Nevada (6 page)

12.

She wakes up around four thirty and feels rested. Do other people feel like this all the time? It’s fucked up. Her head feels all clear and she thinks for a second about pouring herself a glass of breakfast wine, but then she thinks, no this is perfect! I have four hours until I have to be at work, which means I can shave, put on makeup, then go to Kellogg’s and write for two and a half hours. As the sun is coming up, no less.

So she does. Shaving at five
AM
means she’s going to be visibly beardy by like three, which is gonna suck for the last couple hours of work, but it seems like she’s only ever visibly beardy to herself. Nobody else ever seems to notice. Nobody ever really gets six inches from your face and scans for stubble though, plus lots of girls have hair on their face, plus it kind of hides behind foundation a little bit, plus gender is totally 100% performative, right? Whatever! All you gotta do is perform Lady, totally embody it, and then nobody will care about anything.

She’s getting kind of manic, actually. She’s going to be tired early, but that’s totally great because maybe then she’ll get on a normal sleep schedule, where she’s too exhausted to move by eleven o’clock every night, and she wakes up totally stoked every morning at seven. No, five! And solves her life at Kellogg’s! Every morning forever!

Then she’s tired and bored of being excited. She puts on extra too many sparkles around her eyes out of zealousness. Other people really feel this way regularly?

13.

Kellogg’s is a shitty diner right in the middle of Williamsburg. Williamsburg is a weird little neighborhood in Brooklyn, right next to Manhattan, where a ton of artists and queers started living about twenty years ago, when Manhattan started being too expensive. They displaced a bunch of Hasidic Jews, which is gross, especially since now it’s all people who look like they’re in experimental disco punk bands because they are in experimental disco punk bands. It’s pretty creepy.

And Kellogg’s actually used to be a shitty diner right in the middle of it, although they redid it a little while ago and now it’s way less shitty, even though the onion rings are still greasy, the coffee’s still burned and everyone who works there still seems like they hate you. In Maria’s trite lifelong quest for authenticity, Kellogg’s still kind of rates a blip. The sky is just starting to turn from black to blue as she’s chaining up her bike outside.

Bars in New York close at four. What this means is that Barcade, which is across the street and down a little from Kellogg’s, kicked the last bunch of drunks out into the street about an hour ago, and since they were drunk they wanted greasy things. So they’re all inside Kellogg’s at five fifteen on a Tuesday morning. They are probably graphic designers or something? Telecommuting, expensive fake-
DIY
haircut, drunk graphic designers.

These are the situations where, if you are trans, you are going to get read as trans, and it is going to be a situation. It hasn’t happened to Maria in a long time, but it used to, and that sort of experience leaves a mark so she’s hoping the little corner booth under the fake tree is empty so she can hide out there with her face in her notebook and the drunks will ignore her.

She goes inside and the place is packed with haircuts and vintage jackets. Whatever, fuck ’em. Maria’s aggressive veneer of tough monsterness goes up and she stomps through to the table in the back, which is empty, like she’s wading through a river, head down, no reason to stop. Nobody notices her. It’s funny. Nobody ever does any more. It’s just that when they used to, they were so vocal about it that still, to this day, you worry. Sucks. Whatevs.

You can’t help but wonder what people see when they look at you. Androgynous fag? To be real that’s a look she tried for when she first started transitioning, which doesn’t disrupt strangers’ worldviews much and theoretically they will just ignore you. But no, you can tell that Maria has tits, you can see from the cleavage she’s sharing with the world that they’re not pretend. She wears pretty small tank tops. Maybe they just know what a transsexual is and are respectful?

Yeah. Totally. Clearly.

It’s been her experience that if people look at you and figure out that you are trans, they are pretty eager to tell you. No matter their demographic, teenage boys like to talk shit loudly so their friends can get in on it, older women like to wink or give a sly little smile, straight men who know they’re boring make angry faces, straight men who think they’re cool give you a smirk, straight women will give you a quiet little aside to let you know that they are totally onto you, gay boys want to be your best girlfriend (except the
HRC
type, who think that you’re trying to steal their rights), and dykes.

Dykes are hard to read. Too much expectation and stress.

So the whole time all these people are failing to make all these responses to her, to the fact that she exists, Maria is trying to drink as much coffee as she can. And to solve her relationship situation. She’s like, Jesus, can I get twenty minutes where I don’t think about being trans, please?

Then she realizes that she’s been at her table for ten minutes, nobody’s acknowledged her, and actually she is literally halfway toward twenty minutes where she doesn’t have to think about being trans. She makes eye contact with a waiter, he brings her a menu, she orders eggs, fries, toast and coffee. Where she grew up, this used to cost two dollars and five cents. Here it’s eight ninety-five.

She takes out her notebook. She can’t shut off her hetdar, though. For whatever reason she’s convinced the graphic designers are going to be assholes. But when the waiter brings the coffee, she takes a sip, feels her shoulders and back tense and then relax—like, actually relax—and forgets about them. She has another sip and opens her notebook, one of those fancy Moleskine fuckers Hemingway used to write in even though Hemingway and his patriarchal, strong silent type can suck a dick.

She doesn’t actually write or diagram or make a list or anything. She doodles. Since grade school, she’s always been able to pay attention way better if her hands are occupied, whether it’s to a teacher or a movie or her own thoughts. So she’s drawing guitars, girls with super heavy dark bangs, piglets, little wax paper bags of powders, syringes, a calendar.

Syringes and a calendar because she’s late for a shot of estrogen. Like, a week late.

Eureka, motherfucker. Maria is supposed to take a shot of estrogen every two weeks; some people take a pill or two every day, but she can never remember, so she shoots it into her thigh. And man, if you do not keep your estrogen levels consistent, you become a useless and fucked up mess. It’s just like, it hadn’t even occurred to her that she was going on romantic late-night adventures and drinking herself stupid because she needed a shot. That’s good to remember. Prioritize a shot tonight, she tells herself. There was a time when she was so willful about being trans and having her shots and everything that she carried her little cardboard box with needles and bottles and alcohol pads and stuff around with her everywhere. She’d just like lay out old syringes on the table at Veselka while everybody ate pierogies, just to be confrontational. But not so much any more.

It also explains why she’s been so goddam hung up on being trans. Her body is telling her, hey fucker, I am a trans body, you need to do the things that you do to take care of a trans body. Normally she’s not all the way over being trans, but normally she is a lot more over it than this.

So, cool. Check. Noted.

She still has two hours to think about Steph and herself and Brooklyn and Kieran, but the bent-over little man who waits tables at six
AM
brings over her food and she slides her notebook aside and douses everything in ketchup.

14.

When Maria met her, Steph was this short punky femme with spiky bleachy multicolored hair and a ton of eye makeup. It was because of her more is better eye makeup philosophy that Maria developed the confidence to get as much onto her face every morning as she possibly can. But Steph was also this smart, angry little person with absolutely no sense of humor, in this way that Maria read at the time as super dykey. Maria was this trans girl whose friends were all straight dudes she’d met when she’d been telling everyone she was a straight dude too, which meant that, in her social circle, she was kind of an anomaly who was tolerated, not really understood or respected. She was already out, she’d already been taking hormones for a while, but when she met Steph, Maria was still in the middle of the part of transition where you get harassed by strangers.

It was at a Christmas party somebody from the bookstore was throwing, but it was an interesting one because usually bookstore parties were mostly straight people. Like, queer people from the store would come and get wasted with the straight people because in neobohemia everybody’s cool with queers. But parties would usually be at straight folks’ houses and all their non-bookstore straight friends would be there. It was different the night Maria met Steph: this queer girl from the art department who’d leave in March to work at Random House was having a Christmas party at her big art-dyke loft collective apartment, way out past the end of Bushwick. That meant queer people Maria didn’t already know, kitschy Christmas decorations, a whole other vibe than she was used to. A vibe she’d known was out there without really knowing how to access it. As a theoretically straight theoretical guy, she had probably hung out with more dykes than the average straight guy, but it still wasn’t the sort of space she felt welcome in, or felt like she had access to, or really even felt like she belonged in. Actually it was kind of terrifying, not knowing what the unspoken rules in a space like that would be, or whether any of the queers at the party would be the kind of queers who had weird stuff against trans women.

So Maria felt like she was walking on eggshells all night, wanting to make a good impression and not say the wrong things to anybody—with an unsteady grasp on what the wrong things even were—so she kind of stood by the wall with a bottle of wine, trying to look like she wasn’t trying to look cool. Which is hard to pull off—she wasn’t totally succeeding. Folks came and hung out by her for a minute, she’d take the occasional lap around the party, but it is hard, man—being trans, at that point in a transition, it was characterized by this intense feeling of inferiority toward pretty much everyone. Look at all these girls, they know how to dress themselves, they know how to stand, they know when to talk and when to be quiet. Maria felt like she didn’t. She’d internalized this idea that trans women always take up too much space, so she was trying hard to disappear.

She had mostly quit smoking, since you’re not supposed to smoke on estrogen, but in situations of excruciating awkwardness like that, all the self-invalidation and depression/anxiety, you make exceptions. She climbed up to the roof where everybody has been smoking all night. It was freezing. Like, too cold, the kind of cold where you can feel the rungs of the roof ladder through your mittens, but it felt good. Her whole face felt all rosy with wine.

She lit a cigarette and looked around. The city spread out in every direction, propping up the old moody and tragic and melodramatic mental self-portrait. Self-pity as respite from anxiety! Classy, Batman. Then Steph climbed up the ladder in this big, stupid knit hat, and it was a total first meeting from a Hugh Grant movie, like where Keira Knightley doesn’t like him at first. Except in her memory Maria’s not played by Hugh Grant, she’s played by, like, Milla Jovovich or somebody.

Except Milla’s kind of short, right? Maybe Maria is Keira Knightley and Steph is played by Milla Jovovich.

Steph didn’t even want to talk to Maria. She was drunk and she didn’t have a lighter but Maria didn’t want to light Steph’s cigarette for her because she thought that might be, like, patriarchal, somehow? Like that’s what a dude does and women don’t do that for each other. Who fuckin’ knows, it made sense at the time Maria handed Steph the lighter so Steph had to take off her mitten and the glove she was wearing under it to light her cigarette. To this day Steph gives Maria shit about that.

No! Steph’s not Milla Jovovich, she’s like Ally Sheedy in
The Breakfast Club
, when Emilio Estevez is like, What’s your drink, and she’s like, Vodka, and he’s like, How much, and she’s like, Tons. She totally entertained herself while she smoked that cigarette by being flirty and confrontational and kind of mean.

When Maria was done smoking, she went back down to the apartment and left Steph up on the roof by herself to finish her cigarette, and then they didn’t talk to each other for the rest of the night. Pretty inauspicious.

Plus, if Steph was Ally Sheedy, that made Maria the only other female character from the breakfast club: Molly Ringwald, the spoiled princess. It’s a little uncomfortable for Maria how true this is.

15.

In one of Michelle Tea’s books (maybe
The Chelsea Whistle?
) she writes this thing about how coffee is the greatest thing in the world, it makes your eyes bug out, it makes you want to write and produce and create and it’s like speed except, something something, who can remember exact quotes. Maria’s like, I’ll get it tattooed on my forearm so I can remember it. The point is just, Michelle Tea nailed it like she nailed most other things: Maria’s on her third cup of coffee now and she is making Progress.

She needs to be single. It’s pretty obvious, right? When she’s having boring romantic predictable teenage emotions riding her bike around the city instead of being home with Steph, the reason she likes it so much is that she’s enjoying the tiniest little bit of freedom. She’s not in love with her bike because of the wind in her face, which chaps her lips, or because she can totally handle the difficulty of riding across bridges and in traffic wearing a long skirt. She’s in love with her bike because when she's on her bike, she’s not tied to anybody.