First Spring Grass Fire Read online

  FIRST SPRING GRASS FIRE

  Rae Spoon

  FIRST SPRING GRASS FIRE

  Arsenal Pulp Press | Vancouver

  FIRST SPRING GRASS FIRE

  Copyright @ 2012 by Rae Spoon

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 101, 211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

  Cover illustration by Elisha Lim

  Book design by Gerilee McBride

  Editing by Brian Lam

  Author photograph by J.J. Levine

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Spoon, Rae

  First spring grass fire / Rae Spoon.

  Issued also in electronic format.

  ISBN 978-1-55152-481-8

  I. Title.

  PS8637.P66F57 2012 C813’.6 C2012-904419-9

  For my sister and my brothers

  Thanks to Oliver Fugler, Ivan E. Coyote, Sandhya Thakrar, S. Bear Bergman, Zoe Whittall, Shannon Webb-Campbell, Elisha Lim, Brian Lam, Dawn Loucks, and everyone at Arsenal Pulp Press.

  Contents

  Billy Graham

  Rushed Salvation

  1988

  Voyageur Girls

  Sasquatch in My Shower

  Nerd Pride

  I Will Be a Wall

  Cowboy

  Knives and Baseball Bats

  Bible Camp

  Hide and Seek

  Healing Meeting

  Respect the Wheel

  Outsiders

  Drunk in the Spirit

  Becoming Nothing

  Music Saves

  Change Your Name

  Second Coming

  With a Little Help from Grunge

  Sprint

  Art Hanger

  Escape Hatch

  Ice Blue Light

  Billy Graham

  THE FIRST STADIUM CONCERT I ever went to was a Billy Graham rally at the Saddledome when I was nine. I remember taking the C-Train in from the suburbs with my family. For those of you who haven’t been to Calgary, the Saddledome is a hockey arena shaped like a saddle. I had good memories of it because when I was younger I won contests in Sunday school memorizing and reciting books of the Bible and was rewarded with tickets to Calgary Flames hockey games. I was excited, but the ice and the Flames were gone, temporarily replaced by AstroTurf, a large stage of risers, and a portable wooden cross. I consoled myself with the fact that I got to wear white corduroy pants instead of a dress, a small victory in my losing battle against wearing my little sister’s hand-me-down ruffles since she had already outgrown me by the time I was four.

  That night ran like clockwork for an evangelical event. Praise and worship, a sermon, and an altar call to those who were lost to become born again and give their lives to Jesus. Some might have strayed from the faith and needed to recommit themselves, something I called “born again again.”

  Anyway, it wasn’t the type of night I would have ordinarily remembered. Being raised with evangelistic fervor all around me, Pentecostal antics were normalized. At any moment in church, someone could start speaking in tongues (which sounds like a string of gibberish to a non-believer, but is thought to be the holy spirit speaking through people), and even at that age I had already seen several people slain in the spirit (when a person spontaneously falls backwards as a result of being overwhelmed by God). These events didn’t impress me much, nor did the sight that evening of thousands of people streaming out of their seats in the bleachers to march wet-eyed onto the neon green artificial grass to get a closer look. I was shifting in my chair, counting the seconds on my plastic wristwatch, trying not to panic against the indeterminate ending of soul-saving events. I had come close to calming myself down just as Billy Graham stopped singing. Looking out over the crowd around the stage, he exclaimed, with sweat pouring down his face and a tremor in his voice, that heaven was going to be exactly like this meeting, like church, only it would never end. It would go on for eternity.

  This was the beginning of doubt for me. I was nine years old and the best option that’d been presented to me was an eternity of Christian contemporary music. My imagination protested. My mind was full of places in books where people didn’t have to wait for the school bus with numb legs in the cold all week just to spend the weekends inside of a church imagining hellfire. I begged internally for the option of non-existence.

  I would stare at the slivers of the Rocky Mountains that I could see from my bunk bed and imagine crawling over them like they were tiny pebbles to the ocean. I would look into the clouds for messages that confirmed my doubts and find nothing—just a huge, God-filled sky over the dry grass on Nose Hill, brown after the snow melted and waiting for a lit cigarette to set the first spring grass fire.

  Rushed Salvation

  BEFORE MY FATHER’S DIPLOMA in computer programming allowed him to jump from construction work to an office job, we lived in the Calgary neighbourhood of Tuxedo Park, which was comprised of rows and rows of nearly identical townhouses. Each month my mother would walk with my sister Karen and me to a house at the furthest end from ours in order to pay the rent. Inside there was a man who had an office set up in his living room. It was dark with brown carpets and smelled of cigars. I loved the smell of cigar smoke. It reminded me of my favourite aunt’s mobile home, only more fragrant.

  Our home in Tuxedo Park was the first place where my sister and I could walk outside and away from our parents on our own. All of the backyards faced in, but had no fences between them. This shared green space allowed the neighbourhood parents some illusion of safety as we children could at least be kept away from the busy street while we played. There was the time when one of the other kids sold us a mud pie for nickel, which my sister and I somehow mistook for chocolate. We learned further about the harshness of life when we woke up one morning to find that someone had ripped the new tassels and twirlers off our pink bikes and thrown them in the dumpster (probably the same kid who sold us the mud pie).

  From the age of two onward, we were not allowed to take off any of our clothes outside of our bedroom, not even our shirts, because we were girls. The difference between a girl’s chest or a boy’s chest was hard for me to see then, so I sometimes forgot. I was once punished for wearing only the bottom of my bikini while I played swimming pool on my parents’ waterbed. But I remember two specific times when I was allowed to bypass the strict rules. Once, I peed my pants at daycare and got to wear boys’ underwear from the lost-and-found; I was so happy about it that I refused to take them off at home and even wore them to bed. They felt better than the ones I usually got to wear that had flowers all over them. Then there was the time when I was four and got stung by a bee in the backyard. I remember feeling a sharp pain in the side of my neck and running howling into the house, and then having it explained to me that I had been stung. I got to spend the rest of that day with my shirt off, including lunch with my family. Secretly thrilled about it, I sat up tall in my chair. Otherwise, my little sister and I were usually dressed in matching pink outfits. We also had long, light brown hair, which we kept rolled in rags a
s we slept so we would have ringlets for family photos or church.

  I very much identified as the older sibling to Karen when we were children. When she was born, I noted her inferiority to me (she couldn’t even talk), so I took her in. I tried to teach her everything I knew, which included a repertoire of songs made by banging pots and pans, how to use colourful felt markers as makeup, and strict habits of self-control that had her potty-trained at a very early age. I once even upset all the parents waiting in a lineup with their children to see Santa when I turned to Karen, who was scared, and said, “Don’t cry. It’s just a man in a suit.”

  So when my mother came to me one night when I was four and told me that Karen had just given her heart to Jesus, I was appalled. It made no sense to me that she could be capable of doing something like this before me. After all, wasn’t I the eldest? So I too was born again that night. I answered a series of questions my mother asked, which were meant to determine if I was old enough to understand my own mortality. I did so by kneeling next to her and repeating, “Yes. I know I was born a sinner. Yes, I understand that Jesus died for my sins. Yes, I want to live my everlasting life with Him. Yes, I will devote my life to the service of His will.”

  But what I was really focused on was catching up with my sister. If this meant that she was going to get to meet Jesus before me, I would have to figure out how to spiritually accelerate in order to pass her in the race. So I guess the way I officially joined the church was a simple case of sibling rivalry.

  After that, I was more watchful of her to make sure that she didn’t do anything to encroach on my position. It wasn’t often an issue, though, because she befriended other children while I preferred to talk to ants. When I would be in my room playing guitar quietly to myself, she would be dancing around hers to a Dance Mix ’92 cassette with her friends. Even when we shared a room with L-shaped bunk beds, it didn’t look like we were going to end up in the same universe. She was the girl that my parents wanted us both to be, and I was trying to lay low and get away with acting like a boy as much as I could.

  In grade twelve I made my girlfriend tell Karen that we were dating while I shivered in the next room because I was so scared she would shun me for being gay. She was one of the last people we came out to. Three months later, I got the shock of my life when she herself came out to us. We all went to the same high school, where word got around; our basement was rumoured to be a lesbian love dungeon. Like being born again, my sister and I experienced the homophobic hatred together, sometimes evading carloads of boys together and running defense to make sure our family didn’t find out we were queer. In those spaces, I can’t see myself as separate from her. We managed it all together. I am able to admit now that Karen beat me to salvation, but we escaped our religious heritage together.

  1988

  FOR CHRISTMAS IN 1987, I got two presents from my parents: a stuffed blue dinosaur and a large black Bible. Though I was only six, the latter made me feel incredibly grown up. It was bound in fake black leather, had gold embossed letters on the cover, and was cool to the touch. I would hold it close to my chest and carry it around the house. My favourite thing about it was the fact that everything Jesus said was written in red, the colour of blood. I would scan through the red passages to learn what I thought must be the most important information, since it came directly from the Son of God. As hard as I looked, though, there was never any mention of dinosaurs. Now that I think of it, it’s amazing that my parents gave me that blue dinosaur; somehow it was exempt from their war on non-biblical creatures. It certainly fared better than the unicorn my sister got from someone on her fifth birthday; as soon as her party ended, my father took it to the bathroom and cut its horn off. From then on, it was just a horse with a hole in its forehead.

  I went through a phase in which I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I memorized their names and special qualities like club tails, claws, or mouthfuls of teeth. It started with a class trip to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, where replicas of dinosaur skeletons were strung up from the ceiling. I could barely believe that these giant creatures had been pulled right out of the ground in Alberta. From then on, I would play endlessly with my plastic dinosaurs and look for fossils in our garden, convinced that I would find one some day. It seemed inevitable.

  That same year, my family made room for the arrival of a new baby. My sister and I already had a brother, Craig, who was born in 1985. Jack was born on New Year’s Day, 1988, at five in the morning. A few hours earlier, after we toasted the New Year at midnight with ginger ale and watched the big apple drop in Times Square on TV, our parents made their way to the hospital, leaving my sister, brother, and me with a babysitter. When we woke up, we found her sitting in the living room. “Guess what? You have a new baby brother!” she said as I rubbed my eyes awake. Our father took us to meet Jack at the hospital. On the way there I picked out his first present, a grey wrinkled dog puppet that was larger than him.

  I was about to turn seven. Having three younger siblings had started to feel like being in command of a small army. When Jack came home I took on the role of helping to take care of him. I would change his diaper, feed him, sing to him. There is a picture of us four children just after he was born, taken on a Sunday before church. I am in a pink dress with a grin on my face holding Jack, who is dressed in a fancy sleeper. My sister Karen is standing on one side of me wearing a dress similar to mine, and our brother Craig is on the other side, dressed in a tiny suit with his wet hair combed down. I will never forget how proud I was to hold Jack by myself, feeling his weight in my arms as I cradled his neck and held him safely off the ground.

  A month after Jack was born, the Winter Olympics came to Calgary. In art class, we had prepped for the entire school year beforehand. I must have drawn the Olympic rings a hundred times in scrawled pencil outlines that were then filled in with semi-accurate colours. The symbol for the Calgary Olympics was too difficult, being an intricate snowflake with cowboy boots on all of the tips.

  The entire city was anxiously awaiting the Olympics, and I could feel it too. Every public school in Calgary was given a replica of the torch, complete with a plastic flame. One morning at our school, on one of the coldest days of the year, we were taken outside one classroom at a time so that each student could run around the field with it. When it was my turn, I remember panting down the snow-covered grounds with my legs and hands quickly turning numb, struggling to hold up the torch. It seemed very important. During the Games, the Calgary Tower, a prominent feature of the downtown skyline, had a gas-fuelled flame shooting out the top, turning it into the world’s largest Olympic torch. We could see the flame on the tower from almost everywhere in the city. When Canadian Elizabeth Manley won the silver medal in figure skating, I saw a picture of her on the front page of the newspaper, biting down on it like a cookie. I asked my mother, “Why is she doing that?” My mother answered, “So she can see if it’s real.”

  After two weeks, the Olympics came to an end, the flame on the tower was snuffed out, and the world receded from our doorstep. The snow melted and I resumed my hunt for fossils in our yard. There were little sprigs of green coming up from underneath the grass that had been killed by winter’s deep freeze, and the wind was blowing the loose dirt around like it always does in March.

  Jack was two months old and getting bigger every week. Then one day while my mother was out shopping for glasses, he was napping and didn’t wake up. She found him when she got home. Everyone else was watching television in the basement. Her scream sent my father barrelling up the stairs with all of us kids behind him. After the ambulance took my mother and Jack away, my father shuttled Karen, Craig, and me away from the house. I remember turning to my sister in the car and saying, “ Don’t worry, Karen. Jesus will save him.”

  The events that followed are like photographs. Most of them are blurry: the ambulance, my divorced grandmother and grandfather in the same room at the same time for the first time in my life, church people’s casseroles,
the funeral, and red, tear-stained adult faces everywhere. A lot of people I’d never met before.

  Loss crashed in as clear as the glaring Alberta sunlight. I felt weightless. I had a refrigerator-box fort in the basement that I crawled into for the better part of three days. Unable to feel my body, I started to believe that there was no way that any of it was real. I would lie inside the box praying for a sign from God to show whether I was real or not, all the while clutching a yo-yo my aunt had bought for me.

  Over the next few months, whenever I got upset, I was told that Jack was in heaven. It was the only information about where he might have gone to that I got from my parents, my teachers, and even my own friends. But I could never picture it. It seemed like the opposite of where we had put him. We got rid of his crib and his clothes and he started to disappear altogether. My family went to the graveyard only once after the funeral. Losing Jack was something we stopped talking about, and other things just started piling up on top of it. But it would come out in other ways. Once, years later, my father and I were playing marbles on the living room floor. We were both on our stomachs facing each other on the beige carpet. All of a sudden, my father said, “This is what death is like. God decides it’s time and you are knocked out, gone. Like Jack.” Then he struck a bunch of my marbles out. Life was a game that I had no control over. Between God and my father, almost everything was out of my hands. But the moment I realized I could sing and play guitar at the same time, I wrote a song about Jack. Songs became where I could put my secrets, my pain, and my little brother. They were in my head where no one could find them.

  Many years later, my cousin Ben visited from Penticton. We were driving around in his car smoking and somehow we started talking about how Ben had never met Jack. Ben, being impulsive, insisted on driving me to the graveyard when I admitted that I hadn’t been there since I was a child. I knew where it was, though, because I had passed it every day on the city bus to school when I moved to my grandmother’s house for a while. I often thought about stopping there but never got off the bus.