Nevada (4 page)

She forgot that she was making a list. She takes the little flask out of the bag and lifts it to the light. There’s only about a quarter left. She thinks, wow, I am pretty lucid for a forty and 600 milliliters of whiskey, and then she thinks, what was I thinking about? A list? And then she’s at the bottom of the bridge, waiting at the weird turny corner light.

Oh, Williamsburg. There was a point when you seemed like a scary, tough neighborhood, but now it’s obvious that the graffiti on your walls gets put there by art students.

7.

Maria kind of fucked Kieran first. Steph knows about it. It was a pretty big deal when it happened, and Maria has been sporadically remembering, wincing, and trying not to feel like an asshole ever since. What happened was that he started working at the bookstore a little over a year after Maria started injecting estrogen, when people she didn’t know were starting to read her as a woman most of the time.

He is trans too. He’s pretty into it: for Maria, being trans is like, Here is this shitty thing I have to deal with, but for Kieran it’s like, Fuck yeah! Being trans, all right! Trans guys seem to have this relationship to being trans a lot more often than trans women. It’s understandable. Sometimes trans guys come out of radical activist dyke communities where having a punk rock gender is kind of like, chic, or whatever. Whereas for trans women, this tends not to be the case. When they come out trans women tend not to have the analysis that comes from having existed in a queer community where people talk about gender; the mistake some people make is assuming that this means trans women never put together an analysis.

There’s also a thing about cultural norms about masculinity and femininity that everybody internalizes, and the kind of light that throws on the different directions of transitioning, but whatever. Who cares. It’s hard to explain. Maria’s been mentally outlining a zine about this stuff that will lay it out clearly and solve everything since, like, before she started transitioning.

So Kieran started working at the bookstore, read Maria as trans, and decided to be her friend. It was great because Steph knows queers but gets anxious, and Maria doesn’t talk at parties so neither of them has ever been particularly enmeshed in a queer community, but Kieran was. That fucker knows everybody. You’ll be like, Oh, Judith Butler’s written a new book, and he’ll be like, I threw her over a table and fucked her at brunch once.

You’re like, Really?

And he says, No, but I did have her come read at my school when I was in college.

So they became friends, they ate lunch together, it was a new relationship, even though it wasn’t supposed to be a make-out relationship. They talked about stuff, he explained stuff to her—he loves to explain stuff—and she was like, oh my god, here is a person who knows the real smart truth about transitioning! Gender truly
is
a construct!

Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars. Which, also, are constructs.

They fucked in a Burritoville bathroom.

He managed to kind of fuck her with a packer in a tiny, dirty yellow bathroom downstairs in the Burritoville on Second and Sixth. She managed to keep her skirt on the whole time and not to let him touch her junk. She certainly didn’t come. Maybe he did. There were greasy patches on the mirror and since the bathroom was so small she pressed her face against it while he kind of fucked her, and then when they left there was grease all over her cheek. It was hard to wash off. She was like, cool, punk rock, degradation, kinky sex, how queer and great. That was her sleaziest moment. It seemed like, from then on, she’d be a building a body of work about the interesting sex she’d had, but those stories never really materialized. That time at Burritoville, that was pretty much it.

She’s thinking, I think I just don’t
get
sex, while she shoulders her bike and starts climbing stairs. Maybe one day, when my seven hundred dollars of savings become twenty thousand and I can afford bottom surgery, I’ll be able to get past the inevitable shutoff point and actually enjoy it. Can’t wait.

She opens the door and the cat isn’t in the kitchen, which means she is probably in the bedroom with Steph. Kieran probably isn’t here. The cat hates everyone except Maria and Steph.

The cat appears and rubs her little black head on Maria’s leg. Hi cat, she says.

She opens the fridge, which is empty, prolonging her own anxiety in a really familiar way. Like, if Kieran were in Maria’s bed with her girlfriend, not that Maria owns Steph’s sexuality or anything, but it would be pretty stupid for her to be in the kitchen in a scarf, one glove on and one glove off, thinking about a middle-of-the-night stir-fry, while he was in there spooning her. Getting his sweat and come and lube all over Maria’s blankets.

Ew.

Steph sleeps pretty deeply, so Maria walks down the hall, all three feet of it because this is a New York City apartment, and cracks the door. She’s asleep by herself. Maria goes back to the kitchen, finishes her little bottle of whiskey, accidentally leaves the kitchen light on and the refrigerator door open, and passes out on the couch.

At four or so she wakes up all headachey and sets her phone alarm—Steph had called, kind of a lot of times—turns off the light, closes the fridge and goes back to sleep on the couch in the kitchen. So bohemian.

8.

Maria misses Steph in the morning. Steph has a grownup job so she’s up and gone before Maria wakes up, which is funny because usually sunlight, a car horn, her own breathing, anything will wake Maria up. Good work last night, whiskey, too bad you can’t make sleep as restful as you make it deep.

Turns out Piranha texted Maria last night, too. Fuck. Mostly her texts are just a bunch of cussing, because Piranha knows that Maria likes cuss words. She’s a good friend. But last night she was like, Dude, where are you? Maria texts back: Sorry dude. Hang out soon?

She’s exhausted and feels half-dead, but that’s really not new. Her alarm leaves her exactly enough time to shave, puts on makeup and get out the door. She rushes: there’s a schedule for sleeping as late as you can, if you’re economical enough with your time in the morning. She slept in her clothes, which saves her almost four minutes of getting dressed.

She got very cold one night at Camp Trans, the year that she went, and put on all of her clothes: a dress, a long skirt, jeans, a hoodie, that denim jacket. It ended up being kind of a great outfit. Plus jeans and multiple skirts means no stress about, like, anatomy. It basically became her uniform. Like, she’ll change her underwear. It’s hard to admit but she has exactly one bra that she likes, and a bunch that she hates, so she wears the same bra every day but theoretically you could change your bra too. You just rotate out a dress or put on the other hoodie and voilà, new outfit. Same clothes every day! It’s a non-appropriative mantra. She’s even gotten good at riding a bike in a long skirt.

Because shaving and putting on a bunch of foundation every day are emotionally exhausting reminders of being trans, she gets a step removed from them by monologuing like she’s explaining them to someone. Secret trick one is to boil water in a kettle on the stove while you get dressed and brush your teeth, then stop up the sink and make yourself a little boiling lake. If the water is so hot that it truly hurts your fingers when you splash it on your face and you kind of worry that you’re doing permanent damage to your skin, you are doing it right. Super hot water makes the shave closer, who knows why. Maybe like how you have to warm up a tortilla before you can make anything out of it? Anyway then you smear shaving cream all over your face. Use the cheapest stuff you can find: sometimes Barbasol has a kind that says Real Man on the side, that’s the best one. Shave your face with one of those triple-blade razors. They’re expensive, but you can re-use them for like a couple weeks. You’ll know it’s time to replace the blade when your face is a gory mess every day after you shave and you keep thinking, you want blood moon magic but you only bleed a couple days a month? I bleed every day.

From my face.

Anything more than three blades is for rich people.

Secret tip number two is to get some of that face lotion stuff that smells like an old lady. After you’ve shaved and washed off your face, glob it on everywhere and give your face time to suck it in. It makes your skin softer, which helps gross middle-aged businessmen slumming in your store know that you are the one to hit on.

For makeup: Okay. If you still need to shave, you are still going to have a little bit of, like, beard shadow on your face. A lot of people will tell you to slather on tons and tons of foundation, or the trick where you put lipstick all over your head and then cover it in foundation, but they are stupid. The truth is that nobody is going to look at your chin very hard, so all you need is normal foundation you can get at Sephora. The cheapest stuff there. Powder foundation, liquid foundation, who cares. Get it all over your face, your nose, down your throat to past where your fur ends. Sometimes you can get lucky at the drug store, but mostly you just want the cheapest stuff at the fancy store. If everything else is working right, heavy layers of makeup are more of a This Person Is Trans sign than the implication that there’s a mustache hibernating under that foundation.

Secret trick number three is to get as much eye makeup on your eyes as you can. People will disagree about this but fuck them. It took years of research but the current theory on the reason this works, and complimentarily why lipstick makes you look all unhinged, is that you are drawing the beholder’s eye toward your eyes, away from your beard shadow area. Lipstick draws the eye toward the bottom of your face, where the hibernating stubble lives. Fuck that.

So put lots of black shit around your eyes, like Ally Sheedy in the Breakfast Club. You will look kind of goth. Can you pull off kind of goth? Do you want to? If not, here is secret thing number four: sparkles. Apparently sparkles on a trans woman are kind of a cliché, but this is the thing, the truth that underlies all of this makeup advice: nobody is expecting to see a trans person. Girls are allowed to wear sparkles on their eyes. If you wear lots of sparkles and, like, blood red lipstick, without foundation, and a low-cut shirt that shows off a flat expanse of chest, then yes: people will heckle you and try to intimidate you. But nobody expects trans women to be wearing sparkles, to have a fucked up growing out dye job and tons of dykey punk shit covering every inch of their skin. So.

Maria is tall and thin, though. She’s already getting the benefit of the doubt. None of this stuff might work for you.

This ritual takes five minutes from the time the kettle starts whining.

A couple weeks ago Maria bought a four-foot tall rip-off print of Piss Christ, the picture of a crucifix in urine that everybody flipped out about in the early nineties, for fifteen bucks from a weirdo on St. Mark’s. She brought it out to Piranha on the train because she thought Piranha would be into it. And she was. She literally teared up when Maria showed up at her door with a huge and awkward framed piece of art. She didn’t cry though, she was fine in a second, and then she insisted on giving Maria a bag of pills. Maria was like, okay, that’s cool, thanks, while Piranha explained which pills were which. These ones are Percocets, these are morphine, these are Adderall, these are Vicodin, careful with these. Maria’s not really even that into drugs any more. Nowadays taking drugs just seems exhausting, four hours of yay and then like three days of ugh. Plus, puking. The worst is the part where you are choking up your guts and you can’t breathe, and it seems like more and more, as she gets older, that’s all that happens.

Pills are okay. Whatever. Heroin’s too down; coke’s too up and then too down. Psychedelics just take too long, and then you feel weird for a week. Smoking weed makes you totally stupid, and Maria’s already pretty dumb. No, to be more specific, smoking weed makes her useless and unable to do anything, and she’s already pretty bad at making herself do anything besides beat herself up for not doing anything.

So once she’s put on her face, she takes two Adderall from the crumpled and powdery little sandwich bag with the idea that they’ll kick in by the end of her half-hour bike ride to work, and then she’ll be super productive all day. Or at least, for the first six hours. One complicating factor is that she’s never really sure which pills are which, so these ones she just took are probably Adderall but they might be anything. Hopefully they’re not morphine. Morphine is the worst. One morphine is kind of floaty but two morphines are one five-hour stomachache and then three pukings.

Anyway, makeup secret from a trans woman number five: Take pills.

Maria used to have a pretty strong body, back when she was an energetic little college kid who looked like a dude and journaled obsessively about gender in top secret notebooks all day every day. But now she is old, almost thirty, and she’s been going sleepless and depressed and drunk for so long that her body starts feeling like it’s collapsing at the slightest provocation. Seriously, the sun hurts her eyes, her belly feels like old dry leaves turning wet while they rot, and her shoulders throb from just a forty and a little whiskey, but she’s got to be at work. So: Adderall.

Riding into Manhattan takes longer than usual because she usually has a beer or two or a glass of whisky before bed, not a forty and a flask. She gets into work late. Oops. They are probably looking for reasons to fire her, because she’s been here so long and she’s gotten so many mandatory union raises that she can almost afford food and rent, so being late is kind of a big deal. Like, when you’re in the union, they can’t just fire you.

She spends the morning waiting for the axe to fall. Like, she’s not just going to get flat-out fired, but she might get talked to. They do this thing where they show you a computer printout of your clock-in times. It’s just a gross atmosphere. But it’s fine! Turns out she was right and it was Adderall that she took, which means she is super focused and gets a ton of work done. She dusts the shit out of a bunch of displays, rearranges them, shelves a million books, helps tiny old ladies find old, tiny books, and barely even sneaks out the side door for extra bonus breaks at all, except a couple times. Around noon she’s thinking, I am the
MVP
of this shit, when she bumps into Kieran, on his way outside for a cigarette.