Memory of the last loan shark

It was a stupid fucking costume. A last minute costume for a last minute party that I didn’t really want to go to at all. It was a party that I had wanted, that we had all wanted and asked for. Begged for, almost. When you have a friend who has a perfect house for parties and you want parties to be the answer to all your nagging questions then it is easy to beg for more, because what happens when they end is far scarier than anything that lurks in the imagined darkness. 

I had an adult size shark costume, bought it a decade before for a friend's nautically themed birthday party and it proved useful over the years as I hid underneath it whenever the last minute panic set in. I put a blazer over top, filled my pockets with fake money bought at the dollar store down the street, the good one, the one across from McDonalds. Now I was a Loan Shark. Clever girl.  

I hid a flask in my back pocket, slung a bag with a six pack and the rest of a bottle of 151 in front of me and walked into a crowded scene of familiar faces jubilantly celebrating Halloween, dancing in the living room, dancing in the kitchen, doing jello shots on the counter, doing lines in the bathroom, smoking skunk weed on the back deck. People dressed as wild animals, as mummies and zombies and mermaids and zombie mermaids danced and loved and laughed. I drank with an angry heart. In the bathroom, I struggled to find my balance as I looked at myself in the mirror, the beard on my face peppered with gray hair as time and lies caught up to me. I whispered expletives to my reflection, and then drank more, and then more still. I danced, and I hated it. I did shots in the kitchen and I hated them. Everyone screamed at the songs we screamed at together so many times before and for the first time no longer felt anything at all. I drank some more.  

And then I was home somehow. I don’t really remember the journey back. I think I walked. My feet, tired and sore, told me I walked. I had blood on my hand, not sure how it got there either. My cat, Charlie, curled up like a croissant on the bedspread next to me, and the sound of a forklift carrying boxes outside my window from the Ford dealership I lived behind. Signs of life in the murky darkness of the morning. Fall in the Yukon is already winter, the night sky leaves later and arrives earlier, and with it comes a lingering darkness that seeps into you, like a cold wind that sticks to your bones. 

I thought that this was all pretty tiresome, and thought about a way out. The gun hidden in the closet, a classic. I knew secret truths about myself that no one could have possibly imagined. My brain was broken, I no longer felt anything. Nothing moved along the tired wires of a nervous system drowned in the night.

I had tried to come out as trans before. The first time in Alberta in the early 2000s at the rise of the Nickelback era. “How You Remind Me” played on a cheap WalMart stereo in an ex-girlfriend's living room where I tried to find the right words to express my desire to name the truth buried away inside me. I texted someone on a flip phone in the Arby's drive-thru that I thought I might be a transsexual, a word I had looked up the morning before when the questions in my head got too loud. She never texted back ever again, but at least I got my beef ‘n cheddar and curly fries with a medium coke. I told another partner a few years after that too, it also went very badly, and a pattern emerged. 

November 1 years ago, the morning after waking with blood on my hand that I don’t remember the reasons behind, I made a series of final decisions. I drank for a few more days, went to work in a daze, moved through the world in it too. I got pizza from Dominos delivered and laid in a bathtub with a bottle of bourbon and cheesy bread and thought about the end of all this. I would try once more, tell my then-partner the hidden truth that was proven to push partners away, and then I would be alone again for the last and final time and then it could all be over. Then I could make final plans, then I could know the source of the blood. 

I got out of the bathtub on occasion to lay flat on the living room floor and listen to records, and these are the moments that saved me. Lying on the floor listening to Springsteen, Grandaddy, the Replacements, Otis Redding and Billie Holiday. Whatever struck me as necessary background music for a room spinning over my head. Playing records helped me feel alive in all the moments I didn’t really want to be anymore, the desire to play just one more enough to get me through another minute. 

Soon I’ll be in full promo mode for my book, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman, and I think about what good any of this does in the end sometimes, but today, in the memory of an anniversary it feels like this: I write about music in part because of my mom, who played music at home in my younger years, KD Lang and Dwight Yoakam and Paul Simon. She told me stories while those records played and taught me about storytelling and memories and music all working as one. It’s because of her that the records that spun on a turntable where I laid on the floor became conduits to my own memories and stories. Being able to write through all the years left behind is a blessing, a celebration of not giving in to the darkest impulses of the mind. 

This is the anniversary of a decision made years ago to speak an honest and difficult truth one last time, and this is the anniversary of being heard for the first time and feeling encouraged to go on. These are hard memories to recall, partly because they’re imperfect and broken in my own mind and partly because they’re still a challenge to conjure up. It is hard when you can no longer trust your own inner dialogue, that loud and commanding voice which turns on you in your darkest hours. But this is the anniversary too of not giving in, and trying one more time.