Read Nevada Online

Authors: Imogen Binnie

Tags: #Lgbt, #Transgender, #tagged, #Fiction

Nevada (18 page)

BOOK: Nevada
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You don’t look like the folks who usually shop here, that’s a pretty dumb thing to say, but she doesn’t disagree.

She looks at his name tag, smirks, and says, That’s probably true, James H., but check this out. I left New York City about a week ago and my dog, my cat and I have been living out of my car since then, driving out to the West Coast solely because we’ve never seen it. In New York City, there are Spanish music stations, rap stations, dumb rock stations, and little stations run by painfully self-aware college students with no idea what to do with all their privilege besides collect records and gentrify neighborhoods that have been fine for generations. But I don’t think there’s a country station in New York. I guess there are a lot of reggaeton stations, which in a lot of ways people tend to not even notice has a lot of similarities to country music. Anyway it turns out, though, that once you leave New York, which nobody should ever do, haha, j/k, the only things you can consistently get on a twelve year old car stereo are
NPR
and country stations. And have you ever listened to
NPR
? It’s soothing for a while, but eventually it makes you want to call in and cuss somebody out until you cry. It wouldn’t get onto the radio, because I guess they have enough lag time to dump out angry people who call up and lose their shit, but it turned me off
NPR
for a while. Which means country station after country station for the last four days. And I’m not some New York jerk who thinks country music is for yokels or something—I’m into it, I get it. I even think it’s kind of nice that country singers are so fucking convinced of their own sincerity that they don’t do any of the tortured artist, I don’t care if you like me it’s art, man posturing that all the indie rock kids do. And they don’t spend all day telling me about how tough and rich they are, like the rappers on the radio do. Except, James H., there is also a lot of dumb shit on country radio. ‘I’m so much cooler online?’ ‘She thinks my tractor’s sexy?’ I guess it’s funny the first time. But! But!

Maria has followed James over to the country music section and is jabbing her pointer finger toward his chest.

I guess, she says, Miranda Lambert isn’t the biggest star in the country sky, because I’ve only heard the radio play her a couple times. But I think all her songs are about burning down cheating ex-boyfriends’ houses and, like, shooting your abusive ex in the face? The first time I heard
that
song I was like, Finally! Someone is just coming out and threatening to kill her asshole boyfriend, right there on the radio! Not that I think anybody should kill anybody else or anything, but after five days of country radio, consider me brainwashed. Miranda Lambert, James H., is the punkest shit on the radio, and I am going to drive my car off a cliff if I hear the song about how the guy hopes he gets a chance to live like he was dying. Ever again. Not because I don’t like it though—because it’s so sad and true that it makes me want to live like I was dying and then, like, die. So, James H., Miranda Lambert is a contingency plan to save my life.

Then she actually said the Internet abbreviation for just kidding out loud.

There’s a pause and then she smirks and she’s like, Sorry, I guess I haven’t really talked to anybody in a while.

James is like, It’s cool. He picks Miranda Lambert’s second album out and hands it to her.

This is the CD with that song about the gunpowder and lead on it, he says.

Thank you, James H., she says. You’ve been very helpful.

Then she starts to leave the movies and cds department.

Wait, James says, You’ve got to buy it here, or else security will kick my ass.

This is kind of true. Mostly true, you’re supposed to get people to buy their music and DVDs in the music and DVDs section, even though there isn’t like a rule about it or anything. It’s a firm suggestion in the interest of loss prevention. But it’s a stupid thing to emphasize just then. It’s not like he’s going to slip her his phone number on the receipt.

Well. The receipt does have the phone number for Wal-Mart #8304 on it, if she wants to call him.

I don’t think they could take you, she says. You look like a total bruiser.

Yeah, he says. Totally. I’m a regular ol’ Brad Paisley.

Which one is Brad Paisley?

Y’know, he says, I don’t highlight my hair, and I’ve still got a pair?

Maria’s eyes light up and she quotes from this dumb country song: My eyebrows ain’t plucked and there’s a gun in my truck!

That’s me, he says, Honey, I’m still a guy. It’s ten dollars and ninety cents.

The weirdness of that exchange isn’t lost on either of them.

Maria pays with a debit card. James notices that her
PIN
is 6664. Then she leaves and he thinks, well fuck. Then his headache is back and he gets pretty bummed so he starts thinking about how, like, soon he is going to go home and get high as fuck.

Smoking weed rules and the fact that this girl just showed up in his life and now she is gone forever totally sucks. He’s thinking about this weird girl who was just here whose name he doesn’t even know because she paid with a
PIN
instead of credit, and then his thoughts naturally and optimistically turn toward his go-to non-sexual fantasy: weed.

He’s envisioning like laying down in the sprawling fields of the marijuana farms of Northern California but she keeps stomping in. Even though it is his go-to fantasy, James is aware that it’s pretty boring. More interesting things tend to intrude. Like, fantasizing about laying down in a field of weed crops, it’s like licking the centerfold of an issue of High Times. He just keeps thinking like, New York City. Her and a dog and a cat in a car for a week, what the fuck is reggaeton... trans!

It’s weird that he could tell that she was trans. You could tell. But not in like an obvious way, like if a drag queen came parading up the aisle. You couldn’t really tell from the way she looked, or the way she talked, or anything. Probably? But then you have to ask yourself, like, well, how could I tell? It was probably some kind of combination of things. But could other people tell? Was he going to have to have stupid conversations for the next three months with idiot coworkers about the freaky queer that was in the store that one time? Gross. Weird.

10.

Because look it’s not like James doesn’t think about whether he’s trans too, right? To be totally honest he thinks about it all the fucking time, he just can’t imagine actually being trans in the real world. Does he wish he was a girl? Fucking—obviously he wishes he was a girl. You don’t spend twenty-nine hours a week thinking about being a girl and masturbating without wondering, like, I wonder if this pattern is trying to tell me something. And to be honest he probably hasn’t committed to it either way. Like there are a million reasons why he obviously is not trans or is not the kind of trans person who transitions. He has never said it out loud or even explicitly thought it but he is probably kind of genderqueer, so he doesn’t even know what to think about it. He’s looked at a lot of people’s websites and blogs and read up on autogynephilia and what hormones do and don’t do and he knows that if he’s transsexual he’s definitely not, like, a normal kind of transsexual, normal transsexuals all fucking know they’re transsexual when they’re little kids and fucking tell their parents and get yelled at for it or else start hormones when they’re thirteen and don’t fucking spend every night of their lives jacking off and reading embarrassing as hell pornography that is stupid and boring and repetitive and, like, just an entirely different avenue of gender and sexuality expression so whatever who cares, the point is just, like, James is aware of transsexuality.

Maybe, like, very aware.

So maybe he’s on the lookout for it? Of course he’s on the lookout for, like, weird gender stuff in everyone all the time or whatever, like he’s hypersensitized or something. But he definitely just was like, oh my god, a trans person! But he choked it down and didn’t say anything because he is totally good at choking things down and not saying anything. Like, feelings and stuff.

So maybe he is on the lookout for transsexuals all the time and finally he saw one? Whatever man, who knows? Who even knows how to talk about this stuff without being disrespectful so whatever, never mind, the point is just, it took a minute after she left to even put together that that was what had been the thing about her. Except she was gone now, right? He was like, I do have the credit card slip, maybe I could do some kind of hacker shit with it if I was a creep. And if he had the time and energy and focus to learn to do hacker shit. On some level he’s been meaning to learn that stuff for a long time. So.

11.

Maria doesn’t go right back into the Wal-Mart. She walks back out to Steph’s car, sits down and turns the key. She hadn’t thought to find a tree to park under, so the car is really hot. She’s thankful for a second that she hasn’t brought cutoffs to wear because if she’d been wearing jorts she would have literally burned the bottoms of her thighs on the hot vinyl. She could probably take off the long skirt she’s wearing under the shorter skirt but then she would feel nervous about her junk. The orange skirt isn’t sheer, but it’s not thick either—and even velvet drapes. So she sits in the car, foot above the gas pedal, the sticky brake pedal, not driving. Waiting for the air conditioning to cool the car down.

The air conditioning in Steph’s car isn’t great, but it works. The whole car feels like maybe a Platonic solid, if that’s a thing. Like, it’s sort of old, and sort of busted, but not truly old or busted, and nothing in it is really broken or particularly effective. The air works, but it never really gets cold. It can accelerate, but not so much if it’s going uphill.

She’s thinking: I should go, let’s go. But there’s a tug at the telephone wire that connects her heart to her brain. It’s more taut than usual. On some level she’s thinking, this is what’s going on, Maria, this is what you’re doing, this is the whole point of this trip you’re on right now. This thing. Right here.

She drove almost all the way across the country trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong with her: why she can’t be present in a relationship, why she can’t keep track of her money. Why she can’t even manage to give herself a shot every two weeks. It seems clear that it’s something to do with being trans and probably something to do with the way that being trans interrupts normal human development, but instead of getting stuck at the anal stage or whatever, you end up getting stuck at the tween stage, the Nickelodeon stage, the I can take care of myself but I suck at it stage. That’s the obvious reason that she flipped out and bought a bunch of drugs that to be honest she is too wimpy to even fuck around with, and then tried to disappear, and it’s why she keeps charging her cell phone, reading Steph and Piranha and Kieran’s texts and thinking, yeah, tonight, I’ll respond to that when I pull over, when I stop to eat I’ll definitely let them know that I’m not dead. But not doing it. For the last couple days she’s been charging her phone through the cigarette lighter but not turning it on for longer than it takes to reread those texts. Steph’s reported the car stolen. Kieran’s obnoxious. Piranha misses her blog, which sounds sarcastic.

The central thing here is that Maria is really good at being trans.

Maybe that is just relative to other people, but she has figured this one thing out and she is good at it. The couple hundred people who read her livejournal agree. Trans women are like Wow, you said that so well, and cis people are like Wow, I had never thought about that that way. Maria can explain to you exactly what she’s figured out and how she figured it out and can smell cisnormativity from like a hundred yards. She just sucks at pretty much everything else.

Sitting there in a warm car in a Wal-Mart parking lot under a hot sun in the early afternoon she is thinking: I might not know shit about my own life; I’ve learned a lot from Steph about sex and community and perspective and queerness and all these other really important things, but nothing about what to do when somebody looks at me on the train, or what to do when I can’t afford rent and it’s the third and I’m not getting paid for another five days and I’m afraid to call my mom and I know that theoretically we’ve got a community that supports its people but in practice what am I going to do, put a paypal button on my blog? I guess that’s no moochier than throwing a top surgery party but right now, at this moment, in this car and without a computer, putting a paypal button on my blog is not going to solve anything. So far this stupid little jaunt away from the center of the universe hasn’t taught me anything about how to live a life post-transition and it sure doesn’t seem likely that I’m going to get to Oakland or San Francisco, or drive up to Portland, to Seattle or Olympia, and find somebody there who will sit me down and explain what I need to do to exist like a three-dimensional person who cares about her body and her mind and her life and her friends and her lovers and is able to exist in a relationship with another person. How to exist as a person who knows what she’s feeling and can express that to another person.

Maria knows people who transitioned years before she did, even a couple people who started transitioning like a decade before she did. They’re not fuckups. But they’re not, like, buddhas, either. She’s thought of them as buddhas, in her life, and then been disappointed when they’ve explained that their enlightenment consists of the same platitudes that every enlightenment consists of: Fuck what people think, and I dunno man, and There is no center at the center of things. It’s like, cool, but then how do you repair the damage that a fucking lifetime of not giving a fuck about your life did to you?

The dashboard looks like it’s probably cool enough to touch when she’s thinking, fine, there’s no epiphany. The only way to be a buddha is just to be a buddha, to disregard the shit that’s in the way of being a buddha. So she’s like, fine, if enlightenment is just sitting here, in the car with me, on my lap, weightless and violent, then fine, enlightenment. Fine.

BOOK: Nevada
6.1Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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