Juliet Takes a Breath (7 page)

Researching badass women in history and organizing a book reading worked for me. The two components made sense. Readings at school were often all-white—boring. People read things about the silences in the trees and most nights some privileged wannabe “outsider” white boy claimed the open mic to lament the fact that no chicks would bang them. LGBTQ events didn't feel like family yet, either. Even the letters themselves made me feel like I was hovering above a movement and not connected to it via blood and tissue. The on-campus LGBTQ group called itself the Gay Brigade. I always needed a few drinks to loosen up and feel comfortable in my skin at their events. I was like one of one Latinas in the group anyway. Mainly, I went to snuggle up with Lainie in public, surrounded by other self-identified homos. A reading from
Raging Flower
in Portland with real-life adult gay people sounded like it could break open my chest. Whatever Harlowe needed me to do, I'd do it.

Phen looked at me and placed his hand on my arm. “Juliet, I apologize for being rude and for imposing my nakedness on you. I would feel blessed if you let me take you around Portland.”

Through the haze of our morning smoke-fest, I saw him as a misfit in a sarong, an equal.

“No worries, man,” I said, “I'd love to bounce around this city with you.”  

 

 

We caught the Tri-Met bus on East Burnside and 16th. Phen wore a tattered red Che Guevara T-shirt, ripped army green work pants that cut off right below his knees, and dusty black combat boots. His tall frame made it look like he had robbed a militant ten-year-old of his clothes. Thick little me had on my favorite Baby Phat jeans and black and white Bx T-shirt. I wore red plastic-framed glasses and had my labret pierced; glasses because I was a nerd with bad vision and the labret in attempt to hide both of those facts. Oh yeah, and let's not forget the crispy Jordans. They'd be broken in perfect by summer's end.

Waiting at the bus stop we looked like a streetlamp and a fire hydrant out for a day trip. A bus pulled up and Phen ushered me in first. My nose twitched and eyes watered.
What the fuck?
A stench I had never known infiltrated my olfactory sense. I couldn't comprehend how a bus full of white people smelled so bad. Didn't they have mothers? When I was 11 and my chubby chest turned into actual breasts, Mom swooped in, handed me some Dove deodorant and gave me the low down on covering up.

“Nena, from now on you must always wear a bra. Your breasts will get bigger like mine and Grandma's. You must protect them. Trust me, eventually you will need the support, as well. Men in public or even in the house should never be able to see the outline of your
tetitas
or the poke of your nipples. Put your bra on the second you wake up in the morning. Men can't handle seeing those things. It makes them crazy. Remember, they're just not as smart as we are, mama. From now on, you must shower every day and always wear deodorant and perfume. I do not want my little girl to be stinky. You are too pretty for that.”

Boom. Instant knowledge of appropriate feminine hygiene. This must have been a busload of no-shame-having motherless children because there were loose sagging tits, sweat stains and B.O. running free like locusts. Some of the men on the bus looked like normal white guys but their beards were thick, unkempt, and their T-shirts were yellowed from sweat. I didn't understand them. What kind of white people were they?

Back home, my brother and my cousins hit up Butta Cutterz, the local barbershop, once a week to get tight shape ups. My older cousins wore the best colognes, too. Real talk, sometimes the hood stinks, but I was not prepared to find myself in the middle of a
sucio
fest here in Portland.

I parked my curvy ass on an open window seat and counted how long I could hold my breath. Phen was unfazed and judging by the ocean deep sweat marks under his pits, he felt right at home. I sat there breathing all crazy and feeling
demasiado
grossed out. How was I supposed to survive here? These Portlanders were an entirely different breed of white people.

From an all-girls Catholic school in Westchester County, New York to the private liberal arts college I attended in Baltimore, Maryland (yea scholarships!), I was used to the buttoned up, wealthy, Casper-skinned whites that always spoke in their library voices and used words like
sassy
and
spicy
to describe me. I was used to white people that embodied the suburban American dream. White people like Lainie's parents, who wished their daughters weren't dating me but tolerated it and engaged me in discussions about affirmative action and how I benefited from it. White people that informed me that my fellow Latinos were “genetically more violent” than the average white boy all while inviting me to their summer home on the Cape. I was comfortable with white people that only sweat during a friendly game of tennis with their law school buddies. Those law school buddies would often have sons who would try and seduce me in secluded walkways and darkened corridors in other wings of their giant homes. They were careful to avoid their perfect cheerleader girlfriends while putting the moves on me. Flawed as the set-up was, those were the
blanquitos
I knew. The devils you know and whatnot. These cats over here made me wish I had
santos
to pray to for guidance. I didn't know how to navigate hippie white.

A storm cloud of hypocrisy slid over me. I felt kind of sick. My mother didn't raise me this way. Who was I to assume that these stinky ass people had no home training? Or that they were any worse than the other uppity whites I was more familiar with? Who was I to judge how these hippie-types chose to live in their own bodies? I closed my eyes and breathed in these new people. Still stanky. After a few long minutes, I got used to the rawness of it and filed the smell in my brain as
earthy
. I could do earthy. I swiveled around and went back to scoping everyone. Some of these hippie white girls looked summer-sweet like the type you make wild love to lakeside somewhere surrounded by dandelions, possibly on hallucinogenic drugs.
Damn that girl in the corner is beautiful with her brown dreadlocks, blue eyes, and grass stained overalls.
She smiled at me and I couldn't help but grin back. Beautiful-hippie-stranger girl reached for the yellow tape to indicate her stop and a chia pet of pit hair popped out from under her arm. I choked and spun back around to look out of the window. Being open-minded about everything earthy entailed was going to take a hot minute.

Phen stared at me, unsmiling. He crossed his arms over his chest and asked, “So Juliet, how do you identify? What are your preferred gender pronouns?”

“I'm sorry, what? How do I identify what?” I asked, my voice quiet. A gender pronoun? I wanted to ask what a preferred gender pronoun was but Phen's face, his raised eyebrow, his entire manner kept me from feeling comfortable. The way Phen asked—so casually, like this was common knowledge—made the air between us shift into a hazy thickness.

Phen half rolled his eyes, “Oh c'mon, do you identify as queer? As a dyke? Are you trans?” he asked, spitting phrases at me, amused by my ignorance. “And PGPs are so important even though I think we should drop preferred and call them mandatory gender pronouns. So, are you she, he, ze, they?”

I shrugged and said, “I'm just Juliet.” I chewed my pinky nail, looking down at the floor.

I was surrounded by hippies and the only person in the world who knew my name on this bus was sitting across from me speaking another language. His judgment slid into my heart and carved a space for itself. Trans? Ze? PGPs? Those words weren't a part of my vocabulary. No one in the Bronx or even in college asked me if I was a Ze or a trans. Was that even how they fit into sentences? I felt small, constricted, and stupid, very stupid. Phen dangled these phrases over my head. He was waiting for me to jump up and beg to be educated, beg for him to explain the world he inhabited.

“How did you even get here?” Phen asked, unblinking. “Harlowe told me she didn't need any help this summer because she found you, some Internet fan girl.” Phen rolled a cigarette with organic tobacco and dye-free rolling papers. “I bet you're not even really gay. You're just feeling trendy because you're going to a liberal arts college.”

I started to tear up. I stood and walked to the back of the bus. Phen wasn't going to see me cry or take pleasure in my silence. The moment to retaliate passed by, leaving brass knuckle bruises on my ego. His queer questions brought back memories of Puerto Rican kids asking me if I knew all the words to Big Pun's part on
Twinz (Deep Cover ‘98)
. Pun spit lyrics so twisted they choked the tightest vine-tongued wannabe. But for some reason this song was the test: Are you Puerto Rican enough, Juliet Palante? Do you know the words? Are you down with us? Or are you just a white girl with brown skin?

Dead in the middle of Little Italy little did we know

That we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily

 

No, I didn't know the words. No, I didn't know my preferred gender pronouns. All of the moments where I was made to feel like an outsider in a group that was supposed to have room for me added up and left me feeling so much shame. Burning hot cheeks, eyes swollen with tears that were all the words I couldn't say—that's what my shame looked like. I wanted to run. The world is filled with enough room to flee at any moment. In any situation, there's a window, a crowbar to blast through a locked door, or even the ability to just jump across the roof or down an entire flight of steps; there's always some way to escape.

After a few more stops, the bus driver announced that we were in downtown Portland. Two white lesbian moms on the bus—one had her blonde hair twisted into frayed dreadlocks and the other wore their baby wrapped behind her back in kente cloth—exited in front of me. I followed them, not alerting Phen, not making a sound, just moving. There were fewer trees and more concrete in this part of Portland. I stood at the intersection and just as I picked a direction, a hand landed on my shoulder from behind. I whipped around quick, ready to fight.

“Juliet,” Phen said, jumping back, “I almost lost you.” He lit the smoke he'd rolled on the bus.

I sighed and said, “Listen, dude, you don't have to babysit me, okay? I'm from New York. I can navigate Portland.” I walked past him heading down West Burnside with no idea where I was going. Phen followed me, silent. We walked together with him a few paces behind. Our steps were awkward, like the steps taken while trying to make up after a public fight with your girlfriend. I wondered what he thought, if he knew that he'd been some weird word snob to me on the bus. I had no idea why he was here with me in this moment. Would Phen slow down my aura's ability to sync with Portland? Since when did I start thinking about my aura as an entity that existed? Feeling light-headed and disoriented, I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and inhaled all the hippie air my lungs could take in.

We stood at the corner of North West Tenth Avenue. Powell's Books beckoned to us in red, black, and white, like a flag for a new America. One that's educated, homegrown, and all about sustaining local book culture. “New and Used” it's storefront promised, assuring the world that information would not be discarded; that we could find what we needed within its doors. It looked like the Salvation Army of bookstores, and who doesn't love a little dig through salvation?

Phen folded his arms behind his back and spoke in a soft voice,” “When I need information not regulated by our genius-crippling government, I come here.”

I stared at him and asked, “Are you going to be nice to me now? Like, can I get a break?” For a moment he was too real to look at, radiant in an angry sort of way. Phen had the kind of beauty that boys with attitude and slim bones get away with. They're the type of boys that men like Alan Ginsberg fell in love with and bled out poetry for.

He held the door open for me, “I wasn't mean to you. I asked you two questions. You chose to not answer them. Being nice is worthless. You're existing on a different plane of consciousness.”

I didn't respond. He wasn't on my consciousness level either. The doorway to Powell's loomed and his judgments of me drifted into the dust. Aisles and aisles of wooden bookshelves created a labyrinth in which nerds like me could lose themselves possibly forever. We walked inside and I almost crashed into a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Harlowe Brisbane. A copy of
Raging Flower
stood on a large metal easel. The caption above her face read: “Portland's own Harlowe Brisbane brings her
Raging Flower
to Powell's Bookstore! Reading and Q&A Wednesday, July 28 at 7:00 p.m. Make sure to RSVP.” About one hundred copies of
Raging Flower
sat in stacks of ten along a mahogany table.

“Intense, right?” Phen picked one up and flipped through it, “Portland dykes worship her and the local literati queers and non-queers just can't get enough Harlowe. I'm surprised you haven't received death threats for landing such a coveted internship.”

“I had no idea that Harlowe was such a phenomenon,” I said, staring at Harlowe's cardboard face.

“Juliet, right now in this town and along the West Coast, Harlowe is the white lady authority on pussy, feminism, healing, and lesbianism. You've got so much to learn, chica.” He leaned against the row of her books, shaking his head. Phen turned in the direction of other similarly-dressed boys and disappeared into the abyss of books.

Phen used the phrase “non-queers.” As much as I wanted to dive into his language and understand his words, I also refused to bite. The way he used words felt like bait. He wanted to enlighten me, to educate me. I didn't want to experience Portland or obtain a queer education that way, not from some smug dude. His energy drained me. I didn't like the way he said “dyke.” Maybe he was allowed to say it by association, but he wasn't an associate of mine.