Nevada (17 page)

It was a vague plan.

Then life got in the way. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say when you’re super old, not when you’re twenty? It did, though. First, Nicole asked him out, and he didn’t have a good reason to say no. Plus he likes her. Plus, having a girlfriend wasn’t that far off from having a bunch of dresses. Nicole never really wears skirts any more, even when he tries to hint that it would be cool if she did. She’s more of a brown sweater tight jeans hipster glasses and pixie haircut type than a pinup fifties dress lingerie type. And at first it wasn’t even complicated. Her ass in his lap got him all hard and he was like Oh, maybe this autogynephilia stuff was just kid stuff and now I can be a Man. Which actually felt kind of gross.

On top of that, how the fuck do you get dresses? You can’t just go online and order a dress. You have to know what size you are. You have to measure yourself. But how do you measure yourself? You can’t just buy a measuring tape at the Wal-Mart where you work: somebody would notice and ask what you were going to do with it. And a metal tape measure from the tools department doesn’t work. James tried. And then even if you just guess that you probably wear a size large, you might have the most depressing experience in the world when you try to test out that theory.

He ordered one. There is a dress in the back of James’s closet that nobody has ever noticed before. Why would anyone go into his closet? It seems inevitable that Nicole is going to go looking for a belt to borrow or something, and find it, and James is not going to have an explanation for why a dress that not only can he not fit into, but also one that would have to be about a foot longer, is hung up behind his two suit jackets and single pair of khaki pants.

The first week that he had this apartment, he ordered this dress online. He was like, Freedom! I can finally order myself My First Dress! He ordered it from eBay. The idea was that he was being responsible. It isn’t slutty, it isn’t pink, and it’s not even supposed to be short. It’s navy blue with white piping, and he spent the week after he ordered it, which was in the middle of the night a cold sweat click of the Buy Now button, panicking that it was going to be shipped in a box labeled ‘dress’ and left out in front of the door of his apartment. It wasn’t though. Just a plain brown box in front of his door after work one day.

He took it inside breathing shallow little breaths and tried to cut it open. His hands didn’t work. Then a fork worked okay to poke through the tape and start some tearing, but he had to find the sharp knife to cut all the tape open. Then the box was on his kitchen counter, next to the plates with the crusts of pizza and grease on them, open like a present, and it wasn’t even scary, it was already sad. First of all, he should have hidden the box until after Nicole had come over that night and then left. She was on her way over any minute. Second of all, you could tell immediately that this wasn’t the dress he thought he’d ordered. That dress was in his head. The dress in his head was cute, and made him look like he had a waist. It was cool, sort of a hipster Jackie O thing. This dress in the real world, though, was clearly someone’s dead grandmother’s church dress. It was boxy and square, a thick almost terrycloth kind of fabric. The piping wasn’t cool, it was stupid. He didn’t even take it out of the box, he just closed the box and buried it under a couple of old Converse boxes in the back of his closet and walked over to the computer. Sat down. Looked at some pervert stuff until Nicole came over. She even knew something was wrong when she got there.

She was like, Are you okay, you’re breathing really fast and you look like you’re going to cry.

Nah, he said. Nah I just read something really messed up. About baby seals.

Fucking ridiculous.

After she came over that night, and after they had sex, and then after she went home, he did try it on. It looked like a skirt and a jacket, but it was actually only one piece, a dress. Maybe because he’d already come once that night, or because the dress was so ugly and stupid, or maybe because his ribs were all full of disappointment and helium, whatever it was, he didn’t even get turned on when he tried it on. He had expected to. The whole point of actually getting his first dress was to satisfy this impulse that was supposed to be all sexual.

He didn’t have a full-length mirror or anything, but he could barely figure out how to get his shoulders into it, and then it tangled around his ribs and armpits and he was worrying that he was going to stretch it out and ruin it—wouldn’t it be a tragedy, to ruin such a beautiful thing—but eventually he got into it and felt probably dumber than he had ever felt. There was tons of room and drape in the hips. His stomach, even though it barely even exists, bulged out against the front of the dress. He realized that he hadn’t known what he’d expected to feel when he tried this dress on, but it certainly wasn’t this emptiness verging on boredom butting up against wanting to die.

But he had it and this was what he’d wanted so he checked to make sure the front door was locked, then checked to make sure the side door was locked, closed all the blinds, and smoked the rest of the weed that he had, sitting on the futon in that stupid dress, feeling like an idiot. And then even when he was really, really high, he didn’t stop feeling stupid. He tried to jack off and it didn’t work.

This is how James knows he’s an autogynephiliac instead of a transvestite. Cross-dressing seems exciting in theory but in practice it is the saddest and most disappointing thing in the world.

That should have been the end of his career as a transvestite, but the next night Nicole was doing something else, who knows what, so he didn’t jack off all day and then he tried the dress on again at like eleven o’clock and managed to come that time, but it felt even worse than jacking off while reading stupid Internet caption porn. Like, he came, but there was barely an orgasm, and there was no euphoria, and then he was just like, What the hell. Am I not a transvestite? Do I not like dresses? Do I have a fetish that you can’t even do in real life, like being turned on by being eaten by slutty giants?

He couldn’t make sense of it, so he buried that dress in the back of his closet for good. He didn’t throw it out, because it would be even worse to throw it out, and maybe somehow the situation could be salvaged. Doubtful, considering how much he hated this dress, but he still couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it.

The same melancholy and depressing feeling that characterized the whole dress incident culminated in this feeling that he couldn’t ball it up and throw it under a bunch of stuff in the back of his closet, so he hung it up. Even though he hated that dress, he liked the idea of having it hanging back there in his closet. Autogynephilia, man.

7.

James is sitting in the dark, trying to get as stoned as he can, dick in one hand, then bong in both, then his dick in one and then the bong again, spacing out and thinking about this dress in his closet that he hates, this girl that he’s supposed to love but doesn’t really feel anything about. Thinking, What the fuck is wrong with you, dude. Shit like that. If he were in a French movie maybe he’d put his dick away and go for a late night walk where he would feel feelings, but dude a late night walk in Star City looks like fucking nothing. He’d walk by a bunch of houses either to Wal-Mart or to the highway access road or the desert. And anyway, this is an American film. If it were a Tarantino movie maybe he’d kill everybody. In a David Lynch movie it wouldn’t even be clear what happened next but you would know it was something. But obviously this isn’t a movie and he’s just a stupid clueless pervert stoner with no idea what the fuck is going on in his life.

Maybe he should call Nicole. He doesn’t even understand that fight they had. He didn’t want to have sex so now they are having a fight? You were supposed to be allowed to say no to sex. That was what sex positive feminism was about: choice. Isn’t consent important? But maybe he did it wrong, or maybe that’s just for women. Whatever. They’ve had this fight before and it didn’t go anywhere then and he’s sure they’ll have it again. She’ll come over tomorrow night and he’ll be like, I dunno. And she’ll be like, I dunno. And then one of them will apologize and then the other will apologize and they’ll go back to pissing their lives away with shitty Drew Carey movies forever.

Eventually he gets stoned enough that he gets off, comes into a sock he’s already worn twice, and is able to go to sleep.

8.

As soon as Maria Griffiths sees James Hanson in the Star City, Nevada Wal-Mart she’s like, That kid is trans and he doesn’t even know it yet.

9.

He smokes out before he gets to work, but by hour four or so of a nine hour shift he’s not really feeling stoned any more. Every day by this point he mostly feels tired and pissed off. He’s always wished he could be the kind of cool badass who smokes out at work, but there’s no way you could do it without somebody finding out. Plus his mom rides in his car sometimes, so he can’t even hotbox it ever. It’s actually very possible that this is why he hates his job so much. He’s like, I should think about that more. Every single day I go through an unstoned-ening and fucking hate my life and my job and my house and my girlfriend and everyone and everything that I can see. It seems like that probably affects my job satisfaction. I end each shift with a headache. I need a fix, man, because I am addicted to the she-demon marijuana.

It is getting toward the end of his shift and James isn’t stoned any more and it sucks. This old guy who comes in once or twice a week was looking for some stupid old movies that he couldn’t find because Wal-Mart doesn’t carry stupid old movies but this guy doesn’t listen to James at all, so they always wind up spending half an hour pretending to look for these DVDs that aren’t there.

That’s probably a metaphor for life in Star City, actually. Whatever. Once or twice a week James thinks very seriously about writing out a note to have waiting for this guy the next time he comes in that explains that these are very, very old and hokey movies, starring actors that nobody cares about any more, and that he’d be better off going to the Family Dollar over in Imlay where they sell those mass-produced DVDs of public domain stuff that feel all light in your hands like there’s no DVD in them.

Wal-Mart can’t even order them. Those DVD companies have their own distributors that Wal-Mart doesn’t use. Which is weird, since it seems like the distributors that make those wholesome DVDs would be Christian, and Wal-Mart doesn’t shy away from Christian anything. But whatever. Who cares. James has a headache, he needs to smoke out again, and this old guy is starting to seem done with playing out this scenario yet again, when Maria Griffiths comes strutting up the aisle of the Wal-Mart looking out of place as hell, like she’s made of long red hair and layers of clothing.

James does what anybody would do when they see somebody they’d like to know: he ignores the shit out of her. Probably he freaks out a little. But she came right to the music and movies section, so what else could he do? He says hi to her when she first comes in because he can get in trouble if he doesn’t. According to Wal-Mart corporate policy, greetings turn thieves into friends. But then he just ignores her like hell. Maybe on some level he notices that she might have looked at him for a second longer than was appropriate, but if he half-thinks anything it’s like, Suck it up, dude, that girl is definitely not checking you out.

She is wearing more clothes than he’s ever seen anyone wear at once: huge black boots, a long black skirt or maybe a dress, what looks like a shorter, dark orangey skirt on top of it, a long maroonish sweater under a ratty denim jacket with a bunch of patches and buttons on it, a black scarf, and wavy, dried-out-looking hair down just past her shoulders. Her hair is almost exactly the same color as her sweater, but a little bit darker. They probably clash or whatever. Her clothes look like she slept in them. There are permanent-looking crinkles in the elbows of her jacket and her hair looks like it would leave a mark if she leaned her head against a wall. She looks like she is probably a rock star or a murderer. One time the band Creed came to his Wal-Mart on tour to buy batteries or something and everybody flipped out even though Creed is a stupid band, but James saw one of the guys from the band and he walked with this magnetism or swagger or something, like he knew he was a big deal, and Maria carries herself kind of the same way.

She walks over to the pop/rock CD display and James thinks clearly, who the fuck wears a scarf in the daytime in Star City, especially during a heatwave? While he’s ignoring her he stares at her back. Steven Tyler? The fourth Doctor? He is seriously just being a creep and staring at her because people who look like that don’t live here. They don’t stop here while they’re driving through, either. There are other Wal-Marts close to the highway. Like, three exits away in either direction on route 80. It was fucking dumb for Wal-Mart to put a Wal-Mart here. Well. Nobody comes here except for Creed. Once.

She flips through the pop/rock cds for a second and James manages to look away from the Poison patch safety-pinned across her back and the messy wavy hair sprawling its way down it. Like, Poison, the ridiculous glam rock band with the singer who does reality TV shows now? His headache fades or else James just forgets about it because when she turns around he is very intently alphabetizing cds that have just come in and need to be shelved.

Hey, she says, looking him up and down again.

James is like, Hi.

Do you have the Miranda Lambert album?

Um, he says, Probably, but it’s probably in the country section.

She’s like Oh, there’s a country section?

And he says, Well, yeah.

Then, because he’s feeling totally weird, James doesn’t even stop himself, he just blurts out, You don’t look like the folks who usually shop there, though.

Because if he’s being totally honest with himself, on some level James has already figured out that this girl is trans and while he hasn’t processed what that means yet he is having this desperate magnetic attraction to her. Like not even sexual. Just like, I want to be your Facebook friend or something. I need to grab you, to have you in my life. Whatever.