Real Man Adventures (24 page)

What my wife does get excited for are those completely unknown and obscure, yet infinitely more interesting individuals doing incredibly cool (if sometimes more quiet) things in the world. She also writes about those things beautifully, as she can be relied upon to find the most fascinating and human moments among all sorts of people—even Ryan Seacrest—that tell us something we didn’t know about the world, about ourselves. My wife is an all-around brilliant writer and poet (who also wrote an incredibly moving, not to mention award-winning, nonfiction book), an old-school bona fide journalist to whom all the clichés apply: a dying breed, the last of her kind.

2.
Since I’m probably already dead for including this chapter in the first place, now before my corpse is desecrated entirely, I should add that this particular guy was the only one she ever said yes to when he asked her out after their business relationship concluded.

3.
There are several sides to every story.

1.  T
HAT
[
BEING TRANS
]
WILL
prevent me from getting love and happiness and success. It’s sad being a transsexual. I feel sad about it. —R

2.  Getting my ass kicked. Also I fear dying alone or being unlovable, or for people to see me as a monster in nursing home care. —K

3.  That I’m going to go bald because my mother’s father is. —D

4.  My biggest fear is that, due to the imminent apocalypse, or socio-economic
collapse of society, I would lose access to Vitamin T.
²
—C

5.  Sexual rejection. —T

6.  Cervical cancer. —G

7.  Recently I’ve started worrying that my pee stream sounds different from cis-guys’.
³
—E

8.  That my dick will fall out when I’m running on the treadmill at the gym. —L

9.  Obvious stuff like yearly exams, nudity, family reunions. This year I had to face extended family as a dude at my father’s funeral, though my mom still calls me her “daughter” (yes, even with a full beard), so that was awkward. —S

10.  That I’m unlovable. —A

_______________________________

1.
I asked ten FTM friends, “What, as a transman, is your biggest fear?”

2.
aka testosterone.

3.
Cisgender
is a respectful term for “not transgender,” basically to avoid using potentially pejorative terms like “real man” and “real woman” or “biological man” and “biological woman,” all of which subtly imply that transgender men and women aren’t “real” or “biological” men and women.

1.  T
HAT
I
MIGHT BE
trading in a couple years at the end of my life so that I can live in a body more aligned with who I am now, while I am relatively young and healthy.

2.  That after this book comes out, neighbors and parents at my kids’ school and various other people who “didn’t know” about me will find out, and then I’ll be standing there choking and coughing in that burning room, with a bucketful of kerosene residue in one hand and nothing but a fist in the other.

3.  That after this book comes out, I’m going to have to discuss things like feelings and thoughts and bravery and misconceptions and personal journeys toward understanding with people like my parents and other family members and in-laws and friends and shit.

4.  That I am an asshole for wasting all of this time and energy writing about my stupid fucking self when maybe I should’ve been putting that time and energy toward something that actually matters, like building houses for people who don’t have them, or getting food and water and clothing to people who don’t have enough of those things either, or saving children and puppies from abuse, neglect, and skin infections. Helping occupy Wall Street, and shutting down factory farms and the Tea Party. Rescuing more pit bulls from certain death, adopting HIV-positive orphans from Malawi, volunteering to read books aloud at nursing homes, or teaching writing workshops up at the state prison. Hell, learning to play the banjo.

5.  That I won’t be able to support my family and myself.

6.  That I will end up with a chronic health condition, go off testosterone, and then be sickly, plus stuck in some kind of purgatory.

7.  That my kids will hate me when they “find out” that I’ve been lying to them about who I am, even if I haven’t been lying—the way my brother was supposedly angry with my parents when he “found out” he was adopted, even though they’d been telling him as much since he could speak.

8.  That my wife will leave me and I will end up a sad and lonely freak with nobody to truly understand and love me in my dying days, which will be spent in a run-down, woefully under-funded nursing home staffed by mean and abusive nurses who won’t tend
to my bed sores because they will be disgusted (by me, not the bed sores).

9.  That, like Sarah Kurtin in high school, whose only wish was not to be remembered for her perfect score on the SAT (and yet that is all I seem remember about her), I will always be known primarily for the thing I’d like not to be known for.

10.  That just as quickly as I think I’ve managed to capture something here, it will be gone. For one, because I could wake up tomorrow and my feelings about all this (not my gender identity, just the business surrounding it) could change. And second, that even if I’ve managed to capture anything here, I’ve squandered my one opportunity to do so because I will have done merely a mediocre job of it. The impudence of trying to encapsulate any kind of a life at all, whether in the space of six hundred words—or sixty thousand.

_______________________________

1.
Conversation I had with my wife one recent night in bed, after sex:

HER: Hey, are you going to write about sex in your book?

ME: Hey, are you fucking kidding me?

HER: That’s what people always want to know about.

ME: No fucking way.

HER: Just asking…

ME: Well, I’m definitely going to work in something about how I’m far and away the best sex you’ve ever had, ever—a world champion—but that’s pretty much it.

Another Brief Interview with My Wife

ME: I’
M THINKING OF
publishing this book under the name Tyrone Cooper instead of T Cooper. Do you think it’ll help at all to use a different name? Or am I deluded? Or is it
delusional?

MY WIFE: I thought you were Tyrone Cooper. And yes. And likely both.

ME: Tell me the thing you said about art and truth again.

MY WIFE: I believe any real art is about telling the truth. That truth is the point of art. And if you aren’t starting from that, if the core is something easier, less honorable, cheap, petty, small, commercial, then the art is not art at all. It may sail by, undetected. Mr.
Brainwash. But it will not resonate, won’t sing like a tuning fork in the belly, won’t change a fucking thing, will just be another mirror people can’t resist looking in.

ME: You know how people will sometimes come up to me and say I’m “courageous”? I feel the opposite.

MY WIFE: You shouldn’t. But it is still condescending.

ME: Do you remember one time when we were at the gym—last year sometime—when I was trying to decide whether or not to write this book, and I disappeared for a while and I wasn’t on the track, and when I came back you asked me where I went? Well, I had been trying to locate a pen and paper to write down something I thought of while doing the incline bench press. It was this note, in fact:

So what I think I’m saying is, this isn’t a memoir. It’s “a mostly nonfiction book on the subject of masculinity with some biographical elements.” Do you think that’s going to fly?

MY WIFE: Yes. Because you are trying to say something real. And God knows we need more of that in the universe.

ME: Will you still love and respect me if I am ever accidentally referred to as a “memoirist”? I’m only doing it because, “50 told me, ‘Go ahead, switch the style up, and if they hate, then let ‘em hate and watch the money pile up.’”

MY WIFE: I love you when you are accidentally referred to as a woman. I think I can handle memoirist. (You really need to get over this chip about telling your story. It is the story that matters, not the form, and in a weird way, not the storyteller.)

ME: Do you sometimes wish I were a “real” man?

MY WIFE: Oh, Christ. Even you don’t believe that is a “real” question.

ME: What’s the worst thing that could happen because of my writing this book?

MY WIFE: Harm would come to you or our children.

ME: What’s the best?

MY WIFE:
Go The Fuck To Sleep
. Not really. I don’t know. The best would be that you are proud of your work, and that the work moves someone else to a better place. Maybe even you.

ME: Don’t you ever get sick of having that moment of paranoia like, WHO KNOWS, AND WHAT DO THEY THINK THEY KNOW? when a new neighbor or friend or the guy fixing the roof asks what we do for a living and we answer and then the person likely sets about asking around or Googling? I’m really sick of it, so I’m going to try to stop worrying, starting… NOW.

MY WIFE: It is a necessary concern. Because the world is not as we wish it were. See: Rick Santorum. See also:
Dancing with the Stars
.

ME: How do I end the book? I probably need some sort of crescendo or sense of “resolution,” but at the same time it seems like it’s never really going to end.

MY WIFE: Oh, baby, this is just the beginning.

L
AST
C
HRISTMAS MY WIFE
and I took the kids to Las Vegas, where my entire family—including my parents, my brother, and all of my family from Texas—was spending a few days together for the holidays. (It’s a Jewish thing.) My children had never been to Vegas, but my wife and I certainly had; it’s where we eloped and tied the knot as man and wife. The first time. We did it with only Elvis as our witness (God was busy), about six months before our “official” wedding, which was at our home and attended by about 150 friends and family, most of whom did not know that we had already legally married prior to the big day. (This second wedding was “real,” too, having been officiated by my childhood friend Spencer, who is a Universal Life Church minister. We had to marry earlier for legal reasons I don’t need to elucidate here—it had something to do with
the status of my identification documents and what the two states require.)

On this Vegas holiday with the whole family, we dive in, taking the kids for a fairly anticlimactic ride on the zip line above Fremont Street in downtown Vegas. We tour Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden (filled with white tigers, lions, leopards—and for some reason that doesn’t particularly jibe with the overall premise of the hotel— dolphins). We travel to “fake Venice” and “fake Paris” and roll through “fake New York,” as our younger one deems them. We watch a volcano erupt and lava flow every hour on the hour, and dancing fountains shooting twenty-five stories up into the sky every fifteen minutes. We eat overpriced sushi. Light Hanukkah candles and open presents one night with my cousins and their kids. We eat more: crepes, Thai fusion, Brazilian, Sicilian. It is all so crazy but also somehow fitting.