Nevada (11 page)

Fuck, darlin, she says again. I wish there was something I could do.

Yeah. I wish people would come if I had a benefit. Like trans guys who have top surgery benefits? Fuckers.

Haha, she says to Piranha, yeah, it’s pretty much you and me against the entire world.

You and me against the rest of the queer community, she says back, only she’s not really kidding.

23.

They watch movies. Heroin isn’t cocaine; Piranha doesn’t do more than one or two more lines all night, and she doesn’t chatter away. She actually looks way less stressed than usual, just kind of lying back, watching zombies eat faces and monsters destroy New York, but not really responding to anything. Maria falls asleep. Piranha probably does too.

Then the sun is coming up through her one small semi-opaque window. Maria snaps awake and realizes that she has to go to work. She carries razors and makeup with her; she runs the water until it’s hot, gets a presentable shave, does her eyes, and checks in on Piranha. She’s sleeping calmly, chest rising and falling, same clothes as last night. It’s awesome that she’s got this moment of peace; Piranha really does have way more shit to deal with than she deserves.

Maria, on the other hand, leads a super-charmed life. Steph broke up with her, she went to her friend’s house and got drunk, and then this morning she doesn’t have anything worse than the same headache she has every morning. Jesus. She considers riding her bike all the way to work, but that’ll take forever from out here, so she buys a coffee and a bagel and gets on the train. She kind of resents spending two dollars on a Metrocard, though.

Mostly what she’s taken from her conversation with Piranha last night is that she needs to be extremely irresponsible in her life from now on.

She has a journal! An honest-to-god paper notebook journal like our ancestors used to use. Fully aware that she is going to get coffee all over herself, she arranges her bike, messenger bag, coffee, and bagel in a way that lets her write in it. She ends up scalded and stuff, but whatever, she hasn’t written in this thing literally in a couple years except for the doodling she did at Kellogg’s the other night. Maria reads so much that she assumes one day she’ll have an idea and put together a Great Anti-American Novel or two, so she always carries it. Mostly it is phone numbers and addresses and doodling, though.

OCTOBER 15TH.

Piranha’s on heroin.

She can’t think of anything else to write, though, and after four and a half words her hand is starting to cramp. She can type all night, but with a pen, not so much. Maybe she should keep a haiku journal, in a non-appropriative way. It wouldn’t be appropriative to write like Hemingway.

OCTOBER 15TH, PART 2.

I am a soldier in the First World War. I don’t have very many feelings. I drink a lot and girls like me. We had a long conversation about whether she should have an abortion, but we didn’t use the word abortion. The whole thing was a dream and I am dead.

It’s the sort of dumb, self-conscious stuff she used to write when she was a kid and nothing really mattered. She used to get stoned and write about vampire dinosaurs, or write a review of a rock show for the school paper without mentioning the band’s name at all except in the headline. She’s been single for twelve hours and she’s already regressing back to sixteen.

She wonders what she’s going to do after work today. It feels exciting.

24.

She almost kills everybody getting her bike and stuff off the train in the morning rush but whatever. You can’t help but look cool carrying a bike up subway stairs, and then she’s on the street and it’s pouring. It had been gorgeous out by Piranha’s house. She doesn’t have an umbrella, but she does have a hoodie, so she pulls up her hood and says fuck it. Rain rules. She’s all ebullient, and weirdly can’t wait for her lunch break so she can write in her journal again.

There is always construction everywhere in Manhattan, which means that it’s easy to find a spot under a tarp overhang thing to chain up her bike so it doesn’t get rained on any more than it has to. She goes into work, regretting a little how wet she is, but whatever. She clocks in, finds a radiator way back in the Irish history section, and throws her hoodie over it: fire hazard schmire hazard. The Irish history section rules because almost all of the books’ spines are green and because it’s around two corners from everything else, which means the managers never really go there. Like, if they do, they will catch you trudging your way through John O’Driscol’s history of Ireland and scowling, but they almost never do. Mostly it’s just the occasional lost customer. Or Irish person.

When the air is humid from rain like this, the humidity mixes with the dust that’s literally all over everything in this store and you can barely breathe. It means you need to take a lot of breaks, leave the store a lot, you know? Maria goes on her first walk at 9:45. She’s like, maybe pizza for breakfast?

This is Manhattan and tons of pizza spots are already open. Breakfast pizza is irresponsible to her belly, and she can’t afford to get a bagel for breakfast and then also pizza plus coffee and then, later, lunch, but also, whatever.

Irresponsibility. Maria’s never been irresponsible. When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit around her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid. Of course, then they had a weird, sad kid anyway, right? Whatever. That’s when responsibility at the expense of self became a habit: she did not care about school, but she knew her parents would be sad if she didn’t go to college, since certain things are expected from you when you do well on standardized tests, so she scraped by and paid attention. Then, with drugs, it’s like, she took them all, but always in such moderation that it wasn’t really dangerous. Even when she was throwing up or incoherent, it was in a controlled situation. She never went to jail, never had the police bring her home, never got caught breaking curfew or went to the hospital or anything. And then she came to New York, paid her rent, had a job, kept her head down, had relationships with people where making the relationship run smoothly was more important than being present in it. Which did not work. It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life. It has been fucking everything up.

She buys a vegetable slice and walks back to work in the rain. Further, being irresponsible totally works out for her. The only way she’s been able to keep this job and not lose her shit completely is by taking lots of trips outside, spending lots of time reading instead of working, helping wingnut old man customers for hours at a time even though they’re not going to buy anything. Or riding her bike dangerously: she got doored yesterday, her hip is still sore, and guess what, that is a pretty good story. Or even this morning, on the train! She spilled coffee all over herself, took up tons of space, and ended up reminding herself how much she enjoys writing total bullshit in her journal.

She’s like Sigmund Freud: she can come up with a million examples to support whatever bullshit theory she wants to support. And being completely irresponsible for the first time in her life is so appealing that she is fully willing to build a case for it.

She’s the Sigmund Freud of Irish history.

When you are trans, you are supposed to know everything about men and everything about women and the ways they interact and the important differences that lubricate the dating book market and how ultimately everybody is fundamentally the same but also fundamentally different. And when you first transition? For the first couple years, you totally think you do. You have dated girls all your life, but as a boy, so you have this experience of knowing what it’s like to be a straight boy, but now you are a girl, and, more and more, the world is seeing you as a girl, and also the girls you are dating are now relating to you differently than the other girls you used to date used to relate to you. Also, now you’ve been on a couple dates with boys, so you feel like you are this great authority on what it’s like to be a het girl. And you just want to talk about it, all the time, because it feels like such a revelation: oh, now I get to act this way on a date, and oh, now I have so much insight into why my old relationships would always fail, I am Nietzsche’s fuckin’ uberlady, and oh man I am so smart all the time I just want to tell everyone how the world is.

Then, after you have felt very smart and insightful for a long time, you start to realize that all your insights are kind of stupid. For one thing, when you were supposed to be a boy, you weren’t, really. You learned how to act that part, the way your culture taught you (and it was pretty easy), but your heart wasn’t really in it. There was an undertone of mopiness to your performance and experience of boy which isn’t really there for most boys who aren’t trans. Then, you figure out that when you first started spending more time with women in a non-sexual way, they weren’t treating you like a boy, and they were letting you in kind of similarly to how they normally let other women in, but you were this effusive, messy, uncertain person of indeterminate gender who was prone to freaking out and having breakdowns over things like, say, boys giving flowers to your friends but not to you.

And then, when you dated that boy those two disastrous times, he knew that you were trans, and you will never know whether that informed the way he treated you, which means that for sure you were a lot closer to a heteronormative girl-boy relationship than you’d ever been in, but how are you going to relate that to anybody else’s experience?

Then you started dating dykes and found out how different it was to be a girl who dates girls than it was to be a boy who dates girls, but you could never really separate out whether it was because the girls you were dating now were different from the girls you had dated previously, or whether it was because dykes were somehow fundamentally different to date from straight girls, and then further: really? You dated one boy so you’re going to talk about what it’s like to date all boys? On top of which, you dated what, three, maybe four girls before you transitioned? And they were all pretty different from each other, had different issues, different ways of dealing with relationship stress, and now you’re going to generalize about all women?

On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out. You thought you were into it, you definitely liked the orgasms. It’s not like you had any reason you knew about to be mad at your junk, but jacking off was always way easier and less stressful than actually getting and maintaining an erection when somebody else was there. And further, you didn’t even know you were dissociating during sex until you’d been doing it for about a decade. You’d heard about dissociation a lot of times, and then you finally put together that, actually, that’s what it was when you had to stop paying attention to the person you were fucking so that you could fantasize about any number of situations that didn’t have anything to do with having a penis and fucking somebody with it. So you have no idea what it’s like to have a loving relationship with fun sex in it, which you assume everybody else has. Although really how are you gonna know?

And those are just the relationship aspects of gender. What about the way you get treated by old men working in stores? Young women? Do you think being tall, thin, and white has anything to do with the way you’re treated now? Do you think being thin, dressing okay, and being white had anything to do with it before you transitioned? There are so many variables that it’s like, you see all the constructions, all the connections, and you kind of understand them, but if you ever plan on trying to make sense of them, you’d better be doing it in a cave on a mountain someplace far away from other people, where you can eat lichens and drink from a shallow mountain spring and meditate eight hours a day—because it is very complicated.

But still, Maria is like, I’m supposed to have some kind of insight? Here is my insight: gender is stupid and annoying and I don’t want to talk about it any more ever. And if somebody is super-stoked to use me as an example of how gender isn’t real, or if anybody ever wants to talk to me about how my body is an example of genderqueerness at its most integrally crucial, or if anybody wants to tell me that they are through with their first year at a women’s college and that they represent the End of Gender, then that person can fuck off. Kate Bornstein was right when she said none of this gender stuff is real, but she didn’t go far enough. All of this gender stuff is stupid and it’s so complicated that it’s impossible to make sense of.

A tall, fiftyish gentleman type wanders into the Irish history section, all but bumps into her, then takes off his hat and bows subtly but dramatically. His clothes are clearly expensive.

Pardon me, my lady, he says in this Upper East Side drawl or something.

Of course, Maria says.

He looks at the shelves for a second, then seems to catch himself. He turns to her and he says, Forgive me for saying so, but you are beautiful.

Aww, thank you, she says, suddenly playing the sweet het girl.

Have you read all of these books?

He is being playful. Ugh. She mumbles a no and turns away, still smiling because what else are you going to do, explain patriarchy to this fucking rando?

He turns to look at the books again, and she start to walk around the corner, just so she doesn’t have to awkwardly interact with this middle-aged suitor, but he stops her with his voice.

I’m sorry, but may I ask you a question?

Of course, she says.

Would you join me for lunch this afternoon?

No thanks, she says. I have a boyfriend.

Then she pretty much runs away.

Obviously she should have told him she was gay. And that he was too old for her. She should have said a bunch of things, but one, she has frustratingly internalized the social code that says younger women must not be rude to older men, and two, disclosing that she’s gay always feels like it’s necessarily going to lead to the person figuring out that she’s trans, and not only does that feel scary and kind of dangerous, but it feels like they also might want to ask whether she’s really gay, if someone who is Really A Man and dates women isn’t just some fuckin creepy dude. Part of transitioning is trial-and-erroring your way through the social interactions that most women trial-and-error their ways through around puberty, learning just how to make a rando who’s hitting on you go away without getting mad. But when you’re twenty-nine and you haven’t learned this stuff, it feels impossibly mortifying.