Nevada (16 page)
She was the sixteen-year-old talking about Andrea Dworkin at the lunch table. Suddenly it made sense to fantasize about making out with Jason Sanger, the floppy-haired second-string kicker on the football team, and then knocking him over instead of marrying him. Basically she could see through misogynist rape culture and didn’t want anything to do with it. She tried to be a lesbian, but it didn’t work. She would try to think about Kathleen Hanna or Princess Leia or Scarlett Johanson when she jacked off but no luck. At the last second they’d turn into Jason Sanger and his arms, his legs, his smirk and his tiny little butt.
It was a major dilemma until one day, at the lunch table, humorless feminist nonfiction tome on the table in front of her, she noticed James for the first time. Like, noticed noticed. Hair to his shoulders, probably too skinny, almost pretty but carrying himself like a boy, sitting at a table with Mark Richardson, probably talking about weed. James smiled about something. His mouth was probably too big for his head, and this feeling just hit her: That is the kind of boy I need to date. Taller than me but skinny, a boy but not a man, a space cadet instead of an athlete. Somebody who’d listen to her and not try to shut her up.
Those were pretty big assumptions, but Nicole is really smart and she was totally right. She asked him out two days later. She made him a mix tape. Not even on a CD, either, a proper mix tape she made on a boom box. She collaged together a cover and was super intentional about not really including love songs or anything, just the kinds of music that she imagined a cute stoner would like. Long songs, songs where the guitars sound weird, stuff with guitar solos. Suave as hell! But he agreed, even though he looked terrified at first. Nicole has a car so they went to the truckstop out on route 80.
He was checked out from the start, pretty much. He just seemed bewildered, although he did ask to listen to the tape she made him while they were driving. But he didn’t try to kiss her or anything, which kind of made her want him to. She knew that was kind of gross but it’s how she ended up in his lap in the passenger seat of her own car at eleven
PM
, November 3rd, two years ago, in the dark far corner of the truckstop parking lot. She’s pretty small but it was still pretty uncomfortable and she managed to stop herself from asking him to go fuck her somewhere. Sex-positive feminist or not, she was a seventeen-year-old virgin and not interested in fucking someone before she even knew his middle name. So they made out for a long time but she kept her tights on and then she dropped him off at his parents’ house and they’ve been dating ever since.
And he’s weird. She knows that. Mostly he just likes to watch movies and smoke weed. She smokes with him sometimes, but she’s not as into it as him. She took mushrooms once. Whatever. He likes to smoke. He smokes enough that you can’t really tell he’s stoned when he’s stoned. He just acts normal. Of course, maybe he’s just always high and nobody knows what normal for James Hanson even looks like. So: he smokes and they watch movies, eat food, go to work—he works at Wal-Mart too—and do whatever else it is that weirdo teenagers who just turned twenty do. Once they spent a weekend in Reno.
Sometimes, like tonight, they fight. Sometimes she just want to burn his face down because of how checked out he is, and it makes her want to push him, force him to make a decision. Any decision. Like, she knows that he has really strong opinions about movies, but not because he’d ever tell her about them. Mostly she knows because sometimes he writes about them on his blog. But just now he wouldn’t do it, he was like, Let’s watch a movie, but then he refused to even vote on anything. So she was like, fine. To be an asshole she was like, Let’s watch that movie Drew Carey made a couple years ago. He didn’t even say anything to that, so they ended up watching Drew Carey’s stupid movie. It was like a contest of wills they were having without acknowledging it. Who would get so mad that this movie was so dumb that they would turn it off and pick something good? She was like, It’s not going to be me, but with his Zen ability to disappear, it wasn’t going to be him. How can you be so disinterested but so willful at the same time? Weird shit, James.
Plus the movie wasn’t even that bad. Nicole’s bar for awful is pretty low: no sexual assault and no overt sexism, but it doesn’t even need to pass the Bechdel test. But most movies still can’t even manage that. Somebody always has to make a fat joke or laugh at a girl who isn’t conventionally attractive. But that stuff didn’t even happen! Much. By the end of the movie she was like, Well shit, I guess I don’t even hate Drew Carey. And if she’s going to be honest, she was even more pissed at James than she was before they started watching it. He managed to stay awake, at least, but at the end of the movie she all but blurted, like, What the fuck, dude, now what are we going to do?
She knows she was being a brat, but after sitting there stewing for an hour and forty minutes, she couldn’t just let it go. She wanted to have sex and to have that sex make her feel better, and make him feel better, and bring them closer together, and reset stuff, the way sex is supposed to do. Whatever. She knew it was dumb but she took her jeans off and climbed on his lap. He got mad and pushed her off, so she pulled them on and left without saying anything. Waited for him to say something while she rounded up her flannel, her purse, her keys, the half-empty two-liter of Coke. Drawing out her silent exit as long as she could. Stupid. Whatever. It’s fine, they fight about stuff sometimes. It’s better to let it out, right? She’d rather fight about it than seethe forever. So she came home and he hadn’t called. She’s definitely not going to call him tonight. Fuck him. She’ll hear from him by the weekend and they’ll make up. Meanwhile she’s going to work on this zine she’s been hacking away at for literally like a year. You’re not supposed to take home stripped magazines from Wal-Mart, but she sneaks out a huge stack of them almost every week. She collages the shit out of them. It wasn’t even supposed to be a very long zine, but it keeps getting longer and longer and longer because she keeps having more and more and more to add to it. It’s going to end up being like sixty-four pages.
5.
It’s not like James is proud of the porn that he looks at, but what are you supposed to do? Will yourself not to be a pervert? He’s tried. He’s still trying. He tries most nights.
The only light in the room right now is the light of the computer monitor, the blue and black light of the naked bodies on the screen. He knows how this is going to end, though. He’s going to try to watch men fuck women for about half an hour, get depressed, not be able to even get hard, and then look at blogs of pictures of women with captions that turn the pictures into weird and absurd erotic transvestite scenarios.
There are basically four scenarios.
One blog is devoted entirely to quote unquote Scientific Transformations, so like, it will be a picture of a pretty girl in a space station with a caption that reads, Professor MacMillan stepped out of the body regenerator and his assistant smirked at the error. Or whatever. Like the premise is always nanorobots, or body switching machines, or like, who even knows? Gender-change rayguns. There are just all these pictures of women with captions explaining that they used to be men. It’s stupid that these are supposed to be, like, scientific, because obviously science that can turn you into Pamela Anderson isn’t science anyone is working on. There are archives of these things that go way back into the history of the Internet but that shit is not science, it is fucking magic.
Then there are ones that are explicitly devoted to magic. Like, there will be a picture of a pretty girl in a forest and a caption reading, The evil ice sorceress had turned Brave Samson into a demure maiden. In the erotic minds of the people who make this creeper porn, magic and science are the same thing and mostly what they do is turn men into conventionally attractive women.
There are also angry girlfriend captions. These are the ones where girlfriends make their boyfriends into women for some reason. These ones at least take place kind of in the real world, but it’s not like putting lipstick and a dress on the average clueless stoner boyfriend will make him look like the beautiful women who are inevitably pictured.
Stupid.
There are also hardcore ones that barely even have captions, like a picture of a pretty girl sucking some dude’s dick and it says, like, Suck it, boy, or whatever. You can’t help but wonder who makes these, who is sitting at their computer finding still pictures of blowjobs to write stilted half-sentences on, in order to enable legions of perverts to come all over their computer keyboards? This is a dangerous path of thinking to go down, though, because who the fuck even looks at any of this stuff? It is all so weird and stupid. And at the same time, once you have a boner from looking at this ridiculous shit, suddenly it doesn’t seem weird as much as it seems magic. Potent. Fascinating. Magical! Scientific! It’s like, this is no longer a dumb picture from a fashion magazine or a porn shoot or a Halloween costume advertisement, subtitled with a stupid scenario. Suddenly this shit is functioning in your reptile brain the way that pussy is supposed to function.
James isn’t gay or anything. He’s not that into the ones where there are dicks. The ones with lesbians, sure, but he’s not into dudes or anything. Like, being a pervert would probably even be easier if he was gay, right, and didn’t have to worry about liking girls just in a totally impossible way. Like, there’s lots of gay guys, right? If you’re a gay guy, you can just go suck a dick in a bathroom at a truck stop or whatever gay guys do. If you’re a straight guy who’s into the idea of being turned into a girl there’s not a lot of girls who are interested in being involved in that, probably. Well there are a lot of imaginary girls who are into that on the Internet, but they’re just wish fulfillment, dudes making the worlds they wish they lived in and putting them online. Like World of Warcraft.
It’s supposed to be called autogynephilia. It’s like a thing. That’s the name of the fetish. If it’s a fetish? James doesn’t know what it is. Being sexually attracted to oneself as female. Hot! Who wouldn’t be hot for that?
Gross.
It’s the sort of thing you can never tell anyone. A secret you carry with you like an albatross stapled to your neck that you take with you to your grave.
Lots of other fetishes or whatever, like, you can frame them as cool. People can look cool getting tied up and whipped. People can look cool pissing on each other, even. Imagine if Nine Inch Nails put that in a video. You could make that cool. But wanting to be a girl? Not even like, I have known my whole life, man trapped in the body of a woman, whatever. Anyone can tell you that James is not a woman. James knows who Jennifer Finney Boylan is, and he is no Jennifer Finney Boylan. He’s just some fuckin dude who wishes he was allowed to wear dresses.
He’s looking at a picture of a girl in a French maid Halloween costume:
Philip’s girlfriend was furious! It seems he couldn’t be bothered to get a costume for her big party so she got one for him
—
and it was a dress!
It’s absurd and he can’t even focus on it. He’s a million miles away, imagining how ridiculous he would look in that dress, working out scenarios for ways that he could ever connect with another human being about this stuff. There aren’t even support groups for transvestites. There are social clubs, which are probably full of hairy men in pantyhose. And James is sure there isn’t even a transvestite social club anywhere near Star City. Plus, he has never even worn women’s clothes before. What is he going to do, show up to the support group in jeans and a denim jacket and ask to borrow something from someone? There aren’t autogynephile support groups, either, because autogynephiles are a kind of transsexual. Sort of. Fake transsexuals: ugly transsexuals. Men who decide to become women even though they’re nothing like women. James has looked it up. Kenneth Zucker, J. Michael Bailey. It’s science.
He can’t even get hard. He should be thinking about himself with Nicole, but he’s thinking about himself with his traitorous dick. But he can’t even do that right. What kind of twenty-year-old guy has trouble getting hard while he’s looking at the kind of porn he likes? What kind of twenty-year-old guy has a lot of trouble coming unless his girlfriend is sucking his dick so he can think about the evil ice sorceress turning Brave Samson into a demure maiden?
6.
It’s not one hundred percent true that he’s never worn women’s clothes.
All through high school, probably somewhere back in the mists of time even before high school, god knows when it showed up, he had this idea. He knew he wasn’t going to go to college. He’s pretty dumb and barely graduated high school, so his Future has always basically been at best rising through the ranks at Wal-Mart to become a manager and then to die of a corporate heart attack at age fifty. He was never going to move to New York and become a rapper. He has a blog about film that he took seriously for a minute, but nobody cares what he has to say and to be honest he hasn’t updated it with anything substantial for like six months because he keeps watching these stupid movies with Nicole that he doesn’t care about. The point is, all through high school he could not wait until he could graduate and get his own apartment, where he could have a closet full of dresses.
Whatever the fuck is wrong with him, it isn’t that he’s a transvestite. He has no idea how to wear a dress. But when he had his own apartment, everything would change. He thought he’d be able to order dresses off the Internet, and then have them in his apartment and wear them whenever he wanted. He started working at Wal-Mart when he was sixteen because he knew it would take a minute to get promoted and start making more than minimum wage. He was going to need to be able to afford not to have a roommate, so he wouldn’t even have to just dress up in his room. He was going to invest in really thick curtains, a bunch of mirrors, and then this phenomenal wardrobe: all the most absurd, frilly and short and sexy and demure dresses. And then he could wear them all the time, then figure out what to do from there. Like, not transition. After all, most women in the real world don’t even wear dresses much. He wasn’t transsexual. He just wanted dresses.