“Quick, I’ve got to write a poem. Give me your pen.” Nancy springs out of the front seat of her car, and yanks a black marker from my hand, nearly breaking my fingers. Not that she notices. She’s interrupting her own wedding vows to scribble on an empty coffee container, stricken by her need to compose. She doesn’t look like the bohemian type. She’s dressed in khakis and gortex, a regulation Chap Stick dyke if I’ve ever seen one, but of course, clothes don’t always make the person.

I should know. I’m dressed as Elvis from his Las Vegas period, which is to say a white flared polyester jumpsuit with a chunky belt. My outfit is a perfect facsimile of Elvis’ Chinese Dragon Suit, covered in intricate beading designs that I sewed myself. A white scarf ensnares my neck and a gold medallion nuzzles my chest that I keep shaved unlike Elvis. There are limits to what I will do for this job. I have a former life living in an urban gayborhood and working as a corporate temp, but now I live up north in a Canadian mining town that resembles the cratered surface of the moon, a wasteland in which vegetation has been decimated by logging and acid rain that occurred as a result of the mining. I impersonate the King for my job, performing weddings for my Uncle’s Joe’s drive-through wedding chapel specializing in elopements. At $99.99, his wedding ceremony is cheaper than city hall.

I have a slight resemblance to Elvis. I have his dark expressive eyebrows, a fullness to my lips and softness to my cheeks, sparkles of femininity that in my twinky days made me a man magnet, but have turned to puffiness now that I’m on the wrong side of thirty. My uncle Joe, in his heyday, was a better impersonator but now he’s too old to be Elvis, even in his bloated, coke addled days.

Sylvie, the ‘groom,’ a squat French Canadian woman who has selected black jeans and a long sleeved white shirt for her big day, gets out of the car to inspect the plastic garlands of flowers surrounding my booth, the Crystal Wedding Chapel. Two kids remain strapped in the back seat, faces and hands twitching as if they have Tourette’s, calling to Nancy, clearly their bio Mom, no doubt from a previous straight marriage: Mom, I want to go to Burger King; Mom, he stole my toy; Mom, do you have to write a poem? The kids are delegates at an attention deficit disorder conference.

I glance at my watch. I have another couple booked in a quarter of an hour. Fridays are always busy. I hope Nancy’s writing a haiku. Her need to write reminds me of the men (and they always seem to be men) who aim video cameras with the intensity of a sniper, taping weddings and the kids birthday parties I also do. When recording your experience is more important than your experience, something’s wrong. I’m not sure why, but it feels like evidence being gathered for a future cover-up.

Nancy holds her poem up and announces she’ll read it before she and Sylvie put on their rings. I suggest that the two of them might want to get back into their car first. My tone must have been off, because Sylvie whips her head around at me like a terrier catching the sound of an intruder. Nonetheless, they get into the car, Sylvie opting for the driver’s seat. Nancy puts one hand on her chest and reads her poem, dipping her words up and down her decidedly limited vocal range. You Give Me Love That Burns / Like a Sunbather Hopping Across Hot Sand / Your Hand Enters / The Canyons of My Desire / But Our Journey of Love Transcends Time and Place. Sylvie watches her with the smitten benevolence of someone who is whipped as hell.

“I pronounce you partners in life,” I say. They are my first same-sex couple, now that marriage is legal for gays in this province. I redrafted the standard vows with care, made sure every sentence was inclusive. When gay marriage first became legal, I was actually quite sincere in looking forward to marrying gays and lesbians. I thought it might be an opportunity for me to be more sincere generally, as if all that was wrong was not the ceremony itself, but my exclusion from the process. I wanted to stop watching the groom, thinking yum, what a waste; I wanted to stop trashing the bridesmaids’ dresses in my head, and making them over with my own, much improved designs. Yes, even though this is a drive-through, the parking lot is sometimes crammed with over a hundred people. I thought I might be moved for a change but it doesn’t happen. As I watch Nancy slip a silver band over Sylvie’s finger, I think Just Assimilated. I think, what happens to desire when gay becomes the new straight? I think, am I still being bitchy, or is it just that my first gay customers were such a tiresome cliché?

In the afternoon I get a call from a babbling woman named Tracy. She wants to book a wedding. The problem is, she twitters, she isn’t sure her boyfriend will agree to marry her. She plans to propose on the weekend.

Honey, if you got to pop the question, it ain’t going to happen, I think.

“He’s always said that the reason he doesn’t want to get married is because of his family. They’re Finnish, they’ll insist on a huge, expensive wedding with relatives coming over from Finland and we’ll have to eat rye bread and herring. So I thought...” Tracy pauses for a breathy titter. “What if we just elope? I mean, his family can’t be mad at him for forever. Especially, if we have a baby. I mean, my boyfriend really wants to have kids.”

I reach for the appointment book. “If you want a quick and dirty wedding, this is the place.” I get paid enough to be civil, but something about sweating in polyester Elvis in a drive by window makes it difficult to embellish.

Tracy giggles again. “Well, I hope it’s not dirty. My boyfriend is Mr. Clean. His apartment is spotless. And you know, before I started seeing him, I never bothered ironing my clothes. But he irons everything, his jeans, his t-shirts, even his underwear. And he folds it. Now I iron everything. It takes a lot of work but it does feel nice against your skin, do you know what I mean?”

I close my appointment book. “The chapel is perfectly clean. But this is a drive-through. You don’t get out of your car. The ceremony only takes five minutes.”

“That’s okay, so does he.” She pauses. “Was that too much information?”

Before I can stop myself, I chime in, “Not at all, my boyfriend’s a premie too.”

Silence. I guess I had gone too far. Coming out as a queer is a bad idea in the blue collar land of fag bashers and fundies.

Then she says, “Is he also Finnish?”

There are a lot of Finns in this part of the country. “Actually, yes.” The horrifying possibility that we might have the same boyfriend wavers in front of me but I dismiss it.

She continues, “My boyfriend’s a big fan of Elvis. That’s why I thought of you. We met you when you performed at his twin nephews’ birthday party.”

I hold the receiver a little away from me staring at it like it’s a nuclear device about to detonate. I remember the twin boys from that party two years earlier when I couldn’t keep my eyes from Otto, a short man with an ass worthy of a ballet dancer and muscles rippling just under the surface of his skin like the Terminator. Otto had shaken his blonde hair from his eyes to look at me, and then looked away when I checked him out. But I knew, we sang in the same choir. What I can’t remember is his girlfriend. She left no impression, she was totally beige. But I know Otto will marry her.

After work, I meet Otto at a motel just outside of town. This is what we do on Fridays during the horizon of afternoon and evening, our illicit but predictable cocktail hour. Otto likes to watch porn on cable television while I play with his tits. He pretends to be bored and indifferent while I pinch his nipples to pinpricks, lower my mouth over his dick, sucking the come out until his knees shudder when he gets up.

Today I suggest we talk, which baffles him. I’m the boy-whore who has met someone else, someone young and fine who has distracted him from the limited attractions of his aging benefactor. Otto switches tactics. While I remove my watch, he grabs me like a thug, orders me to bend over. When I protest (while wiggling my ass against his hard-on), he pushes me into the green chenille bedspread. He unhooks my belt and peels my pantsuit down. He likes me to wear my work clothes. He steps away, smacks my ass with the belt. Not having my attention makes him mean, makes him talk in a way that would normally make him cringe. This makes my dick so hard that I don’t even need to touch myself when he slips his lubed, wrapped cock into my ass. He comes fast, as usual, but in a few minutes he’s rock-stiff again. He slides both of his hands over my nipples, flips me over and jerks himself off on my stomach. I lie back with my limbs gripping the bed, a quiet starfish, not chattering to him about my clients as I usually do.

“Is something wrong?” he asks. He hazards a guess. “Has your father gotten worse?”

My father has Alzheimer’s. I moved up north to help my Uncle Joe look after him. My mother died ten years ago in a car accident, so it was my Uncle Joe who first noticed when my Dad got lost on the way over for a visit. Joe made him see a doctor when he came home to a flooded house after my father fixed a faucet leak for him. My father was a handyman who could repair anything. He had made his living as an electrician. I tell Otto no, things are better with my father because he forgets that he forgets.

Otto nods. “Like retarded kids who don’t know they’re stupid.”

Otto is so up north. He doesn’t know better than to say ‘retarded’ or ‘Indian’ yet he doesn’t hate people who aren’t like him. A bit of hostility towards the Swedish for historical reasons but that’s about it.

“I married two dykes today,” I say.

Otto jerks his chin back. “You can do that now?”

“Don’t you read the papers?” I ask, knowing that he doesn’t. I don’t even know why I’m being such a bitch. I’m not in love with him. I don’t want to marry him and persuade a member of the opposing team to inseminate for cash, or adopt a litter of Children’s Aid kids with fetal alcohol syndrome. What bothers me is the fact that the question never comes up, even after two years of clandestine meetings in motels and one weekend in a city four hours away where we went bowling together and shared chicken wings in a family restaurant. I’ve never had sex with anyone for as long as I have had sex with Otto. Shouldn’t passion count for something?

I continue, “I thought I’d be happy for them but I didn’t give a fuck.” In the whole time I’ve been working at the chapel, only one couple touched my heart: a hunky Italian boy barely out of his teens marrying an older aboriginal woman who made her living singing country western in the bars. Their desire was like a comet tearing a hole in the sky.

Otto isn’t listening. He’s looking out the window across the parking lot at the rocks, cracked and bleeding silt, dirt and water. The city we live in was formed by a star wound, a meteorite that seared a crater in the earth over a billion years ago. The debris and fallout material surrounding it became a rich mineral deposit. If I smash everything, will I be left with a gem?

“I think we should end this relationship,” I say. Elvis has left the building.

On weekends, I look after my father because the live-in nurse gets two days off. I shower and dress my Dad, brush his teeth, both his real ones and his partial dentures. Change his adult diapers from his nightly bouts of incontinence. Show him where the cereal bowls are just as I did the day before because he can’t remember. His brain shoots blanks; cell by cell, he’s dying.

When my father was first diagnosed, he denied the disease, and then got depressed, not that he would acknowledge it. Just lost some weight, why you asking? For me, his sequence of emotional responses was all too familiar because it was how he had dealt with me being a fag. When I was a teenager, he made me fix cars with him while I sulked, screwed the wrong parts together in acts of sabotage he pretended not to notice. His anger erupted when he and Mom visited me in Toronto and met my nelly roommate, who really was just my roommate. My father left my house before he unpacked; an emotional self-discipline I never wanted swallowing my words, my histrionics, because boys don’t shriek, they rage, because boys don’t cry when they lose. The aftermath? A crater where there had been a family of sorts, absence where there should have been presence, an injury where the evidence had been carried away.

These days I have to remind him he is my father and sometimes I just don’t want to.

After I dump Otto, I drop by the mall to pick up a book for my Dad on car racing. For some reason, my father can remember being a kid, and he’s developed a fondness for what thrilled him then: fast cars. At the Shirt Shack, I buy him a t-shirt that says, ‘Been There. Done That. Can’t Remember.’ T-shirts for good old boys who have had a few too many. The vendor doesn’t realize he has a niche market in seniors suffering from Dementia or Alzheimer’s. When I give my father the shirt, he chuckles. That’s my cue; I laugh too. But then he cries, and I feel terrible.

“I’m scared,” he says.

I look at him, a scarecrow in his brown cardigan. He’s slipping towards seventy-five, and his hooked nose looks like it’s going to jump off the loose skin on his face. His hair is white tinged with yellow streaks like dog piss in the snow. We share the same build and features; I’m looking at my future. I pat his back, offer him a smoke. He puts his hand up like the sun is in his eyes. Recently, he’s lost the desire to smoke. It’s as if his adulthood and adolescence have melted away leaving me with an ancient child. It’s the closest I will come to being a parent. It’s the closest I will come to having a domestic partner. Maybe it’s the closest I want to be. It’s not like making gay marriage legal made me want to go out and get one. It’s a probably a lot like making pot legal; whether it’s legal or not, you either smoke it or you don’t.

On Monday, a woman turns up just as I’m closing the Chapel. I’m clad in my usual attire, ersatz Elvis, his King of Spades suit this time. The woman’s wearing mismatched business casual from Goodwill, and the overall effect is Cindy Lauper’s small-town sister who never left home. She has dyed purple hair that’s spun out like cotton candy. I would bet money her hairdresser is a young raver twink in beads that I’ve seen around.

The woman sticks her hand out. “I’m Tracy. I spoke to you last week. I just wanted to see what you looked like.” Then she starts crying, her liquid blue eye-liner striping her freckled cheeks. What’s weird about her is that she looks the way she does but she isn’t a teenager. No, she’s closer to thirty, the unpopular office secretary that everyone wants to vote off the island and won’t sit next to on United Way Pizza Luncheon Day.

“He doesn’t want to get married,” I guess. Otto’s girlfriend. Heartbreak Hotel.

“I asked him if there was someone else. He said there used to be and that’s why he couldn’t marry me. He said he could manage being bi, he could be my husband if he has a boyfriend but he doesn’t anymore.”

“Tracy,” I begin.

Tracy wags her finger at me. “No, I don’t need to know the sordid details. It wasn’t too hard to figure out. There aren’t very many gays in this town.”

“You’d be surprised,” I say. I hand her a Kleenex from a package in my pocket.

She wipes her smeared make-up, tilts her chin at me. “You know I didn’t want kids anyways. My sister’s kids are such brats. I don’t know how she stands them. If I’m at the mall with them for more than ten minutes, I fantasize about weird Christians snatching them, kidnappers who wouldn’t interfere with them, but who might teach them not to expect so damn much.”

I want to thank her for feeling the way she does, but instead I offer her a banality about not everyone being cut out for parenthood. It turns out, a little goes a long way.

She sniffs. “My sister and my parents feel sorry for me. They’re always telling me not to worry, that I’ll settle down and have kids too. I want to tell them that’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Tracy, would you like to go out for a drink with me?” Tracy doesn’t realize it but she needs to come out too. She’s a born fag hag, weird and dramatic. I can’t help it, I like her.

Tracy’s eyes go slitty for a moment, carrying the suspicion that people up here always have towards the unexpected. But even up here, some people realize that the unexpected can be a gift, can be a geode in which sliced granite reveals the sheen of a gem. Tracy relaxes and smiles, runs her tongue along the roof of her mouth, says, “You’re on.”

 

© 2004 Nairne Holtz - Contributor's Bio