Wedding Bells-Check Your Morals at the Door

Sherman and I decided to get married pretty quickly after my recent proposal to the polar bear that ran away with my heart. Most people that think they are in the know of my life were of the opinion that this was because I was pregnant and against having a bastard love-child with what my incarcerated grandmother refers to as “my man”.

This is obviously wrong on so many levels. For one, just because I have put on a little bit of weight around my mid-section does not mean I am retaining water. For two, I am against the use of shot-guns in any circumstance, especially in their use as a threat to coerce the procurer of the seed-of-life into marrying the carrier of his imminent offspring. For three, this allusion of the “shot-gun wedding” implies that the father of the bride is motivated—and intelligent—enough to load a shot-gun, drive to the potential husband’s house and force him to wed the bride under duress. My lesbian father sucks at both loading guns and following driving directions. He also lacks the motivation to put together a plan that involves moving farther than his fridge.

What I am getting at is that Sherman and I settled on all the details pertaining to our wedding on our own. It will be important for us to remember that we got ourselves into this mess, as we remember the details of the event with the aid of Ritalin fondly.

Part of why we decided to maneuver for a quick wedding was the hope that most people wouldn’t have time to get over the initial shock that accompanies such an announcement, and move on to the  reaction my mother had. “Someone is dumb enough to marry you, Scott Mainprize? Don’t let that bitch go!”

There was also the hope that the “mesmerizing” members of my family would not have a chance to meet the fairly well-adjusted members of Sherman’s family with enough time to vocally challenge Sherman on whether or not he really wants to co-mingle genes with the kind of people that led to the official criminalization of inbreeding. Again, this was both a valiant attempt and epic fail for Sherman and me.

“Fuckin’ right we’re havin’ a rehearsal dinner,” Sheryl, my grandmother who had recently been incarcerated for tax evasion in her effort to teach the government a good, old fashioned, life lesson, informed me with her one phone call of the week. “Otherwise, they won’t give me a full weekend pass.”

“I was kind of hoping they wouldn’t even give you a full day pass,” I replied, but the reception from the Arctic Circle is too grainy and she didn’t hear me. Besides, in spite of both herself, and her extra X chromosome, Sheryl and Sherman have really hit it off. She would totally go for stealing the plot of The Graduate to spend a pre-marriage summer fornicating with “my man”, which is just another incentive to getting these shenanigans dealt with as soon as possible.

“I’ll fuckin’ be there,” Sheryl replied with enough hostility to make me believe it. “And don’t go booking some transvestite to over-see the wedding. I have that diploma your grandfather bought for me on-line and I know how to use it.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I sighed, hanging up the phone in an effort to cut the conversation short.

“But Scott!!! You’ll need to get it done at city-hall first if you want it to be legal…” Sheryl trailed off as the dial-tone brought me back to temporary sanity.

Not wanting to be out-done by my family, I was aware that most of my friends would also be in attendance at this festive occasion. No fucking way I’d miss that shit for the world! was the response written-in over the crossed out will attend part of the few RSVP slips I didn’t pretend had been lost in the mail. These responses were complemented with Make room for my caravan in lou of the ignored book accommodations option.

“I guess we are going to have to do this on a beach somewhere,” I confided to Sherman. “I hope that isn’t going to be a problem.”

“That’s probably best,” he responded in between puffs of his pipe. “In fact, If we can get it booked somewhere in the deep woods maybe people will get lost on the way.”

“I like the way you think, lover,” I laughed. Sherman was taking this all in stride though. I can’t imagine time will do me justice, and with each new revelation about this process he seems to be more self-assured in his initial snap-decision to say yes to all of this. Besides, with the onslaught of global warming he decided we would probably be best served in relocating after the honeymoon. He was thinking a return to the south. I was thinking Kuwait.

The night of the rehearsal dinner was clearly going to be a bust. My father needed a tranquilizer just to pick out an outfit. “You’ll look ridiculous in anything you wear,” Sheryl told him, as she sucked the life out of her first bottle of tequila since her incarceration. “I wouldn’t sweat it if I were you.”

“But you aren’t me mother!” he screamed like a banshee might if it were in a bad mood. “You never were me and you never try to understand me!”

“Pull yourself together,” Sheryl snarled, slapping him in the face. “Can’t you think about anyone but yourself? I have to officiate this monstrosity!”

“Granny, you demanded to officiate this monstrosity,” I responded. What a Beelzebub.

“Potatoe—potato,” she replied, as though this made any sense, as she tried to slam her empty bottle down on the table, but missed, dropping it into the recycling bin. “Where’s the open bar, damn it!”

“There is no open bar,” I said through clenched teeth. “You don’t get an open bar at a rehearsal dinner. In fact, you don’t even get an open bar at the reception. Your ankle-bracelet will light up if you go over 0.8.”

“Scott, cut an old-woman a break,” Sheryl heaved, as she flopped into a chair that exchanged quarters for happy-endings. “If you want to know a story of woe, ask me about my life.”

“Okay, what’s going on with your life,” I asked, realizing that, having been caught-up in the hubbub of my own life recently, it was entirely possible that I had been somewhat negligent in attending to the people I love the most.

 “Rent OZ,” she snapped. “Now pass me some gin.”

I had made the mistake of letting my friend Miranda arrange the seating for this event. I had assumed that since she had recently gone through her own nuptules, she would be more empathetic than most. However, I had not factored-in her having gone through her even more recent divorce, or her new “burn-baby-burn” life mantra. Basically, the bitch fucked me over by separating my relatives and pairing them off with Sherman’s, under the pretext of “letting everyone get to know each other with enough time to draw some necessary conclusions.”

“Those being?” I had asked.

“This wedding needs more vodka.”

I don’t remember much about the evening, or the meal for that matter, since I didn’t get to eat it. Miranda had thoughtfully chosen duck as an entrée. Since both Sherman and I are vegetarians, she thought this would be funny. Sheryl—by now fully inebriated and with an ankle bracelet that was flashing five shades of red—thought this was hilarious.

On top of this, Miranda had seated me next to Sheryl’s second-cousin, Vernon, who is a parishioner of some sort. Why he had been invited to the wedding I don’t know, but upon questioning my grandmother she just flung a disc of OZ, season three, in my face and told me to “deal with it”. Interestingly enough, this was also her game-plan for an introduction during the ceremony.

Vernon wasn’t about to mince words. He had clearly spent his life indulging in two things that I had very little knowledge of: Ronald Reagan’s inspirational quotes and Sambuca. Neither of which I had a fucking clue about. “Do you have any morals at all?” he asked, as what I can only assume was his idea of an ice-breaker.

To be honest, I don’t think it’s a question of morality, or morals, at all. Morals are like opinions; in that everyone has them. They are just different from one person to the next. Morals also seem like opinions in the sense that everyone believes theirs are the right ones. If your opinion wasn’t right to you, you wouldn’t have it—or you are pretty stupid. Morals are the same way. However, I wasn’t prepared to make this argument in the midst of my very own shit-show wedding.

Fortunately, Sheryl had my back on this. She also appeared to have outstanding hearing, considering she was stationed on the other side of the room, next to Sherman.

“Grow the fuck up Vernon-Mc-Learnon,” she hollered, whipping disc one from OZ season four at him. “Don’t think you are ruining my special day with your biblical bullshit.”

It’s interesting the way people show their affections for you. It’s never how you would have hoped or, how it all plays out in your head, but when it happens for real, it seems all the more magical.

Sheryl crossed religious--and state--lines to be a part of the wedding of her openly gay grandson and his polar bear of a lover. Well, also for the gin. Mostly for the gin. My lesbian father pulled his personal shit together for one day too (not that one, but a previously negotiated November afternoon in the year 2015) and Sherman’s family agreed that my family’s genetic inferiority was “endearing”—a sentiment they have universal stuck by in spite of their intellect and summer vacations with my blood-line on a time-share we all have keys to in the South-Pacific.

But reflecting on the year that was, I learned something (other than how to live in a land with an average temperature of fifty-three below). I learned that there's really only one thing worth caring about. That somewhere along the snow trail of life we all realize that it isn't the things we create, or where we've been, or even what we do. It's the people we let into our story. The ones who moved our mountains and let us move theirs.

I think the luckiest people around are the ones who realize that early enough in life to live that way. The ones who learn that making the extra effort for the people they love is really no effort at all, but the very--the only--reason any of us are here. And that the one regret more hollow than anything else I can imagine is to realize that too late; or even worse, to never realize it at all.

That’s it. That's us. That’s the Year of the Bear. Hibernation’s in session, y’all!

Marry Me (Most Things Usually Are)

“You’re not Gandalf, this isn’t Middle Earth and I don’t need a life lesson right now,” I sputter in furry as I recap the events that have led to my professional demise. Being brilliant is tough—take my word for it—and it isn’t exactly rare for it to be thrown back in your face. I feel Van Gogh's plight, is what I’m getting at.

I got fired from my job as a junior art instructor today. This leaves me in the same state of professional disarray I was in a year ago when I met Sherman in the forest we shared with my Hyundai and a gaggle of blue jays. Fortunately, I have moved up from being homeless to being a free-loader, since we now live together.

A normal person’s reaction to this might be to critique my professional candour—some may say “abrasiveness”—or to make some crude derailment joke, wherein my life-choices are accurately compared to a train that has not been able to manouver a straight stretch of track. Sherman isn’t like that though. He is also a polar bear, which works out well, since we live in the arctic.

“Well, I’ve been wanting to spend more time with you anyway,” he smiles. “I get lonely when you’re not around.” Sherman does some sort of engineering that he can do from home. I never really paid too much attention to that sort of thing. Peoples’ jobs bore me more than my supervisor’s life advice.

Such a comment would make me want to throw-up in my mouth; but, coming from Sherman, it just sounds different. It's the kind of thing I have come to expect from him: perfection really, at least as I see it. It isn’t pandering to my ego or patronizing my inefficiencies (of which there are many). It’s just honestly, earnestly, Sherman.

“Sherman,” I smile—the tears seemingly removing the ache from lines so conspicuously etched into my previously troubled faced over years of uncertainty—feeling a new, comfortable, calm wash over me. I’ve never understood most peoples’ inability to enjoy the phases of their lives for what they are, while they are. Instead, for the most part, we think forward in hope, or backward in rumination, or, sometimes, all around and nowhere at all, simultaneously; but, it seems a rare human eccentricity to be able to live through an experience like this without fretting the fear of its end or wishing through it in a desire for something more. “I love you.”

I take the ring from my pocket. With neither fumble of hand nor hesitation of heart, I trace the silver circle with my index and pinky fingers, only now fully realizing the syrupy symbolism of the circle as a signifier for completion. The notion makes me sad for stupid people around the world. Sherman doesn’t complete me. We don’t even complete each other. What he does is make me feel safe in a world that I never knew people could feel comfortable in, let alone secure or limitless. I’ll never know what I truly mean to him, but I suspect I make him laugh and happy, and perhaps feel loved for parts of himself that he thought were unlovable. If not, that makes us different.

If he catches the eye of that bitchy blue jay who lives in our summer home and wreaks of Benadryl or runs-off with one of the slutty squirrels from our former book club, this experience will still have as much meaning to me as it will if it leads to forty years of me breaking bread with his relatives here in the Arctic. Either way, he took hold of my heart and my self and he moved the mountains and shook everything up. What was left was new and different and exciting to me.

 I think my secret fear—going back as far as I can remember; perhaps even farther than that—was waking up one morning and realizing that I had missed my life. A few things got in the way of my doing that. I got really sick once, which probably shook me free of a lot of my old societal expectations, but around the same time that I was lost and alone I met a bear, in a forest, and I fell in love with all the possibility I had forgotten to learn might exist beyond what I used to think was a fixed, unshakable, interpretation of the world. Inching free of that has been trepid and exuberating and unbelievably enchanting all at the same time.

Sherman was a big part of helping me see the world that way. I guess that’s worth, as they say, putting a ring on it for. Besides, he doesn't snore. That's a plus in my books.

“I’m not old. As it turns out, I’m not even broken,” I begin, trying ever so unsuccessfully to put my inner thoughts into words. “With expiry dates lifted, you seem to want to stick around anyway. If you’re still not smart enough to run into the tundra right now, I’d like to share my secret life with you.”

He looks at me with a puzzled expression. He usually breaks this out when I do, or say, something stupid, so I’ve gotten pretty used to this particular contortion of his face. Whether that makes us more like Batman and Robin or Mr. and Mrs. Smith makes no difference to me, which I suspect means that regardless of how this plays out, our life together will change very little.

I don’t get the whole fuss over marriage, the whole sanctity of it anyway. Not even a hundred years ago it was no more than a property transaction. One man taking ownership of one woman yes; but, not a very romantic notion, and certainly not the horse I would think otherwise rational people would so confidently hitch the wagon of their sensibilities to.

It’s argued that gay marriage will lead to other things. Subversive things. Like, a sudden joy in alien-sponsored anal-probes or a spontaneous craze in bedding-down with your own mother. I find that argument kind of boring though, and, unlike Gandalf the White, I think things really are changing. Heck, even my grandmother, crazy Sheryl, walks around with a pack of instant coffee to throw at her Pentecostal friends when they discuss the idea at their Friday night mixers.

“Wake the fuck up,” she tells me she says.  “Do you want people to start comparing you to Elizabeth Hasselbeck? You have your own life to fuck up, let them fuck up there’s too.”

Whether she really says that or not is of little importance to me. The fact that a woman who, until recently, thought gay was a synonym for Satan and HIV an act of benevolence from her special sky friend Jesus, is affirmation enough for me that real-world things can change faster than the sign on the Chinese zodiac, and not only for the worse.

"Things that don't change," I mouth awkwardly, thinking more about my inner dialouge than my outter one. "Well, history has shown that they, they tend to stagnate."

It's awkwardly said, but it's jarringly true.

You can move from the right- to the wrong-side of history pretty quickly. So you can't really go by that. When the collective consciousness decides something, it shifts rapidly. A dozen years after slavery was practiced by a praised president, it became the scarlet letter of the human heart--the sign of how evil we can be when we think selfishly. We laugh and ridicule those that thought the earth was flat, thinking how stupid, how ignorant, how ridiculously naïve, but we're doing it again.

Someday very soon we will be shocked or ashamed that our brains sent messages to our tongues saying "tell the world one man and one woman and our traditions are more important than someone else's--someone lesser's--human rights." We'll believe we would have never stood idly by and allowed for that, that we would have been different; but, I don't want to get into that now.

I just want to keep being happy. That’s always seemed to trouble some people, and maybe it always will; but, it has yet to bother Sherman. The more time I spend with him, the more I like the person I’ve grown into becoming while I walk along-side him in the tundra. I trust myself, and there’s really no one else I’d rather be right now. I think that’s important to have going into a commitment like this—really any commitment to things like walks in the tundra, polar bear second-cousins and the avoidance of arctic char. Like I said, he was a big part of that for me.

I don't know how to say these things to him though. I guess the thing that makes this so worth persuing is that he makes me feel like I don't have to. I can say something stupidly boring and he treats it like art; because, damnit, I am an art teacher.

“Here’s a ring. Do you want to be my partner in crime?” I finally ask him, already knowing the answer. The truth is that he’s always loved me. I’ve always known that. Until recently I never thought he would realize it too, but a funny thing happened this past year. I’ve come to call it life.

“I thought I already was?” he says, confused. “I live my life with you. It’s reflected in your words and it reverberates across your face. I think our hearts beat to the same meter when we sleep.”

I shake my head in agreement. Someday, if I am still with him when I am old and grey--or young and grey, or old and bald for that matter--I imagine he will push me off into the sunset, adrift a tiny iceberg. That seems kind of amazing right now. “Yes, but do you want to share a tax form?”

“Okay,” he smiles, knowingly, as he takes the ring and puts it around one of his furry fingers. “That sounds pretty good to me, especially since you're unemployed now. Why did you get fired, by the way?”

"My supervisor said my snarky humour wasn't appropriate for the workplace."

"That's when you made the comment about Middle Earth isn't it?"

"Yeah," I snicker, recounting the fragments of what already seems like a past life to me now. "Right before I told him Gollum wants his face back. Like I've said before, I'm a classy dude."

"You've never said that to me," Sherman responds. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to matter.

"Oh. I guess it was just implied then." Most things usually are.

So, You Want to Be a…

This morning is my birthday. Or, is it Queen Victoria Day? Or, the first day of the summer harvest? I really don’t know. What’s important is that it is some sort of holiday and Sherman loves holidays.

He is actually quite good at them. Besides, he kind of treats every day like it’s a holiday, so maybe this is just some average Tuesday. Regardless, Sherman is always leaving surprises around our make-shift igloo (not made of snow by the way). This morning I opened the cupboard to reach for my morning coffee grinds and was caught in a rain of Hershey’s Kisses cascading from the top shelf—the one where he knew I couldn’t reach them from.

After being initially offended—I believe the raging phrase “What the fuck!!!” may have slipped from my carnal lips—I took a step back and aligned myself with the whimsical kindness I had just experienced. I also aligned myself with the piping fresh coffee Sherman had left out on the counter for me, complete with a love note that read: Your face could freeze like that. Have a good day.

No doubt this was going to be the highlight of the day. Most of the rest of this holiday—whichever one it is—was spent listening to my art students referring to me as a “wannabe” as we looked at my artistic wet-dream, Sir Jackson Pollock. Okay, he is runner-up to Salvador Dali and neither of them looks quite like Serena Williams in a beard, but he is still on the medal stand of my art-heart fantasy, damn it.

“Jackson Pollock did something no one else had done before,” I told them, likely beaming at the thought that I was being paid to recreate a Julia Roberts moment that was not a Pretty Woman discard, complete with herpes. “He changed the definition of what is considered art.”

“Jealous much!” sneered one of my students, in what I must admit was an impressively abstract use of the English language. Clearly I am better suited as a professor of language than an, albeit brilliant, junior art instructor.

“Wannabe,” hollered another.

“Oh, and here I thought no one wanted to go to summer school,” I said, drawing upon my inner-Julia. I believe this is called the method. “My mistake.”

“NEVER!” the class cried in unison. I had been hoping more for a round, but I was willing to take it.

Feeling Dali would not go over any better than Pollock, and not wanting another of my ethereal lovers to be attacked today—I am a very protective partner in this way, just ask Sherman—I decided we could use the term art more abstractly as well and delve into the world of poetry. I picked up a dusty book titled Poetry through the Ages that I had purchased in haste one day while in graduate school, thinking it was a more cerebral version of Poetry for Dummies. When I flipped through ‘the ages’ I realized that the title was tongue-in-cheek meant that it will take you ages to read it. Hence the dusty cover; but, I suppose that all roads tread have inevitably led to Sherman in my own serial, so I was willing to give PTSD PTTA another shot at a place in my life.

“Okay class,” I shouted. When no one responded to this I broke out my bear whistle and went to town on it like I was auditioning for American Idol for the seventh time and had never once made it past the reject episode. That got their attention; but, only because they thought it meant Sherman was coming to visit. He has occasionally made an appearance and they all like him way more than any of them like me. This decision obviously raised my opinion of all of them as well. To be honest, the only one who lost that game was Sherman.

“No, there’s no Sherman,” I said, to a sea of audible groans and snivels. “We are going to do some poetry fun instead!”

“NEVER!” the chorus rang out again. At this point they almost had it honed enough to go on tour in the Ozarks.

“Don’t worry,” I reassured them. “Poetry is the beautiful language of your special sky friend, Jesus. Jesus loves poetry. If you leave a poem under your pillow for him, he will come and leave you a silver dollar in return.”

“That’s the tooth-fairy!”

“Damn, I always confuse those two.” Instead of continuing on with what might have proven to be a logical dialogue, I awkwardly flipped through ‘the ages’, coming across a poem that seemed less sentimental than the ones I was too carefree to interpret back in grad school. “So you want to be a writer…”

“NEVER!” the chorus chimed in.

“So you want to be a writer,” I sang as my mind drifted off to a future where we were all on tour together, not entirely unlike The Rankin Family, “by Charles Bukowski.”

“If it doesn’t come bursting out of you, in spite of everything, don’t do it,” I began, as the chorus chimed in with “NEVER!”

 Yet, with each new line, the chorus became less and less enthused, the synchronicity waned and eventually the voices puttered to a full stop. Of course, this delighted me. I had always known I possessed the enchanting voice of a siren, and had finally been presented with the evidence.

As I flipped the crisp, although not entirely unhandled page, to finish my reading exercise, I noticed that two additional stanzas had been inserted in ink and calligraphic penmanship.

So, you want to be a writer—

don’t give up your day job.

But, if you want to be my lover and my friend—

everything you do is magic; there is nothing left to mend.

You will probably never read this, which is a dozen kinds of good,

since the greatest things in life (and love) are done for reasons not often understood.

For you a thousand kisses are witnessed in the sky, but a million more rise from my heart—

never seen, yet forever uninterrupted.

                                                                                                      —Your Bear

As a piece of poetry, it broke all of the rules. It was touching, romantic and far more endearing than anything I had ever come up with myself. As I sat there, tears welling in my eyes, the class came to a complete stop.

After a moment I composed myself once more. “That was a perfect round everyone—class dismissed!”

“Later, Pollock!”

 As the class peeled out of my dank art studio with more zeal than even the greatest poets ever exhibited in their respective quests to share their visions with the world, I spoke softly, almost inaudibly, to myself. “This was a day for the ages.” Then I closed the dusty book and returned it to the shelf, quietly relishing the secret thought that I know what Sherman does for me without him even knowing that I know it at all.

In itself, that is almost poetic. That we both know that the truth of our story is as alive unsaid as it ever could be told, makes it more than something for the ages—it makes it timeless.

Tax Evasion

A woman just brought a smelly, rotten, fish into the airport, as her luggage. How disgusting! I began typing to Sherman while waiting in the airport lobby. This isn’t exactly Trudeau Airport. The lobby is about the size of an average person’s kitchen. Basically, too close for comfort when people are carting around fish that could challenge a mid-sized German shepherd in a fighter-class.

“19.6 kilograms” said the airport attendant. I was waiting for him to speak more critically, the way he had when I had loaded my quite average 4.4 kilogram suitcase onto the conveyor belt. That reaction wasn’t coming anytime soon though. Instead, “Good catch Claudia!” is all I heard.

It wasn’t that Claudia had taken the precautionary measure of wearing latex gloves to crate the fish around that bothered me. I was kind of jealous actually. She had found gloves with a hint of blue and had taken the time to bejewel them herself.

It wasn’t even that the airport staff had no apparent qualms with such unacceptable luggage as a forty-five pound Arctic Char that is draped in nothing other than an untied, translucent, orange garbage bag that allowed the dead fish’s head to poke through the end with what I am sure was a forced How’d Ya Do! expression pinned across its traumatized face. No. While perhaps shocking a year ago, such a sight paled in comparison to the bootlegged two-four of Molson Canadian that had been shipped up by the man after me in line when I moved up here in the fall. When I retrieved my cat from the cargo dock upon the arrival at our half-way point in Wasilla, I was greeted by a soaking, stinking, Ms. Richard Hatch who was pissed to no end.

No. What bothered me about the sight of this fish is that it reminded me so completely of my grandmother, Sheryl. She had recently been upgraded to “Two Finger Sheryl” after her most recent physical and her boyfriend’s investment in Viagra, but, in her youth, this was totally the kind of shit Sheryl was likely to have pulled.

When I was young Sheryl used to make me ketchup and toast sandwiches while insisting she was a witch, not because she knew how to use a broom or could turn the mayor’s wife’s hair blue on a dime during her brief “professional years”; but, because she had long fingernails. Delusions run rampant in our family the way an addiction to glitter does in Cher’s house, but Sheryl was entirely self-possessed when making the claim that she is a witch. She is also a grade-A bitch, but that’s only an allegation.

Like any good witch—since she was the only admitted witch I had met at that point, I had assumed she must be of a higher integrity than I might now—she didn’t care about lecturing me too harshly on traditional religions like Christianity, or, as she put it, “what boring people call a good time.” I think she tried to read me a picture-bible book before bed once, but only until I pointed out that her true people had been lit-up like kindling back in Salem.

“Only after they got bored of burning the fags,” she quickly pointed-out.

“Touché,” I chuckled.

Getting the point and moving on, Sheryl began defining herself more as a gypsy after investing in a moo-moo with pockets large enough to hide some dangly earrings once she found a pair to steal from the GT Boutique. Next she tossed her bible in a drawer and has been regaling me with the best kind of legend—her true stories of sin and carnage--ever since.

Sheryl captivated me with her failed tales of deception and espionage. There was the time she, with my uncle, tried to steal a Christmas tree from the “back forty” of a tree farmer's run-down lot, only to get their car stuck and need to ask the farmer to tow them out, which he did, but only after charging them double the regular cost for the tree. Then there was the time that Sheryl had been excommunicated from her church for calling her parishioner a thief.

“That never happened, Granny!” I challenged.

“Twice, bitch!” Sheryl cackled, as she blended each of us some ice for our vodka martinis. A tradition we started when I was six and Sheryl drew the smallest straw, resulting in her having to play babysitter for the day. “The life of a rogue Gypsy—you have no idea!”

But none of these stories held a candle to her current scheme—defrauding the government. This was sure to be the jewel in the crown that was her lifetime of conniving. The fact that this crown had obviously been purchased from Wal-Mart was nobody’s business but her own.

Sheryl would have liked to have tried a Ponzi scheme instead, but she isn’t that bright. She had also  thought about burning a flag, but it doesn’t carry the same criminality that it does in southern Alabama. Besides, she realized that she would have to purchase both the flag and the match, and, as she put it, “Tryin’ to teach the scum suckers a lesson, not keep em’ in business!”

Ultimately, more out of boredom than any decision-making on Sheryl's part, she settled on not paying her taxes. “I’m eighty fucking years old. What the hell are they going to do?”

“They are going to throw your crotchety ass in jail, where it belongs,” my lesbian-father pointed out. “You aren’t pretty enough to handle OZ the way I could.”

Not that my father had ever been to prison, but he did own all six seasons of Boston Legal, which he watched religiously. This made him something of an expert on all legal matters, he figured.

“How are they even going to know?” Sheryl asked, smacking the empty bottle of tequila that she had been nursing down on the soft sofa she was loafing on.

“You made your income working for the government,” my father challenged. “You don’t think they will check into the filing habits of their direct employees?”

“They don’t check-up on your dress purchases,” she snarled, more aggressively than if she had stuck to vodka. “Why should they root through my business?”

“It’s a little easier when you are their employee,” challenged Ellen’s wannabe.

“Whatever, I don’t even care,” Sheryl moaned. “I bet the liquor is better in the slammer anyway.”

As I sat in the airport, trying desperately to under-romanticize my witch-Gypsy-criminal grandmother, another whiff of that over-sized Arctic Char found its way into my nasal passage. Being a vegetarian, and the fish being at least a little rotten, I wanted to vomit. This reminded me of Sheryl even more. The same Sheryl who had nursed me back to health when I was sick. The same Sheryl who had embraced Sherman, my polar bear lover, so unflinchingly when I found what I was looking for in this world. “Don’t lose this one Scott," she had beamed that first night, like he was her own pride and joy. "He’s a keeper.”

“Thanks, Sheryl.”

“Also Scott, don’t give each other the HIV,” she warned condescendingly. “It isn’t a Snickers bar.”

Should Sherman and I get married one day, Sheryl might even preside over the ceremony. Well, at least if we wait eight years or if she gets out for good behaviour being old.

As the scent of that grimy Arctic Char swelled inside my nostrils and set my tear-ducts into over-drive, I reconsidered my email to Sherman. A woman just brought a smelly, rotten, fish into the airport, as her luggage. How disgusting! I miss Sheryl now that she’s in prison. Let's send her something shiny to play with. Call you in the morning. Love, Scott

April Rains

“Happy Passover,” Scott giggles, rolling over-top of Sherman and waking him up. The night before had gone rather pleasantly. Sherman’s uncle, visiting from Israel had made a few opening cracks about Scott’s inability to wear functional clothing and his failures in the areas of dignity and decorum, but after Scott settled into a conversation about plans to go to Turkey, Gerald just started mouthing the words “Midnight Express,” in reference to the delicious film noir.

“Start saving up,” Scott had replied. “I’ll need bail money and I have your phone number.” From that moment on they had crafted a night the sorts of which sprout life-long friendships.

“You did well last night,” Sherman responds, rubbing his eyes and trying to wake up. “It can’t be easy being the odd-one-out.”

“What, you mean because I’m Jain?” Scott asks surprised, to which Sherman nods. “Nah,” Scott continues, shrugging his right fist across the air in front of his chest. “I don’t see there being that much difference between any of us Sherry Bear. I think the kinship of religion is less in the religion you follow and more in the type of allegiance you have to it.”

“Interesting,” Sherman responds, albeit through a yawn.

“I think those who are rigid in reading the words of any religion are more similar to each other than they are to anyone who shares the title of their particular religion. Those who refuse to accept difference in others or contextualize the words they see as gospel. They are kind of the same—to me—regardless of whom their god(s) is or are. We can spin the words and choose the phrases that we follow with any belief. Some people will use any religion to justify hate and create fear where there never was reason. Others won’t.”

Sherman just lies there, taking it in.

“Anyway, I think that most people get a lot of things wrong,” Scott confides. “I know I certainly do.”

Sherman says very little in these revelatory moments of Scott’s. He doesn’t need to verify or deny the process; letting Scott come to his own solutions. He has a bewildering comfort with silence too. Something a lot of people seem afraid of. Instead, he sits up and rubs Scott’s back. For such a big polar bear, Sherman knows how to do this very well. His paws are surprisingly soft as well. That something big needs to be coarse, hard or scary seems an aberration of nature. That Scott was lucky enough to have never learned to be ignorant to that one thing led him to this man that might be the love of his life.

“I think, for the most part, people have a horrible misperception of each other,” Scott decides, as the man that has become his security and comfort continues to massage his back. “We act like things that we can define as differences—whether we call them illnesses or diseases and whether they are mental, physical or psychological in nature—we act like they make some of less whole than others. I know that’s not true. All people have their own struggles. If there is a label to pin to that struggle, or part of it, that may, or may not be helpful given on the situation, which is fine; but, for others to act like they are complete in some way that the rest of us aren’t is a delusion. It bothers me.”

Scott thinks about how Passover represents the need for Jews to once leave a land to escape slavery because of their religion. He knows that forty years ago he would have been thought of as having a mental illness because of his sexual orientation. That every individual dimension of any person can, and is, so easily extracted and magnified with judgment and ridicule by those around them. How every truth of one generation is proven ridiculous in the next.

“Nobody’s perfect. No one ever has been. It surprises me that we can convince ourselves that we—whatever we define as we—are without the flaws that others possess.”

Sherman just continues to rub Scott’s back. He knows Scott struggles with most things: a lot of easy things. He can’t cook or clean, he is not a great art instructor and he dresses incorrigibly; but, somehow he seems to have a unique insight into a lot of deep things that nobody else in Sherman’s world bothers to think about. He doesn’t get defensive about it, or have an ego that needs stroking. He just gives a shit and Sherman likes that.

“I love you,” Sherman breathes more than says, as the oxygen seems to have evaporated from his lips, making it difficult to speak. “I love your troubles and your faults and your fears. I love the package that is you and I love that I have gotten to see it stripped of all the dressings of urban life. You in this tundra has really been you, with nothing else to hide behind.”

It wasn’t the answer Scott was fishing for; but, not being a fisherman, maybe it was the answer he had cast out for. If not, given his tie-dye evening wear, it has certainly become the catch he will forever believe is out of his league.

Coming Into My Own Part 2

“But you don’t believe in God,” Sherman laughs, coming over to me and turning-down the left side of my collar. We are getting ready to go to another community event that his family is putting on. “This is all so easy for you.”

He’s joking. He knows the truth of my world. He knows the popular, and easy, perception to make by those who don’t. He knows the difference. I’ll play along though, if only to dance this holiday tradition with him. Plus, I don’t have to wear the sweater his aunt gave him.

“But I do believe in god,” I say, as balanced and calmly as I might. “I just don’t see her, or him or it in the heavens like most people. I believe that there is a piece of that god, whatever it looks like, inside of every living thing: every person; every animal. That is what I have always believed. Before I knew there was a name for that belief, or that other people held it as well. Most people don’t get that. They think I am trying to be trendy, I think.”

“They clearly don’t know you, or see your wardrobe,” Sherman scoffs. He’s right. I am an appallingly bad dresser. If trends had any merit at all to me, I would take offence to what I wear, daily. “Besides, it isn’t trendy to be Jainist. Almost no one even knows what that means.”

Again, he’s right. He usually is. Thank goodness too, because I am usually wrong. However, I think it is my beliefs that have helped give so much of my world meaning to me even when it had no meaning, or merit, to anyone else around me. It helped me appreciate that the truths of others was always as credible as my own, even if we don’t understand each other’s rationales. I always assumed that if we have a part of the same god inside of us, then we are equal: nothing more and nothing less. That helped me love my family when they struggled to love me back. It helped see love myself in the face of a world that told me I shouldn’t. It helped me believe that while I might not be right, I might not be wrong either.

“But, when you come to a dinner like this one tonight, how do you feel?” Sherman continues, interrupting my inner monologue, which must have seemed like I had forgotten how to speak from the outside. There might be a few ways to look at this. Jains don’t congregate or read from a communal holy book. I think the theory is that you have to find the meaning in and for yourself. That way you know it is your truth. You can neither credit nor annex authority of your ideas or actions to a higher power. 

“I love it,” I say, a tear swelling in my left eye. “Nothing could make me happier than being with the people I love the most and experiencing their truths—their comforts—with them. That’s unconditional love, no?”

Sherman shrugs his arms, but he also nods. I must seem so strange to him. That he has fallen in love with me anyway makes me care for him even more.

“And that, I think, is the thing at the heart of all beliefs,” I say, choosing to let the tear travel the length of my face and tying Sherman’s tie instead. “Love each other without either hate or mistreatment. If we all did that; if any of us could really practice that, well, I think that would be something. We’re all just trying to do that. We try and we fail and we try again. No?”

“But you get attacked,” Sherman counters with a vigorous knowingness I forget he has sometimes. He always seems so assured of himself that it is easy to forget he has endured a lot too. “Tonight people will get angry and frustrated with you for not believing along with them. They’ll yell. They’ll get louder and faster.”

It’s true. But, it is also the reaction of every side. It is the reaction of each of us. Especially when grasping for the last slice of cheesecake, whether that is literal or figurative. Personally, I like to think that I jump faster for the literal, but no one is a very accurate self-arbitrator.

“I just try to remember that talking faster and louder do not make anyone more right,” I smile cheekishly, turning to Sherman and rubbing his back. “Getting faster and louder has never made anyone more right. Actually, I think it shows how far from right we all are most of the time.”

“Meaning?” he asks, as his eyes start to dance with a spark of the light I have come so accustomed to seeing in them. It’s something that sets my heart at ease. Now that I’ve found this comfort it is hard to believe I existed without it for so long.

“I mean that getting faster and louder is usually what we do when we’re afraid,” I continue. “Afraid we’re wrong; afraid someone else—anyone else—is right, more right, maybe more right; afraid the foundations we’ve built our lives around—the same ones we have used to judge friends and hate strangers—isn’t quite as right as we thought it was a second ago. That it never will be again.”

"Okay," Sherman agrees, tentatively anyway. What I have said is part of a substantive argument, but it's only part. It's theoretical and an easy thing to mouth without practicing. It's something I can say while inhaling the same breath I'll use to scream. I consider this for a second, while chewing on my lower lip in a way I am sure is less seductive than when I see female leads pulling it off on film.

"I think there is a lot less acclaim for a more contemplative, willingly discoursive..."

"You mean willing to have a discourse," he corrects me.

"Right," I smile, unaffected. "Way of interacting with the world--the people--around us that far more rewarding than this defensive, hostile stance we take most of the time. Maybe all of the time."

"What do you mean?" Sherman asks, suddenly entirely involved in this conversation, with a passion and quiet confidence I know and trust in him.

"I mean that when we trust the reasons we think the way we do we aren't troubled to question them and to let others question them. We aren't afraid of the prospect of eventually—not wantonly—seeing parts of the world in a different way. We don't box ourselves into the way we have been conditioned or trained to see the world. I think that takes courage and intelligence and respect for different points of view," I say, before shrugging. "I think that is often brushed off by the fat, loud, talkers as weakness or hesitance. But I think that type of honest contemplation in interactions is what lets us move those mountains inside of us and sometimes, allow what start out as very much other people—in self-construct, perception and global frameworks—to become a part of our world. Maybe even a part of ourselves."

“I like that,” Sherman smiles lovingly, as he blows his nose and puts the frenetic sweater on that his aunt made him and requests to see at every family gathering. Neither of us would have chosen this sweater, but I love that Sherman wears it for her. It’s an unaffecting compromise in that it neither hurts, nor changes, his world to wear it; yet, it seems to bring a peaceful reassurance to her. Watching her, you can visibly see tension lift from her face when she sees him walk in the room with it on. As though its presence marks her place in the world as she has come to know it.

I wonder how our world would be—could be—if we lived our lives that way, wearing such sweaters. If we honestly only took issue with the things that affect us in real ways instead of distracting ourselves with things that will never affect us, but are simply different, and thus, scary or fearful to us.

Then Sherman does something he never has before. He comes over to me and lifts one side of my collar. "One up, one down; just the way you like it."

Coming Into My Own

We are getting ready for the high holy days up here where the sun never sets. Literally. It is the first day that the sun won’t set because my polar bear lover and I moved up to the top of the world to be closer to his family. On a day like this, that feels like a really smart move on our part. And by a day “like this” I mean every day.

But then I look over at the polar bear that stole my heart before informing me that he was taking it up to a place that doesn’t have active postal service. He doesn’t seem his usual chipper self. In fact, he looks a little too much like me—this being the expression experts would label annoyed. I make a note to work on this in the future. It is not an appealing facial contortion. I imagine that if I wear it too many days in a row I could lose the only man I have ever tricked into loving me back.

Fortunately, this is not that day. Today I choose to be a bitch (this is what experts should label as edgy or clever, but never will get ballsy enough to do so). “Do we need to take a bathroom break,” I laugh. “You look like you are full of shit.”

This isn’t accurate, but I have been waiting to try-out that line. I guess it’s a fail. Sherman ignores this, and sits at the edge of our bed, looking forlorn.

“Scott, what do you say when someone tells you your life is meaningless?” he finally asks. To be honest, I am kind of an expert on this question. People have been asking me this question since I was eleven and challenged Tonya Harding’s guilt in the Nancy Kerrigan attack. Since then I have heard it from my guidance counsellor, both parents, strangers on the street and my parole officer—and that was just last week.

“Sherman, no one has the right to tell you how to live your life,” I smile, realizing this is one of the rare moments in our life together where I get to feel more in the know than my, normally, self-assured lover. I am so often the one that seems out of sorts with this world that it’s nice to be the one with the fortune cookie answers for a change. “They have their own lives to lead. Yours is the only one you get. Well, unless you’re Buddhist.”

I can’t imagine having to deal with this all the time though. Talk about pressure: I don’t know how Sherman does it. He is always helping me through the hard stuff. I love him for that.

“Do you really believe that?” Sherman asks with that needing hopefulness I so often see in the mirror of my own reflection. It’s something I have never heard from him before. He’s usually so confident; so self-assured. It should be troubling, I suppose, to realize your rock is as vulnerable as you are. The way learning your parents are only human can throw-off a child’s access. I kind of dodged a bullet there. My father is a drag queen and my mother collects pictures of Keanu Reeves. The cracks were kind of apparent.

Besides, that’s the thing about religion. It’s this anomalous piece within each of us: A piece that severs itself from the rest of us; and, far too often, from each other. This very thing we think builds bridges, is so often, the thing that keeps us apart. I kind of like that this troubles Sherman too.

“Buddhism?” I laugh, trying to lighten the mood. “Hells no. I’m a Jain. You know that, Sherry Bear.”

I had been waiting for the perfect opportunity to test-drive this new nickname for Sherman. I suspect by the expression on his face that I should have waited a little longer—story of my life really—but I do know what he really means and I’m not going to make him repeat himself. Not here, where the cold and the snow and the wind make it so hard to warm up to these moments of genuine vulnerability to begin with. It’s easy to brush-off syrupy melodrama here, but this kind of honesty is rare for us.

 I roll over Sherman’s big bear belly, while realizing that it probably requires several takes for the graceful people in movies to pull this kind of maneuver off. Neither being Grace Kelly, nor having an Alfred Hitchcock, I fumble poorly.

“But I really don’t think that matters Sherman,” I say, as I wrestle myself off of the floor and back onto the bed, ever so seductively locking eyes with him. I recall some yoga instructor I took three lessons from in a heroine-park once telling me that this is the way you access someone else’s soul. “Where you see god; What he, or she, or it, or its vacuum, looks like, or feels like. None of it matters, Sherman.”

“Are you drunk Scott?” Sherman asks, quizzically. “You know this is a dry community.”

Being a lunatic, I have gotten much more graceful at ignoring such comments than I am at foreplay.

“Sherman,” I giggle. The giggle I got from Marilyn Monroe. She may have also done heroine, but I trust her more than that Yogi in the park. I smile, caressing his furry back and nuzzling up to his ear as though I am about to whisper some deep secret we can’t let the wolverines outside in on. “I’m serious. And yes, I do believe that. You only get one chance at this life. Don’t ever let anyone else’s ideas of what’s right, or wrong, guide you. No one else will ever have walked your truth—they can’t know your story, not fully. Don’t let them determine how you live it.”

“You’re a lunatic,” Sherman sighs. It’s a dance this thing of truths and sharing. Deciding how vulnerable to make yourself, even to those you love the most. It is tough, even for the few who ever muster the courage to try it. “Thanks.”

I guess this is how Sherman deals with the pressure of taking care of me. When you get it right—or, right enough—it feels like a super power. Feeling like you made a difference for someone you love: that’s magic.

“How do you deal with it—with the abuse?” Sherman asks, interrupting my inner-monologue.

“I guess…” I start, trying to come up with that trite response that makes for a really good four second sound-bite.

“Don’t do that,” Sherman protests, cutting me off. “Tell me something real. You really take a lot of abuse from people. It’s one of the things—maybe one of the only things—you do really well. Well, that and make cupcakes. Delicious, I might add.”

Sherman’s right. I make a mean chocolate-swirl. The secret is to under-cooking them ever so slightly to ensure they stay moist. I think about this for a minute. He’s also right about my checkered past. I worked in a homeless shelter where I let women call me a cunt and a faggot without ever contesting them. Then we came up north, where I work with some fairly angry Alaskan youth who call me a white dictator and an idiot from the south while they domineered our their classroom, to which I do nothing other than nod my head in acknowledgment and ask if they are done so we can move on (and back into the real world). Then there is my family—that is a game of Survivor, minus the million dollar prize, I might add. Realizing these are the instances he is referring too, I respond honestly.

“Oh, those cases,” I smile. “Sherman, I don’t take those cases personally.”

“What do you mean?” Sherman asks, aghast. “They attack you. They vilify you.”

“No,” I sigh in love, knowing how protective this big bear is of me; how he would do anything to protect me. All things being considered, I have been lucky in this life; but, I have never known this kind of love before. “Not really.”

I put my head against his chest, positioning my ear against his heart. I align our breathing before I continue. “None of those people ever really attack me.”

“What are you talking about? They attacked you every single day,” Sherman protests, emphasizing the words as though the effort will bring me up-to-speed. He feels so out of sync with the rationalization coming out of my mouth.

“It’s true. I received the abuse, but they don’t really aim at me—not ever,” I continue, breathing deeply to match his cadence. “They weren’t attacking me. They weren’t aiming it at Scott or being gay or Jain or short or slightly fat. It had nothing to do with you or me or my lack-luster skills as an art instructor. It had nothing to do with me or my religion or my sexual orientation or my skin tone. If I were Sydney Crosby they would act the same way.

“They were angry at a world that silenced them and stripped them of their dignity; disempowering them. They were angry at everything that was external and oppressive to them—at ever body who was outside of their experiences of oppression. I got caught in the cross-fire as something—someone—that was an easy target and a representative of that world that had hurt them so irretrievably. I got that. I always got that when I worked with those women and kids. They needed to release that rage. I love myself and I am proud of my life, and so letting them release that anger didn’t ever have to change me. It didn’t hurt my heart the way real abuse—the stuff that targets a person and victimizes them does. Besides, they were really clever and manipulative and I could respect that.”

“But what about your family?” Sherman asks, smiling. He gets it now. He gets a piece of me that he didn’t before. He cares enough to try. That’s the mountains we’ve talked about before.

“Sherman,” I giggle. “They spend their free time watching reruns of Boston Legal and Will and Grace. Why, on earth, would I care what they think? They’ll never really know me. They’ll never really try. Not the way you do.”

“Fair enough,” Sherman smiles. That’s when he kisses me. Yeah, this is a pretty good life I live up here in the tundra. Plus, at least his family watches the news.