Real Man Adventures (20 page)

I
F IT ALL SOUNDS
contradictory, that’s because it is.

I think about new money. I think about immigrants. Lady CEOs.

No matter how much you grow, how far you travel, how high you reach—
how deftly you pass
—you will always at least in some small way wonder. You will cut an eye back over your shoulder every now and again. To see who might be coming up from behind, or looking at you funny. You hear Jay-Z do it in some of his songs. Jews do it every day, it eats away at their colons, two thousand years of running and fretting over some form of “The Nazis are in Pasadena.”
¹
Martha Stewart must do it, too, in a rare flash of
fragility—perhaps on the darkest of the 150-some-odd nights she spent in the pokey—think,
Do they know what I really am? Can I keep it all up and pull this off?
²

I don’t care if you are the richest motherfucker on the planet, you came from nothing and now have everything. Sealed away forever are your Midwest trailer park beginnings, and your seventh-grade-educated mom and ninth-grade-educated dad are currently tucked into a luxurious, Scotchgarded, overstuffed sectional in front of satellite TV in the new split-level you quietly purchased in their name within a gated suburban community. TiVoing the
fuck
out of
Dancing with the Stars
and
Two and a Half Men. The Voice
. Making enough Frito pie to freeze and eat for a whole week. You will always harbor a little of that in you.

Or maybe you have done everything possible to shed that, and you don’t have it in you at all. There is not a single external indicator, you are instead an Incredible Hulk of a man: five foot ten, thickly bearded, with a Barry White–deep voice, muscles out to here, a don’t-fuck-with-me set jaw. I know transmen like this (albeit not green-skinned ones). And on the flipside, I know transwomen who are petite and gorgeous and svelte and delicious in ways that Beverly Hills and Hamptons housewives pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on operating tables in hopes of becoming. NOBODY WOULD EVER SUSPECT! is the go-to, generous compliment nontrans people always give us. I NEVER WOULD’VE KNOWN! had you not told me you weren’t born female. Or male. Or poor. Or in another country.

But it’s not about what others think you are.

It’s what you think you are: what you fear, what you project— even unconsciously, unintentionally. Maybe during one of those moments of weakness. Or in times of illness, or failure. Even if it’s the last thing in the world you intend to do. It radiates invisibly, hisses out silently to all but you. But waiting to be confirmed by somebody who is not you.

There are always people who pick up whiffs of something being
off
in others. Just slightly askew. One tick from
normal
. It is not on your person, cannot be discerned from your twenty-five-thousand-dollar pair of sunglasses,
³
the framed Ivy League diplomas on your wall, your bison ranch in Wyoming. Your perfect English. Or that formidable, bulging package you’re rocking in your jeans. It’s nothing anybody could put a finger on (or five). But it’s there. Behind your eyes
beneath
those sunglasses. Or in the way you imperceptibly fix your head like a spaniel, listening and observing for that instant when everything can turn, and you will be exposed for everything you really are. Which is not what you really are, of course it’s not. But it’s what you
know
most people will forever
think
you are if they ever discovered the TRUTH. And that’s why it’s contradictory: I’m just living my life and don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks—AND—I am TERRIFIED EVERY SECOND of being FOUND OUT.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. I don’t sweat every minute of my daily life. It’s way more subdued than that. In fact
many days I don’t think about it at all, not consciously. A lot of the time, I am
most
comfortable with people who “don’t know”: mooky guys selling me a new set of tires at the garage, tattooed girls fixing me espresso drinks at the coffee shop, old Christian ladies I help with their bags at the grocery. Some dapper gay dude cruising me on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. I don’t sit there through every interaction wondering, WHEN WILL THEY FIND OUT?

You understand? I am at my
best
when the world sees me for what I am, when people assume I am nothing but what they see before them. When every new person I encounter, each new day, is fresh and pure and baggage-free. IN THE MOMENT, as fucking BUDDHIST as it gets. Let go of expectations, control, preconceptions, the past, the future… and there I am in the hardware store, and the cotton-candy-haired old lady ringing me up gives my well-behaved and handsome dog a cookie and says to me with a tear pooling in one eye and the thickest Southern drawl: “You are just the
kindest
and
sweetest
man for adopting a pit bull and helping him be such a good citizen in this world. It’s all how the owners raise them….” It’s as though it’s the first time a stranger has ever addressed, accepted, and approved of me and my deeply misunderstood and discriminated-against dog, and it feels right. I feel right, even though in truth I feel no different than I’ve felt all along.

And I am at my most ill at ease when I am, say, sitting around a dinner table over the holidays with my parents,
⁴
my wife and
children, maybe an aunt and uncle, and half a dozen cousins, various spouses. Stories about the past inevitably bubble up, and the hostess is all, “What can I get you to drink, sir” (to me), and the waiter’s all, “Are you ready to order, sir?” (again, to me, within earshot of the whole table), and I’m just sitting there, a fairly normal-looking guy with his wife and kids and extended family, and they’re all Texan and thus a little bit tipsy and a lot of loud, and I’m giving my kids paper on which to draw exotic fish in hopes of keeping them conscious through dinner because of the time change, and everything looks pretty fucking simple and straightforward, and in some ways it is. But actually it’s not, because there I also am, trying to remain present and in the moment, but I’m instead bracing myself against the booth, constantly, anxiously scanning a few seconds ahead in time and wondering, WHEN IS SOMEBODY GOING TO REFER TO ME AS ‘SHE’?
Any second now it’ll pop out, here it comes…
BOOM! from a cousin, in reference to me: “Remember how she used to always flip the finger in photographs? No wait, that was her brother!” HAHAHAHAHA. And then shortly after, POW! there’s the name on my birth certificate, the one I’ve never really been called, not by my parents, my brother, my friends, EVER IN LIFE, except for official purposes (transcripts and schools and jobs and such), but that magically tumbles out of the mouths of family members now that I’ve really not been using it for something like twenty-five years. And then for a moment everything in my life feels wrong (if only to me and perhaps, if she’s within earshot, my wife), so wrong like
it’s always been wrong, and there never was any right, even though I still pretty much feel precisely like I’ve always felt. I’m the same person no matter what people call me. Even the ones who remember the day I was born. Who held me. They of course don’t have the power to change what I am, to take anything away, I remind myself. Okay, maybe they do for that second, but then I come right back to level, thinking,
Maybe we just don’t spend as much time with family anymore
. Which I promise myself never to do again. That is, until the next wedding or bar mitzvah, or the holidays.

I don’t know how many years it will take of me looking how I look, sounding how I sound, being addressed how I am addressed in the world, before some people will use the right pronoun. Or at least not use the wrong one. Maybe it’s out of stubbornness, or perhaps they just don’t care enough to make the effort or truly understand why they should. I know it’s not malicious—they rarely know when they’ve done it. It’s hard to make big changes. I get it. In fact I think I can safely say I know that better than most. But it nevertheless feels like a complete negation of my very existence, almost every single time. And I fucking hate how I grant people that power over me, even for a second.

More contradictions:

A) “Of course I’m going to publish this book under my real name. I don’t give a fuck who knows, and if anybody has a problem, including my kids’ fucking friends’ parents and our neighbors, then we don’t need them in our lives anyway.”

vs.

B) “Gee, I sure don’t want to get strung up from that award-winning, historic maple tree at the end of the block.”

And my wife’s:

A) “I love and support you and your work and am 100 percent behind anything you choose to do.”

vs.

B) “Do you think that the prowler who was fixing to throw a brick through our glass door but instead dropped it on the porch when the dog barked at three
A.M.
last night was a hate crime?”

It is far simpler to say something was broken and needed fixing. That God made a mistake. That a boy brain was accidentally installed in a girl body. Or vice versa. Because most people understand mistakes. Even God botherers understand mistakes: love the sinner, hate the sin. Understand something mutating and just needing a little adjustment to be made right. Because anything else is too complicated. Demanding. Not black-and-white enough. Too gray. Too man-without-a-penis. Too woman-with-one. Does. Not. Compute.

My truth is, I wasn’t a “man trapped in a woman’s body,” and I didn’t “always know.” What was there to know? There were no role models, not even a beaten, raped, and murdered Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena winning an Oscar to give me “hope.” The only images I had were shameful, fleeting ones of sad, hulking men in ladies’ clothing, bad makeup, and cheap, crooked wigs. Patchy thrift store rabbit furs tossed over linebacker shoulders. Hissed asides about “transvestites,” reviled by society and not fooling anybody— even themselves.

Sure, I knew something was different about me. But every kid with half a brain and a third of a heart feels that way, and I guess I
just wasn’t smart or brave enough to figure it out on my own:
I know, I’ll just change into a boy!
I acted like a boy (whatever that means). I acted like myself. I wore board shorts and T-shirts. Did tons of sports, climbed hillsides, played in Dumpsters, got in fights. Overall I was a pretty happy, well-adjusted kid. Outgoing, social, curious. Of course I got made fun of—the “dyke” barbs stinging the worst, for reasons I hadn’t even begun to unravel. But didn’t everybody’s major, glaring area of vulnerability get massacred when they were kids?

Somehow, despite every external message to the contrary, I suppose I was always fairly comfortable living in my person. I never demanded to be called by a boy’s name or cut off all my hair; I didn’t start “developing” and then freak out and try to destroy the parts of me that didn’t feel quite right. I certainly didn’t like parts of my body as I grew older, wore big T-shirts and didn’t celebrate any changes (except getting a drivers’ license), but I didn’t know that wasn’t what everybody felt.

AND THAT YOU COULD DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT, ANYWAY.

Sometimes I look at my twenty-three-year-old friend Hunter, who began transitioning in early high school, and I’m like, YOU LITTLE PRICK. FUCK YOU that you get to go through life with your new name and your altered birth certificate, and nobody knows but your parents and your sister, and a few neighbors and friends of your choice, and wherever you go, you’re just “the new guy”—in college, grad school, at your internships—and your parents helped you and supported you and signed fucking papers to let you see a therapist and get hormones and surgery and all these things that I
didn’t even know
existed
when I was your age. Mostly because they didn’t actually exist; there were maybe one or two people out there who were furtively experimenting with that sort of thing. Okay, maybe a few more than that, but you couldn’t just punch it up on the Internet and see thousands of photos of chest surgery results and an endless stream of meticulous blogs detailing every facet of transition, minute by minute, day by day. And there weren’t big city clinics, and peers to talk to, a boundless supply of sterile syringes, and armies of people—male and female, straight, gay, whatever—who would still want to have sex with you (without paying for it). And support groups for parents whose kids think they want to change their genders.

And other times I look at Hunter and I’m like, Hey, dude. How are you doing? It’s been a minute. I’m glad to have a little tranny brother, because there are things you (and a small handful of my other older buddies) understand that most people cannot. Good luck with that retreating hairline, bitch!

Kidding! I’m just jealous.

So, it took me a little more time. Sometimes I wish it hadn’t. It was about information, or lack thereof. I frequently wonder whether, had I been born in the nineties instead of busy graduating high school and college, would I have chosen the path that Hunter did? When Hunter did? Would I have chosen a name like Hunter? Or Cole, or perhaps Tristan (likely the three most popular FTM names on record, by the way)? Would my folks have kicked me out of the house like so many (still) do, or would they have driven me to the LGBT health clinic in Los Angeles to get me started on my “journey” in a safe, supportive, healthy way?