Nevada (23 page)

James hears a hitch or a pause in her voice at the end there that makes it clear that she thinks he’s a dumb kid who just doesn’t understand yet that he’s transsexual so he just keeps glaring and doesn’t say anything and she drops it. They’re quiet for a bit and then she puts on a CD with a dude yelling kind of high pitched and guitars that sounded like they were scraping the metal walls of a rusty shed. It’s awful. James wishes that he’d rolled a joint ahead of time so he could smoke it right now, because you can’t really roll down the highway blazing a pipe. But he hadn’t had the foresight.

He thinks Maria has not only decided that he needs to transition, probably pretty soon, and that he should break up with Nicole and stop smoking weed and probably, like, wear a ton of clothes all at the same time and dye his hair red and talk in long, boring monologues. He’s kind of like, Well fuck you then. But he still can’t bring himself to just be like, Fuck you, and never talk to her again. He imagines having the kind of fight you have when you’re friends, where you make up afterward, but he’s only known her for a day and has no idea how to argue like that. He’s probably never had that kind of fight with anyone. So he sits and sulks and glares at the cactuses.

Getting Stoned And Glaring At Cactuses: The James Hanson Story
. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman.

Hold on, he says. I gotta pee.

Okay cool me too, she says.

24.

The thing about route 80 is that there’s nothing on it—like, there are truck stops at every exit, and there are exits every ten miles or so, but James didn’t even really have to take a piss. Like, kind of he did but really what he wanted to do was get high. Like he felt the need to get high. Right now. He should’ve smoked before they left the house but at the time he’d been like man, this is some intense shit right here, I better be sober for it, but now shit has gotten even more intense and he’s kind of feeling done with it. Ready to be high. It’s been a weird twenty-four hours. Whatever. Anyway most of the exits off 80 in the area have those big Flying J truck stops or whatever and you can’t really smoke weed in their huge bathrooms but there’s a dusty old piece of shit gas station at the Lovelock exit with a men’s room and a women’s room that only fit one person at a time and the doors lock. So that shit was a brilliant tactic: Oh, hey, I have to pee, let’s pull off at the next exit. Turns out James is a brilliant strategist. Who knew.

Probably everybody knew that he was a genius when it came to weed, actually.

They pull into the gas station and it’s as desolate as ever. Maria parks at the pump and puts gas in her tank before she goes to pee, which makes him wonder if she’s secretly rich or what, but who cares. Then he gets distracted thinking about how if you wanted to make a big boring metaphor about who goes into which bathroom at this stupid gas station you could, but he doesn’t even want to think about it so he locks himself into the men’s room, packs a bowl, and blazes up. Whatever.

He smokes the whole thing and packs another but while he’s packing the second bowl he has this conscientious feeling and only packs it halfway full. Like, hey man, you don’t have to smoke two whole bowls. A bowl and a half should be enough to get whatever feelings you’re having under control.

He imagines the smoke billowing out of the bathroom behind him, like he always does, but leaving the bathroom is not dramatic. It feels good to be stoned though. The sun is above them and hot even though it’s November. There’s nothing around but desert and a bleached-out little gas station store with probably candy bars and stuff in it. He has this long-distance bleak feeling, like it’s the end of the world and they came out here. It’s a dumb Resident Evil movie or maybe even an old western. James always kind of felt insecure about the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to give a fuck about westerns, given that he is a westerner, but he can take ’em or leave ’em, no strong feelings either way. He doesn’t even actually care about country music, you just can’t help but absorb it through your skin when you live in Star City. He sure doesn’t have any Brad Paisley mp3s or anything. He’s staring at the fancy-looking wheel of the front tire of the fancy bike chained to the back of Maria’s car when she walks up to him, out of nowhere, makes eye contact, and starts laughing.

Oh yeah, she says. Meaning, Oh yeah, you’re a stoner waste of space who can’t do anything without getting high.

She probably didn’t mean like, that specifically.

But James can hear it in her voice so he mumbles something and they get back into the car. The same CD is playing but obviously it is a lot more interesting now and he can sit and listen to it and space out. Eventually, when they’re back on the highway and he hasn’t said anything for a while, Maria starts singing along quietly a little bit sometimes, under her breath. She has kind of a low singing voice but he can’t hear it well enough to say more than that about it. He can’t tell if she sounds like a guy or a girl or what, she just sounds quiet.

Mostly though he’s focusing on himself and on why he kind of hates her and himself and everything right now, because like, he is supposed to be on this cool adventure right now, but all he can think about is this really shitty stuff. The things about this girl that seem gross, that stubble that’s gone now, her stupid forehead, the things about himself that he hates, the things about his relationship with Nicole that are good and that he should be thankful for. He should probably text her, but the thing about texting when he’s high is that he never really got good at it. It’s like how on the Internet you look like a fucking dork if you use emoticons, but nobody knows what you’re talking about if you’re sarcastic or anything. He’s good at being a stoner—let’s be real, maybe the best—but he can never figure out how a sentence in a text message is going to be read, like whether it’ll seem sarcastic or mean or whatever. Like, Maria probably thinks he should send a text like, I think we need to spend some time apart, but that makes him feel even more like he should send a text that says I think we should never spend any time apart. Even though, like, two nights ago he was thinking, I think we should spend some time apart.

And to be real, this is day two apart.

He looks down and his body is all scrunched up, knees to his chest in the little passenger seat of this little car. He’s pretty tall, which is important for a lot of reasons, but he’s making himself tiny.

Whatever, he stretches out his legs, moves the seat as far back as it’ll go and rubs his shoulder. His shoulders are sore. Who cares about anything. He doesn’t need to solve this right now. The singer is yowling about how merchandise keeps us in line and James is thinking, like, this is not relevant to my life right now, but he doesn’t want to think about himself and his shit any more so he doesn’t say anything.

After a while Maria asks James if he told his girlfriend he was going to Reno.

He hadn’t even thought about telling her. That’s weird right? Usually he would check in with her right away about whatever he does but right now he hadn’t really thought much past, like, I guess I will go to Reno with this person who I thought I liked. Maybe on some level he figured he’d be back before Nicole got off work today. Either way he’s like, No, and Maria asks what Nicole is like.

She’s cool, James says. I dunno.

That’s it?

What’s your girlfriend like? he shoots back.

Okay yeah fair question, she says. Except we broke up. She’s cool though. She’s kind of like, y’know how sometimes you know a punker when he’s fourteen and then you meet him ten years later and you’re like, man, you are an entirely different person, it’s like you never even had a punk phase, with your cell phone and your button-down shirt and your haircut? But sometimes you meet a punker you knew when he was fourteen ten years later and you’re like, whoa, your punkerness has grown and matured and evolved into a worldview that’s obviously consistent with what you believed when you were younger?

James thinks, No, but he doesn’t say anything.

Steph is definitely the latter, Maria says, except like, instead of punk, really it’s like her babydyke purple hair and triangle pins evolved into this, not power lesbian, exactly, but this grownup queer thing.

She thinks for a minute.

I guess it’s kind of scary, she says. I guess watching your girlfriend become someone else, more of a grownup, but still stay herself, while meanwhile you’re still working the same job you always have, at the same level of broke with the same people who knew you years ago and knew you when you transitioned. When you see the same people every day that you’ve seen since before you transitioned and you already went through this massive social and physical change, and you’re afraid to really even consider changing or evolving in any way, because you kind of had to have all this bravado, to act like you really believed in yourself in order to transition.

It’s like, how do you take down that bravado in order to evolve as a person? I mean, you asked about Steph and I’m just talking about myself again but I guess the question is, like, how do you transition but then continue to evolve as a person, post-transition, when it seems like the only way you got through your transition was to assert loudly, even just to yourself, that you knew who you were and you knew what you wanted and you trusted yourself?

I think Steph has been in the process of figuring out who she is and what she needs and I’ve been in the non-process of, like, swearing up and down forever that I knew exactly who I was and exactly what I needed and what I cared about. I think, James H., that I was swearing to myself before I left New York that the most important thing in my life was irresponsibility but what I meant, what I hadn’t figured out yet, was that I don’t need to be irresponsible in every way. I think what I meant was that I need to stop feeling responsible, to everybody all the time, for presenting this consistent and static face. And I needed to get over the idea that being responsible in a relationship means being consistent and stoic and out of touch with my own feelings.

What a bunch of dude bullshit to have internalized.

But yeah, she says, Steph rules and is smart and good at what she’s doing—she’s definitely the kid who kept her principles. She works at fucking Callen-Lorde when she’s not at work! I guess she’s kind of a fucking idiot, still, pulling weird plots about pretending to cheat on me or whatever, but I think I couldn’t keep up with her because I didn’t know how to be in a relationship so I just grabbed onto our relationship as tightly as I could and hoped for the best but inevitably I just squeezed all the blood out of it or whatever. Fuck.

So why’d you break up, James asks.

Fuuuuuck, Maria says. I. I don’t know.

Oh you don’t know, James says, suddenly able to take the offensive.

I mean, Maria says. She makes a face and gestures like she’s got all these thoughts and ideas and she’s going to get them in order and it seems like she’s just gathering her thoughts but then it takes a really long time and eventually she’s like, I don’t know.

Oh you just don’t know? James says. Like nobody cheated on anybody and you didn’t just stop having interests in common and you still liked all the same movies and you just looked up one day and you were like, Well see you, I think I’m gonna steal your fucking car and drive it thousands of miles to fucking Star City Nevada for no fucking reason?

Maria pauses for a second and then she’s like, It’s complicated.

No fuckin shit, James says, glad he’s kind of stoned because sober he certainly couldn’t twist the knife like this. You just complicatedly stole her car and bailed.

I don’t know, all right? Maria says. I just fuckin’—Some shit happened and then it wasn’t like we suddenly hated each other or anything. I was just like, fuck, this relationship isn’t good for me any more and she was like Yeah me neither and I was like Well. And she was like, Well, cool. And then instead of working out the logistics of the most important breakup in my three decades of life I fuckin just bailed, okay? Yeah. I’m gonna have to go to New York at some point and get my books and my cat and shit but no, I don’t have a tidy narrative about how we broke up.

So you broke up with her, James says.

She pauses even longer and then she’s like, It was a mutual thing.

James stares at the cactuses muttering about how Yeah fuckin’ right, it was a fuckin mutual thing. I’ve dated exactly one fuckin’ girl in my life and I know that ‘It was a mutual thing’ means I got my ass dumped so fuckin’ hard. Fuckin’ delusional ass—but he stops himself before he says dyke.

He laughs. He’s not sure whether he said any of this loud enough to hear, but then Maria laughs—once, a little—and she’s like, She broke up with me.

James is like, Whatever.

Maria’s like, So. Does Nicole know about the old autogynephilia?

James has a cold panic reaction, like, God I hope not, and then he goes, Not as far as I know.

Why not?

Can you imagine if you had a boyfriend who told you that shit?

He thinks for a second. Then he’s like, Wait a minute, you know exactly why the fuck not, I thought you knew all this shit and that was why you were stepping in and trying to get me to break up with Nicole and be transgender or whatever the fuck.

Maria doesn’t say anything so he’s like Fuck man, I don’t know, how the fuck do you tell your girlfriend something like that?

He’s thinking, though, that the reason he’s unhappy with Nicole is the exact same reason Maria was saying she was unhappy with Steph. He’s like, it’s not because I am transgender, it’s not because I’m a fucking pervert, it’s because I don’t say, like, I think this movie sucks. Or, I don’t want to eat that. Or, I want to wear your underwear, I want to have a pussy like yours.

It feels like one leads to the other. Like if he were to say, I don’t want to watch a stupid Drew Carey movie, Nicole would be like Okay, what do you want to watch and he’d be honest and be like Paris Is Burning, or Hedwig and the Angry Inch, or Transamerica, some other movie about transgender people that he can barely even admit to himself that he wants to watch. And then if he was honest about what movie he wanted to watch when Nicole comes over the whole castle would tumble down and it would lead to being honest about what kind of clothes he wants, and what kind of body he’d want to have so he could look okay in those clothes, and then questions about what kind of sex he wants to have—which he doesn’t even know how to answer—and that was when it just, like, sank in. That all the shit Maria had been talking about, the whole time, was exactly all of his own shit. Like different specifics. Kind of. But like, what
are
my kinks telling me? Why am I so unable to talk to Nicole? She asks, clearly, all the time, what I’m thinking and what I want, but I don’t even know how to tell her, even if the answers were things that she’d want to hear.