looked it up online.
Feng’s parents were bigwigs in the Chinese Baptist Church. Later that day, he returned from class to find his packed bags on the front porch and the locks changed. That night, Pussy found Feng drunk and distraught at the bar, so she got him a room at the Smith and convinced Estelle to give him a job cleaning. One day Estelle heard him singing while he was cleaning rooms. She called Pussy on her cell.
“He’s singing fucking opera!” said Estelle. “Real good too. I think. I don’t know. But it sounds dope.”
It turned out that Feng had studied opera growing up and had an amazing counter-tenor voice. It took some convincing, but Pussy finally persuaded him to perform at the bar one night, and it’s a good thing she did because the kid was a natural.
People still talk about Fu Ling Yu’s debut. She started her set in Kabuki drag, singing “Un Bel Di, Vedremo” from Madama Butterfly. Feng was hesitant at first because he was Chinese, and Butterfly was Japanese. He was concerned about cultural appropriation, not to mention cultural dyslexia.
“Darling, Madama Butterfly is an opera by a white male Italian based on a short story by a white male American,” Pussy told him. “She is a figment of the white Western male gaze, girl. She’s a fetish. Her existence is cultural appropriation. So, play with it!”
Which is exactly what Fu Ling Yu did, after asking Pussy to explain what “male gaze” meant. Her high geisha drag was impeccable, and disturbing. She held a whip (from Pussy’s collection of professional play toys), which she cracked loudly against the stage floor throughout the aria. At the end, she pretended to bite her lip while biting down on a capsule of fake blood, which streamed down her chin. Then she smeared her makeup and removed her kimono for a shocking reveal: a nude illusion bodysuit with gold chains and locks wrapped around her limbs and torso.
“Do you think you can get Roger to turn the music down, at least for now?” Pussy asked Feng. “I can’t hear myself think.”
Feng picked up the phone and dialed the tech booth. “Hi, Roger. Can you turn down the music? Our Lady Pussy needs to collect her thoughts.” He replaced the receiver. “There. Done. Oh, and by the way, I’ve got some not such good news. The Boys are in the management office.”
“The Boys?”
Feng bit his lower lip and nodded.
“Rasputin and Bitchface?”
“Uh-hunh, ’fraid so.”
The Boys were the Smith’s owners. They were a couple. Sergei and Roland had both grown up in nosebleed sections of the city. Roland in the rarified country club air of landscaped, spit-level, modernist homes clinging to the mountainside in show-offish West Vancouver. Sergei in starchy Shaughnessy with its boulevards, mature chestnut trees, and vintage street lamps.
Pussy started the nickname Rasputin for Sergei. It was meant ironically because his family were Russian aristocracy who fled the Bolshevik revolution. Over time, they built the largest chain of car dealerships in western Canada and developed a portfolio of properties that included the Smith, which Sergei had inherited. His partner, Roland, was younger, forty-five going on twenty-one thanks to an unrestricted regimen of cosmetic procedures, which gave him permanent resting bitchface, hence his nickname among the Smith’s staff. Also, because he was gratingly high maintenance.
The ambience in the management office was funereal. Rasputin, Bitchface, Estelle, and Roger — who co-managed the Smith with Estelle — sat around a 1950s chrome and Formica kitchen table that served as an improvised boardroom table. Estelle looked fit to kill.
“I’d guess that someone farted or died but from the look on all your faces I’d say someone did both,” said Pussy as she sat down between Roger and Estelle.
“These fuckers are selling the Smith,” said Estelle, never one to mince words.
There was a large binder in front of Sergei, which he pushed across the table to Pussy.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“They made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. And I’m not getting any younger. So, I’m winding down and selling off most of my properties,” said Sergei. He grabbed Roland’s hand. “We want to spend more time together.”
Pussy opened the binder. Her heart sank. “You sold the Smith to Roydall Developments? The Smith is becoming condos?”
Arthur Roydall was the city’s most powerful real estate developer and marketer. He made an international name for himself as the “Prince of Pre-sell” because he practically invented the concept of pre-selling condos before they were completed, or even started. Every building he touched turned into a luxury condo, leaving the previous renters out on the street.
“They’re turning the bar into a tapas restaurant?” Pussy asked as she flipped through the binder. “And there’s going to be an oxygen bar? What about all the people who live in the hotel, and all the patrons who think of the Smith as community?”
“Well, that’s all nice and kumbaya, but you can’t sell community,” said Sergei.
“But you can sell air,” replied Estelle.
The bar was starting to fill up. The music was louder. The waves of laughter and conversation grew in volume.
“We’ll wait till tomorrow to tell people,” Pussy said to Estelle. “Let’s give them one last night.”
Estelle and Pussy both got up to leave. On their way out, they slammed the door.
The next day, in interviews and quotes on radio, TV, online, and in print, Albert from the front desk was all over the news. He was a key witness to what had happened. He was relatively unscathed compared to most of those trapped in the bar because the perpetrators had entered through the bar’s street entrance, not via the hotel lobby. The minute Albert heard shots and the first screams, he fled out onto the street, dialling 911. But by the time the cops and ambulances showed up, the damage had been done: four dead, fifty-two injured, one missing, and everyone else royally fucked up.
“They were wearing balaclavas, black balaclavas, and were dressed completely in black,” Albert told a scrum of microphones and cameras. “I think it was mostly men, if not all men, because of their voices. I didn’t hear any female voices. They were shouting so loud, you could hear them from the street, even above the screaming. They were calling people all kinds of names, names we all know so they don’t bear repeating. Some of them had guns, some had knives, and some had machetes. Machetes! This wasn’t random. This was organized. Planned. It was purposeful.”
As an emergency worker walked him away, sobbing, in the background you could see police tape, people being carried out on gurneys, a hushed and horrified crowd gathering beyond the barricades, and the staccato strobe of endless ambulance lights.
The person missing was Pussy. She got to the guy with the machete too late. Estelle’s neck was severed almost in half. Pussy wrested the machete away, knocked him to the floor, and pulled off the balaclava. She kicked him in the head, and he passed out. Then, somehow, she made it out onto the street, and started to walk aimlessly in a daze.
It was late. The rain had stopped. The moon was out. The cars along Hastings were few and far between. The trade was gone. The dealers were gone. Tarps were sealed, the cardboard shacks closed and curtained. It was just Pussy, by herself, standing in front of Model Xpress. She held a brick in her hand, from the construction site down the street. She was in her stocking feet, her high heels carefully placed side by side on the sidewalk so she could run faster.
Pussy felt the weight of the brick in her hand. She felt its fate. More than a hundred years old, from a warehouse built along a train track long since torn up and paved over, the brick was scarred from years of commerce, eroded, no longer able to withstand the tensions of time or pressures of progress. Its surface had corroded to a dark oxblood red, as though stained by sacrifice.
Pussy lifted the brick to her lips and kissed it, leaving a bright red imprint on its decay. After checking to see that there was no one around, she raised it up above her head, swung back her arm, then hurled it with all her might, shattering glass. She didn’t wait for the alarm to sound. She grabbed her shoes and hightailed it down a nearby alley. She turned a corner at the next side street and continued to run until she couldn’t run any longer. She stopped beneath the awning of a closed restaurant, put on her shoes, pulled a smoke from her purse, and tried to figure out what she should do next.
That’s when the van pulled up.
In thumbs’s experience, the cops never listened to anything someone like him had to say, but that didn’t stop him from trying. Every week he made his way to the police station to attempt to persuade someone — anyone — to consider his van sightings and list of licence plates. And every week he was told not to interfere with their ongoing investigation of women missing from the neighbourhood, even as more and more women disappeared. It wasn’t just Thumbs; they weren’t willing to hear from anyone in the community, or outside it. Some parents had showed up with theories, clues, and evidence concerning their disappeared daughters, but they were ignored too. Now that Pussy had gone missing, Thumbs was hellbent on trying yet again.
The officer at the front desk rolled his eyes when he saw Thumbs shuffle up to the counter. “Not now, Thumbs. We’re up to our eyes with the attack at the Smith. I don’t have time for your nonsense.”
Thumbs whipped out Pussy’s book from his coat pocket and shoved it in the officer’s face. “Yeah, my friend was there. And now she’s gone!”
“Get that book out of my face, Thumbs. Yes, we know Pussy Esperanto is missing. She’s kind of famous. Which is making this whole thing an even bigger headache.”
“Why?” asked Thumbs. “Because now everyone’s looking at how you guys fuck everything up? Now you can’t pretend that you’re doing something when you’re not.”
“Calm down, Thumbs. And let’s use our inside voice, okay?”
“Check out a grey van with this licence plate, asshole,” said Thumbs, stating the number from memory.
“We’re done here, Thumbs,” the officer said quietly as he feigned being busy with paperwork. “Go home.”
“We’re not fucking done here! I’m not going anywhere until you fuckers get off your asses and do something!” shouted Thumbs.
Being shoved into a crowded cell wasn’t the outcome Thumbs had been hoping for, although this wasn’t the first time this had happened after one of his heated exchanges with law enforcement. He found himself a spot on a bench and looked around at his cellmates, some he’d seen here before, some not. He kept his eye on a kid slumped on the bench across the cell. He was solid, tough-looking, dressed in a black tank top and black jeans. There was a nasty gash on his shaved head.
“Jace! Jace Gilley!” shouted a cop at the cell door. “Your counsel’s here. C’mon. Step it up.”
When the kid got up, Thumbs noticed that he had a swastika on one arm and a Canadian flag on the other.
The van was heading east out of the city, flying along the freeway past hilly suburbs, sprawling subdivisions, big box strip malls, industrial parks. Eventually, here and there, farms. And in the distance, the looming mountains. They were going to somewhere near Chilliwack. He had property there.
“I have a farm,” he told Pussy after the van rolled up to her and she leaned into his window. “More of a compound really. Five acres. Some animals, but mainly machine work. And lots of partying. Lots.”
“Sounds exciting,” said Pussy. “Want some company?”
“What’s your name?”
“Ginger,” Pussy answered. This seemed to discomfit the driver, for a brief second.
“Well Ginger, hop on in!”
The van drove by a new condominium development at the very edge of the city. A large sign promoting the virtues of the cluster of tall, slender, glass high-rises with matchbox-sized suites was ebullient. “Urban Heaven at the Heart of It All!” it said, even though they were twenty-five miles from downtown. “Exclusive Living! Breathtaking Views! All the Amenities!”
Pussy reached into her bag to check that the rope was still there, and the knife. Then she grabbed the bear spray, quietly pulled it out, and held on to it for dear life.